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Intellectuals, the refusal of power, office workers' unions
(The following is a guest post by Doug Johnson, from The Weblog)
A critique of culture means to refuse to be intellectuals. Theory of revolution means direct practice of the class struggle. - Mario Tronti, "The Strategy of the Refusal"
So far as I know, Steve Wright's tendentious and hackneyed monograph Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism is unfortunately the best (perhaps only?) English language, book length account of the movement from which Antonio Negri arose. Wright is highly critical of Negri, and basically attributes the downfall of Autonomia to the forsaking by Negri and others of Tronti's insistence that there be "no intellectuals," that "theory of revolution" must always be undertaken by those who "direct[ly] practice class struggle" through time in the factory.
That Wright should fault Negri on this charge is absolutely ludicrous: has Wright spent hard time in the pokey for his participation or role in factory or other work place resistance? Wright focuses on Negri's understanding of the socialized worker, a concept that broadens the domain of struggle far beyond the scope of traditional "blue class" workers. He seems incapable of understanding the necessity of widening the struggle and, apparently, would have preferred that Negri hold down a job at Fiat or some other large factory while publishing his findings solely in obscure circulations.
Still, Wright's book does highlight just how important it was and is that any worthwhile theory of revolution earn its stripes by working alongside those whom it hopes to mobilize. For most of us, taking Tronti seriously would mean a refusal of a university job. To make use of Negri's constitutive power/constituted Power distinction, we might say that a refusal of the university means a refusal of Power. Let's face it, the professorate is the second most respected profession (at least in the U.S.; M.D.'s are first), and professors, while ever carrying the potential to change thinking (and thus not to be refused completely), are more often essentially midwifing minds for the corporation. But what then?
How about getting our asses behind cubicles and fomenting an office workers revolution? Actually, most of us would probably be horrible organizers. But seriously, I am more and more struck by the observations that 1) as factory work is continually being outsourced, the office is replacing the factory as the site of the proletarian work force 2) the people who are most likely to hate their jobs already are office workers (witness the cult popularity of the movie Office Space) 3) there is a major dearth of office workers unions (did some quick google work here, but will spare the details) 4) the office worker is far more essential to first world domestic economies than we have presently acknowledged.
The power of autonomia and ultimately of Negri's thinking rested squarely on the shoulders of some hard working, theoretical social analysis that could only be undertaken by those who were in the trenches in factories. The radicality of Italian thought and practice has been driven by Trontian strategies of refusal - for smart folk a strategy of refusal that means refusing the intellectual temptation.
By Doug | March 26, 2006 in Academia, Refusal, Tronti | Permalink
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I totally disagree with you, but thanks for the post!
Posted by: Charles | Mar 26, 2006 11:31:32 AM
I think what Tronti means by refusing to be intellectuals is much more complicated than refusing a university post. This would be to reduce his philosopy to a mere formalism. Indeed, he makes a specific distinction between an intellectual of the labor movement and of the working class (not mentioning universities once, since he's not speaking explicitly of location). He speaks elsewhere about how words, too, are always bourgeois, but one cannot abandon them. There is, then, a remnant of hegemony, in the irreducible sense of not abandoning potentially useful instruments to the capitalists alone.
Posted by: geo | Mar 26, 2006 3:28:59 PM
Doug,
I'm having trouble being constructive because Steve is a good friend of mine (and I always get pissed when I feel like folks are bagging on my friends) whose political activity I know a reasonable amount about such that your charges are unfair and insulting. I don't feel comfortable to say what he has and hasn't done without his permission, and in any case I think fights over activist/political cred are kind of revolting. As far as I know Steve's also never had a (or may have just recently gotten his first) tenure track position, so the 'professor' crack is misplaced.
It's particularly ironic that you lambast Steve for holding (which I don't think he does) the ridiculously old faschioned idea that radicals need to proletarianize themselves, then turn around say that after reading Tronti we should do the same thing. Tendentious and hackneyed indeed.
Given the relative absence of material referenced and even less engaged with in your post it's hard to see what your actual complaints are - let alone actual substantively respond to them - other than that Steve's not Negri's #1 fan. That's true. This is also true of Harry Cleaver, one of Negri's early translators, and I believe also of Michael Ryan (and Sergio Bologna, a former student and collaborator with Negri, and Claudio Albertani, a militant from the same political and intellectual millieu as Negri, not to mention a lot of people in 'area of autonomy' in the 70s from the 'creative autonomy' in opposition to the 'organized autonomy' that Negri was part of). Are these judgments also hackneyed and tendentious, or might there be some substantive reasons why people who know Negri's intellectual and political work and the larger context might disagree with Negri's ideas and his politics at different points in (and throughout) his carreer?
As for office worker unions, I agree completely. Transportation workers as well - office workers produce and move electronic commodities around the global economy while truckers, dockworkers, cargo handlers, etc, move the physical ones. As far as I know, relative lack of attention to matters like these - lack of attention to what the operaisti called class composition analysis - is one of Steve's bigger complaints with Negri. Me too.
