working days

(What follows is by Chris Okane, a graduate student in social and political thought.  His blog is here.)

As the punditry weighs in on how Hilary Clinton's inevitability became evitable, Clinton has responded in a number of desperate ways.  The brash attacks have got the headlines- as they always do- but I want to focus on her new commercial running in Ohio, as it is far more illuminating for those of us interested in the politics that underlie neo-liberal posturing.

I believe Clinton's new ad was introduced following her speech in Youngstown, a steel town, which has been particularly devastated by the effects of globalization.  This setting reflects the Ad's purpose:  to appeal to the traditional democratic base of lower income workers i.e. the working class.  But the content of the ad backfires because Clinton's attempt to identify with working class is made palpably ludicrous, first by her patronizing empathy, then by the way she identifies with their lives:

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Abstract: Marx and Individualism

Here's the abstract to a paper submission to "Marx's Vitalism and Its Relation to Individualism"

Topic: Marx and Philosophy Society fifth annual conference Final call for papers

Conference Title: Is there a Marxian philosophy?

Location: London, Saturday 24th May 2008

Keynote speaker: Andrew Feenberg (Simon Fraser University)

Marx had a theory of individualism that is a surprise for many people to learn about. His belief was that the crowning achievement of the proletarian movement would not be the production of a socialist state that would organize society's product in such a way as to benefit the greatest number of people possible, thus producing a picture of Marx as a radical or revolutionary utilitarian, but rather that the dynamics of development and struggle that characterized modern bourgeois society would result in a situation where, for the first time, real individuals would be created that were liberated from the restrictions of class existence. Membership in a class, Marx believed, led to the creation of what he called "average individuals"; individuals who didn't really have their own individuality at their disposal, but rather people who had to live out the life of an average member of a class, taking on the opinions, the world view, the newspapers, the popular beliefs associated with a particular class, rather than developing their own and independent ideas and understandings of the world around them. Precisely the point of the proletarian movement was to create a situation in which individuals were created who were not defined by their class position and by membership in a class. This paper will explore Marx's theory of individualism and its relationship to his peculiar brand of vitalism. [end of abstract]

Everyone wish me luck!

hacia la multitud

Because it seems the thing to do (plenty more here), and having been a little more critical over on Posthegemony, a snippet from Pablo Neruda, specifically (almost) the end of his monumental Canto General:

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serious, serious problem

The site we all know and love, marxists.org, is under serious, life-threatening attack, possibly - seemingly - directed by the Chinese Government.

In early November we came under sustained denial of service attack from Internet hosts in China attempting to exploit a misconfiguration in our server's operating system. The nature and origin of the attack, our previous history with the PRC, and the experience of others suggest that this maybe politically motivated and directed by the Chinese government. Protecting ourselves necessitated rebuilding part of the kernel and rebooting the system remotely. The failure of the system to properly boot into the new kernel caused a prolonged outage as we scrambled to find someone with the necessary access to get the system back into the previous configuration.

While the attacks continued and greatly degraded MIA performance, we were understandably cautious about rebuilding the kernel and trying again. On January 15, the server became unresponsive and we asked for it to be remotely rebooted, taking the opportunity to bring it up with the new kernel.

While this alleviated the previous issue, it seems to have uncovered another, more serious, problem with our CPU that causes random errors (machine check exceptions) and cause the system to reboot.

Each time the system reboots, it causes our RAID storage system to reinitialize and rebuild, a lengthy process that severely degrades performance. To make matters worse, the redundant disk in the array seems to be failing.

As if that weren't bad enough, while attempting to make arrangements to buy a new server, we learned that our colocation facility will be closing on February 1, leaving MIA literally homeless.

At the moment, our redundant disk is back online and we are rebuilding the array to protect against data loss on the server. We also have offsite backups of all MIA content should the worst come to pass. We are furiously searching for new hosting space, but our data transfer needs (approximately 1.3TB a month) make this a very difficult choice compared with our previous non-profit host.

The bottom line: there is a significant probability that we will not be able to find and deploy an acceptable solution in time to meet the February 1 lights-out date. This means that the MIA will be off the air. We will make every attempt to bridge the gap with the help of our dedicated mirror operators though we may need to stop serving some of our more "expensive" content such as MP3s and PDFs. There is also a chance that our ultimate solution may require us to make a long-term evaluation of the type of content we serve and make things like PDFs available via alternate distribution channels (e.g. BitTorrent). However, despite our recent litany of seemingly fatal problems, the MIA remains a strong organization with a wealth of content, committed to providing the premiere electronic library of Marxist writings. Despite the political, technical, or economic pressures, rest assured that we will find a way to keep these works available to the world.

