Autonomist Marxism Research Articles

Staging a dialogue between Autonomist Marxists and Post-Marxists: The case of the alt-right multitude

Albeit in different ways, both Autonomist Marxists and Post-Marxists have proposed radical democratic theories. To Autonomist Marxists, the latest advances in capitalism would pave the way for global democracy. To Post-Marxists, the plurality of social movements would push society towards a radical model of democracy. Despite their contributions, both Autonomist Marxism and Post-Marxism have left underdeveloped the possibility that digital, affective capitalism could push society towards the opposite direction of global and radical democracy. This article explores the hypothesis that contemporary capitalism may have given birth to a multitude that aims at consolidating White, Western, and masculine supremacy. It argues that fantasies that have, for centuries, sustained the racist, xenophobic, and sexist ideological dimensions of capitalism have brought together multiple groups and individuals that have engaged in the collaborative production of conspiracy theories conveying the common belief that an idealised White/Western identity is under attack: the alt-right multitude. By merging part of the key features of the multitude proposed by Autonomist Marxists with what is known as a ‘Žižekian-Lacanian-Post-Marxist theory’, this article stages a dialogue between both schools of thought, opening new directions for research on how capitalism intersects with issues of race, ethnicity, and gender.

Value and Productive Labour in the Era of Digital Technologies

This article revisits the so-called digital labour debate to clarify and problematise the many different positions in this debate. Synthesising the most promising arguments from the different positions in the debate, the article outlines a theory of digital media usage as exploited, value-producing labour. In doing so, the article criticises the Autonomist Marxist tradition and argues for the utility of a value-form theoretical approach to the question of free digital labour. In conclusion, the article argues for more analytical attention to the ways in which technological developments in contemporary capitalism can engender new processes of production and thereby also new types of unpaid value-producing labour.

Exposure to harm as a function of bargaining position: The class composition of hospitality workers in Sheffield

This article advances a zemiological framework of work-based harms, as a means of interrogating the contemporary crisis in the quality of work. Such a framework provides a more nuanced conceptualisation and a stronger political framing of the various harms that are incurred in the workplace than alternative understandings. We critically appraise the development of zemiology out of critical criminology and review recent models which demonstrate the value and insights of the approach to the topic of work-based harms. Nonetheless, these accounts tend to neglect the role of worker resistance in determining the distribution of harm, and we draw on Class Composition Analysis from Autonomist Marxism as a way of better understanding the bargaining power of workers, which in our understanding is synonymous with their ability to resist the imposition of harm. We apply this combined framework to an analysis of hospitality work in Sheffield. First, we describe workers’ experiences of three significant forms of harm (employment insecurity, wage thefts and health and safety during the COVID pandemic). Second, we explore the barriers to union organisation, which very often are linked to the dynamics generating harms in the workplace. Finally, we examine how those barriers were overcome and harms effectively contested, drawing on the example of the Sheffield Needs A Pay Rise campaign.

Marx, work, agency and postcapitalist prefiguration

Marx's interpretation of ‘praxis’ as a primary expression of what we are, of self-realisation and what we might achieve as social beings, frames his revolutionary thought. This article connects Marx's unique approach to certain forms of contemporary grassroots resistance and community-based postcapitalist responses to global heating and the totalitarianism of capital. In particular, his appreciation of humans as at one with nature supports a postcapitalist imaginary abolishing the contradiction between humans and more-than-human nature intrinsic to capitalist practices. By reference to critical theorists such as Jasper Bernes and autonomist Marxist authors Harry Cleaver and P.M. (Hans Widmer), the article identifies key principles of a nonmarket socialist form of postcapitalism, i.e. beyond both state and money. Work as waged labour under the rule of capitalists gives way to ecologically and socially constructive activities fulfilling collective sufficiency cogoverned and coproduced by all. Work is freed up as semi-voluntary activity, negotiated within a community mode of production where the product is both predetermined (co-planned) and, later, shared on the basis of satisfying basic needs. In contrast to strictly defined capitalist waged work, now standard across various geographies and cultures, the postcapitalist community mode of production proposed establishes convivial and ecologically appropriate work within local geographies of community sufficiency. Even as universal (global) principles typify the community mode of production, symbiotically respectful relations between humans and nature give rise to unique localised geographies of ecological diversity and pluralism.

