Everybody talks about the weather

By Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi

“Everybody talks about the weather. We don’t.” This 1968 poster was a response by the German Socialist Student Union to an ad campaign for weatherproof trains. The students were suggesting that like the figures pictured above, they had more important concerns than everyday things like the weather. The next year, journalist and future Red Army Faction terrorist Ulrike Meinhof would use the slogan to argue that radicals should talk about everyday life, since “the personal is political.”

For us, it just means that we should talk about the weather. It’s going to start snowing on the occupations, and the authorities want to use the weather as a weapon. They’re hoping that winter will kill the movement off, and it’s hard to deny that camping out in the middle of January would be a poor tactic.

But the weather represents a much bigger question: what will it take to make this movement last? There is great potential in what has been achieved, but there are also significant obstacles, which present themselves both inside and outside the movement. With an eye towards advancing this struggle, let’s start by trying to understand what’s happening: who is protesting, and what does it mean?

In a reflection on the riots in London this past summer, “The Prince and the Pauper,” we argued that the composition of the rioters reflected the blurred boundaries between a precarious and hyperexploited “lumpenproletariat” and the mainstream working class. What was important above all was that the spontaneous violence of the riots took place at the same time as a strike by Verizon workers across the pond, within the very industry that provided the rioters with means of communication. And though struggles were communicating with each other across the world, these two political compositions – one reflecting a disorganized population usually subjected to the worst state repression, the other reflecting the classical mode of trade-union politics – did not encounter one another.

The Occupy Wall Street crowd seems to be an in-between element, both technically and politically. Much of the energy behind it comes from the activist milieu that characterized the Seattle “anti-globalization” protests, but it also clearly draws from a wide base of working people who are now seeing the disintegration of classical forms of work alongside the social fabric that once supported them. So the Occupy movement is simultaneously the space where encounters can take place, as well as a form of struggle with the implicit objective of creating conditions in which these encounters can take hold. But who exactly is in this space?

The best information we have now is about Occupy Wall Street; though other occupations may have unique elements, this serves as a useful starting point. The composition of Occupy Wall Street is unsurprisingly heterogeneous. Age, wealth, and experience vary widely; some participants are veterans from former struggles, others are joining in for the first time; there’s a large concentration of youth, but more than 28% are over 40. You’ll find the homeless, doctoral students, and professionals of various stripes all camping out together. Despite these sharp differences, however, some common characteristics stand out. First, the vast majority is highly educated: a study by CUNY sociologist Hector R. Cordéro-Guzmán observed that over 90% reported “some college, a college degree, or a graduate degree.” Second, the great majority does not support either of the political parties. Third, and perhaps most important, the movement as a whole is overwhelmingly composed of the unemployed, underemployed, or precariously employed.

In many important ways, it’s no coincidence that this particular technical composition would choose the Occupy movement as its form of struggle. By firing workers, putting them on furlough, demanding that they work part-time, or simply forcing them to accept an early retirement, the capitalists gave them all free time. Instead of sitting at home, these workers are using this imposed free time against those capitalists who forced it upon them in the first place. The Occupy movement demonstrates how workers can creatively turn their situation against their bosses, how they can transform an imposed form of production into a weapon. It’s not so much a kind of prolonged march as it is a transformed strike, work stoppage, or collective slowdown. It’s a form of struggle that has emerged directly from the particular economic situation that capital has led us into. But not only is it a form of struggle, it’s a bridge between a multiplicity of forms, where already existing movements can cross-pollinate and new ones can be tested for the first time.

This bridging is international in character. Inspired by the Arab Spring, the struggles in Greece, and the Spanish indignados, Occupy Wall Street first emerged as yet another moment in this broader cycle of struggle. It’s significant, however, that after becoming a real movement by spreading itself across America, this form of struggle then found its way back into the hands of those who had inspired it in the first place. There is no greater illustration of the circulation of struggles today: from Puerta del Sol square in May, to the occupation of Zuccotti Park, and back to Madrid in October. But it’s not as though the same coin has passed through thousands of new hands just to return to its owner unchanged. The circulation of this struggle has added something; it returns with more experiences, a sharper perspective, a more radical edge.

But we’re not dealing with the same struggle. There’s a plurality of almost bewilderingly diverse forms of contestation. Before Occupy Wall Street, there were literally thousands of distinct struggles from Greece to the Middle East to China. What the Occupy movement has done is strategically subsume many of these preexisting struggles into a shared discursive space – providing them with a common language. In China, demonstrators have held up banners reading: “Resolutely support the American people’s mighty Wall Street Revolution!”

On October 15, protests erupted in 900 cities across the globe. Though many had already witnessed their fair share of disturbances over the past few years, it was the bold synchronicity of it all that was so unprecedented. This could have only been accomplished through a recoding of each particular struggle into a more general vernacular. Of course, all of these struggles were already implicitly – and in some cases explicitly – in touch with one another. But now, they speak the same language. Slogans reappear, symbols are shared, and practices are recycled on different continents.  Struggles all over the world are beginning to recode themselves in this idiom.

The dilemma is that while unions have expressed their support, organizations like Occupy the Hood are attempting to prioritize the sectors of the working class that are racially marginalized, and international struggles are taking up occupations as their banners, no concrete and institutional connection has been made. It could very well be that the durability and radicalization of this movement will rely on its potential as a mediating element between the the various segments of the class, their particular interests, and their traditional forms of struggle. Achieving this means going beyond a spontaneous reflection of changes in our working lives. It has to start by understanding the system underlying them.

We Are the Wage Relation

We all know how the protest represents itself. “We are the 99%,” said Occupy Wall Street, and this single slogan has spread like a prairie fire.

Only a philistine would dismiss the movement based on objections to this slogan. A quick glance at the now-famous website wearethe99percent.tumblr.com shows what it has achieved. In a society that is supposed to be hopelessly atomized, made up of alienated zombies staring at individual TV screens, ordinary people are showing solidarity with each other. The problems people describe on this website might once have been thought of as personal issues, of no concern to anyone but your spouse and your landlord. Occupy Wall Street has given us the language to understand our personal problems as a collective political struggle against the 1% who got rich from our misfortune.

At the same time, the slogan advances no analysis about how things got this way. Social inequality is shameful, to be sure, and it’s been growing steadily. But does this happen because there are bad eggs at the top? Because the good guys in government aren’t strong enough? Or is it because there’s an underlying relationship in our society that produces this inequality and ensures that it constantly increases?

It would be no improvement to quibble about percentages. (“We are the 87.3%! Down with the 5.2% and their 7.5% running dogs!”) The figures which actually demonstrate the fundamental changes in our economy leading to today’s discontentment are shown in the following graph, covering the period from 1947 to 2010, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

The top line represents worker productivity, measured by output per hour. The line lagging behind is their hourly compensation, which means wages plus benefits, adjusted for inflation. The growing “wage gap” between the two lines essentially measures the change in the rate of exploitation, and it shows that exploitation has been steadily increasing. This doesn’t mean there wasn’t exploitation before the 1970s, it just means that social inequality wasn’t growing; now bigger and bigger portions of wealth are being transferred from labor to capital.

In 1865, Karl Marx engaged in a debate in the First International Working Men’s Association against a utopian socialist named John Weston. Weston argued that the wave of strikes across Europe demanding higher wages was dangerous, since if wages were increased, capitalists would simply raise commodity prices to compensate and make life more expensive for workers. Marx argued in his speeches, later published as Value, Price and Profit, that this position was based on a totally incorrect understanding of the wage. Capitalists pay a wage that ensures the worker will show up to work the next day, equivalent to the socially average collection of necessities (food, housing, entertainment) required to reproduce labor-power, or the ability to work. They don’t pay for each individual commodity the worker produces, because the central fact of capitalism is that workers produce more than the value of their daily necessities. The difference between their wages and the value of the commodities they produce is the “surplus value” that belongs to the capitalist. No other input of the production process generates more value than it costs; the exploitation of labor is the source of profit.

What Marx pointed out is that if there is an increase in the productivity of labor, but wages stay the same, struggles for higher wages have to be understood as “reactions of labour against the previous action of capital.” If capital can’t pay workers less, or work them longer hours, it has to increase the productivity of labor by disciplining workers and introducing technological innovations. This has two dramatic effects. First of all, it reduces the demand for labor, which means unemployment. Second, it means capitalists are investing more in expensive machinery than in their source of profit.

If productivity has dramatically increased, and industries across the board produce many more commodities, they need people to buy them – but that’s difficult to pull off when wages have been so low for so long. The result of rising social inequality is that capitalists are sitting on vast amounts of money, or channeling it into a luxury economy, and banks are running out of profitable investment opportunities. Workers, on the other hand, need money just to live. The solution to these problems is well known. The widespread reliance on consumer credit – a risky investment for the banks and potentially lifelong debt for the consumer – increases purchasing power beyond the wage.

Alongside the use of home equity loans and credit cards to shore up consumption is the massive student loan industry, which lends future workers the resources to develop their productive powers. In theory, these debts would be paid off by future income, assuming some kind of imminent recovery. The problem is that people graduating with enormous and unreasonable loans are not getting jobs, and as we’ve already noted, capitalism is tending towards unemployment. With the classical system of exploitation by the wage undermining itself, capital is forced to find ways to use debts to extract wealth. Ever paid an overdraft fee?

There’s also a dramatic political effect of debt: it prevents people from deserting the sinking ship of the wage system. In spite of the fact that nobody expects a job to become a lifelong career anymore, which used to be work’s way of justifying itself, they’re still forced to accept precarious work – rushing between multiple part-time jobs unrelated to their education, if they have jobs at all, and cutting every possible expense to pay off their loans.

This is just an extension of the brutal strategy of expropriation already imposed on the poorest sectors of the working class, the predatory lending that specifically targeted black and Latino women. Just as student debt established a supplementary form of exploitation, by compelling people to pay for the rest of their lives to acquire a competence they may be unable to cash in on the job, subprime mortgages practiced exploitation at the site of reproduction. Low-income workers who needed an address, a place to maintain their abilities to work and to institutionalize their social existence, found themselves struggling to pay an unmanageable debt until the bank simply took the house back to sell it again, pocketing the already-extracted payments.

It should be clear that these very visible actions by finance can’t be reduced to the greed of individual criminals. They are the violent and reckless attempts by capitalists to defend and radicalize the exploitation that took place in the wage system, in spite of the growing contradictions of that system. So we have to decouple our rhetoric from notions of corporate power and lawless bankers. It’s a relationship we’re fighting, not a bunch of guys in expensive suits.

What the 99% slogan moves us towards is a concept of class. It’s the ladder that we’re using to climb up to a class analysis. But to really develop that analysis, we’ll have to leave the ladder behind. “We are the wage relation” is not a very good slogan. It’s a shift in perspective that indicates the need for new slogans.

The 99% is a coalition built upon many different tendencies, interests, and projects. While it helps us unify our separate struggles, discover the social in the personal, and forge our different demands into a common discourse, it ultimately conceals more than it reveals. The danger is most apparent when we consider that some of the tendencies within the Occupy Movement hope to use the momentum of the struggle to enter into a profitable alliance with finance. The “professional-managerial sector,” or what has been commonly though erroneously labeled “the middle class,” is certainly part of this 99%. But it’s a peculiar part of this percentage: although it is exploited by capital like everyone else, it nevertheless occasionally profits from its own exploitation. As that layer which embodies the interests of both labor and capital, the “middle class” stands as a variable and potentially dangerous element within the movement as a whole.

The “middle class” is, in its own way, tormented by wage labor – we think of what Riccardo Bellofiore and Massimiliano Tomba describe as “the lack of social life, the endless cigarettes, the psychic disturbances and the hemorrhoids of our ultra-modern knowledge workers.” But this layer also has a tendency to look for a way out – not by abolishing exploitation in general, but by taking a cut of the exploitation of lower-income workers. The professional-managerial liberals want to make finance work for them; their gamble is to co-opt the more exploited sectors of the proletariat, to claim to speak for the whole working class, to use reform as a means of stabilizing the wage relation rather than putting it into question.

In many ways, it’s an old strategy that goes at least as far back as the French Revolution. The Third Estate united its heterogeneous components by reconstituting itself as the nation. Everyone else – the upper clergy and the nobility – was regarded as a mere parasite idly leeching off the labors of the overwhelming majority. The dominant figures of the Third Estate – the businessmen, lawyers, and aspiring politicians – at first hoped to use the strength of the movement to advance their own distinct interests rather than those of the masses. Even some aristocrats threw in their lot with the masses in the hopes that they too could domesticate it. This was all in 1789.

But now we’re in the twenty-first century – we don’t need another French Revolution. So we have to question the strange resurgence of the language of parasitism. It’s a convenient way to reduce the objectives of the movement to nothing other than casting off the parasites in order to preserve the body. And the rhetoric of the 99% helps dissemble the very real contradictions slowly tearing apart that purportedly coherent body. The danger is all the more severe when we remember that this body is not so much American as it is international.

Beyond the divisions within the American “99%” there are global divisions. Inequality of wealth extends to the inequality between nations and suggests that the situation of the working class varies with national boundaries. In many nations workers are caught between the increasing impoverishment of agriculture and an unstable slum life structured around contingent or informal work. Farmer suicides in India are echoed by iPhone factory worker suicides in China.

The American inflection of the slogans now circulating globally is significant. It signals the decisive reentry of the United States into this international cycle of struggle; the dominant pole of capitalist accumulation can no longer distance itself from the struggles rending the rest of the world. But there is a danger that the growing significance of the American struggle will begin to blind us to the distinct characterof other struggles and the specific historical form of the wage relation in which they have found themselves. The Israelis began with a housing crisis, the Chileans attacked education, the Greeks aimed at austerity, and the Filipinos united against American imperialism. Movements in the countries of the “Third World” will have to take on a distinct set of interests and strategies precisely because their composition is already so different. So while the Occupy movement has allowed these dialects to translate, it will have to avoid the risk of obliterating its particularities. The contradiction is not between a homogeneous international majority against an equally homogeneous international minority, but between the different poles of a global wage relation that necessarily assumes different forms in different places.

Enemy of the State?

The media like to suggest that the Occupy movement is the Tea Party of the left. And maybe there are some similarities: both are socially hetereogenous, both have brought together individuals from across the country, and both have several decentralized grievances, some of which may even be the same. Where they differ most strongly, however, is their relationship to the state. While the Tea Party has strategically insinuated itself with the Republican Party in the hopes of reorienting the state itself, the Occupy movement has consistently refused to do the same with the Democratic Party. The Democrats are too politically impotent to effectively co-opt the movement, and even the unofficial demands of the occupation are well beyond anything the Democrats will ever be willing to get behind. Most significantly, the movement rejects the entire party system. The Cordéro-Guzmán survey discovered that the vast majority of those involved in Occupy Wall Street – some 70% of the respondents – identify as politically independent.

This signals a major shift in the political culture. While just a few years ago the Democrats were able to rebrand themselves as a party of opposition, change, and new hopes, they’re now widely regarded as opportunists with nothing to offer. This legitimation crisis forced open a wide vacuum on the left of the political spectrum that has been filled by the Occupy movement. But while the movement has clearly abandoned the Democratic Party, it has not yet definitively abandoned the state.

There are two tendencies that fetishize the state. The first is the typical liberal call for financial regulation – if it was the unregulated avarice of the corporations that got us into this mess, then we can resolve it by pressuring the state into regulating them more tightly. The second, paradoxically, is the opposite end of the spectrum, the “End the Fed” Ron Paul fanatics who believe that fiat currency is the root of all evil. The shared ideological assumption of both these tendencies is that the state and the market are somehow totally distinct actors with contrary interests.

So the comparison with the Tea Party should lead us to an unexpectedly important question: why is the only anti-government rhetoric to be found on the right? The paranoid notion that “big government” seeks to take away the private property of individuals is a mystified understanding of the reality that wealth really has been transferred away from middle-income Americans, and it accurately intuits that this process has been overseen by the state. We don’t have to spend a lot of time emphasizing the fact that the state not only represents the interests of the wealthy, it’s actually composed of them. Everybody knows this.

Add to this that all these processes of financialization have been administrated by the state. The bail-out was no aberration; it just confirmed who the state is here to support. Consider the telling example of student loans. Since 1965 the government has underwritten private lenders who facilitate an increasingly expensive college education, as part of the Federal Family Education Loan Program. What this means is that the ability of universities, including for-profit colleges, to radically increase tuition, and of private lenders to prey on more students, has been enabled by the government. The policy was ended in 2010, but not before making it absolutely clear in 2005 that the government was not interested in extending any support to the borrowers: student loans have become nondischargeable, leaving a generation of unemployed graduates without the option of declaring bankruptcy. The only winners are the financial corporations, which have been packaging student loans into lucrative financial products called student loan asset-backed securities. Even the most recent measures announced by the White House only make it easier for people to get into debt; they do nothing to counteract the 8.3% increase in tuition at public colleges.

In spite of the government’s visible defense of the capitalist class, the tendency on the left is to imagine that we can somehow just negotiate with the state. It’s not the first time this has been attempted. A militant labor movement confronted capital on the shop-floor during the 1920s and 1930s. Capital and the state were forced to find a way to subsume and control this threat; that strategy was called the New Deal. Under the pressure of World War II, the Communist Party entered into an alliance with the Democrats and threw in its lot with the New Deal, suppressing rank-and-file activity in the name of the “no-strike pledge.” The situation established had serious consequences after the war. The labor bureaucracy set the stage for its coming decline; they strengthened capital and paved the way not only for the Smith and Taft-Hartley Acts, the legal foundations for the purging of communists from the unions, but also for the devastating separation of the working class from the labor movement.

Recognizing that the state is an adversary, however, doesn’t mean moralistically ignoring it. It won’t wither away if we just refuse to engage with it out of principle. The lesson from our labor history is not only that alliance with political parties is treacherous, but also that meaningful reforms were won by the labor movement as a result of militant and antagonistic strategies, extending from the 1919 Seattle general strike to the 1934 San Francisco general strike. It would be the worst sectarianism to reject reforms; they alleviate suffering and advance the position of the working class. But the question is whether meaningful reforms can be achieved within the political limits of capitalism. If the political apparatus is controlled by the capitalist class, this means that those limits are not external limits that can be overcome by a stronger program. Instead, they are internal to the strategy of reform. The only way to force the capitalist class to concede reforms is to confront it with an antagonistic agent, a unified working class. Let’s not delude ourselves into thinking we can convince them with our better ideas.

Today the immediate tactical questions of the movement also pose the question of the state. In a telling international exchange between the various occupations across the world, a New Yorker questioned occupiers in Frankfurt about their decision to request a permit from the police. Noting that Liberty Plaza was occupied without a permit, she asked why the Germans had asked for one, wondering if such collaboration with class enemies could have been the result of a “cultural difference.” But why not be flexible, on the lookout for openings that can be strategically exploited? Some compromises may advance the class position, allowing a movement to confront the state on a different plane. If the state is willing to give us a permit, let them make that decision and live to regret it.

The question of police permits touches more generally on the police force itself. Are they, as some protesters have chanted, part of the 99%? From the start there has been a clear tension with the police. They have made arrests, have begun infiltrating the various occupations, and will certainly be called in, as they have been in Berlin and Oakland, to violently crush the movement.

But the challenge of the police is that they genuinely are workers, and their work is to repress proletarian antagonism. This paradox is not to be taken lightly. Neither blindly defending them as fellow workers nor blindly attacking them as hated pigs will help us now. Any failure to understand their specific function is either a reformist danger or an adventurist error.

The real problem was posed in 1968 by Pier Paolo Pasolini, after the Battle of Valle Giulia, in which police and student radicals clashed violently. Pasolini, the communist filmmaker, would later write a poem declaring solidarity with the police:

At Valle Giulia, yesterday, there was a fragment
of class struggle: you, my friends, (although
in the right) were the rich,
and the policemen (although in the wrong)
were the poor…

The important point in Pasolini’s poem is not his romanticization of the police’s purported proletarian identity, but instead the question of the composition of the revolutionaries. The problem this poses is that the repressive state apparatus has greater contact with many more layers of the proletariat than the political movement. In many spectacular street confrontations the police have seemed to be the only representatives of the “traditional” working class, including people of color, allowing the reactionary media to represent the protesters as entitled college students. And there can be no doubt that the police force recruits from the underclass; it offers one of the last careers available. Though in the abstract it is possible to bring the police over to our side – the protesters in Wisconsin successfully won the support of the police – this strategy can’t be assumed as some kind of utopian reflex. The Oakland Police Department gave us a crucial reminder of the instability of Pasolini’s perspective, when the vicious and obscene violence used for years against the black community was brought down upon Occupy Oakland. The real goal of the movement should be to move past the fetishization of the police, and to forge deeper connections with excluded segments of the proletariat, surrounding the police with their neighbors alongside college students.

Whatever the composition of the police, they remain an index of the state’s experience of protest. Remember the wise words of William S. Burroughs: “a functioning police state needs no police.” The Wall Street occupation was taken far more seriously when the pepper spray came out; even more when 700 were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. The acts of violence perpetrated by police have served as indication that the protest is a threat to the state’s functioning. Determining the next steps will require careful consideration, and leadership by people of color, who have the most experience dealing with police violence.

The Roof is on Fire

Some squeamish left-liberals complain that the Occupy movement lacks organization. This is obviously ridiculous. How can the simple occupation of a park spontaneously ignite similar occupations in well over 50 American cities, incite a global protest in nearly 900 cities across the globe, and successfully link together a series of heterogeneous struggles without any form of organization? The Occupy movement is perhaps one of the most organized movements in history.

