Communist Realism

The Big Other Finally Noticed

2009-04-11T09:58:00.007+01:00

The systematic cover-up by London police - with the passive cooperation of most of the mainstream print and broadcast media - of the circumstances leading to the death of Ian Tomlinson during the April 1st G20 spectacle protest in London should come as no surprise. A full six days elapsed before the Guardian released video footage filmed by, ironically, an American bond-dealer tourist, during which time the police and their 'watchdog' predictably sought to displace blame onto others, from Tomlinson himself (the myth of the self-implicating 'heart attack') to protesters (interfering with medics' attempts to revive Tomlinson) to the media ( The IPCC alsatian attempting to restrain the Guardian from publishing details of Tomlinson being attacked by police minutes before his 'natural' death because it would 'upset Tomlinson's parents'). They almost succeeded.

The Guardian's Paul Lewis summarizes the chronology of events:

How the story changed ...

Wednesday April 1. Ian Tomlinson, 47, a newspaper vendor, collapses and
dies at the G20 protests. In a statement that night, the Metropolitan police
says that medics were temporarily impeded from helping him as "a number of
missiles - believed to be bottles - were being thrown at them".

Thursday April 2. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC)
says it will "assess the circumstances".

Friday April 3. A postmortem finds that Tomlinson died of a heart
attack. The Guardian contacts City of London police - tasked with conducting the
investigation into Tomlinson's death on behalf of the IPCC - and says it has
obtained photographs of him lying on the pavement at the feet of riot
police.

Sunday April 5. The Guardian's photographs are published, along with
the testimony of three named witnesses who describe him being hit with a baton
or thrown to the ground by police. The IPCC criticises the Guardian for
upsetting Tomlinson's family. It tells other journalists that there is "nothing
in the story" that he had been assaulted by an officer.

Monday April 6. The IPCC confirms Tomlinson had contact with police. It
continues to "manage" an investigation conducted by City police, some of whose
officers were pictured at the site of Tomlinson's alleged assaults.

Tuesday April 7. At 2am, the Guardian receives video footage that
clearly shows Tomlinson was hit with a baton and pushed to the floor by a riot
officer. That afternoon, it publishes the footage on its website and hands a
dossier of evidence to the IPCC.

Wednesday April 8. The IPCC reverses its decision to allow City police
to investigate the death.

Thursday April 9. The Met suspends the officer shown in the footage; 48
hours on, he has still not been questioned by the IPCC.

Friday April 10. Tomlinson's father says he believes the police acted
with excessive force

What is increasingly clear from all the video footage and the eyewitness reports, is that Tomlinson cracked his head against the concrete pavement after being knocked over by a cop (one eyewitness 'winced' upon hearing the sound), while the rushed postmortem that concluded that his death was the result of a 'heart attack' has already been discredited: the freelance pathologist called in by the police turns out to be an incompetent loon, having previously, among other bizarre determinations, also attributed the death of a murdered woman to a 'heart attack', a finding that enabled the unstable suspect to be released to murder yet another two women.

The indifference to Tomlinson's death of much of the media, especially the BBC, prior to the wide release of the watershed video comes on the heels of their seeming acceptance of Section 76 of the Terrorism Act, which is being increasingly invoked to ban all photographing of police activity, of officers, of their vehicles, of their buildings, and in spite of this recent protest against the ban outside Scotland Yard headquarters by hundreds of NUJ photographers:

The risk now is that what K-punk describes as the romance of a politics of failure will escalate further, the libidinal investments intensified, with state power more rigidly and obscenely implementing the 'Terrorism Act' against protesters while the reflexively impotent acting-out of the protesters themselves continues serving to postpone their giving up on "the gratification of displaying wounds inflicted by the police as signs of grace, evidence that we are on the side of the Good" while further elevating the spectacle of a 'feelgood simulation of politics' devoid of any direct political organization that acts without the need for recognition or permission from the Big Other.

Fail Again. Fail Better: Another Conference. And Another.

2009-04-07T23:14:00.005+01:00

I have a boring suggestion.

Could the next venue for a 'radical' conference please be at the site of antagonism, at the site of a factory, office, corporate, or state-body occupation? Or how about its prestigious deliberations being presented at the participants' local bank branch? Or a 'job centre'/unemployment office? An 'event' rather than a cosily rarefied academic-rivalry non-event? A simple token of cross-fertilization, of connectivity? A little immanence. Or is the impossible still impossible?

Radical Philosophy Conference, Central London, 9 May 2009

Power to the People?

`Power to the people!’ was once a revolutionary slogan, but reference to government by the people and for the people soon became an empty cliché of the post-revolutionary status quo (see above - Citizen Smith as commentary on fidelity?). The people has become a notoriously ambiguous and contested term, for which numerous alternatives have been proposed: the proletariat, the workers, the masses, the soviets, the nation, the community, the multitude, the commons… And now? How might we assess the different conceptions of political change embodied in these often conflicting ideas? What is the political and philosophical significance of `the people’ today?

Plenary (chair: Peter Osborne, RP)
`They, the People’ - Gayatri Spivak (Columbia University, NY)

The General Will (chair: Peter Hallward, RP)
‘The General Will on the Street’ - David Andress (Portsmouth)
‘How Do the People Make Themselves Heard?’ - Sophie Wahnich (CNRS, Paris)

Urban Collectivities (chair: David Cunningham, RP)
‘Urban Intersections and the Politics of Anticipation’ - AbdouMaliq Simone (Goldsmiths)`Urbanism and the Post-Political’ - Erik Swyngedouw (Manchester)
Population & Biopolitics (chair: Stuart Elden, Durham)
‘Biopolitics, Diasporas and (Neo)Liberal Political Economy’ - Couze Venn (Nottingham Trent)
‘Feminist Strategies Revisited – Sexopolitics, Multitude and Biopolitics’ - Encarnacion Gutierrez Rodriguez (Manchester)

Class, Commons & Multitude (chair: Esther Leslie, RP)‘Crisis, Tragedies and the Commons’ - Massimo De Angelis (UEL)

£25/£10 unwaged
Registration and further details: matt.charles@blueyonder.co.uk
Cheques payable to `Radical Philosophy Ltd’ should be sent to: Radical Philosophy Conference, Peter Osborne, CRMEP, Middlesex University, Trent Park Campus, Bramley Rd, London N14 4YZ

Via IT.

---- Turin, 1920: factory occupation.

And Another ...

IMMANENCE AND MATERIALISM CONFERENCE

DEPARTMENT OF POLITICS> QUEEN MARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

CALL FOR PAPERS
Date: 23 June 2009>
Venue: Queen Mary, University of London>
Call for papers deadline: 22 May 2009
All papers and enquiries to: s.j.choat@qmul.ac.uk

Keynote speakers:
Professor James Williams (University of Dundee)
Dr Ray Brassier (American University of Beirut)
Dr Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths, University of London)

The concepts of immanence and materialism are becoming increasingly important in political philosophy. This conference seeks to analyse the connections between these two concepts and to examine the consequences for political thought. It is possible, as Giorgio Agamben has done, to make a distinction within modern philosophy between a line of transcendence (Kant, Husserl, Levinas, Derrida) and a line of immanence (Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Foucault). If we follow this distinction, then 'the line of immanence' might include Spinozist interpretations of Marx, Althusser's aleatory materialism, and Deleuze's superior empiricism. But what is the value of this work and is it useful to distinguish it from 'transcendent' philosophies? Distinctions between materialism and idealism are equally complex: Derrida, for example, might as easily be classed a materialist as an idealist. And where can we place more recent work like the critiques of Deleuze by Badiou and Zizek, or Meillassoux's speculative materialism?

Papers may wish to consider the following questions:

-What is materialist philosophy? How can it be distinguished from idealist philosophy, and is it useful to do so? Are all philosophies of immanence necessarily materialist?
-Is it legitimate or useful to make a clear distinction between philosophies of immanence and philosophies of transcendence?
-How have the concepts of immanence and materialism traditionally been conceived within political philosophy?
-What, if any, are the political consequences of pursuing a philosophy of immanence?

Paper titles and a 300-word abstract should be sent by Friday 22 May> 2009 to Simon Choat at s.j.choat@qmul.ac.uk, Department of Politics,> Queen Mary.>> Graduate papers welcome.

Via No Useless Leniency. [Graham Harman will be there with his new USB microscope, Levi Bryant with his bumber crop of cucumbers, and Dejan with 'his' latest trans-gender photoshop application ...].

----------------

"How did the ideology of Enlightenment evolve in the 18th century France? First,
there was the epoch of salons, in which philosophers where trying to shock their
benefactors, the generous Counts and Countesses, even Kings and Emperatrices
(Holbach Frederick the Great, Diderot Catherine the Great), with their "radical"
ideas on equality, the origin of power, the nature of men, etc. - all of this
remaining a kind of intellectual game. At this stage, the idea that someone
could take these ideas literally, as the blueprint for a radical socio-political
transformation, would probably shock the ideologists themselves who were either
part of the entourage of an enlightened nobleman or lone pathetic figures like
Rousseau - their reaction would have been that of Ivan Karamazov, disgusted upon
learning that his bastard half-brother and servant acted on his nihilistic
ruminations, killing his father. This passage from intellectual game to an idea
which effectively "seizes the masses" is the moment of truth - in it, the
intellectual gets back his own message in its inverted/true form. In France, we
pass from the gentle reflections of Rousseau to the Jacobin Terror; within the
history of Marxism, it is only with Lenin that this passage occurs, that the
games are REALLY over. And it is up to us to repeat this same passage and
accomplish the fateful step from the ludic "postmodern" radicalism to the domain
in which the games are over."

-----Slavoj Zizek, Repeating Lenin.

Nancy On The Word

2009-03-30T19:20:00.002+01:00

Communism, the Word
Jean-Luc Nancy
Notes for the London Conference
Birbeck College

Not the word before the notion, but the word as notion and as historical agent.

"Communism" is a word with a strange story. It is very difficult to rigorously trace its origin. Nevertheless, it is sure that the word "communist" existed already in the XIVth century, with the meaning of "people having in common a property belonging to the category of main morte – that is, not being submitted to the law of heritage": a monastery belongs to the community of the Monks, which is, as community, independent from the individuals. It seems that at the same time and even before, from the XIIth century, the same word designated some aspects of communal law and was linked to the communal movement which expanded as the beginning of a bourgeoisie.

Later, namely in the XVIIIe century, the word appears in a text written by Victor d'Hupay de Fuveau in 1785 – four years before the French revolution. It designates the project or the dream to found a community of life – which precisely is supposed to replace that of the Monks.

Here for example a quotation of d'Hupay :

Cette union et cette communauté de régime moral économique serait praticable par pelotons, dans tous les états, sans confondre les fortunes, eu égard au juste mérite de divers talents, moyen que n'avaient point encore voulu admettre les Zélateurs de la République de Platon. Elle fortifierait l'amitié humaine dans chaque profession, en excluant toute vaine et extérieure distinction, odieuse dans une même classe de Citoyens: rivalité puérile qui confond et entraîne ensemble tous les états à leur ruine et à tous les crimes. Tel fut l'abus funeste auquel remédia par ses simples Lois Somptuaires le bon Roi Idomenée, modèle de nos deux Henris. Les Agapes des premiers Chrétiens tendaient au même but, en réunissant les Hommes dans cet esprit de simplicité le plus propre à maintenir la paix et la religion. Il appartiendrait donc à un Prince qui voudrait mieux mériter le titre de Père de la Patrie, que tous ceux encore qui ont favorisé l'établissement des Moines, devenus inutiles aujourd'hui, placent ces vrais et nouveaux Modèles de tous les états, chacun relativement à leur fonction, dans les divers Monastères qui se dépeuplant tous les jours, semblent attendre une meilleure destination.

D'Hupay was a a friend of Restif de la Bretonne's, who is known to be the first to present, among the several kinds of government, the "communism or communauté." In his autobiography (Monsieur Nicolas), he expounds it as one among nine types of government and writes this one is only effective for some people of South America, who "work together in the morning and play together in the afternoon" (this is not very different from what Marx says in German Ideology).

A short time later, at the time of the French Revolution, (and this is well known), Gracchus Babeuf, taking part in the first "Commune insurectionnelle de Paris", used several times the word "communautariste" in the context of his thought about the Egaux and the phrase communauté nationale.

Beside the explicit use of the word, we have to remember how other nouns designated the same thing, for example in the doctrine of the English "Diggers" of the XVIth century, who spoke of the land as a "common treasure" and who belonged to the time of the first English Revolution, which ended with the creation of the first Republic under the name of Commonwealth which had at the time almost the meaning of res publica.

Actually, those historical data are unable to give us the origin and the meaning – or, even better, the sense – of "communism". No history, no etymology either, can produce anything like sense.

But there is something we may understand from those data: something has been at stake with this word, with the invention of it and with the attempt or the need which was involved in it. Something – which is still in front of us, which is still to be discovered, or which is still to come.

Communism – the word, again. The word as presence, as feeling, as sense (more than meaning).

To a certain extent, it seems strange that the inquiry or commentary about this word should be so rare. As if it were always considered as self-evident… It is, in a way – but in which way, this deserves a little more reflection …

Even if history is not enough to explain what we could call the "destiny" of this word, something seems to be positive : community - koinonia, communitas - emerges at times of profound social transformations and/or trouble or even destructions of social order. This is the case at the time before the Christian era as well as at the final time of feudalism or later at the time of the first industrial revolution. The first time was that of the transformation of the whole social and cultural structure of the antique world - that is, the final achievement of what had opened his antique world itself : the deconstruction of agrarian culture and of theocracy. Such a deconstruction makes clear, or pushes to the foreground what was hidden under or inside the construction : that is, the togetherness of people (admittedly, even of people with every other being like animals, plants, even stars and stones…). Before and out of the Greek - occidental - moment, the togetherness is given first. We call that "holistic society", supposing that such society understands itself as a holon, that is a whole. To the whole we oppose the parts - as parts taken out of their whole - or a togetherness of several wholes - that is, of individuals. In both representations the same question arises : what becomes of togetherness when a whole is not given, and perhaps even not to be given in any way ?

Thus arises koinônia or I would say the drive to it, the drive to community. It comes or it emerges, perhaps it constitutes itself because what it calls, what it names or designates is not or is no longer given.

Certainly, many important features or trends of common life – or, to be more precise, life in common - are already given with the first kind of mankind, as certainly as precisely the first kind of mankind is or has never been an individual but a group, a gathering of many. But as far as we can see, something of the togetherness is given - and is given with or through an aspect of the whole, of totality (which has nothing to do with what has been called totalitarianism).

