Beyond Tradition: The Flaws of a ‘Neo-Capitalist Post-Democracy’

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The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. – Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) The quote above comes from Karl Marx’s critique of the French President turned Emperor Napoleon III, the nephew of the French Emperor of the early eighteenth century. Napoleon III was democratically elected president of the Second French Republic before leading a coup d’état to become the Emperor of the Second French Empire. Marx’s abrasive critique of Napoleon III’s rise to power is, in my opinion, one of Marx’s best writings. One of the major problems he had with Napoleon III and the Second French Empire was that it appealed to French tradition of the Napeolonic Era, which French people adorned as a time of its great power and influence. Napoleon III lacked the leadership skills of his uncle, but he shared the name and appealed to that tradition, which gave him credibility with many French. Marx’s point was that — in a time of revolutionary distress — instead of embracing progressive or radical change, the French people and Napoleon III looked to the past to find names, symbols, imagery, that provided nostalgia for a supposed better time. In short, traditions of past generations haunt the beliefs of the living generation who cling to symbols of the past to find comfort during times of change. Marx’s quote relates to and can explain many conservative beliefs that continue to look to the past to resolve political problems.

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Systematic Dialectic

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Systematic dialectic is distinguished from historical dialectic and its logic explored. As a strategy of exposition designed to articulate the forms of a given whole it orders the relevant categories in a linear development. The dialectical justification of the transitions is the central question addressed. What is given progressively as the further determination of the abstract beginning should be read retrogressively as a grounding movement validating the earlier categories from the perspective of the concrete whole.

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Mapping Pathways within Italian Autonomist Marxism

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Borio, Pozzi and Roggero (eds.) 2005 have characterised operaismo as ‘neither a homogenous doctrinaire corpus, nor a unitary political subject’, but rather ‘multiple pathways with their roots in a common theoretical matrix’. Starting with a diagram drawn up by Primo Moroni in the 1980s, this paper will explore a number of the ways in which those paths might be mapped out, in terms of key categories and projects, above all for the years that follow 1979.

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Marx Myths and Legends

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During the last ten years Marxism has come to occupy a substantial position within American academia. This is especially true in economics where, until recently, discussion of Marx and the Marxist tradition was largely confined to courses in the history of economic thought and in the economic history of the Soviet Union. The rise of an academic Marxism has been due, I would argue, to two forces. First, the struggles of students within the context of the social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s carved out time and space within which politically active students could study Marxism as apart of radical economics, insurgent sociology, and so on. Second, university administrators and the business interests they generally represent have been surprisingly tolerant of the expansion of Marxist studies. This reaction to student demands is not simply a case of the “repressive tolerance” Marcuse described so vividly. The current tolerance is due, more importantly, to the need of business for new ideas during the present period of economic and social crisis. There is a long history of the capitalist appropriation of Marxist ideas which should lend credence to this suggestion. Moreover, the numerous attempts in recent years in the business press and in professional economic journals to give space to radical ideas and to evaluate current Marxist economic research demonstrates the on-going interest of business and its ideologues in the possibility of appropriating something new from Marx. Nowhere has this tolerance been more obvious than in the area of Marxist research on the theory of economic crisis." This willingness on the part of business to appropriate Marxist ideas and to use them for its own purposes has been largely ignored by Marxists working on the theory of crisis. They have, time and again, formulated their theories in ways that facilitate such appropriation. Yet this is not necessary. There is a way to read Marx and to develop Marxist theory that does not lend itself to this kind of appropriation. In this essay I do two things. First, through a series of examples, I illustrate how, in the history of Marxist work on the theory of crisis, many have forgotten the revolutionary content of Marx’s own work and thus left themselves open to the dangers of capitalist appropriation. Second, I suggest an alternative approach to the study and elaboration of Marx’s analysis of crisis that makes its political and revolutionary content explicit and thus more immune to appropriation.

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Self organisation is the first act of the revolution ; it then becomes an obstacle which the revolution has to overcome

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Autonomy is the practice, the theory and the revolutionary project of the epoch of “fordism”. Its subject is the worker and it supposes that the communist revolution is his liberation, i.e. the liberation of productive labour. It supposes that struggles over immediate demands1 are stepping stones to the revolution, and that capital reproduces and confirms a workers’ identity within the relation of exploitation. All this has lost any foundation. In fact it is just the opposite: in each of its struggles, the proletariat sees how its existence as a class is objectified in the reproduction of capital as something foreign to it and which in its struggle it can be led to put into question. In the activity of the proletariat, being a class becomes an exterior constraint objectified in capital. Being a class becomes the obstacle which its struggle as a class has to overcome; this obstacle possesses a reality which is clear and easily identifiable, it is self-organisation and autonomy.

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Reflections on Tronti

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It has been suggested to me, in the corridors of the Historical Materialism conference held over the week end, that what distinguishes what we may call, broadly speaking, autonomist marxism with other marxist approaches is the argument that the “working class” is the agent of transformation that pushes capital on the defence and forces its “economic” development rather then, on the contrary, being capital that “overdetermines” the rest by means of its agency. This suggestion furthermore is accompanied by the claim that this view is false, since capital has “more power.” In my view, the insight of 1960s operaismo with respect to working class agency were not falsified in light of 1980s capital’s agency, they were simply temporally bounded. Class struggle, in a process-like manner, have at least two broad actors, not one, and their tragic-comic struggle develop through highs and lows for both sides, “scoring points” for both sides. The process of this historical development of struggle, this very process of “point scoring” for one or the other, is the stuff of capitalist development. The problem is that acknowledging this does not give us any hint of how to go beyond capital and the very specific form of struggle shaping its development.

