Archive of issues of the online publication Viewpoint Magazine, an autonomist Marxist influenced online publication.
Viewpoint Magazine
Issue 1: Occupy Everything
Complete first issue of Viewpoint Magazine, an autonomist Marxist influenced online publication.
Everybody talks about the weather
Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi analyze the Occupy movement and the conditions that created it.
“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 character of 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 workers as 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 to independently 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.
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Who threw the can of green paint?: the first two weeks of Occupy Philadelphia
An article by Ben Webster on the contradictions and potential of the Occupy movement in Philadelphia during Fall 2011.
On the morning of October 14, one week into Occupy Philadelphia’s encampment beside City Hall, someone emptied the contents of a paint can on the building’s southwestern entrance. The unknown painter fled the scene, leaving behind a decidedly unsymbolic smear. Not of angry black or bloody red, but a smear of bland mint green. Police cordoned off the entrance, dismissing eager Occupy volunteers offering their assistance. A pressure cleaner quickly removed all traces of the deed.
This bizarre incident suggests much about Philadelphia’s iteration of the Occupy phenomenon. Like other occupations, its porous boundaries integrate the protest site with the flows of the city. Participants, passers-by, police, and provocateurs move freely throughout, with the possibility of enriching or destabilizing the action; was our painter a police provocateur or a well-intentioned but strategically challenged participant? Both were considered in the aftermath.
This incident also suggests the ambiguity and contradiction in the political imagination of Occupy Philadelphia (OP). What constitutes meaningful action – a spectacular act of vandalism, the peaceful occupation of public property, or direct action on the horizon more confrontational and radical? There has been no shortage of activity – daily marches strike out to the usual targets – but as of yet no dramatic confrontations like those of Occupy Wall Street have occurred. This is the real significance of the green paint incident. That such a blatant act of vandalism against the seat of municipal power was shrugged off so quickly by occupiers and police alike indicates both the power and impotence of OP. On the one hand, there was no police advance under the pretext of this or any other number of small provocations – surely an index of our power. On the other hand, the incident is an index of the limited threat to capital’s power that OP poses, which is, as of yet, not enough to move the heavy hand of the state, a hand whose ruthless power has been amply shown in recent Philadelphia history, from the 1985 bombing of the MOVE house to the repression of protests against the 2000 Republican National Convention.
To use two familiar political concepts, Occupy Philadelphia is at once animated by both the spirit of the commons and of the strike. I do not wish to argue for the primacy of either approach or assert their incompatibility, but rather to frame the young history of OP as a state of tension between these two poles. As a participant in the occupation, I hope to describe from both experience and analysis the distinct character of the Occupy X movement in post-industrial, working-class Philadelphia, and its significance for the contemporary class struggle.
Fighting City Hall
Occupy Philadelphia feels like a march, a strike, a commune, and a carnival. This variety of forms derives from the peculiarity of the tactic. One can participate in OP just by moving ordinary human activities – like sleeping, eating, socializing – to the occupation site. But “extraordinary” human activities – demonstrations, assemblies, teach-ins, movie screenings – have taken place there as well, creating a charged but uneven topography. The personal and the political do not yet coincide here, but they rub shoulders. A reading group on Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James’s The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community next to campers drying their soggy socks on a clothes line; a college dude testing out pickup lines in earshot of the people of color caucus.
Philly’s unique Occupy identity has developed in large part due to a détente with the city and its police. Over 1,000 people attended a raucous planning meeting two days before the occupation’s inauguration, a sizable show of force well covered by the local press. Of the two options available to the Philadelphia police – massive and very public repression or tacit cooperation – they opted for the latter. At 9 AM on October 6, hundreds assembled on the west side of City Hall and began constructing an encampment with relatively little interference. Although police are stationed visibly around the occupation and conduct walk-throughs both uniformed and plain-clothed, so far they’ve acted with restraint.
Activity in violation of city codes, including the construction of pallet structures for the homeless, has been permitted, emboldening some occupiers but creating an acrimonious internal debate. The hands-off approach thus far by the police confirms the liberal naiveté of some who, using the movement’s vocabulary, identify the police and city brass as part of “the 99%,” and therefore our allies. Indeed, Mayor Michael Nutter and Chief of Police Charles Ramsey made very public, very genial appearances at OP in its first days. Others, from political acumen or personal experience, view the city’s overtures with skepticism or overt antagonism. This debate came to a head with the early question posed to the general assembly of acquiring a permit, and has persisted to current discussions on how to respond to the city’s evolving position. The GA voted for a permit after much discussion. Although unprecedented in modern Philadelphia history for the liberties and exemptions it grants to the occupation, the permit does bind OP in a legalistic stasis – official, even granted a welcome by the powers that be, but neutered of antagonism. To the outlaw, relations of power are crystal clear.
This Philly compromise distinguishes OP from its Occupy Wall Street (OWS) template. Freed from both the glare of the international media and the menace of overt police activity, OP turns inward. Freedom from repression in a far larger physical space than OWS offers opportunities to strengthen our position but also deepens the contradictions latent within the Occupy movement. And although the police aren’t yet using pepper-spray and batons as they have against our New York comrades, this doesn’t indicate a lack of police tactics to crush OP. Two strategies must be anticipated from our enemies in City Hall. One, the strategy of patience, in which the police bide their time and wait for either winter weather or the “tragedy of the commons” to disperse OP. Two, the exploitation of incidents of non-passivity at OP-associated direct actions to crack down on the encampment. Both approaches can be anticipated, and, with proper foresight, made to backfire as the attempts at repression in New York have.
Strike and Commons
Philadelphia City Hall is monumental, the symbolic and geographical center of a battered but tenacious city. It is the second-tallest masonry building in the world, and in its heyday was a wonder of architectural achievement. The city’s two subway lines intersect underneath it, sending continuous rumblings up to its cold stone plazas. Along its west side is Dilworth Plaza, a two block long concrete plaza cast in the austere style of 60s urban renewal. It is the habitual dwelling of a large homeless population, and is scheduled to be handed over shortly to a private development group for the building of a cafe, skating rink, and conceptual fountains. In autumn, the plaza is perpetually in the shadow of City Hall and the surrounding office buildings, and whipped by intense winds.
OP has adapted many organizational features of the Occupy movement. The general assembly, which meets daily at 7 PM, is the primary forum for communication and decision-making. Working groups assure the daily reproduction of the occupation (food, medic, education, safety, facilitation, etc.) and its strategic thrust (direct action, media, messaging, etc.). Over 300 tents have been erected across Dilworth Plaza, populated by various “tribes” of the political and non-political (“do you go to the general assembly?”), young and old, white and black, counter-cultural and normies. Things are typically quiet before noon, and afterwards through the evening swell with part-time participants who sleep at home, curiosity-seekers, representatives of various political organizations, cops, passers-by, and the media. OP benefits greatly from its location literally on top of the city’s busiest transit hub. High school students and commuters contribute to its open vitality; there is strength in numbers, even if they are anonymous and temporary. Despite its proximity to Philadelphia’s central business district, OP does not have the belly-of-the-beast feel of OWS; this is not a global city, and a proletarian mien contaminates even those quarters fashioned in the mold of neoliberal finance capital.
OP, like its peers, strives for horizontal organization – ideally all participants have an equal right to determine the course of the occupation. The space created at OP for experimentation in egalitarian decision-making should be applauded; the proliferation of such spaces is essential for the project of proletarian autonomy. However, since thus far participation in decision-making and execution is encouraged but not compulsory, I would suggest that in practice, power at OP is functioning along the lines of a kind of primitive syndicalism. Proposals submitted for approval at the general assembly must first pass through a daily co-committee meeting (“co-co”), composed of representatives of the various working groups. In effect, access to power at OP is streamlined by participation in a working group: in the micro-society of OP, the workers in the working groups that constitute its infrastructure constitute its sovereign power. Is this a positive model to acknowledge and propagate, or a model that will tend to produce a division among occupiers between more active participants and those who participate by simply showing up and remaining in the encampment? It should be noted that groups such as caucuses of anarchists and people of color, by dint of their organizational capacity or moral power, readily move to the center of OP’s sovereign power at parity with the working groups. The ambiguity of the situation lies in the question of access to power: should this be determined by capacity for organization or objective position within existing social hierarchies? How can the reproduction of these hierarchies be actively combated within the occupations?
Confusion, overlap, and frustration are tolerated out of necessity at OP by the proliferating working groups. Good faith and movement momentum – for the time – paper over the considerable challenges of constituting a micro-society from a milieu of strangers with varying experiences and backgrounds, excepting the occasional raised voices and scuffles.
How long can the momentum last? OP has passed through three overlapping stages: spectacle, organization, and critique/action. In the early days in which spectacle dominated, everyone seemed to be filming everyone else with cellphone cameras, and the media swarmed over it all. When people gathered on the morning of October 6, they seemed uncertain what to do, which protest rituals to follow – who do I show my sign to? Is this a rally, a sit-in, or what? Who’ll be the first to set up their tent, and where? The proliferation of image production coincided with a nervous amorphous mass, only vaguely aware of its commonality and power.
In the second stage, organization, the encampment’s infrastructure was established. With the formation of working groups and procedures for communication and decision-making, the potential of the mass was harnessed. Dilworth Plaza was spatially delineated and mapped. Sub-groups such as the people of color caucus and the wheelchair-dependent self-organized to identify and correct patterns of exclusion. Brief struggles for control of media and outreach efforts finally expelled a narcissistic individual who treated OP’s Facebook page as a personal fiefdom. Internal organization is an ongoing process involving considerable experimentation, but the day to day reproduction of OP is secured for now, clearing the way for a deepening focus on critique and action.
In this current stage of critique and action, the conceptual parameters of commons and strike assume their power. Two questions, of demands and of acceptable direct action, predominate. It is widely accepted that OP can only maintain its momentum with a constant schedule of marches, teach-ins, and speakers. In this laboratory of praxis, in which the tactic of maintaining the occupation and the proliferation of collective critique are mutually reinforcing, the only thing lacking is a catalyst of true resistance. Marches have set out from OP to harass banks, visit predatory student loan sharks, tour shitty hospitals, and, arguably most successfully, chase Eric Cantor from a speaking engagement at the University of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia PD dutifully block off intersections and escort the marchers to their target and back to the occupation. OP now ironically possesses the power to march unobstructed anywhere in the city it chooses, but seems to be running out of symbolically potent destinations. All dressed up with nowhere to go, obscure political differences take on a new importance. What if the police are our enemies precisely by acting like our most obliging friends? If the “1%” can so easily neutralize our efforts, why will they bother listening to our demands?
OP recasts Dilworth Plaza as a commons, shifting it from a nominally public space to an actively common one, collectively owned by those who rule to the extent that they actively participate. It is a space striving towards decommodification, where human relationships have more value than the exchange of money. Yet it also bears a resemblance to a strike, a collective suspension of normal activity leading to a confrontational moment of decision. As the weather turns, the quotidian quality of OP tends towards the grim resolve of a picket line in the dead of winter. The two forms are not mutually exclusive; every commons must be defended, and every strike relies on a shared territory of experience, spatial or otherwise. The tendencies towards commons or strike do not neatly coincide with reformist or revolutionary perspectives. Yet the intersection of the forms makes for an unhappy tension, unable to develop with confidence in either direction. To expand and deepen the commons would be to hit too deeply and radically at the relations of private property and social reproduction for some participants. To adopt the antagonistic solidarity of the strike would be to abandon all pretenses of cooperation with the state and its agents, unacceptable for some. The project of OP, and the Occupy movement more broadly, is to synthesize the commons and the strike in a form appropriate to current relations of power and production.
Recomposition
Proletarian combativeness in Philadelphia, the site of many proud clashes in the history of American class struggle, still exists, evidenced by a variety of expressions ranging from the victorious PASNAP strike at Temple Hospital in 2010 to the auto-reduction action organized by teens at a local Sears store this past summer. OP is potentially a site of encounter and recomposition for a metropolitan working class changed by decades of deindustrialization, a swelling population of recent immigrants, and the combative youth subcultures of the flash mob and debt-ridden college grad variety. Although the process remains vague and preliminary, the occupation movement in Philly is a promising indicator of the working class’s political recomposition.
Two of the largest populations in the OP encampment are the long-term homeless and the college student milieu. That they sleep willingly side by side for weeks at a time speaks to the novelty of the Occupy movement. The close, extended contact of occupiers tends to cut through prejudice and ideological mystification, even though the egalitarian ideal of the movement remains distant. Individuals and groups who may never have otherwise encountered each other in the huge city now find themselves sharing both an economic critique and a tent. Should a major work stoppage occur in the city soon – both the Verizon negotiations and a number of public sector contract negotiations remain unsettled – encounter on a far larger scale is possible. The city’s major unions have issued statements of support for the occupation, but a material mingling has the potential to change the constitution of both movements for the better and expand momentum beyond the focal encampment. OP, however, may in the long run be a better producer of subjectivities then of concrete demands, and this would not be a fault.
An important subjectivity crystallizing in the Occupy movement is similar to the driving force behind the global originators of the occupation concept in Spain, Egypt, and Tunisia: young, educated, and downwardly mobile workers. Many recent graduates or dropouts of local universities like Temple and the University of Pennsylvania provide a motive force behind OP’s working groups, experiencing a mode of collective struggle quite different from managed, predictable campus “activism.” As comrades in California noted during the university occupations there in fall 2009, the practice of occupying tends to dissolve outdated distinctions like that between “workers” and “students.” A tantalizing possibility begging more research is the connection between OP’s site above a transit hub, and the highly mobile nature of this sector, moving around the city at odd hours between multiple part-time jobs, casual work, and classes. Earlier cycles of struggles in Philly, from the post-New Left Movement for a New Society in the 1970s to the clashes at the 2000 RNC, bequeathed long-lasting infrastructures of radical institutions and experience. Will OP be the coming-out party for a new cycle or just a flash in the pan?
Think Locally?
OP clearly owes its inspiration to Occupy Wall Street, encamped just two hours up the New Jersey Turnpike. The proximity of the two cities allowed many Philly organizers to visit OWS before launching OP, taking note of its organizational model and learning from its miscues. As one of the largest occupations in the country as of yet spared overt police repression, OP is both a significant model for the national movement and something of an aberration. Among occupiers, the relationship of OP to the movement remains uncertain, bespeaking a larger ambiguity towards the global, national, and local contexts of the crisis. Material efforts have been made to share resources with OWS, and solidarity actions with comrades attacked by police in Oakland and Atlanta are under discussion.
The political imaginary of OP remains largely stuck at the national level. Rhetoric of the 99%, Wall Street, and corporate taxes implicitly locates the current social and economic crises within national borders. Yet these crises have international causes and implications, and resistance in the form of occupations has likewise been a global phenomenon. As the calls for unified Occupy X demands increases, a real danger exists both in ignoring the global character of capital and our struggles, and in failing to connect Occupy’s critiques with local conditions and local grievances.
A faction within OP seized an early opportunity to advance long-standing local grievances and make demands of the city. After receiving a letter from the city government which made several demands of OP (dismantle fire hazards, control open urination, etc.), they refused a paternalistic relationship and in turn advanced several demands at the GA that OP should make in response. One of these included a repeal of Philadelphia’s racist youth curfew law. Conveniently up for a vote of extension steps away in City Hall, the law was initially passed to kill off the flash mobs that once rocked the city. Fighting a law that intentionally seeks to fracture, discipline, and manage specific layers of the working class would go a long way to reconnecting with those sectors that are still underrepresented at OP.
This general effort was accompanied by distribution of an excellent summary of recent local struggles, entitled “The Mayor and Police Are not Our Friends!” Spearheaded largely by anarchists (who have been the convenient targets of an ongoing red-baiting campaign), this effort has brilliantly changed the inflection of OP, focusing attention on local communities already in struggle. A predictable backlash followed, with many claiming that linking the occupation with struggles around the curfew and police brutality diluted our message and weakened public support.
This backlash escalated when 15 occupiers were arrested in front of Philadelphia PD headquarters on the national October 22 day of protest against police brutality. Although the efficacy of their non-violent civil disobedience tactics is debatable (all blocked a street overnight, refusing repeated police orders to disperse), the reality of police brutality in Philly is not. The first arrests of OP were denounced by many who sought to distance the activities at City Hall from those which, pushed outward by the occupation’s momentum, occurred elsewhere in the city. Should this failure of solidarity and centrifugal political imagination continue, OP will likely die a wintry death shivering in the shadows of Center City.
The October 22 arrests and the emergence of a new ultimatum from the city throw the future of OP into question. After granting an open-ended permit to the occupation, with no stated end date, the city announced November 15 as the first day of the renovation of Dilworth Plaza. This renovation includes the total reconstruction of the plaza by a private company bearing a 30-year lease, which will install an ice-skating rink and chic cafe, obviously inspired by Manhattan tourist geographies. Of course, the renovation will entail fencing off the plaza, expelling not only the occupation, but also the homeless who use it as a long-term home. So the date has been set for confrontation. Whether the city backs down, OP relocates, or is forcibly expelled, is uncertain. How OP decides to act against this threat will be a major indicator of the movement’s resolve and potential.
A far larger challenge, however, is the winter weather. The last two Philadelphia winters have been among the harshest on record. Simply put, OP cannot withstand a northeastern winter at its current size, and should not try to. Discouraged dispersion when the temperature dips is the worst possible outcome, and providing a spectacle of personal suffering to the media through it all is a terrible tactic. Occupations have captured the imagination of the world, but fetishizing the tactic is a strategic blunder. The only limit to continuing and growing this nascent movement is our imagination. Our conversations and GAs must move, and quickly, to the discussion of new tactics – occupying abandoned buildings (of no short supply in Philly), subversive organizing in our schools and workplaces, strengthening of the local struggles our anarchist comrades have drawn attention to – action, education, and theorizing without a central encampment if need be. GAs can continue indoors, marches and direct action can expand throughout the city, and of course hardcore occupiers can continue outside if they wish. This strategic retreat is actually an advance across the entirety of the social terrain – but one that will require defying the logic of media representation and the spectacle of contemporary politics.
In one form or the other, we can be optimistic that Occupy Philadelphia will inspire a winter of discontent in the City of Brotherly Love. Come spring, we can reoccupy not only Dilworth Plaza, but Rittenhouse Square, Love Park, Franklin Parkway, and – why not – Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, too.
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From Egypt to Wall Street
Wendell Hassan Marsh on the links between the Wisconsin protests, the Egyptian Revolution and the Occupy movement.
Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak had already stepped down, following a popular movement that established a micro-republic, the Gumhuriyyah el-Tahrir (Republic of Liberty), which contradicted the pervading logic of the international economic system. And now protesters in Wisconsin were occupying the state house to prevent the passing of legislation that would effectively suspend bargaining rights for public workers. Sitting in a Washington newsroom, we needed a headline. I very quickly suggested something along these lines: “Middle East unrest spreads to the Midwest.” I got a side eye. After all, how could a free and open society, the democratic society, be taking its cues from, of all places, Egypt, an antique land with backward ways, Islamic fundamentalists, and Arab dictators? The editors went with a more modest title.
However, for many in the Arab world, the connection was not lost for a minute. They saw in the occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol the same spirit that was present in Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation: the refusal to accept the financial order’s demand to obliterate decades of progressive struggle and negotiation.
Maybe my own time in Cairo made me see the easy connection that my editors missed. I lived there for a almost a year and a half on the largess of the American government. The conditions of my presence were a reminder of the structural inequalities of the global system. Any old American can arrive to the airport without a visa, little training in any useful domain and quickly find gainful employment and a life of comfort. An Egyptian, however, even with years of education, has to struggle to make a living.
As many set out today to occupy everything, let us take a moment to remember the real origins of this global movement and allow it to guide our ongoing politics.
Deep in the land of Hannibal the Carthaginian, who once challenged the power of another global empire, Bouazizi was born to a construction worker, living his entire life in Sidi Bouzid, an agrarian town. The 26-year-old scraped together an existence for himself and a large family by selling fruit. Relatively speaking, he did well to have even that hustle, as the New York Times reported that unemployment reaches as high as 30% in his area. There was a nearby factory, but that only pays around $50 a month. Even the college educated were heading to the coast, where they too struggled with underemployment.
A veteran fruit vendor, Bouazizi was used to the authorities that policed the fruit stands. Sometimes he paid a fine, other times a bribe. But on the morning of December 17, Bouazizi refused to do either. He also refused an attempted confiscation of his fruit, commodities that are often bought on credit by the para-legal vendors. The representative of the state eventually won the first battle. Beaten and humiliated, Bouazizi quickly tried redressing his grievances at the governor’s office, requesting that, at the least, his scale be returned. Ignored at the governor’s, he was reported to ask, “how do you expect me to make a living?” He set himself ablaze and ignited a global movement.
Protests started hours after the incident. Bouazizi’s family and friends threw coins at the governor’s gate. “Here is your bribe,” they yelled. As the unrest grew, police started to beat protesters, firing tear gas and eventually bullets. But the spirit wouldn’t be stifled. Organized labor joined in the struggle, identifying the central problem as economic. After all, it was global capital that had denied Bouazizi and his supporters their dignity; it extracted surplus value from human objects down to the last drop of blood.
Former colonial power France offered to lend a hand with its security savoir-faire. Or maybe they would have just hired a private firm to handle the contract. Later acknowledging the misstep, Sarkozy tried to justify his government’s support of the authoritarian regime with revealing, if trite, arguments. “Behind the emancipation of women, the drive for education and training, the economic dynamism, the emergence of a middle class, there was a despair, a suffering, a sense of suffocation. We have to recognise that we underestimated it,” Sarkozy said in a press conference.
Sarkozy underestimated the effect that the “economic dynamism” of the ruling elite had on the majority of the country. He underestimated the diminished economic prospects that resulted from Tunisia’s decreased agricultural and manufacturing exports to Europe. He underestimated the Tunisian people’s reaction in the face of potential annihilation by economic violence.
The movement quickly spread to nearby Egypt, where conditions have been even worse, the socio-economic divide between the top 1% and the rest even more dramatic. Several self-immolations occurred throughout the country, prompting the Cheikh of al Azhar, the most respected institution in the Sunni Islamic world, to issue a fatwa against the practice. Youth with degrees but without jobs started to occupy Tahrir Square, to call for the dignity that global neoliberal policies had denied them. They took the recent tactics of Egypt’s young but growing labor movement and added others.
When Mubarak, whose 30-year reign had been marked by the opening of the country to Western business interests, started to crack down on the protesters as the empire’s strong man, the people said he had to go. The public began to protest against dictatorship, but only insofar as they were protesting the global economic empire.
Somehow a popular narrative has emerged in our media that the Arab spring protested against dictatorship, against murderous regimes. These popular struggles have been reduced to rebellions against the villainies of a Qaddafi, an Assad, a Saleh.
But the Arab Spring started as a protest against global finance and its henchmen. Almost across the board, protesters claiming public space were demanding mostly economic reforms. It was only after Arab dictators, whose decennial rules offered up their countries to the jaws of the global market, started to repress this popular struggle with violence, that dictatorship became the target of regime change.
Occupy Wall Street and the subsequent Occupy movement were initiated in the same spirit of economic justice. Zuccotti Park, ironically taken and renamed Liberty Plaza by its occupiers, is a micro-republic where the logic of empire doesn’t work. People take pride in discomfort, in being arrested and working for free. Altruism has become normative and hierarchy repugnant. To be sure, there is inner dissent and struggle within the body politic of the micro-republic. Nevertheless, the audacity to live a utopian practice has become liberating in itself.
Yet this movement can’t content itself with granting young people the right to take on more debt to live the lives the world can’t sustain, or reforming the way candidates fund their campaigns. The despotism that western powers decry in the name of human rights is a symptom of a wider system of economic exploitation, which at home manifests itself in the attack on the American working and middle class. They are connected.
The repressive measures states use against their own populations has also been imported from the Middle East. A recent post by Max Blumenthal connects the dots behind recent alarming examples of social control and police militarization:
The police repression on display in Oakland reminded me of tactics I witnessed the Israeli army employ against Palestinian popular struggle demonstrations in occupied West Bank villages like Nabi Saleh, Ni’lin and Bilin. So I was not surprised when I learned that the same company that supplies the Israeli army with teargas rounds and other weapons of mass suppression is selling its dangerous wares to the Oakland police. The company is Defense Technology, a Casper, Wyoming based arms firm that claims to “specialize in less lethal technology” and other “crowd management products.” Defense Tech sells everything from rubber coated teargas rounds that bounce in order to maximize gas dispersal to 40 millimeter “direct impact” sponge rounds to “specialty impact” 12 gauge rubber bullets.
One veteran of the war in Iraq knows the effects of the police-sponsored violence firsthand. After being hit by a tear gas canister launched by the Oakland Police Department, Scott Olsen suffered a fractured skull and a swollen brain. As though that were not enough, video footage shows a police officer throwing a flash bang grenade next to the bloodied man to disperse the crowd of people coming to his aid. But such police brutality is nothing new in Oakland, home of a radical black politics that has struggled against structural economic and physical violence against the working class, the poor, and minorities.
We should remember that the politics forged by the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s and 1970s made deep ties with the anti-imperial projects of North Africa, the hotbed of today’s vanguard movement. Algeria made the Panther headquarters in Oakland their embassy, providing a sort of diplomatic shield against police surveillance. When Eldridge Cleaver went into exile, Algeria hosted him and the international section of the party. A chapter was also created in Cairo, then, a nerve center for the world wide freedom struggle.
Much is riding on the direction of the Occupy movement in America. While visiting the Wall Street occupiers, two of Tahrir’s leading activists emphasized the importance of the Occupy movement for the renewal of the Arab Spring. To Americans who asked how they could help the ongoing Egyptian struggle, Asmaa Mahfouz replied, “get your revolution done. That’s the biggest help you can give us.” What Mahfouz was counting on was the possibility that struggles in the United States could pressure the government to cut off the $1.3 billion yearly payments that sustain Egypt’s military.
Long-time activist Ahmad Maher reminded the crowd of the immense task the Arab Spring confronted, and which activists around the world still confront. An American asked him the most fundamental question: “how do you overthrow a system?” Speaking as a grassroots political organizer who has been on the Egyptian street for years, Maher replied, “It’s easier to overthrow a dictator than an entire system.”
There is a reason that the Occupy movement does not have a singular message, tied to one political body; its success or failure will lie in the degree to which it changes everything.
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Insurrection, Oakland style: a history
An article by Matthew Edwards on the roots of Occupy Oakland, which includes the movement and riots that happened in response to the police murder of Oscar Grant in January of 2009.
This is an unfinished work – a snapshot of history as it occurred, experienced by me, reported on social media, or retold by trusted comrades. It will lack the finality of hindsight. Contained within is my account of the Oakland Insurrection, as it has unfolded over the past days and weeks. Both the insurrection and this essay are works of hope. I hope that we push forward on the streets of Oakland, the Bay Area, and everywhere else, to the limit of what is possible – beyond occupation and the proposed general strike to “total freedom” for us all.1
#OccupyOakland
Inspired by the uprisings across the world and fueled by the increasingly precarious economic conditions across the United States, a callout was made for an occupation of Wall Street. On September 17, 1000 people occupied the financial hub of the United States and arguably global capitalism. Within days, dozens of towns and cities had their own version of the #Occupy movement – with varying degrees of encampment, protest, and organizing space; within weeks, hundreds of cities were occupied; within a month, over a thousand worldwide.
Oakland’s Frank Ogawa Plaza, renamed Oscar Grant Plaza by many Bay Area residents, was occupied on October 10. Logistical planning started a week before the occupation date, with #OccupyOakland fielding a fully functional canteen, childcare, medic, sound, and general assembly area on day one, with person of color (POC), gender, and queer safe spaces soon to follow. #OccupyOakland had the same populist rhetoric regarding the problematic “homogeneous” nature of “#Occupy…”, but pushed the “99%” critique in a decidedly anti-capitalist direction. Coupled with this was a distinctly anti-police and anti-state tone that also translated into anti-oppression organizational forms.
On October 21 the city of Oakland presented the general assembly, the official organizing body of #OccupyOakland, with a letter of eviction, citing “public safety.” The words of OaklandCommune, posted October 19 on the Bay of Rage website, beautifully foreshadow what transpired on October 25 and 26when the police made good on their threats:
Social rebels from around Oakland have descended upon Oscar Grant Plaza and have created a genuine, autonomous space free of police and unwelcoming to politicians. Whereas other occupations have invited the police and politicians, or have negotiated with them, Occupy Oakland has carved a line in the cement. That line of demarcation says: if you pass this, if you try and break up or over shadow this autonomous space, you are well aware, as observed over the last couple of years, what we are capable of.
History
The Bay Area’s history of social resistance is well documented, and it’s important to remember the context behind the militancy seen around #OccupyOakland. The general events these social rebels are referring to are the uprisings and demonstrations that have occurred over the past three years in the Bay Area, responding to police violence and “austerity.”2
To understand the events of the past week, one must understand the atmosphere in which these actions took place. The most relevant of these demonstrations revolve around three sets of riots that followed the murder of Oscar Grant III on January 1, 2009.3
One week after Oscar’s murder by police, January 7, 2009, a rally at the Fruitvale BART station transitioned into a march that eventually evolved into a riot, with running street fights against police. The action resulted in 100 arrests and hundreds of thousands in policing costs and property destruction. Johannes Mehserle, the officer who killed Grant, was arrested one week later – a day before thousands marched through Oakland, serving notice to the police that their actions had consequences.
A series of low and mid-intensity direct actions and marches occurred over the next 18 months until the verdict day, July 8, 2010, when Mehserle was ostensibly acquitted for murder and found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for shooting an unarmed and prone Oscar Grant in the back. Police preparations, dubbed “Operation Verdict,” were one of the largest local buildups of state and federal police forces in recent history.4 The buildup actually seemed to intensify popular opinion against the police. Operation Verdict not only failed to stop another riot, where hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of property was destroyed, but also failed to arrest as many demonstrators as the riots of a year before. Sentencing day, November 5. 2010, saw an evolution of police tactics that stopped the march before it morphed into something greater. The march was kettled and everyone was arrested in mass, all later to be released without charges.
Oscar Grant’s Legacy
I would like to recognize that Oscar Grant was a real person; with a daughter, family, and friends. I would like to recognize this because the human element can get lost when we make martyrs out of casualties. The actions around his death were living laboratories for many Bay Area residents, specifically youth and political radicals – anarchists, anti-authoritarians, and anti-capitalists. For some, this was the first time they had tasted tear gas or felt the sting of a rubber bullet. The January 7 riot was a hurried affair, with people quickly learning how to stay together, erect makeshift barricades, or set fires to necessitate getaways.
July 8 saw the forces of the state prepared and still unable to stop scores of “crews” smashing shop windows.5 Communication and coordination appeared to improve between the various demonstration participants. Masks were worn and code names used. It was apparent that even just a few “battle hours” dramatically increased a collectivity’s “street” effectiveness, i.e. the ability to create social unrest and get away with it. Through these events, it was revealed that street demonstrations, with riots in particular, did have an effect on, if not public policy, then at least civic discourse.
There were failures as well. Media and state forces conspired to create the concept of the “outside agitator” – the anarchist from afar whose only purpose was to smash. The actions of property destruction seemed to overshadow the context in which they were used. The tactic itself was the perfect expression of the powerlessness that people felt in demanding, from an unjust state, some sort of “justice.” It was an action of tantrum, saying, “in this protest zone, in this space of social rupture, I only have the ability to destroy.” A statement like that, while unifying for the participants within that instant of “social rupture,” has little to no organizing potential. And so the movement went from active conflict to history. Its steam and momentum were lost. However, with its passing came a time of tactical and strategic reflection, the results of which were practiced on the streets of Oakland under the banner of #Occupy only a week ago.
Anarchists
The efforts and effects of the anarchist tradition in the Bay Area cannot be ignored, neither in the case of Oscar Grant nor #OccupyOakland. There are hundreds of anarchists active in “street level” actions; hundreds more working in various corporate, non-profit, alternative, and other industries that bring money, logistical support, and experience when needed; and hundreds still who are engaged in their own projects, communities, and building families.
The presence of such a high concentration of anarchists at radical or potentially explosive demonstrations has influenced how people protest. To be sure, not every person at a demo is an anarchist, far from it, but many have adopted anarchist practice. Masking up, wearing black, and working in teams has created a safer and more disciplined force. The attendance of anarchist street medics, propagandists, and experienced street fighters adds a level of infrastructural and logistical support that makes actions on the streets feel supported and emboldened. Traditionally organizing on egalitarian and non-hierarchical planes, as well as a familiarity with consensus process, have facilitated the creation of a strong general assembly. The creation of solidarity groups for those arrested at actions, and access to the legal network that years of Bay Area activism created has been key in movement progress. In both social movements the anarchist presence has been an important, though by far not the only, element to any success.
This is not to say that an anarchist presence in the Bay Area has not had its troubles in recent years. The attempt by the state to brand anarchists as “outsiders” failed in the buildup of Operation Verdict, but did highlight racial and class issues that people are still confronting. Furthermore there was a successful attempt to brand anarchists has violent, although this was just one more step in a process dating back hundreds of years to redefine “anarchism” in the negative. Still, the only contact that many people have had with anarchists is the images presented by the media of “black-clad hooligans destroying things.” The insurrectionary anarchist current that is alive within the Bay has showed itself as a trend of attack, security culture, and tightknit networks. In the past it was inward focusing and only surfaced in times of action, although the presence of many insurrectionists at the general assemblies and their use of violence in a form different from that of property destruction does give credence to the idea that this trend is maturing.
Insurrection and Strike
Throughout the week, preparations were made within the #OccupyOakland space for arrival of police enforcing the eviction notices. The plan was to construct and defend barricades to keep the Oakland Police Department (OPD) out for as long as possible. Over the past two weeks, the police made only a handful of incursions into the autonomous space. The response by those camped was always forceful yet disciplined, with the distilled message being: “get out!” As a result there was little worry about the question of “when” “they” would come. “They will come when they do,” one camper told me with a shrug the night before the eviction. On Tuesday October 25, at 4:30 AM, hundreds of riot police from over a dozen different agencies descended upon the camp. After calling a dispersal order, police waited for five minutes before throwing concussion grenades, launching tear gas, firing pepper and rubber bullets, and hitting people with batons. The night concluded with around 80 arrests and some serious injuries.
A call out was made for 4 PM the same day to meet at the Oakland Library for a march to Oscar Grant (OG) Plaza. A diverse crowd of over 1500 people arrived. They marched around Oakland, swelling in numbers as people came into the streets. The police attacked with gas, less-than-lethal rounds, and batons. Demonstrators responded with bottles and paint balloons. Police snatch squads grabbed and beat protestors in full view of the crowd, with a handful having to be taken to the emergency room.6 The march continued to OG Plaza where lines of riot police stood behind metal barricades blocking all possible entrances. A standoff ensued.
At roughly 8:30 PM a crowd of 500 assembled at 14 and Broadway. After repeated warnings the police attacked. The gas attack was the worst of the day. Injured protesters littered the intersection, including Scott Olson, two-tour Marine veteran, who took a teargas canister to the head. Others were blinded and choking on the gas. Numerous burn victims from the gas canisters ran for cover; at least one of them needed plastic surgery on her foot. The crowd recomposed within minutes, playing cat and mouse with the police, rallying and taking the streets outside the barricades, fleeing from police attacks only to form again.
The chatter of excitement and anger was easy to understand. Groups of people were swapping stories from the days events. The gas was loosing its fear effect; these crowds were not dispersing. Teenagers were laughing at each other’s snot and tear-soaked faces. Older people were talking about the 1960s; “gas nowadays seems more potent,” they said. Anarchist and other radical medics were helping gas victims. By about 10 PM it was obvious that even though the group had failed to retake the plaza, they had in fact won two important victories. #OccupyOakland was effectively in control of all of downtown Oakland save OG Plaza. Or, to put it differently, the police had lost the initiative: they had lost their mobility and the ability to dictate terms outside the range of their weapons. By controlling the plaza they abdicated control of the rest of downtown Oakland to the occupiers. Declaring victory on the ground, the hundreds of occupiers began to disperse to ready themselves for the next day.
The second victory was not seen until the next day, when media outlets had no choice but to broadcast images of the night’s insurrection. Grabbing the media’s attention as well was the grievous injury to Scott Olson. Surviving two tours in Iraq to come home and be shot by OPD sealed the police’s fate in the realm of public opinion. Not only had #OccupyOakland succeeded in controlling the streets, they had also won over hearts and minds. As of this writing it looks as though Scott will recover and not become a martyr for any cause, just another victim of police brutality.
