THE ATLANTIC ROOTS OF WORKING-CLASS INTERNATIONALISM:
A HISTORICAL RE-INTERPRETATION
THIERRY DRAPEAU
https://yorkspace.library.yorku.ca/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10315/29972/Drapeau_Thierry_2014_PhD.pdf?sequence=2
A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO
THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
GRADUATE PROGRAM IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT
YORK UNIVERSITY
TORONTO, ONTARIO
2014
Abstract
This dissertation offers a historical re-interpretation of working-class internationalism by
situating its development within the early modern Atlantic-world economy (c. 1600-
1830). Through an exploration of various moments of insurgency and revolt of an
emerging Atlantic class of workers, among them slaves, sailors, servants, and others, it
demonstrates that profound and decisive traditions of proletarian solidarity across borders
existed prior to the nineteenth-century classical age of working-class internationalism. In
doing so, this dissertation alters the prevailing standpoint of the free, white, waged,
industrial worker of Europe by bringing in that narrative the agency of the unfree, black
(and racialized), wageless, plantation-slave worker of the Americas. Underpinning this
intervention is a more generous and complex understanding of capitalism as a mode of
production inclusive of unfree forms of labour.
In order to recover and foreground early formative moments of working-class
internationalism in the Atlantic-world economy, this dissertation proposes to re-theorize
this development in terms of processes of transboundary proletarian solidarity in a longue
durée frame. Rooted in a multidisciplinary framework of analysis situated at the
intersection of Historical Sociology, Global Labour History, Atlantic Studies, and Social
History, this strategy has allowed me to illuminate two world-significant moments of
proletarian solidarity played out across colonial and imperial borders. The first is golden
age piracy (1714-26), when thousands of insurgent seafaring workers of all nationalities
revolted against capitalist exploitation at sea and took possession of their ships,
instituting their own self-governments and creating multicrew alliances against imperial
navies. The second moment expressing a durable process of transboundary proletarian
solidarity is offered by the Saint-Domingue revolution (1791-1804), when thousands of
African slaves rose up to overthrow slavery, leading to the formation of the first
independent black republic in the Americas. This dissertation highlights that during the
revolution, underground channels of communication entertained by black sailors and
corsairs linked revolutionary Saint-Domingue to other slave revolts elsewhere in the
Atlantic world, which cumulated in, and intersected with, the wake of working-class
internationalism during the 1848 revolutions in Europe.
Monday, April 20, 2020
ECOLOGIES OF THE COMMON: FEMINISM AND THE POLITICS OF NATURE
By MIRIAM TOLA
Dissertation Directors:
Ed Cohen, Elizabeth Grosz
https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/51479/PDF/1/play/
ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
This dissertation proposes a theory of the common beyond the modern figure of Man as
primary agent of historical transformation. Through close reading of Medieval debates on
poverty and common use, contemporary political theory and political speeches, legal
documents, and protests in public spaces, it complicates current debates on the common in
three ways. First, this work contends that the enclosures of pre-modern landholdings, a
process the unfolded in connected and yet distinct ways in Europe and the colonies, was
entangled with the affirmation of the European white man as proper figure of the human
entitled to appropriate the labor of women and slaves, and the material world as resources.
Second, it engages contemporary theorists of the common such as Paolo Virno, Antonio
Negri and Michael Hardt. Although these authors depart from the prevalent assumptions of
modern liberalism (in that they do not take the individual right to appropriate nature as the
foundation of political community), their formulation of common is still grounded in Marx’s
view of labor as the primary force making the world. As a counterpoint to this position, this
dissertation draws on feminist and science studies to bring into relief the entanglements of
human and other-than-human entities (including water, soil, and technological
infrastructures) that constitute the common. Finally, it examines connections and
divergences between Western notions of the common-as-resources and contemporary
indigenous communal politics in Latin America that unsettle the divide between nature and
politics. Ecologies of the Common mobilizes the pre-modern past and indigenous forms of life
obliterated by Western narratives of development as living forces that might generate the
future of the common as mode of living together in the ruins of capitalism.
This insistence is especially manifest in Negri's discussion of Marx's Grundrisse ... 'workerist' theorist Tronti, who in 1967 decided to espouse the 'really-existing ... object, the technicians will serve in reality only as a transmission belt, this time ...
In the course of this book we attempt to show that the political economy of the
USSR is fundamentally capitalist in nature; and in considering it in a critical and theoretical
fashion we find the Marxist critique of capital and the Autonomist Marxist understanding of
class struggle to be tools of very substantial utility. It is also argued that previous
considerations of the USSR, both ‘Marxist’ and sovietological, do not offer a critique of the
production relations of an adequately profound kind; and that even those Marxist writings
which come closest to one are weakened by the insufficiency of their attention to the
necessarily classist and antagonistic basis of those relations. Thus we hope not only to
provide a framework for a more profound theoretical understanding of the nature of Soviet
production relations than has hitherto been available; but also to demonstrate in what way the
production relations in the USSR have been racked throughout the Soviet period by the
irreducible struggle between the proletariat and capital. In both areas the examination of the
contradictions of the Soviet economic system has led to the drawing of important and
original conclusions.
Deep Currents Rising: Some notes on the global challenge to capitalism
Chapter (PDF Available) · January 2014
DOI: 10.4324/9781315662084
In book: Social Movements: Transformative Shifts and Turning Points, Edition: 2014, Chapter: "Deep Currents Rising: Notes on the Global Threat to Capitalism", Publisher: Routledge, Editors: Savyasaachi and Ravi Kumar, pp.193-235
Cite this publication
Chapter (PDF Available) · January 2014
DOI: 10.4324/9781315662084
In book: Social Movements: Transformative Shifts and Turning Points, Edition: 2014, Chapter: "Deep Currents Rising: Notes on the Global Threat to Capitalism", Publisher: Routledge, Editors: Savyasaachi and Ravi Kumar, pp.193-235
Cite this publication
Despite neo-conservative illusions of a hegemonic Pax Americana, the persistent efforts of supranational state institutions such as the IMF and the WTO to impose neo-liberal policies throughout the world and the US government's efforts to use its post-9/11 "war on terrorism" to leverage the power of capital against all opponents, the basic institutional structures of modern capitalist society continue to be challenged on all levels by diverse currents of grassroots struggle. In their increasingly common rejection of business priorities these struggles recall Marxist notions of class warfare. Yet the common opposition to capitalism is not accompanied by the old notion of a unified alternative project of socialism. On the contrary, such a vision is steadily being displaced by a proliferation of distinct projects and a common understanding that there is no need for universal rules. In response to these struggles, the threatened global order is responding in various ways, sometimes by military and paramilitary force, sometimes by co-optation aimed at reintegrating the antagonistic forces. The problem for us is finding ever new ways to defeat these responses and continue to build new worlds. To find those new ways, we need to understand the character of the currents of struggle now in motion. Among such diverse currents conceptual approaches have naturally differed. In the notes that follow I evaluate a few of those concepts and offer some new ones.
Autonomist Marxism and Workplace Organizing in Canada in the 1970s
JOHN HUOT / ISSUE 18 / 6/28/2016 UP THE ANTE
ANOTHER CURRENT THAT INFLUENCED MY POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT AT THE TIME
ANOTHER CURRENT THAT INFLUENCED MY POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT AT THE TIME
Autonomist Marxism, from its headwaters in the early 1960s workers’ struggles and Marxist circles in Italy to multiple, diverse social movement/Marxist/feminist spaces in many countries, has developed into a significant current in the global anti-capitalist, anti-oppression project for social transformation.[1] During the 1970s, a small stream of workplace and community activists in Canada was influenced by the developing Autonomist Marxist (AM) current that flowed from Italy across Europe to the US and Canada.
