ABSTRACT
Autovalorization was presented as a process of expanding and changing ‘needs’ (as forms and styles of life) in the class composition, against any naturalization of needs determined by austerity measures or essentialist understandings of the human. In this expansion of needs, autovalorization was also a mechanism for warding off tendencies to identity in autonomia itself, for every minority of the movement – inasmuch as they conceived themselves as part of the class composition – was to assert and develop its particular needs, desires, and new forms of practice, and distribute these across the movement through engagement, contestation, alliance, and struggle. But autovalorization was also linked to the question of the social wage. It was through the social wage that autovalorization connected what we could call, following the framework of minor politics, the ‘little intrigues’ of autonomia to the social whole. The social wage became the site of a certain ‘reclamation of surplus value’, and required a continual process of struggle for a wage de-linked from work done, following the mass workers’ struggle for more pay and less work. In practice, political innovation and the struggle to increase the social wage tended to be simultaneous, as was seen in the practices of ‘autonomous pricesetting’ and ‘autoreduction’.
