Re: AUT: Negri and Charleton Heston?

[Thiago Oppermann <difference_3ngine@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Nate!

>
> I think I agree with the bulk of what you're saying, but one thing: as
> I read it, Negri wasn't saying the US working class should have guns
> but rather he was saying that the working class elsewhere should have
> access to guns just like US folks have. Which sounds crazy to me, too.

Well - I am not sure how you can argue one thing and not the other. If the
rest of the world should have guns like the US, doesn't that mean that the
situation in the US is desirable? Maybe the mistake here a kind of fetishism
- That you could take the American guns away from American gun culture, as
if it were the things that mattered here...

> There's a quote from Bologna somewhere about Negri seeing increasing
> violence and saying 'recomposition of the class'. I think this is in
> line with that.

There is no question whatsoever that the American working class is
recomposing. I am sure that were that what Negri was saying, he'd be right
on the money.

I don't think class recomposition is a good or a bad thing; it's something
like industrial development, with which it is closely associated. It is
often very good (I like my bracer-enhanced flourine-perfected teeth; I like
the new kinds of mobilization that have arisen in the last 20 years), but
often very bad (millions have to day for my sparkling white teeth;
precariously employed god-botherers are very annoying).

>
> I've been thinking a lot about Negri lately, about the two version of
> the multitude -  'the multitude is the whole proletariat' vs 'the
> multitude is the revolutionary subject'. I think there's a way that
> this can be made consistent with itself.

This is such an ancient problem in Marxism - it's really the one
culturalists get stuck into, and which Marxist often pretent is not a
problem. Technically, my doctor is a worker like me, but I am far more
likely to find common cause with my neighbour, a self-employed taxi driver .
Class politics is often in a position were it has to rewrite class in
sociocultural terms.  I mean, I don't know if you know about Class War -
they were a mob who organized a hilariously funny tabloid in England
(Aufheben has a far too serious appraisal of them). They'd have things like
the queen with a burning tire around her neck with the caption "This
Necklace a Gift from the People!". They heralded the birth of Prince
what's-his-name with 72-point type "Another Fucking Parasite!".  Great
stuff, but I can't think of anything less class-based than Class War. They
managed to totally destroy the concept of class and replace it with a
cultural construct of proletarian punk identity. They waged war (almost
literally) on yuppies, who were, often, technically, workers. Indeed more
proletarian than the union bosses' sons who ran that paper. But they were
completely relentless: they would not have a bar of anybody who deviated
from a certain construction of proletarity. I am sure you've come across the
phenomenon of lifestylism, though that at least has a philosophical
elaboration all of its own. Here you have a class politics which is in fact
constructed, all the way through, from cultural artefacts.

I am NOT saying - let me make this clear - that this is a bad thing.
Cultural power and identity politics is serious stuff that should be rescued
from the molasses of cultural studies; I realise that this is something
Hardt and Negri are self consciously attempting.

Btw. I have in my possession a blood-stained concrete-filled beercan with a
(Australian) Class War sticker which reads "Fuck Howard Before He Fucks
You!". The can was thrown at the pigs back in a riot at Federal Parliament
1995 (we tried to break in!), possibly one of the most significant rallies
in Australia since the Franklin Dam movement; second only to S11 or maybe
Woomera. I really admire the rage of the person who threw that; the message
and the can were dead on. Yet I would not last five minutes in a room with
the class war people. They'd probably throw a can on my head, over-educated
snob that I am.

>
> Negri writes in the essay '20 theses on Marx' that material changes in
> the technical composition make it such that class consciousness
> doesn't matter anymore. (The corollary of course is that it used to,
> ie, Lenin was right in his time a la Hardt's remarks that Lenin would
> use networks if he was around today.)

Yes, but this is really misleading, because 'class consciousness' means
consciousness of class as articulated by means of specific theories of
historical agency. The most interesting aspect of Thomas Frank's book was
the detailed picture of a class consciousness he finds within the backlash
ideology. So there is TONs of class (un)consciousness around, and it matters
a lot. But does having a marxist analysis matter? Probably it would make
things a lot more salubrious. Frankly, we'd almost be better off with
Stalinism than with the Christian Right, except that the Christian Right is
in a sense a self-defeating movement (or so I tell myself so I won't become
a Stalinist...)


The way I understand this, it's
> like production (for Negri) at its most advanced point requires a
> laboring subject that is also a political subject (not necessarily one
> with 'class consciousness' because this doesn't matter anymore). In
> other words, 'class-in-itself' at the highest point of production is
> tendentially 'class-for-itself', that is, value accumulation requires
> the multitude in all its saintly glory. Thus, the folks in reactionary
> USA who refuse to collaborate are not part of the multitude (as Hardt
> says on one of Doug Henwood's radio shows) - they're not politically
> subject and they're economically backward (and culturally too).
>

But that's just a load of crap. They are not economically backward - they
are at the cutting edge of capitalism. Ie. not sillion valley, but Wal Mart.

They are to modern capitalism what the weavers were in medieval Flander -
the economically crucial, most sophisticated and religiously, socially and
politicaly most radical faction of society.  (Radical in the sense that
we're all a bunch of bores compared to people who think the Sun goes around
the Earth, that all of society should be reconfigured in Christian terms,
etc... ) They're zealots alike, to the point of heresy (there is a section
in Frank's book were he meets a dissident Pope in Kansas; it is one of the
most poignant thing I have read, to a fault) .

Historically, the delelopment of a class-in-itself to a point of extreme
articulation led, due to the force of contradiction to a turn towards
reflexivity. Roughly. But reflexivity, ie. consciousness isn't a trivial
thing, and in particular it doesn't exist except in medium, and that medium
shapes it. What you see in the US today is a class-for-itself but through a
particular ideological formation, a language of class that has not only a
lot of fascistic overtones, but also manages to encode profoud
truths-effects, specially in terms of resentment. We shouldn't say wrong or
backward ideological formation; we should inquire as to the likely effects
and powers encoded in this formation, whether it is viable, whether its
contradictions are generative or negative, etc... That's the serious
problem. Moaning about people being stupid doesn't help (even if people are,
in fact, stupid, obese, intellectually lazy, uneducated, etc...)

> This is the only way I can think to square the circle of the two
> multitudes, and one that I think is internally consistent. It sounds
> like older ideas dressed up in new clothes - one class figure acting
> as subject, a figure operating in the most productive and advanced
> sectors, the venerable trick you mentioned. It doesn't seem touch the
> ground very much, ends up sounding catastrophist/messianic ("the
> kingdom is at hand, the time is nigh".)

We should embrace messianic catastrophism. I think it is a very western form
of thought, a destructive and revolutionary one that has stalked our
civilization for a couple of thousand years and isn't about to go away. At
the very least, we should figure out a way of harnessing its powers ­ that
is what Marxism and Anarchism once did, but the circuits through which
leftwing doommongering flow these days are definitely not generative...


Thiago

PS. Sorry to bore you all to death - my partner is on a two week bike
ride/death march up Australia's largest "mountain", so I have way too much
time on my hands.





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