A general assembly was called for 6 PM on October 26. The police were nowhere in sight, but some reported that they were massing at a nearby parking garage. They were never to mobilize in any show of force. Bike patrols were passing back information, and a general feeling of safety permeated the camp. The metal fence that had been set up by the city was taken down, and once again the plaza was in the hands of #OccupyOakland. A proposal was submitted for a general strike in Oakland on November 2. The proposal passed by 96.9%; 1484 votes for to 77 against, with 47 abstentions, more than enough in Oakland’s modified consensus of 90% for the proposal to pass.
After the vote, 2000 people attempted to march for the downtown Oakland BART station to travel to San Francisco, where it was reported that the SF occupation was to be attacked by SFPD. The station was closed by BART officials, so the 2000-strong group marched through Oakland, stopping once at the OPD headquarters to yell at the police, once at the Oakland jail chanting in support of those incarcerated, and once under a freeway overpass, to discuss whether the group should cross the Oakland/Bay bridge to support #OccupySF. The march decided to retake OG Plaza instead.
A truly startling realization emerged among many of the anarchists present at the general assembly. As thousands of people discussed the general strike proposal, others were circulating and intermingling, talking about the victory of the night before. A major theme of the discussion was the fact that so much had been gained without resorting to property destruction. A tacit understanding developed amongst many of the radicals that no one was going to physically stop any of the “wrecking crews” from smashing windows, but people understood that much of the previous night’s victory could be attributed to the images of police violence against protestors and the counter-violence of protestors against the police. If there is an insurrectionary imperative to attack the state, that idea seemed to gain support, at least among those in the general public who watched the live stream. The march on October 25 showed how the protestors had done due diligence in their attempt to remain “peaceful”; they responded to police violence with defensive force, instead of the less understood (and less direct) tactic of attacking property. A violence of low-intensity self-defense actually gained #OccupyOakland international support.
Lessons Learned
In the OG Plaza riots, the impotent violence that resulted in Mehserle’s arrest also doomed the movement to remain marginal. People have many unresolved issues with property destruction. It is my presumption that those in command of the police forces on the night of the October 25 expected to see protester-initiated property destruction. Broken windows have the power to retroactively rationalize the use of police violence. The destruction of the camp and the attack on the march would suddenly seem understandable once the nightly news flashed images of broken glass. Unfortunately for police command, the radical and urban #OccupyOaklanders did not fall into their trap. There was no need; confronting OPD and Alameda Sheriff’s Department was enough.
There was a very real feeling that if the OPD had changed its tactics on the night of October 25, and – instead of holding positions and gassing protestors – went in for arrests, the police might have started a fight that they were not prepared to win. There were roughly equal number of police and #OccupyOaklanders, around 500 each, but the police were spread out, covering the perimeter of OG Plaza, while the demonstrators were able to focus all their numbers in one location. Even more impressive is that on the night of October 26, with the police lacking the authority to act in response to #OccupyOakland’s retaking of OG Plaza, the occupiers were able to push the police out of their autonomous zone and defend it. This cohesion and the strength of will it produced is a direct result of the reflections, lessons, and tactical considerations that grew from the OG riots. Those initiating confrontations with police did so with discipline, and, dare I say it, style.
There has been a lot of talk about a lack of demands as a weakness of the #Occupy movements. I hear their demands loud and clear. The critique of capitalism, opposition to state power, clear revulsion towards the police, redefinition of social and power relations, independent organization, cooperation, and the attempt to reconfigure our existing world into one that is healthy for all; these are demands that are being made by those occupying. The idea from the beginning was to create. In acts of creation power is returned. We have held our ground, defended a space that is our own. Now we are organizing not just for ourselves but also for others. A general strike will occur. The next question is clear: what other cities will follow?
See you in the streets.
Matthew Edwards is a graduate student at UC-Santa Cruz, and an organizer in the Bay Area. A native Californian, he has been involved in radical politics since refusing deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2002. Comments can be sent to anewhope AT riseup.net
- 1This phrase appeared on a massive banner by a contingent of Greek anarchists at the 2009 G-20 in Germany. While not explicitly Insurrectionist, the Greek anarchist tendency of spectacular street battles has become synonymous with the Insurrectionary Anarchist milieu that has dominated North American discourse in recent years.
- 2For an amazing collection of news stories dating back over 10 years, see indybay.org.
- 3The first murder of 2009 was committed by a police officer against an unarmed person of color.
- 4It is also important to note that the National Guard was mobilized.
- 5One could also use the term “affinity group,” but an affinity group is an expressly political form of self organization that may not necessarily apply to all those who ran together that night.
- 6It is important to point out that the police were not the only perpetrators of violence that evening. One arrestee was punched, elbowed and pushed to the ground by an Oakland fire department member who also made derogatory sexual and racial comments towards him. Later in sheriff custody at the county jail he was beaten by at least four correctional officers.
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The Italianization of Puerto Rico: a reflection on social struggles against university policies in the world's oldest colony
A former University of Puerto Rico professor briefly describes the imposition of austerity on the UPR, the struggle in response and the similarities to the Italian experience.
Dismantling a public education system in a country with strong background of political struggles requires a mitigated form of neoliberal strategy. Shutting down a whole language department, which is happening at SUNY Albany, is something you can do in certain areas of the United States. But it is a whole different story in a hot and participatory place like Italy. In a situation where active unions and a strong popular movement still have a say in public policies, one cannot launch a blitzkreig. What is needed is a longer and murky war of position. Thus various center-right governments, with the complicity of the center-left, embarked since the 1990s in a long-term project that aimed at progressively cutting off key resources from public education (while financing the private Catholic sector) so that the whole edifice would eventually crumble under the weight of its own (apparent) contradictions. At that point, they simply need to suggest that the public system is inefficient and ultimately unproductive and voilà! Who could deny the crude reality of the fact?
If the Italian peninsula displays the last stage of this drama, a similar – yet perhaps more rapid – operation has been carried out in Puerto Rico in the last three years. Between 2009 and 2010, I observed this operation as a new professor at the University of Puerto Rico. The new right-wing governor, Luis Fortuño, initiated the process I had already seen completed in Italy by frontally attacking the lower classes, the true source of his opposition. This happened through the infamous Ley 7 that fired about twenty thousand public employees in a matter of a few months. In 2010, the time was ripe to begin grinding down the public university system, one of the largest public sectors on the island and the last stronghold of a once fertile tradition of pro-independence and socialist thought. With the drastic reduction of state support for the university budget, the true revenue for higher education in Puerto Rico, the newly appointed bureaucrats (all political nominees) enforced draconian measures that crippled the institution. Tenure-track promotions were frozen, funds for research eliminated, contributions from the employer to pension funds were slashed away. After the technocrats sampled the weak response of their opponents – the professors – they hit the toughest contingents: the university maintenance workers, and students.
Employees of the university responded with a series of limited mobilizations. In the spring of 2010, students instead opted for an indefinite strike.1 The most controversial point, a matter that unified students in their fight, was a proposal to levy an additional yearly tax of eight hundred dollars for enrollment (the so-called cuota). The measure was presented by the president as the essential step to save the university from bankruptcy, but while the budget kept on shrinking in the following academic year, the university also refused to open its books and show how and where it was using the remaining funds graciously made available by the state. The reactions to these unfair and discriminatory actions were immediate. The strength of the response was especially noticed in a traditionally conservative campus like Mayagüez – the technological pole of the University of Puerto Rico. Ignoring the most politicized wing of the student body, who boycotted the referendum in fear of manipulations by the administration, the majority of students cast their ballot in favor of the strike three consecutive times.2 A felicitous case of popular outflanking of one’s own political avant-garde, the one-month-long occupation of the Mayagüez campus left a permanent memory in those who participated in it. Pickets were organized so that ongoing activities were taking place at all time during the hot days of the protest. Participants caught a glimpse the true meaning of a general strike, the moment when social norms and masked forms of oppression break down, making room for new modes of conviviality, where a gratuitous kind of social unity proliferates.
And yet, in the best Italian tradition, during that summer the university administration staged a treacherous coup de théâtre: it accepted the conditions of the Student National Negotiation Committee, declaring the rejection of its increase in tuition, only to enforce it a few weeks later when students had returned to the classroom.3 It was a perfect maneuver, which used trickery to spread a sense of impotence among the movement. Only in the main campus of San Juan did students deploy a vigorous and continuous opposition. But as the university – notwithstanding the opposition of the president, José Ramón de la Torre, who on this account later resigned – militarized the campus the movement lost that widespread mobilization that affected the whole island only few months before.4
Meanwhile, the ones who could have replaced the students, keeping alive the hope for an opposition against the destruction of higher education in Puerto Rico – the professors – remained silent. During the occupation, a minority of professors with ties to the union (APPU) actively supported the student movement. But as students were defeated, they had gained no consensus among the rest of the faculty. And yet the latter had every reason to protest, for beyond the serious impact these policies had on instruction, the faculty could also notice how former colleagues were rapidly disappearing while classrooms began to overflow. Those who had a market fled the island, but others, mostly holding temporary positions, vanished as the 2010-2011 academic year began. In the following months, the next most vulnerable component of the teachers’ workforce, international professors, was targeted as the usual procedures for working permits became almost impossible to complete. Here the most astonishing confirmation of the power of ideology took place. Although the large majority of the teachers, independently from their political affiliation, were affected in one way or the other, they kept silent and went about their business as usual.
The background of the teaching body at the University of Puerto Rico is significant. We could divide up faculty in three large sets. The first one is composed of Puerto Rican nationals, as well as Latin Americans and Europeans, who obtained a PhD. in the United States. Here is where the students enjoyed the strongest support. A consistent number of these intellectuals infused the body of theoretical knowledge accumulated in the best North American institutions with the praxis of the decades of struggle at home. Obviously, not all of them were so devoted to the cause. A consistent part of this group was also either cynically refusing any form of alliance with the students on account of some higher and more intellectual superiority, or was implicitly supporting the government. Among these individuals the new cadres of the university bureaucracy were selected; they zealously followed the prescriptions of the administration, opting out of what was left alive in the university.
The second ensemble groups US professors who were catapulted into an unfamiliar reality that remained foreign to them – although they usually operated in it quite effectively, at least from an educational point of view. Though the majority felt like they were living in another country, they usually denied that this territory is in fact a colony with specific tensions and responses in and to social fights. Moreover, accustomed as they were to the costs of education at home, these professors saw no problem in the imposition of the cuota. Overlooking at the disparity in incomes between Puerto Rico and the US, they at best adopted a classic defensive corporatist position tacitly supporting increases in tuition in the interest of the institution. This form of ideological preclusion prevented them from reading the complexity of the issues at stake, which also affected them as part of that community. They channeled their discontent into the usual reproach of Puerto Rico as just another Latin country, where corruption, bureaucracy and protest culture jam the whole social system and make it inefficient and chaotic. Only a few of them, those who knew their history and possibly lived through similar colonial dynamics in the US, avoided this ideological blockage and joined forces with the student movement.
The last group is formed by personnel trained in the former motherland: Spain. Although the Puerto Rican political elite holds the precious fruits of the Spanish academia in high regard, it recently had to realize that Spanish universities no longer produce the highly conformist generations of graduates they used to hurl out under Franco. Support came also from this new and energetic guard of professors, but it was not strong and pervasive enough to win a majority among the faculty.
To be sure, the rigid university hierarchy is very resistant to change, and has so far neutralized any reactions to the current situation. Divided by national differences and stubborn ideological occlusions, the majority of the teaching faculty is unlikely to take any collective step to protect their institution. As the administration rapidly saws away at the branch they are sitting on, along with any future safety net – the employees’ retirement plan recently came under government’s attention as well – they passively wait for a new election. Little do they know that freedom is something you gain, and that you have to defend day by day. It will not be an illuminated sovereign who will reestablishes peace and prosperity. It will be up to the students, instead, to rise again, and, if not defeat the government neo-liberal agenda, at least establish firm conditions for the new government (whatever it will be) to preserve the common good of their university.
Andrea Righi is the author of Biopolitics and Social Change in Italy: From Gramsci to Pasolini to Negri (Palgrave, 2011). He is assistant professor of Italian at Colorado College. Between 2009 and 2011 he taught at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez.
Originally posted at Viewpoint Magazine
- 1The strike was supported by the Professor’s Association (APPU), the so-called Hermandad (university maintenance workers) and other unions such as Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration and the independent union of the authority of public buildings (UIAEP).
- 2Following the no-confrontation policy that is enforced in the university system after the bloody confrontations of the 1970s and 1980s, the University of Puerto Rico grants that if one of the major three branches (the faculty, the student body or the employees) calls for a strike, campuses shut down and classes resume only at the end of the strike.
- 3See Leysa Caro González, “Reafirman que la cuota va en enero próximo,” Primera Hora, December 14, 2010. http://www.primerahora.com/reafirmanquelacuotavaeneneroproximo-452820.html
- 4See Cynthia López Cabán, “De la Torre exorciza sus demonios,” El Nuevo Día, May 25, 2011. http://www.elnuevodia.com/delatorreexorcizasusdemonios-974789.html
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The underground history of occupation
Julie McIntyre argues that the Occupy movement, in order to sustain and increase its momentum, should put issues such as housing and the cost of utilities at the forefront and look towards the long history of ephemeral occupations by dancing collectivities for inspiration.
In the early twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of African-Americans migrated from the Deep South to Harlem. Racist white residents fled to the outer boroughs and the suburbs, and landlords began to double and triple Harlem rents, capitalizing on the limited geographic options presented to new black New Yorkers. Families crammed into single rooms, but when the first of the month neared, they still had to search for supplementary sources of income to make their rent payments. Inspired by the tradition of Southern Saturday night fish fries and “breakdowns,” Harlemites began to roll up their rugs, push the furniture aside, and print tickets to promote their “Parlor Socials,” or “Too Terrible Parties.” Hosts invited dueling pianists such as Fats Waller to turn on the heat with “cutting contests,” which sparked unrestrained dancing and revelry, the likes of which working-class blacks could never access in exclusive neighborhood joints that denied admission to black people, such as Harlem’s famed Cotton Club. The party hosts charged admission, typically a quarter, and made extra rent money from the sale of bathtub gin, corn whiskey, and soul food. The rent party scene served as an incubator for several notable jazz pianists, and it began to play a vital economic and social role in the life of Harlem’s working-class community.
Though some recent media accounts depict rent parties as a novel practice of the alternative white twenty-somethings who gentrify black communities, they began as a dynamic and autonomous response to exploitation, and warrant careful study as a traditional practice of occupation. Although the concept was not widely addressed in mainstream U.S. media prior to the seizing of Zuccotti Park and various other public and private spaces in American cities, the act of occupying has a rich and complex history. Critical participants have emphasized that the United States is occupied land, and have called for the movement to use the word with acknowledgement of its destructive history for indigenous populations. Those with a global perspective have pointed to the occupation of Tahrir Square, and similar popular movements throughout the world over the past many years. For those anchored in labor history, the term brings to mind the tradition of worker occupations of factories – as a strike technique used to prevent lockouts, and in some cases, to “recover” the factories under worker control. Finally, those who have inhabited abandoned buildings, by choice or necessity, clearly draw links between their life’s work and the habitation of major cities’ parks and plazas over the past several months.
But in spite of this attention to occupation, some vibrant and essential forms of the practice have been overlooked. It is these forms to which we should be looking as the winter months near and the movement begins to realize the need to diversify its tactics.
Throughout the summer of 2011, Philadelphia’s mayor, Michael Nutter, Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, and the local media whipped up a frenzy, threading together a diverse array of gatherings of black teenagers in predominantly white, affluent areas of the city over the past three years under the umbrella of “flash mobs,” “teen mob attacks,” and even “riots.” A closer look at the eleven incidents identified as flash mob attacks and used as a justification for the enactment of a racist curfew law, which the Philadelphia City Council recently extended across the city for the next two years, reveals that these events have little in common other than the presence of black youth transgressing the boundaries of their neighborhoods to occupy the city’s white economic center.
Several of the incidents can be completely discounted, according to the widely accepted definition of a flash mob, “a public gathering of complete strangers, organized via the Internet or mobile phone, who perform a pointless act and then disperse.” Six friends punching a man in the head on the way home from summer school hardly seems to constitute a mob of strangers engaging in a premeditated, pointless act, and anyone who has spent a day in a dysfunctional Philadelphia public school or one of its equally deranged charter counterparts could easily sympathize with the students’ sense of outrage and misdirected aggression.
Even if we set aside incidents in which a small group of people attack an individual, the collection of events identified as flash mobs is complex and ranges from exercises in auto-reduction to what many Philly teens would just describe as “breakin’ it down.” The news and gossip site Gawker investigated the conspiratorial social media exchanges that led up to a March 20, 2011 flash mob on South Street in Philadelphia and discovered links to Team Nike, a neighborhood dance crew that promotes their weekend parties through public dance performances. But while Gawker snidely concludes that Philly flash mobs and party crews such as Team Nike “might be nothing more sinister and revolutionary than a few street performances that got out of hand,” the Occupy movement can learn a lot from young people’s libidinal disruptions of the street.
While Philadelphia’s white elite spent their summer cowering indoors, bracing themselves for “roving gangs” of black teenagers who might “terrorize” their neighborhoods, the rest of the city embraced the heat and the streets, hosting outdoor parties on every block. Like the flash mob, the block party has much to teach today’s occupiers about taking back colonized spaces, and infusing them with a sense of joyful resistance. Black and Latino teenagers living in the Bronx in the early 1970s began organizing parties, inspired by Jamaican yard dances and sound system culture. They were looking for alternatives to the gang culture that had resulted in the deaths of their friends and brothers, and they were pushing back against the crushing force of “urban renewal,” a state-sponsored movement to destroy communities of people of color in major American cities. Young people organized block parties to make money for school clothes, to push their sound systems to the limits, and to demonstrate their vernacular dance expertise. They stacked up speakers in the parks and siphoned power from street lights, and they danced until daybreak.
The youthful founders of hip-hop, who literally rose from the ashes of their burnt, abandoned communities, followed in the footsteps of the Civil Rights activists who came a half generation before them by dancing in the street; but at the same time, they created a new form of occupation and defined new relationships with each other and their city by breaking away from the limited political paths presented. They created what hip-hop historian Jeff Chang describes as a celebratory “space of possibility,” and the tradition lives on in many communities of color each summer.
Party crews, groups of teens who have been loosely linked with flash mobs and described as “junior varsity street gangs,” have appropriated rent parties and block parties and applied them to the temporary occupation of vacant homes and commercial buildings. Coverage of party crew activities has been centered in Arizona and the Los Angeles metropolitan area, where swathes of vacant or foreclosed tract homes stand empty, inviting teenagers to claim the spaces as their own. The activities of young party crews echo the West Coast rave scene of the 1990s. Although many electronic music events are widely promoted and generously funded today, this widespread acceptance bloomed from a culture in which warehouses, malls, and large fields were secretly taken over, essential party infrastructure was put in place, and participants followed a trail of breadcrumbs and map clues to various locations before reaching the actual event. Once there, ravers had the chance to reinvent the spaces of everyday life, to encounter new bodies and sounds, and create strange new forms of community. In the morning, the occupation would end, the space would return to its mundane state of disuse, and the participants would begin planning their next intervention.
Dancing, in its many forms and contexts, from rent parties and block parties to raves and riots, often involves the active and intentional occupation of spaces that are highly regulated and controlled, and not intended for popping, locking, or any similar kind of social relation. Young people from marginalized communities have long politicized this everyday practice simply by insisting on doing it wherever they want, whenever they want. As the frigid weather sets in, the Occupy movement must look beyond its own borders and consult the annals of history to develop a broader repertoire of effective techniques, and the ephemeral occupation of city spaces by dancing collectivities might be just what this movement needs to increase its momentum.
As the movement consults this history, it must also recognize that there are communities who continue to occupy urban American spaces out of necessity and resilience, and that their tactical knowledge should put them in positions of leadership. I work with 18 to 21-year-old youth who have dropped out or been pushed out of traditional public schools. One of my students, a 20-year-old intermittently homeless black mother who is working towards obtaining her high school diploma and securing a job as a home health care aide, issued a demand to me after presenting her research on homelessness. “Y’all need to do something about this,” she explained. “There are so many houses in North Philly with nobody in ‘em, and then there are so many homeless people with no houses. Y’all need to fix that.” But it’s clear that we’ll only be able to fix it by organizing together.
“Turn on the heat.” The phrase refers to the heat generated by bodies dancing in spaces that we have temporarily reclaimed, but it also refers to the concrete concern of paying for heating as winter approaches. While the occupiers at City Hall in Philadelphia and around the Northeast confront cold weather this winter, many families struggle to stay warm every year because they can’t pay the heating bill. The participants of the contemporary Occupy movement need people of color, poor people, and young people to lead us into new forms of struggle. In order to sustain and expand the movement, their issues must be at the forefront; we have to understand that the cost of utilities is a major political issue. But let’s not think of people from marginalized communities as helpless victims. Instead, let’s learn from their history of resistance in everyday life.
Julie McIntyre is an educator who has worked with children and youth in schools, libraries, art organizations, and residential detention centers. She lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.
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Occupy the workplace: organized labor and the occupations movement
The Occupy Wall Street phenomenon has achieved a stature and longevity unrivaled by recent demonstrations in the United States, and has understandably struck a chord with a wide range of people dismayed by the barbaric level of inequality that is the defining feature of contemporary American society. As the small encampment in lower Manhattan has swelled and spread to cities across the country, the rallying cry of the “99%” has at least momentarily introduced the mainstream discourse to a conception of class, which is usually missing from the political theater showcased on corporate news outlets. The risks posed by an over-reliance on mass media coverage notwithstanding, the organizers’ ability to attract the public eye has been impressive and is an encouraging reminder that most people are yearning for a political vision that resonates with the material anxieties they feel. As the most brutal economic crisis in over a generation grinds on for the third consecutive year, perhaps most surprising is that it has taken so long for such an upsurge to occur.
However, while an inner-core of participants may remain for months, with time the size of the direct occupations will likely wane and media attention will slowly gravitate to more profitable ventures. The travesty that unfolded in Wisconsin over the past ten months should serve as a painful reminder of that inevitability. And though the moment’s political salience may briefly persist, it will be fleeting unless anchored in something more durable than a demonstration, throwing into sharp relief the need for a level of organization that can sustain and expand upon the Occupy energy. The slogan of the “99%” may have tremendous rhetorical currency, but history shows that there is no shortcut to the long-term, painstaking task of generating a real movement: meeting people where they are, building trust and struggling with them over the issues they’re worried about, connecting those anxieties to a coherent political program, and consolidating those efforts into a force to be reckoned with. While many of the Occupy working groups may be beginning this project, most of the millions who constitute the “99%” have been unable or unwilling to participate and need to be reached by some other means. OWS can be an opportunity to start this process, but it is not a spark that will spread on its own.
Here the civil rights movement, which is often invoked in relation to OWS, is instructive. Unmentioned in most grade school lore on the subject, the struggle for racial justice grew out of a deeply rooted organizational apparatus that had been constructed through decades of diligent labor and community organizing. Rosa Parks was a seasoned activist who had been trained at the legendary leftist organizing academy, the Highlander Folk School, and Martin Luther King Jr. owes his beginnings to veteran trade unionists who recruited him. No miracles initiated this historic fight; it was planned and executed by individuals and their organizations who through years of struggle in pursuit of concrete demands had cultivated powerful bases of support in specific communities.
Only through following this long-term organizing approach can OWS begin to harness the anger and energy it has made visible and translate it in into a dynamic, class-conscious movement. And only the labor movement has the experience and organizational capacity to take on the challenge. Weakened though they may be, and with all the limitations of their sedentary bureaucracies, unions are still the most democratic membership organizations in the United States, with established activists and infrastructures in cities across the country that possess the practical skills and resources necessary to carry on the fight, particularly when it becomes less visibly exciting. Though union density has precipitously declined in recent decades, still today millions of people have experienced real improvements in their lives through workplace struggles led by existing labor unions, a much larger and more representative cross-section of the population than is likely to turn out at any “Occupy” event.
It’s important to remember that historically, organized labor has been the most effective vehicle for challenging economic inequality; it is an empirical reality that when unions are weak wealth concentrates in the hands of the few, and when they’re strong it is at least a bit more evenly distributed. A recent study demonstrated that between 1973 and 2007 private sector unionization decreased by over 75% and inequality increased by 40%. In this spirit, OWS might best be considered as an opportunity to push the mainstream labor movement toward a more aggressive organizing strategy and, hopefully, an alternative political vision. Rank-and-file militants in a variety of unions have engaged in this grueling project for decades, with some successes and many setbacks, and perhaps the most encouraging feature of OWS is the space it might create for more work of this sort. However, an opportunity is only as valuable as the concrete steps taken to capitalize on it, and unless the strategic thinking needed to orient and initiate that process begins in earnest, this wave of activism will likely join the recent anti-globalization and immigrants’ rights demonstrations in the annals of modern left history while neoliberalism continues its plunder unscathed.
A number of unions have taken up the OWS mantle and some inspiring labor-community partnerships have grown out of it. The New York City Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 was an early supporter, and even went to court to prevent police from ordering union drivers to bus arrested demonstrators to jail. The National Nurses United (NNU), one of the most progressive and militant unions, has been present at occupations around the country administering flu shots and providing basic medical assistance. And the courageous art handlers of Teamsters Local 814 who have been locked-out of Sotheby’s auction house – a quintessential symbol of the “1%” – have cultivated a remarkable level of solidarity with the New York occupation, turning out bus loads to their rallies and gaining international attention in the process. These three examples represent elements of the most dynamic and forward-looking wing of an otherwise rather glacial labor establishment that always seems to be on the defensive. The best chance OWS has to become the kind of force necessary to win a more just society lies in following their lead.
Samir Sonti is a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara. He has worked for SEIU.
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Deviations, part 1: the Castoriadis-Pannekoek exchange
Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi's introduction to a series of letters between Anton Pannekoek and Cornelius Castoriadis.
In early 1953 Cajo Brendel, a Dutch council communist affiliated with a group known as Spartacus, visited the members of Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarism) in Paris. As members of a militant organization harshly marginalized by the most blistering winters of the cold war, Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, and their comrades understandably hoped to make contact with other communist tendencies critical of the official currents. Delighted to discover that Anton Pannekoek, that veteran communist whose dissenting tracts had drawn the ire of none other than Lenin himself, was quite close to Spartacus, the group decided to supply Brendel with a copy of every issue of the journal, eleven in all, to pass along to the revered theorist. Pannekoek, who read them with excitement, wrote later to Brendel the French group showed much promise despite its questionable position on the party question. On November 8, 1953, he wrote a letter to Castoriadis, which was later published, along with a response, in number 14 (April-June 1954) of the journal.
Spanning an entire generation, a linguistic divide, and a geographical shift, the epistolary encounter between Pannekoek and Castoriadis in many ways marks the internal transformation of the ultra-left. But the ultra-left, far from a historical relic, is making headlines again. The appearance of a mysterious little book called The Coming Insurrection on bookshelves across the country in 2009 piqued an already growing interest. Not only did Michael Moore name the “leftist call-to-arms manifesto” as his most recent read in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, the tract even climbed to the top of Amazon bestseller list after Glenn Beck told Fox News viewers it was “the most evil book I’ve read in a long, long time.” But this pamphlet was only, if we may lapse into pop sociology, the tipping point for a resurgence of forgotten tendencies, obscure journals, and previously unheard of milieus, which are suddenly being discussed everywhere from academic conferences to national broadcasting channels. It’s likely that the “Invisible Committee” that wrote The Coming Insurrection grew out of Tiqqun, a French group that officially disbanded in 2001 after releasing two issues of its eponymous journal. Tiqqun itself has been rediscovered after the infamous Tarnac affair in 2008, when former members of the group were arrested for sabotaging train lines.
The appearance of new works and translations by groups like Tiqqun, including Troploin, Théorie Communiste, Aufheben, and Echanges et Mouvement, reflect the close engagement of the ultra-left with the tendencies and sensibilities of contemporary activist movements. An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education traced the “intellectual roots” of Occupy Wall Street to the anarchist David Graeber, who invoked the language of the ultra-left in his description of the political importance of the general assembly: “One of the things that revolutionaries have learned over the course of the 20th century is that the idea of the ends justifying the means is deeply problematic… You can’t create a just society through violence, or freedom through a tight revolutionary cadre. You can’t establish a big state and hope it will go away. The means and ends have to be the same.“1
But this paradigm, though it is thoroughly grounded in the present, nevertheless has deep roots in the past. All of the journals circulating today would deny such a strong link to their own ancestors; they admit the influence of the ultra-left, but none describe themselves as ultra-leftists. Most believe they have made a clean break with this history, and usually only employ the term as an epithet for those still thought to be trapped in antiquated politics. They are on poor terms with each other, and almost certainly would not consider themselves to be part of the same constellation of theories.
Although they have their disagreements, this dissension only conceals a shared unity that unsurprisingly originates from the common heritage they all seem intent on repressing. Many of the defining principles of the historical ultra-left persist, and their peculiar combination of blindness and insight bears the marks of their progenitors. Their shared emphasis on proletarian self-activity, their willingness to deliberately conflate means and ends, their tendency to elide the moment of strategy, their demand for the abolition of a transition period, and their tendency towards fatalism, are all age-old historical debates. And just as before, the ultra-left tendencies of contemporary movements have provoked a backlash from those who call for a return to the fundamentals of political organization, usually represented by the figure of “the party.”
What is now commonly called the ultra-left emerged as an oppositional tendency within the international communist movement in the early nineteen-twenties. Though critical of the right, personified by Eduard Bernstein, the center, represented by Karl Kautsky, and even the left, dominated by Lenin, its members never organized themselves into a coherent current: its theorists were spread across several countries, disagreed sharply with one another, and were only grouped together when Lenin criticized them all in his infamous pamphlet, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Some, like Amadeo Bordiga, fetishized the vanguard party; others, like Otto Rühle, saw workers’ councils as the only organ of the revolutionary process; still others like Paul Mattick turned to crisis theory. But whatever their differences, their shared refusal to participate in parliamentary elections, work with trade unions, or make any compromises with any kind of reformism, unexpectedly brought them all together. It was this underlying stubbornness that allowed Lenin to transform them into a single tendency.
It should be remembered, however, that the ultra-left, despite what it would later become, was actually not a minority tendency in its heyday. Its spokesmen were all major figures in the history of European communism: Bordiga was the first general secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), Sylvia Pankhurst was one of the most respected communists in England, and Pannekoek was cautiously praised in Lenin’s State and Revolution as a bulwark against reformism. Even more importantly, the ultra-leftists had such a significant following in the early twenties that they could rightfully claim to be the dominant communist tendency of the time. When the PCI was finally formed in January 1921, it was Bordiga who commanded the majority. And when the German Communist Party (KPD) split in 1920, the vast majority followed the ultra-leftists in forming the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (KAPD). The Communist Party, initially led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, had itself broken from reformist groups like the Social Democratic Party (SPD) at the end of December 1918. But the KPD, despite its revolutionary stance, was pulled in several directions. Disagreements over the unions, parliament, and compromise in general, ultimately led to another break. It’s been suggested, however, that the new party, the KAPD, “embraced almost the entire membership of the former KPD.”2 The marginalization of the ultra-left – Bordiga, for example, officially lost control of his party to Gramsci in 1926 – only set in after the defeat of the revolutions to which they were almost organically connected.
With their revolutions crushed, and now harassed by capital on the one side and Comintern on the other, the tendency itself began to eat itself apart from within as ultra-leftists fought each other over the most trivial matters, and by the thirties this once vibrant milieu was reduced to a jumble of sequestered groups. The onset of the Cold War proved to be an especially decisive time for the ultra-left: marginalized more than ever, journals lost much of their already limited readership, organizations disintegrated, and isolated groups ossified into myopic sects. It was in this inhospitable context that two of the most prominent theorists of the tendency made contact.
Castoriadis Meets Pannekoek
The intersection of two lives represents the collision of two worlds. First and foremost, there is the generational divide: Anton Pannekoek was born in 1873, after the defeat of the Paris Commune, and Cornelius Castoriadis in 1922, just as the German Revolution, in which Pannekoek had played a part, was painfully coming to accept its own defeat. Then there is the implicit geographic shift: Pannekoek, born in the Netherlands, played a constitutive role in the development of central European communism, while Castoriadis, Greek by birth, made perhaps the most significant contribution to the emerging French scene that was made famous in May 1968. Their exchange shows the center of gravity of the communist movement moving from Germany back to France, while French theory made increasing reference to German history.
And last, the peculiar convergence of two distinct forms of ultra-leftism: one that defined itself against Lenin and another that actually made a constitutive detour through him. Though always aware of his great achievements, most of the historical ultra-left, from Sylvia Pankhurst to Herman Gorter, eventually grew quite critical of the Bolshevik leader’s theoretical doctrines. Pannekoek stands as perhaps the greatest example of a tendency that criticized all that Lenin represented, from his philosophical positions to his political practice. Shortly after the Russian Revolution, Pannekoek devoted much of his writing to refuting the universal applicability of Bolshevik tactics. His famous book Workers’ Councils sought to definitively discredit the theory of the vanguard party by demonstrating the historical significance of the councils as the only real form of proletarian emancipation. Against both reformists and Leninists, he claimed that “the new orientation of socialism is self-direction of production, self-direction of the class-struggle, by means of workers’ councils.”3
Castoriadis, in contrast to Pannekoek, had fought in the Greek resistance as a Communist, later joining the Trotskyists in France. Beyond the many positive references to Lenin in his writings of the time, it’s quite clear from his theoretical works and his practical positions that Lenin had left an indelible stamp on him. His ultra-leftism is an unusual case: he entered it through Trotskyism, but broke with that tradition when he argued that “the content of socialism” went beyond the abolition of private property to “workers’ management of society,” down to the organization of work on the shop floor – a historical task whose terms were established by the expansion and integration of managerial labor in postwar capitalism.4 He spent a good decade furiously producing a body of work so important that it would effectively define the far left in France, leading Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the European Green parliamentarian who was the most visible student revolutionary of May 1968, to frankly admit in Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative that he had plagiarized Castoriadis’s work. But then Castoriadis turned his pen against Marxism himself; having already grounded self-management in the critique of alienation in the young Marx, he concluded that the late Marx of Capital had capitulated completely to bourgeois scientism, and brazenly declared that the only way to remain revolutionary was to break from Marxism.
The letters of these figures not only give us a glimpse into the history of the ultra-left, they also speak to our own time. True, our conjuncture is radically different: we no longer face the realities of the Cold War, the role of the Soviet Union, the influence of the Communist Parties, or the uncertainties of decolonization. But there are nevertheless ways in which the present resembles the conjuncture in which these letters were written. We are beginning to glimpse the end of a long period of proletarian defeat, just as Castoriadis and Pannekoek were. They had the courage and insight to discuss the possibilities of revolution, reaffirm the value of autonomous activity, and emphasize the role of the proletariat at a time when intellectuals of the left and right were loudly declaring the integration of the working class, the definitive stabilization of capital, and the impossibility of revolutionary rupture.
But Pannekoek and Castoriadis were vindicated a few years after their exchange. Hungary and Poland erupted in revolution. Councils dotted the social terrain, autonomous activity was the order of the day, and suddenly capital did not seem so secure. If their mode of thought was in alignment with the potential and the limits of these nascent struggles, it seems that today’s ultra-left has a similar alignment with the eruptions of Greece, Spain, France, and England.
Reading through these letters makes it clear that whatever their agreements – and there were many – Pannekoek and Castoriadis differed on the very two questions that had defined the historical ultra-left from the beginning: the nature of the Russian Revolution and the party form. Though both clearly parted ways with the official communist movement, their differences were nevertheless irreconcilable.
Although the exchange circulated around what may appear to be a pedantic rehashing of these two seemingly irrelevant topics, both were using them to think through the key concepts of political practice. Beneath Pannekoek’s questioning of the Russian Revolution or Castoriadis’s consideration of the possible degeneration of the party lies a shared attempt to ascertain the content of the communism of their time. With sufficient historical distance from everything that transpired between the storming of the Winter Palace and the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have begun to ask how the content of communism can be reimagined beyond sectarian cliches. For our moment, these letters are remarkably contemporary. To grasp their relevance, we will have to trace the genealogy of these two major questions.
