Saturdays 1–4PM CST

School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)
112 S. Michigan Ave. room 920

Sundays 2–5PM EST

New School University
Eugene Lang College
65 W. 11th St. room 258

Summer 2013

Art and politics

• required / + recommended reading

Required preliminary reading

• Chris Cutrone, “The relevance of Critical Theory to art today” (2011)

Week 1. The meaning of art | Jun. 22–23, 2013

[Artists'] work is to sustain the critical moment of aesthetic experience. [Critics' work] is to recognize it.
– Susan Buck-Morss, response to Visual culture questionnaire (1996)

• Susan Buck-Morss, response to Visual culture questionnaire (1996)
• Immanuel Kant, Preface and Introduction to Critique of Judgment (1790)

Week 2. Modern aesthetics of art | Jun. 29–30, 2013

• G.W.F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics first section:
1 Prefatory Remarks
2 Limitation and Defence of Aesthetics
3 Refutation of Objections
4 Scientific Ways of Treating Beauty and Art
5 Concept of the Beauty of Art
6 Common Ideas of Art
(i) The Work of Art as a Product of Human Activity
(ii) The Work of Art, as being for Apprehension by Man’s Senses, is drawn from the Sensuous Sphere
(iii) The Aim of Art

Week 3. Art and politics in our epoch | Jul. 6–7, 2013

• Leon Trotsky, “Art and politics in our epoch” (1938)
• Clement Greenberg, “Avant-garde and kitsch” (1939)

Week 4. Revolutionary art? | Jul. 13–14, 2013

• Walter Benjamin, “Experience and poverty” (1934)
• Benjamin, “The author as producer (1934)
• Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: an incomplete project” (1981)

Week 5. Art and the commodity form | Jul. 27–28, 2013

• Stewart Martin, “Critique of relational aesthetics” (2007)
• Stewart Martin, “The absolute artwork meets the absolute commodity” (2007)
• Theodor Adorno, “Art’s self-evidence lost” and “Society”, Aesthetic Theory (1970)

Share

Saturdays 1–4PM CST

School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)
112 S. Michigan Ave. room 920

Sundays 2–5PM EST

New School University
Eugene Lang College
65 W. 11th St. room 258

Summer 2013

Late capitalism

• required / + recommended reading

Week 1. | Jun. 22–23, 2013

• Moishe Postone, “Contemporary historical transformations: Mandel and Bell” (1999)
• Daniel Bell, “Modernism and capitalism” (Foreword to The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 1978)
+ Postone, “Theorizing the contemporary world: Brenner, Arrighi, Harvey” (2006)

Week 2. | Jun. 29–30, 2013

• Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (1972) pp. 8-183

Week 3. | Jul. 6–7, 2013

• Mandel, Late Capitalism pp. 184-342

Week 4. | Jul. 13–14, 2013

• Mandel, Late Capitalism pp. 343-473

Week 5. | Jul. 20–21, 2013

• Mandel, Late Capitalism pp. 474-590

Share

Platypus Review 56 | May 2013

Last autumn, chapters of the Platypus Affiliated Society in New York, London, and Chicago hosted similar events on the theme of “Radical Interpretations of the Present Crisis.” The speakers participating in New York included Loren Goldner, David Harvey, Andrew Kliman, and Paul Mattick. The transcript of the event in London appeared in Platypus Review 55 (April 2013). What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation that PAS-NYC hosted on November 14, 2012 at the New School. A full recording of each of the events held in this series can be found at <http://media.platypus1917.org/radical-interpretations-of-the-present-crisis-an-international-panel-series/>.

Loren Goldner: The title of my talk tonight is “Fictitious Capital and Contracted Social Reproduction.” It is important to note that as we convene tonight, there are general strikes across the southern flank of Europe, the miners’ strikes in South Africa, and at least 50 strikes a day in China. While we convene to talk about the crisis, there are people in motion trying to do something about it.

Marx writes in his Grundrisse, “Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labor time to a minimum, while it posits labor time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth.”[1] Unpacking that one sentence can get us very far in understanding the crisis and the history of at least the last hundred years.

Capital can be broken down into Marx’s categories: surplus value (s), variable capital (v), and constant capital (c). Within constant capital there is a breakdown into (i) fixed capital, which refers generally to machinery and tools, and (ii) circulating capital, which refers to things such as raw materials.

With these categories I would like to address the question of fictitious capital, which I define as claims on the social wealth and social surplus that correspond to no existing social surplus. The origins of fictitious capital are the advancing productivity of labor in capitalism, which is an anarchic system, one that is constantly devaluing the constant capital invested by the capitalist class. Capital volumes 1 and 2 describe a pure capitalist system, in which there are only two social classes: the wage-labor proletariat and the capitalist class or the bourgeoisie. Other classes enter the picture, for instance peasants, in the long historical chapter on accumulation. But Marx is trying to set up a pure model and then move on to the more everyday appearances of the system.

Value is defined in Marx as the socially necessary labor time of reproduction; I want to emphasize the “re-” in reproduction. For, in the opening chapter of Capital, Marx talks a lot about the value of a commodity as the socially necessary labor time embodied in it, but later moves to social reproduction. There he is talking about an expanding system in which the early definitions are superseded.

Capitalists themselves tend to have only a vague idea of use-value. As they are running a society into the ground, say in the contemporary debates on infrastructure, capitalists come to a recognition that use-value plays some kind of a role. But, by and large, individual capitalists are interested in profit of which use-value is a mere by-product. One aspect of recent capitalist history that is important to emphasize is that the tremendous incomes that a part of the capitalist class gets from the sale and rental of buildings of all kinds has long superseded the total amount of profit directly derived from industry. This is important to understand for the contemporary situation.

There is another category that doesn’t attract the attention that it should: what I call “capitalist consumption.” Capitalist consumption does not refer to the consumption of the capitalists themselves, not the yachts in the Hamptons and the Malibu lifestyle, but the consumption of all the hangers-on of the capitalist class. Marx has a colorful formulation, in which he refers to king, minister, professor, and whore, as different embodiments of the hangers-on. But I would expand this category quite a bit to include state bureaucrats—let’s not forget that 35–40% of U.S. GDP goes to state expenditure at the local, state, and federal level. In 1950 there were ten workers for every manager; today there are three. The military police, prison system, and the biggest single group the so-called FIRE (Finance-Insurance-Real Estate) sector, which represent the interest and ground siphon of surplus value, all of these elements enforce capitalist social relations. We also have the total wage bill, which is comprised of more than the pay packets or checks, but also everything that goes into education and training. The military has increasingly assumed this role over the last thirty to forty years in the U.S. with the collapse of a lot of vocational schools.

Though an incomplete picture, all the above points to different ways in which capital in crisis transfers variable and constant capital to a surplus, as a way of saving itself. In the United States and most countries in crisis over the last 40 years, we see the non-reproduction of labor power—just think of the fact that almost 40% of all high school students in NYC don’t ever finish high school.

Also important, perhaps more important, is primitive accumulation. This Marx defines as the separation of petty producers from the means of production. There is a lot of debate about whether Marx simply meant the expropriation of the English peasantry in the late-17^th early 18^th century. But I think primitive accumulation is a permanent feature of the capitalist system. In this respect, I follow aspects of Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital, which included chapters with examples of this process from the nineteenth century. I don’t think one has to go along with all of Luxemburg’s reasoning to recognize the mobilization by modern capital of labor power outside of the subsectors of the world economy, more specifically the peasantry of India, China, Latin America, and Africa. All kinds of people who are not wage workers are recruited to the wage labor system, after another subsector has paid their reproduction costs.

In short, what keeps this proliferation of fictitious capital afloat in all the forms that I have just described, is a general process of non-reproduction: both of labor power and of aspects of constant capital, such as infrastructure—concerning which, for instance, the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that it would cost 2.3 trillion dollars just to bring things to a standard level.

David Harvey: I had an interesting experience in May when I was in Istanbul, where I was giving lectures and hanging out with social movement people. Istanbul is a boomtown and it is quite incredible what is going on there. Turkey is growing around 7% a year. There is talk of a new bridge across the Bosporus, and the population of Istanbul will grow from 18 million to 40 million in 10-15 years. Meanwhile, Athens, two hours away by flight, is a catastrophe. Argentina was a disaster in 2001–03, but by 2004 it had reneged on its debt and has been booming ever since. China in early 2009 had lost close to 30 million jobs due to cuts to export industries. Yet by the end of the year it recorded a net loss of 3 million jobs, which means that they created 27 million jobs in nine months, through expansive urbanization—basically, a huge infrastructure project. The bankers in China obeyed the orders of the Central Committee to lend. The huge labor absorption in China stands in contrast to the 7 million net jobs lost in the same year in this country. Why? For one thing, you have this stupid form of austerity here, whereas, in effect, there was a Keynesian expansion program in China. Argentina did very well, too, because it started selling all its agricultural commodities to China. It is now one big soy plantation for the China trade. How are we to create a theoretical apparatus that can encompass these incredible differences, as well as the dynamics that created them?

I tried to do a little of that in the Enigma of Capital, analyzing the ways capital flows. As Marx puts it, every limit and barrier has to be overcome. But as you surpass one crisis, it just manifests somewhere else. It has moved from the U.S. and the property markets, impacting consumers in China, and then spun over to the financial sector, creating sovereign debt problems, as in Spain. It is in Iceland, then Dubai, and then Greece. If you don’t have a theoretical framework that can understand the rapidity of these moves then you cannot really encompass what is going on. The crisis tendencies of capitalism are never resolved, but simply moved around from one space to another and from one sector to another.

That the crisis moves around like this poses great difficulty for organizing. The huge anti-capitalist movement in Argentina in 2003, with its assemblies, strikes, and factory takeovers, resembled a revolutionary movement. But five years on, everything is back to normal. One political disaster follows after another. Something that looks like a revolutionary movement can suddenly rescind itself. The result is that the class struggle is very volatile right now. If we were in Bolivia in 2003–05, we would be looking at El Alto, which was in revolutionary mode, but now that Eva Morales is in power you have a mix of indigenous thinking and neoliberal compromises.

I take seriously Marx’s argument that crises express the internal contradictions of capital. However, here can be a tendency, when we come across something we don’t fully understand, it is tempting to chalk it up to the “internal contradictions of capital.” What do we really know about the structure of internal contradictions within the capitalist mode of production? When does a contradiction become an absolute contradiction and generate a crisis?

I went back to Capital, and there are 17 internal contradictions specified therein. To give you one example: The basic contradiction is between use-value and exchange-value. One place to look at this is housing, which has a use-value. But many people who dwell in houses don’t rent, but become incorporated into home ownership—and this use-value is sold as a commodity. This became very popular toward the end of the 19^th century, when it was seen as a way of stabilizing society. Home dwellers eventually became homeowners who would use their house as a form of saving. This became critically important in the Great Depression, when all of the financial reform was about encouraging home ownership amongst the working classes. It was once famously said that the savings and loans societies and building societies across Great Britain were the best defenses against Bolshevism. Or to put it the other way around: debt encumbered homeowners don’t go on strike.The incorporation of the U.S. working class as homeowners in suburban locations turned them into very conservative people. They became the defenders of property rights and defenders of capitalism rather than its essential enemies. Prior to this unlike they had been part of a conscious political project during, say, the 1930s.

Around 1980, housing became something else, not simply a form of saving, but a form of speculation. Homeowners became much more concerned with improving the exchange-value of their house. You would stretch a bit to buy a house for $200,000 , improve it, and sell it for $300,000 in a couple of years. The Savings and Loan Crisis of the late-1980s and the housing crash of 2008 led to foreclosures and a crisis of exchange-value, which in turn led to some people being denied the use-value of their house. This conflict between exchange and use-value has evolved historically and has culminated in the current crisis.

This can help tell us what an anti-capitalist politics should be about: namely, that we do not want housing that is vulnerable to the exchange-value calculus. We want housing to be secured as use-values that everyone can access. The same is true of education, healthcare, and water supply. In other words, what you do is say that the contradiction led us into this crisis, but we have a particular political stance now which would roll back neoliberalism’s drive to privatize all those things, gearing them toward exchange-value accumulation.

Andrew Kliman: “Do different interpretations of the crisis really recommend different political strategies?” That this question has to be asked is a sign of the irrationalism and elitism in which much of the left is mired. If you think the masses need you to lead them step by step to a more advanced consciousness, like pieces on a game board, how they understand the crisis is unimportant. But how this vanguard understands the crisis is not important either until you have the allegiance of people, so gaining that allegiance becomes the all-important task—appealing to them where they are now, providing sound bytes about Wall Street, neoliberalism, and the one percent. Similarly, if you think that people can change society by spontaneous activity alone, or by a spontaneously arrived at consensus, understanding how capitalism functions becomes unimportant. Activity becomes all-important, the possibility of unintended consequences is dismissed, and rational argument is seen to lead only to disagreement and disunity.

I begin from a different starting point. Many lack information and access to ideas, but they want a real solution to the ongoing economic malaise. They are not going to rise up unthinkingly without first knowing what they are trying to accomplish and what actions can reasonably accomplish it. Finally, actions have unintended consequences, as the many failed revolutions and failed utopian experiments attest. The road to the present morass was paved with good intentions. This suggests the need for severely rationalist politics. We have to be oppressively aware that some supposed solutions to our economic problems seem good on the surface, but won’t work, or will only worsen the crisis.

When I set out to write The Failure of Capitalist Production, I found some things about the present day crisis that counter the traditional account on the Left about the causes of the recession. First, the turning point of recent U.S. economic history was not the rise of neoliberalism, but what transpired in the 1970s, with the slowdown in economic growth, the relative increase in borrowing, global financial instability, decline in the growth of U.S. public infrastructure development, and so forth. This alone casts doubt on the political determinism of the conventional left view that the reversal of neoliberalism is the key to solving our economic problems.

Contrary to what the conventional left account suggests, I also found that the rate of return on investments, the rate of profit, of U.S. corporations did not rebound under neoliberalism. It fell from the mid-1950s through the early 1980s and never recovered in a sustained way. National corporations’  foreign investment also trended downward. This has to do with the long-term slowdown in the growth of productive investment or what is called the rate of capital accumulation. The conventional left account claims that slowdown was caused by financialization: Corporations diverted profits from production to financial uses. But I found that there was no such diversion. Almost all of the fall in the rate of accumulation had taken place by 2001. Between 1981, when Regan took office, and 2001, the period of neoliberalism, U.S. corporations invested a bigger share of their profits in production than they did between 1947–1980. Productive investment absorbed a bigger share of their surplus than it had before. So the slowdown in growth of productive investment is real; however, it was not caused by the difficulties in absorbing the surplus, but by the relative lack of surplus or profit in the first place.

For U.S. corporations, the entire fall in the rate of accumulation or productive investment between 1948–2007 is attributable to the fall in their after tax rate of profit. I have found that even though there has been a rise in income inequality in this country, which is real, profits did not increase at the expense of wages and benefits. The share of corporate output that employees receive did not change, nor did the share of the net national product that the working class was able to buy. Workers’ income enabled them to buy the same share they were able to buy before, without going deeper into debt. Redistribution from wages and benefits to profit didn’t occur, and thus was not the cause of the debt build-up. There was a build up, but for other reasons.

The underlying causes of the Great Recession, at least in the U.S., are the long-term fall in the rate of profit. This is what led to a long-term slowdown in productive investment, which in turn led to a slower growth of output and income. The slowdown in income growth led to ever rising debt burdens, as did government policies that repeatedly kicked the can down the road by throwing even more debt at the problem and encouraging private borrowers to do the same. This led to a series of burst bubbles and debt crises, culminating in the Great Recession. The recession was triggered by a financial crisis. There is no denying that. But if the financial issue was the only aspect of the problem, the economy should have rebounded smartly long ago, since the financial crisis in the U.S. had been quelled by the end of 2008. But there has been no such rebound anywhere in the world and that is mainly due to the profitability and debt problems that remain unresolved and to the political consequences of those debt problems, especially for the future of the Eurozone.

What are the political implications of this analysis? First, neoliberalism did not cause the changed trends in the economy. Financialization didn’t cause profits to be diverted from production. So people who want a broad multi-class alliance against neoliberalism, replacing the bad capitalists with the good capitalists, who want investment in production and for jobs to be created—this isn’t going to solve the problem. Productive investment is not going to rebound until profitability problems, debt problems, and the associated lack of confidence remain unresolved.

Debt forgiveness can help people in debt and in debtor countries but it is not going to solve the economic malaise. To reverse the malaise, the debt problem has to be solved in a way that boosts lenders’ confidence that they are going to be repaid, not the opposite. If lenders are forced to forgive some of the debts, they are going to learn the lesson that they should not lend, or that they should lend at much higher rates, and we would have no solution to the crisis. There has not been redistribution in the United States of wages and benefits for profits, so while reduced inequality is certainly going to help those at the bottom, it is not going to solve the economic crisis. Profit is the fuel on which capitalism runs. The problem that capitalism is facing is that it has been low on fuel for quite some time and any redistributionist measures that siphon off even more fuel are not going to help to stabilize capitalism, but will do the opposite.

I do not think that there is any progressive or leftist solution within the confines of capitalism. Within the system the problems are going to be solved—if they are solved—by addressing the profitability and debt problems. So I would like to suggest that we stop thinking about solving the crisis and instead assist peoples’ ongoing struggles to protect their incomes, jobs, and homes. Concessions were won during the Great Depression, they can be won again, even though they will not solve capitalism’s problems and, in fact, might even make them worse. Concessions are nevertheless worth fighting for and supporting. We need to offer the prospect of a socialist way out of the crisis. It is a real historical possibility. Struggles have been accelerating throughout the world and the problem has been the Left’s response—or lack of response. In the fall of 2008, the notion that capitalism had failed was common in the mainstream media, but it went nowhere because almost all of the Left moved in the opposite direction. The Left tried to downplay the severity of the crisis. It didn’t so much as echo the conclusion that capitalism has failed. That was an enormous lost opportunity and explains a lot of what this panel is meant to address.

Paul Mattick: “What does it mean to interpret the world without being able to change it?” This is not particularly mysterious. Changing the world requires the collective action of very large numbers of people. This does not mean, as the guiding questions for this panel suggested, that capitalism is a system devoid of human agency. Human agency keeps capitalism going, as people go to work, go to school, buy and sell goods. The process of social reproduction is carried out by active, conscious individuals. The existence at various times of social movements against that reproduction attests to other directions for that human agency. The misery the social reproduction process generates explains those movements and with them the various efforts to understand the system that constitute the history of socialist thought. As Marx observed long ago, it is social being that, practically speaking, determines the consciousness, not the other way around.

The most profound understandings of capitalism will lack any practical importance unless what used to be called the broad masses of the people are engaged in social transformation in ways that lead them to find those understandings useful. Marx’s own thought provides an excellent example. His brilliant analysis of capitalism was for the most part not even read, much less understood or acted on, in the heyday of Marxist movements. It was, after all, of little relevance to the social democratic projects of the regulation of the market system in Western Europe and the construction of state capitalism in Russia.

Today, with the disappearance of the historical left, Marxian ideas have become largely an academic specialty. On the other hand, what seems an increasing interest in those ideas, inside and outside the academy, attests to a growing discomfort with the existing social system, especially since the start of the current depression in 2007. It is not impossible that some of those presently engaged in interpreting the world may some day get a chance to participate in changing it. It may be hard on a thinker to discover how little brilliant interpretation shapes history, but there is a positive side to this situation. If the proletarian revolution required a firm grasp of Marx’s Capital with, for example, a correct understanding of value-price transformation by the aforesaid broad masses, it is hard to imagine how that revolution could ever get going. Luckily this is not how social movements happen. They happen when large numbers of people find the existing state of affairs unbearable to such a degree that they are willing to risk the comforts of ordinary life, not to mention life itself, to try something new. Then they look around for ideas that might help them understand what is happening to them and what they can do about it. Social theory can help explain how such situations may come about, but it cannot be expected to produce them.

Crisis is a term used very loosely. I like to remember its original meaning: a turning point. A crisis coming after a period of prosperity initiates a period of depression, thus it corresponds to what on the other end is called a recovery. In this sense the crisis of 2007–08 is over, but the depression lingers on despite all the official talk of recovery. Of course the downturn, like all developments in capitalism’s history, is uneven in its effects. The weakest are hit hardest. Small businesses are crushed in Greece while Germany is still doing fairly well. As Detroit is depopulated, housing prices rise in Brooklyn and Paris. For this reason, the social effects are likewise uneven, although this also reflects the strengths and weaknesses of local traditions. Quebec students defeated an effort to increase university tuition while American students have been unable to prevent similar developments. Such movements, like the mass demonstrations in Lisbon and Spain that have so far held back somewhat the assault on the Iberian working class, have so far remained sporadic, localized, and limited in their challenge to the capitalist economic order. For this reason, we cannot really speak of social or political crisis at the present time.

This economic crisis and the downturn that led into it are like earlier episodes of the same type in the history of capitalism since the early 19^th century. But like each of those predecessors they have novel features. Crises manifest deep-rooted problems in profitability in the capitalist economy, which discourage investment and create unemployment and market gluts. They are overcome as the depression acts to shift capital values and labor costs downward. The devaluation of capital makes possible higher profit rates and so a revival of economic affairs. The last major downturn of this type, which began in the 1930s and led into World War II, was so destructive in its effects on capital values as to make possible the 20 years of prosperity known to economists as the golden age. But even this prosperous period required constant infusions of government spending to maintain low levels of unemployment. When the golden age came to an end in the mid-1970s government borrowing and spending was further increased. More and more government policies also facilitated the expansion into the 21^st century of the credit necessary for the debt-based version of prosperity that lasted despite continuous debt cresses, stock market crashes, currency exchange crises and decades of depression in Japan. The failure of all this to restore the profitability of capital can be seen in the flow of money from capital investment to speculation, which offers high short-term profits, at least for the well-placed or lucky. As capital flowed into speculation instead of productive investment, producing the effect of temporary prosperity by means of a series of bubbles, working class living standards were maintained by the massive growth of consumer debt, culminating in workers’ participation in the mortgage bubble in the early 21^st century. Like the growth of state debt and the welfare state, the difficulty we see today in doing away with them registers the decline of the private enterprise economy.

Despite its dynamism and the gigantic increase in the productivity of human labor that it has achieved since the early 19^th century, and despite the disappearance of political and social barriers to its spread in the course of the 20^th, capitalism has not been able to generate the quantity of profit production needed to incorporate much of the world’s population into its modern industrial form. The failure of the non-financial parts of the economy to expand sufficiently showed itself in 2008 in the near collapse of the whole Rube Goldberg device of cantilevered finance. For the same reason the massive increase in government spending that avoided a return to depression conditions after the mid 1960s led not to a steady flow of profits from the now primed pump, but to today’s increasingly problematic state deficit.

From the viewpoint of the Marxist theory of capital accumulation, it is precisely the avoidance of depression conditions that have prevented a new transition to prosperity since the end of the post-war golden age. The desire to avoid a full-blown depression, still, as of late-2012, prevails among the global ruing class. Although smaller scale businesses have been pushed into bankruptcy, the European Central Bank along with the International Monetary Fund and Federal Reserve Bank of the U.S. are printing money to keep afloat the banks and hedge funds, whose investments powered the recent expansion of the euro and dollar zones. At the same time, one sees in full force the will to extract as much as possible from the world working class by cutting wages, including socially administered segments of the wage such as pensions and health insurance, along with the elimination and privatization of government services with attendant cuts in public employment. This is held somewhat in check by mass expressions of anger; austerity has not progressed as rapidly, for example, in Spain or Italy as it has in smaller and weaker economies, like Ireland or Greece. Is this to say that the current crisis cycle has moved capitalism to the point of breakdown, in the sense of self-destruction? No. Because today, as in all earlier moments, capitalism’s fate hangs on the willingness of human beings to engage in the difficult struggles needed to overthrow existing relations of social power and create new forms of production and consumption.

In its current condition, capitalism promises economic difficulty for decades to come. Waves of bankruptcies and business consolidations for capitalist firms and increasingly serious conflicts among economic entities and even nations all center around who is going to pay for the system’s survival. The mass unemployment and material deprivation that Marx predicted as the long-term outcome of capitalist development have become features of the world economy. That is not permanent, but it will be with us for an extended time, together with the havoc promised by the ongoing ecological catastrophe. It is not inconceivable that this could lead to social and political convulsions that would deserve the name of crisis.

Responses

LG:

David, I would eventually like to hear about the 16 or so contradictions that we didn’t address yet. But first, regarding the housing bubble that began in the 1980s right up to 2007–08, it seems to me this was a response to a deeper crisis of profitability in the system as a whole. It was part of a wider attempt to solve the crisis by putting consumption power in the hands of people with supposedly appreciating assets, i.e., their homes. Andrew, I agree about dating the crisis to the 1970s. You mentioned that there has been no fall in real wages for American workers. I don’t want to argue much over statistics, but the disappearance since the 1960s of the one-paycheck family means that, with these same levels of income, the possibility of one paycheck reproducing a family of four has become nearly impossible. Marx mentions in Capital, and this is often neglected, that the wage of a worker is not just to reproduce the worker but also to produce the next generation of workers. The rise of the 2- and 3-paycheck family is a sure sign of a contraction of social reproduction. Paul, I would like you to elaborate more on the devaluation represented by the crisis of 1929–45, or 1914–1945. At those times a phase of destruction did lay the foundation for the post-war boom, so why do you think that is not what is going to happen now? What we have seen the 1970s is a kind of substitute World War III, in that there has been tremendous destruction on a world scale. Do you think that social revolution is a possible outcome of the crisis?

