Mario Tronti: “[T]he tasks of the workers’ party are: not to support capitalism’s needs, not even in the form of workers’ demands; to force the capitalists to present their objective necessities and then subjectively refuse them; to force the bosses to ask so that the workers can actively – that is, in organized forms – reply to them: no.” In The Project of Autonomy, Pier Vittorio Aureli, an Italian architect, takes issue with how Italian Autonomia has been presented outside of Italy. He associates Negri’s version of Autonomia with a cultural postmodernism that is more than congruous with contemporary capitalism and academic complacency. He claims, “If outside of Italy the reference to ‘autonomia’ evokes cutting-edge politics, inside it is still associated with the political disarming of the Left and the general depoliticization of postmodern society.” To enable an excavation of a more valuable legacy, Aureli divides the Italian autonomous movement into three periods: “Operaism (early 1960s-1968), Poeter Operaio (Workers’ Power, 1967-1973); and Autonomia Operaia (Workers Autonomy, 1976-1978). The first movement was characterized by intense theoretical production; the second by a radical but less original elaboration of the premises of the first, especially reflecting Negri’s post-Communist position; the third by militancy over theoretical speculation.” Aureli argues that the first period, Operaia, remains the most neglected and misunderstood, especially in the English-speaking world. Aureli claims that Operaism “should be seen as the progenitor of the Autonomia groups but also as something completely independent of them.” He explains, “The fundamental difference between them is that Operaism developed entirely within a communist perspective of politics and power, while Autonomia took a radically anti-communist stance, to the point of conflating itself with the many forms of postpolitical subjectivity that emerged with the crisis of political representation of the 1980s.” Aureli does not extensively (or adequately) support his dismissal of what he terms Autonomia’s “postpolitical practice;” but this may be fortunate, since instead of adding one more critique of Hardt & Negri’s Empire, Aureli devotes the first half of his short book to the Operaist period he does value and to an exegesis of the work of Operaism’s two primary theoreticians, Raniero Panzieri and Mario Tronti. According to Aureli, the question of autonomy emerged in the 1950s and 1960s in two journals: Socialism ou barbarie / Socialism or barbarism (led by Castoriadis and Lefort) and Quaderni rossi / Red notebooks (founded by Panzieri). Both journals sought “a renewal of working-class analysis and politics distinct from that of the Communist Party establishment,” but the Socialism ou barbarie group eventually rejected much of the legacy of Marxism-Leninism whereas the intellectuals around Quaderni rossi more fully embraced it, critiquing both Soviet Russia and the communist movements in liberal democratic countries for failing to maintain a revolutionary perspective. The Operaists portrayed the working class as a “culturally and politically innovative and creative collective subject” and conceptualized “the struggle between the working class and capitalism not from the standpoint of capitalist development, but from that of the working-class struggle.” Italy in the 1950s and 1960s saw a strong wave of economic planning as the nation adopted the monopolistic forms of control and Fordist mode of regulation that had appeared in the U.S. in the 1930s. The Operaists termed this economic integration of society “neocapitalism,” and developed a theory of autonomy as the struggle “against from within” such structures. In essays published in Quaderni rossi, Panzieri claimed that neocapitalism portrayed both the development of the forces of production and technological innovation as rational and neutral. This ideology of capitalism’s rationality made political struggle appear as merely an interference with capitalism’s increasing ability to produce abundance for all, and it greatly supported the compromises communist parties and trade unions made with the State. For Panzieri, “In the face of this capitalist ‘rationality,’ there could be no weapon other than the political subjectivity of the workers – that is, nothing except a bid for power by those who produced and therefore demanded ‘not rationality, but control; not technical programming, but a plan to empower the associated producers.’” “[I[n the context of capitalism’s increasingly greater economic integration of society, autonomy meant demystification of technological development and the taking of control of this development by the workers per via politica.” According to Panzieri, workers should resist capitalism’s appropriation of their cooperation by asserting “workers’ control,” or “antagonism at the level of the centers of production.” Aureli claims that Panzieri failed to concretely develop this proposal for “workers’ control,” but the 1962 “Piazza Statuto protest revealed to the Operaists . . . the features of the new political subject: the mass worker.” Panzieri expressed reservations about the importance of the protest, whereas Tronti, who had been involved with Quaderni rossi from its beginning, saw in it a new possibility for revolutionary practice. Along with Negri, Cacciari, and others, Tronti founded in 1964 the journal Classe Operaia / Working class. In “Factory and society” (published in Quaderni rossi), Tronti, drawing from Panzieri’s description of neocapitalism’s integration of society, claimed that capitalist production had extended to cover the whole of society: “At the highest point of capitalist development, social production becomes a moment of the process of production, which means that all of society lives within the factory, and the factory extends its dominion over the whole of society.” In other words, “Society was a factory.” Whereas Panzieri made “technological development” primary and workers’ struggle secondary, Tronti