\documentclass[DIV=12,%
               BCOR=10mm,%
               headinclude=false,%
               footinclude=false,open=any,%
               fontsize=11pt,%
               twoside,%
               paper=210mm:11in]%
               {scrbook}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setmainfont{Linux Libertine O}
% these are not used but prevents XeTeX to barf
\setsansfont[Scale=MatchLowercase]{CMU Sans Serif}
\setmonofont[Scale=MatchLowercase]{CMU Typewriter Text}
\setmainlanguage{english}








% global style

\pagestyle{plain}




\usepackage{microtype} % you need an *updated* texlive 2012, but harmless
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{alltt}
\usepackage{verbatim}
% http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/3033/forcing-linebreaks-in-url
\PassOptionsToPackage{hyphens}{url}\usepackage[hyperfootnotes=false,hidelinks,breaklinks=true]{hyperref}
\usepackage{bookmark}
\usepackage[stable]{footmisc}
\usepackage[shortlabels]{enumitem}
\usepackage{tabularx}
\usepackage[normalem]{ulem}
\def\hsout{\bgroup \ULdepth=-.55ex \ULset}
% https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/22410/strikethrough-in-section-title
% Unclear if \protect \hsout is needed. Doesn't looks so
\DeclareRobustCommand{\sout}[1]{\texorpdfstring{\hsout{#1}}{#1}}
\usepackage{wrapfig}
\usepackage{indentfirst}
% remove the numbering
\setcounter{secnumdepth}{-2}

% remove labels from the captions
\renewcommand*{\captionformat}{}
\renewcommand*{\figureformat}{}
\renewcommand*{\tableformat}{}
\KOMAoption{captions}{belowfigure,nooneline}
\addtokomafont{caption}{\centering}

% avoid breakage on multiple <br><br> and avoid the next [] to be eaten
\newcommand*{\forcelinebreak}{\strut\\*{}}

\newcommand*{\hairline}{%
  \bigskip%
  \noindent \hrulefill%
  \bigskip%
}

% reverse indentation for biblio and play

\newenvironment*{amusebiblio}{
  \leftskip=\parindent
  \parindent=-\parindent
  \smallskip
  \indent
}{\smallskip}

\newenvironment*{amuseplay}{
  \leftskip=\parindent
  \parindent=-\parindent
  \smallskip
  \indent
}{\smallskip}

\newcommand*{\Slash}{\slash\hspace{0pt}}


\addtokomafont{disposition}{\rmfamily}
\addtokomafont{descriptionlabel}{\rmfamily}

% forbid widows/orphans
\frenchspacing
\sloppy
\clubpenalty=10000
\widowpenalty=10000
% http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/304802/how-not-to-hyphenate-the-last-word-of-a-paragraph
\finalhyphendemerits=10000

% given that we said footinclude=false, this should be safe
\setlength{\footskip}{2\baselineskip}

\title{Change the world without taking power}
\date{2002}
\author{John Holloway}
\subtitle{The meaning of revolution today}


% https://groups.google.com/d/topic/comp.text.tex/6fYmcVMbSbQ/discussion
\hypersetup{%
pdfencoding=auto,
pdftitle={Change the world without taking power},%
pdfauthor={John Holloway},%
pdfsubject={The meaning of revolution today},%
pdfkeywords={marxist; power; crisis; organization; revolution; not anarchist}%
}


\begin{document}



  \begin{titlepage}

  \strut\vskip 2em
  \begin{center}

  {\usekomafont{title}{\huge Change the world without taking power\par}}%
  \vskip 1em
  
  {\usekomafont{subtitle}{The meaning of revolution today\par}}%
  
  \vskip 2em
  
  {\usekomafont{author}{John Holloway\par}}%
  
  \vskip 1.5em


   
   \vfill


  
  {\usekomafont{date}{2002\par}}%
  

  \end{center}

  \end{titlepage}

\cleardoublepage



\tableofcontents
% start a new right-handed page

\cleardoublepage



\chapter{The Scream}

\section{I}


In the beginning is the scream. We scream.


When we write or when we read, it is easy to forget that the
beginning is not the word, but the scream. Faced with the
mutilation of human lives by capitalism, a scream of sadness, a
scream of horror, a scream of anger, a scream of refusal:
NO.


The starting point of theoretical reflection is opposition,
negativity, struggle. It is from rage that thought
is born, not from the pose of reason, not from the
reasoned-sitting-back-and-reflecting-on-the-mysteries-of-existence
that is the conventional image of the thinker


We start from negation, from dissonance. The dissonance can
take many shapes. An inarticulate mumble of discontent, tears of
frustration, a scream of rage, a confident roar. An unease, a
confusion, a longing, a critical vibration.


Our dissonance comes from our experience, but that experience
varies. Sometimes it is the direct experience of exploitation in the
factory, or of oppression in the home, of stress in the office, of
hunger and poverty, or of state violence or discrimination.
Sometimes it is the less direct experience through television,
newspapers or books that moves us to rage. Millions of children
live on the streets of the world. In some cities, street children are
systematically murdered as the only way of enforcing respect for
private property. In 1998 the assets of the 200 richest people were
more than the total income of 41\% of the world’s people (two and
a half billion). In 1960, the countries with the wealthiest fifth of
the world’s people had per capita incomes 30 times that of the
poorest fifth: by 1990 the ratio had doubled to 60 to one, and by
1995 it stood at 74 to one. The stock market rises every
time there is an increase in unemployment. Students are
imprisoned for struggling for free education while those who are
actively responsible for the misery of millions are heaped with
honours and given titles of distinction, General, Secretary of
Defence, President. The list goes on and on. It is impossible
to read a newspaper without feeling rage, without feeling
pain.


Dimly perhaps, we feel that these things that anger us are not
isolated phenomena, that there is a connection between them, that
they are all part of a world that is flawed, a world that is wrong in
some fundamental way. We see more and more people begging
on the street while the stock markets break new records
and company directors’ salaries rise to ever dizzier heights,
and we feel that the wrongs of the world are not chance
injustices but part of a system that is profoundly wrong. Even
Hollywood films (surprisingly, perhaps) almost always start
from the portrayal of a fundamentally unjust world - before
going on to reassure us (less surprisingly) that justice for the
individual can be won through individual effort. Our anger
is directed not just against particular happenings but is
against a more general wrongness, a feeling that the world
is askew, that the world is in some way untrue. When we
experience something particularly horrific, we hold up our hands
in horror and say ’that cannot be! it cannot be true!’ We
know that it is true, but feel that it is the truth of an untrue
world.


What would a true world look like? We may have a vague idea:
it would be world of justice, a world in which people could
relate to each other as people and not as things, a world in
which people would shape their own lives. But we do not
need to have a picture of what a true world would be like in
order to feel that there is something radically wrong with
the world that exists. Feeling that the world is wrong does
not necessarily mean that we have a picture of a utopia to
put in its place. Nor does is necessarily mean a romantic,
some-day-my-prince-will-come idea that, although things
are wrong now, one day we shall come to a true world, a
promised land, a happy ending. We need no promise of a
happy ending to justify our rejection of a world we feel to be
wrong.


That is our starting point: rejection of a world that we feel to be
wrong, negation of a world we feel to be negative. This is what we
must cling to.

\section{II}


’Cling to’, indeed, for there is so much to stifle our negativity,
to smother our scream. Our anger is constantly fired by
experience, but any attempt to express that anger is met by a
wall of absorbent cotton wool. We are met with so many
arguments that seem quite reasonable. There are so many ways of
bouncing our scream back against us, of looking at us and
asking why we scream. Is it because of our age, our social
background, or just some psychological maladjustment that we
are so negative? Are we hungry, did we sleep badly or is
it just pre-menstrual tension? Do we not understand the
complexity of the world, the practical difficulties of implementing
radical change? Do we not know that it is unscientific to
scream?


And so they urge us (and we feel the need) to study society, and
to study social and political theory. And a strange thing
happens. The more we study society, the more our negativity
is dissipated or sidelined as being irrelevant. There is no
room for the scream in academic discourse. More than that:
academic study provides us with a language and a way of
thinking that makes it very difficult for us to express our
scream. The scream, if it appears at all, appears as something
to be explained, not as something to be articulated. The
scream, from being the subject of our questions about society,
becomes the object of analysis. Why is it that we scream? Or
rather, since we are now social scientists, why is it that they
scream? How do we explain social revolt, social discontent? The
scream is systematically disqualified by dissolving it into
its context. It is because of infantile experiences that they
scream, because of their modernist conception of the subject,
because of their unhealthy diet, because of the weakening
of family structures: all of these explanations are backed
up by statistically supported research. The scream is not
entirely denied, but it is robbed of all validity. By being
torn from ’us’ and projected on to a ’they’, the scream is
excluded from the scientific method. When we become social
scientists, we learn that the way to understand is to pursue
objectivity, to put our own feelings on one side. It is not so
much what we learn as how we learn that seems to smother
our scream. It is a whole structure of thought that disarms
us.


And yet none of the things which made us so angry to start off
with have disappeared. We have learnt, perhaps, how they fit
together as parts of a system of social domination, but somehow
our negativity has been erased from the picture. The horrors of
the world continue. That is why it is necessary to do what is
considered scientifically taboo: to scream like a child, to lift the
scream from all its structural explanations, to say ’We don’t care
what the psychiatrist says, we don’t care if our subjectivity is a
social construct: this is our scream, this is our pain, these are our
tears. We will not let our rage be diluted into reality: it is
reality rather that must yield to our scream. Call us childish
or adolescent if you like, but this is our starting point: we
scream.’

\section{III}


Who are ’we’ anyway, this ’we’ that assert ourselves so forcefully
at the start of what is meant to be a serious book? Serious books
on social theory usually start in the third person, not with the
assertion of an undefined ’we’. ’We’ is a dangerous word, open to
attack from all sides. Some readers will already be saying
’You scream if you like, mate, but don’t count me as part
of your ”we”! Don’t say ”we” when you really mean ”I”,
because then you are just using ”we” to impose your views on
the readers’. Others will no doubt object that it is quite
illegitimate to start from an innocent ’we’ as though the
world had just been born. The subject, we are told, is not a
legitimate place to start, since the subject is itself a result, not
a beginning. It is quite wrong to start from ’we scream’
because first we must understand the processes that lead to the
social construction of this ’we’ and to the constitution of our
scream.


And yet where else can we possibly start? In so far as writing\Slash{}
reading is a creative act, it is inevitably the act of a ’we’. To start
in the third person is not a neutral starting point, since it already
presupposes the suppression of the ’we’, of the subject of
the writing and reading. ’We’ are here as the starting point
because we cannot honestly start anywhere else. We cannot
start anywhere other than with our own thoughts and our
own reactions. The fact that ’we’ and our conception of
’we’ are product of a whole history of the subjection of the
subject changes nothing. We can only start from where we are,
from where we are but do not want to be, from where we
scream.


For the moment, this ’we’ of ours is a confused ’we’. We are an
indistinct first person plural, a blurred and possibly discordant
mixture between the ’I’ of the writer and the ’I’ or ’we’ of the
readers. But we start from ’we’, not from ’I’, because ’I’ already
presupposes an individualisation, a claim to individuality in
thoughts and feelings, whereas the act of writing or reading is
based on the assumption of some sort of community, however
contradictory or confused. The ’we’ of our starting point is
very much a question rather than an answer: it affirms the
social character of the scream, but poses the nature of that
sociality as a question. The merit of starting with a ’we’ rather
than with an ’it’ is that we are then openly confronted with
the question that must underlie any theoretical assertion,
but which is rarely addressed: who are we that make the
assertion?


Of course this ’we’ is not a pure, transcendent Subject:
we are not Man or Woman or the Working Class, not for
the moment at least. We are much too confused for that.
We are an antagonistic ’we’ grown from an antagonistic
society. What we feel is not necessarily correct, but it is a
starting point to be respected and criticised, not just to
be put aside in favour of objectivity. We are undoubtedly
self-contradictory: not only in the sense that the reader may
not feel the same as the writer (nor each reader the same
as the others), but also in the sense that our feelings are
contradictory. The dissonance we feel at work or when we read the
newspapers may give way to a feeling of contentment as
we relax after a meal. The dissonance is not an external
’us’ against ’the world’: inevitably it is a dissonance that
reaches into us as well, that divides us against ourselves. ’We’
are a question that will continue to rumble throughout this
book. We are flies caught in a spider’s web. We start from a
tangled mess, because there is no other place to start. We
cannot start by pretending to stand outside the dissonance
of our own experience, for to do so would be a lie. Flies
caught in a web of social relations beyond our control, we can
only try to free ourselves by hacking at the strands that
imprison us. We can only try to emancipate ourselves, to
move outwards, negatively, critically, from where we are. It is
not because we are maladjusted that we criticise, it is not
because we want to be difficult. It is just that the negative
situation in which we exist leaves us no option: to live, to think,
is to negate in whatever way we can the negativeness of
our existence. ’Why so negative?’ says the spider to the
fly. ’Be objective, forget your prejudices’. But there is no
way the fly can be objective, however much she may want
to be: ’to look at the web objectively, from the outside -
what a dream’, muses the fly, ’what an empty, deceptive
dream’. For the moment, however, any study of the web that
does not start from the fly’s entrapment in it is quite simply
untrue.


We are unbalanced, unstable. We scream not because we are
sitting back in an armchair, but because we are falling over the
edge of a cliff. The thinker in the armchair assumes that the world
around her is stable, that disruptions of the equilibrium are
anomalies to be explained. To speak of someone as unbalanced or
unstable is then a pejorative term, a term that disqualifies what
they say. For us who are falling off the edge of the cliff (and here
’we’ includes all of humanity, perhaps) it is just the opposite:
we see all as blurred movement. The world is a world of
disequilibrium and it is equilibrium and the assumption of
equilibrium that have to be explained.

\section{IV}


Our scream is not just a scream of horror. We scream not
because we face certain death in the spider’s web, but because
we dream of freeing ourselves. We scream as we fall over
the cliff not because we are resigned to being dashed on
the rocks below but because we still hope that it might be
otherwise.


Our scream is a refusal to accept. A refusal to accept that
the spider will eat us, a refusal to accept that we shall be
killed on the rocks, a refusal to accept the unacceptable. A
refusal to accept the inevitability of increasing inequality,
misery, exploitation and violence. A refusal to accept the truth
of the untrue, a refusal to accept closure. Our scream is a
refusal to wallow in being victims of oppression, a refusal to
immerse ourselves in that ’left-wing melancholy’ which is
so characteristic of oppositional thought. It is a refusal to
accept the role of Cassandra so readily adopted by left-wing
intellectuals: predicting the downfall of the world while accepting
that there is nothing we can do about it. Our scream is
a scream to break windows, a refusal to be contained, an
overflowing, a going beyond the pale, beyond the bounds of polite
society.


Our refusal to accept tells us nothing of the future, nor does it
depend for its validity on any particular outcome. The fact that
we scream as we fall over the cliff does not give us any guarantee
of a safe landing, nor does the legitimacy of the scream depend on
a happy ending. Gone is the certainty of the old revolutionaries
that history (or God) was on our side: such certainty is historically
dead and buried, blasted into the grave by the bomb that fell on
Hiroshima. There is certainly no inevitable happy ending, but,
even as we plunge downwards, even in the moments of darkest
despair, we refuse to accept that such a happy ending is
impossible. The scream clings to the possibility of an opening,
refuses to accept the closure of the possibility of radical
otherness.


Our scream, then, is two-dimensional: the scream of rage that
arises from present experience carries within itself a hope, a
projection of possible otherness. The scream is ecstatic, in the
literal sense of standing out ahead of itself towards an open future.
We who scream exist ecstatically. We stand out beyond ourselves,
we exist in two dimensions. The scream implies a tension between
that which exists and that which might conceivably exist, between
the indicative (that which is) and the subjunctive (that which
might be). We live in an unjust society but we wish it were not so:
the two parts of the sentence are inseparable and exist in constant
tension with each other. The scream does not require to be
justified by the fulfilment of what might be: it is simply the
recognition of the dual dimension of reality. The second
part of the sentence (we wish it were not so) is no less real
than the first. It is the tension between the two parts of the
sentence that gives meaning to the scream. If the second
part of the sentence (the subjunctive wish) is seen as being
less real than the first, then the scream too is disqualified.
What is then seen as real is that we live in an unjust society:
what we might wish for is our private affair, of secondary
importance. And since the adjective ’unjust’ really makes
sense only in reference to a possible just society, that too
falls away, leaving us with ’we live in a x society’. And if
we scream because we live in a x society, then we must be
mad.


From the time of Machiavelli, social theory has been concerned
to break the unbreakable sentence in half. Machiavelli lays the
basis for a new realism when he says that he is concerned
only with what is, not with what things as we might wish
them to be. Reality refers to the first part of the sentence, to
what is. The second part of the sentence, what ought to be,
is clearly distinguished from what is, and is not regarded
as part of reality. The ’ought’ is not entirely discarded: it
becomes the theme of ’normative’ social theory. What is
completely broken is the unity of the two parts of the sentence.
With that step alone, the scream of rejection-and-longing is
disqualified.


Our scream implies a two-dimensionality which insists on the
conjunction of tension between the two dimensions. We are, but
we exist in an arc of tension towards that which we are not, or are
not yet. Society is, but it exists in an arc of tension towards that
which is not, or is not yet. There is identity, but identity
exists in an arc of tension towards non-identity. The double
dimensionality is the antagonistic presence (that is, movement) of
the not-yet within the Is, of non-identity within identity. The
scream is an explosion of the tension: the explosion of the
Not-Yet contained-in-but-bursting-from the Is, the explosion of
non-identity contained-in-but-bursting-from identity. The scream
is an expression of the present existence of that which is denied,
the present existence of the not-yet, of non-identity. The
theoretical force of the scream depends not on the future existence
of the not-yet (who knows if there will ever be a society based
on the mutual recognition of dignity?) but on its present
existence as possibility. To start from the scream is simply
to insist on the centrality of dialectics, which is no more
than ’the consistent sense of non-identity’ (Adorno 1990, p.
5).


Our scream is a scream of horror-and-hope. If the two sides of
the scream are separated, they become banal. The horror arises
from the ’bitterness of history’, but if there is no transcendence of
that bitterness, the one-dimensional horror leads only to political
depression and theoretical closure. Similarly, if the hope is not
grounded firmly in that same bitterness of history, it becomes
just a one-dimensional and silly expression of optimism.
Precisely such a separation of horror and hope is expressed
in the oft-quoted Gramscian aphorism, ’pessimism of the
intelligence, optimism of the will’. The challenge is rather
to unite pessimism and optimism, horror and hope, in a
theoretical understanding of the two-dimensionality of the world.
Optimism not just of the spirit but of the intellect is the aim. It
is the very horror of the world that obliges us to learn to
hope.

\section{V}


The aim of this book is to strengthen negativity, to take the side
of the fly in the web, to make the scream more strident. We quite
consciously start from the subject, or at least from an undefined
subjectivity, aware of all the problems that this implies. We start
there because to start anywhere else is simply an untruth. The
challenge is to develop a way of thinking that builds critically
upon the initial negative standpoint, a way of understanding that
negates the untruth of the world. This is not just a question of
seeing things from below, or from the bottom up, for that
too often implies the adoption of pre-existing categories, a
mere reversal of negative and positive signs. What has to be
tackled is not just a top-down perspective, but the whole
mode of thinking that derives from and supports such a
perspective. In trying to hack our way through the social
theory which is part of the strands which bind us, there is
only one compass to guide us: the force of our own ’no!’ in
all its two-dimensionality: the rejection of what is and the
projection of what might be. Negative thought is as old as the
scream. The most powerful current of negative thought is
undoubtedly the Marxist tradition. However, the development of
the Marxist tradition, both because of its particular history
and because of the transformation of negative thought into
a defining ’ism’, has created a framework that has often
limited and obstructed the force of negativity. This book is
therefore not a Marxist book in the sense of taking Marxism
as a defining framework of reference, nor is the force of its
argument to be judged by whether it is ’Marxist’ or not: far
less is it neo-Marxist or post-Marxist. The aim is rather to
locate those issues that are often described as ’Marxist’ in the
problematic of negative thought, in the hope of giving body to
negative thought and of sharpening the Marxist critique of
capitalism.


This is not a book that tries to depict the horrors of capitalism.
There are many books that do that, and, besides, we have our
daily experience to tell us the story. Here we take that for granted.
The loss of hope for a more human society is not the result of
people being blind to the horrors of capitalism, it is just that there
does not seem to be anywhere else to go, any otherness to
turn to. The most sensible thing seems to be to forget our
negativity, to discard it as a fantasy of youth. And yet the
world gets worse, the inequalities become more strident,
the self-destruction of humanity seems to come closer. So
perhaps we should not abandon our negativity but, on the
contrary, try to theorise the world from the perspective of the
scream.


And what if the reader feels no dissonance? What if you feel no
negativity, if you are content to say ’we are, and the world is’? It
is hard to believe that anyone is so at home with the world that
they do not feel revulsion at the hunger, violence and inequality
that surrounds them. It is much more likely that the revulsion or
dissonance is consciously or unconsciously suppressed, either in
the interests of a quiet life or, much more simply, because
pretending not to see or feel the horrors of the world carries direct
material benefits. In order to protect our jobs, our visas, our
profits, our chances of receiving good grades, our sanity, we
pretend not to see, we sanitise our own perception, filtering out
the pain, pretending that it is not here but out there, far away, in
Africa, in Russia, a hundred years ago, in an otherness that, by
being alien, cleanses our own experience of all negativity. It is on
such a sanitised perception that the idea of an objective,
value-free social science is built. The negativity, the revulsion at
exploitation and violence, is buried completely, drowned
in the concrete of the foundation blocks of social science
just as surely as, in some parts of the world, the bodies of
sacrificed animals are buried by builders in the foundation blocks
of houses or bridges. Such theory is, as Adorno (1990, p.
365) puts it, ’in the nature of the musical accompaniment
with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its
victims’. It is against such suppression of pain that this book is
directed.


But what is the point? Our scream is a scream of frustration,
the discontent of the powerless. But if we are powerless, there is
nothing we can do. And if we manage to become powerful, by
building a party or taking up arms or winning an election, then we
shall be no different from all the other powerful in history. So
there is no way out, no breaking the circularity of power. What
can we do?


Change the world without taking power.


Ha! ha! Very funny.

\chapter{Beyond The State?}


In the beginning was the scream. And then what?


The scream implies an anguished enthusiasm for changing the
world. But how can we do it? What can we do to make the world
a better, more human place? What can we do to put an end to all
the misery and exploitation?

\section{I}


There is an answer ready at hand. Do it through the state. Join a
political party, help it to win governmental power, change the
country in that way. Or, if you are more impatient, more angry,
more doubtful about what can be achieved through parliamentary
means, join a revolutionary organisation, help it to conquer state
power, by violent or non-violent means, and then use the
revolutionary state to change society.


Change the world through the state: this is the paradigm that
has dominated revolutionary thought for more than a century. The
debate between Rosa Luxemburg and Eduard Bernstein a
hundred years ago on the issue of ’reform or revolution’
established clearly the terms that were to dominate thinking
about revolution for most of the twentieth century. On the one
hand reform, on the other side revolution. Reform was a gradual
transition to socialism, to be achieved by winning elections
and introducing change by parliamentary means; revolution
was a much more rapid transition, to be achieved by the
taking of state power and the quick introduction of radical
change by the new state. The intensity of the disagreements
concealed a basic point of agreement: both approaches focus
on the state as the vantage point from which society can
be changed. Despite all their differences, both aim at the
winning of state power. This is not exclusive, of course. In
the revolutionary perspective and also in the more radical
parliamentary approaches, the winning of state power is seen as
part of an upsurge of social upheaval. Nevertheless the winning of
state power is seen as the centrepiece of the revolutionary
process, the hub from which revolutionary change will radiate.
Approaches that fall outside this dichotomy between reform
and revolution were stigmatised as being anarchist (a sharp
distinction that was consolidated at about the same time as the
Bernstein-Luxemburg debate). Until recently, theoretical and
political debate, at least in the Marxist tradition, has been
dominated by these three classifications: Revolutionary, Reformist,
Anarchist.


The state paradigm, that is, the assumption that the winning of
state power is central to radical change, dominated not just
theory but also the revolutionary experience throughout
most of the twentieth century: not only the experience of the
Soviet Union and China, but also the numerous national
liberation and guerrilla movements of the 1960s and the
1970s.


If the state paradigm was the vehicle of hope for much of the
century, it became more and more the assassin of hope as the
century progressed. The apparent impossibility of revolution at
the beginning of the twenty-first century reflects in reality
the historical failure of a particular concept of revolution,
the concept that identified revolution with control of the
state.


Both approaches, the ’reformist’ and the ’revolutionary’
have failed completely to live up to the expectations of their
enthusiastic supporters. ’Communist’ governments in the Soviet
Union, China and elsewhere certainly increased levels of material
security and decreased social inequalities in the territories of the
states which they controlled, at least temporarily, but they
did little to create a self-determining society or to promote
the reign of freedom which has always been central to the
communist aspiration. In the case of social democratic or reformist
governments, the record is no better: although increases in
material security have been achieved in some cases, their record in
practice has differed very little from overtly pro-capitalist
governments, and most social-democratic parties have long since
abandoned any pretension to be the bearers of radical social
reform.


For over a hundred years, the revolutionary enthusiasm of young
people has been channelled into building the party or into
learning to shoot guns, for over a hundred years the dreams of
those who have wanted a world fit for humanity have been
bureaucratised and militarised, all for the winning of state power
by a government that could then be accused of ”betraying”
the movement that put it there. ”Betrayal” has been a key
word for the left over the last century as one government
after another has been accused of ”betraying” the ideals of
its supporters, until now the notion of betrayal itself has
become so tired that there is nothing left but a shrug of
”of course”. Rather than look to so many betrayals for an
explanation, perhaps we need to look at the very notion
that society can be changed through the winning of state
power.

\section{II}


At first sight it would appear obvious that winning control of the
state is the key to bringing about social change. The state claims
to be sovereign, to exercise power within its frontiers. This is
central to the common notion of democracy: a government is
elected in order to carry out the will of the people by exerting
power in the territory of the state. This notion is the basis of the
social democratic claim that radical change can be achieved
through constitutional means.


The argument against this is that the constitutional view
isolates the state from its social environment: it attributes to the
state an autonomy of action that it just does not have. In reality,
what the state does is limited and shaped by the fact that it exists
as just one node in a web of social relations. Crucially, this
web of social relations centres on the way in which work is
organised. The fact that work is organised on a capitalist basis
means that what the state does and can do is limited and
shaped by the need to maintain the system of capitalist
organisation of which it is a part. Concretely, this means
that any government that takes significant action directed
against the interests of capital will find that an economic
crisis will result and that capital will flee from the state
territory.


Revolutionary movements inspired by Marxism have always
been aware of the capitalist nature of the state. Why then have
they focused on winning state power as the means of changing
society? One answer is that these movements have often had an
instrumental view of the capitalist nature of the state. They have
typically seen the state as being the instrument of the capitalist
class. The notion of an ’instrument’ implies that the relation
between the state and the capitalist class is an external one: like a
hammer, the state is now wielded by the capitalist class in their
own interests, after the revolution it will be wielded by the
working class in their interests. Such a view reproduces,
unconsciously perhaps, the isolation or autonomisation of the state
from its social environment, the critique of which is the starting
point of revolutionary politics. To borrow a concept to be
developed later, this view fetishises the state: it abstracts it from
the web of power relations in which it is embedded. The
difficulty which revolutionary governments have experienced in
wielding the state in the interests of the working class suggests
that the embedding of the state in the web of capitalist
social relations is far stronger and more subtle than the
notion of instrumentality would suggest. The mistake of
Marxist revolutionary movements has been, not to deny the
capitalist nature of the state, but to underestimate the degree of
integration of the state into the network of capitalist social
relations.


An important aspect of this underestimation is the extent to
which revolutionary (and, even more so, reformist) movements
have tended to assume that ’society’ can be understood as a
national (that is, state-bound) society. If society is understood as
being British, Russian or Mexican society, this obviously gives
weight to the view that the state can be the centre point of social
transformation. Such an assumption, however, presupposes
a prior abstraction of state and society from their spatial
surroundings, a conceptual snipping of social relations at the
frontiers of the state. The world, in this view, is made up of so
many national societies, each with its own state, each one
maintaining relations with all the others in a network of
inter-national relations. Each state is then the centre of its own
world and it becomes possible to conceive of a national revolution
and to see the state as the motor of radical change in ’its’
society.


The problem with such a view is that social relations have never
coincided with national frontiers. The current discussions of
’globalisation’ merely highlight what has always been true:
capitalist social relations, by their nature, have always gone
beyond territorial limitations. Whereas the relation between feudal
lord and serf was always a territorial relation, the distinctive
feature of capitalism was that it freed exploitation from such
territorial limitations, by virtue of the fact that the relation
between capitalist and worker was now mediated through money.
The mediation of social relations through money means a
complete de-territorialisation of those relations: there is no reason
why employer and employee, producer and consumer, or
workers who combine in the same process of production,
should be within the same territory. Capitalist social relations
have never been limited by state frontiers, so that it has
always been mistaken to think of the capitalist world as being
the sum of different national societies. The web of social
relations in which the particular national states are embedded is
(and has been since the beginning of capitalism) a global
web.


The focusing of revolution on the winning of state power thus
involves the abstraction of the state from the social relations of
which it is part. Conceptually, the state is cut out from the clutter
of social relations that surround it and made to stand up with all
the appearance of being an autonomous actor. Autonomy is
attributed to the state, if not in the absolute sense of reformist (or
liberal) theory, then at least in the sense that the state is seen as
being potentially autonomous from the capitalist social relations
that surround it.


But, it might be objected, this is a crude misrepresentation of
revolutionary strategy. Revolutionary movements inspired by
Marxism have generally seen the winning of state power as just
one element in a broader process of social transformation. This is
certainly true, but it has generally been seen as a particularly
important element, a focal point in the process of social change,
one which demands a focussing of the energies devoted to social
transformation. The focussing inevitably privileges the state as a
site of power.


Whether the winning of state power is seen as being the
exclusive path for changing society or just as a focus for action,
there is inevitably a channelling of revolt. The fervour of those
who fight for a different society is taken up and pointed in a
particular direction: towards the winning of state power. ’If we can
only conquer the state (whether by electoral or by military
means), then we shall be able to change society. First, therefore,
we must concentrate on the central goal - conquering state
power’. So the argument goes, and the young are inducted
into what it means to conquer state power: they are trained
either as soldiers or as bureaucrats, depending on how the
conquest of state power is understood. ’First build the army,
first build the party, that is how to get rid of the power
that oppresses us’. The party-building (or army-building)
comes to eclipse all else. What was initially negative (the
rejection of capitalism) is converted into something positive
(institution-building, power-building). The induction into the
conquest of power inevitably becomes an induction into power
itself. The initiates learn the language, logic and calculations of
power; they learn to wield the categories of a social science
which has been entirely shaped by its obsession with power.
Differences within the organisation become struggles for power.
Manipulation and manoeuvring for power become a way of
life.


Nationalism is an inevitable complement of the logic of power.
The idea that the state is the site of power involves the
abstraction of the particular state from the global context of
power relations. Inevitably, no matter how much the revolutionary
inspiration is guided by the notion of world revolution, the focus
on a particular state as the site for bringing about radical
social change implies giving priority to the part of the world
encompassed by that state over other parts of the world. Even the
most internationalist of revolutions oriented towards state power
have rarely succeeded in avoiding the nationalist privileging of
’their’ state over others, or indeed the overt manipulation of
national sentiment in order to defend the revolution. The notion of
changing society through the state rests on the idea that
the state is, or should be, sovereign. State sovereignty is
a prerequisite for changing society through the state, so
the struggle for social change becomes transformed into the
struggle for the defence of state sovereignty. The struggle
against capital then becomes an anti-imperialist struggle
against domination by foreigners, in which nationalism and
anti-capitalism are blended. Self-determination and state
sovereignty become confused, when in fact the very existence of
the state as a form of social relations is the very antithesis of
self-determination.


No matter how much lip service is paid to the movement and its
importance, the goal of the conquest of power inevitably
involves an instrumentalisation of struggle. The struggle has an
aim: to conquer political power. The struggle is a means to
achieve that aim. Those elements of struggle which do not
contribute to the achievement of that aim are either given a
secondary importance or must be suppressed altogether: a
hierarchy of struggles is established. The instrumentalisation\Slash{}
hierarchisation is at the same time an impoverishment of struggle.
So many struggles, so many ways of expressing our rejection of
capitalism, so many ways of fighting for our dream of a different
society are simply filtered out, simply remain unseen when the
world is seen through the prism of the conquest of power. We
learn to suppress them, and thus to suppress ourselves. At
the top of the hierarchy we learn to place that part of our
activity that contributes to ’building the revolution’, at the
bottom come frivolous personal things like affective relations,
sensuality, playing, laughing, loving. Class struggle becomes
puritanical: frivolity must be suppressed because it does not
contribute to the goal. The hierarchisation of struggle is a
hierarchisation of our lives and thus a hierarchisation of
ourselves.


The party is the organisational form which most clearly
expresses this hierarchisation. The form of the party, whether
vanguardist or parliamentary, presupposes an orientation towards
the state and makes little sense without it. The party is in
fact the form of disciplining class struggle, of subordinating
the myriad forms of class struggle to the over-riding aim
of gaining control of the state. The fixing of a hierarchy
of struggles is usually expressed in the form of the party
programme.


This instrumentalist impoverishment of struggle is not
characteristic just of particular parties or currents (Stalinism,
Trotskyism and so on): it is inherent in the idea that the goal of
the movement is to conquer political power. The struggle is lost
from the beginning, long before the victorious party or army
conquers state power and ’betrays’ its promises. It is lost once
power itself seeps into the struggle, once the logic of power
becomes the logic of the revolutionary process, once the negative
of refusal is converted into the positive of power-building.
And usually those involved do not see it: the initiates in
power do not even see how far they have been drawn into the
reasoning and habits of power. They do not see that if we revolt
against capitalism, it is not because we want a different
system of power, it is because we want a society in which
power relations are dissolved. You cannot build a society of
non-power relations by conquering power. Once the logic
of power is adopted, the struggle against power is already
lost.


The idea of changing society through the conquest of power thus
ends up achieving the opposite of what it sets out to achieve.
Instead of the conquest of power being a step towards the
abolition of power relations, the attempt to conquer power
involves the extension of the field of power relations into the
struggle against power. What starts as a scream of protest against
power, against the dehumanisation of people, against the
treatment of humans as means rather than ends, becomes
converted into its opposite, into the assumption of the logic, habits
and discourse of power into the very heart of the struggle against
power. For what is at issue in the revolutionary transformation of
the world is not whose power but the very existence of power.
What is at issue is not who exercises power, but how to create a
world based on the mutual recognition of human dignity,
on the formation of social relations which are not power
relations.


It would seem that the most realistic way to change society is to
focus struggle on the winning of state power and to subordinate
struggle to this end. First we win power and then we shall create a
society worthy of humanity. This is the powerfully realistic
argument of Lenin, especially in What is to be Done?, but it is a
logic shared by all the major revolutionary leaders of the
twentieth century: Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, Gramsci, Mao,
Che. Yet the experience of their struggles suggests that the
accepted realism of the revolutionary tradition is profoundly
unrealistic. That realism is the realism of power and can do no
more than reproduce power. The realism of power is focused
and directed towards an end. The realism of anti-power, or,
better, the anti-realism of anti-power, must be quite different
if we are to change the world. And change the world we
must.

\chapter{Beyond Power?}

\section{I}


The world cannot be changed through the state. Both theoretical
reflection and a whole century of bad experience tell us so. ’We
told you so’, say the satisfied ones, ’We said so all along. We said
it was absurd. We told you that you couldn’t go against human
nature. Give up the dream, give up!’


And millions throughout the world have given up the dream of a
radically different type of society. There is no doubt that the fall
of the Soviet Union and the failure of national liberation
movements throughout the world have brought disillusionment to
millions of people. The notion of revolution was so strongly
identified with gaining control of the state that the failure of those
attempts to change the world through gaining control of the state
has led very many people to the conclusion that revolution is
impossible.


There is a toning down of expectations. For many, hope has
evaporated from their lives, giving way to a bitter, cynical
reconciliation with reality. It will not be possible to create the free
and just society we hoped for, but at least we can vote for a centre
or left-of-centre party, knowing quite well that it will not make
any difference, but at least that way we will have some sort of
outlet for our frustration. ’We know now that we will not be able
to change the world,’ says one of the characters in a novel by
Marcela Serrano. ’That has been the greatest blow of all for our
generation. We lost our objective in the middle of the way, when
we still had the age and the energy to make the changes\dots{}
The only thing that is left is to ask with humility: where is
dignity?’


Is the character in the book not right? If we cannot change the
world through the state, then how? The state is just a node in a
web of power relations. But will we not be always caught up in the
web of power, no matter where we start? Is rupture really
conceivable? Are we not trapped in an endless circularity of
power? Is the whole world not a spider-web, which can be made a
little better here and there? Or perhaps: is the whole world not
a multiplicity of spider-webs, so that just when we have
broken through one, we find ourselves entangled in another? Is
the idea of a radical otherness not best left to those who
comfort themselves with religion, to those who live with a
dream of heaven as the reward for living through this vale of
tears?


The great problem with trying to retreat into a life of private
dignity and saying ’let’s make the best of what we’ve got’ is that
the world does not stand still. There is a dynamic of development
which is leading to more and more poverty, more and more
inequality, more and more violence, more and more subjection of
our lives to money. Dignity is not a private matter, for it
involves the recognition of the dignity of others: in a world
based on the negation of dignity, this inevitably involves
the struggle for radical change. It is precisely the pursuit
of personal dignity that confronts us with the urgency of
revolution.


The only way in which the idea of revolution can be maintained
is by raising the stakes. The problem of the traditional concept of
revolution is perhaps not that it aimed too high, but that it aimed
too low. The notion of capturing positions of power, whether it be
governmental power or more dispersed positions of power in
society, misses the point that the aim of the revolution is to
dissolve relations of power, to create a society based on the mutual
recognition of people’s dignity. What has failed is the notion that
revolution means capturing power in order to abolish power. What
is now on the agenda is the much more demanding notion of a
direct attack on power relations. The only way in which
revolution can now be imagined is not as the conquest of
power but as the dissolution of power. The fall of the Soviet
Union not only meant disillusionment for millions; it also
brought the liberation of revolutionary thought, the liberation
from the identification of revolution with the conquest of
power.


This, then, is the revolutionary challenge at the beginning of the
twenty-first century: to change the world without taking power.
This is the challenge that has been formulated most clearly by the
Zapatista uprising in the south-east of Mexico. The Zapatistas
have said that they want to make the world anew, to create a
world of dignity, a world of humanity, but without taking
power.


The Zapatista call to make the world anew without taking
power has found a remarkable resonance. The resonance has to do
with the growth in recent years of what might be called an area of
anti-power. This corresponds to a weakening of the process by
which discontent is focused on the state. This weakening
is clear in the case of the would-be revolutionary parties,
which no longer have the capacity they once had to channel
discontent towards the struggle to seize state power. It is
also true of social-democratic parties: whether or not people
vote for them, they no longer have the same importance as
focuses of political militancy. Social discontent today tends
to be expressed far more diffusely, through participation
in ’non-governmental organisations’, through campaigning
around particular issues, through the individual or collective
concerns of teachers, doctors or other workers who seek to
do things in a way that does not objectify people, in the
development of autonomous community projects of all sorts,
even in prolonged and massive rebellions such as the one
taking place in Chiapas. There is a vast area of activity
directed towards changing the world in a way that does not
have the state as its focus, and that does not aim at gaining
positions of power. This area of activity is obviously highly
contradictory, and certainly includes many activities that
might be described as ’petty bourgeois’ or ’romantic’ by
revolutionary groups. It is rarely revolutionary in the sense of
having revolution as an explicit aim, yet the projection of a
radical otherness is often an important component of the
activity involved. It includes what is sometimes called the
area of ’autonomy’, but it is far, far wider than that which
is usually indicated by the term. It is sometimes, but not
always, in open hostility to capitalism, but it does not find and
does not seek the sort of clear focus for such activity that
was formerly provided by both revolutionary and reformist
parties. This is the confused area in which the Zapatista call
resonates, the area in which anti-power grows. It is an area
in which the old distinctions between reform, revolution
and anarchism no longer seem relevant, simply because the
question of who controls the state is not the focus of attention.
There is a loss of revolutionary focus, not because people do
not long for a different type of society, but because the old
focus proved to be a mirage. The challenge posed by the
Zapatistas is the challenge of salvaging revolution from the
collapse of the state illusion and from the collapse of the power
illusion.


But how can we change the world without taking power? Merely
to pose the question is to invite a snort of ridicule, a raised
eyebrow, a shrug of condescension.


”How can you be so nave?” say some, ”Do you not know that
there can be no radical change in society? Have you learnt nothing
in the last thirty years? Do you not know that talk of revolution is
silly, or are you still trapped in your adolescent dreams of 1968?
We must live with the world we have and make the best of
it.”


”How can you be so nave?” say others, ”Of course the world
needs a revolution, but do you seriously think that change can be
brought about without taking power, by election or otherwise? Do
you not see the forces we are up against, the armies, the
police, the paramilitary thugs? Do you not know that the only
language they understand is power? Do you think capitalism will
collapse if we all hold hands and sing ’All we need is love’? Get
real.”


Reality and power are so mutually incrusted that even to raise
the question of dissolving power is to step off the edge of reality.
All our categories of thought, all our assumptions about what is
reality, or what is politics or economics or even where we live, are
so permeated by power that just to say ’no!’ to power precipitates
us into a vertiginous world in which there are no fixed reference
points to hold on to other than the force of our own ’no!’. Power
and social theory exist in such symbiosis that power is the lens
through which theory sees the world, the headphone through
which it hears the world: to ask for a theory of anti-power is
to try to see the invisible, to hear the inaudible. To try to
theorise anti-power is to wander in a largely unexplored
world.


How can the world be changed without taking power? The
answer is obvious: we do not know. That is why it is so important
to work at the answer, practically and theoretically. Hic
Rhodus, hic saltus, but the saltus becomes more and more
perilous, the pressures not to jump become ever greater, the
danger of falling into a sea of absurdity ever more difficult to
avoid.


Let us forget our ’fear of ridicule’ and ask then: How can we
even begin to think of changing the world without taking
power?

\section{II}


To think of changing the world without taking power, we need to
see that the concept of power is intensely contradictory. But to
make this argument we need to go back to the beginning.


In the beginning, we said, is the scream. It is a scream of hope,
not of despair. And the hope is not a hope for salvation in the
form of divine intervention. It is an active hope, a hope that we
can change things, a scream of active refusal, a scream that points
to doing. The scream that does not point to doing, the scream
that turns in upon itself, that remains an eternal scream of despair
or, much more common, an endless cynical grumble, is a scream
which betrays itself: it loses its negative force and goes into
an endless loop of self-affirmation as scream. Cynicism - I
hate the world, but there is nothing that can be done - is
the scream gone sour, the scream that suppresses its own
self-negation.


The scream implies doing. ’In the beginning was the deed’, says
Goethe’s Faust. But before the deed comes the doing. In the
beginning was the doing. But before the doing comes the scream.
It is not materialism that comes first, but negativity.


It is true that the scream springs from experience, from a doing
or a frustrated doing. But the doing too springs from the scream.
The doing springs from a want, a lack, a desire, a hunger. Doing
changes, negates an existing state of affairs. Doing goes beyond,
transcends. The scream which is our starting point pushes us
towards doing. Our materialism, if that word is relevant
at all, is a materialism rooted in doing, doing-to-negate,
negative practice, projection beyond. Our foundation, if
that word is relevant at all, is not an abstract preference for
matter over mind, but the scream, the negation of what
exists.


Doing, in other words, is central to our concern not simply
because doing is a material precondition for living but because our
central concern is changing the world, negating that which exists.
To think the world from the perspective of the scream is to think
it from the perspective of doing.


Saint John is doubly wrong, then, when he says that ’in the
beginning was the Word’. Doubly wrong because, to put it in
traditional terms, his statement is both positive and idealist. The
word does not negate, as the scream does. And the word does not
imply doing, as the scream does. The world of the word is a stable
world, a sitting-back-in-an-armchair-and-having-a-chat world, a
sitting-at-a-desk-and-writing world, a contented world, far from
the scream which would change everything, far from the doing
which negates. In the world of the word, doing is separated from
talking and doing, practice is separated from theory. Theory in the
world of the word is the thought of the Thinker, of someone in
restful reflection, chin-on-hand, elbow-on-knee. ’The philosophers’,
as Marx says in his famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, ’have
only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however,is to
change it.’


Marx’s thesis does not mean that we should abandon theory for
practice. It means rather that we should understand theory as
part of practice, as part of the struggle to change the world. Both
theory and doing are part of the practical movement of negation.
This implies, then, that doing must be understood in a broad
sense, certainly not just as work, and also not just as physical
action, but as the whole movement of practical negativity. To
emphasise the centrality of doing is not to deny the importance of
thought or language but simply to see them as part of the total
movement of practical negativity, of the practical projection
beyond the world that exists towards a radically different
world. To focus on doing is quite simply to see the world as
struggle.


It might be argued, with some force, that changing society
should be thought of not in terms of doing but in terms of
not-doing, laziness, refusal to work, enjoyment. ’Let us be
lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except
in being lazy’: Lafargue begins his classic The Right to be
Lazy with this quotation (1999, p.3), implying that there is
nothing more incompatible with capitalist exploitation than
the laziness advocated by Lessing. Laziness in capitalist
society, however, implies refusal to do, an active assertion of an
alternative practice. Doing, in the sense in which we understand it
here, includes laziness and the pursuit of pleasure, both of
which are very much negative practices in a society based
on their negation. Refusal to do, in a world based on the
conversion of doing into work, can be seen as an effective form of
resistance.


Human doing implies projection-beyond, and hence the unity of
theory and practice. Projection-beyond is seen by Marx as a
distinctive characteristic of human doing. ’A spider conducts
operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to
shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what
distinguishes the worst architecture from the best of bees is this,
that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he
erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we
get a result that already existed in the imagination of the
labourer at its commencement.’(Marx, 1965, p. 178) The
imagination of the labourer is ecstatic: at the commencement of
the labour process it projects beyond what is to an otherness that
might be. This otherness exists not only when it is created: it
exists already, really, subjunctively, in the projection of the
worker, in that which makes her human. The doing of the
architect is negative, not only in its result, but in its whole
process: it begins and ends with the negation of what exists.
Even if she is the worst of architects, the doing is a creative
doing.


Bees, to the best of our knowledge, do not scream. They do
not say ’No! Enough of queens, enough of drones, we shall
create a society which will be shaped by us workers, we
shall emancipate ourselves!’ Their doing is not a doing that
negates: it simply reproduces. We, however, do scream. Our
scream is a projection-beyond, the articulation of an otherness
that might be. If our scream is to be more than a smug
look-how-rebellious-I-am scream (which is no scream at all), then
it must involve a projected doing, the project of doing something
to change that which we scream against. The scream and the
doing-which-is-a-going-beyond distinguish humans from animals.
Humans, but not animals, are ecstatic, they exist not only in, but
also against-and-beyond themselves.


Why? Not because going-beyond is part of our human
nature, but simply because we scream. Negation comes not
from our human essence, but from the situation in which we
find ourselves. We scream and push-beyond not because
that is human nature, but, on the contrary, because we are
torn from what we consider to be humanity. Our negativity
arises not from our humanity, but from the negation of our
humanity, from the feeling that humanity is not-yet, that it is
something to be fought for. It is not human nature, but the
scream of our starting point that compels us to focus on
doing.