DH: I was a little confused by your understanding of fictitious capital, Loren. I understand it as the capitalization of any income stream, which can then be brought to the market and sold in stocks and shares. What’s striking about Marx’s analysis is that this is where he comes back to the question of fetishism. Why it is it that the fetishistic character of the credit system can produce circulation of fictitious capital? That leads into an interesting question as to why capital actually tolerates the insanity of the credit system, which is a Pandora’s box out of which all kinds of nasty things jump, including the speculative waves that we have been experiencing.

Andrew, I too date the origins of neoliberalism to the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly the market crash of 1973, which was followed then by what I saw as the major dual experiment in neoliberal politics: One was in Chile, of course, in 1975, and also of course in the New York fiscal crisis. The notion of structural adjustment that would later become a shibboleth within the IMF after 1992 was first experimented with in 1975. The origin of neoliberalism was not technical. It was a class project. To those who argue that neoliberalism is over, I say the class project is going very well, in fact the upper classes have benefited from this last crisis. In many ways they have consolidated even more wealth and power.

AK: When I say that the real wages and benefits of American workers have increased in place and their share of income hasn’t fallen, I am talking about the real wages per hour, and this is not because per family they are working more hours. What Paul has said, about the empirical basis of the claim that there has been a diversion from production to finance, the evidence actually points to the opposite.

My other comment though is that the actual contradiction, as Marx argues, is between use value and value, not use-value and exchange-value. The two factors of the commodity are use-value and value. Exchange value is just a form of appearance. It seems like a kind of abstruse theoretical point, but I think it goes deep into the question of what we need to do, which is to get rid of the law of value, the economic laws that compel producers to produce at low cost because time spent producing stuff that you don’t need above the social average does not count.

PM: We don’t see the kind of massive devaluation of capital that took place during the Great Depression and the Second World War because the nature of the capitalist economy relentlessly pushes people in that direction anyway. Hence every government’s move in the direction of austerity, cheered on by capitalist pundits, who at the same time are reluctant to destroy the debt-based structure supporting the fictitious capital that had sustained the appearance of prosperity over the last 30 years. Capital has become much more centralized and concentrated in the last 50 years and much more globalized. The only hope for capitalism, you could say, for capitalism would be massive devaluation, even though they don’t want to do that, hence the endless pussyfooting around austerity and bits of stimulus.

Q & A

Do you think that U.S. hegemony is at an end, and if so, what is to come? Is neoliberalism at an end? What will replace it?

DH: As far as military power is concerned, the U.S. is hegemonic, absolutely! But is it financially and productively hegemonic? In many ways it seems more decentered. We are getting regional hegemons like China in the Far East, Brazil in Latin America, and so on. In some parts of the world neoliberalism never really got started. Latin America has been anti-neoliberal for some time now, adopting (broadly speaking) a more Keynesian approach. Neoliberalism was a political project, which had diverse structures deeply embedded in some parts of the world and not in others. The reaction against it is also uneven. Is this the end of capitalism? Certainly not. But the interesting question is what kind of capitalism will follow—a plutocracy, or something rather different? 

AK: While certainly the U.S. has military might that is unrivaled, there is an argument, which I think should be taken seriously, that in the financial sphere and the economic sphere, the U.S. was never hegemonic. Regarding neoliberalism, I don’t accept that the economic direction is determined by politics and ideology. I think it is rather the reverse. Consider that Henry Paulson, the neoliberal Treasury Secretary, pushed for a massive bailout. Those in power will do what is pragmatic, muddling through to keep the system afloat, whatever their ideological inclinations, if they think that is what it takes to save capitalism. 

PM: Neoliberalism never really existed as much more than an ideology. The greatest prophet of neoliberalism in American history, Ronald Regan, also was the greatest Keynesian. The move toward austerity does not significantly decrease state involvement in economic activity. We don’t know what the outcome of any period of social and economic crisis would be. The historical record is that so far only small minorities of people have tried to overthrow the existing system of social relations. It’s possible that in the future much larger numbers of people might be moved in a similar direction and they might be large enough to succeed in doing it.

How is listening to a panel like this, with four white males telling us things we already largely know, helpful to us in overcoming the crisis? Why was nothing mentioned about rights, gender, or the family? Why were these treated as side issues?

One implication of the crisis of neoliberalism is that there is no alternative and that this absence of alternatives has to do with the collapse of the centrally planned economies. Would socialism entail the creation of a democratic, globally planned economy?

LG: I am really sorry that I was born a white male and spent 40 years studying capitalist crisis. I think the question of the disappearance of the one-paycheck family—though I am no fan of the bourgeois nuclear family—is one key aspect of the contraction of social reproduction. This can lead to a fruitful discussion of some gender issues.

If one looks over a 200-year period—from the very labor-intensive capitalism that existed in the early 19^th century to today—there is no question that there has been a long-term trend towards the rise of constant capital and the diminution of variable capital, albeit with a lot of fluctuations along the way. The credit system was necessary to uphold the value of different claims to wealth well past the time they otherwise would have collapsed due to lack of profit. The goal of socialism is, as Andrew said, the abolition of value, the destruction of the regulation of social production by socially necessary labor time.

PM: Participating on a panel like this is not a radical activity. It does not change the world. It does not undermine anything. As a group we are interested in the subject, but I see no reason to describe that as a radical or revolutionary activity. I generally refuse to be on a discussion that does not include at least one female. This time I would have refused, but, the truth is, I deal with a lot of the crisis literature, but I don’t know any women who are writing about the subject. I would say that issues of race and gender, while of importance or interest politically, are quite irrelevant to the question of the nature of the world economic downturn. They have no bearing on it. This is an extremely, highly abstract feature of capitalism. If you had total gender equality and total racial equality in every nation in the world, you would still have economic depressions. If we would begin to talk about political responses to the existing economic situation, then we would have to start talking about gender, race, nationality, and many other social categories. I think it has to be faced, as a sociological fact, that Marxist theory is a male business, like ham radio operators or tropical fish keeping. It’s a hobby for white males. There is a history behind that sociological fact.

AK: I would also have liked a more representative panel. But, on the question of planning: If you are going to overcome the law of value, you have to have planning and at some level it will have to be centralized, for practical reasons. To have a world economy, it has to be coordinated. It doesn’t have to be coordinated by bureaucracy in an oppressive manner. Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel have done really good work about how you can have, in a sense, central planning, without anybody being controlled. 

If it is difficult to conceive of the end of capitalism, this probably is an indication that there is not currently a force capable of challenging it. If that is the case, what is the interpretation of capitalism for? Do you think that, in the early 20^th century, when there was a burst of revolutions, that the issue of anti-capitalism was clearer?

PM: We have now had 300 years of capitalism. It seems like it has always been there and always will be there. The problem is still the same and the solution is still the same. Unless people figure it out, they will suffer wretchedly. Since people are not completely nuts, it’s possible they will be pushed to the point that they say, “We have to do something about this.” If they want to, they certainly can.

LG: Forty years ago, the most advanced notion of revolution on the radical left was the idea of seizing the factories and establishing worker’s councils. But looking more deeply into Marx, one of the things that always struck me was that as capitalism evolves, it illuminates things in Marx that people didn’t notice before. Let’s take the unpublished sixth chapter of volume one of Capital. It has this very powerful description of the transition to an embodied technology that self-expresses a social relationship of capital. Most early 20^th century Marxists did not even know this chapter, but the evolution of capital now makes it stand out. As for the early 20^th century, I think it is very important to understand that the overwhelming majority of Marxists and revolutionaries at that time were statists of one kind or another. There was a belief that if it wasn’t a question of seizing the existing state, it was a question of setting up another state that would essentially continue capital in a different form, as in the Soviet Union.

DH: Value is a social relation. As such, it is immaterial and objective, as Marx makes very clear. It therefore needs material representation, money, which depends on exchange-value. But the representation of value, the money form, does not truly represent it. Value is socially necessary labor time on a world scale. The problem is that its representation is such that private persons can appropriate its sociality. As a result, this social power can be accumulated by an individual and a class. This representation of value in the money form is a perversion of what value is really about, and this is a contradiction. If you want to abolish classes and the individual appropriation of social value, then you have to come up with a money form that is anti-accumulation. This is a very interesting idea. Marx says that the money commodities are gold and silver for the very simple reason that they do not oxidize. They do not rot or disintegrate, but retains its character. Therefore, you can accumulate and save value. If you had a form of money that dissolved, you would end up with a very different kind of society, because money would aid circulation but would not facilitate accumulation. Perhaps we should start inventing new forms of money that oxidize!

What we have to do is stop the accumulation of wealth and power in private hands. One of the ways to do that is to revolutionize the money form. I know someone is going to say, “Marx objected to Proudhon’s attempts to do this,” but Marx is sometimes unfair to Proudhon. Some of the stuff about alternative currencies, which the Marxist left usually renounces as anarchist, is actually worth considering.

What are the political implications at stake in the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value?

AK: This is not the essential contradiction of capital but a form of its appearance. The internal contradiction of capital is between use-value and value. It is not just a question of Marx being fair or unfair to Proudhon; there is a question of whether or not you can fundamentally alter the nature of the system by regulating markets or messing with money. Marx puts forward a very detailed argument—in section three, chapter one of Capital, volume one—about why attempting to change the system by abolishing money, while keeping commodities and commodity production intact, is like getting rid of the pope while keeping Catholicism otherwise in place.

The Left set about downplaying the crisis of 2008. Howard Zinn remarked in The Nation, “It is sad to see both major political parties agree to spend 700 billion dollars of tax-payer money to bail-out huge financial institutions.”[2] Populists like Zinn were focused on, “Why are we enriching the bankers?” while failing to see that the system was hanging in a balance. The financial system could have collapsed in September-October of 2008. But the Left didn’t want to say that it wanted that to occur. Yet it hated to admit that keeping capitalism afloat required the implementation of something like TARP. The Left was thus unable to put forward a reasonable response in light of the widespread opinion that capitalism had failed.

LG: What does the non-reproduction of the working-class mean and what is the role of the revolutionary left? I think we saw a very good example of this in the most radical days of Occupy, which took place on the West coast, where you might say a “precariat” or a large pool of casual workers began to form an alliance with more traditional, older organized workers, the West Coast Longshoreman Union. This culminated with the attack on the Longshoreman in the fall of 2011 and carried over into the spring of 2012. I do not advocate the formation of a vanguard party. Someday, a political party will emerge, but in the meantime what is possible and necessary is a network of people, like those in Occupy, that are spreading an analysis of the fundamental crisis of the system, putting forward the claim that there is no exit short of a socialist-communist alternative to the capitalist mode of production. As Marx says in the Communist Manifesto, the involvement in this or that struggle is not the question of victory or defeat, but of building the unity of the working class. I think that’s what briefly emerged, in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco, at the time of the Longshoreman struggle.

PM: The non-reproduction of the working class is a misnomer. What one should say is that the value of labor power is declining or being pushed down. A smaller percentage of the world’s population is becoming necessary for the working class. You can send half the people in the United States to college but you only need to employ eighty percent of them. The others will become part of the “precariat” and go on to work as baristas or scrabble for some other kind of wage-labor, or go to Vermont and to make goat cheese. In Greece now, there are no jobs for people, but globally the working class is reproduced. As Marx expected, the reserve army of labor increases over time. China is an interesting example where, in the last 10 years, there has not been one new job in manufacturing, according to ILO (International Labor Organization) statistics, partly because the southern edge of China, where foreign manufacturing and assembly platforms are constructed, is using the latest technology with extremely high productivity.

Historically, socialists have proposed answers even beyond capitalism, pointing to the reappropriation of technology. What happened to that socialist imagination?

LG:  Technology as such is not capital. Capital is a social relationship and in the case of, say, the port of Rotterdam, where some infinitely small number of longshoreman are unloading ships in the biggest port in Europe, this shows how capital has marginalized much of the working class through technological innovation even as it depends upon the value of the reproduction of labor power as its standard for exchange. It is only a socialist-communist society that can strip away that value form and use technology for its unrealized use-value.

PM: I feel I have to defend the honor of the socialist past. The idea of the abolition of labor and the abolition of the working class was the prime idea of much of the socialist movement of the 19^th century and it was particularly dear to the heart of Marx, who looked to a communist society in which people would do as little work as possible through the egalitarian use of technology in order to maximize free time. This was the Marxian utopia: The freeing of time for everybody by abolishing the class of workers. Through the generalization of labor, the hours of labor would be shortened and everybody would do as little work as possible. This is a very old idea that Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue celebrated, and it is one that all socialists should follow. |P

Transcribed by Daniel Jacobs and Konstantin Kaminskiy

1. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books, 1973), 706.↑
2. Howard Zinn, “Spend the Bailout Money on the Middle Class,” The Nation, October 27, 2008,  available online at < http://www.thenation.com/article/spend-bailout-money-middle-class>.↑

Share

Platypus Review 56 | May 2013

On Saturday, April 6, 2013, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel, “Marx and Wertkritik,” at its Fifth Annual International Convention, held at the School of the Art Institute Chicago. The panel featured Elmar Flatschart of the German theoretical journal EXIT!, Alan Milchman of Internationalist Perspective, and Jamie Merchant of Permanent Crisis. It was moderated by Gregor Baszak, of Platypus. What follows is an edited transcript of their discussion. A full recording of the event can be found online. 

Elmar Flatschart: Value critique, or, following the theorem developed by Roswitha Scholz, a critique of value-diremption (Wertabspaltungskritik), seeks to understand and critique the fundamental mechanisms that govern modern society. This critique is not as interested in the political Marx of class struggle and the workers’ movement, but more in the philosophical aspects of his work that focus on the abstract and fetishized character of modern domination. This approach tries to keep the abstract critical theory of society strictly separate from the contradictory practical attempts to overcome capitalism. Marxism shouldn’t be understood as an identity-giving, wholesome position, which history proved to be erroneous, but should be reduced to a theoretical core that can help us to understand society, via a negative critique, even if it does not necessarily provide us with a way out. The call for the abolition of labor does not have immediate ramifications for Marxist politics.

There is no new program or a master plan for emancipation that can be developed out of the abolition of value. Rather, it can be seen as a condition of emancipation from value and the abstract system of oppression it represents. How emancipation will be achieved is a more complex story. We know what will not work: much of what the Old Left proposed as Marxist politics. A lot of that should be abandoned because, essentially, abstract domination cannot be abolished through the imposition of some other kind of direct, personal domination. If we are to critique the abstractions of the economic forms, we similarly have to target the political form itself. While Marx and Engels suggested as much by their formulation of the state eventually “withering away,” I think we need to be a lot more radical. Emancipation ultimately has to mean the abolishment of the political as well. This is contradictory in the present political situation, but we should not try to postpone this task until after the revolution. We should see the constraints and the fetishizations immanent to the political form as something we want to get rid of now.

On the issue of value critique’s relation to the New Marx Reading (Neue Marx Lektüre [NML]) initiated by Hans-Georg Backhaus, I would say that Backhaus was more of a philosopher and philologist than an economist. He sought to uncover the deep core in Marx that was in line with his teacher Adorno’s reading. Unfortunately, he didn’t get very far with that himself, but I think he set the agenda. Backhaus’s efforts were a key point from which value-diremption critique departed and tried to enlarge its vision. The 1970s were a turning point in both theory and praxis when it was acknowledged that the old economicist and politicist roads to revolution do not work out. So the reformulation of the theory, which builds on the earlier work of the Frankfurt School, corresponds to new forms of praxis and reacts to the fact that everything now is more complex: There is no one vanguard party but many situated politics; no one system of oppression that covers all, but an abstract notion of reified domination (verdinglichte Herrschaft) that realizes itself in various ways; and no one strategy for revolution, but contradictory relations that, although graspable only in the negative, we have to confront wherever we meet.

Some aspects of the Left’s impasse today, according to value critique, came about for necessary reasons. These difficulties were necessary in that they prompted a broadening of perspectives, which made things more difficult but ultimately more complete, corresponding to social reality and the new complexities of oppression. Certainly, pondering this cannot solve the problems the Left faces today, namely, of its marginalization. But just because you face this problem, asking for a simple and programmatic solution would not correct this. In fact, it would mean setting the wrong questions on the agenda again, which have been proven to be wrong. What Backhaus and others have taught us is that emancipation from the currently prevailing system of abstract oppression is immensely complex and also highly unlikely. But it is still possible, if we face the complexity involved in it. There are neither programs nor utopias, only a hard laboring through these contradictions that we face in struggles, wherever they occur.

On whether value critique signifies a return to anarchism: I think it is dangerous to frame things in these terms. You should not work with old labels that do not conform to reality anymore. Designations applicable in the 19^th and early 20^th century, concerning the opposition between Marxism and anarchism, cannot be applied to today’s social movements. Surely, there are certain questions in this dispute that are still relevant, but today’s leftist landscape is in many ways not reducible to this simple opposition. The Situationists, for example, were probably the first who combined an essentially Marxist critique with an anti-authoritarian, anarchist method of politics. Part of the problem is that one would have to define what anarchism and Marxism mean with respect to the specific social relations of the present—and that is all but easy. The concept of the “Left” is maybe even more difficult: What is the Left today? I think it’s hard to say what this really means. Should we even be referring to this concept and can we even use this label meaningfully? Marxist and anarchist approaches intersect in social movements today. From the perspective of value-diremption critique this can also be seen as progressive insofar as one core contradiction that arises from emancipatory projects is dealt with more comprehensively, and that is the one between immanence and transcendence. You can see this complexity as a kind of double dialectic: On the one hand, what is termed “anarchist” means striving for some immediate transcendence in praxis at the cost of remaining immanent. On the other hand, you can say that Marxist approaches, at least some of them, retain the theoretical vision that went beyond the given immanent categories and tried to account for the complexity of transcendence in a meaningful way. It might be good that this dialectic is no longer split into a stark Marxism-anarchism duality but comes together in the more progressive parts of social movements.

How is “the science of value” (die Wissenschaft vom Wert) determined (and limited) by the contemporary potential for revolutionary change of the societal whole it addresses and belongs to? Here I would repeat that, concerning the social-revolutionary aspect of value critique, there simply is none. It is not the task of abstract critique of society to give you immediate steps to social revolution. Rather, it seeks to develop the most radical critique of society, but that project is in no way tied to an equally elaborated notion of revolution. That was also a problem of older approaches that had this package-deal mentality, which was essentially politicist, as it proved to be with Lenin and the Marxist-Leninist tradition. As value-diremption critique sees it, revolution is not the task of the abstract critique of society; rather, revolution is the task of concrete theories of praxis and immanent political theories, which is different from and more complex than theorizing society. We need to keep those separate.

Alan Milchman: My approach to Wertkritik is somewhat different. Several comrades have criticized Wertkritik, saying it is all about philology and text critique, that it is academic. Quite the contrary: Wertkritik is the reverse of academicism, pure text critique, or philology. Wertkritik has rescued from Marx’s texts things that we wouldn’t have known otherwise. The division Elmar drew between the domain of politics and that of Wertkritik is highly dubious. The figure that I take as a good example of the union of the two is Hans-Jürgen Krahl, who was active in the 1960s and, tragically, died young in an automobile crash. He had a great interest in Marx’s manuscripts, and it wasn’t a philological but rather a political interest, and it is the union of the two that I find so interesting about Wertkritik.

Imagine what kind of Marxism we would have if no one had ever published the Paris manuscripts of 1844. True, one could argue that Lukács’s inquiry into reification and alienation already laid out much of what was in those manuscripts. But our understanding of the relation between Marx and Hegel, of alienation and reification, has certainly been enriched by the 1844 Manuscripts. How much weaker would our understanding of capitalism have been, if Marx’s elaboration of capital as a moving contradiction in the Grundrisse had never come to light? It seems to me that these texts of Marx with which Wertkritik is engaged are crucial precisely for a political orientation to capitalism in this epoch.

I was asked whether the working-class movement ultimately proved to be the best bourgeois subjects, keeping capital going in a way that the bourgeoisie itself could not. It depends, however, on what you mean by the “working-class movement.” If by this one means that the mass political parties, social democratic or Stalinist, became the enforcers of capital in several countries beginning in August of 1914, through the 1930s and the reconstruction of the 1950s and the epoch of Stalinism, then yes, certainly that is true. But is that the working-class movement? No, that is the political force that crushed the working-class movement. That is not the workers’ movement, but the death of the workers’ movement. These forces did what the classical bourgeoisie did not, and never could have done. Will they return again in the midst of the present crisis, if neoliberalism is as bankrupt as many of us believe it is? I don’t want to rule out that possibility. Would they come in the same clothes? Probably not, but many of the same ideas, including nationalization, would be a last rampart of capitalism.

Does value critique have a social revolutionary aspect to it? Yes—it allows us to see that capital in this epoch is different from capital in earlier periods. It allows us to see the trajectory of capitalism that Marx anticipated, though he couldn’t foresee its details, namely, the shift away from the idea that communism is about the (re-)distribution of wealth, and realizing instead that it is really about the transformation of the production of wealth. Unless you transform or abolish the production-relations based on the value form of wage labor, you have not struck a blow against capitalism. In fact, you are probably only reinforcing capitalism. Capitalism lives or dies on the basis of the value form. That is exactly what Wertkritik tries to show us. So much of the political program of the classical left is predicated on redistributing income or regulating the bourgeoisie, and not on the abolition of wage labor and value. The argument that Internationalist Perspective makes is precisely that unless one moves directly to the task of the abolition of value, creating and participating in a revolutionary movement is impossible today. It is not the task of Marxist revolutionaries to create the movement singlehandedly. Nevertheless, this understanding of the possibilities of the abolition of the value form, and what it means if we do not directly attack it, this is something that is accessible to the working class today.

The organizers have quoted Marx from the 1844 Manuscripts: “[W]ithout revolution, socialism cannot be made possible.” Speaking for Internationalist Perspective: Definitely! Without a revolution, the overthrow of the value form is just an academic exercise. It has to be concretized in the overthrow of the value form, and the protector and guarantor of the value form in this epoch is the capitalist state—whatever garb it dresses itself in. Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, Ahmadinejad in Iran, and Bashar al-Assad in Syria are all different faces of the capitalist state today. If the Social Democrats win the next election in Germany, they will be the capitalist state. And when Barack Obama won the last election, he became the representative of capital in Washington, D.C., and therefore the mortal enemy not simply of the working class, however you want to define it, but of humankind. This recognition is closely connected to value form theory and Wertkritik, and unless that link is made, we will fail to go beyond a discussion of redistributing income, nationalizing the banks, or seizing the means of production through the state or through cooperatives. Frankly, I am sick of Richard Wolff telling us that we need cooperatives, repeating what the utopian socialists Saint-Simon and Fourier said some 200 years ago. Responding to the crisis we are in now with cooperatives would mean making the workers compete on the world market, the same as any other capitalist enterprise. It changes nothing. Just how dramatic and revolutionary the change has to be—that is the contribution of Wertkritik.

Jamie Merchant: In the 1970s and ’80s, an important reinterpretation of Marx’s critical theory of society began to emerge that cut directly against long-standing and ideologically entrenched modes of reading Marx. Emerging in a variety of places and at different times, this reinterpretation consisted of a reconceptualization of Marx’s key theoretical categories, such as labor and value, that removed the affirmative, transhistorical characteristics they retained for orthodox Marxism and transformed them into critical, historically dynamic categories. As indicated in the Grundrisse and as highlighted by Moishe Postone, Marx’s categories denote not positive economic phenomena but rather fundamental forms of human practice that constitute the capitalist social formation. Rather than conceiving, in the orthodox manner, of “labor” as an eternal, immutable property of human existence that is the ultimate source of value and thus the standpoint for the critique of capitalism, in this view “labor” is grasped as a historically specific form of human practice that actually has the “misfortune,” as Marx puts it in Capital, of producing “value.” The ineluctable abstraction of human labor under the capitalist production of commodities, that is to say, its role within the valorization processes of capital, produces value as abstract, homogeneous labor-time. It is the blind, relentless drive to accumulate surplus value regardless of and often at the expense of human life itself that constitutes the peculiar form of wealth at the core of capitalist modernity. Far from constituting the standpoint of critique, value-producing labor must be seen as the object of critique in any critical theory directed at the social conditions and forms of domination that constitute the modern world.

The production of value through the expenditure of human labor-time is the determining form of wealth for modernity, but it is not the only form of wealth for Marx. In the Grundrisse, Marx argues, “[T]o the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labor time and on the amount of labor employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labor time.”[1] Interpreting this passage, Postone suggests that “Marx contrasts value, a form of wealth bound to human labor time expenditure, to the gigantic wealth-producing potential of modern science and technology. Value becomes anachronistic in terms of the system of production to which it gives rise; the realization of that potential would entail the abolition of value.”[2] What both Marx and Postone refer to as “real wealth” is in fact pure potentiality; it is the possibility of a form of production in which the tremendous collective productive powers of society will no longer work to devalue necessary labor time in order to produce surplus labor time, but instead abolish surplus labor tout court, so that the general necessary labor-time for everyone across society is reduced to a minimum. This is a possibility that is immanent to capitalism as a contradictory, historically dynamic totality. As Marx argues in the Grundrisse,

Capital itself is the moving contradiction, in that it presses to reduce labor time to a minimum, while it posits labor time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth…. Forces of production and social relations… appear to capital as mere means… In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky high.[3]

The abolition of value means the determinate negation of capitalism. It would mean realizing the potential for the real collective wealth of humanity to greatly reduce, across the board, the required time and intensity of work for everyone, everywhere. It would mean severing the structural links between the total productive power of society and the driving, destructive imperatives of the capital-form. It would mean abolishing the central constitutive contradiction of modern society and open the path to a fundamentally new and unprecedented organization and experience of social life. Such a radical break is itself only possible, however, because the abolition of value implies the abolition of the totality that is constructed around it, the totality of capitalism as a structure of alienation, or of self-generated self-domination through value, labor, and capital as social forms of practice.

