Volume 26 Issue 2 April 2014
From the time of its emergence in the 1960s Italy as operaismo to its current manifestation as postautonomism, the autonomist movement has gone through various transformations, spreading its theoretical and political wings to other parts of Europe: to France, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands, among others. From its inception until now, the movement has had an intriguing connection to Marxism, which is without a doubt one of its foundational inspirations yet also from which it has distanced itself. We thus start this issue of Rethinking Marxism with a symposium coedited by Esra Erdem and Joost de Bloois, the main motivation of which is to explore the connection between post-Autonomia—which has provided us with a lively critique of capitalist modernity—and contemporary Marxism.
In their introduction entitled “From Autonomism to Post-Autonomia, from Class Composition to a New Political Anthropology?,” Joost de Bloois, Monica Jansen, and Frans Willem Korsten argue that the current import and relevance of autonomist thinking derives from the traumatic experiences of the 1970s and the attempt to theorize and practice self-valorization and autonomy at the moment of their disappearance in a society which has become the (social) factory, subsumed under neoliberal onslaught. It is this thinking—born out of crisis, they believe, and transformed in the process—that gives autonomism universal appeal beyond its Italian roots. Their contribution is dedicated to revealing the continuity and also the breaks in the journey from autonomism to postautonomism.
What were some of the reasons behind this crisis? De Bloois, Jansen, and Korsten, among others, refer to Stevphen Shukaitis, who focuses on the crisis in radical imagination, which has been unable to recognize that what solicits our rage today is precisely the “dreams of yesterday's revolutionaries turned upside down.” Franco “Bifo” Berardi, similarly, argues that the demands of the progressives were not left unanswered but were in fact met with the flexibilization and fractalization of labor, or put differently, the precarity of labor, an argument and a core theme taken up by other essays in this symposium.
De Bloois, Jansen, and Korsten point to a debate over the changes that forced the transformation of autonomist thinking: while some argued that its failure had to do with the fact that autonomism did not notice the modes of subjectivation outside of the factory, others claimed the opposite, that the factory as the center of analysis was bypassed. Of equal significance, however, is the fact that one core idea in autonomism comes through into postautonomist thinking without alteration. Like their predecessors, the postautonomists believe that no social change can take place through the categories—or the language, if you will—of the adversary, capital. The emancipation of the multitude can be realized not in a place or a “beyond capital” that takes place chronologically, but rather in a world that is constructed parallel to it.
The question then arises: If we are trapped in the condition of an all-embracing capitalism, what can be done? What are the outlets? Are there any possible escape routes? Part of the answer can be found in a political anthropology, which de Bloois, Jansen, and Korsten claim has always been at the heart of the autonomist project. And at the center of this anthropology lies the concept of multitude, the differential meanings of which the authors discuss in the context of the works of leading theorists.
A seminal theorist, Mario Tronti, makes the radical and inspiring suggestion that the desire to escape really existing democracy can be confronted by nothing less than rethinking what it means to be anthropos, human. In the process of such foundational rethinking, the conditions of knowledge production are also called into question, inviting a questioning, among other things, of the hierarchy between the object and subject, worker and researcher. Drawing from the work of different theorists, de Bloois, Jansen, and Korsten argue that the universities are no longer monopolizers of knowledge production, and they reflect on the idea of Jack Bratich's “machinic intellectual” who is embedded in larger circuits and who collaborates with nonacademic machinic intellectuals, a kind of rethinking which is reminiscent of Antonio Gramsci's organic intellectual and also brings to mind the knowledge production practices of the Community Economies Collective touched upon in Rethinking Marxism 25 (4).
As machinic intellectuals working to reclaim the cultural commons, de Bloois, Jansen, and Korsten focus on claims (such as by Holmes) that art still offers a chance for self-expression and development in this environment of capitalism—yet another point of entry to the following essays in the symposium, which reflect on immaterial labor in its cultural manifestations as part of emancipatory practices in contemporary capitalism. Indeed, the explosion of artistic forms in the Gezi Park revolt in Turkey in the summer of 2013 seems to testify to the optimism that art offers (as does the vision behind the artwork by Jim Fleming displayed in this issue, discussed below).