The Russian Revolution
Every communist current that sought to pose an alternative to the practices, policies, and programs of the Soviet Union first had to explain what kind of society it really was – an attempt to understand the meaning of communism as well as capitalism. The dominant explanations in the West for the nature of the USSR were variants of the Trotskyist analysis. However, Lenin had acknowledged, before Stalin’s ascent, that the revolutionary government was not only a proletarian dictatorship, but either a “workers’ and peasants’ state” or a “workers’ state with bureaucratic distortions.”5 During the years of “War Communism,” from 1918 to 1921, when requisition of peasant land and nationalization of industry proceeded alongside the introduction of Taylorism and one-man management in factories, it was actually Trotsky who had called for extension of militarization to the total control of trade unions by the state, as an apparatus of industrial management. Lenin insisted that more independent participation would train workers to ultimately take on the task of management themselves, arguing against Trotsky that the “sum and substance of his policy is bureaucratic harassment of the trade unions.“6
Beginning in 1921 with the “New Economic Policy” (NEP), Lenin argued for the replacement of the state’s “surplus-grain appropriation” with a moderate “tax in kind,” which would permit peasant producers to sell the remainder of their surplus in order to obtain manufactured goods at a more equitable rate. In spite of the reintroduction of market relations this represented, it was a transition to “regular socialist exchange of products,” and indeed an anti-bureaucratic measure, intended to avoid further development of the state bureaucracy that had grown in compensation for “the atomised and scattered state of the small producer with his poverty, illiteracy, lack of culture, the absence of roads and exchange between agriculture and industry.” If NEP represented a movement towards the free market and capitalist relations, this was a necessary step, since it permitted the peasantry to develop social power instead of subjugating it to the interests of the urban and industrial proletariat.7
Lenin had already argued as early as 1918, in a polemic against Russian left communists, that “state capitalism would be a step forward,” even “a sure guarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold.” Since the transition period contained elements of different economic categories, the direction of large enterprises by the state would be a “proletarian weapon,” since “it is not state capitalism that is at war with socialism, but the petty bourgeoisie plus private capitalism fighting together against both state capitalism and socialism.”8 Now, three years later, he reiterated that the fact that the proletariat, represented by the party, held power in the state, was the primary defense against the “restoration of capitalism.”9 Recalling his earlier intervention on behalf of independent trade unions, Lenin emphasized that in a socialist transition there would still be classes, and therefore “the class struggle is inevitable” – the proletariat would have to use unions to combat bureaucracy and “survivals of the old capitalist system” in the government.10 The combination of an anti-bureaucratic attitude and the continued belief in shared workers’ and peasants’ power coexisted with the somewhat contradictory project of industrializing agriculture, to develop the productive forces to the level of the capitalist mode of production, and NEP manifested these contradictions.
After Lenin’s death, the continuation of NEP was advocated by both Joseph Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin, who were part of a hegemonic bloc within the Communist Party. Bukharin, in spite of his earlier leftist enthusiasm for immediate nationalization and industrialization, came to believe in the gradual enrichment of the peasants, which would lead to their identification with the communist project. This found support in Stalin’s insistence on continuing Lenin’s line on the “workers’ and peasants’ government,” defending “the worker-peasant alliance as a cardinal means of achieving the socialist class objectives of the proletarian dictatorship in our peasant country.“11
However, the enthusiasm for NEP was by no means universal; the Left Opposition, which included Trotsky and Bukharin’s former leftist coauthor Yvgeni Preobrazhensky, had warned that agricultural market relations would permit the development of a nascent capitalist class in the countryside. Their fears were confirmed in the rise of the kulaks, the landholding peasants who hired waged laborers and hoarded grain to counteract the drop in agricultural prices. In the 1927 platform of the left, Trotsky described a growing “class differentiation among the peasants,” the slave-like exploitation of farmhands, and a gap between industrial and agricultural prices that threatened to sever the “alliance between town and country.”12
The next year Stalin went to Siberia, to address party members who he accused not only of cooperating with the kulaks, but also living in their homes. He contrasted “socialist construction in the countryside, in agriculture” with the danger of capitalist restoration.13 Later that year, after returning to Moscow, he would rage in party plenums against the “Right deviation” which made restoration possible, since in spite of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the roots of capitalism, of capital and capitalists, were still embedded “in commodity production, in small production in the towns and, especially, the countryside.”14 The threat of regenerating capitalism resulted from the contradiction between two foundations of production in the USSR: “the foundation of the most large-scale and united socialist industry and the foundation of the most scattered and backward, small commodity economy of the peasants.” To succeed, socialist construction would have to place “agriculture on a new technical basis, the basis of large-scale production, and bring it up to the level of socialist industry.”15 With the end of NEP and the elaboration of the first Five Year Plan, Stalin put into place an economic program based on the collectivization of peasant land, aiming at the rapid industrialization of the countryside.
Writing in The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky stepped into the middle of these “zig-zags” in policy by painting a picture of the USSR as a “degenerated workers’ state.” The workers had taken state power, but it had been usurped by the Stalinist bureaucracy. The difficulty of this view is that the history of the bureaucracy in the USSR could by no means be limited to Stalin – Trotsky had himself contributed to bureaucratization. Furthermore, Lenin had already described a close relationship between bureaucratization and economic development. “Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory,” Trotsky famously wrote in a celebration of Russia’s productive forces, “in the language of steel, cement and electricity”; and he made a point of noting that the blame for Stalin’s terror “lies not upon collectivization, but upon the blind, violent, gambling methods with which it was carried through.”16 But next to Lenin’s acknowledgement that the reorganization of peasant agriculture by industrial state capitalism forced a complex bureaucratic structure, the compatibility of these two positions seems unclear.
An unorthodox Trotskyist shoe salesman named Bruno Rizzi began to circulate an analysis, culminating in 1939’s The Bureaucratization of the World, which claimed that if the bureaucracy had indeed usurped state power, it was impossible to retain the idea of a “workers’ state,” degenerated or otherwise. The original, somewhat ultra-left concept he advanced was “bureaucratic collectivism,” which led Trotsky to conclude that Rizzi had “obviously lost his balance.”17 According to this theory, the managerial bureaucracy was a ruling class that extracted a surplus for its own enrichment, and orchestrated through a totalitarian state a highly developed monopoly capitalism indistinguishable from fascism and the New Deal.
Castoriadis may have had Rizzi’s account in mind when he underscored the primary importance of the bureaucracy as ruling class, but he rejected the earlier emphasis on collectivism. After all, far from a term of Marxist theory, “collectivism” is a quasi-ethical term of sociological description – it says nothing about the political economy of the USSR. For Castoriadis, capitalism as a system was defined by exploitation – the extraction of a surplus from labor by a non-producing class who dominated the production process – and not by market relations, which were essentially epiphenomena. The fact that the ruling class of the USSR operated collectively, rather than competitively, was irrelevant – the society could only be described as bureaucratic capitalism.
When Pannekoek first wrote to Castoriadis, he reminded his younger comrade that the theory of a non-socialist mode of production in the Soviet Union was by no means a development internal to Trotskyism. In fact, the left communists had made the case, arguably even before the Russian Revolution, that the policies of Lenin and Trotsky were not consistent with the struggle for a workers’ state and its accompanying socialist mode of production. This was a theory of “state capitalism,” distinctly different from the later Trotskyist version made famous by Tony Cliff. It held that the displacement of the “soviets” or “workers’ councils” that defined the explosions of 1905 and 1917 by the rule of the party represented the defeat of socialism. In this regard they anticipated the critique of Socialisme ou Barbarie.
However, there was a primary difference. Convinced of the capitalist nature of the Soviet Union, Pannekoek went on to denounce root and branch the very revolution that brought it into being. He called the Russian Revolution “the last bourgeois revolution, though carried out by the working class,” in the tradition of the English Revolution of 1647 and the French Revolution in 1789. By “bourgeois revolution,” he meant specifically “a revolution that destroys feudalism and opens the way to industrialization.” He pointed out that even the historic bourgeois revolutions had been enabled by the revolt of “the artisans, the peasants and the workers,” but since “working class was not yet mature enough to govern itself,” a “minority of functionaries and politicians” emerged as the dominant class. This was inevitable in Russia, “the laboring class being a small minority among the peasant population.”
The paradoxical element of this ultra-left theory, ultimately shared by Rühle and Gorter, was that it swung back around to the paradigm of reformism. Karl Kautsky vehemently denounced the Bolsheviks, before Stalin’s dominance and in opposition to Trotsky, for their notion that a socialist revolution was possible in a Russia that had not yet passed through the capitalist stage of history. As early as 1919, Kautsky wrote that the objective conditions in Russia “were not ripe for the abolition of capitalism,” and that the “immaturity of the existing relations” led the Bolshevik revolution to produce “the most oppressive of all forms of despotism that Russia has ever had.”18
Castoriadis’s response was twofold. He first called attention to the logical problem behind Pannekoek’s purism: the ultimate fate of the Russian Revolution does not alter the fact that within it, the proletariat struggled for its own interests, even instituting workers’ self-management in the factories, rather than subsuming its struggle into the program of the bourgeoisie. The fact that these independent demands were articulated by workers in Russia “made the Russian Revolution forever a proletarian revolution.” His second point was that the concept of the bourgeois revolution ignored a fundamental development in the mode of production of the 20th century: it was the bureaucracy, rather than the bourgeoisie, which ruled in Russia, and it was this same new class that was emerging as a dominating force throughout the world, including the capitalist world.
Throughout the whole ultra-left, these concepts of “bourgeois revolution” and the “bourgeois-democratic tasks” were never put into question. In spite of Pannekoek’s knowledge that Russia was predominantly peasant, that pre-capitalist conditions altered the subjective development of the working class, and that his own theory was developed within the specific conditions of political strikes in urban Europe, he never met the challenge posed by the Bolsheviks of theorizing communist revolution in a peasant society. And though Trotsky did accept the Bolshevik challenge in 1917, the approach to industrial development and “permanent revolution” that would predominate among Trotskyists took as its starting premise the subordination of peasant demands to the industrial proletariat.
But it was precisely the peasant problem that was central to the theories of economic development within the USSR. Just before Pannekoek and Castoriadis’s exchange, in 1951, Stalin wrote a final reflection called Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. There he preempted the entire discussion of state or bureaucratic capitalism in Russia by frankly acknowledging, even after the collectivization and industrialization advocated in his earlier speeches, that the law of value “does exist and does operate,” alongside commodity production, in the Russian economy. While the goods produced by state-owned industry were distributed publicly by the state, agricultural production, even in the form of the kolkhoz, the collective farm, “will not recognize any other economic relation with the town except the commodity relation – exchange through purchase and sale.”19
It is overall an unsettling collision of terms, which recalls Lenin’s argument against the left communists. The attributes ascribed by the left to state capitalism were simply the contradictions of the socialist transition, the persistence of elements of different modes of production within the same economy – including the survivals of capitalist relations. These contradictions within the USSR became clear when, after denouncing Stalin in the 20th Party Congress and calling for peaceful coexistence with the capitalist world, Nikita Khrushchev organized the sale of the state-owned “Machine and Tractor Stations” to the collective farms – which, Stalin had warned in Economic Problems, meant that the agricultural enterprises would privately own their means of production, a step backwards away from communism.
Only one ultra-leftist seriously engaged with this mode of analysis. Bordiga argued consistently that the central dynamic of the Soviet economy was the “agrarian revolution” – the condition of possibility for capitalism. Bordiga had supported the Bolshevik revolution as proletarian, which he reiterated in a 1926 letter to Korsch, who had taken the state capitalist line; but the same year he personally butted heads with Stalin when he called for the Soviet Union to be governed by the international communist parties that made up the Comintern. While Bordiga supported Trotsky and the Left Opposition in the 1920s, by 1945 he began to argue for an analysis of the Soviet Union that brought him far closer to Bukharin and the right.
The year before Castoriadis and Pannekoek’s exchange, Bordiga wrote a response to Stalin’s Economic Problems called Dialogue with Stalin. His assessment of the Soviet economy was broadly similar, but with an added historical dimension. Not only did the law of value operate in the USSR, so did all the laws of capitalism, since it was impossible to develop the productive forces “without proletarianizing people.” This meant a repetition of the “ferocious” process of primitive accumulation that Marx described in Capital:
It is the kolkhozians who find themselves deprived of their cow, the nomadic shepherds of Asia torn away from the contemplation of the beautiful stars of the Great Bear, or the feudal serfs of Mongolia, uprooted from their soil of a thousand years. It is certain that the orders demand more goods for production, more workers, a longer labor time with a greater intensity of effort, which is to say, an accumulation and expanded reproduction of capital to the rhythm of hell.20
The agrarian revolution, carried out in the process of primitive accumulation, was the violent refashioning of peasants into landless proletarians, the same process that occurred in 17th century England. Unsurprisingly, this returns to Preobrazhensky’s description of the coexistence of planning and the law of value in “socialist primitive accumulation.” While Preobrazhensky had called for a gentle process of accumulation based in progressive taxes, he had ultimately supported Stalin’s leftward turn.
The next step for Bordiga was to describe the economic characteristics of capitalism in Russia. For him, the accumulation of profit was epiphenomenal. What counted instead was the existence of enterprises that engaged in accounting on the basis of a general equivalent, the law of value, and maintained the existence of property. Even though production in Russia was centrally planned by the state, it was carried out by individual enterprises, which meant that property was not social and collective, but restricted to private bodies. The ruling class in Russia were not bureaucrats, but entrepreneurs – consistent with a theory of communism that opposed “human community,” grounded in the human essence described by the young Marx, to commerce, rather than proletariat to capital. For this reason the existence of soviets or councils was essentially irrelevant to Bordiga; if the workers managed enterprises, they were simply managing the capital relation.
So Stalin and Bordiga differed mainly in definitions. Stalin viewed socialism as a contradictory process of construction, while Bordiga argued for a total conception of communism incompatible with survivals from the old regime. But the trick is that Bordiga’s historical analysis, while it led him to condemn the capitalist nature of the USSR, also constrained him to see it as progressive, as he wrote in his Dialogue:
The homage which, in spite of a band of suckers, we render to “Great Stalin” responds precisely to this process of initial capitalist accumulation. If this really reaches the provinces of immense China, mysterious Tibet, and that fabulous Central Asia that the European stock came from, that will be a revolutionary fact, a fact that will move forward the wheel of history, but which, far from being socialist, will be on the contrary a capitalist fact. The elevation of the level of the productive forces in this immense part of the globe is necessary: but Stalin is right when he says that the credit will not go to him, but to the economic laws which have imposed this policy upon him. His whole enterprise consists in a falsification of labels which makes the capitalist commodity pass under the name of socialism and which is, itself, a classic expedient of the agents of primitive accumulation.
In other words, the whole of the ultra-left returned to Kautsky and his stages, which is why Bordiga described Russia as undergoing the transition to capitalism. Indeed, with only entrepreneurs managing production, it had not yet produced a properly capitalist class.
Though Pannekoek and Castoriadis did not directly address these issues, their exchange offers theoretical advances that put the problem of stages in new contexts. On the one hand, the skilled industrial working class who could organize councils on Pannekoek’s model were a such a minority in Russia that is very difficult to understand how this model of organization could lead the nation on a mass scale – and it gives no way of determining how the members of these councils will be fed.
On the other hand, Pannekoek’s theory of a “bourgeois revolution,” though it did not address Bordiga’s agrarian question, did step away from Kautskyan commitment to the fixed progression of stages. While Rühle and Korsch ultimately concluded along with Kautsky that Russia was too backwards, Pannekoek emphasized the subjective development of the class, rather than the objective development of the productive forces. He argued that if state capitalism led to revolution, this “would not be the result of economic crises but of the class struggle” – a political rather than economic change.21 The Russian workers, he wrote in the third letter, were “not yet capable of taking production into their own hands”; and when the party bureaucracy assumed this role in place of the proletariat, it became, ipso facto, the bourgeoisie.
But Pannekoek’s analysis had no way of determining whether the class was ready, particularly if it was spread into distinct forms of production. Castoriadis’s work had focused with greater attention on this problem. He had described the situation of the peasantry as “feudal exploitation” by the bureaucracy, and disputed the classic Bolshevik claim that the “small producer” would serve as the basis of capitalist restoration, instead arguing that only the bureaucracy could play such a role.22 Though he still assumed peasant production should be submitted to urban proletarian leadership, he went on to call for a form of peasant autonomy in “rural communes” analogous to the workers’ council.23 But because in Russia there was no automatic progression towards revolution, and no automatic way to unify the class, Castoriadis continued to insist on the form of the party – our next theme.
The Party
The historical ultra-left was always somewhat divided about the party form. Some, led by Bordiga, defended the notion of a disciplined party even more fervently than Lenin himself. Combining the intransigence of the German left communists with Lenin’s central focus on the party led Bordiga to produce a peculiar breed of vanguardist sectarianism. He soon went from reducing the class to the party to reducing communism itself to little more than the realization of an allegedly coherent, pure, and forever invariant program that was said to stretch back unchanged to the founders themselves. Others, like Karl Korsch, remained ambiguous. Although a member of the KPD, Communist Minister of Justice in the regional Thuringian government, and even a Riechstag deputy until 1928, he eventually broke entirely with the official communist movement and drew very close to Pannekoek, Rühle, and Mattick’s criticisms of the party, ultimately becoming something of an anarchist.
It was the German and Dutch left communists, however, who were the most uncompromising critics of the party form. They effectively offered three distinct, though interrelated, criticisms. The first, which was often shared by the anarchists, was a kind of moral denunciation of the authoritarian, undemocratic, and hierarchical character of parties in general. The second argued that the party, especially in its vanguardist configuration, was largely inapplicable to Western Europe, since its material conditions differed so vastly from those that engendered it in Russia. The third claimed that the proletariat had to prefigure the very world it was trying to create by inventing its own forms of struggle, rather than mirroring those that were firmly entrenched in the old world. Pannekoek summarized this sentiment in his second letter to Castoriadis, describing the need to oppose the established communist parties: “we cannot beat them by following their methods. That is only possible by practicing our own methods.” In terms of actual practice, this translated to a refusal of all bourgeois forms, from the trade unions to parliaments. Otto Rühle captured this sentiment in an essay audaciously titled “The Revolution is Not a Party Affair.”
Even when they did preserve the party as a form of struggle, the leftists severely restricted its role. Indeed, Lenin would at one point exclaim that they had essentially reduced the party of the class to a circle of intellectuals. According to Pannekoek, the party could only play the ancillary role of clarifying, through discussion, debate, and exchange, what the proletariat was already doing. As “organs of self-clarification,” such parties – and Pannekoek always imagined that there would be many – would have to content themselves with doing little more than offering suggestions to the workers, circulating information, and calmly debating their differing points of view.24 They would serve as the investigative subcommittees of a council, from which their destiny would ultimately be indistinguishable.
For both Castoriadis and Pannekoek, there was a primary logical consequence of the Marxist premise that the emancipation of the proletariat could only be the task of the proletariat itself: the council would be the principal organ of proletarian emancipation. By regarding the council as both that which would destroy the old and create the new, both were echoing a characteristic trait of the ultra-left: the deliberate conflation of means and ends.
But in contrast to the seasoned councilist, Castoriadis refused to accept that council would be the only organ of emancipation. He believed that the party could constitute a separate form of struggle, subordinated to, but ultimately distinct from the council: “the party is an organ whose form and substance are unique.”25 Its tasks could not be predetermined, as Pannekoek implied, but would have to vary depending on the particularities of the struggle at hand. If the revolution did indeed lead to the emergence of a network of decentralized councils in which unobstructed discussion could unfold, as Pannekoek suggested in his first letter, then Castoriadis agreed that the party would limit its role. But, Castoriadis quickly added, since the councils would likely become the very sites of class struggle rather than peaceful oases standing outside of it, the party, as something other than the council, could not limit itself to “appearing like the owl of Minerva at nightfall” but would have to set the stage for this struggle:
To be revolutionary signifies both to think that only the masses in struggle can resolve the problem of socialism and not to fold one’s arms for all that; it means to think that the essential content of the revolution will be given by the masses’ creative, original, and unforeseeable activity, and to act oneself, beginning with a rational analysis of the present with a perspective that anticipates the future.26
Experienced as he was with the dirty politics of workplace struggles in an environment dominated by Stalinists on the one hand and reformists on the other, Castoriadis poured some cold water on his friend’s naive faith in rational discussion. He insisted that the party would have to actively prevent counter-revolutionaries from co-opting the struggle, and therefore began to force a disjuncture between means and ends. Unlike the council, the party would not be an end in itself, but could only be a means. The destruction of the old world would have to be something related to but ultimately other than the constitution of a new one. Indeed, sometimes revolutionaries would have to resort to certain unsightly means in order to bring about certain desired ends. This could even mean a militant, even undemocratic, intervention on behalf the councils.
Pannekoek’s subsequent response was enviably simple: sometimes the class is just not ready to make a revolution. No amount of party intervention, no matter how militant, organized, or disciplined can force that class to mature – and in fact, such intervention would actually undermine the struggles of the class, by forcing it into a situation which it did not itself willingly create. The result, whatever the intentions of the revolutionaries, would have to be a new form of oppression.
A famous struggle just after these letters serves as an example. From December 1960 to January 1961 Belgium was rocked by an unexpectedly militant strike wave that ultimately involved some one million workers. Castoriadis called it the most important event, after the uprisngs of 1956, of the entire postwar period; Maurice Brinton, the guiding spirit of Solidarity, took part in them; and Guy Debord arrived the following year as part of a team sent by Socialisme ou Barbarie to research the aftermath of the strikes. The peculiar thing about these strikes, however, was that despite their strength they completely failed to exhibit any autonomous political initiative. Castoriadis put it as follows:
We thus find ourselves faced with a striking contradiction between the combativity of the working class, its solidarity, its awareness of its opposition as a class to the capitalist class and to the capitalist State, its distrust of bureaucracy, on the one hand; and, on the other, the at-present insurmountable difficulty it encounters as it tries to free itself from this bureaucracy’s grasp, to take on in a positive way the direction of its own affairs, to create its own institutions, to formulate explicitly its own objectives.27
Castoriadis’s solution was a revolutionary organization. But imagine, Pannekoek seemed to say, if this organization, which claimed to represent the proletariat, had hastily intervened by seizing the state, appropriating certain points of production, and dispatching red guards out into the streets to fight the Belgian police. Even if their intervention had somehow produced a revolution, the consequences would have been disastrous. Neither the proletariat, nor those other class formations which it would have to lead down the road of revolution, were prepared for such a situation. Rather than emancipating themselves, they would only enter a different kind of class society.
Castoriadis never wrote a direct reply. But he had already elaborated the basic premises of his position. Just as we can never really know if our actions will turn us into bureaucrats, we can also never know whether the proletariat is mature or not; there is simply no way to scientifically measure whether a class is ripe for power. In some cases, as with the Belgian strikes, there is some clarity. But in others, such as the Russian revolution of 1905, it is simply impossible to tell. When the first workers went on strike, no one expected the whole country to explode in insurrection. Even the revolutionaries who had studied the contours of the class struggle for decades were caught off guard, and had to determine what to do in this new situation. As it turns out, revolutionaries chose to intervene and the class was defeated – but we can only imagine the outcome if, after a sober assessment of the situation, the professional revolutionaries had decided not to intervene because the class was not ripe for power. What would have been the result if the party had chosen to fold its arms, take a step backward, and sit on the sidelines? Who is to say that it was not the very intervention of these revolutionaries, their very attempt to escalate a struggle possibly doomed to defeat, that later prepared the material conditions for victory less than a decade later?
The messiness of history demonstrates the difficulty of translating Pannekoek’s thoughts on class immaturity into concrete practice. But as we have already seen, this ambiguous position also contains an original answer to an old question: what are the necessary objective conditions for a successful revolution? For Pannekoek, immature objective conditions are not the result of underdeveloped industrial production. In fact, objective conditions are really nothing other than the general level of the class struggle itself. Because capital is an antagonistic relationship between two classes, its maturity or immaturity can only be understood with reference to the conflict between these classes. So when Pannekoek speaks of unripe objective conditions, he is actually referring to the underdeveloped subjective conditions of the class struggle itself. Claiming that Russia was unripe for revolution did not mean it was economically backward, only that the proletariat was not developed enough to take power on its own.
But here, as Castoriadis intimates, Pannekoek ultimately reveals his failure to understand the specific class dynamics of Russia on the eve of the revolution. For him, it is enough to claim that the class was not ready to take power simply because, at the end of the day, the party had to step in. His logic is consistent only if one assumes that communism will adopt the same form at all times: the gradual spread of councils over the totality of the social fabric. If this fails to happen, then the revolution was bourgeois; if it does, which, one might add, it never has, then it was communist. It is this static conception of communism, this refusal to accept that communism may appear differently in different historical conditions, that it may have to be produced by a diversity of means, that led him to misread the particularities of the Russian struggle.
Now the two questions, the nature of the Soviet Union on the one hand and the role of the party on the other, intersect dramatically. If Pannekoek had paid serious attention to the history of class relations in Russia, he would have seen that the characteristics of the proletariat at that historical moment – its technical makeup, its political forms, its relationship to the other classes – made it impossible for the class to take power without party intervention. Because Russia was so riven by class divisions, a revolution with any chance of success would have to find some way to forge an alliance between proletarian vanguards and peasant masses in a way that could transcend these separations. Pannekeok would have seen that the class was, at that conjuncture, actually quite ready. It just had to assume a different political form, one distinct from the soviets, in order to make the revolution.
This gap goes a long way in explaining Pannekoek’s somewhat confusing belief that the party can never actually be a part of the class itself. In his letters, he seems to argue that any enlarged conception of the party would necessarily transform it into a special forces team, which would be called in to bash heads when the class runs into trouble. He refused to entertain the possibility that the party, as was the case in Russia, may itself be a necessary element of the class. Unlike Castoriadis, who tried to capture the significance of the French Communist Party by studying its possible social bases, its particular history, and its broader relationship to the class struggle itself, Pannekoek contented himself with simply arguing that it was on the side of capital. For Castoriadis, this was not good enough; the task was to meticulously analyze the peculiar, and rather unprecedented, composition of a reformist party working in the service of a foreign country, to “explain patiently the complete workings and material roots of Stalinism’s betrayal” in order to definitively outflank it.28
Pannekoek deliberately ignored these kinds of questions – questions, he would say, that have been posed in “an entirely practical way” – because his vision of revolution, despite its numerous merits, was still largely informed by a kind of fatalism. Proletarians will naturally figure everything out based on their immediate experiences, as though they possess some kind of innate knowledge organically driving them to a specified goal, like an acorn growing into an oak tree. They will spontaneously become political subjects, like the logical result of an equation, and make their revolution on their own. If they run into any setbacks, it’s only because they still don’t have enough experience; if they suffer a defeat, it’s only because they weren’t ready. For the Pannekoek of these letters, there is no gap between immediate needs and the emancipation of the class through revolution. The two seamlessly blend into one another in such a way as to entirely cover up the moment of strategy.
But in order to explore these themes further we have to take a step backward. Though many of the problems above – the conflation of means and ends, the elision of strategy, the suppression of class heterogeneity, and the reversion to fatalism – persist within today’s ultra-left, the best way to understand and eventually supersede them is to go back to their genesis. This means returning to another famous encounter, that between the ultra-left and Lenin himself. It was Lenin, after all, who united a set of radically distinct groups under the umbrella of the “ultra-left.” Our forthcoming investigation, therefore, will move backwards to Lenin and his adversaries.
Until then, we present the letters. The first entry in this exchange, from Pannekoek to Castoriadis, has been available on the internet, and we reproduce that version here. Pannekoek indicates that he wrote the letter in English, but it was ultimately translated into French for publication in Socialisme ou Barbarie. It is not clear whether this version is a translation or the original English text. Castoriadis’s response, written under the pen name Pierre Chaulieu, and a final response by Pannekoek, have only been available in French. The versions available here are our translations from the originals reprinted at mondialisme.org.
- 1Dan Berrett, “Intellectual Roots of Wall St. Protest Lie in Academe,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 16, 2011.
- 2Denis Authier and Jean Barrot (Gilles Dauvé), La gauche communiste en Allemagne. 1918-1921 (Paris: Payot, 1976), p. 159; English version at marxists.org.
- 3Anton Pannekoek, Workers’ Councils (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2003), p. 206.
- 4Cornelius Castoriadis, “On the Content of Socialism, I” in Political and Social Writings, Volume 1, 1946-1955: From the Critique of Bureaucracy to the Positive Content of Socialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 298.
- 5VI Lenin, “The Party Crisis” in Collected Works, vol. 32 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), p. 48.
- 6Lenin, “The Trade Unions and Trotsky’s Mistakes” in
, p. 42. - 7Lenin, “The Tax in Kind” in Collected Works, vol. 32, pp. 342, 351.
- 8Lenin, “Left-Wing Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality” in Collected Works, vol. 27, pp. 335, 349, 336.
- 9Lenin, “The New Economic Policy and the Tasks of the Political Education Departments” in Collected Works, vol. 33, p. 66.
- 10Lenin, “The Role and Functions of the Trade Unions Under the New Economic Policy” in Collected Works, vol. 33, p. 186-7.
- 11JV Stalin, “Concerning the Question of a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government” in Works, vol. 9 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), p. 189.
- 12Leon Trotsky, Platform of the Joint Opposition, chs. 1 and 3, reprinted at marxists.org.
- 13Stalin, “Grain Procurements and the Prospects for the Development of Agriculture” in Works, vol. 11, p. 8.
- 14Stalin, “The Right Danger in the CPSU(B)” in Works, vol. 11, p. 313.
- 15Stalin, “Industrialization of the Country and the Right Deviation in the CPSU(B)” in Works, vol. 11, p. 263.
- 16Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (Minneola: Dover Publications, 2004), pp. 7, 31.
- 17Trotsky, “The USSR in War” in In Defense of Marxism (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1995), p. 55.
- 18Karl Kautsky, Terrorism and Communism, ch. 8, reprinted at marxists.org.
- 19Stalin, Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1972), pp. 10, 15.
- 20Amadeo Bordiga, Dialogue avec Staline, “Deuxième journée,” reprinted at sinistra.net. All quotations are our translations from French.
- 21Pannekoek, “State Capitalism and Dictatorship,” reprinted at marxists.org.
- 22Castoriadis, “The Peasantry Under Bureaucratic Capitalism” in
1, pp. 162. - 23Castoriadis, “On the Content of Socialism, II” in Political and Social Writings, Volume 2, 1955-1960: From the Workers’ Struggle Against Bureaucracy to Revolution in the Age of Modern Capitalism(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 134, 149.
- 24Pannekoek, “Party and Working Class,” 1936, reprinted at marxists.org.
- 25Castoriadis, “Proletarian Leadership” in PASW 1, p. 203.
- 26Castoriadis, “On the Content of Socialism, I” in PASW 1, p. 298.
- 27Castoriadis, “The Signification of the Belgian Strikes” in Political and Social Writings, Volume 3, 1961-1979: Recommencing the Revolution: From Socialism to the Autonomous Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 4.
- 28Castoriadis, “Stalinism in France” in PASW 1, p. 65.
Comments
An interesting and useful pulling together of various earlier and more recent 'ultra-left' tendencies and I'm curious to see how the author moves on to his (I suspect) defence of Lenin. For us today it seems we can find a better theoretical understanding of modern global capitalism only by weaving together some of the better elements of these past contributions. I think maybe the conclusions in this text regarding the need to recognise that communism might come through a diversity of means and political forms, whilst being a seemingly sensible observation given the changing nature of global capitalism, is drawn here from the same narrow focus of revolution as essentially limited within a national framework which even in the time of the Russian revolution was misplaced.
Reply to Pannekoek - Castoriadis
A reply to Pannekoek's letter to Socialisme ou Barbarie, translated by Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi for Viewpoint Magzine.
Your letter has provided a great satisfaction to all the comrades of the group; satisfaction of seeing our work appreciated by a comrade honored as you are and who has devoted an entire life to the proletariat and to socialism; satisfaction of seeing confirmed our idea of a profound agreement between you and us on the fundamental points; satisfaction finally of being able to discuss with you and of enriching our review with this discussion.
Before discussing the two points to which your letter is devoted (nature of the Russian Revolution, conception and role of the party), I would like to underline the points on which we agree: autonomy of the working class as both means and end of its historical action, total power of the proletariat at the economic and political level as the sole concrete content of socialism. I would furthermore like on this point to to clear up a misunderstanding. It is not correct that we restrict “the activity of these organisms to the organization of labor in factories after the taking of social power.” We think that the activity of these soviet – or workers’ council – organisms after the taking of power extends itself to the total organization of social life, which is to say that as long as there is need for an organism of power, its role will be fulfilled by the workers’ councils. Neither is it correct that we would only think of such a role for the councils in the period following the “taking of power.” At the same time, historical experience and reflection show that the councils could not be the organisms truly expressing the class if they were created to thus decree the future of a victorious revolution, that they will be nothing unless they are created spontaneously by a profound movement of the class, therefore before the “taking of power”; and if it is thus, it is evident that they will play a primordial role during the entire revolutionary period, whose beginning is precisely marked (as I said in my text on the party in number 10) by the constitution of the autonomous organisms of the masses.
Where in contrast there is, in fact, a real difference of opinion between us, is on the question of knowing if, during this revolutionary period, these councils will be the sole organism which plays an effective role in conducting the revolution, and, to a lesser extent, what the role and task is of the revolutionary militants in the meantime. That is, the “question of the party.”
You say “in the conquest of power we have no interest in a ‘revolutionary party’ that will take the leadership of the proletarian revolution.” And even further, after having quite rightly recalled that there are, beside us, a half-dozen other parties or groups that claim to represent the working class, you add: “in order for them (the masses in their councils) to decide in the best way possible they must be enlightened by well-considered advice coming from the greatest number of people possible.” I fear that this view of things has no correspondence with both the most glaring and the most hidden traits of the current and prospective situation of the working class. Since these other parties and groups of which you speak do not simply represent different opinions on the best way to make revolution, and the sessions of the councils will not be calm gatherings of reflection where, according the opinions of these diverse counselors (the representatives of the groups and parties), the working class will decide to follow one path rather than another. From the very moment that these organisms of the working class have been constituted, the class struggle will have been transposed to the very heart of these organisms; it will be transposed there by the representatives of the majority of these “groups or parties” which claim to represent the working class but who, in the majority of cases, represent the interests and the ideology of the classes hostile to the proletariat, like the reformists and the Stalinists. Even if they don’t exist there in their current form, they will exist in another, let us be sure. In all likelihood, they will start with a predominant position. And the whole experience of the last twenty years – of the Spanish war, the occupation, and up to and including the experience of any current union meeting – we learn that the militants who have our opinion must conquer by struggle even the right to speak within these organisms.
The intensification of the class struggle during the revolutionary period will inevitably take the form of the intensification of the struggle of diverse factions within the mass organisms. In these conditions, to say that a vanguard revolutionary organization will limit itself to “enlightening with well-considered advice” is, I believe, what in English is called an “understatement.” After all, if the councils of the revolutionary period prove to be this assembly of wise men where nobody comes to disturb the calm necessary for a well-considered reflection, we will be the first to congratulate ourselves; we feel sure, in fact, that our advice would prevail if things happened this way. But it is only in this case that the “party or group” could limit itself to the tasks that you assign it. And this case is by far the most improbable. The working class which will form the councils will not be a different class from the one that exists today; it will have made an enormous step forwards, but, to use a famous expression, it will still be stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. It will be at the surface dominated by profoundly hostile influences, to which it can initially oppose only its still-confused revolutionary will and a minority vanguard. This will be by all means compatible with our fundamental idea of the autonomy of the working class extending and deepening its influence on the councils, winning the majority to its program. It may even have to act before; what can it do if, representing 45% of the councils, it learns that some neo-Stalinist party prepares to take power for the future? Will it not have to try to seize power immediately?
I do not think that you will disagree with all that; I believe that what you aim for above all in your criticisms is the idea of the revolutionary leadership of the party. I have however tried to explain that the party cannot be the leadership of the class, neither before, nor after the revolution; not before, because the class does not follow it and it would only know how to lead at most a minority (and again, “lead” it in a totally relative sense: influence it with its ideas and its exemplary action); not after, since proletarian power cannot be the power of the party, but the power of the class in its autonomous mass organisms. The only moment when the party can approach the role of effective leadership, of the corps which can try to impose its revolutionary will with violence, may be a certain phase of the revolutionary period immediately preceding its conclusion; important practical decisions may need to be taken outside the councils if the representatives of actually counter-revolutionary organizations participate, the party may, under the pressure of circumstances, commit itself to a decisive action even if it is not, in votes, followed by the majority of the class. The fact that in acting thus, the party will not act as a bureaucratic body aiming to impose its will on the class, but as the historical expression of the class itself, depends on a series of factors, which we can discuss in the abstract today, but which will only be appreciated at this moment: what proportion of the class is in agreement with the program of the party, what is the ideological state of the rest of the class, where is the struggle against the counterrevolutionary tendencies within the councils, what are the ulterior perspectives, etc. To draw up, as of now, a series of rules of conduct for the various possible cases would doubtless be puerile; one can be sure that the only cases that will present themselves will be the unforeseen cases.