To take doing, rather than being or talking or thinking, as the
focus of our thought, has many implications. Doing implies
movement. To start from doing-as-going-beyond (and not just the
busy-bee doing-as-reproduction) means that everything (or at
least everything human) is in movement, everything is becoming,
that there is no ’being’, or rather that being can only be a
frustrated becoming. The perspective of the scream-doing is
inevitably historical, because the human experience can only
be understood as a constant moving-beyond (or possibly a
frustrated moving-beyond). This is important, because if the
starting point is not screaming-doing (doing-as-negation) but
rather the word or discourse or a positive understanding
of doing (as reproduction), then there is no possibility of
understanding society historically: the movement of history
becomes broken down into a series of snapshots, a diachronic
series, a chronology. Becoming is broken down into a series of
states of being.


To put the point in other words, humans are subjects while
animals are not. Subjectivity refers to the conscious projection
beyond that which exists, the ability to negate that which exists
and to create something that does not yet exist. Subjectivity, the
movement of the scream-doing, involves a movement against
limits, against containment, against closure. The doer is not.
Not only that, but doing is the movement against is-ness,
against that-which-is. Any definition of the subject is therefore
contradictory or indeed violent: the attempt to pin down that
which is a movement against being pinned down. The idea that we
can start from the assertion that people are subjects has been
much criticised in recent years, especially by theorists associated
with post-modernism. The idea of the person as subject, we are
told, is a historical construct. That may be so, but our starting
point, the scream of complete refusal to accept the misery of
capitalist society, takes us inevitably to the notion of subjectivity.
To deny human subjectivity is to deny the scream or, which
comes to the same thing, to turn the scream into a scream
of despair. ’Ha! Ha!’ they mock, ’you scream as though it
were possible to change society radically. But there is no
possibility of radical change, there is no way out’. Our starting
point makes such an approach impossible. The sharpness of
our No! is a sword that cuts through many a theoretical
knot.


Doing is inherently social. What I do is always part of a social
flow of doing, in which the precondition of my doing is the doing
(or having-done) of others, in which the doing of others provides
the means of my doing. Doing is inherently plural, collective,
choral, communal. This does not mean that all doing is (or indeed
should be) undertaken collectively. It means rather that it is
difficult to conceive of a doing that does not have the doing of
others as a precondition. I sit at the computer and write this,
apparently a lonely individual act, but my writing is part of a
social process, a plaiting of my writing with the writing of others
(those mentioned in the footnotes and a million others), and
also with the doing of those who designed the computer,
assembled it, packed it, transported it, those who installed the
electricity in the house, those who generated the electricity, those
who produced the food that gives me the energy to write,
and so on, and so on. There is a community of doing, a
collective of doers, a flow of doing through time and space.
Past doing (of ourselves and others) becomes the means of
doing in the present. Any act, however individual it seems,
is part of a chorus of doing in which all humanity is the
choir (albeit an anarchic and discordant choir). Our doings
are so intertwined that it is impossible to say where one
ends and another begins. Clearly there are many doings
that do not in turn create the conditions for the doing of
others, that do not feed back into the social flow of doing as a
whole: it is quite possible, for example, that no one will ever
read what I am now doing. However, the doings that do
not lead back into the social flow of doing do not for that
reason cease to be social. My activity is social whether or not
anybody reads this: it is important not to confuse sociality and
functionality.


To speak of the social flow of doing is not to deny the
materiality of the done. When I make a chair, the chair
exists materially. When I write a book, the book exists as an
object. It has an existence independent of mine, and may
still exist when I no longer exist. In that sense it might be
said that there is an objectification of my subjective doing,
that the done acquires an existence separate from the doing,
that the done abstracts itself from the flow of doing. This is
true, however, only if my doing is seen as an individual act.
Seen from the social flow of doing, the objectification of
my subjective doing is at most a fleeting objectification.
The existence of the chair as chair depends upon someone
sitting upon it, reincorporating it into the flow of doing. The
existence of the book as book depends upon your reading it, the
braiding of your doing (reading) with my doing (writing)
to reintegrate the done (the book) into the social flow of
doing.


It is when we understand ’we scream’ as a material ’we scream’,
as a screaming-doing, that ’we-ness’ (that question that rumbles
through our book) gains force. Doing, in other words, is the
material constitution of the ’we’, the conscious and unconscious,
planned and unplanned, braiding of our lives through time. This
braiding of our lives, this collective doing, involves, if the collective
flow of doing is recognised, a mutual recognition of one another as
doers, as active subjects. Our individual doing receives its
social validation from its recognition as part of the social
flow.

\section{III}


To begin to think about power and changing the world without
taking power (or indeed anything else), we need to start from
doing.


Doing implies being able-to-do. The scream is of no significance
without doing, and doing is inconceivable unless we are able-to-do.
If we are deprived of our capacity-to-do, or rather, if we are
deprived of our capacity to project-beyond-and-do, of our capacity
to do negatively, ecstatically, then we are deprived of our
humanity, our doing is reduced (and we are reduced) to the level
of a bee. If we are deprived of our capacity-to-do, then our scream
becomes a scream of despair.


Power, in the first place, is simply that: can-ness, capacity-to-do,
the ability to do things. Doing implies power, power-to-do. In this
sense we commonly use ’power’ to refer to something good: I
feel powerful, I feel good. The little train in the children’s
story (Piper, 1978) that says ’I think I can, I think I can’
as it tries to reach the top of the mountain, has a growing
sense of its own power. We go to a good political meeting
and come away with an enhanced sense of our own power.
We read a good book and feel empowered. The women’s
movement has given women a greater sense of their own
power. Power in this sense can be referred to as ’power-to’,
power-to-do.


Power-to, it must be emphasised again, is always a social
power, even though it may not appear to be so. The story of
the little train presents power-to as a matter of individual
determination, but in fact that is never the case. Our doing is
always part of a social flow of doing, even where it appears
to be an individual act. Our capacity to do is always an
interlacing of our activity with the previous or present activity of
others. Our capacity to do is always the result of the doing of
others.


Power-to, therefore, is never individual: it is always social. It
cannot be thought of as existing in some pure, unsullied state, for
its existence will always be part of the way in which sociality is
constituted, the way in which doing is organised. Doing (and
power-to-do) is always part of a social flow, but that flow is
constituted in different ways.


It is when the social flow of doing is fractured that power-to is
transformed into its opposite, power-over.


The social flow is fractured when doing itself is broken.
Doing-as-projection-beyond is broken when some people arrogate
to themselves the projection-beyond (conception) of the doing and
command others to execute what they have conceived. Doing is
broken as the ’powerful’ conceive but do not execute, while the
others execute but do not conceive. Doing is broken as the
’powerful’ separate the done from the doers and appropriate it
to themselves. The social flow is broken as the ’powerful’
present themselves as the individual doers, while the rest
simply disappear from sight. If we think of ’powerful’ men in
history, for example, of Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, then
power appears as the attribute of an individual. But of course
their power to do things was not an ability to do them on
their own, but an ability to command others to do what
they wished them to do. The ’we’ of doing appears as an
’I’, or as a ’he’ (more often a ’he’ than a ’she’): Caesar did
this, Caesar did that. The ’we’ is now an antagonistic ’we’,
divided between the rulers (the visible subjects) and the
ruled (the invisible de-subjectified subjects). Power-to now
becomes ’power-over’, a relation of power over others. These
others are powerless (or apparently powerless), deprived of
the capacity to realise our own projects, if only because we
spend our days realising the project of those who exercise
power-over.


For most of us, then, power is turned into its opposite. Power
means not capacity-to-do, but incapacity-to-do. It means not
the assertion of our subjectivity but the destruction of our
subjectivity. The existence of power relations means not the
capacity to obtain some future good but just the contrary:
the incapacity to obtain the future good, the incapacity to
realise our own projects, our own dreams. It is not that we
cease to project, that we cease to dream, but unless the
projects and dreams are cut to match the ’reality’ of power
relations (and this is usually achieved, if at all, through bitter
experience), then they are met with frustration. Power, for those
without the means of commanding others, is frustration.
The existence of power-to as power-over means that the
vast majority of doers are converted into the done-to, their
activity transformed into passivity, their subjectivity into
objectivity.


Whereas power-to is a uniting, a bringing together of my
doing with the doing of others, the exercise of power-over is a
separation. The exercise of power-over separates conception
from realisation, done from doing, one person’s doing from
another’s, subject from object. Those who exercise power-over are
Separators, separating done from doing, doers from the means of
doing.


Power-over is the breaking of the social flow of doing. Those
who exert power over the doing of others deny the subjectivity of
those others, deny their part in the flow of doing, exclude them
from history. Power-over breaks mutual recognition: those over
whom power is exercised are not recognised, and those who
exercise power are not recognised by anyone whom they recognise
as worthy of giving recognition. The doing of the doers is deprived
of social validation: they and their doing become invisible. History
becomes the history of the powerful, of those who tell others what
to do. The flow of doing becomes an antagonistic process in which
the doing of most is denied, in which the doing of most is
appropriated by the few. The flow of doing becomes a broken
process.


The breaking of doing always involves physical force or the
threat of physical force. There is always the threat, ’work for us or
you will die or suffer physical punishment’. If domination is
robbery of the done from the doer, that robbery is, necessarily,
armed robbery. But what makes the use or threat of physical force
possible is its stabilisation or institutionalisation in various ways,
an understanding of which is crucial to understanding the
dynamic and weakness of power-over.


In pre-capitalist societies, power-over is stabilised on the basis of
a personal relation between ruler and ruled. In a slave society, the
exercise of power-over is stabilised around the idea that
some people (whose quality as persons is denied) are the
property of others. In feudal societies, it is the notion of
divinely-ordained hierarchies of person-hood that gives form to the
commanding of some by others. The personal nature of the
relation of power-over means that the use or threat of force is
always directly present in the relation of domination itself.
The refusal to work is always an act of personal rebellion
against one’s owner or lord and punishable by that owner or
lord.


In capitalist society (which is what interests us most, since that
is where we live and what we scream against), the stabilisation
into a ’right’ of the bossing of some people by others is based not
on the direct relation between ruler and doer but on the relation
between the ruler and the done. The doers have now won freedom
from personal dependence on the rulers, but they are still held in a
position of subordination by the fracturing of the collective flow of
doing. Capital is based on the freezing of the past doing of
people into property. Since past doing is the precondition of
present doing, the freezing and appropriation of past doing
separates the precondition of present doing off from that
doing, constitutes it as an identifiable ’means of doing’ (more
familiarly, ’means of production’). Thus, the freed serfs and slaves
are freed into a world where the only way in which they
can have access to the means of doing (and therefore of
living) is to sell their capacity-to-do (their power-to-do, now
transformed into power-to-labour or labour-power) to those who
’own’ the means of doing. Their freedom in no sense frees
them from subordination of their doing to the dictates of
others.


Capital is that: the assertion of command over others on the
basis of ’ownership’ of the done and hence of the means of
doing, the preconditions for the doing of those others who are
commanded. All class societies involve the separation of done from
doing and doers, but in capitalism that separation becomes the
sole axis of domination. There is a peculiar rigidification of the
done, a peculiarly radical separation of done from doing. If, from
the perspective of the social flow of doing, the objectification of
the done is a fleeting objectification, immediately overcome
through the incorporation of the done into the flow of doing,
capitalism depends on making that objectification a durable
objectification, on converting the done into an object, a thing
apart, something that can be defined as property. Capitalism
thus implies a new definition of ’subject’ and ’object’, in
which the ’object’ is durably and rigidly separated from the
doing.


This does not mean that subject and object are constituted
by capitalism. Subjectivity is inherent in negativity (the
scream), and negativity is inherent in any society (certainly any
in which doing is subordinated to others). However, the
separation between subject and object, doer and done or
done-to, acquires a new meaning under capitalism, leading to
a new definition and a new consciousness of subjectivity
and objectivity, a new distance and antagonism between
subject and object. Thus, rather than the subject being the
product of modernity, it is rather that modernity expresses
consciousness of the new separation of subject and object which
is inherent in the focussing of social domination upon the
done.


Another way of formulating the same point is to say that there
is a separation of the constitution of the object from its existence.
The done now exists in durable autonomy from the doing which
constituted it. Whereas from the perspective of the social flow of
doing, the existence of an object is merely a fleeting moment in
the flow of subjective constitution (or doing), capitalism depends
on the conversion of that fleeting moment into a durable
objectification. But of course durable autonomy is an illusion, a
very real illusion. The separation of done from doing is a real
illusion, a real process in which the done nevertheless never
ceases to depend on the doing. Likewise, the separation of
existence from constitution is a real illusion, a real process in
which existence never ceases to depend on constitution. The
definition of the done as private property is the negation of the
sociality of doing, but this too is a real illusion, a real process
in which private property never ceases to depend on the
sociality of doing. The rupture of doing does not mean that
doing ceases to be social, simply that it becomes indirectly
social.


Capital is based not on the ownership of people but on the
ownership of the done and, on that basis, of the repeated buying
of people’s power-to-do. Since people are not owned, they can
quite easily refuse to work for others without suffering any
immediate punishment. The punishment comes rather in being cut
off from the means of doing (and of survival). The use of force
comes then not as part of the direct relation between capitalist
and worker. Force is focused in the first place not on the doer but
on the done: its focus is the protection of property, the protection
of ownership of the done. It is exercised not by the individual
owner of the done, for that would be incompatible with the free
nature of the relation between capitalist and worker, but by a
separate instance responsible for protecting the property of the
done, the state. The separation of the economic and the political
(and the constitution of the ’economic’ and the ’political’
by this separation) is therefore central to the exercise of
domination under capitalism. If domination is always a process
of armed robbery, the peculiarity of capitalism is that the
person with the arms stands apart from the person doing
the robbery, merely supervising that the robbery conforms
with the law. Without this separation, property (as opposed
to mere temporary possession) of the done, and therefore
capitalism itself, would be impossible. This is important
for the discussion of power, because the separation of the
economic and the political makes it appear that it is the
political which is the realm of the exercise of power (leaving the
economic as a ’natural’ sphere beyond question), whereas
in fact the exercise of power (the conversion of power-to
into power-over) is already inherent in the separation of the
done from the doing, and hence in the very constitution of
the political and the economic as distinct forms of social
relations.


The conversion of power-to into power-over always involves the
fracturing of the flow of doing, but in capitalism, to a far greater
extent than in any previous society, the fracturing of the social
flow of doing is the principle on which society is constructed. The
fact that the property of the done is the axis on which the right to
command the doing of others is based puts the breaking
of the flow of doing at the centre of every aspect of social
relations.


The breaking of the social flow of doing is the breaking of
everything. Most obviously, the rupture of doing breaks the
collective ’we’. The collectivity is divided into two classes of
people: those who, by virtue of their ownership of the means of
doing, command others to do, and those who, by virtue of the fact
that they are deprived of access to the means of doing, do what
the others tell them to do. That projection which distinguishes
people from bees is now monopolised by the former class, the
owners of the means of doing. For those who are told what to do,
the unity of projection-and-doing which distinguishes the worst
architect from the best bee is broken. Their humanity, in other
words, is broken, denied. Subjectivity (projection-and-doing)
is appropriated by the capitalists. The doers, deprived of
the unity of projection-and-doing, lose their subjectivity,
become reduced to the level of bees. They become objectivised
subjects. They lose too their collectivity, their ’we-ness’: we are
fragmented into a multitude of I’s, or, even worse, into a
multitude of I’s, you’s, he’s, she’s and they’s. Once the social flow
of doing is broken, the we-ness which it braids is broken
too.


The break between projection and doing is also a break between
the doers and the doing. The doing is ordained by the non-doers
(the commanders of doing), so that the doing becomes an alien act
(an externally imposed act) for those who do. Their doing is
transformed from an active doing to a passive, suffered, alien
doing. Doing becomes labour. Doing which is not directly
commanded by others is separated from labour and seen as less
important: ’What do you do?’ ’Oh, I don’t do anything, I’m just a
housewife.’


The separation between doer and doing, doing and done, is a
growing separation. The capitalists’ control of the done (and hence
of the means of doing) grows and grows, accumulates and
accumulates. The fact that capitalist rule is focused on the done
rather than on the doers means that it is boundlessly voracious in
a way in which doer-centred domination (slavery, feudalism) is
not. ’Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!’
(Marx, 1965, p. 595) The endless drive to increase the quantitative
accumulation of the done (dead labour, capital) imposes an
ever faster rhythm of doing and an ever more desperate
appropriation of the product of doing by the owner of the done.
The done comes to dominate the doing and the doer more and
more.


The crystallisation of that-which-has-been-done into a ’thing’
shatters the flow of doing into a million fragments. Thing-ness
denies the primacy of doing (and hence of humanity). When we
use a computer, we think of it as a thing, not of the union of our
writing with the flow of doing which created the computer.
Thing-ness is crystallised amnesia. The doing that created the
thing (not just that specific doing, but the whole flow of doing of
which it is a part) is forgotten. The thing now stands there on its
own as a commodity to be sold, with its own value. The
value of the commodity is the declaration of the commodity’s
autonomy from doing. The doing which created the commodity is
forgotten, the collective flow of doing of which it is part is
forced underground, turned into a subterranean stream.
Value acquires a life of its own. The breaking of the flow
of doing is carried to its ultimate consequences. Doing is
forced underground, and with it the doers, but it is more
than that: those who exercise power-over too are pushed
aside by the fragmentation on which their power-over is
based. The subject in capitalist society is not the capitalist.
It is not the capitalists who take the decisions, who shape
what is done. It is value. It is capital, accumulated value.
That which the capitalists ’own’, capital, has pushed the
capitalists aside. They are capitalists only to the extent
that they are loyal servants of capital. The very significance
of ownership falls into the background. Capital acquires a
dynamic of its own and the leading members of society are quite
simply its most loyal servants, its most servile courtiers. The
rupture of the flow of doing is carried to its most absurd
consequences. Power-over is separated from the powerful. Doing is
denied and the crystallised negation of doing, value, rules the
world.


Instead of doing being the braiding of our lives, it is now the
negation of doing, value, in the form of its visible and universal
equivalent, money, which braids our lives, or rather tears our lives
apart and sticks the fragments back together into a cracked
whole.

\section{IV}


Power-to is inherently social and is transformed into its opposite,
power-over, by the form of this sociality. Our capacity to do is
unavoidably part of the social flow of doing, yet the fracturing
of this flow subordinates this capacity to forces we do not
control.


Doing, then, exists antagonistically, as a doing turned against
itself, as a doing dominated by the done, as a doing alienated from
the doer. The antagonistic existence of doing can be formulated
in different ways: as an antagonism between power-to and
power-over, between doing and labour, between done and capital,
between utility (use-value) and value, between social flow
of doing and fragmentation. In each case there is a binary
antagonism between the former and the latter, but it is not an
external antagonism. In each case, the former exists as the
latter: the latter is the mode of existence or form of the
former. In each case, the latter denies the former, so that the
former exists in the mode of being denied. In each case, the
content (the former) is dominated by its form but exists in
antagonistic tension with this form. This domination of form
over content (of labour over doing, of capital over done,
and so on) is the source of those horrors against which we
scream.


But what is the status of that which exists in the form of being
denied? Does it exist at all? Where is power-to, where is
unalienated doing, where is the collective flow of doing? Do they
have any sort of existence separate from the forms in which they
currently exist? Are they not mere ideas, or romantic echoes of an
imagined Golden Age? They are certainly not intended as a
romantic harking back to a past age: whether there was ever a
golden age of free doing (primitive communism) does not really
matter to us now. They point not towards the past but towards a
possible future: a future whose possibility depends on its real
existence in the present. That which exists in the form of being
denied exists, therefore and inevitably, in rebellion against this
denial. There is no unalienated doing in the past, nor can
it exist, hippily, in a present idyll: nevertheless, it exists,
crucially, as present antagonism to its denial, as present
projection-beyond-its-denial-to-a-different-world, as a presently
existing not-yet. That which exists in the form of being denied is
the substance of the ecstatic, the materiality of the scream,
the truth which allows us to speak of the existing world as
untrue.


But it is more than that. The power-to that exists in the
form of power-over, in the form, therefore, of being denied,
exists not only as revolt against its denial, it exists also as
material substratum of the denial. The denial cannot exist
without that which is denied. The done depends on the doing.
The owner of the done depends on the doer. No matter how
much the done denies the existence of the doing, as in the
case of value, as in the case of capital, there is no way in
which the done can exist without the doing. No matter how
much the done dominates the doing, it depends absolutely on
that doing for its existence. Rulers, in other words, always
depend on those whom they rule. Capital depends absolutely
upon the labour which creates it (and therefore on the prior
transformation of doing into labour). That which exists depends
for its existence on that which exists only in the form of
its denial. That is the weakness of any system of rule and
the key to understanding its dynamic. That is the basis for
hope.


’Power’, then, is a confusing term which conceals an antagonism
(and does so in a way that reflects the power of the powerful).
’Power’ is used in two quite different senses, as power-to and as
power-over. The problem is sometimes addressed in English by
borrowing terms from other languages and making a distinction
between potentia (power-to) and potestas (power-over). However,
posing the distinction in these terms can be seen as pointing
merely to a difference whereas what is at issue is an antagonism,
or rather, an antagonistic metamorphosis. Power-to exists as
power-over, but the power-to is subjected to and in rebellion
against power-over.


The struggle of the scream is the struggle to liberate power-to
from power-over, the struggle to liberate doing from labour, to
liberate subjectivity from its objectification. In this struggle, it is
crucial to see that it is not a matter of power against power, of
like against like. The struggle to liberate power-to from power-over
is the struggle for the reassertion of the social flow of doing,
against its fragmentation and denial. On the one side is the
struggle to re-braid our lives on the basis of mutual recognition of
our participation in the collective flow of doing, on the other side
is the attempt to impose and re-impose the fragmentation of that
flow, the denial of our doing. From the perspective of the
scream, the Leninist aphorism that power is a matter of
who-whom is absolutely false, as indeed is the Maoist saying
that power comes out of the barrel of a gun: power-over
comes out of the barrel of a gun, but not power-to. The
struggle to liberate power-to is not the struggle to construct a
counter-power, but rather an anti-power, something that is
radically different from power-over. Concepts of revolution that
focus on the taking of power are typically centred on the notion of
counter-power. The strategy is to construct a counter-power, a
power that can stand against the ruling power. Often the
revolutionary movement has been constructed as a mirror image of
power, army against army, party against party, with the
result that power reproduces itself within the revolution
itself. Anti-power, then, is not counter-power, but something
much more radical: it is the dissolution of power-over, the
emancipation of power-to. This is the great, absurd, inevitable
challenge of the communist dream: to create a society free of
power relations through the dissolution of power-over. This
project is far more radical than any notion of revolution based
on the conquest of power and at the same time far more
realistic.


Anti-power is fundamentally opposed to power-over not only in
the sense of being a radically different project but also in the fact
that it exists in constant conflict with power-over. The attempt to
exercise power-to in a way that does not entail the exercise of
power over others, inevitably comes into conflict with power-over.
Potentia is not an alternative to potestas that can simply
co-exist peacefully with it. It may appear that we can simply
cultivate our own garden, create our own world of loving
relations, refuse to get our hands dirty in the filth of power, but
this is an illusion. There is no innocence, and this is true
with an increasing intensity. The exercise of power-to in a
way that does not focus on value creation can exist only in
antagonism to power-over. This is due not to the character of
power-to (which is not inherently antagonistic) as to the
voracious nature, the ’were-wolf hunger’ (Marx 1965, p. 243)
of power-over. Power-to, if it does not submerge itself in
power-over, can exist, overtly or latently, only as power-against, as
anti-power.


It is important to stress the anti-ness of power-to under
capitalism, because most mainstream discussions of social theory
overlook the antagonistic nature of developing one’s potential. The
antagonistic nature of power is overlooked and it is assumed that
capitalist society provides the opportunity to develop human
potential (power-to) to the full. Money, if it is seen as being
relevant at all (and, amazingly, it is generally not mentioned in
discussions of power, presumably on the basis that money is
economics and power is sociology), is generally seen in terms of
inequality (unequal access to resources, for example), rather than
in terms of command. Power-to, it is assumed, is already
emancipated.


The same point can be made in relation to subjectivity. The
fact that power-to can exist only exist as antagonism to
power-over (as anti-power) means of course that, under capitalism,
subjectivity can only exist antagonistically, in opposition
to its own objectification. To treat the subject as already
emancipated, as most mainstream theory does, is to endorse
the present objectification of the subject as subjectivity, as
freedom. Many of the attacks on subjectivity by structuralists or
post-modernists can perhaps be understood in this sense,
as attacks on a false notion of an emancipated (and hence
autonomous and coherent) subjectivity. To argue here for
the inevitability of taking subjectivity as our starting point
is not to argue for a coherent or autonomous subjectivity.
On the contrary, the fact that subjectivity can exist only
in antagonism to its own objectification means that it is
torn apart by that objectification and its struggle against
it.


This book is an exploration of the absurd and shadowy world of
anti-power. It is shadowy and absurd simply because the world of
orthodox social science (sociology, political science, economics and
so on) is a world in which power is so completely taken for granted
that nothing else is visible. In the social science that seeks to
explain the world as it is, to show how the world works, power is
the keystone of all categories, so that, in spite of (indeed, because
of) its proclaimed neutrality, this social science participates
actively in the separation of subject and object which is the
substance of power. To us, power is of interest only in so far as it
helps us to understand the challenge of anti-power: the study of
power on its own, in abstraction from the challenge and
project of anti-power, can do nothing but actively reproduce
power.

\section{V}


We have presented the issue of power in terms of a binary
antagonism between doing and done, in which the done, existing
in the form of capital (apparently controlled by, but actually in
control of, the capitalists) subordinates, ever more voraciously, all
doing to the sole purpose of its self-expansion.


But is this not too simple? Surely that which we scream against
is far more complex than this? What about the way that doctors
treat their patients, what about the way that teachers treat their
students, that parents treat their children? What of the treatment
of blacks by whites? What about the subordination of women to
men? Is it not too simplistic, too reductionist, to say that power is
capital and capital is power? Are there not many different types of
power?


Foucault in particular makes the argument that it is mistaken
to think of power in terms of a binary antagonism, that we must
think of it rather in terms of a ’multiplicity of relations of force’.
(1976, p. 121) Corresponding to the multiplicity of power relations
there is then a multiplicity of resistances, ’present everywhere in
the network of power. In relation to power, there is therefore not
one place of the great Refusal - soul of revolt, hearth of all
rebellion, pure law of the revolutionary. But resistances which are
special cases: possible, necessary, improbable, spontaneous, wild,
solitary, concerted, rampant, violent, irreconcilable, ready to
negotiate, interested, or sacrificial: by definition, they can exist
only on the strategic field of the relations of power’. (1976, p.
126)


In terms of our scream, that would suggest an endless
multiplicity of screams. And indeed it is so: we scream in many
different ways and for many different reasons. From the beginning
of our argument it was stressed that the ’we-ness’ of ’we scream’ is
a central question in this book, not a simple assertion of identity.
Why, then, insist on the binary nature of an over-riding
antagonism between doing and done? It cannot be a matter of an
abstract defence of a Marxist approach - that would make no
sense. Nor is it in any sense the intention to impose a single
identity or unity upon the manifest multiplicity of resistance, to
subordinate all the variety of resistances to the a priori unity of
the Working Class. Nor can it be a matter of emphasising the
empirical role of the working class and its importance in relation
to ’other forms of struggle’.


In order to explain our insistence on the binary nature of the
antagonism of power (or, in more traditional terms, our
insistence on a class analysis), it is necessary to retrace our
steps. The starting point of the argument here is not the
urge to understand society or to explain how it works. Our
starting point is much more pointed: the scream, the drive to
change society radically. It is from that perspective that we
ask how society works. That starting point led us to place
the question of doing in the centre of our discussion, and
this in turn led us to the antagonism between doing and
done.


Obviously, other perspectives are possible. It is more common to
start positively, with the question of how society works. Such a
perspective does not necessarily lead to a focus on doing and the
way in which doing is organised. In the case of Foucault, it leads
rather to a focus on talking, on language. This perspective
certainly allows him to elucidate the enormous richness and
complexity of power relations in contemporary society and, more
important from our perspective, the richness and complexity of
resistance to power. However, the richness and complexity is the
richness of a still photograph, or of a painting. There is no
movement in the society that Foucault analyses: change from one
still photograph to another, but no movement. There cannot be,
unless the focus is on doing and its antagonistic existence. Thus,
in Foucault’s analysis, there are a whole host of resistances which
are integral to power, but there is no possibility of emancipation.
The only possibility is an endlessly shifting constellation of
power-and-resistance.


The argument in this chapter has led to two important results,
which it is worth reiterating. Firstly, the focus on doing
has led to an intimation of the vulnerability of power-over.
The done depends on the doer, capital depends on labour.
That is the crucial chink of light, the glimmer of hope, the
turning-point in the argument. The realisation that the powerful
depend on the ’powerless’ transforms the scream from a
scream of anger to a scream of hope, a confident scream
of anti-power. This realisation takes us beyond the merely
radical-democratic perspective of an endless struggle against
power to a position from which we can pose the issue of
the vulnerability of capital and the real possibility of social
transformation. From this perspective, then, we must ask of any
theory not so much how it illuminates the present, but what light
it throws on the vulnerability of rule. What we want is not a
theory of domination, but a theory of the vulnerability of
domination, of the crisis of domination. The emphasis on
understanding power in terms of a ’multiplicity of relations of
force’ does not give us any basis for posing this question.
Indeed, on the contrary, it tends to exclude the question, for,
while resistance is central to Foucault’s approach (at least
in his later work), the notion of emancipation is ruled out
as being absurd, for it pre-supposes, as Foucault correctly
points out, the assumption of a unity in the relations of
power.


To pose the question of the vulnerability of power thus requires
two steps: the opening of the category of power to reveal its
contradictory character, which has been described here in terms of
the antagonism between power-to and power-over; and secondly,
the understanding of this antagonistic relation as an internal
relation. Power-to exists as power-over: power-over is the form of
power-to, a form which denies its substance. Power-over can exist
only as transformed power-to. Capital can exist only as the
product of transformed doing (labour). That is the key to its
weakness. The issue of form, so central to Marx’s discussion of
capitalism, is crucial for an understanding of the vulnerability of
domination. The distinction which Negri makes (and develops so
brilliantly) between constituent and constituted power takes the
first of these two steps and opens up an understanding of the
self-antagonistic nature of power as a pre-condition for talking
about revolutionary transformation. However, the relation
between constituent and constituted power remains an external
one. Constitution (the transformation of constituent into
constituted power) is seen as a reaction to the democratic
constituent power of the multitude. This, however, tells us nothing
about the vulnerability of the process of constitution. In
the face of power-over (constituted power) it tells us of the
ubiquity and force of the absolute struggle of the multitude,
but it tells us nothing of the crucial nexus of dependence of
power-over (constituted power) upon power-to (constituent
power). In this sense, for all the force and brilliance of his
account, Negri remains at the level of radical-democratic
theory.


Does this emphasis on the perspective of the scream lead us
then to an impoverished view of society? The argument
above seems to suggest that the perspective of the scream
leads to a binary view of the antagonism between doing and
done, and that in such a perspective there is no room for the
’multiplicity of forces’ which Foucault sees as essential to the
discussion of power. This seems to suggest a split between the
revolutionary or negative perspective and the understanding
of the undoubted richness and complexity of society. This
would indeed be the case (and would constitute a major
problem for our argument) if it were not for the second result
of our previous discussion, namely that the antagonistic
relation between doing and done, and specifically the radical
fracturing of the flow of doing that is inherent in the fact
that power-over exists as ownership of the done, means a
multiple fragmentation of doing (and of social relations). In
other words, the very understanding of social relations as
being characterised by a binary antagonism between doing
and done means that this antagonism exists in the form
of a multiplicity of antagonisms, a great heterogeneity of
conflict. There are indeed a million forms of resistance, an
immensely complex world of antagonisms. To reduce these to an
empirical unity of conflict between capital and labour, or to
argue for a hegemony of working class struggle, understood
empirically, or to argue that these apparently non-class resistances
must be subsumed under class struggle, would be an absurd
violence. The argument here is just the contrary: the fact that
capitalist society is characterised by a binary antagonism
between doing and done means that this antagonism exists as a
multiplicity of antagonisms. It is the binary nature of power (as
antagonism between power-to and power-over) that means
that power appears as a ’multiplicity of forces’. Rather than
starting with the multiplicity, we need to start with the prior
multiplication that gives rise to this multiplicity. Rather than
starting with the multiple identities (women, blacks, gays,
Basques, Irish and so on), we need to start from the process of
identification that gives rise to those identities. In this perspective,
one aspect of Foucault’s enormously stimulating writings
is precisely that, without presenting it in those terms, he
greatly enriches our understanding of the fragmentation
of the flow of doing, our historical understanding of what
we shall characterise in the next chapter as the process of
fetishisation.


A last point needs to be dealt with before passing on to the
discussion of fetishism. It is an important part of Foucault’s
argument that power should not be seen in purely negative terms,
that we must also understand the way in which power constitutes
reality and constitutes us. That is clearly so: we are conceived and
born not in a power-free vacuum but in a power-traversed society:
we are products of that society. Foucault, however, fails to open
up the category of power, to point to the fundamental antagonism
that characterises it. Thus, we can say, for example, that we
are products of capital, or that everything we consume is a
commodity. That is clearly so, but it is deceptive. It is only when
we open up these categories, when we say, for example, that
the commodity is characterised by an antagonism between
value and use-value (utility), that use-value exists in the
form of value, and in rebellion against this form, that the
full development of our human potential pre-supposes our
participation in this rebellion, and so on: it is only then
that we can make sense of the statement that everything
we consume is a commodity. It is only then that it makes
sense to speak of the commodity-form as a form of relations
to be rejected and fought against. Similarly, with power:
it is only when we open up the category of power and see
power-over as the form of power-to that we can fully understand
power-over as a form of social relations to be rejected and fought
against.u

\chapter{Fetishism}


The Tragic Dilemma: The Urgent Impossibility of
Revolution

\section{I}


In the last chapter, we argued that the transformation of
power-to into power-over is centred on the rupture of the social
flow of doing. In capitalism, the done is severed from and
turned against the doing. This severing of the done from the
doing is the core of a multiple fracturing of all aspects of
life.


Without naming names, we have already entered upon a
discussion of fetishism. Fetishism is the term that Marx uses
to describe the rupture of doing. Fetishism is the core of
Marx’s discussion of power and central to any discussion of
changing the world. It is the centrepiece of the argument of this
book.


Fetishism is a category that does not fit easily into normal
academic discourse. Partially for that reason, it has been relatively
neglected by those who would force Marxism into the moulds of
the different academic disciplines. Although it is a central
category in Marx’s Capital, it is almost completely ignored by
those who regard themselves as Marxist economists. It is
similarly overlooked by Marxist sociologists and political
scientists, who usually prefer to start from the category of
class and adapt it to the frameworks of their disciplines.
Fetishism, in so far as it is discussed at all, is often seen as falling
in the realm of philosophy or cultural criticism. Relegated
and classified in this way, the concept loses its explosive
force.


The force of the concept lies in that it refers to an unsustainable
horror: the self-negation of doing.

\section{II}


The young Marx discusses the self-negation of doing not in terms
of fetishism but in terms of ’alienation’ or ’estrangement’.
Alienation, a term now often used to describe a general social
malaise, refers in Marx’s discussion to the rupturing of doing
which is characteristic of the capitalist organisation of production.


In his discussion of ’estranged labour’ in the Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx starts from the process
of production, arguing that under capitalism production
is not just production of an object, but production of an
object that is alien to the producer: ’The alienation of the
worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes
an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside
him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it
becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the
life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as
something hostile and alien.’ (1975, p. 272; emphasis in the
original)


The sundering of doer from done is inevitably the sundering of
the doer himself. The production of an alien object is inevitably
an active process of self-estrangement. ’How could the worker
come to face the product of his activity as a stranger, were it not
that in the very act of production he was estranging himself from
himself?\dots{}If then the product of labour is alienation, production
itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the
activity of alienation.’ (1975, p. 274) Alienation of man from his
own activity is self-estrangement: it is the worker himself who
actively produces his own estrangement.


The rupture of the doer from the done is the negation of the
doer’s power-to. The doer is turned into a victim. Activity is
turned into passivity, doing into suffering. Doing is turned against
the doer. ’This relation is the relation of the worker to his own
activity as an alien activity not belonging to him; it is activity as
suffering, strength as weakness, begetting as emasculating, the
worker’s own physical and mental energy, his personal life - for
what is life but activity? - as an activity which is turned against
him, independent of him and not belonging to him.’ (1975, p.
275)


Alienation is the production of humans who are damaged,
maimed, deprived of their humanity: ’In tearing away from man
the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears
from him his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the
species, and transforms his advantage over animals into the
disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken away from
him’. (1975, p. 277) This ’tearing away from man the object of his
production’ alienates him from his collective humanity, his
’species-being’: ’Estranged labour turns \dots{} man’s species-being \dots{}
into a being alien from him, into a means for his individual
exstence.’ (1975, p. 277) This implies the fragmentation
of the collective human subject, the ’estrangement of man
from man’. (1975, p. 277). Mutual recognition is broken,
not just between ruler and ruled, but between the workers
themselves. ’What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the
product of his labour and to himself, also holds of a man’s
relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labour
and object of labour. In fact, the proposition that man’s
species-nature is estranged from him means that one man is
estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s
essential nature.’ (MECW3, 277) The term ’species-life’ or
’species-being’ refers surely to nothing other than the social flow
of human doing, the material braiding of a mutually recognitive
’we’.


This estrangement of man from man is not only an estrangement
between workers but also the production of the non-worker, the
master. ’If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, if
it confronts him as an alien power, then this can only be
because it belongs to some other man than the worker.’
(MECW3, 278). Estranged labour is the active producing of
domination, the active conversion of power-to into power-over:
’Just as he creates his own production as the loss of his
reality, as his punishment; his own product as a loss, as a
product not belonging to him; so he creates the domination of
the person who does not produce over the product. Just as
he estranges his activity from himself, so he confers upon
the stranger an activity which is not his own.’ (MECW3,
279)


The notion of alienation thus refers to the breaking of the social
flow of doing, the turning of doing against itself. This is not
the result of fate or divine intervention: human doing is
the only subject, the sole constitutive power. We are the
only gods, the sole creators. Our problem, as creators, is
that we are creating our own destruction. We create the
negation of our own creation. Doing negates itself. Activity
becomes passivity, doing becomes non-doing, being. Alienation
points both to our dehumanisation and to our complicity in
the production of our own dehumanisation. But how can
maimed, dehumanised, alienated people possibly create a
liberated, human society? Alienation signals not only the
urgency but also, apparently, the impossibility of revolutionary
change.

\section{III}


The rupture of doing and done is introduced right at the
beginning of Capital. Echoing the words of the 1844 Manuscripts
(’The alienation of the worker in his product means \dots{} that \dots{} it
exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and
that it becomes a power on its own confronting him.’), Marx
begins the second paragraph of Capital saying, ’A commodity is,
in the first place, an object outside us. ’ (1965, p. 35) The
commodity is an object produced by us, but standing outside us.
The commodity takes on a life of its own in which its social origin
in human labour is extinguished. It is a product which denies its
own character as product, a done which denies its own relation to
doing.


The commodity is the point of fracture of the social flow
of doing. As a product produced for exchange, it stands
at the unhinging or dis-articulation of social doing. It is
of course the product of a social doing, but the fact that
it is produced for exchange on the market breaks the flow
of doing, makes the thing stand apart from the doing of
which it is both product and precondition. It stands on its
own to be sold on the market, the work that produced it
forgotten. The labour which produces it is social (labour for
others), but it is indirectly social, it is labour for others which
exists in the form of labour for oneself. The sociality of doing
is ruptured, and with it the process of mutual recognition
and social validation. Mutual recognition is removed from
the producers and transferred to their products: it is the
product which is recognised socially, in the process of exchange.
Recognition of doing is expressed as the value of the product. It is
now the quantitative, monetary measure of value (price)
which provides social validation for the doing of people. It
is money which tells you whether what you do is socially
useful.


The commodity, then, is not a thing to be taken at face value.
Analysis allows us to discern the labour that has produced
the commodity and to see labour as the substance of its
value, but that just leads us on to a far bigger question:
why is it that the doing which produced the commodity is
negated? ’Political Economy has indeed analysed, however
incompletely, value and its magnitude, and has discovered what
lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the
question why labour is represented by the value of its product
and labour-time by the magnitude of that value.’ (1965, p.
80)


Capital is a study of the self-negation of doing. From the
commodity, Marx moves on to value, money, capital, profit, rent,
interest - ever more opaque forms of the occultation of doing, ever
more sophisticated forms of the suppression of power-to. Doing
(human activity) disappears further and further from sight.
Things rule. It is in this world where things rule, where the novum
of human creativity disappears from sight, in this ’enchanted,
perverted, topsy-turvy world’ (Marx 1975, p. 830), that it becomes
possible to speak of the ’laws of capitalist development’. It is on
the basis of the critique of this insanity that it becomes possible
to criticise the categories of the political economists, the
rationality and laws of their analysis of an irrational, perverted
world.


The core of all this is the separation of the done from the doing.
This is inherent in the commodity, and receives its fully
developed form in capital, the appropriation of the done by the
owners of the past done (and therefore of the means of doing),
the accumulation of done upon done, the accumulation of
capital. ’Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the
prophets!’ Accumulation is simply the voracious, relentless
process of separating done from doing, of turning the done (as
means of doing) against the doers in order to subject their
future doing to the sole end of further accumulation. It is this
ever-renewed process that gives a specific form to doing
(as abstract labour, labour abstracted from any particular
content, value production, surplus value production) and to the
done (as value, as commodity, as money, as capital): all
aspects of the ever-repeated rupture of the collective flow of
doing.


Marx now refers to this process of rupture not as alienation, but
as ’fetishism’. In his discussion of fetishism at the end of chapter 1
of the first volume of Capital, he explains: ’In order \dots{} to find an
analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of
the religious world. In that world the productions of the
human brain appear as independent things endowed with
life, and entering into relation both with one another and
with the human race.’(1965, p. 72) The commodity is ’a
very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and
theological niceties’ (1965, p. 71). The ’mystical character of
commodities’, Marx says, comes not from their use value, but from
the commodity form itself, that is, from the fact that the
product of labour assumes the form of a commodity. ’The
equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by
their products all being equally values; the measure of the
expenditure of labour-power by the duration of that expenditure,
takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of
labour; and finally, the mutual relations of the producers,
within which the social character of their labour affirms itself,
take the form of a social relation between the products. A
commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it
the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an
objective character stamped upon the product of that labour;
because the relation to the sum total of their own labour is
presented to them as a social relation, existing not between
themselves, but between the products of their labour.’(1965, p.
72).


Just as Marx had insisted on understanding self-estrangement
as the product of self-estranged labour, so he emphasises that the
peculiar character of commodities has its origin in the ’peculiar
social character of the labour that produces them’.(1965,
p. 72) Commodity production is indirectly social labour:
although the products are produced for social use, the form of
production is private. ’Since the producers do not come into social
contact with each other until they exchange their products, the
specific social character of each producer’s labour does not
show itself except in the act of exchange. In other words,
the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the
labour of society, only by means of the relations the act of
exchange establishes directly between the products, and
indirectly, through them, between the producers. To the
latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one
individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct relations
between individuals at work, but as what they really are,
material relations between persons and social relations between
things.’(1965, p. 73; my emphasis). Social relations do not
merely appear to be relations between things: rather, this
appearance reflects the real fracturing of doing and done, the
real rupture of the community of doing. Relations between
doers really are refracted through relations between things
(between dones that deny their origin in the sociality of doing).
These things are the fetishised forms of the relations between
producers, and, as such, they deny their character as social
relations. Commodities, value, money conceal, ’instead of
disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the
social relations between the individual producers’.(1965, p.
76)


The fracturing of social relations is consolidated by bourgeois
thought, which takes these fetishised forms as its basis rather than
criticising them. ’The categories of bourgeois economy consist
of such like forms. They are forms of thought expressing
with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite,
historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of
commodities.’(1965, p. 76) There is, then, no clear distinction here
between thought and reality, theory and practice. Theory is an
element of practice, actively contributing to the production and
reproduction of the separation of doing from done.


The starting point for our thought is the fetishised world which
confronts us. We are born into a world in which the community of
doing is fractured. The separation of doing and done permeates
our whole relation to the world and to those around us. Our vision
of the world is already pre-shaped before we begin to reflect
critically. Power-over, that separation of doing and done
which is inherent in the production of commodities for the
market, presents itself here impersonally. Marx introduces
fetishism in the context of the production and exchange of
commodities. This is not, however, a pre-capitalist phase, for the
generalisation of commodity production presupposes the existence
of labour power as a commodity, that is, the existence of a
capitalist society. Commodity fetishism is, therefore, the
penetration of capitalist power-over into the core of our being,
into all our habits of thought, all our relations with other
people.


Confronted with the fetishised world, all we can do is criticise.
Value, for example, ’does not stalk about with a label describing
what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a
social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic,
to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp
an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as
language.’(1965, p. 74) ’Man’s reflections on the forms of social
life, and consequently, also his scientific analysis of those forms,
take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical
development. He begins, post festum, with the results of the
process of development ready to hand before him.’(1965, p.
75)


Bourgeois thought has, in the best of cases, managed to
decipher some of the social hieroglyphics. ’Political Economy has
indeed analysed, however incompletely, value and its magnitude,
and has discovered what lies beneath these forms.’(1965, p. 80)
There is, however, a limit to bourgeois criticism. The separation of
subject and object, doing and done, inevitably involves a
hypostatisation of the present, a fixation of the present. As long as
the separation of subject and object is not questioned, as long
as the capitalist form of social organisation is not seen as
transient, criticism is inevitably blind to the historicity of
the phenomena criticised. The rupture of the sociality of
doing is assumed to be natural, eternal. In other words,
bourgeois (fetishised) thought is blind to the question of form.
The question of form (value, money or capital as forms of
social relations) arises only if one is alive to the historicity of
bourgeois social relations, that is, to the fact that capitalism is a
particular historical form of organising relations between
people. ’If \dots{} we treat this mode of production as one eternally
fixed by Nature for every state of society, we necessarily
overlook that which is the differentia specifica of the value-form,
and consequently of the commodity-form, and of its further
developments, money-form, capital-form, \&c.’(1965, p. 81)
Consequently, bourgeois criticism does not look to the genesis of
the phenomenon criticised, does not ask why social relations exist
in these forms.


The category of form is central to Marx’s discussion in Capital.
He speaks of ’money-form’, ’commodity-form’, ’capital-form’
and so on. These are not to be understood in the sense of a
species-genus distinction (money as a ’form’ or ’species’ of
something else), but simply as a mode of existence. Money,
commodity, capital are modes of existence of social relations, the
forms in which social relations currently exist. These are the
frozen or rigidified modes of existence of relations between
people. ’Form’, then, is the echo of the scream, a message of
hope. We scream against things as they are: yes, comes the
echo, but things-as-they-are are not eternal, they are just
the historically congealed forms of social relations. ’These
formulae, which bear it stamped upon them in unmistakeable
letters that they belong to a state of society, in which the
process of production has the mastery over man, instead
of being controlled by him, such formulae appear to the
bourgeois intellect to be as much a self-evident necessity
imposed by Nature as productive labour itself.’(1965, pp. 80-81)
But for us who scream, they are neither self-evident nor
eternal.


