Spinoza: Then and Now by Antonio Negri

Author:Antonio Negri
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509503544
Published: 2020-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

Who, then, can replace hatred with love, through generosity? Certainly not the capitalist, whose existence is tied to the exploitation of the other. And equally certainly the proletarian, who, albeit subjected to bourgeois hatred, builds community and organisation through a practice of cooperation in labour and of solidarity among workers. For generosity is a passion defined by love for the other, that is, by the capacity to be ‘active together’. And then ‘those actions, therefore, which aim only at the agent’s advantage, I relate to Tenacity, and those which aim at another’s advantage, I relate to Nobility. So, Moderation, Sobriety, presence of mind in danger, etc., are species of Tenacity whereas Courtesy, Mercy, etc., are species of Nobility’ (Ethics III, 59, Note). So hate, anger, fear (and courage), which are the basis of the struggles against capitalist exploitation, are – in the machine of generosity – brought to be effective moments of concatenation and organisation; and in this way they become ‘rules of life’, ‘the command of reason’ in the generous construction of a common (Ethics V, Proposition 10, and Note). Getting together, emerging from solitude by generously generating a community recycles bad passions and predisposes them to struggle. ‘A man who is guided by reason is more free in a state, where he lives according to a common decision, than in solitude, where he obeys only himself’ (Ethics IV, Proposition 73). All forces must be employed to build, in the struggle for the common, our association that frees us from exploitation.

A new difficulty:

But to achieve these things the powers of each man would hardly be sufficient if men did not help one another. And indeed, money has provided a convenient instrument for acquiring all these aids. That is why its image usually occupies the Mind of the multitude more than anything else. For they can imagine hardly any species of Joy without the accompanying idea of money as its cause. (Ethics IV, Appendix, Chapter 28)

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