Matteo Pasquinelli, in his contribution entitled “To Anticipate and Accelerate: Italian Operaismo and Reading Marx's Notion of the Organic Composition of Capital,” takes another theoretical journey into the history of the Italian operaismo movement, this one around the axis of Marx's concept of the organic composition of capital (OCC). He claims that this formulation of the objective economic situation was translated within operaismo into a subjective political analysis, confirming a view prevalent in this symposium that autonomism is the Marxism of subjectivities. In his historical exegesis, Pasquinelli finds in Tronti's work “Lenin in England” the first formulation of the operaist claim that capital responds to an autonomous working class. Technological innovation and the division of labor represent adjustments to the working class on the part of capital, the translation of a technical formula into an organic antagonism, of a technical reality into a political reality.
Pasquinelli argues that the error with this way of thinking is the manner in which the working class is theorized outside capital: if the working class is to oppose capital, then it has to recognize itself as a part of capital, reminding us of the claim in the de Bloois, Jansen, and Korsten introductory piece about the profound problem of creating space for liberatory struggle outside of the space of capital. What are the spaces of struggle against capital when one is part of capital? How can the working class liberate itself from itself?
Pasquinelli notes that an important contemporary metamorphosis of the OCC has occurred through the concept of the social factory, but he claims that, while Tronti saw society as an extension of the factory, the factory is now seen as a moment of the general network of social productivity. The social factory, as can be seen in the other contributions, is also one of the central concepts of postautonomist thinking. In his archaeology, Pasquinelli further notes that, contrary to current views that immaterial labor and cognitive capitalism are new concepts, they actually have their first formulations in Romano Alquati's work, written in 1963. Alquati perceived the cybernetic apparatus, in which surplus value extraction is also predicated on the control of information. In this way, the capitalist not only extracts energy from the worker but also information, an idea later developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whereby the surplus value of code (knowledge) is transformed into the surplus value of flow (traditional Marxian surplus value). Hence was born the idea of cognitive capital. So, argues Pasquinelli, the cognitive turn in autonomism had already taken place between 1962 and 1972. And it was when operaismo conceptualized collective knowledge as an abstract machine, argues Pasquinelli, that the most radical rupture from the site of the factory as the center of analysis took place, in yet another metamorphosis of Marx's OCC, with an intensifying emphasis on knowledge in contemporary capitalism.
For Pasquinelli, Paolo Virno's analysis on the notion of mass intellectuality represents an important turning point. Mass intellectuality for Virno expands throughout the metropolis, is diffused throughout, creating the conditions of new subjectivities. With this turn, Pasquinelli argues, the traditional boundaries between variable and fixed capital can no longer be sustained. This transformation in turn represents for Carlo Vercellone a new division of labor in capitalism, as well as a new organization of society; this is cognitive capitalism, in which machines deterritorialize the division of labor across society, which is distinct from industrial capitalism, in which machines reterritorialize the division of labor within the factory.
With machinic knowledge—which is productive being embodied in machinery, by managing the division of labor of the social factory, and also by producing “new forms of life”—no longer just the brains but even the bodies of the workers are transformed into fixed capital. This vision is the basis of the call for the social anthropology that de Bloois, Jansen, and Korsten view as a central point of autonomist/postautonomist thinking. It is this transformation that Christian Marazzi describes as the emerging anthropogenic mode of production. For this reason, cognitive capitalism is also referred to as biopolitical capitalism, where the living becomes fixed capital. This vision of the world encompassed by capital, which has now embraced life-forms, poses difficult political questions that, Pasquinelli argues, find a response in the idea of the common as theorized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the two foremost theorists of postautonomist thinking, in yet another framing of the OCC in the form of the becoming society.
What modes of subjectivity can be framed in this becoming society? This question is the theme of Stevphen Shukaitis's contribution, entitled “Learning Not to Labor,” in which discussion centers on the production of subjectivity in relation to different modes of the refusal to work. Just as the technical and organic composition of capital are the core of Pasquinelli's essay in understanding the evolution of operaismo's analyses of transforming capitalism, in Shukaitis's essay they are important in understanding the refusal to work as a sociopolitical practice embedded in a broader context rather than an individual position. In what he names the compositional analysis, it becomes important to understand the forms of care, social reproduction, and organization that are constituted to sustain the self-reproduction of the refusal to work, for as Shukaitis believes, the forms of refusal that do not rethink their practice tend to reinforce the traditional forms of support, as can be seen for instance in the domestic and other work demanded from women in order to sustain striking workers.