The goal of this article is provide an account of this experience, focusing on how AM concepts were used to understand working class struggles in Canada and to orient workplace organizing, specifically in the Post Office. This account is based on my own participation as a political activist and as a postal worker. Although based on documents and memory at a distance of 40 years, this account is relevant to contemporary movements in four areas: first, the importance of grounding theoretical development and anti-capitalist organizing in investigations directly connected to the actual struggles of workers and oppressed groups; second, the relevance of the AM concept of class composition to understand the current stage of capital and the class struggle; third, the importance of putting workers’ and oppressed peoples’ struggles, not unions and social movement organizations, at the centre of analysis and organizing strategies; and fourth, how the concept of power relations within the working class and oppressed groups can contribute to understanding the importance of autonomous movements, as well as intersectional movement-building.
The “New Tendency” and Autonomous Marxism
The small AM stream in Canada was part of the “New Tendency,” (NT) a 1970s network of activists, mainly from the student movement. We were influenced by powerful examples of workers’ struggles, particularly the May 1968 general strike in France and the wave of workplace and community struggles in Italy from 1969 onwards. Struggles in the US, Quebec, and the rest of Canada also turned our political organizing towards the working class.
The NT criticized the understanding of “working class” held by both “old” left Marxists and the new Trotskyist and Marxist-Leninist groups as abstract and unchanging, on the basis it did not reflect the specific conditions of working class and capital in advancedcapitalism. For the same reason, we rejected the dominant vanguard party-building approach, which held that class consciousness and revolutionary leadership cannot develop within mass struggles, but has to be transmitted to mass struggles by the external vanguard party. Unions and other mass organizations were thus “transmission belts” of revolutionary class consciousness between party and masses.[2]
NT activists were influenced by a new Marxist theory and organizing approach in Italy called “operaismo” or “workers’ autonomy,” which developed during the 1960s. Important writers included Mario Tronti, Toni Negri, and Sergio Bologna. When the massive worker and student movements erupted in the late 1960s, the development of “workers’ autonomy” merged with these movements and was the foundation of several new autonomist political organizations.[3] Workers’ autonomy posed fundamental challenges to social democratic and Leninist parties and their affiliated unions. Struggles at large plants demonstrated that a new layer of young unskilled workers was generating demands for de-linking wages from productivity and for wage equality across job classifications. These actions were framed explicitly as anti-capitalist attacks on the wage labour-capital “bargain” and on the organization of work as a weapon to enforce capitalist power. Furthermore, they were advanced by workplace organizations autonomous from unions and left parties.
The NT was also influenced by early social reproduction feminism[4] and by the C.L.R. James-related group Facing Reality in Detroit.[5] With collectives in Toronto, Windsor, Kitchener-Waterloo, and Winnipeg, and ongoing contact with US, British, and Italian AM organizations, the NT was the largest AM-influenced activist network in North America.[6]
To develop an understanding of class struggle in Canada, the NT’s first priority was the investigation of the conditions and pattern of workers’ struggles among different sectors of the working class.[7] This investigation was practiced through direct participation in working class struggles. Although our theory asserted that working class power developed in both workplace and community struggles, in practice most investigations and organizing were in workplaces.
NT activists were involved as rank and file workers in the auto industry, the post office, rail, medium-sized industrial plants, nursing homes, and public sector offices.[8] Since our main goal initially was to investigate workers’ struggles, we did not advance an organizing agenda. We supported rank and file struggles and their leaders, in sharp contrast to other left activists who immediately sought steward positions, tried to recruit workers around their political organization’s agenda, distributed leaflets calling for more militant action, and got involved in Local union politics, often aimed at getting Local leadership positions.
Key Autonomist Conceptual Tools
Workers’ autonomy provided three key conceptual tools for understanding the class struggle in advanced capitalism. First, workers’ autonomy occurs when the basic thrust of struggles is to satisfy workers’ needs autonomously from workers’ function to maximize surplus value as waged and unwaged labour. this autonomy has two aspects: content and organizational forms. Anti-capitalist content is expressed in struggles for a greater share of surplus value produced for less work, in short, the struggle for more wages for less work. When this content circulates throughout the working class, it attacks the basic mechanisms of capitalist accumulation, thus creating a crisis for capital.[9] The autonomous form of workplace struggles is reflected in struggles apart from the control of unions, whose function under capitalist law is to contain workers’ share of surplus value within profitable capital accumulation and to reinforce workers’ subservience as wage labour.[10]
The second key concept is the wage relation, and wages, as a power relation between capital and the working class. The wages won by workers in different sections of the class are a reflection of the relative power won by workers against capital in a given sector; divisions in the working class from high wage to low wage and wageless constitute a hierarchy of power based on the wage that these sectors have won in struggles with capital, and not simply the “price” of labour as a reflection of relative labour market power.[11]
“Class composition” is the third key concept, analyzing how capital transforms the composition of labour power in the production process with the goal of undermining the basis of workers’ power in a particular organization of production. Different class compositions in various historical stages of the struggle between workers and capital also reflect different leading political class compositions with historically-specific anti-capitalist contents and forms of struggle. For example, in the 19th and early 20th century when the production process was centered on skilled workers, their power was based on employers’ dependence on their skill and the difficulty of readily replacing them, thus providing a limited weapon to bargain wages and control work.
At this stage, the struggle for workers’ control of production expressed the anti-capitalist ‘political’ content and workers’ councils or shop steward councils expressed the organizational form of the most developed power of the working class struggle against capital.[12] Capital’s response to the cycle of struggles dominated by skilled workers’ power was to “recompose” the working class by deskilling the production process and by the widespread adoption of mass assembly production. This undermined the material basis of skilled workers’ power by enabling employers to introduce unskilled workers into the production process, drawn widely from both within national borders and globally.
The subsequent “Fordist” cycle of struggles in the factory, extractive industries, and offices until the 1970s was dominated by the “mass worker”: lower-skilled and -paid, readily hireable, trainable, and replaceable, thus increasing capital’s power in the struggle with workers over the share of value produced. But just as capital “re-composes” the working class, so too the working class “re-composes” itself through a lengthy cycle of struggles, yielding new anti-capitalist contents and forms of organization. Examples were the Industrial Workers of the World, One Big Union, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The anti-capitalist content of the “mass worker” was expressed in the struggle for more wages for less work, in short, the struggle against wage labour. Organizationally, the struggle developed autonomously, especially after state regulation of industrial unions after the 1930s, at times “below” on the shop floor, and often in opposition to unions.
Postal Workers’ Struggles in the 1970s
The post office provided an extraordinary site to investigate the struggle of workers and capital in advanced capitalism. In an era prior to electronic communication and to the partial privatization of mail services, business depended almost entirely on the post office for print communication. With 90 percent of all mail being business-related, the Post Office was essentially a state-provided service to capital. Postal workers’ struggles were massive; between 1970 and 1975 alone, there were 28 strikes and work stoppages, 26 of which were illegal. Montréal, Toronto, and Vancouver were the epicentres of this contest between postal workers, capital, and the state. The main downtown postal terminal eventually became the main focus of Toronto AM activists. Several worked at the main downtown postal terminal for up to four years, and produced three major articles about their work.[13]
Until the early 1970s, the core of the postal production process was a manual sortation system; workers’ sorting speed and instant recall of hundreds of destinations were central. Workers’ power was based on the employer’s dependence on their skill and the difficulty of replacing them through minor changes in the production process or during strikes. The Post Office job classification system and corresponding wage hierarchy was organized around skilled sorters as a benchmark for unskilled workers.
