Pre-Hardt Negri collaborating with Guattari (Deleuze's frequent collaborator). As a reader of some of this back in the 80s (in a collection of Guattari's solo stuff), I realize why that book Empire seemed so unoriginal.
---------------------------- http://voiceimitator.blogspot.jp/2009/09/felix-guattari-toni-negri-communists.html Felix Guattari & Toni Negri: Communists Like Us (1985) "Singularity, autonomy, and freedom are the three banners which unite in solidarity every struggle against the capitalist and/or socialist orders. >From now on, this alliance invents new forms of freedom, in the emancipation of work and in the work of emancipation." Communists Liks Us is a defense of communism and a relatively early explication of the idea of autonomy for non-Italian readers. Its political intervention and theoretical advances misunderstood or ignored when first published, Communists Like Us faces the opposite problem today: the surge of Negri translations and works on Autonomia has drained the book of much of its intended force. However, the book remains singular in its hybridization of conceptual lexicons: autonomy is quite directly identified with (or reduced to) "molecular movement" throughout the book, and the concepts Guattari developed with Deleuze - notably deterritorialization and reterritorialization - play, for the better or the worse, a greater role here than in most of the rest of Negri's writings. At the book's outset, Guattari and Negri state that their aim is "to rescue 'communism' from its own disrepute." Writing prior to the collapse of real socialism, they seek out a communism that would escape from the capitalist/socialist dichotomy of the Cold War. For them, communism is "the collective struggle for the liberation of work." Work must become "a project and a process of liberation." In contrast to the Soviet model of state economic planning and to the capitalist subordination of work to control and calculation, the work process must become autonomous. Communism is more than "just the sharing of wealth . . . it must inaugurate a whole new way of working together." As Negri often repeats in his books, communism involves "the creation of a new subjective consciousness born of the collective work experience." But this subjective consciousness is not some homogeneous or inevitable class consciousness. Nor is it the official ideology of any party or state. "Communism has nothing to with the collectivist barbarism that has come into existence. Communism is the most intense experience of subjectivity, the maximization of the process of singularization." Collective consciousness is the ongoing "nodal articulation of a multitude of marginalities and singularities." There is a complex "weaving" of "molecular struggles for liberation" that would be difficult to order into a "single historical sequence." Somewhat problematically, Guattari and Negri obviously use the history of Italy and Autonomia in the 1970s to analyze communism, but they refuse to go into any details. Their book is therefore greatly assisted by being read alongside the more concrete discussions collected in the semiotext(e) reprint of Autonomia. Perhaps groping toward a concept of Empire or at least of the capitalist world-system, Guattari and Negri argue that the international integration of economies has generated "Integrated World Capitalism" (I.W.C.), an awkward term that reflects the book's unclear analysis of globalization. Guattari and Negri demand "the destruction of all ideologies of an external vanguard" while defending their ideas from the accusation of anarchism (I presume this argument was lost on many non-Italian readers at the time). Clearly the Red Brigade is in mind when they denounce "an ossified leninism, which is disconnected from all historical materiality, reduced entirely to a statist interpretation, a sort of paranoid point of reference which it sought to impose on the recomposition of the movement." They also dismiss representative government and the desire to acquire state power through revolution: "We refuse everything which repeats the constitutive models of representative alienation and the rupture between the levels where political will is formed and the levels of its execution and administration." This attack is extended to the socialist parties/unions that historically compromised with the state and the interests of capital and that ended up reproducing the state's representative form. Instead of terroristic vanguardism or parliamentary participation, Guattari and Negri affirm a "radical materialism," a materialism that is irreducible to economism or anarchist spontaneity. They claim that "only a continuous and multidimensional revolution can constitute an alternative to the failed projects of archeo-socialism." "From now on, organizing signifies first: work on oneself, in as much as one is a collective singularity: construct and in a permanent way re-construct this collectivity in a multivalent liberation project. Not in reference to a directing ideology, but within the articulations of the real." In particular, we need to break with the ideology of the "workers' centrality" to revolutionary struggle, though of course "molecular revolutions, the new subjective arrangements, autonomies and processes of singularization are capable of restoring a revolutionary meaning to the struggles of the working class." Guattari and Negri add: "Think, live, experiment, and struggle in another way: such will be the motto of a working class which can no longer perceive itself as 'self-sufficient' and which has everything to win by renouncing its arrogant myths of social centrality." _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
