Struggle, withdrawal, alienation, sabotage, lines of flight from the capitalist system of domination. Autonomy is the independence of social time from the temporality of capitalism.

– Franco "Bifo" Berardi

Autonomist Marxism was first developed in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s, originating from Operaismo [lit. workerism], a core tenet of the Italian Left, and labour movement, which had been principally developed by Raniero Panzieri, who was considered the founder of the movement. The term “workerism” was originally viewed as derogatory term applied to radical perspectives and movements that blindly fetishized the industrial working class.

However, workerism in Italy had very different connotations, as it used to describe emerging radical groups, including not only Workers' Power but also segments of Workers' Autonomy [Autonomia Operaia], fronted by Antonio “Toni” Negri and The Struggle Goes On [Lotta Continua], Adriano Sofri, led by that insisted “upon the independence or autonomy of the working class in relation to the ongoing development of capital and indeed the priority of the working class's composition and action in determining the form and direction of that development.” (Negri, 2005).

To explore this movement, we must first discuss Panzieri's early intellectual development in relation to the Italian Marxist movement at the time. Neither encompassing idealism nor historicism, many of his writings of the early 1940s were committed to the advancement of an “authentically Marxist culture in Italy, were sometimes marred by a certain intolerance towards thinkers deemed renegades by Stalinism.” (Wright, 2017: 16). It was from this point, we can understand that from Raniero Panzieri’s perspective that the task of Marxism, was to “restore Marxism to its natural terrain, which is that of permanent critique”.

Panzieri’s involvement with the Italian Left was devoid of involvement from the institutional control of party leadership and bureaucrats. This was further intensified by Panzieri’s expulsion from the Italian Socialist Party, for his opposition to forming a government with the Italian Christian Democratic Party. After his expulsion he had decidedly moved to Turin, in order to start Quademi Rossi (Red Notebooks), an Italian political journal spearheaded by himself, as well as many others, such as Mario Tronti, Romano Alquati, Antonio Negri, and Danilo Montaldi.

This journal came to be known as one of the primary sources of Autonomist Marxism in Italy. The first issue of Panzieri's journal appeared in the second half of 1961, making a big splash within the Italian labour movement. Within a matter of weeks, Red Notebooks exhausted its first initial run of its journals, as Red Notebooks had excited interest amongst “politicians of the left, union officials, workplace activists as well as rank-and-file party members.” (Wright, 2017: 16) The journal enjoyed its success influencing the Italian labour movement at the time, greatly swaying its direction going forward. However, Quademi Rossi itself was not without its problems, as the journal suddenly “suffered an unexpected blow, from Panzieri's death, in October 1964, which it never fully recovered from.” (Wright, 2017: 33)

The Hot Autumn

Several years after Panzieri’s death, a wave of social conflicts began to bubble. This would peak around 1969, with the event known as the 'Hot Autumn', Italy’s “was a 'creeping May', and if its Movimento Studentesco (Student Movement) (MS) had then only recently emerged from beneath the shadow of the official student organisations” (Wright, 2017: 89).

This was unprecedented, students and workers, hand in hand joined together against capitalist machine in Northern Italy, it is estimated 440 hours of strikes, nonstop within the region. “It was observed that the relation between the autonomist factions and the wider student movement was similar to the relation between the anarchist groups and the masses in the Sorbonne in May '68.” (Lotringer and Marazzi, 2007: 56). This was a watershed moment for the labour movement at the time, as organisation between the students and workers had begun to be permeated throughout the major universities centres within in Italy. Much of this organisation was devoid of party structure and was mostly spontaneous, as Movimento Studentesco (Student Movement) had swelled to mass proportions in only a few localities during 1967, and it was the experiences in these cities were Turin and Trento.

This new kind of revolutionary organisation was part of the new formulation of the working class:

For us today the articulation of organization is posited not within the contradictions of development, but within the antagonism between the proletariat constituted as a unified class and the desperate vitality of the law of value over and against it. The articulation of organization takes place through the alternating rhythm of mass pressure' aimed at appropriation, and vanguard assault against the intelligent actions of the enterprise. Not for work, not over the wage, but against work: this constitutes the positive articulation of the new revolutionary organization (Negri, 2005: 35)

Most of the “pure” workerists remained in North-eastern Italy, while many involved in the student movement formed Potere Operaio veneto-emiliano (POv-e), who differed their Venetian counterparts, “Whilst most students came from bourgeois families, the MS represented an attempt 'to negate their own class origin in order to be a revolutionary class'.” (Wright, 2017: 98). It was during this POv-e's primary interest sought to be consummated in the environs of the factory, where, they had claimed that capital's plan “is most organised, and from whence it draws its strength.” (Wright, 2017: 98). This is a direct reference to the concept of the Social Factory by Mario Tronti in which was originally written in Red Notebooks.