If togetherness is given without this aspect, that is, if it is given as a society - an association instead of, say, an integration like the family, the tribe, the clan - then the association as such opens a questioning about its own possibility and its own consistency: how is it possible to associate those who seem not to want it or even to reject it. Society then is what its members - the socii - have to accept and to justify. Communitas on the contrary, or communio, is invented as the idea of what justifies by itself the presence and even the existence of its members.

Communism is togetherness - the Mitsein, the being-with - understood as the belonging to existence of the individuals, which means, in the existential meaning, to their essence. Society means an unessential - even if necessary - link between individuals who are, in the final analysis, essentially separate.

(I will not enter into the analysis of the word socialism neither in general nor in Marx's text. As we know, for several historical reasons but as well - this is my belief – on account of the strength and depth of the meaning of the word (of the image, of the symbol), communism alone took and kept the force of more than a political choice, a political line and a party.

This, for me, is the point : communism says more and says something else than a political meaning. It says something about property. Property is not only the possession of goods. It is precisely beyond (and/or behind) any juridical assumption of a possession. It is what makes any kind of possession properly the possession of a subject, that is properly an expression of it. Property is not my possession: it is me.

But me, I, never exists alone. It exists essentially with other existing beings. The with is no external link, it is no link at all : it is togetherness - relation, sharing, exchange, mediation and immediation, meaning and feeling. The with has nothing to do with what is called collective. Collectivity means collected people : that is, people taken together from anywhere to the nowhere of the collectivity or of the collection. The co- of collective is not the same as that of communism. This is not only a matter of etymology (munire versus ligare) . This is a matter of ontology : the co- of collectivism is a mere external "side by side" which implies no relationship between the sides or between the parts of this "partes extra partes".

The co- of a communism is another one. It is, in the terms used by Heidegger about the mit of the Mitsein, not a categorical but an existential with (mit, co-). A categorical one means, in a more or less kantian way, that it is merely formal and does nothing more than distinguish between with and without (you are here with me, but you could be here without me ; it does neither disturb the fact you are here, nor the fact that you are you as I am me). An existential with implies that neither you nor me are the same together or separate. It implies that the with belongs to the very constitution or disposition or as you may wish to call it - say : to the being of us. And there is more to it : only in this case is it allowed to speak of a "we" - or still better : only in this case is it possible that a we comes to be spoken. Or even better: if the we can only and each time be a speech act, then only a we existentially spoken may perform its significance (what is exactly this significance is another matter : for now, I note only that it implies a relationship, not a mere side-by- side).

(Another parenthesis - sorry ! It is not sure that there is, absolutely, something like "a mere side-by-side". Side-by-side is already taken in a relationship. But we may discuss this point later.)

By putting together the various arguments I have used so far, I can say : communism is the speech act of existence as it is ontologically being-in-common. This speech act claims (for) the ontological truth of the common, that is the relation - which ultimately is nothing else than sense.

(I can come back later or elsewhere on this identity of sense and relation - as well as the identity of truth and existential co-)

Further : the truth of the common is property. Property does not mean only the possession or the belonging. In a reverse way, one should rather say that possession or belonging may only be truly understood and determined if property is first understood.

Marx wanted to open the way for a property he calls "individual property" just as distinct from "private property" as from "collective property". Private and collective refer both only to the realm and to the category of law. The law knows only the formal and external links. Individual property means : property which is proper to the proper subject (we may call it "person" or even, as Marx does in this passage "individual").

Subject means the capacity of what we could call "properness" : the way to enter a relationship or to engage in a link, an intercourse, a communication, which has nothing to do with possessing something (but may be possible as well with things, objects). I am proper in so far as I commit myself as well as I communicate, that is, as the word makes clear, I am in the common (which in English can be the name for the common or communal place), I am made of it, by it, to it. Freud is the best way to understand it: as he states, the I or the ego is only a small disk, almost a point, emerging at the surface of the large it which is the totality of the other being of the world. Even in solitude, I am made of the whole world as it takes with "me" or as "me" a new singular point of sensitivity.

Communism, therefore, means the common condition of all the singularities of subjects, that is of all the exceptions, all the uncommon points whose network makes a world (a possibility of sense). It does not belong to the political. It comes before any politics. It is what gives to politics an absolute requirement: the requirement to open the common space to the common itself - that is neither to the private nor to the collective, neither to separation nor to totality - but without permitting any political achievement of the common itself, any kind of making a substance of it. Communism is a principle of activation and limitation of politics.

At this point it becomes necessary to question the -ism. Any -ism implies a system of representation, and a kind of ideologization (in the marxian meaning as well as in the arendtian meaning of ideology). Cartesianism is the ideologization of Descartes's original drive.

I do not want to go into the question of historical or so-called, so oddly called real communism. Communism is still exposed to the jeopardy of becoming an ideology and should lose its -ism. The word is commun without -ism. Not even commun - common, kommune, any thing that could be taken as something like a form, a structure, a representation - but com. The Latin preposition cum taken as the universal pre-position, the presupposition of any existence.

This is not politics, this is metaphysics or, if you prefer, this is ontology : to be is to be cum. (At the very moment I am writing this, I am surrounded by a singing crowd of futbol aficionados on a plaza in Madrid : there is there a multitude of symbols, problems, feelings about the common) But it asks politics this question : how is it to think about society, government, law, not with the aim of achieving the cum, the common, but only with the hope of letting it come and take its own chance, its own possibility of making sense – if, as I wish to suggest, any sense is necessarily common sense or, if not "common sense" in the common meaning of the word, then in the meaning that any sense is made of communication, of sharing or exchange. But of an exchange which is not an exchange of possessions, but an exchange of property : where my property becomes proper by its own commitment ; sometimes this is called "love", "friendship", sometimes "faithfulness", sometimes "dignity", sometimes "art", sometimes "thought", sometimes even "life" and "sense of life" – under all those names there is nothing else than a commitment to the common.

***

If the question of communism is the question of property - namely, the question of neither collective nor private property but of individual as well as common property, then it raises a double question :

1). what does it mean to be both "individual" and "common" ? How are we to understand "the individuality of commmonness" and "the community of individualness" ?

2). how are we to think of wealth and poverty in the realm of common-individual property?

To the first question I would like to answer by arguing that it has to be taken in terms of singular plural, which has other implications than "individual-common" ; I do not want to address this matter here (I have already written some pages about it) ; but to say the least here I would suggest that singular-plural avoids the jeopardy of the double substantiality which may be involved in "indidual-common")

As far as the second question, namely the one concerning wealth and poverty, the issue is clear as it is obviously presented to us: wealth means to possess more than common life needs, poverty to have less. The first commun(ist) command is obviously that of justice : to give to the common what common life needs. This need at the same time is simple, evident (in a way, it is included in human rights - which nevertheless may be discussed from other points of view) - and it is nevertheless unclear : from the need to the desire or to the wish, there is no simple nor clear difference. It is then necessary to think differently. We shall not only take a first step of "needs" and their "satisfaction" - even if, of course, we shall absolutely consider a level of elementary or minimal satisfaction. But we shall as well consider that infinity is involved in each need and as the very essence of it. Need is to be taken as an impulse to get something (like bread, water or space) but as a drive toward what is not a thing, and maybe is nothing - but infinity.

At this point we are close - again… - to capitalism, that is to infinity taken as endless accumulation of things (which are all equivalent, as measured by the very possibility of accumulating them, whose name is money - money taken itself as the endless process of making money). Capitalism is endlessness instead of infinity, or infinity as endless production of capital itself.

This has been, so to speak, a choice of civilization. At one point (even if this point is extended through some centuries) the western civilization opted for endlessness. This point was the one where infinity as the absolute given in each existence changed into infinity as an endless process toward accumulation.

Of course it has been connected with a change about wealth.

Control, regulation of the market is not enough. The challenge is not only about managing the system of production-consumption

It is about the meaning of wealth. Wealth and poverty may have two quite different uses and meanings. One can be accumulation vs disaccumulation, if I may say so, or getting rich vs. impoverishment. Another can be what I would name glory vs humility. ("The Humble", the name of a virtue became the name of poor people…).

Possibly glory and humility could not even be called wealth and poverty. They are related to each other not as the plus to the minus but like, let's say, a monk in his simple frock facing a golden altar. Or myself listening to Beethoven's quartets.

Possibly this relationship, whose proper name is adoration or worship, which names a kind of prayer as well as a form of love, never took place as such in society or was always already mixed with or transformed in the opposition between wealth and poverty. Nevertheless, as a matter of fact, the couple rich/poor as such and as a philosophical as well as moral and religious theme or topic was formed precisely at the time of pre-capitalism, that is in Antiquity, between Plato - and the critique of money making sophistes - and Christ - with his strong rejection of wealth. This age has been the first, and in a sense maybe the last, time of the critique of wealth, that is of no longer thinking of it as glory. On the contrary, thinking of it as the fake brightness par excellence.

Our civilization is a schizophrenic one that thinks its own value, its main value is fake.

The question of property is the question about the proper property, which belongs to the proper "person" : that is, of the proper "wealth" (or "glory" - or, this is the same in a way, the proper "sense"). Such a proper property may only be common. As private, it makes no sense (sense for a single one is no sense at all) ; as collective it makes the same effect for the collective is a single - mechanical - unity, not the plurality of the common.

Common is the adequate word for the properness of being, if being means ontologically being "in common".

Idiot Broadcasters: Who's Medium Wants This Message?

2009-03-29T03:08:00.004+01:00

Alain Badiou being interviewed here by a lethally obnoxious (ie a 'normal' pompous twerp) BBC broadcaster.

In a BBC HARDtalk interview broadcast on 24 March 2009, Stephen Sackur talks to French socialist philospher Alain Badiou: "As the world's richest economies plunge deeper into recession could there be a whiff of revolution in the air? Alain Badiou has been an intellectual hero of France's anti-capitalist left since the Paris street protests of 1968. His recent book 'The Meaning of Sarkozy', in which he attacked the French President, has caused a storm in France. But does anyone beyond Parisian café society believe communism is the answer to the current crisis? Alain Badiou talks to Stephen Sackur."

Does anyone beyond the University of Chicago's cafeteria believe neo-liberalism, etc ...

Why haven't these ratmen been shot, yet?

Nostalgic Advertising in Defence of Object-Oriented Philosophy

2009-03-25T20:04:00.005Z

Miniature BritArt stick-people queueing at the 'tilt-shifted' Tate Modern

The prolific, effervescent speculative-realist philosopher Graham Harman over at his blog, Object-Oriented Philosophy, notices (real pictures that look fake) the increasingly Baudrillardian prophesied phenomenon of image infantilization, in this instance the by-now viral CGI practice of 'tilt-shifting', or perspectivally converting ordinary actuality photos/films into child-like scale-model visualized playthings. Soon all images may look like this in our metastasized hyper-reality. Though Dominic at Poetics coincidentally provides an example (The Little Engine That Couldn't)of an earlier attempt at achieving the opposite affects - fake videos that look real - in the video for The Smith's Ask, like the KLF before them. From the sublime to the hyper-real ...

But, returning to the subject of this post's title, this advertisement for Kit Kat chocolate bars, from the 1990s, must be the best anti-correlationist, pro-speculative realism advert I've seen to date, the real of object integrity forever receding from our chronic ego-desire to capture and grasp it. I should imagine Mr Harman would appreciate the joke):

More Reflections On The Idea of Communism Conference

2009-03-22T19:59:00.006Z

Nina at Infinite Thought has now posted up her notes from the Idea of Communism conference:

on the idea of communism, birkbeck, 13-15 March 2009, part one
on the idea of communism, birkbeck, 13-15 march, 2009, part two

Further thoughts on the conference at

Total Assault on Culture
The Commune

Shaviro On Hardt

2009-03-21T20:06:00.001Z

Michael Hardt’s talk, “The Production of the Common,” at the London conference On the Idea of Communism, summarized a lot of his ideas over the last several years in a way that I found helpful. He defined “communism” as having to do with the common — as opposed to both private property and state property. And said he wanted to put the focus on political economy and on the question of property. (This in contrast to the other speakers on his panel, Bruno Bosteels and Peter Hallward, who were both far-ranging and lucid, but foucsed rather of questions of political action and organization. Indeed, I have now gone to nine talks — with three more to come — and Hardt’s and Negri’s were the only two which so much as mentioned political economy. Quite odd for what is supposed to be a Marxism conference). I will try to summarize what Hardt said, with a little commentary.

In the 18th century, and still in the 19th when Marx wrote, capitalism was in transition from a form based mostly on immobile property, which is to say agricultural land, from which surplus was extracted in the form of rent, to a form of capitalism based on mobile property, which is to say manufacturing (since a factory can in theory be built anywhere), from which surplus was extracted in the form of profit (i.e., although Hardt didn’t express it this way, from the direct expropriation of absolute and relative surplus value). The landlords were losing out to the new industrial capitalists. Even still in Marx’s time, there were less industrial workers than there were agricultural ones, but industry was the dominant mode of production in the sense that it was the one that imposed its forms and methods of organization on all the rest (a “dominant,” as Jameson would say).

Today, Hardt said, we are in the midst of another transition, this time from industrial production to “immaterial production.” The number of workers involved in immaterial or affective production is still much smaller worldwide than the number of factory workers, etc., but immaterial production is the leading edge that imposes its forms of organization on the rest, just as industry was in the 19th century. (This, in part, was Hardt’s response to criticisms of the entire notion of immaterial production on the grounds that millions of people still work in factories, even if it is mostly today in the “underdeveloped” world instead of in the wealthy nations of the West, or global North). [Hardt didn't mention this, but his periodization fits in well with McKenzie Wark's idea of a movement from landlords to industrialists to the current "vectorial class" of the owners of property rights to "information." Hardt, like Wark, is focused on what Wark calls "the property question"].

Today, informatic or immaterial production is focused on questions of so-called “intellectual property” (this is my term, not Hardt’s), in the forms of copyright, patents, etc. A company’s physical products often have value, not because of any actual use, but because they are manifestations of a “brand” to which consumers are attracted, or with which they identify. Massive sums of money are gained from things like patents on genetic sequences, genetically modified crops, rights to copyrights on music, video, and text, to (often frivolous) patents on supposed inventions, to control of certain channels of distribution, to a company’s working methods and “trade secrets,” and so on. Even traditional hard-manufacture factories are governed by informatics, and profit comes as much or more from control of the informational organization that governs production, than from the physical items in themselves that are produced (as these latter are not sold for much above cost).

