Tuesday, February 05, 2013
Marxism and McLuhan posted by Adam Marks
A People’s History of the World, by Chris
Harman, is a fascinating and wonderful book. Something interesting happens
around halfway through however. The story of Absolutely Everything changes; things
like settled agriculture, irrigation and the printing press and so on, drop
away. The last few hundred years expand massively and the tale becomes much
more about wars, Jacobins, syndicalism and such like. This is very appropriate.
The bourgeois revolution in its broadest sense is the dawn of public life, the
awakening of mass consciousness and all that it has entailed until this point.
But we must go back a step. Being
determines consciousness. Our mode of being is altered by the inventions
through which we live. The clock, for example, alters our sense of time. Under
capitalist relations it bourgeoisifies our sense of time. Under capitalism time
is money. Through the clock face it is converted from peasant, analogue flow
into measurable capitalist quanta. This is just an example.
There is relatively little in the Marxist
canon that deals with the effects of new media. The Marxist who paid closest
attention to this question was Walter Benjamin. Excellent groundwork though his
essay The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction is it is also short and aphoristic. It was also
written prior to several major developments in mass media.
I would like to introduce to you all a
philosopher, not a Marxist, but someone whose ideas can extend and enrich our
discussion and study in the area of culture and technology. Marshall McLuhan.
A
short biography
Marshall McLuhan was born in 1911, in Edmonton , Alberta Winnipeg University of Manitoba
Marshall McLuhan was a bit of a polymath.
He started out academic life studying engineering before switching to English
Literature, a subject at which he excelled. In 1937 he moved to Cambridge England Cambridge
All of this is to say he was not a
revolutionary figure. However his focus changed when he began teaching
Communication and Culture seminars, funded by the Ford Foundation. He carved
out an academic niche of his own, starting with the book The Mechanical Bride,
examining technology and popular culture, quite different subject matter to the
(I would argue) closed and cold world of the New Critics. This led to the
foundation of the University of Toronto McLuhan
Programme
He was not completely closed to the world
of politics. His aphoristic, collage style of writing and his non-judgemental openness
toward new forms of communication lent itself to post-war youth culture. While
McLuhan was a friend of right-wing author Wyndham Lewis, he was also an
associate of Timothy Leary and is credited with coining the hippie slogan, Turn
On, Tune In, Drop Out.
McLuhan’s arguments and aphorisms have
proven massively popular and influential. His speaking-style, especially in
front of non-academic audiences, was playful and thought provoking. They are
important for us I think because they help stimulate thought often about things
we take for granted. Mass culture and its role within bourgeois hegemony is a
crucial question for Marxists in advanced, core capitalist countries. Mass
media profoundly determine the shape and form of mass culture.
The ideas I present here from the beginning
of McLuhan’s most famous work, Understanding
Media. First of all:
The
medium is the message
“It is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out”.
It is not exactly an aphorism, but it is a neat
segment of Marx’s Preface to the Critique of Political Economy with an important
implication. Ideology is reasonably defined as a collection of ideas based
around a distinct point of view. The argument here suggests ideology is the
medium of class consciousness.
In the clash between forces and relations of production, the basis of class struggle, people can achieve things which are contrary to the ideas they hold. This was something Antonio Gramsci dwelt upon in his Prison Notebooks repeatedly. The achievements of the Biennio Rosso were not capitalised upon because there was not sufficient critical renovation of ideas; long story short, the workers rebellion was not translated into a workers state.
Ideology is the medium of class consciousness and, as we know, the medium is the message. The key benefit of Marshall McLuhan’s media studies was the spotlight he shone on the media themselves, media as physical objects, and the effects they have. For example, (in this case David Sarnoff, pioneer American broadcaster) people often advise that the “products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way that they are used that determines their value”. McLuhan responded:
In the clash between forces and relations of production, the basis of class struggle, people can achieve things which are contrary to the ideas they hold. This was something Antonio Gramsci dwelt upon in his Prison Notebooks repeatedly. The achievements of the Biennio Rosso were not capitalised upon because there was not sufficient critical renovation of ideas; long story short, the workers rebellion was not translated into a workers state.
Ideology is the medium of class consciousness and, as we know, the medium is the message. The key benefit of Marshall McLuhan’s media studies was the spotlight he shone on the media themselves, media as physical objects, and the effects they have. For example, (in this case David Sarnoff, pioneer American broadcaster) people often advise that the “products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way that they are used that determines their value”. McLuhan responded:
“Suppose we were to say, ‘Apple Pie is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way that it is used that determines its value’. Or ‘the Smallpox Virus is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way that it is used that determines its value’. Again, ‘Firearms are in themselves neither good nor bad; it is the way that they are used that determines their value’.
A useful point for consideration, the ideology of Protestantism helped found capitalism. Not because of some supposed work-ethic, plenty of harsh toil had been carried before anyone pondered the nature of a personal god, but because its dispute with Catholicism over humanity’s relationship to the divine was in effect an argument over the individual’s relationship to authority. “No King But Jesus” is a roundabout call for a republic.
But why does this matter? One of the crucial questions about ideology, and specific ideologies, is why do they arise when they do? As Frederick Engels pointed out, early socialism was utopian because:
“What was wanted was the individual man of genius, who has now arisen and who understands the truth. That he has now arisen, that the truth has now been clearly understood, is not an inevitable event, following of necessity in the chains of historical development, but a mere happy accident. He might just as well have been born 500 years earlier, and might then have spared humanity 500 years of error, strife, and suffering”.
So, Protestantism didn’t just happen to rise up during the feudal era to attack it, it arose out of the feudal era, part of it but against it (and eventually to be supplanted by more advanced articulations of bourgeois ideology). There is no debate about a personal versus an impersonal god without print technology and the beginnings of mass literacy. There are no ideas apart from the means of articulating them.
We live in the medium of Earth’s atmosphere. We do not notice it because our bodies are evolved to live at around sea-level pressure; we live at the very bottom of an ocean of air. You can only get a handle on this when you climb a large mountain, get into a submarine or board a spacecraft. We exist, in a similar way, in a state of media saturation, to the point where we do not regard the effects such media have upon us.
We tend not to notice the dominant ideology, the collection of ideas based around the point of view of the dominant class in our society. It is only when we are outside that medium that we see it for what it is. McLuhan’s strength is that he looks at the effect of technology on consciousness. It is easy to accept that electronic media creates almost instant global communication, and thereby bridges the gap between cause and effect, core and periphery in the public mind. You can extrapolate from this. We have lived through a period of growing gated bourgeois communities, increasingly militarised policing, the enclosure of more and more public space, and so forth. The mass media batters away, the poor are dangerous, deracinated and, look, they're living among us. It’s all very logical.
But there is one clear problem with techno-determinism. Take something like the Canary Wharf Complex in
Hot
and cold media
Hot and cold media are important concepts
for McLuhan. ‘Hot’ and ‘cold’ are slightly misleading names. The basic
opposition is between high definition/low participation and low definition/high
participation media. It is, say, the difference between a live action film and
a drawn animation. With live action the visual detail is fairly rich, leaving
little room for the viewer to fill in/interpret. With a drawn cartoon (a good
example being Matt Groening animations) there is minimal visual information,
few lines, few surfaces, and wide room for viewer inference.
Why should hot and cold media bother us? I think, firstly, because it is a useful way to track cultural development. Ruling classes attempt to develop culture appropriate to its rule. This means that culture is a site of conflict in class society. In Understanding Media, McLuhan at one point cites the example of the waltz (a ‘hot’ dance) versus the twist (a ‘cool’ dance).
Dance is an expression of sexuality. The waltz, a formal dance, where the information is largely filled in beforehand, was consistent with early capitalism and its attempt to mould sexuality to the nuclear family and capital accumulation. The twist is an informal dance, with room to improvise and, most dangerously of all, does not require two closely locked partners. The twist and related forms of dance were consistent with a period of affluence and immanent sexual liberation. They were consequently terrifying to authorities committed to the capitalism and sexual propriety. Let’s not forget the added bourgeois horror of mixed race social dancing. It may seem unbearably strange and backward now but American cops used to attack Ray Charles concerts for precisely this reason (brilliantly evoked in Mike Davis’s writings on post-war youth riots).
