I sat in on a presentation by the Team Colors Collective at Modern Times Bookstore the other day. Team Colors Collective take their inspiration from Italian Marxist currents of the 60s and 70s which, diverging from the increasingly aloof and reformist Italian Communist Party (PCI), emphasized direct inquiries into the labor process and the conditions of the working class. This form of worker’s inquiry or “co-research” eschews the distance of academic research, calling for political collaboration with research subjects. Even as the Italian Autonomia abandoned its commitment to co-research in favor of more esoteric and distant theorizing, the anglophone Midnight Notes Collective took up this model in its research into primitive accumulation or “New Enclosures” in Nigeria, extending it to subjects outside of the traditional working class, and now the third-generation Team Colors Collective brings co-research to bear on a wide variety of activist groups.
Let me first admit that I’ve only glanced at their anthology—Uses of the Whirlwind—so the following should be read as occasioned by the TCC rather than in response to them. One of the concepts bandied about by Autonomist Marxism—particularly Antonio Negri—is that workers should refuse to labor for capital and instead produce use-values for themselves (auto-valorization). So, one of the many projects mentioned by the TCC was community gardening in Detroit. Detroit, suffering 50% unemployment and losing population every year, has been abandoned by supermarkets, leaving residents without access to inexpensive food. Here, capital has refused the working class rather than vice versa (even if we connect the fall of Detroit to auto-workers’ wage struggle) but functionally the move is the same—rather than obtain use-values through monetary exchange (and thereby continue to valorize capital), citizens of Detroit raise food for themselves for free. This is great as a palliative measure and at least potentially useful for creating a life-support system for future struggles. Workers who depend less on money to meet their needs can strike for longer or engage in even more revolutionary action. Granted.
But all of this talk about “exodus” from capitalist bondage or withdrawal from labor and exchange fails to appreciate workerist \ autonomist theories of the social factory and, in particular, reproductive labor. The autonomists argued that the entirety of life, waged and unwaged, now works to valorize capital. The reproduction of the working class—all of the things it takes to get workers back to the factory gates and ready to work—requires a great deal of unpaid labor, often carried out by women. Capital does not have to pay the wage the worker would require to pay someone else to wash his or her dishes, or cook food, or care for and socialize future workers, or what have you—it’s done for free by the worker’s household or by the workers themselves. This unpaid labor, therefore, ultimately ends up as more surplus value for capital. Community gardening, then, might very well be just another subsidy for capital, reproducing workers gratis and thereby contributing to the vast pool of unpaid labor that accrues to the employing class.
Of course, that should come with a few caveats. Paying for food valorizes capital, too, and presumably at a higher rate. Moreover, it’s not as if the wage level automatically drops if one worker in a hundred does laundry in her bath tub instead of dry-cleaning. DIY practices might just free up more cash for workers, making life a little more bearable. And these practices have their value as propaganda or consciousness-raising tools.
But focus on self-reliance, estrangement, or autonomy at the expense of direct struggle is counterproductive. There’s always talk in anarchist-leaning contexts about building the new world in the shell of the old, about alternative models, small-scale projects, that anticipate and embody a different mode of politics and production. Let’s face it, these little pockets of utopia hiding in the pores of capitalism are always going to be small, meager, and constrained unless they expropriate the wealth of capital. Even if these enterprises succeed without access to funds or a stable, paid workforce, there’s still the question of co-optation. Capitalism has always been promiscuous—it gladly articulates itself with other modes of production, other ways of capturing value: capital welcomed the labor of slaves in antebellum America and now enjoys the commodities produced by workers in state capitalist China. Indeed, the household has been described by Resnick & Wolfe as a formally communist mode of production—one in which workers appropriate their own surplus value. Capital will always push to enclose, privatize, and subsume these modes of production—restaurants replace home-cooked meals, corporate farming shoves out subsistence farming—but their existence does not pose a necessary threat. That is not to say that anything that does not bring down capitalism is futile but, rather, that there is a need for policy or institutional change. I’m attracted to autonomism because it takes seriously the demands of the working class — often to the point of failing to account for ideology or false consciousness — but I think this needs to be coupled with a look at the demands of the capitalist class: what is it they aren’t willing to give up? Where are the zero sum games between capital and labor? Where does capital resist labor? At sites of worker appropriation, when workers reclaim capital. Auto-reduction, strike actions, the social wage, and expropriation, but not auto-valorization.