There are comrades who say: to trace this perspective is to leave the path open to a possible degeneration of the party in the bureaucratic sense. The response is: not tracing it means accepting the defeat of the revolution or the bureaucratic degeneration of the councils from the very start, and this not as a possibility, but as a certitude. Ultimately, to refuse to act in fear that one will transform into a bureaucrat, seems to me as absurd as refusing to think in fear of being wrong. Just as the only “guarantee” against error consists in the exercise of thought itself, the only “guarantee” against bureaucratization consists in permanent action in an anti-bureaucratic direction, in struggling against the bureaucracy and in practically showing that a non-bureaucratic organization of the vanguard is possible, and that it can organize non-bureaucratic relations with the class. Since the bureaucracy is not born of false ideas, but of necessities proper to worker action at a certain stage, and in action it is about showing that the proletariat can do without the bureaucracy. Ultimately, to remain above all preoccupied with the fear of bureaucratization is to forget that in current conditions an organization would only know how to acquire a noteworthy influence with the masses on the condition of expressing and realizing their anti-bureaucratic aspirations; it is to forget that a vanguard group will only be able to reach a real existence by perpetually modeling itself on these aspirations of the masses; it is to forget that there is no longer room for the appearance of a new bureaucratic organization. The permanent failure of Trotskyist attempts to purely and simply recreate a “Bolshevik” organization finds its deepest cause there.
To close these reflections, I do not think either that one could say that in the current period (and hence the revolution) the task of a vanguard group would be a “theoretical” task. I believe that this task is also and above all the task of struggle and organization. For the class struggle is permanent, through its highs and lows, and the ideological maturation of the working class makes itself through this struggle. But the proletariat and its struggles are currently dominated by bureaucratic organizations (unions and parties), which has the result of rendering struggle impossible, of deviating them from the class goal or conducting them to defeat. A vanguard organization cannot indifferently attend this show, neither can it content itself with appearing as the owl of Minerva at dusk, letting the sound of its beak fall with tracts explaining to the workers the reasons for their defeat. It must be capable of intervening in these struggles, combating the influence of bureaucratic organizations, proposing forms of action and organization to the workers; it must even at times be capable of imposing them. Fifteen resolute vanguard workers can, in certain cases, put a factory of 5,000 into strike, if they are willing to knock out some Stalinist bureaucrats, which is neither theoretical, nor even democratic, these bureaucrats having always been elected in comfortable majorities by the workers themselves.
I would like, before ending this response, to say a couple things about our second divergence, which at first glance has only a theoretical character: that of the nature of the Russian Revolution. We think that characterizing the Russian Revolution as a bourgeois revolution does violence to the facts, to ideas, and to language. That in the Russian Revolution there were several elements of a bourgeois revolution – in particular, the “realization of the bourgeois-democratic tasks” – has always been recognized, and, long before the revolution itself, Lenin and Trotsky had made it the base of their strategy and tactics. But these tasks, in the given stage of historical development and the configuration of social forces in Russia, could not be dealt with by the working class who, in the same blow, could not pose itself essentially socialist tasks.
You say: the participation of workers does not suffice. Of course; as soon as a battle becomes a mass battle the workers are there, since they are the masses. But the criterion is not that: it is to know if the workers find themselves the pure and simple infantry of the bourgeoisie or if they fight for their own goals. In a revolution in which the workers battle for “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” – whatever meaning they subjectively give to these watchwords – they are the infantry of the bourgeoisie. When they fight for “All power to the soviets,” they fight for socialism. What makes the Russian Revolution a proletarian revolution is that the proletariat intervened in it as a dominant force with its own flag, its face, its demands, its means of struggle, its own forms of organization; it is not only that it constituted mass organisms aiming to appropriate all power but that this itself went past the expropriation of the capitalists and began to realize workers’ management of the factories. All this made the Russian Revolution forever a proletarian revolution, whatever its subsequent fate – just as neither the weakness, nor the confusions, nor the final defeat of the Paris Commune prevents it from having been a proletarian revolution.
This divergence may appear at first glance to be theoretical: I think however that it has a practical important insofar as it translates par excellence a methodological difference into a contemporary problem: the problem of the bureaucracy. The fact that the degeneration of the Russian Revolution has not given way to the restoration of the bourgeoisie but to the the formation of a new exploitative layer, the bureaucracy; that the regime that carries this layer, despite its profound identity with capitalism (as the domination of dead labor over living labor), differs in many aspects that cannot be neglected without refusing to understand anything; that this same layer, since 1945, is in the process of extending its domination over the world; that it is represented in the countries of Western Europe by parties deeply rooted in the working class – all this makes us think that contenting ourselves with saying that the Russian Revolution was a bourgeois revolution is equivalent to voluntarily closing our eyes to the most important aspects of the global situation today.
I hope that this discussion can be pursued and deepened, and I believe it is not necessary to repeat to you that we welcome with joy in Socialisme ou Barbarie all that you would like to send us.
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Reply to Castoriadis - Pannekoek
Pannekoek's final response to Castoriadis's letter in Socialisme ou Barbarie, translated by Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi for Viewpoint Magazine.
I noticed with great pleasure that you have published in your review Socialisme ou Barbarie a translation of my letter annotated with critical remarks in such a way that involves your readers in a discussion on fundamental questions. Since you express the desire to continue the discussion, I am sending you several remarks on your response. Naturally, there are still differences of opinion that could appear in the discussion with a greater clarity. Such differences are normally the result of a different assessment of what one considers as the most important points, which in turn is related to our practical experiences or the milieu in which we find ourselves. For me, this was the study of the political strikes in Belgium (1893), in Russia (1905 and 1917), and in Germany (1918 to 1919), a study by which I attempted to reach a clear understanding of the fundamental character of these actions. Your group lives and works among the turmoil of the working class of a great industrial city; consequently, your attention is completely concentrated on a practical problem: how could the methods of effective struggle develop beyond the inefficient struggle of parties and partial strikes of today?
Naturally, I do not claim that the revolutionary actions of the working class will all unfold in an atmosphere of peaceful discussion. What I claim is that the result of the struggle, often violent, is not determined by accidental circumstances, but by what is alive in the thoughts of the workers, as the basis of a solid consciousness acquired by experience, study, or their discussions. If the personnel of a factory must decide whether or not to go on strike, the decision is not taken by smashing fists on the table, but normally by discussions.
You pose the problem in an entirely practical way: what would the party do if it had 45% of the members of the councils behind it and if it expected another party (neo-Stalinists that strive to conquer the regime) to attempt a seizure of power by force? Your response is: we would have to preempt it by doing that which we fear it will do. What will be the definitive result of such an action? Look at what happened in Russia. There existed a party, with good revolutionary principles, influenced by Marxism; and assured, moreover, of the support of the councils already formed by the workers; however, it was obliged to seize power, and the result was totalitarian Stalinism (if I say “it was obliged” that means that the circumstances were not ripe enough for a real proletarian revolution. In the western world in which capitalism is more developed, the conditions certainly are more ripe; the measure of it is given by the development of the class struggle). Thus, one must pose the question: could the struggle of the party that you propose save the proletarian revolution? It seems to me that it would be instead one step towards a new oppression.
Certainly, there will always be difficulties. If the French, or global, situation required a mass struggle of the workers, the communist parties would try immediately to transform the action into a pro-Russian demonstration within the boundaries of the party. We must lead an energetic struggle against these parties. But we cannot beat them by following their methods. That is only possible by practicing our own methods. The true form of action of a class in struggle is the force of arguments, based on the fundamental principle of the autonomy of decisions! The workers can only prevent the communist party’s repression by the development and reinforcement of their own class power; that means their unanimous will to take the means of production under their control and manage them.
The principal condition for the conquest of freedom for the working class is that the conception of self-government and self-management of the apparatuses of production is rooted in the consciousness of the masses. That agrees, to a certain degree, with what Jaurès wrote on the Constituent Assembly, in his Socialist History of the French Revolution:
“This assembly, brand new, discussing political subjects, knew, barely convened, to thwart all the maneuvers of the Court. Why? Because it held several grand abstract ideas, seriously and lengthily ripened and which gave them a clear view of the situation.”
Of course, the two cases are not identical. Instead of the grand political ideas of the French Revolution, it is a question of the grand socialist ideas of the workers, which is to say: the management of production by organized cooperation. Instead of 500 deputies armed with their abstract ideas acquired through study, the workers will be millions guided by the experience of an entire life of exploitation in a productive job. This is why I see these things in the following way:
The most noble and useful task of a revolutionary party is, by its propaganda in thousands of small journals, brochures, etc., to enrich the knowledge of the masses in the process of a consciousness always more clear and more vast.
Now, several words on the character of the Russian revolution. Translating the English word “middle class revolution” into “révolution bourgeoise” does not exactly express its meaning. When in England the so-called middle classes seized power, they were composed of a large party of small capitalists, or businessmen, owners of the industrial apparatuses of production. The struggle of the masses was necessary to drive the aristocracy from power; but in spite of this fact, this mass was itself not yet capable of seizing the instruments of production; the workers could only achieve the spiritual, moral, and organizational capacity to do that by means of class struggle in a sufficiently developed capitalism. In Russia, there did not exist a bourgeoisie of certain importance; the consequence was that the vanguard of the revolution gave birth to a new “middle class” as ruling class of productive work, managing the apparatus of production, and not as an ensemble of individual owners each possessing a certain part of the apparatus of production, but as collective owners of the apparatus of production in its totality.
In general, we could say: if the laboring masses (because they are the product of pre-capitalist conditions) are not yet capable of taking production into their own hands, inevitably that will lead to new leading class becoming master of production. It is this concordance that makes me say that the Russian revolution (in its essential and permanent character) was a bourgeois revolution. Certainly the mass power of the proletariat was necessary to destroy the former system (and it was in this a lesson for the workers of the entire world). But a social revolution can obtain nothing more than what corresponds to the character of the revolutionary classes, and if the greatest radicalism possible was necessary to conquer all resistances, later on, it would have to fall behind.
This appears to be general rule of all revolutions up to the present day: up to 1793, the French Revolution became more and more radical, until the peasants definitively became the free masters of the soil, and until the foreign armies were pushed back; at that moment, the Jacobins were massacred and capitalism made its entrance as the new master. When one sees things this way, the course of the Russian revolution would be the same as those preceding revolutions that all conquered power, in England, in France, in Germany. The Russian revolution was not at all a premature proletarian revolution. The proletarian revolution belongs to the future.
I hope that this explanation, even though it does not contain any new arguments, will help to clarify several divergences in our points of view.
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Issue 2: Theory and Practice
The neighborhood is the new factory
An article by Liz Mason-Deese on the unemployed movement in Argentina since 2001.
In 2001, Argentina suffered an economic crisis, similar to the one that much of the world is experiencing today. After more than a decade of IMF-mandated structural adjustment, which only deepened poverty and unemployment, the government was forced to default on over $100 billion of public debt and declared a state of emergency in an attempt to calm public unrest. Despite a military-imposed curfew, thousands of people rushed to the streets and forced the president and other politicians out of office with the chant “que se vayan todos/ni se quede uno solo” (they all must go/not one can stay). These protests were the culmination of years of organizing in response to increasing unemployment and simultaneous reductions in welfare programs as part of neoliberal policies. Workers were taking over factories, the unemployed blocking highways, migrants occupying unused land. When joined by the spontaneous protests of the middle class in December, the mobilizations were able to overthrow the government as the president fled Buenos Aires in a helicopter. The movements were not only the largest mass mobilization in Argentina since the 1970s, but also qualitatively different from earlier movements: not interested in taking state power, nor in working more jobs and longer hours, they struggled to create new forms of life, including new forms of socio-spatial organization and the production and distribution of wealth. In the ten years following the crisis, the strongest of the movements, the Movements of Unemployed Workers (Movimientos de Trabajadores Desocupados, MTDs), has continued on this path, even as the country has recovered economically and has so far been able to resist the effects of the global crisis.
Here I’ll examine the history and practices of the MTDs, drawing on research I’ve conducted since 2003 with the MTDs La Matanza and Solano, and current research in Buenos Aires on the organization of the unemployed. The movements of the unemployed, which first emerged in Argentina in the mid-1990s, challenge traditional representations of the unemployed as lacking political agency and revolutionary potential. While many Marxists and labor organizers have maintained the latter position, Argentina’s recent history paints a different picture: the militant organization of the unemployed across the country was instrumental in overthrowing the neoliberal government in 2001 and steering the course the country would take following the economic crisis. Movements of the unemployed in Argentina are redefining work through their organizational practice, discourses around labor, and active creation of different forms of production and reproduction. This will necessarily be a very partial description of a complex, fragmented, and diverse movement, which has existed for over fifteen years.
Organizing the Unemployed
By the mid-1990s, unemployment in Argentina had reached nearly 20% (with even higher levels of underemployment), due to rapid deindustrialization and privatization, alongside a working class weakened from the earlier military dictatorship. New laws had stripped workers of remaining rights and led to the increasing “flexibilization” of labor, allowing employers to hire workers under short-term contracts and provide less benefits, making it easier to fire workers and unnecessary to compensate them upon doing so. Different forms of informal and precarious labor were already the norm for women and youth, and became increasingly so for adult men as well. President Carlos Menem had effectively cut social spending so that only certain sectors received unemployment benefits, and the jobless could not reliably depend on any support from the state. The main, officially recognized labor movement, headed by the CGT (Confederación General del Trabajo), was politically in ruins as it continued to support Menem because of its Peronist party affiliation, while these changes in the organization of work made the traditional forms of labor organizing increasingly difficult. Without stable employment, the poor increasingly relied on different forms of informal labor, illegal activity, and the political parties’ systems of patronage, as well as strengthened networks of mutual aid and support within communities.
It was in this context that the unemployed began to organize themselves, first in the interior of Argentina and soon after in the country’s major urban centers. Their first public actions were roadblocks, using barricades and burning tires to block major highways, sometimes for weeks at a time. The roadblocks were organized without any support from the major trade unions or leftist political parties, but rather through the already existing networks of support of the poor and unemployed. In the interior of the country, laid-off workers of the recently privatized oil company were the first to protest in 1996, demanding unemployment benefits and/or their jobs back. In the urban areas, however, the protests were of a more heterogeneous composition, including many who had never participated in the formal labor market. In the urban periphery of Buenos Aires, the first actions were centered around the question of food, with large public collective meals and protests demanding food assistance from the state. Other early protests focused on the rising costs of electricity and gas, the poor living conditions in working-class neighborhoods, and the lack of state support for the unemployed.
While different organizations of the unemployed emerged during this time in Argentina, the MTDs were generally the most independent and innovative. The MTDs are organized by neighborhood, instead of around a specific workplace or sector, taking the name of the neighborhood or region where they are based. Although the different MTDs sometimes come together in specific campaigns or actions, and have formed coalitions or blocks, there has never been a national organization uniting all the different groups of unemployed across the country. The MTDs are engaged in a constantly shifting constellation of alliances and networks with each other, different sectors of the labor movement, and other social movements. Thus each group is unique, not only in its geographic location, but in terms of its internal organization, political activity and ideological affiliations as well. Yet there are several elements the MTDs have in common, including the tactic of the roadblocks, a form of organization that emphasizes autonomy and a critique of hierarchy, and an emphasis on territorial organization and forming their own productive enterprises.
The MTDs first came into the public eye for their confrontational roadblocks, or piquetes. The roadblock’s immediate purpose is to stop the normal circulation of goods and services, and to make people’s demands visible. It has been widely remarked that the piquetes are the unemployed’s version of the strike or work stoppage, the only available tactic once denied access to this privileged form of workers’ revolt. However, the decision to block roads does not necessarily start from the assumption of lack: the piqueteros took their protests not to the factory doors, but rather to the streets of the city, understanding the city as the crucial site of capitalist production. For this reason, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri exemplify this tactic as a “wildcat strike against the metropolis.”1 In Buenos Aires, the roadblocks were particularly effective because they often took place at the major bridges or other entry points to the city from the suburbs, and as the crisis worsened and the government’s power weakened, at major intersections within the city itself. The roadblocks were essential in giving the piqueteros a sense of agency many felt they lacked without access to employment or the work site as a place to organize and proved to be an extremely powerful and effective tactic. The piquetes were successful in forcing the state to provide unemployment benefits and food baskets to the poor, and for the organizations winning control over the distribution of the subsidies. This control was important, as it allowed the movements to remain independent of the political parties, which would generally distribute benefits in turn for votes and political support, and because it allowed the movements to choose how to reinvest the funds in community organization.
The roadblocks were also important in that they served as a space of encounter, bringing together the different unemployed and forming new social relations and communal values. More than just protests, the piquetes were encampments in the middle of the street, where people took care of each other, and shared food and other responsibilities for maintaining the space.
Horizontality & Autonomy
While different organizations of the unemployed, and later other movements across the country, use the tactic of the roadblock, the MTDs can be further differentiated by their internal organization and commitment to autonomy. The MTDs’ internal organization emphasizes direct democracy, generally using a moderated consensus process in assemblies which are open to everyone in the movement. While the MTDs differ in their exact practices of internal democracy, with some committed to complete horizontalism while others have different leadership structures, they agree upon a critique of unions and parties for their top-down, hierarchical, and bureaucratic structures and practices, and are dedicated to enacting different forms of internal organization. This differentiates them from other organizations of the unemployed that are organized more bureaucratically, or that have come to rely on charismatic leaders.
The MTDs were formed from self-convened and organized groups of neighbors and remained autonomous from trade unions, leftist and national-popular political parties, and the parties’ patronage networks. They have resisted being incorporated into these institutions although at times they make strategic alliances with the more independent unions or leftist political parties. Since the election of Nestor Kirchner in 2003, many social movements in the country, including organizations of the unemployed with a more national-popular/Peronist political leaning, declared their support for the government, and, in some cases, became officially integrated into its ranks. Several of the MTDs, including those that make up the Frente Popular Dario Santillan, and the MTDs La Matanza and Solano, have remained independent from the government, choosing instead to focus on territorial organizing and creating new productive practices, which continue to this day.
The commitment to horizontality and autonomy are accompanied by a critique of representation. It is recognized that the movement is internally very heterogeneous and there is no ideal figure of the unemployed worker. Additionally, these movements emerged at the time of a complete breakdown of representational democracy, as seen in the neoliberal government of the 1990s and its eventual overthrow. It was clear that the politicians in power did not represent the people, not even of their own parties. Nor did the union, which continued to support Menem, represent the workers. The loss of faith in representational politics led to the cries that “they all must go,” and the adoption of popular neighborhood assemblies across the city of Buenos Aires. This skepticism toward representational politics is countered by a commitment to territorial organizing, to creating new ways of life and social-spatial organization in the neighborhoods where the poor live.
Territorial Organization
The territorial organization is another element that distinguishes the organizations of the unemployed, especially those in urban settings, from other social movements in Argentina and elsewhere. “The neighborhood is the new factory” was one of the principal slogans of the MTDs and other organizations of the unemployed. This slogan carries a double significance: production is no longer centered in the factory but dispersed throughout the territory and, in parallel, labor organizing must be dispersed throughout the neighborhood as well. Many of the MTDs, especially in southern reaches of Greater Buenos Aires, emerged from settlements in the urban periphery that had been illegally occupied in the 1980s. In these settlements, the neighborhood was already the key site of political organization, as the settlements were largely collectively controlled by their inhabitants and sites of constant struggles to maintain their land and for access to services. The neighborhood was also the obvious site for political organization for the large numbers of women and youth that had never been included in the formal labor movement and had always been excluded from other political organizations. Thus, they were the ones to take the lead as these movements emerged, a stark contrast to the many forms of political activity dominated by men.
The struggle against capital must also be the struggle to produce a different type of space and different social relations within the space.2 That is precisely what the MTDs seek to do in their territories, by establishing a physical presence in the neighborhood and seeking to collectively manage as many of the elements of daily life as possible. Territorial organization as practiced by the MTDs includes creating schools, soup kitchens, health clinics, daycares, community gardens, social centers and productive enterprises within a given territory. It means organizing around the basic needs of community residents, food, clean water, housing, education and the desire to form community in neighborhoods that are socially and ethnically fragmented. Territorial organization implies opening up all the spaces of daily activity to critique and as possible sites of organization. These movements recognize and more fully value the different types of labor that go into producing a territory. Ultimately, territorial organization seeks to build on the self-activity of the working class as expressed through the practices of everyday life and social organization in the neighborhoods.
Labor
The MTDs differ from what is traditionally conceived of as the labor movement because of their decentering of waged labor and explicit organizing of unemployed people. The MTDs have explicitly taken on the challenge of organizing the unemployed, as well as partially-employed, informal, and domestic workers. Through the positive identity of the piquetero and continuing to identify as workers, the MTDs have moved beyond a definition of the unemployed that is based on lack, on what they don’t have (employment), to one that values the political organization of the class. Thus, this discourse no longer privileges wage labor as the norm, recognizing that this is no longer a possibility for much of the country’s working class. Yet, the MTDs continue identifying as “workers,” as the working class, even without employment or even the possibility of employment. Rather, the movement recognizes that there are many types of work, and that they are organized in many different ways.
The MTDs decenter the experience of waged labor and instead put the spaces of everyday life in the center of their struggle. In this way, they are able to challenge distinctions between waged and unwaged labor, or formal and informal employment, to create a space for the majority of urban residents who survive on some combination of precarious work along with state subsidies, illegal activities, and support from family and friends. Residents of the urban periphery often work part-time in domestic labor or construction, are self-employed through micro-enterprises run out of their homes, and are involved in the constant labor of care in their own homes and communities. This labor lacks the rights and security that have helped other workers to organize, as well as geographic stability. This makes workplace organizing extremely difficult, if not impossible, meaning that there is generally little place for these workers within labor unions. The piquetero movement, however, is one of the few movements that has managed to successfully bring together these different type of workers without reproducing the hierarchies and divisions of the labor market.
Within the piquetero movement there are differing analyses of work and diagnostics of the economic situation, which are manifest in the organizations’ demands and practices. One sector of the movement calls for “genuine work” and demands their old jobs back: real, legitimate, authentic jobs. These were opposed to the demands for subsidies and unemployment benefits, which they considered to reproduce patterns of laziness and dependency. While certainly politicians’ use of these these subsidies to pacifty and co-opt movements must be criticized, it is easy to see how the simple critique of subsidies-as-dependency risks reproducing the logic of neoliberal capital and its ideology of individual responsibility. The demand for “genuine work” makes another mistake by labeling certain forms of labor as legitimate and authentic as opposed to others, devaluing women’s work in the household and community, as well as many other types of labor. It fails to take into account structural changes that make its premise worthless: there is no more genuine work.
Another sector of the piquetero movement, mostly adhering to a nationalist-populist ideology, has centered their actions around demanding unemployment subsidies from the state. Thanks to their success in winning these benefits and the right to distribute them, these organizations grew rapidly in the late 1990s, yet were unable to provide a real alternative to the corrupt and hierarchical forms of politics already taking place in working class neighborhoods. A politics based on making demands of the state means that most of these organizations now support the Kirchner administration and many have officially integrated into the government apparatus, thus losing most of their oppositional potential.
The independent MTDs, on the other hand, have taken a different approach from those either demanding “genuine work” or only demanding subsidies. While these MTDs decenter waged labor, work remains at the center of their practice and analysis. The MTDs do not just demand jobs, however. Instead, they ask: “what kind of work do we want?” and answer: “work with dignity.” Work with dignity is not so much a demand as a statement of intent, for it is precisely what the movements are putting into practice, creating new forms of work that spill over into new ways of living and organizing the urban territory.
Alternatives
Starting in the late 1990s, at the same time as some workers began taking over their factories, a number of MTDs started their own productive enterprises as a way to provide an income for some of their members and to regain a sense of control over their lives, which they had lost with unemployment. These efforts multiplied after 2001, as the crisis hit its peak and the lack of a stable government made it clear that solutions would not come from the state. During this time, the MTDs also participated in organizing barter markets and alternative currency networks, creating new economic systems based on mutual aid and support. Recognizing that full employment was no longer an option, or perhaps even a desire, for everyone, these groups decided to create their own ways of reproducing life in their territories, outside of the capitalist market.
There are different ways of interpreting “work with dignity,” and different ways of putting it into practice. We can, however, identify some common threads: (1) self-management/workers’ control/no boss, (2) workplace democracy and horizontality, (3) communal values over market values. These alternatives sometimes take the form of worker-owned cooperatives, but go beyond obviously productive enterprises as well. As part of their territorial organization, the MTDs seek to collectively manage other spaces and activities of life, from healthcare to education to the food they eat. There is a dimension of autonomy to these projects as well: although most are funded at least partially through state subsidies, the MTDs aim to be self-sufficient in order to no longer rely on the state. This is mostly a practical concern, since it is expected that the state will one day take away the subsidies or enforce certain requirements the movements are not prepared to meet. The subsidies are considered useful, however, inasmuch as they provide a material base from which to further strengthen the movement and people’s self-organization.
The alternatives that the MTDs construct are not limited to workplace alternatives, to working without bosses and democratically controlling the workplace. They aim to create different ways of working, questioning what counts as work and how that work is valued, how that work is carried out and organized, and the relationship between that work and other parts of life. This means going beyond the productive enterprises to focus on activities that create new social relations within the neighborhoods, relationships that are not based on competition or profit but on solidarity and mutual aid.
The productive enterprises the MTDs set up are usually small-scale workshops making food or textiles, or providing services. Bakeries and pizzerias are some of the most common. These enterprises are democratically controlled by the workers themselves and ultimately by the movement as whole, making the needs of the community more important than just turning a profit. They attempt to provide an alternative to the hierarchical discipline of most capitalist workplaces, as well as divisions between manual and intellectual labor, by including all workers in decision-making and rotating roles. Profit is generally invested into the organization as a whole or distributed to members most in need.
In many ways, the cooperatives run by the MTDs are similar to the “recuperated factories” that emerged in Argentina around the same time. In hundreds of sites around the country, workers took over and restarted production in factories, rather than submit to owners’ decisions to close the factories and leave workers unemployed. These range from small printing presses to large metal factories. There is a wide range of diversity in how the recuperated factories operate: in some, workers radically transform the relations of production, instituting non-hierarchical relations between workers and equally sharing responsibilities and tasks, decision-making power, and surplus, while others largely reproduce the relations and practices of the factory under its former boss. Yet in many ways the recuperated factories remain limited, because, after all, they are still creating work, which, instead of relying on a boss to instill the factory discipline, relies on collective self-exploitation. Overall, the recuperated factories do little to challenge the overall system of capital, especially as many continue to fill the same contracts with capitalist corporations as when they were run by a boss. The recuperated factories that are doing the most for political change are those that have been able to create networks with other worker-controlled enterprises, recreating the whole supply chain, and those that build ties with other movements and the wider community.
One of the central focuses of all these movements has been education, which can perhaps best be seen in the bachilleratos populares. The bachilleratos populares are high school degree programs for adults run by social movements, but with state funding and accreditation. The schools emerged out of the movements, both the recuperated factories and the MTDs, first without any outside funding or state recognition, as a way to provide education to their members and the public. They arose out of a double acknowledgment: the lack of quality educational opportunities for much of the city’s poor, and the power of education for political empowerment. After years of fighting, the degrees earned in these schools were formally recognized by the state (in 2007 in the province of Buenos Aires and 2008 in the city). The state provides additional resources as well, and in some localities provides small salaries for the teachers. However, the movements control the curriculum, and are responsible for organizing the school and teaching the classes. Teachers are generally movement activists and/or politically committed university students; some work as teachers in other schools. The MTDs put a great deal of emphasis on knowledge production in general, in some cases even operating their own publishing houses, through which they edit and publish their own research.3
Additionally, some of the MTDs operate health clinics, providing an alternative to the overcrowded and underfunded public health system and taking more holistic approaches to health, as opposed to only treating sickness. Alongside the clinics, the MTDs tend to offer classes about nutrition and wellness, seeking to integrate these elements of their activities into the daily lives of their members. The organizations offer a wide range of cultural and educational programming, from painting classes to readings groups on Marx, provide legal aid for migrants seeking to legalize their status, and facilitate women’s empowerment groups.
Participation in these activities, whether a worker-run bakery or a movement-controlled high school, creates new subjectivities and social relations, produces new territories and new forms of life. The participants go from seeing themselves as helpless victims of global capitalism, solely defined by their lack of employment, to identifying as active agents of social and political change, with the power to confront the state and capital and produce different ways of living. The MTDs challenge dominant narratives about the centrality and desirability of waged labor and instead seek to create alternative forms of production and social organization.
Today the MTDs are not as publicly visible as they were ten years ago, with much less open confrontation with the state and piquetes no longer a daily occurrence. The movement, which was never unified, is perhaps even more fragmented today: some piquetero organizations have been integrated into the Kirchner apparatus, receiving subsidies and other resources from the state, and others are increasingly critical of these new forms of co-optation. The lack of unified action poses an important problem as the government tries to divide “good protesters” from “bad protesters,” determining access to subsidies, and the cooperatives discover it is hard to sustain themselves without building larger networks of trade and support. Certain groups, most notably the Popular Front Darío Santillán, are attempting to counter this fragmentation through the construction of new alliances bringing together the unemployed, low-wage and precarious workers, and students, along with indigenous and campesino groups from other parts of the country. Despite these challenges, however, the MTDs remain committed to the day-to-day work of territorial organizing. There are now around 100 popular high school programs offering degrees around the country, dozens of cooperatives, social centers, and other activities, working to directly improve people’s lives while strengthening the self-organization of neighborhood residents and building their autonomy from the state and capital.
Liz Mason-Deese is a member of the Counter-Cartographies Collective and the Edu-Factory Collective, and is a graduate student in the geography program at UNC Chapel Hill. She currently lives in Buenos Aires, where she is conducting her dissertation research.
Originally posted: September 22, 2012 at Viewpoint Magazine
- 1Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).
- 2See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991) for a theoretical analysis on the relationship between space and capital. For more on how social movements across Latin America struggle to produce new types of spaces, see Raúl Zibechi, Territorios En Resistencia: Cartografía Política De Las Periferias Urbanas Latinoamericanas, (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Lavaca editora, 2008). This book has recently been released in English as Territories in Resistance, trans. Ramor Ryan (Oakland: AK Press, 2012).
- 3The MTD La Matanza has self-published two books: De la culpa a la autogestión: un recorrido del Movimiento de Trabajadores de La Matanza (2005) and Cuando con otros somos nosotros: la experiencia asociativa del Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados de La Matanza (2007).The Popular Front Darío Santillán operates a publishing house which has published over 50 books since 2007. The MTD Solano has collaborated with Colectivo Situaciones on various projects, including the book Hipótesis 891: Más allá de los piquetes.
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Against humanities: the self-consciousness of the corporate university
A standard feature of the hand-wringing associated with the crisis of the university is a fixation on the humanities. After all, for those of us in the so-called creative and critical fields, illustrating, visualizing and – dare we say it – branding the crisis is a new and unique opportunity to show off. This is what we went to school for, isn’t it? Take a recent event at Cornell University, which dramatized the question with the following thought experiment: after some sort of maritime disaster (details are scarce), a group of undergraduates commandeers a life raft. As luck would have it, they have a bit of space left – but, tragic twist of fate, the only people left to save are professors. Instead of giving up the seats to their elders, our clever young narcissists make the professors present a case as to why they deserve the remaining spot on the life raft. One physics professor and four from the humanities are graciously granted 10 minutes, during which students are educated on the ability of literature to help us understand each other, Homer’s extensive insights on rafts in the Illiad, and the power of theater professors abroad to impart the “knowledge that Ugandans could solve many of their own problems” with a firm belief in themselves – more effective, apparently, than “fresh water or a new AIDS vaccine.” Physics offered electricity, fire, and, perhaps most important of all, distilled alcohol. While the classics and physics tied, everyone was rooting for the humanities as a whole by the end.
These creative defenses come with an underlying subtext: it has been the programs in the humanities, and to a lesser extent the social sciences, that bear the brunt of budget cuts, because some departments lack the immediate ability to parlay their knowledge into contracts with surrounding businesses. University administrations, only moderately adept at the art of triage, cut those programs that are unable to find outside sources to bolster their existence. This has become a human tragedy – after all, the way we know ourselves is through the common culture that the humanities in the university are supposed to facilitate. For the defenders of the humanities, the 1926 words of Harvard graduate and classical scholar Paul Shorey echo through now-profane halls. From his speech “Can an American be an Optimist?”:
Who shall resist the fierce, unremitting pressure of the public, the press, the lecture platform, the literary critics, the school boards and schools of education to reduce everything to the level of the taste and understanding of the average pupil, the general reader, the ordinary audience, and to suppress every word, allusion, or quotation, every difficulty, every refinement and qualification, every touch of scholarship in footnote or appendix that may baffle or offend the illiterate literacy of those who have learned to read easy head-line and best-seller English and do not wish to learn more? And yet if we cannot establish and maintain some dike and se-wall of resistance to these tendencies, the rising tide of mediocrity will submerge us even while we are counting our universities by the score and our students by myriads.
When the scalpels are about to be deployed, the natural response of intellectuals is to assume defensive postures and recite the usual litanies of praise for our own profession: the humanities teach democracy; they teach a shared sense of self; they teach how to playfully and intelligently interact with the world, and sometimes even produce the world; they are the sole patch of life beyond the scope of market relations. Those who teach in and take classes in the humanities make the principal claim that without the noble vocation of the professor we’d all be stupider, less capable of making informed decisions, and left to the cold calculations of science.
For those outside of the defensive posture, many of these arguments might seem ludicrous, arrogant, and insulting. Barely muted is the claim that only those who have attended college – the right classes at college – and have subsequently absorbed the requisite cultural learning have the capacity to make society thrive. This was precisely the argument used by the emerging intellectual elite at the end of the 19th century – the liberal sons of the New England ruling class who helped create the humanities from the rubble of the classical studies. The argument underlying their thinking was that civilization was essentially a fragile machine, which must be operated by a small, though hopefully growing, group of men – a “democratic aristocracy” whose position was granted by virtue of their education and judgment, who could inculcate right ideas in both the business titans (who they mistrusted) and the working class (who they feared). In a 1926 speech delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa club at William and Mary, former Princeton professor Henry Van Dyke summed it up well:
[democracy’s] high purpose should be to develop an aristocracy of its own begetting, after its own heart, and dedicated to its service. Unless it can do this, democracy spells confusion of mind, fickleness and feebleness of action, and final decay hastened by the increase of material wealth. The fatter it grows the more it degenerates.
The advent of capitalist higher education by the latter half of the 19th century meant that universities would no longer serve just the small cohort of legal and religious minds who were to influence the tenor of towns and cities through their exemplary action and material success. The transformation was a direct result of the capitalist class usurping hegemony from the colonial patricians, and subsequently ignoring those institutions of higher education; this forced the cash-strapped universities and colleges (whose numbers far outstripped demand) to desperately search for a way to seduce the fledgling capitalists, the stubborn farmers, and the recalcitrant working class.
John William Draper, president of NYU in 1835, complained that “mere literary acumen is becoming utterly powerless against profound scientific attainment.” He asked, “To what are the great advances of civilization for the last fifty years due – to literature or science? Which of the two is it that is shaping the thought of the world?” According to the historian Christopher Lucas, the superintendent of California schools in 1858 declared the graduates of the old colleges to be useless individuals. And Henry Tappan, NYU professor and later University of Michigan President, usually credited as the father of the modern US university, declared that “the commercial spirit of our country, and the many avenues of wealth which are opened before enterprise, create a distaste for study deeply inimical to education… The manufacturer, the merchant, and the gold-digger, will not pause in their career to gain intellectual accomplishments. While gaining knowledge, they are losing the opportunities to gain money.” Engineering, physical science, and other practical knowledges were the principal means of this courtship (and sports, of course, though these had appeal beyond the bourgeoisie and helped knit universities into the urban fabric of the industrial era). There was not a tremendous enthusiasm for either classical studies or the humanities outside of a small cohort of average students, who enjoyed the theatricality of lectures, or the scions of the wealthy.
Classical studies gave up the ghost as advocates of the humanities – a composite of classical studies and the contemplative elements of the newly splintered sphere of political economy, from which emerged the disciplines of economics, anthropology, history, social science, and psychology – seized control of university departments in philosophy, literature, and the arts. The capitalist university would not just produce the legal, juridical, and technical minds required for industrial capitalism, it would also produce its soul. As Laurence Veysey recounts in The Emergence of the American University, the Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce helped provide the core of the new humanities: to encounter the thought behind the scientific method, not just the method. The humanists would be the self-described conscience of the university, the sometimes conservative, sometimes radical gadfly that would preserve capitalism’s humanity in the face of the vulgar utilitarians who prized pecuniary gain and specialization above all. By the early 20th century, the humanities had become assured of their place in the university, allowing Paul Shorey to breathe a sigh of relief: “Neither do I fear direct hostility, suppression, or neglect for the so-called humanities. We have outgrown that stage of controversy.”
