Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 14:11:14 +0100
From: Lowe Laclau <lowe.laclau-AT-gmail.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: Negri and Charleton Heston?


Nate,


> what Negri used to say about the social(ized) worker. If Steve Wright
> is still here maybe he could say a little on this, or maybe Harry? I
> think people back in the day responded to Negri's 'social(ized)'
> worker stuff the same way you're responding to multitude: it's more of
> a nice goal than an analytical tool. And the more I think about it,
> the more it seems like the claims (or sometimes less of a claim than
> an air, an aura about things) that multitude etc is new don't really
> make sense.

A concept is itself however an analytical tool. And fact is the
socialized worker does correspond to real measurable changes in the
nature of the needs of social capital. Today, its nothing of a goal.
Its already accomplished for the most part. I think it'd be a mistake
to think that N was somehow pulling an idea from the air and started
to think about it. He's in part drawing upon the analysis (and
predictions) of Marx, and in part making reference to two other fields
of transformations: 1) the transformation of global capital and its
effects on the State in the early 70's  and 2) the subsequent
transformations (also quite measurable... although in today there is
still no real concensus amongst scholars Marxist or otherwise in the
"in which way") of the nature of capitalist wage regimes.

> The claim to novelty only seems to make sense if you think that
> domestic labor didn't used to be productive, that democracy didn't
> used to be possible, but that these become the case only now (or
> starting around the 1970s).

Framing "novelty" in this sense however is not very meaningful though
IMO. At what point in the 20th century were things not changing? Were
not all the "monetary politics" of the 60's already having a great
impact on what would happen in the 70's? Was not 1934 already a
momentous occassion waiting to be deconstructed yet again? I don't
like framing claims to novelty in terms of general equilibrium. You
end up hiding too much.


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