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Capitalism: Some disassembly required

Dec 21st, 2011
by John Steele.
3 comments

Nicole Pepperill has been at work for some on a close reading of Marx, and especially of Capital, showing the ways in which Marx’s style and complex but precisely-thought organization must be taken into account in ways they have not been in readings which have historically been wooden and overly literal. What follows is an excellent example, and statement, of this approach.

Her aim is to show that Marx’s immanent critique of capitalist production is multi-dimensional in ways that introduces greater contingency into both the historical development of capitalism and, more importantly, the complex of emancipatory possibilities which it generates.

The following is the text of a talk given by Pepperill in New York last February, and represents a slightly earlier version of what is now published in Communization ans its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles, ed. Benjamin Noyes, where it has the title I’ve given above.

The Higher Realms of Nonsense: Relections on Capital‘s ‘Greatest Difficulty’

N. Pepperill

Marx aims to present an immanent critique of the reproduction of capital. He aims, in other words, to show how the process by which capital is reproduced necessarily also reproduces the potential for the emancipatory transformation of capitalist society. In the Grundrisse, Marx uses the metaphor of mines that are ready to explode capitalist production from within, suggesting that emancipatory social movements mobilize an arsenal that has been inadvertently built by the very social practices they seek to transform:

[W]ithin bourgeois society, the society that rests on exchange value, there arise relations of circulation as well as of production which are so many mines to explode it. (A mass of antithetical forms of the social unity, whose antithetical character can never be abolished through quiet metamorphosis. On the other hand, if we did not find concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of exchange prerequisite for a classless society, then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic.)[1]

But how does Marx understand the generation of such explosive possibilities? By what means does the reproduction of capital necessarily reproduce the potential for alternative forms of collective life?

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Posted in: Marxism.

Global reserve army

Nov 29th, 2011
by John Steele.
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The following is taken from the November issue of Monthly Review.

If we take the categories of the unemployed, the vulnerably employed, and the economically inactive population in prime working ages (25–54) and add them together, we come up with what might be called the maximum size of the global reserve army in 2011: some 2.4 billion people, compared to 1.4 billion in the active labor army.

The answer to the challenges facing world labor that Marx gave at the Lausanne Congress in 1867 remains the only possible one: “If the working class wishes to continue its struggle with some chance of success the national organisations must become international.” It is time for a new International.

The Global Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism

John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna

n the last few decades there has been an enormous shift in the capitalist economy in the direction of the globalization of production. Much of the increase in manufacturing and even services production that would have formerly taken place in the global North—as well as a portion of the North’s preexisting production—is now being offshored to the global South, where it is feeding the rapid industrialization of a handful of emerging economies. It is customary to see this shift as arising from the economic crisis of 1974–75 and the rise of neoliberalism—or as erupting in the 1980s and after, with the huge increase in the global capitalist labor force resulting from the integration of Eastern Europe and China into the world economy. Yet, the foundations of production on a global scale, we will argue, were laid in the 1950s and 1960s, and were already depicted in the work of Stephen Hymer, the foremost theorist of the multinational corporation, who died in 1974.

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Posted in: Political Economy.

What direction Occupy?

Nov 24th, 2011
by John Steele.
1 comment

The relevance of the topic here is obvious. We hope to publish more analytical and theoretical pieces on Occupy, which has emerged as the movement of this historical moment. This is reprinted from Viewpoint Magazine.

Everybody talks about the weather

By Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi

“Everybody talks about the weather. We don’t.” This 1968 poster was a response by the German Socialist Student Union to an ad campaign for weatherproof trains. The students were suggesting that like the figures pictured above, they had more important concerns than everyday things like the weather. The next year, journalist and future Red Army Faction terrorist Ulrike Meinhof would use the slogan to argue that radicals should talk about everyday life, since “the personal is political.”

For us, it just means that we should talk about the weather. It’s going to start snowing on the occupations, and the authorities want to use the weather as a weapon. They’re hoping that winter will kill the movement off, and it’s hard to deny that camping out in the middle of January would be a poor tactic.

But the weather represents a much bigger question: what will it take to make this movement last? There is great potential in what has been achieved, but there are also significant obstacles, which present themselves both inside and outside the movement. With an eye towards advancing this struggle, let’s start by trying to understand what’s happening: who is protesting, and what does it mean?

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Posted in: Activism, Current events, Revolutionary Strategy.

Badiou on democracy

Nov 20th, 2011
by John Steele.
2 comments

The concept of democracy — both ideologically and theoretically — is of key importance in “the radical reconception of revolutionary theory,” to quote from our masthead. The following excerpts from Badiou’s contribution to Democracy in What State? may serve as a beginning step in that direction.

