Date: Mon, 21 Sep 1998 03:29:56 +1000
Subject: Re: AUT: Grundrisse/MBM


Hi franco,


i am not particularly concerned with the distinctions between, or even the use
of, offensive or defensive as a way of characterizing, judging or
differentiating between particular campaigns, movements etc.  the reasons for my
disinterest in doing this are perhaps particular to a certain view: that a
particular movement may, in its demands, ways of thinking about itself and the
world, be quite limited and nominally 'reformist' but the effects of such a
demand, or of the very existence of that demand at a particular point in time,
have historical (or perhaps less immediate) consequences which are anything but
intentional, which overflow the expressed intentions of those who participate.
so: this would be to note the distance that pertains between 'subjects' and
'effects' (to put it in these terms), a recognition that 'effects' are not
always to be sourced to this subject, that the 'effects' do not originate in
subjectivity as a matter of course. this seems to me to be an illustration of
some of the problems associated with a subjective 'emphasis': that of knowing
subject and that of the subject as origin.



FRANCO BARCHIESI wrote:

> 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.

 franco: the issue of convergence seems to me to be distinct from the criticisms
raised thus far.  for myself, i have no problems with attempts to connect
various struggles, indeed i have in the past made precisely this attempt to
relate various struggles - my involvemnts in left alliance was a feature of
this, and perhaps for that reason, i feel like i got a very intimate glimpse of
the ways in which it was possible to make this work and the times when a certain
kind of alliance was really the continuance of pluralism (which i reject) or
assimilationism (which i reject also).

i would applaud any of these efforts or circumstances.  this was not the flow of
my argument here.

my criticism was related both to the claim to empiricism (the facts of the world
require a good deal of sorting to even begin to resemble a theory, or even an
opinion, on the world) and subjectivism.

there is a process through which facts are arranged in order for them to express
an opinion or an analysis.  this process of arrangement is not however something
that we always do knowingly or intentionally, so i am not speaking in terms of
the rationalist's critique of empiricism, namely that we CHOOSE to arrange facts
in a certin way.

a fairly uninteresting example, though perhaps it illustrates my argument here
in a different context: there is a huge debate in australia at the moment over
the health, education and employment of men.

the facts do support the view that men are tending toward higher rates of
unemployment, dropping out of school, and are suffering more health problems
than women do.   there is - a very uninteresting one though - dispute about the
reasons for this.  but no one has challenged the premise on which such data was
(not arranged so much as) collected  in the first place - ie, that the
categories of women and men form the point of departure for the collection of
data - not even feminists who are being made implicitly responsible for this
shift in 'men's standing' have challenged such research, because to challenge
the founding categories of the research would also unsettle a first principle of
feminism, of the fundamentality of sexual/gender differences.

Yes, men and women exist, but the history of establishing this as the basis for
empirical study has a political-economic history.  it is not just about the
arrangement of 'data', but of the framing of the questions that actually get
asked.  this is a matter of theoretical as much as empirical dispute.

franco also wrote:

> 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.

franco, maybe i did not make myself clear enough in terms we share an
understnding of.  emails are at best a fragment, and we can only guess at the
tone of a delivery, gestures and so on.

it was precisely because i didn't want to talk in terms of authenticity that i
find certain assertions troubling. a critique of subjectivism BEGINS through the
refusal of the attribution of authenticity to a particular politics, the
DEFINITION of the working class (or sections of it) as authentically working
class insofar as it EXPLICITLY ARTICULATES an antagonism to capitalism. if
working class people do not resist are they not then truly working class?  this
seems to me to flow from arguments harry had been making.

as i have already said in a prior post, i'm happy to have an argument about
whether or not the working class is decisive or even relevant to our
emancipation from capitalism - i happen to think it is crucial.  but i do not
think that it is possible to define whether or not someone is authentically
working class - whether they express what somne view as the essence of the
working class - depending upon whether or not they articulate certain politics.

franco also wrote:  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.


franco,
this formulation to me does express the kind of search for authenticity that i
rejected the terms such as 'class-for-itself', or of the articulation of a
particular politics as constituting an authentic proletariat.  this is still a
search for a definition that i think justifies itself more through an argument
about the role of theory as weapon in struggle, where its role in struggle leads
to things like the injunction to optimism and the feeling that it is necessary
to endlessly define/redefine/discover the oppositional subject(s).  philosophy
has a political history, analysis too is i would agree important in politics,
but this does not mean that we reduce everything (especially what should be a
fairly open discussion) to political imperatives.


this talk of authenticity is also what i think harry's formulation in a previous
post advances:

harry wrote:
"The working [class] in-itself is capital's creation, people whose lives are
controlled through the imposition of work. The working class for-itself refers
to the struggles AGAINST that imposition and FOR a variety of alternative ways
of social being (which would necessarily include the abolition of imposed work
and thus of "working"
class status"

harry went on to define marxist, or "more narrowly autonomists", as being this
'class-for-itself'.  so, it was not merely a judgment on certain struggles and
strategies, but these strategies became people, became personified.

i guess i think this is about who can be described as authentically
oppositional, if not working class - a kind of sectarianism and voluntarism that
i would have thought to be a matter of serious debate amongst those who seem so
committed to disentagling themselves from orthodoxy. perhaps what i see as
orthodoxy is different to what others beleive it to be (i remain to be convinced
that one can easily define althusser as an orthodox marxist, for example)

i think it is another question entirely to define the working class (or prole,
as some - but not myself - prefer) as relating to the processes of surplus value
creation.  as i said, this does not rule out for me - is a separate question to
- debates over whether this makes the working class decisive to revolutionary
change, how is this class composed, changing and so on.

i would also not find it disturbing if someone put a case as to why surplus
value may or may not be the issue.

perhaps i would prefer it if an argument was made viz. the irrelevance, or
limited relevance, of the working class to anti capitalist politics (which i
would not agree with) than arguments which attempt to stretch this to include
all manner of movements or whatever simply in order to situate this on the
(apparently) privileged terrain of marxian discourses.

i am however deeply troubled by the refusal to countenace the dangers inherent
in this subjective 'emphasis'.

re: franco's comments on why the need to make working class identity an
expression of the domination of capital.

i can understand that some people think to reduce their identity to the workings
of capitalist dominion is an offence, that it somehow insults their illusions of
self-sufficiency.

but i think in the more limited sense it can be said that the working class
would not have been created had not capital 'established its dominion'.

we can argue about the character of that class and indeed the workings of
capitalist processes at specific concrete moments as shaped by the struggles to
resist (as in marx's specific illustration) being thrown off the land to be
forced to become a 'free labourer', present struggles (be they nominally
reformist or insurgent in their orientations) and whatever as bearing upon the
working through of the processes of capital and hence the prospects for
emanicpation,

but for me again, this is a differnt question to the statement: the working
class presupposes capital and vice versa,

since without capitalism there would be no working class.  i do not think this
statement confines my future or our futurity to capital, and it also does not
confine me to the working class since it poses the ABOLITION OF BOTH.


regards,
angela



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