LENIN'S TOMB

Gangs of London

2012-02-01T22:52:00.000Z

1. Chief Inspector Ian Kibblewhite of Enfield constabulary: "You might have 100 people in your gang - we have 32,000 people in our gang. It's called the Metropolitan Police."

2. "Entire crime squad is investigated for corruption ... All the officers are based on the Enfield borough crime squad which deals with local robberies and burglaries and the inquiry centres on the "mishandling of property" believed to be stolen electronic goods including televisions."

3. "Video footage shows the detective sergeant and five constables leaping from an unmarked car shouting "attack, attack", before smashing baseball bats and a pickaxe handle into the side windows and windscreen of a Mini stopped in traffic. The plainclothes officers – all members of the Enfield crime squad in north London – then pull out the driver, Jonathan Billinghurst, and push him to the floor, where he is arrested. ... Scotland Yard said on Wednesday that the six officers – who are the first to face disciplinary action as a result of the inquiry – had been found guilty of misconduct but would not be sacked."

Bad cops, bad cops

2012-01-31T16:57:00.000Z

What is policing? In a recent interview with the New Left Project, Robert Reiner argues that "in practice the police are primarily an instrument for regulating the lower orders". Historically, police forces emerge as "a more urban and industrial ruling class" arises and requires "a more predictable, bureaucratic, legal and apparently universal means of maintaining order" than traditional agents of monarchy, armed forces, etc. The "apparently universal" aspect of this has been reinforced by a misleading focus on the police's role in "routine crime prevention" which obscures its role in political policing, but the net effect is to protect a particular order, one based on inequality and hierarchy. This is all very useful, and I expect readers will benefit from reading Reiner's book, Law and Order. (For those looking for a marxist approach to the British police, the late Audrey Farrell's book Crime, Class and Corruption is a must read.)

But this is merely to set up the problem. In my opinion, it still doesn't satisfactorily answer the question as to what policing is. We can agree that in a manner of speaking the police are "an instrument for regulating the lower orders", which is a part of the state's overall regulatory function in daily life. Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer's classic historical monograph on the English/British state, The Great Arch, covering its transformation from the high middle ages until the late 19th century, argues that the state is fundamentally a cultural form involved in "moral regulation": a "project of normalizing, rendering natural, taken for granted, in a word 'obvious', what are in fact ontological and epistemological premises of a particular and historical form of social order ... Centrally, state agencies attempt to give unitary and unifying expression to what are in reality multifaceted and differential historical experiences of groups within society, denying their particularity." So, this supports two aspects of Reiner's analysis: the police in this perspective would have a regulatory function, and a unifying, apparently universalising function. Moreover, the emphasis on moral regulation specifies something particular about police conduct which is that, as repressive institutions, they are deeply involved in ideological work. The police have a role in maintaining a symbolic order, and deploy violence to that end. Still, we haven't really moved very far forward from the most general of generalities here.

***

I think to take this analysis further it would help to outline what would seem to be a peculiar set of circumstances. The government is introducing a series of substantial changes to policing structures and tactics in England and Wales (devolution in Northern Ireland and Scotland exclude these constituents of the UK from the reforms). First, they are introducing a system of elected commissioners, drawing to some extent from the US model. I think most police officers hate this, and the 'witnesses' before the Home Affairs Committee rejecting the idea - such as Sir Hugh Orde, Sir Paul Stephenson and numerous others - seemed to represent a big chunk of the policing establishment. Coupled with this change is the abolition of the old police authorities in which the police were run by a selected committee made up of elected councillors and 'independent' appointees. There was initially to be an elected committee that would oversee policing, but that was abandoned under pressure from police and previous committees. Instead, the oversight of commissioners will be carried out by appointed panels, with appointees drawn from 'local communities'. The government has made it clear that the main aim of these reforms is to change the relationship of police to the 'local communities' in which they operate. This is a strategic rather than tactical reform: that is, it is less about operational issues than about organising the relationship of the police to society (or rather, to social classes) in such a way as to cultivate a basis for right-wing, populist 'law and order' politics.

Second, the Tories are cutting police budgets. Contrary to my own expectations, the cuts have not been substantially revised in response to the student protests, industrial militancy, or the riots. This is one of the reasons why you will sometimes encounter low ranking officers policing demos etc, moaning that they too are public sector workers and no one cares about them. (I've witnessed this sort of exchange numerous times, and I think it reflects a real anger being expressed in the rank and file.) And it is in stark contrast to Mrs Thatcher's qualitative expansion and upgrading of police budgets, numbers, technology and legal powers, or indeed to New Labour's policy along similar lines. I had thought this must reflect the degree of the Tories' complacency about the prospects for serious social conflict arising from their deep structural adjustment programme. That certainly can't be excluded as a factor - their handling of union negotiations shows how arrogant they are. It also probably manifests their belief that the technological and organisational re-tooling of the police can make up for the shortfall in central government spending. The rationalization of the police bureaucracy - usually understood in ideological language as making it 'more responsive', filling a 'democratic deficit', 'professionalizing' the force, and so on - is consistent with the neoliberal theory of organisational efficiency in the form of 'public choice theory'. The current Met Commissioner, to whom I'll return in a moment, makes the argument that the police are like every public monopoly in having no competition: they must therefore simulate the basic structures of competitive market efficiency within themselves. But above all, the fact that the Tories are prepared to take such political risks over this - damaging their own public support, as well as their long-standing close relationship with the police - indicates that something fundamental is at stake. That something is the budget, and reducing the burden of taxation on businesses, entrepreneurs, speculators and property owners over the long-term. This is supposed to create an extremely favourable climate for investors, enabling a leaner British capitalism to remain competitive. Rationalising the police force is part of the programme, like it or not.

Thirdly, the government went for the police following the riots, attacking their response as tactically timid. Since the Police Federation had been warning the government of the likelihood of serious social unrest since its election, and since the Home Secretary dismissed these warnings as scaremongering, this was waving a red rag. It was also politically weird when irrational police fetishism was the order of the day. Then, the government announced that it was pursuing further reform along US lines, that it was bringing US 'supercop' Bill Bratton in to advise the government on 'gangs', and that it would be open to an application from him to head up a revamped Metropolitan Police, whose leadership had been taken out by Hackgate. In the end, Bratton didn't work out for them - Cameron thought he was a tough guy advocate of 'zero tolerance' policing. He isn't. But the introduction of this worn out old nostrum pissed off UK police chiefs, who actually aren't very keen on the idea at all. In the end, Bernard Hogan-Howe, who has seemed to be a tacit supporter of the government's reforms and champions something called "total policing", was appointed Commissioner of the Met and given a remit to fundamentally reform the capital's police service.

So, in a very politicised way, policing in the capital is being re-organised in a way that will presumably exert effects right throughout the chain of police authorities in the UK. It is being done in a way that makes policing more confrontational, more explicitly political, and which alienates both the rank and file coppers and a great proportion of the police leadership. Inasmuch as there will be a critical response from social democracy to these developments, it will hinge on the cuts to 'a vital public service', on the inadequacy of the reforms, and on the need to bolster the crime prevention aspect of policing. The Labour right has been most vociferous on the need to protect constabulary independence from politics (meaning, from democratic oversight). Labour's left will have something to say about the politicization of policing, and the growth of authoritarianism alongside the reduction of necessary 'community policing', just as they did under Thatcher. The limits of such an approach, however, become evident when you look at what 'total policing' involves.

***

"Total policing", as practiced by Hogan-Howe in Merseyside and now in London, is not necessarily "total policing" as advocated by some police experts. They argue that it entails breaking down specialization in the police force to allow a more flexible response to emergent problems, whereas Hogan-Howe is committed to retaining specialized units. But inasmuch as it does relate to that basic organizational motif, and Hogan-Howe is explicit in stating that it does, it seems to relate to a set of peculiar institutional and social problems created that arise in the context of austerity. That is, for as long as the political opposition to the Tories is so weak, they can expect the opposition to emerge in a localised, spontaneous, unpredictable manner. In this situation, having big battalions of police ready to fight on all fronts is less important than having a police force with the maximum adaptibility, able to suddenly surround an emerging confrontation and subdue it before it spreads. In practice, and this is where the experts have reservations, it also seems to mean literally having a 'total' architecture of police control in the context of protests and rallies. Rhetorically, Hogan-Howe sticks to the script about ensuring a 'balance' between rights and upholding the law, but even in his highly coded public discourse the emphasis is clearly on treating increased protest as a problem to be contained, demanding an escalated response. The TUC march on November 30th in London was subject to the most extraordinary police restrictions, including the walling off of Trafalgar Square and routes around it with steel - this on a trade union march, where it was highly unlikely that anything was going to 'kick off'.

'Total policing' also entails, of course, a 'total war' on crime, deploying a wide range of tactics - nothing illegal or aggressive, Hogan-Howe insists - to constantly frustrate criminals. Here, the new Met Commissioner's technophilia and fondness for militarised solutions comes through. Thus, instead of spending months surveilling drug gangs, just get a warrant and kick in the door, and reap some surprising rewards. Or, instead of simply going after criminals directly, impound uninsured cars on the premise that 80% of them are owned by people with a criminal conviction, thus impeding the mobility of burglars, robbers etc. (This sounds like something from a popular book expounding behavioural economics.) Technology, Hogan-Howe argues, should also be reconfigured away from 'bureaucratic' apparatuses, toward preventive technology. He contrasts computers which permit number-crunching and 'lists' - how many burglaries were committed in a given area last year - with numberplate-recognition technology which ostensibly allows one to stop crimes in progress, or before they happen.

This is a false dichotomy, since any technology could feasibly be used in the development of prevention tactics. But it illustrates the kind of thinking underpinning this 'total policing' approach. If policing as such reduces complex social phenomena to bureaucratic problems to be resolved through the targeted application of violence, 'total policing' tries to reiterate these bureaucratic problems in the language of technology. And as long as we understand 'technology' in its broad sense, as in a technical process, an ensemble of techniques related to governance, a technology of power, it makes complete sense. Contrary to what one may be tempted to assume, this is policing at its most ideological. For what has happened here is that the dominant ideology has already been materialized in the practices of the state. The dominant ideology, we may say for the sake of brevity, is that which normalizes "ontological and epistemological premises of a particular and historical form of social order". It is an ideology which arises directly from productive relations, from the division of labour and the labour process itself, and which constitutes a particular capitalist form of corporeality.

To elaborate. It is not that the existence of "biological individuals" necessarily generates the ideology of individualism: this is plainly not true, historically, and the concept of "biological individuals" is itself question-begging, avoiding or suppressing the matter of our natural biological dependence. It is that the capitalist mode of production presupposes the individualization of bodies. We are all, in this sense, self-sufficient units engaged in a competitive, self-interested struggle for utility maximization, which is ultimately the aggrandisement of the self. This is not simply a 'theoretical' proposition of capitalism, not a 'premise' in that sense, but a necessary material aspect of its development. We carry out labour processes in relative independence from one another - our cooperation is not enacted by prior engagement and planning, but in the context of market competition. We sell our labour power and purchase the means of its reproduction in this way. In this process, the political, ideological and juridical relations which constitute us as autonomous (rights-bearing, contract-bound, property-owning) subjects are always-already present. Every relation in the capitalist labour process presupposeses this possessive-individualism.

In the practices of the state, specifically for our purposes the legal/juridical practices of the state, these relations are materialised. In the discourses of crime, and law and order, certain social practices and the relations of dominance contained in these practices are normalized and legitimized, whereas practices which disrupt these relations of dominance are criminalized. But in materializing these relations, the state also represents itself as the unifying agent, fusing these individuals, these capitalist bodies, together in a collective national body, the popular-national state. And in so doing, it does not just normalize certain relations, but it universalises them. The ideology of crime already effects this universalisation - mark the point in Hogan-Howe's speech where he says no one benefits from ongoing crime, it is in everyone's interests to stop crime, etc. This 'naturally', in an entirely unforced way, obscures the existence of social interests seriously at odds with the dominant social order, at odds in such a way that they cannot be negotiated or resolved within the extant politico-legal framework.

It is mistaken to think that this is always necessarily effective. The whole field of social (class) relations is a field of struggle, and therefore the materialization of these relations will necessarily be riven with antagonisms. This is clear if you look at how, historically, the police have been rejected in many working class communities - a pattern that has persisted to this day, in a way never quite captured in The Bill, but obvious enough in the context of the riots. This is why the government feels the urgent need to re-organise the relationship between the police and 'local communities'. It may also be one reason why Hogan-Howe feels the need to change the police's approach to 'stop and search', about which more later.

Finally, in materializing the relations of dominance, the state also works to constitute them at every level, and this is where its practices form an ensemble of technologies of power. The technology that we are invited to focus on, to think fondly about, to imagine in thrilling action, is nothing other than the technology involved in the production of i) social relations themselves, and ii) the capitalist bodies in which those relations are inscribed.

***

This helps to explain why the social democratic response is necessarily limited at best. During the miners' strike, Paul Gilroy and Joe Simm published an article, brimming with embarrassing detail, which attacked certain Labour left mythologies on crime and punishment. These commonplace myths held that Thatcher's very real augmentation and militarisation of the state's repressive apparatuses was a fundamental departure from the practice of the welfare state 'golden era'. During the years of class compromise, it was held, policing was focused on clearing up crime in a civic fashion, while national bargaining institutions and parliamentary democracy resolved political differences. Gilroy and Simm demolished this fairly comprehensively, showing that from the first post-war Home Secretary, James Chuter Ede, up to Merlyn Rees, Callaghan's Home Secretary, Labour administrations had always dealt with class conflict, crime, and of course political struggle in Northern Ireland, in a militarized, politicized and authoritarian fashion. The 'golden age' never was.

We will similarly have no difficulty in recalling the extraordinary authoritarianism of New Labour, from ASBOs to the threatened use of troops to break a firefighters' strike. But the point of detailing all of this was and is to indicate the limits of an analysis of policing which treats it centrally as a 'public service' in which a municipal agency delivers 'law and order' to a tax-paying community. Such was a contention not just of Labourites but of marxists such as E P Thompson. That analysis is what led many on the left to blame Thatcher for police misconduct in the 1980s, and to demand more police on the beat. In fact, and this is something I assume Cameron's reformers are well aware of, more police officers on the beat makes practically zero difference to crime rates. This is something that Home Office figures, as well as academic research, constantly indicates. By demanding more police, the left just played into Thatcher's strategy of beefing up capacity in anticipation of major social conflicts.

Policing is about something other than crime. That something else is, to put it crudely, violence and coercion. To put it less crudely, the police force contains within itself both 'legal' and 'illegal' forms of behaviour. It's not just that there is well known corruption, the beating of suspects, harrassing activists, and so on. It is that the apparent "gap between the democratic rhetoric of law and the actual practice of justice", as Gilroy and Simm put it, is expressive of the process of legality in itself. This process supposedly involves the collection, presentation and assimilation of evidence, a set of procedures designed to evaluate the objective truth of a situation: a person broke the law, or they didn't. But the process itself is constituted by power: the power of the police to determine, within limits, the laws and restraints applicable to them and their immediate relations with their subjects, to reconstruct events in a self-justifying way, to frame suspects; the power of judges to act arbitrarily, to sermonise, to unduly restrain solicitors, to (mis)instruct the jury, to inflict harsh punishments and thereby 'send a message'; the power of the media to identify crime 'scandals' or determine a person's guilt or innocence in advance; and so on. The product, 'justice', is a resolution of antagonisms and conflicts in society, generally to the advantage of the dominant classes and to the particular disadvantage of the poorest sections of the working class.

To grasp the specific role of the police in this production process, let me just return to something Hogan-Howe said. He referred to the disproportionate use of 'stop and search' powers by police against black and ethnic minorities. This was a constant flash-point of struggle with the police in the twentieth century, more explicitly racialised in the post-war era. Reducing its use would seem to be a plausible goal. However, it is important not to get too swept up in the idea that there will be a reduction in racist harrassment by police. Hogan-Howe favours a more targeted, smarter 'stop and search' policy - the technological solution again - and a more 'professional' manner of interaction between police and the subject of 'stop and search'. Now, it is notable that this does not any specific legal or even necessarily administrative restraint. Hogan-Howe mentions none, at any rate. Rather, it involves discretion in the use of police powers. And this discretion, coming under the rubric of 'professionalism', is something that actively undermines accountability, because it renders their conduct dependent on the immediate calculable variables of a given situation, for which no one can legislate or even dictate guidelines. Gilroy and Simm point out that the logic of professionalization has always been to free the police from legal accountability.

Moreover, and this is very far from the commonplace idea that the beat copper is an authentic proletarian, this freedom is one enjoyed in relation not just to suspects and courts, but principally in relation to senior officers and managers. It doesn't matter what the official line is, the culture of rank and file policing, the officers' understanding of their role, based on training, ideology, the institutional matrix, the particular kinds of cop sociality, etc. determine far more than managerial edict how crimes are dealt with on a daily basis. This is not to say that managers do not ultimately manage, that legal and political power over the police isn't ultimately centralised through a fairly inflexible hierarchy up to the executive. It is not to say that the average police officer has complete freedom of action. But the information on which policing is based, court judgements processed, and political decisions made, flows to a considerable extent up the chain from the police, giving them a degree of relative autonomy as professional managers of the social body. In the context of techniques such as 'stop and search', this increases police freedoms to define situations as ones requiring intervention and coercion. It empowers them to harrass, to brutalise, to demean, or to abstain from these if they see fit. Reports, ethnographies, research, etc. all show where this leads. The police in reality don't spend much of their time carrying out investigative work. Most of the time, they do little. They walk around, or drive around, or sit around. But when active, they engage in routine confrontation with certain subaltern social groups, pursue vendettas or indeed criminal enterprises. They work up 'results' based on certain tried and tested techniques, which may or may not coincide with actual crimes (of which they deal with a vanishingly small proportion at any rate). And they do all this within their understanding of what their role is in relation to society, formed by racist and sexist occupational sub-cultures, hatred for the 'underclass', and so on. What they're doing is exerting violence and coercion not only in defence of the legal and juridical forms of capitalist social relations, but in the defence of a moral and symbolic order, which expresses their own relationships to the dominant ideology, to the institutions they work in, the (professional middle) class they belong to, and to the social world they police. And that is what policing is.

Syria's revolution, and imperialism

2012-01-30T14:58:00.001Z

The Syrian regime is fighting for its survival. I have no sympathy for it, and will welcome its consumption in a revolutionary overthrow. The struggle in Syria is fundamentally - not exclusively, and not in a crude, unmediated fashion - a class struggle. It is an open war of movement between, for the most part, the most advanced sections of the popular classes and a narrow state capitalist oligopoly which has always dealt with the surplus of political opposition by jailing it or killing it. In that struggle, inasmuch as it matters what I think, I situate myself on the side of the popular opposition. Not in an undifferentiated manner, and not without confronting the political problems (of eg sectarianism, pro-imperialism etc) that will tend to recur amid sections of the opposition to any of these regimes. But without conditions or prevarication.

Yet imperialism has its own reasons, of which reason knows a little, for seeking a different kind of ending to the regime: one which does not empower the currently mobilised masses. And I really think the chances of an armed 'intervention' in Syria under the rubric of the UN have noticeably increased. And how we orient ourselves to that situation politically is, I suspect, going to be an important problem in the coming months. The following pleonastic stream of head-scratching and arm-waving is my contribution to securing that orientation.

***

For what it's worth, this is how I read the international situation with respect to Syria at present. The revolutionary wave that was unleashed over one year ago has reverberated through every major social formation in the Middle East. Because it broke the Mubarak regime, which was a regional lynchpin of a chain of pro-US dictatorships, its effects could not be localised. The response of the US was one of confusion and fright, followed by the bolstering of some of the ancient regimes and simultaneously a very cautious 'tilt' toward some mildly reformist forces (in general the most right-wing and pro-capitalist forces). The Saudi intervention in Bahrain was an instance of the former. The invasion of Libya was an improvised policy along the latter lines. And the position within Yemen has been somewhere between these two, with the US attempting to manage a replacement of the leadership without empowering the actual popular forces calling for its downfall, some of whom were conveniently vaporised by US bombing raids.

In general, I think the liberal imperialists have won the ideological argument that the US must be seen to be on the side of reform, because today's insurgent forces are potentially tomorrow's regimes, and the US will have to deal with them on oil, Israel, and so on. However, the political argument as to what concretely to do about it is much more in the balance. The realpolitikers have dominant positions in the Pentagon, while the lib imps seem to have a strong voice in the State Department. It's schematic, but nonetheless a reasonable approximation of the truth to say that the former are very cautious about any Middle East wars, especially wars fought on a liberal (rather than securitarian) basis, while the latter are much more bellicose. Obama's 'state of the union' address, which undoubtedly had its share of theatrical sabre-rattling, made it clear that he would see the overthrow of the Syrian regime as a logical corollary to the overthrow of Qadhafi, which he boasted was made possible by ending the occupation of Iraq. Moreover, his administration has continued to ratchet up pressure on Iran, through sanctions, and we are beginning to hear serious arguments in the bourgeois media in favour of a war. I am not saying that an attack on Iran is likely in the short or medium term. But any escalation regarding Syria could not but be linked to the escalation against Iran.

Obama and Clinton are also highly responsive to pressure from the European Union and particularly France. Sarkozy is naturally leading the EU's response to the Middle East crisis. He may not have a triple A credit rating, but he does have nuclear weapons, a large army with extensive imperialist experience, and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. (Merkel, who has none of these, is taking a much more passive role.) And since the Sarkozy administration has been embarrassed and damaged by the extent of its relations with dictatorships in the Middle East, its 'tilt' toward potentially pro-EU reformist forces has been all the more pronounced. Britain, consistent with its imperial past in the Middle East, its adjusted but continuing role as a subordinate partner of the US, and the warmed over 'liberal interventionism' embraced by Cameron and Hague, has tended to align with France over both Libya and Syria.

***

Another important actor is the Arab League, and within it the prominent figure of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). In the latest Socialist Register, Adam Hanieh points out the strategic centrality of the GCC to the region as far as imperialism is concerned, due to its pivotal role in the region's capitalist development, its hold of enormous oil resources (a quarter of future production), and its articulation with the world economy. Three GCC states have experienced their own uprisings - Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman - all of which have been repressed with military force and marginalised in the ideological apparatuses. Even so, it is the GCC monarchies which have been most stable in the context of the global recession, and the most active in managing the fall-out. So, while the Arab League has not adopted a single, coherent policy response to the regional uprisings, GCC states have played a key role in manouevering the League to support selective interventions, monitoring missions, sanctions and so on against regionally awkward regimes. The League's support for the intervention in Libya was a decisive factor in enabling it to come about. Saudi Arabia, which has coordinated many policy initiatives to contain the region-wide uprisings, has involved itself deeply in the Syrian context. The involvement of Arab League monitors, received with some scepticism by the Syrian local co-ordination committees, was driven by Saudi Arabia; their recent withdrawal has also been triggered by Saudi Arabia. The subsequent lobbying for a UN resolution calling for the Assad regime to step down and supporting some form of UN intervention, has been led by Britain and France, but strongly supported by the Arab League. Russia is at present the only obstacle to the resolution, due to its long-standing relationship with Assad.

Finally, there is the Syrian opposition. The pro-imperialist bloc, the Syrian National Council (SNC), largely led by exiles based in France and Turkey, has not thus far been representative of the sentiment among the rank and file of Syrian opposition members. There is a left and nationalist contingent to the revolt, moreover, that complicates any attempt to simply annexe the revolt to the wider regional strategies of imperialism. Further, even in Libya, where no left or labour movement existed prior to the overthrow of Qadhafi, and where the revolt was quickly disfigured by a racist component, the opening of the political space subsequent to that overthrow has created a window in which germinal popular forces have been able to assert themselves. A political strike in the oil industry took out a pro-Qadhafi chairman, while unrest in Benghazi has resulted in a serious rift with the governing 'transitional council'. The ongoing struggles in Egypt, which is strategically central to the whole region, can also swiftly make calculations made on an ad hoc basis, moot. Nonetheless, complications and problems in a line of development do not necessarily mean that the line will be impeded. Were the Syrian opposition sufficiently crushed, I think it would be more likely that a pro-intervention 'line' could gain ground, and this would tend to divide the left-nationalist contingent. This has to be the assumption because, as Bassam Hassad has pointed out in his critique of the SNC and various pro-Assad types, the existing support for imperialist intervention is itself already the result of brutalisation, mediated by certain types of politics, (generally both liberal and Islamist).

There is also the problem of sectarianism. As far as I can tell, the majority reject any explicit political appeal along sectarian lines. The banners saying 'no to sectarianism' reflect a popular sentiment. The local co-ordination committees have explicitly opposed sectarianism in the movement. Every substantial report I have encountered indicates the strength of the determination to overcome sectarian politics. Nonetheless, the regime has a sectarian basis and has reinforced sectarian divisions as a technique of statecraft - not fundamentally dissimilar to a protection racket. Even though many of the Christians and Alawites supposedly protected by the regime are among the protesters, it would be astonishing if some sections of the opposition were not themselves driven by sectarian politics. It is noticeable that commentators dismissing the revolt as mere sectarian intrigue tend to focus on the role of the salafists. They exist as a subordinate stratum in the revolt, and they are among a number of forces which are against the regime on sectarian grounds. Far from constituting the main political current in the uprising, they nevertheless represent a problem and a weakness for the opposition. Such divisions are, moreover, always manipulated and amplified whenever imperialism is involved - Iraq, anyone?

Finally, there are divisions over the use of armed force against the regime. The Free Syrian Army (FSA) is a large army of defectors from the regime's armed forces, perhaps including tens of thousands of soldiers - at least 15,000 on recent estimates. This exists, to put it crudely, because the Israeli occupation exists. These soldiers, trained to defend Syria from Israeli aggression, are now defending Syrians from state aggression. But their remit has expanded. While their initial rationale was to defend communities against the security forces, they have consistently engaged in military attacks on the regime's infrastructure. The risk of doing so, of course, is that it brings down the regime's repressive apparatus. There is gossip and speculation to the effect that the FSA represents an imperialist conspiracy. I see little proof of this. Despite representing a layer of military defectors, it looks to have gained real support among the oppressed and exploited. The problem is that most of the movement's organised core has insisted on keeping it peaceful, on tactical grounds: the terrain of violent struggle is not where the regime is weakest. Yet, in some parts of the country, particularly the poorest, the regime is not leaving that option open. So, tactical divisions underpinned by geographical disparities and the regime's tactics of selectively striking out at opposition strongholds, are also a potential weakness. Now since the FSA is loyal to the Syrian National Council, which supports an imperialist intervention, there's an obvious dynamic that could come into play here. That is that in the event of the popular movement being crushed or at least severely set back, the armed component comes to the fore and substitutes for the masses; and in the event of a UN-sanctioned intervention, the FSA becomes an auxiliary of NATO, and alongside the SNC forms the nucleus of a post-Assad regime that is not representative of Syrians.

There is not an immediate move to bomb or invade Syria. There is, however, mounting external pressure to create the conditions that would allow this to happen fairly quickly and expediently. It would be a mistake to assume that because such a path would be riddled with problems, it would not be pursued.

***

With all that said, I intend to elaborate further in an abstract manner before coming up for air. From a marxist perspective, the most fundamental antagonism in the capitalist world system is class antagonism. These, of course, cut through the dominated regimes in the imperialist hierarchy just as much as they do in the dominant regimes. As such, in a popular struggle against these regimes, marxists start from the position of supporting those struggles. To be more specific, in various direct and indirect ways, these antagonisms are amplified by imperialism, inasmuch as the ruling classes of the imperialist chain benefit from the exploitation of workers and popular classes in the dominated societies. This is a fundamental cleavage which, arising from the outward extension of capitalist productive relations from the core, separates the dominant from the dominated formations. As a consequence, marxists also start from an axiomatic position of opposing imperialism. It is not simply that imperialism retards the social development of these societies, but that it constitutes an additional axis of exploitation and oppression.

Within the class and state structures of such societies, moreover, the domination of imperialism is reproduced in various ways, such that the modes of domination within those states cannot be extricated from the question of imperialism. As a consequence, popular movements arising against them will tend to have two targets: a domestic and international opponent. Their struggles will also have a tendency to be internationalized, and to have global effects. By the same token, where you have a national bourgeoisie that has developed in resistance to imperialism, that resistance will also be inscribed in its forms of class rule and in the state through which its political domination is secured. Its legitimacy will depend in part on the national bourgeoisie's promise to organise the society in its self-defence. It follows that where there is a break-up of the regime's social control, the issue of imperialism will be to the fore in its ideological and political strategies for retaining its dominant position. This isn't merely manipulation, nor can it be wished away. It poses a particular challenge to popular movements aiming to depose the regime, which is why the role of the anti-imperialist pole in the Syrian uprising is so critical.

But the reality is that these dying regimes can't effectively resist imperialism. The republics organised under the rubric of Arab nationalism have rarely, even in the rudest health, fared much better against Israeli aggression than the old monarchies, and have often been available for opportunistic or long-term alliances with imperialism. This is even true of partially resistant regimes. Hafez al-Assad's support for Falangists against the Palestinians provided the occasion for Syria's initial invasion of Lebanon. Assad senior was also a participant in the Gulf War alliance against Iraq. His son, Bashar al-Assad, has always notched up plaudits from Washington as a neoliberal reformer - the liberalisation of the economy along lines prescribed by the IMF has been one of the causes of the polarisation of Syrian society, and the narrowing of the regime's social base - and leased some of his jails to Washington during the 'war on terror' to facilitate the torture of suspects. The Islamic Republic has a similarly chequered record with regard to imperialism. So, if the regime's raison d'etre is partially that it is an anti-imperialist bulwark, the obvious answer is that it isn't even very good at this.

