Categories: Interventions, Militant Research
Minor Compositions is launching a workers’ inquiry into the shaping of creative, cultural, and artistic labor in the metropolis. We are currently searching for accomplices and comrades to take part and further develop this investigation. Description and more information below.
The Metropolitan Factory: making a living as a creative worker
Short survey on creative labor (more…)
Categories: Events, Interventions
Seminar on Political Organization March 12th
March 12th, 4PM-6PM @ University of Essex Room 5N.7.23
Centre for Work, Organization, and Society
Rodrigo Nunes, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande Do Sul
With the Arab Spring, the Spanish indignados, Occupy and so much more, 2011 is likely to go down in history as a very special year – perhaps even the beginning of something. But what would that something be? This presentation attempts to draw some conclusions about the present state and future of politics and organization by examining the practices of the movements that erupted in the last year. Thinking beyond their usual representation by the media, trying to avoid either describing them as something entirely new and unheard of or as manifestations of an ultimately non-political culture, what can be the lessons of 2011?
Categories: Interventions
Immanent Singularities: A Minor Compositions Interview with Bruno Gulli
As a philosopher and academic worker, Bruno Gulli is nothing if not untimely. In an era when the labor of thought, the work that creates new concepts, finds itself squeezed by an ever-increasing array of restrictions (from journal and publisher limitations to lack of time from overwork and precarious employment), Gulli bucks these trends in a spectacular fashion. Rather than composing 8000 word chunks of pabulum, simply recycling tired clichés or niceties, Gulli has embarked on composing a three-volume inquiry into the relation between ethics, labor, and ontology. Such an approach might not have seemed all that remarkable fifty years ago, but today to carry out such a fundamental rethinking of our categories of political thought and discourse is paradoxically no longer appreciated, and therefore all the more necessary. Gulli’s first book, The Labor of Fire (2005, Temple University Press) led Michael Hardt to comment that the work of Gulli, along with others carrying out similar work, will renew the Marxist tradition. This renewal, he claims, will not be of a scientific, structuralist, or humanist Marxism, but rather a philosophical approach to Marx centered on the concept of labor its power of social transformation. High words of praise indeed. This interview was conducted shortly after the publication of his most recent book Earthly Plenitudes: A Study on Sovereignty and Labor(2010, Temple University Press). (more…)
Categories: Interventions
Operaist Freedom
By Gigi Roggero
Translation by Silvia Federici
“Look, you went to the wrong floor” Romano Alquati would answer at the beginning of the 1990s to a leftist student who wanted to write a dissertation on (factory) workers. If you want to write a dissertation on (factory) workers you should go to the second floor, to “Archeology.” Like the “rude pagan race” [Tronti’s description of the mass worker], Alquati had no gods and refused myths. The cult of the past is a wretched thing. When he arrived in Torino in 1960, after growing up in Cremona and having lived in Milano in the commune of via Sirtori 2 (a true cultural and intellectual crucible of the 1950s and ‘60s, meeting point of Phenomenology and Marxism, international crossroad of philosophers and revolutionaries), Romano, like the politically and humanly exceptional generation that would give life to operaism, was not in search of a metaphysical, disembodied subject, heroic custodian of the general interest. “There have been and there are still a populist and welfarist operaism (of Christian origin), a trade-unionist operaism, a combination of both, whose characteristic was considering (factory) workers “the weak section” of the population, thus in need of help. These operaists love (factory) workers, the very condition of being a factory worker. The ‘political’ operaists, instead, were interested in proletarian workers because, against all universalisms, they saw them as strong, a power.” (more…)