I cite

On "Capitalism and Communism"

Dauve and Martin again, from the early seventies. To me, the text feels very seventies. Its atmosphere is one of rejecting states, bureaucracies, and mediations and trying to connect with another directly, 'taking matters in our hands.'  I don't even know what 'taking matters in our own hands' means or why it's desireable. It seems to me that all institutions arise as the arrangements people who have taken matters in their own hands introduce. It also seems to me that institutions can be useful--it saves us from having to do everything new and differently each time we do something (I read Hegel as making this point in the Philosophy of Right). To me, some problems occur when institutions lose their adaptive capacities, get into negative feedback loops, become unresponsive. Other problems occur because the institutions we have developed to preserve and protect capitalism; they are difficult to subvert, undermine, infiltrate, eliminate--that takes a revolution.

At any rate, the text unfolds in an outline, A-K. My comments will follow along.

A.    Wage labor as a social relation.

The general point is non-controversial, repeating Marx's discussion of the violent imposition of wage-labor as well as the critique of the fiction of free contracts. But, there is a further element in the discussion that strikes me as reductive: 

The two pillars of modern society, exchange and wage-labour, are not only the source of periodic and constant disasters, but have also created the conditions which make another society possible. Most importantly, they compel a large section of the present world to revolt against them, and to realize this possibility: communism.

Are exchange and wage-labor by themselves the source of periodic and constant disasters? Do exchange and wage-labor themselves create these conditions which make another society possible by themselves? In other words, are they necessary causes? sufficient causes? quasi-causes? Do they by themselves compel revolt? It seems to me that there are additional factors that matter, factors that are inter-related: ideology, social relations, technological development, resistance. To be sure, all these factors come up in the text. But their relation to the two pillars isn't clear. And, insofar as communization seems to require the abolition of exchange and wage-labor, it seems that they are the most important factors in and of themselves. They are in effect the 'true basis' of capitalism.

It's curious to me that the problem isn't identified as commodity production and exchange. First, to focus on exchange seems to confine the inquiry to circulation and to leave out production (although it could be the case that wage labor is the opening to production; if that's true, then this first point goes away). Second, I don't think exchange is a problem (or even a pillar of modern society). Exchange does not require exchange value. We can easily imagine communist exchanges on the basis of need, desire, and pleasure. One group might exchange the corn they grow for the milk and leather produced by another group. The groups don't have to exchange these in any proportion other than community need.

Michels: the rusty iron law of oligarchy

This post is a reading of Robert Michels' discussion of the iron law of oligarchy. Two questions underlie the reading: what is his critique of the party and what is the relation of his idea of the crowd to this critique? At this point, I only sketch some of the components of the latter idea rather than provide much of an analysis.

Robert Michels' Political Parties (1911) is the classic critique of not just the revolutionary party (or the 'modern party as a fighting organization') but the party form in general. His basic claim is well known. Parties tend to oligarchy -- it's an iron law. Sometimes overlooked is the fact that Michels' argument applies to democracy (or any kind of mass or collective governance) overall: democracy, of any kind, tends to oligarchy. What might work for a small group can't be carried out by masses directly, so they have to divide the tasks, delegate, specialize, report, and assign. Because leadership is technically indispensable, democracy leads to oligarchy.

The problem for socialists is that socialism, too, tends to oligarchy (Michels was a member of the SPD and then the PSI; Lenin refers to him as 'the garrulous Michels'). Even those parties one might most expect to remain in tune with and accountable to the workers, even those organizations animated by ideals of democratic participation, even those championing the cause of the proletariat ultimately take on a whole slew of oligarchical characteristics. It's a sad but true fact of modern political life 

Consider some of the specific criticisms of the socialist party: the party as an entity is not identifiable with the totality of its members. It is created as a means to an end, but quickly becomes an end in itself, with interests of its own, detached from the class it ostensibly represents. It can well be, then, that the interests of the party do not coincide with those of the masses at all.  A problem with the socialist party, then, is that a party is a program (here I think Michels is mistaken, as will become clearer below; Michels describes multiple ways in which the party is more than a program; his larger argument, then, undercuts this claim). The party is not a social or economic unity. The socialist party might have a program based on the working class but its members can be from any class; class struggle reappears within the party. (The idea that class struggle will appear in the party seems right to me.)

