Angela has suggested a conversation comparing some of the different threads/versions of refusal passing through some conversations recently. The initial point of departure is Tronti’s Strategy of the Refusal, perhaps it can be something like the Long Sunday symposium on the Critique of Violence of recent memory. (Jodi and I have plans already to read this piece anyway, and some Lenin, in order to keep the ball rolling on the conversations about solidarity. Tronti and Lenin will go well together as at least back in the day Tronti was a Leninist, of sorts, and the Lenin will also compliment the Mao reading that a couple of us have been trying to do. No shortage of ways to spend my time! Too bad there’s the need to work instead. Anyway…) The Tronti’d be quite interesting to do en masse, and not an inappropriate follow on, as Tronti engages with Benjamin, and with Schmitt, in his more recent work. Hopefully Brett will say a few words on that for those of us che non leggiamo Italiano molto bene. Sono molto excited at the idea of all this. E’ bello. Hope others are too.
March 1, 2006
… is refusal?
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Call me old fashioned, but I can’t help but think that refusal is not enough. In fact, the way I see it, Tronti and others don’t think refusal is enough either, which is why they spend so much time explaining how refusal is something more than sitting at home watching TV and refusing to have anything to do with politics.
But frankly, I sort of fear that this kind of language is just an excuse for people who have no idea what to do. What should we do? Nothing! But with a frown! Then you have this supremely cynical take which says: the people who want you to do something - they’re the ones who have no ideas! they want to take the easy way out! Really, if you want to do something very hard, let’s explore the political possibilities of doing nothing!
I say that half-seriously. Because concretely refusing something isn’t just a matter of saying “Oh, I’d rather not”. In fact, there is a lot of work underneath a refusal, and generally the refusal is only meaningful if the work is your own. If you’re saying “oh, no, not really…” and you can do that because you are a professor somewhere, that’s just repugnant. Look at actual refusals, how people in fact get in a position to refuse. They don’t just walk out of their work and go live off mana: no they organize, they create an infrastructure for refusal. Or they use other infrastructures, like the state. It’s one thing to deduce refusal from the alchemical reaction of Nancy and Tronti, it’s quite another to burn the paycheck.
Maybe I am missing something, but I doubt it.
Comment by TCO — March 2, 2006 @ 10:45 am
hi Thiago,
I sympathize with some of the spirit of your comment, but only some.
As to whether refusal is enough or not, that question doesn’t resonate for me. Refusal defined as what is not enough for what, judged by what standards of evaluation? The devil’s in those details - you can turn a phrase until it reads a million ways, it comes down to the frame of reference. Along these same lines, for instance, some remarks around John Holloway’s last book and about Negri - including by both Holloway and Negri - seem to me to be off the mark: positivity or negativity? To deny or to affirm? To refuse or to embrace? That all seems to me to be a terminological fight that does less work than the investment in the debate would seem to suggest. It all depends on how the terms cash out in other idioms and contexts.
And so, if you see in some cases that a given idiom is being used for a purpose you don’t like - refusal-talk feeding a self image of action in a condition of quietism - then the point of attack seems to me to better to press upon what the idiom cashes out as in the contexts you care about, not to attack the idiom as such. The danger you diagnose seems to me to be a danger that any idiom whatsoever is susceptible to, which I think would be quite easy to show with nearly any example we wanted to pick. (Armed struggle? I can think of several dumb romanticizing conversations I’ve sat through about that. Union organizing? Ditto. The vanguard party? Ditto. Anarchism? You were on aut-op-sy, you know that one as well as I do! And all of these are also susceptible to being used for purposes even more nefarious than making oneself feel a perhaps unwarranted individual sense of radicalism.)
On that note, Tronti at least is very clear that what he means requires organization - both in the sense of organizing (the work that underlies refusal in any sense that you or I would find compelling) and in the sense of capital O Organization, namely The Party. There’s no mana there, though there are certainly other problems.
Have you read the Tronti? (That’s not intended as a jibe, I hope it doesn’t sound like it is.)
Comment by Nate — March 2, 2006 @ 3:11 pm
Yes, I have read Tronti, but only what’s on the web. I generally think he’s quite interesting, but like I said, what he means by ‘refusal’ is more than just refusing. I actually think there is little common ground between the refusal he talks about and whatever it is that Zizek is saying. I do have lots of reservations, like I think the idea that refusal was a form of strategy makes sense under some circumstances, it is not true in others. I believe there is such a thing as involuntary unemployment. As much as I like Bologna, Tronti and pals, I sometimes feel they have this account of capitalism where the working class is topping from the bottom. I think this is only true under very limited circumstances.
