Re: AUT: hegelian stuff

["Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 9 Aug 2002, Nate Holdren wrote:

> Can anyone tell me a little about the history of the reception of concepts
> like alienation, reification, ideology, and fetishism among the Italian
> autonomist marxists and other similar folks who are important to
> autonomist/libertarian marxism today?
>
> I read that Tronti (I think it was him) was at one point called a hegelian
> due to an essay he wrote, but I don't know why this was the case or what
> that was supposed to mean.

Nate: perhaps Steve can respond to this in some detail. I never paid much
attention because these concepts were not central to the Italian material
that interested me when I was working on the history of their development.

>
> In my limited exposure it seems that there are pretty big differences in the
> autonomist/libertarian marxist stuff around ideas like alienation, ideology,
> reification, fetishism, etc, which I understand to be part of a hegelian
> heritage w/ in marxism.

You are quite right about this. There have been big differences. Just as
an example Hegel and hegelian dialectics were extremely important to the
Johnson Forest people. Raya was one of the first, if not the first, to
translate 1844 Manuscript material into English. And explicit Hegelian
perspectives permeate her and James' work: see his "Notes on Dialectics"
and just about anything she wrote. On the other hand, as I said, these
references were not central to much of Italian autonomist thought.

>
> It's been a little while but I don't remember much discussion of any of the
> above in Harry's _Reading Capital Political_ or Nick Dyer-Witheford's
> _CyberMarx_, nor much in Steve Wright's _Storming Heaven_, which are my 3
> principle sources of info on the autonomist tradition.

There is not much discussion in RCP because I judged it would be a
distraction from the main focus on working class autonomy. It would also
have required dealing with many of what I considered at the time secondary
differences among those writers who interested me, and would have required
a more detailed critique of "dialectics" and Hegelian Marxism than I
wanted to get into at that point. If you want to see something of my own
sympathies for Marx's analysis of alienation check out my course website
material dealing with chapter seven of Capital. Unlike Althusser and his
ilk I consider Marx's early understanding of alienation to permeate his
later work.http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/357ksg07.html


>
> I know the Johnson-Forest tendency and its various descendents were and are
> very concerned with hegelian ideas, as are a number of the Common Sense/Open
> Marxism folks.
> I vaguely remember Debord discussing hegel in places. Though I can't recall
> his position the idea of the spectacle seems fairly contiguous with
> reification, alienation, etc.

Yes, on Johnson-Forest and yes on Debord, but Chris has already spoken to
the latter.

>
> I don't remember Negri and Hardt taking up any of this in a substantive
> manner in _Empire_ (other than snide comments about 'the dialectic').

Negri's opposition to "the dialectic" is much more than snide comments. He
is firmly within the the anti-dialectical tradition identified and
analyzed at some length by Gilles Deleuze. That anti-dialectics, however,
is not at all the same as Althusser's anti-Hegelianism but involves a
rejection of the notion of an all encompassing, neverending movement of
the sort that Althusser was all too happy to take over from diamat and
remix with his own "philosophical" twists.

>
> At this point I don't know what to make of ideas like alienation, ideology,
> etc. They were initially very important to me when I first read Marx, but
> now I'm not sure what I think about this. It seems a lot of great and
> important work gets done both with and without these concepts, and people
> who have had a huge impact on me have been all over the spectrum in relation
> to their use of these ideas.

Not being sure what you think is a great point of departure for sorting
ideas out and coming up with a new reading. I would say read the original
writings and try to see if you find counterparts elsewhere in life.
There are huge literatures on these ideas and much of it is, IMHO, a
waste of time. Begin at the beginning.


H.


>
> I'm less interested in starting a debate here on the relative validity and
> utility of hegel. Rather I'd like to hear a little from people who know a
> lot of the history and theory better than I do how and why different people
> have or have not employed different concepts, and taken these concepts as
> either central to or not necessary for marxism.
>
> any info is much appreciated.
>
> Nate
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Join the worlds largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail.
> http://www.hotmail.com
>
>
>
>      --- from list aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
>

............................................................................
Snail-mail:
Harry Cleaver
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712-1173  USA

Phone Numbers:
(hm)  (512) 442-5036
(off) (512) 475-8535
Fax:(512) 471-3510

E-mail:
hmcleave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
PGP Public Key: http://certserver.pgp.com:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=hmcleave

Cleaver homepage:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index2.html

Chiapas95 homepage:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html

Accion Zapatista homepage:
http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
............................................................................




     --- from list aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---