Imperfect Composition

I started this blog to post on topics not covered on a more Korea-focused blog that I write here. I’ve started posting more frequently on that blog and am still deciding what to do with this one. I think I might keep it for longer posts, so it will be around for a while longer. Just so you know.

After the 1980s in South Korea in general and after the democratic uprising of 1987 and the fall of the Soviet Union in particular, the Korean Left underwent radical changes. One consequence of this transition is that a number of theorists from both the 80s movements and early 90s student movement began to move towards different heretical, anti-authoritarian traditions of social thought. Some embraced more Deleuzian/Foucauldian/Lacanian trajectories while others sketched out a more Autonomia-style form of thought. Of course, there are theorists of many other stripes as well, from Athussarians to Trotskyists,  but I’d like to focus on two of these currents here and highlight some of their publications in English.

The Suyu + Trans Research Machine is an intellectual commune led by a number of poststructural thinkers. It is a pretty amazing place. They have managed to run a collective cafe, restaurant, seminar schedule and research institute through membership fees and individual donations. They are also involved in general anti-neoliberal activism emphasizing support for environment and peace campaigns, and support for irregular and migrant workers. They have also translated a lot of poststructuralist thought into Korean and written quite an amount on their own. Here is a article about the establishment of the commune after the political sequence of the 1980s movements began to transform:  What do Commune-ists think? Unfortunately you’ll need a library proxy to access it, I think.

The Twilight of Empire was a manifesto put out by the Suyu folks around the time of the negotiation of the Korea-US free trade agreement and has political mix of tones from Agamben, Negri, and Deleuze to it. There is criticism of the sovereign exception used in Neoliberalism, and it endorses a political project of mobilizing the multitude, and of minorities widely construed, instead of left nationalism (the dominant left position in South Korea).

Another problem with interpellating nation as the subject of struggle is that it may conceal the disastrous effects of the FTA that is “yet to come,” effects which diverse minority groups in our society are “already” experiencing. The U.S.-South Korea FTA, which seems to have taken us by surprise, has been tailing the young, the disabled, women, migrant workers, non-regular workers, and all the creatures of the tidal flats for a much longer time, under the guise of GDP, market competition, neo-liberalism, and the calculation of economic profits. We must realize that our society has encouraged or neglected the exploitation of these minorities. The unimaginable scale and intensity of disaster that the U.S.-South Korea FTA entails will be the messenger that will inform us that the pain of those minorities that we have overlooked can become our own. Hence, the struggle against the FTA should start not from the nation, but from the minorities, the masses, and the multitude.

A more recent work on a similar theme and written by Goh Byeon-Gwon, a founding member of the commune, is Marginalization vs minoritization: expulsion by the state and flight of the masses. It is also worth a read.

Outside of Suyu, Joe Jeong Hwan and the multitude network center seem to embrace a more classical autonomist perspective and focus on issues of class composition. Joe Jeong-Hwan’s article Class Composition in South Korea Since the Neoliberal Economic Crisis (the 1997 one, not the current crisis) was published a few years back in Multitudes Journal, which is open access. Here is an excerpt:

Significantly, the citizen’s movement is having difficulty to define the concept of a ’citizen’. Recently the main current tends to define the citizen as a non-class subject. In contrast, I propose that the ’citizen’ needs to be defined in the context of recomposition of working class accomplished by the industrial restructuring of capital since the 1980s. The industrial restructuration centered upon high-tech and informational industries since the 1980s have figured a different form of labor power. This different form of labor power has acquired a more scientific-technological character and, as a result of it, the school, home, and society have all been transformed into factories of reproduction. We should consider the weakening of the traditional labor movement as the effect of this process. The relative ratio of industrial laborers has been reduced as a result of the diversification of the working class. Therefore, ’citizen’ is but an old label to which have been attached new labor subjects composed of plural and heterogeneous multitudes.

Joe J-H also has a blog in Korean, with some English and Esperanto posts (yes, Esperanto). He has translated a number of Negri’s books and has a new book of his own, Literature of Kairos, out now. Too bad these aren’t translated into English.

Anyways, if you are curious about different non-nationalist left trajectories of Korean thought, this post should get you started. I might also post in the future about art collectives in South Korea that use situationist or autonomia style tactics, which is a topic I’m planning to write more about in the coming months.

For those in/interested in Vancouver, Pirooz Nemati has a necessary photo exhibit about the Little Mountain Housing (re)Development this week at Dadabase’s online gallery. The images here are cropped screenshots from the gallery page.

