°Finally, maybe
Autonomy, Recognition, Movement, the first couple of paragraphs, as I send it off to the editor:
In 1964, Mario Tronti began putting forward an analysis of working class autonomy that would come to be identified—and not always accurately—with an entire period and milieux of radical politics in Italy. The argument went something like this: while capitalists must necessarily equip themselves with the state so as to enter the field of class struggle, working class struggles can occur independently of any given form and level of representation. In “Lenin in England”, he dismissed claims of any “inexorable necessity of working class mediation”, insisting that, to the contrary, the state amounted to capitalist subjectivity as such. [1] Put otherwise: the subjectivation of capital consists of law as well as necessity accounted for through law and the state, whereas working class struggles imply an indeterminacy but not, for all that, a haphazardness.
Moreover, for Tronti, “the beginning is the class struggle of the working class. At the level of socially developed capital, capitalist development becomes subordinated to working class struggles; it follows behind them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital’s own reproduction must be tuned.” As an instance of this, Tronti argued that the unification of “the world market” was imposed on capital by “the unity of movement of the working class at the world level”. He would later characterise this “unity of the movement of the working class” as the “strategy of refusal”. [2] In the rejection of work, widespread non-cooperation and the desertion of traditional forms of working class representation (such as unions and parties) that characterised the 1960s in Europe and elsewhere, Tronti (and others) discerned not the end of class struggle—as the optic of socialist orthodoxy would have it—but a different strategy. In retrospect, and with a nod to historically parallel theoretical discussions in a French idiom, Franco Berardi described these insights as “the emancipation from the Hegelian concept of subject”. For him, the distinct innovation of the analyses of class composition developed through Potere Operaio and Autonomia consisted of a reappraisal of the understanding of class, seen not as an “ontological concept, but rather as a vectoral” one. [3] Therefore, there was no essential form of organisation or struggle that was valid for all time but, instead, movements and compositions. […]
Oh, and the footnotes, badly formatted.
1. “Lenin in England”. First Published: in Classe Operaia, January 1964, and republished in Operai e Capitale, Einaudi, Turin, 1966, p.89-95, under the heading “A New Style of Political Experiment.” (1964)
2. “The Strategy of the Refusal” This essay was written in 1965 as part of the “Initial Theses” in Tronti’s Operai e Capitale, Einaudi, Turin, 1966, pp.234-252. The whole of Operai e Capitale has yet to be translated into English. (1965)
3. “What is the Meaning of Autonomy Today? Subjectivation, Social Composition, Refusal of Work”. Available at: http://info.interactivist.net/print.pl?sid=04/01/16/1733237
4. Mitropoulos, A. “Virtual is Preamble: The Movements Against the Enclosures”. Available at: http://www.makeworlds.org/node/133 (Orig. 1999) See also more recently the conversation between Manuela Bojadÿzijev, Serhat Karakayalõ and Vassilis Tsianos (Kanak Attak) and Thomas Atzert and Jost Muller (Subtropen) on migration and autonomy, and “Speaking of Autonomy of Migration”. Available at: http://www.kanak-attak.de/ka/text/conver.html and http://www.kanak-attak.de/ka/text/esf04.html respectively.
5. See Sabine Hesse, “I am not willing to return home at this time”. Available at: http://www.makeworlds.org/node/19
6. “The Art of Flight” Interviewer, Stanly Grelet. Available at: http://slash.autonomedia.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/07/1350202
7. Mezzadra, S. and Neilson, B. (2003) ” Né qui, né altrove - Migration, Detention, Desertion: A Dialogue” Borderlands 2:1 Avalaible at: http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol2no1_2003/mezzadra_neilson.html
8. See Deleuze and Agamben. Also Mitropoulos, “The Barbed End of Human Rights”, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol2no1_2003/mitropoulos_barbed.html (Orig. 2000).
9. See Agamben, The Open.
10. “Migration, Autonomy, Exploitation: Questions and Contradictions” Available at: http://thistuesday.org/node/91
11. Ricciardi and Raimondo, ” Migrant Labour”. Available at: http://thistuesday.org/node/72
12. It is not necessary here to reiterate the managerialist parallels between Fordist production methods and, say, Leninist understandings of the relation between the party (conceived as a gathering of radicalised bourgeois intellectuals) and ‘the masses’. Suffice to note that the more interesting question is of the post-fordist arrangement of this relationship, as discussed, for instance Maurizio Lazzarato’s discussion of the reorganisation of the relationship between command and autonomy, in “Immaterial Labor”. Available at: http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcimmateriallabour3.htm
13. See Jason Read’s The Micro-Politics of Capital (New York: SUNY Press, 2003) for a discussion of formal and real subsumption and some of its implications.
14. Illuminati, A. (1996). ‘Unrepresentable Citizenship’ in P. Virno and M. Hardt (eds) Radical Thought in Italy. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press pp.166-85.
15. For a brief discussion of this in relation to the university, see B. Neilson and A. Mitropoulos, “Universitas, Polemos”. Borderlands.
16. For the first, see Caffentzis; for the second, Mitropoulos, “Precari-us?”. Also, see Barchiesi for an English-language review of Moulier-Boutang’s work. Available at: http://www.generation-online.org/t/imprisonedbodies.htm
17. For a longer discussion of the ways in which the task of ‘making the invisible visible’ played itself out in the noborder networks, see A. Mitropoulos, “The micro-physics of theoretical production and border crossings”, Borderlands 3:2 (2004). Available at: http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no2_2004/mitropoulos_microphysics.htm
18. See edition of Multitudes on aleatory materialism, as well as Borderlands, forthcoming.
s0metim3s [October 18, 2005 @ 5:30 pm]