Talking about Suicide

The Tyranny of Silence

When my son Bruno killed himself in January 2007 my first impulse was to talk about it. I, my partner, and the rest of my family, came up immediately against the press guidelines that do not allow mention of suicide as a cause of death in the mainstream media. Naively we thought that since the Labour Government had reformed the legislation and suicides were now designated as “accidents” with burial costs covered by ACC, that suicide was a disease like any other. When someone dies suddenly it is only natural that people want to know why. To say that the death was “sudden”, “tragic” or an accident” leaves them guessing and perpetuates the “tyranny of silence” that surrounds suicide. I got around that partly by publishing a tribute to my son on Aotearoa Indymedia two days after his death.

My instinct was to share the knowledge of his life and death with many of those I had met, discussed and debated with on Aotearoa Indymedia as a “community”. Here was a politically engaged, mainly youthful audience that was actively concerned about social issues. I wasn’t aware at that time suicide has a ‘profile’ that should not be raised. The discussion that followed this posting reinforced for me the disconnection between the official code of silence and the openness of the internet where suicide is spoken of in all of its aspects from the sublime to the horrific. I discovered that the press guide lines were designed to stop copycatting.

The question then arose: why if silence was supposedly “evidence based” and therefore a “best practice” designed to stop copycatting, had no one at various Ministries surfed the social sites frequented by young people where hundreds of Youtube or Bebo tributes to dead young people are watched and commented on profusely and sometimes profoundly and realized that their social policy prescriptions are on a different planet?

I then looked for evidence in the published research that backed up the claim that silence was a means of suicide prevention. I couldn’t find it. Nor I discovered could others like Keith Newman who have been active in documenting suicide and its prevention over many years and who runs the internet site SOSAD (Save our Sons and Daughters). Newman saw the government’s policy of clamping down on suicide “awareness” as “politically correct”, an attempt to “censor” youth, stopping “open and sensible dialogue” and undermining youth initiative.

“Surely this should be a matter for youth to decide themselves. Youth are far more broad in their thinking than we give them credit for. Putting the right information in their hands and encouraging them to talk about their hurts and frustrations can be an important part of getting their thinking back on track and realising they are not alone.”

Newman also pointed to Australian evidence that showed that “raising awareness” caused suicide was a “myth”.

I was by this time very suspicious of the counter-intuitive claim that “talking” about suicide makes it “contagious” as if it were a virus. What made things even more strange was the fact that no evidence was cited to prove that talking about suicide would ‘normalize’ it or increase the danger of copycatting. It seemed that in the place of evidence there were patronizing assumptions that young people are impressionable, easily influenced and even uncritical consumers of fashion. This week it is this band, next week its cluster-suicide. Who at the Ministries knows anything about youth culture and why this model of youth consumption of death is supposedly held in such high regard? (McGorry and Robinson)

All the evidence of copycatting shows that its incidence is low (less than 5% of suicides) and that it may have nothing to do with “awareness” or “profile” or “contagion” but may be part of modern consumer capitalism. This research finds that those who suffer suicides of close friends or family tend to try suicide themselves more often than those who do not. However when other social factors such as alcoholism are considered, the “contagion” factor disappears, leaving other social and psychological factors as the most likely cause. In fact, the only significant finding is that knowledge of friends’ suicides after a period of at least a month is more immunizing than contagious as it leads to less “copycatting”. This high quality ‘anecdotal’ evidence supports the argument that the best suicide prevention for those affected by suicide may be active involvement in suicide prevention (Mercy et al, 2001).

In the age of the internet and global roaming the cat is out of the bag and pretending otherwise will not prevent suicide. Knowledge of suicides spreads like the ozone hole among peer groups and throughout the wider society despite the code of official silence. There is something unhealthy about adults pasting on ultra suicide block when their sons and daughters are grieving or morbidly fascinated by the latest suicide online. Internet bullying is now cited as a growing threat and cause of youth suicide. But like copycatting there is no way that the internet can be silenced or policed by parents and schools, nor should it as an important site of freedom of expression.

Internet bullies cannot be silenced on the internet but they can be exposed by identifying them publicly and building support in schools against the competitive culture that promotes bullying.

So logically, if silence doesn’t stop the talk of suicide, then maybe shouting might. This was the view of Maria Bradbury whose son Toran Henry committed suicide on March 20 2008. Ms Bradbury organized a march up Queen St, Auckland, to promote her view of the need to raise public awareness of the causes of suicide. Metaphorically speaking, this is what the Youth Suicide Prevention Trust and its Yellow Ribbon program in schools did between 1997 and 2005 when it was forced to shut down.

Who Killed Yellow Ribbon?

Yellow Ribbon was a self-help suicide prevention group founded by parents and friends of youth suicides who formed the Youth Suicide Awareness Trust in NZ 1997. Its basic approach was to enlist and train young people as ambassadors in schools to promote the Yellow Ribbon message that “It’s OK to ask for help”. Its members handed out yellow cards with the words “Its OK to ask for help” and referred young people who asked for help to health workers and counselors. Each school had a procedure for referral and for keeping their ambassadors safe from risk. Yellow Ribbon was initially modeled on the organization of the same name which was founded in the US in and which has since spread to many US states and to Australia, Canada, Scotland and Africa. By 2002 Yellow Ribbon NZ had over 1400 ambassadors in more than 140 schools.

Yellow Ribbon’s existence, however, was strongly contested. In NZ, Yellow Ribbon was consistently opposed by a number of academics and researchers in the field mainly associated with the New Zealand Youth Suicide Prevention Strategy, formed in 1998 after Yellow Ribbon, who argued that it could not prove that it did not ‘harm’ young people. Endorsements on the US Yellow Ribbon websites from suicidal young people who said they owed their lives to Yellow Ribbon and the many personal testimonies made to those involved in Yellow Ribbon in NZ did not fit with the orthodox “evidence based” approach to suicide prevention. Yet the case of a young Yellow Ribbon ambassador who committed suicide was cited informally as evidence of “harm”. The Minister in charge of NZYSPS, Jim Anderton, stated categorically:

“The literature is very clear – if you raise the profile of youth suicide, you get a higher rate of suicide”

(Collins).

As a result Yellow Ribbon had to look elsewhere for funding. When it went to ‘Fight or Life”, a charity boxing contest which featured “celebrity” matches, for funds it was heavily criticized for promoting a violent sport that could lead to bullying a recognized cause of suicide. Yet many of the ‘celebrities’ such as former league personality Tawera Nikau have a strong record in youth work. Another was the current Deputy Prime Minister, Bill English, who has yet to be shown up as a playground bully.

The question as to why Yellow Ribbon was closed down has yet to be answered. Those who were involved argue that it was deliberately shut down. They point to the claim made by the leading NZ suicide researcher Anne Beautrais who stated correctly that there was no evidence to prove “beyond doubt” that Yellow Ribbon did not cause harm.

In the face of this official criticism, Yellow Ribbon was more than ready to evaluate its approach to suicide prevention and correct any shortcomings. It commissioned Professor Ian Evans and Dr Narelle Dawson to design and implement a research project precisely for that purpose. This was the most advanced and robust study of Yellow Ribbon devised that I have seen anywhere. It was specifically designed to meet the requirement that: “the programme must demonstrate that it is “safe, effective, and evidence based, in a rigorous and scientific way.”

Thelma French wrote in response to Government concern that the Yellow Ribbon programme “lacked a robust evaluation framework”:

“Government is very aware of the evaluation design prepared by Prof Evans and Narelle Dawson in August 2002, the implementation of which we have been asked to delay, despite our seeking specific ring-fenced funding for evaluation studies. In order to ensure our evaluation plan would meet Ministry requirements, we initiated several meetings in which Yellow Ribbon requested from the Ministry representatives more detailed specification as to what in their view would be minimally required for a sound evaluation. To date they have been unable to provide any such guidelines. That safety issues have not been dismissed and are taken very seriously by Yellow Ribbon.”

However this was followed by a more serious criticism in a draft report of the IPRC at Auckland University:

“… the lack of evaluation evidence makes it extremely difficult to substantiate the impact of the program, and the level to which programme aims have been achieved. Consequently, respondents strongly questioned the probable contribution of the Yellow Ribbon program to young people’s help seeking behaviours and in particular to preventing suicidal behaviours among young people. Yellow Ribbon has no right whatsoever to claim that they make any positive contribution to suicide prevention.”

Yellow Ribbon replied:

“This type of comment places Yellow Ribbon in a classic double-bind. Obviously a programme cannot produce outcome evidence until it has been implemented for a period of time. Clearly the general thrust of the Yellow Ribbon programme is based on reasonable principles, and as already explained, work is under way to evaluate both process and outcome. Some initial efforts at review of processes have been initiated, for example in the above-mentioned questionnaire to ambassadors in January 2003, the majority (45.5%) said the training increased their knowledge a lot; and 27.5% said the training increased their knowledge somewhat. The majority of ambassadors said training increased their knowledge of where to seek help a lot (40.9%) and 29.6% ambassadors said the training increased their knowledge somewhat. In addition Youthline has recorded a 500% increase in calls and relationship services have also seen a marked increase. Whenever asked if we believe we have contributed to the drop in youth suicide we state that our belief is that education and awareness is very important, but we always reiterate if there is a significant decrease, it is due to the efforts of many organisations and strategies.”

In fact, as the reference to the survey of ambassadors points out, despite claims to the contrary, Yellow Ribbon was responsibly cooperating in an evaluation by the Injury Prevention Research Centre at Auckland University to establish an ‘evidence base’. This survey found a large majority of the ambassadors strongly approving of, and supporting, the work of Yellow Ribbon. A small number expressed doubts about its value, but these were of not sufficient ‘concern’ to warrant being followed up by the research project. A larger minority thought there should be more professional backup and support. However, as the researchers point out, most of those who responded (in fact a very low response rate of 37%) had been ambassadors for less than one year. This reflects the fact that Yellow Ribbon was by 2002 barely 3 years into its operation and was feeling its way and very willing to learn from the “evidence”. Moreover, the concerns of the researchers expressed in this report (lack of training, reported failure to refer young people at risk to adults or professionals etc) were clearly echoing the concerns of those ambassadors who wanted better training and more professional backup. Overall, the project endorsed Yellow Ribbon as a sound approach to youth suicide prevention.

However, the “concerns” that surfaced in the survey of Ambassadors were then used in the Ministry funded research on peer based programs as “evidence” that Yellow Ribbon’s program was “potentially harmful”. The results of this research were leaked to the Sunday Star Times which sensationalized YR as “dangerous”. Yellow Ribbon had its own evaluation of the research done by Professor Ian Evans and Dr Narelle Dawson, who found it to be “unscientific” and “unprofessional”.

The Evans/Dawson critique makes it clear that Yellow Ribbon is under attack by Government agencies. I would add that it was “unscientific” to misuse the survey of ambassadors based on a small sample in which an overwhelming endorsement of Yellow Ribbon by its ambassadors as cause for “potential harm” where suicides may results from promoting “awareness”, and Ambassadors put at risk in taking too much responsibility for counseling suicidal peers. It is clearly “unprofessional” in its cynical misrepresentation of Yellow Ribbon as lacking a theoretical base, and not interested in evaluating its methods, when it had initiated, designed and planned a world beating outstanding evaluation project and willingly collaborated with the University of Auckland Injury Prevention Research Centre to do the survey of its ambassadors.

While the survey of ambassadors was a world first in actually asking ambassadors (and not gatekeepers) to at least talk about their role, the obvious next step was not taken. Young people at risk were not asked if Yellow Ribbon had reduced their suicide attempts. Nor were those who did commit suicide tracked to see if their suicide was in any way caused by the “awareness” generated by the Yellow Ribbon program. Such critical questions were addressed by the Evans and Dawson evaluation plan. Moreover, the anecdotal evidence of testimonies of both ambassadors and young people helped by Yellow Ribbon and conveyed to the organizers was ignored as invalid and unreliable.

Yet, during the years of its existence from 1996 to 2005, suicide rates for the younger age groups (15-24) showed a decline of around a third. This was no doubt due to a combination of factors the most important of which is social inequality. But on the face of it, the “evidence” speaks for the efficacy of Yellow Ribbon rather than against it. So why did the IPRC researchers base their evaluation of Yellow Ribbon on the opinion of professionals (teachers and health workers) and not ask the young people who “talked” to the ambassadors, whether they thought suicide “awareness” prevented suicides or not? If Yellow Ribbon was at risk of doing “harm” why not ask the very people thought to be at risk? Why not fund the very good research project initiated by Yellow Ribbon that would have answered all these questions?

Suicide Prevention orthodoxyy

New Zealand has the third highest (behind the Russian Federation and Finland) suicide rate for young males, and the third highest for young females. The male rate is high because of the rate for Maori males in the youth age group 15-24 is up with Australian Aboriginal youth at 3 or 4 times more than non-Maori and non-Aboriginal respectively. The 2006 statistics

How the ‘Labour left’ sold out NZ workers in the 1990s

Book Review

No Left Turn: The Distortion of NZ’s history by Greed, Bigotry and Right-wing politics

By Chris Trotter. Random House, NZ, 2007

Part One: Keeping the social democratic torch alight

Chris Trotter’s new book is an attempt to revive the flagging hopes of the social democratic left in New Zealand. He sees NZ history as a long struggle of the working class majority to win state power and bring about the ideals of an egalitarian democracy. That they have been prevented, as the subtitle of the book says, is down to “greed, bigotry and right-wing politics”. Basically the right-wing minority with the power and wealth conspired to keep the worker majority out of power for most of NZ’s history. But it the periods when workers did win parliamentary support for progressive legislation that Trotter uses to hold up hopes in the ‘pot of gold at the end of the rainbow’ and boost our hopes of taking power some happy day.

Trotter borrows heavily from the late Bruce Jesson, the left republican intellectual and journalist. He paraphrases Jesson:

“So it is in these shaky isles. While the successors of those who came to these shores in search of power and wealth remain locked in bitter conflict with those who came in search of equality and justice, nothing of enduring worth can be constructed in this country.”

But he couldn’t be more wrong. To say that conflict between these two forces is un-necessary and prevents real progress, is to reduce class struggle to the megalomania of ‘extremist’ and ‘undemocratic’ leaders who herd workers as if they were sheep. This is an insult to workers, especially as it is not true. In fact Jesson understood clearly that class struggle was not an epithet for ‘extremists’ pissing on the workers, but a real force that pushed people to extremes to fight for their class. Yet he could not see that the middle class is a potentially fascist force unless it is won over by a powerful working class.

Jesson made the mistake of seeing classes as a colonial hangover which could be overcome, or pushed to the margins, in a republican Aotearoa. Founding the republic was the task of the middle class socialist intellectuals. He died disappointed. He argued in his last writings that the new right won in the 1980s because the ‘left’ intellectuals did not put up a fight. The sad irony was that it wasn’t a failure of the revolutionary left to fight. It was Jesson’s ‘left, the social democrats in the Labour Party and unions who didn’t fight. They were not the vanguard of a republican anti-imperialism after all. They were part of the middle class who had always been in an alliance with international finance capitalism.

Historically they had earned their money dividing the working class and isolating the militants so they could be more easily smashed by the farmers and the bosses. This was the pattern in 1912, WW1, 1930s, 1951 and in the 1980s. Despite the arguments of Jesson’s one-time political ally, Owen Gager, that the Labour Party under Harry Holland betrayed the anti-war movement during the First World War, Jesson never recognized the historic treachery of social democratic intellectuals. Today, when a new fight against the new right is emerging, Trotter follows in Jesson’s footsteps, parading the petty bourgeois social democrats as the salvation of the working class.

Why another old Labour Party Story?

Or to put it another way, Trotter in following Jesson, is retelling the old story of the sell-out Labourites for today’s consumption so that the new layers of militants will reject revolution and stick with the worldwide ‘socialist’ utopia of the reformist World Social Forum. To do this he has to render the outright betrayals of the Labourites in the past as necessary, just and strategic, isolating the militant wreckers and rendering the completion of the democratic socialist project possible today.

This means patching together a ‘democratic socialist’ version of NZ history from the books of the petty bourgeois intellectuals who provided the ideological smokescreens for the ‘good’ men Trotter worships – the men who straddled the great divide between the greedy and the needy – Dick Seddon, Micky Savage and Norm Kirk. The first is W Pember Reeves the author of ‘Aotearoa: Land of the Long White Cloud’.

Reeves was the first Minister of Labour in Seddon’s earth-breaking Liberal government until he was sacked and sent off to London as High Commissioner. He was a ‘Fabian Socialist’ – the first official current of petty bourgeois intellectuals who saw the British Labour Party as the vehicle for democratic socialism.

Before he was removed for his ‘extremism’ Reeves was responsible for the Industrial, Conciliation and Arbitration Act which created a state Arbitration Court as ‘referee’ between labour and capital. But the great divide opened up again when the Court refused a wage order and the Red Fed broke from the Court in 1908 and began a strike wave that ended in the defeat of the General Strike of 1913. Of course Jesson was right up to a point. Working class militancy between 1908 and 1913 was imposed by British imperialist shipowners and mineowners.

But if NZ workers were going to defeat British owners they had to lead the national struggle to socialism –to nationalize industry, banks and the land – and not capitulate to the local capitalist agents of the British bosses and the militant petty bourgeois farmers who enlisted as Massey’s ‘Cossacks’ to break the General Strike. The militant left was defeated by the bosses’ state which used scabs and the military to impose the class alliance of the middle class and the bourgeoisie on the unions. This defeat was compounded by the jingoistic rallying of workers into the colonial class alliance that went to fight the bosses’ war.

But wait! The great hope for the future which could build a majority from the left and centre in the image of the Liberal Party (which had united workers and small farmers) was about to be born from the battle of the extremes – a social compromise in its conception –the Labour Party. Here of course Trotter has to argue that something good came out of an un-necessary class confrontation. Yet, almost every historian has recognized that the Labour party was an attempt to reconcile militant and moderate wings of the labour movement in the aftermath of the outbreak of class struggle. It gave birth to the vehicle of democratic socialism – the Labour Party, its main ideologues like Bill Sutch, and provided its leaders like Savage, Semple and Fraser.

Bill Sutch was the giant of social democracy from the 1930s to the 1970s. All social democrats in NZ are at heart Sutchites and Jesson and Trotter are no exception. The ‘golden age’ of NZ is period from the election victory of 1935 to 1949 when Labour was defeated in a right wing backlash linked to the onset of the Cold War and of US hegemony in NZ.

The issue is whether this period creates the template for re-founding democratic socialism in NZ, or a historic settlement that would only last so long as the middle-class and capitalist class profited from it.

‘State socialism’ or bust

The Sutchites take the first view. The workers and working farmers now formed the majority in NZ. Labour’s victory was a triumph for social democracy. It insulated the economy and nationalized the critical productive and distributional sectors, and introduced social security for the working class. What Jesson and Trotter after him call the ‘post-war settlement’ was a class compromise in which workers, petty bourgeois and capitalists all appeared to all benefit from economic growth. It was ended when Labour swung to the right to keep the centre onside after the war.

FP Walsh the leader of the FOL was backing Fraser’s rightward shift to keep the bloc of workers, poor farmers and manufacturers in power and to stop a right wing government from breaking the settlement and smashing the labour movement. He almost succeeded in 1949. What went wrong? As Trotter says: “Had the militants held their fire during the ‘scoundrel years’ of 1946-49, it is more than conceivable Fraser and Walsh could have made it across the churning waters that separated wartime stringency from peacetime plenty.” Labour lost 47.2% to National’s 51.9%.

The right wing National government, aligned to the rich farmers and foreign capital, came to power in 1949 determined to smash the unions so that they did not gain from the post war economic boom. Workers had fought the war on behalf of capitalism, suffered the losses, and now demanded a better share of the new wealth. When Labour and the FOL under Walsh denied them that victory bonus, the same unions that formed the backbone of the Red Fed in 1908 split from the FOL to form the TUC.

Now, according to Trotter, Walsh had his own stabilization plan to allocate fair shares in postwar wealth, but it would be allocated centrally from above by the FOL tops, the Government, and the bosses representatives in committee. He was determined to drive through this corporatist plan. He would smash the militants to save the whole labour movement and the prospects of selling his ‘stabilisation plan’ to Labour or National governments. He made sure the militants would rise up against the FOL by baiting Jock Barnes to force a confrontation that could only end in their total defeat. Unaware that they were pawns in this plan their struggle was “heroic but futile”.

For Trotter then, the militants let down the moderate majority by resisting Labour’s right swing, and were then sacrificed for the sake of defending the gains of the whole labour movement. Trotter tells us that not only Barnes but the whole militant wing of the movement brought their defeat on themselves for breaking with the moderates. Had it not been Walsh who did the dirty deed, National would have done it by breaking the Labour class alliance and smashing the post-war settlement for good. The Labour Party could never have recovered from such a defeat. Oh Dear!

Revolution and decolonization

Trotter is adamant that workers had no choice but to huddle inside the Labour Party to shelter from the rampages of capitalism in this period. The evidence is that post-war attempts at socialism outside the Soviet sector did not survive. But it was the Stalinist bureaucracies that played the main role in the defeating the socialist revolutions in Greece and Italy. When Trotter says that any attempt by the left to push towards socialism in NZ would have been smashed by an anticommunist bloc of local capital, the US and sections of the petty bourgeoisie, how does he know this? The evidence shows that the traitors were not the militants who went into fight to defend the interests of the whole working class and won the support of most workers and small farmers, but the leadership of the FOL and Labour Party who sided with US imperialism and the NZ capitalists, to split the militants from the moderates to then smash them.

The revolutionary Marxist argues that the war was an imperialist war which drafted workers to kill one another. But the war also had the effect of arming and radicalizing workers and in some countries such as Yugoslavia, Greece and Italy popular armies routed the Nazis and took power. These were not isolated ultra-left insurrections, but mass movements of workers and poor peasants. The imperialists had no means of defeating these movements by themselves. The Stalinists were the only force that could do this because they dominated the mass Communist parties and the unions. The US and Britain did a deal at Yalta in which the SU would get control of Eastern Europe in return for containing and defeating the revolutionary movements in Western Europe. The SU did this with ruthless efficiency justifying it in the name of workers joining with ‘progressive’ national capitalists to form ‘democratic socialist’ popular front governments.

The pattern in NZ is very similar. The working class was impatient for ‘its’ government to deliver on its promises. But this government was a bloc of workers, small farmers and manufacturers. Its purpose was always to subordinate the workers to the interests of national bourgeoisie; to put profits before people. So workers would have to wait until the bosses had their full dividend before claiming higher wages.

When F.P. Walsh was a burning revolutionary in the US in 1917, the workers of the world were afire with enthusiasm for the Bolshevik revolution. By the 1940s Walsh was a rightwing labor bureaucrat operating hand in glove with the Labour Party leadership of Fraser. The FOL was a bureaucratic machine with its numbers bolstered by compulsory unionism. Walsh collaborated with Fraser to suppress rank and file militancy during and after the war. When the big one blew up in 1951 he could be trusted by the bosses to isolate and smash the militants in an alliance with the National government’s emergency regulations and US imperialism’s backing. His role as the leader of the ‘responsible unions’ was warmly appreciated by both the Auckland Chamber of Commerce and by the National Party. http://eprint.uq.edu.au/archive/00000935/01/tb_bchp_04.pdf

What we see here is evidence that the Labour Party, while based in the unions, had to first protect the profits of the bankers, manufacturers and farmers, before it could pay out to the workers. To retain any hope of being the government Labour had to promise to control the labor movement on behalf of the capitalists. To do this it had to defeat the militant unions who objected to wage cuts when profits were climbing.

Walsh played the same role in NZ that the Stalinists did in Europe, blocking with the capitalists to smash the militant left to stop them winning the support of the majority of the working class to defeat the National Government and the rotten leadership of the Labour Party and FOL. Of course this was the position of Jock Barnes and is argued forcefully by Tom Bramble in his Introduction to Barnes’ memoirs Never a White Flag. http://communistworker.blogspot.com/search/label/Jock%20Barnes

For Trotter though, Barnes did not represent the interests of the working class at all. He was an embittered maverick. The defeat of 1951 was the lesser evil; the militants could never have won, and the vehicle for democratic socialism survived, if tarnished and burned off on the left. The Labour Party could live to fight another election and implement the ‘corporatist’ Walsh Plan where the union, government and bosses representatives collaborate to develop the economy and share out the increased productivity of the workers. Labour can bide its time with its structures and historic gains intact until a new opportunity to push forward the boundaries of democratic socialism arises.

That opportunity will not come until the postwar boom is over. Then facing a massive economic crisis, it is Labour that rejects its social democratic past and openly embraces imperialism with Rogernomics.

Part 2: Social Democracy fails the test of neo-liberal reforms

The first part of this review ended with Trotter’s claim that the Savage model of the Labour Party survived the post war cold war and attacks on the ‘left’ and lived to fight another day. That day was the Rogernomic revolution in the 1980s. This became the key test of social democracy. If the Fourth Labour government betrayed the workers in capitulating to the ‘new right’ what was left of democratic socialism?

The standard argument of the democratic socialists is that the party was hijacked by Treasury and the right wing cabal around Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble. The left and centre of the party are portrayed as victims of this hijacking along with the rest of NZ workers.

This is the story that Trotter retails with a few more twists. But the serious analysis of the failure of the ‘left’ to defend the workers from Rogernomics is conveniently overlooked. Especially since the ‘left’ around Anderton had more than a third of the party delegates in support of a program of nationalization! The centre under Helen Clark and the SUP/FOL was trying to do a deal with the Rogernomes along the lines of the Australian ‘compact’ i.e. a form of neo-corporatism where the government, unions and employers would run the economy together. This required that the unions remain a strong centralized organization with a compulsory membership.

However the ‘left’ remained dependent on the centre and was stopped by the centre from expelling the right. This was revealed most clearly when the Engineers union bosses stopped Matt McCarten from rolling Prebble in Auckland Central. To avoid Prebble taking the Labour Party to court, the centre threatened Rex Jones of the EPMU to end compulsory unionism. Jones used this threat to bring the ‘left’ into line. This tells us that the left was just as much part of the centralized labour bureaucratic machine as the centre.

The pretext that Anderton used to split was his opposition to the sale of the Bank of New Zealand [BNZ]. He was sacked by caucus but reinstated by the Party Council. But rather than stick around to fight in the unions and the Labour Party organization, he resigned on May1st 1989 to form the New Labour Party. This left Lange and the centre to battle on against the Rogernomic machine. Despite removing Douglas and Prebble from Cabinet, Lange could not oppose Douglas when he was re-instated to Cabinet by caucus on August 3. Without the left he was too weak to stop the Rogernomic machine from rolling on.

Anderton’s split allowed the right to use its dominance of the parliamentary caucus against the Party to undermine and destroy Lange and force his resignation on August 7, 1989. Trotter makes no criticism of Anderton’s decision to split clearly agreeing that Anderton made the right move. Trotter was himself a leading figure in the formation of the New Labour Party.

Isn’t it incredible that the left would abandon the party of Savage just because the Rogernomes had taken temporary control of the parliamentary party? The core working class did not abandon the party. Even at its lowest point of 1993 Labour support never went below 34.7% of the electorate. And as we will see in the core labour seats it fought back and rejected New Labour.

Thus Anderton showed absolute contempt for the rank and file organization of the party where he claimed he had a large minority. By turning his back on the Party he showed that the left had no confidence in the union movement, especially the more blue-collar Trade Union Federation [TUF] that had refused to join the state union dominated Council of Trade Unions [CTU]. It was also tactically stupid as the left knew that it was handing the party to the Rogernomes when there was no visible groundswell of support in the union ranks for a split or the formation of a new Labour Party that could quickly replace the old.

Worse, the left knew that the majority of Labour voters were not abandoning the party. In 1987 Labour was re-elected with an increased majority, despite some Labour abstentions, because non-Labour voters swung over to Labour on the strength of Rogernomics.

Yet the Anderton ‘left’ didn’t split then –it stayed on inside Labour for nearly two years. The reason was that Anderton hoped to reclaim some control at the top of the Party. He resigned after being narrowly defeated for the Presidency and still with support from the NZ Council which backed his stand against the sale of the BNZ. It wasn’t a split that took into account the left’s actual support inside and outside the party. It was a bureaucratic split designed to allow time to prepare an electoral challenge to Labour when it seemed to be heading for inevitable defeat.

But this gamble was based on a miscalculation. Anderton’s desertion wasn’t matched by Labour supporters. In 1990, 14% of 1987 Labour voters abstained, 13% went back to National (having switched to Labour in ‘87), 7% went to New Labour and 6% to the Greens. Overall, 35.1% voted Labour, 6.9% Greens and 5.2% New Labour giving a total for the combined left of 47.2% to National’s 47.8%! Put another way, Labour lost over 230,000 votes, while between them New Labour and the Greens got almost 220,000 votes. Yet, despite the abstentions and defections to New Labour and the Greens, Labour’s core constituency of over 640,000 voters remained intact.

What if the ‘left’ had stayed and fought inside?

The question that Trotter doesn’t ask is this: would the level of Labour voters’ abstention have been as high had the left stayed in the party fighting to the bitter end?

Would voters have left Labour in the same numbers if New Labour had not existed? New Labour supporters were those who opposed Rogernomics most strongly. They should also have been most committed to democracy within the party. But they rejected democracy inside the party when they walked out 18 months before the 1990 election effectively disenfranchising many party members and delegates.

Many of the Labour voters who abstained in 1990 were not prepared to vote for New Labour. A survey of Labour supporters found that 51% who abstained stated that they retained their loyalty to Labour compared with 37% of those who voted for New Labour (Vowles et al Towards Consensus? 165). These amounted to several thousand Labour supporters who abstained yet instinctively rejected the bureaucratic New Labour split.

