I cut some of this material from my post to Long Sunday. It’s a set of notes, trying to spin a red thread on the subject of democracy and proletariat. I’m also going to paste up the post to Long Sunday here below, after it’s been up over there for a bit.
1. E.P. Thompson urges that we not think class as a thing. Class is a process for Thompson: a making. Thinking class as a thing makes “it possible to deduce the class consciousness which “it” ought to have (but seldom does have) if “it” was properly aware of its own position and real interets.” This tendency in thought makes it “easy to pass from this to some theory of substitution; the party, sect, or theorist, who disclose self-consciousness, not as it is, but as it ought to be.” (The Making of the English Working Class, 10.) If class is a making, it is also subject to unmaking, though this is not what those who substitute themselves for the working class want. Substitution entails an attempt to monopolize unmaking, a monopoly which precisely contributes the process of making the class.
2. John Holloway argues that all of the categories of capitalism should be understood not as object but as processes. Capital, value, money, state, class should be thought of as nominalizations (corresponding to reifications) of processes that capitalize, valorize, monetarize, statify, classify. Against these Holloway proposes a counter-process, negation, breaking up the identities and solidities, disrupting the processes. Negation is a nonmonopolizable power. Negation is unmaking. Unmaking class entails unmaking state, capital, value, money … Better, unmaking enters into conflict with the forces of making these entities - capitalization, etc.
3. Alain Badiou defines democracy as a form of state, as “a figure of sovereignty or power: the power of demos or the people; the capacity of the demos to exert coercion for itself.” (79.) In contrast to democracy “communist politics strives (…) to abolish the separate form of the State in general.” (80.) This is particularly so in Badiou’s version of communism, which is superior to Althusser’s by virtue of Badiou’s unequivocal rejection of the party form. Insofar as “democracy names a supposedly normal state of collective organisation or political will, then philosophy demands that we examine the norm of this normality.” (Metapolitics, 78.) Democracy is not a philosophical category because “it is a form of the State” while philosophy is related to “the ultimate aims of politics,” defined as “the end of the State, and so too the end of all relevance for the word ‘democracy’.” “[T]he only adequate philosophical word for evaluating the political is possibly the word ‘equality’, or ‘communism’.” (80.)
4. Louis Althusser declared a failure on the part of Marxism to think the state and the political. It is unclear whether Althusser’s own avowedly Marxist work is included in or exempted from this declaration. This declaration is bound up with Althusser’s rejection of the PCF’s parliamentarian political strategy, against which he proposed the dictatorship of the proletariat, which might be defined as working class post-revolutionary full spectrum dominance. Althusser holds that the political moment of this dominance is mass democracy at a level not previously seen, but stresses that the political moment is only one of a triad, economic-political-ideological, a triad wherein the economic is primary. There is an additional ambiguity in Althusser’s formulation, a temporal ambiguity. Once it is achieved, maintaining proletarian dominance will require an ensemble, the previously mentioned triad. Prior to - or, in the process of - the achievement of this condition, what is the role of mass democracy? What are the roles of (conflict in) the ideological and the economic? In any case, Althusser is right to insists that “what is known as ’subjective’ (that is, both theoretical and organizational) capacity” determines the tendencies of capitalism. (Philosophy of the Encounter, 92.)
this is really interesting nate. I read EP Thompson’s work in college, but wasn’t in the right place for it (it bored me real bad). I’m actually on and off working on an article that lays out why class isn’t something that exists as a descriptive concept, but instead should be understood as a normative concept that we use to account for various forms of social making throughout history, and with which we try and guide our struggles. The former view has some distorting and problematic issues.
Comment by todd — July 19, 2006 @ 3:57 am
hi Todd,
Thanks, you’re kind. I’d love to read your article when’s ready. This has been a pretty shift in my thinking. One of the places it started was in reading and discussing some stuff by Mario Tronti. Tronti reverses the usual picture of class-in-itself (class as objectively given) to class-for-itself (class as subject), saying that the class-for-itself is the starting point. I thought that was pretty great. We do, of course, want to retain some definite sorting principles - folks who hire and fire are generally out (not counting, say, hiring a babysitter for the evening).
