Re: AUT: Negri and Charleton Heston?

[chris wright <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Actually, Canadians own way more guns per capita and do not have these
problems.  Clearly, being armed is not the issue and frankly fear of gun
ownership is liberal tripe.

On the problem of class, you keep running into the same dilemma of
positing the proletariat as a thing or a group which exists positively.
There is no proletariat today, though there are lots of workers, many of
whom resist capital in a variety of ways, but without any sensibility
that capital is what is at issue.

And the situation of the population that supports the neo-cons is
complex.  But there are some things that are obvious in this:

The base of the neo-cons in the working class has several major
attributes:

1.  from areas that were industrial and manufacturing centered, but
which have been turned into Wal-Mart land.  And frankly, Wal-Mart is not
the basis of new accumulation, since it is very hard to imagine how
expansion in small consumer goods is going to lead to a new regime of
accumulation.  Usually that involves some rather serious investment in
good old Department 1, ie in new means of production.  On that basis,
computers, bio-tech and other areas seem more suited, and that is not
happening in the neo-con areas.  That is happening on the coasts, in the
big cities (hence Illinois, being centered around Chicago.)

This has a certain impact, as people see their communities collapsing.
Here in Baltimore, Dundalk and Essex used to be well-off white working
class areas (and traditionally racist) attached to steel and shipping.
NOw they have been utterly decimated.  They are in fact worse off than
the African American areas because they have no skills in managing their
lives in the abscence of these jobs.  They are unskilled in the arts of
unemployment and managing the social welfare bureaucracy.  You see this
odd fissure between drug-dealing as a new way of life on the one hand,
and a sharper right-wing, racist turn.

2.  The tendency has been to regress, in the face of this and where a
tradition of class struggle is absent, as it largely has been in these
areas (even Kansas saw a lot of industry in the 50s and 60's moving into
the cornfields and wheatfields away from the cities, and it was very
much the hollowing out of the cities that continued into the 1980's).
These areas were already predominantly white and the white working class
followed into the suburbs and semi-rural areas.  One problem with
Frank's book is the lack of a sense of demographic change in this
period, but it is significant.  Even 25 years ago, where I live now in
Baltimore was lily-white.  In the 60's, you would get beaten if you were
Black where I live.  Now it is 90% Black people.

I think that places like Illinois took a different tack not only because
of Chicago, but becaue through the 90's there was intense strike
struggles throughout Illinois, which was often quite radical.  That is
not the case in many of the so-called Red States.  Or there were just
outright capital flight and recomposition into Wal-Mart economies that
are in fact much less well-off than years ago.

3.  In the face of this, and in the abscence of any class solidarity,
the class response is certainly anti-elite on some level, but has also
involved a reliance on the possiblity of making it based on whiteness.
By this I do not mean that every one of these folks is a racist.
Certainly many of them are racially liberal compared to their
grandparents. Rather, being white has offered them ways of protecting
themselves that depend on whiteness and there has also been a deep
backlash over the fear of families collapsing.  More on that in a
second.  As a result, people there had more wealth to fall back on, from
pensions to home ownership to some small quantity of stock and share
plans that largely do not exist for African Americans, Latinos and
Native Americans.

4.  Many of the neo-con areas are also the recipients of massive amounts
of state and federal money, but not in the form of transfer payments
(except social security, hence the kid gloves the neo-cons apply
there.)  The money is largely in the form of productive state money:
military industries, government jobs, etc.  It was funny that Newt
Gingrich's district is something like 75% dependent on federal money.
As such, there is a deep affiliation with the state or with this aspect
of the state and a war over the allocation of federal money and
militarism go hand-in-hand with this.

5.  The result is that working class identity is no longer with
industrial labor per se, esp not unionized industrial labor which has
remained far more liberal on the whole.  But working class identity was
not such a good thing ever.  It was actually a part of the racialization
of dissent so that, as MJ implicitly points out, white and male went
hand-in-hand with the identity 'working class'.

6.  The actual collapse of communities and families has lead people to
try and find ways to reinforce the last of the remaining social support
networks people had.  The formation of many of these communities around
a white ethnic industrial working class meant that people associate
family with a specific kind of household.  The alternative, let us be
clear, have not been positive for most people.  There have not been new
family forms that seem to offer any security, including for women.  A
single mother is a tough row to hoe in his country, and it is materially
and physically not a safe way to go about life.

7.  Unlike the Left, the Right has spoken to these fears and it has done
so at a time when Left solutions like striking and class struggle seemed
impossible, since companies were just shutting places down.  The
resistance to work had no appeal since the abscence of work seemed to
mean the death of communities and general ruin.  At the same time, that
previous economic security in the white working class, largely, led to a
deep individualism, the idea that there was another way out.  In my
personal experience, there is much more practical support and solidarity
in much of the African American population, networks of support (however
dysfunctional) that comes through in peculiar ways, such as the idea
that a house is not a sanctuary from social life, but the center of
social life and that in the white working class, people are less likely
(though more so than in more traditionally middle class settings) to
functional in a communalistic manner.  The social support is even more
tenuous in the so-called Red States and the environment meaner and more
insular in ways.  For all the universalism of God and Country, there is
also a harsh particularism that leaves each person or family on their
own, except through the mediation of the churches in many cases.

