Autonomia in the Anthropocene: New Challenges to Radical Politics

Sara Nelson and Bruce Braun Autonomia in the Anthropocene: New Challenges to Radical Politics The theoretical innovations that emerged out of the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970s have enjoyed a striking revival in Anglophone critical scholarship in the past two decades, informing a generation of political activism that erupted in force with the alter-globalization movements of the late 1990s. In the midst of the “Ital- ian miracle” of industrial growth following the country’s postwar devastation, a broad-based movement of workers, students, and intellectuals refused capital’s “gift” of work (Tronti 2007) and advanced a politics of self-determination and self- valorization outside of state and party politics. Autonomia, Italian for autonomy, referred both to the ontological priority of labor power vis-à-vis capital and to a rejection of the bureaucratic politics of compromise characteristic of the establish- ment Left.1 Among the movement’s ongoing lega- cies is a vibrant intellectual tradition that has transformed established categories of Marxist analysis to contend with the changing political terrain that accompanied the rise of what is now referred to as a post-Fordist mode of production. Along with Latin American and indigenous anti- colonial movements, Autonomia forms one of sev- eral intellectual undercurrents nourishing the The South Atlantic Quarterly 116:2, April 2017 doi 10.1215/00382876-3829368 © 2017 Duke University Press Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/116/2/223/471692/ddsaq_116_2_01Nelson_Fpp.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 224 The South Atlantic Quarterly • April 2017 turn toward direct, horizontal democratic organization outside of the repre- sentative structures of electoral politics and oriented toward a horizon of liberation. Despite Autonomia’s widespread influence on political action and post- Marxist scholarship, it has been surprisingly slow to address planetary change and environmental politics. With a focus on cognitive capitalism, many autonomist scholars have downplayed or fully ignored the ecological dimensions of post-Fordism—its foundations in extractive energy economies, its links to the accelerating financialization of nature under the banner of so-called green capitalism, its harnessing of nonhuman capacities, and its wildly uneven toxic geographies. This lack of engagement is regrettable given that, we propose, autonomist insights hold great promise for under- standing both the transformed relation between capital and nonhuman natures in post-Fordism and the many political movements that have emerged in response. More significantly, the era of anthropogenic global change named by the Anthropocene poses profound challenges to a politics of autonomy in the present. The nomination of the Anthropocene as a new geologic epoch shines a spotlight on the immense scale and consequence of human transformations of earth systems. These changes cannot be undone; we have produced a new nature and a new humanity, the contours of which we are still discern- ing. That responsibility for these transformations is uneven has been widely noted, and other names—Capitalocene, Plantationocene—have been pro- posed to identify specific social actors and forces that have brought us to the present juncture. These names matter, but none of them alter a key point: we may now be geological actors, but that has only further revealed our entanglement with the nonhuman world, the impossibility of separating the anthropos from geology, ecology, and climate. In the context of these entan- glements it is not clear what autonomy means, politically or ontologically. Indeed, even as the figure of the human is inflated in some Anthropocene narratives, it has been radically decentered in others, as inhuman materiali- ties, temporalities, and genealogies come to the fore that precede, exceed, and subtend human life. “Considering the human within geologic time,” Kathryn Yusoff (2015: 388) writes, “poses the problem of thinking an inhuman milieu, both before, after and internal to ‘us’” (italics added). Placed alongside recog- nition of the consequences of anthropogenic change, this displacement of the human demands that “life” be understood not in terms of humanity as a uni- fied category but in terms of what Elizabeth A. Povinelli (this issue) describes as “more or less densely compacted forms and modes of existence” that nei- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/116/2/223/471692/ddsaq_116_2_01Nelson_Fpp.