Now, look. I'll admit to something of a fascination with the PRC. Veteran blogtypes even know the long form of my pseudo-handle. I am fully aware of the human-rights abuses, of the not-actually existing socialism of the place. I've been there, I've seen it with my own eyes. But seriously, if this is true, forget it, forget my half-affection, the grain of salt with which I read all the western critiques of the place. I'm going to burn the fucking Little Red Book I bought there. I am going to forget semi-plans to figure out the viability of attending the Beijing Olympics. My university has a bigtime exchange agreement with several universities in China; I was just today looking at the brochures, thinking about taking part. No more!!!! Marxists.org is one of the good things in the world. What someone else might call a "category killer" of the left internet - I use it on an almost daily basis as just about everything is there.

Seriously, you've driven me to it:

(democratic?) multitudes good and bad

The question regarding democracy is whether or not we can imagine an anti-democratic, or better non-democratic, politics.  In other words, is politics tied to democracy, or can it be imagined beyond democracy?

(A supplementary question might then be whether or not we can and should imagine a beyond to politics itself: a post-politics.)

The prevailing consensus would seem to be that politics is unimaginable without democracy, that it is only democracy that opens up the possibility for politics.  Without democracy, all we are left with is (variously, or perhaps in combination) power, administration, fanaticism, hatred.

Such is the view of Ernesto Laclau, but also, for instance, Jacques Rancière, who writes:

There is politics, the art and science of politics, because there is democracy.  Politics is encountered as already present in the factuality of democracy, in the very strangeness of the combination of words which joins the unassignable quantity of the demos to the indefinable action of kratein.  (On the Shores of Politics 94)

Rancière traces the mixed fortunes of both politics and democracy from its invention in Athens to the current "end of politics." 

Continue reading “(democratic?) multitudes good and bad”

Schmitt and Mao

Spike Lee’s Inside Man is about a bank robbery, and one of the many twists in the film is that the chairman of the bank being robbed, Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer) derived his initial wealth from collaboration with the Nazis during the war. These tainted beginnings are ones which apparently continue to haunt him throughout his life—leading him, on the one hand, to devote himself to philanthropy and humanitarianism in an attempt to assuage his guilt and, on the other hand, to keep the physical evidence of his wartime complicity locked away in a secret safe deposit box in the main branch of the bank. The contents of that safe deposit box, in turn, become a crucial fulcrum point around which revolve questions of the legitimacy of each of the principle players in the drama—including not only bank chairman Case and the head robber (Clive Owen), but also the principle detective (Denzel Washington) assigned to negotiate with the bank robbers, as well as the mysterious power broker (Jodie Foster) hired by Case to try to protect his interests.

The central question posed by Spike Lee’s film, therefore, is an ethical one—in effect, the film asks whether there are situations in which the ethics of robbing a bank might supercede those of founding and running the bank in the first place. In framing in the film in this way, Lee (or script-writer Russell Gewirtz) may have been inspired by Brecht’s famous rhetorical question in The Three-Penny Opera: “What is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?”

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Partisan of No Part

(The following is a guest post by Nate Holdren, who authors the blog, What in the hell...?)

In 1972 Mario Tronti presented a paper dealing with Carl Schmitt at the University of Turin. Whether beginning or example, this presentation is of a conceptual turn in which "Schmittian elements became part of a thoroughgoing 'Marxist critique of Marxism' which sought (...) to put a practical theory of power squarely at the centre of revolutionary theorizing." (Muller, A Dangerous Mind, 179.) The Marxisti Schmittiani exemplify the problematic relationship of "Karl und Carl" which Tronti later characterizes, albeit not critically enough, as foundational to political theory.

There are several aspects in Schmitt's Theory of the Partisan resonant with the sensibility of operaismo and subsequent developments which take Tronti's early work as a touchstone. One such similarity is the relationship posited between resistance and constituted power wherein the former forces the latter to attempt to render resistance productive of innovation in the forms of power-over. In response to the partisan's irregularity, there are produced "new concepts of warfare (...) along with a new doctrine of war and politics" (3), such as that embodied in the Prussian Landsturm edict of 1813. A similar point can be seen in the chapter on the working day in volume one of Capital, concepts and law are produced in response to working class struggle. Technology as well. "The partisan too participates in the development - in the progress - of modern technology and its science." (54.) Again there is a Marxian parallel: "It would be possible to write quite a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working-class.” (Capital v1, ch15.)