The concept was used by Tronti to analyse how capitalist social relations had expanded outside the sphere of production to that of society as a whole, in Factory and Society (1962). As Tronti explains, “The more that capitalist development advances, that is, the more the production of relative surplus value penetrates and extends, the more that the circle-circuit production-distribution-exchange-consumption is necessarily closed […] At the highest level of capitalist development, the social relation is transformed into a moment of the relation of production, the whole of society is turned into an articulation of production, that is, the whole of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination to the whole of society.” (Tronti, 1962)

However, POv-e later reneged on student interests, in order to promote the workers' struggles, which in practice, this 'unity' meant the 'working- class use' of the MS as a channel of communication against the bosses and, where necessary, union leaders as well (Wright, 2017: 99).

Creeping May

In December 1967, a number of prominent intellectuals associated operaismo had met to discuss the nature of international class struggle during the interwar period. The venue was University of Padua, where Antonio Negri assumed the Chair of State Doctrine. Following the demise of Classe Operaia's demise, mass worker and the wage became prominent themes for workerism. It was until the Padua conference this class figure “remained somewhat indistinct.” (Wright, 2017: 107).

To define the mass worker, Negri explains that:

The mass worker's relatively undifferentiated technical and behavioural composition (in comparison with the professional worker) arose from her/his experience of unskilled factory labour on a mass scale and the welfare state's safety net of public services. This composition expressed itself politically through the negotiation-oriented national unions, which emphasized the struggle for higher wages at the expense of struggles for workers' control of production, and the reformist left parties, which emphasized electoral participation and inter-party alliance in government instead of popular revolution, that came to dominate working-class action in the industrialized capitalist countries (Negri, 2005)

The mass worker had become relevant during the sixties, as throughout that time there was a growing homogenisation of labour within many of Italy's large and medium-sized industrial sectors during the late 1960s acted to reinforce that compactness encouraged by the spread of mass production techniques.  The original system of grading work by skill also began to assume new connotations: having once served in part to defend the wages and conditions of skilled workers, its original rationale had been increasingly undermined from the 1950s onwards, by the fragmentation of work tasks intrinsic to mechanisation.

It was through this capitalist restructure of the economy which was used recuperate and diffuse the wage demands, “the varied and combined modality of working-class action is respected in every moment of the restructuration of capital: from the actions of the mass worker, and from those of the “social” worker, arise effects that are then matched, in the sense of a radical destructuring of the enemy power.” (Lotringer and Marazzi, 2007: 70). Many workers had rebelled during the Creeping May, “guerrilla warfare in the factory” was what many referred to this as, during late June, the dispute saw a dozen stoppages before its climax, in early August, with a demonstration in which thousands of chemical workers converged upon the neighbouring town of Mestre, effectively isolating it from the rest of the Veneto (Wright, 2017: 113).

This further escalated during as many of the strikers remained aggressive, with stoppages on alternate days designed to disrupt production, and mass picketing to intimidate those still prepared to work. The biggest card, however, would be played on 29 July, when strikers threatened to reduce the size of the skeleton staff traditionally left to oversee the plant, prompting a lockout. (Wright, 2017: 113). By the end of Creeping May, the tendency's major organisational expression turned away from the problems of class composition, and instead towards militarising the new revolutionary movement.

The Decline and Fall of Workerism

The collapse of workerism began during the early 1970s. Much of the popular movement had waned despite best efforts, with many involved having a terrible fate, such as retrenchment, addiction, imprisonment, even suicide were not uncommon at the time. In the aftermath of its defeat came the 1980s, “the years of cynicism, opportunism, and fear.”(Wright, 2017: 198).

This might have been most evident in the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, the Italian government at the time accused Toni Negri of the alleged kidnapping, and colluding with the Red Brigade (BR).

Negri proclaimed in his interrogation that:

They are not only untrue accusations, but down right un likely and incompatible with everything I have said and done during the times I belonged to P.O. and later "Autonomia.” The opposition between the B.R a n d "Autonomia" is clear from the documents from the two groups themselves. It is preposterous us to say that I taught these people how to make Molotov cocktails, I which, by the way, I do not know to assemble. I have never spoken in support of making links between the B.R’s miliary actions and the mass actions of the  organized Autonomy. The accusations are based on pure fabrication - they are fantasies! (Lotringer and Marazzi, 2007: 194)

Negri fled to France where, protected by the Mitterrand doctrine, he taught at the Paris VIII (Vincennes) and the Collège international de philosophie, along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. In 1997, Negri had accepted a plea-bargain that reduced his prison time from 30 to 13 years—he returned to Italy to serve the end of his sentence. Many of his most influential books were published while he was behind bars.

