The Inside/Outside of Capital: 3/16 Reading Notes

Sorry about the infrequency with which this blog has been updated lately. Other responsibilities have taken precedent.

Maybe more than anything else our reading this week allowed us to get a glimpse into the development and fundamental shifts in Antonio Negri’s thought. Speaking from the working class point of view, “having arrived at this level of awareness,” “Domination and Sabotage” offers both a theoretical framework and a set of tactics for confronting capital that, when we get to Empire, appears inverted (71). There are two points in “Domination and Sabotage” that are here relevant. The first is Negri’s focus on the self-valorization of the working class:

Working class self-valorisation is first and foremost de-structuration of the enemy totality, taken to a point of exclusivity in the self-recognition of the class’s collective independence . . . It is only by recognising myself as other, only by insisting on the fact of my different-ness as a radical totality that I have the possibility and the hope of a renewal. (63)

For Negri, assuming this radical otherness is the precondition of proletarian self-valorization; it is the means by which capitalist development is resisted and clearly demarcated:

The method of social transformation that derives from the self-valorising separateness of the proletariat has nothing in common with the homologies of rationalist or historicist progressivism. Proletarian self-valorzation is the power  to withdraw from exchange value and the ability to reappropriate the world of use-values . . . the rupture and recognition of the class’s own independent productive force, removes and possibility of a resolutive dialectic. (66)

Here, we found this process of self-valorization and withdrawl to be akin to Alfredo Bonanno’s concept of autonomous base-nuclei. It seems to be the very same process. Yet, for Negri, self-valorization is an effective strategy for resisting capital precisely because it participates in, or is maybe constitutive of, a revolutionary outside. Thus, the second point is derivative of the first. Where Negri refers to a brief history of class struggle provided by Karl-Heinz Roth and Gisela Bock, he points to the “radical, irreducible differentness of the revolutionary movement” that, for him at this time, necessitates a destructive confrontation with capital (63). On this point, Negri writes,

For the moment I know only one thing, that from the working class point of view–having arrived at this level of awareness–the effects of destructuring action that I have set in motion force me to confront–in a destructive manner–capital’s power of stabilization. And this means, above all, confronting that power which provides the breeding ground for the multiple indifferent possibilities of domination. Destructuration of the enemy system involves the immediate necessity of attacking and destablizing its political game. (71)

The self-valorization of the working class thus necessitates its total opposition to capital as well as its immediate confrontation with it.

By the time we get to Empire, however, we no longer experience a Negri who speaks from the position of the working class or a theorization of revolutionary outside that is clearly demarcated from capital. What is interesting is that Hardt and Negri do not refer to “Domination and Sabotage” when thinking the relation of the inside and outside of capital. Rather, this conversation is situated within a historical transformation from imperialism to empire and between Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg:

On the basis of this interpretation of imperialism as a hegemonic
element of sovereignty, Lenin could account for the structuring
effects and totalitarian consequences of imperialist politics. He
understood with great clarity the centripetal dynamic of imperialism that progressively undermined the distinction between the ‘‘inside’’ and the ‘‘outside’’ of capitalist development. The standpoint of Luxemburg’s critique of imperialism was rooted in the ‘‘outside,’’ that is, in the resistances that could reorganize the noncapitalist use values of the multitude in both the dominant and the subordinate countries. From Lenin’s perspective, however, that standpoint and that strategy are not tenable. The structural transformations imposed by imperialist politics tend to eliminate any possibility of being outside, in either the dominant or the subordinate countries. (233)

Here, however, we find echoes of “Domination and Sabotage” in terms of the confrontation between the operations of class struggle and Empire:

Hence the dialectic, or really the science of the limit and its organization, evaporates. Class struggle, pushing the nation-state toward its abolition and thus going beyond the barriers posed by it, proposes the constitution of Empire as the site of analysis and conflict. Without that barrier, then, the situation ofstruggle is completely open. Capital and labor are opposed in a directly antagonistic form. This is the fundamental condition of every political theory of communism. (237)

Yet, in the figure of the multitude, and in opposition to Empire, class struggle appears here as something massified and generalized. Further, where the outside of capital is said not to exist within Empire, we are confronted with an entirely different set of tactics for resisting capital, seemingly more reformist in their function and operation. Revolutionary movement becomes globalized and of some kind of universal character. In this way, we find a Negri that stands opposite of Bonanno. The multitude, as a broad-based and all encompassing concept of resistance, is not an organizational form that takes intimate forms of oppression as its point of theorization and response nor an organizational form that thinks partisanship outside of an immediate and universal confrontation with capital.

