Fantasy sites and the conquistadors of the planet

(The following is a guest post by Roger Gathman, author of the weblog Limited, Inc.)

What would one have said, in 1976, about Tronti’s essay and the future it forecast? Here is my tendentious and unfair opinion: one of the things one could have forecast is that, as the privileged site of production became less and less like a nineteenth century factory, the term 'factory' would experience a metaphorical creep. And that this creep would disguise the increasing blurring of the analytic distinction between production and consumption, and thus miss what distinguishes the Keynesian period from its predecessors.

Let’s illustrate this with a little story. When Tonti writes: “… capital reach[ing] a high level of development it no longer limits itself to guaranteeing collaboration of the workers - i.e. the active extraction of living labour within the dead mechanism of its stabilisation - some-thing which it so badly needs. At significant points it now makes a transition, to the point of expressing its objective needs through the subjective demands of the workers, ” I imagine he was not thinking of the embodiment of that demand in union pensions. But, indeed, in the forties, fifties, sixties and the seventies, a lot of money flowed into union pensions (I am talking about the U.S.), and that money did a lot of things. I’m not talking about the most colorful things, like the way Teamster pension funds built Las Vegas. I’m talking about your standard pension investments in equities in general. In the eighties, those funds – to the disappointment of the new breed of body snatching Randians, eager to take down the traditional enterprise structures and replace them with a new structure dedicated to the proposition that an enterprise is an aphid, and the upper management is a super-ant – were mobilized by the traditional managers of capitalist enterprises against the LBO merchants. Schwab and Thomas, in a review of Union pension investment patterns published in Michigan Law Review, Feb 98, were much more prescient about labor and its place in influencing the internal composition of the capitalist enterprise than Tronti was in 1976:

Managers traditionally were thought to represent shareholders' interests and unions were thought to represent workers'. Of course, a viewpoint that equates managers' and shareholders' interests is naive. Corporate scholars have long emphasized a divergence between managers and shareholders. Indeed, in the 1980s workers often aligned with managers against shareholders in thwarting hostile takeovers, depriving shareholders of substantial premiums in the process. Most empirical work has found that workers were not harmed by takeovers[7] and so gained little from this alignment. In the 1990s, a historic shift has begun, as worker-shareholders prod other shareholders into holding management more accountable. Important changes in corporate governance have already resulted. To maintain its momentum, this realignment will require unions to modify their self-image as well. Unions, swept along by actions of their pension funds, increasingly will focus on the long-run health of corporations. If they do not, labor-shareholder activism may be a fad of the 1990s, doomed to fizzle. But the potential exists for fundamental change in both corporations and unions.

If you check out that reference (7) to the claim that “workers were not harmed by takeovers,” you will find that Schwab and Thomas’s reference says something a bit different – that line production workers were not initially “slimmed” as much as middle management. Of course, in factory creep, those middle management types are as much in a factory as the revolutionary academic, thrust into the assembly line of grading papers. But lets be literal for a second. Viewing this – as Tonti does, and as Schwab and Michael want us to – solely in terms of aggregate class relations, what should the union pension fund manager do? On the one hand, there is class solidarity. There is also the notion that, if you allow a company to fire en masse its paper pushers for no individual crimes of lese corporation, but simply because you want to tick the stock upwards, that may well lead to a general laxity in terms of firing, slimming, and otherwise becoming lean and mean.

On the other hand, it turns out that the worker’s subjective demands include off time activities, like retirement. Given this, Schwab and Thomas are pretty confident that the objective embodiment of the subjective demands of the workers are about to meet a proposal they can’t turn down – a very sweet ROI, a fattening of those pensions, and the ability of the producer to become a non-producer (and a fisherman and a wearer of Bermuda shorts) on good terms. All that is required is to damn the ties that bind one to the old class enemy with a simple change in investment strategy. And so it went in the late 90s, when union pension fund managers, like day traders and software geeks, plunged into a bubble market, helping to shift money to those enterprises willing to create leaner and meaner structures, and to fire en masse for the up tick of the stock price. Of course, in many ways Schwab and Thomas are the two blind mice here – for the interests of the shareholders, at this time, were bound over in a much heralded pact that bribed the upper management to pay attention to what they were doing with immense awards of equity.

This story isn’t a happy story – the bubble, as we know, collapsed, and the leaner and meaner enterprises, after putting out the villainous middle managers, started going lean and mean on what remained of the manufacturing sector in the U.S. And this last year the shoe has dropped about those pensions, as the newest new management has decided to unload those pensions (as is the way of all hardcore free marketers) on the state. A preview of coming attractions, given the fact that almost every state employee in America is being promised retirement benefits that he or she will almost surely not receive.

