Date: Thu, 01 Oct 1998 01:19:27 +1000
Subject: Re: AUT: Cleaver's MBM Intro


just a reiteration - for those who have read enough, just hit that delete
button.

hello fiocco laura,

i'll try and briefly clarify my position in relation to your comments below.
(harry, i guessed that you did not want to keep this particular debate going,
so i've not thus far, added to the intrusion of having to go house-hunting and
working - if you want a response, or have anything specific to add, drop me a
note.)

Fiocco Laura wrote:

> 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.
>

i agree that the more crucial and interesting  point of analysis would be to
look at the class relation and the dynamic, or i think it is perhaps dynamics,
of that relation in particular circumstances and times.  the reason i raised
the issues regarding the dichotomy between subject and object was that it
seemed t me that this dichotomy was pivotal to how harry referred to that
relation.  a few more comments on this below.

> 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."
>

so: 1. in the above quote, capital is depicted as a subject (which i would
reject, for reasons which i think are fairly obvious - namely, that it is not
consistent with the position (which i think harry holds as well, though he will
have to speak for himself on this) that capital is already a social relation.
harry responded to my rejection of this by referring to the times marx felt it
appropriate to talk of capital in these ways.  i could only guess that harry
means certain passages in 'the communist manifesto', but i'm not sure.  this
for me implied that it was alright to speak of capital as a subject in writings
which were meant to rally the people, as a morale booster along the lines of an
'us' and 'them'.  it seems to me that this kind of tactical writing makes a
perceived political objective override an appropriate analysis.  in this
regard, i think it reproduces the trotskyist version of the 'two languages':
one for 'the masses' who it is presumed are not theoreticians and cannot be,
and another for the theoreticians who understand that, well, of course, capital
is not a subject but a social relationship.

and 2. the other subject in this equation - the working class - it seems to me
is presented as a working class, as a fully constituted subject prior to
(perhaps not historically prior, but definitely logically prior) to the
formation of capital.  if it were only a matter of  the logical relation
between the terms, i would not really care.  but, it is a logical relation with
certain consequences: specifically that the identity and needs of the working
class are conceived as outside the relation.  different autonomists would
disagree perhaps over whether this is a potentiality, or a power, and so on.
but, i think this raises more problems for an analysis than it solves.  it does
'solve' the historical 'pessimism' that many find themselves in, provides a
case for optimism.  but, for example, how are we to define certain needs and
versions of working class identity?  many on this list seem to me to have
gotten bogged down in exactly this kind of exercise, asking questions about
whether or not this or that movement was defensive or offensive for example.
these are questions which - at their very base - have as a working assumption,
the distinction between 'good' and 'bad' identites/needs/etc, the endless
search for signs and portents of the actuality of the autonomy of working class
needs.
i would rather look at the potentialities and limits of any situation we may
find ourselves in for struggling against commodification, the compulsion to
produce surplus value, and so on.  i cannot see us doing this if we engage in
attempts to privilege certain needs/identities, or even the more limited
version of naming certain movements/identities/needs as the pre-eminent
expression of such needs conceived as existing outside capitalism.  this to me
speaks of religious transcendence - more than a wish, but the announcement of a
wish as personified; and a burdensome gesture for that very reason.

> 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."

i would agree that objectivity is the result of conflicts.  but i do not think
we can talk of 'two forces' who exist separable from eachother, either
analytically of historically.  i look forward to the abolition of both.  there
is a dialectic here, the two 'forces' presuppose eachother.

>
>
> 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?).

i hope the above clarifies that i have explicitly not been arguing along the
lines of Lukacs.  i merely tried to take the insistence on an anti-vanguardism
and the focus on class composition and meet them up with adorno's critique of
identity, theories of destiny and/or origins which arise from such notions, and
four specific positions from marx: 1. the injunction against the projection of
the present (in whatever idealised forms) into the future; 2. the rejection of
the view that labour is the source of all values; (these two points being drawn
explicitly in  'the critique of the gotha program'); 3. the insistence on
capital as a social relation; 4. that what distinguishes a communist politics
from socialist politics is that communists work toward the abolition of surplus
valu and hence the abolition of the working class.

i do not i think have a sociological view of classes, since i do not think that
classes exist in the weberian sense of groups of people organised as social
actors.  it does seem to me though that despite talking of vectors and physics
(though i confess i don't undertstand the term vectors all too well), there is
in harry's version of class relations a constant slippage into viewing them as
separable entities who face eachother off at certain times.  harry has used the
phrase 'class war'.  i would not do this for the above reasons.  i also happen
to this that this does not make for an appropriate ethical practice, where
there is a picture of 'enemies' and so on.  for some, these enemies will
include anyone they perceive as perpetuating the rule of capital - all workers
perpetuate (as a condition of being workers) the rule of capital, so are these
people then to be treated as enemies?  harry talked of tronti being a
capitalist idealogue, for instance.  i would not think this is the kind of
ethical engagement that i reagrd as approrpriate.  one can make an argument
against tronti's realignments and why this is bad, but a 'capitalist
idealogue'???

> 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.

i think i agree, but i am not sure we might be speaking here in the same
terms.   if you mean by this that individuals are themselves constituted as
individuals within a series of social processes, then i would agree. i was not
arguing for a focus on the individual.

> 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.

i agree.  in the discussion on the effects of action i was attempting to
clarify to what extent all effects (what is objective or becomes objectified as
truth for instance) is to be seen entirely as the result of intention,
subjective will.  the issue of the role of the unconscious, at an individual
level, seems to me relevant; as do the accretions of the history of class
struggle (which themselves act in may ways as our uncosncious).  i do know to
what extent the history of class struggle and its materialised effects in the
world are accessible to those acting and living here and now - i would include
marxists and autonomists in this.

>
>
> 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.

i would like to agree, but i am still bothered by the question of then what
happens to those whose praxis is defined as not being antagonistic to capital?
this might seem easy at one level, but at another, i feel burdened by the
history of  (awful phrase) 'really-existing-socialisms', the history of the
realtion between marxism and the formation of states/vanguards/sects and
sectarians/the beleivers in the truth of such declarations.

> 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.

do you mean that it is in the spaces/moments of our antagonism to capital that
a subjectivity arises?  i am not sure if this is a description or a wish or a
combination of both.  i think that subjects are formed and transformed every
day.  i also do not know from where, or maybe i am asking more about how,  this
subjectivity (in the sense that i think you mean it) comes from?  is it
something lurking (ie., prior) ready to come forth?  is it strictly a condition
of being antagonistic to capital?  how does this subjectivity, if it is a
condition of antagonism, become the basis for the abolition of capital, and (by
implication) the abolition of its own (albeit antagonistic) identity?  i really
don't know if i have anything more than questions here.

> 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".

does capital have a subjectivity?  what do you think of the theory that capital
develops and grows on the basis of the antagonism?  again, i have questions.

>
>
> Ciao laura
>
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  angela.



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