Sunday, September 30, 2012

New Left parties in Europe posted by Richard Seymour

Thankfully the folks at Socialist Resistance put up videos of yesterday's excellent meeting on New Left parties in Europe (and, with Adam Hanieh's talk, the Middle East).  Credit where it's due, it was an extremely interesting and robust discussion, and I was very encouraged by the tone and the seriousness of the analysis.  Watch: Stathis KouvelakisKate Hudson, Adam Hanieh, and Michael Voss.


How Nazis progress posted by Richard Seymour

The Greek state is falling apart.  It is fragmenting, unable to perform its normal functions.  It cannot exercise control of the territory or the population.  The governing parties are barely cohesive, parliament isn't really functional.  The policies imposed by the 'troika' can't be implemented, and the attempt to implement them will not be rewarded by the EU bosses.   This is creating chaos.  There is no alternative popular democratic structure, no working class structures of self-government to make up for the sudden collapse of capacity, the sudden devastating loss of services amid five years of deep recession.  

Some of the apparatuses are increasingly attracted to the neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn.  Half of the Athens police force voted for the Nazis.  Now police departments are sending crime victims to Golden Dawn "protectors".  The Nazis are positioning themselves to appropriate certain state functions in other ways, for example staging propaganda exercises distributing free food to people provided they are 'indigenous'.  These are not yet serious charitable efforts.  However, historically, the propaganda component of Nazi charity organisations is complementary to the material incentive - it provides a framework through which their ideological claims can be implemented and demonstrated.  It reinforces a conception of public (national, racial) need over private ('Jewish', 'foreign') greed, and permits welfare to be extricated from ideas of universal entitlement and equality and instead linked to other thematics such as eugenics, patriarchy, militarism, Christian brotherhood, and so on.

The neoliberal bourgeoisie responds to the Nazis with the usual half-hearted criticism and complicity.  The media coddles the Nazis while their leader, a former commando reservist, openly advertises what the party is - an armed Nazi movement out to murder opponents and crush democracy.  Every day, it almost seems, one hears of another immigrant or leftist beaten or killed by the Golden Dawn.  This is how they are building their organisation, generating internal cohesion and gaining popular support, with the complicity of a section of the state and of the bourgeoisie.  So far, the dominant trend is still for the Left's support to increase.    But the terror isn't reducing Golden Dawn's support.  They feed off the chaos which they contribute to.  They are presently the third most popular party in Greece.  They aren't yet on the verge of taking power, but remember that they won't need a majority to do so.  And remember that if they do, these people are to the right of most of Europe's fascist parties, to the right of the old Greek dictatorship, literally ready to physically obliterate immigrants, the Left, intellectuals, and other 'traitors'.  That's what is being aroused in Greece, and it will take a Herculean effort to kill it.


Saturday, September 29, 2012

The consumption of black labour as pomo luxury item. posted by Richard Seymour

The criticisms of Dolce & Gabbana rightly point out that the images of black servants they have used are part of a set of representations which romanticise slave life. But it would be a mistake, I think, to suppose that's what they're trying to do. Racism is always constructed in reference to present circumstances, organises present day antagonisms. I would speculate that the revival of this imagery is related to the revival of domestic servitude in the last twenty years or so, especially the increasing use of migrant workers as servants. The ear rings represent an image of black servitude transported out of the era of colonial rule and segregation, and into the hyper-commodified universe of fashion, of things that are consumed precisely for their commodified status. That is, they take the commodification of black bodies out of the politically unacceptable and passé realm of slavery and indentured labour and repeat it in a more up to date idiom - owning black labour, the ultimate provocative, daring, brazen fashion accessory for upper bourgeois and nouveaux riches. These ear ornaments say, unashamedly, "yes, I'm so rich I have black servants just because, just as an indulgence and item of luxury, and I'm not abashed by political correctness." This is one of the ways that race works in the age of neoliberal 'meritocracy'.


