Interview with G. Steven Farris

Abstract

The Way Ahead Interview - Steven Farris of Apache Corporation shares his industry experience and offers advice to young professionals entering the oil and gas industry.

Contemporary class composition analysis: The politics of production and the autonomy of the political

“…This discontinuity Tronti understood in terms of the separation between state and civil society foundational to bourgeois liberalism. Rather than ‘an ideological trick of the bourgeoisie’ or a ‘function of class domination’, this separation represents the non-coincidence and capacity for contradiction between political and economic cycles (Farris 2013: 190–198). This separation is the beginning point of any democratic politics, and not, as the revolutionary left tends to imply, a problem to be abolished.…”

“…This relation exhibits ‘a lag, a being out of sync’, affording space for the state to ‘absorb and temper socio-economic conflicts’. Hence rather than the one always and inevitably driving the other, Tronti perceived separate political and economic cycles – representing ‘distinct moments of the struggle between classes’ – between which there was constant discontinuity in each direction (Farris 2013: 192; Mandarini 2010: 181–182). This discontinuity Tronti understood in terms of the separation between state and civil society foundational to bourgeois liberalism.…”

“…Tronti’s embrace of bourgeois theory was thus all part of his attempt to escape the ‘petrified forest of vulgar Marxism’ (cited in Farris 2011: 32–35). In this embrace of non-materialist perspectives, Tronti could be read as suggesting a ‘politicism’ just as deterministic as the ‘economism’ of orthodox Marxism (Farris 2013: 199), in that it appears to swap the ‘primacy of the political forces’ for those of the material and economic. However, Tronti’s account is more contingent than this would allow, stressing the primacy of different elements at different points in time, and relativising the merits of materialist analyses according to the character of their context.…”

“…Whereas ‘early capitalism’ had provided the social conditions for a theory of the coincidence of politics with economics, the growing conflict between workers and capitalists and sophistication of the state with the rise of industrial capitalism saw the emergence of a ‘professional political elite’ responsible for the ‘management of power’ by means of a capacity for mediating between capital and labour. Out of this mediating function and its milieu arises an ‘art’ and ‘science’ of politics – arguably represented today in what is called ‘political science’ – that it is incumbent upon the left to embrace not simply as a window on the economic, but as an end in itself (Farris 2013: 188–189). Our current period, while characterised by significant material and economic ruptures, sees politics increasingly overdetermine economics owing to upheaval at both the national and geopolitical level.…”

“…In its capacity as the ‘centre of mediation’ of the class antagonism, the state need not necessarily rest in the control of capital alone, but also that of labour. In order to wield control, however, labour must demonstrate its ‘ability to govern’ through participation in ‘the practice of negotiation, manipulation and intervention’ associated with politics proper (Farris 2013: 191–192; Mandarini 2010: 181–184).…”