Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1998 14:27:45 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Re: AUT: Grundrisse/MBM


On Sat, 12 Sep 1998, Rakesh Bhandari wrote:

> To put things in my rather pedestrian way, are we not talking about how
> defensive working class struggles can become struggles to create a new
> form of social labor? 

Rakesh: Only to the degree that "a new form of social labor" is an element
in new ways of organizing society, and only to the degree that we look at
what people struggle FOR as opposed to what they struggle AGAINST. Both I
think are necessary. 

> 
> I am very interested in Jerry's suggestion that we study dialectics in
> terms of the logic of Marx's *Capital*, yet it seems to me that unless the
> working class thinks dialectically as well then we can't turn defensive
> battles into revolutionary attempts to create new bases for society. 

Rakesh: I have no idea what "thinking dialectically" means other than
grasping the dialectic of capital. I don't see "revolutionary attempts to
create new bases for society" as some kind of "dialectical inversion" of
the present. If such an inversion leaves us within the dialectic we
haven't escaped.
> 
> Yet at the same time unless we can reconstruct the (dialectical?) logic of
> *Capital*  and understand how its analysis of the economic law of motion
> may demonstrate limits on the capacity of crises to reestablish always the
> relation between the mass of surplus value and that required for further
> accumulation, then it seems to me that the working class can never lose
> its belief in the necessity or advantageousness of the existing social
> relations (isn't this importance Marx attributes to value theory in the
> famous letter to Kugelmann?)  If the system has no economic limits once
> it "readjusts" itself,  then there is no reason for the working class to
> think of its resistance dialectically. 
> 
> best, rakesh

Rakesh: I don't think "the working class" needs a Marxist analysis of the
limits to capitalism to impose those limits. Some of us find Marxist
analysis useful for grasping the dynamics of the class struggle, most 
do without yet manage to be very effective. I think lots of people can see
beyond capital to new and more interesting ways or organizing social life.
There is no shortage of such vision; the problem is that of linking the
struggles within which those visions exist so that they become more and
more complementary and effective at constraining and replacuing capital.

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/
............................................................................



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