Re: AUT: Negri and Charleton Heston?

[Nate Holdren <nateholdren@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Chris,
Very eloquent and interesting and I think dead on.

Except the last three paragraphs. Bracketing theoretical questions of
Hegel vs Deleuze, dialectics vs immanence, etc etc -  I just don't get
what you're on about at the practical level. I don't have any idea how
to relate this stuff to my experiences and attempts to do stuff in
some small way. I think I agree with you on the level of ideas,
hermetically sealed from the world, (Black implies White, etc) but
surely all of this is much, much less clear cut in how it plays out.

Piquetero groups in Argentina have demanded (and gotten) money from
the state so that they can continue to live. The EZLN has used a
language of identity that has been effective. Segio Bologna has
written about the council movements in the early 20th century, saying
bascially that at the level of ideas they weren't particularly radical
but they put forward (and spread very far) a demand that would have
been fatal to capital at the time. (I cite Bologna only because I only
know about the council stuff via him.)

Given that you recognize that practically most people do (and need to)
start from demands for something better (which I assume, because of
your lower enthusiasm for it, implies a level of 'positivity'), the
important question then seem to be how do folks move from the
positivity/identitarian view you don't like and start to become
hegelian ultraleftists?

I like all the folks you like to cite, but I really have no idea what
do once I put down the book. It seems to me that it's hard enough to
know how to act and win from the position of positivity (I like what
the IWW is doing, though I'm a member so I'm biased, and I like what
I've heard about initiatives like the Montpelier Downtown Workers
Union), let alone to build anything with 'abolish the class relation'
as the immediate point of departure.

take care,
Nate


On 28 Nov 2004 13:44:13 -0500, chris wright <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> 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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