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A Brief History of Italian Autonomia from Sylvère Lotringer | post.thing.net

Now the distinction between work and non-work has been abolished. Now it can’t be calculated where the surplus value which capitalism, according to Marx is bound to extract from workers, is to be found. Life has become work; we are working all the time.

Autonomism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Autonomist theory

Unlike other forms of Marxism, autonomist Marxism emphasises the ability of the working class to force changes to the organisation of the capitalist system independent of the state, trade unions or political parties. Autonomists are less concerned with party political organisation than other Marxists, focusing instead on self-organised action outside of traditional organisational structures. Autonomist Marxism is thus a “bottom up” theory: it draws attention to activities that autonomists see as everyday working class resistance to capitalism, for example absenteeism, slow working, and socialisation in the workplace.

Like other Marxists, autonomists see class struggle as being of central importance. However, autonomists have a broader definition of the working class than other Marxists: as well as wage-earning workers (both white collar and blue collar), autonomists also include the unwaged (students, the unemployed, homemakers etc), who are traditionally deprived of any form of union representation.

Early theorists (such as Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Sergio Bologna and Paolo Virno) developed notions of “immaterial” and “social labour” that extended the Marxist concept of labour to all society. They suggested that modern society’s wealth was produced by unaccountable collective work, and that only a little of this was redistributed to the workers in the form of wages. They emphasised the importance of feminism and the value of unpaid female labour to capitalist society.

i don’t want to see my work as a way of survival, i cannot accommodate in giving my services for small change. and to repeat that its because of development for all or most humans is hypocrisy.

in this way its better not to work, not to arrange holidays, not to have weekends.

Multitudes Web – Autonomist Marxism and the Information Society

Beneath the rosy images of the information society lie
the stark goals of ’control and reduction in the costs of labour’
(Negri 1978, 254).

Such analysis is by no means unique to autonomists.
Indeed awareness of the role of informatics in the neoliberal assault
on the working class has generated an influential line of quasi-Marxist
’neo-Luddism’. Based largely on ’labour process’ perspectives derived
froth Braverman’s (1974) seminal studies on the ’degradation of work’,
but with important strands in media studies, this seeks to expose the
new technologies as instruments for deskilling and ’mind management’
(Schiller 1976) and to revive, at least intellectually, the resistant
tradition of 19th century machine-breakers (e.g. Noble, 1983, 1984 ;
Webster and Robins 1986).

Capital attempts to maximise exploitation either ’absolutely’ (by
extending the working day) or ’relatively’ (by raising the intensity or
productivity of labour). But workers, both in daily practice and
organised struggle, persistently initiate their own, very different
project. Seeking a secure, full, plenitudinous life that escapes the
reduction to mere labour-power, they set in motion a counter-logic that
defies capital’s by either forcing up the wage level or lowering the
duration and pace of the working day. These efforts by workers to
reclaim the values they themselves have produced are not merely
’economistic,’ but strike at capital’s intrinsically political command
over labour-power. The horizon to which they point is the separation of
labour from capital. Ultimately ; capital needs labour, but labour does
not need capital. Labour, as the source of production, can dispense
with the wage relation : it is potentially autonomous.