A Short Note on Rancière and Class

I've argued previously that class is an important category in the work of Jacques Rancière. Rarely, however, do we find such a direct reference to class as in this short piece in the Guardian, discussing the revival of Marxism:

[The author is talking about class with Owen Jones, author of Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class...] "If I had written it four years earlier it would have been dismissed as a 1960s concept of class," says Jones. "But class is back in our reality because the economic crisis affects people in different ways and because the Coalition mantra that 'We're all in this together' is offensive and ludicrous." [...]

This chimes with something Rancière told me. The professor argued that "one thing about Marxist thought that remains solid is class struggle. The disappearance of our factories, that's to say de-industrialisation of our countries and the outsourcing of industrial work to the countries where labour is less expensive and more docile, what else is this other than an act in the class struggle by the ruling bourgeoisie?"

Things even get a bit stranger when he discusses the "gravediggers" of capitalism, a figure that Rancière often criticizes (he treats it as a synecdoche for "historical necessity," which he dismisses below):

After all, I suggest to Rancière, the bourgeoisie has failed to produce its own gravediggers. Rancière refuses to be downbeat: "The bourgeoisie has learned to make the exploited pay for its crisis and to use them to disarm its adversaries. But we must not reverse the idea of historical necessity and conclude that the current situation is eternal. The gravediggers are still here, in the form of workers in precarious conditions like the over-exploited workers of factories in the far east. And today's popular movements – Greece or elsewhere – also indicate that there's a new will not to let our governments and our bankers inflict their crisis on the people."

Roundtable Roundup

I'm back from the Society for Social and Political Philosophy's roundtable on Marx's Capital, Volume 1 (here), down in College Station, Texas. There were lots of great presentations (and people), and I found the roundtable format congenial, since we were all, in the general sense, developing our work from the same starting point. In that regard, I also learned quite a bit. The only downside is that the keynote speaker, Harry Cleaver, canceled due to illness.

I also learned, thanks to the local participant Cody Moore, the local game for dominoes, called 42.

As might be expected, new friends mean links to new blogs: I suggest the SSPP's, Nicole Pepperell's Rough Theory, Jason Read's Unemployed Negativity, and Will Roberts' Accelerate the Contradictions. If I missed anybody, let me know.

Spanish Anarchism and the Post-Soviet Malaise

The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (1917-1920) and the initial success of the Spanish anarchists in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) are often fetishized by Leftists. At anti-war demonstrations one can see anarchists and Marxists chanting old slogans, pining about the good ol' days and revolutionary missed opportunities. The ambiance is that of a Renaissance Fair for the Cold War era. What the Bolshevik Revolution and Spanish anarchists did was demonstrate that society can be structured in various ways. Capitalism and liberal democracy are not sent as a cure-all from a Judeo-Christian God. They are also not a "natural" outgrowth of progressive evolution initiated by the human species. Slavoj Zizek summed it up best when he noted that twenty-first century thinkers can conceive of a massive environmental catastrophe before they can think outside the notion of capitalist democracy.

In this youtube is a clip from a documentary on Spanish Anarchism. It makes clear that there is a world of possibles. Instead of trying to relive the past, this history should motivate a confidence in the future. Each time and place has its own unique set of circumstances. In Zizek's 2002 Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin From 1917 he states:

The return to Lenin aims...[not] at nostalgically re-enacting the "good old revolutionary times"..."Lenin" stands for the compelling freedom to suspend the stale existing (post-)ideological co-ordinates, the debilitating Denkverbot (prohibition on thinking) in which we live--it simply means that we are allowed to think again (11).

I will add, the Spanish Anarchists of 1936 have some creative ideas in which to share.

Slavoj Zizek Interview

It is about time that the great cultural critic Slavoj Zizek make an analysis of his own rising popularity. It seems his role as a popular thinker even baffles establishment media. I am posting an interview of Zizek from the BBC arts program The Culture Show. The interviewer, Paul Mason, points out that Zizek is known to discuss Marxism while incorporating concepts from the Matrix film. He asks if Zizek's use of Marxism can only be tolerated in this manner. Then Mason asks if it could be the global financial crisis that makes Marxism once again palatable. This is the interesting duality of Zizek. Zizek is a "marketable" thinker because he is a showman and a spectacle. At the same time he breaks down the harsh realities of capitalism and modern society. He is like a humorous court jester that operates simultaneously as a prophet bearing bad news. Zizek preforms his jokes that tell of ominous tidings: Everyone laughs and then realizes how serious things really are.

