Nihilist Optimism

Improvised music tends to arrive burdened with a surprisingly limited collection of images. On one side is the noodly jam band: musicians wandering amiably through an indefinitely extended groove, waiting for something to happen and apparently unconcerned if it ever does. On the other is the ecstatic saxophone solo inherited from the popular memory of free jazz: eyes closed, cheeks inflated, the player pushing upwards towards some threshold where expression becomes scream, transcendence or bodily exhaustion. Improvisation appears either as endless conversational meandering or as heroic individual release. Neither model is particularly helpful for approaching Eddie Prévost. There are moments in this performance with Signe Emmeluth and Anton Lukoszevieze that could be located within the histories of free jazz or free improvisation. Emmeluth’s alto saxophone can move rapidly between fine melodic fragments and more abrasive, fractured cries. Lukoszevieze’s cello carries its own accumulated...

Capital cannot produce social cooperation by itself. It must make living labour carry it – and that dependence is where struggle begins. The history of the working day is not, for Marx, the story of enlightened reform gradually moderating the excesses of industrial capitalism. It is the record of a “protracted and more or less concealed civil war” (202) between capitalists and workers. The isolated worker, formally free to sell their labour-power, is powerless to determine the conditions under which that power will be consumed. Left alone in the marketplace, the worker “succumbs without resistance” (202). It is only through workers acting collectively that limits can be placed upon capital’s apparently unlimited right to command labour. This changes how the struggle over the working day must be understood. It is not simply a dispute about how the products of society should be divided: how much goes to wages, how much to profit, who receives more and who receives less. The apparent laws...

In this section of Workers and Capital , Mario Tronti returns to one of Marx’s most unsettling claims: that to be a productive worker under capitalism is not a fortunate condition but a “sad fate.” Productive labour is not defined by its usefulness, its skill, its social necessity, or its contribution to human flourishing. It is defined by its relation to capital. Productive labour is labour that produces surplus-value, and therefore labour that produces capital itself. To be productive, in this precise capitalist sense, is to participate in the reproduction of the social relation that dominates you. This is where Tronti’s argument opens onto the problem of the “social worker.” The worker is not simply an individual located in the factory, nor merely a seller of labour-power standing before the capitalist. Capitalist development increasingly socialises labour, drawing more and more forms of cooperation, knowledge, reproduction, circulation, and communication into its process of valoris...

INTERCEPTED COMMUNIQUÉ FROM THE INTERGALACTIC POSADIST OBSERVATORY OF CIVILIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT CLASSIFICATION: Cosmic Solidarity Level Gamma-7
 TRANSLATION STATUS: Automatically rendered into Terran English by the Department of Revolutionary Xenolinguistics
 SOURCE: Fourth Spiral Collective of the Sirius Proletarian Confederation
 DATE: 4,113 years after the Abolition of Scarcity REPORT 77-B: ON THE PECULIAR SUB-SPECIES ENCOUNTERED WITHIN EARTH’S INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER LEARNING Comrades, As part of our continuing investigation into the developmental trajectory of the species Homo sapiens, our field units recently undertook a series of discreet abductions in the geographical region known as “England.” Believing universities to be sites of advanced collective intelligence, democratic inquiry, and species-level self-reflection, we selected specimens occupying elevated positions within these institutions. The results have been perplexing. Initial observations suggested these specimen...

When in 1998, on the eve of the World Cup in France, it was written that the future of football belonged to multiracial teams, some might have thought it a provocation, one of the many exaggerations that football allows, just as it allows adults to cry in front of eleven men in shorts or the illusion that a victory on penalties can improve a nation’s GDP. Today, on the eve of the World Cup organized by the United States, Canada, and Mexico, we must recognize that provocation has become commonplace. Not because the world has become better. The world rarely improves. It simply changes shape. And football, the most reliable sociological laboratory of the contemporary age, noticed this before universities, governments, and often even citizens. In 1998, France seemed an exception. It was the France of Zidane, Thuram, Desailly, and Djorkaeff, a team that seemed to have been built by an enlightened official from the Ministry of Integration rather than a coach. The France Black-Blanc-Beur was ...

One of the most striking aspects of these sections (p129-159) of Workers and Capital is the way that Tronti develops a conception of socialization that is simultaneously central to later autonomist Marxism and yet markedly different from the forms it would take in the work of Antonio Negri. Reading these passages today, one encounters not an anticipation of the socialized worker as a figure of emerging autonomy, but rather a careful analysis of how the socialization of labour first appears as the socialization of capital itself. The argument proceeds from a deceptively simple observation. Labour-power is not naturally capital. Nor are the means of production. They become capital only within a historically specific social relation. For Tronti, the decisive question is therefore not labour in the abstract but the transformation of labour-power into capital through the wage relation. The secret of capitalist production lies not in humanity’s generic capacity to labour but in the historica...