Shukaitis argues that one of the best examples of this rethinking can be found in the work of the Madrid-based collective, Precarias a la Deriva (analyzed in detail in the essay that follows, by Maribel Casas-Cortés). The key idea in the work of this collective is to see patterns of association between the forms of refusal and the kinds of work. Starting with a typology thus built, the aim then becomes to see the different patterns of subjectivation that emerge from new forms of political composition. Another very striking example of the refusal to work that Shukaitis picks up is the artwork of Mladen Stilinović, who celebrates laziness in a picture of himself reclining in pajamas, with the claim that those artists who are afraid of developing their capacity for laziness are merely producers rather than artists. Being from the former Yugoslavia, Stilinović's claim makes us wonder with additional strength at the production-driven nature of modern society, not only in a capitalist context but also in previous socialist contexts. This form of “laziness” is an outside of labor, rather than an escape from it. We are also reminded here of the notion of impotentiality in the work of J. K. Gibson-Graham, where moments of hesitation and instances of silence do not represent blanks in an ongoing process of thinking but are themselves part of a creative process. Shukaitis thus pulls us away from the dark vision of a victorious capitalism and from the view that the refusal of work amounts to refusal of life by pointing out other alternatives, including those of the black radical tradition.
Shukaitis's defiant theorizing against an all-embracing capitalism is shared by Maribel Casas-Cortés in her essay entitled “A Genealogy of Precarity: A Toolbox for Rearticulating Fragmented Social Realities in and out of the Workplace.” The author delineates four developments in this genealogy: labor after the decline of the welfare state, the more recent paradigm of intermittent and immaterial labor, the “unceasing mobility of labor,” and the feminization of labor, and she underlines also the important fact that the concept of precarity has been put to work in Europe in the context of austerity, which makes the discussion all the more relevant to our day.
Noting with irony that some of the first movements of precarity in Europe were borne out of the policies of socialist governments, Casas-Cortés observes that some of the most creative collectives that are organized around precarity—such as the Assemblée de Jussieu and the French network AC!—have rejected a return to full employment and protectionist struggles for specific sectors in favor of a novel and alternative organization based on the idea that not all relationships should be monetized (gratuite) and the idea of the reappropriation of private goods and services (réappropriation). Experiments of a similar kind exist also in Spain, such as YoMango and Dinero Gratis, which symbolize the younger generations' reacting against nostalgia for loss and their preference for building on the current situation with a desire to create something completely new. Perhaps such an inspiring protest recently took place in Turkey, where workers at the Kazova textile factory took over the premises and the machinery left behind by the departing owners. The production unit is now functional under worker management and is operating in conjunction with the distribution units. These new efforts in Europe, for Casas-Cortés, symbolize a “celebration” of precarity rather than mourning over the loss of full-time employment, and so she notes with interest new political propositions, such as those raised by Les Intermittents that ask for flexicurity and basic income, among other things.
Casas-Cortés also brings into her discussion the important question of subjectivation through the distinction she makes between immaterial labor, one of the core concepts of autonomist/postautonomist thinking, and precarity. She argues that while the former refers to a change in the mode of production in contemporary capitalism, the latter is about modes of subjectification, which she claims is exactly the realm where the struggles over precarity emerged in Europe. Just as with Shukaitis, Pasquinelli, and de Bloois, Jansen, and Korsten, the key role played by knowledge in contemporary production is also picked up in Casas-Cortés's essay, in which the once-privileged position of intellectual workers has been transformed, putting them in similar positions with other workers. This experience of the “cognitariat,” firsthand experience of some of the producers and readers of this journal as well, has underlined the significance of the deep social changes in contemporary capitalism.