When those of us who are educators in the humanities reflect on what exactly it is that “we” do, it is easy to dissociate our individual work from that of the totality of the institution – and from the ways that students use or ignore our work. Sure, says our thoughtful professor, the humanities have been partly responsible for the status quo over the last century. But my colleagues and I subvert, deconstruct, transform these spatial, intellectual, disciplinary boundaries and help students actualize themselves, confront inequality, and learn methods for speaking truth to power in defiance of a culture that seeks to reduce all matter to market calculations.
This attitude will no doubt continue to persist because very few of us want to believe that we are participating in alienating institutions – whether we are bankers, educators, or urban gentrifiers. And of course, the work that some in the humanities do is interesting, reveals much that is not yet known, and provides tools by which to better understand the social structure. But the truth is that the humanities actively hide and mystify the struggles that underly the “common culture.”
Having long prized virtuoso performances, and the ability of the pen and podium to beat back the sword, the humanities foster a specialized tool, abstract intelligence, that can be most powerfully wielded by elites. Writing in The Nation, Christopher Hayes gives a fine description of the social role of this intelligence:
Of all the status obsessions that preoccupy our elites, none is quite so prominent as the obsession with smartness. Intelligence is the core value of the meritocracy, one that stretches back to the early years of standardized testing, when the modern-day SAT descended from early IQ tests. To call a member of the elite “brilliant” is to pay that person the highest compliment.
Hayes describes intelligence like some sort of jewel encrusted dagger: “Smartness dazzles and mesmerizes. More important, it intimidates.” This type of valuation is rife throughout academic departments, especially the humanities. The contempt with which many faculty and TAs regard their own students illustrates just how deeply this attitude runs.
What Hayes misses is that this meritocratic elitism isn’t just a general risk of organization that could be corrected by a “radicalized upper middle class”– it’s part of a wider social process. A cohort of properly democratic elites, long the central fantasy of the humanities, would still fail to step outside the underlying dynamic, which is that capitalism requires expansion and movement. There is no reproduction of market society without the conquest of new markets, and the opening of new spaces to market mechanisms. We would do well to keep this in mind when we discuss the “crisis of the university.” There can be no doubt that the university is in crisis. But the metrics in vogue to describe the crisis seem wrong.
A peculiar insight raised by Brian Whitener and Dan Nemser is that the university as such is not actually in crisis, when measured by the only really important index of our society: investor return. It would be a mistake to imagine that privatization, corporatization, or meritocracy are driving the crisis of the university, when in fact the internal dynamics of capitalism itself lay at its center. Higher education today is simply unable to remain in any kind of stasis, and the stasis urged by the defenders of the university in general, and the humanities in particular, is a weak liberal utopia.
But the utopia isn’t just a weak form of opposition – it’s been part of the ideological foundation of the university from the beginning. Echoing the earlier gadflies, English professor James Mullholland argues in the Chronicle of Higher Education: “We succeed within a corporatized university because we offer ways to reflect on it, reinvent it, and evaluate it. We are the self-consciousness of the corporate university.” When this self-consciousness is universal and “human,” questions of social struggle can be evaded. And once this evasion is complete, the fine-tuning of capitalism can commence.
For the ascendant liberals of the early 20th century, a broad framework embedded in the humanities and social sciences was a mechanism by which to absorb local conflict into the realm of the interventionist state. With the passing of laissez-faire capitalism heralded by the arrival of the railroads, big business and the emergence of an organized working class in the US, the intellectual and business leaders saw only two paths: a strong centralized state anchored through centralization of power at the national level, or socialism. Stephen Skowronek’s Building a New American State shows how this centralization of bureaucratic functions within the civil administration, the military, and business regulation was accomplished, with the help of the National Civic Federation (NCF), as a response to the accumulation of capital by large businesses in the 1870s and the concomitant labor strikes that subsequently shook the US. “The construction of a central bureaucratic apparatus,” Skowronek writes, “was championed as the best way to maintain order during this period of upheaval in economic social, and international affairs.”
Edward Silva and Sheila Slaughter have traced a parallel history in Serving Power, which tells of the crucial role academics from the newly created social sciences had to play in this transformation. As “disinterested experts,” they had the distance and authority to expound local problems in ways that those involved did not; they could see the whole picture. Through the NCF, “the most influential business-sponsored political-economic forum group operating during the Progressive Period,” academics, bankers, manufacturers, and conservative labor leaders – AFL president Samuel Gompers was a founding member – partnered together with the goal of “increasing the overall efficiency of capitalistic enterprise and solving the many problems of rapid industrialization” – meaning, labor militancy and revolution.
Calling on willing leaders in the newly formed divisions of the social sciences, academics wrote model legislation, conducted studies on working conditions and public opinion, and offered theories of social change that placed true agency only with the bureaucratic centralized state. Even the organizations of these new divisions – the American Economics Association, American Political Science Association, American Historical Association, American Social Science Association, and Modern Language Association – formed, Silva and Slaughter note, as academics sought to atomize and specialize the discipline of political economy, seen to have fostered Marxism.
Through the social sciences the university offered a strategy for social change that countered Marxist political economy, to entrench both private property and an interventionist state. Through the humanities the university offered a universal theory that saw humanity as something to be imposed upon those too stupid or too obstinate to sublimate their own desires and needs to those of Western civilization. For this reason, writes Richard Altenbaugh in Education for Struggle, the militant working class distrusted formal education at every level. Altenbaugh cites a 1921 remark by Alexander Fichland, director of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union’s “Workers University,” to this effect:
Workers feel that they cannot obtain in non-workers’ educational institutions correct information on subjects affecting their own interests. They feel that they are frequently deceived and are furnished with interpretations of life which are intended to keep them docile and submissive. They feel that the truth will be told to them only by those of their own choosing, whose outlook on life is their outlook on life, whose sympathies are their sympathies, whose interests are their interests.
By abstracting from class struggle in all of its guises, the university weaponized the knowledge of the emerging disciplines and turned them on the working class. All knowledge and all education are historically situated, developed out of particular histories and cultures, and are dependent on vast social structures in order to survive. The thought produced in universities has, for reasons deeply embedded in their history, been used to attack and undermine class struggle in the name of a progressive utopia that appears more impossible now than ever.
And this is precisely why the peans to to knowledge and higher education – especially to the humanities – grow more wearisome every year. Even in The New Yorker, the hallowed claims of educated self-consciousness, the crown jewel of the humanities, have been questioned. A recent article on the research of Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman concludes that we are nearly incapable of rational thought regarding our own actions, but revel in criticizing the actions of others along supposedly rational lines. “Education,” it acknowledges, “isn’t a savior.” In fact, “introspection can actually compound the error, blinding us to those primal processes responsible for many of our everyday failings. We spin eloquent stories, but these stories miss the point. The more we attempt to know ourselves, the less we actually understand.” Research shows that the smarter – and better educated – are more prone to these “mistakes.” A case in point is the author of these words, Jonah Lehrer, who was unable to resist the “primal process” of making up quotes and no longer has a job with The New Yorker.
Something other than defense of the university, and something other than the humanities, are necessary today. And this “something other” must take be constructed both within and outside of the university. Within, because as Gigi Roggero has pointed out, the university is a dynamic site of struggle and capitalist production. Outside, because knowledge is a particular kind of power, culturally and historically dependent. The humanities and university academics are an outstanding example of this: they were created as an ideological offensive against both the militant working-class struggles that threatened Europe and Americas and the residual patrician elites that threatened to hold back capitalist expansion. Instead of defending this kind of knowledge, we would do better to heed the words of Gilles Deleuze: “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.” Our task is to develop new weapons, and that will require leaving the university and abandoning the humanities.
Mark Paschal has written for Reclamations Journal, and is a member of University Research Group Experiment (URGE). He is also a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz.
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When professors strip for the camera
If TED took a turn to leftist (or any) critique, Žižek, the professor of “toilets and ideology,” would be the keynote speaker. The irony of the animated lecture, “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce,” is that a diatribe on “global capitalism with a human face” would get over 900,000 views on YouTube. “It’s not just what you’re buying, but what you’re buying into” seems to apply not only to Starbucks’ “coffee ethics” and TOMS Shoes’ 1-for-1 African philanthropy, but also to the availability of 10-minute Lacanian Marxist “soft apocalyptism” at a Google subsidiary with personalized ads.
With YouTube’s help, the academy where Žižek’s persona was born is an increasingly visible terrain of so-called “cultural capitalism.” The last decade has witnessed a revolution in open courseware, a source of short-circuit consumption in which anyone with a computer can drink elite university Kool-Aid without earning credit. The movement has been so explosive – the Hewlett Foundation, which provides the mother lode of funding for university initiatives, supported a whole book on it, Taylor Walsh’s 2011 Unlocking the Gates – that one wonders how long the political economy of education that it anchors, contra Žižek’s hipster-friendly fantasies of consumerist dystopia, will last.
To date, the most successful, or at least most prominent, initiative is MIT’s OpenCourseWare. In 2001, MIT unveiled a plan to offer most of its courses online for free – reading lists, lecture notes, exams, and all. In its first five weeks of existence, the OCW site got 361,000 unique visitors from 177 countries and all 7 continents. In response to OCW, UNESCO held a “Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries.” MIT was the new Bill Gates. As university president Charles Vest wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2004:
a faculty member at a new engineering university in Ghana, a precocious high-school biology student in suburban Chicago, a political scientist in Poland, a literature professor in upstate New York, or an executive in a management seminar down the hall at MIT will be able to use the materials our professors rely on in teaching our full-time students.
Open Yale Courses, which drafted off MIT’s success, is now a competitor in the techno hype-space, only with different operating parameters. The OYC site hosts 42 courses, most of which are introductory lectures in the humanities and social sciences. Yale gives OYC professors a small honorarium in exchange for letting videographers sit in the back of the room and record every lecture.
Occasionally, there will be an awkward moment when the professor asks students not to walk in front of the class lest they get on camera, or apologizes for having to fix their mic. It’s the self-assurance of Yale’s hand-picked all-stars which makes OYC differentiable from TED talks, in which some speakers, perhaps getting to condense their wisdom into 20-minute nuggets of optimism for the first time, repeat phrases or give clumsy postscripts. Otherwise, Yale qualifies, in the words of Evgeny Morozov, as a TED-esque “international meme launderer.” Open Yale Courses are the ivory tower of university TEDification. At the same time that Yale continues its 20-year stomp on grad student unionism and ’juncts its academic workforce, it parades popular tenured professors – “I keep my eyes open for people in the news,” director and OYC participant Diane Kleiner has said – with few offerings in critical or politically charged disciplines that produce less marketable research.
Yale isn’t the only university that picks the best and brightest for the world screen. Fathom, a failed for-profit initiative at Columbia that pre-dated OCW at MIT, marketed over 600 courses but focused on star faculty. Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, which offers 15 courses in its core competencies of science, math, and foreign language, demands significant time for course development and thus draws mostly from tenured faculty. The whole open courseware enterprise was born of relationships among big-name university leaders. Yale president Richard Levin had been on the board of the Hewlett Foundation since 1998. AllLearn, another failed for-profit venture from the dot-com era, was a collaboration between Levin and his friends at Oxford, Princeton, and Stanford. After AllLearn, Yale’s liaison went on to be president of TIAA-CREF.
The elite origins of open courseware, put together with the academic hyperreality of its all-star offerings, are nothing compared to the backroom power play that is 2011’s “Great Big Ideas,” a course offered to students at Yale, Harvard, and Bard College and anyone else willing to shell out $199 to watch twelve hour-long lectures online. The course, “an introduction to the world’s most important ideas and disciplines,” is the pilot offering of the for-profit Floating University, a joint venture between Yale-bred businessman Adam Glick and online forum Big Think. Though it isn’t free like OYC, the conceits of open courseware lie within FU’s glossy syllabus: Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom (Norton authors); Larry Summers; William Ackman’s “If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?” which explains “the logistics of the modern portfolio theory of investment, handing students the tools to become the savvy investors of tomorrow”; and a TED-friendly smorgasbord of hard science, economics, and discourse on human nature—to be sure, the world’s most important ideas and disciplines.1
In Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line, Stephen Kirp writes that open courseware gives elite universities the symbolic capital “to keep their exclusivity intact.” For schools like Yale that can only drop within existing hierarchies of exchange value – U.S. News & World Report rankings, for one – the open courseware revolution represents a new lattice of use value that fortifies the gates against disruptive innovation from other high-tech knowledge ventures as well as competitors from below. (“I don’t want to wake up one morning and find out that Harvard and Microsoft have put $5 million on the table,” piped Columbia trustee and NBA commissioner David Stern at the advent of Fathom.) Under this new regime, universities accrue a sort of secondary rent on what they already own.
Like the University of Phoenix, elite universities have heeded Bank of America analyst Howard Block’s admonition to embrace their role as content providers – or, as David Brooks noted optimistically in a May column, to bank on the transformation of “knowledge into a commodity that is cheap and globally available.” Famous Berkeley chancellor Clark Kerr’s preferred use of the university is upon us: “Knowledge is durable. It is also transferable. It only pays to produce knowledge if through production it can be put into use better and faster.” Or, if we take Carnegie Mellon’s fine-tuned, web-specific courses as the model – as President Obama has, in hailing a future for community college expansion that doesn’t require more classrooms – BF Skinner’s “teaching machine,” which rewarded students for correct answers following pre-programmed instruction, is the new motor of the digital superhighway.
Open courseware is a way for universities to get by as businesses and as universities, with all the attendant contradictions. On the one hand, as Walsh recounts in Unlocking the Gates, Yale’s director of marketing and trademark licensing claims that OYC “was driven from a marketing perspective, because every time someone views something we made, they’re consuming Yale, and the quality of their experience reflects how they think of us and the brand.” Indeed, the OYC site is laced with Yale’s name, logo, and colors, and every YouTube video has a Yale imprint. On the other hand, as Kleiner has it, “This isn’t a numbers game, since we’re not making money off this; this is a gift we’re giving to the world, so we want to see if we can bring that to as many people as possible.” In a 2000 lecture at Oxford, Mellon Foundation president William Bowen waxed that universities shouldn’t sell open courseware for fear of sacrificing their pro-bono purpose. The proprietors of webcast.berkeley consider online lectures signals to state legislators that the purveyors of tech transfer and privately supported research also teach – for the public good.
At Yale and elsewhere, the old boys club has become a genderless, frictionless, surfable ocean of philanthropy; and yet these same universities remain corporately managed austerity-mongers. Standard critiques of cybernetic utopianism apply. In Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class, Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein define the “will to virtuality” as the “dream of being the god of cyberspace – public ideology as the fantasy drive of pre-pubescent males.” In the globalized academy, a new pantheon rises.
TED and Twitter have two things in common: they package knowledge into personal brands; and they disseminate it faster and more widely than the average academic journal. Anyone can watch a TED talk; hardware-willing, anyone can tweet. Twitter’s mass appeal has as its elite counterpart the slushy marketing pitch of the TED talker.
Today’s paradigmatic intellectual commodities, like intellectual property rights granted to authors but absorbed into the capital circuitry of the publishing world of 18th century Western Europe, come with new forms of exploitation. The labor-power embedded in these commodities is lost not only in the buyer’s fetish but in mega-networks that redefine cognitive labor and reroute it to profitable ends. In the Twitter-sphere, The New Inquiry’s Rob Horning put it in a 2011 essay, “we can be aware of ourselves only insofar as we see ourselves as profiting or not… We sell out simply by choosing to have subjectivity on social media’s terms.” This alienation, one of the “quintessential aspects of the contemporary experience of precarity,” represents “the total breakdown of the possibility of collective identity… the transformational potential of the enhanced social cooperation on which the economy depends is neutralized, frittered away in ostentatious narcissism.”
In “The Ideology of Free Culture and the Grammar of Sabotage,” Matteo Pasquinelli describes this set-up as a regime of exploitation, while also pointing to a certain kind of resistance to it. Responding to high-utopian “digitalism” and selectively permeable networks like the Creative Commons, he writes, “There is nothing digital in any digital dream. Merged with a global economy, each bit of ‘free’ information carries its microslave like a forgotten twin.” Akin to creative production subsumed by urban growth machines or media monopolies, “open culture” becomes a kind of multitude-for-rent. For Pasquinelli, subversion lies with the likes of Dmytri Kleiner’s copyfarleft, in which the commons are open to commercial use by single workers or worker cooperatives that till them, but not agents that exist outside. Over and against the flat world of open culturists, Pasquinelli posits a commons that runs on both cooperation and uncooperation, in which the multitude struggles within itself.
Sabotage of the copyfarleft sort is an important plank of resistance, but a kind of vanguardist one; culture jammers and conspiratorial digital cabals draw on highly politicized subjectivities lodged in a world that relies on the academy no matter how much it may disavow its origins. By comparison, strong assertions about the impossibility of collective identity abandon all attempts to unravel the contradictions and changing class composition of the so-called knowledge economy. While it’s predictable for the professional intellectual to decry the crassness of the newest brave new world, tweets and free lectures represent a redistribution of knowledge whose latent promise must be taken as seriously as its runaway promises. To be sure, it’s easy to criticize techno-babblers like Wired – which in 2003 wrote of MIT’s OCW, “no institution of higher learning had ever proposed anything as revolutionary” – or, for that matter, MIT’s marketing team. The operative question here is whether the tweeters or open courseware consumers who aren’tprofessional intellectuals can speak. Just as Wired’s take on Occupy Wall Street, a December article entitled “#Riot: Self-Organized, Hyper-Networked Revolts,” treats protesters as mindless iron filings, Andy Merrifield’s “Crowd Politics” in the September/October 2011 New Left Review foregrounds the “intensity of the encounter” while ignoring the variable subjectivities and lived experiences that protesters carry with them to protest. Who is Horning’s “we”?
For those who never went to a top school or, financial aid notwithstanding, couldn’t take on the debt, open education represents a utopia captured by university growth machines. Bastard simulacrum of academia that it can be, it calls neither for knee-jerk defense of the traditional academy nor blithe celebration from those whose departments or job prospects are safe from the chopping block, but measured consideration of new possibilities for reappropriating the crisis of the university.
As America’s university system grew and modernized in the postwar era, students and faculty collaborated on significant reforms to Yale’s grading system, graduation credits, and opportunities for independent study. In the postmodern academy, ideas for appropriating systemic transformation for radical ends run wild. At the Open Education Conference in 2009, Christopher Mackie offered a “Model Proposal for Utterly Transforming Higher Education Pedagogy and Intellectual Property Generation,” involving course credit for students who generate online content – elevating students’ consumption of open courseware, particularly operative at MIT, to a co-creative art. As a resolution to the skyrocketing cost of university degrees, n+1’s editors make the less modest, if more speculative, pitch for “the credentialed to join the uncredentialed in shredding the diplomas that paper over the undemocratic infrastructure of American life.”
Breaking down this infrastructure demands recognition that knowledge commodities are objects consumed by a heterogeneous multitude rather than a monolithic mass trapped within an imposed “consumerism.” As Yale’s Michael Denning contends in Culture in the Age of Three Worlds, “cultural forms do not have a necessary political meaning, and may be appropriated and reappropriated by a variety of social movements seeking to lead a society.” For Denning, cultural practices are not “quick sales” but sites of class contestation and variable material investment. Within this paradigm, the masses of people to whom simulated academic knowledge is distributed are an integral part of any program that purports to redirect the political economy of higher education.
As the academy broadcasts itself to the world, it opens itself to disruption from this audience – Ghanaian students seeking an MIT degree in exchange for all the coursework, high schoolers who love the free lectures but can’t access highly ranked university education because of race or class, let alone adjuncts who see the lies of tenure exposed on camera. The onus is on the rest of us to meet them at the gates.
* I’ve benefited from the personal guidance and generosity of several instructors from this course. My statements here are directed toward the course and not the professors themselves.
James Cersonsky (@cersonsky) is a Philadelphia-based writer and activist. His writing can be found at Dissent, In These Times, AlterNet, and elsewhere. Read about his work on community-centered pedagogy here.
- 1I’ve benefited from the personal guidance and generosity of several instructors from this course. My statements here are directed toward the course and not the professors themselves.
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History and politics: an interview
Asad Haider: You write within a Marxist framework, but often focus on classical political philosophy, prior to or outside of the Marxist tradition. What’s the relevance of this kind of study?
Gopal Balakrishnan: I would say that just as we clearly see that Marx’s economic thinking arises out of a critique of classical political economy, and that in turn was made possible by a prior critique of idealist philosophy, we also have to see the problems of revolutionary politics that Marx is addressing as a critical engagement with the past history of political thought. There are specific category problems, as well as intertwined historical subject matter in an engagement with that side of Marx, and Marx’s own engagement with this lineage of thinkers – Hegel as a legal and political thinker, clearly, but Hegel’s thought as a culmination of a tradition of legal and political thinking going back to Aristotle. That’s something which has been underscored by others in the Marxist tradition, you could think of Althusser and Colletti, who also had works which were explicitly about the political writers before Marx, who in some way introduce or delineate the problems of politics and history that Marx will subsequently take up in his accounts of the class struggles and civil wars of the times that he was living in.
I want to ask about two political thinkers, and what we can learn from them. The first is Carl Schmitt, the subject of your first book, The Enemy.
Well, you know, it’s not always obvious to people why it’s necessary to read figures like Schmitt, a figure who was compromised by his intimate associations with fascism and National Socialism. So this is an initial obstacle to a critical engagement – it was even for me. Schmitt, from the other side of the political spectrum, was approaching the problems of the forms of politics that arose in a period of the historical and structural crisis of the state-form, manifesting itself in the indeterminacy around the basic categories and conceptual distinctions that organized legal and political thinking from an earlier period. His benchmark is the period of classical liberalism, so the concepts and category distinctions that organized legal and political thinking for classical liberalism and before are entering into crisis in this new era, in which the opposition of state and society, the fundamental separation of the economic from the political – which is of course one of the ways Marx understands what’s specific to modern bourgeois or capitalist society – is under threat. Schmitt is addressing the same problem as Marx, except he’s doing it in a period when the further development of the capitalist system, mediated by the interstate system into a pattern of combined an uneven development, and further mediated by revolutionary and counterrevolutionary ruptures, is bringing about a reconnection of these previously separated spheres or domains of the political and the economic. The actual subsequent development of capitalism is reconnecting them in various ways, although maintaining fundamentally the separation insofar as we’re still speaking of capitalism. So I think in that sense Schmitt is dealing with a problem – indirectly, sometimes, but sometimes directly – a deep problem that arose in Marx’s own thinking.
Now Marx, even though he posited this separation of the political from the economic, did not on that basis attempt to elaborate on concrete forms of modern statehood and their potential historical transformations within later phases of capitalist development. While he identified the social relations behind the long-term dynamic of capital accumulation, he developed a more rudimentary account of the basic structure of the state that arises from this separation. His accounts of class struggles and civil wars of the 19th century present some general outlines of the modern bourgeois state, but not much as far as theorizing its concrete tendencies of development. Unlike capital, the state is a very simple category in Marx’s writings. There isn’t really a systematic historical critique of the political order that arises from this constitutive separation of the political from the economic, or of contemporary relation between state and the development of capitalism, although he has much to say about how this played out in the period of the formation of capitalist society. In the early works, when he’s engaging with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, he addresses the specific delineated forms of the European state arising out of this process of separation, but its of course still in a rudimentary philosophical form.
Getting back to Schmitt: there are of course serious limits to his thinking, to the extent that he only approached these problems through the mediation of his conception of the state in the tradition of constitutional law and its premises, so his understanding of the transformations of capitalism in this period are approached through this mediation. But what he has to say about the crisis of the legal forms of statehood, private property, and war is interesting in its own right, and often goes well beyond what Marxists at the time wrote on these matters. The Weimar Republic was, after all, the epicenter of a larger historical situation of an intense interwar structural crisis of capitalism and the inter-state system within which it had evolved. The Weimar state-form, and the constitutional controversies surrounding it, was a staging ground for the larger theoretical questions around the character of the period, in terms of the fundamental transformations in the relationship of the state to capitalism, of the political to the economic, that should be of interest to any Marxist. Of course, many of his students were Marxists, and he was often able to appropriate ideas from others across the political spectrum. This is apparent from the very beginning of the Weimar Republic, when he wrote on the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat within a wider intellectual history of emergency powers and states of exception, all the way to its end when he addressed the problem of the compatibility of the crisis management of post-laissez-faire capitalism with existing forms of democracy.
The second thinker is Machiavelli. Both Gramsci and Althusser wrote about Machiavelli, and you returned to some of this material in Antagonistics.
I would say that one of the ways to think about the significance of Machiavelli is the context in which thinking about the present through a reading of Machiavelli emerged, from the 19th century to the interwar period, and perhaps closer to the present context as well. If you think about it that way, you can see that there are a number of episodes in the story of the reception with Machiavelli. In the early 19th century you have Fichte and Hegel responding to the crisis of the German state, and trying to think about the conditions of possibility of the reconstitution of a national state, by looking at Machiavelli’s writings on the problem of Italian national unity. They saw Machiavelli as addressing the problem of the conditions of the genesis of a state, particularly in the context of what appeared as catastrophic defeat in the form of foreign occupation. So that’s their historical link to Machiavelli’s situation.
Keeping that in mind, the renewed interest in Machiavelli during the interwar period, and this is manifested by writings on him across the political spectrum – you mentioned Gramsci, there’s also Leo Strauss, Wyndham Lewis, Raymond Aron, and many others. Gramsci, whether he was dealing with the problem of revolutionary political strategy in the West, the rise of Fascism or even the onset of American hegemony, raised Machiavellian questions about the nexus between the foundation of new states and the conditions of their perpetuation. This is the problem that Machiavelli is dealing with in the Discourses, the need for an interlude or founding episode of terror to establish a new state, and the mode by which that origin can be superseded through the establishment of political forms that are capable of perpetuating themselves on the basis of the multitude, the not yet fully independent popular foundation of the new order. So, these episodes of reading Machiavelli are all about the origins and foundations of new orders, as experienced in the aftermath of defeat.
So we’re seeing the resonance of these themes across historical periods. Crises in state-forms, and crises which are truly global, with catastrophic defeats, situations in which the shape of a new order can’t be clearly seen. We’re now experiencing what seems to be an interminable economic crisis; how do these classical themes play into understanding the current period?
The ability of some of these older legacies of thought to address the present was called into question by the restabilization of the capitalist system in the postwar period. For that reason those who have remained interested in those older legacies of revolutionary political thought, thinking about a politics that could bring them back, have found it difficult to find its points of application to the world of capital that arose in the postwar Western sector. There were a variety of attempts to keep alive, in some way, the possibilities of revolutionary political change, but often this took the form of trying to look for other agencies outside the working class, and other sites of struggle. For a very a long period of time we’ve experienced the development of capitalism which is in some respects no longer capable of continuing and reproducing the successes of the postwar period.
An adequate understanding of the so-called period of neoliberalism involves understanding these different levels, some of which seemed to indicate that the capitalist system was reaching new heights, as the entire world was incorporated into it, while other levels of its evolution exhibited characteristics which suggested that the fundamental economic problems of the 1970s, in terms of a slowdown in the growth of income, were never really superseded. What I suggest in my piece “Speculations on the Stationary State” is that these conjunctural problems carried over from the 1970s are converging with the structural limits of capitalism itself, which make it less realistic to assume that this renewal process is going to happen.
It was often thought, until recently, that the last thirty years, after the postwar “Golden Age,” were the greatest period of capitalism ever. Developing a comprehensive objective account of what happened in this period has been difficult, since there are so many different levels at which what happened unfolded. There’s been a long term period of structural transformations and adjustments with so many new characteristics introduced into the capitalist system, it would seem at least initially paradoxical that this has not in some way broken forth into a new period of accumulation. So in order to address that problem, its now important to reconsider some theorizations of longer-term limits of capitalism. I didn’t really go into the various Marxist versions of that, which I would do more of now, but I think that the core of it arises out of the Brenner account and some unresolved problems and questions in that account regarding the long term, drawing the political and historical problems out.
Let’s talk about Robert Brenner’s analysis of what he calls the long downturn, which started in the 1970s. His account is controversial for a number of reasons, including among Marxists. He doesn’t make use of the Marxian terminology of value, and doesn’t explicitly refer to Marx’s texts on economic crisis.
It’s neither framed in terms of Marx’s own characteristic terminology, nor is it framed as a general theory of capitalist crisis. Though some general principles might come out of it, Brenner doesn’t advance this as an explanation of the interwar economic crisis, the so-called Great Depression, nor of the crisis of the last decades of the 19th century. So although there’s a general characterization of the social property relations of the capitalist mode of production, and there’s an account of some of the long-term dynamics and trends, every particular phase of accumulation is a historical topic unto itself, calling into question the idea of Marx’s economic thought as a crisis theory. That’s good, in my view.
As a secondary issue, on Brenner’s relation to Marx, despite the terminological distance, I think actually the account that Brenner provides gives a concrete meaning to various concepts that are the foundation of Marx’s own account of the value form. I think that there’s still something more to be said on this subject, since Brenner himself doesn’t use the terminology and more or less frames his own account of capitalism and of its accumulation process in terms of a cost-price theory, explicitly avoiding the problematic that Marx opened up with his understanding of the social relations which give rise to production in a value form, that there’s a significant dimension of what Marx was trying to get at in his theory of capitalism that is not brought into sharp relief in Brenner’s account.
You’re actually in the midst of researching and writing a book on Marx, focusing on Marx’s economic writings. One of the major problems for the entire history of what was called Western Marxism was that Marx never actually wrote what his method was in works like Capital.
From beginning to end, Marx’s own theory arises out of a critical analysis of the category problems that arose within classical political economy, that it was unable to solve. Marx’s own account of “the capitalist mode of production” takes the form of a solution to these problems, from the mystery of why the value of commodities must appear in a monetary form to why the social relations of production appear in the form of separate factors of production contributing to the value of the commodity, with each appearing as a separate source of revenue to their owner. One of the premises of my work on Marx’s economic thought is that we have generally lost sight of the fundamental economic problems that Marx was addressing, that came out of classical political economy. These were in part still living problems at the time that Marx was working through them, but even during the course of Marx’s own writings on these topics, from the late 1850s to the early 1870s, this tradition of classical political economy, and the living historical content of the problems it was addressing, began to fall out of view, became in some way occluded, so I would argue there’s a kind of opacity to the fundamental underlying problems of Marx’s economic thought. The meanings of many of the terms he’s using, and more seriously the systematic character of his economic thought, are not apparent. Of course, there have always been dogmatic understandings of the systematic character of Marx’s writings, but putting those aside, interpretations of his theory of capitalism have always been mediated by the initial attempts to make sense of it, which took shape in the aftermath of the decline of the intellectual traditions out of which Marx himself formulated his critique of political economy. These initial attempts established the points of entry, topics and problems that have dominated much of the commentary since.
That being said, Marx’s own understanding of capitalism has many characteristics of the particular socio-historical world of 19th century English capitalism embedded within it. Although it’s a general theory, and arises as a critique of the fundamental economic categories of classical political economy, and the solution of the fundamental category problems and with them obviously the real underlying characteristics of a capitalist economy, with the working through of the problems and impasses of classical political economy, Marx arrived at a general theory, but this general theory is in some way conjoined to the specific socio-historical context of the capitalism of his time. Not just of course the factory-industrial order that emerged in England, which is the locus classicus for the general theory, but also the various regions of the larger world-system, from declining Asiatic empires to the still-intact world of European feudalism in the East, in Russia, in the period of its demise, the emergence of white settler states, the end of the large plantation slavery-based economies. These conditions are specific to the classical period of capitalism that Marx is theorizing, and not all of them are in some uniform way subsumed under one single form of capitalism. Many of the characteristics of his age of capitalism belong to another world: capitalist landlordism based on agricultural rent, gold standard money, and conditions of working class life that were uprooted with the advent of modern medicine and the welfare state – although, of course, this latter development has only taken place in more advanced economies. So there’s a number of ways in which Marx’s world is discontinuous with our own, though the general theory allows us to make the bridge, to understand what in the subsequent periods of capitalism, although they break and depart with the characteristics of Marx’s own time, are nonetheless intelligible in terms of the account that Marx does provide.
What you’re pointing to is the fundamental relation between the logical exposition in Capital and the historical chapters, which are sometimes seen as existing in an entirely different register.
There is a tendency to isolate the value theory, or the “theory” part of Marx’s economic writings from the historical parts, to put it crudely. That has to do with prevailing conceptions of what theory is. I’d like to demonstrate what kind of theory Marx is building by presenting it in a systematically unified, reconstructed form. Clearly, Marx does not mean by mean by theory, generalizations applied to something called “history.” But there is another sense of the term “theory” associated with Marx which is also not exactly the one Marx himself had: so-called “Critical Theory.” Marx’s conception of theory was not merely negative in this sense, but aspired to be scientific and systematically integrated with historical content, that is, with the articulation and solution of real historical problems.
Many of the attempts now to get to a new reading of Capital set up as their adversary something called “traditional” Marxism or “worldview” Marxism, which is connected to the political projects of the workers’ movement. Now, if we do a reading of the theoretical texts that were produced by the workers’ movement, we find a remarkable heterogeneity, of perspectives, problematics, questions. How can we begin to reread this tradition as well?
I think there are a couple of questions there, some of which presuppose a particular answer. I would say that, contrary to my own inclinations, insofar as I’m sympathetic to some of the traditions of so-called “worldview Marxism,” there really isn’t much in Marx’s economic writings to warrant the idea that it had some immediate or direct relationship to an understanding of the conditions of possibility of the pursuit of class struggles, or immediately oriented towards the problems of the revolutionary praxis of the working class. That was an attempt made at a later point, based in the fact that Marx’s writings are not just economic, but also on the politics and history of his time, some of them part of a series of writings on the great upheavals, the revolutions and counterrevolutions from 1848 to 1871. So obviously it was not simply culled out of nothing, that so-called “worldview Marxists” would try to establish the connection. But aside from some discussions of the workers’ movement in the form of the struggle to limit the workday, and to establish normal conditions of labor within the factory system, and the significance of the success of that in inducing structural changes within capitalism, as opposed to breaking with it and overthrowing it, there isn’t really that much in the economic writings which either explicitly puts the class struggle at the center of the unfolding evolution of these social relations. There’s much more on the violence of the class struggles that characterized the period of the “primitive accumulation” of capital than on any subsequent episodes of it. It’s not even clear whether the theory which he presents, and this is a tribute to his scientific integrity, really identifies the conditions of possibility for a workers’ movement, in the sense of a dynamic by which the working class might develop out of the process of the accumulation of capital into a force of emancipation and reconstruction. It’s not entirely clear that this is his understanding of what happens to the working class under capitalism.
Nevertheless he described Capital as a weapon in the hands of the working class.
Scientific theory is a weapon, it’s ultimately beneficial to the workers and the downtrodden of society because they have the most interest in understanding the world without illusions. It’s in that respect that I think it’s a weapon for the working class, and it’s not really clear that it can be directly, in the form that Marx wrote it, turned into an instrument of the class struggle. But that’s not what Marx is trying to do, either. He’s trying to set up a framework for concrete investigations of the evolution of this form of society and the political and other forms of struggle that result from its underlying contradictions. Theory – in some ways I think this is what Althusser was good at pointing out – is not there for us, in the sense of something which is immediately even meaningful for us, and the questions that we’re asking. It’s not meant to do that. It’s meant to maybe take us away from the questions we’re asking. So we can’t really think of theory in an instrumental way, because of that relationship, true theories don’t serve our purposes so easily. But they better serve our purposes for all that, because they are ultimately about true things and a knowledge of them. In that sense I think you could say that the scientific-critical understanding of theory, as opposed to a political worldview understanding, is really what the classical conception ultimately subscribed to. Let me qualify that: I think that Gramsci is maybe, in the aftermath of defeat, more attuned to the way a scientific-critical understanding of history and politics leads to a certain, let’s say, disabused relationship to the immediate prospects of the conditions of struggle for working and subaltern classes. It’s really a difficult thing to scientifically and critically explore these problems. We prefer to have our questions result in answers which are enabling to us in some way. There are totally good reasons we ask theory to do this for us. But it best served even that purpose when it did this indirectly.
Now, there are moments in Marx, even in Capital, which describe a kind of inexorable process of historical development which will result in communism.
Where would you say that is?
The “Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation,” in continuity with earlier works.
