Mike who does the Sojourner Truth blog is interested in reading the Fragment as well. I’ll email some folk and see if we can get a round of electronic discussion going, parallel/complimentary to an in person do here in the TC.

In the meantime, marxological ?s on the Fragment… the piece by Virno in Marxism Beyond Marxism, “Notes on the General Intellect” has a translator’s note which says that the Fragment is pages 693-706. (In a French version of an earlier version of that same article, here - http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Quelques-notes-a-propos-du-general.html - Virno says that the Fragment is p. 304-316 in the French. I can’t find a French copy of the Grundrisse online to compare that with, my French is tres merde.) In Marx Beyond Marx (p139) it says the Fragment is p690-712. Steve sent me an email saying that the version in #4 of the Quaderni Rossi starts w/ the phrase ‘As long as the means of labour remains a means of labour in the proper sense of the term …’ (page 692) and ends bottom of p.706. He also said that Nicholaus mistranslates ‘valorisation process’ as ‘realisation process’ on p 692. All very interesting. I’m curious to know more about the history of the translation, naming, and pagination of the Fragment. In any case, I’d be keen to read those 22 pages together, 690-712.
take care,
n8

My source for the partitioning of the fragment is a lecture Cesare gave a couple years ago. I have those notes which I’d be happy to share with you or the blogoshpere generally–I haven’t looked at them in a while, though, so I don’t really know what all they say.

I got news that Matt Stod wants in on the reading–anyone from your end? How would you like to proceed?

take care,

JC

Actually John, given how short this is compared with the Results thing, I’d rather do the Fragment first. How does this sound? Let’s plan to blog it, so to speak, and if we can arrange an Mpls in-person do with some altri compagni that will be gravy (or frosting, take your pick).

Any other takers for a read of the Fragment on Machines?
Related texts -

Virno’s entry on General Intellect from the Lessico Posfordista
http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpvirno10.htm

Virno’s theses on multitude and post-fordism
http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/11/12/1615227&mode=nested&tid=9&tid=4

Lazzarato’s General Intellect piece
http://multitudes.samizdat.net/General-intellect.html

Offline there’s also Virno’s “Notes on the General Intellect” and Berardi’s “A zigzag starting from Marx”

Reading the Marx sounds fantastic. I could send out an email to some folks around Mpls, if you like.

As for the illustrious “Frammente sulle macchine,” in my understanding it runs from p. 690 of Notebook VI all the way to p.706 of Notebook VII (pgs here are from the Nicholaus trans.). When we read it, we should also read up on its production as an object for the Italians–the Grundrisse generally and the machine fragment specifically have a very interesting publication/reception history in Italy that could be useful to go over.

stammi bene e baci,
JC

That reminds me, can you send me that thesis for me to read?

I’d planned to make some remarks on the Virno stuff soonish, yours are better than what I’d had planned though. I agree completely re: Virno’s treatment of the boss’s use of labor power. V stays at an overly formal level. His description isn’t one-sided or perspectival enough (whether from the boss’s or the workers’ side) and in either case you’re right that he wrongly treats the boss’s use of the commodity LP as a foregone conclusion. (Whether from our side or their’s it’s not the case that the boss can simply make use of us, that’s a political outcome.) I’m not sure if he’s better on this elsewhere or not. I’d be willing to say that this is a flaw which goes back to a lot of what Marx wrote, from what I’ve read of it. What do you think Mike, does that sound fair? (This is part of why I like Cleaver so much. He said somewhere once something to the effect that folk on the left are a lot better generally at describing in minute detail the many ways we’re fucked over and the effects that has, but nowhere near as good at talking about the ways we resist and go beyond that. This stuff on labor power may fall into that same dynamic.)

One quibble: I don’t think the struggle begins after the purchase of LP. As much as I do fetishize the workplace, I think there’s at least two moments we can identify - does LP appear as a commodity? and does the boss get to use (set to work) the LP purchased? The latter is the one I tend to pay more attention to - strikes, slowdowns, etc, but it’s not the only struggle, as much as I have a hard time talking or thinking about the former. I suspect we don’t really disagree here.

As for whether or not it makes sense to talk about LP as a commodity, it all depends on the uses of that kind of talk. I think focusing on our being bought is problematic. For our purposes, I think it’s important to talk about the ways in which we are capable of being more than a commodity, of not being a commodity, and of preventing the bosses making use of us when they have bought us (and better than capable of, we should talk about the ways in which we do and have done those things).

