Research On Negri’s Autonomous Subjects And Their Alternative Road To Emancipation

The ability to analyze the autonomous subject and its movement is of great significance to understand the revolutionary subject of the contemporary capitalist society and the possibility of the capitalist social reform.In negri’s view,both the production environment and the forms of production in contemporary capitalist society have changed.Social production is not only limited to the mode of industrial production,but also goes deep into the production of social life.The traditional material production labor is replaced by the informationalized,symbolic and emotionalized immaterial production labor.Therefore,the production of biopolitics,including the whole life,has gained the hegemony of production.Under the condition of the transformation of social environment and production relation,the proletariat defined by Marx is no longer enough to act as the revolutionary subject of the whole society.Negri believed that in the current society dominated by the capital empire,the multitude as the autonomous subjects should become the new revolutionary subjects,and the autonomous movement of the multitude has the possibility to lead to communism.The development of the practical concept of the autonomous subject has gone through a long process.Marx pointed out the revolutionary road of proletariat as the revolutionary subject on the basis of objective class contradiction.Western marxism summed up the reasons for the failure of the proletarian revolution,intended to put forward a new form of revolutionary movement,but eventually went to the non-revolutionary road of social criticism.Autonomism returns to the practice road of the workers’ movement,expecting to realize the change of capitalist society through the way of the autonomism movement.The change of the practical concept of the autonomous subject is not accidental and the new order of globalization provides the objective basis for its theory.In the form of sovereignty,the development of capital globalization constructs a new form of political sovereignty,"empire",which provides a new soil for the emergence of autonomous subject.In the economic environment,the production enters the metropolis from the factory,makes the production of biopolitics become the mainstream production way,thus can carry on the production of subjectivity.In terms of cultural form,post-modern deconstruction and the characteristics of different cultures have injected a new mode of understanding into the diverse development of autonomous subjects.It can be said that the transformation of the new social environment provides an objective and realistic basis for the emergence of the autonomous subject.In the new capitalist objective environment,to fully understand the autonomous subject,we must first clarify the theoretical premise of this concept.The "autonomous" ability of an autonomous subject derives from its ability to produce subjectivity.The attention to subjective production lies in the change of the perspective from capital as the subject to the subjectivity of life.The autonomous subject is different from the traditional proletariat,and its real undertaker is the multitude with class attribute.The universal character is "poverty" and "poverty" does not mean status or wealth,but exclusion from political power.The reason why the multitude can unite is that they are based on the common mode of production;The power of all beings to fight lies in their antagonistic nature."The common" of production and the antagonism of struggle constitute the inner essence of the autonomous subject.The inner essence of the autonomous subject expresses its ability,which is expressed by the movement of biopolitics of the autonomous subject.From the perspective of biopolitics,the subject power of life itself is concerned,which constitutes the premise of understanding the movement of autonomous subject.On the one hand,the autonomous subject develops and strengthens "the common" through the movement strategy of "exodus" from the relationship with capitalism.On the other hand,it also prevents capital from corrupting "the common".The movement of autonomous subject is to realize the goal of a kind of radical democracy.The concept of democracy has been around since the enlightenment.It was originally meant to be positive,but now it has become a legitimate instrument of governance.The ruling class promotes the democratic system of "the people",but the people are identical representatives,and the democratic expression of the people is only a "representative" democracy,rather than a real democracy.The power of the multitude expresses the creative power of life itself,and the movement of the multitude expresses its pursuit of perfection.Thus,the democracy of multitude represents the path to true democracy.In the contemporary context of capital domination,capital is not satisfied with merely absorbing and disciplining labor in the field of material production,but applies its ruling principles to the field of social life with the intention of comprehensively controlling and occupying social life.This transboundary act of capital domination directly constitutes the opposition between the capital and the social life,and creates the precondition for the revolution and its inner resistance.In the process of capital domination,first of all,it can quantify the rule of value as the standard of domination with the purpose to seek exchange value.In the aspect of value,all kinds of production of biopolitics create special use value and return to the essence of human value,which cannot be calculated quantitatively and can’t be directly used as exchange value in the capital market.Secondly,value comes from the creation of labor,and the appreciation of value comes from the exploitation of surplus value of production of labor by capital,which is based on the premise that labor becomes a commodity.On this level,the biopolitical production of the multitude is the stimulation and release of the autonomous potential of labor,so it surpasses the original form of capital’s exploitation of labor.Thirdly,capital takes the form of power as the guarantee of governance,so as to maintain the hierarchy since modernity.On the power level,the biopolitical activities of the multitude show the freedom of subjectivity.Logically,its existence precedes the domination of power,and its resistance goes beyond the scope set by power.Finally,the capital takes the private property system as the precondition of the domination,which is protected by the law of the property republic.By contrast,the labor of biopolitics is autonomous and can fully possess the fruits of its own labor.From this point of view,it can shake the private property foundation of capitalism.The movement of autonomous subject has the possibility of transcending the boundary of capitalism,and it can lead to the liberation of communism.On the one hand,the failure of the realistic proletarian revolutionary movement makes some people give up the pursuit of the communist belief.On the other hand,Marx’s thought of communism is misunderstood to some extent in theory,which distorts the real connotation of communism.The real communism is not an idealized social state that can be fixed,but rather a constructive path toward a future in which the existing condition is continually destroyed.The movement of autonomous subject expresses the integration between individual of subjectivity and the community and realizes the development of common interests.In this sense,it contains the prospect and hope of the road to communism.The path of autonomous subject to communism is different from Marx’s communism,which points to an alternative construction of communism.