Date: Thu, 18 Apr 1996 20:36:44 -0400
From: Michael Hardt <104373.21-AT-compuserve.com>
Subject: steve's note di discussione


Steve, 

you seemed concerned at the end of your recent post in response to the
padovani and the note di discussione about a certain irritability.  Well, I
certainly was irritated by the post because you were so quickly dismissive.
 Thinking about it for a day, though, I decided there are a few points
worth discussing.  The first few aren't really what I want to talk about
(you might just skip them), but let me get them out of my system so we can
get on to what I find interesting.

1. It doesn't seem to me justified (or useful) that you criticize anyone
for admiring Althusser as philosopher, nor that you pose the definition of
philosophy so narrowly.  So many philosophers, even the most abstract, even
the most reactionary ones (even Hegel or Plato), can be used in interesting
and productive ways.  You seem to close that down so quickly.  And, by the
way, some of Althusser's late essays that are being published now, such as
the one on aleatory materialism, are extremely beautiful.

2. There seems to be some confusion regarding the dialectic and the real
subsumption.  It might be helpful to distinguish among at least three
conceptions of the dialectic: one that is used casually as a mere
relatedness; a second that is a two-part and open structure where the basis
of each term is its opposition to the last (this seems to me what you are
refering to with the cycle of struggles and restructuring a la Tronti of
Operai e capitale); and a third that is a three-part structure in which the
third moment is a subsumption of the first two.  The question of real
versus formal subsumption is posed within this third conception.  Now, what
exactly do you mean when you say that the dialectic has not ended and that
this is not the society of the real subsumption?  I, for one, have found it
useful to think a rupture of the dialectic in thinking a kind of struggle
that is not directly oppositional (and supportive of power in a negative
way) but rather more autonomous.  And for me the difference between the
real and formal subsumptions have been a way to think what postmodernism
might mean through Marx's texts, particularly in relation to the change in
the form of the State.  (I know this is cryptic but I don't know how much
to go into it.)

3. Well, leave all that aside, because what seems interesting to me to
discuss is the question of post-fordism you raise.  You seem to be charging
those who speak of post-fordism with Eurocentrism: that is, maybe the
factory has declined in Europe and the US but in the rest of the world ....
 Well, I find that interesting and I wonder if that is true.  It is
certainly the case that several of the characteristics of fordist
production continue to exist throughout the world (maybe more elsewhere but
also certainly in Europe and the US--in this regard I found Lipietz's ideas
on central and peripheral fordism interesting).  The question is to
recognize the wage relation and mode of accumulation that defines fordism
and post.  Hilferding wrote that when European imperialism exported capital
it exported it always in its highest form.  That does not mean that it
always exported the most advanced productive processes or wage relations,
but that the highest form of capital (even if it occupies a very small
fraction of the production of a region) is dominant over the other forms of
capital.  That seems to me an argument for recognizing post-fordism on a
global scale.  It may be worth entertaining the idea, in other words, that
the immaterial labor that characterizes postfordism and today defines the
highest form of capitalist production (at least according to Robert Reich)
exerts a force of domination over the whole of production.  Does that make
any sense?

Well, I've run out of energy so I'll stop.

Michael   


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