Labor‐capital relations on digital platforms: Organization, algorithmic discipline and the social factory again

AbstractDigital platform labor and its complex relationship with capital have stirred scholarly inquiry, calling for a systemic review that bridges foundational theories and various currents of development. In this review, we revisit Marxist and autonomist Marxist theses on the changing nature of work in the platform economy. Following that, we review two major strands of studies on the organization of production at the macro level and labour control at the micro level, which have revealed variegated types of workplace fissuring and different techniques of algorithmic control over bodies. However, we argue that the path forward must transcend these boundaries. We call for a revival of the ‘social factory’ thesis to rekindle ‘networking’ as a way of understanding labor‐capital relations on digital platforms. Our premise is that capital and labor mutually constitute the platform economy through their agency of networking the internet and ‘outernet’. We outline four key directions for future research based on this premise: networking with public elements, networking with market‐driven elements, networking for financialization in the digital landscape, and networking for resistance. By reinvigorating the social factory approach, we aim to enrich scholarly understandings of labor‐capital relations in the platform economy by articulating digital labor in a wider web of sociocultural, technical, political and economic relationships extending beyond and transcending the internet.

The centrality of disablement subjectivation to the reproduction of capitalist social relations: considerations for Critical and Global Political Economy

In the face of a global, mass impairment- and chronic illness-producing event such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the question of how to consider and integrate the politics of disablement within Global Political Economy scholarship and anti-capitalist activism has become ever-more pressing. In this article, I provide a proposal for how to conceptualise the capitalism-specific commonality between people who identify as having impairments, being chronically ill, neurodivergent, D/deaf, experiencing mental distress and who may or may not also identify as disabled people. To this end, in this article I adopt the ‘social model of disability’ and engage with both Moran’s cultural-materialist approach to identity and Autonomist Marxism’s ‘class composition’ thesis. Then, I make the case for the analytic usefulness of the non-identity, relational concept ‘subjects of disablement’ as the technical composition of disability on the basis of which the socio-political identity ‘disabled people’ as the political composition of disability emerges. Acknowledging disablement oppression and exploitation as central and fundamental to the reproduction of capitalist social relations would equip the GPE scholarship embedded within the praxis of dissent and resistance (see Bonfert et al, 2022) to generatively support activist groups’ already-existing efforts and mobilisations against and beyond – what I call – disabling capitalism. The Global Political Economy journal offers the opportunity for the ‘sluice gates’ (Clua-Losada and Moore, 2022: 6) of this interdisciplinary field to be widely opened for, and welcoming of, further explorations of how capitalism cannot be fully understood and ruptured without an analysis of structural disablement.

On Purposefully Poor Images: Aesthetic Encounters with Alienation

This article introduces the concept of purposefully poor images. Building on Hito Steyerl’s theory of poor images as images that travel through networks and lose resolution and information, (2009) the theory of the purposefully poor image looks at the phenomenon of images that are produced with the intention of looking poor. These are images that draw attention to their own process of objectification by satirising their degradation. In showcasing the material markers of objectification, purposefully poor images allow for an aesthetic encounter with the experience of alienation. This article draws the autonomist Marxist approach of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (2009) to argue that their place within semiocapitalism allows purposefully poor images to draw attention to and overcome alienation from within capitalist relations. It is argued that purposefully poor images are a product of collective circulatory logics within digital capitalism, but also a powerful tool for aesthetically representing alienation.

Contemporary class composition analysis: The politics of production and the autonomy of the political

The political and organisational routes opened up on the contemporary left following the financial crisis have seen a revival of class composition analysis as a means of comprehending a broad array of social and economic phenomena both within and beyond the workplace. Contextualising contemporary class composition analysis as a long-standing component of autonomist Marxism, this article argues that its application amid the left’s electoral turn exposes to scrutiny deeper-running weaknesses. The article first presents a history of class composition analysis through operaismo into postoperaismo. The second part of the article discusses four interconnected new directions in class composition analysis: Hardt and Negri’s Assembly; the analysis of social composition offered by the Notes from Below collective; Keir Milburn’s analysis of ‘generation left’; and, finally, the uptake of some of these ideas among commentators on the left of the British Labour Party like Paul Mason. The article then discusses the theoretical and strategic implications of these contributions through the prism of critiques of class composition analysis put forward by other theorists in the autonomist Marxist tradition. Noting the possible limitations confronting the application of class composition analysis to contemporary challenges faced by the post-crisis left, the penultimate section considers Labour Process Theory as a theoretical alternative implicit in recent critiques of contemporary class composition analysis, arguing that while Labour Process Theory’s analysis of the ‘politics of production’ captures the contingency of the connection between the workplace and formal politics, it leaves unresolved the lack of a distinctive theory of the latter on the contemporary left. The final section reconnects the discussion to the legacy of operaismo by exploring Mario Tronti’s recently translated work on the ‘autonomy of the political’ as a more substantial articulation of the specificity of politics against the backdrop of class conflict at the point of production. The conclusion relates this back to recent strategic issues in the Labour Party and broader labour movement.

