I committed my first revolutionary act yesterday. I shut the door on a man’s thumb. I did it for no reason at all and I didn’t warn him; I just slammed the door shut in a rapture of hatred and imagined the bone breaking and the edges grinding into his skin. He ran downstairs and the phone rang wildly for an hour after while I sat, listening to it, my heart beating wildly, thinking wild thoughts. Horrible. Horrible and wild. I must find Jael.
Women are so petty (translation: we operate on too small a scale).
Now I’m worse than that—I also do not give a damn about humanity or society. It’s very upsetting to think that women make up only one-tenth of society, but it’s true. For example:
My doctor is male.
My lawyer is male.
My tax-accountant is male.
The grocery-storeowner (on the corner) is male.
The janitor in my apartment building is male.
The manager of the neighborhood is male.
My landlord is male.
Most taxi-drivers are male.
The designers of my car are male.
The factory workers who made the car are male.
The dealer I bought it from is male.
Almost all my colleagues are male.
The Army is male.
The Navy is male.
The government is (mostly) male.
I think most people in the world are male. (Russ 203-204)
Joanna’s declaration of war contained in the conclusion of The Female Man has produced a number of valuable symptomatic readings by critics, particularly in the novel’s initial reception. As Sarah Lefanu has noted, the particular section of the text has been labeled as ‘hysterical’, ‘angry’, defensive’, amongst other dismissals. (Lefanu 19) It’s also one of a small number of passages that have given the novel its reputation as a particularly violent text. As a number of critics[1], particularly Russ herself, have pointed out, the number of acts of violence are fairly limited compared to any number of contemporary science fiction texts. (Russ 144-5) However to remain on that surface level of analysis, one loses the ability to ask why the novel has produced these particularly errant effects. Answering that question involves a serious engagement with the political project found in Russ’s critical reading and rewriting of the literary conventions of science fiction, and with the form of the novel itself, an engagement that can only be understood within those literary traditions of science fiction. To put it another way, we need to read Russ’s work in the terms introduced by Sarah Lefanu in her text on feminist science fiction, In the Chinks of the World Machine, as “a part of science fiction while struggling against it.” (Lefanu 5) For Russ, the project of feminist science fiction is committed to bringing out the full potential of the genre, a potential found in its ability to estrange the ideological assumptions of the present by presenting a potential futurity.
The section of the narrative opens with a declaration of an opening, of a shift in subjectivity through what is declared a revolutionary act, the act of smashing a man’s thumb into a door. Even as the narrator, Joanna revels in the excess and violence contained in the act, and recoils from its potential consequences, she also declares the act as occurring for ‘no reason at all.’ Indeed, Joanna goes on to declare the action in line with the ‘petty’ nature of women’s activities, which ‘operate on too small a scale.” The text continues by connecting the ‘petty’ acts of women to their systemic occlusion from ‘society’ and even by implication ‘humanity.’ She marks that occlusion through noting the variety of occupations and social positions that women do not hold, positions that deeply shape the daily lives and horizons of expectations for those women. The productivity of the sexual contract, the construction of women as a sort of commons accessible to a cross class alliance of men is both deeply productive in its ability to harness and discipline the labor of women into a narrow set of reproductive tasks and a profound if implicit act of domination. As has been previously noted, the household as an institution has been consciously developed over the twentieth century, drawing from the models of industrial production developed by Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford, but modifying them to deal with the contingent realities of the household.[2] Rather simply imitating the reform processes developed in the factory, the household is industrialized on very different grounds.
The work of Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James in their pamphlet, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, published in 1972, can contribute to our understanding of the relationship between the occlusion of women from the public sphere of humanity and the modes of social reproduction and consumption in the Fordist regime of accumulation that depends on that occlusion. Through that analysis, we can begin to understand the productive element of the forms exclusion and petty domination that the text attempts to critique. We need to understand those actions within the context of the productive labor that women contributed to the maintenance of that system. Within the context of trying to understand the work of housewives to the social reproduction of Fordism, the authors challenge the limited notions of labor power contained in conventional Marxist analyses, insisting on understanding the unpaid labor of the household as playing a central role in the reproduction of surplus labor, noting.
The community is not an area of freedom and leisure auxiliary to the factory, where by chance there happen to be women who are degraded as the personal servants of men. The community is the other half of capitalist organization, the other area of hidden capitalist exploitation, the other, hidden source of surplus labor. It becomes increasingly regimented like a factory, what Mariarosa calls a social factory, where the costs and nature of transport, housing, medical care, education, police, are all points of struggle. And this social factory has as its pivot the woman in the home producing labor power as a commodity, and her struggle not to.
The demands of the women’s movement, then, take on a new and more subversive significance. When we say, for example, that we want control of our own bodies, we are challenging the domination of capital which has transformed our reproductive organs as much as our arms and legs into instruments of accumulation of surplus labor; transformed our relations with men, with our children and our very creation of them, into work productive to this accumulation. (James and Dalla Costa, 11-12)
The forms of informal social relationships that make up the ‘community’ including the domestic sphere are recognized as playing a significant role in the social reproduction of capitalism. On one hand, Dalla Costa and James recognize the intense political and disciplinary pressure put on the household, pressure designed to increase and intensify the accumulation of capital through the extraction of surplus labor. The household literally becomes the social factor, producing the crucial labor power needed for the entire system to work. The intimate relationships of the household, whether in the form of romance or raising children, are crucial to the reproduction of labor power, transforming the woman’s body into an instrument for the reproduction of capital. On the other hand, the varieties of forms of feminist activism are forms of resistance to that regime, whether they are recognized as that as such. The household is both a space of the social reproduction of capital, and a myriad of forms of resistance, both formally and informally. As such, the disciplining and reproduction of that workplace becomes a central concern, one that involves both private and public interests. The construction of conventions and norms of femininity becomes a regulatory mechanism and way of creating forms of consent for this necessary condition for the reproduction of capital. Despite the attempts on the part of a number of theorists to place the household economy outside the disciplinary and pedagogical apparatuses of the state and capital, we find an institution that is intertwined within the modern capitalist state as any other.
Although his work in not frequently considered helpful in the field of women’s studies, Marx’s description of the reductive qualities of factory labor can contribute to our understanding of this situation. The immense cooperative capacity of the factory, its power, is dependent on a reduction of the activities of the individual workers that make up that collectivity. Marx forces us to recognize the repressive violence contained in that process that reduces labor to an increasingly small set of rote, physical gestures. He notes, “Factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost; at the same time, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity. Even the lightening of the labor becomes an instrument of torture, since the machine does not free the worker from the work, but rather deprives the work itself of all content.” (Marx, Capital, 548) At a surface level, Marx’s description captures the repressive nature of the disciplinary structure of the factory, the experience of physical, emotional, and intellectual pain produced by such an operation. He links that pain to a state of unfreedom, both intellectually and physically, marking the profound destruction of the potentiality contained in the body and the mind. Moreover, he argues that this act of violence is inescapable within the logic of the regime of accumulation that is capitalism.
But we have to understand that this particular repression is a secondary effect of capital’s domination. The primary effect is the unleashing the profound productive capacities of the factory in order to facilitate the production of surplus value. Anachronistically, the regime of accumulation produced by the factory is dependent on the production of the docile body of the mass worker. The analogy between the social factory of the home and the industrial factory has its limitations, in the forms of sociality contained in the respected locations, and the relationship each plays to social reproduction and production respectively, but the connection nonetheless allows for a way of connecting both to the expanded regime of accumulation, along with its costs. Moreover, each aspect of this regime can be understood as the result of the geometry of forces that might be reductively called the class struggle, the struggle between the complex and at times contradictory forces of living labor, and the logic of accumulation of capital, the geometry of forces, it might be added, that created the conditions in which women could be treated as a form of the commons by a cross class alliance of men.