I think it is implicit in Tronti, or at least in his earlier writings that refusal is actually part of a wider organization, with wider goals, mostly related to the self-determination of workers, conceived radically so that this determination takes them outside of wage-labour.
I am just not really very impressed by the suggestion that there is some kind of evil normative crypto-vanguardist element in saying that refusal is not enough. It’s a trivial point, just a matter of conceptual clarity. Refusing politics could mean sitting at home and watching TV. Refusing work could also mean taking up the dole, which any serious person has to admit is definitely not out of the circuit of the state or capital. In fact, really refusing work would not be a trivial matter at all. It would be extremely difficult to do. It’s one thing to say “oh, let’s refuse!”, and quite another to make this a plausible option let alone a reality. Of course I agree that we should not have some kind of party line that tells us what to do, but we do need goals and so on. I mean, some people think this is inherently fascism or something, but to me, that attitude is entirely self defeating.
Comment by TCO — March 2, 2006 @ 7:42 pm
hi Thiago,
Absolutely. Not every activity is the revolution in miniature. I think there’s a difference between anglophone receptions, primarily via Negri, of the refusal talk and that talk among some of the Italian folks. I’d like to know a lot more about all of it. I do think that sort of passive refusals - sitting at home etc - can pose a problem for problem and often do (Napster’s another version of this, in a sense) but I think that politics requires deliberate organization. Or, at a minimum, the only thing we can really do is deliberate organization. Other things may take on other meanings/have other effects, but one can’t wait for that unless one wants to lapse into a quietistic voluntarism.
I don’t know what you mean by “the suggestion that there is some kind of evil normative crypto-vanguardist element in saying that refusal is not enough”. What are you referring to here? Tronti when he wrote the Strategy of the Refusal was certainly some kind of vanguardist, full stop. Negri’s relationship with vanguardism would be something that’d be interesting to know more about too. Steve’s the only person I know who’s done any work on that. It’s all stuff that’s quite different from the reception of Negri’s recent work in the English speaking world, wherein he’s held up or denounced as a libertarian depending on who is talking about him. Myself, all I meant by saying I don’t agree with you is that the terminological stuff doesn’t speak to me very much. You say refusal also needs X to be wortwhile, someone else could say X is internal to that refusal. That type of conversation strikes me as missing the point. The question is what the X is, whether it’s needed, and how to do it. In this instance, it’s organization and we both agree that it’s something really important. Whether it is refusal or something supplementing refusal strikes me as a red herring that distracts from closely looking at the contents and modes of the issue.
That said, I do think there’s a real limit to at least one version of the refusal of work, along the lines of countercultures and all that, which is that in the absence of a welfare state (which is largely the case in the US today) one doesn’t have many avenues of access to means of subsistence without doing some kind of work (of course, we could also argue that the strictures of the welfare state were/are work, I’d be amenable to that) such that it’d be tremendously difficult to really build much around that model. I think the wage is a key site of struggle - raising it, expanding it to include other people and other currently nonwaged times - etc. I’m not sure what relationship that has to refusal. This may also just be me universalizing my own unionist bent.
best,
Nate
Comment by Nate — March 2, 2006 @ 8:45 pm
“I think there’s a difference between anglophone receptions, primarily via Negri, of the refusal talk and that talk among some of the Italian folks.”
Between some anglophone receptions, I should say. Don’t mean to paint an “italiano, buono; english, bad” kind of picture, though it sounds like that here.
I just mean that these terms have different uses in different contexts, and that in at least some cases the Italian or even the anglophone political contextual meanings don’t seem to be getting the same kind of treatment that the theory (qua Theory) does.
Comment by Nate — March 2, 2006 @ 8:48 pm
I hear what you are saying. My jibe about people thinking that specifying goals for refusal is Wrong has more to do with the kind of material Zizek and his friends spat out. I find all ofthat terribly silly. It really is just liberalism with a veneer.
