Re: AUT: Negri and Charleton Heston?

[Nate Holdren <nateholdren@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Thiago-

Lots to think about here, thanks. I'm not sure but I think for Negri
there is only a forward moving political recomposition of the class.
This is why I like Virno better on this stuff, he says
straightforwardly that all this is ambivalent.

The demo stuff you and David are talking about sounds like a good
time. I'm surprised the cops didn't kill anyone. I'm familiar with
Class War, some autopsy subcribers were members and tried get the
group to dissolve itself, perhaps they can comment. (Keir? David?)

Thiago, let me know if you figure out how to make the crazy
fundamentalists march leftward-ho. In the meantine, I'm scared of
those folks and am trying to get myself out of this country in
response (sorry MJ).

I don't think those people are backward in the sense of being
holdovers or vestiges of a prior era, and I don't think my revulsion
at the contents of their beliefs is in anyway analytically useful.
It's abundantly clear that the US right is a contemporary animal, more
up-to-the-minute and adequate to the world today than the US left -
hence their greater organizing successes (I think due in part to the
fact that they just organize more...). I think they're tremendously
effective. That's why I find them frightening.

That's been one of the biggest shocks to many left leaning folks I
know here after the Bush election: no one with brains had any
illusions about Kerry, but we had illusions about Bush. A lot of us
thought Bush's election was a fluke, a lie and a sham and a lie. Nope.
The point on the top of Bush's head is the tip of a far-right iceberg.
The election was like a flash of lightning in the middle of the night
illuminating that the street and the outside of my apartment building
are covered with giant cockroaches marching in strange geometric
formations. That's why my response is short on analysis and long on
looking for a new place to live.

take care,
Nate



On Sun, 28 Nov 2004 21:54:01 +1100, Thiago Oppermann
<difference_3ngine@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> 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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