Date: Mon, 21 Sep 1998 10:53:26 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Re: AUT: Grundrisse/MBM


On Sat, 19 Sep 1998, FRANCO BARCHIESI wrote:

<snip> 
> 
> 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. 

Franco: I don't understand this question unless you are suggesting that
the current capitalist offensive is a "counter-"offensive against the
previous wave of working class struggle? Out of historical context, it is
easy to see why people see "defensiveness" in reaction to the hammering
down of wages, destruction of social services, mass layoffs, etc.

> 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")

Franco: In what sense a "precondition"; I'm inclined to think that
"convergence" is even more the RESULT of the circulation of struggle than
a precondition. But perhaps I don't understand the sense in which you use
these terms.

>  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. 

Franco: In general I agree.

> 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.
> 

Franco: Whose "neglect"? The "leadership"? The "organization"? My guess is
that part of the capitalist project of stabilizing class relations after a
cycle of struggle involves the severing of such linkages, just as it seeks
the severing of newly created networks within the cutting edge of the
movement.

> 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. 

Franco: Absolutely, it was often a key ingredient, as in the 1960s.

> 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. 

Franco: And as so many other examples show as well. Do you remember my
brothers piece in Zerowork #1 on struggle in the Appalachian coal
mines/communities.  I hope some day we'll have a book length treatment of
this South African experience.

> 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.

Franco: Yes, which are processes within which the analysis of "class
consciousness" makes some sense --as long as one's concept of it is not
simplistic.

> 
> 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.
> 

Franco: I'm not sure your interlocutors would agree, but I'll let them
answer, if so inclined.

> 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. 

Franco: In past arguments with such people I have found that they "rely"
on such a narrow view because in good orthodox tradition they see the rest
as secondary at best, unimportant at worst. When you point out the breath
of the conflict, its dynamic in and among areas, I have found such people
dismissive of what goes on outside the "factory" as unessential --which
fits, of course, their whole political orientation and justifies it.

> 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.

Franco: There have been some attempt to impute capitalist measures to
these diverse terrains of struggle but the main motive for dismissal, at
least in my exprience has been a priori and not based on difficulties of
measurement.

> 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). 

Franco: As you know Toni attributes this dichotomy to Spinoza and
appropriates for his own use as a way of providing a way of talking about
the "power" of capital and that of the working class without falling into
homology.

> 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: Except that I keep hoping Matt will suggest an approach to our
collective reading of MBM, I'd say go for it. But while waiting, why not
go for it anyway.

Harry



> Franco
> 
> Franco Barchiesi
> Sociology of Work Unit
> Dept of Sociology
> University of the Witwatersrand
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> http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~mshalev/direct.htm
> 
> Home:
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> 
> 
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............................................................................
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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