Paolo Virno’s A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life is a short book, but it casts a long shadow. Behind it looms the entire history of the labor movement and its heretical wing, Italian workerism (operaismo), which rethought Marxism in light of the workers’ struggles (strikes and sabotage) of the 1960s and 1970s. For the most part, though, it looks forward. Abstract intelligence and immaterial signs have become the major productive force in the “post-Fordist” economy we are living in, and they are deeply affecting contemporary structures and mentalities. Virno’s essay examines the increased mobility and versatility of the new laborers, whose work time now virtually extends to their entire lives. The “multitude” is the kind of subjective configuration that this radical change is liberating, raising the political question of what we are capable of.