This story is, of course, incomprehensible if labor is a composite of members of the laboring class – if the same expropriation of labor’s private property that went on in creation of the factory system that Marx observed simply proceeded to do the same thing over and over again. Poorhouse pittances for aged coalminers were never a major source of capital for the Victorians But labor's successes generated new roles for the laboring class; it strikes me that those roles are hidden behind the factory as a fantasy site, much as the market is a fantasy site for neo-classical economics and its ideological fans.

Now, I am not surprised by the rhetorical afterlife of the factory, or the way in which the objective embodiment of the subjective desires of a class can turn against it. I used to ride in from New Haven to New York in the nineties, looking at all the dead factories and feeling like the route was a sort of anti-theme park. At that time, I was a temp secretary for a multi-national construction company, and then I got lucky and got a job as a secretary for an architectural firm. The afterlife of the factory culture was a lot stronger in Connecticut than from where I come from – it was up and down West Haven, in every bar I went into, and every party I went to at Milford, and it waitered and clerked and went to college and toked up and down the Boston Post Road. It impressed me with a feeling that somewhere on the outskirts something enormous had broken, and nobody understood it.

I don’t either. But these are the doubts I have about a strategy of refusal that is, to my mind, so unclear about what in the system is being refused; so opposed to the conditions of production and in the same gesture so mired in an classical economics of production; and one that is finally enamored of being the one to say no -- the position of resistance that, frankly, I'm sick of, since I feel like it has lead to, well, mass laziness -- a dependency, for one thing, on the party system to do all the oppositional work, a refusal to seize opportunities, a posturing boldness that, at the same time as it makes me the man, gives me an alibi for the cops -- after all, if you are resisting, you aren't attacking. From the IWW on down, attackers haven't fared well from the cops. Not that I want to commit cop suicide myself, but I am not sick of dressing this fear in the rhetoric of "resisting." Nihilistic criticisms all, I grant you. But they do express my feeling that the "strategies" of the left are in almost terminal paralysis.      

So okay, smartypants, what do you propose? Well, for one thing, I propose yet another framework for looking at who pays for the costs of the system that is about the costs of the system -- not about labor, or about supply and demand. Simply about who pays, and in what currency, for the system's total costs. Or I guess subsystems. The costs seem to me both spread out internally, among the people within the system, and then externally, among not only the people outside the system -- all the dead Iraqis -- but also the unrepresented. The unrepresented aren't subjects at all. They are territories.

In the first case, it is a question of forms of property, for one thing. We are so often told that the free enterprise system depends on private property that we forget that it depends on seizing and using property, and encroaching with more and more ferocity on private property the more diminutive that private property is -- until, when we reach the body, there is no limit to the shit they can put in us, for free. Tronti's factory workers no doubt breathed in asbestos, just as any car mechanic working on brakes does. Factory workers across the world from the 40s to the 80s breathed in a variety of shit such as would astonish the world even of  the nineteenth century. In my cells, no doubt many a pesticide molecule is grilling up the steaks. The crossed and rich textures of the world that was made around us, and which we would generally be unhappy to be without, required a lot of free lodging for better chemistry.

Outside the system, there are of course the usual tv images. (or teevee... no, I'm not going there). The wars this country bumps into, accidentally and like clockwork, spending its 300 billion a year on the military. And then there is the unrepresented. On a larger scale, it seems to me that we are seeing the end of the conquistador era, finally, as the last planetary properties are seized: the ozone layer. The climate. The temperature and composition of the oceans. This is no different than the typical conquistador business of the 15th century -- a motley group comes in a takes possession of "vacant" territory.  doesn't seem to occur to anyone that this is a seizure of territory no different, really, than the seizure of the Andean system by the Spanish -- an uncompensated plundering. At the moment, these are the sites that interest me much more, and I want some more, uh, interactive (a gross term, I admit it, but the one that occurs to me at the moment) notion than resistance. 

Comments

[Jon]

I'm a little confused... Why 1976? The essay was published in 1966, if that's what you mean.

[roger]

Jon, you are right. I'm made a mistake -- I mistook the translation date for the date of the writing.

[Jon]

No worries. We can silently correct the mistake if necessary...

[Jodi]

Actually, I thought you were deliberate on 1976 since Negri follows up on these themes in Domination and Sabotage. I had some similar questions, primarily rooted in the shift from Keynesianism to neoliberalism. It's hard for me to find much of this persuasive given the collapse of even minimal social welfare provisions.

