Re: discussing neo-liberalism & utopia

["FRANCO BARCHIESI" <029FRB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(...)
On 3 April Steve Wright wrote:
>
> " With all its dependence upon subjectivity and creativity,
> > modern capitalism can only promote a political culture characterised by the
>
> > asence of *radical* imagination, by the absence of an alternative vision of
>
> > existence - not in the distant future, but here and now, where the present
> > material and subjective bases could render it conceivable, if not
> > actualisable [yes, I'm sure that's a neologism].
>
On 4 April Massimo De Angelis responded:

> Yes, it is in a sense, Actualisable is opposed to realisable.
> Whatever is realizable presuposses a pre-conceived plan which must be
> realised (by  subordinating to the plan all the people who
> don't like it). Whatever is actualisable is already existing in a
> virtual way, where virtuality is a dimension of reality.

(...)


This distinction is extremely insightful. But to make a new
subjectivity emerge in the context of the end-of-century nexus
financial-productive capital, industrial-precarized working class
etc., we must have a clear distinction between what Steve called the
"material" and the "subjective" bases.

As far as the material bases, a massive contradiction arise for
capital: it has to stimulate and
harness subjectivity by encouraging increasing worker
responsibilization, even creativity, in order to grasp a social and
communicational surplus value in the workplace. This is
qualitatively different from surplus value deriving from the
abstractization of single worker capacities to comply with his/her
prescribed and atomized tasks, and it comes to constitute a
competitive edge in the global fight for shrinking and specialized
markets. But in doing so, capital has to be careful in depriving
worker subjectivity of any implication in terms of power and control,
that is to say in preventing it from representing the condition of
workers as unified in its estrangement from capitalist production
relations, regardless of functional and spatial subdivisions in the
valorization process.

In this way, capital silences subjectivity just at the same time it
calls it into life. Capital has not found, yet, the ways to deal with
this contradiction. Two examples: the use of Just-in-Time *as a
weapon of worker resistance* in the case of the General Motors strike
in the US, whereby the streamlining of lines of communication and
the quickening times of delivery, far from buying worker loyalty to
the firm, emphasized the impressive potential to cripple the
whole process contained in the strategic location of small groups of
workers in particular phases. And this happened as
a largely unpredictable consequence (for GM and maybe the union
itself) in the *event* of managerial resort to outsourcing. Another
example here in SA, where a continuous succession of strikes in the
auto sector (Toyota, VW, Samcor) is taking place just after the union
has signed a three-year contract which, keeping worker wage increases
shelved against inflation, was aimed at over-determining their
subjectivity through the imperative of increased productivity.

These contradictions refer to what Steve called the "material bases".
But what happens at the subjective level, when the subject has to
actualize its antagonistic virtuality? Traditional working class
politics is quite loathe at investigating this kind of question. For
it, the identification between the movement and the party/union is a
necessary moment related to the objectively progressive nature of
the development of the productive forces. This, in this
argument, creating a homogeneous working class also facilitates the
circulation of a unified consciousness, a "critical mass" which,
having cumulatively reached a certain point, rebels against the
oppressive nature of productive relations. It would be too long to
deal here what impressive damages the idea of the "progressive
character" of the productive forces had in the organization of the
"worker movement".