 

Reading for Wednesday March 30th includes “The City in the Female Gender” and the first half of the Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection
–Matt

Reading for 3/9

Notes for last Wednesday’s meeting are forthcoming.

For next week we will be reading “Domination and Sabotage” by Toni Negri and part 3.1 of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, “The Limitations of Imperialism.”

Meeting Post-poned

Hey All,

Due to some unforeseen circumstances we had to post-pone our meeting this week. We will meet again this coming Wednesday, 3/2. Our discussion will cover Bonanno’s “Revolution, Violence, Anti-Authoritarianism–A Few Notes” and Leopoldina Fortunati’s The Arcane of Reproduction.

Approaching Autonomist Feminist Texts as Political Weavings

I’d like to begin with a question that exceeds the bounds of that asked already by the Binghamton Autonomia Reading Group regarding Rivolta Femminile’s Let’s Spit on Hegel. That question was “what is the specific autonomist gesture in the text?” The response circled around the rejection of subsumption along dialectical lines. This comes in the form of an articulation of a subject position always already outside the Hegelian master-slave relation. They write as much in their conclusion: “An entirely new word is being put forward by an entirely new subject.” Autonomist Feminism is feminism engaged in the invention of a new subjectivity, not a feminism that seeks inclusion within or recuperation by the political subjectivities already on offer. In keeping with this focus, one of their primary targets – beyond the undeniable masculinism of the Marxisms at work in their historical conjuncture – was liberal feminism (in both its classic and egalitarian articulations). These women weren’t the first to critique liberal feminism – see Voltaraine deCleyre’s They Who  Marry Do Ill, or Emma Goldman’s corpus (really, check the roots of contemporary Anarchafeminism), as well as De Beauvoir’s body of work, including her memoirs (all 7 volumes), The Second Sex, as well as The Ethics of Ambiguity (which, while not tacitly written against liberal feminism, charts an existentialist ethics fully incompatible with the linkage of one’s desires to mere institutional inclusion). Moreover, autonomist feminists were developing and propagating this critique in an historical moment wherein radical feminist thought was flourishing in multiple localities, and connected transnationally (indeed, Selma James’s and Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community was quickly translated into multiple languages). In reading Let’s Spit on Hegel and The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community, we must bear in mind the notion of the text as tissue or weave, and articulate points of political influence and dialogue that extend beyond a search for the autonomist gesture. For the feminist critiques on offer in these works draw upon a much deeper backlog of political philosophy; much of the argument worked out here comes from earlier articulations of radical feminism in both Western Europe and the States. What I’m suggesting is that to search for the autonomist gesture is perhaps reductive; or maybe, alternately, that we can think about how what looks like an autonomist gesture is deeply indebted to preceding radical feminist critiques (we may have been autonomist way before y’all called it that). It’s easy to trace a nearly all-male political lineage for these modes of thought (Hegel-Marx-Gramsci-Tronti-Negri), but to do so is both a fallacy and an ignorance of the immense contributions of radical feminist thought to the articulation of autonomist politics, both theoretically and praxically. Indeed, what better could motivate a refusal to work than a grasp of the notion that the work that you do daily has never been considered, legitimately, work? This, coupled with a direct full or partial exclusion from the agitating groups – be they suffragists or unions – that are ostensibly agitating on your behalf , though never with your desires taken as primary.

