File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_2001/aut-op-sy.0102, message 134


From: "Chris Wright" <cwright-AT-21stcentury.net>
Subject: Re: empire & globalization, was... Re: AUT: Re: autonomist crisis theory
Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2001 23:00:40 -0600


This is a multi-part message in MIME format.


There is a lot I would like to reply to, but I am going to stick to a few points.

I think everyone has raised some good stuff, but also some problematic approaches.  I think Peter is right to point out that a lot of the discussion has been focussed on capital, which is the wrong focus.  But starting from Negri, how can you do otherwise when the working class (or multitude) does not appear as an active force in Negri until the last part of the book.  In other words, something like two thirds of the book focusses on capital, as if it has its own dynamic.  This is a problem, especially in relation to autonomist theory.

Second, I think some confusion between capital and the capitalist class exists.  Capital has no nation or national boundaries.  It never really has, in so far as it has always lead a more or less global existence, in slavery, colonialism, international wars of conquest (Opium wars in China, the conquest of all of Asia, the division of Africa in the 1870's and 80's, the conquest of Latin America, etc.)  Capital has always roamed the globe in search of profit, but it has also had to overcome pre-capitalist societies and the process of integration and the development of the capital-labor relation in those places has proceeded unevenly.  Maybe we can say that as the capital-labor relation has penetrated and come to dominate almost the entire planet, capital has more means of moving about the globe.

But, I think globalization signals a crisis, not a new opening (at least no yet).  Globalization really involves the flight of capital from labor.  We can think of the movement of capital around the world as both the flight to new, unexploited labor, but also as the flight from insubordinate labor, much as we can think of the development of technology as a flight from labor, an attempt to escape from dependence on labor.  That will fail, however.  Capital is nothing but alienated labor, labor in and against itself.  So how does that relate to the current process?

I think globalization really signals the flight of capital from production into the form of money.  Capital has been trying to find a new regime of accumulation, but that requires a confrontation with labor, with the destruction of dead labor (capital) and the massive restructuring of the relationship to living labor.  With 1929 and the 1930's in the backs of their heads, I think we are seeing a flight from production, from a direct confrontation with labor in the form of money.  Money is the one form of capital that moves freely and instantly all over the world.  At the same time, money does not make money without labor (capital would love to live in M...M', without ever having to go through M...C (Labor + raw materials)...P(production)...C'(saleable commodity)...M'.  They can't.  Labor sits there daring capital to do so.  So money has flead around the globe for the last 25 years precipitating crisis after crisis (Mexico in 1982, which put an end to Monetarist attempts to discipline labor and led to a renewed Keynesianism; Black monday 1987, where the whole world pitched in to stop a major crash and bail out the banks; 1991 and the recession;  1994 in Mexico again; 1998 in SE Asia, 1999 in Russia and Brazil; and now the recession in our faces in the United States.) 

Globalization is really about capital's flight from labor in the money form, from the confrontation, the consummation of crisis.  That is why the debt crisis is worse today than in the early 1980's.  In the G7 countries, overall household debt has risen to 104% of yearly household income, which is really staggering.  The debtor countries have not improved.  They still borrow from Paul to pay Peter.  We have a financial system of enormous instability.  Will a reckoning come?  Who can say?

The other side of globalization is the re-privatization of as much as possible; of the end of the Keynesian Welfare State and Social Democratic policies.  Maybe capital can pull it off.  But maybe not.  Maybe the recent expansion of struggles will meet the recession and the shit will hit the fans.  we will see.

On the other side, I think the discussion of the end of the power of the nation state is a false argument.  First, the nation state never was independent of capital to begin with.  Keynesianism, the Fordist state, if you want, was a product of the insubordination of labor on a massive scale from 1917 to 1947.  With the end of the post-war boom and the increasing problem of overaccumulation (overexploitation), and the resistance to that exploitation, capital could not go on anymore.  They have yet to find a new mode.  All the people who rush to see Empire already here, even appearing before the crisis even began (now we have gone back to the League of Nations), have already written crisis out of the picture.  If capital has already attained a new mode of exploitation, then we have some big problems ahead of us, but no openings.  Negri, like many others of late, has written a book about capital that assumes it will succeed, no, has succeeded already, in reorganizing a new regime of accumulation (I don't like that term, regime, but i am too tired to be more precise.)

