48

On economic determinism and autonomism

One 'comrade' writes to us, in opposition to our mechanistic
concepts which he characterizes as, "economic determinism that
denies the complexities of social processes etc" and supersedes
them by advocating "the development of the class struggle and the
autonomous organization of the class in it, a condition for the
consciousness of the possibility (for revolution)". Harry Cleaver
writes in Reading Capital Politically, "With the working class
understood as being within capital yet capable of autonomous
power to disrupt the accumulation process and thus break out of
capital, crisis can no longer be thought of as a blind 'breakdown'
generated by the mysteriously invisibly laws of competition".

There is a lot of dust blown up in these statements and nothing is
very clear, but what is common to them is the use of the term
'autonomous' which we find very interesting. We would like to
expand the discussion of consciousness to include both these
ideas on the 'complexity of social processes' and the use of the
concept of autonomy.

Many of the arguments we have come up against from
communist are stated in Cleaver's book (which we recommend
very highly but with which we disagree in almost every detail
beginning with the title and its Phd thesis style), however there is
no reference in the otherwise complete index for the concept of
autonomy. So, how can the working class be both inside and
autonomous of capitalism, by autonomy we understand ' not
determined'? Cleaver appears to argue it becomes so when it gets
politicized, which we immediately and emphatically disagree with,
as we think politics is always a maneuver away from the issue of
the ownership of production. But then he goes even further and
says that reality is not simply imposed by the ruling class but it is a
matter of response and counter-response within the class struggle,
this seems fair enough on one level until we remember that we still
live in capitalism, that all of the reforms won in the political
struggles of the working class have helped capitalism run more
effectively.