Re: AUT: Zanny Begg's reply to Harry Cleaver

["Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sergio:
Someone sent me a copy of this reply and I wrote back asking for some
analysis of the context within which the "debate" is occuring. No answer.
Perhaps you could do so. Normally I don't bother arguing with sectarian
Leninists but if some kindred souls would find it useful, I'll answer this
second piece by Begg.
Harry

On Tue, 7 Dec 1999, Sergio Fiedler wrote:

> Comrades,
>
> I think Harry is geeting really popular in  Australia latelly. This is
> an article written by Zanny Begg from the DSP on Green Left Weekly. All
> comments and replies welcome...
> A  lot of people here are really interested in the debate....
>
> in solidarity
>
> Sergio
>
> ___________________________________________
>
> Three flaws in autonomist
>        Marxism
>
>        By Zanny Begg
>
>        In Green Left Weekly issue #384, Resistance
>        magazine carried an article, by me, which looked
>        at some of the key ideas of autonomist
>        Marxism. The piece focused on the ideas of US
>        theorist Harry Cleaver, an enthusiastic proponent
>        of autonomist Marxism who has helped publish
>        works of autonomists such as Antonio Negri.
>
>        Harry Cleaver has responded to the ideas raised in this
>        article on the National Broad Left's e-mail discussion list.
>        Since many readers of Resistance are neither students nor
>        subscribers to this list, some of this interchange has been
>        summarised here.
>
>        The debate between Marxists and autonomist Marxists has
>        revolved around three points: labour and the role of the
>        working class in struggle, how revolutionaries should
>        approach the state and whether we need a revolutionary
>        party.
>
>        Cleaver argues that Resistance suffers from a stubborn
>        refusal to recognize students and women and their struggles
>        as moments of the working class and that the insistence
>        on limiting the application of that August title to waged
>        workers not only reeks of Marxist orthodoxy but blinds
>        one to actual class dynamics.
>
>        It may be orthodox, but Resistance believes that what
>        defines whether one is a worker or not is their relationship
>        to the means of production and their consequent social role.
>        Workers are those who have no means of living other than
>        to sell their labour-power to an owner of capital.
>
>        This definition is not reducible to the old industrial
>        proletariat. It includes most women, most indigenous
>        people and most migrants (i.e., all those of these groups
>        who work); it includes white-collar workers, knowledge
>        workers and so on. The development of technology and of
>        the information age has not fundamentally undermined
>        the basic class antagonism between workers and capitalists.
>        On the contrary, it has intensified it by massively increasing
>        the numbers who are part of the working class.
>
>        Students, on the other hand, do not have a definite
>        relationship to the means of production and so cannot fit the
>        title of waged worker. The usual Marxist definition for
>        students is a layer in transition -- some go on to be
>        capitalists, most go onto find work.
>
>        Students, and the various social movements such as the
>        women's liberation movement or the gay and lesbian
>        movement, play a crucial role in building and inspiring
>        movements for change. But neither students nor these
>        movements are able to overthrow capitalism, unless they
>        bring into political struggle the mass of the working class.
>
>        Cleaver goes on to argue that it is a very old and orthodox
>        formulation of the idea of socialism that centres on
>        socialism being differentiated from capitalism by the
>        property ownership of the means of production shifting
>        from capital to labor. Leninists in general, including
>        Trotsky, argued that the workers `owned' the means of
>        production in the Soviet Union and therefore it was
>        socialist. But of course the `ownership' was purely formal
>        and while the state controlled the means of production ... it
>        actually used that control for very capitalist purposes: the
>        imposition of work, the extraction of surplus and the
>        expanded reproduction of these same relationships.
>
>        Cleaver is right to draw a distinction between the
>        ownership and the control of the means of production
>        in the Soviet Union, although he is hardly the first to point
>        it out. Workers owned the means of production (in as much
>        as they were state property, and not privately owned as in
>        the West), but under the undemocratic Stalinist regime,
>        they had no control over what was produced or how.
>
>        For revolutionaries this meant that the task was to retake
>        control of the means of production through a political
>        revolution. Unfortunately, in 1991 the opposite occurred,
>        and those supporting capitalism (under Yeltsin) took
>        control and have started to give ownership of the means of
>        production back to capitalists.
>
>        Cleaver argues that Resistance proposes a united
>        organization or party that can match the power of the
>        capitalist state. What is either not understood or is rejected
>        by this old Leninist argument, he argues, is that the
>        seizure of power and the construction of an alternative
>        organization that can match the power of the capitalist state
>        amounts to no more today than it did in 1917: the creation
>        of a mirror image, which remains the same only inverted ...
>
>        The point of revolution is to change the meaning of
>        power, not to substitute the power of one class for that of
>        another. The point is to abolish the state, not to substitute
>        one state structure for another. What history teaches is that
>        every attempt to substitute the mirror image fails to get us
>        beyond the image itself.
>
>        Autonomist Marxism falls into the anarchism camp by its
>        rejection of state power as a key goal for the
>        revolutionary movement. Cleaver argues that the point of
>        revolution is not to substitute the power of one class for
>        another. But what other point is there for revolution? Do
>        we want to build a huge movement against the system and
>        then leave the capitalist class in power?
>
>        Marx was not prescriptive on how exactly the transition
>        from capitalism to a classless society would take place -- he
>        expected the experience of struggle to reveal the necessary
>        organisational forms. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx
>        argued that the capitalist state was to be replaced by the
>        proletariat organised as the ruling class. After the
>        experience of the Paris Commune, Marx wrote that the
>        organisational form at last discovered by revolutionary
>        struggle was a working class government.
>
>        The experience in Russia, the first attempt at building a
>        socialist society, gives more information about the
>        necessary forms of the transition from capitalism to
>        communism. In October 1917 the revolutionary movement,
>        led by the Bolsheviks, took state power. They abolished
>        the political power of the capitalists and set about
>        constructing a socialist society.
>
>        Rather then creating a mirror image of capitalism, they
>        decriminalised abortion and homosexuality, instituted
>        workers' control of production, appropriated the wealth of
>        the capitalists and reorganised society in the interests of
>        workers and poor peasants. It was for these reasons that
>        they were invaded and attacked by the capitalist powers,
>        and weakened to such an extent that a bureaucratic caste
>        was able to usurp control.
>
>        Stalin's rise to power in the 1920s, and the tragic
>        consequences for the socialist movement, do not destroy
>        the revolutionary democratic content of the Russian
>        masses' seizure of power in 1917. Nor does that tragedy
>        take away from the revolution's theoretical conquests: the
>        need for the working class to organise itself as the ruling
>        class and the necessary, and vital, role to be played by a
>        revolutionary party.
>
>        Those who would like access to the full debate can visit the
>        Resistance web page at .
>
>
>
>
>
>      --- from list aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
>

............................................................................
Snail-mail:
Harry Cleaver
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712-1173  USA

Phone Numbers:
(hm)  (512) 442-5036
(off) (512) 475-8535
Fax:(512) 471-3510

E-mail:
hmcleave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
PGP Public Key: http://certserver.pgp.com:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=hmcleave

Cleaver homepage:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index2.html

Chiapas95 homepage:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html

Accion Zapatista homepage:
http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
............................................................................



     --- from list aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---