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Karl (und Carl)

May 5th is Karl Marx's birthday.  Happy birthday Uncle Karl! 

In the trajectories of blogweaving, and by way of an invitation sent out rather late, what would it mean to assemble a conversation not at Marx's funeral but at his birthday?   I'll leave it for Craig to post here about (the other) Carl.

Resistance with irony

The following is a guest post by Brett Neilson, blogger at the irregular Life During Wartime.

1. ‘Triumphant global finance capital/world trade can only be resisted with irony.’ I am simultaneously drawn and worried by this claim from Spivak’s 2000 essay ‘From Haverstock Hill Flat to U.S. Classroom, What’s Left of Theory.’ Perhaps this is because the work of irony is never done. Reaching on the one hand toward insubordinate refusal and on the other toward an unbearable ontological lightness, irony holds forth a promise it cannot keep. As such, it provides no chart of programmatic action--no twelve steps for overcoming global capitalism. Its tactics are inevitably polluted with ideological longings that, as Spivak’s teacher Paul de Man points out, it can know but never quite overcome.

Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity but can never overcome it. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level, but it remains endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowledge applicable to the empirical world

Is this precisely the impossibility that drives Spivak to rewrite her observations on reading Marx after Derrida so many times?

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The insane mechanics of the 'fear ritual' of capitalism

The following is a guest post by Aren Airuza, blogger at the moving going somewhere?.

I've spent the last week trying to decide whether to engage––as may be expected on a 'literary' blog––in 'close reading' in a philosophical/literary manner, or to get eclectic on your asses, and tie some questions Spivak asks to questions I'd like people to think more about.  I ended up going with the latter, and at length.  But first, prefatory caveats.  Part of the oddness of my response to "Scattered Speculations", I think, is that capitalism has never seemed that coherent or smooth to me.  It has always seemed crazy.  Now, I am not a scholar of Marx, and I lack skills in parsing the distinctions in debates about use-value, exchange-value and surplus-value unless they are explained to me very slowly.  But it still seems 'intuitive' that capitalism runs on crisis.  There's an interview in Hatred of Capitalism where Jack Smith calls capitalism (or rather, landlordism, but he saw landlordism as an extension of capitalism) a fear ritual, completely counterintuitive:  "We have to spend the rest of our time struggling against the uses we make of our money against us."  This might be about antagonism rather than indeterminacy, I know, but I will come back to Jack Smith later.  (I also committed to blogging against heteronormativity today, and later I'll try to address that in regard to value.)  What I get from "Scattered Speculations" is yet another insight into the precise mechanics of that insanity; and, more importantly, the role of imperialism and 'culture' in that mechanics.

Continue reading “The insane mechanics of the 'fear ritual' of capitalism”

Four notes on the periphery of a speculative morphology

1. "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" is, perhaps, for those who arrive at it from literature, cultural studies, philosophy or similar, Spivak's most 'difficult' or elusive of essays. It seems to be the one that, more than any other, makes readers blink, their eyes glaze over.

Sometimes, at best, this is expressed as a bewilderment as to what might be at stake in the argument or, as a slightly different question, as a consideration of what is at put at stake in reading at a particular conjuncture. At other times, with a more or less implicit embarrassment that Spivak herself notes, the readers' gaze is averted from the discussion of 'economics', or better: labour-power and value - which is to say, that which is least familiar and proper to the aforementioned disciplines but which, as it turns out, the essay is about.  Other times, still, the confusion that results from Spivak's indisciplined writing cuts the other way. But, indeed, "before there is language, there are languages", as someone would say  (though, it remains to ask whether this statement exists in its temporal, integrative sense, as the hope or promise of a lingua franca).

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Questions on and responses to the Spivak piece.

The following is a guest post by Nate Holdren, blogger at the militant What in the hell .....

First, thanks to Jon and the Long Sundayista crew for holding this symposium. This is not a text I would have otherwise read. I look forward to reading the other contributions in order to understand it better.

