[LAF] An article from Stevphen which may be of interest...

[ANTINES]

Is it ok if I copy and paste to site as it stands?
Ed





========================================
Message date : May 18 2005, 02:30 AM
>From : "stevphen shukaitis" 
To : laf at lists.aktivix.org
Copy to : 
Subject : Re: [LAF] An article from Stevphen which may be of interest...
here's a combined book review I wrote that will be published this summer
in the Journal of Periphery Studies. it's closer to a number of the things
I was talking about Saturday. i'm feeling too lazy to paste in all the
footnotes at the moment - but feel to write me if you want the article as
a word file with the references and all that jazz.
cheers
stevphen


Operaismo, Autonomia, and the Emergence of New Social Subjects

By Stevphen Shukaitis

Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism
By Steve Wright
London: Pluto Books, 2002

Grammar of the Multitude
By Paolo Virno. Trans. Sylvère Lotringer
New York: Semiotext(e), 2004

State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality
By Stefano Harney
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002

During the past several years there has been a growing interest in
autonomist Marxism. Fueled by the publication of Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri’s celebrated and reviled text Empire (2000), new attention has been
brought to a branch of Marxism, that of the Italian current of operaismo
(workerism), which has been long neglected within discussions in the
English speaking world. This essay will explore some of the concepts of
autonomist Marxism, particularly focusing on voices from within and
working with autonomist Marxism who have not received as much attention or
readership: Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian
Autonomist Marxism by Steve Wright; Grammar of the Multitude by Paolo
Virno; and State Work: Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality by
Stefano Harney. Although it would difficult to a provide complete overview
of the many ideas found within these texts, it is nevertheless useful to
summarize them in relation to the currents of thought from which they
emerge, precisely because many of them draw from ideas developed within
Italy during the 1960s and 1970s that are close to the very same concepts
underpinning much of the organizing within the global justice movement:
the rejection of rigid notions of class and of the working class as the
privileged revolutionary subject, self-organization, an analysis of
capital’s articulations over the entire social fabric, engaged withdrawal
from relations of domination, the primacy of resistance and social
collectivity as preceding its appropriation by capital, and the formation
of new collective identities and subjectivities in struggle.
Beyond parallel political development, much of current organizing in
Italy descends directly out of the political laboratory of the 1960s and
70s. Italian autonomist Marxism, which has a curious and contradictory
relationship with orthodox Marxism, has for the most part been overlooked
by English speaking audiences whose main reference point for Italian
Marxism is Gramsci. Furthermore, one could draw out possible links
between this particular branch of heterodox Marxist tradition to look at
how such could provide a possible avenue for cooperation and merge
between strands of anarchist practice and theorization and Marxism. One
could make an argument, as David Graeber has, that there has long existed
a radical politics division of labor characterized by Marxists focusing
on analyzing the workings of capitalism and strategies for seizing power
while anarchists have been concerned with building ethical forms of
practice and organization consonant with prefiguring the world we desire.
And it is in this way that autonomist Marxism could be most useful to
anarchists, precisely because even if it's focus remains centered on
labor it is a focus that is tuned to the changing nature labor, and
contains conceptual tools that can be used in ways that often might be
resisted by the very individuals who have theorized them. This essay will
explore these ideas, in particular that of the multitude and the notion
of exodus, and what they could mean for radical organizing.