In this book a number of contemporary thinkers (Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj Zizek) were asked to respond to the questions, ”Is it meaningful to call oneself a democrat? And if so, how do you interpret the word?” Reprinted here from Columbia University Press blog. A longer extract from Badiou’s essay can be accessed here.

Our concern is le monde, the world that evidently exists, not tout le monde, where the democrats (Western folk, folk of the emblem) hold sway and everyone else is from another world — which being other, is not a world properly speaking, just a remnant of life, a zone of war, hunger, walls, and delusions. In that “world” or zone, they spend their time packing their bags to get away from the horror or to leave altogether and be with—whom? With the democrats of course, who claim to run the world have jobs that need doing….

In sum, if the world of the democrats is not the world of everyone, if tout le monde isn’t really the whole world after all, then democracy the emblem and custodian of the walls behind which the democrats seek their petty pleasures, is just a word for a conservative oligarchy whose main (and often bellicose) business is to guard its own territory, as animals do, under the usurped name world.

Badiou concludes by writing:

What I have aimed to do here is to set brackets around the authority the word democracy is likely to enjoy, or have enjoyed, in the mind of the reader and make the Platonic critique of democracy comprehensible. But as a coda, we can go right back to the literal meaning of democracy if we like: the power of peoples over their own existence. Politics immanent in the people and the withering away, in open process, of the State. From that perspective, we will only ever be true democrats, integral to the historic life of peoples, when we become communists again. Roads to that future are gradually becoming visible even now.

Posted in: Alan Badiou, Communism.

Political Art

Nov 13th, 2011
by John Steele.
1 comment

The question of art and revolution is an old one, reaching back at least to the French Revolution. It’s one that every radical activist has probably thought about (probably inconclusively), and it’s one that has arisen for every actual revolution and for many artists. 

The following talk by Alain Badiou was given at the Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York about a year ago (10/13/2010). The following transcript, prepared by Richard James Jermain, is taken from the symptom, where a video of the talk can also be found. Some obvious errors and typos in the transcript have been corrected; unclear words are indicated by a question mark.

So I propose to distinguish an art which is close to the State power, in dependency to state power, and a properly militant art. We shall name the first artistic creation inside the space of the State power an official art; and we must say that to mistake official art for militant art has been the great problem during the last century. In real militant art ideology is the subjective determination not of an apparatus but of a process, a struggle, a resistance.

In a more aesthetic language, we can say that the first (the official art) under the Idea of le grand art, the great art, the high, monumental art of the glorification of the result, under militant art is under the idea of experimental art, of avant-garde, in some sense of this word. So we can clearly distinguish between the two and recognize that from the same subjective conviction two completely different formal orientations can be defined.

But there is also a sort of dialectics between the two. The militant art can be, and is very often a critique of the official art, it’s true; and we know that the official art is very often a critique of the militant art. But the official art uses some new means of the militant art because the militant art is very often of the same ideology. And the militant art is also stimulated by the potency of the official art when the offical art is of the same ideology. The fact that the same ideology is realized in the artistical field in two different forms creates by necessity an historical dialectics betwen the two. There is a sort of exchange between the two, and some great common moments where official art and militant art are something in common.

And so when we have to expose today the question of the possibility of a militant art we cannot immediately expose our thinking in the parameters of the distinction between official art and true militant art. And why? First, there is today no common strong ideology. There is no vision – a global vision – for another possibility of the world as such, for the historical world as such. Naturally, there exists opposition, there exists revolutionary movement, there exist struggles and so on. But it’s clear that we cannot affirm purely and simply the existence of another possibility as such, which was clearly affirmative in the second part of the last century.

Does the Notion of Activist Art still have a Meaning?

Alain Badiou

My question this evening will be “Is it possible to propose a general definition of a militant vision of artistic creation?” The first and simple possibility is to say something like that. A militant vision of artistic creation is when an art – a work of art – is a part of something which is not reducible to an artistic determination. For example stained-glass windows in churches. It’s a symbol of the Light of God, and it’s also a part of artistic creation. Greek temples, which are also something for collective cult; military music, which is something inside the creation of patriotic courage; Egyptian pyramids, which are works of art certainly, but also the old symbolic question of the death of the king, and so on.

In all these cases we have the phenomena of artistic creation, certainly, but which is included in something else which is the ? of something which is outside of artistic determination. We can speak of an official artistic activity much more than a militant one. Finally, it’s the artistic creation in the space of the State, of the power.

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Posted in: Alan Badiou, Art.

Zizek: Preserve the vacuum

Nov 1st, 2011
by John Steele.
5 comments

Zizek spoke October 26 at St Mark’s Bookshop in Manhattan. What follows is not the complete talk, but some interesting parts. Reprinted from impose (with a few corrections),  where the complete transcript can be found.

