CLASS COMPOSITION AND THE SOCIAL FACTORY
The idea of ‘class composition’ (Zerowork 1975; Kolinko 2002; Notes from Below 2018a, 2018b) originates in what is known as ‘autonomist Marxism’ (Cleaver 1979; Dyer-Witheford 1999; Eden 2012), a school whose emphasis on the potential strength and autonomy of workers (hence ‘autonomist’ Marxism), supplies a counterpoint to discussions of capital’s deepening machinic powers. Marx held that capital had a long-term tendency to replace workers (variable capital) with machines (fixed capital), and discussed this both in ‘technical’ terms, as it altered the organization of work, and in ‘value’ terms, as it affected capital’s rate of profit. For autonomist thinkers, Marx’s formulation was one-sided. It lacked a theory of how workers resist machinic exploitation. So they inverted Marx’s (1990: 762) concept of the ‘composition of capital’ and looked instead at the composition of the working class, that is to say, its changing capacities to challenge domination by capital.
automating the social factory
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