Towards a Genealogy of Right Workerism: Notes on the Origin of Bizarro World

 At the end of a summer with at least a little time to read books not directly connected to teaching or writing I picked up Melinda Cooper's Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance and Stéphane Legrand's Ayn Rand: Femme Capital. The first I had been meaning to get to since it came out, and the second has lingered on my shelf for awhile. I was always curious what a French philosopher who has worked on Marx and Foucault would say about the very American (and anti-Marxist) phenomena of Ayn Rand.

Translating Transclass: Or Teaching Eribon in America

Since this is a post about class, family, and returns

I thought that I would illustrate it with pictures illustrating

the fact that I now live in the same neighborhood my mother lived in, 

but the neighborhood has changed except this old fishing/gun store

 

I have often considered teaching to be a kind of translation and not just because much of the history of philosophy is written in different languages. Part of what one does in teaching is try to take the questions and concerns of a different time and figure out some way to bridge that gap, while at the same time being faithful to its original sense and meaning (just like translation). These thoughts occurred to me again when I decided to teach Didier Eribon's Returning to Reims.

Waiting for the Robots: Benanav and Smith on the Illusions of Automation and Realities of Exploitation

All images from Starstream

In the last month or so two remarkably similar books appeared, Aaron Benanav's Automation and the Future of Work and Jason E. Smith's Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation. The books are similar without being redundant. They are too similar to construct anything like a provocative debate between them. They are perhaps best viewed not just in terms of their polemics against certain fantasies or fears of automation but the way in which they constitute an emergent, or even dominant, sensibility and orientation of Marxist thought, one that makes sense of the present through the infamous tendency of the rate of profit to fall. 

Negative Solidarity: Towards the Definition of a Concept

Even though it is not a recent post, I was struck by this post on "negative solidarity" on the blog splintering bone ashes. To cite from the blog: 

Starting from Year Zero: Occupy Wall Street and the Transformations of the Socio-Political

Day and Night, by Occuprint

To consider what Occupy Wall Street has to do with philosophy, to Occupy Philosophy, is already to depart from one of the longstanding dictums of the relationship between philosophy and political invents. I am thinking of Hegel, who as much as he argued that philosophy is its own time comprehended in thought, also famously argued that philosophy can only comprehend its own time retrospectively, can only paint grey on grey once the ink has dried. Occupy, or OWS to use a preferred moniker, preferred not because it ties the movement to the hashtag, making it one of the many instances of the supposed twitter revolutions, but because it abstracts the movement from a specific place making it a general political transformation and not a specific occupation, is very much an active movement. Any statement about it, about its ultimate meaning, possibility, or limitations, must confront the fact that it is still in the process of shaping and forming.

Reproducing Relations: On Communization and its Discontents

This is not intended as a review of Communization and its Discontents. If I were to write a review of the book it would simply be: it is a good book, you should read it (hell, you can even downloaded it for free, so there is no excuse not to). This is intended instead as a series of provocations for further reflection.

The Politics of Composition: A Few Thoughts on Occupy Wall Street

Photo from Maximum RocknRoll's Facebook feed 

Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s After the Future opens with a question, a question that defines the current political moment. As he writes: 

The Composition and Decomposition of the Radical Imagination: Remarks on Class Composition

Of all the various concepts, innovations, and interventions of “autonomist Marxism,” perhaps the most well known is the so-called autonomist hypothesis. This idea, first developed by Mario Tronti, and publicized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, fundamentally argued that resistance precedes and prefigures exploitation. Tronti initially proposed this as a way of making sense of capitalism, where it was a kind of Copernican revolution: rather than begin with capital, understanding its structures and demands, the idea was to begin with the working class, with resistance to capital. (Despite the fact the Copernicus, and by extension Kant, is often used to make sense of this transformation, Tronti’s real point of reference, the one that he opens the book with, is the transition from Newton to Einstein, the fixity of laws versus the relativity of forces). Tronti’s thesis, which was first applied to an understanding of capitalism, has been expanded and generalized into an ontological principle. First, by Deleuze and Guattari, who smuggled Tronti’s thesis into the footnotes of A Thousand Plateaus, making it into a general point of opposition between their work and Foucault: “the diagram and abstract machine have lines of flight that are primary, which are not phenomena of resistance or counterattack, but cutting edges of creation…” Hardt and Negri’s reversal, in which the multitude must be seen to be at the basis of empire, follows both Tront’s specific use and Deleuze and Guattari’s general ontology.

