This course presents a survey of the "autonomist" tradition in
Marxism. The term "autonomist" is used here to designate a dominant,
though by no means the only, characteristic of this particular tradition: the
emphasis on the autonomy of the working class in its struggle against capital
as well as on the autonomy of various groups of workers vis ˆ vis others of
their class. In an earlier incarnation this course was labeled "social
capital theory”, a title which evokes another aspect of this tradition: the explicit
recognition of the systematic extension of capitalist domination and of class
struggle throughout the social fabric of the 20th Century, of the emergence of
the "social factory" and of the struggles to destroy and escape it. There
are many other titles which might be used. None have gained currency either
among the practitioners of this tradition or among their opponents, at least
not in the English speaking world. In Italy, Germany, and France, where some of
the most interesting developments in this tradition have taken place, the
general political "space”, as the Italians say, occupied by this tradition
is called Autonomy or Workers' Autonomy. Autonomist Marxism is thus an
adaptation of that designation.
In developing this course, in
deciding which materials to include and how to organize them, there have been a
number of key considerations to take into account. In the first place the
tradition is not only internationalist but has evolved rapidly in several
different countries on both sides of the Atlantic. It is easy to identify
groups of American, or French, or Italian militants as well as their
contributions. But at the same time, in each case, those militants were
self-consciously connected in their thinking and sometimes their organizing to
many other parts of the world. As a result, despite the importance of local
factors, none of those working in this tradition think in local or national
terms. It would therefore be somewhat misleading to speak of "the
Italian" contribution, or the "American" contribution.
In the second place, because of
intense involvement in particular struggles the literature of this tradition is
a complex mix of the theoretical, of intervention, and of the historical. Most
authors have been involved not only in developing studies of particular
situations but also of elaborating new theoretical concepts and directions. It
therefore makes little sense to attempt to divide up the material into
categories such as "theoretical innovations”, "historical studies”, or
"industrial" versus "sphere of reproduction" studies.
As a result of these
considerations I have decided, to organize the presentation of the literature
of this tradition around a number of key issues that have occupied its
participants. This leads to two more observations. First, the issues chosen are
fundamental but hardly exhaustive; others could be included. Second, because
all issues are connected, the articles that deal with one almost always deal
with others as well. Thus an effort must be made to interlink the various
contributions and to understand them in the context of the struggles within
which they have been developed. To help with this, I will interweave some
commentaries on the evolution of this tradition by its principals and by others.
Reading these commentaries is also important because of the intrinsic interest
of some of them, and because the literature of this tradition is larger than we
can possibly cover in a semester course and so overviews and syntheses are
especially useful to give a sense of the whole, both that part studied and that
part left for future exploration.
In any survey of a tradition
defined in terms of a set of ideas or of political strategies, it often
difficult to know where to begin. In some cases, say Marxism in general, we can
always start with the fountainhead from which the ideas sprang. Yet even there
we can suspect that there are deeper roots which we really need to grasp. In
other cases, such as the one at hand, the point of departure is even more
ambiguous. Because we are dealing with one tradition in Marxism, we too could
begin with Marx. However, this tradition is not based on this or that reading
but rather on considerable reinterpretation of much of Marx's writing – too
much for a short treatment as an introduction to the later material. Similarly,
we can find roots in both Leninism and Anarchism that have contributed to the
growth of this tradition, but those too are vast subterranean storehouses, too
large to be explored here. Therefore I have decided to limit this course to
those writers, groups and tendencies which have been central contributors to
the elaboration of this tradition in the recent past – the last 50 years or so.
There has been enough direct contact and recognition of influence among those
in this tradition to make it possible to identify central lineages, with all
their continuities and breaks, as well as important outside influences and
parallel developments which appear to be important enough to note.
A final general note: one severe
limitation on the comprehensiveness of the materials included in this course is
the absence of English translations of many central writings. There are a great
many articles and books in Italian, French, German and Portuguese which have
not been translated and/or are not available. In some cases, if we have
adequate language skills among course participants we will be able to get
reports on some of this material, but you must know that the bulk of it will
remain "out there" beyond most of our abilities to tap, at least in
the short run. A listing of materials (in many languages) in this tradition
which are locally available can be found in THE TEXAS ARCHIVES OF AUTONOMIST
MARXISM.
The only prerequisite to this course is the Econ 387L Introduction to Marxian
Economics offered every Fall. That course provides an introduction to Marxism
based on reading Marx, especially Capital. Taking that course
therefore, gives you a point of departure as well as one of reference to
evaluate what later Marxists have had to say about Marx's own work and what
they have done to develop it (or undermine it as the case may be).
A paper dealing with some aspect of the material covered, the subject to
be agreed upon between the student and the professor. A first draft due 2/3s of
the way through the course, the final version due the last day of class.
Although there is no comprehensive study of this tradition available, I
did spell out its broad outlines in the introduction to my book READING CAPITAL
POLITICALLY, pages 43 to 66. A reading of the whole introduction will situate
the tradition within the overall history of Marxism. The introduction can be
found on-line.
Our point of departure will be the perception, held by virtually all
contributors to this tradition, that the existing socialisms of the world have
not, either in individual countries or collectively, constituted any real
alternative to Western capitalism. This position has mostly taken the form of a
critique of Soviet and other socialisms which argues that they constitute only
a new form of capitalism: a state capitalism, given the centrality of the state
in the organization and imposition of accumulation. This critique originated
soon after the Russian Revolution in 1917 among a number of anarchist and other
communist groups who rejected the recentralization of power by the Bolsheviks
as well as their projects of "socialist" accumulation.
Among the many left groups within
which there rapidly developed a critique of the centralizing tendencies of
Bolshevism were the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) – the most radical of
all American labor movements – and the Council Communists which originated in
Germany and Holland. Along with European revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg,
Wobblies such as Big Bill Haywood had hailed the Revolution of 1905 as an
inspiring example of the power of the General Strike and, like many others,
greeted the Revolution of 1917 enthousiastically. That enthousiasm quickly
waned, however, in response not only to the Bolsheviks' displacement of the
Soviets, but also to their efforts to dominate workers' movements in other
countries. Both of these developments confirmed the Wobblie's long standing
suspicions and hostility toward specifically political organizations not based
directly in workers' control of production (as the Soviets had been). So they
refused any identity with Lenin and the Bolshevik Communist Party just as they
had refused alliance in the U.S.with De Leon and the Socialist Labor Party
years before. Unfortunately, the Wobblie critique of Bolshevism, however, left
no detailed analysis of the social and political dynamics of the new Soviet
System which could be included in this course.
The Council Communist movement
grew out of the same fascination with the Soviets in 1905 and 1917, but
blossomed as a movement as a result of the experiences of the German Workers'
Council's after 1918 and defined itself partly through its polemics against the
Bolshevik dominated Third International. Unlike the Wobblies who saw themselves
as trade unionists – albeit unlike most trade unionists in so far as they were
dedicated to one big union of all workers and to revolution – the Council
Communists developed a critique not only of parliamentary electoral politics
but also of trade unionism and of the Soviet Union as state capitalism. It is
this last aspect of their work which interests us here, and elements of their
writings have been included in course materials.
The most direct lineage of the
critique of socialism among Autonomist Marxists today can be traced back to the
break with Marxist orthodoxy that developed in the 1930s and 1940s within the
ranks of the Trotskyist wing of Marxism-Leninism. This break involved at least
three groups in three countries: the Johnson-Forest Tendency in the United
States, those around Tony Cliff in England and Socialism ou Barbarie
in France. In each case the development of substantial differences with some
aspects of the Trotskyist analysis and program led to the development of new
theory and new politics. Although these groups were clearly not the first to
develop a Left critique of the Soviet Union, they did carry out much more
extensive research into the actual social relations of production which had
been created in the Soviet Union than any of the previous critics. It is this
depth of analysis, coupled with other aspects of their theory, which along with
their direct influence on the tradition of autonomist marxism which justifies
the space they are accorded below.
READING MATTER: Harry
Cleaver, “The Critique of Existing Socialism”, (typescript) 1989.
This is a draft of the second chapter of a book I am writing on
autonomist Marxism. This draft provides an overview and analysis of this whole
tradition of critique. It covers not only the materials included in this
syllabus, but considerable additional material besides. It thus constitutes
something of a guide to a more in depth examination of this subject that the
materials we will have time to look at. Most importantly, it includes an
analysis of the autonomist Marxist analyses of other existing socialism besides
the Soviet Union, especially those of China and Eastern Europe.
READING MATTER: W. Jerome
and A Buick, “Soviet State Capitalism? The History of an Idea”, Survey
62, January 1967.
This article provides a brief overview of the variety of individuals and
groups that have seen state capitalism emerging in the Soviet Union, from Lenin
through the Western European Social Democrats and the Council Communists to the
groups we are concerned with here. Jerome and Buick identify three general
groups who have held one version or another of this interpretation. 1) orthodox
Marxists: these include: the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its companion
parties in various other countries, who agreed with Lenin that state industry
was, regretably, a form of state capitalism but came by 1929-30 to see the
society as a whole as state capitalist; Karl Kautsky and Otto Bauer who saw
Lenin creating "state capitalism" and some Mensheviks and Italian
social democrats who also used this label. 2) the council communists: Gorter
and Pannekoek for example as well as Karl Korsch saw the Bolsheviks creating
both a new ruling burearucracy and state capitalism. 3) dissident Leninists:
which includes: Bukharin et al who worried about such trendsas early as 1918,
Zinoviev who was still worrying about it after Lenin had died, the Italian
communist Amadeo Bordiga and followers (who had split with Gramsci and the
PCI), the Yugoslav Anton Ciliga and last, but not least the Trotskyist splinter
groups, especially the Johnson-Forest Tendency in the US, SOCIALISME OU
BARBARIE in France and Tony Cliff in England. What is striking in this overview
is the widespread recognition that the new Soviet State was not socialist and
the frequent rereappearance of "state capitalism" as a
characterization of the new regime. First Lenin and then Stalin and Trotsky had
to spend considerable time dealing with critics of the new Bolshevik regime,
both within Russia and without. Except for Lenin's early admissions of the
state capitalist character of state enterprise, orthodox Marxists have mainly
spent their time converting Marxism into an ideology of domination as they have
sought to justify the new, viciously exploitative relations as those of
socialism.
Although, like so many other revolutionaries in Western Europe and
elsewhere, they at first admired the revolutions in Russia, especially the
workers' creation of the soviets in 1905 and again in 1917, and indeed saw them
as a paradigm of revolutionary working class organization, the council
communists came to reject, along with many anarchists, the Bolshevik emphasis
on the party and their recreation of a centralized state. This rejection
involved both a theoretical critique of Soviet socialism as state capitalism
and a political split from the Third International. The Council Communist
movement was made up of small groups of intellectuals in Western Europe (mainly
Germany and Holland) and later the United States. Most prominent among those
associated with this tendency were Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter, Otto Ruhle,
Paul Mattick (who later moved to the United States) and Karl Korsch who, while
not officially a council communist, was closely associated with them and often
wrote for their publications. All of these were associated with other well
known radical-left figures of the time, such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl
Liebknech who were murdered during the period of the councils.
The political work and writings of
those who would be called Council Communists began before the first Russian
Revolution, within the debates of the Second International (1898-1914), but
reached its greatest intensity during and after the revolutionary movements in
Germany in 1918 and 1919 based on the Workers' and Soldiers' Soviets which were
formed at the collapse of the German government and the end of World War I. The
Councils were the spontaneous creation of the German working class and, in at
least some areas, came to replace temporarily other forms of government. Conflict
over the role of the councils, however, both within the council movement and
from without, vis-a- vis the formation of a new parliamentary government
separated from them weakened the movement and made it possible for the ruling
class to crush them militarily.
The development of a critical
attitude towards the new Soviet State among the Council Communists occured very
quickly in the context of the relations between their political organizations
and the newly formed, Soviet controlled Third International or Comitern. The
Comitern Russian leadership was not only centralizing power at home (and
destroying the Soviets in the process) but it sought first to push its own
political strategies onto all members of the Comitern and then to use the later
to gain stability in Western Europe and links with major liberal forces, both
in the trade unions and parliament. Not only did the Council Communists
critique the evolving relation between the soviets and the Russian state, but
they rejected Moscow's call for cooperation with the trade unions and
parliament which they saw as systematically counter-revolutionary. It was such
conflicts that led Lenin to issue his Left-wing Communism: An Infantile
Disorder attacking the German radicals and to the subsequent complete
break. Although the early debates that led to the break are interesting, and
essential for understanding the development of the Council Communist position,
the main writings developing a critique of the Soviet Union as a state
capitalist regime came later, long after the Council's had been crushed and
many of their theoreticians exiled from Germany.
READING MATTER: Otto
Ruhle, From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution, 1924, Chapter
2 "The Russian Problem. "
Ruhle was one of the first Council Communists to develop a critique of
the Soviet Union. Sent to Moscow as a delegate of the KAPD (the Communist party
of Germany, formed in April 1920, of which he was at that time a member) to the
Second Congress of the Comitern in July 1920, Ruhle took several weeks to
arrive as he studied the situation in Russia. Disillusioned, he refused to
participate in the Congress and returned to Germany to recount what he had
found. In a 1921 article "The Basic Issues of Organization”, published in Die
Aktion, No. 37, Ruhle blasted the Bolsheviks arguing that the soviets had
been destroyed by the party and "without councils there is no socialist
construction, no communism. " He went on to say that "The
dictatorship of the party is commissar-despotism, is state capitalism. "
It was, he said, a dictatorship "of 5% of a class over all other classes,
and over 95% of its own class. "
Three years later, in 1924, Rühle
elaborated on his analysis in his essay "From the Bourgeois to the
Proletarian Revolution. " In chapter two of that essay, devoted to the
Soviet Union, Rühle argued that the Bolsheviks had tried and failed to leap
over capitalism to socialism. Their failure lay both in their concepts and in
their policies. He argued had they behaved like a capitalist nation state in
signing the Brest-Litovsk treat but their distribution of land to peasants and
their nationalization of industry merely reinforced private property on the one
hand (amounting to a "capitulation to profit") while building a
"large scale, tightly centrally controlled state capitalism”, on the other.
The alternative policies which he thought would have prolonged the revolution
were: continued opposition to the Germans, the elimination of private property
in the countryside, the development of the soviets and the avoidance of the NEP.
The failure to move in these directions, he argued, resulted in the Russian
Revolution amounting to a "bourgeois" revolution – a process which he
concluded on the basis of a rigid "phaseological" interpretation of
Marx was inevitable.
READING MATTER: "Theses
on Bolshevism”, International Council Correspondence, No. 3, December 1934.
Written by the Dutch Group of International Communists, this was a
statement of the council communist view of the Bosheviks as the instruments of
the bourgeois revolution in Russia and as the constructors of state capitalism.
International Council Correspondence was published in the US by Paul Mattick in
the 1930s and 1940s. (The Texas Archives of Autonomist Marxism has an index to
the collection which is available in the PCL: 335, N449, Vols. 1-6, 1934-1943. )
READING MATTER: Paul
Mattick, Anti-bolshevik Communism, White Plains: M. E. Sharpe, 1978. Chapter
VI: "Otto Rühle and the German Labour Movement. "
Mattick, one of the last important council communists, has written on
the social movement out of which he and Rühle emerged. In tracing Rühle's
development, Mattick recounts the limitations of the German labor movement
including the soldiers' and workers' councils which, to a considerable degree
he argues, were merely fighting for the restoration of bourgeois democracy. For
our purposes here, the main aspect of his analysis is Rühle's critique of
bolshevism, which flowed from both Luxemburg's critique which he shared and his
analysis of Bolshevik practice after the revolution. Mattick sees in the
Radical German Left's opposition to Bolshevism the beginnings of the struggle
against Fascism – against party rule and centralized political and economic
discipline. At the same time Mattick realistically points out the marginal
character of the Radical Left and their political, if not theoretical failure,
in the face of Soviet backed communism and then fascism.
READING MATTER: Mark
Shipway, “Council Communism”, in M. Rubel and J. Crump (eds), Non-market
Socialism in the Nineteeth and Twentieth Centuries, New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1987, pp. 104-126.
Shipway's article constitutes a nice quasi-bibliographic overview of the
Council Communist movement, one of a series of essays in a volume dedicated to
sketching those traditions of pro-socialist groups and writers who have
understood that to move beyond capitalism means to leave the market and money
behind.
READING MATTER: Peter
Rachleff, Marxism and Council Communism, Brooklyn: The Revisionist
Press, 1976. Chapter VIII: "Council Communist Theory”, especially the
section on "The Critique of Bolshevism in Russia”, pp. 185-197.