Take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — July 19, 2006 @ 5:45 am
I’d really like to see these issues pushed in general, but also in the IWW. I think the boss=bad, worker=good, mentality pervades and distorts the work that goes on. Or even just the fetishization of “working class” and labeling enemies petit-bourgeios or whatever. I think if we drew these out as social categories, it be a positive contribution. But it would have to be done in terms and a way that makes sense and is accessible.
Comment by todd — July 19, 2006 @ 10:45 pm
Well, yes and no. A friend of mine said to me not too long ago that he thought the exclusion of people with the power to hire was a mistake, I disagree entirely with that. I generally hold to a very expansive definition of class, such that it includes almost everybody, but folks with hire/fire power should always be out I think. I do think fetishizing “worker-y” jobs is a mistake, manual and industrial work.
On the other hand… objective conditions as a whole are something I’m ambivalent about. I don’t think they should be ditched, in that, well - I’m convinced by arguments that workers in transportation are in a position where there’s a lot less systemic elasticity. Transport worker strikes can shut down capital accumulation more rapidly and more broadly than domestic worker strikes. On the other hand, I’m not at all clear on what that ought to mean for our strategizing. This has come up in some discussions in the ODFC, about picking targets - really small side conversations, not directly relevant to the task of the OD - and on assessing campaigns (which is directly relevant). I’m of the mind that our capacities to organize successfully should be our primary goal, an accumulation on our side, so a campaign that fails to win external gains, which that’s a big loss still, can also be an important victories. (One of the FWs on the GEB is evidence of this.)
Take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — July 20, 2006 @ 4:10 am
Hey Nate, I wrote up a long comment to your post on Long Sunday, which is quite interesting, only to find out that someone has figured out a way of settling arguments much more in keeping with her temperament.
On the hire/fire thing, it is hard. Hiring and firing has itself been taylorised to some extent, so you get these HR drones who are really production line workers, only you are the hubcap on the line. They are often mercilessly exploited, with ease, since they have bought the ideology. But I think their situation is really a bit like that of the police or the army. Maybe a constructive thing to do is to explain why they must quit their jobs, work out some way of helping them do that.
Anyway, I am off to a land beyond electricity next week, so best wishes.
Comment by TCO — July 20, 2006 @ 12:44 pm
Thanks Thiago. If I understand your cryptic remark properly I suspect it’s some other error as I think since it’s my post the comment decisions go to me. Anyway, I agree that low-level management is like cops or soldiers. I’m not advocating that they be eliminated. There are good managers, bosses who are decent human beings and so on, it’s not a moral issue (though I do take “don’t be or become management” as fully in keeping with the categorical imperative and my sympathies are limited). It’s a pragmatic thing. If my boss and I are both member of an organization with equal access to the organization’s power then it makes the organization less effective for me confronting my boss and challenging the boss’s power.
Front line managers are among the people who organizing campaigns are hardest on, at least in the US, because they have no legally protect rights (including no rights to concerted activitiy) and they get caught between upper management and organized workers. What they ought to do is just try to stay out of the way of the workers and feed information to the campaign in exchange for some protection. And when it’s all over they should look into transitioning out of the management position. Ones who get involved in fighting organizing, though, they deserve whatever they get.
Have a good and safe trip, and get in touch when you’re back.
Take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — July 20, 2006 @ 2:33 pm
Oh yeah - one other thing I forget to mention. I do think it’s fair to characterize HR folks, like economists, as having bought into ideology. I don’t know that that’s the case for every manager, though. Some folks just wanted or needed a raise, maybe. That could be thrown into the ideologized category too, but I don’t see that as very important. The important bit is their location, regardless of reasons. I take hire/fire as a sorting principle basically on its own, without qualifications or much that it derives from (ideological investment of bosses etc).
Comment by Nate — July 20, 2006 @ 2:43 pm
Hi Nate,
you wrote: “I do think it’s fair to characterize HR folks, like economists, as having bought into ideology. I don’t know that that’s the case for every manager, though. Some folks just wanted or needed a raise, maybe. That could be thrown into the ideologized category too, but I don’t see that as very important. The important bit is their location, regardless of reasons.”
absolutely.