I would disagree with that, I would say that there’s often a kind of peculiar dialectical form to the way Marx establishes the conditions of the negation of existing conditions. So although he very strikingly suggests the dialectical form of the development of capitalism as a process of the expropriation of labor, which will in turn capsize over into an expropriation of the expropriators, that formal-dialectical structure shouldn’t deceive us. I think this is where we might take a cue from some of the criticism of dialectical thought that came out of currents in the, let’s say, Althusserian tradition. The way the logic of development is understood as a way of following the logic of negation, can lead to assumptions about the course of history which ultimately turn out to be dialectical illusions. I’m not advocating stepping back away from the dialectical development of laws and tendencies. Much of what is great in Marx’s thinking takes this form, and any version of Marx which strips that out of it, really strips out the guts of it. Briefly in the penultimate chapter of volume 1 he speaks of this “expropriation of the expropriators,” it seems as if this is culmination of the analysis, at least in that volume of the text. We might be tempted to see volume 1 as culminating in this understanding of the expropriation of the expropriators. Capital is often read today as the story of the formation of the working class and, let’s call it, before the letter, “the multitude.” The basic idea is that as we approach the final chapter of the expropriation of the multitude, the conditions are emerging for a great reversal. This is the enabling ideological formula of the radical left today. There is a rational core to this. Liberals, social-democrats and remnant legacies of an older far-left often snicker at such illusions, but since they were completely blindsided by the contemporary crisis of capitalism, and failed to predict it, and now offer only hindsight and stick to whatever it is they were saying before, they’re hardly credible either.
It seems to me the reason Marx places such an emphasis on violence, as you mentioned before, in the chapters on primitive accumulation is to break from the idea – which is there in classical political economy, but can also be repeated in a modified form in a Marxism which relies on a transhistorical narrative of the forces of production, the development of the forces of production – the idea that the “social-property relations” of the capitalist mode of production are the realization of something nascent in the previous mode of production, whereas he is describing a process which isn’t a simple realization, but which involves discontinuity, and which engages every level of the social formation. He emphasizes the role of the state, the interaction of various elements which don’t contain capitalism within them.
I’m not sure if you’re describing Marx here, I think that his thoughts on the subject of the emergence or transition to something like a “social” mode of production, are scattered, as everyone knows, and really take the form of either this dialectical-overturning, or, more modestly, of a consideration of the way aspects of social reproduction which assume a particular form because of capitalist social-property relations would be suspended, given a social mode of production. In this latter vein his basic point is that what are assumed to be material necessities of production are really only such because of these particular social forms.
You’ve described the story of primitive accumulation as the formation of the working class as a kind of ideological narrative, with utility for the social moment. What would be a scientific analysis of the formation of the proletariat? Not Marx’s?
Well, he explicitly says in that chapter, that he is not going to look at the economic causes of the formation of the proletariat, that he is just going to look at the role that violence played in this process. That’s an explicit admission that this is not really a theorization, or historically grounded account of the whole process of the original accumulation of capital, but a counter-myth to the bourgeois story of enterprising Lockean forefathers scraping together, out of their labors, sums which they are then able to use to employ those who were unable, or didn’t want to do that. That story is basically an ideological account of why people today are divided into classes, and so Marx is countering it with another one unfolding within a dialectical form, with this kind of reversal.
So he’s lapsing out of science? Because you’ve described the systematicity of this entire work.
I have said that there is a logico-historical systematicity. I haven’t described it though.
Okay. But your characterization of the chapters on primitive accumulation seems to suggest that they are not part of this.
I think that there’s a conceptual development running throughout Marx’s works, including the texts on primitive accumulation.
Theorizations of history and politics are always in some way connected to a concrete historical situation, an existential-historical situation. Every example we have of even the articulation of sweeping accounts of basic political forms, whether that’s done in a way that historicizes them or not, arose in that conjuncture and encounter with a particular setting. That’s going back to Aristotle’s Politics, and that’s certainly true of early modern political thought. It’s also true of Marx. So this duality of theory and, let’s call it ideology, is inside of theory. The questions we’re asking of politics and history are questions for us, not like when we’re asking questions about other kinds of objects, with the understanding and comprehension of non-human reality, the separation of what is and what is for us can in some way be made completely, and that’s obviously not true when we’re talking about politics and history. So there is in some way this internal mutual implication of the ideological and the theoretical. Theory takes the form of the dissolution and critique of our ideologically formed questions. It doesn’t ever sever itself completely from our ideologically formed questions. Ideology in the Althusserian sense is rising out of social experience, right? The spontaneous ways things appear, and even theories can become encrusted with ideology, and become a kind of obscurantist naivete. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but it’s not the case that we have theory on the one hand and spontaneous and direct social experience in its naive form on the other. That social experience is mediated by a whole garbled set of terminologies and half-formed questions and problems, which then it’s the business of critical theoretical understanding to break apart and to generate tracks and paths for analysis and investigation. Theories and problems within any tradition can become ideologized. This is true of Marxism, this is true of every tradition. There’s a moment in which theory emerges in some living relation to scientific-critical problems and does so perhaps in some conjunction with the political moment, and then there are moments when that is left behind, and we only have ossified terminologies and poorly-understood questions and problems.
For Althusser, I would argue, the really core characteristic of ideology is that it posits the transparency of social relations. And this is guaranteed by an understanding of history as a process with a subject and a goal, which is the realization of this transparency. The primary example of this is the teleology of the Second International, and for him this is repeated in the humanist, historicist theoretical revolt against the categories of the Second International. The way this maps out onto Marx’s works is, for example, that dialectical account that you described in that chapter in Capital, that would be the ideological moment, while primitive accumulation is an attempt to break with that.
Certainly within Marx’s work is the possibility of developing an adequate account of the actual primitive, or original accumulation of capital. There’s plenty of material in Marx which is about this process of the formation of wealth in a new social form during the manufacturing period. That’s the real material on primitive accumulation. Whether it’s wholly correct is another matter.
So while I am suggesting, along with Althusser, that the chapter on the expropriation of the expropriators and the chapters on primitive accumulation are in a tension, because one describes a historical dialectic with a goal, the other describes a process of rupture which is figured in violence, you’re suggesting that they’re part of the same ideological mold.
Like I said before, I’m not saying that Marx himself was unable to break with this. I’m saying that he explicitly says that in this chapter he is only looking at the political side, the role that violence played in this process. That’s a pretty direct statement to the effect that this is not a comprehensive account of the whole process. The process of social and historical change, the emergence of a new mode of production, can’t be explained adequately by a “force theory of history.” Although Marx once referred to force as the midwife of such changes, Engels had to launch an attack on exaggerated reactionary versions of this view. By the late 19th century there’s an increasing widespread rejection of the older peaceful account of the origins of civilization, and Bismarckian blood and iron is replacing Lockean labor as the dominant ideology of the origins of society. Marxism as a result developed not just a critique of the story of the peaceful rise of civilization that you get from the classics, it also develops as a critique of the bourgeois reactionary accounts of blood and iron as the motor of history, and in this respect Marx was a Marxist.
It never really suffices to say “it’s more complicated than that,” but social and historical change is, to put it generally, a multi-dimensional process. In some way Althusser tried to convey this with his understanding of the discontinuities between levels of a social totality, that they were not capable of cohering into a single subject, because they all had their own relatively autonomous tendencies and histories. So in this sense there were histories, but there is no subject from which one could speak of a history. This was the point of contention with Sartre and Lukács. The formation of history was not an automatic and given process, it was a complex one in which the mediated and relatively autonomous social and historical existence could be given a unifying account which would become the basis for a process of their sociopolitical transformation. The idea of a subject of history, and I think Althusser came to this understanding later, is somehow implicit within our politics of historical transformation. One of the reasons why I think he’s wrestling with the problem of theory and ideology later on, is that he realizes that these are not separable things, in precisely the manner in which this was thought to be possible in the earlier writings.
Sometimes the critique of “traditional” or “worldview” Marxism extends as far as the claim that capitalist development required a workers’ movement in order to complete itself. So the end of the workers’ movement was essentially inscribed in its origins. To me it seems we’re back at what Althusser cheekily described as “poor man’s Hegelianism,” reproducing the Second International’s teleology in what claims to be a critique of the very deepest categories of Second International Marxism. The same structure of historical development is now applied to the history of the workers’ movement itself.
If by this you mean the idea that we can understand historical processes through general interrelationships between categories of analysis, this is truly to be avoided. This is something that Marx himself had things to say about. So the idea that one can, instead of actually doing historical investigation in the mold that Marx does himself, which he is in some sense creating the foundation of, if one thinks that we can instead of that do a kind of understanding of the world-historical dynamics that arise out of the internal relationships between categories, then that is not something which follows Marx. It might be that some things of intellectual interest arise out of this way of framing things, I don’t want to say that there’s nothing to that, but it should never be conceived of as a substitute for real historical understanding.
The social relations that Marx develops out of an analysis of categories and the category problems of political economy are always being developed through real historical content. This real historical content takes the form of problems that cannot be resolved by apprehending their conceptual form. They don’t exist independently, the idea that there’s a kind of purely logical mode of the interconnection of these categories to one another is simply to have a mystified and fetishistic conception of what theoretical categories are.
I want to return to these two themes of political thought that you identified earlier. One was crisis, which we’ve discussed. The other was defeat. The major defeat which frames our period is precisely the defeat of the workers’ movement, across the end of the 1970s through the 1980s. As the ambivalence towards “traditional” Marxism demonstrates, this defeat poses considerable problems for people interested in mass movements and political transformation today.
On the one hand we seem to be in a period in which more and more people are coming around to the view that the economic problems of the day speak to a deep structural crisis of capitalism. Even a few years ago when I wrote the piece on the stationary state this wasn’t widely held to be the case, but it’s now increasingly accepted. On the other hand, as you point out, we’re confronted with the absence of any large-scale agencies of social and political change that might open up the question of a new social economic order beyond capitalism. The way the crisis has unfolded so far is primarily to raise questions about how to sustain and prop up the status quo, and even forms of opposition to austerity have not really been able to break out of a set of purely defensive demands, to roll back some of the damage of the financial crisis and think about restabilizing the economy by restoring a previously existing level of economic equality and job security, which is thought to be perhaps attainable. Some people are drawing the conclusion that the problems are so deep that those kind of solutions aren’t going to work anymore, but the fundamental structural transformations that would have to happen for these problems of unemployment, declining wages, and mass poverty around the world, to be overcome are so daunting, that the fallback position is understandably one or another of these forms of left-wing populism. I don’t have any problem with that being the form that struggles assumes, it’s inevitable for that to be the case. But the reason the reason why this cannot ultimately succeed even as a strategy of defense is because there’s no new track that capitalism seems to be able to go to. Various types of left-wing reformism have been dependent on the ability of capitalism to deliver employment and rising living standards. So even though capitalism is in this deep and systemic crisis, the crisis is simultaneously manifesting itself in undermining the conditions of social and political opposition. That hasn’t just been a matter of defeat of revolutionary challenges to the system, but has also in this period taken the form of a rollback of the reformist accomplishments of the working class within the advanced capitalist countries, and elsewhere the various mixed legacies of the attempt to promote economic development in some vision of progress in more economically “backwards” zones of the world-system. That’s the context in which we operate.
Gopal Balakrishnan is an editor at New Left Review, and the author of The Enemy and Antagonistics. He is a professor in the History of Consciousness department at UC Santa Cruz.
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To the party members
The sound and image of a drum circle may be one of the most easily-mocked moments associated with the Occupy movements. But the role of music in the movement, and its relation to protests and political action in general, bears closer investigation, beyond the drum circle.
Music at Occupy events has been as diverse as the people and locations involved, from Bay Area rap stalwart Mistah FAB’s freestyle at Occupy Oakland to Tom Morello’s Guitarmy, indigenous dancers and singers in Minneapolis, political marching bands like the Rude Mechanical Orchestra or the Hungry March Bands in New York, the Milwaukee Molotov Marchers, Pittsburgh’s Riff Raff, and the legendary Infernal Noise Brigade of Seattle. Videos and albums have been launched, and many have called for a new era of protest music to arise.
These musical actions themselves are often characterized as “protest music.” In fact, marching bands serve vital tactical purposes at street protests (and beyond): surrounding police vans, identifying and following undercover police, de-escalating tension, and helping facilitate the flow and communication of the crowd. But the concept of “protest music” can obscure some of music’s most powerful aspects as a social force. For many involved in Occupy, the specific relationship between the music being played and the people who hear it has not been thought through very carefully – and this weakness can reinforce political weaknesses. Indeed, when even Salon.com can call 100 tracks of Occupy-themed music “shapeless and safe,” we might ask ourselves what this protest music is missing.
Harsha Walia has pointed out that many of the most powerful aspects of Occupy spaces were not about “protesting,” but about enacting existing connections: what happened in the kitchens, the medic tents, the libraries, the teach-ins and workshops. These were places where people brought their existing skills to bear in self-organized configurations, providing for themselves and each other along a metric that was neither charity nor business, but a common interest. The most promising political actions were those that connected to existing community struggles around police violence, home foreclosure, and homelessness, where activists, residents, and even the homeless themselves, engaged directly with the lived realities of people facing systemic violence.
Music constructs similar possibilities for social relations. The kind of social relations evoked by “protesting” are not very fertile – a protest can get voices “out there,” somewhere – but doesn’t necessarily affect how people deal with each other. While music, on the other hand, can have a “message” to communicate, it can be so much more – it can be a social activity rather than just a product, what the musicologist Christopher Small has called musicking: a way for people to perform connections with each other and with existing communities, through shared cultural expression.
There is a complex relationship between music and culture that makes music politically significant – and mobilizing – in ways that go beyond words, and the particular moment of “protest.” Music can be a lived negotiation and performance of community and communication. A better understanding of how music does this, as well as more serious attention to its different culturally and historically specific traditions, would help forge a more radical relationship between the heterogeneous communities and interests that participate in resistance movements.
In my own experience as a DJ, dancer, party organizer, and researcher, I’ve engaged in-depth with the everyday practices of Jamaican musicking. In Jamaica, even though the culture of the urban poor is officially vilified and excluded, that culture still sets mainstream trends, and is understood to be authentically Jamaican. This cultural authority has persisted despite its exclusion from mass media technologies like radio and television, from their earliest inception. Both underwritten by the government until relatively recently, these media outlets have consistently supported foreign and British-identified cultural expression over popular culture.
This same hostility has limited poor people’s ability to participate in both formal employment and prestigious artistic performance. Such bodily restraints operate at the levels of both race and class: skin color tracks poverty even more dramatically in Jamaica than in the US, so the physical and verbal traits associated with poverty are also generally associated with dark-skinned Jamaicans. In the face of colonial rejection and hostility at traditional sites of “mass culture,” poor Jamaicans began, in the 1930s and 1940s, to carve out their own sites of creative expression, especially through nightlife – music and dancing at night, usually around home-built sound system. These dances, especially the free outdoor events usually known as “street dances” – became places where poor Jamaicans produced a degree of cultural autonomy from the colonial tastes of the ruling class.
These parties weren’t utopias of freedom and equality, but the performances of gender, sexuality, dominance, and pleasure that were enacted there represented a collective resistance to domination. After Jamaican independence, official media channels remained dominated by colonial tastes, and poor neighborhood nightlife became centers of an alternative voice for the majority.
This alternative voice speaks in terms that traditional politics usually don’t hear. For example, sexualized dance moves have been continually popular in Jamaica from the 1930s to the present, and critics of nightlife are often unable to hide their discomfort with these erotic social interactions. But sweaty moments can have political significance. Jamaican scholars such as Carolyn Cooper have emphasized the context of these moves: invented by descendants of enslaved Africans, such dances were a way to express traditions and relations denied to them by dominant society. Cooper suggests that that dancehall culture is “an erogenous zone in which the celebration of female sexuality and fertility is ritualized.” Taking this point more broadly, for marginalized communities – especially those with a history of enslavement – sexual autonomy is a serious issue. Securing this autonomy frequently requires transgression of religious, sexual, and even economic relations valued by dominant society.
These issues are still alive. Jamaican elites, and the government itself, have been so hostile to local popular music that to this day there is no large music venue in the capital city – so the ability of popular spaces to redraw and resist dominant cultural hierarchies remains relevant. As Sonjah Stanley-Niaah puts it, these can be spaces where people “revaloriz[e] aspects of the body that are censored in the wider social sphere.” Consider, for example, the 2010 victory in a Jamaican “Dancehall Queen” competition by Kristal Anderson, a vivacious and talented performer who was both dark-skinned and weighed over 200 pounds. Anderson’s glorious skills and talents, honed in the dances that occur in what Obika Gray calls “exilic spaces,” drew enthusiastic popular support. The judges, whose ties to the local music scene require that they respect the audience’s taste, had to represent that audience’s subversive values. It would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of street dances, and the culture centered on them, in challenging dominant standards.
Valid criticisms can be made of these practices. Sexualized performances can participate in the commodification of bodies along gendered and racial lines, and many subcultures are not free of the homophobia and sexism that also dominates mainstream society. However, ignoring the specific context in which such inequalities take place risks misinterpreting their origins, and perpetuating hierarchies of race and class. The Jamaican dancefloor, while echoing with the sound of many an explicitly anti-gay lyric, is simultaneously a place where performers challenge standard definitions of gender and sexuality – consistent with a cultural shift, even in mainstream Jamaican politics, towards a less homophobic stance than many popular elected officials in the US. Understanding how dancefloor politics reflects and possibly pushes towards these changes requires a critique informed by the subject-positions and experiences within the communities being discussed. Unfortunately, white-dominated “activist communities” have not demonstrated a humble commitment to understanding marginalized cultures. This is a great loss for many reasons. For one thing, it’s clear that so many communities care about music, and use it as a basis for solidarity and pleasure – which ought to make any good organizer sit up and pay attention.
My own observation of (and participation in) white-dominated activist scenes suggests that the ability to collaborate often falls apart not over political platforms, but over personal and social engagements around race, culture, ethnicity, and gender – often in seemingly non-political settings, like nightclubs and parties. In relation to music, these problems result from the “protest” mindset. Many participants in the Occupy movement have approached music as a didactic event, instrumentalized around “getting a message to people,” to inspire them or otherwise make them behave in a certain way. Alternately, music is expected to be a general communal “emotional release” where the specifics of particular cultural and musical practices and histories are expected to be subsumed or erased – and that erasure is apparently assumed to be liberating.
Neither understanding of music is politically fertile, or likely to take the musical experience very far outside of white middle-class activists, because it fundamentally mistakes or ignores the social function of music within marginalized communities. This reflects a broader problem facing the self-identified “American left,” which has long made it irrelevant, or even harmful, to communities of color, queer communities, and indeed the working class – an inability to deal with culture as an aspect of political identity and practice.
Much like Jamaican street dances, the history of vogue balls, hip-hop (which includes DJing, dancing, rapping, and graffiti), and house or block parties where immigrants play the music of their home countries or diasporic communities, all demonstrate that music affirms specific histories and identities in the face of marginalization. Queer communities, especially queer communities of color, have been especially rooted in these spaces, since a queer person of color may not be safe diverging from expected identity performances anywhere else they go. While certain norms of gender are enforced at home, at school, and at work, the dance floor is a space to work out pleasure, sex, and style, in the face of often murderous hostility from dominant culture. Pleasure, sex, and style can be disruptive of dominant social orders – not always, but depending on the specific bodies and communities who perform them, and the modes of their performance. It is possible, to be sure, for people to take pleasure in racism or sexism, or for hedonism to collapse, especially along lines of class, into consumerism and addiction. But when people’s actual bodies face hostility – from arrest to state-sanctioned vigilante violence, or direct police violence – for deviating from dominant norms of sexuality, gender, and race, then their practices are more significant than simple “sex-positivity” or the fetishization of transgression.
After all, we shouldn’t forget that despite the white faces of mainstream “gay rights,” it has always been queer and transgender people of color at the forefront of the struggles against the policing of sexuality. Such struggles often began with attempts to defend seemingly disreputable spaces of refuges and resistance. Such spaces are specially important for people – disproportionately queer people of color – who have been expelled from or are unable to find homes. If a home isn’t safe, or you don’t have one to live in, spaces where you can just be yourself, without scrutiny and threat from oppressive forces, are even more necessary. Many of these spaces exist on the margins of respectable and legal society. From warehouse parties to the Christopher Street Pier, such struggles are rooted in the history of queer liberation: it should be no surprise that Stonewall is so significant to the movement’s history – a bar frequented by trans people of color like Silvia Rivera, who led the resistance. Nightlife can be a refuge, but also a source of resistant identity and mobilization.
When we talk about culture, we’re also talking about history, and often music defines people’s identities from the beginning. Songs with lyrics that might make white middle-class activists squirm can take on different meanings in the context of the dance floor. Such an engagement with music is not defined by the recordings or lyrics themselves – music is a socialexperience, and its political significance can’t be understood until you know who is physically in the room, and how they are interacting with each other in the moment of musical engagement. A roomful of white frat boys singing along to DJ Assault’s “suck my motherfucking dick” has a very different significance, and a very different effect, from the same chorus sung by black drag queens.
What I’ve learned as a DJ is that the significance of a musical experience is enacted by the actual bodies of the people in the room, and thus making meaningful musical experiences requires knowing specifically who you’re trying to reach and what their (musical) histories are. Reusing those musical references can affirm and represent the listener in a way that builds collective emotional connections. In the context of mass political mobilizations, these tools are especially important, to generate the inclusivity that is the condition for any meaningful dialogue or connection.
The failure to build these connections has been one of the major weaknesses of the Occupy movement, which set its camps up against institutions – like the police – that many communities were already in struggle against. It’s not surprising that Occupy had repeatedly replicated the racist, sexist, nativist, and ethnocentric attitudes of mainstream society; it just requires a conscious effort to resist. Part of the solution is to more carefully define the problems facing Occupiers, to connect them to existing struggles over, for example, police violence or indigenous rights. And another part of the solution is that these same struggles take place over the role of music.
The great protest songs were powerful not only because the lyrics were true, and forced people to respond, but because the music called out to connections that already existed, named realities and identities that were already lodged in people’s memories, in their own experiences and traditions. That force is lost if music is subordinated to a passive vision of “message” and “protest,” or a homogeneously common struggle. Attending to music’s cultural resonance, and the social dynamics around its practice, can make it a powerful force for sharing pleasure, trust, release, and purpose across marginalized communities, and forging a radical, broadly participatory movement.
Larisa K. Mann is a legal ethnographer, educator, journalist, public speaker, and DJ, who teaches Media Studies at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and Sociology of Law at Brooklyn College. She has written for WireTap, the Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts, and other publications, and has contributed chapters to Bits without Borders: Law, Communications & Transnational Culture Flow in the Digital Age (forthcoming, Elgar, 2012), and Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement (New Internationalist Publications, 2012). As DJ Ripley, she has played in 19 countries across 3 continents over the past 16 years.
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Be the street: on radical ethnography and cultural studies
The man who only observes himself however never gains
Knowledge of men. He is too anxious
To hide himself from himself. And nobody is
Cleverer than he himself is.
So your schooling must begin among
Living people. Let your first school
Be your place of work, your dwelling, your part of the town.
Be the street, the underground, the shops. You should observe
All the people there, strangers as if they were acquaintances, but
Acquaintances as if they were strangers to you.
—Bertolt Brecht, Speech to the Danish Working-Class Actors on the Art of Observation (1934-6)
“Anthropology is the daughter to this era of violence,” Claude Levi-Strauss once said. Poetic as that statement is, I prefer the more precise and less gendered words of esteemed anthropologist and Johnson-Forest Tendency member Kathleen Gough: “Anthropology is a child of Western imperialism.” Much like Catholic missionaries in the Spanish Empire, anthropologists examined indigenous groups in order to improve colonial administration, a tradition that continues into the present day with the US military’s Human Terrain Project in Iraq and Afghanistan. Often, this colonial imperative has fed a racist disrespect of the subjects under study. It was not uncommon, for example, for researchers to draw upon colonial police forces to collect subjects for humiliating anthropometric measurements.
According to Gough, at their best, anthropologists had been the “white liberals between conquerors and colonized.” Ethnography, the method in which researchers embed themselves within social groups to best understand their practices and the meanings behind them, had only mediated this relationship, while Gough, a revolutionary socialist, wanted to upend it. Writing in 1968, she urged her discipline to study imperialism and the revolutionary movements against it as a way to expiate anthropology of its sins. Gough later attempted this herself, travelling throughout Asia in the 1970s. Although she lacked a solid university connection due to her political sympathies, she managed to conduct fieldwork abroad, analyzing class recomposition in rural Southeast India during the Green Revolution, and detailing the improvement in the living standards of Vietnamese peasants after the expulsion of the United States.
Years later, anthropologist Ana Lopes sees fit to ask, “Why hasn’t anthropology made more difference?” The problem is not that anthropologists are reticent to contribute to ending imperialism. Indeed, there are probably more radical and critical anthropologists now than during Gough’s time, and certainly the discipline takes anti-racism and anti-imperialism incredibly seriously. Gough herself articulated some difficulties:
(1) the very process of specialization within anthropology and between anthropology and the related disciplines, especially political science, sociology, and economics; (2) the tradition of individual field work in small-scale societies, which at first produced a rich harvest of ethnography but later placed constraints on our methods and theories; (3) unwillingness to offend the governments that funded us, by choosing controversial subjects; and (4) the bureaucratic, counterrevolutionary setting in which anthropologists have increasingly worked in their universities, which may have contributed to a sense of impotence and to the development of machine-like models.
None of these plague anthropology today. Anthropologists are often incredibly deep knowlege about multiple disciplines (I have an anthropologist friend I consult on any questions of structural semiotics, Marxism, 19th century literature, or gambling); they have examined culture within large industrial and post-industrial societies; they have been involved in all sorts of radical issues, from unionizing sex workers to analyzing the securitized state; and while the university may remain a bureaucratic, counterrevolutionary setting, anthropologists have largely abandoned machine-like models. So what gives?
One issue is how anthropology chose to atone for its complicity in racism and imperialism. Instead of making a direct political intervention into imperialist practice, ethnography attacked imperialist hermeneutics. A deep critique of the Enlightenment subject, the source of anthropology’s claims to science and objectivity as well as metaphysical ground for Western notions of superiority, became a major target of the discipline. Thus rose critical ethnography, deconstructive in spirit. According to Soyini Madison, critical ethnography “takes us beneath surface appearances, disrupts the status quo, and unsettles both neutrality and taken-for-granted assumptions by bringing to light underlying and obscure operations of power and control.”
This functions at the level of the method itself: critical ethnographers should be self-reflexive. Rather than assuming an omniscient authoritative viewpoint, they should highlight their own positionality in the field by emphasizing it in the written account, thereby deconstructing the Self and its relation to the Other whenever possible. In an attack on Enlightenment pretensions to universality, accounts became partial and fragmentary, a way to head off potentially demeaning totalized portrayals at the pass.
However, ironically enough, by performatively questioning one’s own research, the figure of the ethnographer risks becoming the central figure in the study, rather than the social group. Even as it produces an often-engrossing literature, critical ethnography can undermine its own political thrust by drastically limiting what it permits itself to say. While Marxist sociologist Michael Burawoy, who shoveled pig iron for years in the name of social science, claims that with excessive reflexivity ethnographers “begin to believe they are the world they study or that the world revolves around them,” I’d counter that this isn’t so much professional narcissism as a product of the very real anxiety surrounding the ethics of representation. How best to fairly, but accurately, portray one’s subjects? How can one really know the Other? I’ve struggled with this in my own work, and I know colleagues who have been all but consumed by it. Writing about oneself seems, at the very least, safer. But this abandons scientific rigor in its reluctance to make any generalizable claims.
My own experience in ethnography came from a study of popular culture. I had grown tired of scholarly textual analysis: it seemed like more of a game for the commentators, where we critics bandied about speculative assessments of books and films and TV shows, trying to one-up each other in novelty and jargon. These interpretations said more about our positions as theory-stuffed graduate students eager to impress than they did about the putative “audiences” for the texts. Our consciousness of the objects in question had been determined by our material lives as critics-in-training. I felt pulled further away from cultural phenomena, when I wanted to get closer in order to better understand its significance. So I revolted against the rule of thoughts, starting to learn the methods that got closer to the matter at hand: ethnography,
In cultural studies, ethnography (or as a fully-trained anthropologist would probably write, “ethnography”) is most closely associated with audience reception and fandom studies. Textual analysis tells you only what a critic thinks of the work; in order to discover how “average” consumers experience it, you have to ask them. This way you avoid the totalizing, top-down generalizations of someone like Adorno, where a reified consciousness is determined by the repetitive, simplified forms of the culture industry.
This was Janet Radway’s goal when she studied female readers of misogynist romance novels. She found out that readers cared more about having private time away from domestic duties than the borderline-rape occurring in the books. However, she was forced to conclude that romance novels worked as compensatory mechanisms, securing women in capitalist patriarchal domination – in other words, she took the long way around and ended up in the same Adornoian conclusion: we’re fucked and it’s our mass culture that makes it so.
My chosen topic helped me get on a different path, one that I believe has more relevance to radical politics than haranguing the choices of hapless consumers. I wanted to study independent popular music instead of romance novels. This meant I was well positioned to examine music from the standpoint of production, rather than just surveying audience members, a technique that always felt too speculative and a bit too closely aligned with market research.
Not that market research was totally off base. Popular music exists in the form of commodities. Its form, as Adorno rightly points out, is dictated by the needs of the culture industry. If the music industry was a factory, then musicians were the workers, banging out products. A peculiar factory, to be sure, where operations spread to the homes of the workers, the machines were pirated software, and the products were derived from unique creative labors, becoming objects of intense devotion among consumers.
You can run into resistance when you define art in this way – it seems to cheapen it, as if you can’t call a song a “commodity” without implicitly sticking a “mere” in there, just as referring to artists as workers seems to demean their abilities. But this resistance comes almost entirely from music fans, who commit their own Adornoian blunder by placing music on that archaic crumbling pedestal of Art. The producers and DJs I spoke to in Detroit didn’t see it that way. They saw themselves as creative workers; at best, as entrepreneurs. One DJ talked about remixing songs in the morning over coffee. “You know how some people check their email or read the newspaper? Well, I’m making a remix of the new Ciara song during that time.” He took pride in his work ethic, but never romanticized his occupation.
There wasn’t much to wax romantic about in the Detroit music scene at that time. The culture industries were undergoing a restructuring for the immaterial age. Vinyl was no longer moving. Local radio and local music venues had gone corporate, squeezing out local music. DJs who wanted local gigs had to play Top 40 playlists in the suburban megaclubs instead of the native styles of electronic music that had given Detroit mythic status around the world. Many had given up on record labels entirely. Everyone looked to the internet as the saving grace for record sales, promotion, networking – for everything, practically. Some of the more successful artists were attempting to license their tracks for video games. Almost everyone had other jobs, often off the books. For critically acclaimed Detroit producer Omar-S, music is his side job, in case his position on the factory line is eliminated.
I wasn’t embedded within this community, as an anthropologist would be. Instead, I made the 90 minute drive to Detroit when I could, and spent the time interviewing artists in their homes or over the phone. I attended some events, participated and observed. And still, I could have written volumes on my subject-position and how it differed from many of the musicians: I was white, college-educated, not from Detroit (the last one being the most salient difference). But my goal was to go beyond self-reflexive interrogations, in spite of their importance as a starting point. I aspired to write something that would in some way, however minor, participate in the implicit political projects of musical workers.
I can’t say I succeeded in this goal. But while I may have done little for the political fortunes of Detroit musicians, I had started to think about how to revolutionize my theoretical tools. The point was not to efface or undermine my role in my research, but to identify the structural antagonism the artists were dealing with and describe it from a partisan perspective. Beyond the self-reflexive analysis of the ethnographer’s subject-position was the possibility of picking sides.
Deciding to pick sides is the difference between militant research, of the kind Kathleen Gough practiced, and purely scholastic exercises. Burawoy argues that this is a fundamental element of Karl Marx’s “ethnographic imagination”: Marx rooted his theories – not just of how capitalism functioned, but how best to destroy it – in the concrete experiences of workers, as relayed to him by Engels and others. Kathleen Gough is an exemplary figure in this respect, remaining a firm materialist in her studies. As Gough’s friend and colleague Eleanor Smollett puts it in a special journal dedicated to Gough’s legacy,
she did not arrive in Vietnam with a checklist of what a society must accomplish to be ‘really socialist’ as so many Marxists in academia were wont to do. She looked at the direction of the movement, of the concrete gains from where the Vietnamese had begun… Observing socialist development from the point of view of the Vietnamese themselves, rather than as judged against a hypothetical system, she found the people’s stated enthusiasm credible.
After studying material conditions and foreign policy in the socialist bloc, Gough decided that the Soviet Union, while certainly no workers’ paradise, was a net good for the workers of the world – heresy for anyone trying to publish in the West, let alone a Trotskyist.
Analysis is important, but the really explosive stuff of ethnography happens in the encounter. Accordingly, ethnographers and others have increasingly turned towards the methods of participatory action research (PAR). In these studies, a blend of ethnography and pedagogy, the anthropologist takes a partisan interest in the aspirations of the group, and aids the group in actively participating actively in the research. Members of the group under study become co-researchers, asking questions and articulating problems. The goal is to tease out native knowledges that best aid people in navigating difficult circumstances while mobilizing them to create political change.
But participatory action research has returned to the same old problems of imperialist anthropology. In the hands of radical anthropologist Ana Lopes, PAR led to the formation of a sex workers’ union in Great Britain. But in the hands of development scholar Robert Chambers, PAR is a tool to better implement World Bank initiatives and govern populations by allowing them to “participate” in their subjection.
The point, then, is to realize that ethnography has no political content of its own. Politics derives not from the commitment or beliefs of the researcher, but from engagement with wider social antagonisms. Ethnography enables Marxism to trace the contours of these antagonisms at the level of everyday life: a militant ethnography means Marxism at work, and functions not by imposing models of class consciousness and radical action from above, but by revealing the terrain of the struggle – to intellectuals and to workers – as it is continually produced. Ethnography can contribute in just this way, as a method where researchers listen, observe, and reveal the now hidden, now open fight for the future.
Gavin Mueller is a graduate student in Washington, DC.
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In defense of vernacular ways
The crises continue to accumulate: the economic crisis, the ecological crisis, the social crisis, crises upon crises. But as we try to create “solutions,” we distressingly find ourselves up against a limit, discovering that the only alternatives we can imagine are merely modifications of the same. Proposed solutions to the economic crisis toss us back and forth between two immobile poles: free market or regulated market. When we face the ecological crisis, we decide between sustainable technology or unsustainable technology. Whatever our personal preference, a little to this side or a little to that side, we all unwittingly play according to the same rules, think with the same concepts, speak the same language. We have forgotten how to think the new – or the old.
Ivan Illich, priest, philosopher, and social critic, is not a figure that most would expect to read about in a Marxist magazine. But he identified this problem long ago, and argued that the only “way out” was a complete change in thinking. His suggestion, both as concept and historical fact, was the “vernacular.” We will not escape from capitalism through the rationality of the scientist of history; nor will we get any help from the standpoint of the proletariat. The firm ground of Illich’s critique was precapitalist and preindustrial life in common.
Even those who reject this position must meet its challenge. Those for whom politics is embedded in the proliferation of postmodern “lifestyles,” inflected with pseudo-Marxist jargon, will have to recognize that the only model we have of forms of life based on direct access to the means of subsistence is precisely the “vernacular” that Illich proposes. Alternatively, those who locate emancipation in a Marx-inflected narrative of technological progress must to face Illich’s deep criticisms of developmentalism, scientism, and progressivism. The following is a challenge not only to capitalism and the experts who defend it, but also to its critics.
Mind Trap 1: the economic crisis
Ignoring his own contributions to the festivities, George W. Bush recently scolded those on Wall Street for getting drunk on the profits from selling unpayable debts.1 The resulting collapse of financial markets heralded the end of the party. The drunks seem to have sobered up without themselves suffering the consequent hangover. Instead, in the U.S. and elsewhere, a growing number of people are left stranded without homes, jobs, food, or medicines in the wake of that twenty-year long binge. In the opinion of some, the prospects of full employment or secure retirements for US citizens are a distant and unlikely dream. As recently as April 19th 2011, The McDonald Corporation conducted a national hiring day. Almost one million people applied for those jobs, known neither for their lavish pay nor for their agreeable working conditions. McDonald’s hired a mere six percent of these applicants, as many workers in one day as the number of net new jobs in the US for all of 2009.2
Unsurprisingly, diagnoses of what went wrong have proliferated fast and furiously. Of the many explanations offered, three stand out.3 First, in a spirit of self-examination, economists have concluded that their scientific models of how people behave and asset prices are determined were wrong and contributed to their inability to anticipate the crisis. That is, economists confessed to their ignorance of how economies work. Since their earnest attempts to improve these models are unlikely to question the credulity that forms the shaky foundations of financial markets, it is likely that the future of financial and macroeconomics will resemble the epicycles and eccentricities of Ptolemaic astronomy in the time of its decline.4
Second, journalists, policy makers, and economists who began to sing a different tune after the crisis erupted, find fault with the ideology of neo-liberalism. There is widespread recognition now that deregulated and unregulated markets allowed commercial and investment banks to invent and trade in financial instruments that carried systemic risks and contributed to the failure of credit and capital markets. This doctrine that unfettered markets produce the greatest economic benefit for the greatest number, while embarrassed, is not in full retreat, at least in the U.S.5 That neo-liberal ideology is not vanquished by its evident failures is related to the third cause identified in these diagnostic exercises.
