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

["Chris Wright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

How can I resist?

> >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'.
No, the simple point is that capital does not exist by itself, nor does it
have any positive existence.  I don't think it is a small point to make
since many Marxists, esp. those defending the tired old notion of 'base and
superstructure' (which you may or may not), basically turn class struggle
into something which at most mediates the structures and 'laws' that
magically exist independently of it.  Capital does NOT exist as the product
of the struggle between labor and and the attempt to exploit it in this
view.  Where is the class struggle in the base/superstructure notion?  That
is partially what I am trying to get at.
>
> >   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.
But does the working class exist as the bearer of something other than the
capital-labor relation?  Yes.  Does capital?  No.  Capital can be nothing
other than what it is and it roams blindly about because of it
(competition.)  Labor, on the other hand, the working class, has a future as
its own negation when it negates (overthrows) capital, i.e. the relation of
exploitation.  The relationship is not symmetrical, but asymmetrical.  We
are not talking about thesis-antithesis-synthesis here, in which the two
come together to form something new.  Labor's revolution means the absolute
negation of capital, not blending in with it.  That's why the working class
has a different meaning in relation to capital, than capital does in
relation to labor.

> >   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.

Actually, the working class may continue to exist to some extent, even if as
a vanishing class after the revolution because we will not get to
revolutionize everything at once.  I expect 'a bit' of a lag between the
revolution and the achievement of communism.  I won't bother repeating The
Critique of the Gotha Program.  I could take an example nearer to home.
Under the so-called 'communist' regimes, nothing much of a capitalist class
existed.  But capital existed as long as the dominatio of labor existed.
Marx recognizes this in the French edition of Capital (1873, roughly), when
he says that even if capital became one big trust, we would have the same
old shit.  In the so-called 'communist' regimes, the state acted to suppress
the working class, extort labor, and engage in accumulation.  It took
decades for a capitalist class to remerge in those countries, and we have
seen the results.  But the abscence of a coherent capitalist class did not
stop the exploitation of labor.

I also do not see where you get the idea that I defend a denial of class
differences.  I just see capital as the ultimately weak and dependent pole
of the class relation.  Marx did not write about the power of capital or to
show how it worked.  He wrote to show its weakness and vulnerability because
it is a product of labor's power.

> >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.

First, crisis as Marxists usually refer to it means 'economic crisis', a bit
of a problem in the first place.  But I would argue, along with a pretty
good tradition from autonomism, that it is not 'overproduction',
'underconsumption', 'disequilibrium between departments', 'The Tendency of
the rate of profit to fall', etc., but the overaccumulation of capital, aka
the overexploitation of labor power.  All these other things are simply
expressions of the fact that capital has run into a roadblock where it
cannot any longer get the producitivity gains, wage cuts, etc. because the
working class creates a barrier in struggle.  For example, the post-WWII
boom did not end because of competition, overproduction, etc., but because
teh international working class began to reject the post-war deal of
producitivity increases for wage increases.  Alongside this came the
anti-colonial struggles which disrupted capital's power and cost huge sums
of money.  Examples?  Viet Nam, Algeria, Portugal in 1974, Chile 73, Prague
Spring 68, Paris '68, the Hot Autumn in Italy, the Black power movement (esp
in the factories), the U.S. wave of wildcats in the late 1960's to early
1970's, and so on.  Is it an accident that these struggles coincided with
the oncoming crisis? Hardly.  They caused it by making it impossible for
capital to continue the same old accumulation at the same proit levels.  Is
that stretching it?  Not by half, I think.

Second, the 'economic' notion of class is a very constricted one.  class
shapes every relationship.  Almost every relation in society in and through
the class struggle, whether gender, race, sexuality, etc.  That is part of
capital's legacy and brittleness: the total immersion of the world in a
highly perfected form of class relation.  Everything becomes abstract in
capitalist society because human labor itself becomes traded for the perfect
and meaningless form of money, the ultimate abstraction of all life into
quantifiable terms.  In return, class becomes the generative relation for
all other social relations.
> >[...]
> >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.

See above on miraculous immediate disappearance of the working class and
thousands of years of shit.

> >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?

No, it is a political difference and a language problem brought on by that
difference. we defend different Marxisms.  But that is what this list is
about.
>
> >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.

Well, race has its origins in the expansion of European capital.  The
struggle against the Islamic empire that dominated Spain ('Moores' were well
known and racially vilified in Shakespeare already.)  The earlier Crusades.
And most of all, Slavery, which was totally bound to the formation of
capitalist social relations and development.  So the very origin of
capitalist class relations is deeply connected with the domination by
capital of a slave class, but expressed in the fairly newly emergent terms
of race.

