Category: Politics

My friend Roddey Reid has published a great article on the public culture of bullying that has arisen in the United States in recent years. In the light of recent “tea party” activities, I think that the article is even more relevant now than it was when it was first published a year and a half ago.

Roddey has made the article available for free downloading:

— Original version, published in 2008

— French-language version

— Revised and expanded “tea party” version

I think that Hardt/Negri are right when they suggest that a contemporary analysis of “the organic composition of capital” will involve great attention, not just to what capitalist corporations do internally, but to the “externalities” that greatly affect “the increase and decrease of value” (Commonwealth 141). But there is rather a too easy slide from this to the claim that “capital is increasingly external to the productive process and the generation of wealth. In other words, biopolitical labor is increasingly autonomous” (141). These two statements are not equivalent. The first one means that what is being expropriated from workers is not just their eight hours a day of labor power, but their entire body and soul, with all the knowledges and practices that are parts of the common lifeworld that informs them, and that they inherit. In this sense, it is perfectly true that predatory capital is extorting wealth today to an enormous extent through continuing “primitive accumulation”, and through what might be considered a sort of “ground-rent” on what was up till recently the commons,or general culture, until it was appropriated in the form of “intellectual property.” But — where Hardt/Negri say that “the exploitation of labor-power should be understood in terms of not profit but capitalist rent” (141), they really should have said “as well as” rather than “not… but.”

Hardt/Negri then make a sort of rhetorical slide when they move from the (correct) claim that capital is increasingly exploiting the entire life-world of the multitude, to the (highly dubious) claim that, therefore: “rather than an organ functioning within the capitalist body, biopolitical labor-power is becoming more and more autonomous, with capital simply hovering over it parasitically with its disciplinary regimes, apparatuses of capture, mechanisms of expropriation, financial networks, and the like” (142). The problem here is that capital has always been “parasitic” in this sense. Industrial production was/is no more “organic” than the current regime of immaterial production. (That is, unless you get rid of the old-fashioned, idealistic notion of what is “organic”, and understand that the relationship of parasite to host is itself entirely something “organic”). It is not as if workers in call centers and workers hired through temp agencies somehow have more autonomous control over what they are doing than workers on a factory assembly line. What we are still seeing is the expropriation of relative surplus-value.

The ambiguity here relates especially to the idea of the “real subsumption” of labor under capital. I think that Hardt/Negri are right to see the intensifying movement from merely formal subsumption to real subsumption as a characteristic of the current order. I agree entirely with them that today “capital might be said to subsume not just labor but society as a whole or, really, social life itself, since life is both what is put to work in biopolitical production and what is produced” (142). But I cannot for the life of me see how this can be inverted into the assertion that, therefore, “capital is increasingly external and has an ever less functional role in the production process” (142). (“Functional” is a strange word here. Capital is always dysfunctional in the sense that, as Marx often says, it introduces faux frais into the process of social reproduction. But it is highly functional in the sense that it coercively organizes production to the end of more intensive expropriation — I am inclined to agree with Max Weber that the whole point of capitalism, in contrast to earlier modes of expropriation, is that it “rationally” organizes its extortion). With real subsumption, the coercive organization of all life by capital for the purpose of increased expropriation is, if anything, intensifed beyond what it ever was in the time of merely formal subsumption.

Hardt/Negri can thus be denounced as guilty of the old Marxist sin of  “economism”, to the extent that they seem to argue that the advance of capitalist exploitation, in itself, somehow objectively leads to a situation in which the multitude (proletariat) becomes autonomous and is able to take the production and reproduction of life into its own hands. They even say that “the exercise of capitalist control is increasingly becoming a fetter to the productivity of biopolitical labor” (143); this is just a new formulation of the old idea, from the earlier Marx, that capitalism is doomed to collapse because the relations of production turn into fetters on the development of the forces of production. This is a position that Marx himself later nuances and problematizes greatly, and perhaps rejects entirely.

I think that Hardt/Negri’s claims that the current form of capitalist control interfere with productivity needs to be modified. They identify three trends that are needed in order for capitalism to control production, but that in fact limit production (145ff): destroying and appropriating the common fetters or reduces production, as does “precarization” of labor, and as does the enforcement of borders and the limitation of labor mobility. I am not convinced that these trends really cripple productivity in the way that Hardt/Negri say; rather, they all work to insure profits by transforming abundance into scarcity. Such measures do indeed lead to crises, as has been the case for the entire history of capitalism; but do such crises actually herald the end of capitalism?

