Why I disagree with Kalle Lasn

In These Times ran an interview with Adbusters'Kalle Lasn a few days ago. Here are some excerpts from the interview with my responses.

Lasn's primary engine runs on an opposition between the old left and the new left. Most of the time it isn't completely clear what this means. In the interview, he presents Occupy as a continuation of 1968, so the new left looks pretty much like the new left that has been around since the late 60s. The interviewer positions Lasn as a kind of Situationist (cue Bookchin criticism of neo-Situationism), which may be inaccurate insofar as Lasn's views seems an amalgam of various trends, particularly embrace of digital media, leaderlessness, horizontalism, multitudes, swarms, mystical thinking (cue Bookchin again--I was too quick yesterday to say that mysticism wasn't a problem), and insurrection.

Lasn's response to a question about Occupy:

A power struggle is going on in the movement, between the old vertical type of a Left and a new young Left that has social media at its finger tips and isn’t so enamored with the old wolf pack mentality but is ready to do things in a much more horizontal way without leaders – sometimes even without demands. The question is: In this tussle between the old Left and the new Left, who will win? And if temporarily the old Left triumphs then we’re in for a hard year this year and possibly even next, but bit by bit this movement does herald a new Left. This movement has made the Left cool again.

I agree that there is a power struggle going on (which is always the case in movements and parties and can be a source of energy and innovation). I find the opposition between a wolf pack and social media pretty interesting in that nature looks bad and technology looks good or, attacking and eating other animals is bad and connecting on social media is good. Back to the interview (interviewer question in bold):

How does one build counter-hegemonic power and get beyond “crowd sourcing,” which is really what the Occupy general assemblies are?

In the next few years there will be what I call a “meme war” – a war of really big ideas within economics. Will we be able to pull off a paradigm shift from neoclassical economics to this new ecological or bionomic or psychonomic discipline that is bubbling underneath the surface? Will we be able to change our current dysfunctional marketplace into one in which the price of every product tells the ecological truth? Will we be able to impose Robin Hood taxes and dismantle this global casino with more than $1 trillion a day flushing around the system in derivatives and credit default swaps and other financial instruments?

If we on the Left try to figure out what these meta memes are and start fighting for them, then we will get somewhere. If we fall back on the old ways of doing things, then capitalism is going to swallow us whole.

First problem: arguments are more than memes. They are ideas backed by reason and evidence. Lasn diminishes the challenge and the sort of significant work involved. Second problem: Lasn misrepresents the economic problem of neoliberal capitalism as a division between neoclassical economics and the "new ecological or bionomic or psychonomic discipline that is bubbling underneath the surface." Now maybe I just don't know what he's talking about, but it looks to me like the sort of stuff that is usually wrapped up as complexity theory, with all its talk about emergence and swarms and self-organization and criticality (I talk about this in the first chapter of Blog Theory). It's the same set of ideas part of New Economy thinking, which isn't opposed to neoliberalism at all but was a primary carry of it, especially insofar as regulation is bad and free flow is good. Thomas Friedman, after all, is like the poster boy of horizontality--The World is Flat.

Where does power over the distribution of societal resources fit into this equation? How is the Occupy movement going to redistribute wealth from the 1% to the 99%?

Quite frankly, the question you ask betrays the fact that you are quoting the old Left. The way to fix the problem may not actually be a straightforward approach of passing some laws and taking some money from the 1% and giving it to the 99%. Maybe we have to have a more sophisticated approach where we don’t play out this kind of class warfare idea. The change has to be deeper. If we can finally ram through this Robin Hood tax, which a lot of people are for in Europe, and make it very high, not just a .01% but a 1% tax on all financial transactions, then that will be a deep-down transformation of casino capitalism, and all of a sudden the Robin Hood tax would collect trillions of dollars every year and then we the people of the world could start arguing over how to spend that money.

Lasn is too sophisticated for class warfare, which is just another way of saying that he is on the side of the sophisticated (or as Corey Robin has called them, the "fancies"). That is, he is denying that our current economic situation is the product of class war, capitalist attempts (largely successful) to roll back the gains made by the working class from the 30s through the 60s. The thing is, Lasn's answer here seems inconsistent--wouldn't "ramming through" a 1% tax on all financial transactions be a tool of class warfare? On the other hand, why is that tax a "deeper change" than the abolition of private property?

Isn’t the legislative process needed to enact or “ram through” redistributive policies like the Robin Hood tax?

Once you do that, you’re accepting the status quo. Maybe the real job is to launch a third political party in America that is initiated on the Internet, gets million of signatures, and then has a convention. Maybe the task of changing the political landscape of America with a third party is a way smarter move than what the Tea Party did with the Republicans, and what so many people are saying we should do with the Democrats. The trick for the political Left is to think deeper. Instead of thinking, “Hey, let’s pass a law that legislates the Robin Hood tax,” let’s change the political landscape.

