Ok, I'll give it ago, with the usual caveats about the 'non-systemic' nature of my education. Maybe Michael will chime in, since I don't have the time / erudition to keep up this side of the conversation entirely by myself.
>
> >Well, I would imagine that what you do is you 'push capitalism's promises'.
> >For instance, the Zapatistas strategy of globalising a local conflict
> >in Chiapas through injecting their struggle into an international network
> >of support and discussion heavily depends on the ability of activists
> >in to bridge the enforced divisions which are fundamental to imperalism.
>
> Well, yes, but what's _new_? Don't tell me it's the Internet!
What's new in the Zapatistas? I think probably most importantly the idea of non-homogenous unity - instead of struggling the seize the state and unify people as abstract atoms of that state ('citizens' or whatever), rather struggling against the state and in favour of 'the free development of each'. Holloway's written a book on the Zaps which is apparently quite interesting, and Massimo de Angelis has also written some stuff.
>
> >This is all pretty standard Marxism - Trotsky idea of a transitional
> >programme is talking the same language.
>
> Right.
>
> >Where Negri and co. - and
> >other 'autonomists' - differ from orthodox Marxism is that they see
> >the refusal of the relations of capital as happening constantly - the
> >capital relation constantly needs to be re-imposed.
>
> I don't think that insights into the presence of constant struggles
> against capital & capital's ceaseless endeavor to re-impose the
> ensemble of social relations necessary for its expanded reproduction
> have been missing in the Marxist tradition aside from "autonomists."
> What were Marx, Lenin, Luxemberg, Trotsky, Postone, Gramsci, Mao,
> Braverman, Althusser, Mandel, O'Connor, and so on, and so forth?
> Chopped liver?
Let's see...
Lenin and clearly had a 'definitional' approach to class where the operation of the 'objective forces' of history mould a particular sub-set of the exploited into the 'most advanced' representatives of the working class. Unfortunately, I don't think they are online at the moment, but it is clear from Lenin's attack on the Workers Opposition that Lenin considered the industrial workers to be this 'most advanced' subset. Trotsky and Gramsci continue this tradition, with various arguments revolving chiefly around how the Communist Party might concentrate the energies (intellectual and practical) of the mass of the working class into itself.
What then does this tradition make of those who are different to or consciously diverge from the 'most advanced' layer of the proletariat? This is not a theoretical question, but extremely practical - I would argue that it is exactly this view of seeking out and supporting the most advanced section of the proletariat which has led Leninists and Trotskyists to be blind to challenges to the relation of capital which emerge on unexpected lines - even today, the distinction drawn by many socialists between 'women's struggles' and 'workers struggles' (i.e. trade union/workplace struggles), and the continued priviledging of the workplace as the cite of struggle against capital suggest that this 'definitional' approach to class remains a shackle.
In contrast to this, most 'autonomists' that I know prefer an 'antagonist' definition of class (such as that clarified by e.g. John Holloway, and, I'd argue, Karl Marx in certain places) where class is seen as arising from a social relation wherein people occupy different poles as a result of their concrete actions in society. So, for instance, the argument has been made recently on aut-op-sy, and I'd largely agree, that in various concrete cases in US history (and I'd say also in SA history) white workers by aligning themselves with whiteness have embraced, rather than opposed, capital. If we understand the imposition of work, for instance, as a key aspect of the capital-labour relation, then it is clear that those IT workers who recently argued on Slashdot.org against trade unions *because they protect workers from intensification of work* are actually acting concrete as the transmitters of capital as a social relation. In this case it makes little sense to talk of abstract 'working class unity' when it is clear that some members of the working class are quite happy to take their place as atoms of capital.
Again, this is no abstraction - I've many times heard seperate organisation of fragments of the working class denounced merely for not 'promoting working class unity'. One of the most terrible of these cases recently has been the denunciation (by NUMSA - metalworkers union) of some VWSA auto workers as splitters because they refused to work within NUMSA. Ignored in this denunciation is the fact that NUMSA imposed productivity agreements on them, imposed shopstewards and ultimately colluded in getting them fired. The point here is not that NUMSA beaurocrats betrayed these workers - rather, my point is that it is exactly the discourse of 'one is workers unity and ever more shall be' - a discourse which grows out of a definitional, homogenizing approach to class - which was used against these workers.
Ok, so that's Lenin, Trotsky and Gramsci... Mandel was a Trotskyist, and a rather turgid one at that, so I'll leave him out of this. I'm not familiar enough with O'Connor, Postone, Braverman or Mao to talk about them (although what I've read of Postone thus far seems quite good, and what I've read of Mao - bits of the Little Red Book - is too abysmal for words). Luxemberg's a difficult case - her work makes an excellent start on a Marxism which sees the varied activity of the working class - not a judgement of whether they are following the correct Party Line - as central, but unfortunately remains within the tradition of 2nd International Marxism, with its positive dialectics (drawn pretty much from the vulgarities of Plekhanov), its definitional approach to class, etc.