8.  Reliance on public institutions carries a degree of shame with it
that, while not absent in other communities, is not as severe.  This IMO
has a lot to do with the formation of that white, male-centric working
class identity which was bound up with being law abiding, industrious,
individualistic, male-head of household, etc.  For example, it is not
uncommon for young women in the African American community to physically
engage with young men, to play fight, to challenge their physical
dominance.  We see it a lot in my neighborhood and in all of the schools
which my partner has taught at.  That kind of physicality would very
quickly become dangerous for white working class women in many
instances, or would out them socially.  A change of family structure
strikes deeply social order in those communities and does not, at the
moment, offer obvious direct benefits even to the women in many cases.
This is not to say that we are living in 1980 (Kris and I listened to a
conversation between a teenage waitress and a waiter at a diner we go to
where she was talking about how much she could bench press and dead
lift, and it left Kris quite stunned, as that kind of talk in her
neighborhood in Chicago in the 70's and early 80's would not have been
accepted and would have been met with some kind of reprisal as
threatening to the guy.)

9.  Multiculturalism, libertinism, alterity are all in fact Modernisms.
They are the institutionalization of the demands for racial equality,
sexual equality, etc.  They signify its failure as much as its success,
that is the failure to overthrow gender, race, etc.  The Right-Christian
response is a reaction to that, founded on the fallow ground of
neo-liberalism and class decomposition.  The Christian-Right is
post-modern or rather post-Modernist.  They appeal to so-called
retrograde needs, but far from it.  And as such, the usual demands of
Modernist intellectuals have no purchase in that world because they
merely remind the Right-Christians of what has failed, of what is
insufficient.  Multiculturalism represents the ascending capital, on
some level, one which is able to afford single parenting, $300/week day
care, etc.  Of course, even this is not so clear, as among the
computariat, anti-Asian nationalism runs rampant.  But at least they
appear to be able to compete on the global scale.

10.  The regression to national chauvinism of the God and Country type
is a demand for security against laborers with whom they cannot compete
in the industries in which those workers were embedded.  The decline and
fall of US industry is not the same thing as the decline and fall of US
corporations, which try to keep hold of capital as it flows around the
globe.  One of the least-observed phenomena right now is the transition
of manufacturing and industrial production (of some of it) to the poorer
countries and regions of those countries.  And I say least-observed not
because people do not write about it.  They do and with great
frequency.  Rather, that it means that recomposition is a layered
process which has deeply redivided global labor, without the
disappearance of Fordist industry and the mass worker.

As a result, there is indeed a class response going on, but one very
much mediated by the past and present relations to the state, to
industrial development, to race and gender and sexuality.  As a result,
there is a very divided set of responses, one which to no small degree
is based on feeling trapped and reaching for a response based on real
'blue collar' authenticity, hence stupid fucking comedy tours like The
Blue Collar Comedy Tour, which is in fact the Southern Cracker Comedy
Tour based on culturalist notions of class (as Thiago has pointed to):
Southern accent, NASCAR-watching, football watching, bad hygene,
hyper-maculinity which is openly insecure and afraid of the
harpy/bitch/wife, national chauvinist, anti-intellectual,
country-music-loving, and so on.  In fact, that has nothing to do with
my family when I was growing up, which was white ethnic, Northern,
unionized, clean and educated.  It is the hypertrophying of the the
classic 'American working class' identity, based on people who did not
even get access to modern industrial labor until it fled the North in
the face of the class struggles of the post-WWII period.

The more attached to that identity this milieu is, the less it has
anything to do with the proletariat.  Of course, the Marxists and
anarchists IMO have no idea what to make of this, as most of them
depended on the idea that a working class identity was radical, was
communist.  The truth of the matter is that that identity is not radical
and now it is coming back to bite the Left in its big, stupid ass.

The radical potential of the working class (and in fact of all
anti-oppression movements) lies not in the affirmation of a 'working
class identity', or 'blackness' or 'woman-ness', but in the negation of
those things, a practical negation of the relations upon which those
identities are constructed.  The affirmation of working class as
identity is simultaneously the affirmation of capital, the affirmation
of Black as identity is the affirmation of whiteness, etc.  This
happens, it seems, only mediated through those identities at some point,
but if the identity rather than the rupture becomes the focus, then the
radical aspect is lost.  Certainly, it is important to say at some
point, "I am a slave, against the masters", but if there is never the
movement to "the only option is to abolish slavery, slaves and masters",
then there is no way out.

That is why the politics of 'us and them' is so hopeless.  There is no
fixed working class 'us' against 'them'.  There is only an us against
the conditions we are involved in reproducing.  A proletariat can only
form as a social force in the refusal of wage labor, not in the demand
for better wages (though in the concrete, there is no way to avoid
starting from that demand, as someone who does not demand something
better in the here and now is not likely to ever realize that they can
demand the abolition of the whole game.)

Since Negri scraps negation and dialectic, he can only be trapped in a
dualism of "multitude as whole class' and 'multitude as subject'.  The
working class is both simultaneously (as labor is always
in-and-against), but only a class for-itself when it becomes a class
against class, as a negation of the conditions in which labor is
reproduced as foundation of capital.  Thiago is correct that Marxism
pretended this dilemma did not exist, but not all communists did, hence
my continual and annoying assertion that the SI, the Open Marxism folks,
and contemporary groups like Theorie Communiste have something relevant
to say on the matter.  That dilemma is the very center of the best thing
TC has written that is available in English and is quite beyond Negri.

Cheers,
Chris



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