The political economy of the information machine is discussed within the Marxist tradition of Italian operaismo by posing the hypothesis of an informational turn already at work in the age of the industrial revolution. The idea of valorizing information introduced by Alquati (1963) in a pioneering Marxist approach to cybernetics is used to examine the paradigms of mass intellectuality, immaterial labour and cognitive capitalism developed by Lazzarato, Marazzi, Negri, Vercellone and Virno since the 1990s. The concept of machinic by (...) Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 1980) is then adopted to extend Marx’s analysis of the industrial machine to the algorithms of digital machines. If the industrial machine can be described as a bifurcation of the domains of energy and information, this essay proposes to conceive the information machine itself as a further bifurcation between information and metadata. In conclusion, the hypothesis of the society of metadata is outlined as the current evolution of that society of control pictured by Deleuze (1990) in relation to the power embodied in databases. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene por objetivo poner en valor la importancia del postestructuralismo francés en el tránsito del operaismo al operaismo. El encuentro entre la corriente francesa e italiana no es tanto un proyecto para reunir ambos pensamientos, como un proceso de revelamiento de resonancias previas. Lo que abre la verdadera posibilidad de encuentro entre ambas corrientes son los lazos teóricos profundos que preexistían a la contingencia del encuentro. El resultado de ese encuentro no puede ser reducido a una (...) unidad. Penetraremos en él desde las grietas y fisuras de sus formas desbordantes y disruptivas. (shrink)

This first volume in a new trilogy of books by Antonio Negri examines and develops the Italian tradition of radical Marxist thought known as operaismo or ‘autonomist Marxism’ – the tradition to which Negri himself adheres and in which he is a leading figure. The tradition of operaismo emphasizes the role of the worker in capitalism and the primacy of class struggle. Within this framework, Negri’s key contribution has been to theorize the transition from the ‘mass worker’ to (...) the ‘social worker’ – that is, to broaden the concept of living labour and liberate it from the theoretical cages that locked it into the factory. It was only by moving beyond the ideology and political practice of the mass worker that the revolutionary character of the Marxist concept of class could be updated for our times and developed in relation to the exploitation and socialization of living labour, including networks of cognitive work, reproductive work and care work, networks which also have the potential to become the bases for new forms of resistance to capitalist exploitation. By bringing together Negri’s key contributions to the reconceptualization of the worker and class struggle, this volume demonstrates the vitality of the Marxist tradition of operaismo and its continued relevance for understanding the key social and political struggles of our time. (shrink)

This article critically examines the transition from Marx to Spinoza within Antonio Negri’s postoperaist thought and explores a potential alternative rooted in Mario Tronti’s concept of the ‘autonomy of the political’. In Negri’s postoperaismo, the embrace of Spinoza reevaluates Marx’s critique of political economy through an optimistic lens, suggesting a tendency beyond capitalism. However, Negri’s embrace of a Spinozian plane of immanence entails a problematic affirmation of what exists. The article argues that Negri’s worldview, despite its beginnings, ends up resembling (...) deterministic historical materialism. While critical theory exposes flaws in Negri’s theory, it falls short in providing a practical alternative. Returning to Negri’s interpretation of Spinoza’s Political Treatise uncovers earlier arguments, rooted in paradoxes inherent to practical politics. However, reliance on the concept of the multitude highlights deeper issues in Negri’s approach. Rather than adhering to postoperaismo or critical theory, the article suggests an alternative in Tronti’s journey from operaismo, particularly in the concept of the ‘autonomy of the political’. Notwithstanding critiques, this attempted liberation from Marxist determinism allows for a clearer confrontation with politics. The article concludes that Hardt and Negri’s recent critical engagement with this concept advances their arguments but does not entirely overcome inherent limitations in their approach. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The article deals with the early career of the literary critic Alberto Asor Rosa, one of the founders of the operaismo movement, a Marxist tendency advocating the management of factories by workers through bottom-up councils. It outlines the role he assigned to literature and culture, investigating his criticism first against the non-revolutionary cultural politics of the Italian Communist Party, notoriously through his book Scrittori e popolo and his writings for the periodical classe operaia, then identifying a transition from (...) a destructive approach against any culture based on values to the use of cultural disciplines purely as techniques. The article posits that this instrumental understanding of culture depended on Asor Rosa’s political choice to take the perspective of the working class, in order to use culture itself for social analysis. In the second half of the decade, contributing to the periodicals Angelus novus and Contropiano, he still considered culture ineffective as a way towards revolution, but he began to value the great works of ʻbourgeois’ literature for their ability to penetrate the middle-class spirit and undermine capitalist society. The article concludes that, despite his changing idea of culture, Asor Rosa’s opinions on the intellectual’s task fit the traditional concept of it. (shrink)

