Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 12:14:44 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Bryan N. Alexander" <bnalexan-AT-umich.edu>
Subject: Re: autovalorization


Ever since I was a child, I've loved the feeling of having opened a can 
of worms.... :)

	I'll respond to this post, since it includes another one I wanted 
to work with:

On Sat, 6 Jul 1996, Harry M. Cleaver wrote:

> On Sat, 6 Jul 1996, FRANCO BARCHIESI wrote:
> 
> > Some interesting points have been touched, even if in a somewhat 
> > unaddressed way, in the recent debate about "autovalorization" (Harry 
> > is right, maybe that "auto" is a bit awkward for an English-speaking 
> > public, let's use "self" valorization).

This is especially annoying for research!
	But I'm fond of the "auto-" prefix.  It seems to snidely 
recuperate the cybernetics vocabulary.

> > In particular, the relationships between self-valorization and class 
> > consciousness seem particularly relevant to me. If we assume self-
> > valorization as self-development of the class (Massimo's interview 
> > with Harry quoted by Steve on 2 July), I think it is very sound what 
> > Harry wrote (2 July) about the nature of class consciousness as a 
> > *moment* in a more general process of self-activation. This for two 
> > reasons: the first, named by Harry, is that the notion of class 
> > consciousness refers to the pure antagonistic dimension of 
> > self-activity "vis-a-vis" capital, whereby a broader understanding of 
> > self-activity must encompass its proactive elements of prefiguration 
> > of societal alternatives as well. 
> 
> Franco: "prefiguration" yet more than that. If we agree that communism 
> (post capitalist society) is not an ideal but a process already becoming 
> then current developments are more than just shadows images of the 
> future, they are sprouts that may or may not come to full growth. 
> Capitalist repression may whack them off, capitalist cooptation may 
> distort their growth into non-revolutionary forms, or, revolutionary 
> struggle may carve out enough for them to grow and take over the garden, 
> so to speak. This is related the one issue below.

Excellent. 
This also allows for a connection to many anarchist moments: 
the Spanish anarchists, Russian non-federal soviets, Kropotkin's mutual 
aid societies, etc.

> 
> The second reason is that, I 
> > think, very little has appeared, on the terrain of orthodox (ie. 
> > official CPs oriented) Marxism or in its social-democratic critique, 
> > challenging the Lukacsian notion of class consciousness based on a 
> > dialectic of "false" and "true" at the point of production, of which 
> > the revolutionary party is the ultimate vehicle and repository. This 
> > obscures, as many have said, the day-to-day struggles, what are the 
> > unintended consequences of capitalist restructuring, forms of 
> > "exceeding" consciousness which, even if not always "truly" resistant 
> > are nonetheless never entirely aligned with capital's imperative. 
> > This especially when capital becomes more and more dependant on the 
> > "human factor" on the workplace, with the associate contradiction to 
> > promote it and repress it *at the same time*. In short, these 
> > omissions hamper the understanding of subjectivity formation as we 
> > tried to define it in previous debates. 
> > 
> Franco: Absolutely. If the true and false dichotomy has any meaning it 
> must be in reference to whether or not struggles escape the logic of 
> capital, true being related to perceptions of what it means to break 
> free, false being related to not being able to see that. But this way of 
> approaching it suggests that the dichotomy itself is not very helpful 
> beyond pointing us in the direction of having a clear understanding of 
> what we don't want and have to get loose from. Perceptions, like the 
> broader constellation of the dimensions of struggle, are inevitably 
> scarred by confining logic within which and against which they emerge. No 
> conceptual approach that doesn't allow an analysis of the complexity of 
> such situations can be very useful. That was, after all, why the concept 
> of "class composition, recompostion and decomposition" were developed, to 
> deal precisely with such complex, contradictory situations.

Glad to see an escape from binarism.  Self-activation allows, then, a 
more nuanced version of the resistances to capital.  autovalorization 
returns it to everyday life, before the triumph of the revolution.  This 
embracing/working through of contradictions is precisely a dialectic that 
Negri talks about.

