“In the same way that the figure of the peasant tends to disappear, so too does the figure of the industrial worker, the service industry worker and all other separate categories.”
125
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
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Antonio Negri 63
Italian sociologist 1933Related quotes
interview by Gerardo Munck on February 24, 2003, published in Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics edited by Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder
The Abolition of Work (1985)
Context: I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimun definition of work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, it's done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist or "communist," work invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness.
Usually—and this is even more true in "communist" than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee — work is employment, i. e., wage-labor, which means selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or something) else. In the USSR or Cuba or Yugoslavia or Nicaragua or any other alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastions — Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey — temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several millennia, the payment of taxes (ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. All industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility.
1930s, Address at San Diego Exposition (1935)
About the rise and fall of the blue-collar worker
1990s and later, "The Age of Social Transformation." 1994
Speech at the National Sugar Plenary Meeting in Camagüey, February 9, 1963 Ernesto Che Guevera. Escritos y discursos. Op. cit., vol. 7.
On Automation (1963)
Interview (4 November 1994) quoted in Backlash Global Subversion of the Environmental Movement (1996), p. 51
Context: You can go to any major history and see the effect of unregulation. The very point of developing regulation around industrial society was that they were not only exploiting the workers to death they were befouling the planet, so regulation came because of that. What the right wing wants is for the public to have this role in the societal debate over balance of these issues and no power. The public power to confront these errors of industry is government regulation.