Brief overview of the council communist critique of Bolshevism as a
prototype of fascism (a political form of capitalism) and of the Soviet Union
as state capitalist.
READING MATTER: Serge
Bricianer, Pannekoek and the Workers' Councils, Saint Louis: Telos
Press, 1978.
This book, along with Rachleff's, provides one of the most thorough
studies to date on the Council Movement – in English.
READING MATTER: Sergio
Bologna, “Class Composition and the Theory of the Party at the Origin of the
Workers' Council Movement”, Telos, #13, Fall 1972, pp. 4-27. Translated
by Bruno Ramirez from Operai e Stato, Milano: Feltrinelli, 1972, pp. 13-46.
(12pp)
Bologna is an historian and major figure in the post-WWII
"autonomist" tradition in Italy. Relevant here mainly for 1) the way
he situates the Workers' Councils as one moment of a series of international
cycles of struggles that also included the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917
and the American Wobblies in the period 1905-1920, and 2) his analysis of the
way in which the councils (including the soviets) were the organizational
expression of a particular class composition: skilled manufacturing
worker/engineers who, to an unusual degree, designed, created, controlled and identified
with their tools. It was that class composition he argued that led to the
particular politics of the councils. With the passing of that composition, the
working class, he goes on to show, evolved other organizational solutions more
appropriate to other class compositions.
The Johnson-Forest Tendency was built within, and then left, the
Trotskyist movement primarily through the efforts of C.L.R. James (J. R. Johnson)
and Raya Dunayevskaya (F. Forest). The political differences which led to their
break were many but included James' and Dunayevskaya's analysis of the Soviet
Union as state capitalism as opposed to the 4th International's lanalysis of
Russia as a "degenerate workers' state" or the Workers' Party's
analysis of "bureaucratic collectivism. " Over time the the JFT's
theoretical and political work led to disagreements with other Trotskyists on
almost all levels and issues. After breaking with the Trotskyist movement
altogether in 1951, James and Dunayevskaya founded a new group called
Correspondence. During the early 1950s Correspondence extended their critique
of the Soviet Union to its new, post WWII satellites in Eastern Europe. They
responded enthusiastically to the revolts in Eastern Europe in 1953 and in Hungary
in 1956, especially to the formation of autonomous workers' councils. They saw
in these creations a concrete alternative to capitalism. After several years,
they themselves split apart with the James' contingent creating a new group
called Facing Reality, (now defunct) while Dunayevskaya's started their own
group called News and Letters (still operating). The materials listed below
contain a sampling of their critique of the Soviet Union as state capitalism
along with some commentaries. Few overviews of the history of the
Johnson-Forest Tendency are available, but see: Paul Buhle, C.L.R. James:
The Artist as Revolutionary, New York: Verso, 1989.
READING MATTER: C.L.R. James,
“Resolution on the Russian Question”, submitted to the Second Workers' Party National
Convention in September 1941.
James' basic approach to his critique of Russia was characteristic of
all the Johnson-Forest Tendency materials which would follow. He defined
capitalism in terms of its relations of production (as opposed to the Trotskyist
focus on property relations), argued that those relations obtained in Russia
and therefore concluded first, that the actions of the ruling bureaucratic
elite in Russia could only be understood in terms of Marx's analysis of
captalism and second, that working class policies toward Russia must be as
hostile as those toward other capitalist states. On this basis he rejected both
Trotsky and the SWP's calls for the defense of Russia and Schachtman's view of
Russia's "property relations" being progessive.
James definition of capitalist
relations of production is fairly classic; he focuses on the exploitation of a
class of wage laborers (via the extraction of surplus value) by another class
through the production of commodities within the context of a world market. Thus
surplus value, the subordination of use value to exchange value and the world
market are his theoretical points of departure. On them are based, he argues,
Marx's understanding of the "laws of motion" of capitalism,
especially the tendencies of the organic composition of capital to rise, and
that of the rate of profit to fall. Where all these characteristics obtain,
capitalism exists. They do obtain, he argues, in the Russia, so Russia is
capitalist.
A key methodological principle
which James enunciated in this resolution, was the importance of seeing past
"form" to "essence. " "That the laws inherent in
capitalist production in Russia”, he wrote, “manifest themselves in unusual
forms is obvious. " But if, behind the unusual forms, capitalist
relationships could be identified then Marx's analysis would apply. It was this
perspective which led to the Johnson-Forest replacement of the Trotskyist
preoccupation with "property" with a focus on relations of production.
Henceforth, just as "democracy" and "fascism" could be
understood as two different political forms of the capitalist state, so too
could "competitive" capitalism and "state" capitalism be
seen as two different organizational forms of capital accumulation. In fact,
James went on to argue that there was an historical tendency for the
centralization of capital which Marx had identified as an inherent tendency to
lead to the displacement of free markets (and with them the "private
character" of capital) by state controlled allocation. "What was
formerly private and uncontrolled . . . becomes more and more state-controlled.
" The intermediate step in this process, James argued, was the rise of the
"joint-stock" company (limited liability, stock issuing corporation)
which Marx had already recognized as involving the "abolition of capital
as private property within the boundaries of capitalist production. " The
"climax" of this process he argued was "the ownership of all
capital in the hands of the State. " Thus, he concluded "the
development of Russia is a sign-post as to the future of capitalist society. "
Thus, he also concluded, Russia could be expected to behave internationally in
ways similar to that of other capitalist states, i. e. , imperialistically. Presciently,
he predicted that "Should [Russia] emerge victorious in the coming war
[WWII] it will share in all the grabbings of its partners, and for the same
reason. " The Johnson-Forest Tendency would not be at all surprised by the
Russian takeover of Eastern Europe.
READING MATTER: J. R. Johnson
and Joseph Carter, “Aspects of Marxian Economics”, THE NEW INTERNATIONAL, Vol. VIII,
No. 3, April 1942.
READING MATTER: F. Forest
(R. Dunayevskaya), “An Analysis of Russian Economy”, Part I: 3 articles in the
NEW INTERNATIONAL (Dec 1942, Jan. 1943 and Feb. 43) These articles, along with
two others [see below] were reprinted by News and Letters in 1973 as a
pamphlet: The Original HIstorical Analysis: Russia as State-capitalist
Society.
James' analysis of Russia was strengthened considerably by Dunayevskaya's
research on the social history of the first three Russian five year plans and
the evolution of official Soviet Marxist theory whose results she published in
a series of articles between December 1942 and January 1947. She reaffirmed
James assertion that the Soviet state's systematic exploitation of workers to
finance investment in heavy industry was a process of captitalist accumulation
and not one of socialist construction, as the Russian leadership maintained,
but she also provided evidence of this in data showing the preponderance of
investment in the means of production over means of subsistence, the sharp
income differentials between managers and workers, as well as in the fierce
resistance to that accumulation mounted by workers and peasants and in the way
in which Soviet planners allowed the world market to shape their policies.
"An Analysis of the Russian
Economy”, Dec. 1942: This first article is mainly an examination of official
Russian sources as the basis for arguing that the "intrinsic law of
motion" of the Russian economy is basically the same as that of capitalism.
First, R. D. shows that production of means of production was growing faster
than the production of means of consumption. Then, she goes on to examine the
5-year plans. In the analysis of the 1st 5-yr plan, she critiques the Russian
use of value measures of output in the presence of high inflation and
recalculates in physical terms to show how the state overstated success. She
then argues that high world prices and higher foreign productivity forced the
state to invest more heavily in means of production than it had planned. In the
analysis of the 2nd 5-yr plan, she again argues that the planners were forced
by "the high organic composition of capital on a world scale" to
invest more heavily in means of production than planned. With respect to the
3rd 5-yr plan she notes the continuing relatively low productivity of Russian
labor and the emphasis on extracting a surplus from the workers by holding wage
increases below productivity increases.
Jan. 1943: This second article
begins by arguing that the state extracted an enormous revenue from the people
by imposing a turnover tax that, by being imposed on the price including the
tax raised prices greatly, especially the prices of basic consumption goods. R.
D. then goes on to explain the campaign for enterprise profits that held worker
wages down while generating surpluses for investment and very high managerial
salaries. At this point R. D. turns to agriculture where she traces the
processes of collectivization and the resistance to it which forced the state
to allow free markets for [non collectivized] peasant output. She argues that
agricultural development was complicated by the world crisis that held down
Russian export prices that made it more difficult to import needed machinery. She
also notes how variations in access to inputs and to official output markets
led to enormous differences in collective farm income: millionaires vs paupers.
Finally, she shows how mechanization, refusal to move to the factory and low
levels of peasant work created large scale hidden unemployment in the
countryside that the state began to tap, by force.
Feb. 1943: The first two-thirds of
this article is an examination of the struggle between the Russian workers and
the state. R. D. traces state efforts to impose work and limit workers
resistance She examines conflicts over labor turnover, piece wages and
Stakhonovism. Then she shows how standards of living for the average worker
deteriorated absolutely during the period of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd 5-yr plans to
levels lower than that of Czarist times. The last one third digs beneath
employment categories to count the numbers of the "classless
intelligensia" [from university professors to factory managers] who rule production
and constitute, for R. D. , the "ruling class" – about 2% of the
population.
READING MATTER: Raya
Dunayevskaya, “A New Revision of Marxian Economics”, American Economic
Review, September 1944.
This article contains Dunayevskaya's commentaries on a Russian article
she translated and got published in the AER (same issue) on "Some
Questions of Teaching Political Economy. " The article and her
interpretation of it as embodying the abandonment of basic Marxist tenets led
to considerable discussion and debate, not only in the AER but in Foreign
Affairs, the New York Times and elsewhere. The commentators in
the AER included Paul Baran (Dec. 1944), Oscar Lange (March 1945),
Brooks Otis (March 1945) and Leo Rogin (March 1945). These comments led
Dunayevskaya to respond in the September 1945 issue of the AER.
The Russian article announces a
revision in the official interpretation of Marxian economics. The major
revision consists in the insistence that Marx's "law of value" must
be understood to apply to the USSR as well as to capitalist countries. From
this flows an acceptance of a wide variety of phenomena often called
capitalist: surplus value, money, interest, banking, and especially,
distribution according to labor. The authors argue that is is impossible to
apply the old communist slogan "to each according to his needs" when
the level of productivity is so low in the USSR. So distribution according to
labor is the rule to be followed. Because different workers have different
skills and abilities, it is argued, they will therefore receive different
incomes. "Labor" therefore, continues to be "the measure in
economic life. " This is justified by saying the law of value applies to
all commodity producing countries of which the USSR is one and by arguing that
the socialist state intervenes to prevent the kind of chaos produced by the
market. The article then goes on to argue the need for extra work and surplus
value in order to raise productivity and meet the needs of the people.
Dunayevskaya's response is to argue
that the affirmation of the applicability of the law of value to the USSR shows
that capitalism persists and will be developed in that country. She also says
that distribution according to labor is being used to justify income
differentials that are occurring as a side effect of the new manager/worker
class structure. She quotes Marx and Engels to argue that the law of value does
not apply in socialism which must abolish both alienation and exploitation.
Baran attacks her interpretation
and supports the Russians on several minor points, except that he denies the
applicability of the law of value to socialism. That law, he claims, quoting
Sweezy, is the result of market exchange and allocation. He attributes their
error to a failure to understand what Marx meant by "law. " He also
attacks Dunayevskaya's assertion of an emerging class society in Russia, saying
there is no evidence of this, and argues for using neoclassical theory to help
with Russian planning.
Lange, on the other hand, sees the
article as a return to Marxian fundamentals that occurred for political
reasons, but he sees the law of value as an inadequate basis for planning and
calls for the use of marginality tools.
Ottis also sees the article as
quite orthodox, argues that Marxian theory was never meant as a theory of
relative prices, and, like Lange, thinks that marginal analysis is of potential
use to socialists.
Rogin, after complaining about
Dunayevskaya's undiplomatic attacks on a war ally, also argues that Marx
thought the law of value applied to socialist countries in their early stages
but goes on to say that the Russian article overgeneralizes to all of socialism
which, according to him, one would expect to see moving in the direction of
distributing goods according to need. However, he backs off and argues that
given the low level of productivity in the Soviet Union it will be a long time
before that can happen.
To these critics, Dunayevskaya
responds that they misinterpret Marx, that the law of value includes surplus
value and was integral to and limited to capitalism and therefore to admit that
it applies to the USSR is to admit that capitalism persists there. She also
throws a bunch of references at Baran concerning class structure in the Soviet
Union.
All in all it is interesting to
see what Dunayevskaya choses to attack in the article and how, and then to see
what of her critics she responds to and what she ignores.
READING MATTER: F. Forest
(R. Dunayevskaya), “The Nature of the Russian Economy: A Contribution on the
Discussion on Russia”, Part II: 2 articles in the New International (Dec. 1946
and Jan. 1947) These articles, along with three others [see above] were
reprinted by News and Letters in 1973 as a pamphlet: THE ORIGINAL HISTORICAL
ANALYSIS: RUSSIA AS STATE-CAPITALIST SOCIETY.
Dec. 1946: This first article provides a summing up, without all the
factual evidence, of the three articles presented in 1943 and 1944, together
with some of the results of the AER debate mentioned above. The basic line of
argumentation is that Stalinism overthrew many of the gains of the revolution
and recreated the capitalist mode of production with its classical laws of
motion. At the same time she rebuts the Trotskyist position that the absence of
competition and private property mean the abolition of capitalism. She
basically argues that the forms of appropriation have changed, but the content:
the extraction of surplus value, remains the same, and, as a result, the class
struggle persists. She again traces workers resistance to exploitation, including
the 1937-38 flight to the countryside where "the unemployed army hides out.
" Central to her argument is the idea that the "world market"
has forced the state to raise the organic composition of capital and to exploit
workers. How? Either to compete in the market, or to avoid being beaten by more
efficient capitalist nations in imperialist war. [e. g. WWII] The article
concludes with a brief discussion of crisis in Russia. She says while Stalin
has avoided "the ordinary type of commercial crises" crises have come
and have been more violent and destructive. But she does not explain their
nature or dynamics.
Jan. 1947: This last article
attacks Trotskyism directly, especially the fetishism of state property whereby
the Russian state is seen as a workers state, albeit degenerated. R. D. insists,
quoting Lenin, that the key issue is the relations of production and on this
grounds Russia must be recognized as capitalist. She goes on to argue that
"socialism cannot be achieved except on a world scale" and that
"The socialist revolution is only the beginning. The greater and more
arduous task of establishing socialist relations of production begins after the
conquest of power. " Finally, she associates herself with "The
Johnson Minority" [C.L.R. James] and attacks the Fourth International for
defending Russia and the Red Army. She sees the 4th Intern'l call for the
withdrawal of the all occupation armies from Europe (including the Red Army) as
a "first necessary step in the right direction. " She concludes by
saying that only by changing its interpretation of Russia can the 4th Intern'l
"take its rightful place as the vanguard of the world revolutionary forces.
"
READING MATTER: C.L.R. James
(with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee) STATE CAPITALISM AND WORLD REVOLUTION (1949)
Written before the split with Dunayevskaya, this was a major Johnson-
Forest policy statement and, although apparently written by James, contains
their joint analysis and critique of the Soviet Union as a state capitalist
system. See especially chapters 1-5.
Chapter 1 rejects Trotsky's
analysis of the USSR and affirm the JFT view that Stalinism is the ideology of
a class of labor bureaucrats that dominate a state capitalist social order.
Chapter 2, through a polemic with
a variety of other Marxists, rejects underconsumptionist theories of capitalist
crisis saying that the Stalinists are trying to hide class conflicts in
production. The theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is
affirmed as pointing to the centrality of production relations and of the class
struggle in production.
Chapter 3 attacks the view that
socialism is characterized by planning and argues that capitalism has developed
to the point where it must plan to deal with workers' struggles.
Chapter 4 continues the polemic against
the Stalinists affirming that "capitalist planning does not in the
slightest degree allow it to escape the laws of capitalism. "
Chapter 5, the most substantial
chapter analyses the rise of state capitalism in the USSR and in the United
States with its associated bureaucracy. Included is a discussion of the
relations of production in the factory in both the US and the USSR with
parallels drawn.
READING MATTER: Raya
Dunayevskaya, MARXISM AND FREEDOM (1958): especially chapter XIII:"Russian
State Capitalism vs Workers Revolt. "
Written after the split with James et. al. , this book treats a variety
of issues in Marxian theory, including the issue of state capitalism in the
Soviet Union. Whatever other differences the two splitting factions had,
disagreement over the basic nature of the Soviet Regime was not one of them.
