Apocalypse and Survival
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Jacques Camatte Community and Communism in Russia
Jacques Camatte Community and Communism in Russia Chapter I Chapter II Chapter III Chapter I Publishing Bordiga's texts on Russia and writing an introduction to them was rather repugnant to us. The Russian revolution and its involution are indeed some of the greatest events of our century. Thanks to them, a horde of thinkers, writers, and politicians are not unemployed. Among them is the first gang of speculators which asserts that the USSR is communist, the social relations there having been transformed. However, over there men live like us, alienation persists. Transforming the social relations is therefore insufficient. One must change man. Starting from this discovery, each has 'functioned' enclosed in his specialism and set to work to produce his sociological, ecological, biological, psychological etc. solution. Another gang turns the revolution to its account by proving that capitalism can be humanised and adapted to men by reducing growth and proposing an ethic of abstinence to them, contenting them with intellectual and aesthetic productions, restraining their material and affective needs. It sets computers to work to announce the apocalypse if we do not follow the advice of the enlightened capitalist. Finally there is a superseding gang which declares that there is neither capitalism nor socialism in the USSR, but a kind of mixture of the two, a Russian cocktail ! Here again the different sciences are set in motion to place some new goods on the over-saturated market. That is why throwing Bordiga into this activist whirlpool -
Where Did Braverman Go Wrong? a Marxist Response to the Politicist Critiques
Where did Braverman go wrong? A Marxist response to the politicist critiques Onde está errado Braverman? A resposta marxista às críticas politicistas Eduardo Sartelli1 Marina Kabat2 Abstract Braverman is considered an unquestionable reference of Marxist labour process. The objective of this paper is to show that despite Braverman’s undeniable achievements he forsakes the classical Marxist notions related to work organization, i. e. simple cooperation, manufacture and large-scale industry and replaces them with the notion of Taylorism. We also intend to show that because of this abandonment, Braverman cannot explain properly how the deskilling tendency operates in different historical periods, and in distinct industry branches. Finally, we try to demonstrate that those Marxist concepts neglected by Braverman are especially useful to understand labor unrest related to job organization. Braverman overvalues the incidence of labor fragmentation and direct forms of control and disregards the impact of mechanization achieved with the emergence of Large-scale industry and the new forms of control associated with it. Whereas Braverman’s allegedly Marxist orthodoxy is considered responsible for this, in fact, exactly the opposite can be asserted: the weaknesses of the otherwise noteworthy work of Harry Braverman are grounded in his relinquishment of some crucial Marxist concepts. We state that labor processes conventionally considered Taylorist or Fordist can be reconceptualized in Marxist classic terms allowing a better understanding of the dynamic of conflicts regarding labor process. Keywords: Labor process. Politics. Marxism. Regulationism. Workers’ Struggles. Resumo Braverman é considerado uma referência inquestionável do processo de trabalho marxista. O objetivo deste artigo é mostrar que, apesar das contribuições inegáveis de Braverman ele abandona as noções marxistas clássicas relacionadas à organização do trabalho, a saber, cooperação simples, manufatura e grande-indústria e substituí-las com a noção do taylorismo. -
Communization and Its Discontents
Minor Compositions Open Access Statement – Please Read This book is open access. This work is not simply an electronic book; it is the open access version of a work that exists in a number of forms, the traditional printed form being one of them. All Minor Compositions publications are placed for free, in their entirety, on the web. This is because the free and autonomous sharing of knowledges and experiences is important, especially at a time when the restructuring and increased centralization of book distribution makes it difficult (and expensive) to distribute radical texts effectively. The free posting of these texts does not mean that the necessary energy and labor to produce them is no longer there. One can think of buying physical copies not as the purchase of commodities, but as a form of support or solidarity for an approach to knowledge production and engaged research (particularly when purchasing directly from the publisher). The open access nature of this publication means that you can: • read and store this document free of charge • distribute it for personal use free of charge • print sections of the work for personal use • read or perform parts of the work in a context where no financial transactions take place However, it is against the purposes of Minor Compositions open access approach to: • gain financially from the work • sell the work or seek monies in relation to the distribution of the work • use the work in any commercial activity of any kind • profit a third party indirectly via use or distribution of the work • distribute in or through a commercial body (with the exception of academic usage within educational institutions) The intent of Minor Compositions as a project is that any surpluses generated from the use of collectively produced literature are intended to return to further the development and production of further publications and writing: that which comes from the commons will be used to keep cultivating those commons. -