These considerations have certain implications for politics. Theory, broadly speaking, must again come to play some role, however mediated, in the formation and guidance of practice. For any politics that neglects the agency of the value-form misses the core logic of the capitalist social formation and so risks an unwitting perpetuation or affirmation of it. On the other hand, as long as the practices constituting proletarian labor and the production of value persist, then capitalism continues to reproduce itself as a structure of domination regardless of whatever subjective ideas are entertained by the producers themselves. Regarding the Left, this basically means that capitalism could care less whether we call ourselves Marxists, anarchists, socialists, or whatever. From the point of view of our entanglement in the circuits of value-producing labor, the imperatives of the totality define what is necessary, regardless. Conversely, a social movement with sufficient scope would not have to explicitly identify itself with “Marxism” per se, or with any other ideological label, to potentially bring the totality into some kind of focus. Of course Marxist currents can play an important role of self-clarification within the context of a given movement. But, at present, a form of politics that somehow comes to be mediated by the critique of value will have no a priori ideological identity. One should therefore consider whether the movement’s ideological content in tandem with the form of the movement seems in some way to point beyond the present historical context. The task, then, is to see whether critical forms of collective consciousness, which emerge as part of an evolving, contradictory historical totality, are able to see that totality, in however mediated a form, and somehow absorb that vision in an organizational praxis.

There is also a vital temporal dimension that must be taken into account. Neoliberal capitalism has in many ways decimated the capacity to imagine, in a common-sense sort of way, society as a total form, much less to envision the supersession of capitalism itself. This was not always the case. Though exhibiting its own contradictions, the Fordist state-capitalism of western social democracy presented a different scenario. The state-mediated organization of capital accumulation along national lines, the closely interwoven nexus of capital, labor, and the state, and the apparent pacification of the class war between capital and labor—however temporary and illusory—provided material foundations for the mass perception of something like “society,” of a social whole that is greater than the sum of its individual parts. The international reorganization of accumulation beyond national borders, in the arcane, opaque world of financial capital, is a hallmark of neoliberal society and a material precondition both for its pervasive ethos of unfettered individual choice, as well as for an academic fixation on subjectivity at the expense of pursuing any rigorous historical inquiry into objectivity. In its political comportment, the abolition of value must take on a robustly materialist outlook: These political economic conditions, fundamental to the production of neoliberal subjectivity as well as its objective social structures, must be targeted for transformation by any critical politics. Such a transformation would not constitute the endpoint of political struggle, but the movement to a penultimate formation of capitalism on terms favorable to the Left, that would make overthrowing it once again appear possible, plausible, and desirable to great numbers of people.

Any truly anti-capitalist politics will be dead in the water if it remains limited to the horizon of the nation-state. Value theory imposes this conclusion upon us. Inasmuch as value, understood as socially necessary labor time, is a category of the totality, it is a manifestly global category; socially necessary labor time denotes the value of the labor of the collective worker in toto, that is, of the global proletariat at a given historical moment in the trajectory of the capitalist world system. Therefore, if the abolition of value and the realization of real wealth would be the determinate negation of capitalism, then politics with that goal must necessarily operate in some kind of internationalist frame. The abolition of value must be the abolition of all value, the determinate negation of the totality formed by value-producing labor.

Right now, we are facing a rapid retrenchment of neoliberal financial power across the advanced capitalist bloc in a way that is destroying the lives of people every day, coalescing in the formation of an “austerity state,” a long-term mutation of the neoliberal state that has emerged from the massive financial collapse of 2008 and the ensuing global slump. The enormous public bailouts of the self-destructing financial system across the capitalist west have created a situation in which the state, ironically, is now more severely mortgaged to international capital and financial markets than it was before. Sovereign debt and government bonds—one of the only remaining sources of finance after neoliberalism’s exemption of corporations and the richest strata from taxation—must maintain their prices at a certain level to keep creditors on the world market satisfied. A major requirement for this is greatly reducing the amount of the social product directed towards public goods, and greatly increasing that which goes toward debt service. At the same time, the economic crash destroyed and continues to destroy a great deal of value, as the general unemployment rate of the advanced capitalist world rises. The creation of a massive reserve army of labor in tandem with the permanent fiscal crisis of the state means this formation is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

It is upon this inhospitable terrain that the Left must somehow learn to organize itself if it is to have any future. Additionally, given what appears to be an increasing probability of either a major ecological catastrophe or a revival of imperial geopolitics, it is probably not an exaggeration to say that the Left must learn to organize itself if society is to have any future. But because the Left at this moment is not—because, at least in the U.S., there is no organizationally coherent leftist project with a true mass base of support—we are not even in a place to adopt Gramsci’s classic metaphor of the “war of position” to inform our thinking during this period, as that first requires some actual “forces” which can then be “positioned” strategically. As always, there are more-or-less inchoate antagonisms towards the current form of society. Negativity will exist as long as capitalist society, in all its internal and manifest contradictions, exists; it is immanent to it. But it is up to leftists and progressives to channel that negativity in a direction that would implicate capital and bring it into perspective as an impersonal system of domination whose abolition would benefit everyone, and the Left must do so before such negativity is turned toward darker, right-wing trajectories.

Q & A

If we assume that the early 20^th century revolutionaries failed simply because they didn’t have access to this deep critique of the value-form, doesn’t this completely write off the history of Marxist politics, and how that history might be useful, even necessary, in the present? More generally, what is the relationship between the programmatic goal of abolishing socially necessary labor time, and abolishing the abstract domination of capital?

AM: I don’t know how we would have read Marx’s manuscripts in the 1870s, 1890s, or 1920s. Probably, if they were accessible then, it would have changed things, but more important is the trajectory of capitalism itself. We can read Marx’s manuscripts today in a way we might not have been able to read them then. For instance, until fairly recently, and as a result of the financial crisis of 2008, I don’t think I would have appreciated how critical Marx’s analysis of money is. But I am not arguing that history would’ve been different had we access to these manuscripts, only that reading those manuscripts today allows us to better grasp capitalism now.

JM: The suggestion that we should think transitionally comes from the vast majority of people who are being screwed over by this global crisis and the onset of the global regime of austerity. A post-capitalist vision of society is very difficult to render plausible when the vast majority of people are looking for a job, trying to put food on the table, and so on. We would have to think in terms of reforms for revolution: How can we reform the financial system in a way that makes investment possible for public projects, that gets more people back to work, that reduces the level of structural unemployment? We need to accomplish that, as it will allow people to glimpse past the horizon of capitalism, which was once possible, but is now exceedingly rare on a mass scale.

EF: There is no programmatic demand to abolish the value form; rather, the value form is a necessary condition for emancipation. Programmatic goals need to “climb down” from this abstract necessary condition, or start in the concrete context. These programmatic goals have to add up in order to change totality. There is no program on the level of the totality—this is very important, as that is the “politicist” illusion, with which we must dispense.

Neoliberalism might well have obscured the experience of the Fordist era, rendering it more esoteric, but didn’t Fordism, and the nationalism from which it is inseparable, in its own way occlude even deeper issues of capitalism? Elmar, you warn against “privileging” the workers as a revolutionary subject, but you seem to conflate earlier Marxism, in which the proletariat’s role is characterized negatively, with 20^th century Stalinism and Social Democracy. What other subject would manifest the self-overcoming capitalism “on the basis of capitalism itself,” as Lenin put it in “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder?

EF: Marx had a negative notion of class, insofar as he saw it as immanent to capitalism and this is evident in the logical approach of Capital. But then again you already have with Marx, and more so with Engels, this political privileging of class as an emancipatory actor. There were no other questions of oppression, and hence no other emancipatory subjectivities. There is no one subject anymore, and this is what we can learn from the New Left and the postmodern turn.

JM: Yes, Fordism definitely occluded capital in many ways, especially, in the Cold War context, in terms of the role of the nation-state. But my point was that it was a form of society in which the social whole did appear, and so the idea of society had more currency. There was this concern during the Fordist period of the individual being absorbed into the social whole and losing individualism. But this was just the inversion of the cultural logic of neoliberalism. The point is that different periods of accumulation provide different versions of society and apprehension of the “social”; the social form appears in differently mediated ways. Different regimes of accumulation can lead to different perceptions of what society is, which could open up avenues for new forms of politics.

What was found in the Grundrisse and 1844 Manuscripts that added to political understandings of Marx’s writings, which often speak to the abolition of value?

AM: Why wasn’t the abolition of labor part of the Critique of the Gotha Programme? Why did Marx preserve, in the lowest stage of communism, remuneration for the worker on the basis of labor-time? Yes, Marx certainly spoke of the abolition of labor before 1875, in the Paris manuscripts and in his critique of Friedrich List. But then he came to write his Critique of the Gotha Programme, and it was not there. What was there, instead, is a long period of transition in which labor time and accounting would be the basis of this stage of communism. Today, we must admit this was not the basis for even a transition to communism. It is only the basis for the perpetuation of capitalism.

Is the abolition of value the same as the abolition of labor? How is this related to a question of unemployment or a question of full employment? Do you think the Left should pursue a politics of fuller employment coupled with shorter hours? If so, how? If not, by what other means could one hope to politically accomplish the abolition of labor?

AM: I don’t see how a demand for full employment has anything to do with the abolition of labor. Full employment is a demand for jobs. It is a demand predicated upon the existence of labor, the continuation of wage-labor, rather than the overthrow of wage-labor.

JM: I disagree with Alan. If we are able to organize something like full employment—and the people around Jacobin magazine, for instance, are talking about this—the collective working class would be in a much stronger position. This would be much more favorable for the formation of consciousness, opening the way to more radical demands once most people no longer have to be so fixated on getting and keeping a job. 

EF: It is totally wrong to ask for full employment. We should strive to see labor itself, the labor form, as something that can be abolished. That will make way for meaningful activities. We have the technological ability to enable a rich living for all without a minimum of fixed, necessary labor. That should be part of our program.

What sorts of political developments on the German left led in the direction of value critique, NML, and so on?

EF: Backhaus’s theory built on the basis of the Frankfurt School, and also on its mistakes, including a tendency for Adorno to be superficial in his critique of political economy, which focused on exchange-value and was supra-historical. Those with this new interest in Marx said, “We have to work on that, because Marx is more complex.” But they wanted to retain certain of the Frankfurt School’s notions—we need a critique of totality that goes beyond the economic, that takes in culture, things like that. They wanted to retain the negativity, the dialectical, the Hegelian thing, and that’s how this peculiar tradition came to develop. Politically, the activism going on in the 1960s in Germany was relevant. All these new issues, all these new movements—the women’s movement, the anti-Fascist, ecological, gay rights—all those things went into this critique of abstract domination. The idea was to try to get them together—at least, in theory. As it turned out, a lot of people didn’t include all these demands in their concrete programs.

What does it mean to talk about the abolition of the value form? Hegel would say this is like trying to jump to the truth, not understanding that truth comes through necessary forms of appearance. Marx understood the depth of this problem. He did not view it in these impossibly abstract terms, but in a way that connected, from one step to the next, to the revolution that was seen as increasingly necessary. How is your demand to abolish the value form connected to Marx’s own politics?

AM: Is the abolition of labor too abstract? Let’s concretize it. There is a movement in a factory against its closure. Workers seize the factory and decide that the factory will be self-managed. The workers manage it, buy the raw materials, and sell the products on the market. They even agree to cut their own wages in order to compete. Somebody else says, that’s ridiculous, and instead raises what so many other workers demand: jobs from the capitalist state, printing the infamous trillion dollar coin, basically following the Keynesian left today in the U.S. What we should ask of them is: Why are you demanding more jobs? Why are you demanding full employment? Capital cannot concede it. I can imagine Paul Krugman saying, why doesn’t the American state give every human being in the U.S., legal or illegal, a hundred thousand dollars a year. But it is an impossible claim, as it would destroy the basis of American capitalism unless the surplus value extracted was sufficient to give every human being in the U.S. a hundred thousand dollars.

I think it is quite realistic to abolish labor. Therefore I say, we reach out to the workers, we challenge the legality of the of the whole state apparatus and its juridical infrastructure, and we seize the means of production, not to operate them as capitalist enterprises, but to begin the process of making the social wealth that capitalism has created freely available to people. If some form of rationing is necessary, which depends on how successful such a revolution proved to be, then the rationing should be on the basis of need, rather than labor.

Elmar claimed the old distinctions between Marxism and anarchism are out of date, when, according to the debate between Marx and the anarchists of the 19^th century, Elmar and Alan both would be considered anarchists. I exempt Jamie from this, because he seems to be a traditional Marxist, dressed up as a Postonian. If you read Marx’s polemics against Bakunin, the critique is on the basis that they are going to “leap into the open skies” of freedom. It seems that, through a passive response to historical weakness, what Wertkritik has arrived at is 19^th century anarchism.

EF: You are reducing the whole of anarchist and Marxist programmatics to the political. If you take the Marxist tradition, there’s this grand theory of society and there are anti-political approaches that are also important for emancipation, in a dialectical relationship to the political processes of emancipation.

AM: I think everything I have said is compatible with the reading of Marx. We may well disagree; but this is a dispute that would be within Marxism, not between anarchism and Marxism. The fundamentals are as true today as they were in 1857 or 1875: The collective worker, or Gesamtarbeiter, alone has the capacity to explode the value form. There are various movements, but it is only the collective worker that can potentially coalesce as a subject. If we don’t grasp that fact, we disarm ourselves.

How does the collapse of the Soviet Union and “state capitalism” figure into the course of value-critique? Of  what continued insight is value-critique theory now that these forms of socialism are no longer historically present? What now motivates the impulse behind Wertkritik?

AM: Wertkritik and NML emerged in Germany—though you see somewhat similar impulses in, say, Operaismo in Italy—and were predicated upon the development and the logic of capitalism in the most advanced industrial societies. What happened in the Soviet Union was that the destruction of the national capital led inexorably to an economic impasse. Gorbachev had to work through what was needed in order to begin to reshape it, and now we have Putin’s Russia. But Stalin’s project or Mao’s project was the predecessor to what we see now in Russia or China. The insoluble contradictions of the USSR, for instance, were not the impetus for Wertkritik. I think that was a sideshow. Could one construct socialism on the model of Mao or the model of Stalin, or even the model of Lenin? I am sure Postone would agree, that this was national capitalist development under specific circumstances, and that it had to end the way it did end. It probably could have ended in a working class revolution, and that obviously would have been better—but it didn’t. |P

Transcribed by Gregor Baszak, Thomas Willis, and Wentai Xiao

1. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books, 1973), 705.↑
2. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 26.↑
3. Marx, Grundrisse, 706.↑

Share

Platypus Review 55 | April 2013

Last summer, the Frankfurt chapter of the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted the latest iteration of “The 3Rs: Reform, Revolution, and Resistance,” a series of events for which speakers were invited to reflect on the contemporary state of anti-capitalist politics. Similar events were previously hosted in New York in 2007 and Thessaloniki in 2012.[1] Panelists included Thomas Seibert of Interventionistische Linke, Janine Wissler of Die LINKE/Marx 21, Norbert Trenkle of Krisis, and Daniel Loick from Goethe University Frankfurt; Jerzy Sobotta moderated. What follows is an edited and translated transcript of their conversation, which was held on June 25, 2012, at Goethe University Frankfurt.

Thomas Seibert: I don’t believe that the Left is at a historical low point today. The Left reached a nadir in the nineties, which was a depressing time, when many former leftists abandoned the Left. This has been reversed today, especially since 2011, since the return of a protest form that was thought to have become historically obsolete, i.e. of insurrections based on people rallying in public squares. Then they stay there and demand the overthrow of the government.

Let me begin, however, with a definition: resistance is rebelliousness and revolt. I see resistance as located in everyday life, in small matters such as sabotage at the workplace, skipping work, or located on an even smaller scale. You can also detect resistance where the political unconscious comes into play: people get sick by the thousands, for example, and mental illnesses have increased by 40 percent in Greece in the past months. The most determined form of resistance in its classical form occurred in Tottenham, England, in 2011. These sorts of riots are a central pillar of collective resistance, that is, rebelliousness and revolt.

Many people who see resistance as their approach to politics do so because they have turned away from such concepts as reform and revolution. And they do so to avoid posing the difficult questions that arise from the issue of reform and revolution: Are we confronted with a totality? Do we arrest this totality? How do we overcome this totality? There is a tradition on the Left that simply evades such questions that have supposedly become historically obsolete; these vexations are instead replaced by a notion of resistance, which is limited to specific aims, rather than at the social totality. This idea is evident since the 60s, in the work of Michel Foucault, and has appeared again and again since the 80s-90s. Such approaches no longer pose the question whether the whole, which is to say capitalism, can be abolished. This is seen as too complicated, unattainable, or simply theoretically wrong-headed. This is where this micro-political resistance comes in.

Yet, such politics are misguided, I believe, and for a very logical reason: If this is your conception of politics, you reaffirm your position as reactive to the problem of oppression, which will always go on.

About reform and resistance I would just say: No specific strategy and no specific form of protest have definitely failed historically. It is naïve to say that this or that has definitely failed, and if someone says something has failed, I would like to know what, specifically. Let’s take parliamentary politics: Some say the reformist approach has definitely failed, as has the attempt to seize power and thus change society, and so too have spontaneous revolts and guerrilla tactics. All of these strategies have failed, that is true, but I would still say that how these different strategies address the question of social transformation—the abolishment of present forms of domination and exploitation and of present forms of subjectivization—remains central. I aim at the simple formula: “by any means necessary.” Although, of course, I would say that some things have been tried and should no longer be applied.

The question of a revolutionary rupture needs to be posed in a differentiated manner. We know that we are faced with various forms of domination and exploitation, and some of these will certainly not be overcome by means of a swift revolutionary rupture, such as in the case of overcoming patriarchy. Still, the abolishment of capitalism will entail the suspension of the logic of capital, however long you take that period of transition to be. Thus, I don’t believe we can do without a conception of a revolutionary rupture.

Let’s pose the matter of reform, revolution, and resistance more concretely by acknowledging that everything begins with resistance. The Left has to have a positive relation with emerging revolts, without saying, of course, that it approves of them in principle.

Norbert Trenkle: I would like to stress the need to overcome the conception of resistance as micropolitics, and instead refocus on the totality. The terms “reform” and “revolution” have become deeply infected by the logic of capital. In fact, they are a reflex of the consolidation of capitalism, and for that reason no longer useful for the supersession of capitalism. Their meanings have changed too: Reform today means the cutback of social rights, of the rights of workers, or in other words, a thorough economization of society. And revolution implies nothing more than the overthrow of some authoritarian regimes to make way for free markets or, at best, an attempt to introduce democratic rights.

By this, I don’t mean to say that these terms have simply become suffused by neoliberal dogma, although they are rather closely connected with the social process of bourgeois society, in that they are subjected to the historical trajectory of the continued expansion and permanently revolutionizing means of production. However, this basic process has become a metaphysically bloated conception of philosophy of history, particularly in its classical formulation, with its emphasis on progress. Marxism, on the other hand, already regards bourgeois society as a transitory phase, directed toward a higher social formation. “Reform” and “revolution” stand in the tradition of this conception of progress and refer to it. Despite the fact that those two terms are antagonistic, they both share similar points of reference and are closely related, since they both imagine that the historical process is pushing them forward. We need to liberate ourselves from this metaphysical conception of social transformation as it is infected with the real metaphysics of bourgeois society.

By real metaphysics I mean that our actions are already anticipated by unconscious processes, or in other words, what Marx calls the “fetish,” a reification of social relations which rules over people. Liberation or emancipation can thus only mean a liberation in terms of the unconsciously presupposed that rules over people although they are their own social relations. This also implies that emancipation cannot be formulated with metaphysical or historico-philosophical categories.

Bourgeois-capitalist society has reached its limits. This, however, is not a historico-teleological interpretation but the result of the immanent contradictions of capitalism. This process does not point into some beyond, but rather to the fact that the limits have been reached. We are at a point at which we are forced to confront the question of what will follow next, since we are in a situation in which the whole of capitalist society has been formed through these contradications, and not only in its objective structures but also in its structures of consciousness. This means that there are no prerequisites for emancipation that we can relate to—these prerequisites have to be created first. Likewise, there is no presupposed “us,” no prior subject, but this “us” has to be created first through our reified consciousness.

The question of tactics and forms of protest poses itself anew once we become aware of the limits to our own consciousness. The same is true for the problem of immanence and transcendence, or, in other words, what kinds of immanent demands can be raised while at the same time pointing to the transcendence of this society. Neither the tactic nor the form of protest is the problem but rather the question what our cause is all about. First, there needs to be a negative identification of the liberation from this reified process, and secondly an appropriation of material wealth. The crisis of bourgeois society has emanated from the paradoxical fact that this society is too rich. Therefore, the answer to the question of what our cause is all about is access to material wealth and an emancipation from this form of value, for only then can forms of actions and tactics be determined anew.

Daniel Loick: I am afraid that I am a representative of exactly these Foucauldian micropolitics of the post-68 generation, with its insistent stress on everyday concerns, to which Thomas and Norbert are so fundamentally opposed. Frankfurt is where Helke Sander, at the delegate conference of the SDS, helped establish a new phase of the feminist movement. We can still learn from the speech she delivered and from the feminist politics of the generation of ’68. The feminists pointed to the fact that a change in economic relations does not necessarily result in a change of gender relations. Rather than merely relieving women in private life, for example by organizing education in a solidary or collective manner, it meant the opening up of a new area of political struggle. Previously private matters were now understood as political. What resulted from this new conception of politics was the fact that social transformation was no longer thought of within the same confines of reform versus revolution.

Let me therefore put these 7 theses up for debate:

1. Let’s put an end to economism: There is no primary or secondary contradiction, no base-superstructure relation, or real subsumption, or social totality, no deduction from the economy, or reducibility, no determination, and certainly not “in the last instance.” Capitalism, sexism, racism, neo-colonialism, anti-semitism, and many other processes of marginalization, exploitation, and oppression all compose an ensemble of forms of domination. They are interrelated, of course, at times promoting each other, at other times opposing each other. However one can never deduce the temporal or logical priority of one of these elements.

2. No division into “political politics” and “everyday politics”: Reproductive and nurturing labor needs to be made visible and distributed fairly. Our daily lives are a terrain for political struggle. The private sphere is neither subordinated nor of secondary importance to political struggle. Demands for a just organization of housework and child-rearing, and for solidary care are not merely meant to present women or other excluded persons with equal access to the sphere of “real” politics; it’s rather the other way round so that men and other privileged people are forced back into the sphere of “real” politics.

3. No fear of your own success: Progress in the fight against a relation of domination is not invalidated by the fact that it does not come about at the same time with success in the struggle against all forms of domination. The feminist revolution of 1968 is not less revolutionary because capitalism was not abolished at the same time. That is not to say that our own success cannot be integrated and domesticated or that individual forms of liberation in the end cannot have an ambivalent or ironic outcome. Those who claim, however, that post-68 forms of liberation have not really changed anything, or, even worse, have been the harbingers of post-Fordist or post-modern labor relations, merely continue the privileging and prioritizing of transformations of a so-called “base.” Those purporting the priority of some totality are really always only concerned with some part, namely the economy, and only a certain part of the economy.

4. No “tabula rasa” and no catharsis: Since we face a multitude of relatively autonomous forms of domination that are not congruent with one another, it follows that the idea that one simple “rupture” will radically alter reality is unrealistic and misleading. There are always several fronts at which we need to fight, several alliances or enmities. The term “revolution” either needs to be given up upon entirely or reformulated in such a way that it can include the heterogeneous temporalities of emancipatory movements.

5. There are no longer any barricades: We must not conceive of all forms of domination in the same way that we conceive of capitalism. Some forms of domination constitute antagonistic oppositions; some are intimate and run through our own bodies (such as gender dualism). There are militants within bourgeois institutions and enemies in my bed. Some demands can be put into rights, others require changes of attitude; some struggles aim at changing a material regime, others at a cultural or symbolic one. Relations between parents and children are a relations of domination. But these relations cannot be solved by the guillotine or through tax incentives that reduce them to problems of economics. Such issues can only be adequately resolved through the recognition of specific needs of the subaltern.

6. Put an end to aniconism: We need to develop and establish new relationships in the here and now. These forms of how we want to live need to be tried, reflected upon, revised, and published. There is no reason why we need to wait for the day after the revolution. We can begin now.

7. Occupy your life: What is truly exciting and encouraging in global protest movements that we are currently witnessing is precisely that they take seriously the specific aesthetics of existence which rest in activism. It seems that, from the beginning of the Occupy movement, discussions about the organization of our everyday lives have played a major role; from the beginning the activists have not pushed aside the cultural dimension of protest, but rather affirmed it. In almost all documents from Occupy, the experience of living together collectively is emphasized, the experience of sleeping in tents, of debating, gathering, and the emotions and affects related to it. Occupy rejects the interpellation of a personified addressee or the fiction of a grand social subject. And as a side effect, Occupy showed that activism need not be ascetic or sad, but that there is a lot to win even today, once we set up together a new and defiant life.

