Image by Petra Gerschner, for the exhibition, A World Where Many Wolds Fit.
It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated at one pole of society in the shape of capital, while at the other pole are grouped masses of men who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Nor is it enough that they are compelled to sell themselves voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed breaks down all resistance. – Karl Marx
While Seattle, 1999 is seen as a coming out moment for this strategy of qua anarchistic multitudes, these practices are now fairly rooted within our cultures. Like an artist's practice, today it is seen as legitimate to work as an individual or a small collective, within a real or frequently improvisatory network to attempt social change – by any means necessary. Here we can think of the blogger as activist, the organics food consumer as activist, the interventionist artist as activist, the DIY artist as activist, the member of an anarchist marching band as activist. All these roles symbolize a position counter to the status quo. All of them imply a continued labor in difference to the state. However, none of these roles necessarily require an activist to relate to traditional notions of political party, political platforms, or legislative action. These acts of self-organizing, playing out these personally-assigned roles, can operate to subvert more hierarchical and representative forums of social change, such as electoral politics. These roles, though potentially collective, are highly subjective in nature. They represent the will of the 'personal is political' and proliferate with the relative ease of imagining a job and then putting a shoulder to an ephemeral collective wheel. – Robby Herbst
The above two statements reflect the major stakes in the game of contemporary anti-capitalist politics, especially as the latter have coalesced around the anti-globalization movement that emerged with the 'Battle in Seattle' in 1999. My reflections in this essay are occasioned by the North American presentation of A World Where Many Worlds Fit, an exhibition of antiglobalization protest artworks and films curated by the Vienna-based artist Oliver Ressler.[1] In his statement for the exhibition, Ressler emphasizes the links between the "movement of the movements" and the workerist themes of the non-hierarchical, autonomous organization and collective intelligence of the multitude. Despite the plurality of left-wing individuals and organizations that have assembled in Seattle and later G8, G20 and WTO protests – anarchists, social democrats, union locals, civil society organizations, NGOs, church groups, anti-poverty groups, environmentalists, Marxist-Leninists, etc – it would appear that anarchist and libertarian politics best characterize the movement. Indeed, it is a fact that the key text of the movement turned out to be Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire, a work that takes a schizo-anarchist approach to the communist emphasis on contemporary modes of production. Empire brought international attention to the Euro Mayday movement, with its Italian workerist cast, inaugurating in Europe and North America a new language with which to define struggles around cognitive and creative labour, and set in motion a series of concepts like the new political subjectivity, the multitude, cooperating humanity, constituent activity, mass intellectuality, immaterial labour and nomadic production.[2] Inspired by workerist thought, today's alter-globalization activists argue that post-Fordist production brings with it a new mode of thinking that obliges us to reconsider some of the core concepts of Marxism. Instead of an organized revolutionary proletariat, an undefined, decentred multitude of struggles responds to capitalist directives through a counter-power that is limitless, non-hierarchical, and impermanent.
Needless to say, post-Fordist capitalization has facilitated flows of production that lead to new forms of independence and cooperation, but it has also helped to create, especially in developed countries, new conditions of exploitation and self-precarization. Isabell Lorey argues that under conditions of neoliberal governmentality, self-precarization appears to cultural workers as a choice, a normalized "economization of life" associated with liberal ideals of individual autonomy, lifestyle choice and even deviance or freedom from institutions. Such imaginary self-relating and self-discipline masks the fact that the mass precarization of labour is "forced on people who fall out of normal labor conditions."[3] In the age of post-Fordist capitalism, and with an increasingly educated population, control is managed through the very productivity of sociality itself. The point of contention here is whether it is the productivity of the immaterial worker that is valorized in excess of capital, or whether this now fetishized relation between people represents a contemporary version of the relation between things. Does the nomadic labour of directly participatory energies not function as the very shape of the contemporary commodity economy?[4]
Although Marx long ago described the forms of social cooperation that are features of the capitalist mode of production and capital accumulation, the autonomist drive that inspires today's "movement of the movements" asks us to take the advanced stages of post-Fordist capitalism as already communistic, a virtual communism in which immaterial work prefigures a world of equality.[5] From a Marxist point of view, capitalism not only provokes resistance, it also provokes cooperation. We can therefore understand the kinds of competition that characterize contemporary social relations as cooperation in reverse. How so? In Capital, Marx argued that productivity within the context of capitalism leads to the self-valorization of capital. Efficiency in labour requires that large numbers of people work jointly in order to produce a revolution in the means of production. As classical political economists understood, the cooperation of wage-labourers finds its externality in competition between capitalists. To think that autonomous workers and activists can cooperate among themselves without there being a reciprocal effect at the level of capitalist production is to ignore the self-revolutionizing power of capital to overcome resistance as well as competition. If it was once possible for factory workers to recognize that their cooperation is "a plan drawn up by the capitalist," this is perhaps less apparent to today's networked entrepreneur or immaterial worker-as-activist.[6] As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello argue in The New Spirit of Capitalism, the shift to post-Fordist forms of organization that emphasize employee initiative, teamwork, egalitarianism and networked participation, represents a shift away from the hierarchical and administrative forms of managerial capitalism.[7] Along with this, communism itself appears conservative in contrast to today's decentralized production and permissive society.[8] The universal rights and benefits that might accrue for workers are held for ransom as the left depoliticizes the historical processes that led to the new economy and contemplates the "end of ideologies." Why then does the movement renounce the old left and its strategies?[9] How does the slogan "beyond Washington and Moscow" relate to today's protest movements and public spheres of affect? Can the idea of the multitude and the logic of affinity manage the rifts that are opened up by competing political positions? Lastly, what is the status of the political in a world that proscribes class struggle?
