All of which is to say, Duncan, I’ll pack my copy of v1 for my holiday travels and will do my best to get back on track…!

/ End odd mood.

I wonder how much of all this is the result of longstanding projects and relationships and how much of this is the result of things (you know, things - relationships, networks, etc) that are being built much more quickly. I particularly wonder about how this stuff is spreading. Are (some of) the same people involved from one effort to the next? If so, at what level - planning, or just spreading the idea? Are people hearing about occupations then being inspired to occupy? If so, by what means? And what people? Few or none of the possibilities here are mutually exclusive. My hunch is that this stuff is being spread something like the following - radicalized students who are plugged into some informal information networks hear about one occupation through somewhat passive outreach (by passive outreach I mean here material that one sort of has to be looking for to find, not a clear or well worked out definition I know), get fired up, try to spread information further in other parts of their social and information networks. What I wonder most about is the participation of less politicized students. How much is it happening? If it is to much of a significant degree, how is it happening? How much outreach is being done beyond the circles of the usual suspects? (I don’t mean that dismissively, I can’t think of a better term.) I think this has a lot of bearing on what might be done by those of us who aren’t involved and who live far away. Among other things, I wonder if some kind of coordinated outreach might be done, and if that would be actually useful, to let more people know about all this - beyond the usual suspects.

After I gave the beers to my neighbor I started thinking, when would I drink that beer? I’d definitely would drink it if I had kept it around the house but I wouldn’t have liked it. It’d be a first beer that I’d endure, not enjoy. I think it might be an okay second beer, or third beer. Then I got to thinking, what makes for a good second beer? To be clear here, “second beer” doesn’t mean “the second drink you have”, it’s the second type of beer you drink while drinking. So, if you have a pint of Guiness then a pint of Stella, the Stella is both the second drink and the second beer. If you have three pints of Guiness then a pint of Stella, your second drink and third drinks are Guiness, the Stella is your fourth drink and your second beer. I know I have tastes about what I like better in a second beer, but I’m not sure what they are, because I don’t drink very often anymore. I’d say this brown ale that I didn’t like would be a lousy first beer for me (because I don’t like how it tastes). It’d be an okay second beer, because by the time the second beer rolls around I’m in a more charitable mood. I think it’d totally work for a third beer, because the third beer mostly just has to be wet and beer-ish in flavor. Ideally it should be lighter too. Hmm.

Inconclusive. Clearly further inquiry is needed.

Currently 3 degrees F (that’s about -16 celsius), -12 (that’s -24 C) with the windchill. I wish my dog could walk herself.

EDIT:
It’s 2ish in the AM, I took the dog out one last time before going to bed. The dog was already asleep, I woke her up. She was happy to see me but when I walked over to the door and started putting on my coat she realized that I wanted to take her outside. She turned and walked away, headed back for her bed. I called her again but she wouldn’t come to me. I had to trick her, I opened the pantry door. We keep the dog food in the pantry so she always comes running when she hears it. I had the leash ready so when she ran over I clipped it on her and made her come outside with me. She looked at me like she was being punished. I took a bit of dog food with me, as a reward for enduring the cold. She peed really fast then turned back toward the house. My dog normally loves walks. I just checked, it’s 0 degrees F, -14 with windchill right now.

‘Tis the season when ’tis fairly easy to strike up a conversation with any stranger here, as long as it’s about the weather, and when ’tis fairly hard to have any conversation about anything else.

Did I mention that it’s cold?

One of the things I now reject is the idea that capitalism’s development historically is conditioned solely by the struggles of the working class. I think that’s a fair paraphrase of ‘the autonomist hypothesis,’ which is a misnomer because it’s more like an axiom for a lot of autonomists. I think Negri’s work in particular is only able to ever identify a historical advance, the working class is always recomposing on a higher plane of struggle and so on. It ends up being like a clock with the hands frozen - sometimes it gets the time right, but it usually doesn’t. That’s some bathwater. The baby here, to my mind, is the idea of trying to pay attention to what’s going on and identify when and where history may be advancing (”historical advance” is not my favorite idea, but I hope the gist is clear), and when the forces
of reaction are rising or winning. Another thing I now reject is Negri’s idea that all of our life time is productive. I think the baby here is again the question of when and where and how the capital relation shapes our lives and our lives serve to help maintain the capital relation; the bathwater is the move that provides pat answers, usually of an entirely theoretical nature, which close off questions and stand in place of investigating actually existing phenomena.

