Not that there’s necessarily just one. In the Tomich book he discusses slave systems in the Caribbean, mainly in Martinique, where among other things he discusses slave-owning planters that gave slaves garden plots and time off to cultivate them. There ended up conflict over time for tending the garden and time working for the slave owner, and a developing customary right to the former. (I know I’ve also seen reference to slaves having something like rights to commons, have to try and find the reference.)
I in no way want to minimize the utility of the gardens for slaves, but I do want to mention something - this provision of commons to the slaves was functional for slave owners: it lowered the costs of keeping the slaves alive, by making the slaves’ subsistence the result of their own cultivation rather than the masters’ purchase of needed commodities. It lowered the maintenance price of slaves.
Several brief notes on this. First, this is relevant to arguments around housework and value. Fortunati’s argument, for instance, is that unwaged reproductive labors are value productive. An alternative argument (I believe made by Harry Cleaver but I’ll have to doublecheck) is that these labors make it possible to lower the price of labor power as part of stretching the buying power of the wage, in the same way that the garden plots of the slaves lower the cost to slave owners of keeping slaves.
In a sense, the slaves’ appropriation of their ‘free’ time and the waged laborers’ of unwaged laborers’ activities is also appropriation of the same by capital. As Fortunati puts it, housework is an exchange between women and capital, mediated by male workers. This means that capitalist appropriation doesn’t only proceed through dispossession of the working class; the proletariat owns some things. This means that when Marx refers to the vogelfrei proletariat, translated by Fowkes as “free and rightless”, this is an overstatement, at least Fowkes’ translation is, in that the proletariat need not be wholly free in the negative sense of being wholly divested of possessions. More to the point: not all of the proletariat has to be dispossessed. Among other things, one portion of the proletariat might collude with - or carry out - dispossession of another portion, as with the forcible holding of women in common that Federici discusses. This last is a second form of commons, one much different than the type I began with, that practiced by some slaves; the second form is of course indefensible and I don’t mean to posit any connection between them, except to say that something being “commons” or “commoning” is not alone enough to make it a good thing. There are modes of commons and commoning; some are ambivalent, some are simply objectionable. This means also that capitalism is not the only issue.
I do not believe Mrx says members of the working class own nothing. I do believe he says that the fundmental presuppositon for a person potentially belonging to the working class is that they do not own means of production, and means of production are those means that produce capital. Consequently and consistently, we could consistently that vegetable gardens fall outside those contradictions, although within the system generated by those contradictions, they bedome a new form of social relationship.
Comment by Chuckie K — May 22, 2008 @ 7:21 pm
hi Chuckie,
I agree with the main point I think you’re making - the waged working class is free in that it lacks sufficient access to the means of production to work for itself and live off the sale of the product, and lacks access to the means to secure its own full subsistence without working for another.
Fair point. I might be being overly literal or hairsplitting, but it seems to me that the term ‘free and rightless proletariat’ is a bit of an overstatement. It’s also in tension with the idea that there is some substantive content to the freedom of free labor, something some marxists make too much of in my opinion. At least some of the proletariat does have some rights in the sense of the right to own the money they’re paid in wages - the capitalist doesn’t have the right to steal it back directly, for instance. If all I’m doing is restating Marx’s own position then so much the better. I like being on board with Marx’s own position.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — May 23, 2008 @ 12:13 am
The case with the slaves cultivating a plot of land and thus retaining a feeling of freedom/autonomy while producing the means of their own substinence, reminds me of the argument Gorz makes in “Adieux au proletariat”, that the bourgeois society builds small gardens for the working class, giving them some means of self-activity (is that the word in English, self-realisation? Marx uses the term ‘Selbstbetätigung’ in The German Ideology) and producing their own goods, - whereby the feeling of being a worker, the proletarian identity remains accidental, coincidental to the working class in the sense that it could be different - and thereby preventing them from developing a ‘class-consciousness’. Similarly the slaves must have felt they had some degree of freedom cultivating their ‘own’ plot of land, and that while working there, they were not wholly or merely slaves (it is in no way my intention to equate the conditions of a modern industrial worker to a slave).
What exactly is the condition for something to be ‘commons’, is it enough that it is an area of some sort of productive/reproductive activity that is not yet being capitalized upon/exploited, or does it have to be a collective activity? Im pretty sure about the meaning of pre-capitalist/feudal commons, but when we’re talking about commons ‘inside’ capitalist societies i am less sure.
Comment by Mads — May 23, 2008 @ 5:36 am
hi Mads,
Good question. I think the issue to my mind is the communist content - if it’s something that builds for more or contains us. Re: the slaves and their gardens, what you suggest is what Tomich describes though he also argues that the planters used the gardens not only to lower their costs for maintaining slaves but also to instill different work rythms and habits that they weren’t able to create by sheer force, and that this was encouraged by law makers in order to make the coming transition to waged labor go more smoothly (to prepare the slaves for being productive waged laborers).
