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Re: [ox-en] "counteracting causes" and the most productive class - Negri's Leninism?



Martin

You've got two of the most important questions, both in one email. I hope
the answers are being created. I feel like there are fragments of the 
answers to both questions around already, but not coherent enough yet 
for anybody to be able to write the answers down in an email. The only
thing I'm sure of is a complete gpl society isn't going to drop from
the sky one-size-fits-all for instantaneous identical change 
everywhere.

Two possible ways I can see of getting to answers:

1. practical. 

a. Carry on doing what you're doing in Mocambique. Try to hook up with
S.A. Build links across with Brasil and Venezuela and Argentina. Link up
with people involved with other issues: not just aborigine rights, but
also issues with pharmaceuticals etc.

b. Work with people trying to spread ideas from free software to other
kinds of production. Projects which exist, but are patchy, uncoordinated,
and working with very different ideas and theories because No-one has the
answers yet.

2. theoretical.
Break the questions down into smaller chunks, because as you've
got them now I think they're unanswerable. Maybe smaller pieces
might be better to get hold of.

Either way is going to take time cos answering your questions is
going to take a lot of work. And its going to take a lot of people
experimenting too, because no genius is going to come up with a 
one-person solution. 

For what it's worth I think Caffentzi's article is right, but too 
negative: the gpl is not only what he says it is but also part of the
fight back. The only way to get a new society - including in Germany
or the US - is if the fight back wins in SA and India and... 
 

You wrote in another mail about people in Mocambique not being 
interested in a gpl society but in ways to start their own businesses.
If the gpl gives them that is there a problem? 

When the revolution happened in Russia the old economy collapsed. 
Factories closed. People needed to survive. A factory worker who could 
make shoes might try to survive by setting up as an independent
cobbler. The situation all around forced the recreation of capitalism
from the beginning. All that could only be stopped by orders and
violence from above. Capitalism was never transcended, so it was always
a threat. This time round, it won't be a threat in the same way.
If people in Mocambique are involved with programmers round the rest of 
the world and use that to make their own small businesses, isn't that
a big step forward over importing binary black boxes? Does it need
to be immediate paradise too? And isn't it part of stopping surplus 
value being sucked from the '3rd world'?

I'll stop rambling now...

Graham 
 

   
On Sat, 28 Feb 2004, auskadi tvcabo.co.mz wrote:

Graham and Rich

the questions I wrote where actually for another place but for oxen this 
passsage seems pretty relevant:

ultra snip fo the purpose of focus: "the computer requires the sweat 
shop, and the cyborg's existence is premised on the slave."

"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."

the issue I suppose is "whose new society" does the gpl found .....

Seaman wrote:

On Fri, 27 Feb 2004, Graham Seaman wrote:

 

On Fri, 27 Feb 2004, Robin Green wrote:

   

On Fri, Feb 27, 2004 at 08:38:41AM [PHONE NUMBER REMOVED], auskadi tvcabo.co.mz wrote:
     

But is it as cut and dry as Caffentzis makes out - the Negrian focus is 
on the cyborgs?
       

I don't think so. I haven't read Negri, but from what I have read of
this report:

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2003/11/280632.html

on the famous debate between Negri and Callinicos (representing the 
Marxist/Leninist/Trotskyite tendencies), Negri seems to be EXPANDING
the "revolutionary class" into what he calls the Multitudes - rather
than restricting attention to a small subset of the "working class".
     

In former (national) times this would have been called populism. Negri's
novelty is not in being a populist, but in redefining populism for a world
claimed/projected to be without national boundaries, as multitudinism.
But IMO multitudinism has exactly the same weaknesses and dangers as
populism.
   


good grief, that sounds pompous. oh, well, it's still what I think.

Graham

 

Graham

   

Quote:

"Negri's speech was of course long and somewhat complicated but made
essentially those points that work is no longer confined to the
official working day but extends itself into all of life; going to
and from work, consuming etc. "The factory is no longer the sole
producer of value." He also attacked the traditional Marxist
conceptions of the relation of agricultural workers as being outside
the working class and their analysis of women etc. Essentially the
Trotskyist fetishisation of the factory and the blue collar, full
time worker etc., as being the main agent of social transformation.
The multitude was a "multiplicity of singularities", that realized
that value is produced across society and not just "at work"."

     

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.
       

That's too simplistic as well.

     

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Organization: projekt oekonux.de

   


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Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: projekt oekonux.de


 





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Organization: projekt oekonux.de



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