Trees and other anarchists

James C. Scott. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. 1998.

The basic ideas of Seeing Like a State may be expressed in two of Scott’s favorite examples. The first, used to introduce the themes of the book, is that of scientific forestry. This is basically the practice of treating a forest like a specialized kind of farm. Rather than allowing the trees to propagate in their own way in the context of a whole ecosystem, managed timber production planted the trees in rows, and systematically cleared out underbrush and fallen deadwood. This had the effect of enormously increasing both the efficiency with which the wood was harvested and, at least as important, the predictability of production. Yet it turned out that this radical simplification of the forest was simply not sustainable. 70-80 years after the practice was first introduced, the growth rate of the trees had drastically fallen. The lesson is, for Scott, clear. The simplified point of view of the state (although this also applies to other organizations with simplified incentives, such as capitalist corporations) lead to the simplification of the environment, with catastrophic results. This is itself a simplified example, and the great bulk of Scott’s book is given over to other examples of the same phenomenon: planned cities, agriculture, economy, revolution.

The second example, almost more of an anecdote, receives less attention, but is perhaps yet more revealing of Scott’s basic worldview. It is the so-called grève du zèle, or the work-to-rule strike. In such a strike, the workers do not explicitly stop working, but they rather scrupulously follow every rule and regulation, and do precisely, exclusively, the work assigned to them in their job description. In even the most ‘scientific’ and Taylorized factory, Scott says, this has the result of drastically reducing or even entirely halting production. The point here is that even in those cases in which scientific simplification appears to have had the greatest success, it in fact requires for its survival the support of what Scott calls mētis. Or, as he puts it, rationalization is always parasitic on mētis, cunning, skill, the art of muddling through, which is practical, experiential, rigorously ‘empirical,’ and neither transparent nor democratic (as rationality strives to be).

Scott’s book is a litany of catastrophes visited upon humankind by ‘high modernist’ planning, which is essentially the drive to simplify and to codify. One of Scott’s suggestive points is that ‘high modernism’ has a strong aesthetic component, so that it is apparently unable to make the rather elementary distinction between visual and other forms of order. Thus a cityscape, from a ‘high modernist’ point of view is orderly only if it appears planned, if functions are distinguished from one another, if all the units are the same (Jane Jacobs is Scott’s reference point here). The explanations he gives for why governments and certain other forms of organizations ‘prefer’ or tend toward transparent, conceptually simple and standardized solutions, makes good sense. Why this should manifest in such a strong visual aesthetic is not so clear. Scott would probably want to argue that this drive for visually manifest order at every level is an iteration or effect of the completely practical need for agents of the state to literally see the people from whom they need to extract taxes (or who might be plotting violence, or practicing the wrong religion…). What I question is really the relation between this practical need and, for instance, Le Courbusier, who even Scott would admit is an easy target. Surely a great deal of explanation must come between the aesthetic canonization of this sort of order, and the practical need for it? This seems like a more vexed question—although, arguably, also a less important one—than that of the institutional conditions under which a bureaucracy comes to be driven by incentives that are literally counter to those of the human beings over which it rules.

Also problematic is the epistemological status of mētis. Doubtless, Scott would not want to take a very firm stand on this. It just is. Scott might point especially to the example of the doctor who is able to diagnose a disease intuitively. This intuitive capacity itself cannot be codified, but through careful study the particular cues in the patient that the doctor unconsciously used were isolated, and therefore could be codified and taught. One interesting characteristic of Scott’s position here is the inversion of what I think of (perhaps incorrectly) as the Habermasian evaluations of kinds of reason. Mētis, for Scott, is pure instrumentality. It is always intimately connected to getting things done in the chaos of the world. It is empirical and practical. And, despite Scott’s prudent cautionary notes, he certainly believes it should be more highly valued than it is. The reason of state (not Scott’s phrase—he would say the vision of the state), is conceptual and rationalistic. It is not really empirical, since it tends to shape reality to itself, rather than the other way around. Its goal in this sense, is not practical, but solipsistic. Its universalistic impulse is the opposite of critical, and if it is democratic, it is in the worst possible sense. The main epistemological point here is that the movement of the world as a whole cannot be ‘mapped’ by science (hence the invocation of Borges at the beginning of the chapter on mētis). From this derives the main political lesson of the book as a whole: the state naturally strives to simplify and to codify, this is indeed its function; very bad things can happen when civil society is weakened to the point that the state is able to do this in an unrestrained fashion.

The French Commonwealth

The excellent website La Vie des Idées has just posted a review of Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth written by Stéphane Haber. The review is positive, but brief and aware of the difficulty of reviewing such a book briefly. It makes none the less some interesting points that I want to summarize here yet more briefly.

First, Haber notes the strong engagement with, or return to, what might be called the technical vocabulary of Marxism. Hardt and Negri find themselves in a moment somewhat different from that of Empire or Multitude, in which, “apparemment, il ne faut plus craindre le reproche traditionnel d’économicisme.” Their critique of capitalism is a communist critique. Haber’s summation of Hardt and Negri’s basic economic diagnosis of the contemporary world gets, I think, only half the picture. It is rightly pointed out that, somewhat problematically, Hardt and Negri put ‘immaterial production’ at the center of the contemporary economy. It seems to me that their analysis of the turn to rent, as opposed to surplus value, as a source of capitalist profit, is also of enormous importance. For them, the contemporary world is typified by capital’s tendency to capture the product of the common—the new enclosure. This is important not least because it suggests that we are, perhaps, on the way to (rather than in the midst of) a revolution in the mode of production.

