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.
Showing posts with label Paulo Virno. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paulo Virno. Show all posts
Friday, April 21, 2017
Friday, November 9, 2012
On the industrialization of Housework
Ruth Schwarz Cowan's More Work for Mother plays a significant role in thinking about the radical shifts in domesticity, particularly looking at the process of industrialization in the household. She argues that our understanding of those shifts have been a 'victim of cultural obfuscation' due to the sort of popular romanticism of the home, which places it in opposition to the outside public sphere, a romantic notion embraced by conservatives and progressives for different ends. Cowan proposes exploring this radical transformation, making the following argument.
"Households did not become industrialized in the same way that other workplaces did; there are striking differences between housework and other forms of industrialized labor. Most of the people who do housework do not get paid for it, despite the fact that it is, for many of them, a full-time job. They do not have job descriptions or time clocks or contractual arrangements; indeed, they cannot fairly be said even to have employers. Most of their work is performed in isolation, whereas most of their contemporaries work in the company of hundreds, perhaps even thousands of other adults. Over the years, market labor has become increasingly specialized, and the division of labor has become increasingly more minute; but housework has not been affected by this process. The housewife is the last jane-of-all-trades in a world in which the jacks-of-all-trades have more or less disappeared; she is expected to perform work that ranges from the most menial physical labor to the most abstract of mental manipulations and to do it all without any specialized training. These various characteristics of household work have led some analysts to suggest that housework (or the household economy) is the last dying gasp of feudalism, a remnant of precapitalist conditions somehow (miraculously) vaulting the centuries unimpaired, the last surviving indicator of what the Western world was before the market economy reared its ugly head.
Perhaps this is true, but there are other sides to the coin; industrialized housework resembles industrialized market labor in significant ways. Modern housework depends upon nonhuman energy sources, just as advanced industrialized systems do....
Thus, even if the household is an isolated work environment, it is also a part of a larger economic and social system; and if it did not constantly interact with this system, it could not function at all--making it no different from the manufacturing plant outside the city or the supermarket down the street....
Finally, both household labor and market labor are today performed with tools that can be neither manufacture nor understood by the workers who use them....
In sum, we can say that there are three significant senses in which housework differs from market work (in being--most commonly--unpaid labor, performed in isolated workplaces, by unspecialized workers) and three significant senses in which the two forms of work resemble each other (in utilizing nonhuman--or non-animal--energy sources, which create dependency on a network of social and economic institutions and are accompanied by alienation from the tools that make labor possible). If we take all six of these criteria and group them together, we will have a good definition of industrialization. Then we might be able to see that, in the West over the last two hundred years, women's work has been differentiated from men's by being incompletely industrialized or by being industrialized in a somewhat different manner. (Cowan 6-7)
Before we work through the productive aspects of the quote, I want to point to out the most significant problem of the passage, the binary between the commercial space of men and the household space of women. On one hand, the industrialized workplace certainly hasn't excluded women. One can look at the factories Lowell in the 19th century, the wartime workplaces of the United States, amongst other examples. On the other hand, the isolated space of the household has contained substantial amounts of commercial, particularly in the form of home work, piece work taken up by immigrant wives to supplement income. Perhaps to put another way, the farther we move away from white, middle-class households, the less this split between the public and the private works. It works best during the 1950's, precisely because of the explosion of white middle class households. (As many note, the post war period coagulates a white, middle class identity, at the expense of the African American portion of the population.)
Once we move beyond these problems, the text provides some provocative approaches to understanding the structures of domesticity and consumption that increasingly dominates industrialized, mass production through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cowan provides some useful evidence to critique the notion taken up by a set of conventional marxist thinkers and feminists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Despite the fact that household labor doesn't mirror the structures of mass labor found in the Fordist factory, it is in fact modern, industrialized work that appears radically different than previous household labor. In effect, the structure of the household is radically transformed by the structures of industrialization as much as any other form of work. Just as significantly, the entire process of industrialization cannot be understood without thinking about the role of the household as an aspect of that process. We can think about this in a couple ways. The first way of thinking about this relates to the question of consumption, one not fully taken up by Cowan, but dealt with in depth by Stuart Ewen in his critical work. The household becomes the place that legitimates mass production through the consumption of what is produced, and by acting as a place of solace, providing a substitute to any meaningful voice in the space of production. What Cowan makes us see is that it also shapes the way that reproductive labor occurs. Although she gestures towards the critiques that label this form of work as 'primitive' or non-modern, the reality is that it is intensely tied into the forms of industrialization that were occurring throughout the system. Just as the work of carpenters and other craft workers was being deeply reshaped, the work of the housewife was just as significantly transformed, operating in isolation, but, at the same time, deeply shaped by the social structures of industrialization. We might even say that the feminist movement played a class role in bringing out the common experience of this isolated socialization.
