What in the hell …

As the result of a combination of a post of Chris’s and an excellent article in an old issue of Anarcho-Syndicalist Review that I read while in sunny California for a wobbly meeting recently, I’ve been thinking about history. (more…)

The LS Schmittfest bonfire’s settled down into orange and black embers. In his raking of the coals Craig suggests people reflect on nationalism and proposes privilege as a further conversation topic. (more…)

Buy a copy, and then use these notes to return to it.

The stuff on urban and rural is quite like immaterial labor in those circles today, as is the stuff on language. The stuff on labor as political basis may be useful for challenging Virno’s assertion that the Arendt/Aristotle formulation has broken down in postfordism, since labor was already conceived as and functioned as political in the 1840s. Also would be interesting to compare artisan labor w/ immaterial labor, esp printers, worker-poets, pamphleteering incl Ranciere on artisans and response to him. Sewell starts the book asserting essentially the hegemony of artisan labor, rather like immaterial labor, also shows up limits of the abilities imputed to hegemonic immaterial labor (among them universalizing a nonuniversal position). Also check out the book Alberto recommended on immaterial labor and utopian socialism.

Also to return to -
p189- 193 on corps, corporation, etat,
194-200 on the July Revolution, change in idiom, change in the use of the term “exploit”
201-206 on the idiom of association, Buchez,
206-211 on association, corporation, conflict with the masters
211-215 on changes in the concept of labor and broadening the field of association
222 on the use of the term “social” (see also 143-4 on “industry” and “society”)
228 on Villerme and a moralizing bourgeois image of the workers, need for discipline (like Lenin)
235-6 on Louis Blanc, (petit) bourgeois radicalism
236-242 on worker poets and changes in the concept of labor
249 on the concept of labor
262-265 on the concept of labor, socialism, labor as providing a right to participation (the workers are the people)
267-270 on the relationship with rural and agricultural workers - a universal idiom but one which neglects important differences (universal program for association based on the experiences of urban workers). See especially 267 on “workers of thought” and “workers of the head”, and 269 on the power of speech, language as foundation

Pillage material from the bibliography on 285-290, 293, 295, 296, 298, 299, 301, 302, 305, 309-317.

I’ve been racing the clock to finish this Sewell book before it’s due back to the library (curse you, unknown recaller!) but I may break down and buy it. One of Sewell’s goals is to show that the persistence of corporate idioms among the working class after the French revolution does not indicate a backwardness on the part of the class, no kind of vestigial holdover. Rather, the idiom on the workers’ differs on the part of the workers than on the part others, and it is re-articulated by the workers in new contexts. (more…)

A body. No, not Foucault or Spinoza. More from Sewell. (more…)

More trying to tie threads between things. (more…)

Class consciousness is not a category I’ve got much interest in, insofar as I’ve encountered it. William Sewell takes it his object of study in his 1980 book Work and Revolution in France, but not so much as a theoretical category. More along the lines of “what did (some) workers think?” I’m more open to that. (more…)

There’s been a bit of discussion on the autopsy email list about an interview with Paolo Virno that appeared in Grey Room. In it Virno says the following -

The decisive experience of my youth was the revolutionary
struggle in a developed capitalist country. I insist: developed. A country, that
is, in which physical survival was guaranteed, consumption relatively high,
with by that time widespread scholastic instruction. I did not participate in
an uprising against misery or dictatorship but in a radical conflict aiming at
abolishing that modern form of barbarism: wage labor. We were not “thirdworldist”
but “Americanist.” Fighting at Fiat of Turin, we were thinking of
Detroit, not Cuba or Algiers. Only where capitalist development has reached
its height is there a question of the anticapitalist revolution.

(more…)