Haber’s comments are organized into three fundamental thematics: production, the critique of capitalism, and the philosophy of poverty.

The essential objection in the realm of production is that, it seems, it tends to include potentially everything. What Haber calls Spinozist, and what I myself would call a Bergsonian, monism includes everything. This seems to bother Haber—I can’t say that it bothers me:

Le schème du travail, relayant le monisme spinoziste, permet ainsi de couper court aux tergiversations : le monde (y compris dans celles de ses composantes que nous sommes tentés de qualifier de « naturelles »), tout comme nous-mêmes, sommes toujours déjà pris dans le cercle de la production inventive et collective dont « nature » et « société » ne forment que des moments isolés par abstraction. Tout cela ne manque pas d’allure, philosophiquement parlant. Mais la question reste posée de savoir si un écologisme quelque peu articulé (ne serait-ce que sous la forme d’une préoccupation minimale pour le « développement durable »), en tant qu’inévitablement orienté en direction de la préservation d’un environnement existant, peut trouver son compte dans une telle élaboration. Il lui faudra bien, ouvertement ou en catimini, une ontologie qui ménage une place à ce qui vient avant le travail humain. Voilà qui symbolise sans doute la difficulté du parti-pris néoproductiviste, si immatérialisé soit-il.

If I understand Haber correctly—and things are compressed here, I am writing on the fly, so perhaps I do not—then it seems to me that he misses the whole force of refusing to partition ‘the natural’ from ‘the human.’ Radical ecology is not the recognition that we must protect mother nature, but rather the recognition that there is no mother nature, that we must regulate ourselves for ourselves—in fact, radical ecology is clearly a critique of capital or, better put, a critique of capital is radical ecology. The point is that nothing comes before human labor—this is precisely why it is so important to understand the limits internal to this labor and its social formations. David Harvey makes a similar point about the inclusion of ecology within the critique of capital in the new preface to his big book. This brings us to Haber’s next point.

Hardt and Negri conduct a rigorously immanent critique of capitalism. Haber finds it unusual: “Ce qu’il y a sans doute de plus étonnant dans leur livre, c’est le sérieux avec lequel Hardt et Negri prennent au pied de la lettre le mot d’ordre de la « critique immanente ».” So immanent is the critique, in fact, that it turns out not to be sufficiently critical for Haber of life as it is lived ‘under capitalism.’ What is wanted and not supplied is a treatment of alienation (as we would find in the Frankfurt school, or on the contemporary French left in so many places—the comité invisible, say).

Ainsi, le passage au communisme suppose non pas la réinvention de régulations (dans le style d’ATTAC) ou la promotion d’institutions économiques nouvelles (une position actuellement défendue par la social-démocratie associationniste), mais la libération des forces productives existantes qui, d’elles-mêmes, s’assumant elles-mêmes, se soustrayant au pseudo-soutien que leur offre le capital tel qu’il existe aujourd’hui (en fait une force de contrainte et de parasitage) sont censées pouvoir favoriser l’avènement de la société désirable.

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Hardt et Negri critiquent non pas l’autonomie aliénante du capitalisme comme « système » (inhumain, anonyme, poussé à l’autoreproduction élargie constante, délié de la volonté et de l’intelligence etc.), mais cet aspect bien particulier du capitalisme qu’est la privatisation, c’est-à-dire en fait la sous-utilisation, des richesses produites en commun, un « vol » qui est d’ailleurs aussi censé expliquer la misère des exclus.

Haber is put off by this lack. It seems to me to be one of the signal virtues of the book. Capitalism is productive, and not only of misery (which Hardt and Negri hardly ignore), but also of possibility and innovation (although that word has been co-opted by CAppleitism). Haber recognizes that this perspective connects Hardt and Negri to the Proudhonian tradition—this is a tradition that seems to me, in parts, salvageable.

Lastly, Haber recognizes that Commonwealth takes the human suffering inflicted by capital as its starting point. How is this done, how might it be done? After discussing several possibilities, Haber describes the one in which Hardt and Negri can be located:

Un intersubjectivisme participationniste. Ici, les conditions de vie décentes, non-misérables, sont considérées comme faisant partie des supports empiriques d’une délibération digne de ce nom. Présupposé dans ces approches, l’argument trivial selon lequel on n’est pas prêt à bien délibérer lorsque l’on est dans le besoin suffit à la fois à emporter la conviction et à orienter la discussion. L’idéal d’une participation démocratique inclusive et authentique y forme donc le point de vue à partir duquel les situations socioéconomiques concrètes se trouvent évaluées. Dans le champ contemporain, Habermas a fourni une légitimation influente de ce genre d’approches d’aspect plus républicaniste.

