Date: Sat, 6 Jul 1996 10:47:37 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave-AT-mundo.eco.utexas.edu>
Subject: Re: autovalorization


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).
> 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.

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.


> 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. 
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.

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.


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.

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. 
> 
> 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. 

> 
> 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".

But I think that a *general* trend 
> social conflict is taking in its nexus inside and outside the 
> factory, what we have called the "planetary work machine", is that, 
> given the crisis of trade unions and revolutionary parties, the only 
> chances it has to survive and to be sustained is to define 
> *communities in struggle* through the fusion of different subjects in 
> singular subjectivities, whereby workers' expectations, culture, 
> skills, communicational capacities, etc. converge and are totally 
> mobilized in the definition of "collective selves" which not only 
> challenge capital, but define alternative patterns of social 
> relationships *regardless for the immediate content (even the most 
> "economistic") of the struggle*. 

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".

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. 

Franco: we look forward to the development of your analysis of these 
things vis a vis South Africa --whose struggles, it seems, are beginning 
to link with those in Chiapas. (I'm posting a story by Patrick Bond on this)

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...
> 
> 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."

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
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