Re: AUT: Re: empire, multitude & class ...

[Steve Wright <pmargin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris Wright wrote:
>

> from Marx.  And this notion of the multitude depends on (or rather extends)
> the notion of the 'social worker', the next stage from the 'mass worker'.  I

while I tried to savage the 'social worker' thesis in the article you mentioned,
I still wonder if there isn't some mileage in the notion of 'the multitude'.
What intrigues me about it is

a) it suggests many subjects rather than just one (which is what I associated
with the 'social worker' as an attempt to encompass everything and their dog).
Of course it's easy enough to come up a version of 'the multitude' that DOES
suffer the same problem as the 'social worker', but maybe - just maybe - it's salvagable.

b) a use of language that doesn't evoke either classical marxism or populism,
and all the baggage they bring with them. But that could just be the bad poet
and failed bible scholar in me - it is, after all, a term more reminiscient of
the turmoil of the 17th and 18th centuries in England ('the swinish multitude')
than anything else. And as I argued a few months ago, I am definitely not
convinced by the Negri/Hardt argument that struggles of the past decade or so
are unable to communicate horizontally (and Harry offered some arguments why
their particular examples didn't hold), which is also part of the mole/snake
discussion in Empire . . .

Anyway, I am interested to know what others think of such categories in terms of
the talk in some circles (eg Midnight Notes), since  the Zapatistas (and
before), of developing a new language that can communicate/resonate in ways that
at least *part* of the traditional revolutionary lexicon (whether marxist or
anarchist) no longer seems to do. Or I could be wrong about all this: clearly
it's possible to talk about/against capitalism again without automatically
drawing strange looks, so maybe dictatorship of the proletariat (or 'the D of
the P', as it was called in one group I belonged to in the early 1980s) will
just starting rolling off the tongue in conversations in offices and company
canteens around the globe . . .

I'm keen for some forms of language that hold explanatory power (which I think
notions like 'valorisation process' still do) and are able to combine this with
an ability to communicate with those currently beyond the fold. Not sure how to
get there though. It's something I feel about the IWW at times: the language
used 90 years ago was often refreshing - or so I sense, not having been here
then so far as I can tell - but as a collectivity, we neo-wobs (I know there are
a few of us on this list) are sometimes weighed down in our PR material by that
language, and still need to help invent ways of communicating that follow the
spirit if not always the letter of way back then.

Sorry, a bit of a unhinged rave - I may have to borrow Chris' flame-proof underthings.

Steve


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