Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2000 08:58:03 -0700 (PDT)
From: Sean Fenley <satellitecrash-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: Me and my interests


--- kubhlai <kubhlai-AT-proweb.co.uk> wrote:
> 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.

but i think what negri is saying is that whatever it
is that we are being parasitic of call it the overall
capitalist system, the totality, a particular
corporation; because the workplace is no longer
regimented or based on particular skills, you know the
deskilling of the workforce has taken place (the
transition from a Fordist to Taylorist model), there
has never been more reason to to dissolve that which
we are being parisitic of, never has there been more
opportunity to democratize workplaces, and eliminate
the bosses... and perhaps at some point negate
capital, or if not perhaps the opposite of that give
everyone working or not a guaranteed wage... for me i
have not seen anything in negri's writing that sets up
a praxis to go about this change, but my readings of
mainly two books of his Communists Like Us and
Politics of Subversion seem to suggest this...

this all ties in to the struggles of 1968, where for
the first time negri says the masses were demanding
total liberation. not just liberation of work, but the
home, prisons, mental institutions... the struggles we
are seeing today against bio-tech, neo-liberalism, and
what i think are being struggles against liberal
democracy in favor of more direct or decentralized
democracy, are similar to those of 68 b/c the masses
are once again posing a problem to technocracy or
top-down organizing as well as rigidity of what
capital is trying to do (if you are familar with
deleuze and guattari the inability of capitalism to
deal with a schizophrenic movement is taking place, a
rupture occurs and only so many ruptures can take
place before the whole thing crashes), although the
different segments of the "middle class" may not know
they are united and demanding the same thing, getting
them to be conscious of the fact that they want the
same thing; that is maybe the most important
struggle...
 > 
> 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.

i think you are correct, i had not looked at it that
way before... capital desperately tries to legitimize,
fit within its system or reaps the benefits of the
information that the socialized worker produces... i
will write more on information in the future, i have
to check my notes for that...

> 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.

i think i see what you are saying, but i often think
that social justice stuggles aren't about being
pragmatic, do people really think about where the
money will come from when they go on strike... do most
doctors want nurses payed less while they make more?
what i'm trying to say is that the irrationality of
the way capital values different kinds of work really
comes out in the kinds of struggles you refer to...
the civil service worker may not be cognizant that
his/her raise in pay will come of a teacher's pocket
or whomever, all s/he knows is that s/he has two kids
to feed and put through college, and his/her standard
of living needs to improve... i think that the working
classes (i'm including everything from doctors to
janitors here) are realizing that the way the piece of
the pie so to speak is being divided (that is the
amount of all wealth that is allotted to working
people) is the same in terms of a ratio (the doctor
still makes five times that of the janitor) but
overall the pool of money that is there to pay their
salaries is being appropriated by the ruling
classes.... of course some ratios have gone out of
wack, stock brokers, ceos (probably not real working
people but i;ll just mention them), bankers, their
real wages (adjusted for inflation) have probably
increased over the years...
> 

> 
> 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 
> 
i think that what globalization seeks to do is
homogenize the world into one overall culture, with
smaller amounts of people getting integrated in to the
ruling classe in the third world and semi-peripheries;
thus we see a lot of nationalisms and identity based
struggles emerging, i do not necessarily think this is
bad, you see even the nation of islam talking about
neo-liberalism here in the U.S., these struggles
although nationalistically based are not far off from
realizing they are in the same boat as people in many
other places...
the zapatistas have been criticized for being to
nationalistic, yet they tell people to work in their
own communities for the same type of revolution that
they are pursuing in chiapas.

the reason i suggest moral, cultural, and race
backgrounds are so different is b/c the whole world
seems to be becoming multi-racial, and that i think in
the third world more than the advanced capitlist
states you see people "voting in blocks" with their
race or religion, a particular party always gets
supported by a particular racial or religious group...
i just think more peolple feel proletrian or
disempowered than maybe in quite sometime, yet the
ideologies they latch onto differ vastly...

peace,
-Sean

p.s. the only Negri sites i know of online are:

the free Negri site:
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~forks/TNmain.htm

and a blurb on negri by michael hardt who has
co-authored i think now three books with negri:
http://193.128.6.150/index_oc/news/italy241197.html




===="Darwin pointed out how, in numberless animal societies, the struggle between separate individuals for the means of existence disappears, how struggle is replaced by co-operation, and how that substitution results in the developement of intellectual and moral faculties which secure to the species the best conditions for survival. He intimated that in such cases the fittest are not the physically strongest, nor the cunningest, but those who learn to combine so as mutually to support each other, strong and weak alike, for the welfare of the community."
  -Petr Kropotkin-

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