Autonomist Marxism [Archive]

Nachie

29th April 2006, 15:39

Reading Capital Politically might be a bit heavy for an introduction. I would recommend this interview (http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3843/cleaver.html) with Harry Cleaver as the best possible introduction to autonomist Marxist thought because it's not too long and the first question itself is, "You have been the first to talk about an Autonomist Marxist tradition which includes a variety of national "schools"--in Italy, France, the U.S. and so on. What are the main elements which differentiate this tradition from other strands of Marxism such as Marxism-Leninism or the Frankfort school?"

The interview is not particularly long and is available as a pamphlet from RAAN.

Actually, let me just quote Cleaver's response to that question in full:

What gives meaning to the concept of "autonomist Marxism" as a particular tradition is the fact that we can identify, within the larger Marxist tradition, a variety of movements, politics and thinkers who have emphasized the autonomous power of workers--autonomous from capital, from their official organizations (e.g. the trade unions, the political parties) and, indeed, the power of particular groups of workers to act autonomously from other groups (e.g. women from men). By "autonomy" I mean the ability of workers to define their own interests and to struggle for them--to go beyond mere reaction to exploitation, or to self-defined "leadership" and to take the offensive in ways that shape the class struggle and define the future.

Marxism-Leninism and the Frankfort School have shared a bias toward focusing on the power of capital and have seen workers as essentially reactive to oppression and dependent on some kind of outside leadership to mobilize them for revolution. The Marxist-Leninists, as is well known, have privileged the political party of professional revolutionary intellectuals capable of grasping the general class interest and teaching it to workers who are seen as locked in merely "economic" demands. The critical theorists, who largely accepted the orthodox Marxist analysis of capitalist hegemony within the factory and extended this vision to culture and society as a whole, have also privileged the role of professional intellectuals who alone are capable of grasping the nuances of instrumentalist domination and of finding a path through the thicket to the light. In both cases, not only the bulk of empirical and historical analysis but also of theory has concerned understanding the mechanisms of domination and the myriad ways in which workers have been victimized. What both approaches have failed to do is to study the power of workers to rupture those mechanisms, to throw the system into crisis and to recompose social structures. Unable to develop a theory of workers' power, even their understanding of domination has been limited by their inability to see the contingency of capitalist power and how it has had to adapt repeatedly, often desperately, to an autonomously developing working class subjectivity to maintain its control, i.e., to survive. As a result even their theoretical understanding has remained one-sided, and more of a paean to capitalist power than a useful tool for us in our struggles.
That first paragraph is basically the most concise definition that you're going to get...

PS. I'm sorry if you've already seen this interview. There really isn't a "founding text" for autonomist Marxism, though a collection of Negri's 1970's essays released as Books for Burning in the US gives a pretty good overview of his own theoretical evolution from Leninism to Autonomism.

GoaRedStar

3rd May 2006, 23:15

Here is a good article from Autonomy & Solidarity.

Learning from Autonomous Marxism

The Politics of Revolution: Learning from Autonomist Marxism

By Gary Kinsman

Based on a presentation given at a public forum organized by Sudbury Autonomy & Solidarity in Feb. 2004.

INTRODUCTION: NOT ALL POWER TO CAPITAL

Autonomist Marxism can be seen as a form of Marxism that focuses on developing working class autonomy and power in a capitalist society that is constituted by and through class struggle. One of the strengths of autonomist Marxism is its critique of political economy interpretations of Marxism that end up reifying the social worlds around us, converting what people socially produce into social relationships between things. Most “orthodox” Marxist political economy gives all power to capital and considers workers as victims without power or agency. In my work and writing I have tried to recognize the resistance and agency of the oppressed and how this agency and action obstructs ruling relations, often forcing the elaboration of new strategies of ruling. For me, autonomist Marxism has provided a much firmer basis for this very different reading of Marxism.

In the 1970s, I had a number of close encounters with autonomist Marxism and currents related to it. When I was a young Trotskyist in the Revolutionary Marxist Group in the 1970s I remember debates with members and supporters of the New Tendency (a current in Toronto and Windsor influenced by the Italian New Left and Lotta Continua). I argued, as I had been told, that they were “spontaneists” who didn’t grasp the need for a party building approach. Some feminists in the New Tendency became engaged with a wages against housework campaign built from the autonomist Marxist notion of capitalism as a social factory that extended beyond the factory walls. Autonomist Marxist feminists like Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, and Silvia Federici argued that women doing domestic labour were not only labouring for individual men but also for capital and were participating in producing labour power as a commodity used by capitalists. Looking back on it now, I was quite wrong in my arguments that the problem was “spontaneism” and that domestic labour did not produce value. After leaving the Trotskyist / Leninist left in 1980 because of its refusal to be transformed by feminism and movements for lesbian/gay liberation, I was influenced by Sheila Rowbotham’s book Beyond the Fragments, particularly her critique of Leninism, and by organizations in England such as Big Flame and the Beyond the Fragments network. Big Flame was also influenced by Lotta Continua and other currents on the Italian left and attempted to prioritize building autonomous class and social struggles ahead of building itself as a revolutionary organization.