Along with the many students of the 1970s did not share the same sympathetic values to the working class as the previous, Italy's most recent generation of students revealed them as practitioners of a new form of anti-Communism. Unlike the Italian New Left of 1968, the rebels of 1977, many were simply dismissed as revisionist and counter-revolutionary, not only by the leadership of the historic left, but also their followers. Another reason for the decline of Autonomia was that they had failed to represent themselves a as general political force and as a result, opened a programmatic void that the armed groups on its fringes and beyond were more than willing to exploit. Their mission of becoming a militant movement had also fell through as extensive state repression, by the State and by a Communist Party determined to legitimate itself as a 'party of law and order’ at the 'deviant' social forces, the movement began to falter and eventually decline.

Many of the original members FIAT’s workers who had been apart of the original operasimo movement component had been weeded out, the Italian far left had effectively been destroyed as a political force, and instead been replaced a generation of FIAT workplace activists with it—a far cry from the shopfloor radicalism that was seen during the Hot Autumn, as the movement was cut from its roots.

Where are they now?

While the historic movement of Autonomia Operaia is effectively dead. The movement continues albeit far more theoretically diverse, compared to its classical workerist incarnation. Antonio Negri remains a political philosophy professor in his hometown university, with his research areas focusing on Spinozism, globalisation, alter modernity, biopolitics and the commons. Nowadays, Toni Negri is widely recognised for his contributions to the theory of Empire, in the titular book of the same name, which had sold quickly beyond initial expectations as an academic work.

The book itself remained relevant during and after the Occupy movement. In May 2012 Negri self-published (with Michael Hardt) an electronic pamphlet on the occupy and encampment movements of 2011–2012 called Declaration which argued for the movement explores new forms of democracy. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, former host of Radio Alice now works with the magazine Derive Approdi as well as teaching social history of communication at the Accademia di belle Arti in Milan, in addition to his collaborations with artists such as Warren Neidich and publications such as e-flux in the contemporary arts field. He is the co-founder of the e-zine rekombinant.org and of the tele street movement, founding the channel Orfeo TV. Berardi remains politically and socially active, continuing to publish articles and interviews in collaboration with Ill Will Editions and eflux magazine, his most recent article, Welcome to the Geopolitics of Chaos focusing on the vengeance of colonialism, nationalist humiliation, fascism, and the new war in Europe.

Maurizio Lazzarato currently lives and works as an independent researcher. He is one of the founders of the influential Parisian magazine Multitudes and is a member of the Collège International de Philosophie. His theories on immaterial labour are key ideas found in the discussion of digital capitalism and have influenced Nick Sirneck and Christian Fuchs. Lazzarato was a founding member of the editorial board of the journal Multitudes.

Many other theorists have explored autonomism in relation to digital technology and capitalism, such as Nick Dyer-Witherford who expands on immaterial labour by situating his focus on the internet, and its impact on modern society.

(This is a repost from Jacob Winter's Medium page. Visit the original article here: https://medium.com/@jacobwntr/internationalism-at-a-cruise-missiles-point-mason-monbiot-and-the-left-s-love-affair-with-nato-a6348efd8eb6)

“In war, truth is the first casualty.” Aeschylus (525 BC — 456 BC)

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has thrown the British left for something of a loop. Although those in support of Russia are few and far between, the reaction by prominent left-wing figures and organisations has been wildly disproportionate. From Labour threatening to suspend 11 Labour MPs for criticising NATO, to Paul Mason and George Monbiot furiously condemning a supposedly large faction of the Left who act as “Kremlin mouthpieces.” This opposition to anti-war Leftists has led many of the Left into the loving arms of NATO, a military alliance that has conducted illegal military actions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Libya and was set up to contain Russian influence during the Cold War. Just 2 months ago, most on the Left could easily condemn NATO expansion but suddenly faced with the invasion of Ukraine they have resorted to the same hawkish positions that they have furiously criticised in the past.

I don’t think the embrace of NATO is necessarily proof of some sort of moral spinelessness on behalf of these people. The invasion of Ukraine is certainly less black and white than illegal NATO actions and American interventions before. During Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, condemning NATO was a rather easy thing to do simply on the basis of how explicitly these interventions were wrong. In Ukraine, however, it really does seem like Ukraine is for the most part an innocent bystander. Any principled anti-imperialist should likewise condemn Russian imperialism, and some individuals amongst the commentariat are correct to point out that a small contingent of the far-left does embrace the imperialism of China and Russia as a form of kneejerk anti-Americanism. I would argue, however, that the messages of the Stop the War Coalition and other anti-NATO leftists are being openly misconstrued by these members of the commentariat and by some of the centre-left establishment, particularly within the Labour Party.

Almost nobody on the Left is explicitly pro-Putin. Although many groups, such as the various British Communist parties, welcomed their recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk on a Leninist principle of national liberation, all of them that I could find immediately released statements condemning the Russian invasion. The only left-wing Twitter commentator I could find that was explicitly pro-Russian is Josh Jackson, who defends Russian military action regularly (The tweets I initially sourced during this article have since been deleted.)