Republican is right. One might also describe this, nodding to Petit: ‘freedom as (collective?) non-domination.’ But, for Haber, problems arise because the authors of Commonwealth link this collective participation not necessarily to fundamental bare-life issues such as drinking water or rule of law, but rather to participation in bio-political production. This is indeed difficult. It seems to me here that, on the one hand, Hardt and Negri are being faithful to a certain relativism in Marx, one that might be shorthanded as ‘time socially necessary.’ On the other hand, it is unjust to first admit that the authors begin with the problem of human misery, and then object when they subtract misery as such from the solution to the problem. This may be related to Haber’s relative discounting of the shift from a regime in which profit is based on the extraction of surplus value to one in which it rests on rent. It is not, it seems to me, empirically unrealistic to say—with many ‘official economists’—that poverty is the result of not-enough globalization. This ‘not-enough’ is required by capital. Remove it, and you allow the fruits of production to be distributed in a more egalitarian way.

Haber’s review, I think, hits many of the right points. Its incompleteness should be ascribed to its length rather than anything else. The final word of the review is positive and, it seems to me, rightly points out that the most appealing aspect of Hardt and Negri’s work is the attempt to grapple with the empirical reality of new economic formations in a critical and even revolutionary philosophical mode. The clear (although unnamed) foil here is Badiou. I’ll reproduce the last lines:

Les difficultés de la position défendue par Hardt et Negri forment la contrepartie de leur façon nette et décidée de répondre à cette exigence, et c’est pour cela que, sûrement, elle jouera à juste titre un rôle important dans la discussion contemporaine. Ne serait-ce que parce que, en ce qu’elle a de plus intéressante pour nous, l’impulsion marxienne a plus de chance de survivre dans une tentative sincère pour concevoir les transformations du travail et de l’exploitation que dans une quelconque spéculation déliée sur l’essence du Communisme comme Exigence pure.

Gender, the Parasitical State, and Revolution

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is, it is often asserted, a classic. It is as rewarding a document for a meta-reading, or a history of reception, as any—see Donald Reid’s 2007 essay in Modern Intellectual History for just such a project. But before a scholarly survey of this kind can be properly appreciated, the text itself should be read because the reception history of a work is more interesting when one understands how complex the thing is all on its own.

The Brumaire recounts in some detail the period from February of 1848 to the days just following Louis Bonaparte’s coup of December 2nd, 1851. The tone is one of bitter invective and scorn; the mode is very often satire. The question, of course, was how what began as a proletarian revolution could end in a cheap, tawdry, strong (but really weak)-man dictatorship. Today the spectacle of a revolution descending into tawdry authoritarianism is so banal as to be declared often enough a law of history. At the time, in France, certainly dictatorship was associated with revolution, but it should be born in mind that if 1789 eventually lead to military dictatorship—Napoleon’s empire—it did so first by passing through a Jacobin period that had the highest possible ambitions, and that Napoleon himself was easy to see as a world-historical genius. Marx’s task, then, writing in the 1850s, was to understand and explain the path revolution had taken, and indicate what might be the consequences, theoretical and practical, of this revolution.

By way of introducing what Marx says about the interrelated issues of the state and the class base of Louis Napoleon’s power, and considering the relation of this to Marx’s other work, I would like to make a rhetorical, or metaphorological, point that I feel smells strongly of a certain outmoded style of criticism, and that perhaps has already been made.

The famous opening passages of the text catalogue symbolic borrowings of various revolutions from history—these borrowings go from narratives to costumes. Marx puts language in a central position here. Indeed, he makes the learning of a language the metaphorical bridge from the faintly ridiculous actual history of these borrowings to an imagined revolution: “Likewise a beginner studying a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue; but only when he can use it without referring back, and thus forsake his native language for the new, only then has he entered into the spirit of the new language, and gained the ability to speak it fluently”(32).[1] In the case of the 1848 revolution, however, farce is in the air. Marx’s satire holds what is, what is said, and what ought to be, up for inspection. Louis Bonaparte is a con man running a nation as an emperor in order to pay his own debts. Everything is tawdry and small in comparison to past revolutions. If the Brumaire has become a central text for interpretation of Marx’s understanding of ideology, it is because he pays so much attention here to language and its power, perception and reality—to the essential emptiness, or lack, that drives the logic of public political discourse.

I would like to suggest that we link this obsession with farce, the tawdry, the small, and the emptiness and corruption of discourse, with Marx’s occasional, throw-away comparisons of politics and sex. There are a few remarks in the text, not central to the argument, but which in good post-structuralist fashion, I would like to suggest might provide a key to its rhetoric. It need hardly be said that Marx’s sexual politics are not those of the politically correct 21st century. First, famously, we have, “it is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation has been taken [by Louis Bonaparte] unawares. A nation like a woman is not forgiven the unguarded hour in which the first rake that tries can take her by force”(36). In reference to the eventual arrival of Odilon Barrot at the head of a ministry, a position he had sought for many years, Marx says, “he brought the bride home at last, but only after she had been prostituted” (49). Later on, more obliquely, discussing the accumulation of small bribes by which Bonaparte purchased the loyalty of the army, we find a similar trope, “hence the shamefaced despair, the feeling of terrible humiliation, degradation, which weighs down upon France and suffocates her. France feels dishonored. Just as under Napoleon there was scarcely any pretext for freedom, so under the second Bonaparte there was no longer any pretext for servitude” (116). Finally, and again veiled, there is the gender imaginary implied in the joke Marx makes discussing the duping of the peasants about the merits of the newer Napoleon, who perhaps does not really have a right to the glorious name he bears. Louis Bonaparte arrives protected by the Napoleonic (law) Code, under which “all inquiry into paternity is forbidden” (118).

