File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9708, message 263


Date: Wed, 20 Aug 1997 16:26:07 -0400
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: The Madrid Conference


As far as I can tell, this conference was a gathering of people
internationally who identify with the Zapatista movement in Mexico and are
trying to apply that model to an urban and proletarian framework. Since the
Zapatistas have tended to express themselves in an elliptical manner, the
movement around them has drawn all sorts of groups. Anarchists identify
strongly with them. So do "autonomist Marxists".

The autonomists got started in Italy where an academic named Toni Negri
developed his ideas during the radicalization of the late 1960s and early
1970s. My only exposure to Negri was in the course of reading "Communists
like US", co-authored with Felix Guattari. I read this during my research
on Deleuze-Guattari for a presentation on their views of fascism for a
cyberseminar on the old Marxism list. I disagreed strongly with the ideas
of this book which seemed to depart from Marxism on the primacy of the
working class. It tended to look at the new social movements for
inspiration. It had a lot in common, as far as I could tell, with the
radical democracy of Laclau-Mouffe.

Harry Cleaver, a University of Texas professor who I know casually from
PEN-L, is a leading proponent of autonomist Marxism. He started a Web Page
for the Zapatistas that achieved a lot of recognition. I like Harry, but I
have problems with many of his ideas. The home page of the Madrid
conference includes a paper by him with the following paragraph:

"The efforts of militants focused on environmental, gender and indigenous
issues have also been increasingly global. Led partly by theories that
emphasize the simultaneous complexity and interconnectivity of all life
processes even unto the plantetary whole (Gaia) and partly by experiences
in confronting capitalists who shift operations from country to country to
outflank and undermine controls, many ecologists now struggle to build
global coalitions of eco-warriors able to cut-off and destroy such tactics.
Faced with a patriarchal set of relationships throughly integrated into the
structure of the hierarchical capitalist organization of the world,
feminists have also found themselves forced (and drawn) to share experience
and collaborate across borders (e.g., the international wages for housework
campaign, the counter-conference in Bejing, cross- border struggle against
the international sex industry, and so on). One essential element of the
current period of indigenous rennaisance has been its global character.
Resistance to genocidal murder and social marginalization has provided a
common ground for the most diverse peoples and upon that ground is being
woven a web of cooperation and mutual aid across vast cultural differences,
languages and experiences."

This is far too post-Marxish for my tastes. I have also had a brief but
sharp exchange with Harry on the "sex industry" question. He thought that
it was wrong for the Cubans to outlaw prostitution and seems less eager
than most leftists to view the sale of one's body in a different light than
any other form of capitalist exploitation.

I suspect that the Madrid conference is a positive thing all in all. The
forms of organization for a new international socialist movement are not
settled. Mostly what people have decided firmly about is what doesn't work.
This means old-line Stalinism and old-line Trotskyism. I still hold out for
old-line Marxism but it will take some time before this gains greater
popularity. I expect with the recent Teamsters victory, this movement based
on the primacy of the working class might pick up some momentum.

Louis Proyect



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