Date: Sat, 12 Sep 1998 17:59:35 +1000
From: rc&am <rcollins-AT-netlink.com.au>
Subject: Re: AUT: re: grundrisse etc discussion


General question: is there some kind of structure proposed for
discussing MBM?   If so, I apologise for being in ignorance - but could
someone restate it?

Steve: 
Many thanks for posting the discussion notes again.  

Harry:
Perhaps I was less than distinct than I should have been.
Perhaps I did not emphasise enough that I was referring more to my own
experiences of the reception of autonomist ideas - the ways they have
been taken up as grounds for a kind of optimism - than to the range of
positions actually taken in such writings - though with possibly too
much brevity I said "the grundrisse (and negri) have too often been
assumed as taking one side in these kinds of disputes (the subjectivist
side)", which I thought would be enough to note this.
Shorn of the detailed analyses, this kind of reception resembles a left
version of supply-side theories.
Which, is what I was attempting to gesture toward with the reference to
credit:  it seemed to me that the issue of the difference between
capital and capitalists had been well advanced in many of the writings I
mentioned (and yes, bonefeld et al referred to the volumes of 'open
marxism' and 'global capital, nation state . . . ') as an issue, not
simply of the various fractions of capital, but of the specific
historical processes of the formation of a capitalist unity, of the
actual processes through which the state became, at a certain point in
time, explicitly the executive committee for the management of the
affairs of the bourgeoisie. (I think that marx's overall discussion on
the working day - i.e., the ways in which individual capitalists will
strive for an unlimited extension of the working day and the historic
links between relative surplus value and credit - and the stuff on 'the
civil war in France', where it is credit (the honouring of debts) which
guarantees the reimposition of bourgeois social relations, is
particularly useful.  I did not necessarily read this stuff as entirely
a discussion of different capitalist fractions.
So: if credit was (is?) the mechanism for the disciplining of individual
capitalists such that (the equally powerful compulsion toward)
competition was made dependent upon (and redirected) by credit, then is
there a similar mechanism that, at particular moments, became (is?)
pertinent to the organisation of the working class?  The obvious short
answer is of course the wage, which negri deals with at length in MBM. 
Yet, I have misgivings about this which I will not raise right now.
Re: the comment on derivation from 'occupational structure'.  I should
have noted this as the work by tronti, which I actually like a great
deal, but remain frustrated by its reliance on a kind of sociologism,
which does define class composition as almost wholly a matter of
occupational structure. I'll re-read James and the others you noted.
Lastly, in a long posting, I think the formulation:
'being-labour-power-for-capital' and 'being-workers/people-who
struggle-to-be-more' does echo the class in itself/class for itself
stuff, which I remain uncomfortable with.  What is the passage from one
to the other that is not mediated by the leninist party?  Do they
perhaps co-exist to the extent of being impossible to categorise as
different? Does differentiating them always entail a leap into the
rather unfortunate practice of ascribing to certain politics a
more-prole-than-thou basis?  I remain disturbed by these questions,
though I cannot find a way out of the problem here that I'm comfortable
with.
Angela


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