Fifth Estate's Critique of the Megamachine
4 Steve Millett Technology is capital: Fifth Estate’s critique of the megamachine Introduction ‘How do we begin to discuss something as immense as technology?’, writes T. Fulano at the beginning of his essay ‘Against the megamachine’ (1981a: 4). Indeed, the degree to which the technological apparatus penetrates all elements of contemporary society does make such an undertaking a daunting one. Nevertheless, it is an undertaking that the US journal and collective Fifth Estate has attempted. In so doing, it has developed arguably the most sophisticated and challenging anarchist approach to technology currently available.1 Starting from the late 1970s, the Fifth Estate (hereafter FE) began to put forward the argument that the technologies of capitalism cannot be separated from the socioeconomic system itself. Inspired and influenced by a number of writers, including Karl Marx, Jacques Ellul and Jacques Camatte, it began to conceptualise modern technology as constituting a system of domination itself, one which interlinks and interacts with the economic processes of capitalism to create a new social form, a ‘megamachine’ which integrates not only capitalism and technology, but also State, bureaucracy and military. For the FE, technology and capital, although not identical, are more similar than different, and cannot be separated into an ‘evil’ capitalism and an essentially neutral technology. Any critique of capitalism and the State must recognise the importance of contem- porary technology and the crucial role it plays in the development of new forms of domination, oppression and exploitation. Concepts of ‘capital’ and ‘mega- machine’ are also explored later in this chapter. The Fifth Estate The FE began in Detroit in 1965, started by seventeen-year-old high-school student Harvey Ovshinsky. -
“Bifo” Berardi Marco Deseriis Theory & Event, Volume 1
Irony and the Politics of Composition in the Philosophy of Franco “Bifo” Berardi Marco Deseriis Theory & Event, Volume 15, Issue 4, 2012. Abstract By analyzing Franco Berardi’s reflections on irony as an extension of his political praxis, the article first examines the multifaceted functions of this rhetorical device in the contexts of the late-1960s social struggles against factory work in Italy, the communication experiments of the Autonomia movement, and the information overload of the contemporary mediascape. In the second part, the text addresses Berardi’s attempt to reconcile Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of desire to end with a reflection on how his distinction between irony and cynicism may offer a counterpoint to Slavoj Žižek’s critique of ideology. Keywords Irony; class composition; Italian workerism; social movements; subjectivity; autonomy. Born in Bologna in 1949, Franco “Bifo” Berardi has participated in four major anti-capitalist movements in the past four decades: the 1968 as a member of the Marxist revolutionary group Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power); the movement of Autonomia in 1977; the alter-globalization movement in the late 1990s-early 2000s; and the current European movement against austerity measures, the precarization of labor conditions, and the budget cuts to public education. Berardi has combined this personal engagement with an ongoing experimentation with social movement media such as the magazine A/Traverso, the experimental community radio Radio Alice, both founded in Bologna in the mid-1970s. In the late 1990s, he launched the e-mail list Rekombinant and, in the early 2000s, the community TV Orfeo TV. -
Workerism and Politics
Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 186–189 brill.nl/hima Workerism and Politics Mario Tronti Centro per la Riforma dello Stato [email protected] Abstract !is is the text of Mario Tronti’s lecture at the 2006 Historical Materialism conference. It provides a brief, evocative synopsis of Tronti’s understanding of the historical experience and contemporary relevance of operaismo, a theoretical and practical attempt, embodied in journals such as Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia, to renew Marxist thought and politics in the Italy of the 1960s through a renewed attention to class-antagonism and the changing composition of labour. Keywords capitalism, communism, factory, Italy, labour-power, workerism First, what is ‘workerism’? It is an experience that tried to unite the thinking and practice of politics, in a determinate domain, that of the modern factory. It looked for a strong subject, the working class, capable of contesting and putting into crisis the mechanism of capitalist production. I underscore its character as an experience. Young intellectual forces were involved, encountering the new levies of workers, introduced especially into the large factories of the Taylorist and Fordist phase of capitalist industry. What had taken place in the thirties in the US was happening in the sixties in Italy. !e historical context for workerism was precisely that of the sixties of the twentieth century. In Italy, that period witnessed the take-off of an advanced capitalism, the passage from an agricultural-industrial society to an industrial- agricultural one, with the migratory displacement of labour-power from the peasant South to the industrial North. !ey called it ‘neo-capitalism’. -
