Date: Fri, 1 Feb 2002 09:00:53 -0600 (CST)
Subject: Re: AUT: civil society


On Tue, 29 Jan 2002, Ben Hoh wrote:

>
> > I don't think that the concept of "real subsumption" is nihilistic at all.
> > I just think it gives up theorization of autonomy and is a step backward
> > from both his notion of working class self-valorization and that of
> > constituent power. Both of those concepts, it seems to me, evoke and
> > focus our attention on the ability of people to create newness
> > autonomously from capital.
>
> Right. This leads, then, to another question: what is autonomy, exactly? And
> what is the relationship between "autonomy" and "subversion"?
>
Ben,

What is autonomy? To me it means taking the initiative rather than just
reacting. In much of what you might call the mainsteam Marxist tradition
capital is portrayed as active, expanding, imperialistic, exploitative,
etc and the working class as reactive: it defends itself against
capitalist actions, e.g., "economistic", trade union activity. This view
makes the basis of supposedly-possible "political" revolution very
mysterious. The magical formula that solves the mystery being
joining the party and smashing the state.

But in all fields of class conflict some have found and recognized that
workers don't just react, don't just defend, but take the
initiative and go on the offensive. A classic example being found in
Marx's discussion of the working day. First, he recounts how capitalist
pushed out the length of the working day --they had the initiative and
workers were on the defensive-- and then he relates how workers seized the
intiative and began to roll back the working day. In the US over the
decades between roughly 1880 and 1940 they suceeded in cutting the working
week in approximately half. Those struggles are "autonomous" vis a vis
capital.

And then there is the other side, ultimately more interesting side, when
people take the initiative to fight for alternatives to capitalist ways of
being and doing, when they begin to craft new worlds. Those struggles,
also involving the seizure of the intiative, I call autonomous. I have
found Toni's concepts of self-valorization and constitutent power
interesting because they evoke precisely such ability to "valorize" one's
(collective) self and to "constitute" new social ways of being
autonomously from the rules and plans of capital, i.e., to create newness.

Then there are issues of the specificity of autonomy, e.g., autonomous
from what aspects of capital more exactly --autonomy from the official
organs of the class (trade unions, parties), autonomy of sectors of the
class from each other, etc.

In all of this there is clearly a problem with the word/concept
"autonomy", namely that while "autonomy" implies kinds of self-activity,
it can evoke an "aloneness" that is never the case. You might say there
is no such thing as absolute autonomy because "taking the intiative" or
"acting autonomously" always occurs within the social context of class
forces --even the creation of newness involves breaking out of the class
context and thus, as I have said, that newness is inevitably scarred with
the wounds of that out of which people have broken. People invent on the
basis of what they know, sometimes marginally, sometimes dramatically, but
their point of departure is the class context within which they find
themselves and their innovations are scarrred by those origins.

There is also the problem that capital may find ways of
instrumentalizing autonomous struggles in such ways as to effectively
destroy the autonomy. For instance, struggles for higher wages not only
have limited autonomy because they remain within the wages system, but may
be trapped within the dynamic of capital by being frozen within
"productivity deals" such that apparently autonomous struggles become
the motor of capitalist development. The student struggles of the 1960s
and early 1970s to create black studies, chicano studies, women's studies,
etc within the university were certainly autonomous; there were no
intiatives coming from capital to do this, indeed it resisted. But to the
degree that those programs were shaped into what Marcuse called
"repressive tolerance" and the professors and students within those
programs came to play by the usual rules of the game (struggling for
tenure, degrees, etc in ways acceptable to the wider (capitalist)
academy), the initial autonomy was undermined and the programs
neutralized.

These caveats aside, I feel comfortable enough using the term autonomy and
trying to judge the degree of autonomy manifested in various struggles.

Autonomy and subversion. If we understand capital to be totalizing and
ever seeking (if not realizing) the subsumption of all of human life to
its own rules and rhythms, then all autonomous struggles, either against
those rules and rhythms or for alternatives, would seem to qualify as
subversive --even if they eventually fail by being crushed or
instrumentalized.

H.



............................................................................
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............................................................................



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