Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1998 14:32:03 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Re: AUT: re: grundrisse etc discussion


On Sat, 12 Sep 1998, Forrest T Hylton wrote:

> Greetings all.  Though I shall not weigh in on the interesting theoretical
> debate taking place of late, I want to back Harry up vis working class
> resistance and capitalist development.  In their forthcoming work on the
> composition of the Atlantic proletariat in the seventeenth and eigtheenth
> centuries, Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh set out to demonstate
> that proletarian *subjectivity*- whether of the slave, the indentured
> servant, the wage slave, the domestic worker/slave, the tavern owner, the
> pirate, the sailor, etc.- provides the fuel for capitalist development,
> insofar as capitalist planners had to respond, at every point in the
> plantation-port circuit, to proletarian counter-planning.  Rediker and
> Linebaugh have amassed an impressive wealth of documentary evidence to
> support their thesis, which will in any case be familiar to readers of PM
> Notes "New Eclosures."  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.  
> 
Forrest: Well said. For those to whom this understanding/demonstration
sounds interesting they should read a copy of "The Many-Headed Hydra" in
the Autonomedia book GONE TO CROATAN, and then Linebaugh's LONDON HANGED
and Rediger's BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA.


> Does it still work
> this way?  I think so, but in the absence of theoretically
> informed empirical studies, it seems that the question is chicken-or-egg.
> 
> 
> Forrest
Forrest: I don't understand the Chicken-0r-egg metaphor/analogy. And it
seems to me that we have quite a bit of theoretically well informed
empirical studies of crisis in this period which demonstrate that it was a
cycle of working class struggle in the 60s and 70s that created a crisis
for capital and to which it has been responding ever since.

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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