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[ox-en] "counteracting causes" and the most productive class - Negri's Leninism?



Soemone recently sent me this off list:

The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery? A Critique of Rifkin and Negri by George Caffentzis

http://www.endpage.com/Archives/Subversive_Texts/Midnight_Notes_Collective/EndOfWork.txt
and
http://www.ecn.org/finlandia/autonomia/theend.txt

I found the dicussion of "counteracting causes" quite interesting. For example "Negri imperiously denies "the social and economic laws that govern the deployment of labor-power among the different sectors of social production" and rejects the view that labor-time is crucial to "the capitalist processes of valorization." But capital and capitalists are still devoutly interested in both. That is why there is such a drive to send capital to low waged areas and why there is so much resistance to the reduction of the waged work day. For the computerization and robotization of factories and offices in Western Europe, North America and Japan has been accompanied by a process of "globalization" and "new enclosures."

These new enclosured are not in Caffentzis' view the high tech IP enclosures but seem to be better exemplified by capitals concerns in relation to "communal land tenure in Africa".

"Why is capital worried about communal land tenure in Africa, for example, if the true source of productivity is to be found in the cyborgs of the planet? One answer is simply that these factories, lands, and brothels in the Third World are locales of "the counteracting causes" to the tendency of the falling rate of profit. They increase the total pool of surplus labor, help depress wages, cheapen the elements of constant capital, and tremendously expand the labor market and make possible the development of high-tech industries which directly employ only a few knowledge workers or cyborgs."

"In order for there to be an average rate of profit throughout the capitalist system, branches of industry that employ very little labor but a lot of machinery must be able to have the right to call on the pool of value that high-labor, low-tech branches create. If there were no such branches or no such right, then the average rate of profit would be so low in the high-tech, low-labor industries that all investment would stop and the system would terminate. Consequently, "new enclosures" in the countryside must accompany the rise of "automatic processes" in industry, the computer requires the sweat shop, and the cyborg's existence is premised on the slave."

Caffentzis says that Negri is "Eurocentric in a rather archaic way. .... But the charge of Eurocentricism is a bit too general. What can better account for Negri's methodological oblivion of the planetary proletariat is his adherence to one of the axioms of the Marxist-Leninism: the revolutionary subject in any era is synthesized from the most "productive" elements of the class ...... on the choice of the revolutionary subject he is Leninist to the core. Negri makes so much of computer programmers and their ilk because of their purported productivity. Since the General Intelligence is productive, then these intellectual workers are its ideal (and hence revolutionary) representatives, even though they have not yet launched a concrete struggle against capitalist accumulation qua "social workers" or "cyborgs."

Now my question is somewhere in here: in the past views have been put to me along the lines that Negri sees the "revolutionary" sector or "revolution" arising from, growing out of the poor. I always understood the Negri/Hardt/Empire interest in the "cyborgs" to be something along the lines of what Caffentzis calls Negri's leninsim. Having lived throughout the 3rd world for sometime and seeing the brunt of neo liberalism and the attck on these locals by various national and internation organisations I have found it difficult to identify "revolutionary subjectivities" amongst these poor. The magnetism of the market just seem to strong. Primitive accumulation in its varous forms in some ways appears as the only anti hegemonic process. I know this is not the whole picture. On the other hand as someone trained in IP law and with an interest in free or open source software I see beyond the current rhetoric of this area much of what Caffentzis describes as the products of Negri's leninism.

But is it as cut and dry as Caffentzis makes out - the Negrian focus is on the cyborgs? Or is it as has been claimed or stated to me in the past on GO - that Negri sees the poor as the where the revolutionary subjectivities will arise. Or is it better seen as just another one of the antagonisms demanding the building of alliances between poor and cyborg? And that an nvestigation of eithe or both is valid once one accepts the notion of the "counteracting causes"?

I hope what I am trying to ascertain is clear from all this.

Thanks

Martin


--
"the riddle which man must solve, he can only solve in being, in being what he is and not something else...."

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