Re: AUT: Re: autonomist crisis theory

[Rob Schaap <rws@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Happy with heaps of your stuff, Chris, but I'm not sure what this bit means.

>We do need to understand class in a
>refreshed way, which understands Capital not as an objectivist,
>structuralist piece of political economy, but as a text where every category
>is imbued with class struggle, is constituted by class struggle, is a
>critique of political economy aimed right at the heart of capital.

Sure, capitalism is a text in the sense that it has authors (human
society), but what's the nature of the distinction you make above?  I would
agree that Das Kapital was but one book in a projected corpus (marx was not
a well man, and one who took too long getting his manuscripts right - used
to drive poor Freddie Engels to the odd glass beyond thirst at times), and
that, being about capital, this particular volume took capital as its
subject.  And, yes, I would agree that people often make the mistake of
casting the human as non-agentic flotsam in a sea of blind accumulation
(yes, I loathe the ship Althusser and all the mad opaque antihumanist
postie ideas who have since sailed in her) as a consequence of Das
Kapital's historical salience.  But none of that means we have to risk
forays into ambiguity and amorphous gallic terminology.  Capitalism is a
product of man, has contradictions immanent within it, and always and
everywhere manifests as class struggle.  I think we agree, but I'm scared
we're going where we needn't go here, that's all.

>As for autonomists who believe that mass struggles cause crisis, I think
>that it is more a contradiction in their work (again, what little i have
>read) that keeps haunting me.  They want to move in a different direction,
>but ultimately, because I think they see BOTH capital and labor as
>autonomous, as externally connected rather than as internally connected,
>that they see mass struggles (seen here as 'external' struggles) as the
>locus of crisis.  They understand labor against capital, but often fail to
>grasp labor as in-AND-against capital.

I'm wondering already why I felt moved to post in instant response -
something's worrying me, but I find myself so often in agreement, I'm
forced to sit back and take stock here ... perhaps it's that we're always
blathering away in the abstract (y'know, when people suddenly stop talking
about people, and start talking about 'subjects' etc).  Perhaps we'd make
more sense to ourselves if we went with what we have and take a good look
at the world.

Evidence for the sort of thing you're talking about is all around us, I
reckon.  More starkly than it usually presents itself, too.  The
inevitability of 'globalisation' and the uncritical association of
neoliberalism (the theory of high capitalism - kept back for the moment
when capitalism must confront the source of its own legitimation and
amelioration, the state) with inevitable improvements in human welfare -
well, the whole package is unravelling before our eyes, it seems.  Four
years ago, I was doubting Gramsci's salving words that hegemony could never
be complete, but I was wrong.  Just coz ya can't see stuff don't mean
stuff's not happening, eh?  Like tectonics.  And the earthquake's afoot.
The natives are restless.  You should feel the tide turning here in
thoroughly Anglo-Saxonised Australia.  Motherhood'n'apple-pie articles of
faith are suddenly on the nose everywhere.  Sure, people don't have
self-consciously articulated theories for what's happening to them - not
even for what they're doing themselves - but they smell a rat alright!  And
the dissent is spontaneously taking a mainstreaming order of magnitude.

Pity the radical right are taking better advantage than the left here, but
then the purists always manage to stuff up a decent effort at left
organisation ... anyway, the pseudosocdems are back in fashion with a
vengeance around these parts.  Not coz anyone wanted 'em, but because their
rhetoric is at least a step away from the more honest neoliberals on the
other side - and all we can imagine, and all that 'the democratic process'
allows, at the moment is to avoid lung cancer by opting for tuberculosis.
But that doesn't mean something deeper ain't afoot ...

Er, I'm blathering again - but capital is wearing manifest body-blows from
proletariat and petit-bourgeois alike at the moment - a volatile and even
dangerous mix, being as how it could culminate in xenophobic bloody
reaction as easily as a tide of internationalist democracy, but an
empirical mess that looks not unlike an autonomist might have thought it'd
look, I reckon.

Cheers,
Rob.




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