Against today's "post-political" orthodoxies, it becomes necessary for us to assert that the series of struggles associated with new social movements, mico-politics and the anti-foundationalism of the postmodern critique of meta-narratives, challenge our ability to think in terms of alterglobal anti-capitalism. The tendencies and practices that emphasize difference, dispersal, decentredness and fluidity argue against the view that revolution is a total phenomenon, inexhaustible and containing latent contradictions. Often drawing on the mediating function of civil society, which Marx associated with the private person, these tendencies are said to challenge economic reductionism and historical materialism. The totality of the social space is replaced with the partiality of contingent struggles, with libertarian practices and with thinking that is conjunctural and indeterminate. Instead of a unified political theory, we encounter the problems of global warming, agribusiness, immigration, militarism, etc, as issues that can be treated separately. Perhaps the most challenging interlocutor of today's radical democracy and schizo-anarchism is Slavoj Žižek. Žižek explains that the contingency that best defines the working of capitalism as the concrete universal is the very belief that we are in a period that has superceded the radical revolutionary movements of the past and that class exists as but one category in a series of the interlocking differences that involves gender, race and sexuality.[10]
If the alterglobalization movement has made any crucial steps recently, it is away from the focus on the identity politics of the 1980s and the transnationalism of the 90s through an engagement with the struggles of the revolutionary left. As Žižek himself puts it:
"in the postmodern 'anti-essentialist' discourse regarding the multitude of struggles, 'socialist' anti-capitalist struggle is posited as just one in a series of struggles ('class, sex and gender, ethnic identity' ...), and what is happening today is not merely that the anti-capitalist struggle is getting stronger, but that it is once again assuming the central structuring role. The old narrative of postmodern politics was: from class essentialism to the multitude of struggles for identity; today, the trend is finally reversed."[11]
It is necessary for movement artists and activist to learn to recognize and understand problems of political theory at the same time as they address the ways that social inequality interpellates people, precisely, as raced, gendered and sexed, or as Hardt and Negri put it, through "capture devices" like race and gender. As Alain Badiou writes: "We must reject the ideological framework of 'ethics', and concede nothing to the negative and victimary definition of man. This framework equates man with a simple mortal animal, it is the symptom of a disturbing conservatism [that] prevents us from thinking the singularity of situations."[12]
Žižek's work has placed some needed pressure on the lambasting of Marxist radicals like David Harvey who suggest that leftist activists need to be far more realistic in their views that grassroots organizing, decentred, networked and non-hierarchical movements represent a serious challenge to existing forms of neoliberal politics. Activists and communitarians should take greater stock of the fact that solidarity does not always entail and necessitate absolute reciprocity. Much of today's active citizenship, thus, has the features of what Žižek calls an empty gesture. As he puts it:
"the system is compelled to allow for possibilities of choices which must never actually take place, since their occurrence would cause the system to disintegrate, and the function of the unwritten rules is precisely to prevent the actualization of these choices formally allowed by the system."[13]
No wonder then that postmodern academics put so much faith in agency as opposed to structure or determination. As psychoanalysis shows, however, it is agency that is most troubling to the subject, especially when s/he has to act in situations that are radically open, that are not covered by customs or rules of political correctness. What the market economy model of academic critical and cultural production leads us to is therefore not only the problem of choice, but the very question: what is a revolutionary subject?
