self-criticism: bourgeois socialism

(First, let me just mention that I have moved my personal blog to adswithoutproducts.com. If you link to me, or ever visit, or haven't visited but would like to, there's the new address. The old typepad site will close shortly...)

I've been reading The Communist Manifesto, as well as the truly excellent (and book-length, really) introduction in the new Penguin edition by Gareth Stedman Jones. A few passages toward the end have provoked my interest tonight. First from the section on Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism:

The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.

And another, related passage from the section on Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism:

The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without the distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?

The second one is a bit tougher than the first, but I must admit that I feel some half-guilty self-recognition here. I am not sure that I do not, in my heart of hearts, dream of a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.

The thing is, I also do not think I am alone on this point, even in contemporary leftist circles. Is it possible to believe in a proletariat anymore? In the developed world? If you were to say that it exists in the US, you would have to stretch the definition to enormous, distorted dimensions. In short, while Marx and Engels were in 1848 trying to argue the nascent-proletariat into existence in the first place, we who remain invested in Marx wonder if the revolutionary class has not already come and gone, at least here, where we live and think and write.

(This is of course not at all to deny the very, very tangible examples of poverty and degradation and alienation both economic and psychological that exist all around us in the US and other developed nations. It is, rather, to doubt the existence of the very specific configuration that Marx and others labeled the proletariat - and to doubt whether, if change were to come, change would come from even the remnants or the afterlife of this class...)

Isn't the Bourgeois Socialism that Marx describes something all too familiar to us American leftists? Isn't it something close to the US fantasy of welfare-state Europe: government by an enlightened, socialized bourgeoisie that, yes, has eliminated (upward!) the proletariat altogether. Of course it is a dream, a falsehood - it is the dream that we Americans often call "Sweden." And it is a dream that surely has something very much to do with race, the old secrets-in-plain-sight of the American experiment.

There are no easy answers, it seems to me, to this problem. One might be tempted to claim that my problem is simply one of misunderstanding (or choosing not to acknowledge) the global division of labor. One might respond that the proletariat exists, it simply lives elsewhere, and due to the construction of global society, the US must be completely written off as a locale for revolution or reform.

I do not accept this answer. I will perhaps go into the question more deeply, but I cannot help but believe that a socialized United States would be - if done properly* - a gift to the world. There is great suffering here in the US - definitely not on the scale of so many other places - and here is exactly where I tilt toward the second passage from Marx above - there is suffering spread across the economic strata of society.

Dangerous thoughts, I know. They likely will provoke angry responses from some - which I welcome. Just do ask yourselves first whether the policies that you support are truly aimed exclusively or even primarily at the lowest quadrants of society. There are quite a few things that we all like to discuss that are perhaps selected - unconsciously or not - because of their dual applicability to the poor and the relatively well-off at once. I can think, for instance, of reforms that would do more immediate good for the working classes than socialized medicine, which we never stop discussing.

In short, I am left with the same question that I am almost always left with - and the primary question that mobilizes my work on the blogs. I cannot tell whether my self-recognition as what Marx calls bourgeois socialist is:

1) simply an effect of my own class-standing, one that (completely naturally) naturalizes my own classed perspective at universal, as the "truth."

or

2) a moment of recognition that work needs to be done to reconfigure the terms of Marx's (of the socialist) argument to present day conditions and in terms more distinct and workable than, say, Hardt and Negri's turn to the amorphous (and amorphously useless) "Multitude."

In concluding with this question, you will see that I remain, perhaps, methodologically dogmatic if not programmatically or ideologically so. But - whether or not my questions are the right ones - we do not listen to Marx if we fail to adapt his claims to the current socio-economic conditions, which are distinctly different from those of 1848. I am beginning to feel that resting on the wrong side of some of these questions is stunting out growth as a movement. I am beginning to believe, in other words, that failing to define exactly what it is that we mean, today, by the words socialism and communism, will lock us into a permanent cage of obsolescence, nostalgic hubris, and doctrinal impossibility.

