Hi,
attached is the Negri interview on the Paris riots I mentioned at the last
meeting. He's evidently as insane as ever; but here for once the elements
of misreason converge quite interestingly. He's being interviewed by 'La
Stampa', a fairly lightweight reactionary paper owned by Fiat, so he has
some of the dumbest commonplaces flung at him and deals with them neatly by
invoking the basic sense of historical proportion that's been missing from
most of the 'debate'. But then some of his solutions sound strikingly like
a Blairite agenda of 'social inclusion': not just hand-outs, but REAL
participation, schools that work etc. Never mind a late lurch into the most
egregious sexism. Two other odd details: Negri is apparently privy to the
otherwise classified information that the 7/7 bombers went to the pub and
got 'drunk on beer' before blowing themselves up, and this lifelong admirer
of Machiavelli and author of some very fine scholarly writing on him feels
obliged to declare: 'I am not Machiavellian'!
Anyway, following on from the Yves Coleman piece, which is pretty much
the best thing I've seen on this stuff, maybe this could form part of a
mini-thread together with Yann Mouilier-Boutang's piece on Interactivist
which comes
from the same sort of political background as Negri but is a bit more
elegant, and, crucially, insists on the rationality of the
non-self-representing rioters, and Diana Johnstone's early first-hand
empirical account on Counterpunch
, which is
social-democratically minded but sets out the issues and dispels some of the
fantasies quite effectively, and some of the other French-language texts,
including a lot of participant/eyewitness stuff, collected on the
Mondialisme site, where an early version of Coleman's text showed up:
.
Something else very loosely related that I came across recently: David
Harvey has written a new book about the last 30 or so years of capital flows
and value-transfer called something like 'a brief history of neoliberalism'.
It's apparently thick with empirical detail, and is reviewed quite
interestingly by Brian Holmes here:
It sounds
vaguely pertinent to the French stuff and the other contemporary discourse
around race/religion/terror/'integration' etc inasmuch as a central theme,
already insisted on by the author elsewhere, is the disastrous effect (and
hence indeological centrality) of treating political/economic problems as
cultural ones. But another theme of the book that might be more interesting
to pursue, perhaps by asking Harvey to write something himself, or just
through an apposite review, is the centrality of crisis to accumulation:
i.e. 'crisis' is a motive force, not a disaster, for capital; it's the
mother of all structural adjustment. Negri actually wrote quite well on
this in terms of the nation state and the death of Keynsianism in the 70s,
but a global 'crisis-state' is surely something else again. Might be worth
addressing in terms of economic-crisis portents (eg the Greenspan bubbles,
those 900 million 'marginal' Chinese peasants, etc) that sound quite
plausible but by no means imply the happy 'revolutionary' ending that their
adherents tend to see in them. And I suppose, more superficially, also in
terms of purely ideological Mike Davis-children's-book-apocalypses like bird
flu, sars or, some would say, peak oil...
I'll stop now before I end up proposing three-sided ideological boxing over
hypothetical US/Chinese meltdown between Augheben, Harvey and Goldner, with
a containerload of the HSBC's sars-contaminated banknotes as the prize...
See you tomorrow if the Airborne Toxic Event doesn't get us first.
Krankensliebe,
Matthew