“Negri goes mad�
That’s how a South African autonomist of my (vague) acquaintance, describes this article in neo-liberal house organ Global Agenda, and it’s difficult to disagree with him. The idea of a global Magna Carta is not a bad one in itself of course. And perhaps the article can be located somewhere in the tradition of operaismo. Negri has always focussed on the current struggle, aware of the ever-present ability of capitalism to come to a new accommodation with the multitude’s desires (although autonomia is usually connected with the Grundrisse and bits of Capital, it did occour to me that maybe you could get to it from the 1844 Manuscripts, too. Imagine an analysis of recuperation, if Adorno had been insanely optimistic…). Because of this, Negri doesn’t think in terms of The Revolution, but of infinite micro-revolutions (if I read Empire correctly, Negri thinks the global proleterian revolution has been going on and off since about 1300). So it’s essential to keep an eye on what the next partly stable point in capital’s eternal mutation might be. But presenting yourself as an advisor to capitalism, as Hardt and Negri seem to do in this article, is quite another thing. We know we will be temporarily defeated in our current struggle; but Hardt and Negri seem to have moved from cheerfully accepting this defeat (in the knowledge that it is temporary), to actually telling capital how to defeat us. Isn’t that precisely what reformism is: in the final analysis siding with capital against workers’ struggle (and it doesn’t matter that the defeat will always be, at least partially, on the workers’ terms – it’s still a defeat).
I can’t even begin to think what Hardt and Negri’s purpose is in this article. Perhaps enlightenment will come from the Aut-op-sy mailing list is filled with filled with interesting comments on the issue (unfortunately, they have the worst archives in the world, so the posts on this issue are scattered between other posts, many of them very interesting too – see, for example, the class composition analysis of football hooliganism).
Meanwhile, Paul Dunne will doubtless be pleased to learn that he is the top Google result for ‘adorno’ and ‘recuperated’, and another result for the same search suggests that Schmitt and Benjamin might be useful in understanding the BBC’s relaunch of TOTP.
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