Casas-Cortés then moves to an analysis of a Madrid-based group, already referred to by Shukaitis as an inspiring experiment in struggles around precarity: Precarias a la Deriva. The importance of this group lies, Casas-Cortés tells us, in reminding us that the predominant conceptualizations of precarity have neglected the importance of the gender question, as well as the contribution of feminism to such struggles. Precarias a la Deriva develop their argument from the view that precarity is not limited to the workplace but has absorbed all of life into itself and that, in fact, the Fordist regime has been the anomaly in the history of capitalism, presupposing huge pools of female and colonial supplies of labor. They also note feminist observations from some time ago, that spheres of production and reproduction have been sources of work for a long time. So what is called the feminization of labor is the becoming of a general tendency, of that which has historically been women's tasks, the affective-relational component of labor. And while Precarias a la Deriva agree with Virno's claim that capitalism has assimilated its critics' demands, with their less capitalocentric notion of precarity they point to different demands that are not exclusively based on monetary concerns or around the axis of labor: significantly, a social reorganization of care, felicitously called “caretizenship.”
Both Shukaitis and Casas-Cortés seem to be pointing to an alternative constitution of the multitude and the commons in different political and cultural practices that, even if in partial agreement with Virno's vision, don't succumb to contemporary capitalism's darkness but point to the holes in this vast universe which may be filled with alternative practices, once again reminiscent of the analyses of community economies. The kind of fluidity that is inherent to precarity also offers us the intriguing image of class heterotopia, painted by different forms of production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor. In that sense, the analyses of precarity lend themselves to overdeterminist theoretical and political class projects.
Theoretical and political concerns over subjectivation and subjectivities figure in every article in this symposium. As part of this concern, the concept of multitude is implicitly or overtly a part of every contribution. In his contribution entitled “The Multitudo According to Negri: On the Disarticulation of Ontology and History,” Vittorio Morfino takes issue with this central concept in postautonomist thinking. Morfino's thesis states that Antonio Negri's development of the concept of multitude is based on a misreading of Baruch Spinoza, which ends in detaching—disarticulating—the history in and the ontology of the concept. Negri argues that Spinoza's work constitutes a radical break with the Hobbesian tradition by positing the multitude prior to the individual and not the other way around. Power—potentia—in this formulation is always the power of the multitude.
Morfino argues that Negri reads Spinoza in such a way that being is being that expands, in which potentia is not merely a possibility but a collective act. Morfino claims that the important difference between Spinoza's and Negri's concepts of potentia is that, while in the former there is no telos, Negri celebrates potentia as telos. The author identifies two distinct forms of temporality in Negri's analysis. In the first, time takes life away and “dissipates it in illusion.” In the second form, time is hope, life, and power. It is the future. Morfino calls the former empty, while the latter is full. Collective praxis corresponds to the latter.
Yet another important notion in the work of Negri is the notion of power as potestas, which for him is that which power opposes by constituting itself collectively. Morfino summarizes the two kinds of power found in Negri's work as the time of history, which is the time of power, and the time of ontology, which is that of collective praxis. According to Negri the time of collective praxis (i.e., potentia multitudinis) forms the grounds of the former. Yet while being connected this way, the two are separate realities. This is the paradox, argues Morfino: the collective praxis that constitutes the multitude for Negri is always in the present but not in history, and this, he claims, is the source of what he names the disarticulation of ontology and history.
Morfino's discussion of the juridical notions of power elaborates this conclusion. Constituent power must always eventually start to function normally, as constituted power. For Negri, Morfino argues, constituent power is the expansive life force that creates constitutional norms and by nature is against any form of structure. The multitude is the subject of constituent power. The multitude is in flux and cannot be embodied by a nation or an ethnicity or any such closure. This subject, the multitude, for Negri can only be a temporal subject.
Morfino ponders why constituent power—which in Negri's work takes on the meanings of communism, absolute democracy, and revolution—appears on the historical plane but for an instant. Yet, he continues, there is also accumulation and progress because these eruptions are not without a telos. But in Negri accumulation is ontological, not historical. He concludes with the claim that the reason why Negri's analyses of the subject and structure do not coincide, why the totality without closure becomes a subject only instantaneously, is Negri's misreading of Spinoza's concept of multitude. Unlike what Negri argues, for Spinoza the multitude is not a present but is a complex network of relations, a connection of bodies, images, ideas, practices, passions—it is a texture, Morfino says, in the sense used by Lucretius. Here ontology and history are articulated; power, ideology, and violence do not constitute an empty form that embodies them but rather are the form of the necessity of their holding together.