This article considers the engagement of Mario Tronti - one of the leading figures of classical Italian workerism [operaismo] - with the thought of Max Weber. Weber constituted one of Tronti’s most important cattivi maestri. By analysing Weber’s influence upon Tronti’s development, this article aims to show the ways in which this encounter affected his Marxism and political theory in general. In particular, during the period of the debate in Italian Marxism about the thesis of the autonomy of the (...) political, Tronti increasingly adopted Weberian terminology and theoretical points of reference. Ultimately, the article argues that Tronti’s heretical method led him to incorporate and to re-propose theoretical and political problematics that are characteristic of bourgeois political theory: namely, the dyad administration/charisma, and a teleological and anthropological approach to history. Focusing upon this heterodox encounter therefore enables us to understand one of the trajectories of the transformation of Marxism that occurred during its recurrent rendezvous with the ‘Marx of the bourgeoisie’. (shrink)

Chapter 2 – ‘Collective visioning: Utopia as process’ briefly locates this enquiry within a strong tradition of knowledge co-production between political activists and the academy: from the workers enquiries of the nineteenth century; experiments in direct democracy of the early twentieth century; the participatory research methods that emerged from the campesino movements of Africa and Latin America in the 1960s; Italy’s Operaismo and Argentina’s Argentinazo; and more recently the Zapatista-inspired encuentros and the dialogical spaces of the World Social Forum. (...) The chapter then outlines the specific Collective Visioning approach used for this book and introduces the participants themselves, exploring how the process works to reveal images of future worlds, and of the seeds of liberation already existing in the present. This method, as we discover, utilises utopia as process – transitioning the functionality of utopia from noun to verb, and operationalising imagination as a productive power in the pursuit of new knowledge and praxis. (shrink)

This article introduces a special section concerned with precariousness and cultural work. Its aim is to bring into dialogue three bodies of ideas — the work of the autonomous Marxist `Italian laboratory'; activist writings about precariousness and precarity; and the emerging empirical scholarship concerned with the distinctive features of cultural work, at a moment when artists, designers and (new) media workers have taken centre stage as a supposed `creative class' of model entrepreneurs. The article is divided into three sections. It (...) starts by introducing the ideas of the autonomous Marxist tradition, highlighting arguments about the autonomy of labour, informational capitalism and the `factory without walls', as well as key concepts such as multitude and immaterial labour. The impact of these ideas and of Operaismo politics more generally on the precarity movement is then considered in the second section, discussing some of the issues that have animated debate both within and outside this movement, which has often treated cultural workers as exemplifying the experiences of a new `precariat'. In the third and final section we turn to the empirical literature about cultural work, pointing to its main features before bringing it into debate with the ideas already discussed. Several points of overlap and critique are elaborated — focusing in particular on issues of affect, temporality, subjectivity and solidarity. (shrink)