Turning back to the text, we find a world in which ‘most people in the world are male.’ That world, the world of the public sphere, operates through the exclusion of women, who only make up 1/10th of that world. Similar to the world of the mass factory worker as described by Marx, we need to understand the acts of repression and exclusion that separate the public from the private, the domestic labor of social reproduction from the production of value in the public sphere. The small and petty act of shattering a man’s thumb acts as the rhetorical destruction of the distinction of the two spaces, of the act of enclosure that constructs that very act of distinction.[3] The act of smashing a thumb holds additional significance, referencing the legal structures of patriarchal violence legitimated by the American legal system, structures that were revealed as a part of the collective historical project that arose out of the radical and cultural feminist political engagements. In that context, Joanna’s act can be defined as an act of transgression, rather than liberation, a temporary respite from the tyranny of enclosure, and presumably the first act of many. After all, Joanna recoils from the very real consequences contained in her act, gesturing towards a continuation of the status quo. The text oscillates between these small acts of resistance and the expansive vision between a multiplicity of worlds, radically different social systems, containing radically different economic, social, and political forms. The act of shattering a thumb mushrooms into a shift from inactivity to activity, in the form of an implicit entrance into the women’s movement[4], disrupting the myriad of forms of common sense that produce the forms of common sense that allow for the construction of social hegemony.
That explosion of possibilities can only be understood within the horizon of the social movements that defined the time of the text’s production. The Female Man was produced between the years of 1969-1971 with an additional three years to find a publisher for the text. At that same time, we see the crystallization of a series of structural crises in the capitalist world system, transforming into what Immanuel Wallerstein argues constitutes ‘a single revolution.’ (Wallerstein 355) That revolution constituted a challenge to the U.S. hegemony of the world system, and a challenge and protest ‘against the “old left” antisystemic movements (Wallerstein 358). It shattered the world created by the failed and partial transformation of those previous social movements, and its mixture of social mobility and social control. In doing that, it ended a series of assumptions about radical transformation, and the role of minoritarian groups, moving from a conventional assumption that the problems of minoritarian groups would be resolved after the revolution. As Immanuel Wallerstein notes that after 1968, none of the minoritarian struggles “would ever again accept the legitimacy of “waiting” upon some other revolution.” (Wallerstein 363) The radical feminist movements that exploded globally were a prime example of that refusal to be put into the waiting room of history.
Reading both the polemical work of the period along with the retrospective historical analysis produced by Alice Echols in Daring to Be Bad allows for one to recognize the breadth and depth of that struggle. Thousands of formal and informal political circles formed and broke up in the period, meeting to engage in consciousness raising sessions, organizing protests, and challenging a variety of cultural and political organizations, ranging from conventional women’s magazines to countercultural institutions such as underground newspapers and a variety of new left groups. As Echols notes, radical feminists both challenged liberal feminism’s attempt to fight for formal equality within the contemporary structures of domination of the capitalist world system, and rejected the radical left’s placement of class as the primary contradiction, instead positing an alternative primary contradiction of women as a sex-class. (Echols 3-7) Despite the attempt to construct a united class project, radical feminism did not constitute a homogenous project, defined as much by its explosive conflicts, personal attacks categorized as ‘trashing’ by the movement, its multiplicity of political approaches, as much the movements commitment to unity. (Echols 51-101) Every attempt to construct a stable foundation for the category of woman translated into even more expansive conflicts and contradictions, even greater political and theoretical instability. At one level, we can understand this failure at a theoretical level, the inability to recognize the extraordinary historical contingency tied to the class category that radical feminists wanted to understand as a trans-historical one. One can turn to the work of any number of Black feminist thinkers to see those criticisms.[5] At the same time, this instability aligns with the very nature of the revolutionary project. Antonio Negri’s analysis of Marx’s Grundrisse offers a useful lens for this aspect of revolutionary politics through his critique of the dialectic along with his conception of class, a concept he draws from the work of Mario Tronti and expands upon.
Before we look at Negri’s critique of the dialectic, we should first turn to the concept of class, a concept central to radical feminism, through its construction of women as a class. The novel draws on the concept of women as a class and explores its potential construction as a central point of the novel, through the collective engagements of women from four very different versions of the Earth. Turning to Negri allows us to explore the idea of class composition, a concept that is referenced in the feminist turn to understanding women as a class, but is not theoretically developed. Instead, radical feminist take this category for granted, conceiving of it as a trans-historical concept, rather than one born out of a very particular history. Negri’s work does something very different, despite some of its limitations. Negri, following the work of Mario Tronti, conceives of class composition as a result of the terrain of struggle, rather than its cause. To put it another way, class identities are produced through the formation of working class institutions, cultural forms and common sense assumptions produced in the conflict with a variety of dominant institutions. Class identity is a result of a history of struggle, rather than a cause of it, and as such, is continually mutating into different forms as it breaks apart and coagulates together within the terrain of the class struggle.
This alterative concept of collective class identity is deeply embedded in Negri’s reconceptualization of the dialectic. Negri argues that the dialectic represents the struggle between labor and capital from the perspective of capital. Because of its need for the force of living labor, capital can never entirely succeed in what might be considered a complete victory, in the annihilation of the alterity of its opposite, is impossible. Instead, it draws on the logic of the dialectic, continually trying to come up with forms of mediation to neutralize this force, to come up with new modes of synthesis, which will accomplish the impossible, the incorporation of this alien force, the proletariat in its many guises. The logic of the force of living labor operates from a considerably different perspective, that of antagonism. Unlike capital, the collective assemblage of living labor can easily exist without the organizing logic of capital. Its project is defined by the multiplicity contained in the non-value defined as use value within Marx’s project, the dense thicket of needs, structures, and relationships that exist outside the logic of capital, but are necessary for its reproduction. Cleaver spells out the implicit telos of this alternative and antagonistic project in his introductory notes to Negri’s text.
The antagonistic logic of working-class separation reaches its conclusion as it explodes and destroys capital’s dialectic. It explodes all binary formulae, as Negri says, bursting the dialectical integument and liberating a multi-dimensional and ever-changing set of human needs and projects. (Cleaver xxvi)
If the dialectical logic of capital finds its highest form in the increasingly thinly mediated moments of synthesis, then the logic of its opposite explodes that binary into a dense and complex explosion of forces, a multiplicity that aligns itself with the form of non-value and refusal of equivalence contained in the category of use, that Cleaver describes us as “a multi-dimensional and ever-changing set of human needs and projects.” That explosion, the explosion of needs, desires that are linked into a set of new collectivities, new subjectivities are inextricably linked with a dense array of texts, taking the form of manifestos, theoretical analyses, rants, poetry, and fiction. Turning back to the radical feminist movement, we find alongside its political engagements a prodigious textual production, operating at the performative, critical, and analytical level to shatter the forms of domestic containment discussed in the previous chapter, to unleash the suppressed multiplicity disciplined in service of the accumulation of capital.[6] Joanna Russ explicitly embraces this revolutionary project in her text, the destruction of imagining its own obsolescence produced through the revolutionary transformation to come.[7] In order to make sense of how science fiction is brought into service of a revolutionary project, we need to shift from the broad historical conversation contained above, into the exploration of the formal qualities of the novel, that is, its strategies for estranging and dismantling the regime of domestic labor of the post war period, and the particular intersection of the discursive formations of femininity and sexuality that produce its infrastructure. To do so, we need to begin with a generic engagement with the novel, only to move onto the modes of temporality and subjectivity contained in the novel. Only then, can we appreciate the radical engine of destabilization contained in the text.
