Draft:Midnight Notes Collective

Midnight Notes Collective is a US-based autonomist Marxist collective associated with the journal Midnight Notes, which began publication in 1979. Emerging from debates around the earlier journal Zerowork, the collective brought together influences from Italian operaismo and autonomist Marxism, the Wages for Housework movement, anti-colonial struggles and the anti-nuclear movement.

The collective's writings have addressed class composition, work and the refusal of work, energy, technology, war, globalization, primitive accumulation, enclosure and the commons. Its 1990 issue The New Enclosures developed an account of enclosure as an ongoing feature of capitalist development rather than a process confined to the historical origins of capitalism. This analysis subsequently became one of the best-known aspects of the collective's work.

History

The Midnight Notes Collective developed after the cessation of the autonomist Marxist journal Zerowork in the late 1970s. Its first meetings took place in 1978, initially in Brooklyn, New York. The collaborators on its first issue included Hans Widmer (p.m.), George Caffentzis, Monty Neill, John Willshire and Vasilis Passas.

The first issue, Strange Victories: The Anti-Nuclear Movement in the U.S. and Europe, appeared in 1979. Early issues focused particularly on the relationship between the contemporary organization of work, energy production and anti-nuclear struggles. MayDay Rooms describes the collective as bringing together different strands of the US radical left shaped by the protest movements of the late 1960s, including anti-colonial politics, Italian autonomist Marxism and the women's liberation movement.

Membership and participation in the collective changed over time. Peter Linebaugh became an early member, while later collaborators and contributors included Steven Colatrella, David Riker, John Roosa, Harry Cleaver, Silvia Federici and others. Federici contributed to several of the collective's major later publications, including The New Enclosures and Midnight Oil.

The collective produced ten issues of Midnight Notes between 1979 and 1990 before moving toward more occasional publication. Its themes shifted alongside contemporary political struggles, including the anti-nuclear movement, changes in technology and work, international debt, war, globalization and struggles against enclosure.

Ideas and themes

Work, energy and class composition

The collective's early work drew upon the autonomist Marxist concept of class composition, emphasizing struggles by workers and other social groups as forces shaping capitalist development. Its writings rejected accounts of economic crisis that treated workers primarily as passive victims of structural economic processes.

A recurring theme was the relationship between work and energy. Early issues interpreted the energy crises of the 1970s and the growth of nuclear power in relation to conflicts over labour, wages and social reproduction. These arguments were later collected alongside material from Zerowork in Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973–1992, published by Autonomedia in 1992.

The collection linked energy and class struggle to subjects including oil production, the Gulf War, industrial conflict, migration and struggles in Africa and the Middle East.

The new enclosures

The New Enclosures, published as issue 10 of Midnight Notes in 1990, marked an important development in the collective's analysis.

The collective argued that enclosure should not be understood solely as a historical stage preceding industrial capitalism. Instead, it described enclosure as a recurring process through which people are separated from land, resources and other means of subsistence and reproduction. Its account connected contemporary processes including international debt, privatization, migration and structural adjustment to the longer history of primitive accumulation.

Political theorist David Eden treats the Midnight Notes analysis of the "new enclosures" as a distinct current within contemporary autonomist Marxism. He argues that the collective's approach rejects the idea of a homogeneous proletariat and emphasizes the multiple forms of labour and dispossession through which capitalist social relations are reproduced.

The concept has subsequently been taken up in scholarship on property, neoliberalism and the commons.

Commons

The collective's analysis of enclosure was accompanied by increasing attention to the commons as a form of social cooperation and political struggle. Its later work contrasted the privatization and commodification of shared resources with practices of collective reproduction and commoning.

Themes of work and enclosure were described retrospectively by Caffentzis as two continuing concerns of Midnight Notes: "work/refusal of work" and "enclosure/commons".

Later publications

After The New Enclosures, Midnight Notes continued to publish less frequently.

Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973–1992 (1992), published by Autonomedia, combined writings by Midnight Notes with texts from the earlier Zerowork collective. The volume examined two decades of conflicts involving energy, oil, labour and war.

One No, Many Yeses, published in 1998, addressed emerging forms of international anti-capitalist politics.

In 2001, Autonomedia published Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local and Global Struggles of the Fourth World War. Rather than concentrating only on the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, the collection examined the influence of Zapatismo on struggles against neoliberalism and globalization in Mexico, Canada, Europe, India, the United States and elsewhere. The book was subsequently reviewed in the Humboldt Journal of Social Relations.

Following the 2007–2008 financial crisis, the collective and collaborators published Promissory Notes: From Crisis to Commons in 2009, returning to questions of crisis, enclosure, debt and collective alternatives.

Archive and influence

In 2009, a conference marking thirty years of Midnight Notes was held at the Brecht Forum in New York City. Contributions reflecting on the history and influence of the collective were subsequently collected in Toward the Last Jubilee! Midnight Notes at Thirty Years (2010).

In 2013, George Caffentzis donated a collection of Midnight Notes materials to MayDay Rooms in London. The archive includes a complete run of the journal together with pamphlets, correspondence and other material covering the period from 1979 to 2009. Digitized versions of the issues have also been made available through the Memory of the World digital archive.

Midnight Notes has subsequently been discussed as a distinct strand within the history of autonomist Marxism. David Eden's Autonomy: Capitalism, Class and Politics devotes separate chapters to the collective's theory of the new enclosures, its politics of the commons and a critique of its approach. Its writings on enclosure and commons have also been cited in later work in geography, political theory, cultural studies and studies of commoning.

Selected publications

• Strange Victories: The Anti-Nuclear Movement in the U.S. and Europe (Midnight Notes, no. 1, 1979)
• No Future Notes: The Work/Energy Crisis and the Anti-Nuclear Movement (Midnight Notes, no. 2)
• Space Notes (Midnight Notes, no. 4)
• Computer State Notes (Midnight Notes, no. 5)
• The New Enclosures (Midnight Notes, no. 10, 1990)
• Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973–1992 (Autonomedia, 1992)
• One No, Many Yeses (1998)
• Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local and Global Struggles of the Fourth World War (Autonomedia, 2001)
• Promissory Notes: From Crisis to Commons (2009)

See also

• Autonomism
• Operaismo
• George Caffentzis
• Peter Linebaugh
• Silvia Federici
• Wages for housework
• Commons
• Primitive accumulation of capital
• Autonomedia

External links

• Midnight Notes archive at MayDay Rooms
• Digitized Midnight Notes collection at Memory of the World

This page will be placed in the following categories if it is moved to the article namespace.

Categories:

• Collectives
• Autonomism
• Marxist organizations
• American organizations established in 1979
• Far-left politics in the United States