The point here isn’t the boring simple-feminist one that Marx had reprehensible, perhaps Victorian, views about virtue and chastity, corruption and promiscuity. The point is rather the (I hope more sophisticated) sort of one made by gender analysis. The same set of idealist beliefs Marx had about the virtue of women slide over into politics, and seem also to govern the relationships he perceives between political action and social foundation. Louis Bonaparte is a weak and self-interested individual who finds the social foundation of his power in the conservative elements of the least-organized class, the small-holding peasantry. If he himself is a member of the lumpenproletariat (the members of which, it should be pointed out, typically have low moral standards), and if he draws his personal army from their ranks, his support in the larger society comes from what is essentially his seduction of a simple—but morally reprehensible—class. The smallholding farmers are only half a class, although they share the physical make-up of a class, in other words are united by a similar relation to and means of production, they lack the intellectual or superstructural unity, the community, that forms a class. Marx ends his breathtaking single-paragraph analysis of this sector of society thus:

They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must also appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unrestricted governmental power which protects them from other classes and watches over them from on high. The political influence of peasant proprietors is ultimately expressed in the subordination of parliament to the executive, society to the state.(p. 117)

It must be admitted that this description is not unlike a certain 19th century idea of woman—who would, if admitted into the homosocial community of politics, only drag unfreedom into it by acting simply as the proxy of her husband or her priest.

Louis Bonaparte is not the only object of Marx’s scorn in the Brumaire. The fragmented and indecisive bourgeoisie also comes in for much abuse. (It should be indicated here that a good point of comparison with Marx’s analysis of the political dynamics of these years is Maurice Agulhon’s book on the Second Republic. Agulhon, like Marx, sees the Republic as caught, paralyzed, between the twin dangers of popular uprising and monarchism; unlike Marx, he has, or is able to express, more respect for the political perspicacity of Louis Bonaparte in allowing each faction to believe what they liked about him, playing them off against one another). The source of Marx’s scorn, though not of his hostility, is the failure of the bourgeoisie to insist on the alignment of its economic and its political power. Marx heaps invective on the bourgeoisie because, fragmented as it is, it effectively renounces political life—which for Marx is the power to act (108)—in the hope of thus securing its economic creature comforts. That is, the bourgeoisie falls away from its ideals and prostitutes itself out. Sexual and political virtue are confounded.

Now, I will want to wait and see how Marx’s analysis of this period appears in his later, post 1870 writings on France, but it seems possible to assert that this confusion of virtues makes it difficult for Marx to see the potential of what Louis Napoleon had done. When Marx looked at the new regime, he seems largely to have seen only the socially marginal, the classless, and therefore corruption that is coded sexually—for instance in his reproduction at the end of the piece of the quip about the specific difference of the new regime: “France has often had a government of mistresses, but never before a government of kept men” (126). I understand that the Brumaire was referred to in the 1930s as a tool for understanding the rise of Fascism, seen then as a classless gang of petty criminals grabbing power from the weak and divided bourgeoisie. Is it permissible to suggest that this kind of analysis makes sense only when one cannot fully appreciate the power of political rhetoric because one is trapped in a sexist grounding of moral virtue on physical innocence? The purity of the physical must be certain, or there can be no moral (which is to say, spiritual) force? Could this be a sort of cruel irony whereby the sexist assumptions of progressive rationalism prevented it from seeing the enormous power and danger of fascist demagoguery? Or perhaps this is going much too far. It would none the less perhaps be interesting to see if previous feminist readings of the Brumaire (which must exist, but which I know nothing about) move in this direction.

The above is a little unfair to Marx in that he does not base his entire analysis of Louis Napoleon’s power base on the staging of an act of sexual violence. Marx’s treatment of the nature and tendencies of the French state is also crucial here. What I find most productive here in terms of a Marxist vision of French history is how close Marx comes to describing the state as itself a sort of class. The material reality of this seems to have made a great impression on Marx. The president, as head of state, has the power to fire and appoint 500,000 bureaucrats, which is to say that 1.5 million individuals (the families of the appointees), owe their daily bread to him personally (44, 67-8, 115, 122). According to Marx, during the Second Republic, the president makes a strong contrast with the national assembly, “While each individual delegate of the people merely represents this or that party, this or that city...He is the elect of the nation...The elected national assembly stands in a metaphysical relation to the nation, but the elected president stands in a personal one” (45). [2]

Marx’s analysis of the French state and the role it plays in Louis Bonaparte’s ascension must have an important role his broader interpretation of 19th century French history. (Clearly expressing Marx’s position here also provides a crucial substratum for reading Lenin—indeed, it seems to me now that I must go back and re-read State and Revolution to see precisely what it was that Lenin adds to Marx, and what he merely renames). The great centralizing bureaucratic apparatus of the French state—and Tocqueville would agree with Marx here—developed first under the absolute monarchy, and in the sequence of revolutions in the earlier part of the century, always served as the tool of the rising bourgeoisie (115-116). This has been the history of the state, “this executive with its enormous bureaucratic machinery of state...this fearsome parasitic body, which traps French society like a net and chokes it at every pore...All upheavals perfected this machinery instead of destroying it...Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have achieved independence with respect to society and to have brought it into submission” (115-116). The state, if it is conceived as a monstrous parasite, must of course have a host. It must also have support, “state power is not suspended in mid-air” (116), the cohort of bureaucrats themselves are not enough support. Here we return to the above-mentioned small-holding peasants, the formless class seduced, with the aid of the Napoleonic legend, into supporting Louis Bonaparte.

