Essence and appearance -redux

Yeah I think following on from the other thread Sean68 could realise who he's arguing against.

The article 'TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT CLASS' that he keeps on quoting in the other thread ends:

I think that is a sentiment that almost every poster on this board could identify with. I think Sean could do well with reading To work or not to work? Is that the question? By Gilles Dauvé. Personally in the Dauve/Theorie Communiste debate, I'd side with TC. But Sean68 should realise nobody on here is affirming wage-labour. We are all about aboloshing it.

Amusing that Sean68 still thinks his 'big idea' - that the proletariat must abolish itself rather than constitute itself as a positive post-revolutionary force - is any great revelation to those he is speaking to. But to stereotype all who disagree with his rejection of class struggle as one mass of theoretical dinosaurs shows either dishonesty or chronic ignorance/incomprehension.

To "create a society in which labour does not play a socially mediating role" (as Sean68 describes it on another thread) would mean a struggle between those who recognise their real interests as being for or against that goal. This potential arguably tends to be manifested as a class struggle - pray tell who the new agent of change and what its practice is, if not the most exploited in struggle? Presumably a purely ideological category - those who have assimilated the works of PD, Krisis and Postone? His rejection of class struggle on the basis that the working class is 'integrated' into capitalism is not new, but was spouted by various ideologues in the 60s. The class struggles of the time negated in practice such nonsense - the subsequent terrible defeat of those struggles has inspired a repeat of such notions of 'integration' - 1st time as tragedy etc... (Yet, as GS's quote shows, Sean68 appears to be exaggerating or misinterpreting the meaning of his intellectual gurus.)

The 'conclusion' to the linked article is quite confused and inconclusive; e.g., he claims "...many workers occupy a privileged position within the pecking order. HGV drivers actually produce more accidents statistically than any other road user...". This is a blinkered moralism based on his denial of the significance of workers' class conflict. What he should have more accurately said is that 'The working conditions imposed by the bosses on HGV drivers actually produce more accidents...'

And for all his dismissals of anarchism, he seems to be falling into one of its worst occasional cliches - a fetishising of the unemployed/sick/poor outside the workplace ('lumpens' to some) as inherently more radical than workers. He conveniently forgets that the redundancies/budget cuts in the public services that the unwaged are the most dependent on will only be defended by workers actions - and possibly, at a higher level of class struggle, in alliance with service users.

But Sean68 gets his whole identity from projecting these strawman positions onto others - he uses it to try and convince himself and others that he has 'seen the light' and broken with this illusory belief - and is therefore superior to the left/anarchists etc. In doing this he appears to be renouncing his own former beliefs in an idealised messianic proletariat that he now projects onto others. He judges others by his own miserable standards and so thinks those who talk of any radical potential of class struggle are repeating his own 'proles on a pedestal' foolishness. He is dependent on the left/ultra-left as something to define himself in (supposedly) superior contrast to - so he is its most loyal opposition. That is more or less the whole content of his magazine writing, his posts here etc - a one trick pony.

Sean68 has passed from being the world's most loyal Debordist to a dedicated Postoneism. For all his dismissal of workers as hopelessly integrated into the hierarchies of capitalism, it is those like him who defer to the supposed excellence of their latest intellectual/academic gurus who thereby solidify the very social hierarchies that they attack the working class for being integrated into.

challenging my fucking cock cheese! anyone with any wit reading Marx would have long ago realised that the proletariat was universial in so much that it's liberation meant the abolition of all classes and thus itself. Anyone from a fucking working class background and with some wit wouldn't even have to have bothered reading it to have come to the conclusion that the proletarian condition is nothing to celebrate and what is worth celebrating and upholding is the working class transcending/ negating it's position.

Only middle class cunts, artisanesque workers, or old labourists ever fetishised labour in such a manner, afterall if you actually worked on a production line you'd not be to likely to romanticise it.

Who exactly do you imagine thinks like this on these boards? I don;t think anyone on here is under any illusion that they and their workmates constitute ''something pure under capitalim''. I mean jesus how mental would you have to be to think like that.

So in terms of workplace activity ot oganising in the community, what relevance does this have? What real political point are you actually trying to make?

Also I'm out of this thread. For obvious reasons.

