Autonomy in the UK

[chilango]

After spending today wading through Negri's stuff on Spinoza (don't ask) I've stumbled across the name Mauricio Lazzarato whilst trying to avoid Deluxe & Guattari. Anybody read him?

 

[danny la rouge]

After spending today wading through Negri's stuff on Spinoza (don't ask) I've stumbled across the name Mauricio Lazzarato whilst trying to avoid Deluxe & Guattari. Anybody read him?

Not me, but am aware of his work on debt and neoliberalism. Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of Indebted Man

 

[butchersapron]

Noel Ignatiev died tonight.

(I'll come back on ML tmw)

 

[imposs1904]

Noel Ignatiev died tonight.

(I'll come back on ML tmw)

Damn, I just saw him speak in Brooklyn two weeks ago and he seemed in fine fettle.

R.I.P.

 

[butchersapron]

Damn, I just saw him speak in Brooklyn two weeks ago and he seemed in fine fettle.

R.I.P.

You were lucky comrade.

 

[butchersapron]

Confirmed today. RIP Race Traitor.

 

[butchersapron]

Just to remind people that he said white w/c people were poor in the US partly because of racism not rich because of racism. Misuse of the ideal of white privilege will be all over RIPs and overviews.

 

[brogdale]

Courtesy of Brendan McGeever's twitter acc.
A correspondence with Ignatiev in 'Race Traitor'.

 

[butchersapron]

You were lucky comrade.

The one reffed here?

 

[imposs1904]

The one reffed here?

That's the one.

 

[chilango]

Just to remind people that he said white w/c people were poor in the US partly because of racism not rich because of racism. Misuse of the ideal of white privilege will be all over RIPs and overviews.

Yeah. Never read any of his stuff as the old Race Traitor moniker put me off at the time
Good place to start?

 

[chilango]

Thls looks interesting.

The Golden Horde

...but pricy.

 

[butchersapron]

And not published for another 7 months. I would like to know what is newly translated, but yes, looks very welcome.

 

[butchersapron]

Ignatiev was not without feet of clay and i'm glad MS (he did the book on the Sojourner Truth Organisation NI was central to) chose not to gloss over this stuff in his reflections:

Noel Ignatiev, 1940-2019: A revolutionary who tried to think

Later conflicts were even more explosive. In 1996, a year before his own death, Ted Allen demanded that his name be removed from the masthead of Race Traitor, where it had been prominently placed for the first five issues. He did so because he objected to the publication in issue #5 of an exchange of letters between Ignatiev and an anonymous neo-Nazi who expressed, in the pages of the journal, explicit racial hatred toward people of color and toward Jews. This was far from the only time Ignatiev was accused of coddling anti-Semites.

By the mid-2000s, many others had taken serious issue with Ignatiev’s continuing and apparently friendly interactions with the anti-Semitic writer Israel Shamir, whose writing was published in the final issue of Race Traitor in 2006. A similar dalliance between Ignatiev and the anti-Semitic jazz musician Gilad Atzmon ended in 2011, not because of Atzmon’s repugnant views on Jews, but because Ignatiev could not countenance Atzmon’s comparison of the Palestinian right of self-determination to that of “lost cause” white supremacists who upheld the “right” of the Confederacy to self-determination – and slavery – in the context of the US Civil War.

Given Ignatiev’s life-long opposition to white supremacy, such controversial positions can be hard to understand. My best guess is that Ignatiev, who permanently rejected the formal politics of Stalinism in the late 1960s, spent the rest of his life struggling to shed the remnants of Stalinist political method that persisted in his political DNA. He was raised in a world of vitriolic rhetoric and ideologically driven splits inside already small organizations that believed they had sole access to the “scientific” truths of class struggle. In a seemingly endless array of circumstances, Ignatiev saw both principles and people through an instrumentalist lens, as tools or mechanisms through which to accomplish one or another political objective. While these goals – freedom for Palestine, the destruction of white supremacy, the defense of black autonomy, and the ultimate project of communist revolution – were and remain eminently laudable, Ignatiev’s strategic choices were not above reproach, and demand continuing critical scrutiny at a bare minimum.

-------

Loren Goldner's brief piece here.

 

[butchersapron]

And in the same vein, it seems he was keen on the khazar thesis. Though the Shlomo sand respectable version rather than the outright open anti-Semitic version. Still, don't sound great do it?