But there’s a second point of interest. In McLuhan’s scheme new media cause a shock to our system. In order to overcome this shock, so we aren’t sent reeling every time we walk down the street or glance at a TV, we numb ourselves to the medium’s effects. One way of doing this is by cooling down the medium.
The printed word is visually hot. Spoken word on the radio is aurally hot. They each take particular senses and fill them out. One thing you will not have missed is the rise of right-wing demagogy in the internet and talk radio. These are cooling media that allow for greater participation; but this participation is as a kind of reflective surface in an echo chamber. Slanders become rumours and rumours become facts, as host and audience goad each other.
This can create false notions that are very difficult to dispel. An example: after the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes the Metropolitan Police put out a number of statements that simply weren’t true: he jumped the barrier, he was wearing a suspicious device, he challenged the police, he looked like Hussein Osman, etc. These claims were recycled through public forums and consequently longer in people’s minds even after they were disproved.
What is ideology, the medium itself; hot or cool? As far as the question is relevant I would suggest it is a cool medium, participatory. For example: The Conservative Party is a key outlet for bourgeois ideology. The party cannot win general elections on the vote of its social base, the bourgeoisie, alone. There is a Conservative Party for big capitalists, but there is also one for small business people, there is even a party for a minority of conservative workers. This can only be achieved by incorporating the concerns, the points of view of other groups into the broader bourgeois perspective of the Tories.
The point here is not to suggest hot, cold or cooling media are better, worse, beneficial or pernicious, but to understand them so we are not taken by surprise by their effects.
Why should hot and cold media bother us? I think, firstly, because it is a useful way to track cultural development. Ruling classes attempt to develop culture appropriate to its rule. This means that culture is a site of conflict in class society. In Understanding Media, McLuhan at one point cites the example of the waltz (a ‘hot’ dance) versus the twist (a ‘cool’ dance).
Dance is an expression of sexuality. The waltz, a formal dance, where the information is largely filled in beforehand, was consistent with early capitalism and its attempt to mould sexuality to the nuclear family and capital accumulation. The twist is an informal dance, with room to improvise and, most dangerously of all, does not require two closely locked partners. The twist and related forms of dance were consistent with a period of affluence and immanent sexual liberation. They were consequently terrifying to authorities committed to the capitalism and sexual propriety. Let’s not forget the added bourgeois horror of mixed race social dancing. It may seem unbearably strange and backward now but American cops used to attack Ray Charles concerts for precisely this reason (brilliantly evoked in Mike Davis’s writings on post-war youth riots).
But there’s a second point of interest. In McLuhan’s scheme new media cause a shock to our system. In order to overcome this shock, so we aren’t sent reeling every time we walk down the street or glance at a TV, we numb ourselves to the medium’s effects. One way of doing this is by cooling down the medium.
The printed word is visually hot. Spoken word on the radio is aurally hot. They each take particular senses and fill them out. One thing you will not have missed is the rise of right-wing demagogy in the internet and talk radio. These are cooling media that allow for greater participation; but this participation is as a kind of reflective surface in an echo chamber. Slanders become rumours and rumours become facts, as host and audience goad each other.
This can create false notions that are very difficult to dispel. An example: after the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes the Metropolitan Police put out a number of statements that simply weren’t true: he jumped the barrier, he was wearing a suspicious device, he challenged the police, he looked like Hussein Osman, etc. These claims were recycled through public forums and consequently longer in people’s minds even after they were disproved.
What is ideology, the medium itself; hot or cool? As far as the question is relevant I would suggest it is a cool medium, participatory. For example: The Conservative Party is a key outlet for bourgeois ideology. The party cannot win general elections on the vote of its social base, the bourgeoisie, alone. There is a Conservative Party for big capitalists, but there is also one for small business people, there is even a party for a minority of conservative workers. This can only be achieved by incorporating the concerns, the points of view of other groups into the broader bourgeois perspective of the Tories.
The point here is not to suggest hot, cold or cooling media are better, worse, beneficial or pernicious, but to understand them so we are not taken by surprise by their effects.
From
narcosis to awakening
McLuhan’s best known writing is more about aphorism
and argument than precisely laid out research. This is particularly the case
with the opening chapters of Understanding Media. There are two chapters, which
run together smoothly, The Gadget Lover and Hybrid Energy. McLuhan begins his
argument by retelling the myth of Narcissus.
The myth is generally understood as a warning against self-love, Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection. According to McLuhan this is not quite the intention of the story. Narcissus was transfixed by his reflected image and so became numb to all other stimuli, a closed circuit.
All media are extensions of particular human aspects; the wheel is an extension of the foot, the lever an extension of the arm, clothing an extension of the skin, and so forth. Human invention is a response to need generated by discomfort; the wheel relieves the burden of moving objects, the lever the burden of lifting them, clothes keep us from being cold (or sunburned).
Any new invention is a greater or lesser shock to human relations. A neat illustration, from Rosa Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital:
The myth is generally understood as a warning against self-love, Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection. According to McLuhan this is not quite the intention of the story. Narcissus was transfixed by his reflected image and so became numb to all other stimuli, a closed circuit.
All media are extensions of particular human aspects; the wheel is an extension of the foot, the lever an extension of the arm, clothing an extension of the skin, and so forth. Human invention is a response to need generated by discomfort; the wheel relieves the burden of moving objects, the lever the burden of lifting them, clothes keep us from being cold (or sunburned).
Any new invention is a greater or lesser shock to human relations. A neat illustration, from Rosa Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital:
“In districts where natural economy formerly prevailed, the introduction of means of transport – railways, navigation, canals – is vital for the spreading of commodity economy… The triumphant march of commodity economy thus begins in most cases with magnificent constructions of modern transport, such as railway lines which cross primeval forests and tunnel through the mountains, telegraph wires which bridge the deserts, and ocean liners which call at the most outlying ports”.
The latter chapters of the Accumulation of Capital are a meditation on the various media used to establish a commodity economy in various colonies, including the medium of ballistic weaponry. Colonialism is a rather sharp example but the point stands, changes in the medium of human existence require changes in the way people relate to each other.
On an individual level the shock of change leads to numbness, what might have been disturbing to your ancestors you have to take in your stride. Imagine, for example, your journey to work. You would never get there if you had to regard every single advert trying to catch your attention. This shutting down of the senses blinds us to the effect of various media. Back to the original example, ideology; we do not recognise mainstream ideology as such. Even so the supposedly non-ideological person is in fact the most ideological.
We only recognise a medium for what it is when it is either hybridised or superseded. An example from art is the journey from painted portrait to lithograph to photograph, to moving image, to synchronised sound, to Technicolor. Each invention cried out for the following one. As each medium was superseded it was transformed, the obvious example being after the rise of photography artists began painting concepts and feelings, rather than literal objects.
Another example: we now know that novels are in fact movie scripts. Every successful novel is touted to movie producers as a sure-fire hit (that or it’s cherished as an unfilmable novel). Movies are not novels, however. They almost never make the journey backwards. If anything movies are becoming role-playing computer games, judging by the number of spin-offs that have been made.
Relating this back to the point about ideology; we overcome our numbness to bourgeois ideology, see it for what it is, through its supersession (or, perhaps, hybridisation if we take reformism into account). This of course happens through practical action, class struggle, combined with the critical renovation of consciousness.
Challenge
and Collapse
McLuhan’s legacy, if it is anything, is a
techno-evangelism, in part an offshoot of the counter-culture (McLuhan was also
the first person to use the word “surf” in its modern sense); computing will
save the day the internet will broaden our minds, liberate information and the
geeks shall inherit the Earth.
One very modern off-shoot of this philosophy is the argument (distraction in my opinion) over the role of social media in popular rebellion. Does the application of Twitter to 21st century society result in occupations, riots and strikes? It's certainly a more comforting conclusion than admitting people over the world are tired, poor and fed up with living under their rulers.
But McLuhan was not a member of the 60s counter-culture. He was an educator, an educator with a very keen sense of the crisis in education, which arose out of post-war society and came to be known as the Generation Gap.