So how do we orient to this situation, politically? It seems obvious enough that the greatest bulwark against imperialist intervention in societies like Syria is the fullest and most active mobilisation of the masses themselves. Their defeat at the hands of their regime would represent a green light to those pressing for intervention. This is not the main reason why I think marxists should support these rebellions, but it is a very strong reason for doing so. Second, the organised opposition are for the most part, the most politically advanced sections of the popular classes in both Syria and Iran. They are the ones who, however they represent it, are responding to the class antagonism in a way that we would want the most radical workers in Europe, the United States and beyond to do. For this reason, arguments along the lines that both regimes continue to have a popular base and shouldn't be written off are fundamentally wrong. They do have a popular base, but it is not predominantly organised around any claims or values that the left, especially the revolutionary left, has a stake in. So, one must hope for that base to erode, and rapidly. Third, the same basic political grounds on which one opposes an undemocratic capitalist regime and supports its downfall are those on which one must oppose the regime of US imperialism, and work toward its downfall. Anti-imperialism is an indispensable and not merely occasional aspect of emancipatory politics.

These problems cannot, of course, be resolved with such abstract formulae: but such formulae have a role in reminding us of our political coordinates. In concrete struggles, socialists in the imperialist societies would be trying to maintain relations with the opposition to these regimes, linking with exile groups and supporting their protests. But at the same time, they would be the first to oppose military intervention, and would try to assemble the broadest coalition of forces to stop it. Even if the deep political logic of events suggests that there is a confluence of these positions, in the real time in which such practices are developed it means negotiating some potentially fraught alliances. Serious disagreements over the issue of imperialism are bound to emerge in any solidarity campaign; just as there will be sharp disagreements over the regime in any anti-imperialist campaign. Socialists would have to manage these tensions carefully, while being the ones to consistently argue that the two goals are mutually necessary, rather than opposed.

Salaried bourgeois on "revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie"

2012-01-29T21:51:00.002Z

Zizek's latest for the LRB is proof of that old adage that those who attack multiculturalism in the name of class instantly forfeit their probity on both subjects. Actually, that isn't an old adage. I just made it up. But it is nonetheless true. To explain: Zizek has expended a lot of polemical energy attacking a certain kind of poststructuralist and post-marxist politics for its abandonment of class. But this critique was bound up with a simultaneous attack on 'political correctness', 'multiculturalism', and so forth, in the name of a 'leftist plea for Eurocentrism'. Of course, it was possible to appreciate the former critique without subscribing to the latter. (And if you want a serious critique of post-marxist fashion, you must read Ellen Wood's The Retreat from Class.) But it was never very clear what Zizek understood by 'class', apart from a structuring discursive principle: it was always invoked somewhat dogmatically. If one doesn't expect from Zizek a scientific analysis of social classes, one would at least expect him to know what he thinks classes are. It's quite clear from his latest piece, which re-states some of the theses earlier expounded in Living in the End Times, that he either has no idea, or has a novel theory of classes that he has yet to explain.

Rent, surplus value and the "general intellect"

Zizek's main argument is that the current global upheavals comprise a "revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie" in danger of losing its privileges. He begins by making an argument about the source of ruling class wealth in advanced capitalist formations. Taking the example of Bill Gates, he asserts that the latter's wealth derives not from exploiting workers more successfully - "Microsoft pays its intellectual workers a relatively high salary" - but "because Microsoft has imposed itself as an almost universal standard, practically monopolising the field, as one embodiment of what Marx called the ‘general intellect’, by which he meant collective knowledge in all its forms". In other words, Microsoft doesn't extract surplus value but rent, through its monopolistic control of information. This is paradigmatic of "the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge". The influence of post-operaismo in all this is clear: Zizek accepts and expounds the idea that intellectual labour is "immaterial" labour, which he maintains has a predominant or "hegemonic" role in late capitalism. On this basis, he asserts that orthodox marxist value theory has become problematic, as "immaterial" labour simply cannot be appropriated in the way that "material" labour can.

Before going any further, just note that this whole line of argument is a red herring. Even accepting the narrow focus on Microsoft's "intellectual workers" as a paradigm of 21st century work, their "relatively high salary" has no direct bearing on whether they are efficiently exploited. Or rather, if it indicates anything, it would tend to be that they are likely to be far more efficiently exploited than other workers. Globally, this is the trend: the higher the wages, the higher the rate of exploitation. It is also the trend historically: the famous high wages offered by Ford were possible in part because the techniques of Taylorism allowed the more effective extraction of relative surplus value. (The distinction between relative and absolute surplus value would be a fairly basic one for anyone claiming to operate within a marxisant radius.) This is not to say that all of Microsoft's "intellectual workers" are therefore diamond proletarians. Classes are formed in the context of class struggle, and the extent to which these workers are 'proletarianised' or 'embourgeoised' will depend on how successfully managers have subordinated the labour process, etc. Nor does it strike me as a wholly unreasonable proposition that Gates' main source of added value is monopoly rent - it is arguable, at least. But Zizek's argument in support of this idea is simply a non-sequitur.

Marx, the sock puppet

Zizek goes on to explain how his approach differs from that of orthodox marxism, and much of his argument hinges on how he sets up Marx as a foil. Thus: "The possibility of the privatisation of the general intellect was something Marx never envisaged in his writings about capitalism (largely because he overlooked its social dimension)." Setting aside the curious claim that Marx "overlooked" the "social dimension" of capitalist productive relations, it is worth re-stating what Zizek undoubtedly already knows: the writings on the 'general intellect' are part of an exceptionally brief fragment in the Grundrisse, and would thus be hard pressed to 'envisage' anything; nonetheless, the description of the "general intellect" in the Grundrisse as a "direct force of production" manifest in the "development of fixed capital" assumes that the "general intellect" is already privatized.

What Zizek means, I assume, is that Marx did not anticipate the monopolization of "general social knowledge", and therefore did not anticipate that the major class struggles in an advanced capitalist formation might be over the share of rent rather than over the direct extraction of surplus value. This is clear in the way that he treats the example of oil. For, according to Zizek: "There is a permanent struggle over who gets this rent: citizens of the Third World or Western corporations. It’s ironic that in explaining the difference between labour (which in its use produces surplus value) and other commodities (which consume all their value in their use), Marx gives oil as an example of an ‘ordinary’ commodity. Any attempt now to link the rise and fall in the price of oil to the rise or fall in production costs or the price of exploited labour would be meaningless: production costs are negligible as a proportion of the price we pay for oil, a price which is really the rent the resource’s owners can command thanks to its limited supply." So, this raises two questions: i) did Marx really not anticipate in his theory the possibility that rent extraction would be a source of major class struggles?; and ii) as a corollary, does the example of oil and its absurdly high prices undermine the labour theory of value?

This is fairly straightforward to establish. First of all, the evidence of Marx's writings is that he understood that there could exist a class or fraction of people whose income depended on rent extraction. Marx discussed two main types of rent. These were, differential rent, and absolute ground rent. To explain the first type of rent, it is necessary to specify some implications of the labour theory of value, which Zizek maintains is outmoded. First of all, if the value of goods is determined by the socially necessary labour time invested in them, it would tend to follow that if less labour time is needed to make the goods then over time the exchange value of these goods would decline. But the fact is that producers are in competition with one another for market share, so will tend to invest in labour saving devices so as to reduce their labour costs. And even if, over time, the replication of this tendency throughout the economy - enforced by imperative of competition - the result is to reduce the total profit on the goods, the immediate effect is to enrich whoever temporarily has a more efficient firm as a result. They obtain a differential rent because their investment enables them to obtain a larger share of a diminishing pool of surplus value. The second type of rent, absolute rent, needs no lengthy exposition here, but can be said to be that type of rent that would most naturally arise in monopoly situations. At any rate, it's reasonable to suppose that Bill Gates' wealth must embody some of both types of rent, alongside an unknown quantity of direct surplus labour.

Secondly, Marx's labour theory of value is not rebutted by the fluctuations of oil prices. The theory is not supposed to explain price fluctuations, which respond to supply and demand. The exchange value is an average across the productive chain; there is no mathematically fixed relation between the price of one particular commodity and the exchange value that exists as an average over the whole class of commodities which changes over time. Nor is the theory endangered by the fact that the relation between supply and demand can be manipulated in monopoly situations to drastically increase the actual price of a good. I am well aware that there are valid controversies regarding the labour theory of value. Nor do I imagine that Kliman's heroic work will completely save the orthodox theory from its doubters, many of whom aren't even operating on the same theoretical terrain. But Zizek's challenge is, purely on theoretical grounds, ineffectual. It is a straw man that he dissects to such devastating rhetorical effect in this article. For the sake of concision, I omit other instances in which he travesties Marx, both in this and other articles - we'd be here for a long, tedious time.

The "salaried bourgeoisie"

Zizek uses terms extraordinarily loosely. Take the "salaried bourgeoisie", whose "revolt" apparently motivates this piece. They are said to be leading most of the strikes taking place. Zizek thus presumably includes in this groups like the public sector workers who have struck in most European countries. Yet, he doesn't say what makes them a "salaried bourgeoisie". His useage implies a novel class theory, but the closest he comes to defining this term is where he specifies that he means those who enjoy a 'privilege', being a surplus over the minimum wage. Now, it's not at first clear what he means by the minimum wage. There are, of course, legally enforced minimum wages in a number of advanced capitalist societies, but he doesn't mean that. That would be arbitrary and would tell us nothing directly about productive relations. But mark what he does mean by the 'minimum wage': "an often mythic point of reference whose only real example in today’s global economy is the wage of a sweatshop worker in China or Indonesia". This no less arbitrary, as Zizek himself acknowledges.

Now, while the manner of his exposition implies a critical distance from such concepts, he nonetheless deploys them, arguing that they are themselves constitutive of a politically and discursively constructed division of labour: "The bourgeoisie in the classic sense thus tends to disappear: capitalists reappear as a subset of salaried workers, as managers who are qualified to earn more by virtue of their competence (which is why pseudo-scientific ‘evaluation’ is crucial: it legitimises disparities). Far from being limited to managers, the category of workers earning a surplus wage extends to all sorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and artists. The surplus takes two forms: more money (for managers etc), but also less work and more free time (for – some – intellectuals, but also for state administrators etc). The evaluative procedure used to decide which workers receive a surplus wage is an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence; the surplus wage exists not for economic but for political reasons: to maintain a ‘middle class’ for the purpose of social stability."

In this sense, the "surplus wage" that characterises the exploitation of the proletariat by the "salaried bourgeoisie" is a discursive fiction, unanchored in real productive relations. Still, having thus qualified his terms, it is nonetheless clear that it corresponds to some material processes. After all, if the labour theory of value no longer adequately captures the workings of surplus extraction, and if the 'hegemonic' pattern of accumulation is the extraction of rent, then the 'surplus wage' has some material basis as that which is paid out of a share of the rent (largely extracted by Western corporations from the citizens of the Third World). Further, Zizek goes on to maintain that the efficacy of such 'classes' is not the less real for their being political and discursive. It explains current political behaviour, he says (and here I must quote at length):

"The notion of surplus wage also throws new light on the continuing ‘anti-capitalist’ protests. In times of crisis, the obvious candidates for ‘belt-tightening’ are the lower levels of the salaried bourgeoisie: political protest is their only recourse if they are to avoid joining the proletariat. Although their protests are nominally directed against the brutal logic of the market, they are in effect protesting about the gradual erosion of their (politically) privileged economic place. Ayn Rand has a fantasy in Atlas Shrugged of striking ‘creative’ capitalists, a fantasy that finds its perverted realisation in today’s strikes, most of which are held by a ‘salaried bourgeoisie’ driven by fear of losing their surplus wage. These are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being reduced to proletarians. Who dares strike today, when having a permanent job is itself a privilege? Not low-paid workers in (what remains of) the textile industry etc, but those privileged workers who have guaranteed jobs (teachers, public transport workers, police). This also accounts for the wave of student protests: their main motivation is arguably the fear that higher education will no longer guarantee them a surplus wage in later life."

Zizek goes on to qualify this observation - each protest must be taken on its own merits, we can't dismiss them all, etc. - but is clearly arguing that the general thrust of the strikes and protests is in defense of relative privilege. This is especially true of the "special case" of Greece, where "in the last decades, a new salaried bourgeoisie (especially in the over-extended state administration) was created thanks to EU financial help, and the protests were motivated in large part by the threat of an end to this". So far the only evidence offered for the existence of this 'salaried bourgeoisie' is in its ostensibly discernible, concrete effects in the political behaviour of social layers affected by crisis. Yet this behaviour can be explained far more efficiently by the class interests of fractions of the proletariat who, due in part to superior organisation vis-a-vis their employers, have obtained a degree of job security and in some cases relatively high wages. In which case, the concept is useless.

As is typical with Zizek, each step in his argument is characterised by an astonishing lack of precision, a slipshod and loose useage of terms, straw man attacks, sock puppetry and so on. There are lots of fireworks, but little real theoretical action: all show, no tell, an empty performance of emancipatory politics. And I just thought I'd spell that out because so many people messaged, prodded and otherwise cajoled me into criticising this latest from Zizek. I hope you're satisfied.

Terrifyingly real: Poulantzas and the capitalist state

2012-01-25T20:08:00.000Z

The theory of politics and the politics of theory

This is part II of the long delayed Poulantzas series, this time on the problem of the capitalist state. Poulantzas made several distinctive, ground-breaking contributions to state theory. Or, I should say, to capitalist state theory since in his view a generic theory of the state was impossible. One can derive some "general theoretical propositions" about the state from the study of its types, but they "can never be anything other than applied theoretical-strategic notions". The two major works of his dealing with the capitalist state are Political Power and Social Classes (1968 - hereafter PPSC), written within an althusserian problematic, and State, Power, Socialism (1978 - SPS), which advances a relational view of the state and dispenses with some of the earlier althusserian themes.

I will disappoint some people by not immediately treating in detail the politics of each theoretical phase, but I do intend to return to this in a later post. Suffice to say for now that the two major works cover a shift from 'Marxism-Leninism' of a more or less critical variety (PPSC, finished days before the occupation of the Sorbonne and the beginning of the May 1968 uprising in France) to a left variant of Eurocommunism (SPS, published during a crisis of marxism, especially of althusserian marxism, and containing passages aimed at the nouveau philosophes). Strategically, and with regard to the capitalist state, this involved a shift from a nominally revolutionary approach to a 'centrist' approach - centrism, in the terminology of the Third International, being a position suspended between reform and revolution.

In each case, Poulantzas was arguing for a strategy commensurate with the politics of the communist formation (the Greek Communist Party of the Interior - KKE-I) that he was a member of. This breakaway from the Greek Communist Party (KKE) was active in the resistance to the colonels from 1968-1974, and represented the non-Stalinist wing of the party. It was initially one of the more left-wing communist parties, but moved to the right throughout the 1970s. Confounding expectations, this did not improve its standing among Greek voters. In the 1977 elections, it was the party advocating hardline Stalinism (the KKE) that reaped the lion's share of the communist vote, while the KKE-I's modernising Eurocommunist position received a derisory vote. The KKE-I was famed among the intelligentsia, but never broke out of its ghetto of less than 3% of the vote, with membership in the region of 12-14,000 in contrast to the KKE's votes of 9-11%, and membership of between 100-120,000. The fact that Poulantzas' major Eurocommunist text followed the 1977 result suggests that even if he had been aware of the historic failure awaiting the Eurocommunist project, he would have continued in the same direction as he saw no future in orthodox alignments, and expected Stalinism be superseded by some form of 'democratic socialism'.

Before delving into Poulantzas' theoretical innovations, I must make a note on his method. As he said in his critique of Miliband, any historical materialist approach to the capitalist state must clearly state its epistemological criteria in order to properly situate the concrete historical data it works with. Absent this, it becomes an exercise in empiricism. His own works, particularly PPSC, are to a very large extent concerned with outlining these protocols. His approach, as such, has been taxed with the stigma of 'formalism' and (pace Miliband) 'hyper-abstractionism'. The burden of this criticism is that Poulantzas spent more time parsing texts from the marxist canon and arguing through their implications, than examining concrete state formations. This is not entirely unfair, and to the extent that it is true, Poulantzas was being typically althusserian: a close, symptomatic scrutiny of texts being the modus operandi of the Althusser Circle. But the point is overstated. The survey of the typologies of the capitalist state in PPSC, for instance, largely draws on current sociological and historical research. The argument about the ambiguous role of state personnel in SPS draws from the immediate experience of May 1968 in France. Moreover, there is something praiseworthy in Poulantzas' re-evaluation of first principles, the painstaking clarification of concepts. Though this responded to concrete political problems, usually crises - of Greek communism, of democracy, of marxism, etc - his response was far from intellectually defensive. He took theoretical risks in order to make marxism adequate to the present. Only by doing so is it possible to make any sort of progress.

'Relative Autonomy', the 'effect of isolation', and the regional theory of the capitalist state

In PPSC, Poulantzas' approach to the capitalist state was, as I have suggested, conducted within the problematic of althusserian marxism. That is, he sought to understand the state in terms of the specific role of the political 'instance' or level within the capitalist mode of production. Recall that for Althusser, the mode of production is a 'structure of structures', an articulation of political, ideological and economic levels in which the economic level indirectly determines the content of the political and ideological levels 'in the last instance'. At the same time, the political and ideological levels intervene in the economic in an 'overdetermining' fashion - that is, the effects and 'contradictions' that accumulate at one level of the structure are condensed in each point of the whole. (I hope this explanation makes some sense - a lot is being omitted here.) For Poulantzas, therefore, to understand the capitalist state was to understand: i) the role of the political instance in the capitalist mode of production; ii) the specific way in which the political intervenes in the economic, and is determined by the economic in the last instance, and iii) the relationship of the state to the field of class relations, and thus class practices.

Under capitalism, the political has a certain 'relative autonomy' from the economic and ideological levels. (Please bear in mind in what follows that the term 'relative' is as important as the term 'autonomy'.) One way of arguing this might be to claim that capitalism is distinguished by an extrusion of politics from direct relations of production and surplus extraction. Whereas under feudalism, the levels are 'mixed', with those appropriating surplus labour also wielding direct political power, they are separated out under capitalism. But Poulantzas rejects this. Rather, his analysis rests on the so-called 'effect of isolation'. That is, under capitalism the labour process is subject to both collectivization and separation. On the one hand, labour processes are carried out in a more dependent, cooperative manner than ever before; on the other hand, they are within certain limits carried out independently of one another, in a competitive fashion, "without the producers having to organize their cooperation to begin with". At the level of politics, this results in the setting up of agents in the productive process as 'individuals/subjects'. This is not merely an ideology but a real juridical relation, which intervenes in and structures the productive process so that agents actually experience socio-economic relations as fragmented and atomised processes. The 'effect of isolation' is thus "terrifyingly real". It "has a name: competition", and it affects not just direct productive relations but "the whole ensemble of socio-economic relations".

The capitalist state in this sense appears as the "strictly political unity" of these relations. "It presents itself as the representative of the 'general interest' of competing and divergent economic interests", whose class character is concealed precisely by the isolation effect. The state thus systematically conceals its own political class character, representing itself as a popular-national state, with "the people-nation" "institutionally fixed as the ensemble of 'citizens' or 'individuals' whose unity is represented by the capitalist state". The effect of isolation is the "real substratum" of this state. But it is precisely in "putting itself forward as the representative of the unity of the people-nation" that the state assumes this relative autonomy with respect to class relations.

Another way to put this is that if the effect of isolation on economic struggles tends to impede class unity, resulting in sectional struggles, it is at the level of political practice that this unity must be created. Thus, the political class struggle operates in a relatively autonomous fashion with respect to economic class struggles. The capitalist state has to be seen in light of the political practice of the dominant classes, whose purpose is to produce class unity out of the isolation of their economic struggles, and at the same time constitute their political interests as the "general interest of the people/nation". The relative autonomy of the capitalist state enables it to better organise the unity of the dominant classes, and to represent their interests as those of the society as a whole: this, the organisation of the dominant classes, and the disorganisation of the dominated classes, is the primary political function of the state. It is the indispensable 'factor in unity', without which the bourgeoisie's political dominance is unthinkable. This leads us to the question of hegemony, and the 'power bloc'.

The capitalist state, hegemony and the 'power bloc'

Alongside Althusser, Gramsci is one of the major influences in Poulantzas' thought. Even where Poulantzas felt compelled to upbraid Gramsci's 'historicism' in his earlier work, a tendency which Peter Thomas notes is "essentially discontinuous with or rhetorically external to his concrete analyses of Gramsci's theses", the trend is toward a growing articulation of his research project with that of Gramsci. Concessions to althusserian fashion obscured this. (In fairness to Althusser, his own later writing on Gramsci was far less schematic, and far less driven by the dismissive typologies of his earlier work.) In PPSC, he takes over the concept of 'hegemony' and seeks to develop it with specific reference to its role in the political dominance of the ruling classes.

In Gramsci, hegemony has several senses. In one sense, it refers to the hegemony of the proletariat within a wider anticapitalist class alliance incorporating peasants. To this extent, the concept is continuous with its useage in the Russian context. In another sense, it refers to a particular state of ruling class dominance. In this perspective, hegemony is a brief historical moment, which has to be constantly worked on and constructed, in which the ruling class does not merely rule, but actually leads politically and ideologically. In such moments, the bourgeoisie, or a fraction thereof, sets itself up as the leading class/fraction in a world-historic mission, and uses a combination of repressive, ideological and material means to incorporate subordinate classes and fractions into a system of class alliances supporting this mission. But aside from these exceptional moments, one can also speak of hegemonic political practices - practices through which a dominant class or fraction aspires to hegemony. This is the sense in which Stuart Hall argues that the coalition government is pursuing a hegemonic project, attempting to fundamentally alter the popular 'common sense' in a reactionary direction.

Poulantzas is at this stage solely interested in developing the concept of hegemony in so far as it accounts for "the political practices of dominant classes in developed capitalist formations". The concept of hegemony is thus used in two senses. First, it indicates the relation of the dominant classes of a capitalist formation to the state, and the constitution of their interests as the 'general interest'. This reinforces the concept of the state as the factor in unity, transposing struggles from a corporate to a universal plane. Second, it specifies the specific form in which the dominant classes unity is secured: through an alliance of classes and fractions, in which one class or fraction (usually a fraction) is dominant, or hegemonic. This alliance, Poulantzas calls the 'power bloc'.

The need for a power bloc derives from the nature of capitalist production relations, which ensures that the ruling class is "constitutively divided into fractions" (financial, commercial, industrial, rentier, and so on). The isolation effect, moreover, is not compensated for by any other factor - such as the factor of 'collective labour' in the working class. This means that the dominant fractions and classes are incapable of raising themselves to the hegemonic level through their own parties: they need some other basis for unity. The power bloc comprises a "contradictory unity of dominant classes or fractions" under the leadership of a hegemonic class or fraction. But the relation of this bloc to the state is not one of a 'sharing out' of power among the fractions. "In the last analysis," says Poulantzas, "it is always the hegemonic class or fraction which appears to hold state power in its unity". As such, it is the hegemonic class or fraction that assures the unity of the power bloc and acts as its protector.

Returning to the argument about the relative autonomy of the state ‘machine’ from class relations, it seems here that the 'Caesarist' tendencies discussed in Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire are immanent to the capitalist type of state. Far from the state being dependent on any one of the fractions of the dominant classes, far from it securing its unity from an already unified hegemonic class or fraction, it is "the factor of the political unity of the power bloc under the protection of the hegemonic class or fraction. In other words, it is the factor of hegemonic organisation of this class or fraction". The state does not arbitrate between already constituted social forces. Rather: "Everything happens precisely as if the state permanently played the role of political organizer of the power bloc".

Poulantzas goes on to argue that the play of institutions within the state apparatus is directly related to the relations of power within the power bloc. Though it functions as a "centralised unity", it has a set of formal separations - between legislative, judicial and executive power. Setting aside the judicial branch, the distinction between legislative and executive power is here treated as a power relation and not merely a juridical separation: "it corresponds both to the precise relations of political forces and to real differences in the functioning of state institutions". Depending on the state in question, one of the branches always dominates, usually either the executive or legislative branch, and thus constitutes the nodal point where unitary institutionalized power is concentrated within the state organization. The formal separation of powers reflects an internal index of subordination, inasmuch as the hegemonic class or fraction controls the dominant branch of the state. Here, Poulantzas is drawing on Althusser's reading of Montesquieu, who coined the doctrine of the separation of powers. In this reading, the relations between executive and legislative branch (separated into lower and upper chambers) of the French state immediately following the revolution, relates to a certain conception of the relations between social forces. The royalty controlled the executive, the nobility the upper legislature, and the ‘people’/bourgeoisie the lower legislature. The interplay between these institutions reflected a struggle for power among these dominant classes, with the less powerful branches playing the role of allowing certain resistances on the part of subordinate fractions within the power bloc: but the centralised unity of the state remains, and power, far from being actually separated out or distributed, continues to be concentrated in the dominant branch.*

The relational approach: the state traversed by class struggle from top to bottom

Thus far we have encountered the capitalist state as a relatively autonomous force; a class state in a 'popular-national' form, organising the hegemonic struggles of the dominant classes; and a centralised unity acting as the factor in the unity of the power bloc, and by extension the disunity of those excluded from power. This approach has been taxed with functionalism, and this is not the only place where a functionalist problematic can be detected in the formulations used by Poulantzas. To describe the state as the 'factor in unity' of the dominant classes implies a degree of internal unity and consistency that would make destabilisation and disintegration hard to imagine. But we don't have to read it in that way. It's possible to see this 'function' of the state as, if you like, a necessary condition for bourgeois rule, which may or may not be adequately fulfilled at any given moment. The only way to redeem the insight, though, would be to separate from the functionalist problematic and incorporate it into a new epistemological framework.

In his later work, SPS, Poulantzas made several adjustments along these lines. In place of the focus on the regional autonomy of the political, Poulantzas came to argue that "political-ideological relations are already present in the actual constitution of the relations of production". Therefore, the position of the capitalist state vis-a-vis the economy was not to be resolved by declaring its 'relative autonomy', but rather by showing that this position was just "the modality of the State's presence in the constitution and reproduction of the relations of production". Poulantzas did not deny the relative separation of economic and political regions, but rather laid a different emphasis, stressing their "mutual relation and articulation - a process that is effected in each mode of production through the determining role of the relations of production". This mutual relation and articulation, incidentally, explains why there can be no general theory of the state.

So, rather than start from a 'regional' analysis of different 'instances' in the capitalist mode of production, he re-energised his whole approach with a 'relational' analysis of the state as a strategic field brought into existence by the intersection of ruling class power networks. In breaking with Althusser's "legalist image" of the state as a sovereign legal subject guarding the perimeters of economic sphere that otherwise reproduced itself independently, he held that the state was a set of relations that actively constituted and reproduced the economic sphere. Far from being a juridico-political organisation standing over the economy, it concentrated within itself the political and ideological relations already present in the relations of production; it incarnated those relations, inscribing them (thus, the political and ideological dominance of the ruling class) in the "institutional materiality" of the state itself.

The "strategic field" of the state, in Poulantzas' terms, is defined quite broadly. While Foucault and Deleuze charged marxists with ignoring the political power relations in institutions beyond the state, such as asylums, hospitals, sporting apparatuses etc., for Poulantzas these were "included within the strategic field of the state". This is not to say that these were constituted as sites of power by the state: power in the marxist sense goes well beyond the state even in the broad sense understood here. It is to say that these sites of power "do not stand in an external relationship to the state", which increasingly penetrates every sphere of social reality, "dissolving thereby the traditionally 'private' texture". This understanding of the "strategic field" brings into focus one of the problems for the analysis of state forms, that of 'parapolitics'. Take, for example, the Ku Klux Klan organisations of the 1950s. These were not bodies with an explicit, codified relationship to any public authority. Yet, their illicit hierarchies and relations (with governors, police commissioners etc), their protection of explicit hierarchies through the administration of racial violence, and their relation to the political class struggles of the Southern ruling classes, all place them firmly in the "strategic field" of Southern state forms. They were partially, but not wholly, constituted as political powers by the state. They did not occupy privileged sites of political power, but power was delegated to them by those who did occupy them. This ambiguous position does not only manifest itself in the case of covert political violence. One of the ways in which neoliberal statecraft manifests itself, for example, is the proliferation of so-called 'quangos' which perform state-like functions within a remit defined by the state. There is a whole ensemble of institutions, stretching out well beyond the public kernel of policemen, bureaucrats, armies etc which are not understood to be part of the state but which nonetheless fall into its strategic field. And beyond that, there is no social reality that does not in some way constitute itself in relation to the state.

Without further spelling out what forces are at play in this "strategic field", however, the phrase risks becoming a mere incantation. The major forces at work in any society are class forces. The positioning of these forces in the strategic field of political power depends on the relations of production, and the social division of labour that emerges from it. For Poulantzas, the latter mainly manifests itself in the form of a division between mental and manual labour. The state constantly re-constitutes this division, through the education system and by other means, and is itself the distinctive embodiment of intellectual labour. By reproducing this division, moreover, it deprives the popular classes of the intellectual skills necessary to penetrate its bureaucratic discourses. This case is simply unconvincing in its original form, and leads to unsustainable conclusions about the formation of classes. (See the previous post on Poulantzas' thinking about the division of labour and classes in contemporary capitalism). Given the proletarianisation of occupations that involve intellectual labour, I would suggest that we might better think of the division as one between executive/managerial and menial/subordinate labour. With that adjustment, we can then return to the relationship between the state and the dominant classes.

