Communism: some thoughts on the concept and practice
Transcript of a presentation by Antonio Negri
Italy 1980-81: After Marx, jail! The attempted destruction of a communist movement - Red Notes
Red Notes' pamphlet charting the repression of Italy's 1970s extraparliamentary communist movement, when thousands of radical workers and intellectuals were swept into the country's jails.
Memories of a Metropolitan Indian
Submitted by vicent on Sep 13 2015 23:00
A former Metropolitan Indian (member of a situationist-influenced group in Italy) recounts some experiences with the group during the "Years of Lead": the violent late-1970s.
In the Social Factory?: Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work
This academic article is concerned with precariousness and cultural work. It aim is to bring into dialogue three bodies of ideas – the work of the autonomous Marxist ‘Italian laboratory’; activist writings about precariousness and precarity; and the emerging empirical scholarship concerned with the distinctive features of cultural work, at a moment when artists, designers and (new) media workers have taken centre stage as a supposed ‘creative class’ of model entrepreneurs
Man as machine
Submitted by Automnia on Oct 9 2013 22:20
As mainstream discourse again shifts towards a discussion of automation, @Aut_Omnia examines its mechanics, human cost and utopian potential.
The last twenty years of social liquidation - Miguel Amorós
In this 2006 lecture, Miguel Amorós depicts the previous twenty years as a period of radical changes for the emancipatory project, beginning with “the disappearance of the workers milieu” in the 1980s and the simultaneous rise of a new youth movement which, because it “started from zero” as a result of its lack of historical memory, was in part drawn to violence (“immediate confrontation”), and in part to the practice of “neo-contestatory”, “festive” forms of simulated struggle (“In the society of the spectacle protest is a form of leisure”), only to be “absorbed by the dynamic of survival in a hostile environment” as “the fifth wheel of the electoral bandwagon of social democracy”.
Rethinking class: from recomposition to counterpower - Paul Bowman
In this article Paul Bowman draws a line between revolutionary class analysis and universalist utopianism and goes on to explore the history of different ideas of class and the elusive revolutionary subject. After exploring the intersecting lines of class and identity, he poses the challenge that we as libertarian communists face as we strive to create “cultural and organisational forms of class power [that] do not unconsciously recreate the... hierarchies of identity and exclusion” that are the hallmark of the present society.
Work and non-work - Owen Hatherley
A short history of the refusal of work as a revolutionary strategy.
Apocalypse and survival - Francesco Santini
A harrowing intellectual biography and review essay devoted to the life and works of Giorgio Cesarano, interwoven with an account of the Italian “radical current” of 1968-1978, when revolutionary expectations ran high but, for the few consistent revolutionaries caught between the terrorism of the state and the armed groups, the hostility of the Stalinist and crypto-Stalinist political formations, and a ruthless and sweeping repression, the results were often madness, prison, suicide and a wave of disillusionment that devastated the revolutionary milieu.