So, from our side, building and exercising power, I don’t think we need to talk much about LP as a commodity, except perhaps in denouncing ways - the costs to us of how they treat us. On the other hand, the bosses do treat us as commodities (at least, I think that’s how they think about us and talk about us in their literature) and there are all sorts of processes, of course contested, aimed at making us appear for sale in the market and at the boss being able to make use of us after purchase.

In terms of looking at those dynamics, I think it does make sense to talk about LP as a commodity. One could of course ask what use it is to look at those kinds of dynamics or if this vocabulary is needed to do so. I’d be very sympathetic to that.

take care,
Nate

I like the translations, but I think either I’m missing something or else Virno is missing something: he says in the first paragraph “After the purchase-sale has been effected, the buyer employs at will the commodity that they have taken possession of…” But this is plainly false: even after purchasing labor power in the form of hiring workers, the boss doesn’t have possession of the labor power of the workers, certainly not in any sense that would allow her or him to employ it “at will.” Instead, *after* the transaction has been completed is when the real struggle begins: how many hours will be worked? How much work will be done in those hours? Strikes, slow-downs, and sabotage (not to mention the bosses’ counter-maneuvers – lockouts, speed-ups, and surveillance cameras) mean that there are multiple “wills” involved in determining whether, when and how the buyer of labor power can take possession of her or his new purchase. It seems the Virno dances around this fundamental issue with his talk of life/non-objectified labor. The real question is then the one I raised in the comments to your post on Long Sunday as part of the Spivak symposium: given the disjuncture between purchase and control of labor power, does it make sense to call labor power a commodity. As I said at that point:

“Marx admits somewhere in the first volume of Capital that labor-power is unique among commodities in that its purchase does not guarantee access to its use value. That is, hiring workers doesn’t by any means assure that they will actually work, much less at the rate that is hoped for by the boss. From some perspectives, this means that labor-power is not best viewed as a “commodity” in the strict sense Marx invokes in the opening sentences of Capital. Cornelius Castoriadis, Ernesto Laclau, and Herbert Gintis, among others, make this point. Years back, in my undergraduate thesis, I argued strongly that this represented a fundamental contradiction in Marxism (labor-power is a commodity vs. labor-power is not a commodity), whose dialectical resolution involved the departure from Marxism as such, and the embrace of the “subjective element” implied in the notion that labor-power is not a commodity. As I’ve mellowed with age, I’m no longer quite sure that this is a necessary logical maneuver (although that mellowing hasn’t made me any more of a Marxist; still the anarchist-communist I was back in the day…), but I do think it should get people like Nate to think about this stuff a little differently.”

I’m not at all familiar with Virno’s work, so it is possible that he deals with this somewhere. If so, I’d love to see how he tackles it. More than that, however, I’d love to hear your thoughts on all this, Nate.

Solidarity,
Mike

We could do some interblog discussion, if you like.
The Fragment’s planned for later, then to finally get around to reading the Lenin that Jodi D and I agreed to read earlier this year (it’s gonna be a marxist summer). Hey, this reminds me, what’s considered the precise pagination of the Fragment? I’ve seen conflicting references. My impression is that it starts w/ the section in Notebook 7 called “Fixed capital and continuity of the production process. Machinery and living labour.”, p702 in the Vintage edition. (I can’t remember where I picked up that idea actually, to be honest, probably off the autopsy email list, but I wrote it a few years ago in the table of contents to my copy.) I’ve heard speculation that the Fragment title is an operaisti thing
(also via autopsy: https://lists.resist.ca/pipermail/aut-op-sy/2006-February/005099.html
https://lists.resist.ca/pipermail/aut-op-sy/2006-February/005104.html)

Do you think some folk around Mpls (Melissa and the Matts?) would be into doing a one off discussion on the Results piece and on the Fragments?

un abraccio,
Nate

Thanks for the trans. of Virno, as well as the invitation to read some Marx. In short, I’d love to! Please keep me in mind if you undertake a reading of the Machine Fragment et. als. soon.

BTW, thanks for linking vogliamotutto on your blog. It is meager at the moment, but hopfully will gain momentum. Thanks for your support, and at some point soon I will need to have you over to teach me some ins and outs about blog-tech stuff.

Baci,

John