Angela Davis at Occupy Philly posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: anti-capitalism, capitalism, class struggle, left, occupation, occupy oakland, occupy philly, occupy wall street, protest, socialism, strikes

OWS vs. the Octopus: On Making a Demand posted by Richard Seymour

Guest post by Ruth Jennison and Jordana Rosenberg

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Labels: anticapitalism, antiwar movement, civil rights, class struggle, democracy, left, occupation, occupy wall street, socialism, us politics, working class

Police terror in Oakland posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: capitalist state, class struggle, democratic party, occupation, occupy oakland, occupy wall street, police, police brutality, ruling class, us politics

On Utoya posted by Richard Seymour

I've written a contribution to a new ebook, 'On Utoya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism & Europe', which is now available for purchase:

‘The teenagers who gathered at Utøya that day could not imagine that they would be enrolled in the ranks of those murdered by the Right’

In a challenging new book, a collection of Australian and British writers respond to the terrorist attack by Anders Breivik, and attempts by the Right to depoliticise it.

On July 22, 2011, Anders Breivik, a right-wing writer and activist, killed more than sixty young members of the Norwegian Labour Party on Utøya island. Captured alive, Breivik was more than willing to explain his actions as a ‘necessary atrocity’ designed to ‘wake up’ Europe to its betrayal by the left, and its impending destruction through immigration.
Breivik’s beliefs – expressed at length in a manifesto, ‘2083’ – were part of a huge volume of right-wing alarmism and xenophobia that had arisen in the last decade. Yet Breivik, we were told by the Right, was simply a madman – so mad, in fact, that he had actually believed what the Right said: that Europe was in imminent danger of destruction, and extreme action was required.
On Utøya: Anders Breivik, right terror, racism and Europe is a response to this attempt to deny responsibility, and any connection of Breivik’s act to a rising cult of violence, racism, and apocalyptic language. The editors and authors shine a light on Breivik’s actions, and argue that they cannot be understood abstracted from the far Right racist and Islamophobic social and political conditions in which it emerged.
Organised, written and produced within three months of the killings, On Utøya is a challenge to anyone who would seek to portray this event as anything other than it is – a violent mass assassination, directed against the left, to terrorise people into silence and submission to a far-right agenda. It concludes with an examination of the manufacture of hate and fear in Australia, and considers what is needed in a Left strategy to deal with the growing threat of far Right organising.
Edited by Elizabeth Humphrys, Guy Rundle and Tad Tietze, with essays by Anindya Bhattacharyya, Antony Loewenstein, Lizzie O'Shea, Richard Seymour, Jeff Sparrow and the editors.

You can read editor Tad Tietze's article on right-wing attempts to depoliticise Utoya here.

Labels: breivik, edl, europe, fascism, islamophobia, norway, racism, utoya

On demands posted by Richard Seymour

Our own bat020 on this presently fraught subject six years ago:

...if we admit the possibility of a non-hysterical demand by the popular masses – a slogan, let us say – what would it look like? Here I'd suggest that the answer lies in the direct converse to the famous (and eminently hysterical) situationist graffito "Be realistic, demand the impossible!". Rather than formulate realistic but impossible demands, our "demands" must be unrealistic but nevertheless possible. And moreover they should be addressed diagonally, ie to both the ruling elite and the popular movement simultaneously, or more precisely, they should formally pose a demand addressed to the elite, but actually raise a slogan that engages and resonates with the movement – mobilising it and thereby subjectivating it from within.

A neat example of this was provided by an Independent front page last week. It was dominated by a table whose columns listed four "options" for the future of British troops in Iraq: what the option was, its pros and cons, who was calling for it and what its likelihood was. The leftmost column was "troops out now", called for by the Stop the War Coalition – and likelihood of this happening was, in the Independent's eyes – nil.