According to Hardt, all this means that immaterial production has more similarities to the pre-industrial capitalism focused on the extraction of rent than it does to the (pre-informatic, or perhaps Fordist) industrial system that focused on the extraction of surplus value as profit. The most dynamic sort of capitalist appropriation today comes in the form of a renewed “primitive accumulation,” or privatization of the common: one can see how both the patenting of genetic sequences taken from plants used by traditional cultures, and the copyrighting of “new” ideas and their expression, fits into this paradigm. This means that the struggle against capitalism must take on radically different forms, compared to those of the 19th and early 20th centuries. According to Hardt, immaterial production qua primitive accumulation is more a case of the direct appropriation of the common by capitalists, than it is one of the indirect expropriation of the common through the sale and purchase of labor power as was the case under industrial capitalism.

Now, I am largely in agreement with Hardt (and Negri, and some of the economists associated with their position, like Marazzi and even to some extent Moulier Boutang) about the transformations in capitalism over the last fifty years, and especially since the 1970s. But I am not sure I entirely accept the framework through which Hardt interprets these developments. In particular, I do not think that immaterial production involves a more “direct” expropriation of the common than was the case when industrial capitalism extracted value. It is true, as I have already said, that a lot of this new source of capital appropriation comes from a kind of “primitive accumulation” — corporations are now appropriating the commons in the form of things like genomes and songs and procedures of working, in the same way that landlords appropriated the commons of land at the time of the enclosures. But I don’t think that this is either a novelty or a reversion. It is rather the case that “primitive accumulation” never went away; it is a continual structural feature of capitalism, and was at work in the industrial age as much as it was in the agricultural stage, and as much as it is still today. Capitalism always both appropriates to itself things that it didn’t produce — and this precisely by “privatizing” them — and extracts a surplus from the processes of production that it directly initiates and supervises.
That is to say, there isn’t that great a difference between, on the one hand, how industrial capitalism imposes “cooperation” on large numbers of workers simultaneously, and draws profit from the economies of scale due to this cooperation (which is a form of relative surplus value) as much as it does from the initial inequalities built into the process of buying and selling “labor power” as a commodity (which is what Marx calls absolute surplus value); and, on the other hand, the way that immaterial capitalism today draws its profits from turning employees’ collaborative projects, and the cultural knowledge of indigenous peoples, into “intellectual property” locked under copyright and patent. In both cases, there is a double movement: on the one hand, the appropriation of what would otherwise be (or what previously was) common, and on the other hand, the transformation of that “common” precisely into a commodified form that stores or embodies congealed “labor” and that allows for the “marketization” of the product. The transformation of home knitting into manufactured clothing is not that different from the transformation of a plant with medicinal properties into a patented drug, or into a genetic sequence that can be used for controlled production of the medicine.

So, the point is that primitive accumulation and surplus-value extraction go together, both in 19th-century industrial production and in today’s immaterial production. This is why I don’t accept Hardt’s claim that production today somehow involves a less mediated and more direct appropriation of the common than was the case in the large factories of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. Primitive accumulation or appropriation doesn’t occur apart from those other techniques of the extraction of surplus value — and this is just as much true for immaterial production today as it is, and was, for industrial production.

If we are to see a difference in the capitalism of the contemporary era, this has to to with the fact that, today, capital has become even more mobile and abstract than it was in the age of heavy industry. The movement from industrial to immaterial production is an intensification of the movement from agricultural to industrial, an even further internalization of capitalist social relations, an increase in the “mobility” or “flow” of capital. Today we are coming closer than ever to the limit-condition of the real subsumption, instead of the merely formal subsumption of all of society under capital. There is less and less of an “outside” that capitalism can “primitively” accumulate, and more and more is included in the mass of what is directly managed by capital’s disciplinary and modulatory procedures. (But there is only an asymptotic approach to the absolute of “real” subsumption; such a totality is never fully achieved. There always has to be some outside that capital has not appropriated yet, and without such an outside capitalism would entirely stagnate — a point made as much by Schumpeter as by Marx).

To say that we are moving ever closer to real subsumption is equivalent to saying that now — under what Jonathan Beller calls “the cinematic mode of production” (although I think it is rather post-cinematic — which is a point I am still working on), or what Jodi Dean calls “communicative capitalism” — surplus value is extracted in the processes of distribution and consumption as well as in the process of primary production. For Marx, circulation involved the faux frais of the capitalist mode of production, and had to be subtracted from profit. But today, in an “information economy” or ‘attention economy,” circulation is itself a direct source of further profit. Hardt and Negri are correct to associate this situation with real subsumption displacing merely formal subsumption. But they seem to me to be overly opimistic when they suggest that this means that we are finally reaching the point where the “objective conditions” for communism finally exist, or that the property form has become a “fetter” on the technological means of production, a fetter that is ready to be burst asunder. It just ain’t so. Digital technologies bring with them new forms of potential liberation, certainly; but they also bring new forms of control, new potentials for micromanagement and control via continual modulation (as Deleuze says in his great article on the society of control).

Hardt said at several points that the restrictions of copyright, patent, etc., because they are privatizing the common, are thereby making immaterial or affective labor less “productive” than it could be — which isn’t altogether wrong, but also isn’t the right point to be making — since “productivity” (like “efficiency”) is a category of the private enterprise system and wouldn’t have the same meaning (certainly wouldn’t be measured in anything like the same way) in a world of communism, or of the unrestricted common. Part of the point is precisely that (as Hardt, together with Negri, says — and as Virno says as well) even the most individualized and particular acts of human invention rely so extensively on the whole past accumulation of human invention, that private property rights become absurd. I maintain my signature on this blog, for instance, but it would be utterly ludicrous for me to maintain that my ideas and words come from nowhere — in fact, they come from what I have heard and read and otherwise encountered in the society that I live in. My own personal spin on things is still a spin on what arises and exists elsewhere, or in many elsewheres. And people can make what they want of my words, including things that I absolutely detest, which disabuses me of the notion that these words are “mine” in any metaphysical, propertarian sense.

At best, my words here will become part of what Hardt beautifully called — quoting from Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts — “the production of man [sic] by man” — this by way of making the point that those early manuscripts are anything from essentialist, since they see “human nature” not as something that exists once and for all as our basis, but rather as something that human beings themselves continually remake. Our very remaking of ourselves is at stake, and this is one further reason why the relentless privatization of the common is so obscene. But I am made uneasy when Hardt also calls this remaking a process of “biopolitical production” — because, once again, I think that this characterization is only valid under the conditions of capitalist appropriation, and that it would have to be characterized differently if it were truly to be, and to remain, common. I think that more than vocabulary is at stake here; Hardt and Negri’s terminology reflects what I see as their excessive optimism about how conditions for the common have (supposedly) already been achieved in the heart of capitalism itself.

One final word, on finance. Hardt cited the current financial crisis as an instance of capital’s inability to manage its own complexities in a useful manner. But things seem to me to be a little more complicated than this. Obviously, the system is dysfunctional; and obviously, the insane proliferation of derivatives and other “arcane financial instruments” is a symptom of informatics run amok. More orthodox Marxists often say that finance is merely fictive, since it is not related to, or backed up by, any actual production. But this “ungrounded” finance itself needs to be seen as part of the infrastructure of immaterial and affective capitalism; and as an effect of immaterial and affective labor. In such a context, “fictive” does not mean unreal or ineffective — as we are currently experiencing, the effects of delirious financial capital flows are all too material and evident. This is something that needs to be theorized much more than I am able to do here. I am still trying to figure things out; I would definitely say that, for instance, Christian Marazzi’s ideas about the linguistic nature of these types of finance is inadequate. But I haven’t found anyone yet who can explain it to me, or theorize it, better.

Re-Booting Communism and the End of Philosophy

2009-03-21T14:28:00.000Z

Further commentary on the Idea of Communism conference; these impressions from Aditya Nigam at Kafila ...

Re-booting Communism Or Slavoj Zizek and the End of Philosophy - I

Today, 13 March, a whole galaxy of philosophers and theorists got together for a three-day conference "On The Idea of Communism" under the auspices of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, London University. The Conference opened to a jam-packed hall where all tickets had sold out (no jokes, this was a ticketed show where the likes of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Jean Luc-Nancy, Toni Negri, Jacques Ranciere, Terry Eagleton and many many others are to perform on the 'idea of communism'). The huge Logan hall with a capacity of about 800-900 was so packed that the organizers had made arrangements for video streaming in another neighbouring hall - and that too was half full! Very encouraging in these bleak days.

The conference began in the afternoon with brief opening remarks by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek. Badiou made his general point (see below) about the continuing relevance of the 'communist hypothesis'. Staid and philosopherly. And then, Zizek. Clearly, in the five brief minutes he spoke, he was the star - a rock star playing to the gallery and the gallery responding to him as it would to Michael Jackson (who, one of the organizers said was being given a run for his money by the communist conference, or so the Guardian said!). As a matter of fact Zizek and his audience seemed already tied in a bond of performing for each other. This once post-marxist but now relapsed marxist philosopher-theorist thundered, gesticulating with eavery word he spoke: "We must resist the temptation to act. We must refuse being told that children are dying of hunger in Africa or in the slums of India, for this is the philosophy of the present times. They don't want us to think." And he went on, amidst cheers from a hysterical audience, "We must do, you must do what Lenin did in 1915, after the war broke out, after th failure of the Social Democratic parties. He went to the library and started to read Hegel's Logic. And this conference should be our moment of reading Hegel's Logic. How much polemic is compressed in this one statement was of course evident only to Zizek followers, for he was not just making the simple point about reading and thinking as opposed to mindless 'doing' that is the mantra of our times; he was also polemiciizing against all kinds of anti-Hegelians: Althusserians, postmarxists like Laclau and Mouffe, poststructuralists, Deleuzians and so on.

The background to the conference is an ongoing exchange between Alain Badiou and Zizek on the idea of communism. Badiou's piece which kickstarted this debate appeared in the New Left Review shortly after Sarkozy's electoral victory in France. In itself a very ordinary piece, it seems to have quickly become a major reference point for Left-wing discussions as it argued - courageously in this day and age - for the continued relevance of the communist idea. Badiou argued in this piece that Communism (or what he calls the communist hypothesis whose history stretches from the revolt of Spartacus to the present) was still relevant today. It was relevant however as a regulative ideal, not as a programme and that many of its earlier beliefs (like the party-form) had become redundant. Enter, at this point, the priest of Ljubliana, the new postmodern Stalin. Zizek, it may be recalled, rapidly reinvented himself after his initial post-marxist forays into theory. He took up cudgels on behalf of Marxism and revolution, claimed to 'repeat Lenin' and unabashedly claimed that the Truth of Marxism is only visible from the truly proletarian standpoint! Lest I be misunderstood, I quote here from the man himself: "Lenin's wager today, in our era of postmodern relativism, more actual than ever is that universal truth and partisanship, the gesture of taking sides, are not only not mutually exclusive, but condition each other: in a concrete situation, its UNIVERSAL truth can only be articulated from a thoroughly PARTISAN position truth is by definition one-sided." This ccould well be said of Islam or Hindutva - that its 'universal truth' can only be articulated or grasped through the partisan standpoint of the believer. And this is merely one of the many such statements that Zizek has made including his infamous 'plea for Leninist intolerance'.

How could this Zizek accept the mild philosopherli-ness of Badiou's position? So, he entered into a debate with Badiou. Communism as a mere horizon, without a programme? Isn't this a mere Kantian regulative ideal? Truth to tell, Badiou's piece itself is pretty orthodox, philosophically speaking, but Professor Zizek would have none of that. Communism is a programme, he had proclaimed. And the backdrop for the present conference was set up.

Today's sessions had three presentations: Michael Hardt of Empire and Multitude fame, Bruno Bosteels, editor of Diacritics and Peter Hallward. Hardt's presentsation was the only one that actually dealt with the 'real world' of contemporary capitalism and spoke about the new conflicts between two forms of property - material and scarce property versus immaterial and reproducible property. Hardt argued that some passages in Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts also talk about conflict between two forms of property - immobile like land versus the new capitalist property embodied in the commodity form. He underlined the need to understand the political econ0my dimensions of contemporary transformations as also to recognize how capitalism was once again bringing forth its own 'grave-diggers'. For an otherwise sophisticated presentation, it was strange that Hardt did not find it necessary to even refer to what happened to the earlier grave-diggers and whose grave was eventually dug! Partly this was the consequence of the atmosphere that prevailed there in a mehfil of the faithful.

Other presentations were disappointing. Bruno Bosteel's because it was an orthodox restatement of the marxist-leninist position, despite repeated gestures to philosphers' like Delueze, Agamben or Foucault. Peter Hallward's entire presentation was fixated on the experience of the French revolution and Rousseau, Saint-Just and the Jacobins. At the end of the day, one marvelled at this discussion on communism in the twenty-first century which could conduct itself entirely with reference to a certain textual tradition and a certain European history. The idea of communism, if it has to have any relevance at all, can hardly be elaborated without reference to the 'real movements' of our times. The conference also displayed virtually no awareness of the fact that in our times, issues were much more complicated than mere capital-labour conflicts. Take for instance the new Left wing formation in South America where the indigenous leadership has led the re-emergence of the Left, represnting interests of indigenous people, cocoa growers and on issues such as water privatization. Islam and Empire constitute yet another pole of the contemporary which was far away from the miinds of both the speakers and the audience who asked questions (except one questioner). At which point I turned to take a look at the composition of the audience. Not one black in the audience. Some sprinkling of East Asians (four of five) and some South Asians in similar numbers.

The question then: Does this composition say something about the direction in which our thought is going? Does the radicalism of the white liberal have anything to offer to the non-white? Some years ago I had heard Alain Badiou speak in Princeton. There the audience was not communist. And it was not a ticketed show but free. There were Palestinians, north Africans and many others in the hall and Cornell West on the dias. Badiou, the French radical philosopher found himself beseiged after his talk - during the question answer session. Badiou had spoken grandly of why "9/11 was not an Event becuase it did not enunciate anything new" - a particularly Badiouan notion of event this. Half an hour into his talk, he was smuggling in old universalisms into his exposition, representing 9/11 as Evil. A woman student, possibly Palestinian, got up to ask him why then was Osama bin Laden considered a hero among a large number of people across the world. (By the way, I had been told just a few days ago by Sinclair Thomson of New York University, who had just returned from Bolivia that pictures of bin Laden and Che Guevara could be seen together in many places in the Bolivian capital.) Badiou, ably assisted by Cornell West tried in vain to answer her, giving rise to more and more questions in the process till someone asked: "What then does your universalism say regarding this complete lack of ability to understand the other?"