I’ve been meaning for some time now to do some research on the architecture of post-War Canadian planning. I’m much more familiar with the subject in the US and Britain but not here. Perhaps that is because outside of Quebec there is not as much of it, but I’m not sure. At any rate, from what I can tell, the Canadian version of post-war social housing, often lacking the aesthetics of militant British modernism, nonetheless had some achievements. Even if the materials, at least in the western provinces, were cheap wood and stucco, the Little Mountain housing development in Vancouver at least had some aspiration towards providing comfortable social housing and with something of an aspiration towards modern planning even if the end result was something between a small garden community near the park and the stucco-ed post-war low rise buildings one sees  across the city (I believe there was a subsidy or tax loophole for such apartments during that time).

The site is now being redeveloped and replaced with a public-private partnership that will probably erase much of the history of the place while also dislocating current residents, most of whom have already moved out with only a few holdouts left. Whatever replaces it will probably be a mixture of concrete, siding and glass that one sees around the city, the purpose of which is to make social housing blend in with condominiums, and perhaps their residents as well. There is certainly a need for social housing in this city, but it seems like Little Mountain was an opportunity to retain something of the old site, including its residents — it is difficult to tell how many of whom will opt to move back in after a couple of years — but also the idea, reflected in design and operation, that social housing could signify something different, more egalitarian, and not merely an intermediate position within the trajectory between poverty to condo-owner.

The banks did not show up for their appointment

[Update: Robert Reich writes a similar diagnosis here, minus the foray into Scandinavian economics]

Reading about the results of the US Treasury’s stress tests of the banking system today,  it seems that the government is planning to convert its preferred stock to common stock with the assumption being that ‘no new taxpayer money would go to the banks.’

The government would merely exchange one investment, its preferred stock, which is much like a loan, for ordinary common shares. The move amounts to shifting public money from one pot to another to ensure that these big lenders — those deemed too big to fail — have enough common stock to cushion their potential losses.

As common stock ends up being ‘the first layer to absorb losses on bad loans,’ doesn’t this essentially mean that the government is merely taking the capital it put into preferred stock, where it could earn dividends and have a claim on liquidation, and exchanging it for something riskier? Further still, doesn’t that essentially transfer value from the conversion over to other preferred stock holders who would benefit from dividends and other direct profits far sooner than common stock holders? Therefore, isn’t the idea that ‘no new taxpayer money’ will go to banks merely glossing over the fact that particular investors will benefit from this conversion? Furthermore, what material interest would these investors have in keeping money flowing through particular banks if they are insulated from the first line of losses? Might not they be just as interested in exiting the market as much as staying on board?

The government’s position seems to be a dangerous gamble. It should probably treat the banks as public property given that such a high amount of funds have been invested already and as such introduce better qualitive demands on the kinds of investment they pursue. Norway’s state-run pension plan, which is something like a giant SRI might provide some guidance here in terms of ethical standards to follow. Social economy models that one can see in larger credits unions like Vancity in Canada might also be a place to look. In as much as these models contest the dominant value-form of financial capital as private property — repressing the profit motive by giving much of it away, and pursing investment that is more effective at producing  social goods while respecting labour standards — this will probably be resisted by private investors for whom profit matters more than effectively-delivered economic development and growth. Marx’s adage about fetters on production makes sense here, but it does not necessarily herald better times, as few alternatives have been concretely proposed or seem likely to be implemented.

Furthermore, in contradistinction to notion that socialism always implies state planning and ownership of the economy, the social economy (as well as classical market socialism rather than the socialist free market model of China)  still operates within a market — it just does not have to be a necessarily purely capitalist one — with limits on private property in finance and limits on the commodity form of labour and the environment. But then again, markets have always been mixed in these regards, just more tilted toward financial investors in some countries more than others, and what we have now in the US is merely government attempts to simulate the speculative sectors of the market in order to get money flowing to other areas, but in this they are still failing and it would be better to assume control of what they now own and organize these financial institutions more directly. Worse yet, the government should certainly not try to gloss over what seems to be a wealth transfer as a savings to taxpayers. Certainly a psychoanalyst did not perform these stress tests, if they did they might have recognised such disavowal.