If ignorance excused economists and policy makers from anticipating the crisis and widely worn ideological blinkers exacerbated it, then it is badly designed incentives that are generally fingered as the most prominent and proximate cause of the crisis. Accordingly, much ink has been spilled on redesigning incentives to more effectively rein in the “animal spirits” that derail economies from their presumed path of orderly growth. As such, incentives are a flaw that recommends itself as remedy.
This conceit is perhaps best exposed in the report authored by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission of the US government.6 For instance, in indicting the process and methods for generating and marketing mortgage-backed securities, the commission emphasizes that incentives unwittingly encouraged failures at every link of the chain. Low-interest rates allowed borrowers to refinance their debts and use their homes as ATM cards; lucrative fees drove mortgage brokers to herd up subprime borrowers; the demand for mortgages from Wall Street induced bankers to lower lending standards; rating agencies stamped lead as gold because paid to do so by investment bankers; the latter distributed these toxic assets worldwide relying on mathematical models of risk; and the C-suite of the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors presided over the house of card because handsomely rewarded for short term profits. Unsurprisingly, changing these incentives through more stringent regulations and better-specified rewards and punishments to guide the behaviors of different market participants occupy most of its recommendations for the path forward7
This peculiar combination of ignorance, ideology, and incentives used to explain the economic crisis, also illuminates the space of contemporary politico-economic thought. Most of the heated debates on how to ensure orderly growth, center on the quantum of regulation necessary to control economic motives without stifling them. Accordingly, thinking about economic matters vacillates on a fixed line anchored by two poles-free markets on the one end and markets fettered by legally enforced regulations at the other. Only a brief exposé can be afforded here of the lineaments of this thought-space circumscribed almost two centuries ago.8
Around 1700, Bernard Mandeville acerbically exposed the mechanism driving economic growth. Poetically, he pointed out that it was the vices—vanity, greed, and envy—that spurred the expansion of trade and commerce. In baring the viciousness that nourished the desire to accumulate riches, he also left to posterity the problem of providing a moral justification for market activity.9 Adam Smith provided a seemingly lasting rhetorical solution to this moral paradox. First, he collapsed the vices into “self-interest” and so removed the sting of viciousness from the vices by renaming them. Second, he grounded “self-interest” in a natural desire to “better our condition” that began in the womb and ended in the tomb and so moralized it.10 Third, he invoked an invisible hand to transmute the self-interest of individuals into socially desirable benefits. Not only was the passage from the individual to the social thereby obscured by providential means but the private pursuit of riches was also justified by its supposed public benefits.
Thus, Smith hid the paradox unveiled by Mandeville behind a rhetorically pleasing façade. The uncomfortable insight that private vice leads to public benefit was defanged by the notion that public benefits accrue from the unflinching pursuit of self-interest. Whereas the former revealed the vicious mechanism fueling commercially oriented societies, the latter made it palatable. Faith in the efficacy of the inscrutable invisible hand thereby underwrote the purported “natural harmony of interests,” according to which the butcher and the baker in each pursuing his own ends unwittingly furthers the wealth of the nation at large.
Smith’s rhetorical convolutions were necessary because he excised use-value from political economy and founded the latter entirely on exchange-value. In contrast to his predecessors for whom the economic could not be separated from ethics and politics, Smith carves out a space for the economic by defining its domain by the determinants of market prices.11 He accepted Locke’s arguments: that labor is the foundation of property rights; that applying labor transforms the commons into private property; that money ignites acquisitiveness; and that accumulation beyond use is just.12 Smith deliberately ignores the commons and emboldens the market because it is the sphere in which acquisitiveness flourishes. He curtails his inquiry to exchange-value in full awareness of the contrasting “value-in-use.” Even if not in these precise terms, the distinction between “exchange-value” and “use-value” was known to both Aristotle and Smith. Yet, Smith is perhaps the first who recognizes that traditional distinction and nevertheless rules out use-value as a legitimate subject of an inquiry on wealth.13 For Aristotle, it was precisely the distinction between use and exchange that grounded the distinction between appropriate acquisition and inappropriate accumulation. More generally, it is when considerations of justice and the good constitute the starting point of thinking about man that profit-seeking becomes visible as a force that rends the political community into a commercial society. By encouraging self-interestedness, Smith allows the vainglorious pursuit of wealth to overshadow virtue as the natural end for man.14 By focusing economic science on exchange values, Smith privileges the world of goods over that of the good. The price Smith pays for ignoring use-value is the need to invoke providential the mystery by which self-interest becomes socially beneficial. Since Smith, neo-classical economics has either disavowed the distinction between use and exchange value or confessed to being incapable of understanding use-value.15 By insisting that the valuable must necessarily be useful, Marx, unlike Aristotle, could not rely on the latter to criticize the former.16
Nevertheless, it was soon discovered that individual self-interest did not “naturally” produce social benefits. Vast disparities in wealth, endemic poverty, miserable living conditions, and persistent unemployment constituted some of the many socially maligned consequences of unfettered market activity. To account for these visible failures in the natural harmony of interests, a second formula, due to Jeremy Bentham, was therefore paired to it. An “artificial harmony of interests” forged through laws and regulations were deemed necessary to lessen the disjunction between private interests and public benefits. That is, state interventions in the form of incentives – whether coded in money or by law- were thought necessary to prod wayward market participants to better serve the public interest.17
Accordingly, it is this dialectic between the natural and artificial harmony of interests that encodes the poles of the Market and the State and constitutes the thought-space for contemporary discussions on economic affairs.18 Too little regulation and markets become socially destructive; too much regulation and the wealth-creating engines fueled by self-interest begin to sputter. And yet, the continuum constituted by these two poles is unified by a common presupposition: that use-value is of no use to commerce and that the egoism implied by self-interest is both necessary and natural to commercial expansion.
Though the economic crisis has, once again, exposed the Mandevillian foundations of commercial society, thinking about it continues to function in the space marked out by Smith, Bentham and the founders of that philosophical radicalism, which erected the morality of a society oriented by exchange value on the foundation of egoism. When confined to this thought-space, one is condemned to relying, in alternating steps, on the interrelated logics of free and regulated markets. The question remains whether there is an alternative to the thought-space constituted by the State and the Market. Perhaps the answer to this question lies in taking a distance to what these logics presume: that exchange-value is of preeminent worth and that possessive individuals are to be harnessed to that cause.
Mind Trap 2: the environmental crisis
Boarded up homes and idle hands are to the ongoing crisis in economic affairs, what disappearing fish and poisoned airs are to the oncoming environmental crisis. A generation after Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner, scientists are now of almost one mind: humankind’s activities on the earth have so changed it, that the species is now threatened by disaster on a planetary scale.19 What poets and prophets once warned in verse, scientists now tell us through statistics and models. Lurking beneath those dry numbers is a growing catalog of horrors – rising seas, raging rivers, melting glaciers, dead zones in the oceans, unbearable hot spots on land – that foretell an unlivable future.
Were the picture they paint not so dire, it would be laughably ironic that scientists and technocrats now disavow the fruits of the very techno-scientific machine they once served to midwife. But it is certainly tragic that in thinking about what can be done to avert the impending crisis, scientists and engineers no less than politicians and corporate bosses insist on more of the same. Attention is now directed at inventing methods to not only mitigate the physical effects of runaway industrialization, but also to re-engineer the human psyche to better adapt to such effects. Thus, from recycling plastic and increasing fuel mileage in cars to devising towers to sequester carbon undersea and engineering carbon eating plants, the proposed solutions range from the mundane to the bizarre. More generally, the debate on what to do about the conflict between economic growth and ecological integrity is anchored by two poles: at the one end, “eco-friendly” or “sustainable” technologies, and at the other, presumably “unsustainable” or environmentally destructive ones.
Thus man’s survival appears as a choice between the Prius, solar panels, biodegradable paper bags, local foods, and high density urban lofts on the one hand, and the Hummer, oil tanks, plastic bags, industrialized foods, and suburbia on the other. Eco-friendly technologies may change the fuel that powers our energy slaves but does nothing to change our dependence on them. That the fruits of techno-science have turned poisonous is seen as a problem calling for more and improved technical solutions implying that the domain of technology forms the horizon of ecological thought.20 That more and different technology is the dominant response to its failure suggests that the made (techne) has replaced the given (physis). Ecological thought is confined to the space framed by technology partly because of the unstated assumption that knowledge is certain only when it is made.
It was Vico who announced the specifically modern claim that knowledge is made, that verum et factum convertuntur (the true and the made are convertible; have identical denotation). It is true that the schoolmen, in thinking through the question of the Christian God’s omnipotence and omniscience, argued his knowledge was identical to his creations. They argued this by insisting that through his creative act (making something from nothing) he expressed elements already contained within Himself. God knows everything because he made it all from his own being. However, the schoolmen humbly held that the identity of making and knowing applied only to God. Man, being created, could not know himself or other natural kinds in the manner akin to God. Since scientia or indubitable knowledge was the most perfect kind of knowledge, and nature or physis was already given to man, it implied that man could not scientifically know the sublunary world. It took a Galileo and a Descartes to turn this understanding on its head.21
These early moderns were “secular theologians” who tried to marry heaven and earth. They argued that geometrical objects or forms – such as triangles and squares – were unearthly. At best, such mathematical objects were “ideas” formed by the creative act of the imagination. The imagination as a site of creative activity entailed that it be unhinged from what is given. Exemplified by mathematical objects, whose perfection owes little, if anything, to the imperfect beings of the world, the secular theologians thus argued that the truth of ideas is guaranteed by the very fact that they are made.22
The perfect and timeless shapes of geometry were once thought to be applicable only to the unmoving heavens. The sublunary sphere of generation, change, and decay was not susceptible to immobile mathematical forms. But according to the secular theologians, what was good for the heavens was good enough for the earth. By insisting that the book of nature was written in “measure, weight and number,” these early moderns raised the earth to the stars.
For them, beneath the blooming, buzzing, phenomenal world lurked the laws of nature inscribed in mathematically formulated regularities. Thus the made lay beneath the given, it required arduous experimentation – the vexing of nature – to unveil these insensible but imagined laws. Accordingly, mathematical forms and laboratory experiments constituted the preeminent methods for constructing knowledge of the world. Unhinged from the given because committed to the cause of the made, techno-science shook off its Aristotelian roots, where experience was the memorable formed from long immersion in the regularities of the world, genesis and movement were impossible to know with certainty but only for the most part, and beings in the world were possessed of substantive natures.23
Prideful immodesty was not the only reason that early modern philosophers brought the heavens to the earth. They also did so for charitable reasons. Moved by concern for the poor this-worldly condition of man, they sought to improve man’s estate by escaping what is given – food technologies to erase hunger, cars and planes to overcome the limits of time and space, medicines to eliminate disease, and now genetic manipulations to perhaps even cheat death. Thus, pride and charity infuse that potent and world-making brew we call techno-science.24
Modern techno-science grew, a bit topsy-turvy, but always cleaving close to these founding impulses. The pride that compels to know-by-construction continues to be wedded to the charity fueling the production of artifacts that better our condition by transmogrifying it. Whether TV’s or theorems, the modern techno-scientific endeavor is one by which, Entis rationis, creations or constructions of the mind, are projected and given form as entis realis, things realized. Caught in this closed loop between mind and its projections, everywhere he looks, man now sees only what he has made. Instead of recovering the garden of his original innocence, modern man is now faced with the growing desert of his own making. Yet, trapped by the premise of the identity between knowing and making, contemporary thought remains unable to think of anything other than remaking what has been badly made.25
Perhaps it is this commitment to the proposition that we can know only what we make, to knowledge by construction, that forces us to be trapped within the techno-scientific frame. The environmental crisis has exposed the Achilles heel of unrestrained techno-scientific progress. Yet, faith in Progress and in Knowledge as the currency of Freedom remains unshaken. Shuttling between the poles of “sustainable” and “unsustainable” technologies, the former is proffered as the new and improved cure for the diseases caused by the latter. And once more, disinterested curiosity and solicitous concern for the welfare of others justify and reaffirm faith in salvation through technology. To escape this debilitating confine perhaps requires being disabused of the prejudicial identity between knowing and making, which animates techno-science.
Planely speaking, but not entirely
The space constituted by the dialectic between a natural and artificial “harmony of interests” enfolds the relation between free and regulated markets. The politics of a commercial republic is oriented to the satisfaction of human needs through commodities. To continually increase the satisfaction of needs, market societies must expand the sphere of commodity dependence, that is, the relentless pursuit economic growth. The production and consumption of commodities presupposes the worker and the consumer, and regardless of who owns the means of production or how profits are distributed, economic growth requires workers/consumers. Even if workers are no more likely to find well-paying jobs than are debt saturated consumers likely to buy more stuff, the social imaginary formed of workers and consumers persists. Accordingly, any effort to see beneath or beyond this confining thought-space must take its distance to this industrial mind-set formed by the thoroughgoing dependence on commodities.
Similarly, the debate on the necessity of “eco-friendly” technologies that carry a lower “ecological footprint” presupposes man as operator instead of as user.26 The user is transformed into an operator when the power of a tool overwhelms that of its user. Thus, whether it is a Prius or a Hummer, both aim to improve man’s condition by frustrating his natural ability and capacity to walk. Both demand skilled operators to steer, and neither permits the degrees of freedom necessary for autonomous use. Whether promoted by the technocrat or ecocrat, men are disabled by and become dependent on their artifacts when the latter are designed for operators instead of enabling users.
The ordinary and everyday meaning of usefulness embeds it within both human purposes and human actions. A thing is useful insofar as it unleashes and extends the capacities of the user; as long as it can be shaped, adapted, and modified to fit the purposes of its users. Therefore, the capacity of a thing to be useful is limited by the innate powers or natural thresholds of the user. For example, a bicycle calls for users because it only extends the innate capacity for self-mobility. In contrast, the automobile requires immobile if adept machine operators. In this sense, the former is a convivial technology where the latter is manipulative. A hand-pump or a well can be used to raise water for drinking or bathing. In contrast, a flush-toilet or a dam must be operated to pipe or store a liquid resource. Thus, to bring to light was has been cast into the shadows requires exposing the disabling features of some technologies.
Accordingly, whatever lies beyond the thought-space marked by the dialectic of the State-Market on the one hand and that of the sustainable-unsustainable technology on the other, it must be heterogeneous to both the worker/consumer and the operator. In this search, two caveats are to be kept in mind. First, even if the question is addressed to the present, the answer must be sought for in the past. One is obliged to rummage in the dustbin of history to recover what was once muscled into it. Otherwise, imagined futures would give wing to utopian dreams just like those that have now turned nightmarish. Second, there is no going back to the past and there is no choice between the (post)industrial and the traditional immured in habit and transmitted by memory. The dependence on commodities and manipulative technologies has been and continues to be established on the destruction of alternative modes of being and thinking. There is little of the latter around, even as millions of peasants and aboriginal peoples are daily uprooted and displaced in China, India, and Latin America. But it would be sentimental and dangerous to think that one can or should bring back the past. Instead, the task for thought is to find conceptual criteria to help think through the present.27
The Vernacular Domain
Ivan Illich proposed to revivify the word “vernacular” to name a domain that excludes both the consumer and the operator. The appropriate word to speak of the domain beyond dependence on commodities and disabling technologies is fundamental to avoiding one or both of two confusions. First, the presuppositions of economics and techno-science are likely to be anachronistically projected into forms-of-life that lie outside or beyond the thought space constituted by them. This is obvious when economists retro-project fables of the diamond and water “paradox,” “utility-maximization” and “scarcity” into pre-modern texts. So does the historian of technology who indifferently sees the monkey, Neanderthal man, and the university student as tool users. In a related vein, forms-of-life orthogonal to techno-scientifically fueled economies are likely to be misunderstood. Thus, those who today refuse modern conveniences are labeled Luddites or just cussed, while those who get by outside the techno-scientific and commodity bubbles are classified as backward or poor.
A second, more potent, confusion flourishes in the absence of a word adequate to the domain outside technologically intensive market societies. Disabling technologies no less than wage work can produce or generate unpaid toil. That the spinning jenny and the computer have put people out of work is well-known. But it is less familiar that waged work necessitates a shadowy unpaid complement. Indeed, wage work is a perhaps diminishing tip of the total toil exacted in market-intensive societies. Housework, schoolwork, commuting, monitoring the intake of medicines or the outflows from a bank account are only a few examples of the time and toil devoted to the necessary shadow work compelled by commodity-intensive social arrangements. To confuse the shadow work necessitated by the separation of production and consumption with the unpaid labor in settings where production is not separated from consumption is to misunderstand shadow work as either autonomous action or the threatened and shrinking spaces outside the market.28
Indicative of this confusion is the use of such terms as “subsistence economy,” “informal economies,” or “peasant economy” to refer to what has been cast into the shadows. By adding an adjective to the “economy,” historians and anthropologists unwittingly reinforce the grip of what they intend to weaken. By merely modifying the “economy” they are nevertheless beholden to its presuppositions. A similar weakness attends the term “subsistence.” While its etymology is noble and invokes that which is self-sufficient and stands in place, its modern connotations are irredeemably narrow and uncouth. In primarily invoking the modes by which people provided for their material needs – food and shelter – “subsistence” reinforces the economic by negation. With its connotations of “basic necessities” or “bare survival,” subsistence desiccates the varied and multifarious forms-of-life once and still conducted beyond the space circumscribed by the machine and the market. One cannot speak of “subsistence architecture” as one can of vernacular architectures. “Peasant” or “informal” does not modify dance and song, prayer and language, food and play. And yet, these are integral to a life well-lived, and at least historically, were neither commodified nor the products of techno-science. It is to avoid such blinding confusions that Illich argued for rehabilitating the word “vernacular.“29
Though from the Latin vernaculum, which named all that was homebred, homemade, and homespun, it was through Varro’s restricted sense of vernacular speech that the word “vernacular” enters English. The history of how vernacular speech was transmuted into a “taught mother tongue,” is an exemplar of not only what lies beyond the contemporary thought-space but also for what may be worthy of recuperation in modern forms.30
Elio Antonio de Nebrija was a contemporary of Christopher Columbus. In 1492, he petitioned Queen Isabella to sponsor a tool to quell the unruly everyday speech of her subjects. In the Spain of Isabella, her subjects spoke in a multitude of tongues. To discipline the anarchic speech of people in the interest of her power Nebrija noted, “Language has always been the consort of empire, and forever shall remain its mate.” To unify the sword and the book through language, Nebrija offered both a rulebook for Spanish grammar and a dictionary. In a kind of alchemical exercise, Nebrija reduced lived speech to a constructed grammar. Accordingly, this conversion of the speech of people into a national language stands as a prototype of the forays in that long war to create a world fit for workers/ consumers and operators.
Nebrija fabricated a Spanish grammar as a tool to rule enlivened speech. Because standardized and produced by an expert, his grammar had to be taught to be effective. Moreover, following grammatical rules for speech conveys the belief that people cannot speak without learning the rules of grammar. By this dispensation, the tongue is trained to repeat the grammatical forms it is taught; the tongue is made to operate on language. Hence, the natural ability to speak that can be exercised by each and all is transformed into an alienable product requiring producers and consumers. The conversion of everyday speech into a teachable mother tongue thus renders what is abundant into the regime of scarcity – to the realm of exchange-value. Instruction in language not only disables the natural powers of the speaker but also makes her dependent on certified service providers. Thus, Nebrija’s proposal at once discloses and foreshadows the world populated by workers and operators, by the market and the machine.
The war against the vernacular has been prosecuted for some 500 years.31 Once the commodity and market occupied the interstices of everyday life. Today, it is everywhere. For most of human history, tools were shaped by the purposes and limited by the natural abilities of its users. Today, their machines enslave the majority of people, particularly in advanced industrial societies. Though this transformation has and is occurring in different places at different times and rates, it nevertheless duplicates the diagram of how standardized Spanish grammar disembedded the speech of people. For instance, the rapacious “primitive accumulation” that enclosed the commons in the 17th century, uprooted English peasants from the land to make them fully dependent on wages. A similar dispossession now occurs in China and India, where hundreds of millions move from farms to factories and slums. Aboriginal tribes of the Amazon are being dispossessed and killed now with the same impunity as those in Australia and the Americas once were. For entertainment, children now operate PlayStations where they once kicked around a ball on the street. Mega-churches in the US indoctrinate the flock with power point slides and music, much as teachers, trainers, and coaches do in classrooms around the country. Food scientists, nutritionists, and plant pathologists provide just some of the inputs that consumers depend on for their daily calorie intake. Whether in single-family homes or boxes piled on top of each other, people live in houses seemingly cut from an architect’s template. Women in India now demand valentine cards with as much enthusiasm as Turkish men purchase hair, calf, and chest implants. The historical record is rife with examples that stand as witnesses to the continuing destruction of the vernacular –whether of food, shelter, song, love, or pleasures.
It is by attending to the historical specificity of our present predicament in the mirror of the past that Illich thus reveals a third axis that lies orthogonal to the plane circumscribed by the axes of commodity intensity and disabling technologies. On this z-axis are located forms of social organization anchored by two heterogeneous forms. At the point of origin of this three-dimensional space, are social arrangements that plug people into markets and machines and thereby prevent them from exercising their freely given powers. At the other end of this z-axis is found a profusion of social forms, each different from the other, but all marked by suspicion towards the claims for techno-science and the commodity.
For these modes of social organization, the difference between “sustainable” and “unsustainable” technologies is a chimera. Instead, what matters is the real distinction between convivial and disabling technologies. Similarly, the purported difference between regulated and free markets, between public and private property does little to shape these social forms. Instead, they are animated by the distinction between the household and the commons. Thus, the Amish of Pennsylvania curtail their use of such power tools as tractors. The Bhutanese limit the number of tourists to whom they play host. Some cities in Germany and Denmark have banned the car to make way for the bicycle and walking. Whether on a rooftop in Chicago or by the rail track in Mumbai, diverse groups rely on their vegetable patches for some their daily sustenance. While community supported agriculture build bonds of personal dependence, ceramic dry toilets and related forms of vernacular architectures allow people to dwell. In a fine essay by Peter Linebaugh on the Luddites and the Romantics, one is persuaded by the implicit claim that communism for the 21st century may need to mimic in a new key, the courageous Luddite defense of the vernacular.32 Even Marx, in his last years, was less of a Marxist than many of those who spoke in his name. He was far more open to the peasant communes of Russia and Western Europe than usually assumed.33
These modes and manners of living in the present are informed by the past. Those engaged in the attempt to unplug from the market and the machine know that the reign of property – whether private or public-was erected on the ruins of the commons and that the ubiquity of disabling technologies-whether sustainable or not-was achieved by denigrating convivial tools. Yet, crucially, knowing what is past has gone, they are not dogmatic in their fight. They practice a form of bricolage, opportunistically taking back whatever they can get. A shared lawnmower here, an overgrown and weed infested garden there, a political struggle to retain artisanal fishing in Kerala, a move to the barricades in the Chiapas, the willingness to peddle cocaine derived home remedies in Peru and building illegal tenements on public lands in Sao Paulo, each effort is aimed at reducing the radical monopoly of commodities and disabling technologies. Such ways – of fishing, farming, cooking, eating, dwelling, playing, praying or study – are as diverse and varied today as the people who engage in them. However, what they have in common is being oriented by the same genus, the vernacular.
Epistemic Prudence
The effort to fight against the continuing war on the vernacular also extends to the activity of thinking.34 What is confused for knowledge today is largely R&D funded and deployed by government and industry. Scientists, whether in the employ of universities, governments, or corporations, produce objective knowledge for use by others. The pertinent question for those affected by these circuits of knowledge production and sale is to ask if there are vernacular styles of thinking. Is there a kind of thought justified by neither pride nor charity? What is the nature of rigorous thought that is nevertheless conducted among friends and aimed at shaping one’s own modes of life in more beautiful ways? Are some styles of thinking better suited to comprehending the vernacular?
It is likely that the intellectual effort appropriate to bringing vernacular ways out of the shadows might itself be self-limiting. I suggest the now discarded notion of common sense as a criterion to both comprehend the vernacular domain and to recognize the styles of thought appropriate to it. Though the history of common sense is too tangled a story to be told here, it is sufficient to note its primary meaning, at least in English. The first meaning of common sense is the Aristotelian “sensus communis”: “The common bond or center of the five senses; the endowment of natural intelligence possessed by rational beings.”35 This understanding of the common sense stretches from at least Plato to Descartes and, in this primordial sense, refers to the faculty necessary for the exercise of reasonable judgments. Contrary to popular prejudice today, common sense does not refer to the content of what is known but rather how knowledge is achieved. Common sense is not reducible to a body of propositions or of knowledge-claims: instead, it is the ground from which judgments are reached, particularly, the judgment of what is appropriate, fitting, or adequate.36
Briefly, common sense is that faculty which synthesizes sense impressions into perceptions of the world. In turn, the active intelligence abstracts concepts from these sensible perceptions. An echo of this activity of the intellect still resonates in the word “concept,” etymologically related to grasping or touching. That concepts are tethered to percepts, which are rooted in the sensual, underwrites that Aristotelian commonplace, “nothing in the intellect that is not first in the senses.” Concepts are abstractions. But precisely because they are abstractions from the real, they maintain an accord between the world and the mind. Stated simply, both perception and the concepts that flow from them are dependent on what is given to the senses; conceptions of the world depend on grasping the world as it is.
Yet, techno-science is based on precisely turning this understanding on its head. Indeed, the announcement of Vico may be taken as the slogan behind which a common sense understanding of the world was slowly suffocated. From the very beginning of modern science, knowing is understood to be the same as making: the Cartesian plane is as constructed as an airplane; the Poisson distribution is as fabricated as a pipette in the laboratory. Modern scientific ideas are not concepts tethered to the senses; instead they are constructs. Constructs, as the word suggests, are made and not given. As Einstein famously said, “Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and not…uniquely determined by the external world.” Though wrong to use the word “concepts,” his acknowledgement that scientific theories are created underscores how scientific constructs fractures the common sense tie between perception and reality.
The sharp distinction between concepts and constructs recalls that the modern world is constructed and that people and things are often resized to fit in. Concepts are forms of thought engendered by the common sense, which itself expresses the union between the world and the senses. Concepts reflect a way of knowing things from the outside in – from the world to the mind. In contrast, constructs are forms of reflexive thought expressing a way of knowing from the inside out – from the mind to the world.In modern times, what is made up does not ideally conform to what is given. Instead, what is given is slowly buried under the made-up world.
Scientific constructs are therefore not rooted by a sense for the world. Indeed, given the contrast between concepts and constructs, it follows that scientific ideas are non-sense. They are not abstracted from experience but can often be used to reshape it. They can be experimentally verified or falsified. But experiments are not the stuff of ordinary experience. No experiment is necessary to verify if people breathe, but one is required to prove the properties of a vacuum. Experiments are necessary precisely to test what is not ordinarily evident, which is why they are conducted in controlled settings and also used to propagandize the unusual as ordinarily comprehensible. Experimental results are neither necessarily continuous with nor comprehensible to everyday experience; they do not clarify experience but usually obfuscate it.
Unlike R&D, vernacular styles of thought are neither institutionally funded nor directed at the purported happiness and ease of others. Moreover, vernacular thinking also cleaves closely to the common sense understood as the seat of reasonable judgments. Thus, it avoids the monstrous heights to which thought can rise on the wings of the unfettered imagination. Accordingly, the ability to grasp the vernacular demands not only the courage needed to buck academic pressures but also to avoid those flights of theoretical madness powered through the multiplication of constructs.37
To draw out some features of the form of thought adequate to the vernacular domain, consider Illich’s essay titled Energy and Equity, where he distinguishes between transport, transit, and traffic. Whereas transit bespeaks the motion afforded to man the self-moving animal, transport refers to his being moved by heteronomous means, whether car, train, or plane. There, a bullock cart transports villagers headed to the market. Here cars transport commuters to the workplace. By common sense perception, transport – whether by cart or car – perverts transit, which is embodied in the freely given capacity to walk. To those who cannot perceive the sensual and carnal difference between walking and being moved as a Fedex package, the distinction between transport and transit is unpersuasive. It is equally unpersuasive to those mired in that constructed universe where all motion is identified with the displacement of any body in space. The ritualized exposure to passenger-miles – whether in cars or classrooms – is the likely reason for the inability to perceive the felt distinction between transport and transit. Thus, the elaboration of concepts to properly grasp the vernacular domain cannot but begin by placing the constructions of the economy and techno-science within epistemic brackets.
Yet, if it is to be reasonable, such an exercise in epistemic hygiene cannot be immoderate.38 The contrast between transport and transit is clear and distinct, rooted as it is in phenomenologically distinct perceptions. Yet, traffic is a theoretical construct, proposed to comprehend any combination of transport and transit. This necessity for constructs is nevertheless undermined by their being tethered to and by concepts. Accordingly, the conceptual grasp of the world hobbles the free construction of it. The distinction between concepts and constructs does not imply refusing the latter at all costs but rather entails seeing the hierarchical relation between them. That is, vernacular styles of thinking do not exclude theoretical constructs but only seek to keep them in their place.
A second and related feature of vernacular thought-styles confirms its moderate and indeed, modest nature. In accord with vernacular ways, vernacular thought does not demand the exclusion or excision of that which is antithetical and foreign to its domain – the market or the machine. For instance, vernacular thought does not demand the erasure of transport so that transit can flourish. Instead, because rooted in the perceived accord or just proportion between the transit and transport, vernacular thought insists only that the capacity for auto-mobility impose a binding constraint on transport. The suggestion that the speed limit for cars be roughly the same as that reached by a bicycle is rooted in the argument that traffic be calibrated by the lexicographic preference for transit over transport.
Thus, vernacular ways of thinking in consonance with doing and being do not deny constructs – whether imagined or realized. It merely refuses the characteristically modern identification of knowing and making, of reducing thinking to calculating, of displacing the relation between subjects and their predicates by quantitative comparisons. In seeing beyond the prejudice that compares beings in terms of “measure, number, and weight,” vernacular thought reanimates a second form of quantitative measurement that, with it, was also cast into the shadows. Recall, as Einstein admitted, scientific constructs are free creations of the mind, exemplified by mathematical constructs – equations, calculations, and the like. But such mathematical measurement is only the inferior of two kinds of quantitative measurement.
In The Statesman, Plato argues for the distinction between arithmetical and “geometric” measures.39 While both are forms of quantitative measurements, arithmetical or numerical measure is independent of the purposes of the calculator and either correct or incorrect. In contrast, “geometric” measurements of too much or too little are inextricably bound to intentionality and therefore never simply correct or incorrect but always measured with respect to what is just right or fitting. To clarify the distinction, consider the following two points. Given a conventional measure – gallons or liters – a quantity of water can be precisely and universally measured as 4. However, whether 4 is too much or too little depends on whether one intends to fill a 3 or 5 gallon pail; or to put out a blazing fire or to water a horse. The frame of intentionality or purpose thus defines the quantitative measurement of greater or lesser, of more or less. Accordingly, the numerical measure of plus or minus 1 gains its meaning from and is therefore subordinate to the non-numerically measure of too much or too little. Moreover, it is also relative to purpose that 3 or 5 is considered fitting, appropriate or just right.
But there is a second point to be emphasized about the relation between so-called arithmetical and “geometrical” measurements. Arithmetical measures are utterly sterile when it comes to answering the question of purpose, of what is to be done. That is, the question of whether a given end is appropriate or fitting cannot be debated in mathematical symbols. In fact, the opposite is true. It is always possible to ask if applying arithmetical measures to a particular situation is appropriate. Thus, whether one should fill a 5-gallon pail, or construct a mathematical model of human behavior or fabricate a measure called ecological footprint are unanswerable in numerical terms.40
That arithmetical measurements cannot adjudicate its own appropriateness shows they are inferior in rank or hierarchically subordinate to “geometric” measurement. The question concerning purpose is preeminently a question of ethics, of justice among persons. Moreover, since personal relationship cannot but be grounded in the embodied sense of and for another, it follows that ethical judgments must be rooted in common sense. Thus, geometric measures of what is just and right, of what is appropriate and fitting, are judgments formed of the common sense. Accordingly it follows that concepts should regulate and serve as norms for constructs and, analogously, that vernacular ways should regulate techno-scientific constructions.
Past or Future?
Illich’s plea to resuscitate the vernacular must be taken seriously – especially now, when the ongoing economic and ecological crises reveal the restricted thought-space within which contemporary debates continue to be conducted. Just as the demand for more regulated markets expose exchange-value as the presupposition of economic thought, so also the call for sustainable or eco-friendly technologies expose the grip of techno-science on the modern imaginary. The vernacular, we could say, lies orthogonal to these axes of markets and machines, offering us a unique standpoint from which to interrogate the present. While the object of an almost 500 year long war, it nevertheless persists within the interstices and byways of modern life, ready for reactivation.
Sajay Samuel is a Clinical Associate Professor of Accounting at Penn State University. He has spoken on science, economic thought, and the vernacular for Canadian radio. His academic publications aim to undermine the current fascination with accounting and related numbers as a modality of management.
- 1BBC, “‘Wall Street got drunk’ says Bush.”
- 2Andy Kroll, “How the McEconomy Bombed the American Worker,” TomDispatch. While advanced industrialized economies cannot find enough jobs for its unemployed populations, so called emerging economies are actively creating employment. By inverse symmetry, to satisfy the demand of economic growth through industrialization, notably in China and India, peasants are converted into factory workers in the hundreds of millions.
- 3Of the raft of books on the causes and consequences of the current economic situation, there are those who argue, rightly in many particulars, that this was only the most severe of the crisis prone dynamics of capitalism. In this vein, see for example most recently, Paul Mattick, Business As Usual (London: Reaktion Books, 2011); David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009). I ignore these accounts since they are and were largely ignored in policy circles and mainstream economic thinking.
- 4Notably, George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, Animal Spirits (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). But see also Justin Fox, The Myth of the Rational Market (New York: Harper Business Books, 2009); and Paul Krugman, “How did economists get it so wrong?” New York Times, September 9, 2009.
- 5Joseph Stiglitz in Freefall (New York: Norton Books, 2010) is perhaps the most trenchant of the well-known economists to finger free market ideology as an important cause of the crisis. Also see, N. Roubini & S. Mihm, Crisis Economics (New York, Penguin Press, 2010); and S. Johnson & J. Kwak, 13 Bankers (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010). Worthy of special mention in this regard, is Richard Posner’s, A Failure of Capitalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), which stands as a model for retrospective hand-wringing by a booster of neo-liberalism.
- 6The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report (New York: Public Affairs, 2011). Most if not all of the writings on the financial crisis cite incentives as both cause and remedy. The U.S. Congressional report published after two years of study and investigation is exemplary since failed or inadequate incentives—whether in the form of regulation or compensation- comprise the sum of causal factors driving the crisis. But also consult among any of the above-mentioned books, Laurence Koltikoff’s, Jimmy Stewart is Dead (New York: Wiley & Sons, 2010) for a sensible proposal to limit financially induced boom-bust cycles through limited purpose banking. The latter is designed to dampen the ill-effects of debt financing.
- 7The paradox of designing incentives to determine future behavior seems not to have been fully comprehended. Indeed, in a forthcoming work, I intend to argue that incentive mechanisms assure only one consequence: they will certainly fail.
- 8For a fuller account, see Sajay Samuel & Jean Roberts, “Water can and ought to run freely: reflections on the notion of “scarcity” in economics” in The Limits to Scarcity, ed. Lyla Mehta(London: Earthscan, 2010), 109-126.
- 9Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924).
- 10“It is because mankind are disposed to sympathize more entirely with our joy than with our sorrow, that we make parade of our riches, and conceal our poverty…Nay, it is chiefly from this regard to the sentiments of mankind, that we pursue riches and avoid poverty. For to what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world? What is the end of avarice and ambition, of the pursuit of wealth, of power, and preheminence? Is it to supply the necessities of nature? The wages of the meanest labourer can supply them… If we examined his oeconomy with rigour, we should find that he spends a great part of them upon conveniencies, which may be regarded as superfluities, and that, upon extraordinary occasions, he can give something even to vanity and distinction…From whence, then, arises that emulation which runs through all the different ranks of men, and what are the advantages which we propose by that great purpose of human life which we call bettering our condition? To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation, are all the advantages, which we can propose to derive from it. It is the vanity, not the ease, or the pleasure, which interests us. But vanity is always founded upon the belief of our being the object of attention and approbation.” Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: A Millar, 1759/1858), pt. 1, sec. 1, ch. 3, emphasis added. Consult Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1977) whose close textual analysis of classical authors shows that it is the idea of a natural harmony between individual self-interest and the general interest, that allows, in principle, acquisitiveness to be free of ethico-political restraints. Though he includes William Petty and John Locke among “economists,” William Letwin’s judgment is instructive: “…there can be no doubt that economic theory owes its present development to the fact that some men…were willing to consider the economy as nothing more than an intricate mechanism, refraining for the while from asking whether the mechanism worked for good or evil”; Origins of Scientific Economics (London, 1963), 147-48. See CB Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962) for supporting arguments that root economic liberalism in 17th century political thought.
