Date:          Sat, 19 Sep 1998 13:38:23 GMT + 2:00
Subject:       Re: AUT: Grundrisse/MBM


Comrades, this discussion on Grundrisse, Negri, and all that is really 
(and fortunately) too fast and hectic for me to catch up. So (after 
a hard selection among lots of interesting messages), I can just 
reply now to something Harry wrote five days ago:

> Franco: A few comments, interspersed.
> 
> On Sat, 12 Sep 1998, FRANCO BARCHIESI wrote:
> 
> > I think we should make a distinction between the defensiveness of 
> > formal working class organizations, and the development of new 
> > patterns of movement, identity and subjectivity in resistance to 
> > free-market global capitalism. 
(...)
> > However, if we read the whole question of "defensiveness" vs 
> > "offensiveness" in proletarian responses in terms of changes in 
> > working class composition, I think that the struggle against 
> > neoliberalism cannot be easily defined as "defensive" (...)
> > because such a struggle is providing forms of common sense, discourse 
> > and languages that are defining relevant commonalities in processes 
> > of resistance that are taking place in different national and social 
> > context. I think this is one of the crucial impacts of the Zapatista 
(...)

> Franco: I think you are right about the difficulties that often exist in
> any clear-cut distinction between "offense" and "defense". While at times
> it may be relatively easy to make at other it is not. In the current
> situation in Chiapas, which you mention above, there is clearly a
> government military/paramilitary offensive against the Zapatista
> communities and the demand for autonomy. But that "offensive" is also a
> "defensive" response to the Zapatista uprising and the rapid development
> of autonomous communities. Moreover, within the current conflict, it would
> be a mistake to see the activities of the communities being attacked as
> purely defensive, even though there is a large quantum of that. 

I fully agree with that; my point was just critically addressing a
view, that it seems to me to be present in recent and more distant
discussions on the list, according to which the terrain of anti-
neoliberal struggle (implying, particularly, resistance against the
new enclosures in forms of community networks of insurgent subjects)
would be a "defensive" one for working class struggles. If that is
the case, it would be interesting to know where such "defensiveness"
comes from. On another level, my point on the Zapatista served
especially to introduce the following one, that is for me the most
interesting aspect to be developed in this whole discussion on
MBM-Grundrisse-subjectivity. As I wrote:

> > on the other hand, very little exists, in terms of   
> > research and analysis, of how the anti-neoliberal motif generates
> > such convergence of meanings and programs, what are the conditions   
> > for such a convergence, how local diversity relates to it, and what    
> > are the political potentials of such convergence.
> >
> 
> Franco: This is, unfortunately, all too true, despite the existence of
> plenty of information floating around about it. There is everthing
> associated with the Interncontinental Encounters, there is the European
> wide movement dealing with the union which has become ever more frequently
> discussed in terms of neoliberalism, etc. In short the whole circulation
> and adoption of a common language and understanding about who the enemy
> is. But the convergence, to all appearances, has been primarily one of
> concept and rhetoric and analysis rather than one of coordinated struggle
> --although this is not always true, there is some of that as well. At any
> rate no one that I have seen has tried to pull it all together even to
> tell the story, much discover emerging forms of "global" coordination or
> complementarity. Much remains to be done.
> 

Harry: Yes, there is something going on, and on the other hand I
think that the issue of "convergence" (that I would say is a
precondition for the "circulation") of anti-capitalist struggles by
plural oppositional subjects is not something that autonomists merely
invented (just to replace, as I think Angela wrote, "optimism for
political organization"), or that is just a product of the retreat of
the factory working class in these hard times.

I rather think that such forms of convergence and alliances inside
broader networks of resistance and opposition have been constant
features in the history of revolutionary working class politics and
strategy, including the "high points" of *factory* working class
struggles. On the contrary, I think it is precisely the neglect of
these broader linkages of working class struggles with other
autonomous forms of opposition that can often explain the drift, so
common during this century, of majority sectors of the working class
towards social-democracy, or even worse.