We have come to believe, if only by force of repetition, that the working class is no longer the revolutionary subject, who, as a product of the internal contradictions of capitalism, will lead the way to communism and the eventual withering of the state. We in today's world of institutionalized cultural practice, anxious to demonstrate our theoretical acumen and our affinity with various struggles, have a tendency to forsake the critique of political economy and replace it with a free-floating subject in a state of becoming, a cipher of undecidability in a world of flows regulated by the rhythms of capitalist production. Instead of working through the challenges to thought that are posed by a universal political project, we turn to questions of affect, transculturalism, hybridity and performativity.[14] The problem here, I would argue, is that emancipation begins to function as a by-product of the dominant symbolic order, which comes to appear all the more totalizing. If the movement of the movements has any momentum, it is in its potential to rethink postmodern pieties and reclaim the space of critical thought, which in part must work to reclaim the universities, publishing companies, newspapers and various other instruments of the "general intellect."
A strenuous debate is taking place within the movement. John Holloway and Alex Callinicos, head of the Socialist Workers Part in Britain, addressed divergences between workerism and revolutionary socialism at the Marxism 2008 festival. Callinicos also debated with Toni Negri on the subject of "working class or multitude" during the 2003 European Social Forum in Paris. The conference "On the Idea of Communism," held at the Birkbeck Institute (University of London) in March of 2009, brought together some of the leading theorists of the movement, a sign that the movement is not only having to "work through" past disputes, but needing to put concepts like multitude to the test.[15] My argument in this essay is that the debate between old left and postmodern variants is in fact symptomatic of an impasse on the left and of the prohibition against the communist choice, perceived as the Stalinist trauma that can never be worked through.[16] Despite the long tradition of revolutionary thought we have to draw upon, the movement currently tends toward anarchist and libertarian traditions, in part due to the success of academic post-structuralism and the failure of today's democratic labour parties to challenge the status quo.
The title of Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler's film, What Would It Mean to Win? (2008), one of the works in the exhibition, asks us to not only think about the neoliberal world order that we are up against, but how we wish to organize ourselves and according to what principles. Its title revisits the Seattle slogan "we are winning" and also happens to be the title of the free newspaper that was handed out at the G8 summit protests in Heiligendamm in June of 2007. For this issue of the journal Turbulence, fourteen groups and individuals were asked to answer the question "what would it mean to win?"[17] The editors of Turbulence argue that while they believe that it is not possible to represent a movement as complex as ours, it is possible and indeed necessary to move beyond the politics of 1917 (Leninism) and 1936 (Stalinism/anarchism) and to carry out the debates and investigations of today's political realities. The variety of progressive movements of the last decades, in Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, France, Chiapas and Venezuela especially, and everywhere solidarity movements have resisted and offered alternatives to neoliberal market values and policies, indicates that people are experimenting with alternatives within and outside of electoral democracy. However, the editors of Turbulence, some of whom are featured in the Begg and Ressler film, and as stated in the epigraph provided by one of the former editors of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, hold a number of convictions that place restrictions on a revolutionary left movement.[18] And so, while all of us agree that we would like to see more self-management, more ownership and control of the means of production, more action on climate change, and production that takes the local and the ethical into consideration, the supplement for today's post-traumatic politics is the question of whether or not it is wise to altogether avoid acting and thinking at the level of state bureaucracy and electoral politics. Alternately, the other question that arises is how to unite the left.
Gregory Sholette, WTO Action Figure, from the exhibition AWWMWF.
The North American leg of A World Where Many Worlds Fit provides another occasion to ask the questions that function as chapter headings in the Begg and Ressler film: What would it mean to win? Who are we? What is our power? It might be instructive here to consider a strange occurrence that has accompanied the G20 protests in Pittsburgh in September of 2009. On this occasion, the US President, Barack Obama, criticized the protesters with the suggestion that "focusing on concrete, local, immediate issues that have an impact on people's lives is what really makes a difference and ... having protests about abstractions [like] global capitalism ... is not really going to make a difference."[19] Does Obama's idea of decentralized grassroots progressivism not echo in some strange way the ideological presuppositions of the activists of the World Social Forums? In other words, is Obama's concern here not similar to today's alter-globalization activists? Despite the growing proletarianization of the world's population, we hold to the now orthodox idea that the working class is not the historical subject, led by a party vanguard, who becomes conscious of its historical mission.[20] To take one example, John Jordan, who is well-known for instigating the affinity groups Reclaim the Streets and the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, writes in The Guardian that autonomous peasants' movements like those in Argentina are freed from ideologies, "liberated from abstract dreams of a pending revolution and futile dreams of taking power and running governments."[21]
Rebel Clown Army at Gleneagles G8 protests. From John Jordan's contribution to AWWMWF.