Evidence that their political instincts were correct comes from The Great Experiment by Castles et al. They argue that Labour supporters in NZ reacted strongly against Rogernomics and wanted a return to ‘interventionism’ and ‘collectivism’. This suggests that when New Labour failed to stay and fight for these principles, especially after the defeat and resignation of Lange, the Government was seen as still committed to de-regulation and Rogernomics. In taking the defence of collectivism outside the Party, the New Labour split undermined the already weak labour movement and its fight against Rogernomics. (207-8).

The second question that Trotter does not ask is this: did those who switched from Labour to vote New Labour or Green split the Labour vote and lose Labour seats?

In 1990 National won by a massive 38 seats. How many of those were lost because of the split? In a number of core working class electorates the Labour, Green, New Labour and Democratic vote combined was more than that of the National winner. In a few of these the New Labour vote alone exceeded National’s majority and was likely to have lost the seat for Labour; [in Gisborne (Labour missed by 618; NL vote was 804); Horowhenua (Labour lost by 413 votes; NL got 744 votes); Miramar (Labour lost by 178; NL got 996); Onehunga (Labour lost by 679; NL got 880 votes); Onslow (Labour lost by 396; NL got 687); Roskill (Labour lost by 722, NL got 876); Te Atatu (Labour lost by 587, NL got 1086); Titirangi (Labour lost by 116, NL got 1160); Western Hutt (Labour lost by 532, NL got 645).]

So the New Labour vote alone cost Labour 9 seats. If we include Anderton’s own seat of Sydenham, NL cost Labour 10 seatsl. The total switch to New Labour, Greens and Democrats (the future Alliance) accounted for at least another 11 Labour losses. [Birkenhead, East Coast Bays, Eden, Glenfield, Hastings, Heretaunga, Manawatu, New Plymouth, Timaru, Waitakere, and Wanganui.]

So Labour lost 21 seats to voters who switched to the parties that would soon become the Alliance. A loss that would have been around 40 to 46 became as a result 19 to 67!

Thus when we look at the received wisdom as to why Labour was soundly defeated in 1990 we find that it was only due to National winning support, but Labour losing it to abstentions and defections to the ‘left’ i.e. New Labour and the Greens. For the majority of defectors it was a protest non-vote or vote to the ‘left’ to punish Labour for its betrayals. But what a way to punish Labour, to leave it with only 29 seats in parliament facing an more draconian Rogernomics attack, Ruthonomics, that saw benefits slashed by 10% and the imposition of the ECA to smash the unions.

The National Minister of Labour, Bill Birch, conceded that he expected the strong union fightback outside parliament to force him to concede more to the unions, but this fizzled when Ken Douglas did a deal with Birch to ensure that the ECA would allow unions to be ‘bargaining agents’.

In other words, the ‘left’ New Labour Party had split the Labour Party and weakened it severely inside parliament, yet did almost nothing to put up a strong fight outside to lead the rank and file in the unions against the sell-out CTU leadership of Ken Douglas et. al. It was doing what the parliamentary party always did, refusing to support extra-parliamentary strike action, and keeping its powder dry to fight another day in parliament.

Moreover, the New Labour Party failed to mobilize much more than 5% electoral support. With the formation of the Alliance a few more former Labour voters and swingers moved to the Alliance whose share of the vote went up to 18.2% (4% more than the combined 1990 vote of the constituent parties).

Yet there is no evidence that it was core Labour voters that swung to the Alliance in 1993 after 3 years of National’s Ruthonomics, and the Rogernomes had been defeated inside the party. Labour’s share of the vote reduced marginally from 35.1% to 34.7%. But its tally of seats went from 29 to 45. That is, Labour won back 16 seats without any significant increase in the number of those voting because National’s support had greatly evaporated. What counted against Labour was the role the Alliance played in the marginal, mixed class seats in the smaller cities and provinces.

How the ‘left’ kept National in power through the 1990s

So the next question Trotter fails to ask is: was the NLP (which had formed the Alliance with Mana Motuhake, and the petty bourgeois Greens, Democrats and Liberals) responsible for this loss in 1993? If these parties had cost Labour 21 seats in 1990, how many did they cost in 1993?

Even though Labour’s vote remained static, the big loss for National meant Labour had the chance of winning many more seats. So how many seats did the Alliance cost Labour?

It seems that the New Labour component of ‘collective’ workers was itself was not a key factor. The most obvious result of 1993 is that in its core seats particularly in South Auckland, more workers rejected the Labour/Alliance split. In Otara for example Philip Field reclaimed the seat that New Labour and the Greens had cost Labour in 1990, with the SAME VOTE, while National lost nearly 7000 votes and the Alliance lost 1000 votes. Other core working class seats where the Labour vote held or went up while the Alliance, i.e. the New Labour vote, went down were: Christchurch Central; Eastern Hutt; Mangere, Mirimar, Mt Albert, New Plymouth, Pencarrow, Porirua, Roskill, Timaru, and Yaldhurst.

So while the New Labour component lost votes in the core Labour seats, reflecting the class wisdom of the rank and file Labour supporters in its urban heartlands, the Alliance cost Labour an electoral victory in many marginal seats where it would have won without increasing its vote, or even with a reduced vote: Awarua, Birkenhead, Eastern Bay of Plenty, Glenfield , Heretaunga, Kaimai, Kaipara, Kapiti, Marlborough, Matakana, Papakura, Raglan, Rangiora, Rangatikei, Rotorua, Selwyn, Waikato, Wairarapa, Waitakere, Wellington-Karori, Western Hutt and Whangarei.

So, despite Labour’s overall static vote, and the collapse of National, it was clear that almost two thirds of the electorate had voted against Rogernomics. A class re-alignment took place when the working class core of one-third of the electorate stuck by Labour, while National was reduced to its core one-third bourgeois support. The petty bourgeois Alliance and NZ First were now sharing a ‘balance of power’ in relation to the two main parties. So, for 10 days parliament was hung on the middle class.

Mike Moore, then Labour leader, tried to break this class deadlock by embracing the middle class. He said that National had no “moral authority to govern” and proposed that Labour, the Alliance and NZ First form a loose coalition around a 5 point Xmas present.

The 5 points in this plan were; to bring MMP forward to 1995 (looking at an early election!); reverse the privatization of health and the Accident Compensation Corporation; repeal the Employment Contracts Act, and abolish the 26 week stand down for the dole (which punished the unemployed by not paying up for 26 weeks after they lost their jobs). And all of this by Christmas!

Anderton played the Grinch and rejected this plan. Instead he offered Alliance support to the party had the most seats if it abandoned Rogernomics! Not repeal anything, just do nothing! A recount gave National another seat and Labour offered Sir Basil Arthur as speaker to allow National a majority. A by-election in Selwyn in 1994 saw National come within 346 votes of the Alliance winning the safe conservative seat! This confirmed what the ‘93 election had shown, that the Alliance had picked up the majority of its votes in mixed class electorates, because the Greens and Democrats appealed to middle class, self-employed and small business people.

Workers Power [a revolutionary Trotskyist group] wrote at the time:

“Opposition Collapses: the 1.2 million who voted against National last November have seen their votes go down the dunny [toilet]. All the opposition parties have refused to oppose National. The Alliance in the days after the election promised to use its two votes to keep National in power if it did nothing. This was a total betrayal of its supporters. The Government by ‘doing nothing’ could allow its radical reforms already in place to continue to destroy workers lives. The bosses would continue to see a ‘recovery’ in their profits but at the expense of a further collapse of the labour movement.” (Workers Power, “New-age or age-old exploitation?” #98 February/March 1994)

Here, then, we have the complete bankruptcy of the Labour Government of Savage that stays aloof from real class struggles so that it can supposedly defend the collectivist politics supported by the majority of moderate workers in parliament. When it gets hijacked by the new right which attacks that majority, the ‘left’ abandons it to rebuild the ‘Savage’ party. When that fails, it then forms an electoral Alliance with middle class Greens, Liberals and Democrats, while the core working class majority it claims to protect remains loyal to the Labour Party.

So, during the 90’s when two thirds of the electorate opposed Rogernomics, Anderton preferred to keep the lame duck National Party in power rather than allow the working class majority to put Labour’s promises to repeal major planks of Rogernomics like the ECA to the test. Instead, a decade of defaults and defeats accumulated while the labour movement marked time inside and outside parliament.

Communists don’t expect any capitalist government, including Labour Governments, to legislate for socialism. That’s something that can only come from a workers revolution that overthrows the state including parliament. But while workers have illusions in social democracy we need to re-elect Labour Governments in order to expose them and the futility of parliamentary reforms.

Trotter is an apologist for reformism, and seeks to cover up and prettify its betrayals to prevent workers from breaking with it. His failure to confront the betrayal of Anderton and the Alliance in serving the ‘new right’ for a decade in the 1990s clearly reveals this cover up.

Saint Jacques: Derrida and the Ghost of Marxism

Introduction

For the bourgeoisie, the collapse of “communism” made the world-historic victory of capitalism seem certain. Yet the contradictions of capitalism immediately called the new world order into question as globalisation brought with it what Jacques Derrida calls the “10 plagues”. Apologists for capitalism are now fearful of the return of Marx’s ghost. George Soros sees the ghost in the form of the anarchy of finance capital. Anthony Giddens sees the ghost in the rise of left or right fundamentalist ideology. Without realising it, they pose the problem in terms familiar to Marxists: the contradiction between dead and living labour and the rise of the dead reclaimed by the living. But is there a way out for capitalism?

2. Jacques Derrida enters the fray with his book Specters of Marx. He returns to Marx, or at least, “one spirit” of Marx in the German Ideology. This is the “spirit” of Marx which became lost to totalitarian Marxism — the “spirit” rediscovered in the extreme individualism of Max Stirner, who deluded himself that he was a free floating “unique” ego not subject to any social laws. By reclaiming the powers of alienated social being from the Hegelian god, Stirner worshipped his self as his personal god. By rediscovering this formerly unnoticed “spirit” of Marx, Derrida claims to find a way out of capitalism’s plagues with the call for a “new International”. Not a Marxist International on the side of living labour, but rather a reworked messianism of the religion of the abstract ego. This is the path of individual redemption, an expression of the alienation of dead labour that can never reclaim itself as the spirit of living labour. In appropriating Marx, Derrida provides the ultimate apology for capitalist reaction in the name of a “Marx” — an ideology of personal religious salvation which serves as a philosophical left cover for the “Third Way”.

3. In a recent reply to a number of responses to his book, Derrida re-asserts his messianic claims when he accuses his strongest critics of being “proprietal” and “patriarchal” under the ghostly influence of “Marx the father”.1 While this is undeserved, I argue that Derrida’s Marxist critics nevertheless fall short of conjuring away Saint Jacques because they represent the flawed tradition of Western Marxism — the failure of materialist dialectics grounded in the ontology of living labour. Therefore, the Marxist counter to Derrida’s apologetics for capitalism is to be found in reclaiming the dialectical method that Marx applies in the German Ideology and which Lukacs, Lenin and Trotsky attempt to develop in the unity of theory and practice of the revolutionary party.

Post-Marxist Apologists for the New World Disorder

4. George Soros, one of the richest men in the world, has spent millions trying to restore capitalism in Russia. But he lost much of his money with the collapse of the Russian economy in August 1998. He claims that the global finance system is out of control and needs to be regulated. His calls for a return to an “international” like Bretton Woods, or some body attached to the IMF, have been echoed with increasing frequency after the so-called Asian “meltdown”. His fear is that the casino of finance capital will bring an end to the new world order and the return to anarchy and revolution.2 If Soros fears the collapse of the new world order, Tony Giddens, the apostle of the post-scarcity global society, claims that the new world order can be managed by social scientists as advisers to the politicians of the “Third Way”.3 The recent discussions between Soros and Giddens about the unstable state of the world are premised on the “death” and “burial” of socialism.4 Giddens believes that socialism has been banished: “. . . the spectre which disturbed the slumbers of bourgeois Europe for more than seventy years . . . has been returned to its nether world”.5

5. Yet it seems that these speeches at the graveside of Marxism are premature. The ghost of Marxism continues to haunt the big bourgeoisie despite every effort to exorcise it. The Communist Manifesto is being fleshed out as never before by a capitalist world system out of control. The end of the cold war and collapse of “communism” has allowed capitalism unrivalled domination over its “other”. Yet everywhere the forces of disorder manifest themselves — from the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union, the instability of the “Middle East” and Central Asia, to the renewed worker and peasant uprisings in Latin America and South Asia. It is in the face of such rampant disorder and deepening divisions that a more robust defence of capitalism is required. In order to exorcise the ghost of communism, it is necessary to provide a philosophy of rebellion and redemption that can empower the intelligentsia to confuse and disorient the masses. Post-Marxism and the new liberalism of the centre need an anti-foundationist foundation. Post-Marxism needs a new priesthood.6

6. If Soros is its financier and Giddens its sociologist, then perhaps Derrida is the philosopher of post-Marxism.7 His mission? The “new middle” needs to pre-empt the left not merely by declaring Marx dead (since who has seen the body?), but by res-erecting the body of the father as the son — Derrida! From the safety of “After the fall” (of “communism”), Jacques Derrida, darling of the post-structuralists writes Specters of Marx, claiming that we are all in “debt” to Marxism as the New World Disorder crumbles.8 Derrida asks, “Where is Marxism going? Where are we going with it?” He recounts how he re-read The Communist Manifesto after some decades. “I knew very well there was a ghost waiting there, and from the opening, from the raising of the curtain. Now, of course, I have just discovered, in truth I have just remembered what must have been, haunting my memory: the first noun of the Manifesto, and this time in the singular, is ’specter’: ‘A Specter is haunting Europe ­ the specter of communism’”.9 Derrida’s salutes Marx and reveals his desire to reclaim at least “one spirit” of Marx by de-totalising Marx-ISM.10

Upon re-reading the Manifesto and a few other great works of Marx, I said to myself that I know of few texts in the philosophical tradition, perhaps none, whose lesson seemed more urgent today, provided that one take into account what Marx and Engels themselves say (for example in Engel’s “Preface” to the 1888 re-edition) about their own possible “aging” and their intrinsically irreducible historicity. What other thinker has ever issued a similar warning in such an explicit fashion? Who has ever called for the transformation to come of his own theses? Not only in view of some progressive enrichment of knowledge, which would change nothing in the order of a system, but so as to take into account there, another account, the effects of rupture and restructuration? And so as to incorporate in advance, beyond any possible programming, the unpredictability of new knowledge, new techniques and new givens? No text in the tradition seems as lucid concerning the way in which the political is becoming worldwide, concerning the irreducibility of the technical and the media in the current of the most thinking thought — and this goes beyond the railroad and the newspapers of the time whose powers were analysed in such an incomparable way in the Manifesto. And few texts have shed so much light on law, international law, and nationalism.11

7. Derrida repeats the familiar refrain that Marxism is transformed as society is transformed. But what social transformations is he talking about? The power of Marxism to predict the changes Derrida talks of — in politics, technology and media — comes from the method of abstraction which uncovers the developmental dynamic of capitalism and its laws of motion. Marx expected that Marxism would disappear along with the withering of the state under socialism. Yet neither capitalism nor Marxism has been fundamentally transformed despite the rush of ex-Marxists into the post-al camp.12 However, Derrida believes that there is a “Marxism” that can be true to transformed capitalism. It was the “Marxism” that Marx denied at birth. So Derrida wants to magically “transform” Marxism at its inception. He wants to reclaim the “memory” of Marxism from the doctrinaires, and to produce a new Marx for the “future”.

It will always be a fault not to read and re-read and discuss Marx — which is to say also a few others — and to go beyond scholarly “reading” or “discussion”. It will be more and more a fault, a failing of theoretical, philosophical, political responsibility. When the dogma machine and the “Marxist” ideological apparatuses (States, parties, cells, unions, and other places of doctrinal production) are in the process of disappearing, we no longer have any excuse, only alibis, for turning away from this responsibility. There will be no future without this. Not without Marx, no future without Marx, without the memory and the inheritance of Marx: in any case a certain Marx, or his genius, of at least one of his spirits. For this will be our hypothesis or rather our bias: there is more than one of them, there must be more than one of them.13

8. Derrida recognises that the end of “official” Marxism has left a political vacuum to be filled. He is appalled at the apparent victory of the new right and wants to reclaim Marxism to bolster the appeal of deconstruction.14 He will do this by recouping “one of [Marx's] spirits” conjured up from his youth which will bear a striking resemblance to deconstruction. Derrida recognises the “inheritance” of Marxism that cannot be wished away by the “end of ideologists”. He knows because he opposed official Marxism in his youth, and it still haunts him.

Nevertheless, among all the temptations I will have to resist today, there would be the temptation of memory: to recount what was for me, and for those of my generation, who shared it during a whole lifetime, the experience of Marxism, the quasi-paternal figure of Marx, the way it fought in us with other filiations, the reading of texts and the interpretation of the world in which the Marxist inheritance was — and still remains, and so it will remain — absolutely and thoroughly determinate. One need not be a Marxist or a communist in order to accept this obvious fact. We all live in a world, some would say a culture, that still bears, at an incalculable depth, the mark of this inheritance, whether in a directly visible fashion or not. Among the traits that characterise a certain experience that belongs to my generation, that is, an experience that will have lasted at least forty years, and which is not over, I will isolate first of all a troubling paradox. I am speaking of a troubling effect of “déjà vu”, and even of a certain “toujours déjà vu”. I recall this malaise of perception, hallucination, and time because of the theme that brings us together this evening: “wither Marxism?” For many of us the question has the same age as we do. In particular for those who, and this was also my case, opposed, to be sure, de facto “Marxism” or “communism” (the Soviet Union, the International of Communist Parties, and everything that resulted from them, which is to say so very many things), but intended at least never to do so out of conservative or reactionary motivations or even moderate right-wing or republican positions.15

9. Derrida knows that Marxism will not “wither” even as its official versions have been declared dead and buried. This is because Marxism is as “alive” as the historic struggle between dead and living labour is “alive”.16 The ghost of Marxism has returned to haunt Sorosian capitalism today where hot money 30 times the dollar value of world trade is flooding around the world speculating in exchange rates. That ghost is all that alienated, dead labour coming home to haunt the bourgeoisie as speculative capital.17

10. The growth of speculative capital represents the overproduction of capital incapable of mobilising sufficient living labour to produce more alienated surplus-value because of insufficient profits. Overproduction of capital can be in commodity form represented by gluts that cannot find a market. It is expressed also as money capital, which cannot find a profitable productive investment. So the “out of control” growth of the financial system is ultimately a symptom of the necessary overproduction of capital. Similarly the threat of fundamentalism is a consequence of the inherent crisis and anarchy of capitalist production. The real spectre is and remains the spectre of communism. It is this fear of the return of the spectre that unites Soros, Giddens and Derrida as “ideologists” of post-Marxist apologetics of the “new middle” that now seeks to replace the neo-liberal ascendancy.18

The Ghost of Dead Labour

11. Under capitalism, “dead labour” is all the accumulated value of past labour owned as capital. It is owned as the private property of the capitalist class. Dead labour is therefore the accumulation of past living labour. It is in contradiction with living labour — the working class that daily produces more value. Dead labour is in contradiction with living labour because it is used to increase production of use-values only if it realises an exchange-value and creates a profit. This contradiction means that the accumulation of alienated dead labour is at the expense of the consumption of use-values to meet the needs of living labour. Production for profits starves the consumption (and therefore reproduction) of labour-power as a use value. The contradiction can only be resolved when living labour reclaims its dead labour and frees up its capacity to produce use-values to meet the needs of all. Arising out of these social relations of production, alienation is the “human” condition of capitalism. It represents the “spectre” of past labour that comes back to haunt the bourgeoisie in the form of proletarian revolution.19

12. Alienation is the state of being separated from your self. Marx says that humans live by their labour and by consuming the fruits of their labour, or they die. Therefore to be separated from your labour and its fruits is to be separated or estranged from your self. The “self” which bourgeois intellectuals today mystify as “identity” or “lifestyle” is empty, phoney, because it is not produced through our labour. Rather our ersatz “self” is passively reconstituted when we consume our alienated labour as reified commodities.20 Instead of seeing that it is our labour that is the value in the “things”, these “things” appear to have value in themselves. Social relations of production become inverted as social relations between “things”. Marx calls this commodity fetishism. Who we are, and what we are, is therefore the product of what we consume as alienated values. Because our labour and its value is alienated so is everything else. Money is now everything. I am, as Marx says, my hip pocket. I “shop therefore I am”.21

13. At the root of what is rotten about capitalism is the separation of workers from their labour so that they do not control the fruits of their labour. This means that they have lost any control over their lives. The less control they have the more they look for alien forces as the forces which determine their fate, or in desperation they challenge fate by appealing to the irrationality of chance or good luck. Under the grip of alien forces they are incapable of recognising that they are mere projections of their own power. They fail to see that they externalise their power to fate, chance, God etc as alien and outside their control. Is it not surprising that appeals to irrational, supernatural, out-of-world experiences, mysticism, and post-modernism, become alibis for not taking control of our-selves? The alienated bourgeois subject staring into the mirror! What the bourgeois fear is what they do not see in the mirror — the ghost of dead labour that haunts them; yet it will disappear only when living labour re-expropriates its dead labour and abolishes capital in a social revolution.

14. That is why for ideological reactionaries today the spectre is still proletarian “communism”. In the language of conservative neo-Hegelians like Fukuyama, it is the totality of the working class essence (forms of which appear as “socialist”, environmentalist, religious fundamentalism, etc.) posing a threat to the unique, finite freedom of the bourgeois subject, i.e. capital. Derrida demolishes Fukuyama as an objective idealist incapable of providing a rationale to defend democracy and human rights.22 This because such a “perfect liberal democracy” is in “contradiction” with the real world of the “10 plagues”, and cannot therefore persuade anyone that the “end of history” has arrived.23 But more than this, Hegelian idealism is another totalitarian system which has to be rejected along with its cross cousin, dialectical materialism.

15. Similarly, post-modernism’s ghost is too abstract for Derrida’s purposes because it repudiates the Enlightenment project and humanism as totality. It tries to gloss over capitalism’s contradictions and to present the commodification of the world as personal redemption. This retreat into an elitist consumption culture and identify politics is too crude to contain the masses who are deprived of use-values. We shall see that the precise point at which Derrida appropriates Marxism is his rejection of the ontology of labour as a use-value. This is to eliminate labour as productive of commodities to meet the needs of wage-labour. For to allow labour as use-value to remain as a necessary condition of capitalism is to recognise the necessary contradiction between the reproduction of society (forces of production) and the demands of capital accumulation (relations of production). Such a contradiction drives the laws of motion of capital and its intensifying periodic crises. This is what makes capitalism a transient, historical mode of production, which produces the pre-requisites for the collective transformation of capitalist social relations.

16. By conjuring away the real ghost of use-value, Derrida eliminates the material basis of social determinism that can undermine and threaten the messianic performance of the bourgeois individual.24 He eliminates it as labour both in the form of living labour appropriated as commodities, and as dead labour, appropriated in the past as the accumulated material/technical wealth of the productive forces. Therefore the new challenge of capitalism in decline is for its ideologists to appropriate “Marxism” in the name of “radical” democracy ie. bourgeois individualism. There is a need for more subtlety; for an ‘indirect apologetics’ which takes capitalism’s “plagues”, and attempts to explain them as ethical sins that can be redeemed by the pure moral intentions of “responsible” intellectuals.25 There is a need for a post-Marxism that can claim to be both post- and ‘radical’ ie. true to Marx. This requires a new initiative to restore Marx to his “self”.

17. Derrida, following the “death of Marxism”, tries to marry “one spirit” of Marx to deconstruction by repudiating Marx’s ontology of living and dead labour as the social forces shaping the lives of alienated bourgeois individuals. As I hope to show, this ‘take’ on the humanist “spirit” of young Marx, attempts to recoup the subjective idealism of Max Stirner as that of the young Marx also. To help make this point I will critique a number of critics of Derrida’s recent “turn” to Marxism to show that they all fail to recognise the deeply reactionary project lying at the heart of Derrida’s “spirit” of Marx.26

Derrida’s Critics

18. It is interesting to see how Derrida’s critics interpret his (re)turn to Marx. Eagleton makes some caustic comments on Derrida’s “opportunism”, his “academicist fantasy that he has somehow mistaken for an enlightened anti-Stalinism”. He makes fun of Derrida: “It is the ultimate post-structuralist fantasy: an opposition without anything as distastefully systemic or drably ‘orthodox’ as an opposition, a dissent beyond all formulable discourse, a promise which would betray itself in the act of fulfilment, a perpetual excited openness to the Messiah who had better not let us down by doing anything as determinate as coming”.27 Yet Eagleton does not pursue Derrida’s political purpose in re-fashioning the de-totalised Young Marx.

19. Spivak, the “Marxist” most sympathetic to Derrida has tried for 10 years or more to marry Derrida to a deconstructed Marx.28 Her purpose is to rid Marx of what she sees as the idealist hangover of an undercover humanist universalism. But in the process she turns Marx into a Feuerbach who sees some abstract Enlightenment social essence (the unity of “nature” and “reason”) which can only be realised in the intellect.29 Spivak picks up on several shortcomings in Derrida’s treatment of Marx. He denies the dual nature of the commodity and counter-poses use-value as the future release from exchange-value. Socially necessary labour time is not the measure of value. He universalises money as capital so his brand of utopian socialism is to remove money — exchange-value — and replace it with use-values. (Remember the attack on Proudhon in the opening passages of the Grundrisse.) To extend Spivak’s critique further, Derrida’s discourse on the ‘new world disorder’ reduces to a critique of unequal exchange — not of labour values but of money “values” or prices as determined by the market.30 This means that insofar as “exploitation” exists it results from individuals buying commodities cheap and selling them dear. Equitable consumption then becomes a matter of caveat emptor. This reduces ideologically to performativity as “market choice” similar to that of Hayek or the “negative freedom” of Berlin.

20. Spivak’s blind spot on Marx is her view that the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value is not a real contradiction that motivates the class struggle. She thinks that Marx sets up the goalposts of a socialist “society” at which we take aim by intellectually overcoming of the shortfall of reason with doses of political dogma. This is the familiar post-structuralist critique of totalising Marxism as yet another Enlightenment teleology that has to fail.31 Marx, however, argued against idealist conceptions of revolution. The contradiction between use-value and exchange-value was, and is, a real contradiction. It is class struggle at the point of production and not in the academy that motivates capitalism’s crisis-ridden development. The limits to capitalism’s development will be decided by the practical struggle of the proletariat, and not by philosophers. While Spivak picks up on some of Derrida’s obvious “mistakes” she misses the main one — that the purpose of Marxism is not merely to interpret the world but to change it.32

21. Thus Spivak’s blind spot obscures the real source of Derrida’s weakness in his fixation on Stirner. She attempts to “correct” Derrida conceptually, but cannot understand why he “mistakes” Marx. This is because these are not “mistakes”, but the result of deliberately “excluding” the spirits of labour, class, the “party”, etc., i.e. the “totalitarian Marx”. Because Derrida is obsessed by these evil spirits, he cannot follow Marx into the Grundrisse or Capital to demonstrate the material laws of motion that elaborate and pose the practical resolution of the real contradiction between use-value and exchange-value as social revolution. Derrida purposely excludes these unwanted spirits so that he can recover the pure spirit of rebellion against “evil” in the acts of faith of individuals taking “responsibility” (weak messianic force).

22. Jameson, too, is sympathetic. While driven to explain post-modernism as a cultural expression of late capitalism (or more recently finance capital) Jameson has no brief to unite Derrida and Marx. Yet he finds Derrida’s fixation on the young Marx refreshing. He seems to endorse Derrida’s position on “messianism” shorn of the “apocalyptic” ontological certainties of Marxism. He accepts that Derrida’s appeal to the “messianic” is akin to that of Benjamin’s “weak messianic power”.33 Here he is referring to Benjamin’s conception of revolution as the “unexpected” as opposed to the Stalinist and Social Democratic “rhetoric of historic inevitability”. Jameson sees in Derrida’s return to the young Marx a way of conceiving of

post-modern virtuality, a daily spectrality that undermines the present and the real without any longer attracting attention at all; it marks the originality of our social situation, but no-one (before Derrida) has re-identified it as a very old thing in quite this dramatic way — it is the emergence, at the very end of Derrida’s book, of spectrality, of the messianic, as “the differantial deployment of the tekhne, of techno science of tele-technology”. Perhaps we need something similar here: Marx’s purloined letter: a whole new programme in itself surely, a wandering signifier capable of keeping any number of conspiratorial futures alive.34

23. This limp solidarity with Derrida’s radical indeterminacy fits with Ebert’s assessment that for Jameson consumption is the “basis for capital accumulation in postmodernism”. “Jameson offers a model of the mode of production that erases the appropriation of surplus labour just as thoroughly as does Baudrillard’s hyperreal semiotic system”.35 Ebert does not expand on Jameson’s preference for the consumption moment over the production moment. I think it can be found in his adoption of Mandel’s theory of Late Capitalism.36 Because Mandel makes crisis contingent on many causes including underconsumption he opens the door for Jameson to develop his consumptionist explanation of post-modernism.37

24. More recently Jameson has moved further away from Marx by adopting Arrighi’s model of capitalist development which separates and isolates the overproduction of MC as “finance capital” as a definite stage in the cycle of capitalist development.38 The effect is to shift the cause of the post-modern cultural turn from the drive to consume to the drive to speculate which becomes further separated from the production moment and production relations. The ills of capitalism in its current historical context are seen to be the result of the decline of US hegemony caused by the rise of financial speculation. There is no Marxist conception of the fundamental causes the financial speculation itself, or how this will “determine” a crisis of capitalist production relations and the re-emergence of the enlightenment project as socialist revolution. It is not surprising then that Jameson cannot account for much that is going on in the world and finds Derrida’s appeal to the “virtuality” of the “always-now” attractive.39

25. Fletcher gets closer to Derrida/Stirner’s extreme individualism. Fletcher argues that Derrida is reclaiming the Young Hegelian Marx but with a Stirner twist. Derrida collapses modernity into the abstract “past-present-future”. The abandonment of any historicity of social relations for an ahistorical metaphysics of time allows him to set up a surreptitious “transcendental hauntology” against ontology — which he sees as metaphysics ie. the attempt to exorcise hauntology.40 Yet obviously Derrida is privileging a meta-ontology which says that egos are shapeless and empty of substance or presence unless formed by a succession of irreducible acts (differance).

