Exodus

The political aspect of exodus is seen to be its potential for 'innovation'. 'the exit can be seen as free-thinking inventiveness that changes the rules of the game and disorients the enemy.', in 'social conflicts that manifest themselves not so much as protest, but most particularly as defection..' [p. 199 Radical Thought in Italy]. If one sees this politically first as a form of 'radical disobedience' that in not 'confronting' Power on its own grounds constitutes at once its delegitimasation and the positing of a progressive alternative, it makes sense. but to take it onto the plane of production and labour, things get quite complex.

Immaterial labour: The point about where it is located is crucial I think. Beyond the scientific knowledge embodied in fixed capital immaterial labour also characterises the direct production of social relations and above all, of subjectivity. In the 10th thesis on Marx Negri says that 'capital transfers the program of control of society from the outside (the factory) to the inside (communication) of society itself', through the destruction of the factory and the expropriation of social knowledges. In this and the next theses Negri sees social cooperation as -ontologically, again?- prior to its 'being put to work', its value-producing usage by capital. In this sense as a means of production it is not ALL the exclusive property of capital, and also probably the possibilities of rutpures and the vulnerabilities of the current mode of production he refers to in Empire are greater when seen in this light. In concrete terms, though, it is more difficult to think of examples but mainly because we are often not aware of their existence. Forms of immaterial labour that practice exodus could be for instance all those that ignore copyright laws.the possibility of positing these practices outside the capitalist mode of production, in real subsumption, is a different question. I don't think one can. But the political point here seems to be more that the proliferation of modes of productive activity that use social cooperation in the sense of exodus, would produce 'against' capital by being 'in spite of it'.

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