[1] For a longer discussion of this, see Sarah Lefanu, In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (London: The Women’s Press Ltd., 1988). See Tatiana Teslenko, Feminist Utopian Novels of the 1970’s: Joanna Russ and Dorothy Bryant (London Routledge Press, 2003) for a feminist reading that replicates some of these assumptions.
[2] For a longer conversation, read Ruth Schwarz Cowan, More Work for Mother (New York: Basic Books, 1983), McHugh, Kathleen Anne. American Domesticity: From How-to Manuel to Hollywood Melodrama. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, and Stein, Sally. ‘The Graphic Ordering of Desire: Modernization of a Middle Class Women's Magazine 1914–1939’, Heresies, 18, 1985.
[3] A more immediate reference might be the misogynist song by The Rolling Stones, “Under My Thumb.”
[4] See Lisa Maria Hoagland, Feminism and Its Fictions: The Consciousness Raising Novel and the Women’s Liberation Movement (Philadelphia: University of PennsylvaniaPress, 1998) for an example of this interpretation of the novel.
[5] See bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margins to Center (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000), Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984) are two early examples, but we can find a significant archive beyond these two texts.
[6] See, liberation now!: Writings From The Women’s Liberation Movement, Ed. Deborah Babcox and Madeline Balkin (New York, Dell Publishing, Inc,, 1971), Sisterhood is Powerful; an Anthology of Writings From the Women's Liberation Movement, Ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Random House, 1970)
[7] “Do not complain when at last you become quaint and old-fashioned, when you grow as outworn as the crinolines of a generation ago and are classed with Spicy Western Stories, Elsie Dinsmore, and The Son of the Sheik; do not mutter angrily to yourself when young persons read you to hrooch and hrch and guffaw, wondering what the dickens you were all about. Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. Do not reach up from readers’ noses.
Rejoice, little book!
For on that day, we will be free. (Russ 213-214)
Showing posts with label Immanuel Wallerstein. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Immanuel Wallerstein. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
Friday, April 21, 2017
planting a tree as metaphor for long term organizing
I recently read a most likely apocryphal story about Hegel during
the period of the French Revolution. The story isn't terribly
complicated; Hegel, Holderlin, and Schelling took the time from their
studies to plant a tree of liberty. Despite the very different
directions the three thinkers took, the fictional act gestured towards a
commitment to the radical possibilities embodied by the revolution. The act of planting a tree doesn't strike me as the
worst metaphor for a radical political project. It gestures towards three
substantial aspects of any political project committed to radical
and systemic transformation, the fact that any such project will take
time, the care that needs to be put into such a project, and finally,
the immense contingency implicit in such a project.
Time: The act of planting of tree implicitly has a fairly long period of time in mind. It's going to take most trees at least twenty of thirty years to develop any significant growth, and even fast growing trees take a few years to take hold. Most radical or progressive reformist groups work within a considerably shorter period of time, often only thinking about the next rally or, if the group is particularly ambitious, the next year long campaign. Even NGOs tend to think within a shorter timeline, developing, at most, five year plans. In this sense, we can think of the activities of most radical or reformist organizations as being profoundly opportunist in their organizational practices, if not their rhetoric, in the framework that is implicit in both the work of Paulo Virno and V.I. Lenin . Within both thinkers' frameworks, opportunism operates on the premise of accepting the rules set of the existing system without challenging the rules and structures of that system. By refusing to or perhaps more significantly being unable to create long term goals and projects, radical and reformist projects find themselves playing by the rules of the systems that they ostensibly oppose. I think this opportunist framework is an effect, rather than a cause of the profound destruction of the counter-systemic movements of the second half of the twentieth century. However, it's difficult to imagine escaping this situation without having the resources and foresight to begin the process of developing meaningfully long future projects.
It's notable that the thirty year time period that it takes for a tree to grow is remarkably close the the medium time-frame that Immanuel Wallerstein posits as the length of the medium term project that is largely ignored by the counter-systemic movements of the present within the United States. Wallerstein opposes this medium time frame to a set of long term goals, which take the form of large, global projects that take the form of abstract concepts such as communism, the end of exploitation, etc. Short term goals take the form of an organizing campaign such as organizing a workplace, a campaign to end a particular practice at an institution such as using sweat shop labor, or often in the case of subcultural activism, simply organizing a demonstration or an action. This work involves immediate goals. How do we get people to the rally? Can we get media attention? Can we disrupt the actions of decision makers in a way that causes them to change their behavior? These are all important questions, but they don't lead to giving any meaningful thought to the larger goals that the movements ostensibly have. Instead, their framework is largely negative. How can we disrupt? How can we translate that disruption into policy makers changing their actions? I'm not saying that these are irrelevant questions, but they abandon the element of planning to the structures we ostensibly oppose. They also abandon the question of how we form new forms of social structure and create new modes of governance within those forms of social structure, and what kinds of representation will define new forms of democratic practice.
Care: To return to the metaphor of the tree, it takes quite a bit of care to get a tree to take root and adjust to the environment in which you have place it. This is notably true for Southern California because of the lack of rain and its poor soil. However, it's a metaphor that works elsewhere. At the most obvious level, the creation of any social structure is dependent on formal and informal structures of social reproduction. You need to not only bring new people into an organization or movement, but you need to create social spaces that cause those people to stay in those structures, to allow them a sense of meaning and participation in those organizations and movements, and to create structures of care. These are questions that are taken quite seriously at the most immediate level by anarchists, particularly the focus on self care. However, those same organizations have difficulty imagining how you might participate in these movements when you're thirty or forty, rather than twenty, or how to be a part of a movement when you have children or you have a disability. I don't think these are problems that can be solved through a movement that continues to operate as a subculture, that is as a community largely produced through voluntary and informal labor. It should be additionally noted that those informal structures tend to unduly burden women with the 'traditional' tasks of reproductive labor, leaving them unpaid and undervalued. We need structures and institutions that we can plug into, and that is going to involve getting people money to do those jobs. There's a real question of how we do this and continue to hold onto forms of democratic governance and representation, but refusing to pose those questions by refusing to create any kind of formal structure has clearly not translated into either sustainability or equality.
Contingency: There is quite a bit of contingency implicit in the act of planting the tree. The most obvious contingency is the fact that trees can die, even with all the care of the world that is put into the project. Analogously, projects fail, even with the best intentions and plans. However, at a more modest level, even when a tree lives and grows, it doesn't grow in precisely the way you plan it to grow. That is to say, there is a need to recognize that as a plan develops and perhaps even progresses, the means and even the ends of that plan are going to change. That doesn't mean that you don't plan, but that you recognize that your plans are going to change. We're good at dealing with that kind of contingency at the level of the event, and even the campaign, but we don't spend a lot of time thinking beyond that. At the level of a lot of subcultural activism, we rarely even spend much time discussing what succeeded or failed within an individual event afterwards, often leaving events as isolated and unrelated events. When criticism does occur, it often spirals out of control becoming a circle of mutual incrimination. We lack the mechanisms for a form of collective and individual assessment that operates constructively, rather than disastrously destructively, a mechanism that would teach organizers better practices and encourage them to engage in those practices. At some level, we need forms of self-criticism primarily for organizations, but also for individuals, but in a manner that somehow escapes from the logic of the confessional within which that mode was initially created. Just as significantly, we need forms of institutional knowledge that will preserve that knowledge to direct future campaigns and future actions, and we need to be able to think about what the successes and failures of those actions say about our longer term plans.