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 Nelson and Braun • Autonomia in the Anthropocene 225 ther begin nor end with “us,” with consequences not just for the most hubris- tic fantasies of geoengineering but also for what constitutes the common, where and in what potentiality is located, how autonomy should be understood, and who and what is named by the anthropos. It is no longer evident that key terms found in the autonomist lexicon— species being, the common, multitude, potentia—survive the challenge of the Anthropocene unchanged or that the production of subjectivity (a cornerstone of autonomist thought) can be understood solely in terms of language, habit, or gesture. It may therefore be necessary to think beyond the struggles of the factory floor, or those of the cognitariat today, to imagine and think from other sites of struggle, other forms of solidarity, and other experiments in “com- moning.” These bring into play unfamiliar actors and unacknowledged geographies: sites of extraction and circuits of waste, indigenous communities and territories, rising seas and toxic landscapes that are materially present within the informationalized economies of global capitalism, but often invisible to those working within them. We might say, then, that the Anthropocene names autonomist Marxism’s unthought, an unthought that intrudes on its political imaginaries. What happens to autonomism if it begins to question the autonomy of the human? Or if it leaves its privileged sites in the global North? And what does it mean, in the context of cognitive capitalism’s toxic ecologies, to advance a politics based on the progressive expansion of human productive capacities? Might we be compelled to recognize, as Isabelle Stengers (this issue) forcefully asserts, that capitalism may lead only to catastrophe and bar- barism? In sum, the conjuncture named by the Anthropocene would seem to push Autonomia to its conceptual and political limits. Yet if the Anthropocene describes a blindness in autonomist thought and politics, it is a blindness rooted in the historical tensions that gave rise to the Autonomia movement, in a manner that is constitutive but contingent. Focusing for the moment on the movement’s epicenter in Italy, we can see that the politics of Autonomia were rooted in the geographical specificity of workers’ experience in postwar Italian industry. As the country’s productive capacity and share of world trade ballooned throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, commentators hailed the “economic miracle” that transformed Italy from a largely rural economy into an industrial powerhouse centered on the automotive industry (De Rosa 2008c; Wright 2002: 6). This “miracle” was predicated on an intensification of exploitation: Italy’s comparative advantage lay in its low labor costs, enabled by a large industrial reserve army of migrant workers from the impoverished South (Berardi 2007: 150; De Rosa 2008c: 102). The workerist movements gathered under the banner of Potere Operaio Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/116/2/223/471692/ddsaq_116_2_01Nelson_Fpp.pdf by guest on 23 September 2021 226 The South Atlantic Quarterly • April 2017 (Workers’ Power) diagnosed the crisis at the heart of the economic miracle, revealing its roots in the hyperexploitation of labor and the uneven geographies of Italian development. In the “hot autumn” of 1969, widespread strikes, factory occupations, and sabotage rocked the manufacturing sector, resulting in the loss of 40 million worker hours that autumn alone (Berardi 2007: 149; De Rosa 2008c: 108). Capital flight intensified as the contracts won by labor kicked in the following year, and a shortage of money capital prompted rising inflation and a contraction of credit (De Rosa 2008c: 108). The notion of labor power’s autonomy that would inflect autonomist thought was therefore rooted in the concrete experience of workers’ power as it was exercised on the shop floor and reverberated throughout the banking and financial sectors. Borrowing from Antonio Negri’s (1991) reading of Spinoza, we might rename the so-called Italian miracle “the Italian anomaly.” Negri finds in Spinoza’s metaphysics a radical expression of “the Dutch anomaly,” describ- ing the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic’s exceptional rate of economic growth, precipitated by an emerging industrial capitalism and an expanding colonial regime; the coinciding golden age of Dutch humanism, in stark contrast to the baroque reaction in France and elsewhere; and its constitu- tional structure, which stood apart from European monarchies. In this context, Negri (1991: 8) argues, Spinoza recognized the multitude as an emerging political and economic force underpinning both the republican constitution and Dutch industry: “It is on the basis of this material force that Spinoza’s philosophy is comprehensible, as power and as an anomaly with respect to all modern rationalism, which is irremediably conditioned and

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