London Conference in Critical Thought

Žižek and the Political

http://londonconferenceincriticalthought.wordpress.com/2012/01/31/zizek-and-the-political/

Posted on January 31, 2012by londonconferenceincriticalthought

Stream Coordinator: Chris McMillan

Arguably the most prominent critical theorist of our times, Slavoj Žižek has regularly intervened in contemporary political debate over issues such as the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. Nevertheless, there is little consensus over the value of these interventions or the effectiveness of Žižekian theory as a mode of political practice. Whilst Žižek is often readily enjoyed as a philosopher of culture and ideology, or an adept reader of Lacanian theory or German idealism, significant doubt remains over the political credentials of his theory. Indeed, for many Leftists’ Žižek’s work exemplifies the tragedy of our times; full of damming of critique without any concrete solutions. This stream invites papers to critically engage with these wide-ranging debates around the political difficulties and potential of Žižekian theory.

Whilst not seeking to prescribe any particular responses, papers from a broad range of perspectives might consider Žižek’s relationship to;

- Marxism and political economy;
- Democracy and the state;
- Communism and the ‘communist hypothesis’;
- Ideology or the politics of ideology and enjoyment;
- The political prospects of psychoanalysis;
- Broader theoretical papers that reflect upon the structural possibilities for Žižekian political engagement are also encouraged.

"The Mask of Anarchy"

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Written after the massacre carried out by the British Government, at Peterloo, Manchester 1819

As I lay asleep in Italy
There came a voice from over the Sea,
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.

I met Murder on the way -
He had a mask like Castlereagh -
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed the human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.

And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them.

Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.

And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw -
'I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!'

With a pace stately and fast,
Over English land he passed,
Trampling to a mire of blood
The adoring multitude.

And a mighty troop around,
With their trampling shook the ground,
Waving each a bloody sword,
For the service of their Lord.

And with glorious triumph, they
Rode through England proud and gay,
Drunk as with intoxication
Of the wine of desolation.

O'er fields and towns, from sea to sea,
Passed the Pageant swift and free,
Tearing up, and trampling down;
Till they came to London town.

And each dweller, panic-stricken,
Felt his heart with terror sicken
Hearing the tempestuous cry
Of the triumph of Anarchy.

For with pomp to meet him came,
Clothed in arms like blood and flame,
The hired murderers, who did sing
'Thou art God, and Law, and King.

'We have waited, weak and lone
For thy coming, Mighty One!
Our Purses are empty, our swords are cold,
Give us glory, and blood, and gold.'

Lawyers and priests, a motley crowd,
To the earth their pale brows bowed;
Like a bad prayer not over loud,
Whispering - 'Thou art Law and God.' -

Then all cried with one accord,
'Thou art King, and God and Lord;
Anarchy, to thee we bow,
Be thy name made holy now!'

And Anarchy, the skeleton,
Bowed and grinned to every one,
As well as if his education
Had cost ten millions to the nation.

For he knew the Palaces
Of our Kings were rightly his;
His the sceptre, crown and globe,
And the gold-inwoven robe.

So he sent his slaves before
To seize upon the Bank and Tower,
And was proceeding with intent
To meet his pensioned Parliament

When one fled past, a maniac maid,
And her name was Hope, she said:
But she looked more like Despair,
And she cried out in the air:

'My father Time is weak and gray
With waiting for a better day;
See how idiot-like he stands,
Fumbling with his palsied hands!

He has had child after child,
And the dust of death is piled
Over every one but me -
Misery, oh, Misery!'

Then she lay down in the street,
Right before the horses' feet,
Expecting, with a patient eye,
Murder, Fraud, and Anarchy.

When between her and her foes
A mist, a light, an image rose,
Small at first, and weak, and frail
Like the vapour of a vale:

Till as clouds grow on the blast,
Like tower-crowned giants striding fast,
And glare with lightnings as they fly,
And speak in thunder to the sky,

It grew - a Shape arrayed in mail
Brighter than the viper's scale,
And upborne on wings whose grain
Was as the light of sunny rain.