What I want to bring to this conversation might be understood in a two fold process. 1. I want to argue that despite what Cowan argues, there existed deeply embedded structures of pedagogy for this newly industrialized labor. Most obviously, this training occurred in a variety of classes for immigrant mothers and wives, in classrooms focused on home economics and other disciplines, but that could be expanded to the informal space of domestic and women's magazines, which became the prime location to popularize the academic discourses of home economics and other engagements with the home. It also produced a heavily edited and monitored collective space in which women could discuss techniques and approaches to child care, gardening, and other activities. Housework could only be understood as untrained labor if these spaces as well as other formal and informal spaces are ignored. 2. In some sense, the types of labor discussed by Cowan, rather than being primitive gesture towards the forms of labor found in the contemporary forms of post-Fordism. As Paulo Virno notes, this era is defined precisely by the expectation that workers can operate within a variety of rules systems, take on a multiplicity of tasks, and most notably, invest themselves passionately in each of them. Perhaps, instead of thinking of the walls of the factory falling down to envelope society, we can see the reproductive structures of the household falling down with the fights brought on by feminism, and that fight and more notably, its reaction, leading to a generalization of the reproductive role of the household throughout social structures. This obviously needs more thought, and I probably will need to deal with the question of the counter-revolution within this process, but I think I will leave my thoughts here for now. Hopefully, this isn't too repetitive.
"Households did not become industrialized in the same way that other workplaces did; there are striking differences between housework and other forms of industrialized labor. Most of the people who do housework do not get paid for it, despite the fact that it is, for many of them, a full-time job. They do not have job descriptions or time clocks or contractual arrangements; indeed, they cannot fairly be said even to have employers. Most of their work is performed in isolation, whereas most of their contemporaries work in the company of hundreds, perhaps even thousands of other adults. Over the years, market labor has become increasingly specialized, and the division of labor has become increasingly more minute; but housework has not been affected by this process. The housewife is the last jane-of-all-trades in a world in which the jacks-of-all-trades have more or less disappeared; she is expected to perform work that ranges from the most menial physical labor to the most abstract of mental manipulations and to do it all without any specialized training. These various characteristics of household work have led some analysts to suggest that housework (or the household economy) is the last dying gasp of feudalism, a remnant of precapitalist conditions somehow (miraculously) vaulting the centuries unimpaired, the last surviving indicator of what the Western world was before the market economy reared its ugly head.
Perhaps this is true, but there are other sides to the coin; industrialized housework resembles industrialized market labor in significant ways. Modern housework depends upon nonhuman energy sources, just as advanced industrialized systems do....
Thus, even if the household is an isolated work environment, it is also a part of a larger economic and social system; and if it did not constantly interact with this system, it could not function at all--making it no different from the manufacturing plant outside the city or the supermarket down the street....
Finally, both household labor and market labor are today performed with tools that can be neither manufacture nor understood by the workers who use them....
In sum, we can say that there are three significant senses in which housework differs from market work (in being--most commonly--unpaid labor, performed in isolated workplaces, by unspecialized workers) and three significant senses in which the two forms of work resemble each other (in utilizing nonhuman--or non-animal--energy sources, which create dependency on a network of social and economic institutions and are accompanied by alienation from the tools that make labor possible). If we take all six of these criteria and group them together, we will have a good definition of industrialization. Then we might be able to see that, in the West over the last two hundred years, women's work has been differentiated from men's by being incompletely industrialized or by being industrialized in a somewhat different manner. (Cowan 6-7)
Before we work through the productive aspects of the quote, I want to point to out the most significant problem of the passage, the binary between the commercial space of men and the household space of women. On one hand, the industrialized workplace certainly hasn't excluded women. One can look at the factories Lowell in the 19th century, the wartime workplaces of the United States, amongst other examples. On the other hand, the isolated space of the household has contained substantial amounts of commercial, particularly in the form of home work, piece work taken up by immigrant wives to supplement income. Perhaps to put another way, the farther we move away from white, middle-class households, the less this split between the public and the private works. It works best during the 1950's, precisely because of the explosion of white middle class households. (As many note, the post war period coagulates a white, middle class identity, at the expense of the African American portion of the population.)