Class Composition and Unrealized Implications
Turning first to Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in
Italian Autonomist Marxism by Steve Wright we can contextualize
historically and socially where many of the concepts dispersed and
branched out from operaismo originated and developed. Wright traces the
emergence and development of operaisti thought and practice from the
mid-1940s to its dissolution in the late 1970s. Wright’s book serves as a
corrective focus to increased attention to the work of Negri in recent
years that has often overlooked the context by placing Negri’s work
within the context of the movements he was involved in and more
importantly drawing out other voices and ideas from that period who have
been less heard. This is especially important as operaisti concepts did
not emerge from the work of isolated theorists but from reflections on
on-going processes of organizing.
The neglect of many of the voices from operaismo that Wright draws
attention to, such as Panzieri, Tronti, Alquati, and Bologna, is due to
the lack of translation of these materials into English. Wright’s book is
the first and only text in English to provide an overview of the
evolution and development of operaismo, a task that it handles quite
successfully. While the detailed history reads at some points like an
extended version of a who’s arguing with who in the radical left, it is
well worth it to be able to trace the development of these ideas
emergence a contextualized manner. It is the setting of 1950s Italy's
“economic miracle” and the decisions of the Italian Communist Party to
emphasize state capitalist development, combined with the ideological
fallout from the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and massive immigration
from southern Italy, that created a grouping of workers who were not
willing to work within the confines of existing party structures. It is
these emergent populations and the industrial unrest they fermented that
would congeal in the theorization of operaistis as the figure of the mass
worker. The figure of mass worker is characterized in that his/her is
labor is: (1) massified, the performance of labor simple labor, (2)
located in the immediate process of production, and (3) individually
interchangeable but collectively indispensable to the workings of
capital.i
Wright brings together the vast array of operaisti practices by looking
at their emergence and development in relation to the concept of class
composition. The idea of class composition describes the effects,
circumstances, and behaviors resulting from the insertion of the working
class into specific conditions of labor and the ways in which the
subjective experiences of a population entering shape and relate to their
circumstances. For Italian autonomist Marxists theorizing about their
situation the concept of class composition was central because it
highlighted what Wright describes as “the importance it placed upon the
relationship between the material structure of the working class, and its
behavior as a subject autonomous from the dictates of both the labor
movement and capital.”ii While earlier operaisti texts focused
exclusively on labor within the factory walls, operaismo’s theorization
of work broadened beyond this narrow focus on the factory itself after
the unleashing of new forces of antagonism in 1968 and the Italian “hot
autumn” of 1969 during which students and new social forces emerged into
popular consciousness.
It is these newly emerging social forces that worked their way into
operaisti theories of the social factory. Tronti described the idea of
the social factory as that “At the highest level of capitalist
development, the social relation becomes a moment of the relation of
production; the whole of society becomes an articulation of production;
in other words, the whole of society exists as a function of the factory
and the factory extends its exclusive domination over the whole of
society”iii That is to say that the production of surplus value and its
extraction no longer occurs only within the factory walls but is diffused
through the social milieu; the diffuse nature of production as described
by a concept like the social factory meant that the privileged
revolutionary position of the industrial working class would be ceded to
support for all struggles that intervened in broader social reproduction.
This means that various forms of social struggle from student organizing
to feminist struggles are not resistance outside of what could be
considered “class struggle” but are all interventions in reclaiming the
common resources and social energies that capital is continually trying
to siphon off for its own uses.
Operaisti, morphing their practices according with the changing nature of
social and political production, came to argue that the primary objective
of organization is to “maintain the continuity of open struggle.”iv That
is to say that is they shifted away from the dead ends created by the
constraints of orthodox Marxist theorization as well as socialist and
communist party discipline. However, that does not mean that the new
concepts developed by operaisti theorists always found their way into
practice immediately, for often refocusing away from Marxist orthodoxy
and workerism in a negative sense (focus on workplace struggle to the
neglect of all others) took some years to be worked out effectively. For
example operaisti theorists through the 1970’s often embrace the
struggles of others (such as feminist campaigns like Wages for Housework)
only to the extent that they agreed with and extended arguments that they
had made. And as the social antagonisms unleashed through the 1970s
through forms such as the dispersed struggles of Autonomia became beset
by various internal factionalization and disagreement, it would be the
massive way of state repression brought on by the 1978 kidnapping and
murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades, among other
factors, would tear the project of operaismo apart for some time.