On its helm, seen far away,
A planet, like the Morning's, lay;
And those plumes its light rained through
Like a shower of crimson dew.

With step as soft as wind it passed
O'er the heads of men - so fast
That they knew the presence there,
And looked, - but all was empty air.

As flowers beneath May's footstep waken,
As stars from Night's loose hair are shaken,
As waves arise when loud winds call,
Thoughts sprung where'er that step did fall.

And the prostrate multitude
Looked - and ankle-deep in blood,
Hope, that maiden most serene,
Was walking with a quiet mien:

And Anarchy, the ghastly birth,
Lay dead earth upon the earth;
The Horse of Death tameless as wind
Fled, and with his hoofs did grind
To dust the murderers thronged behind.

A rushing light of clouds and splendour,
A sense awakening and yet tender
Was heard and felt - and at its close
These words of joy and fear arose

As if their own indignant Earth
Which gave the sons of England birth
Had felt their blood upon her brow,
And shuddering with a mother's throe

Had turned every drop of blood
By which her face had been bedewed
To an accent unwithstood, -
As if her heart had cried aloud:

'Men of England, heirs of Glory,
Heroes of unwritten story,
Nurslings of one mighty Mother,
Hopes of her, and one another;

'Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.

'What is Freedom? - ye can tell
That which slavery is, too well -
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.

'Tis to work and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day
In your limbs, as in a cell
For the tyrants' use to dwell,

'So that ye for them are made
Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade,
With or without your own will bent
To their defence and nourishment.

'Tis to see your children weak
With their mothers pine and peak,
When the winter winds are bleak, -
They are dying whilst I speak.

'Tis to hunger for such diet
As the rich man in his riot
Casts to the fat dogs that lie
Surfeiting beneath his eye;

'Tis to let the Ghost of Gold
Take from Toil a thousandfold
More that e'er its substance could
In the tyrannies of old.

'Paper coin - that forgery
Of the title-deeds, which ye
Hold to something of the worth
Of the inheritance of Earth.

'Tis to be a slave in soul
And to hold no strong control
Over your own wills, but be
All that others make of ye.

'And at length when ye complain
With a murmur weak and vain
'Tis to see the Tyrant's crew
Ride over your wives and you -
Blood is on the grass like dew.

'Then it is to feel revenge
Fiercely thirsting to exchange
Blood for blood - and wrong for wrong -
Do not thus when ye are strong.

'Birds find rest, in narrow nest
When weary of their wingèd quest
Beasts find fare, in woody lair
When storm and snow are in the air.

'Asses, swine, have litter spread
And with fitting food are fed;
All things have a home but one -
Thou, Oh, Englishman, hast none!

'This is slavery - savage men
Or wild beasts within a den
Would endure not as ye do -
But such ills they never knew.

'What art thou Freedom? O! could slaves
Answer from their living graves
This demand - tyrants would flee
Like a dream's dim imagery:

'Thou art not, as impostors say,
A shadow soon to pass away,
A superstition, and a name
Echoing from the cave of Fame.

'For the labourer thou art bread,
And a comely table spread
From his daily labour come
In a neat and happy home.

'Thou art clothes, and fire, and food
For the trampled multitude -
No - in countries that are free
Such starvation cannot be
As in England now we see.

'To the rich thou art a check,
When his foot is on the neck
Of his victim, thou dost make
That he treads upon a snake.

'Thou art Justice - ne'er for gold
May thy righteous laws be sold
As laws are in England - thou
Shield'st alike the high and low.

'Thou art Wisdom - Freemen never
Dream that God will damn for ever
All who think those things untrue
Of which Priests make such ado.

'Thou art Peace - never by thee
Would blood and treasure wasted be
As tyrants wasted them, when all
Leagued to quench thy flame in Gaul.

'What if English toil and blood
Was poured forth, even as a flood?
It availed, Oh, Liberty,
To dim, but not extinguish thee.

'Thou art Love - the rich have kissed
Thy feet, and like him following Christ,
Give their substance to the free
And through the rough world follow thee,

'Or turn their wealth to arms, and make
War for thy belovèd sake
On wealth, and war, and fraud - whence they
Drew the power which is their prey.