Technology Is Capital: Fifth Estate's Critique of the Megamachine
4 Steve Millett Technology is capital: Fifth Estate’s critique of the megamachine Introduction ‘How do we begin to discuss something as immense as technology?’, writes T. Fulano at the beginning of his essay ‘Against the megamachine’ (1981a: 4). Indeed, the degree to which the technological apparatus penetrates all elements of contemporary society does make such an undertaking a daunting one. Nevertheless, it is an undertaking that the US journal and collective Fifth Estate has attempted. In so doing, it has developed arguably the most sophisticated and challenging anarchist approach to technology currently available.1 Starting from the late 1970s, the Fifth Estate (hereafter FE) began to put forward the argument that the technologies of capitalism cannot be separated from the socioeconomic system itself. Inspired and influenced by a number of writers, including Karl Marx, Jacques Ellul and Jacques Camatte, it began to conceptualise modern technology as constituting a system of domination itself, one which interlinks and interacts with the economic processes of capitalism to create a new social form, a ‘megamachine’ which integrates not only capitalism and technology, but also State, bureaucracy and military. For the FE, technology and capital, although not identical, are more similar than different, and cannot be separated into an ‘evil’ capitalism and an essentially neutral technology. Any critique of capitalism and the State must recognise the importance of contem- porary technology and the crucial role it plays in the development of new forms of domination, oppression and exploitation. Concepts of ‘capital’ and ‘mega- machine’ are also explored later in this chapter. The Fifth Estate The FE began in Detroit in 1965, started by seventeen-year-old high-school student Harvey Ovshinsky. -
Jacques Camatte and the New Politics of Liberation
Jacques Camatte And the New Politics of Liberation Dave Antagonism 2004–2005 Contents The Despotism of Capital .......................... 4 The Domestication of Humanity ...................... 10 Paradise Now! ............................. 11 The Revolt of Humanity Against Capital . 13 Editors’ Note ................................. 15 2 During the final decade of the 20th century and into the early years of the 21st, the nature of radical politics fundamentally changed. The hegemonic currents, Marxist- Leninism and social democracy, suffered from the sea-change of neo-liberalism, and had difficulty grappling with the new currents of opposition embodied insuch things as the Zapatista Uprising, radical ecology and the anti-summit movements. On a deeper level many of the fundamentals of traditional Leftism had been unset- tled intellectually by post-modernism and by the changes of social organization that accompanied the growth of post-Fordist capitalism, not to mention the fall of the USSR and the regimes of Eastern Europe. This crisis of the Left was quickly interpreted as the universal victory of Liberal Democracy. However it is now clear that social antagonism, often of a revolutionary anti-capitalist nature, has not de- parted; rather it is re-asserting itself in ways that seem unintelligible to traditional political analysis. One of these new currents is green anarchy/anarcho-primitivism (GA/AP). Con- sciously anti-ideological, it is rather a broad church of numerous tendencies and trajectories united by an anarchic politics that details a critique that goes beyond opposition to the state and market to a larger critique of civilization and its total- ity. Its roots are also broad, coming out of elements of radical ecological politics (especially around groups like Earth First! UK and the Animal Liberation Front), various counter-cultures and the ultra-left. -
THE FIGHT AGAINST PLATFORM CAPITALISM JAMIE WOODCOCK Uwestminsterpress.Co.Uk (2019) and the Gig Economy (2019), Marx at the Arcade
THE FIGHT AGAINST PLATFORM CAPITALISM PLATFORM AGAINST FIGHT THE THE FIGHT AGAINST PLATFORM CAPITALISM CDSMS o far, platform work has been an important laboratory for capital. Management techniques, like the use of algorithms, are being tested Swith a view to exporting across the global economy and it is argued that automation is undermining workers’ agency. Although the contractual trick of self-employment has allowed platforms to grow quickly and keep JAMIE WOODCOCK their costs down, yet it has also been the case also that workers have also found they can strike without following the existing regulations. This book develops a critique of platforms and platform capitalism from the perspective of workers and contributes to the ongoing debates about the future of work and worker organising. It presents an alternative portrait THE FIGHT AGAINST returning to a focus on workers’ experience, focusing on solidarity, drawing out a global picture of new forms of agency. In particular, the book focuses on three dynamics that are driving struggles in the platform economy: PLATFORM CAPITALISM the increasing connections between workers who are no longer isolated; the lack of communication and negotiation from platforms, leading to escalating worker action around shared issues; and the internationalisation of platforms, which has laid the basis for new transnational solidarity. An Inquiry into the Global Focusing on transport and courier workers, online workers and freelancers, author Jamie Woodcock concludes by considering how Struggles of the Gig Economy workers build power in different situations. Rather than undermining worker agency, platforms have instead provided the technical basis for the emergence of new global struggles against capitalism. -