Bill Clinton says ominously, “because your demands create a vacuum, and if you don’t bring quickly concrete proposals which will fill in this vacuum, who knows who will fill in this vacuum?” But at this point, I claim, precisely we should maintain this openness in all ominous directions. We don’t need dialogue with those in power. We need critical dialogue with ourselves. We need time to think. We effectively don’t know. And nobody knows. On the one hand we should reject the cheap — because Mao was never so stupid — psuedo-Maoist idea, “Learn from the people, people know”. No, they don’t know. Do we intellectuals know? Also, we don’t know. I mean, any intellectual who says, “Okay, people now have some confused ideas, oh I have a ready and precise plan of what to do,” they are bluffing. We don’t know where we are.

But I think that this openness is precisely what is great about these protests. It means that precisely a certain vacuum open the fundamental dissatisfactions in the system. The vacuum simply means open space for thinking, for new freedom, and so on. Let’s not fill in this vacuum too quickly.

Zizek speaks at St. Mark’s Bookshop

So, while the standard reaction of the Wall Street itself against the protest is the expected, vulgar bullshitting, I want to draw your attention to a more intelligent, but I think even more disgusting reaction; a critical rejection of Wall Street; a very liberal, sophisticated one: it was done a couple of days ago by Anne Applebaum, you know, the lady who wrote a book on gulag and so on. Again, it’s a very sophisticated argumentation. She even, in a slightly tasteless but almost convincing way, she [?] the [?] Monty Python film, The Life of Brian, where this Brian, the new Christ figure shouts to the people, “You are free individuals!” and then all of them shout, together as a crowd, “Yes we are free individuals!”; claiming that my functioning of repetition reminds her of that.

Okay, but nonetheless I claim… her reaction to it, and I will just read you two long paragraphs; I think they are worth quoting. It’s ideology at its purest, precisely in the way they make her argumentation appear convincing.

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Posted in: Current events, Philosophy, Revolutionary Strategy, Zizek.

Some contributions to thinking in the present moment

Oct 26th, 2011
by John Steele.
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There’s a new wind 

blowing across this globalized world, from Tunisia to Egypt to Greece to Spain to Occupy Wall Street. How do the theoretical investigations of this site relate to this, to what’s new and emerging? 

This question of the emergence of novelty, of understanding this very changing world so as to help to change it fundamentally, has always been central to this site. And some pivotal issues of the Occupy movement (Who are the 1%? for example) have been explored here as well.

At the urging of Mike Ely from Kasama, we’ve put together a guide to some important writings on khukuri, organized by topic:

What is current the structure of global capital? See essays concerning a transnational capitalist class (TNC) — truly the global 1% (or less) – by Leslie Sklair, by William Robinson, Jerry Harris, and by William K. Carroll, as well as in the recent piece on global corporate networks.

How do we analyze the present crisis, and how do we go forward from it? See this by David Harvey, as well as essays by Don Hamerquist, on the crisis of both capitalism and the left, and hollow states in a time of austerity and chaos, and John Steele’s notes from a conference devoted to this subject.

What is the relevance of Marxism today? This important question is explored in this essay by Vern Gray and in these by John Steele:

Our Relation to Revolutionary Tradition;

We Need a Politics We Haven’t Got;

and To what extent is revolutionary theory detachable?

as well as Bill Martin’s extensive essay Into the Wild.

How can we understand the present historical moment in a way that can also prepare us for the eruption of something new? And what is the relevance of the contemporary thinker Alain Badiou?

John Steele has written a series of essays: Another take on revolutionary theory; on Badiou and the event; Revolutionary fidelity and the radically new; on Badiou’s political value; and on Badiou’s Maoism.

Relatedly, there is J. Ramsey’s essay addressing the question.

And see these by Don Hamerquist: Barack, Badiou, and Bilal-al-hasan; and “…that which in them divides itself from the old”.

(And here too, Bill Martin, in the essay cited above.)

Finally, in terms of understanding the “new wind,” although this is a topic we’ll have more on, for now it’s worth noting an essay by Don Hamerquist on the earlier parts of this sequence.

Posted in: Alan Badiou, Bill Martin, Communism, Current events, David Harvey, Don Hamerquist, J. Ramsey, Jerry Harris, John Steele, Marxism, Nat W., Philosophy, Political Economy, Revolutionary Strategy, Social Theory, William I. Robinson, William K. Carroll.

Global Corporate Networks

Oct 25th, 2011
by John Steele.
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Image at right: The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue.

The fact of highly concentrated global capitalist networks — as well as the related question of a transnational capitalist class — will be familiar ones to readers of this site. We’ve published a number of essays and interviews which center on these topics. And now these are also central questions for the Occupy Wall Street movement and all its offshoots.

