Labor landscapes of post-Fordism are commonly characterized by fragmentation, fracture, and atomization, with platformization as the latest abstraction of a workplace that is everywhere and nowhere. The period following the 2008 financial crash has been posed as an interregnum where the exposed contradictions of neoliberalism have not yet ousted this order, while multiple actors jostle to grasp the reins. In this paper, I propose a focus on the cultural practices of place-making in theorizing contemporary class struggle with reference to two groups of digital laborers: tech workers and online sex workers. Taking the incubator—a place of pooled resources for companies in-the-making—as a jumping off point, I consider the interrelations, differentials, and potentials for class (re)composition when the distinction of work from life is as blurred as it is distinguishing. From an autonomist perspective and looking to collectives such as the Tech Workers Coalition and Hacking//Hustling, I unpick the “common sense” of a placeless platformed capital to explore the multiplicity of the “workplace,” what counts as “work,” and which places enable the imagination of otherwise. As visions of the “future of work” abound I ask, how can research under the umbrella of cultural studies support and co-create points of intervention—places of aggregation—in the interregnum?
Keyword: Autonomist Marxism
Context and Organization: Situating Antonio Negri’s Factory of Strategy in the Contemporary Debate on the Party Form
This paper begins by observing a tension in contemporary political discourse on the left: against a backdrop of social movements that prioritize “horizontal” organizational structures, there has been a renewed academic debate on the relevance of Lenin and the party form. In this paper I look at Antonio Negri’s recently translated Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin (a work based on a collection of lectures originally delivered by Negri in the 1970s). I suggest that Negri’s intervention can make a significant contribution to this debate, one that—without rejecting the Leninist project as such—reframes what it would mean to appropriate Lenin for today. By focusing on Lenin’s method of political analysis rather than his specific form of organization, I argue that Negri recovers from within Lenin’s writing a set of categories that can themselves provide the terms for a critique of contemporary Leninism. For Negri, this entails showing how Lenin’s system contains the means by which to theorize its own supersession. In presenting a theory of political intervention that is able to reflexively analyze its historical conditions of possibility, I suggest that Negri’s work on Lenin embodies several important theoretical and methodological commitments. This paper’s concluding section looks at recent work by Jodi Dean and critically interprets her endorsement of the party form in light of Negri’s intervention.