David Harvey, "Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development"

(Verso, 2006)

David Harvey is one the premiere academic Marxists writing today. He's a geographer by training, but his analysis of post-Fordist capitalism and his materialist critique of cultural postmodernism have earned him a notable place in debates ranging across a number of other disciplines. Unfortunately for the Harvey neophyte, much of his work is packaged in daunting paving stone sized volumes. Spaces of Global Capitalism, clocking in at a mere 148 pages, comprises a lecture series given by Harvey in 2004. It makes for a concise introduction to Harvey and has the added benefit of drawing a neat, if somewhat artificial, division between three levels of ascending explanatory abstraction with which Harvey is concerned.

I should comment further on this last point. Much as Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit figures as the ladder to the greater Encyclopaedic system, but at the same time a concluding gloss on the very same, Harvey's Spaces of Global Capitalism is structured to reward repeated readings. The first lecture is the most easily digestable. Having made it to the end of the third lecture, however, one will have better grasped the theoretical abstractions Harvey employs and be in a better position to start again.

Lecture 1: "Neo-liberalism and the restoration of class power"

Lecture 1 is a concise restatement of the narrative contained in Harvey's essential A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, 2005). The global fortunes and local determinations of neo-liberalism are briefly recounted, with particular emphasis on its political causes and mechanisms. Harvey argues that the history of neo-liberalism shows it to be a failed and mystifying economic program masking a retrenchment of upper-class power. He explains with precision neo-liberalism's inherent contradictions and goes on to examine both the neo-conservative and progressive responses to these. Of particular interest to me was his critique of human rights discourses as engendered by and responding to neoliberalism. Harvey ends on a hopeful note.

Lecture 2: "Notes towards a theory of uneven geographical development"

Here Harvey takes a step back and sketches the components of a "'unified' field theory of uneven geographical development" ("unified" in scare-quotes because harvey seeks a dialectical rather than a reductionist or organicist theory). In brief, Harvey uses Marxist conceptual tools (updated and broadened in certain respects; for instance, his interpretation of "primitive accumulation" as "accumulation by dispossession") to make sense theoretically of the kinds of events tracked by the first lecture. The subsection "Capital accumulation in space and time" on pages 95-96 is as concise a statement as one can find of Harvey's general theory (though it should also be understood that for Harvey, theory is not a static but rather a dynamic discourse). One will find that Harvey is open to explanatory tools from a variety of traditions, but, given his penchant for dialectics, is sensitive to where these have potential to become sclerotic and obfuscating. This lecture could be titled: "Harvey's Marxism in Brief".

Lecture 3: "Space as a keyword" 

Harvey's main contribution to Marxism, following Lefebvre, is in pushing space to the forefront of Marxian analysis. More accurately, he has insisted on a variegated category of "space-time" in studying capital accumulation and, by extension, uneven geographical development. In this lecture he analyzes the notion of "space" and how it may be cashed out into three different conceptions (Cartesian/Newtonian "Absolute space", Einsteinean "Relative space(-time)", and Leibnizean "Relational space(-time)"). All of these stand in dialectical tension with each other and form a grid with "experienced", "concepualized" and "lived" variants. One must "roam the grid" to construct or reconstruct the role of space(-time) in a given materialist explanation. There's much fuel for philosophical reflection here, and ultimately one gets a sense of how even at a highly abstract level, Harvey's spatial/geographical thinking can be brought to bear on his history of neo-liberalism and his search for a "unified" theory of uneven geographical development. He signals that such a thinking is "rich in possibilities"; his history of neo-liberalism is a skeleton to be filled in by richer spatializations which must, however, keep in mind the dialectical unity of the spatial grid and not founder on specificities. For Harvey, there are real consequences to such an error: by focusing on place, rather than space, one courts political irrelevance and defeat. Hence his call for an enriched Marxism beyond the impasse of culturalism/postmodernism.

