I cite

Lenin: Capitalism and Female Labor (1913)

Lenin:

All the oppressed and exploited classes throughout the history of human societies have always been forced (and it is in this that their exploitation consists) to give up to their oppressors, first, their unpaid labour and, second, their women as concubines for the “masters”. Slavery, feudalism and capitalism are identical in this respect. It is only the form of exploitation that changes; the exploitation itself remains. An exhibition of the work of “women exploited at home” has opened in Paris, the “capital of the world”, and the centre of civilisation. Each exhibit has a little tag showing how much the woman working at home receives for making it, and how much she can make per day and per hour on this basis. And what do we find? Not on a single article can a woman working at home earn more than 1.25 francs, i.e., 50 kopeks, whereas the earnings on the vast majority of jobs are very much smaller. Take lampshades. The pay is 4 kopeks per dozen. Or paper bags: 15 kopeks per thousand, with earnings at six kopeks an hour. Here are little toys with ribbons, etc.: 2.5 kopeks an hour. Artificial flowers: two or three kopeks an hour. Ladies’ and gentlemen’s underwear: from two to six kopeks an hour. And so on, without end. Our workers’ associations and trade unions, too, ought to organise an “exhibition” of this kind. It will not yield the colossal profits brought in by the exhibitions, of the bourgeoisie. A display of proletarian women’s poverty and indigence will bring a different benefit: it will help wage-slaves, both men and women, to understand their condition, look back over their “life”, ponder the conditions for emancipation from this perpetual yoke of want, poverty, prostitution and every kind of outrage against the have-nots.

Response to Luke Mergner

Public Seminar deleted my response to Luke Mergner's review of Crowds and Party. 

The review is critical -- so critical that the author doesn't even get the title right. Nor does he get the title right of one of my other books that he mentions.

Here is my response (fortunately, a Facebook friend was able to recover it):

Hi Luke, thanks for the thoughtful review. My 2009 book is called Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies.

As you know, definitions are not always useful since most of our concepts have histories. The concept of the crowd that I use comes primarily from LeBon (a temporary collective being) and is expanded via Canetti (especially with respect to the egalitarian discharge). Crowds don't have to be spontaneous; they can be organized and produced. I talk about mobs on pp. 7-8, and refer briefly to some of that literature. As I note, the 19th century opens up the discussion of whether a crowd is a mob or the people. This is a political question, a matter of struggle and debate. This struggle is always necessarily situated -- what is opened up, what is possible? Some commentators always mistrust the people, always render the crowd as a mob. Others find possibility.

I don't deconstruct the idea of individual interests because I am more interested in rejecting the individual form altogether. You write: "Dean wants to argue that intelligible interests can be attributed to collectives" -- that description doesn't ring true to me since I don't use the language of interests. Instead, with respect to the crowd I use Canetti to speak of the discharge as the moment of equality that gives the crowd its substance.

You say I don't give concrete historical examples of the party -- but chapter 3 discusses Lenin's account of the party and chapter 5 talks about experiences of members of the British and US communist parties.

Where you really misunderstand (or misrepresent) what I'm doing is when you say that "the party form, like the crowd, provides a mechanism for the individual to find meaning and reinterpret their identity." This isn't accurate because the first two chapters of the book dismantle the individual form. Even the quote from me that you use to support your point doesn't work because in the quoted passage I refer to communists in the plural. My point involves the way that the Party is a site of collective belonging that works back on the collectivity. There is no rediscovery of individuality -- the long section on Kristin Ross should make that clear. At any rate, my point is not that "its the ability to subsume individuals into a collective" that links crowd and party; it's that the party is the form that organizes fidelity to the egalitarian discharge of the crowd. By organizing this fidelity, it can hold open the gap opened up by the disruptive crowd event (and of course not all crowd events are disruptive).

Also, notice: it is not just participation in a crowd event that disrupts the interpellation of the subject as an individual. Rather (as chapter 1 argues), it is already the case that commanded individualism is over-burdening the fragile individual form. The extremes of contemporary capitalism are too much for individuals to bear (as I explain via the account of the changes in the individual form). So there are material reasons for the dissolution of this form today that should be understood not as pathologies (ala Turkle) but as indications of real contradictions.