The union representing inside workers until the mid-1960s was the Canadian Postal Employees Association (CPEA), founded in 1911 as a craft union for killed workers only; unskilled inside workers were included after 1928. CPEA’s priority was to use the real, though limited, power base of skilled workers in production to gain “acceptable” wages and working conditions.
For skilled postal workers and the state/employer, this accommodation started to break down by the early 1960s. With mail volumes rapidly increasing, the employer tried to increase productivity and lower wage costs by hiring more unskilled sorters. Average wage levels fell further behind other sectors. These trends culminated in 1965 in a three-week illegal strike which led to the formation of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW). CUPW was determined to use a new collective bargaining system, including the newly-won right to strike, to gain better wages and working conditions.
By the early 1970s, several CUPW contract strikes had won wage increases that outstripped productivity increases. The employer responded by deskilling some manual sortation and by large scale hiring to handle increasing mail volumes. Young workers brought a new culture of shop floor resistance to waged work, including generalized insubordination, slowdowns, sabotage, absenteeism, high turnover, as well as direct action on the shop floor and wildcat strikes. Their struggles grew parallel to, and often in conflict with, the union’s contract strikes. Local union officials, mostly older skilled workers, policed these struggles to contain them within the confines of the collective agreement, including calling in police to escort workers across a wildcat picket line during a three-day wildcat in 1973.
NT activists identified these forms of resistance as characteristic of the “mass worker’s” autonomous struggle against capital, and essential building blocks for workers’ power. For the vanguard left, they were at best “fodder” for more militancy to advance their group’s agenda; at worst they were disruptive of the union’s collective bargaining relationship with the employer. The employer was fully aware of the cumulative anti-capitalist effect of these struggles, lamenting in the business press that productivity per worker had declined 12.5 percent.
The state/employer recognized that wage gains and shop floor struggles had created a crisis for both the reliability and financial viability of a vital service to capital. The long-term solution was a complete re-composition of the technical composition of labour power through technological change. The goal was to eliminate the power of the skilled worker, increase productivity, and re-establish work discipline through the technological regulation of an unskilled, lower paid, and easily replaceable labour power. CUPW’s strategy was to focus bargaining on tying lower wages in the new, deskilled job classification system to the skilled sorter benchmark; several contract strikes in the 1970s and a 12-day illegal work stoppage in 1974 revolved around this union goal.
The NT activists’ perspective was that in the new unskilled production process, job classifications were no longer based on real skill differences, and served the employer’s interest to divide workers and to create an artificial job mobility ladder. During the 1973 contract strike, we advanced the goals of wage parity for all sorters, manual or machine-assisted, and worked to close the wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers.
The 1974 Occupation, Sit-downs, and National Illegal Strike
In April 1974 the suspension and firing of workers in Montréal’s main postal terminal led to a rank and file-led occupation of the terminal, which was broken up after six days by riot police.
Immediately following the occupation, the national CUPW decided to broaden the fight to re-instate over 300 Montréal occupiers by directing workers across Canada to sit down in lunchrooms after reporting to work. Unresolved contract issues about pay and classification were also made conditions of the settlement. After several days of the sit-down with mixed worker support, the national CUPW ordered that the sit-downs be terminated and postal facilities across the country picketed, in effect shutting down the whole postal system.
Only a small number of Toronto workers picketed, with some crossing picket lines along with most members of the outside workers’ unions. NT activists in the main terminal were very involved in building support for the sit-down and subsequently organizing picket lines. This included an in-plant mass meeting of hundreds, which was disrupted by the CUPW Local President, called in by the employer to break up the mass meeting.
We brought Montréal rank and file postal workers to Toronto to talk at picket line meetings; we called this a concrete way to “circulate” the struggle. The national work stoppage was settled after six days of picketing. The settlement included no discipline against any participants in the Montréal occupation or in the cross-country sit-ins and illegal picketing. Also, the employer agreed for the first time to bargain the new classification system for less skilled mechanized sorting, which had been exempted by law from collective bargaining.
The tepid rank and file support in Toronto during the 1974 sit-down and picketing led to a critical re-assessment of our assumptions about workers’ autonomous struggle and our role as rank and file activists. We concluded that workers were prepared to fight for their own autonomous interest, which most fundamentally was the struggle for more money and less work, but not for objectives and methods of struggle dictated by the union from the top down.
We understood from meetings with Montréal workers that the main differences between the two sites were the explicit awareness in Montréal of the workers’ autonomous interests, and the level of rank and file organization. We were faced with many questions: How to articulate workers’ autonomous struggles in demands workers would take up as their own? How to relate such demands to the collective bargaining strategy of a new, militant national and local union leadership? What forms of autonomous organization? More broadly, how would these issues play out in other workplaces in Canada where the level of autonomous struggle was less developed? How would autonomous power in workplaces stimulate, and be stimulated by, struggles outside the workplace, for example by the wageless, including women, the unemployed and poor, and students?
The Wages for Housework Collective and the Dissolution of the NT
In mid-1974, the women in the Toronto NT collective left the mixed local collectives and the New Tendency to form the Wages for Housework collective (WFH).
Several reasons underlay this decision. First, discussions with Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James during a 1973 visit to Canada sharpened the conviction that women’s autonomy was essential for developing women’s class power.[14] Second, the increased recognition of the importance of social reproduction in advanced capitalism provided the theoretical and organizing focus for a wages for housework campaign. Third, the women’s conclusion that the focus of NT activity on male-dominated workplaces reproduced the sexist hierarchy of power in capitalism, and neglected the political priority for developing women’s power in social reproduction.
The women’s decision had a far-reaching impact on the NT project. By 1975, the remaining AM-influenced men in Toronto, now organized as the Struggle Against Work Collective (SAWC), decided to abandon the NT’s “investigation-participation” workplace approach, and instead proposed that priority be given to “the spreading of the struggle against work perspective through the preparation and distribution of political materials, with the aim of collectivizing experiences of struggle and generalizing their content and direction.”[15] We decided to discontinue direct involvement in the Toronto Post Office, soon followed by a similar decision by the Windsor Autoworkers Group. The broader New Tendency network and The Newsletter were also discontinued, as its more articulated components decided that emerging political differences had outgrown the political basis of the NT.[16]
In part, the men’s decision reflected the inconclusiveness of discussions about how to move forward after the 1974 post office sit-down and strike. It also reflected SAWC’s developing understanding of power relations between different sectors of the working class, influenced by WFH. Initially the autonomy of struggles by women and other less powerful sections of the working class was framed as the precondition for developing the power of women.
At times women’s struggles could be in conflict with male workers’ struggles, particularly if the latter were simply protecting their own power and material gains. But not always, as CUPW demonstrated in 1975 by winning pro-rated benefits for part-time workers, mostly women, a first in collective bargaining in Canada. However, relations of power came to be understood by WFH and SAWC to mean that only the struggles of the less powerful sections could increase the power of the whole class.[17] Over the following year, that view hardened into the position that struggles by more powerful sections for more power against capital could only advance at the expense of the less powerful.
By 1976, SAWC divided over the issue of power. One group defended the “hardened” position, and advocated that the collective’s priority should be support for the WFH campaign. A second group argued that the struggles of both the less powerful and more powerful sections against capital could advance the power of the whole class; activists in more powerful sections, in solidarity with activists in less powerful sections, needed to determine the conditions in which what we called the “circulation of power” between sections of the class could be advanced.[18]
The NT experience demonstrated the importance of grounding theoretical development and anti-capitalist organizing in investigations directly connected to the actual movements of workers and oppressed groups. The focus of investigations has to be uncovering the anti-capitalist content and forms of movements, not fitting movements into the theories, strategies, and organizational forms appropriate to earlier periods of capitalism. Any theoretical perspective, including autonomist Marxism, which is disconnected from real movements runs the risk of becoming an abstract theory, rather than an instrument to empower workers and oppressed groups themselves to transform the world.