Second, while I'm glad to have read it and grateful for the opportunity to participate in the symposium, it is unfortunately the case that I'm not sure what to do with this text. Much of the idiom and at least one of the major writers it references--Derrida--is very unfamiliar to me. I also find some of the philosophical uses of Marx in the essay bring out a proprietorial response on my part. I'd like to claim that it's because I prefer treatments of Marx to stick closer to the letters of blood and fire in which the history of capitalism is written, but that would be dishonest. I like a lot of abstract treatments of Marx. I don't know what it is about this text that doesn't click for me, maybe it's just that I don't really understand chunks of it. Hopefully some of you lot can and will help sort me out.

In any case, below is what I have to contribute to the symposium on Spivak's "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value." I have organized my contribution into three categories. There are two items under each category. I have numbered these items according to category.

The three categories in my contribution, in order of appearance, are:
- Questions that are nothing more than questions (QTANMTQ)
- Questions that are maybe a bit snarky and which are just as much comments as they are questions (QTAMABSAWAJAMCATAQ)
- Responses (R)

Continue reading “Questions on and responses to the Spivak piece.”

wrenching them out of their assigned function

I'm going to jump in here with a brief note on continuity and discontinuity in Spivak's text, "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value."

The nub of Spivak's argument is this: she presents a critique, first, of what she terms "the continuist version of Marx's scheme of value" (In Other Worlds 155), but second and more importantly, also of "all ideologies of adequation and legitimacy" (171).

The notion of value as continuity (of unruffled exchange, or even a series of more or less orderly exchanges and transformations) is at best mistaken, at worst ideological, and so complicit.

Hence Spivak's recourse to "the concept-metaphor of the text" (171) and textuality, to indicate the overdeterminations, the loose ends, the "situation of open-endedness" that characterizes the process by which value is produced as "an insertion into textuality" (161).

But the point is that there are discontinuities and then there are discontinuities.

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The Invaluable

The following is a guest post by pomegrenade, a dissertator in Comparative Literature, and state school teacher in upstate New York, who is starting to set foot on the shores outside the academy...

Let me start with the end of the first scene from Jean Genet’s The Screens--as it kept coming back to me while reading Spivak on Marx, for which I had to constantly defer the preparation I had to do for a Wednesday class on Genet’s play. In this scene, Said and his mother, very poor Algerians in the period immediately before the war of liberation, are carrying a suitcase of dough to the house of Said’s prospective wife, for the wedding. The end of the scene comes with a frantic/incestuous(?) dance of mother and son in a state of exhaustion from the long walk carrying the dough in the hot sun:

SAID: Take a look at my mother, see how beautiful and proud she is beneath her sweat and on her high heels! THE MOTHER keeps smiling and dancing. You’re beautiful. I’ll carry the valise. Whee!...

He imitates lightning. He reaches for the valise, but THE MOTHER grabs it first. A brief struggle. They burst out laughing, imitate thunder and lightning. The valise falls to the ground and opens, and everything falls out: it was empty. SAID and THE MOTHER fall to the ground and sit there roaring with laughter.

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How No Can You Go?

(The following is a guest essay by Keith Tilford, author of the weblog Metastable Equilibrium.  It is very long but, like everything on Long Sunday, hardly bored, or boring.  Update:  Part II is now here.)

Michael Blum, still from "Wandering Marxwards", 1999

What follows definitely took some liberties with a reading of Tronti.  I used “The Strategy of The Refusal” more as a point of departure than anything else, as I wanted to focus generally on the notion of refusal – on its creative/inventive capacities - and attempt to make visible some of the relationships between art practices since the 1960’s and the trajectory of operaismo and autonomia along with the theoretical works that have come out of Italy.  So perhaps in the spirit of Zizek’s book on Deleuze that he didn’t write, this can be my post on Tronti that I didn’t write.  The post is divided into four parts, the first two will be here at LS, but because of excessive length I’ll be posting the last two parts over at my blog if the reader is interested (one is a more in depth consideration of the work of artist Francis Alys, and the other on “anorectic subjectivities” which acts as a kind of conclusion).  This is really part of a wider research interest of mine, but I am very pleased that this symposium took place since it gave me the chance to return to some of those interest.  Call this a draft, then. Many of the themes taken up in the second part of this post are also adressed in Howard Slater's essay "The Spoiled Ideals of Lost Situations", which is meant to accompany a reading of the book Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, where most of the artist's writings I've used can be found.  Two artists that I have not been able to squeeze into this, but would highly recommend that anyone interested with what’s being said here check out are Thomas Hirschhorn (see here) and especially Santiago Sierra (a little about him here).  Also, I should point out that while the word “practice” appears throughout, many artists today (including myself) really don’t like this word.  I’ll skip giving reasons for the moment.  Perhaps Ranciere’s “ways of doing and making within the aesthetic regime of the arts” would have been better, though long-winded – and out of laziness I have not yet modified any of that.  However, the word does appear in inverted commas at several points, which I’m sure Matt will appreciate.

