How did Bill Gates become the richest man in America? His wealth has nothing to do with the production costs of what Microsoft is selling: i.e. it is not the result of his producing good software at lower prices than his competitors, or of ‘exploiting’ his workers more successfully (Microsoft pays its intellectual workers a relatively high salary). If that had been the case, Microsoft would have gone bankrupt long ago: people would have chosen free systems like Linux which are as good as or better than Microsoft products. Millions of people are still buying Microsoft software because Microsoft has imposed itself as an almost universal standard, practically monopolising the field, as one embodiment of what Marx called the ‘general intellect’, meaning collective knowledge in all its forms, from science to practical knowhow. Gates effectively privatised part of the general intellect and became rich by appropriating the rent that followed from that.

The possibility of the privatisation of the general intellect was something Marx never envisaged in his writings about capitalism (largely because he overlooked its social dimension). Yet this is at the core of today’s struggles over intellectual property: as the role of the general intellect – based on collective knowledge and social co-operation – has increased in post-industrial capitalism, so wealth accumulates out of all proportion to the labour expended in its production. The result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge.

The same goes for natural resources, the exploitation of which is one of the world’s main sources of rent. What follows is a permanent struggle over who gets the rent: citizens of the Third World or Western corporations. It’s ironic that in explaining the difference between labour (which in its use produces surplus value) and other commodities (which consume all their value in their use), Marx gives oil as an example of an ‘ordinary’ commodity. Any attempt now to link the rise and fall in the price of oil to the rise or fall in production costs or the price of exploited labour would be meaningless: production costs are negligible as a proportion of the price we pay for oil, a price which is really the rent the resource’s owners can command thanks to its limited supply.

A consequence of the rise in productivity brought about by the exponentially growing impact of collective knowledge is a change in the role of unemployment. It is the very success of capitalism (greater efficiencies, raised productivity etc) which produces unemployment, rendering more and more workers useless: what should be a blessing – less hard labour needed – becomes a curse. Or, to put it differently, the chance of being exploited in a long-term job is now experienced as a privilege. The world market, as Fredric Jameson has put it, is now ‘a space in which everyone has once been a productive labourer, and in which labour has everywhere begun to price itself out of the system’. In the ongoing process of capitalist globalisation, the category of the unemployed is no longer confined to Marx’s ‘reserve army of labour’; it also includes, as Jameson describes, ‘those massive populations around the world who have, as it were, “dropped out of history”, who have been deliberately excluded from the modernising projects of First World capitalism and written off as hopeless or terminal cases’: so-called failed states (DR Congo, Somalia), victims of famine or ecological disaster, trapped by pseudo-archaic ‘ethnic hatreds’, objects of philanthropy and NGOs or targets of the ‘war on terror’. The category of the unemployed has thus expanded to encompass vast ranges of people, from the temporarily unemployed, through to the no longer employable and permanently unemployed, to the inhabitants of ghettos and slums (all those often dismissed by Marx himself as ‘lumpen-proletarians’), and finally to the whole populations or states excluded from the global capitalist process, like the blank spaces on ancient maps.

Some say that this new form of capitalism provides new possibilities for emancipation. This at any rate is the thesis of Hardt and Negri’s Multitude, which tries to radicalise Marx, who held that if we just cut the head off capitalism we’d get socialism. Marx, as they see it, was historically constrained by the notion of centralised, automated and hierarchically organised mechanical industrial labour, with the result that he understood ‘general intellect’ as something rather like a central planning agency; it is only today, with the rise of ‘immaterial labour’, that a revolutionary reversal has become ‘objectively possible’. This immaterial labour extends between two poles: from intellectual labour (production of ideas, texts, programs etc) to affective labour (carried out by doctors, babysitters and flight attendants). Today, immaterial labour is ‘hegemonic’ in the sense in which Marx proclaimed that, in 19th-century capitalism, large industrial production was hegemonic: it imposes itself not through force of numbers but by playing the key, emblematic structural role. What emerges is a vast new domain called the ‘common’: shared knowledge and new forms of communication and co-operation. The products of immaterial production aren’t objects but new social or interpersonal relations; immaterial production is bio-political, the production of social life.

Hardt and Negri are here describing the process that the ideologists of today’s ‘postmodern’ capitalism celebrate as the passage from material to symbolic production, from centralist-hierarchical logic to the logic of self-organisation and multi-centred co-operation. The difference is that Hardt and Negri are effectively faithful to Marx: they are trying to prove that Marx was right, that the rise of the general intellect is in the long term incompatible with capitalism. The ideologists of postmodern capitalism are making exactly the opposite claim: Marxist theory (and practice), they argue, remains within the constraints of the hierarchical logic of centralised state control and so can’t cope with the social effects of the information revolution. There are good empirical reasons for this claim: what effectively ruined the Communist regimes was their inability to accommodate to the new social logic sustained by the information revolution: they tried to steer the revolution making it into yet another large-scale centralised state-planning project. The paradox is that what Hardt and Negri celebrate as the unique chance to overcome capitalism is celebrated by the ideologists of the information revolution as the rise of a new, ‘frictionless’ capitalism.

