Autonomia

Notes
lists.village.virginia.edu The J18 mobilization sought to link up the autonomous struggles of “environmentalists, workers, the unemployed, indigenous peoples, trade unionists, peasant groups, women’s networks, the landless, students, peace activists and many more”. See bak.spc.org In political discourse in the UK, ‘workerism’ is usually a derogatory term for approaches we disagree with for fetishizing the significance of workplace struggles (and dismissing those outside the workplace). Italian operaismo, on the other hand, refers to the inversion of perspective from that of the operation of capital to that of the working class: “We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first, and workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn the problem on its head, reverse the polarity, and start from the beginning: and the beginning is the class strugg... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 3, Conclusion : A Bad String Makes a Bad Necklace
Conclusion: a bad string makes a bad necklace New old categories for the ‘new’ era In the course of this article we have addressed the inadequacy of Negri and Hardt’s concepts of material and immaterial labor for the understanding of capitalism and its contradictions — the string of their fascinating necklace. Negri and Hardt’s categories of material and immaterial labor replace the old categories of manual and mental labor of traditional Marxist times. The latter were intended to conceptualize the ‘manual’ as a potentially revolutionary agent of class struggle. It is important to notice that the essential distinction between those who create and those who execute within production — thus a distinction in roles and privileges — became conflated with ‘mental’ and ‘manual’ work, i.e. the type of work done. The increasing investment of capi... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 3, Chapter 5 : Immaterial labour and the heart of capital
5. Immaterial labor and the heart of capital We have focused so far on immaterial production as the production of knowledge and ideas. Another, central, aspect of immaterial production as defined by Negri and Hardt is the production of affects, communication and cooperation. In this section we address Negri and Hardt’s view that this production, which is capitalist production, is ‘elevated to the level of human relations’ and criticize their inability to understand the ontological inversion that turns affects and communication into abstract powers of capital and into our disempowerment. 5.1. ‘Immaterial production of communication and affects and subversion Capital and affects, it seems, do not go along too well. For Negri and Hardt capital was simply forced to incorporate affects and other subjective powers like communication and cooperation into production (Empire, pp. 275–6). Without the strug... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 3, Chapter 4 : Immaterial labour and the mind of capital
4. Immaterial labor and the mind of capital We now consider the subjective side of immaterial production i.e. how immaterial production is related to class antagonism and the necessity of the revolution. Negri and Hardt say that antagonism emerges from our resistance against capital’s efforts to tamper with our potentially autonomous deployment of creativity and to enclose what we produce in common. To this view we oppose that antagonism arises from the unacceptability of a division of labor that imposes our daily deprivation of creativity, and we explain why immaterial production is part of it. 4.1 The contradictions of immaterial production as the contradictions of capital Negri and Hardt’s theory has the interesting aspect of speaking about subjectivity. Against bourgeois objectivism it tells us that the development of capital and its contradictions are the result of antagonism, of subjectivity. As we have seen in Section 1,... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 3, Chapter 3 : Immaterial labour and capital as objectification
3. Immaterial labor and capital as objectification In this section we comment on Negri and Hardt’s thesis that immaterial production is ripe for self-management since this ‘new’ production is inherently independent from the individual capitalist. We argue that the apparent objectivity and autonomy of immaterial labor from the capitalist is only evidence that immaterial production is an aspect of capital. We argue that Negri and Hardt’s uncritical naturalization of the present production system derives from their lack of understanding of capital as an objectified social relation. We will see that this problem is mirrored by a parallel, opposite one: Negri and Hardt’s lack of critical understanding (and celebration) of capital as the product of bourgeois subjectivity. 3.1. Production as inherent in the practices of labor Negri and Hardt tell us that there is something interestingly new in immaterial production t... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Promise and limits of an ‘autonomist’ class analysis
From Operaismo to Autonomist Marxism Italy’s ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1969 and ‘Movement of 1977’ were two of the high points of late 20th century revolutionary struggle. The recent publication of two books on workerism and autonomia testify to the continued interest in the theoretical development surrounding these events. Steve Wright’s Storming Heaven presents a critical history of Italian workerism; and Harry Cleaver’s Reading ‘Capital’ Politically has been influential as an account of the ‘autonomist’ tradition. The review of these two books gives us the opportunity for a critical reappraisal of the contributions of workerism. We suggest that Cleaver reproduces some of autonomia&r... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The subsumption of society by capital and class antagonism
2. The subsumption of society by capital and class antagonism As we have seen in Section 1, the arcane of the Autonomist interest in demonstrating that the work of reproduction, or any work done outside the sphere of production, is productive work, lies in a reading of Marxist categories, which makes the categories of value, abstract labor, etc. have ‘meanings’ in terms of subjective categories: the imposition of work by capital and the resistance to work by the working class. The way value and its laws can immediately mean a class relation of antagonism is explained by De Angelis. Abstract labor, the creation of value, being tantamount to imposed, boundless and alienated labor, is the ‘form’ of work in capitalism. F... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The nature of labour power
5. The nature of labor power The above leads us now straight into the core of Fortunati’s work: her original ‘demonstration’ that housework produces value. In fact, it is not a demonstration, but simply, the declamation of a ‘truth’ based on an initial assumption that labor power is ‘a commodity like any other’ (p. 19). If this is the case, labor power must contain value, as the crystallization of the abstract labor expended by its producer. Thus the labor of the housewife, the producer of the labor power of the chief wage-earner of the family, must be abstract value and must create value. There is a general tendency in Autonomist theory to gloss over the nature of labor power as a special commodity... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Invisible value
6. Invisible value Thus Fortunati starts with a mistake, the assumption that labor power is ‘a commodity like any other’, that it must consequently carry some value created by the housewife. Starting from an initial mistake, it is no wonder that a theory is bound to be contradicted by facts: Fortunati’s theory clashes with the fact that the exchange value of labor power does not reflect any housework-created value at all. But for Fortunati, this is not because there must be something wrong in her assumptions, but because of a hidden peculiarity of labor power, that it can contain invisible value. In fact, for Fortunati, labor power is such that its value and exchange value are related to totally different mechanisms, this ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Beyond leftism?
2. Beyond leftism? It was a vital insight of workerism to see workers’ refusal to participate in union-sponsored token strikes not as the absence of class conflict but as evidence of their autonomy. In debates today about the state of the class struggle, the danger is to take such ‘passivity’ as just a refusal of representation when it might in fact be doubled-edged: at the same time as being an expression of hostility to capital it might also entail a paralyzing fatalism. However, a weakness of workerism was not an exaggerated sense of the significance of workers’ autonomous antagonism not only to capital but to the institutional left; rather it was an unwillingness or inability to reconcile their insights with thei... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)