Friday, September 28, 2012

A few points about the conjuncture in Britain posted by Richard Seymour

Like most socialists, I follow the Sard, who said that he didn't like to throw stones in the dark.  That is to say, he always needed some opposition to stimulate his thinking about situations, philosophical problems, historical controversies, or political methods.  A few recent arguments with people who are wrong, prompted a few thoughts-in-progress about how to analyse the conjuncture.
I.  The primacy of politics.  This doesn't refer specifically to the Leninist thesis of the primacy of politics which has a general application; rather it refers to the dominant level at which the major social antagonisms are going to be fought over and resolved in one class or another's favour in the coming years.  But in what sense?  One perspective I have encountered is that the weakness of the trade unions is such that if there is going to be an upsurge it is going to happen first through a general political radicalisation, and only thereafter produce a revival of working class organisation.  I don't think such sequential schemas really respect the actual pattern of struggles.  Look at the relationship between the anti-war movement over Gaza, the student occupations and uprising over fees, the germinal feminist revival, and the very large but bureaucracy-led trade union protests and struggles.  I think what you find is not a sequence of 'first politics, then economics', but rather the unpredictable outbreaks of struggles on various levels of the social formation consistent with a system going through organic crisis, each having a reciprocal effect on the others.  The sense in which politics is dominant is that it forms the edifice within which economic and ideological struggles take place, securing their unity and coordination, determining their tempo and efficacy.
Of course it's always true that in the last analysis politics is decisive.  But it's not true that in every conjuncture political struggles are dominant.  The dominance of politics today derives from the centrality of 'austerity politics' as a spatio-temporal fix for capitalism's woes, conducted through the state and centred on the neoliberal reorganisation of the public sector and welfare state.  Mervyn King recently argued that in the short run it would necessary to restrain spending cuts, but in the long run there had to be a drastic rebalancing of the economy away from consumption and towards investment - in other words, put as much of the country's wealth as possible in the hands of the rich and hope they will put it into circulation as capital.  This could only be achieved through state action, which has to be mediated through the political parties and their relationship to social classes.  Therefore, politics predominates.
II. The crisis of authority.  I have referred to an organic crisis.  According to Gramsci, a crisis of capitalism becomes an organic crisis when it affects the state and its hegemonic apparatuses.  And that is exactly what has happened.  One of the significant insights of the state theorist Claus Offe was that this tendency for capitalist crises to become political crises is built in to advanced capitalism insofar as it has developed an expanded political administrative apparatus to cope with the dysfunctions of production and protect its legitimacy.  As soon as there is a serious crisis, not just a recession but something that puts into question whether the system can reproduce itself, it is more likely to radiate into the state and from there into every aspect of production, politics, and ideology, etc.,  reached directly or indirectly by the state.  This is just a tendency, not an inevitability - but for reasons mentioned above, the crisis has certainly reached the state.  The question is how far advanced this process is.
The British capitalist state has always been one of the more stable of its type.  Unlike continental rivals, it has not suffered revolution, invasion, occupation or defeat to a militarily superior rival for centuries.  Its colonial losses were, it is true, considerable.  And that loss of global power and prestige has been a source of constant axe-grinding on the right, the prism through which Northern Ireland, the Falklands and even Europe have been perceived.  But the adaptation was managed without disrupting the continuity of the state.  This matters.  It also matters that the British state is still, for all its losses, a leading imperialist state with considerable global advantages, aloof from the eurozone while enjoying the benefits of EU membership.  This confers a degree of independence of action not available to, say, Greece or Spain.  This government can, if it wants to, increase spending to temporarily dampen a crisis.  It can nationalise a company if it is too important to leave it to the market.  It can bring forward infrastructure investments.  It can even selectively increase benefits, or make certain tax concessions.  As of now, the government and the Bank of England prefers to print money to stimulate lending, which has certain distributive consequences, but basically it has a range of options.   The state also has a system of violence that, despite acute breakdowns, has effectively reinforced consent throughout its long duration.
Nonetheless, the concept of a 'crisis of authority' is a good criterion of historical analysis against which to measure the stability of the British state.  What does a crisis of authority look like?  One would ordinarily look for the withdrawal of consent on the part of the masses, the  mobilization of large subaltern classes against the ruling class, and the detachment of social classes from their representative parties.  Some of these tendencies are visible in the UK today.  There is, first of all, no doubt about the de-alignment of social classes from their representative parties.  This is a secular tendency that is becoming acute due to the successful rollback of representative democracy by means of neoliberal policy.  (Chapter One of The Meaning of David Cameron outlines some of this.)  Second, in some complex ways, consent is being eroded.  Certainly, over the long term there has developed a nebulous and politically polyvalent sense of dissatisfaction with authorities, with officialdom, with the main parties, and with parliament itself.  This doesn't by itself amount to antisystemic feeling, nor is it proof of political radicalisation.  And not all institutions suffer from this general decline in respect.  Trust in the police is resilient, despite constant disclosures of corruption, racism, brutality and murders.  On the immediate questions of austerity and related policies, the balance of popular opinion is against the government - but not on all planks of its agenda, and not necessarily on the worst planks of its agenda.  It is true that any presumed 'consensus' is very fragile, but the support for punitive welfare policies has been quite high.  The current state of the Labour party is substantially responsible for this.  Moreover, the way in which the state can mobilise consent against the enemy of the month (just recently, they used the face of Abu Hamza to conceal the crimes against Babar Ahmed and Talha Ahsan, and it worked a treat) does not indicate that its legitimating resources are running dry.  This is related to the question of state violence which I'll return to.