Why would a neoliberal politician like Obama bother to sound the alarm bell against anti-capitalism as abstraction and recommend instead what the anti-globalization movement is already proposing: local tactics, popular education, neighbourhood screenings, occupations against university administrations, workshops on immigration policies, assemblies against agribusiness and pharmaceuticals? One immediate explanation is the fact that Obama said this just as Michael Moore's film Capitalism: A Love Story was about to be released in North American theatres. No doubt Obama was reacting to the positive reviews of Moore's film, which moved away from single issues like gun control, offshore labour, universal health care, or the war economy, and put the whole series of problems into one big bundle. Despite its populist and religious premises, Moore's film makes common cause with those who call for new instances of broad-based anti-capitalist organization – a popular front that can rival the big political parties and help move state politics in the direction of emancipatory change.[22]
Can this be achieved and is this taking of power desirable? On this issue hinges the major rift in the movement, though all agree that, as Franco Berardi has recently stated, the post 9/11 and post-Genoa summit years have seen the entrenchment of conflict and global warfare as capitalism's response to challenges to neoliberalism.[23] Berardi's proposals for alternative modes of practice fit within workerist strategies of renunciation, desertion and exodus.[24] Perhaps, in second place to Empire as a key text for the movement, is John Holloway's book, Change the World Without Taking Power.[25] Like many post-Marxist thinkers who have been influenced by the work of Foucault and Deleuze, Holloway argues that the exercise of anti-power can help people reclaim human capacities and energies that are repressed by capitalism. Arguing that there is no outside to capitalism, Holloway and autonomist-inspired thinkers look for moments of subversion within capitalism, which includes subversion of the very categories of marxian analysis. Revolutionary socialists, in contrast, argue that desertion and the evasion of power leaves power in the hands of forces that are undemocratic and unaccountable, and thus, the long march through the institutions remains a tactical necessity that has yet to be realized. According to Alex Callinicos, anti-capitalism is not merely a problem of organization, but a matter of political struggle. He writes:
[Democracy] requires a political struggle within the new forms of workers' power to win the majority to the recognition that, unless the capitalist state is dismantled, sooner or later it will use its coercive power to crush the mass movement. This is the supreme function of a mass revolutionary party: not to seize power for itself, but to win the argument that the new democracy should storm the last strongholds of capitalist power. (...) Revolution has to be about seizing power, because otherwise the capitalist state will survive to become a launching pad for counter-revolution."[26]
Now is precisely the time for us to revisit histories and concepts of popular democracy, radical pedagogy and revolutionary theory, and to consider the distinctions between the generation of '68 and our generation, the generation of '89 which grew up with the first war against Iraq and the shameful New World Order that came on the heels of the neoconservative 70s and 80s. How much political energy has been wasted in the name of micro-Hegelian progress in the fields of "difference" and "becoming," and in the selective elimination of distinctions between the personal and the political, the private and the public, work and play? What, we now ask, do today's artists, activists and intellectuals contribute to politics that make emancipation a universal priority?
In conclusion, as a summary of the view that we have entered the stage of a properly global era of production (i.e. Hardt and Negri's "Empire"), we should perhaps recall Henri Lefebvre's concept of the state mode of production. For Lefebvre, Stalinism inaugurated a new, fully technocratic state, one that also characterizes today's neoliberal societies. If we seek to fully confront the meaning of globalization, and indeed, anti- and alter-globalization, we should be prepared to consider the ways in which the conservative cultural and intellectual forces that have dominated high and postmodernist culture block our ability to even consider what Marx foresaw as proletarian dictatorship and the withering of the state, understood very specifically as a Hegelian overcoming of contradictions.