Representing a new generation of theorists reaffirming the radical dimensions of art, Gail Day launches a bold critique of late twentieth-century art theory and its often reductive analysis of cultural objects. Exploring core debates in discourses on art, from the New Left to theories of "critical postmodernism" and beyond, Day counters the belief that recent tendencies in art fail to be adequately critical. She also challenges the political inertia that results from these conclusions. Day organizes her defense around critics who (...) have engaged substantively with emancipatory thought and social process: T. J. Clark, Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and Hal Foster, among others. She maps the tension between radical dialectics and left nihilism and assesses the interpretation and internalization of negation in art theory. Chapters confront the claim that exchange and equivalence have subsumed the use value of cultural objects—and with it critical distance— and interrogate the proposition of completed nihilism and the metropolis put forward in the politics of Italian operaismo. Day covers the debates on symbol and allegory waged within the context of 1980s art and their relation to the writings of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man. She also examines common conceptions of mediation, totality, negation, and the politics of anticipation. A necessary unsettling of received wisdoms, _Dialectical Passions_ recasts emancipatory reflection in aesthetics, art, and architecture. (shrink)

This article takes the suggestions by Jameson and Žižek that Hardt and Negri's recent Empire is an important `new theoretical synthesis' and a challenge to a politically complacent Cultural Studies as its starting point to explore Negri's understanding of `production'. It opens out Negri's apparent synthesis to consider the formative elements of his work: operaismo's `social factory', Marx's `Fragment on Machines' and Deleuze's figure of `control society'. The article argues that whilst Negri develops the important analytic categories of socialized (...) and affective labour, he breaks with operaismo's and Deleuze's `cramped' and `minor' interrogation of the intricacies of capitalized production to develop a problematic understanding of an emerging autonomy-in-production. In this Negri makes a strange return to the orthodox Marxian and - in an inverted way - neo-Gramscian positions which operaismo had sought to undermine; so making Empire less a synthesis of, than a break with some of the core theoretical principles of operaismo, Marx and Deleuze. (shrink)

Resumen: Deleuze y Guattari caracterizan el capitalismo como una serie de relaciones diferenciales entre flujos: trabajo / capital; medios de pago / moneda de financiamiento; códigos científicos y tecnológicos / mercado. Al mismo tiempo consideran las formas de lucha a partir del operaismo italiano. Este artículo muestra cómo se articulan ambas dimensiones de lo político a partir de establecer que son respectivamente la aplicación de los dos conceptos ontológicos fundamentales de Diferencia y repetición : la Idea diferencial y la (...) intensidad como factor de individuación. Para ello, se concentra en la relación monetaria, a partir de la teoría de los economistas que Deleuze y Guattari usan como fuente y la lucha a nivel monetario planteada por Berti.: Deleuze and Guattari characterize Capitalism as a series of differential relations between flows: labor / capital; means of payment / financing currency; scientific and technological codes / market. At the same time, they think the ways of struggle through the Italian operaismo. This paper shows the articulation of the two dimensions of politics by holding that they are an application of the two fundamental ontological concepts of Difference and Repetition : differential Idea and intensity as factors of individuation. To do that, we will focus on the monetary relation, using the theory of the economists who are source for Deleuze and Guattari and the struggle at a monetary level proposed by Berti. (shrink)

This article explores some of the crucial conceptual dimensions of Italian workerist Marxism [operaismo], identifying both its underlying impetus and its limits in particular interpretations of Marxian concepts. Particular emphasis is placed on the manner in which the focus of workerists such as Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri on living labour, antagonism and class-composition can be understood in terms of a philosophy of subjectivity founded on a Marxian conception of difference.