Empire is not here yet.  nor might it ever come.  There is a tendency to confuse capital and capitalist classes, as I said earlier.  Nation states compete to draw capital to them.  National competition in a certain sense is nothing other than national states fighting to be the best place to exploit labor.  Also, we loose sight of the degree to which capital cannot allow itself to become one unit, one state.  capital fragments everything because it needs differential levels of exploitation so it can move from one to another, seeking the best.  One state, one ruling class, would not only have to overcome the struggle of each to attract capital, it would have to give up differential conditions of labor under unified laws. 

At the same time, it has always been true that the capitalist class is an international class, that borders have as much to do with the maintenance of certain protected markets for certain groups of capitalists.  we cannot just theorize this, however, since this process has taken place in relation to a pre-existing history of who could exploit where under what terms and with what political alliances.  We have to get concrete about these issues to really give them depth.  To say that the UN was an attempt to create an international capitalist class or an international state is a bit like saying that the U.S., walking out of WWII unscathed and producing for the whole world, with over half the world's wealth and 4% of the population, decided it wanted to give everyone a share of the pie.  Hell, the U.S. just had to recognize that it could not play world cop without aquiescence.  The UN became a political mechanism representing U.S. domination in an era of the collapse of colonialism.  Without the United States, the UN did not really exist.  That's why the League of Nations was still-born: lack of U.S. participation.

Anyway, the capital is international, but it has to settle somewhere.  That somewhere is in part determined by the conditions it finds in different places, conditions created by capitalism's uneven, necessarily uneven, development.  Unless uneven development ceases to be a feature of capitalism, national states will not go away.  At the same time, capital has no patriotism unless it needs protection of arms.  Capital will go anywhere it finds a profit.  And so-called national capitalist classes will go where they can, not as the lords of capital, but as its servants and caretakers (after all, the individual capitalist has no real control over capital as a whole, just a small portion of it, and that only as long as insubordinate labor can be subordinated adequately.)  They will, however, settle in the safest places (and that is not just a military issue, either.) 

The talk of an international capitalist class does not really include the poor countries, so much as it assumes a kind of ultra-Imperialism, a unity of the biggest exploiters.  Could it happen?  Sure.  I suppose.  However, it;s current maturity is highly overrated.  look carefully.  The nationa state is more important than ever militarily, in terms of policing, and the general task of the subordination of labor to the dictates of capital.

Anyway, that's my take.

Cheers,
Chris
----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter van Heusden" <pvh-AT-egenetics.com>
To: <aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2001 7:27 AM
Subject: Re: empire & globalization, was... Re: AUT: Re: autonomist crisis theory