I. Double-Headed Histories

"Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults into a terrain of particles each containing its own void." – Robert Smithson

"The clear division between reality and fiction makes a rational logic of history impossible as well as a science of history." – Jacques Ranciere

With nearly forty years separating us from the first publication of Tronti’s essay “The Strategy of The Refusal”, a document showing that the struggle against work was actually essential to the development of capital, what to make of it now, in light so many radical, and at times even invisible or largely unnoticed mutations in the constitution of contemporary capitalism?  Perhaps some possible answers can be recognized in Tronti’s formulation that ‘against the old forms of struggle and resistance’ should be installed new forms of political organization and refusal.  It seems apparent then, that to think refusal today should invest in the same formulation – this time polemically positioned against Tronti.  Why?  Because from within the paradigm of “The Strategy of Refusal” is a rigorous division of class – and one that seems to run the risk of merely satisfying a dialectic and binary representational machinism; the categories of ‘worker’ and ‘party’ seem to end up installing themselves within the very representations that the workers would have intended to overthrow, a move which became thwarted by their own becoming-major.  So perhaps some solutions to envisioning contemporary forms of refusal might begin along the lines suggested by Deleuze and Guattari: to think minority instead of class.  To say this does not mean denying that there are classes, or that there is a ruling class; only that refusal, resistance – what composes and calls for them - are not reducible to the antagonisms of a class division.  As the Italian Futurist FT Marinetti once said, “language is the motherload of all culture”, and it is without doubt impossible to follow the consequences of Tronti’s initial formulations without encountering and taking into much consideration all the nominations which have entered and continue to circulate through the “post-Fordist” lexicon as a result of the ‘failures’ of the Italian operaismo: social subjectivity, social chain, multitude, social factory, the general intellect, generic will, compositionism, immaterial or cognitive labour…

In coincidence with the workers movement as a particular history of struggles and theoretical works lay another long history of artistic practices and revolutions that could be said to have aimed at constructing solidarities with such resistances and refusals.  If the artists and workers caught up in these histories shared a common enemy it was certainly ‘capital’ – though such an enemy will always express itself in different forms relative to a given situation or milieu.  In Italy it was the factory; with artists, the museum, institution, or gallery.  In both instances there was a resistance toward the system’s control that manifested itself in the engaged and active search for an outside set against received modes of subjectivity and the “conjugations of the axiomatic” (D & G); a search that concerned itself with the invention of new forms of life and work aimed at the embetterment of society as a whole.  This other history, with loose ties to the attitudes of such localized movements as the Bauhaus in Germany and the Russian Constructivists (or for that matter more diffuse movements such as Dada), initiated new inquiries into modes of aesthetic production conceived through a kind of ‘anti-aesthetic’ which intersected with the ambitions of the Italian workers and autonomia during the 1960’s and 1970’s.  Such coincidence figures into the attempts made by artists during this period to resist both the sedentary space of an elitist institution and the commodity form of the artwork in what came to known as Conceptual Art.

Continue reading “How No Can You Go?”

Five theses on Tronti

(The following is a guest post by Brett Neilson, author of the weblog Life during wartime.)

What is important about ‘The Strategy of Refusal’ is the strategy of refusal. This is its Copernican revolution, its exception. The rest is noise.

[O]nly afterwards, after a long-terrible, historical travail which is, perhaps, not yet completed, do the workers arrive at the point of being actively, subjectively, ‘a class against capital’.  A prerequisite of this process of transition is political organisation, the party, with its demand for total power.  In the intervening period there is the refusal - collective, mass, expressed in passive forms - of the workers to expose themselves as ‘a class against capital’ without that organisation of their own, without that total demand for power.

Refusal is the strategy of ‘the intervening period’, the hinc et nunc, the long Sunday.  Is it any accident that Tronti reminds us in La politica al tramonto that Kafka was born in Prague the same year Marx died in London?

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Strategy of Refusal of Strategy

(The following is a guest post by Stephen Squibb, author of the weblog fugitive ethical.)

What is being refused in Tronti’s “The Strategy of The Refusal”?

