Re: AUT: Me and my interests

[kubhlai <kubhlai@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sean to kubhlai:
>but here i want to respond to your comments about
>class backgrounds being more complex and varied. i
>think this is not so, i think that race, moral and
>cultural backgrounds are in fact what have become more
>varied, and that class backgrounds are becoming
>similar.

Most of the issues around which protest has emerged in the last decade or
so have been about things which effect people pretty-much-regardless of
class. I'm thinking of GM-crops, Reclaim the Streets (in a narrow sense),
anti-bypass campaigns and so forth. In fact lets make that two decades
and include Save the Whale and CND. I guess this kind of proves your
point rather than mine so far.
However none of these issues are particularly *revolutionary*. None of
them are very resistant in fact, in the fullness of time, of being taken
advantage of by populist politicians of the kind I'm sure we all despise.
Despite that, I think there *are* revolutionary possibilities opened up
by these cross-class protests and in fact believe that the way forward is
to promote policies with merit in the eyes of the majority. (For one
example -- rights of tenure, ie over rights of property, so that people
cannot be evicted; which would apply and appeal equally to both the
mortgaged middle class, the working class tenant and the peasant farmer).

Nevertheless, the very reason I think that issues should be formulated
with a wide social frame in mind is precisely because I think unity is
*absent* for the class reasons I gave.
It could be that this boils down to semantics -- that you can choose to
use the term "workers" and define it by the common interests you
perceive, (this after all has been the custom, especially in the west,
since the 1940s). However this has got to be a dangerous
oversimplification: the more you reserve the term for definition in a
strict Marxist sense -- as defined by materialist economics and the
production of material artefacts -- the more obvious are the divergences
of interest. How, for example, can the socio-economic interests of an
administrator (say a civil service accountant) who produces nothing
essential to life and/or who depends upon the state to enforce his
instructions, be the same as those of the actual producer of the means of
life -- say a farm labourer?
In my view, the "middle class" is precisely that -- it consists largely
of individuals who only contribute in small or varying degree to
production (and specifically provide services needed by production mainly
by virtue of the capitalist system in which it has to occur) but who
also, as reward, receive a small share of the devolved power of the
state. In other words, they are paid in both money (which essentially
derives from the labouring class) and in power (which is sacrificed to
them by the ruling class in its self-defence: "danegeld").
Even this is too polarized a view. Almost everyone today is producer and
parasite in varying degree. We all stand to both gain and lose by revolt.

>with the transition from mass worker (factory work
>based on wages as labor's value) to socialized worker
>(non-factory work based on information as labor's
>value), all workers have been put on a much more equal
>level.

Information is quite ill defined perhaps, but I suggest that what you
mean by information here corresponds in large part to what I have just
said about power. In other words, the value of this information is that
it enables, and therefore embodies, social control. Come to think of it
(and this is a spur of the moment thought) this information might also
readily be identified with the images of the spectacular society as
described in Situationism : certainly some of these images (guchi and
reebok labels for example) are intimately connected with social status
and "being taken seriously".... If you widen the meaning of information
in the situationist direction, then even "information" such as artistic
productions, "style" (added-commodity-value) reveal themselves as a
currency in power.
So what I'm saying is that there cannot really be a "class" identity
between those who possess a share in this *information*-power and those
who do not.
Even within the middle "class", there is a kind of competition not found
in the proletariat. In the modern market place there is very obviously a
perpetual war to possess "charisma", "fashion", "street-cred", "respect";
brandname competes with brandname (often brutally ie people get put out
of work). If BMW is in, then Porsche is out...
There is no corresponding disunity in the working class -- the car-worker
cares little if he works for Ford or for Nissan, and one peasant who
grows a banana is rarely forced to fight it out with another who grows a
plantain.

>labor militance is no longer restricted to one who
>uses his/her hands or works in a factory...

Yes but. Where is the competitor which obliges middle class professions
to take union-style action? When the proletarian struck -- his enemy was
obviously the mill-owner and his class. However when the teachers obtain
more pay, I think they know that in effect they are taking the money from
nurses (a UK example -- where both are publicly supported), or if doctors
demand more influence over XYZ, they know they are competing with civil
servants in the district health authorities. What I mean is that such
protests are not so clearly directed at *the* Ruling Class any more. If
they are to aquire such a perspective it will require building (by trying
to direct attention to fundamental problems/causes) rather than simply
emerging of its own accord from these largely *factional* struggles.

>in addition since workers have seen the factories
>become mobile due to freer capital flows,
>technological change, etc... there is some fear that
>even the upper level jobs could simply be moved
>somewhere else where the labor is cheap...
>i don't know how good this example is but, in relation
>to even white collar labor having mobility, i think of
>an episode of tv nation where michael moore set up a
>scenario where he planned to open up the headquarters
>of a U.S. TV station in Mexico...

Well yes -- and this is just the kind of issue which can build (what I
would continue to call) "cross-class" unity. Unfortunately this
particular kind of example also invites that unity to take the form of
*nationalism* (so defining issues so that they have transnational appeal
is equally important.

As to your suggestion that race, morality, culture etc have become more
important...
Hmm. American friends tell me that ethnic communities have become more
polarized over there so I'm wary of expressing a general view. Its been
my impression in the Uk that such differences have steadily waned. (Not
always for the better though -- only yesterday there was a documentary
charting the "western" problems now appearing in asian families such as
drugs and crime, and the rejection of their traditional cultures and
faiths). Of course ethnic identities, religions and moralities can all be
commodified to greater or lesser degree -- can be reduced to fashions and
"qualifications". Whether their adherents "grow together" or "grow apart"
might not be telling us anything very clear about class.

>a lot of what i was saying was coming from Politics of
>Subversion by Toni Negri, in this book he talks about
>the proletarianization of the subjectivity of the
>socialized worker.

Well I'm here to get educated. Is there an archive of Negri and autonomic
etexts somewhere?

I cant think of anywhere in the situationist archives which specifically
addresses this question by offering a modern redefinition of class (I'll
ask a friend) but almost anything would expand on what I've said about
images as commodities and as mediations of social power. Both Debord's
Society of the Spectacle and Vaneigem's Revolution of Everyday Life are
now available complete as etexts. I could email, or try these urls--

http://situationist.cjb.net
http://www.nothingness.org
http://www.notbored.org
http://www.geosophy.com


If it moves -- subvert it.

-- kubhlai


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