Re: AUT: Re: autonomist crisis theory

["Karl Carlile" <dagda@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Like the pope sir you are infallible.

I found Chris Wright's response quite convincing - what
I find unconvincing is your refusal to actually engage with it
in a politically and intellectually sustained way.  Any two-bit
paper seller for micro-sects X, Y, and Z can throw around epithets
like "petty bourgeois."
Best,
Ed C.

Karl Carlile wrote:

> You response is just not convincing
>
> --------
>
> Thank you for the helpful and perceptive posting.
>
> However, you happen to be wrong.  I did not even use the word
"individuals".
> Not once.  I did talk about micro-sized struggles, which could include
> actions in departments by a group of people, or small strikes, or
slowdowns,
> or all kinds of struggles that small (understood here as something that
may
> be isolated in one fashion or another and which does not involve large
> numbers of workers or a central point of production that shuts things
down)
> groups or individuals wage.  So where you get the idea that I only mean
> "individuals" is not clear to me, except that you read what you wanted to
> read, but not what I wrote.
>
> But even so, mass struggle (you know, hundreds of thousands and millions
of
> people, that kind of scale) is not the only way in which people struggle
> with capital.  Nor is it the only important form of struggle.  Nor do
> individuals cease to exist as legitimate actors in the class struggle.
All
> of those small struggles, some of them seemingly individual struggles,
work
> like grains of sand between two gears, slowly eating away at the
functioning
> of the gears.  However, as I implied in a later post, the indivdual grains
> of sand also happen to be the prerequisite for the bucket of sand poured
> into the machine sometimes.  the two have a relationship.  If individuals
> and small groups did not resist, then we would have to leap from no one
> struggling to mass struggles, out of nowhere.
>
> I am NOT claiming that each act of insubordination is as good, as
effective
> or as conscious as the next.  Every thief violates the sanctity of
property,
> but not every act of theft hurts capital.  Some can reinforce capital.
Some
> don't.  I know someone who "aquired" equipment from work, and the other
> workers took up the idea as a way to get back at the company.  that
> eventually led to an attempt to organize a union, but the original act
came
> from someone consciously stealing as a means of sticking it to the
company,
> and sharing that perspective with her co-workers.  I also know people who
> steal and want to be rich.
>
> To make some absolute separation between individual struggle and mass
> struggle is to lose the links in how insubordination, struggle, is
> omnipresent, how the rejection  of the capital-labor relation permeates
all
> levels.  That would be 'petty bourgeois'.  On the other hand, to make a
> virtue of individual struggle, at the expense of ignoring mass struggle,
> would be wrong and 'petty bourgeois'.  To see that the crisis of
capitalism
> involves both individual, small, medium, large and mass struggles
altogether
> is to recognize that crisis flows from struggle, not from 'structural
> problems'.  Strucutralism is another 'petty bourgeois' approach because it
> denies agency to the class for self-emancipation.  Class struggle then
just
> 'mediates' structures, rather than creating those structures.
>
> Of course, using 'petty bourgeois' in this way tells us nothing because it
> fails to show any serious linkage between class and ideology.  It is,
> rather, ham-fisted denunciation that discourages conversation and
dialogue.
>
> Finally, someone asked a specific question: if crisis is caused by
struggle,
> then how can autonomist Marxists see the current slide into recession as a
> product of struggle?  What can we possibly mean by struggle?  Or do we
have
> to go back to the structuralist, "objective laws of motion of capital"
> approach common to Leninism, Social Democracy and most academic Marxism?
>
> If you have a good answer for that, THAT would be helpful.
>
> Cheers,
> Chris
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Karl Carlile" <dagda@xxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Monday, February 19, 2001 12:32 PM
> Subject: AUT: Re: Re: autonomist crisis theory
>
> > The latter part of this posting cannot be taken seriously. Under this
> > perception class struggle is no longer the struggle of the class but
> simply
> > the resistance of individuals who are members of the working class. Very
> > petty bourgeois.
> >
> > Regards
> > Karl Carlile
> >
> > Visit our Communist Think-Tank Web Site at:
> > http://homepage.eircom.net/~beprepared/
> >
> > Join our Communist Think-Tank Mailing Community  at:
> > mailto:rev-commies-subscribe@xxxxxxxxxxx
> >
>
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