The discussion above of the curiously directionless nature of the small peasants is important here. If these peasants exist in no sense as community or organization, and are a group only by virtue of the similarity of their employment (that is, their position relative to the means of production), then the state as it is described by Marx is precisely the opposite of this. It is entirely organization, and has no material substrate whatsoever. It is an unproductive parasite. The opposition isn’t highlighted by Marx, and has, we might say, a poetic content rather than anything else. It is one more sign that the end is near.

Terrell Carver, in his brief accompanying note calls the Brumaire a “consolation.” In what sense? In the sense that Marx attempts to show some progressive result to the catastrophe of having such a nonentity as Louis Napoleon rise to power. Marx says,

It’s plain as day: ‘all Napoleonic ideals’ are ideals of the undeveloped smallholding in its heyday, but for the smallholding that has outlived this, they are an absurdity. They are merely hallucinations of its death struggle, words transformed into phrases, ideas into spectres, befitting dress into preposterous costumes. But the parody f the empire was necessary to liberate the bulk of the French nation from the weight of tradition and to work out in pure form the opposition between state and society. The demolition of the state machine will not endanger centralisation. Bureaucracy is only the low and brutal form of a centralization which is still afflicted with its opposite, feudalism. When, disappointed with the Napoleonic restoration, the French peasant will cease to believe in the smallholding, the whole edifice of state erected on this smallholding will collapse, and the proletarian revolution will obtain the chorus without which its solo becomes a swan song in all peasant countries. (p. 123)

The whole course of revolution, Marx suggests, can be read as a ‘heightening of the contradictions’ in a political sense. In the whole period up until the coup in 1851, revolution had “developed parliamentary power so that it could be overthrown. Now that this has been attained, it is developing the executive power, reducing it to its purest expression, isolating it, confronting it as sole challenger in order to concentrate all its powers of destruction against it” (115). That is, the purification of executive power represented by Louis Bonaparte is a necessary stage in the development of the consciousness of the rural population before an urban proletarian revolution can be successful.

Here is the basic inspiration for Leninism, although my sense is that Lenin made explicit the important additional step that it would be necessary for the proletariat to seize and use the full force of the bureaucratic machinery of state built by the bourgeoisie in order to eliminate the bourgeoisie. Here, also, is a theory on the level of the political that is structured much in the same way as an ‘economist’ Marxian theory of revolution. Based on Capital alone, one might well think that Marx’s theory of revolution was largely limited to the developing contradictions between the means of production and the relations of production (property). Perhaps the overlap I see here is the famous ‘dialectic’ applied to both realms. Or perhaps my reading of Marx is clouded by my reading of Lenin. Yet it seems that Marx is here posing his characteristic theory of social change as contradiction driven evolution-then-revolution in a manner that leaves economic change almost entirely out of the picture. No doubt much effort has been made by other more accomplished exegetes of Marx than this one, to make the two versions line up.

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[1] I am reading from the Later Political Writings, edited by Terrell Carver, published through the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series. It seems to me that this earlier passage mentioning the learning of a language must certainly be read as the first part of another, more famous passage a few pages on: “The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot create its poetry from the past but only from the future...Past revolutions required recollections of world history in order to dull themselves to their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury the dead in order to realise its own content. There phrase transcended content, here content transcends phrase” (32). That is, we might say, the revolution is in fact taking place only when the form of what takes place is no longer drawn from the textbook of the past, but arises out of immediate necessity.

[2] These passages suggest two areas of comparison. The first is with the history of suffrage in France, in particular the intellectual-philosophical history approach to it taken by Pierre Rosanvallon. Another is to compare Marx’s analysis of the concept and physical reality of sovereignty in this and perhaps other texts with the current obsession with the idea, drawing primarily on Schmitt and Agamben, in contemporary Theory. Having mentioned Schmitt, I’d like to record my impulse, which will go unfulfilled here, to compare what he says about the parliamentary system in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy to the various critical noises Marx makes here. The sentiment Schmitt identifies is supposed to be shared by the right and left—what relation does that fin-de-siècle and interwar manner of thinking actually owe to the Brumaire?

Tantae molis erat

Alfred North Whitehead famously characterized western philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato (I paraphrase). I have the strong impression that a significant portion of contemporary historical work would fit comfortably into a few footnotes in the last 40-odd pages of Capital.

For instance, I recently read a short, popularizing essay by on globalization and politics by Kevin O’Rourke—I had already noticed his textbook, and thought idly about reading it. The article is interesting, and argues generally that geopolitical equilibrium has as much to do with patterns of global trade as to ‘technical’ capabilities. An important part of the article is an analysis of the uses to which certain European powers put their ‘comparative advantage in violence’—that is, they used this power-imbalance to seize or create monopolies where this was possible, to drive up prices, and pay for more violence. Marx, in chapter 31 (pg 917), describes these very same monopolies as moments of ‘primitive accumulation.’ Where O’Rourke suggests that we can ask whether or not the monopolies, given the costs of the military required to protect them, were really ‘worth it,’ Marx would say that they achieved their real purpose, which was capital accumulation rather than profit, per se.