Michels notes as well that the socialist party (which he understands to be a parliamentary party) 'gives a life to certain strata of the working class,' raising them up out of their proletarian position. In effect, the socialist party removes from the proletariat some of its best members. This may be involuntary, but in happens insofar as these members come to hold office in the party. The effect is that the 'involuntary task' of the socialist party is to deproletarianize the proletariat (which could perhaps even be thought of as prefiguring the abolition of the proletariat as a class; in practice, though, it is a form of embourgeoisement).

According to Michels, 'who says organization, says oligarchy.'  Or, more specifically, once there are paid officials, a distinction between electors and elected, a division of labor, and the necessity of leadership, all which seem necessary components of an organized party, union, association, or state, then we are deep in the midst of oligarchy. 

Empirical work on revolutions: J curve and the reversal of rising expectations

On "Leninism and the Ultra-Left"

Recently some folks have suggested that I take a look at texts associated with communization theory, in part because of the critique of the party raised in these texts. "Leninism and the Ultra-Left" is on the list (presented initially in 1969, by Gilles Dauve and Francois Martin). The text criticizes both Leninism and ultra-leftism. The primary charge against the ultra-leftist view is that it remains too tied to Leninism in its own critical rejection of Leninism. Thus, ultra-leftism fails to address the economy in the way that it should. My own view is that the criticisms of Leninism summarized in the text are not persuasive. At the same time, recognizing why they are not persuasive illuminates a place where some of my ideas about the party converge with the idea of a party of communists suggested at the end of the piece.

Although the ultra-left designates groups and positions that changed over time, for the sake of clarity Dauve and Martin present the ultra-left view of organization as follows:

any revolutionary organization coexisting with the organs created by the workers themselves, and trying to elaborate a coherent theory and political line, must in the end attempt to lead the workers. Therefore revolutionaries do not organize themselves outside the organs "spontaneously" created by the workers: they merely exchange and circulate information and establish contacts with other revolutionaries; they never try to define a general theory or strategy.

Attempting to lead the workers is bad (actually, impossible and because it is impossible the attempt always results in defeat). Leadership is an unavoidable by-product of the elaboration of coherent theoretical and political line. Revolutionaries, then, should not organize outside of organs created by the workers. Instead, they should just exchange information and make contacts with one another (in other words, their role is limited to networking and providing information--no wonder this position is so powerful today; it describes the behavior of intellectuals in communicative capitalism).

1.    This ultra-left position contrasts directly to a position attributed to Lenin. Leninism is described as rooted in the idea that the labor movement and the revolutionary movement are two separate movements ('severed' from each other) and that revolutionaries introduce revolutionary ideas to the workers 'from the outside.'

In a previous post on Zizek and the party, I noted that 'from the outside' does not mean from outside class struggle. It means from outside the specific economic struggle. Since intellectuals are also within the class struggle (to which there is no outside), it can't be the case that, for Lenin, the labor movement and the revolutionary movement are 'severed' from each other.

That said, Lenin did agree with Kautsky that the key contribution of Marx and Engels was their merging of workers struggle with socialism (two currents in 19th century struggle that did not consistently overlap). Lars Lih describes the project as one of 'bringing the good news' to the workers of the true point of their struggle. Lih explains that for Lenin the key figure in the spread of awareness was the 'purposive worker,' that is, the worker with right kind of consciousness. Purposive in this context designates a quality of action, a compulsion to act or feeling of being impelled to act collectively. It is not the same as intellectual knowledge of socialism. Yet Lenin saw the purposive worker as the natural leaders of the worker movement.

In this vein, Lih criticizes readers of "What is to be Done?" who construe Lenin as 'worried about the workers,' detailing the multiple ways workers figure in Lenin's account: as dedicated fighters, as organziers of their own economic struggle, as audience, as students, as those who actively push forward leaders from their own midst. Lenin reproaches intellectuals 'for wasting their time doing what the workers are fully capable of doing themselves.' At any rate, it should be clear at this point that the assertion that Lenin thought "revolutionaries live in a totally different world from that of workers" is simply wrong.

2.    The ultra-left position also emphasizes that "capitalist society itself produces a communist party which is nothing more than the organization of the objective movement." I will take this in two sections.

a. Capitalist society itself produces a communist party. This is completely vague. One could say that all institutions and organizations that exist in a capitalist society are produced by capitalist society: family, church, gang, garden club, reading group, S/M swingers circle. If this is what the statement means, then it is too indeterminate to be useful. It is just another way of saying that there is no outside to capitalism. So, this is likely not the best way to understand the statement. A second meaning might be to say that capitalism producers its own grave-diggers. This isn't controversial either--we all agree on this. What we don't agree on is how this comes about.

