The New York Archives of Autonomist Marxism is a research, archiving and collecting project that inquires into and draws out the development of pamphlets, periodicals and leaflets within the broadly-defined tradition of Autonomist Marxism. Through examining the political and movement context of particular publications, as well as their publication history, this project aims to deepen knowledge and documentation of the broadly-defined autonomist tradition.
The collection is the outcome of more than two-decades of research and is based New York. The collecting aspect of the project means there is an interest in procuring, archiving and documenting the different editions of given publications and exploring their publication context, content and aesthetics. This is a private collection.
What is Autonomist Marxism?
For purposes of defining the scope of this archive we use Harry Cleaver’s definition of autonomist Marxism:
What gives meaning to the concept of “autonomist Marxism” as a particular tradition is the fact that we can identify, within the larger Marxist tradition, a variety of movements, politics and thinkers who have emphasized the autonomous power of workers–autonomous from capital, from their official organizations (e.g. the trade unions, the political parties) and, indeed, the power of particular groups of workers to act autonomously from other groups (e.g. women from men). By “autonomy” I mean the ability of workers to define their own interests and to struggle for them–to go beyond mere reaction to exploitation, or to self-defined “leadership” and to take the offensive in ways that shape the class struggle and define the future.”
Focus, Commitment to Distribution, and Loans
We aim to focus on publications that are not already documented or discussed at great length on the internet. For those publications, the ones we write entries about, we will scan them upon making an entry if they’re not available online.
If there are writings/images listed in the contents section that are not available online and you would like a a scan, we will do our best to do so (but it will take some time!). The archive is not available to the general public because it’s a personal collection. However, if you would like us to loan you an item for a movement event or exhibition we are generally interested in doing so (for cost of round-trip postage). For loans, please email us at the address below.
Listing of Contents
We are steadily putting together a listing of physical holdings. As the collection is thus far at ~1500 items, this will take a while. An overview of the main holdings will be available this year.
New York Archives of Autonomist Marxism 