It should already be clear what a central part the concept of
fetishism plays in revolutionary theory. It is at once a critique
of bourgeois society, a critique of bourgeois theory and an
explanation of the stability of bourgeois society. It points at once
to the dehumanisation of people, to our own complicity in the
reproduction of power, and to the difficulty (or apparent
impossibility) of revolution.


The concept of fetishism is central to Marx’s critique of
capitalist society. The theme of dehumanisation is constantly
present in Marx’s discussion in Capital and elsewhere. In
capitalism there is an inversion of the relation between people and
things, between subject and object. There is an objectification of
the subject and a subjectification of the object: things (money,
capital, machines) become the subjects of society, people (workers)
become the objects. Social relations are not just apparently but
really relations between things (between money and the state,
between your money and mine), while humans are deprived of
their sociality, transformed into ’individuals’, the necessary
complement of commodity exchange (’In order that this
alienation be reciprocal, it is only necessary for men, by a tacit
understanding, to treat each other as private owners, and by
implication as independent individuals’(1965, p. 87)). In the long
and detailed discussion of conditions in the factory and the
process of exploitation, the emphasis is constantly on the inversion
of subject and object: ’Every kind of capitalist production, in so
far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of
creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the
workman who employs the instruments of labour, but the
instruments of labour that employ the workman. But it is only
in the factory system that this inversion for the first time
acquires technical and palpable reality.’(1965, p. 423) It is not
only for the physical misery that it brings, but above all
for the inversion of things and people that Marx condemns
capitalism: for the fetishisation of social relations in other
words.


Inextricably linked with the condemnation of the inversion
of subject and object in bourgeois society is the critique
of bourgeois theory which takes this inversion for granted,
which bases its categories on the fetishised forms of social
relations: the state, money, capital, the individual, profit,
wages, rent and so on. These categories are derived from the
surface of society, the sphere of circulation, in which the
subjectivity of the subject as producer is completely out of
sight and all that can be seen is the interaction of things
and of the individuals who are the bearers of these things.
It is here, where social subjectivity is hidden from view,
that liberal theory blooms. This sphere of circulation is ’a
very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule
Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.’(1965, p. 176) The
whole three volumes of Capital are devoted to a critique of
political economy, that is, to showing how the conceptions of
political economy arise from the fetishised appearances of social
relations. Political economy (and bourgeois theory in general)
takes for granted the forms in which social relations exist
(commodity-form, value-form, money-form, capital-form and so
on). In other words, bourgeois theory is blind to the question
of form: commodities and money (and so on) are not even
thought of as being forms, or modes of existence, of social
relations. Bourgeois theory is blind to the transitory nature
of the current forms of social relations, takes for granted
the basic unchangeability (the ’is-ness’) of capitalist social
relations.


Bourgeois thought, however, is not just the thought of the
bourgeoisie, or of capitalism’s active supporters. It refers rather to
the forms of thought generated by the fractured relation
beween doing and done (subject and object) in capitalist
society. It is crucially important to see that the critique of
bourgeois theory is not just a critique of ’them’. It is also, and
perhaps above all, a critique of ’us’, of the bourgeois nature of
our own assumptions and categories, or, more concretely, a
critique of our own complicity in the reproduction of capitalist
power relations. The critique of bourgeois thought is the
critique of the separation of subject and object in our own
thought.


The fetishism which is so highly elaborated in the work of the
political economists and other bourgeois theorists is equally the
basis of everyday ’common-sense’ conceptions in capitalist society.
The assumption of the permanence of capitalism is built into the
daily thought and practice of people in this society. The
appearance and real existence of social relations as fragmented
relations between things conceal both the basic antagonism of
those relations and the possibility of changing the world. The
concept of fetishism (rather than any theory of ’ideology’ or
’hegemony’) thus provides the basis for an answer to the age-old
question, ’why do people accept the misery, violence and
exploitation of capitalism?’ By pointing to the way in which
people not only accept the miseries of capitalism but also actively
participate in its reproduction, the concept of fetishism also
underlines the difficulty or apparent impossibility of revolution
against capitalism. Fetishism is the central theoretical problem
confronted by any theory of revolution. Revolutionary thought
and practice is necessarily anti-fetishistic. Any thought or
practice which aims at the emancipation of humanity from the
dehumanisation of capitalism is necessarily directed against
fetishism.

\section{IV}


The tragic dilemma of revolutionary change, the fact that its
urgency and its apparent impossibility are two sides of the same
process, intensifies to the degree that the fetishism of social
relations becomes more penetrating and more pervasive.


The separation of doing and done, of subject and object, it is
clear from Marx’s discussion in Capital, goes beyond the
immediate ’tearing away from man the object of his production’
by the exploiting class. It is not just that the capitalist tears away
from the worker the object which she has produced. The fact
that the sociality of doing is mediated (broken and stuck
together cracked) through the market (the sale and purchase of
commodities) means that the rupture of doing and done is by no
means limited to the immedate process of exploitation, but
extends to the whole society. The whole of capitalism is cracked,
’an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world’ (Capital III, 830).
Although Marx’s focus in Capital is on the critique of political
economy, there is no reason at all to think that fetishism extends
only to the sphere conceptualised by political economy. The
implication of Marx’s discussion is rather that fetishism
permeates the whole of society, that the whole of capitalism is
’an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world’, and that the
subjectification of the object and the objectification of the subject
is characteristic of every aspect of life. ’Separation’, says
Marx, is the ’real generation process of capital’. (1972, p.
422)


The question of the all-pervasive character of fetishism is taken
up by a number of authors working in the Marxist tradition. The
further the argument is developed, the more intense the tragic
dilemma of revolution becomes. The more urgent revolutionary
change is shown to be, the more impossible it seems. In terms
of reification, instrumental rationality, one-dimensionality,
identity, discipline, the different authors have emphasised the
penetration of power into every sphere of our existence, the
increasing closure of existence under capitalism. Their work raises
to an excruciating pitch the intensity of the revolutionary
dilemma.


Rather than try to give an account of the contributions of the
different theorists, we shall try to build on their work to develop
some of the points made in the previous chapter. This involves
going back over the argument so far.


The starting point is the separation of doing and done.
This implies an antagonistic separation between the doers
and the appropriators of the done. The appropriators of
the done (the owners of capital) use their control of the
done, which is the means of doing, to get the doers to labour
for them to increase the done which they appropriate. The
capitalists, in other words, exploit the workers: they pay them
what they need in order to survive (the value of their labour
power) and appropriate the surplus that they produce (the
surplus value). The separation of doing and done implies a
dual class analysis, an antagonism between capital and the
working class. This is fundamentally important and nothing
in the argument should be taken as derogating from this
position.


This class antagonism is often understood within the Marxist
and socialist tradition to be an external relation. It is assumed
that the antagonism between working class and capital is an
external antagonism which leaves the two sides untouched in their
fundamentals. The two sides of the antagonism are then a good
side (working class) and a bad side (capitalist class). In such a
perspective, one might expect that the question of revolution
would be a relatively simple one, largely a practical question of
organisation. Why, then, has there not been a successful
communist revolution? The answers given are usually in terms of
ideology, hegemony or false consciousness. The working class does
not rise up because it is imbued with the ideology of the market;
in a class society, the ideas of the ruling class are hegemonic; the
working class suffers from false consciousness. In each case, the
question of ideology, hegemony or false consciousness is separated
from the question of the separation of doing from done: the sphere
of ideology is seen as separate from the ’economic’. The
emphasis on the lack of understanding of the working class is
usually (inevitably?) accompanied by an assumption that the
working class is a ’they’. ’They’ have the wrong ideas, so our
role (we who have the right ideas) is to enlighten them, to
illuminate them, to bring them true consciousness. The problem
of organisation is essentially ’how can we make them see?’
’We’, of course, are generally assumed not to be subject to
the same ideology, hegemony or false consciousness. The
political problems inherent in such an approach should be
obvious.


A second problem with such an approach is simply that it is
unable to account for the complexity of the world. Lines are drawn
too crudely, the complexity of social connections is short-circuited,
so that Marxism loses its power of conviction. This has been
particularly obvious in discussions of changing forms of social
conflict in recent years - conflict around issues of gender or the
environment, for example. There has been a tendency either to
force such struggles into a pre-conceived mould of class struggle,
or to speak of them as ’non-class struggles’. In the latter case, the
concept of non-class struggle is accompanied either by the view
that class struggle is diminishing in importance or that, in spite of
everything, the fundamental conflict between capital and
labour still remains the most important form of conflict. The
understanding of the conflict between labour and capital as an
external conflict which leaves both sides essentially untouched
leads to the conception of the antagonism as an immediate one, in
which both sides are immediately, empirically present. And then
come the problems: where was the working class in the struggle
against the Vietnam War, against nuclear weapons, where is
the working class in support of the zapatista uprising, how
can we speak of working class revolution when the working
class is numerically on the decline, and so on. All of these
questions can be answered, of course, but the cumulative
evidence of a separation between ’the working class’ as an
empirically identifiable group and the most striking forms of
rebellion has led to a progressive undermining of the idea that
capitalism should be understood in terms of a basic class
antagonism.


The argument here is that a class understanding of capitalism is
fundamental, but that the class antagonism cannot be understood
as an external relation, nor can class be understood in this
immediate way. The separation of doing and done, as we have
already begun to see in the previous chapter and in the first
sections of this one, is not just a simple antagonism between doers
and the appropriators of that which is done. Capitalist power-over,
the separation of doing and done, is like one of those horrific
modern bullets which do not simply pierce the flesh of the victim
but explode inside her into a thousand different fragments. Or,
less horrifically, capitalist power is like a rocket that shoots
up into the sky and explodes into a multitude of coloured
flares. To focus on the flares or the fragments of the bullet
without seeing the trajectory of the rocket or the bullet is what
much post-modern theory (or, indeed, bourgeois theory in
general) does. On the other hand, to focus just on the primary
movement of the bullet or the rocket and to treat the flares and
the fragments as something external (non-class struggle)
is a crudity that is politically unhelpful and theoretically
unconvincing.


The concept of fetishism is concerned with the explosion of
power inside us, not as something that is distinct from the
separation of doing and done (as in the concepts of ’ideology’ and
’hegemony’), but as something that is integral to that separation.
That separation does not just divide capitalists from workers, but
explodes inside us, shaping every aspect of what we do and what
we think, transforming every breath of our lives into a moment of
class struggle. The problem of why revolution has not happened is
not a problem of ’them’, but a problem of a fragmented
’us’.


We live, then, in an ’enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world’ in
which relations between people exist in the form of relations
between things. Social relations are ’thingified’ or ’reified’. The
term ’reification’ is the one used by Lukcs in his History and Class
Consciousness, published in 1923. As the term ’reification’
suggests, Lukcs insists on its relevance for every aspect of social
life. Reification is not just associated with the immediate labour
process, nor just something that affects the ’workers’. ’The fate of
the worker becomes the fate of society as a whole’. (1971, 91) ’The
transformation of the commodity relation into a thing of
’ghostly objectivity’ \dots{} stamps its imprint upon the whole
consciousness of man\dots{} And there is no natural form in which
human relations can be cast, no way in which man can bring
his physical and psychic ’qualities’ into play without their
being subjected increasingly to this reifying process.’ (1971,
100)

\section{V}


The separation of doing from done (and its subordination to the
done) establishes the reign of is-ness, or identity. Identity is
perhaps the most concentrated (and most challenging) expression
of fetishism or reification. The breaking of the flow of doing
deprives doing of its movement. Present doing is subordinate to
past done. Living labour is subordinated to dead labour. Doing is
frozen in mid-flight, transformed into being. The beauty,
transfixed by the witch’s curse, losing her movement loses her
beauty: sleeping beauty is a contradiction in terms. The freezing is
not absolute (any more than the rupture of doing is absolute). It is
not that everything stands still, but everything is locked into a
perpetual continuity, everything is repeated, everything moves
forward on tracks.


If the world is looked at from the point of view of doing, it is
clearly impossible to say ’the world is’, or ’things are’, or ’I am’.
From the perspective of doing it is clear that everything is
movement: the world is and is not, things are and are not, I am
and am not. The contradiction that is inherent in these statements
presents no problem if we think in terms of doing: in doing I go
beyond myself, the world moves beyond itself, and so on. The
change in me that is implied in my doing means that I am and am
not. But once doing is broken, once doing is subordinated to
the done, movement is halted and the statement that I am
and am not seems incoherent. Once doing is ruptured, it
is no longer doing and contradiction that prevail. Identity
rules, contradiction is flattened. The world is, that’s the
way things are. But if we say ’the world is not; that’s the
way things are not’, these now seem meaningless, illogical
statements.


Identity implies the homogenisation of time. When the flow of
doing is broken and doing subjected to the done and its
quantitative accumulation, then doing is forced onto certain
tracks, contained within certain parameters. Doing is reduced to
labour, limited to doing-in-the-service-of-the-expansion-of-capital.
This both limits the content of doing and imposes a certain (and
ever-increasing) rhythm upon doing. Labour, as doing has become,
is measured quantitatively: it is labour for a certain number of
hours, labour that produces something that can be sold for a
price, labour that produces value, labour which is rewarded
quantitatively in money by a wage. People’s doing becomes
converted into a train that moves faster and faster, but along
pre-established tracks. ’Time sheds its qualitative, variable,
flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable
continuum filled with quantifiable ’things’ \dots{}: in short, it
becomes space’ (Lukcs1971, p. 90). Time becomes clock
time, tick-tick time, in which one tick is just the same as
another: a time that moves but stays still, treadmill time. The
varying intensity of lived time, of the time of passion and
happiness and pain, is subordinated to the tick-tick of the
clock.


Homogenous time has the present as its axis. It is not that the
past and the future are completely denied, but the past
and especially the future are subservient to the present: the
past is understood as the pre-history of the present, and the
future is conceived as the pre-visible extension of the present.
Time is seen as a linear movement between past and future.
Radically alternative possibilities for the future are pushed aside
as fiction. All that lies, lay or might lie outside the tracks
of tick-tick time is suppressed. Past struggles that pointed
towards something radically different from the present are
forgotten. ’All reification is a forgetting’, as Horkheimer and
Adorno put it. (1972, p.230) The rule of identity is the rule of
amnesia. Memory, and with it hope, are subordinated to
the relentless movement of the clock which goes nowhere.
’Only with the dismissal of the closed and static concept of
being does the true dimension of hope arise.’ (Bloch 1993, p.
17)


The rule of identity implies certain linguistic hierarchies. It
implies, for example, the dominance of one verb, ’is’, over all the
others. In a world that is defined, other verbs are de-activated:
their force is limited by that which is. Doing is a doing which is
not just limited by, but permeated by, that which is: our everyday
activity is constrained and permeated by that which is. Put
differently, Is-ness implies the dominance of nouns over verbs.
That which is becomes crystallised, consolidated, rigidified into
nouns: in nouns movement is suppressed or contained. Just as
time becomes tick-tick time, movement becomes tick-tick
movement, the movement of an object without subject, a
movement that itself becomes a thing, a movement rather than a
moving.


The separation of doing from done is the separation of
constitution or genesis from existence. That which is done is
separated off from the doing which did it. It acquires a separate
existence distinct from the doing which constituted it. I make a
chair. From the perspective of the social flow of doing, there is a
fleeting objectification of the chair: it is immediately integrated
through use (through doing) into the collective flow (if it is not
used, it ceases to be a chair from the perspective of doing). But in
capitalism, the objectification is more than fleeting. The chair
which I made exists now as the property of my employer. It
is a commodity which can be sold. Its existence is quite
separate from its constitution. Indeed, its constitution or genesis
(the doing which made it) is negated by its existence as a
commodity: it is forgotten, a matter of total indifference to the
existence of the chair. The purchaser uses the chair and in that
sense reincorporates it into doing, but the flow is (really and
apparently) broken: there is absolutely no direct relation
between the doing of the user and the doing of the maker.
Existence acquires a duration. The time of existence of the
chair is a time of duration: the chair now is, its is-not-ness
totally forgotten. Constitution and existence are sundered.
The constituted denies the constituting, the done the doing,
the object the subject. The object constituted acquires a
durable identity. This sundering (both real and apparent) is
crucial to the stability of capitalism. The statement that
’that’s the way things are’ presupposes that separation. The
separation of constitution and existence is the closure of radical
alternatives.

\section{VI}


The separation of doing from done and the transformation of
doing into being (identity) that it implies is the core not only of
the rigidification of time but also of the falling apart of every
aspect of social relations. If the social flow of doing is what
braids people’s lives together, if it is the material formation
of a ’we’, then the fracturing of the collective doing which
capitalism involves pulls the braid apart, tears the individual
strands of the braid one from another. If the flow of doing
implies community, a community across time and space,
then the breaking of that flow dismembers all possibility of
community.


The breaking of the collective flow of doing brings with it the
individualisation of the doers. For the exchange of commodities to
take place, both the commodities and their producers must be
abstracted from the collectivity of doing. ’In order that this
alienation [of commodities] mat be reciprocal, it is only necessary
for men, by a tacit understanding, to treat each other as
private owners of those alienable objects, and by implication
as independent individuals. But such a state of reciprocal
independence has no existence in a primitive society based on
property in common\dots{}’ (Marx 1965, p. 87) The starting point for
thought becomes not the person-as-part-of-the-community but the
individual as a person with his own distinct identity. Community
can thenceforth be imagined only as the aggregation of discrete
individuals, the putting together of beings rather than the flow of
doings.


The individual stands apart from the collectivity. He is
separated from his species-being or species-life, as the young
Marx puts it. In the bourgeois notion of science, that is, in
the notion of science which assumes capitalist society to
be permanent, this distancing of the individual from the
community is prized as a virtue. The further away the scientist of
society stands from the society which he is studying the
better. The ideal scientist would be an observer placed on
the moon, from where he would be able to analyse society
with true objectivity. The collectivity, society, becomes an
object, separated from the subject by as great a distance as
possible.


In this way of thinking, science and objectivity are regarded as
synonymous. To study something scientifically is to study it
objectively or, if it is acepted that this is not possible, then the
scientist must do his best to aproximate objectivity, to maintain a
distance from the object of study. Objectivity here means
suppressing our own subjectivity as far as possible: a subjective
statement is considered, by definition, to be unscientific. The
notion of what is scientific is thus based upon an obvious
falsehood, namely the idea that it is possible to express a thought
that excludes the thinker. (This does not, of course, mean that a
statement that is explicitly subjective is thereby necessarily
correct or scientific).


Identity thus implies a third person discourse. To write
scientifically, we write about things in the third person, as ’it’ or
’they’: political parties are such and such; Marxism is so and so;
Britain is this or that. First person discourse (I am bored by
political parties; we want a better life; above all, we scream) is
regarded as unscientific. Study or theory is therefore study of
something or about something, as in: social theory is the study of
society, that is a book about Marxism, today we are going to learn
about Mexico in the nineteenth century. In each case, the
preposition ’of’ or ’about’ marks a separation or distance between
the student or theorist and the object of study. ’Knowledge
about’ is quite simply the other side of ’power-over’. The
best students or theorists of society are those who can view
society as though they stood outside it (students who find this
pretence difficult often have problems in getting their work
recognised, although, again, this does not mean that first
person discourse is thereby correct). Theory, then, is what
the word ’theory’ (from qew, I view) suggests: a viewing or
contemplation of an external object. The subject is present, but as
a viewer, as a passive rather than an active subject, as a
de-subjectified subject, in short as an objectified subject. If
we write about ’it’, then the only way in which we may
appear scientifically is as viewer (voyeur). Then, precisely
because the theory is seen as existing separately from the
theorist, it is seen as something that can be ’applied’ to the
world.


The third person of which we speak is a third person present
indicative. What is important in thought that takes identity as its
basis is things as they are, not things as they might be or as we
wish they were. There is no room for the subjunctive in the
scientific discourse of identitarian thought. If we are excluded,
then our dreams and wishes and fears are excluded too.
The subjunctive mood, the mood of uncertainties, anxieties,
longings, possibilities, the mood of the not yet, has no place
in the world of objectivity. The language of the world of
’that’s-the-way-things-are’ is firmly in the indicative mood.


The breaking of the social flow of doing implies, then, that I (no
longer the vague ’we’) as a social scientist abstract from my
feelings and my position in society and try to understand
society as it is. Society presents itself to me as a mass of
particulars, a multitude of discrete phenomena. I proceed by
trying to define the particular phenomena that I want to
study and then seeking the connection between those defined
phenomena.


Identity implies definition. Once the flow of doing is fractured,
once social relations are fragmented into relations between discrete
things, then a knowledge which takes that fragmentation for
granted can only proceed through defining, delimiting each thing,
each phenomenon, each person or group of people. Knowledge
proceeds through definition: something is known if it can be
defined. What is politics? What is sociology? What is economics?
What is a political party? What is Marxism? The introductory
questions to study in schools or universities are typically
definitional questions. Postgraduate theses typically begin with a
definition or delimitation of the object of study. Definition is the
description of an identity which is distinct from other identities.
Definition aims to delimit identities in a non-contradictory
manner: if I define x, it does not make any sense, from a
definitional perspective, to say that x is both x and non-x.
Definition fixes social relations in their static, fragmented, reified
is-ness. A definitional world is a clean world, a world of clear
divisions, a world of exclusion, a world in which the other is
clearly separated as other. Definition constitutes otherness. The
definition of x constitutes non-x as other. If I define myself as
Irish, then I am not English; if I define myself as white,
then I am not black; if I define myself as Aryan, then I am
not Jewish. The English, the blacks, the Jews are Others,
not-Us. A whole world of horror is contained in the process of
definition.


Definition excludes us as active subjects. The ’we’ who started
this book, the still unexplored ’we’ who want to change the world,
are excluded from a definitional view of the world. When we define
something, we normally define it as separate from us. Definition
constitutes that which is defined as an object, as an object which,
by its definition, is separated from the subject. It is no different
when ’we’ are defined, as in ’we are women’ or ’we are the
working class’: the definition delimits us, denies our active
subjectivity (at least in relation to that which is defined),
objectifies us. The we-who-want-to-change-the-world cannot be
defined.


The world of identity is a world of particulars, individualised
and atomised. The table is a table, the chair is a chair, Britain is
Britain, Mexico is Mexico. Fragmentation is fundamental to
identitarian thought. The world is a fragmented world. A
world of absolute identity is thereby also a world of absolute
difference. Knowledge of the world is equally fragmented, into the
distinct disciplines. Study of society takes place through
sociology, political science, economics, history, anthropology
and so on, with all their distinct sub-disciplines and endless
specialisations, which rest in turn on fragmented concepts of
space (Britain, Mexico, Spain), time (the nineteenth century,
the 1990s) and social activity (the economy, the political
system).

\section{VII}


But what is beyond this fragmentation? A world composed purely
of particulars would be impossible to conceptualise and impossible
to inhabit. The fracturing of doing is the fracturing of collectivity,
but some sort of collectivity is necessary, both conceptually
and practically. The collectivity is no longer a communal
braiding of doing, more a lumping together of particulars into
the same bag, much as potatoes in a sack might be said
to form a collectivity, to adapt Marx’s famous description
of the peasants as a class. Collectivities are formed on the
basis of identity, on the basis of being, rather than on the
movement of doing. This is the process of classification. Doing
may well be part of the process of classification, but it is
a dead doing, doing that is contained within an identity,
within a role or character-mask: classification of doctors as a
group, say, is based not on the weaving together of their
doing, but on their definition as a certain type of doer, on the
imposition of a character-mask as doctor. Classes in this
sense are always more or less arbitrary: any collection of
identities can be thrown into a sack together, sub-divided
into smaller bags, put together into larger containers and so
on.


It is the fracturing of doing that, through definition and
classification, constitutes collective identities. It is the fracturing
of doing that creates the idea that people are something -
whatever, doctors, professors, Jews, blacks, women - as though
that identity excluded its simultaneous negation. From the
perspective of doing, people simultaneously are and are not
doctors, Jews, women and so on, simply because doing implies a
constant movement against-and-beyond whatever we are. From
the perspective of doing, definition can be no more than an
evanescent positing of identity which is immediately transcended.
The barrier between what one is and what one is not, between
collective self and collective other can not therefore be seen as
fixed or absolute. It is only if one takes identity as one’s
standpoint, only if one starts from the acceptance of the rupture
of doing, that labels such as ’black’, ’Jewish’, ’Irish’ and so on,
take on the character of something fixed. The idea of an
’identity’ politics which takes such labels as given inevitably
contributes to the fixation of identities. In this, it makes little
difference whether one thinks of that identity as woman or man,
black or white, gay or heterosexual, Irish or English. The
appeal to being, to identity, to what one is, always involves
the consolidation of identity, the strengthening, therefore,
of the fracturing of doing, in short, the reinforcement of
capital.


Classification, the formation of collective identities on the basis
of definition, is, of course, not just of immediately political
relevance. It is fundamental to the scientific procedure as it is
conceived in capitalist society. It is the core of formal abstraction -
the attempt to conceptualise the world on the basis of static and
non-contradictory categories, rather than on the basis of
movement and contradiction (substantive or determinate
abstraction). Formal abstraction, abstraction on the basis of
identity in other words, is the basis of all the methods and
procedures which are recognised as scientific in our institutions of
teaching and learning.


Through classification, conceptual hierarchies are formed.
Particulars are ordered under universals, universals under higher
universals, and so on. This is a desk chair; the desk chair is an
upright chair; the upright chair is a chair; the chair is a piece of
furniture, and so on. A hierarchy of species and genera is
established: a desk chair is a species, or type, or form, or class, of
upright chair. The hierarchical ordering of concepts is at the same
time a process of formalisation: the concept of chair (or furniture)
becomes increasingly separated from any particular content. Lips
touch in a kiss; a bullet flies towards the victim. Both the
touching of the lips and the flying of the bullet are forms of
motion. We can speak of the motion of both in a way that
abstracts completely from the different contents of kissing and
killing.


Formalisation, the abstraction from content, makes possible the
quantification and mathematisation of the object of study.
Once lip-touching and bullet-flying are classified as forms of
motion, it becomes possible to compare them quantitatively by
comparing the speed with the which the different objects move. In
quantification all content is left behind: lips and bullet are brought
together on the unassailable assumption that 1=1, 2=2, 3=3 and
so on.


Quantification, however, is just one aspect of the way in
which mathematics develops the formal abstraction which is
inherent in identification. If x is x and y is y, then the only way
in which we can bring them into relation with each other
is formally, by abstracting from their particular content.
If we classify John and Jane as people, we do so not by
denying their particular identities (John remains John, Jane
remains Jane), but by abstracting from them, by leaving aside
their particular contents as John or Jane and focusing on
their formal equivalence as people. Formal abstraction is at
the same time homogenisation: in identitarian thought one
person is equal to another in the same homogeneous way
that one tick of time is equal to another, one square metre
of space is equal to another. Once particularities are left
behind, it is possible to develop a formal reasoning which
aims at making the whole structure of identification and
classification as rigorous, orderly and non-contradictory as
possible. Formal logic and mathematics start from the simple
identity x=x and develop its implications to the highest
degree possible. If x were not x, if x were both x and not-x,
then the basis of mathematics would be undermined. The
mutual exclusion of x and non-x is expressed most clearly
in binary logic (Boolean algebra), in which everything is
expressed as 1 or 0, True or False, Yes or No. There is no room
here for the yes-and-no or maybe of common experience.
Over the last 50 years, binary logic has been elaborated
with extraordinary practical impact in the development of
computing.


The separation of doing from done which is the basis of
fetishism or reification thus involves an increasing formalisation of
social relations and a corresponding formalisation of thought. In
the course of the Enlightenment, the philosophical accompaniment
to the establishment of capitalist social relations, reason becomes
increasingly formalised. Where previously the notion of reason had
been related to the pursuit of the good or the true, it now
becomes progressively limited to the establishment of the formally
correct. Truth is reduced to ’formally correct’: beyond that, truth
is seen as a matter of subjective judgment. (Horkheimer 1997)
What is formally correct can be seen as a mathematical problem
which abstracts entirely from the content of the matter. The
tendency of theory is ’towards a purely mathematical system of
symbols’. (Horkheimer, 1972, p. 190). In this ’increasingly
formalistic universality of reason \dots{} value judgement has nothing
to do with reason and science. It is regarded as a matter of
subjective preference whether one decides for liberty or obedience,
democracy or fascism, enlightenment or authority, mass culture
or truth’. (Horkheimer, 1978b, p. 31). Reason is separated
from understanding, thought from being. Reason becomes a
matter of efficiency, ’the optimum adaptation of means to
ends’. (Horkheimer, 1978b, p. 28). Reason, in other words,
becomes instrumental reason, a means to achieve an end
rather than a scrutiny or critique of the end itself. Reification
involves the loss of meaning, or rather meaning becomes
the purely formal process of measuring means to an end.
Nuclear destruction is the outcome of rational thought. It is
when judged by such rationality that our scream appears
irrational.


The formalisation of reason is at the same time the separation
of what is from what ought to be. Rational thought is now
concerned with what is and its rational (efficient) ordering. This
means not the elimination of ’ought’ but its separation from ’is’:
what is is one thing and what ought to be another. Most people
would agree that there ought to be no children forced to live on
the streets, but (so the argument goes) the reality is different. The
study of society, whether it be sociology, politics, economics or
whatever ’discipline’ of social science, is the study of what is. The
question of what ought to be may be interesting too, but we
must not blur the distinction between the two, we must
not confuse reality with dreams. As long as they are kept
separate, there is no problem. Moralistic reasoning about
what ought to be, far from undermining what is, actually
reinforces it: ’the ”ought” presupposes an existing reality
to which the category of ”ought” remains inapplicable in
principle. Whenever the refusal of the subject simply to
accept his empirically given existence takes the form of an
”ought”, this means that the immediately given empirical
reality receives affirmation and consecration at the hands of
philosophy: it is philosophically immortalised.’ (Lukcs, 1971, p.
160)


To the extent that there really is a formal abstraction of social
relations, those relations can be understood as being governed by
laws, and it becomes possible to speak of the ’laws of capitalist
development’. The owners of capital do not control capitalist
society. Rather, they too are subject to the laws of capitalist
development, laws which reflect the separation of the doer from
the doing, the autonomy of the doing. The most that people can
do is adapt themselves to these ’laws’ which they do not
control: ’man in capitalist society confronts a reality ”made” by
himself (as a class) which appears to him to be a natural
phenomenon alien to himself; he is wholly at the mercy of its
”laws”, his activity is confined to the exploitation of the
inexorable fulfilment of certain individual laws for his own
(egoistic) interests. But even while ”acting” he remains,
in the nature of the case, the object and not the subject
of events.’(Lukcs, 1971, p. 135) Freedom, in this context,
becomes simply knowledge of and subordination to the laws, the
aceptance of necessity. The law-bound nature of capitalist
society, then, and the possibility of the scientific study of
these laws is nothing other than an expression of the fact
that doers do not control their doing and that ’all human
relations \dots{} assume increasingly the objective forms of the
abstract elements of the conceptual systems of natural science
and of the abstract substrata of the laws of nature.’ (1971,
p.131)

\section{VIII}


The argument could go on and on. The point is that at the basis
of an immensely complex social structure lies a simple principle -
identity. The principle of identity is so basic to capitalist social
organisation that to underline its importance seems absolutely
meaningless, simply because it seems so obvious. And yet it is not
so obvious. The idea that someone is x without the simultaneous
realisation that she is not x is rooted in something that is very far
from obvious: namely, the daily repeated separation of done
from doing, the daily repeated seizure from the doers of the
product of their doing and its definition as the property of
someone else. This very real, very material identification (this
thing is mine, not yours) spreads like a crack into every
aspect of our social organisation and every aspect of our
consciousness.


Identity is the antithesis of mutual recognition, of community,
friendship and love. If I say that ’I am x’, it implies that my being
x does not depend on anyone else, that it does not depend on
anyone else’s recognition. I stand alone, my relations with other
people are quite peripheral to my being. Social recognition is
something that stands outside me, something that comes through
the market when I can sell my product or sell my own capacity to
do things at a higher price (promotion, for example). Other
people are just that, other. Seen through the prism of identity,
relations between people are external. As Bublitz (1998, pp.
34ff) points out in her discussion of Aristotle, friendship and
love are impossible to conceptualise on the basis of a formal
logic of identity. There can be no mutual recognition, no
recognition of ourselves in others, of others in ourselves. From
an identitarian perspective, the ’we’ with which we started
can be no more than an arbitrary sack of potatoes, or else
a false (and threatening) chumminess with no real basis.
There is no room there for the mutual inter-penetration of
existence which we experience as friendship or love. Enmity,
on the other hand, is easy to understand: the other is the
other. The other is not part of us and we are not part of the
other.


It is clear that the process of identification is not external to us.
We are active in the process of identifying or reifying social
relations, just as we are active in producing the done which is
turned against our doing. There is no innocent subject. Power-over
reaches into us and transforms us, forcing us to participate
actively in its reproduction. The rigidification of social relations,
the that’s-the-way-things-are-ness that confronts our scream is not
just outside us (in society), but reaches into us as well, into the
way that we think, the way we act, the way we are, the
fact that we are. In the process of being separated from our
done and from our doing, we ourselves are damaged. Our
activity is transformed into passivity, our will to do things
is transformed into greed for money, our cooperation with
fellow-doers is transformed into an instrumental relation mediated
by money or competition. The innocence of our doing, of our
power-to, becomes a guilty participation in the exercise of
power-over. Our estrangement from doing is a self-estrangement.
Here is no pure, eager revolutionary subject, but damaged
humanity. We are all deeply involved in the construction of
identitarian reality, and this process is the construction of
ourselves.


The reality that confronts us reaches into us. What we scream
against is not just out there, it is also inside us. It seems
to invade all of us, to become us. That is what makes our
scream so anguished, so desperate. That too is what makes
our scream seem so hopeless. At times it seems that our
scream itself is the only fissure of hope. Reality, the reality of
capital, seems completely inescapable. As Marcuse (1998,
p. 16) puts it, ’the unfree individual introjects his masters
and their commands into his own mental apparatus. The
struggle against freedom reproduces itself in the psyche of man,
as the self-repression of the repressed individual, and his
self-repression in turn sustains his masters and their institutions.’
This introjection of our masters is the introjection of an
identitarian, alienated reality (theorised by Freud as an absolute,
biologically determined reality rather than a historically specific
form of reality), to which we subordinate our pursuit of
pleasure.


Reification, therefore, refers not just to the rule of the object
but to the creation of a peculiarly dislocated subject. The
separation of doer from doing and done creates a doer who is cut
adrift from doing, who is subordinate to the done, but appears to
be completely independent of it. The separation of people from
the social tapestry of doing constitutes them as free individuals,
free not only in the double sense indicated by Marx, namely free
from personal bondage and free of access to the means of
survival, but free also from responsibility to the community
and free from a sense of meaningful participation in the
collective doing. While our discussion has shown that the
fracture of doing means that the subject too is fractured
(alienated, anguished, damaged), the subject of bourgeois theory
is an innocent, healthy, freely self-determining individual:
admittedly, certain individuals have psychological problems, but
they are just personal problems, nothing to do with the
social schizophrenia that cuts through every aspect of our
existence. The more subordination to the done is taken for
granted, the more free the individual subject appears. The more
thoroughly identification is established as something that
is simply beyond question, beyond thought, the freer the
society appears. The more profoundly unfree we are, the more
liberated we appear to be. The illusory freedom of the citizen is
the counterpart of the illusory community of the state. We
live in a free society, don’t we? No wonder our scream is so
violent.


We have, then, two concepts of the subject. The subject of
bourgeois theory is the free individual, whereas the subjectivity
that has been central to our account is a collective subjectivity
rent asunder by the tearing of doing from done, an atomised
subject damaged to our depths. The subject of bourgeois theory
does not scream, while our subject screams to high heaven, not
because of any particularity, just because of our sundered
subjectivity. For bourgeois theory, subjectivity is identity,
whereas in our argument, subjectivity is the negation of
identity.


There is no doubt that the first concept, that of the innocent,
wholesome, subject, has often been transferred by some currents
in Marxist theory to the notion of the working class. Soviet images
of the heroic working class come to mind, but the image of the
heroic revolutionary goes far beyond the Soviet experience. It is in
this context that it becomes possible to understand the concern of
some theorists (structuralists, post-structuralists, post-modernists)
to attack the notion of the subject. Much of what is seen as an
attack on subjectivity is simply an attack on identity, on the
bourgeois identification of subjectivity with identity. Thus, for
example, when Foucault speaks of (and analyses in detail) the
’immense work to which the West has set generations to produce
\dots{} the subjection of men; I mean their constitution as ’subjects’ in
both senses of the word’ (1976, p. 81), then this is surely
correct in relation to the constitution of the ’free’ subject of
capitalist society, who is indeed subject in both senses of the
word. To identify the bourgeois subject with subjectivity
as a whole, however, is a most murderous throwing of the
baby out with the bathwater. To confound subjectivity with
identity and criticise subjectivity in an attempt to attack
identity leads only to a total impasse, since subjectivity, as
movement, as negation of is-ness, is the only possible basis for
going beyond identity, and therefore beyond the bourgeois
subject.

\section{IX}


The fetish is a real illusion. Marx, as we saw, insists that in a
commodity producing society, ’the relations connecting the labour
of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social
relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are,
material relations between persons and social relations between
things.’ (1965, p. 73) The fetishised categories of thought express a
really fetishised reality. If we see theory as a moment of practice,
thinking as a moment of doing, then there is a continuity between
the fetishisation of thought and the fetishisation of practice.
Fetishisation (and hence alienation, reification, identification
and so on) refer not just to processes of thinking but to
the material separation of done from doing of which those
conceptual processes are part. It follows that fetishisation
cannot be overcome in thought alone: the overcoming of
fetishisation means the overcoming of the separation of doing and
done.


This is important because the concept of fetishism (alienation
and so on) loses its force if it is separated from the material
separation of doing and done in which it is founded. Fetishisation
is central to the material process by which the done is torn from
the doer. If a separation is made between the material process of
exploitation and the fetishisation of thought, then alienation or
fetishisation becomes reduced to a tool of cultural critique, a
sophisticated moan. This is indeed, as Adorno points out (1990, p.
190) to make ’critical theory idealistically acceptable to the
reigning consciousness and to the collective unconscious’. It is to
reproduce in the concept of fetishisation itself precisely that
separation of ’economic’ and ’cultural’ which the concept of
fetishism criticises.


The violence of identification, then, is by no means merely
conceptual. The scientific method of identitarian thought is the
exercise of power-over. Power is exercised over people through
their effective identification. Thus, capitalist production is based
on identification: this is mine. Law too is based on identity: the
person subjected to legal process is identified, separated off from
all those others who might be considered as co-responsible in some
way. The identification is expressed very physically: in the
handcuffs that identify the person as accused of a crime, in the
treatment of the person as an identified individual, in the physical
enclosure in a prison or a cell, possibly in execution, that supreme
act of identification which says ’you are and have been, and shall
not become’. Is-ness, identity, the denial of becoming, is
death.


Identification, definition, classification is a physical as
well as a mental process. The Jews who were identified,
classified and numbered in the concentration camps were
the objects of more than a mental exercise. Identification,
definition, classification is the basis of the physical, spatial and
temporal organisation of armies, hospitals, schools and other
institutions, the core of what Foucault refers to as discipline,
the micro-physics of power, the political economy of detail.
Bureaucratic power is based on the same process of identification
and classification, as indeed is the whole operation of the state.
The state identifies people, defines them, classifies them. A state
is inconceivable without the definition of citizens and the
simultaneous exclusion of non-citizens: 856,000 Mexicans were
detained on the frontier with the United States in the last six
months. That is identification, definition, classification on a grand
scale.

\section{X}


The argument of this chapter has taken us forward in our
understanding of power, but we are left with a depressing
dilemma.


It should be clear now that power can not be taken, for the
simple reason that power is not possessed by any particular person
or institution. Power lies rather in the fragmentation of social
relations. This is a material fragmentation which has its core in
the constantly repeated separation of the done from the doing,
which involves the real mediation of social relations through
things, the real transformation of relations between people
into relations between things. Our practical intercourse is
fragmented and, with it and as part of it, our patterns of
thought, the way we think and talk about social relations. In
thought and in practice, the warm inter-weaving of doing, the
loves and hates and longings which constitute us, become
shattered into so many identities, so many cold atoms of
existence, standing each one on its own. Power-over, that which
makes our scream echo hollowly, that which makes radical
change difficult even to conceive, lies in this shattering, in
identification.


The state, then, is not the locus of power that it appears to be.
It is just one element in the shattering of social relations.
The state, or rather the states, define us as ’citizens’, and
’non-citizens’, giving us national identities in what is one of the
most directly murderous aspects of the process of identification.
How many millions of people were killed in the twentieth century
for no other reason than that they were defined as being nationals
of a particular state? How many millions of people did the killing
for the same reason? How many times has the scream against
oppression been diverted into the assertion of national identity in
national liberation movements which have done little more
than reproduce the oppression against which the scream was
directed? The state is exactly what the word suggests, a bulwark
against change, against the flow of doing, the embodiment of
identity.


The understanding of power as the fragmentation of social
relations takes us back again to Foucault’s attack on the binary
concept of power and his insistence that power must be
understood in terms of a multiplicity of forces. It should
now be clear that the dichotomy between a binary and a
multiple view of power is a false one. The multiplicity of
power relations derives precisely from the binary antagonism
between doing and done. To reduce this complexity to a simple
binary antagonism between capitalist class and proletariat, as
has often been done, leads to both theoretical and political
problems. Similarly, to focus on the multiplicity and forget the
underlying unity of power relations leads to a loss of political
perspective: emancipation becomes impossible to conceive, as
Foucault is at pains to point out. Moreover to focus on a
multiplicity of identities without asking as to the process of
identification which gives rise to those identities is inevitably to
reproduce those identities, that is, to participate actively in the
process of identification. It is essential, then, to insist on the
unity-in-separation, separation-in-unity of the binary and the
multiple.


We are left with a dilemma. The power of capital is
all-penetrating. It shapes the way in which we perceive the world,
our sexuality, our very constitution as individual subjects, our
ability to say ’I’. There seems to be no way out. ’Absolute
reification \dots{} is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely’, as
Adorno (1967, p. 34) puts it. And absolute reification is absolute
death. Identity negates possibility, denies openness to other life.
Identity kills, both metaphorically and very, very literally. Over all
our reflections on identity stands the terrible warning of Adorno:
’Auschwitz confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death.’
(1990, p. 362).


The more we think about power in capitalist society, the more
anguished our scream becomes. But the more anguished it
becomes, the more desperate, the more helpless. The penetration
of power-over into the core of those who are subject to that
power-over is the central problem that any revolutionary
theory has to deal with. The reaching of the separation of
doing and done into the doer herself is both the reason why
revolution is desperately urgent and the reason why it is
increasingly difficult to conceive. The maiming of the subject
through the penetration of power-over into the depths of
her existence stirs both indignation and resignation: how
can we live in a society based on dehumanisation? But how
can we possibly change a society in which people are so
dehumanised? This is the dilemma of the urgent impossibility of
revolution.


There are three possible ways out of the dilemma.


The first is to give up hope. Instead of thinking that it might be
possible to create a society free of exploitation, free of war, free of
violence, an emancipated society based on mutual recognition, this
approach accepts that the world cannot be changed radically and
focuses instead on living as well as can be and making whatever
small changes may be possible. Alienation is recognised, perhaps,
but regarded as being permanent. The concepts of revolution and
emancipation are abandoned and replaced with the idea of
’micro-politics’. The multiplicity of power comes to be seen as
the underpinning of a multiplicity of struggles focussed on
particular issues or particular identities: struggles which
aim at a rearrangement but not an overcoming of power
relations.


Disillusionment is associated most commonly with post-modern
theory and politics, but it spreads much farther than that. In
other cases, the notion of revolution may be retained as a point of
reference, but left-wing discourse becomes more melancholic, more
and more focussed on denouncing the horrors of capitalism and
more and more removed from considering the possibility of a
solution. Left-wing intellectuals adopt the position of Cassandra,
prophesying the doom that is to come, but with little hope of
being heard.


The melancholic Cassandras and the post-modernists may, of
course, be quite right. Perhaps there is no hope, perhaps there
is no possibility of creating a society that is not based on
exploitation and dehumanisation. It may well be that when
humanity finally destroys itself in a nuclear blast or otherwise, the
last post-modernist will be able to say with glee to the last
hopeful Marxist, ’you see, I told you so, now you can see that my
approach was scientifically correct’. It may well be so, but it does
not help us very much. The scream with which we started
announced an obstinate refusal to give up hope, a refusal to accept
that the miseries and inhumanities of capitalism are inevitable.
From the perspective of the scream, then, giving up hope is simply
not an option.


The second possible option is to forget the subtleties and focus
exclusively on the binary nature of the antagonism between
proletariat and capitalist class. Power, then, is quite simply a
matter of ’who-whom’, as Lenin put it.


In the mainstream Marxist tradition, fetishism has always been
a rather suspect category, a mark of heterodoxy. It has always
arisen as a critique of the ’scientificity’ which defined Marxist
orthodoxy, and which was upheld by the Communist Parties
during the first two thirds of the twentieth century and continues
to dominate much of Marxist discussion today. Especially during
the reign of the Communist Parties, emphasis on the question of
fetishism always had something of the character of ’anti-Marxist
Marxism’, with all the dangers of political or physical exclusion
that that implied. Lukcs’s book caused him serious political
problems within the Communist Party. The tensions that exist
already in his work between the consistency of his criticism and
his loyalty to the Party led him in practice to give priority to the
Party and to denounce his own work. Other authors who suffered
even more seriously for their attempt to return to Marx’s
concern with fetishism and form were I.I. Rubin and Evgeny
Pashukanis, both of them working in Russia just after the
revolution. Rubin, in his Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, first
published in 1924, insisted on the centrality of commodity
fetishism and the concept of form for Marx’s critique of
political economy. One of the implications of this insistence
on the question of form was to underline the specifically
capitalist character of value relations, and as a result Rubin
disappeared during the purges of the 1930s. A similar fate was
shared by Pashukanis who, in his General Theory of Law and
Marxism, argued that Marx’s critique of political economy
should be extended to the critique of law and the state,
that law and the state should be understood as fetishised
forms of social relations in the same way as value, capital
and the other categories of political economy. This meant
that law and the state, like value, were specifically capitalist
forms of social relations. At a time when the Soviet state was
consolidating itself, this argument did not find favour with the
Party authorities.


Orthodox Marxism has generally preferred a simpler picture of
power, in which the taking of state power has been central to the
concept of revolutionary change. In a later chapter we shall
examine in more detail this tradition and some of the problems
associated with it.


The third possible approach to solving the dilemma of the
urgent impossibility of revolution is to accept that there can be
absolutely no certainty of a happy ending, but nevertheless to look
for hope in the nature of capitalist power itself. Ubiquitous power
implies ubiquitous resistance. Ubiquitous yes implies ubiquitous
no. Power-over, we have seen, is the negation of power-to, the
denial of the social flow of doing. Power-to exists in the form of its
negation, power-over. The social flow of doing exists in the
form of its negation, individual performance. Doing exists
in the form of labour, community in the form of a mass
of individuals, non-identity in the form of identity, human
relations in the form of relations between things, lived time
in the form of clock time, the subjunctive in the form of
the indicative, humanity in the form of inhumanity. All of
those different expressions of human emancipation, all those
images of a society based on the mutual recognition of human
dignity, all exist only in the form of their negation. But they
exist. It is to the force of that which exists in the form of
being denied that we must look for hope. That is the stuff
of dialectical thought: dialectics is the ’consistent sense of
non-identity’, the sense of the explosive force of that which is
denied.