Take, for example, the idea we launched last year. In the general assemblies we have a microcosm of a democratic process that’s magical and beautiful. It works and this is a metaphor for how America should work.

Love the idea of a third party--The Common Party or The Party of the Commons. Why on the internet? Lasn is using the model of the Pirate Party (Sweden, Germany). I need to learn more about what they've done. I'm skeptical that "initiating it on the internet" is the key or the most fundamental question for creating a new party; that seems to me to place means way before ends (which is a problem with process-oriented approaches over all). Lasn is right to say "change the political landscape." But this change isn't magical (whether it's beautiful seems to me to be an aesthetic question that gets us off track). That we can't fully determine or predict outcomes doesn't mean that they are the products of magic. I'm also not convinced that GAs are a metaphor for how American should work--it depends on what the tasks at hand are, on what we want to do.

. . . Change finds its bed within a culture with big ideas that resonate with people. There has to be a sort of mystery and magic to the whole thing and so far the Occupy movement has been very good at operating on that deeper level. Somewhere along the line we will have to pass laws  . . .  But there are a lot of meta memes that we have to conjure up . . . 

I'm starting to wonder about the "deeper level" Lasn so persistently invokes--is it magical? Conjuring memes doesn't strike me as democratic--it strikes me as a kind of manipulation that wants to avoid reason, argument, exchange, critique. I worry about the magicians of culture who want to create a big affective charge. The sorts of political organizations that rely on mystery and magic are generally either fascistic or secret societies.

The Occupy movement has been committed to developing actions and strategies through consensus. How do the “tactical briefings” issued by Adbusters fit into that process?

This tussle over what we should do next is something we should all get involved in. When we put out that call [in the January 25 “Tactical Briefing #25”] for 50,000 people to descend on Chicago [on May 1, ahead of the NATO summit], people in Chicago said, “You haven’t been talking to us. How dare you do this. You haven’t been part of our meetings.” I say, “To hell with them.” We want to put out a tactical briefing, and you can take it or leave it.

Horizontalism looks like the assertion of will. Anyone can say whatever they, issues calls for whatever they want. Cooperation and coordination, are possible through social media, but not necessary. To hell with those who don't want what we want. At this point, it's hard to see the difference between the new left and a wolf pack.

Comments

[Sadbillionaire]

Excellent post. One takeaway, perhaps non-obvious, is that, in 2012, liberalism remains a problem. And not just a problem in the sense of a dilemma that remains to be solved, but a structural issue, a paradox that threatens new social movements because it leaves them vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy or the Hegelian "beautiful soul" syndrome about which Zizek writes.

Lasn's comments reveal, perhaps more starkly than any others I have seen, the strange shift that has taken place in the relationship between the activist/movement left, and parliamentary liberalism. It seems to me that, for decades--with the birth of the New Left and African American, women's, and gay and lesbian liberation movements-- liberals have relied on the energy and enthusiasm of grassroots and rank-and-file activists, in order to solve the motivation crisis that naturally follows from the transformation of political parties into machines for the management of populations by experts and technocrats.

Even while contributing to the immiseration of their left constituencies, then, institutions like the Democratic Party have been highly parasitic on activist energies (apotheosized in the mobilization of affect in the run-up to the 2008 election). Disdainful and dismissive of "anachronistic" militants, liberalism has, for decades, in fact fed off them as key sources of energy and popular legitimation. While activists have usually been (correctly) cynical about the sincerity of liberalism, and its capacity to effect meaningful change, I think it is fair to say that we are currently at a moment wherein suspicion of, and hatred for, all things liberal is more profound than ever. And at the same time, (gulp), the current movement's demands are overwhelmingly liberal.

Now, it seems, the historical tendency described above is reversed: or at very least, our perspective has shifted. It is now techno-utopian Ideologues like Lasn (and, dare we say, no small number of anarchists) who are quite clearly parasitic on liberalism, even as they disdain its old-fashionedness and mock its fetishes for, say, planning and redistribution. But what they are talking about, in real terms, is old-fashioned liberal regulation of banking, Tobin taxes or variations thereof, interventions against excessive consumerism, green labeling, etc.

The wish to prefigure a new state, or smash the current one, seems to coexist with the desire for the fortification of the New Deal apparatus and nostalgia for Cold War capitalism (why do we talk so much about the decline of Bretton Woods, and what else might Lasn mean by "casino capitalism" if not the "bad" capitalism that replaced the "good" one?). These simultaneous and contradictory desires seem to lurk at the center of our current left ideological formation. Why, and what does this mean?

The larger Occupy movement has been fueled, undeniably, by the steady augmentation of desire to protect, at very least, baseline levels of liberal commitments to public education and the state university system, some version of Wagner Act-era collective bargaining rights, and health care/pensions/welfare. Even the Alex Jones-inspired libertarians whose livestreams I watch (and whose efforts I commend) seem to believe in this agenda. (That's pretty weird, in and of itself). And, as you point out, Lasn and his ilk draw from the same imaginary resources of neoliberalism, in their taste for "horizontality," and striking levels of gullibility regarding the promises of new social media technologies.

