From: "Nate Holdren" <nateholdren-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: Callinicos (SWP UK Commisar) critique of Holloway & Negri
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 10:04:56 -0500


Hi Peter-
Thanks posting this, he's always good for a laugh.

I read the rest of the piece, this paragraph came right after what you 
excerpted:

"Common to reformism and autonomism is despair. Both currents share the 
belief that the power of capital and its state cannot be defeated. So either 
we seek to treat the capitalist state as a benevolent agent of social 
transformation or we try to evade and constrain it. Revolutionary socialists 
do not think capital and the state are too strong to overthrow. There is an 
alternative source of power in capitalist society. This is to be found in 
the extraordinary capacities of democratic self organisation possessed by 
the mass of ordinary people."

Like I said, always good for a laugh...

I though this was mildly interesting -

"... workers' councils embody a more advanced form of democracy than is 
practised in liberal capitalist societies. They are based upon rank and file 
participation, decentralised decision making where people work and live, and 
the immediate accountability of delegates to higher bodies to those who 
elected them. The councils represent an alternative way of running society 
to the centralised and bureaucratic forms of power on which capitalist 
domination depends."

but then it turns out that what we really want is the state, again:

"It is through this workers' democracy that the oppressed and exploited 
majority can mobilise the power needed to take on the capitalist state. 
Indeed, one pressure behind the formation of workers' councils is the need 
to take over the functions of local government from state agencies when 
'normal service' breaks down during mass strikes. But there is no reason for 
workers' councils to stop at supplanting the local representatives of the 
state. Once they embrace an entire national society, they have the 
organisational capacity and the economic power to replace the state as a 
whole.

To achieve this objective depends on the developing workers' state 
concentrating its forces on overcoming--by force if necessary--the 
resistance of the core apparatuses of capitalist state power. This is 
fundamentally a political and not an organisational problem. It requires a 
political struggle within the new forms of workers' power to win the 
majority to the recognition that, unless the capitalist state is dismantled, 
sooner or later it will use its coercive power to crush the mass movement. 
This is the supreme function of a mass revolutionary party--not to seize 
power for itself, but to win the argument that the new democracy should 
storm the last strongholds of capitalist power."


cheers,
Nate

No more weekdays, they hanged Monday, shot Thursday, sliced up Friday! Every 
day is Sunday.

-Franca Rame and Dario Fo, "Waking Up"





>From: Peter Jovanovic <peterzoran-AT-hotmail.com>
>Reply-To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Subject: AUT: Callinicos (SWP UK Commisar) critique of Holloway & Negri
>Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 16:52:40 +1100
>
>hi all
>
>This may be of interest. The full article is at 
>http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr272/callinicos.htm
>
>cheers
>pete
>








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