>
> On Jan 12, 2011, at 5:32 PM, Sean Andrews wrote:
>
> > I don't think that these people normally think of themselves as laborers.
> > My brother-in-law works as a trader for a hedge fund and it took a
> lengthy
> > explanation for me to convince him he was a laborer.
>
>
> Isn't this due in part to the fact that it's hard to picture what he would
> do in a communist economy?
>
Not in his case, he has a vitriolic hatred for poor people, thinks they are all stupid and fat, and therefore can't picture himself in any form of solidarity with them.
>
> Are there hedge fund traders after the revolution?
I hope we get rid of that position before that! On the other hand, doesn't this depend on whether it is a national or international revolution? If the former, we might need something like a hedge fund trader to, well, hedge our activities. wouldn't it be possible to have a public, instead of private, hedge fund?
On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 10:00, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
> You _did_ convince him then?
>
I wouldn't go that far, but I think I convinced him of some grey area in his dichotomy. The conversation began with him asking if I was a capitalist, by which he meant was I an adherent to the ideology that capitalism is the superior form of social organization. I took him literally and said, no, and neither are you. IIRC, he changed the subject after that.
In any case, I agree with much of your description of class that followed.
I'm working on an article that touches on the concept of immaterial labor in the Italian autonomist tradition. This idea seems really flawed if it is meant to describe an actual transformation of capitalism as a world system.
It might work to signal a change in work done at one point in the value chain, but this work is (usually) only valuable because it is adding value to some material work done somewhere else. So it is less a complete transformation of all labor processes than a recognition that the division of labor is more transnational and the distribution for its rewards is unequal.
If it is taken, therefore (as it seems to be in works like this one: http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcimmateriallabour3.htm) , as a description of the transformation of labor processes as a whole, I think it does little of use critically--just a more theoretical description of Daniel Bell's Post-Industrial Society thesis. This is the way it seems to sit in the problematic of Hardt and Negri--though they assume certain revolutionary potentials are the consequence of this, namely that this creative labor is easier to see as collective and dynamically connected therefore its performance helps to meld new subjects and subjectivities. I see the utility of this, but even this alone seems paltry if it only works to make a division of the division more self aware and self interested--i.e. opposed to the rest of the laborers.
However, as the present conversation suggests, if instead of talking about it as a dominant transformation of all work and labor, it were to create solidarity between laborers, I can see its strategic importance. This doesn't seem to be the direction the concept is going--or, more accurately, it is where Negri, et. al. seem to think they are going, but I don't see how they can get there with these warmed over mainstream premises.
Thoughts?
s