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Freedom as Productivity?

Now I'm going to approach two of the authors mentioned in the first part in a more detailed manner:

First Negri, then in the 3rd part Reitter. Both authors have in common that they are interested in the

possibility condition of a free society. As opposed to Reitter, Negri isn't a (Neo-)Marxist in the

narrow sense, but a representative of what one can refer to as Postmarxism: Negri deems

necessary not only to go beyond Marx, but also to leave him behind in many respects.

In the Wild Anomaly Negri refers to Spinoza's thinking as an anomaly, or more specifically: a Dutch

anomaly. The Netherlands of the 17th century, a big trading and industrial power, was (How to

translate conjunctive? Sometimes I hate english!) spared from the European crisis for the time

being. Therefore they didn't know the Baroque, or in other words: they didn't know the

internalisation of the crisis. The humanist love for freedom and spirit of optimism and reform

blithely lived on. Negri follows Huizinga's thought in so far as the Netherlands had skipped

mercantilism and proceeded directly to the money market. The Netherland's state of political form

however had dragged behind this economical revolution. Negri writes that the Dutch constitution

lacked a formal cohesion of rules. He underlines this with Spinoza's statement that the major part of

subjects didn't know who held the sovereignty. Hence Negri concludes the maintaining of theinstitutional dynamics of the revolutionary process itself.

However, according to Negri the crisis became noticeable also in the Netherlands as from 1660 and

destroyed the anomaly of the Dutch ideology. The Dutch bourgeoisie turned to the philosophy of

Hobbes who saw the revolutionary process and the civil acquisition as a state of war. Acquisition as

a war of all against all has to be mediated through a relation of dependency and legitimized through

submission under the sovereign.

Bourgeoisie and capitalism thus Negri can't be constituted without presuming the egoistic

interest as a substantial element of human passion. Acquisition, reduced to the egoistic interest, has

to submit to a scheme of social order. Imagination, passion and acquisition are thereafter creativity

that is subdued to order. Through the scheme of order that mediates the acquisition, the acquisition

is legitimized and hence mystified. Not only Hobbes but also Rousseau and Hegel complete the

bourgois mystification:

Rousseau mystifies the authoritarian transfer of the productive forces to the sovereignty

democratically and saints alienation. From then on the connection between private law and

absolute form of public law begins to dissolve the juridical foundation of the dictatorship of

capital. Hegel removes the paradox, makes it dialectical, distributes therein moments of relative

independence, gives everyone their employment, to halo the alienated condition in the absolute, to

restructure the illusion of freedom for everyone in the totality of alienation.

Negri writes that Spinoza demystified all of this rushing ahead. Unlike Hobbes, Spinza continues

the revolutionary utopia of humanism despite of the crisis. While Hobbes dissolves the individual

and its freedom in the totality, Spinoza develops the humanist sense of the new dignity of the

invidivual further to the sense of the constructive ability* of the multiplicity of individuals in their

totality. Because totality and multiplicity correspond with each other, there is no mediation and no

transcendency inbetween. If god is everything, then everything is god. Existence is in its totality and

multiplicity infinite ability, the actual constituitive force that unfolds unmediatedly and

spontaneously. Or in other words: The productive force is absolute. It can't be assimilated to the

relations of production.

* Vermgen is maybe better translated with power, but ability works better with to be able.

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Physically the productive force results cumulatively from the composition of things; politically it

expresses itself as the collective, practical ability. Spinoza doesn't reduce acquisition to egoistic

interest, because reason demands a collective determination of ability: Humans are dependent on

each other and able to do more together than alone. Instead of transferring individuality into the

absolute according to Negri the political miracle and mystification of the bourgeois ideology of

the state , Spinoza defines right as ability and accordingly democracy as the common human right

on everything humans are able of together. Negri concludes that Spinoza's democracy can't beconceived as a state of law, but as an unmediated self-organization of human ability.

Negri conceives imagination as the basic human ability. Spinoza describes in his TTP how the

prophetic imagination gives rise to a social order and hence obtains an ontological constitution.

Since Spinoza rejects the idea of mediation, imagination, passion and acquisition aren't subdued to

order but constitute unmediatedly the world. Humanity liberates itself annexing existence by dint of

their imagination and thus their productivity. Ultimately there is only the world that is founded in

the collective imagination.