Re: AUT: Re: autonomist crisis theory

[Peter van Heusden <pvh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Feb 18, 2001 at 01:11:09PM -0800, Sean Fenley wrote:
 i think the
> retreat from class in academic institutions has
> horrible consequences for this; people are no longer
> studying political economy, and for this reason many
> of the current struggles going on today are organized
> around reforming culture, or institutions and don't
> focus on overthrowing the economic system... i think
> these struggles need to complement each other not be
> self-indulgent or exclusive, to a have a chance of
> overthrowing capitalism.

I just want to briefly respond to this. I find the idea that
culture and political economy are two distinct, opposed
perspectives rather ludicrous. As many people have pointed
out, Marx did not 'study political economy' - he critiqued
the discipline, seeing the catagories of the discipline as
reifications of social relations. Marxists, however, have
done just the opposite - examined political economy as in
some way the basis of social relations, rather than their
reification. Now, obviously, in so far as we are confronted
by political economy as thing-like, it makes sense to study
the way that we (as 'things') are manipulated.

But to invert the current situation - to demand human
relations between humans - well, we can't get there simply
by studying political economy. It is precisely this understanding,
and a fuller understanding of what Marx was talking about
when he talked about alienation, which has led many people over
the last 50-70 years or so to examine the social relation that
is capital increasingly not as a thing, but rather as something
constantly produced by various strategies. (I'd argue that it
is here that the idea of 'discourse' finds its power - not in
pretending that the whole world is just language, but rather
in acknowledging the discursive structure of social relations)

The impetus to take 'culture' seriously did not come out of the
blue, but is, in my mind, intimately bound up with a richer
understanding of capital, and thus class. While some point to
the influence of French post-structuralists in introducing
'cultural studies', I think it is also important to grasp the
role feminism played in moving the study of culture beyond
its 'aesthetics' doldrums and into the spotlight as a terrain
of power. Now, I'm not arguing that the feminist inspired debates
which raged from the mid-1960s onwards were perfect, but I do think
that something important came out of them: the shift away from
seeing class as only produced in the context of wage-labour (and
thus the 'factory' or 'workplace'). Debates like those around the
relation of unpaid domestic labour to capitalism were just the
thin edge of the wedge, which opened up a whole new vision of a
world where the capital relation is enforced through much more than
factory walls and time-and-motion studies.

Sure, 'reforming culture' is hopeless (as the Situationists
so correctly argued) and 'reforming institutions' is not only hopeless,
but endlessly dreary. Seizing on cultural practices as a terrain
of power and contestation is, however, I think a rather important
step towards overthrowing the economy.

Peter
--
Peter van Heusden <pvh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics
"Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man
shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain
and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844
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