Class Composition and Capital
Since the 1970s, the significant changes to capital and working class composition are usually ascribed to the exclusive initiative of capital through measures such as globalized free trade, deregulation, and privatization. A shrinking traditional working class is relegated to defending past gains. The concept of class composition remains important to analyze the struggles which have produced the decomposition of the “mass worker” and the progressive re-composition of a new class composition by the 2000s. This approach points to the historically-specific anti-capitalist content and forms of workplace struggles and other mass movements in the era of the global working class and capital.[19] For example, in recent years university contract faculty and graduate teaching assistants in Ontario have waged some of the sharpest struggles in the public sector.
Political analysis of these struggles tends to focus on bargaining strategy, strike tactics, and conflicts within the union locals or between the locals and the central union. These struggles are usually framed as resistance to the neo-liberal agenda of the universities, including lowering the cost of academic labour.[20] A class composition focus would start from an investigation of changing class composition as a product of struggles between academic labour and the neoliberal state and university. It would investigate the anti-capitalist content and forms of organization generated by this changing class composition, including consideration of autonomous organizations of the academic precariat not only at individual colleges and universities, but also regionally, irrespective of union affiliation, which could advance these struggles both within and beyond unions’ collective bargaining strategies. This approach would also investigate the degree to which the new class composition of the academic precariat is shared with other “knowledge precariat” workers outside the academy, as well as how anti-capitalist contents and forms of organization circulate, as happened between global justice movement activists, York University precarious faculty, and Ontario anti-poverty activists in the early 2000s.[21]
Class composition needs to be analyzed throughout the entire cycle of production and reproduction, including unwaged work, from the local to the global level, using the theoretical advances since the 1970s of both autonomist Marxism and social reproduction feminism.[22] For example, the “precariat” and migrant workers, and their specific forms of struggle, have already been the focus of investigation in this perspective.[23] Finally, a class composition approach would provide an alternative to the party-building approach by grounding the circulation of the struggles and power of workers and oppressed groups in the real movements which develop power in struggles with capital.[24]
Workers’ Autonomy and Unions
By collective bargaining law and historical practice, unions contain workers’ struggles within collective bargaining with individual employers over the narrowest range of wages, benefits, and working conditions around which a “deal” can be reached which will keep the employer profitable. All forms of active solidarity by other workers are legally prohibited, including mass pickets, solidarity strikes, and secondary boycotts. Once a contract is signed, the union is legally bound to confine the workers’ struggle within the grievance-arbitration system.[25]
It is therefore important not to conflate workers’ autonomous struggles with collective bargaining and union political action. The self-activity of workers’ struggles is the basic building block, even when it has little formal organization and only embryonic class consciousness. The priority is to develop workers’ autonomous power. How to do this – through independent worker organizations or within unions – is a tactical question.
Workplace organizing can no longer be theorized or strategized with an exclusive workplace focus. For example, precarity is common to most workers today, with a resulting lack of workers’ connection with a single workplace or with strictly workplace-based organizations or unions. The most innovative organizing of waged workers today is community-based, rather than workplace-based. Examples are the independent community-based worker centres such as the Workers’ Action Centre in Toronto, as well as the movements for the $15 minimum wage in Canada and the US.
Autonomy, Power, and the Working Class
The understanding of divisions within the working class and oppressed groups as relations of power has relevance today as a way to ground these divisions as fundamentally different relative levels of power and wealth resulting from struggles against capital in the workplace and community, locally and globally. This is an alternative to framing divisions as “divide and conquer” capitalist tactics, or as the inequitable distribution of existing power and systemic advantages among identity groups. This would also re-frame conflicts and convergences within and between movements.
For example, it is strategically important to assert the organizational autonomy of struggles of less powerful sectors (low waged and wageless workers; racialized workers; women) to set their own strategies, demands, and methods of struggle in order to develop their power and thereby increase the power of the whole working class.[26] This goes beyond the “representational” approach in the labour movement or other movement organizations, where representatives of less powerful groups such as women and racialized workers are allocated leadership positions.
Real autonomy means supporting spaces in movements where women, racialized groups, and other oppressed groups can set their own priorities and methods of struggle.[27] For the more powerful sections, active solidarity, not control of the struggles of the less powerful, can increase the power of both the less and more powerful. An example would be unions making the struggle for a living wage for all, waged and wageless, a top priority within their own organizations, while accepting the autonomy of the low waged and wageless to determine their own campaigns.
These four areas of relevance of the NT workers’ autonomy experience have remained at the center of activists’ experiences in mass movements and political organizations since the 1970s. It is ultimately up to the current generation of activists to decide what can be learned from past experiences to address these issues in movements today.
Notes
1. Gary Kinsman, “The Politics of Revolution: Learning from Autonomous
Marxism,” Upping the Anti #1. I want to thank Gary for his encouragement
to re-visit this 1970’s activist experience with a view to its relevance to contemporary movements.
2. Adriano Sofri (1968), Organizing for Workers’ Power: Beyond Trade Unionism and
Vanguardism; New Tendency pamphlet, trans. with Canadian introduction by John Huot (1972). http://www.connexions.org/CxLibrary/New-Tendency-18943CX.htm.
3. Lotta Continua played a leading role in workplace and community struggles from 1969 to 1976, incorporating some thousands of activists and publishing a national daily newspaper. Potere Operaio was active in several significant local struggles with a national presence, and published influential articles. On operaismo, see Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in
Autonomist Marxism. Pluto, 2002.
4. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James (1972), The Power of Women and the
Subversion of the Community. Falling Wall Press; Selma James (1973), Sex, Race
and Class. Falling Wall Press.
5. Facing Reality published reports in the 1960’s on industrial workers’ struggles, the Black liberation movement, and women by activists such as Martin Glaberman, Grace Lee Boggs, James Boggs, and Selma James.
6. Many articles from the three main influences on the New Tendency are accessible at http://zerowork.org/.
7. See Huot in Sofri (1972).
8. The Newsletter, 6 issues, 1972-75. These reports are valuable records of struggles
in diverse workplaces in 1970s Ontario. http://www.connexions.org/CxLibrary/New-Tendency-18943CX.htm.
9.Toronto NT Collective (1974), Autonomous Struggles and the Capitalist Crisis, edited with introduction by Ramirez, Bruno, Workers’ Autonomy pamphlet.
10. John Huot (1973), “Notes on Workers’ Autonomy,” The Newsletter #2, 40-48;
Ramirez, Judy and Taylor, Peter (1973), “Elements for a Political Perspective,” The Newsletter #3, 3-9.
11. John Huot (1974), “Workers’ Autonomy and Power Relations Within the Working Class,” Toronto NT Collective Educational on Workers’ Autonomy.
12. Sergio Bologna (1972), “Class Composition and Theory of the Party at the Origins of the Workers’ Council Movement,” Telos, No. 13, 4-27. Also at http://zerowork.org/.
13. John Huot (1973), “Workers’ Struggles in Advanced Capitalism: The Post
Office,” The Newsletter # 3, 40-55; Toronto NT Collective (1974), “The April
Postal Strike: Workers, Union and the State,” The Newsletter #5, 19-48; Peter
Taylor (1975), “‘The Sons of Bitches Just Won’t Work’: Postal Workers Against
the State,” ZeroWork 1, 85-112.