* Of course there is always the possibility of what has been labeled (by Hobson I believe and others) "welfare imperialism." Which may in fact be one way to label exactly the thing that the US glides toward now. And the extreme form of "welfare imperialism" we usually know as "national socialism."

dialectics at a standstill: bruce sterling as exemplary public intellectual, circa now

The current configuration of the fields of journalism, academia, and publishing - plus the advent of the blogsphere - have produced in turn a new configuration of public intellectualism. There's something of a long tail effect at work - there are probably more PIs listened to by fewer than any time in history. All manner of blogpundits, evangelists, and visionaries abound.

One of these (actually, he's officially the Visionary in Residence at the Art Center College of Design in California) is Bruce Sterling, who has recently produced his very own youtubed guide to Belgrade:

Let me clip in what I think is the key passage here:

OK. so bear around the corner of the street, and this Tito-era workers housing building with its crumbling substandard concrete, we have what's basically an ideological declaration here: business, technology, communication. You notice it doesn't seem to be actually selling much of anything, it's more like a placard for the 21st century way of life. Just a layer, a thin layer, on top of an older building. But it is this layer, this thin layer, that actually allows me to live within this particular city and earn a living here... via internet. Oh but what kind of person am I? Well, you know, look at my clothing. Look at my possessions. Business, technology, communication. What are these objects, actually attached to my body. This one in particular, wireless communication, completely changes people's physical relationship to the city grid. In order to assemble my crew here on this street corner, we had to make about 30 different wireless phone calls just this morning and this afternoon. And yet, thanks to wireless communication, this is it. Thanks to the internet, that's what allows me to be here.

Dear Christ. So, let's consult the scorecard. The public housing of the old regime sucked, sure, but now there's, what, a weird placard and Sterling with a fucking cellphone. For a proper celebration to ensue, you'd think we'd catch sight of all the fabulous new housing for the underclasses since the arrival of the free market chez Belgrade. After all, one guesses that there still are, like, people living in the crumbling workers housing building. Just as the failure of the American welfare state doesn't mean that no one has to live in towering projects, it's just that the idea of building new residences for the working class has been abandoned.

I suppose it does change "people's relationship to the city grid" to have a well-paid speculative fiction writer cum freelance consultant strolling the streets of your city, making 30 calls a day on his phone, escorted by a movie crew. The rise of communism. The death of Tito. The fall of the Wall. The arrival of Bruce Sterling in your city. It all makes sense now, no?

More seriously: the illogic of the paragraph I've typed in speaks to the strange situation of the nearly-depoliticized public intellectual in 2007. The past, its utopian politics, are recognized and then derided. Guffaw, guffaw. But when the part of the paragraph arrives when you're meant to explain why you're smiling and carrying on, the part about the world actually being a better place now that the nasty specter of communism has slinked back into the grave, you simply stare into the face of your cellphone, or flip it out for all to admire. You register the amazingness of the fact that you're actually here, wherever you are: a post-communist city that still bears the scares of US bombing, or a Pizza Hut in Bangalore, or the Department of Defense media center in the green zone, wherever. Your voice rises, you get excited, but there's nothing to show but a civic-boosterist information economy poster splayed across the face of a Worker's Residence, gutted into condos.

In short, the past and its potentialities are everywhere confronted, but only to be at once disowned with a shrug....

Karl (und Carl)

May 5th is Karl Marx's birthday.  Happy birthday Uncle Karl! 

In the trajectories of blogweaving, and by way of an invitation sent out rather late, what would it mean to assemble a conversation not at Marx's funeral but at his birthday?   I'll leave it for Craig to post here about (the other) Carl.

Resistance with irony

The following is a guest post by Brett Neilson, blogger at the irregular Life During Wartime.

1. ‘Triumphant global finance capital/world trade can only be resisted with irony.’ I am simultaneously drawn and worried by this claim from Spivak’s 2000 essay ‘From Haverstock Hill Flat to U.S. Classroom, What’s Left of Theory.’ Perhaps this is because the work of irony is never done. Reaching on the one hand toward insubordinate refusal and on the other toward an unbearable ontological lightness, irony holds forth a promise it cannot keep. As such, it provides no chart of programmatic action--no twelve steps for overcoming global capitalism. Its tactics are inevitably polluted with ideological longings that, as Spivak’s teacher Paul de Man points out, it can know but never quite overcome.

Irony divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic. It can know this inauthenticity but can never overcome it. It can only restate and repeat it on an increasingly conscious level, but it remains endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowledge applicable to the empirical world

Is this precisely the impossibility that drives Spivak to rewrite her observations on reading Marx after Derrida so many times?