Just as Morfino problematizes the connections between ontology and history regarding the concept of multitude in the work of Negri, Robert Wells in his contribution “The Multitude: Ambivalence and Antagonism” traces genealogically these concepts in the works of Virno and Negri and Hardt while arguing that they need to be reformulated rather than removed. Virno formulates the multitude as a mode of being that contains ambivalence. As such, his discussion has a bearing on all other discussions of subjectivation in this symposium. Negri draws on Spinoza, who states that men and masses can attune the conatus to live according to the true good, but they can also get confused in the clinamen. Here Wells draws our attention to the distinction between masses and multitude by pointing out that contemporary discourse is marked by a certain antagonism toward the former. Guattari's argument about fascism also being a mass movement that neutralizes the democratic multitude is especially important to note here. Further, Virno's analysis of the multitude's capacity to turn to democratic or fascistic imaginaries is all the more apt in the context of the growing importance of parties of the New Right and their increasing mass support.
Wells notes Virno's sharp and insightful intervention with Hardt and Negri's optimism about plurality and difference within the multitude not being a barrier to its unifying itself into the One. Hardt and Negri's notion of the multitude resists sameness and unity so that the internal differences within the multitude need to be negotiated through the common, which connects them and allows for communication and action. But we are reminded with incision that fascism and other forms of totalitarian movements also produce their commons. Virno's warning is all the more important in the context of growing support for neo-Nazi and neofascist movements across Europe and elsewhere. The optimistic notion of the multitude—the embodiment of constituent power, always rebellious—is a notion that needs to be carefully reflected on. Perhaps if we really think of the multitude as texture in the way Morfino suggests, the varieties of this texture will allow for a wider spectrum of tendencies within a particular multitude, including of the fascistic variety.
Wells notes that one of the common characteristics of postautonomist thinking is the multitude's antagonistic attitude to work, which brings us back to the interventions of Shukaitis and Casas-Cortés. This refusal to work, however, should not be taken as an erasure of activity, as it rather valorizes human activities that have escaped the domination of labor. Virno's argument about the need of the intellectual to be outside of work and in opposition to it also is a reminder to us of the work of artists like Stilinović.
In the artwork “Radical Heroes for the Millennium: The Autonomedia Jubilee Saints Calendar Project,” Jim Fleming brings together many of the themes which appear in the symposium. “Radical Heroes” is the continuation of a project that started as a protest against the Christopher Columbus quincentenary in 1992, reappropriating the U.S. government's use of the word “jubilee” and restoring its original Hebrew sense: in biblical times, this was a special day on which slaves were freed, debts were cancelled, prisoners were released, and laborers stopped work. It was an ancient tradition of zerowork. The first calendar was a statement of the group's desire for a “reprieve” from five hundred years of hard labor and the wider consequences brought on by European colonization.
Fleming speaks in optimistic yet ambivalent tones about the lifetime of the Planetary Work Machine. He sees signs of an “end” in varied forms—such as the global financial crisis, ecocide, and chemical-biological warfare—and hopes that this is the end of “us.” His optimism stems from the presence of other worlds that are not waiting to be created but are already around us. He sees in the Autonomous Zones diverse forms of defiance and refusal in this world afflicted by a disease called work. He invites workers, the precarious, the waged and unwaged, in all their forms to liberate themselves. His is a call for an exit. He realizes that not everyone will be part of this multitude. Those who continue in exploitative work environments may even feel good about what they are doing. But perhaps they can be convinced to put their tools to other uses. We can imagine worlds where today's hard labor may even be attractive labor. The zerowork world is/will be born out of our efforts. There is no central authority, no party, no leader to call out the orders. Fleming invites the multitude to a celebration of the no-work world. He seems to see the world of Virno, Hardt and Negri, and others in the autonomist/postautonomist tradition; while he sees the darkness brought on the all-encompassing world of work, he derives courage from areas of refusal, driven similarly with the hopes of Shukaitis and Casas-Cortés. Fleming and Stilinović are kindred spirits in finding hope and solace in these zones. When Fleming calls us to nominate our heroes and sheroes for sainthood, we are reminded of a different practice of the creation of art: more participatory, more communal. Could this be an example of Pasquinelli's artist as part of the cognitariat?
Finally, when we look at the calendar and the tremendous plurality of saints—ranging from Pavel Pukhov, to Charles Baudelaire, Rachel Corrie, György Lukács, Cesar Chavez, Antonio Gramsci, Richie Havens, and many others—we think of another kind of multitude: a multitude of “saints” of all creeds, genders, ethnicities, and nationalities. This serves as a subtle reminder of Casas-Cortés's claim about the significance of race and gender in discussions of precarity, rendering the concept applicable to regions and realities that extend beyond Europe.