In Chapter 13, Dunayevskaya
basically restates her previous analyses the first three five-year plans, the
efforts to implement them and the resistance of workers. She now sees two
opposing plans: that of the planners and that of the workers. On the side of
the planners she points to the state imposed high turnover taxes on consumption
goods, forced labor camps, Stakanovite competition, wage hierarchies,
intensified piece work, purges and the beginnings of a new managerial class. On
the side of the workers she points to continued resistance:peasant slaughter of
animals and continuous worker resistance in the factories. She argues that the
extent of repression (death penalties, forced labor camps, etc) measures the
extent of resistance. "Had the revolt not been so persistent, the terror
would not have been so violent. " The conflict exists she argues, because
of fundamentally opposing goals of the workers and the state. The workers
wanted to improve their standards of living and control production, the state
wanted to emphasize surplus and investment at the expense of the workers. The
planners were pushing the economy in the direction of "a continuous
preponderance of means of production over means of consumption. " This she
said Marx had seen as a principle of capitalist development. The by-product in
Russia was class struggle and famine. To achieve these results the planners
followed, she says, the principle of paying the workers the "minimum necessary"
for their existence, while extracting from them "the maximum surplus value.
" As long as this is the case she argues the productive system is governed
by the law of value and "capitalist relations of production exist, no
matter what you name the social order. "
READING MATTER: C.L.R. James,
Grace C. Lee, and Pierre Chaulieu, FACING REALITY: THE NEW SOCIETY. . . WHERE
TO LOOK FOR IT, HOW TO BRING IT CLOSER. A STATEMENT FOR OUR TIME, Bewick/Ed,
1974. (Originally published by the Correspondence Publishing Committee in 1958.
) Especially Chapter II: "The Whole World. "
In the section on Russia, the authors do not dwell on definitions but
examine the relations between the workers and managers in the Soviet Union,
drawing parallels with the same relations in the West. The especially argue
that the workers in the Soviet Union are just as "united, disciplined, and
organized by production. . . as the workers in the United States. "
Perhaps most interesting in the treatment are the quotes from Khrushchev's
speech to the 20th Congress on difficulties in controling the workers. The
authors argue that the managers have had to capitulate to the plans of the
workers, especially to their manipulation of the piece work system to increase
their wages.
Socialism ou Barbarie was a journal founded by
Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort in France in 1949. Like the
Johnson-Forest people, they split from the Trotskyist Fourth International over
disagreements which included the interpretation of the nature of the USSR. Not
only did the evolution of the group around SouB have many striking similarities
with the J-F Tendency, but the two groups were in direct contact with each
other, published each others materials and cosigned various documents
indicating the similarities of their views. The views of Socialism ou
Barbarie on the nature of the Soviet Union differ significantly from those
of the JFT but never led to any difficulty in the two groups working together. Perhaps
the major difference was one of emphasis. Whereas the Johnson-Forest people
tended to emphasize the Soviet imposition of accumulation and working class
resistance to that imposition, the SOCIALISME OU BARBARIEauthors tended to
emphasize the structure of state power, i. e. , bureaucracy. Among the links
between the two groups was SOCIALISME OU BARBARIE's translation and publication
of THE AMERICAN WORKER by Paul Romano and Ria Stone (Grace Lee) (See Section
III below) Romano and Lee's work paralleled that of SOCIALISME OU BARBARIE's
factory workers-authors, such as Daniel MothŽ who was a worker in a Renault
plant and wrote of his day to day conflicts between worker creativity and
managerial repression. Later on the principal writers in SOCIALISME OU
BARBARIE, Castoriadis and Lefort, would abandon Marxism, but in the early 1950s
their work constituted a definite contribution to its development.
READING MATTER: Cornelius
Castoriadis, “From Bolshevism to the Bureaucracy”, OUR GENERATION, 12, No. 2
(Fall 1977):43-54.
In this article Castoriadis first explains the rise of bureaucracy in
the Soviet Union as being the natural outgrowth of the victory of Bolshevik
Party centralism over the Soviets and other forms of workers control and argues
that Lenin and Trotsky made basic mistakes in separating the issue of "who
manages" from that of "who ultimately controls" and in not
recognizing that the capitalist "forms" of production necessarily
embodied the content of class power. He begins by rejecting the explanation of
the development of the bureaucracy out of the revolution as caused by Russia's
"backwardness" and "isolation. " He explains the emergence
of the bureaucracy in general as due to "the concentration of
production" in industry which leads to the formation of a "managerial
stratum. " Similarly, the expanding role of the state leads to a
"bureaucratic state machine. " Finally, in the developed countries
working class organizations are integrated into the system through
bureaucratization. In the Third World, he argues, the weakness of the local
bourgeoisie leads to the state bureaucracy substituting itself for the
bourgeoisie and taking responsibility for bringing the new [capitalist] mode of
production into being. The Russian bureaucracy, he says, is a third type: the
degeneration of the revolution. The degeneration lay in the Bolshevik desires
to establish "state capitalism. " The Party felt it had to manage the
economy, displacing the power of the Soviets. The Opposition within the Party
opposed this direction demanding "collective management" against management
by the bureaucracy, but were defeated. (This opposition never included Trotsky
who always believed in the necessity of the bureaucracy. ) Within production,
furthermore, Lenin and the others, felt compelled to follow the capitalist lead
in the organization of production in order to maximize productivity. They never
realized that the capitalist methods of production embodied capitalist
mechanisms of control. In theory, this was expressed by the emphasis on the
development of the "productive forces. " In practice, by the
willingness to force workers to work.
READING MATTER: Cornelius
Castoriadis, “The Relations of Production in Russia”, in Cornelius Castoriadis,
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL WRITINGS, VOLUME 1, 1946-1955: FROM THE CRITIQUE OF
BUREAUCRACY TO THE POSITIVE CONTENT OF SOCIALISM, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1988.
READING MATTER: Andre
Liebich, “SOCIALISM OU BARBARIE, a Radical Critique of Bureaucracy”, OUR
GENERATION, 12, no. 2 (Fall 1977):55-62.
This article densely traces the rise and evolution of SouB, noting its
links to the Johnson-Forest Tendency in the U.S.and the changing conflicts
between Lefort and Castoriadis.
READING MATTER: Arthur
Hirsh, THE FRENCH NEW LEFT: AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY FROM SARTRE TO GORZ,
Boston: South End Press, 1981, Chapter 5: "Castoriadis and SOCIALISME OU
BARBARIE. "
A brief but useful overview of some of the key aspects of SOCIALISME OU
BARBARIE and Castoriadis and Lefort's evolution from a Marxist critique of
bureaucratic capitalism, both East and West, through their embrace of the
Eastern European revolts of the 1950s to anti- Marxism.
READING MATTER: "An
Interview with C. Lefort”, TELOS 15 (Spring 1973):3-20.
READING MATTER: "An
Interview with C. Castoriadis”, TELOS 23 (Spring 1975):117-130.
In England, at about the same time as JFT and SouB, a number of English
Trotskyists also elaborated a critique of the Soviet Union as State Capitalist.
Although not as central to the development of the tradition at hand as the
other two groups discussed above, the further international character of this
theory is worth noting.
READING MATTER: Tony
Cliff, THE NATURE OF STALINIST RUSSIA JUNE 1948; REISSUED AS STALINIST RUSSIA:A
MARXIST ANALYSIS IN 1955; AS THE FIRST PART OF RUSSIA: A MARXIST ANALYSIS in
1964, and as STATE CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA, Pluto Press, London, 1974.
As the title of the course suggests the view of the working class as
having an essential autonomy from capital, an ability to initiate its own self
activity and not to be purely reactive to capitalist depredations has been a
dominant theme of the tradition under consideration. This appreciation of
working class autonomy has included an understanding of the autonomy of workers
not only from capital, but from the official organizations of the class (e. g.
the party and the trade unions) and from other sectors of the working class
itself.
READING MATTER: Paul Buhle,
“Marxism in the USA”, URGENT TASKS, No. 12, Summer 1981 (Special issue on C.L.R.
James. )
This article locates James against the background of American Marxism
during the first 30 years of this Century and relates him to writers such as W.
E. B. Dubois, Austin Lewis, William Walling, and Louis Fraina and also
describes the course of his relationship with Trotskyism. He notes how James
has been outside the "mainstream" of Western Marxism partly by always
insisting on the creativity and revolutionary potential of the working class,
partly by his rejection of the Vanguard Party which was one of the reasons for his
rupture with Trotskyism. He locates the origins of James' viewpoint in the
richness of the struggles of blacks in the Third World (sports to revolution). Buhle
also emphasizes the vitality of James' views at a time (40s and 50s) when the
Left appeared bankrupt. James' ability to recognize and fight for the
possibilities of autonomous black struggles both in Africa and the US extended
and developed DuBois' earlier work on the role of blacks in the development of
the working class. He also notes James analysis of state capitalism and its
implications. [It should be said Buhle's focus on James fails to give his
comrades in the JFT, and after, due credit for their contributions to these
subjects. ] Finally, he emphasizes James' undying belief in the creative,
revolutionary possibilities that lie with plain people: "barbarism"
he quotes James, “exists only because nothing else can suppress the readiness
for sacrifice, the democratic instincts and creative power of the great masses
of people. "
C.L.R. James, Grace C. Lee, and
Pierre Chaulieu, “The Workers' Councils: Hungary”, in FACING REALITY, Detroit:
Bewick/ed, 1958.
This work included an important discussion of the Hungarian workers
councils which became almost paradigmatic for Facing Reality's understanding of
working class autonomy. The excerpt included in your packet was published as
"The Workers Councils in Hungary" in C.L.R. James THE FUTURE IN THE
PRESENT. The fascination with the Hungarian Workers Councils came from the
perception that the workers had not only made a revolution but had done so on
the basis of self- organization, without party or trade union leadership, at
the point of production and without repression. "The secret of the
workers' councils”, they began, “is this. . . . these shop-floor organizations
of the workers demonstrated such conscious mastery of the needs, processes, and
inter- relations of production, that they did not have to exercise any
domination over people. . . Workers' management of production, government from
below, and government by consent have thus been shown to be one and the same
thing. " They went on to point out how the workers organized production
and defence from the base with no central plan or central direction from any
party or any delegation of power. At the same time they noted, the councils
called for the creation of workers councils "in every branch of the
national activity”, e. g. , by government employees, white collar workers, and
so on. They also saw the councils over coming traditional divisions, such as
that between technicians (who were invited into the councils) and manual
workers, and as those between workers and peasants (who supported the workers).
In all this they saw a new kind of society emerging, one which was crushed just
as it was organizing itself. [The Facing Reality people also circulate a thin
volume by Andy Anderson, Hungary '56, published by Solidarity in London in 1964
and by Red & Black in Detroit in 1976. ]
READING MATTER: George
Rawick, “Working Class Self-Activity”, RADICAL AMERICA , Vol. 3, No. 2
(March-April 1969).
READING MATTER: Ferrucio Gambino, “Only Connect”, URGENT
TASKS, No. 12, Summer 1981 (Special issue on C.L.R. James. ) pp. 95-96.
In this short note, Gambino makes three points: first, C.L.R. James was
able to link the self-activity of the proletariat in the industrialized
countries with the self-activity of the proletariat in the colonized countries.
" Second, it was remarkable how in the late 40s and 50s, James helped lead
a "convergence of the self-activity of the masses against exploitation
with the contribution of dedicated intellectuals in legitimizing such self
activity. Three, the 50s was a time when "tiny groups and individuals in
Southern Europe discovered and read 'the American comrades'. . . discussion
started about Danilo Montaldi's translation into Italian of Paul Romano's The
American Worker. . . " Gambino thus documents the connection established
between the JFT/Facing Reality tendency and the Italian New Left.
At the most general level, that of the class relation as a whole, the
dominant traditions of Marxism, especially orthodox Marxism, but also the
critical theory of the Frankfort school tradition, have only given lip service
to the basic Marxian notion that the dynamics of the history of class societies
lies in the struggle between the classes. The actual theories elaborated within
those dominant traditions portray only one historical class subject: capital. The
working class is seen, for the most part as a victim of capital's exploitation
and unable to affect the course of capitalist development – unless, of course,
it joins the Party, or the critical theorists, to overthrow the state. Workers
struggles have been seen as inadequate, in and of themselves, to bring about
such radical change.
Typical of such views have been
most theories of capitalist accumulation and crisis. Accumulation has been
understood to occur, for the most part, as a result of the competition among
capitalist firms – a formulation which leaves the working class out of the
dynamics all together. Crisis, in turn, has been understood to occur as a
result of the working out of the inexorable laws of capitalism, e. g. ,
underconsumptionist theories of overproduction. Even where critical theoreists
have admitted that workers' "economic" struggles could challenge
capital, they have affirmed capital's ability to "instrumentalize" or
"integrate" those struggles into moments of capital's own growth – an
analysis which, in their formulations, again submerges the working class within
capital's own logic.
Against such understandings, the
tradition we are studying here has emphasized the ability of the working class
not only to resist capital's depredations but also to launch its own initiatives
of struggles – struggles which repeatedly rupture capital accumulation,
precipitate crisis and threaten the complete overthrow of the system. The
analysis of such struggles has been developed on many levels. At the most
general level, the power and autonomy of struggles have been studied which have
brought about dramatic revolutionary ruptures. Against Marxist-Leninist
interpretations which have emphasized the role of "political
leadership" or the Party, groups such as the Council Communists or the Johnson-Forest
Tendency have shown how masses of workers have acted without such leadership,
creating their own organization "spontaneously" and, where they have
had the power, new organizational alternatives to capital, e. g. , the Soviets,
the German and Hungarian workers councils.
During periods inbetween such
dramatic historical moments, the emphasis has been on the day to day struggles
of workers. Early on the emphasis was on the day to day struggles of workers in
production, on the shop floor within the factory or in the countryside. Later
on the analysis focused more and more on struggles in reproduction. (See
especially the section below on the Unwaged).
Within production working class
self-activity has been seen both in workers resistance to the capitalist
organization of work and in workers' ability to transform creatively their work
and work environments. These kinds of continuing self-activity were not seen
primarily as something "within" capital, but rather as autonomous
activities constantly checking, rupturing and overthrowing capitalist
management which could often, at best, react and adapt to the workers power.
In such ways, at all levels, this
tradition reversed orthodox Marxism and critical theory's vision of the
respective roles of labor and capital. Instead of capital the jauggernaut, we
have capital as dead labor, shaped by living labor (the working class). Instead
of labor as victim, we have labor evolving from living labor to labor as
revolutionary subject capable of negating capital.
READING MATTER: Phil
Romano and Ria Stone(R. Dunayevskaya) THE AMERICAN WORKER, Detroit: Facing
Reality Publishing Company, 1946. Translated and published in France by SouB,
and then in Italy (from the French) by Danilo Montaldi.
READING MATTER: C.L.R.
James, STATE CAPITALISM AND WORLD REVOLUTION, 1949.
Although first introduced in the previous section, this document also
contains a few of the JFT's statements of workers' autonomy. In particular in
Chapter 5 on the Class Struggle, the rise of state capitalism is associated
with a rise in autonomous working class struggle against both the state and the
unions. Again in Chapter 6 on the party, the problem of organization is found
not in the mistakes of elites (party or union) but in "the crisis of
self-mobilization of the proletariat. " Autonomous struggles are not to be
confused with simple reactions of workers to capitalist crimes but must be
recognized as having their own revolutionary initiative.
Even clearer are the statements in
the 1956 Preface to the 2nd Edition of the work where the vanguard party is
openly rejected and the ability of workers to develop new forms of organization
is affirmed. "The great organizations of the masses of the people and of
the workers in the past were not worked out by any theoretical elite or
vanguard. They arose from the experience of millions of people and their need
to overcome the intolerable pressures which society had imposed upon them for
generations. . . . new organizations will come as Lilburne's Leveller Party
came, as the . . . . Soviets in 1905, with not a single soul having any
concrete ideas about them until they appeared in all their power and glory.
"
READING MATTER: C.L.R.
James, Grace C. Lee, and Pierre Chaulieu, “New Society: New People”, FACING
REALITY, 1958.
An almost lyrical ode to the reality of working class imagination and
power to craft a new society out of the present. The authors swept across the
world, from the developed First world to the underdeveloped Third, from the new
attitudes and behaviors of shop stewards in England through the struggles of
women in the United States to anticolonial struggles in Asia and Africa. Everywhere
they were able to see "new men, new types of human beings" throwing
off the encumbering prejudices and destructive hierarchies of capitalism to
develop new ways of being. Where others see only the brutality of capital, they
saw the ferocious struggle that brutality was required to crush. "We wish
to draw attention to one of the great social forces of the day, the spirit of
renaissance which now animates the vast millions everywhere in the globe. . .