Continue reading “Resistance with irony”

Four notes on the periphery of a speculative morphology

1. "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" is, perhaps, for those who arrive at it from literature, cultural studies, philosophy or similar, Spivak's most 'difficult' or elusive of essays. It seems to be the one that, more than any other, makes readers blink, their eyes glaze over.

Sometimes, at best, this is expressed as a bewilderment as to what might be at stake in the argument or, as a slightly different question, as a consideration of what is at put at stake in reading at a particular conjuncture. At other times, with a more or less implicit embarrassment that Spivak herself notes, the readers' gaze is averted from the discussion of 'economics', or better: labour-power and value - which is to say, that which is least familiar and proper to the aforementioned disciplines but which, as it turns out, the essay is about.  Other times, still, the confusion that results from Spivak's indisciplined writing cuts the other way. But, indeed, "before there is language, there are languages", as someone would say  (though, it remains to ask whether this statement exists in its temporal, integrative sense, as the hope or promise of a lingua franca).

Continue reading “Four notes on the periphery of a speculative morphology”

Tronti blogweave

For your quick or leisurely perusal, the compilation of Long Sunday's recent symposium on Mario Tronti's "The Strategy of the Refusal", and some remarks.  The multitudinous, but alphabetised, contributions:

»Jon Beasley-Murray, The new barbarians
»Eric Beck, Minor refusals
»George Ciccariello-Maher, Class and subalternity
»Jodi Dean, Two questions on Tronti [follow-up]
»Roger Gathman Fantasy sites and the conquistadors of the planet
»Nate Holdren, Notes on "The Strategy of the Refusal"
»John Holloway, Adorno meets Tronti
»Doug Johnson, Intellectuals, the refusal of power, office workers' unions
»Brian Lamb, I would prefer not to bore you
»Craig McFarlane, Refusing to engage
»David McInerney, Tronti and Althusser
»Angela Mitropoulos, When will this labour end?
»Brett Neilson, Five theses on Tronti
»Stephen Squibb, Strategy of refusal of strategy
»Keith Tilford, How no can you go? Part I [Part II]

The preamble to the Long Sunday symposium, which includes links to related texts.  The relevant essay by Tronti is here, and a quick link to Long Sunday's Tronti folder. 

There were also a number of related posts elsewhere:  Destructive Creation, Northanger, Going Somewhere, Philosophy.com, pas au-delà, Attitude Adjustor. (Those are the most directly related to the discussion, though I wouldn't be surprised if I've missed some.)  And, not least, there is always the ongoing reading at Leggiamo Tronti.

My immense gratitude to all those who contributed their writings, readings and questions - those who simply took the time to read along with, and specifically those, such as Matt, who spent much time coding and uploading.

Already, Jon has the ball rolling for another reading, and I'm hoping that blogweaving continues, mutates and grows.  Not only because it creates a shared conversation that cuts across various blogs without converging along the one line, but also because - in ways that have yet to be fully explored - it marks an autonomy of writing, reading and research from the university that, particularly in times such as these, becomes an imperative.  Needless to say, what we read and write is related to how we read and write, no less than it is to the diificult questions of who, how and why this 'we' might appear, in that process.

Many thanks for the adventure.

When will this labour end?

Labouring against work. Mulling over the contributions and remarks made during the course of these readings, this is what strikes me as the first paradox, which is also the specific paradox of abstract labour and concrete labours that, in turn, characterises Marx's distinctive account of capitalism, that which brings all others paradoxes to the fore and makes them boil over. It's all about specificity, the difference and the cut. And is there anything more paradoxical than communism, a class politics that gears itself toward the abolition of class society? Operaismo - ie., workerism - against work. And Tronti's essay is nothing if not paradoxical.

Who would have guessed that a discussion of the refusal of work would result in so much toil?

Continue reading “When will this labour end?”

Adorno meets Tronti

(This is a guest post by John Holloway, author of Change the World Without Taking Power.)