"What is generally known as class consciousness is, for us, nothing other that the moment of organization, the function of the party, the problem of tactics – the channels which must carry the strategic plane through to a point of practical breakthrough. And at the level of pure strategy there is no doubt that this point is provided by the very advanced moment in which this hypothesis of struggle becomes reality: the working class refusal to present demands to capital… in the final event, this means depriving capital of its content, of the class relationship which is its basis."

Putting aside the specifics of Tronti’s account of class consciousness for a moment, it is certainly evident that this is a departure from the traditional understanding of the term. But this should not surprise us; Tronti warns at the outset that it might be worthwhile "to confound Hegel's dialectic a bit," by asserting that the working class is a class for itself before it is a class against capital. He is clear that this is a departure not simply from Hegel, but from Marx as well.

Continue reading “Strategy of Refusal of Strategy”

Notes on “The Strategy of the Refusal”

(The following is a guest post by Nate Holdren, author of the weblog What in the hell...)

Thanks very much to Angela for being the impetus behind getting this Tronti symposium going.  I'm enjoying it a great deal.  In what follows I deal with a few issues that I am concerned over in relation to a few different thinkers and within Marxism generally.  Some of this may well repeat things I have said elsewhere.  (One of the prices of friendship is that one sometimes runs out of interesting things to say, or simply forgets what one has said to whom, and so one repeats oneself to one's friends.  If this is so here, I apologize, and apologize as well for the length of this post.  I hope that at least in this instance affection beats boredom in the interpersonal emotional game of rock-paper-scissors.)  There are also many other things I wish I could address, and which are I think related to the concerns I deal with here.  I can't do so here due to limits of time, length and ability, and so relegate these matters to future conversation, reading, and discussion.  There's also a great deal in Tronti that I like very much.  I don't spend much time on it here because I'm trying to work out other problems with what I like less.

Tronti begins “The Strategy of the Refusal” with a gesture common in Marxism, that of positing the uniqueness of capitalism:  “the effective development of the productive power of labour begins when labour is transformed into wage labour, that is, when the conditions of labour confront it in the form of capital.”  I take 'effective development' to mean something like 'increase of.'  I'm not entirely sure what Tronti means by 'productive' when he says that labor becomes more productive under capitalism.  Since I didn't understand it, and since I don't like not understsanding things and tend to dismiss that which I don't like, I at first thought this was something I could just leave out in my selective read of the piece.  I no longer think that's the case.

Continue reading “Notes on “The Strategy of the Refusal””

Class and Subalternity

(The following is a guest post by George Ciccariello-Maher, occasional contributor to the illustrious Wrong Side of Capitalism.)

In thinking about Tronti's essay as well as other work I'm presently doing on hegemony, I found myself puzzling over a statement by Jon Beasley-Murray on the Marxist notion of class. Since Jon is joining us here, and since Tronti’s essay deals directly the questions involved, this is the ideal forum in which to raise the question. In his essay “On Posthegemony” (2003), Jon writes: “Here Marx was wrong: the history of all hitherto existing societies is less the history of class struggle than, at a still more primordial level, it is the history of the struggle to produce class.” This statement is part of a defense of the concept of the multitude as the operative concept in a posthegemonic period, and I would like to discuss briefly how Tronti responds to the same critique but does so within an understanding of class.

The radical character of Tronti’s position on class (and its fundamental proximity, I argue elsewhere, to that of Sorel) emerges most clearly in his markedly non-orthodox discussion of the class-in-itself (Klasse an Sich) versus the class-for-itself (Klasse für Sich). It is perhaps worthwhile to begin by noting that, even for Marx, the so-called “class-in-itself” cannot be reduced to pure objectivity, and we see this even in its alternative formulation as a “class against capital,” a class determined differentially vis-à-vis its enemy:

This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends becomes class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle (The Poverty of Philosophy). [This sentiment is echoed in The 18^th Brumaire as well as The German Ideology.]

Here, we see that the organic link between an oppositionally-defined class and its homogenization through struggle is already clearly present in Marx’s formulation. My point is less to defend Marx than to emphasize an ambiguity in the Marxist formulation, in which, in Jon’s words, we could see “the struggle to produce class” as intimately linked with class itself. In a passage that is so crucial as to be worth quoting at length, Tronti seizes upon this differential character of Marx’s definition to catapult himself beyond it:

Continue reading “Class and Subalternity”

2 Questions on Tronti

This symposium has been my first exposure to Tronti. I've benefitted from the posts and comments that have appeared thus far.