A third and more likely interpretation is that the party is a political form that emerges in the context of the rise of parliamentary democracies in Europe. These institutions were (and are) the political form of capitalist class domination. To the extent that one adopts a party form, one is adopting a form given to us by the political form of capitalist class domination. To my mind, this is the most generous way of interpreting the claim (so I mean it as a good faith effort in understanding; the other two interpretation were introduced polemically as a way of demonstrating how vague the sentence is). If this is correct, then the argument is "you can't use the Master's tools to dismantle the Master's house." I don't agree with this. A bomb can blow up militarists as much as it can militarism's victims. Or, we can put the point like this: we do not control the uses of the things that we make; there are always unintended consequences, forms of misuse, misassembly, misappropriation. Users always change up the things that they use. Only if one adopts a view that says tools, words, institutions, and things can only be used in the ways determined at their origin or by their makers could one find the idea that capitalist society creates the communist party a damning criticism.

b. Which is nothing more than the organization of the objective movement. No. the party is the organization of the subjective movement. Not only does it concentrate the forces of the movement as it incorporates it into a political body, but it also makes the movement present to itself as the movement. It is that extra point of concentration, incorporation, and naming that makes the movement the movement of a subject. 

3.  The argument continues to hold that insofar as the communist party is a historical product of capitalist society,"totally determined by social evolution," revolutionaries don't need to build it or fear it. This claim makes a mistake that Zizek identifies in multiple places: failing to include oneself in the picture (or failing to include the frame). Our subjective attitude, actions, practices are part of the very scene that we diagnose. Our diagnoses are part of the setting out of which they arise and which they create. The desire (or compulsion or need) to build organizations, to try to create a party, cannot be other than part of the setting out of which it arises. This, then, is where the fantasy that there is an elsewhere or an outside where the intellectual is situated takes place, here at the point where the revolutionary or theorist excludes himself from his context, displacing action onto others acting in a time and place from which he is perpetually exiled.

4.  The essay continues by urging a move away from Lenin altogether which it then attempts to execute by turning to value theory. I can't go into those details here. The primary repercussion of the argument is that socialist ideas of managing the economy remain capitalist because the economy is capitalist. The goal, then, is the complete destruction of capital. Sometime in the nearish future I will try to take up some of these discussions. If part of the point is to say that communism won't be just another way of managing an economy rooted in growth, then I agree. I expect there will be other points of agreement as well.

5.  Dauve and Martin end this piece by rejecting nonaction under the pretense that 'the workers must decide for themselves. They write:

For, on the one hand, the workers only decide to do what the general situation compels them to do; and on the other, the revolutionary movement is an organic structure of which theory is an inseparable and indispensable element. Communists represent and defend the general interests of the movement. In all situations, they do not hesitate to express the whole meaning of what is going on, and to make practical proposals. If the expression is right and the proposal appropriate, they are parts of the struggle of the proletariat and contribute to build the "party" of the communist revolution.

I like this ending because I like the way intellectual work is referred to as a proposal. We make proposals. These proposals can be and often are rejected. 

We are unconscious

In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud engages Gustav Le Bon's account of the crowd. LeBon writes, "The substitution of the unconscious actions of crowds for the conscious activity of individuals is one of the principal characteristics of the present age" (4). Drawing from LeBon, Freud, too, links the crowd, group, or mass (the terms are interchangeable) to the unconscious. I think I can put the point more strongly. For Freud, the unconscious is the group. 

This seems to be the case in at least two senses. One is the way that the unconscious is the sedmented and repressed product of history, whether that of a species or a family as it impresses itself within the individual as one of its singular sites.  A second is the way the unconscious is described in terms of the features of the group or the mass. It's this second sense that interests me insofar as Freud ascribes to the unconscious the features LeBon ascribes to the group.

LeBon writes, "Crowds, doubtless, are always unconscious, but this very unconsciousness is perhaps one of the secrets of their strength." It's as if there is a kind of inversion or exchange: LeBon views crowds as unconscious and Freud views the unconscious as crowds. This is exchange is possible because LeBon thinks of groups or crowds as psychological. They are not limited to the mass of bodies in the streets but extend to a wide array of imaginary communities and identities, myriad sites of belonging. The unconscious is that to which the individual belongs. 

