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.)

The quest for value
1. The quest for value No Marxist would deny that housework and reproductive work are functional and necessary for the whole process of capital’s self-valorization. What makes Fortunati’s book new or challenging is that it aims to convince the reader that housework is a real expenditure of abstract labor time, and a real creator of value, and that this can be quantified. In fact, the argument that work done outside production is productive is a recurrent focus in Autonomist theory. In Reading Capital Politically, Cleaver reminded the reader that abstract labor and abstract labor time ‘must be grasped in the totality of capital’ (p. 118) and that in the ‘total social mass’ of abstract labor and value produ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The dialectic of capital as despotism and bourgeois freedom
3. The dialectic of capital as despotism and bourgeois freedom In the previous section we acknowledged the importance of the Autonomist argument that human activity in society can be subsumed by capital, and that this subsumption entails antagonism. We appreciated that this understanding is a moment of truth in the understanding of capitalism. Yet we have also seen that this does not necessarily imply that attending a vocational course, hoovering, making love, sleeping, smiling at a parent, etc. are productive labor for capital and create value. In this section we will see that there are in fact differences between these activities and those done within a wage-work relation, and that a view of bourgeois society as simply a social factory mi... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

A political reading of Capital: From 20 yards of linen to the self-reduction of prices in one easy step
5. A political reading of Capital: From 20 yards of linen to the self-reduction of prices in one easy step In his attempt to render a political reading of Marx’s critique of political economy, Harry Cleaver is again following in the workerist tradition: Negri’s ‘Marx on cycle and crisis’, which was written in 1968, is an earlier example of the attempt to connect Marx’s categories with notions of strategy and struggle. However, a sub-text of Cleaver’s book is his defense of the importance of Capital against the arguments made by (the later) Negri that, for the revolutionary project of our time, Capital is superseded by the Grundrisse. In Marx beyond Marx, Negri argues that Capital has served to reduce crit... (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.)

Negotiating the ‘law of value’
3. Negotiating the ‘law of value’ A further workerist tension reproduced in Cleaver’s book is that surrounding the status of the ‘law of value’. On the one hand, the very emphasis on workers at the sharp end of the immediate process of production appears to speak of a commitment to the centrality of value-production in the explanation of the dynamic of class struggle. On the other hand, the seeds of a revisionist approach were sewn as early as 1970, when Potere Operaio argued that class struggle had broken free of the bounds of accumulation; the mass worker was said to have disrupted the functioning of the law of value, forcing capital to rely more and more on the state (p. 137). Potere Operaio cited the Hot Au... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)