To draw off the example of an old friend, we might look at the anarchist project in Spain. We think about the high point of anarchism in the mid to late 1930's, but in doing so, we miss out on the fact that it took decades of organizing, starting withing the middle part of the nineteenth century for this wave of militancy to occur. It involved engaging in and creating institutional and educational structures, and involved creating forms of engagement that were not simply accessible to the young. When we simply look back nostalgically at the height of a moment of struggle without recognizing the conditions that produced that struggle, we're going to lack any ability of how to advance our own goals of creating similar or more successful movements. We have to see those movements with the context of the long duree of time, and the day to day work that occurred in that time frame. The question is how to return to that form of longer term thinking.
Time: The act of planting of tree implicitly has a fairly long period of time in mind. It's going to take most trees at least twenty of thirty years to develop any significant growth, and even fast growing trees take a few years to take hold. Most radical or progressive reformist groups work within a considerably shorter period of time, often only thinking about the next rally or, if the group is particularly ambitious, the next year long campaign. Even NGOs tend to think within a shorter timeline, developing, at most, five year plans. In this sense, we can think of the activities of most radical or reformist organizations as being profoundly opportunist in their organizational practices, if not their rhetoric, in the framework that is implicit in both the work of Paulo Virno and V.I. Lenin . Within both thinkers' frameworks, opportunism operates on the premise of accepting the rules set of the existing system without challenging the rules and structures of that system. By refusing to or perhaps more significantly being unable to create long term goals and projects, radical and reformist projects find themselves playing by the rules of the systems that they ostensibly oppose. I think this opportunist framework is an effect, rather than a cause of the profound destruction of the counter-systemic movements of the second half of the twentieth century. However, it's difficult to imagine escaping this situation without having the resources and foresight to begin the process of developing meaningfully long future projects.
It's notable that the thirty year time period that it takes for a tree to grow is remarkably close the the medium time-frame that Immanuel Wallerstein posits as the length of the medium term project that is largely ignored by the counter-systemic movements of the present within the United States. Wallerstein opposes this medium time frame to a set of long term goals, which take the form of large, global projects that take the form of abstract concepts such as communism, the end of exploitation, etc. Short term goals take the form of an organizing campaign such as organizing a workplace, a campaign to end a particular practice at an institution such as using sweat shop labor, or often in the case of subcultural activism, simply organizing a demonstration or an action. This work involves immediate goals. How do we get people to the rally? Can we get media attention? Can we disrupt the actions of decision makers in a way that causes them to change their behavior? These are all important questions, but they don't lead to giving any meaningful thought to the larger goals that the movements ostensibly have. Instead, their framework is largely negative. How can we disrupt? How can we translate that disruption into policy makers changing their actions? I'm not saying that these are irrelevant questions, but they abandon the element of planning to the structures we ostensibly oppose. They also abandon the question of how we form new forms of social structure and create new modes of governance within those forms of social structure, and what kinds of representation will define new forms of democratic practice.
Care: To return to the metaphor of the tree, it takes quite a bit of care to get a tree to take root and adjust to the environment in which you have place it. This is notably true for Southern California because of the lack of rain and its poor soil. However, it's a metaphor that works elsewhere. At the most obvious level, the creation of any social structure is dependent on formal and informal structures of social reproduction. You need to not only bring new people into an organization or movement, but you need to create social spaces that cause those people to stay in those structures, to allow them a sense of meaning and participation in those organizations and movements, and to create structures of care. These are questions that are taken quite seriously at the most immediate level by anarchists, particularly the focus on self care. However, those same organizations have difficulty imagining how you might participate in these movements when you're thirty or forty, rather than twenty, or how to be a part of a movement when you have children or you have a disability. I don't think these are problems that can be solved through a movement that continues to operate as a subculture, that is as a community largely produced through voluntary and informal labor. It should be additionally noted that those informal structures tend to unduly burden women with the 'traditional' tasks of reproductive labor, leaving them unpaid and undervalued. We need structures and institutions that we can plug into, and that is going to involve getting people money to do those jobs. There's a real question of how we do this and continue to hold onto forms of democratic governance and representation, but refusing to pose those questions by refusing to create any kind of formal structure has clearly not translated into either sustainability or equality.
Contingency: There is quite a bit of contingency implicit in the act of planting the tree. The most obvious contingency is the fact that trees can die, even with all the care of the world that is put into the project. Analogously, projects fail, even with the best intentions and plans. However, at a more modest level, even when a tree lives and grows, it doesn't grow in precisely the way you plan it to grow. That is to say, there is a need to recognize that as a plan develops and perhaps even progresses, the means and even the ends of that plan are going to change. That doesn't mean that you don't plan, but that you recognize that your plans are going to change. We're good at dealing with that kind of contingency at the level of the event, and even the campaign, but we don't spend a lot of time thinking beyond that. At the level of a lot of subcultural activism, we rarely even spend much time discussing what succeeded or failed within an individual event afterwards, often leaving events as isolated and unrelated events. When criticism does occur, it often spirals out of control becoming a circle of mutual incrimination. We lack the mechanisms for a form of collective and individual assessment that operates constructively, rather than disastrously destructively, a mechanism that would teach organizers better practices and encourage them to engage in those practices. At some level, we need forms of self-criticism primarily for organizations, but also for individuals, but in a manner that somehow escapes from the logic of the confessional within which that mode was initially created. Just as significantly, we need forms of institutional knowledge that will preserve that knowledge to direct future campaigns and future actions, and we need to be able to think about what the successes and failures of those actions say about our longer term plans.
To draw off the example of an old friend, we might look at the anarchist project in Spain. We think about the high point of anarchism in the mid to late 1930's, but in doing so, we miss out on the fact that it took decades of organizing, starting withing the middle part of the nineteenth century for this wave of militancy to occur. It involved engaging in and creating institutional and educational structures, and involved creating forms of engagement that were not simply accessible to the young. When we simply look back nostalgically at the height of a moment of struggle without recognizing the conditions that produced that struggle, we're going to lack any ability of how to advance our own goals of creating similar or more successful movements. We have to see those movements with the context of the long duree of time, and the day to day work that occurred in that time frame. The question is how to return to that form of longer term thinking.
Friday, January 18, 2013
identity and capitalism
Some of the recent conversations at the edges of the recent controversy in the UK Socialist Worker's Party have reminded me of some ongoing concerns. A small number of posts have brought up the old question of class vs. gender, which in itself has never been a terribly productive conversation despite its commonality. Within these conversations, a small, but distinctive group of marxist men will begin by accusing those opposed to them of engaging in 'identity politics', demand that 'class' be put at the center of the conversation, and then proceed to defend themselves based on their authentic class position. In effect, their rejection isn't of the concerns of identity, but in demanding that their identitarian concerns be put ahead of others. What's ironic in this construction is that feminism in its academic and activist forms have largely rejected this identitarian tendency. In effect, the men in the conversation project their own identitarian concerns onto the much richer and complex feminist project expressed by their feminist counterparts. I want to take this as a point to argue that a marxist historical materialist project should reject the notion of beginning with a standpoint in identity at all, whether that be class, race, or gender, but that it should conceptualize those formations within the context of the struggle within complex structures of accumulation. In order to make this argument, I want to look at the reasons that Kathi Weeks rejects the centrality of class analysis in her text, The Problem with Work, and then turn to the arguments made by Etienne Balibar about the formation of class in his work with Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities.