Capitalism needed an educated, skilled workforce more than ever. Educational opportunities grew and millions of young people growing up in the core capitalist countries for the first time had the chance to go into Higher Education, therefore reaping the rewards of a better life. At the same time the rigorous application of capitalist norms to a formerly artisan-like HE system generated conflict, conflict between the new mode of intellectual production and the relations of production. The lecturer was slowly proletarianised. The student, promised intellectual liberation, was subjected to fusty, paternal supervision and backward rules. For example: the student struggle in France 1968, which set off the great strike in May, began as a struggle over the right of male students to visit female dorms overnight.
McLuhan was a lecturer during this period of change. He experienced the shift when he began teaching. Though only a few years older than his students, he felt an insurmountable gap between him and them. The difference, he thought, was in the mode of understanding. He was steeped in the literate, sequential and disinterested mode of thought. His students were saturated by modern media and its effects. Their understanding was post-literate, non-linear and deeply involved.
He saw this as the root of the conflict, the crisis of education (and of society at large). It was this he studied. His solutions were humane, intellectual and appropriately utopian – more designed to provoke debate rather than resolve it. His answer was critical reflection, we had to understand the changes we were going through as a society in order to cope with them. Cutting edge thought, and in particular art were to lead the way.
The Marxist response is clear. Firstly, culture is ambiguous. For human history so far every document of civilisation has also been a document of barbarism. In order to have Socrates you also had to have slaves. The prevailing culture of any class society is determined by that society's ruling class, their prerogatives, their preoccupations. An obsolete way of thinking does not simply give way to critical reflection, which brings us onto the second point; consciousness has its basis in material reality. As Marx pointed out in his Theses on Feuerbach, criticism of heaven takes place on earth.
I want to conclude with two quotes, from Challenge and Collapse, the final chapter of the opening section of Understanding Media, one which Marxists should find intriguing:
One very modern off-shoot of this philosophy is the argument (distraction in my opinion) over the role of social media in popular rebellion. Does the application of Twitter to 21st century society result in occupations, riots and strikes? It's certainly a more comforting conclusion than admitting people over the world are tired, poor and fed up with living under their rulers.
But McLuhan was not a member of the 60s counter-culture. He was an educator, an educator with a very keen sense of the crisis in education, which arose out of post-war society and came to be known as the Generation Gap.
Capitalism needed an educated, skilled workforce more than ever. Educational opportunities grew and millions of young people growing up in the core capitalist countries for the first time had the chance to go into Higher Education, therefore reaping the rewards of a better life. At the same time the rigorous application of capitalist norms to a formerly artisan-like HE system generated conflict, conflict between the new mode of intellectual production and the relations of production. The lecturer was slowly proletarianised. The student, promised intellectual liberation, was subjected to fusty, paternal supervision and backward rules. For example: the student struggle in France 1968, which set off the great strike in May, began as a struggle over the right of male students to visit female dorms overnight.
McLuhan was a lecturer during this period of change. He experienced the shift when he began teaching. Though only a few years older than his students, he felt an insurmountable gap between him and them. The difference, he thought, was in the mode of understanding. He was steeped in the literate, sequential and disinterested mode of thought. His students were saturated by modern media and its effects. Their understanding was post-literate, non-linear and deeply involved.
He saw this as the root of the conflict, the crisis of education (and of society at large). It was this he studied. His solutions were humane, intellectual and appropriately utopian – more designed to provoke debate rather than resolve it. His answer was critical reflection, we had to understand the changes we were going through as a society in order to cope with them. Cutting edge thought, and in particular art were to lead the way.
The Marxist response is clear. Firstly, culture is ambiguous. For human history so far every document of civilisation has also been a document of barbarism. In order to have Socrates you also had to have slaves. The prevailing culture of any class society is determined by that society's ruling class, their prerogatives, their preoccupations. An obsolete way of thinking does not simply give way to critical reflection, which brings us onto the second point; consciousness has its basis in material reality. As Marx pointed out in his Theses on Feuerbach, criticism of heaven takes place on earth.
I want to conclude with two quotes, from Challenge and Collapse, the final chapter of the opening section of Understanding Media, one which Marxists should find intriguing:
“Perhaps the most obvious “closure”... of any new technology is just the demand for it. Nobody wants a motorcar until there are motorcars, and nobody is interested in TV until there are TV programmes”.
This is a close relation to the Marxist observation that a society does not create problems for which it does not already have solutions. There is no solution to bad weather therefore it is not a problem. There is a solution to poor harvests, to food speculation and starvation. These things are problems. While McLuhan's solutions may be technocratic, we can accept what he is saying here. But, McLuhan continues:
“The power of technology to create its own world of demand is not independent of technology being first an extension of our own bodies and senses. When we are deprived of our sense of sight, the other senses take up the role of sight in some degree. But the need to use the senses that are available is as insistent as breathing - a fact that makes sense of the urge to keep radio and TV going more or less continuously. The urge to continuous use is quite independent of the ‘content’ of public programmes... It is ridiculous to talk of ‘what the public wants’ played over its own nerves... Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we really don't have any rights left”.
This is a vital point that we can all agree
with. However you define 'the media', broadly or narrowly, they are our mode of
existence, alienated from us and used against us. We take them back under our
control in order to emancipate ourselves.
Labels: capitalism, communication, engels, hegemony, Marshall McLuhan, marx, mass culture, media, Rosa Luxemburg
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Wednesday, October 17, 2012
The worst has yet to come posted by Richard Seymour
I wrote this for Jacobin:Recently, I proposed a few points about the conjuncture in Britain. None of these were offered in the spirit of hard and fast conclusions, but the aim was to begin to explain the stability and longevity of the coalition government in the face of quite serious social resistance despite its obvious weaknesses. One factor that certainly needs to be added to this list is the delayed, protracted nature of the crisis facing the British working class.
It is often said that this government forgot the lesson that the Thatcherites learned: the need to salami slice one’s opponents, taking on weaker quarries first and only moving on to larger prey after a few demonstrative kills. This government seems to be taking on everyone at once. Its attacks on the public sector have at times seemed to be reckless, its negotiating stances absurdly hubristic, the sweep of its offensive indiscriminate. Yet the two parties of government still have a plurality between them; they aren’t attacking everyone at once, they are attacking certain definite social constituencies, which are traditionally core Labour constituencies. Of course, in the context of the wider capitalist offensive, this means that the vast majority of the working class, and a significant section of the middle class, suffers. But they are doing so in a staged, multilayered fashion, and that has made a difference...
Labels: anti-capitalism, austerity, british capitalism, capitalism, capitalist offensive, the meaning of david cameron, tories, working class
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Thursday, September 13, 2012
The territorial logic of the capitalist state posted by Richard Seymour
The movements from Tahrir to Liberty Square have in different ways posed the question of space and political authority.
But perhaps there has been a bias toward approaching this question mainly on the level of international or transnational action, whether it be in the form of ‘globalization’ or imperialism. Somehow, and I know this bothers you as much as it does me, New Labour’s Regional Spatial Strategies were just not as interesting as the Bush administration’s ‘Green Zone’ strategy in Iraq.
It is natural enough that the ‘spatial turn’ of social theory was linked particularly to the question of imperialism in the last decade. This is not only because the US army corps of engineers could be found building Xanadu compounds, permanent military bases and separation walls in Iraq, which just is an inherently interesting type of spatial activity. It is because when a state projects political authority outside of its sovereign, bounded territory, and begins the task of organising the political space of another nation, the seeming naturalness and obviousness of the relationship between space and political power is necessarily problematized. Territorial authority looks very clearly like what it is: an artifice, a production, multi-tiered effort of coercion, culture war, political organization, economic strategy, material incentives, symbolic organization, the construction, reconstruction and moving of internal frontiers, and so on. Suddenly, the means by which we ourselves are dominated become visible. Suddenly we get to see how it is all constructed: it isn’t called ‘state-building’ for nothing. We can learn a lot from the cities defiled by empire, as Derek Gregory has shown us.