Interesting post and discussion. Good summary of Thompson! His grounded, concrete and historical examination of the working class in early modern england, and how they ‘make’ themselves in opposition to capital can be read as an historical ‘becoming’ too–but is more specific, self-avowed, and true than a reductionist multitude–a label that is too often placed upon people (a multitude that I think functions as a WHITEwash of people struggling in very different circumstances and human organizations).
Re: defining class. I’ve worked on a union drive with a guy who is big into multitude (sorry, this example might sound like a straw man, but I’ve met a few people like him). For him, there are two groups: management and (potential) multitude. But he confided to me over beers that he didn’t know how to talk to working class people and asked me how to do it—he wanted to feel like he belonged. My fucking jaw dropped. Going to a local working class bar and playing pool with a steel worker doesn’t make you working class, you know what I mean?
I guess what I’m saying is that in that we both agree there are other axes of domination (of domestic sexual and colonial economies) that are materially produced, what raises concerns for me is the subject position of many I’ve met who call for an identity of everyone but management—a professional distinction—which in my experience seems to be mostly by our academic contemporaries—and elides the real constitution of working class identity—and potentially lets us off the hook of our own social organization.
When I was working at a Public Intereset Research Group, I was management: a non-profit organization that by law must have a board of directors (same time I was on a union drive just to be contrary). And sure enough, the issue of employee relations was front and center–interesting that a few so-called progressives quickly thought like management while maintaining they weren’t the boss of employees, when they were signing the paychecks and demanding more employee acccountability and efficiency! Fucked up! Likewise, any tenured prof. operates as a manager, hiring and firing RAs, TAs, etc… But I wouldn’t say those positions are more reactionary than other petit bourgeois or middle classes who do not have employees, yet are recognizably (to themselves and to others in their relations to capital) capitalists. I’m not sure how necessary, or true, it is to recognize people’s struggles in what can be, at least in some instances, a hegemonic nominalism, ie ‘multitude’. I mean, it’s cool to desire this, but I haven’t met many people outside of academics or devoutly religious folks who call for this sort of eschatology.
People seek out human organizations of solidarity and struggle in many progressive shapes or forms, but I think it is a mistake to push class to the point that it becomes a merely an performative utterance–and excluding only those who hire/fire can be much more arbitrary than other marxian notions of class.
Sorry for the ramble. I’m trying to figure this out too.
Comment by hollowentry — July 20, 2006 @ 10:43 pm
hey Hollow,
Thanks for your comments and compliments, I appreciate both (ramble away, comrade!).
Lots of stuff… on multitude, at the conference at St Cat’s I was struck by how much multitude was an economic and objective determination for Negri. That thesis simply doesn’t hold, full stop. It’s a very old operation, one in which an image of one class sector is taken to be the image of the class as such, such that any departure from that image is a departure from the ideal type that is posited. (Not my insight, Ranciere’s, quoted in Donald Reid’s intro to Nights of Labor.)
As for talking to working class people and all that… I think it depends on how one defines the working class again. If one renders the class a thing rather than a relation then the problem is harder. My dad’s an anglophone electrician from the midwest US. He would not be able to talk to many members of the working class all over the world, because of langauge differences, and might have a hard time having productive conversations with people who do speak English in much of the rest of the world. These are cultural differences. They’re not class differences, though. I also don’t see income and education as being class differences for the most part - at least not in a Marxian sense of class. Those issues are wicked important, but they are for the most part bound up with differences and real hierarchies and conflicts within the working class (qua value producing agent).
This also means that I’m really ambivalent about the category of working class identity. I’d prefer to say working class identities, which vary along many, many axes. On a related note, many times I’ve been in organizing trainings or discussions where people trot out some idea that people can only organize people they’re like. Usually this means racial background, but it can also include gender and something vague called culture. If anything I’d want to go too far the other way - anyone can organize anyway, if they speak the same language even minimally. This is because organizing, when successful, starts from the interests not of the organizer but the people who are organizing. Also because it takes people less as things than as makings, and tries to get people collectively involved in (re)making themselves differently.