But while calling for troops out now is certainly "unrealistic" within the framework of bourgeois politics, it is nevertheless clearly possible – nothing in principle prevents it from happening. And it is the very raising of this demand from the radical left that has exacerbated divisions in the elite about what to do re Iraq. The demand forces its own possibility and reconfigures the frame of what is considered "realistic". One only need recall that prior to Stop the War demanding troops out now, the question of withdrawal from Iraq was never openly discussed in the bourgeois media – why, to even entertain the possibility would be Giving In To Terrorism... now we are treated to the bizarre spectacle of Simon Jenkins calling for rapid withdrawal, with a string of MI6 "experts" in tow!

But more important than this slogan's effects on the ruling elite, its exacerbation of a "crack in the big Other", is the mass political subjectivity that emerges through this crack. "Troops out now!" acts as a rallying point for anyone repulsed by the lies and prevarication that have characterised Blair's imperialist theatrics. But it simultaneously consolidates the anti-war movement, forcing all those involved to discern where our power lies, what our strengths are, and how we can rely on those strengths and powers instead of those of any putative Master figure.

One final example, this one taken from Bolshevik lore. It was June 1917 and Kerensky had formed a provisional government that included the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries – but also representatives of the capitalist parties such as the Cadets. The Bolsheviks refused to join such a government. But what was their demand/slogan to be? Their choice was "Down with the ten capitalist ministers!" – and Trotsky later explained the rationale behind this choice:

The enormous role of the Bolshevik slogan "Down with the ten capitalist ministers!" is well known, in 1917, at the time of the coalition between the conciliators and the bourgeois liberals. The masses still trusted the socialist conciliators but the most trustful masses always have an instinctive distrust for the bourgeoisie, for the exploiters and for the capitalists. On this was built the Bolshevik tactic during that specific period. We didn't say "Down with the socialist ministers!", we didn't even advance the slogan "Down with the provisional government!" as a fighting slogan of the moment, but instead we hammered on one and the same point: "Down with the ten capitalist ministers!" This slogan played an enormous role, because it gave the masses the opportunity to learn from their own experience that the capitalist ministers were closer and dearer to the conciliators than the working masses.

The precision of this slogan is astonishing. It cuts like a chisel at a fracture that only an understanding of class struggle allows one to discern. It acts simultaneously as a populist demand and a mobilising slogan. It separates those who are willing to fight from those who are not, to use one of Trotsky's characterisations of the united front. And it is a model for what our response should be to the obscure face-off between popular movements and liberal political elites that increasingly characterises this conjuncture.

Labels: demands, ideology, movements, populism, protest, slogans, socialism, socialist strategy

On consensus posted by Richard Seymour

How, then, would society make dynamic collective decisions about public affairs, aside from mere individual contracts? The only collective alternative to majority voting as a means of decision-making that is commonly presented is the practice of consensus. Indeed, consensus has even been mystified by avowed "anarcho-primitivists," who consider Ice Age and contemporary "primitive" or "primal" peoples to constitute the apogee of human social and psychic attainment. I do not deny that consensus may be an appropriate form of decision-making in small groups of people who are thoroughly familiar with one another. But to examine consensus in practical terms, my own experience has shown me that when larger groups try to make decisions by consensus, it usually obliges them to arrive at the lowest common intellectual denominator in their decision-making: the least controversial or even the most mediocre decision that a sizable assembly of people can attain is adopted -- precisely because everyone must agree with it or else withdraw from voting on that issue. More disturbingly, I have found that it permits an insidious authoritarianism and gross manipulations -- even when used in the name of autonomy or freedom.

To take a very striking case in point: the largest consensus-based movement (involving thousands of participants) in recent memory in the United States was the Clamshell Alliance, which was formed to oppose the Seabrook nuclear reactor in the mid-1970s in New Hampshire. In her recent study of the movement, Barbara Epstein has called the Clamshell the "first effort in American history to base a mass movement on nonviolent direct action" other than the 1960s civil rights movement. As a result of its apparent organizational success, many other regional alliances against nuclear reactors were formed throughout the United States.