And, to be fair, things aren’t quite as one-sided as I am painting them. It is true that the organization of cities, metropolitan boroughs, counties, and regions, was much more of a going concern during the ‘urbanisation’ boom of the Sixties and Seventies. Henri Lefebvre and his student Manuel Castells were took the lead as social theorists throwing into question the embedded assumptions of Chicago School ‘urban theory’, partially in response to the jacqueries of 1968, and the French state’s urban rationalisation project. Each understood in different ways – Lefebvre as a marxist-humanist, Castells as an althusserian - that the ideology of ‘urbanism’ was symptomatic, coming just as the urban-rural divide was really dying, the city in its old form as a sort of isolated hive of commerce and culture finished. This ideology adverted to certain real long-term trends, intimately connected with the state and its functions in allocating production facilities, and ensuring the conditions for collective consumption (of housing, health, education, municipal lighting, rubbish collection, etc.) in its extended sense allowing the reproduction of labour power. But the explanation of these issues was obscured by the deployment of an object, the ‘urban’, which lacked rigorous definition. They understood the ‘urban’ to refer to a set of social predicaments, political antagonisms, and so on, among and between definitely social classes and interests, which required a more sophisticated socio-spatial analysis to cope with scalar reorganization that was global and affected not just the metropolitan area, but also the status of national states as the strategic basis for production. This type of analysis, sometimes leavened by poststructuralist additives, has been sustained through the years by the likes of Neil Brenner, David Harvey, Ira Katznelson and Mike Davis. Arguably, such work has become more important in recent years. For example, Harvey’s Right to the City, though simply following up on his long-term research agenda, seems very Zeitgeisty in the wake of Occupy.
Still, there’s a logic to focusing on the axis of imperialism, since the emphasis on interstate relations and antagonisms forces one to consider the national territory not as a spatial given but as a social relationship. What I want to do in this, another of my exceptionally long, finger-wagging, listen-up-and-do-as-you’re-told posts, is try to explain something about the capitalist state and its spatial logics. I start at the inter-state level, by traversing some of the issues thrown up by imperialism, and then drill down to national states and their ordering of space. Let me start with the ‘new imperialism’.
***
Theories positing a 'new imperialism' pivot on the intersection of two logics of power, conceptually separate though inextricable in practise. According to David Harvey and Giovanni Arrighi, these logics are: the capitalist logic and the territorial logic. (I’m aware that Alex Callinicos also aligns with this tendency, but I see his dichotomy as being slightly different, focused on the relative autonomy of the geopolitical from the economic logic). Harvey assigns a distinct type of spatial organisation to each of these logics of power. Thus, the territorial logic is that of states, whose power is based in command of a determinate territory and "the capacity to mobilize its human and natural resources". The capitalist logic of power produces capillary flows of capital accumulation which flow "across and through continuous space, towards or away from territorial entities".
Lefebvre looms large in much of this thinking, especially for Harvey. For Lefebvre, the relationship between the state and space has to be constituted along several axes. First, there is the production of a national space itself, a national territory that bears the marks of human generations, classes, political forces, etc. Of course, the capitalist state by no means coincides with the nation – but as we will see, this is beside the point. Capitalist states organise territory as national space. Second, the state constitutes within the territory a matrix of institutional spaces appropriate for a social division of labour, and the imperatives of political dominance. Each of these spaces, from the borough to the post office to the police station, condenses a system of social expectations and responses, which become so 'natural' and 'obvious' that they are never articulated. Third, the state composes a 'mental' or imaginary space, a set of representations through which people live their relationship to the people-nation, the state and the territory.
According to Lefebvre, the spatiality of the state constantly comes into conflict with "the pre-existent economic space that it encounters", "spontaneous poles of growth, historic towns, commercialized fragments of space that are sold in 'lots'":
"In the chaos of relations among individuals, groups, class fractions, and classes, the state tends to impose a rationality, its own, which has space as its privileged instrument. The economy is thus recast in spatial terms - flows (of energy, raw materials, labor power, finished goods, trade patterns, etc.) and stocks (of gold and capital, investments, machines, technologies, stable clusters of various jobs, etc.). The state tends to control flows and stocks by ensuring their coordination. In the course of a threefold process (growth - i.e., expansion of the productive forces - urbanization, or the formation of massive units of production and consumption; and spatialization), a qualitative leap occurs: the emergence of the state mode of production (SMP) (mode de production etatique). The articulation between the SMP and space is thus crucial. It differs from that between previous modes of production (including capitalism) and their manner of occupying natural space (including modifying it through social practice). Something new appears in civil society and in political society, in production and in state institutions. This must be given a name and conceptualized. We suggest that this rationalization and socialization of society has assumed a specific form, which can be termed: politicization, statism." (See Lefebvre, 'Space and State', in Neil Brenner and Bob Jessop, State-Space: A Reader, Blackwell, 2002)
I dare say the concept of the 'state mode of production' is theoretically extravagant, stretching the concept of the mode of production beyond breaking point, but the thrust of this is clear: there are two spatial logics of power, one spontaneous, random, commercial and capitalist, coming 'from below'; the other planned, ordered, rationalised, non-capitalist, coming 'from above'.
Equally, some of the inspiration for this distinction may have to do with the work of the geographer G William Skinner, who certainly influenced Arrighi, and the sociologist Charles Tilly, who extrapolated from Skinner's conclusions. In an important book, Coercion, Capital and European States 900 - 1900, Tilly wrote:
"G. William Skinner portrays the social geography of late imperial China as the intersection of two sets of central-place hierarchies ... The first, constructed largely from the bottom up, emerged from exchange; its overlapping units consisted of larger and larger market areas centered on towns and cities of increasing size. The second, imposed mainly from the top down, resulted from imperial control; its nested units comprised a hierarchy of administrative jurisdictions. Down to the level of the hsien, or county, every city had a place in both the commercial and the administrative hierarchy. Below that level, even the mighty Chinese Empire ruled indirectly via its gentry. In the top-down system, we find the spatial logic of coercion. In the bottom-up system, the spatial logic of capital. We have seen two similar hierarchies at work repeatedly in the unequal encounter between European states and cities."
Again, it seems that the spatial logic of capital is identical with the spatial logic of commerce, a spontaneous system of flows, coming from below, 'bottom-up'; while the spatial logic of the state is rationalising, ordering, coercive, 'top-down'. Two spatial logics, two types of power, each so distinct that, for Lefebvre at least, the state's type of power even rises to the level of being a mode of production.
This has, superficially at least, a topographical similarity to the Deleuze and Guattari couplet, territorialization-deterritorialization. You have on the one hand the oedipalized territorialities such as the nation, the church, the family etc., imposing themselves hierarchically, top-down. These are dominant in the feudal era. And on the other, the "deterritorialized" flows of capital, obeying a logic much like that of free-flowing desire, destroying the Oedipal territorialities. The capitalist logic arises from the intersection of two developments, two decoded flows - those of labour, in the form of the free worker, and those of production in the form of money-capital. And so these twin logics of territorializing political authority and deterritorializing capital, though carnally enmeshed*, tug at and militate against one another. This is a common image in social theory.
***
My reservation about 'new imperialism' theory was at first an inchoate and very slightly philistine feeling that I simply didn't 'get' the seemingly exaggerated emphasis on space. Bob Jessop pointed out a decade ago that the turn toward 'globalization' as the master-concept of social theory produced a pronounced 'spatial' turn that was long overdue for reconsideration if not revision. More specifically, I didn't get the emphasis on the territorial as a drive logically distinct from capitalist power. It seemed to me that territorial space was just one aspect or moment in the development of concrete social formations in which the mode of production took root, just one of the aspects that the mode of production organised. Could it really constitute a logic of power distinct from, but equivalent to, capitalist power?
Robert Brenner's critique of Harvey's 'new imperialism' theory zones in on this problem. The capitalist logic of power, says Brenner, is clear. There are a set of imperatives (production for profit, reducing costs, etc.), and a set of mechanisms (intra-capitalist competition, pricing, etc.) by which those imperatives are enforced. Moreover, there is a strong empirical basis for its existence. But the territorial logic of power, the state logic, is not at all clear. There appears to be only a vague set of determinations behind this logic, no obvious imperatives or raison d'etre driving it, and little in the way of an empirical basis. Insofar as the state planners have an interest in defending a territory, expanding their extra-territorial dominion, etc., it is not clear that this is distinct from capitalist interests. In explaining this, Brenner sticks closely to a 'homeostatic' model of the capitalist state. The state’s functioning and wealth being derived from capitalist growth, its managers will tend to act in accord with capitalist imperatives. And he suggests that, independently of his conceptual framework, that is actually Harvey's approach in his explanations of concrete imperialist actions.