" Only "a socialist economy, without the overhead burdens and
incompetence of official society”, they argued, can generate the enormous
surplus wealth needed "for the development of the world economy as a
whole. " Similarly they also argued that those in the Third World could
only solve their problems "in a global context" but at the same time
their struggles could serve "as inspiration and example to the advanced
proletarians. " Finally, they discussed the emergence of new forms of art
and literature that could only accompany the development of the forces of a new
classless society. (The excerpt in your packet is from C.L.R. James, AT THE
RENDEZVOUS OF VICTORY, Allison & Busby, 1984. )
READING MATTER: Mario
Tronti, “Lenin in England”, (Classe Operaio, No. 1, Jan. 1964) Republished in
OPERAI E CAPITALE, pp. 89-95. Translated and published in WORKING CLASS
AUTONOMY AND THE CRISIS by Red Notes and CSE, London, 1979.
In this short piece, Tronti calls for reversing traditional Marxism's
focus on capitalist development toward the analysis of the development of
working class struggle. Capitalist development, he asserts, is led by and
follows behind working class initiative. The workers he says have gone beyond
their old organizations, the trade unions and the party but have not yet
developed appropriate new organizations. To do so is the project he calls
"Lenin in England. " If the workers were well organized politically
they would be able to lead capital and "make use" or take off from
capital's highest points of development. That is to say they could use
capital's composition as a point of departure for a political recomposition of
class organization. But, because there is no appropriate organization, capital
has the initiative and workers must oppose its development which is aimed at
their repression. Without revolutionary organization he warns working class
theoretical and strategic thought can leap forward but tactics must be decided
pragmatically and as such there is still a link to the unions (while there is
no longer any link to the party which can no longer express the necessary
strategic leap forward). He calls for discovering "certain forms of
working class struggles which set in motion a certain type of capitalist
development which goes in the direction of revolution (a sympathy for vanguards
that the red notes editors reject in a footnote). Finally he calls for a new
working class newspaper that would "monitor the strategic validity of particular
instances of struggle" to discover emerging new, un-coopted, revolutionary
organizational forms – as opposed to the Leninist concept of paper as
collective organizer.
READING MATTER: Mario
Tronti, “Workers and Capital”, TELOS 14 (Winter 1972):25- 62. (from OPERAI E
CAPITALE, Einaudi, Turin 1966, 1971. )
This key book, OPERAI E CAPITALE is also available in French and
Portuguese, but not in English. A few pieces have been translated and published.
"Workers and Capital" was the 1971 postface "Poscritto di Problemi”,
written after Tronti had returned to the CPI. It is of interest here less for
the interpretation of labor history, which is open to criticism at several
points, than for the methodology it contains. Despite his return to the CPI,
Tronti held on to much of his previous work and this article must have been, in
part, one step in trying to gain acceptance of that work, and many of its
insights, within the CPI.
The article opens with a dichotomy
between two possible approaches to history: 1) a chronology of cycles of labor
struggle; this is capital's history, and 2)the examination of great historical
events, privileged periods which present models; this is labor's viewpoint and
politics. Basic here is the juxtaposition of the capitalist and working class
viewpoints.
Tronti then sketches three such
moments. The first is during the progressive era in the U.S.when Theodore
Roosevelt breaks the coal strikes with arbitration rather than troops. This is
a change from the previous period when working class violence was met with
capitalist violence. With arbitration and legal action capital shifts to
reformism.
The second moment is in England
and is Marshall's theoretical response to a new level of working class
organization, a capitalist response on the level of Science. Thus capital's
response is a function of a new working class composition. Tronti argues two
things here: first, that the autonomy of politics appears here only as the
autonomy of science (capital's economics) and second, we must learn to
translate the "scientific language of capital" into "our
illustrious class dialect. " The concept of the autonomy of politics is
central to the CPI's justification for its own centrality and its evocation
here bespeaks Tronti's return to the fold. The emphasis on looking at things
from a working class viewpoint, Tronti holds over from his autonomist days. His
perception of the need to translate capital's views of itself is fundamental:
"Every discovery of an objective social science can and must be translated
in the language of the struggles. The most abstract theoretical problem will
have the most concrete class meaning. "(p. 30)
The third moment is in Germany and
is social democracy. Here Tronti sees the German labor movement as appearing to
have only a political history. There are underlying struggles of course, but he
thinks the social democrats accurately "derived the political form of the
party from the content of the struggles. . . [and]. . . having used the
struggles to grow as an alternative power. " Lenin's theory of the party ,
he goes on to say, is a theory equally applicable to social democracy as to
Bolshevism. Lenin's theory reconstituted the autonomy of the political from
labor's viewpoint, he says. Tronti hails the immediacy of relationship between
social democratic politics and worker struggles, unmediated by trade unions as
"an unequalled organizational solution of the labor struggle on the
political level. " Why did German social democracy fail?
"Intellectual mediocrity”, and "theoretical misery. " Tronti
then goes on to draw parallels between Weber's concept of the purely political
and Lenin.
Tronti then returns to the United
States, which he argues, gives us the most important models of working class
struggle because American struggles have gained the most. He then sketches the
cycle of struggles of the teens and the era of social peace of the 20s. About
the twenty he says two things of note: first, workers struggles are
"irreplaceable instrument[s] of self conciousness for capital”, and
second, workers didn't struggle much in the 20s because from 1922-1929, they
could "obtain without asking" and from 1929-1933, they knew there was
nothing to gain. "Why bother to struggle when it is impossible to win
concessions?" "They know that there is nothing to gain as a
particular class if the general development has nothing more to grant. "
Here we see a line of reasoning which the CPI used against workers struggles
during the crisis that beset Italian capital at the end of the 1960s to get
workers to cooperate with finding a solution to the crisis.
Tronti then sketches Roosevelt and
the Keynesian solution to the Great Depression: legalizing workers struggles
and then harnessing them for capital's development. He shows how labor took the
initiative and how Roosevelt and the state acted in labor's interest against
the capitalist but in such a way as to preserve the system. Reformism is again
the response to labor struggles but coupled with a new way of using the state
and a new economics. So during this period all of the newness of the three
moments mentioned above are combined. Keynes theoretical initiative equals
Roosevelts political one. "If Keynes could have directed poitically the
'capitalist revolution' as the theoretician of the New Deal, he would have been
an American Lenin. " From this Tronti draws two principles, one
methodological, one strategic: methodologically: "To depart from the labor
struggles in order to grasp the various levels of social development such as
the state, science and organization is something learned all of a sudden in
these events. " I. E. , the primacy of autonomous working class struggle
within capitalist development. Strategically: "Afterwords it becomes
useless to condemn [the great capitalist initiative]: our only advantage is in
using it. " Thus the CPI position of cooperating with capitalist
development but using it at the same time. In the course of this analysis
Tronti touches on many facets of the new order: the mass worker, the
obsolesecence of orthodox Marxism, the contract as a form of periodical
stabilization of struggle, the need for constant organizational renewal on the
part of labor [an appeal for innovation within the CPI?].
Methodologically, toward the end
of the article is a good statement of autonomist methods: "If politics for
us is labor struggle that leaps to increasingly higher levels of quality, and
history is capital updating on this basis its technological and productive
structures, its organization of work, its control and manipulative social
instruments and substitutes, upon the objective suggestion of the class
adversary, the increasingly obsolete parts of its power mechanism, then
politics always procedes history. . . . We don't start with the class: we come
to it. Or better, we reach a new level of class composition. We begin with
struggle. "
READING MATTER: Ferruccio
Gambino, “Workers Struggles and the Development of Ford in Britain”, BULLETIN
OF THE CONFERENCE OF SOCIALIST ECONOMISTS, March 1976, pp. 1-18.
Labor unions have been fundamental forms of working class organization
ever since capital generalized the imposition of work and created a class of
people defined by their labor. As a rule they have been created by worker as
organizational expressions and vehicles of their own struggles. The form and
organization of labor unions have varied considerably over time, from
professional craft unions to industrial unions to the "one big union"
of the Wobblies, but they have always taken production as the point of
organization – even if that organization has often reached beyond production
into reproduction. Given this history, the issue of the role of the union in
workers struggles has always been one of the most basic issues of working class
politics.
Because orthodox Marxist-Leninist
analysis has always seen day to day struggles as "economistic" and
unable to rise to the level of "politics”, i. e. , to the level of the
general interests of the class as a whole, it has always considered the labor
union as the proper organizational vehicle for workers efforts at that level. Where
the various orthodox communist parties have had the power, they have taken over
unions and through the control of the union burearucracy tried to subordinate them
to the current Party line and strategy.
Besides this left pressure, labor
unions have also been subjected, throughout their history, to pressures from
capital to transform these vehicles of struggle into business unions –
organizations which confine their demands to those compatible with the growth
of business. Those pressures have taken the concrete form of capitalist
attempts to coopt union leaders either through appeal to their good judgement
or through less honorable means. Where the labor union bureaucracy has accepted
to confine workers demands in this way, sharp contradictions have often emerged
between the rank and file workers and their union leadership. Such
contradictions have involved daily guerrilla warfare as well as overt battles,
e. g. , wildcat strikes, between the workers and "their" union. Such
guerrilla warfare often coincides with the day to day struggles of workers
against capital – precisely to the degree that the union has become the labor
relations arm of capital. Part of the autonomous Marxist tradition has
consisted of giving expression to such autonomous working class struggles and
showing how it constitutes a critique and going beyond of such organizational
mediation.
READING MATTER: Martin
Glaberman, PUNCHING OUT, Detroit: Correspondence Publishing Committee, 1952
(Reprinted 1973 by Bewick Editions)
A collaborator of James in the JFT and then in CORRESPONDENCE and Facing
Reality, Martin Glaberman was an autoworker and central contributor to the
development of this tradition. Most of Glaberman's writings have concerned the
autonomous activities of rank and file workers vis ˆ vis the unions.
In this pamphlet, Glaberman
analysed how the unions were transformed from an organization of workers to an
organization of capital after the mass struggles of the 1930s. Running through
the pamphlet is the tension between the workers trying to organize themselves
and their production and the capitalist attempts to control production and
subordinate them to it. Thus Glaberman argued that the resistance to the
capitalist plan reveals the workers' own plans, their own desires to manage
production. He noted that workers do not always clearly conceptualize their
resistance as an attempt to create a new society but their activities run in
that direction. He illustrated the struggles with many examples taken from the
30s, the 40s and the 50s. Particularly interesting is his discussion of the use
of the contract to harness workers struggle. He pointed out the contradictory
nature of the contract: on the one hand it records workers victories, on the
other, as the Wobblies knew, it becomes a means to control them, as the company
and union representatives impose the disciplinary clauses of the contract on
the workers. One illustration is the grievance procedure that, by tying up the
whole process for long periods of time, and diffusing conflict, undercuts
workers ability to change things. Similarly, at the social level, he argues
that much of the social legislation of the New Deal was designed to achieve the
same kind of control.
Glaberman went on to argue that
left wing caucuses and union groups only "want to substitute themselves
for the porkchoppers in power. " He even drew a parallel between Walter
Reuther's 1950 five year contract – during which the union would cooperate with
management to control the workers – and Stalin's five year plans.
Finally he gave a variety of
examples of worker self-organization of work and work time which showed
elements of an incipient "new society" that capital wants to repress.
Thus we have here, mostly on the level of the shop floor, an analysis of
workers' autonomy versus capitalist/union control.
READING MATTER: Martin
Glaberman, ARTIE CUTS OUT, 1953.
READING MATTER: Martin
Glaberman, UNION COMMITTEEMEN AND WILDCAT STRIKES, Detroit: Correspondence
Publishing Committee, 1955.
In an analysis of a member of Correspondence who left the group after
being editor of its paper, Glaberman presents a fascinating examination of one
aspect of the class composition in the auto plants. He argues that as a union
committeman who did not work but who was constantly preoccupied with union
business or abstract political discussion, this man was structurally separated
from the other workers and thus could neither understand nor relate to them. As
a result, over time, the alienation became more complete and he came to typify
the modern relations between workers and bureaucrats. As an enforcer of the
union contract the committeeman appears to the workers more of a cop than a
representative of the workers' interests. As enforcer he could not empathize
with wildcat strikes, struggles to control overtime, or hostility to automation.
Moreover: "The independent forms of the struggles of Negroes, what women
and youth were doing to establish new human relations, the mass participation
and concern with sports, entertainment, literature, all these escaped the
editor completely. " In his analysis Glaberman reaffirms the JFT &
Correspondence view that the future society should be sought in the positive
content of the attitudes and struggles of people today. (what will later be
called self-valorization) The committeeman was opposed to those attempts to
open up the paper to those emerging attitudes, knowledge and feelings in the
experiences of workers themselves. "What the editor could not and would
not learn”, Glaberman finishes, “is that the only reason that Correspondence
has for its existence is to provide a place and a means for the expression of
the hostility to all forms of bureaucracy that exists in every section of
society. "
READING MATTER: Bruno
Ramirez, WHEN WORKERS FIGHT: THE POLITICS OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS IN THE
PROGRESSIVE ERA, 1898- 1916, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978.
If the debate about the proper relationship between the union and the
working class has been one of the perennial issues of working class politics,
so too has a parallel debate about the political "party" form of
organization. The autonomist Marxist position on this issue, which has
developed against the background of the social democratic or Marxist- Leninist
party as the dominant forms of the party, has generally been highly critical of
all such delegation of power to any kind of central organization. The point of
reference has been more Marx's negative views of conspiratorial Blanquism and
his positive assessment of the Commune with its immediately revocable
delegates, than his own practice within the First International. In Germany,
the Rosa Luxemburg and later the Council Communists opposed both strict
parliamentarianism of the German Social Democratic Party and the subordination
of the workers councils to either a centralized Leninist communist party or the
Comitern. In the US, as with many European syndicalists, the IWW expelled those
who would subordinate its activities to electoral political parties. In Russia,
as we have seen, there was fierce resistence to the subordination of the
factory committees and the soviets to communist party control. Again in the US,
those in the Johnson-Forest Tendency, while at first working within a
Trotskyist party environment, came to reject the Leninist party altogether. In
France, a similar history marked the development of SOCIALISME OU BARBARIE. In
Italy, many militants in the autonomist movement not only came from the
socialist or communist parties but developed profound critiques of both the
Leninist party and parliamentary politics.
Such critiques have involved both
historical analyses of the actual political roles played by various
"parties" throughout the history of working class struggle and
theoretical meditations on the general question of working class organization. The
Leninist/Boshevik-Stalinist nexus has, of course, a key point of reference in
such studies.
For independent-minded European Marxists
like Rosa Luxemburg, the Left Opposition in Russia and the Council Communists,
of course, opposition to Boshevik politics developed early, first in theory and
then in practice. For others, however, for whom the Russia Revolution and
subsequent events were faraway historical events, the trajectory of their
critical intellectual assessment of working class experience has been different.
First, a recognition of the reactionary and repressive character of the
Stalinist party, coupled with the assertion of that party as a sharp break from
Lenin's party which is seen as a valid expression of working class organization.
Second, a critique of existing post-Stalinist Marxist- Leninist parties – such
as those in the West. Third, a recognition of the contradictions within
Bolshevism and the concept and practice of the Leninist party in any form. For
the Trotskyists the critique of Stalin came early, for others it came only
after his death in 1953 and the revelations of the XXth Congress. The tendency
to preserve Lenin as a revolutionary saint, and his theory of working class
organization as a guide to action, has been strong among virtually all those
who didn't have to deal with him directly. The critique of the Leninist Party
has often been developed quite separately from the critique of Lenin himself. What
has survived longest of the veneration of Lenin is respect for his incredible
ability to interpret every phenomenon in poitical terms and to grasp the ebb
and flow of the class struggle. Since few make any pretense to clairyovance,
they hardly blame Lenin for not forseeing the development of the Soviets. Instead
they praise him for his ability ot grasp their importance and raise the cry
"All Power to the Soviets!" Such respect has survived despite the
rejection of his subsequent attempts to subordinate the Soviets to the party.
This critique of the party form
has by no means meant a rejection of all forms of working class organization. On
the contrary, it has been accompanied by an openness to and exploration of a
wide variety of different organizational forms. Luxemburg became known for her
embrace of the "spontaneous" creativity of the working class in its
organizational response to obstacles in the class struggle. The IWW, of course,
embraced the more or less syndicalist approach of what they called "trade
unionism" – workers taking over society on the basis of factory
organization as a base. Others embraced the council form of organization. Still
others worked within the framework of what they called the "small working
class organization" which was conceived, not as party, but as a forum for
discussion within struggles that would eventually generate other, broader
organizational solutions. Over time, with the proliferation of various kinds of
organization, from free radio stations and underground newspapers, to squatters
groups or women's groups, what has differentiated autonomist Marxists from
other Marxists has been their openness to organizational variety and their
refusal to attempt to subbordinate such variety to a single organization.