14.As Dalla Costa explained, “Only those directly affected and with a direct interest in destroying their exploited condition can really discover the necessary political analysis and the ways to organize their struggle and exercise a real power…. When women begin to organize and become aware of their force and power, the whole working class discovers new strengths and possibilities.” Quoted in Huot, Notes on Workers’ Autonomy,” The Newsletter #2, Fall 1973, 42).
15. Struggle Against Work Collective (1975), “Statement on the Dissolution of the New Tendency”, archived as The Newsletter #6 http://www.connexions.org/
CxLibrary/New-Tendency-18943CX.htm.
16. Struggle Against Work Collective (1975); Out of the Driver’s Seat: Marxism in North America Today (1974) (by Windsor Facing Reality-related group). http://www.connexions.org/CxLibrary/New-Tendency-18943CX.htm.
17. Struggle Against Work Collective (1975), Statement on the Dissolution of the
New Tendency, The Newsletter #6 http://www.connexions.org/CxLibrary/New-Tendency-18943CX.htm.
18. “Toronto Collective Statement” (1976), written by the men, including myself, who left SAWC over this issue. http://www.connexions.org/CxLibrary/New-Tendency-18943CX.htm
19. Immanuel Ness ed. (2014), New Forms of Worker Organization: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class Struggle Unionism, PM Press. This otherwise interesting collection makes no use of the class composition concept; in consequence, the articles focus exclusively on forms of workers’ struggles, but not on their class composition, which is the material basis for strategically evaluating new forms of organization.
20. See, “Thinking Through the York University Strike,” Editorial, Canadian Dimension, May/June 2009, with online responses by Tyler Shipley and Tyler McCreary.
21. Clara Kuhling, “How CUPE 3903 Struck and Won,” Just Labour, vol. 1 (2002), 77-85.
22. E.g. Sergio Bologna (2014), “Workerism Beyond Fordism: On the Lineage of Italian Workerism,” Viewpoint Magazine, https:viewpointmag.com/2014/12/15/workerism-beyond-fordism-on-the-lineage-of-italian-workerism/; Silvia Federici (2012), Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, PM Press; Nick Dyer-Witheford (1999), Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism, University of Illinois Press.
23. Susan Ferguson, and David McNally (2015) “Precarious Migrants: Gender, Race and the Social Reproduction of a Global Working Class,” in Transforming Classes, ed. Leo Panitch and Greg Albo, Socialist Register 2015, pp. 1-23.
24. Dorothy Kidd (2016) “Extra-Activism,” Peace Review, 28:1, 1-9, uses a class composition approach to analyze the contemporary mining justice movement.
25. Jane McAlevey (2012), Raising Expectations (And Raising Hell): My Decade of Fighting for the Labour Movement, Verso, is a rare example of a union staff organizer pushing many of these limits of unions and collective bargaining.
26. The labour movement has mostly failed to respect the autonomy of anti-poverty organizations, especially the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, which has led many campaigns over the last 25 years. OCAP has consistently supported unionized workers’ struggles.
27. This was an issue in the Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly (2009-2015). See Herman Rosenfeld (2011), “The Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly: A Hopeful Experiment,” New Politics, Summer 2011; Elise Thorburn (2011), “Motion to Strike a Feminist Action Committee,” GTWA Discussion Bulletin, January 2011.
Workerism Beyond Fordism: On the Lineage of Italian Workerism
https://www.viewpointmag.com/2014/12/15/workerism-beyond-fordism-on-the-lineage-of-italian-workerism/
The Working Class as a Complex Organism
From what has been said, it is evident that workerists dislike schematism and simplifications. On the contrary, aware of the extreme complexity of capitalist reality, they developed an in-depth analysis, taking into careful consideration both its more manifest as well as its less obvious aspects. We could say that they had a great appreciation for the enemy, knowing it to be a refined power, brutal and seductive at the same time. To underestimate the enemy would be a stupid move, leading to certain defeat. The first aspect of the capitalist system they considered was technology. The decisive impulse was given by Raniero Panzieri with his innovative reading of Marx’s “Fragment on Machines,” published in the first issue of Quaderni Rossi. 2 Technology is labor embodied. It plays an ambivalent role, because it “liberates” the workers from work, but at the same time “submits” them to more rigid forms of control. Technology has the power to shape a certain type of labor-power, to determine some of its characteristics, and can also have a specific influence on its way of thinking, its culture, and therefore its political action. Workerism says that technology has the power to determine the “technical composition of the working class.”
Let’s give an example. In the auto factories of the 1970s, there were departments in which the worker had an individual relationship with the machine he operated, knew all its secrets, was able to “prepare” it, to equip it, and was very proud of this knowledge, which was also the source of his small power. These were specialized workers with a strong consciousness of their own roles, and were considered the so-called “labor aristocracy.” These workers were in general the most combative; most of them were communist, and considered being communist a natural consequence of their being the most specialized, the most qualified, not only with regards to the machine assigned to them – a press, a turn, a cutter, a welder – but with regards to the entire productive cycle. They knew the factory like the back of their hands, and were therefore able to organize improvised strikes and blockade production, closing the focal points of the cycle. They passed on their knowledge to the younger workers but, at the same time, had a strong sense of hierarchy. They felt that a strongly differentiated wage system was justified – the younger workers had to climb the ladder of specialization step by step.
In other departments of the factory, on the other hand, there were assembly lines, that is, a type of technology which does not permit an individual approach, where workers, male and female, could be employed without any qualification. In Milan at the beginning of the 1960s in the electromechanic factories, where work on the line was often not as heavy as in auto, in the assembly departments women were employed as generic workers, obviously paid much less than the machine operators. This working class was the one that workerism defined as the “mass worker,” with a mentality very different from the specialized workers of the labor aristocracy, and therefore with opposite demands: equal wage increases for all, abolition of individual piecework. Demands which had to sound like blasphemy to the ears of the old communist workers who were toolmakers on individual machines.
What happens when, in the 1980s, the factory disintegrates and information technology gradually spreads, eventually taking over? What happens when the factory worker, more or less specialized, more or less “mass,” is partly replaced by robots, partly laid off because production has relocated to emerging countries? What happens when workers lose their social force, the communist tradition is thrown into the sea by the left parties, and the working class is no longer a political subject?
What happens is that that world of labor adapts itself to the new technologies, is molded by the new technologies. Those who come from the workerist experience find themselves equipped with the intellectual tools necessary to understand what is happening. Just as before, when they observed the relation between the specialized worker and the individual machine, or between the mass worker and the assembly line, they now observed the relation between the personal computer 3 and the subject using it. This meant comparing two totally different modes of working, the Fordist mode, framed in a rigid organization involving thousands of people amassed in specific spaces, and the mode of solitary work, without a specific working space, where the subject is able to determine its own rhythms and has permanent access to a universe of potentially infinite information.
At first glance the worker on a personal computer is puzzling. Is this person liberated? Does this person have a greater degree of liberty than the worker enslaved to the assembly line? Apparently, yes. Is this a person with power? Power of negotiation against the employer? As much power as the workers who could collectively shut down production and deal with management? Apparently, no; indeed certainly no. Social power is obtained only by coalition; the individual by itself is always subaltern. As Michel Serres says, “connectivity has been substituted for collectivity.” The worker does not live together with other workers like him, face to face; workers are connected with other workers, knowing not their voices but only their email addresses. Does the mass of information that can be obtained via the internet give them greater power, a greater capacity of negotiation, with respect to the worker who, enslaved to the machine, had no possibility of accessing the world of information?
