tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post8167749451564007119..comments2024-03-20T01:04:27.846-05:00Comments on Permanent Crisis: The labor process and consciousnessUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-10215885153496428322011-08-26T09:55:39.492-05:002011-08-26T09:55:39.492-05:00The difference I would note between class identity...The difference I would note between class identity and the other forms of identity therein is that class threatened to cut out the very heart of capitalist society as a society based on impersonal, objective forms of domination, whereas the other struggles primarily tackles relations not of impersonal, objective forms of domination but personal, directly social forms of domination. To the degree that capitalist society can allow for the mitigation of direct forms of domination, a certain jockeying is inevitable. The class aspect however is more difficult to deal with insofar as a positive working class identity is always sort of oppositional to capital and thus must be hidden in the guise of the citizen-consumer and employee. The impersonal, objective character of capitalist domination lends itself to this masking at the point at which workers are broadly included politically and as consumers.<br /><br />I would also just add that racialization and gendering, for example, have a specific ground in the capital-labor relation. In the case of sexualization/gendering, for example, it is tied to the separation of private and public the family and reproduction on one side, and civil society and the state on the other. That is, the separation of citizen and bourgeois in capitalist society is sort of always-already gendered because prior to that women were driven into the private world of the family and public space was accorded to men, itself a somewhat natural outcome of the absolute separation of the space and time of production for a wage from the space and time of unwaged (hence private, not social, not public) reproduction. This is why it is not enough to invert private and public (as Gaspar Tamas suggests in his otherwise excellent "Rudiments of a Political Philosophy of socialism"), but to remember the importance of the slogan of the women's movement that the personal is political, thought I would express it more in the vein that the private is public/political, that is, it too is a domain of social relations of power that must be opened up.<br /><br />As a result of this, I think that identity politics has taken on a particularly pernicious character in pluralist and multicultural conceptions, tolerance, etc. Lost is the desire to completely destroy oppressive relations, but rather to allow them to subsist in their equal difference, side by side, leaving them essentially unquestioned.<br /><br />The good part is that radical theory around this, like Judith Butler for example, begins to recognize the need to abolish gender as much as to abolish class, that revolution entails the surpassing of the relations, not the equitable sharing of society among them.Chris Wrighthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14364071049767652706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-16232422074491886732011-08-26T09:55:25.665-05:002011-08-26T09:55:25.665-05:00I wish I had an answer to your first questions! I...I wish I had an answer to your first questions! I think the best we can say is that some of the old illusions, which seemed virtually unimpeachable because they expressed the positive identity labor at a certain, definite point in the development of the capital-labor relation, are vulnerable. The ideas that it was enough to abolish private property, get rid of the capitalist class, exchange the working class for the capitalist class in power over "industrial society" i.e. that the problems were at the level of distribution of wealth and power, are severely shaken and have been systematically taken to task theoretically (c.f. Postone, Tamas, Rose, Bonefeld, Backhaus, Reichelt, etc.)<br /><br />As for the rise of identity politics, I don't think that is new. Identity politics have always existed as long as specific forms of oppression are at issue. And I believe that much of working class politics remained a kind of identity politics as well, insofar as working class was a positive identity, rather than a relation to be abolished along with the entirety of class society.<br /><br />What I find disturbing in the present is that whereas for a long time "identity politics" in the form of the workers' movement, women's movement, anti-colonial movements, civil rights, anti-slavery, etc. had two dimensions, an identitarian, regressive dimension that sought to find its rightful (rights-full?) place in capitalist society, it also had a universalizing, anti-identitarian dimension which did not want to solidify the gender, racial, class, etc. identity but which sought to abolish it, and in general the oppressor identity which was its opposite, today that anti-identitarian element has been undermined not only in the workers' movement but in all of these movements.<br /><br />I think there is a jockeying for position in contemporary identity politics which is also willing to acknowledge the validity of the oppressive side, thereby, most importantly, validating the ethical acceptability of racialization, gendering, sexualizing, nationalism, etc.Chris Wrighthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14364071049767652706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-25150044257673670272011-08-25T16:32:38.418-05:002011-08-25T16:32:38.418-05:00Thanks for this essay, it gives us a lot to think ...Thanks for this essay, it gives us a lot to think about and I think it will definitely help advance the conversation on this blog. I am wondering where you think the collapse of "working-class identity politics" has left us. How does the loss of a working-class identity change our understanding of what the role of the left is? What new opportunities are we presented with for realizing the overcoming of capital, or do you view this loss in terms of a regression?