Janine Wissler: Far from having reached a historical nadir, the contradictions today loom so large that, on the contrary, the Left and anti-capitalist politics should be able to relate much better to the social consciousness than was the case during Fordism. That is, in times of huge growth rates, when many parts of society could, in one way or another, get something out of the growth, when there was an actual improvement of the quality of life, the contradictions in the system are less obvious. It seems obvious to many people that our current social and economic problems will never be solved if the prevailing power and property relations remain intact. The Occupy and Blockupy protests, the latter with about 25,000 participants, are great developments. However, I also argue that, especially in Germany, social movements have had great difficulties gaining a foothold.

I would follow Thomas’s definition of the term “resistance.” There are different forms of resistance, which can be concerned with single issues, can be long-lasting, can be very individualized, or can take place on a mass scale in the shape of social movements. It is the task of the Left therefore to endorse these kinds of resistance and to lead them in a way from the concrete to the universal. It should be made obvious that it doesn’t make sense in the end to just fight the symptoms of a sick system. How can you put an entire system into question though? It doesn’t work to merely win reforms and improvements step by step and then hope to arrive at a better society. Reforms can be taken back; indeed, the last few years in particular showed that advancements once gained can be taken back, so that the universal does have its limitations.

In the last few years and decades struggles for positive reforms have not had priority, rather we have only witnessed defensive struggles, which were meant to impede political setbacks. There were no mass protests that raised demands which pointed beyond the status quo. We can see this in struggles within higher learning or at workplaces. It seems that the fight for positive reforms has retreated into the defensive and the term “reform” has been perverted completely. If you think of reforms today, you think of deterioration, and not of anything positive.

If we do talk of reform and revolution, however, reformist parties should be criticized for never raising the issue of what stands in the way of social movements and for never properly addressing what keeps people from fighting for their interests together. The reason for this oversight is that the dominant principle within reformism is that you make policies for people, as their proxies. The idea seems totally lost that you can fight for self-emancipation, i.e. that people can engage in politics by fighting for their rights themselves, by making policies on their own.

I concur with the critique of economism. Nevertheless, it is actually important to discuss how exploitative and oppressive regimes are interrelated, and how they condition one another. I also agree with the sentiment that the fights against racism and against the oppression of women are independent struggles. It would, of course, be wrong to deduce everything out of the class struggle. We do need to consider where we can find correlations. I, for example, cannot imagine how women are supposed to be free in an unfree society and vice versa. That is why Daniel’s arguments seem absolute. There are seemingly naturally objective reasons why it makes sense socially that women are not equal to men, but if you get rid of the economic reason, you erase the objective foundation of inequality. We need to reflect on how we can link the struggle for the equality of women with the fight for a better society. History has shown that it was precisely during times of revolutionary upheavals that women were able to gain the most rights. Think only of 1918 when women gained the vote. Those were times when you had progressive developments and revolutionary situations all across society. Thus, we need to discuss those issues alongside one another without regressing back to the old debate around secondary contradictions, as such debates are harmful to the Left.

TS: I feel thrown back into the old debates of the 70s. Back then, I always used to say the same things that Daniel said just now, and they were always the vantage point of my politics. But we are in the year 2012 now; we have accumulated a lot of experience since the 70s.

There was a time when politics was defined as what the party does against the state and capital, always under the leadership of men, and everything else remained part of the private sphere, at best a secondary contradiction, to be dealt with after the revolution. To counter this, the dualism of micro- and macro-politics was introduced, which defined the entire micropolitical field as an area of resistance. All the old questions remain, though, and you’re not an economist if you stress that. There are different forms of domination, and they all follow their own logic. Of course, capitalism is not the only system of domination. But it is an essential one (but certainly not the only one) that runs through all the other ones. If you deny this fact, only the left-liberal position remains, which at best aims at taming the anarchy of capitalism.

Let me introduce the old, “evil” Leninist dualism of trade unionism versus politics. Trade unionism includes everything we accumulate spontaneously in our everyday lives, which is then articulated, e.g. in union demands. This was to be done away with and replaced by what the party dictated. Looked at from today’s point of view, this is of course a flawed position. However, there is a moment contained in it in which we can rediscover our experiences of the last 30 years: The division into trade unionism versus politics also meant the division of those who could not see beyond their own interests, who could only focus on their specific grievances, and were unable to offer more resistance. Lenin coined the term economism for the labor movement of his time, but you can also speak of a trade unionism of women, the youth, the sick, and of ecologists—it is a real problem that needs to be transcended. You need to move beyond this and constitute yourself as a political subject. I believe that those who set out to oppose the SDS have themselves been corrupted and gotten stuck in a specific trade unionism of their own. That doesn’t diminish their activities. Still, we need to ask how an entire generation could become saturated with questions of better child daycare and changed gender relations, which have all changed so dramatically. And, once again, we need to re-pose the question of the political subject who arises to fight in the name of all.

NT: Naturally I reject the accusation of economism. Driving this sort of attack is a truncated understanding of capitalism and its underlying features. It makes a difference whether I speak of a capitalist society whose basic process is the logic of the value form, or whether I say, “Everything is determined economically.” Those are entirely different things. There is a historically specific character to this society which is comprised in this way of being constantly “driven,” of this compulsion to constant acceleration, this necessity of always overthrowing everything, including the means of production, and penetrating all of society with capitalist relations. In no way is this merely an economic relationship, but relates to the most intimate human relationships, in other words, to the way in which people interact with one another. When we speak of subjects who understand themselves to be in constant competition and who have to act accordingly, then we’re speaking of human beings who are forced to objectify the world and themselves. We can observe this at its most obvious in the fact that I need to sell myself day after day as the commodity labor power. But things reach even farther: the need to objectify yourself and face the world as an objective process, i.e. facing something that is objectively alien to you—that’s something specific to capitalism, and which penetrates all forms of domination that persist in it. In other words, it’s not just about some sort of “economic process,” but rather about something that preconditions all social relations, and is thus also not easily grasped as it operates prior to everyday relations and actions. That’s reflected in the way people think about society. For example, the construction of a collective subject such as “the nation” is a form of metaphysics, i.e. when I identify with a meta-subject and I consequently submit myself to it. In this close way of looking at things we realize that it naturally does not have anything to do with economism but with the way I behave toward this society.

The “perverseness” of the term “reform” that Janine talked about expresses itself in the fact that the historical process which expedited reforms and allowed greater latitude within bourgeois-capitalist society has exhausted itself. The shift of the dynamic of capitalist accumulation to the financial markets has taken place because it saw in this move a strategy to avoid this underlying crisis of capitalism for a few decades. Not only has the latitude been narrowed, but the balance of power has also shifted in a way such that what once was meant by reform, i.e. gaining social rights and leeway in labor relations, does not work anymore. That’s what is meant when we talk of the “perverseness” of the term “reform.”

DL: I’ll grant you this: I, too, support the abolition of capitalism. What I find problematic, however, is the deduction of some kind of priority of the economic sphere before all other forms of domination, be they of a temporal or of a logical nature. The autonomy of struggles means that there are various autonomous, overlapping spheres that mutually influence one another, but there is just no prioritization. The belittlement of micropolitics overlooks the seriousness of those forms of domination and how difficult it is to change things on a small scale. Have you ever tried changing yourself? This is the toughest thing of all!

Foucault did not refuse to face the totality. He simply answered this challenge differently, by opposing the brand of Marxist thought that was dominant in the Communist Party of France, which took as its basic premise the category of the social totality. It was this that Foucault countered with the belief that micropolitics were heterogeneous and constituted local power relations which you have to resist locally as well as globally.

There are two dangers for the Left: corruption and conformity. The institutionalization of the Left can cause it to lose and betray its own ideals. That is what it needs to look out for and develop mechanisms to counter. The second danger is that of conformity or Stalinism. This is what Foucault opposed. When Thomas says, even after all the experience of avant-garde politics, that we should strive to achieve socialism “by any means necessary,” my alarm rings! The concept of the political needs to be reflected on critically; the experiences of Stalinism as a temptation for the Left demands reflection. We do definitely exclude some “means!”

JW: I believe that even struggles for the most minor improvements, such as better child daycare, are absolutely legitimate and necessary. The question is rather whether we stop at those.

In her essay “Reform or Revolution,” Rosa Luxemburg makes clear that she does not confront those matters as contradictions. On the contrary, in the fight for reforms we sow the seeds of a new society and the consciousness that this other society is possible, even though, to be sure, Luxemburg also explains how it does not suffice to only fight for reforms. Contemporary power relations as well as property relations are intertwined and the Left cannot lead struggles based on a conception of capitalism that detaches one from the other.

Q & A

What role do you ascribe to the political as a way to engage history, as a means to learn to understand things in a new way, such that the object of critique is itself changed and thus also our own understanding of this object of critique?

TS: The political does have a dynamic of its own. You would be mistaken, though, to assume that the political process can put everything into a new direction without being embedded in the restraints demanded by politics. I think that the political process contains the unpredictable, the non-deducible, the unexpected and surprising, sudden openings that no one is expecting. The political considerations of the comrades in Cairo only a few months or even a few weeks before the events in Tahrir Square took place within an entirely different horizon than after fall of the Mubarak. Everyone thought the Mubarak regime would last forever, that they would have to essentially adapt to this world dominated by Mubarak, and this was especially true for the left in Egypt. When the events in Tahrir Square unfolded, the Left, which until then still had been marginalized, was suddenly agitating in an entirely different context—this is the momentum of the political and it goes beyond mere “resistance.” At the level of the relationship between the micro- and the macro-political, the question arises, “What kind of rupture within your life exists once you decide to remain the political subject after having certain experiences?” If I take a historical look back at my own life I can definitely say that a giant part of my generation has been corrupted.

NT: The Greens, like Die Linke or any other party that tries to change anything by engaging in the political process, face structural constraints. When you take the case of Die Linke joining in on austerity measures when they were in a coalition government in Berlin a few years ago it had to accept the budgetary logic of sustaining only that infrastructure which can also be paid for. This is what happens once you enter into politics. That way, I am already wrapped in all the constraints that define capitalist logic, and all of this is the case in a time in which I have less leeway politically because capital accumulation is faltering. Soon we are left with the so-called “pragmatists” who accept systemic constraints and execute them. That is how a political class emerges which is nothing more than an operative of this logic, which is to say, of the logic of financial feasibility and the fact that this money necessarily is taken from capitalist accumulation.

JW: Nevertheless, you do need to look at the social configuration of the Greens. They neglected the social question from the beginning. I agree that the Greens in a way are the expression of the demise of a movement, and that they conformed in face of institutional constraints to coalitions, parliaments, and governments by really believing they could change the system. The Greens were able to achieve much more and impact consciousness far more by means of extra-parliamentary activities than what they were able to accomplish during the years they were actually governing. Once the Greens entered into parliament, they accepted constraints, budget consolidations, and the rollback of the welfare state, while appearing politically helpless.

However, there are also important reasons why Die Linke exists as a parliamentary force, since in its absence, the Right would be able to gain all the more at the polls. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if SYRIZA had become the strongest party in Greece. You cannot explain SYRIZA’s success at the polls without taking into consideration the mass movements of the last two years in which there have been 17 general strikes in Greece. It does make a difference whether you can count on mass movements as a government to get through reforms, or whether you can’t, and in Greece, SYRIZA could have gone the road of accommodation in a coalition with PASOK. However, they could have also begun to fundamentally question things and dispossess the Greek ruling class, and this could have initiated an entirely new conversation in Europe on the fiscal compact and the so-called “rescue measures.”

TS: It was good that SYRIZA did not win the elections! They would likely have not survived a victory because they would have been faced with constraints early on. All leftist forms of politics—the new social movements and the old ones, social democracy, Marxism-Leninism, anarchism—are responsible for some parts of the historical failures of the Left; yet they also have elements that I wouldn’t want to forgo. And then there is the possibility that projects such as SYRIZA, which is something else entirely, can emerge. SYRIZA is a new constellation and its platform is of a leftist social democratic nature, in which post-Maoists, post-Trotskyites, anarchists, and upright left social-democrats can participate. This has never existed historically, and it’s extraordinary, which is cause for optimistim.

Shouldn’t we ask, “What is to be done?” rather than argue over whether the Left was dead? Would this not be a way to address such issues more productively? Isn’t the end of latitude within capitalism a chance to develop politics independent of it?

NT: Indeed, I think that the term “reform” cannot be applied, for instance, to the governments in Latin America. Chavez’s regime does not achieve the political goals it sets for itself, and it is also, as is commonly known, pretty corrupt. What is much more interesting is the space it has opened up for social movements. On the political and institutional level, questions over how to finance things will always come up. Such questions never arise on the level of grassroots politics. There you can say: We don’t care how things will be financed. Instead, we just take the houses, the land, the resources and use it according to our needs. And we organize. I wonder what different sorts of latitude are opened up here. Can you still speak of politics in this case? At any rate, you definitely can’t talk of reformist politics here—it is something totally new.

JW: Look at the movements in the Arab world, the mass movements in southern Europe, and then look at what’s happening in Germany with regard to the crisis. We are immediately faced with the problem that the economically strongest country in the Eurozone has a level of class struggle that is incredibly low. This naturally has something to do with the fact that the strategy to counter the crisis in Germany was entirely different than in southern Europe. Germany did the opposite of what is expected in the south. Here, we went the way of social partnership, which is part of the problem too: In Germany we have the fewest strike days, whereas our unions are the most powerful ones in Europe, and still wages are decreasing. But it should be Germany where protests and resistance against enforced austerity measures and cutbacks are staged. What we are seeing now reminds me of the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s that occurred in the Third World, which, in the end, entirely disempower people.

What’s supposed to have changed so substantially such that there is no more leeway in capitalism, as Norbert claimed? And how have reforms become impossible? Isn’t the logic of capital he talks of as old as capitalism is?

NT: If we measure the growth of productivity in material goods, we have seen a four- to six-fold increase in the last 30 years, but under capitalist conditions people have become dispensable en masse. Due to this enormous increase in productivity the dynamic of accumulation, which pushes capitalism forward, has been undermined. That is why we have seen this shift to the financial markets. Capitalism today can only sustain itself by the accumulation of fictitious capital. That is the reason they say, “There is no alternative.” Central banks have to pump money into the markets and states jump to the rescue when banks are threatened to collapse because this dynamic of fictitious capital needs to be sustained. And this is what is so dramatic about the changes that have been wrought since the 1960s and ’70s.

This dynamic of fictitious capital cannot be sustained forever. Yet every time the Left debates wealth, this debate takes place in the category of money, which is a key point and needs to be debated. Those so-called mandatory spending cuts result solely out of the necessity to sustain the accumulation of (fictitious) capital. However, capitalism increasingly uses up future value in the present to sustain production, and this is precisely what has reached its limits. This is what presents itself symptomatically as the necessity to cut spending. Now is the historical moment in which we need to broach the issue of the kind of wealth we want.

TS: Whether reformism is possible now or not cannot be derived out of any analysis of the momentum of capital, no matter how refined it is, since the fact that reformism was possible in the 20^th century was essentially the result of the October Revolution. Capital always resisted concessions, but the October Revolution terrified the bourgeoisie so much that they were suddenly willing to make concessions after all.

What I would expect from a reformist project in the 21^st century is that it would have to brace itself for the permanence of an autonomous contradiction from society and accept it as such. This would be a reinvention; it would be a project that tries to acknowledge the autonomy of the street and the autonomous self-organization of people even in moments of conflict. For that you need a solidary communication of people from both camps—the moderate and the radical left. Never before was the dialogue between these camps led in such an open, multifaceted and solidary manner, and on such a long-term scale, as is the case today. There are radically left organizations, such as the Interventionistische Linke, who still work on the problem of how to establish the autonomy of all, and if we succeed in establishing dialogue on a long-term basis, then we have a model for such a reformist project.

What this can achieve, however, will depend on whether people will revolt, just as the October Revolution was such a revolt, and opened up the possibility to spread—as it did, as a matter of fact—despite repeatedly failing. The October Revolution inspired anticolonial movements that ultimately led to the collapse of colonialism. This was the essential reason why we had reforms in Central Europe. This presents an option for us to pursue. Otherwise I’d suggest we just retire for a while and think—for example, by reading Adorno.

How important is Adorno’s critique of the ’68 generation’s understanding of resistance and of their actionism? Is it perhaps more topical today than it was in 1968?

DL: This conflict took place in a situation in which all were partly wrong. On the one side you had students protesting at lectures and erring fundamentally in their assessment of Adorno and of the actions they took against the Institute for Social Research. It sucked just as much, though, that Adorno called the police. We can learn something of the relationship between intellectuals and social movements: Both need to be part of a social transformation. For that you need space and time to think, and this is what Adorno was doing in the face of the pressures of the street. But of course he was wrong in his assessment of this movement.

However, I do think the accusation of pseudo-activity is wrong. What’s the prefix “pseudo-” supposed to mean? You can explain it by a conception of society as a dominating totality, so that nothing short of its complete abolition can be counted as “real” activism. Such a conception is wrong, and this is where Adorno erred. You have to give him credit, though, in that he himself never complied with this verdict. Adorno did involve himself in politics. Not only did he give lectures and write texts, but he also intervened just as much in practical politics, such as in his stances on pedagogy. This is a specific kind of politics, namely a reformist one. This is what Adorno pursued, while opposing an activist kind of politics. He did so for various reasons we can debate. We could ask whether he assessed the situation adequately; he said the time for this sort of activist politics was over and that we needed a different kind of politics. Here, too, I disagree with him. Nevertheless, Adorno had some important criticisms that I think are still valid. But the term “pseudo-activity” is unwarranted, and it’s not helpful for today’s struggles.

TS: Although I appreciate Adorno, I thought his criticism of the student movement was mistaken then, and still is. He was incapable of accepting what was happening in front of his own eyes. On the subject of pseudo-activism: This aspect is the most important one when you evaluate the question of how to become a political subject! If things are the way they are, you need to take the right to hold off, instead of getting lost in pseudo-activism. My background is in the non-dogmatic, post-Leninist, half-Maoist left of the 1970s, and from a certain point onward I was surrounded by Greens and Autonomists. I allowed myself to withdraw from those discussions and to think, because I thought that which was being offered did not resonate with me for various reasons. However, when, in the early 1990s, neo-Nazis set fires to several buildings that housed asylum seekers, it became clear to me that I had spent enough time thinking and I needed to be active again. Thus, there are times of pseudo-activism, and it’s part of being seriously political that one avoids simply becoming entangled in activism. Yet, if you back out completely, you stop being a political subject.

JW: What’s important is not whether we have arguments on the Left, but whether a concerted effort or praxis emanates out of such an argument, for it makes little sense to argue unproductively over things if we cannot reunite in the end. This is where we need to ask, “What is it that we can actually agree on now, and what is the task for the Left today?” |P

Transcribed by Gregor Baszak, Markus Niedobitek, Nicolas Schliessler, Jerzy Sobotta. Translated by Gregor Baszak.

__________

1. See Platypus Review 4 (April 2008) at <http://platypus1917.org/2008/04/01/the-3-rs-reform-revolution-and-“resistance”-the-problematic-forms-of-“anticapitalism”-today/> and Platypus Review 53 (February 2013) at <http://platypus1917.org/2013/02/01/the-3-rs-reform-revolution-and-resistance-the-problematic-forms-of-anti-capitalism-today/>.↑

Share

Platypus Review 55 | April 2013

Book Review: Ian Birchall. Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time. London: Bookmarks, 2011.

THE SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY (SWP) is the largest political party left of the Labour Party, and has been active on the far left since 1977 and before that as the International Socialists since the 1960s. The party was led by Tony Cliff until his death thirteen years ago, and Ian Birchall, who has written this diligently researched memoir, is still a member since joining in the 1960s. Birchall’s “warts-and-all” examination is motivated by a marked unhappiness about A World To Win, the autobiography which Cliff apparently wrote based on recollection, without access to the relevant documentation. Cliff, Birchall remarks, was sometimes abrasive and “often underestimated the contributions of other comrades” (ix, 543). However, whatever its deficiencies, A World to Win narrates the story of the SWP pretty much as it appeared to Cliff, as one that was inseparable from his own life story. And as Cliff made clear, “there was no time in which militant workers were so open to us as in 1970–74,” under the Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath, “not before and not since.”[1] Yet if we take this claim seriously, no organization better embodies the failure of the British workers to take power than the Socialist Workers Party, which has endured for more than half a century, though not for the reasons that its leaders think.[2] Indeed, it might be argued that Cliff’s real achievement was to found a movement that rode a wave of disaffection from mainstream politics, unburdened by too many dogmatic ideas.

Birchall recounts that Tony Cliff joined the small Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League in Palestine before coming to Britain after the Second World War. The movement he joined faced some big problems. First, like all far left groups, it was guilty by its association with the repressive dictatorship that Stalin had built in the USSR. Second, the Trotskyists were saddled with an analysis that the economic crisis would get much worse after the Second World War (the destruction of the war had laid the basis for a revival). Third, globally, the working classes were divided between the peoples of the developing world, who were denied their freedom by military imperialism, and those of the developed world, who tended to support reforms offered by the state.

It was in this context that Cliff started to develop new theories to explain the new conditions in which the Left found itself, along with his early collaborators Mike Kidron and later Nigel Harris. He broke with orthodox Trotskyism to argue that the Soviet Union was not socialist, but actually capitalist, “state capitalist,” only masquerading as socialist (anti-Stalinists like Max Schachtman and Raya Dunayevskaya drew similar conclusions, and later some Maoists argued the point). He also countered the prevailing claims of the Marxist left that the 1960s would be years of crisis, arguing that government spending on arms would boost the economy, what Cliff referred to as the “permanent arms economy.” Lastly, against British comrades who believed in the importance of Lenin’s argument about imperialism, Cliff held that it was not the highest stage beyond which capitalism could develop, but the “highest stage but one.” Together, Cliff thought of the theories of “state capitalism,” the “permanent arms economy,” and the end of imperialism as a “troika” of intellectual achievements.

Although Birchall does not acknowledge it, these were not really theories so much as an intellectual spinning of the facts, worked up to avoid specific problems. It was wise to say that the International Socialists did not want to make Britain into the Soviet Union, but bizarre to say that what was wrong with Stalinism was that it was capitalist, as if “capitalist” were a word that you applied to anything that you did not like. For as Kidron went on admit, the “state capitalist” “analysis was never a general theory,” and the “permanent arms economy” was a piece of Keynesian thinking.[3] These “theories” saddled the group with false prognoses that had to be reversed later on. The spending on arms, which was credited with preserving capitalism, was later credited with precipitating a new crisis. And while the International Socialists thought that Lenin’s theory of imperialism was superseded in the 1960s (just as the conflicts in Algeria, Vietnam, Northern Ireland, South Africa and elsewhere were mounting) the SWP later embraced the struggle against imperialism in 2003 when it rallied to support for what the party called “the resistance” in Iraq and Afghanistan.[4]

None of this “theorization” was all that important to the growth of the International Socialists. But it shows that, from the outset, a convenient indifference to dogmatism sat well with the organization’s pointedly anti-intellectual approach. What Birchall’s portrayal inadvertently illustrates is that rather than working through the difficult history of the Left, Cliff’s approach was to travel light, jettisoning theories that did not seem to fit, making up new ones to fill the gaps. While the classical Marxist tradition held that the key question of socialist organization was class consciousness, Cliff dismissed it, thinking that most workers were already socialists and that their bigger problem was class confidence (282). It is in this vein that Alex Callinicos, who inherited the mantle of chief theorist of the SWP, has argued it does not matter too much if workers “have reactionary ideas on questions such as race, the position of women and so on”—the key thing was that they build their confidence through struggle.[5]

Birchall owns up to a philistine side to Cliff’s Party: “On occasion in the SWP there had been currents of workerism and anti-intellectualism, and Cliff himself had sometimes been guilty of encouraging them,” (546)—but even that is to talk down the failing. Birchall documents that Cliff often told students, “Don’t waste your time reading books!” And that even Callinicos was told not to bother pursuing a doctorate on Marx’s Capital because Cliff had already settled issues of its interpretation (344). Cliff’s anti-intellectualism was not so strange in the 1960s, when hippies painted Blake’s saying, “The Tigers of Wrath are Wiser than the Horses of Instruction,” on the walls of Notting Hill, and Jay Landesmann recommended the “university of life” above college brain-washing. While Landesmann boasted that his children got “the worst education money could buy,” Birchall reveals that Cliff offered his daughter Anna £5 for every exam she failed (390).[6]

With its emphasis on activism, an iconoclastic view of received opinion, and an emphasis on change from the bottom up, the International Socialists caught the mood of the 1960s student revolt. Cliff’s group recruited impressive young comrades in Paul Foot and Gus MacDonald in Glasgow, the polymath Peter Sedgwick and the brothers Christopher and Peter Hitchens at Oxford University, the Women’s Liberationists Irene Bruegel and Sheila Rowbotham, Eamon McCann of the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, and the sociologists Laurie Taylor and Jock Young.

