From: pvh-AT-wfeet.za.net (Peter van Heusden)
Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 18:27:07 +0200
Subject: Re: AUT: new thread: nomads


On 12 Mar 2002 at 17:09, Aileen wrote:

> Hi
> 
> The comments about credit and work discipline are interesting. I've
> been re-looking at Empire and I wonder what people think of the
> following assertion  ..
> 
> 'Desertion and exodus are a powerful form of class struggle within and
> against imperial post-modernity. This mobility, however, still
> constitutes a spontaneous level of struggle, and, as we noted earlier,
> it most often leans today to a new rootless condition of poverty and
> misery (p213)'.
> 
> I can see how opting out is a form of resistance and of class
> struggle, but I can't see how it is a 'powerful' form of class
> struggle. Isn't it a form of flight?

Indeed, it is. And as such it stands in marked contrast to the ('old') strategy of 
defending the boundaries of workers fortresses. This strategy could be said to be 
operating in e.g. the German revolution of 1919 (the 'professional' workers) and the 
various attempts to defend the Fordist concentrations of labour and resistance.

 Above, Negri&Hardt themselves say
> it often leads to nowhere. So where is the power?  I can see how
> people are motivated to to become self-employed in-order to escape
> work discipline or to have more control over their work process. And I
> can see that many information workers move jobs frequently in the hope
> that the next job will be more interesting or so well paid they can
> escape work altogether, but these aren't these all strategies that act
> on a purely individual level, mitigate against collective action and
> fail to challenge capitalist production. 

I've seen, first hand, the efforts of programmers to find 'the ideal job'. In fact, a few 
months after I left my full time job as a programmer at a bioinformatics company, 
one of the other main programmers left, sending a long rant to people in the 
process (myself included). His argument was precisely along the quest for the ideal 
job lines.

However, as Bologna points out, individualism is as little a necessary condition of 
self-employment as collective solidarity is of mass workplaces. And getting back to 
Negri&Hardt - I think we should take seriously the concept of social labour, which is 
founded on the notion that capitalism now focusses powerfully on the creation of 
subjectivities through the real subsumption of all lived activity within capital. My 
experience in the UK is of a pretty closed circuit - work, spend, borrow, work to pay 
back loans, spend more, borrow more, etc. The steadily increasing US consumer 
debt levels seem to suggest the same thing. Life in the UK is what turned me into 
an autonomist - in South Africa I could still believe in the theory of the crisis of 
overproduction - that one day there simply wouldn't be anyone left to sell to. In SA, 
at least in 1999, most shops sold simple utilitarian goods - clothes, food, washing 
machines, vcrs. The proportion of a shopping centre devoted to 'lifestyle' goods in 
the UK is MUCH higher (though that trend is happening in the affluent areas of 
South Africa now). The constant pressure to consume is almost palpable.

In that context, the word desertion starts to ring true. And I think Bologna's getting at 
the fact that when confronted by flexibility, precariousness, when forced into 
nomadism... in this context, possibilities of collective anti-capitalism exist. In my 
concrete experience this means the conversion of free time into anti-capitalist time - 
time spent organising, etc.

I think Nate talked about the decline of the 'welfare' states - Harry Cleaver talks 
about the 'subversion of money as command' in the 'welfare' states, and how it was 
necessary to break this, through the imposition of debt and debt conditionalities, etc. 
I think here the point that the meaning of income is not fixed is important. In South 
Africa, the meaning of income is altered by campaigns like the Soweto Electricity 
Crisis Campaign in Jo'burg, the Anti-Eviction Campaign in Cape Town, and the 
campaigns in Chatsworth and Mpumalanga and elsewhere in Durban. Self-
valorisation takes forms such as the use of electricians and plumbers skills to 
reconnect electricity and water. Collective resistance (e.g. street marshals with 
whistles who sound the alarm when Council vehicles enter an area) increases the 
cost, and thus reduces the frequency, of evictions and other punitive actions. As I've 
mentioned before, those involved in these struggles are often unemployed / self-
employed.

My impression of the social centre that I visited in Genoa (no, not during  the 
protests) was that it was engaged in a similar pluck - various activities happened 
there - plays, poetry, hacking workshops. In a world where public space is 
relentlessly being privatised (even including modifying the ledges of buildings to 
stop people sitting / skateboarding), the opportunity to form social relations (to some 
extent) outside of commodity exchange is an important one. (I noticed, walking 
along Oxford street, how it was impossible to rest anywhere besides an expensive 
coffee shop) Again - escape, flee, regroup somewhere else. Not political in the 
conventional sense, but in so far as capitalism is engaged in the production of 
subjectivity, in the total enclosure of every aspect of life, as least 'unconsciously 
political'.

Later on he cites the IWW and
> the autonomists as positive examples of a political activity and a
> politics that was based on mobility.  Mobility, escape, nomadism, on
> its own isn't a political activity and doesn't have a politics.

Neither, however, does mass, collectivity (as in collective labour) and stability on its 
own constitute political activity (Bologna's point).

Peter


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