More strikingly, in the final chapter on ‘The Modern Theory of Colonization,’ Marx describes in outline the very same economic process—the problem of creating in land-rich colonies a floating population of ‘free’ workers—that Thomas Holt puts at the center of his excellent The Problem of Freedom. Holt is certainly marxisant, if not explicitly Marxist; I’d check to see what he says specifically if I had his book here. In any case, I can now recognize that book as a sophisticated revision and expansion Marx’s basic framework in order to include and explain the trajectory of racism as a political force.

I also do not see, despite the prophecies at the end of chapter 32, how a historiography taking inspiration from Marx himself could be inflexible or deterministic. The very grammatical structure of Marx’s predictions set them apart from the rest of the text:

The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. (pg 929)

Most of the sentences in Capital do not have this kind of lucidity (though I should really look at the German). Here, for instance, we are again in the philosophical realm: “this is the negation of the negation.” The historical narrative Marx has given us about the development of property relations in England (the so-called ‘classic’ case), in fact is contingent and flexible. It is eminently empirical, and although many people are starved to death, although this narrative does contain contradictions such as the presence of at once a great demand for labor and unemployment and starvation wages, this narrative is able to unfold across hundreds of pages without even a single ‘negation of the negation.’ Its logic is, rather, historical. The development of the English economy cannot be understood outside larger, essentially global series of events. This is not to say that god touched England, and the whole world moved in such a way as to produce capitalism at a given spot. Rather, as it happened, this particular geographical location witnessed the conjuncture (not, at least here, one of Marx’s words) of a set of circumstances that were propitious for the exploitation of the surplus-value of labor and the development of industrial machinery.

I would like to write some kind of summary, some sort of more comprehensive reaction, on finishing this book. I can’t. It’s too big, too rich with detail. I can only say that I understand how it became a classic (following, shall we say, Antoine Compagnon’s definition of the classic). The disjunction between the philosophical and the empirical, between the necessary unfolding of ideality and the contingent play of violence and power—such is the unevenness that makes a book a classic.

Badiou interview

On Tuesday, Libération published an interview with Alain Badiou, which can be read on their website. Badiou is cast as one of Sarkozy’s three “adversaires”—he fits nicely into the prefab role of “radicalité.” So although the occasion of the interview is really only to continue the anti-Sarko circus, Badiou does manage to articulate some broad political points.

The mode in which the newspaper introduces Badiou is worth pointing out: he is a philosopher, who stands apart both from Derrida and from the nouveaux philosophes, “Il a préféré se lancer dans l’élaboration d’un système philosophique sophistiqué, d’inspiration platonicienne, où les mathématiques jouent un rôle important, et qui lui vaut une certaine renommée dans le monde universitaire anglosaxon.” Then he is also politically engaged, a practicing Maoist. The two are quite separate, and it is his philosophy, not his politics, that interests the English-speaking world; which, in my experience, is quite false. Of course, to begin with, the sectors of the US academy that are interested in Badiou would reject most formulations of a distinction between philosophy and politics. But also, anecdotally, it seems to me that the philosophy is worked through in order to get to the politics, or at least something that is supposed to be critique and therefore political.

(As an aside: I am amazed, though perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, that the French press still says ‘anglosaxon,’ when what it means is Britain and the US—the ethnic identification leaves a bad taste in my mouth.)

In the interview itself, Badiou indulges in anti-Sarko banter, which is the whole reason they asked him to do the thing in the first place. I think all that is beside the point (conjunctural?). Badiou reaffirms his commitment to the idea of changing the ‘motor’ of society to something other than self-interest, or profit. He argues that so-called democratic societies (the wealthy west) have not in fact reduced violence, but only externalized it. Although the form of this claim is compelling, and I am convinced that ‘we’ export rather than solve a great many of the problems that we solve, Badiou’s specific claim about violence is, as they says, fortement contestable. Also, perhaps, it is subject to empirical verification. The rhetorical reason for this specific claim was to contrast capitalist society with the Soviet Union and other socialist ‘experiments’ (a terrible way to refer to half the world). The capitalists export their systemic violence (one assumes from the capitalist core to the capitalist periphery, although, again, I think the spatialization of capital distribution implied here is, to be short, wrong), while the socialists fully assume it, which is to say, turn the apparatus of the state against the people it is supposed to serve.

Mostly, Badiou states (as probably he has said before) that in his opinion the major theoretical problem of our time is to arrive at an effective form of political mobilization that is not the military-party model. He says,

Le problème d’une discipline politique qui ne soit pas calqée sur le militaire est un problème ouvert, expérimental. Gardons-nous des approches théorique de la question, qui ramènent toujours à l’opposition entre le léninisme (l’organisation) et l’anarchisme (la mobilisation informelle). C’est-à-dire à l’opposition entre Etat et mouvement, qui est une impasse.

He seems to have some specific examples in mind when he rejects the ‘movement’ as a model of political activity. I’m not sure exactly what they are. But I agree that the fetishization of the state/non-state distinction is to be avoided, especially in France, where the line is sometimes hard to find.

