From: "Karl Carlile" <dagda-AT-eircom.net>
Subject: AUT: Re: Re: Re: Re: autonomist crisis theory
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2001 11:09:53 -0000


You response is just not convincing

--------

Thank you for the helpful and perceptive posting.

However, you happen to be wrong.  I did not even use the word "individuals".
Not once.  I did talk about micro-sized struggles, which could include
actions in departments by a group of people, or small strikes, or slowdowns,
or all kinds of struggles that small (understood here as something that may
be isolated in one fashion or another and which does not involve large
numbers of workers or a central point of production that shuts things down)
groups or individuals wage.  So where you get the idea that I only mean
"individuals" is not clear to me, except that you read what you wanted to
read, but not what I wrote.

But even so, mass struggle (you know, hundreds of thousands and millions of
people, that kind of scale) is not the only way in which people struggle
with capital.  Nor is it the only important form of struggle.  Nor do
individuals cease to exist as legitimate actors in the class struggle.  All
of those small struggles, some of them seemingly individual struggles, work
like grains of sand between two gears, slowly eating away at the functioning
of the gears.  However, as I implied in a later post, the indivdual grains
of sand also happen to be the prerequisite for the bucket of sand poured
into the machine sometimes.  the two have a relationship.  If individuals
and small groups did not resist, then we would have to leap from no one
struggling to mass struggles, out of nowhere.

I am NOT claiming that each act of insubordination is as good, as effective
or as conscious as the next.  Every thief violates the sanctity of property,
but not every act of theft hurts capital.  Some can reinforce capital.  Some
don't.  I know someone who "aquired" equipment from work, and the other
workers took up the idea as a way to get back at the company.  that
eventually led to an attempt to organize a union, but the original act came
from someone consciously stealing as a means of sticking it to the company,
and sharing that perspective with her co-workers.  I also know people who
steal and want to be rich.

To make some absolute separation between individual struggle and mass
struggle is to lose the links in how insubordination, struggle, is
omnipresent, how the rejection  of the capital-labor relation permeates all
levels.  That would be 'petty bourgeois'.  On the other hand, to make a
virtue of individual struggle, at the expense of ignoring mass struggle,
would be wrong and 'petty bourgeois'.  To see that the crisis of capitalism
involves both individual, small, medium, large and mass struggles altogether
is to recognize that crisis flows from struggle, not from 'structural
problems'.  Strucutralism is another 'petty bourgeois' approach because it
denies agency to the class for self-emancipation.  Class struggle then just
'mediates' structures, rather than creating those structures.

Of course, using 'petty bourgeois' in this way tells us nothing because it
fails to show any serious linkage between class and ideology.  It is,
rather, ham-fisted denunciation that discourages conversation and dialogue.

Finally, someone asked a specific question: if crisis is caused by struggle,
then how can autonomist Marxists see the current slide into recession as a
product of struggle?  What can we possibly mean by struggle?  Or do we have
to go back to the structuralist, "objective laws of motion of capital"
approach common to Leninism, Social Democracy and most academic Marxism?

If you have a good answer for that, THAT would be helpful.

Cheers,
Chris
----- Original Message -----
From: "Karl Carlile" <dagda-AT-eircom.net>
To: <aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Monday, February 19, 2001 12:32 PM
Subject: AUT: Re: Re: autonomist crisis theory


> The latter part of this posting cannot be taken seriously. Under this
> perception class struggle is no longer the struggle of the class but
simply
> the resistance of individuals who are members of the working class. Very
> petty bourgeois.
>
> Regards
> Karl Carlile
>
> Visit our Communist Think-Tank Web Site at:
> http://homepage.eircom.net/~beprepared/
>
> Join our Communist Think-Tank Mailing Community  at:
> mailto:rev-commies-subscribe-AT-eGroups.com
>



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




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