I think not. Indeed, Hardt/Negri themselves quite accurately note that the inevitable, and repeated, economic crises of capitalism do not lead to collapse, but rather offer opportunities for capital to reorganize itself on a more intensive basis: “capital works by breaking down, or, rather, through creative destruction achieved by crises. In contemporary neoliberal economic regimes, in fact, crisis and disaster have become ever more important as levers to privatize public goods and put in place new mechanisms for capitalist accumulation” (143). It is extremely odd, therefore, that in the same paragraph where they observe this, they also argue that “subjective” crises, as opposed to “objective” ones, do indeed threaten the survival of capitalism by means of the contradiction between relations and forces of production. In Hardt/Negri’s own context, this distinction makes no sense. For all that they proclaim their allegiance to a Deleuzian affirmationism rather than to the old Hegelian vision of “the negation of the negation,” Hardt/Negri are in fact relying on a facile dialectical reversal in the bad old Hegelian manner.

“Economism”, in the Marxist tradition, has generally meant a belief in the inevitability of the fall of capitalism, and the birth of socialism, through objective economic laws alone. And I do think that Hardt/Negri can be charged with this, for all their claims to be radically rewriting Marx in accordance with the changed configuration of capitalism we face today. At the same time, I think that Hardt/Negri are right in their attention to economic processes, or to the accumulation of capital; in contrast to the way that Badiou, for instance, entirely dismisses such concerns, and turns instead to a romantic and mystical hyper-voluntarism. I think that Hardt/Negri are in fact at their best and most helpful when they discuss the “metamorphoses of the composition of capital” (Commonwealth 131-149); if only we leave out that twist of dialectical reversal at the end by which they endeavor to rescue things.

What I propose, therefore, is indeed a renewed “economism” — only without the sense of historical inevitability tacked on at the end. I haven’t really seen any arguments about agency, or about organization, that are more than futile compensatory fantasies. I think economism is of value, to the extent that at least it lets us see clearly what is going on, what the situation is, in which we are enmeshed. Economism would correspond, therefore, to Jameson’s famous call for a “cognitive mapping” of the world system of capital. It is necessary in order to account for the ascendency of finance capital in the present moment. It would let us better understand what has happened as the latest crisis has once again allowed for the reorganization and further consolidation of capital, rather than leading to even minimal changes in its oppressive functioning.

The positive functioning of “economism” is all rather vague for the moment — let’s just say it is something I am starting to explore and work on. I think that the whole subjective/objective opposition, which Hardt/Negri retain as a legacy of Hegelianism, needs to be questioned in the light of speculative realism’s attack on correlationism. The point would not be to get rid of the strong sense that economic arrangements are matters of concern for human beings in particular, but to understand the workings of such arrangements in a different way. I do not think that Marxist capital logic needs to be confined to the Hegelian framework, even if this framework is where he started out from. (Apologies for the vagueness of these final propositions; I am only at the beginning of thinking about them. Stay tuned).

Some weeks ago, Nick at Speculative Heresy raised some interesting questions about the possible relations (or not) between Marxism and Actor Network Theory: “Across speculative realism, Marxism, non-philosophy and actor-network theory, one of the constant tensions is between a totalizing theory and what we might call an assemblage theory.” Now, this is something I have been trying to grapple with for quite some time.

Thirty years ago, in graduate school, I engaged, as a Deleuzian/Blanchotian, in endless arguments with my Adorno- and Jameson-influenced friends about the possibility and necessity of “totalization” — which they saw as a crucial imperative for Marxist thought, and which I denounced as a pernicious cognitive imperialism. They insisted that any attempt to historicize, or to mobilize critical negativity, necessarily implied an endeavor to totalize — even if this goal of totalization could never actually be reached. I supported assemblages and open systems, and saw the drive to totalize as an attempt to foreclose alternatives; I thought that the affirmation of difference would get us further than critical negativity.

Today, in my grim middle age, it seems to me that the whole debate was irrelevant and beside the point. But it is obviously a debate that is far from dead, since it keeps on coming back, and seems central to contemporary disputes between Zizek/Badiou and Hardt/Negri, as well as between theorists who retain a Marxist orientation and those who adopt the anti-Marxism of Latour and DeLanda.

