Auto Italia South East presents Auto Italia LIVE: Double Dip Concession, an artist-run Live TV show performed before a studio audience and broadcast over the internet. Working in collaboration with Auto Italia, artists are developing new work in collaboration for this one-off episode which engages directly with the format of live television.

The episode will be broadcast live from the ICA Theatre on Saturday June 9th at 7pm. For more information and to book tickets, click HERE.

Auto Italia LIVE: Double Dip Concession is commissioned by the ICA as part of Remote Control – 3 April 2012 – 10 June 2012. Supported by Arts Council England.

Promo produced by Benedict Drew. With thanks to Nathan Budzinski, Marianne Forrest and Jess Weisner.

Our old Auto Italia warehouse on Glengall Road has now been completely demolished and the site is empty awaiting re-development. Glengall Road was home to Auto Italia from 2008 to 2010 and housed a wide-range of projects with a huge number of collaborators.

We’d like to take a moment to delve into the archive, re-visit some of the projects that took place in that space and say a huge thank you to everyone who was involved in making them happen.

Simon Leahy and Ansis Kirmuzs rehearsing for PROH-SOH’ PA-PEER.

Auto Italia illuminated with a copy of Andreas Slominski’s Christmas Decoration for Spring as part of A History of Two Mountains II.

The interior of the Glengall Road warehouse after the move-in and a huge cleaning and renovation push from our amazing team of volunteers.

Lucky Dragons perform ‘Making a Baby’.

A piece by Danielle Dean in the Panda Malin-Head show.

Veronica from Teeth crowd-surfs at YES WAY! 2009.

The shop at 2010′s YES WAY! event.

Richard John Jones, Carlos Monleon Gendall and Josh Love performing in outfits designed by Craig Green at YES WAY!

Inking the windows of Auto Italia with Sumi Ink Club.

Rachel Pimm talks to camera (manned by Theo Cook) as part of the first Auto Italia LIVE project in 2010.

Following on from our re-publication of Mark Fisher’s examination of autonomy and post-capitalism, we’re excited to present Marina Vishmidt’s text Counter (Re-)Productive Labour, also commissioned during ‘We Have Our Own Concept of Time and Motion’ for the accompanying publication.

Marina Vishmidt is a writer, editor and Ph.D. candidate at Queen Mary, University of London – whose discussion with Mark Fisher as to whether art work – as comparable to housework – provides a possibility for a post-capitalist future closed the first day of events during the Time and Motion project. Here we revisit her article, which examines similar questions surrounding domestic and immaterial labour, and present the piece in full.

Counter (Re-)Productive Labour

Marina Vishmidt

This text is modified from a paper delivered at the ‘Beyond Re/Production: MOTHERING – Dimensionen der sozialen Reproduktion im Neoliberalismus’ exhibition, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin, 30 March 2011

This text proposes to situate the debate about the management of social reproduction in the historical framework of Marxist feminisms that redefined domestic labour as a question of critical political economy and class struggle, as well as in the present state of activist and theoretical practice. The starting point of my approach consists of inquiring into what it means to inscribe social practices which do not produce market commodities into the wage-form, more narrowly, and into the value-form more broadly. Another aspect to this would be the production of subjectivity that arises out of struggles that necessarily include both moments of identification with and negation of, or, the consolidation and dispersion of, of a social category or identity, and feminist politics as well as communist politics are two examples which I have worked with for some time (although the same paradoxes, or, rather, dialectics, can be found in any social movement that has to invoke a group identity which marginalizes in order both to overcome the oppressions of that identity and to change the social conditions that make it possible, that is, the totality).

What these two sides of the inquiry have in common, for me, is the question of strategy.  There is the truism that whatever doesn’t kill capital only makes it stronger, and that also goes for ‘excessive demands’ such as Wages for Housework or the basic income which have been implemented only to the degree that they enhance the surveillance capacities of the state on behalf of capital’s ability to exploit the recipients of such ‘benefits’. Thus ‘excessive demands’ meant to raise social struggles to another plane tend to bear the paradoxical character that their real practical goals are so contrary to the profit motive that far from posing demands to capital that it cannot fulfil (or, as Silvia Federici once wrote, ‘Wages Against Housework’), they could only be realized in a revolutionary situation where capital and the state have been eliminated from the equation. As Marx put it in the first notebook of the Grundrisse when writing about the socialist proposals for ‘labour-money’, ‘This demand can be satisfied only under conditions where it can no longer be raised.’  Much the same can be said for social democratic demands made in a militant spirit like many of the arguments and demands posed by the education movements in the current period, such as ‘education must be free’: as demands, they seem to be addressed in an advisory spirit to a capitalist state which has lost its way, or to a political subject which can only be addressed in a reflexive capacity, like the subject of Kant’s aesthetic judgement.  But it is not to be discounted that such invocations may yet develop real power, looking at the severely curtailed horizons for capital at present, certainly in Europe and the United States.

