We seek to elaborate the concept of corruption as formulated by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. By providing a brief history of the concept, we show that it reveals how the compositional and autonomous politics of class struggle and becoming are threatened by decompositional techniques of capture and exploitation. In order to thicken the historical-material specificity of this distinction, we provide a research note about organized labor’s effort to communicate an alternative to Governor Walker’s union busting legislation in Wisconsin. We are particularly critical of the effort to re-direct the class struggle into an electoral campaign of recall and referendum.
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