Hardt and Negri’s analysis has some weak points, which explain how capitalism has been able to survive what should have been (in classic Marxist terms) a new organisation of production that rendered it obsolete. They underestimate the extent to which today’s capitalism has successfully (in the short term at least) privatised the general intellect itself, as well as the extent to which, more than the bourgeoisie, workers themselves are becoming superfluous (with greater and greater numbers of them becoming not just temporarily unemployed but structurally unemployable).

If the old capitalism ideally involved an entrepreneur who invested (his own or borrowed) money into production that he organised and ran and then reaped the profit, a new ideal type is emerging today: no longer the entrepreneur who owns his company, but the expert manager (or a managerial board presided over by a CEO) who runs a company owned by banks (also run by managers who don’t own the bank) or dispersed investors. In this new ideal type of capitalism, the old bourgeoisie, rendered non-functional, is refunctionalised as salaried management: the new bourgeoisie gets wages, and even if they own part of their company, they earn stocks as part of their remuneration for their work (‘bonuses’ for their ‘success’).

This new bourgeoisie still appropriates surplus value, but in the (mystified) form of what has been called ‘surplus wage’: they are paid rather more than the proletarian ‘minimum wage’ (an often mythic point of reference whose only real example in today’s global economy is the wage of a sweatshop worker in China or Indonesia), and it is this distinction from common proletarians which determines their status. The bourgeoisie in the classic sense thus tends to disappear: capitalists reappear as a subset of salaried workers, as managers who are qualified to earn more by virtue of their competence (which is why pseudo-scientific ‘evaluation’ is crucial: it legitimises disparities in earnings). Far from being limited to managers, the category of workers earning a surplus wage extends to all sorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and artists. The surplus they get takes two forms: more money (for managers etc), but also less work and more free time (for – some – intellectuals, but also for state administrators etc).

The evaluative procedure that qualifies some workers to receive a surplus wage is an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence; the surplus wage exists not for economic but for political reasons: to maintain a ‘middle class’ for the purpose of social stability. The arbitrariness of social hierarchy is not a mistake, but the whole point, with the arbitrariness of evaluation playing an analogous role to the arbitrariness of market success. Violence threatens to explode not when there is too much contingency in the social space, but when one tries to eliminate contingency. In La Marque du sacré, Jean-Pierre Dupuy conceives hierarchy as one of the four procedures (‘dispositifs symboliques’) whose function is to make the relationship of superiority non-humiliating: hierarchy itself (an externally imposed order that allows me to experience my lower social status as independent of my inherent value); demystification (the ideological procedure that demonstrates that society is not a meritocracy but the product of objective social struggles, enabling me to avoid the painful conclusion that someone else’s superiority is the result of his merits and achievements); contingency (a similar mechanism, by which we come to understand that our position on the social scale depends on a natural and social lottery; the lucky ones are those born with the right genes in rich families); and complexity (uncontrollable forces have unpredictable consequences; for instance, the invisible hand of the market may lead to my failure and my neighbour’s success, even if I work much harder and am much more intelligent). Contrary to appearances, these mechanisms don’t contest or threaten hierarchy, but make it palatable, since ‘what triggers the turmoil of envy is the idea that the other deserves his good luck and not the opposite idea – which is the only one that can be openly expressed.’ Dupuy draws from this premise the conclusion that it is a great mistake to think that a reasonably just society which also perceives itself as just will thereby be free of all resentment: on the contrary, it is precisely in such a society that those who occupy inferior positions will find an outlet for their hurt pride in violent outbursts of resentment.

Connected to this is the impasse faced by today’s China: the ideal goal of Deng’s reforms was to introduce capitalism without a bourgeoisie (since they would be the new ruling class); now, however, China’s leaders are making the painful discovery that capitalism without a stable hierarchy (brought about by the existence of a bourgeoisie) generates permanent instability. So what path will China take? The former Communists, meanwhile, are emerging as the most efficient managers of capitalism because their historical enmity towards the bourgeoisie as a class perfectly fits the tendency of today’s capitalism to become a managerial capitalism without a bourgeoisie – in both cases, as Stalin put it long ago, ‘cadres decide everything.’ (An interesting difference between today’s China and Russia: in Russia, university teachers are ridiculously underpaid – they are de facto already part of the proletariat – while in China they are comfortably provided with a surplus wage as a means to guarantee their docility.)

