Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1998 14:23:11 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Re: AUT: Grundrisse/MBM


Steve: Some comments below.

On Fri, 11 Sep 1998, Profit Margin wrote:

<snip.
> 
> Certainly one question I hope we can address is one raised in a phone
> conversation a few days ago by a friend here in Melbourne: how useful (and
> how verifiable) is the workerist/autonomist notion that capital's action
> can be understood as *responses/reflexes* to working class initiative -
> both on the micro level, and in terms of broad historical sweep (e.g. the
> struggles of the sixties/seventies evoke the crisis/restructuring of the
> seventies onwards)?

Steve: There seems to have been the RECOGNITION that working class action
may be autonomous, i.e., take the initiative, and have the power to force
changes in capital, as in the early piece by Panzieri on planning.
But also  Tronti`s Lenin in England that carried the argument
further to make working class action primordial, the fundamental drive in
capitalist development. I think that view is still very much around, even
in Negri, just the concept of the subjectivity providing the drive has
changed. At any rate this interpretation is rooted in a reading of Marx
which emphasizes the distinction between living and dead labor the former
embodied in the working class and the later in capital. Movement can only
derive from life, so capital derives its pseudo-life by instrumentalizing
living labor -vampire like as Marx said so often. But what this means,
practically is that capital draws the subjectivity of the working class
in and turns it to the "dark side" of the force as it were, i.e., people
become "functionaries of capital" and use their creativity and imagination
to maximize capital's pseudo-life and keep the real life of the working
class in check. At the micro level this can be programs of cooptation,
like bonuses for good ideas, or just getting managers to use their skills
of coordination in ways which preserves and strengthens capital's control.
At the macro level it might be Keynesianism which used both
macro and micro mechanisms to harness collective working class struggle to
drive capitalist development. This perspective is often useful for getting
us to SEE the power we have; but it need not blind us to situations where
we are on the defensive and capital has the initiative.

> 
> I know some (e.g. in Padova) argue that the cycle of
> struggle/restructuring/accumulation has now been broken (which still begs
> the question of what if any form it assumed in the past) . . . This debate
> connects back to the Grundrisse/Marx Beyond Marx texts in the sense that
> Negri insists that Marx's Capital lacks precisely a sense of working class
> subjectivity in and against (and groping beyond) the class relation.
> 
> Steve
> 
Steve: As I understand it the first fundamental objection to theory of the
cycle you mention was that's its formulation and the way of thinking it
led people to assumed the inevitability of its continuance. The dialectic
seemed eternal and the desire for revolution amounted to a desire to break
the dialectic. Thus the need to find ways of thinking about the class
struggle that emphasized the possibility of its rupture. This was perhaps
one reason why Toni was so open to working with Deleuze and Guattari in
Paris who themselves were interested in and trying to build upon an
anti-dialectical tradition.

The other thing that has led to the "cycle is over" thesis appears to be
Toni's notion of the total subordination of society to capital, i.e., the
socialialization of capital having become complete leaves no room for
dialectical development because the "maturity" of the working class
subject is also complete and ready to move on without capital, more or
less. Every new synthesis required a further socialization and now, a
little like  Luxemburg's theory of imperialism, there's no dimension left
to socialize. Something like this seems to be in the texts, but we would
do well to examine them directly.

Harry
............................................................................
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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