I can personally attest to the fact that within the Clamshell Alliance, consensus was fostered by often cynical Quakers and by members of a dubiously "anarchic" commune that was located in Montague, Massachusetts. This small, tightly knit faction, unified by its own hidden agendas, was able to manipulate many Clamshell members into subordinating their goodwill and idealistic commitments to those opportunistic agendas. The de facto leaders of the Clamshell overrode the rights and ideals of the innumerable individuals who entered it and undermined their morale and will.

In order for that clique to create full consensus on a decision, minority dissenters were often subtly urged or psychologically coerced to decline to vote on a troubling issue, inasmuch as their dissent would essentially amount to a one-person veto. This practice, called "standing aside" in American consensus processes, all too often involved intimidation of the dissenters, to the point that they completely withdrew from the decision-making process, rather than make an honorable and continuing expression of their dissent by voting, even as a minority, in accordance with their views. Having withdrawn, they ceased to be political beings -- so that a "decision" could be made. More than one "decision" in the Clamshell Alliance was made by pressuring dissenters into silence and, through a chain of such intimidations, "consensus" was ultimately achieved only after dissenting members nullified themselves as participants in the process.

On a more theoretical level, consensus silenced that most vital aspect of all dialogue, dissensus. The ongoing dissent, the passionate dialogue that still persists even after a minority accedes temporarily to a majority decision, was replaced in the Clamshell by dull monologues -- and the uncontroverted and deadening tone of consensus. In majority decision-making, the defeated minority can resolve to overturn a decision on which they have been defeated -- they are free to openly and persistently articulate reasoned and potentially persuasive disagreements. Consensus, for its part, honors no minorities, but mutes them in favor of the metaphysical "one" of the "consensus" group.

The creative role of dissent, valuable as an ongoing democratic phenomenon, tends to fade away in the gray uniformity required by consensus. Any libertarian body of ideas that seeks to dissolve hierarchy, classes, domination and exploitation by allowing even Marshall's "minority of one" to block decision-making by the majority of a community, indeed, of regional and nationwide confederations, would essentially mutate into a Rousseauean "general will" with a nightmare world of intellectual and psychic conformity. In more gripping times, it could easily "force people to be free," as Rousseau put it -- and as the Jacobins practiced it in 1793-94.

The de facto leaders of the Clamshell were able to get away with their behavior precisely because the Clamshell was not sufficiently organized and democratically structured, such that it could countervail the manipulation of a well-organized few. The de facto leaders were subject to few structures of accountability for their actions. The ease with which they cannily used consensus decision-making for their own ends has been only partly told,6 but consensus practices finally shipwrecked this large and exciting organization with its Rousseauean "republic of virtue." It was also ruined, I may add, by an organizational laxity that permitted mere passersby to participate in decision-making, thereby destructuring the organization to the point of invertebracy. - Murray Bookchin, 'What is Communalism?: The Democratic Dimension of Anarchism'.

Labels: anticapitalism, autonomism, autonomy, consensus, democracy, dissensus, dissent, individualism, socialism

Discovering the capitalist network posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: capitalism, capitalist crisis, class struggle, finance capital, imperialism, neoliberalism, ruling class

Revolutionary crisis posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: capitalist crisis, class struggle, media, recession, revolution

Greece on the brink posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: austerity, capitalism, class struggle, eu, europe, european left, eurozone, exploitation, greece, neoliberalism, working class

Occupy Wall Street and the US working class posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: capitalism, class struggle, democrats, occupy wall street, us politics, us working class, wall street

Visiting Occupy London posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: anti-capitalism, austerity, capitalism, militancy, occupation, occupy london, occupy wall street, protest, socialism

