Date: Thu, 17 Sep 1998 21:17:17 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Re: AUT: RE:  


Thano: Thanks for the precise reference. A couple of comments below.

On Thu, 17 Sep 1998, Thano Maceo Paris wrote:

<snip> 
> 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 
> 
Thano: What can I say but that I burst out laughing at the above remarks,
first at the notion that I am Toni's "protege" and then at his
dismissive non-response to the use of Patton. If this is a
sample of the quality of his work, it doesn't sound like its worth the
trouble.


> "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. 

Thano: Is this a typo? maybe "hence was UNable to understand feminism"??
As I said in a previous posting, Negri's focus on work is largely based on
his understanding that being capital's basic means of domination many
other forms of domination are articulated through it. HOWEVER, it is also
true that in COMMUNISTS LIKE US and then in THE LABOR OF DIONYSUS Toni
has so focused on work/labor as the nexus through which working class
subjectivity moves toward communism as to begin to sound a lot like
traditional productivist orthodox Marxism. The "struggle against work"
which figured so prominantly in Italian New Left theory and politics seems
to have been replaced, at least to some degree, by something very much
like the old notion of the appropriation/transformation of work. I
remember at a conference he organized in Paris in 1992 he asked me at one
point "what's your problem with work?" So little am I Toni's protege that
I published in the Italian journal Vis a Vis a critique of this drift in
his writing --a journal (now defunct) that I understand he was quite
displeased with. 

> But he travels  quite
> far down the road of revolutionary rectitude, condemning those who rethink
> obsolete categories of analysis. 

Thano:This is an absolutely absurd statement. His own work as well as much
of that of the Italian New Left involved enormous amounts of such
"rethinking"!

> He continues to regard Russia as his
> Mecca-calling it, of all things, an example of democracy to be emulated in
> the 1990's. 

Thano: Where does he get this stuff? In the first place the Italian New
Left, including Toni paid very little attention to the Soviet Union at all
--very much in the fairly independent tradition of the Italian communist
party. What little attention they did pay was highly critical, as in the
work of Rita de Leo.

> 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
> 
Thano: I find these assertions downright hysterical and demonstrating no
understanding whatsoever of either Toni or the movement in which he
struggled. Take the text that we were going to try to discuss: Marx Beyond
Marx and look, for example, at the first Lesson and the discussion of
Soviet Marxism and Vygodskij on page 16 --hardly the comments of someone
"mired in the tradition of Russian sovietism". Or take a look at the
discussion of "the crisis of real socialism" in THE LABOR of DIONYSUS,
etc. etc. etc.

Harry
............................................................................
Harry Cleaver
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712-1173  USA
Phone Numbers: (hm)  (512) 478-8427
               (off) (512) 475-8535   Fax:(512) 471-3510
E-mail: hmcleave-AT-eco.utexas.edu
Cleaver homepage: 
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html
Chiapas95 homepage:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html
Accion Zapatista homepage:
http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
............................................................................



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