> On Wed, Feb 21, 2001 at 11:44:50AM +0200, Tahir Wood wrote:
> >
> >
> > >>> commie00-AT-yahoo.com 02/21 6:20 AM >>>
> > >thoughts?
> >
> > Well I think that the "globalisation of the ruling class" as you put it
> > (not sure that this is a very good formulation), or rather the further
> > globalisation of the means of exploitation, needs to be met with a further
> > globalisation of the means of struggle. For a long time though I've felt
> > that the struggle AGAINST globalisation per se is somewhat misconceived.
> > It smacks too much of nationalism or Amin's delinking or the national
> > democratic revolution or something. However, one can't be FOR globalisation!
>
> I've been giving this lots of thought, and its a topic that provokes
> constant running battles (e.g. against Patrick Bond) on the Debate and 
> LBO-talk mailing lists. My current thinking is that one can indeed be
> for globalisation, if you turn conventional left analysis on its head
> a bit. My major problem with anti-globalisation rhetoric is that it
> maintain a perspective which sees capital as the active element in the
> world, and sees people as (largely) passive. Strategies like de-linking,
> strengthening the social-democratic state, etc. tend to take this
> perspective in their stride, and follow through with policies which
> would definitely lock the working class in place (in the framework
> of a 'strong state' class compromise).
>
> If, instead, communism flows from the activity of the working class, and
> the organisation of capital (including the state form) is a reaction to
> this activity (this is a brief summary of the autonomist perspective
> as I see it), you get a different perspective, one where the goal is not
> to stop and block capital, but is rather to unleash and develop the
> energies of capital's negation - the working class. Then internationalism
> can be embraced not simply as the 'globalisation of the means of struggle'
> (a perspective which could still mean many local struggles across
> the globe - ala. the taking to task of one's national bourgeoisie which
> Marx talks about in the Manifesto) but as a process of 'class composition'
> across and against national borders. Something of this comes
> across in Massimo de Angelis's 'Global Capital and Global Struggles'
> http://www.acephale.org/encuentro/globintr.html. Might the supercession
> (aufhebung) of capitalism be possible alongside the linkages that
> globalisation creates?
>
> Is 'globalisation', which is not only the globalisation of the ruling class,
> but also entails numerous processes of standardization (e.g. the TCP/IP
> infrastructure which makes the Internet possible, global telephonic
> communication standards, the deployment of similar 'base technologies' on a
> global scale to ensure that 'innovation' (in other words extraction of 
> surplus value) can be moved rapidly from place to place) and development
> of 'cultural trans-nationalism' (in the sense that 'cultural understanding'
> is vital for the development of trans-national capitalism - this means 
> everything from a common 'trade language' to a desire for 'multi-
> culturalism') not a resource which makes the emergence of a truly
> global 'self-conscious social humanity' easier?
>
> This is not to say that the various processes of 'globalisation' need
> to accepted or rejected as one, of course.
>
> BTW. Doug Henwood has a positive review of Negri & Hardt's 'Empire' in
> the latest issue of LBO (LBO #96). He addresses some of the meaning of
> being 'for globalisation' from a progressive perspective there. I've
> got a copy on campus if you want a look.
>
> Peter
> --
> Peter van Heusden <pvh-AT-egenetics.com>
> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics
> "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man
> shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain
> and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844
> OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF  9295 6A26 6A92 0517 502B
>
>
>      --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

HTML VERSION:

There is a lot I would like to reply to, but I am going to stick to a few points.
 
I think everyone has raised some good stuff, but also some problematic approaches.  I think Peter is right to point out that a lot of the discussion has been focussed on capital, which is the wrong focus.  But starting from Negri, how can you do otherwise when the working class (or multitude) does not appear as an active force in Negri until the last part of the book.  In other words, something like two thirds of the book focusses on capital, as if it has its own dynamic.  This is a problem, especially in relation to autonomist theory.
 
Second, I think some confusion between capital and the capitalist class exists.  Capital has no nation or national boundaries.  It never really has, in so far as it has always lead a more or less global existence, in slavery, colonialism, international wars of conquest (Opium wars in China, the conquest of all of Asia, the division of Africa in the 1870's and 80's, the conquest of Latin America, etc.)  Capital has always roamed the globe in search of profit, but it has also had to overcome pre-capitalist societies and the process of integration and the development of the capital-labor relation in those places has proceeded unevenly.  Maybe we can say that as the capital-labor relation has penetrated and come to dominate almost the entire planet, capital has more means of moving about the globe.
 
But, I think globalization signals a crisis, not a new opening (at least no yet).  Globalization really involves the flight of capital from labor.  We can think of the movement of capital around the world as both the flight to new, unexploited labor, but also as the flight from insubordinate labor, much as we can think of the development of technology as a flight from labor, an attempt to escape from dependence on labor.  That will fail, however.  Capital is nothing but alienated labor, labor in and against itself.  So how does that relate to the current process?
 