26. So hauntology is a subversive meta-narrative which says that in history there is no objective or material reality such as the necessity of social relations, only a reality which is the projection of the indeterminate (free will) ego. Any ontology that specifies “being” in relation to social essences, including social relations, is pre-empted by a bogus anti-essential ghosts-in-general/hauntology. In other words there is no “essence” beyond the individual who can perceive and understand social relations only as a sequence of indeterminate acts of “free will”, i.e. market choice. Any attempt to give this indeterminate chaos substance as a collective, universal essence is to engage in metaphysics — i.e., ghosts. Derrida writes:

What is a ghost? What is the effectivity or the presence of a specter, that is, for what seems to remain as ineffective, virtual, insubstantial as a simulacrum? . . . Let us call it a hauntology. This logic of haunting would not be merely larger and more powerful than an ontology or a thinking of Being. It would harbour within itself, but like circumscribed places or particular effects, eschatology and teleology themselves.41

27. By coining a term “hauntology” to exorcise the ghosts of Enlightenment determinism, Derrida must pre-empt the ontological (and epistemological) assumptions of “being” (rationality) by counter-posing a radical “essence” of “nothingness” (irrationality). Here he borrows from Heidegger.42

28. Derrida draws on Heidegger in particular in his reference to the notion that the “time is out of joint”. It is an attempt to explain how the “present” is formed out of the actions of individuals not ’caused’ by past or future, but for whom the present is shaped by indeterminate “traces”, i.e. before society, before psychology, etc. Derrida refers to Hamlet and his predicament (” time is out of joint”) to suggest that the “disjointure” of past present and future can only be “rejoined” in acts of pure justice. Heidegger calls this irreducible act a “gift” meaning it has no market or exchange value. Of this Derrida says:

There is first of all a gift without restitution, without calculation, without accountability. Heidegger thus removes such gift from any horizon of culpability, of debt, of right, and even, perhaps of duty. . . . Beyond right, and still more beyond juridicism, beyond morality, and still more beyond moralism, does not justice as relation to the other suppose on the contrary the irreducible excess of a disjointure or an anachrony, some Un-Fuge, some “out of joint” dislocation in Being and in time itself, a disjointure that, in always risking the evil, expropriation, and injustice against which there is no calculable insurance, would alone be able to do justice or to render justice. . . . Otherwise justice risks being reduced once again to juridical-moral rules, norms or representations, within an inevitably totalising horizon (movement for adequate restitution, expiation, or reappropriation).43

29. Derrida then goes on to explain how such pure acts can realise social justice.44 The “Messianic: the coming of the other, the absolute and unpredictable singularity of the arrivant as justice”. This is the “ineffaceable mark” of “Marx’s legacy”. Following Blanchard’s “Marx’s Three Voices”, Derrida says that Marx asks us:

Not to maintain together the disparate, but to put ourselves there where the disparate itself holds together, without wounding the dis-jointure, the dispersion, or the difference, without effacing the heterogeneity of the other. We are asked (enjoined perhaps) to turn ourselves over to the future, to join ourselves in this we, there where the disparate is turned over to this singular joining, without conception or certainty of determination, without knowledge, without or before the synthetic junction of the conjunction and the disjunction. The Alliance of a rejoining without conjoined mate, without organisation, without party, without nation, without state, without property (the “communism” that we will later nickname the new International)”.45

30. This attempt to use Heidegger to read Marx backwards as a deconstructionist also explains what he finds useful in the extreme egoism of Max Stirner.46 Derrida fixes on Stirner because Stirner learned to live with, and like, his “spooks”, i.e. the “spirit” of his unique ego — the pre-social, pre-religious, pre-everything act of self-determination.47 In Stirner’s mind these acts are the irreducible effects/spectres of his own egoistic being, messianic eschatology and teleology even. The absolute ideal becomes the “unique” ego. These “spooks” are not “totalities” coming back to haunt the ruling class because there is no class and no rule, in fact no society even. All there is is the uniquely posited pre-social individual and his (sic) “own” property.48

31. Fletcher suggests that Derrida gets into retro mode at a point when Marx made the decisive break with the Young Hegelians who had yet to expunge religion (alienation) from their cult of humanity. But more than this, I argue that Derrida recuperates a pre-Marxist Stirnerian anarchism and projects it forwards not only as an antidote to totalitarian Marxism in the present (which is largely defunct) but more importantly to any revival of revolutionary Marxism in the future. By selecting a voluntarist “spirit” of the young Marx, Derrida regresses into the pre-history of Western Marxism and defaults into a form of liberal anarchism.

Why Stirner?

32. Stirner is usually seen as an anarchist who in rejecting Hegel takes subjective idealism to its extreme.49 In so doing, Stirner exposes some of the weakness of the Left Hegelians and forces Marx to make a complete break with idealism.50 That is why it is Stirner and not Feuerbach or Bauer, who becomes the main target of Marx’s ferocious critique in The German Ideology.51 Marx’s critique of Stirner is motivated by the appeal that Stirner’s brand of radical egoism has against his own materialist method and politics. This seductive idealism had to be pulled out at the roots. Marx goes for the throat of Saint Max Stirner.

We spoke above of the German philosophical conception of history. Here, in Saint Max we find a brilliant example of it. The speculative idea, the abstract conception, is made the driving force of history, and history is thereby turned into the mere history of philosophy. But even the latter is not conceived as, according to existing sources, it actually took place — not to mention how it evolved under the influence of real historical relations — but as it was understood and described by recent German philosophers, in particular Hegel and Feuerbach. And from these descriptions again only that was selected which could be adapted to the given end, and which came into the hands of our saint by tradition. Thus, history becomes a mere history of illusory ideas, a history of spirits and ghosts, while the real, empirical history that forms the basis of this ghostly history is only utilised to provide bodies for these ghosts; from it are borrowed the names required to clothe these ghosts with the appearance of reality. In making this experiment our saint frequently forgets his role and writes an undisguised ghost-story.52

33. Stirner’s peculiar brand of ghost story in which realism and idealism are historically unified as “egoism” is just another “dishing up” of a “tedious” and “boring” speculative history, says Marx. “Moreover, the strong competition among the German speculative philosophers makes it the duty of each new competitor to offer an ear-splitting historical advertisement for his commodity”.53 Having noted that even in 1845 philosophers were commodifying their speculations, an insight that applies even more to recent French philosophy, Marx proceeds to take apart the use-value of Stirner’s commodity phrase by phrase.

34. Stirner’s egoism is an idealist fiction, itself as much an “essence” as the religious conventions he assails. “How little it occurs to him to make each “unique” the measure of his own uniqueness, how much he uses his own uniqueness as a measure, a moral norm to be applied to other individuals, like a true moralist, forcing them into his Procrustean bed”.54 His notion of the “individual” is shorn of social relations and so reproduces an “association of egoists” as an “ideal copy of capitalist society, of Hegel’s civil society”. Marx jokes that Stirner, “would be allocated a place in the capitalist division of labour”, of which he is totally ignorant.55 In destroying Stirner’s notion of “freedom of labour” as “free competition of workers among themselves”, Marx develops his concept of abstract labour.56 In his demolition of Stirner’s “rebellion” and rejection of “communism”, Marx offers a dialectical and historical conception of the individual whose self-activity and self-realisation is achieved by the transformation of social relations in practice.57 “Modern universal intercourse can be controlled by individuals . . . only when controlled by all. . . . Only at this stage, does self-self activity coincide with material life, which corresponds to the development of individuals into complete individuals. . . . The transformation of labour into self-activity corresponds to the transformation of the earlier limited intercourse into the intercourse of individuals as such”.58

35. For Derrida, however, Marx’s critique (his ontological response to Stirner’s mystification of labour) entailed the “totalising horizon” of an essential “communism”, conceived by Marx in the German Ideology, but realised as the actually existing communism of the 20th century. For Derrida, this vindicates Stirner’s objection to “communism” as doing “violence to the individual’s freedom”, against Marx’s fundamental critique of Stirner’s egoism, which takes as its starting point the “unfreedom” of labour under capitalism.59 Thus for Derrida, Marx fear of the ghost/void of the “unique” ego lead him to posit “unfree labour” as a totalitarian essence. To follow Stirner, Marx should have responded not by “filling in a void” but by “increasingly emptying it out”.60 Here the “void” is the indeterminacy of society represented by “spectrality” and exercise of “hauntology” against all totalising operations in ghost-busting. But Marx’s critique of Stirner/Derrida is precisely to “fill in the void” with the knowledge of the social relations which determine the “being” in front of its “consciousness” so that the real specter of “dead labour” can be brought back to life.

36. So it seems that Derrida has put his finger on what was a decisive turning point in Marx’s shift from post-Hegelian idealism to historical materialism. Marx was determined to overcome alienation by recognising its material other — “unfree labour” — rooted in the social relations of production. Derrida senses that this is the crucial point at which Marx defeats subjective idealism. So he wants to undermine the adoption of the philosophical method of dialectical materialism in its embryonic form. He wants to get in at the beginnings of Marxism so as to abort any rebirth of historical materialism out of the ashes of Stalinism and Menshevik Western Marxism. He must do this by inserting a subjective idealism that is congenial to the post-modern petty bourgeois’ desire for personal salvation in the age of the new world disorder.

37. Callinicos and Eagleton suggest that something of this sort is Derrida’s purpose but don’t pursue the argument further. Callinicos is correct to point to the absence of any link between Derrida’s “messianic eschatology” and “any theoretical understanding of the dynamics of historical transformation”.61 “Marx thus relies, according to Derrida, on “an ontology of presence as actual reality and as objectivity relative to which spectres and other forms of representation of the absent can be ‘conjured away’ by being reduced to their material conditions, the world of labour, production, and exchange”.62

38. So how is it that Derrida can make such a belated reconciliation with “one-spirit” of Marx? What was he doing when others such as Althusser attempted to rescue Marxism from Stalinism? Derrida, after all, is proud to state that he opposed “everything” to do with Marxism for twenty years.63 He supported the cause of Chris Hani in South Africa, but who to the left of Kissinger did’nt? Callinicos cannot come up with any real explanation for Derrida’s renewed interest in Marxism. Callinicos own stalinophobic politics is a blind spot, which obscures the reason Derrida could not take up an active anti-Stalinist stand such as that of Trotsky’s “Fourth International”. Like Derrida, Callinicos was taken by surprise at the collapse of Stalinism. Neither had a theoretical basis on which to predict the outcomes in the Stalinist states; how could there be a counter-revolution in the counter-revolution? Hence the unexpected counter-revolutions of 1989.64

39. In my opinion, this is a telling point against Callinicos’ own Marxism. On the one hand, Derrida is a subjective idealist. He wants to free the authentic act of the ego from any social determination. Ultimately this freedom is a religious experience — in which Stirner’s free ego is the pure expression of messianic salvation.65 On the other hand, Callinicos’ rejection of Marx’s analysis of the determinate effects of commodity fetishism on consciousness traps him in an equally idealist position of the spontaneously class conscious proletariat.66 For me this explains why Callinicos can only take his critique of Derrida so far. To take it any further would require an overcoming of the idealist baggage that both Derrida and Callinicos, in their own way, bring from Western Marxism.67

40. Eagleton criticises Jameson’s “summary treatment” of Derrida’s politics in defending Derrida’s brand of “left” deconstruction opposing “post-Marxism” and attacks on Althusser. Yet, he says, “Derrida’s ‘left’ deconstruction seems no more than a ‘left liberalism’, well meaning, flexible, participatory if somewhat theoretically diffuse political programmes of the traditional New Left. Is there to be a Deconstructive Party alongside the Democrats, or is the encounter between Marxism and deconstruction not that kind of thing at all?”68 “. . . Derrida has turned to Marxism just when it has become marginal, and so, in his post-structuralist reckoning, rather more alluring. (He has in fact no materialist or historical analysis of Stalinism whatsoever as opposed to an ethical rejection of it)”.69

41. Eagleton recognises that it is no coincidence that Derrida rediscovers the early Marx just as the “late” Marx of the Second International, and the Stalinist Third International, has been certified dead and buried. He can see that Derrida wants to reclaim that part of Marx that retrospectively makes deconstruction the genuine Marxism. Yet Eagleton fails completely to see what is at stake here. Derrida’s is not merely an intellectual exercise in which deconstruction becomes the ‘new’ new left fashion any more than Stirner’s unique was the fashion in young Hegelian circles. It may be that Stalinism and Second International menshevism have suffered an historic defeat, but that is not to say that the idealist method (the totalised Marx) which underpins Western Marxism is dead.

42. More important, the re-emergence of capitalist crisis tendencies carries the threat of a renewal of revolutionary Marxism. So it seems to me that in anticipation of this contest, Derrida, like other post-Marxist ideologues, is insinuating himself into the lineage of Western Marxism at the point of its inception to claim the franchise on genuine Marxism. Therefore the appropriation of Stirnerian “rebellion” as a deconstruction of materialist ontology is a conscious attempt to install an anti-materialist subjective idealist “spirit” of Marxism against the time and place of the revival of revolutionary Marxism.

From Pre- to Post-Marx via Benjamin?

43. The attempts by Laclau and Critchely to recruit Derrida to a self-conscious post-Marxism support this view. Their shift towards indeterminacy and contingency is on a convergence course with Derrida’s rejection of “totalitarian” Marxism.70 Laclau is optimistic that “deconstruction can present itself both as a moment of its inscription in the Marxist tradition as well as a point of turning/deepening/supersession of the latter”. For Laclau, the true Marxist tradition is the “Sorelian-Gramscian” line within Western Marxism where “material forces” become “loose and indeterminate”, and where the “distinction between the ethical and political becomes blurred”.71 Negri’s position is similar. He chides Derrida for his nostalgia, but commends him for producing a “new theory of spectrality, which corresponds with common experience: an experience of the everyday, and/or the masses, the experience of a mobile, flexible, computerized, immaterialized and spectral labour”.72 In other words there is a shift from objective idealism: fate, the proletarian mission, etc to subjective idealism. After all, if “material forces” become contingent, and indeed Marxism becomes one of many “emancipations”, who or what is the revolutionary subject?

44. Lukacs makes the point about bourgeois apologetics at the beginning of the imperialist epoch that it is an elite philosophy of the ‘parasitic intelligentsia’ who in response to the crises of war and revolution set out to “philosophically demolish dialetictics and historical materialism” by “incorporating its ’serviceable’ and suitably ‘purified’ elements”.73 Similarly, in the currrent period of late imperialist crisis the role of ‘revolutionary subject’ falls by default to the counter-hegemonic intellectual/priest who infiltrates the camp of the class enemy, and articulates indeterminacy as a “weak messianic power”. This is a direct reference to Derrida’s supposed affinity with Benjamin in an attempt to incorporate his “seviceable” and “purified” elements to bolster Derrida’s post-”Marxist” credentials.

45. While Jameson takes Derrida’s appeal to Benjamin seriously Callinicos is not taken in. He argues that Derrida’s attraction for Stirner fits with the latter’s “proto-Nietzschean tone”. He comments: “One might say that the poststructuralist discovery of Stirner was bound to happen sooner or later”. By comparison, Benjamin’s “tortuous, ambiguous, but ultimately decisive moment towards revolutionary socialism and historical materialism — showed that the reverse is true, that ‘messianic extremity’ requires a materialist anchorage”.74 Yet Callinicos does not speculate about why it is necessary for Derrida, as opposed to poststructuralism in general, to rediscover Stirner as “proto Nietzschean” and still make a gesture towards Benjamin the genuine Marxist.75 Either Benjamin is not a real Marxist or Derrida is.

46. But Derrida’s gesture towards Benjamin is rhetorical, since his conception of the “messianic” is very different from that of Benjamin, who takes as read Marx’s critique of Stirner’s “rebellion”.76 In his recent response to his interlocuters, Derrida clarifies what he means by ‘messianic’. This is a “messianicity without messianism” — i.e. messianicity without a messiah, without utopia.

Nothing could be further from Utopia and Utopianism, even in its “subterranean” form, than the messianicity and spectrality which are at the heart of Specters of Marx. While Benjamin still has traces of Jewish and Marxist “messianism” . . . messianicity (which I regard as a universal structure of experience, and which cannot be reduced to religious messianism of any stripe) is anything but Utopian: it refers, in every here-now, to the coming of an eminently real, concrete event, that is, to the most irreducibly heterogenous otherness. Nothing is more “realistic” or “immediate” than this messianic apprehension, straining forward toward the event of him who/that which is coming . . . messianicity mandates that we interrupt the ordinary course of things, time and history here-now: it is inseparable from an affirmation of otherness and justice. As this unconditional messianicity must therefore negotiate its conditions in one or other singular, practical situation, we have to do here with the locus of an analysis and evaluation, and therefore of a responsibility.77

47. There is clearly a massively subjective idealist project here. The “unconditional messianicity” as the “universal structure of experience” is devoid of social relations (and is therefore a void/specter) and is wholly self-driven like the sovereign consumer of bourgeois ideology. The “affirmations” of “otherness”, “justice” (meaning the gift without obligation) is the substance of social responsibility. No wonder Derrida thinks that Benjamin’s messianism has some way to go before it arrives at “messianicity”. Meanwhile Derrida merely suggests a “possible convergence” between himself and Benjamin. He wonders:

If Benjamin does not link the privileged moments of this “weak messianic power” to determinate historico-political phases, or, indeed crises. . . . Thus there would be, for Benjamin critical moments (pre-revolutionary or post-revolutionary). moments of hope or disappointment, in short, dead ends during which a simalcrum of messianism serves as an alibi. Whence the strange adjective “weak”. I am not sure I would define the messianicity I speak of as power (it is, no less, a vulnerability or a kind of absolute powerlessness); but even if I did define it as power, as the movement of desire, as the attraction, invincible elan or affirmation of an unpredictable future-to-come (or even as the past to come again), the experience of the non-present, of the non-living present in the living present (of the spectral . . . . I would never say, in speaking of this “power”, that it is strong or weak . . . . For in my view, the universal, quasi-transcendental structure that I call messianicity without messianism is not bound up with any particular moment of (political or general) history or culture (Abrahamic or any other); and it does not serve any sort of messianism as an alibi, does not mime or reiterate any sort of messianism, does not confirm or undermine any sort of messianism.78

48. Yet Benjamin’s messianism was not an alibi in the sense that Derrida means it — as a capitulation to the specter of (Abrahamic or Marxist or both) determinism. Quite the opposite. Benjamin’s own messianism fell short of Marx’s sense of “vocation”, or “destiny” of the communist individual for whom self-determination is a collective social act.79 Benjamin rejected the party as playing into the hands of bourgeois culture, while he sought to explode the contradictions from inside bourgeois culture.80 He was a dedicated communist committed to class struggle as the means of transcending the reified bourgeois subject. There is nothing in Benjamin’s role as communist intellectual to suggest any “messianic power”, however weak. He did not act as a Stirnerian ego deluded about his “freedom”. This would have reproduced in Benjamin the melancholy he found in all theological (spirit-ridden) transcendence, as against the materialist transcendence which occurs when knowledge of the “fully concrete” (i.e. void filled in) and mediated “moment” destroys bourgeois culture and its economic underpinnings.81

49. The manner of Benjamin’s death raises important questions that cannot be answered here about the role of the detached communist intellectual compared to the party cadre.82 Derrida implies in Benjamin’s rejection of the “Communist Party” a tendency towards a “hauntology” of the ghosts of determinism making his rebellion possible. Benjamin’s suicide may have had the appearance of an authentic undetermined act. But it was the “overdetermined” action of physically isolated, power-less and “defeated” communist individual.83 Derrida identifies only with a surface resonance of Benjamin’s “rebellion” and misses the historical and material conditions that determined his life and death. Derrida would have been a mortal enemy in Benjamin’s project to rid the world of capitalism and its reified (alienated) subjects.

50. Nevertheless, in flirting with Benjamin, Derrida is trying to re-appropriate a “spirit” of Marxism, which is much more than David Harvey claims:

Derrida’s resort to something akin to the Leibnezian conceit in his discussion of self-other relations as he examines how the “European subject” (an entity that Leibniz was also crucially concerned with) constitutes itself on the inside through the construction of the “other” — the colonial subject. Spivak (1988:294) approvingly cites Derrida’s strategy as follows: “To render thought or the thinking subject transparent or invisible seems to hide the relentless recognition of the Other by assimilation. It is in the interest of such cautions that Derrida does not invoke ‘letting the other(s) speak for himself’ but rather invokes an ‘appeal’ to, or ‘call’ to the ‘quite-other’ . . . of ‘rendering delirious that interior voice that is the voice of the other in us’. The dangers of such a gesture are obvious. If the only way in which the ‘other’ can be represented is through ‘rendering delirious’ the voices that I have internalised in the process of discovering myself, then very soon the identities of ‘l’autre c’est moi’ become as surely planted as did the thesis of ‘l’estate c’est moi’”.84

51. This passage echoes Marx’s critique of Stirner forcing the “other” into his “Procrustean bed”. But the point is surely that, for Marx, Leibniz’s philosophy had already been transcended by Hegel who had overcome the false Kantian dualism and united objective and subjective realities. The young Hegelians then turned Hegel “right side up” but retained the mystical kernel in the ahistorical abstraction of humanity. So it is not Leibniz who becomes the reference point for Derrida, but rather Stirner who took the ideal of humanity to the extreme of the “unique” individual. His subjective idealism rejected all social norms and conventions as limits on the free ego. For Derrida this represents the lost “spirit” of the early Marx who made the mistake of not rejecting his own “haunting”, i.e. his own self “reduced” to social relations of production. Derrida is not interested in the Leibniz pre-capitalist monad, but the young-Hegelian “self” which Marx “denied”. It is Derrida’s insistence that Marx “denied” his true spirit, which Derrida wants to conjure up and restore to life that gives Derrida’s intervention its political point.

52. I want to suggest that Derrida’s intervention in Specters is not a frontal attack on Western Marxism a la post-modernism in general as Harvey would suggest. Post-modernism rejects the Enlightenment frame in which Marxism is also caught. Derrida accepts that the “humanist” project is what is at stake. He does not turn his back on the Enlightenment, but picks up on its critique of Hegel’s objective idealism by the Young Hegelians. He wants to restore the “humanist project” to the free will of the undetermined ego by denying the alienated bourgeois subject with its roots in the ontology of labour.

53. Derrida locates the ‘free spirit’ of Marx in Stirners’ defence of private property, in civil society as an “association of egoists”, and in Stirner’s rejection of revolutionary violence as a totalitarian threat to individual freedom.85 He also hopes to enlist Benjamin in his reconstruction project. However, as I have argued, there is nothing in Benjamin that allows him to be reduced to the idealist “autonomous ego”. Moreover, his “idealist residue” is a powerful stimulus to the rebuilding of a dialectical Marxism, against Derrida’s deconstruction project.86 Thus Stirner’s anarchist idealism is a much more suitable go-between than Benjamin’s “weak messianic power” in the marriage of Marxism and deconstruction.

54. So far his critics can go. Beyond this point, Derrida wants to dehistoricise the origins of Marxism via deconstruction as a contemporary “indirect apologetics” for capitalism. His is a pre-emptive strike to render Western Marxism even more harmless than it is, and provide an antidote to any revival of revolutionary Marxism. Those critics who are part of Western Marxism, and whose method reflects the idealist split between objective and subjective reality, leave the proletariat exposed to Derrida’s political purpose. Their critiques remain one-sided critiques of ideology unless they are capable of uniting the theory and practice in a revolutionary party.87

55. It is striking that in his reply to his critics in “Marx and Sons” Derrida makes use of the failure of his Marxist critics to demolish his surreptitious religion. By this I mean Derrida’s celebration of alienation as performativity, and of deconstruction as “emptying the void” (i.e. ghost worship). He turns on his critics, accusing them (Spivak, Eagleton and Ahmad) of defending “Marx the father’s property” as their inheritance.88 “To whom is Marxism supposed to belong?” he asks. This is the sort of question that can only be asked by one intellectual of another. No doubt Derrida’s answer is that Marxism belongs to those who can “transform” Marxism according to the “spirit” of Marx. His criticism is that the “proprietal Marxists” should leave the patriarchal household. My answer is: Marxism does not “belong” to anyone, but it is the “ineffaceable mark” of the proletariat for which it is the promissory note of an historic emancipation. To prove that this is not some rival messianism with Marx as the patriarch, it will be necessary to return to the Marx’s method in the German Ideology and to the work of Lukacs and Lenin to counter Derrida’s misappropriation of Marx.

Indirect Apologetics

56. If it is true that Derrida’s “turn to Marx” is to subvert a genuine Marxism, how must he try to do this? In a word he has to render alienation natural (i.e. universal, ahistorical, nothingness). Because alienation is the fundamental condition of living labour dominated by dead labour under capitalist social relations, real-world Marxism seeks to end alienation through revolutionary practice. Derrida must abstract from capitalist social relations and naturalise the ego as an historically indeterminate actor capable of realising its “self” through its authentic pure actions. To do so he has to engage in some idealist ghost-busting. The real “specter” of alienated labour separates society from nature. This is expressed as a split between labour and its value, between labour-power as use-value and exchange-value. Thus Derrida must reject the “ghosts” of “labour”, “value” and “class”.

57. By rejecting the ontology of living labour as the source of determinate social life Derrida removes at one stroke any objective being as presence. Next the capital-labour relation is obliterated as “metaphysics”. The historical unity of production and consumption is broken, and restored only in an alienated ie. supernatural or idealist form, as the irreducible, pre-social act. This break in the unity of production and consumption can take many forms, deceptively different. In one sense the whole of Western Marxism can be understood as the result of “freezing” the moments in this unity.89 But there is common metaphysic — that of the alienated labouring social self. The subject is dominated in thought by an alien absence (the determinate “other” of dead labour) which is impossible to recover — as fetishised labour, love, or power — except in an alienated form.

58. In response to his critics Derrida’s attempt to claim adherence to the notion of class is pathetic. “I believe that an interest in what the concept of class struggle aimed at, an interest in analysing conflicts in social forces, is still absolutely indispensable…But I’m not sure that the concept of class, as its been inherited is the best instrument for those activities, unless it is considerably differentiated“.90 This is a banal Weberian, social democratic, liberal “Third way” even, lipservice to class shorn of “inheritance”, i.e. social relations, contradictions, etc.

59. But Derrida is not free indulge in mysticism as a purely ideological exercise or publicity stunt. He senses that Marxism is not quite “post”. The contradictions of capitalism manifest themselves in mounting political, social and cultural crises. In its attempts to overcome the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value, the market tries to commodify everything, including its own ideological legitimation, thereby transposing the crisis directly from the infrastructure to the superstructure with less and less mediation. As the crisis invades the “lifeworld”, i.e. culture, the ideological expressions become more and more extreme — e.g. hyperreality — echoing Marx’s prophetic words about “idealising phrases, conscious illusion, deliberate hypocrisy”.91

60. This is not just any old anarchy. The impending crisis appears to Derrida as the return of Marx’s ghost. Derrida re-reads the Communist Manifesto and realises he has to lay the ghost.92 The specter of communism is still haunting the world. The specter must be conjured away.93 The academic factory scavenges the corpus of Marx after the death of “defacto Marxism”. To certify the death. “Marx is dead, communism is dead, very dead, and along with it its hopes, its discourse, its theories, and its practices. It says: long live capitalism, long live the market, here’s to the survival of economic and political liberalism!”94 The incantations are necessary to keep the 10 plagues of the new world disorder at bay.95 But they will not work because they cannot identify the ghost. The real ghost has to be faced and a “new international” or “association of egos” created to conjure away the ghost.

61. Consider Derrida’s interesting excursion on the academic neutralisation (cushioning operation) of Marx.

Why insist on imminence, on urgency and injunction, on all that which in them does not wait? In order to try to remove what we are going to say from what risks happening, if we judge by the many signs, to Marx’s work today, which is to say also to his injunction. What risks happening is that one will try to play Marx off against Marxism so as to neutralise, or at any rate muffle the political imperative in the untroubled exegesis of a classified work. One can sense a coming fashion or stylishness in this regard in the culture and more precisely in the university. And what is there to worry about here? Why fear what may also become a cushioning operation? This recent stereotype would be destined, whether one wishes it or not, to depoliticise profoundly the Marxist reference, to do its best, by putting on a tolerant face, to neutralise a potential force, first of all by enervating a corpus, by silencing in it the revolt [the return is acceptable provided that the revolt, which initially inspired uprising, indignation, insurrection, revolutionary momentum, does not come back]. People would be ready to accept the return of Marx or the return to Marx, on the condition that a silence is maintained about Marx’s injunction not just to decipher but to act and to make the deciphering [the interpretation] into a transformation that “changes the world”. In the name of an old concept of reading, such an ongoing neutralisation would attempt to conjure away danger: now that Marx is dead, and especially now that Marxism seems to be in rapid decomposition, some people seem to say, we are going to be able to concern ourselves with Marx without being bothered — by the Marxists and, why not, by Marx himself, that is, by a ghost that goes on speaking. We’ll treat him calmly, objectively, without bias: according to the academic rules, in the University, in the library, in colloquia! We’ll do it systematically, by respecting the norms of hermeneutical, philological, philosophical exegesis. If one listens closely, one already hears whispered: “Marx, you see, was despite everything a philosopher like any other; what is more [and one can say this now that so many Marxists have fallen silent], he was a great philosopher who deserves to figure on the list of those works we assign for study and from which he has been banned for too long. He doesn’t belong to the communists, to the Marxists, to the parties; he ought to figure within our great canon of Western political philosophy. Return to Marx, let’s finally read him as a great philosopher.” We have heard this and we will hear it again.

