Re: AUT: Me and my interests

[Steve Wright <pmargin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Harald Beyer-Arnesen wrote:

>
> However this is, this is an interesting question. I sure
> would like an up-date on whatever new thoughts and currents
> within autonomist marxism regarding the organisational
> question.

I'd also be interested to hear about any new developments - say over the past
five years. There were some interesting discussion documents coming out of
Padova (that was an apt crack, Myk) in the early nineties, about the death of
the party and the need for a multi-centred movement. But that circle has shifted
some way since, as far as I can tell.

I think there's at least two sides to the issue raised by Harald: a) how
autonomists organise themselves, and b) how they posit what forms are
appropriate for the class.

a) The impression I've always got from the Italian circles with whom I've had
contact was that the tyranny of structurelessness was not uncommon in their
seemingly informal collectives. That's fine if you're part of the kitchen
cabinet, but . . .

It may well be different elsewhere. Here, autonomists are so thin on the ground
that it has only been in recent times that an autonomist-ish organisation has
emerged - maybe Sergio or someone else can say something about the Australian
Love & Rage.

b) The traditional formula of course is that organisational forms are a function
of particular class compositions. That can lead to somewhat partial critiques
of, for example, leninist norms eg they were appropriate once, in specific
circumstances, but as these no longer exist . . . ; or to more radical ones
(leninism wasn't appropriate even in the wake of 1917, a position defended once
by Sergio Bologna) . . . There was also the notion in the 1960s of 'the working
class use of the party and union', which could lead in practice either to
entrism, or the argument (shared with Marty Glaberman, I think) that workers
won't abandon traditional unions until they have wrung every use out of them, so
revolutionaries should bear this in mind (and in fact the first autonomous
workplace collective wasn't driven out of the official union at Porto Marghera
until the late 1960s). And of course, many in the 1970s (such as Negri)
continued to want to somehow smuggle Lenin back into the equation.


>
> hand it provides excellent instruments for a critique
> of such phenomema, or for that sake to end with what
> is perhaps a provocation and an overstatement: the
> spectacle of events such as in Seattle.

It may well be that the rallies organised against the World Economic Forum in
Melbourne in September will remain within the logic of spectacles. It's hard to
know beforehand whether such events will allow space for emerging trends in the
working class to express themselves openly, or whether instead they will simply
move to the rhythm and needs of self-defined 'activist' layers. I know J18 has
prompted some critiques in this regard, although they only go so far . . .

Steve



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