Finally, what is the state of popular mobilisation?  In and of itself, it is impressive - student occupations and 'riots', Tory HQ smashed up, coordinated strikes in the public sector, mass marches encompassing the breadth and depth of the organised working class and its periphery, even a 1980s-style youth uprising against the police.  Yet these are notable for a) being episodic and apt to lose momentum very quickly, and b) being totally unequal to the problem, to the scale of the ruling class mobilisation and its goals.  The credit crunch came just as the British social movements were abating, the left was entering a vicious downswing, and the Tories were pulling themselves back together as a fit team to replace the bruised, tired, shat-on-looking New Labour cabinet.  The popular movements since the winter of 2010-11 have really been playing catch-up, and not actually catching up thus far.
Greece: that is a full-blown crisis of authority.  If the British state does reach that condition, it will be catalysed by outbreaks of social struggles which are not visible today, and not possible to predict.
III. Violence and consent.  It is a mistake to think that a turn toward greater violence on the part of the state is a sign of weakness, that it signifies a crisis of consent and thus an erosion of the civil society basis of the state.  Violence and consent are not separate, opposed quantities; violence is one of the main ways in which consent is secured.  Take an example.  The British police, like no other police force, has embraced the tactic of kettling.  It works in three ways.  First, it is managed violence: it creates moving frontiers where a confrontation with angry crowds can happen within a predictable range of circumstances, with police able to concentrate their forces at certain points when necessary and according to the geographical terrain already incorporated into the kettling plan.  Second, it is biopower: it acts on the fact that people have biological needs and tendencies, that they need to excrete, that they become cold and tired, that they have caloric requirements which, unsatisfied, leave them physically weak and vulnerable.  Third, it is ideology.  The very act of 'kettling' people communicates that they are dangerous criminals, if not bestiary.  It also creates the scenario in which this point can be 'proved'.  Notwithstanding the problems it has had in the courts, this has been one of the most effective means of shutting down protest movements threatening to gain momentum.
  In this tactic, coercion and consent, violence and ideology, are combined.  The 'rule of law' is the dominant form of the dominant ideology, the main area in which consent is organised; and it is precisely through violence that it is materialised. Thus, it isn't that the state turns to violence when consent has been exhausted, but rather that it must reorganise violence in the constitution of social categories (race, culture, nationality, citizenship, criminality, subversion, entitlement, rights, etc), to found consent on a new basis.  It is therefore mistaken to see violence as 'making up for' a lack of consent, as a factor merely held 'in reserve' for when consent erodes.  Recall Gramsci's metaphor: "State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armour of coercion".  This quite an interesting topography.  Rather than the core of the state consisting of repressive institutions, special bodies of armed men, etc., which is protected by the outward layers of civil society, the repressive institutions form an integument shaping and protecting the flesh of the body politic.  One way to read this is to relate it to the concept of hegemonic practices in which the dominant classes attempt to organise a cross-class coalition in support of the historic goals they have set themselves.  It would be mistaken to see hegemony as a state actually achieved for most of the time; it is best to see it as a tendency guiding the organisation of class domination in a capitalist democracy.  When some form of potentially hegemonic coalition is achieved, there is always an excluded remnant of classes and class fractions that aren’t incorporated.  In a genuinely hegemonic situation, the excluded remnant is an easily policed and suppressed minority; most of the time, it is actually a majority that must somehow be disorganised, stratified and divided.  The role of violence in this situation would be prove the implausibility of resistance to both the dominant bloc, whose unity is thereby secured, and to the excluded, whose acquiescence is thereby gained.
  One aspect of the complex political and ideological mix that was Thatcherism was its attempt to re-found consent on a new populist right basis, incorporating sections of the skilled working class alongside the petty bourgeoisie and big business in a new dominant bloc.  Rather than 'from cradle to grave' provision, the traditional state philosophy of Labourism, 'the discipline of the market' became the new basis of consent.  If the new regime was more violent, this was not to 'make up for' a lack of consent, though the regime was narrower in its social basis and had of necessity to disorganise a much wider coalition, but rather because the new regime had to simultaneously demolish the bases for militant leftist politics in order to viable, and construct a new form of consent based on penalising the poor.
  The purpose here is not to deny that the ruling class is weak and fractious, and the social basis of the dominant bloc narrowing dangerously from its point of view.  That is evident in the pathologies already mentioned, the degeneration of the main capitalist parties, the decline of legitimate institutions, and so on.  Rather, it is to say that an escalation of violence is not in itself indicative of weakness.  So long as the state’s violence is actually efficacious in securing consent, and disorganising the popular classes, and as long as it can be coupled with selective material incentives which are in themselves perfectly compatible with an overall increase in the rate of exploitation and a long-term material loss for most of the population, then it need not be.  And the reason why it has become necessary to Defend the Right to Protest is that this violence is proving extremely efficient in the short run.