And they are saying all of this from the comfort of my own place of birth, Canada. Lasn seems to me to be a paradigmatically Canadian thinker in several respects: he clearly falls into the tradition of glib media analysts like Marshall McLuhan; he has an overweening obsession with American popular culture and the political stupidity of the American public, a la so many Canadian comedians; and he insults the politics of both Old and New Lefts (it is unclear to me if he uses these terms in their accepted periodizing function), largely, I would wager, because like me and my Canadian friends when I lived in the Great White North, he has come to think of universal healthcare, the absence of outrageously overpriced private universities, and the persistence of a strong social-democratic political tradition as ho-hum, mundane, maybe in their own way stultifying and oppressive. I understand such sentiments, although as an adult, they now seem to me childish and ahistorical--but the point is that if this is indeed Lasn's basic orientation, the current movement might want to look elsewhere for guidance, inspiration, and "tactical" (whatever the heck that means) intelligence.

Because I am a Marxist and a class-struggle kind of person, I feel a bit weird about the way I've laid out the radical-liberal relation here. After all, I should just make fun of liberalism, right? Mostly, that's what I do. But if we are invoking, for example, the spirit of the Haymarket martyrs, or of Marx and Mao, or of Deleuze and Tronti to fight (however secretly) for the New Deal state and Cold War capitalism, we should be honest about it. If the achievements of the liberal state stemmed from the pressure to the powerful on the part of social movements (and as such constitute, as Ernest Mandel argued, concrete proletarian victories), then we should talk about that, too.

And we should be aware that in the context of a Federalist system and a very racist country, the question of the politics of the state has its own unique valences. (Is it impolite to mention how Occupy continues to maintain a weird, and it seems to me, quite strained relationship to anti-racist politics?) The Black radical tradition (for example, in Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America, maybe the most radically Marxist, and in its own way, autonomist work of history ever written in the US) has always maintained that the failure of Reconstruction was caused by the WITHDRAWAL of Federal troops from the South. If smashing (or less final attacks on) the federal state leads to the empowerment of the several states, the result, it seems to me, is always the amplification, rather than diminution of, domestic fascism. So much of the history of popular resistance, in the US, has been the push to make liberalism overcome its own inherent flaws--arrogance, gradualism, faith in normal science, legalism, coldness--in order to fulfill the promise of liberal policymaking. But we have told the story, and continue to tell the story, in a very different way. That's why, I think, the revelation of so much evidence of bad faith in Lasn's interview, vis-a-vis liberalism and the "radicalism" of the future is so telling. And maybe useful to reflect upon, as the Left continues to think through the current crisis.

[Jodi Dean]

This is really brilliant -- completely interesting. I don't have a response right away--I need to think about it.

This part is particularly insightful (the real core of the insight):

While activists have usually been (correctly) cynical about the sincerity of liberalism, and its capacity to effect meaningful change, I think it is fair to say that we are currently at a moment wherein suspicion of, and hatred for, all things liberal is more profound than ever. And at the same time, (gulp), the current movement's demands are overwhelmingly liberal.

"Now, it seems, the historical tendency described above is reversed: or at very least, our perspective has shifted. It is now techno-utopian Ideologues like Lasn (and, dare we say, no small number of anarchists) who are quite clearly parasitic on liberalism, even as they disdain its old-fashionedness and mock its fetishes for, say, planning and redistribution. But what they are talking about, in real terms, is old-fashioned liberal regulation of banking, Tobin taxes or variations thereof, interventions against excessive consumerism, green labeling, etc.

The wish to prefigure a new state, or smash the current one, seems to coexist with the desire for the fortification of the New Deal apparatus and nostalgia for Cold War capitalism (why do we talk so much about the decline of Bretton Woods, and what else might Lasn mean by "casino capitalism" if not the "bad" capitalism that replaced the "good" one?). These simultaneous and contradictory desires seem to lurk at the center of our current left ideological formation. Why, and what does this mean?"

[Jodi Dean]

eek--I should have placed quotation marks about your first paragraph--somehow placed the open quote at the wrong place

[Sadbillionaire]

Thank you for your kind words. I am a huge fan of your writing and this site.

Just got an #Occupy tweet, from an Occupy tweeter with a constructivist clenched-fist avatar, calling for a Tobin tax in the same syntax one would expect to see a call for the abolition of prisons or factory occupations. Of course, the world would be better with Tobin taxes. But, ideologically speaking, these are weird times.

[The Mathmos]

"This kind of class warfare idea", christ! The man is with one of the foremost counter-cultural magazine in North America, and still he can't shake off the Fox News?

Next, he'll be telling occupiers to disregard race relations for fear of "this racism idea", or something.