Just a quick thought related to my post, some time back, about the political economy of information. When I read the quote below about Hayek it stirred something in my imagination which suggests that in a highly subversive way, Hayek may have been closer to Negri and other socialists than he may have figured in as much as his theory of exchange involves a slippage into a logic of community, or rather, requires a conception of community to work even if the structure of this community is never historicized and is left unexplained under the assumption that it is composed only of individual units. For perhaps to explore it would have led to the rupture that Chicago School economist have been resisting for most of their carreers and their fixation on such maxims as: there is no such thing as society. Perhaps this repressed feature of the Austrian school is also why Oskar Lange suggests that a statue of Mises might be placed in front of the office of central planning, in that Mises was unknowingly aiding socialism by providing them with a challenge — a price theory — that could only better socialism, but this is just idle chit chat and besides the point. Anyways, from wikepedia,

Friedrich Hayek used the term Catallaxy to describe as “the order brought about by the mutual adjustment of many individual economies in a market.”^[1] He was unhappy with the usage of the word “economy”, feeling that the Greek root of the word – which translates as “household management” – implied that economic agents in a market economy possessed shared goals. Hayek derived the word “Catallaxy” (Hayek’s suggested Greek construction would be rendered καταλλάξια) from the Greek verb katallasso (καταλλάσσω) which meant not only “to exchange” but also “to admit in the community” and “to change from enemy into friend.”[2]

What stirred me was this. That Hayek’s methodological and possessive individualism, ie, his conception of economic man [sic], actually subverts itself because, it is based not just on exchange between individuals but literally, in the sense of katallasso from which Hayek develops the term Catallaxy, implies that exchange admits participants into a community. Community here is not simply the sum of exchanges but must be something different even if exchange is the only way into it. But, as I said above, the examination of community, what its means or ends or form of being is, and what its use of information, forms of valuation, and alternate forms of exchange (market, gift-giving, plunder, etc) might be is left to the imagination.

For me, the moment that community is recognized one has to accept that there is a logic here that exceeds the sum of its parts, ie of individual exchanges, and Hayek seems to begrudgingly accept this, if only in a repressed sort of way. Therefore, riffing somewhat off of Badiou, the one of economic exchange, and thus the one often presumed to be the utility maximizing participation in the market, with perfect location and perfect information (the one of arrow-debreu equilibrium and other such models), is actually not the one, but is inter-subjective.

How neoclassical economics comes to terms with that, besides limiting the scope of market behaviour and externalizing social phenomenon from the market through such weak theorization as ‘social capital’ (the Putnam type, not the Bourdieu type), is an interesting question to explore. Surely it has implications for how information asymmetries are understood, and for introducing degrees of sociality: ie values that are not confined to the one of economic man [sic], homo economicus, but take into account a greater sociality and thus different articulations of value, valuations, and value-forms, but this is another question and one that has not been taken up by neoclassical economists who still seem obsessed with reducing society to the individual and running with those assumptions as far as they can go, and mostly because of the enormous political utility that such ideas allow them, even if bankrupt, in a particular type of capitalist society. While other economist, institutionalists and heterodox ones mostly, tend to be more agnostic on some of the key equilibrium assumptions of neo-classical economics, and thus also its methodological individualism, opting instead for what passes, in economics, as a kind of institutional thick description, it seems (often) left up to the other social sciences to explore logics of the social, albeit at one step removed from the discipline, economics, that gets to decide some crucial questions of allocation of economic resources all of which affect the distribution of other resources of the sensible and what not. It is here that some of Latour’s arguments (whom I’m rarely enthusiastic about) about settlements between disciplines makes sense.

At the moment, I’m reading David Graeber’s Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value which I hope offers some more thoughts on these matters. I’ve just got started and David is a stirring writer, so, I’ll post more on this question later when I’ve read more.

A few weekends ago there was something of what seems an unprecedented — at least for the last few years — philosophy conference at Birkbeck College in London titled ‘On the idea of communism.’ Much of it was organized by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, with Negri, Hardt, Rancierre, Nancy, and others in attendence. Much ado was made of the conference in the weeks before, which I’ll save you here, but the thing went off without a hitch and there are now some interesting summaries and perspectives on the event online. Steven Shaviro has the most succinct one, and IT does a very good  overview as well, verging on concrete poetry, just scroll down and you will see summaries from both days including other links to video and some of the pre-conference drama.

I’m re-posting these old posts here because I’m deleting an old class blog but would still like to keep them. They are from last October. I’ve lost the original pictures I had in them, but the two here are in the same spirit, if not as pretty.

Politics of the Negative

This is a bit of an obscure post, but one of the themes that has come up in the readings throughout the course is something we might call the ‘politics of the negative.’ The way we have encountered this theme is through readings from the Shut Them Down book on anti-globalization organizing and, in particular, in the difficult task of articulating alternatives to neoliberalism while overcoming the problems of muted opposition and co-optation associated with ‘horizontality’ as a form of movement organization.

