Over the past year, a lot of critique has been levelled at the many strands of German leftism, from the openly Zionist antideutsche, to the social chauvinist Sahra Wagenknecht’s political debut. In this article, I continue with this proud tradition of leftist infighting, and critique both the theoretical and practical positions of the autonomist movement.
It is rather difficult to be involved in leftist politics in Europe and not have engaged in some capacity with autonomist-adjacent groups. Traces of autonomist ideology are found in countless left spaces across the continent. From squats to anarchist cafés, from soli-festivals to foodsharing, autonomists seek to exit the sphere of capitalist relations in whichever way they can. They have a history of spontaneous demonstration, most notably and consistently against the commodification of housing, but also against globalist organisations, like the G8. And as with most subcultures, they have their quirks: a tedious obsession with aesthetics that has spurred accusations of being a middle-class movement; a high burnout rate with activists who rapidly discover the limits of their ability to participate in the autonomist lifestyle; and in Germany, to nobody’s surprise, endless internal quibbles over Palestine. But quirks aside, surely seeking a withdrawal from capital, and resisting its slow march through institutions is a good thing, right?
I argue that autonomism has failed to grapple with the reality of being a predominantly European movement, and that their political direction is determined by a poor understanding of material conditions. To evaluate these shortcomings, we must regrettably fall back to theory, something that autonomist subcultures eschew in favour of spontaneous action. But autonomism did not begin as a subculture; rather, it began as a theoretical movement, albeit one grounded in very practical events.
Autonomism’s emergence was something of a swan song of modernity. Born in the factories of Northern Italy in the 1960s, it was situated amidst massive internal movements of workers from the underdeveloped and semi-feudal south of the country, to the rapidly industrialising north. These migrant workers, subject to brutally exploitative labour regimes, often rejected structured wage negotiations through labour unions, instead partaking in wildcat strikes and sabotage. Theorists of the period, such as Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri, began to frame this as a theory of the worker’s subjectivity, sparking a theoretical movement that came to be known as operaismo (“workerism”). The operaists, writing in journals like Quaderni Rossi and Classe Operaia, inverted the Marxian relationship between capital and labour. Instead of framing capital as tending towards crisis under its own imperatives, the operaists highlighted how capital always seemed one step behind labour. In their narrative, rather than being the protagonist, capital had a reactive tendency: it was forced to respond to the specific forms of organisation of labour, such as the factory, and to the subjectivities that emerged through this organisation. And these subjectivities would always grow to threaten capital: forcing, in their own epochs, a collapse in the rate of profit. Capital would thus be periodically forced to deconstruct existing labour processes to kill this organisational capacity, and then restructure them, to renew the cycle of accumulation.
The wide range of sabotage actions undertaken by factory workers came to a head in the so-called autunno caldo (“Hot Autumn”) of 1969, which culminated in the acceptance of some of the workers’ demands, and a consequent weakening of the workers’ movement. The decade after saw a restructuring of labour, and the centre of analysis gradually drifted away from the factory, shifting instead to the productivity present within other spheres of life. Feminist thinkers like Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Silvia Federici provided the theoretical foundation for the Wages for Housework campaign, highlighting the role gendered labour played in (re)producing the most valuable commodity: the worker’s labour power. The student movement organised against the commodification of the university and the rising cost of housing. These currents, as well as the growing proliferation of white-collar labour amidst the reconstituted working class, framed the transition from operaism to post-operaismo. Theorists of this period included Toni Negri (whose academic career was briefly interrupted by his arrest for the murder of… the Prime Minister of Italy); but also Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno, and, moving away from Italy slightly, Michael Hardt. Post-operaismo concerned itself mostly with labour in a post-Fordist society, i.e. with immaterial labour. The mass worker, in post-operaist narratives, was transformed into the social worker, as capital began to expand to subsume all of life itself. Socially produced value was captured by capitalists, who, rather than investing in the factories of a bygone era, instead sought to commodify the conditions for sustaining life itself.
In a practical sense, the autonomist subject is thus the immaterial worker, in their role as a concrete, direct opposition to capital. This labour can be pulled outside the sphere of capitalist relations: third spaces like cafés can collectively be established, squats can provide housing, open-source software can be collaboratively designed. For the autonomists, the material conditions for communism already exist, and all that is needed is to pull productive labour out of the control of capital, that has long outlived its purpose. The labour theory of value no longer holds true: value is being produced and co-opted everywhere, round the clock. The wage form is thus obsolete, and capitalism is already dead: we simply need to rid ourselves of the turbulent capitalists.
A key assumption undergirding these ideas is that the forces of production have developed, through labour’s intransigence, to the point that expansions of fixed capital are no longer particularly necessary to sustain life. Cooperative labour can (and does) produce most of the commodities consumed in contemporary society. There is some truth to the fact that capital has increasingly refrained from transforming or expanding production (see Brenner’s long downturn), instead resorting to the accelerated commodification of assets. Automation theorists have engaged with this, and tend to view this refusal to expand production as a reactionary force that must be counteracted through democratic control over capital; this is particularly salient in light of the colossal transformations in production and housing that the climate crisis would require. Autonomists, on the other hand, claim that this intransigence on part of capital is because large-scale investment of capital is increasingly unnecessary. The dirty material world belonged to a historical phase of capitalism, one that we have transcended. And this is where our troubles begin.
The widening of the traditional Marxian notions of productivity beyond the muscular Soviet male factory worker are much welcome, and thankfully fairly uncontroversial today. Yet the extension of this immaterial lens to all of society, optimistic though it might seem, tends to display a certain agnosticism to actually existing labour processes, particularly to those that tend to be invisibilised in the global North. Now, contemporary capitalist crisis has indeed sparked a much wider debate surrounding the processes of accumulation that are hegemonic today, and nobody can deny that capital does seem to flood precisely those parts of the world where immaterial labour dominates. Does that not imply that we have indeed transcended factory labour, if capital no longer cares to touch it?