On management and the petit bourgeoisie being reactionary, I do think that’s true and I do think it’s generally the case that people who hold those kinds of jobs will act as expected of them. I’m not sure one needs much to account for this, because, I mean, managers who fail to manage as expected get fired just like workers who fail to work as expected (I expect often the former occurs when the latter is discovered to be occuring). The important bit, I think, is less a typology in which to slot people for accounting for objective or structural position and more a matter of a political/organizational sorting principle. People with hire and fire power are out of the bargaining unit, because the whole enterprise is to strip them of their power (to deny us access to means of subsistence). They are, of course, not the only people who we want stripped of their power.
Also, just to be clear, the hire/fire thing as an organizational principle is not as much a claim about who is in and who is out of the working class (in some kind of objective register). Fascists and scabs and management spies are also in the working class, some of them, but they’re out politically - out of the organization and part of whom the organization fights against. (And even if they claim to have come around or changed their minds it’s pragmatically a good idea not to trust them for a good long while.)
As for PIRG, I don’t mean to be a jerk here but … here’s a set of links about labor practices there. (This isn’t at all meant to be an attack on you personally!) I worked in non-profits for a while before I went back to school and labor conditions are generally pretty poor (not least because the management-employee division isn’t stark enough). I tried to organize at a canvassing job I had but it was only marginally successful (turned into a de facto slowdown which resulted in the office being closed, so we all got unemployment), could have gone better if we’d been smarter about it. I had a similar experience working for one of the business unions. It shouldn’t be a surprise (non-profit organizations are not actually nonprofit in a marxist sense), but I have kinda strong feelings because of my experiences in these settings, and because they often speak an idiom or talk about values close to mine, which makes it harder to take.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=1583
http://www.thestudentunderground.org/old_website/print.php?ArticleID=163
http://la.indymedia.org/news/2006/05/161432_comment.php
Just to show I’m not anti-PIRG in particular, here’s stuff on other nonprofit organizing -
http://www.iww.org/unions/dept600/iu650/
One thought, at least loosely connected… I don’t want to make class just a performative utterance either, I am attached to something like objective conditions, but I’m not sure what they mean politically. To some extent, it is the performative level, the level of collective action, that matters since that’s what we can control. Put another way, the question I think is one of what the relationship is between the making of the working class (qua variable capital, including the participation of the class or segments thereof in this making) and working class self-remaking and/or unmaking. These latter should be the starting point for inquiry of any type (start from the point of production of the working class as antagonist subject, which is really many, many points that may well operate differently). I think.
Take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — July 21, 2006 @ 12:31 am
I meant something a little different actually Nate. I didn’t mean ditch objective conditions or let managers in. Instead I meant a more cultural thing I’ve noticed where in people try to deduce and explain people reductionistically based on their position at the point of production. This is stupid for a variety of reasons, and is most easily explained by saying class is a social category taht is constantly created and recreated and usually not along strictly worker-boss lines, and individuals are a seperate level of analysis that is irreducible. That is class is an emergent property of social networks. We can sometimes explain the actions of individuals on the basis of class, but can’t expect strict casual links.
That being said, management being what it is and workers what they are, as an emergent organization we need to come at groups along class lines, but there is a clear group vs. individual distinction. I think, if put in simple language, this would clear up some organizing issues… i.e. my boss is a nice guy (but I’m still fucked). Or how workers act against their own interest (without appealing to their ‘backwardness’), etc.
Comment by todd — July 21, 2006 @ 5:37 am
Got it Todd, sorry I was being thick. I’m in complete agreement. Appeal to one’s experiences, great. Appeal to interests based on positions, okay (though I prefer appeal to power relations). Accounts of others’ consciousness because of position, absolutely unacceptable. It does no positive work at all.
Re: workers with bad ideas, I think it’s just a matter of respect to say that working class folks are moral and intellectual agents as much as anyone else is, such that we’re capable of bad choices and bad ideas as well as good ones, without those decisions being reducible to objectively instilled subjective consciousness.
