What in the hell …

I finally got a draft of that talk on the common done. I’m not happy with it except the done part. This is as good as it’s gonna be, given my time etc. Say la vee. As they c’est. (more…)

In a recent post, Steve Shaviro suggests that Hardt and Negri are economistic. I agree. In a recent piece, “The Common in Communism,” Hardt approvingly cites Marx from the 1844 manuscripts, about the growth of one form of property opening up new political possibilities.

Of course, changes in forms of property and so forth *do* change existing possibilities. (more…)

Getting closer to an actual draft of talk I agreed to give on “the common.” Regular readers of the blog may recognize pieces of prior posts here, sorry about that y’all, those posts have been part of me working my way up to/around to this.

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I’m going to talk about some recent writings by Antonio Negri and others on what they call “the common.” Before I get into that, though, please consider the images below. I’ll lay out some things that I think are interesting about these images.

Each of these photographs takes an image out of its context and holds it up for our consideration in a new context. (more…)

So I’ve been reading around in Hardt and Negri’s new book Commonwealth, as part of my ongoing interest in their work and as part of trying to finish this talk I’m supposed to give on Negri and others’ writings on what they call “the common.” As anyone whose ever discussed this stuff w/ me knows I’ve engaged with this stuff for a while and have moved from being very enthusiastic to being frustrated by it. I think that’s legitimate and I do of course think I’m right in my criticisms and so on, but I think my tone get annoying sometimes, a tone of exasperation. This annoys me too, in that these days I sort of lose sight sometimes of why this work is worth engaging with at all. This work was a formative intellectual influence for me despite my current disconnects. (This is part of the source of the tenor of my reactions, a feeling that people I like and respect are falling short of what they could be doing with their abilities and know-how.) And despite my disagreements with a fair bit of their work nowadays, there remains a big chunk of it that is still (at least for me) a really important thing to think with - even though increasingly I feel like I’m thinking with it by thinking against Hardt and Negri’s positions on a lot, that thinking is for me quite clarificatory.

Continuing my recent spate of re-blogging, check out this post by Negatron. In it, Negatron discusses some marxists’ recent uses of categories like primitive accumulation and in the process says some things which are I think useful for making sense of other issues within marxism. (more…)

The same as my line on more or less everything - a rigorously Marxist one.

I’ve had all this common/commons stuff on my mind lately (I got some links to toss in here later, they’re on another computer). A while back when I was doing a bit of reading on slavery in the US it struck me that slave labor at least some of the time involved an ongoing use by slaveholders of land which slaves held in common, in a sense. That is, slave owners could offload reproductive costs and so forth onto slaves, cheapening the cost of maintaining slaves. (In my opinion one of the many things that’s interesting about the history of slavery - really, the history of any forms of exploitation - is how it can clarify one’s marxism.) At this level of generality, this is what goes on with waged labor as well - we reproduce ourselves day to day and year to year and many of us reproduce in the sense of having children, thus making more workers. We don’t do so in order to enrich anyone monetarily, but we still produce life and lives appropriated under capitalism. (more…)

One of these days when I finally feel like I’m ahead of the curve on at least some of the things I have on my plate (and when I’ve stopped mixing my metaphors) I’d like to work up some of the following. And so, notes to self. (more…)