It is something altogether other that I wish to attempt here as I turn or return to Marx. It is “something other” to the point that I will have occasion instead, and this will not be only for lack of time and space, to insist even more on what commands us today, without delay, to do everything we can so as to avoid the neutralising anaesthesia of a new theoreticism, and to prevent a philosophico-philological return to Marx from prevailing. Let us spell things out, let us insist: to do everything we can so that it does not prevail, but not to avoid its taking place, because it remains just as necessary. This will cause me, for the moment to give priority to the political gesture I am making here, at the opening of a colloquium, and to leave more or less in the state of a program and of schematic indications the work of philosophical exegesis, and all the “scholarship” that this “position-taking” today, still requires.96

62. Derrida doesn’t want to leave Marx as merely an academic commodity. He knows that is no way to bu(r)y Marx (how many proletarian militants will pass through the academies of the new millennium?). Rather he wants to embrace a re-born Marx as a mass commodity. He wants to honour one spirit out of a number of Marx’s spirits for deconstruction. It is the spirit of rebellion, of the moral injunction, of individuals to aspire to the pure act of salvation. Derrida sees that capitalism cannot be contained inside discourse. Capitalism’s contradictions cannot be ignored, so its apologetics have to be indirect. He needs transcendental signifiers for mass ecological destruction, genocide, poverty, disease etc. So Derrida buys Marx cheap, i.e. after his death and burial.97 He then excavates only the spirit he wants. He “disappears” those spirits he doesn’t want — the totalising method, the “dogmatics”, the party, the old-fashioned workers international. Then sells Marx dear as a emancipatory/religious icon by diminishing Marxism to a utopian anarcho/socialism, and then packaging it as the “promised land”. Derrida’s reduction of the “spirit of Marx” to a “messianic eschatology” and the “spirit of Marxist critique” is repacked as the commodity of “radical deconstruction”.98 This becomes clear in the section written in response to the cynics who justifiably ask, “You picked a good time to Salute Marx”.

Which Marxist Spirit, then? It is easy to imagine why we will not please the Marxists, and still less all the others, by insisting in this way on the spirit of Marxism, especially if we let it be understood that we intend to understand spirits in the plural and in the sense of specters, of untimely specters that one must not chase away but sort out, critique, keep close by, and allow to come back. And of course, we must never hide from the fact that the principle of selectivity which will have to guide and hierarchise among the “spirits” will fatally exclude in its turn. It will even annihilate, by watching (over) its ancestors rather than (over) certain others. . .

. . . To continue to take inspiration from Marxism would be to keep faith with what has always made of Marxism in principle and first of all a radical critique, namely a procedure ready to undertake self-critique. This critique wants itself to be in principle and explicitly open to its own transformation, re-evaluation, self-reinterpretation. Such a critical “wanting-itself” necessarily takes root, it is involved in a ground that is not yet critical, even if it is not, not yet, pre-critical. This latter spirit is more than a style, even though it is also a style. It is the heir to a spirit of the Enlightenment, which must not be renounced. We would distinguish this spirit from other spirits of Marxism, those that rivet it to the body of Marxist doctrine, to its supposed systemic, metaphysical, or ontological totality (notably to its “dialectical method” or to “dialectical materialism”), to its fundamental concepts of labor, mode of production, social class, and consequently to the whole history of its apparatuses (projected or real: the Internationals of the labour movement, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the single party, the State, and finally the totalitarian monstrosity). . . .99

63. That spirit of Marxism that is radical and able to critique itself, is the spirit that Derrida wants to recover and use today as a radical deconstruction of the other “spirits of “Marxism” that are not radical in this sense. To be radical thus means a constant re-styling of the commodity-Marxism. The “fundamental concepts” of labour (and labour value?) must go. No doubt they are spirits that have too much proletarian resonance today in the world of “plagues”. Mode of production is too metaphysical. It betrays the “spirit” of “dialectical method”.100 Social class and the state as an instrument of class rule? How can a class rule?! No! says the radical apologist of plague-ridden capitalism — no class can rule because class is a ghost, which cohabits with other ghosts such as labour and value. Such “spirits” must be “fatally excluded”.

To critique, to call for interminable self-critique is still to distinguish between everything or almost everything. Now there is a spirit of Marxism, which I will never be ready to renounce, it is not only a critical idea or the questioning stance (a consistent deconstruction must insist on them even as it also learns that this is not the last or first word). It is even more a certain emancipatory and messianic affirmation, a certain experience of the promise that one can try to liberate from any dogmatics and even from any metaphysico-religious determination, from any messianism. . . .

64. But more than self-criticism (i.e. deconstruction) is the “emancipatory” promise to liberate one from these ghosts of “determinism”, from a “messianic affirmation” that one can be saved by knowledge and rational action. Instead there is nothing but “interminable self-critique” and an irrational messianicity of individual salvation. Here, Derrida expresses his debt to the earlier philosophers of self-emancipation from Nietzsche to Heidegger.101 The problem now however, is to reclaim Marx, the most damning critic of irrationalism and of its most bizarre disciple Stirner, as an indirect apologist for irrationalism.

. . . Now, this gesture of fidelity to a certain spirit of Marxism is a responsibility incumbent in principle, to be sure, on anyone. Barely deserving the name community, the new International belongs only to anonymity. But this responsibility appears today, at least within the limits of an intellectual and academic field, to return more imperatively and, let us say so as not to exclude anyone, by priority, in urgency to those who, during the last decades, managed to resist a certain hegemony of the Marxist dogma, indeed of its metaphysics, in its political or theoretical forms. And still more particularly to those who have insisted on conceiving and on practicing this resistance without showing any leniency towards reactionary, conservative, or neo-conservative, anti-scientific or obscurantist temptations, to those who, on the contrary have ceaselessly proceeded in a hyper-critical fashion, I will dare to say in a deconstructive fashion, in the name of a new Enlightenment for the century to come. And without renouncing an ideal of democracy and emancipation, but rather by trying to think it and to put it to work otherwise. . . .102

65. Derrida thinks his own political credentials for “putting to work” the “ideal of democracy and emancipation”, in a “deconstructive fashion” are good. He claims that the “end of communist Marxism did not await the recent collapse of the USSR . . . all that started at the beginning of the ’50s . . . the eschatological themes of the ‘end of history’, of the ‘end of Marxism’, of the ‘end of philosophy’, of the ‘ends of man’, of the ‘last man’ and so forth were, in the ’50’s, that is forty years ago, our daily bread”. Deconstruction, he says, was born out of this “totalitarian terror” of Stalinism and neo-Stalinism. So deconstruction of the totalising “philosophical responses” includes Marxism in the name of “differance”. “The originary performativity that does not conform to pre-existing conventions . . . In the incoercible differance the here-now unfurls. No differance without alterity, no alterity without singularity, no singularity without the here-now”.103

66. Here Derrida is reproducing the core of Stirner’s “unique”, the “freedom” to act in the absence of coercive, totalising, social relations. Derrida does not see that the individual uncoerced act is not “against” totalitarianism. Rather it is the expression of the “unfreedom” of the alienated bourgeois subject. It is the ghost in the mirror, the ghost on the rampart, the absence separated from presence. Deconstructed, performativity is the “practice” of the alienated capitalist individual. It is “rebellion” as “sentimentality and bragging”. Here we have the “cushioning exercise” which poses the rebel spirit of Marx as his true spirit, to render the socially determinate as the irreducible “here-now”. He “sells” the revolution in the name of the rebellion of the “association of egoists”.104

67. Marx anticipates Derrida’s “here/now” performativity in his critique of Stirner’s “unique”:

Individuals have always and in all circumstances “proceeded from themselves“, but since they were not unique in the sense of not needing any connections with one another, and since their needs, consequently their nature, and the method of satisfying their needs, connected them with one another (relations between the sexes, exchange division of labour), they had to enter into relations with one another. Moreover, since they entered into intercourse with one another not as pure egos, but as individuals at a definite stage of development of their productive forces and requirements, and since this intercourse, in its turn, determined production and needs, it was therefore, precisely the personal, individual behaviour of individuals, their behaviour to one another as individuals, that created the existing relations and daily reproduces them anew.105

The New International

68. What is the meaning of Derrida’s “new International” as his answer to globalisation and its 10 plagues? Derrida invokes, as a counter-conjuration, a worldwide social movement with no organising features to reform international law! As an idealist fix, this is no more than a hollow call for social justice which joins with Soros and Giddens et al. in appeals to a spontaneous “millenarian” power of bourgeois citizens to fight “responsibly” for a democratic capitalism against the totalitarian spectres of speculative capital, fundamentalist ideas and totalising dogma.

But without necessarily subscribing to the whole Marxist discourse (which moreover, is complex, evolving, heterogeneous) on the State and its appropriation by a dominant class, on the distinction between State power and State apparatus, on the end of the political, on “the end of politics”, or on the withering away of the State, and, on the other hand without suspecting the juridical ideas in itself, one may still find inspiration in the Marxist “spirit” to criticise the presumed autonomy of the juridical and to denounce endlessly the de facto take-over of international authorities by powerful National-states, by concentrations of techno-scientific capital, symbolic capital, and financial capital, of State capital and private capital. A “new international” is being sought through these crises of international law; it already denounces the limits of a discourse on human rights that will remain inadequate, sometimes hypocritical, and in any case formalistic and inconsistent with itself as long as the law of the market, the “foreign debt”, the inequality of techno-scientific, military, and economic development maintain an effective inequality as monstrous as that which prevails today, to a greater extent than ever in the history of humanity. For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the “end of ideologies” and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth. . . .

69. The concerns of the “new International” are those of liberal democracy — poverty, ecological destruction, crimes against humanity — and so on — which are caused by the “de facto takeover of international authorities” by nation states and capital. Thus the authority of the law which is being ‘taken over’ is that which represents bourgeois right as freedom and equality ie. bourgeois citizenship rights and civil society. While Soros can talk of the aberration of finance capital, and Giddens of fundamentalism against citizenship, Derrida provides the political philosophy of the hyper-decadent bourgeois ego. Like Stirner in his day Derrida conjures up a philosophical apology for private property and the “freedom of labour”. And as with any common liberal it seems that Derrida subscribes to such norms and conventions of bourgeois society when he defends them against the challenge of “crimes” and “oppression” of capital. However, in rejecting the method and theory of Marxism as “totalitarian”, and wishing to renew Marxism as a “weak messianic power”, Derrida is advocating a “new” reformist International that subscribes to an ideology of distributional social justice posing as “natural” justice. Since this is the way the fetishised social relations of capital appear in daily life, there is no necessity for a “new International” which is organised around a revolutionary programme.

. . . The “New International” is not only that which is seeking a new international law through these crimes. It is a link of affinity, suffering, and hope, a still discreet, almost secret link, as it was around 1848, but more and more visible, we have more than one sign of it. It is an untimely link, without status, without title, and without name, barely public even if it is not clandestine, without contract, “out of joint”, without coordination, without party, without country, without national community (International before, across, and beyond any national determination), without co-citizenship, without common belonging to a class. The name of the new International is given here to what calls to the friendship of an alliance without institution among those who, even if they no longer believe or never believed in the socialist-Marxist International, in the dictatorship of the proletariat, in the messiano-eschatological role of the universal union of the spirits of Marx or Marxism (they now know that there is more than one) and in order to ally themselves, in a new, concrete, and real way, even if this alliance no longer takes the form of a party or a workers’ international, but rather of a kind of counter-conjuration, in the (theoretical and practical) critique of the state of international law, the concepts of State and nation, and so forth: in order to renew this critique, and especially to radicalise it.106

70. Derrida’s new International is nothing like a Marxist international and more like a Masonic order.107 By basing itself on the ideal to which capitalism aspires in its fetishised form of equal exchange, he seeks to render this ideal real for each individual. The spirit of Marx he has recovered is actually that of Stirner’s “free ego” who is alienated not by society-in-general, but by capitalist social relations. To express this freedom as a intellectual critique or a “radicalisation” of Marxism is a retreat to a subjective idealism in which the bourgeois subject aspiring to Stirner’s “unique” remains trapped in performativity as consumption of its alienated identity.

71. So in his misappropriation of Marx, Derrida offers the young idealists of today a brand of anarchism they can consume in the belief that their actions constitute a rebellion for “democracy” and “emancipation” against the dehumanising norms and conventions that alienate them. Just as Stirner’s “association of egoists” was a figment of his “Thought”, Derrida’s new International has the potential to divert a new generation of alienated youth into discursive acts against the symptomatic phrases rather than the materialist substance of capitalist crisis.

72. In his response to his critics who deride the idea of an “international” without class he replies:

Whenever I speak of the New International in Specters of Marx, emphasising that, in it, solidarity or alliance should not depend, fundamentally and in the final analysis, on class affiliation, this in no wise signifies, for me, the disappearance of “classes” or the attenuation of conflicts connected with “class” differences or oppositions (or, at least, differences or oppositions based on the new configurations of social forces for which I do in fact believe that we need new concepts and therefore, perhaps new names as well) . . . the disappearance of power relations, or relations of social domination . . . . At issue is, simply, another dimension of analysis and political commitment, one that cuts across social differences and oppositions of social forces (what one used to call, simplifying, “classes”). I would not say that such a dimension (for instance, the dimension of social, national, or international classes, or political struggles within nation states, problems of citizenship or nationality, or party strategies, etc.) is superior or inferior, a primary or a secondary concern, fundamental or not. All that depends, at every instant, on new assessments of what is urgent in, first and foremost, singular situations and of their structural implications. For such an assessment, there is, by definition, no pre-existing criterion or absolute calculability; analysis must begin anew every day everywhere, without ever being guaranteed by prior knowledge. It is on this condition, on the condition constituted by this injunction, that there is, if there is, action, decision and political responsibility — repoliticization.108

73. In other words, the term “international” is a mystique. It covers for a nihilistic cult. Its Marxist meaning is inverted; just as messianicity is messianism without a given messiah — because everyone is one’s own messiah. There is no prior knowledge that can guide any collective action because that pre-anything (society, religion, etc.) is spectral, is the unfilled “void”. There are only irreducible acts which individuals perform at any given moment by personally attempting to calculate, on the spot as it were, which of many “dimensions” or “forces” immediately concern them, “responsibly” and in the name of “justice” (whose gift?). If there is one name to apply to this contingent conjunction of “forces” which tries to “name” the “new” it is as I have argued above, performativity.109 Moreover, as I set out to prove, Derrida’s performativity is the idealist philosophical license for the political/social concept of reflexivity as developed by Soros and Giddens to express their abstract understanding of the ’structure-agency’ problem in the new global economy.110 Teamed-up, as performo-reflexivity, we could not get a better prescription for “demobilising” and “depoliticising” the masses in the face of the current world crisis of capitalism.

Marxist Dialectics

74. Yet as the crisis of “very late” capitalism looms larger it cannot be contained by such idealist fixes.111 Despite the hype, capitalism that is in dis-order and dis-equilibrium, and in terror of its own ghosts (this time the real ghosts of dead labour) is under threat of a materialist re-haunting. The victory of the more market messianicity is clamped in the jaws of contradiction. The neo-Hegelian infinite liberal democracy cannot paper over the cracks in the world economy. The resident contradiction between use-value and exchange-value asserts itself constantly in the form of the rejection of Says law that supply creates demand — that the market is the best/only historic mechanism to meet the needs of consumers. Needs are “out of joint” with profits. There is no “jointure” if consumers have no income with which to consume to meet their needs/justice. What pure gifts are possible when poverty cannot be commodified? So how can the Soros/Derrida/Giddens “new International” of the “new, new right” be the answer to underconsumption?

75. Underconsumption was the problem that Keynes recognised as the result of insufficient investment. There was no necessary connection between demand and supply because capitalists were governed by “animal spirits” which determined whether or not they would invest in production to supply demand. Keynes solution was for the state to take responsibility for productive investment [consumption] when the capitalists did not. What Keynes failed to recognise was that capitalists’ motivation for investment did not depend upon their atavistic ahistorical “animal spirits”, but the rate of profit.112

76. Keynes was unable to explain why Say’s law broke down. Capitalists only produce to meet demand if they can make a profit. This is not a problem of under-consumption that can be fixed by boosting consumption, but a problem of overproduction of capital that cannot be reinvested profitably. The reason for this is that consumer needs are not sovereign under capitalism, profits are. In order to produce capitalists want to make profits and they can only do this if they can expropriate sufficient surplus-value during production to be realised as profits. They will not permit their profits as private property to be socialised by fiat or by stealth. And while this is the case the messianic Hayek and Co can still argue for the inherent superiority of the market. Bourgeois social relations and their legal forms, property rights, set systemic limits to the possibility of distributional/cultural/legal reforms.

77. Hence modern capitalist society is ‘reflexive’ only to the point where it generates a spontaneous defensive reflex from the owners of the ’structure’ of private property against the ‘agency’ of the rampant oppressed. Giddens’ attempts to supplant “productivism” with a “post-scarcity order” will also come up against this limit.113 Given the need to accumulate capital, capitalists have to constantly increase the rate of exploitation (expropriation of relative surplus-value) and to do this they are driven to increase their investment in constant capital (machines etc) to increase labour productivity. This is what Marx called relative surplus value expropriation. This has the effect of super-exploiting a relatively declining proportion of workers, and throwing an ever-larger number of workers onto the industrial scrap-heap. As a result capitalism produces more and more efficiently with less and less necessary labour time in order to increase relative surplus value.

78. This creates an obvious problem. Profits begin to fall if the rate of surplus value does not rise fast enough to keep up with the rising organic composition (the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall — TRPF — which Marx called the most important law of political economy). This is the real cause of capitalist instability and disequilibrium. But in addition to this, and with fatal consequences for Say’s law, proportionately less value is expended on variable capital (wages) and is available for wage-good consumption. So capitalism digs its own grave by creating a working class that becomes increasingly impoverished and unable to consume what it needs without revolutionising the relations of production.114

79. The market therefore cannot be fixed by state intervention to compensate for this falling demand because it cannot prevent the fundamental cause of overproduction in the first place. Keynesian demand management, which involves boosting state spending and working class consumption, exacerbates the problem of falling profits because taxes are a drain on profits! The fatal flaw of the market, (and of all forms of market socialism that are all attempts at state intervention to suppress the TRPF) is that it is integrated into the circuit of capital at the point of exchange. It cannot be cut loose and doctored to transform the circuit of capital, since in the last analysis the circuit of capital is determined by production and production relations.115

80. What does this mean for the ideology of more-market as the “historic best” at matching supply with demand? It makes all the rhetoric surrounding the superiority of the market over planning so much hot air. Hayek’s fundamental point that only the market can coordinate the information necessary to match supply with demand falls flat when demand falls flat.116 The demand factor is now seen to be not the result of a natural market-freedom to spend a “factor” income. Rather demand results from a socially alienated and historically conditioned residual income, the value of the wage, in the case of the vast majority of producers, or revenue plus profit as expropriated value in the case of the tiny minority or exploiters. But consumption depends upon production. The production of market mythology will continue, but its consumption will fall as demand collapses. As the masses are starved of consumption, the ghosts of alienated labour and the fetishised world-view will cease to hold them in thrall. It will no longer be possible for indirect apologetics of Derrida and Co. to keep up the lie of the (l)awful legitimacy of the market.

81. In the face of the contemporary crisis of capitalist production it becomes more difficult to maintain the false split in reality between ideal fixes and material roots. The symptoms collapse in on the cause. The discourse is exposed as dis-cause. Crisis theory formerly retracted into discourse without even the signifiers of the contradiction — use-value/exchange-value — explodes back into consciousness. And despite all his efforts to de-materialise Marx into the idealist Max Stirner, Derrida cannot suppress this fundamental contradiction of signified dead labour carried on the backs of living labour coming back to haunt him.

82. In other words there is more to “life” outside discourse than the “void”. And there is more to this “void” than fetishised appearances (including Derrida’s “speeches” to the masses).117 Derrida’s recuperation of Marx stops at exchange relations. The 10 plagues are but manifestations of capitalist ills that can be Stirnerised without totalising transformations. But the real predicate that Stirner fears — the ghostly contradiction between use-value and exchange-value — is in reality objective. It manifests itself both objectively and subjectively as a dialectical process that cannot be suppressed by idealist contemplation/interpretation. And despite their wilful attempts to reject history as dialectics, and to substitute the unique ego, both Stirner and Derrida have a place in the division of labour already set aside for them. It is as bourgeois intellectuals engaged in indirect apologetics of pre/post-Marxism.118

83. This proves, as Trotsky said, that if we don’t “recognise” dialectics, dialectics nevertheless “recognises” us: “that is, extends its sway” over us.119 In the same way that the “visor effect” blocks off the ghost’s identity yet the ghost sees right through us.120 So in the end, it is dialectics — finally the contradiction between use-value and exchange value — that is the ghost that haunts capitalism. No amount of tinkering with the system will stop the capitalist market as a historically time bound mechanism from collapse (though if the proletariat pushes it will not fall in on them). The market and the new millenarian hype cannot magic away the “specter” of Marxism. It cannot be conjured out of existence. The Dialectic is the ghost’s re-visit. The Spectre of Marx re-materialises Derrida’s hauntology.

Millenerianism or Materialism?

84. Today, after more than 200 years of capitalist expansion all over the world, we face the dawn of another century. Will it herald a conflict free age of social advancement, or an age of growing social disorder and international class conflict? By itself a new century offers no hope to the billions of workers and peasants whose lives are ruined or destroyed by the ruthless capitalist market. It will only offer hope, if they can shed all their religious and superstitious illusions about the past and the future, and destroy the social system that denies them hope in this life. The promise of the new millennium for the masses is not the re-born Marx of Derrida, but the dialectical method of the German Ideology and of Lukacs, Lenin and Trotsky. Only such a real-world Marxism shows them how to root out the causes of their poverty and misery and to overcome their alienation from themselves and others and to take the power over production and society in the name of humanity.

85. I think that Marx was already a materialist dialectician in the German Ideology.121 Not in spite of, but because of Hegel. This shows up clearly in his critique of Stirner. The contradiction of the relations and forces of production was already at the centre of Marx’s method. Unfortunately Western Marxism aping radical bourgeois ideology split and fetishised the forces or the relations into a one-sided fatalism or voluntarism. This is the trap of Western Marxism laid by the petty bourgeois intellectuals with no life in the class struggle but who want to (p)reserve an indeterminate cultural space for their own historical “com-edification”. Benjamin was a victim of this failure of dialectics, but no more than the various “communist” internationals that failed to apply materialist dialectics and thus the method of Bolshevism. Within this tradition only Lukacs powerful analysis of bourgeois irrationalism (that splits subject and object) succeeds in uniting theory and practice in the party.122

86. Lenin and Trotsky revived the dialectical method in the form of the revolutionary party. The contradictory unity of objective and subjective reality was realised in the revolutionary programme by means of revolutionary practice. Here we find bourgeois idealism subjected to the revolutionary critique of practice. The weapon of critique becomes the critique of weapons. Freedom is not posed as the fear of necessity expressed as “metaphysics” only to be ‘overcome’ by the authentic irrational acts of isolated individuals. Real freedom is the recognition of necessity. First, as the theory of the historic social relations which determine social life and which alienate bourgeois subjects from their labour and from themselves. Second, as the practice that allows necessity to be transcended by social revolution.123

87. We do not have to let capitalism destroy the planet. We can take power, expropriate the expropriators, and collectively plan to create a better, freer, and equal society called socialism. But to do this we need to mobilise and organise the working class. Not in Derrida’s “spirit of Marxism” but against it, taking stock of Marx’s method, recuperating the methods of the Bolsheviks and taking state power. This is both necessary and possible, since the contradictions of capitalism make busting the ghost of alienation and collectivising dead labour the only means of survival as well as emancipation of living labour.

---

Notes

1 Derrida, 1999, “Marx and Sons” in Sprinker (ed.) Ghostly Demarcations. This is an astonishing appeal to the banished universals of psychoanalysis as motivating his marxist critics.

2 Soros, 1998.

3 Most recently in Giddens, 1998.

4 New Statesman, October 31, 1997. See also the interview with Giddens which talks about his influence on Blair’s New Labour Party and his search for a term which expresses the essence of the “global, post-traditional, market society”, in The New Yorker, October 6, 1997.

5 Giddens, 1995:1.

6 The role of bourgeois intellectuals as apologists for capitalism at its various stages of development is tbe basic premise of Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, and of Lukac’s in The Destruction of Reason. I develop this theme in this paper.

7 Despite his reputation to the contrary, Derrida is a philosopher with his own “metavocabulary” (Rorty, 1991:94) and what’s more presents himself as the interpretor of a “real” world (Norris, 1997:106). The only question is: what is this reality? Here I argue that it is the fetishised reality of exchange relations. Cf Spivak (1995) on Derrida’s confusion between “commercial” and “industrial” capital. See Ahmad on Derrida’s affinity with the “Third Way”.

8 1994:63-64.

9 Ibid xix; 4.

10 Ibid 13.

11 Ibid 13. See Lewis on Derrida’s ‘metaphysical’ and “psychological” method of interpreting law, international law and nationalism.

12 For example in Sprinker (1999) both Negri and Hamacher argue for qualitative transformations in capitalism which partially endorse Derrida’s project.

13 1994: 13.

14 I agree with Ahmad (1994) that Derrida’s motives for reclaiming Marx are suspect. Why didn’t Derrida challenge the “dogmatics” with his “spirit” of Marx when it could have mattered? Why mourn the death of Marxism when he never loved it anyway? And why condemn totalitarian Marxism and keep quiet about the right-wing uses of deconstruction? But I argue that there is more to Derrida’s “recouping” of Marx than a re-branding of deconstruction to distinguish itself from the new right.

15 Op.cit. 13-14.

16 “In proposing this title, Specters of Marx, I was initially thinking of all the forms of a certain haunting obsession that seems to me to organise the dominant influence on discourse today. At a time when the new world disorder is attempting to install its neo-capitalism and neo-liberalism, no disavowal has managed to rid itself of all of Marx’s ghosts. Hegemony still organises the repression and thus the confirmation of a haunting. Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony”. (37)

17 But this is only a symptom — an “appearance” of “times out of joint”. Things need to be “put right” and made “lawful”. But “dead labour” (i.e., abstract labour that is embodied in the value of commodities) cannot be made “lawful”.

18 Why Derrida? His influence is wider than the academy, as a recent visit to Australia and New Zealand showed, Derrida drew between 1000 and 2000 at public lectures and got exposure in the national media. It seems that Derrida provides a “speculative philosophical” anti-foundationism which is the necessary premise of “Third Way” post-marxist and post-modernist politics. Anticipating this, Marx argues that “speculative history” requires a shift from the mysticism of the “concept” to the materialism of the person as “self-consciousness”, and to “thinkers”, “philosophers” etc. who represent the “concept” in history, the “ideologists who . . . are understood as the manufacturers of history, as the “council of guardians”, as the rulers”. ( Marx and Engels,1976:70)

19 I use “dead” labour in the sense of past “living labour” that becomes “objectified labour”, “crystallised” “congealed labour-time” etc. (see Marx, 1976:129-131) now represented as “constant capital”, combined with current “living labour” or “variable capital” to set in motion the further production of value (Marx, 1981:243-245).

20 Of course the performativity of alienated consumption appears as the opposite, as the authentic realisation (sovereignty) of the individual who is freed from necessary labour.

21 Marx, 1973:157. Also Marx, 1976:163-177. Money is the highest expression of alienated labour. On the surface it seems that Derrida understands this. However, on further inspection, the closest he comes to it is to recognise that money is the alienated form of “property” — not specifically labour value.

22 Derrida is correct to see Fukuyama as presenting a Hegelian “gospel”, which echoes Kojeve, that the US and the EU is “the embodiment of Hegel’s state of universal recognition” (1994:61).

23 Ibid p. 62-65.

24 See Derrida’ comments on use-value as ideology and ontology in “Marx and Sons” (1999). By mystifying use-values, Derrida renders the whole Hegelian/Marxism bag of tricks of dialectical contradiction non-existent (haunted).

25 Lukacs defines “indirect apologetics”: “. . . Whereas direct apologetics was at pains to fudge the contradictions in the capitalist system, to refute them with sophistry and to be rid of them, indirect apologetics proceeded from these vary contradictions, acknowledging their existence and their irrefutability as facts, while nonetheless putting an interpretation on them which helped to confirm capitalism. Wheras direct apologetics was at pains to depict capitalism as the best of all orders, as the last, outstanding peak of mankind’s evolution, indirect apologetics crudely elaborated the bad sides, the atrocities of capitalism, but explained them as attributes not of capitalism but of all human existence and existence in general. From this it necessarily follows that a struggle against these atrocities not only appears doomed from the start but signifies and absurdity, viz., a self-dissolution of the essentially human” (1980:202-3). Also: “In the ethical realm, indirect apologetics chiefly discredited social action in general, and in particular any tendency to want to change society. . . . Indirect apologetics in ethics have the task of steering intellectuals, sometimes rebellious ones, back to the path of the bourgeoisie’s reactionary development, while preserving all their intellectual and moral pretentions to a superior ease in this respect (1980:295).