What strikes me about the European phrase "the movement of the movements" is its similarity to the Hegelian concept of the state as "a system of systems."[27] In volume two of his four-part series De L'État (a forgotten precursor to his more familiar writings on social space and the planetary system of late capitalist production), Lefebvre argued that the state form has a logical and practical coherence that goes beyond individuals and groups – a coherence that approaches the neoliberal idea of the free market and the Marxist notion of productive activity. The twentieth-century state introduced a shift from the logic of progress to that of economic growth, overseeing and producing a global surplus based on financing, taxation, loans, and militarism. Violence becomes an irrationality that is inherent to the contemporary state in all its theatricality and monumentality, mystified by the fetishism of elections and political parties, by culture and politics, the environment and population control, in short, by all manner of institutionalized knowledge and criticism.[28] From this rationalization of knowledge, the Hegelian "Spirit" passes to the justification of the real. The state overcomes its own contradictions through its conquest of nature and all of human endeavour. It appropriates needs, works, and classes; it sweeps in its path all of history, religion, the family, the nation, politics, art and philosophy. An ominous catastrophism marks its limit and its negation: revolution.
Marx famously sought to complete the Hegelian division of social being with the concept of productive activity and with this he announced the critique of the state in its political idealism. Could this rupture with Hegel not also represent the "movement of the movements" as the revolutionary movement of disalienation? And with this do we not find in the artworks produced in Seattle, Genoa, Québec City, Prague, Gleneagles, Buenos Aires, Saint Petersburg, Heiligendamm and Toronto, works that are in excess of democratic idealism and the pluralist form of cultural citizenship? The state's cruelty towards protesters and anti-capitalist organizing proves, Lefebvre argues, that the state is a living entity that harbours within itself a will to fight to the death. Our shocked reaction to the violence of the state confronts us with what Žižek has identified as the psychoanalytic truth of Hegel, the sickness unto death that underscores the Freudian concept of drive, the passage à l'acte against which the state appears as both an obstacle and a condition of possibility.
Taipei Biennale, 2008.
Foreman Art Gallery, Bishop's University, Québec, 2010.
This essay was first presented in the context of "Capitalism and Confrontation: Grassroots Responses to Empire, Ecology, and Political Economy," a conference organized by the Critical Social Research Collective at Carleton University, March 10, 2010. A shorter version of this text is published in A World Where Many Worlds Fit, the catalogue for the exhibition curated by Oliver Ressler for the Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop's University, Jan 28 – March 20, 2010.
Notes
1. The exhibition was on view at the Taipei Biennial in Fall 2008 and at the Foreman Art Gallery, Bishop's University, from January 28 to March 20, 2010. The artists included in the exhibition are: RTMark, Zanny Begg, Christopher Delaurenti, Noel Douglas, Etcétera, Petra Gerschner, John Jordan, Oliver Ressler, Allan Sekula, Gregory Sholette, Nuria Villa + Marcelo Expósito, Dmitri Vilensky. The Canadian version of the exhibition, held at the Foreman Gallery at Bishop's University, included the Montreal collective ATSA. See "A World Where Many Worlds Fit, a Section Curated by Oliver Ressler," in 08 Taipei Biennial (Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2008). For an interview with the artist and his involvement with artists protesting the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, in the summer of 2007, see Marc James Léger, "From Reaching Heiligendamm: An Interview with Oliver Ressler," Art Journal (Spring 2008) 100-113.
2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). For an introduction to Italian workerism, see Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, eds. Autonomia: Post-Political Politics (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007).
3. Isabell Lorey, "Governmentality and Self-Precarization: On the Normalization of Cultural Producers," Transversal (January 2006): http://www.eipcp.net/transversal/1106/lorey/en.
4. With the eclipse of the welfare state, commodified social relations now come to operate as the basis of so-called social activism and participatory democracy. It has also been argued that the theories of post-Fordist "immaterial" cultural production, those associated with the work of Negri, Virno and others, effectuate a certain depoliticization, in particular, as communicative capitalism is taken to be cooperation tout court, and as it proposes the obsolescence of the value theory of labour. On this, see Emma Dowling, Rodrigo Nunes and Ben Trott's introduction to the special issue of Ephemera on "Immaterial and Affective Labour" (February 2007): http://ephemeraweb.org/journal/7-1/7-1editorial.pdf.