Rethinking the Charge of Essentialism

It is tempting to place the charge of essentialism on these writings, in their figuration of a notion of woman that is defined by certain biological capacities, and that is united transnationally on account of a shared ‘women’s experience’ (i.e. the figuration of women as composing a ‘sex-class’ so common in 70s-era Marxist-feminisms; or the figuration of a ‘global sisterhood’). While it is tempting to look at the figurations of ‘woman’ present in these, we have to remember the radicality of the aims implicit in the declaration of women as new historical subjects. For Rivolta Femminile, this declaration was immediately followed by the assertion that, for autonomist feminists, “there are no goals, there is the present of our here and now. We are the world’s dark past, we are giving shape to the present.”  To utter this declaration is to draw on a deep reserve of feminist utopian imaginings and inventions, to recapitulate a much older feminist cry for self-definition through invention, to rearticulate the notion that we know not what a free woman is, for we have never seen her, never met her. She may, indeed, not even be ‘a woman,’ bearing in mind Simone’s old injunction that one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. Autonomist feminism may have preached the necessity of not communicating with men, temporarily, while in the first throes of subjective reinvention – but they never did so with the aim of sedimenting or ‘essentializing’ atemporal, common, and inherent notions of what a woman was; rather, they engaged this process in order to de-sediment, to get away from the fucked faux-essentialisms forcefully constructing their realities. This, again, speaks to the radical autonomist gesture inherent in all feminisms that seek something other than liberal (or neoliberal) institutional inclusion; this gesture is the mobilization of one’s exclusion as an occasion of experimentation and invention with alternative social systems, non-official and non-statist ways of getting things (including yourself) done and done over. We can think of the phenomenon of skill-sharing around menstrual extraction in order to perform early-term abortions,  or the creation of separatist communes, or the utopian fictions of Gilman, Wittig, and others, or the revalorization and mobilization of what has been traditionally called ‘women’s work’ as a form of caring labor that is anti-capitalist (i.e. the sort of work Selma James has been doing recently – an example I’ll come back to in a moment).

Queering The Gay Explosion

As another example of the rich dialogue with other instances of radical feminism extant in autonomist feminism, I’d like to think briefly about James’s and Dalla Costa’s assertion of what they call the ‘homosexuality of the division of labor’ as well as the ‘explosion of gay elements within the [radical feminist] movement. In a way, the former assertion is another way of articulating what Gayle Rubin asserts in “The Traffic in Women” – that what we have heretofore understood as cultural and political publics are fundamentally homosocial exchanges; that is, women – while doing the work of social reproduction – appear only as objects in an exclusively male circuit of exchange. This is what is means, for Rubin, to ‘become a woman’ – an argument very similar to that of James and Dalla Costa when they proclaim that one of the effects of the socio-economic arrangements that comprise gendered separate spheres is the elevation of heterosexuality to a religion, a “sexual, economic and social discipline” rather than a modality of erotic expression. To get away from the church of heterosexuality we need to destroy the homosociality of our lives. They go on to cite the importance of the “explosion of the gay tendencies” within the movement for they forcefully articulate the specificity of women’s oppression – and are able to do so on account of a temporary separatism, that “refusal of communication” Rivolta Femminile writes of.

(An autobiographical aside: I’ve explained my own flirtations with separatist thought and political community in a similar way. It was never about ‘hating men’ or only wanting to associate with women – it was that I hated the person I felt obligated to become in relation to men. It was nothing personal, so to speak, and was an existential and political position I grew out of as I grew into a surer sense of my own self, sexuality, and politics. But growing out of something is not burying it or leaving it behind . It’s testifying to the traces it has left, to the formative nature of who you were then, way back when).

The hope, with autonomist feminist thought, is that we can – as a result of this refusal – become something other than the women (and men!) we’ve been. The most cursory look at radical queer subjects and communities demonstrates the (beautiful! tasty!) fruits of this process of existential reorientation.

This is, perhaps, just a long way of saying I’m entirely on board when James and Dalla Costa establish as a proper autonomist feminist task the refusal of the night shift so folks can make love.

The Aftershocks of the ‘Wages for Housework’ Demand

On a final note, I want to think of contemporary radicals as inheritors of a rich feminist legacy that stems, in part, from the autonomist feminist demand of wages for housework. While this seems, at first, a valorization of ‘women’s work,’ it has always been about – and has grown into – an effort to establish these modes of work – ‘labors of love,’ ‘works of care’ – as essential to the process of reinventing the social. Feminist care ethics, in particular, is a rich contemporary manifestation of this line of thought, as is the work that Selma James is currently doing with the Global Women’s Strike, whose demands are entirely marked by the interwoven legacies of decolonial struggle, marxism, anarchism, and radical feminism:

Payment for all caring work – in wages, pensions, land & other resources. What is more valuable than raising children & caring for others? Invest in life & welfare, not military budgets or prisons

Pay equity for all, women & men, in the global market.