What is worth noting is that there is a certain sense in which the Anglo American philosophical scene was particularly ready for this particular Italian import. The question of “resistance” was everywhere, at least everywhere in the Academy, during the last decades of the twentieth century. At graduate seminars and conferences the question was asked, often in response to a discussion of Foucault, “What about resistance?” The autonomist hypothesis arrived, cleansed of its militant origins (Tronti’s book has yet to be translated into English), to answer the question.

There is another element of autonomist thought, which has recently popped up in a few books. First, Franco Berardi has preferred to describe autonomist thought as compositionism. His point, at least in The Soul at Work, is to present this work as a third position, opposed to both Frankfurt School and Sartrean emphasis on alienation and the theoretical anti-humanism of Althusser. Compositionalism treats estrangement as a historical fact, rooted in the contemporary production process, but sees in this not the loss of some “laboring essence” but the positivity of refusal. As Berardi writes:

“Compositionalism overturns the issue implicit in the question of alienation. It is precisely thanks to the radical inhumanity of the workers’ existence that a human collectivity can be founded, a community no longer dependent on capital. It is indeed the estrangement of workers from their labor, the feeling of alienation and its refusal, that are the bases for a human collectivity autonomous from capital.”

The strategy of refusal, and with it the primacy of resistance, has to be placed in relation to the composition, to class composition, constituting a warp and weave of creation and containment.

All of which is something of a preamble to a brief discussion of Stevphen Shukaitis’ Imaginal Machines: Autonomy and Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life.

“While it is difficult to treat class composition analysis as a coherent and unified whole, it is marked by several distinct characteristics. Notable among these is the consideration of class not as an immutable fixed identity, but as a constantly evolving form of social relations expressed through technical and political composition. Technical composition involves particular forms of labor that exist in a historical situation, while political composition expresses the formation of the working class as an evolving historical entity which develops through solidarity created through its struggle against capitalism.”

Shukaitis adds something crucial to this diagram, which makes up the bulk of his examination into the imagination, and that is the aesthetic dimension. Aesthetics is understood here not in the rarefied sense of the beautiful and the sublime, but in the much more fundamental and everyday sense of the way in which people experience, make sense of, and imagine their world. Aesthetics is then closely related to affects in the sense developed by Spinoza and Deleuze. It is necessary to discuss not just the technical composition of labor, the machines and division of labor, and the political compositon, the structures and institutions, from unions to parties, that workers use to express their interests, but also the aesthetic/affective dimension, how people perceive their work and lives, and what they see as possible. (This aesthetic/affective dimension is close to some of the work Rancière has done on the “distribution of the sensible” and Lazzarato’s work on the aesthetics of belief and subjectivity). Shukaitis has some great passages on the aesthetics of punk and the imagination of outer space in Sun Ra and other groups.

Shukaitis’ addition of aesthetics and affects to class composition is an important suggestion, one that opens up new lines of examination. (Berardi’s work on depression and economic uncertainty comes to mind) However, it also would seem to suggest the necessity of moving beyond the standard dualism of composition and decomposition, of the constitution or destruction of the working class. As I have suggested elsewhere on this blog, it is necessary to consider the antagonistic dimensions of class composition, that there are at least two classes being composed. As Shukaitis argues, in a chapter on the politics of precarity, experience and concept of precarity has not produced the same sort of mass mobilization in the US as it has in Europe. This is in part due to political and economic factors: the US has never had some of the same labor protections that are common place in Europe, protections that are themselves the effects of past struggles. However, it also seems that there is a strong aesthetic/affective dimension to this as well. Individualism and self-reliance are so much apart of the American political imaginary, an imaginary that is replenished daily, that it is difficult to imagine how people could ever turn precariousness, the economic norm of temporary and uncertain jobs (jobs which include access to health care and other resources) into the conditions for mobilization.