Best regards,
Nate
Posted by: Nateq | Mar 26, 2006 6:29:31 PM
Geo, I didn't attribute to Tronti the argument that the university should be abandoned (nor did I advocate that myself), but am convinced that his argument would mean less of us taking university posts and instead finding someway to continue our theoretical work while more directly engaged with those we hope to mobilize.
Nate, I think my complaint regarding Wright's book is pretty clear. Negri did plenty to remain faithful to Tronti's vision of an intellectual engaged with the actual working class and (perhaps this is where I am misled because of what I take to be a hackneyed work) I also understood Wright to be taking exception to Negri's understanding of the socialized worker such that the field of workers considered a part of a class struggle is widened beyond traditional bounds. Wright's prose isn't all that easy to follow even for those who frequently read difficult thinkers.
I have gone after Negri myself over at the weblog and don't expect everyone to be his number one fan by any stretch of the imagination. I never specifically cracked at Wright for being a professor, but I do think the attack on Negri as abandoning Tronti's vision is misplaced given Negri's actual history. I further have no clue where you get the notion that I am lambasting Wright for holding the position that radicals need to proletarianize themselves. What I disagreed with was his bizarre suggestion that autonomia would have been better off if Negri had stayed closer to the factory rather than engaging in flights of philosophical fancy (while never engaging seriously with most of Negri's important concepts with the lone exception of the socialized worker - a concept that he treats badly in my view).
Posted by: Doug | Mar 26, 2006 11:21:01 PM
Nate: I'm having trouble being constructive because Steve is a good friend of mine (and I always get pissed when I feel like folks are bagging on my friends) whose political activity I know a reasonable amount about such that your charges are unfair and insulting.
Just wondering out loud: what is one's responsibility to the ideas of a friend? Being a bit unfair to your comment, Nate, it seems that you are more upset that Doug disgrees with your friend than you are with the substance of the disagreement itself! What distance should we have from the ideas of our friends? I thought I heard somewhere that a certain member of Long Sunday was going to blog Derrida's Politics of Friendship... anyone?
(By the way, Nate, I think you are being unfair to Doug.)
Posted by: Craig | Mar 26, 2006 11:32:41 PM
hi Craig, Doug,
I stand corrected for the aggressive tone. My bad. Doug, I'm sorry. Thanks for calling me on that Craig.
Doug:
"no clue where you get the notion that I am lambasting Wright for holding the position that radicals need to proletarianize themselves."
I read this:
"[Wright] would have preferred that Negri hold down a job at Fiat or some other large factory while publishing his findings solely in obscure circulations."
as you saying _Storming Heaven_ holds that it's better to be in the factory than the university, which you then suggested as a response to reading Tronti today.
As for responsibilities to friends' ideas, I have no universalizable principle, just a gut reaction to uncharitable reads if I'm invested. The gist of my response was precisely one of "don't dis my friend" in response to the two (I think still unjustified) adjectives 'tendentious' and 'hackneyed'. I understand how my response was not productive for this kind of exchange. Sorry again for that. A reductive and wrongheaded response to a good book is also unproductive, though.
That's part of what really set me off: the exact type of dis it was, which struck me as misrepresentation of some quality work. I mean, if you said I'm a lousy guitar player or that my blog is full of sloppy half-baked ideas you'd be rude but basically right. If you said Jodi Dean's a lousy reader of Zizek you'd be rude, wrong, and doubly rude for making a gross misrepresentation.
Storming Heaven's not a book I like simply or primarily because the author's a pal. My affection for the book pre-dates my friendship with the author. If anything I like Steve better for having written it rather than I like the book for it being written by Steve.
My copy of the book's currently on loan so I can't check right now, but I don't recall the argument being directed against the social(ized) worker as expansion of the class subject. I remember the book being opposed to the factoryism of many of the operaisti, and pointing up a problematic vanguardism that runs through the whole tradition. This vanguardism is very clear throughout Tronti, and is, in my opinion, very much the case in Negri's work at least until recently when he gets much more ambiguous on this stuff. So, in your terms Doug, I think Negri's quite faithful to Tronti at least through the 80s, and in a very problematic way.
For what it's worth Doug I will look the book over again when I get it back, I may well be off in my recollection of it, perhaps we can discuss some of this a bit more in depth later on.
Also, trying to salvage or just change my impoliteness into something possible constructive, Doug, if you have time, can you expand on the Tronti-Negri parallels or faithfulness, where you see this and what you make of it? One of the tensions I see in Negri's work, shared with a lot of the millieu, is the desire to identify a hegemonic class figure (professional worker, mass worker, socialized worker) - a type of vanguardism and something it's not at all clear one has to do. My take on this was strongly shaped by a discussion in an article by Midnight Notes, that discussion is online here
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3843/monty5.html
in case you're interested.
Best,
Nate
Posted by: Nate | Mar 27, 2006 1:40:19 AM
I like Doug's qualification about the parasite intellectual, as opposed to Public Intellectual, if I read that correctly.
Independent of it's relation to Nate, whose comments are always interesting, Craig's comment is also well-taken (it would be nice to talk about 'friendship', and the distance it demands; maybe after brief interlude between symposia...)
Am I correct in assuming that a proper Trontian (...) should have little use for something like Borradori's distinction, between "political activist" and "social critic"? Or maybe hers is a less useful tack than it claims to be?