The other big thing that I’ve come back to wondering about is the question of organization(s). Autonomist marxism strikes me as quite bad about that. Here too, baby and bathwater. The baby is the emphasis on the limits of some organizations/organizational form, expressed sometimes as the autonomy of the class from “its” official organizations - parties and unions and so on, and the power of workers to create new organizations and organizational forms. The bathwater is that all of that remains, in much autonomist marxism, at basically the level of an abstract gesture with very little concrete details. And here Negri in particular seems quite limited, seeing every organization as contributing something to the forward march of the
multitude, and that something is barely if at all specified, instead of having a critical sensibility that allows one to sort organizations/organizational forms. Whatever there is to say about issues of organization, autonomist marxism seems to me to have little to offer, except the important but to my mind rather basic point that no organization will be the whole class or represent the whole class’s interests.

Where is the process of workers moving from class in itself wanting more of what we’re denied to class for itself wanting the abolition of the structures that produce our denial of needs? Call it coming to class consciousness, or something else, I don’t like any of the terms but I think the problem is key and it’s one that I’m increasingly convinced autonomist Marxism is at best mixed at.

There’s at least a version of autonomist marxism which seems to suggests that the
class is already self-sufficient to some degree, imposing crisis on its own – composing, recomposing, and decomposing class deals without any or much input from the left, use of revolutionary ideas, or even thinking in a clear way about what it’s doing.

autonomist Marxism generally articulates an idea of the relative self-sufficiency of the working class. I agree with that in broad strokes. The thing is how relative this is and what sort of self-sufficiency. What role do writings by autonomists have? What role do people have who don’t just want more of what we’re denied now but who want an end to the structures that produce our denial? Where do such people come from? Is it important to try to get there to be more of such people?

More simply, is there any role for discussions on political organizations and their tasks in all this? Autonomist marxists sometimes form political organizations of a sort - editorial collectives, mostly. I’ve never seen them explain why they do what they do instead of other things, nor have I seen them engage with historical or current questions of political organization, or of the various options of how political organizations can relate to mass organizations and an evaluation of those different options.

I’m still trying to sort out what to make of autonomist Marxism in light of my experiences over the past few years. I’ve had very little experience with localized versions of the class as sufficient. I’ve had limited but positive experiences with working class radicals deliberately acting on other workers to get them fired up about taking action on the job. Through those experiences, I’ve come to wrestle with a question of priorities: do we want to win for the class in itself or do we want to move more workers to a class-for-itself perspective? The two aren’t totally incompatible but a lot of the time at least in my activities we have had to make a
decision about which to prioritize, which has shaped our tactics. I’ve found autonomist Marxism only minimally useful in all this. The empowering narrative is useful as a starting point, but only as a starting point at best, and in some versions of it the emphasis on autonomy precludes certain discussions from even happening. Maybe we can use the Hegelian terms – autonomy is a negation of the idea of our class as determined by capital, there can be what the Hegelians call a first negation and a second negation of this idea. The first negation is the one I’m hesitant about. I’ve yet to see much in the way of a second negation of this, at least in what I’ve read of material that is generally called autonomist.

I also feel like the autonomist stuff, particularly it’s more theoretical end (and it’s a pretty theoreticist milieu over all), namely the post-operaismo stuff like Negri, had me chasing up textual references to certain figures and chasing questions of intellectual history and narrowly philosophical questions rather than more low theory questions (”low” as in “close to the ground”) that I feel like are more pressing and that I am, as a result, ill equipped to answer (and after those questions appeared on my radar I’ve found that at least for me the autonomist stuff doesn’t speak to them very well, either, such that I feel the need for other resources and approaches, and other conversations to be part of).

Anyone know how to make that go away so I can get the actual useful incoming links thing to work again?

Edit:
By the way, several years late, I figured out how to make recent comments appear! Neat, eh? Lower right hand corner of the page.

Neurath: “We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, never able to dismantle it in dry-dock and to reconstruct it there out of the best materials.”

Quine: “a boat which, if we are to rebuild it, we must rebuild plank by plank while staying afloat in it”

So I don’t forget the whole reason I looked for the quote(s) in the first place: I want to play with the metaphor in relation the ‘building a ship’ column I wrote a while ago. Must get back to that eventually.

I recently did a bit of thinking again recently about some of Marx’s remarks on communism, mostly in the German Ideology. I’m not keen on that book over all but there are some moments… Marx talks about how “[i]n a real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association.” I think this combines well with his (best) definition of communism as “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things” and with his claim that “the word “communist”
(…) in the real world means the follower of a definite revolutionary party”,though I’ve got big reservations with the party, at least with the term. In any case, the real movement and the revolutionary organization (not to conflate the two) both ought to be a place where people obtain freedom in and through association in/as they/we abolish the present state of things. Our hope is that we build “real community [in which] the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association”, such that we are — in at least one sense of freedom — more free in/through/for our involvement. I like to use music as an analogy for this - there’s a discipline required to learning an instrument and learning to play music (either other people’s songs/covers or writing songs or improvising), and/but this discipline allows one greater freedom… a really good practiced musician is more free than I am, in a specific sense - free to make good music, and I, with my very limited and lazy under practiced musicianship am in that same sense more free than people who don’t have any music training.