What is the status, then, of all of these categories that exist
only in the form of being denied? Certainly they are not
recognised by mainstream social science: for mainstream
social science, there is absolutely no room for that which
exists in the form of being denied. Are they then a mere
chimera, mere fancies of discontented intellectuals, a romantic
harking back to a mythical golden age? No, they are none of
those. They are hopes, aspirations, prefigurations of a human
society. But for these hopes to have force, we must understand
them also as substratum, as that without which their denial
could not exist, as that upon which their negating forms
depend.


The third approach is to try to understand and thereby to
participate in the force of all that which exists in antagonism, in
the form of being denied.

\chapter{Fetishism and Fetishisation}

\section{I}


The focus on fetishism does not in itself resolve all theoretical and
political problems. As we saw in the previous chaper, fetishism
leaves us with the dilemma of the urgent impossibility of
revolution.


Fetishism is a theory of the negation of our power-to-do. It
draws attention both to the process of negation and to that which
is negated. In most cases, however, discussions of fetishism have
focussed on the negation rather than on the presence of that
which is negated. In order to find a way beyond our theoretical
impasse, we have to open up the concept of fetishism, to try and
discover in the concepts themselves that which the concepts
deny.


The emphasis on one or other moment of the antagonism
between negation and negated is connected with differences in the
understanding of fetishism. There are, in other words, two
different ways of understanding fetishism, which we can refer to as
’hard fetishism’ on the one hand, and ’fetishisation-as”process’, on
the other. The former understands fetishism as an established fact,
a stable or intensifying feature of capitalist society. The latter
understands fetishisation as a continuous struggle, always at issue.
The theoretical and political implications of the two approaches
are very different.

\section{II}


The more common approach among those who have emphasised
the concept of fetishism is the ’hard fetishism’ approach. Fetishism
is assumed to be an accomplished fact. In a capitalist society,
social relations really do exist as relations between things.
Relations between subjects really do exist as relations between
objects. Although people are, in their species-characteristic,
practical creative beings, they exist under capitalism as objects, as
dehumanised, as deprived of their subjectivity.


The constitution or genesis of capitalist social relations is here
understood as a historical constitution, something that took place
in the past. Implicitly, a distinction is made between the
origins of capitalism, when capitalist social relations were
established through struggle (what Marx refers to as primitive
or original accumulation), and the established capitalist
mode of production, when capitalist social relations are in
place. In the latter phase, fetishism is assumed to be stably
established. In this view, the importance of Marx’s insistence on
form is simply to show the historicity of capitalist social
relations. Within this historicity, within the capitalist mode
of production, fetishised social relations can be regarded
as basically stable. Thus, for example, the transition from
feudalism to capitalism involved a struggle to impose value
relations, but it is assumed that, once the transition has been
accomplished, value is a stable form of social relations. Value is
seen as struggle only in relation to the transitional period;
after that it is regarded as simply domination, or as part
of the laws which determine the reproduction of capitalist
society.


Similarly with all other categories: if the reification of
social relations is understood as stable, then all the forms of
existence of those social relations (and their interrelation) will
also be understood as stable, and their development will be
understood as the unfolding as a closed logic. Thus, money,
capital, the state and so on may be understood as reified
forms of social relations, but they are not seen as forms of
active reification. These categories are understood as ’closed’
categories, in the sense of developing according to a self-contained
logic.


What happens here is that identity creeps in again through the
back door just when we thought we had finally got rid of it. The
whole point of talking of fetishism is to undermine the apparently
insuperable rigidity of social relations under capitalism by showing
that these rigidities (money, state and so on) are merely
historically specific forms of social relations, the products of
social doing and changeable by social doing. However, if one
assumes that these rigidities were established at the dawn of
capitalism and shall remain until capitalism is overcome,
rigidity is re-introduced. The ’capitalist mode of production’
becomes an over-riding arch, a circle that defines. We know that
the capitalist mode of production is historically transient,
but within its confines relations are sufficiently reified for
us to understand their development in terms of law-bound
interactions between the fetishised phenomena. Instability is
implicitly banished to the outer reaches of capitalism, to the
temporal, spatial and social margins: to the period of primitive
accumulation, the few areas of the world where capitalism is not
yet fully established, and those who are marginalised from the
social process of production. The core of capitalism is an
increasingly reified world: away from the margins, capitalism
is.


The hard fetishism approach involves a fetishisation of
fetishism: fetishism itself becomes a rigidified and rigidifying
concept. The idea that the fetishisation of social relations took
place at the origins of capitalism, the idea that value, capital and
so on are forms of social relations which were established on a
stable basis a few hundred years ago, is inevitably based on the
separation of constitution and existence: capital was constituted
hundreds of years ago, now it exists, one day it will be destroyed.
The time between constitution and destruction is a time
of duration, a time of identity, a homogenised time. The
understanding of fetishism as accomplished fact involves an
identification of the fetishised forms. It is as though those who
criticise the homogenisation of time have themselves fallen
into that homogenisation, simply by assuming fetishism as
accomplished fact.


There is a central problem for those who understand fetishism
as accomplished fact. If social relations are fetishised, how do we
criticise them? Who are we who criticise? Are we on the margins,
privileged perhaps by our insights as marginalised intellectuals?
The hard understanding of fetishism implies that there is
something special about us, something that gives us a vantage
point above the rest of society. They are alienated, fetishised,
reified, suffering from false consciousness, we are able to see the
world from the point of view of the totality, or true consciousness,
or superior understanding. Our criticism derives from our special
position or experience or intellectual abilities, which allow us
to understand how they (the masses) are dominated. We
are implicitly an intellectual elite, a vanguard of some sort.
The only possible way of changing society is through our
leadership of them, through our enlightening them. If fetishism is
something stable and fixed within capitalism, then we are back
with the Leninist problematic of how we lead the fetishised
masses to revolution. The hard concept of fetishism leads
to the obvious dilemma: if people exist as objects under
capitalism, then how is revolution conceivable? How is criticism
possible?

\section{III}


The author who has grappled most resolutely with the problem of
the critical-revolutionary subject is undoubtedly Lukcs , in his
History and Class Consciousness.


Lukcs ’ attempt to solve the question is based, firstly, on a
distinction of class, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
Both bourgeoisie and proletariat exist in a reified world, but
for the bourgeoisie, there is no way out. There is nothing
in their class position which would drive them beyond the
world of reification, for the perspective of totality, which is
inevitably a historical perspective, would be suicidal, since it
would reveal to them the transitory nature of their own
class.


In relation to reification, the position of the working class is, in
the first place, no different from that of the bourgeoisie. ’For the
proletariat makes its appearance as the product of the capitalist
social order. The forms in which it exists are \dots{} the repositories of
reification in its acutest and direst form and they issue in the most
extreme dehumanisation. Thus the proletariat shares with the
bourgeoisie the reification of every aspect of its life.’ (1971,
p.149)


The difference between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is
that while the class interests of the bourgeoisie keep it entrapped
in reification, the proletariat is driven beyond it. ’This same
reality employs the motor of class interests to keep the bourgeoisie
imprisoned within this immediacy while forcing the proletariat to
go beyond it\dots{} For the proletariat to become aware of the
dialectical nature of its existence is a matter of life and death\dots{}’
(p.167)


It is the experience of having to sell his labour power
as a commodity that makes it possible for the proletarian
to breach the fetishised appearances of social relations: ’it
is true that the worker is objectively transformed into a
mere object of the process of production by the methods of
capitalist production \dots{} i.e. by the fact that the worker is
forced to objectify his labour power over against his total
personality and to sell it as a commodity. But because of the split
between subjectivity and objectivity induced in man by the
compulsion to objectify himself as a commodity, the situation
becomes one that can be made conscious.’ (pp. 167-168)
Or, in other words: ’while the process by which the worker
is reified and becomes a commodity dehumanises him and
cripples and atrophies his ’soul’ - as long as he does not
consciously rebel against it - it remains true that precisely his
humanity and his soul are not changed into commodities.’
(p. 172) The worker, then, becomes ’aware of himself as
a commodity’ and, with that, ’the fetishistic forms of the
commodity system begin to dissolve: in the commodity the
worker recognises himself and his relations with capital.’ (p.
168)


Lukcs’s argument here points to the incomplete or,
better, self-contradictory nature of fetishism. The process of
objectification induces a split between the subjectivity and the
objectivity of the worker, between the worker’s humanity and his
dehumanisation. The experience of the worker is at once
fetishising and de-fetishising. At this point, Lukcs seems to be
laying the basis for a theory of revolution as the self-emancipation
of the workers.


Lukcs insists, however, that this incipient defetishisation is not
sufficient. The consciousness of the worker of himself as a
commodity does not resolve the problem: ’It could easily appear at
this point that the whole process is nothing more than the
’inevitable’ consequence of concentrating masses of workers in
large factories, of mechanising and standardising the processes of
work and levelling down the standard of living. It is therefore of
vital importance to see the truth concealed behind this one-sided
picture\dots{} the fact that this commodity is able to become
aware of its existence as a commodity does not suffice to
eliminate the problem. For the unmediated consciousness of
the commodity is, in conformity with the simple form in
which it manifests itself, precisely an awareness of abstract
isolation and of the merely abstract relationship - external to
consciousness - to those factors that create it socially.’ (p.
173)


To solve the problem of the proletarians who need to go beyond
fetishism but are unable to do so, Lukcs introduces a distinction
between the empirical or psychological consciousness of the
proletariat and the ’imputed’ consciousness of the proletariat. The
empirical or psychological consciousness refers to the consciousness
of individual proletarians or of the proletariat as a whole at any
given moment. This consciousness, being reified, does not express
a true consciousness of the class position of the proletariat. It is
characteristic of opportunism that it ’mistakes the actual,
psychological state of consciousness of proletarians for the class
consciousness of the proletariat.’ (p. 74) True class consciousness
is ’neither the sum nor the average of what is thought or felt
by the single individuals who make up the class’. (p. 51)
Class consciousness consists rather of the ’appropriate and
rational reactions’ which can be ’imputed’ to the class. ’By
relating consciousness to the whole of society it becomes
possible to infer the thoughts and feelings which men would
have in a particular situation if they were able to assess
both it and the interests arising from it in their impact on
immediate action and on the whole structure of society. That is to
say, it would be possible to infer the thoughts and feelings
appropriate to their objective situation.’ (p. 51) This notion of
de-reified class consciousness or the perspective of totality
obviously returns us to our original question: who is the
critical-revolutionary subject? Who can have this ’imputed’
consciousness that is distinct from the psychological consciousness
of the proletariat? Lukcs resolves this problem by sleight of hand,
by bringing in a deus ex machina: the bearer of the ’correct class
consciousness of the proletariat’ is its organised form, the
Communist Party. (p. 75) And elsewhere: ’The form taken by the
class consciousness of the proletariat is the Party\dots{}the Party is
assigned the sublime role of bearer of the class consciousness of
the proletariat and the consciousness of its historical vocation.’ (p.
41)


The Party is drawn out of a hat. Unlike the tight and rigorous
argument that characterises the essays as a whole, there is
never any explanation of how the Party is able to go beyond
reification and adopt the perspective of totality. In contrast
to the long and detailed argument on the consciousness of
the bourgeoisie and of the proletariat, the ’sublime role’
of the Party as the ’bearer of class consciousness’ is just
asserted. It is as though Lukcs’s reasoning has hit precisely that
’dark and void’ space which he saw as the limit to bourgeois
rationality.


If the Party is simply drawn out of the hat, however, it is
because it is in the hat from the beginning. The answer of the
Party is already implicit in the way in which the theoretical
problem is set up. From the beginning the whole question of
dialectics, of overcoming reification, of class consciousness and of
revolution is posed in terms of the category of totality: ’\dots{} only the
dialectical conception of totality can enable us to understand
reality as a social process. For only this conception dissolves the
fetishistic forms necessarily produced by the capitalist mode of
production\dots{}’ (13) However, the emphasis on totality immediately
poses the question of the Know-All: who is it that can know the
totality? Clearly, in a reified world, it cannot be the proletariat
itself, so it can only be some Knower who knows on behalf of
the proletariat. The category of totality already implies the
problematic (if not necessarily the answer) of the Party. The
whole theoretical construction already sets up the problem in
such a way that it can be resolved only by introducing some
Hero-figure, some deus ex machina. The attempt to combat
fetishism leads, because of the way in which fetishism is
understood, to the creation (or consolidation) of a new fetish: the
idea of a Hero (the Party) which somehow stands above the
reified social relations of which, however, it is inevitably a
part.


Despite the radical character of his essays, Lukcs is operating in a
theoretical and political context which is already pre-constituted.
His approach is far from the crude ’scientific Marxism’ of the
Engelsian-Leninist tradition, yet his theoretical-political world is
the same. In that tradition, the claim that scientific Marxism
(or historical materialism) provides knowledge of reality
grows together politically with the notion of the Party as
Knower. To operate politically within the Party, as Lukcs
did for the whole of his life, poses, in its turn, the idea of
Marxism as knowledge of reality. The political context and the
conception of theory as the ’self-knowledge of reality’ are
mututally reinforcing (the legitimation of the Party depends on
its proclaimed ’knowledge of reality’, while the notion of
theory as knowledge of reality suggest there has to be a
Knower, the Party). It is within this context that Lukcs pitches
his argument. Curiously, despite its radical emphasis on
’totality’, the whole argument takes place within certain
parameters, within the framework of certain categories that
are not questioned, such as Party, proletariat, economics,
Marxism, seizure of power. Thus, although he insists that
everything must be understood as process, and that ’the nature of
history is precisely that every defintion degenerates into an
illusion’ (p. 186), he nevertheless starts with a definitional
question, the first essay being entitled ’What is Orthodox
Marxism?’ Although he sets out in this essay by criticising the
Engelsian conception of the dialectic (and, by implication, that of
the Engelsian tradition), it remains true that he remains
within the realist problematic of Engels, the idea that Marxist
theory gives us knowledge of reality. With that, the idea that
there is a distinction between correctness and falseness is
given, and with it the idea of the Party as guardian of that
correctness.


That solution, but also that problematic, is historically closed
to us now. Whether or not it ever made sense to think of
revolutionary change in terms of the ’Party’, it is no longer even
open to us to pose the questions in those terms. To say now
that the Party is the bearer of the class consciousness of the
proletariat no longer makes any sense at all. What Party? There
no longer exists even the social basis for creating such a
’Party’.


What makes Lukcs’ work so fascinating, however, are the
tensions within it. The very focus on reification places us in an
unavoidable field of tension from the beginning simply because
talk of reification implicitly poses the question of the co-existence
of reification with its antithesis (de- or anti-reification) and the
nature of the antagonism and tension between them. This tension
creeps into the category of totality itself on several occasions, in
the form of the ’aspiration towards totality’. As though to modify
the absolutist claims of the perspective of totality, he says ’The
category of totality begins to have an effect long before the whole
multiplicity of objects can be illuminated by it. It operates by
ensuring that actions which seem to confine themselves to
particular objects, in both content and consciousness, yet
preserve an aspiration towards the totality, that is to say:
action is directed objectively towards a transformation of
totality’. (p. 175) And again: ’the relation to totality does not
need to become explicit, the plenitude of the totality does
not need to be consciously integrated into the motives and
objects of action. What is crucial is that there should be an
aspiration towards totality, that action should serve the purpose,
described above, in the totality of the process.’ (p. 198)
The notion of the ’aspiration towards totality’ potentially
dissolves the problem of the Know-All Party: we presumably do
not have to be the bearers of true consciousness in order
to aspire towards totality. However, the argument is not
developed.


The introduction of the ’aspiration towards totality’ and the
emphasis on the contradictory nature of the reification of the
consciousness of the proletariat suggests a rather different politics,
in which the proletariat is assigned a more active role in its own
emancipation. It is clear that Lukcs, although he remained
within the Party framework, strained towards a more radical,
self-emancipative conception of politics. Thus, he criticises
Engels’s notion of revolution as ’the leap from the realm of
necessity into the realm of freedom’ as undialectical: ’If we
separate the ’realm of freedom’ sharply from the process which is
destined to call it into being, if we thus preclude all dialectical
transitions, do we not thereby lapse into a utopian outlook similar
to that which has already been analysed in the case of the
separation of final goal and the movement towards it?’ (p.
313) He defends the Party as a form of organisation on the
ground that it involves the active engagement of the total
personality: ’every human relationship which breaks with this
pattern, with this abstraction from the total personality of
man and with his subsumption beneath an abstract point
of view, is a step in the direction of putting an end to the
reification of human consciousness. Such a step, however,
presupposes the active engagement of the total personality.’ (p.
319) Without this, party ’discipline must degenerate into a
reified and abstract system of rights and duties and the party
will relapse into a state typical of a party on the bourgeois
pattern.’ (p. 320) It is little wonder, then, that the book was
condemned by the Soviet authorities in 1924 at the Fifth
World Congress of the Comintern; and little wonder too that
Lukcs repudiated his own argument in the interests of party
discipline.


Lukcs’s discussion of reification has the enormous merit of
treating it not only as a theoretical but a political problem, not
only as a question of understanding domination but as a matter of
thinking about revolution. He failed in his attempt to provide a
theoretical and political answer to the revolutionary dilemma, to
the ’urgent impossibility of revolution’, but at least he focussed
on the problem. After Lukcs, there is a historical falling
apart. It becomes clear that there is no place within the
Party for the development of critical Marxism, with the
result that critical Marxism becomes, on the whole, more and
more divorced from the issue of revolution, more and more
concerned with criticising the all-pervasive character of capitalist
domination.


In the writings of those theorists associated with the Frankfurt
School, there is the same critical distance from the empirical
consciousness or present psychological state of the proletariat,
which the concept of fetishism implies. As Horkheimer puts it, ’the
situation of the proletariat is, in this society, no guarantee of
correct knowledge. The proletariat may indeed have experience of
meaninglessness in the form of continuing and increasing
wretchedness and injustice in its own life. Yet this awareness is
prevented from becoming a social force by the differentiation of
social structure which is still imposed on the proletariat from
above and by the opposition between personal [and] class interests
which is transcended only at very special moments. Even to
the proletariat the world superficially seems quite different
than it really is.’ (1972, pp. 213-214). The Party, however,
is no longer a significant figure and cannot fulfill the role
that it did in Lukcs’s discussion. Consequently: ’under the
conditions of later capitalism and the impotence of the workers
before the authoritarian state’s apparatus of oppression, truth
has sought refuge among small groups of admirable men.’
(1972, p. 237). Or, as Adorno puts it, in modern society
’criticising privilege becomes a privilege’. (1990, p. 41) A
privilege and a responsibility: ’if a stroke of undeserved luck
has kept the mental composition of some individuals not
quite adjusted to the prevailing norms - a stroke of luck
they have often enough to pay for in their relations with
their environment - it is up to these individuals to make
the moral and, as it were, representative effort to say what
most of those for whom they say it cannot see, or, to do
justice to reality, will not allow themselves to see.’ (1990, p.
41).


In the work of Marcuse, the triumph of fetishism is captured by
the title of his most famous work, One Dimensional Man. Positive
thinking and instrumental rationality have permeated society so
absolutely that society has become one-dimensional. Meaningful
resistance can only come from the margins, ’the substratum of the
outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races
and other colours, the unemployed and unemployable.’ (1968,
p. 200) It is not that this ’substratum’ has revolutionary
consciousness, but ’their opposition is revolutionary even if their
consciousness is not. Their opposition hits the system from
without and is therefore not deflected by the system.’ (p. 200). It
is to be understood that the unconscious political practice of
the marginalised corresponds in some way to the conscious
theoretical practice of the academically marginalised critical
theorists.


For all the differences between these authors, the important
point for our argument is that the understanding of fetishism as
established fact (the emphasis on the all-pervasive character of
fetishism in modern capitalism) leads to the conclusion that the
only possible source of anti-fetishism lies outside the ordinary -
whether it be the Party (Lukcs), the privileged intellectuals
(Horkheimer and Adorno), or the ’substratum of the outcasts and
the outsiders’ (Marcuse). Fetishism implies anti-fetishism, but the
two are separated: fetishism rules normal, everyday life, while
anti-fetishism resides elsewhere, on the margins. If one discounts
Lukcs’s faith in the Party as being now historically irrelevant at
best, the result is that the emphasis on fetishism (or the depth
of capitalist power) tends to lead to a deep pessimism, to
intensify the sense of the urgent impossibility of revolution.
To break with this pessimism, we need a concept in which
fetishism and anti-fetishism are not separated. To develop the
concept of fetishism today inevitably means trying to go
beyond the classic authors on fetishism, in this respect at
least.

\section{IV}


The second approach, what we called the ’fetishisation-as-process’
approach, maintains that there is nothing special about our
criticism of capitalism, that our scream and our criticism are
perfectly ordinary, that the most we can do as intellectuals is to
give voice to that which is voiceless. If that is the starting point,
however, then there is no way that fetishism can be understood as
hard fetishism. If fetishism were an accomplished fact, if
capitalism were characterised by the total objectification of the
subject, then there is no way that we, as ordinary people, could
criticise fetishism.


The fact that we criticise points to the contradictory nature of
fetishism (and therefore also to the contradictory nature of
our selves), and gives evidence of the present existence of
anti-fetishism (in the sense that criticism is directed against
fetishism). The point is made by Ernst Bloch: ”alienation
could not even be seen, and condemned of robbing people of
their freedom and depriving the world of its soul, if there
did not exist some measure of its opposite, of that possible
coming-to-oneself, being-with-oneself, against which alienation
can be measured” (Bloch 1964 (2), p. 113). The concept of
alienation, or fetishism, in other words, implies its opposite: not
as essential non-alienated ’home’ deep in our hearts, but
as resistance, refusal, rejection of alienation in our daily
practice. It is only on the basis of a concept of non- (or
better anti-) alienation or non- (that is, anti-) fetishism that
we can conceive of alienation or fetishism. If fetishism and
anti-fetishism coexist, then it can only be as antagonistic
processes. Fetishism is a process of fetishisation, a process of
separating subject and object, doing and done, always in
antagonism to the opposing movement of anti-fetishisation, the
struggle to reunite subject and object, to recompose doing and
done.


If we start, then, from the idea that our scream is not the
scream of a vanguard but the scream of an antagonism that is
inseparable from living in capitalist society, a universal (or almost
universal) scream, then the hardness of fetishism dissolves and
fetishism is revealed as process of fetishisation. With that, the
hardness of all categories dissolves and phenomena which appear
as things or established facts (such as commodity, value, money,
the state) are revealed too as processes. The forms come to life.
The categories are opened to reveal that their content is
struggle.


Once fetishism is understood as fetishisation, then the genesis of
the capitalist forms of social relations is not of purely historical
interest. The value-form, money-form, capital-form, state-form etc.
are not established once and for all at the origins of capitalism.
Rather, they are constantly at issue, constantly questioned as
forms of social relations, constantly being established and
re-established (or not) through struggle. The forms of social
relations are processes of form-ing social relations. Every time a
small child takes sweets from a shop without realising that money
has to be given in exchange for them, every time workers refuse to
accept that the market dictates that their place of work should
be closed or jobs lost, every time that the shopkeepers of
Sao Paolo promote the killing of street children to protect
their property, every time that we lock our bicycles, cars or
houses - value as a form of relating to one another is at
issue, constantly the object of struggle, constantly in process
of being disrupted, re-constituted and disrupted. We are
not a sleeping beauty, a humanity frozen in our alienation
until our prince-party-proletariat comes to kiss us, we live
rather in constant struggle to free ourselves from the witch’s
curse.


Our existence, then, is not simply an existence within fetishised
forms of social relations. We do not exist simply as the objectified
victims of capitalism. Nor can we exist outside the capitalist
forms: there is no area of capitalism-free existence, no privileged
sphere of unfetishised life, for we are always constituting
and constituted by our relations with others. Rather, as the
starting point of this discussion, the scream, suggests, we
exist against-and-in capital. Our existence against capitalism
is not a question of conscious choice, it is the inevitable
expression of our life in an oppressive, alienating society. Gunn
puts the point nicely when he says that ”unfreedom subsists
solely as the (self-contradictory) revolt of the oppressed”
(1992, p. 29). Our existence-against-capital is the inevitable
constant negation of our existence-in-capital. Conversely,
our existence-in-capital (or, more clearly, our containment
within capital) is the constant negation of our revolt against
capital. Our containment within capital is a constant process
of fetishising, or form-ing, our social relations, a constant
struggle.


All of those apparently fixed phenomena which we often take for
granted (money, state, power: they are there, always have
been, always will, that’s human nature, isn’t it?) are now
revealed to be raging, bloody battlefields. It is rather like
taking a harmless speck of dust and looking at it through a
microscope to discover that the ’harmlessness’ of the speck
of dust conceals a whole micro-world in which millions of
microscopic organisms live and die in the daily battle for
existence. But in the case of money the invisibility of the battle it
conceals has nothing to do with physical size, it is the result
rather of the concepts through which we look at it. The
banknote we hold in our hand seems a harmless thing, but
look at it more closely and we see a whole world of people
fighting for survival, some dedicating their lives to the pursuit
of money, some (many) desperately trying to get hold of
money as a means of surviving another day, some trying to
evade money by taking what they want without paying for it
or setting up forms of production that do not go through
the market and the money form, some killing for money,
many each day dying for lack of money. A bloody battlefield
in which the fact that the power-to do exists in the form
of money brings untold misery, disease and death and is
always at issue, always contested, always imposed, often
with violence. Money is a raging battle of monetisation and
anti-monetisation.


Seen from this perspective, money becomes monetisation, value
valorisation, commodity commodification, capital capitalisation,
power power-isation, state statification, and so on (with ever uglier
neologisms). Each process implies its opposite. The monetisation
of social relations makes little sense unless it is seen as a constant
movement against its opposite, the creation of social relations on a
non-monetary basis. Neoliberalism, for example, can be seen as a
drive to extend and intensify the monetisation of social relations, a
reaction in part to the loosening of that monetisation in the
post-war period and its crisis in the 1960s and 1970s. These
forms of social relations (commodity, value, money, capital
and so on) are interconnected, of course, all forms of the
capitalist separation of subject and object, but they are
interconnected not as static, accomplished, sleeping-beauty forms,
but as forms of living struggle. The existence of forms of
social relations, in other words, cannot be separated from
their constitution. Their existence is their constitution, a
constantly renewed struggle against the forces that subvert
them.

\section{V}


Take the state for example. What does criticism of the state as a
form of social relations mean when the forms are understood as
form-processes, processes of forming?


The state is part of the fixed firmament of Is-ness. It is an
institution, apparently necessary for the ordering of human affairs,
a phenomenon the existence of which is taken completely for
granted by political science, the discipline dedicated to its study.
Criticism in the Marxist tradition has often focussed on
showing the capitalist character of the state, on showing
that, despite appearances, the state acts in the interests of
the capitalist class. This leads easily to the conception that
it is necessary to conquer the state in some way so that
it can be made to function in the interests of the working
class.


If we start from the centrality of fetishism and the understanding
of the state as an aspect of the fetishisation of social relations,
then the matter presents itself differently. To criticise the state
means in the first place to attack the apparent autonomy of the
state, to understand the state not as a thing in itself, but as a
social form, a form of social relations. Just as in physics we have
come to accept that, despite appearances, there are no absolute
separations, that energy can be transformed into mass and mass
into energy, so, in society too there are no absolute separations, no
hard categories. To think scientifically is to dissolve the categories
of thought, to understand all social phenomena as precisely that,
as forms of social relations. Social relations, relations between
people, are fluid, unpredictable, unstable, often passionate,
but they rigidify into certain forms, forms which appear
to acquire their own autonomy, their own dynamic, forms
which are crucial for the stability of society. The different
academic disciplines take these forms (the state, money,
the family) as given and so contribute to their apparent
solidity, and hence to the stability of capitalist society. To think
scientifically is to criticise the disciplines, to dissolve these forms,
to understand them as forms; to act freely is to destroy these
forms.


The state, then, is a rigidified or fetishised form of social
relations. It is a relation between people which does not appear to
be a relation between people, a social relation which exists in the
form of something external to social relations.


But why do social relations rigidify in this way and how does
that help us to understand the development of the state? This was
the question posed by the so-called ’state derivation debate’, a
slightly peculiar but very important discussion which spread from
West Germany to other countries during the 1970s. The
debate was peculiar in being conducted in extremely abstract
language, and often without making explicit the political and
theoretical implications of the argument. The obscurity of the
language used and the fact that the participants often did
not develop (or were not aware of) the implications of the
debate left the discussion open to being misunderstood,
and the approach has often been dismissed as an ’economic’
theory of the state, or as a ’capital-logic’ approach which
seeks to understand political development as a functionalist
expression of the logic of capital. While these criticisms can
fairly be made of some of the contributions, the importance
of the debate as a whole lay in the fact that it provided a
basis for breaking away from the economic determinism
and the functionalism which has marred so many of the
discussions of the relation between the state and capitalist
society, and for discussing the state as an element or, better,
moment of the totality of the social relations of capitalist
society.

\chapter{Anti-Fetishism and Criticism}

\section{I}


Theory is simply part of the daily struggle to live with dignity.
Dignity means the struggle to emancipate doing and liberate that
which exists in the form of being denied. Theoretically, this means
fighting through criticism for the recovery of doing. This is what
Marx means by science.

\section{II}


Criticism is an assault on identity. The scream against the way
things are becomes a why? Why is there so much inequality in the
world? Why are there so many people unemployed when there are
so many others who are overworked? Why is there so much hunger
in a world where there is so much plenty? Why are there so many
children living on the streets?


We attack the world with all the stubborn curiosity of a
three-year-old, with the difference perhaps that our whys are
informed by rage. Our why asks for a reason. Our why holds that
which exists up to the judgment of reason. Why do so many
children live on the streets? Why is there so much violence? Our
why moves against that which is and asks it to justify itself.
Initially, at least, our why attacks identity and asks why that
which is has come to be. Initially, at least, because soon our whys
come up against the same problem that confronts anyone who
tries to satisfy the curiosity of a three-year-old: the problem of
infinite regress.


The problem of infinite regress lies at the heart of identitarian
thought. The problem is inherent in identity. In a world composed
of particular identities, what is it that allows us to conceptualise
those identities? The answer lies, we saw, in classification, the
grouping of particular identities into classes. The problem is that
the classificatory concepts remain arbitrary unless they in turn
can be validated by a third-order discourse and that in turn
by a fourth-order discourse, and so on, so that there is a
potentially infinite regress of theoretical foundation (cf. Gunn
1991).


It is ironic that identitarian thought, founded as it is on the
common sense view that of course x is x (as sure as eggs is
eggs), is unable to provide itself with a firm foundation.
Time and time again, attempts to show that a system of
classification can have a rational basis have come up against
the impossibility of providing such firm foundations. The
search for a rational foundation for identitarian thought leads
inevitably to an irrational Given, a thing-in-itself (Kant)
that cannot be explained, a ’hidden hand’ (Smith) behind
the functioning of the economy, a space that is ’dark and
void’ (Fichte). The attempt, promoted by Hilbert at the
beginning of the twentieth century, to prove that mathematics is
a coherent non-contradictory system, was shown by Gdel
to be incapable of fulfilment. The result, of course, is that
identitarian thought has preferred, on the whole, not to worry
about the rationality of its own foundation, devoting itself
instead to improving the ’exactness’ of its own fragmented
disciplines. ’And the fact that these sciences are ’exact’ is due
precisely to this circumstance. Their underlying material base is
permitted to dwell inviolate and undisturbed in its irrationality
(’non-createdness’, ’givenness’) so that it becomes possible to
operate with unproblematic, rational categories in the resulting
methodically purified world. These categories are then applied not
to the real material substratum (even that of the particular
science) but to an ’intelligible’ subject matter.’ (Lukcs 1971, p.
120)


This is the problem uncovered by our why. In the face of our
why, identity always tries to limit the damage, to recuperate, to
turn the interrogation to its advantage, to enclose the attack
within an identitarian framework. We are all familiar with this. A
persistent why are there so many children living on the streets? is
likely to come up eventually against the answer of private
property, given with the understanding that private property is
immutable; or possibly, against the answer that God made it that
way, with the understanding that God is who is; or possibly
against the simplest, most direct answer: thats the way things are,
or what is, is necessary.


Often we accept those limits. We accept that the struggle
implicit in our why has limits. We struggle for better conditions
within the university, but we do not question the existence of
the institution. We struggle for better housing but do not
necessarily question the existence of private property which is so
fundamental in shaping housing conditions. Our struggle takes
place within an accepted framework of that’s-the-way-things-are.
We know that this framework limits or partially invalidates
anything we might achieve, but we accept it in the interests of
obtaining concrete results. We accept the bounds of identity and,
contradictorily, reinforce them in so doing. But supposing we
do not accept the limits? Supposing we persist with our
why in the true manner of the stubborn three-year-old?
A solution to infinite regress can come only when being is
re-converted into doing. To say that God made it so, is not a
true transition from being to doing because God is confined
immutably and eternally within being: I am who am. The
only answer that can take us out of the circle of identity is
one that points to a creator who is not unchangeable, a
creator that creates herself in the process of creation. That
answer is a horrific one, but the only basis for hope: there are
so many children living in the street, because we humans
have made it so. We are the only creators, the only gods.
Guilty gods, negated gods, damaged, schizophrenic gods,
but above all selfchanging gods. And that answer turns the
whole world upside down. Our doing becomes the pivot of all
comprehension.


Marx deals very quickly with this initial movement of why,
the movement of critical analysis, of trying to go behind
appearances, in the opening pages of Capital. Starting from the
commodity and its contradictory character as useful article
(use value) and object produced for exchange (exchange
value), he discovers that behind this contradiction lies the
two-fold character of labour as useful or concrete labour
(which creates use value) and abstract labour (which produces
value, which appears as exchange value in exchange). This
two-fold nature of the labour contained in commodities is the
pivot on which a clear comprehension of Political Economy
turns. (1965, p. 41) The being of the commodity is quickly
brought back to doing and its existence as concrete and
abstract labour. The commodity is so because we have made it
so. The pivot is human doing and the way in which it is
organised.


But then our why takes a turn. If we are the only creators, why
are we so powerless? If we are so powerful, why do these things
that are our products take on an independent life and dominate
us? Why do we produce our own enslavement? Why (for Gods
sake, we are tempted to say, only there is no god, only ourselves)
did we make society in such a way that millions of children are
forced to live on the streets?


The why, which initially tries to go behind the appearance of
things and discover their origin, now tries to recompose those
appearances and see how their origin (human doing) gives rise to
its own negation. Criticism acquires a double movement: an
analytical movement and a genetic movement, a movement of
going behind appearances and a movement of tracing the origin or
genesis of the phenomenon criticised.


The idea that understanding involves genetic criticism does not
begin with Marx. Philosophers from the time of Hobbes have
argued that understanding involves tracing the process of
construction of a phenomenon, and it is basic to the development
of mathematics that a proof is ’constructed’. The eighteenth
century philosopher Giambattista Vico formulated the link
between understanding and making with particular force when he
made his central principle the idea that verum et factum
convertuntur: the true and the made are interchangeable, so that
we can only know for certain that which we have created. An
object of knowledge can only be fully known to the extent that it
is the creation of the knowing subject. The link between
knowledge and creation is central for Hegel, for whom the
subject-object of knowledge-creation is the movement of absolute
spirit, but it is with Marx that the verum - factum principle
acquires full critical force.


Knowledge, in this view, is the re-appropriation of the object by
the subject, the recuperation of power-to. The object confronts us
as something separate from us, something out there. The process
of knowing is, therefore, critical: we deny the out-thereness
of the object and seek to show how we, the subject, have
created it. We see money, for example, and it confronts us as
an external force: in order to understand it, we criticise its
externality and try to show how money is in reality our
own product. This type of criticism does not necessarily
involve denunciation, but it goes much deeper. It questions the
very existence of the object as object. It shakes objectivity
to its foundations. Criticism in this sense is the stirring of
anti-power, the beginnings of the reunification of subject and
object.


For Marx, criticism in this sense is central to his whole
approach. In his early Introduction to the Contribution to the
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, he makes the point clearly:
’The basis of irreligious criticism is this: Man makes religion,
religion does not make man’ (1975, p. 175; emphasis in original).
Criticism of religion is not criticism of its ill-doings or evil effects,
but of its very existence as religion. It is a criticism that
emanates from the exclusive subjectivity of humanity. The
point of criticism is to recuperate the lost subjectivity, to
recover that which is denied. In religion, God presents himself
not as our creation but as an independent subject who has
created us (as object). The aim of criticism is to reverse the
subjectivity, to restore subjectivity to where it should be,
saying ’we are the subject, it is we who created God’. The
subjectivity of God is then revealed as the self-estrangement of
human subjectivity. Criticism is an act of bringing subject and
object together, the assertion of the centrality of human
creativity. ’The criticism of religion disillusions man to make him
think and act and shape his reality like a man who has been
disillusioned and has come to reason, so that he will revolve round
himself and therefore round his true sun. Religion is only the
illusory sun which revolves round man as long as he does
not revolve round himself’ (1975, p. 176). The purpose of
criticism is to restore humans to our proper place as our
own true sun. For the young Marx, it is essential to move
on from the ’holy form’ of self-estrangement ’to unmask
self-estrangement in its unholy forms. Thus the criticism of heaven
turns into the criticism of the earth, the criticism of religion
into the criticism of law and the criticism of theology into
the the criticism of politics.’ (1975, p. 176; emphasis in the
original).


Marx remained true to the project he set himself. For him,
’science’ is not correct, objective knowledge, but rather the
movement of criticism, and hence the movement of anti-power.
Criticism tries not just to get behind a phenomenon and analyse
it, but above all to see how it has been constructed. ”It seems to
be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the
real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the
population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire
social act of production. However, on closer examination this
proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for
example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes, in
turn, are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements
on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These
latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices,
etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour,
without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin
with the population, this would be a chaotic conception
[Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of
further determination, move analytically towards ever more
simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards
ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest
determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced
until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time
not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of
many determinations and relations\dots{} The latter is obviously
the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete
because it is the unity of many determinations, hence unity of
the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore,
as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point
of departure, even though it is the point of departure in
reality and hence also the point of departure for observation
[Anschauung] and conception. Along the first path the full
conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination;
along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a
reproduction of the concrete by way of thought\dots{} But this is by no
means the process by which the concrete itself comes into
being” (Marx 1973, pp. 100-101; my emphasis). The simplest
determinations can only be understood as doing (or the
two-fold existence of labour): this is surely the pivot, the
turning point which gives meaning to the retracing of the
journey.


The same point is made repeatedly in Capital, as, for example,
in a concise remark in a footnote in which Marx starts from the
critique of technology and moves on to the critique of religion: ”It
is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core
of the misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is, to
develop from the actual relations of life the corresponding
celestialised forms of those relations. The latter method is the only
materialistic, and therefore the only scientific one” (Marx 1965,
pp. 372-373).


Why does Marx insist that this is the only scientific method?
That it is theoretically more demanding is clear, but why does this
matter? And how are we to understand the genetic connection?
The remark on the critique of religion suggests an answer. The
reference to discovering by analysis the earthly core of the misty
creations of religion is a reference to Feuerbach and his argument
that belief in the existence of a god is an expression of human
selfalienation, that human self-alienation, in other words, is the
earthly core of religion. The second part of Marx’s sentence, on
developing from the actual relations of life the corresponding
celestialised forms of those relations refers to Marx’s own criticism
of Feuerbach, to the effect that self-alienation must be understood
not in an abstract, but in a practical (and therefore historical)
sense. Feuerbach is correct in pointing out that god is a human
creation (and not vice versa), but the process of creation has to
be understood practically, sensually. The concept of ’god’
has to be understood as the product of human thought,
and this thought, in turn, is not an individual a-historical
act, but an aspect of social practice in certain historical
conditions.


The criticism of Feuerbach has important political implications.
Religion presents humans as objects, as beings created by God,
the sole creator, the genesis of all things, the source of all power,
the only Subject. Feuerbach’s criticism of religion puts humans in
the centre of the world, but Feuerbach’s human is trapped in a
timeless selfalienation. Humans are at once deified and rendered
powerless. Once the production of god is understood as a social,
historical human practice, however, then humans are no
longer trapped in a timeless vacuum of powerlessness: it
becomes possible to think of a time of non-alienation, of
different socio-historical conditions in which humans would
no longer produce god, would no longer produce their own
objectification. Marxs critique of the political economists follows
the same pattern as his critique of Feuerbach. In Capital, his
attention has moved to a much more powerful god than the
god of religion, namely Money (value). Money, in everyday
thought, proclaims itself as ruler of the world, as the sole
source of power. Ricardo (taking the place of Feuerbach) has
shown that that is not so: he has discovered ’by analysis’ that
the ’earthly core of the misty creations’ of economics (the
religion of money) is human labour, as the substance of
value. However, Ricardo treats value in the same way as
Feuerbach treats god: as a timeless, a-historical feature of the
human condition. Political economy has indeed analysed,
however incompletely, value and its magnitude, and has
discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never
once asked the question why labour is represented by the
value of its product and labour-time by the magnitude of
that value. These formulae, which bear it stamped upon
them in unmistakeable letters that they belong to a state of
society, in which the process of production has the mastery
over man, instead of being controlled by him, such formulae
appear to the bourgeois intellect to be as much a selfevident
necessity imposed by Nature as productive labour itself. (1965,
pp. 80-81) The result is that Ricardo, like Feuerbach, puts
humans at the centre of the world, but leaves humanity
entrapped in a timeless, unchanging vacuum of powerlessness. It
is only by tracing the production of value and money by
social, historical human practice that the critique of the
Power of Money (and powerlessness of humans) becomes a
theory of human antipower, of the anti-power of human
practice.


Genetic criticism is crucial, therefore, to the understanding of
existing phenomena as historically specific, and therefore
changeable, forms of social relations. In a footnote to the passage
on political economy just quoted, Marx says: Even Adam Smith
and Ricardo, the best representatives of the school, treat the
form of value as a thing of no importance, as having no
connexion with the inherent nature of commodities. The
reason for this is not solely because their attention is entirely
absorbed in the analysis of the magnitude of value. It lies
deeper. The value-form of the product is not only the most
abstract, but is also the most universal form, taken by the
product in bourgeois production, and stamps the production
as a particular species of social production, and thereby
gives it its special historical character. If then we treat this
mode of production as one eternally fixed by Nature for
every state of society, we necessarily overlook that which is
the diferentia specifica of the value-form, and consequently
of the commodity-form, and of its further developments,
money-form, capital-form, \&c. (1965, p. 81) It is genetic
criticism that opens up the question of form, that helps us to
understand that our power-to exists in the form of being denied,
that points us towards the all-important question of the
force and reality of that which exists in the form of being
denied.


These examples make it clear that the genetic method is not
just a question of applying a superior logic. Marx’s method is
sometimes described as based on the logical ’derivation’ of
categories (money from value, capital from money, etc). This is
correct, but in so far as the derivation, or the genetic link, is
understood in purely logical terms, then the core of Marx’s
approach is misunderstood.. The claim that Marx’s method is
scientific is not a claim that its logic is superior, or that it is
more rigorous, but that it follows in thought (and therefore
consciously takes part in) the movement of the process of
doing. Genesis can only be understood as human genesis,
as human power-to. Marxs method is above all politically
important.

\section{III}


Criticism, understood as an analytical and genetic movement, is
the movement of defetishisation, the theoretical voice of the
scream. Criticism is both destructive and regenerative. It is
destructive because it is directed relentlessly against everything
that is. It destroys is-ness itself. No identitarian statement,
no claim (whether left, right or centre) that something is
something, can be immune from the destructive force of criticism.
However, criticism is not solely destructive: the destruction of
being is at the same time the recuperation of doing, the
restoration of human power-to. In so far as criticism destroys that
which denies, it is also the emancipation of that which is
denied. Criticism is emancipatory to the extent to which it is
destructive.


The recuperation of doing is, of course, just a theoretical
recuperation. The being which we criticise, the objectivity which
we criticise, is not a mere illusion, it is a real illusion. There is a
real separation of doing and done, of subject and object. The
objects which we create really do stand over against us as
something alien, as things that are. Genetic criticism involves the
recuperation of our lost subjectivity, the understanding that those
alien objects are the product of our own self-alienated subjectivity,
but the objects do not cease to be alienated objects just
because of our criticism. Their objectivity is not the result of
our lack of understanding but of the self-alienated process
of work which produced them. To say this is not at all to
minimise the importance of theory, but to make the obvious
point that theory makes sense only if it is understood as part
of the more general struggle for the real recuperation of
doing.


In the context of this struggle, it is important to emphasise that
the doing that is recovered is not an individual but a social
doing. In order to understand the genesis of phenomena, in
order to understand the origin of fetishised appearances,
we are always brought back to social doing and the form
in which it exists. Understanding the origin of money, for
example, is not a question of saying x made it, but seeing that
money is generated by the organisation of human doing
as labour to produce commodities for a market. Money,
like value, like the state, like capital, are, as Marx points
out, forms of social relations, but it is crucial to understand
that social relations are relations between doers, between
active subjects. The doing that is recovered through genetic
criticism is social doing, what we have called the social flow of
doing.


This social doing is not just something in the past, it is
present substratum. That is all-important in understanding
the force of our scream. That which is denied, social doing,
is not just the historical origin of the being which denies
that doing, it is its present inescapable substratum. The
genetic critique of money (in chapter 1 of Capital) does
not just point to the historical origin of money: it reveals
rather the continuous regeneration of money through the
existence of social doing as commodity producing labour.
Money could not exist if doing did not exist as abstract
labour.


The understanding of fetishism as fetishisation makes it clear
that genesis must be understood not just as historical genesis but
above all as present genesis. We do not ask simply ’how did value,
money, state arise as forms of social relations?’ but rather ’how do
value, money, state arise as forms of social relations? how are
these forms disrupted and re-created each day? how do we disrupt
and recreate these forms each day?’ Moving out from our
scream, we are confronted by a world that is fixed, a world of
Is-ness. Criticism breaches that fixedness, first by showing all
phenomena to be forms, historical modes of existence of social
relations, and now by showing that these forms are highly
volatile, highly unstable, constantly challenged, disrupted,
re-formed, challenged again. The doing that is revealed by genetic
criticism, is not Pure Subjectivity. It is damaged subjectivity, the
only kind we know. Criticism seeks to understand social
phenomena in terms of human creativity and the forms in which
that creativity exists. The man who makes religion is not
a whole man. He is a sick, damaged, self-estranged man.
’Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who
has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself
again\dots{} Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the
heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless
conditions’. (1973, p. 175) Similarly, in Capital, Marx does not
derive all the categories of political economy from human
creativity but rather from the self-divided, self-antagonistic
dual existence of human creativity as abstract and concrete
labour.


Genetic criticism points to the exclusive subjectivity of
humanity. In that sense, it is a great chest-thumping cry of
power-to: ’it is we who create society, not God, not capital, not
chance: therefore we can change it’. Our initial scream of
frustration here begins to become a scream of anti-power. On the
other hand, if we create society in such a way that it stands over
against us as something alien, if we subjects create an objectivity
that we do not recognise as the expression of our own subjectivity,
then it is because we ourselves are self-estranged, selfalienated,
turned against ourselves.


