Autonomous Marxism
Description
Emanuele Leonardi:
"AM can be defined as follows: from a historical point of view, the elaboration of workerism is closely linked to the conflict cycle of the 1960s and 1970s in Italy. In this context, at least a few magazines and political groups should be mentioned: Quaderni Rossi, Classe Operaia, and Rosso, on the one hand; on the other, Potere Operaio and Autonomia Operaia. From a methodological perspective, the workerist option unfolds through four steps: the partiality of the point of view, the constitutive unity of thought and conflict, the ambivalence of the working-class condition (labor force / abstract labor within capital, working class / living labor against capital), and the centrality of class composition (Filippini and Tomasello, 2010). Lastly, from a political point of view, the two main innovations of AM were the practice of refusal of work, theorized among others by Sergio Bologna and Antonio Negri—on which I will elaborate further—and the Copernican revolution elaborated by Mario Tronti, according to which class struggle comes first and capitalist organization follows suit (instituting, therefore, a causal and incremental link between workers' unrest and capitalist development).
Finally, it is appropriate to underline the specific modality through which, starting from the 1990s, a second moment of workerist reflection "territorializes contemporary French philosophy in the field of Italian beyond-Marxism [oltremarxismo]" (Chignola, 2015, p. 32), in particular the issue of biopolitics as posed by Michel Foucault. The Foucauldian toolkit, especially the notion of neoliberal governmentality, is mobilized by post-workerism to question the emergence, starting from the crisis of the social-democratic welfare state models, of a new strategy of capitalist accumulation based on: 1. the centrality of the sphere of reproduction; 2. the financialization of the economy; and 3. the cognitization of work (Fumagalli, Giuliani, Lucarelli and Vercellone, 2019). The historical junction from which post-workerism enters into tension with the concept of crisis is therefore twofold: on the one hand, the collapse of the social dynamics that had supported the so-called “Glorious Thirty Years (1945-1975) of capitalism; on the other, the elements of societal “creative” destruction that, starting from the 1980s, characterize the increasingly hegemonic project of neoliberalism. In passing, it must be said that both of these passages, and the relevance of criticizing them from an ecological standpoint, have been thoroughly analyzed by the most attentive strands of political ecology (Pellizzoni, 2019)."