The Multitude in the New 17th Century
Turning to Paolo Virno to consider his theorization of the multitude in
his book The Grammar of the Multitude, which is a transcription of a
seminar he gave on the subject. Virno's main argument is that the
concept of the multitude is the important category of analysis for our
contemporary age. Virno draws out this analysis of the the multitude
starting from the distinction between the people and the multitude found
in the writing of the philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza. In a
periodization that makes this allusion all the more present, he argues
that “we are living in a new seventeenth century, or in an age in which
the old categories are falling apart and we need to coin new ones.”v
Unlike the unitary figure of the people, the multitude never reaches a
point of synthetic unity that justifies the existence of a state (or is
used by governing elites to rationalize their actions through state
power).
For Virno, the multitude is “the form of social and political existence
for the many,”vi it is “a fundamental biological configuration which
becomes a historically determined way of being, ontology revealing itself
phenomenologically.”vii The conditions that multitude emerges from are
those in which the categories and boundaries of political previously
coupled, such as those of inside/outside and labor/action/intellect, are
becoming blurred, hybridized, and collapse into each other. The multitude
in these conditions “affirms itself, in high relief, as a mode of being
in which there is a juxtaposition, or at least a hybridization, between
spheres which, until very recently . . . seemed distinct and
separated”viii The breakdown of categories of political thought and the
changing nature of social and political life result in conditions of the
multitude where there is a perpetual feeling of never being at home that
leads to seeking new forms of refuge from the vague uncertainty of the
world. In the diffused workings of the post-Fordist economy people seek
refuge in the common places of language and communication, or in what
Virno describes as the public life of the mind in which we all take part.
The emergence of the multitude in this way has two senses, both
describing increased usage of the concept for analysis and organizing as
well as the recent conditions and changes in the world system are
creating new possibilities for forms of politics identified as the
formation of multitude as a political project. This is to say that the
rapidly changing nature of society, the economy, and the world order,
rather than preventing the possibility of liberatory projects have rather
created new possibilities for forms of organization and the
self-organization of populations beyond the limits of state power.
In some ways Virno’s theorization of the multitude’s emergence seems more
fitting precisely for his greater degree of caution and attention to what
might be called “the dark side of the multitude,” or the common created
by a publicness of fear. Virno argues that “if the publicness of
intellect does not yield to the realm of a public sphere, of a political
space in which the many can tend to common affairs, then it produces
terrifying effects . . . [it] translates into an unchecked proliferation
of hierarchies as groundless as they are thriving”ix That is to say that
the conditions of fear and apparatuses of security are not just
atomizing, but can create common spaces and forms of the multitude
experienced paradoxically as a servile and oddly depoliticized space.
Virno locates the emergence of the multitude in relation to the changing
nature of labor and production where existing reservoirs of skills,
knowledge, and experience have become welded together and essential in
the productive process; for Virno these characteristics united by
linguistic experience and increasingly take on the form of performance
and as such “not only characterizes the culture industry by the totality
of contemporary social production . . . [it] becomes the prototype of all
wage labor”x They embody forms of immaterial labor, which encompasses
cognitive and affective labor, service work, and in general all forms of
work focused on the creation that is more an idea or relation than a
physical product. It is distinguished in that its end product is
ephemeral (such as images, relations, or ideas) than physical production.
Virno argues that the emergence of flexible production techniques was the
response of capital and the state to the resistance to the Fordist
assembly line, not just in Italy but also through many parts of the
world.
For Virno the challenge is not to return to some previous imagined era,
but to develop from the networked and communicative capacities of the
emergent multitude new forms of social creativity and non-representative
democracy that can be taken into exodus, to reapply the skills and
knowledge that capital has appropriated into the apparatuses and the
economy and the state into projects for the self-liberation of the many.
Virno argues that “Nothing is less passive than the act of fleeing, of
exiting. Defection modifies the conditions within which the struggle
takes place, rather than presupposing those conditions to be an
unalterable horizon”; and through finding new forms of exodus, one finds
that “exit hinges on a latent kind of wealth, on an exuberance of
possibilities . . . [that] are allusions to what the true political, and
not servile, virtuosity of the multitude could be.”xi

Laboring in and Away from the State
Moving the usage of these concepts in a different direction is Stefano
Harney in his book State Work: Public Administration and Mass
Intellectuality, which draws from operaismo as well as performance and
cultural studies, labor process theory, and public administration to
construct a cultural theory of labor in the state, or state work. From
this perspective he hopes to find “how to glimpse the state as it
transforms labor into work, and in the shimmers of that image, catch the
society of producers making the state.”xii Harney makes this distinction
between the concept of labor and work by using labor to describe a
creative world making activity of creation and work to mean the
particular quotidian forms that practically embody labor.
Drawing from his experiences of working in the Ontario Ministry of
Intergovernmental Affairs in the Antiracism Secretariat from 1992-1995 
Harney explores the techniques of public administration and management
that hide the labor of creating the state in endless chains of
equivalence and comparison. It is these techniques that create state
effects, or the impression that the state is more than the sum of its
parts, and naturalize the idea of the state as a necessary organizing
people in people’s lives. To look at the construction of the state from
the position of labor in the state “would have the effect of calling the
state into question as an object of constitutional construction based on
contract and sovereignty but a material object made by these practical
embodiments;”xiii that is, it would open avenues for looking at state
work in terms of constructing of collective identities and social
surpluses involved in the construction of the state, elements that can be
appreciated in terms of how they might be socialized differently to
disperse the state altogether.xiv
Transformations in the nature of state work and government labor, for
example as represented by the discourses around “reinventing government”
and privatization of state services, represent the continuing creation of
state effects and forms of power now created through different means.
This angle allows Harney to draw out radical potential from forms of
knowledge and practices such as public administration where one might not
expect to find them. By looking at forms of labor and social self
creation that are embodied in state work and necessary to the
appropriation of these forms of social creativity Harney argues that “it
is precisely what I am labeling state work that must be brought with us
into exodus in order to truly be left behind through the new mediation of
difference;”xv it is by keeping the antagonisms of capital and state work
near enough to be firmly dispelled that a constitutive politics of exodus
would maintain its transformative powers.
As state work and governmental labor increasingly become immaterial, much
like the nature of labor and production itself, the creation of wealth
becomes welded into the process of constituting forms of subjectivity.
But as the production of social wealth and its appropriation is
increasingly immaterial in its state embeddedness, ideological effects of
state work such as citizenship and the idea of the state itself are
potentially antagonistic to the forms of appropriated and alienated labor
that produces them. These processes of creating forms of collective
identity and subjectivity in state work itself contain them within
themselves potentials for pushing the desires embodied with practices of
state work beyond the capacities of what the administrative apparatus
itself can handle. Or, as Harney notes, “Perhaps it is possible to
continue state work only at the risk of wanting what it cannot have,
revealing what it does want – a society of labor as the pleasure and
fantasy and social reproduction.”xvi It is in this way that Harney’s
theorization of state work is most useful, as by looking at the labor
embodied in state practice (rather than reifying the state as given
object) it becomes possible to look for new ways to draw from the
creativity of that labor and find ways that such could be channeled
toward productive social ends, rather than captured within the frozen
governmental apparatus of state power.