In SPS, Poulantzas held to his previous argument regarding the primary political role of the state, viz. the organization of the dominant classes, and disorganization of the dominated classes. It does this by unifying a power bloc politically, while linking fractions of the dominated classes to the power bloc in various ways so that they are unavailable for counter-hegemonic struggles. But his new methodological approach required a different understanding of this role. For, if the power relations that were condensed in the state were primarily class relations, it followed that the strategic field of the state must be traversed by class struggles. Rather than merely allowing for resistances by fractions within the power bloc, he laid a great deal more emphasis on strategies pursued by dominated classes either within the state, or impacting on the state. He allowed for beach-heads of resistance on the part of popular classes within different layers of the state. These were by no means equivalent to the centres of power within the state occupied by the dominant classes: this would imply a permanent state of dual power within the capitalist state itself. But the strategic calculations of the latter could be modified by the struggle of popular classes. We might add that the divisions mentioned earlier, between menial and executive labour, are reproduced within the state apparatus. (It would be difficult to understand the public sector strikes otherwise - unless, like Zizek, you maintain that they represent the revolt of a salaried bourgeoisie struggling for privileges and a share of rent extracted from the proletariat. In which case, you're easily gulled.) So the state is riven with class struggles. But it is also exceeded by them. For though it attempts to incorporate class relations on terms favourable to the power bloc, because these relations are characterised by struggle they always exceed the capacity of apparatuses to incarnate them. This is certainly some distance from a 'functionalist' treatment of the state, and it helps us to understand more precisely certain aspects of our own situation. After all, one of the weaknesses (far from the major one) of the anti-cuts movement in the UK is the weakness of political representation of the working class, the absence of footholds in the state at most levels, including the lowest council chamber. We cannot be indifferent to the fact that only Caroline Lucas and a few Labour lefts even try to conduct such representation in the commons. We need only look at the Linke to see the difference that such representation, such footholds, can make to class struggles outside of parliament. At the same time, such an understanding does not, to my mind, lend itself to the substitution of parliamentary struggles for all others.

Poulantzas also refined his thinking on the state's role in the production of hegemony, arguing that the distinction between repressive and ideological state apparatuses in Althusser was misleading (we know from our own experience that repressive institutions such as the police and courts have a strong ideological role). In addition, I have said that the linking of different subaltern fractions to the power bloc is a role of the state, but in SPS Poulantzas clarifies that this is not only a political or ideological operation: the state must constantly produce a material substratum for mass consent: "even fascism was obliged to undertake a series of positive measures, such as absorption of unemployment, protection and sometimes improvement of the real purchasing power of certain sections of the popular masses, and the introduction of so-called social legislation. (Of course, this did not exclude increased exploitation through a rise in relative surplus-value - quite the contrary.)" Again, this is an advance on PPSC, and in those accounts which overestimate the power of the 'ideological state apparatuses'.

One of the problems that remains was hinted at by Goran Therborn. Therborn, writing before the publication of SPS, contended that for all of Poulantzas' innovations in state theory, he paid remarkably little heed to the internal organisation of the state, and specifically the state apparatus. But with SPS and its reflections on the "institutional materiality" of the state, its argument that the institutions-apparatuses of the state concretise the relations of political-ideological dominance in the wider society, we can no longer substantiate that claim. Yet there remains an aporia, as far as I can tell: that is, the implications of the state's internal organisation for political strategy are drawn out incorrectly. So, for example, when Poulantzas writes on the possibility of a transition to democratic socialism, he focuses on the differing class locations of state personnel. In normal situations, the state is so organised that a general 'line' will emerge from the interplay of strategies and tactics of the dominant classes with the institutions of the state itself, and that 'line' will successfully be imposed on dissident and antagonistic elements within the state. But during a crisis, he argues, of a scale like that which shook France in May 1968, the diverging class positions will result in a fracturing of the state personnel which, if sensitively handled, can help effect the transition. I think this places far too much weight on the strategic significance of such divisions, and doesn't follow through on the correct (to my mind) understanding that he has earlier developed, the implication of which is that the dominant classes would continue to command the most strategically important positions within the centralised unity that is the state.

Now, this doesn't result in a straightforwardly reformist position on Poulantzas' part. He still maintains that the working class must build structures of rank-and-file self-government to challenge liberal democratic forms of representation. But this is as much to apply pressure to the capitalist state as to develop alternative, socialist forms of democracy. The strategic perspective that follows from this mediates between reform and revolution. Perhaps it says something that the only place where something like this strategy has been implemented and yielded some gains - not socialism, of course - is the highly exceptional case of Venezuela where the struggle of the popular classes really has traversed the state right to the top with no serious reversal as yet in sight. (Poulantzas as a co-author of "21st Century socialism" - anyone?) But I think that if Poulantzas' superior insights are taken seriously, their logic is revolutionary.

*Analyses of this sort suggest themselves for the British state system, with its crown-in-parliament, its commons, its lords spiritual and temple, and its judiciary centralised in the executive. Alas, barring a few beach-heads of popular resistance in the commons, the whole thing is bourgeois all the way down.

The state of the 18th Brumaire

2012-01-20T00:27:00.000Z

You have been penned in, kettled, assaulted and arrested. You have had your protest broken up, your occupation invaded, your picket line disbanded. Now you're facing something called 'Total Policing'. Wherever you try to organise, you confront the state as the constant factor in your disorganisation. Whether 'personated', as Marx puts it, by the riot cop, the senior civil servant, or the coalition minister, you find it is always there, resourceful, organised, centralised, almost always one or two steps ahead, almost always with a monopoly on political initiative. Of course, the state represents itself as a popular, democratic institution, upholding the general will, maintaining law and order as the condition for the full participation of each in the political community. Yet your experience suggests that something else is at work, and you have to ask: what sort of thing is the state? Is it even a thing? Is it an autonomous power over and against society, or does it 'represent' sectional (class) interests within it? Is it an 'instrument' of the powerful or a venue of contestation? What are its boundaries? Where are its weaknesses? How does its power accumulate, and disintegrate?

***

I was talking to Dan Hind several years ago over a fried lunch, and he explained his interest in what he termed "the mystery of the state". I said, rather crudely, that I thought there was no mystery. I invoked Lenin's famous de-mystification: the state is special bodies of armed men, prisons, bureaucracy, and so on. He looked at me like I was a mad monk reciting arcane scripture. It was a fair cop. My answer was question-begging, rather like defining a football game as special bodies of uniformed men, balls, goalposts, etc. I hadn't resolved the mystery at all, merely listed the obvious clues. After all, football also consists of relations between its uniformed men, and between those and their managers, and in turn between those and their owners and shareholders, and between all of these and media companies, and shopping outlets, and paying fans. It consists of a social-structural 'script', a set of codified rules with definite social origins, class-based cultural forms, political antagonisms (Rangers v Celtic etc), mass spectacle, commodity production, and so much more. The "mystery of football", aside from its popularity, could only be resolved by disclosing the complex, mediated relations between all of these aspects. I returned to my fried egg, dejectedly poking holes in the disgustingly glutinous texture of the solidified white. In fairness, my summary of Lenin was rather... summary. The widely recited phrase from State and Revolution is an extremely bowdlerised version of the argument if left at that. Lenin was interested in the relationship between the state and social classes, its origin and development, its strategic role in class struggles, and so on. His engagement with the marxist tradition - in what is, after all, intended to be a rousing pamphlet, a guide to action rather than a monograph or treatise - is extraordinarily sharp, even if he ultimately cleaves to an instrumentalist account of the state, which I think marxists must reject. But enough about my namesake.

The mystery of the state would not go away, because the state would not go away. Far from retreating to the perimeters of the 'economic', guarding its boundaries but otherwise allowing 'civil society' to go about its business in laissez-faire fashion, it was everywhere, pro-actively formulating and implementing agendas and strategies, domestically and overseas. War, sanctions, special forces operations, internment, deportation and special rendition are only the most brute, mail-fisted manifestations of the state. What about the coordination of ideological agendas on 'Britishness', 'integration', 'culture' and so on? What about the coordination of bank bailouts, and subsequent austerity programmes? What about 'workfare' and privatization? In fact, it seemed increasingly apparent that whereas the capitalist class itself was constantly divided, constantly at its own throat, rarely capable of sustained class initiatives by itself, the state was always there doing something that in one way or another furthered the reproduction of capitalist relations in new ways. And insofar as it did this, it seemed to be not just a state but a capitalist state.

Part of the mystery dissolved there and then. It had been a mistake to try to penetrate the core of the state as a sui generis form. There can be no general theory of the state. The state is not an eternal form that recurs through successive ages, modes of production and social formations, and to read it as such tends to lead to a Hobbesian view of the state as an instrument for the suppression of 'anarchy' (social conflict). At most, one can have a general, descriptive outline of what distinguishes a state apparatus (special bodies of armed men, etc), or a genealogy of types of state, noting the factors that recur (though even these factors will have an entirely different content, and stand in different relations to one another, depending on the historical epoch in which they are embedded). But it is possible to have a theory of the capitalist state, and the best way to approach it seems to be confront the state in its setting, the social formation.

***

This is what the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte does, among other things. Its refined lapidary style and mordant ironising also make it a literary classic. This is a strange thing in a way, but what pomo theorists would call its 'mode of emplotment' is deployed with a deliberate pedagogical purpose. The satirical deflation is intended to show how potentially world-historical events were always doomed to be reduced to low farce, how the movement of forces under various banners constituted a hollow pantomime of revolution. The essay surveys the political circumstances of Louis Bonaparte's coup d'etat on 2nd December 1851. This is where the title comes from: because, for Marx, this coup is a farcical repetition of Napoleon Bonaparte's tragic putsch on the 18th Brumaire VIII (9th November 1799). From tragedy to farce - you see how literary parody is already inscribed in the first words of the text. In its parodic appropriation of French history and bourgeois literary traditions, the 18th Brumaire penetrates layers of appearance - not so as to dispose of these layers as so much subterfuge (aha, behind the iron mask of Napoleon lies the unheroic, icy calculation of the bourgeois!) but to show their necessity and efficacy; not to dismiss them but to enact them, to show them at work.

Now, the 18th Brumaire is an extended analysis of a political situation. But from that comes a subtle diagnosis of the French social formation, and particularly the French state, in its conjuncture. The text's elegant movements between different levels of analysis, mediating between the abstract and the concrete (or, if you will, the concrete-in-thought), shifting from the political to the ideological to productive relations, its extremely subtle and suggestive analysis of masks and decoys, and the movements between semiosis and performance, discourse theory avant la lettre and strategic class analysis, make it an exceptionally rich study. Though Marx was writing very shortly after the events, moreover, he did so in a determinedly historical, rather than journalistic, mode: the complex periodisation, the way Marx maps the temporal structure of events and charts the strategic possibilities in each phase, is indicative of how seriously he takes the historical aspect of his purpose. He is determined to relate these events to deep historical dynamics, even before the dust has fully settled, and moreover to do so in a way that grasps their singularity. That is why those marxist theorists most concerned with the idiographic, above all Gramsci, have continually returned to the 18th Brumaire. This lengthy preface is by way of explaining and justifying the focus on one text by Marx to examine the question of the state.

***

In assessing the grotesqueries of 1848-51, Marx developed the elements of a theory of the state for the first time, a project he intended to continue in a sequel to Capital. For while Louis Bonaparte would seem to have simply reversed the gains of the bourgeois revolution, reinstating the absolute monarchy and "the shamelessly simple domination of the sword and cross", Marx insisted that his regime was in fact something new. And to understand it, one had to understand the social interests that had driven the struggle between the political forces and their situation in relation to one another that made it possible for Napoleon le Petit to take power. There had been a failed revolution: somehow the French bourgeoisie and popular classes had been unable to repeat the monumental achievement of 1789. The first difference between the two situations was that the era in which the bourgeoisie played the progressive historical role was being superceded. The development of capitalist relations and the opposing interests of capital and labour meant that the bourgeoisie was becoming an increasingly conservative class. The second was the growing fractionalisation of the ruling class, the major fractions being finance-capital, industry and landlords. The latter were represented as rival monarchist factions in the Party of Order. The Legitimists were allied to the landlords, while the Orleanists were allied to high finance. In principle, these were supporters of different monarchic dynasties, but organised within this rivalry was the sectional struggle of competing class fractions for hegemony within the state. And in that struggle, they waged a war for the support of subordinate classes: for example, the Legitimists sometimes posed as defenders of the working class against the exploitative industrial and financial capitalists. Once again, the layers of appearance, the pageantry of ancient intrigue and birthright, codify and represent very modern conflicts. The question of political representation, in its many senses, is at the centre of Marx's analysis here. In this connection, note also that the landlords are included as a fraction of the capitalist class, because "large landed property, despite its feudal coquetry and pride of race, has been rendered thoroughly bourgeois by the developments of modern society".

At any rate, if the bourgeoisie was thus divided and weakened, the weakness of the proletariat, its youth and lack of development, meant that it was unable to take the leadership of national politics. Nor was it able to form the class alliances that would be necessary for the left of the revolution to prevail. Marx had written in 1848 of how it would be necessary for the urban workers to unite with rural proletarians and revolutionary peasants. But in the end the urban working class was isolated. So, there was a sort of stand-off between classes, a stasis that no one class is able to resolve. The resolution of the stand-off fell to Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, a dim gaffeur who nonetheless managed to channel a multitude of social interests in his person. Napoleon le Petit, as Victor Hugo named him, had been the candidate of the monarchist right because he was seen as an exponent of order; of the industrialists, because of his liberal economic views; and of the passive majority of the rural classes, for whom the name of Bonaparte meant something (national greatness) as opposed to nothing. "The most simple-minded man in France," Marx said, "acquired the most multifarious significance." His main opponent, Cavaignac, was opposed by a similarly broad range of forces, including the socialists for whom he was tainted by his military career and his involvement in the massacre of workers. The 'democratic socialist' Ledru-Rollin was distrusted by the urban working class for the same reason. Bonaparte, meanwhile, also summoned the support of the so-called 'lumpenproletariat', consisting of declassed peasants and workers, soldiers, adventurers, crooks and so on. It was on this social basis that the Society of 10 December, a pro-Bonaparte faction, rested. But Bonaparte did not 'represent' all of these classes in the same way, an important point to which we'll return. He took the presidency in alliance with the party of Order, before eventually disposing of the latter and declaring himself Napoleon III, and Emperor of the French.

Before launching into the issue of 'Bonapartism' and its relation to state theory, though, it is important to see in motion: the jostling of massed forces; the shifting of masses under different political banners; the fractionalisation of the ruling class; the complex and sudden changes in representative techniques; and the way in which the state is contested and occupied. Using Marx's periodisation without attempting to imitate his style (which would be a severe discourtesy to the original), I will describe a loose schema of this process.

***

Marx begins with the First Period: "From 24 February to 4 May 1848. February period. Prologue. Universal brotherhood swindle." The February revolution of 1848 had disposed of the monarchy, and brought into being the Second Republic. The social forces united in the creation of this republic were, at first, bourgeois liberals and workers. The 'swindle' was the bourgeoisie's promise to defend the interests of workers, the struggling petty bourgeoisie (particularly the artisans whose way of life was in crisis), and the educated for whom there were few posts of status available. Thus bourgeois republicans promised to create a democratic and social republic. They extended the franchise to millions of male workers, and relaxing repression and censorship. Hundreds of newspapers flourished that spring. In principle, Marx argues, the democratic republic is an ideal form of class rule for capital - in a phrase, the democratic republic is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. But it also creates the political terrain in which the bourgeoisie's contest with the proletariat becomes open, and the 'swindle' of universal brotherhood melts into air. The bourgeoisie initially honoured its social commitments by adding a proto-welfare state to the democratic republic, with National Workshops (effectively nationalised businesses) giving work to the unemployed. 100,000 were thus employed by the end of May. All this, the better to consolidate their dictatorship under the banner of universal brotherhood: but this was where the 'swindle' began to break down.

The second period was that during which the republic and Constituent National Assembly are convoked, and is broken up into three sub-phases: "1. From 4 May to 25 June 1848. Struggle of all classes against the proletariat. Defeat of the proletariat in the June days." The bourgeoisie had already started to resent the taxes it had to pay to support the Workshops, and the growing pressure mounted by workers through the new democratic institutions. It led a generalised shift to the right among an alliance of classes against the proletariat, and the April elections were won by conservatives and moderates. By June, the workshops were being closed down. The barricades were once more erected in the capital, and the bourgeois republicans became outright reactionaries. Working class resistance in the capital was crushed by the National Guard, with 1500 killed during the suppression, 3000 murdered afterward, and 12000 deported to labour camps in colonial Algeria - or, in the familiar refrain of the bourgeoisie, order was restored.

The second sub-phase of the second period: "From 25 June to 10 December 1848. Dictatorship of the pure bourgeois-republicans. Drafting of the Constitution. Proclamation of a state of siege in Paris. The bourgeois dictatorship set aside on 10 December by the election of Bonaparte as President." The defeat of the left and the working class left the state apparatus under the leadership of a "pure" bourgeois-republican bloc that was still moving to the right, albeit with a small opposition from radicals and the social democratic Montagne. The constitution was revised in a highly conservative manner, striking out clauses supporting a 'right to work', and leaving education in the control of the Catholic church among other things. Sub-phase 3: "From 20 December 1848 to 28 May 1849. Struggle of the Constituent Assembly with Bonaparte and with the party of Order in alliance with him. Passing of the Constituent Assembly. Fall of the republican bourgeoisie." During this phase, the conservative Party of Order was increasingly dependent on Bonaparte, and increasingly at odds with the 'pure' bourgeois republicans. The rule of the latter came to an end in the legislative elections of 28 May 1849, when the Party of Order won a substantial victory. This reflected, as much as anything else, the continued right-ward swerve of the bourgeoisie, and its rejection of the republicans.

The third period is the most complex, punctuated by three sub-phases, the last of which is itself broken down into four parts. Sub-phase 1: "From 28 May 1849 to 13 June 1849. Struggle of the petty bourgeoisie with the bourgeoisie and with Bonaparte. Defeat of the petty-bourgeois democracy." While the right had won the elections, a radical minority of republicans and socialists, known as the Montagne, had been elected to the legislature with 25% of the vote. For Marx, they represented a kind of petty bourgeois socialism which consisted mainly of the reform and perfection of capitalism: the big bourgeoisie exploits us through finance, so we want credit institutions; it crushes us through competition, so we want protection from the state; etc. The Montagne continued to resist the Party of Order in parliament, and were expelled from the Assembly for their trouble. Sub-phase 2: "From 13 June 1849 to 31 May 1850. Parliamentary dictatorship of the party of Order. It completes its rule by abolishing universal suffrage, but loses the parliamentary ministry." The Party of Order held the ministry in alliance with Louis-Napoleon, and held together a more or less stable government until elections were held again in 1850. During these elections, the left swept the board in Paris. In response, the Party of Order decided to get rid of universal male suffrage and cut about 30% of voters off the rolls.

Sub-phase 3 contains the most complex and compressed sequence of movements. Marx begins: "From 31 May 1850 to 2 December 1851. Struggle between the parliamentary bourgeoisie and Bonaparte." This is the decisive movement that makes Louis-Napoleon's coup d'etat possible. Marx breaks down the period into four discrete steps. First, in the period until 12 January 1851, parliament lost "the supreme command of the army" to Louis-Napoleon. Second, in the time until 11 April 1851, the weakness of the Party of Order in the Legislative Assembly forced it to form a coalition with the radicals it had previously expelled. Third, in the period until 9 October 1851, the Party of Order "decomposes into its separate constitutents", with growing antagonism between the executive (Louis-Napoleon) and parliament, and a "breach between the bourgeois parliament and press and the mass of the bourgeoisie". Finally, in the period until the coup d'etat, the breach between parliament and executive power became more open. Parliament was abandoned "by its own class, by the army, and by all the remaining classes". Bourgeois rule passed away, with no resistance. Foreknowledge of the coup and the ineptitude of its leadership did not prevent its success. Thus: "Victory of Bonaparte. Parody of restoration of empire."

***

As mentioned, the "parody" of imperial restoration here is in fact a modern tale of a failure of class capacities, a collapse in bourgeois initiative and leadership, the bathos of slogans betrayed before the ink has dried. It is about a particular from of bourgeois state in which the bourgeoisie does not rule. Prior to the revolution, the bourgeoisie had not ruled, merely "one faction of it: bankers, stock-exchange kings, railway kings, owners of coal and iron mines and forests, a part of the landed proprietors associated with them—the so-called finance aristocracy." Also excluded were, of course, workers, the "petty bourgeoisie of all gradations" and the peasants. Even the industrialists were in opposition. "On the other hand, the smallest financial reform was wrecked due to the influence of the bankers." At the end of the farce of 1848-51, the bourgeoisie was once again out of power. In fact, no class had been able to take power: in power was the state apparatus itself, the increasingly powerful bureaucratic and military machinery, which had obtained a degree of autonomy from the contending social classes. It was powerful enough, independent enough, that a drunken adventurer supported by the lumpenproletariat and smallholding peasants could suffice for its head. This was, in a word, the 'Ceasarist', or the 'Bonapartist' regime.

There are three immediate elements to this kind of regime. The first is the autonomy of the state apparatus from the contending classes; the second is the existence of a passive popular base for the regime; the third is that the bourgeoisie, by surrendering its political dominance, has retained its dominance at the level of productive relations. The concept of Caesarism has since been developed in many directions. Gramsci notably used the concept as a basis for the analysis of fascism, though it has also been a habitual recourse wherever populist governments of one sort or another have appeared. Other theorists, often influenced by Althusser, have argued that the analysis confirms a more general 'relative autonomy' of the state apparatus. These are leads that I do not intend to pursue at the moment; I merely list them to indicate that the theoretical (and thus political) consequences of this study, the Eighteenth Brumaire, are profound and contested.

What I instead want to do is draw out some implications of Marx's survey. First is the extraordinary power of the state as an apparatus in itself, the sort of power that could enable it to act as a more or less autonomous force in society. This is far more evident today than in the period Marx was describing. Second is the relation to social classes. It is not merely the occupation of the state that determines its class role: the structure of the state itself is not class-neutral. This is not to say that the class basis of a particular state can be read off from its various features. After all, if a democratic republic is ideal for a bourgeoisie in rude health, a dictatorship of some sort (not necessarily a Caesarist dictatorship) may be its saviour in crisis. The question, as Goran Therborn suggests, is what role the state plays in advancing, allowing or inhibiting the further reproduction of capitalist social relations. Third is the relation between the state and civil society. Although the state is not class-neutral - and for this reason, Marx takes the view that it must be dismantled rather than perfected - it is nonetheless a terrain which is traversed by contesting classes in representational struggles. It is impossible to be indifferent to the forms of representation that take place. Not because these are 'reflections' of 'real' class struggles taking place outside of the political system, but because they are highly mediated forms of class struggle in themselves. And because the representation of classes within the state has a formative effect on the behaviour of classes within civil society. When representation breaks down, the political forces in parliament become useless, unmoored: but the class forces they have tried to represent are thereby also disenfranchised. Fourth, the state has a particular role in relation to the fractionalisation of the ruling class. Such fractionalisation is an inevitable aspect of capitalist development, and is merely one of the ways in which a 'general' bourgeois interest is only possible under the hegemony of one of its fractions. In addition to fractionalisation is the individuation of and competition between members of the capitalist class. The result is that were it not for the state's ability to act as a unifying factor, organising the power of social classes within the apparatus itself, the capitalist class might be constantly, as I suggested earlier, at its own throat. Poulantzas suggested that the separation of powers - executive, legislative and judicial - could be understood in terms of a distribution of power in which the hegemonic class or fraction controls the executive. Either way, the state must play a pro-active role in securing the unity of the dominant classes; and by extension the disunity of the dominated classes.

The case of the Nazi drinking game

2012-01-17T15:14:00.001Z

Why do the rich and right-wing in Britain so love their Nazi uniforms? Whether it is Tory students, royals, politicians, or upper class jocks, the naughty pleasures of pretending to be a fascist bomber or concentration camp guard are irresistible for some. Lately, some LSE students, most likely fitting into the category of the aforementioned upper class jocks, were discovered engaging in a drinking game called the 'Nazi Ring of Fire'. You can imagine the sorts of rituals involved - saluting the fuhrer, that sort of thing. A Jewish student who objected to this display was assaulted. Now, I'm sure the students involved don't quite get the furore that has resulted. Most likely, they think the affair was maybe a bit off-side, but otherwise bloody good sport. Too bad for them. Let them suck it up.

I'm rather more concerned about the way the political reaction has panned out. First of all, it's worth saying that there's a fairly sensible article by Jay Stoll, president of the LSESU's Jewish Society in the LSE newspaper, The Beaver. (I don't know why they called it that.) Stoll rejects the scapegoating of Muslims for antisemitism, and suggests that the usual culprit is actually the upper middle class boarding school type. That's probably true in the UK. Even here, though, there's already something odd going on. The newspaper calls the affair an 'antisemitic' drinking game. Now, I hope you understand what I mean when I say this is bordering on euphemistic. I just mean that there's a lot more involved in Nazism than antisemitism, and the decision to inhabit a Nazi persona for kicks signifies something more than judeophobia.

What more? Well, what more is involved in 'national socialist' politics? Nationalism, anticommunism, anti-liberalism, patriarchy, homophobia, strains of virulent biological racism other than antisemitism, social Darwinism, extreme political authoritarianism, class chauvinism, contempt for the poor and weak, etc. It is absolutely correct to identify and attack the vicious antisemitism involved in such Nazi performance, particularly as it was a Jewish student who was assaulted. But antisemitism won't stand in for every evil of Nazism. I think what's really going on with such people is not just antisemitism, but more fundamentally a certain admiration for supermen, hatred for the weak and vulnerable, enjoyment in the imperial bunting, the festivities and aesthetics of domination and hierarchy. It's not fascism, but the licensed pleasure of a class on the offensive, people who are intent on clinging on to everything they have and taking more, exhaling with gratification and relief as the opposition is violently policed, or bombed.

In this connection, a less sensible response to the affair came from Tanya Gold of The Guardian, who usually makes her wedge writing lighter fare. (I click on the links, sometimes). She proves the old adage that if antisemitism prompts you to defend Israel, you have already forfeited your probity on both subjects. Actually, that isn't an old adage, I just made it up: but it is nonetheless true. I suppose one could make the 'paradoxical' point that Israel is organised antisemitism, which is also true. Or, in a more elaborate version of the same basic idea: Israel is an apartheid state that can only exist through the expropriation and murder of Palestinians, and to identify its interests with those of Jewish people as such is to defile the latter, to defame them, to blood libel them. This, while correct, is utterly inadequate, because the perspective of Israel's victims is lost in this. What I really mean is that defending the state of Israel by reference to instances of antisemitism in modern day Europe is, wittingly or otherwise, another way of identifying with a would-be master race - with no sense of irony. Worse still when they rank instances of legitimate protest by pro-Palestinian groups as examples of mounting antisemitism, or worry about a "demand that Jews denounce Israel if they wish to be accepted in polite society", as if it wasn't the victims of Israeli oppression and their allies who are debarred from 'polite society'. Of course, Zionism is not fascism, but nor is it the eternal other of fascism. You can't have it both ways. Either racist, nationalist, imperialist ideology is objectionable, in which case its organisation in a state is calamitous, or you must count the thuggish Nazi impersonators as bedfellows. This is a choice that Israel's founders and planners have always faced, and they have always opted for the latter without embarrassment.

Austerity in Canada: Canadian Labour at the Crossroads

2012-01-16T21:01:00.000Z

Guest post by Doug Nesbitt:

A wage cut of fifty percent. An elimination of pensions. Cuts to benefits.

These demands have inevitably led to a major showdown at a locomotive factory in London, Ontario between the 700 unionized workers of Electro-Motive Diesel and Caterpillar, a massive US-based corporation. The workers, members of Canadian Auto Workers Local 27, responded to the employer’s demands with a positive strike vote of 97 percent. The employer, Progress Rail, a subsidiary of Caterpillar, locked the workers out on New Year’s Day.

In addition to facing down a notorious anti-union employer who hammered the American United Auto Workers in the 1990s, there are plenty of rumours about Caterpillar closing the London plant and moving operations to Muncie, Indiana. EMD workers in London make $CDN 36/hour while their counterparts in Muncie are paid only $CDN 12.50-14.50. Indiana is also on the cusp of becoming the first rust-belt state to introduce a "Right to Work" law, a notorious form of anti-union legislation made possible by the even more infamous Taft-Hartley law of 1947, the long-standing crown jewel of American anti-union legislation.

The response of organized labour to the lock out has been swift. The Ontario Federation of Labour is coordinating a mass rally in London on January 21 with buses coming in from numerous cities across the province and as far away as Sudbury and Ottawa. The OFL is anticipating at least ten thousand protesters.

Mainstream media coverage has also been extensive and the shocking nature of Caterpillar’s demands have so far ensured that coverage has been neutral and even supportive of the workers. The story is being covered by all major Canadian dailies, prime-time news hours on CBC and CTV, and has received coverage in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and now the European and Australian press.

Not surprisingly, the federal government has stayed silent. Since they won their first majority government in May, the Tories have gone to war with organized labour. In June, postal workers were locked out by Canada Post, the state-owned crown corporation. The Tories responded with back-to-work legislation which called for pay increases lower than the employer’s last offer.

Federal Labour Minister Lisa Raitt went further, twice threatening to legislate Air Canada flight attendants back-to-work, even though Air Canada was privatized in 1988. From a party espousing government non-intervention in the economy, Raitt’s reasoning behind intervening in the private sector was that Air Canada was essential to the economy. This absurdity was repeated in October when Raitt floated the idea of defining the “economy” as an “essential service”, thus providing some pseudo-legal justification for further interventions.