A Short Critique of Benjamin's Fragment "Capitalism as Religion"

Walter Benjamin argues, in an early fragment entitled “Capitalism as Religion” (dated 1921), that capitalism serves a religious function insofar as it “allay[s] the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers.” This short critique will ask if Benjamin’s thesis is adequate to a critique of capitalism, a question that is pertinent insofar as much of contemporary ‘continental’ political philosophy is undergoing a ‘post-secular’ turn.

Benjamin identifies three features of the religious structure of capitalism:

1. Capitalism is purely cultic, it lacks a theology or specific dogmas. All things take on meaning in relation to this cult.
2. This cult is permanent; every day demands that one participate in it. As Benjamin states, there are no “weekdays.”
3. The cult of capitalism is a system of guilt (Schuld, also ‘debt’) and despair rather than atonement.

It is notable that each of these features is structured as an exception to the rule, that each could be read as ‘Capitalism is a religion, except that…’. Beyond the emphasis on paradox in these formulations, Benjamin’s central thesis seems structured to fail. So why insist that capitalism should be understood in relation to religious structures?

The ‘exceptional’ status of capitalism serves a dual purpose in this short fragment. First, it defines what is unprecedented in capitalism vis-à-vis other religious forms: capitalism is a permanent cult that “offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction” rather than its salvation. Despite these differences with other religious forms, Benjamin’s thesis also establishes a sense of continuity, specifically the possibility of atonement, or as he later calls it, redemption. As is well-known, redemption is central to Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” but in the two texts, the concept named by atonement or redemption possesses different features.

In “Capitalism as Religion,” atonement is thought as a threshold (note how this will direct us, elsewhere, to a critique of Giorgio Agamben). The concept of atonement cannot arise from the cult, religious reformation, or even renunciation, rather “the religious movement which is capitalism entails endurance right to the end…the point where the universe has been taken over by that despair which is actually its secret hope.” Only by completely following through with this movement, and traversing this threshold where the relations of capitalism become– as Marx would say– the fetters of the productive forms of society, is salvation possible.

In “On the Concept of History,” redemption is not thought as threshold; Benjamin now thinks it as intervention or event. Rather than pursue the destructive movement through which ‘all that is solid melts into air,’ the later Benjamin (in the “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’”) writes that “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train– namely, the human race– to activate the emergency break.” Or, as he also mentions, the task is to blast open the “continuum of history.” In both cases, redemption is not set off to the future as threshold; it is a subjective intervention in the present. Between the two texts, moreover, Benjamin relocates his analyses; no longer satisfied with a critique of sociological forms (note the references to Weber and Sorel in “Capitalism as Religion”), he now pursues an anti-Stalinist historical materialism (against, specifically, the idea that there are forces of objective necessity in history).

We will leave aside, for the time being, the question of whether the theory of intervention in Benjamin’s historical materialism ought to enlist “the services of theology.” For now, we will confine the critique to whether the thesis that “capitalism as religion” imparts any advantage to understanding either the ideology of, or the relations of production in, capitalism. I think it is self-evident that this kind of critique cannot advance an analysis of the productive forces of society as they are organized by society, so we are left with the question of ideology.

Hence the question: do any of the religious features of capitalism advance our critique? We will address them in the order that they are proposed by Benjamin.

1. Contrary to “Capitalism as Religion,” we know that capitalism possesses at least one dogma (although the religious metaphor does not advance our critique): the right of private property, i.e. the right of capital.
2. Here, Benjamin is right: one not need believe in capitalism to participate (even if by force). Because it is a system that structures social relationships, it has to be fought at the level of these same relationships. Thus:
3. Capitalism, at least in its contemporary form does not disseminate guilt. Instead, it is productive of desire, even to the degree that it can ‘accommodate’ many of the micro-resistances that so many critics of capitalism espouse. Hence the difficulty of struggle.

Finally, does capitalist ideology answer the same concerns that religion does? As Marx wrote, “Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering,” but the same– the simultaneous ‘expression of’ and ‘protest against’ real suffering– is not expected of capitalism, although religion and other ideological appartatuses do attempt to account for this suffering. Instead of proposing that capitalism should be understood as religion, we ought to separate the specific roles of, and contradictions between, various apparatuses.