I don’t want to go into great detail here on this problem except to say that the theoretical level there is a lot of creative work being done these days by some British theorists who have been engaging with theories of the ‘multitude,’ ‘immaterial labour’ and ‘cognitive capitalism’ amongst various anarchisms and anti-capitalist ideas that animate the ‘movement of movements.’ Part of the frustration that they seem to have is that 1) some of the politics of the negative – in the sense of being unwilling to engage the current political economic conjuncture in a practical fashion — unwittingly fall into the ‘politics of the very worst,’ of advocating from the basis of teleological goal the stance that things must necessarily get worse before they can better (eg. we must have an economic crisis so that people will naturally turn to socialism, and other such viewpoints). Now, some of this theorizing gets into some pretty complicated territory — political theology and post-workerist theory — but I thought I’d post some links for those interested.

Two state solutions and We hold what we have are two blog posts, both by two proficient bloggers and good thinkers in their own right (the latter has a book coming out called the persistence of the negative), that take up this theme in the context of current events. The critique of state power by the anti-authoritarian and anarchist left and its implications for Venezuala and current credit crisis, where, undoubtedly, some forms of state intervention are necessary and where there seems to be a need for progressives to influence these interventions in a way that is more democratic and in accord with social and environmental needs. Both articles also criticize the sometimes unspoken affinity between both of those on the right and the left who advocate, for different reasons, a radical withering away of the state.

He’s not beyond good or Evil, by Nina Power. Reviews Paulo Virno’s book on the multitude. In some ways she argues that much of post-autonomist/post-workerist theory speaks too generally, this seems to come from the very generic theorizing of nature, linguistics and biology behind the theory of biopolitics and immaterial labour that underpin larger conceptions of the multitude. Here we can see how a historical problem — the rise of a new sector of workers involved in information technology and the problems of politically organizing the skills and desires of subjects under a more computerized capitalism — is replaced with more grand claims but generic claims about basis of human ‘nature’ that, unfortunately, dilutes the task of more practical or ‘concrete’ criticism.

The sadness of post workerism, by David Graeber. Criticizes the obscurity and perhaps technological determinism of concepts like immaterial labour to show that much of the work of creating value assumed by post-workerist theorists — who tend to regard immaterial labour as a an outcome of the changing labour process in advanced capitalism — tends to be a feature of everyday life and not necessarily as novel or as ‘subsumed’ as assumed by some of these theorists. It may appear that Graeber is making the same claim that Power is criticizing, but something else is going on here as Graeber is using this understanding to advocate a more critical understanding of current processes. In other words, he is saying something like: immaterial labour, no doubt it exists, but what does this tell us about how/why we should organize?

Movements, Multitudes and the Financial Crisis

Just a few links for those of you interested in following some of the trajectories of thought commented on below. Generation Online, what seems to be a collective translation project, has a lot of rare and previously untranslated articles by some of the key thinkers affiliated, or loosely affiliated, with the Italian ‘autonomia‘ and ‘post-workerist’ movements (maybe one could also use the term ‘post-autonomia‘ to describe the more current theories, but I’m not sure). Some of this is heady stuff, but I think it is important for understanding where ideas such as Hardt and Negri’s Empire come from, as concepts like ‘multitude,’ and ‘immaterial labour’ were not developed in a vacuum. Most of these thinkers operate across a wide theoretical field, using novel combinations of marxian, and foucauldian analyses — often combined with other theoretical traditions from feminism to finance — but one of the benefits is that they are able to discuss a wide range of ‘governmental effects’ brought about by transformations of capitalism without losing sight of key transformations in the economy and the labour process. Though, perhaps, they often lack a good geographical understanding of the variations in these transformations and the ways in which changes in the labour process in one region are connected to changes elsewhere.

One recurrent problem encountered by this theoretical tradition, however, is the problem of agency. Much of the theory is an attempt to account for the divergent particularities of power relations under capitalism (or ‘empire’), and it is difficult to see where or rather how there is room for collective projects except for the forms of ‘swarming’ and ‘networked resistance’ that we discussed in class so far. This is a major problem. I think as an ontology of specificity (of that which shapes bodies, subjects, and inter-subjectivity, thus community, at the micro level), the theory works in a descriptive sense, but it also undermines more collective understandings of politics through its refusal of older forms of commonality. Or, rather, the theory does not seem to be being used to enrich our understandings of actually-existing forms of commonality besides generic notions of the ‘multitude.’ Isn’t there room here for using this theory for unpacking, but also in some ways affirming, the forms of commonality present in classic categories of social thought at the level of organization or at the level of identity beyond just very generic instances of ‘multitude’: ie, at level of the ‘party,’ the ‘collective,’ the ‘movement,’ or the ‘indigenous,’ ‘the worker,’ ‘women,’ ‘queer,’ or even perhaps ‘species’ (but that is perhaps getting too generic, and indeed some of the theory is focused on unpacking notions about ‘forms of life‘)?