Because the unconscious is that to which the individual belongs, the site of its belonging, the unconscious exacts certain qualifications from the individual: it subjects the individual to dictates of belonging, making it act in a certain way insofar as it is a member of a group. Anxiety about this subjection is a characteristic of over a century of inquiry into the mass or crowd, from Durkheim, through Mill, through twentieth century American sociology's emphases on the mass and conformity.

Overall, what is the payoff of this inquiry into the connection between the unconscious and the group? Why is it worth considering? It might help us understand the problem of collective desire, of the difficulty of formulating a positive conception of collective desire. First, the unconscious is the repository of impulses and instincts figured as so wild and primitive that civilization is itself the direct product of their repression. Second, the enclosure of the unconscious in the person is like a triumph of the individual over the group; the individual becomes primary, the ally of civilization against the primal forces and urges of the group. At the same time, psychoanalysis as a field is possible because the structures it investigates are already collective, are already the properties of a group. The subject is common, generic, a form or container. Yet this containing or enclosing makes the group unconscious in another sense--we are perpetually thwarted in our attempts to access it, to get to it, to comprehend it as more than just a quantitative expansion of individual subjects. It's one rather than the more than one. 

Going through the text: 

Freud begins by noting that the distinction between individual and group psychology is actually not a very sharp one--individuals are related to others. He observes that typically group psychology focuses on man as a member of a race, nation, profession, caste, institution, or crowd. "Natural continuity" is severed in favor of an emphasis on this large group, sometimes in the name of some kind of her instinct or group mind. Freud finds it implausible that number would itself arouse a new instinct. So, he considers two other possibilities: the social instinct isn't primitive; it may emerge out of the family.

He also approaches the problem from a different direction: surprise. An individual that one understands as an individual can act in a totally unexpected way when he is inserted into 'a collection of people which as acquired the characteristic of a psychological group.'

This introduces the 3 questions group psychology is supposed to answer: what is a group, how does it acquire the capacity for exercising a decisive influence over the mental life of the individual? And what is the nature of the mental change which it forces on the individual?

Freud draws heavily on Gustav LeBon for answers to these questions. Individuals transformed into a group possess a collective mind that makes them feel, think, and act differently from the way that they would act alone. Certain ideas and feelings only come into being, only transform themselves into acts when individuals form a group. As Freud quotes LeBon,

Whoever be the individuals that compose it . . . the fact that they have been transformed into a group puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel,think, and act in a matter quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation. There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into being, or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of individuals forming a group. The psychological group is a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being ... (7)

Now Freud is concerned with the bond that unites members, what it is that forms them into a group. He suspects that this bond is 'precisely the thing that is characteristic of a group.' LeBon, though, proceeds differently, addressing the alteration of the individual.

Freud quotes LeBon: "Our conscious acts are the outcome of an unconscious substratum created in the mind mainly by hereditary influences. This substratum consists of the innumerable common characteristics handed down from generation to generation, which constitute the genius of a race. Behind the avowed causes of our acts there undoubtedly lie secret causes that we do not avow, but behind these secret causes there are many others more secret still, of which we are ourselves are ignorant."

Freud explains that Le Bon thinks that the particular characteristics of individuals become obliterated in a group; the racial unconscious emerges. Individuality is the 'mental superstructure' to the unconscious base of the group.

But there is more. Individuals in a group also display new characteristics, such as a feeling of invincible power, a sentiment that LeBon associates with a loss of a sense of responsibility.

Freud doesn't think the characteristics are new. He thinks that the group enables the individual to 'throw off the repressions of his unconscious instinctual impulses.' Far from new, the characteristic the individual displays are mainfestations of the unconscious.

Back to the Party (again, with Zizek and Badiou)

Zizek provides one of the most compelling arguments why the party is not outmoded, why we have not entered a political time that has surpassed the need for a party, and why the party is not a form confined to the limits it encountered in a prior sequence. The most succinct way to put the argument is the "proletarian struggles with a foreign kernel." Another way to make the same point is to say that the proletariat is not self-identical; it is split. Or, the proletariat doesn't know what it desires; it confronts its own desire as something foreign or mysterious.