5. The workerist concept of the multitude is already more totalitarian than what Marxists define as social totality since it is tautological, substituting its self-negating limit in the form of something like, say, a party apparatus, with actually existing capitalism. Capitalism and class society are therefore nothing more than the excess of the emergence of the multitude as the contemporary model for the social relations of production. As the multitude recognizes nothing in itself that is more than itself, its signifier collapses into its signified. No wonder then that the movement favours communal, biopolitical, self-relating. In the form of networked decentralization, the movement might not be doing enough to universalize its politics, precisely by continuing to organize people into an anti-capitalist bloc. Post-operaismo denies the contradictoriness of self-relating by arguing against unicity, interpreted variously as "the One," "the people" or the "universal." Post-operaismo, instead, argues for an exodus from the universal toward the ambivalence of the vague category of the general out of which singularities emerge. On this, see Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004).
6. See the chapter on "Co-operation" in Capital, Volume 1, 450. See also Maurizzio Lazzarato, "Construction of Cultural Labour Market," Framework #6 (January 2007): http://www.framework.fi/6_2007/locating/artikkelit/lazzarato.html.
7. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2006).
8. This is the argument made by Slavoj Žižek in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009) 51-55. A similar line of reasoning is pursued in Andrew Ross, No-Collar: The Human Workplace and Its Hidden Costs (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
9. The following statement by Peruvian peasant leader Hugo Blanco is emblematic of the "postmodern" features of today's fragmented left: "One thing Trotsky said that has been vindicated is that if the working class doesn't take power from the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy will be displaced by capitalism. This is what has happened. Today the principal directors of the Soviet Communist Party are the big neoliberals in Russia. Trotsky said that either the working class will triumph, or the bourgeoisie will, that the bureaucracy is not a social class and has no historical future. Unfortunately, its power was not broken by the working class, so it was broken by the bourgeoisie. But now that there is no Stalinism, why do I have to be a Trotskyist? I don't feel the same imperative. Of course, there are things I have learned from Marx, things I have learned from Lenin, things I have learned from Trotsky – and from other revolutionaries, from Rosa Luxemberg, from Gramsci, from Che Guevara. But now I do not feel it is logical to form a Trotskyist party. The youth who organized the conference yesterday – they want answers to the questions of today. We don't have to resuscitate old debates from the last century. It is enough to still believe that another world is possible. I am old, and if I can teach something about Marx, Lenin and Trotsky and so on, this is something I can contribute. I still believe in standing up and struggling and not pleading with the government, so in a sense I am still a Trotskyist. But I don't feel the need to say, 'Listen everybody, this Trotskyism is the answer!' And when I speak of the indigenas of the Amazon as the vanguard, I do not mean it in the Marxist-Leninist sense, that others should copy their methods. And when I speak to indigenous peoples, I speak of 'collectivism,' not 'communism.'" Blanco's statement, however well-adjusted it is to indigenous struggle, describes perfectly the false choice between postmodernism and class struggle. The point is not that today we have to choose one or the other. What we must bear in mind is that today it has become imperative to prohibit the choice of the communistic, Trotskyist party avant-garde. The very prohibition on the prohibition – the fact that we cannot even talk about this philosophical dilemma (which gives the current post-political situation the features of, surprisingly enough, Stalinism) – makes it that all that we can do is present these options without taking the risk of insisting on the correct strategy. See the LeftViews interview with Hugo Blanco in "Hugo Blanco: Indigenous People are the Vanguard of the Fight to Save the Earth," Socialist Voice (October 13, 2009): http://www.socialistvoice.ca/?p=701.
10. For a work that pursues this post-structuralist critique of dialectics as well as an abandonment of the idea of avant-garde cultural practice, see Chantal Mouffe, "Artistic Activism and Antagonistic Space," available at: http://hinterlandprojectsreadingrooms.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/chantal-mouffe.pdf.
11. Slavoj Žižek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (London: Verso, 2004) 98. On the subject of cultural difference, see in particular Žižek, "Over the Coalition Rainbow," in The Parallax View (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006) 359-65, and "The Crisis of Determinate Negation," in his In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008) 337-80.
12. Alain Badiou's Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London: Verso, [1993] 2001) 16.
13. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997) 28.
14. Against postmodern contingency, which leaves us with little more than technique, genetics and profit as indicators of 'what is to be done,' Badiou revisits the thinking of he Twentieth Century as a thinking that had the courage to view humanity as a political project. See Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).
15. The exchange between Holloway and Callinicos, organized by the British Socialist Workers Party, can be screened at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2liVjkA30T4. Speakers at the Birkbeck conference included: Judith Balso, Alain Badiou, Bruno Bosteels, Terry Eagleton, Peter Hallward, Michael Hardt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Toni Negri, Jacques Rancière, Alessandro Russo, Alberto Toscano, Gianni Vattimo, Wang Hui and Slavoj Žižek.