I think globalization really signals the flight of capital from production into the form of money.  Capital has been trying to find a new regime of accumulation, but that requires a confrontation with labor, with the destruction of dead labor (capital) and the massive restructuring of the relationship to living labor.  With 1929 and the 1930's in the backs of their heads, I think we are seeing a flight from production, from a direct confrontation with labor in the form of money.  Money is the one form of capital that moves freely and instantly all over the world.  At the same time, money does not make money without labor (capital would love to live in M...M', without ever having to go through M...C (Labor + raw materials)...P(production)...C'(saleable commodity)...M'.  They can't.  Labor sits there daring capital to do so.  So money has flead around the globe for the last 25 years precipitating crisis after crisis (Mexico in 1982, which put an end to Monetarist attempts to discipline labor and led to a renewed Keynesianism; Black monday 1987, where the whole world pitched in to stop a major crash and bail out the banks; 1991 and the recession;  1994 in Mexico again; 1998 in SE Asia, 1999 in Russia and Brazil; and now the recession in our faces in the United States.) 
 
Globalization is really about capital's flight from labor in the money form, from the confrontation, the consummation of crisis.  That is why the debt crisis is worse today than in the early 1980's.  In the G7 countries, overall household debt has risen to 104% of yearly household income, which is really staggering.  The debtor countries have not improved.  They still borrow from Paul to pay Peter.  We have a financial system of enormous instability.  Will a reckoning come?  Who can say?
 
The other side of globalization is the re-privatization of as much as possible; of the end of the Keynesian Welfare State and Social Democratic policies.  Maybe capital can pull it off.  But maybe not.  Maybe the recent expansion of struggles will meet the recession and the shit will hit the fans.  we will see.
 
On the other side, I think the discussion of the end of the power of the nation state is a false argument.  First, the nation state never was independent of capital to begin with.  Keynesianism, the Fordist state, if you want, was a product of the insubordination of labor on a massive scale from 1917 to 1947.  With the end of the post-war boom and the increasing problem of overaccumulation (overexploitation), and the resistance to that exploitation, capital could not go on anymore.  They have yet to find a new mode.  All the people who rush to see Empire already here, even appearing before the crisis even began (now we have gone back to the League of Nations), have already written crisis out of the picture.  If capital has already attained a new mode of exploitation, then we have some big problems ahead of us, but no openings.  Negri, like many others of late, has written a book about capital that assumes it will succeed, no, has succeeded already, in reorganizing a new regime of accumulation (I don't like that term, regime, but i am too tired to be more precise.)
 
Empire is not here yet.  nor might it ever come.  There is a tendency to confuse capital and capitalist classes, as I said earlier.  Nation states compete to draw capital to them.  National competition in a certain sense is nothing other than national states fighting to be the best place to exploit labor.  Also, we loose sight of the degree to which capital cannot allow itself to become one unit, one state.  capital fragments everything because it needs differential levels of exploitation so it can move from one to another, seeking the best.  One state, one ruling class, would not only have to overcome the struggle of each to attract capital, it would have to give up differential conditions of labor under unified laws. 
 
At the same time, it has always been true that the capitalist class is an international class, that borders have as much to do with the maintenance of certain protected markets for certain groups of capitalists.  we cannot just theorize this, however, since this process has taken place in relation to a pre-existing history of who could exploit where under what terms and with what political alliances.  We have to get concrete about these issues to really give them depth.  To say that the UN was an attempt to create an international capitalist class or an international state is a bit like saying that the U.S., walking out of WWII unscathed and producing for the whole world, with over half the world's wealth and 4% of the population, decided it wanted to give everyone a share of the pie.  Hell, the U.S. just had to recognize that it could not play world cop without aquiescence.  The UN became a political mechanism representing U.S. domination in an era of the collapse of colonialism.  Without the United States, the UN did not really exist.  That's why the League of Nations was still-born: lack of U.S. participation.
 
Anyway, the capital is international, but it has to settle somewhere.  That somewhere is in part determined by the conditions it finds in different places, conditions created by capitalism's uneven, necessarily uneven, development.  Unless uneven development ceases to be a feature of capitalism, national states will not go away.  At the same time, capital has no patriotism unless it needs protection of arms.  Capital will go anywhere it finds a profit.  And so-called national capitalist classes will go where they can, not as the lords of capital, but as its servants and caretakers (after all, the individual capitalist has no real control over capital as a whole, just a small portion of it, and that only as long as insubordinate labor can be subordinated adequately.)  They will, however, settle in the safest places (and that is not just a military issue, either.) 
 
