Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 10:05:26 -0600
From: Nate Holdren <nateholdren-AT-gmail.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: Negri and Charleton Heston?


hey there Lowe-

I think we just disagree on our reading of Negri on the proletariat,
labor etc and I don't know how to move that conversation forward
productively, so I'm not going to respond to the other email.

As to the socialized worker and such - I find Negri's presentation of
the shape of production today compelling, that work is done for
capital well beyond the walls of workplaces and so forth - the
socialized worker as a technical composition, that makes sense to me.
I'd say the same of 'multitude' in this sense. In this sense,
socialized worker/multitude are analytical tools
[ I do have a concern, though, which is that the traits of this
composition (the productivity-for-capita of work done outside the
factory - housework etc) don't seem new, they seem like they were
always the case. That's not the point here, so I'll drop this for
now.]

Negri's stuff on the socialized worker (and I've only read some of it,
the stuff in English) and his more recent work on multitude suggests
that it is or is becoming a political composition, a class figure
analogous to the mass worker, which - the story goes - was the leading
sector of the class struggle in Italy in the 60s, with '68 as the
violent death throes of that cycle of struggle. I am all for this
political recomposition of the socialized worker/multitude - it'd be
great to see Hardt and Negri's project of the possible multitude
succeed. But this sense of the term, as a project for political
composition, is not an analytical concept. In the same way 'the party'
and 'the union' are not analytical concepts when one is in the process
of party- or union-building. Negri has a history of this in his work,
blurring analytical and political-project categories - it's part of
what makes him exciting because it feels like we're on the cusp of
something huge, but it's also questionable as to whether he's right or
not.

HN talk sometimes like this political recomposition is happening now,
but I'm not so sure. Sometimes I think HN are working in the spirit of
the lovely old situationist slogans - 'be realistic, demand the
impossible' and 'we take our desires for reality' . I feel
uncharacteristically pessimistic saying this, but I'm just not sure
that current political reality is as close to HN's desires as they
sometimes make it sound.

take care,
Nate 

On Wed, 1 Dec 2004 14:11:14 +0100, Lowe Laclau <lowe.laclau-AT-gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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