Food security for breastfeeding mothers, paid maternity leave and maternity breaks. Stop penalizing us for being women.

Don’t pay ‘Third World debt’. We owe nothing, they owe us.

Accessible clean water, healthcare, housing, transport, literacy.

Non-polluting energy & technology which shortens the hours we work. We all need cookers, fridges, washing machines, computers, & time off!

Protection & asylum from all violence & persecution, including by family members & people in positions of authority.

Freedom of movement. Capital travels freely, why not people?</blockquote>

That first demand – regarding ‘caring work’ – hinges on the notion that this sort of work should never be solely ‘women’s work,’ and seeks the undoing of gendered divisions of labor – as well as labor under capital – more generally. The basic premise is that this work is necessary and of enormous existential value, work we all must do on account of our constitutive interrelationality, our always already non-monadic being.

–Hilary Malatino

Discussion Notes on 2/16 “The Strategy of Refusal” and The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community

On the whole, we found Mario Tronti’s “The Strategy of Refusal” and Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James’s The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community to be a fortuitous pairing. Both texts offer a strategy of refusal that relies on a total rejection of capital. For Tronti refusal is fomented as “the form of organisation of the working class “No”: the refusal to collaborate actively in capitalist development, the refusal to put forward positively programme of demands” (11). Again, “the refusal is thus a form of struggle which grows simultaneously with the working class – the working class which is, at one and the same time, both political refusal of capital and production of capital as an economic power” (11). For Dalla Costa and James, refusal is fomented as a refusal of “housework as women’s work, as work imposed upon us, which we never invented, which has never been paid for, in which they have forced us to cope with absurd hours, 12 and 13 a day, in order to force us to stay at home” (24). More than this, Dalla Costa and James’s strategy of refusal is a refusal of the bourgeois household, of the conditions under which women are understood to be subservient to men and the means by which a man’s labor power is sustained:

To abandon the home is already a form of struggle, since the social services we perform there would then cease to be carried out in those conditions, and so all those who work out of the home would then demand that the burden carried by us until now be thrown squarely where it belongs – onto the shoulders of capital. This alteration in the terms of struggle will be all the more violent the more the refusal of domestic labor on the part of women will be violent, determined and on a mass scale. The working class family is the more difficult point to break because it is the support of the worker, but as worker, and for that reason the support of capital. On this family depends the support of the class, the survival of the class – but at the woman’s expense against the class itself. The woman is the slave of a wage-slave, and her slavery ensures the slavery of her man. Like the trade union, the family protects the worker, but also ensures that he and she will never be anything but workers. And that is why the struggle of the woman of the working class against the family is crucial. (25)

Thus, where both strategies are concerned with the total refusal of capital by the working class, Dalla Costa and James problematize the organization and operation of the working class by identifying the household, and, more importantly, the woman’s place in the household, to be the site where the reproduction of capital is simultaneously the most intimate the most ignored. In this way, the destruction of the bourgeois family adds a new dimension to class struggle and demands that, in Dalla Costa and James’s words, sexuality be reintegrated “into other aspects of creativity, to see how sexuality will always be constrained unless the work we do does not mutilate us and our individual capacities, and unless the per­sons with whom we have sexual relations are not our masters and are not also mutilated by their work” (27).

What, then, is the composition of the working class? On the one hand, the rejection of the household is also the rejection of the patriarchal organization of the working class. Dalla Costa and James quite clearly claim that the working class cannot, if it is to reject the reproduction of capital, continue to function through the relations established by the bourgeois family structure. On the other hand, where the rejection of the household is simultaneously a rejection of the operative composition of the working class up to this point, it, in the very least, demands that class be rethought and restructured entirely. I think this works to complicate even further the point made over at res0nance concerning the tension shared between Guy Debord’s support of workers councils and the autonomist gesture to ‘refuse work.’ For, here, we must also think the refusal of work as the refusal of exploitation and oppression on the determination of one’s biological sex. In this way, the question that Tronti broaches at the end of “The Strategy of Refusal”—“what happens when the form of working class organisation takes on a content which is wholly alternative; when it refuses to function as an articulation of capitalist society; when it refuses to carry capital’s needs via the demands of the working class?”—remains operative, but it necessitates a more complex consideration of class composition and maybe even another form of the question: what happens when the form of working class organisation takes on a content which is wholly alternative; when it refuses to function as an articulation of capitalist society; when it refuses to carry the working class’s needs via the demands of the bourgeois family? To this question, Tronti, Dalla Costa, and James do not determine an outcome.