This is the most prominent commentator I could find on the Left who openly supports the invasion, who only has around 20k followers, which while nothing to be sneered at is still relatively small compared to Monbiot who was 477k followers and Mason who has 623k followers.

So where are Monbiot and Mason coming from? Their accusations of a Left repeating Kremlin propaganda seem to be somewhat baseless. Further analysis of their articles on the topic is warranted.

We must confront Russian propaganda – even when it comes from those we respect | George Monbiot

The grim truth is that for years, a small part of the ‘anti-imperialist’ left has been recycling Putin’s falsehoods, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

The GuardianGeorge Monbiot

This is George Monbiot’s article on the subject, and although he has many Twitter threads on the issue, it is far easier to interrogate this article than it is to trudge through his miles upon miles of tweets to find his opinions.

The first major error Monbiot makes is his accusations against journalist and filmmaker John Pilger, pointing out that his statements align with the Kremlin’s positions.

“At the end of last year, the writer and film-maker John Pilger claimed, “it was the US that overthrew the elected govt in Ukraine in 2014, allowing Nato to march right up to Russia’s western border”. This is a standard Kremlin talking point, dismissing the revolution as a US coup” The argument that what Pilger says is wrong because it “is also what the Kremlin says” is a rather facile argument.

Pilger is wrong to claim that the overthrow of Ukraine’s government in 2014 was a US coup. It was, however, a US backed-coup, and it did nothing but allow NATO to antagonise Russia further. Monbiot does add “Ukraine, of course, is not a Nato member.” in order to try and prove that the pro-Western coup in 2014 could not have been orchestrated by NATO nor used by NATO to provoke Russia. He says this as if it isn’t common knowledge that NATO has been arming and training the Ukrainian army for years and that it has been Ukraine’s intention to join NATO ever since 2014.

Before I continue with this article, I must make some things very clear to avoid any confusion as to what my own position is. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is illegal. Thousands of Ukrainian civilians will die and Putin will let his own population suffer reams of sanctions in order to achieve some irredentist dream of a Russia long since past. At the same time, it is not hard to see that NATO expansion into Eastern Europe would provoke Russia into such an action. This stance was the mainstream position of the American foreign policy establishment for a long time after the fall of the USSR and has only recently been deemed controversial or “Putinism”, as the students at Chicago university who have tried to oust International Relations scholar John Mearsheimer have suggested. This position does not exonerate Russia and still holds them responsible for the invasion, it simply recognises NATO’s complicity in adding fuel to the fire of an already tense situation (the fall of the USSR).

Monbiot does take aim at the Stop The War Coalition as well, claiming that the coalition’s deputy president Andrew Murray has “reproduced a classic Kremlin falsehood: that in Ukraine, “Russian has been banned from the public sphere”.” This is not by any means a “Kremlin falsehood.”

Since 16 December 2015, three communist parties have been banned in Ukraine (the Communist Party of Ukraine, Communist Party of Ukraine (renewed) and Communist Party of Workers and Peasants). Sergei Dolgov, a pro-Russian journalist, was kidnapped and likely killed. Media construed as pro-Russian was banned en mass during the Poroshenko presidency, drawing condemnations from Human Rights Watch and Reporters without borders. Amnesty International has appealed for the release of Ukrainian journalist Ruslan Kotsaba and declared him a prisoner of conscience, while the Ukrainian website Myrotvorets publishes information on the personal details of journalists who are considered “enemies of Ukraine.” They published the home address of Oles Buzina, a pro-Russian writer, just days before he was assassinated. They also published the home address of parliamentarian Oleg Kalashnikov, just days prior to his assassination also. Russia is infamous for its totalitarianism and suppression of free speech, but by no means should we just ignore Ukraine’s own blatant violations of human rights as Monbiot does here.

Something Monbiot fails to do in the article is recognise that Putin does, at least to do some degree, have a point. Anything that Putin or Russian outlets say must be immediately assumed to be propaganda and anything corroborating or supporting these claims must be assumed to be so as well.

Monbiot isn’t wrong to point out that Stop The War and other anti-war groups are being unnecessarily harsh towards NATO and are maybe condemning the wrong people at this specific time, but they aren’t by any means wrong to claim that NATO expansion has led to this outcome. As I said previously, NATO expansion eastwards had always been prophesied to be a disaster. As Ted Galan Carpenter, of the Cato Institute, warned:

“History will show that Washington’s treatment of Russia in the decades following the demise of the Soviet Union was a policy blunder of epic proportions. It was entirely predictable that NATO expansion would ultimately lead to a tragic, perhaps violent, breach of relations with Moscow…We are now paying the price for the US foreign policy establishment’s myopia and arrogance.”

