jim submits:

Here is the first part of an extensive interview by Greek comrades with George Caffentzis. The second installment can be found here.

TPTG's Conversation with George Caffentzis

PREFACE


George Caffentzis, an offspring of Greek immigrants from Lakonia, a place in southern Greece, is associate professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Southern Maine. But, as you will see it for yourselves, the 15th of October, 2000, was not for us "an evening with a philosopher". George is an activist to a fault. We met him for the first time in Athens on the 14th of October, 2000, but we have been in correspondence with Midnight Notes editors since 1993. By that time we had published two texts of our own on the Gulf War and the Macedonian Question and we had distributed here some important documents about the Gulf War (like Ten Days That Shook Iraq). So, we were looking for comrades abroad who had done some theoretical work on the connection between capitalism and war and who had also taken part in anti-war movements. That year we discovered the 10th issue of Midnight Notes which was devoted to the "New Enclosures". We immediately understood that we had to do with a very important work and that we had to learn more about their activities. So we came in touch with them and they sent us a few back issues and their book called Midnight Oil which had just been published by Autonomedia in New York. Without any exaggeration, only Marx's and Kropotkin's work, Debord's Society of the Spectacle, Barrot's Fascism/Antifascism and the critique of counterculture by the american Situationists had as a decisive influence on us as Midnight Oil. Some of the articles in the book lent credit to our belief that war is a means of keeping the working class under discipline. But, most important, we discovered in it one of the most original and open-minded definitions of the working class and its struggles. The study of Zerowork/Midnight Notes' work was fundamental for us. In the last 8 years we' ve tried to combine their views on unwaged work, the community/circulation of working class struggles and the crisis of social reproduction with Marx's and the Situationists' critique of alienation and ideology and we believe that this has helped a lot the development of our theoretical/practical activity. (For example, see our articles on Mexico and the struggles in education in Greece). But our disagreements with George are fundamental, too. His text, "Notes on the Antiglobalisation Movement 1985-2000", which he had given us the night before, sparked off the debate between us in the second part of the conversation. Our disagreements do not arise from different interpretations of the debt crisis (it certainly was a crisis of class relations) or of the origins of the "antiglobalization movement" (if the word "globalization" is another word for Structural Adjustment Programmes or global neoliberalism, it is certainly true that the "movement" started as a series of non-coordinated, spontaneous reactions against it)-- they arise from George's refusal to draw a distinction between social uprisings against SAPs and their political, reformist representation (a form of representation one can find both in the "first" and the "third" world). Then again, unlike George, we consider a movement to be proletarian judging not only by its social composition but also by its forms of activity and its objectives. We believe that this conversation was of benefit to both sides: we started examining "globalization" and the movements against it more carefully and George -- in a critical text he wrote about Genoa -- admitted that the "movement" is disconnected from the needs of the inhabitants of the cities in which the demonstrations take place (which is an indirect admission of the fact that there is a communication gap between the "movement" and the working-class).