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The Multitude and the Many-Headed Hydra: Autonomist Marxist Theory and Labor History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2013

Verity Burgmann
Verity Burgmann*
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne
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Abstract

The autonomist Marxist critique of determinist Marxism offers even more valuable insights for labor historians than that mounted by earlier antideterminists, such as Sartre and Thompson, who emphasized proletarian agency to counter determinist orthodoxy in which the accumulative logic of capital unilaterally shapes the world. Autonomist Marxism is more far-reaching. It places labor at the very beginning of the labor-capital dialectic: Labor can exist independently of capital, but capital needs to command labor to ensure profit; therefore, capitalist development does not occur due to internal momentum but in reaction to labor's tendency to unloose itself from capital. Linebaugh and Rediker offer a similar hypothesis in exploring the myth of the many-headed hydra—and demonstrate the fruitfulness of such an approach. By contrast, the notion of the multitude in Hardt and Negri's Empire has not been well received by labor historians due to its inexplicable abstraction when read in isolation from other autonomist texts. This article attempts to rescue the ideas of autonomist Marxist philosophers, especially Toni Negri, from the enormous condescension of labor history.

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Articles
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 83: Strikes and Social Conflicts , Spring 2013 , pp. 170 - 190
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2013 

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References

NOTES

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101. Ibid., 185–187.

102. Negri, “Archaeology and Project,” 205–208.

103. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 62

104. Ibid., xi.

105. Ibid., xii–xiii.

106. Negri, “Crisis of the Crisis-State,” 193.

107. Negri, The Politics of Subversion, 57–58.

108. Michael Goddard, “Interminable Autonomy: Bifo's Symptomatologies of the Present,” Mute Magazine (December 15, 2009), 5.

109. Negri, “Archaeology and Project,” 208.

110. Ibid., 199, 209.

111. Ibid., 219.

112. Negri, The Politics of Subversion, 89.

113. Ibid.

114. Ibid., 102.

115. Ibid., 91.

116. Negri, The Porcelain Workshop, 25.

117. Negri, “Archaeology and Project,” 219.

118. Negri, The Politics of Subversion, 58–59.

119. Ibid., 85.

120. Negri, “Archaeology and Project,” 220.

121. Negri, The Politics of Subversion, 84.

122. Negri, “Archaeology and Project,” 221

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