16. On this see Bruno Bosteels, On the Actuality of Communism (London: Verso, 2011).
17. See issue #4 of the journal Turbulence, "What would it mean to win?" available at: http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-1/. Incidentally, the cover of this issue shows the busy, swarming activity of bees. In Capital Marx famously contrasted the planned activity of the architect to the unconscious activity of bees. Does this cover and the magazine's desire for collective openness not belie a certain obsession with new social movements that, like the movement in general, takes on an oedipal relation to revolutionary radicalism, which like the post-68 movement, wishes to forge a path beyond left and right? Clearly, it is the Cold War situation that is outmoded and that should cause us to rethink the verities of the past rather that abandon them. In this I am in agreement with Brian Holmes when he suggests that today's precarious generation takes the globalization process itself as the only vanguard. See Brian Holmes, "Answer to Chto Delat Questionnaire," (2008): http://brianholmes.wordpress.com. The bee metaphor reflects the schizo-anarchist imaginary in more than one way. On the one hand, we have the conjunction of singularity and multiplicity, which stand as the root concepts for the autonomist idea of the multitude. We should be careful here to distinguish metaphysics and mathematics, and emphasize the mathematical break with the metaphysical understanding of the infinite. For Hegel, the singular does not relate to the concrete so much as to the determinations of the concept of the infinite in its historical temporalization. In the Grundrisse, Marx warned against the inability to think of historical forms as anything other than "the latest form of historical development" with regard to "the previous one as steps leading up to itself," a myopia that made the present unable to criticize itself. The present, like the exchange form of value, leads a tautological, antediluvian existence. [Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). Trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973) 101.] For this reason, Alain Badiou argues in "One, Multiple, Multiplicities" that multiplicity is not available as a consistent delimitation but as a process of "limitless self-differentiation," a condition for thought's freedom from destinational constraint (calculation). The multiple is therefore distinguished from the "vitalist terrorism" that supposes that movement is superior to immobility, openness to closure, the anti-categorical to the concept. Here, neutral multiples substitute for pure multiples, undermining the "undecidability" and "difference" theses of contemporary post-structuralism and replacing it with "paradoxical multi-dimensional configurations." The undecidable, rather, contains parts and elementary belonging to sets and relations, an "errant excess" that undermines the opposition of virtual and actual. In short, for Badiou, "Deleuze has no way of thinking singularity other than by classifying the different ways in which singularity is not ontologically singular." In order to deploy the intuition of the virtual, one is obliged to deploy an analogy: bees. Badiou closes with the question: "what exactly is a universal singularity?" Here, we should have more to say than globalization. The planned activity of the architect, in contrast to the busy caste of worker bees, offers the political alternative of universal singularity. See Alain Badiou, "One, Multiple, Multiplicities" in Theoretical Writing. trans. Ray Brassiter and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2006) 68-82. See also Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004).
18. Two of the editors of Turbulence, Tadzio Mueller and Michal Osterweil, are featured in What Would It Mean to Win? Also featured are John Holloway and Emma Dowling.
19. See Dave Zirin, "Chicago 2016? Why Obama's wrong to boost Olympic bid," rabble.ca (October 1, 2009): www.rabble.ca/news/2009/10/chicago-2016-why-obama-wrong-boost-olympic-bid.
20. The transition to capitalism is hardly a fait accompli but continues today through the expropriation of land and a decline of public sector protections, contributing to pauperization through falling wages, unemployment and under-employment. In Iraq alone, in the aftermath of a bloody colonial war that has left more than one million dead, more than three million peasants have moved to cities. This process of urban migration is especially noticeable in China, the world's second largest economy after the US, where, since the economic reforms of 1992, there has been a significant expansion of the proletarian class and new middle classes. Chinese proletarianization is due, in large part, to the transformation of areas cultivated by subsistence farming families into large-scale farming enterprises that are created through practices of expropriation. Internationally, mass migrations caused by poverty and civil wars account for nearly twenty percent of the underclass of metropolitan areas. Industrialization has been especially intense in countries like Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Korea, Tunisia and Morocco, where women workers are being substituted for men. Since the 1990s, the transition to capitalism can be said to contribute increasingly to the proletarianization of women, especially in Latin America, the Carribean and Southeast Asia. The globalization of female labour is less intense in the Middle East, where lower rates of foreign direct investment has kept women out of the world-market factory. The 1979 Revolution in Iran, for example, limited female employment and the kinds of proletarianization seen in Southeast Asian and Latin America since the 1970s. Lower levels of industrialization, thanks largely to oil revenues, have resulted in lower levels of proletarianization. Countries invested in export industries, in contrast, with higher levels of FDI, participate more intensely in a world division of labour. Slum cities in developing economies and a casualization of labour in the economic centres places pressure on national economies as large-scale industry contributes to the fragmentation of the global working class, drawn increasingly to religious and ethnic regression and mafia-type patronage. According to Karl Heinz Roth, proletarianization and its increasingly transcultural and multicultural identifications has become the single most important factor of a new global class composition. Among the different possibilities of political regression in this context, and one that can potentially harm the alter-globalization anti-capitalist movement, is a tendency to project fears and anger onto political leaders and anyone who promises to represent the interests of the working class. The rise of a salaried international petty bourgeois class (referred to as class polarization) accompanies this proletarianization and with it the expansion of the private sector, the development of managerialism, and the expansion of informal work.