Weeks frame her critiques of the primacy of class within a set of socialist feminist concerns, noting that it often it plays a powerful role in the erasure of a variety of structures of exploitation and domination. She gestures towards the focus on division of labor as advocated by Iris Young. Such an analysis would allow for the complex mapping of the modes of exploitation and domination in the workplace, and out of it. It also recognizes the wholesale destruction of working class cultural practices that marks the 20th century in a complex and uneven manner. But she brings up something more significant in the following passage,
"So by at least one way of reckoning, class and work belong to different fields of analysis, and my project pursues the critical study of work instead of class analysis and antiwork politics as a substitute for class struggle. But there is another way to approach class that does not produce such a sharp contrast with the category of work and that yields a different, and I think, more compelling approach to this territory. The distinction between the two fields of analysis becomes rather less clear when class too is conceived in terms of a process rather than an outcome. Process notions of class disrupt the functionalism of static mappings of class formations by attending to the practices by and relations within which they are secured, re-created, and challenged. If class is figured as a process of becoming classed, it may be that work--including struggles over what counts as work--could be conceived as a useful lens through which to approach class; in this way. the struggle against work could be a terrain of class politics.
But let me add one caveat: rather than conceiving class groupings and relations as the ground of antiwork politics, as that which provides its fuel and organizational form, it might be better to think of them as what might emerge from these efforts. By this reading, class formation, or what the autonomist tradition calls class composition, is best conceived as an outcome of struggles rather than their cause. The particular composition of the working class that might emerge from this politics of work--that is, the collectivities that might coalesce around its issues and the divisions that might develop in the interstices of antiwork struggles and in relation to postwork imaginaries--remain an open question." (Weeks 19)
Weeks' approach to the category of class doesn't act to reject its usefulness, but reimagines it in such a way as to think of it primarily as an effect of struggles, rather than as a cause of them. That is to say, class composition is created through the struggles that occur in response to the modes in the various laboring structures that they operate within. That approach recognizes that class composition can only be understood in mobile terms, that is as 'processes', rather than 'static mappings.' We might indeed draw on the Deleuzian language implicit in Weeks' formulation, and state that class composition and decomposition can be only understood within the lines of flight and apparatuses of capture that constitute the terrain of struggle. Although Weeks doesn't spell this out, it also becomes significant that class formations are inevitably products of defeat in the worst cases, and compromise in the best cases. They reflect the oscillation between capitulation and resistance that defines the history of class struggles. Therefore, such historical formations must be learned from critically, precisely because any simple embrace of such formations is simultaneously an embrace of the present situation. Instead, the recomposition of class resistance must be open-ended, and without a predetermined goal, defined by goals produced by its own struggles, rather than embracing the image of success constructed by dead struggles of the past.
Etienne Balibar's work in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities provides a useful lens of analysis in order to understand this process within a historical perspective. He begins by noting,
"What seems very clear, then, if one looks at the actual text of Marx's analysis, is not that there is a predetermined linking of forms, but rather an interplay of antagonistic strategies, strategies of exploitation, domination and resistance being displaced and renewed as a consequence of its own effects." (Balibar 164)
The class form is then produced through a complex structure of social relationships, defined by exploitation and domination on one hand and resistance and solidarity on the other hand. A shifting set of forms must be largely understood as an effect, rather than as a cause of the 'interplay of antagonistic strategies' that shape and form it. Balibar will go on to point out that this fact means that the splits and conflicts found throughout working class history "are no accident but represent the very substance of this relationship." Class identity is not only an effect of the complex and overdetermined structure of the class struggle, but it is also an extremely unstable and shift formation.
Balibar then goes on to spell out the historical terms that define the shifting nature of that particular formation.
"I want to suggest, to begin with, that what showed itself in the nineteenth and twentieth century as a relatively autonomous 'proletarian identity' needs to be understood as an objective ideological effect. An ideological effect is not a 'myth', or at least it cannot be reduced to one(all the more so since it does not imply that the 'truth of the myth' lies in individualism, since individualism is itself, par excellence, and ideological effect linked to the market economy and the modern state). In the same way, it is not possible to reduce to a myth the presence on the political stage of a force that identifies itself and is acknowledged as the 'working class', however intermittent its direct political acts may be, however variable its unity and divisions. Without its presence, the persistence of the social question and its role in the transformation of the state would remain unintelligible.
But what the work of historians does force us to register that there is nothing spontaneous, automatic or invariable about this ideological effect. It is the result of a permanent dialectic of working-class practice and organizational forms in which the forces in play include not only 'living conditions', 'working conditions', and 'economic conditions' but also the forms taken by national politics in the framework of the state (for instance, the questions of universal suffrage, national unity, wars, secular versus religious education and so on). In short, it is a constantly overdetermined dialectic in which a relatively individualized class is formed only through the relations it maintains all the other classes within a network of institutions. (Balibar 169-170)
Balibar moves on to state class is not only an effect of struggles, but the very conception of an autonomous notion of class is constructed as a particular way of negotiating a series of historical struggles, one that negotiates a series of differences and conflicts in order to frame and form those very struggles. He makes the point of pointing out that this statement doesn't turn class into a myth opposed to the 'real' individualism, which is itself a distinctive ideological effect of the particular nature of the market economy and the modern state, and that one cannot deny the reality of this ideological structure as a political force. But one has to look at a complex series of forces, that cannot be reduced to the reductivist understanding of the workplace. Instead, the working class is formed through a series of political questions that may seem incidental to it, including religious questions, questions of suffrage, etc. One might push this farther when looking at the proletarian structures of the United States and elsewhere to focus on structures of race and gender contained in the division of labor itself. Our concept of the proletariat or independent working class has either resisted those forms of domination, or it has all to often contributed to them, but those questions are not incidental to the notion of a relatively autonomous working class, instead they form the very fabric of that structure, and cannot be separated out of the process.
In effect, the question of identity is crucial to any historical materialist practice, but one that must be understood largely as an effect, or perhaps more generously, a part of the complex and overdetermined process that structures a particular regime of accumulation, which is itself in constant transformation.
Weeks frame her critiques of the primacy of class within a set of socialist feminist concerns, noting that it often it plays a powerful role in the erasure of a variety of structures of exploitation and domination. She gestures towards the focus on division of labor as advocated by Iris Young. Such an analysis would allow for the complex mapping of the modes of exploitation and domination in the workplace, and out of it. It also recognizes the wholesale destruction of working class cultural practices that marks the 20th century in a complex and uneven manner. But she brings up something more significant in the following passage,
"So by at least one way of reckoning, class and work belong to different fields of analysis, and my project pursues the critical study of work instead of class analysis and antiwork politics as a substitute for class struggle. But there is another way to approach class that does not produce such a sharp contrast with the category of work and that yields a different, and I think, more compelling approach to this territory. The distinction between the two fields of analysis becomes rather less clear when class too is conceived in terms of a process rather than an outcome. Process notions of class disrupt the functionalism of static mappings of class formations by attending to the practices by and relations within which they are secured, re-created, and challenged. If class is figured as a process of becoming classed, it may be that work--including struggles over what counts as work--could be conceived as a useful lens through which to approach class; in this way. the struggle against work could be a terrain of class politics.
