Date: Sat, 13 Apr 1996 22:01:50 +1000
From: sjwright-AT-vaxc.cc.monash.edu.au (Steve Wright)
Subject: (Eng) Mauro on Padova Discussion Notes pt1


Here is a translation of the first 2/3 of Mauro's last post. I will send
the rest just as soon as I finish it ;-) - Steve
_________________

I'm responding to the "Discussion Notes of the Autonomous Network of Social
Self-organisation in the North East" translated and posted by Steve.

These are preliminary observations about the text's metodological premises;
others, if there is the opportunity, will follow.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The first thing that strikes the reader is the equation "dialectic of
capital/labour" = "mediation".

This premise immediately places us outside marxism. No big deal; it's
enough to recognise the fact and avoid playing at marxology. The dialectic
between capital and labour can be resolved only in its synthesis (if we're
talking about the dialectic), and the synthesis is the surpassing of the
mode of production based upon that contradiction. Still, the capitalist
mode of production doesn't seem yet to have been surpassed. (Or did I miss
something?).

But the sleight of hand [giochino], typical of the old workerism of Tronti
and later Negri, continues: "the rupture of the dialectic between workers'
struggles and capitalist development (...), of the linear sequence
struggles-crisis-restructuring, followed by struggles-crisis-etcetera in a
'bad infinity'.

To talk of the rupture of the dialectic may seem fascinating, but it is
meaningless. Above all, that "linear sequence" lives only in the fantasy of
the old Italian workerists; it finds no correspondence in the real dynamic
of the capitalist mode of production. It's true that workers' struggles can
encourage automation as a way of recovering profit margins eroded by wage
increases - but to see this as the only motor of restructuring is pure
myopia. Tell us, please, where and when it can be verified that workers'
struggles are so effective that, within most of the OECD, they have induced
that powerful process of restructuring which we rightfully define as the
third tecnological revolution under capital.

Here, in reality, the hard reality of the contradictions peculiar to the
capitalist mode of production (of the capitalist economy) are exchanged for
fantasies about workers' struggles.

And again (and throughout): "In real subsumption, capital poses itself as
the univocal substance of the world's fabric, as absolute foundation, as
unique subject, as self-referential totality. What can the dialectic be, if
there is no recognition of the other term of the contradiction?"

Here, in the same sentence, another "discovery" which flies in the face of
reality is introduced in customary style. It's very true, in fact, that "In
real subsumption, capital poses itself as the univocal substance of the
world's fabric, as absolute foundation, as unique subject, as
self-referential totality." But it does so before all else on the level of
subjectivity - that is, to (bourgeois) thought dominant amongst citizens of
a bourgeois social formation, and has nothing to do, at least directly,
with the objective permanence of classes. In the second place, that phrase,
and the one that follows it, imply that... real subsumption dates back to
the 1970s!

The famous "dialectic", in fact, would have declined, broken down, right
now, in the midst of real subsumption [sarebbe venuta meno, sarebbe stata
rotta, giusto ora, in forza della sussunzione reale: I'm not sure if I
rendered this sentence correctly - SW].

The rhetoric of words completely fails to cover up the lack of ideas.

If these are the metodological premises, the rest of the argument collapses
with them. We will examine them in a later chapter; for now I want to make
some further observations about the text's premises.

Let's return, then, to the famous dialectic between capital and labour,
which the text compares to mediation.

There is talk, immediately before the citations above, of the end of the
old fordist pact between capital and labour and of the old model of the
welfare state, as the capitalist mediation of class conflict.

Fordist pact? Or rather social democratic pact: that is, a substantial
social peace governed on the workers' side by social democracy, on the
basis of the defeat of the first revolutionary wave? The  difference is not
insignificant.

The national-communists and/or social democrats (the signatories of the
pact) are seen, by our neo-workerists, not as bourgeois parties (in terms
of their program and practive, quite apart from the sociological
composition of their membership), but as parties still of the working
class. It must be recognised, in order to avoid formal polemics, that our
autonomists designate as capitalist the mediation of class conflict, whilst
continuing to consider as part of the working class the parties that
realise that mediation.

In fact our aut-op, like the old Communist party member Tronti,
conceptualise the notion of the workers party in a totally formal way. They
fail to grasp, therefore, the fundamental difference between mediation and
subversion, between negotiation and ...  expropriation. For them,
mediation can be functional to subversion, negotiation can prepare the way
for expropriation. Certainly the wording is new, but the content is still
that of old-style reformism, the reformism flailed by Marx and Engels which
had nonetheless triumphed in the Second International.

But the weakness, or rather the grave errors of the text's analytical
system go much further than this. The completely bourgeois myth of the
welfare state has been embraced by the workerists and autonomists. For
them, political economy has supplanted the critique ofpolitical economy.
Keynesian categories have taken the place of marxist ones; once again,
contractualism has taken the place of antagonism.




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