IV.  The disorganisation of the popular classes.  Thus far, there has been no general unity on the immediate goals, tactics or politics of an anti-cuts movement, nor has a viable compromise between the rival perspectives been possible.  One result of this is that there is a vacuum in which fragmented groups and platforms are capable, at certain junctures, of projecting influence well beyond their real size and social depth.  We have seen this with UK Uncut and, in a different way, Right to Work; we saw it with various small, radical, student and education groups during the student riots; arguably, a similar type of dynamic was visible in last summer's riots.  (In localised situations, even smaller formations can acquire a significant role: eg, the campaign against the closure of Chase Farm hospital is now most visibly conducted by an infinitessimal sect, due mainly to the seeming collapse of the Save Chase Farm group since Nick de Bois was elected.)  The result of the vacuum is that adventurism and stunts acquire an exaggerated importance - not that I'm remotely snobbish about these things, but they can only advance us so far, and they tend to dissipate as quickly as they take off.  This state of affairs is a register of failure, to be sure, but it's not just a failure of initiative and leadership on the part of the radical Left.  It's a measure of the disorientation and demoralisation of the most advanced, radical workers during the New Labour era, and particularly in the wake of the worst global crisis since the Great Depression.
  In contrast to most continental equivalents, where there has been a left breakaway from the major social democratic formations fusing with Communists and the far left, resulting in some degree of electoral realignment, the political opposition to the Tories is hegemonised by the Labour Party in England and to an extent in Wales.  This is all very fragile.  George Galloway's breakthrough in Bradford was not a miracle; it reflected a wider volatility, a willingness to suddenly, sharply swing behind alternative reformisms where they appear to be viable - the SNP in Scotland, Caroline Lucas in Brighton, Galloway in Bradford, possibly Plaid Cymru in Wales, and it may well have been Kate Hudson or Salma Yaqoob next.  There is nothing inevitable or secure about Labour's electoral and political dominance in the working class, or the absence of an alternative.  The lamentable performance of Johann Lamont in Scotland seems to ensure that Labour will not recover there for some time, if it does. 
  Nonetheless, there is something different about the UK in this respect, which makes realignment a lot harder.  First of all, no left-wing opposition developed and split away from New Labour as it implemented neoliberal policies, because the defeat of the Left after 1985 was so severe and sweeping that the Blairite leadership was able to win acquiescence for the main lines of its policies in advance.  Even if the concrete realisation of those lines (tuition fees, PFI, etc) produced dissatisfaction, there was no underlying precept on which opposition could be founded.  Second, even when an issue (the Iraq war) did arise which could potentially divide the Labour Party, it did not.  Only George Galloway split away, because he was forced to rather than because he wanted to.  This is partly because the Labour machinery had been so tightly sewn up by the Blairites that an internal opposition was almost impossible to mount; most people left the party rather than fight within it.  Faced with this, there was no obvious basis for the small number of left MPs to lead a split-away, even if they were brave enough to do so.  The result is that the radical left formation that did emerge, Respect, made much of its small, locally concentrated forces, but was inherently limited compared to its most of its equivalents.  The SSP... oy.
  The only serious, national resistance to the Tories' programme is coming from the trade unions.  It is not being led by the rank and file.  Rather, the rank and file pressures the union bureaucracy for action, but remains dependent on the bureaucracy to actually take the initiative.  The shop steward movement hardly exists today.  It is not just that it is numerical depleted, both in absolute terms and relative to the unionised workforce.  It is that the role of stewards has changed dramatically, so that they end up as case workers rather than the people calling 'all out' when an issue arises.  So there isn't a basis for a rank and file movement - that would have to be painstakingly constructed in and through struggles.  Nor is there a big battalion of militant workers ready to take on the government by itself.  No one has the confidence after decades of neoliberal assault and diminishing strength and influence, to risk everything in a big set-piece dispute with the government.  This isn’t the 1980s but, alas, everyone still remembers the Miners.  The result is that strikes are seen by the union leadership as a bureaucratic manoeuvre to force the government to soften its bargaining stance. 
  This brings us back to the dominance of politics.  The unions, despite their relative historical weakness, have two potential significant strengths.  One is that their private sector membership is concentrated in clusters of high value-added parts of the economy.  The workers thus covered have considerable strategic power, as they can cut off crucial flows of surplus value very quickly.  The second, more significant, is that most of their members are based in the public sector and exercise real political power as a result.  It is not just that they can shut down vital processes in the extended reproduction of capital, thus indirectly disrupting the flow of surplus value; they can create a crisis for the state and for the government of the day.  Whereas the government can take a certain tactical distance from private sector strikes (‘hope this is resolved expeditiously, both sides need to get round the table’ etc.), it is directly implicated when nurses, teachers, civil servants and rubbish collectors go on strike.  This gives the unions the potential, and only the potential, to ascend beyond the ‘economic corporate’ mode of organising.  They are historically narrowly based, yet their immediate problems – pension and pay cuts, longer hours, etc. – can be swiftly and logically linked to the problems of other sections of the working and even middle classes.  They can create a broad system of alliances by fusing their struggles with those of students, pensioners, communities losing their hospitals and council services, and non-unionised workers suffering low pay and insecure work. 