This second volume of a new three-part series of Antonio Negri's work is focussed on the consequences of the rapid process of deindustrialisation that has occurred across the West in recent years. In this volume Negri investigates exactly what happens when the class subjects of industrial capitalism are demobilised and the factories close. Evidently capital continues to make profit, but how and where? According to Negri, the creation of value extends beyond the factory walls to embrace the whole of society; (...) the 'mass worker' of industrialism gives way to the 'socialised worker' (operaio sociale) and the terrain of exploitation now becomes the whole of human life. In postmodernity, the metropolis becomes the privileged arena of value extraction. We must therefore understand the global city, with its stratifications, its enclosures and its resistances. Old categories of the private and the public are inadequate to describe the new matrix of production, which is characterised rather by the 'common', the productive space of cognitive and immaterial labour. Today's metropolis can be defined as a space of antagonisms between forms of life produced, on the one hand, by finance capital (the capital that operates around rents), and on the other by the 'cognitive proletariat'. The central question is then how 'the common' of the latter can be mobilised for the destruction of capitalism. In an analysis that runs from the Italian workerism (operaismo) of the 1970s to the present day, From the Factory to the Metropolis offers readers valuable insight into the far-reaching impact of deindustrialisation, presenting both the challenges and opportunities. It will appeal to the many interested in the continuing development of Negri's project and to anyone interested in radical politics today. (shrink)

This article presents Jean-Paul Sartre’s criticisms of institutions in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), and later in his study of French and Italian social movements after 1968. Sartre’s Marxist existentialism opposes petrified institutions to free praxis—the creator of groups in fusion able to reinvent themselves when facing social reification. By commenting on the events of May ‘68 and the Italian struggles of the time, Sartre aligns with the operaismo thinkers who denounce parties’ and unions’ bureaucratic inertia. Sartre then (...) continues his study in It is Right to Rebel (1974), by promoting revolutionary spontaneity and direct democracy. (shrink)

This chapter surveys the philosophical and theoretical foundations of Antonio Negri’s postoperaist conceptualisation of a crisis in the law of value. Central to this is Negri’s turn from Marx to Spinoza. The chapter begins by outlining the shift from operaismo to postoperaismo in Negri’s work and the wider tradition. It then considers how, in the development of thinking around the social factory and real subsumption comes a shift from the refusal of work to its celebration as an expression of (...) the constituent power of the ‘multitude’. The chapter then assays Negri’s rejection of dialectics, contradiction, abstraction and mediation for the Spinozist immanence of ‘Empire’. This, the chapter suggests, forecloses the capacity to grasp the negativity and antagonism central to the critique of political economy. (shrink)

This is the text of Mario Tronti’s lecture at the 2006 Historical Materialism conference. It provides a brief, evocative synopsis of Tronti’s understanding of the historical experience and contemporary relevance of operaismo, a theoretical and practical attempt, embodied in journals such as Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia, to renew Marxist thought and politics in the Italy of the 1960s through a renewed attention to class-antagonism and the changing composition of labour.

The Cultural Production of Social Movements offers a theory of cultural practices, protest tactics, strategic planning and deliberation, and movement organizational structures: “ideological contention.” It is a theory of ideology “from below.” The Cultural Production of Social Movements shows how conflicts—both with external political forces and disagreements, dissensus, and the decision-making process internal to social movements—produce knowledge and meanings that, in turn, impact upon and change the practices that contribute to how social movements are structured and organized. The Cultural Production (...) of Social Movements theorizes the relationship between consciously held superordinate ideas, the changing composition of progressive and oppositional social struggles, and the social worlds they hope to inhabit. Analyzing the Black Panther Party, specifically Kathleen Cleaver’s break with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and her contributions to the Party, Operaismo (or Workerism) in Italy and the relationship between shifting organizational strategies, inventive tactics, and novel and expansive ways to theorize class struggles, and the communal composition of “Worker-Recovered Enterprise Movements” in contemporary Argentina, this book shows how movement ideologies change and how meanings structure organizations, mobilizations, and futures. In The Cultural Production of Social Movements ideology is neither a static set of principles, nor is an unconscious orientation towards power and governance. Rather, it is the contentious, democratizing, and deliberative processes—which become realized as tactics in protests, struggles, defeats, and victories—that makes the relationship between movements, and what they “mean” conscious to its participants. (shrink)

Marco Enrico Giacomelli, Some Anticipations and Legacies of Foucault in Italy: Operaismo in Perspective. We connect « Sociological » research conducted by Italian operaism in Fifties-Seventies and genealogy of Michel Foucault, analysing some themes concerning contemporary political period. In particular, the concept of city-factory, needs, and disciplinary society, stressing some possible development of research and criticizing some position issued in politology, especially in Italy.