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — May 23, 2008 @ 10:11 am
Hi! This isn’t really related to this specific post, but I’m currently writing an essay on the notion of biopolitical production in Hardt & Negri, and there is this thing that keeps bugging me: They seem to imply that the creation of the multitude, of absolute democracy, self-management etc. has only become possible now, at this point in history, and they thereby also seem to imply that up until this point, when capitalism has become a mere ‘parasite’, capitalism did in some way serve a ‘progressive’ or at least necessary function. It’s not entirely clear to me, however, why this is the case - that is, what made this absolute democracy an ‘objective’ (?) impossibility in the past and why is it only now, with the rise of immaterial labor etc., that it is becoming possible? They sometimes seem to be saying that autonomous production (that is, autonomous of capitalism) was not really a possibility prior in history. I get the impression that a certain interpretation of ‘Grundrisse’ might be implied in this argument, but I’m unable to figure out whether Hardt & Negri believe that a genuine ontological shift has taken place with post-fordism - that is, whether the formation of a general intellect has actually taken place due to capitalism (which now must dissappear for that very same reason) - or, more ’soberly’, if this new possibility of an absolute democracy arises due to the automatisation & socialization of production… Actually, both of these interpretations may be wrong, but I was wondering if you could possibly help point me in the right direction here?
All the best,
Niklas
Comment by Niklas — May 23, 2008 @ 10:46 am
hi Niklas,
I’d like to read your essay when it’s done. From what you’ve said here, I agree w/ you on a lot of this. Among other things, you wrote “It’s not entirely clear to me, however, why this is the case - that is, what made this absolute democracy an ‘objective’ (?) impossibility in the past and why is it only now, with the rise of immaterial labor etc., that it is becoming possible?” I think this is a central tension in Hardt and Negri’s work.
As for pointing you in the right direction, I can’t do that other than point out some stuff I’ve written on this. I’ve got a long-ish thing I wrote on this here - http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/biopolitical-capitalism/
This post - http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2007/10/22/is-the-new-epoch/ - has a translation of some stuff by Negri where he repeats the claim to a new epoch in response to some criticisms by Pierre Macherey.
Some other things (sorry to toss all this stuff at you that I wrote, it feels a bit arrogant) —
This is the first thing I wrote where the Negri thing started to unravel for me:
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2005/10/17/time-is-it/
and this is my first attempt to formulate it more clearly:
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2005/10/23/is-up-with-the-insistence-on-the-new/
Finally, there’s a lot in a recent piece by David Graeber that may help, I pulled all the stuff I liked best from it and pasted the notes here:
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2008/05/07/are-post-operaisti-so-sad-about/
Like I said, I’d like to read the essay when you’re done, please.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — May 23, 2008 @ 11:01 am
I have a similar problem with what may be described as the “post-Marxism” of what I believe that Negri and Hardt have and I have encountered in a talk given by John Holloway. I’m mostly going to focus on Holloway, as I’m most familiar with him and not N & H. While I generally like much of Holloway discusses (a return to the subject as the center which is essentially humanist and his stuff on the relationship to social movements and the state), in a talk of his I attended several years ago I encountered a simliar dichotomy. The centralization of the Fordist mode of capitalism, the centralizing effects of imperialism, go together with a centralized revolutionary movement (the vanguard party). This is contrasted with the decentralism of the post-Fordist mode of production, the use of communication (internet, global media etc) and the decentralism of the current resistance movements.
I just can’t buy this for several reasons though. While there is certainly significant changes in how production is organized (I’m interested in people’s thoughts on how much this is the case and how this relates to movements), I believe to be false arguments asserting that:
1. All movements of the Fordist era were focused on the state, either capturing it or using it as a gradual means to implement socialism. This is only the case if you write out of history of the dominant influence of anarchism, anarcho-syndicalist and non-state centered opposition movements which preceded Marxisms predominance after the Russian Revolution. Sadly, history has been misconstrued along these lines.