So, to begin historically, I would like to take the experience of Italian Autonomist Marxism, or Operaismo as it is also called, from two standpoints: one, the negation of labour, and the other the redefinition of unproductive as productive labour. The negation of labour standpoint of the period is often summed up by Mario Tronti’s thinking on the ‘refusal of work’ and the refusal of political identity stemming from the worker’s place in the social and technical relations of capital: ”’To struggle against capital, the working class must fight against itself insofar as it is capital.”’ In this sense, what is discussed as ‘workerism’ does, from the very start, at least as far as Tronti or e.g. Raniero Panzieri were concerned, entail a rejection of work as constituted in capitalist social relations rather than a valorisation of a productivity severed from capitalist control: this is capital understood as a social relation, not as a parasitic power the way that much subsequent post-autonomist writing has figured it.  Though it can’t be avoided that this latter does follow from the autonomist ‘Copernican turn’, initiated also by Tronti, that is, labour is the primary rather than the dependent variable in the development of capital.  The other standpoint is the redefinition of housework, care work, etc. as productive labour by the autonomist feminists such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Leopoldina Fortunati, etc. which is the perspective that underlay the Wages for Housework demand.

These feminist activists and theorists in the 1970s were responsible for pointing out the necessity of unpaid labour to the system of production centred on waged labour. This argument can be seen as addressing surplus value production (the dependence of profit on unpaid labour) from the viewpoint of divisions within the working class: the labour-power of waged workers is dependent on the unwaged labour of housewives. The revolutionary perspective here was one that aimed to consolidate fractions of the class exploited in very different ways by showing a unity of interests against exploitation – making the question of the wage ancillary rather than definitive for determining the political subject of class struggle. The wage divides workers from one another and produces a form of discipline and identification between the interests of labour and capital (though it should be noted, that the wage preserves a dialectical mismatch between those interests, while the prevalence of debt today, for ex., coercively closes the gap where that mismatch can become a site of struggle).  The solution of collectivising housework and care work would here also be insufficient, so long as the gendered division of waged and unwaged labour and its place in the larger capital-labour relation remained unchanged.

The strategic importance of re-defining ‘women’s work’ as productive work in terms of capital in this way was that since male ‘productive workers’ were the most radical and mobilized part of the Italian worker’s movement, this was a way both to unite the feminist movement with them – to bring together the feminist and the worker’s movement on the ground of exploitation – and to expand the worker’s movement into social reproduction, as also seen from the practices of self-reduction, proletarian shopping, mass squatting, and so forth. It also enacted the discourse of ‘refusal of work’, while pointing out that a housewives’ strike had a very different meaning from a strike in the factory: a housework strike would inevitably be more radical, since the withdrawal of labour at the factory relied in great measure on continued labour in the home.

Yet, Wages for Housework was always contradictory, since by proposing that yet another ‘social program’ or ‘entitlement’ (as they’re called in the U.S.) be introduced, they were tactically confusing the ‘social wage’ (welfare state concessions by capital for the part of the population it does not require for its self-valorisation or which it has exhausted) with the wage as it was paid to the formally employed.  This kind of social wage was counterpoised to what was even then an increasingly fictitious ‘family wage’ which implied one salary by a male breadwinner would be enough to cover the needs of a family of non-employed dependents – a powerful fiction, since it had been used to keep working women’s wages artificially low from the time of the Industrial Revolution up to the present, and excluded women from the mainstream, as well as the radical, workers’ organizations. Also, the idea of ‘wages for housework’, when not enacted in the grotesque outcome of the return of commodified housework, namely migrant domestic labour to the homes of the global middle class, can be readily recuperated by the state as a form of management of populations inactive in the formal economy.

The point about the return of a domestic servant class is crucial, of course, as it reflects so many shifts in global capitalist accumulation – transnational migration and its regulation in Western countries and the feminization of that migration. There is also the dramatic increase in the numbers of women entering the workplace  – partially as a result of equal-rights legislation in the West – who are not in a position to do double-duty in the home as well, especially not with young children and the costs of child-care. This narrative is in fact an allegory of the fortunes of liberal or equality feminism which succeeded in many cases in removing gender from the terms of workplace exploitation, only to displace it to a raced and illegalized class of ‘other women’ as the welfare state melted away in the neoliberal era.  In this sense, the commodification of domestic labour violently enforces the class relations, and class divisions, of feminism, but should be seen as one of the series of defeats suffered by working-class social movements in neoliberalism, which has turned back the clock for women in specific ways as in line with a general social regression, rather than a defeat to be laid at the door of the limited vision held by liberal mainstream feminism – and the power of the latter may be read strictly as a symptom of the power of the former.