This second volume of a new three-part series of Antonio Negri's work is focussed on the consequences of the rapid process of deindustrialisation that has occurred across the West in recent years. In this volume Negri investigates exactly what happens when the class subjects of industrial capitalism are demobilised and the factories close. Evidently capital continues to make profit, but how and where? According to Negri, the creation of value extends beyond the factory walls to embrace the whole of society; (...) the 'mass worker' of industrialism gives way to the 'socialised worker' (_operaio sociale_) and the terrain of exploitation now becomes the whole of human life. In postmodernity, the metropolis becomes the privileged arena of value extraction. We must therefore understand the global city, with its stratifications, its enclosures and its resistances. Old categories of the private and the public are inadequate to describe the new matrix of production, which is characterised rather by the 'common', the productive space of cognitive and immaterial labour. Today's metropolis can be defined as a space of antagonisms between forms of life produced, on the one hand, by finance capital (the capital that operates around rents), and on the other by the 'cognitive proletariat'. The central question is then how 'the common' of the latter can be mobilised for the destruction of capitalism. In an analysis that runs from the Italian workerism (_operaismo_) of the 1970s to the present day, _From the Factory to the Metropolis_ offers readers valuable insight into the far-reaching impact of deindustrialisation, presenting both the challenges and opportunities. It will appeal to the many interested in the continuing development of Negri's project and to anyone interested in radical politics today. (shrink)

The article counters popular predictions of a coming “post-work society” with the argument that the capitalist development of technology leads to an uneven introduction of automation into production processes, paralleled by the expansion of wage labour in the service sectors of social reproduction and the circulation of capital in the centre of the capitalist world-system, as well as in labour-intensive production in the periphery. We draw our argument from a critical reading of Italian operaismo whose development we trace in (...) the terms of the sequence “from official Marxisms to a re-interpretation of Capital, from Capital to Grundrisse and back to Capital”. The operaists made an epistemological break in the study of the relationship between the forces and relations of production by identifying the capitalist development of technology as a key site of class struggle. They also introduced a theoretically fruitful distinction between the concepts of the technical composition of labour power and the political composition of the working class. By introducing the concept of the social composition of labour power, we aim to draw attention to certain negative tendencies within operaismo that led to its vulgarisation by post-operaismo authors, while at the same time correcting it in line with contemporary processes of capital accumulation on a world scale. (shrink)

The current debates about the politization of art often suffer from the fact that we take for granted what we understand by politics. I would like to take the controversies about the political in Luigi Nono’s music as an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of this peculiar category. I would like to differentiate first between three paradigmatic conceptions of the political in order to, secondly, examine the political content of Nono’s overtly political music from the 60s and 70s. The (...) assumption that guides me is that the political content articulated in Nono’s works is linked to the idea of the political transcending itself. (shrink)

This paper reviews the recent writing of Sergio Bologna and Carlo Formenti. These authors are proposed as post-workerist dissenters with respect to Hardt and Negri’s conceptualisation of contemporary capitalism. Therefore, while the latter has risen to prominence within Anglo-American academia astheradical account of the political economy of the knowledge economy, the work of Bologna and Formenti is here presented as providing alternative accounts of contemporary capitalism and its dynamics. In doing so, this work challenges the Anglo-American reception of post-operaismo. (...) However, these analyses are also assessed by showing the many similarities they share with Hardt and Negri’s account. These similarities are argued to pose immanent limits, impeding this post-workerist dissent’s ability to carryoperaismobeyond Hardt and Negri. (shrink)

This intervention aims to question the opposition between a ‘politics of immanence’ and a ‘politics of transcendence’ through a critical assessment of some contemporary philosophical approaches to politics and a reappraisal of Mario Tronti’s account of the autonomy of the political. I shall argue that the contrast between immanence and transcendence is ultimately politically disabling, as it fails to provide an adequate position from which to situate a political thinking and practice.