An accompanying complaint is that the occupations have not put forth demands. But it’s not at all clear that demands are a sufficient condition for social transformation. To a certain extent, as we wrote about the London riots, the refusal to make demands is a protest against the idea that the existing order could make our lives better, a refusal to speak in capital’s language. At the same time, the absence of “official,” institutional demands coexists with an incredible multiplicity of demands made by individual protesters, as the list of grievances in the first official statement indicates.

The important question is whether this organization is durable, and whether the movement’s demands put the social structure into question. No spontaneous collectivity could come together without at least an abstract set of common demands, and it would be unable reproduce itself without some kind of organizational form. But can these forms radicalize the demands so that they are oriented towards the transformation of the social reality outside of them?

The meaning and political effect of demands will depend ultimately on the organizational structure that makes them. It’s possible, for example, that even a highly desirable demand, like free healthcare, could be posed by a faction of the protestors who will make it possible to dissolve the movement into the Democratic Party. But this dynamic could just as easily work in the other direction. Take, for example, this poster produced by the Italian revolutionary group Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power).

The text reads, “Reforms don’t protect wages from rising prices, from the robbery of deductions. Comrades, let’s take the offensive for our objectives. Transportation, rent, school, meals – free. No taxes.” The police figure wields the scale like a baton, showing how the deductions outweigh the wage. The base of the figure is labelled: “parties – bosses – unions.”

The analysis offered by these demands is clear. Like debt today, the prices of daily necessities is a deduction from the wage, a wage which already represents exploitation. But the American reader will find two things very strange about this poster. The first is the idea of communist parties and bosses in alliance with unions; while Italy in the 1960s and 1970s had large and powerful bureaucratic unions and a reformist communist party, we have no influential left parties and our unions have barely any social power. Where it says “parties – bosses – unions,” we should write “liberals.”

The other puzzle is the final demand: “no taxes.” Isn’t this the core platform of the right, of free-market extremists? It is, of course, but this demand is a platform of the right because it is embedded in class, in the organized structure of the ruling class. No taxes for whom? The capitalist class tries to escape from taxes, to continue to redistribute wealth towards the top, and to give the state an excuse to dismantle the social gains made by labor. But if the capitalist class was subjected to a tax that even began to approach the percentage it expropriates from workers, this would render taxes on workers obsolete.

Since the tax is experienced by workers as yet another deduction from the wage, while the public programs that benefit them are on the chopping block, it seems unnecessary to allow the right to monopolize the attack on taxes. If an anti-tax platform is put forward by workersas a class, it represents a program of eliminating one deduction from the wage while charging capitalists for the maintenance of the state. The demand to tax the rich is, of course, accepted by many left-liberals. While it’s definitely a good idea to charge the capitalists, taxing the rich as the maximum program sets us up for social development by the state. The occupation movement gives us the potential toindependently develop the class.

Other demands may be more appropriate for our situation. But they will have to be put forward by an organizational structure that represents a unitary class power. And the construction of such a form of organization will have to emerge from strategies of action that produce class solidarity.

A concrete example of this kind of strategy took place in La Puente, California. Rose Gudiel, who was about to be evicted from her foreclosed home, discussed her situation at Occupy LA. Her seemingly personal story turned out to be a social one; others there had suffered a similar fate. Many of the occupiers followed her back to her home in support. A few days later over two hundred joined her as she protested in front of the mansion of OneWest’s CEO; the next day they staged a sit-in at the Pasadena branch of Fannie Mae. Faced with such widespread opposition the bank gave in and decided to modify her loan.

This was a strategy, however spontaneous, that united participants in the movement who were hit by foreclosures. It provided a conceptual language in which individuals began to recognize that their own problems are closely related to other seemingly distinct problems. Not everyone who supported Gudiel was facing eviction; they joined her in part because they recognized that their own difficulties – unemployment, debt, rising cost of living – were connected to hers. The woman who loses her home is not so different from the neighbor that lost his job.  The power of this strategy emerged from a unique kind of solidarity. For the banks to fight Guidel, they had to fight the whole movement.

A foreclosed home is an interesting site for an occupation. Among the many differences between a house and Zuccotti Park is the fact that a house has a roof. And this brings us back to the weather. Everybody’s talking about it; everybody knows that winter will force the movement to rethink its tactics. This is the politics of weather: it’s not some neutral phenomenon, but a weapon like any other. We will have to use it to our advantage before capital enlists it to crush our movement.

This won’t be the first time weather has figured prominently in a struggle. A reform banquet was scheduled by the moderate opposition to take place in Paris on February 22, 1848. Fearing an escalation of the already existing conflict, hoping to break the solidarity of the opposition, and knowing full well that the district where the meeting was to be held was a real hotbed of revolutionary activity, the forces of order cancelled the banquet the night before, undoubtedly hoping that the week’s horrible weather would work to keep the demonstrators away.

But despite the heavy clouds, cold wind, and biting rain, the protesters took to the streets anyway, enraged by this provocation, and quickly set about building barricades, looting gun shops, and throwing stones at the National Guard. While order was restored in some of the more public places, the demonstrators strategically regrouped in their labyrinthine neighborhoods. Already a challenge for the army, the winding streets, tortuous alleyways, and bewildering terrain became even more dangerous to outsiders now that it was pouring rain. So the forces of order hoped to use the weather to dissuade protesters from coming out; the protesters ended up strategically using the weather to bolster their primary points of resistance and escalate the struggle. So began the revolution of 1848 in France.

We can also use the weather to our advantage. The forces of order are hoping that winter will kill off the movement by forcing us to retreat back to our homes. We should do just that. We should strategically regroup by reoccupying foreclosed homes, squatting abandoned apartments, occupying various other buildings, transforming each and every one of these into the cells of an escalating movement. From the occupation of a public park we can shift towards reoccupying those spaces from which we have been forcibly ejected by mounting debt, unemployment, austerity measures, and cuts to social services. We can take back the public libraries, schools, lost homes, community centers, and more. The point is to constantly think of creative ways to use the weapons of our enemies against them. Let’s start with the barometers.

Asad Haider is a graduate student at UC-Santa Cruz. Salar Mohandesi is a graduate student at UPenn. They are the editors ofViewpoint.

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Zizek spoke October 26 at St Mark’s Bookshop in Manhattan. What follows is not the complete talk, but some interesting parts. Reprinted from impose (with a few corrections),  where the complete transcript can be found.

Bill Clinton says ominously, “because your demands create a vacuum, and if you don’t bring quickly concrete proposals which will fill in this vacuum, who knows who will fill in this vacuum?” But at this point, I claim, precisely we should maintain this openness in all ominous directions. We don’t need dialogue with those in power. We need critical dialogue with ourselves. We need time to think. We effectively don’t know. And nobody knows. On the one hand we should reject the cheap — because Mao was never so stupid — psuedo-Maoist idea, “Learn from the people, people know”. No, they don’t know. Do we intellectuals know? Also, we don’t know. I mean, any intellectual who says, “Okay, people now have some confused ideas, oh I have a ready and precise plan of what to do,” they are bluffing. We don’t know where we are.

But I think that this openness is precisely what is great about these protests. It means that precisely a certain vacuum open the fundamental dissatisfactions in the system. The vacuum simply means open space for thinking, for new freedom, and so on. Let’s not fill in this vacuum too quickly.

Zizek speaks at St. Mark’s Bookshop

So, while the standard reaction of the Wall Street itself against the protest is the expected, vulgar bullshitting, I want to draw your attention to a more intelligent, but I think even more disgusting reaction; a critical rejection of Wall Street; a very liberal, sophisticated one: it was done a couple of days ago by Anne Applebaum, you know, the lady who wrote a book on gulag and so on. Again, it’s a very sophisticated argumentation. She even, in a slightly tasteless but almost convincing way, she [?] the [?] Monty Python film, The Life of Brian, where this Brian, the new Christ figure shouts to the people, “You are free individuals!” and then all of them shout, together as a crowd, “Yes we are free individuals!”; claiming that my functioning of repetition reminds her of that.

Okay, but nonetheless I claim… her reaction to it, and I will just read you two long paragraphs; I think they are worth quoting. It’s ideology at its purest, precisely in the way they make her argumentation appear convincing.

So again, the basis of Applebaum’s reasoning is the idea that the Wall Street type protests around the world are:

similar in their lack of focus, in their confused nature, and above all in their refusal to engage with existing democratic institutions. In New York, marchers chanted, “This is what democracy looks like,” but actually, this isn’t what democracy looks like. This is what freedom of speech looks like. Democracy looks a lot more boring. Democracy requires institutions, elections, political parties, rules, laws, a judiciary and many unglamorous, time-consuming activities...

“Yet,” she goes on:

in one sense, the international Occupy movement’s failure to produce sound legislative proposals is understandable: Both the sources of the global economic crisis and the solutions to it lie, by definition, outside the competence of local and national politicians…

The emergence of an international protest movement without a coherent program is therefore not an accident: It reflects a deeper crisis, one without an obvious solution. Democracy is based on the rule of law. Democracy works only within distinct borders and among people who feel themselves to be part of the same nation. A “global community” cannot be a national democracy. And a national democracy cannot command the allegiance of a billion-dollar global hedge fund, with its headquarters in a tax haven and its employees scattered around the world.

Unlike the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, to whom the New York protesters openly (and ridiculously) compare themselves, we have democratic institutions in the Western world. They are designed to reflect, at least crudely, the desire for political change within a given nation. But they cannot cope with the desire for global political change, nor can they control things that happen outside their borders. Although I still believe in globalization’s economic and spiritual benefits — along with open borders, freedom of movement and free trade — globalization has clearly begun to undermine the legitimacy of Western democracies.

“Global” activists, if they are not careful, will accelerate that decline. Protesters in London shout,“We need to have a process!” Well, they already have a process: It’s called the British political system. And if they don’t figure out how to use it, they’ll simply weaken it further.

End of quote. For this, in my universe, you go to gulag. Why? Let me explain. Firstly, the first thing to note, you notice how Applebaum reduces Tahrir Square protests to the calls of Western-style democracy. It’s as if, you know, they really want what we already have here. Once we do this, it of course becomes ridiculous to compare the Wall Street protests to the Egyptian event. How can protestors here demand what we already have? That is to say, democratic institutions? What is there lost from view — that’s why I oppose this idea — is the general discontent with the global capitalist system which obviously acquires different here and there. So I again claim that she misses the point.

Different as they are, protests here, in Southern Europe, in Egypt, whatever; what unites them is they’re precisely not political in the narrow sense of more democracy, or whatever. They signal a kind of a shared global discontent with their capitalistic system. And now I come to the crucial point: the most shocking part for me of Applebaum’s argumentation, a truly weird gap in her line of reasoning occurs at the end of the passage I read to you. After conceding that the catastrophic economic consequences of global capitalist financial dealings are due to their international character out of control of democratic mechanisms, she remembered to make this point clear: what happens at the level of international capital is simply out of control of democratic mechanisms. And she draws from this the necessary conclusion. Here, we should agree with her, I quote it again: “Globalization” — she means capitalist globalization — “has clearly begun to undermine the legitimacy of Western democracies.”

Because again, things happen there which are out of control of at least normal, the way we have them, democratic processes. Okay, so far, we can agree because I claim this is precisely what the protestors are drawing attention to, that global capitalism undermines potentially democracy.  But instead of drawing the only logical, further conclusion that we should start thinking about how to expand democracy beyond its state multi-party political forum, which obviously leaves out destructive consequences of economic life; instead of this, Applebaum performs a weird turnaround and she shifts the blame on protestors themselves who raise these questions.

Her last paragraph deserves to be read again. Listen.

“Global” activists, if they are not careful, will accelerate that decline. Protesters in London shout,“We need to have a process!” Well, they already have a process: It’s called the British political system. And if they don’t figure out how to use it, they’ll simply weaken it further.

End of quote. So her logic is, since global economy is outside the scope of democratic politics, any attempt to expand democracy to be will only accelerate the decline of democracy. What then can we do? Remember, she says, we should engage in the existing political system. But wait a minute. Paragraph above, she says that precisely this system cannot do the job. So it’s very strange, her conclusion. Her conclusion is basically we cannot do anything. We have our democracy. If you buy it, you have to accept that global capital movement and so on are outside its scope. If you try something more, democracy no longer functions. But it is here I claim that you should go to the end. To the end, even in anti-capitalism.

There is no lack of anti-capitalism today. We are even witnessing an overload of the critique of the hours of capitalism. Books, newspaper, in-depth investigations, TV reports. You know, you cannot open a newspaper without reading this company is polluting environment, corrupted bankers continue to get fat bonuses while their banks are saved by public money, sweatshops in the third world where children work over time and so on.

There is, however, a catch to all this overflow of critique of capitalism. What is, as a rule, not in question in this critique is the democratic, liberal political frame of fighting against these excesses. The explicit or implicit goal is to democratize capitalism. By this it’s meant not to think deeply about our democracy, but simply to extend our standard notion of politics, party politics, representative democracy into more interventionist one. Extend democratic control of economy through the pressure of the public media, parliamentary inquiry, harsher laws, honest police investigations, and so on. But never questioning the democratic institutional framework of our state of law. This remains the sacred cow even when we are dealing with the most radical forms of this, I call it, ethical anti-capitalism — Seattle movement, Porto Allegre, and so on. I think their moralism, like greedy bankers, dishonest companies, is a sign of their weakness.

It is here that Marxist key insight remains valid today, I claim, more than ever. For Marx, and this is for me the true lesson of Wall Street protests, the question of freedom should not be located primarily into the political sphere proper: Does a country has free elections? Are the judges independent? Is the press free from hidden pressures? Are human rights respected? And the similar list of questions, different independent Western institutions apply when they want to pronounce a judgment on a country.

The key to actual freedom rather resides in the apolitical, what appears to be apolitical. Network of social relations. From the market to the family where the change needed if we want an actual improvement is not political reform but a change in apolitical social relations of production.

So Anne Applebaum is right. We do not vote about who owns what, about relations in a factory and so on. All this is left to process outside the political sphere proper. And it is illusory to expect that one can effectively change things by simply extending our parliamentary democracy into this sphere, for example, by organizing democratic banks under people’s control. Radical changes in this domain should be made outside the sphere of legal rights. Such democratic procedures, of course, can play a very positive role. No matter how radical their anti-capitalism is, the solution they seek resides in applying representative democratic mechanisms but again, and Applebaum is right, they live out of control; the economic sphere proper and so on.

In this sense only, don’t misunderstand here, I think that Alain Badiou was right in his claim that today — it sounds terrible — the name of the enemy, he wrote once, is not capitalism, empire, exploitation or anything similar, the name of the enemy today is democracy. Now you will say, “ha ha, now we got you, totalitarian!” or whatever. No no no, I claim, what he only wanted to say is that our too blind attachment to formal democratic party state mechanism prevents our approaching a true problem. So again, I think what Applebaum accepts as the fact, “We can’t do anything, that’s it”. This precisely I claim is the starting point of the deep dissatisfaction which exploded in all anti-Wall Street protests. This precisely they feel that we have certain political multi-party system, obviously we are witnessing dangerous, even catastrophic phenomena in economy, and it’s obviously that this type of democratic system, the way it is now, cannot do the work; because it implies precisely this duality which is very nicely emphasized in Applebaum, between political sphere where we are all free but we have to follow the procedures, proper democratic procedures and so on, and economics sphere of private relations, whatever, which is left out. It is obvious that the urgent task today is precisely to find a way to control or to regulate — I don’t like the word ‘control’ here — precisely that sphere without of course returning to old 20th century totalitarian notions and practices.

So I think what Applebaum is complaining about, “Oh these protests are not clearly formulated, they don’t know what they want.” Let’s return briefly to psychoanalysis. This is a typical dialogue between a patriarchal husband and a hysterical wife, you know. The wife complains, of course in a confused way, and the standard male chauvinist answer is, “say clearly what do you want?” This is of course oppression at its purest. It means “either shut up or formulate it in my terms.”

Preserving the Vacuum

Bill Clinton said this very nice in a sympathetic reaction to Wall Street protestors — which is why I claim Bill Clinton practices clinching; you know what is clinching, you embrace the enemy no? Like we should talk and so on but show us, tell us, give us concrete proposals, what do you want? Well my simple answer is that — and Bill Clinton says ominously, “because your demands create a vacuum, and if you don’t bring quickly concrete proposals which will fill in this vacuum, who knows who will fill in this vacuum?” But at this point, I claim, precisely we should maintain this openness in all ominous directions. We don’t need dialogue with those in power. We need critical dialogue with ourselves. We need time to think. We effectively don’t know. And nobody knows. On the one hand we should reject the cheap — because Mao was never so stupid — psuedo-Maoist idea, “Learn from the people, people know”. No, they don’t know. Do we intellectuals know? Also, we don’t know. I mean, any intellectual who says, “Okay, people now have some confused ideas, oh I have a ready and precise plan of what to do,” they are bluffing. We don’t know where we are.

But I think that this openness is precisely what is great about these protests. It means that precisely a certain vacuum open the fundamental dissatisfactions in the system. The vacuum simply means open space for thinking, for new freedom, and so on. Let’s not fill in this vacuum too quickly. Because the only way to fill it in is either by stupid utopian thinking — “we should have a Leninist party back” or whatever — or with this pragmatic approach: “raise the taxes for the rich by 2%” or whatever. Okay, nothing against this second one, first of all. But my god, this is not the solution, you know what I mean? The system is in crisis, the important thing is precisely that vacuum is open. And if some people experience this as terror, something violent, “Look they don’t want to even talk with us.” Yes, precisely I like this ominous dimension, you know? “You want to talk with us. No thanks.” At this point, no dialogue. We have to keep the situation open.

So who knows then?, if neither intellectuals nor so-called ordinary people know. What I would like here to propose a solution. No, not a solution, just a metaphor.  In a book that I advise you to buy, it’s my favorite Soviet writer who was of course a dissident practically not published, and you have back there, I think, on a table some New York Public Library books or whatever, I bought here a week ago, a book on some kind of special discount. It’s a book by Andrei Platonov, an incredible Russian writer, which has afterword by John Berger, well known European progressive writer. In referring to all these protests, although he referred to older protests, but I think he gives a wonderful analysis. Here is what he says, I quote: “The multitudes” — here I don’t like it, it has to be censored, it sounds too much Negri:

The multitudes have answers to questions which have not yet been posed, and they have the capacity to outlive the walls. 

The questions are not yet asked because to do so requires words and concepts which ring true, and those currently being used to name events have been rendered meaningless: Democracy, Liberty, Productivity, etc.

With new concepts the questions will soon be posed, for history involves precisely such a process of questioning. Soon? Within a generation.

Who has the answer and who the question?

What I like in this idea is not that it turns around the usual relationship between intellectual vanguard and ordinary people; “ordinary people are stupid, oh we are not.” According to this vision, “Oh we don’t know what we want. We ask the question to the intellectual, he will provide answers.” Here, you make notice, it’s the opposite. It’s really as in psychoanalytic treatment. Ordinary people have the answers, they even are the answers. Like a symptom. What they don’t know is the proper question to which they are an answer. This is what maybe we intellectuals know. You know, we should refer here to a wonderful point by Claude Lévi-Strauss, apropos the prohibition of incest. Where he says, no, prohibition of incest is not an enigma in the sense of we don’t know what it is. He says, prohibition of incest is an answer, but we don’t know to what question it is an answer. And I think this is how, if we approach in this way the protests, I think we intellectuals should not patronize those immediate non-intellectual protestors. We should — the worst patronization would be to celebrate them as ‘oooh, the wisdom of ordinary people’, like, you know, Mao in late fifties in China. ‘Go and learn from farmers’ and so on. You know, whenever a leader tells you this, it always means “Learn from the people, but we in the central committee of the party know better than the people what the people really want” or whatever. So, no, do not patronize the people.

Start asking critical questions, like Udi Aloni, who is now somewhere to stab me into my back, I think, draw my attention to this famous 99%. We are 99%, you the enemies are 1%. The point is not only like how many of Americans would really recognize the protestors as 99%. What is more interesting for me is that, Who are these 99%? Not Wall Street. Are they Wall Street protestors? Probably they are. But I raise the question, Are they ready to recognize that the true 99% are not only they, dissatisfied Americans, but the poor starving, I don’t know, in Somalia, in Congo, all around the world. These are the true 99%.

For example, if you want a battle, I’m not saying we should now just listen to its other silences and do nothing. There are battles to be fought. But nonetheless, my message is: time for thinking. Be patient.

And again, the crucial thing is to avoid this duality of either “oh we just have a good time, forget consequences” or this call for cheap pragmatism. What is important is that that taboo is broken. We know the system is potentially in a serious crisis. At the same time we know that the 20th century is over not only in the mechanic calendar sense. Which is to say that the 20th century solution — Stalinist communism, the traditional democracy and so on — don’t work. There is work to be done and I think only this refined interaction between educated intellectuals and so called ordinary people, where again we should not, absolutely not act as the ones — as we say in Lacanian theory — subjects supposed to know. All we can do is provide the tools to formulate the right questions. And with this interaction with those apparently formless demands from the people, maybe there is a hope that something new will emerge. Because, you know, what always — I repeat this always, I’m sorry, some of you already know these phrases; what terrifies me is this idea of “oh now we have a wonderful carnival.” Yeah but screw it, what interests me is the day after. My primordial fear is that the movement will slowly disperse and then what? Ten years after you will meet with your friends, drink bear, and “oh my God, what a wonderful time did we have there but now I have to go back to my banking job now.” Someone has to imagine. The process of thinking has to begin. So again, it’s patience. It’s precisely — sorry, for some of you may be obscene — what in Christianity they call the work of love, which is slow, patient, hard work.