This seems, however, to be a pressing point if some form of solution is to be found for a number of current problems, like the current global financial crisis, for example. How might progressive forces understand the current crisis and modify the forms of public intervention now taking place in order to engineer something that is more democratic and equitable? Certainly there is an ‘economics’ to this problem that shows how state intervention can be used to mediate crisis and solve many problems of inequality and economic development (for example, the Swedish style of ‘market socialism‘); however, it seems that many of these thinkers are silent on possible solutions due to a fear of sounding ‘statist’ or ‘social democratic.’ Would it not be better for thinkers within this tradition of social thought to say that a pubic solution is better than the very worst (a depression-era crisis, or a ‘mad-max’ solution of bailing out wall street in such a way that allows the continuation of speculation and the carving out of new areas of rent from of the commons through privatization of public resources), and then make the next move to show how the understanding of the ‘state’ or the ‘public’ being advanced needs to be much more fully developed, or rather unpacked and reconstituted? One place where the above theories would be helpful would be in politicizing the collectivities that support state intervention so that more ‘horizontal’ or social uses is made of economic resources, these can include better social rights but also the de-commodification of areas of social life from leisure to work, but I digress.

This post, Phuture agency, gets on to some of these problems in light of the articles I posted yesterday, and contains some good references. One argument, I think, that the author of this post makes, is that the ‘refusal to theorize’ some of these older categories of thought/agency actually mirrors invisible hand accounts of market capitalism, in as much as the multitude notion of ‘networked resistance’ shares an affirmation of diffusion and horizontality with free market ideas. My point would simply be that one must understand that almost all forms of social organization involve diffusion and horizontality (as well as degrees of verticality and concentration) and it is perhaps more fruitful to provide an analysis of existing forms of organization that can show how these ontological aspects (verticality, horizontality, networks) can be tweaked, rearranged or transformed in existing forms rather than holding out for a messianic ‘multitude’ or invisible hand to replace prior forms of social organization. A complicated analogy here would be to note that though many of these terms (diffusion, concentration) are borrowed from chaos theory, chaos theorists regard these actions as aspects of a system rather than categories that just describe one actor in a system.

Anyways, this approach (treating horizontality and diffusion as just aspects of everyday ontology rather than ideal types of embodiment of a new subjectivity) might solve what seems to be an unhealthy corollary of ‘ideal-type’ theorizing either of the market or multitude forms that seems to be affecting analysis of some of our current problems: that of regarding some of these older forms of organization (the state, party, union, collective, etc) only negatively as that-which-prevents (a Katechon) the coming of new order of an ideal ‘horizontal’ subject, whether it be of the market, the multitude, or a reign of the angels (to play of the picture of pandaemonium in the post below). However, this is a hard task, I think, for grassroots forces to do, especially when they have been excluded from effective participation in the state and civil society, so often an ideal-type emerges that is particularly anti-statist in such a way that shares rhetoric with the market. When we read Kristin Ross’ s May ’68 and its afterlives we’ll see how this works at the level of intellectuals — in particular France’s new philosophers — who re-interpreted the demands for radical equality made in the ‘event’ of ’68 in such a way to strengthen support for market-based and even militarist notions of human rights against some of the very conceptions of equal rights that protesters were advocating to begin with.

Anyways, difficult theoretical questions to ask, but necessary ones I think, if we are to understand the present, and the difficulties encountered by certain approaches to it.

The book shows obvious signs, from its first pages (with its jibe at ‘Lacanising’ critics) of a heavy ingestion of Anti-Oedipus, and the possibility of negativity and opposition is always sidestepped, disavowed (critiqued, one might say), with a moralism that rivals that of Deleuze and Guattari. Lots of sex happens in the under-Beaubourg, but it isn’t sexy; lots of art is made, but it isn’t aesthetic; all classes make a home there, but the class system still reluctantly persists within it. It is forbidden to forbid, yet much of the book is taken up with priggish attacks on violent revolutionaries who still cling to the infantile belief that the world outside can be transformed. Utopian fictions are often mocked for their moralism and aridity, but this one, becoming more drab with every lifted prohibition, makes News from Nowhere or Red Star seem wildly exciting by comparison. William Morris and Alexander Bogdanov still clung to the apparently obsolete belief that the world outside mattered.

