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This article analyzes a selection of collages made during the 1960s by Italian artist, writer, editor, and extraparliamentary activist Nanni Balestrini in relation to the dissident Marxist intellectual current of operaismo (workerism). Despite his centrality to both extraparliamentary activism and the cultural landscape in postwar Italy, Balestrini's artistic practice remains largely unexplored. Comprised of clipped, often provocative, newspaper fragments and aesthetically arranged to exploit the expressive potency of typography, the works remain visibly indebted to the tradition of avant-garde collage. However, they summon these procedures to address the challenges of a radically different historical moment. Sustained visual analysis and salient texts of political theory are utilized to demonstrate how Balestrini's collages investigate concerns that resonate with those of operaismo, and, in so doing, participate in the unfolding of new understandings of proletarian subjectivity and anticapitalist struggle. The constitutive disjunctures of collage and the medium's potential to spark fresh connections function crucially in this endeavor to reveal a historically contingent form of revolutionary aesthetics. At the same time, the works chart the theoretical and increasingly activist trajectories of operaismo itself, revealing sympathies for the current's most militant strands. Considered together, Balestrini's collages and the theories of operaismo emerge as deeply interconnected, mutually illuminating, and reinforcing one another throughout a period of intense political contestation in Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that, by looking to the generalization of a certain kind of artistic or creative character in paradigms of work, there is a view onto a different kind of relationship between culture and militant action and fugitivity. Here, the term destituent art is proposed to sketch out a form of cultural production that does or might lay waste not only to institutional targets of critique but also to the structurally immanent belief in institutional reform that underlies the aesthetics of that critique. It is an invitation to reconsider some key myths that structure art discourse (even if they appear as objects of critique) and an appeal to read that discursivity as not just productive but potentially destituent. To do so, the author reads operaismo's rereading of Marx against Marxism alongside theorizations of destituent insurrection through the subject of the artist. Some recent social movements in New York City targeting art institutions are analyzed to consider this connection. Like Colectivo Situaciones' discussion of destituent insurrection as a grammar that unifies surplus populations through their expressions of refusal (the riot, the strike, the commune) that are simultaneously modes of reorganizing forms of life, a destituent art would not signal a turn to a productive pessimism—that all creative work is already subsumed—but that the cultivation of destituent power actualizes and is actualized by the aesthetic production of places of action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political and organisational routes opened up on the contemporary left following the financial crisis have seen a revival of class composition analysis as a means of comprehending a broad array of social and economic phenomena both within and beyond the workplace. Contextualising contemporary class composition analysis as a long-standing component of autonomist Marxism, this article argues that its application amid the left's electoral turn exposes to scrutiny deeper-running weaknesses. The article first presents a history of class composition analysis through operaismo into postoperaismo. The second part of the article discusses four interconnected new directions in class composition analysis: Hardt and Negri's Assembly ; the analysis of social composition offered by the Notes from Below collective; Keir Milburn's analysis of 'generation left'; and, finally, the uptake of some of these ideas among commentators on the left of the British Labour Party like Paul Mason. The article then discusses the theoretical and strategic implications of these contributions through the prism of critiques of class composition analysis put forward by other theorists in the autonomist Marxist tradition. Noting the possible limitations confronting the application of class composition analysis to contemporary challenges faced by the post-crisis left, the penultimate section considers Labour Process Theory as a theoretical alternative implicit in recent critiques of contemporary class composition analysis, arguing that while Labour Process Theory's analysis of the 'politics of production' captures the contingency of the connection between the workplace and formal politics, it leaves unresolved the lack of a distinctive theory of the latter on the contemporary left. The final section reconnects the discussion to the legacy of operaismo by exploring Mario Tronti's recently translated work on the 'autonomy of the political' as a more substantial articulation of the specificity of politics against the backdrop of class conflict at the point of production. The conclusion relates this back to recent strategic issues in the Labour Party and broader labour movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article looks at several attempts to conceptualize a legitimate use of revolutionary violence in the anti‐authoritarian revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The