‘68 in Italy, compared to the same movement in other European countries, is characterized by its long duration and its particular intensity. It is in fact a movement that has produced powerful and lasting effects on the Italian society for at least a decade, as it is visible in its central presence in the historical memory of the country, still today. But the outbreak of ‘68, like the social and legislative achievements of the 70s, owe their conditions of possibility to (...) a break – a political break but above all a theoretical break – which occurred earlier, at the beginning of the 1960s. Going back to the genesis of the breakdown of the conservative imagery of the 1950s, while being an operation of intellectual history, can be useful to investigate how the “theoretical novelty” emerges, in this case through a break with its own tradition, albeit aiming to its reactivation. (shrink)

This article turns to the issue of political representation that I argue is central to all forms of political thought and practice of the modern period. Taking political representation as its object, I argue that its crisis—that comes to a head in the travails of the Weimar Republic—provided the opportunity for forms of neoliberal representation to displace political representation with purportedly “neutral”, non-partisan and thus “fair” representational tools. In contrast, I seek to develop the idea of “self-representation” with a discussion (...) of paths not chosen at Weimar and via Italianoperaismo’s reflections on “class composition”, which combines collective self-representation with political organization. Representing each member of a collective to another as it develops epistemic and cartographic tools, it constructs group solidarity, organization and the capacity to act as it reclaims the collectivity alienated in modern political forms of representation and excluded from neoliberal ones. (shrink)

Partiendo de los análisis (post)operaistas, proponemos explicar la transición de los dispositivos disciplinarios a los dispositivos de la sociedad de control, como el in- tento de capturar el exceso de subjetividad y la multiplicación de formas de vida que constituyen el modo inmanente de la producción de riqueza en la economía post- fordista. El capitalismo postfordista no es tanto una estructura de explotación que se pueda comprender, exclusivamente, con relación al concepto de plusvalía, sino un dispositivo de captura y apropiación (...) de esa producción. (shrink)

Aureli advances a fresh, spirited and combative account of the idea of ‘autonomy’, connecting Italian architectural debates from the 1960s with the politics of class-autonomy that was being developed and advanced by workerist theorists such as Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti and Toni Negri. Aureli’s account focuses on Aldo Rossi’s architectural ideas and the project of the No-Stop City proposed by the young avant-garde group Archizoom. The Project of Autonomy is not simply envisaged as an historical exploration of the 1960s; primarily, (...) it is conceived as an intervention in current architectural theory, drawing on the author’s interest in Tronti’s politics to challenge the contemporary popularity of a broadly post-Negrian ‘autonomism’. This review questions aspects of Aureli’s reading of Rossi and Manfredo Tafuri. Furthermore, although Aureli’s discussion of Red Vienna opens up onto vital questions of strategies for social change, which remain pertinent to contemporary arguments over ‘enclaves’ or ‘zones’ of resistance, his antagonism towards Tafuri prevents his argument from either exploring or advancing the debate which he has initiated. (shrink)

This article examines an often-mentioned but largely undeveloped concept in the work of Giorgio Agamben and in particular his Homo Sacer project: form-of-life. What is at stake in this concept is, I attempt to show, a way of thinking “politics” outside of the space of sovereignty. By examining a short text on this notion published just before the opening installment of the Homo Sacer sequence, this article demonstrates the way this early formulation of the concept is indebted to certain strains (...) of Italian workerist and post-workerist thought. The fundamental question this analysis poses, however, is whether the concept of form-of-life, being to some extent “beyond” the classical space of politics, should in fact be understood as fundamentally aesthetic in nature. (shrink)