The government’s hypocrisy goes further. In March 2008, on the very shop floor of EMD London, Prime Minister Harper announced a billion dollar tax break to industry in 2008, $5 million of which went to EMD London. Two years later, EMD London was purchased by Caterpillar.

Despite its record high revenue and profits in 2011, stemming from sales of its machinery to a booming resource sector (tar sands, mining), Caterpillar is attempting to destroy a union. In addition to their anti-union stance, the threat of roughly two thousand jobs being lost in London, and their profiting off environmental disasters like the tar sands and mining operations around the world, Caterpillar supplies Israel the bulldozers it uses to carry out house demolitions in occupied Palestine.

This leaves labour – and all the political allies of labour – at a crossroads in this high profile, high stakes clash between workers and state-blessed corporate power. The implications for other workers – such as Toronto municipal workers, the locked steelworkers of Alma, Quebec, the York Region Transit workers, and all other workers, union and non-union – couldn’t be greater. Since the Tory victory in May, employers, public and private, have received the message loud and clear: the federal government is siding with them in a sustained attempt to hold down wages and benefits, slash them where possible, and break the ability of workers to resist these moves by breaking their only means of defence: unions.

Is labour up to the challenge? The OFL has already moved the rally’s location from the picket lines outside the factory, to downtown London’s Victoria Park eight kilometres away. The move is explained by the OFL as ten thousand being too many for it to be “safe” on the picket line. What nonsense is this? Fifteen thousand pickets peacefully shut down the Port of Oakland last November in an Occupy-initiated general strike.

Holding the rally in Victoria Park will ensure that is a symbolic display of opposition and nothing more. Only a few hundred of the ten thousand will likely take up Local 27’s invite to the picket lines after the rally. Thousands of protesters will be boarding buses after the downtown rally to head back home and won’t have time to make it to the picket lines.

If you’re having deja vu, you’re not alone. Last year, ten thousand people from across Ontario attended the Hamilton Day of Action against US Steel held January 29, 2011. On the steps of Hamilton City Hall, union leaders and labour politicians denounced the lockout and backed the steelworkers refusing to see their pensions gutted by US Steel. A short march made it around a few cold and deserted downtown blocks before returning to City Hall. As one of the hundreds who lined up for union-sponsored buses back to their respective hometowns, I later that we had marched past the old Stelco building, US Steel’s Hamilton office, without even stopping to do anything.

The days of action in Hamilton and London may boost the spirits of locked out workers, but what will it accomplish beyond this? In the wake of Occupy as well as the Capitol Building occupation in Wisconsin last year against the stripping of public sector bargaining rights, the time seems ripe for bolder action. Bold action could galvanize thousands of Canadians angry at the Tories and the one percent, could overturn the limited range of Canada’s political debates, and maybe just put employers and the Tories on the back foot for once.

The battle at EMD might be lost, but it could still be a turning point for labour by showing a new determination to take more controversial but increasingly necessary actions to counter the “race to the bottom” overseen by an entrenched federal government keen on hammering workers and dismantling hard-won social programs.

Drawing on the Occupy movement, the Spanish Indignados, and the Republic Windows and Doors occupation in Chicago from late 2008, occupying EMD London should be on labour’s agenda. In this sense, moving ten thousand pickets away from the factory is a lost opportunity for initiating the occupation. If this sounds too radical, Egypt and Occupy have changed what’s possible – an occupation could be a galvanizing moment for Canadians and become a worldwide beacon of resistance. And the story of EMD London exposes so clearly the intertwined problems of corporate greed and tax breaks, the war against workers, failing democratic institutions, environmental destruction and imperialism. And what better union than the Canadian Auto Workers, founded on the plant occupations in Flint and Oshawa in 1936 and 1937, to carry this out?

Even if an occupation doesn’t happen but the demand is shouted loud enough – “Occupy EMD!” – it normalizes the idea among networks of workers and activists and lays the groundwork for occupations taking place in inevitable future labour disputes.

The decision to occupy will have to be taken by EMD London workers themselves. But solidarity actions can be carried out across Ontario and beyond. Caterpillar owns Battlefield Equipment Rentals with over 30 locations in Ontario, two in Manitoba and five in Newfoundland. The activist networks built up by the Occupy movement could link up even more with trade unionists to spread the resistance to Caterpillar far beyond London itself. This is what Americans did last August when dozens of Verizon Wireless stores across the country were picketed in solidarity with the communication workers strike against Verizon. The union, Communications Workers of America, even launched an “adopt-a-store” campaign for local activists to show their support, leading to many weekly pickets of Verizon Wireless stores.

Where Battlefield Equipment Rentals can’t be found, pressure can be put on the 166 Tory MPs riding offices in every province, highlighting government complicity with the corporate tax breaks to EMD London. Ottawa labour activists already showed this could be done when they occupied John Baird’s riding office during the postal worker lockout.

In short, the Canadian labour movement needs to reinvent itself and abandon the long-standing attitude towards conciliatory relations with employers, hopeless appeals for government intervention, and a general neglect of the wider, non-union working-class. The lockout in London makes this reinvention both necessary and possible. London could be the place where the labour movement – or at least a substantial minority of activists, union and non-union – recovers a tradition of militancy on behalf of the whole working class and sees itself as a collective force for economic and political justice and transformation.

About the Author

Doug Nesbitt is Co-Chief Steward of PSAC 901 representing Queen’s University Teaching Assistants and Fellows. He was born and raised in London, Ontario and now lives in Kingston pursuing a PhD in History at Queen’s. He also co-hosts Rank and File Radio, a weekly labour news program on CFRC 101.9FM.

Another humanitarian intervention.

2012-01-15T00:55:00.000Z

I mentioned the divisions in Syria's opposition a while ago, principally over the question of imperialist intervention and armed insurgency. These divisions have recently frustrated unity talks between the different opposition factions. The fact that Syria has an organised left, and a strong anti-imperialist pole in its opposition, makes intervention for the US (and EU) a much more difficult proposition than the light blitz of Libya. It turns out that this may not be sufficient to prevent an intervention, however. A recent Salon article describes how a coalition of lib imps and neocons is organising around the possibility of a quick, flighty regime-change in Syria - not just in the US, but in Europe.

As has become the pattern in the Obama executive, the main vector for this kind of 'humanitarian intervention' in the administration is Clinton's State Department. It was by persuading Clinton of the virtues of intervention in Libya that the lib imps - people like Samantha Power, Susan Rice and Anne-Marie Slaughter - won the case for war against its Realist opponents. Beyond the US, France is once again leading the drive for war within the EU. This may represent (the culmination of) a shift from the old Gaullist policy of independence from Washington, but it has a certain logic. France is the original home of the doctrine of droit de l'ingerence, a concept it put to use in interventions in Chad, the Ivory Coast, Yugoslavia and elsewhere. More generally, France's political dominance within an EU that has no centralised military authority would tend to give it a leading role where European interests in the Middle East are concerned. The more intriguing factor here is Turkey. Ankara's elites aren't too fond of the idea of releasing their grip on Cyprus to please the EU, and have in recent years slowed down a spate of reforms intended to ease membership of the Union. Nonetheless, their hostility to the Syrian regime is plain enough in their decision to allow exiles and the 'Free Syria Army' to operate from within Turkey. Could it be that the Turkish regime will this time allow itself to be used as a launch pad for an imperialist intervention?

That, of course, would still leave the question of how the Syrian terrain can be negotiated by any imperial coalition of the willing. This is critical both for the warmongers and for the antiwar-mongers. Those waging the intervention will need to be assured of having some sort of social base for a post-Assad regime once they've created it. As for the antiwar-mongers. Well, I don't wish to be rude, but I can already imagine the divisions and recriminations - some defending Assad, others plugging humanitarian intervention, the balkanization of opinion among anti-imperialists, the hair-splitting. All that, unless there was actually a powerful Syrian revolt against intervention. The pro-imperialist position within the Syrian opposition is occupied by the Syrian National Council (SNC), comprising liberals and conservative Islamists, mostly led by emigres with little basis in the domestic grassroots. The SNC is calling for the establishment of "safe zones" Predictably, but not accurately, pro-war politicians and diplomats deem the SNC a more representative organisation than its rivals. The National Committee for Democratic Change, as well as the local coordination bodies, have warned against seeking intervention. Despite vicious repression, they have also resisted moves toward an armed insurgency, perhaps fearing a repeat of the Libyan situation where early gains were quickly reversed by a far better organised state.

Perhaps the greatest problem for any intervention is the resilence of the opposition, despite the killing which the opposition estimates has claimed 5,000 people. The regime doesn't look as if it is about to collapse, but at the same time the opposition continues to draw enormous crowds and inflict damaging strikes. Libya was a veritable cakewalk for NATO because the opposition was being defeated rapidly, its emancipatory impulse was being snuffed out, and a leadership comprising dissident bourgeois factions had filled the vacuum left by the masses when the latter began to retreat under Qadhafi's assault. Syria's opposition has not experienced anything like this yet, and is thus no easy meat for co-optation.

White people need to shut up

2012-01-05T11:52:00.001Z

Not me, obviously. (Good luck with that.) And probably not you either. But, you know, those white people. The endless parade of white victims, the oppressed white, the white who can't say what they really think and yet endlessly say it at length, for a living. I fucking hate these people with every last residue of bile I can muster. Send them back, I say. These are the people now calling Diane Abbott a 'racist' for saying that 'white people' love to use 'divide and rule', it being an old colonial tactic. Abbott says she was trying to express a more complex idea, nuances of which were lost in Twitter's 140-character limit. But I don't really care. I'm not even going to waste time explaining what's wrong with the idea that white people are the victims of racism. You think your feelings have been hurt by Diane Abbott? Come talk to me for five minutes, and I'll fill your ear with some hisses you won't forget.

The counterpart to reactionary outrage-mongering, of course, is liberal condescension: in the vein of "oh, she's a very silly woman, saying these provocative things, giving the right a cause to change the subject". This is wrong in many ways. First of all, what Abbott said was, in a very loose sense, correct: 'white people' do indeed love to play divide and rule. Not all of them, good lord no. Not you or I. Not the good whites (there are some good whites). But I think we all know that there's a troublesome minority in our midst, the ones who give us all a bad name, whom we must root out and expose, and hand over to the authorities. That's all I'm saying. Second, I would rather have a politician who expresses things bluntly and occasionally blunders but is usually on the right side of the argument (Abbott, for all her flaws, is better than most Labour politicians in this respect), than a calculating mountebank who plays for position in the spectacle. The fact that this is the main line of criticism coming from liberals is indicative of the kind of domesticated, gentrified political game they're playing. Third, Abbott's comments may provide the occasion for the right to go on an offensive, but let's not pretend this wasn't inevitable. Following the verdict against the two Lawrence suspects, and the way in which this drew attention to the facts of institutional - no, structural - racism in British society, it was a dead cert that the media would search for a way to restore white victimhood.

The real problem is not that Diane Abbott says "silly" things. It is that public speech is regulated according to conventions largely dictated by the powerful; that the social ideas and images that govern what is acceptable in speech are produced by people with a definite interest in domesticating dissident perspectives. This is something to be opposed, not adjusted to. But first, before all that, white people need to shut up.

Labour's strategy of right-wing populism

2012-01-04T17:19:00.000Z

"...More specifically, the tenor of his latest intervention fits into a wider Labour strategy of articulating a politics of the "squeezed middle". In Miliband's bland cadences, this sounds anodyne. But, in fact, it is a strategy taken over directly from rightwing populism. To understand this, one need only revisit the rightist backlash against social democracy and New Deal liberalism. This had a racist component, visible in the seemingly evanescent campaigns of Enoch Powell and George Wallace. But race wasn't all there was to it, and the techniques of populist mobilisation continued to be deployed long after these two had passed into obscurity.
"Rightwing populism is not merely transparently "representative": rather it seeks to create the division that it articulates. Societies divided along multiple lines are simplified into a dichotomy between "the people" and its other. The working class is redivided into the hard-working taxpayer and the slothful undeserving poor, with the former subsumed into the "people", the latter into its other. The people are then construed as a "middle" whose sovereignty has been abused by bureaucrats, tax-avoiding plutocrats, criminals, protesters and clamourous minorities alike. Thus, Wallace complained that "middle America" was squeezed between the "silk-stocking crowd" and the poor and criminal.
"The "middle", thus defined, is a depthless discursive entity: "the people" supposedly bracketed by the term share little by way of work, culture, housing, education or daily experience. They are united only by what they oppose. Nonetheless, this type of appeal would underpin Ronald Reagan's attempt to forge a Republican majority. In the same way, Powellism would pass into mainstream politics in the form of Thatcherism, which championed a squeezed "middle England" of hard workers against a bossy state and the grasping poor: a form of politics characterised by Stuart Hall as "authoritarian populism". Since then, capturing the "centre ground" has often meant genuflecting to an incorrigibly reactionary "middle"..."

Slavery, capitalism and articulated modes of production

2012-01-03T23:40:00.000Z

The slave is not a proletarian; the proletarian is not a slave. For, under capitalism the dual freedom of the worker consists of her freedom from the means of production, and her freedom to sell her labour power to any buyer. The slave lacks both freedoms. It follows that slavery and capitalism are incompatible. What could be more straightforward than that? Daniel Gaido points out, in a marxist historiograpical treatise on American capitalism, that this focus on the mode of exploitation involved in any mode of production is one that distinguishes marxism from bourgeois political economy. For the latter, exchange relations are far more central. Slavery is thus often (not always) defined as capitalist on account of its integration into commodity exchange. For marxists, this is to focus on one small aspect of the totality of productive relations, which omits the social role of the worker and the relation of exploitation between owner and labourer. This latter, Marx sees as central:

The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers — a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity — which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic basis — the same from the standpoint of its main conditions — due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc. from showing infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances.

So, to repeat: the mode of exploitation comprising the innermost secret of the whole social formation, slave labour would seem to be a form of surplus extraction that belongs solely and exclusively to pre-capitalist modes of production (PCMPs). Yet, of course, there is a tradition in marxist thought, which owes as much to W E B Du Bois as to Eric Williams, which sees plantation slavery as a capitalist form. Contemporary advocates of this view would include David Roediger, for example. In a classic essay, Sidney Mintz made what is in my view a compelling argument for not treating the issue of 'free labour' as decisive. Wage labour is, like exchange relations, only one element in the totality of capitalist social relations, and has precedents in PCMPs. I will return to Mintz's argument, but its polemical thrust is directed against the idea of slavery as the eternal other of capitalism. Naturally, I have my view on the debate over slavery and capitalism which will become obvious throughout the post. And for what it's worth, the latest issue of Historical Materialism carries a symposium on slavery, capitalism and the US Civil War, with contributions from Robin Blackburn, Eric Foner and others, which is mandatory reading on the subject. But what I'm most interested in is trying to clarify the ways in which one would approach the issue, and attempt to resolve it.

First of all, it seems to me that the subject is modes of production, and the relations between them. What does a 'mode of production' specify? The mode of production consists of a conjunction of relations of production and forces of production. This much at least is uncontroversial among marxists. But precisely what each element of this conjunction consists of is a matter of intense, complex argument. We have said that the mode of exploitation constitutes the inner secret of a social formation. But Jairus Banaji in his recent collection, Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation, has a point when he complains of a tendency to conflate productive relations with modes of exploitation. So, for the purposes of this argument, he insists on the distinction between slavery as a mode of exploitation, and the slave mode of production. Not making this distinction, he argues, leads to the erroneous tendency to assume that wherever slavery exists there is a slave mode of production; and, as a corollary, it is assumed that wherever labour is 'unfree', there can be no capitalist mode of production (CMP).

In an enlightening essay, Banaji goes on to interrogate the notion of 'free labour'. The idea of 'free labour' rests on a certain legal formalism in which 'free will' is assumed in the absence of direct political coercion, it logically leads to absurdities such as the assertion by US courts that "a servitude which was knowingly and willingly entered into could not be termed involuntary". The point is not simply that behind formal legal freedom exists a realm of economic coercion; rather, it is that it is incoherent to speak of a free contract, particularly under capitalism where bargaining outcomes are determined by the wider politico-legal structure upheld through coercion. The line between free and unfree labour is impossible to draw without collapsing into liberal mystification. There are various kinds of labour which might be compatible with capitalism - debt-bound labour, hired labour, waged labour, etc - and in each case there are various mechanisms by which labour is subjected and unfree.

Just as much a source of controversy as the content of each element of the mode of production is the relation between the elements, eg whether the dynamic historical element in the mode of production is the forces or relations of production. I won't go into this controversy here, but I have some sympathy with the argument that prioritising productive forces tends to collapse into a kind of techno-determinism. Then there is the question of whether the concept of a mode of production needs to specify additional elements: should it, for example, specify the means of its own reproduction? I don't think it has to, necessarily, but for a rigorous discussion of this and related questions, you should read Harold Wolpe's introductory essay in The Articulation of Modes of Production.

With those questions still in mind, it becomes necessary to resolve exactly what the CMP is, and how does it relate to PCMPs? When capitalism emerges, does it instantaneously obliterate PCMPs, gradually subsume them, incorporate elements of the old into the new, remain constrained by them in various ways... or what? When we speak of "uneven and combined development" in relation to the development of capitalism, we mean that capitalism develops independently in a number of territories, but not in complete separation; and that it develops at a different pace in each zone. The concept helps explain certain concrete effects in terms of class formations, national politics and culture, but it also implies something else. It implies unevenness of development and a combination of different levels of development of capitalism in relation to PCMPs.

To put this in a more concrete way, how might we understand the position of slavery in a capitalist social formation? Must we see it as apart from capitalism, a PCMP in its midst? Alternatively is it possible to think of slavery as a remnant of a PCMP that has been annexed by the CMP? Or is slave labour simply one mode of exploitation that is perfectly compatible with capitalism? Not a remnant of a PCMP but simply one of the many ways in which the capital-labour relation can be expressed? Returning to Mintz's argument, what he shows in his detailed survey of plantation slavery is the co-existence of capitalist and pre-capitalist forms of labour not only in the same social formations, but often in the same sites of production; the same labourer could be both a slave and a proletarian. From a very different position, Charles Post has made a strong case for seeing the cotton plantations in antebellum slavery as non-capitalist on the grounds of their lack of development of the means of production, low productivity and tendency to expand surplus value by crude absolute means such as territorial expansion: this clearly showed that pre-capitalist rather than capitalist imperatives were operative in antebellum slavery. But as far as I can gather, the evidence on this is mixed depending on which sector of production you are looking at - for example, it depends on whether you are surveying evidence from cotton plantations, or from sugar plantations. This would imply, perhaps, that different imperatives operated within the same regional system, that different modes of production were articulated together under a wider capitalist dominance.

Much hinges here on the distinction (derided as positivist by Banaji for reasons I don't follow) between the mode of production, and the social formation. This is principally a distinction between different levels of abstraction. The mode of production is an abstract set of determinations, whereas the social formation is the concrete site on which the mode of production is realised. As such, or so Althusser and his followers would argue, one should expect to find an articulation of distinct 'pure' modes of production in any given formation. And if that is correct, then it would be sensible to expect both capitalist and non-capitalist forms to co-exist in various complex ways; to mutually determine and restrict one another's formation and development; and when capitalism eventually triumphs, it would tend to have incorporate elements, remnants of precapitalist modes that are perhaps useful to its reproduction either at a political, ideological or economic level.

This brings me back to another point made by Banaji, which is worth quoting at length:

For Marx himself, the task of scientific history consisted in the determination of the laws regulating the movement of different epochs of history, their ‘laws of motion’ as they were called after the example of the natural sciences. Vulgar Marxism abdicated this task for a less ambitious programme of verifying ‘laws’ already implicit, as it supposed, in the materialist conception of history. ... Marx had been emphatic that abstract laws do not exist in history, that the laws of motion which operate in history are historically determinate laws. He indicated thereby that the scientific conception of history could be concretised only through the process of establishing these laws, specific to each epoch, and their corresponding categories. In other terms, through a process of producing concepts on the same level of historical ‘concreteness’ as the concepts of ‘value’, ‘capital’ and ‘commodity-fetishism’.

My opinion is that there is no way to determine in advance whether a system of slave (or bonded, or impressed) labour is capitalist or non-capitalist, a remnant or a dynamic component of the dominant mode of production. Slavery cannot be interpreted as a transhistorical mode of exploitation whose substance remains unaltered through various historical epochs and social formations. While it is correct that the capitalist law of value requires the operation of imperatives through competition, and this requires the wider dominance of the form of waged labour, it doesn't exclude the persistence of slave labour as a capitalist form, or as a pre-capitalist form annexed to capitalism.

American Insurgents: A brief history of American anti-imperialism

2012-01-03T20:01:00.001Z

Coming soon:

American Insurgents is a revealing, often surprising history of anti-imperialism in the United States since the American Revolution. It charts the movements against empire from the Indian Wars and the expansionism of the slave South, to the Anti-Imperialist League of Mark Twain and Jane Addams; from the internationalists opposing World War I to the Vietnam War and beyond. It shows that there is a surprising, often ignored tradition of radical anti-imperialism in the US. Far from being ‘isolationist’ in the fashion of Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, the book contends, these traditions were often the most internationalist and cosmopolitan currents in US political history. The most ambitious movements formed direct relationships with the victims of US expansionism, from the abolitionists uniting with Native Americans to stop colonial genocide to the solidarity movements in central America and the ‘human shields’ in Palestine and Iraq. Far from being the privilege of the rich and educated, antiwar activism has been most evident among the poor and oppressed. It has been most militant when visibly connected to domestic struggles and interests, such as slavery, civil rights, women’s oppression and class. Above all, the book contextualizes each anti-imperialist movement in the evolving structure of US expansionism and dominance, and explains how some movements succeeded while others failed. In so doing, it offers a vital perspective for those organizing antiwar resistance today.

The problem of racial populism in Cold War America

2011-12-29T14:49:00.001Z

In Southern US political traditions, populism has many valences. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, there was a brief moment where populist political forces throughout the South seemed to be converging into an anticapitalist coalition. Underlying this movement was the transition to capitalism in the Southern countryside. Charles Post argues in his prize-winning history of The American Road to Capitalism that the US economy prior to the Civil War was an articulation of three modes of production: mercantile capital, petty commodity production, and slavery. In this articulation, capitalism was the dominant mode of production, its imperatives shaping and determining the forms that the rival modes of production took; the relations between these modes of production also determined the forms of regional competition leading up to the Civil War. Following the success of northeastern and midwestern industrial interests in the Civil War, the political power of capital was such that no restoration of pre-capitalist modes was possible. Joseph Reidy's history of the cotton plantations describes how the Depression of the 1870s forced Southern planters to convert themselves into an agrarian capitalist class.

The populist movements arose when they did to a large extent over the defence of customary rights under assault from the capitalist transformation of the Southern countryside. Over time, they developed into something considerably more than a reflux against capitalist modernity, connecting the Southern Farmers' Alliance, the Colored Farmers' Alliance and the Knights of Labor in a coordinated leftist upsurge. I will not go into detail as to the reasons for the failure of this populist moment. Judging from Steven Hahn's work on the subject, I gather that among the key reasons were the segregated nature of the movement, the conservative influence of white property owners, and the co-opting of many populist thematics by the losing Democratic presidential candidate in 1900. This is related to the story of the Anti-Imperialist League, by the way, a subject I'll come back to. At any rate, the defeat of Southern populism allowed the planters to force through the capitalist transformation of the countryside by means of terror, and to completely colonise the local state formations where they did not simply create them. As they were unable to wholly subsume the labour process under capitalist control, they resorted to extra-economic coercion - the Jim Crow system answered this requirement. This involved a dual movement of suppression and incorporation. On the one hand, the exclusion of African Americans and many poor whites from the polity permitted the introduction of segregated controls on their movements and conduct which limited their ability to organise in their own interests. As a contemporary protagonist put it: "If the Negro is permitted to engage in politics, his usefulness as a labourer is at an end." On the other hand, the obverse of such controls was the incorporation of white workers through paternalistic means, most evident in the plantations and the mill towns which emerged from the cotton industry. This involved more extensive intrusion into the daily life of white workers, despite their greater liberty and access to public goods. It involved white workers being addressed as part of a folkish Anglo-Saxon cultural and political community. So, racial populism could become a recurring form of Southern politics thanks in part to the defeat and co-optation of turn-of-the-century Southern multiracial populism.

Before turning to the specific period of the Cold War, 1945-65, what I consider the 'classical period' of US anticommunism, I will make some attempt to specify what I mean by populism. In a previous post, I gestured toward Ernesto Laclau's writing on populism in his pre-post-marxist writing. While acknowledging some problems with the argument, I thought that one advantage of his interpretation was that it was neither purely descriptive nor is simply historicist, confining the interpretation of populism to a certain conjuncture or political space, but rather specified a conceptual core that could help make sense of the variety of movements and ideologies deemed populist. I think this is a quality that any account of populism would need to make the concept workable. The gist of Laclau's account is that while class 'interpellations' (or, if you prefer, identifications) relate to the antagonism between the ruling class and the proletariat, populist 'interpellations' relate to the antagonism between the 'power bloc' and the 'people'.* Populism is thus an anti-status quo discourse that divides the political space into a simple dichotomy of 'the people' vs its other. The 'people' is defined as sovereign yet powerless; the true owners of a polity that has been appropriated by an other. The 'other' must in this sense be somehow an elite or bound up with elites. Thus, racial populism might 'other' a 'Jewish elite', or a 'liberal multicultural elite', or a 'Federal elite' that was seen as 'soft' on racial others, 'loving' the other (rather than the people), or bound up with one-world conspiracies etc. This step is decisive: the process of othering is what determines the positive content of 'the people'. It is what simplifies the political terrain, uniting an array of class actors in (Laclau-speak) a 'chain of equivalents'. Populism is not, then, a form of politics like socialism or liberalism, but rather a form of political identification which is tendentially versatile (Laclau would say 'tendentially empty'), and one which tends to arise when the social order and the system of identities that helps sustain it is in flux. (There is an argument for treating populism in an historicist manner, as a transitional form of politics rooted in the absorption of previously resistant regions and populaces into capitalist markets. We certainly see this with the populist movements in the South of the late 19th Century, where the strongest sources of populist support came from areas least integrated into the national or global markets. Nonetheless, its recurrence in a variety of circumstances seems to weigh against this treatment, and so I think it's most sensible to see it as a kind of crisis politics.)

Within the terms outlined above, Joseph Lowndes treats George Wallace as a pioneer of racial anti-statist populism, emerging in the crisis of the Sixties as the 'New Deal' coalition fragmented over the issue of civil rights. In fact, I think the crisis of the Southern system really began after World War II. Manning Marable's account of the era in Race, Reform and Rebellion demonstrates that by this time, the economic basis for the collapse of Jim Crow had arrived. He does not focus on the effective subsumption of labour in the South through new mechanisation processes, and the arrival of a 'New South' bourgeoisie for whom Jim Crow was desirable but not essential to their reproduction. Rather, he shows that the beginnings of African American empowerment were in place by the end of the war (evident in FDR's de-segregation of the military, which appalled Southern politicians because of the implicit threat to white supremacy posed by a seeming capitulation to threats of black civil disobedience). Politicians of neither party could afford to ignore black electors after the war, and many of the important Supreme Court decisions had been made by the early 1950s. In the south, black political participation was gradually increasing - this is what the wave of lynchings was intended to stop. Meanwhile, the colonial system was already disintegrating so that the 'colour line' was everywhere in peril. Only the political practices bracketed under Cold War anticommunism prevented the crisis of Jim Crow from becoming collapse much earlier than it did.

So, I want to suggest that it is in the years between 1948 and 1964, the peak years of the Cold War, that Southern racial populism was developed and refined. It began with the States Rights Party, which was the basis for the White Citizens' Council and the John Birch Society. These groups were organised around a southern tradition of countersubversion, which has precedent in the terrorist campaigns by Ku Klux Klan and associated organisations following the US Civil War aimed at restoring white supremacy under Democratic rule. Countersubversion is an ensemble of political practices, of which counterrevolution is a subset. It has an especially long pedigree in the United States, where the presumed conspiracies of Freemasons, Catholics, Mormons, African Americans, the ‘yellow peril’, and of course ‘Reds’ have serially aroused movements in defence of Americanism. In addition to its racial and national connotations, countersubversion is intimately bound up with patriarchal practices and the masculinist ‘regeneration through violence’. The dominant form of countersubversion in US politics at the time of Jim Crow's greatest peril, however, was anticommunism.

Anticommunist countersubversion, specifically, is an ensemble of class practices whose product is the conservation of extant relations of dominance primarily, but not exclusively, on the axis of class. It is involved in the suppression of insurgent classes and fractions for this purpose. In treating anticommunism primarily as a set of political practices rather than an ideology, what I am most interested in is the line of political demarcation rather than identifying a specific ideological operation shared by liberal anticommunists, white supremacist anticommunists, Fabian anticommunists, fascist anticommunists, and so on. This line of political demarcation is between those who have at least a nominal anticapitalist commitment (communists, their allies and their anticapitalist critics) and those who are committed to defending capitalism. But importantly, this line bissects a political scene unfolding within a concrete social formation, meaning that the defence of capitalism is not organised around a set of abstractions (the mode of production), but rather around concrete political blocs, local state forms, modes of rule, etc. which are not immediately reducible to capitalist imperatives. This means that such struggles are contextual, and contested: whether white supremacy, 'free unionism', 'pragmatic segregation', or other policies or structures are considered essential to capitalism's efficient reproduction will vary.

