Date: Thu, 04 Jul 1996 08:58:23 +1000
From: sjwright-AT-vaxc.cc.monash.edu.au (Steve Wright)
Subject: Re: autovalorization


I'm glad Jerry mentioned Paul Mattick, Snr. When I abandoned anarchism for
marxism in the mid seventies, it was precisely because I encountered his
council communism and capital logic approach. Then I discovered the journal
_Zerowork_ and the Red Notes pamphlet series and went *really* strange . .

Mainly I stopped being a councillist around 1978 because I thought then, as
I do now, that those publications gestured towards certain themes absent in
Mattick's marxism: above all, an analysis of class composition, and its
role within accumulation; the struggle against work. However, I have never
been able to say "well, I've learnt everything Mattick can teach, so it's
time to forget him", and he continues to be an important reference point.
And Paul Snr was very kind when in preparation for my honours thesis I
contacted him for information about an Australian councillist journal of
the forties (they published the first English edition of Pannekoek's
_Workers' Councils_).

In terms of our discussion of self-valorization and class consciousness, I
think that Mattick's perspective is one of the few within marxism which,
>from a very different basis to Italian workerism, similarly feels little
need for the category "class consciousness" in its account of working class
self-activity. Then again, Negri is amongst the few workerists I know of
who has periodically chosen to talk *positively* of class consciousness -
here, as in som many other ways, he is not "typical" of the tendency as a
whole.

What is also intriguing in the Italian case is that while one of my
favourite journals within the revolutionary left there - _Collegamenti_,
which is libertarian rather than autonomist in tone - has always taken
Mattick's work very seriously, his influence has been very marginal
overall. I suspect this stems above all from his anti-leninist communism;
most strands of autonomist politics continue to look favourably upon Lenin,
even when they abandon (as most now seem to have) his approach to political
organization. In this regard, they remind me somewhat of C.L.R. James or
Dunyevskaya - and James certainly did influence them from the late 50s
onwards, as Harry and others have documented.

All of which made it even stranger once to find, in the pages of the glossy
weekly _L'Espresso_ (circa early 1977), a "family tree" of Autonomia with a
picture of Mattick as well as Bordiga (lucky Mauro is on holidays right
now, or he'd be apoplexic). I do know that Mattick Snr and Jnr (and perhaps
other members of their family?) were in Italy in 1977 for a bit. I once
read, in the journal _Unita' proletaria_, Enzo Modugno's account of Paul
Snr's impressions of that trip; I would have loved to have heard more of
the Matticks' assessment of Italian far left politics.

Oh well, another typically tangential post . . .

Steve

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