[Keith]

Roger - Your questions as to what, exactly, is being refused in the system? I've had a bit of difficulty with this myself, but shouldn't there also be a positive aspect to this? That is, here we are, forty years after Tronti was writing this, and any "strategy of refusal" that might be invented today is not going to be reducible to the binary divisions set up by Tronti. No more party, no more worker vs. factory management, etc.

What of refusal now? That it becomes so difficult to think of what to refuse and what exactly it is one is saying no to only makes it more interesting to me.

[Nate]

hi Roger,

The stuff on pensions is really interesting, thanks for that.

I don't understand what you mean by this:

"This story is, of course, incomprehensible if labor is a composite of members of the laboring class - if the same expropriation of labor’s private property that went on in creation of the factory system that Marx observed simply proceeded to do the same thing over and over again."

I would think that the pension funds are a clear case of what Tronti's talking about, which is the capitalization of working class organized resistance. That the pension funds were tied to (business) unions is unsurprising, as that organizational model is precisely a mechanism for the disciplining of the working class and for the conversion of the class into capital (variabl capital and in the case of pensions money as capital).

As for this: "labor's successes generated new roles for the laboring class", what new roles do you mean? And are they roles for the class or for members of the class? If the latter, then my guess is that these are likely to be bound up with (though not reducible to) hierarchies internal to the working class, labor aristocracies, which don't seem to be that hard to understand or explain. (I don't think Tronti's particularly sensitive to that issue, though, but then that's because I think his Leninism is a politics of a certain class sector against the rest of the class.) I may be misunderstanding you, though.

Best regards,
Nate

[Quinlan Vos]

Well, Tronti in the essay states pretty clearly "...the masses of working class demands simplify and unify into one. There must come a point where all will disappear, except one - the demand for power, all power, to the workers, This demand is the highest form of the refusal." So its not that Tronti makes no positive demands, its just that he reduces them all to one demand, which is the essential one really: abolition of capitalism, all power to the workers (how Leninist).
Personally, I find the lack of positive proposals, the emphasis on refusal (and not on any specific thing being refused, but everything, all of the relations of class society) one of the better things about the essay. The present society is so horrific that anything but relentless negativity towards it is inappropriate. Mass laziness may be a consequence of this (though laziness in itself isn't a bad thing), but a "dependency on the party system to do all the oppositional work" is not at all what I'd like to see, nor is that a necessary consequence of the emphasis on resistance (without positive proposals, because for the time being I'm just happy to see more people develop negative attitudes towards what exists and act upon these attitudes).

[roger]

Nate, I'm assuming, as I think Tronti is, that laborers have agency -- otherwise, a refusal is meaningless. But I am also saying something Tronti would, at least then perhaps, disagree with: that capitalism has many degrees of freedom. To understand the capitalist system in the seventies up to now, for instance, you have to take a look at, among other things, the credit system and the new degrees of freedom of action it introduced, as well as the constraints. This is the reason I'd emphasize roles.

All of which means that where you see the disciplining of the labor in the pensions, I see just the opposite -- one of the great postwar victories, which is being eroded massively at the moment, as corporations sluff off pension structures at all. I would be pretty astonished if the pension funds were buried in a hole, and I image labor members would quickly revolt against this particular form of refusal -- and I would think they were totally right! I bet you would too.

So I'd like to situate refusal and its opposite -- and I'm not going to reduce this to some No/Yes function. I'm thinking more of initiating action. One of the degrees of freedom that was available, in the eighties, was using that money to produce real reforms in the corporate structure - for instance, linking compensation raises to upper management to compensation raises to the median work at the corporations they manage. Off the top of my head. One of the real constraints was that the technostructure, concentrated in the developed countries, was going to have to meet competition from undeveloped countries. It is evident now that another choice that wasn't made - the absense of a real international labor organization, a real internationale - has had terrible effects on the working class.

Nate, I'm not trying to give you a shopping list here, simply giving my sense of the situation of a laborer.

And finally... I'm disturbed that the idea of the big system and the big refusal gives a false image of the system: as if it were a huge, concrete, totally dense structure. It isn't. It does, however, have an outline, and one can have a sense that there is an inside and an outside of it.

Q.V. some days I am with you, some days I'm not. You know that story about I think it is Max Lieberman, the German artist? He watched the Nazis parade through Berlin in 1933, and he was asked what he thought about it. He said, I don't have enough money to buy enough food to throw up enough to show you what I think about it.