The regional variations in US capitalism at the time of Jim Crow's crisis are quite clear. In the north and west, Fordist production dominated, with workers incorporated by means of productivity agreements and wage rises (the material substratum of hegemony) and disciplined by anticommunism (loyalty oaths, the war against communism and the left in trade unions, etc). In the South, the planters and the textile industry dominated. The textile firms were small and poorly unionised. Employers and state officials worked to isolate union activists as 'communists', beating or 'disappearing' them rather than trying to incorporate them in a class compromise. Local state forces in the South had a long tradition of arresting large numbers of workers, especially African American workers, to bolster the cheap prison labour force for local employers - a practice which was incentivised by payments per arrest made, and which continued on a widespread basis well into the 1940s. All of this class repression had a parapolitical, vigilante aspect to it, not dissimilar to the way the Klan operated in alliance with police to terrorise blacks and civil rights workers, or to the way the FBI organised illegal raids on suspected radicals' premises. The murky boundaries of the capitalist state in this context should remind us that it is not an object, or an instrument, or an institution: rather, it is a set of strategic relations which facilitates the organisation of the dominant classes and fractions, and the disorganisation of the dominated classes and fractions.

At any rate, if rising wages and productivity agreements worked to incorporate labour in the north and west, as part of the wider offensive against communism and the radical left, the South depended on different mechanisms of incorporation. Here, the material substratum of hegemony was the relative advantage enjoyed by white labour over black labour: it was this which made white workers so resistant to unionisation, fearing that it would erode their racial position. I hesitate to call this 'white privilege', because the system did not improve the wages of white workers in aggregate. White workers had more access to skilled and supervisorial jobs as a result of segregation. Their wages tended to be better than those of black workers. However, the overall effect was actually to reduce the bargaining power of both black and white labour, and to magnify income inequalities among whites - or, to put it another way, to increase the rate of exploitation of white workers.

This is where racial populism comes in. From the late 1940s, as I say, the system of Jim Crow was endangered. Washington's global empire-building was partially responsible for this, as it entailed a set of strategic orientations at odds with those of the South. First of all, obviously, Washington needed to construct multi-racial alliances against communism - necessarily, given that most of the world was not white, and would no longer be ruled by whites. The US could deploy considerable violence against opponents, but could not have ruled through force alone. So, it was under constant pressure to address or mitigate white supremacy - a matter it took up reluctantly, because Washington politicians mostly believed in some form of white supremacy, and the South was a politically powerful and reliable component of the domestic anticommunist coalition. Nonetheless, segregationists would have cause to complain that troops were being used against white Americans in Little Rock rather than communists in Peking. Secondly, the international system that Washington set about creating was crafted under the influence of New Dealers, whereas the bulk of Southern capital was against the New Deal and particularly opposed to anything (Marshall Aid etc) that smacked of 'socialism'. They had come to terms with the New Deal in the first place largely by ensuring that its provisions were 'racially laden' - e.g., containing exclusion clauses that omitted most African Americans in the South from wage and employee protection. This dramatically accelerated the divergence in living standards between white and black workers. So, the further entrenchment and global expansion of New Deal ideas could not but be perceived as a threat in the South.

The states rights movement beginning in the 1940s founded its activities on the proposition that federal civil rights legislation was the culmination of global communist conspiracy. This grammar of anticommunist countersubversion was one advanced first in Washington DC, of course. The specific charges used by Southern bodies to attack human rights, civil rights and political organisations originated from HUAC, or the Justice Department, or the Senate Internal Security Sub-Committee (SISS). HUAC under the Texas senator Martin Dies had always protected the South as far as possible. But in the South, such countersubversion acquired a populist element during the Cold War in that this conspiracy was treated as one that involved elites - not just the federal government, but financiers, celebrities etc. - in a united effort with the riff-raff (criminals, protesters, blacks, militants) to undermine the people. Civil rights legislation would merely undermine a fragile concord between racial and minority groups, spread misunderstanding and distrust, and hand agitators a weapon to divide the American people and soften them up for tyranny. The States Rights Party warned of a "police state, in totalitarian, centralised, bureaucratic government" arising from Truman's civil rights legislation. In general, the view was that foreign-controlled conspirators had infiltrated the federal government to promote an egalitarian agenda at odds with the venerable 'way of life' of the South, which was itself the most pure version of the American 'way of life'. Strom Thurmond's major thematic in 1948 was the threat posed by "collectivism" to "economic opportunity" for Americans. Echoing claims that were current in Washington DC, he asserted that spies and infiltrators were at the top of major strategic industries, as well as the political establishment, and that the Fair Employment Practices Commission had been introduced to "sabotage America". Seeking the votes of a "racial minority", he said, the national parties had all adopted a programme that would "open the doors to eventual communistic control of this Republic".

Yet it was really following Brown vs the Board of Education and the censure of McCarthy that the articulation of racism and anticommunism in a populist inflection emerged in its most energetic form. McCarthy had never gained as much support in the South as his authoritarian anticommunist politics would lead one to expect. In fact, southerners were the least likely to back McCarthy despite their increasing propensity to back Republicans in national contexts. This was perhaps, as Wayne Addison Clark argues, because McCarthy's basic orientation was toward creating a local power base and maintaining conformity on issues relating to foreign policy rather than defending a racial caste system. Nonetheless, he used his power to disseminate ideas - communist infiltration of government, industry and Hollywood, a lack of sufficient vigilance against communism by American leaders - that the defenders of white supremacy would find very useful. He also had personal influence in a number of political fights against supposed crypto-communists in southern states such as Texas, where he forged alliances with oil plutocrats. Following his personal political demise, the ideas of McCarthyism took on a new life in the South, among the Southern rich as well as small businesses, journalists and 'patriotic' organisations such as the American Legion, Minute Men and so on. Senator James Eastland was the South's McCarthy in many respects, expressing a hatred for the New Deal, liberalism, and concessions to labour that southern Democrats shared with conservative Republicans, in a distinctly Southern idiom. Eastland worked through SISS to gather and disseminate (dis)information about civil rights organisations and to organise the harrassment of white supremacy's opponents, as well as organised labour and the left in general. Similarly, the publications of the White Citizens' Council were remarkably similar in tone and content to those of HUAC, albeit with the emphasis falling on race and identity.

Wallace represented a defiant last stand, as it were, in respect of this form of racial populism. His early background had marked him as a critic of the most egregious forms of white supremacy but, having lost the primary in the 1958 gubernatorial contest to a candidated backed by the KKK, he vowed not to be "out-n****red" again. By 1962, he had become and out-and-out Dixiecrat, using populist identifications to establish himself as a defender of the white southern people against the seemingly unstoppable egalitarian tyranny. "In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth," he said on being sworn in as governor of Alabama, "I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." This speech, written by a former Klan member, invoked the shades of the Confederacy. Though promising 'the greatest people' (the superior southern white) protection from the clanking chains of tyranny, from a regime that reviled them, despised them, and trod on them, he also staked the South's claim to true Americanism. "You are Southerners too", he told the whites of New England, the Mid-West and the far west. However, like many of his predecessors, Wallace preferred not to focus his discourse chiefly on race. And when he did address race, he often addressed it through codes and a richly symbolic language often tapping the region's strongly Protestant religious traditions. But it was through race that he could unite the suburban white middle classes with urban white workers: to the middle classes, he could arouse fear of the threat to property rights posed by civil rights legislation; to workers, he could cite a putative threat to job security. It was through the same language that he could speak to Polish northerners as much as 'Anglo-Saxon' southerners. It was a spurious white racial victimhood that could fuse these disparate class, religious and ethnic groups into a 'people' in opposition to an elitist tyranny.

Throughout the period from 1945-65, Southern elites sought to protect white supremacist capitalism by forging a populist alliance against communist conspiracy. Their efforts were not merely repressive, but actively sought to alert and mobilise popular forces to the threat to their racial advantages. They were not simply conservative, but actively sought to direct an oppositional force against the Washington power bloc - not to overthrow it but to recompose it in the interests of Southern white supremacy.

* The 'power bloc' is a concept from Poulantzas, who argues that such a bloc arises as a logical form of class dominance under capitalism because the ruling class and its allied classes are "constitutively divided into fractions" such as rentier, finance, commerce, industry, etc. A power bloc comprises the "coexistence of several classes, and most importantly of fractions of classes" in a "contradictory unity". The 'power bloc' is thus an alliance of dominant classes and fractions under the hegemonic direction of the leading class or fraction. It is not important for this argument, but it is worth saying, that the power bloc is unified by the capitalist state in this account, because the bourgeoisie and its fractions are held to be incapable of either unifying themselves or assembling a coherent system of class alliances - so wrapped up are they in competition.

Not mourning Vaclav Havel

2011-12-23T23:50:00.000Z

Dear Alex,
As a good and loyal friend, I can't overlook this chance to suggest to you a marvelous way to discredit yourself completely and lose the last minimal shreds of respectability that still raise lingering questions about your integrity. I have in mind what I think is one of the most illuminating examples of the total and complete intellectual and moral corruption of Western culture, namely, the awed response to Vaclav Havel's embarrassingly silly and morally repugnant Sunday School sermon in Congress the other day. We may put aside the intellectual level of the comments (and the response) -- for example, the profound and startlingly original idea that people should be moral agents. More interesting are the phrases that really captured the imagination and aroused the passions of Congress, editorial writers, and columnists -- and, doubtless, soon the commentators in the weeklies and monthlies: that we should assume responsibility not only for ourselves, our families, and our nations, but for others who are suffering and persecuted. This remarkable and novel insight was followed by the key phrase of the speech: the cold war, now thankfully put to rest, was a conflict between two superpowers: one, a nightmare, the other, the defender of freedom (great applause).
Reading it brought to mind a number of past experiences in Southeast Asia, Central America, the West Bank, and even a kibbutz in Israel where I lived in 1953 -- Mapam, super-Stalinist even to the extent of justifying the anti-Semitic doctor's plot, still under the impact of the image of the USSR as the leader of the anti-Nazi resistance struggle. I recall remarks by a Fatherland Front leader in a remote village in Vietnam, Palestinian organizers, etc., describing the USSR as the hope for the oppressed and the US government as the brutal oppressor of the human race. If these people had made it to the Supreme Soviet they doubtless would have been greeted with great applause as they delivered this message, and probably some hack in Pravda would have swallowed his disgust and written a ritual ode.
I don't mean to equate a Vietnamese villager to Vaclav Havel. For one thing, I doubt that the former would have had the supreme hypocrisy and audacity to clothe his praise for the defenders of freedom with gushing about responsibility for the human race. It's also unnecessary to point out to the half a dozen or so sane people who remain that in comparison to the conditions imposed by US tyranny and violence, East Europe under Russian rule was practically a paradise. Furthermore, one can easily understand why an oppressed Third World victim would have little access to any information (or would care little about anything) beyond the narrow struggle for survival against a terrorist superpower and its clients. And the Pravda hack, unlike his US clones, would have faced a harsh response if he told the obvious truths. So by every conceivable standard, the performance of Havel, Congress, the media, and (we may safely predict, without what will soon appear) the Western intellectual community at large are on a moral and intellectual level that is vastly below that of Third World peasants and Stalinist hacks -- not an unusual discovery.
Of course, it could be argued in Havel's defense that this shameful performance was all tongue in cheek, just a way to extort money from the American taxpayer for his (relatively rich) country. I doubt it, however; he doesn't look like that good an actor.
So, here's the perfect swan song. It's all absolutely true, even truistic. Writing something that true and significant would also have a predictable effect. The sign of a truly totalitarian culture is that important truths simply lack cognitive meaning and are interpretable only at the level of 'Fuck You', so they can then elicit a perfectly predictable torrent of abuse in response. We've long ago reached that level -- to take a personal example, consider the statement: 'We ought to tell the truth about Cambodia and Timor.' Or imagine a columnist writing: 'I think the Sandinistas ought to win.' I suspect that this case is even clearer. It's easy to predict the reaction to any truthful and honest comments about this episode, which is so revealing about the easy acceptance of (and even praise for) the most monstrous savagery, as long as it is perpetrated by Us against Them -- a stance adopted quite mindlessly by Havel, who plainly shares the utter contempt for the lower orders that is the hallmark of Western intellectuals, so at least he's 'one of us' in that respect.
Anyway, don't say I never gave you a useful suggestion.
Best,
Noam

Military Wives and the sickening sentimentality of the serial killer

2011-12-22T11:39:00.004Z

The Military Wives Choir is concentrated evil. It is vicious, stupid and banal. It is the worst form of sentimentality. Their husbands murder Afghans for queen and country, and they murder music for the same righteous cause. Wherever you are, soldier boy, know that the love of your counterpart is so strong, so thoroughly adequate, that it is apt to suddenly materialise into a substance able to "keep you safe" from the foreigners you are busy subduing in the rough hinterlands. Yet at the very same time, this love is so elevated, so ethereal, so much above the humdrum and quotidian, that it is almost as if her heart will, as it were, "build a bridge of light across both time and space". Oh, but there is more, cherished mercenary, much more to say on this love. For its cosmic ordering is capable of reducing the distance between Nottingham and Helmand by various simple expedients. Your hearts will "beat as one", for one. This while your amour holds you in her dreams each night "until your task is done", O "prince of peace".

Comrades and friends, you will forgive me if I end the assay there. There is only so much a man can wear his spleen on his sleeve. But lest I seem to fall into a crusty disdain for the cheesier tropes of the pop-tastic, and particularly the romantic ballad, allow me just to say that I have exactly the same weaknesses in this regard as every single one of you. For example, I cried when watching some piece of shit film whose name I forget. (Fuck you, that's what it was called.) And I emoted in a similar fashion over that song that everyone bought one Christmas, and I wasn't tipsy on mulled wine when I did. These cultural technologies produce many of the same reactions in all of us because they are intended to do just that, because they operate on basically identical raw material. But this imperial doggerel is a sick, chauvinist parody of love. If you like this song, you don't have love; you don't even have taste: what you have is a military-industrial infestation.

To illustrate. Jonathan Freedland's tribute notably fails to mention except obliquely the motivating context for this song, the "task" - of bombing, strafing, torturing, disappearing, poisoning, assassinating, subjugating - that is responsible for its sole element of genuine pathos. As such, he can't acknowledge the ethnocentric bases for his appreciation of the song, the mixture of patriotic and narcissistic affect that is mobilised within its construction of a community of harmonious vocalists. He is perhaps unwitting in his cliche when he describes the solidarity achieved through common struggle without the expense of losers, or of the sadism that usually comes with television pop spectaculars. But the idea that a national community forged in war suddenly discovers its manners, its civic virtues, its solidarity and mutualism, is a shopworn antique. And were Freedland aware of the pedigree of this old cynosure of reaction, he would also be aware that the cruelty and malice whose absence he celebrates is, in such cases, merely displaced. That is, the usual (class, racial, sexual) antagonisms that suppurate resentment and cruelty in the culture - which are so expertly manipulated by Endemol, Zodiak, RTL, the BBC and the producers of all that property porn and eugenic fetishism - have simply been externalised. They are still there, in the form of an absence. Behind the woefully lyricised sentiments of the gals in the 'queen and country' t-shirts, something is occluded. That is the emotional, intellectual, religious and social life of those designated by the euphemism, 'task'. Naturally, their love, their pathos, is a matter of indifference and barely submerged contempt, which one delicately builds bridges around and over.

I do not know what motivated BBC2 and Gareth Malone to turn The Choir into a special on 'Military Wives'. Possibly, it's an opaque satire intended to illustrate the Frankfurt school's analysis of popular culture, which in this day and age looks blithely over-optimistic. More plausibly, I suspect that the Ministry of Defence may have had a hand in this monster. Even if they did not, the aptitude of this sort of format for such appropriation and re-territorialisation is a reminder of an important aspect of our conjuncture. Ideologically, the ruling class is weak. Its legitimacy is fragile. Politically, it is disunited (though it doesn't do to underestimate what a cohering factor class struggle can be). Yet, its technologies of ideological rule are vastly more sophisticated than they have been in the past. The surprising 'visibility' of the military-industrial-entertainment complex during the 'war on terror' merely allowed us to see the tip of a cultural iceberg, one formed by the concentration and centralisation of cultural capital and its fusion with the state. The 'Military Wives' song that is presently #1 in the UK charts is a small tribute to its power, its ability to infantilise and temporarily stupefy audiences with artistic cliche and spectacle.

Far be it from me to suggest that a few more hit songs like this will have us marching cheerfully into Tehran - no such thing - but this does have long range effects, even if these aren't computable according to any simple calculus of stimulus-response. We cannot afford to be complacent about such ordure. We have to destroy it, instantly, utterly. It won't do to simply buy a few Nirvana singles to get them to the top of the charts instead of Military Wives. That won't even work at this point. We have to start confronting this military fetishism wherever it insinuates itself in daily life. The 'help for heroes' boondoggle should be noisily boycotted; anyone collecting money for military causes in a bear outfit should be mercilessly ridiculed; young air, navy and army cadets sent out to pack bags at Marks and Spencer should be told exactly how and where to get a life; the poppies should be burned - not just a few, in a symbolic Islam4UK-style action, but all of them in a mass cremation of postcolonial bunting; and any family members who actually sign up to wear a uniform of the armed forces in Afghanistan or anywhere else should be shunned, not loved. That's a map of our kulturkampf for 2012.

From the clutches of (partial) victory

2011-12-20T19:52:00.000Z

It can't be that often that a Tory minister, anxious to look smart, does something stupid. Can it? I have watched this government with some perplexity, wondering if I have underestimated its cunning, or if they really do think they can arouse the whole labour movement and organised left in unified opposition, and trounce them in a jiffy. Their complacency as they embarked on a structural adjustment programme more extreme in its intended effects than anything accomplished by Thatcher, whether the blowback comes in the form of student protests, riots or strikes, seems extraordinary. Seemingly convinced that they need not offer any material substratum to secure the consent of a viable social bloc for their agenda, they simply turn to harsher policing. Apparently unable to imagine the riff-raff posing a real threat to them and their superior class allies, they forget the old salami-slicing praxis and just revel in the reluctance of their opponents to fight, pushing them around, taking their provocations to indulgent, extravagant new levels.

And just when it seemed that the government had finally revisited the old techniques of divide-and-rule, offering just enough concessions to win tacit acquiescence from Unison and GMB leaders while attacking and isolating the PCS, Pickles goes and spoils it all by saying something stupid that destroys it. For sure, the deal announced between the government and (some) unions over pensions was awful, so awful that it was a real question whether rank and file workers could be made to swallow it. The government conceded nothing in terms of its bargaining totals, nor the principle issues over which the two sides were in negotiation. Even a moderate, media-friendly Labourite like Sally Bercow was denouncing the agreement as a sell out yesterday. The idea that those who hit the pickets and streets on 30th November were more likely to take such a deal is dubious. But evidently the union bureaucracies who have been most reluctant to fight are now the most eager to call of hostilities and negotiate the terms of surrender. Without the support of union leaders in the big Labour-affiliated unions, getting strike action back on the agenda for the New Year is that bit harder. So, it is only reasonable to infer that Pickles just blew a tactical victory for the government.

The problem now is that the government and the union leaders will be back around the table to patch this up quickly, rush the deal through and make it a fait accompli as soon as possible. Trade unionists are now planning an emergency lobby of the TUC over this, to go with the emergency meeting (you should go) and emergency statement (I invite you to sign). This is a pivotal moment in the struggle against austerity. So much hangs on whether the organised labour movement will even put up a fight. That will make all the different between the vindication of Tory arrogance, and its humiliating reproof.

The late Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-16T17:34:00.000Z

Don't take this the wrong way, but the glowing tributes to Christopher Hitchens are both tasteless and incorrect. Have some decency. The boring wisdom has it that Hitchens broke the mould intellectually. He did not. For all the unique saleability of the Hitchensian idiolect (or intertext), he was a very conventional thinker, in addition to being a provincial. He also had a reputation for being a fierce defender of universalism, but in fact his was the provincial universalism of empire. One might, in the same speech, catch him defending the right of others to disagree with him, then find him denying that right to Iraqis, insisting that they be coerced at gunpoint into vouchsafing his opinion. He had a reputation for possessing a powerful intellect. He was certainly an intellectual, and a powerful speaker and writer, a polemicist who out-classed many of his opponents. Yet, by insisting on the difference between being an intellectual and having an intellect, I don't merely mean to be scurrilous. His difficulty in handling complex ideas was as notorious among his peers as his facility with emotionally potent oversimplifications.

Hitchens was a sensitive literary critic, but in a way this underlines his tendency to think viscerally. He grasped instinctively the 'John Bullshit' that, for example, made Larkin tick. Indeed, he grasped it with precision because it was a part of his own political personality, manifest in his admiration for Margaret Thatcher, his support for the Falklands War, and the blimpish outbursts redolent of the character of the 'Commander' in his memoir, Hitch-22. Yet when he had to deal with literary theory or applications of it (see Orwell's Victory), I think he tended to flounder. It is for a similar reason that he wasn't especially good as an atheist. Convinced as he was that there was no intelligent way to be religious, and no need to grasp theology in any theoretical depth, he tended to rely on demotic arguments demonstrating the implausibility of religion along the lines of: "so God made the universe billions of years ago; created the life forms that would over millions of years give rise to the only species capable of worshipping him; allowed them to suffer for millenia; and only then decided to make himself known by means of human sacrifice (and at that in an illiterate society) banking on the certainty that Emperor Constantine would turn to Christianity as an official state ideology of the Roman Empire...". This is to say nothing of the vulgar anti-Muslim rants and ugly blood-lust that he ventilated without care, and which sentiments formed a transparent motive for his turn to hypertrophic theophobia after the occupation of Iraq began to fail badly. And what of the crude sociobiological reductionism that he pinned his mast to? At this point, it is arguably more pernicious in its effects than even the encyclicals of the Catholic Church, or the opinions of Muslim scholars.

What he lacked in theory, he could make up for in empirical work. Hitchens could write decent biographical and historical essays. Blood, Class and Nostaglia as well as Hostage to History form extended historical essays in their different ways on Anglophone imperial succession. Richly contemptuous of the abuses of empire's subjects, these books arguably expressed a liberal humanist critique of imperial malpractice rather than a marxist critique. Perhaps there is also evidence of a decline in his standards. His book on Thomas Paine's Rights of Man seems to have been plagiarised, riddled with factual errors and cliched to boot: what Hitchens might call a "triple crown howler". Yet it was in his favoured role as a polemicist, that his limits were most clearly visible. For all the efficiency with which he despatched opponents, tore up or mended reputations, exposed official crimes (or colluded in them), he was clearly obsessed with personnel. The structures of imperialism and capital accumulation were never objects of his inquiry, even at his best.

A final cliche which should at least be qualified is that Hitchens was a wit, and all round dissolute bad boy. Well, he could be witty, but he could also be extraordinarily priggish, crass, or just boorish. The effect of his little joke about child rape ('no child's behind left') was ruined by his later taking an extremely high-handed tone with a rabbi who joked about circumcision. The humour in his 'heartless' bon mot about Louis Althusser applying for the Electric Chair in Philosophy was really purchased at the expense of Helene Althusser. It was not funny when he called the Dixie Chicks 'fat sluts', no matter what the editor of his collected quotables believes. Consider these remarks in the context of Hitchens' mildly hedonistic lifestyle, and they become no more sparkling. Rather, they tend to communicate a meanness of spirit, a sniggering cruelty, that was increasingly evident in later years, and contrasted markedly with the personal warmth that many of his former colleagues describe.

Shut it down

2011-12-13T10:41:00.000Z

Obstructing the profit system:

Fear of a red planet

2011-12-12T19:22:00.000Z

“Whether it was a question of the right of petition or the tax on wine, freedom of the press or free trade, the clubs or the municipal charter, protection of personal liberty or regulation of the state budget, the watchword constantly recurs, the theme remains always the same, the verdict is ever ready and invariably reads: "Socialism!" Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialistic, bourgeois enlightenment socialistic, bourgeois financial reform socialistic. It was socialistic to build a railway where a canal already existed, and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a cane when one was attacked with a rapier.

“This was not merely a figure of speech, fashion, or party tactics. The bourgeoisie had a true insight into the fact that all the weapons it had forged against feudalism turned their points against itself, that all the means of education it had produced rebelled against its own civilization, that all the gods it had created had fallen away from it. It understood that all the so-called bourgeois liberties and organs of progress attacked and menaced its class rule at its social foundation and its political summit simultaneously, and had therefore become "socialistic."” – Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

The Unilever strike, pensions and structural adjustment

2011-12-09T22:52:00.000Z

An article for The Guardian about the Unilever strike:

Unilever workers have embarked on the first national strike in the company's history, over the company's attempt to close the final salary pensions scheme, which will result in a 40% reduction in retirement income for many of its workers. The company, in a stunningly inept move, decided to punish the strike by cancelling Christmas parties and bonuses for the workers. Thus, Unilever, a blue chip company that takes pride in its philanthropic past and "responsible" industrial relations policy, found itself branded Scrooge.
Unilever is one of the companies to have weathered the global crisis in robust fashion. In February 2011, its profits were up 18% on the previous year, at some £5.2bn. Labour productivity has always been reasonably high, in part due to negotiated productivity deals with trade unions. Yet, the company is on the offensive against its workforce. Why is this?
Unilever will say that the current pension system is impossible to fund. This was the argument it used in 2008 for closing the scheme to all new entrants, only three years before closing it to existing members as well. The workers argue, though, that the pension fund is financially robust, and that the company itself admits there is no immediate financial imperative driving the cuts.
This is taking place in the context of a record number of firms shutting final salary schemes and replacing them with much less generous settlements. The GMB's negotiator argues that Unilever simply saw an opportunity to follow the trend. But there is probably more to it than that...

For a people's inquiry into the summer riots

2011-12-05T12:01:00.000Z

The Guardian and the LSE have published their findings on the summer riots. There is no doubt that this presents valuable data, which broadly supports the argument of those on the Left who said it was primarily a response to political injustice. The analysis acknowledges that, for some, the riots presented an opportunity to obtain free goods. But it does not support the claim that the riots were predominantly an outburst of criminality, or that gangs played a significant role. The riots were mainly political.

It finds: just under half of those rioters interviewed were students, and a significant component of their anger came from the sense of injustice over the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance and the tripling of tuition fees, cutting off higher education and thus life chances for millions; of those who were not students, 59% were unemployed, in contrast to some misleading coverage claiming that a disproportionate number were in work or even middle class; gang members played at most a peripheral role; while there was a wider perception of social injustice motivating the involvement rioters, the issue of police injustice, horrificially underscored by the murder of Mark Duggan, was the most significant cause of the riots; 73% of those interviewed had been stopped and searched in the previous three months. Now, the issue of the police was always marked by a strange silence in the accounts of those who said that it was primarily a matter of 'looting'. Much of the rioting that took place centred on confrontations with the police rather than theft or vandalism. Such theft as did take place was not always clearly pecuniary in motive - often it appeared to be targeted, as did some of the vandalism. In fact, the main form of 'opportunism' that is apparent is where young people, often on the receiving end of police harrassment and violence, saw an opportunity in the breakdown of police control to exact revenge. Because of this, many of the interviewees express pride, not remorse. They say they felt empowered, and would do it again. This is not new. So, all this data is useful and should be scoured carefully, the findings reviewed in their full complexity. Have a look at this video by Guardian journalist Paul Lewis:

However, as I understand it, this study is a limited review of one aspect of the story, that being the motivations and views of the rioters. The other main reports come from the Metropolitan Police, and the government's 'independent panel'. It is undoubtedly possible, through a reading of all of these reports, against the grain where necessary, to acquire a workable political understanding of what took place, and what is highly likely to take place again. It's important that such an understanding should inform a broad political response. The government, far from retreating on its agenda, is gearing up for major confrontations. The police, far from facing justice, have recently been let off the hook over the death of 'Smiley Culture', and now have more weapons with which to threaten people - as student protesters menaced with the possibility of water cannon and rubber bullets can attest. One would like to think that the dominant response will be in the form of social struggles, protests, strikes and occupations. Indeed, that is more or less what one expects. However, the most implausible scenario is that the riots will be a one off. And that's something that we have to be ready for, especially given how insanely most people reacted.

So, here's a proposal - a bit late, but still worth thinking about. We need a people's inquiry into the issues, the narrative, the outcomes and the appropriate response to the riots. It should be funded by subscription or donations, and it would require the participation of people able to put in a lot of hours interviewing witnesses and reviewing evidence. There is a model for this. Recently, I was directed to a number of reports published in the 1980s concerning riots that had taken place. These were unofficial people's inquiries, conducted in a judicious manner with the aim of establishing a full narrative which would disclose what public authorities were reluctant to acknowledge, and what was occluded in media coverage focused on vandalism and violence: police brutality, official racism, and so on. For example, in response to the events in Southall in April 1979, an Unofficial Committee of Enquiry was set up, chaired by Michael Dummett, to establish the narrative, the causes and failure on the part of the authorites. It heard evidence from eyewitnesses, participants, those directly or indirectly affected in Southall. It collated and scrutinised data published by the authorities. The final report was published by the National Council of Civil Liberties. Among the Committee's members were Stuart Hall, who wrote much of the report, as well as Labour MPs such as Joan Lestor and Patricia Hewitt (uh huh), alongside trade unionists, clerics and a representative of the Asian Resources Centre in Birmingham. This doesn't seem to be available online, but I got what I think is a rare copy from Amazon, and I shall be scanning it and making it publicly available as soon as I can. The idea here isn't to retrospectively endorse every conclusion reached, or to say that we can simply mimic every principle of organisation adopted then. Rather, it is to illustrate how a well-organised inquiry bringing together a relatively broad coalition of elements can form the basis for a political response. Now, I don't know how one would begin to go about materially constructing the coalition necessary to get an inquiry up and running today. I don't know what it would cost or who would supply the personnel. But I bet some of the people reading this have a better idea than I do. So, think about it.

