Date: Mon, 28 May 2001 23:46:46 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave-AT-eco.utexas.edu>
Subject: Re: AUT: back to crisis theory


On Tue, 29 May 2001, Peter Jovanovic wrote:

> hi all
> 
> this list has been very quiet for a while so i thought i'd try and spark 
> some discussion by revisiting a topic that was discussed a bit a few months 
> ago, autonomist crisis thoery. I asked something like 'do autonomists claim 
> that only class struggle can cause capitalist crisis or is it just one 
> possible cause?'

The basic notion is that by definition "capital" is a social relation of
antagonistic class struggle and that capitalist "crises" worthy of the
name, are ruptures in the capitalist ability to limit the antagonism to
contradiction, ie. to bind it within the capital relationship. Thus
working class struggle is not "one possible cause" among others but the
fundamental force working to rupture the imposition of the capitalist
rules of the game. 

There are those who see "class struggle" as but one cause among many of
capitalist crisis, but they can maintain that because they don't
understand capital itself as class struggle. For example, many traditional
marxists think "competition" is a "cause" of crisis, separate from class
struggle. But this follows from their limited understanding of competition
as a relationship among capitalists independent of (tho having
reprocussions on) workers. The kind of "autonomist" reading of competition
that I do, however, understands it in terms of the differential dynamics
of class struggle across firms and industry, ie the most competitive
capitalist is the one with the best control over workers, and so
competition is a mode of achieving an overall strengthening of capitalist
power by getting rid of the incompetents and increasing the responsibility 
of the more successful capitalist managers.True within an industry, true
at the level of the global capital --which is much of what is at stake in
the whole push for "free trade" and the MAI etc.

> is it possible to distinguish between two sorts of capitalists crisis? are 
> there crises of social control which almost by definition would have to be 
> caused by class struggle and 'mere' crises of reduced profit which could be 
> caused by other things?

in one sense you can call any and all ruptures of the circuits of capital
"crises" --a drought can bring a fall in ag production and a spike in
prices that might have farther reaching reprocusions, a collapse in a
speculative boom market may bring the destruction of ficticious capital
and the bankruptcy of some firms, rising unemployment-- but the
preoccupation of "autonomists" is with our power, the power of the working
class to rupture the capital relationship, to throw it into crisis and
ultimately a crisis from which it cannot recover, which is to say a crisis
in which our power not only to break the constraints of capital but to
build new worlds becomes uncontainable. So.... what is interesting about a
drought in the Sahel, for example, has to do with the power relations
between nomadic tribesmen who have had the power to resist incorporation
in the global factory and capitalist states who convert the drought into
famine in order to cripple that power. Or what is interesting about
speculative booms and busts is not so much their particular trajectories
but the underlying class relationships that have led capital to speculate
on paper values rather than to carry out real investment, ie. putting
people to work to generate surplus value and profit.

> also what's the class struggle explanation for the worldwide crisis of the 
> early 90s or the continuing japanese crisis?

what worldwide crisis of the early 90s do you have in mind? are you
refering to the problems of japanese capital since the "Asia Crisis" of
1997?

It is easy to see the connections between things like the the break
down of the ERM in 1992 or peso crisis of 1994 and class struggle in
Britain, or Italy, and Mexico. It can probably be demonstrated in
Thailand in 1997, tho I haven't seen it done, it was certainly the case
in South Korea at that time, and so on. Once you recognize all the moments
of capital as moments of the class relationship it is just a question of
finding and understanding the dynamics of the struggle. That said, it is
often a lot of work to sort out all the forces at work and the layers of
mediation. 

> I understand that much if not most class struggle takes place at a fairly 
> subterranean level and thus isn't too visible. is widespread individual 
> refusal to work hard the cause of some capitalist crises?

I would say: "sometimes" and sometimes it has been other things. One
fairly widely shared analysis of the late 1960s and early 1970s suggested
that the refusal of work, both invisible and visible contributed to the
slowdown in the rate of growth of productivity and its eventual fall at
the same time that the struggles of the waged and unwaged sent money wages
soaring above productivity growth and undermined profits. All that was
laid out in places like Zerowork #1 published back in 1975 and elsewhere.

As far as I am concerned the widespread, indeed pervasive refusal of work
was at the heart of the crisis of state capitalism in the East. The
withdrawal of industrial efficiency, as Veblen would say, undermined
Soviet productivity not only in agriculture but in most industries.
Stalinists could force workers to build factories, they couldn't force
them to write good software. As time went by the most important refusal of
work was the refusal to provide the state with creativity and innovation.

Even today we can see this kind of thing at work in the West in such
widespread collective endeavors as Gnu/Linux, born and developed as an
autonomous exercise in shared, as opposed to commodified, creativity. Red
Hat, et al are capitalist attempts to make a profit of such creativity but
as Microsoft is very much aware the free software movement tends to
undermine capitalist control of this realm of human activity and to create
alternative spaces that it can only hope to colonize or crush. 

Ultimately, if capital is, as I maintain, a social system based on the
endless imposition of work then the refusal of work directly undermines
that system. The most obvious case of this is any and all attacks on
absolute surplus value, ie work time (understood today to include not only
waged work but unwaged work as well). The success of workers in reducing
absolute surplus value in the late 19th and 20th Century forced capital
both to rely on relative surplus value (raising productivity through
technological change and reorganizing the labor force to break its power)
and to colonize the time set free. Much of the drama of more recent
decades has involved renewed attacks on work time both on the waged job
and off and capitalist counterattacks on both terrains --all over the
world.

> peter

Harry

............................................................................
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Harry Cleaver
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