To Anticipate and Accelerate: Italian Operaismo and Reading Marx's Notion of the Organic Composition of Capital

Abstract

This essay proposes to follow a basic philological track: to illustrate Italian operaismo's theses on the metamorphoses of labor through the lens of Marx's notion of the organic composition of capital (OCC). Since the 1960s, operaismo not only has been importing new labor subjectivities into canonical Marxism but also has shaped these concepts inside a very Marxian logic. Marx's OCC has accompanied operaismo for fifty years, from Tronti's social factory and Alquati's prophetic account of the cybernetic factory to the more recent model of anthropogenic industries. The organic relation implied in Marx's composition of fixed capital and variable capital is also key to understanding operaismo's hypothesis of cognitive capitalism. Finally, operaismo's method is identified in the acceleration of Marx's notion of the tendency of capitalist development.

Key Words:

• Capitalist Development
• Cognitive Capitalism
• Karl Marx
• Operaismo
• Organic Composition of Capital

Notes

1. Panzieri's works are fundamental to understanding the ground from which operaismo moved. His text on machines and “neocapitalism” and his general framing of capitalist development in the first issue of Quaderni Rossi can still be perceived at work behind Tronti's turn. It is precisely because of the “ambiguity” of Panzieri's position, however, that Tronti is taken here as the first proper beginning of operaismo (see Negri 1975).