The analysis we’ve seen so far, naturally enough, has come from thinkers with a Marxist background. The following essay, published in a recent issue of New Scientist, deals with a research project from the world of systems analysis, and as the authors of the following article make clear, a main concern is finding ways to make global capitalism more stable and secure. The analytic conclusions, though, have points of strong similarity.

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world

by Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study’s assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere. But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations (TNCs).

“Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market,” says James Glattfelder. “Our analysis is reality-based.”

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Posted in: Political Economy, Social Theory.

Badiou on existence

Oct 21st, 2011
by John Steele.
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The following is a bit more abstract than what we usually publish here, but for those who want to understand what Badiou is doing philosophically, this essay (originally a talk) will repay the effort.

The talk was obviously given several years ago, and was originally published in lacanian ink 29 (Spring 2007). It is republished here from the symptom.

My proposal will be in three parts.  First, a very short ontological part.  What is our concept of being qua being?  The answer will be: multiple, a multiplicity.  Second, what is our concept of the localization of something which is?  What is being-there? The answer will be: a transcendental field, without subject.  Third, what is existence? The answer will be: the degree of something’s identity to itself in a world is its existence in this world.

Towards a New Concept of Existence

Alain Badiou

Tonight I am not going to engage in any kind of criticism.  Instead, I intend to propose a new concept of existence.  And I shall be as abstract as this intention forces me to be.  You can find a less arid but not complete exposition in a chapter of my “Briefings on Existence,” and a complete one in my last book, Logiques des mondes, which is out in French and will be published in English at the end of next year, I hope.

As all of you know perfectly well, the fundamental problem is to distinguish on the one hand, being as such, being qua being, and, on the other hand, existence, as a category which precisely is not reducible to that of being.  It is the heart of the matter.  This difference between being and existence is often the result of the consideration of a special type of being.  It is the case for Heidegger, with the distinction between Sein and Dasein.  If we take into account the etymological framework, we can see that “existence,” which depends on Dasein, is a topological concept.  It means to be here, to be in the world.  And in fact, I also shall propose to determine the very general concept of “existence” by the necessity of thinking the place, or the world, of everything which is.  And this place is not deducible from being as such.

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Posted in: Alan Badiou, Philosophy.

A crisis of the post-colonial state

Oct 15th, 2011
by John Steele.
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The Arab revolts of the past year represent an important shift politically (and not only for the Arab world) that is important to seek to understand. The following essay, reprinted from a recent issue of New Left Review, is valuable not only for a beginning analysis but for its historical sketch of the development of the “gearbox of imperial control.” We have previously published an interview with van der Pijl.

The dominion of the West today is often analysed in terms of transnational capital’s ability to entangle prior modes of production in its net; but it is equally urgent to analyse the structures of imperialism in terms of modes of foreign relations.

The Arab world, in revolt and once again under attack, finds itself in the midst of a triple crisis: the crisis of Western hegemony, the crisis of capital and the crisis of the nation-state.

This is not, then, a revolution in which the social forces associated with a new way of life press forward to take the place of defunct governing classes, no longer able to hold the line. Instead, it may well be that the current storms raging across the Middle East are part of a planetary depression, signalling a structural weakening of the post-colonial state form through which the West has long exercised its control.

ARAB REVOLTS AND NATION-STATE CRISIS

Kees van der Pijl

The shockwaves of popular rebellion reverberating across the Arab world since the start of 2011 have put to the test the West’s dominion over the region; a rule that has long aimed at securing access to the Middle East’s oil and gas, while supporting Israel’s ongoing colonization of Palestine. The means by which imperial control is exercised were vividly exposed to public view, as Western officials scrambled to ‘stabilize’ the states that had long served as their clients in the region. In Egypt, a favoured destination for CIA rendition flights, the annual subsidy of $1.3bn in US military aid since 1979 has famously bought the Pentagon a direct line to the Army high command, giving Washington a control panel from which to manage the handling of the mass protests. The US Defense Secretary Robert Gates was on the phone to Cairo ‘every few hours’. Daily exhortations from the Obama Administration urged, first, ‘an orderly transition’ with Mubarak stepping down in September; then, as mass pressure grew, ‘an orderly transition now’, to the spymaster, Omar Suleiman; finally, a seizure of power by the Supreme Military Council (SMC), an outcome announced to Congress by Leon Panetta, then head of the CIA, on February 10, the day before it happened. All pointed to the urgency of American actions in stabilizing the 80-million-strong centre of gravity of Arab discontent, through the mechanisms of the post-colonial state.

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Posted in: Current events, History, Imperialist strategy.

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