As for Althusser - that's a rather odd name to put into the list. Again, I'm not so familiar with A., having got my background through Trotskyist politics, but I'll give it a go.
Althusser's reduction of the subject to an abstraction, and the image of a subject essentially operated upon by external structures strips the narrative of life under capital of its elements of discontinuity - exactly what autonomists value most of all, the subversion of structures, the slippage of the machinery of control, seems to be lost in the Althusser that I've come into contact with. The 1960s workerist strain, the work of Tronti, Bologna, Negri et al., focusses very clearly on refusal - in particular their is a kind of archeology of how workers reject their roles as producers of surplus value. This has led in autonomism to a number of rather comical stories about factory sabotage, organised laziness, etc. - beyond the comical, a very important point is found here: workers often do not act like the images which are presented of them. The reaction of communists to this is important - do we reject this kind of activity as merely destructive? (As in the case of the Healyite Workers Revolutionary Party, which in Britian in the 1970s and 1980s argued (according to one ex-squatter I met) that squatters were parasites and enemies of the working class. The Socialist Workers Party were hardly better, ignoring the squatter movement entirely...) Or do we see in it a rejection of the imposition of work, a mental breaking of the chains of capital?
What is radically progressive about autonomism, is the committment to not critique, but not proscribe, and to constantly examine the real activity of the working class for antagonisms which might be supported and strengthen (rather than absorbed by a 'Revolutionary Party' or 'Social Movement').
>
> In any case, what's more progressive about the present (the
> post-Socialist/post-Social Democratic era) than about the past (the
> Socialist/Social Democratic era), aside from some advances in women's
> & GLBT rights in some corners of the earth, a little more awareness
> of ecological dimensions of struggles against capitalism, etc.?
This is a meaningless question in my mind. We can't go back to the past, and the nostalgia for Socialism (which I still consider a form of State Capitalism - that much hasn't changed from my Trotskyist days) or Social-Democracy 1) plays down the way these were enclosures, forms of recuperation of working class struggle and 2) ignores the concrete history of workers fighting those forms of social organisation. (Unfortunately too much history ignores working class resistance until it becomes full-fledged insurrection)
>
> Compare the Cuban Revolution with the Zapatista strategy. _Not
> because of any fault on the part of the latter, but because of the
> drastic change in the balance of the forces_, the latter has yet to
> achieve one hundredth of what the former has.
I find this difficult to answer, I guess because this is one of the disagreements between us that I've let slide over the years. For me, the Cuban revolution, which was a nationalist seizure of the state with a socialist tint, survives through the freezing of the capital relation in a determinate form. It is thus both much better for many people (just as Social-Democracy was and still is to a lesser extent) yet also still a relation of class exploitation (where the labour of many is extracted by the state-productive machinery). The encouragement of the activity of the mass of people is vitally necessary for the survival of the Cuban state, yet simultaneously this activity must be redirected - recuperated - in such a way that the state, which has frozen the capital relation within its structure - continues to survive. I really don't see much of a way forward from there.
The Zapatistas (and autonomist theorists like Negri) are dealing with
another problem entirely - how to achieve the negation of domination.
To do so, they have found it necessary to, by various means, prise
free the life-activity of the peasants from the concrete mechanics of
domination (enforced landlessness, military/police repression, etc.).
That they have managed to do so to even a small degree in the Southern
junior partner of the US is certainly praiseworthy. Ultimately, what
they have achieved needs to spread - not necessary in a strict
geographical sense, but rather through the network which holds capital
together on an international scale. I guess that's what I'd call a
global process of political class re-imposition - the international
proletariat needs to become a reality, not an abstraction.
>
> Whither the Zapatistas (and the Zapatistas are us) in the era of the
> triumphant Progress of the Empire?
>
Right now in South Africa I'm having a series of 'deja vu' moments, as I see once again the same events - evictions, the need for more lawyers, more resources, more sympathetic ears, the suppression of news by the media, etc etc. So here we are again, not yet 7 years after 'liberation' and the state confronts the working class as an antagonist power. The rapidity of this development is astounding - and in my mind also betrays a kind of limited room to maneuver, as South Africa is tied incredibly tightly within Empire. Exactly this tightness will probably be a resource in years to come, as we are tied close to the development of the most advanced forms of capital (South African software is apparently being used in the next-generation US ATMs, and alignment with new forms of capital organisation which seek to leverage intellectual property for the extraction of surplus value is a key goal of the SA state).
So what should we do? Learn to exploit the most advanced products of human society, while simultaneously posing a great Ya Basta! to the plans of Mbeki and co., who seek to make us a useful component of the planetary work machine. Fighting for housing, services, etc - all the basic materials of subsistance - and figuring out to do with the resources that come into our hands (build community social centres, develop self-education strategies, fight encroaching gentrification, spread and sustain rebellion in the workplaces) seem to be the main things on my agenda right now.
Peter -- -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844 OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF 9295 6A26 6A92 0517 502B