When I say the debate is pointless, what I really mean is that I have come to occupy both of the supposedly opposing extremes, without seeing any contradiction between them. (I hope this means that I have performed the Whiteheadian operation of producing “a shift of meaning which converts the opposition into a contrast”). On the one hand, I have become more cheerfully pluralist than ever; I no longer worry about the danger of totalization because I know that it is impossible, that there are always multiple perspectives, multiple links among things, potentialities that cannot possible be exhausted and encompassed by any sort of dialectic. Likewise, critical negativity can never be effective — there are too many things and relations that evade its grasp — so it is not even worth fighting against it. On the other hand, and at the same time, I think that the events of the last several decades have justified and validated Marx’s insights concerning the nature and tendencies of capitalism, to a degree that I couldn’t have imagined thirty years ago, no matter how “Marxist” I considered myself at the time. The accumulation of capital, the extraction of surplus value, the plundering that is equivalent to an ever-expanding “primitive accumulation”, the relentless commodification of all aspects of human life: all these processes are everywhere you look, working systematically — to the extent that I am perpetually dumbfounded, both by discourses that deny the systematicity or problematicness of capitalism, and to those that analyze power and domination and “the State” without taking them into consideration.

I am claiming, therefore, both that capitalism (or, if you prefer, the relentless process of capital accumulation) is indeed systematic, and that this has nothing to do with any arguments about totalization, or base and superstructure, or determination in the last instance, or any of those old categories of “dialectical materialism” and of a “thought of the negative.” Or, to put it in a slightly different way, I am sympathetic to Latour’s insistence that networked social processes cannot be explained in terms of global categories like “capital,” or “the social” – because these categories themselves are what most urgently need to be explained. And the only way to explain these categories is precisely by working through the network, and mapping the many ways in which these categories function, the processes through which they get constructed, and the encounters in the course of which they transform, and are in turn transformed by, the other forces that they come into contact with. But — and this is an extremely crucial “but” — explaining how categories like “capital” and “society” are constructed (and in many cases, auto-constructed) is not the same thing as denying the very validity of these categories – as Latour and his disciples are often wont to do. It is simply disingenuous when (as Nick describes it) ” Latour and the main ANT economist, Michel Callon, argue that capitalism does not exist.” I would add the same for Manuel DeLanda’s anti-Marxism, and for Gibson-Graham’s argument — much discussed in the responses to Nick’s post — that lots of inventive practices already exist, so that we have already somehow reached “the end of capitalism as we know it” (to re-quote my own comments from here). All of these denials that we have to do with anything that could be called “capitalism” seem to me to do violence to the evidences of daily experience

Of course,”capitalism” is a process, or a collection of processes, rather than a thing or an entity. We might substitute for “capitalism” the wordier formulations of capital accumulation, exploitation, “primitive accumulation,” and commodification — since all these are nouns that more clearly indicate process than “capitalism” on its own does. But in any case, the systematicity of these processes is itself something that is largely empirical, rather than somehow a priori. Capitalism is a grouping of mutually-reinforcing processes and relations that insinuate themselves into more and more areas of human existence — and not just “human” existence, if we are thinking, for instance, of ecological effects. A “radical empiricism,” like that of William James, insists upon the experiential actuality — which is to say the reality — of all sorts of relations and processes (in contrast to the way that classical empiricism restricts itself to static entities or isolated sense-impressions). Alternatively, we might think of the way that the line between what is empirically given, and what is necessary a priori, is itself rather blurry and changeable (this is an anti-Kantian argument that nonetheless acknowledges the significance of Kant — it has been made most explicitly in recent years by Paolo Virno via Wittgenstein; but it is also implicitly behind Foucault’s claim for historically variable epistemes or a prioris; it is also consistend with Kojin Karatani’s Kantian Marxism).

Therefore, I agree with Nick’s double claim that “there are some sort of systemic tendencies, but there can be no totalizing system”; but I don’t find it as insuperably difficult as he does “to square the circle and incorporate Marxism, non-philosophy and ANT together.” (I leave aside “non-philosophy” here, because I simply do not have an adequate grasp of Laruelle’s thought). When ANT-oriented people deny the existence of systematic categories, or historically produced and historically variable (relative) a prioris, this is simply because they aren’t empiricist enough — they fail to extend themselves to the point of James’ “radical empiricism,” or of Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism.”

I will let this stand for now, although I regard it as unfinished — there is a lot more to say. In particular, I would like to work out how all this relates to “speculative realism” (and especially to Harman’s brilliant reading of Latour). I think that Harman’s greatest weakness (I am less sure about Latour) has to do with his exclusive focus on entities (objects) rather than on processes, and, in consequence of this, of his underestimation or excessive rigidity in how to understand relations. [I cannot justify this comment at present; it is part of what I am currently trying to work out. Whitehead sees the world as being composed of processes rather than substances; on this basis, he gives an account of “enduring objects” that is irreducible either to Bergsonian total flux, or to Harmanian substance ontology. I think that Whitehead’s understanding of processes and relations is compatible with a sense of the long-term systematicity of something like “capitalism,” in a way that Harman’s and Latour’s formulations are not. But this is all something To Be Continued].