I think that there has been a slight misunderstanding about Lennard's argument here. I don't think she was making a global claim, rather she was making a claim that the state and its repressive apparatuses aren't the only danger to the movement, instead sets of normative practices that are exemplified in structures such as non-profits and the trade union bureaucracy, what we might call a variety of ideological state apparatuses, could just as easily kill the movement by their attempts to make the movement legible in their terms. She argues that the Spanish movement fell apart by this official intervention, rather than directionlessness as Doug argued. (Yes, I've made Lennard sound a little more Althusserian than she probably would want to.... but Althusser sometimes provides a shorthand that is more difficult to achieve with Foucault.)
This particular intervention is still problematic. My experiences in Los Angeles point to the fact that 'structurelessness' can create some of the same problems that she gestures towards, but I think that she is absolutely right in that there is a danger of these actions getting neutralized by being drawn into a set of hollow and bankrupt institutions. At the same time, I'm kind of an orthodox Foucauldian.
Resistance is never exterior to power, and therefore structures of resistance are always at risk of being neutralized and having their tactics and structures appropriated into structures of constituted power. There is no way of escaping this risk, and creating a movement always tarries with this risk.
robert wood
>> This is the meaning
>> of the quote Angelus passed around: Capitalism works because you do.
>> There's no moralism in that; instead, it's an acknowledgment of
>> capital's working in every pore of society, its ability to touch every
>> aspect of our lives. But it's also an acknowledgment of its
>> limitations: it always relies on reproductive labor it can never fully
>> control.
>
> 'Capitalism works because you do.' The problem here is a mistaken
> treatment of our work as the independent variable. 'We work',
> therefore capitalism works. But why do we work? Because we have coded
> positive feelings in our head about capitalism and want to make it
> work? So if only we could have some transformative experience that
> changes our feelings on the matter we would realise how foolish were
> we to work, and we would decide to stop reproducing capitalism?
> Hardly. We work because we need to in order to get the means to live,
> regardless of our feelings on the matter. It's a strategic response,
> given our place in society. Strategies aimed at changing the
> conditions in which we make that everyday strategic decision are
> inevitably going to involve working at a political level, in the
> boring state-oriented sense.
>
> Mike
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