There is a tendency, perhaps, for left-wing critics of capitalism,
to adopt a moral high ground, to place ourselves above society.
Society is sick, but we are healthy. We know what is wrong with
society, but society is so sick that others do not see it. We are
right, we have true consciousness: those who do not see that we
are right are duped by the sick society, enveloped in false
consciousness. The scream of anger from which we started
becomes so easily a self-righteous denunciation of society, a
moralistic elitism. Perhaps we should listen to the upholders of
reality when they turn our scream against us and tell us that we
are sick, unreasonable, immature, schizophrenic. How can
we possibly say that society is sick and that we are not?
What arrogance! And what nonsense! If society is sick, then
of course we too are sick, since we cannot stand outside
society. Our cry is a cry against our own sickness which is
the sickness of society, a cry against the sickness of society
which is our own sickness. Our cry is not just a cry against a
society that is ’out there’: it is equally a cry against ourselves,
for we are shaped by the out-there-ness of society, by the
standing-over-againstus-ness of reality. It makes no sense
for the subject to criticise the object in a holier-than-thou
fashion when the subject is (and is not) part of the object
criticised and is in any case constituted by her separation
(and nonseparation) from the object. Such holier-than-thou
criticism assumes and therefore reinforces the separation
of subject and object which is the source of the sickness
of both subject and object in the first place. It is better
therefore to assume from the beginning that criticism of society
must also be criticism of ourselves, that struggle against
capitalism must be also struggle against the ’we’ who are
not only against but also in capitalism. To criticise is to
recognise that we are a divided self. To criticise society is
to criticise our own complicity in the reproduction of that
society.


That realisation does not weaken our scream in any way. On the
contrary, it intensifies it, makes it more urgent.

\chapter{The Tradition of Scientific Marxism}

\section{I}


The concept of fetishism implies a negative concept of science. If
relations between people exist as relations between things,
then the attempt to understand social relations can proceed
only negatively, by going against and beyond the form in
which social relations appear (and really exist). Science is
critical.


The concept of fetishism implies, therefore, that there is a
radical distinction between bourgeois science and critical or
revolutionary science. The former assumes the permanence of
capitalist social relations and takes identity for granted, treating
contradiction as a mark of logical inconsistency. Science, in
this view, is the attempt to understand reality. In the latter
case, science can only be negative, a critique of the untruth
of existing reality. The aim is not to understand reality,
but to understand (and, by understanding, to intensify) its
contradictions as part of the struggle to change the world.
The more all-pervasive we understand reification to be, the
more absolutely negative science becomes. If everything is
permeated by reification, then absolutely everything is a site of
struggle between the imposition of the rupture of doing and the
critical-practical struggle for the recuperation of doing. No
category is neutral.


For Marx, science is negative. The truth of science is the
negation of the untruth of false appearances. In the postMarx
Marxist tradition, however, the concept of science is turned from a
negative into a positive concept. The category of fetishism, so
central for Marx, is almost entirely forgotten by the mainstream
Marxist tradition. From being the struggle against the untruth of
fetishism, science comes to be understood as knowledge of reality.
With the positivisation of science, power-over penetrates into
revolutionary theory and undermines it far more effectively than
any government undercover agents infiltrating a revolutionary
organisation.

\section{II}


It is convenient to see the positivisation of science as being Engels’
contribution to the Marxist tradition, although there are certainly
dangers in over-emphasising the difference between Marx and
Engels: the attempt to put all the blame on to Engels diverts
attention from the contradictions that were undoubtedly
present in Marx’s own work. The classic claim for the scientific
character of Marxism in the mainstream tradition is Engels’
pamphlet, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, which probably did
more than any other work to define ’Marxism’. Criticism of
scientificism in the Marxist tradition often takes the form of a
critique of Engels, but, in fact, the ’scientific’ tradition is far
more deeprooted than that would suggest. It certainly finds
expression in some of Marx’s own writings (most famously in
the ’1859 Preface’ to his Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy), and is developed in the ’classical’ era of
Marxism by writers as diverse as Kautsky, Lenin, Luxemburg
and Pannekoek. Although Engels’ writings possibly have
relatively few explicit defenders today, the tradition which Engels
represents continues to provide the unspoken and unquestioned
assumptions upon which a great deal of Marxist discussion is
based. In what follows, our principal concern is not who said
what, but to draw out the main constituents of the scientific
tradition.


In speaking of Marxism as ’scientific’, Engels means that it is
based on an understanding of social development that is just as
exact as the scientific understanding of natural development. The
course of both natural and human development is characterised by
the same constant movement: ’When we consider and reflect
upon Nature at large or the history of mankind or our own
intellectual activity, at first we see the picture of an endless
entanglement of relations and reactions, permutations and
combinations, in which nothing remains what, where and as it
was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and
passes away\dots{} This primitive, naive but intrinsically correct
conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy,
and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is
and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing,
constantly coming into being and passing away.’(1968, p.
43)


Dialectics is the conceptualisation of nature and society as
being in constant movement: it comprehends things and
their representations, ideas, in their essential connection,
concatenation, motion, origin, and ending\dots{} Nature is the proof of
dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it
has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasing
daily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature
works dialectically and not metaphysically. (1968, p. 45)
Through dialectics we can reach an exact understanding of
natural and social development: An exact representation of the
universe, of its evolution, of the development of mankind, and of
the reflection of this evolution in the minds of men, can
therefore only be obtained by the methods of dialectics with its
constant regard to the innumerable actions and reactions
of life and death, of progressive and retrogressive changes.
(1968, p. 46) For Engels, dialectics comprehends the objective
movement of nature and society, a movement independent of the
subject.


The task of science, then, is to understand the laws of motion of
both nature and society. Modern materialism, unlike the
mechanical materialism of the eighteenth century, is dialectical:
modern materialism sees in [history] the process of evolution of
humanity and aims at discovering the laws thereof\dots{} Modern
materialism embraces the more recent discoveries of natural
science, according to which Nature also has its history in time, the
celestial bodies, like the organic species that, under favourable
conditions, people them, being born and perishing\dots{} In both
aspects, modern materialism is essentially dialectic\dots{} (1968, pp.
47-48)


It need hardly be underlined that Engels understanding of
the dialectic method is an extremely diluted one. Lukcs
brought upon himself the wrath of the Party by pointing
this out in History and Class Consciousness: Dialectics, he
[Engels] argues, is a continuous process of transition from one
definition into the other. In consequence a onesided and
rigid causality must be replaced by interaction. But he does
not even mention the most vital interaction, namely the
dialectical relation between subject and object in the historical
process, let alone give it the prominence it deserves. Yet
without this factor dialectics ceases to be revolutionary,
despite attempts (illusory in the last analysis) to retain fluid
concepts. For it implies a failure to recognise that in all
metaphysics the object remains untouched and unaltered so that
thought remains contemplative and fails to become practical;
while for the dialectical method the central problem is to
change reality.(Lukcs 1971, 3) Dialectics, for Engels, becomes
a natural law, not the reason of revolt, not the consistent
sense of non-identity, the sense of the explosive force of the
denied. It is no doubt for this reason that some authors,
in their criticism of the orthodox Marxist tradition, have
been concerned to criticise the whole idea of a dialectical
method.


For Engels, the claim that Marxism is scientific is a claim
that it has understood the laws of motion of society. This
understanding is based on two key elements: These two great
discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the
revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through
surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With these two discoveries
Socialism becomes a science. The next thing was to work out
all its details and relations. (1968, p. 50) Science, in the
Engelsian tradition which became known as ’Marxism’, is
understood as the exclusion of subjectivity: ’scientific’ is
identified with ’objective’. The claim that Marxism is scientific
is taken to mean that subjective struggle (the struggle of
socialists today) finds support in the objective movement of
history. The analogy with natural science is important not
because of the conception of nature that underlies it but
because of what it says about the movement of human history.
Both nature and history are seen as being governed by forces
’independent of men’s will’, forces that can therefore be studied
objectively.


The notion of Marxism as scientific socialism has two aspects.
In Engels’ account there is a double objectivity. Marxism is
objective, certain, ’scientific’ knowledge of an objective, inevitable
process. Marxism is understood as scientific in the sense that it
has understood correctly the laws of motion of a historical process
taking place independently of men’s will. All that is left for
Marxists to do is to fill in the details, to apply the scientific
understanding of history.


The attraction of the conception of Marxism as a scientifically
objective theory of revolution for those who were dedicating their
lives to struggle against capitalism is obvious. It provided
not just a coherent conception of historical movement, but
also enormous moral support: whatever reverses might be
suffered, history was on our side. The enormous force of
the Engelsian conception and the importance of its role in
the struggles of that time should not be overlooked. At the
same time, however, both aspects of the concept of scientific
socialism (objective knowledge, objective process) pose enormous
problems for the development of Marxism as a theory of
struggle.


If Marxism is understood as the correct, objective, scientific
knowledge of history, then this begs the question, ’who says so?’
Who holds the correct knowledge and how did they gain that
knowledge? Who is the subject of the knowledge? The notion of
Marxism as ’science’ implies a distinction between those who
know and those who do not know, a distinction between
those who have true consciousness and those who have false
consciousness.


This distinction immediately poses both epistemological and
organisational problems. Political debate becomes focussed on the
question of correctness and the correct line. But how do we know
(and how do they know) that the knowledge of ’those who know’
is correct? How can the knowers (party, intellectuals or whatever)
be said to have transcended the conditions of their social time and
place in such a way as to have gained a privileged knowledge of
historical movement? Perhaps even more important politically: if a
distinction is to be made between those who know and those
who do not, and if understanding or knowledge is seen as
important in guiding the political struggle, then what is to be the
organisational relation between the knowers and the others (the
masses)? Are those in the know to lead and educate the
masses (as in the concept of the vanguard party) or is a
communist revolution necessarily the work of the masses
themselves (as ’left communists’ such as Pannekoek maintained)?


The other wing of the concept of scientific Marxism, the
notion that society develops according to objective laws, also
poses obvious problems for a theory of struggle. If there
is an objective movement of history which is independent
of human volition, then what is the role of struggle? Are
those who struggle simply carrying out a human destiny
which they do not control? Or is struggle important simply
in the interstices of the objective movements, filling in the
smaller or larger gaps left open by the clash of forces and
relations of production? The notion of objective laws opens up a
separation between structure and struggle. Whereas the notion of
fetishism suggests that everything is struggle, that nothing exists
separately from the antagonism of social relations, the notion of
objective laws suggests a duality between an objective structural
movement of history independent of peoples will, on the one
hand, and the subjective struggles for a better world, on the
other. Engels conception tells us that the two movements
coincide, that the former gives support to the latter, but they
do not cease to be separate. This duality is the source of
endless theoretical and political problems in the Marxist
tradition.


Engels’ notion of the objective movement of history towards an
end gives a secondary role to struggle. Whether struggle
is simply seen as supporting the movement of history or
whether it is attributed a more active role, its significance in
any case derives from its relation to the working out of the
objective laws. Whatever the differences in emphasis, struggle
in this perspective cannot be seen as self-emancipatory: it
acquires significance only in relation to the realisation of the
goal. The whole concept of struggle is then instrumental: it
is a struggle to achieve an end, to arrive somewhere. The
positivisation of the concept of science implies a positivisation of
the concept of struggle. Struggle, from being struggle-against, is
metamorphosed into being struggle-for. Struggle-for is struggle
to create a communist society, but in the instrumentalist
perspective which the positive-scientific approach implies,
struggle comes to be conceived in a step-by-step manner,
with the ’conquest of power’ being seen as the decisive step,
the fulcrum of revolution. The notion of the ’conquest of
power’, then, far from being a particular aim that stands on its
own, is at the centre of a whole approach to theory and
struggle.

\section{III}


The implication of Engels’ analysis, namely that the transition to
communism would come about inevitably as a result of the
conflict between the development of the forces of production and
the relations of production, did not satisfy the revolutionary
theorists-activists of the early part of the century. They insisted
on the importance of active struggle for communism, yet
they retained much of the dualism of Engels’ presentation of
’Marxism’.


The problems posed by the dualistic separation of subject and
object came to the fore in the revolutionary turbulence of the
beginning of this century. Virtually all the debates of the
’classical’ period of Marxism (roughly the first quarter of the
twentieth century) took place on the assumed foundation of the
’scientific’ interpretation of Marxism. Despite their very important
political and theoretical differences, all the major theorists of the
period shared certain common assumptions about the meaning of
Marxism - assumptions associated with key words such as
’historical materialism’, ’scientific socialism’, ’objective laws’,
’Marxist economics’.


This is not to say that there was no theoretical development.
Perhaps most important, attention in this period of upheaval came
to focus on the importance of subjective action. Against the
quietistic, wait-and-see interpretations of historic necessity
favoured by the main body of the Second International, all the
revolutionary theorists of the period (Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky,
Pannekoek and so on) stressed the need for active revolutionary
intervention. But this emphasis on the subjective was seen in all
cases as complementary to (if not subordinate to) the objective
movement of capitalism. Now that the theoretical criticism of
Engels as the ’distorter’ of Marx has gained such wide diffusion,
it should be emphasised that the assumptions of scientific
Marxism were accepted not only by the reformists of the
Second International but by all the major revolutionary
theorists.


The dualist concept of Marxism as science has, it was seen, two
axes: the notion of an objective historical process and the notion
of objective knowledge. The theoretical-political problems
connected with both of these axes provided the stuff of theoretical
debate in this period.


The first of these axes, the concept of history as an objective
process independent of human will was the main issue in Rosa
Luxemburg’s classic defence of Marxism against the revisionism of
Bernstein, in her pamphlet, Reform or Revolution, first published
in 1900. Luxemburg’s pamphlet is above all a defence of
scientific socialism. For her, the understanding of socialism as
objective historic necessity was of central importance to the
revolutionary movement: The greatest conquest of the developing
proletarian movement has been the discovery of grounds
of support for the realisation of socialism in the economic
condition of capitalist society. As a result of this discovery,
socialism was changed from an ’ideal’ dream by humanity for
thousands of years to a thing of historic necessity (1973, p.
35).


Echoing the distinction made by Engels between scientific and
utopian socialism, Luxemburg sees the notion of economic or
historic necessity as essential if the emptiness of endless
calls for justice is to be avoided. Criticising Bernstein, she
writes: ’”Why represent socialism as the consequence of
economic compulsion?” he complains. ”Why degrade man’s
understanding, his feeling for justice, his will?” (Vorwrts, March
26th, 1899) Bernstein’s superlatively just distribution is
to be attained thanks to man’s free will, man’s will acting
not because of economic necessity, since this will itself is
only an instrument, but because of man’s comprehension of
justice, because of man’s idea of justice. We thus quite happily
return to the principle of justice, to the old war horse on
which the reformers of the earth have rocked for ages, for the
lack of surer means of historic transportation. We return to
that lamentable Rosinante on which the Don Quixotes of
history have galloped towards the great reform of the earth,
always to come home with their eyes blackened.’ (1973, pp.
44-45)


The scientific character of Marxism is thus seen as its defining
feature. The scientific basis of socialism is said to rest ”on three
principal results of capitalist development. First, on the growing
anarchy of capitalist economy, leading inevitably to its ruin.
Second, on the progressive socialisation of the process of
production, which creates the germs of the future social order.
And third, on the increased organisation and consciousness of the
proletarian class, which constitutes the active factor in the coming
revolution” (1973, p. 11).


The third element, the active factor, is important for Luxemburg:
It is not true that socialism will arise automatically from the daily
struggle of the working class. Socialism will be the consequence of
(1) the growing contradictions of capitalist economy and (2) the
comprehension by the working class of the unavoidability
of the suppression of these contradictions through a social
transformation (1973, p. 31). Thus, although Luxemburg, in
common with all the revolutionary theorists, rejects the quietistic
interpretation of the inevitability of socialism favoured by many
in the German Social Democratic party, the emphasis on
the importance of subjective action is located against the
background of the objective, historic necessity of socialism.
Socialism will be the consequence of (1) objective trends, and (2)
subjective comprehension and practice. The focus on the
subjective is added to the understanding of Marxism as
a theory of the historic necessity of socialism; or, perhaps
more precisely, Marxism, as a theory of objective necessity
complements and fortifies subjective class struggle. Whichever
way around it is put, there is the same dualist separation
between the objective and the subjective - ’the classic dualism
of economic law and subjective factor’ (Marramao 1978,
29).


The central issue arising from this dualism was the question of
the relation between the two poles of the dualism - between
historic necessity and the ’active factor’. The terms of the question
posed by scientific socialism already suggest an endless debate
between determinism and voluntarism, between those who
attribute little importance to subjective intervention and those
who see it as crucial. The argument, however, is about the space
to be granted to the subject within an objectively determined
framework. The space is essentially intersticial, the argument
being over the nature of the interstices.


Whatever the weight attached to the ’active factor’, the
argument is about how to reach the objectively determined ’final
goal’. Luxemburg opens her argument against Bernstein in Reform
or Revolution by accusing him of abandoning the ’final goal’ of the
socialist movement. She quotes him as saying ’The final goal, no
matter what it is, is nothing; the movement is everything.’
(1973, p. 8) To this Luxemburg objects: ’the final goal of
socialism constitutes the only decisive factor distinguishing
the social democratic movement from bourgeois democracy
and from bourgeois radicalism, the only factor transforming
the entire labour movement from a vain effort to repair the
capitalist order into a class struggle against this order, for
the suppression of this order \dots{}’ (1973, p. 8) And what is
this final goal, according to Luxemburg? ’The conquest of
political power and the suppression of wage labour’. (1973, p.
8)


The goal, then, according to Luxemburg, is to bring about
social revolution through the conquest of political power. ’From
the first appearance of class societies having the class struggle as
the essential content of their history, the conquest of political
power has been the aim of all rising classes.’ (1973, p. 49) ’It is
necessary to extract the kernel of socialist society from its
capitalist shell. Exactly for this reason must the proletariat seize
political power and suppress completely the capitalist system.’
(1973, p. 52) Class struggle is instrumental, the aim being ’to
extract the kernel of socialist society from its capitalist shell’.
Struggle is not a process of self-emancipation which would create a
socialist society (whatever that might turn out to be) but
just the opposite: struggle is an instrument to achieve a
preconceived end which would then provide freedom for
all.


In the classical debates of Marxism, the issue of the relation
between the ’active factor’ and ’historic necessity’ was focused
most clearly in the discussions surrounding the collapse of
capitalism. These discussions had important political implications
since they centred on the transition from capitalism to socialism,
and therefore on revolution and revolutionary organisation
(although the different positions did not follow any simple
left-right split (cf Marramao 1978)).


At one extreme was the position usually identified with the
Second International, and formulated most clearly by Cunow at
the end of the 1890s (Cunow 1898-99): since the collapse of
capitalism was the inevitable result of the working out of its own
contradictions, there was no need for revolutionary organisation.
Those who argued that the collapse of capitalism was inevitable
did not all draw the same conclusions, however. For Luxemburg,
as we have seen, the inevitable collapse of capitalism (which she
attributed to the exhaustion of the possibilities of capitalist
expansion into a non-capitalist world) was seen as giving support
to anti-capitalist struggle rather than detracting from the need for
revolutionary organisation.


The opposite view, the view that collapse was not inevitable,
also led to diverse political conclusions. For some (Bernstein, for
example) it led to the abandonment of a revolutionary perspective
and the acceptance of capitalism as a framework within which
social improvements could be sought. For others, such as
Pannekoek, the rejection of the idea of the inevitability of
capitalist collapse was part of an emphasis on the importance of
revolutionary organisation: he argued that the objective movement
of capitalist contradictions would lead not to collapse, but to ever
more intense crises, which must be understood as opportunities
for subjective action to overthrow capitalism (1977). It is
interesting that Pannekoek, the leading theorist of left or
council communism, denounced by Lenin in his Left-Wing
Communism - An Infantile Disorder, accepted, in spite of all
his emphasis on the importance of developing the ’active
side’, the framework of Marx’s ’economic materialism’ as
the analysis of the objective movement of capitalism. His
emphasis on activism did not take the form of challenging the
objectivist interpretation of Marx, but of arguing that it was
necessary to complement the objective development by subjective
action. The second axis of scientific Marxism, the question
of scientific knowledge and its organisational implications,
formed the core of the discussion between Lenin and his
critics.


In Lenin’s theory of the vanguard party, the organisational
implications of the positive notion of scientific knowledge are
developed to the point of creating a sharp organisational distinction
between the knowers (those who have true consciousness) and the
non-knowers (the masses who have false consciousness). In the
pamphlet which spelt out the theory of the vanguard party, What
is to be Done?, Lenin argues the point very explicitly. After
discussing the limitations of the strike movement of the 1890s, he
makes his central point about class consciousness and socialism:
”We said that there could not yet be Social-Democratic
consciousness among the workers. This consciousness could only
be brought to them from without. The history of all countries
shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort,
is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., it
may itself realise the necessity for combining in unions, for
fighting against the employers and for striving to compel the
government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory of
socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical and
economic theories that were elaborated by the educated
representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals.
According to their social status, the founders of modern scientific
socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the
bourgeois intelligentsia. Similarly, in Russia, the theoretical
doctrine of Social-Democracy arose quite independently of the
spontaneous growth of the labour movement; it arose as a
natural and inevitable outcome of the development of ideas
among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia.’ (1966, pp.
74-75)


It has been suggested (by del Barco 19??) that the clear
separation of theory (developed by bourgeois intellectuals) and
experience (that of the workers) was a reflection of the particular
history of the Russian revolutionary movement. Lenin’s own
references, however, suggest that his ideas have a wider basis
within the Marxist tradition. He quotes both Engels and Kautsky
at length. Particularly significant is the passage quoted with
evident approval from an article by Kautsky, in which Kautsky
writes: ’Of course, socialism, as a theory, has its roots in
modern economic relationships just as the class struggle of
the proletariat has, and just as the latter emerges from the
strugge against the capitalist-created poverty and misery of the
masses. But socialism and the class struggle arise side by side
and not one out of the other; each arises under different
conditions. Modern socialist consciousness can arise only on
the basis of profound scientific knowledge. Indeed, modern
economic science is as much a condition for socialist production
as, say, modern technology, and the proletariat can create
neither one nor the other, no matter how much it may desire
to do so; both arise out of the modern social process. The
vehicles of science are not the proletariat, but the bourgeois
intelligentsia [K.K.’s italics]: it was in the minds of some members
of this stratum that modern socialism originated, and it
was they who communicated it to the more intellectually
developed proletarians who, in their turn, introduced it into the
proletarian class struggle where conditions allow that to be done.
Thus, socialist consciousness is something introduced into
the proletarian class struggle from without (von Aussen
Hineingetragenes), and not something that arose within it
spontaneously (urwchsig). Accordingly, the old Hainfeld
programme quite rightly stated that the task of Social-Democracy
is to imbue the proletariat with the consciousness of its position
and the consciousness of its tasks. There would be no need for this
if consciousness emerged itself from the class struggle.’ (1966, pp.
81-82)


The quotation from Kautsky makes clear that the central issue
is not the peculiarities of the Russian revolutionary tradition:
however important those peculiarities might have been, ascribing
the problems of Leninism to them lets mainstream Marxism off
the hook. The central issue is rather the concept of science or
theory which was accepted by the main stream of the Marxist
movement. If science is understood as an objectively ’correct’
understanding of society, then it follows that those most likely to
attain such an understanding will be those with greatest access to
education (understood, presumably, as being at least potentially
scientific). Given the organisation of education in capitalist
society, these will be members of the bourgeoisie. Science,
consequently, can come to the proletariat only from outside. If the
movement to socialism is based on the scientific understanding of
society, then it must be led by bourgeois intellectuals and those
’proletarians distinguished by their intellectual development’ to
whom they have transmitted their scientific understanding.
Scientific socialism, understood in this way, is the theory of
the emancipation of the proletariat, but certainly not of its
self-emancipation. Class struggle is understood instrumentally, not
as a process of self-emancipation but as the struggle to create a
society in which the proletariat would be emancipated: hence the
pivotal role of ’conquering power’. The whole point of conquering
power is that it is a means of liberating others. It is the means
by which class-conscious revolutionaries, organised in the
party, can liberate the proletariat. In a theory in which the
working class is a they, distinguished from a we who are
conscious of the need for revolution, the notion of taking
power is simply the articulation that joins the they and the
we.


The genius of Lenin’s theory of the vanguard party, then, was
that it developed to their logical conclusion the organisational
consequences of Engels’ notion of scientific socialism. From
being a negative concept in Marx (science as the negation of
fetishised appearances), science in Engels becomes something
positive (objective knowledge of an objective process), so that
’unscientific’ then denotes the absence of something: absence of
knowledge, absence of class consciousness. The question
that Marx leaves us with (how can we, who live against
and in fetishised social relations, negate this fetishism?)
becomes turned around to become ’how can the workers
acquire class consciousness?’ ’Simple’, replies Lenin, ’since
their consciousness is limited to trade union consciousness,
true consciousness can only come from outside, from (us)
bourgeois intellectuals.’ The inconvenient question of the
material source of the bourgeois intellectual consciousness
is lost, since it is seen as just the acquisition of scientific
knowledge.


Marxist practice then becomes a practice of bringing consciousness
to the workers, of explaining to them, of telling them where their
interests lie, of enlightening and educating them. This practice, so
widely established in revolutionary movements in all the world,
has its roots not just in the authoritarian tradition of Leninism
but in the positive concept of science which Engels established.
Knowledge-about is power-over. If science is understood as
knowledge-about, then there is inevitably a hierarchical relation
between those who have this knowledge (and hence access
to the correct line) and those (the masses) who do not. It
is the task of those-in-the-know to lead and educate the
masses.


It is not that scientific Marxism simply reproduces bourgeois
theory: clearly the perspective is revolutionary change, the point
of reference is a communist society. It introduces new categories
of thought, but those categories are understood positively.
The revolutionary character of the theory is understood in
terms of content, not in terms of method, in terms of the
what, not the how. Thus, for example, working class is a
central category, but it is taken to refer, in the manner of
bourgeois sociology, to a definable group of people, rather
than to the pole of an antagonistic relation. Similarly, the
state is seen as the instrument of the ruling class rather
than as one moment in the general fetishisation of social
relations, and categories such as Russia, Britain and so on go
entirely unquestioned. The concept of revolutionary theory is
much too timid. Revolutionary science is understood as a
prolongation of bourgeois science rather than a radical break with
it.


The Engelsian concept of science implies a monological
political practice. The movement of thought is a monologue, the
unidirectional transmission of consciousness from the party
to the masses. A concept that understands science as the
critique of fetishism, on the other hand, leads (or should
lead) to a more dialogical concept of politics, simply because
we are all subject to fetishism and because science is just
part of the struggle against the rupture of doing and done,
a struggle in which we are all involved in different ways.
Understanding science as critique leads more easily to a politics of
dialogue, a politics of talking-listening, rather than just of
talking.


The great attraction of Leninism is of course that he cut
through what we have called the tragic dilemma of revolution. He
solved the problem of how those who lacked class consciousness
could make a revolution: through the leadership of the Party. The
only problem is that it was not the revolution that we (or
they) wanted. The second part of the sentence we shall take
power and liberate the proletariat was not, and could not be,
realised.

\section{IV}


The concept of scientific socialism has left an imprint that
stretches far beyond those who identify with Engels, Kautsky or
Lenin. The separation of subject and object implied by the idea of
scientific socialism continues to shape the way that capitalism is
understood in much modern Marxist debate. In its modern form,
scientific socialism is sometimes referred to as ’structuralism’, but
the impact of the ’scientific’ position is not limited to those who
would recognise themselves as structuralists. Rather, the
’scientific’ separation of subject and object is expressed in a whole
series of categories and specialised fields of study developed by
people who do not feel themselves addressed in any sense
by criticisms of Engels or of modern structuralism. It is
important, therefore, to get some sense of just how much modern
Marxism has been marked by the assumptions of scientific
socialism.


The basic feature of scientific socialism is its assumption that
science can be identified with objectivity, with the exclusion of
subjectivity. This scientific objectivity, it was seen, has two axes or
points of reference. Objectivity is understood to refer to the course
of social development: there is a historical movement which is
independent of people’s will. It is also taken to refer to the
knowledge which we (Marxists) have of this historical movement:
Marxism is the correct ’discovery’ of the objective laws of motion
that govern social development. In each of these two axes, the
objectivity shapes the understanding of both object and
subject.


Although the notion of scientific Marxism has implications for
the understanding of both subject and object, in so far as science
is identified with objectivity, it is the object which is privileged.
Marxism, in this conception, becomes the study of the objective
laws of motion of history in general, and of capitalism in
particular. Marxism’s role in relation to working class struggle is
to provide an understanding of the framework within which
struggle takes place. Marxists typically take as the point of
departure, certainly not a denial of the importance of class
struggle, but an assumption of it which amounts to virtually the
same thing: class struggle becomes an ’of course’, an element so
obvious that it can simply be taken for granted and attention
turned towards the analysis of capitalism. A special role falls to
’Marxist economics’ in the analysis of history and especially of
capitalism. Since the driving force of historical development
is seen as lying in the economic structure of society, since
(as Engels puts it) the key to social change is to be found
in economics and not in philosophy, the Marxist study of
economics is central to the understanding of capitalism and its
development.


Marx’s Capital is the key text of Marxist economics, in this
view. It is understood as an the analysis of the laws of motion of
capitalism, based on the development of the central categories of
value, surplus value, capital, profit, the tendency for the
rate of profit to fall, and so on. Thus, recent discussions
in Marxist economics have focused on the validity of the
category of value, the ’transformation problem’ (concerning
Marx’s transformation of value into price), the validity of the
tendency for the rate of profit to fall and the various theories of
economic crisis. As in mainstream economic discussion, much
attention is devoted to defining the terms, to establishing
precise definitions for constant capital, variable capital, and so
on.


The understanding of Capital as a book on economics is
certainly supported by some of Marx’s own comments, but it owes
much to the influence of Engels. Engels, who was responsible for
the editing and publication of Volumes II and III of Capital after
Marx’s death, fostered through his editing and his comments a
certain interpretation of Marx’s work as economics. In the ten
years which separated the publication of Volume II (1884) and
Volume III (1894), for example, he promoted the so-called ’prize
essay competition’ to see if other authors could anticipate Marx’s
solution to the ’transformation problem’, the problem of the
quantitative relation between value and price, thus focussing
attention on the quantitative understanding of value (cf.
Howard and King (1989) pp. 21ff; Engels’ Preface to Vol.
III of Capital). In a supplement which he wrote to Volume
III on the ”Law of Value and Rate of Profit”, he presents
value not as a form of social relations specific to capitalist
society but as an economic law valid ”for the whole period of
simple commodity-production \dots{} a period of from five to
seven thousand years” (Marx 1972a, pp. 899-900). It was
through Engels’ interpretation that the later volumes of Capital
were presented to the world. As Howard and King put it:
he conditioned the way in which successive generations of
socialists viewed Marx’s economics, both in his editions of
Marx’s writings and in what he left unpublished. (1989, p.
17)


For the Marxists of the early part of this century, Marxist
economics was the keystone of the whole structure of scientific
Marxism, that which provided the certainty which was the crucial
moral support for their struggles. In more recent times, Marxist
economics has continued to play a central role in Marxist debate,
but it has acquired the newly important dimension of also
dovetailing with the structure of university disciplines: for
many academics Marxist economics has come to be seen as a
particular (albeit deviant) school within the broader discipline of
economics.


The defining feature of Marxist economics is the idea that
capitalism can be understood in terms of certain regularities (the
so-called laws of motion of capitalist development). These
regularities refer to the regular (but contradictory) pattern of
the reproduction of capital, and Marxist economics focuses
on the study of capital and its contradictory reproduction.
The contradictory nature of this reproduction (understood
variously in terms of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall,
underconsumption or disproportionality between the different
departments of production) is expressed in periodic crisis and in a
long-term tendency towards the intensification of these crises
(or towards the collapse of capitalism). Class struggle does
not play any direct part in this analysis of capitalism. It is
generally assumed that the role of Marxist economics is to
explain the framework within which struggle takes place. Class
struggle is intersticial: it fills in the gaps left by economic
analysis, shapes not the reproduction or crisis of capitalism, but
affects the conditions under which the reproduction and
crisis take place. Thus, for example, the left Marxists of
the early part of the century, it was seen, argued that class
struggle was essential to convert the crisis of capitalism into
revolution: class struggle was seen as an ingredient to be
added to the understanding of the objective movement of
capital.


The understanding of Marxist economics as an alternative
approach to a particular discipline (economics) suggests the
possibility of complementing it with other disciplinary branches of
Marxism, such as Marxist sociology and Marxist political science.
Both of these disciplines have been developed in recent years,
partly in response to demands for Marxist courses within the
disciplinary structures of the universities. Marxist sociology
focuses principally on the question of class and the analysis of
class structures, while Marxist political science has the state as its
principal focus. Neither of these disciplinary approaches is as
well developed as Marxist economics, but they start from
the same basic understanding of Marx’s work and of the
Marxist tradition, according to which Capital is a study of
economics, which needs now to be complemented (since Marx
did not live to do it) by similar studies of politics, society,
etc.


What all these modern disciplinary strands of Marxism
have in common, and what unites them with the underlying
concept of scientific Marxism, is the assumption that Marxism
is a theory of society. In a theory of society, the theorist
seeks to looks at society objectively and to understand its
functioning. The idea of a ’theory of” suggests a distance between
the theorist and the object of the theory. The notion of a
theory of society is based on the suppression of the subject, or
(and this amounts to the same thing) based on the idea
that the knowing subject can stand outside the object of
study, can look at human society from a vantage point on the
moon, as it were (Gunn 1992). It is only on the basis of this
positing of the knowing subject as external to the society being
studied that the understanding of science as objectivity can be
posed.


Once it is understood as a theory of society, Marxism can be
ranged alongside other theories of society, compared with other
theoretical approaches which seek to understand society. Through
this comparison, emphasis falls on the continuity rather than
the discontinuity between Marxism and the mainstream
theories of social science. Thus, Marx the economist is seen as
a critical disciple of Ricardo, Marx the philosopher as a
critical disciple of Hegel and Feuerbach; in Marxist sociology,
there has been discussion of enriching Marxism with the
insights of Weber; in Marxist political science, especially in
the writings of many who claim to derive their inspiration
from Gramsci, it is assumed that the purpose of a theory of
the state is to understand the reproduction of capitalist
society.


The understanding of Marxism in disciplinary terms, or as a
theory of society, leads almost inevitably to the adoption of the
questions posed by the mainstream disciplines or by other theories
of society. The central question posed by mainstream social
science is: how do we understand the functioning of society and
the way in which social structures reproduce themselves?
Marxism, in so far as it is understood as a theory of society, seeks
to provide alternative answers to these questions. Those authors
who look to Gramsci to provide a way of providing a way of
moving away from the cruder orthodoxies of the Leninist
tradition, have been particularly active in trying to develop
Marxism as a theory of capitalist reproduction, with their
emphasis on the category of ’hegemony’ as an explanation of how
capitalist order is maintained.


The attempts to use Marx’s own categories to develop a theory
of capitalist reproduction are, however, always problematic, in so
far as the categories of Marxism derive from a quite different
question, based not on the reproduction but on the destruction of
capitalism, not on positivity but on negativity. The use of
Marxist categories to answer the questions of social science
inevitably involves a reinterpretation of those categories
- for example a reinterpretation of value as an economic
category, or class as a sociological category. The attempt to use
Marxist categories to construct an alternative economics or an
alternative sociology is always problematic, not because it
involves a deviation from the ’true meaning’ of ’true Marxism’,
but because the categories do not always stand up to such
reinterpretation. Thus, these reinterpretations have often
given rise to considerable debate and to a questioning of the
validity of the categories themselves. For example, once value is
reinterpreted as the basis for a theory of price, then doubts can be
(and have been) raised about its relevance; once ’working
class’ is understood as a sociological category describing an
identifiable group of people, then doubts can fairly be raised
about the significance of ’class struggle’ for understanding the
dynamic of contemporary social development. The integration of
Marxism into social science, far from giving it a secure home,
actually undermines the basis of the categories which Marxists
use.


The understanding of Marxism as a theory of society gives rise
to a particular type of social theory which can be described as
functionalist. In so far as Marxism emphasises the regularities of
social development, and the interconnections between phenomena
as part of a social totality, it lends itself very easily to a view of
capitalism as a relatively smoothly self-reproducing society,
in which whatever is necessary for capitalist reproduction
automatically happens. By a strange twist, Marxism, from being a
theory of the destruction of capitalist society, becomes a theory of
its reproduction. The separation of class struggle from the laws of
motion of capitalism leads to a separation between revolution and
the reproduction of capitalist society. This does not necessarily
mean that the idea of revolution is abandoned: it may indeed be
given up (in the name of realism), but often it is simply taken for
granted (in the way that class struggle is taken for granted in so
much Marxist analysis), or relegated to the future. Thus, in the
future there will be revolution, but in the meantime, the
laws of capitalist reproduction operate. In the future, there
will be a radical break, but in the meantime we can treat
capitalism as a self-reproducing society. In the future, the working
class will be the subject of social development, but in the
meantime capital rules. In the future, things will be different, but
in the meantime we can treat Marxism as a functionalist
theory, in which the ’requirements of capital’, a phrase which
recurs frequently in Marxist discussions, can be taken as an
adequate explanation of what does or does not happen. The
emphasis on reproduction, combined with an analysis of
reproduction as class domination, leads to a view of society in
which capital rules and capital’s will (or requirements) prevails.
Rupture, then, if the idea is maintained at all, can only be seen
as something external, something that is brought in from
outside.


Functionalism, or the assumption that society should be
understood in terms of its reproduction, inevitably imposes a
closure upon thought. It imposes bounds upon the horizons within
which society can be conceptualised. In Marxist functionalism, the
possibility of a different type of society is not excluded, but it is
relegated to a different sphere, to a future. Capitalism is a
closed system until, until the great moment of revolutionary
change comes. Consequently, social activity is interpreted
within the bounds imposed by this closure. The relegation of
revolution to a distinct sphere shapes the way in which all
aspects of social existence are understood. Categories are
understood as closed categories rather than as categories
bursting with the explosive force of their own contradictions, as
categories containing the uncontainable. That which might
be (the subjunctive, the denied) is subordinated to that
which is (the indicative, the positive which denies) at least
until.


Twist and turn the issue as one may, the notion of scientific
Marxism, based on the idea of an objective understanding of an
objective course of history, comes up against insuperable
theoretical and political objections. Theoretically, the exclusion of
the subjectivity of the theorist is an impossibility: the theorist,
whether Marx, Engels, Lenin or Mao, cannot look at society from
outside, cannot stand on the moon. Even more damaging, the
theoretical subordination of subjectivity leads to the political
subordination of the subject to the objective course of history and
to those who claim to have a privileged understanding of that
course.

\section{V}


The tradition of scientific Marxism is blind to the issue of
fetishism. If fetishism is taken as a starting point, then the
concept of science can only be negative, critical and self-critical. If
social relations exist in the form of relations between things, it is
impossible to say I have knowledge of reality, simply because the
categories through which one apprehends reality are historically
specific categories which are part of that reality. We can proceed
only by criticising, by criticising the reality and the categories
through which we apprehend that reality. Criticism inevitably
means self-criticism.


In the tradition of scientific Marxism, criticism does not play
a central role. Certainly there is criticism in the sense of
denunciation of the evils of capitalism; but there is no criticism in
the sense of the genetic criticism of identity. To be blind to
fetishism is to take fetishised categories at face value, to take
fetishised categories without question into ones own thought.
Nowhere has this been more disastrous in the tradition of
orthodox Marxism than in the assumption that the state could be
seen as the centre point of social power. A Marxism that is
blind to the question of fetishism is inevitably a fetishised
Marxism.


The core of orthodox Marxism is the attempt to enlist certainty
on our side. This attempt is fundamentally misconceived: certainty
can only be on the other side, the side of domination. Our struggle
is inherently and profoundly uncertain. This is so because
certainty is conceivable only on the basis of the reification of social
relations. It is possible to speak of the ’laws of motion’ of society
only to the extent that social relations take the form of relations
between things. Non-fetishised, self-determining social relations
would not be law-bound. The understanding of capitalist society
as being bound by laws is valid to the extent, but only to the
extent, that relations between people really are thing-ified.
If we argue that capitalism can be understood completely
through the analysis of its laws of motion, then we say at the
same time that social relations are completely fetishised.
But if social relations are completely fetishised, how can
we conceive of revolution? Revolutionary change cannot
possibly be conceived as following a path of certainty, because
certainty is the very negation of revolutionary change. Our
struggle is a struggle against reification and therefore against
certainty.


The great attraction of orthodox Marxism remains its
simplicity. It provided an answer to the revolutionary dilemma: a
wrong answer, but at least it was an answer. It guided the
revolutionary movement to great conquests that, in the end of the
day, were not conquests at all, but dreadful defeats. If, however,
we abandon the comforting certainties of orthodoxy, what are we
left with? Is our scream not then reduced to the childishly
naive and self-deceptive appeal to the idea of justice, do
we not return, as Luxemburg mockingly warned, to that
lamentable Rosinante on which the Don Quixotes of history have
galloped towards the great reform of the earth, always to come
home with their eyes blackened? No, we do not. We return,
rather to the concept of revolution as a question, not as an
answer.

\chapter{The Critical-Revolutionary Subject}

\section{I}


Who are we, we who criticise?


In the course of the argument, we have moved from the earlier
description of ’we’ as a disparate compound of the author
and readers of this book to talking of ’we’ as the critical
subject. But who, then, are we, the critical subject? We
are not God. We are not a transcendent, trans-historical
Subject who sits in judgment on the course of history. We are
not omniscient. We are people whose subjectivity is part of
the mire of the society in which we live, flies caught in a
web.


Who are we, then, and how can we criticise? The most obvious
answer is that our criticism and our scream arise from our
negative experience of capitalist society, from the fact that we are
oppressed, from the fact that we are exploited. Our scream comes
from the experience of the daily repeated separation of doing and
done, of subject and object, a separation experienced most
intensely in the process of exploitation but which permeates every
aspect of life.

\section{II}


We, then, are the working class: those who create and have our
creation (both the object created and the process of creation)
snatched from us. Or are we?


Most discussions of the working class are based on the
assumption that the fetishised forms are pre-constituted. The
relation between capital and labour (or between capitalist and
working class) is taken to be one of subordination. On this basis,
understanding class struggle involves, firstly, defining the
working class and, secondly, studying whether and how they
struggle.


In this approach, the working class, however defined, is defined
on the basis of its subordination to capital: it is because it is
subordinated to capital (as wage workers, or as producers of
surplus value) that it is defined as working class. Indeed it is only
because the working class is assumed to be pre-subordinated that
the question of definition can even be posed. Definition merely
adds the locks to a world that is assumed to be closed. By being
defined, the working class is identified as a particular group of
people. For socialists, ’working class’ is then treated as a positive
concept and working class identity as something to be prized, such
that the consolidation of that identity is part of the class
struggle against capital. There is, of course, the problem of
what to do with those people who do not fall within the
definitions of working class or capitalist class, but this is dealt
with by a supplementary definitional discussion on how to
define these other people, whether as new petty bourgeoisie,
salariat, middle class or whatever. This process of definition or
class-ification is the basis of endless discussions about class and
non-class movements, class and ’other forms’ of struggle,
’alliances’ between the working class and other groups, and so
on.


All sorts of problems spring from this definitional approach to
class. Firstly, there is the question of ’belonging’. Do we who work
in the universities ’belong’ to the working class? Did Marx
and Lenin? Are the rebels of Chiapas part of the working
class? Are feminists part of the working class? Are those
active in the gay movement part of the working class? And
what about the police? In each case, there is a concept of a
pre-defined working class to which these people do or do not
belong.


A second consequence of defining class is the definition of
struggles that follows. From the classification of the people
concerned certain conclusions are derived about the struggles in
which they are involved. Those who define the Zapatista rebels as
being not part of the working class draw from that certain
conclusions about the nature and limitations of the uprising. From
the definition of the class position of the participants there follows
a definition of their struggles: the definition of class defines the
antagonism that the definer perceives or accepts as valid. This
leads to a blinkering of the perception of social antagonism. In
some cases, for example, the definition of the working class as the
urban proletariat directly exploited in factories, combined with
evidence of the decreasing proportion of the population who fall
within this definition, has led people to the conclusion that
class struggle is no longer relevant for understanding social
change. In other cases, the definition of the working class and
therefore of working class struggle in a certain way has led to
an incapacity to relate to the development of new forms of
struggle (the student movement, feminism, ecologism and so
on).


Defining the working class constitutes them as a ’they’. Even if
we say that we are part of the working class, we do so by stepping
back from ourselves and by classifying ourselves or the group to
which we ’belong’ (students, university lecturers and so on). The
’we scream’ from which we started is converted into a ’they
struggle’. The framework for the definitional approach to class is
the idea that capitalism is a world that is; from a left perspective
it is clear that it should not be and it may be that it will
not always be, but for the moment it is. This perspective
certainly provides a means of describing the conflicts that exist
between the two classes (conflicts over wages, over working
conditions, over trade union rights and so on). However, if the
framework is the framework of an identitarian world, of a world
that is, then there is no possibility of a perspective that
transcends this world. The idea of revolution either has to be
abandoned, or the transcendent, revolutionary element has to
be imported in the shape of a deus ex machina, usually a
Party. We are back with Lenin’s distinction between trade
union consciousness and revolutionary consciousness, with the
difference that we now see that the attribution of trade union
consciousness to the working class follows from the identitarian
theoretical perspective (which Lenin shared) rather than from the
world that is\Slash{} is not. What is seen in this case is shaped
more by the spectacles used than by the supposed object of
vision.

\section{III}


If, on the other hand, we do not start from the assumption of the
fetishised character of social relations, if we assume rather that
fetishisation is a process and that existence is inseparable
from constitution, then how does this change our vision of
class?


Class, like state, like money, like capital, has to be understood
as process. Capitalism is the ever renewed generation of class, the
ever renewed class-ification of people. Marx makes this point very
clearly in his discussion of accumulation in Capital: ’Capitalist
production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected
process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only
commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and
reproduces the capitalist relation: on the one side the capitalist, on
the other, the wage labourer.’ (1965, p. 578). In other words, the
existence of classes and their constitution cannot be separated: to
say that classes exist is to say that they are in the process of being
constituted.


The constitution of class can be seen as the separation of
subject and object. Capitalism is the daily repeated violent
separation of the object from the subject, the daily snatching of
the object-creation-product from the subjectcreator-producer, the
daily seizure from the doer not only of her done but of her act of
doing, her creativity, her subjectivity, her humanity. The
violence of this separation is not characteristic just of the
earliest period of capitalism: it is the core of capitalism. To
put it in other words, ’primitive accumulation’ is not just a
feature of a bygone period, it is central to the existence of
capitalism.


The violence with which the separation of subject and object, or
the class-ification of humanity, is carried out suggests that
’reproduction’ is a misleading word in so far as it conjures up an
image of a smoothly repeated process, something that goes around
and around, whereas the violence of capitalism suggests that the
repetition of the production of capitalist social relations is always
very much at issue.


Class struggle, then, is the struggle to classify and against being
classified at the same time as it is, indistinguishably, the struggle
between constituted classes.


More orthodox discussions of class struggle tend to assume that
classes are pre-constituted, that the working class is effectively
subordinated, and to start the analysis of class struggle from
there. However, the conflict does not begin after subordination has
been established, after the fetishised forms of social relations have
been constituted: rather it is a conflict about the subordination of
social practice, about the fetishisation of social relations. Class
struggle does not take place within the constituted forms of
capitalist social relations: rather the constitution of those forms
is itself class struggle. All social practice is an unceasing
antagonism between the subjection of practice to the fetishised,
perverted, defining forms of capitalism and the attempt to
live against-and-beyond those forms. There can thus be no
question of the existence of non-class forms of struggle. Class
struggle, then, is the unceasing daily antagonism (whether it
be perceived or not) between alienation and dis-alienation,
between definition and anti-definition, between fetishisation and
de-fetishisation.


