“I was convinced we’d have a revolution in [the] US and I decided to be its leader and prevent it. I’m a rich man too and have run with your kind of people. I decided half a loaf was better than none – a half loaf for me and a half loaf for you and no revolution.”
– Franklin Delano RooseveltMoral of the story: if you really want Obama to be like FDR, threaten him with revolution.
- Lenin’s Tomb
In the spirit of revolutionary Marxism, Alex over at Splintering Bone Ashes calls for a total break with the capitalist order, a complete overhaul of the global political-economic system. The “crucial concept” he argues, “must be that of institutionalisation — agglomerative masses of power (including states, corporations, NGOs, religions, discrete humans) all of which need to be dissolved.”
But if “dissolution” is the solution, it’s not by choice. It’s the only option. Attempts to engage the capitalist system are ‘by definition’ futile because, so this logic goes, capitalism sustains itself on modifications and challenges to it. Thus, it can only be disposed of wholesale, in one fell revolutionary swoop (which, presumably, would bypass all the messiness of resistance proper).
This decidedly categorical opposition to engaging ‘capitalism’ in any way other than with the aim to “dissolve” it, presumably violently, stumbles, however, when it finds its subject to be a present (rather than historical) crisis. Suddenly, to be sure, the position of total refusal can seem a form of paralysis.
This false choice between engagement and dissolution, itself symptomatic of a deeper ambivalence, comes to the fore in Alex’s take on the present economic crisis. On the one hand, he admits, the crash seems to offer a genuine opportunity to bring about significant change in the economic system:
“Perhaps what this crash offers however is a chink in the armour of late capital, a Badiouian event, evading the usual in-situational structural determinations. In a sense Badiou would not recognise (economic) it really does give an opportunity (as did the crash of 1929) to recalibrate both the state-market relation and the type of economic theory deployed by governments.“
Which is to say, the chink in the armor is ‘real’, and the crisis is not simply one adjustment amongst many. But to pursue this opportunity for what it is — an incision deep enough to allow for radical reform — would violate the absolute refusal to ‘play the game’ of resistance and absorption, challenge and modification. Thus, immediately following the above paragraph, Alex withdraws his characterization of the crisis as an opportunity for change significant enough to pursue.
“But this will be merely to retrench, to stabilise, to maintain the present system, in a new form, by whatever means necessary and available. Politically it is less clear, for in order that the potential this event offers to be fully exploited, we need a politics capable of fully evading even the kind of generic humanism Badiou’s politics (for example) proffers. For the impasse of the end of history can only be properly surmounted by a final nihilistic overcoming of humanism– in a sense even Badiou fails this test, his minimal-communist humanism not going far enough.”
But how far is far enough? How is one to act purely destructively, without offering anything affirmative or institution-like for the capitalist machine to appropriate? If the revolutionary is barred from resisting or reforming capitalism through positive (which is to say, absorbable) practices, how is one to effect capitalism at all? The only alternative, Alex reasons, is to “utilize” capitalism ‘against itself’.
Now, without going into how the figure of ‘using a power against itself’ invents for itself an agency without an actor, suffice it to say this explanation fails to offer much in the way of progressive causes and quickly leads to a number of curious, misguided suggestions, the first of which is the destruction of nation-states:
“In a sense this is a continuation and merging of both Marxist-Leninist Communism and Neo-liberal capitalism, but where there is no need to take over the state, but rather to utilise capitalism as an engine with which to obliterate nation states. However, to merely do this would be entirely insufficient, as the state function within capitalism would simply be taken over by institutional figures such as corporations, which must therefore also be dissolved.”
This kind of political desire, though well-intentioned, strikes me as somewhat irresponsible. The way things stand, the state might just be the sole existent means through which corporate entities can be regulated, controlled, and policed. In fact, the ‘obliteration of the nation-state’ might be something the capitalist engine would be all to happy to endure. Indeed, as Naomi Klein has persistently shown, global capitalism is already increasingly invested in the destruction and looting of nation-states, which remain surprisingly inimical to global market forces.