26 The recent appearance of Sprinker’s (1999) “symposium” on Derrida’s Specters of Marx, is disappointing. Of those contributors who are clearly critical of Derrida, there is little that is new. Ahmad’s promise to devote a longer reply to Derrida has yet to appear. Lewis reproduces much of Callincos’ critique. Derrida’s response is much more interesting, including as it does Spivak (who does not appear in Sprinker’s book), in his petty and pathetic response in “Marx and Sons”.

27 1995:37.

28 Eagleton, 1986:117.

29 1993:108.

30 Like Max Weber, when push comes to shove, Derrida is a vulgar marginalist. On Weber see Lukacs, 1980, and Clarke, 1982.

31 1993:119.

32 Cf Ebert who accuses Spivak of “substituting discursive politics” for the transformation of social relations, 1996:291-293.

33 Derrida, 1994:55. It is clear that Jameson approves of Derrida’s concept of the “messianic” as a realm of “contingency” for the individual undetermined by social relations etc. I argue below that this is a consequence of Jameson’s adopting of Mandel’s eclectic model of Marxist economics which separates production from consumption, and more recently Arrighi (1994) who over time separates speculative capital from production. This primes Jameson to provide a “left cover” for the post-Marxist “cultural turn” (1998).

34 1994:108-109.

35 1996: 40.

36 See Jameson, 1991: 3, 35, 53 and especially 400.

37 See Paul Mattick’s (1981) critique of Late Capitalism. “Mandel adheres to two distinct theories of crisis at once: the overaccumulation theory, which is based on the relations of production, and the overproduction theory, which is based on the difficulties of realizing surplus value due to insufficient demand for consumer goods” (200). That aspect of Mandel’s theory which allows increasing consumption to partially compensate for overproduction, becomes the basis for his theory of the “Third Phase” of capitalist development, or “Late Capitalism”. Mandel’s consumption theory of crisis is that which is then used by Jameson to account for post-modernity as the commodification of culture. It is a short step from this theory to a messianic theory of cultural resistance as acts of virtuality in the face of consumer choice.

38 By this I mean that Arrighi separates out the sphere of money circulation (M-M’) from production, not merely in a real time circuit, M-C-M’, where excess money capital which cannot invested profitably results in speculation, but historically. Each hegemonic power goes through a period of productive development followed by a period of financial speculation. This is a retreat from Mandel’s position which conflates crises of overproduction and underconsumption where the circuit of capital is potentially arrested at the consumption moment, to a position in which financial speculation in the sphere of circulation (M-M’) creates a crisis that arrests the circuit of capital. See Robert Polin’s (1996) review of The Long Twentieth Century. As Polin puts it, “Arrighi never explicitly poses the most basic question about the M ­M ‘ circuit, which is, where do the profits come from if not from the production and exchange of commodities?” (115).

39 See Jameson “Culture and Finance Capital” in Jameson, 1998. Note the echo of this “overaccumulation” of money theory of capitalist crisis in Derrida”s “epidemic of overproduction”, 1994:63.

40 1996:33.

41 1994:10.

42 I see Derrida as following in the tradition of irrationalist philosophy of which Nietzsche and Heidegger are part. He is idealist in rejecting an objective reality outside consciousness. His idealism is subjective, as it is the individual consciousness rather than some external transcendental consciousness that gives meaning to being. For an excellent account of the role of Nietzsche and Heidegger as “indirect apologists” for capitalism against socialism in the irrationalist tradition, see Lukacs, 1980.

43 (1974: 25-28).

44 Derrida has no answer to the social causes of injustice. He argues that “justice” must come not from vengeance as with Hamlet, not from market exchange, but from pure gifts (presents) in a social “desert”. Here Derrida imagines that redistributive justice can proceed on the basis of an absence of social content let alone social relations; otherwise, he says, “justice risks being reduced again to juridical-moral rules, norms, or representations, within an inevitable totalizing horizon (movement of adequate restitution, expiation, or reappropriation” (28). Cf Spivak, 1995: 77.

45 Ibid 28-29. To attribute to Marx such views is quite a feat. It is the expression of a form of pious utopianism as we have seen. All the more utopian as the moral injunction to give what one does not have is not directed to those who can give some of what they have as charity. Derrida’s problem is that he cannot find a way to achieve justice in the here/now for fear of “evil, expropriation, and injustice”. But why fear what already exists in the historic social relations of capitalism? Because for Derrida the fear of the “inevitable totalising horizon” of dogmatic Marxism is much greater than the actually existing evil of capitalist expropriation and injustice. Marx did not counterpose the future ideal of the communist individual as the answer to capitalism today, but as the real outcome of the collective knowledge, party organisation, and mateship of a revolutionary alliance to expropriate and socialise the ‘dead labour’ of capitalist property.

46 Lukacs, 1980:255.

47 “I on my part start from a presupposition in presupposing myself; but my presupposition does not struggle for its perfection like ‘man struggling for his perfection’, but only serves me to enjoy it and consume it. I consume my presupposition, and nothing else, and exist only in consuming it. But that presupposition is therefore not a presupposition at all: for, as I am the unique, I know nothing of the duality of a presupposing and presupposed ego (an ‘incomplete’ and a ‘complete’ ego or man); but this, that I consume myself, means only that I am. I do not presuppose myself, because I am every moment just positing or creating myself, and am I only by being not presupposed but posited, and, again, posited only in the moment when I posit myself; that is I am the creator and creature” (Stirner, 1995:135).

48 Cf Stirner’s “self-determined” ego (Marx and Engels, 1976:308) and Derrida’s notion of the self in Derrida, 1997:16-22 and 1998:304.

49 I use the term “subjective idealism” here in the same sense as Lukacs. “The dissolution of Hegelianism, before Marx took the decisive step to the materialist overthrow of Hegelian dialectics, has the peculiarity that the attempts to break through the Hegelian barriers engendered a retrograde movement in these questions objectively. Bruno Bauer, in the effort to develop Hegelian dialectics further in a revolutionary way, lapsed into the extreme subjective idealism of a ‘philosophy of self-consciousness’. By thus caricaturing ­as the young Marx was already demonstrating at the time — the subjectivist aspects of the Phenomenology, and by reducing Hegel to Fichte, he too eliminated the social and historical motives from dialectics and made them far more abstract than they were in Hegel himself; he thus de-historicised and de-socialised dialectics. This tendency reaches its climax which tilts over into the absurdly paradoxical with Stirner” (1980: 254-5). Cf Leopold’s introduction to Stirner, 1995.

50 Paterson, 1971: 107.

51 Thomas, 1980; also Patterson, 1971 and Leopold, 1995.

52 Marx and Engels, 1976:142.

53 Ibid, 143.

54 Thomas, 155.

55 Ibid 142.

56 Ibid 147.

57 Marx clearly has a concept of historically specific social relations in The German Ideology. It arose from his break with the Feuerbach specifically in response to Stirner’s critique of Feuerbach and Marx. “The more the normal form of intercourse [social relations] and with it the conditions of the ruling class, develop their contradiction to the advanced productive forces, and the greater the consequent discord within the ruling class itself as well as between it and the class ruled by it, the more fictitious, of course, becomes the consciousness which originally corresponded to this form of intercourse (i.e., it ceases to be the consciousness corresponding to this form of intercourse), and the more to the old traditional ideas of these relations of intercourse, in which actual private interests, etc., are expressed as universal interests, descend the level of mere idealising phrases, conscious illusion, deliberate hypocrisy. But the more their falsity is exposed by life, and the less meaning they have for consciousness itself, the more resolutely are they asserted, the more hypocritical, moral and holy becomes the language of this normal society” (Marx and Engels, 1976:310). Also: “That money is a necessary product of definite relations of production and intercourse and remains a “truth” so long as these relations exist — this, of course is of no concern to a holy man like Saint Max, who raises his eyes towards heaven and turns his profane backside to the profane world” (ibid: 219). Cf Callinicos, 1985: 44-46.

58 Marx and Engels, 1976: 97.

59 Thomas, 146.

60 Derrida, 1994:30.

61 1996: 40.

62 Ibid: 38.

63 Ahmed, 1994.

64 Callincos 1991. Cf Trotsky’s position that the “degenerate workers’ states” were a contradictory unity of workers property and stalinist state power which could only be resolved by political revolution or social counter-revolution (1972). Lewis (1999) repeats Callinicos’ argument in more detail, charging Derrida with ignorance of “state capitalism”. It is beyond the scope of this paper to further develop the significant differences between these contending positions. Nevertheless because Derrida’s ignorance of Marxism is most profound on the question of method I don’t think that the state capitalist position can possibly correct it.

65 Compare Marx on Stirner’s self-determination as “absence of determination” (Marx and Engels,1976: 309) and Derrida on the messianic as “opening to the future or to the coming of the other as the advent of justice”. This is a discursive fantasy where Derrida imagines a desert preceding “all determinate community, all positive religion . . . it would link pure singularities prior to any social or political determination, prior to all intersubjectivity, prior to the opposition between the sacred and the profance”. Such a link would allow a new respect and tolerance . . . without this desert in the desert, there would be neither act of faith, nor promise, nor future, nor expectancy without expectation of death and of the other, nor relation to the singularity of the other” (1998:16-22).

66 Callinicos’ rejects commodity fetishism on philosophical and political grounds. Philosophically, he rejects any necessary link between social relations and consciousness, and specifically a link between exchange relations and bourgeois ideology. Thus the whole basis of Marx critique of fetishism which turns relations between men into relations between things as the source of ideology is rejected. Politically, Callinicos says that if fetishism is allowed then this suggests that “capitalism can reproduce itself indefinitely”. Both of these grounds are wrong. By avoiding Marx’s reified individual Callinicos apparently avoids “pessimism”. In its place he puts a groundless, fatalistic “optimism” based on an idealist notion of spontaneous class consciousness that must lead to workers remaining trapped by fetishised exchange relations (1985:131). Nor do I think that Eagleton’s warnings against “fetishism” are valid (1986:75). For an excellent discussion of the importance of Marx’s method and the theory of commodity fetishism in Marxism, see Rubin, 1973. For its application to the theory of the party see Lukacs, 1970 and 1971.

67 Briefly, the failure of materialist dialectics in Western Marxism results from the split between objective and subjective reality that can be united only in the programme of the revolutionary party. Callinicos cannot transcend this split because his stance is one of objective idealism in which the working class (rather than humanity) acts spontaneously, unmediated by the revolutionary unity of theory and practice in the party which is necessary to penetrate fetishised reality. On the other hand, Derrida is attempting to revise Marxism as a left-Hegelian subjective idealism. In both cases the self-activity of the individual is dehistoricised either by abstracting from social relations in Derrida’s case, or by abstracting from the alienated bourgeois subject in Callinicos’ case.

68 1986:87.

69 1996:87, 1995.

70 Laclau, 1995; Critchley, 1995.

71 1995:95.

72 1999:9 There are strong echoes here of Jameson’s endorsement of “weak messianism”.

73 1980:404, 411.

74 1996:40-41 n.7.

75 See Callinicos’ discussion in 1987: ch. 5.

76 See Marx on Stirner: “The unity of sentimentality and bragging is rebellion” (Marx and Engels, 1976:318) and “By rebellion we make a leap into the new, egotistical world” (ibid: 399). Compare Benjamin who sought to eliminate the “autonomous individual” of bourgeois culture and replace him/her with the critical intellectual who used dialectial materialism to destroy capitalism by means of critique which could explode the contradiction in the commodity at its point of highest tension — the dialectical image (Pensky, 1993; Lowy, 1996; Wohlfarth, 1996).

77 1999:248-9.

78 1999:253-4.

79 “For Saint Sancho however, self-determination does not even consist in will, but in indifference to any kind of determinateness…if Saint Sancho saves himself from determination by his leap into absence of determination . . . then the practical, moral content of the whole trick . . . is merely an apology for the vocation forced on every individual in the world as it has existed so far. If, for example, the workers assert in their communist propaganda that the vocation, designation, task of every person is to achieve all-round development of all his abilities, including . . . the ability to think, Saint Sancho sees in this only the vocation to something alien, the assertion of the “holy”. He seeks to free them from this by defending the individual who had been crippled by the division of labour at the expense of his abilities and relegated to a one-sided vocation against his own need to become different. . . . The all-rounded realisation of the individual will only cease to be conceived as an ideal, a vocation, etc., when the impact of the world which stimulates the real development of the abilities of the individual is under the control of the individuals themselves, as the communists desire” (Marx and Engels,1976:308-309 also 463). I would argue that this projected communist individual is the unity of theory and practice, which theoretically is foreshadowed in the party cadre of the Communist Party (Bolshevik).

80 Benjamin’s “marxism” had an idealist residue. This could be seen to result from his efforts to escape the crude (vulgar marxist) determinism of Stalinism, and his own personal isolation and intellectual standpoint. On Adorno’s and Brecht’s views on Benjamin see Broderson, 1996: 233-239.

81 Pensky, 1993:211-239.

82 Benjamin’s rejection of the “party” was probably more the effect of his isolation from the working class, than a cause of it. There is obviously no direct relationship between actual historic party membership and the incipient ‘communist’ individual Marx projects in the Germany Ideology. First, after 1924 the actually existing party was Stalinist and repressed or even murdered its dissidents. This meant that the “Left opposition” had few mass roots that could have sustained a “collective” proleterian culture. It would be interesting to compare the long-term legacy of Benjamin with his younger brother Georg who joined the party in 1923 and died in a concentration camp in 1942 (Broderson, 1996: 208).

83 See Broderson (1996:261) for an account that shows that Benjamin was but one of countless victims of fascism. His decision to kill himself in Port Bou on the French/Spanish border rather than be returned to Vichy France and to a concentration camp, followed frantic but futile phone calls to the US Consulate in Barcelona, and tragically occurred during a short period of one day when the Spanish authorities refused entry.

84 1996:70-72.

85 Thomas,1980:142.

86 Specifically Benjamin’s uncompromising attitude towards the “independence” of cultural history which for him is reduced to the history of class struggle! What about some Benjamin studies in place of “cultural studies”? (See Wohlfarth 1996.)

87 Following Marx, Lenin, Lukacs and Trotsky, my view of materialist dialectics is that it unites objective and subjective reality in the unity of theory and practice of communists. Since Lenin this formulation has been expressed as the unity of theory and practice in the organisation and programme of a democratic centralist party. Intellectual critiques of Derrida’s deconstruction do not unite theory with practice unless they are translated into a revolutionary programme and put into effect by a revolutionary party as the “proletarian scientist”. Specifically, Derrida’s politics would favour an individual contract between a worker and a boss. Since all work is “here/now” this contract should be very flexible. From a materialist dialectical standpoint, the revolutionary party would attempt to sign up individual workers to collective contracts that are enforceable by collective action such as the closed shop. In the process workers would be educated by the experience of winning more favourable conditions, exposing the “performativity” of the isolated worker as one determined by exploitative social relations rather than the “affirmation of the other”.

88 1999:231.

89 This breaking of the unity is an attempt by the petty bourgeios intelligentsia to “incorporate” the “servicable” parts of Marxism and “purify” the rest. Thus separating the exchange moment reduces exploitation to unequal exchange the province of the trade union bureaucray; freezing the distributional moment reduces exploitation to power relations and the maldistribution of wealth which can be reformed by parliament. . . . Freezing the consumption moment, reduces the notion of exploitation to individual errors of choice and hence to caveat emptor.

90 Derrida, 1999:237.

91 Marx and Engels, 1976:310.

92 Cf Ebert, 1996.

93 1994:40.

94 Ibid:52.

95 Ibid:81.

96 Ibid:31-32.

97 Just as in the 1890’s Max Weber borrowed from Marx in order to suborn him (Clarke, 1982) so in the 1990’s Derrida repays his debt to Marx by “buying him cheap and selling him dear”. Marx rejects the analysis of capitalism based on exchange-relations where profits “apparently” derive from “buying cheap and selling dear”. Similarly, I reject Derrida’s re-appropriation of Marx as similarly superficial because he “profits” from the “appearance” that Marx stands for distributional social justice rather than the revolutionary “essence” which is the socialisation of the means of production to produce use-values to meet needs.

98 Ibid: 59; 68. Rorty picks up on this when he says that Derrida “betrays his own project” by offering a view which is not totally devoid of “all dialectics, all theology, all teleology, all ontology” (1991:92-91). Rorty obviously sees Derrida as genuinely keeping alive some of the misconceived totalising spirits of Marx. He accuses Derrida of offering a “new metavocabulary which claims superior status” (1991:94).

99 1994:88-89.

100 1994:68.

101 See Lukacs, 1980. Specifically on post-1945 irrationalism (765-853).

102 1994:87-90.

103 Ibid 14, 14, 30. See also more recent statements along the sames lines in Derrida 1997 and 1998.

104 Stirner’s ego is an idealist essence because it abstracts from social relations and inserts a concept of the free ego. The “association of egos” is therefore meaningless. As Marx says of Stirners rebellion: “The difference between revolution and Stirner’s rebellion is not, as Stirner thinks, that the one is a political and social act while the other is an egoistical act, but that the former is an act while the latter is no act at all. The whole senselessness of the antithesis that Stirner puts forward is evident at once from the fact that he speaks of “the Revolution” as a juridical person, which has to fight against “what exists”, another juridical person” (ibid: 400).

105 Marx continues: “They entered into intercourse with one another as what they were, they proceeded “from themselves”, as they were, irrespective of their “outlook on life”. This “outlook on life” — even the warped one of the philosophers — could, of course, only be determined by their actual life. Hence it certainly follows that the development of an individual is determined by the development of all the others with whom [s]he is directly or indirectly associated, and that the different generations of individuals entering into relation with one another are connected with one another, that the physical existence of the later generations is determined by that of their predecessors, and that these later generations inherit the productive forces and forms of intercourse [productive relations] accumulated by their predecessors, their own mutual relations being determined thereby. In short, it is clear that development takes place and that the history of a single individual cannot possibly be separated from the history of preceding or contemporary individuals, but is determined by this history” (1976:463).

106 1994: 85-86.

107 Ahmad, 1994:103.

108 1999:241-2.

109 See Hamacher’s (1999) sympathetic interpretation of this point. It is not too difficult to see that Derrida’s notion of performativity is the (post) modern version of the existential, irrational subject. See Lukacs on the “Ash Wednesday of Parasitical Subjectivism” (1980: 489 passim).

110 See Soros, 1998: 6-27, and Giddens, 1995.

111 Crisis is understood here following Mattick, 1981.

112 Pilling, 1986.

113 Giddens, 1995:247.

114 Marx and Engels, 1962: 43-45.

115 Marx, 1973:99.

116 Hayek, 1935.

117 Despite his disclaimers and attempts to purge filiation, fraternity, paternity etc of the authority of the pre-existing everything (history), it seems to me that the logic of Derrida’s whole method is that of the priest/demagogue/saviour who speaks to the masses of the religion of pure egoism as personal salvation — his message? “faith, hope, charity”. . .

118 On this point see Deb Kelsh (1998).

119 Trotsky, 1971:62.

120 Derrida, 1994:7

121 Cf. Callinicos’ view that Marx confuses technical and social relations in The German Ideology (1985:131).

122 Here I follow Lukacs’ brilliant exposition of the Communist (i.e. Bolshevik) Party as the “conscious” vanguard of the proletariat. I cite only one passage: “The pre-eminently practical nature of the Communist Party, the fact that it is a fighting party presupposes its possession of a correct theory, for otherwise the consequences of a false theory would soon destroy it. Moreover, it is a form of organisation that produces and reproduces correct theoretical insights by consciously ensuring that the organisation has built into it ways of adapting with increase sensitivity to the effects of a theoretical posture. Thus the ability to act, the faculty of self-criticism, of self-correction and of theoretical development all co-exist in a state of constant interaction. The Communist Party does not function as a stand-in for the proletariat even in theory. If the class consciousness of the proletariat viewed as a function of the thought and action of the class as a whole is something organic and in a state of constant flux, then this must be reflected in the organised form of that class consciousness, namely in the Communist Party. . . . Thus in the theory of the party the process, the dialectic of class consciousness becomes a dialectic that is consciously deployed” (1971:327-8).

123 E.g. Lukacs, 1970, 1971; Lenin, 1976; Trotsky, 1975.

---

References

Ahmad, Aijaz (1994) “Reconciling Derrida: ‘Spectres of Marx’ and Deconstructive Politics”. In New Left Review 208, 88-106.Anderson, Perry and Patrick Camiller (1994) Mapping the West European Left. Verso. London.

Arrighi, Giovanni (1994) The Long Twentieth Century. Verso. London.

Benjamin, Walter (1973) Illuminations. Fontana. Paperback.

Berlin, Isaiah (1963) Karl Marx. (3rd Edition) Oxford U. P. London.

Boynton, Robert S (1997) “Letter from London: The Two Tonys”. The New Yorker, October 6.

Brodersen, Momme (1996) Walter Benjamin: A Biography. Verso.

Callinicos, Alex (1985) Marxism and Philosophy. Oxford U. P.

Callinicos, Alex (1987) Making History. Polity Press.

Callincos, Alex (1991) The Revenge of History. Polity, Cambridge.

Callinicos, Alex (1996) “Messianic Ruminations”. Radical Philosophy, 75, 37-41.

Cassidy, John (1997) “The Next Thinker; The Return of Karl Marx“. New Yorker, October 20-27.

Critchley, Simon (1995) “On Spectres do Marx”. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 21 (3) 1-30.

Derrida, Jacques. (1994) Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Routledge.

Derrida, Jacques (1995) Points . . . Interviews, 1974-1994. Stanford U. P.

Derrida, Jacques (1997) The Politics of Friendship. Verso.

Derrida, Jacques (1998) “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone”. In Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (eds.). Religion. Polity Press.

Gray, John (1998) False Dawn. Granta.

Derrida, Jacques (1999) “Marx and Sons”. In Sprinker (ed) Ghostly Demarcations. Verso.

Eagleton, Terry (1981) Walter Benjamin. Verso, London and New York.

Eagleton, Terry (1986) Against the Grain. Verso, London and New York.

Eagleton, Terry (1995) “Marxism without Marxism”. Review of Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx. In Radical Philosophy, 73, 35-37.

Eagleton, Terry (1996) The Illusions of Postmodernism. Blackwell , Oxford.

Ebert, Teresa (1996) Ludic Feminism and after: Postmodernism, Desire and Labor in Late Capitalism. U. of Michigan P.

Fletcher, John (1996) “Marx the Uncanny? Ghosts and Their Relation to the Mode of Production”. In Radical Philosophy, 75, Jan-Feb.

Giddens, Anthony (1995) Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Polity Press. London.

Giddens, Anthony (1998). The Third Way. Polity Press.

Habermas, Jurgen(1990) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Polity. London and New York.

Hamacher, Werner (1999) “Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity-Language and Derrida’s Specters of Marx. In Sprinker (ed) Ghostly Demarcations.

Harvey, David (1996) Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Blackwell, Oxford.

Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism. Verso.

Jameson, Fredric (1995) “Marx’s Purloined Letter: on Derrida and Marx”. New Left Review 209, 75-109.

Jameson, Fredric (1998) The Cultural Turn. Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998. Verso

Kelsh, Deb (1998) “Desire and Class: The Knowledge Industry in the Wake of Poststructuralism”. Cultural Logic, 1 (2). On-line: http://eserver.org/clogic.

Laclau, Ernesto (1995) “The Time is Out of Joint”. Diacritics, 25 (2) 86-96.

Laclau, Ernesto (1996) Emancipation(s). London and New York.

Lenin, V.I.(1976) The State and Revolution. Foreign Languages Press. Peking.

Leslie, Esther (1997) ‘The Multiple Identities of Walter Benjamin”. New Left Review 226, 128-135.

Lewis, Tom (1999) “The Politics of ‘Hauntology’ in Derrida’s Specters of Marx”. In Sprinker (1999).

Löwy, Michael (1996) “Against the Grain: The Dialectical Conception of Culture in Walter Benjamin’s Theses of 1940″. In Michael P Steinberg (ed.) Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History. Cornell.

Lukacs, Georg (1970) Lenin: A Study of the Unity of His Thought. NLB.

Lukacs, Georg (1971) History and Class Consciousness. Merlin Press.

Lukacs, Georg (1980) The Destruction of Reason. Merlin Press. London.

Macherey, Pierre (1999) “Marx Dematerialized, or the Spirit of Derrida”. In Sprinker (ed) (1999).

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels (1962) Manifesto of the Communist Party. In Selected Works. Vol.1. Foreign Languages Publishing House. Moscow.

Marx, Karl and Fred Engels (1976) The German Ideology. Progress Publishers. Moscow.

Marx, Karl (1973) Grundrisse. Penguin.

Marx, Karl (1976) Capital. Volume 1. Penguin.

Marx, Karl (1981) Capital. Volume 3. Penguin.

Mattick, Paul (1981) Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory. Merlin Press, London.

Negri, Antonio (1999) “The Specter’s Smile”. In Sprinker (ed.) Ghostly Demarcations.

Norris, Chrisopher (1997) New Idols of the Cave: On the Limits of Anti-realism. Manchester U.P.

Paterson, R.W.K. (1971) The Nihilistic Egoist Marx Stirner. Oxford U. P.

Pensky, Max (1993) Melancholy Dialectics. U. of Massachusetts P.

Pollin, Robert (1996) “Contemporary Economic Stagnation in World Historical Perspective”. New Left Review, 219, Sept/Oct. 109-118.

Pilling, Geoffrey (1986) The Crisis of Keynesian Economics. Croom Helm. London.

Roberts, Julian (1982) Walter Benjamin. Macmillan. London.

Rorty, Richard (1991) Essays on Heidegger and Others. Philosophical Papers. Vol 2. Cambridge U. P.

Rorty, Richard (1995) “A Spectre is Haunting the Intellectuals”. European Journal of Philosophy, 3 (3).

Rorty, Richard (1997) Truth, Politics and “Post-Modernism”. Van Gorcum.

Rubin, I.I. (1973) Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. Black Rose Books. Montreal.

Salemohamed, George (1995) “Derrida and the Marxism Promise”. Economy and Society, 24 (3) 471-482.

Soper, K (1996) “Specters of Derrida”. Radical Philosophy, 75, 26-31.

Soros, George. (1997) “Beyond Chaos and Dogma”. The New Statesman, 31 October, 1997. 24-27.

Soros, George. (1998) The Crisis of Global Capitalism. Little Brown. London.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti (1988) “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Nelson, C and L. Grossberg eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. U. of Illinois P. Urbana.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti (1994) “Limits and Openings of Marx in Derrida”. In Outside the Teaching Machine. Routledge, New York.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakrovorti (1995) “Ghostwriting”. Diacritics, summer, 1997. 65-84.

Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty (1996) “Speculation on Reading Marx: After Reading Derrida”. In D. Attridge, G Bennington and R. Young (eds.) Post-structuralism and the Question of History. Cambridge U. P.

Sprinker, Michael (ed.) (1999) Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Verso. London.

Stirner, Max (1995) The Ego and Its Own. Edited by David Leopold. Cambridge U. P.

Thomas, Paul (1980) Karl Marx and the Anarchists. Routledge and Kegan Paul. London.

Trotsky, Leon (1969) The Permanent Revolution. Pathfinder. New York.

Trotsky, Leon (1972) The Revolution Betrayed. Pathfinder. New York.

Trotsky, Leon (1975) In Defence of Marxism. New Park. London.

Uchiltelle, Louis (1997) “Global Good Times, Meet the Global Glut”. New York Times, November 16.

Wahlfarth, Irving (1996) “Smashing the Kaleidoscope: Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Cultural History”. In Michael P. Steinberg (ed.) Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History. Cornell U. P.

---

Contents copyright © 1999 by David Bedggood.Format copyright © 1999 by Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087, Volume 2, Number 2, Spring 1999.

geovisit();

Lost in the Crowd? Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Multitude in Argentina

Introduction

In their book Empire Hardt and Negri argue that today world capitalism has entered a new stage of development. ‘Empire’ is different from imperialism and is bigger than any particular country including the US. ‘Empire’ is opposed by the ‘multitude’ that is different from, and yet has greater potential for resistance, than pre-existing conceptions of class organisation.[1]

I welcome the challenge posed by Hardt and Negri.[2] But it is necessary to test this theory against the more standard neo-liberal, social democratic and Marxist approaches. Negri has himself claimed that his theory can explain recent events in Argentina. After the World Social Forum of January 2002, he stated that the Multitude is “walking on two legs”; the ‘movements of movements’ represented by Genoa, and the Argentinazo of December 2001. So here we have the opportunity to put Negri’s theory under scrutiny as a ‘new communist manifesto’ and as a political action program. ‘Empire’s’ initial appeal was its ‘fit’ with the eclectic notions of multi-class ‘networks’ or ‘movement of movements’ that is to be found in the World Social Forum of Porto Alegre (Hardt, 2002b; WSF, 2003). This now reverberates back with Negri and Cocco citing the WSF of 2002 as mounting the worldwide struggle of the Multitude against Empire (2002).

When the Argentinazo bursts on the scene in December 1991 it becomes the first clear expression of the Multitude against Empire. Negri and Cocco seize on it to demonstrate the fruitfulness of their concepts. The multitude came out on the streets on December 19 and 20 uniting the middle class and unemployed across class lines as an opposition to Empire (Negri and Cocco, 2002).[3] So the case of Argentina should allow us to see how far Hardt and Negri’s basic theory fits with the reality of a semi-peripheral or ‘developing’ country undergoing an economic, social and political upheaval.