Once we move beyond these problems, the text provides some provocative approaches to understanding the structures of domesticity and consumption that increasingly dominates industrialized, mass production through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cowan provides some useful evidence to critique the notion taken up by a set of conventional marxist thinkers and feminists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Despite the fact that household labor doesn't mirror the structures of mass labor found in the Fordist factory, it is in fact modern, industrialized work that appears radically different than previous household labor. In effect, the structure of the household is radically transformed by the structures of industrialization as much as any other form of work. Just as significantly, the entire process of industrialization cannot be understood without thinking about the role of the household as an aspect of that process. We can think about this in a couple ways. The first way of thinking about this relates to the question of consumption, one not fully taken up by Cowan, but dealt with in depth by Stuart Ewen in his critical work. The household becomes the place that legitimates mass production through the consumption of what is produced, and by acting as a place of solace, providing a substitute to any meaningful voice in the space of production. What Cowan makes us see is that it also shapes the way that reproductive labor occurs. Although she gestures towards the critiques that label this form of work as 'primitive' or non-modern, the reality is that it is intensely tied into the forms of industrialization that were occurring throughout the system. Just as the work of carpenters and other craft workers was being deeply reshaped, the work of the housewife was just as significantly transformed, operating in isolation, but, at the same time, deeply shaped by the social structures of industrialization. We might even say that the feminist movement played a class role in bringing out the common experience of this isolated socialization.
What I want to bring to this conversation might be understood in a two fold process. 1. I want to argue that despite what Cowan argues, there existed deeply embedded structures of pedagogy for this newly industrialized labor. Most obviously, this training occurred in a variety of classes for immigrant mothers and wives, in classrooms focused on home economics and other disciplines, but that could be expanded to the informal space of domestic and women's magazines, which became the prime location to popularize the academic discourses of home economics and other engagements with the home. It also produced a heavily edited and monitored collective space in which women could discuss techniques and approaches to child care, gardening, and other activities. Housework could only be understood as untrained labor if these spaces as well as other formal and informal spaces are ignored. 2. In some sense, the types of labor discussed by Cowan, rather than being primitive gesture towards the forms of labor found in the contemporary forms of post-Fordism. As Paulo Virno notes, this era is defined precisely by the expectation that workers can operate within a variety of rules systems, take on a multiplicity of tasks, and most notably, invest themselves passionately in each of them. Perhaps, instead of thinking of the walls of the factory falling down to envelope society, we can see the reproductive structures of the household falling down with the fights brought on by feminism, and that fight and more notably, its reaction, leading to a generalization of the reproductive role of the household throughout social structures. This obviously needs more thought, and I probably will need to deal with the question of the counter-revolution within this process, but I think I will leave my thoughts here for now. Hopefully, this isn't too repetitive.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Tonight, We're Going to Party Like its ? (A Critical Reading of Jodi Dean and Slavoj Zizek)
Over the past few year, there has been a sort of nostalgia for the party form entering the discourse of a select set of left academic thinks. The most notable of those is Slavoj Zizek, but this phenomenon certainly isn't limited to him. Probably the most recent concrete expression of this desire can be found in Jodi Dean's thoughtful talk, The Communist Horizon, but it also can be found in Zizek's recent polemic on the riots in England in far more simplistic terms. Perhaps more significantly, these responses have found a fairly wide audience amongst those interested in the intersection of radical and academic discussions. There have been fairly lengthy discussions of these works both on a variety of websites, as well as on Doug Henwood's Left Business Observer listserve. I want to provide a critique of these engagements, in order to discuss some of the limitations that I see in this recent formation, focusing primarily on the more thoughtful engagement of Dean's, but also bringing in Zizek's more problematic formulation, as well. However, I want to make it clear that this critique is made in a sympathetic light, at least to its sympathetic reception. I want to use this response as a way of seriously pushing forward the discussion about collectivity, solidarity, and the construction of institutions pushed forward by these reconsiderations of the party form.