Most interesting to me is Tronti's insistence on the party, on a form for political action that corresponds to mass passivity at the level of production. On the one hand, refusal (passivity) is necessary to deprive capital of what it needs to control. On the other, the constitution of the party as a political actor is necessary in order to break the hold of the capitalist state. The party then is another space, a political alternative, a new site which does not issue demands but which receives or responds to those of capitalists. So, it seems as if his strategy involves an economic and a political logic, one that separates productivity from struggles and claims, and that establishes a specific task fitting for each.

All I can add at this point are two questions.

Continue reading “2 Questions on Tronti”

Minor refusals

(The following is a guest post by Eric Beck, author of the weblog Recording Surface.)

Deleuze says somewhere that the beginning and the end are merely points, that it's the middle that is truly interesting. So it is for Tronti, who almost despite himself affirms that in the struggle against capital the action takes place in the center. For Tronti, the middle is the place of the refusal, nestled between the beginning, the workers as a "class for itself," and the end, the workers as a party demanding "total power." Near the end of "The Strategy of the Refusal," even as he insists that we must move beyond passivity and noncollaboration and as he avows his teleological commitment to the party form, Tronti reiterates that the struggle should be based on "the working class refusal to present demands to capital, the total rejection of the whole trade union terrain, the refusal to limit the class relationship within a formal, legal, contractual form."

So even in his invocation of an end, Tronti returns to the middle, the site where the working class rejects not only the commands of capital but also the institutional imperatives of official labor movements, the cultural authority of working-class intellectuals, and the state, which seeks to reduce the working class to juridical and democratic, i.e., nonpolitical, citizen-subjects. Tronti hints at, but doesn't detail, the ways in which the middle offers the working class fecund ground for creating a politics that gives voice to its refusals. The working class shares the cramped spaces of the middle with other political minorities, women, ethnic and racial minorities, migrants, the disabled. These minorities establish revolutionary connections and create revolutionary becomings in the autonomous space they share, and these minoritarian connections and becomings are responsible for demands that capital cannot tolerate:

The first demands made by proletarians in their own right, the moment that they cannot be absorbed by the capitalist, function objectively as forms of refusal which put the system in jeopardy. Whenever the positive demands of workers go beyond the margins that the capitalist is able to grant, once again they repeat this function--the objective, negative function of pure and simple political blockage in the mechanism of the economic laws. [...] In such circumstances, the demand as a refusal sets off a chain of crises in capitalist production, each of which requires the tactical capacity to make a leap forward in the level of working class organisation.

Continue reading “Minor refusals”

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:

Continue reading “Fantasy sites and the conquistadors of the planet”

Shaviro on surplus value

Steven Shaviro has a fascinating post on the Grundrisse and surplus value. Read the whole thing: The Pinocchio Theory. He writes:

If value cannot be calculated in empirical terms, then neither can surplus value (or the quantitative amount that capitalists are appropriating from workers). Marx knows that there is no simple one-to–one correspondence between the rate of exploitation in a given firm or industry, and its profit; rather, the entire social surplus (the excess of what is produced over what is paid for in production costs) gets distributed among capitalist enterprises through the market. But again, Marx never succeeded in linking the macro-level to the micro-level mathematically. ...

Throwing out the whole dimension of value, however, is like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. You need some concept like value if you are ever to try to look at the economy (of the world, or of a given nation or society) systematically rather than just atomistically.... 

But how do we make sense of Marx’s whole theory of value, if we stand apart from the questions of calculation that he tried but failed to put into practice? All sorts of answers have been given in the course of the last century. I am inclined to accept Karatani’s suggestion that the theory of value needs to be regarded, not as an empirical phenomenon, but as the “transcendental condition,” in a Kantian sense, for the functioning of a capitalist-commodity mode of production and distribution. Marx acutely notes at one point in Grundrisse that “language as the product of an individual is an impossibility. But the same holds for property” (490). It is much more familiar today than it was in Marx’s time to note that, although I express myself through language, the language in which I make this expression is not properly mine, and does not belong to me, because it is social and communicative, and even precedes me. Marx says that the same is the case with “private property”: it is only in a given social framework, only when there are others, and myself and those others stand in various forms of relation, that I can even make the claim that something is mine, that it represents me, that it belongs to me. Property relations, like language, already have to be given before the issues of personal expression and personal presence and personal belonging even arise in the first place.