The notion of surplus wage also throws new light on the ongoing ‘anti-capitalist’ protests. In times of crisis, the obvious candidates for ‘belt-tightening’ are the lower levels of the salaried bourgeoisie: political protest is their only recourse, if they are to avoid joining the proletariat. Although their protests are nominally directed at the brutal logic of the market, they are in effect protesting against the gradual erosion of their (politically) privileged economic place. Ayn Rand has a fantasy in Atlas Shrugged of striking ‘creative’ capitalists, a fantasy that finds its perverted realisation in today’s strikes, which are mostly strikes on the part of a ‘salaried bourgeoisie’ driven by fear of losing their privilege (their surplus over the minimum wage). These are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being reduced to proletarians. Who dares strike today, when having a permanent job has itself become a privilege? Not low-paid workers in (what remains of) the textile industry etc, but those privileged workers with guaranteed jobs (teachers, public transport workers, police). This also accounts for the wave of student protests: their main motivation is arguably the fear that higher education will no longer guarantee them a surplus wage in later life.

At the same time it is clear that the huge revival of protests over the past year, from the Arab Spring to Western Europe, from Occupy Wall Street to China, from Spain to Greece, should not be dismissed as merely a revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie. Each case has to be taken on its own merits. The student protests against university reform in the UK were clearly different from August’s riots, which were a consumerist carnival of destruction, a true outburst of the excluded. One can argue that the uprisings in Egypt began in part as a revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie (educated young people protesting about their lack of prospects), but this was only one aspect of a larger protest against an oppressive regime. On the other hand, the protest hardly mobilised poor workers and peasants and the electoral victory of the Islamists is an indication of the narrow social base of the original secular protest. Greece is a special case: in the last decades, a new salaried bourgeoisie (especially in the over-extended state administration) was created thanks to EU financial help and loans, and the protests were motivated in large part by the threat of losing this privilege.

Meanwhile, the proletarianisation of the lower salaried bourgeoisie is accompanied at the opposite extreme by the irrationally high remuneration of top managers and bankers. This remuneration is economically irrational since, as investigations have demonstrated in the US, it tends to be inversely proportional to a company’s success. Rather than submit these trends to moralising criticism, we should read them as signs that the capitalist system itself is no longer able to find any level of self-regulated stability – it threatens, in other words, to run out of control.

See also: Postone, Marx and Capitalism.

From the LRB:

Slavoj Žižek · The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie · LRB 11 January 2012.

Fast Tube by Casper

Can we call the alternative communism? or is that now a terminally discredited word? One view here and another  here.

Valences of the Dialectic by Fredric Jameson

Verso, 625 pp, £29.99, October 2009, ISBN 978 1 85984 877 7

Fredric Jameson’s pre-eminence, over the last generation, among critics writing in English would be hard to dispute. Part of the tribute has been exacted by his majestic style, one distinctive feature of which is the way that the convoy of long sentences freighted and balanced with subordinate clauses will dock here and there to unload a pithy slogan. ‘Always historicise!’ is one of these, and Jameson has also insisted, under the banner of ‘One cannot not periodise,’ on the related necessity (as well as the semi-arbitrariness) of dividing history into periods. With that in mind, it’s tempting to propose a period, coincident with Jameson’s career as the main theorist of postmodernism, stretching from about 1983 (when Thatcher, having won a war, and Reagan, having survived a recession, consolidated their popularity) to 2008 (when the neoliberal programme launched by Reagan and Thatcher was set back by the worst economic crisis since the Depression). During this period of neoliberal ascendancy – an era of deregulation, financialisation, industrial decline, demoralisation of the working class, the collapse of Communism and so on – it often seemed easier to spot the contradictions of Marxism than the more famous contradictions of capitalism, and no figure seemed to embody more than Fredric Jameson the peculiar condition of an economic theory that had turned out to flourish above all as a mode of cultural analysis, a mass movement that had become the province of an academic ‘elite’, and an intellectual tradition that had arrived at some sort of culmination right at the point of apparent extinction.

Over the last quarter-century, Jameson has been at once the timeliest and most untimely of American critics and writers. Not only did he develop interests in film, science fiction, or the work of Walter Benjamin, say, earlier than most of his colleagues in the humanities, he was also a pioneer of that enlargement of literary criticism (Jameson received a PhD in French literature from Yale in 1959) into all-purpose theory which made the discussion of all these things in the same breath established academic practice. More than this, he succeeded better than anyone else at defining the term, ‘postmodernism’, that sought to catch the historical specificity of the present age.

This was a matter, first, of cataloguing postmodernism’s superficial textures: the erosion of the distinction between high and pop culture; the reign of stylistic pastiche and miscellany; the dominance of the visual image and corresponding eclipse of the written word; a new depthlessness – ‘surrealism without the unconscious’ – in the dream-like jumble of images; and the strange alliance of a pervasive cultural nostalgia (as in the costume drama or historical novel) with a cultural amnesia serving to fragment ‘time into a series of perpetual presents’. If all that now sounds familiar, this owes something to the durability of Jameson’s account of postmodernism, first delivered as a lecture in 1982 and expanded two years later into an essay for New Left Review: a 40-page sketch that caught the features of the fidgety sitter more accurately than many longer studies before and since.

via LRB · Benjamin Kunkel · Into the Big Tent.