Empire vs imperialism?

Empire puts forward the proposition that Empire is not located in any one imperialist country, especially the US. The US is not about to be replaced by Europe or China. Rather Empire transcends any nation state and is a global power with a legal/political repressive framework. For Negri this is a progressive shift from imperialism to empire created by the Multitude that now has the capacity to end the constituted power of Empire. Any reversion by the major powers back from the historic advance of Empire to ‘oil wars’ is regressive because it reactivates old populisms, fundamentalisms and even fascism, and hinders the formation of the Multitude (Negri and Cocco, 2002).

The strongest argument in Empire is that Empire and Multitude are now facing off directly without mediating institutions. This is posed as the stark opposition of the constituent power of the Multitude confronting the constituted power of Empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000:184-185). The question arises how do we identify the power protagonists on both sides? A problem here is that if Empire has no official nation-state backing what role is left to the various states at the centre and the periphery? Do we ignore the US sponsored invasions of Iraq, Bosnia (Gowan at al, 2001) or Afghanistan (Zizek, 2002b) or are they a manifestation of the regression of US imperialism from the global challenges of Empire? The latter it seems. Hardt and Negri attribute the US war drive to a regression from Empire back to US Imperialism (Hardt, 2002c; Negri, 2002b, 2002e; Negri and Cocco, 2002).

However, if Empire is legal/political framework that succeeds imperialism in the extraction of surplus value for the purpose of capital accumulation, surely it has to have a territorial base i.e. states. Negri talks of the ‘global aristocracies of multinational capitalism’. The closest he comes to defining this is to talk of the leaders of powerful states, such France and Germany, opposed to Bush’s ‘imperialist’ reaction (2002g). Hardt counsels these ‘elites’ to resist the US war drive in the name of the ‘Empire’ (2002). Here we have a clear statement of the inchoate, progressive Empire against the backward and outmoded imperialism.[4]

It seems that it is ‘international institutions’ such as the IMF/World Bank, and the UN Security Council as well as the ‘global aristocracies’ who own the multinational firms and banks that constitute the power of Empire.[5] On the face of it this is a new ‘ultra-imperialism’ where it is supposedly rational for capital to unite and dissolve national antagonisms. However, like the earlier theory of ultra-imperialism, these propositions seriously misunderstand the inbuilt nature of the rivalry between the major powers for a zero-sum repartition of the world.[6] In the post September 11 2001 world, it seems that these epochal rivalries have re-asserted themselves over fundamental questions of which imperialism should control the world. The question is, which set of social relations, imperialist, or of the Empire, manifests itself in Argentina?

Multitude vs proletariat

Second, who or what is the Multitude and how does it resist Empire on the ground? What has happened to the concept of class? Where have the old sites of class struggle gone? Hardt and Negri argue that the proletariat has been reconstituted as the Multitude in which ’communication workers’ who produce immaterial labour are the core.[7] The relationship of the urban middle class to the unemployed worker is rewritten. Both become included in the overarching concept of biopower that says that all whose bodies cooperate in production part of the Multitude.[8] It seems that a class alliance between the unemployed and the ruined middle class is no longer necessary because they are two elements of the same ‘class’ united in the common production of immaterial labour. Does this mean the Empire extracts most of its surplus from immaterial labour? The theoretical status of immaterial labour has been unclear because it lacked application (Blunden, 2001). Now that it has been apparently concretised in Argentina we have the opportunity to put this concept to a reality test. (Negri, 2002; Negri and Cocco 2002)

Let’s summarise the main arguments in Empire as they apply to Argentina. Empire is the product of the tendential shift from US imperialism under pressure from the Multitude below. US imperialism has exhausted its power to extract surplus value by dominating countries like Argentina as semi-colonies or client states (which is why the current warlike regressions are seen as episodic exceptions). The ruling classes (of the non-American powers and multilateral sectors of the US ruling class) are now the proponents of Empire. Empire is de-territorialized so Argentina is not a separate sovereign state but part of Empire. Its locus of constituted power is the multinationals and multinational organisations that displace national institutions. The Argentinean Multitude is recomposed around biopower relations of oppression and exploitation to now unite former class opponents. This Multitude confronts Empire unmediated by the Argentinean state. Rather UN sanctioned policing ultimately regulates the extraction of the collective, creative, biopower of the Argentinean Multitude. In the Argentinazo the Multitude revolts and attempts to create its own constituent power.

Let us now see if Hardt and Negri’s conception of the Multitude up against Empire can explain the Argentinazo which opened a period of pre-revolutionary ferment. Does Hardt and Negri’s conception of the Multitude account for the uprising and subsequent events? Less than a year-and-a-half later the election of the left-liberal Peronist Kirchner in May 2003 has seen the Argentinean working class contained within the frame of national politics. This seems to be the result of the return of the radicalised middle class to the left Peronism of Kirchner, and the cooptation of large sectors of the unemployed into the state apparatus by the labour bureaucracy. Was the failure of the Argentinazo to complete its mission the result of a weakness of the Multitude against the constituted power of the Empire? Or perhaps Argentina remains trapped as a semi-colony of US and EU imperialism so that its crisis has been contained by the traditional institutions of the Peronist national bourgeoisie in alliance with the bureaucratic union leaders. Where is the evidence that Empire has displaced Imperialism in Argentina?

Argentine nation state displaced by “Empire”?

The theory of imperialism would point to Argentina being in a similar situation in Latin America to that of Russia in Europe in 1917. If not the ‘weakest link’ in those countries exploited by imperialism, the severity of its crisis is undoubted. Clearly this conception pits nations against nations. Argentina is a semi-colony oppressed by imperialism and is engaged in a struggle for self-determination. The Argentinean people recognise national oppression and this shapes their anti-imperialist politics. The Argentinean bourgeois have a class interest in acting as agents of imperialism, and this role includes containing the resistance of the popular masses by appearing paradoxically as defenders of the nation against imperialism. Peronism balanced these conflicting class interests for the Argentine bourgeoisie in the post-WW2 period in the form of the popular or patriotic front that drew the working class into a cross class nationalist alliance.

But, says Negri, the crisis of neo-liberalism and the shift to the post-modern global Empire is in part a response to successful colonial struggles against imperialism. The result is that the national (or local) is now re-constituted by the deterritorialised Empire that exploits biopower globally. This means that colonial and semi-colonial sovereign states no longer exist and that the national revolutions are transcended by a post-modern globalisation that obliterates national borders. The Empire now exploits the labour of the Multitude without the mediation of the nation state. Thus, for Negri, wars of re-colonisation are the backward aberration on the part of rogue ‘imperialist’ states that must be opposed. Not by equally backward national liberation struggles as advocated by some elements in the WSF, rather by a ‘vertical’ anti-globalising ‘movement of movements’ expressed by more progressive elements of the WSF.[9]

By contrast, the Marxist account of ‘neo-liberal globalisation’ does not posit the end of national politics. On the contrary, the crisis and restructuring of international capital requires the state to impose the law of value by means of neo-liberal austerity measures.[10] The state is required to devalue capital and measure both constant and variable capital in order to re-create the conditions for restoring the rate of profit.[11] Abstract labour as the measure of value is necessarily material combining both manual and mental labour in the production of commodities. Capital drives state policies that creates unemployment, underemployment, flexibilisation and casualisation in manufacturing, services, communications and knowledge industries.

Neo-liberal restructuring therefore means national state deregulation and restructuring of national capitals in all industries (including the privatisation of state owned assets) as part of the ongoing concentration and centralisation of capital globally to increase surplus-extraction and revive profits. This process requires that the global market directly asserts itself in national economies eliminating all barriers formerly managed by the nation state. It also requires that the nation state remains very active in managing the social and political ‘crises’ that result within the frame of national politics. Does this hold for Argentina?

Finance capital ‘re-cycles’ Argentina

At the beginning of the 20^th century Lenin once referred to Argentina as a ‘British commercial colony’.[12] Despite its nominal political independence its economy was largely ‘owned’ by British banks. A large share of export earnings from Argentina’s internationally competitive primary production sector was exported as profits on foreign investment. In the post WW2 period, rising export earnings allowed Argentina to partially insulate its domestic economy, but this failed when prices slumped. The world capitalist crisis that began in the 1970’s exposed Argentina’s semi-colonial structural dependency and its indebtedness grew rapidly. The neo-liberal policies of the 1990s were designed to allow international capital to restructure the economy, buying up the best performing assets and closing down the least efficient. The cycle was complete. At the dawn of the 21^st century, Argentina’s finances were once more recolonised by the international financial institutions.

I argue here that Argentina has always been semi-colony of British, and more recently, of US and EU imperialism, all of which are now trying to solve their economic crises at the expense of the Argentinean people. Argentinean workers and oppressed are in turn, ‘resisting’ being made the ‘fall guys’ of these imperialist plans. Not to recognise the persistence of imperialist crisis and anti-imperialist struggle is to ignore the main thrust of the Argentinazo – its nationalism –and to fail to confront the reactionary consequences of an anti-imperialist struggle that does not transcend nationalism.

In Argentina we have a fairly classic crisis of a breakdown of the economy due to the relentless extraction of surplus value. Was this caused by the policy failures of the multilateral financial institutions of Empire? In which case, Hardt and Negri are in the same camp as the neo-liberals and Blairites who propose a regulation of international finance to overcome such defaults to imperialism. Or was the crisis caused by deep-seated and continuous imperialist domination of Argentina?

In the case of the former, it is true of course that the so-called global finance institutions oversaw this process. Stiglitz argues that the crisis is one of financial mismanagement of the IMF and World Bank (2002, 69-70). Argentina went from IMF ‘showcase’ to IMF ‘basket case’. Bhagwati says that this was the deliberate policy of the Clinton administration to impose the rule of Washington and Wall St on the world economy (2000). They propose liberal humanitarian (Blairite-type) solutions to reform the international financial institutions and to ‘rescue’ Argentina.

Yet what if the crisis was not one of a mere failure of these institutions to implement the correct policies. Perhaps they acted exactly as they were supposed to in pumping profits back home in the interests of their shareholders i.e. the US (and to a lesser extent European) imperialist ruling class. In the final analysis the policies of these institutions are designed to serve the interests of international finance capital based exclusively in the imperialist countries. Any ‘rescue’ of Argentina on their part would therefore be designed to protect their longer term investments. Therefore, to project onto these institutions a global rationality that puts them in the service of a deterritorialised international capital is utopian.

Argentina as client state

Nor can we blame the favourite target of the intellectual apologists and media in the US and EU –the failure of Argentine national institutions. This neo-liberal modernisation theory ignores Argentina’s structural dependency. The military regime and the Alfonsin and Menem regimes, whatever policies they adopted, were increasingly incapable of acting independently of the world economic crisis and its worsening impact on Argentina.[13] These regimes were driven mainly by external pressures and shocks, principally the debt crisis (Rock, 2002) into adopting neo-liberal crisis management policies that generated a worsening crisis of political legitimacy.

For these reasons the state could not resolve the successive crises that resulted from the inability and refusal of Argentinean workers to create more surplus value to make more profits and pay back yet more debt. In the 1980s this led to falling profits. The Banks and firms in Argentina started to fail. The IMF and World Bank stepped in to rectify this with the whole structural adjustment package, demanding balanced budgets, cuts in social spending, wages and conditions for workers, and privatisation of state assets as conditions for more loans.[14]

International investors continued to prop up the bankrupt economy right up to the Argentinazo. In the period since, Duhalde and Kirchner have tried to do deals with the IMF and World Bank that will require Argentine workers to continue to pay the debt albeit in easier instalments. Far from the Argentinean state being sidelined by Empire, it remains a ‘client state’, firmly in centre stage as the repressive instrument of imperialism in the financial re-colonising process.[15]

What we see in reality is US imperialism, re-colonising its semi-colony Argentina (not an abstract case of the ‘global reconfiguring the local’) to take more direct control of the economy using the local client state as its agent. This poses clearly the solution: that of anti-imperialism against both the US and its local/national agents. This fact is the foremost political lesson in Argentina today. The single most popular demand raised by the unemployed, the occupying workers and the ruined middle class is “they all most go”! This refers to the ‘political class’ of the right and left who are all perceived as being the servants of imperialism.[16]

This is hardly a case of the Argentinean ‘multitude’ bypassing the state and acting directly, and vertically, against Empire. The ‘national question’ becomes increasingly posed as the social question i.e. class against class. It is against this pressing reality that we have to consider the question of whether Hardt and Negri have provided an analysis of the power of the Multitude able to replace that of the working class and oppressed people to complete this historic task.

The Argentinean ‘multitude’

If Empire is still US imperialism behind the ‘face lift’ of multilateral agencies, what of the opposition to Empire – the multitude? Let us see how Negri and Cocco view the role of the main sectors in struggle.

Negri and Cocco (2002) identify three elements that constitute the Argentinazo. First, are the unemployed. The Argentinazo happened despite, or rather because of, the rise of unemployment and the ‘dissolution of the fundamental wage relation’. “…the almost complete disappearance of the actively employed workforce represented by the Peronist unions and the state did not stop the recent, solid and radical social mobilisations.” Therefore, say Hardt and Negri, the Argentinazo was not caused by a classic workers uprising but by the ‘social movement’ of the unemployed, separated from the wage relation, and now part of the Multitude.

[a] The Unemployed

The piquetero movement[17] is a major development. Originating in the north of Salta around Mosconi and other towns in 1991, these protests threatened to spread all over Argentina. Police repression used against the piqueteros generated a rising militancy and armed defence by the movement. To contain this militancy, successive governments have handed out job programs administered by the traditional union leadership and by new layers of bureaucrats thrown up by the movement. The effect of this has been to dampen down the movement, but it has not quelled a series of national assemblies that have continued to make militant demands, challenge the bureaucratic leaderships, and develop a range of effective tactics. James Petras commented that after the Argentinazo the nature of the demands were very ‘left’. The original piqueteros 21 point program of July 2001 included demands to repudiate the national debt and nationalise the banks and industries, and subsequent assemblies have raised the demand for a ‘workers and peoples government!’

How to explain the militancy of the leading layers of the reserve army of labour? The unemployed industrial workers figure strongly in Negri and Cocco’s analysis. They are evidence of the demise of the industrial proletariat as Empire has moved from industrial production to the social production of immaterial labour in Argentina. They are no longer in the capital wage labour relation, and nor are they citizens so represented, so this cannot explain their political role. Yet they have staged massive insurrections in the north of Argentina that have spread to other parts of the country. For Negri and Cocco then they are part of the Multitude, because of the ‘dissolution of the wage relation’, and because of their inclusion in the bio-political reproduction of production, where ‘marginalised’ workers complement the ‘flexibilisation’ of social production.[18]

Negri and Cocco explain the inclusion of the piqueteros in the Argentinazo as the ‘unity of singularities’ in the collective self-creation of the Multitude. Here they abstract from the concrete condition of unemployment to the imputed collective interests of the Multitude. This ignores the immediate interests of unemployed for work and for a living food basket. It overlooks the ability of the Duhalde regime to divide unemployed from employed on the basis of workfare schemes that tie the unemployed into the state welfare apparatus. Most important it glosses over the class barriers between unemployed industrial workers and the urban middle class. The irony is that the cross class alliance that emerged during the Argentinazo was motivated not by collective social labour, but by a spontaneous uprising against the regime for abandoning the interests of Argentineans as ‘social citizens’ constituted by the semi-colonial nation state. Negri and Cocco idealise the end of class differences brought about by Empire against the reality of different classes taking common refuge in the utopia of the failed patriotic front of Peronism. In the process Negri and Cocco divert attention from the real class alliances that have to be painstakingly built out of the wreckage of nationalism as the basis for socialism in Argentina.

Most Marxists would say that the nature of the crisis shows that the capital relation is still dominant. The neo-liberal program de-industrialised Argentina creating massive pools of unemployed especially in working class neighbourhoods of the big cities and the remote regions such as Salta in the north. More than 1200 companies have gone bankrupt and cast hundreds of thousands onto the scrap heap. These firms cover a range of domestic industries from steel, petrochemical, potteries, to more everyday food and textiles etc. Over 30% of Argentineans are now unemployed (and another 30% are ‘underemployed’) creating a reserve army of mainly displaced industrial workers who have recently and militantly entered national politics to demand jobs and decent welfare payments. The reality is that the unemployed see themselves as part of the working class aligned with employed workers.

For Marxists, unemployed industrial workers do not signify an end to the capital relation. Their role as a reserve army reinforces the capital relation. Thus at the level of appearances (distribution) they are divided from employed workers. By themselves they do not have a direct lever on the productive apparatus.[19] While road-blocks may bring transport, and some production, to a halt, they expose the piqueteros to state violence isolated from the employed workers organisations. For that reason, piquetero politics has been economistic in making immediate demands on the national state, even if using increasingly militant means of making them.[20] This means that unemployed are a force that can have only a limited progressive role. Traditionally Marxists have argued that the success of workers’ struggle must be decided one way or the other by the intervention of organised workers power at the point of production. Rather than idealise the unity of unemployed and employed as collective singularities (the ‘absolute democracy’ of the Multitude), Marxists find ways to unite the unemployed in defence of exiting jobs so that workers can use their labour to fight for jobs for all.[21]

[b] The Middle Class

Negri and Cocco’s second element of the Argentinazo is the ‘middle class’ which unites with the unemployed in the Multitude. “How was it possible to politically ally side by side the unemployed piqueteros excluded by the neo-liberal restructuring and suffering from job cuts and cuts in social spending, with the ‘ahoristas;’ –the small savers and private urban service workers whose wages were artificially inflated by monetary policy of the currency board? This was possible because these two elements have many more things in common than the traditional theory of classes [Marxism] reveals and in fact tries to conceal.” (Negri and Cocco).

In other words, what did the unemployed and the ‘ruined middle class’ have in common? In Argentina the term middle class is used loosely to mean well-paid professional workers, as well as self-employed and even small bourgeoisie.[22] It was the urban middle class, especially in Buenos Aires, that prospered under the economic nationalism of the post-war period, and managed to survive relatively intact during the neo-liberal years. But with the onset of the current crisis this middle class has been massively squeezed. It was hit hard by the collapse of the banking system in late 2001 and it is the ruined urban middle class that is the main force behind the formation of the Popular Assemblies (Assembleas Populares or PAs), and the massive rallies that brought down de la Rua in December 2001.

According to Hardt and Negri the rise of immaterial labour is displacing the traditional industrial factory worker and is now the leading edge of the Multitude (2000:53). This means also that the immaterial workers are the vanguard of the Multitude against Empire. Negri and Cocco make much of the failure of classic Marxism to explain the ‘cross class’ alliance of the unemployed and urban middle class. Implied in this is that the ‘urban middle class’ is comprised mainly of immaterial workers who have a strong identity of interest with the unemployed. We can test this by looking at the class composition of the Popular Assemblies and the demands raised by the PAs. Here we have combined salaried workers whose salaries were paid via the banks with self-employed and small employers. Hardt and Negri define immaterial labour in terms of provision of services that do not produce a material commodity such as intellectual, communications and linguistic work. Since such ‘immaterial’ or service workers are a significant element in the urban class structure, did they play a distinctive role in the PAs?

Are the immaterial workers the most politically advanced sector of struggle? The evidence so far suggests that this is not so. The PAs were formed spontaneously after the Argentinazo around the demands “all of them out”, non-payment of the national debt and the nationalisation of the banks. But these demands do not have a clear anti-capitalist content. They express an opposition to the ‘political class’ who are perceived as ‘in the pay’ of imperialism. At one level they also express nostalgia for a return to a national populist politics since abandoned by Menem and de la Rua. In the last analysis these are populist statist demands made on the basis of all citizens’ right to have their small savings protected by the national state from the multinational banks.

The PAs have in general also taken a strong stand against political party representation of the ‘left’ as well as the ‘right’ rejecting socialism as a solution to the national crisis. The broadening of the PA’s political demands to include solidarity with other sectors has been slow in developing and usually only in those PAs where the initiative of a minority linked to workers’ movements or political parties has outweighed the more traditional petty bourgeois elements. Most important, however, since the Argentinazo, among those PAs in the working class neighbourhoods, political alliances have formed with the piqueteros but also with the occupied factories. This reflects a differentiation between those PAs who have reverted to negotiations with the state, and those who have rejected ‘negotiations’ and ‘pacts’ with the state, and now fight for radical demands including the nationalisation of workplaces under workers control. Rather than supporting Hardt and Negri’s immaterial middle class as a new vanguard, we see here the ‘radicalised middle class’ recognising its common interest with the left wing of the industrial labour movement (self-organised as a unity of employed and unemployed) – a reality that appears to throw the concept of the Multitude completely out of play.

[c] Multitude as revolutionary subject

The third and last element of the Argentinazo put forward by Negri and Cocco (2002) is the role of the Multitude as revolutionary subject. Since they reject any revolution arising out of the capital-labour relation, the self-emancipation of the Multitude has no relationship to the classic struggle between workers and capitalists over ownership and control of the means of production. Therefore there is no perspective of building unions, occupying factories, taking over production and generalising this movement into strike committees, general strikes, and ultimately a seizure of state power.[23]

“The politics of the Multitude is constituent of the work of the Multitude and vice-versa, definitely outside the dialectics of ‘capital and wage labour’ whose synthesis is always the development of capital. Indeed, the constitutive power has nothing to do with the outdated interests of power: unity of the subject (people), the forms of their composition (social relations between individuals) and ways of government (monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, simple or combined).”

In other words, the constituent power of the Multitude will not contest ownership of the factory, challenge the bourgeoisie in parliament, or seek to overthrow governments. Rather its power is to resist and exit Empire by transforming it from within. So what has been transformed in Argentina since the Argentinazo? I would argue that the development of the factory occupations is the only significant transformation to take place in the development of the revolution. Not only is Negri completely blind to this, he cannot recognise that the other sectors or ‘movements’, the Popular Assemblies, and the Madres, are increasingly recognising the occupations as the key to the success of the revolution.[24]

As we have seen, Argentina was subjected to vicious neo-liberal restructuring of its protected industries. As the bankruptcies mounted in the last years, many employers simply walked out and abandoned their plant. Rather than accept that they had lost their jobs and join the unemployed masses, workers began to occupy the factories, shops and clinics to keep them producing. There are over 100 factories under occupation and they constitute a major advance as centres of potential workers control over production, but also organised community services including self-help, self-defence, and of cultural activities.

What began as sheer basic survival mode for most workers has proven to be a huge political school for revolution. This has produced a real challenge to the system of private property. Employers are trying to regain control and many attempts by police and hired thugs to break up the occupations have taken place. The workers have called on support from the piqueteros and the PAs and this has seen most occupations successfully defended. The defence of the occupations has become a catalyst for unity across all the sectors of struggle. Some have created jobs and are backing the call of the Subte (underground railway) workers for a 6 hour day and an extra shift. We now see the beginnings of a real unity of employed, unemployed, the ‘ruined middle class’, the ‘mothers’ and the students, coming together.

For Negri and Cocco, however, the occupations (some like Zanon go back over a year before the Argentinazo) do not figure in their analysis, since they are the old ‘horizontal’ backbone of the industrial proletariat and are an impediment to the emergence of the Multitude. As we shall see, this single omission renders their concept of the Multitude totally unreal as a revolutionary subject.

The key role of factory occupations

Of all these sectors in struggle, clearly the factory occupations pose the biggest challenge to capital. The occupations have now become the ideological testing ground for the whole movement. We do find a coexistence of production and politics here, but one in which production relations are determinant. Basic issues in this debate are: First, the workers have control over means of production. Second, they are proving that they can produce essential commodities without employers or managers. Third, this has inspired other elements to defend these occupations uniting sectors of resistance. Fourth, the political question of who should own and control these factories is being debated.

The state authorities and no doubt the US imperialists are alarmed by the threat posed by the occupations. It is trying to find a way to return the factories to their private owners by allowing workers to lease the factories and pay outstanding debts before they retain any of the proceeds. This is opposed by some of the key occupations like Brukman[25] and Zanon[26] where there is a campaign to get the state to nationalise factories under workers control and without compensation to the private owners.

What is at stake here surely is the classic Marxist concept of ‘dual power’ rather than Hardt and Negri’s misconception of ‘constituent power’. The new power that workers constitute is not against the constituted power of Empire, but is the power over the means of production owned and controlled by imperialism and backed by local state power. This can be the only meaning of ‘constituent power’ for the working class – i.e. workers’ power. In Argentina it is spoken of clearly, as does Hebe de Bonafini, as the basis for a workers and people’s power over their own lives. “If we win Zanon, we can win them all… we can be an example to the world”. [27]

Why have these sectors of struggle emerged? Returning to the question posed at the start, can they be explained (even predicted) on the basis of the Marxist theory of imperialism, or is it necessary to develop a new theory of Empire to do so? I suggest that what we find in Argentina today is a classic class struggle argued by Marxists for more than a century. Argentina is a semi-colony whose infrastructure has been largely destroyed by restructuring its productive base. But it is those traditional workers displaced by the neo-liberal de-industrialisation that have formed the powerful piquetero movement.

Similarly, the factory occupations are not the response of immaterial labour to a global empire, but the life and death struggle of manual workers for survival when their factories close down. The ruined middle class is partly composed of communications and social workers. Are they leading the ‘resistance’ to Empire? They have been politicised but their politics does not of itself go beyond radical opposition to the ‘political class’. It requires a radicalisation of the PAs on the part of those worker or ruined petty bourgeois elements in support of the leading sectors in struggle. A growing reserve army of impoverished industrial workers and a ‘declassed’ middle class, formerly united by a Peronist populism, and now united around the defence of production, are both symptoms of crisis-ridden semi-colonial capitalism and not Empire.

While the divisions within the proletariat and middle class are historically deep and wide (the legacies of the dictatorship and Menenism) the severity of the crisis has radicalised some sectors of the middle class into an alliance with employed and unemployed workers against the US, IMF and the Argentine ‘political class’. Again, these historic divisions are those we would expect from the theory of imperialism. Peronism was a system of national patronage in which large segments of the labour movement were clients of the national bourgeoisie. It is the inability of the Argentine bourgeoisie to use its political patronage to buy off the more militant sectors in struggle that has created the ‘crisis of Peronism’.[28] So the Multitude in Argentina looks very much like the old proletariat rising up against its long-time local and imperialist exploiters and oppressors and raising the possibility of a socialist solution to the crisis.

The question of state power

The demand ‘all of them out, not one should remain ‘ is interpreted by some as a full-scale challenge to the bourgeois state, and by others as an invitation for workers’ leaders to contest elections. This difference of opinion was recently centred on the question of boycotting the upcoming elections for the Presidency called by Duhalde,[29] and the question of the Constituent Assembly. Everyone, whatever their political colour, sees the Argentinean state as the locally constituted power. How appropriate that the debate over who should hold state power should be so clearly posed as a test of Hardt and Negri’s ‘constituent power’!

The militant piquetero assemblies with the backing of the more radical PAs and factory occupations have consistently called for workers to organise independently of the state and put forward the demand for “workers to power”. This amounts to the demand that the workers and the oppressed people replace the bourgeois state with a new state. Yet it is not widely perceived as the classic Leninist/Trotskyist ‘Workers’ government’ or workers’ ‘dictatorship.[30] There is widespread confusion about the form of such a state. Yet there is a serious move towards dual power as the class struggle tendency calls for mass actions such as more road blocks, indefinite general strikes and the formation of self-defence committees. The question of power is being posed also by those who advocated an ‘active boycott’ against the forthcoming elections to bring Duhalde down.” [31]

Some left reformists, for example the ‘Citizens’ Forum’ sponsored by Elisa Carrio, Luis Zamora and CTA chair de Gennaro, see the elections as an opportunity to put forward a Constituent Assembly under the existing constitution. This of course cannot be a challenge to constituted power. Others want the Constituent Assembly to come out of an active boycott which either means that the ‘active boycott’ is expected to fail or they know in advance that organs of dual power will fail (PO-Workers’ Party). Yet others want the mobilisation of workers direct action to result in a Revolutionary Constituent Assembly (PTS-Socialist Workers Party).[32]

What we have here is a case of old-fashioned class politics, where the various currents on the left contest the leadership of the proletariat. Those who want to contest the elections short of an active boycott and general strike to bring down Duhalde are falling into the electoral trap. After a year of pre-revolutionary struggles and the gradual uniting of the sectors in struggle, Duhalde is using the elections to steer the workers’ movement into a blind alley. It is no accident that those on the left who take this line are those who have historically taken a stage-theory approach to national liberation.[33]

For this reason it is crucial for those on the class struggle left to take a lead in organising and mobilising all the sectors in struggle under the banner of direct democracy. This is necessary to establish the political independence of the working class as the revolutionary class subject capable of leading and winning a socialist revolution. This class independence will grow out of the struggle for national congresses of rank and file delegates of all the sectors in struggle dedicated to putting forward and acting on a program of demands such as the piqueteros 21 demands of 2001. It is also expressed in the formation of self-defence organisations to defend the interests of the workers and oppressed people from state and military reaction.

The independence of the working class is the key to the fate of the ruined middle class whose politics can easily be drawn into radical right or fascist movements directed at the working class. The remains of the Peronist movement can easily turn into a fascist front backed by the military to smash any new Argentinazo. Yet the stronger the proletarian movement the more will the ruined middle class gravitate to its leadership. But because this poses the question of state power and private property, the middle class has to be convinced that its survival as petty bourgeois is no longer possible, and that socialism will at least provide them with a future less than barbaric.