in his essay “Lenin in England” (published in Classe Operaia) reversed the order and claimed that capitalist development was “subordinated to working-class struggles; it follows behind them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital’s own reproduction must be tuned.” The working class was a continuous threat to capitalism because the latter depended on the former for value creation. Tronti saw emancipatory potential in the workers’ ability to refuse work: “The strength of the working class was embodied not in the constructive positivity of work but rather in its refusal to be work; in other words, in an obstinate, destructive negativity, in a de facto demonstration of its intransigence toward its own transformation into wage labor.” “Thus working-class nihilism toward forms of corporate society did not mean destruction for its own sake, but instead a real theoretical and strategic project of attaining emancipation and power through refusal and autonomy rather than adaptation and reform.” Tronti termed “strategy of refusal” “the workers’ threat to negate their own essential mediation in the whole system of capitalist social relations.” Aureli claims that although Negri’s influence on Autonomia led to this “strategy of refusal” being deployed in an “anarchic, individualistic” manner, Tronti’s original political conception of it was quite different. Drawing from Carl Schmitt, Tronti introduced the “concept of the political” into his Marxist analysis. He aimed to analyze “the autonomy of political power tout court with respect to economic determinations.” Workers’ refusal was an “instance of political autonomy” that created “a state of exception” that called forth a political response from capitalism and the State. The development of the economy was historically crisscrossed by such autonomous political decisions by workers and the State: “Economic continuity and political discontinuity together: this is the history of Capital.” With Negri, Cacciari, and others, Tronti founded in 1968 the journal Contropiano / Counterplan to develop a “Marxist-Communist ‘counterplan’ to the one of liberal capitalism.” Yet Tronti took his analysis of the autonomy of the political in a direction that led Negri to leave the journal after one issue. Whereas Lenin and other Marxist writers had dismissed 19th-century German Social Democracy as reformist and reactionary, Tronti “affirmed German Social Democracy as the paradigm of autonomous politics.” Tronti argued that Social Democracy was not a passive adaptation but rather the product of an autonomous political tactic that was able to “take the content of the workers’ struggle and translate it immediately into politics at the level of State institutions.” Tronti’s subsequent extension of this argument about the “instrumentalization of party politics” to the Italian Communist Party strongly conflicted with Negri’s conception of worker autonomy. Aureli explains, “Negri’s concept of the workers’ refusal was incompatible with any process of political integration, first and foremost integration within the Communist Party. Tronti, however, never conceived his political extremism outside the framework of the party. It was political action within the institution, and eventually against it as the party made compromises against its own class interests, that constitute the very core of the Operaist philosophy.” Contropiano published Massimo Cacciari’s article “On the genesis of negative thought,” which drew from Tronti’s claims about the autonomy of the political and argued that “it was the instrumentalization of crisis, not the institution of rules, that enabled the bourgeoisie to control the political forces of capitalism.” Capitalism’s capability for “negative thought,” its “ability to absorb the negative,” allowed it to “absorb and finally resolve every crisis within its structures.” Antagonistic culture therefore needed a “counterplan” that would “make use of this mechanism productively and deliberately, even when such use would seem to have a regressive horizon.” According to Cacciari, antagonistic culture needed a “theory of the use of the critical effects of capitalism.” The last half of Aureli’s book turns to some Italian architects who were around and affected by the intellectual milieu described in the first half of the book. Aureli’s primary focus here is Aldo Rossi, whom Aureli claims saw “the city as a site of political choices” that contested the technocratic planning of space. The capitalist rationalization of space led Italian planners in the early 1960s to propose the concept of the “city-territory,” the functional reorganization of entire regions to serve capitalism’s circuits. Against such theories, Rossi constructed an architectural theory around the idea of the “locus,” the (universal) singularity of architectural events. Rossi suggested “that there was a possibility of looking at the city as an arena of decisive and singular events whose defined forms could pose a challenge to the urban phenomena and flux surrounding them.” Rossi was particularly hostile toward the new concepts of the “open project” and the “network,” which seemed too complicit with the form of city-territory planning. Rossi claimed: “they are a mystifications in view of the fact that any design intervention addresses a problem by means of a form. It is only the possibility of a closed, defined form that permits other forms to emerge.” Aureli argues Rossi’s “rigid grammar of forms. . . . shifted attention to the locus as a symbolic and geographic singularity, a state of exception within the city, posing a challenge to the open-ended space of the capitalist city-territory. Analogous to Tronti’s autonomy of the political, which was an inquiry directed not at the autonomy of one part of society with respect to another but at the autonomy of power itself, Rossi’s autonomy of architecture was above all the establishment of urban concepts that posited the supremacy of politics over the city’s accelerating economic development.”