Strategies for the anticapitalist transition posted by Richard Seymour

#Occupy is an interesting combination of a kind of protest, a direct action and an organizing forum from which further actions can be planned and launched.  The biggest of the 950 protests and occupations today has been in Puerta del Sol (which is absolutely packed), where one of the first such occupations was launched, explicitly taking inspiration from Tahrir Square.  Reports from many of these dozens and dozens of occupation sites today suggest that there are detailed tactical discussions going on, organised along painstakingly consensual lines.  (Dan Hind has written an elegant introduction to the model of the People's Assembly being deployed here.)  But just as consensus is about procedure not goal, so #occupy is a tactic, and not a strategy.  And the meaning of a tactic varies drastically depending on the strategy into which it's integrated.  The return of, if not an actual socialist offensive, mass antisystemic movements means that strategy is back on the agenda.  At the same time, the pursuit of more immediate agendas has allowed a modus vivendi to emerge among potentially competitive groups, but it has also meant that the strategic question tends to be suspended in practice.  So, before moving on to the rest of the Poulantzas stuff, I just wanted to sketch out a few observations on the relevance of strategic thought to this movement. 

For the sake of argument, I'll assume that this movement is basically aimed at transcending capitalism somehow.  I'm aware that this is not a realistic assumption. The immediate demands of the movement have been for plausible reforms, while the long-term goals of the occupations have yet to be resolved.  It's too early for that to have happened.  But it's not possible to speak of strategy without assuming shared goals, so I'm assuming a shared commitment to some form of anticapitalist transition.  Computing the possible scenarios for such a transition is not utopian thought, in the negative sense, but the most hard-headed labour of conceptualisation.   It involves descending carefully from the most abstract hypotheses, through a series of mediations, to the most concrete determinations.   At the most abstract level, this can include rigorous conceptual work on something as apparently esoteric as value theory.  We saw with the (sometimes heated) discussion of Poulantzas that defining 'non-productive' labour with reference to the extraction of surplus value, and then deciding whether it belongs to the working class, has potentially profound political-strategic consequences.  Negri's account of value and the concept of 'immeasurability' has a similar role in co-determining certain of his strategic orientations.

I say strategic thought is not utopian 'in the negative sense', because one of the authors best known for utopian thinking, William Morris, also put the same impulse to work in elaborating strategies for the transition to socialism.  (Here I'm cribbing the discussion from Perry Anderson's Arguments Within English Marxism).  Morris' work preceded the long strategic divide between revolutionaries and reformists, but the problems he addressed himself to were exactly those that would cause the divide, and he had sufficient foresight to see it coming.  For the sake of brevity, I'll say that he generally (not without complexity) took the side of revolution in this debate.  He argued that the structural unity of the capitalist order was such that it could not be gradually reformed out of existence.  The parliamentary system, he suggested, could potentially be used by revolutionaries but would usually be of greater use in sustaining the 'fraud' of the rulers and securing the acquiescence of the ruled.  And he argued that the capitalist state would have to be opposed by a counter-power, a commune, a Committee of Public Safety representing the combined power of the working class, forming a rising new pole of legitimate authority that can "be sure that its decrees will be obeyed" rather than those of Westminster.  He thought it would be a violent process, largely because of the insurmountable opposition of the capitalist state.   And he foresaw one of the most important conditions for revolution: the decomposition of the state in a situation of dual power, as sections of the army break away and support the revolutionary government.

I'll leave the thumbnail sketch of his views there, and just draw your attention to what I think anyone could learn from this.  For what is at stake in Morris' exposition is a detailed, insightful analysis of the nature of the problem - class society, the capitalist mode of production, capitalist class power, state power, ideology, and their intersection - as well as of the possible agents of opposition (the working class and its allies), the potential forms of power that they might have (the commune, the Labour Combination, the Committee of Public Safety) and the difficulties they could face (ideological illusions, poor leadership, a greatly superior opponent, etc).  And while Morris doesn't himself subject each plank of his thinking to exacting critical enquiry, nor press his analyses to the most abstract points - it's a piece of futurology, not sociology - those organising for the anticapitalist transition would necessarily have to develop a rigorous body of analysis along those lines.  That's what the project of historical materialism, and the profusion of strategic concepts such as 'hegemony', the 'united front', and so on, is essentially about.