What are the implications of this idea for thinking about the potential of a party for us? I begin by looking at how Zizek approaches his discussion, namely, via Lenin's paraphrase--and revision--of Kautsky with respect to the idea that the working class needs non-working class intellectuals to bring knowledge to them. This idea has been widely criticized, viewed as elitist or as a failure to trust the workers. Zizek emphasizes that Lenin and Kautsky are not the same here:  where Kautsky says that intellectuals are external to the class struggle, Lenin says they are external to the economic struggle, which means they are still within the class stuggle. So, the first thing to note is that the perspective of the party is one that is not external to class struggle but embedded within it.

Nonetheless, there is an externality here, an externality to the economic struggle. This is important insofar as without this external perspective, the working class remains subordinate to bourgeois ideology. Its spontaneous development can go no further. The perspective of the party, then, is one that situates the economic struggle within the larger class struggle. It makes the economic struggle appear not as a matter for these workers in this factory but as part of a larger, more fundamental conflict, the antagonism constitutive of capitalist society.

Another way to express the same point is to note that the working class is a bourgeois subject. It is constrained within a field or discourse configured by and for the bourgeoisie; it gets its position from within this field. So it might refuse and resist, sabotage and strike, but all these actions are still confined within a field given by the bourgeoisie, configured for its interests, in its behalf. To be another kind of subject, the subject of another field, discourse, politics (sequence?), to be proletarian, requires a break or twist, a shift to another field, the field of the Party.

Badiou has something like this in mind in Theory of the Subject when he notes the internal split in the working class between its 'true political identity' and 'its latent corruption by bourgeois or imperialist ideas and practices' (8). He writes: "the practical (historical) working class is always the contradictory unity of itself as proletariat and of it specific bourgeois inversion ... This unity of opposites is determined .. by the general bourgeois space" (9). And, "the bourgeoisie makes a subject" (42); "the subjective effect of their force lies in the divided people" (42).

 Zizek writes: "'external' intellectuals are needed because the working class cannot immediately perceive its own place within the social totality, which enables it to accomplish its 'mission'--this insight has to be mediated through an external element." This external element is the Party.

The Party is not identical to the 'external intellectuals.' As we know from "What is to be Done?" Lenin assumed that the membership of the Party would come from intellectuals and workers, in fact, that those categories blurred and intermingled; they were not fixed and firm as some kind of split between mental and physical labor. The Party, then, cannot be localized onto a specific, empirical set of people. In fact, because it is not reducible to a number of given people, it cannot be said to 'substitute' these people for the workers, proletariat, or masses. To assume so is to make a kind of category mistake.

The Party "gives form" to the external element, to the setting in which the workers are situated but which remains opaque to them with respect to their own position in it. It does this in several senses.

First, the Party occupies the position of the proletariat's own decenteredness. It takes that place; it inserts itself there. Zizek writes: "it is not possible for the working class to actualize its historical mission spontaneously--the Party must intervene from the outside, shaking it out of the self-indulgent spontaneity." He continues, "in psychoanalysis there is no self-analysis proper; analysis is possible only if a foreign kernel gives body to the object-cause of the subject's desire."

[Unfortunately for me as I typed this I realized that psychoanalysis is in fact rooted in Freud's self-analysis. My best guess is that the way out of this would be to focus on Freud's dream analysis and his writing, understanding these as practices of externalization and working through that ultimately were taken up in letters to and discussions with others.]

I understand the analogy between working class and analysand/Party and analyst as relying on the insight that we do not know our own desire; desire remains opaque to us; it is unconscious, manifest in our actions, our practices, in various symptoms or distortions, but not something we know. Nor is it something we choose--rather, we are who we are because, in  a way, desire has chosen us; we are who are because of the desire that makes us. It is in us more than ourselves, a constitutively foreign, even alienating kernel. [I add alienating here as a step toward rejecting a politics rooted in a critique of alienation; alienation is constitutive and unavoidable.] 

The argument for the split nature of the working class is important as a response to those who would posit in workers a clear knowledge of what they want and who would link this knowledge to politics. Put in old fashioned Leninist terms, this can only take us as far as trade union consciousness. It remains within the economic struggle rather than the class struggle.

Second, the Party gives form to a new kind of knowledge, knowledge rooted not in some determinate content but linked "to a collective political subject." The Party doesn't know everything; it provides a position from which to know. We could say that it opens up another field, another discourse. The Party holds this field in place, providing the working class within a new place, the place of the proletariat. 

