From: "Karl Carlile" <dagda-AT-eircom.net>
Subject: Re: AUT: An interesting critique of Negri
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 21:15:24 -0000


Hi John

John Holloway: If we think of theory as negative, then the relation between
the
two sides is not external. In other words, if we start by saying that we
negate capitalism, it is clear that our existence is already being defined
by capital. We are not a pure subject, we are already permeated by capital
and that is why we struggle. We are not saints, just poor oppressed sods
struggling to change the world. So a negative starting point leads us to
ask about the way that capital enters into us. But it also leads us to ask
how we enter into capital. If capital is the negation of humanity, this
means that capital is infected by that which it negates.

Karl: The above observations are of some interest. I am particularly
interested in your conclusion that we are not pure subject because we are
permeated by capital. This means  that the working class as subject is
limited and even damaged or infected by capital. This means that the
revolutionary subject can never establish revolutionary politics in some
perfectly pure form. Consequently the revolutionary process will always
smell. This means that we must reject any idealism that presents the
revolutionary working class as an unadulterated revolutionary agent or
subjectivity that seizes power in a chemically pure way. In Soviet Russia
attempts were made to present the revolutionary process as it unfolded in
Russia as perfectly logically and clean process. Clearly this was not the
case.

But it is precisely because of damaged subjectivity that the non-Leninist
vanguard party is necessary. It is precisely because of the reified or
fetishised nature of the working class that the revolutionary political
party is indispensable. Indeed it is the politics of autonomism that
presents the working class as a chemically pure subject that provides the
conditions for its belief in the revolutionary self-activity of the working
class --a messianic notion.

Regards
Karl Carlile

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