Three..

A little review of a few chapters of Fred Jameson’s new book, Valences of the Dialectic

The first essay or introduction (it borders on both), “Three Names of the Dialectic,” is hard reading. Harder, I think, than Jameson usually is. Things get a much better in the two following chapters on Hegel, and the last chapter (or two) on Ricoeur is a masterpiece, over much quicker than you expected, like a good movie. That said, “Three Names” does excellently what many have tried and few have actually accomplished: a full-on characterization of what dialectic is about. This is, no doubt, why it is so tough, for Jameson is not concerned just with the Hegelian dialectic, but all of it–indeed, when he allows himself the luxury of just confining his analysis to just Hegel, things get more concrete (and that’s saying something, as you’ll soon see). Where Jameson particularly succeeds though is in showing, not how this diversity reduces to one particular thing we can clearly grasp–the dialectic, which is only the first name of the dialectic in this first chapter–but just how diverse this old thing really is. By spraying dialectic around, then sluicing it in certain directions–indeed showing us many dialectics (dialectic prefaced with the indefinite article is the second name) the whole thing seems much richer, more expansive, more exciting, than the old definitions we carried in our heads before picking up the book.

Read the rest at Working notes: Three names.

Marx

Although many use this expression, no one seems to have bothered actually to have read The Eighteenth Brumaire. Marx was not merely coining bons mots, he actually meant something when he wrote this. The two events Marx was talking about were first, the French Revolution, which he took to extend from 1789 to 1814, and second, the French Revolution of 1848-1852, of which The Eighteenth Brumaire is a history.

Marx follows this famous line about tragedy and farce with one almost equally famous: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.” This also used to be quoted often, but now isn’t, I suspect because it makes some people uneasy to suggest that men make their own history. After all, if they get the idea that they can do something, they might decide to make something other than what the rulers have in mind. Marx is not treating history as a scientific phenomenon worthy of observation. Science is a discipline that postulates the impossibility of acting with a purpose. It expunges purposes from the pantheon of causes. Marx, a firm believer in human action, that is action with a purpose, is trying to explain its difficulties. People often take the farce line to mean that the first time, the tragic one, is serious, and the second, farcical one, is a kind of joke. But Marx is making the point that whenever people want to act they usually can only act in a pattern taken from the past. People act in a way that they know. Thus the first French Revolution took on the trappings of Rome to bring about the Bourgeois Revolution. Once the revolutionaries overthrew the ancien régime, the Roman garb came off and they settled down to moneymaking in a world free of the complicated obligations and ties of the ancien régime. The Revolution of 1848 imitated the Revolution of 1789 precisely because it was not a “real” revolution. For whereas the Revolution of 1789 threw off its Roman costume once it had accomplished itself in the abolition of the ancien régime, the Revolution of 1848 continued to imitate the earlier revolution because it had so little to accomplish: it was a farcical revolution. In the end it all vanished behind Louis Napoleon’s conjurer’s handkerchief.

Robespierre

Read more via Swans Commentary: The First Time As Tragedy, by Michael Doliner – mdolin48.

Waking the dead

Terry Eagleton

For Walter Benjamin, history was more than a series of dispassionate facts. He showed how the struggle for the past shapes our future

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open. Benjamin thought that the past could be transformed by what we do in the present. Not literally transformed, of course, since the one sure thing about the past is that it does not exist.

There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it. Napoleon will be squat and Einstein shock-haired to the end of time. Nothing in the future can alter the fact that Benjamin himself, a devout Jew, committed suicide on the Franco-Spanish border in 1940 as he was about to be handed over to the Gestapo. Short of some literal resurrection, the countless generations of men and women who have toiled and suffered for the benefit of the minority – the story of human history to date, in fact – can never be recompensed for their wretched plight.

What Benjamin meant was that how we act in the present can change the meaning of the past. The past may not literally exist (any more than the future does), but it lives on in its consequences, which are a vital part of it. Benjamin also thought this about works of art. In his view, the meaning of a work of art is something that evolves over time. Great poems and novels are like slow-burning fuses. As they enter into new, unpredictable situations, they begin to release new meanings that the author himself could not have foreseen, any more than Goethe could have foreseen commercial television. For Benjamin, it is as though there are meanings secreted in works of art that only come to light in what one might call its future. Every great drama, sculpture or symphony, like every individual person, has a future that helps to define what it is, but which is beyond its power to determine.

More at:

New Statesman – Waking the dead.

Alain Badiou

Thank you for being here today. It’s a real brave gesture to talk of Communism just after the victory of Barak Obama and when there is a violent crisis of capitalism. However, to do that in a theater in New York is magnificent.

 

I begin by two very different things. On the one hand some very abstract definitions, on the other hand some very concrete points in concern with the victory of Obama. And it’s from the point of view of the position between the two, philosophical definitions and concrete study of contemporary thought, that I shall introduce the old word Communism.