My feeling whenever I read another story about Iraq.

[Keith]

I love, love, love the Max Lieberman anecdote.

[Nate]

hi Roger,
Thanks for clarifying. I'm not sure if we disagree or not. All the things you're talking about in your comment here, I agree. I just don't see where this departs from Tronti (or at a minimum, from what I want to make of/do with Tronti).

I don't see pensions as a disciplinary mechanism, or certainly not only or primarily one. There's a long history of critical accounts (the folks who are most familiar to me are Martin Glaberman and Stan Weir) of the contract model of unionism (business unionism), in which the contract becomes a way to make the union discipline the workforce. Based on that stuff, and Tronti agrees I think, the business union is a mechanism of capitalization.

The pension fund has the same function. To be clear, though, this is not to say in any way "fuck the pension fund" or anything like that. In some cases, capitalization in some fashion is what one wants and needs (it beats dying sooner). This does, though, effect the composition of the working class, such that there are hierarchies and conflicts within the class. (My dad, for instance, is a lifelong union electrician who makes a good wage and has a nice pension built up. Given his views, he would oppose an effort to increase income tax or fees on pensions in order to give more money to lower income workers, unless some good organizing was done to reach him. And I suspect he wouldn't do anything to lose his job if it came down to illegal mass support action like secondary strikes for another group of workers, especially if it threatened the pension. Again, none of this is anti-pension. We all need to live under capitalism before it's abolished.)

The point is in no way a sort of angelic protest against a fallen world, where things are reducible to the elements we don't want to keep in the longterm. The point is that there's a conflict that goes on - and, it varies across a number of axes of time and space and social strata, the system is not totally dense as you put it - wherein freedoms are fought for and constraints are fought for, and any example of something that is more one than the other can be made into more of the other, and so on. And what Tronti wants (and me too, though I think I'd think it'd be differently organized than Tronti) is for the processes (the conflicts) in which freedoms that open up and the ways that freedoms get constrainted or turned into constraints to occur in a way that lays the groundwork for more freedoms and less constraints in the future. And the determining element here is class power (which encompasses/can't be exercised without things like political will and organization, and technical arrangements of production, finance, etc.) I worry I've not clarified anything at all, but this is my best shot. Sorry for the length here.

Regards,
Nate

[roger]

Nate, I think we DO agree on many things -- although I think we diverge down the road. My aim is to wreak as much damage as I can on the current phase of Reaganism -- or at least give it a few verbal dings. But I don't aim at ending capitalism.

I'd agree with your dad, actually, about the taxes -- I'd imagine the taxes from his pension, far from being given to lower paid workers by some benificent entity, will probably be given to some War industry company for the betterment of their next season's balance sheet and the bewilderment and horror of another "liberated" portion of mankind. I suppose the notion of who is doing the giving, here, is where I think that, in the short term, we all have to think harder. Not that I have any answer, I hasten to say -- just that I am averse to that step being simply assumed.

My larger point, I guess, was that neither the liberal, the neo-liberal, nor the communist form of economic organization has been developed to confront the ecological consequences of industrialization, and that we are entering a time when that confrontation can't simply be delayed. In the 60s, when Tronti published his pamphlet -- not the 70s, as I mistakenly put it in my post -- the Soviet Union was making up for Khrushchev's agricultural "mistakes" by pouring money into the white gold project in Central Asia -- a massive catastrophe that will be around to haunt Central Asia a hundred years from now. Nothing in the labor theory of the economy would have said, don't do this. The Soviet's, like the American G.O.P., had no doubt about the fact that man is the master of nature.

Man simply isn't -- although, to make a first grade joke, he is evidently the master-bator of nature. But I think the wanking has to stop before we truly create a planetary catastrophe.

cheers to that. Hastening the pace of destruction for destruction's sake seems hardly cause for any celebration.

From;
http://www.counterpunch.org/schaefer10202003.html

An Interview With Michael Hudson on Chile's Failed Economic Laboratory

How Labor's Forced Savings were transferred to the Financial Classes ­ and then wiped out

SS: The rising stock market that resulted from the Chicago Boy's reforms was seen as a way to inflate asset prices the capital gains of which would be used to pay off debts. Why couldn't the market sustain this cycle?

MH:Quite simply, as Luders and other participants have described, the reason was that too many individuals who bought companies with no money down took the revenue and ran, or else bought yet more companies on credit. The revenue was not enough to pay the carrying charges on the debts they had taken on.

SS: The stock market collapse destroyed the pensions that were privatized under Pinochet. Can you explain how those pensions related to the speculative excess and transformed the managerial class?

