Date: Tue, 02 Jul 1996 08:40:58 +1000
From: sjwright-AT-vaxc.cc.monash.edu.au (Steve Wright)
Subject: Re: autovalorization


Thanks, Bryan, for raising the question of self-valorization - I'm curious
to know what others have to say about it, and will chip in with my own 5
cents worth soon.

In the meantime, here is an excerpt from an interview with Harry Cleaver
recorded by Massimo De Angelis three years ago. It appeared in the first
issue of the Italian journal vis-=E0-vis 1 (Autumn 1993), and a nameless
circle of comrades (but we're looking for a name! - any suggestions
gratefully received) here in Melbourne will be bringing it out as a
pamphlet shortly. We'll also lodge it in the list archive.

Steve
_______________________

Section IV: Self-valorization

M: The refusal of work leads us necessarily to talk about the constitutive
practices beyond capital. In your work you use the category of
self-valorization first introduced by Negri some years ago. What do you
mean  by self-valorization?

H:      Toni Negri took a relatively obscure term which had been used by
Marx (but by few of his followers) to talk about the self-reproduction of
capital and gave it a new meaning: the self-development of the working
class. There are problems with this term-the self-valorization of the
working class is not homologous with that of capital-and he might have
chosen some other but this one serves well enough. The point was to focus
attention on the existence of autonomy in the self-development of workers
vis a vis capital. For too long the development of the working class had
been seen by Marxists as derivative of the development of capital. Earlier
autonomist Marxists, especially Mario Tronti, had reminded us that for Marx
capital (dead labor) was essentially a constraint on the working class
(living labor), not the other way around. The living, inventive force in
labor is the imagination and self-activity of workers, not capital. Yet, as
the struggles of the mass workers took the form of the refusal of work,
there developed a tendency to overlook this essentially creative
self-activity. At the same time, in Italy in the late 1960s and 1970s that
creative self-activity exploded throughout the social factory in a myriad
of social, cultural and political innovations. Negri's term of
"self-valorization" gave a name to the positive content of that explosion
and refocused our attention on the ways in which workers not only struggle
*against* capital but *for* a diverse variety of new ways of being. It
provided a point of departure for rethinking not only the content of
working class struggle but also some fundamental issues such as the nature
of revolution and of the "transition" to post capitalist society. As Negri
pointed out so well in his lectures on the *Grundrisse* published as *Marx
beyond Marx*, the creation of communism is not something that comes later
but is something which is repeatedly launched by current developments of
new forms of working class self-activity. Marx had said this before of
course and so had some other, earlier, autonomist Marxists (e.g. C.L.R.
James and his comrades in the 1950s) but Negri's theoretical work brought
the idea back into the light in a thoroughly grounded theoretical fashion.

M: How has the idea of self-valorization influenced the development of a
political agenda?

H:      One result of this refocusing of attention on what I would call the
positive content of workers struggles, was a shift in political agenda for
many of us. Along with our attempts to understand how working class power
had created and sustained the crisis for capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s,
we also began to explore the historical processes of self-valorization that
had also been an integral part of the the crisis for capital and that might
provide the point of departure for the elaboration of communism in the
present. Whereas Negri's work has remained primarily theoretical and his
limited empirical work restricted to a few cutting edge industries, others
have pursued the exploration of self-valorization from the re-examination
of the urban cultural revolutions of the late 1960s and 1970s in the North
to the study of the rural/urban communal struggles of peasants and
indigenous peoples in the South. Whereas Negri's focus has increasingly
been on self-valorization in labor, other explorations and studies of both
work and non-work activities have borne rich fruit and have provided a
wealth of understanding about the diverse experiences of creative struggles
that have persisted through the crisis, uncaptured or unharnessed and
undestroyed by capitalist repression or cooptation.

M: How do you see the relationship between the refusal of work and
self-valorization?

H:      Earlier I said that the only reasonable point of departure for the
elaboration of working class political strategy is an understanding of our
own power. What the concept of self-valorization does is to draw our
attention not only to our power to limit and constrain capital's domination
over us, but also to our abilities and creativity in elaborating
alternatives. Just as the concept of the "refusal of work" helps us to
understand how a wide variety of social struggles undermined capitalist
accumulation and threw it into crisis, so too does the concept of
self-valorization help us to understand how our ability to elaborate and
defend new ways of being not only against but beyond capital is the other
side of the crisis.

H:      The power of refusal is the power to carve out times and spaces
relatively free of the capitalist impostion of work. (I say "relatively
free" because such times and spaces are always limited and scarred by
capitalist power.) The power of self-valorization is the power to fill
those spaces with alternative activities and new forms of sociality-to
elaborate the communist future in the present.

H:      This perspective allows us to recognize and to understand within a
Marxist theoretical and political framework the creativity and imagination
at work within the so-called "new social movements" that many traditional
Marxists and many post-Marxist, post-modernists, have seen or claimed as
beyond the purview of Marxist theory. But such new social movements have
always been movements against the constraints of the capitalist social
factory-whether they have articulated their ideas as such or not-and are
new primarily in their strength and their imagination. For example, the
women's and gay movements have not merely refused the subordination of life
to work but have initiated a wide variety of experiments in developing new
kinds of gender and family relationships, new kinds of personal and social
relations among men and women, among men and among women. The Green
movement, in a parallel fashion, has not only attacked the capitalist
exploitation of all of nature but has also explored a wide variety of
alternative kinds of relationships between humans and the rest of the
earth. In their development these movements have overlapped and influenced
each other just as they have also sought inspiration in a wide variety of
alternative cultural practices, e.g. those of indigenous peoples or those
of pre-capitalist European history. Please note, I am not saying that just
because we can grasp the character of these movements in Marxist terms,
that they are not subject to analysis and political critique. Just as more
familiar moments of working struggle, such as trade union activity, can,
must and has been subjected to the most intense scrutiny and critique, so
too with these movements. Not only creativity is fruitful, not all
innovation automatically undermines capital and helps free us for more
interesting ways of being. There is much that is destructive in the
political spaces of these movements-not least of which is the rejection by
some of the Marxist analysis of capitalism and their blindness to the
nature of the enemy arrayed against them. So too with some forms of
"identity politics" which through a dogmatic overinsistence on difference
cut off any possibility of political dialog and political action.
Post-structuralist linguistic theory has provided some with a convenient
excuse to avoid the difficulties of organization. But, as a rule, it comes
naturally to Marxists to see such limits and carry out such critique. What
interests me more, at this point in history, is the other side: the
importance of being able to discern the positive content of such struggles
in such a way as to be able to think about how the social forces they
embody may contribute to building communism.

___________________________________________
http://www.monash.edu.au/arts/ces/sw.html
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/aut_html
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