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

["Rowan Wilson" <wilson_rowan@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Chris

I don't see how this approach obscures the class relation or understandings
of class composition. This approach asks the question 'what is done' rather
than 'where are they' - that is, it's not about a single position of
individuals but about the relationship of their acts. Now this does include
an understanding of social position, of the author of an act, but it
recognises that we all occupy multiple social positions (say one person can
be a professor, a father, a son, a consumer, an activist, fixing cars on the
side, working in a bar for extra money, etc) - that each of our social
positions are a consolidation of acts - all these positions have a different
place in relation to capital - each of them feed in to the development or
inhibition of capital. Thus we can see how the sexist at home can be an
active agitator at work, the stakhanovite can be a tireless defender of
racial equality, etc. It is in this sense that I see the class struggle - it
runs through us as much as between us.

This is not to deny the existence of a working class - rather to point
towards the ubiquity of labour and its conflict with capital. It does not
mean that we ignore where people are situated, or the jobs that they are
doing, but it means we look beyond the classic 'point of production' as the
place where the conflict between labour and capital happens.

Sorry, run out of time!

Rowan


>From: Chris Wright <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Reply-To: aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>To: aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: Re: ruling class subjectivity, was: Re: AUT: a rejuvenated
>communist
>Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2000 21:45:47 -0600
>
>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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