Date: Sun, 13 Sep 1998 10:36:07 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Re: AUT: re: grundrisse etc discussion


On Sat, 12 Sep 1998, rc&am wrote:

> 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?

Angela: Good question. I haven't seen any such proposal, perhaps the
original proposer could make one.
> 
> 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 

Angela: I don't know why this would bother you. Against the piece STeve
just reposted from the Padovani autonomist I think that autonomist
thinking, precisely because it both recognizes and takes seriously what
power we do have --in its limitations as well as its achievements-- HAS
indeed been an important source of "optimism" against traditional Marxism
which has often appeared as writing odes to capitalist power and only
offered faith in the party elite as the road to anywhere. In a world as
full of horror as the one we live in any theoretical approach to class
struggle which gives ANY of the energy associated with optimism has
something to be said for it. It's not a sufficient condition but it's a
necessary one for any chance of success.

- 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.

Angela: It is true that autonomists have sometimes been seen
sympathetically as "righting the balance" against more orthodox
approaches. I remember Jim O'Connor taking this line back in the 1970s.
But as I once wrote in METROPOLI the one-sidedness of "supply-side"
economics was only ideological, it was very much preoccupied by "demand"
issues as well --especially shifting demand from workers to capital.

> 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?  

Angela: Ah! I didn't get this in your previous post. It is an interesting
question, looking for homologous mechanisms. My bias, however, is that
while the issue of mechanisms that accelerate the circulation of struggle
are of great importance, the search for those which produce any kind of
unity homologous to capital's is not merely doomed to failure but
supportive of the old socialist vision of ONE alternative to capitalism
and thus to be rejected.

> 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.

Angela: Perhaps you should if a more attractive proposal for taking on MBM
is not offered. Entering the text through the door of the discussion of
the wage would be a useful one.

> 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. 

Angela: Even though some of the Italians who elaborated the concept of
class composition in the 1960s were, in fact, sociologists, I have always
been impressed by the ways in which their work was NOT stuck in
"occupational structures" but rather sought an understanding of the
dynamics of intra-class as well as inter-class struggle. This is what
differentiated the analysis of class composition from Marx's definition
(if not his analysis) of the "technical composition of capital". You see
this quite clearly when you examine the work of these militants --on FIAT,
on Olivetti, etc.

> 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.  

Angela: Yes and no. In the classic formulation of class in itself and for
its self --in the 18th Brumaire in Marx's comments about French peasants
and sacks of potatoes the "content" of the collective interest for which
peasants had not yet learned to fight remained vague. But the discussion
of the salt tax and exploitation via credit, etc. suggested a notion of
class for itself axed on resistance to exploitation. The formula I gave
that you cite above is aimed at capturing the struggle for
self-valorization along with resistance. Once you do that then the notion
of working class for-itself comes to include the struggle to transcend its
class status and no longer be workers.

> 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
> 
Angela: I see how you associate these concepts with some of the bleaker
moments of Marxism. I would not think in terms of passage from one to the
other. Leninist did this because they thought it required "class
consciousness" which only the party could provide. Your second formulation
is more to the point I think; the concepts denote two distinct dimensions
of the class: one in which it is a creature created and commanded by
capital as labor power, another in which it is an entity with its own
agenda. Research has shown that these dimensions obtain, contra Marx,
throughout the class albeit in different forms and degrees. As Thompson
showed for early capitalist times, peasants/workers struggled for their
interests long before there was any general organizational expression
(which he thought was necessary). As James Scott and others have shown for
the present, the same is true today: peasants struggle everyday both
against exploitation and for their own goals even if the balance of power
often forces those struggles underground. Looked at this way, I have no
problem with these concepts and find them useful, as useful as the
distinction between labor power (defined in terms of capitalist work) and
labor (defined as the subjectivity which has to be harnessed/reduced to
lP). The question then becomes what dynamics of class
formation/development do these concepts enlighten. In the realm of the
informational society and immaterial labor, learning to use a computer is
often a moment in the formation of labor power, of a transition in one's
position in the working class in-itself. On the other hand, learning to
use a computer to circulate struggle, to organize against exploitation and
to explore new, alternative forms of interactivity and self-valorization
is grasped, in part, by the concept of working class for itself.  Nowadays
I don't find myself using these concepts very much because I am more
preoccupied with the way struggles transcend working class status --which
is only implicit in the concept of working class for-itself.

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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