Date: Mon, 08 Apr 1996 20:09:49 +1000
From: sjwright-AT-vaxc.cc.monash.edu.au (Steve Wright)
Subject: Re: discussing neo-liberalism & utopia


A few thoughts on Franco's recent post:

[snip]

>As far as the material bases, a massive contradiction arise for
>capital: it has to stimulate and
>harness subjectivity by encouraging increasing worker
>responsibilization, even creativity, in order to grasp a social and
>communicational surplus value in the workplace. This is

[snip]

>In this way, capital silences subjectivity just at the same time it
>calls it into life. Capital has not found, yet, the ways to deal with
>this contradiction. Two examples: the use of Just-in-Time *as a

I wonder whether at least some capitals can deal with this contradiction by
staking everything on getting employees to identify with the firm's
*performance*. This can take a number of forms, from a factory 'patriotism'
complete with company hymns and/or profit-sharing, to a more cynical notion
that since (according to 'common sense', which by definition excludes all
'utopian' horizons) the company is the goose that lays the golden egg
(capital as the *provider* of labour, as Italian legal language puts it),
and killing the goose will threaten workers' livelihoods, we should all
knuckle down and do what we can for the enterprise as a whole, even if we
know from experience that management and/or the owners are scum.

Such views are often strongly shaped by labour market prospects (e.g. can I
get a job somewhere else if this place goes down the drain or becomes too
unbearable?). Pointing this out is hardly a methodological breakthrough, I
know, but I think it's important nonetheless, and applies to many
workplaces where there is no inkling of the sort of glamorous, hi-tech
hi-skill 'self-managed' jobs that post-fordist ideologues drool about.
>
[snip]
>
>in this. Utopia can be equated with the process of subjectivity
>construction as a process whereby a plurality of actors subjected to
>capitalist domination come explicitly to perceive their self-image as
>exceeding any capitalist pre-determined definition, feeling
>antagonistic towards that image and the social power which promoted
>it. In this way the "responsible" worker is replaced by the worker
>collectivity, or the "social movement" as a bourgeois category for a
>"non-class" movement is replaced by movements whose nature is given
>by the circulation of struggles inside and outside industrial
>production. Subjectivity is like a mirror through which the subject
>after having stopped and subverted the rythms of production, can
>look at the "history" he/she has made and thinking it as a
>creation of its own as a subject (eg: looking at factory social
>relations as determined by his/her struggles as worker defined
>through struggles themselves, and not as the articulation of
>performances of particular kinds of capitalistically-defined
>worker). The human eye can see everything, bit it still needs a
>mirror to see itself. Subjectivity, for the subject is just that
>mirror. It implies moments of reflection, of recollection of
>experiences, the inception of a subversive temporality which
>disarticulates the pace of the production process. But this is not

How does this process begin? What I see more and more in this city is
demoralisation and fatalism - a loathing for the way in which the world of
paid work is going, but no confidence that any alternative is possible.
Mind you, Melbourne is a place where workers have been under considerable
attack in terms of wages, conditions and job security (but is that any
different anywhere else?).
>
>The problem is, and that is what I would also like to ask to the
>list: can we intervene on these moments of disarticulation, givig
>them a coherence through the circulation of struggles of autonomous
>subjects? What are the methodological tools? How can we conceptualize
>the importance of the *event* in a non-evolutionistic understanding
>of subjectivity, but which nonetheless maintains subjectivity as a
>solid tool of analysis against the ideological articulation
>globalization/fragmentation? I agree on Massimo's emphasis on the
>circulation of struggles as a way to recognize the "otherness", and
>the only way I think the idea of "Globalization" can be fruitfully
>utilized, and not only moralistically rejected, from a class
>strategy point of view is in the sense of *globalization (and
>differentiation) of the battlefields*.

OK, so what is the 'we' here? Self-defined revolutionaries? I'm not being
sarcastic, just genuinely curious.

[snip]

>capital). Only by rooting the analysis at the level of subjectivity
>construction we can liberate the subversive element in thinking about
>utopia.

This sounds interesting - can you elaborate?

Steve





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