Date: Mon, 12 Feb 1996 22:49:10 -0500 (EST)
From: "Bryan A. Alexander" <bnalexan-AT-umich.edu>
Subject: Re: working-class subjectivity


Sick all weekend, minimal email - now I'm asked to take myself seriously, 
so I shall:

Bryan Alexander					Department of English
email: bnalexan-AT-umich.edu			University of Michigan
phone: (313) 764-0418				Ann Arbor, MI  USA    48103
fax: (313) 763-3128				http://www.umich.edu/~bnalexan

On Fri, 9 Feb 1996, Bradley Mayer wrote:

>... 
> In a thread with Hugh Rodwell, Brian Alexander says:
> 
> >This
> >leads, in fact, to an explicit formulation of revolutionary subjectivity:
> >"Forces of production and social relations - two different sides of the
> >development of the social individual - appear to capital as mere means,
> >and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation.  In
> >fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation
> >sky-high." (706)  This is of course consciousness - but it leaves method
> >fully open as a question, not confining us to certain modes of party or
> >state.  
> 
> Now, the thread generally concerns working class subjectivity, and 
> Rodwell and Alexander in particular seem to have agreed ( I present this 
> without the usual snippets of proof) that working class subjectivity or 
> consciousness cannot exist outside the logic of capital, since the 
> workers as wage laborers are entirely subordinate to capital, are the 
> creature of capital (because wage labor as variable capital is a 
> component part of capital, etc.). But in the quote above the question of 
> *revolutionary consciousness* is raised, but in an manner that confounds 
> this with the original question of working class subjectivity.

Confounds, nothing.  It raises - or begs - the question of how this 
consciousness forms up.  All too often the kneejerk reaction of 
"well-form-a-party-then" occludes the real mechanisms.

> 
> >Here my reading opposes your Leninism, Hugh, because I don't find
> >a necessary constitution of the party in the GR at all.
> 
> Marx surely understood this distinction, but it's because he never got 
> around to an exegesis of their necessary relationship in the development 
> of the socialist revolution that we need to delve into "Soviet 
> biographism", i.e. and in actuality the train of Marxist thought after 
> Marx. For example, it was Kautsky (the old, "orthodox" Kautsky) that 
> developed the concept of the necessary relationship between the 
> spontaneous consciousness of the working class and that of the 
> revolutionaries, which Lenin adopted in _What Is To Be Done?_. The 
> question cannot be safely contained within a purely "Soviet" Leninist 
> context as if it were some unfortunate contaminant contained within a 
> lead casing.

Not sure what's being contained here, or being accused of being 
contained.  Whichever, it's an odd way to address my point on Leninism - 
which I'd like to see worked on/with.

  To confuse revolutionary with working class consciousness - 
> the former as understood on the basis of Alexanders' reference to Marx in 
> the Grundrisse, the latter as a consciousness that *can ever only exist 
> under capitalism*, hence not a revolutionary subjectivity - is not only 
> to theoretically occult the issue of their relation, but is to (therefore) 
> also abdicate responsibility for ones' own consciousness as a revolutionary
> subject within capitalism, to relate oneself in less than a serious manner.
> 
> 			-Brad Mayer
Nah.  We're trying to study the process of generation of revolutionary 
consciousness, not elide or crush it.  Through the GRUNDRISSE notes and 
well into CAPITAL Marx argues for the energetically expansive, omnivorous 
nature of capital: it wants everything, and every shred more intensely 
than before.  Capital has reorganized the planet.  Hence our insistence 
on its totalizing logic.  Yet the production of friction, resistance, 
revolution is essential to this same logic.  Marxists - even these 
celebrated "orthdox Marxists" (and can we please drop the use of 
orthodoxia as a positive word?) - can too readily simplify the process.  
In our century of tidal workers' struggles, where capital insistently, 
consistently retreats, regroups, triumphs once more, we need to ever 
return to the moment of simultaneous production and reproduction.
	This conversation is excellent, and important.  IT's tying back 
into many other threads:
	...fascism.  Raises the question of working-class desires for 
nationalism and autocracy (to crib a slogan) again.  Returns us to the 
importance of this moment of subjectivity, and its inextricable 
involvement with objective conditions.
	...Deleuze and Guattari, who seem to argue that the overcoding of 
capital from ca. 1760 on is quite incomplete, offering a strange model of 
resistance and subjectivity that wanders from psychoanalysis on.
	...statism.  Again I raise the problem of the state, one of 
Marx's key tropes.  Again folks on this list shy away from that specter...


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