Thus, it might be possible to argue for a certain predominance of the aesthetic/affective domain in making sense of politics, a dominance that follows the shift in technology, from production to simulation, and labor. It is not enough to ask what are the technological and political conditions of labor, one must also ask what are the affective and aesthetic conditions: how is it experienced and what do people think is possible? How else can one even begin to make sense of a country where the working class fantasizes about tax cuts while losing unemployment benefits?

Class Composition in Reverse

I recently started reading Massimo De Angelis’ The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital, as part of some reading I am doing on the concept of the commons, and I definitely recommend it. I plan to put together some notes and something like a review as soon as I finish, but in the meantime it provoked me to write the following. In part De Angelis’ book constitutes something of a return to first principles, a return to some of the original ideas of autonomist Marxism. This return is in part explicitly aimed against the contemporary turn in post-autonomist Marxism towards the ideas of “immaterial labor” and Empire. This is what I plan to address in a week or so, or whenever I finish the book.

What struck me recently, however, is the way that the book reframes the autonomist concept of “class composition.” It is class composition, the analysis of the social, technical, and political composition of work, as both cause and effect of struggle, that underlies such concepts as “mass worker” and “social worker.” De Angelis expands the concept of class composition, however, to include reproductive work, following Dalla Costa in arguing for the centrality of unwaged housework to the production and reproduction of capital, renaming it community composition. But the basic tenet remains the same, the tenet that “the forms, the objectives, the dynamics of social conflict are linked to the ways people relate to each other in the places of production and life within a certain historical context.”

It is worth noting, since the matter of the conflicts between “old” and “new” autonomist thought has been raised, that Nick Dyer-Witheford has argued for a revival of a compositional analysis with respect to the multitude. This analysis has the benefit of removing the multitude from a celebration of the new, situating it with respect to the conflicts that animate it. Thus, the emphasis on global relations and new forms of technology are maintained, but they have to be understood in relation to the local conditions and underdevelopments that act as counter-tendencies. Dyer-Witheford’s position seems to make the most sense to me, not only in that it moves us beyond the ridiculous argument of “everything has changed” versus “nothing has changed,” but that it also revives the idea of research, or worker’s inquiry. Ironically there is a great deal of research and inquiry underlying such concepts as “immaterial labor,” it is just that none of this research, which has appeared in such texts as Le Bassin de Travail Immatériel (BTI) dans la Métropole Parisienne, has not appeared in English, lending credibility to the idea that such concepts are the products of the philosopher’s abstraction rather than worker’s enquiry.

This is not the point that I would like to raise now, after all I have to save something for the review, I would like to discuss something entirely different, something that comes out of one of those contingent mental events that happens when one happens to read two things at the same time. In this case, it is a matter of reading Massimo De Angelis at the same time as I am preparing a class on the Frankfurt School. One of the things that strikes me is that there is, in the early works of Horkheimer and Adorno, at least, something like a thought of class composition, of the technological, social, and political constitution of a class. The major exception is that the class in question is no longer the working class, whose struggle drives capital, but the bourgeoisie, the ruling class.

At different and sporadic points, Horkheimer and Adorno make the point that the values and ideals of bourgeois philosophy, autonomy, freedom, conscience, relate to a particular stage of the development of capitalism. As Horkheimer writes:

“Admiration for nobility of character, fidelity to one’s word, independence of judgment and so forth are traits of a society of relatively independent economic subjects who enter into contractual relations with each other…Under the conditions of a monopolistic capitalism, however, even such a relative individual independence is a thing of the past. The individual no longer has any ideas of his own.”

