StartingAgainIsOurHistory
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[edit] Starting again is our history
One of the refrains of the autonomist project was the protagonism of the working class in their own history. This is nice. The various other socialisms in the corpse strewn supermarket of 20th century ideologies were more inclined to see the working class as the agent for their own transcendental moralism. To be educated, coaxed, led co-erced and finally abandoned as labourers in the construction of utopia, which is what we have been doing since records began. (It should now be clear that this bourgeois Utopia is the millennial apocalypse of the Reformation. We even provide our masters with their own despair, or rather they even appropriate our despair as a way of ruling themselves!) Such a practise was sanctioned by Leninist class epistemology. The working class being un-able to achieve anything other than organization under Capital, without the importing of the knowledge by the revolutionary intelligentsia they would be unable to perceive their purpose. But this location of knowledge outside the proletariat is part of the class structure of capitalism, whether that be in Soviet Russia or the social democratic west, a technical and scientific elite monopolise knowledge and hold power. That this attitude is so pervasive in left wing �thinking�, whether social democrat, socialist or, god help us, new Labour confirms our suspicion that much of that thinking is no such thing.It is co-option and imposition. With the defeat of utilitarian socialism as the organization of the working class within capitalism this whole story is remembered as a defeat and coming to terms with Capital, to which there is no alternative.
I don�t believe that this is our history, as it seems more than anything to serve the political purpose of the command hierarchy, who measure our activities in terms of productivity, remunerability, success or failure. If the working class is the protagonist and bearer of its own history then recovering that history and its political project will reveal that, rather than a defeat, it is the history of our society as constructed and animated by our movements and capitals violence upon it. To abuse Marxist terminology, this is a necessary labour for our own social reproduction.
The historiography of the working class was one of the key areas of Autonomist research, and was undertaken not in order to deliver a verdict but as an attempt to rediscover what was still living in that movement. This was and is a political project, as should be expected of a movement in militant struggle, constructing the knowledge of movement of the poor. The reading of Marx as a search for the movements of capitalist development and its overcoming was an extension of Marx�s own project. It is in this grappling with their political history as part of their political struggle that these texts were born and if they are still alive it is because this struggle continues. Which is why it calls itself a movement.
It is not possible to read this story without continually coming up alongside Marx. This is often experienced as a difficulty, not the inherent difficulty of a philosophical enquiry. It more of a psychological resistance to names which have been mis-used or stolen. That the communist project is so often seen nowadays as a variety of fascism is intolerable- the epitome of journalistic glibness and political disengagement. But there is a scandal which needs to be addressed.
Amadeo Bordiga identified the revolutions of the 20th century as bourgeois revolutions whose political content was the development of productive forces. In short he saw the regimes born of these revolutions as Capitalist. In this he was following Marx to the letter. Lenin complained, on achieving power and faced with the task of �building socialism�, that � about this Marx and Engels said not a word�. An eloquent silence. To read Marx now, alongside the Italian autonomists is to bring his ideas face to face with the fully developed capitalism which he described as the stage for a communist revolution.
The purpose of �Capital� was to describe the laws by which capital governed itself, in order to overcome it. At times this makes his work feel like that of a radical bourgeois, rather than the herald of communism, and much of the 20th century revolutionary history is attributable to that fact. But the overcoming of capitalism is not achieved by capitalism, but by communism as the community of the proletariat who reject their place in the social relations mediated by capitalist economy and evacuate. This has been called the exodus of the multitude. Which is not to say that the Multitude is spontaneously born with this insight. Our activity and construction of community, our production of knowledge and its distribution are militant practises towards communism. If it were possible to read this story and think the movement without militancy then what we produced would not be knowledge of our becoming, but the history of the regime under which we labour. A horror story.
It is important that the Autonomist thinking on these issues grew from working in such close proximity to the Italian working class. They were thinking alongside that movement as it rebelled, rejected and finally succumbed to capitalist restructuring. But also as its behaviour and thinking was appropriated by capital in its violent attempt to police the permanent crisis which is its process and its eventual destruction. The refusal to work as the negation of capitalist social relations becomes the precarious job market where everyone is denied any economic security. Feminist agitation for a wage for reproduction becomes their conscription into that job market and the struggle to find a child minder etc. It may be true that a long chapter of the struggle is now over and that we will have to start again. Starting again is the condition of poverty and also the practise of thinking, as Negri has recently written. Starting again is our history and in order to begin again we must free ourselves from the history of capitalism and write the history of communism. Knowledge belongs to the poor.
The Superficialist International