> >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.
Race is interwoven into every aspect of class.  The very formation of the
working class in the U.S. was built on two working classes, one mostly
white, the other totally Black.  After slavery (and the concept of race and
racism changes after slavery and emancipation), the trade union movement
built itself in large part on a white-supremacist basis in the form of the
AFofL (exlusionary clauses, segregated locals, etc.).  Even people like Debs
were in denial (and in the case of the Mexican Revolution, openly racist),
much the less the very racist right wing of the Socialist Party like Victor
Berger and the anti-Chinese racism of Jack London and the California SP.
The IWW stands out as very unique in that aspect.  And inthe South and West,
they made huge efforts to combat white supremacy.  They had the first ever
integrated union meetings in the South.  In the West, they invited Chinese
workers in a very conscious way as a counter to the AFofL and the SP.  And
capital has always used race as a battering ram to fragment the working
class.  It is no accident that after slavery, the struggle was to keep Black
labor tied to sharecropping in the South.  Is it an accident that mostly
white Northern labor failed to rally to Reconstruction?  Is it an accident
that the white leaders of the 1877 General Strike in St. Louis turned the
city back over rather than being branded 'lawless, like a bunch of n***ers"?

How about the CIO?  During the 1930's, even the CIO operated segregated
locals and refused to challenge white supremacy because they did not want to
break with Roosevelt, who squashed any discussion of civil rights in order
to maintain his block with the Dixiecrats.  Relief to farmers and programs
like the CCC were specifically designed to guarantee that most benefits went
to whites and consciously excluded Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers.
After WWII, the CIO actually worked with the KKK in Alabama to break the
CP-led steel workers union (I forget the name.)

Do I have to go on?  The very idea of organized, unionized labor until the
1960's was also 'white'.  White workers fought tooth and nail to keep Black
and non-white immigrants out of the skilled trades and best jobs, off union
posts, and very often out of jobs.  Many strikes during WWII were to keep
Black workers out of factories.  And let's face it, in a world where the
capitalist class is almost lily-white (one of the ost interesting changes
since the 1960's is the emergence of a black middle class and a tiny, tiny
Black bourgeois layer thatis firly integrated into white corporate America),
whiteness confers privileges, even to workers, provided they renounce
allegiance to their class when called upon to be white.  The plant manager
is usually white, and the white workers have a lot better chance of marrying
his/her kids than the Black workers do.  Whiteness is a form of class
collaboration.  it is not simple 'villification' or 'prejudice', but a power
relation grounded in capital's struggle with the power of labor.

Is racist law enforcement a class question?  Ask O.J. Simpson or Chief
Justice Clarence Thomas.  Who's in jail in a hugely disproportionate way?
Working class African Americans.  Between two working class men accused of a
crime, who is more likely to go to jail or get the death penalty?  And that
works to divide the working class.  i would call it a way in which class
gets decomposed by race.

> >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?

Ok, the bumpkin thing is a little bit of a bait.  Please.  I admit, I should
have said "cannot be reduced to an economistic notion of class".  As I
explained earlier, in discussing the state, capital is and is not
fragmented.  We know that the economic and the political are not separate at
a deep level.  But on the surface, and in a way that is really existing,
they are.  Capitalist society is fragmented in appearance, and this reflects
something real.  otherwise, marx's statement in Capital that bourgeois
society is freedom, equality and Bentham makes no sense.  It is free and
unfree at the same time (or rather, its freedom is an unfree kind of
freedom, such as the freedom for rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges,
eat from garbage cans, etc.)  just like living in a democracy has benefits
over living in a military or fascist dictatorship.  At least I hope that is
clear...  The same problem applies to race.  Race appears independent of
class, and to some extent it is.  To the extent that the fetish of race
succeeds in creating class collaboration and working class fragmentation in
one section (and across class lines) and unequal exploitation and political
rights for another section (and across class lines.), it hides its ties to
class and therefore creates a social relation with real effects which have
to be fought.  To that extent, Black Liberation is a real, revolutionary
force.  it threatens capital directly because it means the insurgence of the
poorest layers, the layers that have also tended to be a real vanguard of
class struggle (vanguard here as a section of the working class that tends
to lead by example and daring out of necessity, not a 'party' notion at
all.)  It threatens capital indirectly by challenging a means of fragmenting
the working class.  So I think that a communist or anarchist politics which
is not simultaneously pro-Black Liberation and against whiteness is a weak
politics.

To the extent that racism is part and parcel of capital's very existence
(and always has been), the notion that we can end it under capital's reign
is rather absurd.  Racism will be severely weakened by the end of capital,
but even then, i do not have high hopes that we will see it disappear as if
by magic.

Flame proof jammies holding up, barely,
Chris Wright

I will probably duck out of this thread after this point, unless other
people want to join in.  I am not sure this is anything other than two
monologues at this point.  We shall see.  But I think it a bad sign when
everyone else stops responding but two people arguing back and forth.



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