We do not struggle as working class, we struggle against being
working class, against being classified. Our struggle is not the
struggle of labour: it is the struggle against labour. It is the unity
of the process of classification (the unity of capital accumulation)
that gives unity to our struggle, not our unity as members of a
common class. Thus, for example, it is the significance of the
zapatista struggle against capitalist classification that gives it
importance for class struggle, not the question of whether the
indigenous indigenous inhabitants of the Lacandon Jungle are or
are not members of the working class. There is nothing good
about being members of the working class, about being ordered,
commanded, separated from our product and our process of
production. Struggle arises not from the fact that we are working
class but from the fact that we-are-and-are-not working class, that
we exist against-and-beyond being working class, that they
try to order and command us but we do not want to be
ordered and commanded, that they try to separate us from our
product and our producing and our humanity and our selves
and we do not want to be separated from all that. In this
sense working class identity is not something ’good’ to be
treasured, but something bad’, something to be fought against,
something that is fought against, something that is constantly at
issue. Or rather, working class identity should be seen as a
non-identity: the communion of struggle to be not working
class.


We are\Slash{} are not working class (whether we are university
professors or car workers). To say that class should be understood
as class-ification means that class struggle (the struggle to classify
us and our struggle against being classified) is something that
runs through us, individually and collectively. Only if we
were fully class-ified could we say without contradiction
’we are working class’ (but then class struggle would be
impossible).


We take part in class struggle on both sides. We class-ify
ourselves in so far as we produce capital, in so far as we respect
money, in so far as we participate, through our practice, our
theory, our language (our defining the working class), in the
separation of subject and object. We simultaneously struggle
against our class-ification in so far as we are human. We exist
against-in-and-beyond capital, and against-in-and-beyond
ourselves. Humanity is schizoid, volcanic: everyone is torn apart by
the class antagonism.


Does this mean that class distinctions can be reduced to a
general statement about the schizoid character of humanity? No,
because there are clearly differences in the way in which the class
antagonism traverses us, differences in the degree to which it is
possible for us to repress that antagonism. For those who benefit
materially from the process of classification (accumulation), it is
relatively easy to repress anything which points against or beyond
classification, to live within the bounds of fetishism. It is those
whose lives are overturned by accumulation (the indigenous of
Chiapas, university teachers, coal miners, nearly everybody) in
whom the element of againstness will be much more present. It is
those who are most brutally de-subjectified, whether through the
stultification of endless repetition in meaningess jobs, or
through the poverty that excludes anything but the fight for
survival, in whom the tension of againstness will be most most
tightly coiled. It remains true, however, that nobody exists
purely against or against-and-beyond: we all participate in
the separation of subject and object, the classification of
humans.


It is only in so far as we are\Slash{} are not the working class that
revolution as the self-emancipation of the working class becomes
conceivable. The working class cannot emancipate itself in so far
as it is working class. It is only in so far as we are not working
class that the question of emancipation can even be posed. And
yet, it is only as far as we are the working class (subjects torn
from their objects) that the need for emancipation arises.
We return to the contradictory result already established:
we, the critical subject, are and are not the working class.
The conclusion reached is a non-sense only for identitarian
thought, only if we think of is and is not as being mutually
exclusive. The contradiction between is and is not is not a logical
contradiction, but a real one. It points to the fact that we really
are\Slash{} are not reified; we really are\Slash{}are not identified; we really
are\Slash{}are not class-ified; we really are\Slash{}are not de-subjectified; in
short, we really are\Slash{} are not. It is only if we understand
our subjectivity as a divided subjectivity, and our self as a
divided self, that we can make sense of our scream, of our
criticism.


The concept of fetishism, as we have seen, is incompatible with
a belief in the innocent subject. Power-over reaches into us,
turning us against ourselves. The working class does not stand
outside capital: on the contrary it is capital that defines it (us) as
working class. Labour stands opposed to capital, but it is an
internal opposition. It is only as far as labour is something more
than labour, the worker more than a seller of labour power, that
the issue of revolution can even be posed. The concept of
fetishism implies inevitably that we are self-divided, that we
are divided against ourselves. The working\Slash{}anti-working
class\Slash{}anti-class is self-divided: oppressed yet existing not
only in but also against-and-beyond that oppression, not
only against-and-beyond but also in that oppression. The
struggle between fetishism and anti-fetishism exists within all of
us, collectively and individually. There can be no question,
therefore, of a non-fetishised vanguard leading the fetishised
masses. By virtue of the fact of living in an antagonistic
society, we are all both fetishised and in struggle against
that fetishism. We are self-divided, self-alienated, schizoid.
We-who-scream are also we-who-acquiesce. We who struggle
for the reunification of subject and object are also we who
produce their separation. Rather than looking to the hero
with true class consciousness, a concept of revolution must
start from the confusions and contradictions that tear us all
apart.


This is quite consistent with Marx’s approach. His understanding
of capitalism was based not on the antagonism between two
groups of people but on the antagonism in the way in which
human social practice is organised. Existence in capitalist society
is a conflictual existence, an antagonistic existence. Although this
antagonism appears as a vast multiplicity of conflicts, we have
argued (and was argued by Marx) that the key to understanding
this antagonism and its development is the fact that present
society is built upon an antagonism in the way that the
distinctive character of humanity, namely doing, is organised. In
capitalist society, doing is turned against itself, alienated
from itself; we lose control over our creative activity. This
negation of human creativity takes place through the subjection
of human activity to the market. This subjection to the
market, in turn, takes place fully when the capacity to work
creatively (labour power) becomes a commodity to be sold on the
market to those with the capital to buy it. The antagonism
between human creativity and its negation thus becomes
focused in the antagonism between those who have to sell their
creativity and those who appropriate that creativity and
exploit it (and, in so doing, transform that creativity into
labour). In shorthand, the antagonism between creativity
and its negation can be referred to as the conflict between
labour and capital, but this conflict (as Marx makes clear) is
not a conflict between two external forces, but an internal
conflict between doing (human creativity) and alienated
doing.


The social antagonism is thus not in the first place a conflict
between two groups of people: it is a conflict between creative
social practice and its negation, or, in other words, between
humanity and its negation, between the transcending of
limits (creation) and the imposition of limits (definition). The
conflict does not take place after subordination has been
established, after the fetishised forms of social relations have been
constituted: rather it is a conflict about the subordination of social
practice, about the fetishisation of social relations. All social
practice is an unceasing antagonism between the subjection
of practice to the fetishised, perverted, defining forms of
capitalism and the attempt to live against-and-beyond those
forms.


Class struggle is a conflict that permeates the whole of
human existence. We all exist within that conflict, just as
the conflict exists within all of us. It is a polar antagonism
which we cannot escape. We do not ’belong’ to one class or
another: rather, the class antagonism exists in us, tearing us
apart. The antagonism (the class divide) traverses all of us.
Nevertheless, it clearly does so in very different ways. Some, the
very small minority, participate directly in and\Slash{} or benefit
directly from the appropriation and exploitation of the work
of others. Others, the vast majority of us, are, directly or
indirectly, the objects of that appropriation and exploitation.
The polar nature of the antagonism is thus reflected in a
polarisation of the two classes, but the antagonism is prior to, not
subsequent to, the classes: classes are constituted through the
antagonism.

\section{IV}


What of the workers in the factories, the industrial proletariat?
Are they not central to the concept of class struggle? Is work not
central to the whole understanding of the antagonism of
capitalist society? The central site for the separation of doing
and done is production. The production of the commodity
is the production of the separation of object and object.
Capitalist production is the production by the workers of
surplus value, a surplus which, although produced by the
workers, is appropriated by the capitalist. By producing a
surplus as surplus value, the workers are producing their own
separation from the object produced. They are, in other words,
producing classes, producing their own class-ification as wage
labour. ’Does an operative in a cotton-factory produce nothing
but cotton goods? No, he produces capital. He produces
values that give fresh command over his labour, and that, by
means of such command, create fresh values.’ (Marx, 1965, p.
578).


In production, then, the worker in producing an object
produces at the same time her own alienation from that
object and thereby produces herself as wage labourer, as
desubjectified subject. Capitalist production involves the ever
renewed separation of subject and object. It also involves
the ever renewed bringing together of subject and object
but as alienated subject and object. The relation between
subject and object is an unhinged relation, with value as its
(un)hinge. The category of value faces both ways. On the one
hand the fact that value is the product of abstract labour
points to capital’s absolute dependence upon labour and its
abstraction. On the other hand, value conceptualises the
separation of the commodity from labour, the fact that it
acquires an autonomous existence quite independent of the
producer. Value, then, is the process of subordinating the
strength of the worker to the domination of her autonomised
product.


But the separation of the worker from the means of production
is just part (although a central part) of a more general separation
of subject and object, a more general distancing of people from
the possibility of determining their own activity. The notion of the
separation of the worker from the means of production directs our
mind to a particular type of creative activity, but in fact this very
distinction between production and doing in general is part of the
fragmentation of doing that results from the separation of doing
and done. The fact that the de-subjectification of the subject
appears simply as the separation of the workers from the means of
production is already an expression of the fetishisation of social
relations. The separation of the worker from the means of
production (in the classic sense) is part of, generates and is
supported by, a more general process of de-subjectifying the
subject, a more general abstracting of labour. Hence value
production, surplus value production (exploitation) cannot be
the starting point of the analysis of class struggle, simply
because exploitation implies a logically prior struggle to convert
creativity into labour, to define certain activities as value
producing.


Exploitation is not just the exploitation of labour but the
simultaneous transformation of doing into labour, the simultaneous
desubjectivication of the subject, the dehumanisation of humanity.
This does not mean that creativity, the subject, humanity exist in
some pure sphere waiting to be metamorphosed into their
capitalist forms. The capitalist form (labour) is the mode of
existence of doing\Slash{} creativity\Slash{} subjectivity\Slash{} humanity, but
that mode of existence is contradictory. To say that doing
exists as labour means that it exists also as anti-labour. To
say that humanity exists as subordination means that it
exists also as insubordination. The production of class is the
suppression(-and-reproduction) of insubordination. Exploitation is
the suppression(-and-reproduction) of insubordinate creativity.
The suppression of creativity does not just take place in the
process of production, as usually understood, but in the
whole separating of doing and done that constitutes capitalist
society. Thus: labour produces class, but labour pre-supposes a
prior classification. Similarly, production is the sphere of the
constitution of class, but the existence of a sphere of production,
that is the separation of production from human doing in general,
also presupposes a prior classification.


The answer, then, to our question about the centrality of work
is surely that it is not labour that is central but doing, which
exists in-against-and-beyond labour. To start uncritically
from labour is to enclose oneself from the beginning within a
fetishised world, such that any projection of an alternative
world must appear as pure fancy, something brought in from
outside. To start from labour is to reduce one’s concept
of class struggle, to exclude from sight the whole world of
antagonistic practice that goes into the constitution of doing as
labour.


But even if one adopts the broad concept of class struggle
proposed here, is there not some sense in which the production of
surplus value is central, some sense in which the struggles around
production are the core of struggle for emancipation? There might
possibly be a case for establishing such a hierarchy if it could be
shown that the direct producers of surplus value play a particular
part in the attack against capital. It is sometimes argued that
there are key sections of workers who are able to inflict particular
damage on capital (such as workers in large factories or
transport workers). These workers are able to impose with
particular directness the dependence of capital upon labour.
However, such groups of workers are not necessarily direct
producers of surplus value (bank workers, for example), and the
impact of the zapatista uprising on capital (through the
devaluation of the Mexican peso and the world financial
upheaval of 1994-95, for example) makes it clear that the
capacity to disrupt capital accumulation does not depend
necessarily on one’s immediate location in the process of
production.

\section{V}


It is not possible to define the critical-revolutionary subject for
the critical-revolutionary subject is the indefinable. The
critical-revolutionary subject is not a defined ’who’ but an
undefined, indefinable, anti-definitional ’what’. Definition
implies subordination. It is only on the basis of an assumed
subordination that it is possible to define a subject. The
definition of a critical-revolutionary subject is an impossibility,
since ’critical-revolutionary’ means that the subject is not
subordinate, is in revolt against subordination. An approach that
starts not from subordination but from struggle is necessarily
anti-definitional. Insubordination is inevitably a movement
against definition, an overflowing. A negation, a rejection, a
scream.


There is no reason to restrict the scream to a limited group of
people. Yet the scream is a scream-against. The stronger the
repression, the stronger the scream. Constantly changing, any
attempt to define the scream is immediately overcome by the
changing shape of the scream itself.


Our starting point and constant point of return is our scream.
This is where the question of the critical-revolutionary subject
must begin. The scream is not a scream in the abstract. It is a
scream against: a scream against oppression, against exploitation,
against dehumanisation. It is a scream-against that exists in all of
us to the extent that we are all oppressed by capitalism, but the
intensity and force of the scream-against depends on the intensity
and force of that which is screamed against. The scream is not the
scream of some, but not of others: it is the scream of all, with
different degrees of intensity.


The scream-against is in the first place negative. It is a refusal,
a negation of subordination. It is the scream of insubordination,
the mumble of non-subordination. Insubordination is a central
part of everyday experience, from the disobedience of children,
to the cursing of the alarm clock which tells us to get up
and go to work, to all sorts of absenteeism, sabotage and
malingering at work, to open rebellion, as in the open and
organised cry of ’Ya basta!’ Even in the apparently most
disciplined and subordinated societies, insubordination is never
absent: it is always there, always present as a hidden culture of
resistance.


Often our scream is silent, the ’internal bleeding of stifled
volcanoes’ (Johnson 1975, 36). The scream of insubordination is
heard at most as a low mumble of discontent, a grumble of
non-subordination. Nonsubordination is the simple, unspectacular
struggle to shape one’s life. It is people’s reluctance to give up the
simple pleasures of life, their reluctance to become machines, the
determination to forge and maintain some degree of power-to.
This sort of non-subordination is not necessarily overtly or
consciously oppositional, but it remains a powerful obstacle to the
voracious expansion and intensification of power-over that the
existence of capital entails.


The scream of insubordination is the scream of non-identity.
’You are’, says capital to us all the time, classifying us, defining
us, negating our subjectivity, excluding any future that is not a
prolongation of the present indicative. ’We are not’, we reply. ’The
world is so’, says capital. ’It is not’, we reply. We do not need to
be explicit. Our very existence is negation, not-ness. Negation at
its simplest, darkest: not ’we do not like this, or that’, but simply
’we are not, we negate, we overflow the bounds of any concept’.
It appears that we are, but we are not. That, at its most
fundamental, is the driving force of hope, the force that corrodes
and transforms that which is. We are the force of non-identity
existing under the fetishised aspect of identity. ’Contradiction is
non-identity under the aspect of identity’ (Adorno 1973,
5).


What is it that is at the core of rebellious theory? What
is the substance of hope? ’The working class’, say some,
’we can see it, we can study it, we can organise it, that is
the substance of hope, this is where we can start to work
politically’. ’Call it the working class’, we reply, ’but we
cannot see it, study it, organise it, for the working class as
revolutionary class is not: it is non-identity.’ It seems an empty
answer. Our training tells us to look for a positive force
as the substance of hope, but what we have found is more
like Fichte’s ’dark void’: non-identity, a god who says not ’I
am who am’, but ’we are not who we are, and we are who
we are not’. That is what is disturbing about this whole
argument: we want a positive force to hold on to, and all
that this argument seems to offer is the negative void of
non-identity.


There is no positive force to hold on to, no security, no
guarantee. All positive forces are chimeras which disintegrate
when we touch them. Our god is the only god: ourselves. We are
the sun around which the world revolves, the only god, a god of
negation. We are the spirit that always negates’. ’Man is the
only creature who refuses to be what he is’ (Camus 1971, p.
17).


Yet there is a problem here. The fact that the scream is a
scream-against means that it can never be a pure scream.
It is always tainted by that which it is a scream against.
Negation always involves a subsumption of that which is
negated. That can be seen in any struggle against power: a
merely negative response to power reproduces power within
itself simply by reproducing, negatively, the terms in which
power has set the conflict. The dragon that raises its head to
threaten us in almost every paragraph of this book pops
up again: we seem to be caught in an endlessly recursive
circle.


There is indeed an endlessness in negation, but it is not the
endlessness of a circle. It is rather the endlessness of the struggle
for communism: even when the conditions for a power-free society
are created, it will always be necessary to struggle against the
recrudescence of power-over. There can be no positive dialectic, no
final synthesis in which all contradictions are resolved. If
capitalism is to be understood as a process rather than as a state
of being, even when human potential is so clogged up, how much
more must this be true of a society in which human power-to is
liberated.


But there is more to be said than that. We are not
caught in an endlessly recursive circle simply because our
existence is not recursive or circular. Our scream-against
is a scream-against-oppression, and in that sense it is
shaped by oppression; but there is more than that, for the
scream-against-oppression is a scream against the negation of
ourselves, of our humanity, of our power-to create. Non-identity is
the core of our scream, but to say ’we are not’ is not just a dark
void. To negate Is-ness is to assert becoming, movement, creation,
the emancipation of power-to. We are not, we do not be, we
become.


’We are not’ becomes, therefore, ’we are not yet’, but only if
’not-yet’ is understood not as certain future, secure homecoming,
but as possibility, as a becoming with no guarantees, no security.
If we are not yet, then our not-yetness already exists as project, as
overflowing, as pushing beyond. The reign of the positive present
indicative is broken and the world is seen to be full of negative
subjunctive in which the distinction between present and future is
dissolved. Human existence is not just an existence of negation
but an existence of not-yet-ness, in which negation, by being
negation of the negation of our humanity, is at the same time a
projection towards that humanity. Not a lost humanity, nor
an existing humanity, but a humanity to be created. This
not-yet-ness can be seen not just in overt political militancy,
but in the struggles of every day living, in the dreams we
have, in our projections against the denial of our projections,
in our fantasies, from the simplest dreams of pleasure to
the most path-breaking artistic creations. Not-yet-ness is a
constant drive against an is-ified reality, the revolt of the
repressed Pleasure Principle against the Reality Principle.
Not-yet-ness is the struggle to de-congest time, to emancipate
power-to.


Is our scream of non-identity simply an assertion of humanism?
Is the ’dark void’ of non-identity simply an assertion of human
nature? The problem with humanism is not that it has a concept
of humanity, but that humanists usually think of humanity
positively, as something already existing, rather than starting from
the understanding that humanity exists only in the form of
being denied, as a dream, as a struggle, as the negation of
inhumanity. If a notion of humanity underlies the argument here,
it is a notion of humanity as negation negated, as power-to
enchained. To struggle for humanity is to struggle for the
liberation of negation, for the emancipation of potential. It is the
movement of power-to, the struggle to emancipate human
potential, that provides the perspective of breaking the circle of
domination. It is only through the practice of the emancipation of
power-to that power-over can be overcome. Work, then,
remains central to any discussion of revolution, but only if it is
understood that the starting point is not labour, fetishised work,
but rather work as doing, as the creativity or power-to that
exists as but also against-and-beyond labour. Unless work is
understood in this sense, transcendence is an impossibility,
other than through the divine intervention of an external
force.


The scream-against and the movement of power-to (the two
axes of this book) are inextricably entwined. In the process
of struggle-against, relations are formed which are not the
mirror-image of the relations of power against which the struggle
is directed: relations of comradeship, of solidarity, of love, relations
which prefigure the sort of society we are struggling for. Similarly,
the attempt to develop human potential (to emancipate power-to)
is always a struggle-against, since it must come into open or
concealed conflict with the constant expansion of power-over
which is capital. The scream-against and the struggle for
emancipation cannot be separated, even when those in struggle
are not conscious of the link. The most liberating struggles,
however, are surely those in which the two are consciously linked,
as in those struggles which are consciously prefigurative, in
which the struggle aims, in its form, not to reproduce the
structures and practices of that which is struggled against,
but rather to create the sort of social relations which are
desired.


The unity of scream-against and power-to can perhaps be
referred to as dignity, following the language of the zapatista
uprising. Dignity is the refusal to accept humiliation, oppression,
exploitation, dehumanisation. It is a refusal which negates the
negation of humanity, a refusal filled, therefore, with the project of
the humanity currently negated. This means a politics that
projects as it refuses, refuses as it projects: a politics dense with
the dream of creating a world of mutual respect and dignity, filled
with the knowledge that this dream involves the destruction of
capitalism, of everything that dehumanises or desubjectifies
us.

\chapter{The Material Reality of Anti-Power}

\section{I}


’Romantic’. ’Noble, but not very realistic’. ’We have to deal
with the reality of class struggle, not abstractions about
anti-power’.


How can we possibly change the world without taking power?
The idea is an attractive dream, and we all like attractive
dreams, but what is their reality? How can we dream after the
experience of the twentieth century, when so many dreams
have failed, when so many dreams have ended in misery and
disaster?


Where is this anti-power that is the hope of humanity? What is
the material reality of anti-power? Because if it has no material
reality, then we are deluding ourselves. We all want to dream that
a different type of society is possible, but is it really? The
revolutionaries of the early part of the century built their dreams
upon the mass organisations of the proletariat, but those
organisations no longer exist or, if they do, they are not the stuff
of dreams.


We have thrown out a lot of bathwater. And how many babies?
A defined subject has been replaced by an indefinable subjectivity.
Proletarian power has been replaced by an undefined anti-power.
This sort of theoretical move is often associated with disillusion,
with abandoning the idea of revolution in favour of theoretical
sophistication. That is not the intention here. But where, then, is
this anti-power?


I scream. But am I alone? Some of the readers scream as well.
We scream. But what indication is there of the material force of
the scream?

\section{II}


The first point is that anti-power is ubiquitous.


The television, the newspapers, the speeches of politicians give
little indication of the existence of anti-power. For them, politics is
the politics of power, political conflict is about winning power,
political reality is the reality of power. For them, anti-power is
invisible.


Look more closely, however. Look at the world around us, look
beyond the newspapers, look beyond the political parties, beyond
the institutions of the labour movement and you can see a world
of struggle: the autonomous municipalities in Chiapas, the
students in the UNAM, the Liverpool dockers, the wave of
international demonstrations against the power of money
capital, the struggles of migrant workers, the struggles of the
workers in all the world against privatisation. There is a whole
world of struggle that does not aim at all at winning power,
a whole world of struggle against power-over. There is a
whole world of struggle that sometimes goes no farther than
saying ’No!’ (sabotage, for example) but that often, in the
course of saying ’No!’, develops forms of selfdetermination and
articulates alternative conceptions of how the world should be.
Such struggles, if they are reported at all in the mainstream
media, are filtered through the spectacles of power, visible
only in so far as they are considered to impinge upon power
politics.


The first problem in talking of anti-power is its invisibility. It is
invisible not because it is imaginary, but because our concepts for
seeing the world are concepts of power (of identity, of the
indicative). To see anti-power, we need different concepts (of
non-identity, of the Not Yet, of the subjunctive).


All rebellious movements are movements against invisibility.
Perhaps the clearest example of that is the feminist movement,
where much of the struggle has been to make visible that which
was invisible: to make visible the exploitation and oppression of
women, but more than that, to make visible the presence of
women in this world, to rewrite a history from which their
presence had been largely eliminated. The struggle for visibility is
also central to the current indigenous movement, expressed most
forcefully in the Zapatista wearing of the balaclava: we cover our
face so that we can be seen, our struggle is the struggle of those
without face.


Yet there is an important distinction to be made here. The
problem of anti-power is not to emancipate an oppressed identity
(women, indigenous) but to emancipate an oppressed non-identity,
the ordinary, everyday, invisible no, the rumblings of subversion as
we walk in the street, the silent volcano of sitting in a chair.
By giving discontent an identity, ’we are women’, ’we are
indigenous’, we are already imposing a new limitation upon
it, we are already defining it. Hence the importance of the
Zapatista balaclava, which says not just ’we are the indigenous
struggling for our identity to be recognised’, but, much more
profoundly, ’ours is the struggle of non-identity, ours is the
struggle of the invisible, of those without voice and without
face’.


The first step in struggling against invisibility is to turn the
world upside down, to think from the perspective of struggle, to
take sides. The work of radical sociologists, historians, social
anthropologists and so on has made us aware of the ubiquity of
opposition to power, in the workplace, in the home, on the streets.
At its best, such work opens a new sensitivity, often associated
with struggles against invisibility and consciously starting from
those struggles (the feminist movement, the gay movement, the
indigenous movement and so on). The issue of sensitivity is well
posed by an Ethiopian proverb quoted by Scott: ’When the great
lord passes the wise peasant bows deeply and silently farts’.
In the eyes, ears and nose of the lord, the peasant’s fart is
completely imperceptible. For the peasant herself and for
other peasants, and for those who start from the peasant’s
antagonism towards the lord, the fart is, however, all too
evident. It is part of a hidden world of insubordination: hidden,
however, only to those who exercise power and to those
who, by training or for convenience, accept the blinkers of
power.


That which is oppressed and resists is not only a who but a
what. It is not only particular groups of people who are oppressed
(women, indigenous, peasants, factory workers and so on),
but also (and perhaps especially) particular aspects of the
personality of all of us: our self-confidence, our sexuality,
our playfulness, our creativity. The theoretical challenge
is to be able to look at the person walking next to us in
the street or sitting next to us in a bus and see the stifled
volcano inside them. Living in capitalist society does not
necessarily make us into an insubordinate, but it does inevitably
mean that our existence is torn by the antagonism between
subordination and insubordination. Living in capitalism
means that we are self-divided, not just that we stand on
one side of the antagonism between the classes, but that
the class antagonism tears each of us apart. We may not
be rebellious, but inevitably rebellion exists within us, as
stifled volcano, as projection towards a possible future, as
the present existence of that which does Not Yet exist, as
frustration, as neurosis, as repressed Pleasure Principle, as the
nonidentity which, in the face of the repeated insistence
of capital that we are workers, students, husbands, wives,
Mexicans, Irish, French, says ’we are not, we are not, we are not,
we are not what we are, and we are what we are not (or
not yet)’. That is surely what the zapatistas mean when
they say they are ’ordinary people, that is to say, rebels’;
that is surely what they mean by dignity: the rebellion that
is in all of us, the struggle for a humanity that is denied
us, the struggle against the crippling of the humanity that
we are. Dignity is an intensely lived struggle that fills the
detail of our everyday lives. Often the struggle of dignity is
non-subordinate rather than openly insubordinate, often it is seen
as private rather than in any sense political or anti-capitalist.
Yet the non-subordinate struggle for dignity is the material
substratum of hope. That is the point of departure, politically and
theoretically.


Probably no one has been as sensitive to the force and ubiquity
of the suppressed dream as Ernst Bloch, who in the three volumes
of the Principle of Hope traces the multiple forms of projection
towards a better future, the present existence of the Not
Yet, in dreams, fairy tales, music, painting, political and
social utopias, architecture, philosophy, religion: all testimony
to the presence in all of us of a negation of the present, a
pushing towards a radically different world, a struggle to walk
erect.


Anti-power does not exist only in the overt, visible struggles of
those who are insubordinate, the world of the ’Left’. It exists also
- problematically, contradictorily (but then the world of the Left is
no less problematic or contradictory) - in the everyday frustrations
of all of us, the everyday struggle to maintain our dignity in the
face of power, the everyday struggle to retain or regain control
over our lives. Anti-power is in the dignity of everyday existence.
Antipower is in the relations that we form all the time, relations
of love, friendship, comradeship, community, cooperation.
Obviously, such relations are traversed by power because of the
nature of the society in which we live, yet the element of love,
friendship, comradeship lies in the constant struggle which we
wage against power, to establish those relations on a basis of
mutual recognition, the mutual recognition of one another’s
dignity.


The invisibility of resistance is an ineradicable aspect of
domination. Domination always implies not that resistance is
overcome but that resistance (some of it at least) is underground,
invisible. Oppression always implies the invisibility of the
oppressed. For one group to become visible does not overcome the
general problem of visibility. To the extent that the invisible
becomes visible, to the extent that the stifled volcano becomes
overt militancy, it is already confronted with its own limits and
the need to overcome them. To think of opposition to capitalism
simply in terms of overt militancy is to see only the smoke rising
from the volcano.


Dignity (anti-power) exists wherever humans live. Oppression
implies the opposite, the struggle to live as humans. In all that we
live every day, illness, the educational system, sex, children,
friendship, poverty, whatever, there is a struggle to do things with
dignity, to do things right. Of course our ideas of what is right are
permeated by power, but the permeation is contradictory; of
course we are damaged subjectivities, but not destroyed. The
struggle to do right, to live morally, is one that preoccupies most
people much of the time. Of course, the morality is a privatised,
immoral morality which generally steers clear of such questions as
private property and therefore the nature of relations between
people, a morality which defines itself as ’do right to those who are
close to me and leave the rest of the world to sort itself out’, a
morality which, by being private, identifies, distinguishing
between ’those who are close to me’ (family, nation, women,
men, whites, blacks, decent-looking, ’people like us’) and
the rest of the world, those living beyond my particular
moral pale. And yet: in the daily struggle to ’do right’, there
is a struggle to recognise and be recognised and not just
to identify, to emancipate power-to and not just bow to
power-over, an anger against that which dehumanises, a
shared (if fragmented) resistance, a non-subordination at
least. It may be objected that it is quite wrong to see this as
anti-power since, in so far as it is fragmented and privatised, such
’morality’ functionally reproduces power-over. Unless there is
consciousness of the interconnections, unless there is political
(class) consciousness, it may be argued, such private morality is
totally harmless to capital, or actually contributes actively to
the reproduction of capital by providing the basis for order
and good behaviour. All this is so, and yet: any form of
non-subordination, any process of saying ’we are more than the
objectified machines that capital requires’, leaves a residue. Ideas
of what is right, however privatised, are part of the ’hidden
transcript’ of opposition, part of the substratum of resistance that
exists in any oppressive society. The Ethiopian peasant’s
fart certainly does not blow the passing lord off his horse,
and yet: it is part of the substratum of negativity which,
though generally invisible, can flare up in moments of acute
social tension. This substratum of negativity is the stuff
that social volcanoes are made of. This layer of inarticulate
non-subordination, without face, without voice, so often despised
by the ’Left’, is the materiality of anti-power, the basis of
hope.

\section{III}


The second point is that anti-power is not only ubiquitous: it is
also the motor force of power.


This has not been the predominant emphasis either in the
Marxist tradition or in left thought in general. On the whole
Marxism has focussed its analysis on capital and its development,
and left thought in general usually prefers to highlight oppression,
to stir up indignation against the evils of capitalism. There is
a tendency to treat the oppressed as just that, victims of
oppression. This emphasis may stir us to indignant action, but it
tends to leave open completely the question of how oppressed
victims can possibly liberate themselves other, of course,
than through the enlightened intervention of saviours like
ourselves.


Within the Marxist tradition, this emphasis on domination
rather than struggle has been attacked most articulately by the
current which developed, initially in Italy, from the 1960s onwards,
variously referred to as ’autonomist Marxism’ or ’operaismo’. The
point was sharply formulated in an article by Mario Tronti
first published in 1964, ”Lenin in England”, that was to
do much to shape the approach of ’autonomist’ Marxism:
”We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist
development first, and workers second. This is a mistake.
And now we have to turn the problem on its head, reverse
the polarity and start again from the beginning: and the
beginning is the class struggle of the working class” (1979, p.
1).


Tronti immediately takes the reversal of the polarity a step
further. Starting from the struggle of the working class means not
simply adopting a working class perspective, but, in complete
reversal of the traditional Marxist approach, seeing working
class struggle as determining capitalist development. ”At the
level of socially developed capital, capitalist development
becomes subordinated to the working class struggles; it follows
behind them and they set the pace to which the political
mechanisms of capital’s own reproduction must be tuned”
(1979, p. 1). This is the core of what Moulier refers to as
”operaismo’s \dots{} Copernican inversion of Marxism” (1989,
p. 19). This, according to Asor Rosa, ”can be summed up
in a formula which makes the working class the dynamic
motor of capital and which makes capital a function of the
working class \dots{} a formula which in itself gives an idea of the
magnitude of the inversion of perspectives which such a
position implies politically” (quoted by Moulier 1989, p.
20).


The attraction of the inversion of the traditional approach is
obvious, but how is the working class to be understood as the
dynamic motor of capitalism? As Tronti himself says in the
same article this is not a rhetorical proposition. Nor is it
intended just to restore our confidence\dots{} an urgent practical
need is never sufficient basis for a scientific thesis. (1979, p.
1)


The autonomist re-interpretation of Marxism has its roots in
the upsurge of factory struggle in Italy in the 1960s, which led to a
re-reading of Capital, putting particular emphasis on a part which
generally been neglected by Marxist economists, namely the long
analysis in Volume I of the development of the labour process in
the factories. In this discussion, Marx shows that capital is
constantly forced to struggle with the refractory hand of
labour and that it is this struggle which determines changes
in factory organisation and technical innovation. Thus, for
Marx, automation is animated by the longing to reduce to a
minimum the resistance offered by that repellent yet elastic
natural barrier, man. (1965, p. 403) Consequently, it would be
possible to write quite a history of the inventions, made
since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with
weapons against the revolts of the working class. (1965, p.
436)


Taking as its focus first the struggles in the factories, the
autonomist analyses show how all the organisational and technical
innovations introduced by management can be understood as a
response designed to overcome the force of insubordination on the
part of the workers. Labour insubordination can thus be seen as
the driving force of capital.


This provides a way of analysing the history of struggle. The
workers develop a form of struggle; management introduce a new
form of organisation or new machinery in order to re-impose
order; this in turn gives rise to new forms of insubordination, new
forms of struggle and so on. One can speak of the struggle as
having a certain composition. By analogy with Marxs idea that
capital at any point is characterised by a certain technical and
value composition, depending on the relation between constant
capital (that part of the capital represented by machinery and raw
materials) and variable capital (that part of the capital which
corresponds to wages), the autonomists developed the concept of
class composition to denote the relation between labour and
capital at any particular moment. The movement of struggle can
thus be seen as a movement of class composition. The forms of
struggle at any particular time are expressions of the composition
of the working class; when management introduce changes to
restore order, they aim to bring about a de-composition
of the class; this de-composition gives rise in turn to the
development of new forms of struggle, or a re-composition of
the class. The history of struggle can thus be described in
terms of the movement of composition, de-composition and
re-composition.


The concept is developed not only in relation to struggles in
particular factories or industries but as a way of understanding
the dynamic of struggle in capitalism as a whole. Thus, it is
argued, working class struggle in the period up to the first world
war was characterised by the particular place within production of
the skilled worker. This gave to the working class movement a
specific form of organisation (skill-based trade unionism) and a
particular ideology (based on the notion of the dignity of labour).
The de-composing response by management was the introduction
of Taylorism, designed to de-skill the skilled worker and
deprive him of control of the labour process. This gives rise
in turn to a re-composition of the working class as mass
worker, with new forms of struggle, new forms of organisation
(the general trade unions) and a new ideology (the rejection
of work). The decomposing response by capital is seen by
some autonomist theorists (Negri, in particular) as coming
now not at the level of factory management but at the level
of the state, with the development of Keynesianism and
the Welfare State (Fordism, as it is often called) as a way
of both recognising the growing strength of labour and at
the same time integrating it into the maintenance of order
(through social democracy) and into the dynamic of capitalism
(through demand management). This gives rise, in Negris
analysis, to a socialisation of capital, the transformation of
society into a social factory and the emergence of a new class
composition, the social worker (operaio sociale). The strength of
this new composition is expressed in the struggles of the late
1960s and 1970s which go far beyond the factory to contest
all aspects of the capitals management of society. It is the
strength of these struggles which forces capital to abandon the
Keynesian-Fordist form of management and develop new forms of
attack (neo-Liberalism, or what Hardt and Negri now refer to as
empire).


Class composition thus takes us beyond the analysis of
factory struggles to become the key concept for understanding
capitalist development. Thus, Moulier characterises the notion in
broad terms: ”We must remember that the notion of ’class
composition’ is a concept which aims to replace the too static,
academic and in general reactionary concept of ’social classes’.
Class composition comprises simultaneously the technical
composition both of capital and of waged labour, which
refers to the state of development of the productive forces,
to the degree of social cooperation and division of labour.
But this level of analysis is not separable from the political
composition which is its ultima ratio. We can find in it all that
characterises the collective subjectivity of needs, desires, the
imaginary and their objective translation into the forms of
political, cultural and community organisation.” (1989, pp 40-41,
n.47)


The notion of class composition takes us significantly beyond
the mere observation that resistance to capitalism is ubiquitous. It
suggests a basis for speaking of the developing force of this
resistance, a basis for trying to understand the specificity and the
force of the current forms of struggle. It proposes a way in which
we can see our scream not just as an ever-present feature of
oppression, but as a scream that has a particular historical
resonance. It suggests, for example, that what seems to be the
peculiar loneliness of our scream is the result of the fact that it
comes after the defeat of the old labour movement and the old
revolutionary movement, movements which, through their defeat,
nevertheless forced capital on to a new terrain of battle, a new
terrain of recomposition.


This new terrain is described by Negri in his latest work
(together with Michael Hardt: Hardt and Negri 2000) as
Empire. This they see as the new paradigm of rule: In contrast
to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial centre of
power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is
a decentred and deterritorialising apparatus of rule that
progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open,
expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible
hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of
command. The distinct national colours of the imperialist map of
the word have merged and blended in the imperial global
rainbow.(2000, pp. xii-xiii) There is a change in sovereignty, a
general passage from the paradigm of modern sovereignty toward
the paradigm of imperial sovereignty. In the latter, it is no longer
possible to locate sovereignty territorially in the nation state,
or indeed in any particular place. Even the United States,
although it plays a particularly important part in the network of
power, is not the locus of power in the same way that the
imperialist powers of the earlier age were. One implication of this
would seem to be that it no longer makes sense to think of
revolutionary transformation in terms of the taking of state
power.


In this new paradigm, there is no longer any place of rule, and
consequently no longer any inside or any outside, no longer any
possible external standpoint. Empire is an all-embracing system
of rule, the latest re-formulation of what Negri had earlier
characterised as the social factory or integrated world capitalism
(IWC). This does not mean that all possibility of resistance or
change has been obliterated. On the contrary, Hardt and Negri
insist that Empire is to be understood as a reaction to the
struggles of the multitude. The history of capitalist forms is
always necessarily a reactive history.(2000, p. 268) Thus, the
multitude is the real productive force of our social world,
whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives
only off the vitality of the multitude as Marx would say, a
vampire regime of accumulated dead labour that survives only
by sucking off the blood of the living.(2000, p. 62) Within
Empire, the driving force continues to be the multitude.
Empire has as its material basis the development of immaterial
labour, the intellectual communicative and affective labour
characteristic above all of the development of the service sector of
the informational economy. The important thing about this
immaterial labour is the degree to which it is immanently and
immediately co-operative, thus creating a new subjectivity.
The immediately social dimension of the exploitation of
living immaterial labour immerses labour in all the relational
elements that define the social but also at the same time
activate the critical elements that develop the potential of
insubordination and revolt through the entire set of labouring
practices.(2000, p. 29) The inherently cooperative nature of this
type of labour annuls the title of property (2000, p. 410) and
creates the basis for an absolute democracy, a communist
society.


It should already be clear that the argument of Negri and Hardt
pushes in a direction similar to the argument in this book in two
crucial respects. Firstly, they emphasise the centrality of
oppositional struggle (whether we call it the power of the
multitude or anti-power) as the force which shapes social
development; and secondly, they argue that it is important to
focus on revolution, but that revolution cannot be conceived in
terms of the taking of state power. Their argument is immensely
rich and suggestive, yet, at the same time, their approach is very
different indeed from the approach that has been adopted here.
This leaves us with a dilemma. Are we to say that method does
not matter, that there are many different ways of reaching
the same conclusion? But if we adopt that position, then
much of the previous argument about fetishism and critique
falls. If, however, we say that method does matter, precisely
because method is part of the struggle against capitalist
domination, then what are we to say of Hardt and Negris
argument?


Let us look at the matter more closely.


The difference in approach can be seen as centred in the issue of
paradigm. The argument of Hardt and Negri focuses on the shift
from one paradigm of rule to another. This shift is characterised
primarily as a shift from imperialism to Empire, but it is also
variously described as a move from modernity to post-modernity,
from discipline to control, from Fordism to post-Fordism, from an
industrial to an informational economy. What interests us here is
not the name, but the assumption that capitalism can be
understood in terms of the replacement of one paradigm of
rule by another, one system of order by another. The US
world police acts not in imperialist interest but in imperial
interest. In this sense the Gulf War did indeed, as George Bush
claimed, announce the birth of a new world order.(2000,
p.180)


Hardt and Negri are not alone, of course, in this paradigmatic
approach. Another approach which relies heavily on the notion of
a shift from one paradigm to another and which has had great
influence in recent years is the regulationist school, which analyses
capitalism in terms of a shift from a Fordist to a post-Fordist
mode of regulation. The paradigmatic approach has obvious
attractions as a method of trying to understand the current
changes in the world. It permits one to bring together many
apparently disparate phenomena into a coherent whole. It allows
one to paint an extremely rich and satisfying picture in which all
the millions of pieces of the jigsaw click into place. This
is immensely stimulating, for it suggests a whole series of
correspondences that were not obvious before. It is also very
attractive to academics because it suggests a whole world of
research projects which can be completed with no jagged
edges.


The problem with the approach, however, is just that, that it
paints an orderly world of correspondence. The negative impulse
which is the starting point becomes converted into a positive
science. The party of chaos (Negris phrase) is slotted into a word
of order. Although Hardt and Negri insist that order must be
understood as the response to disorder, the tale is told through
the account of order, not through disorder. Although they insist
that refusal is the driving force of domination, refusal is
in fact relegated to a subordinate place: it is only in the
closing pages of the book (2000, p. 393) that the authors say,
Now that we have dealt extensively with Empire, we should
focus directly on the multitude and its potential political
power.


The paradigmatic approach takes classification to extremes.
There is an eagerness to capture the new, to classify it, label it,
make it fit into the paradigmatic order. There is almost
indecent haste to declare the old order dead and proclaim
the new. The King is dead! Long live the King! As soon
as one system of rule is in crisis, the new system of rule is
proclaimed. At this point the disciplinary system has become
completely obsolete and must be left behind. Capital must
accomplish a negative mirroring and an inversion of the new
quality of labour power: it must adjust itself so as to be able
to command once again. (2000, p. 276) The adjustment to
the new command is assumed as reality, not just seen as a
project: this is the substance of the new paradigm, this is
Empire.


The desire to make everything fit, to see the new paradigm as
established, leads easily to an exaggeration that often seems quite
unreal. Thus, autonomous movement is what defines the place
proper to the multitude. Increasingly less will passports or
legal documents be able to regulate our movement across
borders. (2000, p. 397) Or: there are no time-clocks to punch
on the terrain of biopolitical production; the proletariat
produces in all its generality everywhere all day long. (2000, p.
403)


The paradigmatic approach shades into functionalism. In a
world of correspondences, everything is functional, everything
contributes to the maintenance of a coherent whole. Thus, for
Negri and Hardt (as earlier for Negri), crisis is not so much a
moment of rupture as a force of regeneration in capitalism, a
creative destruction. Thus, as it is for modernity as a whole,
crisis is for capital a normal condition that indicates not its
end but its tendency and mode of operation. (2000, p. 222)
Or: the crisis of modern sovereignty was not temporary or
exceptional (as one would refer to the stock market crash
of 1929 as a crisis), but rather the norm of modernity. In
a similar way, corruption is not an aberration of imperial
sovereignty but its very essence and modus operandi. (2000,
p. 202) Although the project of the book is very clearly
one of rupture, the method adopted seems to absorb the
possibility of rupture, to integrate movement into a photograph.
A paradigmatic approach inevitably involves a freezing of
time.


The functionalism extends to the understanding of sovereignty
and the state. The authors interpret Marxs view of the state as a
functionalist one. Referring to Marx and Engels characterisation
of the state as the executive that manages the interests of
capitalists, they comment: by this they mean that although the
action of the state will at times contradict the immediate
interests of individual capitalists, it will always be in the
long-term interest of the collective capitalist, that is, the
collective subject of social capital as a whole.(2000, p. 304)
Thus, the system of modern states succeeded in guaranteeing
the interests of total social capital against crises (p. 306),
while in the postmodern age of Empire, government and
politics come to be completely integrated into the system
of transnational command. (p. 307) The political and the
economic come to form a closed system, an integrated world
capitalism.


It is entirely consistent with this paradigmatic approach
that Hardt and Negri are very explicitly anti-dialectical and
anti-humanist in their approach. Hegel is repeatedly dismissed as
the philosopher of order rather than seeing him as being
also the philosopher who made subversive movement the
centre of his thought. Dialectics is understood as the logic
of synthesis rather than as the movement of negation. It
is quite consistent with this that the authors insist on the
continuity between animals, humans and machines. They see
themselves as carrying on the antihumanism that was such an
important project for Foucault and Althusser in the 1960s and
quote with approval Haraways insistence upon breaking
down the barriers we pose among the human, the animal
and the machine. (2000, p. 91) Postmodernism gives us the
opportunity to recognise our posthuman bodies and minds, [to] see
ourselves for the simians and cyborgs we are (2000, p. 92).
In the new paradigm interactive and cybernetic machines
become a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and
minds and a lens through which to redefine our bodies and
minds themselves. The anthropology of cyberspace is really a
recognition of the new human condition. (2000, p. 291) The
problem with this approach, surely, is that neither ants nor
machines revolt. A theory that is grounded in revolt has
little option but to recognise the distinctive character of
humanity.


Surprisingly, perhaps, given their general project, Hardt and
Negri have no concept of capital as class struggle. There is, in
other words, a tendency to treat capital as an economic category,
reproducing in this (as in other points) the assumptions of the
Marxist orthodoxy which they so rightly attack. Capital does
not seem to be understood as the struggle to appropriate
the done and turn it against the doing. Thus, in apparent
contradiction of their insistence on understanding the shift of
paradigm as a response to class struggle, they assert that in
addition to looking at the development of capital itself, we must
also understand the genealogy from the perspective of class
struggle (2000, p. 234 my emphasis) thus implying that the
development of capital and class struggle are two separate
processes. The actual analysis of the development of capital
itself is in terms of under-consumptionism rather than the
antagonism between capital and labour. The barriers to capitalist
development all flow from a single barrier defined by the
unequal relationship between the worker as producer and the
worker as consumer. (2000, p. 222) In order to explain the
movement from imperialism to Empire, they follow Rosa
Luxemburgs underconsumptionist theory that capitalism
can survive only through the colonisation of non-capitalist
spheres. At this point we can recognise the fundamental
contradiction of capitalist expansion: capitals reliance on its
outside, on the non-capitalist environment, which satisfies the
need to realise surplus value, conflicts with the internalisation
of the non-capitalist environment, which satisfies the need
to capitalise that realised surplus value. (2000, p. 227 my
emphasis) According to the authors, capital finds a solution
to the exhaustion of the non-capitalist world by turning
from the formal subsumption of the non-capitalist sphere
to the real subsumption of the capitalist world. It is after
this explanation of the passage from imperialism to Empire
that it is pointed out that we must also understand the
genealogy from the perspective of class struggle (2000, p. 234 my
emphasis).


