Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2002 18:25:13 -0700 (PDT) From: Alec Ramsdell <aramsdell at yahoo.com> Subject: Re: autonomist Marxism <http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/txarchintro.html>.
This looks like an excellent resource, thanks. Also .
Tahir: Harry Cleaver is an exceptional writer, in that he manages to be both brilliant and original without being inaccessible.
> >These archives contain a wide variety of material
> related to those
> >threads of the Marxist tradition which have
> emphasized the
> >self-activity of the working class. "Autonomist "is
> used here in
> >several senses: 1. the autonomy of the working
> class vis a vis
> >capital, 2. the autonomy of workers vis a vis their
> official
> >organizations, e.g., trade unions or parties, 3.
> the autonomy of
> >various sectors of the class from each other, e.g.,
> that of blacks
> >from whites, women from men, etc.
Tahir, what's your angle on sense 3? I understand the necessity of identifying and organizing in groups in so far as it enables collective political agency. But how does one deal with the subsequent reification of categories where they're detached from the social, historical, and political contingencies that made them matter in the first place? Where the latter can inspire things like the bell curve and other bogus racial determinations . . .
A quick question after a short read.
Alec
Tahir: Well it seems that I am being asked to self-identify as an autonomist, whereas there are many currents of leftwing communism that I like in one way or another. But leaving that aside, let me first say that what I like about the autonomist tradition, and other similar approaches, is that they leave open the question of organisation, like Marx did (in contrast to Lenin and his epigones).
I find your question to be not quite clear. Let me say that no-one, I think, is actually advocating that people organise along racial, gender or ethnic lines. What this tradition draws attention to is the fact that the working class is de facto struggling and organising in that way. In every one of these instances one can discern an anti-capitalist element, regardless of the particular subjectivities involved. This of course is not say that any of these social movements are beyond critique, but it does counter the view that is often expressed on this list that there is no left, and by implication no class struggle happening. There is and it never ceases. What I like about the autonomous tradition is that it emphasises that communism is as Marx said the real movement of the people, not some mythical ideal society that one holds up as a norm to try to replicate. In other words the marxist critique of capitalism is an immanent critique, not a transcendental one. One therefore b! eg! ins from an assumption that there is always resistance to capital, and one looks for these struggles and their various determinations and gets a better idea of how they can potentially be articulated within the anti-capital movement.
So I think that the detachment that you talk about is the reason why there are communists in the first place, those who can express the movement as a whole in all of its various determinations. To me this seems like the opposite to the reification that you suggest, because it says that all of these forms of struggle have a greater significance as part of a total anti-capitalist movement, not that any one of them is the answer in itself. A good person to read on this is also Raya Dunayevskaya, who from her 'humanist' (hegelian) marxist perspective shows how the black movement, for example, has always had a contradiction within it, between the tendency for black workers to unite with middle class, exclusivist blacks (black nationalism) on the one hand, and another tendency for black workers to unite with white workers on the other.
The writers on gender within the autonomist tradition that you might like to look at for a start include Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James.