ABSTRACT
In Chapter 4 I identified a point of contrast between Negri’s and Deleuze’s understandings of minor politics and its relations with capitalist dynamics. When Negri proposed that Marx’s ‘Fragment on Machines’ raised the possibility of a communism of the ‘transversal organization of free individuals built on a technology that makes it possible’ (in N: 174), Deleuze responded with a ‘shudder’, suggesting that the new mechanisms, technologies, and arrangements of production were less concomitant with communism than with advanced regimes of control. For Deleuze, that is, there was no tendency in productive processes towards an emerging communist autonomy – politics was to continue to reside in cramped minority positions in the midst of capitalist social relations. In Chapter 4 I showed how operaismo developed a framework for the analysis of contemporary production which resonated with Deleuze’s understanding of capital and control. Now I want to return to operaismo and autonomia to see how they developed a politics adequate to this cramped space of the social factory. In a general sense, this chapter is a discussion of the socialized worker that draws back from Hardt and Negri’s (2000) emerging autonomous multitude to see how it can be seen as a minor political figure.