2. Somehow communism, self-management, a society non defined by alienated labor is only possible in the current era and the advent of this is due communication technology. Not to sound flippant- but I think the working class demonstrated their ability to create a radically different society just fine long before the use of the internet, fax machines and satellite TV (Russia 1917 and Spain 1936). An argument that a revolution along the lines of the magnitude of 1917 and 1936 happening today having a much more qualitative character, I’m willing to consider the possibility. Does automation create the possibility to eliminate a great deal of alienating labor necessary to produce what’s needed for society? (I believe this is along the lines of argument that Murray Bookchin put forward in his concept of “post-scarcity anarchism,” which was that under feudalism the scarcity of resources and thus social hierarchy were necessitated and that we live a society where scarcity and the need to develop production no longer exists and therefore we should organize along the lines of citizens or people on a regional basis, rather than along class lines along an industrial basis. Don’t hold to being absolutely correct in representing Bookchin here) I don’t believe that the situation is such that the answer is ‘yes’ or ‘no;’ though more possible that these changes create degrees of different possibilities; meaning that I don’t believe that before automation the creation of a self-managed or free society was impossible, but it is likely that with the development of automatic we can eliminate some of the more alienating types of labor, there is no or little scarcity of social resources and thus the creation of a free society is *easier.*
3. The centralized Fordist mode of production necessitated a centralized movement of opposition- a vanguard party, while today the post-Fordist mode of opposition be formed as networks and nodes. See point 1. Again this position depends on a flat reading of history. Before as today I think opposition will be multi-faceted and we will judge them according to our values- We have Hugo Chavez, Obrador (don’t forget Lula who was embraced by more social democratic radicals, but quietly swept under the carpet after he got elected and began a precipitous swing to the right) then we have the Zapatistas, APPO, the factory repossession movement in Argentina. While clearly I think the latter type of movements have a more real possibility to lead to the society we want and the former highly likely not (and also very likely leading, eventually, to something we would strongly oppose), the structure of capital does not necessitate that people struggle in any particular way. Rather, I think that given the extreme disillusionment with and failure of state-centered models and the lack of a successful contrasting model of revolution that is sending organizers and millions of dollars in support money all over the world (Comintern), people are choosing the later non-state centered models. Further, I think what is problematic about the former is just as problematic today as it was a century ago, again, only a skewed perspective of history allows people to circumvent this.
Wrapping up, I believe that some of the folks discussed acknowledge that history has not fared well for Leninism. My humble theory is that they have created a problematic historical dichotomy between the Fordist and post-Fordist era modes of production (modern and post-modern?), which work to justify their previous Leninist political and historical assumptions, while allowing them theoretical space to assert new political and theoretical analysis’ in contradiction to their previous ones. These thinkers are creating false historical dichotomies, justifying bad politics (Leninism) and avoiding asking more critical questions about their past political assumptions.
To sum it all up, they are not following very sound proletarian science
Thanks for indulging my slightly off topic rant. I’m interested in hearing responses.
Comment by Adam W. — May 23, 2008 @ 8:57 pm
Not that it will clarify the dicussion, but ‘vogelfrei’ is a late medieval/early modern legal term, usually translated as ‘outlawed.’ At that time, protection under the law was inseparable from membership in ‘family’ of a feudal property owner. Separation from the land and the ‘family’ resulted in a life outside the law in much that way. Since outlawery also meant that anyone could inflict summary ‘justice’ on the outlaw, we could also read oulawery as the state of the worker at the disposal of any employer and without legal protection.
Comment by Chuckie K — May 25, 2008 @ 10:56 am
Adam,
Sorry your comment got sent to moderation, I don’t understand the criteria for how the blog decides to do that. Anyhow, real quick, two things. One, on the Bookchin, I’ve been meaning to read that for years. I really disagree with this: “under feudalism the scarcity of resources and thus social hierarchy were necessitated.” It seems to me that this makes hierarchy not political but technical or natural. I think it’s very reasonable to say that under some conditions hierarchy is less surprising, but it’s not like political forms below a certain level of provisioning are just given. That seems really mechanical to me. Second, the other thing I’d say is that “all these centralized forms happened at the same time in the Fordist era - in companies, in the global economy, and in political forms” type of argument makes a logical leap in terms of causality. Why should the centralization of firms dictate the centralization of workers’ movements? Why should the decentralization of firms dictate the decentralization of workers’ movements? Etc. That type of thing seems to me to be intellectually sloppy. It’s like - “I ate bacon and eggs before all of our successful job actions, since I have now become vegan I no longer eat bacon or eggs, I think our next job action will fail because I won’t eat bacon and eggs first.” Okay that’s a bit over the top but it’s a similar jump in reasoning. Gotta go.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — May 25, 2008 @ 10:32 pm
Hi All
I think one of the problems with a notion of the commons, as used by the Midnight Notes Collective form example, is that it effaces any critique of reproductive labour. This is, despite the fact that the MNC have a deep seated commitment to the understandings of Dalla Costa, Fortunati, etc. A politics of the commons oft poses an ill-defined realm of non-monetary creation of value as a currently existing pools of strength for the proletariat and also an area for the direction creation of communism. What Fortunati argued so well was that these ‘apparently’ non-monetary relations are not out-side capital, but within it as they produce the essential commodity: labour - power. Thus they are constitute relations that need to be struggled on/against in a way that produces a ‘positive abolition’ (am I misquoting Marx?). The MNC never resolve this tension. It is a flaw in the heart of the notion of the commons. Perhaps notions of sub/under-commons attempt to resolve this.
rebel love
Dave
Comment by grumpy cat — June 7, 2008 @ 7:47 am
hi Dave,
Well put. The point to my mind is that “commons” is not rich enough a term. Some sorts of ostensible commons may be a subtle redistribution of value productive labor, others may well not be bound up with (re/productive of) capitalism but that doesn’t make them liberatory.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — June 7, 2008 @ 3:58 pm