A new era

So again, this is all I can offer you. This slow work, where we avoid this false leftist melancholy, which is a very comfortable position of enjoying your situation. I’m here a puritan, you know. Okay, I’m a puritan also protestant in the sense that, you know, my favorite rule about sexuality is the protestant one. As they say, ‘Everything is permitted as long as you feel guilty about it.’ But what I’m saying is that it’s really this eager carnivalesque or melancholic pleasure in pain. Like I already see some of my friends who say, Oh my god, I see Wall Street, they are already tired, it will be over. You know this, this is typical melancholy; they are still there, demonstrating; these people already cannot conceal their joy at imagining how beautiful it will be to be sad when it will be over.

Work, work, this is the good protestant attitude. Work, work. Don’t be afraid of words like work, discipline, community and so on. We should take all this from the right wingers. Don’t allow enemy to take from you to determine the terrain of the struggle. People think today that if you mention work, discipline, soldiers, fight, ‘Oh you’re a neo-fascist.’ No, are you aware that this idea of workers in uniforms marching in discipline; sorry to tell you, Hitler took this from social democracy. And maybe it’s time for us to get it back. Don’t allow the enemy — this is so important today; Don’t allow the enemy to blackmail you in the sense of determining the terrain of the struggle. We shouldn’t decide in opposition to the enemy.

So again, there is room for cautious optimism. With all problems I know dangers are always on the horizon. But remember nonetheless a new era is here. A certain taboo fell down. People are accepting the fact that we don’t live in the world of Pelican Brief and All the President’s Men, where they’re very anti-capitalists but the guilty are a couple of corrupted managers, CEO’s, politicians.. and then we get rid of these guys and everything will be okay. No, the problem is in the system, and we have to start to think, bearing in mind the tragic experience of 20th century. So in other words, at least I can say as a philosopher, we live in maybe potentially tragic times, but there is more than enough job for us philosophers. It’s our time. Thank you very much.

Related posts:

1. Zizek on our situation — and communism
2. Zizek and Badiou

blowing across this globalized world, from Tunisia to Egypt to Greece to Spain to Occupy Wall Street. How do the theoretical investigations of this site relate to this, to what’s new and emerging? 

This question of the emergence of novelty, of understanding this very changing world so as to help to change it fundamentally, has always been central to this site. And some pivotal issues of the Occupy movement (Who are the 1%? for example) have been explored here as well.

At the urging of Mike Ely from Kasama, we’ve put together a guide to some important writings on khukuri, organized by topic:

What is current the structure of global capital? See essays concerning a transnational capitalist class (TNC) — truly the global 1% (or less) – by Leslie Sklair, by William Robinson, Jerry Harris, and by William K. Carroll, as well as in the recent piece on global corporate networks.

How do we analyze the present crisis, and how do we go forward from it? See this by David Harvey, as well as essays by Don Hamerquist, on the crisis of both capitalism and the left, and hollow states in a time of austerity and chaos, and John Steele’s notes from a conference devoted to this subject.

What is the relevance of Marxism today? This important question is explored in this essay by Vern Gray and in these by John Steele:

Our Relation to Revolutionary Tradition;

We Need a Politics We Haven’t Got;

and To what extent is revolutionary theory detachable?

as well as Bill Martin’s extensive essay Into the Wild.

How can we understand the present historical moment in a way that can also prepare us for the eruption of something new? And what is the relevance of the contemporary thinker Alain Badiou?

John Steele has written a series of essays: Another take on revolutionary theory; on Badiou and the event; Revolutionary fidelity and the radically new; on Badiou’s political value; and on Badiou’s Maoism.

Relatedly, there is J. Ramsey’s essay addressing the question.

And see these by Don Hamerquist: Barack, Badiou, and Bilal-al-hasan; and “…that which in them divides itself from the old”.

(And here too, Bill Martin, in the essay cited above.)

Finally, in terms of understanding the “new wind,” although this is a topic we’ll have more on, for now it’s worth noting an essay by Don Hamerquist on the earlier parts of this sequence.

Related posts:

1. Could the present crisis be an opening to communism?
2. Financialization and hegemony
3. Marxism, politics, and evil, part 2

Don Hamerquist has published several essays previously on khukuri.

“…that which in them divides itself from the old”

Don Hamerquist

I would like to say a few things on the form and the content of the argument in Anselm Jappe’s article, in order to open up some issues that hopefully will go beyond this starting point.

Jappe, who I only know through this short piece, advances a generic Marxist conception of the limits of capitalist accumulation as if that is sufficient demonstration that most of what the contemporary left is writing and thinking about the current crisis is just stupidity – and probably reformist as well. While the conclusion has undeniable merit, the method falls well short of what we need. Jappe states:

(Karl Marx) also foresaw the eventuality that some day the capitalist machine would stop running on its own, through the exhaustion of its dynamic. Why? Capitalist commodity production contains, from its very inception an internal contradiction, a veritable time bomb built into its very structure.

We have waited a long time on this… “veritable time bomb.“

I have big questions about any explanations and prescriptions from decades in the past (in this instance, centuries) that are presented as what is needed for us to properly understand the politics of our present and immediate future.

It’s not as if propositions such as “…the capitalist machine would stop running on its own…” have been validated by historical experience. Putting questionable hypotheses from a distant past in a more forceful manifesto or a better set of theses tends to be a waste of our political resources. Whether Jappe provides a good rendering of Marx is open to a discussion that I will avoid for now, but regardless of what Marx said or meant – and both questions are quite debatable – it will hardly be sufficient for current circumstances.

My friend and long time comrade, Ken Lawrence, has written an interesting draft piece on his experience with C.L.R. James and the Facing Reality political tendency that relates to some of these issues. Lawrence reluctantly comes to some political conclusions – not ones that I fully share – from a critical appraisal that I do share of another familiar proposition from the Communist Manifesto:

All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

As Ken argues, little in our collective experience demonstrates a capitalist compulsion on the working class to soberly confront, “real conditions” and “relations” and a good deal of our experience supports very different conclusions. This highlights the common problem with the proclamatory first principles methods of Jappe and too many others. They gloss over the indeterminacy and the reversibility of the processes through which a revolutionary anti capitalist subject will develop. But without such a subject, armed with a revolutionary program and the organized will to respond to the mass potentials created in a capitalist crisis, communism will “…remain an ideal that will be always yet to come.” (Bosteels, Badiou and Politics, p. 280)

Ken approaches these issues through the concept of “punctuated equilibria” that he adapts from evolutionary science. In this framework, moments of “great upheaval”, the punctuation, are normally followed by a more prolonged period of a new equilibrium with its unique functional methods of incremental adaptation. Assume, at least for purposes of discussion, that we are experiencing a disruption of a previous equilibrium, perhaps the situation that the Italians describe as “Fordism”, combined with what others of us have termed “imperialism”. We might be seeing some hopeful signs in these circumstances of disrupted equilibrium, but it seems quite clear that these fall well short the necessary and sufficient grounds for revolutionary outcomes. Without a plausibly adequate revolutionary subject, a new equilibrium –- but one that is still essentially capitalist, or at least not emancipatory and communist – will be the most likely outcome.

We know very well that every upsurge of mass resistance contains a tendency to fetishize various short- of-revolution possibilities that are more likely to fit into a new, non-emancipatory, equilibrium than to provide a foundation for a revolutionary advance. The elasticity of capitalist power is shown in limitations on the anti-capitalist counterpower that emerges at the moments of heightened contradiction and crisis. This conservative elasticity facilitates the elevation of illusory popular objectives into political substitutes for revolutionary communism that can dominate radical politics for generations.

So how should we respond? I like this formulation from the younger Badiou (circa 1975) as a starting point – and it is also the point where I will end this piece when I eventually get there:

It is never ‘the masses’, nor the ‘movement’ that as a whole carry the principle of engenderment of the new, but that which in them divides itself from the old.” (Cited from Badiou in Bosteels, p. 136)

The new potentials that develop in the explosively expanded struggles of periods of capitalist crisis aren’t necessarily cumulative and irreversible. They don’t emerge in a linear process. I think that Badiou’s formulation raises the contradictory character of this process and the necessity to counter the strategic unevenness through organized political interventions in a strong and beneficial way. Before capitalism can be overthrown, a number of very uncomfortable elements of the internal dialectic between a revolutionary communist component of a mass movement and the mass popular constituency of that movement will have to be worked through. This will be necessary to prevent popular insurgencies from overdosing on their own victories – real and illusory. As Badiou also points out, far too often: “…once the mass festivals of democracy and discourse are over, things make place for the modernist restoration of order among workers and bosses.” (Cited in Bosteels, P.279).

Capitalism will not topple “…through…exhaustion…”. It will not “…stop running on its own…” as Jappe suggests. It must be overthrown by a politically conscious mass counter force, and the primary issues for us concern how such a force might develop. I’m more a Leninist than a Marxist on such questions which will probably raise eyebrows – and not only from the anarchist crew. I think that this particular strategic process and its associated dilemmas underscore the importance of Lenin’s position on the ‘art’ of revolution. And, although Lenin would certainly have disagreed, I think that rather than an extension and elaboration of Marx, this is a break with Marx – certainly it is a break with the Marx of Jappe, that implies that capitalism might collapse from the working out of a simple internal contradiction.

Financialization

These issues of inevitability and of the complex relationship between the necessity and the possibility of revolution are important, but there is a different, and perhaps more relevant, weakness in the Jappe article. He shows little interest in any connection between such general questions of revolutionary process and this particular capitalist crisis. He dismisses the possibility that “financialization” might provide a key to features of this crisis without proposing any alternative way to understand the specific features that it does exhibit. Unlike Jappe, I think the development of financialization is a root source of a significant and unique disturbance to the capitalist equilibrium of our recent past, and this disturbance is central to this current crisis. I will try out a tentative approach to these issues below, but first, I want to spend a moment on Jappe’s view as I understand it.

He argues that the expanded system of financialization may have deferred and redirected a more basic crisis in capitalist accumulation, but it is not an important causal factor in its own right. Instead, it is more of a surface manifestation of an underlying reality that it partially disguises by projecting a false opposition between a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ form of capitalism. In a certain sense this is right, but, in this same general sense it is also not particularly controversial among anti-capitalist revolutionaries. It’s true enough that the global financial system and its crisis should not – really cannot – be approached separately from the global circumstances for capitalism. But who on the anti-capitalist left thinks differently on this question? For the most part, the distinctions between a ‘bad’ capitalist financial system and a ‘good’ productive capitalism are features of populist tendencies and institutional reformists – with some neo-fascists among the former, and some social democrats among the economic nationalists in the latter. Not many of those folks regard themselves as revolutionary anti-capitalists and fewer still merit such a description.

When this ‘bad capitalism’ approach appears to be adopted by a genuinely radical tendency, perhaps through fixating on bank nationalization as a strategic political demand; the cause is less likely to be a mistaken understanding of the “capitalist machine”, than a reasonable, although slightly desperate, lack of confidence that Jappe’s ‘veritable time bomb’ will ever actually detonate. And as I have said above, there are grounds for such pessimism that Jappe would be well advised to consider. (This shouldn’t be seen as a backhanded endorsement of the Panitch/Gindin approach to bank nationalization which I think it is mistaken, but for reasons related to ‘transitional demand’ strategic conceptions that are not apparently a part of Jappe’s critique.)

When financialization is seen as an independent variable with only a contingent relationship to some idealized capitalism, or when it is reduced to that same idealized ‘simple’ capitalism; our ability to understand its actual impact will be severely reduced. And in the same process, so will our ability to clarify and implement the political interventions that can counter the tendencies for the emerging mass resistance to collapse back into itself; greasing the emergence of some new non-liberatory stage that might or might not be something that looks like an equilibrium.

I’d like to develop a counter argument to Jappe’s with respect to financialization and the unique role the capitalist state assumes in the current crisis, but some preliminary points are needed. What I intend to argue begins from material that is fairly new to me – although possibly not so much to others – and I’d welcome questions and challenges. In part this material is based on the Bosteel’s book on Badiou, Badiou and Politics, which I’ve cited a few times in the earlier argument. I find Bosteels useful, although I disagree with a major thrust of his argument that is peripheral to this discussion. This area of disagreement covers what appears to me to be an impressively academic, but rather unpersuasive attempt to project Badiou as a Marxist critic of “pure leftism” (Bosteels, p. 283-286). (“Pure leftism”, now that’s a camp where I probably fit, but perhaps not so pure).

Arrighi

However, my primary point of reference is the argument presented in Giovanni Arrighi’s book, The Long Twentieth Century. Arrighi covers a different subject matter than Bosteels, one that is primarily historical rather than philosophical. In my opinion, he also has far more to offer than Bosteels (although not Badiou). If his book hadn’t been finished well before the current crisis, Arrighi might have worked out some better resolutions of the dilemmas of juxtaposing patterned long wave historical cycles of capitalist accumulation with chaos theory. These are problems that that he shares with his friend and co-thinker, Wallerstein, in my opinion.

I did find some debatable themes in what I have read from Arrighi. One that is relevant to an understanding of this crisis is his recurring fixation on finding a new capitalist hegemon emerging between the “signal” and the “terminal” crisis of the current, “’organic core’ of the capitalist world-economy” (Arrighi, p. 332). At an earlier date, a greater Japan was Arrighi’s candidate for hegemon. More recently, shortly before Arrighi’s death and with Japan in a prolonged stagnation that was stretching into its third decade, he appears to assign the role to China. Laying aside whether or not these estimates were properly based in socio-economic fact, this strand of Arrighi’s approach is biased towards the possibility of a new long wave of capitalist accumulation, a ‘new equilibrium’, with all of the non-revolutionary implications that this would involve.

In my opinion this lingering reluctance to see a break in the pattern of essentially repetitive cycles of capital accumulation, although on larger scales and with shorter durations, is a major weakness. This is the case even taking into account Arrighi’s recognition that there are some qualitative changes from one cycle to the next that do imply broader and deeper questions about future possibilities. However, I think that this limited approach is at odds with another strand of Arrighi’s presentation that I like much more. Consider this passage from the concluding chapter of the book:

The uncontainability of violence in the contemporary world is closely associated with the withering away of the modern system of territorial states as the primary locus of world power…Combined with the internalization of world-scale processes of production and exchange within the organizational domains of transnational corporations, and with the resurgence of suprastatal world financial markets, these unprecedented restrictions and expectations have translated into strong pressures to relocate the authority of nation-states both upward and downward.” (Arrighi, p. 331)

“Hollow states”

Arrighi died in early 2009 and all versions and updates of this book were finished well before the events of 2008. Nevertheless I find this passage extremely relevant to the period that was initiated by the current crisis. The ‘withering away of the modern system of territorial states” seems to me to raise the ‘hollow state’ issue that I’ve been kicking around recently. The “suprastatal world financial markets,” that Arrighi sees as major active factors precipitating the “withering” process, are just another way of presenting the disruptive impacts of an active and growing – and increasingly problematic – global financial system.

I wouldn’t characterize the results quite as Arrighi does in this citation: “strong pressures to relocate the authority of national-states both upward and downward.” Rather than relocating the authority up and down, it seems to me that the new sources of authority trends are relocating at a diagonal from the previous institutional frameworks. More important, the processes of breakdown in hegemony and command occur at a distance in both space and time from the counter processes of that might activate new and relocated sites of command and acquiescence; the new “…networks of coercion…” (Arrighi, p. xi), that will be essential to any new cycle of capitalist accumulation. But perhaps this is more a disagreement with language than substance. In any case, I like this Arrighi. Consider another aspect of his argument:

In the scheme of things proposed here, the close historical tie between capitalism and the modern inter-state system is just as much one of contradiction as it is one of unity…capitalism and national states grew up together, and presumably depended on each other in some way, yet capitalists and centers of capital accumulation often offered concerted resistance to the extension of state power…the division of the world into competing political jurisdictions does not necessarily benefit the capitalist accumulation of capital.” (Arrighi, p. 32)

According to Arrighi, the emergence of the worldwide capitalist system has involved distinct historic cycles of accumulation that have been linked to the emergence of dominant hegemonic  political structures, primarily nation states, that, “…can credibly claim to be the motor force of a general expansion of the collective power of rulers vis a vis subjects” (Arrighi, p. 30 his emphasis). These hegemonic political structures play a distinct role in both expediting and defending specific capitalist accumulation processes. However, Arrighi perceptively notes that they also are the center of “territorialist” complexes of state formations and civil societies that embody, “…modes of rule… logics of power…” (Arrighi, p. 33), that are distinct from those of capitalist modes of production.

These differences are currently exacerbated to the point of rupture by the increasing influence of the suprastate elements of capital accumulation; transnational corporations; global productive processes and labor flows, and, above all, global financial markets dealing with magnitudes far in excess of any measure of the values of actual production, and more and more commonly, far in excess of the economic resources commanded by and encompassed within any state formation. All of this becomes less and less compatible with the viability and the success of any of these, “competing political jurisdictions”.

So let me turn around the Arrighi citation a bit and ask, isn’t it also true and perhaps more relevant, that the current mode of “…accumulation of capital…”, the business model as they say on CNBC, does not fully “benefit” any “…political jurisdiction…”? And if the growing organization of production within transnational economic structures and the pervasiveness of the global pursuit of ficticious capital translates, “… into strong pressures to relocate the authority of nation-state both upward and downward…”; these same pressures also qualitatively disrupt the traditional state forms, and raise the question of the viability of the essentially bourgeois category of nation-state. This makes for large difficulties in either relocating the various state functions “upward,” to the transnational level, or “downward,” to more local forms or to those emerging quasi-state functional capacities in what previously was considered the private sphere. (Perhaps this latter development shouldn’t be depicted as “downward.”) Thus the emergence of the phenomena of ‘hollow states’ which can’t effectively provide the essential ‘networks of coercion’ and the viable common ruling class project on which further development of new sites of capitalist accumulation depend.

I think that where Arrighi emphasizes the division of the world into competing territorial political jurisdictions that don’t adequately facilitate capital accumulation; the other side of the contradiction is equally, if not more, important. The current accumulation of (ficticious) capital does not benefit any unique array of ‘political jurisdictions’, and, indeed, it undermines most without much discrimination. This extends from the inability of local and regional governments to control adequate revenue streams to allow them to deliver political goods to their constituents, to the inability of supranational capitalist governmental structures to impose discipline on their national or regional components – or on particular segments of capital. I think that the tendency towards various types of financial crisis in this late stage of a cycle of capitalist development is presenting the ‘territorialist’ state complexes with major dilemmas. Specifically, it is proving very difficult to implement a capitalist resolution of a financial crisis through the existing territorial nation state institutional structures without disrupting those structures and eroding essential elements of their internal hegemonic character. This is a reality that we can see in the news of the day – and I mean this quite literally.

State power

I would like to end this by briefly attempting to tie it to some recent discussions of the state and state power. Let’s begin with another reference from a different article, on Marx and the State. (I owe this reference to John Garvey, an editor at Insurgent Notes.) The following is a surprisingly valuable passage from an article which otherwise is a routine defense of a ‘good’ Marx against a bad Kautsky and, particularly, a bad Lenin. The article argues that, according to the relatively early Marx:

The state is alien and detached from civil society precisely because bourgeois civil society is inherently divided. As Marx would put it in The German Ideology, “the practical struggle of these particular interests, which actually constantly run counter to the common and illusory common interests, necessitates practical intervention and restraint by the illusory ‘general’ interest in the form of the state.

This conception of the capitalist state, and note that it is the capitalist state, not the state in general that we are discussing, clarifies some potential stress lines. Capitalist political stability requires a state form that can effectively embody a common (capitalist) class interest derived from a mess of conflicting “particular (capitalist) interests”. But this same state form must integrate this common capitalist interest with a set of “illusory common interests,” based in the subordinated side of the consciousness of the oppressed and exploited; the side in which their needs and possibilities are confined within the limits of capital. This all then is aggregated into a “general interest” which is illusory in the sense that it needs to abstract from real differences and disguise real antagonisms as commonalities. Capitalist stability depends on the maintenance of an “…illusory ‘general’ interest”; illusory precisely because it integrates the real, but divergent interests common to capital with the fake ‘illusory common interests’ that rest on capital’s hegemony over the classes it oppresses and exploits. (I see this as an argument of Marx’s that anticipates Gramsci’s notion of the hegemonic capacity of the “classe dirigente.”) And as the earlier references to Badiou implied, it is the inadequacy of the break with this “illusory common” that dilutes revolutionary consciousness and deflects the trajectory of insurgent movements.

Nevertheless, capitalism does have this complex functional problem of disguising the fact that they are ‘ruled’ to those that actually are ruled – a problem with constantly changing characteristics requiring that the shape of the ‘rule’ must constantly be reset to adapt to changing circumstances, but without jeopardizing its capacity to appear as a manifestation of “common interest.” In terms of this discussion, these changing circumstances are those provided by the metastasized crisis of the global financial system and that is why it is so specifically important to the current situation.

Transnational financialization has created situations where particular competitive interests of blocs of capital can’t be adequately restrained by the intervention of any state since they have accumulated and can wield economic and political power that often exceeds and always compromises that which is available to any existing state or sub-state formation – including the most powerful of them, the U.S. nation state. This inability of the capitalist state formations to discipline the disparate competing tendencies in the class(es ?) they represent, undermines the material foundation for maintaining the illusory common interests on which the incorporation and subordination of the working classes have depended. This brings the issues of the legitimacy of state power closer to the surface and challenges to it develop more frequently and sharply. And, of course, any forceful exercise of state power against the working classes evokes a broader and deeper resistance, while exacerbating the contradictory elements of the “particular interests” within the ruling class.

I want to cut this off here with just one disconnected conclusion. While it will never be self evident just what this involves; our efforts should go to exacerbate this contradiction by focusing on the aspect of collective resistance that, as Badiou said, “divides itself from the old.” Not as easy to do as it is to say – but a point to be kept in mind.

