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 --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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