That's a nice blog you have there. Shame if something were to happen to it.

2011-12-01T23:21:00.003Z

You all know what this is. Christmas time, when you're allegedly in a more yielding, generous mood - so I'm shaking you down. Listen, I haven't been able to persuade more than one person to donate to this blog on a regular, monthly basis. That person knows who he is, and he should also know that he's the only one. Feel good about yourselves? Eh? Eh? Eh?

Flattr didn't work out at all either. Donations last month were in the euro cents. So they've devised a system whereby people wanting to 'flattr' you can actually insult you with small change instead. Now, listen. I do understand. Everyone has their hand in your pocket. Prices are going up, wages are coming down. Living standards are stagnant. And besides, it's not like you pay for anything else on the internet.

But it's because of this failure to generate a sustainable stream of income that I have to come back and subject you to a new round of moral blackmail. And believe me, if you force me to, I'll ham it up so much you'll think you're watching a fucking NSPCC commercial. Then I'll ban Christmas, again. And then I'll shoot this wuvvwy puppy. So, let's try to avoid all that, eh? We're all civilized human beings here, apart from the ones whose comments are still being pre-moderated, and they're at least en route to civilization. Here's the deal. You can see I work hard on my material. There is a lot of labour time congealed in this blog. And that's time that most male bloggers spend stalking rivals, wanking and trolling (not necessarily separate activities). And the time, I like to think, is reasonably well spent. Evidently I'm on your reading list, because you keep coming back. This blog has had over 5 million unique visits. Now, if I had a pound for every time someone visited my blog... it would make no difference whatsoever, because I would still have spent it all on books. But the point is, I'm not asking you to make me a millionaire, just to consider paying a small sum toward the reproduction of my labour power. Regularly if you can, an unreasonably huge lump sum now if you cannot. And if you don't, so help me, I will shoot this blog. I will execute it. I will take it out and shoot it in front of its family, as Clarkson is my witness. So, please, let's not have any scenes. Donate to the church of leninology, and have a Merry Xmas.

PS: Thanks to guidance from a number of readers, I have been able to set up a 'Subscribe' button. This means if you want to make a monthly donation, you can. I have to set specific subscription amounts, but if there is an amount that you feel you can donate that is not covered in the options, please let me know and I'll see if I can add it.

On Democracy Now about Nov 30th

2011-11-30T18:44:00.001Z

Cultural materialism and identity politics

2011-11-30T00:53:00.001Z

If it is possible to have a cultural materialism, of the kind fashioned by Raymond Williams or Stuart Hall, is it also possible to have a materialist politics of identity? Is it even advisable to try? To answer the first question is to think through the meaning of Marx’s concept of the social formation as a unity in difference; to answer the second is to explicate Lenin’s thinking in saying that the person who waits for the ‘pure’ revolution will never live to see it.

In many respects, identity became an obsession in the UK over the last ten years. Were it not for the global economic crisis, we would be dealing mainly with the fall-out from New Labour’s crass attempt to pioneer various formats of ‘Britishness’ – from the sleek, neoliberal cosmopolitanism of ‘cool Britannia’ to the socially conservative, defensive nationalism of the ‘war on terror’. Within that garrisoned territory existed several sub-debates and struggles over Islam, immigration, gypsies and Travellers, ‘Englishness’ and the question of the Union, the north-south divide, and of course over whether the questions of LGBT and gender rights can ever be posed adequately within the framework of the nation (versus its ostensibly intolerant enemies).

Precisely how the left should conduct its operations within such a topography has been the subject of controversy. Much of the left is reproached with abandoning the ‘bread and butter’ of politics (jobs, welfare, housing) in favour of ‘identitarian’ concerns with Islamophobia, Gaza and so on. This criticism may well accept the importance of anti-imperialist and anti-racist politics, but argue that the priority given to these ‘identity’ issues that is the problem, representing both a shift in emphasis and in the locus of operation: from the workplace to the campus, from bread and butter to bruschetta and olive oil. Naturally, this trope is far from novel. Its pedigree has origins in the perplexed reaction to the ‘new social movements’ – those struggles oriented toward environmentalism, LGBT and women’s liberation, anti-racism and so on – by a variety of people on the social democratic and revolutionary left. Before exploring the consequences of this view, it’s worth saying that the argument is itself usually conducted within the very cultural and identitarian terrain that is seen as problematic. One of the better known advocates of the general perspective I’m describing is Owen Jones. (I better spare his blushes by explaining that I’m not attributing every particular of this view to him, merely the broad outlines.) His book, Chavs, is among other things a cultural counterblast against an emerging reactionary common sense that vilifies working class people. The ‘community politics’ that he sees the BNP exploiting, and argues that the Left should learn from, is formed by a politics of identity and a valorisation of the ‘local’. So, although this general style of argument introduces a division on the left between those who orient toward culture, and those who orient toward class, and although it is prefaced by a certain ‘economistic’ materialism, it necessarily occupies a decidedly culturalist problematic.

In response to the culturalisation of class, then, is it possible to counterpose a materialism of culture and identity? The grounds for a materialist approach to culture were outlined in Hall et al’s (Gramscian-Althusserian) Resistance Through Rituals:

“In modern societies, the most fundamental groups are the social classes, and the major cultural configurations will be, in a fundamental though often mediated way, ‘class cultures’. Relative to these cultural-class configurations, sub-cultures are sub-sets—smaller, more localised and differentiated structures, within one or other of the larger cultural networks. We must, first, see subcultures in terms of their relation to the wider class-cultural networks of which they form a distinctive part. When we examine this relationship between a sub-culture and the ‘culture’ of which it is a part, we call the latter the ‘parent’ culture. This must not be confused with the particular relationship between ‘youth’ and their ‘parents’, of which much will be said below. What we mean is that a sub-culture, though differing in important ways—in its ‘focal concerns’, its peculiar shapes and activities—from the culture from which it derives, will also share some things in common with that ‘parent’ culture. The bohemian sub-culture of the avant-garde which has arisen from time to time in the modern city, is both distinct from its ‘parent’ culture (the urban culture of the middle class intelligentsia) and yet also a part of it (sharing with it a modernising outlook, standards of education, a privileged position vis-a-vis productive labour, and so on). … Sub-cultures must exhibit a distinctive enough shape and structure to make them identifiably different from their ‘parent’ culture. They must be focussed around certain activities, values, certain uses of material artefacts, territorial spaces etc. which significantly differentiate them from the wider culture. But, since they are subsets, there must also be significant things which bind and articulate them with the ‘parent’ culture. The famous Kray twins, for example, belonged both to a highly differentiated ‘criminal sub-culture’ in East London and to the ‘normal’ life and culture of the East End working class (of which indeed, the ‘criminal sub-culture’ has always been a clearly identifiable part). The behaviour of the Krays in terms of the criminal fraternity marks the differentiating axis of that subculture: the relation of the Krays to their mother, family, home and local pub is the binding, the articulating axis.” (pp 13-14)

Firmly domiciled within class formations, culture forms and divides them along multiple planes and down as many hierarchical vertices. Of course, it would be mistaken to see cultures as merely class-bound, either in their parent- or sub-cultural form. The practices that comprise a culture or subculture are often available to and accessed by members of more than one class. These practices, and the ‘maps of meaning’ that express the lived relationship of one class to its life situation may be appropriated and reconfigured by members of another for its own purposes, in what one might call ‘trench raiding’. The military analogy is chosen to convey the fact that such raiding crosses a line of antagonism and struggle, not of mere difference. This accounts for the resentment toward those crossing such lines – ‘hipsters’, for example. A greater degree of complexity arises where lines of difference become antagonistic in oppressive situations. Suppose you’re a white person who is considered to be ‘acting black’. In most cases, this would be a deeply weird suggestion. It is unworldly to think of a given set of cultural practices as being exclusively ‘black’. But for racists, ‘blackness’ is a pathology passing through the vectors of music and popular culture to white youths, who are then said to have become ‘black’. That is the basis for a certain folk racist explanation of the summer riots, memorably articulated by David Starkey. At the same time, from a different perspective, such ‘acting’ can be seen as a form of racist parody and condescension, or a simple theft in a cultural war - albeit perhaps not without buying into a certain cultural essentialism and the attendant idea that culture is something that can be policed. Whatever judgement we reach on those criticisms, however, what is important for the purposes of this argument is that we notice the line of antagonism and the ways in which this structures the processes of transmission and appropriation.

Where does ‘identity’ fit into all this? It is common to address the subject in the terms of particularism, in contrast to the universalisms that form the basis for rival political projects such as socialism and liberalism. This would suggest that identity is bound to a specific culture or sub-culture, its political radius extending no wider than the boundaries of cultural form in which it is embedded. Even more scandalously from a certain perspective, the notion of identity seems to be bound to the bourgeois individual, the self-sufficient, self-sustaining Cartesian subject. Yet identity is a much more slippery concept than this would imply. It is not distinguished only by its affirmation of the culturally, or politically proximate, but also by the process of identification which involves the perception of, for example, shared interests. And interests are interesting things: they can be expansive, or narrow; inclusive, or aloof. Identity politics is a ‘politics of location’, certainly. But where one is situated in the social formation has consequences for how far one can see. I seem to recall from somewhere that it was Angela Davis who urged readers to imagine the capitalist system as a pyramid, with heterosexual white male capitalists at the top, and black, gay women prisoners at the bottom. Each struggle by those at the bottom would also lift those further up, such that the more subaltern one’s situation, the more potentially universal one’s interests are. The marxist understanding of the working class as the ‘universal class’ hinges partially on this strategic insight.

‘Identity politics’ is usually treated as an unwelcome narrowing of horizons, a reduction of the political field to competing particularist fiefdoms – in a word, the identitarianisation of politics. But it is also possible to arrive at the same subject from the opposite direction – the politicisation of identity. The tendency of capitalism is to multiply the number of lines of antagonism. And if certain identities are goaded into being, or take on a politicised edge, because the system is attacking people then it is clear that ‘identity politics’ is not a distraction, or an optional bonus. The fact is that ‘identities’ have a material basis in the processes of capitalism. And just because they are constructed (from that material basis) doesn’t mean that they are simply voluntary responses to the life situation they arise in, which can be modified or dropped at will. Thus, it is not realistic to tell people – “you have the wrong identity; you should think of yourself as a worker instead”. To speak of capitalism is to speak of a system of unity in difference, a complex unity structured by antagonism. In any concrete capitalist formation, the forces that emerge to support oppositional and leftist struggles will usually be coming from some identity-position; and usually more than one identity-position, as the lines of antagonism intersect and the fields of politicisation overlap. As Judith Butler argued in her essay, ‘Merely Cultural’, the Left can respond to this in two ways. Either it can try to construct a unity which is based on the exclusions of what I might call, for convenience, a pre-1968 Left: a unity which suppresses or demotes gender, race, etc as being of secondary, derivative importance. But this will not work: the genie will not go back in the bottle, and all such efforts would result in would be a divided and more defeasible Left. Or it can try to construct a unity in difference, negotiating between identities, acknowledging them as starting points which give rise to certain forms of politicisation and which can potentially be the basis for accession to a universalist political project.

Of course, the objection to this might be to remind me of what I only just said (or quoted) a few paragraphs ago: the fundamental division in any society is class (ie, not gender, not race, not religion, etc). And if that is the dominant antagonism, then it must follow that class struggles have a strategic priority over other struggles. It is morally satisfying, but stupid, to pretend that all identities – class, race, gender, religion, etc. – are equivalent. This means that some must be ‘of secondary, derivative importance’. But such an objection, were it offered, would be prestidigitation. First of all, it inserts the essentialist approach that it seems to argue for in its precepts. To say that a form of oppression is derivative of a more fundamental class antagonism is to fall back on that animating illusion, the ‘expressive totality’ in which all the phenomena of a social formation are collapsible into its essence. Secondly, more importantly, we recognise explanatory hierarchies, and thus strategic hierarchies. From the perspective of socialist organisation, some identities are pernicious; some are indifferent; and some possess valuable resources. That’s a hierarchy. But what is at issue, and what is being illegitimately conflated with the above, is the claim that the injustices of oppression are not ‘bread and butter’ as it were; ie somehow less ‘material’, or less ‘fundamental’ than class injustices. Because they are seen as not partaking of the same processes of material life, as not contributing to the reproduction of productive relations, then their resolution can be seen as extraneous to class struggle, as desirable but ultimately not part of the material base in which real politics is conducted.

This is a tendency, to put it no more strongly than that, which we can see creep back into certain left (mainly social democratic) discourses. It is one whose logic, which many of its advocates will resist due to their better nature, tends toward a racially and sexually ‘cleansed’ class struggle, in effect a narrow struggle of straight white men in the imperialist core over their living conditions – ie, not a class struggle in any recognisable sense. It would be a rather parochial form of identity politics. Not only is this rebarbative on its own terms, but it’s actually useless to the people it would seem intended to help, the ‘white [straight, male] working class’. In the concrete struggles arising against cuts in the UK today, quite often the starting point is some form of political identity that isn’t simply ‘socialist’ or ‘liberal’. Those signifiers may designate a wider political-strategic divide that forms the terrain in which political identities work. But quite often, people will join a protest “as a student”, “as a trade unionist”, “as a black woman”, “as the mother of a jailed rioter”, and so on. Their political identities will reflect sectional interests, cultural formations, particular experiences of oppression, etc. But these are, as I say, starting points. And a creative, politically intelligent response to identity politics has to begin, to some extent, where the forces on our side begin.

A materialist politics of identity is one that recognises the corporeality of identities, their involvement in the metabolic interactions between humanity and its environment. Acknowledging that they are part of a lived, material process yields the further acknowledgment of their durability but also of the versatile ways in which they can be operationalized. It means treating identities as forces to be cooperated with, negotiated with, argued with, learned from, and ultimately (one hopes) fused into a universalist project, that being a revolutionary assault on capitalism.

Nov 30th

2011-11-29T21:14:00.001Z

My ABC article explaining the background to tomorrow's strike:

The public sector strike on November 30 will be the largest strike in the UK since the general strike of 1926.
Two to three million workers could take part. Unlike our continental counterparts, coordinated strikes of this kind are extremely rare in the British trade union movement. As such, its political importance, if the action is successful, will be much greater than in the continent.
Why has it come to this? In a sense, the answer is obvious. 'Austerity' involves the most serious attempt to restructure the economy, to the detriment of working class living standards, in decades. It involves reducing wages and pensions, diminishing bargaining rights, cutting jobs and reducing the bargaining power of labour. Everywhere that these measures have been introduced, whether in Wisconsin or Greece, there has been resistance.
Yet, there was no guarantee that the British trade union movement would respond in the way that it has. Decades of declining union composition since the serious defeats inflicted on organised labour – notably, on the miners and the print workers – have left unions in a weaker position.
The orthodoxy among trade union leaders since then has been a form of tactical conservatism known as the 'new realism'. This approach involved unions avoiding confrontation in favour of bargaining with the government of the day. Every sign until last year was that the Trade Unions Congress (TUC) would adopt this approach in dealing with the government's cuts, negotiating to mitigate the effects of cutbacks rather than seriously attempting to obstruct them. Indeed, before grumblings from the shop floor scuppered the plan, union leaders had intended to invite prime minister David Cameron to address congress last year. So, what changed?

Strong public support for strikes

2011-11-28T10:12:00.000Z

The government has lost the argument:

An opinion poll commissioned by BBC News suggests 61% of people believe public sector workers are justified in going on strike over pension changes.
More than two million people are due to walk out on Wednesday.
The research also indicates differences between men and women in their outlook on the strikes and the economy.
The polling firm Comres interviewed 1,005 adults by telephone across England, Scotland and Wales one week ago.
The poll indicates greater sympathy for the industrial action among women - at 67% - compared with men, at 55%.
Younger people, it also suggests, are considerably more supportive of the strikes than pensioners; almost four in five 18 to 24-year-olds back the action, a little under half of over-65s do.

November 30

2011-11-27T02:09:00.000Z

Just a quick note. The political class knows that this strike is going to be huge. For a while, I detected an attempt to play it down, to say that it wouldn't be as big as planned, or to suggest that it would be welcome because the disruption would drive people into the arms of the coalitions and its cuts agenda. But the results from all of the unions have been unambiguous. In most cases, the vote for strike action has been in excess of 80%, and in all cases over 70%. That's an overwhelming mandate for a fight, right across the organised core of the working class. Now the stories of the scale of disruption anticipated are starting to pile up. Worse, the government fears that the strike itself will harden the attitude of the workers, making it more difficult for the union bosses to sell them a duff deal. Now, mark this. Labour, whose leader has repeatedly turned his rhetoric against the strikes, is starting to sound a slightly different note. Alan Johnson, the leading Labour right-winger (and a likely successor to Ed Miliband) came out and defended the strikers, saying: "If they can’t [strike] over an issue as important as their pensions then what can they take industrial action over?" Now, the shadow chancellor Ed Balls has felt compelled to add his "huge sympathy" for the strikers, and blamed the government. The political class are beginning to take note: as Mark Serwotka points out, this is the beginning and not the end of the struggle, but Britain will be a very different place on the day after November 30th.

Red Hunters in the Deep South

2011-11-26T16:21:00.006Z

This is a version of the talk I gave at 'Historical Materialism' recently, with a few of the more contentious points fleshed out. A more detailed paper will probably appear online at some point.

The countersubversive network

I thought we could approach this subject through a contemporary analogy, that of the Tea Party. It is in some senses a classic 'counter-subversive movement', resembling in many ways the ‘anticommunist network’ of the Cold War. It is, after all, out to neutralise a putative threat to property and free markets from a socialist who has captured executive power. Of course, all of this is suffused with racial affect. Thus, Tom Tancredo argued recently that “People who could not even spell the word 'vote' or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House ... we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote.” In my opinion, though, Dinesh D’Souza gave the argument its most interesting spin, suggesting that while there may be some merits to the charge of Obama’s socialism, matters were in fact much worse. He charges that Obama hates the West and everything it stands for. Far from being driven by MLK’s “dream”, or the “American dream”, the dreams from his father are those of anticolonial radicalism.

What to make of all this? Anti-racist liberalism charges that the allegations of ‘socialism’ are coded racial epithets – per Tim Wise, it expresses the white fear that black men are going to elope with their possessions. But this unduly flattens the discussion, reducing the Tea Party’s anti-socialism to a decoy. This is also a problem with most historical writing on southern anticommunism. As with the South's red-hunting, the Tea Party's anti-socialism is not a decoy. It is real. Hayek, who upbraided “socialists of all parties” would have understood the expansive definition of socialism that the Tea Partiers are using. Second, their property concerns may be exaggerated, but the modest reforms proposed by Obama did alarm certain interests – obviously the Koch Brothers among them. Thirdly, D’Souza is a fantasist, but he does understand that there is an historical connection between anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism. The relationship between racism and anti-socialism just has to be theorised a bit more carefully.

I mentioned that the Tea Party is similar to classical anticommunist networks, but it differs in some key respects. It lacks a coherent global narrative. The charge that Obama is an occult Muslim by no means has the same power as the claim that communists were infiltrating the government and engaged in sabotage, which had some empirical basis however exaggerated. Moreover, the classical anticommunist network could be seen as composed of three coordinates: civil society groups and coalitions, such as the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Minute Men, etc; business alliances and departments of commerce; and the state. The latter is the vital unifying element, what really gives these networks teeth. The Tea Party, of course, has no equivalent to to J. Edgar Hoover in the Justice Department, no Dies Committee, and no HUAC. It has no executed traitors, no public testimonials and no police forces and para-state mobs concretising its countersubversive intent with illegal raids. Failing thus far to colonise the state, denied the unifying properties of state power, it has remained the name for a disarticulated and ideologically unstable rightist rump. Its anti-socialism, far from becoming hegemonic, remains sectional.

Hegemony, and the historical bloc

The classical period of anticommunism that I will discuss is that between 1945 and 1965, a twenty year period during which the US was ruled by a Fordist ‘historical bloc’ – that is, an alliance between monopoly capital, the state and the trade union bureaucracy. This hegemonic moment was achieved through the destruction of the CPUSA-dominated Popular Front left and the incorporation of many of its scattered elements. This was crystallised in the outcome of the 1948 presidential election, but punctuated along the way by a series of moments, such as the Taft-Hartley anti-union legislation. Very importantly, the fight against Popular Frontism was won inside the trade union movement, inside the bureaucracy. And if, as Volosinov argued, the word is the most sensitive index of social change, then at the discursive level, this change was registered with the popularisation of terms like ‘communofascist’ among workers, which had first appeared after the Hitler-Stalin pact. This indicates that, as much as anything else, the Cold Warriors were exploiting the limitations of Popular Frontism and specifically the practices of the CPUSA which had alienated working class supporters.

For it to be effective, Cold War anticommunism had to condense and articulate highly antagonistic subject-positions. In particular, it had to plausibly incorporate elements of popular ideologies and aspirations. The extolment of the ‘free’ American worker whose income would rise with productivity, in contrast with the Soviet worker, who was enslaved and impoverished, is an example of this. [It was pointed out in the discussion that one reason for the Tea Party's failure to gain real traction in the working class is that the system can't deliver real wage rises any more, because all productivity rises are accumulated as surplus value.] The symbolic element of this hegemonic practice can be overstated. Nonetheless, it is worth looking at how hegemonic languages are constructed, and how they successfully bind together opposing interests.

In the symbolic field of anticommunism, 'freedom' is the master-signifier, not 'capitalism'. (In the symbolic field of communism, this position was occupied by 'peace'). Yet, 'freedom' for a unionised worker in a northern Ford plant meant something different than for someone in the White House, or the White Citizens' Council, or the Civil Rights Congress, or the Southern States Industrial Council, and so on. Should we say, following Laclau, that 'freedom' is a 'tendentially empty signifer', one of several such, enabling “common nuclei of meaning” to be “connotatively linked to diverse ideological-articulatory domains”? I think there is some validity in this, provided we bear a few caveats in mind.

First, that Laclau did not pioneer this insight, merely attempted to give it some rigour and systematic clarity, with the use of Althusser's concept of 'interpellation' - the process in which subjects are constituted by an ideology. Second, that the purported 'tendentially empty' character of these signifiers has to understood in light of Laclau's political project at the time. In opposition to what he saw as 'economism', in which the apparent contingency of ideological and political struggles was firmly anchored in economic class struggles, he was attempting to construct a relationship between ideology and class struggle based on articulation (the way in which a signifier is brought into relations with other signifiers) rather than reduction (in which a signifier can be reduced to a class connotation). Thus, the ideological valence of a given signifier (democracy, freedom, etc) is not given by a direct class connotation, but rather by the overall ideological framework in which it is articulated. Such signifiers could be adopted by different classes for different purposes, depending on their political project. The sense of this tended to shift from the correct claim that there is no necessary class connotation to specific ideological signifiers, to the unwarranted claim that there is necessarily no class connotation to specific ideological signifiers. This is what the term 'tendentially empty' means, and it becomes especially problematic when applied to signifiers such as liberalism and nationalism, which are not glittering generalities in the way that democracy and freedom are. Laclau, then still a marxist, was in part trying to formulate a theory of populism which would validate a populist (effectively, Eurocommunist) political strategy by communist parties. He argued that class and populist interpellations related to two distinct kinds of antagonism: class, to the conflict between the working class and the ruling class; populism, to the conflict between the people and the 'power bloc'. Populist interpellation was of itself neutral in terms of the class struggle, a raw material with no determinate class content. Therefore, populism was a field of ideological class struggle, in which rival classes would attempt to achieve a hegemonic, or counter-hegemonic, position by articulating popular ideas. The Italian Communist Party, then leading the Eurocommunists, was - he maintained - pursuing a populist strategy. It is important to note that class struggle still plays a dominant role here. The 'people', Laclau notes, don't exist at the level of productive relations. It is a purely a political and ideological category, whereas class antagonisms dominate at all levels. Still, the shift from marxist to post-marxist, and with it the abandonment of class politics as an inadequate basis for socialist struggle, did not take long. With the theory ringing so many alarm bells, then, what do I want with it? Well, bearing in mind that a theory is not reducible to its political uses, I think that with suitable modification it can help explain the contingent element in the determination of ideological signifiers. If not 'tendentially empty', we can say that such signifiers are relatively (and differently) tendentially versatile, and thus more or less capable of being used as raw material in the contruction of a hegemonic language. Racism, then, has some limited versatility, but also can be said to be connotatively linked to certain class projects more than others; and is clearly incompatible with communism. I also think that the notion of articulation correctly specifies the mechanism by which the valence of such signifiers is fixed, or contested.

Anyway, within this hegemonic bloc, there is the Deep South. And as I mentioned, there's a tendency to reduce the belligerent anticommunism of the South to an instrumental decoy. In fact, I will maintain that white supremacy, specifically southern white supremacy, was an integral component of an anticommunist praxis cohering this hegemonic alliance of class forces. Part of the means by which this worked in the South was the practice of a kind of 'racial populism'. Now, what is that? I was just talking about Laclau's notion of populism as a form of popular-democratic interpellation, working on the antagonism between the 'people' and the 'power bloc'. This involves "the presentation of popular-democratic interpellations as a synthetic-antagonistic complex with respect to the dominant ideology". This isn't adequate, but it does capture some of the dimensions of what we're studying. First of all, the theory suggests that there is a potentially oppositional content to popular-democratic ideas which, for the purposes of hegemony, must be absorbed and neutralised. Anyone who revisits the local statecraft of people like Governor Talmadge, and particularly his extremely popular oratory, will see this in action. This is done in a racist, folkish manner counterposing the (white, Protestant) 'people' to the (Jewish, Papist) 'power bloc' - Federal bureaucrats and bankers. Secondly, where hegemony breaks down, there is a potential for these same interpellations to be articulated in an oppositional manner - though, as should be clear, 'oppositional' can mean right-wing or even downright counter-revolutionary. One can think here of how the New Right articulated certain popular ideas in an antagonistic thrust not to depose the 'power bloc', but to re-organise it. By 1965, the hegemonic bloc was breaking down, anticommunist ideology was losing its traction, the position of the Deep South was increasingly at odds with US global hegemony (which was under threat from anticolonial movements), and Washington felt compelled to finally abolish Jim Crow. And in response, in the South we have numerous attempts to mobilise racial populism in an attempt either to protect the old system of Dixiecrat-managed white supremacist capitalism, or to re-organise white supremacist capitalism under a new Republican management.

In what follows, I'll try to further specify the position of the South in the 'historical bloc'.

Pre-history

The toxic fusion of anticommunism and racism had seen its entrée in era of haut Wilsonianism, from 1917 to 1921. In response to the socialist and labour challenges following the Bolshevik revolution, the US government embarked on a series of legal-repressive measures to identify and contain subversives. The dominant key of countersubversion was nativist, concerned with the preservation of ‘Americanism’, and racist. Robert Lansing, George Simons, and military intelligence credited the fraudulent thesis of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to explain the success of the Bolsheviks. The race theorist Lothrop Stoddard maintained that the Bolsheviks were race traitors vaunting “the proletarianization of the world”. The Sedition Act (1918) was used pointedly against ‘aliens’, while the J Edgar Hoover used his position in the Bureau of Investigation to raise alarm over the alleged propensity of African American leaders toward communism – a claim that resonated with the previous hysteria over pro-German sympathies among African Americans. The Lusk Commission established in 1919 to look into radicalism “argued that there was ‘not a single system of Anglo-Saxon socialism, nor a single system of Latin race socialism’. The only scientific system of socialism was ‘of German-Jewish origin’.” This was a particularly portentous accusation after the feverish anti-German propaganda that shadowed US entry into the First World War.

In the ensuing period, communist agitation around the issue of race – particularly after the Moscow Congress of the Communist International supporting self-determination for the black sunbelt in 1928 – served to bolster the mutually reinforcing capacities of anticommunist and racial politics. A number of events served to underline this. In March 1931, local police arrested nine black teenage boys in Scottsboro, Alabama, charging them with the rape of two white women on a train travelling through northern Alabama. Four separate juries convicted eight of the boys that same month. The Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) organised a major campaign of support the ‘Scottsboro Boys’. The prosecution of black CPUSA organiser Angelo Herndon in Atlanta for “inciting insurrection” added to the perception that the red problem was a race problem, and vice versa. And though unions struggled to make progress against the southern business class in the 1930s, communists made gains among most disaffected workers in southern industries, like textiles, particularly among class conscious black workers. Black members of CPUSA made up 7.2% in 1931, but rose to 14% in 1946. Thus, in the prologue to the classical period of anticommunism, the latter was already imbricated with the preservation of Jim Crow and vice versa.

The classical phase of anticommunism

After 1945, the relationship between anticommunism and the racial order became more complex. The complexity arose from the ambiguities of managing different kinds of hegemony, and different kinds of racial order, in different kinds of space. To explain, the US had assumed a hegemonic position among an alliance of capitalist classes opposed to socialism in this period. The rise of anticolonial struggles, often influenced or led by communist parties, demanded that the US government engage in a complex series of operations. While its global interventions were often in defence of racial hierarchies that were perceived to be efficiently anticommunist, the logic of defending worldwide ‘freedom’ against its negative ‘totalitarian’ ideograph placed limits on this and also penetrated the domestic sphere. The issue of segregation “became international in scope”, a fact that its opponents made use of.

Mary Dudziak summarises the thrust of this logic: the world in which America wished to operate was in some senses like a panopticon. Egregious abuses would be witnessed by world opinion, which would in turn apply pressure. Dudziak maintains the US government was deeply reluctant to implement changes to the racial order and did so largely on the basis of global hegemonic considerations, fortifying the American model as an attractive one for decolonizing populations. As Richard Nixon put it, following a visit to the newly independent state of Ghana in 1957, “We cannot talk equality to the peoples of Africa and Asia and practice inequality in the United States”.