This leads directly to Labour Party politics and their attitude towards Stop The War. Ever since the succession of Keir Starmer as leader, there has been a pretty clear attempt to purge the far left from the party. Although this may prove well for election results, especially with Starmer’s attempt to desperately prove he isn’t Jeremy Corbyn, it is having disastrous implications for internal party democracy. Even under Blair, interparty pluralism was stronger, and we know the disastrous implications of a Labour Party enamoured with NATO from the experience of the Blair premiership with Iraq.

The threatened removal of 11 Labour MPs who placed their names on a Stop the War Coalition petition is nothing but a clear attempt to force a reasonably large wing of the membership and parliamentary party towards a hawkish party-line. As if from a skewed version of Leninist Democratic Centralism, any dissenting opinions on Labour’s stance are being vigorously suppressed. It is not hawkish to attempt to defend Ukraine, but Keir Starmer’s nonstop suggestions of a no-fly zone over Ukraine (something that would inevitably lead to World War 3) show Starmer’s own clear Blair tribute act to be just that. If Labour becomes the next party of government and continues with their largely pro-NATO foreign policy, it won’t be long until Britain finds itself in another Iraq-type situation.

This is the party line that Paul Mason supports. I am generally sympathetic to Paul Mason, certainly, his social-democratic body with a Leninist soul is something I can also relate to and his commitment to a sort of Humanist Marxism isn’t entirely unpalatable to me, but just as his humanism led to Erich Fromm’s embrace of the West over the East, it has led Mason to also reject his radical roots and embrace Western imperialism, hiding it under an attempt to “reform” NATO.

The Labour left needs to get serious on defence

Anybody who wakes up angrier at Starmer than at Putin should think hard about whether Labour politics is for them.

New StatesmanPaul Mason

In his article for the New Statesmen “The Labour left needs to get serious on defence” Mason makes a series of incorrect and rather odious claims and analogies for why the Labour Left refuse to embrace NATO. Mason is correct to say that anyone who “wakes up angrier at Starmer than they do at Putin” is wrong, but that’s about where his correctness in the article ends. The first openly false claim he makes is that Labour is repeating the mistakes it made in the 1930s with its appeasement of Hitler:

“Those who know the history of the British left in the 1930s will recognise this as a near-exact replay. The Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald pleaded with Europe to “meet Germany’s demands and allay her anxieties about security.” George Lansbury resigned the Labour leadership over its support for sanctions against fascist Italy. As for the Communist Party, it tried to force the British government to make peace with Hitler even after the Second World War had begun.”

Aside from my own personal offence at being compared to a Nazi appeaser, the main issue with this is a complete lack of contextual analysis. The appeasement of Hitler was wrong, but there was never the threat of global nuclear annihilation with Hitler. With Putin, direct military involvement and the expansion of NATO can lead to the end of the human race, or at the very least the end of human civilization.

Mason argues that Putin’s aggression warrants Western rearmament, clearly ignoring the previously established fact that it was this very rearmament that pissed off Russia in the first place. Maybe he’s right that now we’ve already made the fatal mistake, there is no other option but rearming to face Russia, removing any responsibility from ourselves is a mistake Mason makes.

Both Monbiot and Mason, despite any radical pretences, are still fundamentally humanist liberals. They may have sympathies with the radical left, but they never leave what is effectively just social democracy, and if one thing this situation in Ukraine has proven to us is that liberals love nothing more than war. They want to push the big red button to fulfil their own messiah complexes of saving people from barbarism and the “wrong” forms of government.

Sympathy with Ukraine and condemning Russia is one thing, but to reorient our politics around a fanatical love of NATO and our need to further cement ourselves as satellites for the United States will be the downfall of the Left Wing. There is a middle ground between the wishy-washy condemnations of Russia by secretly Moscow-loving Communists and the outright turn to the internationalism by a cruise missile’s point that Monbiot and Mason promote. It is a middle ground that the Left must occupy, and its commitments to solidarity and peace must not be forgotten.

(This is a republishing of Jacob Winter's article from his personal Medium page. Read the original article here: https://medium.com/@jacobwntr/bone-idle-a-review-of-bash-the-rich-9df72736f9e6)

The greatest irony about Ian Bone’s 2006 autobiography Bash the Rich is that the blurb specifically states that “This is no dry tome destined to gather dust in leftie bookshops.” I found the book in the bargain section of Housmans, with several stacks of the book all being sold for £3, £7 less than it would be to purchase the book at full price. The implication of that is far funnier than any joke I can make here, so moving on.

Stories of the British Left are always very interesting to me. As someone who has a strong preference for British cultural output and has a strange fascination with sectology, Bash the Rich seemed like the perfect book. Promising stories of the Angry Brigade, the Free Wales Army, the 1967 Summer of Love, the 1977 Anarcho-Punks, tales of Grosvenor Square to the Battle of the Beanfield, I was surprised nobody else was buying up this memoir. I quickly came to find exactly why this book that was destined not to gather dust in leftie bookshops would do just that.