No, it does not confer greater power – the only advantage in comparison with the employee, factory worker, or clerical worker, is that of being able to use this information to live as an independent laborer, as “unwaged.” Just a few observations on the nature of post-Fordism were enough for the old workerist to understand that capitalism had made an enormous leap forward in the capacity to control labor-power; the new subject, which still has no name, lacked, above all, the possibility to organize collectively, to negotiate with the employer, indeed to even know who the employer was – himself or some other person? To imagine a path of liberation it was necessary to start over again, while maintaining, however, the point of departure, the one that everyone thought was outdated: the problem of work. Is it still possible to imagine a path of liberation starting from work? Is it still possible to see in the person in front of the personal computer a worker, or must this word “worker” – lavoratore, Arbeiter, travailleur, trabajador – be removed from our vocabulary, because it belongs to an already faded epoch, the Fordist epoch?
The Idea of Work in Post-Fordism
The power of the workerist theoretical elaboration consists, as we have said, in confronting the complexity of the problems, in getting to the bottom of things, averting simplifications and shortcuts. The most illuminating example can be seen by observing how workerists dealt with the concept of “working class.” For most political militants in the 1960s and 1970s the term “working class” was a kind of mantra, an all-encompassing magic word. Just referring to the “working class” was enough to be considered a member of the “Left,” of the workers’ movement, to be considered a communist. For the workerists, on the other hand, the working class was an unexplored universe, extremely differentiated and complex, or, better, the point of arrival of a very long process, fraught with obstacles, in the course of which labor-power became aware of its own role and its own strength, and appeared on the scene of society as a protagonist, not as an appendage of the system of capitalist production. As I wrote in one of my essays on workerism:
The collective work that the workerist group undertook in direct contact with the world of factory-production aimed at penetrating the various levels that make up the system of productive relations: the sequential organization of the productive cycle and the hierarchical mechanisms spontaneously produced by it, the disciplinary techniques and techniques of integration elaborated in various ways, the development of new technologies and processing systems, the reactions to the labour-force’s spontaneous behaviour, the interpersonal dynamics on the shop-floor, the systems of communication employed by workers during their shift, the transmission of knowledge from older to younger workers, the gradual emergence of a culture of conflict, the internal division of the labour-force, the use of work-breaks, the systems of payment and their differential application, the presence of the union and of forms of political propaganda, risk-awareness and the methods used to safeguard one’s physical integrity and health, the relationship to political militants outside the factory, work pace- control and the piecework-system, the workplace itself and so on. 4
The person in front of the personal computer, as a laborer, that is, as a person who yields a determinate intellectual product to third parties in exchange for remuneration in order to survive, must present the same, if not greater, complexity. Let’s begin with the simplest things. For example: what form does this remuneration take? The old form of the wage or the form of a professional fee? Is he paid by the hour or by the project? Is there a working time? The fundamental parameters for defining a laborer are the wage and the hours. His privacy, his personal existence, his everyday life, his consumption, his relationships, his standard of living are determined in whole or in part by these two parameters. It is a very materialist vision, crudely materialist, to which the ideology of modernity opposed the theory that what matters in the individual is not his material conditions but his personality, his character, whether he is an optimist or a pessimist, sociable or surly, seductive or disagreeable, inclined towards leadership or service, effusive or silent, confident or shy, whether he has “character” or not. But, on closer inspection, the crudest materialism is less misleading than extreme subjectivism, than sterile and illusory individualism, which are, on closer inspection, ideological dispositifs which have the purpose of dissolving the notion of “labor.” The modern conception of labor contained within the ideology of modernity is that it is no longer human activity exchanged for the means of subsistence, but an activity in which the individual externalizes his own personality, knows himself better, almost a mystical encounter. “Labor is a gift of God,” I heard one day from a leader of a Catholic union. Labor does not belong to the world of commodities but to that of human psychology. From this ideology emerges the idea of labor as a “gift” of the individual to the collectivity, and the justification of “free” labor, badly paid or unpaid.
Background: Genesis of Zerowork #1
ONE OF THE INFLUENCES ON MY POLITICS
Introduction
The Analysis
Paths to Zerowork
Theoretico-political Roots
These folks came together in the midst of crises both local and international.
Within major Canadian and U.S. cities, such as Toronto, Montreal and New York City, successful and untamed struggles by both waged and unwaged workers had been undermining capitalist control for some years. Ever since public employees in Canada — spearheaded by Post Office workers — had won collective bargaining rights in 1967 and formed the Common Front in Quebec in 1972 — the ability of city, provincial and national governments to provide popular services with cheap labor had been undermined. In New York City street-level and welfare rights struggles had interacted with those of public employees to so undermine the “business climate” of the city as to provoke business flight and job losses in the private sector and fiscal crisis in city finances. By 1974-75 the banks were beginning to refuse to roll over the city’s debt while city government, with the help of union bureaucrats, were beginning to raid union pension funds — not only to cover city debts but to undermine public employee struggles.(1) These crises were forerunners of others to come — of which the automaker abandonment of Flint, portrayed in Michael Moore's 1989 film "Roger and Me", and the 2013 bankruptcy of Detroit are but two examples.(2)
At the international level, widespread worker struggles in the United States had undermined the ability of the Keynesian state to manage the wage/productivity deals that had been the basis of post-WWII accumulation and had provoked business efforts to compensate by raising prices — causing such an acceleration in inflation as to contribute to the disappearance of the U.S. trade surplus and to provoke President Nixon in 1971 to unhook the dollar from gold and abandon the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. That ostensible “monetary crisis” was soon followed by a state-engineered food crisis in 1972 and the first “oil shock” of 1973-74 — initiated by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) but sanctioned by United States policy makers.(3)
READ THE REST HERE http://zerowork.org/GenesisZ1.html
ONE OF THE INFLUENCES ON MY POLITICS
Introduction
The Analysis
Paths to Zerowork
Theoretico-political Roots
- Workers’ Autonomy in the Sphere of Production
From the Johnson-Forest Tendency to Facing Reality and Beyond
Socialisme ou Barbarie
Italian Workerism (Operaismo)
From Struggles of the Waged to those of the Unwaged
- Housework and the Struggle against It
Schoolwork and the Struggle against It
Peasants and their Struggles
Introduction
Those who formed the initial collective that published the first issue of Zerowork were a diverse bunch with various intellectual and political backgrounds and, collectively, considerable international experience. George Caffentzis, William (Bill) Cleaver, Leoncio Schaedel and Peter Linebaugh were Americans living in the United States, but George had family in Greece, Leoncio had recently escaped Chile after the overthrow of Allende and Peter had studied in England. While Bill and Peter had both majored in history, during the crafting of Zerowork #1 Bill was working in the library of the New School for Social Research in New York City and active in local union politics, while Peter was teaching history at Franconia College and at New Hampshire State Prison. George had studied philosophy of science and was teaching at Brooklyn College of City University of New York. Leoncio was in the graduate program in political economy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Paolo Carpignano, Mario Montano and Bruno Ramirez were Italians who had all studied in Italy before crossing the Atlantic. But while Paolo and Mario came and stayed in the US, Bruno moved on to Toronto, Ontario after completing both a BA and an MA in the US. Peter Taylor was a Canadian living in Toronto working — and not working — in the Post Office. Paolo and Mario had both studied sociology, and Mario was teaching it at Clark University. Bruno was working on his dissertation in history. The two corresponding editors, John Merrington and Ferruccio Gambino lived in Britain and Italy respectively. But John had studied in Italy, translated and circulated political materials from Italy in England and participated in study groups with Peter Linebaugh. Ferruccio was at the Department of Political Science at the University of Padua where Toni Negri was chairman, but his frequent travels in Europe and the United States not only kept everyone up-to-date on what was happening and being discussed elsewhere but wove a web of interpersonal relations vital to all involved. (For more detail on the intersecting trajectories of their lives, see the section below with individual biographical sketches.)These folks came together in the midst of crises both local and international.
