[p2p-research] Berardi essay

[Wittel, Andreas]

very interesting comments Andy:
 
1) I would not worry too much about the final crisis problem. This remains to be seen (and the interesting argument of Boltanski/Chiapello that capitalism has always gained in strength due to the criticism directed against it is well supported with historical evidence.) But this crisis won't be over with the bailout policy. The patient is still sick. And there isn't even an idea for recovery.
 
2) I can agree with his position of non-violence. Why not discuss this in terms of efficiency? Violent protest just hasn't been very successful lately. It didn't change anything. Maybe somethings is emerging that is more effective There is another form of resistance happening atm, kind of post-Seattle, it is quiet and growing. People dont protest, but do things in their home and outside the market, and they connect and become effective in hurting the market very badly, e.g. Pirate bay etc.
 
3) True it is not clear at all where the lines of conflict are. I don't think it is about immaterial labour against the rest. There is a big and growing conflict within cognitive labour (what Pasquinelli calls the immaterial civil war), e.g. creative industries labour against more autonomous creative labour. But this seems to be a difficult question atm (who are the allies, where is the line of conflict?
 
Andreas

________________________________

From: p2presearch-bounces at listcultures.org on behalf of Andy Robinson
Sent: Fri 22/05/2009 21:54
To: p2presearch at listcultures.org
Subject: Re: [p2p-research] Berardi essay


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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