The consequence of understanding class struggle and capital as
being separate, and of seeing the fundamental contradiction of
capitalist expansion as being something other than capitals
dependence upon the subordination of labour, is that there is no
understanding of the way in which the insubordination of labour
constitutes the weakness of capital (especially in capitalist crisis).
In this book, as in all of Negris analyses, there is a clash of Titans:
a powerful, monolithic capital (Empire) confronts a powerful,
monolithic multitude. The power of each side does not appear to
penetrate the other. The relation between the two sides of the
capitalist antagonism is treated as external one, as is indicated,
indeed, by the authors choice of the word multitude to describe
the opposition to capital, a term which has the grave disadvantage
of losing all trace of the relation of dependence of capital upon
labour. Negri does not, of course, stand for all autonomist
theorists. Other autonomist theorists have criticised the Empire
book for mistaking tendency for reality. Nevertheless, Negri
is immensely influential within the autonomist tendency.
Not only that, but Negri and Hardts development of the
autonomist argument does raise questions about the whole
approach.


The great merit of the autonomist approach is that it insists on
seeing the movement of capitalist rule as being driven by the force
of working class struggle, on seeing capital as a function of the
working class. There is, however, an ambiguity here, two
possible ways in which this affirmation can be understood. The
weaker version would be to say that capital can be understood
as a function of the working class because its history is a
history of reaction to working class struggle, in much the
same manner as one might see, say, the movements of a
defending army at war to be a function of the movements of
the attacking army, or, possibly, the development of the
police to be a function of the activities of criminals. The
stronger version would be that capital is a function of the
working class for the simple reason that capital is nothing
other than the product of the working class and therefore
depends, from one minute to another, upon the working class for
its reproduction. In the first case, the relation between the
working class and capital is seen as a relation of opposition, an
external relation; in the second case, the relation is seen in
terms of the generation of one pole of the opposition by
the other pole, as an internal relation. In the first case, the
working class is seen as existing simply against capital, in
the second case it exists againstand-in capital. These two
interpretations, the ’reaction’ interpretation and the ’product’
interpretation, are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but
in so far as the emphasis is placed on one rather than the
other, the theoretical and political implications may be quite
different.


Both of these elements are present in the autonomist analysis,
but it is the first, the ’reaction’ interpretation, which is more
prominent. Typically, the dynamic of capitalist development is
understood as a reaction or response to the power of the working
class movement. The development of capital is then understood
as the defensive reaction by capital to the strength of the
working class movement revealed in moments of open revolt.
Keynesianism, for example, in Negri’s analysis (1988) is a
response to the revolution of 1917, which made clear that
capital could survive only by recognising and integrating
the working class movement. Empire too is a response to
the force of the multitude. These analyses are immensely
suggestive, but the point being made here is that capitalist
development is understood as process of reaction, that the relation
between labour and capital is understood as an external
relation.


The reversal of the polarity between capital and labour,
essential though it be as a starting point, ends by reproducing the
polarity in a different form. The traditional Marxist analysis
emphasises the logical development of capital and relegates class
struggle to a ’but also’ role; autonomist theory liberates class
struggle from its subordinate role, but still leaves it confronting an
external logic of capital. The difference is that the logic of
capital is understood now not in terms of ’economic’ laws and
tendencies, but in terms of a political struggle to defeat the enemy.
It is easy to see how, in the analyses of some autonomists
(such as Negri) the law of value, the key category in the
Marxist-economic interpretation of capitalist development, is
seen as being redundant (Negri1988b). In the face of the
power of the working class movement, capital develops into
Integrated World Capitalism (Guattari and Negri 1990), and now
Empire, and its sole logic is the logic of maintaining power
As is perhaps inevitable, the reaction understanding of the
labour-capital relation leads to a mirror-image view of capitalism:
the greater the power of the working class movement, the more
monolithic and totalitarian the response of the capitalist class.
Autonomist theory has been crucial in reasserting the nature of
Marxist theory as a theory of struggle, but the real force
of Marx’s theory of struggle lies not in the reversal of the
polarity between capital and labour, but in its dissolution.
As Bonefeld puts it, the difficulty inherent in ’autonomist’
approaches is not that ’labour’ is seen as being primary but that
this notion is not developed to its radical solution. (1994, p.
44)


The understanding of the relation between capital and labour as
an external one has its consequences for the central category of
class composition. Instead of analysing particular struggles in
terms of the overall movement of capitals dependence upon labour
(not Lukcss perspective of totality but certainly his aspiration
towards totality), there is a tendency to project from particular
struggles (the struggles in Fiat in the early 1970s, say) and see
them as being typical of a certain stage of capitalist development.
What is constructed is an ideal type or paradigm, a heading under
which all struggles are to be classified. The struggles in the Italian
car factories then become a measure for other struggles, rather
than being understood in terms of their place in the general
movement of capitals dependence upon labour. This procedure,
so notorious in Hardt and Negris discussion of Empire, or,
even more so, in the regulationist discussions of Fordism
and Post-Fordism, is present also in the discussions of class
composition and leads easily to crude generalisations, to the
construction of categories as Procrustean beds into which
struggles arising from very different conditions must be forced to
fit.


Underlying the tendency for the notion of class composition to
provide the basis for a paradigmatic approach is a more profound
problem. The reversal of the polarity undertaken by autonomist
theory transfers the positive from the side of capital to the side of
the struggle against capital. In orthodox theory capital is the
positive subject of capitalist development. In autonomist
theory the working class becomes the positive subject: that is
why the positive concepts of class composition and class
recomposition are on the side of the working class, while the
negative concept of decomposition is placed on the side of
capital. In the reversal of the polarity, identity is moved
from the side of capital to the side of labour, but it is not
exploded or even challenged. This is wrong. Subjectivity in
capitalism is in the first place negative, the movement against the
denial of subjectivity. A truly radical reversal of the polarity
involves not just transferring subjectivity from capital to the
working class but also understanding that subjectivity as
negative instead of positive, as the negative subjectivity of
the anti-working anti-class. In the beginning is the scream,
not because the scream exhausts itself in negativity, but
because the only way in which we can construct relations of
dignity is through the negation of those relations which deny
dignity. Our movement, then, is in the first place a negative
movement, a movement against identity. It is we who decompose,
we are the wreckers. It is capital which constantly seeks to
compose, to create identities, to create stability (always
illusory, but essential to its existence), to contain and deny our
negativity. We are the source of movement, we are the subject: in
that, autonomist theory is right. But our movement is a
negative one, one that defies classification. What unites the
zapatista uprising in Chiapas or the Movement of the Landless
(MST) in Brazil with the struggle of the internet workers in
Seattle, say, is not a positive common class composition
(as immaterial labour?) but rather the community of their
negative struggle against capitalism. The problem is not to
understand our composition in the present paradigm but
to understand our negativity as the substance of capitalist
crisis.


Politically, the emphasis on the power of the working class
movement has an obvious appeal. Nevertheless, the understanding
of labour and capital in terms of an external relationship leads to
a paradoxical (and romantic) magnification of the power of both.
The failure to explore the internal nature of the relation between
labour and capital leads the autonomist analysis to underestimate
the degree to which labour exists within capitalist forms.
The existence of labour within capitalist forms, as will be
argued more fully later, implies both the subordination of
labour to capital and the internal fragility of capital. To
overlook the internal nature of the relation between labour and
capital thus means both to underestimate the containment of
labour within capital (and hence overestimate the power of
labour against capital) and to underestimate the power of
labour as internal contradiction within capital (and hence
overestimate the power of capital against labour). If the
inter-penetration of power and anti-power is ignored, if the
issue of fetishism is forgotten, then we are left with two pure
subjects on either side; we are left with the subject as a strong
ego in rational control of all its impulses, the kind taught
in the whole tradition of modern rationalism, notably by
Leibniz and Spinoza, who found here, at least, a point they
could agree upon. On the side of capital stands Empire, the
perfect subject, and on the side of the working class stands:
the militant. Autonomism and this is both its attraction
and its weakness is a theorisation of the world from the
unmediated perspective of the militant. Appropriately, Hardt
and Negris discussion of Empire ends with a paean to the
militant: the militant is the one who best expresses the life
of the multitude: the agent of biopolitical production and
resistance against empire. (2000, p. 411) And the example
of communist militancy which they propose in the closing
paragraph of the book (2000, p. 413) is the perfect embodiment
of the Pure Subject: Saint Francis of Assisi! An attractive
image, perhaps, for the dedicated militant, but hopelessly
out of touch with the experience of those of us who live
enmired in the filthy impurities of daily fetishisation and
who, in spite of and precisely because of that, struggle for
revolution.


To understand the force of anti-power we must go beyond the
figure of the militant. The scream with which we started the book
is not the scream of the militant, but the scream of all the
oppressed. It is necessary to go beyond the force of overt militancy
to ask about the force of all who refuse to subordinate themselves,
the force of all who refuse to become capitalist machines. It is only
when grounded in the ubiquity of resistance that revolution
becomes a possibility.

\chapter{The Material Reality of Anti-Power and the Crisis of
Capital}

\section{I}


In the previous chapter we argued that anti-power is both
ubiquitous and the driving force of power. Now we must take a
further step in understanding the materiality of anti-power.


The third point in understanding the reality of anti-power is
that capital depends absolutely upon labour for its existence, that
is, upon the transformation of human doing into value-producing
labour.


This, surely, is the specific contribution of Marx to oppositional
thought, that which takes Marxism beyond other forms of radical
thought. The radical negation of society typically starts as an
external negation, as us-againstthem: women against men,
blacks against white, poor against rich, multitude against
Empire. Our negativity meets their positivity in external, and
potentially eternal, confrontation. It is clear that the rich
oppress us, that we hate them and fight against them, but the
approach tells us nothing of our power or their vulnerability. In
general, radical theory tends to focus on oppression and
the struggle against oppression, rather than on the fragility
of that oppression. Feminist theory, for example, has been
extremely forceful in throwing light on the nature of gender
oppression in society: what it has not developed is a theory of the
vulnerability or historicity of that oppression. Against this
’us-against-them’ of radical theory, Marx cries out: But there is no
’them’, there is only us. We are the only reality, the only
creative force. There is nothing but us, nothing but our
negativity.


The essential claim of Marxism, that which distinguishes it from
other varieties of radical theory, is its claim to dissolve all
externality. The core of its attack against ’them’ is to show that
’they’ depend on us because ’they’ are continually created by us.
We, the powerless, are all-powerful.


The critique of the ’them-against-us’ externality of radical
theory is not some abstruse theoretical point but the core of the
Marxist understanding of the possibility of revolutionary
transformation of society. It is through understanding that ’they’
are not external to us, that capital is not external to labour, that
we can understand the vulnerability of capitalist domination.
To move beyond the externality of ’them-against-us’ is at
the same time to go beyond a radical theory of oppression
to the concern of Marxism: understanding the fragility of
oppression, and understanding that fragility as the force of our
scream.


We have spoken much of the way in which power permeates
anti-power, the damaged, alienated character of our insubordination.
But the opposite is equally true. Fetishism is a two-faced process.
It points not just to the penetration of opposition by power, but
also to the penetration of power by opposition. To say that money,
for example, is the thing-ification of social relations means
equally that the antagonism of social relations enters into
the thing which money presents itself as being. To talk of
money as disciplining social relations is equally to talk of
social relations as subverting money. If power penetrates
its negation, anti-power, it is equally true (and possibly
more interesting) that anti-power penetrates its antithesis,
power.

\section{II}


The permeation of power by anti-power is the stuff of crisis
theory.


The idea that a theory of crisis is important to support the
struggle against capitalism has been a central argument of the
Marxist tradition: the importance of Marxism lies in giving
support to the struggle for communism by showing that a
transition from capitalism to communism is materially possible,
that is to say, that the struggle for communism is founded in the
material contradictions of capitalism and that these contradictions
are concentrated in capitalist crisis. Marxists have always
looked to crisis for reassurance that we are not alone in our
struggle.


There are, however, two ways of understanding this ’we are not
alone’. The orthodox understanding of crisis is to see crisis as an
expression of the objective contradictions of capitalism: we are not
alone because the objective contradictions are on our side, because
the forces of production are on our side, because history is on our
side. In this view, our struggle finds its support in the objective
development of the contradictions of the capitalist economy. A
crisis precipitated by these contradictions opens a door of
opportunity for struggle, an opportunity to turn economic crisis
into social crisis and a basis for the revolutionary seizure of power.
The problem with this approach is that it tends to deify
the economy (or history or the forces of production), to
create a force outside human agency that will be our saviour.
Moreover, this idea of the crisis as the expression of the objective
contradictions of capitalism is the complement of a conception
that sees revolution as the seizure of power instead of seeing in
both crisis and revolution a disintegration of the relations of
power


The other way of understanding the ’we are not alone’ is to see
crisis as the expression of the strength of our opposition to capital.
There are no ’objective contradictions’: we and we alone are the
contradiction of capitalism. History is not the history of the
development of the laws of capitalist development but the history
of class struggle (that is, the struggle to classify and against being
classified). There are no gods of any sort, neither money nor
capital, nor forces of production, nor history: we are the
only creators, we are the only possible saviours, we are the
only guilty ones. Crisis, then, is not to be understood as an
opportunity presented to us by the objective development of
the contradictions of capitalism but as the expression of
our own strength, and this makes it possible to conceive of
revolution not as the seizure of power but as the development
of the anti-power which already exists as the substance of
crisis.


In any class society, there is an instability deriving from the
ruler’s dependence on the ruled. In any system of power-over,
there is a relation of mutual dependence between the ’powerful’
and the ’powerless’. It appears to be a one-way relation in which
the dominated depend on the dominator, but in fact the
dominator’s very existence as dominator depends on the
dominated. In any society based on exploitation, a certain
instability arises from the fact that the maintenance of the
relations of exploitation, and hence the position of the ruling class,
depends on the work of the exploited. In any class society there is
an asymmetry between exploiting and exploited class: although
there is clearly a sense in which each class depends on the other,
the exploited class depends on the exploiting class only for the
reproduction of its status as exploited, whereas the exploiting
class depends on the work of the exploited class for its very
existence.


The social instability inherent in any class society takes different
forms in different forms of society. The notion of capitalist crisis is
based on the idea that capitalism is characterised by a particular
instability, which finds vent in periodic upheaval. It is necessary,
therefore, to go beyond the instability resulting from the general
dependence of ruling classes on the work of the exploited,
to ask: what is it about the particular capitalist form of
dependence of the ruling class on the work of the exploited class
that makes capitalism as a system of domination peculiarly
unstable?


What is peculiar in the relation of dependence of capital upon
labour that makes capitalism inherently unstable? Freedom.
The answer is both obvious and slightly disturbing. It is the
freedom of the worker that is the peculiar feature of the
relation between capital and labour. It is the freedom of
the worker that distinguishes capitalism from earlier class
societies.


This freedom is, of course, not the freedom dear to the
liberal imagination, but freedom in a ”double sense”: ”For
the conversion of his money into capital \dots{} the owner of
money must meet in the market with the free labourer, free in
the double sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his
labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand
he has no other commodity for sale, is short of everything
necessary for the realisation of his labourpower” (Marx 1965, p.
169). Where the liberal notion of freedom sees only the first
aspect, Marxists have tended, in opposition to liberal theory,
to emphasise the second aspect, the ’reality’ of freedom in
capitalist society, the fact that the worker has no option but
to sell her labour power. The exclusive emphasis on the
second aspect, however, suggests an image of the worker as
victim, as object, and misses completely the importance of
freedom as an expression of the anti-power of the opposition to
capital.


To emphasise also the first aspect, the freedom of the worker to
dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity is not
in any sense to suggest a liberalisation of Marxism. It is
important to bear in mind that all class societies rest on the
subordination of insubordinate workers, and hence on violence:
what distinguishes capitalism from other class societies is
the form which this subordination takes, the fact that it is
mediated through freedom. Marx does not examine the question
why this free labourer confronts [the owner of money] in
the market, but notes that one thing, however, is clear -
Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or
commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their
own labour-power. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its
social basis one that is common to all historical periods. It is
clearly the result of a past historical development\dots{} This one
historical condition comprises a world’s history (Marx 1965, pp.
169-170).


If feudalism and capitalism are seen as different historical forms
assumed by the relation of domination, then the essence of the
transition from feudalism to capitalism is the freeing of the serfs
and the dissolution of the personal power of the feudal lords, the
creation of the ’free labourer’ who confronts the owner of money
(also newly created) in the market. The ’freeing of the serfs’ is not
the simple transition from bondage to freedom suggested in liberal
accounts. The ’freeing’ is rather a dis-articulation of the relation of
domination.


Under feudalism, the relation of domination was a personal one:
a serf was bound to a particular lord, a lord was limited to
exploiting the serfs that he had inherited or could otherwise
subjugate. Both sides of the class divide were bound: the serf was
tied to a particular lord and a particular place, the lord was tied
to a particular group of serfs. If the lord was cruel, the serf could
not decide to go and work for another lord. If the serfs were lazy,
unskilled or insubordinate, the lord could not simply fire them.
The result was revolt on the one hand, the pursuit of other ways
of expanding wealth and power on the other. The personal
bondage of feudalism proved inadequate as a form of containing
and exploiting the power of labour. Serfs fled to the towns, the
feudal lords accepted the monetisation of the relation of
domination.


The transition from feudalism to capitalism was thus a
movement of liberation on both sides of the class divide. Both
sides fled from the other: the serfs from the lords (as stressed by
liberal theory), but also the lords from the serfs, through the
movement of their monetised wealth. Both sides fled from a
relation of domination which had proved inadequate as a form of
domination. Both sides fled to freedom.


Flight to freedom is thus central to the transition from
feudalism to capitalism. But there are, of course, two different and
opposing senses of freedom here (a dualism which is the central
contradiction of liberal theory). The flight of the serfs was
a flight from subordination to the lord, the flight of those
who, for one reason or another, no longer accepted the old
subordination, the flight of the insubordinate. The flight of the
lords was just the opposite: when they converted their wealth
into money, it was a flight away from the inadequacy of
subordination, a flight from insubordination. On the one side,
the flight of insubordination, on the other side the flight
from insubordination: viewed from either side, it was the
insubordination of labour that was the driving force of the new
mobility of the class relation, the mutual flight of serf and
lord.


The flight of-and-from the insubordination of labour, the
mutual repulsion of the two classes did not, of course, dissolve the
class relation. For both serf and lord, the flight to freedom came
up against the reassertion of the bond of mutual dependence. The
freed serfs found that they were not free to stop work: since they
did not control the means of production, they were forced to work
for a master, someone who did control the means of production.
To survive, they had to subordinate themselves again. However,
this was not a return to the old relation: they were no longer tied
to one particular master, but were free to move, to leave
one master and go and work for another. The transition
from feudalism to capitalism involved the de-personalisation,
dis-articulation or liquefaction of the relations of domination. The
relation of exploitation was not abolished by the dissolution of the
ties of personal bondage, but it underwent a fundamental
change in form. The particular bond that tied the serf to one
particular master was dissolved and replaced by a mobile, fluid,
disarticulated relation of subordination to the capitalist
class.


The flight of insubordination entered into the very definition of
the new class relation.


On the other side of society, the erstwhile lords who converted
their wealth into money found too that freedom was not all they
had imagined, for they were still dependent on exploitation, and
therefore on the subordination of the exploited, the workers,
their former serfs. Flight from insubordination is no solution
for the lords turned capitalists, for the expansion of their
wealth depends on the subordination of labour. They are
free to abandon the exploitation of any particular group of
workers (for whatever reason - laziness, inappropriate skills,
whatever) and either establish direct links of exploitation
with another group of workers or simply participate through
non-productive investment in the global exploitation of labour.
Whatever form their particular relation to the exploitation
of labour takes, the expansion of their wealth can be no
more than a part of the total expansion of wealth produced
by the workers. Just as in the case of their former serfs,
flight to freedom turns out to be flight to a new form of
dependence. Just as the serfs’ flight from subordination leads them
back to a new form of subordination, the lords’ flight from
insubordination leads them back to the need to confront that
insubordination. The relation, however, has changed, for
capital’s flight from insubordination is central to its struggle to
impose subordination (as, for example, in the ever-present
threat of factory closure or bankruptcy). The flight from
insubordination has become a defining feature of the new class
relation.


The insubordination of labour is thus the axis on which the
constitution of capital as capital turns. It is the centrifugal mutual
repulsion of the two classes, the flight of and from subordination,
that distinguishes capitalism from previous class societies, that
gives a peculiar form to the exploitation on which capitalism, like
any class society, is based. The restlessness of insubordination
enters into the class relation as the movement of labour and
capital.


From the start, the new class relation, the relation between
capitalists and workers (or, more accurately, since it is a
depersonalised relation, between capital and labour) is a
relation of mutual flight and dependence: flight of-andfrom
insubordination, dependence on re-subordination. Capital, by its
very definition, flees from insubordinate labour in pursuit of more
and more wealth, but can never escape from its dependence upon
the subordination of labour. Labour, from the start, flees from
capital in pursuit of autonomy, ease, humanity, but can escape
from its dependence upon and subordination to capital only by
destroying it, by destroying the private appropriation of the
products of labour. The relation between capital and labour
is thus one of mutual flight and dependence, but it is not
symmetrical: labour can escape, capital can not. Capital is
dependent on labour in a way in which labour is not dependent
upon capital. Capital, without labour, ceases to exist: labour,
without capital, becomes practical creativity, creative practice,
humanity.


The rise of capitalism thus involves the de-personalisation
or, better, dis-articulation, dis-jointing or dis-location of
the relations of domination. The dissolution of the ties of
personal bondage does not abolish the relation of domination
but it dis-articulates it. Both serf (now worker) and lord
(now capitalist) remain as antagonistic poles of a relation of
domination-and-struggle, but that relation is no longer the same.
The insubordination of labour has entered into the relation as
restlessness, mobility, liquidity, flux, fluidity, constant flight. The
relation has been disarticulated; it has been ruptured and
re-composed in dis-articulated form. The dis-articulation of
the class relation is the form in which the power of labour
is contained, subjected to the continuing exploitation of
the ruling class. The dis-articulation of the class relation
is simultaneously the form assumed by the ruling class’s
dependence on labour. That is the meaning of capitalist
freedom.


The key to the dis-articulation of the class relation is its
mediation through money, or the exchange of commodities. The
freedom of the serf from personal bondage is the commodification
of her labour power, the acquisition by the labour power of a
value-form. The means by which the worker can move from one
master to another is by offering her labour power for sale and
receiving in return a wage, the monetary expression of the value of
the labour power. The means by which the capitalist participates
in the global exploitation of labour is through the movement of his
capital, in the form of money. Value, or money, is inseparable from
what liberal theory refers to as freedom - the dis-articulation of
social relations.


The dis-articulation of the relation of exploitation\Slash{} domination
brings with it a dis-articulation of all social relations. The
existence of labour power as a commodity implies a generalisation
of commodity relations in society, the mediation of social relations
in general through the exchange of commodities, through
money.


The dis-articulation of class relations is simultaneously the
dis-articulation of work itself. Work, from being a general concept
denoting creative activity, becomes defined as work performed as a
result of the sale of labour power to the capitalist: a process of
labour subject to the direction of the capitalist. Other forms of
practical activity come to be seen as non-work (as expressed
in the distinction commonly made between working and
non-working mothers, or in the notion that someone who is not
employed is ’out of work’). The same dis-articulation implies also
a disarticulation of the relation between worker and the
content of work. Where the serf lived by performing a certain
type, or certain types, of work, the capitalist worker lives by
selling her labour power: the sale of the labour power as a
commodity, that is, the mediation of money, introduces a
relation of indifference between the worker and the work
performed. The disarticulation of class relations is, in other words,
simultaneously the abstraction of labour. The abstraction of
labour implies also a separation between the exploiter and the
content of exploitation. Whereas the well-being of the lord
depended on the performance of certain types of work by his
serfs, the mediation of money makes it a matter of absolute
indifference to the capitalist what type of work is performed by his
employees


- his well-being depends not on the quality of the work done but
on the quantitative expansion of value. The dis-articulation of the
class relation is also the dis-articulation of production and
consumption: where the serfs produced most of what they
consumed, capitalist workers produce only marginally for their
own consumption - the relation between production and
consumption is mediated through money. The mediation of money
implies both a temporal and spatial separation of production and
consumption.


Similarly, the mediation of the class relation through money\Slash{}
value, implies also a dis-articulation of the economic and the
political. Where the feudal relation is indistinguishably a
relation of exploitation and domination, indistinguishably
economic and political, the fact that the capital relation is
mediated through the sale and purchase of labour power implies
a separation between exploitation (the economic) and the
maintenance of the social order necessary for the process
of exploitation (the political). By the same token, there is
a re-definition of territoriality, a separation between the
a-territorial process of exploitation, characterised by the mobility
of labour and capital, and the territorial organisation of
coercion through the definition of national states (and their
citizens).


The list could be continued indefinitely. The dis-articulation of
the class relation implies a general fragmentation of social
relations, the refraction of relations through things - fetishism, in
other words.


The question that interests us here is how this dis-articulation
(or fetishisation) of the class relation introduces a new instability
into the world. If the distinguishing feature between capitalism
and previous forms of class domination is the dis-articulation of
the class relation (’freedom’), then the peculiarly crisis-ridden
nature of capitalism must be explained in terms of this
dis-articulation.


Most obviously, the dis-articulation of social relations
introduced a new chaos into the world. It created a chaotic,
dis-articulated world in which nothing fits neatly with anything
else. There is no necessary match between people offering to sell
their labour power and people wanting to buy it; there is no
necessary match between consumption and production; there is no
necessary match between the political and the economic. That is
precisely what disarticulation (’freedom’) means. A world of
non-correspondence was born, in which order is established, if at
all, only through disorder, in which social connections are
established through social dis-connection. The orderly world
of feudalism had collapsed, the ties of personal bondage
had proved inadequate to contain and exploit the power
of work. Class domination had been maintained, but only
through the dis-articulation of the class relation. The power of
labour had been contained, but at a terrible price. The cost of
subjugating the power of labour was to introduce chaos into the
very heart of the society. That same fetishism which we
previously saw as the penetration of antipower by power is
simultaneously the irruption of anti-power into the very
core of the functioning of power. The existence of power-to
against and in capital takes form as the uncontrollable force of
value.


This seems upside-down. We are not accustomed to thinking of
value in these terms. It is more common to think of value as
establishing order (the ’law of value’), as being the social bond in
a society of autonomous producers. This is correct, but only if the
emphasis is on the critique of liberal theory. The notion of
the ’law of value’ says in effect: ’despite appearances, the
apparently autonomous producers are bound together by a social
connection which operates behind their backs - the law of value’.
If, on the other hand, we start not from the appearance of
fragmented individualism, but from the historical irruption of
the insubordination of labour into the very definition of
subordination, then value expresses the fragmentation wreaked by
this irruption upon the more cohesive domination of feudalism.
The law of value is simultaneously the lawlessness of value.
Value is the politicaleconomic expression of the presence of
the contradictory flight of-and-from insubordination within
subordination itself, just as freedom is its categorial expression in
liberal political theory. Freedom, value and mobility are
inseparable expressions of the same dis-articulation of class
relations.


The category of value, then, expresses the power of
insubordination, the containment of doing as labour and the
terrible cost of that containment. The labour theory of value
proclaims firstly the exclusive, all-constitutive power of labour
under capitalism. It is therefore simultaneously a theory of class
(cf. Clarke 1982) - if labour is allconstitutive, then conflict can
only be understood in terms of the control over, or exploitation of,
labour.


Secondly, the theory of value proclaims the subjugation of
doing, the fact that human, creative doing is reduced in
capitalism to the dehumanising process of abstract labour, of
value-production. As Marx says of the fact that ”labour is
represented by the value of its product and labour-time by the
magnitude of that value”: ”these formulae bear it stamped upon
them in unmistakeable letters that they belong to a state of
society, in which the process of .. production has the mastery over
man, instead of being controlled by him” (1965, pp. 80-81). The
fact that the product of doing takes the form of value is an
expression of the containment of the power of doing. When the
work of the serfs is freed from subordination to the lord, it
does not become free creative activity, but is held in leash
by the requirements of value production. Unhooked from
personal bondage to the lord, the former serf is nevertheless
bound through the articulation of value to exploitation by
capital.


Thirdly, the theory of value announces the cost to the ruling,
exploiting class of the containment of doing. It makes clear that
this form of the subjugation of work means that social relations
are established ’behind the backs of the producers’, that society is
subject to no social control. In capitalism, the ruling class, if it
can be called such, rules only in the sense that it tries to
contain (and benefit from) the chaos of value. Value rules, as
chaos, as the disarticulation of social relations. Value is the
expression of the power of doing-contained, as disorder, as
contradiction.


In Capital, this loss of social control is expressed through
the successive derivation of the dis-located, disarticulated,
crazy (ver-rckt) forms of social relations. Each form of social
relations expresses not only a connection but a disconnection, a
dis-articulation, dis-location. Each step in the progressive
fetishisation of social relations traced in Capital not only makes
society more opaque, it also makes it more dis-located, more prone
to disorder. Each time the argument moves from one form to
another, the point is made that the particular existence of each
form (of price as a form distinct from value, for example) means
that there is no necessary correspondence, that each form involves
a dis-location, the introduction of unpredictability. Marx says of
the relation between commodities and money: ”Commodities
are in love with money, but ’the course of true love never
did run smooth’” (Marx 1965, p. 107). At each step, the
derivation of each form of social relations is a tale of uncertain
love. Against the fragmentation of social relations, Marx
traces their inner unity, traces the process by which that
inner unity (labour) assumes fragmented forms: important in
Marx’s discussion is not only the inner unity, but the real
fragmentation, dis-location, of the forms assumed by labour. Too
often Marxism is reduced to a functionalism in which it is assumed
that the cogwheels of capitalist domination mesh together
perfectly. Nothing could be further from Marx’s analysis.
Capitalism is crucially a society of non-correspondence, in
which things do not fit together functionally, in which the
law of value is inseparable from the lawlessness of value,
a society based on the maintenance-in-dis-articulation of
class domination, the leashed unleashing of the power of
labour.


The dis-articulation of society is the possibility of social
dis-integration, the possibility of crisis. Crisis is simply the
extreme expression of social dis-articulation: the extreme
manifestation of the non-correspondence of labour and capital, of
production and consumption, of the sale and purchase of
labour-power and other commodities, of the political and the
economic. In that (still limited) sense, the crisis-ridden nature of
capitalism is already given in the dis-articulation of the class
relation.

\section{III}


If crisis is the extreme manifestation of the dis-articulation
of social relations, then any theory of a tendency towards
(or ’inevitability’ of) crisis must begin by asking why the
dis-articulation of social relations should take extreme forms. If
crisis is not viewed as simply endemic in capitalism (an endemic
dis-location of social relations) but is seen as the periodic
intensification of dis-articulation, then it is necessary to go
beyond the argument so far and ask how, in a society in
which there is no inevitability, one can yet talk of a tendency
towards crisis as the key to understanding the fragility of
capitalism


The problem is not just to understand crisis as a crisis of social
relations, rather than as an economic phenomenon. It is not
simply a question of seeing crisis as a periodic intensification of
class antagonism or of intensified social change (and hence
central to any understanding of social movement). This is
important, but the issue at this point of the argument is
how it is possible to talk of a tendency to crisis (or even
inevitability of crisis) without having recourse to external,
objective forces.


Any non-deterministic theory of crisis must locate the tendency
to crisis in the dynamic of struggle. There must be something
about the relation of struggle in capitalism, something about the
relation between capital and labour, that leads it to recurrent
crisis. This is not a question of seeing crisis as the consequence
of a wave of struggle or militancy (as, in different ways,
neo-Ricardian and autonomist analyses do), but of seeing
the tendency to crisis as embedded in the form of the class
antagonism.


It was argued above that the distinguishing feature of the
capitalist form of class antagonism was the disarticulation of the
class relation (expressed in freedom, value, mobility, etc), and that
this dis-articulation is expressed in all aspects of social relations.
Now, if crisis is seen as this social dis-articulation taken to
extreme, that already suggests the question: what is it about the
dis-articulation of class relations that makes it tend to extreme
forms?


So far the dis-articulation of social relations has been discussed
in terms of the distinction between capitalism and previous
forms of class society, as though the dis-articulation had been
completed at the dawn of capitalism. In an antagonistic society
such as capitalism, however, there are no states of being,
only processes of movement. Disarticulation, then, is not a
description of the state of class relations, but a dynamic of
struggle. Dis-articulation does not simply refer to the liberation
of the serfs from the feudal lords and the liberation of the
lords from their serfs, but can be seen as the continuing
centrifugal dynamic of antagonism, as workers fight against their
dependence on capital and capital fights against its dependence on
labour. It is the centrifugal dynamic of struggle which is
the core of capitalism’s tendency to crisis. Both labour and
capital constantly strive to liberate themselves from their
mutual dependence: that is the source of capitalism’s peculiar
fragility.


The centrifugal nature of the struggle against capital is
relatively easy to see. Our struggle is clearly a constant struggle to
get away from capital, a struggle for space, for autonomy, a
struggle to lengthen the leash, to intensify the dis-articulation of
domination. This takes a million different forms: throwing the
alarm clock at the wall, arriving late for ’work’, back-pain and
other forms of absenteeism, sabotage, struggles over tea-breaks,
for the shortening of the working day, for longer holidays, better
pensions, strikes of all sorts. Migration is a particularly important
and obvious form of flight, as millions of people flee from capital,
in hope. Struggles over wages too can be seen as struggles for
greater autonomy from capital, for, although an intensification of
work is often part of the deal for higher wages, money is identified
with ’freedom’, in its capitalist sense, with the capacity to lead a
life less subject to external dictates. The struggle to get
away from capital is obviously not confined to the place of
employment: struggles over health or housing, struggles against
nuclear power, attempts to establish anti-capitalist forms
of living or eating all are attempts to get away from the
domination of value. The struggle by labour (or, better,
against labour) is a constant struggle for autonomy from
capital, whether understood in terms of collective revolt or as
the individual exploitation of opportunities. The struggle
for autonomy is the refusal of domination, the NO which
reverberates in one form or another not only through places of
employment but through the whole of society (cf. Tronti
1964).


That capital’s struggle is also for autonomy is perhaps less
obvious. It would seem that the opposite is true. Capital’s struggle
is against the autonomy of doing. Where we seek to loosen the ties
of capitalist domination, capital seeks to tighten them; where we
seek to extend in-subordination, capital must subordinate; where
we seek to escape, capital must contain; where we seek to arrive
late, capital imposes the clock. It would seem that capital’s
struggle is constantly against the dis-articulation of society, and
that therefore the extreme manifestations of disarticulation (i.e.
crises) are a matter of contingency, dependent purely on the
particular outcome of the struggle between dis-articulation and
articulation.


Yet the matter is not so simple. Certainly, capital’s survival
depends on exploiting labour. What is distinctive about
capitalism, however, is the form of exploitation, the mediation of
the relation of exploitation through money (value, freedom,
mobility). Capital’s struggle to bind labour is mediated through
the dis-articulation of the social relation. The form in which
capital imposes its discipline on labour is through actual or
threatened flight from labour. The worker who arrives late is faced
with dismissal: not with the lash or the gallows, but with the
movement of capital away from her. The labour force that goes on
strike or does not work at the pace required by capital is normally
faced not by the machine-gun but by the closure of the factory
and the conversion of the capital into money. The workers who
raise the hand of insubordination are faced with dismissal and
replacement by machinery - the flight of capital from variable
capital through money to constant capital. The joy of capitalism,
from capital’s point of view, is that it is not bound to the
subordination of any particular worker or group of workers, but
only to the subordination of labour in general. If one group of
workers proves unsatisfactory, capital can simply spit them out,
turn itself into money and go in search of more subordinate
(’flexible’) workers. Capital is an inherently mobile form of
domination.


The paradox of capitalism is that both workers and capital
struggle constantly, in different ways, to liberate themselves from
labour. There is, in the peculiar form of the antagonism
between capital and work, a centrifugality: the two poles of the
antagonistic relation repel each other. There is a mutual
repulsion between humanity and capital (obvious enough, but
all-important). If one thinks of the dis-articulated bond of
capitalism in terms of a dogowner walking a dog on a long leash,
then the peculiarity of capitalism is that both owner and dog tend
to run away from each other.


To take the analogy a step further, crisis comes not when owner
and dog run in opposite directions, but when the unity of
the relation asserts itself through the leash. Dog and owner
may have forgotten about their attachment, but eventually
it asserts itself, independently of their will. It is the same
with capital: no matter how much labour and capital may
wish to forget about their mutual relationship, eventually it
asserts itself. Behind all the forms that the relationship may
take lies the fact that capital is nothing but objectivised
labour.


The process of social dis-articulation does not in itself contitute
a crisis. Hippies can opt out, workers can turn up late to work,
students can fritter away their time in the study of Marx,
capital can turn to financial speculation or handling drugs: all
that does not matter too much as long as the production of
capital (that is, the objectivisation of doing) itself is not
threatened. The dis-articulation of social relations means that
the reproduction of capital depends on one particular type
of social practice - the production of surplus value. It is
when the dis-articulation of social relations threatens the
production of surplus value (expressed through money as
profit) that the underlying unity of social relations asserts
itself.


In this sense, those theories of crisis which are based on
Marx’s analysis of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall
can be seen as more relevant than underconsumption or
disproportionality theories. Where the latter focus on expressions
of the extreme dis-articulation of social relations (the lack of
correspondence between production and consumption, or between
diferent sectors of production), they do not address directly
the relation between the classes, the relation of free mutual
repulsion which is the source of non-correspondence. The
contradiction of this mutual repulsion is, on the other hand, the
core of Marxs theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to
fall.


A crucial form of capital’s struggle for autonomy from living
labour is the replacement of living labour by dead, past labour, by
machinery. In its struggle to maximise surplus-value production,
capital is constantly compelled to wrestle with the insubordination
of the workmen (Marx 1965, p. 367), to struggle with the
refractory hand of labour (1965, p. 437). Capital’s response to the
insubordination of labour is to dissociate itself from living
labour, to replace the insubordinate worker by the docile
machine and to use the machine to impose order (Arkwright
created order, Marx quotes Ure as saying) (1965, p. 368).
The replacement of worker by machine is, of course, not
necessarily a direct response to insubordination: mediated through
money, it may take the form of a response to the costs of
maintaining subordination, that is, it may simply be seen as
cost-saving. Either way, the result is the same: capital’s struggle to
maximise surplus-value, which can be produced only by
living labour, takes the form of a flight from living labour,
the expulsion of living labour and its replacement by dead
labour.


Paradoxically, capital’s flight from labour intensifies its
dependence upon labour. Capital’s flight from labour means that
the reproduction of the material basis of its domination (value)
depends on the exploitation of a relatively decreasing number
of workers (this is what Marx refers to as a rising organic
composition of capital). For capital to reproduce itself, there
must be an ever intensifying exploitation of labour, which
in turn pre-supposes an ever intensifying subjugation of
humanity. If the intensification of exploitation is not sufficient to
counteract the effects of capital’s flight from labour, the
consequences for the reproduction of capital will manifest
themselves as a fall in the rate of profit. What is expressed in the
tendency of the rate of profit to fall is precisely the contradiction
between capitals flight from labour and its dependence upon
labour.


The endemic tendency to crisis is already given in the mutual
repulsion of humanity and capital. This mutual repulsion both
imposes the necessity for capital constantly to intensify its
exploitation of labour and makes it difficult for it to do so.
A crisis can be said to exist when the insubordination or
non-subordination of human life hinders the intensification of
exploitation required for capitalist reproduction to such an extent
that the profitability of capital is seriously affected. Through the
process of crisis, capital seeks to reorganise its relation with labour
in such a way as to restore profitability. This involves the
mobilisation of what Marx calls the counter-tendencies to
the tendency to the rate of profit to fall: raising the rate of
exploitation, eliminating a number of the capitals that would
otherwise participate in the share-out of total social surplus value,
restoring to some degree the proportional part played by living
labour by cheapening the elements of constant capital and
reducing the unproductive use of surplus value. This involves not
just a reorganisation of the labour process itself but of all those
conditions which affect the process of exploitation, that is say, the
whole of society. This ’mobilisation of the counter-tendencies’
typically involves bankruptcies, unemployment, wage cuts,
curtailment of trade union rights, an intensification of work for
those still in employment, an intensification of competition
between capitals and of conflict between states, cuts in state
expenditure on education, health and social welfare, a consequent
change in the relation between old and young, between women and
men, children and parents, a change too in the relation between
different aspects of ourselves, and so on. In so far as these
measures are successful for capital, a new subordination of life to
capital is achieved.


The whole process of crisis involves a direct confrontation between
capital and labour, between capital and the insubordination and
non-subordination of life. This confrontation means risks for
capital: the confrontation could lead not to greater subordination
but to more overt insubordination and an intensification of
capital’s difficulties. The dangers of confrontation are even more
clear from the perspective of particular capitals or particular
states which run the risk of losing in the intensified competition
and conflict which crisis implies. In other words, capital as a
whole, and also particular capitals and particular states, may have
an interest in avoiding or modifying the confrontation with the
forces of insubordination.


To return to the metaphor of the dog and its master, crisis can
be seen as the point in their mutual repulsion at which the leash
tightens, cuts into the dog’s neck and the master’s hand. It is
clear that dog and master cannot continue on their previous
course. Yet still there is nothing pre-determined about the
outcome. If the dog is sufficiently strong and determined
or has gathered sufficient momentum, it will either break
the leash or knock the master off his feet. Alternatively,
the master may have sufficient strength and skill to bring
the dog to heel. In his struggle to subordinate the dog, the
master has an important trick up his sleeve: he can extend
the leash. This is both an acknowledgement of the dog’s
strength and a manoeuvre to tire the dog into submission. Once
the dog is sufficiently tired and weakened, the owner can, if
necessary, beat the dog to bring it to heel and shorten the
leash.


The loosening of the leash, the avoidance of conflict with
the aim of winning the conflict is the expansion of credit.
Crisis (and hence the materiality of anti-power) cannot be
understood without discussing the role of the expansion of
credit.


As profits fall, companies in difficulties seek to survive by
borrowing money. Governments with economic and social
problems seek to avoid confrontation with their populations by
borrowing. Workers too seek to alleviate the effects of incipient
crisis by borrowing. The increased demand for loans combines
with the problems caused by insubordination in production to
make it attractive for capitals to lend their money rather than to
invest it in production. The onset of crisis gives rise to an
expansion of credit and debt. Accumulation becomes more and
more fictitious: the monetary representation of value becomes
more and more detached from the value actually produced.
Capitalism becomes more fictitious, more make-believe: workers
make believe that our income is greater than it is; capitalists make
believe that their businesses are profitable; banks make believe
that the debtors are financially sound. All make believe that there
is a greater production of surplus value than is actually the case.
All make believe that there is a greater subordination of labour,
a greater subordination of life to capital than is really so.
With the expansion of credit and debt, all our categories
of thought become more fictitious, more makebelieve. In a
peculiar, fetishised way, the expansion of credit expresses the
explosive force of the subjunctive, the longing for a different
society.


Classically, the expansion of credit reaches a point, however, at
which, as a result of the avoidance of confrontation with
insubordination, the relative decline in the surplus value produced
makes it impossible to maintain the fiction. More and more
debtors begin to default in their repayments, creditors (such as
banks) start to collapse and the crisis is precipitated in its full
intensity, with all the social confrontation that that involves.
There is a massive destruction of fictitious capital and a
massive destruction of the fictitious expectations and living
standards of most people. Such a destruction of a make-believe
world can be seen, for example, in the stock market crash of
1929.


This classic process of crisis will, however, be modified if there is
some ’lender of last resort’ who is able to keep on lending, to
maintain the expansion of credit in such a way as to avoid the
credit collapse. Credit then becomes much more elastic, the
world of make-believe more fantastic. The leash seems to be
infinitely extendible, giving both dog and master the illusion of
freedom.

\section{IV}


The seventy years or so since the crash of 1929 have seen a change
in the shape of crisis. Credit has become much more elastic, the
role of the lender of last resort much more prominent. The
constant expansion of credit and debt is now a central part of
capitalist development.


The extent to which the reproduction of capitalism now
depends on the constant expansion of debt is the clearest
indication of capital’s incapacity to adequately subordinate life
into labour. The insubordination of life has entered into the very
core of capital as chronic financial instability.


The point was made clearly by the US politician Bernard
Baruch, when Roosevelt abandoned the Gold Standard in 1933 in
order to meet social pressures for more flexible economic and
social policies: ’It can’t be defended except as mob rule. Maybe
the country doesn’t know it yet, but I think we may find
we’ve been in a revolution more drastic than the French
Revolution. The crowd has seized the seat of government and
is trying to seize the wealth. Respect for law and order is
gone.’ The mob had been allowed into the very heart of
capital. The government had given in to social discontent by
adopting policies that would undermine the stability of the
currency.


That was the essence of the debates of the inter-War period
surrounding the restoration and then the abandonment of the
Gold Standard. While Keynes and those of like mind argued that
it was necessary to adapt capitalist rule to incorporate the
new strength of labour (manifested above all in the wave of
revolutionary activity associated with October 1917) by accepting
a new, expanded role for the state and more flexible monetary
policies, their opponents argued that to do so would undermine
the long-term stability of money and therefore of capitalism.
Baruch and his friends (the ’old-world party’, as Keynes called
them) were, of course, right, but in the short term they lost the
argument: the mob was allowed into the heart of money and
monetary stability was undermined.


The problems that arise for capital from this type of development
became clear in the 1960s and early 1970s. The constant
expansion of credit implies above all a weakening of the
discipline of the market, a weakening of the social discipline
imposed by the law of value. By postponing or modifying crisis,
it makes possible the survival of inefficient capitals and,
even worse from the point of view of capital, the survival of
inefficient and insubordinate workers. It also implies the
autonomisation of financial markets from commodity markets.
Credit feeds on credit. In order to avoid defaulting in the
repayment of loans and interest, debtors need to borrow more. An
increasing proportion of credit granted is recycling credit, credit
granted just for the purpose of repaying loans (or, often,
the interest on loans). The more elaborate the structure of
credit becomes, the more difficult it becomes to maintain, but
also the more difficult to undo. A full-scale ’credit crunch’
(the destruction of fictitious capital) would not only cause
massive social hardship but also threaten the existence of
the banking system, and, with it, the existing structure of
capitalism.


The criticisms which had been voiced by the opponents of
Keynes in the 1920s and 1930s arose with force again in the 1970s,
when they formed the basis of the monetarist assault on the
assumptions of the post-war development of capitalism. The
monetarist critique of Keynesianism was directed against the
fictitious character of capitalist development (’funny money’, as
they called it) and against the social indiscipline which the
modification of the market promoted. The monetarist prescription
was essentially to reverse the Roosevelt-Keynes mistake and throw
the mob out of money. Baruch’s argument was now repeated in
the form of an argument about the need to limit democracy (and
the role of the state): the undermining of monetary stability
was discussed in terms of the ’economic consequences of
democracy’. More recently, the argument has taken the form
of advocating greater independence for central banks from
government (and therefore formal-democratic) influence. In each
case, the struggle of capital has been to get the mob out
of money. In each case, it has failed, simply because the
integration of labour through the expansion of debt and
the avoidance of crisis has taken such proportions that the
measures required to restore capitalism to financial stability
would be so drastic as to threaten the existence of capitalism
itself.


The attempt by the United States, British and other governments,
to impose market discipline through tightening the money supply
(that is, restricting the expansion of credit), in the years 1979 to
1982, not only caused considerable social hardship and economic
destruction, but also threatened to destroy the international
banking system. The restriction of credit by raising interest rates
in the United States created a situation in which it became
extremely difficult for some of the biggest debtors (such
as the Mexican, Argentine and Brazilian governments) to
repay their debts or even to pay the interest due. When the
Mexican government threatened in 1982 to default on its
payments, thus precipitating the so-called ’debt crisis’ of the
1980s, it became clear that the attempt to eliminate the
expansion of credit threatened the survival not only of the
debtors but also of the creditors, in this case the world’s major
banks.