The liberal subject, the subject of conscience, rights, and autonomy, is a product of liberal capitalism, capitalism of the small business, the entrepreneur, and the individual craftsman. (Although it might be more accurate to say that it is both effect and cause, producing its justification) Horkheimer and Adorno are less interested in describing this “liberal” phase of capitalism, or in nostalgia for its charms, than in charting what happens to these ideals under monopoly capitalism, the capitalism of large scale industry and the totally managed enterprise (in the form of fascism or even state capitalism). This transformation does not so much invalidate the ideals of liberal capitalism as it undermines their material basis. These ideals are necessarily transformed as their fundamental conditions, most notably the division between private and public, collapse. To quote Adorno from Minima Moralia:

“With the dissolution of liberalism, the truly bourgeois principle, that of competition, far from being overcome, has passed from the objectivity of the social process into the composition of its colliding and jostling atoms, and therewith as if into anthropology.”

Or to take a few more impressionist passages from Minima Moralia:

“As the professions of the middle-man lose their economic basis, the private lives of countless people are becoming those of agents and go-betweens; indeed the entire private domain is being engulfed by a mysterious activity that bears all the features of commercial life without there being actually any business to transact.”

And…

“Whatever was once good and decent in bourgeois values, independence, perseverance, forethought, circumspection, has been corrupted utterly. For while bourgeois forms of existence are truculently conserved their economic precondition has fallen away. Privacy has given way entirely to the privation it always secretly was and with the stubborn adherence to particular interests is now mingled fury at being no longer able to perceive that things might be different and better.”

One could go on; in fact this idea of the decaying husk of bourgeois subjectivity becoming more malevolent as its conditions disappear constitutes something like a minor theme of Minima Moralia. With the loss of the independence and protection of private property, the private home that offered refuge from the demands of competition and the private industry of the small enterprise that rewarded honesty and inniative, the admirable moral qualities of bourgeois life disintegrate in the face of a generalized competition and “networking” that converts every social relation into a business contact. This description is a kind of “neoliberalism” avant la lettre, in which economic relations subsume all of society. It is also similar to the autonomist discussion of real subsumption, with the exception that it is less about the composition of the working class, than of the bourgeoisie that clings to its ideals long past their economic justification.

This is obviously a first glance, as I have not even finished reading De Angelis’ book or rereading Minima Moralia, but a few conclusions follow. It seems to me that class composition must be extended across both sides of class struggle; it is not just the working class whose conditions are structured by the economic, political, and social constitution of its existence, so are the capitalists. As Alain Badiou writes,“Il faut concevoir la société impérialiste non seulement comme substance, mais aussi comme sujet.” (It is necessary to conceive of imperialist society not just as substance but also as subject). Subjectivity is not only on the side of resistance, it is not a matter of a class confronting a structure, multitude against empire, but of different subjectivities. However, the picture is not one of two necessarily opposed camps, in which the new global bourgeoisie confronts the multitude, but of the constant transformation of the terms of antagonism. As Negri writes, “The ontological aspects of subjectivity are produced in different (or rather, antagonistic) ways.” It seems to me that focusing on the composition means that the different elements, technical, social, economic and political do not have a necessary capitalist or anti-capitalist dimension. New technologies can lead to either the constitution of a new commons of information and knowledge or to new realities of surveillance and work. At the same time even an economic crisis, the destruction of the existing conditions for exploitation, can become part of a revolutionary or reactionary composition.

Not with a Bang but a Whimper

Two quick points:
First, it is utterly surprising to me how quickly the language around the economy and politics has changed. For years, even decades, we have heard not only that "free markets" could regulate themselves, but that they were the key to regulating anything else, to fixing any social ill, from health care to social security. Now this seems to be very much in question. Of course the charges of socialism, first against Obama and now against the stimulus package, are hyperbolic and hysterical. The hysteria is, however, a symptom, a symptom of profound unease around the once fundamental justifications of neoliberalism and capitalism. Something has changed, but what?

Second, all of this has taken place with very little popular revolt and uprising, at least in this country. There was the much discussed incident at Republic Doors in Chicago, but not much aside from that. There have been large protests in Europe, but in the US "the left" has not even managed to put pressure on the stimulus package. Of course there has been a vague sense of anger and bitterness, manifested primarily in terms jokes about bankers.

The question then is how do these two things combine? What, if anything, will fill the void left behind by the fantasies of the market? And when, if ever, will people take to the streets?