Related posts:

1. A crisis of financial hegemony?
2. The crisis, financialization, and “cognitive capitalism”
3. Some contributions to thinking in the present moment

The following is republished here from the symptom.

Our task is thus to remain faithful to this eternal Idea of communism: to the egalitarian spirit kept alive over thousands of years in revolts and utopian dreams. The problem is how to avoid the choice between radical social uprisings which end in defeat, unable to stabilize themselves in a new order, and the retreat into an ideal displaced to a domain outside social reality.

……

Our situation is the very opposite of the classical twentieth-century predicament in which the Left knew what it had to do, but simply had to wait patiently for the opportunity to offer itself. Today, we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequences of inaction could be catastrophic. We will have to risk taking steps into the abyss of the New in totally inappropriate situations….

Communism is today not the name of a solution but the name of a problem….

Why the Idea and Why Communism?

Slavoj Zizek

The Left is facing the difficult task of emphasizing that we are dealing withpolitical economy—that there is nothing “natural” in the present crisis, that the existing global economic system relies on a series of political decisions—while simultaneously acknowledging that, insofar as we remain within the capitalist system, violating its rules will indeed cause economic breakdown, since the system obeys a pseudo-natural logic of its own. So, although we are clearly entering a new phase of enhanced exploitation, facilitated by global market conditions (outsourcing, etc.), we should also bear in mind that this is not the result of an evil plot by capitalists, but an urgency imposed by the functioning of the system itself, always on the brink of financial collapse. For this reason, what is now required is not a moralizing critique of capitalism, but the full re-affirmation of the Idea of communism.

The Idea of communism, as elaborated by Badiou, remains a Kantian regulative idea lacking any mediation with historical reality. Badiou emphatically rejects any such mediation as a regression to an historicist evolutionism which betrays the purity of the Idea, reducing it to a positive order of Being (the Revolution conceived as a moment of the positive historical process). This Kantian mode of reference effectively allows us to characterize Badiou’s deployment of the “communist hypothesis” as a Kritik der reinen Kommunismus. As such, it invites us to repeat the passage from Kant to Hegel—to re-conceive the Idea of communism as an Idea in the Hegelian sense, that is, as an Idea which is in the process of its own actualization. The Idea that “makes itself what it is” is thus no longer a concept opposed to reality as its lifeless shadow, but one which gives reality and existence to itself. Recall Hegel’s infamous “idealist” formula according to which Spirit is its own result, the product of itself. Such statements usually provoke sarcastic “materialist” comments (“so it is not actual people who think and realize ideas, but Spirit itself, which, like Baron Munchhausen, pulls itself up by its own hair . . .”). But consider, for example, a religious Idea which catches the spirit of the masses and becomes a major historical force? In a way, is this not a case of an Idea actualizing itself, becoming a “product of itself”? Does it not, in a kind of closed loop, motivate people to fight for it and to realize it? What the notion of the Idea as a product of itself makes visible is thus not a process of idealist self-engendering, but the materialist fact that an Idea exists only in and through the activity of the individuals engaged with it and motivated by it. What we have here is emphatically not the kind of historicist/evolutionist position that Badiou rejects, but something much more radical: an insight into how historical reality itself is not a positive order, but a “not-all” which points towards its own future. It is this inclusion of the future as the gap in the present order that renders the latter “not- all,” ontologically incomplete, and thus explodes the self-enclosure of the historicist/evolutionary process. In short, it is this gap which enables us to distinguish historicity proper from historicism.

Why, then, the Idea of communism? For three reasons, which echo the Lacanian triad of the I-S-R: at the Imaginary level, because it is necessary to maintain continuity with the long tradition of radical millenarian and egalitarian rebellions; at the Symbolic level, because we need to determine the precise conditions under which, in each historical epoch, the space for communism may be opened up; finally, at the level of the Real, because we must assume the harshness of what Badiou calls the eternal communist invariants (egalitarian justice, voluntarism, terror, “trust in the people”). Such an Idea of communism is clearly opposed to socialism, which is precisely not an Idea, but a vague communitarian notion applicable to all kinds of organic social bonds, from spiritualized ideas of solidarity (“we are all part of the same body”) right up to fascist corporatism. The Really Existing Socialist states were precisely that: positively existing states, whereas communism is in its very notion anti-statist.

Where does this eternal communist Idea come from? Is it part of human nature, or, as Habermasians propose, an ethical premise (of equality or reciprocal recognition) inscribed into the universal symbolic order? Its eternal character cannot, after all, be accounted for by specific historical conditions. The key to resolving this problem is to focus on that against which the communist Idea rebels: namely, the hierarchical social body whose ideology was first formulated in great sacred texts such as The Book of Manu. As was demonstrated by Louis Dumont in his Homo hierarchicus, social hierarchy is always inconsistent, that is, its very structure relies on a paradoxical reversal (the higher sphere is, of course, higher than the lower, but, within the lower order, the lower is higher than the higher) on account of which the social hierarchy can never fully encompass all its elements. It is this constitutive inconsistency that gives birth to what Rancière calls “the part of no-part,” that singular element which remains out of place in the hierarchical order, and, as such, functions as a singular universal, giving body to the universality of the society in question. The communist Idea, then, is the eternal demand co-substantial with this element that lacks its proper place in the social hierarchy (“we are nothing, and we want to be all”).

Our task is thus to remain faithful to this eternal Idea of communism: to the egalitarian spirit kept alive over thousands of years in revolts and utopian dreams, in radical movements from Spartacus to Thomas Müntzer, including within the great religions (Buddhism versus Hinduism, Daoism or Legalism versus Confucianism, etc.). The problem is how to avoid the choice between radical social uprisings which end in defeat, unable to stabilize themselves in a new order, and the retreat into an ideal displaced to a domain outside social reality (for Buddhism we are all equal—in nirvana). It is here that the originality of Western thought becomes clear, particularly in its three great historical ruptures: Greek philosophy’s break with the mythical universe; Christianity’s break with the pagan universe; and modern democracy’s break with traditional authority. In each case, the egalitarian spirit is transposed into a new positive order (limited, but nonetheless actual).

In short, the wager of Western thought is that radical negativity (whose first and immediate expression is egalitarian terror) is not condemned to being expressed in short ecstatic outbursts after which things are returned to normal. On the contrary, radical negativity, as the undermining of every traditional hierarchy, has the potential to articulate itself in a positive order within which it acquires the stability of a new form of life. Such is the meaning of the Holy Spirit in Christianity: faith can not only be expressed in, but also exists as, the collective of believers. And this faith is itself based on “terror,” as indicated by Christ’s insistence that he brings a sword, not peace, that whoever does not hate his father and mother is not a true follower, and so on. The content of this terror thus involves the rejection of all traditional hierarchical and community ties, with the wager that a different collective link is possible—an egalitarian bond between believers connected by agape as political love.

Democracy itself provides another example of such an egalitarian link based on terror. As Claude Lefort notes, the democratic axiom is that the place of power is empty, that there is no one directly qualified for the vacancy, either by tradition, charisma, or leadership qualities. This is why, before democracy can enter the stage, terror has to do its work, forever dissociating the place of power from any natural or directly qualified pretender: the gap between this place and those who temporarily occupy it must be maintained at all costs. This is also why Hegel’s deduction of the monarchy can be given a democratic supplement: Hegel insists on the monarch as the “irrational” (i.e. contingent) head of state precisely in order to keep the summit of state power apart from the expertise embodied in the state bureaucracy. While the bureaucrats are chosen on account of their abilities and qualifications, the king is the king by birth— that is, ultimately, he is chosen by lot, on account of natural contingency. The danger Hegel was trying to avoid here exploded a century later in Stalinist bureaucracy, which was precisely the rule of (Communist) experts: Stalin is not a figure of a master, but the one who “really knows,” an expert in all imaginable fields, from economy to linguistics, from biology to philosophy.

We can well imagine a democratic procedure maintaining the same gap on account of the irreducible moment of contingency in every electoral result: far from being a limitation, the fact that elections do not pretend to select the most qualified person is what protects them from the totalitarian temptation (which is why, as was already clear to the Ancient Greeks, choosing rulers by lot is the most democratic form of selection). That is to say, as Lefort has again demonstrated, the achievement of democracy is to turn what for traditional authoritarian power is the moment of greatest crisis—the moment of transition from one master to another, the panic- inducing instant at which “the throne is empty”—into the very source of its strength: democratic elections thus represent the passage through that zero-point at which the complex network of social links is dissolved into a purely quantitative multiplicity of individuals whose votes are mechanically counted. The moment of terror, of the dissolution of all hierarchical links, is thereby re-enacted and transformed into the foundation of a new and stable political order.

Measured by his own standards of what a rational state should be, Hegel was thus perhaps wrong to fear universal democratic suffrage (see his nervous rejection of the English Reform Bill in 1832. It is precisely democracy (universal suffrage) which, much more appropriately than Hegel’s own State of estates, performs the “magic” trick of converting radical negativity into a new political order: in democracy, the negativity of terror (the destruction of everyone who pretends to identify with the place of power), is aufgehobenand turned into the positive form of the democratic procedure.

From democracy to —

The question today, now that we know the limitations of that formal procedure, is whether we can imagine a step further in this process whereby egalitarian negativity reverts into a new positive order. We should look for traces of such an order in different domains, including in scientific communities. The way the CERN community functions is indicative here: in an almost utopian manner, individual efforts are undertaken in a collective non-hierarchical spirit, and dedication to the scientific cause (to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang) far outweighs any material considerations. But are such traces, no matter how sublime, merely that—marginal traces?

In his intervention at the 2010 Marxism conference in London (organized by the Socialist Workers’ Party), Alex Callinicos evoked his dream of a future communist society in which there would be museums of capitalism, displaying to the public the artifacts of this irrational and inhuman social formation. The unintended irony of this dream is that today, the only museums of this kind are museums of Communism, displaying its horrors. So, again, what to do in such a situation? Two years before his death, when it became clear that there would be no immediate European revolution, and that the idea of building socialism in one country was nonsense, Lenin wrote: “What if the complete hopelessness of the situation, by stimulating the efforts of the workers and peasants tenfold, offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilization in a different way from that of the West European countries?”[1]

Is this not the predicament of the Morales government in Bolivia, of the (former) Aristide government in Haiti, of the Maoist government in Nepal? They came to power through “fair” democratic elections, rather than insurrection, but having gained power, they exerted it in a way which was (partially, at least) “non-statist”: directly mobilizing their grassroots supporters, by-passing the Party-State network. Their situation is “objectively” hopeless: the whole drift of history is against them, they cannot rely on any “objective tendencies” pushing in their direction, all they can do is to improvise, do what they can in a desperate situation. Nevertheless, does this not give them a unique freedom? (And are we—the contemporary Left—not in exactly the same situation?) It is tempting to apply here the old distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom for”: does their freedom from History (with its laws and objective tendencies) not sustain their freedom for creative experimenting? In their activity, they can rely only on the collective will of their supporters.

According to Badiou, “The model of the centralized party made possible a new form of power that was nothing less than the power of the party itself. We are now at what I call a ‘distance from the State.’ This is first of all because the question of power is no longer ‘immediate’: nowhere does a ‘taking power’ in the insurrectional sense seem possible today.”[2] But does this not rely on an all too simple alternative? What about heroically assuming whatever power may be available—in the full awareness that the “objective conditions” are not “mature” enough for radical change— and, against the grain, do what one can?

Let us return to the situation in Greece in the summer of 2010, when popular discontent brought about the delegitimization of the entire political class and the country approached a power vacuum. Had there been any chance for the Left to take over state power, what could it have done in such a situation of “complete hopelessness”? Of course (if we may permit ourselves this personification), the capitalist system would have gleefully allowed the Left to take over, if only to ensure that Greece ended up in a state of economic chaos which would then serve as a severe lesson to others. Nevertheless, despite such dangers, wherever an opening for taking power does arise, the Left should seize the opportunity and confront the problems head-on, making the best of a bad situation (in the case of Greece: renegotiating the debt, mobilizing European solidarity and popular support for its predicament). The tragedy of politics is that there will never be a “good” moment to seize power: the opportunity will always offer itself at the worst possible moment (characterized by economic fiasco, ecological catastrophe, civil unrest, etc.), when the ruling political class has lost its legitimacy and the fascist-populist threat lurks in the background. For example, the Scandinavian countries, while continuing to maintain high levels of social equality and a powerful Welfare State, also score very well on global competitiveness: proof that “generous, relatively egalitarian welfare states should not be seen as utopias or protected enclaves, but can also be highly competitive participants in the world market. In other words, even within the parameters of global capitalism there are many degrees of freedom for radical social alternatives.”[3]

Engendering monsters

Perhaps the most succinct characterization of the epoch which began with the First World War is the well-known phrase attributed to Gramsci: “The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters.” Were Fascism and Stalinism not the twin monsters of the twentieth century, the one emerging out of the old world’s desperate attempts to survive, the other out of a misbegotten endeavor to build a new one? And what about the monsters we are engendering now, propelled by techno-gnostic dreams of a biogenetically controlled society? All the consequences should be drawn from this paradox: perhaps there is no direct passage to the New, at least not in the way we imagined it, and monsters necessarily emerge in any attempt to force that passage.

One sign of a new rise of this monstrosity is that the ruling classes seem less and less able to rule, even in their own interests. Take the fate of Christians in the Middle East. Over the last two millennia, they have survived a series of calamities, from the end of the Roman Empire through defeat in crusades, the decolonization of the Arab countries, the Khomeini revolution in Iran, etc.—with the notable exception of Saudi Arabia, the main US ally in this region, where there are no autochthonous Christians. In Iraq, there were approximately one million of them under Saddam, leading exactly the same lives as other Iraqi subjects, with one of them, Tariq Aziz, even occupying the high post of foreign minister and becoming Saddam’s confidante. But then, something weird happened to Iraqi Christians, a true catastrophe—a Christian army occupied (or liberated, if you want) Iraq.

The Christian occupation army dissolved the secular Iraqi army and thus left the streets open to Muslim fundamentalist militias to terrorize both each other and the Christians. No wonder roughly half of Iraq’s Christians soon left the country, preferring even the terrorist-supporting Syria to a liberated Iraq under Christian military control. In 2010, things took a turn for the worse. Tariq Aziz, who had survived the previous trials, was condemned by a Shia court to death by hanging for his “perse- cution of Muslim parties” (i.e., his fight against Muslim fundamentalism) under Saddam. Bomb attacks on Christians and their churches followed one after the other, leaving dozens dead, so that finally, in early November 2010, the Baghdad archbishop Atanasios Davud appealed to his flock to leave Iraq: “Christians have to leave the beloved country of our ancestors and escape the intended ethnic cleansing. This is still better than getting killed one after the other.” And to dot the i, as it were, that same month it was reported that al Maliki had been confirmed as Iraqi prime minister thanks to Iranian support. So the result of the US intervention is that Iran, the prime agent of the axis of Evil, is edging closer to dominating Iraq politically.

US policy is thus definitively approaching a stage of madness, and not only in terms of domestic policy (as the Tea Party proposes to fight the national debt by lowering taxes, i.e., by raising the debt—one cannot but recall here Stalin’s well-known thesis that, in the Soviet Union, the state was withering away through the strengthening of its organs, especially its organs of police repression). In foreign policy also, the spread of Western Judeo-Christian values is organized by creating conditions which lead to the expulsion of Christians (who, maybe, could move to Iran . . .). This is definitely not a clash of civilizations, but a true dialogue and cooperation between the US and the Muslim fundamentalists.[4]

Our situation is thus the very opposite of the classical twentieth-century predicament in which the Left knew what it had to do (establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc.), but simply had to wait patiently for the opportunity to offer itself. Today, we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequences of inaction could be catastrophic. We will have to risk taking steps into the abyss of the New in totally inappropriate situations; we will have to reinvent aspects of the New just in order to maintain what was good in the Old (education, healthcare, etc.).

The journal in which Gramsci published his writings in the early 1920s was called L’Ordine nuovo (The New Order)—a title which was later appropriated by the extreme Right. Rather than seeing this later appropriation as revealing the “truth” of Gramsci’s use of the title—abandoning it as running counter to the rebellious freedom of an authentic Left—we should return to it as an index of the hard problem of defining the new order any revolution will have to establish after its success. In short, our times can be characterized as none other than Stalin characterized the atom bomb: not for those with weak nerves.

Communism is today not the name of a solution but the name of a problem: the problem of the commons in all its dimensions—the commons of nature as the substance of our life, the problem of our biogenetic commons, the problem of our cultural commons (“intellectual property”), and, last but not least, the problem of the commons as that universal space of humanity from which no one should be excluded. Whatever the solution might be, it will have to solve this problem.

NOTES

[1] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33, p. 479.

[2] Filippo Del Lucchese and Jason Smith, “‘We Need a Popular Discipline’: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative.” Interview with Alain Badiou, Los Angeles, 7/2/2007. All unmarked quotes that follow are from the manuscript of this interview.

[3] Göran Therborn, “The Killing Fields of Inequality,” in From Linnaeus to the Future(s), Göteborg: Linnaeus University Press 2010, p. 190.

[4]I rely here on the analysis of Ervin Hkladniuk-Milharcic, Ljubljana.

Related posts:

1. How can communism come to be?
2. On The Idea Of Communism: Communism 2.0?
3. Zizek: Preserve the vacuum

Rather than a sociological or analytic approach (‘what are the necessary features of a revolution?’) these two members of Wu Ming take a rather different approach.

The following comprise parts of talks given by two members of the Wu Ming collective at the University of North Carolina on April 5, 2011. The full versions can be found at Wu Ming Foundation.

Apparently, the kind of revolutionary tale which our brain is most fond of is that of the great 20th century revolutions: the people in the streets, the seizure of power. We do not consider that there may be different kinds of revolution-narrative. Nation-States have changed since October of 1917, perhaps our concept of revolution should change accordingly. Also because, as said, a revolution is not always just about power, state control, the right of expression and so on. A revolution is certainly made on the streets, but above all it’s a creative drive to change the world, to call it with new names, to try the impossible.

WE ARE ALL FEBRUARY OF 1917

by Wu Ming 1

A few weeks ago, the Guardian newspaper published an article by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt entitled “Arabs are democracy’s new pioneers”. The authors tried to provide a frame in which to interpret the recent popular uprisings in North Africa and theMiddle East. At a certain point they wrote that «calling these struggles “revolutions” seems to mislead commentators who assume the progression of events must obey the logic of 1789 or 1917, or some other past European rebellion against kings and czars.»

Our question while preparing this talk was: Is it possible to acknowledge a present-day uprising as a ‘revolution’ without being misled in such a way? And how can we narrate of a present-day revolution?

There’s no doubt that the recent North-African and Middle-Eastern events, especially the Tunisian and Egyptian revolts, have resonated with us all, with our very bodies, all overEuropeand the West. At a recent London demonstration, some people wore t-shirts with the slogan «WALK LIKE AN EGYPTIAN – DEMONSTRATE LIKE AN EGYPTIAN – FIGHT LIKE AN EGYPTIAN». And yet, the public discussion on this has often been sloppy and confusing, with all the narrative traps and ideological devices my comrade WM2 will list and analyze in his talk.

My take is that, while trying to avoid such traps, we should also look for “healthily schizophrenic” narratives of revolution, that is: stories conveying the multiplicity of this prolonged moment of unrest and potentially liberating us from the conditioned reflexes elicited by all kinds of unquestioned, “pathological” connections in our everyday life.

Such “healthily schizophrenic” narratives could incorporate references to both the 20^th century and the European revolutionary tradition, without any reductio ad unum or over-simplifcation, in unexpected, even unsettling ways.

I think such an approach could help us bridge the gap between, on one side, those thinkers – like Negri and Hardt – who tend to over-emphasize discontinuities with the 20^th century struggles and revolution (for example, discontinuities between today’s multitudes and yesterday’s proletariat, between today’s Empire and yesterday’s imperialism etc.) and, on the other side, thinkers like Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou, who make constant references to the 20^th century revolutionary sequence, but sometimes seem to choose them more for their shock value towards liberals than for their usefulness in the present struggle.

In this talk I will look for examples of “healthily schizophrenic” narratives of revolution by comparing the way the Italian working class looked at the Russian “February Revolution” of 1917, a description Marcel Proust makes in the 2^nd volume of In Search of Lost Time, and a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky entitled The 150 Million. It would have been tacky to look for examples in our own novels, wouldn’t it?

We’re in March of 1917. The Great War (quite obviously, nobody yet calls it the «First World War») has just entered its third year, and it is a hopeless spectacle of carnage. The core of the European continent has turned into a slaughterhouse. Gigantic battles are fought for meaningless purposes, like conquering a few dozen yards of wasteland. The Battle of  the Somme, which ended two months ago, lasted about twenty weeks and caused the death of over 1 million and a half men.

Italy has entered the war in May of 1915. The front is located in North-Eastern Italy, the enemy is the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Dozens of thousands of men have already died in a series of useless, ineptly conducted battles along the Isonzo river. Daily life in the muddy trenches is miserable and desperate. Shell-shocked men cast ghostly glances upon each other. It might be useful to remind ourselves of who is fighting against whom:

- on one side there’s an alliance called the Triple Entente, that is the UK, France and the Empire of Russia, but the Entente isn’t «triple» anymore because it’s been joined by Italy, Greece, Romania and other countries. TheUShaven’t yet entered the war, they’ll do it in April.

