Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 08:44:28 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave-AT-mundo.eco.utexas.edu>
Subject: Re: autovalorization


On Mon, 1 Jul 1996 glevy-AT-acnet.pratt.edu.pratt.edu wrote:

> In the course of a very interesting interview (thanks to Steve for
> reproducing), Harry said:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> As an interpretation of Marx, Tronti's description above seems somewhat
> misleading and inadequate. For instance, in discussing the production of
> absolute and relative surplus value and increasing the intensity of labor
> (which could be seen as a form of absolute or relative s depending on your
> interpretation), Marx was certainly aware of how resistance by workers
> could impose a constraint on the production of surplus value and profit.
> Indeed, Marx is quite explicit in _Capital_ and elsewhere in stating that
> struggles against the prolongation of the working day and the workweek
> and increasing intensity of labor can serve as a constraint on capital
> (and, along with natural limits) forces capitalists to increasingly adopt
> technical change as the primary way in which s is increased under
> conditions of capitalist production. Resistance to increasing relative s
> through technical change was also explicitly recognized by Marx (although,
> many Marxists seem to glorify technological change and overlook resistance
> by workers to the adverse nature of technological change by capital on
> workers' conditions).
> 
Jerry: The kind of analysis you cite in Marx is central to the whole 
tradition of autonomist Marxism: the recognition of the power of workers 
to undermine capital and to force it to change, via the decomposition of 
working class power. Implicit in this is the possibility that capital 
may NOT be able to pull off a response and that power turns out to be 
the power to overthrow and transcend. This is not, however, in 
contradiction with the quote above about living and dead labor. 

The above quote concerns what some people call "another level of 
analysis" --a more abstract one. Indeed, properly understood it is 
completely consistent with the kind of phenomena you are talking about.
The quote is:

> > capital (dead labor) was essentially a constraint on the working class
> > (living labor), not the other way around.

What you point to (working class blocking capitalist development) is an 
aspect of "living labor".  Indeed "living labor" can block capital 
precisely because it IS living, it is the source of all imagination, 
creativity and initiative. Dead labor is dead, at best it harnesses 
living labor to give itself life, it seeks to appropriate that creativity 
etc. But it is not always sucessful and living labor acts against it, 
forcing it to have recourse to some other aspect of living labor, e.g., 
its inventive force, in order to implement some kind of technological 
change and decomposition of class resistance. Sure, working class success 
at defeating absolute surplus value strategies (longer work) forced 
capital to have recourse to relative surplus value strategies (higher 
productivity) via technological change, but the point of the above quote 
is that we must recognize how such change always involves a harnessing of 
living labor --and at the same time its attempted limitation to 
innovations consistent with the restoration of capitalist control. 

Schumpeter's entrepreneur (central to his theory of the business cycle 
and the dynamics of capitalist development) embody these contradictory 
class forces. Innovation is an aspect of living labor, the subbordination 
of innovation to the rules of capital (profitability, the circuit form, 
etc) is an aspect of dead labor --the endlessly returning pattern of 
capitalist reproduction of life around work, production, sale, profits, 
investment, more work etc.

The point that Tronti was making, and I think this is quite the point to 
Marx`s distinction between living and dead labor, is that ultimately it 
is the workers who are the sources of all change and capital gains its 
life from confining ours within its sick, monotonous circuits.  That 
said, it obviously doesn't always suceed. It is a class strugle; we often 
win and it must adapt.

What makes this approach striking is how it goes in exactly the opposite 
direction of the usual Marxist interpretation which always focuses on the 
so-called "logic" of capital and sees the working class as victim --as 
you recognize below.

> Nonetheless, these struggles were simply mentioned in _Capital_ as 
> constraints for capital rather than explanations as moments in the self
> becoming and consciousness of the working class. The reason for this, in
> terms of the logical structure of _Capital_ is an interesting and
> hotly-debated question and some suggest (e.g. Mike Lebowitz) relates to
> the missing book on "Wage-Labour" (of course, other books as well in
> Marx's original plan are missing, i.e. they were never written).