READING MATTER: Rosa
Luxemburg, “Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy”, (1904)
in Mary-Alice Waters (ed) ROSA LUXEMBURG SPEAKS, New York: Pathfinder Press,
1970, pp. 112-130.
This article was written in 1904 in response to the publication of
Lenin's book WHAT IS TO BE DONE? and his pamphlet ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS
BACK, both of which detailed his argument for an extremely centralized
reorganization of the Russian Social Democratic movement.
Luxemburg's attack on Lenin's
position likens it to that of the Blanquists while arguing 1) that any attempt
to centralize the labor movement along the lines he calls for would paralyze it
and maximize the dangers of an opportunistic elite imposing its policies on the
masses, and 2) that the history of the Russian movement shows that every
important leap forward in tactics has come spontaneously from the workers in
struggle. She writes: "The most important and most fruitful changes in its
[Russian socialist movement] tactical policy during the last ten years have not
been the inventions of several leaders and even less so of any central
organizational organs. They have always been the spontaneous product of the
movement in ferment. . . . [examples] . . . In general, the tactical policy of
the social democracy is not something that may be Ôinvented. Õ It is the
produce of a series of gret creative acts of the often spontaneous class
struggle seeking its way forward. " pp. 120-121.
READING MATTER: C.L.R.
James, Grace Lee, and Pierre Chaulieu, FACING REALITY, Detroit: Bewick, 1974
(Originally 1958)
Chapter VI: "The Marxist Organization: 1903-1958”, contains a
biting critique of the Leninist Vanguard Party and then a sketch of what
organization should be. Chapter VII: "What to Do and How to Do It”, contains
much more on the role of a small Marxist organization dedicated to recording
and publicizing working class activity.
READING MATTER: Bologna,
Sergio "Class Composition and the Theory of the Party at the Origin of the
Workers' Council Movement”, TELOS, #13, Fall 1972, pp. 4-27. Translated by
Bruno Ramirez from OPERAI E STATO, Milano: Feltrinelli, 1972, pp. 13-46. (12pp)
This diversity brings us to the last essential aspect of the emphasis on
working class autonomy: the tendency toward an acceptance of the necessity of
autonomy among various sectors of the class. For some, this understanding lay
at the basis of the critique of specific organizational forms such as the union
or the party. Empirical observation of the union or party behavior, which by
seeking to subbordinate particular struggles became irrelevant or repressive,
along with theoretical analysis of the meaning of class and the evolution of
class struggle led many to appreciate how maintaining the dynamism of grass
roots struggles required autonomous organization.
Such appreciation has not come
easily to the Marxist tradition. Capital has always ruled by dividing to
conquer. Because of this "unity" has always been a key concept in the
Marxist tradition – the unity of the working class in its struggle against
capital. Indeed the central preoccupation of most politically active Marxists,
including many of those I would associate with an "autonomist" tradition
has been the building of inclusive, unified organizations capable of
successfully confronting capital’s own totalizing unity. For example, despite
her fervent opposition to Lenin’s centralized form of party organization, Rosa
Luxemburg was equally insistent on the need for unified organizational forms. No
where is this more obvious than in her attitude toward any kind of
"national" autonomy within the working class movement. Opposing Lenin’s
stated acceptance of national "self-determination”, she wrote: "the
Russian social democracy should not organize itself as a federative
conglomerate of many national groups. It must rather become a single party for
the entire empire. " (Organizational Questions, op. cit., p. 117)
Perhaps most important in the
early years of the building of this tradition, was the work of C.L.R. James. Born
black in Trinidad, James was politically active not only in Trinidad but in
England, in the United States and in the movement for African independence. Self-activity
and autonomy were central to James' work in several areas: from the beginning,
even before he became a Marxist, he was concerned with the autonomous struggles
of black workers against colonialism, especially in the Caribbean and in Africa.
Eventually this was extended to the observation of the necessary autonomy of
women, students, peasants and so on.
Within the Italian New Left, as
elsewhere in the 1960s, the recognition of sectoral autonomy mostly grew out of
the struggles of women against patriarchal domination. In such circumstances
there was simultaneous theoretical and organizational development as women
pulled out of male dominated groups and developed their own autonomous
organizations. The development of the theory of first black and then women's
autonomy within working class struggle eventually led to its extension to the
struggles of peasants in the Third World. (On both these aspects see the
section below on the unwaged. )
READING MATTER: C.L.R. James,
THE CASE FOR WEST-INDIAN SELF GOVERNMENT, Hogarth Press, London, 1933. Reprinted
in C.L.R. James, THE FUTURE IN THE PRESENT, Selected Writings Vol. I, Lawrence
Hill, Westport 1977 and Allison & Busby, London 1977. pp. 25-40
A pamphlet drawn from James' book THE LIFE OF CAPTAIN CIPRIANI (1932)
which lays out the class composition in the West Indies and argues the case for
local autonomy. James lays out a remarkably honest analysis not only of the
peculiarities and weaknesses of the British white ruling class, but also of the
diverse and conflicting sectors of the West Indian masses. He analyses the way
differentiation by degree of blackness divides West Indians and weakens them in
their struggles with their rulers. At the same time he argues strenuously and
humorously, with devastating illustrations, that the West Indians are as, or more,
capable of governing themselves than the British. The article shows some of the
richness of understanding of human and class complexity out of which James
would later elaborate a Marxist analysis of working class autonomy and
capitalist development.
READING MATTER: C.L.R. James,
A HISTORY OF NEGRO REVOLT, London, 1936.
READING MATTER: C.L.R. James,
THE BLACK JACOBINS: TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE AND THE SAN DOMINGO REVOLUTION,
(London, Secker and Warburg) 1938
Perhaps James best known work, THE BLACK JACOBINS deals with the
struggle for freedom and independence of black slaves in the Caribbean.
READING MATTER: Robert
Hill, “In England, 1932-1938”, URGENT TASKS, No. 12, Summer 1981 (Special issue
on C.L.R. James. )
This short article describes James' sejour in England, his political
development and his connections with the Pan-African movement. Hill traces the
emergence of James political consciousness from his concerns with West Indian
independence through his study of Trotskyism (which led to his book WORLD
REVOLUTION, 1917-1936, and to his translation of Souvarine's biography of
Stalin)to his involvement with Jomo Kenyatta and others in the creation of the
International African Friends of Ethiopia to agitate in England against Italy's
invasion of Ethiopia and later to his book THE BLACK JACOBINS and the formation
with George Padmore and others of the International African Service Bureau to
support Pan-Africanism. Hill particularly analyses the impact of James' book on
the development of Black history and struggles.
READING MATTER: Walter
Rodney, “The African Revolution”, URGENT TASKS, No. 12, Summer 1981 (Special
issue on C.L.R. James. )
Rodney, well known militant and historian who was assassinated in 1980,
situates and appreciates James studies of and contributions to the development
of the African Revolution. He begins with a reassessment of James's HISTORY OF
NEGRO REVOLT (1938) noting James' insistence on Africans as having welcomed
colonialism. James dealt with a whole series of struggles: the Sierra Leone Hut
Tax War of 1898, the African Independent Church movement, the Sierra Leona
railway strikes of 1919 and 1926, the Gambian sailors strike of 1929 and the
Nigerian women's uprising at Aba in 1929. James insisted that the revolts
sprang from both resistance to oppression and from the assertion of African
desires and leadership. Rodney points out James own history of struggle and his
willingness to analyse defeats as well as victories. For example, James work on
Nkrumah and Ghana dealt both with the period in which Nkrumah lead the people's
movement and the later period when his leadership fell behind and became a
tether on it when he failed to smash the colonial state apparatus inherited
from the English. Rodney sees that James work reflected the on going
international character of the struggle against an international capitalist
regime. He also approves James rejection of Stalinism and Trotskyism as worse
than useless for pan- African struggle. He points again and again to James
insistence that Revolution "is by and of the mass of the people, which
means in effect the workers, peasants and such leadership as emerges from the
mass struggle. " In this light, Rodney also notes James fascination with
Tanzania and its experiment with Ujamaa, based on the rural heritage of the
mass of people.
READING MATTER: C.L.R. James,
“The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the USA”, 1938 (New York,
1948) Reprinted in C.L.R. James, THE FUTURE IN THE PRESENT SELECTED WRITINGS
VOL. I, Lawrence Hill, Westport 1977 and Allison & Busby, London 1977.
The basic political program for black autonomy from party and union. James
attacks the old Left position that would subordinate black struggles to the
[white] proletariat, and argues for the real, historically based vitality of
the independent black movement. He argues this position both on Marxist theoretical
principles and on demonstrated history: the role of blacks in the American
Revolution, in bringing on the Civil War, during the Civil War, during the
Populist movement, with Garvey, and finally in the late 40s with the NAACP and
many other black institutions. He argues that not only have black struggles
been vital, but that they have also been initiating of wider proletarian
struggles, and he cites the rapid rise of black militancy in the auto factories
of Detroit. The black movement, he says, is headed toward the labor movement,
and indeed part of it is already playing a decisive role inside of the factory.
He reminds his readers that the long history of capitalist repression of black
people has created a tremendous potential for revolutionary violence. So, in
this piece we can see some of the themes that will be further developed after
the split from the SWP and during the years of CORRESPONDENCE, FACING REALITY
and NEWS AND LETTERS – all of which recognized, and helped give expression to
black voices within the labor movement as well as in the wider struggles of the
black community.
READING MATTER: Dan
Georgakis, “Young Detroit Radicals:1955-1965”, URGENT TASKS, No. 12, Summer
1981 (Special issue on C.L.R. James. )
A reminiscence on the influence of James and the Correspondence/Facing
Reality group on the development of those young militants who would found the
League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit. Georgakis found a number of
important influences: 1) the emphasis on the activities of the workers themselves,
2) the availability of an analysis of international concerns, (he notes he and
his friends concerns with China, Cuba and Palestine, Facing Realities interest
in Hungary, 3) the Facing Reality emphasis on organizing at the point of
production and its sophisticated critique of the UAW and support for the
autonomy of Black struggles, 4) James indirect influence, through his writings
and through his JFT and FR comrades, 5) the FR people as a network of contacts
with a wide variety of militants (Italians, people working in factories and in
the arts), 6) FR's emphasis on culture at the center of political struggle, e. g.
, James work on cricket, and 7) the personal empathy and support of those in
the FR circles in the realm of the "personal as political. "
READING MATTER: George
Rawick, “Personal Notes”, [on C.L.R. James] URGENT TASKS, No. 12, Summer 1981
(Special issue on C.L.R. James. )
A friend of James and a noted historian of slave struggles, Rawick gives
a personal account of what he feels is most basic about James contribution. He
notes James identification of the struggles of plain people as the core of
revolutionary struggle: "James understood and developed the idea of the
autonomous struggle of Black people, an autonomy strong enough not to be
submerged in or subordinated to the struggle of the white, male working class
of the metropolitan center of capital. This notion of autonomy of struggle was
carried through by James and those who worked most closely with him to include
not only Blacks but all other national groups, women, youth, even artists and
writers. " He goes on to note some of James own involvement in struggle,
including his work on such everyday subjects as cricket: "For James
cricket is essential to the West Indian struggle for freedom, for his
development of his views on the human personality, and a mark of his respect
for an important aspect of the life of the West Indian masses. "
READING MATTER: Paul
Lawrence Berman, “Facing Reality”, URGENT TASKS, No. 12, Summer 1981 (Special
issue on C.L.R. James. )
Berman recounts the rebirth of anarchism within the New Left as an
alternative to Leninism and how those interested in anarchism discovered C.L.R.
James through Paul Buhle and RADICAL AMERICA. . He relates a variety of reasons
for James appeal, including his insistence on focusing on the concrete content
of workers struggles including what they reveal about "the existence,
already, before a revolution, of a socialist society in embryo. " He also
notes that James never saw any relationship to anarchism in his work, indeed he
condemned it. But, Berman argues, nevertheless FACING REALITY expresses, as far
as he is concerned "some anarchist ideas. " But at the same time, he
goes on, there was much more in James than anarchism, there was a definite
theoretical advance, mainly because most modern anarchists (e. g. Goodman and
Bookchin) slighted the historic role of class conflict. "James had
managed, in brief, to restate the theory of socialism in a way that recognized
the validity of major libertarian insights and yet still preserved, through its
reliance on Marxist dialectical and historical methodology, suppleness and
solidity of mind. . . . I would say that, for the American Left in this last
quarter century, this book, FACING REALITY, is our underground classic. "
READING MATTER: George
Rawick, FROM SUNDOWN TO SUNUP:THE MAKING OF THE BLACK COMMUNITY, Greenwood,
Westport, 1972. Especially chapter on slave revolt.
The first volume of Rawick's 20-volume set of slave narratives this book
draws upon those first hand accounts to describe and analyze the self-activity
of slaves during the time they had to themselves, i. e. , from sundown to sunup.
According to Rawick's account this book sold more copies among the feminist
movement in Italy than in the US. The intense interest there being plainly
related to the focus on self-activity by a movement beginning to forge its awn
autonomy from the Italian male dominated left.
In Chapter 6, Rawick focuses on
the resistance by slaves to their domination by whites. He considers both overt
resistance and covert forms of struggle. He begins with a discussion of the
black struggle to avoid being Sambo – passive and accepting of domination. Not
only anger and violence demolish this possibility but also wiles and brain. Rawick
analyses the oral story telling traditions of slavery that focus more often
than not on Brer Rabbit-like characters {or Anansi the Spider} who is
relatively weak but survives through using their wits to overcome stronger
animals. Rawick goes on to describe a variety of forms of slave resistance:
running away & the underground railroad, suicide, killing of overseers,
attacking patrollers, killing the masters children, strikes, communication
networks to circulate news and methods of struggle, learning to read for the
same purpose, collective slave revolts, black secret fraternal organizations
that spied on the South during the Civil War, working for the Northern Army,
joining the North as troops, refusing to produce in the South, and so on. In
all these efforts Rawick shows people that the masters would treat as objects
[and others see as victims], struggling to become real human subjects,
individually and collectively, crafting their own lives in an evolving
community. ". . . the Subject: the man with needs and wants of his own,
not only those that others can objectively and quantifiably impute to him; the
man who acts as best he can to satisfy those needs and wants. He may demand
better and more food, clothing, and shelter. He may demand higher status,
dignity, and the time and opportunity to carry on flirtations, to laugh, dance,
sing, make love, loaf, play with his children and raise them as he sees fit; he
may demand the end of being whipped Object and become the one who chooses not
to work well as an act of rebellion. the subject wants liberty and freedom and
the opportunity to appropriate for himself and his family the best that is
available in his time and place. "
The theory of the mass worker and the social factory was implicit in the
work of the Johnson-Forest tendency and SOCIALISME OU BARBARIE in the 1940s and
1950s. Although they did not call them "mass workers”, much of the writing
of the JFT, Correspondence and Facing Reality, because it dealt with auto
workers in Detroit and elsewhere, was, de facto, about the workers at the heart
of the new Fordist-Keynesian organization of society which had emerged in the
1920s and 1930s in the United States. Moreover, their work understood the key
role of this new organization in a new stage of social relations – in both
production and reproduction. It was this understanding which would lead them to
look beyond the factory and recognize the larger social ramifications of this
particular organization of production.
The theory of the mass worker and
the social factory received explicit development by Italian workerist theorists
in the early 1960s as they fought to elaborate a theory adequate to the growing
struggles of the workers in the big Italian factories such as those of FIAT in
Turin. For them, the key points of reference, besides the American and French
work on which they drew, was that of Gramsci and what the Italian Communist
Party had done with his work. Gramsci had elaborated a theory of Fordism in the
US but had concluded that, in his day, Italy had not yet experienced such
developments and that therefore communist political strategy must be based on
the still minoritarian position of the industrial working class. This became
part of the CPI's dogma and part of its rationale for the continuing
subordination of working class interests to political alliances with other
classes, especially the petty bourgeoisie. It was against this position that
the operaistas argued that indeed Ford had come to Italy and that the
associated class composition constituted the basis for an independent working
class politics.
It was in the process of
developing their analysis of the new class structure (new for Italy) that the
operaistas developed their theories of "class composition" as a
working class perspective on Marx's notion of "organic composition"
of capital. This involved a re-examination of Marx, especially his work on
technological change and the division of labor which theorists such as Romano
Alquati and Raneiro Panzieri rethought in terms of the structure of working class
power.