  Recently, a motion was passed at the TUC supporting a general strike.  In its core, it would be a coordinated public sector strike with some private sector support.  But it could attract the wider support of social movements and those directly affected by cuts.  I note that while most people won’t support a ‘general strike’ call, according to polls anyway, most Labour voters will.  This is very interesting since it suggests that Labour’s voters aren’t necessarily persuaded by the leadership.  It suggests that there’s a section of the working class, I would guess including those who are not unionised, who belong to the most precarious, low-paid or unemployed sections of the working class, which is apprised of the seriousness of the situation and ready for a fightback equal to the threat.  For this to materialise, the ‘general strike’ call would have to be used as a lever to mobilise not just the rank and file of the unions but the most left-wing workers in general, and those involved in the social movements, while pressuring the union leadership into action.  Nothing about that is easy, as there will be strong counter-pressures coming from the Tories, and the press (the recent Hillsborough revelations about the collusion between Conservatives, the police and the media rather make the case for ‘Ideological-State Apparatuses’ in a nutshell).  But there is little else that is concrete, in the way of sustained resistance, to organise around.
V.  Petty Caesarism.  The consensual basis for the British capitalist state has been narrowed over the long-term by the  hollowing out of parliamentary representation inaugurated by neoliberalism, combined with the sharpening of social antagonisms, above all class antagonisms.  While social movements of one kind or another have become a more frequent feature of the landscape, there is a crisis in party-political organisation.  The Tories and Labour have been undergoing a long-term decline, and now the Liberals are likely to be reduced to a small rump (even if the exaggerated interest of media and activists during their spell in government persuades them otherwise).  The dominant political parties are poorly rooted in the population, and lack popular trust. Alongside party membership, voting levels have declined, particularly among the working class.  One effect of this during the crisis has been the manifestation of petty caesarist tendencies.  If, as Gramsci said, all coalitions are a first step in caesarism, the imposition of a Tory-Liberal coalition by civil service initiative is a typically British ruling class version of the type. 
  The decline and fragmentation of the traditional Right is an important, under-examined part of this situation.  The Conservative vote has gone through a long, spasmodic period of degeneration since the late 1960s, punctuated by the collapse in 1974, the partial resurgence under Thatcher, the crisis at the tail end of Thatcherism deferred under Major and returning with a vengeance after 1992.  This reflects not just a decline in traditional right-wing values, but the erosion by attrition of the social basis for even ‘secular’ Conservatism.  Moreover, several crisis points have arisen to threaten the traditional ‘British’ basis of Conservatism – the weakening of the Union, and the integration into Europe.  The Tories are badly placed to handle these crises, and the result alongside a sharp decline in the Tory vote is a fragmentation of the right.  UKIP is ascendant not just as the Thatcherite pressure group that it once resembled, its ‘Save the Pound’ stickers defacing Westminster lamp posts, but as potentially a serious challenger to the Conservatives based on significant sections of the Tory middle class and medium-sized capital.
  One outstanding fact about the British situation is that while racism remains at a historically high level, a result (as I have argued) of extensive state intervention to racialise social conflicts, the government would struggle far more than the last Labour government to use this advantage to re-organise its legitimacy in the crisis context.  In principle, racist paternalism would be one way to organise material incentives in a controlled way that reinforces the neoliberal accumulation regime and the attack on the welfare state.  Yet the Tories under Cameron are too hesitant and vacillating after years of being exiled as ‘the nasty party’, to really actualise such a strategy.   Another striking fact is that the far right, despite their surge over the last decade, never gained a foothold in the UK in the way that fascists in other European societies did.  Undeniably after Barking, Tower Hamlets and Walthamstow, the limit on the growth of the far right is primarily due to the successful model of antifascist action aimed at mobilising broad fronts to prevent and disrupt the local implantation of fascism.  The existence of other right-wing fragments ready to absorb Tory defectors is also plausibly a factor, although the past decade has shown us that it is quite possible for fascist and hard right parties to gain support concurrently.  But the effect of the current incapacity of the Right, coupled with the disorganisation of the popular classes, is precisely to reinforce the tendency toward petty caesarism.  The coalition government is an unstable combination, but it allows the leaderships of both coalition parties a degree of autonomy from their active base.  It renders acute the chronic insulation of parliament from the popular classes. 
  The final factor heightening caesarist tendencies is the division and uncertainty of the bourgeoisie proper.  They are not united by what to do about Europe, or about whether now is the time to start making the cuts, or about how deep they should be.  There is undoubtedly a significant section of bourgeois opinion that is gravitating toward Labour’s preferred solution of bringing forward spending now, and implementing the cuts later, in a way that is less egregiously offensive to working class interests.  In this situation, the apparatuses of the state itself – the higher civil service, the Bank of England, etc. – acquire an elevated role, and the parties of government enter a kind of coalition with them.
  Caesarism emerges because the contending classes have reached a stalemate.  What I referred to as ‘petty caesarism’, then, is just the expression of this tendency in a muted form: not exactly a total stalemate but certainly a state of disarray; polarisation but each side hesitating to enter the fray wholeheartedly; both sides almost running on empty.  One morbid symptom of this tendency is the emergence of rival hybrid forms of politics – ‘Red Toryism’, ‘Blue Labourism’ – in an attempt to short-circuit political polarisation and reconstitute the relationship between party and class.  When people say ‘no one voted for this, how do they think they can get away with it’, the answer is clear: caesarism in this case is a symptom of mutual weakness.  Yes, the ruling class is in crisis, yes it is divided and hesitant, yes it lacks political legitimacy; but as of now, its opponents are not in a better state.