Despite my misgivings about the 'new imperialism' theories, I can't assent unreservedly to this critique. Though Brenner pinpoints what I see as a real problem with the 'new imperialism' theories, his critique is bound up with a set of assumptions I don't share. Brenner argues that there is 'rational core' to Harvey's theory in that it seeks to explain the apparent disjuncture between what might be in the interests of the capitalist class, and the actions undertaken by the state (wars, etc.). In place of ‘two logics’, Brenner fulcrums his explanation for this gap on the dysfunctional relationship between a state form (the national state) and capitalist imperatives (which continually transgress national boundaries). For Brenner, the world system being compose of many sovereign states is an historical fact which emerged in the context of feudalism, not capitalism; its survival is not essential to capitalism. Capitalism transformed extant territorial states into capitalist states without actually altering the multi-state character of the world system. This argument is given considerable historical depth and detail in Benno Teschke's The Myth of 1648 A world-state, Brenner argues, would be far more functional for capitalist growth than the national state, since as capital internationalizes, national states cannot implement strategies to resolve international deadlocks in production or make adjustments to overcome global imbalances, with the necessary degree of coordination. The problem here is that while this might explain the general tendency toward irrational conflict between states, and their failure to coordinate rational policy responses to capitalist crisis, this doesn't actually explain why a capitalist state under a particular management might pursue policies that are seemingly at odds with any attempt at a national level to overcome such imbalances, resolve crises of production and so on.
I think it would be better to start answering that question with the fact just as there are many states, that there is no single or general capitalist interest, but rather many capitals, nationally constituted and constitutively divided into fractions with a hierarchy of power between them. The hegemonic fraction is that which leads the others, and dominates the state at any given moment. And even then, there is no absolute agreement on interests or strategy within a given fraction - hedge funds, for example, may differ from investment banks as to the best way to raid social security. The more determinations you add, the more complex the divisions become, and their resolution is contingent on political and ideological leadership. Rather than assuming a homeostatic model of state action, according to which capitalist interests exert a long-range regulatory effect on state power, this approach places the issue firmly back on the terrain of political praxis, with all its implied dysfunctions. And, in fact, Brenner's explanation for the causes of the Iraq war points to this Gramscian problematic.
I have other issues. I think the account of why capitalist states are determined by capitalist and not territorial logic, implies an inadequate mechanistic model of causality. This is a criticism that applies to other political marxists such as Teschke and Lacher, and also in my opinion to theorists such as Fred Block who also deploy a homeostatic model of the state-capital relationship. Intriguingly, the same conclusion regarding the contingent nature of the state system has been reached by those deploying an expressive model of causality. The critical theoretical impulse of the state-derivation school, beginning in West Germany but taking off in the Anglophone left through the work of John Holloway, Werner Bonefeld and others, was to treat the state as a fetishised form of the capital-relation. Influenced by Evgeny Pashukanis, they thought that just as he derived the legal form from the commodity form, so they could homologously derive the state form from the capital form. This being so, the most important thing about the state form was the way in which it condensed at a general level the capital-relation, becoming in a sense the ideal capitalist, in order to remedy the deficiencies and dysfunctions in the circuits of production and exchange. The capitalist mode of production being world-wide in scale, there was no necessary reason why the states system should take the form of national states. Thus, Claudia von Braunmühl’s essay on the nation-state in Holloway and Picciotto’s seminal State and Capital argues that this pre-structuration of the state system by feudal relations has been imposed on capitalism. Capitalism’s systemic opportunism allowed it to take hold of the international states system and transform it, but otherwise it is not essential to the system. There are some extremely interesting aspects of this approach, which I’ll come back to, and the state-derivation approach has produced some rich, suggestive analyses. But, to paraphrase Bernard Shaw, it is in this respect like a library: excellent to borrow from but otherwise to be avoided at all costs.
I am not convinced that the existence of many states under the dominance of the capitalist mode of production is merely an historical legacy contingent to capitalism, which could in principle be superseded. This is not, I insist, to lapse into that tacit functionalism according to which what exists under capitalism must exist for the good of capitalism. I can well see that sovereign, territorial states pre-dated capitalism and imposed a structuring effect on the emerging capitalist world order. I simply do not see that capitalism could provide the material basis for anything other than a multi-state system. And it seems to me that to say the multi-state system is an historical legacy and nothing more is to explain away rather than explain the problem of the relationship between the multiple scalar and spatial levels of political organisation and the capitalist mode of production. The development of capitalism seems to entail a particular type of territorialisation of political power, and it's worth trying to understand why. I think neither the mechanistic nor expressive models of causality can serve us well in explaining this, and I will later indicate the relevance of Althusser’s notion of structural causality.
***
What does the territorialisation of political power consist of? Territoriality in its simplest sense is the disposal of a particular bounded space as a base for achieving a particular social outcome. A church, a police station, a school... all are, among other things, bounded spaces within which a certain type of social organisation is performed; containers for certain sets of social relations. Territorialising political power, then, is nothing other than a process of binding political authority to a determinate space in which the goals of the politically dominant class, the ruling class, can be achieved.
What is distinctive about capitalist state territoriality? We can start with the problem of sovereignty. In the international system, the modern state is a sovereign power to the extent that it not only exercises a monopoly of legitimate violence and political authority within its bounded territory, but also demands recognition by other states of its exclusive right within that territory. In exchange, it recognises the same exclusive right of other states. This notion of sovereignty seems to have origins in feudal property relations, in absolutist states organised on the basis of kingship, patrilineal descent and personal rule. The concept of sovereignty described the absolute right of kings and princes to dispose of their population and territory, to instruct them in their faith, and command them as they saw fit. However, sovereignty takes a particular form under capitalism that is quite distinct from that of feudal states: it is the sovereignty of the people-nation rather than the king as god-incarnate.
This redirects the discussion from inter-state relations to social relations in general; the capitalist state is not just a territorial state, but a national territorial state. It is a national space that the modern state organises, maps, and attempts to bring under a grid of intelligibility. But as I have also said, the state does not strictly coincide with the nation. Many states, like the UK, are multinational; and many nationalities have no state. Nor, obviously enough, are the state's powers simply contained within the boundaries over which it exercises sovereignty: one effect of the internationalization of capital is the internationalization of capitalist states. Nonetheless, the capitalist state specifically identifies itself as a national state, and cannot be indifferent to nations. In some cases, it suppresses them. In some cases, it organises them in a multinational territory, reproducing national spaces through its distribution and scalar organization of sites of power as part of the logic of political domination, while elaborating a superordinate nationality as part of its symbolic organisation of the territory it rules. So, nationality cannot escape the logic of statehood, and the territory of the state is always national.
One strategy for explaining the relationship between nation-state and capital is to relate the development of the national state to the requirements of a unified market. As Fernand Braudel put it:
“A national economy is a political space, transformed by the state as a result of the necessities and innovations of economic life, into a coherent, unified economic space whose combined activities may tend in the same direction. Only England managed this exploit at an early date. In reference to England the term revolution recurs: agricultural, political, financial and industrial revolutions. To this list must be added- giving it whatever name you choose - the revolution that created England's national market.” (Afterthoughts on material civilization and capitalism, 1977)
This would seem at first glance to explain the relationship between the spread of capitalism and the shift from fragmented polities of various scales and types with nebulous boundaries - city-states, principalities, communes, sprawling patchwork empires etc. - to rationalised, imperfectly homogenised national-states. Capitalism’s need for a unified space within which production and exchange can be organised gives rise to various ways of organising space – the growth of towns and cities connected by transport and communications (in a single dominant language), unified by a common currency, protected by military installations, within a territory delimited by borders and protected by a sovereign authority. But returning to Braunmühl’s argument, cited above, we are reminded of a methodological principle derived from Lukacs – the primacy of the totality over individual instances. It is insufficient to take the nation-state itself as the starting point, the self-sufficient unit from whose aggregation a world-system arises: “An international system is not the sum of many states, but on the contrary the international system consists of many nation states. The world market is not constituted by many national economies concentrated together, rather the world market is organized in the form of many national economies as its integral components.”
