[p2p-research] Berardi essay

[Andy Robinson]

Actually I think it's very clear.  Though, you have to have read Deleuze and
Guattari to make sense of his use of "singularity".

It's similar to Hakim Bey, or Colin Ward:  "communism" is the proliferation
of free activity through difference, in which spaces of otherness involving
intense, non-replicable connections occur at many localised sites, producing
a world which is (locally) no longer subordinate to the logic of capital.
As these spaces are also self-organised, self-reproducing, networked and
produce reconnection in the ecological, social and psychological fields,
they are generative of other ways of being - specifically, of inclusive
affinity-networks without hierarchy.

I found a lot of the article inspiring, but I'd challenge three things.

1)  can we really be sure this is the final crisis?  Marxism seems to find a
"final crisis" every few decades - capitalism wasn't supposed to survive the
First World War, the Second World War, the 70s crash, and the current
reference to ecological disaster was formerly focused on the threat of
fascism, then the threat of nuclear war...  If the system is going to get
out of the crisis, it would have to be by doing something as yet unknown,
unpredictable and new.  Which is how it got out of the other crises (e.g.
Keynesianisn after WW2).  But, by definition we cannot know if it is capable
of doing something as yet unknown, unpredictable and new.  The thesis of
final crisis is based on the observed capabilities and actions of the
system, whereas the possibility of systemic survival is based on the
unknown, as is the possibility of antisystemic transformation.

2)  why has Bifo suddenly become so conflict-averse?  Why avoid
confrontation with the conformist majority and the state?  The original
hypothesis of autonomism - the necessity to vigorously defend spaces of
autonomy to aid their proliferation - has never been falsified; it seems
that, as autonomism got its fingers burned in the crackdown in Italy, it
lost the courage of its convictions.  (That, and a lot of them became
academics).

3)  there is a weird attachment to ideas of "general intellect" and
"cognitive labour" - modern-day correlates of the old Marxist working-class
- at the same time that resistance is theorised as minoritarian and as
anti-conformist.  Why is the emergence of proliferating difference in
radical opposition to the system deemed to have anything whatsoever to do
with forms of production?  I think this is a shadow of aufhebung, the
"passage through", the gravedigger created by the system itself, reasserting
itself even as aufhebung is explicitly rejected.  Rather, I would argue that
alternatives and resistance emerge from the "stars that fall out as the
system tightens its grip", the emergence of entire strata of people outside
the dominant system or marginal to it / alienated from it, hence the figures
of the autonomous, the excluded and the indigenous (all of which are aspects
of the "social principle" or affinity-network form as alternative to
capitalism).

bw
Andy
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