'Science, Poetry, and Thought
Are thy lamps; they make the lot
Of the dwellers in a cot
So serene, they curse it not.

'Spirit, Patience, Gentleness,
All that can adorn and bless
Art thou - let deeds, not words, express
Thine exceeding loveliness.

'Let a great Assembly be
Of the fearless and the free
On some spot of English ground
Where the plains stretch wide around.

'Let the blue sky overhead,
The green earth on which ye tread,
All that must eternal be
Witness the solemnity.

'From the corners uttermost
Of the bounds of English coast;
From every hut, village, and town
Where those who live and suffer moan,

'From the workhouse and the prison
Where pale as corpses newly risen,
Women, children, young and old
Groan for pain, and weep for cold -

'From the haunts of daily life
Where is waged the daily strife
With common wants and common cares
Which sows the human heart with tares -

'Lastly from the palaces
Where the murmur of distress
Echoes, like the distant sound
Of a wind alive around

'Those prison halls of wealth and fashion,
Where some few feel such compassion
For those who groan, and toil, and wail
As must make their brethren pale -

'Ye who suffer woes untold,
Or to feel, or to behold
Your lost country bought and sold
With a price of blood and gold -

'Let a vast assembly be,
And with great solemnity
Declare with measured words that ye
Are, as God has made ye, free -

'Be your strong and simple words
Keen to wound as sharpened swords,
And wide as targes let them be,
With their shade to cover ye.

'Let the tyrants pour around
With a quick and startling sound,
Like the loosening of a sea,
Troops of armed emblazonry.

Let the charged artillery drive
Till the dead air seems alive
With the clash of clanging wheels,
And the tramp of horses' heels.

'Let the fixèd bayonet
Gleam with sharp desire to wet
Its bright point in English blood
Looking keen as one for food.

'Let the horsemen's scimitars
Wheel and flash, like sphereless stars
Thirsting to eclipse their burning
In a sea of death and mourning.

'Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war,

'And let Panic, who outspeeds
The career of armèd steeds
Pass, a disregarded shade
Through your phalanx undismayed.

'Let the laws of your own land,
Good or ill, between ye stand
Hand to hand, and foot to foot,
Arbiters of the dispute,

'The old laws of England - they
Whose reverend heads with age are gray,
Children of a wiser day;
And whose solemn voice must be
Thine own echo - Liberty!

'On those who first should violate
Such sacred heralds in their state
Rest the blood that must ensue,
And it will not rest on you.

'And if then the tyrants dare
Let them ride among you there,
Slash, and stab, and maim, and hew, -
What they like, that let them do.

'With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear, and less surprise,
Look upon them as they slay
Till their rage has died away.

'Then they will return with shame
To the place from which they came,
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheek.

'Every woman in the land
Will point at them as they stand -
They will hardly dare to greet
Their acquaintance in the street.

'And the bold, true warriors
Who have hugged Danger in wars
Will turn to those who would be free,
Ashamed of such base company.

'And that slaughter to the Nation
Shall steam up like inspiration,
Eloquent, oracular;
A volcano heard afar.

'And these words shall then become
Like Oppression's thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain,
Heard again - again - again -

'Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.'

La Commune (Paris 1871), directed by Peter Watkins (2003)

http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/commune.htm

The Paris Commune of 1871 - a brief historical background

MARCH 1871: Adolphe Thiers, chief executive of the provisional national government, is alarmed by the revolutionary activities of the Paris National Guard, an armed militia of some 260 battalions organized by the previous government to help defend Paris against the Prussians in the last days of the disastrous Franco-Prussian War. The social situation in Paris is appalling, with massive unemployment and people still suffering the after-effects of the Prussian siege of Paris. Increasing socialism and militancy have been accompanied by the formation of many ‘red clubs’, which were supported by many of the National Guard battalions, especially those recruited from the working class arrondissements (districts) in the capital.

