strategy addition

[Mneillft@xxxxxxx]

To aut-op-sy and aguas lists and to Dave S.  From Monty Neill
<mneillft@xxxxxxx>

In considering comments on the piece on Strategy I am writing with George
Caffentzis and Johnny Machete, I have tried to include and respond to them in
what is now a short DRAFT expansion of section 5 (the final section). I
circulate these comments with trepidation because 1) I have not yet finished
John Holloway's piece on Dignity; 2) I am extrapolating from rather brief
comments from Laura F. (whose first language is not English) in an internet
discussion; 3) I have not finished Stratman's book either. But I need to
finish this piece soon yet consider the points I am responding to to be of
great importance -- so if I am out of line in my interpretation, excuse me. (
I do intend to finish them soon; and I do think that the issues I am posing
do need to be addressed, even if I do not correctly ascribe them to John,
Laura or Dave; and pressures of time propel me to perhaps prematurely raise
these issues).

A note to the lists: Dave Stratman's book "We CAN Change the World" is
available from him; contact via email to newdem@xxxxxxxx Curtis noted it
(saying it was controversial) on the aut-op-sy list.  I think it is well
worth a read.

To John and Laura: can I cite you in print in regard to the email postings,
since they are not published. And John, please send a citation for "Dignity."
Thanks.  (and I will be away most of the next three weeks, so excuse me if
you write and I am not prompt in response).

[A note to those who pointed out that we properly should have said "popular
front," not "united front": yes, but the initial piece of that phase was G.
Dimitroff's "United Front Against War and Facism."]

The new draft text to be inserted in "Strategy" begins with a paragraph from
the old version (at about p. 5) and leads up to the sub-section "Some current
uses of class composition analysis":

It is the space outside of capital, the space of human life not defined by
capital, that is the fundamental source of power against capital as well as
the basic source of capital itself. That is, working class struggles
necessarily come also from outside the working class' existence as working
class.

This point is increasingly being explored. On the one side, the analysis of
the creation of the capitalist body and mind has long been developed.
Arguably, this capitalist tendency to control, define and produce the human
body has intensified over the centuries, and the computer is being used to
intensify it still further (c.f., Midnight Notes Collective, 1982; Neill,
1995). In this, the human is fragmented, decomposed, constructed as labor
power, denied humanity. John Holloway (in press) suggests that the
fundamental contribution of the Zapatistas is to recompose the human through
the assertion of "dignity," that revolution starts not from capitalism, but
>from "dignity." [FN: This is not the space to engage in a critical analysis
of Holloway's piece. We think he is powerfully correct, but point out that
this analysis perhaps best considered as an aspect of considering revolution
as not starting from capital but from the working class.]

Laura Fiocco says that democratic behavior becomes communist when its central
purpose is to "produce the collective subject (WE: where -ME- can feel the
powerness and loveness of BEEING together). If we start from here, to enlarge
the field of solidarity means to enlarge the collective subject. But this
process is not just a quantitative enlargement, it is a de-location
(dislocazione) [relocation?} of the field of stuggle to a higher level. The
new subject - constituted in this process - produces its own goals which
CAN'T be thought before its constitution" (internet communication, Jan. 29,
1997).

Holloway also insists on the emphasis of revolution as process, not product,
arguing that "communism is not something we move towards, but something that
we struggle to
invent... The struggle, as [the Zapatistas] put it, is the struggle to
convert 'dignity and
rebellion into freedom and dignity': dignity is the means, dignity the end,
there is no distinction" (internet communication, Feb. 2, 1997).

These arguments run the risk of discarding entirely an understanding of
structures. One can analyze structures and recognize that the structures of
social relations must be revolutionized without being a "structuralist," and
we suggest it is incorrect to only consider fluid subjectivities developing
their being collectively. Clearly, however, exploring these aspects (as the
women's movement has certainly insisted on) continues to be correct in
response to "structure-only" variants of Marxism.

We also suggest that while the communist movement must create its future
through its struggles (and its creation of new social structures), it is also
true that glimmerings and ideas of the future, of what is desirable and could
be made, continuously infuse struggles and provide some sense of a goal.
More, the abandonment of considering social structures (which we see in
Holloway's piece particularly) also runs the risk of not thinking about such
things as relations of ownership: everything becomes collapsed into
"dignity."

Again, these are fundamentally important restatements that the goal of
struggle is to create humanity; controlling means of production, defining new
modes of ownership, developing participatory democratic processes and
structures, etc., etc., are all for a purpose and are not in themselves the
ends. Our caution is against a one-sided avoidance of structures.

In what we think is a conceptually related work, Dave Stratman (n.d.) says
that "class struggle is a struggle over different conceptions of what it
means to be human." He argues that revolution can be found in the humanity of
everyday life, highlighted through struggles such as strikes, which
(ironically, not unlike Lenin) he sees as being "in certain respects...
revolution on a small scale" (quotations on p. 38). [FN: Stratman not only
does not define himself as a Marxist, he accepts the orthodox Leninist
conceptions of Marxism as the correct interpretation of Marx and rejects it
for reducing humans to their economic self-interest, the same as does
capitalism. He has a point in relation to the history of Marxism; but we find
much more in Marx.]

If life is anti-capitalist, then social struggles asserting life have
anti-capitalist energy, aspects and possibilities. As always, capital seeks
to channel the energy into its productivity (thus, for example, the struggle
against housework becomes work in restaurants and day care centers).

Since, of course, the struggle to cease to be proletarian as a class includes
resistance to capital, the analytical framework developed by Alquati and his
comrades is valuable. But, to sum up, it needs correction and radical
expansion, and the two are related: Correction in understanding better the
planetary composition of capitalist accumulation and thus of the working
class as a whole; and expansion, to understand the capitalist machine as a
vampiric and parasitic structure growing out of life, but not itself living;
while the the working class has life based on its being outside of work as
well as being "living labor" and that this life, not resistance to capitalism
only, is the basis of revolution.

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