Fighting with Tools: Prefiguration and Radical Politics in the Twenty-First Century (Rethinking Marxism, 2015)

Mathijs van de Sande

299 Views18 Pages

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Social Movements,

Anarchism,

Antonio Negri,

Mikhail Bakunin,

Autonomous Marxism

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This article conceptualizes some of the political practices and discourses that characterize recent protest movements such as Occupy and the Indignados. These movements’ strategies are distinguished by the central role they give to the occupation and recomposition of public spaces and also by their refusal to engage with representative politics and public institutions. Critics argue that this so-called strategy of withdrawal illustrates a categorical misunderstanding of the political. But as notions such as “withdrawal” or “exodus” give only a rather partial account of these movements’ practices and discourses, this paper aims to introduce an alternative, contemporary concept that has a much stronger explanatory potential: “prefiguration” or “prefigurative politics.” In order to flesh out and apply this concept, it reconstructs the political ontologies of two radical traditions that significantly influenced more recent protest movements—namely, early anarchism with its antithetic dialectics (Mikhail Bakunin) and contemporary autonomist Marxism (Antonio Negri).

Anthropology and the Social Factory

Stephen Campbell

2018, Dialectical Anthropology

417 Views13 Pages

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Anthropology,

Antonio Negri,

Operaismo

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Since its birth in the early 1960s, Italian operaismo (workerism) has provided an optimistic reading of working-class militancy, a theoretically stimulating account of capitalist transformation, and a set of highly productive conceptual categories. Despite a shared provenance, however, operaista-influenced movements and theorists have since taken these categories in quite varied directions. Given this conceptual heterogeneity, I consider herein one such category—the “social factory”—and its conceptual reworking by Antonio Negri, as he elaborates in his 2017 book, Marx and Foucault. I employ, as means to pursue this inquiry, an anthropological lens—drawing, to do so, on anthropological theory and ethnographic research. My aim is to build toward to a reconception of the social factory analytic for use in a contemporary anthropology of state formation.