> 
> 
> > Now, if we assume this link between self-valorization and a broad 
> > understanding of self-activity, a rupture with traditional Marxism 
> > emerges in that it is no longer possible to think *a priori* this 
> > link *in general terms*. As Brian, quoting Negri, noticed: the more 
> > totalitarian capital's push for subjectivation becomes, the more all-
> > pervasing its command aims to be, and the more the *ideal* horizon of 
> > resistance is embodied in a *material* set of processes of 
> > singularization of struggles, of localized inversions of power 
> > relationships. 
> 
> Franco: True, as has been said for decades by the Frankfurt School and 
> also by autonomia, that capital tends to ever ore pervasive extending its 
> command (if it can) into every nook and cranny of life, thus the social 
> factory. However, we also know that this totalitarianism is never 
> complete, that resistance and struggle for various ways of being 
> incompatible with capital prevents the completion of such a totalization, 
> the dotting of the i's and crossing of the t's in the master narrative. 

Which is one solid reason for analyzing capital's cultural logic, and 
opposing it.  Not that this subsitutes for material struggle, but 
enhances it.  I'm working on nightmares of exchange value in early 
capital-takeoff (ca. Romanticism), and I'm constantly amazed at the depth 
of horror that greets capital emergent.

> This said, resistance has always been material and involved either 
> inversions of power or the prevention of capitalist inversions. I don't 
> like however the use of the term "singularizations" which, with its 
> Hegelian and other legacies, evokes individualistic struggle. Certainly 
> the individual struggles, sometimes superficially alone, but always 
> within a nexus of resistance that provides the tools of struggle and 
> often the energy. Processes of class recomposition are collective 
> processes of interacting individuals. I know we can use the term 
> singularization to designate the specificity of such collective 
> struggles, but I don't find the term helpful for these reasons.

Funny - when you mentioned this term I thought of Deleuze, not Hegel.  In 
his work (and with Felix Guattari) we get a sense of capital's 
incompletion, of its radical failure to subsume nature; singularities 
emerge as local sites of returning capital to, or confronting it with, 
its failure to command the universal. 
	Again, this is no substitute for the nexus of resistance, but 
situates it in yet another productive, antipessimistic field.

> 
> What is new in the build-up of communism today, is 
> > that for the first time revolutionary forces 
> 
> Franco: how about just "revolutionaries" instead of "revolutionary 
> forces" because it was individuals and parties that buttressed themselves 
> with this belief, while the "revolutionary forces" which you indicate 
> below often gave it no thought at all, just got on with the struggle for 
> life.
> 
> cannot live in the self-
> > reassuring thought that there is a dialectic of the forces of 
> > production doing the job for them. And that class consciousness will 
> > be the resultant of this dialectics. Processes of localized 
> > inversions and disarticulation are happening every day at every 
> > latitude, most often unnoticed. 
> 
> Franco: Absolutely. And the problem of understanding the processes of 
> class composition underway in this period is that of gaining some grasp 
> of both the visible explosions of struggle and the invisible (to 
> outsiders) processes which engendered them and provide their ground, 
> whatever their sucess, and hence the future possibilities of their 
> participants.
> 
> By themselves, these processes often 
> > do not require the prior intervention of a communist political 
> > subjectivity, they are mainly unpredictable and, from a kind of "homo 
> > oeconomicus" point of view, totally "irrational". 
> 
> Franco: maybe they don't require a "communist" subjectivity, but in this 
> statement you fall back into the dichtomy you previously rejected. The 
> point is to grasp just what are the political dimensions, both 
> revolutionary and reactionary of whatever political subjectivity exists. 
> This is the point of departure for both the self-development of those 
> struggles and all possibilities of organizing linkages and accelerating the 
> circulation of struggle.

I would add here that it is important to recognize the partial nature of 
logics: that capital has its own, and that resistance to capital has 
developed still others.  This is not to fall into simple relativism, or 
to abandon thinking through totality, but to recognize its historicity.

