Re: AUT: Negri, Hegel, etc

["cwright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bananaman (Phallicman?),

Understanding that e-mail is a poor medium for communication in some ways, I
still feel that there is really no point in replying to most of what you had
to say, if for no other reason than that it would in some way validate your
professorial contempt.  This already began when you insulted Adrian by your
implication that he had not read Hegel's Logic, but only the beginning.  You
followed up by ass-uming that my familiarity with Hegel comes only from
reading Dunayevskaya's work on Hegel, merely because I gave credit where
credit was due for a particular take on an aspect of Hegel's work around the
question of a Hegelian Telos.  You berate me that I should read The Logic,
ass-uming that I have not read it, nor, by implication, any of Hegel's work.
What you seem most dismayed about is that anyone could critique Negri and
the Spinozist interpretation of Marx, that someone could actually side with
Hegel against Spinoza, with dialectic against positivism.  You speak as if
disagreement with you can only be from the ignorance of the person you are
talking with, and therefore you need to combine lecturing with insults.

Well, enough of that pedagogical dick-waving, Banana.

On substance, let's be very clear on one specific point.  My disagreement
with Negri, Althusser and Spinozism is grounded in a distrust of their
politics, not a failure to understand their theory.  I take Negri very
seriously.  And, frankly, reading Hegel in detail obviously does not mean
that you automatically understand Hegel.  Nor Marx.  Hence your professorial
lecturing on about Marx's intellectual bad faith.

Negri, at the end of Empire, returns in his own way to the semi-Leninist
praising of 'the militant'.  His treatment of the Multitude is in fact the
opposite of Marx's treatment of the proletariat.  Negri's Multitude is in
fact quite dumb, in both senses of the word.  Only the militant gives voice
and consciousness.  In the face of the much-deserved death of the Party as
Subject, Negri's return to this type of logic is embarassing.  Very
appealing maybe to the new generation of young activists and intellectuals
who do not see the working class as active, but only see the activist as
active.  Not appealing to me because it is bogus.  Negri (not to mention
Althusser) has abandoned in many respects the idea that liberation is the
active self-liberation of the working class.  His paradigmatic approach is
not new nor novel, but a functionalism which is not about a critique of
capital or, as Marx was concerned with in Capital, a critique of capital's
ideological self-representation in political economy.  Spinozism (and the
Althussers of this world are quite a bit worse than Negri) does not at all
impress me with the conclusions it has drawn politically and I find it
radically at odds with working class self-liberation.

As a result, I feel that an adequate critique of Negri cannot be made from
only the political perspective, but has to be grounded in Negri's
reappropriation of Spinoza and aspects of earlier Spinozist Marxisms eg
Althusser.  This has invigorated my re-reading of Hegel, which I now feel
really has to be gotten back to, not because Hegel was secretly already
Marx, but to try and understand what Hegel offered Marx that caused him to
return to Hegel (and his critique of Hegel) at each key juncture of his own
development, and therefore to try and see what Hegel has to offer us.  I
continue my education in public, btw, because I respect and need the
comradely criticism of my peers.  Unfortunately, not everyone grasps the
fundamental mutual respect required for this listserve to be beneficial for
all of us.

Here's something by way of a reply to your penultimate point, from Cyril
Smith's recent work:
"While human freedom means that humans - all of us - consciously create
their own lives under mutually-agreed relations, socialism sought the
re-arrangement of a given collection of humans by a self-appointed set of
re-arrangers. Marx is after something quite different: 'the alteration of
men [Menschen = humans] on a mass scale'. What might this mean? Clearly, he
is not talking about individuals changing themselves, one at a time, for he
shows that the essence of humanity is 'the ensemble of social relations':
history is the process in which we all make each other. Marx's aim is
nothing less than a collective struggle by all of us to remake our world,
our social relations and ourselves: self-creation. This is what he means by
freedom. The notion that some people, the socialists, will remake the world,
has nothing to do with Marx. Humanity, all of us, must consciously make
ourselves.



Making something generally implies, among other things, that the object made
will exist outside you when it is done, and will be compared with the aim
which preceded the job. What can it mean to make yourself, as a consciously
planned outcome? Each attempt to fulfill your aim will lead to changes in
yourself, both as subject and as object. Even harder: how could this include
the conscious making of social relations? But Marx, acknowledging his debt
to Hegel, was attempting to express no less than this."



"...And that will bring us to Hegel. Describing his own kind of 'speculative
philosophy' as mysticism, Hegel drew on the work of that long line of
mystics. After Aristotle, he seems to have been one of the few philosophers,
as opposed to theologians, to look at the problem of human and divine
creative process, and, through his concept of Spirit, explicitly to bring
them together. Only after examining his relation to the heretics will it be
possible for us to return to Marx and his critique of Hegel. Then we shall
see that, grasping humanity as self-creating, Marx is opposed to every
attempt to consider humanity and its destiny from inside a closed or
complete intellectual system. He never forgets that he is a human being
talking about human beings. That is why 'Marxism', which found this quite
distasteful, was so hostile to the real ideas of Marx.


But we have missed something out of this story. Starting in the seventeenth
century, and especially in eighteenth, all such questions seemed to fade
away. Armed with the advances of science and technology, many thinkers
opposed the oppressive political and intellectual authority of the Church.
But this led them simply to dismiss as 'superstition' the ideas of thousands
of years which have struggled with some of the central questions of
existence. For the rational-scientific outlook, making something new meant
re-arranging bits of the existing world. Freedom could mean no more than the
removal of some obstacles to the will of the isolated individual. Society
could be nothing but a discrete collection of such individuals, and the
individuals could not be seen as more than grains of subjectivity whirling
around inside a mindless, indifferent, deterministic nature-machine.



I want to show that Hegel, followed by Feuerbach and Marx, had to re-connect
with those older, 'heretical' traditions to do their work, re-discovering
them and giving them a modern form. This entailed breaking through the
barrier of the Enlightenment and its successors, like nineteenth-century
positivists. Only then can freedom and self-creation be brought to light in
the conditions of modern life. Only then can Marx find out how we must
struggle to make them a reality. My first task, then, is to look at a long
line of thinkers, mainly religious mystics, whose work feeds into that of
Hegel. (I have missed out lots of others, about whom he says nothing, while
including one or two who, while they are not actually mentioned by him,
directly connect with those who are.)"

Chris





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