>>every little tiny "subversive" gesture
>>(shoplifting, sick-ins, jaywalking, grafitti, etc.) is imbued with
>>revolutionary consciousness
Doug wrote:
>Potential revolutionary consciousness, don't you think? Isn't the job
>of the disciplined professional autonomist revolutionary to make
>these sentiments and practices conscious, link them up with each
>other, and just give a big collective Fuck You to capital, instead
>lots of little, essentially harmless ones?
>Of course, H&N argue that the dispersed Fuck Yous of the 70s
>contributed to the productivity slowdown and the decline in the
>profit rate - which were only reversed with the onset of the
>Reagan/Volcker/Thatcher discipline.
I now write:
No doubt that the multiple and various forms of "blue flu" in the 1970's contributed to the slowing of OECD capital accumulation during that period -- class struggle by other means, as it were. Hardt and Negri are hardly alone in claiming this -- so too have other class struggle-sympathetic neo- Marxists (Aronowitz, O'Connor, etc.), not to mention Daniel Bell and other neo-cons who were so alarmed by it. My educated guess is that in more class- conscious countries such as (Negri's) Italy and France, those who participated in the "revolt against work" were more cognizant of the anti-capitalist ramifications of their actions, whereas in the U.S. it was more of a "take this job and shove it" kind of thing, infused with a kind of macho individualist sensibility (informed of course by the massification of the counter-culture and U.S. defeat in Vietnam). The Euro-communist countries had a big movement for the reduction of the work week; the U.S. celebrated not having to take orders from some pencil-pushing twit undeserving of a position of managerial authority, and starting your own small business -- or better yet, winning the lottery. Still, the overall ethic in the U.S. during the 1970's was much better than today. Today, capital makes folks work longer and harder than before, and Hollywood and Madison Avenue crank out more fantastical and delusive means of wish-fulfillment than before (including pervasive post-modern cyncicism, just check out those ads during the Super Bowl) -- which is why the culture is at one and the same time more authoritarian, more "permissive", and more disturbed than before. The Frankfurtians would have a fucking field day diagnosing this mess: I look forward to four years of frat boy Bush and Company napalming Colombia while promoting "faith-based" social services, and Hollywood liberals getting up on their soapbox about endangered civil liberties while exporting putrid celluloid crap to the world.
John G.