Scottish Labour is doomed, doomed! posted by Richard Seymour

I wrote about Scottish Labour's train wreck for this week's Guardian piece:




Sunday, September 23, 2012

Tory MP doesn't get why 'golliwogg' dolls are offensive. posted by Richard Seymour

While I was in Whitby recently, I was astonished to discover that what are known as 'golliwogg' dolls are not just available for sale but are actually prizes in these parts of the country.

My most recent piece for the Guardian deals with the surprising response I got from the local Tory MP when I raised this with him.


Friday, September 14, 2012

Chicago teachers' strike posted by Richard Seymour

So, a right-wing provocateur and film-maker infiltrated the big teachers' protest in Chicago yesterday, part of the strike against Emanuel's education 'reforms' (see my article for background).  Obviously attempting to make the protest look foolish, he actually made it look amazingly good:

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Thursday, September 13, 2012

The territorial logic of the capitalist state posted by Richard Seymour

precapitalist territories
  The movements from Tahrir to Liberty Square have in different ways posed the question of space and political authority.

  But perhaps there has been a bias toward approaching this question mainly on the level of international or transnational action, whether it be in the form of ‘globalization’ or imperialism.  Somehow, and I know this bothers you as much as it does me, New Labour’s Regional Spatial Strategies were just not as interesting as the Bush administration’s ‘Green Zone’ strategy in Iraq.  

  It is natural enough that the ‘spatial turn’ of social theory was linked particularly to the question of imperialism in the last decade.  This is not only because the US army corps of engineers could be found building Xanadu compounds, permanent military bases and separation walls in Iraq, which just is an inherently interesting type of spatial activity.  It is because when a state projects political authority outside of its sovereign, bounded territory, and begins the task of organising the political space of another nation, the seeming naturalness and obviousness of the relationship between space and political power is necessarily problematized.  Territorial authority looks very clearly like what it is: an artifice, a production, multi-tiered effort of coercion, culture war, political organization, economic strategy, material incentives, symbolic organization, the construction, reconstruction and moving of internal frontiers, and so on.  Suddenly, the means by which we ourselves are dominated become visible.  Suddenly we get to see how it is all constructed: it isn’t called ‘state-building’ for nothing.  We can learn a lot from the cities defiled by empire, as Derek Gregory has shown us.  

  And, to be fair, things aren’t quite as one-sided as I am painting them.  It is true that the organization of cities, metropolitan boroughs, counties, and regions, was much more of a going concern during the ‘urbanisation’ boom of the Sixties and Seventies.  Henri Lefebvre and his student Manuel Castells were took the lead as social theorists throwing into question the embedded assumptions of Chicago School ‘urban theory’, partially in response to the jacqueries of 1968, and the French state’s urban rationalisation project.  Each understood in different ways – Lefebvre as a marxist-humanist, Castells as an althusserian - that the ideology of ‘urbanism’ was symptomatic, coming just as the urban-rural divide was really dying, the city in its old form as a sort of isolated hive of commerce and culture finished.  This ideology adverted to certain real long-term trends, intimately connected with the state and its functions in allocating production facilities, and ensuring the conditions for collective consumption (of housing, health, education, municipal lighting, rubbish collection, etc.) in its extended sense allowing the reproduction of labour power.  But the explanation of these issues was obscured by the deployment of an object, the ‘urban’, which lacked rigorous definition.  They understood the ‘urban’ to refer to a set of social predicaments, political antagonisms, and so on, among and between definitely social classes and interests, which required a more sophisticated socio-spatial analysis to cope with scalar reorganization that was global and affected not just the metropolitan area, but also the status of national states as the strategic basis for production.  This type of analysis, sometimes leavened by poststructuralist additives, has been sustained through the years by the likes of Neil Brenner, David Harvey, Ira Katznelson and Mike Davis.  Arguably, such work has become more important in recent years.  For example, Harvey’s Right to the City, though simply following up on his long-term research agenda, seems very Zeitgeisty in the wake of Occupy.

  Still, there’s a logic to focusing on the axis of imperialism, since the emphasis on interstate relations and antagonisms forces one to consider the national territory not as a spatial given but as a social relationship.  What I want to do in this, another of my exceptionally long, finger-wagging, listen-up-and-do-as-you’re-told posts, is try to explain something about the capitalist state and its spatial logics.  I start at the inter-state level, by traversing some of the issues thrown up by imperialism, and then drill down to national states and their ordering of space.  Let me start with the ‘new imperialism’.
  Theories positing a 'new imperialism' pivot on the intersection of two logics of power, conceptually separate though inextricable in practise. According to David Harvey and Giovanni Arrighi, these logics are: the capitalist logic and the territorial logic. (I’m aware that Alex Callinicos also aligns with this tendency, but I see his dichotomy as being slightly different, focused on the relative autonomy of the geopolitical from the economic logic). Harvey assigns a distinct type of spatial organisation to each of these logics of power. Thus, the territorial logic is that of states, whose power is based in command of a determinate territory and "the capacity to mobilize its human and natural resources". The capitalist logic of power produces capillary flows of capital accumulation which flow "across and through continuous space, towards or away from territorial entities". 

  Lefebvre looms large in much of this thinking, especially for Harvey.  For Lefebvre, the relationship between the state and space has to be constituted along several axes.  First, there is the production of a national space itself, a national territory that bears the marks of human generations, classes, political forces, etc.  Of course, the capitalist state by no means coincides with the nation – but as we will see, this is beside the point.  Capitalist states organise territory as national space.  Second, the state constitutes within the territory a matrix of institutional spaces appropriate for a social division of labour, and the imperatives of political dominance.  Each of these spaces, from the borough to the post office to the police station, condenses a system of social expectations and responses, which become so 'natural' and 'obvious' that they are never articulated.  Third, the state composes a 'mental' or imaginary space, a set of representations through which people live their relationship to the people-nation, the state and the territory.