Posted by: Matt | Mar 27, 2006 2:36:03 AM
I don't see why Nate should apologize. His attitude is no more hostile than the original post.
BTW, Nate has gone very softly on what is a miserably poor showing.
In my view, only a lunatic could say that recent discussions of class composition have somehow avoided the question of the office. From Temp Slave and Processed World to the recent discussions of Precarity and academic conferences on Wal Mart and logistic capitalism, this is very much at the centre of the picture and has been for twenty plus years. Last time I checked there was not just one, but several competing literatures, indeed specialist journals and edited volumes, about white collar proletarizaton, the service industry, casualisation, and so on and so forth... This is a major, maybe the major theme of internet post-operaismo. For obvious reasons too. The people who do this writing are not exactly picking cotton or forging crankshafts.
The real question, in my view, is whether this perspective is not awfully skewed. Living in the First World, you may develop a rather warped view of reality, one in which the people most like to already hate their jobs are call centre operators rather than, say, Chinese miners or Indian ship breakers, who die like flies while our valiant paper shufflers refuse work through endless matches of solitaire. And even more people, literally billions, live off the land. I mean, you don't get any sense at all that this could even be possible from the writing of Hardt, Negri and so on. I don't know enough about Tronti to comment, but the sense I get from all these people is that they have an absurdly narrow view of the economy, as if the welfare state existed for itself and in itself, rather than for itself in a world of radical geoeconomic inequality. This post, however, is just laughably blinkered. As jobs are outsourced, supposedly the office emerges as the site of proletarian struggles - yes, because the jobs are sent to Pluto, were frozen nitrogen elfs make things for us. Sheesh.
Posted by: TCO | Mar 27, 2006 2:51:35 AM
Thanks Matt, you're kind. I'd be up for the Derrida thing, I've just started the friendship book in attempt to start getting my head round what some folks make of Schmitt.
best,
Nate
Posted by: Nate | Mar 27, 2006 10:14:24 AM
I don't think you should apologise, Nate. Doug's critique of Steve doesn't just raise my hackles because I also know Steve, and feel immediately antagonistic to abuse of his hard-won efforts to write in English about operaismo. My hackles rise at the use of such a straw man rhetorical device. And where does it get you, finally? To tell us that unless we've done some jailtime, we better not criticise Negri? Or to replace the straw man with your own brilliant insight about office workers being the new proles and the new radical site of refusal? (Which, wait, hasn't that been said before? Who by? Oh, Negri said it. Well, you can't argue with that.)
If you'd like to find out more about immaterial labour, and writing on immaterial labour, perhaps you should go read some more of Steve's stuff.
Posted by: az | Mar 28, 2006 3:29:18 AM
Get a job! ...and some human rights!
Posted by: Amish Lovelock | Mar 29, 2006 11:44:41 AM
I'm going to avoid the whole back and forth over Steve Wright's book, which I found really excellent. I appreciate TCO's comment referencing Processed World with which I was involved for its entire lifespan (1981-1994, 2001, 2005)... The notion that there ought to be office worker unions offered in the context of discussing a strategy of refusal (whatever level of abstraction you care to employ) is pretty bizarre. The simple fact is that people who find themselves employed in offices--and have any kind radical political sensibilities--for the most part do not think of themselves as 'office workers'. They live a bifurcated life, like most of us, split between what we are forced to do to make money and survive, and what are inclined to do to exercise our full humanity, our multiplicity of skills and interests and reasons for living. There is a great line by a west coast comic performer Merle Kessler (aka Dr. Science): "What you see me doing, isn't what I do!"
The point here is that people working in offices since at least the late 1970s have been refusing the work through time-theft and sabotage and all sorts of relatively invisible forms of revolt. But more crucially, they get the hell out of there as soon as they can. Whether to get on to what they really like to do, or feel is their true calling, or just to spend more time outside of wage-labor, the energy that might have gone into 'standing and fighting' at the office has instead engaged in a steady exodus from the dead-end absurdity of shuffling pointless (for humans) information in a late capitalist economy.
--Chris C.
Posted by: Chris Carlsson | Mar 29, 2006 2:11:21 PM
A link to Processed World, for those who haven't come across it.
Get a job! ...and some human rights!
Now, that's what I call irony.
Posted by: s0metim3s | Mar 29, 2006 2:58:28 PM
Chris: "The point here is that people working in offices since at least the late 1970s have been refusing the work through time-theft and sabotage and all sorts of relatively invisible forms of revolt."
Michel de Certeau takes this up in The Practice of Everyday Life through what he calls “la perruque” (“the wig”), which is the worker's own work disguised as work for his employer. Nate has also done some examination of "deadtime", and the Japanese invented the term 'karoshi' to refer to death caused by overwork.
Posted by: Keith | Mar 29, 2006 3:03:14 PM
Actually, Merle Kessler isn't Dr. Science. He's Rodney, Dr. Science's aging grad student assistant. And he's also Ian Shoales, sneering social critic.
--Mrs. Kessler
Posted by: Amy | Jul 17, 2006 1:15:51 PM
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