It is the separation and interaction of these strata that sets the value vortex in motion, and keeps it spinning. The class struggle, the struggle that continues, always, is the friction and fluctuation at the border of these bands. The motion of the capital vortex also, however, incessantly alters the strata of which it is composed. That not only capital but its human workforce has a changing ‘composition’ was the insight of operaismo, or workerism, a grouping centred in Italy around the mid twentieth-century factory conflicts (see Wright 2002). Operaismo theorists inverted Marx’s concept of capital’s organic composition. Instead, they looked at the ratio of constant capital (machines and raw materials) to variable capital (workers) as it affected the capacities of the working class (since operaismo texts usually refer to ‘the working class’, rather than ‘proletariat’, we will maintain this terminology in discussing their texts). To this end, operaismo thinkers and those who later followed in their footsteps distinguish the technical and political elements of class composition. ‘Technical composition’ is the organization of the working class by capital; this includes both its ‘conditions in the immediate process of production’ – the division of labour, management practices, and, of particular interest here, the use of machinery, and also, in some accounts, the ‘forms of reproduction’, such as community and family structures, through which the class relation is perpetuated (Kolinko 2002: 3). ‘Political composition’, is the organizational capacity of the working class to fight for its own needs and development: the individual and collective actions of refusal, resistance and re-appropriation of surplus value. The political composition of the working class determines its capacity to subvert or go beyond the organization of society around capitalist value: to destroy the vortex from within. Changes in the composition of capital and the composition of the working class chase one another in a ‘cycle of struggles’ (Zerowork 1975). As Raniero Panzieri (1980) argued, the increase in capital’s organic composition is not the outcome of a neutral, purely scientific process of technological progress, but rather of a historically prolonged machinic offensive aimed at ‘decomposing’ working-class counter-power. Thus the resistances of skilled workers to early industrial capital were slowly broken down first by the time and motion studies of Taylorism and then by the mechanized assembly lines of the Fordist factory. However, such changes could become the basis for working class ‘re-composition’. The increase in the organic composition of capital which creates the Fordist factory also generates a new technical composition of the working class whose political power lies in its ability to ‘stop the line’, halting the huge machinic apparatus in which it is implanted, paralyzing a vast fixed overhead whose profitability rests on continuous operation. The result of reducing work to the homogeneity and monotony of the assembly line was to produce the ‘mass worker’ organizations that terrified mid twentieth-century capital, and provided the base within which operaismo thought grew. Operaismo made other innovations in class theory. One was the identification of a ‘circulation of struggles’ (Alquati 1974; Bell and Cleaver 1982), paralleling but subverting the circulation of capital. The circulation of capital involves the market realization of surplus value in commodity exchange, processes in which transportation and communications are vital. The circulation of struggles, however, entailed the connection of resistances against the extraction of surplus value, which, either by inadvertent knock-on effects of strikes and other actions or by intentional solidarity builds an ever greater mass of opposition to capitalist accumulation. Ramono Alquati (1974) wrote of the way workers learned of struggles at other sites ‘as if by telecommunication’ and of the emergence of a ‘network’ made up of the ‘combined vertical-horizontal articulation’ of struggles. Some branches of operaismo suggested capital could be fought not just at the immediate point of production, but also throughout the whole ‘social factory’ which surrounded and serviced it. These ideas were especially important for a feminist wing of operaismo that eventually detached itself from the original grouping. This ‘wages for housework’ movement proposed that women’s work in the home made an invisible and unrewarded contribution to capitalist value creation by its unpaid labour of care for children and families (Dalla Costa and James 1972; Fortunati 1995). Such offshoots of operaismo made not only the workplace but also the sites where labour power was reproduced – that is, where people are raised, trained, educated and socialized for work in households, schools and welfare offices – into points of struggle. What became known as ‘autonomist Marxism’ thus mapped a scenario in which the spiralling enlargement of the capitalist vortex multiplied the chances of its rupture, destabilization and destruction. But despite, or because of, this, operaismo and its autonomist offshoot have been intensely controversial within the Marxist tradition. Although tactical and organizational issues are at stake in these disagreements, at root are major theoretical divergences. One major criticism of operaismo is that it had too ‘pure’ a view of the working class, leading to unrealistic, not to say dangerously romantic, strategies of struggle. A famous operaismo aphorism declared workers ‘in and against’ capital. This acknowledges the envelopment of labour within the value vortex. It also, however, suggests an essential core of working-class identity that is ‘against’ capital – an innate tendency to resist. Many critics argue that this does not adequately recognize the degree to which ‘labour’ as such is caught up in the commodity system. Workers are themselves the sellers of a commodity – their own labour power, exchanged for a wage. They are thus engaged in a commercial transaction that may be more or less intensely bargained but is not in itself inconsistent with general commodification. ==The very subject-position ‘worker’ is not ‘autonomous’, but rather defined by capital; it thus cannot spontaneously provide an adequate basis from which to oppose it.== This criticism comes from a variety of theoretical perspectives, including orthodox Marxisms, for whom the critique of romanticism validates vanguard party organization. It is also, however, delivered in a very different style by other ‘ultra-left’ groupings sharing operaismo’s scepticism about programmatic, top-down party organization. One of these is the group Theorie Communiste (TC), whose work informs recent communisation theory. Like operaismo, TC had its origins in the 1960s and ’70s, though in France not Italy. TC shares with it the concept of the ‘cycle of struggles’ (Simon 2011), but seeks to explain not so much worker movements’ moments of strength as their repeated failures. These, TC argues, cannot be accounted for merely in terms of mistakes, or betrayals, but are intrinsic to the ‘reciprocal implication’ of capital and proletariat, which, rather than being simply antagonistic are also integrated as two poles of a single system (Endnotes 2008: 215). Cyber-Proletariat pp.29-31