Regarding Nick Witheford, and in the gloomy light of the post-Seattle back-biting, it occurs to me we can learn much from the autonomist Marxists. Seems to me capital doesn't have to bother to take a hand in decomposing movements of resistance any more.
Lefties either don't notice the class is in a new phase of composition or resent that it is not reconstituting itself along the lines it did seventy years ago (which was nothing like the way it boiled to the surface thirty-five years ago, either). And maybe one of the reasons for j18 and n30 is precisely that the technology that marginalises, stratifies and retrenches is also the technology through which the new resistence organises itself (that so many different groups, from different places, turned up in one street at the same time on n30 is not cause for concern on this Negri-sorta reading, but evidence of an enhanced potency of tremendous potential, if only we choose to grab the opportunity).
I'm reminded of EP Thompson's terrific section on the Luddites (who were estate-claiming democrats rather than the technophobes they have been so conveniently dubbed). There, too, there was organisation without hierarchy, meaning the establishment had no head to strike at. There, too, a new mode of production (factory capitalism) transformed relations between workers (the 'shop floor'). There, too, a new mode of communication at once regulated the proletariat and enhanced productivity - AND produced a new mode of resistance (partly 'democratised' literacy - eg. Tom Paine was read aloud by the literate to the illiterate). There, too, formerly disparate classes united in practice (artisans and 'unskilled' labour). And there, too (?), an extended period of anti-democratic exploitation-exacerbation was successfully reversed (from the Combination Acts of 1799 to their repeal in 1824).
Dialectical stuff, I reckon. And a lesson quickly to be learned. Things won't be happening like they did last time (which is as the dialectic would have it), and to try to impose the tactics, definitions and hirarchies of old will serve only to decompose resistance from within.
Cheers, Rob.
>This guy's essay in Cutting Edge [Verso, 1997] was excellent. Looks like
>he's expanded that piece into a full fledged work. Call Santa.
>
>Ian
>
>
>http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/5200/02479.ctl
>
>Dyer-Witheford, Nick Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in
>High-Technology Capitalism. 416 p. November 1999
>
>
>ISBN: 0-252-02479-6 Cloth $49.95
>ISBN: 0-252-06795-9 Paper $21.95