Arguments like Alex’s are however all too aware of the ready objection that such desires, revolutionary in character, for so total a liquidation all too clearly indulge in ‘negative theological’ fantasies of an outside or a transcendent move or a deep, clean historical break from the present: thus, the clear impossibility of this outcome must be quickly disposed of. Which is to say, if a total break from, or dissolution of, capitalism is ultimately an incoherent proposition — not because capitalism is inevitable or permanent, but because it can’t be ripped out like a shrub — this incoherence must be relocated from theory to object. And so it is never the institution of philosophy that’s responsible for these ideas, but rather capitalism itself. One would like to react, reform, resist, but since capitalism specifically renders engagement futile ‘in advance’, only a total refusal is possible.
This total position is not without value, however. It has probably sustained much of the anti-war and anti-globalization movements through some dreary, demoralizing times, but beyond its importance for organizational morale, there is a danger in thinking that a radically reformed socialist capitalism would not constitute a fundamental reversal. If the left’s wishlist of reforms were to be implemented over, say, the next ten years, the resultant economic order, though derived from capitalism proper, would hardly resemble it. The difference between that model and capitalism as we know it would no doubt be as profound as the shift from feudalism to a mercantile economy.
The trap here lies in assigning too many different socio-economic forms to the word capitalism; collapsing too many variations, some superficial and some fundamental, into the same global category imbues the present economic order with a power and homogeneity that is not in fact its own, but which, ironically, it would like to possess.
The same goes for appropriation. We have to be careful not to confuse capitalist absorption with a much more ambiguous historical process. “Retrenchment” is, after all, a basic feature of historical change in general — i.e. there has never been an absolute break — and this should not simply be attributed to capitalism itself, as its most prominent, malicious function.
The conversion of labor into value is also not the problem; if this ‘moment’ in capitalist logic, where the “inscription of materiality in terms of the value form” is essential, is in fact a kind of violence, it is at least an unremarkable kind, and hardly exclusive to capitalism, formally speaking. All meaning-making, capitalist or otherwise, depends on, or is identical to, this move – that is, where a relatively autonomous action is ‘appropriated’ or made ‘instrumental’ by an institution or logic or semiotic system. One can not only imagine, but point to, ethical examples of the conversion of labor into value.
In any event, all of this amounts to a profound, and no doubt familiar, “state phobia” – the basic features of which Jodi Dean of I cite recently summarized in a gloss on Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics. For Dean, themes like the one described above “lead to a ‘general disqualification by the worst.’ Since all the different accounts of the state blend together, one harsh sentence becomes ‘the sign that the state is becoming fascist,’ as if there were no harsh sentences part of non-fascist states (I wonder if this is directly a criticism of Deleuze).”
Though Dean does not of course subscribe wholesale to Foucault’s position here, the greater point to be made is that, as she says, “The state is not expanding–other governmentalities are expanding, spreading, intensifying” and it would be an error of great proportions to attribute these other effects to the ‘state itself’. The passage she quotes from Foucault makes this point nicely.
what I think we should not do is imagine we are describing a real, actual process concerning ourselves when we denounce the growth of state control, or the state becoming fascist, or the establishment of state violence, and so on. All those who share in the great state phobia should know that they are following the direction of the wind and that in fact, for years and years, an effective reduction of the state has been on the way … I am saying that we should not delude ourselves by attributing to the state itself a process of becoming fascist which is actually exogenous and due much more to the state’s reduction and dislocation.
In this regard, instead of destroying the state (whatever that might mean), or for that matter every institution (a fantastic proposition), we should be trying to dislocate it, if in a different direction than we’re accustomed. The state, after all, does provide a powerful set of equipment that could be turned, ideally, to more beneficent ends. If this is utopian, and it most certainly is, it is much less so than the project of violently wiping the slate clean to start all over again.