- on the other side we have the so-called «Central Powers», that is, the German Empire, the AustroHungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria. All of a sudden, inRussia, a revolution forces the Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate in favour of a provisional government formed by liberals and socialists. InRussia, they still have the Julian calendar, which means that they are still in February. The Tsar abdicates on the 7th of March, but inRussiathat day is the 22nd of February, which is why this revolution will pass to history as the «February Revolution».

When the Revolution breaks out, the news reach Rome in mid-March. In these days, the Russian socialist movement is almost completely unknown in Italy. Not even the leaders and top intellectuals of the Italian Socialist Party know much about the Russian revolutionaries. In the past 10 years the party’s official organ, the Avanti! daily paper, has published some news on Russia, but they were all second-hand news, excerpts translated from the French and German socialist press. The only occasions in which delegations of Russian and Italian socialists could meet and talk were two anti-war conferences, one in Zimmerwald, Switzerland (in September 1915) and the other in Kienthal, Switzerland (in April 1916), but since then, the war has been fully raging, communications have been difficult, and Italy is experiencing war censorship. The February Revolution takes the Italian socialist movement by surprise.

If the party’s leaders have only access to second-hand news, then the base of the party, that is, the Italian working class, can only rely upon third-hand or fourth-hand stuff. Socialist proletarians remember the failed revolution of 1905, which they looked to in sympathy and solidarity, but more than ten fateful years have passed, the war has changed everything in most people’s lives, the 1905 uprising belongs to a distant, pre-war set of references. And we’re talking about a nation where 40% of the population is illiterate.

News of the February Revolution reach Italy through a dispatch of the Stefani news agency. The Avanti! publishes it on the 16th of March, and then something happens: the Italian working class, exhausted by the conflict, immediately interprets that faraway revolution as a great event that will end the war. Italian proletarians (whether at the front or at home) instantly assume that the revolutionary process will bring Russia out of the conflict, accelerating the end of the great massacre.

And yet, the Stefani dispatch explicitly states that the Russian revolutionaries «want the war to continue» and want to «eliminate all reactionary influences, which are considered conducive to peace». In fact, the first thing that socialist members of the Russian parliament do is to invite people to return to work and soldiers to the front, in order to continue the fight. And the provisional government, in an official note signed by the new foreign minister Pavel Miljukov, unambiguously declares that Russia is still a member of the Entente and the war will go on «until the fnal victory».

The Avanti! publishes these news on March 19. In fact, the ruling classes of the Allied countries happily welcome the February Revolution, which they consider a favorable event for prosecuting the war in the best possible conditions. Now that Nicholas II has gone, the Entente is composed only of democratic countries, and the rhetoric of «the war against the despotism of the Central Powers» seems to ring truer than before. On March 16 the Italian Chamber of Deputies celebrates the abdication of the Tsar, and many MPs shout: «Long liveRussia!» On the 22nd of March,Russia’s provisional government is recognized by the United States,Britain, France and Italy.

And yet, rather inexplicably, a few days after news of the revolution, the industrial workers go on strike inTurin(a bold move, given that strikes have been illegal since the beginning of the war), and they shout: “Down with the war, let’s do as inRussia!”

On the 18th of March, only forty-eight hours after the news, a Milanese socialist writes a letter to a friend who is at the front, he’s an infantry corporal. Here’s an excerpt:

I do not know if you heard the echo of what is happening inRussia. I think so, anyway

I must tell you that things are known only very imperfectly, because of the intentional and opportunistic lies and distortions and restrictions of the bourgeois press and the censors. What is certain today is this: the Tsar has abdicated [...] And if the purpose of revolution is to continue the war indefnitely, why has the Tsar abdicated, since his program was precisely to continue the war? [...] The truth must be very different, but the truth can not yet leak through the press.

Both the sender and the receiver of this letter were charged with «subversive propaganda among the military» and sentenced to respectively ffteen and fve years of military prison.

On March 30th, the Avanti! publishes a brief, second-hand summing-up of a proclamation issued by the Petrograd Soviet, the council of revolutionary workers and soldiers that’s engaged in a power struggle with the Russian provisional government. The proclamation is addressed to all the proletarians in the world, whom are invited to overthrow their national autocracies and put an end to the war. At this moment, people inItalyknow very little about the Petrograd Soviet and its conflict with the provisional government. This is the very frst vague clue that things inRussiacould go in that direction.

And yet, by now, for more than two weeks the Italian working class has been heralding the Russian revolution as the anti-war event par excellence. This will go on throughout the spring, all overItaly. On April 15th, the Italian Army Intelligence Service reports that several letters from soldiers celebrate the Russian events, and that among soldiers it is widely believed that the revolution’s purpose was [quote:] «not to overthrow a government guilty of mis-managing the war, but to prevent the continuation of the war itself.»

Soon the cry “Long live Lenin!” begins to resonate in spontaneous demonstrations. This is almost a miracle: by all logic, in Italy Lenin should be an almost unknown figure. “Lenin”, however, is a synecdoche, a good synecdoche, not a venomous one: a synecdoche where the part reveals the whole: “End the war!” is the true meaning of the slogan.

The leadership of the PSI, whose official line on the war was “neither support nor sabotage,” doesn’t understand why the base of the party has been giving such a fierce anti-war interpretation of events in Russia, which after all they know only through inaccurate dispatches barely filtering through war censorship, and ending up on newspaper pages devastated by the gaps left by censors. Newspapers that most people aren’t able to read, by the way.

A few months later, the Bolsheviks seize power and propose, unheeded by all governments, a general armistice.

In March 1918 the Bolsheviks fnally manage to bringRussia(by now a socialist republic) out of the conflict, with the separate peace of Brest-Litovsk. It is a costly peace,Russiahas to renounce huge portions of its territory, includingUkraine, which are transfered toGermanyand theOttoman Empire.

Nevertheless,Russia is out of the war.

The Italian workers have been proven right. But how could they immediately comprehend what was going on, against all evidence, with no reliable information?

How did they do it? What snapped in the imagination of those members of the Italian working class? What «vision» anticipated the recognition, what gaze were they able to cast upon the Russian Event? People kept uninformed, living and toiling and dying thousands of miles away, bogged down in a trench or crushed by factory work, very little connected with each other… What did the Revolution look like in their eyes?

As the Invisible Committee put it in their 2009 document entitled «Mise au point»:

The dissemination of a revolutionary movement is not carried by contamination. But by resonance. Something that surfaces here resounds with the shock wave emitted by something that happened over there.

The body that resonates does it in its own way. An insurrection is not like the expansion of a plague or a forest fre – a linear process passing from one to the next, starting from an original spark. Rather, it is something that takes shape like music, whose homes, even when scattered in time and space, manage to impose the pace of their own vibration, to 5gain ever more relevance, until the moment when any return to normality can no longer be desirable or even feasible.

Alain Badiou recently quoted a part of this remark, in an article on North African uprisings which was published on Le Monde.

Ok, but… How and why does an insurrection resound? Why does it not resound with all bodies? Why were proletarians the only ones to feel the resonance of the February Revolution? What did that revolution resound with?  Why was the ruling class unable to foresee what’s going to happen, even if they certainly had more information than the working class?

In 1914 and 1915, the war was propagandized as nothing short of a revolution. The Governments of the larger Entente presented the conflict as a democratic crusade against the despotism of decadent empires, against Prussian authoritarianism, against the iron heel of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, and so on. The phraseology was radical and revolutionary. In fact, many radicals enlisted, thinking they would practically help in defeating the old world and build a newEurope. Several Italian radicals thought the war would realize many as yet unachieved political and social goals ofItaly’s Risorgimento. Among these people we find the cream of the crop of that era’s non-Marxist left, for example the Rosselli brothers (Carlo and Nello Rosselli), who a few years later founded the anti-fascist clandestine group Giustizia e libertà.

Even more to the left, members of revolutionary syndicalism looked for a revolutionary value in the radical reset of the world that the upcoming war was likely to cause. In August 1914, the syndicalist Alceste De Ambris, who’d just returned toItalyafter years of political exile in Brazil and Switzerland, wrote:

I believe that the wonderful event which we have the ill or good fortune to behold will have such consequences as to force all parties and all philosophies to radically revise themselves and break all mental habits no matter what principle inspired them, as the 1789 Revolution once did, and maybe to an even wider extent. This is not yet our revolution, but maybe it is necessary in order to get the world rid of the cumbersome remnants of the surviving Middle Ages.

Let’s not forget Benito Mussolini, who at that time was still a revolutionary socialist. In October 61914 he stated:

As both men and socialists, do we want to be idle spectators of this grand drama, or do we want to be, in some way, its protagonists?

One month later, he was expelled from the Socialist Party, and that’s the beginning of another story.

It didn’t take long before such enthusiasm was replaced by disappointment, discouragement, fear, and horror. The war was not a revolution: it was  terrible, meaningless carnage. The war had spoken the language of revolution, but had spoken it with a forked tongue. The promoters of the war had lied.

It should be noted that, unlike the radical intellectuals mentioned before, the masses, who had been contrary to joining the war in the first place, had quickly realized that the war was speaking with a forked tongue, but they couldn’t have imagined the abyss of horror the intervention would topple them into.

The trauma was enormous.

The mobilized masses, tired of the war, could hardly wait for someone to  really speak the language of revolution. A revolution that, at that point could only be antithetical to war.

Let me give you one example among thousands possible: on 20th january 1916, a military court sentenced a 25-year old soldier to four years in prison for spreading news disparaging the army. This guy had written a letter to a friend, in which he told about subversive comments uttered by army officers. He’d written:

Do not believe those stories on the soldiers’ acts of valor, do not pay any attention to what the newspaper says, they’re all lies. Soldiers do not fght with pride nor passion, they go to slaughter because they are ordered to, and because they are afraid of being executed [...]

Then the guy reported a comment he’d heard from an officer:

«If I could lay my hands on the head of government, I would strangle him»

Finally, he concluded:

«Revolution is the only way out. We are tired and only wait for the spark.»

Certainly, nobody would have bet a single cent on backward, peasant Russia. It was the most unlikely country for a revolution. Marxists were looking to more advanced industrial countries. In fact, when the revolution broke out, Antonio Gramsci described it as «a revolution against Das Kapital».

However, a potential narrative of «revolution vs. the war» was in circulation, and the emotions were ready to be expressed. The war itself had contributed to arouse them. The masses were tuned and ready, and when the Event found its unlikely, surprising site, the working class immediately picked up the right narrative, against all evidence, against any “common sense” and all talk by “experts”.

Nevertheless, this is just a general precondition of resonance. We need to know more about the specific ways in which the Russian Event resonated in Italy, and, more precisely, we have to understand what it resonated with.

That’s why I’m starting a second line of reasoning, which is likely to be more tentative and erratic.

As strange as it may seem this line of reasoning has to do with Marcel Proust.

My assumption is that those Italian workers were in an advantaged position with respect to their leaders and their journalists. While the latter were paralyzed by lack of information and suffered the frustration generated by censorship, the workers were more free to look from afar and wonder about the outlines of the revolutionary event, they were more free to focus on its shape, and try to grasp its significance by means of similarities. What did it look like? What did it feel like?

Well, it felt like many things. The proletarians projected on it a multiplicity of images, all of which were related to their main desire, and their main desire was that the war ended, the war that had made life so monotonously terrifying, so unworth living, so depressingly lacking of variety, of multiplicity.

Far from fulfilling its radical promises, the war had established a harsh disciplinary regime, it was associated with blind obedience, despotism and inescapable death. An event in which the masses had disobeyed, overthrown a despot and demanded a better life could not but be associated with the end of the war. A revolution could only be against the war.

Again: those proletarians asked themselves: «What does this remote event look like? What does it feel like?». And they answered: «It feels like what I’d like to do myself! It feels like what I’ve seen attempted many times, without success!».

In mid-July of 1917, the infantrymen of the Catanzaro Brigade rebelled against their officers. It was the biggest revolt ever occurred in the Italian army during the Great War.

The incident took place in Santa Mariala Longa, in the Friuli region, where the brigade had been stationed since June 25th, for a period of rest. The news of a new deployment in the trenches of the first line triggered a protest which soon escalated into open revolt.

The army quelled the revolt by sending in a company of Carabinieri, four machine guns and two autocannon. The fght lasted all night and ended at dawn. In the following days, about 20 rebels were shot and thrown into a common grave.

That’s what the revolution felt like for proletarians: it felt like a mutiny, it felt like desertion, it felt like draft-dodging, it felt like a workers’ strike. Those are the things the Event resonated with: the revolution felt like a larger version of one of the many revolts that were erupting from the trenches in those days.

Ok, but… What in heaven has Marcel Proust to do with this?

……………………………………..

To sum up: our bodies resonate with the multiplicity of life revealed by the Event interrupting the everyday cycle of pathological connections. Such multiplicity and resonance can be powerfully conveyed through a seemingly disorderly description of that moment’s configuration: the “supertrope”, the rhetorical cloud of  “haecceity”, in which there seems to be no “measure” and no hierarchy between small and large things, backdrop and foreground.

This is a direction we could take, in order to avoid the usual framing traps on the path of telling about a revolution. Now WM2 will summarize what those traps are. Thank you.

HOW TO TELL A REVOLUTION FROM EVERYTHING ELSE

by Wu Ming 2

………………………

This means that, in order to tell a revolution from everything else, we need a good heuristic concept, on the one hand, and a good narrative, on the other. Historians, philosophers and social scientists can help to prepare the former, while novelists and storytellers can tell us a few 2things about the latter. Also because, this is not the only link between narrative and revolution, and before proceeding with the analysis, I would like to list at least two others.

The first is that both narrative and revolution revolve around the violation of a rule. In a sequence of ordinary events there is no history and there is no revolution. Without a potential break with the ordinary world, the narrative game isn’t worth playing.  The revolution is born of the same dialectic that acts as a pivot for any story: the one between conservation and change, between what was and what could be.

Secondly, every revolution is an attempt to tell the world with new names and concepts, both on a symbolic level (eg the reform of the calendar during the French Revolution) and on a material one, with previously unknown subjects, rights and laws. It isn’t by chance that coups and civil wars often try to justify themselves through semantic changes that mimic this revolutionary necessity.

At this point it looks clear to me that if we want to deal with a revolution we must handle many more narrative materials than it might seem at first sight. Within these materials, these mythologemes and these rhetoric devices, I would like to identify smokescreens that may confuse our sight, poison the narration and prevent us from distinguishing between a revolution and something else, or rather, between a toxic narrative of the revolution and a narrative of the revolution that’s healthy, open and true to its purpose.

Toxic Narratives

 To begin with, let us ask ourselves what would be the purpose of a narrative of this kind, that is, of a story that doesn’t draw its subject from imagination, but takes it directly from reality.

We might answer that such a story must be true, but then we should explain what truth we are talking about: is it truth as correspondence with the facts, which may be enough for reporters, or is it truth as consistency within a paradigm, the kind wefnd in science and mathematics?

In the case of a narrative – even when it draws on reality – I think it is better to speak of ”poetic truth”, which is not limited to the faithful representation of single facts, but it’s about their overall significance. A narrative is “true” when it increases our awareness, our comprehension (in the etymological sense) of a sequence of facts. In other words, while mere reporting has the task of describing facts, narration must also make them talk: it must connect events, meanings, and individuals.

A story, as we have said, deserves to be told when it insinuates the unacceptable into the allegedly unmodifable rule of everyday life. In fairy tales, there’s an ordinary world in crisis and a hero who leaves for the extraordinary world in order to cut a piece of it and bring it back to the village. Or, to quote Aristotle: the poet is superior to the historian, because the historian tells what happened, while the poet imagines what might have happened. Each story stems from a “what if” question and thereby introduces a conditional and subjunctive dimension in the realm of the indicative. Not even the most realistic non-fiction says “This happened”: it says “this could happen.” Thus, a toxic narrative, a narrative that doesn’t do its job, can be recognized by the lack of subjunctive dimension: a toxic narrative tries to remove the hypothetical, to block in every possible way the drive to “tell the story otherwise” to think of alternative versions, other possible stories, some other poetic truth for the same set of facts.

In this sense, all stories contain a dose of toxins, because – as George Lakoff showed in his studies on neural connections: «When you accept a particular narrative, you ignore realities that contradict it. Narratives have a powerful effect in hiding reality.» This does not mean we should throw them away and replace them with cold hard reason. As we have seen, in order to identify a revolution we need to tell its story. Lakoff’s proposal is that of a New Enlightenment, in which «we will recognize that cultural narratives are part of the permanent furniture of our brains, but we will at least be self-aware of it.» As a storyteller I would add to this program that I would like to produce narratives that raise such awareness, do all that’s possible to restrain their own power to hide reality, and indeed encourage alternative narratives, by providing the reader with hints, occasions, and cracks in the wall.

In the specific case of a narrative of revolution, then, I’d like to understand where the toxins are and what narrative choices play a part in making them dangerous.

To do this, I will start from the narrative structure that our brain uses in reporting of any event, adapting it to the particular case of a revolution.

First of all we have the «Preconditions», that is, the context required for the narrative. In our case, the preconditions are the presence or absence of people with demands that the state cannot fulfill, the situation of human rights and freedom of expression, the presence or absence of a working class, working conditions and the main needs of civil society .

Then there’s the «Buildup», that is, the events leading to the main event: protests, riots, civil disobedience, the reactions of government forces, symbolic protests etc.

Such early unrest should already make us able to understand the «Purpose», what the insurgents want to achieve, what their demands are.

In turn, this should help us to better identify the «Main Event», that is, what the narrative is mainly about. Usually, in newspapers and on TV, revolution is about a regime change.

However, this is not over, because the «Main Event» generates the «Wind-down», that is, the events that end the narrative: what happens to the members of the regime, who will replace them for the time being, the celebrations of the population, etc.

Then we should take into account the «Result», that is, the transformation of the sociopolitical context described in the preconditions, and fnally, consider the «Later Consequences» of the whole mobilization, or how long the desire for renewal remains in circulation in civil society and how difficult it is for the new state to renegotiate its international relations without abandoning the principles of the revolution.

What I just described is, obviously, a structure activated over time. Diachronicity, in fact, is one of the main features of a narrative. To tell a story always means to create a chronology, to interpret time, often with reassuring effects from a cognitive point of view, because putting events in a row convinces us that we dominate them and comprehend them. So much so that not infrequently, this temporal link is transformed into a causal link, the illusion that saying “C follows B which in turn follows A” is equivalent to saying that “C derives from B which in turn derives from A”. If yesterday I said that today there would be a naval battle, my statement today is false, since no naval battle is raging. But yesterday, the same statement was indeterminate, neither true nor false, and the narrative has the task of restoring that pristine shade of unpredictability. We must avoid the so-called retrospective illusion of fatality, a potential toxin present in any story. Under its action, the sequences of the past become necessary sequences and we forget that, on the contrary, there are at any time infinite contingent futures, and that the narratives are made to explore a hypothesis, not to pass it on as inevitable. The fascist regime, in its self-description as the result of a revolution, inscribed in the destiny of Italy, made extensive use of this technique, constantly stressing on the “necessity” of every step, from the foundation of the Party to the March on Rome.

The preconditions

As regards preconditions, it often happens that an analysis of context like the one I described, is made only after the facts, because the revolution «broke out» – instead of «ripened», which could be a better metaphor – in a country of which we know little, an area which suddenly drew international attention because of the riots. We end up knowing the preconditions only after we have formed an idea about what’s going on, because events are pressing but they have to be narrated anyway. However, if preconditions are fished out retrospectively, in a sort of analepsis, they end up butting against an already established frame, rather than helping to establish one. Something similar happened with Libya, where the first demonstrations were instantly seen in the frame “revolutions in North Africa”, and only when Gaddafi proved to be able to resist much longer than Ben Ali and Mubarak, the difference was noticed and we all moved quickly to motivate the regime’s strength with the peculiar preconditions of the Libyan setting. At that point, however, as the Italian saying goes, the patch was worse than the hole, and pundits ended up attributing too much importance to clan-based and territorial divisions among the Libyans, setting entirely aside the element of spontaneous, radical, political protest.

It must be admitted that in the West, before the recent uprisings, knowledge of the civil societies of Tunisia,Egypt,Libya and the Middle East, was heavily conditioned by the vulgate whereby an Arab country is a Muslim country and a Muslim country is a country dominated by religion. Civil society, therefore, is divided between fundamentalists and moderates, and it is religion the only key to understand it and set up a dialogue.

Fortunately for us, if there is a regime that has been revolutionized in recent months, that is our regime of discourse on Muslims and the Arab world. The events of Tunis and Tahrir Square, in this case, have shattered the toxic narrative on preconditions (though for several days, the toxic narrative did prevent many commentators to understand what was happening, and pushed them to look for the role of religion in the riots). As noted by Hayrettin Yucesoy:

«the discourse about Islam in the progressive media and academia was, by and large, similar to Marie Antoinette’s oft-quoted but always mis-attributed, “qu’ils mangent de la brioche” [Let them eat cake].

Good-hearted true, but it showed no understanding and solved no problems. The uprisings destroyed the concepts of “religious dialogue” and “cultural understanding” as a framework for understanding “Muslims” and “Arabs”.»

Another example of a toxic narrative on preconditions is the myth-making carried out by T.E. Lawrence with reference to the so-called “Arab revolution”. Between 1915 and 1916, the British attacked the Ottoman Empire at Gallipoli and inMesopotamia, encountering unexpected resistance. This frustrated the hopes of those Arab secret societies that relied upon the war to open a home front for independence. Such societies were composed of bourgeois elements and military offcials and had their bases in cities like Damascus,BaghdadandAleppo. Facing the discouragement of their revolutionary intentions, the British, who were in great need of that revolution, decided to turn to the Hejaz Bedouins. In the introduction to his magnum opus the Seven Pillars of Wisdom,Lawrence justifes this change in strategy with an ideologic-poetic argument imbued with Orientalism. He explains that the strength of the Arabs was born and lives on in the desert, not in the softness of cities. Therefore, it is in the desert that the insurgency must develop, thanks to a koiné of nomadic tribes held together by the language and faith in the Koran.

