Like Marx, autonomists looked at the ‘technical composition’ of production, such as the division of labour, management practices, the spatial layout and temporal rhythms of workplaces, and especially the use of machinery. They did so, however, to emphasize the problems and possibilities of ‘political composition’, that is, the organization of the working class to fight for improvements in wages, hours and conditions, and, ultimately, create a revolution against capital. Political composition might take the form of trade unions and socialist or communist parties; as or more important were waves of wildcat strikes, sabotage and absenteeism. Such rebellions would often be led by workers in some particularly strategic sector of the economy. Capital, on the other hand, would attempt to ‘decompose’ or break down such movements, replacing striking workers with machines, raising the overall unemployment level, or surveilling workplaces to repress organizing. Autonomists think capital cannot do without humans, and, given this, decomposition will always be met by recomposition as workers, often within some new sector of industry, perceive the cracks and weaknesses in capital’s latest methods of control.
The sequence of composition/decomposition/recomposition thus results in ‘cycles of struggle’ that drive capital on an incessant flight into the future, seeking ever-more extreme solutions to its worker problem. Historically, the resistance of skilled technical workers to early industrial capital was slowly decomposed first by the time and motion studies of Taylorism and then by the semi-automated assembly lines of the Fordist factory. But this change paradoxically became the basis for a working-class recomposition. By reducing work to the homogeneity and monotony of the assembly line, Fordism generates the ‘mass worker’, whose power lay in the ability to bring to a halt the huge technological apparatus in which it is implanted. The mass worker’s parties, unions and strike-power terrified twentieth-century capital with the threat of revolution, a threat that, even when unrealized, extracted the concession of regular wage increases and welfare-state provisions.
This brings us to a second term from the autonomist lexicon, ‘the social factory’. Marx (1990, 1991, 1992, 1993) described capital as a circuit, a total system comprising both the sphere of production and that of circulation, with neither holding primacy. Whereas production is the dual process of making use-values and extracting surplus-value from labour, circulation realizes this value by getting commodities to market and selling them, a process involving activities such as transportation and logistics, advertising and retail sales. Marx also identified a third, increasingly powerful sector tied to circulation, that of finance: banking, credit and speculative activities. Finally, he at least sketched the sphere external to, yet functionally necessary for, capital, that of consumption and social reproduction in which human capacities to labour were renewed. He thought of this in terms of the consumption of goods, but, as feminist Marxists have forcefully pointed out, it also involves vast amounts of work, much of it unwaged and performed by women bearing, raising, educating and maintaining people for a life of labour (Federici 2012; Bhattacharya 2018). ‘Social factory’ is the term used by autonomists to name this entire complex of integrated functions. Initially, they used it to indicate how the industrial factory was a hub around which all capital’s other activities revolved (Tronti 1977). Later they developed it to suggest how capital could be fought not just on the industrial shop-floor, but in schools, households, shops and warehouses around the entire circuit of capital, thereby expanding the concept of the proletariat beyond a solely industrial base.
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inhuman power