  According to Lefebvre, the spatiality of the state constantly comes into conflict with "the pre-existent economic space that it encounters", "spontaneous poles of growth, historic towns, commercialized fragments of space that are sold in 'lots'":
"In the chaos of relations among individuals, groups, class fractions, and classes, the state tends to impose a rationality, its own, which has space as its privileged instrument. The economy is thus recast in spatial terms - flows (of energy, raw materials, labor power, finished goods, trade patterns, etc.) and stocks (of gold and capital, investments, machines, technologies, stable clusters of various jobs, etc.). The state tends to control flows and stocks by ensuring their coordination. In the course of a threefold process (growth - i.e., expansion of the productive forces - urbanization, or the formation of massive units of production and consumption; and spatialization), a qualitative leap occurs: the emergence of the state mode of production (SMP) (mode de production etatique). The articulation between the SMP and space is thus crucial. It differs from that between previous modes of production (including capitalism) and their manner of occupying natural space (including modifying it through social practice). Something new appears in civil society and in political society, in production and in state institutions. This must be given a name and conceptualized. We suggest that this rationalization and socialization of society has assumed a specific form, which can be termed: politicization, statism."  (See Lefebvre, 'Space and State', in Neil Brenner and Bob Jessop, State-Space: A Reader, Blackwell, 2002)

  I dare say the concept of the 'state mode of production' is theoretically extravagant, stretching the concept of the mode of production beyond breaking point, but the thrust of this is clear: there are two spatial logics of power, one spontaneous, random, commercial and capitalist, coming 'from below'; the other planned, ordered, rationalised, non-capitalist, coming 'from above'.

  Equally, some of the inspiration for this distinction may have to do with the work of the geographer G William Skinner, who certainly influenced Arrighi, and the sociologist Charles Tilly, who extrapolated from Skinner's conclusions.  In an important book, Coercion, Capital and European States 900 - 1900, Tilly wrote:
"G. William Skinner portrays the social geography of late imperial China as the intersection of two sets of central-place hierarchies ... The first, constructed largely from the bottom up, emerged from exchange; its overlapping units consisted of larger and larger market areas centered on towns and cities of increasing size. The second, imposed mainly from the top down, resulted from imperial control; its nested units comprised a hierarchy of administrative jurisdictions. Down to the level of the hsien, or county, every city had a place in both the commercial and the administrative hierarchy. Below that level, even the mighty Chinese Empire ruled indirectly via its gentry. In the top-down system, we find the spatial logic of coercion. In the bottom-up system, the spatial logic of capital. We have seen two similar hierarchies at work repeatedly in the unequal encounter between European states and cities."

  Again, it seems that the spatial logic of capital is identical with the spatial logic of commerce, a spontaneous system of flows, coming from below, 'bottom-up'; while the spatial logic of the state is rationalising, ordering, coercive, 'top-down'.  Two spatial logics, two types of power, each so distinct that, for Lefebvre at least, the state's type of power even rises to the level of being a mode of production.  

  This has, superficially at least, a topographical similarity to the Deleuze and Guattari couplet, territorialization-deterritorialization.  You have on the one hand the oedipalized territorialities such as the nation, the church, the family etc., imposing themselves hierarchically, top-down.  These are dominant in the feudal era.  And on the other, the "deterritorialized" flows of capital, obeying a logic much like that of free-flowing desire, destroying the Oedipal territorialities.  The capitalist logic arises from the intersection of two developments, two decoded flows - those of labour, in the form of the free worker, and those of production in the form of money-capital.  And so these twin logics of territorializing political authority and deterritorializing capital, though carnally enmeshed*, tug at and militate against one another.  This is a common image in social theory.
  My reservation about 'new imperialism' theory was at first an inchoate and very slightly philistine feeling that I simply didn't 'get' the seemingly exaggerated emphasis on space.  Bob Jessop pointed out a decade ago that the turn toward 'globalization' as the master-concept of social theory produced a pronounced 'spatial' turn that was long overdue for reconsideration if not revision.  More specifically, I didn't get the emphasis on the territorial as a drive logically distinct from capitalist power.  It seemed to me that territorial space was just one aspect or moment in the development of concrete social formations in which the mode of production took root, just one of the aspects that the mode of production organised.  Could it really constitute a logic of power distinct from, but equivalent to, capitalist power?

  Robert Brenner's critique of Harvey's 'new imperialism' theory zones in on this problem.  The capitalist logic of power, says Brenner, is clear.  There are a set of imperatives (production for profit, reducing costs, etc.), and a set of  mechanisms (intra-capitalist competition, pricing, etc.) by which those imperatives are enforced.  Moreover, there is a strong empirical basis for its existence.  But the territorial logic of power, the state logic, is not at all clear.  There appears to be only a vague set of determinations behind this logic, no obvious imperatives or raison d'etre driving it, and little in the way of an empirical basis.  Insofar as the state planners have an interest in defending a territory, expanding their extra-territorial dominion, etc., it is not clear that this is distinct from capitalist interests.  In explaining this, Brenner sticks closely to a 'homeostatic' model of the capitalist state.  The state’s functioning and wealth being derived from capitalist growth, its managers will tend to act in accord with capitalist imperatives.  And he suggests that, independently of his conceptual framework, that is actually Harvey's approach in his explanations of concrete imperialist actions.