On March 18, Thiers makes a foolhardy (some say deliberately provocative) attempt to seize the cannon of the National Guard, and is foiled by the women of Montmartre. The women appeal to the government soldiers, many of whom refuse to fire on the people of Paris and reverse their muskets in a gesture of solidarity. Within a few hours Paris is in a state of insurrection, and the Mairies (town halls) of most arrondisements within the capital are in the hands of the rebellious National Guard. During these feverish hours, an angry mob has seized two government Generals, one of whom was involved in trying to capture the cannon, briefly held them prisoner, then summarily executed them against the wall of a garden in Montmartre. The firing squad included members of the National Guard as well as disgruntled government troops.

Thiers and his government hurriedly decamp to Versailles to join the National Assembly (with a majority of Monarchists from the recent elections). Henceforth the government forces are known as the ‘Versaillais’, and the National Guard and the Communards in general as the ‘Fédérés’ (in line with their vision of a loose-knit federation of Communes throughout France). A Central Committee of the National Guard occupies the abandoned Hôtel de Ville (the principal town hall governing Paris) and announces preparations for new municipal elections. On March 26, the left-wing gain enough votes to establish a socialist-oriented ‘Commune’ - which will last until May 28. On March 28, the Commune installs itself at the Hôtel de Ville, and for the next two months does its best to run the administration of Paris and to implement a programme of social reform, while fending off a growing siege from the Versaillais, who advance closer and closer in a singularly brutal war fought on the western edges of the capital.

The Communards try to introduce a series of radical social measures, e.g., to separate the Church from the State and establish a lay education system, give pensions to unmarried women, abolish night-work for bakers, introduce professional education for women, etc. But the lack of time and sheer disproportion in numbers (by May Thiers has rebuilt a standing army of 300,000) forces the issue, and the Versaillais army enters Paris on May 21 through an unguarded gate in the outer walls. Thus begins la semaine sanglante - ‘the bloody week’. In an orgy of reprisals, the French army, under the direction of its most senior generals, kills between 20-30,000 men, women and children in a series of bloody struggles for barricades right across Paris, before finally eliminating the last blocks of Communard resistance in the working class 11th, 19th and 20th districts.

Why this film, at this time?
We are now moving through a very bleak period in human history - where the conjunction of Post Modernist cynicism (eliminating humanistic and critical thinking in the education system), sheer greed engendered by the consumer society sweeping many people under its wing, human, economic and environmental catastrophe in the form of globalization, massively increased suffering and exploitation of the people of the so-called Third World, as well as the mind-numbing conformity and standardization caused by the systematic audiovisualization of the planet have synergistically created a world where ethics, morality, human collectivity, and commitment (except to opportunism) are considered “old fashioned.” Where excess and economic exploitation have become the norm - to be taught even to children. In such a world as this, what happened in Paris in the spring of 1871 represented (and still represents) the idea of commitment to a struggle for a better world, and of the need for some form of collective social Utopia - which WE now need as desperately as dying people need plasma. The notion of a film showing this commitment was thus born.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta interviews Slavoj Žižek

Red Ink For Our Walls!

Democracy’s inviolable tenets are useless in articulating our unfreedom
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

http://outlookindia.com/article.aspx?279483
‘What Do They Want?’
• Spain, May 15: Street protests, inspired by the Arab Spring, against global capital and its baleful effects
• New York, Sep 17: The Occupy Wall Street movement kicks off
• Oct 15: Demonstrations across Europe and Asia as part of global protests. In London, protesters camp for days around St Paul’s Cathedral, near the stock exchange.
***

In thinking about the Occupy Wall Street protests and similar outcries around the world, I was reminded that some years ago the British writer John Berger described how “the multitudes have answers to questions which have not yet been posed”.

“The questions are not yet asked because to do so requires words and concepts which ring true, and those currently being used to name events have been rendered meaningless: Democracy, Liberty, Productivity, etc. With new concepts the questions will soon be posed, for history involves precisely such a process of questioning.”
Let the questioning begin.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters and their supporters have the answers. In fact, we’ve bombarded the protesters with questions, just not the right ones yet.