Noel Ignatiev, 1940-2019

 

[butchersapron]

Brooklyn Rail has a new article from NI and a very interesting political obit (with some harsh words, see below for an example) from his co-founder of Race Traitor, John Garvey (Hard Crackers and Insurgent Notes contributor/editor):

A Life Defined by Political Engagement - Noel Ignatiev, 1940–2019

We did share some vocabulary with individuals and organizations that were travelling on different roads to different places. The most significant instance of this was the word “privilege.” In light of the political travesties that have developed under the term since, we wish we could have found some better way of differentiating ourselves from those who wanted to make careers (in journalism, social work, organizational development, education and the arts) by insisting that the psychic battle against privilege must be never-ending. The last thing in the world they wanted was for the white race to be abolished; if it were, they might have to make an honest living.

Our voice was never dominant. “Privilege politics” became a way of avoiding serious thought or political debate and a way of avoiding direct confrontations with the institutions that reproduce race and with the individuals responsible for the functioning of those institutions. The focus shifted to an emphasis on scrutinizing every inter-personal encounter between black people and whites to unearth underlying racist attitudes and to guide people in “unlearning” them. This has developed into a tendency to strictly enforce the boundaries between the races—not only (as in the past) by white supremacists, but by proponents of what might be considered black advancement.

------

And the article itself - which i've not read yet:

Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and the Virtues of Impracticality

.

 

[redsquirrel]

Brooklyn Rail has a new article from NI and a very interesting political obit (with some harsh words, see below for an example) from his co-founder of Race Traitor, John Garvey (Hard Crackers and Insurgent Notes contributor/editor):

A Life Defined by Political Engagement - Noel Ignatiev, 1940–2019

------

And the article itself - which i've not read yet:

Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and the Virtues of Impracticality

.

Ta butchers.
I keep on checking back on that CSE article you linked to a while back, do you know when/if it will be free to access?

 

[butchersapron]

Ta butchers.
I keep on checking back on that CSE article you linked to a while back, do you know when/if it will be free to access?

I'm not sure it ever will be - i can't even access it as a subscriber. They used to have the archives on their own cse site and everything was archived and available to subscribers but now the archives direct you to the commercial publishers instead.

 

[butchersapron]

I say that but they have it listed in the on-line first section - very odd. Maybe it's on the way.

 

[redsquirrel]

I'm not sure it ever will be - i can't even access it as a subscriber. They used to have the archives on their own cse site and everything was archived and available to subscribers but now the archives direct you to the commercial publishers instead.

Damn. I tried accessing it through my institution but no go. I'll ask around and see if anybody I know can get access to it.

 

[butchersapron]

Viewpoint have just put up a wonderful scathing interview with Gigi Roggero that essentially calls for a use of the original operaismo against post-operaismo and related fads (accelerationism etc) in the same manner as the original operaists used marx against Marxism. Lots of really interesting stuff in here with some great lines ("In recent years workers’ inquiry and coresearch have been much talked about, perhaps even too much, in the sense that it would be better to talk about them less and do them more"), section on composition that's really important - compare that with the stuff angry workers are doing right now, plus lots more on intellectual/manual labour, the myth of spontaneity et

In the 1950s and at the beginning of the 1960s, when Alquati and his comrades began carrying out conricerca, the workers and the factories had been politically abandoned. In a sort of unconscious Frankfurtism, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) held that the working class was now irreversibly integrated into the capitalist machine. And so a vicious circle was created. The PCI – which had chosen to follow the middle classes and the”‘Italian road to socialism” (a road without revolutionary class struggle) – asked the factory militants if anything was stirring, and they confirmed the line at the top, saying that there was no possibility of revolutionary class struggle amongst the workers. Immigrants from southern Italy who had been inserted into the production line, who a few years later would become the “mass worker,” were seen by the PCI and trade union militants at the time as passive and alienated opportunists. However, the operaist militants, when talking with these young “new forces,” revealed real ambivalence in their behavior: it was true that they often voted for the reactionary trade unions, but that was because they didn’t feel represented by anyone; they didn’t take part in the strikes because they thought they were useless. The operaisti showed that even their passivity was potentially more effective as a form of struggle. And very soon their outsider status at work turned into refusal and insubordination. What’s more, these southern Italians who had immigrated into the industrial metropoles of northern Italy bore little resemblance to their representation in leftwing literature and cinema, of victims laden down with cardboard boxes, needing our tears and sympathy. On the contrary, they were a potential force, bringing with them new behaviors and cultures of conflict foreign to the traditions of the workers’ movement institutions, which now co-managed exploitation in the factory. Enough with the tears, with talking about the needs of the victim, with the culture of the left: the revolutionary militant searches for strength, not weakness. That’s why we say operaismo is a communist experience that breaks with the Communist Party and which is foreign to the culture of the left.

The term “post-operaismo” was coined in Anglo-Saxon and North American universities in an attempt to capture the power of operaismo, to depoliticize it and abstract it from conflict and class composition, to render it good for academia and the political economy of knowledge, and no longer good for struggles. This then became “Italian theory” which differentiates itself from “Italian thought.” In turn this will become “Critical Italian theory,” then “Critical Italian thought” and so on to the bad infinity of a theory that’s decoupled from class composition and class struggles, moving from university conferences and desks to become solidly embedded in the valorization and reproduction of capital.