 

So first the definitions. I name ‘event’, a rupture in the normal disposition of bodies and normal ways of a particular situation. Or if you want, I name ‘event’ a rupture of the laws of the situation. So, in its very importance, an event is not the realization/variation of a possibility that resides inside the situation. An event is the creation of a new possibility. An event changes not only the real, but also the possible. An event is at the level not of simple possibility, but at the level of possibility of possibility.

 

I name ‘state’ or ‘state of the situation’ the system of constraints, which precisely limit the possibility. For example today I name the state of our situation, capitalist economy, constitutional form of government, veridical laws about the order of labor, army, police, and so on – all that composes the state of our situation. The state defines what is possible and what isn’t. So an event is always something which happens beyond the state. And therein lies the difference between an event and a simple fact.

 

I name ‘truth procedure’ or ‘truth’ an organization of consequences of an event. The process or the fact of naming the process of what follows an event.

 

And I name ‘facts’ the consequences of the existence of the state.

 

So the truth is not purely composed of facts. It’s my own position to complete. The truth is also the becoming of the new subject, the new collective subject, when the event is political. Concerning this new collective subject, I can speak of the creation of the truth. Concerning the state, I can speak of historical facts. For example, the revolution of October 1917 in Russia is the creation of a new political truth. In the same country, the victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany in 1945 is a historical fact. Towards the same history, which happens at times from an event and at times from a historical fact.

 

And finally a historical point. In fact when it transforms the relationship between the identities of individuals and the identity of the power. For example when Lula became the president of Brazil, it was a simple fact and not an event of historical transcendence. Because it was the first time a simple worker occupied the head of the state.

 

Identities like ‘worker’, ‘gay’, ‘black’, ‘woman’, ‘Jew’, ‘youth’, ‘small’, ‘red-haired’, etc., are of no importance in the true political being which is universal or general. But the relationship between these predicates, this identity and the power, can be of some simple value concerning the action of the state.

 

With all that in mind we can say some words about the great victory of Obama, though it is impossible for me to say anything concerning a fact, here and today. First, and I hope it’s not too sad for you, it’s clear that Obama’s victory is not a political event. To hard comparison, with the same feel for the movement of the civil rights, under the direction of Martin Luther King during the 60s, has been a great popular event. But the success of Obama is for the moment, of the moment, straight inside the apparatus of the state, the great capitalist economy, huge social inequalities, the war outside in Afghanistan, etc, two political parties. So Obama’s victory is a fact – maybe an important fact – of the history of the state, but not, at least for the time being, a political event.

 

Second, Obama’s victory is certainly a very important symbolic point of the state, of the history of the state. The development of this real from Africa – of black people, in the name of slavery, of cultural domination, of racism and poverty – is an enormous event, a strong symbol, and not only for African Americans, but also for humanity as such.

 

But the symbolic level of the state is different from political truth. This strong symbol can perfectly be, at the political level, empty or even negative. The decision will be, finally, not in the hands of Obama, but in the subjective determination of the symbol. Could you accept the advice from an old philosopher, from an old country? I just can say to you, separate the levels. Don’t confuse them. Enjoy the Symbolic. Don’t trust the state. And concerning politics rely only on yourself, on the collective action.

 

But here we have a new operation: How can we be prepared for a political event? How can we believe in something which is really a political event and not a fact of the state of history? Generally, in those acts we live in a sort of political activity. We accept the general laws of the state as a necessity. To anticipate the creation of the new possibility, the possibility which is not the simple development of the state facts, at least at an intellectual or ideological level, we must have an idea of the possibility, a general idea of the possibility of a different possibility. We have the ideal of the formal possibility of other possibilities. And during more than one century, Communism has been the name of this ideal. And it was a great name at first. When we find this name which was the name of the possibility of something else, we have to return to the signification it had originally in two texts of Karl Marx’s. One is from 1844 – the manuscripts of 1844 – and the other is from 1848, the famous Manifesto of the Communist Party.

 

In these texts Communism first signified negativity. It signified that the logic of place, of the fundamental subordination of global workers to a dominating class, could be surmounted. The structure of domination, which is that of history in its antiquity, is not to be confounded. Consequently, said Marx, the oligarchic power created in the corrupt state, although they’re paying the workers in an organized situation, is not ineluctable. Other, the negative part of the word Communism. The Communist idea, the good word, and I quote… not for Marx, but as a hypothesis. The Communism hypothesis is that another collective organization can go on. Each an every one that has this, this new organization will eliminate the inequality of worth and even, for Marx, the division of work. People who were separated between manual work and intellectual work, in other words between the city and the country, each and everyone will be polyvalent workers: this is the expression in Marx’s Manifesto. The private appropriation of monstrous fortunes and their transmission of within their means by the very existence of the political state apparatus, protected by the military and the police, separated from the civil society, will no longer appear to be an obvious necessity.