This is why the program of the proletariat and oppressed people should include demands that allow the ruined middle class and self-employed farmers, artisans etc to keep what petty property they have, so that they can be included in the future plans for the economy. Further, demands that seek to nationalise the big banks and big factories, agricultural co-operatives and small farms should be integrated into the plan to ensure that food and other necessities are produced. It will become clear through this experience that small holders, and the self-employed, were never exploited by the workers but by the rich owners of capital.

The unfinished national revolution

I argue that the analysis above demonstrates is that it is not Hardt and Negri’s Empire or the Multitude that figure in the Argentinean crisis, but the class forces found in Lenin’s ‘imperialism’ and Trotsky’s ‘uneven and combined development’. Argentina’s crisis can be understood as one that results from US imperialism attempting to solve its own crisis at the expense of the workers and people of not only Argentina but of the oppressed workers and peasants of Latin America.

In the first instance a successful Argentinean national revolution must be a workers’ and poor peoples’ revolution in one country. In the process is will become clear that this revolution must become a socialist revolution to succeed. This is because national revolutions do not miraculously transform themselves into international movements that can transform and disarm Empire from within, but come face to face with the armed reaction of imperialism. Nor will such a revolution survive without the support of a federation of socialist republics in Latin America – at least Chile and Brazil, or Mexico and Venezuela. But that alone will not be sufficient. It will not overcome the problem of backwardness and economic scarcity that remains the hallmark of the colonial and semi-colonial world. Unless one or more imperialist states forms the basis of such a socialist federation, LA ‘revolutions’ will succumb to sustained imperialist military and economic embargos and to their own relative economic backwardness.[35]

The US has a history of military intervention in Latin America. Its ‘new world order’ requires a stepping up of that intervention. That is why it promotes the various counter-revolutionary wars it calls ‘Plans’ such as the Plan Colombia. It has recently included these incursions as part of the ‘war on terror’ to change ‘regimes’ in so-called ‘failed states’. The outcome of the revolution in Argentina will be decided in the last instance by the international solidarity of workers in the advanced capitalist states refusing to allow their ruling classes to use the ‘war on terror’ as a pretext for ‘preventative wars’ to smash the popular and workers revolution against imperialism and capitalism.

References

Balakrishnan, Gopal (2000) ‘Hardt and Negri’s Empire’. New Left Review, 5 Sept/Oct. http://newlefreview.net/NLR23909.shtml

Beasley-Murray, Jon (2001) ‘Lenin in America’. Review of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 2000

http://www.art.man.ac.uk/SPANISH/Writings/empire.html

Bhagwati, Gadget (2000) The Winds the Hundred Days. The MIT Press, Cambridge.

Blunden, Andy (2001) ‘Negri & Hardt’s Concept of Immaterial Labour.’ http://home.mira.net/~andy/blackwood/empire03.html

Brown, Nicholas and Mire Szeman/Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt (2002) ‘Subterranean Passages of Thought’: Empire’s Inserts.’ Cultural Studies 16 (2) 193-212.

Callinicos, Alex (2001) ‘Toni Negri in Perspective’ International Socialism Journal, No 92

http://www.isj1text.ble.org.uk/pubs/isj92/callinicos.htm

Chingo, Juan and Gustavo Dunga (2001) ‘Empire or Imperialism? A debate with Giovanni Arrighi’s “Long Twentieth Century” and Michael Hardt’s and Toni Negri’s “Empire”. Estrategia Internacional No 17 Abril

Chomsky, N (2003) article on ‘preventative war’

Day, Ronald E. (2002) ‘ Social capital, Value, and Measure: Antonio Negri’s challenge to capitalism’ in Journal of American Society for Information Science and Technology, 53 (12).

http://www.lisp.wayne.edu/~ai2398/socialcapital.html

Edvinsson, Rodney and Keith Harvey (2002) ‘Beyond Imperialism? a journey through Empire. LRLCI, London. www.workerspower.com

Gowan, Peter (2001) ‘Neoliberal Cosmopolitanism’ New Left Review, Sep/Oct. 79-93.

Gowan, Peter, Leo Panich and Martin Shaw (2001) ‘The State, Globalisation and the New Imperialism: A Roundtable Discussion’, Historical Materialism, Vol 9 (1) (3-38)

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000) Empire. Harvard University Press. Cambridge.

Hardt, Michael (2002a) Zagreb Interview with Michael Hardt. Broadcast on Croatian Radio, Third Program, 12/5/2002. A-INFOS NEWS SERVICE http://ainfos.ca/ and generation_online digest, Vol 1 #138 –1 msg

Hardt, Michael (2002b) ‘Porto Alegre: Today’s Bandung?’ New Left Review, 14, March-April.

Hardt, Michael (2002c) “Global Elites must realise that US intervention isn’t in their interests” The Guardian, December 18, 2002.

Holloway, John (2002) ‘Going in the Wrong Direction Or Mephistopheles: Not Saint Francis of Assisi’. Historical Materialism, Vol 10 (1)

Klein, Naomi (2003) ‘Argentina: a new kind of revolution: Out of the Ordinary.’ http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,880651,00.html

Kraniauskas, John (2000) ‘Empire, or multitude’ Radical Philosophy 103, Sept/Oct. 29-39.

Lovink, Geert (translator) (2003) ‘Bible Lessons: The Empire Debate – Audit after 3 years of discussion of Hardt and Negri’s ‘Empire’

http://www.generation-online.org/ 2/February 2003

Michaels, Kevin (2002) ‘The non-dialectical Marxism of Hardt and Negri’, News & Letters, April. http://www.newsandletters.org/Issues/2002/April/essay_apr02.htm

Montag, Warren (2001) ‘Review of ‘Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State.’ Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Historical Materialism, Vol 9 (196-204).

Munck Ronaldo (2001) ‘Review of Hardt, M and Negri, Empire,’ Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press. Capital Logic 3 (1) 2001 http://eserver.org/clogic/3-1&2/munck.html

Negri, Antonio (1999) Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State. University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis

Negri, Antonio ‘ (2000) Alma Venus: Prolegomena to the Common’

http://www.generation-online.org/t/almavenus.htm

Negri, Antonio (2002a) ‘S11 the class in the Western mind/the Imperialist backlash on Empire. Interviewed by Ida Dominijanni

generation_online digest (16 September)

Negri, Antonio (2002b) ‘Ruptures Within Empire; The Power of Exodus. An Interview with Toni Negri by Guiseppe Cocco and Maurizio Lazzarado

http://www.generation-online.org/empireruptures.htm

Negri, Antonio (2002c) ‘Value and Affect’

http://www.generation-online.org/t/valueaffect.htm

Negri, Antonio (2002d) Approximations: Towards an ontological definition of Multitude. http://www.generation-online.org/t/approximations.htm

Negri, Antonio (2002e) ‘The Imperialist backlash on Empire: S 11 a clash in the Western mind. Interview by Ida Dominijanni

http://www.generation-online.org/t/backlash.htm

Negri, Antonio (2002f) ‘Porto Alegre, Sad Empire: Stephane Mandard interview Toni Negri’ http://www.generation-online.org/t/portoalegre.htm

Negri, Antonio (2002g) ‘ ‘Empire and the Multitude: A dialogue on the new order of globalisation. Antonio Negri and Danilo Zolo.

http://www.generation-online.org/t/empiremultitude.htm

Negri, Antonio and Giuseppe Cocco (2002) ‘O Trabalho Da Multidao e o exodo Constituinte: o “Quilombo” Argentino’ http://www.generation-online.org/t/17December 2002 My translation from Portuguese.

Petras, James (2002a) ‘The Unemployed Workers’ Movement in Argentina’ Monthly Review, 53 (8) January.

Petras, James (2002b) ‘US Offensive in Latin America: Coups, Retreats and Radicalization’ Monthly Review, 54 (1) May.

Proyect, Louis (2001) ‘Hardt-Negri’s ‘Empire’: a critique.’ http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/modernism/hardt_negri.htm

Rock, David (2002) ‘Racking Argentina’ New Left Review, 17 Sep/Oct. 55-86

Sheehan, Thomas (1979) Review ‘Italy: Behind the Ski Mask’ New York Review of Books August, 16. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/7727

Stiglitz, Joseph E (2002) Globalization and its Discontents. W.W. Norton, New York.

Trotsky, Leon (1969) The Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects. Pathfinder, New York.

Trotsky, Leon (1974) Writings of Leon Trotsky [1938-39],. Pathfinder Press, New York.

World Social Forum (2003) “WSF 2003- January 23 to 28, 2003 – Porto Alegre, Brazil”. http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br

Wright, Steve (1996) ‘Negri’s Class Analysis: Italian Autonomist Theory in the Seventies’ Reconstruction 8 (Winter/Spring) http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/aut_html/opsoc.html

Zizek, Slajov (2001) ‘Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century?’ Rethinking Marxism, Vol 13 (3/4).

Zizek, Slajov (2002a) ‘Seize the Day: Lenin’s Legacy’ Review of Lenin by Helene Carrere d/Encausse, Holmes and Meier, 2001.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/lrb/articles/0,6109,761903.00.html

Zizek, Slajov (2002b) ‘Taking on America’ Spiked online

http://www/spiked-online.com/printable/00000006DAA75.htm

---

[1]Most of the commentary from the ‘left’ has been welcoming. In particular, Negri is seen as reviving an optimism of the intellect that has been overcome by pessimism in recent years (Beasley-Murray, 2001). Zizek asks if Empire is the Communist Manifesto for the 21^st century (2001). He then has second thoughts and returns to his rediscovery of Lenin as messiah (Zizek, 2001). The return to a forthright and even enthusiastic focus on class struggle is regarded as healthy, even if doubts remain about Negri’s failed workerist politics of the 1970’s (Sheehan, 1979, Wright, 1996) carrying over to the new millennium and underestimating Capital’s power to impose its will (Holloway, 2002). Others have criticised Hardt and Negri for developing concepts that are not directly related to actually existing anti-capitalist struggles (Munck, 2001). There is an almost unhealthy idealisation of ‘America’ (Beasley-Murray, 2001) but no real reality testing when the US bombs Afghanistan (Negri, 2002; Zizek, 2002b). Where is the evidence that the multitude can constitute power against constituted power? Yet, despite these reservations, the book is seen as a challenge to both left and right that demands a response. In particular it demands a response from those who would see in Hardt’ and Negri’s ‘Empire’ a dangerous diversion from opposition to the ‘US Empire’ (Gowan, 2001).

[2] I have major problems with their method of analysis. This is particularly so in the attitude towards ‘resistance’ that substitutes capitalist class relations for the collective ‘singularities’ of the Multitude on a global scale. Ultimately, Hardt and Negri employ a non-Marxist method that rejects dialectics and the contradiction between use-value and exchange value underpinning capitalist social relations. History becomes the result of the ‘accumulations of class struggles’ (Chingo and Dunga, 2001). Negri tries to intellectually override the historic barrier of capital to labour by investing in the Multitude the spontaneous capacity to free its use-value from exchange value (the market) in act of collective subjective resistance.

[3] “It is exactly in the tragedy of Argentina that we find, in a way still more powerful, the work and politics of the Multitude. In Argentina, the Multitude appears as the contender against the Empire. The uprisings of 19 and 20 December 2001 knocked down not only the government, but opened up a formidable period of experimentation and political, economic and social innovation. The blockading of roads by the piqueteros, the carcerolazos of the urban middle class, the systematic siege of the banks by the ahorristas, the neighbourhood and inter-neighbourhood assemblies, the self-management of the occupied factories by the sacked workers and the supportive economic networks, constituted a new configuration of the movement of movements.” (Negri and Cocco, 2002)

[4] Negri: ‘I think we could say that the American leadership is deeply weakened precisely by the imperialist tendencies that it occasionally expresses…the military superpower of the US is, as we know, largely neutralised by the impossibility of being used in its nuclear potential. And this is good news. From the monetary point of view, the US is increasingly exposed and weakened on financial markets: and this is also great news. In other words, with all probability, the US will soon be forced to stop being imperialist and recognise themselves in Empire.” (2002g).

[5] Perhaps these might develop further into the international agencies proposed by Stiglitz (2002) or Soros (1998) to regulate the anarchy of international finance? These writers are neo-liberals who have ‘converted’ to a post-Keynesian or ‘Third Way” position that owes much to the revival of ‘ultra-imperialism’. (See note below).

[6] The classic debate on ‘Ultra-imperialism’ was between Kautsky and Lenin. Kautsky argued that the imperialist powers did not need to be rivals, but could unite as an ‘internationally united finance capital’ i.e. ‘ultra-imperialism’ Lenin (1964:271). Thus the workers movement could prevent wars by appealing to capital’s interest in global integration. This theory foreshadows Hardt and Negri’s view that the ‘multitude’ can force imperialism to mutate into Empire. Lenin’s response to Kautsky serves as a response to Hardt and Negri. “Ultra-imperialism” is ‘ultra-nonsense’ because monopolies (MNCs today) are driven to compete economically by means of trade and military wars. To suggest that global finance capital can overcome the unilateral divisive tendencies of industrial capital and create global peace makes it out to be a progressive force, very similar to the way Hardt and Negri put forward the possibility of Empire as a multilateral transcending of imperialism.

[7] “It is in that sense that the Multitude is a class concept. It is always productive and in movement. Considered from the point of view of the movement, the Multitude is exploited in the process of production; seen from a spatial point of view, the Multitude is still exploited as part of productive society i.e. in the social cooperation of production. The concept of the Multitude as a class should be seen as different from the concept of the working class. Indeed the working class is a limited concept, from the point of view of production (essentially industrial workers) and that of social cooperation (not many assembly workers left). If we make the Multitude the new class concept, the notion of exploitation will be redefined as the exploitation of cooperation: not cooperation of individuals, but of singularities, exploitation of the assembly of the singularities, of the movements that compose the assembly of the assemblies that makes up the movements.” (Negri and Cocco 2002)

[8] “In the Argentinazo, the end of the political neo-liberalism appears as the end of constituent power and the political potential of the Multitude. A traditional analysis of its social composition would bump immediately into its fragmentary and irreconcilable elements: urban middle class on one side, and unemployed proletarians from the periphery on the other. Can such an analysis explain the peculiar conjunction and composition of interests arising from the neo-liberal period? Can it explain the complete ending of any form of representation and delegitimising of all instances of constituted power? For beyond the difficulties that the Argentine movement may be facing and will face, these constituent elements remain and they will remain like an essential launch pad for the movement of movements itself to think its own concept of the Multitude. This includes the possibilities to link together in the development of constituent power of the cooperative Multitude its work and its capacity to oppose capitalist power. The Argentine movement constituted itself in an event without defined (pre-determined) purpose, in a rupture with the collective perception. ”(Negri and Cocco 2002)

[9] Hardt and Negri seem to have swallowed whole the neo-liberal ‘globalisation thesis: the description of the surface features of the economic crisis of world capitalism since the early 1970s that does not penetrate to the underlying causes of crisis. Thus they see the penetration of national economies by international capital as evidence of Empire, and the breakdown of economic nationalism as loss of sovereignty and evidence of the Multitude. However, the superficiality of such a view has been exposed to tough rebuttals from Marxists as ‘globalony’. Globalisation is still imperialism, if somewhat ‘recycled’ (Petras and Veltmeyer, 2002).

[10] At its heart neo-liberal economics merely assert the primacy of the operation of the law of value by which commodities exchange at their value determined by the socially necessary labour time required to produce them. This requires an attack on economic nationalism that regulates to protect the home market from international competition, thereby suppressing the law of value. In the case of Argentina, deregulation and the operation of the currency board, forced Argentina to open up to flows of finance and trade, and removed controls over its money supply. Instead of economic ‘development’ it created indebtedness and austerity policies to pay the debt.

[11] Hardt and Negri assert that value and its measurement are unimportant. See Day (2002), Wright (1996) and Callinicos (2001) for an analysis that traces this approach back to the Autonomist Marxist movement in Italy in the 1970s. The unreality of this approach to value is given by the fact that the national debt is nothing but a measure of value owed to external creditors and paid for by increasing the rate of surplus value by means of post-fordist flexibilisation and by cuts in working class consumption of value.

[12] This was one of the ‘transitional forms’ of state, neither colonies proper, nor imperialist, but “diverse forms of dependent countries which, politically, are formally independent, but in fact, are enmeshed in the net of financial and diplomatic dependence, typical of this epoch.” Lenin, (1964:263).

[13] The 1990s under Menem saw Argentina exposed to structural adjustment. The IMF/WB etc imposed a policy of balanced budgets and privatisation of state assets. Who benefited? The owners of capital invested in Argentina and their local agents. Repayments on the national debt were kept up which meant that the shareholders in the IMF, World Bank continued to profit. Who are these owners? The big multinational banks and the US Treasury!

[14] State assets were bought up cheaply by US and EU MNCs. Who where these MNCs? An example: Enron. The opening up of Argentina was engineered by the IMF/WB institutions but on behalf of the big banks and big MNC conglomerates. So it seems that finance capital was the big beneficiary. And that finance capital has one main location, the USA.

[15] Who oversaw this profiteering? The local state policed this process, backed up by multinational police operations under the name of the ‘war against drugs’ or ‘terrorism’, as well as UN convened military exercises (in Salta in the north of Argentina). While multinational and UN resolutions were used to mount these ‘police operations’, it was always US intelligence and troops that were in control. So despite the appeal to UN and multilateral agencies, it was always the US unilateral interests that underpinned this policing. No Empire here please, we’re Yankees!

[16] There is a very strong link between the Argentinean ruling class and the US as well as some of the EU states. The political regimes act as the direct local agents of imperialism, either in the form of Menem’s neo-liberal regime, or the reactionary crisis regimes of de la Rua and Duhalde, and now the left Peronist Kirchner. These regimes are nationalist ‘client’ regimes balanced between the masses and imperialism. Yet as their role in serving imperialism becomes clearer their ability to pose as anti-imperialists becomes weaker.

[17] The piqueteros are unemployed workers who ‘picket’ (block) roads in protest at their lack of jobs and decent unemployment benefits.

[18] Though Negri and Cocco don’t spell this out they are here referring to the effects of unemployment in disciplining social labour. I.e. one third of Argentina’s workers are casualised to different degrees, in job schemes, part-time jobs, and the ‘black economy’. This is Empires regime of accumulation and mode of regulation.

[19] cf Petras (2002a) more optimistic view of the capacity of the piqueteros to interrupt production.

[20] There is a huge debate in Argentina today among the left parties about the best way of uniting the unemployed with the employed (and other sectors as well).

[21] This is the politics of the class struggle pole in the movement around the occupied factories as I discuss below.

[22] This term is not scientific as it includes members of different and opposed classes i.e. salaried employees along with the self-employed and small employers.

[23] Negri: “The most interesting thing that the reading of the movements shows is that today, to the formation of imperial power, is not opposed a discourse of ‘seizure of power’, but rather of ‘exodus’ (2002g)

[24] The ‘Madres de Plaza de Mayo’ (Mothers of the Plaza of May) who rally in national independence square in Buenos Aires every week and have been a major force in bringing other sectors in struggle together. This has challenged some of the traditional left organisations who see the killing of some 30,000 by the military dictatorship as a ‘human rights’ issue. There has been a reluctance on the part of the Peronist unions (who were implicated in the military regime as was the Communist Party) to join forces with the Madres. The result has been separate marches and protests dividing the mass movement. In October 2002, Hebe de Bonafini visited the Zanon factory occupation in Neuquen and forged an important link between the mothers and the occupying workers independently of the collaborationist bureaucrats.

[25] Brukman is a relatively small clothing factory in Buenos Aires that is important because its workers have been in the leadership of many struggles and are leading the fight for the factories to be nationalised under workers’ control rather than be ‘cooperatised’ or handed back to owners with no guarantees for workers. Brukman was retaken on April 18, 2003. Thousands of workers rallied in support, but were repelled by police armed with tear gas and live ammunition. A police cordon was set up for several blocks but this did not stop 30,000 supporters marching in defence of Brukman on May 1. These supporters were drawn from local popular assemblies, from unemployed organisations, the Madres of the Plaza, students, and the left parties. On May 3 the Brukman workers met with their supporters to launch a campaign to rally support nationally around 4 points to defend the occupations and retake Brukman. These are: 1) Freedom for the jailed Salta piquetero leaders; 2) the retaking of Brukman by the workers; 3) A living wage for employed and unemployed on work plans (work creation); 4) Genuine and worthwhile jobs for all!

[26] Zanon is a ceramics factory situated in the province of Nequen to the west of Buenos Aires. It has been subjected to a number of attempts by bosses, police and union thugs to evict the workers and sell off the factory to Chilean interests. It was the factory recently visited by Hebe de Bonafini (see footnote above). Zanon is a shining example to all. Zanon ceramics are being used everywhere. In Patagonia (extreme south) peasants have occupied land and the Mapuche indigenous people have occupied land designated as a golf course. One old woman said “Here we are working the land, and no one is going to get us out. Not even the police or army”. The Tigre Supermarket in Rosario had dedicated its top floor to culture, drama and a library.

[27] For Negri and Cocco the Mothers add a strong moral force to the Multitude, that does not draw directly on the proletariat, but which provides an example of collective action vitally necessary to unite all the sectors in struggle. How is this conceived in terms of resistance to constituted bio-power? First, the ‘mothers’ are rendered outside class as ‘human rights’ activists. Empire cannot explain the origins of the Mothers as a class response to a former military counter-revolution against the revolutionary uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s. Klein points out that the Mothers now openly declare that their children were not only ‘innocent’ but political opponents of the dictatorship (2003). These origins are clearly vindicated when Hebe de Bonafini visits Zanon and says workers’ power is in workers production! Hardt and Negri should visit Zanon! What are the historic precedents of the role of women in socialist revolution? The day after the recent December 20, 2002 anniversary of the Argentinazo, the occupied Brukman factory hosted a Brecht play ‘The Mothers’. Here Brecht pays homage to the role of women during the 1905 revolution in Russia. It is one of many such homages in the communist literature in particular the February and October revolutions in Russia. They represent ‘mothers’ not as reproducers of biopower in the historical abstract, but mothers as workers, and of workers, who reproduce wage labour under capitalist social relations. That is why the worker-actors who performed “The Mothers’ at Brukman substituted some Argentine characters for the original Russian. The ‘Mothers’ are the women workers of Argentina today. The owner of the factory becomes Mr Brukman. In this way revolution today discovers its history in the heat of struggle. And it is not lost in the ‘crowd’; it is conscious capitalist class struggle.

[28] The so-called ‘crisis of Peronism’ could be interpreted by H&N as evidence of the end to national governance, and the direct confrontation between Empire and the Multitude. But Hardt and Negri still have to show why we need their theory of Empire when the theory of imperialism predicts this outcome.

[29] Originally called for March 2003, these elections have been postponed by Duhalde as it looked like his right-wing Peronist rival Menem was gaining support.

[30] While it is used to include petty bourgeois and liberal bourgeois on the right, on the left ‘people’ means all those oppressed by capitalism and imperialism. In that sense it is used in the same way the Lenin used ‘people’ to mean workers and poor peasants.

[31] ‘Active Boycott’ means to stop the elections by overturning Duhalde’s government in favour of a workers’ and popular government and that has become a call to overthrow Kirchner.

[32] This is not the place to enter into the debate on the Constituent Assembly in Argentina. For an exchange on this question see the archive of Argentina Solidarity where PO-Workers Party supporters defend the Constituent Assembly as a necessary stage in the national revolution to prepared the way for socialist revolution against the Socialist Workers Party that favours a Revolutionary Constituent Assembly called after a workers revolution, and those who say that the question of the Constituent Assembly is secondary to the struggle for dual power in the workers organisations, the general strike and formation of self-defence committees. See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Argentina_Solidarity/

[33] Most left parties in Argentina have a history of adapting to the national bourgeoisie in ‘patriotic fronts’ or ‘popular fronts’ on the basis that before socialism is possible, first a nation must unite across classes to overthrow imperialism. This approach is based on the Stalinist theory of stages Stalin used to justify popular fronts with Western bourgeoisies who were friendly to the Soviet Union and would ally with it against its enemies. It is in direct opposition to the Leninist and Trotskyist position of ‘permanent revolution’ that holds that only workers and poor peasants can make a successful national revolution, because the national bourgeoisie have more interests in common with imperialism than with the working class. This means that national independence from imperialism must also be a socialist revolution against the national bourgeoisie (Trotsky, 1969).

[34] These attacks have radicalised the masses in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, Brazil and Bolivia that demonstrate that anti-imperialist resistance to imperialism has the potential to become continent wide. See Petras (2002b)

[35] The 2^nd Congress of the Comintern recognised that national revolutions in the semi-colonies cannot defeat imperialism alone. The struggle of the Argentinean masses (and in the rest of LA) to survive and to take power at home must have the support of workers in the US heartlands and the other imperialist powers. Otherwise the US military will succeed in reversing if not defeating the revolution and re-imposing a client state of its own choice following the long tradition of US intervention in Latin America, and most recently extended in the Middle East to a policy of ‘preventative war’ against Iraq.

 

A Modern Greek Tragedy

Review of Vincent O’Sullivan’s

Long Journey to the Border: A Life of John Mulgan

Penguin Books 2003

Introduction

John Mulgan has a big name in New Zealand. He is portrayed in the literary culture and even the popular culture as a national hero. His reputation is larger than life because of the ‘mystery’ of his death, an irony given that he must have viewed his suicide without sentimentality.

His only novel ‘Man Alone’ has been a set text in schools and universities for decades. Its hero, Johnson, stands for basic values such as toughness, self-reliance, and the independence of the ‘common man’ of action and few words. That title is taken from Hemingway’s To Have and To Have Not: “a man alone ain’t got no fucking chance”. For Mulgan it means that human freedom and democracy has to be grounded in the individual self-reliance and resilience of agricultural communities resistant to modern ‘fascism of the right or of the left’.

For that reason Mulgan has been adopted as the role model of the left liberal intelligentsia in New Zealand and is emblematic of the post-World War 2 Keynesian compromise which attempted to balance the rights of private property with the interest of the greater community. Mulgan is portrayed by his biographers as the intellectual who best steered between the twin evils of extreme capitalism and state socialism (Paul Day and James McNeish), and who probably paid the ultimate price for this act of personal heroism with his own life.

In my view Mulgan’s personal heroism is not in question. But heroism is not an adequate explanation of Mulgan’s real significance. What if his task was made humanly impossible because he could not personally transcend the contradiction, starkly posed by depression and world wars, without taking sides between capitalist barbarism or degenerated socialism? In that case, his heroic attempt to try to resolve this dilemma by defending democracy as a solitary intellectual makes Mulgan a hopeless case. He becomes a ‘Man Alone’ separated from the community of his choice and his life becomes a modern Greek tragedy.

Vincent O’Sullivan’s recent biography is a wonderfully illuminating picture of Mulgan’s life. It is true to Mulgan since it interprets his life as Mulgan himself might have. It does not step outside Mulgan’s ideological frame of the solitary intellectual. It accepts, as Mulgan did, the centrality of the defence of democracy against fascism and against Stalinism. It defines Mulgan’s importance as the voice of the maturing, independent, and increasingly self-conscious intelligentsia in NZ that sees itself as inseparable from the generation of British, US, and European intellectuals who faced up to the existential questions of war and peace, democracy and fascism, capitalism and socialism.

What I want to argue in this essay is that taking Mulgan’s own standpoint to reflect on his life cannot fully account for his significance. I will argue that Mulgan was trapped by his fidelity to a belief in the sovereign individual, and like many intellectuals of that period who gave their lives in one or other cause (most risked their lives by thinking) he became a victim of that very belief – itself an ideology masking the true nature of the bourgeois self as alienated, self-defeating and powerless. To make this argument however, it is necessary to step outside the liberal frame of O’Sullivan’s biography and adopt a critical Marxist theory of the intelligentsia.

My Approach

I want to use arguments derived from the dead Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and the very much alive Spanish ‘Althusserian’, Juan Carlos Rodriguez. Gramsci’s influence on Western Marxism and the rise of ‘cultural studies’ today is really too important to ignore when locating prominent intellectuals within modern capitalist society. Rodriguez is a more acquired taste derived from Gramsci by way of Althusser and heavy on the theory of ideological production. These approaches share the Marxist assumption that writers are intellectuals who serve to reproduce the key ideas that meet the material interests of the ruling classes –traditional intellectuals – in competition with intellectuals thrown up by the challenge of the revolutionary classes from below – organic intellectuals.

Modern traditional intellectuals reproduce the essentials of capitalist or bourgeois ideology – individualism, private property etc., and the political expression of these, bourgeois democracy. Organic intellectuals speak for the producing classes – workers and peasants – and raise revolutionary challenges to the hegemonic ideology. Organic intellectuals can be co-opted unless they are embedded in the collective practices of workers and peasant struggles. Moreover, traditional intellectuals can pose as organic intellectuals, effectively ‘incorporating’ or ‘immunising’ counter-hegemonic ideas.

In this light, Mulgan’s significance was as a traditional intellectual neutralizing socialism as a counter-hegemonic threat to bourgeois democracy by reducing it to a ‘fascism of the left’. When he kills himself (as an ‘existentialist’ before his time?) his death fuels the powerful myth that bourgeois democracy is worth dying for. (Note that I accept that Mulgan didn’t kill himself for personal reasons, including illness or depression, but out of despair. Yet this concept remains psychologically or culturally reductionist unless unpacked in the full glare of the critical Marxist method.)