“A Science of Destruction”: An Interview with Gigi Roggero on the Actuality of Operaismo


I seer there's also two two tronti-related texts i missed earlier this year, namely Tronti's in-depth justification for running back to the PCI and what i assume is a context setting intro piece (not read it yet).

A Betrayal Retrieved: Mario Tronti’s Critique of the Political

The Autonomy of the Political (1972) - Tronti

 

[Sasaferrato]

Ta butchers.
I keep on checking back on that CSE article you linked to a while back, do you know when/if it will be free to access?

The delicious irony of an 'anarchist' publication being behind a paywall. So much for egalitarianism.

 

[redsquirrel]

<snipped>

Cheers butchers, looks interesting, will have read of that over the weekend.

The delicious irony of an 'anarchist' publication being behind a paywall. So much for egalitarianism.

It's not an anarchist publication you div. And they do give out some of their content for free.

 

[Wilf]

Ta butchers.
I keep on checking back on that CSE article you linked to a while back, do you know when/if it will be free to access?

Which piece is it? I might be able to get it (I seem to have institutional access to that issue).

 

[redsquirrel]

Which piece is it? I might be able to get it (I seem to have institutional access to that issue).

Thanks for the offer Wilf, we managed to get a copy in the end - posted on this thread.

 

[Wilf]

Thanks for the offer Wilf, we managed to get a copy in the end - posted on this thread.

Okay, cheers. I'm about 2 paragraphs into it myself at the moment.

 

[chilango]

The delicious irony of an 'anarchist' publication being behind a paywall. So much for egalitarianism.

Wrong again. Off you pop. Do us all a favour and ignore this thread if you'd be so kind.

Meantime, I can access C&C should anyone struggle with a particular piece.

 

[redsquirrel]

Viewpoint have just put up a wonderful scathing interview with Gigi Roggero that essentially calls for a use of the original operaismo against post-operaismo and related fads (accelerationism etc) in the same manner as the original operaists used marx against Marxism. Lots of really interesting stuff in here with some great lines ("In recent years workers’ inquiry and coresearch have been much talked about, perhaps even too much, in the sense that it would be better to talk about them less and do them more"), section on composition that's really important - compare that with the stuff angry workers are doing right now, plus lots more on intellectual/manual labour, the myth of spontaneity

Cheers for that BA, going to have to read it again but enlightening. Alquati sounds interesting.

Love these lines

It’s best to leave meteorologists to predict the rain, as militants we must create storms.
...
Tendency means a political wager. The wager is not about throwing a dice, nor about making a scientific forecast, but about choosing a path. It is about identifying a line that doesn’t exist but could. It is a materialist wager, within and against the existing force relations. Without a political wager there is no politics in a revolutionary sense, but only the administration of what exists, or rather the techniques of institutional politics.

 

[butchersapron]

Steve Wright reviewed Roggero's (untranslated) book (Italian political workerism) contribution to the project of using operaismo to go beyond post-operaismo - here:

In Praise of Annoyance

Now, with L’operaismo politico italiano: Genealogia, storia, metodo (DeriveApprodi 2019), Roggero sets out to make the case, in concise and accessible prose, as why the experience of operaismo and the gli operaisti might be worthy of consideration by a new generation of readers today. Above all, he asks on the opening page, “perché parlare di operaismo quando ormai si è consumata da tempo la sconfitta di quel soggetto che sta alla radice della sua definizione, cioè della classe operaia di fabbrica, ovvero il tramonto della sua centralità politica?” His answer, as set out across six short chapters and a concluding interview, is that if operaismo was a product of its time, the method it has bequeathed – its way of reading class politics, the questions that it posed about class subjectivity: in sum, ‘a method and style’ developed from a partisan perspective – continue to offer something that reaches beyond the particular context within which the tendency emerged.

Tronti has often argued that operaismo had come to an end by 1968 or thereabouts. As Roggero demonstrates in his fourth chapter, however, there was ‘un operaismo oltre l’operaismo’ that extended well into the 1970s. If anything, the tendency was invigorated by the struggles of the late 1960s – not only winning more militants to its banner (as did most currents in the far left at that time), but also engaging in important further reflections about class composition

 

[butchersapron]

Cheers for that BA, going to have to read it again but enlightening. Alquati sounds interesting.

Love these lines

Alquati is the main influence on the writer, see above. I put most/all of his translated 'political' texts ( it think all at the time at least) on-line at the old site years ago so i expect they're still out there somewhere. Wasn't much., few very influential pieces that others then ran with.