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From sour grapes to vitalism: the life politics of the Left

David Eden’s powerful study of autonomist Marxism or post-Operaismo, which shot to prominence with the popularity of Hardt and Negri’s Empire in 2000, is one of the best stories of the sour grapes of the Left written thus far. Eden focuses on three contemporary currents in autonomist Marxism – the work of Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno, the Midnight Notes Collective and that of John Holloway – and closely examines their work in terms of their analysis of capitalism, understandings of class and approaches to emancipation; highlighting both their strengths and limitations. He does not spend too much time on drawing the links with Operaismo/Workerism as a post1956 reaction against the Italian Communist Party (PCI), especially in the theoretical and political work around the time ofQuaderni Rossi (‘Red Notebooks’, 1961–65), Classe Operaia (‘Working Class’, 1963–66) and the organization Potere Operaio, or the generalization of anti-party calls for self-activity beyond the mass factory to the ‘social factory’ in the Italian autonomist movements of the 1970s. Some background would have allowed readers to appreciate how the shift from workerism in the 1960s to the autonomia/autonomist movement of the late 1970s, enabled the Italian Left to give 1968 student lifestyle radicalism a Marxist makeover: rather than an individualist, student-centred understanding of the world, workers in everyday life and struggle made the world and provided the life-giving creative vital forces which capitalism sought to be both parasitical upon and to artificially contain. Here sociology was the key discipline of critique: blurring the political/economic divide of Stalinist determinism and rejecting the party’s possession of ‘objective’ understandings of economic bases, structures and contradictions. There are three fundamental sour grapes at stake here: the liberal or modernist teleology of material progress; state power as capable of leading and directing social change; and the revolutionary party and revolutionary theory as capable of leading and directing political struggle. The ‘Copernican revolution’ of workerist self-activity put the present above the future, self-activity or the movement above the state or any formal institutions and everyday life, struggle and practice above parties and theory. The failures of the old Left would not be repeated, with their calls for