First, a little background. Bone is an English anarchist activist, mostly known for his role as the key founder of Class War, an anarchist group whose formation and activities are discussed in the book. In recent years, he’s mostly known for having a go at the children of Jacob Rees Mogg, and Class War has ended up in the news for forming an unofficial society at the London School of Economics and demanding that other societies get abolished.

I’m going to quickly mention what I actually like about the book before I start pointing out how truly mad most of it is. If the book is anything, it is entertaining. Bone’s prose is definitely unique, reading like an anarchist zine or tabloid, and when the jokes do land, they are actually pretty funny. If you’re interested in the history of the British left, it’s worth a read just to see one account of many different groups. The stories of these groups are compelling, if only just, and if you can get the book for £3 it's worth the few hours it’ll take to finish it. If you’re an anarchist, you might wanna read it as well just to get a primer on “how do I be less irritating.”

Now, onto why this book is insane. The first thing you get a clear sense of is that Ian Bone has a very high opinion of himself. I could not tell if it was the greatest satire ever written or if he legitimately is completely mad, but in the intro to the book, it claims that Ian Bone and Class War were the “real opposition” during the 1980s, as well as saying that it was Ian Bone who “linked the inner city rioters of Brixton and Handsworth with the striking miners.” My personal favorite bit is “In the 1980s, Ian Bone was THE anarchist in the UK” as if that is anything to be proud of.

Most of the book is not about anarchists sticking to the man, of the leftwing footsoldiers trying to stop the evils of capitalism and imperialism, its instead mostly about Ian Bone pissing off other lefties, bragging about it, and not realizing he comes off like a massive arsehole. The book is initially complementary of the left wing of Labour, but only when discussing Bone’s father, who was a Labour member. Very quickly it tries to spill the beans on corruption in Swansea Council, out the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament as pacifist cowards, and expose Trotskyism as a poisonous counterrevolutionary force. To make a People’s Front of Judea joke here be beating a dead horse, but just imagine something of that sort here and amuse yourselves.

I do share Bone’s own antipathy towards hippies, and his discontent at the Summer of Love is something I am somewhat sympathetic to but in less than a chapter’s time he moves to “We Gotta Get Rid of the Trots!” in which he accuses all Trotskyist groups in the UK as being led by Oxbridge elites who are too scared to actually bring the fight to the ruling class. The main example of this he mentions is Tariq Ali diverting an anti-Vietnam War march away from the US embassy, instead going to Hyde Park. Not an unreasonable criticism of some rather toothless activism, but their movement is itself defanged by how unfunny their jokes are on the next page (Shouting “Ho Ho Rubbish Bin” instead of “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh” is potentially the worst joke in the entire book). He then ends the chapter by saying “Tariq Ali — You’re a cunt!” which is, again, just a bit needlessly rude.

Speaking of, Bone has a rather liberal usage of swearing in the book, but not in a particularly graceful way. Although he’s somewhat self-aware about it, mentioning it at one point in the book, he swears in the way that Ned Flanders swears (or alternatively, the ladies from the Hellbent Podcast swear). He swears so regularly and in such odd ways that it manages to make his swearing unfunny and weird. “Fucking” does not need to replace every other word. He’s like a teenager who just discovered swear words and is now taking every opportunity to say them.

Anyway, back to his Trot-bashing. Another great part of the book is where he mentions how he read a pamphlet called Kronstadt Commune, which apparently was such a powerful pamphlet it allowed his group to entirely disprove the political tradition of Bolshevism and “wipe the floor with Leninists and Trotskyists in argument.” Apparently, he even managed to have the SWP’s founder Tony Cliff on the backfoot during an argument because of a single pamphlet he read.

During the era of the Miner’s Strike, most of his nasty words are not directed at Thatcher, outside of a few Class War covers such as the one where Thatcher gets her head assaulted with a meat cleaver, but directed at Labour, the CND and several other socialist groups. He seems to have a weird begrudging respect for Thatcher as if he respected someone who was an open class-warrior, but for the opposing side. Instead, he talks about how a Class War member nearly hit Neil Kinnock over the head with a glass bottle, or how they destroyed a CND rally for shits and giggles. In his chapter “Autonomania” he spents most of his time slagging off Class War members who were situationists and autonomists, which by his own admission were a significant part of his tiny London Class War chapter.

The main sense you get from the book is that Bone doesn’t really believe in anything except violence directed towards people that piss him off, primarily rich people and leftists he thinks aren’t “hard” enough. He does talk about his anarchist influences in the penultimate chapter of the book, but it mostly seems as if the Himmler-faced gentleman cares nothing more than to be contrarian, annoying, violent, and an arsehole. It can make the book hilarious to read at times, and at other times painfully frustrating. If you can get the book on sale, it is worth a read, but don’t say you weren’t warned.