The theoretical basis for this assertion is the typical state-derivationist approach of attempting to derive the state form from something in the general concept of capital. In this case, it is at first the world market itself that is implied in the general concept of capital, as capital has an innate tendency to drive through and beyond national boundaries. Through the mediation of the world market, localised centres of production and accumulation form a totality, and from that arises the material basis for a world state to carry out the tasks of an ideal-capitalist. The fact that there is not one world state but many states is, then, an historical accident; nonetheless, these states have fallen under the dominance of the world capitalist system, have been transformed into political organisations capable of organising the world market in some way, and thus should not be seen as simply a series of nation-states having a relationship of exteriority to one another. They are intrinsically linked through the world market upon which they arise. Clearly, then, if the unification of the market is what is at stake, it is difficult to explain the perpetuation of national states except as a contingent fact.
However, there is no reason to start by inferring or deriving the capitalist state form from commodity circulation. We can certainly concede the methodological primacy of the totality. But we should remember that the capitalism which emerges in Marx’s Capital is a complex totality composed of many determinations. Each new determination, as Callinicos points out in Imperialism and Political Economy, is connected to the previous in a dependent but non-deductive way. So Marx moves from the analysis of the commodity form to the struggle over the eight hour day, or financial markets, or another aspect of capitalist relations. And while each stage of analysis may depend on the foregoing explications, it is not directly implied in them. Capital markets are not implicit in the analysis of the commodity form; there is no reason why the state form should be implied by the general form of capital either. That being the case, the capitalist state form must be seen as part of a complex totality of mutually articulated elements, each exerting a reciprocal effectivity on the others, the organization of the whole determining the effectivity of each element. The capitalist state is overdetermined by the organization of the complex totality of which it forms a part.
However, there is no reason to start by inferring or deriving the capitalist state form from commodity circulation. We can certainly concede the methodological primacy of the totality. But we should remember that the capitalism which emerges in Marx’s Capital is a complex totality composed of many determinations. Each new determination, as Callinicos points out in Imperialism and Political Economy, is connected to the previous in a dependent but non-deductive way. So Marx moves from the analysis of the commodity form to the struggle over the eight hour day, or financial markets, or another aspect of capitalist relations. And while each stage of analysis may depend on the foregoing explications, it is not directly implied in them. Capital markets are not implicit in the analysis of the commodity form; there is no reason why the state form should be implied by the general form of capital either. That being the case, the capitalist state form must be seen as part of a complex totality of mutually articulated elements, each exerting a reciprocal effectivity on the others, the organization of the whole determining the effectivity of each element. The capitalist state is overdetermined by the organization of the complex totality of which it forms a part.
***
From this perspective alone can one start to do justice to the relationship between the national state and capitalism. The rational kernel of the state-derivation approach is that capitalism doesn’t merely impose a new organization on territorial entities which otherwise remain essentially the same, but rather take hold of an alter their materiality. This is true of all the spatial units that occur under capitalism. Castells denounced ‘urban theory’ for presuming that the urban retained the same content, the same meaning, through centuries of change, across modes of production and the stages in their development. Urban space meant something quite different in medieval Europe; towns and cities represented a different spatial organisation of the social division of labour.
In Marx’s terms, the social division of labour is distinct from the technical division of labour, in that it arises from social functions related to class. Under capitalism, the social division of labour is organised around personalized bonds between the feudal lord and the peasant or serf. The major form of extraction was directly political – the ruling class took tribute by means of coercion – and this tended to produce both a parcellisation of political authority and disarticulation of space. The rural-urban divide, the patchwork of spaces ranging from estates and small towns to great commercial centres and ports to walled cities, condensed a particular social division of labour. In the countryside, the producer was bound to the soil working for nobles of various rank on estates of varying size with porous frontiers and no clear boundaries. Towns varied greatly in size and function; some were enclaves of relative commercial freedom, particularly port towns connected to world markets; smaller towns were usually abutments to large feudal estates. Their inhabitants did not live off the land and produce tribute, but rather lived off petty commodity manufacture, or various types of trade serving the luxury consumption of the feudal ruling class. (On the rural-urban divide in the middle ages, see Rodney Hilton). The major form of ideological dominance being religious, there were overlapping frameworks of sacred and secular power, the church acting as landlord, tithe collector, and symbolic guarantor of the unity of the state as the body of Christ. This specific articulation of economic, political and ideological power was also the basis for the checkered system of miscellaneous polities, from communes to city-states to empires. So, the territorialization of political power under feudalism, based on bonds to lord and land, was such that spaces tended to be irregular, reversible, turned in on themselves (though bonds to lord and land) yet simultaneously open (through extensive migration across intersecting boundaries).
Where the capitalist mode of production took root, however, producers obtained their famous dual freedom, from both lord (bondage) and land (the means of labour); they were drawn into relations of production mediated through exchange, selling their labour power to capitalists who procured it as just one element in a productive process intended to produce a profit. However, as Poulantzas pointed out, this did not entail deterritorialization; such a schema relied on a naturalist image in which territory was assumed to have a continuous meaning, connotatively linked to ‘rootedness’ in determinate plots of land. Rather, the capitalist division of labour entailed a different type of territorialization. Production, circulation and exchange now demanded a spatial matrix of imperfectly homogenized sites, segments of space each carefully delimited by clear frontier marking insides and outsides and linked to a social division of labour – factories, hubs, supply chains, shopping centres, terraces, conurbations, condominiums, and so on. So while the movements of money, capital and labour would tend to push beyond these spaces, they must cross frontiers in order to do so. This system of boundaries is necessary to organise the labour force, the distribution and storage of goods, communications, transport, consumption, residences, and so on. It is necessary to help regularise an already anarchic system of production and minimise its dysfunctions: for example, they help impose a general sedentarization on the labour force (see James Scott on this) that makes its supply more predictable and its constituents intelligible.
The specific combination of cooperative and competitive relations in the division of labour also has effects on the spatial matrix. Production, distribution and exchange must necessarily take place in a cooperative manner, meaning that capital units are locked in a relation of interdependence. This will produce a tendency toward clustering, as functionally associated capitals reduce their distance from one another: it makes sense, for instance, that large manufacturing enterprises would tend to cluster in industrial estates near large workforces with access to main road; or that commercial enterprises would cluster on high streets in pedestrian and motorist accessible centres where consumption can take place. On the other hand, this cooperative effort is structured by competitive accumulation. Some capitals will succeed better than others, and over the long-term there will be a concentration and centralization of capitals, which themselves attract chains of supporting industries, producing spaces (towns, cities, even countries) which work as privileged centres of productive capital, and by extension other spaces that are underdeveloped and neglected.
Political authority under capitalism, rather than being directly embedded in those sites through a chain of significations linking land to labourer to lord, acquired a formal separation or relative autonomy from them. Indeed, part of its role was to help constitute this new spatial matrix by standing in a formal sense ‘outside’ it, while ‘intervening’ constantly. The scare quotes are necessary, because it is clear that in no real sense does the state have an external relationship to the spheres of production or exchange. This is where the state-derivation approach produces an important insight: breaking with the fetishised notion of the state, with the legal, constitutional image of the state as simply an external guardian of civil society, it treats the state as a social relationship, actively involved in the constitution of the totality of social relationships in part by separating off aspects of them and deeming them ‘political’ as opposed to ‘economic’. This is consistent with Corrigan and Sayer’s important argument that ‘the state’ as such is a fiction, a ‘mythicized abstraction’; it is through the state relation itself that the social categories are produced to give it its seeming legal and institutional determinacy, its “misplaced concreteness”.
Still, despite the above, and despite the spatial metaphor deployed, this ‘standing outside’ adverts to a real political relationship which is the state’s relative autonomy from social classes. As Claus Offe put it, this relative autonomy is necessary to capitalism because only a “fully harmonious economic system that did not trigger self-destructive processes of socialization could tolerate the complete positive subordination of the normative-ideological and political systems to itself." It is the fact that capitalist production is not a self-sufficient system, that it has inherent crisis tendencies, and arguably the fact that is articulated with other systems (ecological, biological, etc.), which makes it so inherently unstable and requires a state with the freedom to provide a spatio-temporal fix. Another relevant feature of capitalist production is the ‘isolation effect’ it produces in social classes. Because it is a system of competitive accumulation among many producers, and because capital is constitutively divided into fractions, the capitalist class finds it impossible to constitute its political dominance over the popular classes without the state, which cannot therefore be an ‘instrument’ or ‘tool’ for the capitalist class as such. So the apparent extrusion of political authority from the organization of the spatial matrices of production, circulation and consumption is actually nothing other than the formal separation of the political from the economic; the state remains deeply involved in and articulated with the processes of capital accumulation, constituting the segments of space through its schools, police, armed forces, councils, parking authorities, free enterprise zones, etc. And through its action it seeks to unify and homogenize those spaces; but how?