One of numerous lessons of Wages for Housework is the relationship of a contestation over how the value-form, here the wage, is applied to social relations, specifically social reproduction, to a turning-point in the mode of capitalist accumulation, to a moment of crisis (with the Italian Autonomist and Wages for Housework episodes occurring from the late 60s/early 70s onwards, around the events which were setting the stage for the neoliberal era). The wage there became a contested category, a lever for interrogating a whole mode of production from the standpoint of gender, and a way to link workplace struggles to social or ‘community’ struggles. This discussion could also link into the present day through what it might mean to consider debt in terms of the wage, that is as a site of class struggle, both in terms of the erosion of class antagonism, and its reconstitution on different grounds. But also, importantly, how debt has been used instead of the wage for access to goods as services, as well as the self-development (entrepreneurial and education life projects) implied in the figure of  “human capital” which has become objectively unavoidable as a form of life. In this sense, debt now, as the “discovery” of unpaid labour did then, signals the erosion of prospects for collective working-class activity based in the workplace. This is not only because so much, if not most, capitalist work happens outside the official workplace, as the Italian autonomist feminists pointed out, but because debt-fuelled accumulation produces identities tied to consumption, not production – this could be seen as one of the key subjective political consequences of the post-1970s restructuring of the labour-capital relation – even as surplus-value extraction has intensified drastically over this time. This is not to naturalize the distinction between consumption and production; the whole structure of economies running on asset bubbles and service industries make that untenable. Such a naturalization also has specific political consequences, as is plainly in evidence in coverage of the recent riots: the label of ‘consumerism’ is used to isolate, pathologize and de-politicize looting, as distinct from the productive ‘politics’ of protest, or attacking ‘legitimate’ targets.1

We’re very excited to announce that Auto Italia will be producing a new episode of Auto Italia LIVE as part of the ICA’s Remote Control exhibition (April 3^rd – June 10^th 2012) as well as exhibiting the three 2011 episodes in the Reading Room. The new episode will be filmed in front of a studio audience and streamed live on the Internet on June 9^th at 7pm.

Working in collaboration with Auto Italia, artists will produce all aspects of the broadcast and create a space for producing and distributing work whilst also engaging critically with the medium of live TV itself. Framed by the ICA’s survey of artistic engagement with television, Auto Italia LIVE will explore new possibilities of working with contemporary broadcast and Internet culture.

Click through to watch 2011′s Episode 1: Talking Objects in Space, Episode 2: Cosmosis and Episode 3: C2C P2P.

For more information about the event, and to book tickets, click HERE.

As the economic and political landscape around us still seems to be in free-fall, it is becoming a matter of urgency to struggle against the stagnation of our working conditions and well rehearsed rhetoric of emancipatory change from above. Last August, we produced a project called ’We Have Our Own Concept of Time and Motion‘ Over four days of activity, including discussions, workshops and an onsite printing press we considered the role of self-organisation within our current conditions but with a focus on our own position – not only talking but also ‘working through’ these ideas. There was a lot of discussion around the project at the time which has continued through the rest of our programme. Six months on, we want to re-visit some of the material, open up the project as a resource and keep the conversation going.

We’re excited to re-publish Mark Fisher’s text The Future is still ours: autonomy and post-capitalism, originally comissioned to accompany the project. As the author of Capitalist Realism (Zer0, 2009), Fisher writes regularly for Film Quarterly, Sight&Sound and The Wire, and on his own weblog, k-punk. In this text Mark introduces his framework for examining contemporary leftist political organisation and considers future possibilities for these networks.

To listen to Mark in conversation with Marina Vishmidt, recorded on the first day of Time and Motion, click HERE.

The Future is still ours: autonomy and post-capitalism

Mark Fisher

Adam Curtis’s recent documentary series All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace argued that discourses of self-organisation, which had formerly been associated with the counterculture, were now absorbed into dominant ideology. Hierarchy was bad; networks were good. Organisation itself – held to be synonymous with “top-down control” – was both oppressive and inefficient. There is clearly something in Curtis’s arguments. Practically all mainstream political discourse is suspicious of, and sceptical towards, the state, planning and the possibilities of organised political change. This feeds into the ideological framework that I have called capitalist realism: if systemic change can never happen, all we can do is make the best of capitalism.

