written in 1962 and published in English in 2019 by Verso
notes written in 2017 for a grad school comprehensive paper on autonomy

Beginning from the premise of labor’s primacy over capital, Tronti analyzes the labor process, class struggle, and wider society through this lens. It culminates in the strategy of refusal, to be organized by the party. Tronti begins with his key inversion of Marx: we can’t start with understanding capital as a way to understand the working class. Instead, the working class is the party with all the power, causing capital to continuously transform its methods of exploitation and to organize all of society outside the factory so that it may control labor inside it.

published in 1981, in English in 1995 by Autonomedia
notes written in 2017 for a grad school comprehensive paper on autonomy

Fortunati adds a gendered analysis of reproduction to the Marxist understanding of capitalism. She re-formulates the concepts of production, use and exchange value, and variable capital/labor-power, observing them from the perspective of reproduction, and she elaborates a theory of reproduction that is totally absent in Marx. This core of her theory of reproduction is that it’s the sine qua non of all capitalism since there is no capitalism without labor-power, yet capital ‘naturalizes’ reproduction and is therefore able to benefit from labor-power without paying for it. Women ‘freely’ exchange their unwaged, un-valued reproductive labor for a share in male wages, thereby passing along to the capitalist a second non-equivalent exchange, alongside the commodities-for-wages exchange, and further increasing surplus value accumulation. This comparison of productive and reproductive labor allows Fortunati to deepen a number of Marxist concepts, including our very understandings of class and class struggle. Most importantly, we learn that capital must internally divide labor if it’s to successfully undervalue reproduction.

published in 2016 by Oxford University Press
notes written in 2017 in preparation for a grad school comprehensive paper on social movements

McAlevey makes the argument that labor has been on the decline because it has chosen mobilizing over organizing, thereby separating labor from community and social movement organizations. She takes us through a union history, from her favorite progenitor, the CIO, through the treason of Alinsky and to today’s ‘New Labor,’ and also outlines a theory of power and specific organizing steps that can return us to the CIO’s organizing model. Her key distinction between organizing and mobilizing gives theoretical arguments about NGOs, class formation, and the difference between new and old social movements some concrete, practical teeth. It’s a great example of strategic, praxis-based writing.

published in 1975 by Pluto Press
notes written in 2017 for a grad school comprehensive paper on social movements

Dunayevskaya argues for the primacy of ‘the self-activity of the masses,’ making this the root of her humanist philosophy, her understanding of key Marxist concepts (and the method by which these key concepts were elaborated), and her reading of Marxist and Soviet history. It’s a dialectical theory and method that puts working people at the center and, in doing so, heavily critiques bureaucracy, state capitalism, and vanguardism.

published in 2014 by Estampa
notes written in 2017 for a grad school comprehensive paper on autonomy

Using extensive quotations from primary source interviews, Fernandez explains Zapatista justice in its widest sense, as a practice fundamentally rooted in the collective ownership and work on the land and a practice that is tied to all aspects of autonomy. This is the message repeated throughout the text: the official justice is money and autonomous justice is collective work on collective land. She begins with testimony contrasting current justice and autonomy to slavery and coercion before the uprising; she then situates the fundamental change in the land; she explains self-government and cargos, emphasizing the collective approach; she then (and only after these important explanations) describes the justice system in more detail; and finally mentions its current limitations and how justice-as-education is central to continuing to transcend obstacles.

published in 1980 by St. Martin’s Press
notes written for a grad school comprehensive paper on social movements

Sassoon carries out a close analysis of Gramsci’s notebooks to synthesize his thinking on the party, the nature of the hegemony it’s up against, what revolution should look like, and how the party can be a tool to get there. Gramsci’s end-goal is always a new state of non-capitalist social relations, allowing politics to be infused in all of society so that there is no longer a division between leaders and led. He then works backwards to detail important aspects of the party structure and series of tasks necessary to achieve this vision.

published in 1995 by Women’s Press
notes written for a grad school comprehensive paper on social movements

This is bound to be your definitive reference on questions of revolutionary subjectivity, identity, and the praxis of thinking about these things to make social change. It’s extremely theoretically rich, as she re-orients the identity discussion towards concepts of experience, difference, social relations, relations of ruling, and subjectivity. The analysis dialectically brings together Foucauldian cultural, knowledge/power thinking with Marxist thinking on revolution and social class. In doing so, it’s a prime example of how to carry out a dialectical analysis. In fact, it’s a case study of dialectics as applied to identity. (And for this reason it’s quite hard to summarize, so you’ll probably still need to go back to the notes.)