Reich,Autonomist Marxism and Self-Organisation.

I fully agree to Angeus Novus' sugestion of not using broad phrases that haven't any clear reference to any precise political current through the history of 'radical marxism' - sorry for this self-contradiction.

And then to pingu:

What excacly is the question here ?

J,

Sorry, I mean marxism as a politics of subjective resistance. The label "autonomist" ought to be redundant as should the label "libertarian" in "libertarian communist"..This is a post from the Radical Theory Reading Group blog which I pasted, with some modification into this website. In the mechanistic, deterministic, academic marxism which Reich seems to have subscribed to, the subject is omitted and economic crisis is seen as arising from the objective "laws of motion" of capitalism. In this view, society consists of unchanging, fixed categories (or objects) and change can only come from the outside -as in Lenin's "What Is To Be Done"- and not from society's own internal contradictions. The point however is that we do have a capacity for self-organisation, which capital responds to, and we don't all need therapy before we can exercise this capacity, as Reich seems to have asserted. It is also important to try to understand when a crisis is a response to self-organisation and when it isn't, and when both factors interact to make a contribution i.e. bosses may invest in more automation because competition forces them to, and this is not necessarily a response to working-class resistance, although you may just be able to construe competitive pressures as arising indirectly from subjective resistance- one enterprise invests in machinery because its workers "aren't working hard enough" they are able to sell more cheaply etc. and others follow suit, I am not sure about this one, it requires careful research and analysis to understand just what is happening in any given situation. It seems to me though, that since about the beginning of the industrial revolution when machinery began to be used on a large scale and in a systematic way, the historical tendency has been to attempt to eliminate the subjective factor ,or the amount of living labour involved in production ,as much as possible with the tendential fall in the rate of profit that this implies, and this can be seen as a long-term attack on working class self-organisation .( see my post on John Holloway). Furthermore, Reich was a Freudian, and one of the tenets of Freudian psychology is that the "ego" and "consciousness", or self-awareness, are not necessarily the same thing- some parts of the ego belong to the unconscious mind, and do not therefore enter into the subjective. He may very well have underestimated the subjective as a result, considering that there are different levels of consciousness, some people being more conscious than others, and thus in a position to enlighten those people This fits in with Lenin's view that the most conscious elements be organised into a vanguard party to bring consciousness to the masses. Thus the Freudian and the Leninist view would seem to have quite a lot in common when looked at in this way, and are at variance with a politics of self-organisation and “subjective resistance” whatever label you wish to apply to it. Note that I am trying to avoid the use of the label ”autonomist” here. Reich and others did not see the capacity for self-organisation which was right under their noses.
While I was modifying this I have just seen kurasje's comment. There is no question I just felt like commenting on Reich.

Reich was quite a fella. Post-Reich, Marxism sank into a malaise it never came out of. This isn't Reich's fault at all. Basically Reich has no answer as to how the "mass man" is to become self-empowering because his concept of individual self-development is basically clinical. Change is deemed to be exterior. The Frankfurt School were the ones who really got deep into this shit, until the get the idea from like Erich Fromm that socialism can only come about when proletarians have gone in to get their heads fixed! The idea of "false consciousness" leads to a dead end. A dead end the Situationists (so far as I can tell) took to an ultimate extreme -- the Spectacle is all encompassing and all attempts to overcome it become Spectacular because the Spectacle is everything. Wow man, pass the bong.

Anyway, because Marxism doesn't care about the individual at a basic philosophical level, it cannot explain anything. Change of consciousness, self-consciousness, is an internal and individual process rather than an exterior and mass moment.

Thats my two bob anyway...

that's a reply to Pingu start of the topic, I replied in the wrong place, so I correct it...

that capital still exists even if trad familly is weakened doesn't mean that trad familiy is not an asset of capital nor that weakening the domination of the structure of trad familiy is not a way to undermine capital. I think it is (of course it is not central as is wage labour, direction of work alien to the producers, etc...).
every human relations based on domination, on reproducing trad way of life with patriarchy, hierarchy, etc....is an asset to class society and partake in its reproduction.