I am off to the grève générale, where perhaps I will find some alternative to capitalism.

surplus-value

By the end of chapter 7, “The labor process and the valorization process,” I had lost the train of Marx’s argument on the crucial ground of the creation of surplus-value. I went back, and believe that I have got it back. I will try to explain. Specifically, the following passage from chapter 6 made no sense to me, and then the crucial move of the next chapter, also reproduced here, relied upon it.

Suppose that [the] mass of commodities required for the average day contains six hours of social labor, then every day half a day of average social labor is objectified in labor-power, or in other words half a day of labor is required for the daily production of labor-power. This quantity of labor forms the value of a day’s labor-power, or the value of the labor-power produced every day. If half a day of average social labor is present in 3 shillings, then 3 shillings is the price corresponding to the value of a day’s labor-power. If its owner therefore offers it for sale at 3 shillings a day, its selling price is equal to its value, and according to our original assumption the owner of money, who is intent on transforming his 3 shillings into capital, pays this value. 276

The value of a day’s labor-power amounts to 3 shillings, because on our assumption half a day’s labor is objectified in that quantity of labor-power, i.e. because the means of subsistence required every day for the production of labor-power cost half a day’s labor. But the pas labor embodied in the labor-power and the living labor it can perform, and the daily cost of maintaining labor-power and its daily expenditure in work, are two totally different things. The former determines the exchange-value of the labor-power, the latter is its use-value. The fact that half a day’s labor is necessary to keep the worker alive during 24 hours does not in any way prevent him from working a whole day. Therefore the value of labor-power, and the value which that labor-power valorizes [verwertet] in the labor-process, are two entirely different magnitudes; and this difference was what the capitalist had in mind when he was purchasing the labor-power. 300

And yet more clearly:

The owner of the money has paid the value of a day’s labor-power; he therefore has the use of it for a day, a day’s labor belongs to him. On the one hand the daily sustenance of labor-power costs only half a day’s labor, while on the other hand the very same labor-power can remain effective, can work, during a whole day, and consequently the value which its use during that day creates is double what the capitalist pays for that use; this circumstance is a piece of good luck for the buyer, but by no means an injustice towards the seller. 301

The shillings, I think, confused me a little, as did the 6-hour half-day. The point of this passage and the next chapter is that the exchange-value of the commodity ‘12 hours of social labor’ (and by this is meant the mythic socially-average-labor of any given instance of production) is 6 hours of labor. Why, I thought, would the worker work a whole day if the cost of living for a whole day was half a day of labor? But we aren’t talking about 6 hours of substance farm labor in order to sustain life for the remaining 6 hours of a given 12 hour period. The worker possesses a commodity, labor-power over time, the exchange-value of which can be expressed in the labor-time necessary for its production, just like any other commodity. The special nature of labor-power as a commodity is that its use-value falls in the same qualitative category as its exchange-value, and is greater than this exchange-value. So it valorizes itself.

The total value that goes into the production of any given commodity is measurable in labor-time. But (at the arbitrary 1:2 subsistence ratio) each hour of labor-time purchased at its exchange-value on the market in the form of labor-power (as opposed to the congealed form of leather, or yarn, or any other physical commodity) yields, when it is consumed in use-value, 2 hours of labor-power. That is the source, as far as I can tell, of surplus-value, and therefore of capital. The general formula for capital, M-C-M’, expanded into M-C-M+ΔM, expresses just this fundamental result of the treatment of labor-power as a commodity, measured in time, but expressible in money. So surplus-value itself rests, just as value does, on time measured and chopped up into bits.

Some weeks ago there was a much-reported factory occupation in Chicago. My understanding is that the conflict was over, in part, delayed compensation. Or put differently, the necessity for the worker to lend their labor-power to the capitalist over short periods of time. Another way of saying this is that workers are always paid after the work is done. Marx says,

In every country where the capitalist mode of production prevails, it is the custom not to pay for labor-power until it has been exercised for the period fixed by the contract, for example at the end of each week. In all cases, therefore, the worker advances the use-value of his labor-power to the capitalist. He lets the buyer consume it before he received payment of the price. Everywhere the worker allows credit to the capitalist. That this credit is no mere fiction is shown not only by the occasional loss of wages the worker has already advanced, when a capitalist goes bankrupt, but also by a series of more long-lasting consequences. 278

The footnote to this passage describes, among other things, the system of factory-shops, in which workers who are paid only at long intervals are obliged, between paychecks, to buy necessities on credit at high prices. The very idea of this ‘company shop’ is scandalous now, but the practice of carrying significant credit card debt is really no different. Marx insists that value be measured in social time—necessity is also social. This is to say that Marx’s basic schema still makes a certain amount of sense in an ‘affluent’ society, because necessities for the reproduction of ‘the worker’ are socially, rather than physiologically, determined. Much more value is required to produce a stock-broker who will operate at ‘normal’ levels than is required to feed a human being. As Balzac makes quite clear, much more is required to make a successful journalist than a pen and coffee—there are social, but none the less real, costs to doing this kind of commodity production. Marx also insists on the physicality of labor, the metabolic relationship between man and nature that it incarnates. Although I haven’t worked it all out, it seems to me that most of what I have so far read could stand without this strong (dare I say metaphysical?) distinction between nature and man.

