[ox-en] "counteracting causes" and the most productive class - Negri's Leninism?
- From: "auskadi tvcabo.co.mz" <auskadi tvcabo.co.mz>
- Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2004 08:38:41 +0100
Soemone recently sent me this off list:
The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery? A Critique of Rifkin and
Negri by George Caffentzis
http://www.endpage.com/Archives/Subversive_Texts/Midnight_Notes_Collective/EndOfWork.txt
and
http://www.ecn.org/finlandia/autonomia/theend.txt
I found the dicussion of "counteracting causes" quite interesting. For
example "Negri imperiously denies "the social and economic laws that
govern the deployment of
labor-power among the different sectors of social production" and
rejects the view that labor-time is crucial to "the capitalist processes
of valorization." But capital and capitalists are still devoutly
interested in both. That is why there is such a drive to send capital to
low waged areas and why there is so much resistance to the reduction of
the waged work day. For the computerization and robotization of
factories and offices in Western Europe, North America and Japan has
been accompanied by a process of "globalization" and "new enclosures."
These new enclosured are not in Caffentzis' view the high tech IP
enclosures but seem to be better exemplified by capitals concerns in
relation to "communal land tenure in Africa".
"Why is capital worried about communal land tenure in Africa, for
example, if the true source of productivity is to be found in the
cyborgs of the planet? One answer is simply that these factories, lands,
and brothels in the Third World are locales of "the counteracting
causes" to the tendency of the falling rate of profit. They increase the
total pool of surplus labor, help depress wages, cheapen the elements of
constant capital, and tremendously expand the labor market and make
possible the development of high-tech industries which directly employ
only a few knowledge workers or cyborgs."
"In order for there to be an average rate of profit throughout the
capitalist system, branches of industry that employ very little labor
but a lot of machinery must be able to have the right to call on the
pool of value that high-labor, low-tech branches create. If there were
no such branches or no such right, then the average rate of profit would
be so low in the high-tech, low-labor industries that all investment
would stop and the system would terminate. Consequently, "new
enclosures" in the
countryside must accompany the rise of "automatic processes" in
industry, the computer requires the sweat shop, and the cyborg's
existence is premised on the slave."
Caffentzis says that Negri is "Eurocentric in a rather archaic way.
.... But the charge of Eurocentricism is a bit too general. What can
better account for Negri's methodological oblivion of the planetary
proletariat is his adherence to one of the axioms of the
Marxist-Leninism: the revolutionary subject in any era is synthesized
from the most "productive" elements of the class ...... on the choice
of the revolutionary subject he is Leninist to the core. Negri makes so
much of computer programmers and their ilk because of their purported
productivity. Since the General Intelligence is productive, then these
intellectual workers are its ideal (and hence revolutionary)
representatives, even though they have not yet launched a concrete
struggle against capitalist accumulation qua "social workers" or "cyborgs."
Now my question is somewhere in here: in the past views have been put to
me along the lines that Negri sees the "revolutionary" sector or
"revolution" arising from, growing out of the poor. I always understood
the Negri/Hardt/Empire interest in the "cyborgs" to be something along
the lines of what Caffentzis calls Negri's leninsim. Having lived
throughout the 3rd world for sometime and seeing the brunt of neo
liberalism and the attck on these locals by various national and
internation organisations I have found it difficult to identify
"revolutionary subjectivities" amongst these poor. The magnetism of the
market just seem to strong. Primitive accumulation in its varous forms
in some ways appears as the only anti hegemonic process. I know this is
not the whole picture. On the other hand as someone trained in IP law
and with an interest in free or open source software I see beyond the
current rhetoric of this area much of what Caffentzis describes as the
products of Negri's leninism.
But is it as cut and dry as Caffentzis makes out - the Negrian focus is
on the cyborgs? Or is it as has been claimed or stated to me in the past
on GO - that Negri sees the poor as the where the revolutionary
subjectivities will arise. Or is it better seen as just another one of
the antagonisms demanding the building of alliances between poor and
cyborg? And that an nvestigation of eithe or both is valid once one
accepts the notion of the "counteracting causes"?
I hope what I am trying to ascertain is clear from all this.
Thanks
Martin
--
"the riddle which man must solve, he can only solve in being, in
being what he is and not something else...."
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