I'm not sure what's at stake in your claim that I engage few contemporary authors other than predictably European ones. I'm tempted to think that you read in a different archive and I didn't refer to the people you like to read. But, the first chapter talks about a number of contemporary sociologists, I talk about Sherry Turkle, Kristin Ross, Judith Butler, John Holloway, Hardt and Negri, Eugene Holland and, yes, Althusser, Dolar, Zizek, Badiou.

You say I don't mention political science or any of the literature on parties - -there is an extensive discussion of Michels and notes to political scientists' commentary on Michels. You have a general dismissal that says looking at the literature on representation, democracy, and parties would benefit my scholarship. But you don't say how or in what way in would change my argument. It's interesting to note that by misstating the title of my 2009 book, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, you actually omit reference to a book where I do engage work in democratic theory. Again, I'm left thinking that basically you are just signaling that your archive is different from mine.

You mention that I reject identity politics. You don't mention my argument -- which is that identity today is fully saturated. It can't ground a politics. The claim for or attribution of an identity tells us nothing about a person's -- or a group's -- politics. (I'll add here that my first book was Solidarity of Strangers: feminism after identity politics, 1996). I emphasize as well that "the wide array of politicized issues and identities enables a communism that, more fully than ever before, can take the side of the oppressed, indeed, that can make the multiple struggles of the oppressed into a side."

It seems to me that you have one criticism: Dean rejects individuality. Yes, I do.

And then you end with an anti-communist gesture -- one that you link to recantations part of the history of anti-communism. But of course that does not sum or capture communism or anti-communism, so it strikes me as an odd kind of ideological signal.

 

 

 

Civil war and free speech

The US is in a civil war, a civil war that is at its core a class war.

There are different terrains, forms of struggle and violence. Casualties come from different proximate causes -- police attacks, suicide, overdose, slow death from alcohol and despair, toxic environments, crashes and shooters -- but it's one war.

Terrains of struggle include streets and institutions, workplaces and domestic spaces, bodies and bathrooms, science and museums, churches, media, prison, farms, libraries, hospitals, and universities. There is no space external to this war.

The Left needs to defend whatever spaces we can. We have to make the cost of far right speech too high for them to continue it. The Right makes cultural gains by manipulating liberal ideas of tolerance and neutrality -- whether this is in the form of the white supremacism of Charles Murray and Milo or the climate denialist industry funded by the Koch brothers.

Liberal condemnation of the students who push back against these speakers when they comer to their campuses legitimate these speakers' views as worthy of consideration, as matters worth debating because reasonable people may disagree. Not only do most of these condemnations confuse protests against white supremacist speakers with state action (suggesting that there are liberals who can only think from a police perspective), but they proceed as if we were not in a civil war, a class war. They proceed as if society were a seminar or courtroom, not a war zone where people are daily under attack and where their attackers seek the cover of liberal institutions to justify these attacks.

Particularly incoherent is the way that so many liberals decry Trump as a fascist, yet remain unwilling to confront what this entails for so-called liberal practices and institutions, namely, that they are not functioning in a liberal society but are being made to serve fascist ends. This unwillingness suggests that either they don't really believe Trump is a fascist (and so their rhetoric is disingenuous), that they think that liberalism can defeat fascism (which has never happened), that they don't ideas seriously, or that arguments that some groups are genetically inferior are permissible liberal views.

Also galling is the way that resistance, protest, and "standing up and fighting back" is being championed by liberals and Democrats even as they quickly reject actual standing up and fighting back. Protests that remain controlled and symbolic are permitted. Direct action that shuts things down, that pushes back, that has effects is decried as too far. It appears, then, that for some liberals, protests are only early-stage campaign events, precursors to the only political acts they actually accept: writing letters, signing petitions, and the holy-of-holies, voting.

Some liberal arguments address tactics. They say that it’s a tactical mistake to protest far right speakers on college campuses because it gives conservative media fodder for criticism. Of course, right wing media will always attack the Left; they particularly like attacking liberals as leftists. The Left should welcome the attacks as opportunities to show we are fighting back and will continue to fight back. We should be the power the right fears, the power of the people as the rest of us, the oppressed against the oppressors, the many in solidarity against the few.

Liberals might care about being depicted as biased, not neutral. Anyone on the Left should take it as a matter of course that we are in no way neutral. The Right uses whatever opportunities they can get to spread their influence. We have to block them, shut them down, shut them out, refuse the pretense that we are in a rational debate between equally valid positions. We’re not.

It's a war. There are sides.