Jodi Dean opens her argument with a brief sketch of the three dominant forms of contemporary left organization today, which she labels as anarchism, democracy, and liberalism. She argues that these forms of organization are unable of creating strong forms of stable solidarity needed to challenge the powerful engines of expropriation and dispossession that define the contemporary regime of neo-liberal capital. Contemporary democracy exists primarily to neutralize dissident voices, while liberalism and anarchism replicate the forms of individualization that exist at the core of the neo-liberal formation. In this sense, Bhaskar Sunkara's critique is wrong in arguing that Dean's concept of 'communicative capitalism' is irrelevant to her larger argument. While I certainly agree with Sunkara's argument that Dean ignores the history of anarchism and democracy, I think Dean has productively captured a sense of the present moment, or, at very least, a particular present. We can see that Dean is identifying that all three of these dominant forms of organization creation or conceptions of collectivity as symptoms of this new regime of accumulation, which might be identified in more conventional terms as 'flexible accumulation.' Within this context, Dean can be seen in dialogue with the work of the Italian Marxist Paulo Virno, and the recent interventions of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri without necessarily accepting the optimism contained in the latter formulation. (I would be interested to see what Dean would do with Virno's concept of the multitude, a conceptualization that sees that formation as the result of a failed revolution, defined by cynicism, opportunism, and fear.)
At the same time, I think that Sunkara's historical critique points to some of the blind-spots in Dean's thinking. Most notably, as Sunkara notes, "Dean can’t separate parliamentarism from democracy." This perhaps is one of the areas where I still most profoundly agree with Hardt and Negri, despite other disagreements I have with the thinkers. Democracy cannot be simply interchanged with the conceptual framework of liberalism. Instead, the two frameworks, democracy and liberalism, are by their nature antagonistic, a fact that most historical liberal thinkers have recognized. Our ability to collapse the two concepts together has depended on a lengthy and deliberative process, one that has been dedicated to the neutralization of any meaningful, participatory democratic framework. While I agree with Dean that any belief that we can create substantial transformation through the ballot is illusory, I simply disagree that we could call such a system democratic. There are also a set of organizations that Dean leaves out, trade unions, non-profits, etc., or a whole world of reformism that exists in a variety of states of moribund. I suspect that Dean left these organizations out of the conversation because of the audience, but I would be curious how they would work within her framework.
Turning Back to the argument, Dean then argues that we need to return to the party form in order to counter the forms of individualization that define the contemporary moment. We need forms and structures of solidarity that go beyond modes of localism, and that have a more substantial duree than the temporary formations that often define contemporary politics. For Dean, this need is subsumed under the term, 'discipline.' The party forms allows for and perhaps even demands that its participants think beyond the parochialism of the local to question on the terrain of the national-popular, and even the international. At the same time, it creates a set of forms of solidarity that break away from the temporary arrangements of volunteerism. Dean does a fairly good job of dealing with some of the most obvious critiques within the question and answer session, pointing out that organizations have the ability to recreate and reinvent themselves, that organizations have the possibility of distributing power within their structures as well as accumulating power, and pointing out the fact that much of the criticism of the party form operates within the logic of the red scare. In short, Dean recognizes the modes of liberal anti-communism that haunts these critiques, both in the liberal and the anarchist forms of critique.
At the same time, Dean's concept of the party remains an empty signifier, neither engaging with the history of the party form, as Sunkara points out in his critique, nor thinking through why this form may has lost its traction. As Sunkara points out, the revolutionary party form is hardly extinct. One can find versions of it in a variety of small sectarian formations such as the U.S. version of the Socialist Workers' Party and the Revolutionary Communist Party and larger version such as the Left Party of Germany, the UK Socialist Workers' Party, or the new anti-capitalist formation in France. Sunkara wants Dean to distinguish her vision from these various forms of anti capitalist parties, but I'm struck by a different question. If the party form is such a strong approach to organization, why haven't these various grouplets succeeded in creating new counter-hegemonies or historical blocks? Perhaps more significantly, why has the party formed suffered such a decline, a decline that began long before the advent of our current neo-liberal formation? Such questions would demand an engagement with the Leninist party form as a historical, rather than ideal social formation. An additional question might be posed, why does the only alternative to spontaneity (as it is currently envisioned) have to take the party form?