central problem confronting the repertoire of action in this period lay in understanding how a violence deployed to fight power could avoid reproducing instances of this same power. Some, like Guy Debord, proposed a framework in which the revolutionary subject employs violence without becoming subject to such violence itself. Others, like Antonio Negri, sought to distinguish among various regimes of violence, arguing that true state violence was modally distinct from revolutionary violence, or the concrete materialization of a proletarian potentiality. Although opposed, both of these perspectives strive to mitigate or restrain the brutal subjectivation attending the exercise of violence. Placing this debate against the background of Walter Benjamin's claim, in his "Critique of Violence," that a "divine violence" that would neither sustain nor uphold law is "undisclosed to human beings," this article argues that the Autonomia movement in 1970s Italy reveals how such undisclosedness, such invisibility, becomes incarnated in a social form. If it is only by abandoning a concept of sovereign victory that a form of divine violence can appear, this is because its appearance coincides with the destitution of the cohesion of the social body upholding state sovereignty. Revolutionary violence is not nonviolence but, rather, a violence other than violence, a form of power whose content is a subjectivation beyond the problematic of sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Grounded in theories of workerism (operaismo) and post-workerism (autonomia and post-autonomia), this paper examines how Federico Rizzo's Fuga dal call center and, more extensively, Paolo Virzì's Tutta la vita davanti, both films from 2008, register the shift from material to immaterial labor in the twenty-first century. In both films, the call center replaces the factory as the space of labor; it is the privileged site where relational and affective skills, once not considered economically exploitable, become a source of surplus value, one that is gendered feminine. Against the exterior backdrop of a postmodern Rome and with interiors that mimic the non-spaces of the airport and television studio, Virzì stages work in the world of the hyper-real, which has become reality itself. Though they are works of fiction, heirs to the tradition of the 1960s commedia all'italiana, both films engage with an "ethics of the real" as Lucia Nagib has theorized it, and are concerned with addressing the socio-economic condition of a twenty-first-century class-in-the-making, the precariat, and its uncertain future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Este artículo pretende articular un encuentro entre el operaísmo y la ecología-mundo, es decir, un encuentro entre dos paradigmas teóricos cada vez más objeto de debate a nivel global, pero que, hasta el momento, no han sido analizados en estrecha relación. El operaísmo es una corriente del marxismo heterodoxo caracterizada por centrarse en la ambivalencia de la condición de la clase obrera (fuerza de trabajo/trabajo abstracto dentro del capital, clase obrera/trabajo vivo contra el capital) y la noción de la composición de clases sociales. La ecología-mundo puede definirse como un diálogo internacional que desarrolla el análisis del sistema-mundo desde una perspectiva ambiental: el capitalismo, por lo tanto, no tiene un régimen ecológico, sino que es un régimen ecológico, es decir, constituye un modo especifico de organizar la naturaleza. El objetivo de este artículo es demostrar que, a pesar de que las dos perspectivas se relacionan con la cuestión de la crisis (ecológica) de forma muy distinta, ellas pueden integrarse eficazmente si son yuxtapuestas a otro nivel: el del análisis histórico-político de la cuestión medioambiental. En su origen, ambos planteamientos revisan la teoría de la crisis de Marx, pero no eluden la polarización que caracteriza su evolución: mientras que el operaísmo tiende a reafirmar la tradición que considera la crisis como un momento de desarrollo, la ecología-mundo desarrolla la teoría de la brecha metabólica de un modo bastante inaudito. La convergencia entre estos dos paradigmas —lo que, en realidad, constituye un exigente intercambio teórico y que, por lo tanto, requiere una intensa reflexión por parte de ambas posiciones— puede producirse a través de una relectura del proceso histórico de la politización de la ecología. Aunque se suele situarlo entre mediados de los años setenta y la siguiente década —tras el gran ciclo de conflictos fordistas—, en los últimos años se está comprobando una hipótesis distinta: esta politización no sólo ocurrió una década antes, pero también, y, sobre todo, sucedió debido a, y no a pesar de, las luchas del movimiento obrero (en estrecha relación con el surgimiento del feminismo revolucionario). En ese contexto, la economía verde neoliberal —es decir, el intento capitalista de internalizar el límite ecológico, transformándolo de un obstáculo a la valorización a una estrategia innovadora de acumulación— asume simultáneamente la forma de desarrollo (en línea con la hipótesis postulada por el operaísmo) y la de antidesarrollo (en línea con la hipótesis defendida por la ecología-mundo). De esta “convergencia” plausible podría emerger entonces una interpretación política de la crisis ecológica contemporánea capaz de cuestionar la relación entre el capitalismo y la naturaleza, al evitar tanto el catastrofismo como la afinidad electiva entre la lógica del beneficio y la lógica de la protección medioambiental.