What is missing from this equation is an analysis of the fact that while a hairdresser or a barista is able to pull themself out of the circuits of capital and reproduce themselves in France or Germany, this is clearly out of reach for their counterparts in Brazil or Indonesia. The autonomist choice to disengage from wage labour is one that can only be made in Europe without subjecting the worker to absolute impoverishment in the process. And this is not because the wage has already been rendered obsolete, but rather the inverse—it is precisely because the global North is both governed by the wage form, and capable of commanding the highest wages in the world. There is still a broad range of physical commodities that autonomists regularly need to acquire: second-hand sound systems, used mobile phones, cigarettes, coffee and cocaine; even electricity, clean water, and access to healthcare. They may attempt to acquire these extra-capitalistically, through soli-fundraisers or community care, yet these attempts all hinge on the fact that the overdeveloped world, through its extraordinarily high wages, consists of a considerable surplus of commodities. The autonomist lifestyle still requires other Europeans to continue to participate in the market. But if the autonomists are correct, and capital today relies solely on commodifying the social, what explains this global wage discrepancy?
There are many reasons why even the cheapest solidarity coffee costs upwards of €2 in Germany, compared to a measly 10 cents at a (decidedly unsolidarisch) Indian tea house. To analyse this requires an explication of the differences between the various forms of immaterial labour, of which social reproductive labour is just one subset. And a large proportion of global North workers is engaged in other forms of immaterial labour: working in tech, or marketing, or worse, in the dread worlds of finance and consulting. These labour processes can position themselves on top of value chains, explicitly diverting surplus value towards themselves to generate hyperprofits through their use of political power. Google and Meta can thus utilise vast data holdings to target consumers and sell endless iterations of products manufactured in China, built on the tantalum extracted from the Congo Basin. Bayer and Novo Nordisk can generate broad swathes of pharmaceutical intellectual property, making billions of dollars off people’s demand for an insulin that we already know how to produce. H&M and Zara can insert themselves into the mill labour process in Bangladesh, producing affect through branding, while invisibilising their liability through chains of subcontractors, all the while raking in vast profits beyond the wildest dreams of mill worker and owner alike.
These advantages trickle down to other workers (whether inside or outside capital) in the global North, both through enabling the high purchasing power of a society engaged in the profit-attracting labour processes, and through the existence of well-funded welfare states, who derive their spending power from taxing domestic capitalists. And in this sense, autonomist logic inverts not only Marx, but also Rosa Luxemburg. Capital may need an outside to sustain itself; but even more pressingly, so does the autonomist “outside” require capital for its continued reproduction.
Autonomist theorists have taken critiques of their positioning to heart. Already, the turn of the millennium saw renewed enthusiasm in analyses of immateriality, with the release of Empire, co-authored by Michael Hardt, and a still-productive Negri (now having returned from French amnesty to serve out his prison sentence in Italy). The book begins with a call for nuance, calling earlier framings “too pure”, “almost angelic”. They join dependency theorists in critiquing developmental analyses of the position of the global South, describing very clearly the presence of a global hierarchy of nation-states. And while they are somewhat light on the details of how immateriality reinforces this hierarchy, they succeeded in opening ground for fertile debate: sparking three sequels and considerable discourse, allowing theorists like Nick Dyer-Witheford and Rodrigo Nunes to explicitly highlight precisely the mechanisms through which this hierarchy is maintained.
But praxis lags theory, particularly in circles that weaponise accusations of being “all theory no praxis” to partake in self-indulgence-as-praxis. Obstinately viewing their forms of immaterial labour as not only merely hegemonic but somehow all-encompassing, autonomists can whole-heartedly simulate a faux-exit from capitalist relations, blissfully ignorant to their reliance on these relations in the first place. Viewing pesky details like the existence of fixed capital as no longer relevant, they can avoid having to engage with other pesky details like the allocation of said capital. And in Germany, as the optimistic counterpart to the pessimism of Frankfurt school, autonomists can dismiss any notion of social class(es) as proto-Nazism, thereby cementing a tenuous partnership with the antideutsche.
This critique should not be read as advocating defeatism. Ultimately, the goals that autonomists fight for are noble: combating the expansion of commodification, attempting to maintain and resurrect the ability to reproduce society without every aspect of life turning into an asset to be sold to private equity firms. But without a broader understanding of their own positioning in global capitalism, there is always the risk that many autonomist demands—such as the compensation of “immensurable” social labour with some sort of universal basic income—could easily result in a restoration of the offloading of capitalism’s brutality to the periphery, combined with increasingly restrictive migration to keep these crises distant from the core.
This critique is therefore a call to expend energy in better ways than merely withdrawing from capitalism when it violates an aesthetic code. It is a call for a deeper engagement with capitalism beyond the narrow space of the battles that surround how a society deeply disconnected from material realities should be reproduced. It is a call for an acknowledgement of the fact that organising a decommodified rave in a German forest is not resistance; it is in fact utterly uninteresting to capitalists, who have bigger fish to fry. The fight against capitalist domination must centre genuine solidarity, and strike where exploitation and expropriation are at their most brutal, rather than partake in a self-congratulatory withdrawal of the navel-gazing beneficiaries of this domination.
Today, this engagement must begin with the complicity of European capital in the genocide in Gaza. And if inspiration for praxis is lacking, perhaps they could look to their own intellectual predecessors: to the Italian workers that prided themselves on their ability to bring capital to a grinding halt through good, old-fashioned sabotage.
