File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_2001/aut-op-sy.0103, message 12


From: "Rowan Wilson" <wilson_rowan-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: RE: AUT: An interesting critique of Negri
Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2001 17:28:13 -0000


Hi Chris and all

More rambling gibberish from me, i'm afraid (this answer was composed prior 
to seeing john's piece - apologies for delay, server's been down).

Your comments are spot on as usual, and i'll try and deal with them as best 
i can.

DIALECTICS

I'm really not qualified to answer for Negri on the subject of dialectics 
(and certainly i need to read more on it). I was just giving what I 
understand to be his take on it. I know he's written more on Hegel 
(particularly some untranslated stuff from the sixties) but I can't say 
whether his version is a fair representation or not. So with my comments on 
dialectics it will often be from a rather crude understanding, apologies.

ONTOLOGY & METAPHYSICS

In Marx's theses on Feuerbach that you quote Marx is keen to make the 
distinction between idealism and sensuous human activity, practice. In one 
sense this is all that Negri's ontology is - practice. So although I said 
that I sometimes see Negri's ontology as a sleight of hand, this quote 
highlights to me that it can bear scrutiny. To put it another way, does Marx 
really escape metaphysics with his formulation? As you said 'we have no 
essence outside of our practical-critical, thoroughly social, practice'. 
This definition surely carries a metaphysical claim with it and it is inside 
here that is where I think Negri (and perhaps Foucault and Spinoza) would 
argue a useful ontology lurks, but not an essence in the debilitating 
reified sense of a rational core but in an open sense of being as practice. 
So Negri's ontology is the capacity of creation, of activity, of labour.

It is this notion of being - as practice, labour, power that we don't need 
to negate but develop. This is not to say that history has as its subject 
'man' (as Althusser critiqued), whether as individual or as a group of 
individuals, but that history is moved by collective human activity - and it 
is by developing this potential that revolutions are created. Remember, no 
claims are made for being other than it is dynamic, multiple and creative - 
this is all that is guiding us. This is not to be negated but its reified 
form is.

WHERE DOES CAPITAL COME FROM?

This is a tricky one with Negri and I have no firm answer on this.
I think the answer might be here:
He seems to talk of capital in two different ways: firstly it is limit, the 
horizon of being, the edge of our human capacities. Secondly it is subject, 
a force that attacks the subject of labour. As best as I can understand this 
capital is labour made abstract, reified. But, drawing on Marx, Negri seems 
to suggest that this abstraction becomes a subject, a subject that develops 
a logic of its own, a subject that then tries to dominate its producer. 
However, once it becomes this subject it is separate from being, from 
dynamic labour. Part of capital's confused strategy is its attempt to 
separate itself from labour - labour is felt as a limit on its capacities, 
even though it requires labour to feed off. While it is impossible for 
capital to separate from labour it seeks to dominate labour by trying to 
absorb it into capital. The subject of labour experiences this as an attack 
on itself and is always struggling to finally separate itself from the 
abstraction, from its reified form - which it can only do by destroying it.

So yes - capital does come from labour, but as soon as it reifies it ceases 
to be labour, but capital.

UNHISTORICAL

Does Negri's ontology succumb to being unhistorical? This version of 
ontology does not necessarily suggest that whatever we understand communism 
might be now (whatever 'positive' content we give this term) could have been 
created 500 years ago. The fact is that there were oppressive forces at work 
then and struggles were played out then that have lead us to the current 
situation.

But certainly he wouldn't take the line (as I wouldn't) that we have to go 
through certain stages of history before we get to the golden age. That's 
not what you mean is it?

But I see your point about the relationship between labour and capital. How 
is labour to be affected by capital if it seems to be the harbour of all 
'good things' (as I rather inadequately expressed it) - if ultimately there 
is a fundamental distinction between labour and capital? (see above for my 
tentative discussion of the separation) Well, I guess that capital bends and 
pushes the multiple forces of labour to its own ends, reducing labour's 
intensity, but ultimately capital doesn't alter the fundamental tendency of 
labour to produce, to be different and to be dynamic. But the explosive 
force of labour resists, and negates the capital relation. Maybe we can then 
talk of a second level of theory when we talk about the different forms that 
labour takes (in terms of social worker, etc) throughout history - this form 
is a result of the conflict between labour and capital. And as each of us 
are the territory of this struggle then we are certainly embroiled within 
it.