So, we have a movement that is undertaking a great challenge, that of creating a viable movement to create a viable, systemic alternative to capitalism.  It is not committed to a single route to that end.  This is no disadvantage in itself for the time being - it is only disadvantageous if the question of strategy is neglected when it needs to be debated.  But the methods of organising being settled on, the assemblages of agents organised around them, and the manner of their inclusion, do bear a strategic freight.  Implicitly, for example, the decision to occupy a public space and 'reclaim' it is an attempt to create a form of direct democracy that recognises the undemocratic nature of the capitalist state.  Or, again implicitly, the fact that these germinal communes are being created in squares and not in workplaces indicates that, whether or not class is recognised as a central antagonism behind this struggle, productive relations do not form a direct strategic locus for the organisers  There are a number of similarly implicit strategic arguments one could draw out from this movement and its tactics thus far.  But the point is that it remains implicit as yet.  The issues will become more explicit as the agenda of the movement advances, its problems become more complex, and the conditions of viable unity are more and more urgently on the agenda.

Labels: anticapitalism, capitalism, class, class struggle, socialist strategy, strategy

#Occupy posted by Richard Seymour

Follow events at #Occupylsx for London updates.

Labels: austerity, capitalism, cuts, finance capital, occupation, occupy wall street, socialism, tories

Poulantzas and socialist strategy - part I posted by Richard Seymour

Nicos Poulantzas' detailed and sometimes difficult writings on fascism, dictatorship, the state, capitalism and social classes, were all written with the goal of elaborating strategic concepts to assist the advance toward socialism.  This series of posts deals with some aspects of Poulantzas' thinking on political strategy (the whole corpus is obviously far too rich and varied for me to anatomise here), beginning with a look at his ideas on class and class alliances.  The idea is not simply to see what, if anything, we can find useful in his strategic conclusions today.  It isn't even to decide whether we should agree or disagree with his ideas (Poulantzas' relationship to Eurocommunism will come up consistently, particularly in the final post in this series).  It is mainly to look at the method, the steps involved in the development of his strategic concepts.  It is to see what complex strategic thinking looks like.  If nothing else, in a period when strategic thought on the Left is recovering from a long quietus (see the late Daniel Bensaid's wonderful essay here), the theoretical depth and novelty of Poulantzas' arguments would make him an important contributor to the emerging debates.

I should make it clear that Poulantzas' views evolved and altered in ways I can't properly summarise.  Suffice to say that there is an important shift between an early historicist phase, which I won't go into, a structuralist phase, evident in books such as Political Power and Social Classes and Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, and a later phase where he gradually abandoned some of his Althusserian commitments, which can  be seen in Fascism and Dictatorship and his final book, State, Power, Socialism.  (Althusser's maligned influence deserves some recuperation - fortunately, Gregory Elliot's superb revision of his legacy has been reprinted recently).  I should also say upfront that many of the criticisms that follow are 'immanent', taking Poulantzas' marxist framework for granted and faulting him for not following his precepts through to their logical conclusion.  This isn't to attack Poulantzas for departing from revealed wisdom in "some holy text" as he might have put it, but simply to judge his writing by standards he himself adopts.


Part I: Classes, the 'new petty bourgeoisie' and class alliances
According to Poulantzas, socialist strategy is weakened by a failure to properly grasp changes in the class structure of contemporary capitalism: "it was on this question, among others, that, as we now know, the socialist development in Chile came to grief."  The major development that warranted attention was the growth of "nonproductive wage-earners, i.e. groups such as commercial and bank employees, office and service workers, etc., in short all those who are commonly referred to as 'white-collar' or 'tertiary sector' workers".  (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, pp. 193)   There was a tendency at the time to assess this in terms of the 'embourgeoisement' of the working class and thus the dissolution of hard class boundaries.  Others, like the French Communist Party (PCF) to which Poulantzas adhered, theorised this group as an 'intermediate stratum' within a series of strata that exist independently of either the proletariat or the bourgeoisie.