But let me add one caveat: rather than conceiving class groupings and relations as the ground of antiwork politics, as that which provides its fuel and organizational form, it might be better to think of them as what might emerge from these efforts. By this reading, class formation, or what the autonomist tradition calls class composition, is best conceived as an outcome of struggles rather than their cause. The particular composition of the working class that might emerge from this politics of work--that is, the collectivities that might coalesce around its issues and the divisions that might develop in the interstices of antiwork struggles and in relation to postwork imaginaries--remain an open question." (Weeks 19)
Weeks' approach to the category of class doesn't act to reject its usefulness, but reimagines it in such a way as to think of it primarily as an effect of struggles, rather than as a cause of them. That is to say, class composition is created through the struggles that occur in response to the modes in the various laboring structures that they operate within. That approach recognizes that class composition can only be understood in mobile terms, that is as 'processes', rather than 'static mappings.' We might indeed draw on the Deleuzian language implicit in Weeks' formulation, and state that class composition and decomposition can be only understood within the lines of flight and apparatuses of capture that constitute the terrain of struggle. Although Weeks doesn't spell this out, it also becomes significant that class formations are inevitably products of defeat in the worst cases, and compromise in the best cases. They reflect the oscillation between capitulation and resistance that defines the history of class struggles. Therefore, such historical formations must be learned from critically, precisely because any simple embrace of such formations is simultaneously an embrace of the present situation. Instead, the recomposition of class resistance must be open-ended, and without a predetermined goal, defined by goals produced by its own struggles, rather than embracing the image of success constructed by dead struggles of the past.
Etienne Balibar's work in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities provides a useful lens of analysis in order to understand this process within a historical perspective. He begins by noting,
"What seems very clear, then, if one looks at the actual text of Marx's analysis, is not that there is a predetermined linking of forms, but rather an interplay of antagonistic strategies, strategies of exploitation, domination and resistance being displaced and renewed as a consequence of its own effects." (Balibar 164)
The class form is then produced through a complex structure of social relationships, defined by exploitation and domination on one hand and resistance and solidarity on the other hand. A shifting set of forms must be largely understood as an effect, rather than as a cause of the 'interplay of antagonistic strategies' that shape and form it. Balibar will go on to point out that this fact means that the splits and conflicts found throughout working class history "are no accident but represent the very substance of this relationship." Class identity is not only an effect of the complex and overdetermined structure of the class struggle, but it is also an extremely unstable and shift formation.
Balibar then goes on to spell out the historical terms that define the shifting nature of that particular formation.
"I want to suggest, to begin with, that what showed itself in the nineteenth and twentieth century as a relatively autonomous 'proletarian identity' needs to be understood as an objective ideological effect. An ideological effect is not a 'myth', or at least it cannot be reduced to one(all the more so since it does not imply that the 'truth of the myth' lies in individualism, since individualism is itself, par excellence, and ideological effect linked to the market economy and the modern state). In the same way, it is not possible to reduce to a myth the presence on the political stage of a force that identifies itself and is acknowledged as the 'working class', however intermittent its direct political acts may be, however variable its unity and divisions. Without its presence, the persistence of the social question and its role in the transformation of the state would remain unintelligible.
But what the work of historians does force us to register that there is nothing spontaneous, automatic or invariable about this ideological effect. It is the result of a permanent dialectic of working-class practice and organizational forms in which the forces in play include not only 'living conditions', 'working conditions', and 'economic conditions' but also the forms taken by national politics in the framework of the state (for instance, the questions of universal suffrage, national unity, wars, secular versus religious education and so on). In short, it is a constantly overdetermined dialectic in which a relatively individualized class is formed only through the relations it maintains all the other classes within a network of institutions. (Balibar 169-170)
Balibar moves on to state class is not only an effect of struggles, but the very conception of an autonomous notion of class is constructed as a particular way of negotiating a series of historical struggles, one that negotiates a series of differences and conflicts in order to frame and form those very struggles. He makes the point of pointing out that this statement doesn't turn class into a myth opposed to the 'real' individualism, which is itself a distinctive ideological effect of the particular nature of the market economy and the modern state, and that one cannot deny the reality of this ideological structure as a political force. But one has to look at a complex series of forces, that cannot be reduced to the reductivist understanding of the workplace. Instead, the working class is formed through a series of political questions that may seem incidental to it, including religious questions, questions of suffrage, etc. One might push this farther when looking at the proletarian structures of the United States and elsewhere to focus on structures of race and gender contained in the division of labor itself. Our concept of the proletariat or independent working class has either resisted those forms of domination, or it has all to often contributed to them, but those questions are not incidental to the notion of a relatively autonomous working class, instead they form the very fabric of that structure, and cannot be separated out of the process.
In effect, the question of identity is crucial to any historical materialist practice, but one that must be understood largely as an effect, or perhaps more generously, a part of the complex and overdetermined process that structures a particular regime of accumulation, which is itself in constant transformation.
Monday, January 14, 2013
Another short essay on Joanna Russ: Biopolitics and The Femle Man
I've been rereading Joanna Russ' The Female Man, while working on a substantial rewrite of an earlier paper that I want to turn into a dissertation chapter. Within that context, I came across a fairly interesting passage that I had previously given very little thought, one that links the text with a very problematic biopolitical thread that can be found in feminist utopias, one that I had previously thought was left out of her work. The relevant passage occurs in section viii of the first section of the book, which gives a brief historical sketch of the world of Whileaway,
"Humanity is unnatural!" exclaimed the philosopher Dunyasha Bernadetteson (A.C 344-426) who suffered all her life from the slip of a genetic surgeon's hand which had given her one mother's jaw and the other mother's teeth--orthodontia is hardly ever necessary on Whileaway. Her daughter's teeth, however, were perfect."
This comment along with the obsessive concern about IQ in an earlier section point to a moment that the focus on social construction is briefly undone, and the eugenics of earlier feminist science fiction and utopias enters back into the picture. If the initial conceit of the book is that the four characters, Janet, Jeanette, Jael, and Joanna are all the same individual within different social settings, the radicality of Whileaway can no longer be understood within the transformation of social structures, but in some sense draws on the eugenic construction of its subjects, placing it closer to the work of Herland than I'm sure Russ would have liked to be associated.
At the same time, a reasonably observant reader of the text could note that the description of Whileaway oscillates between satire and idealization, that is, between the world as a sending up of earlier traditions of science fiction that Russ thinks rather poorly of, and the radical possibilities contained in rereading, rewriting, and drawing from those traditions, in order to produce the type of cognitive estrangement that the genre has the potential of producing. I would largely agree that one is not being a terribly attentive reader if one ignores Russ' satirical engagement with the history of the genre, but I would point out that it's a satirical engagement that papers over the racial implications in those utopian traditions. This point is reflected in her own critical rereading of her review of Gilman's Herland, which notes the ways that she minimalizes the racism in that novel.
To move on from this very particular moment in the novel, albeit one that gestures towards a set of significant contradictions in the text, the more I work through questions of social reproduction the the 20th century of the United States, the more I'm convinced that the question of racialization has to be put at the center of the forms of reproductive labor in the household, and more specifically the ways that those forms of labor are organized and valorized. If the first half of the century is defined by a variety of attempts to incorporate new immigrants and elements of the working class into the dual regime of sexuality and consumption, those attempts simultaneously consciously worked to integrate these groups into an expanded whiteness, that only worked through a series of brutal acts of exclusion that denied the humanity of large sections of the world. The civilizing discourse of Gilman, the settlement house movement, theorists of mass consumption operated on the premise of a sort of racial uplift, one that largely drew from the now discounted evolutionary theories of Lamarkian selection.