Actually piter I have read WITBD and without much of a “preconceived notion” of what it was going to be about. I was in the SWP at the time (well, we all make mistakes don't we, and it was a very long time ago............ ) Of course Lenin mentions class struggle, (as did Robspierre and the Jacobins 127 years earlier) but then to say that the working class by itself can only reach trade union consciousness and that revolutionary consciousness can only be brought in from the outside is not merely contradictory but incoherent. Lenin did not realise this incoherence himself. It is not true that: “Lenin abandoned that focus of developing consciousness by way of class struggling after the revolution ”. It is not a case of “abandoning” anything, but rather of Leninism becoming what it actually was -Stalinism, implicit in Lenin's prescriptive vanguard organisation right from the very beginning. That is not to say that Lenin intended it to turn out that way. To separate the political and economic struggle is means to regard the political and economic as seperate spheres, and is to actually separate politcal consciousness from from the class struggle, leaving the former to the experts while abandoning the excercise of power to the politicians and "all the old crap must revive". It also depends on what is meant by "political"- do you mean the excercise of seperate political power by politicians or the the abolition of that power by the proletariat taking power into its own hands? Anti-politics and anti-power in other words. The two are very different.
Personalist, you cannot be an individual by yourself but only as part of a society. Change of consciousness, self-consciousness, is both an internal and individual process and an exterior mass moment.

well, pingu, I don't know about you, but the SWP, as do all leninists and others, has really a "preconceived notion" of WITBD, leninists and anti leninists share the same interpretation of WITBD (the second took itfrom the first in fact), only difference is that one think Lenin is coorect and the others thinks he is wrong, but neither understand really the point Lenin is making.
Lenin do not say that "the working class by itself can only reach trade union consciousness" what he say is that it cannot do it only by partaking in local economical only struggles. what he say is the cosnciousness comes form the outside...not of the working class, but outside of economical and local struggle but comes from "true" class struggle, that is struggles as a class and directed against the bourgeoisie as such and not only against this or that boss...that's is the main meaning of WITBD.
and Lenin never restrict the party to the organisation of professional revolutionnaries, he just say that they are neccessary against the secret police, to make possible an underground political press, etc...but he don't mean that only that is the party, to the contrary he wants it to permit the existence of a broad workers party, taking exemple of the german party (that's not such a good exemple, but that's another discussion...).
you should read the book Lars T Lih wrote about WITBD, "Lenin rediscovered : WITBD in context", or the small text about WITBD by Hal Draper, it's on the MIA.

apart that I also think that the relation btw politics and economics in Lenin is wrong (it goes to reduce the social revolution to a political revolution plus economical reformism by state capitalsit means, to make it short, but oversimplified). but I don't think Lenin was from the start in favor of leaving things to the experts, he only went to that after 1917, and there is in Lenin an anti-politics anti-power perspective, but he subordinated it to it's conception of preparing the transition to socialism by statist means, to make it short once again...

reich eventually lost his leninist illusions. the people's sexual and emotional repression is why their ideological convictions lag behind their economic situation.

yeah sure dave B, but with quotations out of context you can virtually prove anything, and that's usually what people do with WITBD. to understand what Lenin means with "from without" or "from outside" you must replace it in the argumentation of the whole book, and you the best key to understand it , if you likes to quotes, is the sentences where he explains that conscience must be brought from outside...of strictly economic struggles, that is for Lenin in struggles that are not properly speaking class struggles, struggles as a class.
besides that you sure have, bad and dangerous formulations in WITBD, but they do not represent the whole outlook of the book and the point Lenin was making for united struggle of the whole class and for the need for a democratic mass workers movement, explicitly political and revolutionnary, overtly aimed toward the overthrow of tsarism and against bourgeoisie as such, when at the time some socialists were arguing that the class was not strong enough for something else than struggle for wages...

that do not remove of course all the problems with WITBD but to criticize it correctly you first have to present it correctly...