Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 10:24:03 +0100
Subject: AUT: Cleaver's MBM Intro


I didn't read Harry's intro to MSM before: I think it is "bella"
(politically and theoretically).
While I was reading it I thought about his discussion on subjectivity with
Angela. I try to put down what seems to me to be the point of "contendere",
to contribute to the discussion (I read the list's messages from the
beginning of august all together because I'm just back from a long leave
and it wasn't an easy job, thus I apologise with Harry and Angela if I did
not understand correctly their positions).

It seems that the misunderstanding between Angela and Harry on the concept
of subjectivity is not due to the dicotomy subject/object, as Angela
thinks. The point is the way to conceive the relation of class (rapporto di
classe) and its dinamic.

Harry writes in the MBM intro :

"To sum up Negri's exposition of Marx's line of argument in the Grundrisse:
capitalism is a social system with two subjectivities, in which one subject
(capital) controls the other subject (working class) through the imposition
of work and surplus work."

Incidentally, I wouldn't have said that capital is a social system; it
implies it is the totality instead of one of the opposite forces into a
field of forces. But this is another issue.

In Harry (and many others after Foucault) the nature of those two subjects
is that of two antagonistic forces (which I agree is a correct reading of
Marx);
"In a world
of two antagonistic subjects, the only objectivity is the outcome of their
conflicts. As in physics, where two vector forces create a resultant force
whose direction and magnitude is distinct from either of the two, so too in
the class struggle that constitutes the development of capital the "laws of
motion" are the unplanned outcomes of confrontation."

Now, I think that Angela's problem is that she does not conceive the class
as a vector of forces but as a social group of individuals (conscious of
what they do as in Lucacks's theorisation?). But in the same time it seems
to me that Harry in his unswers didn't grasp the point, that is how can we
conceive individual subjects which constitute this field of forces? In
other words, where do we put the real actors of class struggle?

My unswer is that also individuals have to be be conceived as forces in
this field of forces. The praxis of each person, conscious or unconscious,
alone or organised, produces effects, ie the field of forces in a given
moment. This assumption doesn't say anything about where each person's
action is located (on what side), but it implies that classes are not
social groups of persons even if class struggle is made by persons in their
own praxis. Through the praxis of concrete persons class struggle is
onthologically founded.

In this logic, the problem of individual subjectivity (which seems to be
what troubles Angela) is an issue which comes after (another level of
analysis).
Each person is a social actor, so we could think that it is in any case the
subject of his own actions, but this doesn't help neither to make the
difference between Agnelli and one of "his" workers or to say if this
worker is on "the right side". So at this level the question we ought to
put is not who belongs to the class, but which praxis are antagonistic to
capital. The antagonostic subjects individually/molecularly are persons in
their own antagonistic behavior (when they act antagonistically, that is
acting  - consciously or unconsciously - against/out of the rules of the
game). The only possible subjectivity at the individual level is
antagonistic.
This implies that Capital subjectivity is not made by antagonistic
subjects, but by social actors when they (included myself) do consciously
or unconsciously their "duty".

Ciao laura







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