Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1998 00:23:39 +1000
Subject: Re: AUT: re: grundrisse etc discussion


forrest:

I did not think the debate was so much about "working class
resistance and capitalist development", though perhaps there remains a
good deal of work still to be done concretely tracing the shifts in the
modes of production or shifts within capitalism in order to ascertain
such questions. i was more concerned to ask the question relating to the
processes of forming subjects (capitalist and prole).  the problem i
have with a subjectivist notion of capital and labour is that, whilst it
does rightly acknowledge that such processes are not outside the realm
of human action, it is still the case that such processes have an
objective force, that things such as money and machines burden actions
with an objectivity that does compel us to act in certain ways.  If we
were to follow through with a subjectivist position, it seems to me that
we would have to argue that those workers who were not anti-capitalist
are deluded, have a 'false consciousness'.  i think this is arrogant, if
not an understatement of the objective force of capital.

A focus on class composition seems to me to promise a way out of this
morass, an attempt to grasp the processes of formation of working class
subjectivities without the assumption that such subjectivities exist
prior to the processes of struggle.

so: the argument here would be not whether or not class struggle fuels
capitalist developments (which i strongly beleive to be the case), but
the degree to which that struggle takes place as a series of strategic
steps undertaken by calculating - and self-sufficient - subjects in an
explicitly understood battle.

to cast it then as an argument between 'initiative' versus 'reaction'
looks to me a lot like like an attempt to cast discussion in these
terms.

You said: 
"As far as I know, no one else has provided a more convincing
explanation of the nature of capitalist crises, or the means by which
they are overcome, in the early modern world." 

does this rule out a crisis brought on by overproduction?  are crises of
overproduction to be read solely as the effect of working class
struggle?  
was not this crisis in the early part of this century resolved by war -
'a handy solution to overproduction' as holloway has argued?

true, the theory of capitalist crises as brought on by overproduction
does not exclude the working class's role in struggle as bearing heavily
on this, but such crises are also fuelled by competition between
capitalists.

what do you think of Brenner's 'the economics of globa turbulence' (new
left review, 229)?  it does have problems, and i'm only part way
through, but it may well offer a perspective on matters that can be
combined with an analysis of class composition.

angela


     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---