21. John Jordan, "Diary of a Revolution," The Guardian (January 25, 2003): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jan/25/argentina.weekend71.
22. The Toronto Workers' Assembly, which convened in October 2009, is a novel effort in recent Canadian history to create alliances among social movement activists and union movements. While it is too early to say, it bears some resemblance to the Australian Socialist Alliance. On these popular front strategies, see "Interview with Peter Boyle," Socialist Voice (June 6, 2009): http//www.socialistvoice.ca/?p=400&cpage=1#comment-2037 as well as the Alert Radio podcast on the Toronto Workers' 2009 Assembly: http://www.rabble.ca/podcasts/shows/alert-canadian-dimension/2009/10/alert-108.
23. Franco "Bifo" Berardi, "Ten Years After Seattle, One Strategy, Better Two, For the Movement Against War and Capitalism," InterActivist Info Exchange (August 29, 2009): http://info.interactivist.net/node/12965.
24. Gerald Raunig provides a brief archaeological account of the kind of transversal activism that he and others encourage in "On the Breach," Artforum (May 2008) 341-343.
25. John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today (London: Pluto Press, 2002).
26. See Alex Callinicos, "How Do We Deal with the State?" in the Revista Herramienta online debate concerning Holloway's Change the World Without Taking Power: http://www.herramienta.com.ar/debate-sobre-cambiar-el-mundo/presentacion-e-indice-de-articulos. Callinicos' view that "the new democracy should storm the last strongholds of capitalist power" potentially challenges one of the central tenets of the anti-globalization movement. According to Žižek, the critique of capitalism implicates it in the universality of that contradiction. He writes: "What, today, prevents the radical questioning of capitalism itself is precisely the belief in the democratic form of the struggle against capitalism." In other words, the intervention against capitalism should be political and not economic. In this sense, Žižek argues that the workerists (autonomists and post-operaists) are too orthodox when they assume that history is on our side. When capitalism proves itself to be the most effective motor of history, he argues, Marxism responds with the view that only a communist Party apparatus can maintain modernization and prevent social disintegration. The recent example of Venezuela is instructive. Whereas the civil liberties of anti-democratic right-wing media have been curbed, poverty has been nearly halved in the last six years of the Bolivarian experience. See Žižek, "Revolutionary Terror from Robespierre to Mao," in In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008) 157-210. Citation, 183. On Venezuela, see Luke Stobart, "Letter from Venezuela" Socialist Review (October 2009): http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/issue.php?issue=340, reprinted on the venezuelanalysis website: http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4852. Another way that Žižek makes his argument is through the exploration of Lenin's view that no guarantees for revolutionary action can be found in social necessity or in normative "democratic" legitimacy. In other words, the revolutionary passage à l'acte is not covered by the big Other but is authorized only by itself. In this sense, according to Žižek, Leninism in no way corresponds to deterministic, teleological laws of historical progress. See Slavoj Žižek, "Introduction: Between the Two Revolutions" in Žižek, ed. Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings [by V.I. Lenin] from February to October 1917 (London: Verso, 2002) 8.
27. Henri Lefebvre, De L'État, Tome II: De Hegel à Mao par Staline (La théorie "marxiste" de l'état) (Paris: 10/18, 1976) 129.
28. See also Slavoj Žižek, "The Fetish of the Party," in Žižek, The Universal Exception: Selected Writings, Volume Two, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2006) 67-93.
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