Poulantzas holds that it isn't sufficient to describe this layer as a strata: the "class specificity" of this group had to be grasped.  It could not just be subsumed into the wider categories of bourgeois and proletarian either, because the effect of this was to dissolve both categories by compelling theorists to introduce new theoretical determinations that weakened their explanatory power.  Theorising them as simply part of the extant middle class tended toward the same conclusion, since such accounts regarded the middle class as a "stew in which classes are mixed together and their antagonisms dissolved, chiefly by forming a site for the circulation of individuals in a constant process of 'mobility' between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat."  The result was that classes simply ceased to exist as classes.  (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, pp. 194-9)


The starting point for his own analysis was the structuralist framework that he took over from Louis Althusser.  Thus, he explained that the concept of class refers to "the overall effects of the structure on the field of social relations and on the social division of labour".  (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, p. 199)  This structure comprises several distinct regions: "everything happens as if social classes were the result of an ensemble of structures and of their relations, firstly at the economic level, secondly at the political level, and thirdly at the ideological level".  (Political Power and Social Classes, NLB, 1975, p. 63)  This draws from Althusser, who holds that the capitalist mode of production comprises an articulation of distinct economic, political and ideological levels.  Classes must be determined by all three levels - at least, so the early Poulantzas claims.  Importantly, however, the economic level bears the strongest freight of determination here.  It is in the structures of 'economic exploitation' (the appropriation of surplus value by the bourgeoisie), 'economic ownership' (the power of the bourgeoisie to dispose of economic resources for various uses), and 'economic possession' (the power of the bourgeoisie to organise and determine labour processes), that class is determined first and foremost.

Poulantzas draws an important distinction between class determination and class position.  The former is an objective determination: the working class is such due to its situation within the matrix of the capitalist mode of production.  The latter is relational and partly subjective.  A class can adopt a position that converges with that of another class, without altering its objective class determination.  For example, a section of the working class (Poulantzas cites the fabled 'labour aristocracy') may take a position identifying with the bourgeoisie, but "the adoption of bourgeois class positions by a certain stratum of the working class" would not "eliminates its class determination".  Class position has some bearing on class determination, however.  Classes are "reproduced according to the reproduction of the places of social classes in the class struggle".  This, of course, leaves open the possibility that the class struggle will fail to reproduce the places of social classes, or will radically disrupt their efficient reproduction.  (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, pp. 201-3)


Poulantzas chooses to define non-productive wage earners as the "new petty bourgeoisie", asserting that "they belong together with the traditional petty bourgeoisie".  (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, p. 204)  Defining the petty bourgeoisie correctly, he argues, is "the focal point of the Marxist theory of social classes" because it shows that "relations of production alone are not sufficient, in Marxist theory, to determine the place a social class occupies in a mode of production ... It is absolutely indispensable to refer to ideological and political relations".  (Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of Fascism, NLB, 1974, p. 237) So, it's clear that in identifying a "new petty bourgeoisie", he is making both a strategic political intervention which will have profound consequences for the elaboration of class alliances and hegemonic manouevering, and a theoretical intervention in the sociology of classes.

But on what basis does he identify this "new petty bourgeoisie" as a class apart from the working class and akin to the "traditional petty bourgeoisie"?  Poulantzas asserts that the layers that Marxists have traditionally identified as petty bourgeois - small property owners who do not exploit wage labour, or only very occasionally - are actually transitional elements proper to pre-capitalist modes of production: this is why Marx expected them to be subsumed over the long-term into the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.  (This has in fact been an observable trend.)  Yet, the "new petty bourgeoisie" identified by Poulantzas seems to be very different - it is not a mass of small producers, but wage earners who do white collar work, mental labour, but do not contribute directly to the production of surplus value. Despite the fact that they are waged, Poulantzas says that their non-productive status excludes them from the working class.  To explain this position, he cites Marx to the effect that the distinction between productive and unproductive labour is "not derived from the material characteristics of labour ... but from the definite social form, the social relations of production, within which the labour is realised."  Thus, "productive labour in a given mode of production is labour that gives rise to the dominant relation of exploitation of this mode ... productive labour is that which directly produces surplus-value, which valorizes capital and is exchanged against capital"  (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, p. 211)  Thus, those who perform non-productive labour do not produce surplus value and are thus not central to the reproduction of the dominant relation of exploitation under capitalism.  This, for Poulantzas, excludes them from the working class.