> > 
> Moreover, 
> > traditional parties and 
> > unions, with their bureaucracies, their confinement of struggle in 
> > the borders of the nation state, and their emancipatory rhetoric 
> > taken from an idea of social citizenship deduced from welfare 
> > state capitalism now in decay, are increasingly unable to 
> > anticipate them. Or, once these dynamics take place, those 
> > organizations are unable to connect them and to relate them to supra-
> > national dynamics. Traditional organizations of the working class are 
> > too big for the small problems and too small for the big ones. 
> 
> Franco: optimistically they can not deal with them. But in reality quite 
> an army of tacticians and strategists are constantly at work trying to 
> find ways to do just that. And, unfortunately, they do often succeed in 
> either repressing or channeling these struggles into reformist and 
> manageable paths.

This reminds me of the struggle against gingrich etc. in this country, 
which often ends up valorizing the *Democrats* and massive state power.

> 
> I 
> > think there are plenty of examples of these processes here in South 
> > Africa, and the dynamics of the Zapatista uprising are somewhat 
> > resembling this connection between localized inversion and global 
> > mobilization. It would be interesting to hear from other people on 
> > the list if in their countries there is anything relevant from this 
> > point of view. 

"...localized inversion and global mobilization..." that makes for a fine 
slogan!

> > 
> > Just to stay in South Africa: I deal in the paper I've 
> > just posted to the list's archive with the Mercedes-Benz strike of 
> > 1990. Something very similar is happening in these days in the 
> > Amplats platinum mine at Rustenburg, the biggest platinum mine in the 
> > world. There, a sudden, global, unanimous and *totally unpredictable* 
> > strike erupted last week over the refunding of pension contributions 
> > for black miners. The owner of the mine, the giant Anglo American, 
> > facing millions of Rands of loss, called the miners' union NUM in 
> > rescue. NUM"s appeals to go back to work and wait for negotiations 
> > have been overwhelmingly rejected. After an ultimatum, two days ago 
> > Anglo American has fired *28.000* (twenty-eight thousand) miners to 
> > break the strike, but the occupation of the mine still continues, and 
> > workers are relating with NUM, ANC, the bosses and the police through 
> > their self-elected committees, which enjoy total support. The 
> > question is: WHAT, which dynamics, processes of contruction of 
> > meanings, patterns of solidarity, make 28.000 workers simultaneously 
> > choose, *in a mine with very little traditions of struggle* a course 
> > of struggle and organizational alternatives which 
> > puts them directly into the harshest kind of confrontation with 
> > bosses, state and trade union repression (and most of them in this 
> > case are union members), until the point that, faced with a formal 
> > ultimatum, *they prefer to be fired *en masse* instead of giving up*? 
> > [BTW, this extremely relevant episode is going on surrounded by the 
> > silence of "left wing" university barons, now overwhelmingly 
> > converted to the gospel of social-democratic "co-determination", not 
> > to talk about the total neglect of the extra-parliametarian left, 
> > mainly Trot-oriented, and of the mythical "left wing" in the ANC and 
> > the Communist Party].
> 
> Franco: Again, it was to be able to grasp these kinds of situations (and 
> even at one time people hoped to be able to predict them) that "class 
> composition" was deployed. Ferruccio Gambino did it for Ford in Britain, 
> Alquati for Olivetti and Fiat, etc. Earlier the Johnson-Forest and 
> Socialisme and Barbarism people tried to do it in factories in Detroit 
> and in the Parisian banlieu. What is absolutely amazing is how little 
> analysis earlier and more recent Marxists have done of such great 
> movements, eg. the rising of textile workers in the Russian Revolution, 
> the rising of peasants in Mexico, Russia and China etc, the rising of 
> shipyard workers in Gadansk, etc. Methodologically we know what is 
> needed; we need to get on with doing it, and on a global scale. 

Thank you both for the background in current struggles.
	The South Africa case reminds me of the Yugoslav miners' strikes 
in Kosovo, which nearly spread to the entire federation (back when there 
was a federation - ca. 1989).  Milosevic was able to use a careful 
combination of  nationalism, selected Titoist rhetoric, and state power 
to break it.  Watch for this pattern again.

