Re: AUT: they remember nothing and understand nothing

["stevphen shukaitis" <stevphen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

personally i find the concepts H&N are working with to be very useful for
working through some of these questions - which is not to say that I
necessarily agree with all of them. for instance, I think their
distinction between "the commons" (which they call pre-capitalist and
something they don't want their work to be confused with) and "the common"
(which is produced through news forms of immaterial labor and networking)
to be somewhat of a silly distinction - because it makes their idea of
common ahistorical and floating out of nowhere, which ironically perhaps
might make it more politically useful. similarly when the talk about
immaterial labor and cooperative production they seem to totally gloss
over how these things have worked previously in langauge, gift economies,
and so forth - again coming forth with concepts that are strangely
ahistorical but perhaps useful because of that in certain odd ways.

all of which is to say that I will be gathering my thoughts on these
things much more over the coming weeks and then post them to this list.
cheers
stevphen


> And what do you think yourself?
>
> It is a question that need have nothing to do with being a orthodox
> marxist, or a marxist at all. Apart from that, what is most of the
> times referred to as 'orthodoxy' in this context is the inheritance
> from Komintern, which for quite obvious reasons in all reality
> never paid class relations much more than lip service, revolving
> rather around 'the people', 'the nation'. the State and the Party.
> This is important, as the historically the link between leaving the
> centrality of class relations behind and class collaboration or
> reconcillation, and/or elevating onself to becoming the admini-
> trative power over the working classes, is very strong. I am not
> sure if it becomes better by already in theory having done
> away with even the question of middlle layers. No wonder that
> N & H, unlike what actually was the case of Foucault, never are
> able to say anything concrete about *biopolitics'. The reduction
> of all the Other into 'the Many,' as the old greeks used to say, if
> I am not mistaken, I have hard to see this being an advance in
> the understanding of determinate class relations.
>
> What N & H's notion of the *the multitude* often reminds
> me the most of is the crude and simplistic dualistic model of Maoist
> orthodoxy: the people versus monopoly capital. So Hardt's
> reference to 'the Great Mao' is perhaps not that surprising
> after all. This said, in one important aspect, N & H's 'multitude'
> is an advance over the Maoist 'Volk'; that is in bringing thought
> beyond nationalism.  But even the critique of nationalism is
> somewhat half-hearted to me, both as regards the past and
> the presence, where it reappears on a more modernsied form
> as the Magna Carta of progressive Aristocrats, from those
> of the European Union, France and Germany to Brazil and
> Venezuela, and probably Japan and China. There might be a
> line from Machiaevelli to Spinoza, Madison and Lenin. But I
> hardly think it is one I would like to travel. To that I am far
> too much an orthodox anarchist.
>
> Now, I may be wrong in all this. But I do find it problematic
> that is hardly even a topic of discussion. And then I am in
> this context of course thinking of those whose relation to
> 'What is be done" is: What a tragedy that it cannot be
> undone, but let us at least bury that corpse as fast as we
> can, and do out utmost that it will lay down for good.
>
> What is certain however, is that N & H defines 'the multi-
> tude' both transhistoricially, and as an utopian political project,
> as a not yet existing 'multitude'. And apart from the term
> utopian, I am not here putting words into their mouths. If
> that implies that 'the mulitude' can gain no real-life
> existence within capitalism, is far from clear. With that I
> mean, that while the self-emancipation of the working
> classes is imagined as a swan song, 'the multitude' is assumed
> to rake on real life only beyond capitalism, if going beyond
> is not an end left behind then. Anyway, that is certainly
> a trait it certainly shares with 'the people' of the period of
> bourgeois enlightment. And it is little doubt that the nearest
> historic analogy here is the European bourgeoisie path
> to dominance.
>
> Harald
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>


stevphen shukaitis
Guest Editor, "Life Beyond the Market" issue
www.greenpeppermagazine.org

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