It is from this line of that that we have decided to jump ahead with out reading a bit. For next week we have decided to read sections of Leopoldina Fortunati’s The Arcane of Reproduction and Alfredo Bonnano’s “Revolution, Violence, Anti-authoritarianism—A few notes.” We expect to return to essays in The Autonomia Reader the week after.

–Matt Applegate

A Post of Links

Hey All,

Over the past few weeks I have been in contact with people interested in this reading group and I thought I would link in a more explicit fashion to their online domains.

The first is an amazing website that I first saw this morning: http://la.thepublicschool.org/class/3205

While I have not been in contact with anyone affiliated with this group I think it could be an opportunity for an amazing dialogue. If anyone from this group sees this please email us! mappleg1@binghamton.edu

Second is of course http://res0nance.wordpress.com/

Resonance has been following us from the beginning of the group and I still need to post a reply to his first set of discussion notes!

Third is another blog that I am a co-contributor of: http://prodigiesandmonsters.wordpress.com

While we cover many other topics on the blog, there is some related material.

–Matt Applegate

Discussion Notes on Let’s Spit on Hegel 2/9/2011

The question that both guided and helped to clarify points in our discussion was ‘What is the specific autonomist gesture in Let’s Spit on Hegel?’ Here, much of our discussion focused on the master-slave dialectic and the rejection of subsumption. The following paragraph, taken from page six, clearly maps outs this rejection:

Two positions coexist in Hegel: one interprets woman’s destiny in terms of the principle of femininity, while the other sees in the slave not an unchanging principle of essence, but rather a human condition, the historical realization of the gospel maxim that “the last shall be first.” Had Hegel recognized the human origin of woman’s oppression, as he did in the case of the slave’s, he would have had to apply the master-slave dialectic in her case as well. But in doing so he would have encountered a serious obstacle. For, while the revolutionary method can capture the movement of the social dynamics, it is clear that woman’s liberation could never be included in the same historical schemes. On the level of the woman-man relationship, there is no solution which eliminates the other; thus the goal of seizing power is emptied of meaning. Emptying of meaning the goal of seizing power is the distinctive feature of the struggle against the patriarchal system as a concurrent and successive stage to the master-slave dialectic. (6)

What renders the master-slave dialectic inoperative? For Rivolta Femminile it is the irreducible difference between woman and man—this relation evacuates the master-slave dialectic of any reductive or subsumptive power. On the one hand, this irreducible difference calls for a radical critique of equality. Here, women cannot simply be included with the realm patriarchal power or equated with the privileged male subject position. Therefore, equality as a process of inclusion can only manifest as “what is offered as legal rights to colonized people” and/or the “world of legalized oppression and one-dimensionality” (4).  There was some debate and admittedly some confusion as to the status and use of the term humankind. It is used throughout the text and would seem to present the very problem that is being critiqued in master-slave dialectic. Humankind could very well provide the fundamental category to which the man-woman relation is reduced or subsumed. However, we ultimately rejected this reading. For, on our interpretation, although the manifesto relies on an irreducible difference between man and woman, it does not rely on a fundamental essence of either sex or gender. Thus, we do not take the use of ‘humankind’ to provide a essence to which human being can be reduced or subsumed. On the other hand, this irreducible difference positions women as a revolutionary class. For, this rejection of the master-slave dialectic extends to what the collective refers to as Marxist-Leninist ideology. Where Marx and Lenin did not include women in class composition or integral to a revolutionary schema women are understood to both comprise the working class and open up its revolutionary possibilities.

Our discussion of selected chapters from Steve Wright’s Storming Heaven was brief. One movement that did present itself as necessary to situating the Autonomia movement was the simultaneous generalization of the proletariat and the localization of politics. With the formation of the Autonomia movement came the inclusion of groups heretofore excluded from the proletariat as well as an intense focus on the factory floor.

For next week we will read The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Introduction) by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James and Mario Tronti’s “The Strategy of Refusal”.