Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 19:41:30 +0100
From: Nate Holdren <nateholdren-AT-gmail.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: Fwd: [VT_THEORY] on empire and negri


Hi Thomas and everyone-
No time to read and think about all the other emails, will do later,
but I want to respond quickly to you Thomas. I agree completely that
how folks vote indicates something, but I'm not sure always what, or
how that something relates to other somethings.

My dad voted for Bush in 2000 because my dad is a well-paid 30
something year member of the IBEW (electrical workers) and he liked
the idea of paying less taxes. At the same time, he's been active in
his union (for whatever that's worth) and in other unofficial
workplace activity etc and the various forms of nonmonetary exchanges
that flourish among the construction tradesworkers where I grew up
("I'll wire your basement for you" "I'll refinish the flooring in your
kitchen" etc).

Similarly a friend from the IWW tells stories about bike messengers in
Portland who had an IWW local for a while. Some guys were
ex-steelworkers who'd been fucked over by the USWA and hated unions
and so on (which is not to say unions in and of themselves are
necessarily progressive [or reactionary, I'm an agnostic here]), which
to my mind is a bellweather one can read just as much as how folks
vote. And yet these guys were very active in workplace actions and
supporting their coworkers, as long as no-one used the 'u-word'.

The point I'm trying to make is that folks ideas and folks actions
don't always line up, and that folks who are struggling in one area
way well not be super radical in their thinking in other areas, or at
all. This stuff is worth investigating and so forth, but I'm not
convinced that everything hangs on it. (Certainly it doesn't for Negri
- there's a bit in an essay of his, "20 theses on Marx", where he says
- paraphasing - that the current technical conditions are such that
class consciousness is no longer central to strugge.) I mean, yeah,
it's important to think about why folks have ... stupid ideas about
the world, but it's also important to think about what folks are doing
now already, and it's not at all clear to me that explaining the
reasons for folks' bad ideas will tell us what to do politically.
Anyways, just my thoughts.

take care,
Nate

 

On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 21:25:10 -0700 (PDT), Thomas Seay
<entheogens-AT-yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> --- Nate Holdren <nateholdren-AT-gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Hi Thomas-
> >
> > Yeah I think you're right on here, I think this is a
> > real issue for
> > Negri. I'm not too convinced that how folks vote
> > means much
> 
> Despite the argument that voting for one or the other
> party makes no EFFECTIVE difference, I think the way a
> person votes does reflect something about their
> position.  I mean, even if it is a faulty point of
> view, people do vote Democrat because they BELIEVE
> it's more progressive, protects workers rights, etc.
> 
> And as for the French workers that voted Le Pen, they
> are obviously doing so because they see "their" jobs
> being taken away by North Africans and "their" culture
> being tainted by immigrants.
> 
> In other words, I think one can go too far with this
> idea that the bourgeois parties are all the same.
> If you want to refuse voting for them as a means of
> de-legitimizing them it is one thing; it is another to
> say that WHO votes for them and WHY has no
> significance IMHO.
> 
> -Thomas
> 
> ====> The real world gives the subset of what is; the product space represents the uncertainty of the observer.  The product space may therefore change if the observer changes; and two observers may legitimately use different product spaces within which to record the same subset of actual events in some actual thing. The "constraint" is thus a relation between observer and thing; the properties of any particular constraint will depend on both the real thing and on the observer.  It follows that a substantial part of the theory of organization will be concerned with properties that are not intrinsice to the thing but are relational between observer and thing.
> 
> W. Ross Ashby
> 
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