In “Marx on the Family and Class Consciousness,” Haesook Chae challenges the prevalent view that the “woman question” is marginal to Marx's thinking, showing that the liberation of women is, quite to the contrary, integral to his theory of socialist revolution. To the extent that socialist revolution is predicated on the raising of a social consciousness in Marx's work, argues Chae, this is possible in the context of the family. The context of capitalism is competitive and individualistic; sociability—which is defined as man's capacity to become conscious of himself as part of a community, an aspect of the development of man as a species-being—for Marx is possible in the context of a noncapitalist, nonmarket relationship provided by the family. Inspired by Hegel, who sees in the institution of the family the start of an ethical relation, the family is first and foremost where the individual transcends the ego and becomes part of a community. Yet very differently from Hegel, who paradoxically sees the woman as inferior and subordinate to the man, Marx argues that the capacity of the family for the creation of social consciousness depends on its ability to surpass patriarchal mores, which for him precedes capitalism. This is so because, argues Chae, for Marx unequal relations between man and woman—the subordination of the woman to the man—become the basis of an alienated relation, which needs to be transformed for socialism. Chae is careful here to distance Marx's work from that of Engels, who argued that the liberation of women would follow the socialist revolution, having formulated the question of women's oppression around the development of private property relations with the onset of capitalism. Marx, says Chae, by positing patriarchy as part of, but also historically prior to capitalism, had noted that women's liberation is not secured by the transformation of property relations. Such an analysis, clarifies Chae, is based on the traditional, heterosexual model of the family. One is intrigued by the implications of this, with the varied family models in the contemporary context. We are left to question yet again, as with several other articles in this issue, whether the family as a possible noncapitalist site can be one of the those holes in the dark universe of capitalism, as Virno would have it, where anticapitalist struggles can be waged. The response to this question, as decades of feminist scholarship indicates, should be an emphatic “Yes!” Let us remember here Casas-Cortés's pointed remark about the significance of “caretizenship.”
In an article entitled “Arendt after Marx: Rethinking the Dualism of Nature and World,” Finn Bowring offers a criticism of the existing view that Hannah Arendt does not offer insight into the ecological movement—the most well-known reason for this being the perceived rigid dichotomy of nature and culture, organic life and human worldliness, as well as the hierarchy of activities, labor, work, and action in her work. Bowring argues that, while Arendt criticized Marx for his insistence on humans as Animal laborans and because he could only conceptualize freedom from labor as “unproductive freedom,” there is a remarkable and fundamental parallel between their thinking on the division between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom, which on the face of it seems to remove both thinkers from the ecological cause. Bowring argues, however, that a careful reading of their works actually suggests that both thinkers have something to offer. Upon closer reading, Arendt's theory of vita activa reveals a hierarchy of activities, the lower forms of which are nonetheless redeemed when combined with higher ones; more specifically, Arendt states that labor and the consumption needs it satisfies are endowed with dignity once they are connected with and not abstracted from other human activities, thus kept from becoming an end in themselves. In her seminal The Human Condition, Arendt refers to a twofold loss of the world in the form of the loss of nature and that of human artifice. Bowring draws our attention to Arendt's reference to planet earth as “the very quintessence of the human condition,” reminiscent of Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts likening nature to “man's inorganic body.” He digs out the seeds of an ecological statement in Arendt's notion of worldliness, which embodies our attachment to a stable world that we want to last, and that we care for, because it is common to all and independent of each of us. This, Bowring says, is the idea of a political community, a multitude perhaps. Bowring concludes that for both Marx and Arendt the roots of ecological concern lie in feeling connected to this earth as to one's home, and this from an attitude of care that comes from cultured, cultivating human beings who have in the process become political actors. Arendt is sanguine about the notion of culture being a loving care, the treasuring of worldly things and not the snobbery of the “educated philistine” that monopolizes culture for purposes of rank and order. This points us to the realization that it was the “bourgeois philistine” that Himmler had organized for the greatest crimes committed in history. To use postautonomist terminology, we can perhaps say that, it is with this kind of care for not just the environment but for all life around us, in all its realms, the multitude can constitute its commons.