A Multitude by, of, and for the Multitude
One of the distinctive features of operaismo has been creative and
dynamic reinterpretations of Marx that have broken radically with
orthodox interpretations. In particular these have been pursued through
drawing out ideas from sections of Marx’s writing which have generally
received less attention, particularly the Gundrisse. Operaisti theorists
such as Tronti, Bologona, Negri, and Virno have been able to refocus
their analysis in ways that have provided ways around some of the
shortcomings of traditional Marxist orthodoxy. But it should be
remembered that whether or not operaismo was unorthodox it was still
autonomist Marxism, and is significantly molded by that fact. For
instance operaismo still focuses on labor as the lever of creating
political subjectivity while broadening the range of what is considered
under the framework of labor.
The work of all these authors represent the continuation of this line of
theorization. It is in these ways, breaking from traditional Marxist
orthodoxies that open new avenues for the productive meeting of Marxist
and anarchist traditions. These lines of convergence between autonomist
Marxism and anarchism seem possible precisely because a focus on
cooperative forms of resistance and knowledge creation, of open forms of
struggle, come very close to positions long found within anarchist
practice and theory. But, while the work of Negri, Virno, Tronti and
other operaisti theorists are often read as libertarian, it is important
to remember that even if their ideas departed greatly from Marxist
orthodoxy, were in others ways far from libertarian. They were still
focused in many aspects on the seizure of the state power even if
organized is a less hierarchal manner and some operaisti, such as Tronti,
even rejoined the Italian Communist Party. Operaismo developed not as the
work of isolated intellectuals removed from organizing efforts; it
emerged from the struggles taking place in Italy and reflects the
concerns and issues faced in these situations. Some might wonder why a
version of Marxism that conflicts in many ways with the way Marxism has
usually been understood does simply not just break with the idea of being
Marxist altogether? But this makes more sense when one considers the
nature of the Italian situation where there existed mass parties and
unions whose Marxist orientation and organizing capacities make operaisti
theorists continuation of working in this tradition appear more sensible.
But in many ways the sharp distinctions made about current forms of
production are the claims that are used to foster the hope this new
concerted subject of the multitude. While texts such as Grammar of the
Multitude are exhilarating in their ability, a perhaps almost willful
self-delusion, to see possibilities for new forms of revolutionary social
action within current conditions, this does contain notable dangers. This
is where books such as Storming Heaven and State Work become important
for the purposes of seeing how these ideas emerged within a historical
context and how they might be applied in concrete situations that are
quite different from the idealized creation of the multitude and of
coming exodus. It is also the ways that these ideas are being deployed
and worked with in new and interesting ways, for instance in the
organizing around precarious labor in Italy, Spain, and France. It is
these applications that will bear out the fruits of this theoretical
labor and whose outcomes and reflections will refine and improve these
theoretical tools.
The concept of the multitude, exodus and the emergence of new social
subjects as well as the currents of operaismo from which they emerge
contain within in themselves a reservoir of conceptualization and
approaches that could inform and be shaped by our organizing practices.
Only time and experience will be able to tell whether the possibilities
for broadening and enriching the languages through which we can
communicate and describe our resistance will be benefited by the adding
of the idea of the multitude to the arsenal. Perhaps it would be wiser,
rather than asking what the multitude is, to ask what the concept of the
multitude and related ideas could mean for organizers and all those
struggling for liberation. One can wager that this will largely be
related to the degree to which the idea of the multitude can cease to be
a concept associated with or assumed to be the product of one or a few
people and through networked processes of action, reflection,
communication, and reinterpretation become of a concept of, for, and by
the concerted multiplicity of the multitude itself.
_______________________________________________
LAF mailing list
LAF at lists.aktivix.org
http://lists.aktivix.org/mailman/listinfo/laf





Visit The Events And Issues Website 
  http://www.eventsandissues.bravehost.com/ 

-- 

Whatever you Wanadoo:
http://www.wanadoo.co.uk/time/

This email has been checked for most known viruses - find out more at: http://www.wanadoo.co.uk/help/id/7098.htm
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.aktivix.org/pipermail/laf/attachments/20050521/141ca50c/attachment.htm>