The aim of this article is to highlight the importance of French post-structuralism in the transition from operaismo to (post)operaismo [«workerism» to «post-workerism»]. The meeting between the French and Italian movements was not so much a project to unite the two schools of thought, but a process to reveal earlier resonances. What paved the way to a meeting between the movements were the deep theoretical ties that existed before the contingency of such a meeting. The outcome of that meeting cannot be reduced to a unit. This article explores it through the cracks and fissures of its sprawling, disruptive forms.

The use of digital technology has become a key part of contemporary debates on how work is changing, the future of work/ers, resistance, and organising. Workerism took up many of these questions in the context of the factory – particularly through the Italian Operaismo – connecting the experience of the workplace with a broader struggle against capitalism. However, there are many differences between those factories and the new digital workplaces in which many workers find themselves today. The methods of workers’ inquiry and the theories of class composition are a useful legacy from Operaismo, providing tools and a framework to make sense of and intervene within workers’ struggles today. However, these require sharpening and updating in a digital context. In this article, we discuss the challenges and opportunities for a “digital workerism”, understood as both a research and organising method. We use the case study of Uber to discuss how technology can be used against workers, as well as repurposed by them in various ways. By developing an analysis of the technical, social, and political re-composition taking place on the platform, we move beyond determinist readings of technology, to place different technologies within the social relations that are emerging. In particular, we draw attention to the new forms through which workers’ struggles can be circulated. Through this, we argue for a “digital workerism” that develops a critical understanding of how the workplace can become a key site for the struggles of digital/communicative socialism.

Partiendo de los análisis (pos)operaistas, proponemos explicar la transición de los dispositivos disciplinarios a los dispositivos de la sociedad de control, como el intento de capturar el exceso de subjetividad y la multiplicación de formas de vida que constituyen el modo inmanente de la producción de riqueza en la economía posfordista. El capitalismo posfordista no es tanto una estructura de explotación que se pueda comprender, exclusivamente, con relación al concepto de plusvalía, sino un dispositivo de captura y apropiación de esa producción.

The article retraces intellectuals' self-perception within early Italian operaismo and is based on the periodicals Mondo Operaio , Quaderni Rossi, and classe operaia, and on the writings by Panzieri, Asor Rosa, and Tronti. Operaismo was a political tendency that found fertile ground in the Italian non-orthodox Marxist political milieux as a response to the accelerated industrialization and the consequent harsh working conditions in factories between the late 1950s and the early 1960s. It deemed factory life the focal point of contemporary capitalist society, raising criticism against the Italian Communist Party, and supported workers' councils rather than top-down led unions, investigating the lives of laborers at their workplace in times of so-called neo-capitalism. The article highlights the idea of a coincidence of theoretical and practical levels in the organization of class struggle, and the denying of universal values by taking the one-sided point of view of the workers. It also posits that surveys published in these periodicals, which nowadays are still significant sources for studying the industrial environment of the time, must always be considered in the light of the conception of both the role of intellectuals and the function of culture in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the early career of the literary critic Alberto Asor Rosa, one of the founders of the operaismo movement, a Marxist tendency advocating the management of factories by workers through bottom-up councils. It outlines the role he assigned to literature and culture, investigating his criticism first against the non-revolutionary cultural politics of the Italian Communist Party, notoriously through his book Scrittori e popolo and his writings for the periodical classe operaia, then identifying a transition from a destructive approach against any culture based on values to the use of cultural disciplines purely as techniques. The article posits that this instrumental understanding of culture depended on Asor Rosa's political choice to take the perspective of the working class, in order to use culture itself for social analysis. In the second half of the decade, contributing to the periodicals Angelus novus and Contropiano, he still considered culture ineffective as a way towards revolution, but he began to value the great works of ʻbourgeois' literature for their ability to penetrate the middle-class spirit and undermine capitalist society. The article concludes that, despite his changing idea of culture, Asor Rosa's opinions on the intellectual's task fit the traditional concept of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Through a case study of a rent strike against a real estate investment trust in a working‐class neighbourhood in Hamilton, Ontario, this article asks how we might understand class and class struggle against financialized gentrification in a post‐industrial context. While class has been central to gentrification literature, working‐class experience and struggle have often been ignored or conceptualized in a way that precludes agency. New research on financialization of housing often focuses on struggles but has so far paid limited attention to class. In this article I draw on Italian operaismo (workerism) and its concept of class composition to contribute to the current debate by suggesting that financialized gentrification and struggles against it might contribute to a recomposition of the urban working class. Through a qualitative account of the 2018 East Hamilton rent strike, I analyse this struggle as two moments of class composition in the sphere of social reproduction. First, the extraction, exploitation and displacement pressure tenants experienced is analysed through the lens of technical class composition. Second, the rent strike itself is analysed as an expression of political class composition involving a confrontation of urban capital, a politicization of housing precarity, and the building of collective, autonomous power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Proponemos pensar la precariedad como el resultado de 11 contradicciones, esto es, atravesando bloqueos, puntos de crisis, rupturas, apertura de nuevos planos y líneas de fuga inmanentes a la nueva configuración del trabajo postfordista. En cada contradicción podemos reconocer muchos de los medios que tenemos a nuestra disposición para articular proyectos de liberación del capital, para crear instituciones e institucionalidades que posibiliten el que consideramos el mayor de los legados de la teoría (post)operaista: la posibilidad que tiene el conocimiento de devenir autónomo.