It is clear that non-identity is the hero, the centre, the moving force of the world as Adorno presents it.  But what do we understand by non-identity?  Is it just a philosophical concept or is the conceptualisation of a social force?  The answer, surely, is that we are non-identity.  The force that does not fit, the force that contradicts all identification, the force that overflows is subjectivity, we.  And who are we?  We are the subject, uncontainable within any definition.  We can say that we are the working class, but that makes sense only if we understand "working class" as a concept that explodes against itself, a concept that bursts its own bounds.

Continue reading “Adorno meets Tronti”

Tronti and Althusser

(This is a guest posting by David McInerney, editor of "Althusser & Us", Borderlands.*)

The following does not constitute a close reading of "The Strategy of Refusal", or its place within Tronti's work more generally.  Given other demands, the best I can do is relate Tronti's work to my recent study of Louis Althusser's defence/rethinking of the concept of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and its relations to his "aleatory materialism".  For me, the affinities between Althusser and Tronti stand out most clearly with respect to their shared opposition to both Eurocommunism and Stalinism, the difficulties that both faced in grasping the immanent demise of post-WWII social democracy, and the irruption of neoliberalism into European politics (which I think Jodi Dean commented on).  And yet, it is perhaps because of this fact that their work remains valuable, considering the pre-Marxist dross of "radical democracy" (the reanimated Bernstein that passes for "post-marxism") that dominates Left thinking today.

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How No Can You Go?

(The following is a guest essay by Keith Tilford, author of the weblog Metastable Equilibrium.  It is very long but, like everything on Long Sunday, hardly bored, or boring.  Update:  Part II is now here.)

Michael Blum, still from "Wandering Marxwards", 1999

What follows definitely took some liberties with a reading of Tronti.  I used “The Strategy of The Refusal” more as a point of departure than anything else, as I wanted to focus generally on the notion of refusal – on its creative/inventive capacities - and attempt to make visible some of the relationships between art practices since the 1960’s and the trajectory of operaismo and autonomia along with the theoretical works that have come out of Italy.  So perhaps in the spirit of Zizek’s book on Deleuze that he didn’t write, this can be my post on Tronti that I didn’t write.  The post is divided into four parts, the first two will be here at LS, but because of excessive length I’ll be posting the last two parts over at my blog if the reader is interested (one is a more in depth consideration of the work of artist Francis Alys, and the other on “anorectic subjectivities” which acts as a kind of conclusion).  This is really part of a wider research interest of mine, but I am very pleased that this symposium took place since it gave me the chance to return to some of those interest.  Call this a draft, then. Many of the themes taken up in the second part of this post are also adressed in Howard Slater's essay "The Spoiled Ideals of Lost Situations", which is meant to accompany a reading of the book Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, where most of the artist's writings I've used can be found.  Two artists that I have not been able to squeeze into this, but would highly recommend that anyone interested with what’s being said here check out are Thomas Hirschhorn (see here) and especially Santiago Sierra (a little about him here).  Also, I should point out that while the word “practice” appears throughout, many artists today (including myself) really don’t like this word.  I’ll skip giving reasons for the moment.  Perhaps Ranciere’s “ways of doing and making within the aesthetic regime of the arts” would have been better, though long-winded – and out of laziness I have not yet modified any of that.  However, the word does appear in inverted commas at several points, which I’m sure Matt will appreciate.

I. Double-Headed Histories

"Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults into a terrain of particles each containing its own void." – Robert Smithson

"The clear division between reality and fiction makes a rational logic of history impossible as well as a science of history." – Jacques Ranciere

With nearly forty years separating us from the first publication of Tronti’s essay “The Strategy of The Refusal”, a document showing that the struggle against work was actually essential to the development of capital, what to make of it now, in light so many radical, and at times even invisible or largely unnoticed mutations in the constitution of contemporary capitalism?  Perhaps some possible answers can be recognized in Tronti’s formulation that ‘against the old forms of struggle and resistance’ should be installed new forms of political organization and refusal.  It seems apparent then, that to think refusal today should invest in the same formulation – this time polemically positioned against Tronti.  Why?  Because from within the paradigm of “The Strategy of Refusal” is a rigorous division of class – and one that seems to run the risk of merely satisfying a dialectic and binary representational machinism; the categories of ‘worker’ and ‘party’ seem to end up installing themselves within the very representations that the workers would have intended to overthrow, a move which became thwarted by their own becoming-major.  So perhaps some solutions to envisioning contemporary forms of refusal might begin along the lines suggested by Deleuze and Guattari: to think minority instead of class.  To say this does not mean denying that there are classes, or that there is a ruling class; only that refusal, resistance – what composes and calls for them - are not reducible to the antagonisms of a class division.  As the Italian Futurist FT Marinetti once said, “language is the motherload of all culture”, and it is without doubt impossible to follow the consequences of Tronti’s initial formulations without encountering and taking into much consideration all the nominations which have entered and continue to circulate through the “post-Fordist” lexicon as a result of the ‘failures’ of the Italian operaismo: social subjectivity, social chain, multitude, social factory, the general intellect, generic will, compositionism, immaterial or cognitive labour…

