END OF PART
Chapter 4. The Problem of History
8. Break or Accelerate! The Limits to Critique Without Organisation
Perhaps the best way to describe the effect of the crisis of the Symmetry Thesis, is to describe it as the divorce between objective and subjective orientation: between the orientation in actuality and that of actualisation, in other words, between the orientation in that which is organised and the orientation of organisation. This produces a strange effect in radical theory, which, unwilling to limit itself to exposing the dialectical structure of Capital, still yearns to think the temporality of revolution. To think the overcoming of capitalism without organisation but with Marx, leaves, broadly speaking,
420 Ibid., 122.
421 Ibid., 132.
two orientations: the via positiva of revolutionary accelerationism or the via negativa of messianic catastrophism.422 Both try to think the conditions of revolution on the background of what we can call the Asymmetry Thesis, which sees both capitalist organisation and disorganisation as leading to the disorganisation of workers' organisations. Here, we will leave the critique of historical teleology behind, and enter into a brief critique of the critique of this teleology, as it proposes itself as an orientation without organisation.
The space for revolutionary accelerationism in Marx is given by his theory that the ever faster, contradictory development of capitalism will by itself lead to a final crisis. Here we find a special teleology of the history of capitalism, i.e. one that studies the internal history of capitalism as a necessary tendency towards its own limit, and crisis. Here the contradictory character of capital itself and the ever deeper misery and negativity of the proletariat, demonstrate the openness of history towards the overcoming of the current order, even without a party or a labour movement. This teleology is very inorganic and focussed on the species. Whereas for Hegel an organism which reaches its inner limits begins it decline and then dies, revolutionary accelerationism interprets the crisis and 'death' of bourgeois society as well as the production of the conditions for communism as part of the same process. The reason the death of capitalism pure and simple – without the victory of the organised proletariat – can be considered revolutionary rather than catastrophic, is that accelerationism believes in the teleological development of the species, and particularly that of its technologies.
Messianic catastrophism refers to the more pessimistic position, which recognises that the deepening immiseration and sacrifice of life under capitalism will not by itself produce a revolutionary reversal, and that capitalist technology is deeply destructive and designed to discipline. Thus, rather than acceleration, a rupture is needed, an interruption of the whole process. Walter Benjamin suggests here a corrective to the overwhelmingly accelerationist Marx:
Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train – namely, the human race – to activate the emergency brake.423
422 I borrow the concept of accelerationism from Benjamin Noys. Benjamin Noys, The Persistence of the Negative (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
423 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996), 402.
Whereas accelerationism thinks the transition to communism as an Aufhebung, the emergency break functions more on the level of an interruption, which opens for an abolition of capitalism.424 The logic of capital – which is also embodied subjectively and materialised in machinery – is either raised to a higher level, or totally done away with.
So revolution is either – Messianically – an evental break with history, or its commensuration – epically – through the acceleration of the tendencies of history.
The basic temporal structure of this dilemma – to break with history or to accelerate it – is not merely produced, as claimed by Étienne Balibar, by the progressive, evolutionary linearity of the conception of history that accompanies it, but by the totalisation of the process of history, the interconnectedness of all parts in the process.425 At the same time they are both predicated on a critique of the organisational paradigm implied by the Great Symmetry Thesis, but the absence of a concept of organisation, apart from that of capital. The crisis of the previously dominant notion of organisation becomes a crisis of radical theory's ability to think organisation in general – at least as long as other modes of organisation remains invisible to it. The first step to open for another concept of organisation, would be to ask the question of multiple times. Capitalist history is not totality, but totalisation, not organised, but organising; it must be theorised as an ongoing attempt to synchronise a manifold and render it contemporaneous which entails a multiplicity of times, and potential different synchronisations and rhythms.
To question the totalisation of history means to begin to think the temporality of other processes, not to merely criticise capital for being totalising. In the exclusively critical or negative spirit of dialectical Marxism,426 Chris Arthur points to the existence of two 'others' of capital, yet does not seem to recognize the importance of thinking from the point of view of their irreducibility to capital.
The critical aspect of the dialectic shows that on the use value side capital faces two ‘others’ of itself that it cannot plausibly claim – in Hegelian fashion – to be only aspects of it own self. Its external other is Nature which capital is degrading at frightening speed thus undermining its own material basis. Its
424 Balibar describes as a central aporia of contemporary history: 'if communism is located outside history, that is to say outside class struggles, it is simply another speculative or religious myth; but if communism is simply the process of present history (or the direction of present history), it will never become real. How to break with the mainstream of history from within?' Étienne Balibar, “The Non-Contemporaneity of Althusser,” in The Althusserian Legacy, ed. E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1992), 6.
425 Étienne Balibar, Eleven Theses on Marx and Marxism (Swedenborg Hall, London: | Backdoor Broadcasting Company, 2011), the last 10 minutes.