Rummaging through the Berlin’s ruined or soon-to-be-gentrified architecture, Owen at NBS stumbles upon some interesting  ‘post-68-alternate-reality fiction,’ particularly the book ‘Sotti Il Beaubourg’ about a expansive technological commune under the Centre Georges Pompidou.

The Beaubourg is underground, so can never become an aesthetic object, and the art that is produced inside it cannot be consumed, only lived. So far, this would sound like the utopia demanded by the avant-garde from the Constructivists to the Situationists – the revolution of everyday life. Yet Meister is more pragmatic than that would suggest. Although he can imagine the extraordinary technology that creates a multi-multi-storey subterranean super-Pompidou, he cannot seriously imagine the changing of society outside its confines – in fact, he disdains it.

This reminds me of something Hannah Arendt once said about the counter-culture communes or ‘ intentional communities’ (as we call them here on the West Coast) in the book Crises of the Republic, the last chapter of which consists of an extended interview she did with some of the American New Left just after the 60s. Discussing the development the need for organizations that can be built from below in order to engage the state, such as worker’s councils and other forms organization, she glosses over the communes that, with a particular form of both sympathy and disdain, Arendt sees as problematic for their disengagement from public life.

there must be something to be found, a completely different principle of organization, which begins from below, continues upward, and finally leads to a parliament. But we can’t talk about that now. And it is not necessary, since important studies on this subject have been published in recent years in France and Germany, and anyone seriously interested can inform himself.

To prevent a misunderstanding that might easily occur today, I must say that the communes of hippies and dropouts have nothing to do with this. On the contrary, a renunciation of the whole of public life, of politics in general, is at their foundation; they are refuges for people who have suffered political shipwreck–and as such they are completely justified on personal grounds. I find the forms of these communes very often grotesque–in Germany as well as in America–but I understand them and have nothing against them. Politically they are meaningless. The councils desire the exact opposite, even if they begin very small–as neigborhood councils, professional councils, councils within factories, apartments houses and so on.

This problem seems to me to resonate with other forms of counter culture and even certain forms of anarchist organization — just some, not all — which tend to leave a vacuum for political power or renounce public life. This is a mistake, it seems to me, even if one is trying to challenge entrenched political structures such as global trade deals, etc.  For example, one thing I always admired about Ya Basta was their willingness to use the public sphere to make political prescriptions, as against, say, the black bloc which tended to be less organized, unsure of how public to be with its own use of tactics.

A few years ago, when I was perhaps going through something of a muted ‘God that failed‘ stage, more Richard Wright than Sidney Hook, I read the Canadian book The Rebel Sell and quite enjoyed some of its jibes at the counterculture and complaint that the hard work of politics seems rarely done among some in the counterculture (which, it must be said, is more often a composite strawman for the authors than something real), even though the book itself has little properly political content, except for maybe an improper understanding of economics and an admiration for game theory (something that would also be worthy of Arendt’s disdain, if you ask me).  I often find myself having a mixed sympathy for the communes and other experiments in living, partially because the roads that lead to parliment are often fraught with too much of an ‘inside the beltway’ mentality and a lack of mobilization.But, sadly, most of the experiments in counter-cultural living that I’ve seen, of a particular no-rules type, attempt to be islands onto themselves often degenerate into something cultish, but maybe that is their utility: the learning experience. Anyways, I think my own political position often becomes one of attempting to establish a link (not a recuperation) of mobilizaiton between established forms and more grassroots phenonmenon. I’m still not sure if this should entail some creation of a party of movements, or a just a more mobilized approach on behalf of more traditional social democratic institutions as part of a more radical commitment to socialist democratic politics. After the FTAA protests in 2001 I made comments to such effect at conference on Social Democracy organized by some of the old guard in Montreal. Though perhaps a little stuck in the moralizing debate over ‘diversity of tactics,’  I think the prescription — a more mobilized and grassroots political party that assists rather than co-opts — still stands. Anyways, better than a commune.

The following is an unresolved dilemma I am working on which comes out of some previous posts and debates on what to do about the ongoing economic crisis here, and here. I’m going to update this with further commentary on the crisis as well as arguments coming out of different approaches to it.