My method differs from the standard method of a biography like O’Sullivan’s Long Journey to the Border, which for all its strengths, must deal with the individual in a social setting where the impact of deeply rooted class forces on the individual become truncated as personality, psychology, beliefs, national cultures, experience etc. Gramsci argues that it is the role of traditional intellectuals to obscure these deeper causes by (most effectively I would say, unconsciously) de-historicising or naturalising them. Rodriguez produces a detailed account of the historic formation and reproduction of the terms of ideology as the product of deeper social structures; in particular structures (or modes) that overlap or intersect, generating complex hybrid ideological formations, The point is that ignorance of these deeper structures disarms the individual – just as knowledge of them empowers the individual – as a conscious agent of historic change.

I shall use this approach to argue that Mulgan in Man Alone and Report on Experience adopts the standard method (in fiction and biography) and reveals that his understanding of the social forces in which he is caught up will not allow him to break out of the inverted and distorted world view of bourgeois ideology. Moreover, I would argue that Mulgan is a victim of a particularly insidious strand of this ideology – English empiricism. Mulgan is an actor in momentous historic events, yet for all his heroic temperament he cannot transcend the role of an isolated and alienated bourgeois subject.

Mulgan as ‘would-be’ intellectual

According to O’Sullivan, Mulgan’s intellectual formation was virtually complete by 1932. The ‘road to Damascus’ episode of the Queen St Riots saw Mulgan reject his role as a student ‘police special’ and consciously take the side of the ‘common man’. (That his class loyalties were challenged by a former army officer, and now unemployed farmer driven off his land by the depression, is very significant). His earlier ‘benign and complacent’ liberalism owing much to his father, became a more mature and ‘questioning’ liberalism which avoided ‘extremes’ of the right and left. Further developments under fire are ‘fine tuning’ of, and vindication of, his essential liberalism.

This is a fair conclusion as far as it goes. But it does not investigate the limits posed by liberalism on Mulgan’s ability to take theory seriously or to test his beliefs in practice. I would argue that Mulgan’s commitment to liberalism disarmed him intellectually in the face of the momentous events of the Great Depression and World War II and left him bereft of any realistic principles facing the task of the rebuilding of post-war society. In the last two chapters of Report on Experience as he approaches the end of his life, Mulgan returns, almost by default, to the familiar English liberal themes of the ‘common man’, respect for tradition, defence of democracy from fascism, the resilience of the English in war and so on.

What I look for and do not find in O’Sullivan’s book is any account of why Mulgan kept true to English liberalism from his ‘Road to Damascus experience’ in 1932 to the final Report on his experience of the civil war in Greece in 1945. To account for this fidelity to liberalism it is necessary to understand the hegemonic role of the traditional intellectual in reproducing the class terms of liberalism – that is, the inverted ideology of the rights of man that represent the class interests of the English bourgeoisie. It is my belief that Mulgan embodied a contradiction between his emotional and instinctive identification with the ordinary producing classes –the ‘common man’ (Johnson)– and the social role of the ‘would-be’ intellectual transmitting and defending the ideal of the alienated bourgeois subject.

While this gave him great authority and success in translating bourgeois principles into commonly held values it also meant he internalised an insoluable contradiction. The traditional intellectual’s role is to translate bourgeois ideology into the language of the ‘common man’ as natural and just. Such are the ‘four freedoms’ of liberty, equality, fraternity and … property rights. [145-146 Report]. English liberalism defends itself well against all aberrations that challenge natural justice –the ‘extremes’ O’Sullivan talks of fascism of the right an left. It is practical, moderate, and capable of dealing with the excesses of ‘freedom’ such as war profiteering. In Report the main theme is that war is just (it brings out the best in humanity: life, love and solidarity) when it is not about profits or power.

Mulgan’s war does not bring freedom from these extremes; it brings despair about the future. The price of reconciling the contradiction of capitalism with the life of ‘common man’ is not to take up the fight for socialism in the future, but to a retreat into the past ideal of rural life found in the Greek villages destroyed by the Nazis and civil war. Transcendence, not possible in this life, is found in the death of the ‘would-be’ intellectual. Why didn’t Mulgan take his positive concrete experience of the ‘common man’ and translate it into the theory and practice of the revolutionary socialist party? Why didn’t he penetrate the surface manifestations of Stalinism as ‘would-be’ socialism? The answer, I would suggest is in the immunising effects of the English humanism he adopts in his evolution as a traditional intellectual.

The class terms of English liberalism

Mulgan outgrows NZ provincialism (his father’s a better Brit) and adopts an English humanism (a better Angle?). It is important to emphasise the ‘England’ rather than the ‘Britain’. Despite Mulgan’s Irish antecedants, his intellectual provenance eschews the tougher strands of the Scottish Enlightenment and Irish nationalism. The English Enlightenment is a bloodless affair because the English revolution was driven by balance sheets and not ideologues. English intellectuals tended to draw their pay from both semi-feudal and capitalist classes and the results are chronic compromise, and gradualist trial and error evolution. This makes English liberalism both resilient and insidious.

Typically the English ‘lefts’ commitment to socialism is therefore empiricist and social imperialist. It’s thought is ultimately shaped by the belief in Britain’s ‘progressive’ historic role as the workshop of the world – the first modern imperialism – now in decline. But Britain’s errors seldom led to trials. English empiricism worked well in Britain’s ascendancy, and its hollowed-out sheltered workshop cushioned its decline from the threat of a full blooded socialism. That’s why English intellectuals never need venture outside gradualist, evolutionary versions of enlightenment humanism including Fabian socialism and Stalinist fellow-traveling.

Mulgan adopted English empiricism when the empire was already in decline. He took its class terms of reference. Its origins were in the class compromise between feudalism and capitalism in which the old social relations coexisted alongside the new. For Mulgan this accounted for the survival of the English gentleman and the amateur approach to war. This incomplete bourgeois revolution was entrenched by the spoils of imperialism that bought off the labour aristocracy aligning it politically to the bourgeoisie under the British flag. Thus the riches of empire enabled British empiricism to project itself as an enlightenment of class compromise rather than class revolution.

Other NZ expatriates like Bertram and Milner rejected English empiricism and went over to Stalinist (or Maoist) socialism. This was a pragmatic adaptation of NZ ‘state socialism’ (more properly statism) of the 1930s applied on a grand scale in USSR and China. It is a form of frontier pragmatism typical of white settler states (especially archetypal US pragmatism) where in order to catch up with Britain the colonial state had to break (more or less) from imperialism and act as the main agent of economic development. Substituting mass equality for individual liberty in NZ from the 1890s already created an proto-fascist state according to Willis Airey. Bill Sutch was a fan of ‘state socialism’ in NZ and the USSR. Rewi Alley took his ‘number 8 socialism’ off the dairy farm to China. The difference between dairy cooperatives and mass soviets was just a question of scale.

Johnson, the chief protagonist of Man Alone, embodies this dilemma in part; or rather the underlying contradiction. The positive part of this is his commitment to the social forms of the pre-capitalist peasant community on the land. He identifies with Maori society. One suspects that for Mulgan the reason Johnson goes to Spain is not high minded ideals but an instinct for solidarity with the peasant collectives. “What he hated in fascism was its contempt for individual freedom. Milner noted too that unlike himself and regardless of his wide reading, Mulgan had no deep interest in theory, or in what bright promises were held out for another day: ‘Mulgan’s mind was by nature and style of living empirical. He was distrustful of generalised schemes of thinking.’” (Journey, 159)

His loyalty is to the pre-capitalist peasantry, not the landlords, church or intelligentsia. He does not articulate his beliefs in words but in actions. The negative part of the dilemma is that he resolutely rejects Enlightenment modernity not just its ‘extremes’ of fascism of right and left. Johnson is instinctively suspicious of any attempt to ‘intellectualise’ modernity as humanist full stop. It leads to the ‘fascism of the left’. Mulgan denounced the “ideological control and maneuvering of the International Brigade by Andre Marty and the Communist hierarchs” during the Spanish civil war. (Journey, 159)

The ‘Johnson’ side of Mulgan comes out more fully in Greece. Here the ‘theory of communism’ is revealed in ‘fact’ to him be a ‘fascism of the left’. Individual freedom is sacrificed to follow orders and by barbaric torture. The heroes of the resistance are not the communist partisans, nor the Greek nationalists, but the ordinary peasant villagers. Again Mulgan identifies with the simple strengths of self-reliant rural life that has survived for millennia. In Greece the lack of development of modern capitalism is evident. There is almost no aristocracy or proletariat only petty bourgeois. For that reason, modernity and humanity cannot follow the dogma of Marxist theory in Greece. Communism in Greece will have to take the form of peasant cooperatives.

These observations provide the class ‘bearings’ to locate Mulgan’s ‘would be’ intellectual authority. He embodies the contradiction between common man and bourgeois intellectual personally. His instincts are pre-capitalist in his love of nature and for working the land. But he is also an English humanist intellectual. He looks to the enlightenment as the continuation of the freedom of the peasant collective translated into modern times as bourgeois democracy. And Mulgan defends bourgeois democracy against what he sees as the twin extremes of right and left fascism. He rejects the utopia of a communist future that suppresses individual freedoms as evenhandedly as he rejected the fascism of the right. He sees these fascisms as equal. The Greek Stalinists did not forgive the Polish boys forced to fight for the Nazis to protect their families at home, when they defected to the partisans.

Stalinism equals Communism

Why did Mulgan stick to the already historically bankrupted English humanism under the impact of depression and imperialist war? To many intellectuals of this period it was part of the problem and not the solution to the crisis facing humanity. Other New Zealanders like Bertram and Milner sided with Stalinism for better or worse. Mulgan was highly critical of British imperialism, its complicity with the rise of German fascism, and its role in Greece, Yet could not take this leap.

Why did Mulgan equate Stalinism with socialism? Was this bad faith? While swimming against the stream, Trotskyists certainly recognised that Stalinism was a parasitic growth on an otherwise healthy workers state. Moreover, Stalinism may have been homegrown but it was a bacillus introduced by the reactionary attacks on the soviet states by Western bourgeois democracy. We know that Mulgan read Trotsky but obviously did not agree that the left-fascist Stalinist state machine was superimposed on top of workers property rights which could be rescued by overthrowing the Stalinists.

Was Mulgan even aware of the left critiques of Stalinism? The Moscow Trials and the Dewey Commission? Mulgan says he read Trotsky (Report p 46 ) but I can find nothing more on what, when and then what. He got copies of Tomorrow sent over from New Zealand. From about 1936 ‘Colonel Pharazyn’ was writing in the left liberal periodical Tomorrow about the Moscow Trials and taking a pro-Trotskyist line. Perhaps the explanation is that Mulgan’s identification with the masses was emotional and romantic but not real. He did not recognise the masses historic significance except to write about it in idealist (in both senses) terms.

I would suggest that Mulgan was unable to pose these questions (or possibly arrive at a serious answers) because his adopted English liberalism was part of the problem not the solution? It was the English success in class compromise stretching back to the civil war that betrayed the 1917 revolution and prepared the ground for Stalinism. The General Strike of 1926 was aborted by the unholy alliance of the TUC and Stalin’s machine. Fascism itself was the consequence of the treachery of German social democracy in the 1920s. The ‘fascist twins’ of the 1930s were the progeny of the financial mergers of the English and German ruling classes. That is why in the end, Mulgan could not see through the false ‘facts’ of fascist twinning in Greece to the historic struggle between revolution and counter-revolution.

The final test of his historic ambivalence was working with the resistance in Greece. While he had used his natural authority to protect the troops from incompetent officers in North Africa, in Greece his heroic caste of character was not enough. The historic class forces set in motion as the Greek partisans fought among themselves to fill the vacuum left by the Nazi invaders left him bereft of any social compass with which to orient himself.

Mulgan was the main character in his own Report on Experience. He was driven by forces beyond his control only because they were beyond his comprehension. Had Mulgan understood that the partisan struggle was a local expression of a global revolution in which the cast of actors were the Greek ‘Johnsons’ pitted against a counter-revolution band of landlords, Yalta generals and politicians, and murderous Stalinists, he might have demanded a greater historic role for himself as a leader of that revolution.

But that would have meant shifting his emotional loyalty from the rudimentary mechanical solidarity of the peasant community, to that of Gramsci’s Modern Prince – the Revolutionary Party –and abandoning his hegemonic role. In the event he could not defend his admiring view of Lenin’s ‘openness and pragmatism’ from the onslaught of Stalinism. He could not transcend the limits of English humanism and break out of the contradiction he personally embodied. Like countless thousands of others trapped in an ideological system where the limits of bourgeois morality are given by an alienated subjectivity, he took the only other way out.

isd His

While O’Sullivan shares much of Mulgan’s standard frame he cannot ask the all important questions and so they remain unanswered. Interestingly, the title Long Journey to the Border echoes the path of another intellectual who could not escape the trap of bourgeois alienated subjectivity, Walter Benjamin, who killed himself within hours of crossing the border of Fascist Spain to find freedom in the USA.

O’Sullivan shares a story about Mulgan and Theodore Adorno deep in conversation on a train from Paris to London at the outbreak of war. Adorno later writes to Benjamin about the ‘Marxist’ he talked to on the train (Journey, 172). This is an interesting comment coming from a famous Marxist, who himself wrote off the working class as the agency of revolution, to another who could not bring himself to join the Communist Party. Adorno successfully went into exile in the U.S.A.

It seems that Benjamin did not know that his freedom was near and killed himself in ignorance of this fact. But it is an ideologically induced ignorance rooted in the alienation of the individual who cannot find his way to class solidarity because it appears to be blocked by the Stalinist party. It is tempting to say this of Mulgan too, but that in his case his alienation left him trapped inside a historically bankrupt English humanism. Unlike Johnson who was not a Man Alone, and ‘who could not be killed’, Mulgan was both. He was unable to find a way back to his beloved community, or forward to the promised land, on the long journey to the border.

Report on Experience, OUP paperback, Auckland, 1984.

[This review first appeared in the tiny NZ Literary review,

Brief 34, 2006 - not online.]

Situations Vacant

Marx and Engels looking forward

This is a session on ‘Social Critics’ and ‘Public Intellectuals’.

But what do these terms mean in the current context? What ‘Society’? What ‘criticism’? What ‘Public’? What ‘intellectuals’?

I do not accept the adequacy of these terms as a basis for discussing the public role of sociologists. What sociologists practice as a rule is social control. Sociologists need to be critiqued as ‘treacherous intellectuals’ as the purveyors of bourgeois ideology to the ‘masses’ i.e. the workers. They only get away with this ideological practice because true intellectual critique is almost dead.

Sociology has been debased from the mid 19th century when sociology was macro, critical and openly political. Marx built a workers’ international, Durkheim designed hygienic communities, Weber intervened with the General Staff to stop the First World War and forestall socialist revolution in Germany. We know where they stood. They stood toe to toe contesting the consciousness of workers. Lukacs critique of German sociology is still unsurpassed.

Can we say the same about today’s leading social thinkers hiding for cover behind neo-liberal shibboleths of the individual, choice, risk, and worse, today’s chic radicals reclaiming Marx or Lenin as ‘great men’ of history who can rescue society by personal acts of self-sacrifice? Sociology is in danger of flying up its own ass in search of the ‘unconscious’.

We can capture this theme as the long 20th century retreat from consciousness to unconsciousness.

What society?

I tell my students that society is what you make of it. First you have to understand it before you can critique it and change it. Take you pick, there are market liberals who want society to disappear; common liberals who see society as a harmonious unity of responsible citizens; radicals who want to overcome the deep social divisions of race class and gender, and Marxists who are dead. Or are they?

Sociology began as an antidote to Marxism and attempted from the first to present Marx as the immature precursor of Durkheim and Weber. Marx after a perfunctory museum tour is usually dropped off the end of the list of founding fathers. But Marxism hasn’t died and remains a constant provocation to the rest who ignore it like universities, patronise it like the New York Times or try reverse takeovers like Derrida and Zizek.
So social criticism can come from all directions; to end society like Thatcher; to sex-up the market like Giddens; to mobilise the masses like Chomsky; or to replace capitalist society like the latter-day Lenin. Are of these critiques of ‘society’ equally valid?

One dead end approach is to follow the lead of the sociology of knowledge and identify sociologists as ‘intellectuals’ capable of standing above classes and taking a relatively objective view of society. But this view of sociology never was a starter. It didn’t survive the debates over ‘functionalism’ in the 1960’s, or more important, the Vietnam War. Sociologists are partisans with the truth. They have their prized ‘publics’ like Talcott Parsons or C.Wright Mills.

This doesn’t make each intellectual’s truth as good as another. That would be relativism and postmodernism where there are as many truths as there are critics. So how do we decide? Facts? Evidence? Social reality? Science overcoming ideology?

I prefer to look back to see what role intellectuals played in the history of sociology, the legacies of the clashes between its ‘founding fathers’, and the more recent contretemps between post Paris 1968 generation of left and right intellectuals. Here we can trace the spiraling decline and fall of the intellect from consciousness into unconsciousness.

When the conscious becomes unconscious

The practice of early sociology was to work on consciousness. The new bourgeois mode of regulation from Comte to Durkheim was designed to train workers in the new expanding industry of capitalism. Weber provided the moral and philosophical cover with his neo-Kantian notion of ‘rationalisation’ rooted in the Protestant ethic i.e. good was great. Meanwhile back in the concrete jungle the socialists were challenging the new order. Ethical socialism became scientific when Marx and Engels discovered that being preceded consciousness and that being was historical and determinate –the capital-labour relation. Now we had the class truth. You were either for us or against us as the intellectually challenged George Bush likes to say.

In the crisis period of the First World War, of Bolshevism versus fascism, intellectuals were even more partisan. Revolution and counter-revolution blew away the fence. The right became openly militaristic, and much of the left peeled off and joined them. The Bernstein wing of socialism became warriors, the centre behind Kautsky appealed to the common sense of all sides to make peace, while the Bolsheviks called for the war to be turned into open class war. The minority came to power in Russia but the revolution was contained by the European counter-revolution. And guess where the sociologists stood? (Callinicos’ Social Theory is quite a useful survey, and see his more recent look at Habermas, Badiou, Bourdieu, Negri and Zizek in Resources of Critique.)

Antonio Gramsci provided us with a critical analysis of why ‘traditional intellectuals’ who support the capitalist order are so successful in co-opting the left and frustrating the rise of revolutionary ‘organic intellectuals’ (Prison Notebooks). Capitalism can pass itself off as naturally just and equitable provided everyone accepts the rules of the game. When the rules are broken by some power hungry elite, or power hungry mass, then everyone, workers included, must try to restore peace and prosperity. The traditional intellectuals are therefore cast as the priests of common sense, while the organic intellectuals are cast in the unfavourable light of having to justify overthrowing society itself. Unfavourable, that is, so long as the issue remains one fought out by competing factions of the intelligentsia.

Once, however, the class struggle throws up organic intellectuals, Marxists, who organise a revolutionary party (Gramsci’s ‘Prince’) the fight is seen to be that of one class against another. The traditionals have the advantage of the fetishised social relations of capital to back up their obscurantism i.e. Gramsci’s ‘common sense’. But once the organics had penetrated and exploded this ideology, the superior class truth of the proletariat could confront bourgeoisie hegemony head to head and win. Or course Gramsci’s spin on the fate of the Russian revolution was that it was atypical and a war of maneuver in a fluid backward state, as opposed to the war of position that must take place in Europe were the bourgeoisie was entrenched in the state and could only be overthrown by a ‘long siege’.

Lenin’s prejoinder was that workers in Europe were bought off by superprofits from the colonies and their consciousness was stuffed by chauvinism rather than any inherent persuasive power of the bourgeois state. Consciousness could be revolutionised in Europe by the same methods as employed by the Bolsheviks in Russia –i.e. building soviets everywhere. The failure of the revolution to spread to Europe was the result of the ‘subjective’ rather than ‘objective’ features of society (The Renegade Kautsky).

Enter the Unconscious

As well as ‘isolating’ the Russian revolution (Bolshevism, Leninism etc) and ‘quarantining’ it, Western traditional intellectuals (and their radical, Menshevik allies) looked for the failure of the revolution to spread in the unconscious of the working class. Either the working class was co-opted by capitalism in which case talk of ‘false consciousness’ was utopian until workers suffered more on the march of history. Then some petty bourgeois public opinion expert would tell them when and how to revolt. Or some pre-social barrier to revolution existed in the ‘unconscious’ motivations of individuals as theorised by psychoanalysis. In any event Gramsci’s long seige now became a process of protracted or traumatic psychic liberation.

Both of these currents fused in the professors of the Frankfurt school. On the one hand they complained about workers being captured by consumerism so that their consciousness was permanently seduced (see Marcuse, One Dimensional Man). On the other they pointed to deeply repressed drives that made workers submissive to authority figures, fuhrers, Stalins etc. (Adorno et al, The Authoritarian Personality). Put together this became an argument which made the petty bourgeois intelligentsia the agents of revolution in place of the proletariat. Generations of critical theorists have wallowed in this meglamania.

This betrayal of Marxism gave the traditionals a powerful weapon against the marginalised organics. (Of course it presupposed the earlier retreats marked by the Bernsteins, Kautskys and the process of Stalinisation going on in the USSR and in the communist parties – all adaptations of classic Menshevism – a longer story than I have space for here).

The leading organics, Gramsci himself, jailed by fascists in 1926 and dead by 1937, Lukacs trapped after 1924 by Stalinism, and Trotsky expelled from the USSR in 1928 and killed by 1940, had limited chances of success. Nevertheless, they continued to fight for workers’ consciousness rather than submit to the unconscious in the face of rising fascism. Rather than a passive fatalism of history (Stalinism) or of the ‘mass psychology of fascism’ (Frankfurt School) Trotsky continued to demand that the communist workers and social democratic workers unite to smash fascism. He, and they, failed. The missing active ingredient was the Bolshevik party. Had the working class been led by a revolutionary party it would have been strong enough to win over the middle class rather than hand it by default to fascism (The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany).

Fast forward to Paris, May 1968

Fascism (as well as the war against fascism) was a defeat for workers. Though the Soviet Union survived and new so-called ‘workers states’ arose, the US had now become the most powerful imperialist state determined to end ‘communism’ by cold or hot war. Decolonisation, the revolutions in China, Cuba, Vietnam etc., appeared to create a strong global anti-imperialist movement with Western intellectual currents in support. Paris ‘68 showed that this was a wholly hegemonised project.

Paris ‘68 showed that the organic intellectuals had been thoroughly routed by the traditionals. Third world nationalism was a bourgeois democratic struggle aiming at political independence. First and Second world intellectuals (Stalinists, Trotskyists and Maoists) lowered their revolutionary sights to the goal of national independence. A post-colonial inversion of imperialism invested third world movements with revolutionary credentials. Fanon, Che, Fidel and Ho were idolised as revolutionaries.

The defeats of revolutions in the West attributed to the ideological backwardness of proletariat justified the vanguard mantle being passed to third world nationalists. But because national independence was always on the terms of imperialism, Western revolutionaries never took their own ruling class to task to force an end to their neo-colonial economic domination of the third world. The imperialist working classes remained co-opted by high living standards and subordinated by traditionalist hegemonies of applied common sense administered by labourite, Social Democrat and Stalinist bureaucracies.

Unconscious Rules

In May ’68 the students failed to get their revolt against the archaic public education system taken up by workers. This was because workers were trapped in unions dominated by Stalinists and socialists, but also because there was no party or program that could link the two forces. Instead of drawing these conclusions (how could they?) French left intellectuals took this to be a confirmation of the collapse of consciousness into unconsciousness (Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt).

The downward spiral took another twist. Freud who had been adapted by the Frankfurt school to explain the failure of revolution in the 1920’s was now re-mastered by Lacan to explain the failure of all revolutions. Every revolution resulted in new ‘masters’ replacing old ones. ‘ The logic of recuperation’ was a kind of totalitarian treadmill. Evidence Althusser’s attempt to break free of psychodetermination out of the gulag into the bureaucratic PCF (French Communist Party) and the French road to socialism. This was psychic pre-determination which Brennan (History after Lacan) calls the ‘ego’s era’ i.e. the era of the ‘social psychosis’. However we interpret this, it is an argument for a pre-social ego that is not open to social determination. The fate of social revolutionaries is always to be pulled back into this psychosis and to the will of the father. The only way to break out is to become a new father through an Act of personal sacrifice.
Thus we come all the way down the spiral from class consciousness to individual unconsciousness. But can the new social psychotic common sense prevail against collective radical upsurges from below? First it has to be dressed up as radical or even revolutionary. Lets look at some recent paternalist attempts to do this?

Take Derrida’s reclaiming of Marx from the grave. Marx is reborn as a social democrat trying to complete the bourgeois revolution (Menshevism) for universal citizenship, human rights etc by eschewing his ‘totalitarian’ theory of communism. Derrida’s model for the new Marx is Max Stirner a narcissistic egomaniac that Marx and Engels deride mercilessly in The German Ideology. Derrida’s ‘new international’ is any approximation of individualistic struggles for bourgeois rights. There is no recognition that Marx posited a contradiction between use-values and exchange values that means that the drive for profits must exclude the masses from democracy (e.g. in Iraq or Florida). So that today, bourgeois rights can only be universalised in a socialist society. (see my Saint Jacques and the Ghost of Marx).

Second case: Hardt and Negri’s use of Marx to theorise Empire reconstitutes the proletariat as the ‘multitude’ composed of all individuals who are in any way oppressed or exploited by capitalism. At the authors’ exchange level of analysis this definition includes anyone not paid the full price for their commodities, and so unites the unemployed with the middle class. But the Argentinazo of 2001 disconfirms a shift to social movements away from class. (see my Lost in the Crowd: Hardt and Negri’s Multitude in Argentina)

Zizek

Last but not least: Zizek’s reappropriation of Lenin in Lenin’s Choice. He wants to repeat Lenin, but not the historical Lenin. By seizing on the name of Lenin (which for Zizek signifies a great man like St Paul or the Pope) as a man capable of standing above the historical situation and in an act of genuine free will, break with the unconsciously determined cycle of domination, Zizek finds a new master that we can all follow.

But Zizek ignores the real history of 1917 that shows Lenin (and Trotsky) to be a man of the class and the party and not a ‘great man’. Why did the Bolsheviks try to stop the July uprising if after April Lenin was engaged in his supreme ‘Act’? Surely he could have brought the revolution forward by a sheer act of will? Why would Lenin go into hiding after the July Days dressed as a woman if he was the new father? Why does Trotsky in his sublime book The History of the Russian Revolution, refer to himself so few times and always in the third person, when he actually played a leading role in the revolution?

This is hardly the symptomatology of the ‘new man’ leaping into the abyss. Zizek’s repo of Lenin vindicates all the right wing rubbish about Lenin as a great man who not only substituted the party for the working class but then usurped the party and installed himself as dictator. (see my Rebels without a cause: post-Marxism from Althusser to Zizek).

The ‘post’ intellectuals of the ’68 generation would rather see a bewildered old Marx and a manic Lenin roaming loose than a fully fledged and armed soviet of the people on their doorstep – especially one led by women workers (long live 1917)! The retreat of intellectual life into the unconscious is but a symptom of the failure to understand the social reproduction of patriarchy in the heart of advanced imperialist capitalism. It is a retreat to the ideology produced by the class struggle over the first form of private property, women’s unpaid labour-time (on this see my Abort, Ignore, Retry: On the Domestic Mode of Production).

More importantly, the unconscious serves as an index of the extreme degeneracy of very late bourgeois ideology. As Lukacs pointed out in the Destruction of Reason reliance on pre-bourgeois fascist ideology to legitimate capitalism is a sign of desperation. The bourgeoisie enlists the petty bourgeois patriarchs of theory to dredge the historic shit of ages to paste over the masses consciousness. Today when bourgeois class hegemony has to rely on a deeply entrenched patriarchal unconscious in digitalised multimedia displays to keep the lid on the proletariat, bourgeois society has truly exhausted its historic potential. Time to lift the lid on all the old shit!

Short Answers

Of course the answer to positing the unconscious before being is to theorise the unconscious as the effect of being. An interesting contemporary Spanish Marxist intellectual who has developed a theory of the history and method of ideology production is Juan Carlos Rodriguez. I understand from the translator of his book the Theory and History of Ideological Production, Malcolm Read, that Rodriguez is working on a book on Freud. Watch out Lacan and Zizek the Marxists are coming to get you!

(This paper originated as a talk in a session on ‘public intellectuals’ at a sociologists conference in December 2004)

Note: my articles referred to above can be found on my website

Other references cited above are:
Adorno, T et al (1969) The Authoritarian Personality. W.W. Norton and Co, New York.
Brennan, Teresa (1993) History after Lacan. Routledge, London and New York. Callinicos, Alex (1999) Social Theory Polity Press, Cambridge Callinicos, Alex (2006) Resources of Critique Polity Press, Cambridge.
Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. International Publishers, New York.
Lenin, V.I. (1981) The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. Collected Works. Volume 28, 227-319. Progress Publishers. Moscow.
Lukacs, Georg (1980) The Destruction of Reason. The Merlin Press, London.
Marcuse, Herbert (1966) One Dimensional Man. Beacon Press, Boston.
Marx, Karl and Fred Engels (1976) The German Ideology. Progress Publishers, Moscow.
Rodriguez, Juan Carlos (2002) Theory and History of Ideological Production: The First Bourgeois Literatures (the 16th Century). Translated by Malcolm K. Read, University of Delaware Press, Newark.
Starr, Peter (1995) Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory after May ’68. Stanford University Press, Stanford.
Trotsky, Leon (1933) The History of the Russian Revolution. Victor Gollancz Ltd., London.
Zizek, Slavoj (2002) ed. ‘Afterword: Lenin’s Choice’ in V.I. Lenin Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917. Verso, London and New York.