Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 16:45:03 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave-AT-eco.utexas.edu>
Subject: Re: AUT: class composition links (on Holloway etc)


On Thu, 19 Jun 2003, Steve Wright wrote:

> Hi Steve,
>
> I don't want to put words in your mouth, but are your criticisms of class
> composition analysis similar to those voiced in John Holloway's latest book?
>
> eg this passage from Chapter 9:
>
> ____
>
> Starting from the scream, we have argued here that anti-capitalist theory
> must be understood as negative theory, that the movement of struggle is a
> movement of negation. Most autonomist theory, however, presents the movement
> of struggle as a positive movement. The reversal of the polarity undertaken
> by autonomist theory transfers the positive from the side of capital to the
> side of the struggle against capital. In orthodox Marxist theory capital is
> the positive subject of capitalist development. In autonomist theory the
> working class becomes the positive subject: that is why the positive
> concepts of class composition and class recomposition are on the side of the
> working class, while the negative concept of decomposition is placed on the
> side of capital. In the reversal of the polarity, identity is moved from the
> side of capital to the side of labour, but it is not exploded or even
> challenged. This is wrong.

I think John's characterization is wrong. It is he who posits "negative"
and "positive" subjects. He says "autonomist theory" (he needs to be
far more specific, because that theory has varied enormously) sees the
working class as a "positive subject" but what this means to him can only
be deduced from what follows: namely that concepts of "class composition"
and "recomposition" are on the "side of the working class" while "the
negative concept of decomposition" is on the side of capital. This is, I
think, a misrepresentation of much of what has been written on this
subject. Without going into all the history of the literature, I'll just
reiterate my position on this - which is not accurately charactrized by
John's statement. The working class is a "positive subject" only in two
senses, neither of which fit what he says. First, it is positive in the
limited sense that it is not merely reactive but often takes the
initiative in struggle. This is different from many orthodox
characterizations that saw workers as only "resisting" the depredations of
capital, and unable, without the party, to take offensive action. Second,
it is positive in the sense that workers' struggles not only rupture
capital's circuits (negating them if you like) but go on to create new
relationships that escape the logic of those circuits.

Further, "class composition" is not "on the side of the workers" in any
other sense than by denoting and making explicit a constellation of class
forces at a point in time it ruptures capital's attempts to pretend that
class and class struggle don't exist. "Recomposition" denotes those
processes of working class struggle that upset capitalist command and
force a reconfiguration in the distribution of power, both within the
class and between the working class and capital - at capital's expense.
Yes, that is "positive" in the limited sense that it is "good" to rupture
capitalist command. But it is "negative" in the sense that it does rupture
that command. These words just are not helpful here.

He is also wrong to label this a "reversal of identity" which mistakenly
doesn't challenge existing identities. It is hard to find any area of
Marxism where there has been more of a challenge to the identity of the
working class as working class. The history of socialism is a history of
the idea of replacing capitalism with a society of workers. Many of those
in what I have called the autonomist tradition have directly attacked this
pointing out that the point of revolution is to end the identity of
working class, or as Marx says in the Grundrisse, the existence of people
as "mere worker." I, for one, have insisted on this repeatedly.

> Subjectivity in capitalism is in the first place
> negative, the movement against the denial of subjectivity. A truly radical
> reversal of the polarity involves not just transferring subjectivity from
> capital to the working class but also understanding that subjectivity as
> negative instead of positive, as the negative subjectivity of the
> anti-working anti-class.

I don't find this kind of discussion at all useful nor do I think it says
anything new. In the sense that capital has its functionaries who act to
maintain and propagate it, capital and the working class confront each
other as opposed subjectivities. Capital is not a subject only in the
sense that, ultimately, it is a fixed way of organizing social life that
its functionaries seek to impose and keep imposed on humantity. That's the
real meaning of "dead labor" - life frozen into sameness. What people like
me have insisted upon is the existence of a working class subjectivity, or
working class subjectivities (if you want to disaggregate) opposed to
capital (or against capitalism and for humanity as the Zapatistas say -
denoting both the "negative" and "positive" aspects of our struggles). If
John's awkward "anti-working anti-class" means simply that workers
struggle against being reduced to "mere worker" and against being reduced
to a class of people who work, then there is absolutely nothing different
here from many, many texts in the autonomist tradition. I for one have
been quite explicit on this subject.

> In the beginning is the scream, not because the
> scream exhausts itself in negativity, but because the only way in which we
> can construct relations of dignity is through the negation of those
> relations which deny dignity.

John likes his scream, no doubt, and it has a poetic appeal, but I argue
that for Marx (and I agree with him) in the beginning there are human
beings who are subjected to various constraints (such as those of capital)
and it is against those constraints that they scream. They and their
scream negate capital because it is a constraint on their "positive" life
force, however you want to understand it. Yes, only by fighting against
the constraints can one achieve dignity, but dignity is not pure
negativity it involves the assertion of a different kind of being - with a
"positive" content.

