Re: AUT: hegelian stuff

[Steve Wright <pmargin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nate is referring to a piece by a then marxist-leninist active in a
precursor of Lotta Continua -  G. Cazzaniga (1967) 'I giovani hegeliani
del capitale collettivo', Giovane Critica 17, Autumn.

The title itself seems a fairly flip way of denouncing the work of
Tronti et al as 'idealist' (for which I believe there is a case in part,
but based upon somewhat more effort than Cazzaniga provides). The only
explicit reference to anything hegelian in the essay involves a
dismissal of Classe Operaia's 'spontaneist ideology', which, it is said,
entails (p.33):

'a curious return in certain moments to the positions of the Young
Hegelians. To the moment of strategy as subordination of the economic
cycle to the movements of the class, there corresponds a moment of
tactics and organisation based upon the figure - worse, the thinking
head - of the leader'.

I'm trying to remember explicit encounters between operaismo and Hegel,
and none spring to mind. Negri's first book was about Hegel, and around
1964 he translated and edited some of Hegel's writings on the philosophy
of right. Maybe someone else has seen these - I haven't.

As for Negri's abandonment of the dialectic as an explanatory device of
power relations under capital, didn't that occur at some point during
his later prison years, as a way of rethinking what he saw as the crisis
of those relations (eg crisis of law of value, of the state as nothing
but pure domination)? I'm not so familiar with his writings from the mid
1980s, I must admit. I'm currently rereading his Proletari e Stato
(1975), and there the dialectic as an explanatory device is still
strong, along with the use of the base and superstructure metaphor
(although now, it was said, the two were converging), the
Marxist-Leninist party etc. But then, I think Negri pre-1979 was long
the most 'orthodox' of the prominent workerists, with his nods towards
dialectical materialism, historical materialism, Mao's philosophical
writings ...

There was an exchange on this list around 1996 involving Michael Hardt,
myself and others around a recent document of the Padovan autonomists
praising Althusser's method. I trotted out a pretty standard
anti-Stalinist line influenced by E P Thompson and Simon Clarke, along
with a pretty crude 'philosophy is dead' line. Michael had a rather
different take on both scores, so it may (or may not) interest others to
look that discussion over ...

Steve


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