 

There will be, after Marx set up, after a brief sequence of what he names the plus-value, charged with destroying working men or the poor workers, a long sequence of the organization in the ways of free association of producing wealth, which would support what Marx named the Decline of the State. And it was the most important definition of Communism, which was ‘the process of the decline of the state’.

 

Let me remind you that the state is here not only the state of government, police, army, and so on, but all that limits the possibility of collective creation.

 

So Communism in the middle of the 19th century designated the very general fact of intellectual reorganizations. And this fact is the horizon for any action, although local and limited in time, as it may be, which breaking with the order of the established state composes a fragment of the new politics, fragment of politics of mobilization. It is in short Communism, an idea whose function is regulatory and not a program. It is absurd to categorize the Communist hypothesis to be a petit objet a because it serves to produce, between different politics, lines of demarcation for a given political sequence. It is extra compatible with the hypothesis of equality with which Communism is an ideal, and it is emancipating, on the one hand, as directly opposed to the Communist identity and its reactionary stance.

 

Communism in fact is a heuristic hypothesis frequently used in politics even if the word does not appear. And so it’s a useful idea for the political determination and not the concrete program of these politics.

 

Maybe you know the violence and kinds of ferocity with Jean-Paul Sartre who, in the 50s of the last century, said that any anti-communist is a dog. If we correctly read these abrupt contents it’s true. Any action of the state, because it can, any action of the state that appears formally contradictory with the communist hypothesis in the general sense must be judged as opposed to the recognition of the goal of humanity. And so it’s opposed to the properly united destiny of humanity.

 

As we know, the contemporality of, as we should say, capitalism, a name of social existence, as the correct name of social existence is competition. That is to say, it is the war within the capital and outside it, that the war as real is certainly the intra-human part of humanity.

 

In another interview, the same Sartre says, in such terms, I quote; “If the Communist hypothesis is not right, if it is not applicable, this means that humanity is not in itself something very different from ants or ferrets.”

 

What he is saying there is that if competition, free markets, the search for little jouissance and the walls that protect you from the desires of the weak are collectivified, the human being is not worth scum.

 

So only, to be a real actor, the real activity of the becoming-human of the human beast, we have to know the history of the Communist hypothesis. And we have to study the question: is really the Communist hypothesis right or completely wrong?

 

In fact, there are two great historical sequences of this hypothesis. And it is quite a question both of them. The sequence of the creation, the creation of the power itself and that of the first attempt to realize the theory. The first sequence begins with the French Revolution and goes to the Paris Commune. Let us say, from 1792 to 1871. The first sequence of the Communist hypothesis: it is that of the creation of the hypothesis. This sequence links (and develops) the idea of Communism as a popular mass movement with the notion of the savior of all. That is, the concrete form of the idea during this sequence, mass movement on one side and on the other side the savior of all. Because it was a mobilizing popular movement, under multiple forms – demonstrations, strikes, uprising, armed action, and so on – around the figure of overthrowing the state – we know, the state was, within its walls, not only the government, the state was the form of the reduction of possibility – it must be strong to emancipate the possibility as such. And the only possible actor of this destruction is the mass movement, and, first, the mass movement of workers. And this overthrowing of the state is an insurrectional overthrowing, which is called, as you know, revolution.

 

So finally, there is a strong lesson achieved between the Communist idea and the practical upheaval, revolution. This revolution must suppress the existing forms of society – private property, private means of ownership, the separation of humans into nations, the distribution of work, and so on – and establish Communist equality, or what the working-class thinkers of the 19th century, as my friend Jacques Rancière was so well inclined to, names the ‘community of peoples’. Communism was, by insurrection, the realization of the community of peoples.

 

This sequence closes with the astonishing newness and radical flavor of the Paris Commune in 1871. The Commune represented a different alternative, a rare combination of popular movement, working-class direction, and augmented insurrection. It showed the economy of modernism of this formula, namely who was murdered, as you know, or exercised the power of the completely new tying of two moments, in one of the largest capitals of Europe. But it also showed it for what it was worth, for it was not able either to extend the revolution to a national scale, or the capacity to organize resistance to the counter-revolution, which was entirely supported by the French middle class.

 

The second sequence of the Communist hypothesis goes from 1917, the Russian Revolution, to 1976, the end of the Cultural Revolution in China, which also marks the end of the militant youth movements in Europe and America (and Latin America of course), which arose all over the world, somewhere between 1966 and 1975, and whose center, from the point of view of political innovation, was May 1968 in Paris and consequently during the years that followed. But as you know during the late 60s we have many of the things forming political resistance to the Vietnam War in America and also the movement of the youth practically in all countries all over the world.

 

This second sequence lasts about 60 years, but notice that it is separated from the first by a gap of about the same length, more than 40 years. The history of the Communist hypothesis is not a continuous history; it’s a continuity by sequences, which are separated. It is important for us, for maybe we are right now between two sequences.