> Our movement, then, is in the first place a
> negative movement, a movement against identity.

Again, if this is a movement against the identities imposed by capital,
then this is just a different formulation of what people like me have been
saying for a long time.

> It is we who decompose, we
> are the wreckers. It is capital which constantly seeks to compose, to create
> identities, to create stability (always illusory, but essential to its
> existence), to contain and deny our negativity.

Of course our struggles "decompose" capital if you prefer those words.
Or inversely capital seeks to recompose the structures of power to
regain/maintain its rule. This is just a reversal of the use of words,
but nothing new is being said. Sure capital seeks to contain and deny our
resistance and our struggles, but those struggles are not merely negative
resistance to capitalist imposed constraint on our lives, they are FOR
the free development of those lives.

> We are the source of
> movement, we are the subject: in that, autonomist theory is right. But our
> movement is a negative one, one that defies classification. What unites the
> Zapatista uprising in Chiapas or the Movement of the Landless (MST) in
> Brazil with the struggle of internet workers in Seattle, say, is not a
> positive common class composition but rather the community of their negative
> struggle against capitalism.

This is just restatement of the Zapatista position that our struggles
involve "one no, many yeses" but John puts the emphasis here on the "no"
the collective refusal of capitalist command. But ultimately the "no"
is meaningless without the "yeses", without them we could all negate
capital by committing suicide because we have no other being under
construction.

>
>  The conceptualisation of class composition as positive provides the basis
> for a slide from seeing the concept as a means of understanding the movement
> of struggle to using it as way of classifying periods of development, as a
> way of describing how capitalism is.

Any set of ideas can be frozen into useless typologies; such as the
"regulation theorists" did with their bastardization of many Italian
ideas into a periodization of modes of capitalist command. But just
because it can be done, doesn't mean it must be done. Marx could be turned
into the ideology of Stalinism but that doesn't mean we need to abandon
what is useful in Marx.

> Instead of analysing particular
> struggles in terms of the overall movement of capitals dependence upon
> labour (not Lukcss perspective of totality but certainly his aspiration
> towards totality), there is a tendency to project from particular struggles
> (the struggles in Fiat in the early 1970s, say) and see them as being
> typical of a certain stage of capitalist development.

Certainly everyone has to reason from specific cases (which is all we
know) to more general conclusions; but of course this can be done
stupidly, narrowly, blindly and when it is done that way the resulting
generalizations/theories are of limited usefulness. The theory of the mass
worker ignored vast numbers of workers whose modes of labor and methods of
exploitation were quite different and to the extent that it ignored them,
the usefulness of that theory was limited. The same goes for the concept
of "immaterial labor" that focuses on certain types of labor in
contemporary capitalism and the relationship between workers involved in
that labor and capital. The notion was based on observations of certain
new kinds of relationships, and generalizations were made. There is
nothing wrong with that per se. The problem is when those generalizations
are substituted for a more complete grasp of the class composition.

> In these cases the
> concept of class composition is used to construct an ideal type or
> paradigm, a heading under which all struggles are to be classified. The
> struggles in the Italian car factories then become a measure for other
> struggles, rather than being understood in terms of their place in the
> general movement of capitals dependence upon labour. This procedure leads
> easily (though not necessarily) to crude generalisations, to the
> construction of categories as Procrustean beds into which struggles arising
> from very different conditions must be forced to fit.

Actually, I think this is wrong. Instead of trying force all struggles
into the framework of the mass worker, most of those who used the concept
simply ignored strugges that didn't fit! True then, true now. The problem
with EMPIRE is not that it tries to fit the Zapatistas and other
indigenous/peasant struggles into the mold of "immaterial labor" or
"biopolitics" but that the authors know little about those struggles and
largely ignore them.

>
> Certainly some people have understood class composition in this way,
> although as John suggests, not all have.
>
> I think the efforts to create a stages theory of class compositions, such as
> in the 1980s essay contained in Negri's _Time for revolution_, has real
> problems (there it goes as follows, p.76):
>
> undifferentiated worker (1848-1870)
> professional worker (1870-1917)
> mass worker (1917-1968)
> social-multinational worker (1968 onwards)

I think it is important to spell out what those "real problems" are:
namely that by periodizing in this manner one's analysis of each of those
periods, or of struggles in those periods, becomes vastly oversimplified
and ignores struggles that don't fit. Carried into the present it leads
to narrow conceptualizations of struggle and equally narrow
political conclusions that are counterproductive to the global circulation
of struggle that is so necessary. However, we also know that such
tendencies have been countered to some degree by careful studies of
actual historical struggles. You find no such oversimplification, for
example, in the work of Peter Linebaugh in his LONDON HANGED.

<snip>

With respect to any systematic discussion of the history of the concept of
class composition (and the other ideas that have gone with it), it seems
counterproductive to me to begin with a text critical of those ideas,
especially when its representations of them are faulty. Better to begin
with the original texts and then evaluate the critiques in their light.

H.


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



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