In coincidence with the workers movement as a particular history of struggles and theoretical works lay another long history of artistic practices and revolutions that could be said to have aimed at constructing solidarities with such resistances and refusals.  If the artists and workers caught up in these histories shared a common enemy it was certainly ‘capital’ – though such an enemy will always express itself in different forms relative to a given situation or milieu.  In Italy it was the factory; with artists, the museum, institution, or gallery.  In both instances there was a resistance toward the system’s control that manifested itself in the engaged and active search for an outside set against received modes of subjectivity and the “conjugations of the axiomatic” (D & G); a search that concerned itself with the invention of new forms of life and work aimed at the embetterment of society as a whole.  This other history, with loose ties to the attitudes of such localized movements as the Bauhaus in Germany and the Russian Constructivists (or for that matter more diffuse movements such as Dada), initiated new inquiries into modes of aesthetic production conceived through a kind of ‘anti-aesthetic’ which intersected with the ambitions of the Italian workers and autonomia during the 1960’s and 1970’s.  Such coincidence figures into the attempts made by artists during this period to resist both the sedentary space of an elitist institution and the commodity form of the artwork in what came to known as Conceptual Art.

Continue reading “How No Can You Go?”

The web we're on

Tice says the technology exists to track and sort through every domestic and international phone call as they are switched through centers, such as one in New York, and to search for key words or phrases that a terrorist might use...
President Bush has admitted that he gave orders that allowed the NSA to eavesdrop on a small number of Americans without the usual requisite warrants.
But Tice [former NSA insider] disagrees. He says the number of Americans subject to eavesdropping by the NSA could be in the millions if the full range of secret NSA programs is used.  "That would mean for most Americans that if they conducted, or you know, placed an overseas communication, more than likely they were sucked into that vacuum," Tice said.

Today via The Volokh's, who also raise a few questions about the wisdom of that whole e-annoyance law thing from 50-odd posts ago:

This potentially criminalizes any anonymous speech on a Web site that's intended to annoy at least some readers, even if it's also intended to inform other readers.  This is true whether the poster is berating a government official, a religious figure, a company that he thinks provides bad service, an academic who he thinks is doing or saying something misguided, a sports figure who he thinks is misbehaving, or what have you; so long as he's trying to annoy any recipient (whether the target, if the poster thinks the target is reading the blog, or the target's partisans or fans).

How is this different from traditional telephone harassment law? The trouble is that the change extends traditional telephone harassment law from a basically one-to-one medium (phone calls) to include a one-to-many medium (Web sites).

This is a big change. One-to-one speech that's intended to annoy the one recipient is rarely of very much First Amendment value; people are just rarely persuaded or enlightened by speech that's intended to annoy them. It has some value (see item 3 below), but to the extent that it's in some measure deterred, the loss to public debate isn't that great — speakers are still free to speak to others besides the person they're trying to annoy.

But one-to-many speech that is intended to annoy one or a few readers, but intended and likely to enlighten or persuade many other readers, is potentially much more valuable.

Update:  Then again, maybe not such a  big deal you gullible little bloggers, you.  More blog-able items of this sort beneath the fold:

Continue reading “The web we're on”

A Question of Ends?

"It is not legitimate to identify the ends of Fascism with the ends of Russian Communism.  The first represents the exaltation of the executioner by the executioner; the second, more dramatic in concept, the exaltation of the executioner by the victims.  The former never dreamed of liberating all men, but only of liberating a few by subjecting the rest.  The latter, in its most profound principle, aims at liberating all men by provisionally enslaving them all.  It must be granted the grandeur of its intentions."

Continue reading “A Question of Ends?”