These points are probably most substantially developed by Michel Foucault in his, History of Sexuality, Volume 1, but several essays by Etienne Balibar do a good job of expanding on this in a number of essays in the text co-written with Immanuel Wallerstein. There have been a number of substantial feminist critiques of Foucault based on his presumed discounting of sexual difference, and I would certainly accept that the intense weight put upon women in the bourgeois project of sexuality is not taken into account. The figure that is utterly erased from the text is that of the mother, but at the same time, Foucault's reading of sexuality as a both bourgeois and racist project only just recently seems to be incorporated into contemporary feminist work. This is not to say that feminists have refused to confront racism, but all too often its taken as a separate issue to the questions of sexuality that they are taking on. This erasure all too often leads to the inability to recognize the way that a biopolitical project that's deeply embedded in the logic of the formation of race haunts the history of the twentieth century.
"Humanity is unnatural!" exclaimed the philosopher Dunyasha Bernadetteson (A.C 344-426) who suffered all her life from the slip of a genetic surgeon's hand which had given her one mother's jaw and the other mother's teeth--orthodontia is hardly ever necessary on Whileaway. Her daughter's teeth, however, were perfect."
This comment along with the obsessive concern about IQ in an earlier section point to a moment that the focus on social construction is briefly undone, and the eugenics of earlier feminist science fiction and utopias enters back into the picture. If the initial conceit of the book is that the four characters, Janet, Jeanette, Jael, and Joanna are all the same individual within different social settings, the radicality of Whileaway can no longer be understood within the transformation of social structures, but in some sense draws on the eugenic construction of its subjects, placing it closer to the work of Herland than I'm sure Russ would have liked to be associated.
At the same time, a reasonably observant reader of the text could note that the description of Whileaway oscillates between satire and idealization, that is, between the world as a sending up of earlier traditions of science fiction that Russ thinks rather poorly of, and the radical possibilities contained in rereading, rewriting, and drawing from those traditions, in order to produce the type of cognitive estrangement that the genre has the potential of producing. I would largely agree that one is not being a terribly attentive reader if one ignores Russ' satirical engagement with the history of the genre, but I would point out that it's a satirical engagement that papers over the racial implications in those utopian traditions. This point is reflected in her own critical rereading of her review of Gilman's Herland, which notes the ways that she minimalizes the racism in that novel.
To move on from this very particular moment in the novel, albeit one that gestures towards a set of significant contradictions in the text, the more I work through questions of social reproduction the the 20th century of the United States, the more I'm convinced that the question of racialization has to be put at the center of the forms of reproductive labor in the household, and more specifically the ways that those forms of labor are organized and valorized. If the first half of the century is defined by a variety of attempts to incorporate new immigrants and elements of the working class into the dual regime of sexuality and consumption, those attempts simultaneously consciously worked to integrate these groups into an expanded whiteness, that only worked through a series of brutal acts of exclusion that denied the humanity of large sections of the world. The civilizing discourse of Gilman, the settlement house movement, theorists of mass consumption operated on the premise of a sort of racial uplift, one that largely drew from the now discounted evolutionary theories of Lamarkian selection.
These points are probably most substantially developed by Michel Foucault in his, History of Sexuality, Volume 1, but several essays by Etienne Balibar do a good job of expanding on this in a number of essays in the text co-written with Immanuel Wallerstein. There have been a number of substantial feminist critiques of Foucault based on his presumed discounting of sexual difference, and I would certainly accept that the intense weight put upon women in the bourgeois project of sexuality is not taken into account. The figure that is utterly erased from the text is that of the mother, but at the same time, Foucault's reading of sexuality as a both bourgeois and racist project only just recently seems to be incorporated into contemporary feminist work. This is not to say that feminists have refused to confront racism, but all too often its taken as a separate issue to the questions of sexuality that they are taking on. This erasure all too often leads to the inability to recognize the way that a biopolitical project that's deeply embedded in the logic of the formation of race haunts the history of the twentieth century.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
incomplete notes on the concept of the proletariat....
I've found myself in a bit on a bit of a tangent in relation to my dissertation project. Needless to say, for those of you who know me, this tendency to fall into tangent is not precisely shocking. My reading of Alys Weinbaum's Wayward Reproductions brought me back into contact with Immanuel Wallerstein and Etienne Balibar's group of essays, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, which, along with an interesting talk given by Jody Dean on the concept of the communist horizon (you can see it here) returned me to the question of the concept of the proletariat. I've been thinking about this off and on for any number of years, and Balibar's introduction returned me to some of those thoughts. Balibar notes,
"Alongside this, the emergence of the specific struggles of immigrant workers in France in the seventies and the difficulty of expressing these politically, alongside Althusser's thesis that every social formation is based on the combination of several modes of production, had convinced me that the division of the working class is not a secondary or residual phenomenon, but a structural (though this does not mean invariant) characteristic of present-day capitalist societies, which determines all the perspectives for revolutionary transformation and even for the daily organization of the movement for social change." (Balibar 2-3)
Significantly, Balibar connects Althusser's concept of overdetermination with the history of racialization in the capitalist world-system. That history according to Balibar can neither be dismissed as either a throw back to a former era as some conventional marxists attempt to argue nor as a superstructural phenomenon. In effect, Balibar's argument follows the general trend of thought within the various schools of thought within historical materialism. Following Wallerstein's arguments, the forms of racialization simultaneously structure and legitimate the division and hierarchy of labor of that system. Balibar is equally concerned with avoiding the neo-racist fallacy of transforming forms of racialization into a trans-historical phenomenon, and refuses to label the phenomenon as invariant. In effect, a variety of racisms structure the class struggle, but that struggle continually mutates and transforms those struggles.
As significant as that conversation is, and it is a conversation that I suspect that this blog will return to, I want to think about Balibar's comment in relationship to the concept of the proletariat. There has been a tendency amongst contemporary (ostensible) historical materialist thinkers to conceptualize various notions of the proletariat subject. This has come up in the work of Badiou, Zizek, and Gopal Balakrishnan, either as a presence or absence of a revolutionary subject. But as Balibar implicitly notes, the proletariat is better understood as an assemblage or collectivity, one that is structurally divided. Balibar follows up on this argument further in the text.
"1. Marx's thesis concerning the polarization of classes in capitalism is not an unfortunate error, but the strong point of his theory. However, it has to be carefully distinguished from the ideological representation of a 'simplification of class relations' with the development of capitalism, and idea bound up with historical catastrophism.
2.There is no 'ideal type of classes (proletariat and bourgeoisie) but there are processes of proletarianization and embourgeoisement, each of which involves its own internal conflicts (which I shall, for my part, following Althusser, term the 'overdetermination' of the antagonism): in this way we can see how the history of the capitalist economy depends on political struggles within the national and transnational space." (Balibar 11)
Capitalism is defined by the increased intensification of struggle between exploiter and exploited, but that struggle doesn't simplify as it polarizes, instead it mutates and takes on new and more complex forms. Balibar takes the concept of the bourgeois and proletarian classes and turns them into processes, created through the fluid struggles of the field of class struggle that defines capitalist modernity. When Balibar argues that "the history of the capitalist economy depends on political struggles within the national and transnational space", he also acknowledges that the terrain of struggle is defined by the ability of the proletariat coalesce as a collective assemblage. That struggle is dependent on producing "an effective anti-racism", a way of restructuring racist social structures contained in the social formation.