In the early 1960s, when they were known as the Socialist Review Group, the International Socialists worked as “entryists” inside the Labour Party, lifted by the mood that ended the wasted years of Tory rule and swept Harold Wilson’s modernising Labour Party into power. The grubbier compromises of Wilson’s non-ideological, managerial approach disappointed the idealism of those who had voted him in and the International Socialists drifted out of the Labour Party alongside them. While Wilson and his minister Barbara Castle were proposing an official incomes policy, Cliff caught the militant trade unionists’ mood with a small, well-selling book, Incomes Policy, Legislation and the Shop Stewards (1966). Cliff’s one tenacious view was that the International Socialists would stick close to whatever action there was and not let any dogma get in the way; unless they recruited a core of activists, he intuited, they would have no influence. Tellingly, the group ignored its own theoretical view that anti-imperialist struggles were irrelevant and threw itself into the militant student protests against the Vietnam War.

Cliff sought to tighten up the IS group, which was hitherto quite loosely cobbled, through talks and actions, a bit like an anarchist group. He had once set out Rosa Luxemburg’s arguments in favor of working class spontaneity and the “mass strike” as the way to achieve power. But then he altered course, arguing for a “Leninist” party of “democratic centralism,” pressing the need for discipline in the IS. Birchall takes this intellectual turn seriously, although, to my mind, Lenin’s name was invoked more as an incantation than with any real understanding. For, despite what Birchall assumes, it is debatable whether Luxemburg and Lenin held opposite opinions on the issue of party discipline. But the main innovation was that the new group would follow orders. Ted Crawford remembers that the leadership were trying to “hurry things up” and had adopted an attitude of “not in front of the children” (358). Cliff, Kidron, Chris Harman, and Callinicos thought that the discussion of Marxist theory in the party’s branches and discussion bulletins would put workers off the party.[7] They were particularly irritated when David Yaffe and others used Marx’s theory of crisis to show that the state expenditure-led post-war growth had reached its limits. Kidron referred to this as an instance of “Talmudic” reasoning and he stuck to his Keynesian argument that arms spending would offset the recession.[8] The critics who held that the party needed a better understanding of Labour’s grip on the working class were denounced as “paleo-Marxists” and “Abstract Propagandists” and expelled, an episode that Birchall prefers to forget.[9] The lesson seemed to be that socialism had to be dumbed down to appeal to workers.

The International Socialists’ investment in student protests of the 1960s was thus followed by an involvement in the explosion of working class militancy in the seventies. Alive to the need to challenge the Communist Party’s influence among trade union activists, especially shop stewards, Cliff’s student recruits sold the IS newspaper outside factories in order to meet workers. He held that the explosion of protest in France was the result of the “years of depoliticization” and “the deep alienation of workers from traditional organizations” like the official trade union movement and the socialist and communist parties (306). The International Socialists thus challenged the mainstream left for influence just as rank and file militancy was on the rise and thereby transformed itself into a party.

Hacking through the detail, Birchall does not make the point that between 1968 and 1974 the European working class was as close to power as it had been since 1919–23. Industrial militancy went off the chart. In Britain a panic-stricken ruling class attacked militants, sending them to prison (as with the building workers known as the Pentonville Five and then the Shrewsbury Two), drawing up ration books, putting rebellious industry onto a “three day week,” waging clandestine guerrilla warfare in Italy and Belgium; in Northern Ireland the troops were sent in as an army of occupation, setting up internment camps to suppress the rebellious civil rights protestors. There was no absence of working class confidence as voters backed the striking miners when Prime Minister Heath went to the country on the question of who governs. The failure of the revolution in Britain, though, was pointed. While the ruling class was preparing a clampdown, the working class teetered on the brink of challenging them, and then fell back, uncertain what to do.

The Socialist Workers Party called for more strikes and more solidarity, but when an election was called, it lobbied workers to vote for Labour! When, in 1972, the question of state power was put most starkly in Northern Ireland, the Socialist Worker supported the intervention of British troops.

After the arrest of five shop stewards (the “Pentonville Five”) who disobeyed a court order to cease picketing, a series of strikes and protests swept Britain, culminating in the Trades Union Congress’s call for a general strike in July, 1972.

As is well known, the round of strikes went on, but at a high cost. In 1975 a conference document sounded a note of caution: “we overestimated the speed with which the economic crisis would drive workers to draw revolutionary political conclusions” (376), but of course there was no reason that workers would draw revolutionary conclusions if no political movement was making that case. The SWP’s apolitical militancy just left all the political decisions in the hands of the Labour Party, who were waiting in the wings to take over when Heath’s government lost control. Labour’s plan to halt the crisis was a “Social Contract”—a government-brokered restraint on pay. Cliff drew up a new pamphlet, “Crisis: Social Contract or Socialism” (1975), but what it had to offer working class militants was more strife, but no way out, concluding:

We are entering a long period of instability. International capitalism will be rent by economic, social and political crises. Big class battles are ahead of us. Their outcome will decide the future of humanity for a long time to come. (375)

Some of those who were tasked with building the new factory branches of the party in the early seventies, like Jim Higgins and Roger Rosewell, were burned out, and complained that the perspective was unrealistic. Birchall sums up the party’s failure by blaming the other side:

The hopes of the IS in the early 1970s were not realised because the Labour government succeeded in enforcing its Social Contract and large-scale industrial conflict virtually came to an end… reformism proved rather more resilient than had been expected. (405)

That, of course, was precisely where the SWP had failed. It never sought to challenge the Labour Party for political leadership amongst the working class, choosing instead to build influence through trade union militancy.

Struggling to explain the setback, Cliff developed what was called the theory of the “downturn,” which was no theory as such. It was just an empirical statement of the decline in strike activity. Cliff’s view of the working class was essentially sociological. They were defined by their relation to the means of production and they were more or less confident. Workers were organized in trade unions committed to the state socialist policies of the Labour Party. Reformist socialism was the ideal around which the working class had formed itself. When that ideal proved to be a failure, the working class did not “draw revolutionary conclusions” because there had been no political struggle for such conclusions. Instead, the organized working class took the failures of socialism personally. Some were angry; many more were defensive, or altogether demoralized. Cliff’s theory of the “downturn” only reflected the appearance of falling militancy, but left out the decisive factor, the absence of an alternative to Labour that might have become a focus for renewed struggle.

The party’s philistine outlook on questions of race and sex equality was at its strongest in the mid-1970s when there was a concerted push to win working class support. All social questions were reducible to the relation of exploitation of the working class “at the point of production.” The political realm was discounted as unimportant, and the struggle for rights illusory. Women’s liberation was treated as a secondary question, and the student milieu self-consciously adopted what they took to be working class attitudes towards women. The International Socialists’ out-and-out hostility to gay rights went so far that a gay caucus organized by Don Milligan and Bob Cant was broken up (424, 440).[10]

So, too, did the organization struggle to understand the race question. The International Socialists had challenged racism among dockworkers in an infamous walkout in favor of the anti-immigrant cabinet minister Enoch Powell.[11] Still the group thought of racism as little more than divisive ideas, and could not understand the connection between nationally based reformism and the denial of rights to blacks. Racism, they thought, would fall away when workers united in struggle. When police’s targeting of black youngsters provoked riots in Brixton in 1981, Socialist Worker insisted that the rioting had nothing to do with race, but rather a united black and white protest against unemployment.

Where they did feel comfortable talking about race was in the movement against the far-right National Front (NF). The SWP attempted to connect the anti-racist struggle against the NF with the popular anti-fascist mobilization against Germany in the Second World War. Racism was reduced to a question of fascists who were outside the realm of respectable opinion that the Anti-Nazi League would defend. It was a campaign that footballers and bishops could support because it cast the race problem as one of extremists who were alien to British society.

In the eighties, the SWP survived by amplifying the “anti-Thatcher mood,” joining protests and such strikes that were provoked by the employer’s offensive. “There is real hatred for this Tory government,” Cliff intuited, but “this hatred is accompanied by a very widespread impotence” (451). When left-wingers tried to take control of the Labour Party, putting up Tony Benn for deputy leader, Cliff was skeptical not of the revival of state socialist policies but that this resolution-mongering would be a distraction from building in the workplace. Birchall tells the story as if the SWP had savagely criticized the Benn campaign, but at the time the headline of Socialist Worker was “Benn for Deputy.” An entente or division of labor emerged where Benn and the other Labour Party leftists would outline the socialist policy at the podium (mostly about state control of industry), but the willing foot-soldiers of the SWP would prove their worth by organizing the grassroots support, whether gathering canvassers in elections or helping organize demonstrations and building support for strikes.

The party’s defensiveness was writ large when Yorkshire miners struck over a program of pit closures. The weakness of the strike was the division between the militant miners and the rest. Leftist hero of the 1974 strike Arthur Scargill had been elected president of the union and was close to the militants, but feared that a national ballot would have been beaten. It was the militants’ weakness that they sought to sidestep the rest of the membership by avoiding a ballot and instead picketing out the pits in support of those threatened with closure. From the outset “the strike was not solid,” and many miners saw the lack of a ballot as a justification to work on.[12] Instead of challenging the evasion of the activists around Scargill and calling for an all-out campaign to win a national ballot, Cliff made a virtue of the strike’s weakest point, and Socialist Worker denounced rank and file democracy as “ballot-itis” and a concession to Thatcherism. The ballot was not held; the miners stayed divided and lost. Yet more problematic was Scargill’s nationalistic “Plan for Coal,” which claimed that coal was profitable for British industry, as if miners’ interests coincided with capitalist success—the SWP simply ignored the meaning of the Plan for Coal. Birchall makes the interesting point that Paul Foot talked strategy on the phone to Scargill throughout the strike (485). Later Cliff dishonestly tried to shift the blame onto the miners’ leader for the strike’s failure, much to Foot’s dismay, when every step Scargill took had been supported by the SWP. With the miners’ defeat, the “downturn” became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Blaming the working class was always easier than trying to understand that it was the Left that had failed.

The SWP seemed set to fall into decline alongside the rest of the Left. On the other hand, the other rivals were falling by the wayside: the Communist Party was irreparably wounded by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Workers Revolutionary Party run into the ground by its hysterical leader (until a bankrupt leadership overthrew him by uncovering a sex-scandal); the Militant Tendency had been expelled from the Labour Party. In a very small pond, the SWP was the larger fish.

In the last decade of his life, Cliff read the runes of the class struggle, detecting a “new mood” (504). Waiting for the upturn would become the party’s business, and successive events were singled out as the turning point: the middle England protests against the closing of the last mines, the anti-capitalist protests in Seattle, or most recently the expected fight back against Tory cuts. At times popular disaffection would even lead to great carnivals of protest, like the anti-poll tax campaign that culminated in rioting in Trafalgar Square in 1990. In 2003, protests against the Iraq War grew massively as they too became a focus for popular disaffection with the political establishment led by Tony Blair in Britain, who led Labour’s return to office after a 17-year hiatus. The SWP threw itself into those protests, seeing them as a return to mass opposition, but it did not understand that, despite appearances, the dominant sentiment was an anti-political mood of disengagement—pithily captured by the inward-looking slogan “not in my name.”

Stop the War protest in London, February, 2003.

On the back of the Gulf War protests, the SWP took its most ambitious move yet, founding the RESPECT coalition with George Galloway, Salma Yaqoob and Ken Loach to fight against the Labour Party in the elections. Just as they had handed over political leadership to the Labour left in the 1980s, so too did they let the old Labour MP Galloway draw up the platform for Respect. There were two main platforms: the first was anti-war, and for a domestic social program, RESPECT offered a revived platform of social welfare and nationalization drawn from the Labour manifestos of 1945 and 1983. RESPECT could rally disaffected Labour voters, and Galloway worked younger Muslims who were put off by the Iraq war. But it was not a stable coalition, and in Galloway, the SWP had created a monster whose ego could not be contained. Opportunistically, Lindsey German offered to downplay the SWP’s policies on women’s oppression, especially if these were going to jeopardize Galloway and Muslim voters. Still, Galloway refused to be a puppet of the SWP. The coalition split, with an exposed SWP obliged to stand its own “left list” to save face—but getting a desultory vote.

What Cliff and the leadership of the organization that followed him could not understand was that they were not really seeing signs of an upturn, but following the symptoms of popular disaffection with politics. Often misunderstanding these symptoms of depoliticization and decay as positive features of a “new mood,” the SWP could live off the growing disaffection, but at a high cost. Each successive attempt to kick the party into gear with yet another mobilization would lead to demoralization, and increasingly to factions and splits. These factions would usually claim to be trying to go back to the roots of the International Socialists before it all went wrong—though they never could work out where it was that had gone wrong. What Birchall’s book documents is that it is the IS tradition itself that is flawed; the current leadership has merely adapted to this flawed inheritance rather than questioning it. The anti-political bias of the International Socialists relates to the contemporary mood, but appealing to people on the basis of their contempt for politics, in the end, is bound to demoralize them, so that the rate of attrition among the members leaves the party running to stand still. |P

1. Tony Cliff, A World to Win (London: Bookmarks, 2000), 111, 124.↑
2. See for example Alex Callinicos, “Is Leninism Finished?,” Socialist Review, January 2013.↑
3. Borrowed from TN Vance in Michael Kidron, “Two Insights don’t make a Theory,” International Socialism, Series 1, No. 100 (July 1977), <www.marxists.org/archive/kidron/works/1977/07/insights.htm>.↑
4. See Alex Callinicos, “Imperialism and the Global Economy,” International Socialism Journal, 108 (October, 2005), <www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=140>.↑
5. Alex Callinicos, “Politics or Abstract Propagandism,” International Socialism Journal Series 2, No. 11 (Winter 1981): 122.↑
6. See also Cosmo Landesmann, Starstruck (London: Macmillan, 2008), 99–100.↑
7. Martin Shaw, “The Making of A Party,” Socialist Register 15 (1978): 123.↑
8. Michael Kidron, “For Every Prince There is a Princess,” IS Internal Bulletin (March 1973), <www.marxists.org/archive/kidron/works/1973/03/yaffe.htm>.↑
9. See Alex Callinicos, “Politics or Abstract Propagandism,” International Socialism Series 2, 11 (Winter, 1981). Ian Birchall seconded the motion to expel Yaffe and his followers.↑
10. See also Bob Cant, “A Grim Tale The I.S. Gay Group 1972–75” Gay Left, No. 3 (Autumn, 1976).↑
11. Even then the leaflet they put out made an issue out of Powell’s writing Greek Verse, as if to say that really he was upper class and probably a homosexual.↑
12. Cliff, A World to Win, 193.↑

Share

The original description of the series reads: “Panel Description: The present moment is arguably one of unprecedented confusion on the Left. The emergence of many new theoretical perspectives on Marxism, anarchism, and the left generally seem rather than signs of a newfound vitality, the intellectual reflux of its final disintegration in history. As for the politics that still bothers to describe itself as leftist today, it seems no great merit that it is largely disconnected from the academic left’s disputations over everything from imperialism to ecology. Perhaps nowhere are these symptoms more pronounced than around the subject of the economy: radical political economy has witnessed a flurry of recent works, many quite involved in their depth and complexity; similarly, recent activism around austerity, joblessness, and non-transparency, while quite creative in some respects, seems hesitant to oppose the status quo mantra,“There is no Alternative,” with anything but nostalgia for the past, above all for the welfare state. At a time when the United States has entered the most prolonged slump since the Great Depression, the European project founders on the shoals of debt and nationalism. If the once triumphant neoliberal project of free markets for free people seems utterly exhausted, the “strange non-death of neo-liberalism,” as a recent book title has it seems poised to carry on indefinitely. The need for a Marxist politics adequate to the crisis is as great as such a politics is lacking.

And 2011 now seems to be fading into the past. In Greece today as elsewhere in Europe existing Left parties remain largely passive in the face of the crisis, eschewing radical solutions if they even imagine such solutions to exist. In the United States, #Occupy has vanished from the parks and streets, leaving only bitter grumbling where once was seeming creativity and open-ended potential. In Britain, the energy and anger of 2010 Student Protests and the 2011 London Riots, both, in the eyes of the Left, expressions of a shafted generation’s response to a crisis, has now somewhat dissipated. Finally, in the Arab world where, we are told the 2011 revolution is still afoot, it seems inconceivable that the revolution, even as it bears within it the hopes of millions, could alter the economic fate of any but a handful. While joblessness haunts billions worldwide, politicization of the issue seems chiefly the prerogative of the right. Meanwhile, the poor worldwide face relentless price rises in fuel and essential foodstuffs. The prospects for world revolution are remote at best, even as bankers and fund managers seem to lament democracy’s failure in confronting the crisis. In this sense, it seems plausible to argue that there is no crisis at all, but simply the latest stage in an ongoing social regression. What does it mean to say that we face a crisis, after all, when there is no real prospect that anything particularly is likely to change, at least not for the better?”

What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation that PAS-London hosted on December 1, 2012 at Queen Mary College of the University of London. A full recording of each of the events held in this series can be found at: <http://london.platypus1917.org/500/>

 

 

Hillel Ticktin: First I’d like to thank the organizers and Lucy Parker. I think it is a good idea to have debates of this kind in order to bring the Left together.

I follow Marx in defining crisis as a situation in capitalism where all the contradictions come together. From that point of view, this really is the first crisis since 1945. Today the situation is very grave; it’s hard to say anything else. A number of Keynesian economists are calling it a depression. Just taking the statistics that appear in the newspapers—GDP growth or even the intended standard of living—it is worse in Britain now than it was during the Great Depression. It’s not worse in the United States, but it is pretty bad, and could get worse. So, there is no question of where we are. We are in a crisis.

The system itself does not know where to go, but we might begin thinking about the future in terms of a few possibilities. The crisis, or important aspects of the crisis, could in principle be resolved; we go back to where we were. I think this outcome is extremely unlikely. Another possibility is that the crisis carries on the way that it is now, with one problem arising after another, one attempt at dealing with the contradictions after another. It is not a coincidence that in Britain, the United States, France, and Germany, we have such weak responses from the government. They simply cannot deal with the real social tensions that now exist throughout the world. It is also possible that the polarities in the contradictions intensify to the point that society actually disintegrates. This is what happened from 1922 onwards: A significant portion of the population was forced to go outside the towns and grow their own food. Of course, the most optimistic possibility is that it we move over to the new society.

Those are the possibilities. Just stating them indicates where we are today. It is as barefaced as that. To understand that, we simply have to go back to understanding the background—the historical background, in fact—of capitalism over the last 150 years. Capitalism itself is not inherently stable. The working class, in principle, becomes increasingly powerful as capitalism develops, if not in theoretical, ideological terms, then nonetheless in terms of its actual position in society. To see this, we have only to look to the period after the Second World War, in which the mechanisms of capitalism were deliberately contained. Commodity fetishism and the reserve army of labor, however, could not be contained. They could not control the working class, a situation that led to the 1960s and ’70s, and then the pulling of the rug.

In volume three of Capital, Marx discusses crises of banking and so forth, and in every instance there has been a monetary crisis. If we look even in the past 50–60 years, the downturns always ended this way. There is a tremendous pile-up of money that cannot be invested. That is why we had all the discussion around money, the question of confidence, etc. Today you ask bankers, or anybody in the economy, “What’s the problem?” They say, “Confidence.” This should alert us to something terribly wrong about the word “confidence.”

In other words, one cannot look at the crisis simply as a technical crisis of banks. It is not. One necessary result of any crisis is the extension of credit to a breaking point. So one has to look not only at the banks, at credit or whatever, but also at the underlying aspects. The only issue to be discussed regarding banks is how they delayed the moment in which the crisis actually hits. People involved in finance wanted to enrich themselves, and did so. Of course, that endeavor became almost a criminal enterprise in itself, but it did so precisely because there was a pile-up of money. This was unavoidable once they decided that they would not go for growth, but instead would raise the number of unemployed people. We have to look at the crisis in terms of its form, but also in terms of the underlying class struggle. We have to bring together these two aspects.

It eventually became necessary for the capitalist class to effectively pull the plug on the Bretton Woods settlement—the Keynesian settlement—and try to get back to the 19^th century. That is what they were trying to do under Thatcher, but they did not fully succeed. They are now trying to go the whole way. The essential basis of the crisis lies in the class struggle.

The capitalist class is not confident and it will not invest, so we have a pile-up of money. Take one bank, the Bank of New York Mellon. It has 27 trillion dollars in deposits just sitting there, not invested. They charge people for depositing money in the bank. You would have thought, given the needs of the world’s population, they might have dreamed up a few investment ideas—like trying to save the planet—but they are not interested. They lack confidence. They are convinced that, if they invest, they will not get a sufficient return or might even lose their money completely, which is perfectly possible, of course. So we are stuck. The only way they will invest is if the government guarantees the investments will return with sufficient profits for the next 20 to 50 years. The only way the government can do that is through what the right-wing demands all the time—as in the case of the Republican party, of the Christian-Democratic party in Germany, and of our Tory government—the abolition of welfare benefits, taking us back to the 19^th century. But 19^th century capitalism is impossible! We can’t have people in workhouses. The whole project they are putting forward is absurd. Many people say, “the whole project is crazy. It’s impossible.” It is impossible. But they have no other way out, so they are going on with it. That is where we are.

Saul Newman: My approach is somewhat different than Hillel’s—it’s more theoretical, a bit more philosophical, and less economic perhaps. I was asked to comment on whether or not this is a crisis. I would say the following: While capitalism has always been crisis-ridden, indeed, we can even say that crisis is the very motor of capitalism, the limit that allows it to reinvent itself. What’s different now is that I think this moment of crisis has become our common horizon. Crisis and indeed even catastrophe have become part of the symbolic order of capitalism. We live without a foreseeable future. We no longer plausibly look forward to the restabilization of capitalism or the return to life as normal.

There is an abyss confronting us. It is now impossible to think in the long term, to make forecasts and predictions. So this crisis is not simply economic, it is political: The failure, the nihilism of our political institutions is visible to all. The crisis is also social: We are confronted with the limits and the impossibility of a certain way of life, a certain form of identity, through which we had hitherto established a kind of familiarity or stability within capitalist social relations. The very way in which we see ourselves—as one who consumes, who invests, who plans for retirement—is now thrown into chaos. We simply can’t see ourselves in the same way. So the real crisis, from the point of view of capitalism at least, is that people have stopped believing in it. They have stopped having faith in it. People no longer believe that the system will resurrect itself. We see this quite clearly in the levels of consumer spending, which leads to a crisis of investor confidence.

Governments and financial systems want things simply to return to normal. They want to perpetuate our continual enslavement to the financial system through debts and consumer spending in the hope that it will kick-start the economy again. But this plan is not working. This crisis is much more serious than all the crises and crashes that have occurred before, and may prove terminal, because it is a crisis of desire. However, this crisis of desire cannot be addressed separately from the environmental catastrophe looming ahead of us, as a rapacious capitalism turns our increasingly barren world into wasteland. Any attempts to restimulate the economy will eventually run up against the limits of an exhausted material base. Yet, in the face of all this, I feel strangely calm, even welcoming the end of the storm.

The word “crisis” in Greek means a situation that has reached a decisive moment, specifically the turning point of an illness, after which either rehabilitation or the death of the patient will follow. We’ve come to see that there is no rehabilitation, no life, no future in the continuation of capitalism. Indeed, it might already be dead, and cannot be brought back to life through artificial means. What capitalism cannot survive is a crisis of desire, the possibility of a different form of subjectivity emerging in which the libidinal drives are no longer directed towards work and consumption for their satisfaction. For us, for humanity itself, recovery does not mean the recovery of capitalism, but rather the recovery of life and its autonomous organization beyond capitalism. It means, in other words, recovery of the future.

What will take capitalism’s place? Who can say? This is a time for invention, for experimentation, for new forms of autonomous self-organization, modes of exchange, new ways of being together. We can no longer look to the state for salvation. The state is a broken husk, an empty shell. The crisis means that we will have to build new networks of mutual assistance and cooperation. It’s time to stop lamenting the crisis and being angry with the government, which is an irrelevant puppet at this point. It’s time to start preparing for the future.

I have been asked to comment on changes since Marx’s time. Obviously, there have been many structural transformations—the shift to post-industrial capitalism in the West, the fragmentation and displacement of class identity, the emphasis on consumption rather than production. The collapse of the socialist workers movement has not made the overcoming of capitalism impossible. On the contrary, it may well be the condition for it. The fact that now there is no privileged revolutionary agent, which was always an illusory promise in any case, means that we need to reconsider the whole project of revolution and instead begin thinking in terms of insurrection.

I was also asked to comment on whether a certain kind of analysis of the world as it is can bring about any kind of change. All the sophisticated leftist analyses in the world have been unable to bring about any change because they are unable to account for the libidinal economy of capitalism, the way it organizes, intensifies, and constructs desire and enjoyment, what we may call jouissance in psychoanalytic terms. This is why the Marxists’ analysis of ideology in terms of truth, distortion, and “false consciousness” never worked. Our perpetuation of the capitalist system was not because we could not see things for the way they were. Rather, it is because our desire and our whole subjectivity were implicated in it because at some level, perhaps even in a masochistic sense, we enjoyed it.

What will finally enable us to see beyond capitalism is not when we finally see it for what it is, but when we no longer enjoy it. Or, in other words, when there is a vacation in our libidinal economy, in our whole subjectivity, such that we become invested in something else, we become invested in ourselves, perhaps for the first time, beyond the miserable category of the liberal-individual or homo economicus. The means by which we might transcend capitalism does not lie in developing a more scientific analysis. Marxism, of course, always had the aspiration of being a science. But what we require is the invention of new modes of subjectivity, new ways of life no longer channeled by, and conforming to, economic rationality.