The talk of an international capitalist class does not really include the poor countries, so much as it assumes a kind of ultra-Imperialism, a unity of the biggest exploiters.  Could it happen?  Sure.  I suppose.  However, it;s current maturity is highly overrated.  look carefully.  The nationa state is more important than ever militarily, in terms of policing, and the general task of the subordination of labor to the dictates of capital.
 
Anyway, that's my take.
 
Cheers,
Chris
----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter van Heusden" <pvh-AT-egenetics.com>
To: <aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2001 7:27 AM
Subject: Re: empire & globalization, was... Re: AUT: Re: autonomist crisis theory

> On Wed, Feb 21, 2001 at 11:44:50AM +0200, Tahir Wood wrote:
> >
> >
> > >>>
commie00-AT-yahoo.com 02/21 6:20 AM >>>
> > >thoughts?
> >
> > Well I think that the "globalisation of the ruling class" as you put it
> > (not sure that this is a very good formulation), or rather the further
> > globalisation of the means of exploitation, needs to be met with a further
> > globalisation of the means of struggle. For a long time though I've felt
> > that the struggle AGAINST globalisation per se is somewhat misconceived.
> > It smacks too much of nationalism or Amin's delinking or the national
> > democratic revolution or something. However, one can't be FOR globalisation!
>
> I've been giving this lots of thought, and its a topic that provokes
> constant running battles (e.g. against Patrick Bond) on the Debate and
> LBO-talk mailing lists. My current thinking is that one can indeed be
> for globalisation, if you turn conventional left analysis on its head
> a bit. My major problem with anti-globalisation rhetoric is that it
> maintain a perspective which sees capital as the active element in the
> world, and sees people as (largely) passive. Strategies like de-linking,
> strengthening the social-democratic state, etc. tend to take this
> perspective in their stride, and follow through with policies which
> would definitely lock the working class in place (in the framework
> of a 'strong state' class compromise).
>
> If, instead, communism flows from the activity of the working class, and
> the organisation of capital (including the state form) is a reaction to
> this activity (this is a brief summary of the autonomist perspective
> as I see it), you get a different perspective, one where the goal is not
> to stop and block capital, but is rather to unleash and develop the
> energies of capital's negation - the working class. Then internationalism
> can be embraced not simply as the 'globalisation of the means of struggle'
> (a perspective which could still mean many local struggles across
> the globe - ala. the taking to task of one's national bourgeoisie which
> Marx talks about in the Manifesto) but as a process of 'class composition'
> across and against national borders. Something of this comes
> across in Massimo de Angelis's 'Global Capital and Global Struggles'
>
http://www.acephale.org/encuentro/globintr.html. Might the supercession
> (aufhebung) of capitalism be possible alongside the linkages that
> globalisation creates?
>
> Is 'globalisation', which is not only the globalisation of the ruling class,
> but also entails numerous processes of standardization (e.g. the TCP/IP
> infrastructure which makes the Internet possible, global telephonic
> communication standards, the deployment of similar 'base technologies' on a
> global scale to ensure that 'innovation' (in other words extraction of
> surplus value) can be moved rapidly from place to place) and development
> of 'cultural trans-nationalism' (in the sense that 'cultural understanding'
> is vital for the development of trans-national capitalism - this means
> everything from a common 'trade language' to a desire for 'multi-
> culturalism') not a resource which makes the emergence of a truly
> global 'self-conscious social humanity' easier?
>
> This is not to say that the various processes of 'globalisation' need
> to accepted or rejected as one, of course.
>
> BTW. Doug Henwood has a positive review of Negri & Hardt's 'Empire' in
> the latest issue of LBO (LBO #96). He addresses some of the meaning of
> being 'for globalisation' from a progressive perspective there. I've
> got a copy on campus if you want a look.
>
> Peter
> --
> Peter van Heusden <
pvh-AT-egenetics.com>
> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics
> "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man
> shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain
> and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844
> OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF  9295 6A26 6A92 0517 502B
>
>
>      --- from list
aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

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