<br /><br />Also I would be curious to know what kind of connection, if any, you see between the loss of working-class identity and the proliferation of identities and identity groups throughout the neo-liberal period.<br /><br />Obviously these are big questions that would defy any attempt at a definitive answer at this point, but I am curious to hear what your approach to these issues would be.Deckardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06918939582411126943noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-39243860603969099012011-08-25T14:53:04.221-05:002011-08-25T14:53:04.221-05:00There is a wealth of information available digging...There is a wealth of information available digging in articles like these:<br /><br />http://www.marxmail.org/Imani.htm<br /><br />http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~fmoseley/Working_Papers_PDF/RRPE.pdfChris Wrighthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14364071049767652706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-89023251620823924062011-08-25T14:35:42.198-05:002011-08-25T14:35:42.198-05:00I think that I would restrict my comment, at least...I think that I would restrict my comment, at least for now, about the amount of dead labor animating living labor, to the developed countries. One of the interesting things in places like china, which was also true say in Russia in 1913, is that because labor can be so cheap, it is often more profitable to employ a lot of laborers to do certain tasks than to employ a machine. For example, having workers carry steel beams from one part of the mill to another versus spending on a massive lift.<br /><br />The capacity to go back to the land has always been at issue, but I think one problem is that it is not so easy to do now as it was 100 years ago. Still, one problem for China in becoming the next global power, and for India too, would be the seemingly near impossible task of modernizing agriculture. As long as that problem remains (and solving it from a capitalist point of view would be central to building a more massive internal market), it also remains as a certain kind of safety valve.<br /><br />I do think that even in the developing countries, such as they are, the kinds of technology they are forced to employ does not give the same room for expansion of employment that industry did in 1900 or even 1930. If you want to compete in microchips, rather than merely circuit boards, you need a $2 billion plant with probably 50 workers and a huge, highly trained and equipped R & D team.<br /><br />My main indicators for changes in the relation of dead to living labor are taken from changes in productivity, total output, and the number of workers engaged in that production relative to investment in gross fixed capital stock. I make no claim that I could at this point provide something I could pass by a review board, and so maybe I should less sanguine about my comment.Chris Wrighthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14364071049767652706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-21640486136989161962011-08-24T19:00:47.115-05:002011-08-24T19:00:47.115-05:00In early 20th century Russia and even during the C...In early 20th century Russia and even during the Civil War, it was very common for the working class to return to the land and become peasants during periods of job-scarcity. During the civil war, Russian cities depopulated on a massive scale.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110115832783903104.post-61839560755541573732011-08-24T17:57:10.934-05:002011-08-24T17:57:10.934-05:00This is very helpful in making more concrete some ...This is very helpful in making more concrete some of the processes we've thus far been discussing in rather too abstract terms. I like your point that "working-class identity politics" (an illuminating way of putting it) broke apart with the fragmentation of the production process. One potential challenge to this view is the failure of an analogous working-class identity politics to emerge in the great sweatshop regions of China. More than 300,000 workers are interned at a single Foxconn 富士康 facility in Shenzhen, for instance. Ching Kwan Lee has argued in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Against-Law-Protests-Rustbelt-Sunbelt/dp/0520250974" rel="nofollow"><i>Against the Law</i></a> that the plot of agricultural land guaranteed to the millions of migrant laborers who fill the sweatshops has provided a fallback option that forestalls the development of a coherent collective identity: whenever conflict gets too intense, the workers can just go back to the villages. Does this seem like an adequate explanation to you?<br /><br />When you write "Empirically since World War II a point has been reached where more and more dead labor is not animating more and more living labor", do you have only the rich countries in mind, or does this include China and other sweatshop assembly areas? I would be interested in looking at these figures if you have a reference.Walkerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06912406198051338502noreply@blogger.com