Turing briefly to Zizek's polemic, we can see a more pronounced version of some of the same issues contained in Dean's discussion. So far, most of the critical attention paid to Zizek's comments have focused on some of the problematic language in his essay, focusing on his use of the word, 'rabble' and the way he gestures towards certain anti-immigrant tropes. Without dismissing that train of thought, I want to follow a line of thought. Throughout his comments, Zizek continually finds the protests wanting, lacking a sort of conscious political subjectivity. Rather than reading the phenomenon a complex and dense network of actions, collectivities, linked together with a variety of communication strategies, Zizek can only read them in terms of negation. This is not to entirely dismiss the range of critiques that Zizek brings into the second half of his essay, but to note in the case of the incidents in the UK, Zizek makes no particular effort to think through the political dimension of the riots. Or perhaps to put it another way, Zizek's fixation of the revolutionary subject blinds him to engaging with the contingent and contradictory forms that proletarian revolt has actually taken over the years.
Years ago, I found myself frustrated with a talk given by Michael Hardt. Hardt insisted on distancing his concept of the multitude from the descriptive one offered by Virno, arguing that he and Negri were proposing a project, or perhaps, a potentiality. Accepting that premise, I found myself wondering how were we supposed to move from the depressing reality offered by Virno to the new revolutionary assemblage. Beyond a few references to 'Turtles and Teamsters,' Hardt offered very little. I can't help but thinking that we have the same issue with this project. Dean points to a real need in political organizing, and offers a useful symptomatic reading of the present, but I'm not sure how we get from A to B. I think that one might identify a common theme within my critiques, and one that is not terribly new to the terrain of critical theory, the questioning of categories. Dean (and, to a much lesser extent, Zizek) introduce a set of useful categories for engaging with the present, but leave those categories in a reified state. We might ask along with Hegel, 'what is that is being glossed over in the contemporary forms of common sense?" and along with Marx, we might ask, "What is the history of struggle that animates the formation of these categories, and how does that affect our engagement with them?"
Addendum: I realized that I left out something rather significant in my effort to work through Dean's text, which was a comment on Sunkara's intervention. Although I don't explicitly mention it, I was strongly influenced by his argument, and I highly recommend reading his intervention.
Jodi Dean opens her argument with a brief sketch of the three dominant forms of contemporary left organization today, which she labels as anarchism, democracy, and liberalism. She argues that these forms of organization are unable of creating strong forms of stable solidarity needed to challenge the powerful engines of expropriation and dispossession that define the contemporary regime of neo-liberal capital. Contemporary democracy exists primarily to neutralize dissident voices, while liberalism and anarchism replicate the forms of individualization that exist at the core of the neo-liberal formation. In this sense, Bhaskar Sunkara's critique is wrong in arguing that Dean's concept of 'communicative capitalism' is irrelevant to her larger argument. While I certainly agree with Sunkara's argument that Dean ignores the history of anarchism and democracy, I think Dean has productively captured a sense of the present moment, or, at very least, a particular present. We can see that Dean is identifying that all three of these dominant forms of organization creation or conceptions of collectivity as symptoms of this new regime of accumulation, which might be identified in more conventional terms as 'flexible accumulation.' Within this context, Dean can be seen in dialogue with the work of the Italian Marxist Paulo Virno, and the recent interventions of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri without necessarily accepting the optimism contained in the latter formulation. (I would be interested to see what Dean would do with Virno's concept of the multitude, a conceptualization that sees that formation as the result of a failed revolution, defined by cynicism, opportunism, and fear.)
At the same time, I think that Sunkara's historical critique points to some of the blind-spots in Dean's thinking. Most notably, as Sunkara notes, "Dean can’t separate parliamentarism from democracy." This perhaps is one of the areas where I still most profoundly agree with Hardt and Negri, despite other disagreements I have with the thinkers. Democracy cannot be simply interchanged with the conceptual framework of liberalism. Instead, the two frameworks, democracy and liberalism, are by their nature antagonistic, a fact that most historical liberal thinkers have recognized. Our ability to collapse the two concepts together has depended on a lengthy and deliberative process, one that has been dedicated to the neutralization of any meaningful, participatory democratic framework. While I agree with Dean that any belief that we can create substantial transformation through the ballot is illusory, I simply disagree that we could call such a system democratic. There are also a set of organizations that Dean leaves out, trade unions, non-profits, etc., or a whole world of reformism that exists in a variety of states of moribund. I suspect that Dean left these organizations out of the conversation because of the audience, but I would be curious how they would work within her framework.