In the capitalist mode of production, the dominant form of ideology is no longer religious but political; in normal circumstances, the capitalist state presents itself as a popular, representative state (even if not actually democratic). It does so firstly by binding itself to a nation, an ‘imagined community’, usually with a shared language. But to represent the nation as such, it must dissolve classes at an ideological level into individualised subjects, who are then cemented together through the state; the dominant ideological form this takes is legal; the law produces the ‘free and equal’ subject of the bourgeois nation-state. This is connected to the enclosure of a ‘national’ space, which is obviously by no means a natural space (though of course national expansiveness is necessarily responsive to natural resources, and the spatial matrix of production is warped around them). Just as the segments of space at the level of factories, bureaucratic offices or towns are circumscribed by a clear frontier as part of the logic of organising the social division of labour, so the state constitutes the national space by erecting a frontier around it, a system of exclusion and filtered admission (of labour, goods, etc) which is operated on behalf of the nation.
Not only that, but the state effectively operates a system of internal borders, whereby those who are deemed non-national or anti-national can be confined, brutalised, hyper-exploited, etc. – this can range from detention centres for asylum seekers to concentration camps; from Jim Crow laws restricting movement to secret prisons. This too has a certain relationship to the social division of labour, insofar as the latter is constituted by politics and ideology. Capitalism has always shown a marked tendency to stratify labour forces according to principles of race, nationality, religion, gender, ethnicity, and so on, in a way that enhances the political dominance of capital over labour and increases the rate of exploitation of all workers over the long-term. As Roediger and Esch’s accounts of ‘race management’ would demonstrate, this is not something that simply takes place at the level of the state; such strategies are implemented and experimented with directly in productive enterprises. But the state also develops strategies for the control of labour forces, for example by obstructing the mobility of some workers to discourage migration at some points or render migrant workers insecure at others, or implementing material incentives in a gendered way so as to preserve a family structure in which women perform the labour of reproducing labour (ie maintaining a household, raising children, feeding male workers etc). The system of both internal and external frontiers is part of the organization and disciplining of the pyramid.
This directs one’s attention to what the legal concept of the border, as simply an arbitrary political cleavage separating nation from non-nation, obscures: the fact that the frontier is a set of social (economic, political, ideological) relations, mediated through the state, between the contending classes bound by it; between the many capitals based within it and those beyond it; between national oppressed and dominant groups, and those beyond the nation; and between social formations unified by respective national states, whether imperialist or non-imperialist. The transgression of frontiers naturally also represents one moment in a given social relationship, be it oppression (refugee flows), exploitation (labour migration), social resistance and class struggle (breaking out or breaking in), or imperialism (invasion, bombing). The point I’m making here is that the most important fact about national states is not that there are many of them, although logically there must be and this is important; it is the social relations embedded in them, which make them national states.
***
So, rather than deriving the appropriate type of territoriality of the capitalist state from one of the general formal elements of the capitalist mode of production, I have suggested multiple levels of determination beginning with the overall social division of labour, proceeding to the organisation of political authority specific to capitalism, the dominant form of ideological domination under capitalism, the type of relation between capitals, and between different groups of workers, and the effects of these determinants on each other. I am not claiming to have been exhaustive, but approaching it in this way gives one a superior perspective on the different orders of scale and space that characterise the capitalist world system and particularly allows one to understand why the key strategic base at which territorial statehood is organised is the nation and is likely to continue to be the nation. Of course, the specific unity between nation and state is a practical unity, not one that is given in the theoretical understanding of capitalism. Nations are not essential to capitalism. However, in any counterfactual scenario of capitalism’s emergence and development, the world system would most likely be constituted by a graduated system of spaces at the strategic centre of which would be something like national states.
And it’s worth thinking about how this hierarchy of oedipal territories, this very tightly controlled grid of social spaces from the main public square to the prison, dense with symbols and ideology as they are, are so important to capitalist political dominance. I don’t claim that actually controlling this or that bit of space is the most important thing about capitalist territoriality – no, it is the social relations embodied in the space that is central. I have said these segmented spaces are ‘containers’ for social relations in which an implied set of social expectations and responses are condensed. Because of this, there is a strategic hierarchy; some spaces are worth more than others, because the social relations they embody are more important than others to reproducing the system.
A certain approach to anticapitalist struggle focuses on taking over spaces, and creating autonomous zones which are simultaneously protest, pedagogy and prefiguration. This has been tried with the Occupy movement, and has demonstrated some real strengths in all three capacities. But it has clearly reached its limits inasmuch as the capitalist state has learned, through trial and error, how to regain control of such spaces. And to the extent that the strategy was bound up with a longer term perspective of, piece-by-piece, liberating space and building communism on a cellular level, it was never going to work. For, if it is worth claiming autonomous spaces, then it has to be asked why those actually claimed outside of actual revolutionary situations (and then only for a short period) have always been strategically negligible, of marginal importance to the reproduction of the system. The answer is most likely that the politically important spaces are always very well organised and manned, while it would be unwise to occupy strategically important productive spaces unless the workers already agree with you, in which case they should be doing it. That leaves public and semi-public spaces, and a few vacated buildings. Not exactly the Paris Commune; not even the parish commune. And since the national state is the privileged level of the political organization of the territory, capturing visible but strategically marginal space is always at best a short-term tactic, doomed as it is to encirclement and shut-down in short order. The only sensible answer is to re-focus on the social relations that are constituted through a particular organization of space, and try to organize the agencies best placed to disrupt their reproduction.
Labels: althusser, capitalism, capitalist state, mode of production, nationalism, political marxism, poulantzas, social division of labour, socialist strategy, space, state, state-derivation, territory
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Friday, August 24, 2012
Precarity in 21st Century Britain posted by Richard Seymour
My latest piece for the Guardian on the growth of soup kitchens as the latest symbol of precarity in the UK:Lambeth council is turning to food banks in order to manage the crisis of soaring poverty in the borough. This is never a good sign. When soup kitchens started to appear in large numbers in the US during the 1980s, it was supposed to be a form of crisis management. Now they have become a threadbare safety net for masses of jobless and working poor Americans as the welfare system fails them. Dependence on charitable food provision has soared during the recession. Evidence suggests that they don't begin to meet the nutritional needs of those who use them.The trend is for what is supposed to be a temporary stopgap to become a permanent part of the welfare system. It turns welfare into an entrepreneurial wild west, dependent on often inexperienced providers, institutionalising and stabilising chronic insecurity and undernourishment for millions. Whereas in the postwar era poverty was residual or the product of the economic cycle, it has acquired a structural permanence. Nor can this be assumed to be an accidental outcome. States that cut welfare systems are knowing actors, well-placed to evaluate the predictable effects of their actions.
Labels: austerity, capitalism, cuts, neoliberalism, precariat, precarious labour, ruling class, unemployment, welfare, working class
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Monday, April 02, 2012
Mental health care: designed for evil posted by Richard Seymour
Guest post by Kit Withnail:
The following is a storified version of events that led up to the way mental health care is organised in the UK today. It should be familiar to all mental health professionals, and shows, I hope, just how evil - and I do not use the word lightly - care provision truly has become.
Institutional care brings to mind horrific scenes. Whether it's the iatrogenic madness of Crispina at the end of The Magdalene Sisters, gossip about the Rosenhan experiment, Broadmoor, or a fondness for Foucault, mental health institutions bring to most people's minds padded walls, straitjackets, isolation, forced injections and unheard screams.
The truth, in some institutions, was certainly not very different from this, and many were the rich families who felt it too cruel to let relatives rot there as if imprisoned. Their alternative though, was the provision of private nurses working in the home, and as this was expensive it was the privilege of a select few. Institutions were expensive, too, for the state - more so even than prisons. And so the dream of mental health care outside internment grew as the number of institutions grew, in some circles because of love, in others because of profit.