READING MATTER: Martin
Glaberman, PUNCHING OUT, Detroit: Correspondence Publishing Committee, 1952
(Reprinted 1973 by Bewick Editions)
For example, in this pamphlet, where Glaberman analyzed how the unions
were transformed from an organization of workers to an organization of capital
after the mass struggles of the 1930s he discussed the use of the contract to
harness workers struggle in ways that anticipated Mario Tronti's critique of
the contract. Glaberman points out the contradictory nature of the contract: on
the one hand it records workers victories, on the other it becomes a means to
control them, as the company and union representatives impose the disciplinary
clauses of the contract on the workers. One illustration is the grievance
procedure that, by tying up the whole process for long periods of time, and
diffusing conflict, undercuts workers ability to change things. Similarly, at
the social level, he argues that much of the social legislation of the New Deal
was designed to achieve the same kind of control.
Glaberman goes on, in a way that
will be repeated a thousand times in the New Left critique of the Italian
Communist Party, to argue that left wing caucuses and union groups only
"want to substitute themselves for the porkchoppers in power. " He even
draws a parallel between Walter Reuther's 1950 five year contract – during
which the union would cooperate with management to control the workers – and
Stalin's five year plans.
READING MATTER: Raniero
Panzieri, “The Capitalist Use of Machinery: Marx Versus the 'Objectivists,
'" in Phil Slater (ed) OUTLINES OF A CRITIQUE OF TECHNOLOGY, (Atlantic
Highlands, Humanities Press) 1980. (Originally published as "Sull'uso
capitalistico delle macchine nel neocapitalismo”, QUADERNI ROSSI, 1961 and
reprinted in R. Panzieri, LA RIPRESA DEL MARXISMO LENINISMO IN ITALIA, Sapere
Ed. 1975. )
A major figure in the emergence of New Left Italian Marxism, Panzieri
broke from the Socialist Party of Italy (PSI) and helped found QUADERNI ROSSI,
a journal which became a focal point for theoretical and political discussions
that drew on both domestic (esp. the Italian class struggle) and foreign
sources (JFT & SouB) to generate a whole series of new insights and
perspectives. In this article Panzieri takes on several basic issues of
conflict with the CPI and its trade unions. He attacks the orthodox position of
the Italian Old Left that supported "modernization" in Italy after
WWII. (This modernization meant first and foremost the introduction of Fordism,
mass production, and collective bargaining in Italy. In this article he deals
with several key issues: 1) the question of class strategy vis ˆ vis
technological development. The orthodox view saw technology as an autonomous
force which can be supported and used by the working class (say through a
politics that supports struggle within capitalist development). Panzieri
follows Marx's analysis of the development of machinery which sees it within
the capitalist struggle to control the working class, as a moment of capital's
planning. This he brings to bear against the argument that the development of
the "productive forces" can guarantee the automatic or necessary
"overthrow of existing relations. " Thus he recreates in the Italian
context the argument that the JFT and SOCIALISME OU BARBARIE threw against the
Leninists and Stalinists years before. 2) the question of the role of wage and
time struggles. The trade unions, the CPI and the PSI all see struggles for
higher wages and more free time and the only necessary demands within
capitalist development. Panzieri again uses Marx on both subjects to argue that
increases in wages are not enough to rupture the wage relationship, and that
the real meaning of "free time" is the working class control of
production. What is necessary, Panzieri argues is a political rupture of the
system based on the demand for workers' management of the whole society.
READING MATTER: Mario
Tronti, “Social Capital”, TELOS, #17, Fall 1973; from OPERAI E CAPITALE Turin:
Einaudi, 1965, 1971.
One of the key figures in the Italian New Left, Mario Tronti wrote some
of Autonomia's most important early theoretical papers. His book OPERAI E
CAPITALE collects material originally published in QUADERNI ROSSI and other New
Left journals together with new material. Although Tronti would later return to
the CPI and would oppose many of his own earlier positions, his early work
remains an important point of reference even today. This key chapter from
Tronti's book deals with his analysis of Parts I and II of Volume II of CAPITAL
wherein he emphasizes how Marx's analyses of both the circuit of commodity
capital and the reproduction schemes encompass the reproduction of the whole
social capital, including variable capital understood as the working class
(waged and unwaged). From these passages he derives an analysis of social
capital as self reproducing social factory.
READING MATTER: Modern
Times, “The Social Factory”, FALLING WALL REVIEW, #5, Bristol, England, 1974.
READING MATTER: Guido
Baldi, “Theses on the Mass Worker and Social Capital”, RADICAL AMERICA, vol. 6,
No. 3, May-June 1972.
Guido Baldi was a pseudonym used by Silvia Federici (see section V
below) and Mario Montano (see section VIII below) in this article which sets
out, in the form of "theses" a number of the important conclusions
derived from previous work in Italy, and elsewhere, on the history of class
struggle in the 20th Century.
READING MATTER: Raniero
Panzieri, “Surplus Value and Planning: Notes on the Reading of Capital”, In THE
LABOUR PROCESS AND CLASS STRATEGIES. CSE Pamphlet, No. 1, London: Stage 1, 1976.
(Originally in QUADERNI ROSSI, No. 4, 1964(?), pp. 257-288. Reprinted as
Chapter 25 in R. Panzieri, LA RIPRESA DEL MARXISMO LENINISMO IN ITALIA, Milano:
Sapere Ed. 1975, pp. 329-365. )
While the development of the analysis of the wage as an expression of
working class power grew out of the struggles of factory workers, the clearest
analysis of lack of power associated with unwaged income was developed by women
struggling in the sphere of reproduction. Both developments were at sharp
variance with the traditional orthodox Marxist view of the wage. In the
orthodox perspective the wage, first and formost, defined the working class,
that is to say the concept and thus the politics of the working class was seen
as applicable only to those who received a wage. Who constituted the working
class? Those who received a wage. Everyone else in the "proletariat"
or mass of oppressed within capitalism were expected to follow the lead of the
working class which was conceived of as the most progressive class within
capitalism. This was the kind of position which had underpinned the traditional
attitude of Marxist toward peasants and peasant struggles. From Engels through
the 2nd and 3rd Internationals to Mao, the peasants if they were active at all
in the anti-capitalist struggle were supposed to follow the leadership of the
working class. This was the generalized position despite Marx's analysis in
Capital of the unwaged reserve army of labor as an integral part of the working
class and despite his late work on Russia in which he had seen the peasant mir
as perhaps providing the key to a direct transition to communism.
Where the working class was
defined by the wage, and the object of revolutionary struggle was to overthrow
the "wages system”, it was clearly hard for most Marxists to see the wage
as an expression of working class power. Wage struggles were often seen as
either useless (Weston, whom Marx attacked in VALUE, PRICE AND PROFIT) or as
pure instruments of capital (of exploitation for orthodox Marxists or of
instrumentalization for critical theorists). More in the tradition of Marx than
of the Marxist, the contributors to the tradition we are exploring here, came
to see wage struggles as integral moments of a more general power struggle.
In Italy, the New Left operaistas
expressing the demands of the mass workers in the big factorys not only
articulated a theory of the wage as power, but also saw first in the demand for
wage equalization and then in the demand for separating the wage from
productivity, vehicles for undermining the capitalist use of the wage and
strengthening working class power.
Beyond these struggles, Italian
feminists elaborated both a theory of the role of unwaged work (especially the
housework of women) within capital and then a political program based on that
theory: the wages for housework campaign. They argued that most of the work of
reproduction, from procreation to day to day repair work, was just that – the
reproduction of human life as labor power for capital. Therefore, they argued,
women (and anyone else employed in such work) should be paid by capital for
their work. That theory and program challenged the traditional Marxist
subordination of unwaged to waged struggles, i. e. , the demand that women go
get jobs if they wanted to join the working class. Instead, they argued that
the acquisition of a wage would both make women's work visible and undermine
the division between the waged and unwaged which weakened the class.
The autonomous struggles of women
emerged not only out of the male dominated working class movement, but also out
of the male dominated student movement of the late 1960s. Despite strong
traditional pressures to subbordinate student struggles to those of factory
workers, there was also a powerful sense that student struggles could be
validly fought on their own terrain of the school as one factory of
reproduction. Later on with the emergence of crisis in the 1970s and the
increasing number of students who also held part-time, often illegal, jobs, the
development of those struggles would contribute to the battles of the
"tribe of moles. " (See section on Post-Fordist working class)
In time, this theory of the
unwaged as an integral part of the working class was extended to the peasantry
and used both to critique traditional Marxist attitudes and politics toward
peasants and to argue for the importance of autonomous peasant struggles. We
are not talking here about the lip service Lenin gave the peasants, or Mao's
willingness to use them as the "main revolutionary force" under
strict working class (i. e. , Mao's) guidance. We are talking about a
willingness to recognize the various ways in which peasants are not only an
integral part of capital but how their struggles can rupture accumulation every
bit as much as industrial workers' struggles can and how they are also capable
of elaborating projects of self-valorization which go beyond capital. (On this
last see the section below on self valorization). Sometimes such struggle
involve the demand for wages, or higher wages, but often they have involved the
rejection of the wage, as of development as a whole in favor of the independent
construction of autonomous peasant communities.
This work on the wage, the waged
and the unwaged has contributed to a rethinking and reanalysis not only of
contemporary politics but of working class history. Some of the most
interesting of that rethinking has built on the tradition of bottom up history
made prominent through the work of such British Marxists as E. P. Thompson and
Christopher Hill. Historically speaking one of the most interesting issues
concerning the wage was its original generalization as the form of captialist
command and of working class power. Recent work by Peter Linebaugh on crime and
working class struggle in the 18th Century has shown how complex was the
relationship between the rise of the working class and the wage. Just as Marx
clearly differentiated between the formal subordination of labor to capital (in
which labor is exploited but with no change in the forms of work) and its real
subbordination (in which capital reorganizes labor), so Linebaugh shows how
during the period in which capital was imposing rule, i. e. , creating a
working class, the wage was not only one form among many through which the
value of labor power was reimbursed, but its role changed and grew within the
context of working class struggle. The result of this historical work is to
dethrone the wage as the sin qua non of the capital-labor relations, while at
the same time showing its importance within the evolution of the class struggle.
Another result has been to provide a Marxist theoretical basis for
understanding "criminals" and prisoners as soldiers in the class war
and their struggles as an integral part of that war, both yesterday and today.
READING MATTER: Marcus Rediger, BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE
DEEP BLUE SEA,
READING MATTER: Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James THE
POWER OF WOMEN AND THE SUBVERSION OF THE COMMUNITY Bristol, Falling Wall Press
1972. Reprinted in Ellen Malos (ed. ) THE POLITICS OF HOUSEWORK, Allison &
Busby, London 1980.
This book consists of an introduction by James and two articles
"Women and the Subversion of the Community" written by Dalla Costa in
1972 and "A Woman's Place" written by James in 1952. The classic work
of the "Wages for Housework" movement.
READING MATTER: Selma
James, “Women, the Unions and Work, or…What is Not To Be Done”, RADICAL
AMERICA, 7, nos. 4-5 (July-October 1973):51-72.
READING MATTER: Selma
James, SEX RACE AND CLASS, Bristol, Falling Wall Press, 1975.
READING MATTER: Silvia
Federici, “Wages Against Housework”, (1975) Reprinted in Ellen Malos (ed. ) THE
POLITICS OF HOUSEWORK, Allison & Busby, London 1980.
READING MATTER: Leopoldina
Fortunati, “The Archana of Reproduction" (manuscript), originally L'ARCHANO
DELLA RIPRODUZIONE, Venezia, Marsilio Editori, 1981.
READING MATTER: The WAGES FOR STUDENTS Students, WAGES FOR
STUDENTS, Amherst, 1976.
Written by some graduate students at U. Mass, Amherst, provoked by the
imposition of work by self-styled "radical" political economists,
this pamphlet argues that imposed school work recreates labor power regardless
of its content and therefore should be paid for.
READING MATTER: Harry Cleaver, “The Internationalization of
Capital and the Mode of Production in Agriculture”, ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL
WEEKLY, March 27, 1976, pp. A2-A16.
This article was prepared for a conference in Patna, Bihar State, India.
Its objective was to critique the burgeoning literature on the "mode of
production" in agriculture. Like a similar literature in Mexico and Latin
America, this body of writing was largely the outgrowth of the influence of the
work of Louis Althusser and his disciples. In both cases an enormous amount of
energy was being wasted in sterile debate over the appropriate taxonomy for
classifying various sets of social relationships in the rural Third World. This
intervention argued that instead of creating taxonomies we should be studying
the struggles of peasants, their content and how they circulate, succeed or
fail. It sketches an analysis of the current crisis from a workers' autonomy
perspective and recasts the subject in that light.
READING MATTER: Peter
Linebaugh, “Karl Marx, the Theft of Wood and Working Class Composition”, CRIME
AND SOCIAL JUSTICE, Fall-Winter 1976.
An examination of Marx's first "economic" analysis, Linebaugh
argues that the attack on peasants for directly appropriating wood in the
forests of Germany was not an act of primitive accumulation, but rather an act
designed to help impose the wage form on the peasants.
READING MATTER: Ann Lucas
de Rouffignac, THE CONTEMPORARY PEASANTRY IN MEXICO: A CLASS ANALYSIS Praeger,
New York, 1985, especially chapter 3.
READING MATTER: Harry
Cleaver, “The Uses of an Earthquake”, MIDNIGHT NOTES #9, 1988.
This short piece describes how autonomous struggles of the waged and
unwaged poor in Mexico City after the earthquake of 1985 converted a dangerous
threat to several barrios into an opportunity for self- valorization. It
recounts some of the history of struggle out of which this sitution emerged as
well as some aspects of the decentralized forms of social and political
organization which have made it impossible for these movements to be crushed or
coopted by the ruling PRI. The article also describes some of the cultural
values and needs around which the struggles are organized.
READING MATTER: Peter Linebaugh, “Crime and
Industrialization: 18th Century Britain”, Paper for the XII Congress of the
International Political Science Association, Brazil, August 1982.
READING MATTER: Douglas
Hay, Peter Linebaugh et. al. , ALBION'S FATAL TREE,
READING MATTER: Peter
Linebaugh, THE LONDON HANGED, New York: Penguin
READING MATTER: Red Notes, ITALY 1977-8:LIVING WITH AN
EARTHQUAKE, 1978.
This is a collection of translated materials produced during and about
the uprising in Bologna Italy in 1977 and the cycle of struggles associated
with it. This collection provides extremely useful historical background
material to the following two articles which attempt to analyse the emergence
of the new social subject responsible for the uprising.
READING MATTER: Sergio
Bologna, “The Tribe of Moles: Class Composition and the Party System in Italy”,
in WORKING CLASS AUTONOMY AND THE CRISIS. by Red Notes and CSE, London 1979,
and in SEMIOTEXT(E) Vol. III, No. 3, 1980. (originally in PRIMO MAGGIO, No. 8,
Spring 1977, pp. 3-18).
Written immediately after the Bologna uprising in 1977, this article
assesses the "the internal development of the autonomous class movement in
Italy, which led to the explosive confrontation around the University
occupations. " In order to explain the uprising Sergio Bologna begins with
an analysis of the State form which was challenged and undermined by the
confrontations. That form, he argues, was one of a "party system" in
which since WWII had acted to both manage and mediate conflicts in civil
society. On the side of management the state used fiscal policy, state
enterprise and credit. On the side of mediation, the party structure – the
governing parties and the opposition parties – gave the appearance of providing
a terrain for the resolution of conflicts in civil society. In this situation
class conflicts are displaced to party conflicts which laid the ground work for
the CPI to so strengthen its ties with other parties as to eventually lead to
the Historic Compromise and the formation of a solid block in which the
"party system" or system of party alliances appears openly as the
state opposed to working class interests and the CPI becomes a central vehicle
for the imposition of austerity and the attack on worker needs. Thus the
so-called "autonomy of the political" disappears with the parties
becoming overtly the executives of capitalist planning.
From another angle this has
amounted to the subsumption of politics within the capitalist attempt to deal
with the crisis brought on by the cycle of struggle of the mass workers in the
late 1960s. Moreover, because the crisis was international, the capitalist
response has involved a new level of centralization, both nationally and
internationally through the supranational IMF. [We should remember that Italy,
with Britain, was forced to have recourse to IMF funds and conditionality in
the early 70s. ]
At this point, Bologna turns from
his analysis of evolution of the capitalist state to the political
recomposition of the working class which imposed crisis on capital. He
identifies two phases: the first from 1969 to 1974 he sees as a period of
regrouping in the face of the state attacks (the strategy of repressive
"tension”, and industrial restructuring) in which the previously hegemonic
"workerist" area of autonomy was marginalized (along with the
anarchists, situationists, etc) by the emergence of "ultra- bolshevik
models" choosing the militarization of the movement and more intense
organization of militancy. The result he says was the "wholesale recovery
and revival of Third Internationalist models and perspectives" which
rejected "the creative hypotheses of the movement of 1968-69. " While
clearly lamenting this turn, he notes the "positive characteristics:"
the unceasing rhythm of campaigns and mobilizations, the calculated, organized
use of 'direct action', the prompt response to Right provocations. All these,
he says, “established and imposed a terrain of mass political practice, which
became a social structure, a class composition. "
In the second phase, 1974 - 1977,
he sees a complete "suicidal" abandonment of the factory by the
movement, a shift toward the community, and a purely defensive opposition to
"restructuring”, which left a void into which the party-system moved to
confront and undermine the generalization of mass worker style struggles among
doctors, engineers, etc. Yet at the same time, the victories gained by the mass
workers were changing the class composition in the community: a new generation
of worker-students moved into the schools, and the rise of the diffused small
factory, part-time work, and black work in response to the cycle of mass worker
struggles, was creating part-time student workers – essential ingredients in
the generation of "the tribe of moles" whose struggles led to the
uprising in 1977. Along with these changes he especially notes the importance
of the women's movement and the critique of alienated militancy. Here women
rejected the notion of abstract class interests and introduced the thematic of
needs within the movement.