By the advent of the Bauhaus, the notion of design did engage in a two-track operation. Without dissociating itself from themes central to the formation of the architectural discipline, the concept of design, on the one hand, had to recode and at times delete thematic that had attained visibility in the context of labour and skills that were not sustainable under the rising regime of mechanical reproducibility. On the other hand, design became interactive in a web of communication and consumption systems that were informed by the exigencies of a culture that in less than fifty years would be coined the culture-industry. The nemesis of design in contemporary situation marked by the globalization of capital and information, I will argue, demands a radical departure from design recipes, past and present, that do not engage critically with the present production and consumption conditions of architecture. Discussing the collective implicitly involved in tectonics, this paper highlights the paradox in the contemporary theorization of design. This involves a different praxis, one that would surpass the prevailing rapport between academia (history/theory) and profession (practice).

The use of digital technology has become a key part of contemporary debates on how work is changing, the future of work/ers, resistance, and organising. Workerism took up many of these questions in the context of the factory - particularly through the Italian Operaismo - connecting the experience of the workplace with a broader struggle against capitalism. However, there are many differences between those factories and the new digital workplaces in which many workers find themselves today. The methods of workers' inquiry and the theories of class composition are a useful legacy from Operaismo, providing tools and a framework to make sense of and intervene within workers' struggles today. However, these require sharpening and updating in a digital context. In this article, we discuss the challenges and opportunities for a "digital workerism", understood as both a research and organising method. We use the case study of Uber to discuss how technology can be used against workers, as well as repurposed by them in various ways. By developing an analysis of the technical, social, and political re-composition taking place on the platform, we move beyond determinist readings of technology, to place different technologies within the social relations that are emerging. In particular, we draw attention to the new forms through which workers' struggles can be circulated. Through this, we argue for a "digital workerism" that develops a critical understanding of how the workplace can become a key site for the struggles of digital/communicative socialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of digital technology has become a key part of contemporary debates on how work is changing, the future of work/ers, resistance, and organising. Workerism took up many of these questions in the context of the factory -- particularly through the Italian Operaismo -- connecting the experience of the workplace with a broader struggle against capitalism. However, there are many differences between those factories and the new digital work-places in which many workers find themselves today. The methods of workers' inquiry and the theories of class composition are a useful legacy from Operaismo, providing tools and a framework to make sense of and intervene within workers' struggles today. However, these require sharpening and updating in a digital context. In this article, we discuss the challenges and opportunities for a "digital workerism", understood as both a research and organising method. We use the case study of Uber to discuss how technology can be used against workers, as well as repurposed by them in various ways. By developing an analysis of the technical, social, and political re-composition taking place on the platform, we move beyond determinist readings of technology, to place different technologies within the social relations that are emerging. In particular, we draw attention to the new forms through which workers' struggles can be circulated. Through this, we argue for a "digital workerism" that develops a critical understanding of how the workplace can become a key site for the struggles of digital/communicative socialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘68 in Italy, compared to the same movement in other European countries, is characterized by its long duration and its particular intensity. It is in fact a movement that has produced powerful and lasting effects on the Italian society for at least a decade, as it is visible in its central presence in the historical memory of the country, still today. But the outbreak of ‘68, like the social and legislative achievements of the 70s, owe their conditions of possibility to a break – a political break but above all a theoretical break – which occurred earlier, at the beginning of the 1960s. Going back to the genesis of the breakdown of the conservative imagery of the 1950s, while being an operation of intellectual history, can be useful to investigate how the “theoretical novelty” emerges, in this case through a break with its own tradition, albeit aiming to its reactivation.