As for Occupy, I do not see it as a class-based movement. It was certainly nothing like the socialist labor movement in the classical sense. The Marxist and socialist Left have no right to claim it. Indeed, what was surprising and generally innovative about this movement was its radical break with the politics and identity of the past. Rather than being constituted by class identities, it was a politics of what we might call “post-identity”: heterogeneous singularities that are not defined by a class background or by a kind of work, but that gather together and spontaneously arise magically around a common desire to create something different, to create an autonomous space in which new relations between people can emerge. These relations would no longer be based around fixed identities. This, not class identity, is the condition of insurrection today.

What was striking in Occupy was the absence of the usual modes of communication and representation. There were no demands, no programs, and no revolutionary blueprints, just the coming together of singularities without anything in common apart from a desire to create new relations and subjectivities. The mode of communication, on the contrary, was completely innovative, decentralized, and gestural. Lastly, there was no party, no centralized leadership, no form of representatives, no Lenin waiting in the wings to take over state power. Those times are over. The vanguard has fallen from its privileged place in revolutionary politics. It’s completely defunct. This is the time not of revolution, but of insurrection, the creation of autonomous spaces and relations and new collective intensities. Occupy gives a glimpse of the possibilities of the insurrection today.

David Graeber: The last panel I saw here ended with a comment that we have to create a situation in which the ruling class is actually afraid of us. One of the paradoxes of where we are now is that the ruling class is, in fact, terrified of us. We are the ones who don’t actually perceive it. Almost everything we see around us, politically and economically, has emerged from that fear. The people running the system are obsessed with whether we can imagine an alternative, precisely because they realize that no one actually believes in the viability of the system anymore. So we’re their greatest threat because at the moment there is something that seems like a viable alternative and no one has any reason to keep reproducing a system except a very small percentage of the population that no one particularly likes.

I like the analysis of the two cycles of post-war capitalism, which argues that the crisis we are in now, as of 2008, is a crisis of inclusion. According to this argument, in the immediate wake of World War II, there was a Keynesian convergence of strong wages with high productivity. Welfare states provided the basics of what Communists were asking for, at least white working class Communists in North Atlantic countries: “We will cut you in to a certain degree on the deal.” You can see this with all political struggles through the 1970s, with more and more people wanting in on the same deal, saying, “Well, what about us?” This was the case with excluded minorities in the Civil Rights Movement in America, working class elites in the global south, up to and including feminism.

At a certain point it breaks. Capitalism cannot work by offering a reasonable deal to the majority of the working class. It gets to a point where politically it cannot resist a certain level of demand. Then the whole thing falls apart and it has to start all over again. So in the 1970s the Keynesian system broke. Wages stagnated or went down. There was a huge extension of credit on all levels, from mortgages to 401(k)’s in America to the extension of microcredits to spur development in the global south. This crisis of inclusion comes to a peak in 2008, not insignificantly around sub-prime mortgages. The system falls apart.

This crisis really isn’t over. I was talking with somebody at the Federal Reserve the other day. He said, “Give it another two to three years, and there will be another 2008, except much worse, unless we do massive mortgage cancellation, and we can’t get that through politically.” The small percentage of the ruling class that actually cares about the long-term viability of the system has mostly taught itself to look at a two or three-year horizon. Those who take a longer view are scared shitless. They don’t know what to do. So how did this come about?

What’s actually going on in this last, post-1970s phase of crisis, is an obsessive prioritizing of the political over the economic. That is what neoliberalism really means. I recognized this at the IMF protest in 2002. It was after 9/11, and we were all demoralized and depressed. We showed up there—300 anarchists and some 5000 police. I talked to someone who was at the IMF meetings. They said everyone who had come for the IMF meeting went home demoralized and depressed. The cops essentially shut down the meeting. Then I realized that it is more important to the police that 300 anarchists go home feeling like shit, than it is that the IMF meetings actually happen. What does that tell you about how important they think we are?             Almost everything they do is in a preemptive mode, even the war in Iraq. Why did they lose it? Because they were so obsessed with getting over the “Vietnam syndrome.” Make a war that could not be resisted at home. To make sure there was no effective anti-war movement, they calculated, “We have to make sure there are very few American casualties.” But in order to ensure that, they had to adopt more brutal rules of engagement, like killing children in Iraq. This alienated people so much that they don’t want the war, but the rulers don’t care. Ensuring the anti-war movement didn’t get off the ground was more important than winning the war.

It is analogous to what’s going on economically. Almost all the economic moves that we identify with neoliberal capitalism, such as the creation of precarious labor, for example, do not actually translate into more efficient labor. Even the mortgage crisis, and the increased dependence of everyone on debt, to some degree is one of the major answers to break the labor movement. Alan Greenspan actually admitted this at one point. If you have a mortgage you’re in debt and can’t really strike. It’s one of the mechanisms for bringing wages down. So they put all their cards on the political side. In the meantime, the weight of all these mechanisms to destroy alternative sources of vision—the capping of the educational system, for instance—put us in a paradoxical situation where the system is crumbling all around us. It doesn’t even claim to do the things it used to do. The one victory they can achieve in this war on the imagination is that no one can imagine anything else.

What we really have to do—and this is one reason why Occupy movement took the strategy that it did—is shouting in their face that there are other values and ways of existing that are possible. I mean, really, that’s all you have to do at this point, if you do that on a sufficient scale, because the system has entirely delegitimized itself. This explains the extraordinarily militaristic reaction to a bunch of people sitting around in a park.

James Woudhuysen: I’m very pleased to be here. I’d like to thank Platypus, who brought the weather with them. It’s sunny out there. It is nice to see people reading the Financial Times on the Left. I disagree with most of what’s been said today but I think this panel’s atmosphere of judgmental tolerance is the right one.

First, I’ll address one of the questions Platypus put to us: “Do we live in a crisis of capitalism today and, if so, of what sort—political? Economic? Social?” It is perhaps most strikingly a political crisis, because the capitalist class has no forward vision, no plan for growth, and not even a plan for raping the planet, as a lot of our ecological friends seem to think. Is it an economic crisis? Certainly. But while it’s all very well and good for Hillel to talk about the Great Depression or the 19^th century, neither of those periods really saw what’s happening in Asia today, which hasn’t been discussed so far. Part of what we are seeing now is a crisis of innovation in the West. (There is a crisis of innovation in the East, but not to the same degree.) That is one way this crisis presents a new problem. It’s quite different from what happened in the 1930s or the 19^th century. Is the crisis social? I think the unprecedented social factor of our time is the aversion to risk. I heard from our postmodernist friend that ideas were risky. That was fun to hear. I thought we were here for ideas!

Are capitalism’s laws of operation the same today? They’re the same-ish, in that the accumulation of the three things I’ve talked about—political stasis, innovation slow-down, and state-regulated risk aversion—have turned quantity into quality. So, the laws of operation are similar, but there is new stuff that really needs to be addressed.

I like Hillel’s remarks about the banks not being responsible for the crisis. I’m sure Hillel will go further in looking at the cash hordes of IT companies, of energy companies, and of pharmaceutical companies. They are really not that different from the banks. They are increasing their cash hordes, by refusing to invest in the future. They are lowering their research and development, which in the case of energy is extremely weak, while the Asians are increasing it. The extremely high level of risk aversion speaks to a subjective crisis that, characteristically, is not being addressed by the Left.

So then we come to the question, “Why do seemingly sophisticated leftist understandings of the world appear unable to assist in the task of changing it?” Well, I don’t know if they are sophisticated. At any rate, I’m delighted to hear the old canard from Saul here, who I would have thought knew better, that Marxism is partially about false consciousness. I urge you, go to Marx’s work. You will never see the phrase “false consciousness.”

As for the notion Saul has raised, about resources being exhausted: I don’t know whether you have read the papers or not, but various kinds of “peak oil theory” have disappeared in the last few years because so much oil is being discovered. No water is leaving the planet, sunshine has not been decreasing, not even in England. We have an enormous amount of energy that, with practical innovations, we could do a lot with. I don’t see a resource crisis. One thing we need to do is to address consumer issues, but not in an anti-consumerist way. I say, “Let’s hear it for refrigerators! Hooray for the fridge!” We need to take up issues like the fridge, not because they are a part of false consciousness, but because they are a part of popular consciousness. The Left is characteristically—as on Asia, as on innovation—unprepared to take up consumer issues except to concede to green and liberal sentiments.

As for intelligibility, the world is no less intelligible than it was before. With the new tools we have, it is difficult, but not impossible, to comprehend the world. But it has always been difficult. Albeit not completely so, our world is different from the past. The aforementioned crisis of risk aversion shows how capitalism today is very different, but so do seemingly mundane things like how parenting is now regarded as risky, leadership is seen as toxic, computers can catch viruses, obesity is an epidemic, and the widespread sentiment is that we all need to “nudge” our way along with the state.

The Occupy movement is the end of the old social movement, not a revitalization of it. It brings to a close the era of John Kennedy Galbraith, the era of Democratic Party dissent begun by Rachel Carson and Silent Spring, by Herbert Marcuse, Jane Jacobs’s Life of American Cities and Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The period from 1957 to 1963 was also the period of Vance Packard, who believed that advertising, the waste of packaging, and the exhaustion of the Earth’s resources were the big problem. Occupy is the final culmination of that bourgeois tradition of dissent. The early dissenters were much more eloquent than Occupy will ever be. That’s why Occupy cannot bother to introduce any demands—something that Saul applauds, but I put down to a lack of ideas. The Occupy agenda, insofar as it has ideas, is all about greed. For me, that shows us the Left’s commonalities with Obama and Cameron. “The root of all evil is the love of money.” That is an insight from the Bible, and I thank Occupy for repeating it.

Another question asks, “Is today’s crisis different from the crisis of Fordism beginning in the late 1960s and crystallizing with the oil crisis in 1973?” Fordism is a concept pioneered by the Euro-Communist wing, the Marxism Today wing, of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1980s. I think the view that we really have an oil crisis in the 1970s, rather than the early beginnings of the innovation slow-down that I have talked about, indicates that our sophisticated left-wing is not so sophisticated.

One of the main errors being made here today is indicated by the question, “Does the present crisis at least signal an end to neoliberalism?” Apart from Asia, there is one thing that hasn’t been mentioned here today—just a small thing, maybe you noticed it—the Leveson Inquiry. It shows that liberalism, not neoliberalism, is the main problem that we face today. The liberal desire to regulate the press is something that should concern us much more than Cameron’s reputed neoliberal tendencies. As a general point, we should also keep in mind that there’s no such thing as economics in Marxism; there is, rather, a critique of political economy.

Platypus also asks, “How do you avoid the danger of your theory simply confirming your past?” I think that is a problem. I’m always surprised how events seem to confirm my theories and yet things turn out much worse than I had ever surmised. We are in the era of predictable surprises. I like to think I know how bad things are going to get, but capitalism always surprises me.

What about the end U.S. hegemony as an outcome of this crisis? This is why I think discussing Asia is important. If you are not following the Senkaku Islands dispute between Japan and China and considering America’s role in that, then you can’t give a proper answer to this question. So, in this panel’s atmosphere of judgmental tolerance, I would urge more discussion of Asia and the Leveson Inquiry. The striking thing about the Senkaku dispute and the exercise of U.S. power now is that it is not a war for resources, any more than the Iraq war was a war for oil. Resources play a role, but they are not central. What is striking about events in the China Sea is the arbitrariness of international relations today, which reflects the fact that the ruling class has had no clear project for the 20 or 30 years following the wrap-up of the Cold War. In this respect, U.S. hegemony is in decline, but not in the sense of classical imperialist decline. It is more arbitrary and dangerous than that. We need to understand how this is a subjective crisis, not just one driven by the conventional search for raw materials or new markets. There is all of that, of course. Those old laws are still operating. But there is a whole lot of new stuff in there now which we need to comprehend, without imagining that we are very sophisticated.

Well done, Platypus, for understanding that the Left has been dead for a long time. You’re a bit late to the party, though. Some of us, I fear, attended the funeral a lot earlier. Nevertheless, if you want to join in now, realizing that we’re at the end of a period and not yet at the beginning of a new one, then I’m sure we can have a great time discussing these points.

HT: The question isn’t really what’s going to happen to Asia. It is quite clear where Asia is. China is not going to take over the world. Its level of productivity is below that of the United States by any criterion, and the Chinese economy is in tremendous trouble. It’s much more likely to disintegrate than thrive. So, we confront the same basic problem we have had for the last 150 years: capitalism in decline. Just look at Apple, the biggest, most important packaging company in the world today. It doesn’t invent anything. But what’s the issue? The question of innovation was, of course, discussed in the Second International. This “crisis in innovation” is not as new as you might think.

The rate of growth has been lower in the last 30 years—but, again, so what? The fact is that the vast majority of the people in the world don’t have enough. It isn’t a question of absence of resources but of inequality and the inefficiency of capitalism itself. Capitalism is unable to supply the needs of the majority of people and that applies to this country as well. In some areas of Scotland there is no point in cutting pensions because most people die before 65 anyway.

Capitalism can be overthrown. The forms of the future society are here. We can see in the present a future society run in the interests of the majority, a planned society run from below, in which the people take part in the planning and the antagonistic forms which exist today will be abolished. Still, despite what some here are saying, the majority of the people have no hope. The reason is because of what happened in the Soviet Union, which proclaimed itself socialist, but was actually the exact opposite. It was an absolute disaster. At the same time, people see that social democracy has failed. They have seen what the Labour Party has become. So where do you go, politically? The central issue today still is, How do we attain the level of production required in order to guarantee a good life for all people? To fulfill this task, you need a political party to take power.

SN: I think we probably all agree that we are living in a moment of crisis, one that is probably insoluble. What system of social relations can we move into? Is any alternative possible? You mentioned one possible path is to move into socialism, but what would that look like? Would that involve a revolutionary period? How can that be imagined today? The notion of class struggle was important in Hillel’s talk, but how do you reconcile that with the way class identities have shifted, fragmented, or become blurred? It’s clearly not the same kind of class dynamic today that existed in the heyday of the Marxist-socialist movement.

I liked David’s paradoxical formulation that neoliberalism is really about the predominance of politics over economics, and not the other way around. I also liked your idea of the power of movements like Occupy. These movements, the opportunities we have, are quite remarkable. This is not a time for desolation and gloom. On the contrary, it’s a time for some kind of political confidence.

James, the notion of false consciousness was Engels’s, not Marx’s, but you wouldn’t deny that Engels is central to Marxism. The notion of ideology and ontological distortion is central to Marxist politics, which has to explain why the working class, despite the objective conditions, does not revolt. I’m making what I take to be an uncontroversial point about how we can no longer sustain this notion of ideology, nor of the ontological. We do see reality, but we have a libidinal attachment to it.

Is there no environmental crisis whatsoever? Not a day goes by where one does not hear about the environmental crisis. Is that all a big conspiracy? I’m not sure of James’s position respecting the liberal regulation of the media. Are you for or against it? I think we can say that society has retreated to the media and to what may be called “communicative capitalism.” We shouldn’t necessarily be too worried about the regulation of the press, because power now lives with the media. It isn’t in the hands of government anymore.

DG: In different ways, I find myself in strong agreement and equally strong divergence from everyone. For example, I agree that capitalism has gotten to a point where it can no longer produce meaningful innovation in the way it once perhaps did. Now it’s the opposite. I think this is one of the key signs that it is in crisis.

The situation reminds me of a seminar I did in New York where I described what I take to be the changing class alignments that made the Occupy movements possible. The declining rate of profit and the financialization of capital creates a system whereby government and finance become so deeply intertwined that one can hardly tell the difference between them, and the whole thing becomes a means of rent extraction. The plight of an indebted college graduate, which 20 or 30 years ago probably would not have deeply moved the heart of the average transit worker, has become something people do identify with, because people with student loans can’t do what everybody else is doing, namely, liquidating their loans through default or otherwise.

When I gave this talk some Marxist sectarian came out and said, “I disagree with everything you say. It’s not greed. It’s not about greed.” I said, “What are you talking about? I never mentioned greed once.” Another person said that the whole idea of the individual as the only locus of politics is absurd. It is like people carry around in their pockets this prepackaged idea of what they are supposed to say. No matter what you say or do, they’ll just throw it at you. I’ve been to a thousand Occupy meetings and I don’t remember hearing the word greed once. Where is this criticism that Occupy is fixated on greed coming from?

I also don’t think that we are just better singularities at this point. It is more complex and we don’t necessarily have a language for it. There are new class segments and new forms of social alliances that are happening. The most important job for theory at the moment is to think through this, now that the party form is not going to be the way we represent ourselves or imagine social alliances. We need to think hard about what is happening now.

JW: I’m not saying there is no more innovation. There is innovation. If you look at pharmaceutical companies, they are still spending on research and development, but they are cutting budgets. Innovation hasn’t ended, but there is an innovation crisis.

Now, you’ve had the misfortune of going to a thousand meetings of Occupy, David. I’m sure you may never have heard the word greed, but I put it to you respectfully that the critique of bankers, with which Hillel began, is all about their executive pay, their bonuses, their greed. This has nothing in common with Marx’s political economy, if we want to be classical about it. Also, the hostility to consumption, the hostility to fridges by the Occupy movement—that too is hostility to greed. Again, I say: “Let’s hear it for fridges!”

Hillel said that people have seen through the Labor Party, they understand how bad it is. I think that is only partially true. Saul says we can see reality, but we have various libidinal attachments. When you say this, speak for yourself. It seems to me you’re hinting at the Green trope that the masses are guilty of false consciousness because they desire a new fridge. I don’t think that’s fair. When you say that power has shifted to the media from government, there is some truth in that. But you then go on to say that you are indifferent to press censorship. We face in this country the most serious challenge to the press that we’ve ever had. We face government regulation under the guise of independent regulation. This “independent regulation” would put the government in a position to police all of the left publications that we see here today.

Hillel, you say there’s always been a crisis and the age makes no difference; it is always the same crisis we are in. That seems a bit biblical to me. You know, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. As for life expectancies, thousands and millions of Scots are living longer lives. The same is true even in large parts of sub-Sahara Africa. The health of the population has qualitatively improved. That’s not to say the cup is not damaged in many places. But I think the problem that we face cannot be compared with the return to the workhouse that Hillel warns us of. We must understand what has changed, and that includes those things that have actually changed for the better.

 

Photograph from RIPC-London taken by James Heartfield. From L-R: Lucy Parker (moderator), Hillel Ticktin (with microphone), Saul Newman, David Graeber, and James Woudhuysen (not pictured).

 

Q & A

Regarding Asia, we should be focusing on the social movements currently taking place there: the big strike movement in China, the movement of landless laborers in India, the strike movement in Kazakhstan. The future of Occupy will be determined by how it relates to such movements outside the richest counties. Second, aren’t the “resource crisis” and “innovation crisis” two sides of the same coin? Just as capitalism alienates the relationship between humans, it also alienates humans and the planet they live on. James, you are right that the amount of fresh water has not changed in the last 30 years, but the way that industrial agriculture misuses that water in order to produce hamburgers for North American teenagers is a problem. The vast majority of R&D money in pharmaceutical companies is spent to produce drugs for unhappy people who live alienated lives in the First World instead of on generic drugs to save millions from early death in sub-Saharan Africa. Shouldn’t this so-called innovation crisis just be seen as the capitalist crisis?

Saul, you said that Marx was dealing with a more industrial class, whereas today we’re dealing more with office and service workers. But the core social relations between the working class and the exploiters have not changed, and this still empowers the working class to overthrow the system. Our power is the same as it was in Marx’s time. You also questioned what a socialist society would look like. But Marx specifically said he is not going to provide a recipe for the future of the revolution, because capitalism shapes your mind such that we cannot picture in advance what a socialist society is going to look like. Rather, you have to learn through struggle. We have to try for a revolution and learn, on that basis, what a socialist society would look like. You say, “Insurrection instead of revolution.” But isn’t insurrection what we have in Greece right now? That isn’t going anywhere. People can occupy the streets and the squares for a bit. But the next day the police will be back and oppositional energy will be dispersed. All the ruling class has to do in a crisis is stay where they are. An insurrection that fails to make a revolution will get nowhere. Movements eventually collapse in on themselves if there is no forward momentum, no actual establishment of goals and aims.

As to whether we are in a depression or not, doesn’t that hinge on more than purely economic figures, but on the place of a workers’ movement within it? Yet, we have no organized labor movement to speak of in Western countries. How does that figure in to your assessment of the overall situation?

HT: Does a depression in some way hinge on the ability of the working class to organize itself in order to take power? No, I don’t think that is why a depression takes place. I have followed Marx in defining depression in terms of all the contradictions of the system. One has to look at the system itself, its objective structures, and not just the subjective aspect. Today that structure is cracking. The next step is for the working class to take power.

Marx did use the word false consciousness. Commodity fetishism is that false consciousness. It’s very clear the way I use it. But once the class comes into existence as a class, the society dissolves. That has to be our aim: for the class to come into existence and the society to dissolve.

Depression is a collapse of the structure because the contradictions cannot be dealt with. At present, the mediating forms are failing to mediate; the structure begins to fall apart. The fact that the working class cannot act is unfortunate, but it seems to me we can explain it. Such an explanation would begin with the terrible disaster that was the Soviet Union. We would also need to address imperialism and the long, continuing subjection of the Third World. The breakdown in structure—and it is a structure—is taking place no matter what subjective feeling we have about it.

You cannot simply have an insurrection. There is a social structure, and it will defeat the insurrection before it even begins. This is one of the worst things you can dream up. Look at how many people have been killed in so-called insurrections. The last thing we want is tens of millions more killed, like the 50 million killed in China. Even in the national liberation struggles that the Left has supported, millions got killed. I’m not saying one shouldn’t take power. One should fight to take power, but an insurrection is crazy. That is the last thing we should be talking about.

SN: My point is not there aren’t classes anymore. It is true that classes contain different kinds of subjectivities now than they did in Marx’s time. But my point fundamentally is about the political expression of class. In movements like Occupy, class is not the key factor. It’s not the key identity. The very fact that you had people coming together from different classes and groups indicates that there is already a move away from strict class identity. Today, there is not the sort of direct relationship between class and politics that was always presupposed in Marx’s theory.

I also do not wish to say that socialism is impossible, but I do want to know what socialism, as imagined in Marx’s theory, might look like. The point you make about Marx not laying down a blueprint is true. Indeed, in my initial remarks I put the emphasis on experimentation. We do not need to have a vision of what socialism would look like for us to entertain the possibility of it. The point is an open-ended project, whether we call it socialism, anarchism, or autonomy. Certainly that project cannot, it seems to me, take the form of the revolutionary seizure of power and the use of authoritarian state power to build socialism. This brings me to the whole notion of revolution and why insurrection is something different. The whole logic of “revolution” is that it is a grand event led by the working class, but it’s not really the working class. It is the revolutionary vanguard that seizes state power and uses it to build socialism. That project is completely discredited by historical experience. It leads to exactly the kind of bloodshed Hillel was talking about.

So what is an insurrection? Insurrection is not an event, and it has to be seen as more than simply violent clashes with the police. The insurrection is an ongoing project of autonomy, an ongoing project of people choosing to live in new kinds of ways. What’s interesting in Greece at the moment is not so much the clashes with the police but all the various distributive and exchange networks that are emerging with the collapse of the state. To me that is what the insurrection is about: the ongoing process of elaborating and experimenting with new forms of exchange and new forms of cooperation.

DG: One last point on greed. When people in the workers’ movement in the 1860s or Marx’s Communist Party chanted slogans, they never actually said things like, “the organic composition of capitalism will inevitably lead to the acquiring of profit.” Slogans bring up specific issues in specific ways, starting a conversation where you can bring in your entire analysis. Slogans don’t simply quote the analysis.

I agree that the innovation and environmental crises are the same. One of capitalism’s great claims is that, even if things are terrible in numerous ways, at least it is creating meaningful technological advances that will eventually make make peoples’ lives easier and better. I don’t think capitalism can make that claim anymore.

Two things have happened. In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, many decided that Marx was right about the organic composition of capital. There was talk of robot factories and the end of work, no more manual labor. The Situationists got everyone excited. The ruling class freaked out. There was a very self-conscious movement. There was a conscious shift away from space age technology that would compete with the Soviet Union because that was no longer seen as a threat. They put resources into medical technology, information technology, and finally military technology. Though we don’t have a cure for cancer, we have Ritalin and Prozac. These enable people to remain vaguely sane in the context of a crazed intensification of work that the information technologies made possible. So it’s all about technology that the researchers control. On the other hand, it is also true that, with all this money they’ve been pouring into the military, you would at least expect to have giant killer robots shooting death rays from their eyes and stuff like that. God knows they were working on it! But they haven’t been able to do it. A basic breakdown comes from corporate managerialism, tantamount to a generalized war on the imagination. This is happening on all levels, and has ultimately hobbled even the development of technologies that would benefit the ruling class.