No such questioning or interrogation was possible today. It was a comfortable gathering of similar people - brought up in the same traditions. The only other person who was to attend but was not allowed to because he had a single-entry visa in the US (so Zizek informed the audience) was Wang Hui from China. One wonders however, what a single token presence of Wang Hui could have done to the direction of the conference. (Jean Luc Nancy could not eventually attend as he was unwell.)

At the end of the first day, it already seems that for all the sophisticated philosophical language that was being used, most participants simply wanted to re-boot the machine - as though it was just an initialization problem! Maybe the software itself needs rewriting? That thought seems far from most people gathered for the conference.

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Evangelist Zizek and the End of Philosophy - II

Today was the third and final day of the 'Idea of Communism' conference and it was the truly most bizarre experience - bizarre philosophical experience, I should say - of my life. Let me start backwards today.

The preacher from Ljubliana was in full form and he closed his own hour-long (or was it 55 minutes) presentation 'To Begin from the Beginning, Over and Over Again' with the following: "If the rumour that Gilles Deleuze was writing a book on Marx before he died, is true then this should be seen as a sign that after having spent a life time away from the Church he wanted to come back to its foldWe welcome all those anti-communist Leftists who have spent their lifetimes attacking us to come and join us." I may have missed a word or two here and there but this was it. This was also, if I did not miss the point partly aimed at Negri and Hardt, both of whom (Deleuzians of sorts, I should imagine) had reportedly left the conference by then. A questioner who actually took on Zizek on this and asserted the significance of Deleuze in terms of understanding 'the unconscious' not as a theatre of desire but as a factory and of desire itself as productive rather than as a lack, was quickly snubbed by him (in what his co-panelist Judith Balso had to term 'demagogic' style), by saying that you don't know that in many countries the capitalists claim that they are the real Deleuzians, mobile, rhizomic, nomadic etcetera - and that was supposed to be a refutation of Deleuze's philosophy. If this is a philosophical argument coming from one of the biggest superstars of philosophy, I think it is really the end of philosophy. This performance by Zizek was in fact the high point of the conference in many ways, for among other things it was a throwback to sometime four-five decades ago, with this doyen of philosophers openly arguing for terror: "We want a strong disciplinay terror" he said, citing fellow philosopher Alain Badiou's advocacy of proletarian terror as one of the four things that constitute 'the communist invariant'. And believe me, there was no irony in this - it was all very straightorward. But for the time being, let me rewind a bit.

Yesterday, 14 March, there were two sessions. The first was entirely a session of the Italian far Left with Alessandro Russo speaking on "Did the Cultural Revolution End Communism?" and Alberto Toscano on 'Communist Power/Communist Knowledge" and finally Toni Negri ("Communisme: Reflexions sur le concept et la pratique"). Negri spoke in Italian giving the gist of each point that was then read out from a translated text. The entire session was didactic and dry and amounted simply to a reiteration of faith in a somewhat philosophical language. Negri's presentation, true to his style and his now well-known positions, basically reiterated that 'for communists all history is the history of class struggle'! Those who do not understand do not realize that capital is itself a social relation and the struggle is embodied in the social relation. Among other gems of his thought was the claim that 'there is no room for narodniki any more' as 'there is no longer any outside'. 'There is no longer any outside to capitalism and exchange value, no longer any place for use-value'. All struggle is therefore lodged within capital. Thus all struggle is class struggle. QED

It is important to hold on to this point for it recurs in different ways through the conference. In the afternoon session we had a hall packed - easily the most crowded and packed session of the three days when Terry Eagleton, Jacques Ranciere and Alain Badiou spoke. Eagleton, whom I have always fancied as an English Aijaz Ahmad, at least displayed some typical British sense of humour - something that seemed to be missing otherwise. For the rest his talk was basically around Shakespeare and his character Gonzalo from The Tempest, as the exponent of the idea of communism. Fair enough. For Eagleton started by confessing that he for one did not quite see the need to hold this conference but 'Slavoj seems to be a philosopher of the impossible and would like to do impossible things as far as possible' Ranciere was his unassuming best and spoke on the authority of his favourite philosopher - the ignorant schoolmaster Jacotot. He spoke of 'Communism without communists' - an irony that was passed over in somewhat embarassed silence by the audience and fellow speakers. For, Ranciere spoke of the 'communism of intelligence' - there is no superior intelligence hence no pedagogic enterprise, hence no communists! This was of course clearer in his title but in the talk it was put a bit elliptically. And then, at the end of the day we had Alain Badiou defining 'communism' and the 'communist hypothesis' for all of us. His speech was basically a recapitulation of his initial statements that called forth this conference in the first place. This was embellished with his larger philosophical take on the 'Event': 'An Event is the rupture in the normal disposition of bodies and languages', 'it is the opening of a new possibility' - such is the communist hypothesis - A Badiou-ian Event. The sheer metaphysics of it is mindnumbing till we are given its translation into ordinary language as the 'communist invariant'. This communist invariant is defined by radical egalitarain justice, a radical voluntarism with the enunciation of a new collective subject and finally of proletarian or popular terror!

One of the points of debate among the participants was the question of the state. Negri and Badiou of course are known for their anti-state positions. While Negri's is a more radically anti-state position Badiou does recognize the need for some kind of engagement - hence his formulation of acting at a distance from the state. Both however agree with Negri's formulation that for this reason socialism (which is a statist imaginary) can only be replaced by communism which is radically anti-state. However, Zizek struck a pragmatist note here to argue with Badiou and Judith Balso as to what, operationally, this 'at a distance' can possibly mean and how this is a pathetic anarchist recipe for marginality. It can never influence the main course of events. While there is some point to Zizek's argument at a theoretical level, it was an amazingly non-theoretical, pragmatic political and indeed stalinist reaffirmation of the state that repeatedly came through his interventions. This was also evident in an exchange between Negri and Zizek when the latter asked the former why he supported Lula (who Zizek claimed 'was a friend of Bush') and opposed Chavez (who was doing some radical things with the state? Negri's response was interesting. He said he had known Lula for thrity years and seen him at work and was deeply impressed by the way he built the party from within the workers' movement. He distrusted Chavez' politics as that was purely based on the state, he said and added: 'The temporal moment of renewal in Lula has stopped, I accept, but in Chavez it never started.' Clearly, the point was not of immediate politics where I suspect, Negri might support Chavez against the US but one of potentialities and possibilities. And to that extent, Negri's seemed to me to be a more philosophical assessment rather than a crudely political one that is moreover based on pure slander (a Leninist word that should gladden Zizek's heart, but what else is it to say that 'Lula is Bush's friend'!)

The Grand Finale

So, this was the debate of sorts. Today there were three speakers slotted for the day: Slavoj Zizek, Gianni Vattimo and Judith Balso. But it was Zizek's day. Like Stalin at the end of a comintern conference, Zizek spoke almost as if possessed, leading the chair of the session too to remark that it was like a Sunday ecclesiastical session. He took everyone to task - everyone who he thought was deviating from the practical tasks at hand into vague philosophical definitions or elaborations of communism. The man who had begun the session with the classic 'We must resist the temptation to act' was now berating thought and every argument he made was to counter a philosophical theoretical one with a crude - well almost 'but the children are dying in Africa' kind of broadside. The main theoretical intervention by him was his take-off from Susan Buck-Morss' take on 'Hegel in Haiti', where he argued that the Haitian revolution was the 'true repitition' of the French insofar as it took the values and slogans of the French revolution more seriously than the French, thus giving the universalite to its ideals it only possessed potentially. The Haitian revolution was important for Europe's becoming Europe. This is true universalite

Well so far so good. But then he went on to expound on the present, the ecological crisis etc . In this context he then ridiculed Evo Morales, and his apparent claim that all this destruction of the environment began with industrialization and the industrial revolution. Citing from a letter written by Morales, where he had said that therefore 'Mother Earth no longer exists', Saint Zizek proclaimed that if there is one good thing about capitalism, it is that 'Mother Earth no longer exists' - amidst a slightly emabrassed applause from the audience. "We must remain resolutely modern" he further proclaimed. Brilliantly said, but as one questioner later asked him, what was his remedy for the ecological crisis except homilies (actually the questioner did not quite ask him this; it was Zizek who understood this to be his question). And Zizek answered in perplexity that he had after all said what his solution was: it was radical egalitarian justice! Now, did I get him wrong? We can be resolutely modernist, we must resolutely industrialize, see to it that every bit of the earth is transformed into a commodity and the ecological crisis will take care of itself simply because everyone will be made to sink to the sea in equal measure? But no, I confirmed from others. This was all that the great communist philosopher had to offer: ridicule for Evo Morales and some vague unthought masquerading as the philosophical resolution of the ecological crisis.

However, there is news for Zizek - as also for Badiou and Negri who think that 'there is no outside to capitalism' and that it s a good thing (I am not sure the latter two share this part though) that mother earth no longer exists. And the news is that at least in India, like in large parts of Africa and South America, mother earth still exists. The ferocious battles over land acquisition that have been and are still being fought in India are not simply because land is good livelihood but because it is mother earth. The further news for them is that whether they like it or not, whether they think it is regressive or not, a majority of people in countries like India - indeed large parts of Asia and Africa - live outside the dictatorship of 'exchange value' (why exchange value in itself should be a synonymous with capitalism is yet another question) in an economy of sharing, where 'the common' (a la Negri) is a way of life. This is not to romanticize these values in toto but there is something, a deeper connection with life and fellow beings that still exists. What is called 'piracy' in the language of contemporary capitalism and which has been taken over and valorized by radicals in the west is, in a manner of speaking an ethic of sharing that sustains our lives. And no Zizek or Badiou can ever tell me that it is regressive and that it is best that we should adopt the ways of life of Europe and the West that is focused almost exclusively around the figure of the possessive individual. And maybe some of them know this as well - just that it does not all fit into their theories very neatly. How else would one not attempt to theoretically reference either the Chiapas revolt or Morales' Movement for Socialism (India, Nepal etc are too far, I grant) in attempting a retheorization of 'communism' in the twenty-first century? After all, unlike Lula or Chavez, their sole reference points are not capital-labour relations or 'imperialism' in some generic sense. Theirs are questions that pose a serious challenge before modernist marxism, even though they continue to establish a link with the idea of socialism and communism. Maybe it might be better for philosophers to start looking at ways in which these struggles resignify 'socialism' or 'communism' before they start their flights of fancy.

And of course, finally we must state for the record that even apart from these issues, there are others - a whole range of them - that have nothing to do with the capital-labour relations or with 'imperialism' as such, but without an understanding of which such radical politics can only make sense to a very small, white western population. One of these is the Palestine issue, linked to which are a range of others that the sign 'Islam' for instance represents today. If the audience and the speakers at the conference were exclusively white and the speakers almost entirely male (with one exception) - with a very small sprinkling of Asians and NO blacks, then there is something seriously wrong with your radicalism Saint Zizek. It is of course beyond our comprehension why such scholars as Stuart Hall and Cornell West or the likes of Judith Butler or Chantal Mouffe, just to name a few, could not be included in the conference? Is it because they would have made you uncomfortable? Feminist issues, as an aside, have never been resolved by armed capture of state power. They have to be tackled at this level and if you cannot, then it simply means that you have no room for any other kind of politics except the one that you desire - masculine and state-centred.

Communist Power/Communist Knowledge

2009-03-20T14:19:00.001Z

First of all, for the problem of communism and power to be even posed without falling into the usual traps, we need to overcome the apparent antinomy between communism as the name for a form of political organisation with social transformation as its aim and communism as a form of social and economic association with social equality as its practice. It is the least that one can say that in the twentieth-century the relations between crafting the means for the conquest of power and enacting the transformation of everyday life have been immensely problematic, and that the very notion of a 'politics of producers', to use the Marxian formulation, has been overwhelmed by historical conflicts that have left the legacies of commune, council and soviet, with some rare exceptions, in a state of abeyance.

Alberto Toscano: Communist Power/Communist Knowledge

[paper presented at the Idea of Communism conference at Birkbeck, 14th March, 2009. Via Infinite Thought]

For the purposes of this talk, I want to take Zizek's opening remarks yesterday about the 'patience of the concept' as a license to zero in on the question of communism's relationship to philosophy. I want do so in particular through the prism of what I'd like to call the politics of abstraction, a notion which I hope will be clarified as I proceed. As a cautionary note, this means that this paper will not address the immediate prospects of a communist politics, but simply consider what it might mean to be a communist in philosophy, and whether the idea of communism is indeed a philosophical idea. It also means that I will be engaging at various points in the quotation and discussion of Marx. This is not a matter of allegiance or authority Marx is not a timeless standard of correctness but stems from the need to define how philosophy was caught up in the very emergence of the idea of communism, and in what manner communism developed both from and against philosophy. This is a precondition, I think, for revisiting and possibly recasting the idea of communism today.

A philosophical consideration of communism is immediately confronted with two apparently opposed retorts. From the standpoint of its most inveterate detractors, communism is a political pathology of abstraction, a violent denial of worldly differences and customs, of the density of history and the inertia of nature. It is the doomed attempt to philosophize the world into something other than what it is. To employ Hegel's vocabulary, communism is a manifestation of fanaticism. That is, to quote The Philosophy of History, 'an enthusiasm for something abstract for an abstract thought which sustains a negative position towards the established order of things. It is the essence of fanaticism to bear only a desolating destructive relation to the concrete'. In a world of differences, hierarchies and stratifications, how could an intransigent politics of egalitarianism be anything other than fanatical? Such views, which first gained momentum in reaction to the French Revolution, have continued to accompany the various instantiations of what Badiou calls 'generic communism'. This was (...and remains) the case in the literature of Cold War anti-totalitarianism, for which the desolations and destructions of Stalinism are to be referred, in the last instance, not to the logic of political and class struggles, or to the bellicose encirclement of the Soviet Union, or indeed to the baleful mechanics of bureaucratisation, but to the fundamentally 'ideocratic' character of political rule in historical communism. Abstract thought is to blame as the very notion of 'ideocracy' suggests. As a very minor contemporary example take these lines from the review of The Meaning of Sarkozy in The Observer: 'So when he quotes Mao approvingly and equivocates over the rights and wrongs of the Cultural Revolution, it is hard not to feel a certain pride in workaday Anglo-Saxon empiricism, which inoculates us against the tyranny of pure political abstraction'.