Friday, October 16, 2009
Pier Vittorio Aureli: The Project of Autonomy (2008)
Mario Tronti: “[T]he tasks of the workers’ party are: not to support capitalism’s needs, not even in the form of workers’ demands; to force the capitalists to present their objective necessities and then subjectively refuse them; to force the bosses to ask so that the workers can actively – that is, in organized forms – reply to them: no.” In The Project of Autonomy, Pier Vittorio Aureli, an Italian architect, takes issue with how Italian Autonomia has been presented outside of Italy. He associates Negri’s version of Autonomia with a cultural postmodernism that is more than congruous with contemporary capitalism and academic complacency. He claims, “If outside of Italy the reference to ‘autonomia’ evokes cutting-edge politics, inside it is still associated with the political disarming of the Left and the general depoliticization of postmodern society.” To enable an excavation of a more valuable legacy, Aureli divides the Italian autonomous movement into three periods: “Operaism (early 1960s-1968), Poeter Operaio (Workers’ Power, 1967-1973); and Autonomia Operaia (Workers Autonomy, 1976-1978). The first movement was characterized by intense theoretical production; the second by a radical but less original elaboration of the premises of the first, especially reflecting Negri’s post-Communist position; the third by militancy over theoretical speculation.” Aureli argues that the first period, Operaia, remains the most neglected and misunderstood, especially in the English-speaking world. Aureli claims that Operaism “should be seen as the progenitor of the Autonomia groups but also as something completely independent of them.” He explains, “The fundamental difference between them is that Operaism developed entirely within a communist perspective of politics and power, while Autonomia took a radically anti-communist stance, to the point of conflating itself with the many forms of postpolitical subjectivity that emerged with the crisis of political representation of the 1980s.” Aureli does not extensively (or adequately) support his dismissal of what he terms Autonomia’s “postpolitical practice;” but this may be fortunate, since instead of adding one more critique of Hardt & Negri’s Empire, Aureli devotes the first half of his short book to the Operaist period he does value and to an exegesis of the work of Operaism’s two primary theoreticians, Raniero Panzieri and Mario Tronti. According to Aureli, the question of autonomy emerged in the 1950s and 1960s in two journals: Socialism ou barbarie / Socialism or barbarism (led by Castoriadis and Lefort) and Quaderni rossi / Red notebooks (founded by Panzieri). Both journals sought “a renewal of working-class analysis and politics distinct from that of the Communist Party establishment,” but the Socialism ou barbarie group eventually rejected much of the legacy of Marxism-Leninism whereas the intellectuals around Quaderni rossi more fully embraced it, critiquing both Soviet Russia and the communist movements in liberal democratic countries for failing to maintain a revolutionary perspective. The Operaists portrayed the working class as a “culturally and politically innovative and creative collective subject” and conceptualized “the struggle between the working class and capitalism not from the standpoint of capitalist development, but from that of the working-class struggle.” Italy in the 1950s and 1960s saw a strong wave of economic planning as the nation adopted the monopolistic forms of control and Fordist mode of regulation that had appeared in the U.S. in the 1930s. The Operaists termed this economic integration of society “neocapitalism,” and developed a theory of autonomy as the struggle “against from within” such structures. In essays published in Quaderni rossi, Panzieri claimed that neocapitalism portrayed both the development of the forces of production and technological innovation as rational and neutral. This ideology of capitalism’s rationality made political struggle appear as merely an interference with capitalism’s increasing ability to produce abundance for all, and it greatly supported the compromises communist parties and trade unions made with the State. For Panzieri, “In the face of this capitalist ‘rationality,’ there could be no weapon other than the political subjectivity of the workers – that is, nothing except a bid for power by those who produced and therefore demanded ‘not rationality, but control; not technical programming, but a plan to empower the associated producers.’” “[I[n the context of capitalism’s increasingly greater economic integration of society, autonomy meant demystification of technological development and the taking of control of this development by the workers per via politica.” According to Panzieri, workers should resist capitalism’s appropriation of their cooperation by asserting “workers’ control,” or “antagonism at the level of the centers of production.” Aureli claims that Panzieri failed to concretely develop this proposal for “workers’ control,” but the 1962 “Piazza Statuto protest revealed to the Operaists . . . the features of the new political subject: the mass worker.” Panzieri expressed reservations about the importance of the protest, whereas Tronti, who had been involved with Quaderni rossi from its beginning, saw in it a new possibility for revolutionary practice. Along with Negri, Cacciari, and others, Tronti founded in 1964 the journal Classe Operaia / Working class. In “Factory and society” (published in Quaderni rossi), Tronti, drawing from Panzieri’s description of neocapitalism’s integration of society, claimed that capitalist production had extended to cover the whole of society: “At the highest point of capitalist development, social production becomes a moment of the process of production, which means that all of society lives within the factory, and the factory extends its dominion over the whole of society.” In other words, “Society was a factory.” Whereas Panzieri made “technological development” primary and workers’ struggle