Enter Roy Griffiths. Griffiths made his bones in Monsanto (director, 1964-68) and then Sainsbury’s (1968-91), and naturally, this gave him uniquely brilliant insight into mental healthcare. Thatcher had commissioned Griffiths in 1983 to write a diagnosis of the problems of the NHS. What he decided the NHS really needed was more managerialism and internal markets (ask anybody that works in the NHS today what the biggest problem and waste of money is, and they'll all tell you, too many managers and markets), and this seemed to set him up as the best possible person to respond to the media crisis brewing around the terrible quality of institutional care in the UK.
Griffiths produced his report, Community Care: Agenda for Action, in 1988. It was a call to complete deinstitutionalisation, and as with the Browne Report last year, the Conservative government loved it, and implemented its recommendations as fast as they could. But Griffiths didn't just advocate deinstitutionalisation alone, because providing care in homes would cost even more than institutional care. Instead, he wrote that the state needed to move away from being a 'provider' of care, to being instead merely an 'enabler' of care. This move is crucial and in it lies the evil. For the state to deinstitutionalise its patients would surely have meant that institutional staff would become health visitors, but that's not what Griffiths wanted. What Griffiths argued for -and what was adopted in the 1989 White Paper Caring for People - was the abolition of health services for patients, and the managing of the resultant situation with social work. And when the White Paper became the Community Care Act 1990, so 'Care in the Community' was born.
You might be thinking that this sounds a lot like the Government refusing to care for people with mental health difficulties, and that’s because that’s exactly what it is. You may be wondering, what of the patients with complex and specific needs who need round-the-clock care? Well, the Big Society would take care of it. Charities like Mind, who do 'befriending' services, and the weekly chats with social workers were supposed to take care of it, and when they weren't there, well, the Community would step up.
But ordinary people aren't trained to cope with and treat mental health problems. What's more, they have their own lives to lead, and can't deal with such an enormous and permanent responsibility as full-time care. Add to this the fact that people with mental health difficulties are assaulted and raped far more often than the average, and a very ugly picture begins to emerge.
It's OK, though, from the Government's point of view. The ugly realities of social work do occasionally make the headlines, in cases of systematic abuse, but in the other 90% of cases it is just not written about that people (and it is usually women) have to give up their jobs, their independence, their relationships, even their children or control over their own bodies, because nobody else will be the caregiver. The 1995 Carers Act went some way to relieving pressure (and enabling married women, for the first time, to receive an income for their work), but in many homes care was just impossible, and people were forced onto the streets*.
But there were even bigger problems than this: suicides, and assaults by people with mental health problems. Of course people with mental health difficulties are very rarely the attackers, far more commonly the victims, but when they are, it is the stuff of tabloid sensation. Suicide is far less glamorous, but if the Government's new deinstitutionalisation policies triggered a mass wave of suicides, it would nonetheless be distinctly embarrassing. So police were further trained on their sectioning powers, and they became the people you're put through to if you call the emergency services about a potential suicide.
There's other evidence of this suicide-containment strategy at the GP level. GPs are given extraordinarily little mental health training, not to mention limited surgery time, and so they really only have four possible strategies. Firstly, they make people fill in a self-assessment form, which we'll come back to later. Then, if the person really doesn't sound happy, they'll be prescribed SSRIs. Thirdly, if they embarrass themself by crying or some equally heinous act, they'll be given the phone numbers of Care in the Community services, which range from free online CBT courses or private group therapies to social workers and befriending services. Fourthly, if they're really weird, or the doctor is feeling particularly phobic that day, they can have you referred to a therapy course, which almost invariably is CBT. My descriptions are offensive, but I chose them because this is how people are made to feel in surgeries.
Now I could of course write about how calculatedly ignorant this provision is and how obviously deliberate it is - after all, if we want people out of institutions, we should empower them to be flourishing there - or I could write about how CBT is not therapy, but instead a way of forcing economic outcomes from people - but I'd rather focus on that self-assessment form. You can see a version of it here.
The purpose of this form is to return a simple numerical value to guide the GP's actions. Of course a single number cannot say anything at all about somebody's mental health, but that isn't the point of the form at all. If it is too high, and the person admits to considering suicide - and GPs are required to ask if they are - the GP is supposed to call the police, but if the patient is lucky and they have half a heart, social services instead. Obviously the poor patient, confronted by their social worker, let alone a couple of ignorant, bullying cops, immediately withdraws into themself and denies any such thoughts.
The patient is desperately seeking help, human warmth and reasons to live, and what they have been confronted with is in the best case someone with the power to take away their children, and in the worst case a group of loudmouthed, laddish bullies who will talk about them in the third person as 'this nutter', with the power to intern them against their will, potentially indefinitely. With the only concern an avoidance of suicide, it could not have been less caring.
Lots of GPs, of course, are wonderful people who do their level best to learn about mental health, and subvert the system in all sorts of ways, just as lots of nurses and doctors in those old institutions did their best, too. Certainly most social workers do everything they can with the impossibly limited resources they have. But as I hope I have shown, it is not because of unpleasant individuals that mental health care in the UK has become an evil thing. It is the way the system has been designed.
*One of the things that can give people the designation of ‘intentionally homeless’ is the accusation that their behaviour is ‘antisocial’. Crisis estimate that those on the streets are 50-100 times more likely to suffer from a psychotic disorder than the average.
Labels: capitalism, health care, mental health, neoliberalism, privatisation, thatcherism
11:35:00 am |
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The privatization of the NHS posted by Richard Seymour
My latest for ABC Australia:The rich want healthcare. Believe them about this. They want hospitals, doctor's practices, insurance, patient care, pharmaceutical provision, all of it.Last year, four out of the 10 most profitable industries in the US were healthcare-related. This was due to the fact that these industries were providing services rather than more tangible products, thus keeping overheads low, and the fact that the services were, in the sickly phrase of Forbes magazine, "need-to-have". That is, compulsory. Need to have, or you'll die.This is why healthcare is such a prized asset for businesses, and why they are desperate to crack open health sectors globally. And it is one reason why the British coalition government is undertaking the most fundamental demolition job on the National Health Service since its foundation in 1948.
Labels: capitalism, health care, neoliberalism, new labour, NHS, privatisation, tories
8:55:00 am |
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Thursday, March 29, 2012
A short history of privatization in the UK posted by Richard Seymour
My latest in The Guardian explains the course of privatization over the last thirty years or so:Royal Mail is being auctioned, and not necessarily to the highest bidder (and stamp prices are going up). The London fire brigade is outsourcing 999 calls to a firm called Capita, at the behest of the oleaginous chair of the capital's fire authority, Brian Coleman. Multinationals are circling hungrily around NHS hospitals. Schools are already beginning to turn a profit. In the technocratic nomenclature of the IMF, this would be called a "structural adjustment programme", but that doesn't really capture the sweeping scale of the transformation. We can see this through a potted history of privatisation in the UK...
Labels: accumulation-by-dispossession, austerity, capitalism, education, fire brigade, neoliberalism, new labour, NHS, privatisation, public services, royal mail, tories
11:23:00 am |
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European meltdown posted by Richard Seymour
My article for Overland on the Eurozone meltdown is now available online:Like ‘sex’ and ‘violence’, the words ‘Europe’ and ‘crisis’ seem to have a near permanent affinity these days. This constant conjunction tells us that the nature of the crisis is no transient thing. It is what Gramsci would have called an ‘organic crisis’, one that condenses multiple chronic problems at various levels of the system in a single, epochal spasm. Growth rates across the Eurozone are close to zero, unemployment is over 10 per cent on average – a figure masking extremes of joblessness in Greece and Spain. But it is not just an economic crisis. The Eurozone is a political creation, and it is at the level of politics that the strains are manifested at their highest level. Repeated sovereign debt crises threaten debt default, the withdrawal of economies from the euro currency and the ultimate collapse of that currency. The material basis for the European Union (EU) to continue to exist in its present form is endangered, and the solutions only seem to exacerbate the problem.
Labels: austerity, capitalism, europe, european union, eurozone, gramsci, neoliberalism, organic crisis, recession, ruling class
8:39:00 am |
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