From within the economic struggle, only the opposition between worker and bourgeoisie was possible. The external element of the Party opens out another field, one in which the proletariat is its subject. Zizek writes,

"What the Party demands is that we agree to ground our 'I' in the "we" of the Party's collective identity: fight with us, fight for us, fight for your truth against the Party line--just don't do it alone, outside the Party. Exactly as in Lacan's formula of the discourse of the analyst, what is important about the Party's knowledge is not its content, but the fact that it occupies the place of Truth."

So, with respect to knowledge, the Party is not necessary because of its knowledge of history, of struggles, or of anything. It's necessary because its knowing stems from class struggle. The Party speaks from the position of the truth of class struggle as the fundamental antagonism. To say that the position of the Party is true is to designate the position from which the Party speaks, the fact that it holds in place a field or discourse or set of meanings.

[A filled out account of the Party as analogous to the analyst would note that the subject is in the position of addressee and that the master is remaindered. This suggests a formal way of describing the perhaps some of the resistance felt towards the Party and its demands, its requirements and its discipline that we know may be wrong or arbitrary and may very well result in failure insofar as the Party cannot guarantee its own political success; again, the Master is remaindered.]

Third, by giving form to the divided working class (the class within the field of the bourgeoisie), the Party occupies the place of its division and establishes the field for a new subject, the proletariat (or, in my jargon, the people as the rest of us, the people understood in terms of the primacy of division). With respect to the analogy with the analyst, this does not mean that the Party knows the secret of the working class (and thereby turns it into the proletariat). Nor does it mean that the Party cures the working of its bourgeois tendencies, and thereby subjectifies it. Rather, the Party holds open the place necessary for this subjectification. 

If we think of analysis as providing the space within which the analysand can concentrate his or her feelings, fantasies, and experiences, then we can think of action in relation to, in the context of, the Party as an analogous kind of concentration. Badiou is appropriate here when he condemns the idea of 'convergence of struggles.'

You may 'coordinate' them as much as you like, but a sum of revolts does not make a subject. The geometric character of 'convergence' must be replaced with the qualitative character of concentration . . . Convergence is the typical objectivist deviation, in which, once the work of subjective purification is spirited away, antagonism finds itself ill-advisedly dissolved (44).

To sum up, the Party is necessary because the people are split. They are split between the way they are given, positioned, within capitalism. They are situated within a field that tells them who they are and what they can be, that establishes the matrix of their desire (Zizek's definition of ideology), but that represses the truth of this field in class struggle. The Party asserts this truth, it speaks from the position of this truth and offers another field of possibilities, a discourse for another subject. In contrast, opposition to, capitalist desire, it opens up a terrain for the desire of another subject, a collective, political subject.

At this point, I have basically repeated points I've already made in Zizek's Politics and The Communist Horizon.  Why bother? Because at least one element of the analogy between the party and the analyst remains unexplored, the status of each as a transferential object. This is what I want to explore next--the party as a transferential object. What does this mean and what does it accomplish? My intuition is that this is a crucial matter for a defense of the party. Accounts of small, open, and fluctuating groups and associations generally ignore transference. That is, they proceed flatly, as if associations were nothing but assemblages of people working together (with varying degrees of conflict). The unconscious component of association is ignored. I'll take this up in subsequent posts.

Dude, Where’s My Job? | Walter Benn Michaels nonsite.org

Below is a piece by Walter Benn Michaels written last March. I am posting an excerpt from it because it hints at but doesn't get to a point I've been thinking about, namely, that Occupy was a proto-party. What do I mean by that? Well, consider the discussion of demands. It went round and round between specific demands, impossible demands, no demands, the premature nature of demands, etc. There was no 'one demand' (contra Adbusters' call for one). Most folks, myself included, thought the absence of demands was a weakness, a problem, or even a symptom (the position I took).  At the same time, what was announced, early in September? A declaration of occupation that took the form of a list of grievances and a statement of principles of solidarity. These general statements don't make much sense when viewed in terms of movement politics. They are too broad, too amorphous. They establish the set of ideas that bring people together, that provide a common basis for political struggle. They are the sorts of ideas incorporating a body of and in struggle, a militant political body. To limit them would be to stunt or deform that body.

