Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1998 14:39:04 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Re: AUT: re: grundrisse etc discussion


On Sun, 13 Sep 1998, Gerald Levy wrote:

> Forrest T Hylton wrote:
> 
> > <snip>  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. <snip>
> 
> If we are to include slaves, indentured servants, tavern owners, and
> pirates in our definition of proletarians, then the term itself loses all
> (historically specific) meaning. Indeed, the term "proletarian" would
> become an eternal trans-historical category divorced from any specific
> relation to capital. Furthermore, I fail to see how all of these groups 
> had "proletarian subjectivity". E.g. since when do tavern owners view
> themselves as proletarians?  Did slaves view themselves as proletarians?

Jerry: This broader defintion of who is included in the concept of working
class/proletariat has involved the elaboration of an analysis of what we
call "class composition" which is aimed precisely at taking the 
complexity into account. Steel workers are not textile workers are not
housewives, yet all have been involved in the expanded reproduction of
capital and struggle against it. You seem to equate "proletarian
subjectivity" with "view[ing] themselves as proletarians". I would venture
to say that most class struggle has been carried out WITHOUT any such
clear cut vision by people who fought for their collective needs/desires,
many of which could NOT be defined as working class because they sought to
transcend that category. 

> 
> Now, I agree that it is worthwhile to investigate the formation and
> autovalorization of "new social subjects", but ... please ... let's not
> conflate all social subjects which are not capital with proletarians.
> 
> Jerry
> 
Jerry: See previous comment. I wouldn't conflate all social subjects --who
struggle against capitalism-- with "proletarians" because they also
struggle for a variety of ways of being which make them quite different
from each other and that difference is not only attractive but lays the
basis for future real politics.

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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