NOT JUST ANTONIO NEGRI

In talking about autonomist Marxism it is important not to reduce it to its most famous exponent in the English speaking world, Antonio Negri, co-author of Empire and Multitude. Despite his important contributions to autonomist Marxism in both the theoretical and activist spheres, it is important to view autonomist Marxism as a political space which contains a number of different trends. What brings these currents together is a commitment to valorizing the working class struggle against capital, an emphasis on the self-organization of the working class, and an opposition to statist conceptions of socialism and communism. Autonomy in autonomist Marxism can be seen as autonomy from both capital and the official leaderships of the trade unions and political parties and the capacity and necessity of groups of workers who experience different oppressions to act autonomously from others (blacks from whites, women from men, queers from straights).

It is important to locate autonomist Marxism in its social and historical contexts as it actually has roots that predate the Italian New Left of the late 1950s and 1960s. One place to start is with the work of C.L.R. James and his associates who focused on the need for working class autonomy and power - including the autonomy of workers from unions and political parties. They based a lot of their theoretical and practical work on learning from workers and the autonomous struggle of black people in the US and around the world. C.L.R. James and the Facing Reality group, who developed a substantial critique of the Leninist vanguard party, also had connections with the ex-Trotskyist Socialisme ou Barbarie group in France, and through this connection, activists in Italy came to be aware of this strand of critical Marxism.

WORKING CLASS STRUGGLES AND THE RETURN TO MARX

This writing and analysis came together in Italy with dissidents in the Communist and Socialist Parties who were focusing on working class struggle and experience and becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the perspectives of their parties, including such writers as Mario Tronti, Raniero Panzieri, Sergio Bologna, and Antonio Negri. This tendency initially described itself as operaismo or ‘workerism’, given its focus on working class experience at the point of production. They focused on working class struggle and autonomy. Based on their extensive contacts with workers, they produced detailed analyses of working class experience and the social organization and re-organization of production. Their theory and practice soon moved outside the factory, but the inter-relation between the development of autonomist Marxism, working class struggles and other movements in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s is important to understand. Autonomist Marxists argued that the working class is not reducible to labour power (a commodity); instead, it is the active force producing capitalism and its internal transformations. This brought about a reversal of “orthodox Marxism” which instead of giving all power to capital considered working class struggle rather than capital as the dynamic, initiating social force of production.

For instance, technological transformations within capitalism have often developed in relation to working class struggles and as attempts to weaken working class struggles and organizing. Many of the initiators of autonomous Marxism went back to Marx’s writings on the significance of working class struggles in the social organization of capital. They reminded us that Marx argued that it is workers who are the active agents in producing the new wealth in capitalist societies through the exploitation of surplus value from their labour in the process of production. The initial capitalist strategy of raising the rate of the exploitation of workers through lengthening the working day (increasing the absolute rate of exploitation), was defeated in large part by workers resisting and refusing this strategy. It was the active blocking of this strategy through workers’ struggles to limit the length of the working day that led to the strategy of increasing exploitation by technological applications, speeding up production and inventing new forms of “scientific-management.” Many autonomist Marxist theorists and activists rediscovered/remembered that capital is a social relation in which the working class is an active component. Working class struggle is therefore internal to capital (both within and against capital) and carries the possibility of breaking with it.

CLASS COMPOSITION AND CYCLES OF STRUGGLE

Autonomist Marxism has developed a number of important tools for analyzing and thinking through working class struggles. As long as these terms are not understood as monolithic in character and are used in a concrete social and historical sense and are integrated with analyses of gender, racialization, sexuality, ability and other lines of social difference they can be very helpful in our struggles and attempts to theorize working class struggles.