In sum, the ‘capitalism as religion’ thesis cannot assist us in social struggle. Benjamin later recognizes that theology can be more pertinent to the oppressed than as a form of the critique of oppression. Nevertheless, we ought to be hesitant, today, with enlisting the services of theology. As Marx recognized, ideological struggles or contradictions are also lived as real struggles or contradictions. But when their concepts are no longer ‘descriptive’ or ‘instructive,’ they become impediments to social struggle. We will draw from “Capitalism as Religion” its implicit conclusion: capitalism is not like a religion; the critique of political economy requires altogether different concepts.

Back to Sartre's Futures

Unlike the other contributors to our series, The Futures of Sartre's Critique, I've only recently returned to his work. I had studied, in my very early twenties, parts of Being and Nothingness, paged through, with varying degrees of interest, the pieces collected in the anthology Essays in Existentialism, and maybe even looked over a few  post-68 interviews. I'd written a few papers on Sartre, but overall, I felt that his work was incomplete. Indeed, it should have felt that way; only the essays on art found in Essays in Existentialism were published after the 1940s. I read and wrote, but only tangentially with Sartre (there's a few more twists in this winding story, but I will leave them aside for the time being).

This changed in June 2007. I had read Sam Harris's The End of Faith, hoping to find an ethical atheist...but I found a moralizer. For somebody so concerned with what he now calls "well-being," Harris's book is overwrought with indignation and self-righteousness, not to mention lacking a sense of justice. Anything goes, including torture and benevolent dictatorship, for Harris, if it can 'save' us from the benighted hordes of the non-Western world. Of course, political interpretations of so-called religious fanaticism are excluded from his inquiry, in order to focus on the religious ideas themselves. That's nice, but it does not tell us why some concepts become prevalent at some points and not others, how these concepts come to represent not just religious but political struggles. But Harris won't take the long history of imperialism seriously. Those who do, such as Noam Chomsky, are treated with a general condensation.

So, I had to turn to an ethical atheist...and Sartre provides a clear language to engage these kinds of arguments...but then, as it always happens, I write for a few days and then quickly get diverted, because defining the actuality of atheism (it's political and metaphysical commitments) is only part of a much larger political struggle. The fight between new atheism and religion is a particularly western kind of political fight; they can go on talk shows, sell their books and t-shirts, and feel as self-righteous and as persecuted as they want. They can inspire people, convince them to change. Either way, it's all narrated in a self-interested, self-help kind of way. There's a "secret solidarity", as Ronald Aronson states it, between the two.  It's a spectacular substitute for a much more difficult struggle for social justice.

If it's about social justice, however, what does Sartre have to say for future struggle? That's what I want to discuss here. Even though we're commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Critique of Dialectical Reason (Volume 1, of course), I'm going to introduce that book through Search for a Method. Sartre writes that

Far from being exhausted, Marxism is still very young, almost in its infancy; it has scarcely begun to develop. It remains, therefore, the philosophy of our time. We cannot go beyond it because we have not gone beyond the circumstances which engendered it (30).

And yet he states:

Marxism stopped. Precisely because this philosophy wants to change the world, because its aim is "philosophy-becoming-the-world,"  because it is and wants to be practical, there arose within it a veritable schism which rejected theory on one side and praxis on the other....Marxism found itself unable to bear the shock of these new struggles, the practical necessities and the mistakes which are always inseparable from them (21-22).

How to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory statements about Marxism, that philosophy of our time  which has nevertheless stopped? Jean-Luc Nancy's The Inoperative Community rejects the claim that a philosophy could be the horizon of our contemporary times. The very idea of a horizon, Nancy claims, is no longer valid. And, obviously, all of us educated in more or less pluralist philosophy departments might find this claim to be obvious, but it's not.

Sartre introduces three periods of modern philosophy-- the first dominated by Descartes and Locke, the second by Kant and Hegel, and the third by Marxism-- but this third period is qualitatively different. While each of these three philosophies acts, during its respective period, as a horizon to cultural and philosophical forms of its time, Marxism also describes the relationships of the means of production. Descartes, Locke, Kant, or Hegel may have put forward systems that governed other cultural and philosophical forms, but Marxism does something entirely different; it broke down the wall between philosophy and political economy. Class struggle against the bourgeois or capitalist modes of production are "the circumstances which engendered it." This has shaped previous philosophy, but not in a decisive and reflexive way. If we follow Marx himself, we could say that the crises of philosophies that do not overstep their boundaries into political economy can be refuted by their very own ideological means; their abstraction becomes a weapon against them.

