From: "cwright" <cwright-AT-21stcentury.net>
Subject: AUT: Re: Back to the Crisis theory redux
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2001 00:32:14 -0500


> Thank you Harald and Chris. I have been following your discussions with
great
> interest; indeed all the lists' posts, and it is not unlike jumping off a
> very high cliff, with a parachute someone else packed, when the decision
to
> launch oneself into your midst is taken.

I hope that that is a complement, if a back-handed one :)
>
> My premise holds that the concept of class itself, within the framework of
a
> "proletarian struggle" is outdated and counter-productive to reform,
whether
> revolutionary or passive. Indeed the very concept of "class" is one
imposed
> from outside the system by forces either trying to control it, or redefine
it
> in terms of another context.

If one considers class as a definitional mode of thinking, I would agree.
However, Marx, and others since, though far too few, have denied class as a
process of classification in a sociological sense.  For Marx, class is an
antagonistic relation based on alienated labor, and the particular form of a
class comes from the particular form that alienation takes.  as such, class
is one manifestation of an internal relation of antagonism, not an external
relation (as Orthos and academics and sociologists would have it.)  Class is
a relation of struggle, not a social position we should try to use to
pigeonhole people.

On the other hand, I am curious how you would understand both the relation
of antagonism and capital itself.  If capital is not the product of
alienated labor, of alienated subjectivity/alienated creative activity
(Marx's idea of production), then what is it?  Can capital really be
external to us without becoming something non-human?  If it is, then how do
we even relate to it?  Rather more, how do we escape that relation?  I think
your logic is a logic of submission, which one can hermetically prove, but
which is ultimately also one of hopelessness.  Since I agree with Marx that
the capital-labor relation is ultimately an inhuman way to live, beneath the
dingity of the human, a perversion of human aspiration and activity under
certain definite material, social and historical conditions, I think that
another way of living is possible and opened up by the complete, yet
fragile, alienation created by the capital-labor relation (an antagonism in
which one side HAS everything and the other nothing, but which means in turn
that that one side IS nothing independent of the activity of the side which
has nothing but IS everything.)

Also, i do not mean human in the sense used often by humanists, as a
pre-existing, indelible, core humanism, but as a negative humanity, a
humanism in the mode of being denied, a humanity which is
not-yet-but-could-be (ecstatic, in the sense of ek-stasis, not yet.)  Marx
is not interested in a positivism of humanity, but in the possibilities we
see in spite of humanity in the mode of being denied.  That's why Marx has
no system of society called communism.  Communism is not a society as such
which will level everyone down to one social structure, but the freeing of
human beings from any particular social form to freely choose their modes
and methods of association under their own control and by their own
choosing.  If this seems obscure, I apologize, but I fully believe that Marx
did not have a model of communism because communism is humanity beyond
fast-frozen models, humanity in conscious control over our social relations,
freed from crude material necessity and alienated, fetishized relations.
The transparency and transformability of social relations by conscious
choice is central to a libertarian notion of communism and Marx's ideas
about the end of the antagonism between individual and social life.

> Class, in and of itself, is transcendental: Certainly revolutionary social
> change is not initiated to level the playing field from the bottom, so the
> constituent power inherent in any "class" of society is also
transcendental:
> It metamorphasizes with the integration of a social level into a society
or
> an economic "system".

Please explain your use of transcendental more clearly.  that the relation
of antagonism always finds a means of re-integrating the opposition it
generates?  If so, whence comes liberation?  Where is, as commie00 put it,
this 'outside' from which we can attack capital?  This seems to me to be the
theoretical stance of the middle class Marx noted ages ago when saying that
because the middle class is a contradictory mass pushed and pulled by the
struggle between capital and labor, it believes itself to be beyond the
class relation, the human in a positivistic sense.

but I may misunderstand...

> The futility of this is evident: Were the system socially stable there
would
> be no need for the differentiation of class to even exist within the
social
> framework.
> It is only when the system is made to integrate, or even coexist with
> another, that inequities arise, and outside forces precipitate change.

Which system?  You are delving into strucuralism here where systems exist
independently of human social relations.  This is exactly Althusser's break
with Marxism, where structuralism's anti-subjectivism (in a bad sense) and
anti-humanism show their most bizarre colors.  What outside forces?  In my
eyes, I do not see alternate systems, but a 'system' grown from certain
social relations of exploitation which finds its negation not in another
system, but in the end of systems.

> Once the various strata of the system begin to acquire separate "class"
> identities, their original function with the structure is lost, and their
> power diluted. Capital is the motivation from without which both creates
the
> concept of "Class" and the and the specious argument for it's "need"
within
> any system. It is also that force which remains constant, provoking
renewal
> as revolting systems fail to negate it.

Identities are not the issue.  The negation of identity is the issue, of
fast-frozen, fixed images which try to arrest the flux of life into
containable and classifiable structures.  You are now off on a capital logic
which ultimately denies and destroys the subjectivity of the oppressed and
exploited, of us, as agents, as not simply socially constructed, but as
socially constructing and acting.  It is our subjectivity in the mode of
being denied, of our subjectivity turned against us which this logic takes
as the subject.  In this topsy-turvy view, we find structures reified as the
actors and people objectified as determined objects within the machine.
This view is, non-pejoratively speaking, radically anti-human.  but it is
Althusser's legacy, which Negri originally challenged and later succumbed
to, and which he now champions.

Therefore, his exaltation of 'the Militant', the Saint, who is in some sense
outside the system.  This is Birgit Bock's Hero.  This is how Negri
reconciles his ultimate disillusionment with the self-determination of the
class which begins in the mid-1970's, and his genuine commitment to
revolution and hatred of capitalism.  For all his talk of the power of the
Multitude, a defeated, cynical elitism (politically speaking, not
personally) lies underneath Negri's argument because the Multitude does
nothing without the Hero.  And the Militant, the Saint, is Negri's stand in
for the discredited Party.  I am not claiming that for you or anyone on this
list.  Nor am I claiming that Negri is a bad person.  Please be aware that
while my claim is harsh (maybe too harsh, but I don't think so), it is about
a political direction and project, not a person.

Cheers,
Chris



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