Having said all this, their exclusion from the working class (and from the bourgeoisie) leaves them in a middling position.  It doesn't automatically mean they are part of the petty bougeoisie and, as noted, they are very different from traditional petty bourgeois in terms of productive relations. The unity of traditional and new petty bourgeois layers is secured, Poulantzas argues, within the political and ideological regions where they have similar effects.  That is to say, in the polarised situation created by the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, they occupy an intermediate position.  Their 'negative' definition, arising from their exclusion from the two' fundamental' classes, means that they are not a 'fundamental' class, have no long-term interests in this struggle, and will tend to vacillate as a consequence.  They will also converge on certain basic ideological positions: their hatred of the rich combined with fear of proletarianisation will tend to lead them to "status quo anticapitalism" where they embrace property but oppose monopolies in favour of more opportunity and competition; this segues into the second position which is an aspirational faith in "the myth of the 'ladder'" of opportunity; the third is an unwavering belief in the class-neutral position of the state, "statolatry".  Because of their shared political and ideological positions, then, they comprise a single class.   (Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of Fascism, NLB, 1974, pp. 237-44; Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, pp. 206-12; Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Analaysis, Macmillan, 1985, pp. 169-70)

Critics of Poulantzas' class analysis point out that it involves a break with Marx's own method.  The whole conception is built on what appears to be a non-sequitur: that is, an illegitimate extrapolation from certain arguments in Marx.  It is not clear, even from Poulantzas' selected quotes, that Marx excluded 'non-productive' labour from the working class.  Indeed, there are several passages that suggest that the division between mental and manual labour that Poulantzas focuses on is not central to Marx's definition of class.   Poulantzas' analysis of the new petty bourgeoisie attributes to politics and ideology, more than one's objective situation within the productive matrix, a determining role in one's class position.  Not only is this incompatible with Marx, it also contradicts Poulantzas' own statements to the effect that there is an objective class situation that is more important in defining classes than their orientation in any "concrete conjuncture of struggle".  (Quoted, Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Analaysis, Macmillan, 1985, p. 164).  Even within a recidivist structuralism, Poulantzas' argument seems odd.  Recall that in his early work he did insist on the idea that class should be determined at all three levels of the mode of production, but insisted that the economic level had the primary determining role; here, he not only puts the primary determining role at the level of ideology, but he denies any but an indirect economic input.

Lastly, some absurd conclusions appear to follow from Poulantzas' narrow definition of the working class: for example, assuming that the working class only includes those engaged in direct productive or extractive industries, some 70% of the US workforce would be petty bourgeois, and only 20% working class.  (see Alex Callinicos, 'The "New Middle Class" and socialist politics', in Chris Harman and Alex Callinicos, The Changing Working Class: Essays on class structure today, Bookmarks, 1987, p. 19)  Nonetheless, the strategic conclusions that follow from Poulantzas' class analyses are clear.  Poulantzas took from Gramsci the idea that hegemonic struggle was the normal form of political class struggle in a capitalist society.  He argued that the working class needed to build hegemonic alliances similar to those built by the bourgeoisie.  But if the working class does not form a clear majority, then it is arguably in need of a particular kind of hegemonic cross-class alliance: the Popular Front. Thus, for Poulantzas, the need to win over the petty bourgeoisie was central to the anti-monopoly, anti-imperialist alliances behind Union de la Gauche in France, as well as the possibility of the anti-dictatorship alliance in Greece turning into an anti-imperialist and anti-monopoly alliance.  (Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Analaysis, Macmillan, 1985, p. 149)  Given the outline of the petty bourgeoisie's political and ideological dispositions that he has given, this will tend to require the dilution of any agenda for socialist transformation.  Poulantzas was operating on the left-most end of Eurocommunism, and did not go as far down the road of eschewing class politics and anti-imperialism as some did.  Yet, concessions to the economic policies and political tactics of fractions of the bourgeoisie (the 'interior' or 'domestic' bourgeoisie, which may or may not exist), as well as to the purviews of the petty bourgeoisie, were essential to his strategic perspective.