 

So this second sequence, which begins with the Russian Revolution, is dominated by one thing and it’s (betting on it): How can we be victorious? That is the somber and practically unique question during the revolution. How contrary to the Paris Commune can we endure, embracing the sanguine revelation, the rich people and their mercenaries? How can we organize the new power, the new state, in such a way that its enemies would not destroy it?

 

Lenin recognized it, since under Lenin it the first answer to this question was founded. And it’s certainly not for nothing that Lenin responded to the problem, when the insurrection lasted in Russia one day longer than the Paris Commune. This official victory and the real, what concerned Lenin were the problems of organization and indifference and was entirely contained, starting with 1902 and of course in What is to be done?, Lenin’s famous text What is to be done?, in the theory and the practice of the centralism and organization of a class party. We can say that the Communist Party only gives body in their thesis to the realization of the Communist hypothesis.

 

This construction of the second sequence of the hypothesis, the Party, actually restores the question initiated in the first sequence, the question of the victory, in Russia, in China, in Albania, in Korea, in Vietnam, and sometimes in Cuba, and thus gives directions to the Communist Party, the complete revolution of the political and social order at once.

 

After the first sequence, whose dividing line was the formulation of the Communist hypothesis, and of the reality of the movement, of the mass movement, there was effectively a second sequence whose very line was a harsh and militaristic organization, local victory, duration, and construction of the new state.

 

As it is known, the second sequence created in its turn a program that did not have the means to dissolve, with the result that apparently it did not solve the problem left by the first. And in fact, the Party, the Communist Party, which was the body of the Communist hypothesis, the Communist Party adapted to the insurrectional and military history that was successful against fighting their supporters, opposed to the inept, for the construction of the State around the dictatorship of the proletariat in the sense of Marx. That is, a state organizing the transition towards another state. The power of organizing the non-powered, the dialectical form of the decline of the state. Under the form of the party-state – like in Russia, China, and other places – a new form of state, which was authoritarian and imperialist, was instated. And this state was negative, very far from the practical law of the people, and very far from the ideal of the decline of the state. The deployment of, as some would have put it, violence, was in no recognition in the state of the inertia of its internal bureaucracy. When the peasant has competition imposed on him by a mercenary, with the army taking more than its share to demonstrate it, you would never win.

 

The most important contemporary problem is that the political form of the party does not equate with the certain reorganization and the creative transformation of the Communist hypothesis. And it is to this problem that participated the last important contributions of the second sequence. The Cultural Revolution in China and its neighbor Russia, is named, for example, after Mao. In China, Mao’s maxim on this point was: No Communism without the Communist movement. No Communism is without the Communist movement. The party is not sufficient: if you don’t have the movement, you have nothing at all – if any cause can be taken in the name of, to resonate, to develop the power of the state, and consequently the combination of the real world, the Cultural Revolution attempted to start, and quickly becomes cowardly and violent. The definition of the enemy, being either uncertain or directed against the unity – the whole of society, the Communist Party – Mao has something to do with this when he declares, and I quote: “We do now know, in our country, where the movement is, or whether the movement is in the Communist Party.”

 

So, the struggle was finally between the party and the facts. And it destroyed the social consistency. Finally, the old order had to be re-established in the worst conditions. In France, after May 68, the dominating motif was that the organized collective action should create new political space, and not reproduce the centralized management of the state. The reinvigorated content would be new forms of organization and action, enveloping the same political divisions, intellectuals and workers, and proposing the prolongation of the Communist hypothesis even beyond the logic of size or of power. There is an event that even if this experience were under new forms, at the end of May 68, it would be considered that on the whole the modern form of the reactionary state was once again dominant in markets, under the cover of democracy.

 

The word Communism is today a completely forgotten word, only practically identified with a lost experience. It is why the political situation, and the ideological situation are so confusing. Because in fact, the Communist hypothesis, with or without the word Communism, which is only a word, you can speak, for example of the egalitarian hypothesis or the hypothesis of radical equality or whatever, but all that remains of the right hypothesis, the right to think an idea of new possibilities, and not only of realization of old possibilities inscribed in the state. I see no hope. If this hypothesis must be ours, once more we need new words. But we know better to do anything whatsoever as far as the collective action is concerned. Without the horizon of equality and Communism, without this idea, nothing in historical and political revolution is of the nature to interest the philosopher. Let everyone mind his own business and talk no more about it.

 

In fact, what has become of it, or we can even say our ‘philosophical duty’, is to contribute with finding a new mode of existence of the hypothesis we have, new kinds of political organization this hypothesis can give rise to. We have learned from the second sequence and its fateful failure, we must return to the conditions of existence of the Communist hypothesis, and not only to perfect the means of our struggle.