Changing Anarchism.Pdf
Changing anarchism Changing anarchism Anarchist theory and practice in a global age edited by Jonathan Purkis and James Bowen Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Copyright © Manchester University Press 2004 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors. This electronic version has been made freely available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC- ND) licence, which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the author(s) and Manchester University Press are fully cited and no modifications or adaptations are made. Details of the licence can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 0 7190 6694 8 hardback First published 2004 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset in Sabon with Gill Sans display by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester Printed in Great Britain by CPI, Bath Dedicated to the memory of John Moore, who died suddenly while this book was in production. His lively, innovative and pioneering contributions to anarchist theory and practice will be greatly missed. -
Interracial Unionism in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Development of Black Labor Organizations, 1933-1940
THEY SAW THEMSELVES AS WORKERS: INTERRACIAL UNIONISM IN THE INTERNATIONAL LADIES’ GARMENT WORKERS’ UNION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF BLACK LABOR ORGANIZATIONS, 1933-1940 A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY by Julia J. Oestreich August, 2011 Doctoral Advisory Committee Members: Bettye Collier-Thomas, Committee Chair, Department of History Kenneth Kusmer, Department of History Michael Alexander, Department of Religious Studies, University of California, Riverside Annelise Orleck, Department of History, Dartmouth College ABSTRACT “They Saw Themselves as Workers” explores the development of black membership in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) in the wake of the “Uprising of the 30,000” garment strike of 1933-34, as well as the establishment of independent black labor or labor-related organizations during the mid-late 1930s. The locus for the growth of black ILGWU membership was Harlem, where there were branches of Local 22, one of the largest and the most diverse ILGWU local. Harlem was also where the Negro Labor Committee (NLC) was established by Frank Crosswaith, a leading black socialist and ILGWU organizer. I provide some background, but concentrate on the aftermath of the marked increase in black membership in the ILGWU during the 1933-34 garment uprising and end in 1940, when blacks confirmed their support of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and when the labor-oriented National Negro Congress (NNC) was irrevocably split by struggles over communist influence. By that time, the NLC was also struggling, due to both a lack of support from trade unions and friendly organizations, as well as the fact that the Committee was constrained by the political views and personal grudges of its founder. -
Red, Black and Gold:1 Fosatu, South African 'Workerism
IN: Edward Webster and Karin Pampillas (eds.), 2017, The Unresolved National Question in South Africa: Left Thinking Under Apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. CHAPTER 14 RED, BLACK AND GOLD:1 FOSATU, SOUTH AFRICAN ‘WORKERISM’, ‘SYNDICALISM’ AND THE NATION Sian Byrne, Nicole Ulrich and Lucien van der Walt You, moving forest of Africa. When I arrived the children were all crying, These were the workers, industrial workers ... Escape into that forest, The black forest that the employers saw and ran for safety. The workers saw it too ‘It belongs to us,’ they said, ‘Let us take refuge in it to be safe from our hunters.’ Deep into the forest they hid themselves and when they came out they were free from fear ... Lead us FOSATU to where we are eager to go. Even in parliament you shall be our representative. Go and represent us because you are our Moses Through your leadership we shall reach our Canaan ... (Alfred Qabula, ‘Praise Poem to FOSATU’, 1984) INTRODUCTION After months of talks between unions associated with the Trade Union Advisory Coordinating Council (TUACC), the Federation of South African Trade Unions RED, BLACK AND GOLD (FOSATU) was inaugurated on 13 April 1979. FOSATU was the first federation ofp re- dominantly unregistered trade unions with a truly national reach to operate openly in South Africa since the late 1960s.2 FOSATU membership reached 140 000 in 1985 (Baskin, 1991: 49); it was ‘by far the strongest working- class organisation’ opposing apartheid in the early 1980s (Schroeder, 1988: 54). The largest strike wave since the 1940s tookp lace in 1981, and FOSATU played an integral role (Yudelman, 1984: 271).