(This is a repost from Jacob Winter's Medium page. Visit the original article here: https://medium.com/@jacobwntr/against-the-new-malthusians-1d2480f5df7d)

The environmental movement today has become infected by a new form of ecological austerity, a vicious and regressive ideology that would sacrifice all human progress to save the planet, even when other, more progressive, solutions are readily available. The tactics and aims of the environmental movement have become nothing but a blatant assault on the working class. The Left must think cautiously about lending their support to this new movement, lest everything we’ve worked for be for nothing.

Climate change is a problem. Although there is no official scientific consensus on just how existential the problem is, there is no doubt that it is an urgent issue. Regardless of whether or not climate change will render the Earth a livable hell or will wipe out mankind entirely, the growing environmentalist movement shows a clear popular discontent with either choice. Whether it be the mass movements of Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future, bringing schoolchildren out in the masses to protest government inaction or Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain blocking roads to raise awareness for their cause, the environment has become the issue of the day.

A current amongst all new environmental groups, however, is a belief in the concept of degrowth. It may not be in their manifestos, their declarations, or at the front of the minds of their members, but the logical conclusion of the vast majority of environmental campaigners is degrowth.

Degrowth broadly means shrinking and reversing economic growth, rather than expanding economic growth. It’s becoming a particularly popular theory amongst the environmentalist movement, as deindustrialization has become key to their idea of halting damage to the climate. At its least harmful, it’s a generally counterproductive strategy that hasn’t managed to effectively tackle climate change, and at its most harmful it's outright Malthusian.

The general logic of degrowth is that, if we consume less, we extract less of the Earth’s resources, and therefore damage to the Earth is minimized. You can understand why it’s such a compelling theory, as it seems to track. But then you think about it for 5 minutes and you realize it’s bullshit.

Why Degrowth is Bad (in general)

Economic Growth is not just some numbers on an evil financier's spreadsheet. It’s children being fed, its vast swathes of the Earth having clean water, it’s being able to heat your home at night. Economic growth is the lowering of global poverty statistics and child mortality rates. As Tom Chivers puts it:

Two things. First, economic growth saves children’s lives. That is one of the most basic, starkest facts about the modern world.

Second, there is a thing called the “degrowth movement”, which wants to stop economic growth. And, yes, this would lead almost inevitably to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of children a day.

To actively reverse economic growth in the name of the climate would not save the planet, but would instead keep the global poorest exactly in the same conditions they are now. Economic degrowth requires a decline in human standards of living, which may be acceptable for some in the rich West, but not for those at the global periphery who already live in poverty.

Degrowth and Austerity are more or less identical. The gutting of the state in order to prevent economic growth would almost certainly lead to the inability of the state to conduct its other operations, such as welfare, the National Health Service in the UK, or the maintenance of state schooling. More anarchist-leaning members of the environmentalist movement would cheer this on, foolishly believing that humanity would just get on fine without these state interventions; that all medicine would be produced by the commune bog-witch; and that humans would be entirely self-sustainable without the infrastructure to distribute food and water. For those us of with our sanity intact, however, this is clearly a bad thing.

Why Degrowth is Bad (for the Left)

Economic growth is not inherently capitalistic, the growth of economies is a necessity within socialism. The development of productive forces, as written by Marx, is inherently at odds with the mode of production we know as capitalism. Production per capita is something we must strive for, and it’s capitalism that holds back this development. As Trotsky writes,

The deepest, the most objective and the most indisputable criterion says: progress can be measured by the growth of the productivity of social labour.

For the sake of the climate, we must look toward sustainable economic growth within socialism. As Engels writes,

“There will be no more crises; the expanded production, which for the present order of society is overproduction and hence a prevailing cause of misery, will then be insufficient and in need of being expanded much further. Instead of generating misery, overproduction will reach beyond the elementary requirements of society to assure the satisfaction of the needs of all; it will create new needs and, at the same time, the means of satisfying them. It will become the condition of, and the stimulus to, new progress, which will no longer throw the whole social order into confusion, as progress has always done in the past. Big industry, freed from the pressure of private property, will undergo such an expansion that what we now see will seem as petty in comparison as manufacture seems when put beside the big industry of our own day. This development of industry will make available to society a sufficient mass of products to satisfy the needs of everyone.”

For the world that the Left hopes to create, we would need a massive expansion in infrastructure and energy production for this new economy to function. But if we lend our support to the degrowth-supporting environmentalist movement, this will become even more of a fantasy. Today in the world there are 1.6 Billion people with no electricity. There are billions without access to public transport. Billions of people have little or no access to education and health care. To halt economic growth for the sake of the climate would leave these issues unsolved, and the answer socialism provides would fall on deaf ears.