Telling the preconditions of the revolution in this way,Lawrence forgot to say that those tribes were good to solicit Western romantic fantasies and to give the Turks a hard time with guerrilla warfare, but they would never complete a revolution, building the Great Arabia from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. They – unlike urban Arabs – were not interested in building a “nation”, much less a “state”. Only their leaders, at most, could have become national leaders, but in states that would be put up by someone else.

The Buildup

Very often, in order to narrate of a revolution, we bypass the preconditions and go immediately in search of a point of origin, a «beginning» that cast light on what happened. A day to be celebrated in the future, or to be studied in school books. Of course, every story needs a beginning, but in the structure of the “revolution” genre, this kind of beginning has a special symbolic value, as a sort of original sin. Its choice is never arbitrary, it cannot be located in any instant of the time continuum: it is extremely unusual to hear a revolution told out beginning in medias res. Most of the time the focus is on an event that reveals a weakness of the government forces. This is because, as argued by Charles Tilly, our frame of “revolutionary situation” is structured around three characteristics: the presence of factions that make claims incompatible with state control, the vast adhesion of citizens to these factions and, of course, the failure by the State to respond adequately to their demands.

In all accounts of the North African uprisings, there is already a mythical reference to the gesture of a young Tunisian graduate, forced to make a living as a street fruit vendor, who burned himself alive to protest the decision of the police to confiscate his goods. His suicide prompted many citizens to express their disagreement with a determination unseen for many years on the streets of Tunisia. One such initiative is not only a beginning: it is a genesis. It manages to symbolize the spontaneity of the revolt and its social composition: working class youth with a good level of education. But a revolutionary situation is always manifold, it contains various situations, produces multiple changes in many areas and at different times, and focusing on a single point of origin is likely to hide its plural character.

A good narrative of the revolution should have the preconditions as its prologue and as fist chapter a beginning that encompasses more than one point of origin.

«Every time the beginning is this moment of separation from the multiplicity of possibles” wrote Italo Calvino. Separation, but not exclusion or isolation. We need a threshold that does not forget what it leaves out.

Moreover, excessive attention to the point of origin can make us sick of chronological myopia. “Chronological myopia” consists in giving too much importance to recent  events, and too little attention to those more remote.

In our case, chronological myopia may lead us describe as a “revolutionary break” an occurrence which, on the contrary, is in continuity with what has been happening for some time. For example, the “Day of Rage” organized in Manama’s Pearl square was hastily described as a point of origin of the Bahraini “revolution”, whereas such protests have occurred in that country for many years, silenced by the fact that Bahrain is usually not interesting to anyone.

Here, with reference to the onset of narration, we experience a problem that’s inherent to any other moment of it. To tell a good story we need to go into detail, but as soon as we do it, this particularity could be viewed as a prototype, representative of a totality, like a poisonous synecdoche where the part hides the whole. The only antidote is to looking for the contradiction, for the one that becomes two.

For example: the people of Bahrain protest in Pearl Square, Manama, against the country rulers. Then, as a good storyteller, you seek the details and ask yourself: «What is the composition of these “people of Bahrain” protesting in Pearl Square?». Answer: they are Shiites. And the country rulers? They are Sunnis. Well, judging only by this detail, one of your readers may form the idea that in Bahrain there is a civil war between two Muslim sects. And because the Shia country par excellence is Iran, he or she will deduct that Iran is backing that revolt. To counteract this Synecdoche Effect the good storyteller must look for the contradiction, which he or she will fnd upon discovery that Bahrain workers are organizing large-scale strikes involving Alba Aluminium, the largest aluminium smelter in the world, whose workers’ union is headed by Ali Bin Ali, a Sunni. And if our storyteller works hard, he or she will find out that the detail chosen at the beginning, that is, thePearl Square protesters are Shiites, could be interpreted as a token of another type,  because the Shiites are the poor majority of the country, and therefore a Shiite rebellion is also a class rebellion.

Another example: if someone in Tahrir SquareinCairohad burned an American or Israeli flag, no doubt that particular act, once told by television and newspapers, would have assumed the value of a synecdoche: if someone burns an American fag undisturbed, it means that the rebels are against the United States, which means that they are fundamentalists. (It’s interesting to notice that this mechanism also applies in absentia: since no American flag was burned during such big events in a Muslim country, then – for conspiracists – the revolt must be controlled by the CIA).

In choosing the details for my narrative, I’ll be also affected by the rules of the narrative genre that I’m practicing. In the case of the revolution, the frame described by Charles Tilly urges us to look for street riots, power clashes, police brutality, regime changes. Apparently, the kind of revolutionary tale which our brain is most fond of is that of the great 20th century revolutions: the people in the streets, the seizure of power. We do not consider that there may be different kinds of revolution-narrative. Nation-States have changed since October of 1917, perhaps our concept of revolution should change accordingly. Also because, as said, a revolution is not always just about power, state control, the right of expression and so on. A revolution is certainly made on the streets, but above all it’s a creative drive to change the world, to call it with new names, to try the impossible.

…………………….

The Result & The Later Consequences

This is the part we most often we forget to tell about, although its importance should not be underestimated. We forgot to tell about it because of our brain. In our brain, every event of a narrative turns on different emotions. The Main Event is an emotional peak, which can food us with positive or negative feelings, depending on our beliefs. It rarely leaves us indifferent, considering that our mirror neurons light up in the same way whether we live a narrative or hear it told by someone else. If the feeling is positive, after the Main Event our brain, which has received its dopamine release, takes a kind of post-coital break. If the feeling is negative, then we are worried or afraid, and norepinephrine reduces our ability to focus. In both cases, we risk to tell with less interest what looks like a simple epilogue to the main event. In addition, our frame of the revolutionary outcome prompts us to think that the main event, that is the seizure of power by the rebels, coincides with the fnal result of the narrative.

Actually, history teaches us that revolutionaries, after overthrowing the regime, face extremely difficult situations and challenges that jeopardize their success. On the other hand, narratology teaches us that a story does not end with victory in the hero’s main trial, with the killing of the dragon: other dangers – and often a comeback of his enemies – expect the hero or heroine on their way back home. The signifcance of an adventure lies in the main character’s ability to return home and change the ordinary world, thanks to the lessons he or she learned during trials and battles in the extraordinary world. It’s on the way back that the hero must experiment a final litmus test, in order to return to the village with the elixir. It is in that last test that the tragic hero usually ends up dying. The Main Event, on closer inspection, is only half of a story and a story that remains half-told cannot avoid being poisonous.

The real success of a revolution depends on the desire for change that it can spread among all citizens, the level of creativity that they invest in this desire and the duration of such investment in time. In a real revolution, that creativity is maintained, it doesn’t congeal after the storming of theWinterPalace. And it’s shared, universal creativity, it isn’t imposed from above.

……………………………….

Related posts:

1. The Cultural Revolution in China: what was its meaning?
2. Assessing Mao and the Chinese Revolution

We’ve had a continuing discussion on this site of the status, relevance, and use of Marxism (and other ‘-isms’ – Lenin, Mao, and anarch) today, in relation to revolutionary work or the possibilities of an emancipatory politics in today’s world. Most recently, we’ve had some debate and a series of contributions, beginning with my “Marxism or Anarchism or —-,” continuing through Vern Gray’s response, “One, Two, Many Marxisms?” and the comments to this by Nat W., myself, and Vern Gray.

Here I want to continue one strand of that discussion: the question of the adequacy of Marxism (or Maoism, or —) as the basis for an emancipatory politics today. My own position is that, although I’ve been and in some sense still am a Marxist and a Maoist (a sense which will hopefully be made clearer below), I don’t believe that either or both provide such a basis. We need what we haven’t got.

At one point in the discussion I polemicized against the model of moving from Marxist (or Marxist-Leninist, or MLM) theory and its conclusions, applying them to our present situation, using creativity and “the Marxist method” to overcome the problems stemming from the fact that the world has changed, and thereby creating a revolutionary synthesis which would serve as a foundation for a revolutionary praxis.

I then said,

This is the model that I am contesting. Such a process will not result in a revolutionary praxis today. Something like this model may have been sufficient in the past (and this is worth discussing much further), but it’s radically inadequate today. Why? Not simply because the world has changed. But because the basic Marxist template, in all its permutations, has become exhausted—not Marxism as analysis, but Marxism as an unfolding nexus of social theory-and-practice. (In Badiou’s terms, this truth-process has become saturated.)

Vern Gray replies:

 I must admit that I do not understand how it could be that Marxism as analysis has not been “exhausted,” but that it has become exhausted as an “unfolding nexus of social theory-and-practice.” What sort of process of unfolding theory-and-practice is not informed by, and then more than that, integrated with, a good analysis?

Nat W. states that he looks at

MLM [Marxism-Leninism-Maoism] as method and a launching pad from which to start reconception…. It maybe true that starting from any method of analysis (and certainly any “body of doctrine”) will not necessarily lead to a revolutionary praxis. That being said, I think that certain methods of analysis (particularly MLM) give us a better chance at arriving at such a praxis….If it is indeed true that Marxism has become saturated then that is one thing. That must be shown in its own right.

What’s at issue

The issue that has been most explicit within this back-and-forth is that of Marxism (and Maoism) in their relation to an active politics, especially today. The relation between these, in my view, is not simple and requires delicate and thoughtful treatment (which some of our formulations, mine included, have not embodied).

In the intellectual work and questing which is a strong aspect of what we need today, we need a wide intellectual horizon, and active exploration, including in unlikely places. But the idea that all our resources are on a level, that every thinker is of equal potential value – this sort of flaccid eclecticism (which what I’ve said has been taken to imply) is very far from anything I’ve ever held or thought. We are situated historically in relation to a revolutionary tradition which is broadly Marxist, and so we have a particular and continuing relation to Marx. (At the risk of drawing fire from a different quarter, I would say that this is also true of anarchism in its revolutionary strands. But that’s another discussion.)

But the nature of this relation, as well as of its terms, require careful delineation. Above I used the phrase “a revolutionary tradition which is broadly Marxist,” and it is here that the question of “many Marxisms”should be situated. Analytically the unity and diversity of Marx’s work, as well as of Marxism, is an important and interesting topic, which would require a very long discussion. Politically the question is simpler, in that a politics which takes there to be a “one true Marxism” whose articulation and defense is a primary political task, or which will guide the “one true revolutionary politics” – this, I hold, is a mistaken and sterile approach to politics and to the search for a political way forward, especially now. Likewise, if the thought is that Marx formulated a science which has been and should be the basis of a politics (a position which has historically had currency) – no.

What is needed, and what has sometimes existed (but does not now), is theory within the context of which an actual emancipatory politics is situated, lives and grows. Marxism has played that role – or, rather, Marxism is the name for a trajectory of a nexus of revolutionary striving and aspiration, of thinking/acting,

This mention of thinking/acting points to what I believe is the central issue here. I will use, for the purposes of this short essay, some of the vocabulary with which we’re all familiar – practice/theory, primarily – rather than Badiou’s terminology (event, truth-process, fidelity, etc.), and I want to start with some remarks about the concept of practice as I understand it.

The primacy of practice

We are all familiar with the thesis that practice is primary within the practice/theory dialectic. This statement has, as I conceive it, two senses, which are analogous to the two senses of the priority of production in relation to distribution, exchange and consumption, delineated by Marx in the Introduction to the Grundrisse. Production is primary within the entire process described by the four terms, in that it is the point of departure within a process, which overall forms unity; but production is also primary over all the elements of the process, including itself in its more restricted identity within the process.

Likewise, practice is primary in that it forms the point of departure within the process of practice/theory; but practice is also primary overall, in relation to both itself and theory as elements within the process. (There are analogies in this – but also disanalogies – to Mao’s distinction between principal aspect of a contradiction and principal contradiction.)

To state it in another way: we could say that there are certain practices in which we are engaged. Within a practice – a project, a life activity – there is both theory and practice: these are the dialectical moments within the process. Of these moments, practice is the point of departure, primary as between them. But practice as the overall project, which may be said to constitute a practice, is primary or principal with regard to both its moments. (It was this relation that I have been trying to point to, no doubt obscurely, by talking of the “practice/theory nexus.”)

Detachability

I think that this understanding of practice has strong implications for how we construe the body of what we’ve been accustomed to call revolutionary theory. Specifically: Is this theory a knowledge, achieved and detachable, or is it the theory of a revolutionary practice – in the larger sense of practice sketched above – integral to that practice and bound to it by a thousand threads? I hold that it is the latter.

(I borrow the term detachable from logic: once a conclusion – a theorem perhaps – has been proved, it can be detached from the premises and the proof-process through which it was generated, and asserted in itself.)

It will be objected that this contrast is too stark, that this is not a strict dichotomy; and in a certain complex way (which I hope to be able to explain at a later time) this is true. But drawing the contrast sharply serves a purpose: it is the integrality of emancipatory theory to its practice which requires emphasis – always, but especially today.

What happens when that practice, the practice to which the theory is bound and of which it is a part, comes to an end (or virtually so)? That is the question that frames our situation, the question that has been at issue, in reality, for more than 30 years (unrecognized though it may have been by many of us). It is the question, in Badiou’s terms, of the saturation of a truth process.

Continuity and break

There is a strong continuity – recognized by us and felt by those who participated – running from Marx and Engels, the “red edge” of the revolutions of 1848, and then later the Paris Commune, through Lenin and the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution and Mao. (For Badiou there are some discontinuities and differences of truth-processes here, but I’ll leave that aside for now.)  I do not view this sequence, let me make clear, as a march of orthodoxy or “the correct line,” proved through “successful revolutions” and excluding assorted others (anarchists, Trotskyists, council communists, “Western Marxist” thinkers, etc.) as traitors, heretics, or utterly mistaken wanderers in the swamp. The relationships here are far more complex.

Historically there is a relatively continuous trajectory. That continuity has been broken, not simply as a form of thinking or as a theoretical matter, but as a practice or chain of practices in the world. Popular upheavals from the late 1970s on, from the Iranian Revolution and Solidarity inPoland, through the recent “Arab spring,” have not occurred, have not had their reference points, within this Marxist tradition. The continuity of this trajectory has been decisively broken.

Thirty years plus – this is a long stretch of world history, which demands real investigation, thought, and explanation. To declare that “nonetheless, I remain true to the principles of Marxism (of Maoism, of —)” is not an instance of any of these. And to attribute this more than thirty-year break to the errors or betrayals of leaders or “the subjective forces,” or on the other hand to “objective factors,” is not an explanation but simply a refusal to think. (To be clear, none of these descriptions is a reference to anyone who has contributed to the discussion on this site; but we’re probably all familiar with exemplars of these attitudes.)

We are left with the residue of an exhausted truth-process, or to put it differently, theories for which the social practice has for the most part died or ceased – the social practice, that is, of which these theories were once a living, changing part.

We cannot simply use these theories as a basis or guide to resurrect the practice or practices of which they were once an integral part. Nor can we wait for an outbreak or an upsurge, then expect to come into them with our assured theories (our Marxism, our Maoism, our specific strand of anarchism) and have those theories take hold and play a leading role. (All of us with much political experience can think of tens or hundreds of examples here.)

But we also stand in a position to this revolutionary tradition, and to the theories which have been part of it – a trajectory which is not just “our tradition” but that of the struggles and highest aspirations of “the masses” – of humanity in fact, which is a continuing tradition and present actuality. The question now is what form – in both practice and theory – these strivings can take, in order to continue as a communist quest, to reassert “the communist hypothesis.”

That, in short form, is our situation today, and the conditions of our work.

Related posts:

1. John Steele: Badiou — Another Take on Revolutionary Theory

Vern Gray has written several essays appearing on khukuri.

I think it is confusing, and leads in a wrong direction, to conclude that there were or are “many Marxisms.”… I would argue that some ideologies and politics should be assigned a “privileged position”—not that our conclusions should be limited by them (we have to see where our investigation and exploration go) but that they should be given emphasis in the “palette” we draw from in going forward…I am a Maoist but not an “unreconstructed Maoist.” I am not prepared (not yet, anyway) to uphold the idea of “post-Maoism.”

Two, Three, Many Marxisms…?

Vern Gray

Here I will make some comments on John Steele’s article “Marxism or Anarchism or —?“ and discuss at more length a few of the questions it addresses. I will go beyond what he has written but, I hope, maintain a focus on the logic of it so as to see where some of his arguments may lead.

Steele is right, I think, that there is no clearly existing “left,” certainly on a world scale, either subjectively or objectively. The reason is not that the imperialist system does not create the urgent need for the formation of a left; the core reason is that there is nowhere near the clarity, coherence, or correctness of political and ideological line that needs to be at the core of it. Accordingly, forging that kind of line, and the practical/political experimentation that Steele speaks of, are of critical importance if there is to be a chance of revolution.

I agree, completely, that circling the wagons and posing the question as “Marxism vs. anarchism” is not a fruitful way of approaching the need for a new understanding of a politics that can change the world. Rather, there is clearly a need to learn from both of these trends, to take the insights of both, critically sum up the history of revolutionary practice, and dig into the enormous problems facing us.

So the pivotal thing is to begin to make progress on identifying key questions and finding the answers to them. Here, we need to draw on all possible sources of understanding in every sphere. To the extent that Marxism, as developed up to this point in history, is able to help us chart this course, it is of value; to the extent that it is not, it needs to be shed. And the same for anarchism. The point is not to declare an allegiance to either or an opposition to the other but to deeply investigate and analyze conditions, engage in political experimentation (Steele borrows from Badiou and I think it’s a phrase that conveys the right novelty and flexibility), and forge an ideology and politics that can guide and learn from revolutionary practice. This is a brief summary of my understanding of the basic points in Steele’s article, and as far as this goes, I agree with it.

That said, I think there are some problems in his approach. Here I will speak to three of them: (I) the question of “many Marxisms”; (II) the character of Marxism as a science (or not); (III) the role of practice in evaluating the history and current status of Marxism. I want to draw out some of what I consider to be potential implications of Steele’s approach to these questions, even where he does not state them. I don’t mean to say that all these implications necessarily follow from what he has written, any more than the historical development of Marxism consisted of a simple emergent process that was all coded in the fundamental DNA of Marx’s views—a position whose invalidity Steele points out. (That point leads to an interesting discussion that I will take up at another time.) But it’s important to get into the logic of some of Steele’s arguments. In doing so, I may run the risk of putting some words into his mouth. But if I do so, I’m sure he’ll point it out.

I

Steele is right to call attention to the fact that during his life Marx’s thought underwent considerable development and change on many key issues. It would be wrong to look at only one or two aspects or periods in it and generalize to all the others. His views on the state changed, particularly as a result of the Paris Commune experience. In political economy, Capital went well beyond, and contradicted, some of his earlier writings. In philosophy, an earlier, more abstract view of dialectics increasingly gave way to an integration of dialectics and materialism into his writings on economics (and history). His views on the possibility of basing a communist politics on rural communes in Russia in the 1880s constituted a significant departure from his earlier and largely exclusive focus on the proletariat’s class struggle as a revolutionary instrument. These are all very important considerations, and it would be possible to multiply them. Anyone who latches on to only one or a few of the aspects of Marx’s thought and declares them to be the whole of Marxism commits a grave error.

Nevertheless, I think it is confusing, and leads in a wrong direction, to conclude that there were or are “many Marxisms.” Part of the reason I want to look at this is that Steele used the same formulation in his article “Why Is Badiou of Political Value?” I will digress briefly here to compare the situation in a few other fields.

Darwin’s work showed major shifts in emphasis between his beginning, overwhelmingly empirical summations of his vast collection of specimens in the 1830s, to the theoretical structure he began to build in the late 1830s and early 1840s (which reflected a significant reliance on Malthusian economics), and on to the later refinement and further development of his views on a vast range of questions including selection, speciation, extinction, the pace of change, the relationship of biological and geological changes, sexual selection, the implications of evolutionary theory for human prehistory, and so forth. Yet summing up his work in terms of “many Darwins,” or the work of those who have followed in his wake as “many Darwinisms,” is very problematic.

Similarly, Einstein’s early writings do not “contain in embryo” or imply his most significant theoretical contribution, the general theory of relativity, formulated roughly a decade after the special theory and his work on the particle-like character of light. Bohr formulated his theory of the atom more than a decade before the discovery of quantum mechanics, which developed a new atomic theory that supplanted his, but he nevertheless became the leading exponent of the new theory. But were there many Einsteins? Many Bohrs? Would there be some advantage to seeing things in those terms?

It seems to me that the theoretical understanding of these thinkers underwent development as they considered new problems, applied their best understanding of method, and came to new, sometimes contradictory conclusions. Further, it was the more developed, later views at which they eventually arrived that were most comprehensive and characteristic of their thought as a whole (even while they addressed new problems, and even though some of Einstein’s later thinking about quantum mechanics was, I believe, incorrect).

But wasn’t this the case with Marx as well?—a difference being that he was concerned with phenomena that were actually changing during his lifetime whereas the physicists, for example, studied parts of reality that had existed for a much longer period and did not undergo significant change during their lives.