But this reproach of abstraction is also and this is my second point internal to communist thinking itself, especially and above all in its Marxian variant. As early as his 1843 correspondence with Ruge in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbucher Marx was casting doubts on the emancipatory powers of a communism the kind associated with the likes of Weitling or Cabet which operated as a 'dogmatic abstraction'. As he remarks: 'it is precisely the advantage of the new trend that we do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world through criticism of the old one. Hitherto philosophers have had the solution of all riddles lying in their writing-desks, and the stupid, exoteric world had only to open its mouth for the roast pigeons of absolute knowledge to fly into it'. This is why, as he declaims, 'we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world's own principles'. Is this profession of critical and political immanence a mere abdication of philosophy? Far from it. The problem for Marx, the problem of communist politics and communist theory will remain throughout that of a non-dogmatic anticipation. And this anticipation will mutate in accordance with the conjuncture.

To explore and take stock of the relationship between communism and (philosophical) abstraction, I want to begin by exploring this question of anticipation. Taking Marx's 'Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right' as emblematic in this respect, it is possible to suggest that the anticipatory function of philosophy is inversely proportional to the revolutionary maturity of the situation in which it intervenes. Famously, Marx's plea for radicalisation is insistently contextualised in terms of German backwardness. What is perhaps most arresting about this text is precisely how the most generic of programmes, universal social emancipation, is meticulously and strategically situated in a very singular political predicament. Having lyrically encapsulated the results of the critique of religion, which he regards as having been 'essentially completed' for Germany, Marx is confronted with the obstacles preventing the prolongation of the unmasking of religious abstraction into the vanquishing of social and political abstraction, of 'the critique of heaven ... into the critique of earth, the critique of religion into the critique of law, the critique of theology into the critique of politics'. But the retrograde character of the German situation impairs the role of critique as a productive, immanent negativity. In Marx's acerbic words: 'For even the negation of our political present is already a dusty fact in the historical junkroom of modern nations. If I negate powdered wigs, I still have unpowdered wigs'. Or, as we may echo today: 'If I negate subprime mortgages, I still have mortgages'.

What is the critical philosopher to do when faced with an anachronistic regime that, as he puts it, 'only imagines that it believes in itself'? The German anachronism is double: on the one hand, the farce of restoration without revolution in practice; on the other, the anticipation of the future in theory. It is the latter which alone is worthy of the kind of immanent critique that would be capable of extracting, from the productive negation of the purely speculative image of 'future history', the weapons for a genuine overturning of the status quo. In other words, the radicalism of philosophy that is of philosophy's existence as the self-criticism of philosophy is dictated by the paradoxical coexistence of practical backwardness and theoretical advance. In order to be properly radicalised, the situation surveyed by Marx is thus compelled to pass through philosophy. Neither a practical repudiation of philosophy nor a philosophical overcoming of practice are possible: 'you cannot transcend philosophy without actualising it', nor can you 'actualise philosophy without transcending it'. Again, it is important to stress that though these may appear as universally-binding statements, they are specified by Germany's anomalous retardation, its odd admixture of political anachronism (its powdered wigs) and philosophical anticipation (Hegel's Philosophy of Right as the most advanced articulation of the modern state, a state which of course does not actually exist in Germany). This anomaly even permits Marx to hint at Germany's comparative revolutionary advantage, when he asks: 'can Germany attain a praxis à la hauteur des principes, that is to say, a revolution that will raise it not only to the official level of the modern nations, but to the human level which will be the immediate future of these nations?'

But, notwithstanding Marx's faith in theoretical emancipation and his conviction that theory is not a mere collection of ideas but 'an active principle, a set of practices', philosophy's practical conversion appears thwarted by the absence of the 'passive element' or 'material basis' for revolutionary praxis. This basis would ordinarily be found in the domain of civil society, in the sphere of needs: 'A radical revolution can only be a revolution of radical needs, whose preconditions and birthplaces appear to be lacking'. In other words, the 'theoretical needs' that emerge from the immanent critique of philosophy do not translate into 'practical needs'. The sheer immaturity and disaggregation of the German polity means that the 'classical' model of partial and political revolution is inoperative. But Marx could not countenance a praxis simply determined at the level of essence or of philosophy. As he unequivocally put it: 'It is not enough that thought strive to actualise itself; actuality must itself strive toward thought'. This embryonic version of Marx's later 'method of the tendency' dictates that radical emancipation find its objective or 'positive possibility' in 'the formation of a class with radical chains', the proletariat, that the impossible become real. The point of this brief excursus is to stress that, even as critical attention shifts from the limits of the political state to the mode of production and its laws of motion, the demand of a non-dogmatic anticipation will continue to define Marx's work, as will the need to reassert the difference between this approach and that of dogmatic anticipation, especially when the latter takes the form of 'philosophical fantasies' of a truth which would serve as the standard against which to judge social change Marx and Engels's main accusation, in The Communist Manifesto, against utopian socialism.

This figure of philosophical anticipation, initially framed in terms of actuality striving toward thought, and later enveloped and surpassed in the knowledge of capitalism's tendencies, has important consequences, I want to argue, for our very idea of communism. The specificity of communism stems from its intrinsic and specific temporality, from the fact that, while never simply non- or anti-philosophical, it is an idea that contains within it, inextricably, a tension towards realisation, transition, revolution. I now want to briefly draw the consequences of this argument in terms of four interlinked dimensions of the notion of communism which challenge the philosophical sufficiency or autonomy of the concept: equality, revolution, power, and knowledge. You will note that in some manner these are dimensions which philosophy sometimes defines by contrast with the vicissitudes of communist politics and its associated critique of political economy. Thus, economic equality is sometimes treated as the counterpart to equality as a philosophical principle or axiom; power, especially state power, is regarded as a dimension external to philosophical questioning about communism; knowledge is juxtaposed to truth and revolution is regarded as an at best enigmatic and at worst obsolete model of emancipatory change.

Let's begin with equality. The affirmation of equality, both as a political maxim and as a social objective, lies of course behind the age-old view of communism as a dangerous levelling force, a violent abstraction unleashed on a world of embedded customs and refractory differences. But communism in its own words, so to speak has also, at different times, articulated its own criticism of equality as abstraction. Consider the Critique of the Gotha Programme, and the commentary on that document in Lenin's State and Revolution. Faced with a truly 'economistic' theory of justice (the social-democratic ideal, pushed by the likes of Lassalle, that equality signifies 'fair distribution', 'the equal right of all to an equal product of labour'), Marx retorts in passages whose significance for the concept of equality have yet, one might argue, to be fully assumed that the notion of equality implied by this distributionist vision of communism is still steeped in the very abstractions that dominate bourgeois society. Speculating about a communist society that emerges from capitalist society and is thus, not just its negation but its determinate negation Marx notes that the abrogation of exploitation and the capitalist appropriation of surplus-value would not yet end the forms of injustice that inhere in the domination over social relations by the abstraction of value. In a nascent communist society, distribution is still 'governed by the same principle as the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for the same amount in another'.

Equality in such an embryonic, transitional communism is still beholden to the domination of a standard, labour, which is itself the bearer of inequalities of capacity, productivity, intensity, and so on. The equal right so blithely invoked by the social-democrat is thus 'in its content one of inequality, just like any other right', since 'a right can by its nature only consist in the application of an equal standard' to unequal individuals. In other words, a political and philosophical notion of equality as a right, founded on the idea of an abstract and universal measure or standard, still bears the birthmarks of a form of social measurement based on the value of labour. In Lenin's gloss, 'the mere conversion of the means of production into the common property of the whole of society ... does not remove the defects of distribution and inequality of "bourgeois right" which continues to dominate in so far as products are divided "according to work"'. What philosophical lessons are to be drawn from this for our idea of communism? First of all that, to the extent that communism is the determinate and not the simple negation of capitalism i.e. to the extent that it is not a 'dogmatic abstraction' the problem of its realisation is inherent to its concept. The communist problem of equality is the problem of an equality, to quote Lenin, without any standard of right which is to say an equality that does not perpetuate the inequalities generated by the domination of social relations by the measures of value, by the labour-standard in particular, which pertain to capitalism. Such a 'non-standard' equality can only be thought as an outcome of revolution and transition.

From a philosophical standpoint, we could ask whether the very notion of equality is still in effect. Rather than either affirming the principled equality of human beings or promising their eventual levelling, communist 'equality', involves creating social relations in which inequalities would be rendered inoperative, no longer subsumed as unequal under an equal standard or measure of right. This idea of equality beyond right and value is of course in its own way profoundly abstract but it demonstrates, first, how the philosophical contribution of communism involves a struggle against a certain type of abstraction (the kind which is derivative of the capitalist form of value and the standards the latter imposes), and second, how the question of realisation is intrinsic to the idea of communism. In effect, I think it would be more appropriate, when it comes to notions such as Marx's view of equality to speak of a problem rather than an idea of communism, in line with Deleuze's definition of a problem, in his Bergsonism, and with reference to Marx, as something that 'always has the solution it deserves, in terms of the way in which it is stated (i.e., the conditions under which it is determined as a problem), and of the means and terms at our disposal for stating it. In this sense, the history of man, from the theoretical as much as the practical point of view is that of the construction of problems'.

In the case of the concept of equality, we can thus see how a communist philosophy or theory might 'anticipate' a communist politics, not in the sense of producing its own futurological standard against which to measure instances of communism, but by delineating the problems and lines of solution that communism calls for. As I hope to have suggested with reference to the concept of equality, while communism should not be envisaged in terms of ossified programmatic principles or anachronistic refrains, it can be usefully conceived in terms of problems that orient their own resolution. Communism, to quote a useful, rather minimal definition from Engels's Principles of Communism, is 'the doctrine of the conditions for the liberation of the proletariat'. Precisely because doctrine and conditions are not immobile, communism is never exempt from the need to formulate its protocols of realisation. This has important consequences, to my mind, for the philosophical debate about communism, which cannot but also be a debate about communist power. By power I mean the collective capacity both to prefigure and to enact the principles of communism. Too often, in recent discussions, reacting both to the grim vicissitudes of communist politics in the short twentieth century and to meanings given to the idea of power in the social and political sciences (from Weber's domination to Foucault's governmentality), there has been a tendency to think that the philosophy and politics of communism need to separate themselves from power, to think a dimension of politics removed from questions of force, control and authority. But precisely because communism cannot be separated from the problem rather than the programme of its realisation, it can also not be separated from the question of power.

This is a vast debate, to which I cannot do much justice here, but I think a couple of points can be made. First of all, for the problem of communism and power to be even posed without falling into the usual traps, we need to overcome the apparent antinomy between communism as the name for a form of political organisation with social transformation as its aim and communism as a form of social and economic association with social equality as its practice. It is the least that one can say that in the twentieth-century the relations between crafting the means for the conquest of power and enacting the transformation of everyday life have been immensely problematic, and that the very notion of a 'politics of producers', to use the Marxian formulation, has been overwhelmed by historical conflicts that have left the legacies of commune, council and soviet, with some rare exceptions, in a state of abeyance. But the problem of thinking together these two aspects of communist practice, organisation and association remains. To reify them in the separation between politics and the economy is deeply unsatisfactory, precisely because, as I indicated vis-à-vis equality, the problem of moving beyond right and beyond value is inextricably a political and an economic problem; indeed it directly upsets the very distinction between these. In trying to overcome the antinomy between organisation and association, between the instruments and the everyday practice of communism, we cannot but address the question of power. But we cannot merely reduce this question to the dimension of the state. The rather sterile doctrinal disputations over the evils and virtues of the seizure of state power tend to obscure the far greater challenge posed by thinking revolutionary politics in terms of the splitting of power not just in the guise of a face-off between two (or more) social forces in a situation of non-monopoly over violence and political authority, but in the sense of a fundamental asymmetry in the types of power. This is why the problems posed by the classic notion of 'dual power' remain, as various political conjunctures around the world suggest, of such political, and indeed philosophical significance despite the fact that they cannot be conceived in ways congruent to their Leninist formulation in the interim between the February and October revolutions.

The challenge of the notion of dual power lies in the asymmetry that it introduces into the concept. Power is not a homogeneous element to be accumulated, but a name for heterogeneous and conflicting forms of practice. Thus, the power wielded by the soviets is incommensurable with that of their bourgeois counterparts, however 'democratic' they may be, because its source lies in popular initiative and not in parliamentary decree; because it is enforced by an armed people and not a standing army; and because it has transmuted political authority from a plaything of the bureaucracy to a situation where all officials are at the mercy of the popular will, and its power of recall. With its paragon in the Commune, this power is both organisational, in the sense that it incorporates strategic objectives, and associative, in the sense that it is inseparable from the transformation of everyday life, but more to the point, because it is in and through the practice of association that the political capacity to organise is built up. The notion of a 'prefigurative communism' has its place here. This is especially significant today because finding the means of making the communist hypothesis exist, in Badiou's formulation, means finding efficacious ways of fostering such a political capacity.

Perhaps the most difficult problem for a philosophy concerned, to repeat a term introduced at the outset, with the non-dogmatic anticipation of communism, involves linking this subjective demand to build power qua political capacity, with the question of the knowledge of the tendencies that traverse the conjuncture of contemporary capitalism. If and these I think are preconditions for the intelligibility of communism as a concept distinct from those of equality or emancipation communism is to be understood as a determinate negation of capitalism and its concrete forms of abstract domination, and as concerned with the 'conditions of liberation' that Engels spoke of, what role for knowledge? After all, the communist notion of revolution regardless of the particular form it takes lies at the intersection between, on the one hand, the idea of a political capacity and force, and, on the other, the idea that, from the partisan perspective of that organised capacity, it is possible to know and to practically anticipate the real tendencies in the world that communism seeks, determinately and determinedly, to negate. Without some such articulation of power and knowledge, the notion of communist revolution is unintelligible.