In a certain sense, Dean's talk becomes significant here. Dean engages in a certain sense of nostalgia in her talk by referring back to the party form. To be honest, the need to return to the party strikes me as a problematic formulation, both ignoring its failure and the critiques that are brought up by Anton Pannekoek amongst others, but it also returns the conversation to the concept of assemblage. For Dean, the party allows for a form of discipline that creates modes of solidarity, or to return to my Deluzian appropriation, new forms of assemblage containing new capacities, new strengths. At the same time, Dean doesn't engage substantially in the questions of racism and sexism that drive the critical work of Balibar and Wallerstein, favoring the expressive causality that seems to dominate amongst contemporary thinkers. We need to return to the concept of overderermination introduced by Althusser.
"Alongside this, the emergence of the specific struggles of immigrant workers in France in the seventies and the difficulty of expressing these politically, alongside Althusser's thesis that every social formation is based on the combination of several modes of production, had convinced me that the division of the working class is not a secondary or residual phenomenon, but a structural (though this does not mean invariant) characteristic of present-day capitalist societies, which determines all the perspectives for revolutionary transformation and even for the daily organization of the movement for social change." (Balibar 2-3)
Significantly, Balibar connects Althusser's concept of overdetermination with the history of racialization in the capitalist world-system. That history according to Balibar can neither be dismissed as either a throw back to a former era as some conventional marxists attempt to argue nor as a superstructural phenomenon. In effect, Balibar's argument follows the general trend of thought within the various schools of thought within historical materialism. Following Wallerstein's arguments, the forms of racialization simultaneously structure and legitimate the division and hierarchy of labor of that system. Balibar is equally concerned with avoiding the neo-racist fallacy of transforming forms of racialization into a trans-historical phenomenon, and refuses to label the phenomenon as invariant. In effect, a variety of racisms structure the class struggle, but that struggle continually mutates and transforms those struggles.
As significant as that conversation is, and it is a conversation that I suspect that this blog will return to, I want to think about Balibar's comment in relationship to the concept of the proletariat. There has been a tendency amongst contemporary (ostensible) historical materialist thinkers to conceptualize various notions of the proletariat subject. This has come up in the work of Badiou, Zizek, and Gopal Balakrishnan, either as a presence or absence of a revolutionary subject. But as Balibar implicitly notes, the proletariat is better understood as an assemblage or collectivity, one that is structurally divided. Balibar follows up on this argument further in the text.
"1. Marx's thesis concerning the polarization of classes in capitalism is not an unfortunate error, but the strong point of his theory. However, it has to be carefully distinguished from the ideological representation of a 'simplification of class relations' with the development of capitalism, and idea bound up with historical catastrophism.
2.There is no 'ideal type of classes (proletariat and bourgeoisie) but there are processes of proletarianization and embourgeoisement, each of which involves its own internal conflicts (which I shall, for my part, following Althusser, term the 'overdetermination' of the antagonism): in this way we can see how the history of the capitalist economy depends on political struggles within the national and transnational space." (Balibar 11)
Capitalism is defined by the increased intensification of struggle between exploiter and exploited, but that struggle doesn't simplify as it polarizes, instead it mutates and takes on new and more complex forms. Balibar takes the concept of the bourgeois and proletarian classes and turns them into processes, created through the fluid struggles of the field of class struggle that defines capitalist modernity. When Balibar argues that "the history of the capitalist economy depends on political struggles within the national and transnational space", he also acknowledges that the terrain of struggle is defined by the ability of the proletariat coalesce as a collective assemblage. That struggle is dependent on producing "an effective anti-racism", a way of restructuring racist social structures contained in the social formation.
In a certain sense, Dean's talk becomes significant here. Dean engages in a certain sense of nostalgia in her talk by referring back to the party form. To be honest, the need to return to the party strikes me as a problematic formulation, both ignoring its failure and the critiques that are brought up by Anton Pannekoek amongst others, but it also returns the conversation to the concept of assemblage. For Dean, the party allows for a form of discipline that creates modes of solidarity, or to return to my Deluzian appropriation, new forms of assemblage containing new capacities, new strengths. At the same time, Dean doesn't engage substantially in the questions of racism and sexism that drive the critical work of Balibar and Wallerstein, favoring the expressive causality that seems to dominate amongst contemporary thinkers. We need to return to the concept of overderermination introduced by Althusser.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
A Short Note on the eve of the vote count
It's been a few days since I have posted anything up here. The primary reason has been the lengthy controversy around the vote count in our Grad Student election. After a contentious first day of voting, it had seemed like the vote tally was going to be completed the next day. However, at 5pm the election committee declared a one hour break. That break stretched on for an extra two hours. The head of the election committee entered the count room at 8pm and illegally suspended the vote count until the next Joint Council meeting, putting the count of half the votes until months later. This illegal resolution passed with three votes, and no opportunity to vote against the resolution. The head of the elections committee then literally ran out of the room, knocking over empty ballot boxes and abandoning the open ballot boxes. The remaining elections committee folks closed the boxes and locked up the room. Since that Saturday, AWDU (Academic Workers for a Democratic Union) have been monitoring the locked room with the ballots. Additionally, our Berkeley colleagues have occupied the Berkeley office, demanding that their votes are counted. (Over half the Berkeley votes were challenged by USEJ challenger, and non-student, Des Harmon.)
Because of that, the only real writing that I have been able to get done has been directed towards my dissertation project. However, I thought I thought I would take a brief moment at what is possibly the last day of the vigil over the ballots to report into my unknown and most likely imagined public (and my real friends.) The process has been exhausting, but I've been genuinely impressed with all the folks involved in our slate. I'm hoping that our connections with the UCLA folks will develop further, and that we can form some strong and long lasting Southern California connections. I think that the external and internal challenges that AWDU has faced have produced a genuinely strong organization that can continue on, whether we win or not. In his analysis of 1968, Immanuel Wallerstein noted that the radical upsurge of that time period was directed against the traditional counter-systemic movements and their inability or unwillingness to challenge the capitalist world system (whether through the compromises of Moscow, or the complacency of social democracy.) At a far more modest level, AWDU is trying to do something similar with our own union, demanding that it take a meaningful role in the defense of public education and our rights as workers. It's been remarkable how combative the upper echelons of the local have been to this attempt at reform given their complacency in the face of privatization and administration push back. More than anything else, this contrast shows their real priorities.
As in other posts on this topic, I welcome comments and debate, but I will delete all anonymous postings. Union democracy demands responsibility, and if you are unwilling to put your name to a post, I'm not terribly interested in what you have to say.
Because of that, the only real writing that I have been able to get done has been directed towards my dissertation project. However, I thought I thought I would take a brief moment at what is possibly the last day of the vigil over the ballots to report into my unknown and most likely imagined public (and my real friends.) The process has been exhausting, but I've been genuinely impressed with all the folks involved in our slate. I'm hoping that our connections with the UCLA folks will develop further, and that we can form some strong and long lasting Southern California connections. I think that the external and internal challenges that AWDU has faced have produced a genuinely strong organization that can continue on, whether we win or not. In his analysis of 1968, Immanuel Wallerstein noted that the radical upsurge of that time period was directed against the traditional counter-systemic movements and their inability or unwillingness to challenge the capitalist world system (whether through the compromises of Moscow, or the complacency of social democracy.) At a far more modest level, AWDU is trying to do something similar with our own union, demanding that it take a meaningful role in the defense of public education and our rights as workers. It's been remarkable how combative the upper echelons of the local have been to this attempt at reform given their complacency in the face of privatization and administration push back. More than anything else, this contrast shows their real priorities.
As in other posts on this topic, I welcome comments and debate, but I will delete all anonymous postings. Union democracy demands responsibility, and if you are unwilling to put your name to a post, I'm not terribly interested in what you have to say.
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