Charles
Eric Beck
On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 7:42 AM, shag carpet bomb <shag at
cleandraws.com> wrote:
> There's a list of required reading for people into the Oakland
> Commune,
That's a great list of stuff (though no de Certeau, alas). I just reread Wright's Storming Heaven. I'm not sure its lessons can be translated today without a whole lot of modification, but there are a couple of points that I think are relevant:
1. The search for a vanguard. Negri, at his core a Leninist, was (and is) the king of this, always looking for *the* revolutionary subject. His social worker thesis was a huge step forward in thinking about how capital was reproduced and a justified decentering of the Marxist industrial proletariat, and his general proclivity to discover new modes of accumulation and new subjectivities is admirable and something we could use more of. But he always reterritorialized the subject, in part by identifying it as a new vanguard instead of complicating the whole idea of representative subjects.
Today, I think the indebted subject is ripe for Negrian overemphasis. Somewhat ironically, the timing and content of Graeber's debt book may help contribute to this new vanguard. No doubt in a financialized economy debt is important, but just as Negri's focus on the social worker left behind other, far-from-obsolete sectors, e.g., industrial workers, the focus on indebted subjects could emphasize the indebted (students, the precariat) and exclude all sorts of subjects who are not indebted and aren't even allowed to become so (migrants, the very poor). This isn't to lapse into tired talk about privilege (which makes me reach for my revolver), and no doubt even the non-indebted are structured in some ways by debt; plus I wholeheartedly support the debt-default stuff just now starting. But it'd be a mistake to create a unitary subject based on debt, which would wreck any sort of class unity by collapsing difference