This man/nature distinction is related, I think, to another distinction, that between the two kinds of consumption. There is productive consumption, which is social—leather is consumed in producing a boot, for instance, but the value of the leather is transformed and carried on in the exchange-value of the boot. Then there is individual consumption, which is to say the non-productive realization of the use-value of any given commodity. The boots are purchased, and then worn, until they are used up. The distinction seems to be essentially between production which is then rolled into a new commodity, and production which leaves the field of commodity exchange. But what if a worker buys the boots, and wears them to the factory, as a necessary part of his working equipment? Or, to extend my contentious counter-example, what if a stock-broker, or an investment banker, buys the fancy leather shoes, and wears them to work where they become part of the image of success that is, often, what is in fact being sold. In both cases the individual consumption is folded back into the reproduction or production (is there, regarding labor-power, any distinction there at all?) of the labor-power commodity. How are we to draw the line between commodities that an individual buys to consume individually, and those that are purchased and folded into the labor-power sold by this individual? The more we expand the concept of labor-power, the more problematic this becomes. How, in the end, are we to retain the socially constituted aspect of necessity while distinguishing it from that which is not necessary? If we are no longer considering necessity in terms of calories (which Marx is quite clear that we do not), then do we turn to the empirically observed fact of success in any given area of production as the only possible measure of necessity? This is perhaps the relativism of which Marx is sometimes accused.

No doubt at least some of this will become clearer as I read on.

Ranciere, The Hatred of Democracy

If I had more intellectual energy, I would somehow synthesize the Jacques Rancière book I’ve just put down. Here’s a half-hearted effort.

For him, democracy is the absolute principle of egalitarianism, which founds even inegalitarian systems. Democracy is the foundational meaninglessness of things, it seems. It is the essence of relativism and the blank space at the foundation of every power-structure. Equality, radical and contentless, is the transcendentally deduced starting-point for Rancière’s thought. He draws a number of consequences and makes a number of observations that I won’t discuss here. I will point to the interesting comparison with Badiou, who, we might say, puts the ontological relation of belonging in the same place as Rancière does equality.

He also, incidentally, has some interesting things to say about the Third Republic in this light. Jules Ferry is a hero, for instance, of genuine equality, whose vision was corrupted by the pressure for social reproduction.

I’m sympathetic with Rancière’s whole project, though there are points of interpretation on which I’d like to challenge him. In this particular book, there were two issues, both historico-theoretical.

The first one has to do with his discussion of J.-C. Milner’s book, Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique. Rancière seems to accept uncritically the idea that Europe’s ‘peace’ in the post 1945 world was somehow founded on the elimination of the cosmopolitain humanism that somehow inheres to the essence of Jewishness. I’m not at all familiar with Milner’s work, though I remember a bit of Zizek’s discussion. So I’m not sure quite what he’s up to. The argument, interspersed with Rancière’s additions, seems to be a) that the postwar ‘unification’ of Europe under abstract law is possible because the imaginary presence of ‘the Jew’ has, in fact, been successfully erased by Hitler; and so b) it is in this light that we must see European demands for ‘peace now’ in the middle east. Such demands obviously mean the end of Israel, and therefore the extension of the democratic/totalitarian project that is liberal/capitalist Europe onto a global scale. That is: European support for the Palestinians really is a new form of Nazi anti-Semitism. I won’t even begin to argue against this here—but I will point out that there is surely some theoretical interest to the empirical truth that Europe’s peace was, as Tony Judt points out, built not so much on the destruction of the Jews as on the massive scale of wartime and immediate postwar population transfers and border re-drawings, everything tamped down by Soviet control in the east.

More importantly, and in a completely different directly, it seems to me that Rancière grants capital the same transcendental status as equality (in his sense of the word, democracy). He says,

“In order for it [liberalism, which is really to say: capitalism] to function, it has no need that any constitutional order be declared for ‘deregulated competition’, that is, the free and limitless circulation of capital. It requires only that the latter be permitted to function. The mystical honeymoon between capital and the common good are needless for capital. It serves only the ends pursued by oligarchs of State: the constitution of interstate spaces liberated from the need for popular and national legitimacy.” 82

It is important that capitalism, just like everything else, is at least in part a social practice. There is an ample body of literature on the development, and lack of development, of capitalism. Capital is not a subject, though it may be useful to think of it that way. Capital is not a transcendental category. The development of something that we now call capitalism, either in the 16^th or 18^th centuries, did not in itself constitute a radical or epistemic break in world history. Capitalism may not need, as Rancière says, “any constitutional order” to support it, but it needs some kind of order. The proper institutions and infrastructure is necessary even for it to malfunction. Globalization is witness to this. Some economists say that the problem of globalization is that there isn’t enough of it—the poor states are the ones for one reason or another unconnected to the global economy. This doesn’t take the whole state of things into account, but it is none the less simply true that the system has gaps, and is sustained as a system by a huge amount of labor (and not just the sweating kind) and energy.

I’ll have to read more Rancière and see what he really thinks. This book has the feel of an occasional piece, dashed off in a hurry (again, that might be the translation). Certainly, he is in real conversation with Laclau, even Badiou, Zizek, and has some nasty (i think correct) things to say about Agamben. There will certainly be more about Rancière here later.