Date: Thu, 17 Sep 1998 21:32:31 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: AUT: RE:  


Thanks for all the responses. For those interested the full title of the
book is "The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Movements And The
Decolonization of Everyday Life" By George Katsiaficas, Humanities Press,
New Jersey 1997, ISBN 0-391-04045-6, 289 pages. The last time I checked it
wasn't on line, though I do think there's a blurb on it on the web site
for Humanities Press. The section where Katsiaficas critcizes Negri and
others is chapter 6 on "The (Anti)Politics of Autonomy" 

There are a couple of sections really worth quoting:  

"In his attempt to critique Marcuse and the Frankfurt school, Negri's
American protege, Harry Cleaver, asserts a military analogy, certainly in
a context in which it is normal to stifle independent thought. Remarkably,
he draws on the movie Patton to develop a critique of the Frankfurt
school: 

  If Patton had read that book of his declared opponent [Rommel] the way
  Critical Theorists read bourgeois authors, he would still have been   
  sitting in his quarters writting "critiques" of this point or that when
  Rommel  rolled over him with his army. 

  Cleaver's reliance on the military analogy is a projection of his
masculine identity onto the "working class" and a perversion of the
revolutionary project into a simple question of brute force" 
Pg 232 

"If all that were amiss with Negri's thinking was that he wore
productivist blinders and hence was able to understand adequately
feminism...his theories would not be so problematic. But he travels  quite
far down the road of revolutionary rectitude, condemning those who rethink
obsolete categories of analysis. He continues to regard Russia as his
Mecca-calling it, of all things, an example of democracy to be emulated in
the 1990's. Mired in the tradition of Russian sovietism he cannot
comprehend the dictatorial character of Russian politics, from lenin and
Trotsky's assault on Kronstadt  to Yeltsin 's turning the military loose
on parliament...Negri's perspective should be understood as part of the
reason that the left has been so singularly irrelevant in nations where
democratic civil liberties exist." 
   Pg.229





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