MH:The IMF has done a study of this question but has not made it public, so I cannot give you specific details. The essence is what is happening now across Latin America. Labor's savings were the only available source of funding for stock purchases. The money was withheld from paychecks and turned over to employers and financial management companies to "endow" a financial class of insiders who moved as much of their money as possible out of the country.

The result was much like telecoms throughout the world in the late 1990s. They bought each other with borrowed credit that was out of proportion to the revenue being generated to pay their debts.

What happened is that the early privatizers bled their companies while selling shares to the workers at prices that were being inflated by the flow of wage set-asides into the stock market. This is just what the U.S. money managers would like to do with America's Social Security system to create a stock market boom today. In Chile's case the companies were allowed to collapse after their managers had unloaded their stock holdings to the workers' pension funds.

Pinochet and his Chicago advisors called this "Labor Capitalism," and the term was picked up by Mrs. Thatcher in Britain. But of course it was not designed to benefit labor at all. Rather, labor was left holding the bag when the stock market collapsed.

I also should point out that management fees for labor's forced savings were so high that they absorbed the entire flow of dividends. Thus, labor was not able to reinvest the earnings on its savings to grow and multiply. The financial sector got the benefit of this principle of compound interest, not the employee-contributors.

[s0metim3s]

Roger, are you thinking that Tronti's concept of the social factory implies his support for it?

Also, terminologically, when you say "communist form of economic organisation", it's not at all clear to me what you mean or what this has to do with Tronti. In any case, Tronti has been fairly consistent in denouncing 'economisation' (to put it briefly), as well as the notion that 'man' is at the centre, as it were. So, I guess I'm not real clear what you're getting at or who you're arguing with.

[Nate]

hi Roger,
I'm in a rush but I want to reply while I'm online. This will be jumbled, I'm sorry.
My example was clumsy and overly complicated in part because of the involvement of the state. Let me try again. What I meant to say was simply that there are conflicts or tensions within the working class (which are not reducible to simple ideology) and which are both product and productive of capitalization. Better example: folks with very little money faced with a picket line at the most affordable grocery store chain. What do you do? You don't cross the picket line, or you're a rotten scab, but there's a cost. The grocery store workers win a good contract, management's cost go up so they jack up the prices, which effects the pockets of folks who didn't cross the picket line etc. None of this is insuperable of course. I hope that's clearer on what I mean.
As for the environment, I have to admit that those are not concerns which speak to me in any big way, but I am sympathetic. I also think that environmental damage is in many cases a class and race and workplace issue. Take the example of dioxin in medical waste: my understanding is that incinerators tend to operate, at least in Illinois where I used to live, in low income communities of color, which results in a lot of PVC going up in smoke into folks' lungs. It also impacts the medical workers who handle the stuff (and patients, but I think patient exposure rates are lower because they're only in hospital for short periods of time). Last thing on the eco-thing: to my mind the problem is not "man" but rather some humans (mostly men, I think), and certain human social arrangements. The negative effects, like the profits, of ecocide are not equally carried, nor is the culpability. Those lines breakdown along class lines, generally speaking, I think.
Best wishes,
Nate

[roger]

Sometimes

a. No, I'm not trying to imply that at all.

b. I'm using communist form of economic organization to refer to, well, the communist form of economic organisation. In 1966, that would be the form of organization in the Soviet Union and in China. Just as the capitalist form of economic organisation would be the form prevalent in Italy, Western Europe, the U.S. The labels have a limited descriptive reach, of course - there are different forms of communist organisation and different forms of capitalist organisation, or what I am calling degrees of freedom in each system.

I think Tronti would locate the site of the factory in one of those forms, wouldn't he? If he isn't doing that, then I do have an argument with him, since there is a level of abstraction that makes a mockery of all refusal. Otherwise, I am just trying to locate his work in the historical circumstances in which it was produced.

My particular argument with Tronti has to do with an analysis of the workers as producers that, to my mind, ignores the spectrum of other roles and connections that the workers actually perform within in capitalism -- and that the period that he is writing in is striking for the way in which these roles have an effect on the workers, and their collective actions. Putting this simply: the GM worker in 1966 and say, a Dowlais Ironworks Mill worker in 1856 have different structures to deal with. An analysis that ignores that, I think, won't tell us very much.

[s0metim3s]

Roger, thanks for the clarification. On the point about changing forms of work, Tronti (among others around Potere Operaio, such as Sergio Bologna) did quite a bit of work around the question of - their phrase - changing forms of class composition.