Anyway, I am really interested in situationsin which it refusal really is possible, and threatening. In a way, I don’t want to exaggerate the point though, the problem of refusal has a clear formulation within modernizationist economics. Say, in PNG, it is possible for people to go back to their villages and more or less opt out of capitalism in a very radical sense; it would be physically impossible to do this in Australia, but they can,because there is essentially a self-contained mode of production in the village, it is connected with the outside, of course, but not as strongly as one might imagine. Well, what are modernizationists always talking about in PNG? They see this ‘primitive welfare’ system as a major problem: some people are in fact explicit about the fact they need to privatize land so as to generate a landless proletariat. I mean, this is not some loopy Austrian or a marxists, it comes from buttoned down academics, mostly neoclassicists. In fact, if you look at the history of this, already in the 1920s it was well known at the top levels of the colonial administration, which in fact calculated that land should not be privatized,because this would allow the wantok system, as the ‘primitive welfare’ is known, to absorb the cost of policing. This is essentially what my thesis was about. I think this is fascinating stuff: the actual dynamic is that certain kinds of nonparticipation are actually welcome, since they can bemade to underwrite participation.There are parallels to this in other areas, specially in the British ‘indirect rule ‘ sphere.
Now, the kind of refusal of work stuff which I think is fascinating is the analysis of the fordist factory that came from these guys, which I would say is amongst the best industrial ethnography ever made. I just came across a really interesting summary of the Brazilian situation, which talks about the absurd, truly insane levels of turnover at Brazilian factoriesin the 1970s. They were going through dozens of people per position per year, which is just totally idiotic. Then you look at the rise of the ‘rightwing’ Brazilian unionss - the PT powerbase, in fact - and these guys fight for stabilization. They argue thatthis is good for labour and good for capital, and so on. Similar things happened elsewhere, of course.
But the situation now is very different. A call centre can turn over twenty people a year per position without it being complete chaos, partly because the chaos is offloaded on the consumer. I worked as an Estate Manager, with the responsibility for about one hundred people’s entire financial lives, and basically I was managed along these lines. My coworkers were cycled through like a demented laundromat.In a sense, that’s possible because Taylorism is a more realistic option in a call centre than in a factory, where people might die if they don’t have serious baseline skills.It also means that refusal is kind of meaningless: maybe Angela is right when she says that the push for casualisation derived from workers, but it has been well and truly turned over to capital. To put a dent in it, you’d need seriously organized refusal.
Anyway, I ramble.
Comment by TCO — March 3, 2006 @ 2:20 am
hi Thiago,
Have you read much of Midnight Notes’ stuff? I’ve only read a bit of it, but I see their stuff on enclosure and commons (which they mean, I think, much less abstractly and metaphorically than I do) as being addressed to stuff similar to what you’re talking about in PNG. Michael Perelman, who wrote this great book on classical political economists - “The Invention of Capitalism” - calls it self-provisioning and tries to argue at the end that that could be used to supplement ’socialism’, a term which made me unfairly tune him out when I read it.
If you can find a reference to that stuff on Brazilian factories I’d love to read it. Tronti’s pretty sensitive to some of this - he’s all about whose terms everything happens on, ours or theirs. If we get what we want on their terms then it will get used against us. If they get what they want on our terms, then we use it against them. Pretty straightforward, really, but a perspective often sadly lacking.
The turnover stuff is a real obstacle. A friend and I have been talking about trying to start a tempworker social club, that would do nothing but host bowling nights, movie nights, pub crawls, bake offs, etc for a few years, or do some mutual aid style stuff or move into that, then start moving workplace actions. If there’s no pre-existing networks and there’s massive turnover then it’s really hard to get it together to do anything in a shop. Given that many shops are now structured that way, deliberately, the goal would be to create some stability (on our terms) before people enter shops in a given economic area. It’s on the shelf right now, no time, but I think it has potential.
Incidentally, this is more less exactly how things like the troquero activities that were making some waves in the US not too long ago were built — info here:
http://www.iww.org/unions/iu530/truckers/truck1.shtml
and the same goes for situations in some industries/locales where there’s not a lot of intra-shop contact but a lot of extra-shop contact, taxi drivers in some places, bike messengers, and so on. Except that those social networks were built organically (for lack of a better word) then became something else, rather than being build for the purposes, long term, of that something else. (It may sound very instrumental but in practice is a lot less ominous than all that.)
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — March 3, 2006 @ 4:45 am
Hey Nate, the article is by Felipe Luiz Gomes e Silva at Revista Espaço Acadêmico . Have a shot at it, if you have trouble I can knock a translation together pretty quickly.
Yeah, I think that the only way to organize temps is to have a social movement style union; you have to organize people rather than jobs. You try telling that to a union, though. They have no interest in it. Their attitude seems to be: oh, if you are a temp and you don’t hate yourself, you’re a de facto scab.
Comment by TCO — March 7, 2006 @ 12:43 am
Sorry, my link tag didn’t work. It’s:
http://www.espacoacademico.com.br/056/56silva.htm
Comment by TCO — March 7, 2006 @ 12:45 am