There is a systematic, comprehensive character to Marxism as it has developed since the 1840s, Marx’s famous statement that he was “not a Marxist” notwithstanding. Althusser argues as much in the article that Steele linked to his own (I am grateful to Steele for making me aware of this article). While making many criticisms of the methodology and some of the conclusions of Capital, delving into Marx’s and Lenin’s theories of the state, dissecting Lenin’s (and Kautsky’s) views on the relationship between the development of theory and the workers’ movement, and identifying many of the contradictions, “gaps,” and “silences” to which Steele refers, Althusser nevertheless says:

Let us sum up. If we untangle all the theoretical, political, semantic and other difficulties in the texts of Marx and, especially, Lenin—difficulties that all too often encumber these texts and turn them against the ‘general line’ of a body of thought which has to be given its coherence if we are to think what it designates—we discover, precisely, a coherent body of thought. (“Marx in His Limits,” in Philosophy of the Encounter, p. 94.)

A “general line”; a coherent body of thought; but one whose overall contours and substance is only arrived at through a rigorous process of “untangling” and synthesis (which, of necessity, continues). There is no “ready-made” Marxism in final form whether in the texts of Marx, Lenin, or Mao.

I believe the emphasis on “many Marxes” points away from this understanding and tends to elevate some of the positions that Marx discarded for sound reasons to the level of others that he did not. It tends to flatten out a variety of “Marxisms” and in doing so to make Marxism a less sharp—and, perhaps, less flexible—instrument for understanding and changing the world. According to Steele, because any Marxism might hold something of value, no version of it, nor Marxism as a whole, holds a “privileged position.”

My point here is not that various trends should not be critically studied, or that anything of value in them can be ignored and not critically assimilated. Rather, it is that the starting point cannot simply be “let’s look anywhere, let’s not close any doors.” Now there is, of course, an element of truth to that. But if we let things rest there, we will not be able to find our way through the maze and come out the other end with the new revolutionary ideology and politics that Steele wants to create. I would argue that some ideologies and politics should be assigned a “privileged position”—not that our conclusions should be limited by them (we have to see where our investigation and exploration go) but that they should be given emphasis in the “palette” we draw from in going forward.

Again, this does not mean that we will necessarily end up with Maoism, or “post-Maoism,” or even Marxism more generally, as the basis for revolutionary politics. Mao himself did not make this assumption. As he comments in his speeches, after Khrushchev came to power in the USSR, the Chinese Communist Party, striving to understand what had happened, considered the possibility that Marxism itself was wrong.

Obviously very different from Steele’s perspective: Lenin’s view of the “three sources and three component parts of Marxism”—French socialism, German idealist philosophy, and English political economy. Marxism also drew on other sources, for example Greek philosophy, anthropological studies, environmental studies, and many others, and it developed beyond all those sources. But even though Lenin’s formulation is narrow, looking at Marxism as a whole, there is an overall body of work that adopted some basic positions and had a certain orientation toward them after Marx and Engels had died. The same is true of Lenin’s and Mao’s theoretical and practical work taken as a whole. They developed it “on the shoulders” of Marx and Engels’s contributions even as they took up new, more complex problems and constructed new theories.

I am not well versed in anarchist thought but I do not believe that it has this overall systematic character. If that is correct, it is fundamentally different from Marxism in this respect. This does not mean that anarchists have not had some penetrating insights about capitalism—and about elements of Marxism. But there is a huge gap between the two in terms of historical impact, theoretical development, revolutionary advances to learn from—but also, Marxists must honestly admit, errors and disasters to learn from.

II

Regarding the scientific character of Marxism: There is a tendency now, and it is expressed in Steele’s article, to deny or perhaps more precisely to marginalize the idea that there is any. This denial is often associated with certain other positions. One, which he explicitly suggests, is that the idea that there are scientific aspects to Marxism rests on the idea of a science of history, and further, that the idea of a science of history is bound up with the view that class society passes through a determined series of stages, from slavery to socialism and ultimately issuing forth with communism, whose eventual triumph is inevitable. It is true that this view is part of Marx’s thinking, from the Communist Manifesto to his later work, but it is not true that it is essential to Marxism as such or that it is a necessary consequence of a view that aspects of Marxism constitute a science. This is one of the things that must be “untangled.”

Marx of course did view his later work as a science. This is particularly evident regarding the science of political economy (or the scientific “critique of political economy”) in Capital, with its well-known statement at the beginning of the book about the need for science if one is to penetrate beyond surface appearance.

But in twentieth-century Marxism there are numerous other areas that should be understood as science: for example, Mao’s military theory; his views on the class struggle in socialist society; Lenin’s (now outdated) analysis of imperialism, etc. The fact that these are theories that were forged in times and places where the terrain has changed significantly, but in only very partially understood ways, does not mean that the approach in those theories was not scientific. Even though errors were made, and there are new phenomena that require going beyond the old theories, that does not mean that those theories were not, or not principally, scientific. For example, that socialism and communism are not truly inevitable does not refute the scientific character of (parts of) Marxism but upholds it; don’t we arrive at the “post-inevitablist” conclusion, in part, by applying a scientific Marxism (as well as other sciences)? Likewise, Marxist political economy is scientific even though Marx made some unwarranted assumptions. If the criterion of “true science” were that it be perfect, then, never mind a “science of history”—there would be no history of science either.

I am concerned about the tendency of some people nowadays to restrict the idea of science to natural science, or controlled laboratory experiments, or highly quantified science. These views restrict the idea of science and set up a gap between phenomena that can allegedly be understood scientifically, usually seen as those in the natural world, and those that cannot, whether those that are studied in politics, anthropology, or other fields (and some of these phenomena cannot be placed only in the natural or in the social world alone). This view not only rules out most of Marx’s work, but Darwin’s as well. Now it must be said that in various ways, greater quantification does not always make these theories more scientific. But a one-sided focus on that fact does not mean the theories are not nevertheless scientific, unless, again, one holds the view that quantification is a defining characteristic of any science.

To be clear, I am not on board with the notion that Marxism as a whole is a science. There are many components of it, including ethics, aesthetics, and some aspects of politics, that do not and need not meet the criteria of science; and while not denying that there is a dialectic between these aspects and the scientific aspects of Marxism, I think it is wrong to reduce everything to a science. It makes the idea of science lose all specificity, gives rise to “scientistic” errors, and contorts much of Marxism. I think that Marxism overall is a philosophy and at its core is Mao’s view that it is an orientation toward revolutionary practice.

The idea that there is a scientific character to aspects of Marxism, such as political economy, actually goes against the dogmatic tendency that Steele identifies—to see it as a set of pat answers to already articulated questions that have been already thought through, leaving us only to apply the pat answers to arrive at an overall path to liberation that can deviate from what is expected only with regard to some secondary contingencies and relatively unimportant details.

We have many new phenomena to analyze and come to grips with, and while Marxism offers a method and an example of how some perhaps similar problems have been solved in the past, a theoretical understanding of the new phenomena is yet to be forged. An orientation toward science is an essential part of this effort. This work largely remains ahead of us. At present the understanding of any number of areas is entirely inadequate to guide revolutionary practice, though there are seeds of understanding.

I do not attempt here to analyze the statement by Badiou that Steele cites, concerning what Marxism is and is not (and in particular that it is not a science of history). I will note, though, that in some ways it is similar to Mao’s “It’s right to rebel!” in its emphasis on creative human activity rather than some sort of deterministic view. (Mao not only “boiled down” Marxism to “one Marxism” but to one sentence!) But I hope Steele will write more about this.

III

On how to evaluate different political practices, ideologies, theories, etc.: I believe the principal criterion must be revolutionary practice in the broadest sense, historically and today. Steele makes no reference to this. As a result, a certain detachment from practice creeps in and affects some of his formulations. He does not pose the central question: which elements of Marxism (or often at the heart of his stated conception, which of Marx’s writings, or “which Marxism”) have been associated with a revolutionary practice that has actually changed the world at various times and places, moving in the direction of classless society, even though the efforts that drew on and were guided by Marxism eventually failed or were defeated (that time around, and so forth)?

He does not even raise this criterion when briefly referring to his own political history. He writes: “I take up Marx and Marxism simply because this is the tradition out of which I come, and which I know well. (And Marx is a figure—I’ll admit it—dear to me.)” That is all well and good, but it doesn’t get down to bedrock. Why does he come out of the Marxist tradition? Why did he enter it in the first place? Why is it the tradition he knows well? Because he engaged in revolutionary practice and he studied Marxism, not to the exclusion of anything else but as what became for him a core set of ideas. I have known Steele for a long time, and I think he took up, and takes up, Marxism because, first, of what happened in the world in the 1960s—and the role within the Chinese revolution, the Black liberation movement, or other movements that he came to understand Marxism, especially Maoism, to play—and then further because he studied it and found that it helped give him a method with which to take up many questions, not only in politics but in philosophy, political economy, and the arts. In other words, because, at least in its revolutionary form, Marxism was a key part of changing the world: this is what drew him to it. Here again, the criterion of revolutionary practice emerges as dominant. That, at any rate, is roughly how I understand Steele’s political history.

None of this is negated by the more critical, questioning attitude toward Maoism that he has developed over the years following the defeat of the revolutionary forces in China, the smashing or petering out of revolutionary movements in nearly all the other countries where they existed in the 1960s and 1970s, and the fractionation, disorientation, paltriness of vision, and ultimate passing of “the left” today.

Despite all these reversals and setbacks, there is much to learn from Maoism and the 1960s, and I think it is essential to differentiate between a Marxism that led a revolutionary struggle that came to victory and built a socialist society that advanced along the revolutionary road to a certain point, much further than any other; and the variety of “Marxisms” that have never succeeded in changing anything on anywhere near this level. This is not to dismiss the contributions of other Marxists (or “semi-Marxists,” etc.)—how wrong (and “Cominternist”) that would be. But there is a huge difference “on the scales of history,” so to speak.

This may be, or may seem to be, less “ecumenical” in its attitude toward anarchism, but it is accurate nonetheless.

This is the criterion of revolutionary practice. Steele does not refer to it in his article. His basic point, that we need to reexamine and learn from what is best in different ideologies and political trends, within the context of and focus on identifying and solving new problems, is right. But again, he has defined a plane of resources so that, in a sense, everything is everything. That’s the wrong “topology.” If the orientation is not firmly based on looking at things from the angle of changing the world, and centering our study of history on how different theoretical and political approaches have related to that standard, then it is not possible to learn the appropriate lessons from history and really put them to the service of changing the world.

It is on the basis of this criterion more than any other that I believe that in the history of hitherto existing Marxist or semi-Marxist trends, the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist trend is distinguished. We can learn from all these trends but first and foremost from this one. The question of its efficacy in changing the world on a large scale, up to a certain point, in the twentieth century is closely related to its being the most systematic and, yes, scientific trend in Marxism. The only real Marxism? I do not think it is correct to say that but if I had to choose between saying that and saying that there are “many Marxisms” and not distinguishing among them on the basis of practice, theoretical cogency, and effect, then yes, I would say that the only real Marxism of the second half of the twentieth century was Maoism. But I would prefer not to be boxed into that position.

While I do not think the position of “many Marxisms” is correct, I do think we should recognize a broad Marxist current that has mainly not been part of the Leninist tradition, akin to what Bill Martin calls the “philosophical Marxists,” that has maintained its radical integrity and not been co-opted into the social democratic or modern revisionist trends. I don’t know that “philosophical Marxists” is the best way to refer to these thinkers, but I do not think Marxism should be defined so narrowly that they are not under its umbrella. Mapping out the political and ideological field within today’s Marxism in this “bipartite” way—Maoism and philosophical Marxism—is, I think, preferable to the “many Marxisms” formulation. (To be clear: these are not the only revolutionary trends—there are revolutionary anarchism, revolutionary nationalism, and others.)

It is possible that the reason why Steele assigns less emphasis to what have been the most world-changing events and how they bear on what ideology should get a “preferential position” today is that, either he does not think the advances, especially in the USSR and China, were so profound as they are thought to be by the Maoists (and perhaps some of the post-Maoists); or that he thinks that the world has changed so much that today, Maoism no longer has such great currency as I am saying; or maybe that, in a world that has changed quite a bit, he finds it unproductive and distracting to spend much time contemplating the history of previous socialist revolutions. Or perhaps it’s a combination of all of these, or something else. But then it would be interesting to know what Steele thinks about those questions, or whether they bear very much on his views about revolutionary ideology and politics in today’s world.

In conclusion

So then where do things stand now? It is surely no good simply to “stand on Maoism” as though it were some sort of perfect, frozen system. I am a Maoist but not an “unreconstructed Maoist.” Yet I am not prepared (not yet, anyway) to uphold the idea of “post-Maoism” (though I respect the work of many who do, more or less, take this position, including Steele, Martin, and some of the other writers on this site). I think the question of “Maoism or post-Maoism” is related to the question of “many Marxisms,” so I will explore it a bit.

It seems that to be a post-Maoist one would have to have a fairly clear notion of what parts of Maoism would need to be discarded or were “saturated,” of at least a few of the key problems it cannot solve, and why. And then I think even more is required: there should be not only an identification of some problems that elude the “old paradigm,” but some serious movement toward new solutions. Without this, I don’t think the “post-“ prefix is merited. (To draw on another analogy from physics: I would say that Einstein was not yet a “post-Newtonian” because he realized, sometime in the 1890s, that Newtonian physics contained certain contradictions and could not explain certain phenomena, such as the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887. But the designation “post-Newtonian” probably was appropriate, or at least partially appropriate, by the time he published the special theory of relativity in 1905.)

By this argument, it would be right to see Maoism as it developed over several decades as a (form of) “post-Leninism.” But it would not be right to call it that (and it was not yet Maoism either) merely on the basis that, by the mid- to late 1920s, Mao had realized the disastrousness of the Leninist inheritance of urban insurrection as a military strategy for China.

The fact that Maoism did not solve some of the old problems—and I think Badiou is right in identifying the “party-state” formation as one of the key ones—or that it has not, and truly cannot on its own, come to a clear understanding of many of the new phenomena (such as today’s global economy) does not yet, in my view, mean that we should see ourselves as being in the stage of “post-Maoism.”

One of the most important questions is precisely: how do we understand today’s global economy? The understanding of objective conditions in this overall sense is basic to any revolutionary undertaking, certainly on a world scale, which is the only possible and sustainable one in today’s world. Pre-existing Marxism, even in its most advanced twentieth-century form, Maoism, has no ready answer to this. Neither does anarchism. Another example: how do we understand the type of political organization needed to lead and sustain a revolution; how is it similar to or different from previous forms of revolutionary (including Leninist) organization; and how does all of that relate to the construction of a “people’s state” (if there is such a thing) under socialism? Here, it seems to me, both Marxism and anarchism have some important things to say.

With regard to these questions, and others, both Marxism and anarchism have to be learned from (though I am, clearly, far from saying to an equal extent). But in some sense they have to “fall into position” with regard to a number of big, challenging, urgent questions. It is particularly in this light that the formulation of “Marxism vs. anarchism” begs the question. We must focus on identifying and solving the problems. The value of Marxist, anarchist, or other understandings, including entirely new ones, will come to be appreciated in this process.

Toward the end of his article, Steele writes:

The question is: where does politics, and communist praxis, begin—where does it start from? What I am saying: it does not start from Marxism (or any other basic philosophy or theory). Rather, Marxism is a resource for politics.

Now there are all kinds of ways in which a theory can be a resource (in the case of Marxism, some of these might be: to help understand the dynamics of capitalism, to help understand human history, perhaps, to help understand the relation of emancipatory politics and communist praxis to history). In this sense of resource, though (as a help to understanding, for example), Marxism has no privileged status: it’s a rich resource, but not the only one. It’s certainly not a complete theory that ‘explains everything,’ as it’s sometimes been taken to be.

My first observation is that most of this does not really go beyond Maoism. Yet more important, there is a straw-man argument running through it. Politics and communist praxis do not start from Marxism, philosophy, or theory: yes, Mao was very clear on that. He gave an argument, however, for where it does start from, and if we do not understand that so narrowly as “just our own practice” but as “world-historic revolutionary (and communist) practice,” which is then theorized, as in Marxism—then we have an answer to Steele’s question, at least a good one to start from. But he does not venture any answer.

Contrary to Steele, as I’ve argued above, Marxism does have a privileged status. Of course this does not mean it’s the only resource; but Steele blurs these two questions. Of course it does not “explain everything”: again, Mao is quite clear, with his formulation about how Marxism embraces but does not replace scientific and artistic theories, and so forth.

Why make these straw-man or question-begging arguments? What purpose do they serve?

By no means are they necessary in order to oppose the dogmatic, fruitless dance of “Marxism vs. anarchism” that he rightly rejects, or to look at all ideologies from the standpoint of what needs to be understood and how to understand it, grounded in what needs to be transformed.

No related posts.

As it appears here, this essay combines two of what Nappalos describes as a series of four interconneted essays addressing questions of revolutionary organization and organizational theories in use today. Published so far have been Parts I, II, and III of Towards Theory of Political organization for Our Time. What appears below is an edited amalgamation of Parts I and III.

Towards a Theory of Political Organization for Our Time: trajectories of struggle, the nature of our period, and the intermediate level

Scott Nappalos

The Nature of Our Period: looking to an autonomous working class alternative

The end of the twentieth century was a time of transition. The regime of low-intensity warfare, the dismantling of the welfare state, and neo-liberal privatization schemes ultimately was running its course[1]. The final defeats were to be dolled out across the world in the eventual collapse of finance bubbles, widespread resistance to austerity, and the implosive of the economies of Latin America[2]. Before this was all but said and done, there was the gradual and later meteoric rise and fall of social movements against neo-liberal reforms and the militarism leading to the afghan and Iraq wars. Revolutionaries played an active and disproportionate role in mobilizing the social actors in what would become the largest mobilizations of their kind.

Time has passed, and the limitations and deflation of the early 2000s anti-globalization and anti-war movements are becoming clearer to many revolutionaries. Though massive mobilizations occurred, little lasting organization was built.

This means that the militancy we witnessed in the streets had a very short shelf life, and much of the work can reasonably be said to have disappeared. Millions of people engaged in various forms of resistance to the wars, globalization, and the new forms of capital and state; however the left was not able to produce a sustained alternative that was able to engage, nurture, and develop that activity into a lasting movement against capitalism and the state. While seemingly militant direct action was relatively common, this militancy rarely led to further radicalization or the popularization of struggle. Power was built, but dissipated. The left had not developed the ability or perhaps the orientation to build movements, either mass movements or revolutionary ones.

The decline of the era of activist mobilizations was an interlude to a series of economic failures coming to a close. Capital had been able to delay escalating crises in previous decades through expansion of markets into new proletarianized workforces, seizing new assets and bringing them into the market via privatization schemes, austerity programs, and financialization of markets with new financial “products” such as derivatives, currency trading, and the like. A series of bursting bubbles eventually brought us to the brink. Though people dispute the beginning or the trajectory, we can see a continuity of bubbles from the finance scandals of the 80s and 90s, the dot-com bubble, post-September 11 accounting scandals, and the real estate bubble. Resistance both by social movements in the developing and developed worlds forced the ruling class recompositions[3], and likewise bred new resistance. The ensuing crisis has brought a new era of austerity, following previous austerities, and a culmination of decades of ruling class assaults on the basic living conditions of workers and oppressed classes across the globe.

Presently in an environment of austerity, the most politically significant and powerful mass movements in the US are movements from the right, often with organized tendencies of conscious neo-fascist forces. In an era of ruling class assaults and austerity, it has been the right that has been most successful in responding to organizing the oppressed classes. While the left is quite conscious of this, the left’s isolated position makes a serious challenge more difficult and questionable.

At the same time no major progressive mass movements provide a counterweight to the ruling class assaults, restructuring, cuts, and collaborationist mass organizations. Unions are nearing a crisis with decades of attacks on the social compact which gave the unions a stable base in the American economy. As we reach new lows for unions in terms of position and power in major industries, many unions are choosing not to organize at all and others are attempting to launch of quixotic crusade for labor-management partnership while management prepares for total liquidation of the unions. Many environmental groups actively partner with major capitalist interests, and have become support bases for green consumerism.

The institutional left has largely sought to save capitalism as was done in the Great Depression, through a combination of state intervention and a social compact between capital and institutionalized forms of social organization (unions and NGOs). Our time is however different and capital itself has evolved beyond the prior compositions. The New Deal era social welfare programs were based on a time when capitalism required a highly productive and predictable workforce, which was guaranteed by unions as mediators on the shop floor and social welfare programs in the community. No analogy exists in our time of international capital, the dismantling of the welfare state, and increasingly fractured state rule. It is unlikely that even if capital had the will to find such a solution, it would be able to solve the fundamental causes of this crisis which is not merely a lack of jobs or capital, but in fact the global organization of production and the break down of the balance of forces, both proletarian and capitalist[4].

The existing organs of the institutional left (the unions, the NGOs, and the liberal and social democratic political machinery) have not built up mass movements, but rather organizations with a service orientation towards the working and oppressed classes. Our goal is not to judge these movements merely evaluatively. As revolutionaries, we should seek to understand what potential there is for building and supporting the mass popular movements for the revolutionary transformations that can abolish capital and replace it with a classless society administered and organized by all for all. Setting aside questions of how much these institutions actually do to protect and expand life under capitalism (for which they also fail significantly); as revolutionaries who seek not just to win day-to-day struggles but also to transform the systemic causes of exploitation, we need to evaluate our role in these institutions, their role in capitalism, and the potential for transformation in mass movements.

The issue then is this. Whatever level of practice there is amongst the mass organizations is social democratic practice. Revolutionaries, for the very few who do have a level of activity in mass organizations, tend to have social democratic practice in these organizations. In actuality, this social democratic practice is probably the most advanced and progressive even compared to the tiny fractions of revolutionaries trying to build a mass practice. Revolutionary practice, because of the low level of struggle and isolation of the left from direct rank-and-file struggle, is in its infancy. There is a large gap between ideas and action, and in our time it is worth questioning the extent to which ideology does work. If radical ideology yields social democratic practice, and at times social democrats outpace radicals we should question that relationship.