Southern statesmen and businessmen were the most belligerent anticommunist component of the Cold War ‘historical bloc’. And they had to fight for their own version of Americanism against that which might be necessary to secure US global hegemony. They didn’t lack for resources. The classical Jeffersonian discourse of ‘states rights’ for one. The lexicon of antitotalitarianism – against egregious Federal centralism, imposing equality from above, etc. – for another. Anticommunism was their most important weapon. This was not merely opportunistic. The evidence is that they did believe, as the Southern States Industrial Council put it, that civil rights legislation was a “blueprint for totalitarianism”. Moreover, the same anticommunist techniques used by Northern liberals against militant unionism and leftism could be just as plausibly used against anti-racist struggles in the South. If McCarthy said there were communists in the federal government, how hard was it to believe that the civil rights movement was the result of communist agitation? If global communism was, as all elements in the political establishment agreed, bent on a conspiracy of subversion and sabotage, determined to overthrow ‘Western civilization’, what was paranoid or disproportionate about attention to Martin Luther King’s communist associations, or Senate investigations into the activities of civil rights groups? Why shouldn’t HUAC have something to say about the Congress of Racial Equality? Was not the Civil Rights Congress, which embarrassingly charged the US with genocide against African Americans when it was representing itself as the vanguard of global democracy, actually a communist front? At any rate, much of the information used to discredit the foes of white supremacy was coming directly from Hoover and the FBI, who were engaging in extra-legal spying and repression programmes aimed against radicals

Anticommunist legislation was primarily used in the South to target organisations like the NAACP, the Southern Regional Conference, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The Deep South could defend its ascriptive hierarchy using precisely the same hegemonic language and institutions that its occasional critics in the North had already deployed. Moreover, this intersected with international concerns that were shared in Washington. If Southern politicians deemed decolonization a danger due to the unfitness of former colonial subjects for self-government, so Washington feared “premature independence” on the same grounds – and its policies in Vietnam, the Congo and Latin America reflected this commitment.

Anticommunism also secured the unity of a panoply of forces in the south, from the White Citizens’ Council, hardline anti-radical statesmen like Senator James Eastland, ‘pragmatic segregationists’ like Governor J P Coleman of Mississippi, and business advocates of the ‘new south’, and white workers socialised in a peculiar combination of southern paternalism, evident in the Mill Towns, and southern racial populism. To understand the efficacy of racial populist interpellation, we can avail ourselves of Gramsci’s writing on ‘The Southern Question’, wherein he discusses the uses of regional variations and locally embedded cultural patterns, as well as northern quasi-colonial chauvinism toward southerners, in dividing subaltern classes and frustrating the formation of counter-hegemonic movement. To give this its specific relevance, though, it is necessary to appraise the manner in which ‘race’ is constitutive of class relations in the US. Historically, class consciousness among white American workers has taken the form of a ‘white labour republicanism’, in which white workers were bound to the racial system through fear of being reduced to the level of the ‘slave’. Their aspirations for self-determination and dignity in labour were thus incorporated into the ruling ideology. This accounts significantly for the failure of unionisation drives such as ‘Operation Dixie’, which was also the subject of red-baiting. It was, in particular, “the racialism of communism” that alienated Southern white workers.

Concluding remarks

So, those are the very rough outlines of the protocols of my research. At each step, the idea is to descend from these very general historical and theoretical contours to the level of specific social formations, to the sites of racial and anticommunist practises. We can start, for example, by asking: did capitalism underdevelop black America? This forces us to clarify what the capitalist mode of production consists of; what its relationship to 'development' is; how it can relate to other modes of production either as a determining or determined factor; how combined and articulated modes of production can sustain racial caste systems; whether it makes sense to speak of residual modes of production; and from there what the actual southern pattern of development discloses regarding its evolving productive relations, up to the period under discussion, and therefore the relationship between capitalism and the region's system of racial oppression. There is an argument about whether the continuing practice of sharecropping in the Fifties was in some sense feudal, or a kind of capitalist labour tenancy. The answer to this matters, because the planters were one of the main constituencies supporting Jim Crow. How did they fit into the hegemonic bloc? Were their forms of production ultimately incompatible with the successful capitalist development of the United States? Did the industrial and service industries of the 'new South' have a fundamentally different interest with respect to segregation? (I have some provisional answers to all of these questions, but I deliberately omit them here). And so on.

At last, what I intend to do is study the archives of the southern textile industry. This is because the textile industry was the single largest industry in the period under discussion; it was the core segregated industry, employing black workers only for menial occupations, and practising paternalism toward white workers; and it was politically influential. The mill owner Roger Milliken was Nixon’s finance chairman in 1968, a strong supporter of Pat Buchanan, and a funder of Strom Thurmond. Southern politicians worked hard to reach out to the ‘mill vote’. The textile industry was also culturally significant, a source of resonant mythologies. Billy Graham, for example, appealed to the old ‘mill hands’; and it was a prominent target of unionisation efforts by CIO as the Cold War began, and later the subject of federal de-segregation campaigns. The textile industries also had a peculiar emphasis on paternalism. The bosses, by providing amenities and services for their white workers in mill towns, also exerted a degree of influence and control over their lives, regulating not just the production of goods but the reproduction of labour – their family life, everything (this was also evident in early 20th Century Fordism) - and promoting a kind of folkish cross-class solidarity that undercut unionisation and contributed to the failure of the CIO's organising drive, Operation Dixie. Black workers' lives were controlled but less intimately regulated by the bosses, and thus they tended to be a lot more open to unionism.

Obviously, I can’t say exactly what the archives of the textile industry, southern business lobbies, civil rights groups, and the relevant unions will disclose. But I’ve been into some of the background of bodies like the Southern States Industrial Council, which I think is a hugely important business alliance organised around virulent anticommunism and the defence of racial hierarchies as a delicate cultural ecology, an appropriate form of diversity for a healthy America. It coordinated a number of class practises – industrial policy, political interventions both domestically and overseas (Rhodesia, for instance), ideological and propaganda campaigns. And what one tends to find is an articulation of anticommunism and white supremacy as distinct elements in these class practices. One finds the council mainly avoiding direct references to Jim Crow, beyond opposing "civil rights propaganda" and declaring that the issue was a "temporary and typical national vagary". They did organise against the inclusion of Hawaii as an American state, because they believed that the inclusion of another people who were not white would dilute the republic. But as importantly, they maintained that the place was some sort of Bolshevik outpost, where the ILWU ran the place like some sort of socialist dictatorship. Generally speaking, they tended to link a defence of free market conservatism to a discourse of Southern cultural vitality and diversity as a necessary element of a cosmopolitan culture. They were also profoundly belligerent in the Cold War, supporting the wars in Vietnam and Korea, and opposing Nixon’s detente with the PRC; like most southern politicians, they opposed those aspects of foreign policy designed to win the Cold War with ‘soft power’ such as the Marshall Plan (this was ‘socialism’ as far as they were concerned) and especially de-segregating measures. These are some of the concrete ways in which racism and anticommunism were articulated in the South during the Cold War.

Egyptian revolution

2011-11-22T21:21:00.000Z

Some salient developments in Egypt today: The Muslim Brothers asked their supporters not to attend the protest in Tahrir Square today. This is causing a serious rift in the organisation, especially given the scale of the protests. Hundreds of thousands have demonstrated today, including about 100,000 in Tahrir Square (remarkable given the scale of army repression designed to keep people away), a further 100,000 in Alexandria. Despite the enormous amount of powerful and toxic tear gas being used, and the dozens killed and thousands wounded, "huge crowds" are reportedly still making their way into Tahrir. Watch the live feed for yourself:

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The army is starting to hesitate. Field Marshal Tantawi has accepted the resignation of the cabinet and offered to speed up the transition to civilian rule - though without naming a date and without addressing the substance of popular grievances, it was similar to many of the speeches Mubarak made before his overthrow. The protesters aren't buying it. It's an open question whether others, who are not at the centre of the revolutionary movement, will. And some notable defections have occured. Here an army officer splits from the military leadership and joins the protesters:

It is not helpful to overstate the significance of such defections. But recall that an important condition for the overthrow of Mubarak was the disintegration of his police force and the refusal of the army leadership to support him. At the time, the army accumulated moral capital for not supporting the main attacks on protesters. Since then, their conduct - worse than Mubarak, says Amnesty - has turned that black into red. The military itself is now the clear problem; and presumably what is needed is a breakdown in military command.

Last thing, the US has made it clear that it is backing the military to the finish. It has to. Because if the military regime collapses in Egypt, then the US-led attempts to take control of the situation in the Middle East will be in tatters. The initiative would be in the hands of the revolutionary masses, not just in Egypt - the centre of gravity - but also in Syria and Yemen. Israel's regional power would be further weakened. Even the straightforward, low cost victory in Libya - whose new regime excludes both the Islamists and the Berbers - could begin to unravel.

Occupy Tahrir Square

2011-11-21T13:29:00.001Z

Speaking of bungled acts of repression, the Egyptian military's assault on protesters after last Friday's mass protest has revived the country's revolutionary movement and (so I hear) put a general strike on the agenda. Tahrir Square has been retaken. This image (left) shows what the square looked like on Friday. Following the protest, which was against the military council's usurpation of dictatorial power, dozens of people decided to stay on in the square overnight. They were assaulted by troops using tear gas and rubber bullets in a bid to clear the square. The resulting uproar saw tens of thousands drawn back out onto the square. Repeated assaults seem only to have broadened the array of groups willing to stand against the military. Beyond Tahrir, there have been mass protests in Alexandria and Suez, among other places. The assembly of forces looks remarkably similar to that in February - trade unionists, liberals, socialists, Nasserists and Islamists, all out against the regime. There are now calls for international solidarity as the revolutionary movement, in tens of thousands not dozens, faces down rubber bullets and tear gas. The country's trade unions are calling for their 1.4m members to join protesters in the Tahrir Square sit-in. The struggle is still 'in the balance', as it were, but what a turnaround.

For a time, it seemed as if the armed forces would control the tempo of events. Elections would proceed in the manner prescribed by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), and most significant forces would participate. The army would incite sectarianism against coptic Christians, and murder them with impunity. The leadership of the Muslim Brothers - expecting to do well in any prospective elections under the banner of the Freedom and Justice Party - would tend to side with the army in maintaining 'order' against those leftists, liberals and Islamists who antagonised the new ruling order. Indeed, at a crucial moment in July, a mass Islamist rally in Tahrir appeared to show that the alliance between the military and sections of the Islamists was being consolidated. Salafists, jihadis and Muslim Brothers chanted slogans in favour of national unity, while speakers defended the SCAF. The mobilisations of liberals and leftists against the regime, by contrast, looked small. Shortly after the rally, armed thugs were sent by the army to assault opposition supporters camped in Tahrir Square.

Some, in response to this situation, went so far as to declare the revolutionary process at an end. Others descended into indiscriminate rants about Islamists, and enjoined us to remember Iran, 1979. Here was a case of Islamist counter-revolution if ever there was one. Since many of the people I am referring to (I'm being deliberately vague, not to avoid giving offence, but to ensure that the offence is taken widely) are marxists, it is odd that their mistakes were so liberal. They began and ended their assessment of the forces assembled in Egypt on the basis of an ascribed ideology, with little or no reference to class or other political determinants. Whether or not ideology plays the dominant role in situating actors in a given struggle surely depends on the circumstances, but the imperative to be concrete was blithely evaded. Abstraction governed their responses. Relatedly, even while restricting the discussion to ideology, their discussion of that level of struggle was curiously flattened: Islamism was treated not as a complex, incoherent and frequently antagonistic combination of elements, but as a spiritual totality reducible to an incorrigible reactionary essence.

So, it is of more than passing interest that the current mobilisation has drawn support from salafists and detachments from the Muslim Brothers. We needn't deceive ourselves about the role that such forces play. They enjoy mass support, and the Brothers in particular have the infrastructure for a viable political organisation. But, where they have supported progressive political struggles - for democratic and human rights, for Palestine, against the dictatorship - they have tailed, rather than led, secular formations. The responsibility of marxists, however, is to look for the dominant line of political division in any given situation. In this situation, the struggle is between the armed forces, who have murdered and injured several people over the weekend, and the revolutionaries, who include thousands of Islamist activists. The political logic of demonising Islamism in these circumstances would either be a purist abstentionism, or worse, support for SCAF as a bulwark of secular power against the Islamists.

Thirty three people have been killed by armed forces in Tahrir Square since Friday. The level of brutality is shocking. I understand that the military opened fire with live rounds on protesters as they attempted to storm the Interior Ministry. Yet, as you can see, the response from the revolutionaries continues to be defiant:

The military appears to be producing a situation from which there can be no return. Either they will consolidate their power as a new despotism with a slender democratic facade - and elections are now in doubt - or they will be decisively weakened, and a new alignment of democratic forces will have the initiative. As the revolutionaries of Egypt say, Glory to the martyrs, Victory to the revolution, Power and wealth to the people.

Occupy vs police repression

2011-11-21T00:08:00.001Z

Francis Fox Piven conceives of "disruptive power" as that form of usually implicit power that people have as a result of the interdependencies that social organization gives rise to:

"All societies organize social life through networks of specialized and interdependent activities, and the more complex the society, the more elaborate these interdependent relations. Networks of cooperation and interdependence inevitably give rise to contention, to conflict, as people bound together by social life try to use each other to further their often distinctive interests and outlooks. And the networks of interdependence that bind people together also generate widespread power capacities to act on these distinctive interests and outlooks. Agricultural workers depend on landowners, but landowners also depend on agricultural workers, just as industrial capitalists depend on workers, the prince depends in some measure on the urban crowd, merchants depend on customers, husbands depend on wives, masters depend on slaves, landlords depend on tenants, and governing elites in the modern state depend on the acquiescence if not the approval of enfranchised publics.

"Unlike wealth and force, which are concentrated at the top of social hierarchies, the leverage inherent in interdependencies is potentially widespread, especially in a densely interconnected society where the division of labor is far advanced. This leverage can in principle be activated by all parties to social relations, and it can also be activated from below, by the withdrawal of contributions to social cooperation by people at the lower end of hierarchical social relations. I call the activation of interdependent power disruption, and I think protest movements are significant because they mobilize disruptive power." (Frances Fox Piven, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, Rowman & Littlefield, 2006, p. 20)

This analysis is consistent with many theoretical perspectives, and the concept of disruptive power certainly has an affinity with the marxist conception of class capacities, or more broadly, structural capacities. It follows from this that disruptive power is not a particular tactic. Disruptive power may be violent, depending on the context of the struggle that activates it, but it is not necessarily so. It may be noisy, or carnivalesque - but again, not necessarily. The presumption in social movement literature is, says Piven, against violence and in favour of spectacle; but this dual presumption is based on a misunderstanding of protest movements, conceiving them as essentially a form of communication intended to win the support of wider audiences, whereas this is not always the case. In fact, the exercise of disruptive power is mainly about leverage.

We understand the sheepishness about speaking of violence in social movements. It is not a comforting or politically sympathetic thought that popular violence has been productive; that without it, unjust systems would not have been overturned. Yet, aside from the fact that the automatic assumption against violence is actually an assumption against popular violence, the intriguing thing is how easily it shades into an assumption against disruption as such. For example, following a recent direct action at UC Berkeley, the Chancellor complained: "It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience." In fact, linking arms and obstructing police is precisely an example of non-violent civil disobedience. If there was a textbook, this would be in it. The elite arbiters of protest ethics, who are always assuring us of our right to peaceful protest, conveniently forget what "civil disobedience" actually is. At the same time, what is often truly regrettable about what is called violence (usually small scale property damage) is its tactical implications. Sure, there is a moral case against anticapitalist protesters spraypainting graffiti or breaking windows. One could certainly apply similar standards retrospectively to striking miners and steelworkers who made US history in frequently violent struggles that went well beyond property damage. However, as someone once said, every morality presupposes a sociology, and in this case the moral argument implies the point of view of the ruling class. The point of the exercise of disruptive power is not to empathise with the ruling class, but to gain leverage over the ruling class. This brings us to the next point.

Disruptive power is distributed widely, but that doesn't mean it is easy to actualise. Piven cites six difficulties that obstruct this: first is the problem of getting people to recognise the relation of interdependence that endows them with disruptive power; the second difficulty is that the exercise of disruptive power requires people to break rules, defying institutional mechanisms that enshrine the cooperative (if fundamentally exploitative and oppressive) relations that sustain daily life, with the resulting risk of repression; third, this disruptive power has to be coordinated across many different groups and individuals who contribute to the reproduction of the dominant social relations, in order to be effective - "the classical problem of solidarity"; fourth, the people exercising disruptive power are enmeshed in a network of relations with multiple others who may attempt to restrain this disruption (church, family, etc); fifth, those involved have to find ways to endure the suspension of the normal cooperative relations that allow them to effectively reproduce themselves in their normal condition - strikers need to eat, occupiers need tents, etc.; and finally, those engaging in disruption have to consider the threat of exit by those from whom they have withdrawn cooperation - the rich taking off with their capital, partners leaving relationships, etc. The means to overcome these obstacles "are not solved anew with each challenge", but rather enter the "language of resistance", and "become a repertoire" (pp. 21-32)

This will do as an interpretive grid for understanding what the Occupy movements in the US are going through at this moment. Their challenges are all comprehensible as those arising from the exercise of disruptive power: how to attack the dominant ideology, coordinate heterogenous groups, sustain their own 'rule-breaking' and support others in their 'rule-breaking', and resist repression. It is through the prism of the latter question that I want to assess the current state of the Occupy movement in the US. The recent wave of renewed police assaults, some of them apparently co-ordinated across eighteen cities by both Democratic and Republican administrations, has been severe. From pepper-spraying the elderly to macing students, the intention has been to physically atomise these collective enterprises. It is tempting to say that such an over-reaction indicates the degree of apprehension on the part of the ruling class. In fact, however, apprehension has been far more apparent in their hesitations, retreats and fumbling attempts at co-optation, than in the resort to brutality. The latter is their default: far from being a panic reaction, it is how the US ruling class does business. As far as cops are concerned, it is "fairly standard police procedure". Their reliance on such methods may in fact reflect an underlying lack of concern, an insouciance, a feeling that this movement is a nuisance, but ultimately a brittle, shallow affair. To deviate from such methods would show that state planners are concerned that this is a movement which cannot be managed by escalating the costs of participation.

For the sake of argument, anyway, let me assume that the police actions in Portland, Seattle, Oakland, New York, UC Davis, and elsewhere, all reflect a consensus among ruling elites that a sufficient show of force will produce a collapse in confidence among the occupiers, deter their supporters, disorganise their alliances and leave them reduced to a hardcore of easily contained and potentially vilified activists. The timing would support this, as city managers would expect winter to start thinning the numbers anyway. A disorienting attack, a forcible shutdown, before the occupiers have had the chance to fully conceive and implement strategies for managing the cold months ahead, would be tactically intelligible in this context. Yet, although the police offensives have had some of the sought effects, forcing the occupiers onto the back foot, depriving many of them of their secured bedrock, they have nonetheless failed to thwart the momentum. The scale of the mobilisation in New York last Thursday, where an estimated 32,000 people took part in a day of action to shut down parts of the city, followed an ostensible victory on the part of city authorities three days earlier. This was when the police attacked the camp at 2am, and the mayor obtained a court ruling denying occupiers the right to camp in Liberty Square - though the city could not stop protesters from actually gathering there. The evictions demanded a bigger response from the occupiers and their periphery of active support, and Thursday provided it. Liberty Square is still occupied every day; it is still a meeting place, a pedagogical forum, and a launch pad for further action. So, the initiative remains in the hands of the protesters; not the state.

There are a number of reasons for this. First, this is a movement that is still in its upswing. A full-frontal attack on a movement which is still growing, and still popular, can be a dangerous mistake to make. The problem for the authorities is that such an assault isn't a technical operation but a political wager. As technically proficient as a repressive manouevre may be, the political effects aren't easily calculable: the same tactic that kills a movement today may consolidate it tomorrow. Second, as the statement from Occupy Wall Street following the eviction notes, the movement is serious. This seems nebulous, moralising even, but it has a precise political meaning: most of those joining the movement fully expected repression, and were mentally prepared for it. There are arguments that the police are just blue collar workers who should be on the side of the 99% - though, when former NYPD police capitain Ray Lewis asserts that his ex-colleagues are "workers for the 1%" and "mercenaries for Wall Street", one can safely say that such arguments are losing traction. But the occupation in Wall Street came to national prominence following a particularly brutal NYPD assault. It is a simple but reasonable inference that those who joined OWS and embarked on similar projects after this, knew that repression was a risk. So, the movement is far less brittle in this respect than its opponents perhaps estimated.

Third, as a former head of the CBI has pointed out, the ideology of free market capitalism has lost a significant part of its material basis: it cannot as easily claim to be more efficient than rival forms of organisation, or delivery greater prosperity for the majority over the long run. The increasing sympathy for socialism and communism among Americans has something to do with this disintegration of capitalist ideology. There is enormous sympathy for this left-populist movement, and those deemed complicit in its repression run the risk of being publicly shamed and of losing allies rapidly. Fourth, and relatedly, the repressive response from the ruling class may be coordinated and bipartisan, but it is far from unanimous. Some elements of the ruling class have preferred to try and co-opt the movement rather than simply attack it. This is most visible in the liberal segments of the capitalist media. From the very early days, it was obvious that the New York Times and perhaps also MSNBC favoured co-option rather than simple coercion. The fear of the banking industry, as their professional lobbyists have summarised it, is that this strategic fracturing of US ruling class opinion may be disadvantageous to their position. As they are not their own best advocates, they require public advocates - and the fear is that politicians under pressure to respond to such a movement will consider it imprudent to publicly defend financial capital. But the more the repressive option fails, the more the emphasis will fall on co-option. Finally, the occupiers have worked hard to build alliances with groups who already know how to wield disruptive power and have their own sets of repertoires. The response to the first attempted assault on Occupy Wall Street was based on an alliance with unions; the response to the first assault on Occupy Oakland, a city-wide 'general strike', was based on an alliance with the unions too. Of course, one must be wary of what Glenn Greenwald detects is an effort by pro-Obama union leaders to direct the movement into the Democratic fold. And solidarity work has taken other forms, such as the attempt to obstruct foreclosures. But there is a genuine convergence of interests between organised labor and the heterogenous groups assembled at OWS - whether debt-shackled students, workers, the unemployed, or dissident former soldiers. The union leadership knows it, especially after the defeat of the union-bashers in Ohio. The alliance between these groups has to be negotiated and constructed. But the material basis for it, which the slogan 'we are the 99%' communicates, is a shared class interest. This shared interest, at a time of sharpening class antagonisms, is making solidarity easier to achieve, and is laying the basis for a new Left.

Tories, Europe and political animals who cannot be domesticated.

2011-11-20T19:11:00.001Z

I've been away, so neglected to post this article up:

There were merry guffaws when former British prime minister John Major incautiously referred to three cabinet members as 'bastards'.
This was in 1993, when European economic and monetary union was nearing the completion of its first stage. Right-wing Conservative MPs were then in rebellion over the Maastricht Treaty, which ratified the European Union. The weakness and division of the parliamentary party was obvious. With a majority of only 18 MPs, 22 backbenchers voted against the government.
Party whips were unable to contain the revolt with their usual mix of threats and rewards, because the rebels were confident that Major's leadership would not last long and that it would fall to them to save the Conservative Party. In that, they had the blessing of former leader Margaret Thatcher. Though the right reclaimed the leadership after 1997, they could not win an election. It fell to David Cameron, standing as a socially liberal 'One Nation' Conservative, to take the Tories out of the hard right ghetto.
Fast-forward to 2011, and Cameron's prospects look bleak. The backbench rebellion that took place in October was not over an outstanding Treaty issue. Its source was a parliamentary motion for a referendum over membership of the European Union, pushed by a number of right-wing MPs. These MPs must have known there was no prospect, even if a motion was carried, of Britain being withdrawn from the EU. The Tories' business allies would be the first to scream blue murder if this were on the cards. They can only have intended to hurt their leadership.

Socialist pedagogy

2011-11-15T22:24:00.000Z

Watch and learn:

This is for real.

2011-11-15T22:17:00.000Z

"We are closer than you think. When thousands of us jam the streets of the Financial District and surround Wall Street on Thursday we will not be ignored. No business as usual until the voice of the 99% is heard and action is taken. You thought we would just go away. You thought we would be too cold. You tried to arrest us. You tried to beat us. It's not that easy. This is for real. We are serious. We will not be ignored. It has been two months, you are still stealing our money and our labor. You are still destroying the earth. You are still evicting people. But guess what? We are stronger than ever."

Louis Althusser and socialist strategy

2011-11-13T02:01:00.004Z

I was going to proceed with the series on Poulantzas, but to do so properly, I need to address the influence of Louis Althusser. There is, as Ellen Meiksins Wood has pointed out, a trajectory that can broadly be sketched with Althusser, Poulantzas and Laclau/Mouffe as its three compass points: from Maoism to Eurocommunism to 'radical democracy' and the abandonment of class politics as a 'fundamentalist', 'essentialist' error.

Yet to simply read the failings of his followers back into Althusser's project would be a travesty as unfair as E P Thompson's execration of the 'Stalinist' Althusser. It is, in fact, a bitter irony that many of Althusser's followers ended up in the social-democratic camp, as this was precisely the fate that his audacious and original reconstitution of Marxism was intended to help avoid. The fact that it didn't is not necessarily a reflection on the failings of the project; rather, it shows that Althusser was perhaps over-confident in the ability of revolutionary theory to overcome the deficiencies of political practice - particularly on the part of the French communist party (PCF) of which he was a member for most of his political life. He was to acknowledge a "theoreticist deviation" among his failings when he came to review and rectify his work in later years.

For, the motivation for Althusser's 'return to Marx', and the attempt to found a 'left-wing' critique of 'theoretical Stalinism', was political and strategic. As he put it, "that there can be no tactics that do not depend on a strategy – and no strategy that does not depend on theory". So, I will recount, in a highly abbreviated form, the elements of this philosophical enterprise with an eye to its political context - while, in deference to the subject, respecting the autonomy of theory. Also, since I will make no attempt to be original, I'll append a very short, selective bibliography at the end of this post. For now, I'll just say that by far the best guide is Gregory Elliott's Althusser: The Detour of Theory, which is thankfully in print again.

The "dogmatist night"

Louis Althusser joined the PCF in 1948, just as the Cold War was commencing. The party had emerged from its participation in World War II, however belated, with considerable prestige. In the 1945 elections, it won the largest share of the vote, with 26% - 5m votes concentrated in the manual working class. Its membership was at half a million, and would increase to about 800,000 in the next few years. Its leaders joined the Cabinet, and did their best to direct popular radicalism into the reconstruction of French capitalism. Yet, it was at just this point that it was about to be thrust into a political ghetto. The marginalising forces were precisely those of the Cold War. The Socialists under Guy Mollet joined the 'Atlanticist' camp, forced the Communists out of government, and led some brutal class struggles against French workers, not to mention vicious colonial counterinsurgency campaigns. At the same time, Moscow-oriented parties were being instructed to take a 'left turn'. This meant breaking from the 'Popular Front' alliances, and polarising between the pro-peace socialist camp and the dupes of imperialism. At an ideological level, it meant dusting off the shibboleths of 'Marxism-Leninism' which had been stowed for the duration of the 'Popular Front' period, and denouncing a host of ideologies (such as psychoanalysis, for example) as 'bourgeois', 'cosmopolitan' and 'reactionary'. On a more positive level, it also meant that the party was more willing to side with workers in ongoing struggles. But amid a wave of anticommunist hysteria, the PCF found itself increasingly isolated and unable to build on its previous successes. The resulting loss of éclat saw the party retreat to an ideological fortress, with party theoreticians extirpating heresy and administering what Althusser would characterise as a "dogmatist night".

Yet, for him, the PCF was the party of the French working class, and the only party capable of posing a threat to French capitalism. Therefore it was a duty of Marxist intellectuals to be members. He was not unique in this judgment. Sartre, no ally of Stalinism, nonetheless insisted at the height of the Cold War in 1952 that a defeat for Stalinism in France would be a defeat for the working class. The PCF was the sole unifying instance capable of imparting "class-being" to the workers. So, Althusser bore the long night of dogma in relative silence in acceptance of party discipline. It was not until the événements of 1956 - in February, Khrushchev's 'secret speech' at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, attacking Stalin's legacy; and in November, the invasion of Hungary - that Althusser began to break the silence. The glasnost following Khrushchev's speech allowed heterodox currents to emerge, most prominent among which were various strands of Marxist Humanism.

It was the fact that the regime itself was incorporating this humanism into its official ideology, and the fact that the PCF could do the same without skipping a beat - the PCF witchfinder-general Roger Garaudy was converted overnight into a humanist and supporter of theoretical pluralism - aroused Althusser's suspicions. Moreover, this happened without affecting the underlying tenets of 'Marxism-Leninism' in the slightest. This de-Stalinization, he inferred, was a right-wing de-Stalinization that would lead to the social-democratization of communism. Already, the PCF had been attempting to navigate its way out of the ghetto via an alliance with the Socialists - "democratic adventurism" in Althusser's assessment - contributing to a political passivism, support for colonialism in Algeria, and eventually blank perplexity when General Charles de Gaulle established a dictatorship, the 'Fifth Republic', in May 1958. In resisting this tide, Althusser aimed to strengthen the political practice of French communism. As he put it:

"I would never have written anything were it not for the Twentieth Congress and Khrushchev’s critique of Stalinism and the subsequent liberalisation. But I would never have written these books if I had not seen this affair as a bungled destalinisation, a right-wing destalinisation which instead of analyses offered us only incantations; which instead of Marxist concepts had available only the poverty of bourgeois ideology. My target was therefore clear: these humanist ravings, these feeble dissertations on liberty, labour or alienation which were the effects of all this among French Party intellectuals. And my aim was equally clear: to make a start on the first left-wing critique of Stalinism, a critique that would make it possible to reflect not only on Khrushchev and Stalin but also on Prague and Lin Piao: that would above all help put some substance back into the revolutionary project here in the West."