The commentary critically addresses Emanuele Leonardi's arguments as exposed in Lavoro Natura Valore - André Gorz tra marxismo e decrescita (Orthotes, 2017). In particular, it focuses on the Promethean foundations of the General Intellect, on the link between equality and difference, and on the problems concerning an ecological interpretation of Marx's ouvre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its birth in the early 1960s, Italian operaismo (workerism) has provided an optimistic reading of working-class militancy, a theoretically stimulating account of capitalist transformation, and a set of highly productive conceptual categories. Despite a shared provenance, however, operaista-influenced movements and theorists have since taken these categories in quite varied directions. Given this conceptual heterogeneity, I consider herein one such category—the “social factory”—and its conceptual reworking by Antonio Negri, as he elaborates in his 2017 book, Marx and Foucault. I employ, as means to pursue this inquiry, an anthropological lens—drawing, to do so, on anthropological theory and ethnographic research. My aim is to build toward to a reconception of the social factory analytic for use in a contemporary anthropology of state formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article discusses “general intellect” and reveals the quite high incompatibility between post-operaismo and Marx, but also a certain change in Marx’s views after Grundrisse. The article also reveals Marx's inconsistency as a historical materialist, which is probably one of the causes of deterministic readings of his works today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Politicas y Sociales is the property of Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Politicas y Sociales and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

For many years, the concept of cognitive capitalism has been an important subject for elaboration, discussions, and polemics. In this essay, we will not summarize the various theoretical details of the debate; instead, we will try to clarify the political nature of the concept and examine what is at stake from a theoretical point of view. Then, we will give some provisional and explorative answers to some of the central questions on cognitive capitalism: What does it mean? In what sense is it useful as a tool for the struggles? What kinds of class composition and antagonist subjectivity are embodied in this concept? First, we will explain why cognitive labour does not identify a particular sector of the class composition. We will use the term ’cognitivization’ (becoming cognitive of labour) to elaborate on the process of redetermination of the whole class composition. Secondly, we will summarize a genealogy of cognitive capitalism and its peculiarities. Based on our readings, it is not a stage of development, but the site of a new battlefield in the ongoing class struggle. Thirdly, we will point out the tension underlying cognitive capitalism, i.e., the tension between cooperation and capture, autonomy and subordination. Finally, we will point out the problem of re-thinking a central category from operaismo: the class composition. Following this pathway, we can underline the main theoretical and political question: What are the points of rupture in cognitive capitalism?

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This text is an attempt to conduct a historical-materialist analysis oftheological, political, and scientific concepts (e.g.,katechon, multitude and vacuum).Such studies carried out in detail on the discussions between Spinoza, Hobbesand Boyle held on the verge of the modern era are to show the crucial theoreticalconclusions fraught with consequences. It presents the shaping of the bourgeoisvision of science, theology, and the birth of the modern concept of private propertyon the one hand, and on the other - the forming of the first universalist classstruggles conducted both at the level of theology, politics, and the methodologyof science. A better understanding of these struggles and disputes, as well asa clarification of the specific stance taken by Spinoza in this conflict, shed newlight on the crisis described and diagnosed within the autonomist theories ofNegri, Hardt and Virno.