He hasn't made his position very clear on here, but my description of Sean68's 'big idea' is based on what he has often said in the past elsewhere - that those who still believe in class struggle are dwelling in an antiquated retarded swamp etc. As I noted, the views of his intellectual authorities are apparently a little more subtle than that - and S68 takes half-digested bits from here and there to bolster his claims. To revol's query of S68 on the other thread - "Are you at all capable of making something approaching a point instead of cutting and pasting quotes and adding your own non sequitur conclusions?" - the answer appears to be no. Sean68 doesn't really write the PD magazine so much as edit - he ropes in others to write theoretical articles and just puts in the odd paragraph of topical commentary here and there.

I largely agree with revol that the 'big question confronting the class' that is posed here by the TC quote is a bit of a philosophising non-event. (Though I might disagree with him insofar as I think the old workers movement did fetishise/glorify work and the worker and so stunted conceptions of what communism is/may be.) From that quote and other evidence it seems one problem is that the question is posed so that it's discussed as a purely theoretical problem when obviously it is a practical task and will only be solved in practice - a useful theoretical discussion of the practical obstacles would already be beyond any "philosophical quagmires" as it wouldn't be seeking to reach merely philosophical solid ground. The supposed irresolvability of these things on paper seems to be fetishised. If the philosophical categories don't add up, that's a philosophical problem, no more than an abstraction. "Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love." (German Ideology). The level of abstraction doesn't seem to lead anywhere useful for class struggle - it seems to emphasise the end result in a way that ignores the real process of getting there. But, as you acknowledge in your last post, the actual process of struggle is where the answer lies.

But if we are asked to consider undefined terms like "humanity" with regard to class - is it used here as a dismissal/denial of what in proletarian life is not completely at the service of capital and its realisation of surplus value - is it implying, again, that the proles are too integrated to challenge class society, that there is no potential subversive content in class struggle and/or proletarian life? It seems the question wrapped up in all this verbiage is simply 'how can the proletariat make a revolution?' or 'can it make a revolution? or 'why can't it make a revolution?' Hardly great revelations or very novel to pose such questions.

The proletariat - a class of capitalism - has no possibility or need to "exist autonomously"; ie, class struggle only occurs in class society. Why infer from that that it can't "act autonomously from Capital"? It doesn't necessarily follow, unless you believe that one never acts autonomously from what one is in relation to - which more or less demolishes any notion of autonomy. Its struggles have the potential to disrupt and prevent at least some of the goals of its class enemies - its struggles sometimes achieve that. But can it act against Capital's interests, for the self-abolition of the class and with it class society? This question seems here premised on; 'the working class has failed to make a revolution - so maybe it can't due to its relation to Capital'. (Supposing an integration again, sometimes based on 'the proletarian God has failed us'.) For those like Marx - and many others - the answer is the opposite, as revol explained; the proletarian situation is what makes it potentially revolutionary. Even if you don't believe the working class can make a revolution, that wouldn't in itself negate the necessity of class struggle - it's hardly always a given choice whether to resist ruling class attacks. And who are the candidates for new revolutionary subject?

This has come up more than once recently, so I will simply cut and paste my comments from a personal e-mail to Angelus Novus. I edited out some purely vituperative comments, insofar as it has become all too common to not know the difference between one's internal thoughts and inter-personal communications and decent public conduct.

"As for Principia Dialectica, despite a certain warmness to their hostility, I cannot speak kindly of them. Of course, I appreciate if they have translated Krisis and Exit articles, I think they are worth translating. However, they strike me as infantile, to be blunt. The article on their complaint re: the SWP bookstore not carrying their journal was sniveling. Of course the SWP bookstore did not carry it. So what? Who expects otherwise of the SWP? Not carrying Principia Dialectica is not sectarian, it is a political disagreement made manifest in a policy. So much the better for PD if the SWP does not carry them.

More seriously, who gives a fuck about Mark E. Smith from The Fall? Mentions of (relatively) obscure punk rock bands is a definitely sad state of affairs. I had a discussion about something along those lines over dinner last weekend and felt a bit insular and embarrassed, much less having the gall to put it in print. Or simply uncritically posting up a reference to David Harvey's lectures on Capital without even taking a gander at the frankly reactionary crap he has written lately? Or something as sloppy as their comments on Gilles Dauve (Jean Barrot), in which it is impossible to tell where the quote ends and their comment commences (if it did.) http://www.principiadialectica.co.uk/blog/?p=140 see paragraph 3. Further, when someone says "The question is not to remain _faithful_ to 68, but to be _equal_ to the spirit of May. The only method is to be _resolutely outside the system_." I can only wonder on what basis they imagine being outside the system when they spent an entire post claiming that there is no outside.