But what does it mean to demand that communist politics find or create its concrete foothold in real dynamics without, as the young Marx seemed to do, postulating an 'inner logic' whereby 'actuality strives toward thought'? If a communist philosophy is preoccupied with the preparation and anticipation of politics, what relation does it bear to those forms of anticipatory knowledge the kind of partisan knowledge that the later Marx sought to produce which seek to delineate the contemporary field of realisation for the problems of communism? Is it the case that, as Mario Tronti has noted about Marx's partisan epistemology, 'science as struggle is an ephemeral knowledge'? If the idea, or the problem of communism is inseparable, as I believe, from the problem of its realisation with the important consequences that this has for philosophy's relationship to communism then the question of how to connect the prospects of communism to a partisan knowledge of the real and its tendencies, without mistaking these tendencies for a logic or a philosophy of history, becomes crucial. This task is especially urgent in a world such as ours which, to recall Marx, 'only imagines that it believes in itself'. In 1842, in the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx wrote: 'The fate which a question of the time has in common with every question justified by its content, and therefore rational, is that the question and not the answer constitutes the main difficulty. True criticism, therefore, analyses the questions and not the answers. just as the solution of an algebraic equation is given once the problem has been put in its simplest and sharpest form, so every question is answered as soon as it has become a real question'. This is our task today, to turn the question of communism into a real question. We will then get the answers we deserve.

Constructing A New Collective Subject

2009-03-18T16:25:00.001Z

iek's presentation at the conference eclipsed that of Badiou, his ostensible master. It was necessary to begin again, iek said echoing Badiou's call to rediscover 'the communist hypothesis' as if for the first time. Badiou remains a scalding and bracing critic of the present managerialist restoration of power and privilege, but it is difficult to be confident that he is orientated towards thinking the future. By contrast, iek's focus, like that of Negri and Michael Hardt, was very much on how current (apocalyptic) conditions ecological catastrophe, the crisis of private property brought about by digitization, the impact on human identity of neuroscience and genetic engineering may lead to new possibilities. iek is ready to affirm the emancipatory potentials brought by science-fictional capital's liquidation of territories and identities. If what most of the conference speakers still wanted to call 'communism' is to be achieved, it will require nothing less than the construction of a new type of human being. (Something that this conference, with its punitively long sessions, also seemed to demand: maintaining concentration through three 45-minute papers in a row exceeds the tolerances of the human organism.) As Toscano and Hardt made clear, concepts such as equality and the abolition of property only appear to be self-evident; in fact they are at the moment only dimly thinkable. Theory, in its destruction of the very 'workaday Anglo Saxon empiricism' which treats private property and commodities as natural and transparent concepts, must play a role in the construction of this new collective subject.

-----> Mark K-punk Fisher on the Idea of Communism conference, writing in Frieze Magazine.

The Commons And Radical Voluntarism

2009-03-18T15:53:00.000Z

Excellent summary by Steven Shaviro/The Pinocchio Theory of the recent Idea of Communism conference at Birkbeck in London. And it wasn't just the limited attention, as Shaviro highlights, to the critique of political economy of the conference participants that was the problem, but also the complete absence of the urgent issue of organizational design, of the necessity to examine and develop alternative forms of political organization:

Communism at Birkbeck

Steven Shaviro

March 17th, 2009

I don't have the presence of mind to summarize all of the presentations at the Birkbeck Communism conference, the way I did with Michael Hardt's talk in my last post. But I can make some generalizations. Part of the appeal of events such as these is simply to see the academic superstars in action. From this point of view, the conference did not disappoint. Slavoj Zizek was in fine form, manic and excited, and so full of a kind of outward-directed energy that I didn't really mind his overbearingness. Gianni Vattimo, whom I had never seen before (and of whose works I have only read a little) was quite a charmer, in a humorously self-deprecating way. Terry Eagleton reveled in the role of the British common-sense empiricist in a room otherwise full of dialecticians. Toni Negri was warm and animated, jacques Ranciere admirably meditative. Alain Badiou was well, Badiou (more of which later).

The conference's title was "On the Idea of Communism." The idea, it was emphasized, as opposed to the harsh realities of day-by-day social and political struggle. I'm enough of an armchair communist (or petit-bourgeois intellectual, as they used to say in the bad old days) that I had no objection to such an emphasis. I agree with Zizek that we need to show a certain patience, to take a deep breath, to try to understand the contours of the situation we are in (or the conjuncture, in more traditional marxistspeak). But what does it mean to explore the mere idea of communism, as opposed to the actuality of capitalism? The idea of communism is to a large extent a negative one, in that we don't really know what it would be like, only that it would mean the emancipation of people, and the establishment of forms of life that are repressed, oppressed, and denied an opportunity to flourish today. It's utopian; or at least "communism" is the name for the only sort of utopianism that makes sense to me today it makes sense precisely because it is not a religious or new-agey idea of perfectibility and salvation, but something much more down-to-earth. Communism has to do with "the common," as Michael Hardt said, and this is a far different thing from, say, the "public" in its binary opposition to and dependence upon the "private." It doesn't mean giving up on our inner lives, but creating an environment in which such lives might flourish. And I don't think that "communism" is really about politics though politics is inevitably a large part of what is needed to get there,

There is also, of course, the question of the crimes committed by Communist parties, or in the name of "communism," throughout the twentieth century. Zizek opened the conference by saying that the time for guilt was over, that in the 21st century we needed to reclaim the name of "communism" from the ill repute into which it has sunk. And I think this is entirely right all the more so in that capitalism, too, is guilty of many crimes, but of ones which it still refuses to acknowledge, and for which it shows no repentance; not to mention the increasingly untenable situation in which we live today, exacerbated by the current financial disaster.

The conference showcased the major strains of Euro-communism (in which I also include North American leftist thought) today though the rest of the world was noticeable by its absence. All the speakers were white Europeans or North Americans; 11 of the 12 speakers were men. The audience was more gender-balanced than the panels, but it was overwhelmingly white. This is quite disturbing (not because of any multicultural pieties of the sort that Zizek always criticizes, but precisely because it bespeaks a parochialism that "we" in the "West" have still only done a very poor job of breaking away from). Bruno Bosteels talked a bit about Latin American (specifically Bolivian) experiences and theorizations of getting beyond capitalism; and a number of speakers kept on coming back to the (very ambiguous) history of the Chinese Cultural Revolution; but all in all, the conference was far less internationalist than it ought to have been.

In any case, by "major strains" of Euro-communism I basically mean those represented by Zizek and Badiou, on the one hand, and by Hardt and Negri on the other. Since in fact it was Zizek's and Badiou's conference, I kind of got the slight sense that Negri and Hardt were only there on sufferance, as it were; they were noticeably absent during the summing-up on the final day. Now, I've had my criticisms of both of these camps (as can be seen in many earlier entries on this blog); but "at the end of the day," I am much more in Negri and Hardt's camp than in that of the others. This was confirmed for me by the fact that both Hardt and Negri focused on political economy in their talks; whereas none of the other speakers (with the exception of Zizek, whom I will discuss later) so much as mentioned it.

Now, this might be justified to some extent by the argument that the whole point of "communism" is to imagine a society in which the current constraints of a capitalist political economy no longer apply; but this isn't much of an alibi, when you consider that so many of the talks were, indeed, about how to get there from here Terry Eagleton's talk filled with literary allusions was really the only one that was actually about imagining communism as a state of being, rather than just as the negation of what we have today (and his talk precisely showed, in a symptomatic way, the limitations of trying to imagine such a utopian situation I must confess that his literariness made me cringe a bit, as it reminded m all too much of the atmosphere of graduate school in English at Yale in the 1970s (it isn't that I don't like Shakespeare; I do; but I don't really find helpful an approach which acts as if movies and TV and the Internet didn't exist; one can talk about Shakespeare just as one talks about Spinoza but in either case it should be from our actual present situartion).

No, the problem for me with much of the conference is that political economy (by which I include what Marx called "the critique of political economy") was pretty much elided by most of the speakers. For instance, Peter Hallward, with his usual lucidity, developed a rather alarming call for Jacobin rigor and discipline in the defense of virtue and the Rousseauean principle of the "general will"; but he failed to explain how such a state, analgous to that of the Jacobin clubs in 1790s France, could arise in the first place. A number of speakers went on at great length about the necessity of struggles against the "State"; but they seemed to do this with little sense of how State apparatuses work to support and reinforce capital and finance. The dirty little secret of neoliberalism is that the "free market" could not actually function if the government were actually to observe laissez faire, and to leave "the market" alone. For it is only by rigid State control over things like the money supply, together with rigid enforcement of "property" laws (based on the absurd fiction that, say, the genetic makeup of genetically modified crops somehow had the same inviolable status as my personal effects in my bedroom). It's disheartening to hear people on the left denounce "the State" in the very same terms that the neoliberals hypocritically and misleadingly do. Not to mention that, as Bruno Bosteels put it in a question that none of the anti-State panelists were able convincingly to answer, this sort of analysis is distinctly unhelpful when we have a situation such as that in Bolivia, where President Morales is specifically using the power of "the State" the fact of his election to office by a large minority in order to improve economic conditions for the vast masses, even at the expense of the wealthy and privileged. [One might add that, in Bolivia as recently in Thailand and several other places, it is precisely the privileged bourgeoisie who have used the tactics of "people power", with mass protests etc., in order to bring down democratically elected majority governments who threatened their privileges).

In particular, not only did Badiou leave out political economy from his descriptions of how the revolutionary event might challenge the capitalist status quo; but also, when questioned on this score, he explicitly denounced any attention to political economy as being the sin of "economism". All this is caaptured in the video here. Badiou claims that economics can only be part of "the situation" which it is the business of a new "truth," produced in an event and by fidelity to that event, to disrupt. Badiou shows his Maoist pedigree (as Ken Wark remarked to me) in this insistence on politics as the ultimate ruling instance. Instead of engaging in the critique of political economy, and seeing the political as so intimately intertwined with the economic as to makie any separation of them impossible, Badiou relegates economy, in a nearly Gnostic sort of way, to the realm of the irretrievably fallen. His notion of a pure politics (and a pure philosophy) unsullied by any contact with, or 'contamination' by, the economic, is really the mirror image of today's neoclassical economics which imagines itself to be value-neutral and apolitical. What this comes down to is that Badiou is a Maoist without the Marxism a stance that I find rather terrifying.

At his best, Badiou is a kind of no-Kantian this is an appelation that he would reject, of course, and one that most contemporary philosophers would find damning (though I mean it as a sort of praise). What I mean by Badiou's neo-Kantianism is that his whole notion of the event, and of the ethics of remaining loyal to the event, is something like a late-modernist version of the categorical imperative. The event is singular, and yet of absolutely universal import it commands our obedience, regardless of our merely personal, "pathological" implications. Badiou even defines the event, and the way we are called to be faithful to it, in entirely "formalist" terms we are commanded by the very form of the event, rather than by anything having to do with its specific content. This is an utterly Kantian way of thinking and, unlike so many "hegelian" commentators, I find this empty formalism to be a strength, rather than a weakness, of Kantian ethics. But I shudder when Badiou goes on to denature this Kantian impersonal universalism by turning it into a Pauline or Leninist or Maoist form of what Kant would have called "fanaticism." Again, I am no Leninist or Maoist to begin with; but to take Leninism and Maoism, and remove the Marxism from them, as Badiou does, really leaves us with nothing but a delusional hypervoluntarism and a romanticized reveling in "terror."

Zizek, speaking on the last day, gave what I am sure he would be happy for us to think of as a Hegelian synthesis of everything that went on during the conference. Unlike most of his colleagues, and in what might be thought of as a nod to Hardt and Negri, his analysis did include political economy. He listed four threats or challenges that we face today in our world of capitalism gone mad; and three of them, he acknowledged, fit under the rubric of Hardt/Negri's "affective" or "immaterial" production. These were 1)the threat of environmental disaster; 2)questions of so-called "intellectual property," of copyright, patents, etc., and of the privatization of the common (understanding this in the broadest sense, as Hardt argued); 3)quesions of bioengineering, genetics, and the ability to manipulate our own genes, and thus change "human nature" on a biological and physiological level. Zizek then added a fourth challenge, which he said underlay all the others: 4)the question of inclusion and exclusion on a global level as reflected in border controls, nationalisms, and the question of immigration (the countries of the North excluding people from the global South, except insofar as their hyperexploitation was facilitated on the basis of admitting them with only a semi-legal or illegal status. This ties in also with the whole question of "global slums," as raised by Mike Davis. It articulates the demands of capital that lie behind what Deleuze calls the control society, and it gives a way of acknowledging the issues raised by post-colonial theory without falling into the multiculturalism that Zizek is not altogether without justification in criticizing.

Zizek argued that these questions could only be resolved, in an anticapitalist direction, by maintaining principles of egalitarianism and universalism. His example of this was the Haitian Revolution as the radicalization, and Hegelian "completion", of the French Revolution. The French tried to repress the Haitians, which means that the French were not able to live up to their own universalism they wouldn't apply this to black people. But the Haitians took the principles of the French Revolution more seriously than the French themselves did; they demanded and won independence, against the French, on the basis of the very principles that the French had enunciated. This is Zizek's way of splitting the difference between his inherent Eurocentrism, and the fact that by his own principles of universality he needs to get away from Eurocentrism. In effect, he is privileging Europe on the grounds that Europe invented the very universalism that commands us to stop privileging Europe. As so often, I remain highly dubious of how this kind of Hegelian maneuver can be invoked any time Zizek needs to get out of a tight spot. It ends up being a little too easy, and a little too self-congratulatory a method of resolving the problem. That is to say, Zizek still really is Eurocentric, and we need to continue to call him on this. But it is not entirely devoid of merit that the guy is trying, at least

In any case, after laying all this out, Zizek went on to talk about some of the difficulties that we face in trying to deal with these questions. He was emphatic in arguing that the radicality of "communism" needs to be upheld, against the sort of reforms that now that some of the excesses of finance are being at least slightly reined in could come under the name of "socialism" (as in Newsweek's recent assertion that "'we are all socialists now"). Such "socialist" reforms (including the nationalization of institutions like banks, or the de facto ownership of the majority of stock in troubled financial corporations by the US government) would give an illusion of reform, while really leaving the massive inequalities (between wealthy financiers and everyone else, and even more between the citizens of Western nations and the overwhelming majority everywhere else in the world) largely untouched. I think that Zizek is right about this the current crisis situation at least in principle makes radical alternatives more thinkable than they were during the internet and real estate bubbles even though the recuperative efforts of Western governments today are almost entirely oriented towards keeping alive the sense that "there is no alternative," even as that system to which there is supposedly no alternative has entirely collapsed and discredited itself.

In this light, ZIzek talked of the difficulty of making any transgressive or oppositional gestures today, because of the way that such gestures almost immediately get commodified and recuperated, and because the very ideas of transgression and radical innovation have themselves become capitalist resources, the mantras of every business school and every CEO. Zizek even quoted Brian Massumi to this effect, much to my surprise (since Massumi, like Hardt and Negri, is very much on Deleuzian side, rather than the Lacanian one, of recent debates).