Before leaving the subject of class, it's worth stating that one of Poulantzas' most telling insights concerns the way in which 'class interests' should be understood.  Here, he rejects the idea the idea that such interests can be determined from the relations of production themselves.  The historicist (Hegelian) problematic sees class as a subject of history, with interests that can be inferred from its role as a factor in historical transformation.  This raises the problem of how a class becomes aware of those interests and moves from being a class-in-itself to a class-for-itself.  It also raises the deeply problematic notion of "false consciousness", to explain how a class fails to grasp its own interests.  Instead, Poulantzas argues that 'class interests' are not computable outside the field of 'class practises' in a given conjuncture.  That is to say, at any moment in the development of the class struggle there will be a series of 'objective' and 'subjective' factors which limit the working class's possible range of actions.  These form a 'horizon of action', defining the maximum possible advances against opposing classes at any given moment.  One of the determinants of this horizon is the form of political representation that the class has, which means that the 'interests' of a class in a given moment are susceptible to modification by political intervention, even if the objective circumstances have not changed.  (Political Power and Social Classes, NLB, 1975, pp. ; Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Analaysis, Macmillan, 1985, pp. 153-4)  As Jessop points out, this puts the emphasis on "strategic calculation" rather than objective, given facts.  It also has certain political consequences, inasmuch as it avoids the potential elitism of parties or their intellectual cadres presuming to be the bearers of an objective, historically given truth. 

The ensuing posts deal with Poulantzas' ground-breaking work on the state, his arguments on the power bloc, and finally his orientation toward Eurocommunism.

Labels: class, eurocommunists, middle class, poulantzas, ruling class, socialism, socialist strategy, working class

Cameron's immigration spiel posted by Richard Seymour

Me in The Guardian on Cameron's latest immigration spiel:

The increasing frequency with which Cameron is turning to immigration as a rallying theme is arresting. He needs it to inject excitement into a dysphoric party faithful and revive the flagging ideological props of the administration. He sidelined the anti-immigrant xenophobes before 2009. Now his speeches are increasingly littered with demagoguery – anecdotes about forced marriage being used to evade immigration controls being an example of note-perfect Powellism – and pander to the chauvinist sentiment once characterised by Christopher Hitchens as "John Bullshit".

Cameron may grow more attached to such rhetoric as the ideological self-confidence of the government evaporates, and as it becomes more embattled by adverse economic and political conditions. But the danger for him in doing so is that he isn't very good at it. His "toughness" looks ersatz because it is; his promises seem phoney because they are; he is unconvincing because he is unconvinced by his own rhetoric. There are others on the right who know better how to play with this fire, and Cameron is arguably giving them the ammunition with which to depose him when the time comes.

Labels: 'integration', chauvinism, class, immigration, john bullshit, racism, the meaning of david cameron, tories

The Class Struggle in Greece posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: austerity, capitalism, capitalist crisis, class struggle, eu, greece, left, militancy, ruling class, socialism, strikes

Orwell on the liberal defence of murder posted by Richard Seymour

I skimmed through Homage to Catalonia while reading up for The Liberal Defence of Murder, but missed his pointed insights on the "best strategic opportunity" of the Spanish Civil War.  I cited the French government's refusal to free Abd-el Krim, and the Spanish Republic's unwillingness to support Moroccan independence, as a tragic example of self-defeating pro-imperialist politics on the Left helping the fascists to succeed.  This is Orwell:

Labels: fascism, general franco, george orwell, liberal imperialism, morocco, spain