Degrowth in the Constitutional Environmentalist Movement

Degrowth has become a core tenet of the mainstream “constitutional” climate groups, particularly European green parties, such as the German Die Grunen and the British Green Party.

The British Greens are a good example of where a party embraces degrowth to the detriment of human standard of living. Caroline Lucas, the sole Green MP in Parliament, virulently opposed the HS2 Railway, as well as being a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Limits to Growth. Lucas claimed that,

“It’s time to stop annihilating nature in the name of short-term financial gain for big construction companies and its time to scrap HS2 before it does any more damage.”

This shows a much broader trend in the environmental movement to stop any infrastructural development, no matter how beneficial it would be. Die Grunen in Germany has copied this trend, by engaging in vast anti-nuclear energy action, succeeding in having all the power plants within Germany shut down aside from 3.

Die Grunen are no friends of the Left, shown by their attacks on the German union movement around the turn of the millennium, in collaboration with the SPD. They likewise, as Leigh Phillips puts it,

“layed the neo-mercantilist foundations of the current ongoing Eurozone crisis, a crisis in which the sizeable Die Grünen faction in the European Parliament has regularly backed EU policies that favour central European financial interests over those of the ordinary people of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland”

Degrowth in Radical Environmentalism

Extinction Rebellion, the mass climate movement which mobilized vast amounts of young and old to protest against government inaction on climate change, openly supports degrowth. Posting misleading infographics, hosting zoom debates, and holding placards supporting the end to all economic growth, Extinction Rebellion has positioned itself against working people.

Just Stop Oil, the most recent incarnation of the UK’s road-blocking environmentalists, is openly advocating for the end of all oil imports to the UK, in the midst of an energy crisis where people this Winter will need to choose between heating their homes and eating. Again, positioning themselves against those the Left is supposed to be helping. Instead of promoting sustainable economic development with other energy sources, JSO blindly follows the cause of simply ending all fossil fuel usage.

The Darker Side of Degrowth

Within radical environmentalism, degrowth takes a much darker trend at its most radical. One of Malthusianism, population control, and a dark anti-human sentiment. Pentti Linkola, a Finnish “deep ecologist” thinker, promoted the extermination of the vast majority of the human race in order to stop damage to the climate. He once stated,

“If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating, if it meant millions of people would die.”

These anti-human ideas on population control have been popularized by people as popular as David Attenborough, who once stated that,

“What are all these famines in Ethiopia, what are they about? They’re about too many people for too little land. That’s what it’s about. And we are blinding ourselves. We say, get the United Nations to send them bags of flour. That’s barmy.”

The aforementioned Caroline Lucas reposted an article by John Vidal in The Guardian, titled “It should not be controversial to say a population of 8 billion will have a grave impact on the climate.” The article proposes fewer children should be born, which may seem innocent, but would actually be devastating to the economy and as a result, to quality of life.

Britain’s birth rate is almost half what it was at its most recent historic peak in the 1960s. In 2020, the birth rate was 1.58, well below the necessary “replacement level” of 2.1. As Brendan O’Neill writes for Spiked,

“It points out that the flight from procreation has coincided with great successes in sustaining life in the twilight years. So we have more older people and fewer younger people. You don’t need a PhD in demography to know that this could prove problematic. ‘At present, there are a little under three over-65s for every 10 workers, but by the middle of the next decade that ratio will rise to 3.5, and by the 2060s the number will be closing in on four’, the SMF’s report says. It warns that a ‘combination of a lower share of the population in work and a higher share in need of economic support clearly has a negative effect on the productive capacity of the economy’.”

Despite how clearly disastrous this idea of decreasing the production of human beings is, these general beliefs lead to one man and his grand libel against the human race committed 200 years ago, Thomas Malthus.

Malthusianism is the belief that population growth is exponential while resource growth is linear, leading to a population die-off by either war, famine or disease. To stop this, Malthusians would advocate for the mass indiscriminate killing of people to skim the population and prevent this “Malthusian Trap.” This is exactly what Linkola advocates, and a softer version of this theory is practiced by those who advocate for population controls. Not all degrowth-ers are Malthusians, but it doesn’t take a massive leap to end up there, and the logical conclusion of ending all economic growth may well result in this “skimming” of the population.

Conclusion

Engels accused Malthus of making a “repulsive blasphemy against man and nature”, while Marx referred to his theory as a “sin against science.” The Left has forgotten these criticisms, and by willingly associating with these degrowth delusions, they may well sign the death warrant of socialism and of human progress as a whole.

The only way to solve climate change is through sustainable economic growth, a planned economy, and an end to capitalism. Unless these criteria are met, the Malthusians will control the debate, and an eco-fascist future is inevitable.