ABSTRACT
The work of Antonio Negri and Paulo Virno presents us with the most compelling vision of a potential politics. They suggest a politics based on the current existing capabilities of labour: capabilities that are both exploited by capitalism and also can act as the axis of a new social subject. The Midnight Notes Collective (MNC) develops the perspective of autonomy in ways that challenge the orthodoxies of capital and class. MNC participant Silvia Federici argues that the original enclosures, the very opening of capitalism, were areaction to the revolts of the mediaeval working classes. The struggle of capital and labour is recast as one in which the proletariat makes the commons: the commons are places of, and are created by, egalitarian social relations, which then provide a combative autonomy and can be the beginnings of the creation of communism. The work of the MNC shows us potentials effaced by orthodox Marxism.