JW: This is the first time I’ve heard false consciousness made equivalent first to commodity fetishism and then to Ritalin and Prozac. The questioner was entirely right. The social exploitation is the same even if the specifics have changed. One thing that hasn’t changed is the Left’s overestimation of itself. David said that the ruling class is scared of 300 anarchists and Saul is out to convince us that the autonomous spaces opened up by Occupy amount to an insurrection. But if you look at the code of conduct that the London Occupy movement insisted on, you had to raise your hand before you could speak. You could make no genderist or sexist remarks, nor say anything really that would not go down well in polite society. That overestimates the Left’s influence as well as its independence from bourgeois ideology. The adoption of a politically correct agenda by Occupy, its proceduralism regarding how you conduct meetings, and the belief that just because the four of us have the same type of genitalia, we have all been engaged in willy waving—that itself is bourgeois ideology. It confirms for me that the Left is very much self-absorbed and has no influence. We have been witnessing the death of the Left for many years.

I mentioned that the laws of motion are the same as before but with a lot of new stuff on top. I tried to hint at the new stuff. Politically it is bizarre to hear that the big problem with the pharmaceutical industry is that it makes drugs for unhappy First Worlders. In my view the pharmaceutical industry is not innovative enough. Ten years after the Human Genome Project we still cannot buy any personalized medicine off the shelves at Boots! That speaks to the crisis of innovation. Lenin himself observed that R & D was being socialized before the First World War. That was around the time the first commercial laboratory to investigate pure scientific principles was founded at General Electric. That is what happened in that period of imperialism. Today you face a situation where a pharmaceutical company doesn’t want to innovate, but rather invests in doing marketing, distribution, production, a little manufacture, and above all dealing with state regulations. They don’t want to develop the kind of drugs that we need in either the First or the Third World. They don’t want to invest in genetically modified trees like the Brazilians do, because nobody wants genetically modified anything in Europe. Genetically modified trees would be a great carbon sink. They grow in seven years, not seventy. But they don’t want to do that in the West because they are too risk adverse. They were not that risk adverse in the 1930s. FDR, for all his faults, said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”  We don’t hear that from Ed Miliband or David Cameron.

 

I didn’t think that I would have to make what I regard as the basic Marxist point that there are still two classes in society. One is the ruling class, and one is our class, and we still sell our labor power even if the nature of that exchange has changed to a certain extent. I would challenge the idea that the seizure of state power is not the way to go and that revolutionary parties are no longer one of the essential tools for change. I would say the exact opposite. But to use your words, you said there is an ongoing project for autonomy, an ongoing project for choosing to live in different ways. Can you clarify that? It sounds very wishy-washy to me. You talked about different networks in Greece, about delivering food and so on. It made me think of Golden Dawn giving out food, though I assume that is not what you were referring to. But that’s really what the Greek working class is being reduced to. Seizing power is the only way to change the situation. There is a lack of revolutionary leadership in Greece just like there is around the world. 

HT: It’s absolutely true that the majority of society sell their labor power. They are the working class. It doesn’t matter if they are white-collar or blue-collar. It is also true that there are now more white-collar workers than blue-collar workers. But so what? They sell their labor power. The relationship remains the same. What has changed in the world (and I’m rather surprised that no one’s taken it up) is, of course, that we don’t live in a competitive society. Despite all the propaganda about competition, about how everybody has to compete with everybody else, about how everybody is a unique independent atom who has to fight everybody else in order to exist—which is the way the government puts it and the Labour Party doesn’t oppose it—in spite of that, the world is highly integrated. Society is more integrated than ever. In terms of the economy, what we see is an increasing degree of noncompetition. This is what explains the risk aversion being referred to.

When the government forces competition it is not really competition the way Adam Smith understood it in the 18^th century. All it means is three or four firms all collude together. So, there is no incentive to produce new inventions. In this sense, capitalism is not supplying what it is supposed to. But of course it wouldn’t do that. What is capitalism about? Making everybody feel happy? Since when was that the case? Since when was it the duty of capitalism to feed everybody? Or, because someone brought it up, since when was it the duty of capitalism to keep everybody healthy?

On the question of drugs, no one mentioned antibiotics. Why are we not producing antibiotics? We all know they are running out. The answer from the companies is, “Well, if we went on spending money on antibiotics, we would cure everybody and we couldn’t sell drugs then.” The same argument is given for malaria. If we cured people of malaria, we’d no longer sell the drug that cures people of malaria. That is the nature of modern capitalism. Of course for the capitalist, capitalism is simply a means of making money. Accumulation takes him over. It isn’t that he is greedy. It is the nature of the system: “Accumulate, accumulate,” as Marx says, “that is Moses and the prophets.”[1] No other law dominates us in that way, and this has remained true.

A question about laws of motion has been raised. The term actually goes back to the time of Adam Smith. Not that he used it, but one of his correspondents did. It is a general term, as it were, not just Marx’s. As we talk of the laws of capitalism, well, what is it that now exists? A society in which the government continues to play a crucial role. It’s not just a question of GDP, or about how this economic indicator is at 50% in France and at 40% here. Obviously what one is talking about is how we have become a more social society, one in which the majority can exert control. That has to be the ultimate aim of every human being. We can have a genuinely human society controlled from below, not from above.

SN: The problem that we have faced is that capitalism for a certain period of time kept us happy. It had certain vested interest in keeping us happy. That’s why it produces Prozac. We had a whole way of life based on overstimulation of the senses. Now this artificially infused happiness isn’t working anymore and we are experiencing generalized psychological breakdown. It seems to me depression and anxiety, for instance, are symptoms of this aspect of the crisis. This is why it’s precisely not a question of ideology but of our libidinal attachment to the very system that has enslaved us.

To my mind there is nothing is more wishy-washy than the idea that there is this apparatus called the state that you can seize. What does the revolutionary seizure of power look like? It is simply unimaginable today. Power has become dispersed, networked, and globalized. You lament the failure or the lack of revolutionary leadership in Greece. I would point to the absurd role that the Greek Communist—Stalinist—Party plays. It actually defends parliament against the anarchists, because they take themselves to be the only ones who can pronounce when the time is ripe for revolution. This is what the Communist Party has always done. They say, “We’re the ones who will tell you when it is time to revolt.”

DG: To my mind the problem in Greece is that there is way too much revolutionary leadership—37 different parties, all of which hate each other.

I want to address the question of whether the basic structure of exploitation and extraction has changed. In the U.S. at this point, I think 11% of profits come from anything related to industry. Most of that’s bullshit, too, because General Motor’s profits, at least until 2008, all came from financing and not from actually making cars. Calling that industry rather than finance is deceptive. So there’s been a change in where corporate profits come from. That is echoed by a change in how people actually relate to capital. Less and less is being extracted from wage, and more is directly taken. When I was in college they used to say that feudalism was a direct juro-political extraction of surplus whereas in capitalism it occurs indirectly through the wage. Today roughly 20% of the average American household income is being taken away directly. That is a change in the structure of capitalism that is going on right before us, one that explains a lot about the changing forms of opposition to it.

JW: There’s been a lot of discussion about pharmaceutical innovation, and that’s refreshing really. Hillel says they won’t sell antibiotics to people because that would make them too healthy. On the 70^th anniversary of the Beveridge Report, I would reassure Hillel that the social legislation the report led to, as well as the legislation passed by Lloyd George after the Boer War, was quite concerned with the health of the population. It might not sound good to say it, but they needed a supply of labor power. What’s new about the situation is that plenty of so-called leftists will tell you that, because taking antibiotics will make you resistant to them, we should get into homeopathy, “natural medicine,” and all these other things the Occupy movement endorses. So it’s a bit of a problem to say, “It’s the same old capitalism, why aren’t you delivering antibiotic innovation?” It is the Occupy movement itself saying that we’ve had too much innovation.

I’m struck by how the other speakers took up a position of skepticism toward unhappy people getting pharmaceuticals. It was Richard Layard of LSE, founded by the Webbs, who advanced the happiness agenda. It is David Cameron who has wanted national wellbeing to be more important than gross domestic product. But Saul here wants to say that we’ve got mentally ill people because of the drugs. Ed Miliband raises the question of mental health, not with respect to himself (which would be worth discussing), but as “a real issue for Britain.” Such views don’t need attacking. They are simply the far right. A certain independence from liberalism is the main task facing the Left today. |P

 

Transcribed by Houston Small and Daniel Jacobs.

---

1. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 742.↑

Share

Platypus Review 54 | March 2013

On October 14, 2012, Alec Niedenthal and Ross Wolfe interviewed Bruno Bosteels, Professor of Romance Studies at Cornell University and author of such books as Badiou and Politics (2011), Marx and Freud in Latin America (2012), and The Actuality of Communism (2011). What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Alec Niedenthal: It is well known that 1968 was a critical moment for the Left in France, but the simultaneous events in Mexico are not so well-known. What was at stake for you in making this connection more explicit?

Bruno Bosteels: The events of 1968 were definitely pivotal globally for the Left. The reason why 1968 in France was a key moment was because the so-called theories, what people now call “French theory” and the philosophical elaborations and politics stemming from it, all share this interest in “the event.” Whereas Foucault, Derrida, Badiou, and Deleuze were once read as philosophers of “difference,” now it is common to read them as philosophers of the event—that is, 1968. So, we might ask, “Why is it an important moment or event in the history of France or Mexico or other places where, in the same year, there were riots, uprisings, popular movements, rebellions, and so on?” But also, “What does it mean to think about ‘the event’ philosophically?” The theoretical traditions that led to this pivotal moment have a longer history in France than in other places where one must search obscure sources to get to the same theoretical problem. Within the French context, for institutional, historical, and genealogical reasons we have a well-defined debate that can be summed up, as what Badiou himself called “The last great philosophical battle”: the battle between Althusser and Sartre, between structuralism and humanism, or between structure and subject.[1] One can place these in different contexts, but they are extreme versions of the debate on the transparency of the subject versus the opacity of the structure. What I thought was interesting was that the most intriguing theoretical (but also experimental, literary-essayistic, or autobiographical) writings to emerge from 1968 are situated somewhere at the crossover between those two traditions, breaking down both and making caricature impossible. A similar debate also took place in Mexico with José Revueltas, typically considered a kind of Sartrean humanist-existentialist writer and theorist, versus a very strong tendency of Althusserianism on the Mexican left.

“Communism or death,” spray-can graffiti 2009

Ross Wolfe: Much of this French theory centers on a struggle between structure and subject and the idea that events do not necessarily happen autonomously. The question you seem to be asking is, How do we understand the given circumstances that are not of our own making, but in which historical action takes place? Is it possible for a political subject to intervene in history?

BB: In a recent, highly philosophical book on Marx, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval propose that there are two major logics in Marx that are at loggerheads: There is the logic of capital, which is a logic of systematic constraints and turnover, and there is the logic of struggle.[2] They apply Hegelian logic to the way that capitalism posits its own presuppositions, claiming that something that enables capitalism is in fact already the product of capitalism, logically if not historically. There is this kind of spiraling movement in which it seems the logic of capital is unbreakable and that human subjects are only bearers of these functions coming out of the immanent logic of capital’s own self-positing. On the other hand, there is what Dardot and Laval call the historical logic or a logic of class struggle that is contingent, working upon the gaps or moments of breakdown within the economic logic of capital itself. They claim that it all comes down to the question of whether Marx himself (they deal far less with Marxism) was able to reconcile the logic of struggle and the logic of capitalism. They believe that “communism” is almost like an imaginary kind of glue that (even though it is impossible) pretends that these two things can be held together. One of the interesting things about Dardot and Laval’s philosophical reconstruction of the French debate over the competing logics in Marx is their return to the legacy of Hegel and the Young Hegelians. They see two major paths: there is either a more idealist, Fichtean approach or a more materialist, Feuerbachian approach. One path, which is the path of someone like Bruno Bauer or Max Stirner, is to insist upon the subject’s capacity for self-positing. The subject can, in a sense, almost posit itself into existence; it can posit its own presuppositions almost boundlessly. On the other hand there is the more materialist school, which insists on the givenness of external factors that are not the result of the subject’s own positing, but instead precede the subject. Marx, in their account, tries to hold these things together. It is in that particular moment, when Marx seeks to articulate and overcome the idealist and materialist readings of the Hegelian notion of positing the presuppositions, that a certain logic and a certain history is productively combined.

RW: Marx captures the differences between the more Fichtean Hegelians and the Feuerbachian Hegelians in The Eighteenth Brumaire, where he writes, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”[3]

BB: These two logics, which are still at play in trying to think about the event, go back to this legacy of German Idealism. I am interested in seeing what happens when this encounter occurs (or again, in a sense, when this encounter fails to occur) between the logic of capital and the logic of political struggle. They clash precisely at the point where the logic of capital is inconsistent, in the sense that it cannot, strictly speaking, claim to have posited all its own presuppositions. Nor is the logic of the subject here one of spontaneous freedom or autonomy. But, it is precisely just as the structure shows inherent moments of breakdown, where the subject reveals itself to be structurally dependent on what Sartre called “the practico-inert.” What came out of 1968 was, especially in the Althusserian and Lacanian schools, an attempt to formalize the inconsistencies of the structure. That is what we call post-structuralism. This is then tied to a new theory of subjectivity. So all these ex-Althusserians—Rancière, Žižek, and also Laclau—are, in fact, trying to hold these two logics together. It is in the notion of “the event,” or what Althusser called “the encounter,” that these two logics meet. This is why 1968 is so important. It is why the articulation of Althusser-Lacan or Althusser-Sartre is so important, and also explains what happened to those Althusserians who paradoxically (and against Althusser) started to become interested in processes of subjectivity.

RW: What is interesting is that the debates of 1968 were largely framed by two intellectual figures whose own political outlook was formed prior to 1968, namely Lacan and Althusser. Could you expand upon the legacies and interpretations of Lacanianism and Althusserianism in relation to 1968?

BB: It is interesting, of course, that those are the two schools that are retrospectively posited as the dominant schools. The school that was more established was of course Althusser’s; it is not accurate to say that Lacanianism was well-established as a school of thought in wider circles beyond clinical psychoanalytic work. Nevertheless, by then, Lacan may well have stood as a more sophisticated thinker of the subject than Sartre. But what is ironic is that both Althusser and Lacan were surpassed by 1968 and their followers; perhaps more thoroughly in the case of Lacan than in the case of Althusser. Both Lacan and Althusser failed to perceive any political novelty or any event at all in 1968. It is rather the old, so-called “humanist” Sartre who was capable of being in the right places at the right time, as were the Situationists, who occupy a very interesting position between these two extremes. This is why the Althusserians had to first move through a moment of ferociously critiquing Althusser, both in Rancière’s Althusser’s Lesson and in Badiou’s On Ideology.

When we go back now, we can of course see that there are elements of this interest in subjectivity present in Althusser or in Lacan, but that is an insight that comes from outside those traditions. Žižek comes to this insight out of a very interesting parallel development: anti-Frankfurt School (because a Frankfurt School-style philosophy strangely enough was the intellectual orthodoxy in Slovenia), and pro-Althusser (because he was considered heterodox). Treading that same path a decade later, trying to articulate Althusser and Lacan, the encounter between Žižek and Badiou was almost bound to happen.

The question is then: How does one articulate the capacity for making history and the inertia of the circumstances that are not chosen but presupposed? Even in Badiou’s work there has been an oscillation; he either emphasizes the aspect of structural constraint or he pushes more toward a belief in humanity’s capacity to will what he calls “the communist hypothesis,” which is beyond or outside of history. So the ahistorical, radical political leftism in Badiou also alternates with the insistence for politics to be articulated within a given, historical situation. Whenever there is a certain leaning toward the Left he will take a turn toward the Right, or vice versa. In the 1990s, when most of this was still being worked out in isolation, he was discovered in English, at a moment when he was supposedly no longer working along dialectical lines, but in a more formalist, mathematical tradition. Politically, this expressed itself in his belief that one needed to untie politics completely from history. Anything even reeking of objectivity was actually just a subjective condition of truth. Since then, he has gone back to insisting that his work is still an attempt to continue the materialist dialectic, or a certain dialectical and materialist form of thinking, against any sort of leftist radicalism. I am interested in those oscillations, and how they repeat themselves in history both within Marx’s own work, within the history of Marxism, and within the history of communism or socialism in their articulation with anarchism and individual thinkers.

“Self-portrait with Stalin,” by Frida Kahlo, 1954

AN: The most interesting moment in your interpretation of Badiou’s work is the minimal difference between “the event-site” and what he later calls “the inexistent.” The event-site is not a given; as you say, it is a breach that has to be opened up in a situation. For example, you say that there are formal reasons why capitalism cannot claim responsibility for its own conditions of existence, which would be “bootstrapping.”

BB: There is a kind of Münchhausen trick by which capitalism claims to bring itself, as a completely self-sustaining system, into existence. The fundamental premise of capitalism is always that it builds everything, even its own historical presuppositions (“We did build that”). But such bootstrapping is not possible because there are certain outside factors that capitalism does not posit. We can name at least two, which are limited offerings: One is of course labor, or labor-power, and the other is land (which goes back to the question of Latin American Marxism and agrarian reform). Today we might add water. Capitalism did not generate or produce these things. To take these presuppositions into account, then, leads us back to a certain determinism, which is after all still what Althusser studied in terms of structural causality. What Badiou, Rancière, and the other post-Althusserians add to this is that this logic of absent causality is not actually something that moves us in the direction of more inertia. Rather, this is the logic of what happens when the structure starts to collapse, starting from those moments where the fact that there is an outside folded into the logic of capital starts to cause the whole structure to run aground. Suddenly there is a wrench in this machine that is not made by the machine itself. Badiou’s use of set theory, or the use of mathematics by a thinker like Kozo Uno in Japan, as my friend Gavin Walker has shown, is really about the attempt to formalize this moment when structural constraints historically hit this wall. This is not just some formal trick, whereby somebody uses mathematics to fool people. This is really then the moment where the analysis of history—the history of capitalism’s becoming and its perpetuation—can be studied so that history and logic are being articulated through the formalization of inconsistencies. This is not a universal given but something that happens only on rare occasions when the structure internally cannot control its own excesses, when things do not seem to work out so smoothly or naturally. Badiou calls such moments “events.” When these situations emerge, the logic of absent causality functions on the side of the event, not on the side of structural constraint, as it did in Althusser.

But then the question is this: If this is not just a flash in the pan, where something briefly emerges and shows—let us say in a crisis, for example—that there are certain limits that cannot be folded back into the logic of capital, it also requires or already presupposes a subjective or political intervention. There is a subject, but the subject is also “split.” This is why the Lacanian left tradition becomes so important, explicitly for Badiou and Žižek, but also for Rancière. Even though Rancière apparently never read Lacan or engaged extensively with Lacanianism, as he recently said in the public conversation we had at The Kitchen in New York City, in reading Rancière one still sees on a number of occasions that what defines a political subject is what he calls its “distance from itself.” Thus, proletariat is not some kind of substantial identity, but something that is an empty operator that works because there is this internal splitting. The notion of the “site” of an event (which is the symptomatic place where a structure condenses the historical energy that forms around a certain inconsistency in the logic of capital) reconnects with different theories of the subject.

RW: There is a kind of obviousness to the notion of an Althusserian left, insofar as Althusser was working within the tradition of Marxism, but the notion of a Lacanian left is somewhat more contentious. Carl Cederström, for example, wrote an essay that claimed “The Lacanian Left Does Not Exist.”[4] Manfredo Tafuri, an Italian Marxist, was similarly skeptical of Lacanian leftism already in the 1970s. Does the Lacanian left exist? If so, how was it assimilated into contemporary forms of leftism?

BB: Does it exist? Yes and no. Yannis Stavrakakis, Žižek, and others suggest that there is a use of Lacan that may be compatible with, or even necessary for, a certain post-Marxist, post-revolutionary leftist politics. More precisely, there is the insistence upon the inconsistency or incompleteness of social structures, but also the fact that subjects are always already predetermined by an outside symbolic order, which is how Lacan specifically defines the unconscious. Claude Lefort, for example, attempted to study the logic of radical democracy, by focusing on a notion of power or of the political field as symbolic, structured, and organized around a void or empty place. This emptiness must necessarily remain empty, without becoming substantively filled, as it supposedly was under totalitarianism. At that moment, this line of thought became very appealing for leftists who were grappling with the collapse of the Soviet Union, as they attempted to define a Lacanian concept of radical democracy. This is very clear in Žižek’s first books, particularly The Sublime Object of Ideology and then, to a lesser extent, For They Know Not What They Do. I discuss this in the chapter of Badiou and Politics (“For Lack of Politics”) that deals with this model of radical democracy that Lacanians (but also Heideggerians) tried to develop in the late 1980s and early 1990s. What Žižek uncovered soon after that, in moments of self-criticism that were sometimes phrased as criticisms of others, were the shortcomings of the Lefortian model. This is because Lefort remained too overly structural and descriptive, organizing a notion of “the political” around a fundamental lack or empty place, but without changing the structure itself. Therefore, for Žižek, something else was needed besides a philosophy of “the political,” something more than a Lacanian or Heideggerian redefinition of radical democracy as a regime of politics.

As the post-Soviet left was looking to account for the structure of the political field, of “the political,” the search expressed itself in terms of the Lacanian left or the Heideggerian left. That is, around the same time, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe found in Heidegger’s deconstruction of metaphysics a similar way of dealing with the legacy of Soviet communism. Similar, that is, to the lessons that Lacanians were drawing about radical democracy at the same time. They, too, were trying to argue for a complete emptying out of the substance, and subject, of politics. The “political field” became a Kampfplatz or battlefield for the articulation of “the common,” in which there are no substantial identities. So even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, these thinkers had already been working out notions of “the political” in answer to the crisis and final death of Soviet Communism, and the question arose: What kind of politics can take place within such a framework of the critique of the subject?

RW: In The Actuality of Communism you defend Badiou against those who criticize “the communist hypothesis” as ahistorical ideology. You partially defend Badiou’s quasi-Platonic conception of communism as “tactical ahistoricism,” writing that, “in the present circumstances, the recourse to the eternal—the invariant—the ahistorical can certainly be justified.” What do you think is at stake in defending communism as a transhistorical and eternal idea? And what were the historical conditions that first made the idea of communism plausible?

BB: “Speculative left” is a term used by Badiou in Being and Event. For him, it basically means a left that wills itself into existence, independently of any situation. It is a question of the total “disconnection” or what he often calls the “delinking” of a political movement from any situation that would not be of its own making. It is an idealist or even Manichean insistence on the question of the autonomy of the Left, which then is attractive because of the purity of its own shining, eternal strength. This is why for me, as I discuss in Marx and Freud in Latin America, the “speculative left” also expresses itself very often in a certain melodramatic articulation of politics, because there is this notion of “good” and “evil,” or a pure force versus an entirely fallen, degraded existing world. It often entails moralization in terms of good and evil and the purity of the “beautiful soul,” an idea common from Hegel to Lacan. So the lesson to be learned from Badiou, in terms of what to do in order to avoid the temptation of “speculative leftism,” is to insist on the fact that any political movement has to be articulated within the present situation. So there would have to be a dialectic between the affirmation of the political idea and its inscription in the given circumstances. That was precisely the question that for Badiou, in his work in the 1970s, when he first mentioned the idea of “communist invariants,” required an articulation of invariants and historical variation. There were certain fundamental principles that he called communist. Lately, I have been thinking you could as well call them anarchist because they are anti-property, anti-state, and anti-hierarchy. We could add anti-religion and anti-god. Those are the very simple “communist invariants.” Laclau, in his book on populism and Marxism (Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory), already picked up on this and so did Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus.

I actually like the notion a lot that there is a dialectic between communist invariants and historical variation and how they are instantiated in history. Laclau, for instance, says that they are neither invariant nor communist because there is nothing specifically communist about them. What I am interested in is that I can see the advantages existing on the invariants side and I can see the advantages existing on the historical variation side. First of all, as you ask, what are the conditions that brought communism into existence for Marx? There actually already existed a mixture of socialist-communist and anarchist ideas that came together in Marx as he tried to distill them into a certain Marxian notion of communism. This makes it all the more important to understand the history behind these ideas. They come into existence at particular historical times. As someone who works at the crossover between literature and politics, I am interested in the historical complexity behind what later appears to be a pristine, self-evident idea. Those ideas are only the tip of the iceberg and it is important to study their genealogy, in the Foucauldian sense. The drawback of such an approach is that you start to lose sight of the novelty of the appearance. Suddenly, if you start studying any event and looking at the broader historical circumstances that played a role into the “coming-into-being” of it, any radical novelty seems to be explained away by referring to the historical conditions. As Rancière says, “No period is capable of jumping over its own shadow.” Historicization also always comes with the risk of normalization, a confirmation that something could only happen because of these specific historical conditions. I, on the other hand, think one needs to go back and forth between invariants and historicism. There are moments where insisting upon the historicity of what we consider to be a natural fact is radical, for example when Marx writes his critique of political economy. One of the reasons it is a critique is because it entails a denaturalization and historicization of all the beliefs which classical political economists take for granted as the natural way—if you read Adam Smith, there are few words that appear as often as “naturally.” To undermine the natural factor and to insist that capitalism is a historical process that needs to be unraveled suggests how the very appearance of naturalness is integral to how capital posits its own presuppositions. This seems to suggest that it bootstraps itself into existence. That critical approach requires a historicization not only of some historical event but also of the very production of the appearance of a seemingly eternal natural factualness.

AN: In the 1859 preface to the Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx identifies exactly those two poles, exemplified on one side by Victor Hugo, and other the other side by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. So in what sense is this not mere repetition?

