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

["Chris Wright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks for the response.  Good food for thought.

> One of the major benefits of Negri's formulation of labour and capital as
> two subjects is that it takes us away from the problematic distinctions of
> 'capitalist' and 'worker', with the former being a 100% bad guy and the
> latter being 100% good guy/woman. We've all seen some on the left
agonising
> as to who's in which gang, particularly those perceived as higher up the
> hierarchy of the division of labour (working class policemen? teachers?).

> With Negri's formulation 'capital' and 'labour' become identities that we
> both occupy to a greater or lesser extent. For instance, in my job I am a
> part of labour when I'm writing e-mails to a left discussion list, but I
am
> a part of capital when I chase a customer for payment. This is not to say
> I'm on a par with the WTO but it keeps in focus the layout of the social
> forces. Capitalism is a social relation, after all, not one group of
people
> versus another. That is to say, the subjects that we concentrate on in
> analysis is not that of the human but of labour and capital.

I do think that this does obscure the class relation though.  At least in
the way you put it here.  Class is not an identity one wears with this or
that task.  It is a relation to production and struggle simultaneously.  A
professor who fixes cars on the side is not a worker.  He/she is a middle
class person who fixes cars on the side, communist, anarchist or Republican.
Their relation to production and their place in the management of class
power is central.  While I agree on the uselessness of sociological
definitions in an absolute sense, the whole point of class composition is to
have a sense of the changing composition of the working class in relation to
other classes, not to deny the existence of a working class and the
possibility of recognizing some people as working class and others as not.
That is not to define good and bad morally, but to know where our power
comes from and how to leverage it; to know what social posotions lend
themselves to managing capital's power, rather than smashing it.

The human, if I understand you, is never an amorphous human, but a socially
existing human with a specific form and relationship to production.  Capital
may decompose those relations (in fact, its power depends on decomposing by
race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, native vs foreigner, etc.), but that
is the source of its power, not ours.  Ours is in class unity, the
possibility of the working class to represent the Universal in humanity, a
unity which depends on recognizing and battling the separations.  By this, i
do not propose that we, say, ask women to forget about their particular form
of oppression.  Just the opposite: that working men make the political
choice to struggle against the unequal oppression and exploitation of women
as a necessary precondition of class unity, and that they defend every
struggle by women for liberation from patriarchy, in practice and theory.
Revolutionary class unity is simultaneously anti-patriarchy, anti-white
supremacy or pro-Black, pro-woman, etc.  This challenges the ways the
oppressor invades the working class.  It is not enough to demand abstract
class unity.  It requires that we fight every oppression, and every moment
of our possible complicity in that oppression.  Women's oppression depends
on most men accepting it (which depends on male privilege.)  In the process,
working class men side with the oppressor and turn against our class and
colaborate with the enemy.  I think Negri's position tends to undermine
rather than help illuminate this problem.  Like a lot of his work, he tosses
out the dialectic and tends towards the linear or one-sided.

> (With these definitions one also develops the problem of humanism, where
> it's believed that the working class people are somehow  fundamentally
> 'good', it carries the ethical qualities of communism within itself as an
> essence, qualities that are alienated by capitalism.)

Well put.  The possibility of communism is in the working class as negation,
as the class that can end class society, not as bearing some
already-existing 'positive essence'.



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