“But what do you want?” we ask. “What are your concrete demands?”

This is the archetypal question addressed by a male master to a hysterical woman, a scene from bygone days: “All your whining and complaining—do you know at all what you really want?”

Such a question aims precisely at precluding the true answer—its point is: “Tell it in my terms or shut up!”

It’s a question that effectively blocks the process of translating an inchoate protest into a concrete project.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters are drawing attention to two key points. First, that the global capitalist system has destructive consequences: consider only the hundreds of billions that were lost due to unbridled financial speculation.

Second, that economic globalisation is gradually but inexorably undermining the legitimacy of western democracies. Large economic transactions dependent on international players cannot be controlled by democratic mechanisms, which are by definition limited to nation-states. Thus, institutional democratic forms of the old sort are increasingly unable to capture the vital interests of the people.
The crux of the Wall Street protests is this: how to expand democracy beyond its state/multi-party political form, which is obviously impotent when faced with the destructive consequences of economic life?

There is no lack of anti-capitalist sentiment in the world today. There’s an overload of critiques of the horrors of capitalism: books, in-depth journalistic investigations and television reports abound on companies ruthlessly polluting our environment, on corrupt bankers who continue to get fat bonuses while their banks are saved by public money, of sweat shops where children work overtime.

The “democratic illusion”, the blind acceptance of the institutions of democracy as the only and the right force for change, actually prevents radical change.

What is as a rule not questioned, however, is the democratic-liberal framework of fighting against the excesses of capitalism. The explicit or implied goal of such critiques is only to democratise capitalism, to extend democratic control to the economy through pressure from the media, government inquiries, harsher laws, honest police investigations and so on. But we never ever question the democratic institutional framework of the state of law. This is the sacred cow that even the most radical forms of ethical anti-capitalism—think of the Porto Allegre forum, the Seattle movement—do not dare to touch.

Consider the Spanish version of the Occupy Wall Street protesters, the indignados (the angry ones). They dismiss the entire political class, from right to left, as corrupted and controlled by the lust for power. Yet the indignados address their demands for change to—whom? Not to the people themselves: The indignados do not (yet) claim that no one will do it for them, that (to paraphrase Gandhi) they themselves have to be the change they want to see. Their outcry is pitched toward those who are in control—exactly those they are protesting against.
Marx did not believe in locating the question of freedom in the political sphere proper. He would not have agreed with the way western institutions commonly assess degrees of freedom when they want to pass judgment on a country: Are there free elections? Are the judges independent? Is the press free from hidden pressures? Are human rights respected?

The key to actual freedom, Marx believed, resides rather in the “apolitical” network of personal relations, from the market to the family. It is illusory to expect that one can effectively change things merely by “extending” democracy. It’s outside the realm of legal rights that radical changes should be made. “Democratic illusion,” the acceptance of institutional mechanisms of democracy as the only and the “right” force for change, simply prevents radical change.

In mid-April 2011, news reports stated that the Chinese government had prohibited films and television series that deal with time travel and alternate theories of history, charging that they introduce frivolity into serious historical matters. Evidently, the Chinese consider even the fictional escape into alternate reality too dangerous.

In the liberal West, we do not need such explicit prohibitions; ideology exerts enough power over us to prevent alternate narratives of history from being taken seriously. We censor ourselves. There are certain questions we would never ask.
In an old joke often attributed to the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia. Aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: “Let’s establish a code: if a letter you get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false.”
After a month, his friends receive the first letter, written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair—the only thing unavailable is red ink.”

Is this not our situation today?

We have all the freedoms one wants—the only thing missing is the red ink.

What this lack of red ink means is that, today, the terms we use to designate the conflicts that surround us—“war on terror,” “democracy and freedom,” “human rights”—are false. They mystify our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think about it.
We “feel free” because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.
Let’s give the protesters red ink.