Via a suggestion from NUL, I recently stumbled across the ‘calculation debate’ between Austrian economists and market socialists in the early part of the twentieth century. Robin Blackburn discusses it in his 1991 article in NLR: Fin de Siècle: Socialism after the crash. The first 27 pages of the article constitutes a long and justified goodbye to state communism of the sort one would have expected to find at the end of the cold war, but the discussion of the calculation debate is really where things begin to shine though as it gets on to important questions about the use of ‘markets’ that demonstrate some of the shared naivety between market fundamentalism and contemporary radical thought, particularly surrounding the politcal economy of information.

Much of the calculation debate focused on the utility of markets and the difficulties of determining price under a state-owned economy. Obviously, the assumption here was that socialism would entail some form of social ownership/management of the economy and thus some alternative forms of prices or pricing would have to be invented. Now, not all ‘socialists’ in this debate were state socialists, but a common theme was whether or not a socialist market economy or just plain socialist economy could create prices that could allocate economic activity as efficiently as prices in the so-called capitalist economies. Some of the ideas here would undoubtedly begin to play a role in the neoliberal criticism of government allocation in general and indeed one can sense precursors in this debate to such phrases as ‘crowding out the market’ to describe state intervention or to ‘simulated markets’ which would become both a socialist policy tool as well a neoliberal one in developing countries. Indeed, many neoliberal trade economists spoke of state intervention in the East Asian exporting countries as simulating the market. They justified this by arguing that state intervention to create an export-oriented economy was a lesser evil than import substitution.

The calculation debate was also where one could see some of the modern debates about information developing that would shape much of post-war economic thought, and especially the neoliberal counter-revolution against post-war Keynesianism. Hayek was particularly instrumental here in arguing that because of the flow of the ‘inescapably fragmented and dispersed character of economic know-
ledge.’ As Blackburn mentions, for Hayek,

The real economic potential of a resource or commodity depended on exactly where and when it was available. While a multitude of entrepreneurs might be able to spot new possibilities and relationships, and back their hunches at their own cost, the planners simply could not know this mass of dispersed and discrete information, much of it strictly unintelligible or meaningless outside its given context (34).

As Blackburn points out, Hayek’s ideas pointed to the fallacy of the ‘single mind’ depictions of state planning; however, this was a critique of many on the left, including Trotsky, in early Soviet debates, so should not be taken to be purely the territory of neo-classical observers. Blackburn’s take home message in his review of the debate might really be about how to distinguish between the utility of decentralized forms of exchange (through markets) and more centralized planning, or rather, the necessity of somehow striking a balance between these two as a means to better allocation and economic-political equality.

The Soviet collapse aside, these early debates resonate with later developments in the economics of information which tried to lay to rest some of Hayek’s claims about the efficiency of markets, which became part of the Austrian school’s strategic attack on state planning in general. For example, Joseph Stiglitz’s put much of the ‘market fundamentalist’ argument about information to rest when he argued that when information is imperfect (which is most of the time) and when there are information asymetrries (when some know more than others) markets do not necessarily lead to allocative efficiency. Hence, under such conditions, which are what prevail most of the time, “the reason that the invisible hand seems invisible is because it is not there” (See Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work, 2006,xiv). However, this is not to say that Stiglitz and others who work with the notion of imperfect information and imperfect competition wouldn’t like to see allocative efficiency through market equilibrium, they just see markets as imperfect, and, like most neoclassical economists, rarely examine the relations of production in any substantive way.

This brings me to a second point: that there is a philosophical dimension to this debate about the nature of markets and state that poses some intriguing political problems for our current time in that there seems to be an unlikely correspondence between the analysis of information and general intellect embraced by both Hayek and by contemporary thinkers such as Hardt and Negri and Paulo Virno (which I’ve discussed in earlier posts on my class blog). This is also the topic of an article by Malcolm Bull, also via NUL, in the NLR entitled The Limits of Multitude. As Bull mentions (37-38):

Like that of their predecessors, Hardt and Negri’s model of ‘the collective intelligence that can emerge from the communication and co-operation of a varied multiplicity’ comes from the natural world. Taking up ‘the notion of the swarm from the collective behaviour of social animals, such as ants, bees, and termites, to investigate multi-agent-distributed systems of intelligence’, they focus on the multitude’s ‘swarm intelli- gence’; its ability to make ‘swarm music’ without a conductor or a centre that dictates order.67 On this account,

Just as the multitude produces in common, just as it produces the com-mon, it can produce political decisions . . . What the multitude produces is not just goods and services; the multitude also and most importantly pro-duces co-operation, communication, forms of life, and social relationships. The economic production of the multitude, in other words, is not only a model for political decision-making but also tends itself to become political
decision-making’.68

In the work of Virno, this common production is expressed in the oppo- sition between the general will and the general intellect: ‘The One of the multitude, then, is not the One of the people. The multitude does not converge into a volonté générale for one simple reason: because it already has access to a general intellect.’69 Developed from Marx’s passing refer- ence to the moment when ‘general social knowledge has become a direct force of production’,70 the general intellect is presented as ‘the know-how on which social productivity relies . . . [this does] not necessarily mean the aggregate of knowledge acquired by the species, but the faculty of thinking; potential as such, not its countless particular realizations’.

