[p2p-research] Berardi essay

[Michel Bauwens]

Andy,

Is is possible to ask you to present this Bifo article to our blog ... or as
a fallback option, I could mention it with your questions attached?

Michel


On 5/23/09, 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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>


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