Stevphen Shukaitis

Learning Not to Labor

In autonomist history and theory, the refusal of work is frequently invoked but seldom expanded upon in a significant manner. From the celebration of laziness to mass industrial strikes, work refusal takes many forms. This essay develops an expanded autonomist conception of work refusal, understanding work refusal as a compositional practice and arguing for analyzing it through the forms of collectivity and social relations that it creates. Based on this analysis, a form of “zerowork training,” or a pedagogy of learning not to labor, is proposed as a process through which antagonism and refusal can be further socialized. Learning not to labor sits at the junction of the refusal of work and the re-fusing of the social energies of such refusal back into supporting the continued affective existence and capacities of other forms of life and ways of being together, as practice and as a form of embodied critique.

Symphony of the Surplus/Value : Notes on labour, valorization and sabotage in the metropolitan factory

This essay is a reflection on how art produces value using the work of Arseny Avraamov, Heath Bunting, and debates around cultural labour. It argues that art produces value not through exchange itself or through labour as traditionally understood, but in how it renders value out of the labours of circulating ideas, images, and affects. Drawing from this perspective, and informed by autonomist theories of class composition, it then considers possibilities for the sabotage of value within circuits of artistic value production, such as in the regeneration of cities through an arts based economy.

Space is the (non)place: Martians, Marxists, and the outer space of the radical imagination

Joe Hill, the famous labour activist and songwriter, in a letter he wrote the day before his execution, said that the following day he expected to take a trip to Mars during which, upon his arrival, he would begin to organize Martian canal workers into the Industrial Workers of World. Why did he do this? After all, it might seem a bit odd that Hill, famous in his songwriting and reworking for consistently mocking the promises and deceits of religious reformers offering ‘pie in the sky’ (and that’s a lie) to oppressed and exploited migrant workers more concerned about getting some bread in the belly (and maybe some roses, ie dignity, too). Hill continues to say that with the canal worker he’ll sing Wobbly songs ‘so loud the learned star gazers on Earth will for once and all get positive proof that the planet Mars is really inhabited’ (Smith, 1984: 164). So why the reference to some form of other worldly-ness, one in which, rather than promising salvation or escape from the trials and tribulations of this world, Hill rather imagines himself as extending and continuing the very same social antagonism that brought him to the day before his execution in the first place? Aside from the personal characteristics of Hill’s immense wit and humor (Rosemont, 2002), this chapter will argue that there is something more than that, something about the particular role outer space and extraterrestrial voyage play within the radical imagination. It will explore the idea of voyages out of the world as an imaginal machine for thinking and organizing to get out of this world that we want to leave behind. In other words, how themes and imagery of space take part in the construction and animation of socially and historically embedded forms of collective imagination and cre-

‘Theories are made only to die in the war of time’: Guy Debord and the Situationist International as strategic thinkers

The Situationist International (SI) has been one of the main reference points during the past 40 or more years within social movement organizing, cultural studies, social theory and philosophy. While the SI has been understood in many ways as inheritors and elaborators of an unorthodox Marxist politics drawing heavily from the history of the avant-garde, relatively little attention has been paid to the specifically strategic dimension of their thought and practice. This is surprising, especially in Debords case, given how much his work also draws from the history of military strategy. This paper will particularly examine the strategic aspects of Debord and the SIs thought and politics and how they rethink the nature of strategy through collective forms of aesthetic–political practice.

Metropolitan Strategies, Psychogeographic Investigations

The ideas and practices of the Situationist International (SI) and the Italian autonomists of the 1960s and 1970s continue to provide inspiration for developing strategies for contesting capitalism. This essay proposes to bring together concepts from these traditions, working between the Situationist concept of psychogeography and the dérive, with autonomist writings on the shaping of the metropolis. Drawing on the autonomist concepts of class composition analysis and conducting a workers’ inquiry, it will be suggested that they can be usefully combined with psychogeographic investigations and methods to understand the shifting terrain of surplus value production within the metropolis based on an analysis of these transformations to develop new forms of political action and ways to sabotage the accumulation process.

Below the Perceptible, the Political?

This review considers the book Escape Routes by Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsianos, focusing on its analysis of what they theorize through the concepts of imperceptible politics and postliberal sovereignty. By using a broadly autonomist framework to expand the political notion of refusal, they construct an analysis of everyday resistance in a useful and compelling direction.

Fascists as much as painters: Imagination, overidentification, and strategies of intervention

This paper explores the work of Laibach and the Neue Slowenische Kunst collective from Slovenia, and their usage and fusion of avant-garde and fascist aesthetics as a form of cultural and political intervention into the collective imagination. This approach of adopting a set of ideas, images, or politics and attacking them, not by a direct, open or straightforward critique, but rather through a rabid and obscenely exaggerated adoption of them, is referred to as overidentification. This paper will examine the formation of overidentification as a strategy of cultural-political intervention uniquely suited to the Slovenian context. Since their interventions this approach to cultural intervention has been adopted more broadly within political organizing. The argument for such strategies is that in the current functioning of capitalism, the critical function of governance is to be more critical than the critics of governance itself. The question then becomes of how a strategy of overidentification either creates or restrains the possibility of intervening within the creation of collective imaginaries within the present. Overidentification is thus a fitting tool for developing methods of intervention for contexts marked by a high degree of ambivalence, and to find ways to recompose a politics in and against these conditions.