There is something here that we might call ‘methodological communism’ and which is more clearly seen in the realm of politics and that is the position embraced by people like Hardt and Negri and other Italian post-autonomist thinkers who seem to argue that since value is produced through communal activity or through the commons then most or any attempts at political representation are necessarily a form of enclosore or privatization. As such, they prefer the term of ‘multitude’ to people, state, or civil society, as the latter tend to close off certain expressions of the common. Now, I am much more in agreement about the nature of value, as constituted socially, ie in common, with Negri than Hayek, as the latter cannot but, albeit indirectly, accept that there is such a thing as community.

Hayek as well as Mises preferred the term catallaxy and catallactics over the terms economy and economics. According to Wikipedia, with quotes from Hayek’s Law, Legislation and Liberty Vol. 2:

Friedrich Hayek used the term Catallaxy to describe as “the order brought about by the mutual adjustment of many individual economies in a market.”^[1] He was unhappy with the usage of the word “economy”, feeling that the Greek root of the word – which translates as “household management” – implied that economic agents in a market economy possessed shared goals. Hayek derived the word “Catallaxy” (Hayek’s suggested Greek construction would be rendered καταλλάξια) from the Greek verb katallasso (καταλλάσσω) which meant not only “to exchange” but also “to admit in the community” and “to change from enemy into friend.”^[2]

What is interesting here is that if one only takes the economy to be a sequence of individual exchanges then of course the absence of a state is the best outcome, because there is no further rationality to exchange the the benefit of one individual. “There is no such thing as society,” as Margaret Thatcher says. But, astoundingly, perhaps unwittingly, Hayek’s concept of exchange actually supersedes the individual act in terms of its broader metaphorical association. Albeit, for Hayek it is through exchange that one is admitted to a community and an enemy becomes a friend, but this is interesting because it contradicts the idea of the economy as a site for individual association and evokes something larger: a community. And as soon as you do that you have to accede to a rationality that must have common ends, and which supercedes the individual both in terms of the regulation of exchange and in providing a basis, if not a necessity, for some sort of collective administration, even if solely in the perverted form of a commonality based on maximizing the efficiency of individual exchange (the nightwatchmen state). To summarize, Hayek seems to have a form of extreme methodological individualism (or a methodological capitalism one might say), but somehow even seems to subvert himself because he cannot help evoking community.

However, the problem I have with Negri and the ‘multitude’ crowd, is that though I agree that a lot of what capitalism does is enclose forms of common labour and common value, it seems to me that their political logic risks being problematic because each form of political representation becomes an unnecessary closure. To put it a different way, there becomes no way to discuss better forms of redistribution through the state, or forms of state-market synthesis — what the market socialists were attempting to create or understand — that might better allocate communal resources, including the socialization of ownership by differential actors (collectives, associated producers, other constituted organizations) etc, because these would seem to accept a political representation that would be something short of the multitude. As, of course the state, as well as any form of communal organization listed above seems to wager itself on a closure of information. But could not the multitude be just that, a variety of collective positions, some problematic, others less so? Or, does it have to be it’s own identity?

Funny, then, that we have both a methodological capitalism (Hayek) and a methodological communism (Hardt and Negri) that cannot seem to work with actually existing collective conceptions. Albeit, if one believes in the ‘general intellect,’ most communal political representations (state, party, citizen, etc) fall short of their full commonality. But couldn’t these be made more constitutively open compared to more ‘closed’ concepts of negative communality (and you can guess what some of those might be by some of the more disturbing moments of historical experience)?  I suppose I have no answer of where to go with this line of thought, except to suggest that it is perhaps important for the left to work through what forms of markets and planning would be better for a prescriptive politics of equality than that embraced by the current order. However, on the other hand, if the multitude only ever carries the assumption that any politics is an unecessary closure, than I am not sure what options there are for a left project except to critique the limitations of that which exists (which is not a worthless task). But isn’t it better to propose better versions of things which more closely approximate the ‘common’ good, with the qualification that it might fall short but at least be a lot better than the politics of the very worst?