Nihilist Optimism

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...