Questions for existing mass organizations

We can reasonably ask questions of the existing mass organizations (to the extent they actually function as mass organizations): (1) do they organize their members, engaging them in collective activity and struggle, and (2) if so, to what ends, and (3) to the extent this does happen, how much does it facilitating conditions for revolutionary transformation or create openings for developing militants of the left committed to social transformation? We might even add, to what extent does the left presence in the NGOs, unions, and liberal political machinery translate into an advance of revolutionary practice, theory, and organization?

The overwhelming majority would answer no to the first. Instead activity is professionalized service activity, and is integrated into existing channels of struggle within the capitalist and state infrastructure. Nor do most NGOs and unions engage in collective struggle, opting instead for lobbying, attempting to elect representatives, and legalistic maneuvering which can be called struggle only in the most vague and meaningless sense. While collective struggle leverages power based on the collective strength of social classes united in action, legalistic maneuvering relies upon the skills and activity of a narrow class of professionals and decision making that stands outside the grasp of collectivities. It is possible to engage in collective pressuring of institutions of power, but this is different from believing that lobbying, candidate work, and filing lawsuits is itself collective struggle.

Due to the pitched antagonism presently towards any autonomous working class movement, there are contradictions. Some unions for example must fight for their survival in a hostile environment (particularly service sector unions), and in some instances must fight hard against bosses. Even if we’re charitable in the content of these fights, any semblance of activity and organization gets dropped following a contract period. The unions actively promote working together with the bosses, and organize workplaces for labor peace in an era of ruling class cut backs and brutal assaults. The NGOs, often funded directly by major capitalists and the state, have taken up social service functions of the state and have centralized organizing activity into a professional bureaucracy without building up popular organs of collective activity and power. This is the case even when NGOs have nominal revolutionary administrators and explicitly talk about their work in terms of building movement, or worse revolution.

To what ends?

When collective organization and struggle does occur in these institutions, to what ends do they fight? Besides largely symbolic actions (perhaps resolutions passed against wars, symbolic strikes and marches), these institutions are firmly rooted within the bounds of the left-wing of the capitalist class. There are numerous examples that are worth spending a little time reflecting on.

The boring-from-within union reform movement has a section that comes out of revolutionary politics. Most prominently Solidarity (US) is active in union reform movements across the United States, and is one of the main driving forces behind Labor Notes, the labor reform publication with associated movements and conferences. Despite 80+ years of the failure of communist-led union reform movements to produce either reformed unions or communist practice, the basic tenets of reforming the unions through running slates, electioneering, and bureaucratic reform measures is unquestioned. Teamsters for a Democratic Union, which had many Solidarity organizers within, won control of the Teamsters for a period in the early 90s. Many laudable reforms were introduced, and there were strides made to increase organizing and transparency in a notoriously corrupt union. Still, from a revolutionary perspective we should ask, what was built? Where is the mass movement of Teamsters organizing combatively, and where is the revolutionary practice to emerge from this? In fact what we have is a social democratic practice of business unionism and liberal politics, but under revolutionary pretenses.

The union reform movement’s emphasis on positions of leadership, staff organizer positions, and structural reform on the system and union’s own term kept these struggles contained by the existing bureaucracies. Just as Ron Carey’s presidency was recuperated and contained, we repeat the experiences of communist reformism in the unions from another era. Walter Reuther was elected by a communist opposition on a union reform basis. Reuther would eventually become the opponent of the same opposition that led him to power, just as the union reform movement itself is an opposition to a revolutionary practice in the unions in our time[5].

Perhaps another famous example is that of Van Jones. Van Jones was once an NGO staff-cum-Maoist in the Bay Area political grouping STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement) made up largely of the administrative staff of leftist led NGOs. While it is worth questioning Jones’ radicalism (he seems more like a fellow traveler passing through, than a committed revolutionary), it is worth reflecting on the activist –> ngo staff –> white house trajectory. As some have noted[6], the institutions of power are filled with people who think or thought of themselves as radicals, but who function largely to serve and protect capitalism (or at least their progressive version of it). Van Jones’ Green Capitalism is one such project, and we can look to Carl Davidson promotion of Progressives for Obama and similar reformist capitalist visions[7] as yet another.

Whatever the revolutionary ideas or credentials of these particular people, there is a strong link between these ideas (which have strong currency on the left, in spite of their ties to the most major institutions of state power and capitalism) and the institutions (NGOs, progression electoral organizations, and unions). The politics may be on the surface revolutionary, but its role in functioning is not merely reformist but actually constitutive of capitalist power relationships. These radical leaders help reinforce and expand capitalism from inside the system even from a position of supposed opposition.

Communist electioneering

We see similar dynamics at a more local grass roots level as well. There is a long history of communist electioneering, but recently there has been an emergence of Maoist-inspired politics in NGO staff. Freedom Road Socialist Organization (not the Midwest pro-Stalin split organized around the paper Fight Back) is the most characteristic organization which has a high concentration of NGO and union staff. Freedom Road has a long history of electoralism dating back to Jesse Jackson’s Presidential campaign[8], which members of today’s Freedom Road supported and helped organize. Recently, Freedom Road members have been instrumental in election work within NGOs including voter-turn out campaigns, endorsing Democratic Party candidates, and promoting electioneering as a revolutionary strategy both primarily and through voter organizations aiming for “new majorities”[9]. This NGO-revolutionary unity has sought to organize and rally their organizations behind sections of capitalist power[10].

Organizing Upgrade (a new media site that features NGO staff, Freedom Road members, and Maoist-inspired writings) is worth looking at for detailed insight into this new reformism-as-revolution ideology. For an in depth look at the theoretical justification for these electoralist adventures by the staff doing the work, it is definitely worth reading Organizing Upgrade’s “Fast Forum: Electoral Organizing”[11]. What is most interesting is the total conflation of mass movements and attempting to leverage either positions of power or shifts in policy. We see revolutionaries engaged in activity which objectively strengthens the electoral process, takes up positions within the power structure, and actively attempts to bring masses into the system’s means of settling disputes on its own terms. Despite the Maoist origin of this current of NGO staff, the ideology is much more clearly coming from the historical reformist communist currents such as euro-communism. This is clear for example in an interview with two organizers in Virginians for a New Majority who draw from Poulantzas who, perhaps unintentionally, became the theoretician for euro-communism’s embrace of the capitalist social democratic state in Italy and Spain a generation ago[12].

We believe that our strategic approach should draw from Poulantzas and create political space that neither builds a parallel state that leads to a complete replacement of the old with the new, nor simply elects new people to fill the existing state. By creating new structures and laws we seek to create fissures that increasingly alter the class, race and gender power disposition of the state. Examples of this may include efforts at democratizing the system – same day voter registration or mail in voting, felon voter registration (still an arduous process in Virginia and elsewhere in the south), others might work to eliminate structural obstacles that systematically disempower people of color such as statewide election of senators, non-proportional elections, or participatory budgeting. Others challenges could seek to democratize the economy through taxes on financial transactions or community control over banks or other flows of capital[13].

In so far as membership is engaged at all politically (beyond high sounding lectures), it is to mobilize with de facto support of capitalist social and political institutions even when under a red banner.

Playing cop within the movement

The most naked display of the embrace of playing the “cop within the movement” was shown in leaked emails from NGO staff in the Bay Area during the Oscar Grant trial. Advance the Struggle, a bay area revolutionary organization, published an expose of sorts clearly demonstrating the way in which local NGO bureaucracies embraced a role of trying to work with local city and police authorities in diverting organizing and anger surrounding the police brutality in favor of “voicing one’s opinion” and “making music”[14]. The Urban Peace Movement sent an email in which it revealed that they had

…been in preliminary conversation with some of our partners an allies up to this point including the Ella Baker Center, Youth UpRising, Oakland Rising, BWOPA, The Mayor’s Office and the City of Oakland regarding these suggestions.  Let’s continue to be in dialog and hold each other close in the challenging days ahead.[15]

Note that Oakland Rising is one of the groups represented in Organizing Upgrade’s Electoral Organizing article, and the NGO staff proclaims “We don’t believe in struggle, we believe in winning”. The Urban Peace Movement staffer lays out the method that this grouping of state and NGO officials will use to contain coming agitation surrounding the immanent letting loose of Oscar Grant’s murderer. Whatever critiques there are of symbolic protest violence, and I think there are, it is not random that the response of the NGO bureaucracy is to defend the state in this instance and to consciously “inoculate” and “create avenues of expression”.

The position of NGOs constitutively within capitalism reinforcing its social relationships, hierarchies, and distribution of power pushes radicals in these directions, often in contradiction to their self-conception and their language.

The issue is not whether these institutions do some good. Humanistically they do improve humanity and this should be supported. The problem is that these institutions consistently rally behind ruling class interests, often against the working class, and are organized against the building self-activity of the class. Noticeably off the table are fighting mass organizations whose basis and activity are founded on the collective interest and activity of a class working autonomously.  There is a glaring absence of organizations working to build up a class alternative of workers acting directly and collectively to build independent class power capable of breaking with capitalism.

Why?

Whatever struggles can emerge outside of these institutions find themselves facing significant repression, cooptation, and difficulty taking an organized and sustained path. The left is generally isolated both in practice and ideologically from the oppressed classes. Whatever exceptions there are remain localized, cordoned off, and contained at this time. This is not to dismiss out of hand the crucial work occurring in various NGOs, unions, academic circles, and revolutionary organizations. It is not difficult to see what would occur without a positive social force fighting back. Still it is important to ask harder questions about why the good work has systematically been retarded, and why the bureaucratized movements are so dominant.

This situation has meant that whatever solutions and responses the revolutionary left is developing at this time is largely internal to the left, and without sufficient practice to clarify our attempts. In the recent history of North America, this has generally been the case. This severing of theory from practice has contributed to our problems moving forward, building organized revolutionary forces capable of contributing to mass movements, and developing revolutionary consciousness, practice, and catalysts.

With the unions, the social democratic trends, and NGOs lining up behind an increasingly desperate attempt to save capitalism through populist-electoralism and state-interventionist measures, the necessity of an autonomous working class alternative is pressing. There is broadly speaking a crisis in the institutionalized left and its allied radical currents. The path to an autonomous working class alternative is not merely a matter of organizing, or being proficient. There are objective forces that necessitate a strategy, and one that meets the reality of our time. The method for this is intermediate organizing, which I explore below.

Trajectories of struggle, the intermediate level, and political rapprochement

No related posts.

Communism as actual

Bosteels begins by talking about the Idea of communism as a Kantian regulatory idea (a framing which Badiou broaches, and then seemingly retreats from, in The Idea of Communism), brings in Hegel on actuality as well as Marx’s statement in the German Ideology that communism is the real or actual movement which abolishes the present state of things, and then brings forward his own aim or hope:

The point is somehow to perceive communism not as a utopian not-yet for which reality will always fail to offer an adequate match, but as something which is always already here, in every moment of refusal of private appropriation, and in every act of collective reappropriation. (39)

All of this in the book’s Introduction. In the chapters, as said, he examines particular thinkers – Alberto Moreiras, Roberto Esposito, Jacques Ranciere, Alvaro Garcia Linera, of course Alain Badiou, and the inevitable Slavoj Zizek (in particular the last four) – with the aim, he says. of asking whether their proposals “open up a perspective for the actualization of communism.” In all of these he shows himself to be a very sensitive critic (see in particular the chapter on Zizek: “In Search of the Act,” obviously much expanded and revised since its original 2001 version). And whatever the original context of these essays (all of which have been revised for their appearance here) it becomes clear in reading them that this question – what he’s calling “the actuality of communism” – has been for some time one of Bosteels’ most basic concerns.

It’s in the last chapter (the fifth), though, reworking the final section of his contribution to the 2009 London “Idea of Communism” conference, and here titled “The Actuality of Communism,” that this concern comes to a certain sort of crux. The chapter is a meditation on the writings – and career – of Alvaro Garcia Linera, who as mentioned above has gone from guerrilla fighter to Vice President of Bolivia.

After a few pages outlining some themes from Garcia Linera’s work, Bosteels draws two conclusions with regard to our tasks in the present era. The first concerns actively continuing to historicize the communist hypothesis, and in particular carrying it “beyond the confines of Western Europe and the ex-Soviet Union.” (238) Drawing from Badiou’s work on communism as Idea and hypothesis, Bosteels continues,

The key concept in this regard is not the orthodox one of stages and transitions in a linear dialectical periodization but rather that of the different aleatory sequences of the communist hypothesis in a strictly immanent determination, with all that this entails in terms of the assessment of failures…and of the legacy of unsolved problems handed down from one sequence to the other.

The second task (and one that directly speaks to Bosteels’ concern with “speculative leftism”), involves the realization that

Communism must not only be rehistoricized outside all suppositions of historical necessity and stageism, it must also be actualized and organized as the real movement that abolishes the present state of things….Communism must again find inscription in a concrete body, the collective flesh and thought of an internationalist political subjectivity.

Returning to Garcia Linera, and taking up specifically his thinking concerning his entering the state and its relation to the ‘communist horizon’ which he invokes, Bosteels quotes him as aiming “to support as much as possible the unfolding of society’s autonomous capacities.” (247) Socialism, he says,

Is not the ideal to which destiny will have to be adjusted by force; it is above all the practical movement of the common struggles of living labor in communitarian form to recuperate its expropriated capacities. (252)

I will not pursue Bosteels’ examination of some of Garcia Linera’s reasoning and the disputes to which they may give rise. But a general admonition (as it were) by Bosteels, characteristic of his outlook and approach, is worth quoting:

I would argue that we need to avoid two extreme and equally nefarious answers: on the one hand, the wholesale condemnation of all such articulations of the communist hypothesis and the State…; and, on the other, the relativist conclusion that what may be bad for Paris or Bologna may be good for Kathmandu or Cochabamba…. We have use for neither blind and arrogant universalism nor abject and ultimately patronizing culturalism. Instead what is needed is a comprehensive and collective rethinking…of the links between communism, the history and theory of the State, and the history and theory of modes of political organization. (248)

Concluding

In the book’s “Conclusion,” Bosteels seeks to draw out multiple conclusions, particularly concerning the relation of politics to philosophy, to history, and to morality:

As might be expected, Bosteels seeks to rein in the overweening pretensions of philosophy, which he believes has often, in Europe in recent decades, taken its own reflections on politics to be politics:

My goal is to instill a degree of modesty and realism in the reflection concerning politics and philosophy. (274)

With regard to history, Bosteels is even more modestly cautionary and corrective. At present, he says with reference to Badiou and Zizek, “this recourse to the eternal, the invariant, or the ahistorical can certainly be justified, given the depoliticizing effects of the call constantly to historicize…. (277)

Whereas dissolving the supposedly natural and eternal into the historical (as Marx and others did) may once have been liberatory,

Today, the drive to historicize everything is rather part and parcel of late capitalist ideology as such, as is the emphasis on difference, flux, and multiplicity. (277)

And yet:

And yet, given the equally pressing need to avoid lapsing into an ultraleftist purification of communism outside of any given time and place, I would also want to argue for a dialectical articulation of the nonhistorical with concrete analyses of the historicity of leftist, socialist, and communist politics. (278)

Bosteels’ third conclusion, he says, “involves the effects of a growing moralization of politics,” which has “tended to rephrase questions of power and strategy in the melodramatic vocabulary of Good and Evil.” (279)

Here again, while in accord with the necessity of escaping “the pseudopolitical rhetoric of moral outrage and indignation,” this cannot be effected through seeking “a return to pure politics outside of morality, history, economics, or the social.” (282) This sort of “Gnosticism or Manichaeism” as Bosteels calls it here, is of course precisely the sort of speculative leftism against which he has earlier aimed his fire.

What Bosteels proposes against such speculative leftism, though, is “not to adopt the attitude of the Marxist-Leninst-Maoist thought police” by denouncing it as an infantile disorder or the like, but rather that we go forward as a “communism of communisms” in which speculative leftism can have a sort of corrective place (serving as “a constant source of revitalization”) – an “actuality of communism in which there is room for movements and hypotheses no less than for tactics and strategy.” (283)

Finally – and this will be his fourth conclusion –

Communism cannot and will not be actual without also being international…. This means that we cannot let Western European history lessons…determine the agenda for the rest of the world. It also suggests…that we look elsewhere for models or counter-models to put to the test the hypothesis of the actuality of communism. (284, 286-7)

What do we need?

We might say, then, that what Bosteels is arguing for is a politics, or a specifically political thinking, which is which is taken up from a perspective which is in/of the world, historically situated, and internationalist.

He wants a little less philosophy and a little more politics in the concrete (and a lot less Eurocentrism) than he finds among current European left-radical thinkers. He wants a communism which has roots in what is actual and not simply ideal (and certainly not the stance of “the beautiful soul relying on its ineffectiveness as proof of its moral superiority over and above politics as usual” [127-8]).

He believes that communists should be able to see and think the actuality of communism in the world today – the seeds, the roots, the stirrings, the actual potential. That communists should be able to think and see a connection between communism and the world today – and not one which derives from the ideality of philosophy or the majesterial presence of a master thinker.

It would be hard to dissent from this desire and this belief, and difficult to deny that Bosteels has a point with regard to the theorists he examines. Who hasn’t grumbled, winced or cursed at the apparent over-theoreticism and esotericism of many of these thinkers? And, whatever the merits of Garcia Linera, Eurocentrism is a charge that hits home.

However.

A major question must be whether in fact it is speculative leftism which is our main danger today – the chief pitfall for communists or political radicals more broadly. This seems, sometimes, to be Bosteels’ position.

To answer this question, everything will depend on the context. But for most of “the left,” even “the radical left” (and particularly in this country) it seems that this diagnosis does not fit at all.

From the standpoint of movement activism, theoreticism and speculative leftism are not even on the horizon. “Enough talk about theory and doctrinal differences, let’s do something,” with practice far predominating over any sort of theory, is strongly characteristic in my experience. And in the US generally, with its deep legacy of pragmatism and anti-intellectualism, succumbing to the rightist temptation of union and Democratic politics is the characteristic vice, not over-involvement in a theoretical point of view.

Among the organized “hard left” too, rituals of dogma notwithstanding, speculative leftism is hardly a danger; here too, rather, various forms of rightist practice, movementism, and actionism predominate. Even the academic left at present tends far more strongly toward social democracy (including in its theorizing), than toward anything describable as speculative leftism.

But as a critique and diagnosis of a specific intellectual environment – a certain (important!) current of European and especially French politico-philosophical thinking – Bosteels’ analysis of speculative leftism is quite valuable. Respectful and written with care and close attention to details of text and argument, I like it a lot and I think Bosteels has articulated a problem and danger within this current, which tends toward surfacing even among those who (like Ranciere and Badiou) explicitly wish to avoid  it.

What about khukuri?

The charge of over-emphasis of theory has been sometimes raised against this site, with its slogan of radical reconception of revolutionary theory. What about practice? Is Khukuri dedicated to the proposition that the solution to our problems lies simply in the realm of theory?

Well – the fact that khukuri is a site dedicated to theory doesn’t imply on anyone’s part that theory is the only thing needed. But it is true, I believe, that without a basic reconception of revolutionary theory we can’t go forward. It’s an absolutely necessary part, in the present era, of the project of human emancipation. Necessary, although obviously not sufficient.

Our needs again

Practice – this is basic — is not only necessary but primary, in an overall sense. “The overthrow of all existing social conditions” (to quote the Manifesto) is not accomplished – actually accomplished – in the realm of theory. “The weapon of criticism,” to quote the wellknown passage from early Marx, “obviously cannot replace the criticism of weapons. Material force must be overthrown by material force.”

Of course the next sentence is: “But theory also becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses,”  bringing in the theory/practice, idea/matter dialectic (to use those old simplistic terms for a moment). It’s tempting to conclude that the theoretical task is to create that theory which will grip the masses, and in an overall sense that’s true. (And it’s a ready index of our present impoverishment that there is no such theory at present – no truly emancipatory theory which has gripped and become embodied in the struggles of the masses).

But it’s also true that it’s vain to think that one can enter a future period of intense social struggle with the needed theory already in place. A new emancipatory synthesis, a new path, a theoretical structure which actually grips the masses, will undoubtedly arise only in the context of a new mass practice. What do we do in the meantime? Wait for something new to arise? Well, yes, partly and in some sense. But in the meantime no one is preaching complete abstention from practice (not me, anyway).

But is “practice” so straightforward? “Just do something” is worse than useless as a political recommendation – that’s pretty obvious to all, I’m sure. Do what, and where (there are many possible fields of action), and how?

It’s easy enough to say that whatever one does, it needs to be revolutionary, not reformist practice. But what are the forms of revolutionary practice today? I submit that this is a question without a clear answer at all. Not to sit on our hands, but in my view what’s needed is deep and wide-ranging experimentation with new forms and new venues of practice.

Practical experimentation and theoretical reconception – if I could propose a slogan, that would be it.

And to return to the latter:

The taking assessment of our position, thinking in a deep and exploratory way about how a new revolutionary current might arise, understanding the structure and dynamics of capitalism and its classes as they exist now, really taking clear-eyed stock of our history, of the history of emancipatory movements and institutions – all these are theoretical tasks that cry out to be done. Nor are they simply interesting projects – “yeah, it would be nice if we had all that”; these are pressing revolutionary tasks. It’s certainly not clear to me how we can possibly get our bearings at present, and not simply engage in the mindless repetition of everything we’ve done before, without this sort of theoretical work.

To give one variation of something Zizek has recently often admonished: “Don’t just do something – Think!”

Related posts:

1. Zizek on our situation — and communism
2. What is Badiou’s communism?
3. On The Idea Of Communism: Communism 2.0?