Awareness of these issues, I think, prevents Zizek from articulating groundless fantasies of revolutionary agency in the way that certain other speakers did. Yet the only solution Zizek had to offer, in his talk, was an appeal to Badiou's transcendental formulation of politics as fidelity to an event of radical rupture, and of "communism" as the name of this event or rupture. In the course of his talk, Zizek called several times for a "radical voluntarism" though, when called on this formulation in the Q&A, he backpedaled (at least rhetorically) and said that all he meant by such a phrase was that, unlike the old Marxists of the earlier part of the past century, we could no longer believe today that the "logic of history" was on our side, or that we could trust to the objective course of events to displace capitalism and create the necessary and sufficient conditions for communism.

I agree with Zizek on this indeed, my largest disagreement with Hardt and Negri is precisely that they seem to affirm a soft version of the inevitable-movement-of-history, or "objective conditions" thesis but I think that a phrase like "radical voluntarism" works to insinuate a positive thesis a sense of "what is to be done?" that simply isn't there. Which leaves us back in our current condition: the demoralization of an impotent left. I have no solution for this dilemma and I don't think Zizek or Badiou (or Hardt or Negri either) have any more of a solution than I have, although they are way to eager to adopt the rhetoric of seeming as if they do.

All this was symbolized at the very end of the conference. As everyone was getting ready to leave, Zizek asked us to all stand up and sing "The Internationale". Almost nobody did (there were a few people in one corner singing it, but they couldn't be heard above the general hubbub). In my case and I suspect this held for a large majority of the hundreds of people in the auditorium I would have liked to sing "The Internationale", but I couldn't because, although I am vaguely familiar with the melody, I do not know the words.

The State As A Re-Privatizing Servant To Finance Capital ("Nationalization")

2009-03-11T09:51:00.001Z

What "Nationalize the Banks" and the "Free Market" Really Mean in Today's Looking-Glass World

The Language of Looting

By MICHAEL HUDSON

"Banking shares began to plunge Friday morning after Senator Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who is chairman of the banking committee, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television that he was concerned the government might end up nationalizing some lenders "at least for a short time." Several other prominent policy makers including Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have echoed that view recently."

--Eric Dash, "Growing Worry on Rescue Takes a Toll on Banks," The New York Times, February 20, 2009

How is it that Alan Greenspan, free-market lobbyist for Wall Street, recently announced that he favored nationalization of America's banks and indeed, mainly the biggest and most powerful? Has the old disciple of Ayn Rand gone Red in the night? Surely not.

The answer is that the rhetoric of "free markets," "nationalization" and even "socialism" (as in "socializing the losses") has been turned into the language of deception to help the financial sector mobilize government power to support its own special privileges. Having undermined the economy at large, Wall Street's public relations think tanks are now dismantling the language itself.

Exactly what does "a free market" mean? Is it what the classical economists advocated a market free from monopoly power, business fraud, political insider dealing and special privileges for vested interests a market protected by the rise in public regulation from the Sherman Anti-Trust law of 1890 to the Glass-Steagall Act and other New Deal legislation? Or is it a market free for predators to exploit victims without public regulation or economic policemen the kind of free-for-all market that the Federal Reserve and Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) have created over the past decade or so? It seems incredible that people should accept today's neoliberal idea of "market freedom" in the sense of neutering government watchdogs, Alan Greenspan-style, letting Angelo Mozilo at Countrywide, Hank Greenberg at AIG, Bernie Madoff, Citibank, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers loot without hindrance or sanction, plunge the economy into crisis and then use Treasury bailout money to pay the highest salaries and bonuses in U.S. history.

Terms that are the antithesis of "free market" also are being turned into the opposite of what they historically have meant. Take today's discussions about nationalizing the banks. For over a century nationalization has meant public takeover of monopolies or other sectors to operate them in the public interest rather than leaving them so special interests. But when neoliberals use the word "nationalization" they mean a bailout, a government giveaway to the financial interests.

Doublethink and doubletalk with regard to "nationalizing" or "socializing" the banks and other sectors is a travesty of political and economic discussion from the 17th through mid-20th centuries. Society's basic grammar of thought, the vocabulary to discuss political and economic topics, is being turned inside-out in an effort to ward off discussion of the policy solutions posed by the classical economists and political philosophers that made Western civilization "Western."

Today's clash of civilization is not really with the Orient; it is with our own past, with the Enlightenment itself and its evolution into classical political economy and Progressive Era social reforms aimed at freeing society from the surviving trammels of European feudalism. What we are seeing is propaganda designed to deceive, to distract attention from economic reality so as to promote the property and financial interests from whose predatory grasp classical economists set out to free the world. What is being attempted is nothing less than an attempt to destroy the intellectual and moral edifice of what took Western civilization eight centuries to develop, from the 12th century Schoolmen discussing Just Price through 19th and 20th century classical economic value theory.

Any idea of "socialism from above," in the sense of "socializing the risk," is old-fashioned oligarchy kleptocratic statism from above. Real nationalization occurs when governments act in the public interest to take over private property. The 19th-century program to nationalize the land (it was the first plank of the Communist Manifesto) did not mean anything remotely like the government taking over estates, paying off their mortgages at public expense and then giving it back to the former landlords free and clear of encumbrances and taxes. It meant taking the land and its rental income into the public domain, and leasing it out at a user fee ranging from actual operating cost to a subsidized rate or even freely as in the case of streets and roads.

Nationalizing the banks along these lines would mean that the government would supply the nation's credit needs. The Treasury would become the source of new money, replacing commercial bank credit. Presumably this credit would be lent out for economically and socially productive purposes, not merely to inflate asset prices while loading down households and business with debt as has occurred under today's commercial bank lending policies.

How neoliberals falsify the West's political history

The fact that today's neoliberals claim to be the intellectual descendants of Adam Smith make it necessary to restore a more accurate historical perspective. Their concept of "free markets" is the antithesis of Smith's. It is the opposite of that of the classical political economists down through John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx and the Progressive Era reforms that sought to create markets free of extractive rentier claims by special interests whose institutional power can be traced back to medieval Europe and its age of military conquest.

Economic writers from the 16th through 20th centuries recognized that free markets required government oversight to prevent monopoly pricing and other charges levied by special privilege. By contrast, today's neoliberal ideologues are public relations advocates for vested interests to depict a "free market" is one free of government regulation, "free" of anti-trust protection, and even of protection against fraud, as evidenced by the SEC's refusal to move against Madoff, Enron, Citibank et al.). The neoliberal ideal of free markets is thus basically that of a bank robber or embezzler, wishing for a world without police so as to be sufficiently free to siphon off other peoples' money without constraint.

The Chicago Boys in Chile realized that markets free for predatory finance and insider privatization could only be imposed at gunpoint. These free-marketers closed down every economics department in Chile, every social science department outside of the Catholic University where the Chicago Boys held sway. Operation Condor arrested, exiled or murdered tens of thousands of academics, intellectuals, labor leaders and artists. Only by totalitarian control over the academic curriculum and public media backed by an active secret police and army could "free markets" neoliberal style be imposed. The resulting privatization at gunpoint became an exercise in what Marx called "primitive accumulation" seizure of the public domain by political elites backed by force. It is a free market William-the-Conqueror or Yeltsin-kleptocrat style, with property parceled out to the companions of the political or military leader.

All this was just the opposite of the kind of free markets that Adam Smith had in mind when he warned that businessmen rarely get together but to plot ways to fix markets to their advantage. This is not a problem that troubled Mr. Greenspan or the editorial writers of the New York Times and Washington Post. There really is no kinship between their neoliberal ideals and those of the Enlightenment political philosophers. For them to promote an idea of free markets as ones "free" for political insiders to pry away the public domain for themselves is to lower an intellectual Iron Curtain on the history of economic thought.

The classical economists and American Progressives envisioned markets free of economic rent and interest free of rentier overhead charges and monopoly price gouging, free of land-rent, interest paid to bankers and wealthy financial institutions, and free of taxes to support an oligarchy. Governments were to base their tax systems on collecting the "free lunch" of economic rent, headed by that of favorable locations supplied by nature and given market value by public investment in transportation and other infrastructure, not by the efforts of landlords themselves.

The argument between Progressive Era reformers, socialists, anarchists and individualists thus turned on the political strategy of how best to free markets from debt and rent. Where they differed was on the best political means to achieve it, above all the role of the state. There was broad agreement that the state was controlled by vested interests inherited from feudal Europe's military conquests and the world that was colonized by European military force. The political question at the turn of the 20th century was whether peaceful democratic reform could overcome the political and even military resistance wielded by the Old Regime using violence to retain its "rights." The ensuing political revolutions were grounded in the Enlightenment, in the legal philosophy of men such as John Locke, political economists such as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Marx. Power was to be used to free markets from the predatory property and financial systems inherited from feudalism. Markets were to be free of privilege and free lunches, so that people would obtain income and wealth only by their own labor and enterprise. This was the essence of the labor theory of value and its complement, the concept of economic rent as the excess of market price over socially necessary cost-value.

Although we now know that markets and prices, rent and interest, contractual formalities and nearly all the elements of economic enterprise originated in the "mixed economies" of Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BC and continued throughout the mixed public/private economies of classical antiquity, the discussion was so politically polarized that the idea of a mixed economy with checks and balances received scant attention a century ago.

Individualists believed that all that shrinking central governments would shrink the control mechanism by which the vested interests extracted wealth without work or enterprise of their own. Socialists saw that a strong government was needed to protect society from the attempts of property and finance to use their gains to monopolize economic and political power. Both ends of the political spectrum aimed at the same objective to bring prices down to actual costs of production. The common aim was to maximize economic efficiency so as to pass on the fruits of the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions to the population at large. This required blocking the rentier class of interlopers from grabbing the public domain and controlling the allocation of resources. Socialists did not believe this could be done without taking the state's political and legal power into their own hands. Marxists believed that a revolution was necessary to reclaim property rent for the public domain, and to enable governments to create their own credit rather than borrow at interest from commercial bankers and wealthy bondholders. The aim was not to create a bureaucracy but to free society from the surviving absentee ownership power of the vested property and financial interests.

All this history of economic thought has been as thoroughly expunged from today's academic curriculum as it has from popular discussion. Few people remember the great debate at the turn of the 20th century: Would the world progress fairly quickly from Progressive Era reforms to outright socialism public ownership of basic economic infrastructure, natural monopolies (including the banking system) and the land itself (and to Marxists, of industrial capital as well)? Or, could the liberal reformers of the day individualists, land taxers, classical economists in the tradition of Mill, and American institutionalists such as Simon Patten retain capitalism's basic structure and private property ownership? If they could do so, they recognized that it would have to be in the context of regulating markets and introducing progressive taxation of wealth and income. This was the alternative to outright "state" ownership. Today's extreme "free market" idea is a dumbed-down caricature of this position.

All sides viewed the government as society's "brain," its forward planning organ. Given the complexity of modern technology, humanity would shape its own evolution. Instead of evolution occurring by "primitive accumulation," it could be planned deliberately. Individualists countered that no human planner was sufficiently imaginative to manage the complexity of markets, but endorsed the need to strip away all forms of unearned income economic rent and the rise in land prices that Mill called the "unearned increment." This involved government regulation to shape markets. A "free market" was an active political creation and required regulatory vigilance.

As public relations advocates for the vested interests and special rentier privilege, today's "neoliberal" advocates of "free" markets seek to maximize economic rent the free lunch of price in excess of cost-value, not to free markets from rentier charges. So misleading a pedigree only could be achieved by outright suppression of knowledge of what Locke, Smith and Mill really wrote. Attempts to regulate "free markets" and limit monopoly pricing and privilege are conflated with "socialism," even with Soviet-style bureaucracy. The aim is to deter the analysis of what a "free market" really is: a market free of unnecessary costs: monopoly rents, property rents and financial charges for credit that governments can create freely.

Political reform to bring market prices in line with socially necessary cost-value was the great economic issue of the 19th century. The labor theory of intrinsic cost-value found its counterpart in the theory of economic rent: land rent, monopoly price gouging, interest and other returns to special privilege that increased market prices purely by institutional property claims. The discussion goes all the way back to the medieval churchmen defining Just Price. The doctrine originally was applied to the proper fees that bankers could charge, and later was extended to land rent, then to the monopolies that governments created and sold off to creditors in an attempt to extricate themselves from debt.

Reformists and more radical socialists alike sought to free capitalism of its egregious inequities, above all its legacy from Europe's Dark Age of military conquest when invading warlords seized lands and imposed an absentee landlord class to receive the rental income, which was used to finance wars of further land acquisition. As matters turned out, hopes that industrial capitalism could reform itself along progressive lines to purge itself of its legacy from feudalism have come crashing down. World War I hit the global economy like a comet, pushing it into a new trajectory and catalyzing its evolution into an unanticipated form of finance capitalism.

It was unanticipated largely because most reformers spent so much effort advocating progressive policies that they neglected what Thorstein Veblen called the vested interests. Their Counter-Enlightenment is creating a world that would have been deemed a dystopia a century ago something so pessimistic that no futurist dared depict a world run by venal and corrupt bankers, protecting as their prime customers the monopolies, real estate speculators and hedge funds whose economic rent, financial gambling and asset-price inflation is turned into a flow of interest in today's rentier economy. Instead of industrial capitalism increasing capital formation we are seeing finance capitalism strip capital, and instead of the promised world of leisure we are being drawn into one of debt peonage.

The financial travesty of democracy

The financial sector has redefined democracy by claiming claims that the Federal Reserve must be "independent" from democratically elected representatives, in order to act as the bank lobbyist in Washington. This makes the financial sector exempt from the democratic political process, despite the fact that today's economic planning is now centralized in the banking system. The result is a regime of insider dealings and oligarchy rule by the wealthy few.

The economic fallacy at work is that bank credit is a veritable factor of production, an almost Physiocratic source of fertility without which growth could not occur. The reality is that the monopoly right to create interest-bearing bank credit is a free transfer from society to a privileged elite. The moral is that when we see a "factor of production" that has no actual labor-cost of production, it is simply an institutional privilege.

So this brings us to the most recent debate about "nationalizing" or "socializing" the banks. The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) so far has been used for the following uses that I think can be truly deemed anti-social, not "socialist" in any form.

By the end of last year, $20 billion was used to pay bonuses and salaries to financial mismanagers, despite the plunge of their banks into negative equity. And to protect their interests, these banks continued to pay lobbying fees to persuade legislators to give them yet more special privileges.

