All of which, I should add, is not to deny the distinctiveness of Italian autonism and Negri's attempts to give an intellectual voice to it. Zizek's observation about how fascism displaces class antagonism (at least temporarily) is NOT ORIGINAL, by the way. This first quote is Zizek writing for a 'popular' audience, LRB. I think in that ongoing debate about "Is the US a fascist country?" can get beyond the fairly superficial approach which attempts to pit a 'meaning is use' view with an 'essentialist' one (fascism has the following essences, the US does not have a sufficient number of these essences to qualify). The question around 'class struggle' and 'class antagonism' might be: How does the current political economy of the US displace class antagonism?
White on black antagonism might still have some use, but the current state of the US is more like fascism than many suppose. The US's racism is turned outward into militarism and overt racism against Arabs, Persians, brown-skinned Muslims, etc). Meanwhile, everyone who is a productive, patriotic American is a potential manager, business owner, home owner, consumer and stock and bond holder, not a WORKER (worker=loser). But the US doesn't have nor would post-modern fascism in the country need mass political parties attempting social or political revolution. And one key element missing is the fact that ever since WW II the vast majority of working class men DO NOT do military service and even of the ones who do most do not fight in dangerous frontline battlefields. You might have more injuries and deaths in a military training exercise using tanks and artillery than you do in a helicopter deployment to a Taliban-controlled province of Afghanistan. The US is fighting two 'wars' in countries its military occupies and politically controls (to the extent that there is a polity to control, i.e., anti-Iranian Shia groups in Iraq, pro-Gulf Sunni Arabs in Iraq, friends of Karzai in Khabul, etc.). Meaning, it's not really fighting two wars. It is, however, spending money it doesn't have for more than two wars. Hence that final element that makes the US so very scary--profiteering from militarism. Which brings me back to reading around on class etc. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n06/slavoj-zizek/the-two-totalitarianisms What changes in the passage from Communism to Nazism is a matter of form, and it is in this that the Nazi ideological mystification resides: the political struggle is naturalised as racial conflict, the class antagonism inherent in the social structure reduced to the invasion of a foreign (Jewish) body which disturbs the harmony of the Aryan community. It is not, as Nolte claims, that there is in both cases the same formal antagonistic structure, but that the place of the enemy is filled by a different element (class, race). Class antagonism, unlike racial difference and conflict, is absolutely inherent to and constitutive of the social field; Fascism displaces this essential antagonism. http://www.variant.org.uk/35texts/NeverWork.html Antonio Negri, noted, Operaismo was initiated as an attempt to reply politically to the crisis of the Italian labour movement in the 1950s in the aftermath of World War II. For many workers – after their prominent role in the struggles against Mussolini and the Wermacht – the future held out the promise of socialism, or, at the very least, major improvements in work conditions and pay alongside more participation in the production process. Yet Palmiro Togliatti, the leader of the PCI, had other ideas. Above all, Togliatti sought a programme to unite the broad mass of people against the group of capitalists yoked to fascism. The decisive arena for political gains, according to Togliatti, was in formal, parliamentary politics where accommodation with other groups was deemed a necessity. The quest for these political objectives, within the Constituent Assembly and the Constitution, led inexorably to the subordination of working-class antagonism and the struggle for fundamental economic change.60 Togliatti, saw productivity as the path to Italy’s salvation: the resumption of economic growth within the framework of private ownership would ensure the construction of a “strong democracy”. As the “[t]rue children of the Comintern”, the PCI were willing to concede shop-floor organisation for unitary economic reconstruction through “the restoration of the managerial prerogative” within the factories. Hostage to nationalist ideology and private forms of management technique, the PCI facilitated the extraction of high levels of exploitation from the workers by placing labour discipline and productivity at the top of their agenda. As one Fiat worker put it when Togliatti and Christian Democrat leader De Gaspari came to visit his factory: “[t]hey both argued exactly the same thing; the need to save the economy. … We’ve got to work hard because Italy’s on her knees, we’ve been bombarded by the Americans … but don’t worry because if we produce, if we work hard, in a year or two we’ll all be fine. … So the PCI militants inside the factory set themselves the political task of producing to save the national economy, and the workers were left without a party”.61 -------------- The autonomists’ great contribution to debates around the negation of capitalism was to re-instate, after decades of suppression in the name of productivity, the idea of alienation and antagonism at the heart of the production process, positing a radical rupture from the ‘golden chains’ of the wage-labor relation in Italy and beyond. News also travelled from abroad. In the aftermath of May ‘68 in France, Massimo Cacciari would state that liberation from labour, not merely the liberation of labour, had become the key aim of revolutionary politics. When young Renault workers in France, during May ’68, demanded a minimum wage of 1000 francs per month (an exorbitant and impossible demand), Bologna and Daghini saw that the demand, which threatened to “blow up” the labour market, was symptomatic of a desire on behalf of the workers, “to negate their own figure as producers”.67 The “strategy of refusal” first posited by Mario Tronti in 1965 was now a widespread actuality. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
