<> CB: We can say that the Occupation is a new vanguard that has arisen <> spontaneously. It is a vanguard of the working class , the 99%, and <> Marxist-Leniniism because it is founded on the main class antagonism <> in our concrete situation, that between the Monopolies and the People, <> the working class masses. Leninism is flexible enough to accamodate <> the negation of Lenin's discussion of the limitations of spontaneity <> in _What is to be done_, because Leninism is concrete analysis of the <> concrete situation, and adjustment of tactics and organizational form <> to national and historical specifics <> <> 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 <> ___________________________________ <> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk <>
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)