Within major Canadian and U.S. cities, such as Toronto, Montreal and New York City, successful and untamed struggles by both waged and unwaged workers had been undermining capitalist control for some years. Ever since public employees in Canada — spearheaded by Post Office workers — had won collective bargaining rights in 1967 and formed the Common Front in Quebec in 1972 — the ability of city, provincial and national governments to provide popular services with cheap labor had been undermined. In New York City street-level and welfare rights struggles had interacted with those of public employees to so undermine the “business climate” of the city as to provoke business flight and job losses in the private sector and fiscal crisis in city finances. By 1974-75 the banks were beginning to refuse to roll over the city’s debt while city government, with the help of union bureaucrats, were beginning to raid union pension funds — not only to cover city debts but to undermine public employee struggles.(1) These crises were forerunners of others to come — of which the automaker abandonment of Flint, portrayed in Michael Moore's 1989 film "Roger and Me", and the 2013 bankruptcy of Detroit are but two examples.(2)
At the international level, widespread worker struggles in the United States had undermined the ability of the Keynesian state to manage the wage/productivity deals that had been the basis of post-WWII accumulation and had provoked business efforts to compensate by raising prices — causing such an acceleration in inflation as to contribute to the disappearance of the U.S. trade surplus and to provoke President Nixon in 1971 to unhook the dollar from gold and abandon the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. That ostensible “monetary crisis” was soon followed by a state-engineered food crisis in 1972 and the first “oil shock” of 1973-74 — initiated by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) but sanctioned by United States policy makers.(3)
READ THE REST HERE http://zerowork.org/GenesisZ1.html
Postdigital Possibilities: Operaismo, Co-research, and Educational Inquiry
Patrick Carmichael
Postdigital Science and Education volume 2, pages 380–396(2020)Cite this article
Abstract
There are parallels between the post-Marxist traditions of operaismo (workerism) and autonomism and emerging ideas about the ‘postdigital’. Operaist analyses and approaches, and particularly the work of Romano Alquati on co-research, have the potential to contribute to discourses as to what might be involved in postdigital inquiry in educational settings, and to better understand of critical data literacies. For such educational inquiry to evolve into a comprehensive strategy of ‘co-research’, it is argued that what is needed are models of teacher inquiry with the potential to challenge dominant rhetorics, to support emancipatory research and development, and to establish the postdigital as a counter-hegemonic educational programme.
The crises of capitalism as political crises: from Tronti’sworkerism to Amable and Palombarini’s neo-realism.https://www.eiseverywhere.com/retrieveupload.php?c3VibWlzc2lvbl84ODUzM183NTYyMzIucGRmKmVzZWxlY3Q=
Matteo CAVALLARO11 CERN – PARIS XIII. Matteo.cavallaro@sciencespo.fr
ABSTRACT
The following paper's aim is twofold. First, it wishes to retrace the interaction between the concepts of “crisis” and“political” within Italian workerism. According to Tronti, all crises of the Capitalist mode of production are the results of “real” political crisis, pointing at class conflict as the main source of change during the Capitalist era. This concept of crisis appears to be useful in explaining today’s crisis. This statement is validated by recent works proposed by Amable and Palombarini and the interest raised by their neo-realist approach. The differences between these two models will be underlined over the article and will culminate in a final part that will not aim for an impossible synthesis, rather it will highlight new research paths, so as to keep open the work of repoliticisation of political economy started by Amable and Palombarini.
Matteo CAVALLARO11 CERN – PARIS XIII. Matteo.cavallaro@sciencespo.fr
ABSTRACT
The following paper's aim is twofold. First, it wishes to retrace the interaction between the concepts of “crisis” and“political” within Italian workerism. According to Tronti, all crises of the Capitalist mode of production are the results of “real” political crisis, pointing at class conflict as the main source of change during the Capitalist era. This concept of crisis appears to be useful in explaining today’s crisis. This statement is validated by recent works proposed by Amable and Palombarini and the interest raised by their neo-realist approach. The differences between these two models will be underlined over the article and will culminate in a final part that will not aim for an impossible synthesis, rather it will highlight new research paths, so as to keep open the work of repoliticisation of political economy started by Amable and Palombarini.
Keywords: crisis, politics, workerism, classes, social alliances
INTERROGATING THE KNOWLEDGE BASED ECONOMY: FROM KNOWLEDGE AS A PUBLIC GOOD TO ITALIAN POSTWORKERISM
MARCO BOFFO
Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD in Economics
2013
Department of Economics
SOAS, University of London
https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/17843/1/Boffo_3544.pdf
Abstract
This thesis offers a critique of the reception of the Knowledge-Based Economy concept within both mainstream economics and contemporary Marxist debates. The first chapter analyses how this concept and attendant discussions have recently prompted mainstream economists to provide it with foundations within economic theory and advocate the development of an economics of knowledge. Given the fallacious understanding, within mainstream economics, of knowledge, the economy, and their interaction, the chapter demonstrates the flawed nature of the mainstream version of the Knowledge-Based Economy and the economics of knowledge as judged from the standpoint of any contribution holding different views on knowledge, the economy, and their interaction. The second chapter addresses the reinterpretation of the Knowledge-Based Economy as cognitive capitalism elaborated within Italian post-workerist autonomist Marxism. The latter theorises the preponderance of immaterial labour within contemporary capitalism, and has been recently recast in terms of Marxist economic analysis. Following the persistence of capitalism and the continuing relevance of Marxian analytical categories, the chapter demonstrates how the conceptualisation of contemporary capitalism as cognitive capitalism hinges on a misreading of Marxian value theory and its relation to the economy, and weakened links of the analysis with the politics of Marxism itself. The third chapter investigates issues related to the social ubiquity of networked computers, which is increasingly understood as driving new processes of class formation within capitalism and as instantiating new forms of exploitation considered, under the label of “prosumption”, as simultaneously more pervasive and less alienating. The chapter investigates these issues through the prism of recent work of Italian post-workerist Marxists critical of the cognitive capitalism debate. The chapter demonstrates the theoretical flaws
inherent in both understanding technology as a vector of class formation and the concept of
prosumption, while also deepening the critical understanding of Italian post-workerism
elaborated in the second chapter.
MARCO BOFFO
Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD in Economics
2013
Department of Economics
SOAS, University of London
https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/17843/1/Boffo_3544.pdf
Abstract
This thesis offers a critique of the reception of the Knowledge-Based Economy concept within both mainstream economics and contemporary Marxist debates. The first chapter analyses how this concept and attendant discussions have recently prompted mainstream economists to provide it with foundations within economic theory and advocate the development of an economics of knowledge. Given the fallacious understanding, within mainstream economics, of knowledge, the economy, and their interaction, the chapter demonstrates the flawed nature of the mainstream version of the Knowledge-Based Economy and the economics of knowledge as judged from the standpoint of any contribution holding different views on knowledge, the economy, and their interaction. The second chapter addresses the reinterpretation of the Knowledge-Based Economy as cognitive capitalism elaborated within Italian post-workerist autonomist Marxism. The latter theorises the preponderance of immaterial labour within contemporary capitalism, and has been recently recast in terms of Marxist economic analysis. Following the persistence of capitalism and the continuing relevance of Marxian analytical categories, the chapter demonstrates how the conceptualisation of contemporary capitalism as cognitive capitalism hinges on a misreading of Marxian value theory and its relation to the economy, and weakened links of the analysis with the politics of Marxism itself. The third chapter investigates issues related to the social ubiquity of networked computers, which is increasingly understood as driving new processes of class formation within capitalism and as instantiating new forms of exploitation considered, under the label of “prosumption”, as simultaneously more pervasive and less alienating. The chapter investigates these issues through the prism of recent work of Italian post-workerist Marxists critical of the cognitive capitalism debate. The chapter demonstrates the theoretical flaws
inherent in both understanding technology as a vector of class formation and the concept of
prosumption, while also deepening the critical understanding of Italian post-workerism
elaborated in the second chapter.