There’s no doubt that the right has been able to profit from identifying the left with an allegedly superseded ‘top down’ version of politics. Neoliberalism imposed a model of historical time which places bureaucratic centralisation in the past, by contrast with a “modernisation” that is held to be synonymous with “flexibility” and “individual choice”. More recently, the much derided idea of the Big Society is, in effect, a right wing version of autonomism. The work of Phillip Blond, one of the architects of the “Big Society” concept, is saturated with the rhetoric of self-organisation. In the report “The Ownership State” which he wrote for the ResPublica think-tank, Blond writes of “open systems” which “recognise that uncertainty and change render traditional command-and-control ineffective.” While Blond’s ideas have been seen by many as obfuscatory justifications for the neoliberal privatisation agenda, Blond himself positions them as critical of neoliberalism. Blond notes a paradox that I also discuss in Capitalist Realism: rather than eliminating bureaucracy, as it promised to, neoliberalism has led to its proliferation. Since public services can never function as “proper” markets, the imposition of the “market solution” in healthcare and education “generates a huge and costly bureaucracy of accountants, examiners, inspectors, assessors and auditors, all concerned with assuring quality and asserting control that hinder innovation and experiment and lock in high cost.” Such systems, Blond writes, are “organic rather than mechanistic, and require a completely different management mindset to run them. Strategy and feedback from action are more significant than detailed planning (‘Fire – ready – aim!’ as Tom Peters wrote); hierarchies give way to networks; the periphery is as important as the centre; self-interest and competition are balanced by trust and cooperation; initiative and inventiveness are required rather than compliance; smartening up rather than dumbing down.” Since the right is now prepared to talk in these terms, it is clear that networks and open systems are not enough in themselves to save us. Rather, as Gilles Deleuze argued in his crucial essay “Postscripts on Societies of Control”, networks are simply the mode in which power operates in the “control” societies that have superseded the old “disciplinary” structures.

Does all this then mean that ideas of autonomy and self-organisation would inevitably be co-opted by the right, and that there is no further political potential in them for the left? Definitely not – far from indicating any deficiency in autonomist ideas, the co-option of these ideas by the right shows that they have continuing potency. Seeing what is wrong with Blond and his ilk’s appropriation of autonomism will also tell us something about what the difference between right and left might be in the future.

Curtis is right that the principal way in which autonomist ideas have been neutralised is by using them against the very idea of political organisation. Yet autonomist theories continue to be crucial because they give us some resources for constructing a model of what leftist political organisation could look like in the post-Fordist conditions of mandatory flexibility, globalisation and just-in-time production. We can no longer be in any doubt that the conditions which gave rise to the “old left” have collapsed in the global North, but we must have the courage not to be nostalgic for this lost Fordist world of boring factory work and a labour movement dominated by male industrial workers. As Antonio Negri so powerfully put it in one of the letters collected in the recently published Art And Multitude, “We have to live and suffer the defeat of truth, of our truth. We have to destroy its representation, its continuity, its memory, its trace. All subterfuges for avoiding the recognition that reality has changed, and with it truth, have to be rejected. … The very blood in our veins had been replaced.”  Even though the shift into so-called “cognitive” labour has been overstated – just because work involves talking doesn’t make it “cognitive”; the labour of a call centre worker mechanically repeating the same rote phrases all day is no more “cognitive” than that of someone on a production line – Antonio Negri is right that the liberation from repetitive industrial labour remains a victory. Yet, as Christian Marazzi has argued, workers have been like the Old Testament Jews: led out of the bondage of the Fordist factory, they are now marooned in the desert. As Franco Berardi has shown, precarious work brings with it new kinds of misery: the always-on pressure made possible by mobile telecommunications technology means that there is no longer any end to the working day. An always-on population lives in a state of insomniac depression, unable to ever switch off.

But what has to differentiate the left from the right is a commitment to the idea that liberation lies in the future, not the past. We have to believe that the currently collapsing neoliberal reality system is not the only possible modernity; that, on the contrary, it is a cybergothic form of barbarism, which uses the latest technology to reinforce the power of the oldest elites. It is possible for technology and work to be arranged in completely different ways to how they configured now. This belief in the future is our advantage over the right. Phillip Blond’s networked institutions may have a cybernetic sheen, but he argues that they must be situated in a social setting which is re-dedicated to “traditional values” coming from religion and the family. By strong contrast, we must celebrate the disintegration of these “values”, as the necessary precondition for new kinds of solidarity. This solidarity won’t emerge automatically. It will need the invention of new kinds of institutions, as well as the transformation of older bodies, such as trade unions. “One of the most important questions,” Deleuze wrote in the “Control” essay “will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing?” Perhaps the lineaments of that future can be seen in Latin America, where left wing governments facilitate worker-run collectives. The issue is not any more of abandoning the state, government or planning, but making them part of new systems of feedback that will draw upon – and constitute – collective intelligence. A movement that can replace global capitalism does not need centralisation, but it will require co-ordination. What form will this co-ordination take? How can different autonomous struggles work together? These are the crucial questions we must ask as we begin to build the post-capitalist world.