[p2p-research] Berardi essay

[Ryan Lanham]

I found the article interesting, and your comments even more so, but the
more I think about it, the author seems to best describe "the service
economy" with few big corporations involved.

A lot of the futurism seems to describe events that have already happened
or credits to communism events that had little or nothing to do with any
conventional previous description or concept of communism any more than they
could be associated with communitarianism, fabian socialism, anarchism,
etc.

How much Marx can be taken out of Marxism before it becomes something else?
Throwing in a few "labour versus capital" lines and then radically
qualifying them to new conceptualizations seems more a stretch to cover
than an application of a historical inevitability.

Even with all the apologies for communism in past as being a Religion (as
the article starts), it even still feels like millenialists looking for the
seven headed dragon or calculating 666 into every conceivable concept.  At
some point you've got to chuck Nostradomus in the trash and say maybe it
wasn't so after all.

Ryan


On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 3:54 PM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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