Thus, he began work on his reconstitution of Marxism. The hallmark of the ensuing period was tactical quietism and strategic offensive. He forebore criticisms of PCF policy, while working to transform it in the longue durée by means of a theoretical assault on PCF dogma.

"The first left-wing critique of Stalinism"

Before going any further, I should say something about Althusser's attitude to Stalinism. First of all, his claim to be embarking on the "first left-wing critique of Stalinism" implies an ignorance of Leon Trotsky's work, among others. This meant he initiated his critique from within the radius of Stalinism, cutting himself off from extant critical resources. Inevitably, he had to make use of what was there 'in front of him'. Thus, despite attacking Stalinist dogma and lamenting its victims, he did not hesitate to endorse aspects of Stalin's thought if it was useful to him in the theoretical struggle. Despite Stalin's own theoretical dilettantism, he did not resile from attributing theoretical 'discernment' and 'perspicacity' to him at times. And he obliviously championed 'Marxism-Leninism' against the regime, as if it was not the official ideology, and not therefore a caricature of both Marxism and Leninism.

Second, his ideological pole star throughout this period was the People's Republic of China (PRC), whose attack on Khrushchevite 'humanism'* provided much of the stimulus for this "left-wing critique". (*Khrushchevism "substitutes humanism for the Marxist-Leninist theory of class struggle and substitutes the bourgeois slogan of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity for the ideals of communism. It is a revisionist programme for the preservation and restoration of capitalism".) This obviously left him to some extent hostage to the credibility of the PRC. One can also read into his theoretical work certain related political connotations. Ellen Wood rightly points out that Althusser's insistence on the relative autonomy of the 'instances' is congruent with the politics of the Cultural Revolution. Still, one must take care to avoid the tone of a health warning here: "the theoretical formulation of the 'relative autonomy' of 'instances', if taken in extreme quantities, can lead to Maoism". It is not reducible to any such political context. Less so is this theoretical innovation exclusively governed by the need to explain how a Stalinist bureaucracy can arise in a 'socialist' economy - various strands of dissident Marxism managed to explain this to their own satisfaction without recourse to Althusser.

For Althusser, the two dominant theoretical purviews, which he classed as 'humanism/historicism' and 'economism', were symmetrical in their teleological structure. Economism was the "poor man's Hegelianism" shared by both Kautsky and Stalin, a Marxist version of technological determinism in which the development of the productive forces was the sole determinant of historical change and guarantor of the inevitability of socialism. Humanism/historicism, in place of productive forces, posited 'Man' or the working class as the constitutive subject of history, whose progress would bring history to its communist terminus. In an extremely schematic way, these errors could be understood respectively as a rightist and a leftist deviation. As he explained to a New Left Review interviewer: "The rightist deviation suppresses philosophy: only science is left (positivism). The leftist deviation suppresses science: only philosophy is left (subjectivism)".

The chief problem with humanism/historicism was that it relativised Marxism and thus brought its epistemological status into doubt. By describing Marxism as an ideology of the proletariat whose validity could be verified by its contribution to the historical advance of the class, it effaced the gap between science and ideology. For Althusser, the scientificity of Marxism was what distinguished it from all speculative philosophies of history. To compromise its scientificity was to weaken its explanatory power. And there was no doubt for Althusser of its extraordinary power. This "scientific revolution" had opened up the 'continent' of History to scientific knowledge, in exactly the same way that Thales had opened the 'continent' of mathematics and Galileo the 'continent' of physical nature. Marxists were "only just beginning to explore" this new continent, but the explorations were already at risk from theoretical revisions. Althusser acknowledged the strengths of humanism as a rejection of an inhuman and dogmatic tyranny, and welcomed the intellectual thaw that it signposted. Nonetheless, as Gregory Elliot puts it, "it ultimately summed up to a romantic anti-capitalism and anti-scientism, as politically voluntarist as it was philosophically speculative".

Even Althusser's sympathetic reviewers are damning about Althusser's schema here. His engagement with Marxist humanism was unidimensional, dealing only with the doctrine as espoused by the theoreticians of Communist parties after 1956 - "Stalinism with a human face" - and ignoring the work of those who left the Communist parties but remained Marxists. The category of 'humanism/historicism' assimilates an incredibly diverse array of thinkers, from Lukacs to Korsch, Gramsci, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Goldmann and Della Volpe (avowedly anti-Hegelian). He does not acknowledge the Frankfurt School, and despite his hostility to revisions which dilute Marxism, his own approach would involve vitalising Marxism with the supplement of rationalist philosophy in the form of Spinoza and Bachelard. And it is a point repeatedly made, with justice, that Althusser's tendency to subsume qualitatively distinct theorists under a single category of theoretical error - the "Continent of Theoretical Error" as Norman Geras described it in his spirited joust with Laclau and Mouffe - is redolent of the tendency he discerned and derided in Hegel to characterise all the manifold phenomena of a conjuncture as mere expressions of a single moment in the development of the Idea.

Nonetheless, this version of 'humanism' formed the negative reference point for Althusser's attempt to 'return to Marx', and this much may be said for it right away: it neither concedes a single thing politically to those using the critique of Stalinism to move to the right, nor does it simply lapse into a conservative fortification of dogma. Althusser's response to what he saw as a crisis of revolutionary theory was to undertake a critical and robust re-evaluation of Marxism. And the question he posed, in For Marx, was fundamental: "What is Marxist philosophy? Has it any theoretical right to existence? And if it does exist in principle, how can its specificity be defined?"

As should be clear by now, this philosophy was to owe little to Hegel. Engels had attempted to extract the rudiments of dialectical materialism from Hegel's Logic, standing the dialectic 'on its feet' the better to "discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell", as Marx described it in an Afterword to Capital volume one. The 'three laws' of the dialectic in Engels' Anti-Duhring were lifted straight from the Logic and applied to what were then the most cutting edge ideas in science. Althusser argued that this formula of standing of the dialectic on its feet was utterly misunderstood if it taken to mean that one simply had to invert Hegel's postulates, putting matter in place of spirit: this "will merely produce a new materialist metaphysics". Marxists who took this step had misunderstood what Marx was doing Capital, volume one, part one. For here, the apparently Hegelian structure of Marx's exposition is akin to a process of peeling back the mystical layers of Hegel's approach to extract whatever is rational - though, contrary to the kernel/shell metaphor, he insisted that even the kernel had to be 'contaminated' by Hegelian idealism. The major contributions of Hegel were his attack on Kantian subjectivism which could provide the basis for a materialist defence of scientific objectivity, and the concept, implicit in the Absolute Idea, of " a process without a subject" which informed Marx's analysis of Capital. I should say that Althusser's critics justifiably point to his highly selective reading of Marx's writings, thus ignoring a great part of the 'mature' work that is still determinedly Hegelian. In fact, however, this point rebounds to Althusser's advantage: the most Hegelian passages in, for example, Capital, are also the most liable to lapse into dogmatically deterministic assertions. And Althusser, after all, never said that the 'epistemological break' separating the young from the mature Marx was a clean break - quite the contrary.

But, if Althusser otherwise rejected the Hegelian legacy, insisting that what Marx offered was more than a Hegelianised version of English political economy, from whence could this philosophy emerge? It was implicit, he said, in "the logic of Capital". It was also implicit in revolutionary practice, particularly in what he regarded as the two great successes of Marxism, the revolutions of 1917 and 1949. This is what motivated the 'return to Marx', and it is why he could brush off charges of 'scholarly fetishism' with airy contempt.

The primacy of practice

Marxist philosophy, in Althusser's schema, is one of two distinct levels of Marxist theory. These are: historical materialism, being "the Marxist science of the development of social formations"; and dialectical materialism, being the as yet unconstituted philosophy that is implicit in Marx's work. This philosophy would, if elaborated, form the epistemological bedrock of historical materialism, point out its flaws, suggest solutions, and supply concepts adequate to its problems. Above all, it would safeguard the theory as a scientific practice against debilitating ideological dilutions. If historical materialism is the science of history, then, dialectical materialism is the "theory of science and of the history of science", or more broadly "a theory of theoretical practice". One upshot of this conception of theory as a practice, is to render the problem of the unity of theory and practice unintelligible.

Among Althusser's first tasks is to discern what the "theoretical practice" is, of which dialectical materialism is the theory. The concept of practice itself, the "primacy of practice" in Marx, is central: "We can assert the primacy of practice theoretically by showing that all the levels of social existence are the sites of distinct practices: economic practice, political practice, ideological practice, technical practice and scientific (or theoretical) practice." But to speak of an undifferentiated "practice" is to succumb to ideology. Marx's breakthrough was to provide a "theory of the different specific levels of human practice". These different levels - economic, political, and ideological - are the 'relatively autonomous' 'instances' of the social totality. Practice can nonetheless be defined as "any process of transformation of a determinate given raw material into a determinate product, a transformation effected by a determinate human labour, using determinate means (of 'production')". The determinant moment in this process is the labour of transformation itself. Theoretical practice, then, is a form of production, divisible into three 'Generalities': Generalities I, a set of raw materials (concepts, abstractions) into relation with one another; Generalities II, the "means of theoretical production" which are brought to bear on the raw materials; and Generalities III, the end product, knowledge or the thought-concrete.

Althusser proceeded to refine this understanding of knowledge-as-production against the empiricist conception of knowledge as vision. For empiricism, knowledge begins with a relation between subject and object: the 'object' of knowledge is objective reality, on which the subject performs a labour of abstraction through which it separates the essence from the inessence of the object. In so doing, the subject comes to possess the essence and thus has knowledge of it. For Althusser, this was flawed on two accounts. First, it was wrong to assume that the object of knowledge was objective reality. The object of knowledge is what results from the labour of abstraction, which forms the raw material for the process of theoretical production. Second, its two-ply model of reality actually inscribed the knowledge of reality (essence) within that reality itself, thus collapsing the distinction between thought and the real. For Althusser, it was crucial for materialism that the independence of reality from thought should be maintained.

It follows that Althusser must reject the empiricist conception of knowledge as a 'model' composed of abstractions, a model which is necessarily a poor cousin of the reality which it tries to emulate. If, in the empiricist view, the abstraction is always a hugely simplified 'essence' of the real object, and therefore theory can never be adequate to the complex reality it describes. For Althusser, however, the object of knowledge is not a given (the 'real object') but rather a raw material consisting of previously worked on concepts and abstractions, and is therefore susceptible to continual refinement by the means of theoretical production. There is no inherent limit to a theory fully adequate to its subject. This is extremely important. As Norman Geras put it, "if the object of knowledge in the strict sense is not the real object, the object which is known finally, via the object of knowledge, is the real object."

Following both Bachelard and Spinoza, Althusser insisted that science and ideology were wholly distinct kinds of knowledge. Though the process of knowledge production in each case is formally equivalent, science is marked by a foundational rupture, an 'epistemological break' with common sense. The opacity of the everyday is such that only such a profound break could found a genuinely objective knowledge. But how is it possible to tell the difference, to verify that what one is doing is science and not ideology? Althusser turned down the pragmatist option of judging a project by its successes: theory is successful because it is true, he argued; it is not true because it is successful. The proper way to judge a science was by criteria immanent to it. A research programme could only devise its own criteria of verification.

If this seems circular, that is because it is: as Gregory Elliot puts it, "there is something inherently dogmatic and viciously circular in employing Marxist philosophy to guarantee the status of Marxist science". Unable to avoid this problem, Althusser attempted to pose the question in another way: by what mechanism did theoretical practice, which took place exclusively at the level of thought, effect the cognitive appropriation of reality? But that did not yield a satisfactory answer either. As such, and given the manifest deficiencies of Marxism in the face of the last century's challenges, the claim for Marxism's scientificity looks shaky. Althusser would abandon the idea that dialectical materialism was a science of sciences, arguing in Lenin and Philosophy that philosophy was not itself a science but the class struggle in theory. Where that leaves the epistemological status of Marxism is something that is still open to debate.

Befrore proceeding, it's worth drawing out a few implications from this account of theoretical practice and its autonomy. Althusser was defending "the right of Marxist theory not to be treated as a slave to tactical decisions". But a quite different political consequence of this was a certain kind of elitism, in which Marxist theory was the work of specialists who should be left alone. To be clear, Althusser understood that Marxist theory could not have emerged without the workers' movement (in conjunction with certain "theoretical elements". His critics who ascribe to him a form of idealism in which the 'epistemological break' of Marxism is a purely theoretical phenomenon, estranged from class struggle, are wrong. The autonomy of theory is only relative, after all. Yet, for Althusser, the workers' movement did not, and by implication could not, produce Marxist theory "by its own devices". He takes the Lenin of What Is To Be Done to argue that Marxist theory must be imported into the working class movement from outside it, a hypothesis with which he concurs. Workers have a 'class instinct', which enables them to arrive at objectively correct proletarian 'class positions', but they are incapable of being spontaneously revolutionary. So much the worse with theorists, who are instinctively petty bourgeois, and must constantly militate against these prejudices. As it comes down to it, only the vanguard party provides the link between the class and revolutionary theory. Without the party, revolutionary theory cannot be imported into the class; without revolutionary theory, the class cannot make a revolution. And Althusser is insistent that the empirical data confirms this - revolutions have only been made where Marxist theory has been accepted by the workers' movement (Russia and China), whereas those situations where revolution is most distant also happen to be those where Marxist theory was never widely accepted in the workers' movements (Britain), or was adulterated in a social democratic fashion (Germany).

Althusser was thus committed to a version of Leninism which has these days, and for good reason, fallen out of favour. As Valentino Gerrattana argues, despite Althusser's intention to break with Stalin, he constantly evaded the question of the latter's relationship to Lenin and Leninism, never clarifying the issue of how much "theoretical Stalinism" was a break from Bolshevism. As a result, he committed himself to certain 'Leninist' positions that more closely resemble what Hal Draper called 'Leninology' than historical Leninism. Even so, I would again caution against using this political error to dismiss the theory. There is in fact no good reason why one should infer from the autonomy of theoretical practice that the working class movement can produce no revolutionary theory by itself. The fact that theoretical and political practices are distinct, does not mean that workers are incapable of performing both.

Signposts in the "continent" of history

In addition to these epistemological concepts, and the extremely interesting account of knowledge that they sum up to, Althusser elaborated a set of historical concepts. We have already introduced the idea of the relative autonomy of 'instances', that is of different levels of practice within a social totality. But what does such a 'totality' consist of, and what constitutes its different levels? Each level, precisely, is a structure, so that the social whole is a structure of structures.

Something of the nature of the structure is imparted in Althusser's discussion of 'Generalities II', where he introduces the notion of the 'problematic'. The problematic is a theoretical structure which brings the concepts and abstractions into a certain relationship with one another. But it is rarely explicit in the theory that it regulates: it is submerged. This is as true of Marxism as other doctrines, which is why it is necessary for Althusser and his followers to embark on close, symptomatic readings of Marx's texts to bring the problematic to light. Despite being submerged, the problematic plays an active role, and this not in any metaphorical sense. It is not the subject that 'sees' the objects that become known through theoretical practice; it is the problematic. The subject does not play the determinant role in knowledge production; the structure does. And this is typical. This structure is not an audible, visible, tangible object, but rather a "process without a subject" discernible solely through its effects. The only subjects pertinent to it are those constituted and governed by the structure. This is Althusserian anti-humanism. It is a commonplace that this total demotion of the subject was deeply problematic for any revolutionary praxis that might follow from it - after all, if subjects are constituted by the structure, wherein lies the possibility of their emancipation from it? Althusser attempted to deal with this by stating that this was a necessary explanatory step; the theoretical reduction of subjects accounted for the practical reduction of subjects under capitalism. Yet, this by itself didn't solve the problem of how subjects could escape this practical reduction. Ultimately, to avoid a structural-functionalist account in which the structures merely perform in ways that are functional for their reproduction, Althusser relies on his concepts of overdetermination and contradiction, which we'll come back to.

Crucially, the social totality, the structure of structures, is quite unlike Hegel's 'expressive' or 'spiritual' totality, in that the structure has no centre, and no original essence of which its parts are mere expressions. It is the sum of irreducible, multiple instances, each with its own history, each with its own complex structure and each governed by its own temporality. Importantly, each also has its own specific efficacy, so that the political and ideological are by no means merely reducible to the economic. In this sense, Althusser's account of the social has remarkably similar starting points to those of post-structuralists, albeit he draws radically different conclusions about the intelligibility of the structure, and his emphasis on "unity in difference" or "complex unity" distinguishes his difference from the free play of signifiers that is Derrida's différance. And he rescues his analysis from simple pluralism by asserting the determining role of the economic level 'in the last instance'. That is, though the social formation has no centre or essence, within it there is a "structure in dominance" in which one or other of the instances is dominant. And, it is the economic level that determines which of these instances will be dominant in any social formation. (I find it helps to think of the example of feudalism, in which mode of production the instance of politics was dominant, due to the specific mode of surplus extraction in the economic instance.)

It's also worth examining the difference between a social formation and a mode of production in Althusser's analysis. The difference between the two is partially a difference in the level of abstraction. The mode of production is the combination of the elements of a social whole at its most abstract; the social formation is the site in which those elements are concretely present in all of their specificity. The 'elements' of the mode of production can be assigned to an elementary table, listing the labourer, the non-labourer, some means of production, etc. Seemingly, these 'elements' are constant through all modes of production, with only their specific relationship in a given combination varying. Yet, this conclusion has to be qualified by Althusser's stress on 'overdetermination'.

The concept of overdetermination is taken over from Freudian psychoanalysis, in which it refers to the condensation of potent dream-thoughts, wishes, etc., in a single image. The 'overdetermination' of a point in the structure means, analogously, the condensation of all of the relations and 'contradictions' within the totality in that single node. 'Contradictions' in Althusser's useage are purely 'historical', referring to a number of different kinds of complexity, such as paradox, antagonism, ambiguity, combined and uneven development, etc. He does not subscribe to any of the materialist metaphysics of Anti-Duhring. When he refers to an accumulation of contradictions in a given social formation, he is referring to just those tensions, antagonisms and ambiguities that undermine the unity and cohesion of the formation and make possible its disintegration and overthrow. A consequence, at any rate, of overdetermination is that the elements in a mode of production cannot be the same regardless of how they are articulated. Since each point is overdetermined by every other point in the matrix, the specific content of these elements must vary depending on their articulation.

The concepts of overdetermination, determination in the last instance, and the structure in domination, were cited by Althusser to repudiate critics who described his work as structuralist. It is another matter entirely whether he succeeded in avoiding certain structural-functionalist temptations; certainly, his followers didn't always do so. (I mentioned Poulantzas' tendency to collapse into such explanations, at least in his earlier work). However, as Stuart Hall points out, by thinking systematically about the different levels and kinds of determination in a social formation, by locating this complexity and plurality in Marx, he enabled the thinking of concrete historical situations and ideological formations within the Marxist 'problematic', as well as the analysis of political situations in their specificity and lines of antagonism. Indeed, as we learn from Machiavelli and Us, one of the most important historical concepts for Althusser is the 'conjuncture' as an "aleatory, single case", comprising not merely a sum of elements but their unity in a 'contradictory' system. In this respect, Althusser is quite close to Gramsci, whom he otherwise lumped in with the 'historicists'.

We have seen that he avouched a strict distinction between ideology and science which seems to be in some doubt. Yet, one of the bases for this distinction is a suggestive analysis of the "lived relation" between "men" and their world. To be more precise, ideology expresses, not the relationship between "men" and their conditions of existence, but the way they live, or imagine that relationship. The idea of inhabiting the world without ideology is utopian and futile: "there is no practice except by and in ideology".

By the same token, however, "there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects". The term 'imagine' alludes to Lacan's concept of the pre-symbolic 'imaginary order', and the associated doctrine of the 'mirror phase'. In the 'mirror phase', subjects come to recognise themselves in reality, and to imagine their relationship to that reality as if they were fully autonomous, constitutive subjects. This, according to Althusser, is what ideology does: it constitutes subjects so that they imagine themselves to be constitutive subjects; it "interpellates" them. And in giving them an imaginary relationship to their actual relation with the world, it distorts their real situation and binds them to the social structure. This concept of ideology as, not merely erroneous beliefs but a lived relationship to one's situation, has proven enormously fruitful. Much of Hall's splendid repertoire is unthinkable without it, as he is the first to acknowledge.

But it is not just this aspect of the interpretation of ideology that is relevant here. Again, the 'relative autonomy' of the instances has some bearing here. For, while it was a staple of certain crude, mechanistic Stalinism that certain ideologies had a necessary class belonging (this played a useful polemical role if one wanted to debate intellectual opponents), it has equally become a staple of poststructuralist ideologies that there is no correspondence whatever between ideological struggles, which are purely contingent, and the 'economic base'. Thus, Laclau and Mouffe insisted that Gramsci's theory of hegemonic struggle was burdened by an essentialist remnant, which tried to anchor these struggles in a unified economic level - but only if contingency was expelled from the economy could this anchoring be effective. So, Laclau and Mouffe denied any correspondence between classes and ideologies. I think what you find in Althusser's conception, however, is quite different from both. The 'relative autonomy' of instances allows that there is no necessary class connotation to a given idea, (Althusser was witness to all those futile attempts by the Stalinists to bissect scientific theories according to some imputed class position), but does not permit that there is necessarily no such connotation. This allows for a certain open-endedness of political struggles and class practices, for the aligning of heterogenous interests and perhaps even antagonistic subject-positions. Moreover, Althusser's stress on the practical aspect of ideology underlines that any successful articulation between different elements has to be constructed.

No strategy without theory... theory without strategy?

If there is no strategy without theory, it does not follow that a given theory is suited only to one strategic purpose. The relation between political and theoretical practice is more complex, less determinate, than such a view would allow. So, if Althusser did conceive of his theoretical innovations as political interventions, it doesn't mean that he followed what might be the expected path that his theoretical work would imply. Politically, he was neither a Stalinist nor a reformist; theoretically, he was waging an attack on the practice of the French communists. Yet, membership of the party was his sole route, as he perceived it, to an organic connection with the working class and thus to meaningful theoretical work. And because he did not break fully with Stalinism, he could not break fully with reformism, and remained bound to a party moving perpetually in a social democratic direction. Nor did he help renew PCF political practice along revolutionary lines. Toward the end of his career, the PCF was embarking on a Eurocommunist route to the margins.

Althusser's career ended in a squalid tragedy when, under the influence of a mental illness that had grown more intense over the years, he strangled his wife, Hélène. K S Karol's article, 'The Tragedy of the Althussers', listed below, is one of the few that remembers Hélène Althusser for something other than this horrible end - recounting her role in the French Resistance, as a Communist, and as a social scientist. Louis Althusser was consigned to an asylum, before living more or less hermetically until his death. Did Althusser's project fail? By the scale of its own extraordinary ambition, it did fail in many respects. It particularly failed to establish the absolute scientificity of Marxist theory, and thus its safeguard against party bosses, revisions and rivals. Yet, given the real deficiencies of Marxism exposed by the twentieth century experience, there is perhaps only a Beckettian choice between failing and failing better. Althusser failed better.

***

Select bibliography: Louis Althusser & Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, NLB, 1970; Louis Althusser, For Marx, Allen Lane, 1969; Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, NLB, 1971; Louis Althusser, 'On the Twenty-Second Congress of the French Communist Party', New Left Review 104, July-August 1977; Louis Althusser, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, Verso, 2003; Gregory Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory, Brill, Leiden & Boston, 2006; Norman Geras, 'Althusser’s Marxism: An Account and Assessment', New Left Review 71, January-February 1972; K S Karol, 'The Tragedy of the Althussers', New Left Review 124, November-December 1980; Alex Callinicos, Althusser's Marxism, Pluto Press, 1976; Alex Callinicos, Is There A Future for Marxism?, Macmillan, 1982; Valentino Gerratana, 'Althusser and Stalinism', New Left Review 101-102, January-April 1977; Stuart Hall, 'Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates', Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Vol 2, No 2, June 1985

Toward a post-Murdoch age

2011-11-11T22:39:00.000Z

I forgot to link this piece I did for ABC Australia a couple of days ago:

...Carl Bernstein, one of the journalists who cracked open the Watergate affair, has likened Rupert Murdoch to Richard Nixon, referring to "corruption at the highest levels ... the corruption of the process of a free society". A 'free society', according to the liberal-democratic canon, is one that has elected legislative offices, an independent judiciary, and a free press, among other attributes. The free press is a particularly prized component of this institutional matrix. The brief of the 'fourth estate' – however much that term is saturated with mythopoeic connotations – is to keep the other institutions honest and to facilitate popular democratic participation. As Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian put it, "The press doesn't share the same aims as Government, the legislature, the executive, religion or commerce, it is or it should be an outside". The 'corruption' of these assets, therefore, may be lamentable, and call for reform – but only inasmuch as strengthens those institutions.
Yet, in the current context, the language of the 'free press' is being appropriated by those who want to prevent meaningful reform...

The Ides of March

2011-11-07T11:30:00.003Z

George Clooney, Hollywood's meridian liberal, offers a story about a liberal politician making a run for president. This could be good, or it could be insufferable. (The presence of Philip Seymour Hoffman is a reasonable guarantee that it won't be too insufferable, though). You think you're going to get something like Bulworth, where the hero's progressive views are met with disapproval by party bosses and rich donors alike, but stimulate popular enthusiasm. Or you think, as the ambiguous title invites you to, that there's an assassination in the post. And indeed the movie obliquely alludes to this possibility - there's a brief, tense 'Wellstone' moment as the candidate, Governor Mike Morris, and his advisors sit in a small jet air craft passing through turbulence. There are other allusions - a dead intern, redolent of Chandra Levy, perhaps. If the CIA doesn't off him, if his donors don't hang him out to dry, if the media doesn't destroy him, maybe someone will frame him. Somehow, our liberal lion will be sacrificed to the Christians. But no.

At a simple didactic level, this film is closer to The Candidate, where an intelligent, principled reformist allows his campaign to be corrupted, dumbed down and pulled to the right in order to win. But that's not really the basis for two hours in the cinema - not for my money. And indeed if this film were reducible to its explicit politics, it would be fairly appalling. This is often the case with Clooney films. Up In the Air, for example, was a deeply conservative movie whose argument was that only families provide the durable emotional and financial bedrock that allow people to survive unemployment. Syriana was critical of the neoconservatives and the oil companies, but its hero was a fairly repulsive CIA agent. So, consider the elements of the candidate's appeal: the unproblematised liberal nationalism (we want America to lead the world again), the imperial chauvinism (we fight the war on terror by not needing "their product", which is oil), the hypocritical populism (the governor attacks the rich for not paying their dues, but his own wealth, the fact that rich people dominate the political system, is not seen as being problematic). This is 'Obamamania' reheated, without the story of racial redemption. In fact, on that subject, the film's racial politics are reprehensible. The only major black character is a Senator played by the excellent Jeffrey Wright, who is depicted as the basest, most reactionary snake oil salesman - in some respects, he's like a cross between John Bolton and (the fictional) Clay Davis. As I say, if this was all there was to the film, there would be little to admire.

The core of the narrative is the 'corruption' of Ryan Gosling's innocent, idealistic, blue-eyed, K Street consultant employed by the campaign who, we are led to believe, is not a completely cynical, self-serving piece of shit. He is a believer. He thinks Morris is the man who will make a difference. A wised up columnist from the New York Times tells him that he's an idiot, that the presidential race will make no difference to the average working "fuck", that the only real difference it makes is between him working in the White House, or going back to K Street to work for a million dollars a year. He demurs, charmingly. Events, which we won't describe in any detail here, lead the cornflower-eyed sap to revise his idealism, and realise that the drive for success has led both himself and the candidate to compromise themselves, and undermined the progressive content of the campaign.

Again, so far so boring. We have heard all this before. We've heard some of it from Joe Klein. There's very little of political substance here. For many who watched and enjoyed the film, it was yet another sermon about the corrupting effect of politics on integrity. If only we had a better media. If only the political system didn't smile on the ruthless. The liberal lament. And indeed they wouldn't be wrong to see all that. And ultimately, this has a tendency - if pushed to its conclusions - to collapse into the patronising argument that the average working fuck is at fault for being so suadible.

What I think makes the film a bit more interesting is the way it works as a deflation and desublimation of its own 'Obamamania', or rather of the elevating liberal discourse that Obama has mastered. At the start of the film, the basic liberal assumptions are in place. We have a charismatic liberal hero, someone who can make the difference, if only the media and the Republicans can be fought off. The system can be made to work for the good guys - Democrats, as far as this film is concerned - if only talented hucksters will come to their aid. By the end of the film, none of these comforting ideas have been directly contested or challenged: this is not Brechtian film-making. Rather, they are simply cast in a new light in which they appear to be worthless. It's not that the progressive potential of the campaign has been betrayed; it's that it was never there. The impoverished tropes of idealism, integrity, re-taking this country, etc., are just so much sublimated avarice, the language of bourgeois esurience levitated to the plane of 'the general interest'. And it's the affective level on which this case is made; it is only a shift of perspective that transforms dutiful conscientiousness into pitiless, self-serving ruthlessness. After which, the cynosures of Democratic liberalism, which Clooney undoubtedly believes in wholeheartedly, leave a sour taste on the palate of the working fuck.