If this sounds unkindly, so be it. However, this particular article convinced me that they (he?) have give evidence to the idea that the most intellectual radicalism and practical conservatism can go hand-in-hand: http://www.principiadialectica.co.uk/blog/?p=137. Vote for the Labour Left? Vote for Livinginston? Defend democracy? Seriously? Neither Krisis nor Exit! as far as I know has sunk this low.

I take Krisis and Exit! very seriously, for my part. What does it mean to say that we live in a world dominated by money, and in which a large (ever larger?) portion of the planet no longer has access to money through labor or other legal means? I really do believe it means the spread of Pol Pot Cambodia as a new 'model' for the world. I certainly see it here in Baltimore, which as a city that has deeply undergone a process of becoming redundant, now regularly displays a murder count of nearly 1 per day each year with a population of only 600,000+. It is a city where it is hard to not be only one or two people removed from a murder. This last year I had one co-worker have a friend shot and put in a coma, another had a daughter killed, and I was assaulted and robbed at gun point, all of them starting with the request for a cigarette. If I may state something that may seem utterly bizarre, I would ask what kind of world it is where the request for a cigarette, traditionally the one request any person could make of any another person in which a symbolic interaction of the gift was expected without concern for commerce and over which no violence could be expected, has become the opening stanza to murder? It is a small thing, indeed trivial, but when the trivial is a matter of life and death, it becomes impossible to trust at the most trivial level.

To me this (and not only this, by the way, but many other phenomena) only makes sense in a world where money is the foundation of the very symbolic order, and the loss of access to money is the precondition for psychosis and the loss of even the most basic social solidarity, which I mean in a very clinically precise sense. To me, this is the essential value of the analysis of Kurz, et al, regardless of how far we follow them in the rest of their analysis."

Chris

Well, exactly. I think it's very telling that Sean hasn't been back to defend some of the pretty outrageous things he said. I mean, you don't come on a communist website casually claiming that the working class is shrinking and then completely fail to defend that position when challenged several times (to take just the most striking of his claims).

I don't even know what werkritik is, i've been discussing the stuff posted up by Sean68/PD

Wertkritik the label self-applied by the journals Krisis and Exit to their own theoretical "school". Both journals recognize Postone as a co-thinker.

Principia Dialectica, in turn, are co-thinkers of sorts of both Postone and Krisis/Exit.

Chris was stating what he views as the essential contribution of Robert Kurz and the two journals/groups he has been associated with.

Chris also formulated some pointed criticisms of PD, but those criticisms seem to be less at the level of theory, and more at the level of statements made by PD (complaints about the SWP not stocking the journal, etc.)

Fair enough. All I can say is that I am grateful for the work they are doing trying to bring wider publicity to Postone and Kurz/Krisis/Exit. And I say that as someone who has serious reservations concerning the crisis theory of the latter.

Cor! I go on holiday for two weeks and all the chickens in the coop make a right old mess! Words to the wise: 1) go back and read your Marx.
2) To avoid becoming history update your theory. I can't add any more pointers at this stage to help you out on that but here's a titbit for now:
Fredric Jameson halfway right - but seeing it from the standpoint of labour instead of a critique of labour leaves him still,. somewhat short...
"Marxism, like other cultural phenomena, varies according to its socioeconomic context. there should be nothing scandalous about the proposition that the Marxism required by Third World countries will have different emphases from the one that speaks to already receding socialism, let alone to the 'advanced' countries of mulitnational capitalism."
Marxism and Form (1989)
Happy holidays, ye that toil!
The Fox

Some fragments of a new translation of Robert Kurz's 'Lire Marx' is available here:
http://www.principiadialectica.co.uk/blog/?p=190
Here's hoping someone round here might learn to play with Marx's ideas rather than haul them round like tablets of stone?

For all those who missed it first time round...
As well as for all those who don't/can't face the truth about the dimunition of the worldwide proletariat in 2008, you can read the text of the introductory talk at the Principia Dialectica meeting from the recent London anarchist bookfair here:
http://www.principiadialectica.co.uk/blog/?p=208

Textile factories in china and india have encounterd problems with a rapidly shrinking workforce

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