The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie

by Slavoj Žižek

London Review of Books
http://www.lrb.co.uk/2012/01/11/slavoj-zizek/the-revolt-of-the-salaried-bourgeoisie

How did Bill Gates become the richest man in America? His wealth has nothing to do with the production costs of what Microsoft is selling: i.e. it is not the result of his producing good software at lower prices than his competitors, or of ‘exploiting’ his workers more successfully (Microsoft pays its intellectual workers a relatively high salary). If that had been the case, Microsoft would have gone bankrupt long ago: people would have chosen free systems like Linux which are as good as or better than Microsoft products. Millions of people are still buying Microsoft software because Microsoft has imposed itself as an almost universal standard, practically monopolising the field, as one embodiment of what Marx called the ‘general intellect’, meaning collective knowledge in all its forms, from science to practical knowhow. Gates effectively privatised part of the general intellect and became rich by appropriating the rent that followed from that.

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). Yet this is at the core of today’s struggles over intellectual property: as the role of the general intellect – based on collective knowledge and social co-operation – has increased in post-industrial capitalism, so wealth accumulates out of all proportion to the labour expended in its production. The result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge.

The same goes for natural resources, the exploitation of which is one of the world’s main sources of rent. What follows is a permanent struggle over who gets the 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.

A consequence of the rise in productivity brought about by the exponentially growing impact of collective knowledge is a change in the role of unemployment. It is the very success of capitalism (greater efficiencies, raised productivity etc) which produces unemployment, rendering more and more workers useless: what should be a blessing – less hard labour needed – becomes a curse. Or, to put it differently, the chance of being exploited in a long-term job is now experienced as a privilege. The world market, as Fredric Jameson has put it, is now ‘a space in which everyone has once been a productive labourer, and in which labour has everywhere begun to price itself out of the system’. In the ongoing process of capitalist globalisation, the category of the unemployed is no longer confined to

Marx’s ‘reserve army of labour’; it also includes, as Jameson describes, ‘those massive populations around the world who have, as it were, “dropped out of history”, who have been deliberately excluded from the modernising projects of First World capitalism and written off as hopeless or terminal cases’: so-called failed states (DR Congo, Somalia), victims of famine or ecological disaster, trapped by pseudo-archaic ‘ethnic hatreds’, objects of philanthropy and NGOs or targets of the ‘war on terror’. The category of the unemployed has thus expanded to encompass vast ranges of people, from the temporarily unemployed, through to the no longer employable and permanently unemployed, to the inhabitants of ghettos and slums (all those often dismissed by Marx himself as ‘lumpen-proletarians’), and finally to the whole populations or states excluded from the global capitalist process, like the blank spaces on ancient maps.

Some say that this new form of capitalism provides new possibilities for emancipation. This at any rate is the thesis of Hardt and Negri’s Multitude, which tries to radicalise Marx, who held that if we just cut the head off capitalism we’d get socialism. Marx, as they see it, was historically constrained by the notion of centralised, automated and hierarchically organised mechanical industrial labour, with the result that he understood ‘general intellect’ as something rather like a central planning agency; it is only today, with the rise of ‘immaterial labour’, that a revolutionary reversal has become ‘objectively possible’. This immaterial labour extends between two poles: from intellectual labour (production of ideas, texts, programs etc) to affective labour (carried out by doctors, babysitters and flight attendants). Today, immaterial labour is ‘hegemonic’ in the sense in which Marx proclaimed that, in 19th-century capitalism, large industrial production was hegemonic: it imposes itself not through force of numbers but by playing the key, emblematic structural role. What emerges is a vast new domain called the ‘common’: shared knowledge and new forms of communication and co-operation. The products of immaterial production aren’t objects but new social or interpersonal relations; immaterial production is bio-political, the production of social life.