Take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — July 22, 2006 @ 3:56 am
can’t remember if I archived the post from Long Sunday or not. I think that site may disappear soon-ish, so I’m copying the post back here.
*
The current discussion here on democracy includes two posts I like very much on thinkers who I’ve recently encountered and who I find provocative and compelling, Jacques Ranciere and Alain Badiou. I had planned to engage with both in my post. Happily, much of what I’d wanted to say has been said in these fine posts, and more clearly than I’d been able to say it. This frees me up to focus solely on Louis Althusser, an important figure for both Ranciere and Badiou.
Althusser decried the abandonment by the French Communist Party (PCF) of the category “dictatorship of the proletariat,” or, in a formulation he preferred, the domination by the proletarian class of the bourgeoisie.
There are two forms of the dictatorship of the proletariat, one good and the other bad. The bad: “In a word, the incorrect definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat consists in taking the word ‘dictatorship’ in the political sense, (…) in the sense of a political regime, that is, a political government over men.”(Philosophy of the Encounter, 87-88.) Lenin held at least some of the time to this mistaken definition. The mistake here is one of over-emphasis. The bad form of the dictatorship of the proletariat makes the political moment, the political organization, all-determining and thus neglects the point that “[c]lass domination encompasses the whole set of economic, political, and ideological forms of domination – that is to say, of class exploitation and oppression.” (89.) Over-emphasizing the political component reduces “all forms of domination to the political form alone.” Althusser adds parenthetically, “what takes place in production is, let us recall, determinant in the last instance.” (92.)
Overcoming capitalist class domination means overcoming the entire economic-political-ideological ensemble. Proletarian class domination, or the dictatorship of the proletariat, “can only designate the whole set of economic, political, and ideological forms by means of which the proletariat has to impose its politics on the old dominant, exploiting class. (90.)” Althusser holds that the dictatorship or domination of the proletariat will not consist of of expanded democracy. Rather, expanded democracy will be one moment of this dictatorship: “the political form of the dictatorship of the proletariat must be the broadest possible democracy.” The political form is only one side of the triad of economic, political, and ideological which Althusser insists upon. The broadest possible political democracy will make only one moment of the proletariat’s dominance.
Althusser’s attack on the PCF’s abandonment of the dictatorship of the proletariat was an attack on the party’s parliamentarianism. It is no accident that he declared around this same time that Marxism lacked a theory of the state. The two themes are connected.
The state serves “to intervene in the struggle of the working class in order to maintain the system of exploitation and the general oppression of the exploited classes by the bourgeois class” and furthermore “to intervene, should the need arise, in the class struggle within the dominant class, with a view to overcoming its divisions.” (71.) The state is an instrument for class struggle and it “must endure so that the conditions of exploitation will endure as well.” (77.) The state is thus “terribly biased in favour of the ruling class.”(78.) The communist project, then, is not to enter the state but to abolish it. Since democratic government under capitalism is class democracy - that is to say, the political form of the dictatorship of the capitalist class - parliamentarianism will not produce a rupture in the relations of exploitation.
The state and class domination are connected to “another ‘absolute limit’ of Marxist thought: namely its inability to think politics.” (150.) It is unclear if Althusser intended to include or exempt his own work from this diagnosis. What is clear, however, is that for Althusser democracy is not to be eliminated, at least in its good form, which is bound up with the good form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. “[T]he broadest possible mass democracy, in which democracy is ‘taken to the limit’,” is the political component of the ensemble which forms, or rather will form, the proletariat’s dominance.
Those interested in more on Althusser and particularly late Althusser are encouraged to see the recent issue of Borderlands on Althusser, edited by David McInerney. (Another avenue that would be productive would be to engage with Ranciere, Badiou, and the thematic of democracy in relation to Mao and French Maoism as a heterogeneous political sequence and body of thought. I’m not currently able to pursue this avenue because of limits of my time and my French.)
Comment by Nate — January 5, 2009 @ 4:31 pm