But does negative dialectics successfully answer such huge questions as 
where does oppression and its reverse ultimately comes from? 'In the 
beginning was the scream', John Holloway has written - screaming 'no' at ... 
what? A metaphysical oppression? - Or is the scream of life the metaphysical 
beginning?

Also, you say that capital comes from our subjectivity
alienated - does this not suggest an initial moment when the subject was 
whole, unalienated, and that this then progresses through history to return 
to being whole again? so where does the alienating power come from?

Can any theory really successfully account for the origin of oppression and 
resistance?

COMMUNISM

To your fourth comment, i agree that capital assimilates anything but its 
own destruction - but I suppose Negri would argue against the idea that 
there is necessarily a moment of destruction. That is, the rupturing of the 
capital-labour relation is a process - Negri talks of communism as the 
transition. Agreed also that numerous strands of the class struggle 
tradition have raised the idea of new forms of prole politics appearing at 
different moments of struggle. However, there was a tendency to reify such 
political forms. For instance, if I remember rightly from reading the SI's 
stuff, one gets the impression that the workers' council is IT: the final 
form of proletarian politics, the final realisation of communism.
And isn't this discussion of political forms of communism a mooting of 
positivity? A 'yes'?. How can the negation be constructive - where is its 
affirmation? And if you don't suggest a positive direction how do you know 
you'll end up somwehere worth going (although, a plan of some form is 
obviously no guarantee)?
But I think Negri's formulation puts the issue of communist politics centre 
stage without reifying the form. Agreed, there is still that millennial edge 
in that he argues that only now, now that we produce the means for our 
social cooperation can we operate without the mediation of the party 
(something I have problems with).  But at least the sense of politics as an 
ongoing development, the accruing of power, keeps in sight what we are after 
which is not just not-capital but a world where we define what we want and 
what we are. Here is the problem with dialectics - as we define ourselves 
purely by negation, by what we are not, we maintain the 'not' within 
ourselves. I also think that Negri doesn't make enough of the tool that he 
has created, in terms of concretely looking at struggles and seeing how they 
develop their notions of justice (these discussions always seem to be in the 
footnotes).


Yes, the community must be not-capital but can it be more than just 
not-capital? Depending on how you define capitalism this still gives a wide 
scope for what community can be. Community must be for something. If we 
define our community as just not-capital then are we not perhaps still 
defining ourselves as just one side of the capital-labour relation.

I didn't say that the Zapatistas have surpassed capital. Yes, it's all 
around them, yes it still controls a large part of their lives - but they 
have still produced some interesting experiments in democracy. Certainly 
this democracy must be developed and its more unsatisfactory elements must 
be negated.

(The impression I got from Empire was not that Negri was saying that 
struggles no longer have an interconnection. Rather, I thought he was saying 
that they appeared not to be interconnected and that this appearance must be 
denied, that their actual interconnectedness must be re-affirmed by those 
struggling developing some kind of common language whereby they can 
understand each others struggles as each others own.)

Comment 7: It's not necessarily about being moralistic when we worry over 
the importance of different struggles. Its about the problematic 
relationship, as I said, of strategy to autonomy, the problem of the 
authoritarian party with the right program over the freedom of the different 
sectors of the class. But coupled with this is the problem of these 
different struggles defining themselves through their difference to each 
other and not acknowledging their connections, not acknowledging and 
defining their community (and Negri has some caustic words about the 
extremes of identity politics).

Sorry, but this is even more rambling, and it's getting late again. As per 
usual i'm frustrated by my lack of knowledge and  expressive capabilities, 
and this piece is full of that lack; apologies.

Cheers
Rowan



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