To name cases of which I have some direct knowledge, I think it
would be hard to imagine the long wave of working class offensive in
Italy from 1969 to 1977 without associating it with images of
counterpower and antagonist forms of collective reappropriation of
resources generated by issues of non-payment of rents and fees from
housewives, tenants, users of services, unemployed and so on. On the
other hand, it was precisely this trajectory of demands, and
therefore of organization and networks on the territory, that
enabled factory-based wage struggles to transcend (sorry, I couldn't
resist) the horizon of compatibilities of worker dermands with
capitalist calculation of rewards based on productivity. The same
applies, I would say, in the case of the South African independent
unions, which became a real political force, before being reabsorbed
by the ANC in the phase of "democratic transition", only when their
shop steward councils organised outside of the factory and inside
broader processes of resistance, reinventing a common language for a
whole variety of people fighting for basic services, to end
repression, or to get rid with apartheid municipalities. In both
cases, a level of revolutionary politics (revolutionary because
aimed at disrupting the rationale of capitalist expanded
accumulation and because capable to define, in so doing, forms of
non-capitalist societal counterpower) took place. And this happened,
notably, not on the basis of some certainty of the final victory, or
of the fact that every other worker was doing the same thing (what
was that, by the way, a re-edition of the conservative "prisoner's
dilemma" in Marxist clothes?), or of the inherent "true" nature of
the proletariat and, finally, of the structural crisis of capital.
Actually, in both cases it was precisely the political redefinition
of workers struggles inside broader networks of resistance that
*determined* the crisis of capital. Then, the whole question of "who
is" the oppositional subject, the proletariat, the working class,
far from postulating some kind of immanent "essentialist" and
"subjectivist" discourses, as autonomists have been accused to do in
this thread, is not separable from the (empirical, factual,
participative and militant) analysis of the material processes of
recomposition of autonomous subjects whose struggles converge to
identify capitalism as the root of expropriation of control of
individual and collective lives.

It is precisely in this empirical investigation of *processes*,
rather than in theoretical assumptions of *models* where, for
example, the values of Linebaugh and Rediker's studies resides.
Conversely, I cannot see an alternative emerging from critics on
this list of this view of oppositional subjects and processes that
does not mainly regard the "authenticity" of the proletariat in
terms of its proximity to the immediate process of valorization and
its contradictions, that is to say on the terrain defined by
capital. I really do not understand why the definition of the
working class should be so reliant on the mechanisms of capital
domination, whereby the class is primarily defined as a potential
created by such mechanisms, instead of trying to find a definition
of the class as consituted by and inside processes of struggle and
opposition to that domination. I don't know, maybe I am reducing too
much the terms of the discussion, but I think this is the
alternative that seems to come out of this thread.

And here is, by the way, where the big limitation of Brenner's NLR
essay lies. In fact, his view that worker struggles have been less
important than inter-capitalist competition in explaining capitalist
crises relies too much on a narrow view of worker struggles *as wage
struggles*, which focuses mainly on the most direct impacts of such
struggles on capitalist profit margins. In such a view, therefore,
once again worker struggles are assumed as relevant mainly because
they are taken as a "measurable" externality of capital
accumulation, or as just the "negative" side of the dialectic of
capital. On the other hand, there are many more ways in which worker
struggles indirectly affect capitalist accumulation and profits:
think of relations between production and reproduction, household
and land-based struggles, struggles for social services and social
income by unemployed and casualized workers. These "indirect
impacts" are hardly measurable from the point of view of capitalist
calculation, also because the contribution of different sections of
the class in such struggles is provided in patterns of language,
discourse, imagery, identity, community linkages, antagonist
definition of meanings, in short definition of oppositional
subjectivity, whose times and modalities of operation do not
necessarily reflect times and modalities of capital valorization.
And yet all this is crucially relevant, if we shift our attention
from how the class and its potential is produced inside the capital
relation, to the ways in which the class produces itself inside
dynamics of struggle. I think this is well explained by another
distinction present in Negri's work, that between "potere" (potency,
in this case) and "potenza" (power, or might, in this case). But
moving our discussion to the actual ways in which the class produces
itself through struggles would at the same time imply to go back to
Monty's initial suggestion: to discuss the validity of autonomist
analysis mainly in terms of explaining the anti- capitalist nature
and the potential for connection of current plural forms of
resistance, rather than ordering in a preliminary way such forms of
resistance according to their correspondence to abstract theoretical
models of class politics. Now I have to cut, but if this suggestion
will be considered, I can come back with relevant practical points
through which such a linkage between autonomist theory and actual
processes of class struggle can be explored.

Franco

Franco Barchiesi
Sociology of Work Unit
Dept of Sociology
University of the Witwatersrand
Private Bag 3
PO Wits 2050
Johannesburg
South Africa
Tel. (++27 11) 716.3290
Fax  (++27 11) 339.8163
E-Mail 029frb-AT-muse.arts.wits.ac.za
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/aut_html
http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~mshalev/direct.htm

Home:
98 6th Avenue
Melville 2092
Johannesburg
South Africa
Tel. (++27 11) 482.5011


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