Cleaver's response to Aufheben review

What problems did you have with their discussion of class?

From my limited understanding of autonomous Marxism (have only read a couple of very short articles and have only just started "Reading Capital Politically"), it appears that they take a very different view of what constitutes the working class from traditional Marxism. For traditional Marxism the "working class" was defined, in part, by the fact they received a wage for the work they produced. Autonomous Marxism developed to understand the "working class" as the "social worker", including those who did not receive a wage. This included the likes of students, housewives/husbands etc, with the rationale being that all these groups helped, in their own way, to reproduce labour as they are all integral parts of the "social factory". For example, autonomous Marxists would argue for wages for housework as housewives/husbands help bring up children (thus reproducing labour), ensure that their partners can relax when they return home from work etc.

I'm not an expert on this viewpoint at all, but I think one of the main criticisms of this approach is that it ends up defining loads of people as "workers" and, hence, tends to lose the ability to diferentiate between what are different groups. I'm sure most Autonomous Marxists would say that this criticism is rubbish, and that each group will still need to develop different, but often complementary, approaches (hence the "autonomous" in their title) to act against capital.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Redmist - is Steve Wright's book worth reading?

It is supposed to be very good. Check www.abebooks.com fo it. I'll be buying it as soon as I make my way through the current mountain that I have!

Butchers is your man on autonomism, by the way.

I have just finished that article above, and was a bit dissapointed with Aufheben's review. I found Reading Capital Politically to be a very useful book, one that was articulating a positive development of marxist thought in a direction that is very useful to anarchists.

Aufheben confused me as they constantly referred to "autonomism" as a bad development, when I was under the impression that they were the foermweost autonomist marxist journal in the UK? TheCommoner is as well, but I think that Aufheben is better respected.

Cleaver's criticisms of their review were on the whole fair, although he did seem to personalise the whole issue a little too much for me.

Has anyone on here read much more by Negri? What about the impenetrable "Empire"?

It is supposed to be very good. Check www.abebooks.com fo it. I'll be buying it as soon as I make my way through the current mountain that I have!

Butchers is your man on autonomism, by the way.

I have just finished that article above, and was a bit dissapointed with Aufheben's review. I found Reading Capital Politically to be a very useful book, one that was articulating a positive development of marxist thought in a direction that is very useful to anarchists.

Aufheben confused me as they constantly referred to "autonomism" as a bad development, when I was under the impression that they were the foermweost autonomist marxist journal in the UK? TheCommoner is as well, but I think that Aufheben is better respected.

Cleaver's criticisms of their review were on the whole fair, although he did seem to personalise the whole issue a little too much for me.

Has anyone on here read much more by Negri? What about the impenetrable "Empire"?

These is a long anarchist review of it at http://struggle.ws/andrew/empirereview.html also in Swedish at http://www.yelah.net/articles/analys020319