BB: Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire and The Civil War in France are exactly why people like Badiou insist on a political Marx. Badiou never writes on Capital. But he does say in an interview that “Being and Event is, by the way, a commentary on the International.”[5] Why can he say that? Precisely because he is working on the very logic by which ahistoricity, the naturalness of the structure of our lives today, appears as eternal. It is a fallback position. Anything else can be rejected as being dogmatic or involuntary imposition over and above what comes naturally. It is the easiest anti-political ideology one can use. The violent logic by which capital has imposed itself over the past centuries has been by erasing its own forcing of the situation through exploitation, expropriation, wars and so on; it then gives the impression of itself as the natural expression of historical necessity. So there historicization is critical, and even in its destructive ability it shows that what came into existence can go out of existence. However, the other side of the coin is that historicization tends to explain away the novelty of what appeared. If you consider the French Revolution, historians can argue that we didn’t need the French Revolution for establishing bourgeois society, it would have happened regardless. And this risk inherent in historicization is already apparent, to some extent, in Foucault, whom Badiou (in the first interview reprinted in Badiou and Politics) blames for dissolving any event into its historicity.

Therefore, we do not need to focus only on historical events, but also on the historical conditions that make these things happen as if beyond history. That is where what I call “tactical ahistoricism” could be effective because then you insist that there is a recurrence of very simple ideas that have changed very little until now. That is why someone like Badiou would say that there has been very little change from Plato until now. I, for my part, am interested in how it is possible that there is something in the idea of Zapatismo, for example, that transcends its historical specificity in the Mexican Revolution. In 1914–1915, in Morelos, the Zapatistas fell back on their own territory; they began to focus on the question of agrarian reform, autonomous self-government, and municipal or political self-organization with a minimum program that is reminiscent of socialism. The Zapatistas have the idea that utopia must be actualized. What happens when 80 years later that idea reemerges? I want to know what happens to those ideas when they undergo what Freud called “latency”: when they disappear and then suddenly become re-politicized. They become the actual mobilizing forces in the political movement that threatens the Mexican state and they reorganize different types of autonomous, communal modes of organization in Chiapas but also in Oaxaca.

AN: You track forms of potential in descending order, with the actual “becoming-of-the-event” last as that which makes the impossible possible, which is related to your interpretation of the oscillation between actualization and virtualization in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Finally, it would seem that the “speculative left” forgets what you call “effective justice,” and instead confines itself to thinking about the specter of communism. How would you characterize the politics of this process as it is expressed through theory?

BB: Foucault proposes a variation on the philosophical term “conditions of possibility” that Deleuze also talks quite a lot about. The variant allows us to talk about conditions of existence instead of asking about conditions of possibility. This means that we are not asking a transcendental question about the condition of possibility of an event, of politics, or of judgment, but we are asking about historical conditions of existence of how a certain mode of politics, say through a strike or electoral politics, questions these forms that have a history to them.

I think one needs to retain a capacity for formalization or abstraction to recognize recurring structures, and at the same time be attentive enough to the historical specificity of when and how these phenomena occur. Currently I am working on the notion of the commune in Mexico and how the battle between communism, socialism, and anarchism can be studied by looking at that particular manifestation of the commune. Plotino Rhodakanaty writes in “La Comuna americana” (a text from 1877 published in the Mexican journal El Combate) that the future of the Paris Commune is in America. To follow that idea allows us to study the tensions between communism and Marxism, especially in the Bakunin–Marx debates as they were being fought out in Mexico at the same time (or shortly thereafter) as they were within the First International. And that is not simply a replication of what is happening in Europe; it is another consequence of asking a question that is not purely philosophical.

If you are speaking in philosophical terms, you are asking in terms of abstract, universal conditions of possibility; you are not asking about the institutionalization of the discourse of philosophy and at what cost that discourse came into existence. If you are French or German, you don’t have to ask that question because you can speak from within that established place. But if you ask the typical question that came out of ’68, “Where do you speak from?” you speak outside of that locus. To use the technical jargon, you have to justify your particularity. And immediately critics will say, “Well, you are not talking from the philosophical tradition but from your particularistic identity.” The burden of particularism always falls on non-Western traditions. If you start this type of debate you end up with this knee-jerk reminder or bad conscience of the Western tradition, but it is much more than that. Regarding the communist idea, which is a distillation of a historical experience that has a series of historical moments that for Badiou can be summoned with proper names, I am not going to critique that as being Euro-centrist. It can and must be studied elsewhere as well according to the specific articulations of forms of politics and socialist or communist ideas, as in the case of the commune in Mexico.

RW: Your book, The Actuality of Communism, contributed to the growing body of literature that has accumulated around the concept of “communism” over the last decade. What is the significance of communism’s renewed salience? What is at stake in reasserting this once tabooed concept now? What does it set out to correct?

BB: The idea of going back to “communism” has to be placed in the context of the debates during the 1980s, and especially after 1989. There was an unspoken consensus, broken very rarely by very few, to drop “communism” altogether. Due to a variety of failed experiments, deceptions by and disappointments with both Eurocommunism and François Mitterrand, or French socialism, “socialism” was put in the same bag of tried-and-tested ideas that deserve to be consigned to the dustbin of history. Jean-Luc Nancy was one of those few to break with this consensus, interestingly enough, invoking Badiou as one of the better voices to suggest that we need to retain the notion of communism, just as it made sense to hold on to the word “symbolism” in French poetry even after all the watered-down versions that came later.

On the other hand, though, this relegation of communism to the dustbin went hand-in-hand with a return to certain readings of Marx. There was a so-called “political turn” within deconstruction. Derrida published Specters of Marx. Michel Henry and others in Europe also wrote in this vein. There was, of course, also a revival of Italian Marxism. The posthumous writings of Althusser made a big splash, bringing in questions of a hidden tradition of “aleatory materialism,” so one could have Marxism and materialism.

RW: And what about democracy?

BB: One can have democracy—even radical democracy! One can have socialism, as in Laclau and Mouffe, but probably not communism. And certainly not any Marxist versions of communism. One could only have Marxism minus communism.

AN: Was this not Dick Howard’s position?

BB: It took years to come to the point where tactically and strategically it might be important to revisit these ideas that were either forgotten or sidetracked. Why accept this consensus? What is at stake is whether it is worth going back to this notion of communism.

RW: While he may have been its most celebrated advocate, one of Marx’s enduring contributions to revolutionary thought arguably consists in his sustained polemic against rival theories of communism that existed during his time. Would you say that Marx’s critical intervention into the history of the communist idea is irreducible? Or might his legacy of immanent critique perhaps be dispensable at present?

BB: For me it is not a question of going back to an orthodox notion of communism that needs to be resurrected—the result of the Marxian purging of other rival theories of socialism and communism. I am not interested in restaging these debates. It is actually more about reliving the confusion: literally the “fusion” or coming together of a variety of socialist, communist, utopian, anarchist, and anarcho-syndicalist understandings of the politics of equality (in its most generic terms). So it is rather an attempt to study how people sort out the advantages of one position over another instead of the construction of an orthodoxy out of those deviations.

Žižek writes in a preface somewhere that it is important when talking about deviations, “left” or “right” deviations from a more correct line in the middle, to realize that, in a paradoxical way, the deviations precede the orthodoxy. Deviations do not occur from a pre-given orthodoxy. The orthodoxy does not exist, except by going through the debates and the polemics that arise.

RW: So the heresies precede the orthodoxy?

BB: Yes, the orthodoxy establishes itself by purging a number of positions, which are then labeled “heresies.” The energy for a rejuvenation of leftist politics lies in tracking these debates. Today one sees the same regurgitation of the whole debate between anarchist riots versus an organization that then very often has to take the form of a party, as Jodi Dean writes about Occupy. It is a different way of going through the controversies between a so-called “anarchist” position and a so-called “Marxist” or “Leninist” position. The renewed emphasis on communism is a way to suggest, in the context of a Marx without politics (without communism), that we go back to Marx as a figure who is part of a larger political landscape.

RW: Is a non-Marxian communism necessary, then? Or is Marx indispensable? Must any future communism go through Marx?

BB: No, I would not say indispensable, because then the question becomes: Why would Marx be the standard-bearer and therefore the measuring-stick by which we would gauge the authenticity of a political sequence? That seems a little exaggerated. From another viewpoint it is the same problem that is presented by the issue of socialism or communism in Latin America. The immediate way this has been tackled by historians and political theorists is to inquire about what might have been the influence of the Soviet Union, the Second International, or the Comintern in the region. So historians ask: “To what extent did they know about Marx? Did they read him correctly? Did they have enough knowledge about the Marx and Bakunin debate?” But why would that have to be the measuring stick for the spreading of socialist ideas? Which Marx? Or even more narrowly, which texts by Marx are they supposed to have read? It is a huge problem not only in peripheral countries, but for Western European nations as well. Did they have access to the right texts? The right manuscripts? That cannot be the way that one measures the emergence or reemergence of certain communist ideas. It is maybe not even that helpful to establish too rigid a divide between socialism and communism. The point is not to reestablish any lost orthodoxies but to traverse the heresies. |P

Transcribed with the assistance of Daniel Jacobs

1. Alain Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? (Paris: Seuil, 1985).↑
2. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, Marx, prénom Karl (Paris: Gallimard, 2012).↑
3. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, available online at <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm>.↑
4. Carl Cederström, “The Lacanian Left Does Not Exist,” Ephemera, 7.4 (2007): 609–614.↑
5. Gavin Walker, “On Marxism’s Field of Operation: Badiou and the Critique of Political Economy,” Historical Materialism 20.2 (2012): 39–74.↑

Share

Platypus Review 54 | March 2013

On October 13th, 2012, Ross Wolfe of the Platypus Affiliated Society interviewed Jodi Dean, Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith College, and author of The Communist Horizon (New York: Verso, 2012). What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation. 

Ross Wolfe: Your new book, The Communist Horizon, builds upon a body of literature that has accumulated around the concept of “communism” over the last decade. What is the significance of this renewed emphasis on communism?

Jodi Dean: The shift towards communism puts leftist thought into a distinct political horizon. It is no longer a sort of touchy-feely, identity issue-based, and fragmented emphasis on each person’s unique specificity. It is no longer a generic, attitudinal lifestyle, preoccupation with “awareness” or the spontaneous, and momentary reduction of politics to the minuteness of the everyday. Communism returns politics to grand, revolutionary possibilities—to projects of political power. And that change is absolutely, crucially enormous, even if forty years out of date.

RW: Where does your own work on “the communist horizon” fit in relation to the work of other major leftist theorists on the subject?

JD: My writing intersects Žižek as well as Hardt and Negri, with alliance to (and inspiration from) Bruno Bosteels. I get the account of communication as the fundamental aspect of economic change from Hardt and Negri. It is from them I get the account of contemporary capitalism and its political economy. I also disagree with them because they get rid of the notion of antagonism and that is the problem. Their diagnosis of informatization and communicative subsumption in capitalism is right, but they’re too positive about it, without providing the force that negativity carries in critique. I get the critical aspect from Žižek.

On the importance of the party, Žižek says, “a politics without the Party is a politics without politics.” I fully agree with that. Also, Bosteels and I have talked about the similarity between Žižek’s account of the party in the “Afterword” to Revolution at the Gates and Alain Badiou’s account in Theory of the Subject. The party is an association rooted in fidelity to an event. It holds open the space for this fidelity. The implication is that the party is not rightly understood in terms of its program or doctrine, but rather in terms of holding open the space for the subject faithful to the event, in this case, the event of 1917. This is where there is a similarity or resonance in terms of thinking about communism.

RW: In your book, you write: “The problem of the Left hasn’t been our adherence to a Marxist critique of capitalism. It’s that we have lost sight of the communist horizon” (The Communist Horizon, 6). What does “communism” provide that is missing from the Marxist critique of capitalism?

JD: Communism provides a positive moment: It is something that makes you do more than criticize and constantly subject everything to a ruthless critique. It provides a purpose and a direction for that sort of negativity to have a positivity in mind. Leftist intellectuals in particular often get lost in critique. We fetishize critique. We enjoy it, in the psychoanalytic sense, but the question is: What to do with the critique or how to use it to move forward—to galvanize and organize the masses? What communism provides is an orientation for critique. That is what Marx had, too. Yet, when Marxism moved so strongly into the academy that critique became viewed as beneficial for its own sake, it lost the orientation to a politics that would be willing to take power.

“Vote Communist” van featuring a model of Sputnik, Rome 1958

“Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement,” poster by Gustav Klutsis featuring a quote from Lenin, 1927

Share

Platypus Review 54 | March 2013

On December 15th, 2012, Ross Wolfe interviewed Boris Groys, Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. His numerous published books include The Total Art of Stalinism (1986), Art Power (2008), The Communist Postscript (2009), and Going Public (2011). What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Ross Wolfe: In the introduction to your 2006 book, The Communist Postscript, you provocatively assert: “The communist revolution is the transcription of society from the medium of money to the medium of language. It is a linguistic turn at the level of social praxis.”[1] What do you make of the “communist turn” in contemporary left discourse, that is, the return to the idea of communism in Badiou, Žižek, Bosteels, Dean, et al.?

Boris Groys: It doesn’t seem to me that any return has actually taken place. If you are speaking now of the West, not of the East, then you have always had communist parties: the French Communist Party, the Italian Communist Party, every European nation had a communist party during and after the Cold War. So I would rather speak about a migration of discourse away from the framework of mass parties. These became inefficient, partially dissolved, and lost their influence and power within European societies. And now we have groups of intellectuals who are asserting their hegemony over the discourse of the “communist hypothesis.”

But we also shouldn’t underestimate the influence or the intellectual and institutional power of the mass party. The communist party apparatus and communist press were very influential in France and Italy throughout the Cold War. And then, if we look at the intellectual trajectories of different figures, from Sartre to Foucault and Derrida and so on, all of them in one way or another defined his position in the first place vis-à-vis the Communist Party, much more so than in relation to capitalism. So if you look at the career of Badiou, for example, he began with a kind of Sartrean connection, but then developed a Maoist infatuation very early on, in the 1960s. His project since then was one of constant revolt against the domination of the French Communist Party. The Maoist movement, like many others from that time, was actually directed against the leading role of the Communist Party. Everything that we read now from Badiou and others comes out of this very early experience of French Maoism in the 1960s. They experienced the “betrayal” of the 1960s movements by the Communist Party, even though these movements had been partially directed against the communist parties to begin with. We can argue what happened in different ways, but my impression is that right now we have the continuation of an immanent contestation of the communist party that started much, much earlier—in the 1960s.

On the other hand, I was and still am very interested in the institutional and official traditions of communism. As with the early Protestants who saw the Catholic Church as the church of Satan, communists today claim, “All these decades and centuries of communist movements—that was not real communism. Communism will begin with us.” It is a claim that one can understand, but it seems to me historically, ideologically, politically, and philosophically problematic. All of the theorists of communism today say: “We start anew. We reject everything that came before. We don’t interpret or correct it—we just reject it as a fundamental failure.”

 

“Join the Communist Party! This way to progress,” poster from the Communist Party of New Zealand, 1940s

RW: Just as the theorists of communism at present would say that all past forms of communism were the work of Stalin?

BG: They reject Stalin in favor of the idea of communism. But how is one to access this “idea” of communism? To stress the immediate idea of communism is idealistic and neglects the necessity of dealing with the materialist side of communism. Communism is not God. One cannot be a Saint Paul of communism. Sartrean existentialism, Maoist event, or Deleuzean direct contact with energies, desires, affects—these all claim to provide an unmediated understanding of what communism is beyond any tradition, institution, or party. They’re direct, individual, ultimately involving only one person. That is a very Romantic, almost mystical-religious approach. Because, of course, traditionally Marxism has something to do with mediation and a disbelief in the possibility of directly grasping something like “the idea of communism,” or of experiencing communism as an event.

RW: You also argue that the emphasis on the “idea” of communism leads to “a modern form of Platonism in practice.”[2] What is specifically “modern” about communism?

BG: For me, Platonism does not refer to the possibility of immediately grasping the Idea, but rather to a demonstration of the impossibility of any such insight. What the Socratic dialogues demonstrate is the impossibility of the notion of a human being grasping the Idea because every course of argumentation collapses on itself. And this place of collapse is actually a site of power. If you look at the Platonic state, the philosopher-king is someone who actually manages and administers this space of collapse, the defeat of the desire for truth. Historically this site was the Soviet Union. What makes this a modern experience is the extreme scale on which it takes place.

We are living in a society that is split in such an obvious way that we no longer believe in the possibility of democracy, at least from a liberal perspective, because there seems to be no hope for consensus, which is the traditional basis of democracy. If you look at contemporary American society, or really any contemporary society, it is so fundamentally fragmented it seems incapable of reaching consensus. Such societies can only be administered, but cannot be brought to any kind of democratic politics. In the West, this kind of administration—in these societies beyond consensus—occurs through the market. But in the East, the market was ultimately abolished by the Bolsheviks. And so instead of being governed by economics, there was an emergence of certain kinds of administrative power practicing a language beyond consensus. The phenomenon of a language where no agreement can be reached is precisely what one can find in a very refined form in the Platonic dialogues. And the philosopher here is someone who manages language beyond consensus. What makes the Platonic problem modern is that it has became urgent and political, a problem of society as a whole, rather than of a small group of Greek intellectuals in the agora.

In Plato, the state is administered by the philosophers through an occasional application of violence, not determined by any consensus, because Plato understands that such consensus is impossible. So both capitalism and communism, especially in their Eastern European form, constituted answers to the insight that the French Revolution’s bourgeois dream of reaching a sort of basic consensus had collapsed. The dream had collapsed already by the time of Marx, and then even further with Nietzsche. As long as you speak about commonalities or “the common,” you remain at the level of reflection, which is fundamentally pre-Marxist. If you want to speak of politics after Marx, after Nietzsche, after Freud, you have to consider societies that have nothing in the way of common ground. Because if you look at the intellectual landscape before the French Revolution, and even slightly afterward, you find this kind of hope for a consensual politics or ideology. There’s a belief in a natural truth, a divine truth, a common truth, a truth that’s reached at the end of history. But a new, modern period of political thinking commences from a dissatisfaction with such truths. When the class struggle asserts itself the possibility of reaching consensus or a common truth disappears. How does society manage that? There are two models: the state and the market. They manage the problem in two different ways.

RW: With management by the state being socialism and management by the market being capitalism?

BG: A socialist state exists only where the state has been liberated from the market—in which the market has been either subordinated or eliminated entirely. In a capitalist state, say, in the West, the state is subordinated to the market. So what was the Stalinist state? It was a machine for the frustration of everybody, in which the possibility of achieving the truth was excluded. And what is the Western market? The same. It’s a machine for the frustration of everybody, since everyone knows that whatever a politician says, nothing will come out of it.

RW: As an author of one of the books on communism for Verso: How central was Marx’s thought to the formulation of communism? Obviously there were pre-Marxist communists such as Saint-Simon or Fourier or Proudhon. And later there were non-Marxist (anarchist, post-Marxist) developments or articulations of the idea of communism. But with respect to your own work the question is different, I think, in that more than the irreducibility of Marx, it asserts the irreducibility of Stalin.

BG: I would argue for irreducibility of both, and that of Marx, I have summarized already. All these thinkers you mention—Saint-Simon, Fourier, and so on—proposed improvements that were based on the possibility of consensus, on the hope of reaching a common understanding, the insight that life as it is presently is bad, but can be changed from bad to good. Marx believes that such a common understanding is impossible, because of the difference of class interests. He was, basically, anti-utopian.

RW: But didn’t Marx believe in the possibility of a classless society?

BG: Yes, but only after all the classes are suppressed as classes, and this is potentially an infinite process. The traditional utopian communist ideal was based on a perception that one could take all classes, the whole population as it is, and proceed toward a new social truth. Marx argued that this wasn’t possible. For him, one has to start a war inside society, which involved class struggle. A classless society cannot include a huge part of society as it is and that must be therefore destroyed. Stalin’s insight was that a classless society is not something that emerges immediately, spontaneously, or even necessarily, after the abolition of the existing class system. The society that comes after the revolution is also a society that should be managed, which creates its own classes. Now the question is how one deals with that.

Marx starts his discourse with the impossibility of common interest. Everything else comes out of this. Insofar as you believe that there’s something—a “desire,” an “energy,” “absolute spirit,” whatever—that unites society as it is, you’re thinking along pre-Marxist lines. To adopt a post-Marxist lens, you have to see society as something irreparably and irreversibly divided. For this kind of outlook, the question becomes how one manages this division. How does one operate under the assumption (or actually the reality) of this irreparable divide? That is the post-Marxist problem.

RW: To rephrase things slightly: Would you say that Marx’s thought is the necessary presupposition or the condition of possibility for communism? And then, conversely, would you say that Stalin is the necessary outcome of communism?

BG: No, I wouldn’t say all of that, for there isn’t any single answer to this question. Stalin is an answer. Is it a plausible answer? Yes. Is it a likeable answer? Well, no, it’s not. But it’s not an answer that can be ignored. The market doesn’t provide an adequate answer. Stalin doesn’t provide an adequate answer either, at least, not the answer I would prefer. But at the same time, I don’t believe that any answer can be sufficient if it ignores the question, and all its radical implications.

Stalin and Roosevelt fraternizing at the Yalta conference, February 1945

RW: Toward the beginning of your book, Going Public, you refer to “the period of modernity” as “the period in which we still live.”[3] You roughly date it, at least theoretically and philosophically, as coinciding with Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790). The obvious political correlate to this would be 1789 and the French Revolution. Are we still—or were we ever—postmodern? If so, how does this relate to modernity, “the period in which we still live”? Might postmodernity perhaps be reaching an end?

BG: Well, when I speak about postmodernity in my writings, it’s because other people use this word and believe themselves to have a certain understanding about what it means. Personally, I don’t think any such transition from modernity to postmodernity ever happened. Postmodernity has never really had any meaning as a concept.

Postmodernism was associated with disbelief in progress. But nobody in the nineteenth century who was intelligent believed in progress. Baudelaire didn’t believe in progress and neither did Flaubert, nor Nietzsche, or Wölfflin. “Postmodernity” was a way by which people came to understand what people already understood in the nineteenth century.

But perhaps it was only known at first by avant-garde intellectuals, elite circles of artists in Western Europe during the nineteenth century. When people speak of postmodernity, they’re really talking about something that was known before but now was becoming clear to everybody. From the perspective of artistic, intellectual, and cultural modernity, however, nothing has changed. And we still don’t know how to deal with it. Modern problems, as they were formulated in relation to art, culture, and writing, during the nineteenth century, remain very relevant and unsolved. The real change came toward the middle of the nineteenth century. It occurred with the collapse of Hegelianism, the collapse of European idealism amidst the industrial revolution, and with it, the beginning of intellectual and cultural modernity.

But almost as early as the disjunction between Romanesque and Gothic churches, if you will, you’ll always see these “waves” in the succession of European styles. So beginning with the Renaissance, you have clear-cut forms, geometrical models, and a certain kind of clarity or intellectual transparency. But then it’s followed by the Baroque period: by complexity, obscurity, and contradiction. Then you have something similar between Classicism and Romanticism. And then at the start of the twentieth century, there is the avant-garde, which lasted until 1926 or 1927. After that, though, there is this huge wave of embryonic postmodernity—historicism, Socialist Realism, Nazi art, the “return to order,” and the Novecento in Italy. But all of that was suppressed after World War II. Following the war, there’s a new wave of modernism—a neo-avant-garde that goes from the 1950s and 1960s, lasting through the early 1970s. Starting in 1971 or 1972, you get a kind of neo-baroque. There’s Of Grammatology by Derrida, a baroque gesture. So there are these waves in the cultural history of Europe, shifting from clarity, intellectual responsibility, mathematico-scientific influences, and transparency to opacity, obscurity, absence, infinity. What is the Deleuzean or Derridean moment? It’s the moment where they took the structuralist models, defined as a system of finite rules and moves, and made it infinite. It is precisely what Romanticism did with the Enlightenment, what the Baroque did with the Renaissance, and so on. Even in terms of Marxism, you get these waves. There is the classical period of clarity. Then there is a period of obscurity—Benjamin, Adorno, and the like.

RW: A related question: How would you say the Soviet project relates to the modern period? Do you think there’s any sort of link between what’s understood in the West—perhaps wrongly—as “postmodernity” and the collapse of historical Marxism in the 1970s and, after 1989, the dissolution of the Soviet Union? Is there any correlation between the post-Soviet moment and the general onset of postmodernity?

BG: Just as I don’t believe in “postmodernity,” I don’t believe in the “post-Soviet” situation either; rather, we are experiencing an intermediate moment between two periods of wars and revolutions. Today we live under the illusion of peace and free markets, just like people did during the nineteenth century, before the First World War. Our current mode of existence is very similar to the second half of the nineteenth century: there is mass culture, entertainment instead of high culture, terrorism, an interest in sexuality, the cult of celebrity, open markets, etc.

Before the rise of Imperial Germany, everybody in the West believed it was interested in capitalism, although in Germany everyone understood it was about war. That is what will happen again in the foreseeable future. In fact, it is already beginning to happen, in that we are actually witnessing a return to a state and military infrastructure. Just as after the French Revolution, there is the reversion to antiquity, and then a new medievalism with Romanticism, the infrastructure of our epoch will be contested, and this will start a new period of war and revolutions. At that point, we’ll remember the Soviet Union, and many other phenomena. |P

---

1. Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript (London: Verso, 2009), xv.↑
2. Ibid., 2.↑
3. Boris Groys, Going Public (New York: Sternberg Press, 2010), 10.↑

Share