Further, what else was happening? The formation of multiple working groups. Some were focused on operations. Others focused on political issues like alternative banking, education, and foreclosures. Again, this suggests a party not a moment. A party focuses on operations as well as multiple issue categories on which it formulates a position and struggles for outcomes. Or, better, a party is an apparatus for formulating positions and struggling for outcomes. To be an effective apparatus, it also has to concern itself with its own operations. Hostility toward party thinking, fear of centralism and vanguardism, and a generalized mistrust of leaders and hierarchies prevented this sort of step from being taken. 

Such fear and mistrust was justified. It made sense given the compromise and failure of both the mainstream and the sectarian parties of the last decades. Occupy as it continued operated primarily in ways that attempted to build trust, confidence, and capacities. The most recent inspiring steps coming from Occupy participate in this building. But, they are losing what made Occupy so inspiring: it's large, general, proto-party energy. Strike Debt and Occupy Sandy are important, admirable. They seem, though, to be rooted in the sense that Occupy's failure was its broadness, its absense of specificity. In response, they are more focused, essentially single issue groups that have a hard time either extending themselves or in providing a particular that can hegemonize the political field. Strike Debt in particular is working on this (it's well aware of the importance of this move; yet, its focus on debt seems more like issue politics than anything else; this seems clear when its goals are presented as a debt jubilee. There is nothing wrong with this idea, but it is an issue for a movement, a component of a platform, not a positive idea that can name a political subject).

The question of what Occupy Wall Street wants has been a hard one to answer—despite or because of Adbuster’s founding call for “one” “simple” and “uncomplicated” “demand.” This is partly because the Adbuster candidate, “Democracy without Corporatocracy,” was a little vague and partly because the many specific demands that followed it—from reinstating Glass-Steagall to reforming campaign finance to establishing an “Office of the Citizen”—didn’t really capture the radical spirit of the movement. What emerged as most characteristic of OWS was something like a critique of the very idea of demands: we refuse to make any because we refuse to acknowledge that anyone has the authority to accede to them, or we will make only demands that cannot be met. But this strategy, not unlike the mechanism of occupation itself, has obvious limitations: going someplace just because you’re not supposed to be there and asking for something only as long as you can’t possibly get it doesn’t look like a recipe for changing the world.

Nonetheless, because of Occupy Wall Street, the world has begun to change, and it did so the minute OWS adopted the slogan “We are the 99%.” Economic inequality has been increasing for over half a century; in 1962 the bottom 80% of American households had 19.1% of the country’s wealth; by 2007 that number had dropped to 15.0%. But it took the housing crisis—when the loss became not only relative (the share went down to 12.8%) but also absolute (between 1983 and 2009 the net worth of the bottom 80% dropped from $65,300 to $62,900)—for redistribution (upward) to begin to look like a problem (Allegretto 5–6). And it took OWS to make redistribution (downward) begin to look like a solution. To bring the point a little closer to home, it has taken “We are the 99%” to help us professors get a clearer take on the fact that when it comes to class difference, even though we have understood our universities to be part of the solution, they are in fact part of the problem.

via nonsite.org

Yale (Tuesday at 4:00)

Endnotes: Communisation and Value-Form Theory

My ignorance of the debate over the value-form is catching up with me -- not an easy task since I am totally rushing around frantically busy and over-extended these days; really, I feel like I don't have time to think, read, or reflect. Even flights are times for class-prep, grading, and reviewing articles rather than reading on my own (this is not entirely true -- I have been reading about crowds in preparation for a talk in November, but I am afraid that I will not have had time to read what I need to write something new for this and if I think about it too much my anxiety escalates unmanageably).  I tried to squeeze in a little reading of some of the value-form debate. Below is an excerpt of a piece that appeared in Endnotes with my initial thoughts about it. 

