The Autonomist Marxist Reading Group brings together PhD students and faculty from departments across the UC San Diego Division of the Arts & Humanities to develop critical agendas inspired by Marxist and Autonomist thought. Through close readings and group discussion, we draw connections between past and present worker struggles and mobilization for better conditions in response to technology’s role in the transformation of the social relations of work amidst major shifts in regimes of accumulation.

Support from the UC San Diego Institute of Arts & Humanities (IAH) Creating Conversations, Interdisciplinary Research Grant, 2018-2019 and 2019-2020.

Co-organizers: Davide Carpano & Dorothy Howard

Reading List

Jens Beckert (2019). The exhausted futures of neoliberalism: From promissory legitimacy to social anomy.  Journal of Cultural Economy, 1-13.

Franco Berardi (2009). The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Semiotext(e).

Finn Bowring (2004). From mass worker to the multitude: A theoretical contextualization of Hardt and Negri’s Empire. Capital & Class.

Harry Cleaver (1979). Reading Capital Politically. Harvester Press.

Patrick Cunningham (2015). Mapping the terrain of struggle. Viewpoint Magazine.

Nick Dyer-Witheford (1999). Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism. University of Illinois Press.

Silvia Federici & Mario Montano (1972). Theses on the mass worker and social capital. Radical America, 6, 3-21.

Luciano Floridi (2014). Hyperhistory and the philosophy of information policies, In The Onlife Manifesto: Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era. Springer Nature.

Vera Khovanskaya, Lynn Dombrowski, Jeffrey Rzeszotarski, & Phoebe Sengers (2019). The tools of management: Adapting historical union tactics to platform-mediated labor. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3 (CSCW), 1-22.

Lotta Continua (1973). Take over the city: Community struggle in Italy. Radical America.

Sam Lowry (2008). Worker and student struggles in Italy, 1962-1973.

Sandro Mezzadra (2009). Italy: Operaism and Postoperaism, In International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest. Wiley Blackwell.

Lisa Nakamura (2015). The unwanted labor of venture community management. New Formations, 86(86), 106-112.

Paolo Virno (2001). General Intellect, in Lessico Postfordista (Eds. Zanini and Fadini).  Milan: Feltrinelli.

Kalindi Vora & Neda Atanasoski (2015). Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures. Duke University Press.

Kathy Weeks (2007). Life within and against work: Affective labor, feminist critique, and post-Fordist politics. Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization, 7(1), 233-249.

Kathy Weeks (2011). The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Duke University Press.

Steve Wright (2006). There and back and back again: Mapping Autonomist feminism. [Paper delivered at the conference: Immaterial Labour, Multitudes and New Social Subjects: Class Composition in Cognitive Capitalism], Cambridge, 29-30.

Jack Linchuan Qiu (2017). Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition. University of Illinois Press.