Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2004 00:03:07 +0100
From: Nate Holdren <nateholdren-AT-gmail.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: the "multitude" and rights


Hi Andy-
Thanks for the clarifications. I'm not always clear on what
Hardt/Negri mean by production either. I'm new to the whole Deleuze
thing, so I don't always understand all of the talk of
desiring-production, that everything is always produced, production,
production etc. As I understand the point, though, I do like it. It's
not always clear to me whether HN are using productivity in the ...
universal (not a good word, but I can't think of a better one...
'deleuzian', maybe?) sense or in the value-productive sense (imposed
work, or work for capital). I'm not sure if this is an ambiguity in
their work, or an ambiguity in my reading. I know Negri talks about
production for capital producing an excess - this comes up in the new
book and in some other stuff I've read in Spanish, no time just now to
chase up references though. This I think moves toward the evaluation
of types of production, good and bad, that you're calling for, and
also seems in tension with the whole 'everything is productive for
capital' argument which I think is made at times in Empire (and maybe
later qualified or taken back). gotta run.
take care,
Nate


On Wed, 25 Aug 2004 18:21:14 -0700 (PDT), andrew robinson
<ldxar1-AT-yahoo.com> wrote:
> I'm very busy right now, so I can't reply properly - sorry folks - but I'll say what I can.  (More later).  Basically I'd like to find quotes etc. but this will have to wait for now...
> 
> Lowe, you're right that they don't MEAN for their argument for a citizen's income to be exclusionary, but they still explicitly link it to productive activity, and this reproduces the idea that one is to "earn a living" by working.  It's just that working/production for H&N includes virtually everything in the present system.  Seriously, a "citizen's income" is very similar to a gift economy, but retains all the statist and capitalist implications of income, citizenship etc., so why not go for gift economy and abandon the moral accountancy?
> 
> Non-work and unpaid work...  Yes, I really mean unpaid work.  The slip of the tongue is, I'm treating "work" broadly in line with Bob Black's definition in "Abolition of Work", which is that work is activity which is valued by the dominant social system and is thus encoded in terms of the payment system.  In this sense housework isn't quite fully "work", though this is a bad example of "non-work" because clearly it is something which has always helped to reproduce capitalism and which has been necessary.  But H&N want to go a lot further than saying that housework is work; for instance, they treat consumption as itself productive.  Of course saying that something isn't "work" in Bob Black's sense doesn't mean it's unproductive, socially unimportant, or that it isn't "hard work" so to speak.  Quite the opposite.
> 
> Though I'm not sure how H&N's concept of "production" stands.  It's not quite like Bob Black's conception where "work" is defined through the overcoding of activity, but it certainly doesn't seem to mean productive/creative activity in general (as unsystematised), because H&N want to make the point that MORE spheres of life are included in work than ever before.  This is true only if something like Black's criterion is used, i.e. if "production" amounts to inclusion in a particular overcoding apparatus.
> 
> The point is that production is central - it's basically what defines the multitude, and it's what is to be liberated from empire, what is left when empire is gone; so it's absolutely crucial.  So IF they identify production with capitalist production - which they often seem to - THEN the liberation reproduces a lot of capitalism.  And they need to say where the boundary is between "bad" Empire and "good" production, in terms of what will be left over when Empire is gone.
> 
> Nate, I'm not talking about individual production, I'm saying production processes or rather, creative processes of desire are fragmented and do not come together into a SINGLE commonality - whereas H&N seem to be saying that production becomes "common" in this unifying, totalising sense.
> 
> bye for now
> Andy
> 
> 
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