Subject: Re: AUT: Me and my interests
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 00 22:28:48 +0000
From: kubhlai <kubhlai-AT-proweb.co.uk>



Sean to kubhlai:
>but here i want to respond to your comments about
>class backgrounds being more complex and varied. i
>think this is not so, i think that race, moral and
>cultural backgrounds are in fact what have become more
>varied, and that class backgrounds are becoming
>similar.

Most of the issues around which protest has emerged in the last decade or 
so have been about things which effect people pretty-much-regardless of 
class. I'm thinking of GM-crops, Reclaim the Streets (in a narrow sense), 
anti-bypass campaigns and so forth. In fact lets make that two decades 
and include Save the Whale and CND. I guess this kind of proves your 
point rather than mine so far.
However none of these issues are particularly *revolutionary*. None of 
them are very resistant in fact, in the fullness of time, of being taken 
advantage of by populist politicians of the kind I'm sure we all despise.
Despite that, I think there *are* revolutionary possibilities opened up 
by these cross-class protests and in fact believe that the way forward is 
to promote policies with merit in the eyes of the majority. (For one 
example -- rights of tenure, ie over rights of property, so that people 
cannot be evicted; which would apply and appeal equally to both the 
mortgaged middle class, the working class tenant and the peasant farmer).

Nevertheless, the very reason I think that issues should be formulated 
with a wide social frame in mind is precisely because I think unity is 
*absent* for the class reasons I gave.
It could be that this boils down to semantics -- that you can choose to 
use the term "workers" and define it by the common interests you 
perceive, (this after all has been the custom, especially in the west, 
since the 1940s). However this has got to be a dangerous 
oversimplification: the more you reserve the term for definition in a 
strict Marxist sense -- as defined by materialist economics and the 
production of material artefacts -- the more obvious are the divergences 
of interest. How, for example, can the socio-economic interests of an 
administrator (say a civil service accountant) who produces nothing 
essential to life and/or who depends upon the state to enforce his 
instructions, be the same as those of the actual producer of the means of 
life -- say a farm labourer? 
In my view, the "middle class" is precisely that -- it consists largely 
of individuals who only contribute in small or varying degree to 
production (and specifically provide services needed by production mainly 
by virtue of the capitalist system in which it has to occur) but who 
also, as reward, receive a small share of the devolved power of the 
state. In other words, they are paid in both money (which essentially 
derives from the labouring class) and in power (which is sacrificed to 
them by the ruling class in its self-defence: "danegeld").
Even this is too polarized a view. Almost everyone today is producer and 
parasite in varying degree. We all stand to both gain and lose by revolt.

>with the transition from mass worker (factory work
>based on wages as labor's value) to socialized worker
>(non-factory work based on information as labor's
>value), all workers have been put on a much more equal
>level.

Information is quite ill defined perhaps, but I suggest that what you 
mean by information here corresponds in large part to what I have just 
said about power. In other words, the value of this information is that 
it enables, and therefore embodies, social control. Come to think of it 
(and this is a spur of the moment thought) this information might also 
readily be identified with the images of the spectacular society as 
described in Situationism : certainly some of these images (guchi and 
reebok labels for example) are intimately connected with social status 
and "being taken seriously".... If you widen the meaning of information 
in the situationist direction, then even "information" such as artistic 
productions, "style" (added-commodity-value) reveal themselves as a 
currency in power.
So what I'm saying is that there cannot really be a "class" identity 
between those who possess a share in this *information*-power and those 
who do not.
Even within the middle "class", there is a kind of competition not found 
in the proletariat. In the modern market place there is very obviously a 
perpetual war to possess "charisma", "fashion", "street-cred", "respect"; 
brandname competes with brandname (often brutally ie people get put out 
of work). If BMW is in, then Porsche is out... 
There is no corresponding disunity in the working class -- the car-worker 
cares little if he works for Ford or for Nissan, and one peasant who 
grows a banana is rarely forced to fight it out with another who grows a 
plantain.

>labor militance is no longer restricted to one who
>uses his/her hands or works in a factory...

Yes but. Where is the competitor which obliges middle class professions 
to take union-style action? When the proletarian struck -- his enemy was 
obviously the mill-owner and his class. However when the teachers obtain 
more pay, I think they know that in effect they are taking the money from 
nurses (a UK example -- where both are publicly supported), or if doctors 
demand more influence over XYZ, they know they are competing with civil 
servants in the district health authorities. What I mean is that such 
protests are not so clearly directed at *the* Ruling Class any more. If 
they are to aquire such a perspective it will require building (by trying 
to direct attention to fundamental problems/causes) rather than simply 
emerging of its own accord from these largely *factional* struggles.

>in addition since workers have seen the factories
>become mobile due to freer capital flows,
>technological change, etc... there is some fear that
>even the upper level jobs could simply be moved
>somewhere else where the labor is cheap...
>i don't know how good this example is but, in relation
>to even white collar labor having mobility, i think of
>an episode of tv nation where michael moore set up a
>scenario where he planned to open up the headquarters
>of a U.S. TV station in Mexico...

Well yes -- and this is just the kind of issue which can build (what I 
would continue to call) "cross-class" unity. Unfortunately this 
particular kind of example also invites that unity to take the form of 
*nationalism* (so defining issues so that they have transnational appeal 
is equally important.

As to your suggestion that race, morality, culture etc have become more 
important...
Hmm. American friends tell me that ethnic communities have become more 
polarized over there so I'm wary of expressing a general view. Its been 
my impression in the Uk that such differences have steadily waned. (Not 
always for the better though -- only yesterday there was a documentary 
charting the "western" problems now appearing in asian families such as 
drugs and crime, and the rejection of their traditional cultures and 
faiths). Of course ethnic identities, religions and moralities can all be 
commodified to greater or lesser degree -- can be reduced to fashions and 
"qualifications". Whether their adherents "grow together" or "grow apart" 
might not be telling us anything very clear about class. 

>a lot of what i was saying was coming from Politics of
>Subversion by Toni Negri, in this book he talks about
>the proletarianization of the subjectivity of the
>socialized worker.

Well I'm here to get educated. Is there an archive of Negri and autonomic 
etexts somewhere?

I cant think of anywhere in the situationist archives which specifically 
addresses this question by offering a modern redefinition of class (I'll 
ask a friend) but almost anything would expand on what I've said about 
images as commodities and as mediations of social power. Both Debord's 
Society of the Spectacle and Vaneigem's Revolution of Everyday Life are 
now available complete as etexts. I could email, or try these urls--

http://situationist.cjb.net
http://www.nothingness.org
http://www.notbored.org
http://www.geosophy.com


If it moves -- subvert it.

-- kubhlai


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