Thursday, January 22, 2009

A Grammar of the Multiplier

by the Sandwichman


Paolo Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude is a short book, but it casts a very long shadow. Behind it looms the entire history of the labor movement and its heretical wing, Italian "workerism" (operaismo), which rethought Marxism in light of the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s....

6.5. Thesis 4

For the post-Fordist multitude every qualitative difference between labor time and non-labor time falls short...

The concept of "full employment" is obviously essential to any consideration of the Keynesian "multiplier". Yet the very distinction between employment and unemployment is what, according to Virno, is at stake in Post-Fordist society.

The Sandwichman can do little more here than simply to note the existence of the operaismo analysis. I have my reservations about the degree of abstraction of that analysis and it's exclusive historical contextualization in a brief and recent expanse of European history. Nevertheless, the very term, "Post-Fordist," calls into question glib manipulation of Keynesian terminology.
If we can say that Fordism incorporated, and rewrote in its own way, some aspects of the socialist experience, then post-Fordism has fundamentally dismissed both Keynesianism and socialism. Post-Fordism, hinging as it does upon the general intellect and the multitude, puts forth, in its own way, typical demands of communism (abolition of work, dissolution of the State, etc.). Post-Fordism is the communism of capital.
James Callaghan, in 1976:
We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Harry M. Cleaver, Jr. is a good writer in this tradition of Autonomist Marxism (as it is sometimes called):

http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/

They view Keynesianism as a response to crisis and working class resistance, which has merit although I think it goes too far and ignores the fact that Keynes made significant contributions to the analysis of capitalism.

Direct link to papers: PAPERS, ARTICLES & BOOKS

Cleaver also wrote an excellent analysis of Kropotkin, which is probably the best (and most accurate) account of an anarchist by a Marxist I've come across:

Kropotkin, Self-Valorization and the Crisis of Marxism

but that is beside the point somewhat.

Iain
An Anarchist FAQ

Myrtle Blackwood said...

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step."

Great quote!

I haven't sufficient time to read this interesting article yet. Could you, Sandwichman, explain precisely why Callaghan said this in 1976? Was it that control of the productive forces had become concentrated in so few hands? Depletion of scarce resources? The workforce now global and no longer much influenced by the individual actions of governments?....