The Digital Calculus of Racial Capitalism

The Digital Calculus of Racial Capitalism

Commoning with Henri Lefebvre

In this article, I ask how Henri Lefebvre’s oeuvre can contribute to the foundations for a metromarxist theory of urban commoning. To provide an answer to this question I discuss three main areas in which his thinking about the common emerges – his anthropology, philosophy of the urban, and politics of autogestion. This allows me to emphasize the multidimensionality of the Lefebvre-minded commoning, which manifests itself not only at the level of local activism but also touches the dimensions of the production of subjectivity and the constitution of the urban. Read in this way, Lefebvre’s theory of urban commoning helps us to move beyond some of the limitations of the existing discussion of urban commons, as well as to make room for a more fruitful dialogue between urban scholars and autonomist Marxists. It also equips us with an alternative conceptual framework that potentially enhances post-Lefebvrian projects of direct urban democracy.

From autonomous to autonomist geographies

Autonomist Marxist ideas and concepts are resurgent and, with their latent spatiality, are well placed to contribute to radical geographical debates. In particular, the methodology of ‘class composition’ analysis provides a rigorous, materialist critique of transforming capitalist social relations. This paper first provides vital historical–theoretical context from the milieu of Italian Operaismo, before emphasising the value of autonomist Marxist analyses of three contemporary geographical frontiers: labour process, migration, and social reproduction. It ultimately argues that the laudable motivations of the autonomous geographies project, explored in this very journal, would be better served through an explicitly materialist autonomist geography.

Rethinking Italian Autonomist Marxism: Spatial Composition, Urban Contestation, and the Material Geographies of Social Reproduction

AbstractClass composition was the most important concept to be developed within the rich milieu of Italian autonomist Marxism, acutely addressing subject‐object dichotomies and organisational problems of internal differentiation in and between classed, raced and gendered social formations. Yet “compositionist” analysis has received remarkably little attention within urban‐geographical literatures. This paper reviews and develops the class composition concept, offering the first fully developed theorisation of spatial composition and underscoring its relevance for a contemporary politics of space. It stresses the importance of immanent, reflexive non‐teleological periodisations of capitalist relations for anti‐capitalist struggle through the intertwined concepts of spatial composition and the tendency. Through this theoretical lens it narrates the innovative and under‐examined spatial praxis of often women‐led urban movements in 1970s Italy, arguing that these remarkable struggles provide vital lessons for thinking through the diverse modalities of organisation and class recomposition emerging in the material geographies of social reproduction today.

Multiple Careers: Towards a Post-Work Way of Life

ABSTRACT This article examines the capacity of college-educated young people who pursue in several careers – “slash workers” – to act independently and to make their own choices about their work and life in capitalist Hong Kong. Numerous studies have assumed an unproblematic link between precarious employment and the exploitation of young people’s labour. This article offers an alternative understanding of this link from the autonomist Marxist perspective of “refusal of work” and the “getting a life” project. While the literature on freelancing has illuminated workers’ potential to maintain a work/life balance, the novel phenomenon of slash work in Hong Kong adds to our understanding of freedom from labour. By having more than one career, slash workers: (i) blur the boundaries of paid work, volunteer work, and personal interests; (ii) anchor work around self, instead of self around work; and (iii) embrace breadth, instead of vertical mobility in their career trajectory. This post-work approach to work and life allows workers to be rule-setters, which inadvertently results in creativity in work.

Illusioned and Alienated: Can Gig Workers Organise Collectively?

By studying the fraudulent benefits of flexibility in the ride-hailing gig economy, this article explains alienation as a condition in which workers are excluded from the product, estranged, and disadvantaged. Material estrangement, an objective aspect of alienation exemplified by arbitrary distribution of income, capitalists’ exclusive access to data, and robotic communication between Uber and their drivers, has many physiological (subjective) manifestations. Dissatisfaction, powerlessness, and isolation as subjective expressions of alienation prominently shape the prospects of collective labour mobilisation by both sparking and hindering organisational potential. Additionally, the example of workers’ re-appropriation of Uber’s app against Uber explains how modern technologies serve not only as a medium to expand capitalist interests, but enhance possibilities for labour cooperation and liberation. The proposed argumentation uses the Autonomist Marxist concept of “social factory” as a meta-framework, drawing on original ethnographic and interview data on ride-hailing Uber drivers in the gig economy.

