i on thomas paine reviews: origins of crisis in ussr - Common Sense

Page 44 Common Sense - Issue 15
and strain to integrate class struggle into their analysis. As Aglietta (1979, p. 67) sees it,
class struggle is beyond 'any law'. 'Capital' is not conceived as a social relation in and
through labour. Instead, 'capital' is seen as an entity which has its own logic, a logic
which stands above class relations. Thus 'capital' is not class struggle because 'capital is
the subject' (Jessop. 1991. p. 150). Class struggle is expelled from the analysis insofar as
a proper understanding of the concrete, empirical, conditions of class struggle needs to be
based on a specification of the capitalist framework within which class struggle obtains
and unfolds. Consequently, structuralism emphasises the objective lines of capitalist
development. Structures are the only subject recognised by structuralism. Class struggle is
aeated as a derivative of structural development. The dynamic of capitalist development is
located in capital itself. Contradiction is seen as internal to capital, and capitalist devel-
opment is a result of these contradictions.
Unlike the theoretical suppression of class snuggle in structuralist approaches, autonomist
approaches place at their centre the self-activity of the working class. Class struggle is
seen as primary. The emphasis is on labour's revolutionary power. Autonomist approaches
take as their starting point the Marxian notion that all social relations are essentially
practical. In that emphasis lies an important difference from structure-centred approaches.
The difficulty inherent in 'autonomist' approaches is not that 'labour' is seen as being
primary but that this notion is not developed to its radical solution.
Approaches predicated on the notion of labour's self-activity tend to divide social existence
into distinct spheres of, on the one hand, a machine-like logic of capital and the transcen-
dental power of social practice, on the other. The emphasis on 'labour's self-activity' is
founded on the 'inversion' of the class perspective'. This inversion was advocated by Tronti
who argued that rather than focusing on capitalist development, the emphasis should be on
the struggle of the working class. As Tronti (196511979, p. 10) put it, capital uses
exploitation as a means of escaping 'its de facto subordination to the class of worker-
producers'. Such a formulation destroys the insight that labour is a constitutive power.
This is because capital is conceived as a subject in its own right: 'capital' is construed as
some-thing which not only reacts to the self-activity of labour but which also 'lives' by
cajoling labour's self-activity into serving the capitalist cause. In other words, the
inversion of the class perspective is dependent upon two 'subjects': there is the self-
activity of labour and capital's cajoling power. The emphasis on 'inversion' does not raise
the issue that 'labour' is the producer of perverted forms. Instead, labour tends to be seen as
a power which exists external to its own perverted social world: the constitutive power of
labour stands external to its own perversion. This perversion is called 'capital'. Labour is
seen as a self-determining power at the same time as which capital is a perverted power by
virtue of its 'cajoling capacity'. Thus Negri's (1992) emphasis on capital as a 'bewitching
power'. The emphasis on the struggle component of the relation between structure and
struggle cannot overcome their theoretical separation. The question why does human
practice exist in the perverted form of capitalist domination is not raised. Minus an
interrogation of the question of form, i.e. the specification of the social form in and
through which the constitutive power of labour subsists in a contradictory way, notions of
labour's autonomy from capital can amount only to a romantic invocation of the
revolutionary subject's immediacy (see Bonefeld/Gunn, 1991). Merely invoking labour's
revolutionary immediacy tends to externalise structure from subject, so leading to a
subjectivist conception which is the other side of determinism's coin. Unlike structuralist
approaches, the emphasis is on class struggle, a struggle which remains, however, external
On this 'inversion' see Cleaver 1992,1993.