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Reading Capital Politically

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In this book I re-examine Karl Marx's analysis of value through a detailed study of Chapter One of Volume I of Capital. The object of this study is to bring out the political usefulness of the analysis of value by situating the abstract concepts of Chapter One within Marx's overall analysis of the class struggles of capitalist society. I intend to return to what I believe was Marx's original purpose: he wrote Capital to put a weapon in the hands of workers. In it he presented a detailed analysis of the fundamental dynamics of the struggles between the capitalist and the working classes

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Welcome to postnormal times

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Ό,τι ως τώρα ήταν «κανονικό» έχει εξατμιστεί. Έχουμε εισέλθει στους μετακανονικούς καιρούς, την ενδιάμεση περίοδο όπου οι παλιές ορθοδοξίες έχουν πεθάνει, οι καινούργιες δεν έχουν ακόμη αναδυθεί και τίποτε δεν φαίνεται να έχει νόημα. Για να σχηματίσουμε μιαν άποψη για το άμεσο μέλλον, οφείλουμε να κατανοήσουμε τη σημασία αυτής της μεταβατικής περιόδου η οποία χαρακτηρίζεται από τρία C: πολυπλοκότητα (complexity), χάος (chaos) και αντιφάσεις (contradictions). Οι τρεις αυτές δυνάμεις ωθούν και συντηρούν τους μετακανονικούς καιρούς, οδηγώντας σε αβεβαιότητα και διαφορετικούς τύπους άγνοιας που καθιστούν την λήψη αποφάσεων προβληματική και αυξάνουν τους κινδύνους για τα άτομα, την κοινωνία και τον πλανήτη. Σύμφωνα με το άρθρο, οι μετακανονικοί καροί απαιτούν να εγκαταλείψουμε τις ιδέες «του ελέγχου και της διοίκησης» και να επαναστοχαστούμε πάνω στις έννοιες της προόδου, του εκσυγχρονισμού και της αποδοτικότητας. Ο δρόμος προς τα μπρος πρέπει να βασίζεται στις αρετές της ταπεινότητας, της μετριοφροσύνης και της υπευθυνότητας, οι οποίες είναι απαραίτητες για μια ζωή μέσα στην αβεβαιότητα, την πολυπλοκότητα και την άγνοια. Πρέπει να φανταστούμε τους εαυτούς μας έξω από τους μετακανονικούς καιρούς και μέσα σε νέα εποχή κανονικότητας – εξοπλισμένους με ηθική πυξίδα και ένα ευρύ φάσμα οραμάτων παρμένων από την πλούσια ποικιλία των ανθρώπινων κουλτουρών.

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History and Human Emancipation: Struggle, Uncertainty and Openness

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The critique of class society finds the positive only in the classless society, in communism. The difficulty of conceiving of human emancipation has to do with the very idea of communism. In distinction to the pursuit of profit, seizure of the state, pursuit and preservation of political power, and economic value and human resource, it follows a completely different entelechy of human development. Communism means Commune, an association of the direct producers where each contributes according to her abilities, and where each receives according to her needs. In distinction to the second and third Internationals, which subscribed to naturalised conceptions of society and history, there is no universal historical law that leads human kind from some imagined historical beginning via capitalism to communism. If, however, history is not the consequence of either divine revelation or abstract historical laws, what is it? History does not make history. Neither is history on the side of the working class. History takes no sides: it can as easily be the history of barbarism as of socialism. History is made, and will be made. The future that will come will not result from some objective laws of historical development but will result from the struggles of today. The communist future is a future present. Its reality is the everyday struggle over the production and appropriation of surplus value.

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What is to be Done? Leninism, anti-Leninist Marxism and the Question of Revolution today

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Amid the resurgence of anti-capitalist movements across the globe, the centenary of Lenin’s What is to be Done? in 2002 has largely gone unnoticed. Leninism has fallen on hard times – and rightly so. It leaves a bitter taste of a revolution whose heroic struggle turned into a nightmare. The indifference to Leninism is understandable. What, however, is disturbing is the contemporary disinterest in the revolutionary project. What does anti-capitalism in its contemporary form of antiglobalization mean if it is not a practical critique of capitalism and what does it wish to achieve if its anti-capitalism fails to espouse the revolutionary project of human emancipation? Anti-capitalist indifference to revolution is a contradiction in terms. Rather then freeing the theory and practice of revolution from Leninism, its conception of revolutionary organization in the form of the party, and its idea of the state whose power is to be seized, as an instrument of revolution, remain uncontested. Revolution seems to mean Leninism, now appearing in moderated form as Trotskyism. Orthodox Marxism invests great energy in its attempt to incorporate the class struggle into preconceived conceptions of organization, seeking to render them manageable under the direction of the party. The management of class struggle belongs traditionally to the bourgeoisie who ‘concentrated in the form of the state’ (see Marx, 1973, p.108), depend on its containment and management in the form of abstract equality. The denial of humanity that is entailed in the subordination of the inequality in property to relations of abstract equality in the form of exchange relations, is mirrored in the Leninist conception of the workers state, where everybody is treated equally as an economic resource.

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