Why Do Humans Remain Central to the Knowledge Work in the Age of Robots? Marx’s Fragment on Machines and Beyond

The integration of new technologies into the process of production has recently resuscitated the question of world-without-work. Accounts that regard a workless future as a strong possibility often base their arguments on a body of work that upholds that new machines already tend to eliminate the category of work, including knowledge work. This article challenges this view by revisiting Marx’s Fragment on Machines through the lens of autonomist Marxist writings. It offers an answer to the research question, inscribed in the title, that in contemporary capitalism the principal source of value and wealth lies in the general intellect embodied in living labour, living-knowledge-as-mêtis, that cannot be crystallized in and reproduced by the system of machinery and organizational tools in any meaningful way. The political implications of this argument will be discussed in the conclusion.

The biopolitical turn in educational theory: Autonomist Marxism and revolutionary subjectivity in Empire

With Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri reinvigorated debates in political theory and radical philosophy about the cultivation of revolutionary subjectivity. Their theorization of Empire and multitude has also significantly affected the tenor of critical approaches to educational theory during the past two decades. In this article, we discuss Hardt and Negri’s contribution to what we call the biopolitical turn in educational theory, emphasizing the influence of autonomist Marxism on their work. Even more specifically, we discuss the impact of the autonomist tradition on their formulation of the nature of the relationship between the multitude and Empire: that the multitude is the generative force of the social world, whereas Empire is merely an apparatus of capture. This autonomist approach reveals a set of questions regarding subjectivity, materialism, and social ontology, which we argue are ripe for engagement by educational theorists, and indicate the enduring relevance of Empire as a valuable text for educational theorists interested in matters of biopolitical production, collective opposition, and revolutionary subjectivity.

“That type of thing does give you a boost”: Control, Self‐valorisation, and Autonomist Worker Copings in Call Centres

AbstractThere are growing concerns over current and future incarnations of routine work, based on the rise of technology and its perceived impact on skill requirements in the labour market. Drawing on Autonomist Marxist (AM) literature, the following article demonstrates how and why workers are likely to play a role in maintaining meaningful forms of work. Complimenting labour process research, which focuses on the role of worker “resistance” in the workplace, we develop a more nuanced perspective on worker agency and the human potential to create meaning through self‐governance in even the most unlikely service work encounters. Taking resilience and reworking agencies as subtle forms of “self‐valorisation”, we show how different spaces of routine work are mobilised for reproducing human connections and values in ways which act in opposition to management’s control and the evolution of unpleasant work environments.

Snapchat’s Dialectics of Socialization: Revisiting the Theory of the Spectacle for a Critical Political Economy of Social Media

AbstractIn this paper, I use the online app Snapchat as a prism through which I illustrate a “spectacular” power of current informational/communicative capitalism: the ability to subsume and integrate a broad range of practices into a holistic socialization process that operates both at the level of media platform structures and at the level of subjectivization mechanisms. I advance this argument by historicizing Guy Debord’s notion of the Spectacle via Autonomist Marxism and Voloshinov’s materialist semiotics. Shedding light on the tensions inhabiting the post-Fordist labor process its users are involved in—such as autonomy/heteronomy, sociability/alienation, and display/concealment—I show how Snapchat points to a Spectacle that consistently operates through a dialectic of socialization, which enables and compels, consorts and estranges, and deceives and exhibits.

Rethinking intellectual property rights in the cognitive and digital age of capitalism: An autonomist Marxist reading

The transition from industrial capitalism to cognitive capitalism and the rise of the digital revolution have brought the subject of intellectual property rights to the forefront as a controversial issue. This paper holds that the theoretical apparatus and concepts belonging to the industrial phase of capitalism largely fall short with respect to the repercussions that intellectual property rights regime yields. Embracing the methodological precept that social theory must be moulded in order to address the contours of contemporary social reality, this paper engages in an autonomist Marxist update on the concept of intellectual property rights. It ultimately challenges the “intellectual property rights are a socio-economic need” thesis and speculatively argues that the current system of intellectual property rights, directed politically towards the enclosure of commons, constitutes a structural contradiction by i) forming a basis for a social crisis in terms of the established relations of production, and ii) curtailing a part of the socio-economic opportunities for innovation, profit-making, and growth.

Toward a postcapitalist feminist political ecology’ approach to the commons and commoning

Feminist scholars are deeply involved in current global debates surrounding natural resource management. Looking at feminists’ engagement through the entry point of the commons and commoning, feminists’ voices are diverse. Somewhat separate from feminist discussions on commons and commoning, scholars of postcapitalist community economies have recently linked their scholarship to the study of commoning. This essay expands feminist political ecology’s approaches to the study of the commons and commoning by integrating some insights from existing eco- and autonomist Marxist feminims as well as postcapitalist community economies. We first discuss a postcapitalist feminist political ecology’ perspective. After introducing our site and methods, we explore the productivity of this framework through examination of the case of a women-led cooperative that has been producing agave syrup in rural Mexico for the last two decades. To conclude, we discuss several insights this approach may offer for transformative politics.