secondary, Tronti in his essay “Lenin in England” (published in Classe Operaia) reversed the order and claimed that capitalist development was “subordinated to working-class struggles; it follows behind them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital’s own reproduction must be tuned.” The working class was a continuous threat to capitalism because the latter depended on the former for value creation. Tronti saw emancipatory potential in the workers’ ability to refuse work: “The strength of the working class was embodied not in the constructive positivity of work but rather in its refusal to be work; in other words, in an obstinate, destructive negativity, in a de facto demonstration of its intransigence toward its own transformation into wage labor.” “Thus working-class nihilism toward forms of corporate society did not mean destruction for its own sake, but instead a real theoretical and strategic project of attaining emancipation and power through refusal and autonomy rather than adaptation and reform.” Tronti termed “strategy of refusal” “the workers’ threat to negate their own essential mediation in the whole system of capitalist social relations.” Aureli claims that although Negri’s influence on Autonomia led to this “strategy of refusal” being deployed in an “anarchic, individualistic” manner, Tronti’s original political conception of it was quite different. Drawing from Carl Schmitt, Tronti introduced the “concept of the political” into his Marxist analysis. He aimed to analyze “the autonomy of political power tout court with respect to economic determinations.” Workers’ refusal was an “instance of political autonomy” that created “a state of exception” that called forth a political response from capitalism and the State. The development of the economy was historically crisscrossed by such autonomous political decisions by workers and the State: “Economic continuity and political discontinuity together: this is the history of Capital.” With Negri, Cacciari, and others, Tronti founded in 1968 the journal Contropiano / Counterplan to develop a “Marxist-Communist ‘counterplan’ to the one of liberal capitalism.” Yet Tronti took his analysis of the autonomy of the political in a direction that led Negri to leave the journal after one issue. Whereas Lenin and other Marxist writers had dismissed 19th-century German Social Democracy as reformist and reactionary, Tronti “affirmed German Social Democracy as the paradigm of autonomous politics.” Tronti argued that Social Democracy was not a passive adaptation but rather the product of an autonomous political tactic that was able to “take the content of the workers’ struggle and translate it immediately into politics at the level of State institutions.” Tronti’s subsequent extension of this argument about the “instrumentalization of party politics” to the Italian Communist Party strongly conflicted with Negri’s conception of worker autonomy. Aureli explains, “Negri’s concept of the workers’ refusal was incompatible with any process of political integration, first and foremost integration within the Communist Party. Tronti, however, never conceived his political extremism outside the framework of the party. It was political action within the institution, and eventually against it as the party made compromises against its own class interests, that constitute the very core of the Operaist philosophy.” Contropiano published Massimo Cacciari’s article “On the genesis of negative thought,” which drew from Tronti’s claims about the autonomy of the political and argued that “it was the instrumentalization of crisis, not the institution of rules, that enabled the bourgeoisie to control the political forces of capitalism.” Capitalism’s capability for “negative thought,” its “ability to absorb the negative,” allowed it to “absorb and finally resolve every crisis within its structures.” Antagonistic culture therefore needed a “counterplan” that would “make use of this mechanism productively and deliberately, even when such use would seem to have a regressive horizon.” According to Cacciari, antagonistic culture needed a “theory of the use of the critical effects of capitalism.” The last half of Aureli’s book turns to some Italian architects who were around and affected by the intellectual milieu described in the first half of the book. Aureli’s primary focus here is Aldo Rossi, whom Aureli claims saw “the city as a site of political choices” that contested the technocratic planning of space. The capitalist rationalization of space led Italian planners in the early 1960s to propose the concept of the “city-territory,” the functional reorganization of entire regions to serve capitalism’s circuits. Against such theories, Rossi constructed an architectural theory around the idea of the “locus,” the (universal) singularity of architectural events. Rossi suggested “that there was a possibility of looking at the city as an arena of decisive and singular events whose defined forms could pose a challenge to the urban phenomena and flux surrounding them.” Rossi was particularly hostile toward the new concepts of the “open project” and the “network,” which seemed too complicit with the form of city-territory planning. Rossi claimed: “they are a mystifications in view of the fact that any design intervention addresses a problem by means of a form. It is only the possibility of a closed, defined form that permits other forms to emerge.” Aureli argues Rossi’s “rigid grammar of forms. . . . shifted attention to the locus as a symbolic and geographic singularity, a state of exception within the city, posing a challenge to the open-ended space of the capitalist city-territory. Analogous to Tronti’s autonomy of the political, which was an inquiry directed not at the autonomy of one part of society with respect to another but at the autonomy of power itself, Rossi’s autonomy of architecture was above all the establishment of urban concepts that posited the supremacy of politics over the city’s accelerating economic development.”
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