[PEN-L:11745] Re: Prostitutes and "Choice"

["FRANCO BARCHIESI" <029FRB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 14 August 1997 Louis Proyect wrote:

> I wonder if this is evidence of "autonomic Marxism". There was a conference
> in Madrid recently that brought together Zapatista supporters, anarchists,
> squatters, autonomic Marxists, etc. This piqued my curiousity and I checked
> out the auto-op-sys Web Page at Spoons and discovered that the site
> includes one of Cleaver's essays as an example of what they stand for. They
> view their mission in the following terms:
(...)
> One of the useful things about the Internet for an uneducated person like
> myself is that it allows me to find out about things that I never would
> have run into during my day-to-day existence as an activist and
> ex-Trotskyist. As a Trotskyist I found that the sort of things I read where
> rather narrowly focused. Now, as a result of participating on the Spoons
> lists and PEN-L, I have discovered Althusser, postmodernism, and a bunch of
> other squeaky-new things.
>
> So I guess this autonomic Marxism is something I have to learn more about.
> My only reaction to Harry's post is that anything that coincides with the
> thinking of the dreadful Karl Carlile must be re-examined. But what do I know.

I am, together with Steve Wright, a convenor of the aut-op-sy list,
and I've just subscribed to pen-l, so it's great for me to see that
comrades here are talking about "us-the-autonomist" (not
autonomic...). And it's nice to hear from Louis, whom I met at a
Rethinking Marxist conference at UMass last year, where I went with a
South African delegation from "Debate", a journal on the SA ultra-
left (that's how we are defined here by both socialdemocrats and
mainstream Trotskysts). The passage that Louis quoted from the aut-
op-sy site was just an introduction to the aut-op-sy discussion list,
and it did not come from some "summa" of autonomist thought or from
some grand statement on "what we stand for" that are quite common, I
imagine, in Louis' political tradition (at least here in South
Africa). The aim of that introduction was just to provide some tips
for discussion on aut-op-sy, and on many of those issues discussion
has indeed developed with a remarkable degree of complexity and
articulation. So, from this point of view, given that we on the
list are interested in raising questions *before* giving answers, our
statement quoted by Louis may look rather narrow (or too broad,
depending on points of view). However, the implications of those
issues are not narrow at all, and they point exactly to the kind of
problems raised by Harry in the message to which Louis replied: self-
government, self-valorization and self-empowerment. That is to say:
focusing not on vanguardism and grand narratives of the
Contradictions of Capitalism and the necessary nature of Class
Consciousness, but on the ways in which concrete forms of social
antagonism and the construction of networks of resistant
subjectivities relate with capitalist restructuring, create spaces of
freedom, open up possibilities for subversion, and materially
disarticulate the strategies of restructuring itself. If anyone
wanted to get closer to this kind of "autonomic" stuff, maybe this is
a good point to start. BTW: These issues were at the core of the
Madrid Encounter as well, and lots of Trots were there too...

Franco

Franco Barchiesi
Sociology of Work Unit
Dept of Sociology
University of the Witwatersrand
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