Confronting Value with Hope: Towards a Prefigurative Critique of Political Economy

In my review of the four modes of autonomy and their conversion into the key of hope (Chapters 2 and 3), I posed the question of whether autonomous organising is a praxis that fluctuates eternally between rebellion and integration or whether there is anything else to autonomy that can informs its political virtues to produce radical change? I suggested that when the Zapatistas, the QSVT movements, the Network for the Defence of Water and Life and the MST cross boundaries and venture beyond ‘the wire’, they create a surplus possibility or excess that escapes translation. By excess I mean an untranslatable aspect of the autonomous praxis that constitutes both a threat to capital and a source of inspiration for the movements. In this chapter, I discuss the nature of excess and offer a prefigurative critique of political economy. This method reads Marx’s critique of political economy in the key of hope. This does not mean that I will engage directly with Marx’s views on alternatives to capitalism (see Hudis, 2012) but emphasise Marx’s critique of political economy as a prefigurative method and epistemology. As argued in Chapter 3, Bloch reads Marx as a not yet theory, as a philosophy of the future, as a method that takes us in the right direction, puts us in motion, in contact with our inner self and with hope, the expectant emotion that strives for radical thinking and equips us with the capacity to organise hope collectively.