The impact of the work of Hardt and Negri has been wide-ranging, and the notion of Empire has found its way to a very important sector where the heartbeat of cognitive capitalism can be felt most vividly. Joseph Rebello thus reviews Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter's joint work, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. The authors, as the title of their book suggests, conceptualize video games via the concepts of empire and multitude. While Rebello finds a lot to commend in this book, such as the authors' ability to follow the methodological ambiguities of Hardt and Negri's work, he is also critical of certain aspects of the analysis. What makes their analysis distinct is a decidedly Marxian approach to video games in which they analyze the relationship between games and global capitalism. But in addition to the authors' naming several games as “of the Empire,” Rebello finds that one of the more problematic aspects of the book is the determinist use of the concept of real subsumption, in which the cognitive features of contemporary capitalism seem to be taken to cut through every aspect of society. This capitalocentrism leaves aside the complexity and contradiction Rebello would like to see in a more overdeterministic analysis. Rebello concludes his review with concerns that the book provokes on the question of class processes, such as the question of whether real money trade (RMT) creates surplus value or whether it represents a process of distribution.
Criticism of capitalist markets is a tacit or overt dimension of all the contributions to this issue, and so Philip Kozel reviews David McNally's latest book on this theme, entitled Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism. The central thesis of the book, Kozel tells us, is that the erasure of noncapitalist relations and the commodification of human labor create deep social anxieties, which in turn manifest themselves in stories of monsters, especially vampires and zombies. Kozel argues that underlying this thesis is an orthodox view of commodity fetishism whereby those who are undergoing such transformations resort to stories as creative efforts rather than seeing their situation for what it really is, due to ideological “blinders.” McNally develops this thesis with respect to the development of capitalism in England around the time of the enclosure movements, and likewise in sub-Saharan Africa. Kozel believes that while the book is of value, especially to economic historians, it is lacking in one respect: namely, in its conflation of the monstrosity of the development of market relations (and therefore the monstrosity of the market) with stories of monsters. Kozel thus suggests that Monstrosity of the Market would have been a more appropriate title for the content of the book.
Rethinking Marxism started its life in 1988 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. At the time, no one on the production team thought that the journal would last more than a year. The miracle that the journal has completed its first quarter of a century is the result of a combination of factors, of which the dedication and labor of love provided by groups of individuals to such a communal project, without a doubt, are the most important. All of us who have worked on the journal, however, will accept that there are a handful of individuals without whom the journal simply would not have continued to exist and whose impact remains visible in its pages.
Jack Amariglio is at the center of this select group. He is one of the prime driving forces of everything that has anything to do with the Association for Economic and Social Analysis (AESA) and RM. He was the first editor of the journal, the trailblazer who oversaw a completely new project, and was thus a leader, voluntarily or involuntarily, to open the long and winding path we walked as a group. A true scholar, Jack was also one of the first to open the carefully guarded boundaries of economics and Marxist political economy to the “unwanted” influences of postmodernism, in his individual writings as well as in his prolific collaboration over the years with his comrade and friend, David Ruccio. He has welcomed interdisciplinary work, displaying his personal courage by pioneering research drawn from the works of neglected influences in Marxism, like Nietszche and Foucault. He has facilitated the creation of new projects by the younger members of the collective, by listening to and encouraging them. If the theoretical and political projects of RM now include class analyses of subjectivity, the relation between Marxism and psychoanalysis, investigations of community economies, and the relation between Marxist political economy and artistic production, it is because of the inspiration that Jack has been and is, because of his fearless vision and his ability to “champion” his friends and colleagues. Always the heretic, the subversive in any project he worked on from his own research to editorial board meetings, and always coming from “left field,” he brought a fresh look at any issue under discussion. He continues to brighten his environment with his sharp wit, sarcasm, love, and humanity.
In all these ways, Jack was and continues to be a genuinely selfless participant and an unconditional supporter of his friends in the creation of this common called Rethinking Marxism, for which we certainly didn't and possibly couldn't thank him enough. When words will not be enough to express our gratitude, let us just say a big thank you to our beloved comrade, the one and only Jack Amariglio, and hope that with his stepping down from the editorial board, this new period of the journal will be deserving of all that he has given to us.
—The Editors |