> > > 
> > And here a point raised by Steve (BTW, Steve: kiss Ginevra for me 
> > too, and wish Rosa all the best) comes to the fore: where the hell 
> > does it exist a concrete example of self-valorization? I think that, 
> > preliminary to that, there's another question: AT WHICH LEVEL MUST WE 
> > LOOK FOR? Because I don't think that somewhere in the world self-
> > valorization is presenting itself in the form of a coherent 
> > societal alternative to capital. 
> 
> Franco: I'm not sure what you mean by "coherent". If you mean coherent to 
> the point of being able to replace it completely, then obviously not. On 
> the other hand, the growing sprouts of self-valorization (see above 
> metaphor) certainly have their own logics and evolving, metamorphosing 
> coherencies, in both time and space. They ARE observable in all those 
> processes and projects which thrust beyond the logic of capital. Many may 
> be dead-ends, but for the most part it is up to our abilities to struggle 
> to determine how far they can develop as alternatives for how many people 
> and how far they can link with each other to form a wider "coherency".

Jerry's example of squatting is right on.
>... 
> Franco: Yes, again. But not just "survive and to be sustained" but to 
> achieve a revolutionary rupture of the planteary work machine, exploding 
> it and clearing space for those alternatives to flourish.
> 
> Sure, these patterns are still 
> > limited over time and space, and this level of analysis tells very 
> > little about organization, rather compelling us to rethink the whole 
> > issue of organization. 
> 
> Franco: Acutally, I think that if we do the job right, they tell us a lot 
> about organization, both internally to what we are calling particular 
> struggles but also with respect to the all important circulation of 
> struggle from node to note. Thus my interest, for example, in the role of 
> the Internet is achieving such circulation on a global scale. Yet that 
> ability is rooted in what goes on locally --which is why I've discussed 
> the parallels between the Zapatista community "networks" and Internet 
> "networks".

Or rhizomes!  This is clearly a developing new logic of resistance, 
post-Leninist.

> 
> But they point to a qualitative shift 
> > towards a new element of struggle, a kind of "value added" based on 
> > their capacity to *immediately* build alternative communities not 
> > subsumable by capital. Accounts of cultural practices of strikers at 
> > Mercedes Benz or Amplats are stunning, from this point of view. What 
> > is important is that our analysis should look at class 
> > not simply as a matrix of fixed social identities, but as a matrix of 
> > subversive *social practices* especially. This is the level where to 
> > start, I think. 
> 

A matrix of capital's configuring and social resistance?

>... 
> Another case can be that of the Italian social 
> > centres, with the difference that in that case they tried to explore 
> > another dimension of self-valorization it is worth going back on: 
> > that of *self-production* (I wish there can be other contributions 
> > on this). But a discussion on this, which is a hotly contested issue, 
> > as debates at the March Bologna meeting testify, would really take 
> > me too far. Anyway, on what I was saying about local practices of 
> > inversion, I need examples, guys...

Have there been any new developments on this issue?  The account by Viano 
and Binetti was very inspiring-

> > 
> > Cheers
> > 
> > Franco
> > 
> FRanco: I vote yes as well. Could not some of our companeros from Italy 
> pick up this discussion vis a vis social centers. They certainly have 
> proved themselves to have the potential to be more than merely 
> "temporary" autonomous zones. But then viewed historically, perhaps 
> that's all the future will hold: a mosaic of ever mutating TAZ's forming 
> a multifacited and ever evolving "society."

Yes, these sound like fine TAZs, rhizomes.  
> 
> Harry
> ............................................................................
> 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
> ............................................................................
> 
> 
> 
>      --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
> 



Bryan Alexander					Department of English
email: bnalexan-AT-umich.edu			University of Michigan
phone: (313) 764-0418				Ann Arbor, MI  USA    48103
fax: (313) 763-3128				http://www.umich.edu/~bnalexan



     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---