He goes on to examine a number of
the sectors of the tribe of moles:para-statal workers, workers in credit
institutions, hospital workers, transport workers and contract labor arguing
that the diffusion and decentralization "is a more powerful weapon of
massification than the assembly line. " The diffusion has broken the
isolation of the factory and "created large numbers of openings into which
the women, the young people, the students, the laid-off workers and the
redundant workers have inserted themselves, taking on the aspect of waged
workers. " This then is the tribe of moles which rose up to challenge the
whole of society in reproduction as well as production. The explosion of '77
then was "a violent confrontation between the State-form and the new
political composition of the class. "
At this point Bologna attacks
those [probably including Negri] who as part of Organized Autonomy
"whipped out their Leninist masks" and sought to "force the
pace" of the movement. Instead, he argues, all they managed to do after an
initial period of success was to was to detach themselves from the movement and
set themselves up as the target of the full repressive apparatus of the newly
solidified party-system state. [Prophetic words these given the forthcoming
crack down and mass arrests of April 1979. ]
As opposed to this vanguardism,
Bologna calls for the identification of "the channels that can bring about
a mobilization of the entire mass of disseminated labor. . . we should once
again ask ourselves whether it is possible to think in terms of 'mass
objectives' of the type which characterized the anti-authoritarianism of 1968. "
He wants to find ways of subverting State expenditures aimed at control and
turning them "into power-over-our-own-needs, power over our own spaces of
organization and culture, a driving spring for the new development of a new
class composition. "
READING MATTER: Antonio
Negri, “Note on the Social Worker”, (from DALL' OPERAIO MASSA ALL' OPERAIO
SOCIALE, Multhipla Ed. , 1979) Translated in WORKING CLASS AUTONOMY AND THE
CRISIS. by Red Notes and CSE, London 1979.
A very short selection from a long interview with Negri in which he
talks about the unfolding of a new class composition: "After 1977 nobody
can talk seriously about class composition without taking into account the
diffuse proletariat and the new world of needs, as a fundamental element of
class struggle. "
READING MATTER: Antonio
Negri, “Archaeology and Project: The Mass Worker and the Social Worker”, in
Toni Negri, REVOLUTION RETRIEVED: SELECTED WRITINGS ON MARX, KEYNES, CAPITALIST
CRISIS AND NEW SOCIAL SUBJECTS, 1967-83, Red Notes, London 1987. (Originally
written in 1981 in prison and published in Antonio Negri, MACCHINA TEMPO:
ROMPICAPI LIBERAZIONE COSTITUZIONE, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1982.
READING MATTER: Phil
Mattera, “Small is not Beautiful: Decentralized Production and the Underground
Economy in Italy”, RADICAL AMERICA Vol. 14, No. 5, Sept. -Oct. 1980.
A description and analysis of the emergence of black work (illegal, part
time piecework) and the diffused factory in Italy as a reaction to the
capitalist loss of control of the large centralized factory in the 1960s and to
the growing refusal of young workers to enter those large factories. Complements
Bologna's analysis of the emergence of these last as new social subjects.
READING MATTER: Jean-Paul
de Guademar, “L'usine éclatée: les stratégies d'emploi à distance face à la
crise du travail”, LE MOVEMENT SOCIAL, No. 125, Oct.- Dec. 1983, pp. 113-124.
In this article, de Gaudemar analyses the diffused factory as a new
spatial application of Taylorism – a rationalization of space similar to the
earlier rationalization of time. He begins with the refusal of work as a
byproduct of the evolution of work in which the worker is displaced from the
subject of the process. Thus the demand for less of this alienating work. He
suggests that the delocalization of work can best be understood as a response
to a crisis in work discipline, and just as Taylorism was designed to deal with
workers resistance to work, so too may be the new spatial organization of work.
He notes the dangers to workers
and workers' self-organization posed by the individualization and isolation
which may occur with such spatial division. He notes how the technologies of
difused factories tend to produce even greater homogeneity in work and
accentuate rather and alleviate the alienated nature of work. On the other
hand, he also sees the positive attractions being offered to workers of higher
productivity and maybe higher wages, flex-time, reduction in travel time (to
and from work). Yet, he concludes, employee hostility will explode if such
diffusion results in the destruction of work collectivess and progressive
isolation.
READING MATTER: Fergus
Murray, “The Decentralisation of Production – the Decline of the
Mass-Collective Worker?" CAPITAL & CLASS, #19, Spring 1983, pp. 74-99.
The emphasis on working class autonomy has often had, as one element of
this perspective, a recognition of the "positive" side of that
autonomy: the new content which people develop for their lives which they
juxtapose to capitalist domination and for which they fight. This
"positive" side can most easily be understood when contrasted with
the "negative" side of working class struggle. The
"negative" side is the struggle against the capitalist imposition of
work and the various forms of domination with which it seeks to structure and
control society. These are the things that workers do not want, that they
resist, that they try to undermine and destroy. But their struggles are not
purely negative; they are not simply a rejection of the way things are. They
are almost always, simultaneously, either explicitly or implicitly, demands for
new ways of being, new ways of working, or of living life outside of work in
ways that go beyond the simple reproduction of labor power. The recognition of
these positive directions that workers fight for is basic to the Marxian
conception that if you want to know in which direction society is headed, you
have only to analyse the directions of the struggles. Where is the new society?
It is not out there, somewhere, in utopian imagination. It is here, now, in the
content of the struggles themselves. What will post-capitalist society be like?
Dream if you like, but if you want to understand other peoples' dreams analyse
their struggles, see in what directions they are elaborating the future today. In
the 1950s those writing within this tendency spoke of "the invading
socialist society" and of the current conflict between the capitalist mode
of production and the emerging socialist mode of production being elaborated on
the shop floor and in the streets. Later on Antonio Negri would call this a
struggle for new ways of "self-valorization" and would speak of the
"immanence of communism. " The language changed, but the ideas were
basically the same.
READING MATTER: C.L.R. James,
Grace C. Lee, and Pierre Chaulieu, FACING REALITY: THE NEW SOCIETY… WHERE TO
LOOK FOR IT, HOW TO BRING IT CLOSER. A STATEMENT FOR OUR TIME, Bewick/Ed, 1974.
(Originally published by the Correspondence Publishing Committee in 1958. )
Especially Chapter V: "New
Society: New People" and Chapter VII: "What to Do and How to Do it. "
One of the themes of much of James' work, and of FACING REALITY was the
immediacy of the new society, the idea that within the interstices of
capitalism we can find workers shaping new forms of social relations which,
through revolution, they will elaborate into a totally new society. This was
the process evoked but not adequately spelled out in the earlier tract
"The Invading Socialist Society. " In Chapter V of FACING REALITY, we
find an almost lyrical ode to the reality of working class imagination and
power to craft a new society out of the present. The authors sweep across the
world, from the developed First world to the underdeveloped Third, from the new
attitudes and behaviors of shop stewards in England through the struggles of
women in the United States to anticolonial struggles in Asia and Africa. Everywhere
they are able to see"new men, new types of human beings" throwing off
the encumbering prejudices and destructive hierarchies of capitalism to develop
new ways of being. Where others see only the brutality of capital, they see the
ferocious struggle that brutality is designed to deal with. "We wish to
draw attention to one of the great social forces of the day, the spirit of
renaissance which now animates the vast millions everywhere in the globe. . . "
Only "a socialist economy, without the overhead burdens and incompetence
of official society”, they argue, can generate the enormous surplus wealth
needed "for the development of the world economy as a whole. "
Similarly they also reason that those in the Third World can only solve their
problems "in a global context" but, at the same time, their struggles
can serve "as inspiration and example to the advanced proletarians. "
Finally, they discuss the emergence of new forms of art and literature that can
only accompany the development of the forces of a new classless society.
In the beginning of chapter VII
the authors argue that the role of a small Marxist organization is to record
and publicize the evidence of the emerging socialist society. They then sketch
the evidence beginning with informal shop floor organizations through which
workers arrange their working relations as far as they can, given constant
managerial interference. They describe how workers handle problems such as
helping those with disabilities or fighting racial discrimination and explain
how they could and would like to manage such phenomena as overtime, production
schedules and automation. They go on to discuss a number of worker
organizations in the U.S., France and England describing how the workers organize
themselves independently of trade unions and parties and what they fight for. They
suggest that it is necessary to learn to distinguish "stages of the
existence of the new society" and that in the first stages, the new is
mixed with the old, including a variety of racial and sexual prejudices. Although
their emphasis and all their examples are taken from the factory, the point of
production, there is an awareness that the emergence of the new society occurs
everywhere: "outside of production as well as in it, the new society every
day, every hour, establishes itself with a massiveness, a solidity, and an
infinite variety, which challenges the official structure of society at every
turn. "
READING MATTER: Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, ANTI OEDIPUS: CAPITALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA,
(ANTI-L'OEDIPE, 1972) University of Minnesota Press, Minn, 1983.
READING MATTER: Felix
Guattari, “Molecular Revolution and Class Struggle" in F. Guattari, THE
MOLECULAR REVOLUTION: PSYCHIATRY AND POLITICS, (1977) Penguin translation 1984.
READING MATTER: Antonio
Negri, DOMINATION AND SABOTAGE (IL DOMINIO E IL SABOTAGGIO, Feltrinelli, Milano
1978) Translated in WORKING CLASS AUTONOMY AND THE CRISIS. by Red Notes and
CSE, London 1979.
READING MATTER: Antonio
Negri, MARX BEYOND MARX (MARX OLTRE MARX), Feltrinelli, Milano, 1979)
Translated by Harry Cleaver et al. and published in English by Bergin and
Garvey, 1984, then by Autonomedia.
This book contains a series of lectures given at L'École Normale in
Paris. These lectures present Negri's analysis of the Grundrisse as a new point
of departure for re-evaluating the usefulness of Marx for understanding the
class struggle. Negri argues that whereas Capital is susceptible to an
objectivist interpretation that nulifies its usefulness to workers, the
Grundrisse is harder to interpret in this way and more clearly shows Marx as
the prime theorist of the class struggle.
READING MATTER: Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Rhizomes”, in G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, ON THE
LINE, Foreign Agent Series, Semiotext(e), New York, 1983, and as the first
chapter in THOUSAND PLATEAUS (MILLES PLATEAUX).
READING MATTER: Ann Lucas
de Rouffignac, THE CONTEMPORARY PEASANTRY IN MEXICO: A CLASS ANALYSIS Praeger,
New York, 1985, especially chapter 4, “Peasant Struggle, Self-Valorization and
the Disruption of Capital. "
READING MATTER: Harry
Cleaver, “Development or Autonomy”, paper presented to a Conference in Mexico
City on Mexico al Filo del Siglo XXI, November 1985.
This article has two parts: The first argues that "socialist"
development is essentially the same as "capitalist" development,
constituting more of a change in form than in substance. The second argues that
there are many alternatives for the evolution of society and they are to be
found in the diverse needs and struggles of people for self-valorization.
READING MATTER: Harry
Cleaver, “Marginality and Self-Valorization”, paper presented to a conference
on the Political Economy of the Margins, University of Toronto, May 1988. Published
in Spanish in Mexico City in EL GALLO ILLUSTRADO, August 1988.
Derivative of the understanding of the autonomous character of workers
struggles within and against capitalism is the view of "crisis" in
capitalism as primarily concerning the rupture of capital's power to command
labor. Capitalist crisis is not just understood as a breakdown, either partial
and temporary or total and permanent, in the processes of accumulation brought
on by the "internal" logic of capitalism (e. g. , that of
competition) but is seen rather as that moment in the class struggle when
working class self activity undermines capitalist control. This perspective
reverses the usual, orthodox Marxist way of looking at crisis in which some one
or another of what are called capital's "internal contradictions"
lead to a failure in its ability to reproduce itself. One kind of orthodox
theory was built around one version or another of
"underconsumptionism" in which the tendency of the capitalists to pay
workers less wages than the value of their product limited the market for the
final product and led to overproduction. Here the capitalists fell into crisis
because of their own profit-maximizing, wage limiting behavior. And any
capitalist who paid more than average wages would by ruined by the competition
of those who paid the average or less.
Against such theories various
"autonomist Marxists" have generally argued the centrality of the
class relations of struggle within capitalism. This was true, for example, of
the Council Communists and the Johnson- Forest Tendency which attacked
Stalinist underconsumptionist theories of crisis, arguing that the Stalinists
had shifted the focus of crisis theory from production to circulation as part
of their rationalization of the continuation of capitalist relations of
production in Russia after the revolution. One vehicle for this attack was the
work of Rosa Luxemburg which had set out one of the clearest expositions of a
Marxist theory of crisis focused on problems of "realization" of
surplus value through the sale of the product. These critiques of Luxemburg
were spelled out despite considerable sympathy for other aspects of Luxemburg's
work. For example, the Council Communists were very sympathetic to her
critiques of Lenin and of Bolshevik centralism. Similarly, the Johnson-Forest
authors indentified with her efforts to gear working class organization to
working class sponteneity despite their own early Leninism.
READING MATTER: Paul
Mattick, “Luxemburg versus Lenin”, Pt. I, MODERN MONTHLY, September 1935; Pt. II,
INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL CORRESPONDENCE, Vol. II, No. 8, July 1936, pp. 17-35. These
two articles were reprinted as one, in Paul Mattick, ANTI-BOLSHEVIK COMMUNISM,
White Plains: M. E. Sharpe, 1978, pp. 19-48.
The relevant part of these articles is that which deals with
accumulation and crisis. Mattick described Luxemburg's analysis of accumulation
and crisis with its emphasis on the problems associated with the realization of
surplus value (via sale to a non-capitalist sector) rather than on the problems
of production. He then contrasted her interpretation to Lenin's discussion of
realization crisis in his debate with the Narodniki, wherein he denied the
importance of the realization problem both domestically and in terms of foreign
trade. Lenin rather emphasized, Mattick pointed out, the tendency of the
organic composition of capital to rise and saw the origin of any overproduction
in the uneven development of different branches of industry. "There is no
doubt”, Mattick writes, “that Lenin's conception is much closer to the Marxian
than is Rosa Luxemburg's. " He then discusses Bauer's critique of
Luxemburg, Lenin's apparent approval, and Luxemburg's refutations of that
critique. Mattick then refered the reader to Henryk Grossman's analysis which
took into account the issue of "production prices" that produce
average rates of profit, and argues that Luxemburg's failure to do this
undermines her argument since if she had "the undisposable part of the
surplus value may vanish. " [Note: Mattick says "may" vanish but
does not demonstrate this. ]
Having rejected Luxemburg's
theory, Mattick turns abruptly to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall,
which Luxemburg ignored because Marx had said, at one point, that the rise in
the mass of surplus value could offset the fall in the rate. But, Mattick
argues, Marx thought that offset has limits [Mattick does not explain them. ]
and the falling rate would eventually pull down the mass. The central
importance of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, he argues, was
unrecognized by Lenin as well as Luxemburg with the result that both lacked a
theoretical ground to their revolutionary politics.
READING MATTER: F. Forest
[R. Dunayevskaya], “Luxemburg's Theory of Accumulation”, Pt. I, THE NEW
INTERNATIONAL, Vol. XII, No. 4, April 1946, Part II, THE NEW INTERNATIONAL, Vol.
XII, No. 5, May 1946, plus "Letter on Luxemburg”, THE NEW INTERNATIONAL,
Vol. XIII, No. 4, April 1947. The bulk of these artricles were slightly
reworked and published as "Marx's and Luxemburg's Theories of Capital, its
crises and its Inevitable Downfall”, in R. Dunayevskaya, ROSA LUXEMBURG,
WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION, Humanities Press,
Atlantic Highlands, 1982, pp. 31-50.