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Marxism and the Critique of Value
Edited by
Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson, and Nicholas Brown
Download the PDF
Marxism and the Critique of Value aims to complete the critique of the value-form that was initiated by Marx. While Marx’s “esoteric” critique of value has been rediscovered from time to time by post-Marxists who know they’ve found something interesting but don’t quite know which end is the handle, Anglophone Marxism has tended to bury this esoteric critique beneath a more redistributionist understanding of Marx. The essays in this volume attempt to think the critique of value through to the end, and to draw out its implications for the current economic crisis; for violence, Islamism, gender relations, masculinity, and the concept of class; for revolutionary practice and agency; for the role of the state and the future of the commons; for the concepts that come down to us from Enlightenment thought: indeed, for the manifold phenomena that characterize contemporary society under a capitalism in crisis.
Materialism and the Critique of Energy
Edited by
Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti
Download the PDF
Materialism and the Critique of Energy brings together twenty-one theorists working in a range of traditions to conceive of a twenty-first century materialism critical of the economic, political, cultural, and environmental impacts of large-scale energy development on collective life. The book reconceives of the inseparable histories of fossil fuels and capital in order to narrate the historical development of the fossil regime, interpret its cultural formations, and develop politics suited to both resist and revolutionize energy-hungry capitalism.
Examples of the new fields of critical research included in the book range from Marxist-feminism and an energy-critique analysis, test cases for a critique of “electroculture,” an analysis of the figurative use of energies in both political struggle and the work of machines, and the intersection of Indigenous labor and the history of extractivism. Materialism and the Critique of Energy lays the foundation for future study at the intersection of history, culture, new materialism, and energy humanities
Energy and Experience: An Essay in NafthologyBy Antti Salminen & Tere Vadén
Download the PDF
If there is reason to believe that material circumstances such as the ownership of the means of production, geography, or levels of technological development shape society, culture, and experience, then there is reason to believe that the continually increasing input of energy in the form of fossil fuels has had a similar, if not greater, impact on human history. Antti Salminen and Tere Vadén’s Energy and Experience: An Essay in Nafthology is the first book of philosophy to directly address the theoretical and conceptual configurations of our oil modernity. Without surplus energy — the non-renewable, non-human energy of coal, oil and gas — modernity would be completely other than it has come it be. Salminen and Vadén argue that modernity constitutes a historical state of exception — one that cannot be sustained. Energy and Experience unearths the blind spot that energy has occupied in the social thought of a modernity that has too long been self-deluded by its own intellectual capacities to render human beings independent from nature.
Advance praise for Energy and Experience:
“Energy and Experience sounds the oily depths of our present human condition. Working the rich reservoirs tapped by thinkers like Mitchell and Negarestani, Salminen and Vadén brilliantly explore how fossil fuels have intoxicated human imagination and warped human knowledge, how they have accelerated time and constituted illusions of distance and separateness not just in popular or political culture but in philosophy as well. Energy and Experience is a nafthological diagnostic manual, a fieldguide to the black sun; it is also a call for rebellion.”
—Dominic Boyer, Director, Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (Rice University)
“Has God been replaced by oil? Salminen and Vadén argue, yes, in a rousing and provocative manifesto on energy criticism that rereads western oil culture through the philosophies of Marx, Heidegger, Junger, and Bataille. A witty and theoretically challenging book, Energy and Experience examines what it might mean for us to plumb the energetic depths of modern being and knowing while training our eyes on those parts of contemporary culture — those enduring resistances, frictions, and multiplicities — that can provide us with alternatives and focal points to move us beyond the totalizing effects of a culture of global capitalism that rises on and is quite literally fueled by petroleum.”
—Bob Johnson, Associate Professor of History (National University)
MediationsJournal.org
Edited by
Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson, and Nicholas Brown
Download the PDF
Marxism and the Critique of Value aims to complete the critique of the value-form that was initiated by Marx. While Marx’s “esoteric” critique of value has been rediscovered from time to time by post-Marxists who know they’ve found something interesting but don’t quite know which end is the handle, Anglophone Marxism has tended to bury this esoteric critique beneath a more redistributionist understanding of Marx. The essays in this volume attempt to think the critique of value through to the end, and to draw out its implications for the current economic crisis; for violence, Islamism, gender relations, masculinity, and the concept of class; for revolutionary practice and agency; for the role of the state and the future of the commons; for the concepts that come down to us from Enlightenment thought: indeed, for the manifold phenomena that characterize contemporary society under a capitalism in crisis.
Materialism and the Critique of Energy
Edited by
Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti
Download the PDF
Materialism and the Critique of Energy brings together twenty-one theorists working in a range of traditions to conceive of a twenty-first century materialism critical of the economic, political, cultural, and environmental impacts of large-scale energy development on collective life. The book reconceives of the inseparable histories of fossil fuels and capital in order to narrate the historical development of the fossil regime, interpret its cultural formations, and develop politics suited to both resist and revolutionize energy-hungry capitalism.
Examples of the new fields of critical research included in the book range from Marxist-feminism and an energy-critique analysis, test cases for a critique of “electroculture,” an analysis of the figurative use of energies in both political struggle and the work of machines, and the intersection of Indigenous labor and the history of extractivism. Materialism and the Critique of Energy lays the foundation for future study at the intersection of history, culture, new materialism, and energy humanities
Energy and Experience: An Essay in NafthologyBy Antti Salminen & Tere Vadén
Download the PDF
If there is reason to believe that material circumstances such as the ownership of the means of production, geography, or levels of technological development shape society, culture, and experience, then there is reason to believe that the continually increasing input of energy in the form of fossil fuels has had a similar, if not greater, impact on human history. Antti Salminen and Tere Vadén’s Energy and Experience: An Essay in Nafthology is the first book of philosophy to directly address the theoretical and conceptual configurations of our oil modernity. Without surplus energy — the non-renewable, non-human energy of coal, oil and gas — modernity would be completely other than it has come it be. Salminen and Vadén argue that modernity constitutes a historical state of exception — one that cannot be sustained. Energy and Experience unearths the blind spot that energy has occupied in the social thought of a modernity that has too long been self-deluded by its own intellectual capacities to render human beings independent from nature.
Advance praise for Energy and Experience:
“Energy and Experience sounds the oily depths of our present human condition. Working the rich reservoirs tapped by thinkers like Mitchell and Negarestani, Salminen and Vadén brilliantly explore how fossil fuels have intoxicated human imagination and warped human knowledge, how they have accelerated time and constituted illusions of distance and separateness not just in popular or political culture but in philosophy as well. Energy and Experience is a nafthological diagnostic manual, a fieldguide to the black sun; it is also a call for rebellion.”
—Dominic Boyer, Director, Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (Rice University)
“Has God been replaced by oil? Salminen and Vadén argue, yes, in a rousing and provocative manifesto on energy criticism that rereads western oil culture through the philosophies of Marx, Heidegger, Junger, and Bataille. A witty and theoretically challenging book, Energy and Experience examines what it might mean for us to plumb the energetic depths of modern being and knowing while training our eyes on those parts of contemporary culture — those enduring resistances, frictions, and multiplicities — that can provide us with alternatives and focal points to move us beyond the totalizing effects of a culture of global capitalism that rises on and is quite literally fueled by petroleum.”
—Bob Johnson, Associate Professor of History (National University)
MediationsJournal.org
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