La izquierda italiana vive un momento de gran dificultad y confusión, siendo inca-paz de encontrar un campo de discusión y un espacio de organización. Aunque se multiplican las propuestas de nuevos sujetos en el mundo del trabajo, el debate si-gue siendo infructuoso y superficial, limitado a la política partidista y la lucha elec-toralista. Lo que da lugar a un exceso de tacticismo, a menudo personalista o secta-rista. En este contexto de profundas transformaciones en la composición de la clase obrera, no obstante, todos afirmamos la vigencia de la centralidad del trabajo, pero tenemos muchas dificultades para definir e identificar específicamente qué es hoy la «cuestión» obrera. En este ensayo se tratan de clarificar cuáles pueden ser los pro-blemas que impiden esa identificación. About class conciousness at the present stage of capitalism The Italian left is experiencing a period of great difficulty and confusion. She is una-ble to find a field of discussion and space organization. Although proposals for new subjects in the world of work is increasing, the debate remains fruitless, superficial, limited to partisan politics and electoralist struggle. This gives results in excess tac-ticism often personalista or sectarian. In this context of profound changes in the composition of the working class, however, all affirm the validity of the centrality of work, but we have many difficulties to define and identify specifically what is now the labor question. This essay try to clarify what may be the problems that prevent this identification.

One of the most remarkables effects of economic globalization is the change on the nature of work. From the theoretical perspective of operaism, the emphasis is on the communicative and cognitive dimension that characterizes most of the work performance today. Writers as Paolo Virno, Andrea Fumagalli or Franco Berardi use the term cognitive work to refer to the exercise of a set of skills and dispositions that not allude to a specific kind of work, but an increasingly important part of the very nature of work in general.

The article is committed to the aim of reconstruction of the notion ofimmaterial/biopolitical labor in the context of its affinities with Deleuze and Guattari’snotion of desiring-production. Hardt and Negri’s controversial thesis of theautonomization of biopolitical labor from capitalist command as the basis for thepolitical emancipation of the working class/multitude is also discussed and comparedwith Deleuze and Guattari’s vision of becoming-minoritarian as the only viableanti-capitalist politics.

As a result of the analysis of general strike, undertaken after 1905 byRosa Luxemburg and Georges Sorel, the boundaries between classical anarchismand orthodox Marxism were blurred. Their vision of spontaneous revolutionarymass movement became a driving force of „new left” activism in the ‚60s and, atthe same time, a starting point for debates concerning concepts of class and consciousnessand the problem of revolutionary political organisation. In the mid-80s,Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau turned to the heritage of Luxemburg and Sorelto deal with what they perceived as a serious crisis of the left. The aim of this paperis to reexamine the ideas of Luxembourg and Sorel, as well as some of its interpretations,in the context of three revolutionary strategies formulated today – thepractice of the alter-globalization and the Zapatista movement, the universalism ofAlain Badiou, and the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben.

Recent developments in the workplace have seen the intensification of methods to elicit and capture value within and across the affective encounter, notably through the introduction of technologies to monitor and measure the production of affect and emotion in service workers. This paper develops the beginning of a critique of these technologies through a discussion of affective HCI, OKAO Vision and an engagement with the compositionist critique developed in (post-)Operaismo.

I present five theses on the common within the context of the transformations of capitalist social relations as well as their contemporary global crisis. My framework involves ‘‘cognitive capitalism,’’ new processes of class composition, and the production of living knowledge and subjectivity. The commons is often discussed today in reference to the privatizationand commodification of ‘‘common goods.’’ This suggests a naturalistic and conservative image of the common, unhooked from the relations of production. I distinguish between commons and the common: the first model is related to Karl Polanyi, the second to Karl Marx. As elaborated in the postoperaista debate, the common assumes an antagonistic double status: it is boththe plane of the autonomy of living labor and it is subjected to capitalist ‘‘capture.’’ Consequently, what is at stake is not the conservation of ‘‘commons,’’ but rather the production of the common and its organization into new institutions that would take us beyond the exhausted dialectic between public and private.

The political economy of the information machine is discussed within the Marxist tradition of Italian operaismo by posing the hypothesis of an informational turn already at work in the age of the industrial revolution. The idea of valorizing information introduced by Alquati (1963) in a pioneering Marxist approach to cybernetics is used to examine the paradigms of mass intellectuality, immaterial labour and cognitive capitalism developed by Lazzarato, Marazzi, Negri, Vercellone and Virno since the 1990s. The concept of machinic by Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 1980) is then adopted to extend Marx’s analysis of the industrial machine to the algorithms of digital machines. If the industrial machine can be described as a bifurcation of the domains of energy and information, this essay proposes to conceive the information machine itself as a further bifurcation between information and metadata. In conclusion, the hypothesis of the society of metadata is outlined as the current evolution of that society of control pictured by Deleuze (1990) in relation to the power embodied in databases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]