In Part I of this critique of Luxemburg's theories of accumulation and
crisis, Dunayevskaya focuses on Luxemburg's error in refusing to recognize or
accept Marx's assumption of a closed capitalist economy in his analysis of
expanded reproduction. Instead she asserts that exterior markets for the
absorption of surplus production are necessary for accumulation. Dunayevskaya,
supporting Bukharin's earlier critique of Luxemburg, points to Marx's own words
as well as to the logic of the argument. She goes on to argue that the division
of the economy into Dept's I and II, reflects the class division of capitalist
society, a class division in production which is the heart of the accumulation
process. She explains Luxemburg's displacement of the focus of analysis from
production (and hence class struggle in production) to the market (need for
exterior markets) as the result of a methodological error: namely, letting her
understanding of theory (Marx's abstraction of a closed capitalist economy) be
overwhelmed by the imperialist reality surrounding her. The theoretical mistake
which followed moved her away from what was her real interest: revolution, to
the market and a theory of crisis with quietistic implications for class
struggle.
In Part II of this critique,
Dunayevskaya argues that the heart of both Marx's theory of accumulation and
his theory of crisis was the tendency of the rate of profit to fall – an
outgrowth of conflicts within production and independent of the market. Her
interpretation of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall sees its source in
the rise in the organic composition of capital and the displacement of labor
from production where it must be to produce surplus value. Problems of
inadequate effective demand, she argues are derivative of this. For example,
when the rate of profit falls, captialists reduce investment and effective
demand falls below supply causing overproduction crises. The most serious
result of Luxemburg's displacement of the theory from production to
circulation, according to Dunayevskaya, is the loss of a theoretical
underpining for the necessity of proletarian revolution. When she draws
conclusions for individual countries of her interpretation, Dunayevskaya argues
that the world market imposes accumulation and crisis, either through
"competition or on the battle fronts. " (i.e., war between captialist
powers) [Note: this argument was used by her with respect to the inevitability
of Stalin's following the capitalist road in isolated Russia. – see section on
state capitalism above. ]
Unfortunately, Dunayevskaya
applies her interpretation to concrete historical events without mediation or
modification. Although she apparently understands the "rate of
profit" in monetary terms, she fails to discuss any connecting mechanisms
between the "tendency" and such monetary changes. For example, in
refering to the 1929 crash she suggests that bourgeois economists couldn't see
that it derived from the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (derived
"from the very vitals of the productive system") rather than from any
other source, such as "deficiency of effective demand'. But she does not
show us how this may have been the case, she merely asserts it. Moreover, she
shows no recognition of Marx complex work in the 1850s and 60s on money and
financial crises and is content simply to assert the "fundamental
contradiction" against any other explanation.
She argues against Paul Sweezy's
underconsumptionism (referencing his 1942 book THEORY OF CAPITALIST
DEVELOPMENT), but without refuting his arguements against the tendency of the
rate of profit to fall (the indeterminancy of the organic composition of
capital). She is content to point out the similarities between Luxemburg (and
Sweezy's) theory and Keynesian theory, and to call him a "'Marxist'
professor tainted with a good deal of Stalinism. "
She labels Paul Mattick an
"anti-Leninist Luxemburgian”, but fails to recognize how both his critique
of Luxemburg and his embrace of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall
parallel her own positions. She ignores his discussion of Bauer and Grossman,
as well as his analysis of 1) Lenin's debate with the Narodniki (this despite
having, herself, translated and published Lenin's attack on the Narodniki in
THE NEW INTERNATIONAL in 1943!*), and 2) Lenin's failure to recognize the
importance of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. [*this chapter from
Lenin's THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM IN RUSSIA is now available in Lenin's
COLLECTED WORKS, Volume 3. , 1960. ]
In the reworked version of this
material published in her 1981 book, Dunayevskaya dropped her discussions of
Sweezy and Mattick entirely while adding a clearer indictment of Luxemburg for
failing to see how capitalist imperialism (whatever its causes) tended to
generate "new revolutionary forces" which could join with the older
working classes of the imperialist center to help dig capitalism's grave.
The "Letter on
Luxemburg" is a minor reply to a minor critique of her previous articles. She
responds, emphasizing close connection among Marx's theories of accumulation,
crisis and class struggle.
READING MATTER: C.L.R. James
(with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee) STATE CAPITALISM AND WORLD REVOLUTION
(1950)
Written before the split with Dunayevskaya, this was a major Johnson-
Forest policy statement and, although apparently written by James, contains
their joint analysis and critique of the Soviet Union as a state capitalist
system. See especially chapters 1-5. Most relevant here is Chapter 2, in which
the authors, through a polemic with a variety of other Marxists, reject
underconsumptionist theories of capitalist crisis saying that the Stalinists
are trying to hide class conflicts in production. The theory of the tendency of
the rate of profit to fall is affirmed as pointing to the centrality of
production relations and of the class struggle in production.
In section 2 the authors note (as
Mattick did in 1936) that Lenin had denied the existence of a
"realization" problem in his debate with the Narodniki. They then
point to Eugene Varga's and, especially, Paul Sweezy's embrace of
underconsumptionism in THE THEORY OF CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT and in an article
on the transition to capitalism in Science & Society (Spring 1950) where he
locates the motive force in the emergence of capitalism in the contradiction
between production for use and production for the market. The political object
of both analyses, the authors argue, is to "remove the class struggle from
the process of production. " Sweezy the "fellow traveller" has
become, they say”, the authentic voice of the Stalinist manoeuvre to defend
Russia against the theory of state capitalism. "
Reaffirming the centrality of the
tendency of the rate of profit to fall, they argued that the tendency was
actually being realized all around them in 1950. "The total mass of
surplus value . . . is hopelessly inadequate. . . . These profits will never be
able to rebuild world economy. Europe, China, India under capitalism will
perish for lack of capital to continue ever-greater expansion. " Needless
to say, their casual empiricism was proved wrong.
READING MATTER: Antonio
Negri, “Marx on the Cycle and on the Crisis”, in Toni Negri, REVOLUTION
RETRIEVED: SELECTED WRITINGS ON MARX, KEYNES, CAPITALIST CRISIS AND NEW SOCIAL
SUBJECTS, 1967-83, Red Notes, London 1987(forthcoming)(originally 1968)
READING MATTER: Antonio
Negri, “Crisis of the Planner State: Communism and Revolutionary Organizations”,
in Toni Negri, REVOLUTION RETRIEVED: SELECTED WRITINGS ON MARX, KEYNES, CAPITALIST
CRISIS AND NEW SOCIAL SUBJECTS, 1967-83, Red Notes, London 1987(forthcoming). Originally
"Crisi dello Stato-Plano: comunismo e organizzazione rivoluzionaria”, POTERE
OPERAIO No. 45, September 25, 1971.
READING MATTER: Antonio
Negri, “John M. Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of the State in 1929”, in Toni
Negri, REVOLUTION RETRIEVED: SELECTED WRITINGS ON MARX, KEYNES, CAPITALIST
CRISIS AND NEW SOCIAL SUBJECTS, 1967-83, Red Notes, London 1987(forthcoming)
(originally in A. Negri et. al. , OPERAI E STATO, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1972.
READING MATTER: Guido
Viale, “Class Struggle and European Unity”, (1972) Translated and published in
Toronto Collective, AUTONOMOUS STRUGGLES AND THE CAPITALIST CRISIS, Toronto,
Canada, 1973.
READING MATTER: Potero
Operaio, “Italy 1973: Workers' Struggles and the Capitalist Crisis, “RADICAL
AMERICA , 7, No. 2 (March- April 1973):15-32.
READING MATTER: Sergio
Bologna, “Moneta e Crisi:Marx Corrispondente della NEW YORK DAILY TRIBUNE,
1856-57”, in S. Bologna, P. Carpignano and A. Negri, CRISI E ORGANIZZAZIONE
OPERAIA, Feltrinelli, Milano 1974.
READING MATTER: Antonio
Negri, “Theses on the Crisis”, (Appendix 2 in "The working class party
against Work”, in CRISI E ORGANIZZAZIONE OPERAIA, Feltrinelli, Milan, September
1974, pp. 166-183. Translated and published in WORKING CLASS AUTONOMY AND THE
CRISIS by Red Notes and CSE, London, 1979.
READING MATTER: Paolo
Carpignano, "US Class
Composition in the Sixties, “ Zerowork, #1, 1975.
READING MATTER: Mario
Montano, "Notes
on the International Crisis" Zerowork #1, 1975.
READING MATTER: Peter
Linebaugh and Peter Taylor, “Crisis in the Auto Sector, “ZEROWORK #1 (1975)
READING MATTER: Peter
Taylor, “'The Sons of Bitches Just Won't Work:' Postal Workers Against the
State”, ZEROWORK #1 (1975)
READING MATTER: William
Cleaver, "Wildcats
in the Appalachian Coal Fields, “ Zerowork #1, 1975. [pdf
version] Reprinted in Midnight Notes Collective, Midnight Oil: Work,
Energy, War, 1973- 1992, Boston: Autonomedia, 1992, pp. 169-183.
READING MATTER: George
Caffentzis, "Throwing
Away the Ladder, “ Zerowork #1, 1975.
READING MATTER: Bruno
Ramirez, “The Working Class Struggle Against the Crisis: Self Reduction
Struggles in Italy”, ZEROWORK #1 (1975)
READING MATTER: Robby
Guttman and Christian Marazzi, “The Crisis of Social Capital, Money, State and
the Labor Process, “BULLETIN OF THE CONFERENCE OF SOCIALIST ECONOMISTS, July
1976.
READING MATTER: Peter F. Bell,
“Marxist Theory, Class Struggle and the Crisis of Capitalism”, in THE SUBTLE
ANATOMY OF CAPITALISM, ed. Jesse Schwartz, pp. 170-194. Santa Monica:Goodyear,
1977.
An overview of recent Marxist analyses of crisis which critiques most
approaches for being monocausal in the sense of emphasizing either
underconsumptionism or the falling rate of profit, or some other one set of
forces tending to create crisis for capital. This critique is followed by a
sketch of an alternative view which views crisis as a rupture in capitalist
control created by working class struggle.
READING MATTER: Harry
Cleaver, *"Food,
Famine and the International Crisis, “ from Zerowork #2, Fall 1977
Written as an intervention into the "food movement" spawned by
the famines of the early 1970s, this article argues that the manipulation of
food availability has always been a tool of capitalism in the class struggle
and that the access to food is one measure of working class power. Cleaver
looks at the U.S., Western Europe, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and key
areas of the Third World. He shows how peasants, farm laborers, and city
workers have fought in their own interests against various agrarian strategies
and food policies. He argues that their victories have forced capital to
abandon the Green Revolution and the Development Decade and turn instead to
higher food prices and outright starvation to attempt to regain control over
the means of subsistence of the working class.
READING MATTER: Philip
Mattera, ”National Liberation, Socialism and The Struggle Against Work: The
Case of Vietnam”, ZEROWORK #2 (1977)
In this article Mattera goes beyond the debate over human rights and U.S.reconstruction
aid in Vietnam and suggests that the struggles of Vietnamese workers against
imperialism have in fact been battles against the accumulation of capital in
all its forms that have continued after the establishment of socialism. He
presents evidence of an emerging conflict between the demands of workers for
social wealth and the new development plans of the socialist leaders, which
include foreign investments based on cheap labor.
READING MATTER: Christian
Marazzi, “Money in the World Crisis: The New Basis of Capitalist Power”, ZEROWORK
#2 (1977)
In a report on research in progress, Marazzi presents an analysis of the
changing role of the international monetary system in the global class conflict.
He examines how capital in 1971 abolished the Bretton Woods System of fixed
exchange rates (in place since the 1940s) and how it restructured monetary
relations and the institutions of monetary control. He argues that the emerging
system is tailored to the use of "monetary terrorism" (the
manipulation of exchange rates, convertibility, public debt, etc. ) to
undermine local wage struggles and head off a generalized confrontation over
social wealth.
READING MATTER: Donna
Demac and Philip Mattera, “Developing and Underdeveloping New York: The 'Fiscal
Crisis' and the Imposition of Austerity”, ZEROWORK #2 (1977)
The authors examine the "fiscal" crisis in terms of the
struggles of New York workers, both waged and unwaged, against the state. They
show that the imposition of austerity through the debt crisis is not a result
of the vagaries of the financial system or the machinations of polititions but
is capital's response to the success of workers' wage struggles and to their
undermining of the "business climate" and hence tax base of the city.
Demac and Mattera argue that the situation in New York City, with its
international working class and global importance as financial center is not
only a microcosm of the international crisis but that the fiscal crisis used
against its workers is a prototype and test ground for capital's global
strategy.
READING MATTER: Yann
Moulier and Pierre Ewenzyck, “Immigration: The Blockage of Mobility in the
Mediterranean Basin”, originally published as Tom Sawyer, “Immigration: le
blocage de la mobilité autour du bassin méditerranéen”, CRITIQUES DE L'ECONOMIE
POLITIQUE, Nouvelle Série, No. 3, Septembre 1978, pp. 27-65.
READING MATTER: Peter F. Bell
and Harry Cleaver, ”Marx's Crisis Theory as a Theory of Class Struggle”, in
RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY, vol. 5, JAI Press, 1982, pp. 189-261.
Study that synthesizes Marx (and Engels) writings on crisis from the
early 1840s through CAPITAL. Reinterprets the central concepts and lines of
analysis in terms of class struggle. Class struggle is not seen as a cause or
as an effect but as the subject of the analysis and thus crisis is seen as a
crisis in the expanded reproduction of the class relation.
READING MATTER: Midnight
Notes, Strange Victories: The Anti-Nuclear Movement In The US and Europe, 1979.
Part
1, Part
2. Reprinted in Midnight Notes Collective, Midnight Oil: Work, Energy,
War, 1973-1992, Boston: Autonomedia, 1992, pp. 193- 214.
Class analysis of the anti-nuke movement, especially in the North East
of the U.S., which lays out a sketch of the class composition of the anti- nuke
movement which has been heavily reliant on middle class white concerns and
methods while ignoring issues of energy price and the problems of the ghettos.
READING MATTER: George
Caffentzis, "The
Work/Energy Crisis And The Apocalypse", [1981] [pdf
version] , reprinted in Midnight Notes Collective, Midnight Oil: Work,
Energy, War, 1973-1992, Boston: Autonomedia, 1992.
Innovative study of the "energy crisis" that reinterprets
thermodynamics as well as the class nature of the crisis in the 1970s in a way
that puts the crisis in capital's ability to extract working class energy at
the center of the analysis. After an analysis of the crisis that parallels that
in Zerowork, the theory of thermodynamics is interpreted as reflecting
the class struggle in the following sense: a rise in entropy – which means
energy is less available for work – is associated with working class struggle
which withdraws energy from capital and thus ceases to be available for work. This
real problem of the 19th Century, and of capitalist society more generally, is
translated into physics in a general way which hides the social origins behind
abstract relations between energy, work and entropy.
READING MATTER: Riot Not
to Work Collective, WE WANT TO RIOT, NOT TO WORK: THE 1981 BRIXTON UPRISINGS,
London, 1982.
Analysis and eyewitness accounts of the Brixton Riots of 1981. The
analysis section is called "The Impossible Class" and argues the
"riots" were the result of the emergence of a "class" of
those who don't to fit into the capitalist definition of "working
class" by their refusal to play by the rules of the game.
READING MATTER: Harry
Cleaver, “Karl Marx: Economist or Revolutionary?" in Suzanne W. Helburn
and David F. Bramhall (eds) MARX, SCHUMPETER & KEYNES: A CENTENARY
CELEBRATION OF DISSENT, (M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, 1986).
Paper presented to a conference on Marx, Schumpeter and Keynes in 1983. The
argument runs as follows: Most Marxists have read Marx as an economist,
especially with respect to the theory of crisis (examples examined: Luxemburg,
Sweezy, relative shares theorists); this approaches loses the political content
of the theory; he should be read as a theorist of working class power to throw
capital into crisis; this can and has been done and shows Marx was a
revolutionary not an economist.
READING MATTER: Joseph
Ricciardi, “Credit and the Revolutions of 1848”, from J. M. Ricciardi, ESSAYS
ON THE ROLE OF MONEY AND FINANCE IN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, Unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation,
University of Texas, 1985.
Examination of Marx's articles and essays analysing the causes and
course of the 1848 Revolution in France. Ricciardi concentrates on Marx's
analysis of the role of credit and the relationship between the Haute Banque –
the French banking establishment which was built on government finance – and
the state which used the need to repay its debt as a way to mobilize the
peasantry (by taxing them) against the working class and the revolutionary
government.
Ends.
[http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/387Lautonomistmarxism.html]
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