Re: ruling class subjectivity, was: Re: AUT: a rejuvenated

[Bill Bartlett <billbartlett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris Wright wrote:

>Okay, this may be a bit cryptic...
>
>I think the point for me is that capital (and as a result, the capitalist
>class) has no existence except as the product and dominator of working class
>labor power.

What's your point Chris? The exception you allow to the non-existence
of the capitalist class seems a pretty enormous one. You might as
well say something like 'seawater doesn't exist, except in the
oceans'.


>   Capitalists exist as individual subjects, but their existence
>as a class has no meaning separate from alienated labor.

It is in the natire of class structures that the definition of one
class has no meaning except in relation to other classes. The
existence of the working class has no meaning except in ralation to
the employing class either.


>   In fact, their
>more real existence is as a class, since as individuals they can be nice or
>mean or cruel or compassionate, but as a class they are always exploiters
>and we get to the kernel of who they are.  If we stay at the level of
>capitalists as individual subjects, we lapse into 'good and bad
>capitalists'.  If we move to the level of capitalists as a class, then they
>have no meaningful existence as subjects (rather, they are subjected to
>their perpetual attempt to dominate and exploit labor and exist therefore as
>totally unfree because without labor, they perish.  That is the state of
>being of an object, not a subject, in my reading.)

By "they perish" I gather you mean that, without the working class
the capitalist class ceases to exist. But of course the same can be
said for the working class, for without the capitalist class the
working class would also cease to exist. Without another class, there
would be nothing to distinguish the working class as a working class.

You aren't making any sense I'm afraid. If this is a fancy way of
denying the existence of class distinction, just come right out and
say so plainly.

>[...]
>Capital does not have an existence or motion separate from the disruptive
>power of labor

But it does seem to have other problems as well as the class
struggle. These problems usually come down to the way free markets
work under conditions of excess productive capacity. Something of a
serious structural problem when you consider the massive productive
capacity of modern-day technology.  If you think otherwise, please
explain your reasoning. I can see how the exclusively "vertical"
analysis of capitalism's problems might be supportable by some rather
broad definitions of "class struggle" (including the operations of
market forces within the definition of class struggle for example).
But other than such strained efforts, I am inclined to dismiss either
the eclusively "vertical" or the exclusively "horizontal" theories.

>[...]
>Labor, on the other hand, will not cease to exist with the end of capital.

Labour no, but the working *class*, as a class, cannot but cease to
exist in any meaningful way if there is no other class. At the risk
of stating the obvious, again, class is a concept which depends on
distinctions.  A classification system with only a single
classification category would be supremely perverse.


>It will throw off its exploitative and oppressive character and become 'the
>free association of laborers', with a resulting reorganization of every
>aspect of human life.  In that sense, capital is not a real subject, but an
>object posing as a subject, a reified object.
>
>Now that I have "cleared" that up...

Sorry Chris, from where I sit you don't appear to be saying anything
at all, at least nothing that is clear to me. The only meaning I can
discern from what you say on this subject  seems totally illogical.
Is this another language problem?


>Chris
>
>p.s.  The multitude word.  It begs the question of a multi-linear versus a
>unilinear conception of revolution, doesn't it?  I am ambivalent about this
>term in part because I understand the clarity of Marx's notion of the
>working class as revolutionary Subject.  However, 'multitude' seems to imply
>that all our 'identities' offer revolutionary possibilities without really
>drawing out the relationship of different forms of human social relations
>(race, gender, etc.)  I think that anti-racist struggle, the good old
>fashioned Black Liberation struggle, has radically anti-capitalist
>possibilities because of the way in which race is interwoven with class.

Please explain how race is interwoven into class? This is not obvious
to me, there seems to be no natural correlation between the two
different classification systems.

>However, I also tend to think of race in terms of a particular fetishization
>of human relations that does not exist separately from class, but is
>grounded in class, both historically and theoretically.  In that sense, i
>view race as a class problem,

Sorry, I strongly disagree. Racial discrimination and racial
vilkification seems to me to be a problem theoretically amenable to
solution even within the context of present capitalist economic
relations.

>without denying that race takes on a life ot
>its own in capitalist society.  Race may not exist biologically, but it does
>exist politically and socially, and it cannot be reduced to class.

OK, this definitely must be some sort of a language problem. On the
one hand you say race is a class problem, yet in the next breath you
say it cannot be reduced to class. How about you run that one past
again, a bit slower though, for the bumpkins amongst us?

Bill Bartlett
Bracknell tas


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