And yet, "Marxism stopped." How? Sartre introduces a crucial distinction between 'philosophy' and ideology.' A philosophy constructs new set of relationships between thought and praxis, and ideology comes in and does the practical work, it takes inventory, it extends new methods (8). Existentialism, according to the Sartre of Search for a Method, is an ideology and not a philosophy. Marxism stopped, according to Sartre, because it can no longer measure the life of the masses as it is lived by them; instead, Marxism interprets a priori this lived world, individuality is reduced to a series of formulas and types. Marxism needs existentialism to seek out man (sic) "everywhere where he is, at his work, in his home, in the street" (28), but, Sartre argues, "historical materialism furnished the only valid interpretation of history and that existentialism remained the only concrete approach to reality" (21).

Sartre calls this the "double demand" of praxis, for both thinking concrete reality and criticizing political economy. He also identifies the the central and persistent problem: how to make the political imagination that drives praxis (its desires, passions, and fidelities) overlap with a totalizing critique of political economy (the production and reproduction of the relationships that organize and dominate the masses under capitalism) and vice versa? This question is just as relevant today as it was in 1957, just as "the circumstances which engendered" Marxism are, broadly speaking, just as relevant today as they were when Marx wrote.

Sartre's challenge to Marxism revolves around its treatment of the concrete and lived world of the masses.He is one of the first to see that the 'factory' is no longer the locus of the political imagination, that the locus is elsewhere (anticipating post-Fordism?). He has been criticized for his lack of interest in rank and file party organization due to his petty bourgeois background, but I think we should turn this critique around. His relative lack of interest in party organization is also connected to the emphases he placed on local spontaneity and systematic anti-colonialism. 'Imagining' this intersection of spontaneity and anti-colonialism has proved to be difficult for praxis (historically speaking, it was rejected or ignored by the French Communist Party), but it does explain Sartre's proximity to post-68 Maoism.

Schematic conclusions are risky to draw, but it is probably safe to say that many of the figures of post-68 post-structuralism, with their emphases on micro-politics and resistances, lost sight of the totalizing movement of political economy. The upshot is that political practices were extended into previously marginalized social spaces (the prisons, psychiatry, sexuality, etc). Nevertheless, today, we need a totalizing critique, which should pass again through Marx, the later Sartre, and the anti-colonialism and post-colonialism of Fanon, Césaire, and others. We need a  renewed critique of capitalism and a critique of the privilege that Westerners live by virtue of living in North America or Europe, and the exploitation and violence that engender it,  we need a sense of vigilance in order to critique and refuse every so-called humanitarian justification for imperial war and exploitation. We too need to be decolonialized, de-imperialized.

Nazim Hikmet: Marxist Turkish Poet Set to Music

In 2001 the famous Turkish pianist Fazil Say composed an orchestra piece titled "Nazim." Nazim Hikmet Ran was a Marxist Turkish poet that suffered much for his politics that he infused into his poetry. In 1938 he was arrested for inciting the Turkish military to revolt. Hikmet's sentence was twenty-eight years in prison. Turkish authorities stated that his poetry was inspiring subversion. By 1949 Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, and Jean-Paul Sartre, along with others, campaigned for Hikmet's release from prison. In 1950 Hikmet was set free. ( See Poems of Nazim Hikmet trans. Randy Blasing & Mutlu Konuk, New York: Persea Books, 2002, xiv,xv) Before his death Hikmet's life remained dangerous and turbulent while his poetry became more influential.

I have two clips from Say's "Nazim." The first is a powerful rendition of Hikmet's ability to have used art against US Imperialism and a corrupt Turkish state. The second video is from his internationally celebrated Kız Çocuğu (The Little Girl), otherwise known as "Hiroshima Child/Girl." This poem is about a dead girl after the atom-bomb that dropped on Hiroshima in Japan. The musical accompaniments Fazil Say uses make these powerful poems come to life.