empire, multitude & class ... was: Re: AUT: a rejuvenated communist

[commie zero zero <commie00@xxxxxxxxx>]

> I met some of the N&L people in London, very
> briefly, and a correspondent
> of mine, Cyril Smith (ex-Healyite, author of 'Marx
> at the Millenium', and
> someone responsible for starting me on my grand
> slide away from
> Leninism) seems quite friendly with them. I tend to
> think that we need to
> ditch, rather than embrace, Humanism - it ultimately
> entraps the human in
> some kind of 'historic mission'. I rather tend to
> like the emphasis that
> people like Hardt put on 'multitude' (as in the
> Hardt interview which was
> recently posted to
> aut-op-sy:
>
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_&_event/v004/4.3hardt.html).
> As
> someone put it at a meeting I went to in London,
> capital as Subject
> should not be confronted by a Working Class Subject,
> but rather we
> confront it as a multitude of subjects.

this is interesting to me since it seemed pretty clear
to me in my reading of empire (primarily in the mole
and snake section) that "the multitude" was being used
as a way to reformulate (recognize the recomposition
of) the working class linguistically. they seem to me
pretty clear that what they are claiming is that the
notion of the working class centered on the "mass
factory worker" is the problem, and that by
"multitude" they are merely emphesizing that the
working class is (a) multi-various and complex
subject(s), not that "capital as Subject should not be
confronted by a Working Class Subject, but rather we
confront it as a multitude of subjects". that is: to
understand the proletariat-as-revolutionary-subject
you have to understand it's multi-nodal, complex
nature. you have to understand that it is a
"multitude". and that, by extension, it is (in part)
thru this complexity that the working class is a
threat to capital.


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