While Citibank and other major institutions threatened to bring the financial system crashing down by being "too big to fail," over $100 billion of TARP funds was used to make them even bigger. Already teetering banks bought affiliates that had grown by making irresponsible and outright fraudulent loans. Bank of America bought Angelo Mozilo's Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch, while JP Morgan Chase bought Bear Stearns and other big banks bought WaMu and Wachovia.

Today's policy is to "rescue" these giant bank conglomerates by enabling them to "earn" their way out of debt by selling yet more debt to an already over-indebted U.S. economy. The hope is to re-inflate real estate and other asset prices. But do we really want to let banks "pay back taxpayers" by engaging in yet more predatory financial practices vis-à-vis the economy at large? It threatens to maximize the margin of market price over direct costs of production, by building in higher financial charges. This is just the opposite policy from trying to bring prices for housing and infrastructure in line with technologically necessary costs. It certainly is not a policy to make the U.S. economy more globally competitive.

The Treasury's plan to "socialize" the banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions is simply to step in and take bad loans off their books, shifting the loss onto the public sector. This is the antithesis of true nationalization or "socialization" of the financial system. The banks and insurance companies quickly got over their initial knee-jerk fear that a government bailout would occur on terms that would wipe out their bad management, along with the stockholders and bondholders who backed this bad management. The Treasury has assured these mismanagers that "socialism" for them is a free gift. The primacy of finance over the rest of the economy will be affirmed, leaving management in place and giving stockholders a chance to recover by earning more from the economy at large, with yet more tax favoritism. (This means yet heavier taxes shifted onto consumers, raising their living costs accordingly.)

The bulk of wealth under capitalism as under feudalism always has come primarily from the public domain, headed by the land and formerly public utilities, capped most recently by the Treasury's debt-creating power. In effect, the Treasury creates a new asset ($11 trillion of new Treasury bonds and guarantees, e.g. the $5.2 trillion to Fannie and Freddie). Interest on these bonds is to be paid by new levies on labor, not on property. This is what is supposed to re-inflate housing, stock and bond prices the money freed from property and corporate taxes will be available to be capitalized into yet new loans.

So the revenue hitherto paid as business taxes will still be paid in the form of interest while the former taxes will still be collected, but from labor. The fiscal-financial burden thus will be doubled. This is not a program to make the economy more competitive or raise living standards for most people. It is a program to polarize the U.S. economy even further between finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) at the top and labor at the bottom.

Neoliberal denunciations of public regulation and taxation as "socialism" is really an attack on classical political economy the "original" liberalism whose ideal was to free society from the parasitic legacy of feudalism. A truly socialized Treasury policy would be for banks to lend for productive purposes that contribute to real economic growth, not merely to increase overhead and inflate asset prices by enough to extract interest charges. Fiscal policy would aim to minimize rather than maximizing the price of home ownership and doing business, by basing the tax system on collecting the rent that is now being paid out as interest. Shifting the tax burden off wages and profits onto rent and interest was the core of classical political economy in the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as the Progressive Era and Social Democratic reform movements in the United States and Europe prior to World War I. But this doctrine and its reform program has been buried by the rhetorical smokescreen organized by financial lobbyists seeking to muddy the ideological waters sufficiently to mute popular opposition to today's power grab by finance capital and monopoly capital. Their alternative to true nationalization and socialization of finance is debt peonage, oligarchy and neo-feudalism. They have called this program "free markets."

McCann's Solution To Ireland's Frenzied Depression

2009-03-11T08:21:00.000Z

The Solution to Ireland's Austerity Plan

"Make Bono Pay Tax"

By EAMONN McCANN

The most eye-catching placard on a 120,000-strong march in Dublin last Saturday against the Irish government's austerity response to the tottering of the capitalist system was held aloft by a scrawny teenager with the look of a music-lover about him, reading "Make Bono Pay Tax."

The march, organised by the Irish Congress of Trades Unions, was protesting against measures including a pay freeze plus a one percent wage levy on all public sector workers, education cut-backs which will mean, for example, the closure of special needs classes in primary schools, and much else along the same screw-the-workers, neo-liberal lines.

The cut-backs and attacks on public sector workers come against the background of a banking scandal which, proportionately, dwarfs the crimes of the bankster class in the US. Rummaging through the rubble of Anglo Irish Bank which collapsed at the end of 2008 and was nationalized in January, investigators discovered that the bank's founder and boss Sean Fitzpatrick was secretly in hock to his own bank to the tune of €87 million, which he had shifted into Irish Life and Permanent on the day before the annual audit and shifted back again the day afterwards. Fitzpatrick---"Seanie" to both Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Brian Cowan and his predecessor Bertie Ahern---had performed this manoeuvre with sums of around €80 million every year for the past seven years.

It emerged, too, that the bank had last year given loans worth €451 million to ten customers buying shares in the bank, the loans being secured on the same shares. As well, 15 individuals owed the bank at least half a billion each, much of it secured on property holdings which may now be worth as little as shares in Anglo Irish (€17 in mid-2007, 12 cents at the time of nationalization).

The bail-out burden of all this falls on the tax-payers. Hence the mass fury expressed on the Dublin march and the dismay of many at the nervous pusillanimity of union leaders on the platform, whose main call was not to march on another couple of hundred yards to Anglo Irish headquarters and burn it down but to "exert pressure" on the government to agree to reopen talks on a "package of measures".Hence, too, a new focus on tax-avoiders who live high off the hog in Dublin while basing their businesses in Euro-zone tax-shelters. Like U2.

More than 40 years ago, the Beatles followed Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to India in search of a spiritual haven. Three years ago, U2 followed him, in search of a tax haven. (By the time the Maharishi faded from mortal life in February 2006, he was living at his Dutch estate, presiding over a business empire worth more than a man who scorned money could be bothered to count. He'd moved to Holland in 1990 for tax purposes. Or, rather, no-tax purposes.")

Cork-born British television super-star Graham Norton commented at the time: "People like Bono really annoy me. He goes to hell and back to avoid paying tax. He has a special accountant. He works out Irish tax loopholes. And then he's asking me to buy a well for an African village. Tarmac a road or pay for a school, you tight-wad!"

But Norton's words of modest wisdom didn't resonate the media mainstream which endlessly celebraties Bono. They laud his selflessness in occasionally taking time off from counting the cash he had squirrelled away to berate the Irish authorities for refusing to give more of the money they had collected from tax-compliant citizens towards alleviating world hunger. They report worshipfully on Bono's peregrinations around the planet in the company of the liars, murderers, thieves and whores who were have run the global economy into ruin.

The arrival of U2 confirmed Holland as the European Union's number one tax haven. Corporations which have joined the band in establishing headquarters there to avoid paying tax in their home countries include Coca Cola, Ikea, Nike and Gucci.

The band is set to tour their new album, "No Line on the Horizon". So stand by for the latest swirl of jangly guitar enclosed in a fog of undefined feeling. Expect no grit, no danger, nothing jagged or ragged to disturb tranquillity, but a toxic cloud of fluffy rhetoric, a soundtrack for the terminally self-satisfied, not forgetting heart-felt homilies on how to live a moral life.

The best response to one of those breathless Bono appeals for uplift came at a Glasgow gig when he hushed the audience to reverent silence before starting slowly to clap. "Every time I clap my hands," he whispered into the microphone, "a child in Africa dies..."

A voice responded in broad Glasgow accent: "Well, fucking stop doin' it then."

All of which is mere intro to lyrics (by Bono impersonator Paul O'Toole) sung outside the Dail (parliament) in Dublin on Wednesday, at a follow-up- demo organized by the Debt and Development Coalition Ireland.

I want to run, my money to hide
I want build paper walls and keep it inside
I want to seek shelter from income tax pain
Where the accounts have no names
See my tax bill disappear without a trace
Where the accounts have no names

Where the accounts have no names
Where the accounts have no names
Where the accounts have no names
Keeping our fortune is something we love
Something we love
And when we go there, we go without you
Revenue we don't do

Ireland is bankrupt and though it's going bust
Our well paid accountants made sure it don't affect us
They showed us a place to avoid all the pain

Where the accounts have no names
Where the accounts have no names
Where the accounts have no names
Avoiding tax is something we love
Something we love

And when we go there, we forget about you
Revenue we don't do

Tax demands turn to rust
We've used the law and left on the wind
Left on the wind

On the subject of tax our love turns to rust
See our dosh is in trusts
Dosh is in trusts
And when we go there, we forget about you
Revenue we don't do

Or:

I have paid highest fees
I have moved overseas
Only to pay less tax
Only to pay less tax

I have run
I have crawled
I've done so much you'd be appalled
You'd be appalled
Only to pay less tax

But I still haven't learned about democracy
No I still haven't learned about democracy

I know avoiding tax ain't fair
It's just because I'm a millionaire
I don't need to pay like you
No I won't pay like you

Cause I still haven't learned about democracy
But I still haven't learned about democracy

You paid your tax and you
Laid the blame
Carried the burden
Of my shame
Of my shame
You know I'm still running

Cause I still haven't learned about democracy
No I still haven't learned about democracy
But I still haven't learned about democracy
But I still haven't learned about.

In the day of the Beatles, it was peace and harmony to the tune of "All You Need Is Love."

Now, it's "Get It While You Can" to the tune of a billion dollars. Rock and roll, where did it go wrong?

None of this is to deny that U2 could play a part in restoring unity of purpose to the Irish people in these dangerously divisive times. I reckon that "Make Bono Pay Tax" could prove a slogan around which the nation might gather.

And another thing. It will be remembered that, last May in Dublin's Merrion Hotel after a Springsteen gig, Bono undertook to take part in a public debate with Dave Marsh on the effectiveness of celebrity politics. A couple of weeks later, U2's New York office told Marsh that they'd schedule the discussion once the new album was finished. Like, now. So I emailed Marsh last week to find out the details.

"He backed out, without offering an explanation (and I was too smart to ask)" came the prompt reply. "We may draw our own conclusions."

Friday The 13th: Smug Slasher Movie For The Academic Left Elite

2009-03-11T05:06:00.000Z

One hundred pounds (Stirling) will buy you this latest reassuring (as a simulated substitute for serious activism) consumer product:

On the Idea of Communism - Conference 13th,14th & 15th March

"It’s just the simple thing that’s hard, so hard to do."(B.Brecht)

The year of 1990 stands for the triple defeat of the Left: the retreat of the social-democratic Welfare State politics in the developed First World, the disintegration of the Soviet-style Socialist states in the industrialized Second World, and the retreat of emancipatory movements in the Third World. A certain epoch was thereby over, the epoch which began with the October Revolution and was characterized by the Party-State form of organization. Does this mean that the time of radical emancipatory politics is over?

In recent years, there are multiple signs which indicate the need for a new beginning. The utopia of the 1990, the Fukuyamaist "end of history" (liberal-democratic capitalist as the finally found natural social order) died twice in the first decade of the XXIst century. While the 9/11 attacks signaled its political death, the financial crisis of 2008 signals its economic death. In these new conditions, the task is not only to reflect on new strategies, but to radically rethink the most basic coordinates of emancipatory politics. One should go well beyond the rejection of the Party-State Left in its "Stalinist" form – a common place today -, and extend this rejection to the entire field of the “democratic Left” as the strategy to reform the system from within its representative-democratic state form. Much more than the debacle of the Really-Existing Socialism, the defeat of 1990 was the final defeat of this "democratic Left." This defeat raises the question: is "Communism" still the name to be used to designate the horizon of radical emancipatory projects? In spite of their theoretical differences, the participants share the thesis that one should remain faithful to the name "Communism": this name is potent to serve as the Idea which guides our activity, as well as the instrument which enables us to expose the catastrophes of the XXth century politics, those of the Left included.

The symposium will not deal with practico-political questions of how to analyze the latest economic, political, and military troubles, or how to organize a new political movement. More radical questioning is needed today - this is a meeting of philosophers who will deal with Communism as a philosophical concept, advocating a precise and strong thesis: from Plato onwards, Communism is the only political Idea worthy of a philosopher.

"The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other. If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this Idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs, and let us stop talking about it. In this case, the rat-man is right, as is, by the way, the case with some ex-communists who are either avid of their rents or who lost courage. However, to hold on to the Idea, to the existence of this hypothesis, does not mean that we should retain its first form of presentation which was centered on property and State. In fact, what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself." (Alain Badiou)

Speakers: Judith Balso, Alain Badiou, Bruno Bosteels, Terry Eagleton, Peter Hallward, Michael Hardt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Toni Negri, Jacques Ranciere, Alessandro Russo, Alberto Toscano, Gianni Vattimo, Slavoj Zizek

The booking for this conference is now closed - it is full.

Logan Hall
Institute of Education,
University of London
20 Bedford Way
London WC1H 0AL

Envious or resentful plebs can watch a free audio/video link from here:

Elvin Hall
Institute of Education
20 Bedford Way
London WC1H 0AL

Programme:

Friday March 13
Registration opens at 11.30am
2pm Costas Douzinas Welcome
Alain Badiou, Introductory remarks
Michael Hardt "The Production of the Common"
Bruno Bosteels "The Leftist Hypothesis: Communism in the Age of Terror"
Peter Hallward "Communism of the Intellect, Communism of the Will"
Jean-Luc Nancy will be present throughout the conference and will intervene in the discussions.
6 pm End

Saturday March 14
Registration opens at 8.30am
10am Alessandro Russo "Did the Cultural Revolution End Communism?"
Alberto Toscano "Communist Power / Communist Knowledge"
Toni Negri "Communisme: reflexions sur le concept et la pratique"
1pm Lunch
3pm Terry Eagleton "Communism: Lear or Gonzalo?"
Jacques Ranciere "Communists without Communism?"
Alain Badiou "Communism: a generic name"
6pm End
Drinks Reception – Jeffery Hall

Sunday March 15
10am Slavoj Zizek "To begin from the beginning over and over again"
Gianni Vattimo "Weak Communism?"
Judith Balso "Communism: a hypothesis for philosophy, an impossible name for politics?"
Concluding Debate
2pm End

---------------------------------

Such as I.T. , Clare, and the SOAS Student Union in Britain are of course right to express reservations about the underlying organizational culture within elite academic practice that automatically assumes that an important (chronically urgent and largely late) conference on communism should also attract an important price (hopefully participants were wise enough to pay for their registrations via subprime cheques or credit cards, default now being a principle. They weren't?). So SOAS has organized a 'competing' conference on Internet for Activists on Saturday, 14th.

What is to be done. Indeed.