- 11“…money has become in all civilized nations the universal instrument of commerce, by the intervention of which goods of all kinds are bought and sold, or exchanged for one another. What are the rules which men naturally observe in exchanging them either for money or one another, I shall now proceed to examine”; Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, book 1, ch. 4.
- 12The importance of Locke to Smith is evident in his paean to property. “The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable” (Wealth of Nations, book 1, ch. 10, part 2). For reasons of space, I cannot do full justice to Locke’s arguments. However, the following statements sufficiently support the four points I emphasize. “Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined it to something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men”; “And as different degrees of industry were apt to give men possessions in different proportions, so this invention of money gave them the opportunity to continue and enlarge them”; “…the exceeding of the bounds of his just property not lying in the largeness of his possession, but the perishing of anything uselessly in it”; John Locke, Concerning Civil Government, Second Essay, ch. 5.
- 13“…These rules determine what may be called the relative or exchangeable value of goods. The word value, it is to be observed, has two different meanings, and sometimes expresses the utility of some particular object, and sometimes the power of purchasing other goods which the possession of that object conveys. The one may be called ‘value in use’; the other, ‘value in exchange.’” (Wealth of Nations, book 1, ch. 4).
- 14Smith argues that “virtue consists not in any one affection but in the proper degree of all the affections.” For him, Agreeableness or utility is not a measure of virtue. Instead, it is ‘sympathy’ or the “correspondent affection of the spectator” that “is the natural and original measure of the proper degree (of virtue).” ***TMS, Part 8, Sec. 2, Ch.3. But such sympathy is not a virtue. At best it is a mirror of social prejudices.
- 15The blindness to subsistence in contemporary economics is evident in the judgment of George Stigler in his review of late 19th century efforts to grasp use-value: “…and there were some mystical references to the infinite utility of subsistence.” See his “Development of Utility Theory II,” Journal of Political Economy, 58 (1950), 373. Stigler is only capable of equating the useful, which is price-less, with the mystical.
- 16“A thing can be a use-value without being a value. A thing can be useful and a product of human labor, without being a commodity. …Nothing can be a value without being an object of utility..” Marx, K.(1976) Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books), 131.
- 17The fundamental, though largely overlooked, essay on the elaboration of the twinned yet polemically related “natural” and “artificial” harmony of interests remains, Elie Halevy The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).
- 18It would take a longer essay to show the function of law in commercial society. Summarily, Commercial society transforms Law into an instrument of social engineering; and thus of regulation. It began to be used to engineer society towards more or less market-intensive relations. Classical liberalism predicated on the “natural harmony of interests” requires economizing on law. In contrast, to mitigate the destructiveness of rampant market society requires shackling commercialism without destroying it, forging an “artificial harmony of interests” through punitive regulations. Hence both the minimal state of liberalism (whether classical or neo-liberalism) and the expanded state of welfare liberalism implies the instrumentalization of Law. See Michel Foucault, “On Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect, eds. Colin Gordon, G. Burchell and P. Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). The newest crinkle to this old tale is that markets are no longer thought natural. Instead, markets can be designed, often by market participants themselves. Thus moderating markets through incentives becomes a matter of auto-engineering of and by markets around the late 20th century.
- 19 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1962) and Barry Commoner Science and Survival (New York: Viking Books, 1967) are perhaps the two most prominent scientists to have jump-started the environmental movement with the blessings of science. By now, despite a few if noisy detractors, widespread anthropogenic environmental destruction is, as it is said, “scientific fact.” Over 2000 scientists worldwide contribute to the reports and recommendations produced by The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the environmental effects of industrialization at perhaps the most general environmental register. See Climate Change 2007 for its most recent report.
- 20 A pair of recent books authored by French philosophers suggests the philosophical ambit within with the environmental crisis is comprehended. On the one hand, Michel Serres’s The Natural Contract (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) insists on the necessity of a contract with the Earth now that Humanity presses against it as does any mammoth natural force. Such a natural contract, presupposes a new metaphysics, according to which humanity cannot be reduced to individuals and Earth is not underfoot but whirling in empty space; both so comprehended by Science and Law. In some contrast, Luc Ferry’s The New Ecological Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) fears the new metaphysics. Cleaving to modern ways, he believes “it will ultimately be by means of advancements in science and technology that we manage one day to resolve the questions raised by environmental ethics” (127). Nevertheless, neither doubt the path forward to be illuminated by a suitably reformulated techno-science.
- 21Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science Magazine, 155:3767, argued for anthropocentric singularity of Christianity and its attendant bequest of nature to man for fueling techno-science that has caused the ecological crisis. In this section I focus on the metaphysics of modern science. For a recent statement on how historians of science who raise their heads from the dusty archives deal with the metaphysics of modern science, see Lindberg, The Beginning of Western Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), ch.14. He agrees with E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (New York: Doubleday, 1932), whose judgment of the presuppositions and implications of Newtonian mechanics has not been fundamentally challenged. Hannah Arendt, “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man” in Between Past and Future (New York: Random Books, 1993) offers a succinct sketch of the groundlessness presumed by techno-science.
- 22For a fuller account of the theological and philosophical debates that prepared this view from nowhere, see Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). It is he who names as secular theologians, “Galileo and Descartes, Liebniz and Newton, Hobbes and Vico” among others. I rely heavily on him (particularly part 5) and on Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) to grasp the central lines in the mathematization of physis. Also consult Peter Dear’s textbook, Revolutionizing the Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) cast as a pithy summary of the seismic changes between 1500 and 1800 in what was worth knowing and how it was known.
- 23See A. Mark Smith’s “Knowing things inside out: the scientific revolution from a Medieval Perspective,” The American Historical Review, 95:3 (1990) for an excellent summary on the reversal of the hierarchy between sense and reason in modern scientific thought. Also, consult Eamon Duffy, Science and the Secrets of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) for a persuasive account of scientific experiments as vexing nature in order to extract her secrets.
- 24To appreciate the brew of pride and charity that constitutes modern techno-science we need only to attend to Descartes. “…It is possible to reach knowledge that will be of much utility in this life… instead of the speculative philosophy now taught in the schools we can find a practical one, by which, knowing the nature and behavior of fire, water, air, stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies which surround us, as well as we now understand the different skills of our artisans, we can employ these entities for all the purposes for which they are suited, and so make ourselves masters and possessors of nature. This would not only be desirable in bringing about the invention of an infinity of devices to enable us to enjoy the fruits of agriculture and all the wealth of the earth without labor, but even more so in conserving health, the principal good and the basis of all other goods in life.” Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method (Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts Press, 1960), part six.
- 25The term construction refers to things – whether physical or symbolic – made. The mathematical roots of construction and constructivism are thoroughly explored with special note of Descartes in David Lachterman, The Ethics of Geometr (London: Routledge 1989). Funkenstein, Theology, especially chapter 5, describes well the philosophical shift from the contemplative ideal of knowing to the ideal of knowing-by-doing or made knowledge. A cursory glance at any scientific book should convince that “theoretical constructs” are a staple of the modern scientific enterprise. Those (so-called postmodern philosophers, historians and sociologists of science) who think they challenge techno-science by emphasizing that scientific knowledge is constructed only repeat in prose what Bacon, Gassendi, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton said in verse. Those who think they defend scientific knowledge by invoking, as the last trump card, its technical productions merely reconfirm the founding conceit of modern techno-science: that knowing and making are interchangeable.
- 26In this section I rely on the most extensive statement of Illich on critical technology, Tools for Conviviality (London: Marion Boyars, 1973). Note especially the Chapter 4, “Recovery” (84-99) calling for the demythologization of science, the rediscovery of language and the recovery of legal procedure. He supersedes this statement only in some respects with his later thinking: on systems; on the historicity of the instrument as a category; and the emphasis on the symbolic power of technology.
- 27Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), shows precisely the consequences of attempts to recover the past, whose signal dimension has been the relative embeddedness of the individual within the social whole. To insist on recovering that past today is thus to court a species of inhumanity the Western world has once already encountered in the mid 20th century.
- 28The chilling conclusion of this confusion is the dishonest sentimentalism fostered in industrial societies, to wit “that the values which industrial society destroys are precisely those which it cherishes” Ivan Illich, “Shadow Work” in Shadow Work (London: Marion Boyars, 1981), 99. Thus, the radical dependence on work promotes the cherished value of Freedom.
- 29“Vernacular comes from an Indo-Germanic root that implies ‘rootedness’ and ‘abode.’ Vernaculum as a Latin word was used for whatever was homebred, homespun, homegrown, homemade, as opposed to what was obtained in formal exchange. The child of one’s slave and of one’s wife, the donkey born of one’s own beast, were vernacular beings, as was the staple that came from the garden or the commons. If Karl Polanyi had adverted to this fact, he might have used the term in the meaning accepted by the ancient Romans: sustenance derived from reciprocity patterns imbedded in every aspect of life, as distinguished from sustenance that comes from exchange or from vertical distribution… We need a simple adjective to name those acts of competence, lust, or concern that we want to defend from measurement or manipulation by Chicago Boys and Socialist Commissars. The term must be broad enough to fit the preparation of food and the shaping of language, childbirth and recreation, without implying either a privatized activity akin to the housework of modern women, a hobby or an irrational and primitive procedure. Such an adjective is not at hand. But ‘vernacular’ might serve. By speaking about vernacular language and the possibility of its recuperation, I am trying to bring into awareness and discussion the existence of a vernacular mode of being, doing, and making that in a desirable future society might again expand in all aspects of life.” Ivan Illich, “The War against Subsistence” in Shadow Work, 57-58. The argument of this essay belies its title.
- 30For the following section, I gloss “Vernacular Values” and The War on Subsistence,” both in Illich, Shadow Work.
- 31A more comprehensive analysis of the themes in this section would include a selective survey on the historical and anthropological literature on vernacular ways and its destruction. As a first orientation to the extensive literature on the war on the vernacular, consult Ivan Illich, Gender, (Berkeley: Heyday Press, 1982). The works of Karl Polanyi, preeminently, The Great Transformation, (NY: Reinhart, 1944); but also the essays collected in Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies, ed. George Dalton, (NY: Anchor Books, 1968) and those in Trade and Markets in Early Empires,eds. K. Polanyi, C. Arensberg, and H. Pearson (NY: The Free Press, 1957) clarify the historicity of commodity-intensive societies, made visible when nature and human action become widely priced as land and labor respectively. Marshall Sahlins in Stone Age Economics, (NY: Adline, 1972) and M.I. Finley in The Ancient Economy, (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1985) confirm that pre- modern societies, whether Aboriginal Australia or Western Antiquity, got on quite well without it. Jacques Le Goff, in Medieval Civilization, 400-1500 emphasizes the aim of the medieval “economy” as that of subsistence, of providing for necessities (London: Blackwell, 1988). The continuing modern war on subsistence and the resistance to it is well documented. Consult for example, E.P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the Crowd,” reprinted in The Essential E.P. Thompson, ed. Dorothy Thompson (NY: The New Press, 2000), and the essays collected in Customs in Common (New York: New York Press, 1993); Eric Wolf, Peasant Wars of the 20th Century (NY: Harper & Row 1969), Teodor Shanin, The Awkward Class (London: Cambridge, 1977) and Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, Our Word is our Weapon (NY: Seven Stories Press, 2001). James Scott, in Seeing Like a State (Princeton: Yale University, 1999) argues that visionary plans to modernize society invariably fail and usually leave their beneficiaries worse off for the attention. Study the key terms collected in The Development Dictionary, ed. Wolfgang Sachs (NY: Zed Books, 1992) as commands that rally the troops to the war against subsistence.
- 32Peter Linebaugh, Ned Ludd, Queen Mab: Machine Breaking, Romanticism, and Several Commons 1811-12 (Oakland: PM Press/Retort, 2012).
- 33Consult the well-documented essay by Teodor Shanin, “Late Marx: Gods and Craftsmen” in Late Marx and the Russian Road, ed. T. Shanin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), for a persuasive case that “…to Marx, a timely revolutionary victory could turn the Russian commune into a major ‘vehicle of social regeneration.’”
- 34This section is derived from Ivan Illich, “Research by People” in Shadow Work (London: Marion Boyars, 1981), and his unpublished manuscript titled The Wisdom of Leopold Kohr which makes reference to the common sense.
- 35This sentence from the OED weakly summarizes the following: “The senses perceive each other’s special objects incidentally; not because percipient sense is this or that special sense, but because all form a unity: this incidental perception takes place whenever sense is directed at one and the same moment to two disparate qualities in one and the same object, e.g., to the bitterness and the yellowness of bile…” De Anima, III, 425a 30-425b 1. And: “Further, there cannot be a special sense-organ for the common sensibles either, i.e, the objects which we perceive incidentally through this or that special sense, e.g, movement, rest, figure, magnitude, number & unity…. In the case of the common sensibles, there is already in us a common sensibility (or common sense) which enables us to perceive them non-incidentally; there is therefore no special sense required for their perception,” De Anima, III 425a 15-26.
- 36I do not fully explore here the transformation from a faculty into the “innate capacity” of any person to reason and judge correctly after Descartes. The judgment of Funkenstein in Theology, especially page 359, is instructive. He suggests that the “militant, missionary ideal” of education over the 17th and 18th centuries is related to “the shift in the connotation of the term ‘common sense.’” The connotations of the terms “le bon sens,” “gemeiner Menschenverstand,” and “common sense” after the 17th century imply the capacity to be educated; for all men to become philosophers. Indeed, the propagation of a method for thinking presupposes the commonsense as that which is in need of education. More recently, Sophia Rosenfeld, Common Sense: A Political History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011) traces the twinned logics generated by the degradation of common sense from a faculty. On the one hand, it serves as a touchstone for the wisdom of people against elites; on the other, the mulishness of the masses needed re-education. For a conspectus of writers on the common sense consult, AN Foxe, The Common Sense from Heraclitus to Pierce (Turnbridge Press, 1962). It is however frustrating for the lack of a bibliography and a historically insensitive reading of the authors surveyed. In contrast, JL Beare, Greek Theories of Elementary Cognition from Alcemaeon to Aristotle (Clarendon Press, 1926); WR Bundy, The Theory of the Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought (University of Illinois Press, 1927); David Summers, The Judgment of Sense (Cambridge University Press, 1987) are excellent treatments of the history of the common sense as faculty from Aristotle to the late Renaissance when read serially. See also E. Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London, 1975); and HA Wolfson, “The Internal Senses in Latin, Arabic and Hebrew Philosophical Texts,” Harvard Theological Review, 25 (1935).
- 37 Stanley Rosen, The Elusiveness of the Ordinary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) argues spiritedly for the commonsense foundations of thought. Such foundations support but cannot rise to heights reached by extraordinary thought, which by necessity, exceed its grasp. In the so-called “science wars” of recent decades, the issue was framed as that between the social constructivists and the realists. In the light of the foregoing distinction between concepts and constructs, it is clear that both parties to the debate agree that scientific knowledge is made, that is to say, constructed.
- 38 In much of his writings, Illich insists on elaborating conceptual distinctions built on the perception of autonomous human actions. Between Deschooling Society and The History of Homo Educandus he contrasts learning to education and schooling; in Medical Nemesis, between autonomous coping and healthcare; between Research by People and R&D. In some cases, he invents or gives new shades of meaning to terms to recover perceptions buried by constructs – for example, disvalue, shadow work, gender and vernacular. Let the triple, housing, dwelling, and habitation stand as a parallel example to transport, transit, and traffic used in the text above. A general case for the commonsensical Illich still awaits a careful exegesis of his texts.
- 39 I take some liberties with interpreting The Statesman, 283d-284e in Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Hackett Publishing, 1997).The relevant distinction as described by the visitor reads as follows: “It is clear that we would divide the art of measurement, cutting it in two in just the way we said, posting as one part of it all sorts of expertise that measure the number, lengths, depths, breaths, and speeds of things in relation to what is opposed to them, and as the other, all those that measure in relation to what is in due measure, what is fitting, the right moment, what is as it ought to be-everything that removes itself from the extremes to the middle” (384e).
- 40 It is a weak recognition of this hierarchy that is reiterated in the widely accepted disjunction or discontinuity between “science” and “values.”
Comments
Illich had a major influence on me, trying to understand the differences in world outlooks between pre-industrialized/capitalist European organization of society. That led both to the esoteric later marx that Franklin Rosemont discusses in "Marx and the Iroquois" but also William Morris' work which influenced the impossibilist/libertarian tendancies in marxism.
The terrain of reproduction: Alisa Del Re’s “The sexualization of social relations”
In an era when the exploits of Silvio Berlusconi’s “private” life seem to have categorically obliterated any progress towards sexual equality achieved during the Italian feminist movement of the 70s, it is essential to remember what was once accomplished. Although second-wave feminism was already a well-established network of debates in the U.S. by 1970, Italian women influenced by workerist writings of the feminist ilk, most notably Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James’s The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (1972), set out to initiate battles over issues such as abortion and divorce.1 Feminist currents both from within and independent of workerist movements then spread with a fierce momentum that would endure through the decade.
From the inadequate patriarchal rubric of the New Left, from the ashes of male-dominated workerist organizations such as Potere Operaio, and later Lotta Continua, women throughout Italy organized autonomously, on the basis of the inherent connection of reproduction and gender roles to class struggle.2 It was the problem of marginalization of women within these movements, along with the larger question of unpaid domestic labor, that directed many feminist inquiries. Silvia Federici has said, reflecting on her difficulty reconciling her experience as a woman with the rhetoric of these organizations, “I was unwilling to accept my identity as a woman after having for years pinned all my hopes on my ability to pass for a man.“3 An organized collectivity of women independent of the uniform assimilation to a male-driven class perspective became necessary, since women’s work was to this point largely confined to the domain of reproduction, but remained an equally essential yet categorically unique form of production in the greater sense.
Mariarosa Dalla Costa has described how, in the 1970s, Italian feminism largely took one of two positions: a kind of generalized, overall “self-awareness” or a workerist-driven feminism. The latter took shape as Lotta Femminista, which organized into a more substantial international movement. The focus of their attack, housework, was described in Federici’s Wages Against Housework as “the most subtle and mystified violence that capitalism has ever perpetrated against any section of the working class.”4 In 1972, Dalla Costa, Selma James, and others formed the International Wages for Housework Campaign around the notion that women held a significant power as producers of the labor force itself – and that through the refusal of this production, they engaged in a form of social subversion that could lead to “a radical transformation of society.”5
However, Federici has since acknowledged this kind of utopian thinking as damaging to the feminist movement:
One of the major shortcomings of the women’s movement has been its tendency to overemphasize the role of consciousness in the context of social change, as if enslavement were a mental condition and liberation could be achieved by an act of will. Presumably, if we wanted, we could stop being exploited by men and employers… revolutionize our day to day life. Undoubtedly some women already have the power to take these steps… But for millions these recommendations could only turn into an imputation of guilt, short of building the material conditions that would make them possible.6
In an interview accompanying the volume Futuro Anteriore, Alisa Del Re describes how she began her own path towards the analysis of women and work, initially as a political science student and research assistant to Antonio Negri in the late 1960s.7 Encounters with the methods of workers’ inquiry, and later the writings of Tronti and Marx, became points of reference that would inform Del Re’s involvement with Potere Operaio until its dissolution in 1973. Without officially crossing over to Autonomia Operaia like many of her comrades, Del Re remained in somewhat close proximity to the group, while beginning to address issues from a feminist perspective that was unique for this period, particularly regarding social services and the relationship between work and personal time.
Del Re reveals a subjectivity that informed her position on welfare programs – a position that, stemming in large part from her own need for subsidized childcare while navigating the workforce, would unintentionally oppose the views of Dalla Costa and others driving the Wages for Housework movement. While Wages for Housework sought compensation for domestic labor, Del Re argued for subsidized childcare and other such social programs so that a woman could have a life outside of working, both in and outside of the home – not because she disagreed with Wages for Housework, but because their demands did not apply to her own situation as a woman choosing to subsist within the workforce rather than in the home. She describes how her very position as a working woman assigned her to the margins of the workerist movement, while the women of Wages for Housework were demanding rights from within their imposed “terrain” – that of reproduction:
…the issue of wages was perhaps more “revolutionary” but from the political practice that Rosa [Dalla Costa] endorsed it was difficult to understand who was demanding these wages and when… maybe my issue was much more reformist even though it is true that we annoyed a few people when we occupied local government meetings, demanding the construction of nursery schools and proposing concrete forms of ‘liberation from housework.8
It is worth noting, however, that while the positions of Wages for Housework and Del Re were seemingly in opposition, they are perhaps better described as parallel streams of struggle, progress in both arenas constituting a necessary condition for women’s autonomy. In the first place, Wages for Housework recognized housework as work, and thus, the strategy of “getting a job” as a means of liberating women from dependence on men’s wages, as Federici would later reflect, alienated women who worked because their families need the added financial support “and not because they consider it a liberating experience, particularly since ‘having a job’ never frees you from housework.“9 Furthermore, Del Re’s view on the reclamation of personal time supported by state-funded child care provisions offers the only possibility of relief from what would otherwise be a near-24/7 work week, waged or not, for working-class women. Years after Wages for Housework, Federici recognizes the mutual dependence of these two conditions:
…as long as housework goes unpaid, there will be no incentives to provide the social services necessary to reduce our work, as proved by the fact that, despite a strong women’s movement, subsidized day care has been steadily reduced through the 70s. I should add that wages for housework never meant simply a paycheck. It also meant more social services and free social services.10
In a later piece entitled “Women and Welfare: Where is Jocasta?”, Del Re describes the labor of reproduction as “a specific relation between women and the State” that is separate from the labor market and that has been inadequately supported and studied.11 The welfare system, despite “its limitations on the quality of life,” she proposes, “liberat[es] the labor of reproduction from its dependence on another person’s salary,” in other words, the labor of production.12 Thus, Del Re proposes that since women control the means of reproduction, we “must find a way to present [our] bill” – by making “visible the labor of reproduction in its totality” and by underlining “its centrality with respect to production and the market.” As she has continued to assert, this begins with a reorganization of one’s time.13
Interestingly, situated upon this same imposed terrain were both the subjects and objects of a year-long research study regarding work and family, culminating in the publication of Le sexe du travail: structures familiales et système productif (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1984). In an article for the journal Primo Maggio, Del Re examines this work with a favorable view on their investigations, as women researchers, into the sexual and social divisions of labor. Translated here, Del Re’s piece represents in itself an evolving vision of these divisions that does not, as she writes, “signal a marginality.”
In “Women and Welfare,” Del Re elegantly states the importance of the woman’s role as both subject and object:
It is crucial, therefore, that women’s lives – their existence, their nature, as well as their activities - become an integral part of philosophical and intellectual discourse, so that the acknowledgment of female subjectivity, constructed as it is in multiple symbolic and material loci, can reveal the partiality of a vision of the world that even today is considered universal.14
Like other projects of the workerist movement, Primo Maggio as a publication reveals conceptual layers ranging from historiographical record to scholarly periodical to political organization. As Primo Maggio’s Sergio Bologna writes in his review of Steve Wright’s Storming Heaven, the journal focused on maintaining a subject position “within a network of initiatives of self organisation at the level of political culture and formation ‘at the service of the movement.’”15 In an interview with Patrick Cuninghame, Bologna describes Primo Maggio’s search for new methodologies, in contrast to the efforts at party organization by Negri and Autonomia Organizzata:
Primo Maggio was not even a political elite. Rather, we had refused our role as a political elite to put ourselves instead in the role of that techno-scientific intelligentsia which excavated within the disciplines. So, we wanted to excavate within the historical disciplines to make history in another way. You read Primo Maggio and it is not a political journal, in the sense that it is a journal … for the transformation of historical methodology. In the sense of transformation also of historiographical language which has an enormous importance in political language.16
The idea of a “woman-science,” women (and sexual divisions of labor) as a topic of research by women researchers, is the product of this strategy, reconstructing a subject through its methodologies.
Anna Culbertson is a special collections librarian at San Diego State University, where she has taught courses on using primary sources to research feminism and gender roles.
- 1See Jacqueline Andall, “Abortion, politics and gender in Italy,” Parliamentary Affairs 47:2 (1994).
- 2Lotta Continua, in fact, aided in its own demise through its betrayal of female LC militants by sabotaging an abortion march in Rome in 1975. See especially Red Notes’ Italy 1977-8: Living with an Earthquake, chapter 19, and the Big Flame Women’s Group pamphlet Fighting for Feminism: the ‘Women Question’ in an Italian Revolutionary Group.
- 3Silvia Federici, “Putting Feminism Back on its Feet,” Social Text 9/10 (1984), 338.
- 4Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (Bristol: Power of Women Collective and Falling Wall Press, 1975), 2.
- 5Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “The Door to the Garden: Feminism and Operaismo,” reprinted on libcom.org.
- 6Federici, “Femnism,” 339.
- 7 “Interview with Alisa Del Re - 26th July 2000,” trans. Arianna Bove, Futuro anteriore. Dai ‘Quaderni rossi’ ai movimenti globali: ricchezze e limiti dell’operaismo italiano (Rome: DeriveApprodi, 2002).
- 8“Interview with Alisa Del Re.”
- 9Federici, “Feminism,” 340.
- 10Federici, “Feminism,” 341
- 11 Alisa Del Re, “Women and Welfare: Where is Jocasta?” trans. Maurizia Boscagli in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, eds. Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, (Minneapolis: U Minn. Press, 1996), 101-2.
- 12Del Re, “Women,” 108
- 13Del Re, “Women,” 110
- 14Del Re, “Women,” 101
- 15Sergio Bologna,“A Review of StormingHeaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism,” Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture and Politics, 16:2 (2003).
- 16Patrick Cuninghame, “For an Analysis of Autonomia: An Interview with Sergio Bologna.” Mexico City, June 1995.
Comments
The sexualization of social relations
From Primo Maggio, no. 23/24 (summer 1985)1
“Should work, then, have a sex? Absurd question. Everyone knows it has existed only in the masculine [form], in sectors where activity is carried out by men. No work elsewhere, and no women in work. What remains, of course, is to settle the question of a few million ‘actives’…”2 And so is introduced The Sex of Work (Familial Structures and the System of Production), pub. by PUG, 1984, by the authors themselves: a large group of researchers who found themselves over the course of the previous year in the most diverse spaces of debate: from the conference Women and the Working Class (Vincennes, December 1978); to their days at the Société Française de Sociologie on The Familial Institution and Women’s Work (Nantes, June 1980); to the conference of the Centre Lyonnais d’Etudes Féministes on Women and the Question of Work (Lyon, December 1980); and finally to the research seminar of the Unité de Recherche et d’Etudes Sociologiques, Division sociale et sexuelle du travail, on Women’s Work, Paid Work, Domestic Work (1980-81-82), resulting directly in the formation of this group.
Drawing upon their own intellectual and existential resources, their own claims to both feminism and a succession of the most institutional of initiatives, the group finally formed at the Tenth World Congress of Sociology (Mexico City, August 1982), expressing the desire to promote research centered on the simultaneous analysis, for both men and women, of the situation of work and family. This book represents the bulk of the communications presented in Mexico City and constitutes a first tangible, visible step of the experience of the group, a moment in its life.
Women, researchers, feminists, in an institutionalized group with a research topic both precise and isolated from the traditional scientific context, with the palpable need to find new methodologies, new avenues, of reconstructing the subjects in their entire form, the same subjects that in traditional science become chopped, mutilated, seen in quantity and without quality. And this in “science,” to impose a new “scientific” point of view that concerns women and their work, the sexuality of social relations as an “existent.” As a method, bringing scientists together from different disciplines and different “schools” (although here we limit ourselves to the social sciences) is nothing new: interdisciplinary research in the humanities has been fruitful in various fields. But the novelty lies in the fact that it is the woman-subject that is studying the woman-object. And the effect this produces is that it seems the very object of the research floods the limits traditionally imposed, reaching into current methodology, finding itself within strict definitions of use. The very definition of the field research requires different means of approximation, as if one were to turn on different lights rather than just one to identify the road ahead, the contours of the object to be studied. And sometimes it is right at the intersection of two distinct fields, in the area of existing sociological frameworks, that the object of examination is found. As Martine Chaudron says about her research, “The object – the social trajectories and the familiar strategies of reproduction, the one and the other sexed – has been constructed on the intersection of two fields, that of social mobility and that of the family; it [the object] can’t exist sociologically outside of the problem attempting to articulate and hold together the sexual and social divisions of work with social relations of sex and class.”
And this permanent preoccupation with identifying the relations between the sexes as social relations is important, in order to exit the fixity of roles, totally determined and hierarchical: “That which is important in the notion of social relations – defined by the antagonism of social groups – is the dynamic that it introduces.”
The form that attempts this mode of stating, of seeking, of pointing towards a sexualization of social relations that does not signal a marginality, but is in recognition of an existing injustice, to be changed, requires an adjustment to a new vision of reality, and to do this demands a difficult but necessary innovation of tools. And then the interest to depart from traditional methodologies that have always made the study of women subordinate.
For example, as well stated in the general introduction: “The dominant discourse on work continues to function as an implicit model: the male worker, neither too young nor too old, light-skinned, clearly. In short, the ideal type! All the rest are not specified. And so that the family remains the essential starting point of analysis for the professional activity of women; as if their work situation results solely of the obligation (real or symbolic, material or ideological) imposed upon them to take on the bulk of family responsibilities.” “Maternity renders suspect the professional qualities of women”: and then, to remove this suspicion, they must “act like a man,” or not have children socially. And this, only for women. Because however the worker conforms to the norms of work is as a non-parent. But the non-parent as an absolute, the privileged worker, is the father with a family to provide for, but without the responsibilities of a family. This burden is placed on the mother, so that it becomes non-compliant to the norm and – perfectly squaring the circle – justifies her professional stagnation, her non-career with the same motives by which it promotes “the man of the house.”
In economics, sociology and the other humanities, the social inferiority of women is due to the mechanisms of marginalization suffered by this sector of the population, most unarmed for the labor market. So women would constitute, as the young or the old, as immigrants or the handicapped, a marginal group, non-competitive. In other words: because of their family responsibilities, women face obstacles, and therefore require assistance in order to be able to work, given the parameters of work hours, vacation time, and pensions.
Conversely, when it comes to studying the work of men, there is no reference to their marital status, nor to the size of their family (number of children, etc.), nor even to the professional activities of their wives. Only women are enlisted to a family, only men to their posts in the work world; women are inactive and men are without family. So, a joint approach to the familial structure and the productive system that is not the superimposition of one sector on the other is sought.
It is by the denunciation of the invisibility of domestic work in sociological and economic analyses that feminists have introduced a decisive break. The analysis of domestic work and relations between the sexes has signified new approaches in respect to social relations and women’s work. We no longer consider the study of relations between the sexes as confined to the family, but rather, merge all the inter-dependencies between housework and professional work.
And all of this within a constant: the critical analysis of science constitutes the insufficiency of the various disciplines, their blind spots.
So these researchers contest research (and methods) based on the distinction between productive work and reproductive work, where the participation of women in “productive” work is not analyzed as such, but as a particular of a general, masculine model. And the overtaking occurs in the simultaneous analysis of production systems and family structures. The rejection of the production/reproduction dichotomy, and, to its contrary, the study of their interrelations, necessarily implicates the acceptance of key concepts, which I briefly define here from the text:
- The concept of reproduction, used in the text in opposition to production. It’s not, then, treated in the classical sense of social reproduction. Reproduction includes, apart from the production of children and more broadly of individuals, a set of activities, excluding the activity of the production of commodities. From this perspective the analysis of the family is inseparable from the study of other institutions that contribute to reproduction.
- The concept of work: a term that, in the broader sense, takes into account as much professional activity as that which is developed in the domestic sphere. From this perspective it becomes necessary to renew the analysis of production.
- The concept of family, as something that is not a closed space concerning the private sphere. It is necessary, therefore, to study it in terms of social relations and not of the rules between the sexes, in terms of the divisions of work rather than the divisions of labor.
It is from these base concepts, these general agreements, that the itineraries of each researcher become the heads of rams with which this group attempts to break down the social sciences building, little by little, at different levels. Already the critical reading of the statistics of social mobility (generally sexed in terms of the masculine model) is further enriched by qualitative methods (surveys, interviews, biographies, genealogies) of identifying the social trajectories of men and women.
The simultaneous study of production and reproduction necessarily involves the construction of new terrains, cutting across traditional disciplines. And again, all of the more secure concepts should be reconsidered: from, for example, the sexual division of work as a given, it is obvious that the concept of the social division of work itself should be called into question. “To state, as we do, that work has a sex and that therefore the division of work is also sexed, has effectively subversive virtues”.
And it does not end with the book, because this group continues to work together at an annual seminar (1984-85) called Production/Reproduction Workshop (presented at PIRTTEM). They continue the hard work of researching, defining a subject, woman, at full length; of removing the veil of invisibility, of renewing the ties between the visible and the hidden, between the important and the disregarded.
A short digression: already many passes have been made in an attempt to untie the Gordian knot of the relationship between production and reproduction, for example by studying “in continuum” the two phenomena, thus defeating the acquiescent acceptance of inequality, attributed to the natural order of things.
Is it not possible to venture further? Why not attempt to establish a completely new method of investigation, that has reproduction as its epicenter, its quality, in which commodities and their production result in some subordinate way, objects of an external strategy; and inside this grid interpret the struggles, find again the real subjects, interests, the same recent history of the development of capital and of its institutions? Is it too much to propose a scale of values, even in research, less subordinated to the values of the capitalist mode of production (and I insist that it is already a lot to have even changed the composition of the field of investigation by interweaving the problem of reproduction)?
A woman-science that articulates itself on (being directly from) an imposed and not chosen terrain, that is the terrain of reproduction – might that therefore be a subordinate science?
Two considerations:
- Even though it has been imposed as a mode of domination, even though it subsists as a form of exploitation, even though it has been devalued, unpaid, “naturally” attributed to our sex, reproduction, in the broader sense of the word, is in reality the central axis of a world of values to reconsider, placing them in the subordinate, directing all work for the production of commodities. It may be a consideration of plain common sense, but then plainly we speak of work time and free time, we speak of peace and ecology, from the old poor, we speak of the new poor, of unemployment, of famine.
- In the second place, if it is true of the world in which we live that this is not the case, that work for the sake of working seems to be the only form of social and personal realization, and the measurement of existing passes through the measurement of existence or at least of earning a wage, and, subsequently, the amount of that wage (“Marx was right, but that doesn’t suit me – and then, until when?”), it is not clear why, exactly, in a time in which salaries have the tendency to shrink and work to disappear, for both women and men, we can’t see a glimpse of a chance to change our point of view.
But I don’t want to cast aside other budding ideas that need the soil of collective debate to grow. In every case, the very existence of this group of women-feminists-researchers, of a new rigorous and effective style, requires the assumption of a new point of view, marking a point of no return.
All women, researchers, teachers, who work on a topic concerning women, and thus on an issue that directly concerns them, have often seen, at some time or another, their results affected by derision, or else by invisibility. Already the fact of “trying to remain in touch with our similarities in the world” (see Sottosopra [Upside Down], More Women Than Men) “by weaving a web of preferential relationships between women, where the experience associated with being a woman becomes stronger in mutual recognition by inventing ways to translate it into social reality,” is a mode of existing and creating the strength to impose their own ideas. When, then, this also serves to invent new tools with which to understand and analyze the reality that surrounds us, and from this perhaps the strength and courage to change it, we get the impression that something is moving in the right direction, that concrete possibilities reopen.
—Translated by Anna Culbertson
Alisa Del Re is associate professor at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Padova.
- 1I would like to thank Andrea Righi for his invaluable advice; any errors in translation are my sole responsibility. All notes are the translator’s.
- 2The authors of The Sex of Work use “actives” in this case to refer to the four out of ten workers that are women, and as such, are “lost” or not accounted for outside of the domestic sphere. The economic term “active population” refers to all persons legally able to perform work, and corresponds to a country’s labor supply.
Comments
Good work posting all this!
Good work posting all this!
*ahem* Issue 4: The State
*ahem*
Issue 4: The State
Interesting Marxist mag
Interesting Marxist mag Worth a look-see
i am just fiddling with this
i am just fiddling with this as i update the last two editions
btw, if you download the printer friendly page (for each issue) you can read that on your e reader
could you please delete the second issue 5 i created? (delete the one without any children pages)