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

["Chris Wright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The point of language is well made, and if I skipped that with anyone, I
apologize.  I think Peter and commie00 both mentioned it.  I agree some
language may be 'past its expiration date'.  The dictatorship of the
proletariat had a different meaning in Marx's day, at least to some extent.
I think Marx uses less in the sense of a particularlr repressive form of
state than the working class as socially dominant (hence every democracy,
including bourgeois democracy, is a dictatorship of one class.)  After the
Commune, even Engels (at his better moments) defended this conception
against the use that was flowering among the Kautskys and Bebels.

The anarchist tradition may consider that irrelevant, and they may be right.
I must admit I am not exactly running around talking about the need to
establish the DoP :)
Chris
----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Wright" <pmargin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2000 4:55 AM
Subject: Re: AUT: Re: empire, multitude & class ...


> 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
>
>
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>



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