 

The lesson of the second sequence is that the question of victory cannot be the center of our sequence. We have, and we must, experience something new, and, there is, after the resistance, the question of the power. What is the politics which is not to be confused with the question of the power? That is, the real one. We cannot be satisfied with the dialectic situation between the state and the mass movement, with the preparation of the insurrection, with the construction of the power pool and dialectic organization, with the concept of revolution, which today is obscure. We must, in reality, reestablish first the hypothesis, communist or egalitarian, with the ideological or militant fit. And with respect to this, we are closer to the powers already in mind in the 19th century. There we are with the history of the revolution of the last century. We are much closer to the 19th century than to the last century. In the dialectical division of history we have, sometimes, to move ahead of time.

 

Just like maybe after 1840, we are now confronted with absolutely cynical capitalism, more and more inspired by the ideas that only work backwards: poor are justly poor, the Africans are underdeveloped, and that the future with no discernable limit belongs to the civilized bourgeoisie of the Western world. All kinds of phenomena from the 19th century reappear, extraordinarily extended forms of misery within these countries themselves. Forever growing in inequality, the radical cut between the people of the working classes, of the uninformed, and the middle class, the complete dissolution of political power in the service of property and capitalist profits. Several years of ratiocination, disorganization of revolutionaries, and the nihilist despair of large portions of the youth, the servility of the large majority of them, and the experience of the base obsequiousness of formal groups in the quest of the contemporary means to establish, re-establish, find new definitions for the Communist hypothesis.

 

All these characteristics are very close to the political situation which was dominant in Europe in the middle of the 19th century. Which is why the apparent victory of capitalism, occasion to the second sequence of the Communist hypothesis, had been, in fact, a very strong reaction, a very strong return to something very old. The politicization of contemporary capitalism is as you see the return to the cynical capitalism of the 19th century. And it is probably why after the 19th century the question is not for us the victory of the Communist hypothesis, but the conditions of its identity. Our problems are much more the problems of Marx than the problems of Lenin, and that was the great question of the revolutionaries of the 19th century.

 

First, did the historical existence of the hypothesis produce the conditions in a large nation of people and that we are not made prisoners by the very definition of the word uttered by our enemies? Even historical resistance to the hypothesis, where there is a lot of power, is that, sort of identified here, that is oppressing us. It is complex, but at the moment exciting too. By combining conflicts of thought because at the beginning we are dealing with a new form of an instance or idea, there is a weight to the constructions of thought, like the construction of a new form of dialectic by Marx. These constructions of thought are always normal and universal. But we are also with new political experimentations, which are local and singular, and the mixture of the two may constitute a thought at the universal level, with political experimentation at the local or singular level, which finally can produce the new form: the Communist hypothesis.

 

This existence must be, throughout history, in consciousness, by new forms of these organizations of what is the political event, and on the level by the result and by learning of local experimentation. So we can open the third sequence of this great time, we can. And if we can, we must.

 

Thank you.

From lacan.com

MARX AND MONTAGE

It is always good to have a new Kluge, provided you know what lies in store for you. His latest film, News from Ideological Antiquity—some nine hours long—is divided into three parts: I. Marx and Eisenstein in the Same House; II. All Things are Bewitched People; III. Paradoxes of Exchange Society. [1]Capital, whereas in fact only Kluge’s first part deals with this tantalizing matter. The rumour has been spread by the same people who believe Eisenstein actually wrote a sketch for a film on Capital, whereas he only jotted down some twenty pages of notes over a half-year period. [2]Ulysses during much the same time and ‘planned’ a film on it, a fact that distorts their fantasies about the Capital project as well. Yet if Eisenstein’s notes for film projects all looked like this until some of them were turned into ‘real’—that is to say, fiction or narrative—films, it is only fair to warn viewers that Kluge’s ‘real’ films look more like Eisenstein’s notes. Rumour has it that Kluge has here filmed Eisenstein’s 1927–28 project for a film version of Marx’s And at least some of these people know that he was enthusiastic about Joyce’s

Many important intellectuals have—as it were, posthumously—endorsed Marxism: one thinks of Derrida’s Spectres of Marx and of Deleuze’s unrealized Grandeur de Marx, along with any number of more contemporary witnesses to the world crisis (‘we are all socialists now’, etc.). Is Kluge’s new film a recommitment of that kind? Is he still a Marxist? Was he ever one? And what would ‘being a Marxist’ mean today? The Anglo-American reader may even wonder how the Germans in general now relate to their great national classic, with rumours of hundreds of Capital reading groups springing up under the auspices of the student wing of the Linkspartei. Kluge says this in the accompanying printed matter: ‘The possibility of a European revolution seems to have vanished; and along with it the belief in a historical process that can be directly shaped by human consciousness’. [3] That Kluge believes in collective pedagogy, however, and in the reappropriation of negative learning processes by positive ones, in what one might call a reorientation of experience by way of a reconstruction of ‘feelings’ (a key or technical term for him): this is evident not only in his interpretive comments on his various films and stories, but also in such massive theoretical volumes as his Geschichte und Eigensinn—History and Obstinacy—written in collaboration with Oskar Negt.

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New Left Review – Fredric Jameson: Marx and Montage.

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