From: glevy@PRATT.EDU
Date: Fri Dec 15 2006 - 08:04:39 EST
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Massimo De Angelis, “Reflections on Tronti” | http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=06/12/15/0039249 +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ Reflections on Tronti Massimo De Angelis From the commoner It has been suggested to me, in the corridors of the Historical Materialism conference held over the week end, that what distinguishes what we may call, broadly speaking, autonomist marxism with other marxist approaches is the argument that the “working class” is the agent of transformation that pushes capital on the defence and forces its “economic” development rather then, on the contrary, being capital that “overdetermines” the rest by means of its agency. This suggestion furthermore is accompanied by the claim that this view is false, since capital has “more power.” In my view, the insight of 1960s operaismo with respect to working class agency were not falsified in light of 1980s capital’s agency, they were simply temporally bounded. Class struggle, in a process-like manner, have at least two broad actors, not one, and their tragic-comic struggle develop through highs and lows for both sides, “scoring points” for both sides. The process of this historical development of struggle, this very process of “point scoring” for one or the other, is the stuff of capitalist development. The problem is that acknowledging this does not give us any hint of how to go beyond capital and the very specific form of struggle shaping its development. And I think it is at this point that it is important to underline that what distinguishes “autonomist marxism” in its operaiste roots to other forms of marxism, is a specific theoretical attitude, one that takes the processes that traditionally we understand as “political” and “economic.” as one. Its unique political methodology is one that allows to ask research questions as part of a heretic research program, heretic because it sees the world from one side, that which is constituted within, against and beyond capital’s own value program, and thus its broad horizon is the end of capitalism and the begining of history. It is therefore a stand from where to ask questions as articulated to walks of struggle, rather than reading the processes making up our world as something that have already been explained away by some form of marxist theory. This story continues at: <http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=06/12/15/0039249>
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