The (Anti-)Politics of Value Theory

The critical import of value-form theory is that it calls into question any political conception based on the affirmation of the proletariat as producer of value. It recognises Marx’s work as an essentially negative critique of capitalist society. In reconstructing the Marxian dialectic of the value-form, it demonstrates how the social life process is subsumed under — or “form-determined” by — the value-form. What characterises such “form-determination” is a perverse priority of the form over its content. Labour does not simply pre-exist its objectification in the capitalist commodity as a positive ground to be liberated in socialism or communism through the alteration of its formal expression. Rather, in a fundamental sense value — as the primary social mediation — pre-exists and thus has a priority over labour. As Chris Arthur argues:

At the deepest level, the failure of the tradition that uses the model of “simple commodity production”, is that it focuses on the human individual as the originator of value relationships, rather than viewing human activities as objectively inscribed within the value form… In truth, however, the law of value is imposed on people through the effectivity of a system with capital at its heart, capital that subordinates commodity production is the aim of valorisation and it is the real subject (identified as such by Marx) confronting us.53

While it seems true and politically effective54 to say that we produce capital by our labour, it is actually more accurate to say (in a world that really is topsy turvy) that we, as subjects of labour, are produced by capital. Socially necessary labour time is the measure of value only because the value-form posits labour as its content. In a society no longer dominated by alienated social forms — no longer orientated around the self-expansion of abstract wealth — the compulsion to labour which characterises the capitalist mode of production will disappear.55 With value, abstract labour disappears as a category. The reproduction of individuals and their needs becomes an end in itself. Without the categories of value, abstract labour and the wage, “labour” would cease to have its systematic role as determined by the primary social mediation: value.

This is why value-form theory points, in terms of the notion of revolution that follows from it, in the same direction as communisation. The overcoming of capitalist social relations cannot involve a simple “liberation of labour”; rather, the only “way out” is the suppression of value itself — of the value-form which posits abstract labour as the measure of wealth. 

 via endnotes.org.uk

JD:  There is something appealing in an emphasis that suggests an alternative approach to wealth. It would allow natural resources, inefficient talent, cultivated craft, and reproductive and caring labor to appear as valuable. None would be reinserted into a labor theory of value. Further, we can talk about the value of communicative acts without having to insert them into an account of labor into which they don't fit particularly well.

At the same time, there is something here that feels elite and surgical, like an extraction or excision of workers and their productive labor. It's like the people who matter, in their material work and lives, somehow don't matter anymore. It's as if the real movement of people as the actuality of communism is jettisoned. My discomfort here is part and parcel with my dislike of emphases on alienation and reification. Those seem designed to show how capitalists are also trapped and oppressed, how everyone is caught in a bad system. I don't buy it. I think that there are elites who benefit from the system, who like the system, and who even if they are somewhat alienated would gladly pay for their privilege with a little alienation. In fact, I think complete disalientation is an illusion.

In the note corresponding to the sentence with the phrase 'compulsion to labor,' the gloss associates labor done out of necessity (to eat) is not compulsion but free labor. This strikes me as the precisely the opposite of free labor. Labor done out of compulsion is the labor we have to do to survive and to survive at a certain societal level. 

The most crucial theoretical claim appears to be "Labour does not simply pre-exist its objectification in the capitalist commodity as a positive ground to be liberated in socialism or communism through the alteration of its formal expression." The sentence that follows asserts that value--as the primary social mediation-- has a priority over labor. I take 'primary social mediation' to be another way of referring to the social substance crystalized in value, that is, the historically sedimented relations that underlie the abstract labor congealed in the value form. I'm not sure what priority means, though, unless the point is just that under capitalism there isn't first an individual who works and then the exploitation of that person, but that seems so obvious as to be unnecessary to assert (I must be missing the point). In part, I don't get how the point quoted from Chris Arthur affirms the claim preceding it. Arthur implies an individualism underlying Marxian discussions of labor. I don't see that. The entire point is to emphasize that one appears individualistically in bourgeois thought is already and essentially social and collective. There is nothing individual about individual labor.

I also wonder about abstraction. Maybe there is a real advance in abstraction (I think Alberto Toscano and Slavoj Zizek have arguments in this direction). So the good thing about the value form is that it equates different kinds of labor in the form of abstract labor power. The problem with capitalism is that it doesn't go far enough in this direction. Instead, hedge fund managers are somehow more valuable than school teachers or factory laborers. Uneven equalization is thus equalization as the proletarianization of the rest of us while the very, very few at the top are unique, singular, and super-rich. It's like the long-tail (power-law, 80/20 rule) version of employment. I don't think, then, that the equalization I support would count as abolishing the value form. I think it would be better describing as realizing it (in keeping with the already ongoing liberation of labor from the commodity form via unpaid labor).

Next Tuesday at 7:00 in Copenhagen

EXHIBITION / REVOLUTION HAPPENED BECAUSE EVERYBODY REFUSED TO GO HOME / 6/10-17/11 2012