The attempt to precipitate the massive destruction of fictitious
capital through tight monetary policies had proved impossible to
implement. The reproduction of capital required a new and
massive expansion of credit. The problem for capital was
how to provide the credit needed for the reproduction of
capital without alowing this credit expansion to undermine the
discipline needed for the exploitation of labour. The solution
attempted was the so-called ’supplyside’ economics of the 1980s:
the combination of measures to discipline labour with an
unprecedented expansion of credit. The dangers involved in such a
development were signalled by a number of critics of this ’voodoo
economics’ in the mid-1980s. Although the critics were correct in
pointing to the instability entailed by the expansion of debt,
the stock market crash of 1987, of which they had warned,
simply increased the pressures to expand credit in order to
avoid a worse crisis. The response of the governments was
the same: the expansion of credit and the introduction of
measures to avoid at all costs a massive destruction of fictitious
capital.


The response to the recession of the early 1990s was the same
’Keynesian’ response, especially on the part of the United
States and Japanese governments: to reduce the rates of
interest to stimulate borrowing, to create money through
credit. In this case, however, a lot of the money borrowed in
the United States (on the basis of the 3interest rate set by
the Federal Reserve) was not invested in the US but in the
international money markets, and especially in the so-called
emerging markets, where there were high profits to be won.
The most important of the emerging markets was Mexico,
where the inflow of capital in the form of money contributed
to the opening of a huge abyss between the reality of the
process of accumulation and its appearance, the abyss that
was revealed in the devaluation of the peso in December
1994.


The result of the constant postponement of crisis through the
expansion of debt has been an ever growing separation between
productive and monetary accumulation. Money has been
expanding at a far faster rate than the value it represents. In other
words, despite the very real restructuring of the productive
process that has taken place over the last twenty years or so, the
survival of capitalism is based on an ever increasing expansion of
debt. Many statistics can be used to tell what is basically the
same story. Public debt, for example, which was the central theme
of the monetarist attack against Keynesianism, continues to
expand: the OECD calculates that the net public debt of its
member states increased from 21of the European governments
grew from less than 25IMF figures for the member states of the
Group of Seven, domestic credit as a proportion of gross
domestic product rose from 44.48 per cent in 1955 to 104.54 per
cent in 1994. The world bond market (which is closely tied
to the financing of government budget deficits) tripled in
size between 1986 and 1997. The growth in world money
transactions has been far faster than the growth in world trade:
while yearly transactions in the London Eurodollar market
represented six times the value of world trade in 1979, but by
1986 were about 25 times the value of world trade and 18
times the value of the world’s largest economy. Well over a
trillion dollars are exchanged daily on the world’s foreign
exchange markets, and this figure has been increasing about
30The late 1980s and the 1990s saw a massive rise in the
expansion of debt through securitisation - the development of
new forms of property in debt, particularly the so-called
’derivatives’: the derivatives markets grew at the rate of
140


The separation between real and monetary accumulation is
crucial for understanding the instability, volatility, fragility and
unpredictability of capitalism today. Since the whole financial
structure of capitalism is so heavily based on credit and debt, any
default or threat of default by a major debtor (such as Mexico)
can cause great upheaval in the financial markets: the urgency
with which the international package to support the peso was put
together at the beginning of 1995 was related to fears that the
Mexican government could default on the payment of its
debt. More generally, the autonomisation of the financial
markets which the non-destruction of fictitious capital supports
implies the possibility of creating ever more sophisticated
financial instruments of doubtful validity; it also implies the
increasingly rapid movement of greater and greater quantities of
money on the worlds financial markets, and therefore a radical
change in the relation between individual states and world
capital.


All this does not mean that world financial collapse is imminent.
It does, however, mean that a chronic financial instability has
become a central feature of contemporary capitalism, and that the
possibility of a world financial collapse has become a structural
characteristic of capitalism, even in periods of rapid accumulation.
This has two crucial consequences for the understanding of crisis
today. Firstly, it means that attempts to administer the crisis by
political means acquire a new importance. Both nationally and
internationally, the confrontation with insubordination is
selectively directed. Rather like a bank manager faced with
bad debts, both states and international agencies like the
International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Group of
Seven discriminate between debtors. Depending on their
position and the possible consequences of overt coercion,
debtor states are dealt with more or less leniently. In all
cases, debt is used as a means of imposing social discipline,
subordination to the logic of capital, although not always with
success.


In spite of all the praise of the market by the people who
operate and support this process of debt administration, the
administration of debt is very far from being the free operation of
the market. Just the contrary: the administration of debt
which now plays such an important part in the world arises
simply because the free operation of the market would give
rise to such a level of social confrontation, to such a wave
of insubordination, that the survival of capitalism would
probably become impossible. What has taken its place is an
administered confrontation with insubordination, with the debt
administrators taking only such measures as they think are
socially and politically feasible. The result is a deferred,
prolonged, fragmented crisis, in which total confrontation is
avoided, in which the full implications of crisis are felt only
in certain countries and regions, while others continue to
enjoy what is known as prosperity. The incidence of crisis
is always uneven as some capitals or states gain from the
intensification of conflict which crisis entails, but this disparity is
arguably intensified as a result of the role played by debt
administration. Drastic falls in the standard of living in some
areas are accompanied in other areas by talk of a ’Goldilocks
economy’ and of a ’new paradigm’ in which the problem of crisis
has been solved.


At the heart of this administration of crisis is a problem
for capital. There is only a partial confrontation with the
expansion of debt and consequently with the insubordination or
non-subordination which capital needs to eliminate. Capital, in
order to develop with some degree of stability, needs to produce
more and more surplus value, needs to exploit labour more and
more effectively, needs to eliminate the insubordination and
non-subordination which hinders it from doing so. The continued
expansion of debt suggests that it is not succeeding in doing so. In
spite of the partial confrontations, capitalism’s dependence on
debt continues to grow. In part this is actually stimulated by the
process of debt administration itself. Big debtors (large states,
large companies, large banks) come to learn through the process of
administration that they are ’too big to fail’, that the states and
international agencies cannot allow them to collapse, because of
the social and economic consequences that such a collapse would
entail.


Consequently, they know that, no matter how ’irresponsibly’
they behave, no matter how indebted they may become in the
attempt to maximise their profits at all cost, they will be bailed
out by state or international agencies. The attempt to impose the
discipline of the market undermines this discipline at the same
time. This is the so-called problem of ’moral hazard’ which is now
at the heart of debt administration.


Secondly, crisis, by virtue of being adminstered, becomes
more and not less unpredictable. It would be completely
wrong to think that ’administration of the crisis’ means
that crisis is under control. Whereas in the time of Marx
the occurrence of crisis followed a more or less predictable
pattern, this is much less so today. The expansion of credit
and the rise in the relative importance of the money form
of capital which is inseparable from that expansion mean
that there is an enormous increase in the speed and volume
of capital movements. Rather than the unpredictability of
capital being overcome, the expansion and administration of
credit mean that crisis is increasingly mediated through the
rapid and volatile movement of money. Hence the series of
financial crises which have hit the world over the last twenty
years or so: the Debt crisis of 1982, the stock market crash
of 1987, the savings and loans and junk bond crises and
scandals of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the tequila crisis of
1994\Slash{}95, the South East Asia crisis of 1997\Slash{}98, the rubel crisis
of 1998, the samba crisis of 1998\Slash{}1999, the tango crisis of
2000. In each one of these cases, the administrators have
succeeded in restricting the impact of the crisis, normally with
dire consequences for those affected; but in each case there
has been a risk of a ’systemic crisis’, of a world financial
crisis.


The more the separation between real and monetary accumulation
grows, the greater the gap between the real subordination of life
achieved and the subordination demanded by the voraciousness of
capital. Capital, in order to survive, becomes more and more
demanding. ’Kneel, kneel! Prostrate yourselves! Sell every
last drop of dignity that you possess!’ is the watchword of
contemporary capital. The drive to subordinate every aspect
of life more and more intensely to capital is the essence of
neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is the attempt to resolve crisis by
the intensification and reorganisation of subordination. The
separation of subject and object (the dehumanisation of
the subject) is taken to new lengths by the extension of
command-through-money. Just as capital in the eighteenth
century extablished its rule through the enclosure of land
(that is, the separation of people from the land), capital
now is trying to overcome its crisis through the enclosure of
more and more areas of social activity, imposing the rule of
money where previously subordination was only indirect. The
commodification of land, the increased commodification of
health care and education, the extension of the concept of
property to include software and genes, the cutting back of
social welfare provision in those countries where it exists, the
increase in stress at work: all of these are measures which
attempt to extend and intensify subordination, which mark
out new areas and say ’these areas are now subject to the
direct rule of capital, of money’. In the same way as the
enclosures of the eighteenth century meant that conduct
that was previously just minding one’s own business now
became conductagainst-capital, conduct to be punished by law
and poverty, so the enclosures of today mean that conduct
previously regarded as normal begins to appear as a threat
to capital. Thus, for example, the desire of the indigenous
people of Chiapas to maintain their traditional patterns of
life comes into conflict with the extension of property to
include genetic development; in universities it becomes more
difficult for students or professors to work on themes like Plato
or Aristotle, because that sort of work is not considered
compatible with capital’s drive to subordinate intellectual work
more and more to its needs; the simple pleasure of playing
with children or celebrating birthdays becomes harder to
maintain in the face of the intensification of stress at work.
We are told in so many ways by capital to bend our lives
more and more to its dictates (to the operation of the law of
value), our lack of subordination becomes more and more a
point of conflict, something to be punished by poverty or
worse. ’Kneel, kneel, kneel!’ cries capital. In vain: it is not
enough.


In the 1930s Paul Mattick spoke of the ’permanent crisis’ of
capitalism; it would seem that we are in a similar situation, in a
prolonged crisis that is not resolved. Mattick was too optimistic:
the crisis of the 1930s was not permanent, itwas resolved,
through the slaughter of about thirty million people. That is
frightening.


And yet, there is nothing pre-determined about the crisis. We
are the crisis, we-who-scream, in the streets, in the countryside, in
the factories, in the offices, in our houses; we, the insubordinate
and non-subordinate who say no!, we who say Enough!, enough of
your stupid power games, enough of your stupid exploitation,
enough of your idiotic playing at soldiers and bosses; we who do
not exploit and do not want to exploit, we who do not have
power and do not want to have power, we who still want
to live lives that we consider human, we who are without
face and without voice: we are the crisis of capitalism. The
theory of crisis is not just a theory of fear but also a theory of
hope.

\chapter{Revolution?}

\section{I}


If crisis expresses the extreme dis-articulation of social relations,
then revolution must be understood as the intensification of
crisis.


This implies a rejection of two distinct understandings of
crisis. Firstly, it rejects the traditional concept of the crisis as
an opportunity for revolution. This is a concept shared by
Marxists of many different perspectives. The argument is
that when the big crisis of capitalism comes, this will be the
moment in which revolution becomes possible: economic crisis
will lead to an intensification of class struggle, and this, if
guided by effective revolutionary organisation, can lead to
revolution. This approach understands crisis as economic crisis, as
something distinct from class struggle, rather than as being itself
class struggle, a turning point in class struggle, the point
at which the mutual repulsion of capital and anti-labour
(humanity) obliges capital to restructure its command or lose
control.


Secondly, this approach rejects the view that the crisis of capital
can be equated with its restructuring. This view sees crisis
as being functional for capital, a creative destruction (to
use Schumpeters phrase) which destroys inefficient capitals
and imposes discipline on the workers. The crisis of one
economic model or paradigm of rule leads automatically, in this
view, to the establishment of a new one. The argument here
is that a crisis is essentially open. Crisis may indeed lead
to a restructuring of capital and to the establishment of a
new pattern of rule, but it may not. To identify crisis with
restructuring is to close the possibility of the world, to rule
out the definitive rupture of capital. To identify crisis with
restructuring is also to be blind to the whole world of struggle
that capitals transition from its crisis to its restructuring has
always involved.


Crisis is, rather, the falling apart of the social relations of
capitalism. It can never be assumed in advance that capital will
succeed in recomposing them. Crisis involves a salto mortale for
capital, with no guarantee of a safe landing. Our struggle is
against capitals restructuring, our struggle is to intensify the
disintegration of capitalism.

\section{II}


The moving force of crisis is the drive for freedom, the reciprocal
flight of capital of capital and anti-labour, the mutual repulsion of
capital and humanity. The first moment of revolution is purely
negative.


On the side of capital, the drive for freedom involves the
spewing out of nauseating workers, the insatiable pursuit of the
alchemists dream of making money from money, the endlessly
restless violence of credit and debt.


On the side of anti-capital, flight is in the first place negative,
the refusal of domination, the destruction and sabotage of the
instruments of domination (machinery, for instance), a running
away from domination, nomadism, exodus, desertion. People have
a million ways of saying No. The driving force is not so much
insubordination, the overt and militant refusal of capital, as
non-subordination, the less perceptible and more confused
reluctance to conform. Often the No is expressed so personally
(dying ones hair green, committing suicide, going mad) that it
appears to be incapable of having any political resonance. Often
the No is violent or barbaric (vandalism, hooliganism, terrorism):
the depradations of capitalism are so intense that they provoke a
scream-against, a No which is almost completely devoid of
emancipatory potential, a No so bare that it merely reproduces
that which is screamed against. The current development of
capitalism is so terroristic that it provokes a terroristic response,
so anti-human that it provokes an equally anti-human response,
which, although quite comprehensible, merely reproduces the
relations of power which it seeks to destroy. And yet that is the
starting point: not the considered rejection of capitalism as
a mode of organisation, not the militant construction of
alternatives to capitalism. They come later (or may do). The
starting point is the scream, the dangerous, often barbaric
No.

\section{III}


Capitalisms survival depends on recapturing those in flight.
Workers must work and produce value. Capital must exploit them.
Without that, there would be no capitalism. Without that, capital
as a whole would be left in the same position as the unhappy Mr.
Peel:


Mr Peel took with him from England to Swan River, West
Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount
of 50,000. Mr Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides,
3000 persons of the working-class, men, women and children. Once
arrived at his destination, ”Mr. Peel was left without a servant to
make his bed or fetch his water from the river.” Unhappy Mr. Peel
who provided for everything except the export of English modes of
production to Swan River!” (Marx 1965, p. 766) Mr Peel ceased to
be a capitalist (and his money ceased to be capital) simply
because the workers fled. In the West Australia of that period,
there did not exist the conditions to force them to sell their
labour power to capital. Because there was land available, the
workers were not separated from the means of doing. Mr Peels
export of capital turned out to be a flight into emptiness. His
incapacity to reunite himself with labour meant that he ceased to
rule.


The recapture of the workers in flight depends on the
double nature of the workers freedom. They are free not
only to sell their labour power, but also free of access to the
means of doing. The answer to Mr. Peels problem, in West
Australia as elsewhere, is to separate the workers from the
means of doing by enclosure. People must be deprived of
their freedom to do what they like: freedom is gradually
enclosed, hemmed in. This is achieved by the establishment of
property, the appropriation of the land and other means of living
and doing, so that in the end the people have no option
but to choose freely to be exploited by Mr. Peel and his
like.


Property is the means by which freedom is reconciled with
domination. Enclosure is the form of compulsion compatible with
freedom. You can live wherever you like, provided of course that it
is not the property of others; you can do whatever you like,
provided of course that it does not involve using the property of
others. If you have no access to the means of doing, because all of
it is the property of others, then of course you are free to
go and offer to sell your labour power to them in order to
survive. That does not mean that the owners of the means
of doing are obliged to buy your labour power, because of
course they have the freedom to use their property as they
wish. Property restricts the flight of those without property,
but it does nothing at all to restrict the flight of those who
own property. Quite possibly, when the workers (or their
descendants) eventually returned cap in hand to Mr. Peel
(or his descendants) to ask him for a job, they found that
he had already invested his money in another part of the
world where he would have less problem in converting it into
capital.


The basic formula for the recapture of those in flight from
labour is property. Those who do not want to labour are entirely
free to do as they like, but since the means of doing are enclosed
by property, those who do not wish to labour are likely to starve
unless they change their attitude and sell their labour power (their
and only property) to the owners of the means of doing, thus
returning to the labour from which they have fled. Hemmed in,
they can try to escape by stealing, but risk being hemmed in
even more by the operation of the judicial system. In some
countries, they can try to escape by turning to the system of
social security or public assistance, which, by and large,
keeps people from starving to death on the streets, but,
more and more, these systems are designed to return those
in flight to the labour market. They can try to escape by
borrowing, but few lenders will lend their money to those who are
not using their labour power as property to be sold on the
market, and even if they do succeed in borrowing, the debt
collectors will soon come knocking. In some cases, those in
flight set up their own businesses or even form co-operatives,
but, in the relatively few cases where these survive, they
do so by subordinating themselves to the discipline of the
market, by integrating themselves into forms of behaviour
from which they have fled. The system of property is like a
maze with no exit: all paths of flight lead to recapture. In
time, the walls of the maze penetrate the person trapped
within. The external limitations become internal definitions,
selfdefinitions, identification, the assumption of roles, the
adoption of categories which take the existence of the walls
so much for granted that they become invisible. But never
entirely.


Capital is not hemmed in in the same way. On the contrary,
property is its passport to movement. Property can be converted
into money, and money can be moved with ease. The curtailing of
the flight of capital comes through periodic crisis as mediated
through the movement of the market, through the relative
attraction of different investment opportunities. It is above all
crisis, and the changing in market patterns through which the
threat manifests itself, that forces capital, in flight from
non-subordinate labour, to confront that labour and face up to
its task of exploiting. The confrontation with labour is a
confrontation with anti-labour, with labour in flight from labour.
The confrontation involves the ever more intensive exploitation of
those workers who have chosen freely to be exploited and the
ever more profound enclosure of all the means of living and
doing that, if left unenclosed, might stimulate the flight and
non-subordination of the workers. Hence the twin drives of
contemporary capitalism: the intensification of labour through the
introduction of new technologies and new working practices, and
the simultaneous extension of property to enclose more and more
areas (genes, software, land). The more capital is repelled by
people, the more it is forced to refashion people in its own image.
The more frenetically capital flees from non-subordination
(globalisation, in other words), the more violently it has to
subordinate.


Capital becomes more and more repulsive. More and more, it
drives us to flee. But flight seems hopeless, unless it is more than
flight. The scream of refusal must also be a reaffirmation of doing,
an emancipation of power-to.

\section{IV}


To break from capital, it is not enough to flee. It not enough to
scream. Negativity, our refusal of capital, is the crucial starting
point, theoretically and politically. But mere refusal is easily
recaptured by capital, simply because it comes up against capitals
control of the means of production, means of doing, means of
living. For the scream to grow in strength, there must be a
recuperation of doing, a development of power-to. That implies a
re-taking of the means of doing.


Power-to is already implicit in the scream. Flight is rarely mere
flight, the No is rarely mere No. At very least, the scream is
ecstatic: in its refusal of that which exists, it projects some idea
of what might exist in its place. Struggles are rarely mere
struggles-against. The experience of shared struggle already
involves the development of relations between people that are
different in quality from the social relations of capitalism. There is
much evidence that for people involved in strikes or similar
struggles, the most important outcome of the struggles is
often not the realisation of the immediate demands, but the
development of a community of struggle, a collective doing
characterised by its opposition to capitalist forms of social
relations. Barbarism is not as merely negative as the classic
dichotomy between socialism and barbarism suggests. Struggle
implies the reaffirmation of social doing, the recuperation of
power-to.


But the recuperation of power-to or the reaffirmation of doing is
still limited by capitals monopoly of the means of doing. The
means of doing must be re-appropriated. But what does that
mean?


The appropriation by the working class of the means of
production has always been a central element of programmes for a
transition to communism. In the mainstream communist tradition,
this has been understood as the appropriation by the state of the
largest factories, as state ownership of at least the commanding
heights of the economy. In the practice of the Soviet Union
and other communist countries, this did little to transform
doing itself or to make doing the responsibility of the doers
themselves. The term means of production has generally been
avoided here precisely because it conjures up images that
are difficult to dissociate from this tradition. The problem
remains, however: if the means of doing are controlled by
capital, then any flight from capital comes up against the
need to survive, the need to do in a world in which we do
not control the means of doing. As long as the means of
doing are in the hands of capital, then doing will be ruptured
and turned against itself. The expropriators must indeed be
expropriated.


To think in terms of property is, however, still to pose the
problem in fetishised terms. Property is a noun which is used to
describe and conceal an active process of separating. The
substance of capitalist rule is not an established relationship
between a person and a thing (property), but rather an active
process of separating us from the means of doing. The fact
that this separating is continuously repeated does not, for
us, convert a verb into a noun. The fact that it becomes a
habitual separating does not in any sense make it normal, any
more than the habitual beating by a man of his wife makes
that normal or converts the verb of beating into a noun, or
an established fact. To think of property as a noun, as a
thing, is to accept the terms of domination. Nor can we start
from the means of production, for the distinction between
production and doing is itself a result of the separation; nor
even from the means of doing, for the very separation of
means of doing from doing is a result of the rupture of doing.
The problem is not that the means of production are the
property of capitalists; or rather, to say that the means of
production are the property of the capitalists is merely a
euphemism which conceals the fact that capital actively breaks
our doing every day, takes our done from us, breaks the social
flow of doing which is the pre-condition of our doing. Our
struggle, then, is not the struggle to make ours the property
of the means of production, but to dissolve both property
and means of production: to recover or, better, create the
conscious and confident sociality of the flow of doing. Capital
rules by fetishising, by alienating the done from the doing
and the doer and saying this done is a thing and it is mine.
Expropriating the expropriator cannot then be seen as a
re-seizure of a thing, but rather as the dissolution of the
thing-ness of the done, its (re)integration into the social flow of
doing.


Capital is the movement of separating, of fetishising, the
movement of denying movement. Revolution is the movement
against separating, against fetishising, against the denial of
movement. Capital is the denial of the social flow of doing,
communism is the social movement of doing against its own
denial. Under capitalism, doing exists in the mode of being denied.
Doing exists as things done, as established forms of social
relations, as capital, money, state, the nightmarish perversions of
past doing. Dead labour rules over living doing and perverts it
into the grotesque form of living labour. This is an explosive
contradiction in terms: living implies openness, creativity, while
labour implies closure, pre-definition. Communism is the
movement of this contradiction, the movement of living against
labour. Communism is the movement of that which exists in the
mode of being denied.


The movement of doing is a movement against the denial of its
sociality. Memory is an important part of this, the communal
putting together of the experience of collective movement and of
opposition to its fragmentation. The movement of the sociality of
doing implies social or communal forms of organisation. ’The
workers’ council spells the political and economic defeat of
reification, as Lukcs points out (1971, p. 80). It cannot, however,
be a question of reifying in turn the workers council or soviet as a
fixed model: each phase of struggle throws up its own forms of
communal organisation. It is clear, for example, that the
internet is permitting the creation of new patterns in the
formation of collective struggle. What is important is the
knitting or re-knitting or patch-working of the sociality of
doing and the creation of social forms of articulating that
doing.


The movement of communism is anti-heroic. Heroes stand out
from the community, draw to themselves the communal force of
action. The revolutionary tradition is full of heroes, people
who have sacrificed themselves for the revolution, people
(mostly young men, it must be admitted) who have abandoned
wives, children, friends, to dedicate themselves selflessly
to changing the world, confronting physical hardship and
danger, often even torture and death. Nobody would deny
the importance of such figures, and yet there is something
very contradictory in the notion of a heroic revolution, or
indeed of a revolutionary hero. The aim of revolution is the
transformation of ordinary, everyday life and it is surely from
ordinary, everyday life that revolution must arise. The idea
of a communist revolution is to create a society in which
we are not led, in which we all assume responsibility, so
our thought and our traditions must move in terms of the
non-leaders, not the heroes. Militancy cannot be the axis
of revolutionary thought, although certainly the work of
militants is crucial in any form of organising. Revolution is
conceivable only if we start from the assumption that being a
revolutionary is a very ordinary, very usual matter, that we are all
revolutionaries, albeit in very contradictory, fetishised, repressed
ways (but then the heroes of the revolutionary tradition were also
contradictory, fetishised and repressed in many ways). The
scream, the No, the refusal that is an integral part of living
in a capitalist society: that is the source of revolutionary
movement. The weaving of friendship, of love, of comradeship, of
communality in the face of the reduction of social relations
to commodity exchange: that is the material movement of
communism. The non-subordinate are the anti-heroes of the
revolution.


Revolution is the return of the repressed. The return of the
repressed makes up the tabooed and subterranean history of
civilisation. (Marcuse 1998, p. 16) Marcuse is speaking here of the
movement of the pleasure principle against the reality principle,
but the point has a general validity. Communism, we said, is the
movement of that which exists in the mode of being denied.
Communism, then, is the return of the repressed, the revolt
against fetishism. To start theorising from militancy is something
like pre-Freudian psychology, focussing on the manifest symptoms
rather than that which exists in a state of subterranean repression,
in the mode of being denied. This is surely the political
importance of a theory of fetishism, that it starts from the
force of the denied and the revolt against the process of
denial.


That which exists in the mode of being denied is not just
a project: it exists. It exists as the creativity upon which
capital depends. It exists as the living blood which is the sole
nourishment of the capitalist vampire. It exists as negation, as
non-identity. It exists as revulsion, as flight from domination, as
the substance of capitalist crisis, in much the same way as, in
Freudian theory, the repressed is the substance of neurosis. It
exists as the driving force of the explosion of debt. It exists as the
sociality upon which private property (the negation of that
sociality) depends, as the intense sociality of production which is
concealed by the integument of private property, but which makes
the claim of private property ever more grotesque. It exists as the
movement of anti-fetishisation, as the crisis of fetishised forms. It
exists, therefore, as the crisis of the labour movement itself, as
crisis of its organisational forms and of its received ideas. It exists
as the crisis of working class identity, of which this book is
undoubtedly an expression. The force of that which exists in the
mode of being denied is the crisis of all identity, that of capital
and that of labour. As such it is to be welcomed: our struggle
is not to establish a new identity or composition, but to
intensify anti-identity. The crisis of identity is a liberation from
certainties: from the certainties of capital, but equally from the
certainties of labour. The crisis of Marxism is the freeing of
Marxism from dogmatism; the crisis of the revolutionary
subject is the liberation of the subject from knowing. That
which exists in the mode of being denied exists as creative
uncertainty against-in-and-beyond a closed, pre-determined
world.

\section{V}


Revolutionary politics (or better, anti-politics) is the explicit
affirmation in all its infinite richness of that which is denied.
Dignity is the word that the zapatistas use to talk of this
affirmation, meaning by that not just the aim of creating a society
based on the mutual recognition of human dignity and dignities,
but the recognition now, as a guiding principle of organisation and
action, of the human dignity which already really exists in the
form of being denied, in the struggle against its own denial.
Dignity is the self-assertion of those who are repressed and of
that which is repressed, the affirmation of power-to in all its
multiplicity and in all its unity. The movement of dignity
includes a huge diversity of struggles against oppression,
many or most of which do not even appear to be struggles,
but it does not imply a micro-political approach, simply
because this chaotic richness of struggles is a single struggle to
emancipate power-to, to liberate human doing from capital.
It is an anti-politics rather than a politics simply because
it moves against and beyond the fragmentation of doing
that the term politics implies, with all its connotation of
orientation towards the state and distinction between public and
private.


The struggle of that which exists in the form of being denied is
inevitably both negative and positive, both scream and doing:
negative because its affirmation can take place only against its
own denial, and positive because it is the assertion of that which
exists, albeit in the form of being denied. Anti-politics cannot
therefore just be a question of doing our own thing, because our
own thing is inevitably oppositional. Nor, however, can it just be
negative: actions that are purely negative may be cathartic, but
they do nothing to overcome the separation on which capitalist
rule is based. To overcome that separation, actions must
point-beyond in some way, assert alternative ways of doing: strikes
that do not just withdraw labour but point to alternative
ways of doing (by providing free transport, a different kind
of health care); university protests that do not just close
down the university but suggest a different experience of
study; occupations of buildings that turn those buildings
into social centres, centres for a diiferent sort of political
action; revolutionary struggles that do not just try to defeat
the government but to transform the experience of social
life.


Merely negative action inevitably engages with capital on
capitals own terms, and on capitals terms we shall always lose,
even when we win. The problem with armed struggle, for example,
is that it accepts from the beginning that it is necessary to adopt
the methods of the enemy in order to defeat the enemy: but
even in the unlikely event of military victory, it is capitalist
social relations that have triumphed. And yet, how does
one defend oneself from armed robbery (capital) without
being armed? The problem of struggle is to move on to a
different dimension from capital, not to engage with capital
on capitals own terms, but to move forward in modes in
whih capital cannot even exist: to break identity, break the
homogenisation of time. This means seeing struggle as a process of
ever-renewed experiment, as creative, as negating the cold hand of
Tradition (but not negating the antihomogenising thrust of
memory).


This implies a non-instrumental concept of revolution. The
orthodox Marxist tradition, most clearly the Leninist tradition,
conceives of revolution instrumentally, as a means to an end. The
problem with this approach is that it subordinates the infinite
richness of struggle, which is important precisely because it is a
struggle for infinite richness, to the single aim of taking power. In
doing so, it inevitably reproduces power-over (the subordination of
the struggles to the Struggle) and ensures continuity rather than
the rupture that is sought. Instrumentalism means engaging with
capital on capitals own terms, accepting that our own world
can come into being only after the revolution. But capitals
terms are not simply a given, they are an active process of
separating. It is absurd, for example, to think that the struggle
against the separating of doing can lie through the state, since
the very existence of the state as a form of social relations
is an active separating of doing. To struggle through the
state is to become involved in the active process of defeating
yourself.


How, then, do we prevent the process of fetishisation, the
breaking of doing, the separating of doing and done? It is
surely wrong to think in terms of a continuous process of
organisation-building. Certainly there must be an accumulation of
practices of oppositional self-organisation, but this should be
thought of not as a linear accumulation, but as a cumulative
breaking of linearity. Think of discontinuities rather than
continuity, flashes of lightning which light up the sky and pierce
the capitalist forms of social relations, showing them for what they
are: a daily repeated and never re-determined struggle to break
our doing and to break us, a daily repeated struggle to make the
abnormal seem normal and the avoidable seem inevitable. Think
of an anti-politics of events rather than a politics of organisation.
The events do not happen spontaneously. Like parties, they
require work and preparation: here the work of dedicated militants
is crucial. But the aim is not to reproduce and expand the
caste of militants (the organisation) but to blast open the
continuum of history (Benjamin, 1973, p. 264). The shift from a
politics of organisation to a politics of events is already taking
place: May 1968, of course, the collapse of the regimes of
Eastern Europe too; more recently, the development of the
zapatista rebellion, for all its organisational formality, has been a
movement through events, and the wave of demonstrations
against global neo-liberalism (Seattle, Davos, Washington,
Prague, and so on) is obviously event-centred. At their best,
such events are flashes against fetishism, festivals of the
non-subordinate, carnivals of the oppressed, explosions of the
pleasure principle, intimations of the nunc stans. For revolution is
the explicit unification of constitution and existence, the
overcoming of the separation of is and is-not, the end of the
dominion of dead labour over living doing, the dissolution of
identity.


How then do we change the world without taking power? At the
end of the book, as at the beginning, we do not know. The
Leninists know, or used to know. We do not. Revolutionary change
is more desperately urgent than ever, but we do not know any
more what revolution means. Asked, we tend to cough and
splutter and try to change the subject. In part, our not-knowing is
the not-knowing of those who are historically lost: the knowing of
the revolutionaries of the last century has been defeated. But it is
more than that: our not-knowing is also the notknowing of those
who understand that not-knowing is part of the revolutionary
process. We have lost all certainty, but the openness of uncertainty
is central to revolution. Asking we walk, say the zapatistas. We
ask not only because we do not know the way (we do not), but
also because asking the way is part of the revolutionary process
itself.

\section{VI}


This is a book that does not have an ending. It is a definition that
negates itself in the same breath. It is a question, an invitation to
discuss.


This is a book that does not have a happy ending. Nothing in
this book has changed the horrors of the society in which we
live. How many children have died needlessly since I started
to write it? How many since you began to read it? If the
book has done anything to weaken or dull the scream or to
conceptualise it out of existence, it has failed. The aim has
been to strengthen it, to make it more strident. The scream
continues.


This is a book that does not (yet?) have a happy ending.

\chapter{Bibliography}


Acanda Jorge Luis (2000)


Adorno Theodor W. (1967) Prisms: Cultural Criticism and Society (London: ?)


Adorno Theodor W. (1978) 'Subject-Object', in Arato and Gebhardt (1978)


Adorno Theodor W. (1990) Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge)


Arato Andrew and Gebhardt Eike (1978) The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York; ?)


Ashe Fidelma (1999) 'The Subject', in Ashe et al. (1999), pp. 88-110


Ashe Fidelma et al. (1999) Contemporary Social and Political Theory: An
Introduction (Buckingham: Open University Press)


Backhaus Hans-Georg (1992) 'Between Philosophy and Science: Marxian Social Economy as Critical Theory', in Bonefeld et al (1992a), pp. 54-92


Benjamin Walter (1931) 'Linke Melancholie', Die Gesellschaft, VIII


Benjamin Walter (19??) Theses on the Philosophy of History


Bernstein Eduard (1961) Evolutionary Socialism (New York: Schocken)


Best Steven and Kellner Douglas Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (London: Macmillan)


Blake William (1973) William Blake (Introduced and edited by J. Bronowski) (Harmondsworth: Penguin)


Bloch Ernst (1961) Naturrecht und menschliche Würde (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp)


Bloch Ernst (1964) Tübinger Einleitung in die Philosophie (2 Bde) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp)


Bloch Ernst (1993) Das Prinzip Hoffnung (3 Bde) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp)


Bonefeld Werner (1987) 'Marxism and the concept of Mediation', Common Sense no. 2


Bonefeld Werner (1988) 'Class Struggle and the Permanence of Primitive Accumulation', Common Sense no. 6


Bonefeld Werner (1991) 'The Reformulation of State Theory', in Bonefeld and Holloway (1991), pp. 35-68


Bonefeld Werner (1994) 'Human Practice and Perversion: Between Autonomy and Structure', Common Sense no. 15, pp. 43-52


Bonefeld Werner (1995) 'Capital as Subject and the Existence of Labour', in Bonefeld et al. (1995), pp. 182-212


Bonefeld Werner (2001) 'Clase y Constitución', Bajo el Volcán no. 2


Bonefeld Werner, Brown Alice and Purnham Peter (1995) A Major Crisis? (Aldershot: Dartmouth)


Bonefeld Werner, Gunn Richard and Psychopedis Kosmas (1992) 'Introduction', in Bonefeld et al. (1992a)


Bonefeld Werner, Gunn Richard and Psychopedis Kosmas (eds) (1992a) Open Marxism, Volume I: Dialectics and History (London: Pluto)


Bonefeld Werner, Gunn, Richard and Psychopedis Kosmas (eds) (1992b) Open Marxism, Volume II: Theory and Practice (London: Pluto)


Bonefeld Werner, Gunn, Richard, Holloway John and Psychopedis Kosmas (eds) (1995) Open Marxism, Volume III: Emancipating Marx (London: Pluto)


Bonefeld Werner and Holloway John (eds) (1991) Post-Fordism and Social Form (London: Macmillan)


Bonefeld Werner and Holloway John (eds) (1995) Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money (London: Macmillan)


Bonefeld Werner and Psychopedis Kosmas (2000) The Politics of Change (London: Palgrave)


Bonnet Alberto (2000) Dinero y capital-dinero en la globalización (Buenos Aires: Tesis de Maestría, Universidad de Buenos Aires)


Brittan Samuel (1977) The Economic Consequences of Democracy (Harmondsworth: Penguin)


Bublitz Ute (1998) Reconciliation and Rejection (London: Universal Texts)


Camus Albert (1971) The Rebel (Harmondsworth: Penguin)


Clarke Simon (1982) Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology (London: Macmillan)


Clarke Simon (ed) (1991) The State Debate (London: Macmillan)


Clarke Simon (1999) 'El Debate sobre el Trabajo', Cuadernos del Sur no. 29, pp. 121-141


Cleaver Harry (1992) 'The Inversion of Class Perspective in Marxian Theory: From Valorisation to Self-Valorisation', in Bonefeld et al. (1992b), pp. 106-145


Cleaver Harry (1998) 'The Zapatistas and the Electronic Fabric of Struggle', in Holloway and Peláez (1998), pp. 81-103


Cleaver Harry and Bell Peter (1982) 'Marx's Crisis Theory as a Theory of Class Struggle', Research in Political Economy Vol. 5, pp.


Congdon Tim (1988) The Debt Threat (Oxford: Blackwell)


Cunow Heinrich (1898-99) 'Zur Zusammensbruchstheorie', Die Neue Zeit, Jg. XVIII, Bd 1, p.430


Dalla Costa Mariarosa (1995) 'Capitalism and Reproduction', in Bonefeld et al. (1995) pp. 7-16


Debord Guy (1995) The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books)


Del Barco Oscar (1980) Esbozo de una Crítica a la Teoría y Práctica Leninistas (Puebla: Universidad Autónoma de Puebla)


Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (1994) La Palabra de los Armados de Verdad y Fuego (Mexico City: Fuenteovejuna)


Engels Friedrich (1968) Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Moscow: Progress)


Foucault Michel (1973) The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books)


Foucault Michel (1975) Discipline and Punish (London: Allen Lane Penguin)


Foucault Michel (1976) La Volonté de Savoir: Histoire de la Sexualité 1 (Paris: Gallimard)


Gerstenberger Heide (1990) Die subjektlose Gewalt: Theorie der Entstehung bürgerlicher Staatsgewalt (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot)


Glyn Andrew and Sutcliffe Bob (1972) British Capitalism, Workers and the Profits Squeeze (Harmondsworth: Penguin)


Goethe Johann Wolfgang (1969) Faust, I. Teil (Stuttgart: Reclam)


Grant James (1996) The Trouble with Prosperity (New York: Times Books)


Guattari Félix and Negri Antonio (1990) Communists Like Us (New York: Semiotext(e))


Gunn Richard (1987a) 'Ernst Bloch's "The Principle of Hope"', New Edinburgh Review no. 76, pp. 90-98


Gunn Richard (1987b) 'Marxism and Mediation', Common Sense no. 2


Gunn Richard (1987c) 'Notes on "Class"', Common Sense no. 2


Gunn Richard (1991) 'Marxism, Metatheory and Critique', in Bonefeld and Holloway (1991) pp. 193-209


Gunn Richard (1992) 'Against Historical Materialism: Marxism as a First-order Discourse', in Bonefeld, Gunn and Psychopedis (1992), pp. 1-45 Haraway Hardt Michael and Negri Antonio Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press)


Harman Chris (1993) 'Where is Capitalism Going?', International Socialism no. 58, pp.


Hegel Georg W.F. (1967) Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press)


Hegel Georg W.F. (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press)


Hirsch Joachim (1978) 'The State Apparatus and Social Reproduction: Elements of a Theory of the Bourgeois State', in Holloway and
Picciotto (1978), pp. 57-107 Hobbes Thomas (1991) The Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)


Holloway John (1991a) Capital is Class Struggle (And Bears are not Cuddly), in Bonefeld and Holloway (1991)


Holloway John (1991b) 'The State and Everyday Struggle', in Clarke (1991), pp. 225-259


Holloway John (1991c) 'The Great Bear: Post-Fordism and Class Struggle. A Comment on Bonefeld and Jessop', in Bonefeld and Holloway (1991), pp. 92-102


Holloway John (1995a) 'From Scream of Refusal to Scream of Power: The Centrality of Work', in Bonefeld, Gunn, Holloway and Psychopedis (1995), pp. 155-181


Holloway John (1995b) 'Global Capital and the National State', in Bonefeld and Holloway (1995), pp. 116-140


Holloway John (1996) 'La resonancia del zapatismo', Chiapas no. 3, pp. 43-54


Holloway John (1998) 'Dignity's Revolt' in Holloway and Peláez (1998), pp. 159-198


Holloway John (2000) 'Zapata in Wall Street', in Bonefeld and Psychopedis (2000), pp. 173-195


Holloway John and Peláez Eloína (eds) (1998) Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico (London: Pluto)


Holloway John and Picciotto Sol (eds) (1977) 'Capital, Crisis and the State', Capital \& Class no. 2, pp. 76-101


Holloway John and Picciotto Sol (eds) (1978a) The State and Capital: A Marxist Debate (London: Edward Arnold)


Holloway John and Picciotto Sol (1978b) 'Introduction: Towards a Materialist Theory of the State', in


Holloway and Picciotto (1978a), pp. 1-31


Horkheimer Max (1972) 'Traditional and Critical Theory', in Horkheimer M., Critical Theory:
Selected Essays (Place, Seabury Press) pp. 188-243


Horkheimer Max (1978a) 'On the Problem of Truth', in Arato A., Gebhardt E., The Essential
Frankfurt School Reader (Oxford: Blackwell) pp. 407-443


Horkheimer Max (1978b) 'The End of Reason', in Arato A., Gebhardt E., The Essential
Frankfurt School Reader (Oxford: Blackwell) pp. 26-48


Horkheimer (1997) Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft (Frankfurt: Fischer)


Horkheimer Max and Adorno Theodor W. (1972)
Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: ?)


Howard M.C and King J.E. (1989) A History of Marxian Economics, Vol. I, 1883-1929 (London: Macmillan)


Howard M.C and King J.E. (1992) A History of Marxian Economics, Vol. II, 1929-1990 (London: Macmillan)
International Monetary Fund (1995)


International Capital Markets: Developments, Prospects and Policy
Issues (Washington: IMF)


Jay Martin (1984a)
Adorno (London: Fontana)


Jay Martin (1984b)
Marxism and Totality (Berkeley: University of California Press)


Jessop Bob (1991)
'Polar Bears and Class Struggle: Much less than a Self-Criticism', in Bonefeld and Holloway (1991)


Johnson Linton Kwesi (1975)
Dread Beat and Blood (London: Bogle L'Ouverture Publications)


Kaufman Henry (1986)
Interest Rates, the Markets and the New Financial World (London: Tauris)


Kohan Néstor (1998)
Marx en su (Tercer) Mundo: Hacia un Socialismo no Colonizado (Buenos Aires: Biblos)


Lafargue Paul (1999)
The Right to be Lazy (Ardmore Pa.: Fifth Season Press)


Lenin Vladimir Illich (1966)
Essential Works of Lenin (New York: Bantam)


Lipietz Alain (1985)
The Enchanted World (London: Verso)


Lukács Georg (1971)
History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press)


Luxemburg Rosa (1973)
Reform or Revolution (New York: Pathfinder)


Machiavelli Nicolo (1995)
The Prince (London: Penguin)


MacKenzie Iain (1999)
'Power', in Ashe et al. (1999), pp. 69-87


Magdoff Harry and Sweezy Paul (1987)
Stagnation and the Financial Explosion (New York: Monthly Review
Press)


Marcuse Herbert (1968)
One Dimensional Man (London: Sphere)


Marcuse Herbert (1998)
Eros and Civilization (London: Routledge)


Martínez José Manuel (2000)
Tres tesis sobre la Fetichización del Marxismo Contemporaneo
(Rosario: Tesis de doctorado, Universidad Nacional de Rosario)


Marx Karl (1965)
Capital, Vol. I (Moscow: Progress)


Marx Karl (1972a)
Capital, Vol. III (London: Lawrence and Wishart)


Marx Karl (1972)
Theories of Surplus Value, Part III (London: Lawrence \& Wishart)


Marx Karl (1973)
Grundrisse


Marx Karl and Engels Friedrich (1962)
Selected Works in Two Volumes, Vol. I (Moscow: Progress)


Marx Karl and Engels Friedrich (1975)
Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3


Marx Karl and Engels Friedrich (1976)
Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5


Marramao Giacomo (1978)
'Teoría del Derrumbe y Capitalismo Organizado en las Discusiones
del 'Extremismo Histórico', Cuadernos del Pasado y Presente, no. 78, pp.
7-50


Mattick Paul (1978)
'Sobre la Teoría Marxiana de la Acumulación y del Derrumbe',
Cuadernos del Pasado y Presente, no. 78, pp. 86-106


Moulier Yann (1989)
'Introduction', in Negri (1989), pp. 1-44


Negri Antonio (1980)
Del Obrero-Masa al Obrero Social (Barcelona: Anagrama)


Negri Antonio (1988a)
Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist
Crisis and New Social Subjects 1967-83 (London: Red Notes)


Negri Antonio (1988b)
'Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of the State', in Negri (1988a),
pp. 5-42


Negri Antonio (1988c)
'Marx on Cycle and Crisis', in Negri (1988a), pp. 43-90


Negri Antonio (1989)
The Politics of Subversion (Cambridge: Polity)


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


Pannekoek Anton (1977)
'The Theory of the Collapse of Capitalism', Capital and Class no.
1, pp. 59-82


Pashukanis Evgeny (1978)
Law and Marxism: A General Theory (London: Ink Links)


Peláez Eloína and Holloway John (1995)
'Learning to Bow: Post-Fordism and Technological Determinism', in
Bonefeld and Holloway (1995), pp. 135-144


Piper Watty (1978)
The Little Engine that Could (?: Platt and Munk)


Poulantzas Nicos (1973)
Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books)


Red Notes (1979)
Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis: Italian Marxist Texts of the
Theory and Practice of a Class Movement: 1964-79 (London: Red Notes)


REDaktion (Hg) (1997)
Chiapas und die Internationale der Hoffnung (Köln: ISP)


Rubin Isaak Illich (1973)
Essays on Marx's Theory of Value (Montreal: Black Rose Books)


Schlesinger Arthur (1959)
The age of Roosevelt: the Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-1933
(Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Pess)


Schmitt Carl (1987)
Der Begriff des Politischen (Berlin: Duncker \& Humblot)


Scott James (1990)
Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven: Yale University
Press)


Serrano Marcela (1995)
Antigua Vida Mía (México: Alfaguara)


Smith Cyril (1996)
Marx at the Milennium (London: Pluto)


Sohn-Rethel Alfred (1978)
Intellectual and Manual Labour (London: Macmillan)
Stratman David (n.d)
We Can Change the World (Boston: New Democracy Books)


Tavor Bannet Eve (1989)
Structuralism and the Logic of Dissent (London: Macmillan)


Thompson Edward P. (1967)
'Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism', Past and Present no. 38, pp.


Tronti Mario (1979)
'Lenin in England', in Red Notes (1979), pp. 1-6


Tronti Mario (1979)
'The Strategy of the Refusal', in Red Notes (1979), pp. 7-21


Walter Andrew (1993)
World Power and World Money (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf)


Warburton Peter (1999)
Debt and Delusion (London: Allen Lane\Slash{} The Penguin Press)


Witheford Nick (1994)
'Autonomist Marxism and the Information Society' Capital and Class no. 52, pp. 85-12




% begin final page

\clearpage


% if we are on an odd page, add another one, otherwise when imposing
% the page would be odd on an even one.
\ifthispageodd{\strut\thispagestyle{empty}\clearpage}{}


% new page for the colophon

\thispagestyle{empty}

\begin{center}

The Anarchist Library



\smallskip
Anti-Copyright



\bigskip
\includegraphics[width=0.25\textwidth]{logo-en}
\bigskip

\end{center}

\strut

\vfill

\begin{center}


John Holloway

Change the world without taking power

The meaning of revolution today

2002


\bigskip


Retrieved on 2015-02-06 from https:\Slash{}\Slash{}libcom.org\Slash{}library\Slash{}change-world-without-taking-power-john-holloway
   

   



\bigskip
\textbf{theanarchistlibrary.org}


\end{center}

% end final page with colophon


\end{document}