Turning Back to the argument, Dean then argues that we need to return to the party form in order to counter the forms of individualization that define the contemporary moment. We need forms and structures of solidarity that go beyond modes of localism, and that have a more substantial duree than the temporary formations that often define contemporary politics. For Dean, this need is subsumed under the term, 'discipline.' The party forms allows for and perhaps even demands that its participants think beyond the parochialism of the local to question on the terrain of the national-popular, and even the international. At the same time, it creates a set of forms of solidarity that break away from the temporary arrangements of volunteerism. Dean does a fairly good job of dealing with some of the most obvious critiques within the question and answer session, pointing out that organizations have the ability to recreate and reinvent themselves, that organizations have the possibility of distributing power within their structures as well as accumulating power, and pointing out the fact that much of the criticism of the party form operates within the logic of the red scare. In short, Dean recognizes the modes of liberal anti-communism that haunts these critiques, both in the liberal and the anarchist forms of critique.
At the same time, Dean's concept of the party remains an empty signifier, neither engaging with the history of the party form, as Sunkara points out in his critique, nor thinking through why this form may has lost its traction. As Sunkara points out, the revolutionary party form is hardly extinct. One can find versions of it in a variety of small sectarian formations such as the U.S. version of the Socialist Workers' Party and the Revolutionary Communist Party and larger version such as the Left Party of Germany, the UK Socialist Workers' Party, or the new anti-capitalist formation in France. Sunkara wants Dean to distinguish her vision from these various forms of anti capitalist parties, but I'm struck by a different question. If the party form is such a strong approach to organization, why haven't these various grouplets succeeded in creating new counter-hegemonies or historical blocks? Perhaps more significantly, why has the party formed suffered such a decline, a decline that began long before the advent of our current neo-liberal formation? Such questions would demand an engagement with the Leninist party form as a historical, rather than ideal social formation. An additional question might be posed, why does the only alternative to spontaneity (as it is currently envisioned) have to take the party form?
Turing briefly to Zizek's polemic, we can see a more pronounced version of some of the same issues contained in Dean's discussion. So far, most of the critical attention paid to Zizek's comments have focused on some of the problematic language in his essay, focusing on his use of the word, 'rabble' and the way he gestures towards certain anti-immigrant tropes. Without dismissing that train of thought, I want to follow a line of thought. Throughout his comments, Zizek continually finds the protests wanting, lacking a sort of conscious political subjectivity. Rather than reading the phenomenon a complex and dense network of actions, collectivities, linked together with a variety of communication strategies, Zizek can only read them in terms of negation. This is not to entirely dismiss the range of critiques that Zizek brings into the second half of his essay, but to note in the case of the incidents in the UK, Zizek makes no particular effort to think through the political dimension of the riots. Or perhaps to put it another way, Zizek's fixation of the revolutionary subject blinds him to engaging with the contingent and contradictory forms that proletarian revolt has actually taken over the years.
Years ago, I found myself frustrated with a talk given by Michael Hardt. Hardt insisted on distancing his concept of the multitude from the descriptive one offered by Virno, arguing that he and Negri were proposing a project, or perhaps, a potentiality. Accepting that premise, I found myself wondering how were we supposed to move from the depressing reality offered by Virno to the new revolutionary assemblage. Beyond a few references to 'Turtles and Teamsters,' Hardt offered very little. I can't help but thinking that we have the same issue with this project. Dean points to a real need in political organizing, and offers a useful symptomatic reading of the present, but I'm not sure how we get from A to B. I think that one might identify a common theme within my critiques, and one that is not terribly new to the terrain of critical theory, the questioning of categories. Dean (and, to a much lesser extent, Zizek) introduce a set of useful categories for engaging with the present, but leave those categories in a reified state. We might ask along with Hegel, 'what is that is being glossed over in the contemporary forms of common sense?" and along with Marx, we might ask, "What is the history of struggle that animates the formation of these categories, and how does that affect our engagement with them?"
Addendum: I realized that I left out something rather significant in my effort to work through Dean's text, which was a comment on Sunkara's intervention. Although I don't explicitly mention it, I was strongly influenced by his argument, and I highly recommend reading his intervention.
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