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 by the very fact of not 'confronting' power on its own grounds constitutes at once its delegitimasation and the positing of a progressive alternative, it makes sense. However once combined with the types of power operating on the level of social production exodus requires many different modes of analysis.

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 immaterial labour is not all the exclusive property of capital, and the possibilities of rutpures and the vulnerabilities of the current mode of production Negri and Hardt refer to in Empire and Mulitude are greater when seen in this light. In concrete terms it is more difficult to think of examples but mainly because we are often not aware of their existence, exodus employs an exiting from the field of fire and the field of view. Forms of immaterial labour that practice exodus could include for instance all those that ignore copyright laws. The possibility of positing these practices as really existing outside of the capitalist mode of production under its total subsumption is a different question. One doesn't think one can. But the political point here is possibly 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'. The concept is basically the result of a failure of the strategy of being within and against. Many wrongly see it as an opting out survivalism but it is in fact a more powerful weapon.