Storming Heaven - Second Edition by Wright Steve. Tomba Riccardo Bellofiore & Massimiliano. Cleaver Harry

Author:Wright, Steve.,Tomba , Riccardo Bellofiore & Massimiliano.,Cleaver, Harry.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786801173
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

Rather than a politics which dealt with an abstract worker, ‘male, adult, normal, unburdened by feelings and emotions; rational, a democrat or revolutionary, always ready to attend meetings on the history and tendencies of capitalism’ (ibid.: 92), Rosso sought a new perspective which examined questions of sexual and emotional domination, of the nature of the family and the marginalisation of those deemed ‘abnormal’, through which ‘the slavery of the factory and life imposed by capital manifest themselves’. It was to be this, the most libertarian of the major tendencies within the Area, that Negri and his closest associates would join the following year, and help to build into the strongest autonomist formation in the North. Unlike Rosso, however, the majority of the autonomist collectives were to keep their eyes firmly upon the vicissitudes of the industrial workforce during 1973 and 1974. So too with Negri (1973b: 126) himself, whose major essay of the period centred upon the factory as ‘the privileged site of both the refusal of labour and the attack upon the rate of profit’. In this respect, the most interesting aspect of the essay was to be its effort to clarify workerism’s often posited relation between working-class struggle and the accumulation process. Potere Operaio had conceived the relationship between class composition and economic crisis in the blunt, mechanical terms of a zero-sum game between wages and profits. In ‘Partito operaio contro il lavoro’, Negri set out to detail what he had earlier termed that ‘long’ but ‘qualitatively homogeneous’ path linking disputes within the terrain of production to the problems faced by the reproduction of capital (Negri 1968: 65).

The possibility of capitalist collapse, and the place within it of working-class struggle, had first been raised in a systematic manner amongst workerists with Negri’s exploration of ‘Marx on Cycle and Crisis’. Although written before 1969’s ‘Hot Autumn’ of industrial unrest, this essay presaged a number of the central themes later addressed by the tendency. In doing so, it represented operaismo’s first attempt to offer a political reading of that part of Marx’s critique of political economy traditionally most susceptible to the charge of objectivism. The piece’s most interesting aspect, however, was its discussion of the efforts by John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter to offer a solution to the difficulties faced by capital in guaranteeing its own reproduction as a social relation. Following Tronti against Lukács, Negri did not believe that such an undertaking was impossible for capital’s ‘critical awareness’; indeed, both Schumpeter and Keynes were able to perceive that capitalist development was an essentially open-ended process wracked with internal contradictions (Negri 1968: 57). Negri showed particular admiration for Schumpeter, who did not shy away from the fact that the capitalist economy lacked any internal tendency towards equilibrium. Further, by grasping the moment of crisis as not only unavoidable, but ‘a fundamental stimulus within the system’ that was ‘productive of profit’, Schumpeter had glimpsed the relations of force between classes which underlay the apparently autonomous movement of economic categories (ibid.: 54).

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