While political economists of communication take a formational approach to class by examining labour‘s communication and cultural practices, they also sometimes reference another branch of the Marxian tradition – autonomist Marxism, seeing new forms of knowledge and communication as potential resources of anti-capitalist struggle, through which the working class is constituted.79
Autonomist Marxism, referred to in Italian as operaismo (which translates literally as
―workerism‖), first appeared in Italy in the early 1960s. The early autonomism grew from automotive workers in Turin who were not satisfied with their union, which had reached an agreement with Fiat. Because the workers were disillusioned with their organised representation and initiated riots by themselves, a theory of self-organised labour representation outside the scope of traditional representatives such as trade union developed.80 However, ―autonomist Marxism‖ has gone beyond the Italian context and many tributaries have developed during its international diffusion since 1979. While the original thread recognizes the capacity of varied strata of labour to self organize, independent of centralized organizational structures, such as
78 Ibid., 230.
79 Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx.
80 Sylvere Lotringer and Christian Marazzi (eds.), Autonomia: Post-Political Politics (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007); Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London:
Pluto Press, 2002).
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trade unions, political parties, or state institutions, the term autonomist Marxism implies
something broader than operaismo and its aftermath. As Harry Cleaver, the first who coined the term, describes,
What gives meaning to the concept of ‗autonomist Marxism‘ as a particular tradition is the fact that we can identify, within the larger Marxist tradition, a variety of movements, politics and thinkers who have emphasized the autonomous power of workers – autonomous from capital, from their official organizations (e.g. the trade unions, the political parties) and, indeed, the power of particular groups of workers to act autonomously from other groups (e.g. women from men).
By ‗autonomy‘, I mean the ability of workers to define their own interests and to struggle for them – to go beyond mere reaction to exploitation, or to self-defined ‗leadership‘ and to take the offensive in ways that shape the class struggle and define the future.81
Therefore, autonomist Marxism has expanded to see autonomy as that from the official leaderships of the trade unions and political parties and from capital as well. While working class struggle is against capital, it gives emphasis to the self-organization of the working class and to opposition to statist conceptions of socialism and communism. In relation to capital, autonomist Marxist theorists and activists use the expression ―working class composition‖ to refer to the specific forms of social organization of the working class. Unlike in some traditional Marxist contexts, the ―working class‖ is no longer an object or a classification, rather it is always in process of becoming and exists in a context of struggle. It is continually changing and in the process of remaking itself and being remade. History and shifting forms of social organization therefore become crucial to grasping working class experience and struggle. Capitalists attempt to ―decompose‖ the capacities and strengths of working class composition by exacerbating and re-organizing internal divisions in the working class, ripping apart sources of working class and oppressed people‘s power, fragmenting groups and struggles and extending social surveillance.82 In turn, these attempts to decompose working class create new conditions for the possible re-composition of working class struggle and power. For autonomist Marxism, the continuing
81 Massimo De Angelis, An Interview with Harry Cleaver, 1993, http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3843/cleaver.html.
82 Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx.
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process of composition, decomposition, and re-composition of the working class constitutes a
―cycle of struggle.‖83 These cycles of struggle involve what Negri analyses as the antagonism between communication and information. On the one hand, the labour force is capable of composing the working class through communication, delivered and distributed by capital in technological advances, which are transverse and dialogic; on the other hand, capital attempts to increase its powers of control by appropriating the communicative capacity of the labour force and producing information, which is centralized, vertical, and hierarchic.84
Drawing on Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Paolo Virno, and others of the autonomist Marxist tradition, Dyer-Witheford develops the Marxist concepts of ―general intellect‖ and
―immaterial labour‖ to examine the historical trajectory, the emergent forms of counter-power against high technology, globalized capital and possible future of insurgencies in information capitalism. Human subjectivity and ―immaterial labour,‖ other than the accumulation of fixed capital in machinery, are vital to determine a post-Fordist global capitalism. Capital can appropriate the communicative capacities of an intellectual and inventive labour force
(immaterial labour and socialized worker) to create knowledge and information, necessary for capitalist domination. In turn, the new forms of knowledge and communication constitute potential resources for working class struggle, in which ―the socialised worker has come to develop the critique of exploitation by means of the critique of communication.‖85 Therefore, the conflicts between information and communication features working class struggle in the
information age, including that over the collective organization of work in production and the
83 Ibid., 81.
84 Ibid., 83-87.
85 Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx, 86; ―Capital & Class as ‗Autonomist Marxism and the Information Society‘,‖ Issue no. 52 (1994).
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expansion of alternative media activism against the corporate control of news and imagery as well.
Clearly, as Gary Kinsman argues, ―[A]utonomist Marxism has shown how differing forms of organization and consciousness emerge in relation to different forms of working class composition and different cycles and circulation of struggles. These forms of organization are historically and socially specific.‖86 In the Chinese context, the Chinese Communist Party claims to be a vanguard party composed of and representing the interests of the Chinese working class.
Despite the revolutionary and socialist legacies, however, the Chinese working class has suffered the most from oppression and exploitation in China‘s post-socialist transformation. Still claiming to rule in the name of the Chinese workers, the Party state has successfully suppressed their protests and working class communicative and self-organizing activities. China‘s mainstream media, either by imposing censorship or by articulating hegemonic neoliberal discourses, often excludes coverage of worker unrest. As Zhao and Duffy observe, nascent autonomous labour communication networks, media and organizational structures have been under harsh repression.
These communication blockages have helped pre-empt the development of a collective identity that might recompose China‘s stratified working people as a political subject.87
Among many branches in autonomist Marxism, therefore, the original thread with emphasis on the self-activity of the working class has informed this dissertation in particular.
Communication and cultural domain has become the vital site of contestation in China. It is the same important for Chinese workers to struggle for autonomous communicative and cultural spaces as to go ahead with their material struggles. The original thread of autonomist Marxism
86 This is quoted from Gary Kinsman in a presentation, titled ―The Politics of Revolution: Learning from Autonomist Marxism,‖ at a public forum organized by Sudbury [UK] Autonomy & Solidarity in Feb. 2004.
Accessible at http://www.elkilombo.org/the-politics-of-revolution-learning-from-autonomist-marxism/.
87 Zhao and Duffy, Short-Circuited.
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can allow us to rethink and recreate a politics of labour in China‘s post-socialist transformation to re-compose the Chinese workers‘ subjectivity as a social class that builds on the revolutionary and socialist legacies. Crucial to this is the building of a proletarian public sphere where the Chinese workers can begin to experience and live a sense of what a world defined by working class culture and communication, without the domination of capital and without forms of oppression from the authoritarian and neoliberal-driven Chinese state.