Autonomist Marxist theorists and activists use the expression “working class composition” to refer to the specific forms of social organization of the working class in relation to capital in particular situations. For instance: how integrated is the working class into capitalist relations, how internally divided is the working class, how autonomous is working class activity from capital or how are social relations being subverted in working class struggles of a particular context or period? Unlike in some traditional Marxist contexts, the “working class” is not thought of as an object or a classification, rather it is always in process of becoming and exists in a context of struggle. It is continually changing and in the process of remaking itself and being remade. History and shifting forms of social organization therefore become crucial to grasping working class experience and struggle. Capitalists actively struggle to “decompose” the capacities and strengths of working class composition by exacerbating and re-organizing internal divisions in the working class, ripping apart sources of working class and oppressed people’s power, fragmenting groups and struggles and extending social surveillance. These attempts to destroy working class struggles produce new conditions for the possible re-composition of working class struggle and power.

The continuing process of class composition, decomposition, and re-composition constitutes a “cycle of struggle” within autonomist Marxism. Understanding these cycles of struggle and our positions within them is crucial for evaluating our own sources of power and weakness and for determining how to move forward. For autonomist Marxism the notion of circulation of struggles is used to get at the ways through which different struggles and movements impact on and transform each other, sometimes circulating the most ‘advanced’ forms of struggle across geographical locations and creating important ruptures with capitalist relations. Autonomist Marxist theorists have differentiated between different forms of the social organization of working class struggle. This includes the organization of skilled craft workers in the early parts of the 20th century, which was in turn decomposed by the organization of “scientific management” and mass production. This process then created the basis for the re-composition of the mass and industrial workers through large scale factory production and ‘scientific management’ of workers in the mid 20th century, a process also linked to the development of the “welfare-state” and Keynesian social and economic policies.

In the 1960s and 1970s autonomist Marxists saw the emergence of the less clearly defined and more diffuse ‘socialized worker’ of the ‘social factory,’ as capitalist production moved beyond factory walls and came to organize and shape community and everyday life through pervasive consumer/state relations. Areas of household and community life also became terrains of class and social struggle against capital involving domestic labour, housing, health, school-work, and sexuality. These struggles included those not only of ‘productive’ labour but also those of ‘reproductive’ labour as capitalist relations were extended to the social organization of desire and consumption. Autonomous struggles of women, lesbians and gay men, people of colour, immigrants, and other oppressed groups who struggle against not only capital but against groups of workers who participate in their oppression and marginalization thus became increasingly visible and disruptive to capitalist social relations. Faced with the struggles against the imposition of work by ‘socialized workers’ capital abandoned the program of the Keynesian ‘welfare-state’ and sought to decompose working class struggles via neo-liberalism and the establishment of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have termed “Empire.”

Autonomist Marxism has shown how differing forms of organization and consciousness emerge in relation to different forms of working class composition and different cycles and circulation of struggles. These forms of organization are historically and socially specific. For instance some autonomist Marxist theorists and historians have pointed out how skilled craft workers often fought to establish more control over their work and how in various ways this led to an emphasis on workers control of production. This also inspired and created the basis for both the various mobilizations associated with Leninism and the vanguard party but also for Council Communism (where liberation was to be achieved through the establishment of workers councils) which developed a more left challenge to capitalist relations and stressed working class autonomy in the historical context of the early 20th century. While Leninism as an organizational and political practice may have made some sense in these conditions, it no longer does. The mass worker was the basis for the International Workers of the World (IWW) in the USA, for the mass industrial unions in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) later on, and for the struggles in Italy in the late 1960s. In response to these mass concentrations of workers and outbreaks of class struggle capitalists have struggled to decompose and fragment these struggles in part by dismantling the earlier Fordist organization of mass production.

In the period of the ‘socialized’ worker, resistance grows against the imposition of work, struggles expand beyond the narrow point of production into the realm of consumption, while different sections of the working class seek control over home and community life by struggling for ‘self-valorization’. “Self-valorization” is a term used within autonomist Marxism to get at how workers struggles in a broad sense are not only against capitalist relations but are also attempts to create alternative ways of life that overcome capitalist and oppressive relations. Workers struggle not only for autonomy from capital but also for self-valorization in a range of different ways by breaking free from capitalist relations and seeking to build a different way of living. There is a certain commonality here with the notion of prefigurative struggles developed by Sheila Rowbotham in Beyond the Fragments where she argued for the need for activists to reimagine a possible future in our struggles and organizing in the present. This development of alternatives to capitalist and oppressive relations, and the emergence of glimpses and moments of experience of a possible future, become crucial in developing our struggles today.

continue here http://auto_sol.tao.ca/node/view/383