Jerry: Mike is a bit of a johnny come lately on this subject and ignores 
what the rest of us, especially the Italians, have written on the 
subject. He is right, and wrong. He is right that Marx's writing 
generally focuses on capital --he made it the subject and title of his 
book after all-- and there is far too little discussion of either the 
historical struggles of the working class or the elaboration of his 
frequently used metaphor of capital the vampire (who is dead and lives 
off the living). When I teach CAPITAL I point this out and bring in lots 
of stuff form history and contemporary struggles to carry out just such 
elaboration.  He is wrong in arguing that all of this cannot be 
found in CAPITAL --as I argued at length in my book READING CAPITAL 
POLITICALLY. Within the context of Althusser's seminar, Negri did an end 
run. Instead of taking on Althusser's analysis of CAPITAL, he used the 
GRUNDRISSE to bring out this same understanding. (I had used pieces of 
this in my book, but not used it systematically.) All that is in his book 
MARX BEYOND MARX.

> 
> Whether auto-valorization is the most adequate concept for grasping the
> process of self-becoming and consciousness for the working class is
> another question (and one that I have some doubts about). 

Jerry: In the interview which Steve posted, I suggested there are some 
problems with the concept of  self-valorization, not least of which lie 
in its origins. However, please note: the concept was not developed with 
a focus on "consciousness" but rather on self-activity which contains 
"consciousness" only as an element --and not a privleged one at that. 
This again is quite different from the usual Marxist focus on that issue. 
The main emphasis in the analysis of self-valorization (I think the 
Italian prefix  "auto" sounds too wierd in English.) is the notion that 
self activity is not just reactive, not just AGAINST exploitation, but 
also FOR self-determined projects, FOR the realization of desires, FOR 
self-determined processes with at least the potential to elaborate 
themselves into the transcendence of capitalism. This is quite a 
discussion and most of it contains little discussion of "consciousness".


> Yet, as a
> counter to the tendency by most Marxists historically to concentrate
> on the logic of capital alone and just basically assume that
> consciousness would materialize as a result of capitalist crises,
> narrrowly understood in economic terms, this distinction might be
> useful. It is also worth noting that the theoretical analysis that
> most Marxists have adopted has affected their praxis by downplaying
> day-to-day struggles by workers over the control of working conditions.
> This emphasis historically may originate in what Marxists after Lenin
> understood by Lenin's critique against the "economists."  It would be
> interesting, in any case, to contrast Lenin's views on the "stages" in
> the development of working-class consciousness  to the concept of
> auto-valorization. A contrast to Trotsky's views in the "Transitional
> Programme" might also prove enlightening. Any takers?
> 
> Jerry
> 
> 
Jerry: Here you shift almost entirely into the old problematique of 
"class consciousness". As I have said this has not been a primary 
preoccupation of the theorists under discussion. However, it is an 
interesting question and I for one take a very different view of the 
issue than most of the Marxist tradition. I think, quite frankly, that 
the concept of "class consciousness" as the consciousness of workers of 
their common interests has generally been formulated in such a way as to 
privlege the "party" and especially revolutionary intellectuals as the 
only one/ones capable of grasping the transcendent vision --a position 
which justified the subordination of most concrete struggles to whatever 
partly line was decided on. I have suggested elsewhere that the concept 
of "self-valorization" and of the autonomy of various sectors of the 
working class lead us to a different perspective, one in which the most 
common interest is the defeat of capital but not the construction of a 
unified new social order. To jump back to a very abstract perspective, 
Marx's notion of "disposable time" replacing "labor" as the content of 
value suggests an open-ended array of co-existent post-capitalist futures 
in endless dialog through a politics of difference without antagonism 
instead of some unified system we might call socialism or communism.

Harry


> 
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............................................................................
Harry Cleaver
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712-1173  USA
Phone Numbers: (hm)  (512) 442-5036
               (off) (512) 475-8535   Fax:(512) 471-3510
E-mail: hmcleave-AT-eco.utexas.edu
Cleaver homepage: 
http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/index.html
Chiapas95 homepage:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html
............................................................................



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