From: glevy-AT-pratt.edu
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 07:42:55 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: autovalorization


Harry wrote:

> Jerry: Easy, easy. I wasn't trashing Mike. I've studied Mike's book and
> I've discussed it with him one on one, face to face. All those things you
> say are true enough. "Johnny come lately" was not meant as a put down,
> but just a statement of chronological fact and Mike knows he wrote a book
> from within a literature/realm of discussion which did not pay much
> attention to autonomia and its history and literature.

Good. Glad to hear it. BTW, I think he did refer to your book in his 1982
_Review of Radical Political Economy_ article on the "one-sidedness of
capital."

> Jerry: Yes, that vocabulary was unfamiliar to all but a limited circle
> in English speaking countries, mostly around ZEROWORK in the US and some
> CAPITAL & CLASS people in England. The social democratic "Left" in
> England and the US largely embraced Eurocommunism and dismissed the
> extraparliamentary left in Italy and paid no attention to its theory.
> There is, however, more to this than vocabularies and lack of
> communication. I would argue that the the US left largely ignored the
> Italian New Left because its politics WERE closer to those of the PCI.
> The late 60s and 70s saws the emergence of an American counterpart to the
> European social democratic left. A great many of my generation of
> "radical economists" for example were banging on the doors of the
> Democratic Party's "left" wing. The reaction of that "left" to the
> Italian repression that came at the end of the 70s was disgusting, there
> is no other word for it. The distance between IN THESE TIMES and Claire
> Sterling was inconsequential, both parroted the CPI line and were
> perfectly happy to let a lot of our friends rot in prison on trumped up
> charges, often with no trial.  Let us not be naive (and I'm not calling
> you naive) about the relationship between who engages in what dialog with
> whom and what point in time. This is not a problem the Internet will
> solve; it will only give the political differences new forms. It has the
> possibility of providing new terrains of debate but politics often mean
> terrains are simply ignored because engagement is not seen as useful to
> the ends sought.

Yes, I agree that there were significant political differences that led to
this body of literature being (mostly) ignored. More specifically, it was
dismissed by both the social democrats (for the reasons you suggest) and
the "Old Left" (because of its anti-Stalinist and non-Leninist content).
Although his theoretical perspective was very different, this might also
be said of the writings of Paul Mattick, Sr., a council communist, but a
"capital logical" theoretician. Additionally, since Mattick, Sr. was a
worker (a tool-and-die maker?) rather than a professional economist, this
may have been (an entirely secondary, but real) reason for his works being
dismissed by many Marxist "intellectuals" and others (I suspect that Negri
and others in Italy experienced similar disdain at the hands of
professional economists). <perhaps Paul Mattick, Jr. could elaborate>.

In any event, I did not mean to suggest that language and miscommunication
alone were primarily responsible for divisions among Marxists. Clearly,
there are fundamental political divides as well (especially as it relates
to reformism and Stalinism on the one side and Leninism on the other).

> Jerry: Yes, I agree again. And I happen to like the way this interlineal
> back and forth in e-mail exchanges makes it easy to keep things straight
> and to see whether and to what degree a point raised is indeed responded
> to. N'est-ce pas?

It is so. E-mail makes it harder for people, providing they act in good
faith, in a discussion to continuously misrepresent your positions. Once
discussions can move beyond debates about what someone else is *not*
saying, then progress (or at least clarification) is possible.

In solidarity,

Jerry




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