But we cannot even assume subjectivity as a given, "purer" and more
essential foundation of struggle, with the danger of making it an
all-explaining shortcut against economistic and determinist drifts of
the old left. We only can define subjectivity along the virtuality-
actuality axis if we assume it not as a given but as a process, where
various streams converge in controversial or even contradictory
ways. These streams are located in an everyday uncertain divide
between acceptance and resistance but in a way that can unpredictably
explode at any time. The "utopian" element, in the sense very
adequately used by Steven, as something which is no-where and now-
here, *simultaneously* and as a result of the interplay (not
the dialectic...) between actuality and virtuality, resides precisely
in this. Utopia can be equated with the process of subjectivity
construction as a process whereby a plurality of actors subjected to
capitalist domination come explicitly to perceive their self-image as
exceeding any capitalist pre-determined definition, feeling
antagonistic towards that image and the social power which promoted
it. In this way the "responsible" worker is replaced by the worker
collectivity, or the "social movement" as a bourgeois category for a
"non-class" movement is replaced by movements whose nature is given
by the circulation of struggles inside and outside industrial
production. Subjectivity is like a mirror through which the subject
after having stopped and subverted the rythms of production, can
look at the "history" he/she has made and thinking it as a
creation of its own as a subject (eg: looking at factory social
relations as determined by his/her struggles as worker defined
through struggles themselves, and not as the articulation of
performances of particular kinds of capitalistically-defined
worker). The human eye can see everything, bit it still needs a
mirror to see itself. Subjectivity, for the subject is just that
mirror. It implies moments of reflection, of recollection of
experiences, the inception of a subversive temporality which
disarticulates the pace of the production process. But this is not
enough to answer to Steve's point on "subjective conditions".

The problem is, and that is what I would also like to ask to the
list: can we intervene on these moments of disarticulation, givig
them a coherence through the circulation of struggles of autonomous
subjects? What are the methodological tools? How can we conceptualize
the importance of the *event* in a non-evolutionistic understanding
of subjectivity, but which nonetheless maintains subjectivity as a
solid tool of analysis against the ideological articulation
globalization/fragmentation? I agree on Massimo's emphasis on the
circulation of struggles as a way to recognize the "otherness", and
the only way I think the idea of "Globalization" can be fruitfully
utilized, and not only moralistically rejected, from a class
strategy point of view is in the sense of *globalization (and
differentiation) of the battlefields*.

To answer to the following point by Steve, I would say that to affirm
the value of utopian thinking today, we must recognize that *utopian
is the subject*, not only the project or the process, or that the
subject itself is part of a process that we, in our intellectual and
militant capacity, must have the political insight to relate with.
Otherwise, the danger exists that, with the advance of
"globalization", the more penetrating capitalist domination becomes
and the broader (and more comforting and reassuring, inoffensive) is
the space of utopia (in this way Eddie Webster, prof. here at Wits can
talk about the "social-democratic" utopia as a weapon against global
capital). Only by rooting the analysis at the level of subjectivity
construction we can liberate the subversive element in thinking about
utopia.

In fact Steve writes:
> >
> Utopia therefore not as *the* alternative model, not as a party
> > program or a plan in search of subjects to subordinate. Utopia instead as
> > an open and inclusive horizon of thought, antagonistic practice and
> > communication. If theoretical and political recomposition must occur as a
> > heterogeneity of antagonistic thematics and therefore subjects - labour,
> > production, reproduction, race, gender, health, environment, education etc.
>
> > - it must therefore occur in terms of a discourse which to those who manage
>
> > the Great Leviathan must necessarily seem 'utopian' - that is, as a
> > discourse centred around real human subjects, their needs and aspirations
> > uncoupled from the priority of social relations which take the form of
> > despotic objects."

(...)

And Massimo:
> Yes Steve, you are perfectly right. Allow me to add
> something from a sentence in Marx's 1844 manuscript,
> when he refers to the "communal being", that is "the human
> being" in  communism. I quote by hearth
> "the communal beings are  the ones for whom "the other" becomes a
> need for them". (Please note, this means something different than say
> that we need the  "other" ).   I think this sentence captures the entire
> problematic of a new society. The question that Marx does not ask
> is of course HOW does this "communal subject" come about, how do
> we recognize the "others"  from whom we have been divided by capital's
> strategies, as a need for us. I think the way this occures is the process of
>
> struggles of different sections of the working class. So the process
> of circulation of struggles among different sections not only
> disrupts capital, but also at the same time, creates the "communal
> being " as defined above.

Franco

Franco Barchiesi
Sociology of Work Programme
Dept of Sociology
Private Bag 3
University of the Witwatersrand
PO Wits 2050
Johannesburg
South Africa
Tel. (++27 11) 716.2908
Fax  (++27 11) 716.3781
E-Mail 029frb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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