426 See appendix 4.4.
internal other is the proletariat, capital’s own creation, which is potentially capable of overthrowing it.427
Insofar as non-capitalist processes – those of nature, human bodies, other modes of production – are not thought, we cannot even understand the total process of capital: its imposition of its own time through the constant attempt to synchronise its elements, happens through a struggle. The systematic dialectic, qua systematic dialectic, confronts Althusser's challenge to think the 'real residues' of the purified exposition of capital, such as classes beyond capital and labour, the continued existence of other modes of production, and their relation to the strict capital-labour dialectic, as well as the irreducibility of living labour and nature to its capitalist subsumption, as a starting point for orientation and possibly for construction, for organisation.428 In his reading of the chapter on the 'Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation', Balibar expressed some unease with the dialectic of transition. This leads to him positing the transition to capitalism as unfinished: the problem of the transition to capitalism is for him subordinated to a more general task to understand the synchrony than that of the mode of production itself, a synchrony 'englobing several systems and their relations.'429 To this effect, he quotes Lenin's remarks that there were up to five coexisting modes of production in Russia prior to the transition to socialism.430 While this opening to a history conceived in the terms of Spinoza rather than Hegel, is appealing, this should not lead us to a total negation of teleology or dialectics à la Reading Capital. Thus, as we have hinted, Althusser's critique of the 'essential section' fails to come to terms with Marx's own insistence on the 'subjective' drive of capitalism to synchronise and contemporalise its component parts, the systematic dialectic is limited to speaking of the dynamics of capitalism itself, and its unilateral subsumption of non-capital. This leaves us with an analysis which can only approach the analysis of the temporality of the whole through a conjunctural analysis starting from a situated present. The whole can, as noted by Peter Osborne, only be approached through the aggregation of
427 Arthur, New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, 77.
428 Althusser, “The Object of Capital,” 196. While Althusser does not himself take matters so far, Robert C. Young has shown the importance of Althusser's gesture in terms of opening Marxism for a reconception of the post-colonial that does not reduce world history to the history of the capitalist subject. Robert J. C. Young, White Mythologies: Writing, History and the West, 1st ed. (Routledge, 1990).
429 Balibar, “The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism,” 307.
430 Ibid., 308. And we could also quote Marx's remark in the 1857 'Introduction', that the bourgeois mode of production is build on the 'ruins and elements' of vanished social formations 'whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along with it.' Marx, Grundrisse, 105.
disjunctive analysis of different temporalities, but it precludes the analysis of a whole as mode of production or history; in our terms, it precludes the theorisation of real teleologies operating through contemporalising and synchronising mechanisms.431 Althusser's complex variable time negates the possibility of thinking the temporality of the whole as whole, his procedure operates in the mode of a negative totalisation.
9. Conclusion
Insofar as practice is orientated by a theory which is exclusively focused on the interior, systematic contradictions of capitalism it cannot provide a concept of organisation beyond that of the Symmetry Thesis. As Massimo De Angelis remarks,
within traditional Marxist discourse we face a key problem in the conceptualisation of the 'outside'. It seems to me that this presents itself either as historical pre-capitalist ex ante, or a mythological revolutionary postcapitalist ex post. In the middle, there is the claustrophobic embrace of the capitalist mode of production, within which, there seems to be no outside.432 Certainly this claustrophobia was nothing but a feeling of class power, at a time when there was a strong belief that the proletariat organised in the workers' movement would was already leading humanity's march to socialism. The feeling of a lack of an outside emerges only when one is no longer on a victory march. The claustrophobia of today is not merely that of Marxist discourse, but of capitalism itself. Thus, today, Kantian figures of orientation are needed for compensation, to maintain hope, as exemplified in our introduction: the communist hypothesis, the multitude, literary utopias. The reduction of the critique of capitalism to the systemic contradiction between capital and labour produces a curiously self-enclosed present in need of utopian supplements, or a faith in that the acceleration of the capitalist teleology will liberate us. This is a theory which cannot imagine any revolutionary practice which is not fully 'immanent' to the class relation. Caught in this present, the only hope comes from messianism or insurrectionist voluntarism, or a belief in the ultimately self-defeating movement of the whole (or some combination of these). However, De Angelis' 'outside' does of course exist, in the form of commoning practices resistant to capital or to proletarianisation.
This is no pure outside, but rather the present viewed from the point of view of the
431 Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2011), 24–5.
432 De Angelis, The Beginning of History, 229.
continued exteriority of power relations, the continuity of violence, contingency and the ever-renewed attempts at proletarian self-organisation.
The task is, as our final chapters will argue, not to reject the systematic dialectic, but to historicise the emergence of a impersonal social subject (to use Marx's term) that can be described in these terms, and to understand it in a determinate relation to other non-systematic logics, such as those of composition and combination, which are conditions of organisation, of emergent systems. Part II of this thesis will propose a historical, social and political reading of the central orientating logics presented in Part I, where they were presented both in ontological-natural-philosophical (atomism, organism/teleology, crisis and abjection) and in practical-political-economic terms (ethical individual, social organism and organisation, rabble and crisis). In the next chapter we will historicise the starting point of the whole movement of Part I, that is the ontology of separated elements and the problem of their being organised into society, and thus honor the demand put forward by Hegel and Marx that a theory must be able to account for its own conditions of emergence. We will do this by rereading Marx's writings on market individualism and primitive accumulation. In doing so we will be able to develop, in chapter 6, a dialectic which theorizes the emergence of the systemic interiority of bourgeois society through the historical organisation of exteriority, of separated individuals. Further, we will see how the problem of separation, once recast as a problem of proletarian reproduction, becomes related not merely to the exploitation and organisation of labour, but to the problem of the disorganisation of proletarian surplus-populations, and the need and possibility of thinking a mode of organisation that starts from the differences and separations between proletarians (chapter 7).