What in the hell …

WP kindly left some kind comments on a short thinkpiece post related to the long thing on women’s laundry workers. WP and I have been exchanging emails a bit since. Something struck me in the exchange, reminded me to go back to the “Tribe of Moles” essay by Sergio Bologna.

In that essay, Bologna wrote that

“our analysis of these structural factors will be ineffective unless we can combine it with an analysis of the huge transformation taking place in the sphere of “personal life”. This obviously starts from the breakdown of sexual relations brought on by feminism. It then widens to involve all the problems of controlling one’s own body and the structures of perceptions, emotions and desires. This is not just a problem of “youth culture”. It has working-class antecedents in the cycle of struggles of 1968-69. The defence of one’s own physical integrity against being slaughtered by line-speeds and machinery, against being poisoned by the environment etc, on the one hand is a way of resisting the depreciation of the exchange value of one’s labour-power and the deterioration of its use value, but at the same time it is a way of re-appropriating one’s own body, for the free enjoyment of bodily needs. Here too there is a homogeneity, not a separation, between the behaviour of the young people, the women and the workers.

The question of drugs now arises. Control of drug usage is being re-appropriated by the institutions of the political cycle. No sooner have young people had a taste of soft drugs, giving them a first-hand taste of how much this society has robbed them of their perceptive potential, than the heroin multinational decides to step in and impose hard drugs. A space of political confrontation opens up, between use value (self-managed, within certain limits) and exchange value of drugs, and this involves organisation and instances of armed self-defence. Nor is the mechanism of the production of new needs the exclusive prerogative of the “liberation movements”… it has its roots in the “We Want Everything” of the Mirafiori workers in the Summer of 1969. The “Italian Utopia” has a solid working-class stamp, which no theorists of an American-style “movement” – ghettoised and self-sufficient – will be able to erase.

I remember that when I first read this a few years ago what I immediately liked about this passage is that it gathers up phenomena in the time and place it address and treats them as having a red thread in common, as opposed to the story I was more familiar with, that of dispersion into a host of topics (a story often told with a sneer about identity politics). Rather than dispersal there was a movement about a number of different aspects of the uses of the body. One could add feminist struggles around sexual assault, reproductive freedom, and women’s health, as well as disability rights.

A few other thoughts strike me.

First, I have an analogous view re: certain types of politics of the body as I expressed in the post about the autonomous university. While I think there’s a lot of value in - and I would be loathe to attack those who engage in - practices of autonomous self-management in the present, I think it’s not at all clear that these practices help any but their practitioners, which is to say, I’m not sure that practices of autonomy from prevailing hierarchies (evasion, exodus, etc) help undermine those hierarchies. I think conflict against those the mechanisms that create those hierarchies is needed as well (more, to be honest) and that the space for autonomy is created by organized conflict. To put this differently, I think there’s a limit on the degree to which politics can be prefigurative and still be effective with regard to changing prevailing power relations. (I still believe in political transition.)

Second, it seems to me that the frame Bologna offers could be used for other eras as well, like the time during which workers’ comp was passed in the US, a time (depending on how one periodizes) also involved protests against the destruction of bodies in war, protests and strikes against the destruction of bodies at work, claims to support for bodies via welfare and protective legislation on and off the job, as well as (I believe) experiments with sexuality and drugs like those which Bologna notes in a later era.

Third, this could I think be posed as a sort of schematic ahistorical frame about the struggle against the commodification of the body - the conflict between the potential for the body to serve the valorization process and the many other potentials of bodies (including potentials for the good life or good lives - brief remarks in passing on that here, here, and here). That’s one way to frame what I think is at stake in the thing about use value and exchange value that I always trip over in Marx. I think that if we think of Marx’s categories as a conceptual framework, the use value is a larger one containing more determinations than exchange value. Exchange value is a subset of use value. Similarly, producing surplus value is a use value - it’s the use value of the commodity labor power. There’s continual conflict around whether or not labor power - the body - will be sold and under what conditions, after its sale around whether or not it will be put to use and under what conditions, and outside of the direct sale over the degree to which that particular set of uses of the body (those bound up with valorization) will rule over other uses of the body (that is, the degree to which other practices will be made functional for those involved with valorization, and the degree to and manner in which other practices - those which are less useful for or which inhibit the capitalist use of bodies - continue to exist).

Fourth, the body is an interesting theme to follow in Marx - the remarks in the sections of Capital v1 on the working day, machinery, and primitive accumulation, as well as remarks in earlier works like on alienation.