Hardt and Negri are here describing the process that the ideologists of today’s ‘postmodern’ capitalism celebrate as the passage from material to symbolic production, from centralist-hierarchical logic to the logic of self-organisation and multi-centred co-operation. The difference is that Hardt and Negri are effectively faithful to Marx: they are trying to prove that Marx was right, that the rise of the general intellect is in the long term incompatible with capitalism. The ideologists of postmodern capitalism are making exactly the opposite claim: Marxist theory (and practice), they argue, remains within the constraints of the hierarchical logic of centralised state control and so can’t cope with the social effects of the information revolution. There are good empirical reasons for this claim: what effectively ruined the Communist regimes was their inability to accommodate to the new social logic sustained by the information revolution: they tried to steer the revolution making it into yet another large-scale centralised state-planning project. The paradox is that what Hardt and Negri celebrate as the unique chance to overcome capitalism is celebrated by the ideologists of the information revolution as the rise of a new, ‘frictionless’ capitalism.

Hardt and Negri’s analysis has some weak points, which explain how capitalism has been able to survive what should have been (in classic Marxist terms) a new organisation of production that rendered it obsolete. They underestimate the extent to which today’s capitalism has successfully (in the short term at least) privatised the general intellect itself, as well as the extent to which, more than the bourgeoisie, workers themselves are becoming superfluous (with greater and greater numbers of them becoming not just temporarily unemployed but structurally unemployable).

If the old capitalism ideally involved an entrepreneur who invested (his own or borrowed) money into production that he organised and ran and then reaped the profit, a new ideal type is emerging today: no longer the entrepreneur who owns his company, but the expert manager (or a managerial board presided over by a CEO) who runs a company owned by banks (also run by managers who don’t own the bank) or dispersed investors. In this new ideal type of capitalism, the old bourgeoisie, rendered non-functional, is refunctionalised as salaried management: the new bourgeoisie gets wages, and even if they own part of their company, they earn stocks as part of their remuneration for their work (‘bonuses’ for their ‘success’).

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Connected to this is the impasse faced by today’s China: the ideal goal of Deng’s reforms was to introduce capitalism without a bourgeoisie (since they would be the new ruling class); now, however, China’s leaders are making the painful discovery that capitalism without a stable hierarchy (brought about by the existence of a bourgeoisie) generates permanent instability. So what path will China take? The former Communists, meanwhile, are emerging as the most efficient managers of capitalism because their historical enmity towards the bourgeoisie as a class perfectly fits the tendency of today’s capitalism to become a managerial capitalism without a bourgeoisie – in both cases, as Stalin put it long ago, ‘cadres decide everything.’ (An interesting difference between today’s China and Russia: in Russia, university teachers are ridiculously underpaid – they are de facto already part of the proletariat – while in China they are comfortably provided with a surplus wage as a means to guarantee their docility.)

The notion of surplus wage also throws new light on the ongoing ‘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 at the brutal logic of the market, they are in effect protesting against 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, which are mostly strikes on the part of a ‘salaried bourgeoisie’ driven by fear of losing their privilege (their surplus over the minimum 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 has itself become a privilege? Not low-paid workers in (what remains of) the textile industry etc, but those privileged workers with 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.

At the same time it is clear that the huge revival of protests over the past year, from the Arab Spring to Western Europe, from Occupy Wall Street to China, from Spain to Greece, should not be dismissed as merely a revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie. Each case has to be taken on its own merits. The student protests against university reform in the UK were clearly different from August’s riots, which were a consumerist carnival of destruction, a true outburst of the excluded. One can argue that the uprisings in Egypt began in part as a revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie (educated young people protesting about their lack of prospects), but this was only one aspect of a larger protest against an oppressive regime. On the other hand, the protest hardly mobilised poor workers and peasants and the electoral victory of the Islamists is an indication of the narrow social base of the original secular protest. Greece is a special case: in the last decades, a new salaried bourgeoisie (especially in the over-extended state administration) was created thanks to EU financial help and loans, and the protests were motivated in large part by the threat of losing this privilege.

Meanwhile, the proletarianisation of the lower salaried bourgeoisie is accompanied at the opposite extreme by the irrationally high remuneration of top managers and bankers. This remuneration is economically irrational since, as investigations have demonstrated in the US, it tends to be inversely proportional to a company’s success. Rather than submit these trends to moralising criticism, we should read them as signs that the capitalist system itself is no longer able to find any level of self-regulated stability – it threatens, in other words, to run out of control.