Re: AUT: Re: hegelian stuff

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

On Sun, 11 Aug 2002, cwright wrote:

> Nate,
>
> I can't speak on people like Bologna, Tronti, Panzieri, etc. but Negri is
> solidly and completely anti-Hegelian and anti-dialectic.  His substantive
> critique of negation in Empire shows that very clearly, as do other aspects
> of his theoretical apparatus.  The influence of Althusser certainly meant a
> very anti-Hegelian tendency in whoever adopted his ideas.

Hopefully the last sentence was intended to be separate from the earlier
ones because Negri hardly "adopted" Althusser's ideas. He brought to
Althusser's seminar such radically different ideas that he used the
Grundrisse to exposit them rather than directly attack Althusser's
reading of Capital. (BTW after Althusser died, I perused his copy of
Negri's Marx Beyond Marx and there was no indication whatsoever that he
had read the book --those he had read and worked were full of underlinings
and marginal notes and Negri's book was clean as a whistle.)

<snipped section on Debord>
>
> Of course, it is worth noting, again and again, that Marx was also indebted
> to the Old Man, and any acqauintance with Hegel will make it clear that many
> of Marx's categories bear the imprint of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and
> The Logic.

Absolutely true. The real issue is the kind of "imprint" one finds. In
other words how Marx adopted and used Hegels concepts and whether there
are radical differences. I used to use Hegel in teaching Marx but later
decided it was more useful to use Marx to critique Hegel.


> The people who claim that Marx dumped Hegel in his later years
> have a political-ideological axe to grind because Hegel's influence is all
> over each section of Capital and the books on Surplus Value, as well as the
> Grundrisse (which makes Negri's fondness for the Grundrisse particularly
> hilarious and ironic) and other smaller works.

Again the issue is what is meant by "dumped". Althusser argued Marx
dumped the Hegelian analysis of alienation of the 1844 Manuscripts but not
that Marx dumped the dialectic. How could he when he himself was a born
again diamatician. Negri's fondness for the Grundrisse (1857) as opposed
to Capital (1867) is explained in his book Marx Beyond Marx and has
nothing to do with the absence or presence of Hegel in either. The
traditional orthodox left always leaned heavily on Capital, even before
Althusser's "rereading" and Negri found in the Grundrisse
formulations that provided opportunities to counterpose a very different
reading of Marx. When he lectured at Althusser's seminar it also provided
a rhetorical way to avoid a direct attack on his host's version of Marxism
while launching a wide-ranging indirect attack.


> As John Holloway puts it in
> his new book, we are not dialecticians because we are materialists, but
> materialists because we are dialecticians.  This was certainly true of Marx.

Whatever that means. Cute but opaque.

> Now, one can level of a critique of those categories, but as with Negri, one
> wonders what is actually left of Marx's critique.

Look, the anti-dialectical tradition to which Negri has attached himself,
so to speak, is one that sees capital itself as a social system that
imposes dialectical relations on people. (This is my forumulation.)
Capital imposes exploitation and endless work and alienation and endless
circuits of sameness that bind the resistance to that imposition into
itself (into contradiction). To the degree that it is successful it
reduces the inevitable antagonism to mere contradiction that functions as
a motor of the capitalist dialectic, of its own movement. The
anti-dialectical moment of this analysis is the perception that
in successful working class struggle the resistance or antagonism ruptures
the binding and thus ruptures the dialectic. Moreover the resistance or
antagonism is not merely negative but includes the kind of positive
creativity that Marx saw in living labor (but we can generalize far beyond
it) that creates new, non-dialectical ways of being, i.e., ways of being
not involving the creation/subordination of antagonism into contradiction.

> Werner Bonefeld has an
> insightful set of comments on non-dialectical Marxism in one of the back
> issues of Common Sense where he discusses structuralism and autonomism(sic).

If this is the piece I think it is, I think it was awful. He gave it at a
CSE conference in England and I rebutted it there. I was asked to write
up my rebuttal for Commonsence but never got around to it --mainly I
think because in debate I found Werner impermeable to argument, so
repeating myself, once again, in print seemed useless-- so they
published his piece independently. As you can see in Commonsense, in
John's writings, and in the Open Marxism collections we share a perception
of the self-activity of the working class but those who associate
themselves with "Open Marxism" as a perpective have an attachment to such
things as dialectics that we do not share at all.

<snip>

> For example, without any explicit reference to dialectics, Mariarosa Dalla
> Costa, Selma James and Leopoldina Fortunadi formulated a very powerful
> critique of Marx's own limited understanding of the relation of reproduction
> to production in Capital.  that failure meant a failure to grasp the
> centrality of women's struggles to the rest of the working class and
> housework as surplus-value producing and socially capitalist labor, but in a
> different way from waged labor.  Harry Cleaver talks about it a bit, but
> does not take it as far as Fortunadi, for example, who develops a systematic
> critique of Marx based on a close-reading and critique of Capital and
> Theories of Surplus Value.  Good critique, but does it really hit the mark?
> Not sure yet myself, but it is the most important stuff I have read because
> of its vast political implications which have been seriously
> under-appreciated.

Mariarosa, Selma and Silvia Federici's work in the wages for housework
movement is, as far as I am concerned, an indispensible extension or
complement to Marx's own work (and involves some critique of him for not
having worked through much of what they have understood). But Silvia
disassociated herself from Fortunati for both theoretical and political
reasons that she may or may not ever speak to directly. As opposed to
Fortunati's book I would recommend, as was done here recently by someone
else, Silvia's Caliban and her other writings which continue and elaborate
the wfh insights. I'm not sure what "take it as far as Fortunati" means.
But the wfh insight that housework can reduce the value of labor power to
capital and thus increase surplus value has been central to my own
analysis for over a quarter of a century. It was for that that I
elaborated the "circuit of the reproduction of labor power" to complement
Marx's circuits of money, commodity and productive capital and facilitate
an exposition of the interelationship between unwaged and waged work in
capitalism. I began that within the context of teaching, extended it in
the analysis of public health and subsequently my students have done so in
the case of peasant unwaged work and struggle in Mexico and Nigeria.

H.

>
> I'm sure that doesn't help :)
>
> Cheers,
> Chris
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Nate Holdren" <nateholdren@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Friday, August 09, 2002 11:27 AM
> Subject: AUT: hegelian stuff
>
>
> > 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.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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').
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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
> >
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> > _________________________________________________________________
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> >
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> >
>
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............................................................................
Snail-mail:
Harry Cleaver
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Austin
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............................................................................



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