  Despite my misgivings about the 'new imperialism' theories, I can't assent unreservedly to this critique.  Though Brenner pinpoints what I see as a real problem with the 'new imperialism' theories, his critique is bound up with a set of assumptions I don't share.  Brenner argues that there is 'rational core' to Harvey's theory in that it seeks to explain the apparent disjuncture between what might be in the interests of the capitalist class, and the actions undertaken by the state (wars, etc.).  In place of ‘two logics’, Brenner fulcrums his explanation for this gap on the dysfunctional relationship between a state form (the national state) and capitalist imperatives (which continually transgress national boundaries).  For Brenner, the world system being compose of many sovereign states is an historical fact which emerged in the context of feudalism, not capitalism; its survival is not essential to capitalism.  Capitalism transformed extant territorial states into capitalist states without actually altering the multi-state character of the world system.  This argument is given considerable historical depth and detail in Benno Teschke's The Myth of 1648  A world-state, Brenner argues, would be far more functional for capitalist growth than the national state, since as capital internationalizes, national states cannot implement strategies to resolve international deadlocks in production or make adjustments to overcome global imbalances, with the necessary degree of coordination.  The problem here is that while this might explain the general tendency toward irrational conflict between states, and their failure to coordinate rational policy responses to capitalist crisis, this doesn't actually explain why a capitalist state under a particular management might pursue policies that are seemingly at odds with any attempt at a national level to overcome such imbalances, resolve crises of production and so on.

  I think it would be better to start answering that question with the fact just as there are many states, that there is no single or general capitalist interest, but rather many capitals, nationally constituted and constitutively divided into fractions with a hierarchy of power between them.  The hegemonic fraction is that which leads the others, and dominates the state at any given moment.  And even then, there is no absolute agreement on interests or strategy within a given fraction - hedge funds, for example, may differ from investment banks as to the best way to raid social security.  The more determinations you add, the more complex the divisions become, and their resolution is contingent on political and ideological leadership.  Rather than assuming a homeostatic model of state action, according to which capitalist interests exert a long-range regulatory effect on state power, this approach places the issue firmly back on the terrain of political praxis, with all its implied dysfunctions.  And, in fact, Brenner's explanation for the causes of the Iraq war points to this Gramscian problematic.

one does not simply  I have other issues.  I think the account of why capitalist states are determined by capitalist and not territorial logic, implies an inadequate mechanistic model of causality.  This is a criticism that applies to other political marxists such as Teschke and Lacher, and also in my opinion to theorists such as Fred Block who also deploy a homeostatic model of the state-capital relationship.  Intriguingly,  the same conclusion regarding the contingent nature of the state system has been reached by those deploying an expressive model of causality.  The critical theoretical impulse of the state-derivation school, beginning in West Germany but taking off in the Anglophone left through the work of John Holloway, Werner Bonefeld and others, was to treat the state as a fetishised form of the capital-relation. Influenced by Evgeny Pashukanis, they thought that just as he derived the legal form from the commodity form, so they could homologously derive the state form from the capital form. This being so, the most important thing about the state form was the way in which it condensed at a general level the capital-relation, becoming in a sense the ideal capitalist, in order to remedy the deficiencies and dysfunctions in the circuits of production and exchange.  The capitalist mode of production being world-wide in scale, there was no necessary reason why the states system should take the form of national states. Thus, Claudia von Braunmühl’s essay on the nation-state in Holloway and Picciotto’s seminal State and Capital argues that this pre-structuration of the state system by feudal relations has been imposed on capitalism.  Capitalism’s systemic opportunism allowed it to take hold of the international states system and transform it, but otherwise it is not essential to the system.  There are some extremely interesting aspects of this approach, which I’ll come back to, and the state-derivation approach has produced some rich, suggestive analyses.  But, to paraphrase Bernard Shaw, it is in this respect like a library: excellent to borrow from but otherwise to be avoided at all costs.  

  I am not convinced that the existence of many states under the dominance of the capitalist mode of production is merely an historical legacy contingent to capitalism, which could in principle be superseded.   This is not, I insist, to lapse into that tacit functionalism according to which what exists under capitalism must exist for the good of capitalism.  I can well see that sovereign, territorial states pre-dated capitalism and imposed a structuring effect on the emerging capitalist world order.  I simply do not see that capitalism could provide the material basis for anything other than a multi-state system.  And it seems to me that to say the multi-state system is an historical legacy and nothing more is to explain away rather than explain the problem of the relationship between the multiple scalar and spatial levels of political organisation and the capitalist mode of production.  The development of capitalism seems to entail a particular type of territorialisation of political power, and it's worth trying to understand why.  I think neither the mechanistic nor expressive models of causality can serve us well in explaining this, and I will later indicate the relevance of Althusser’s notion of structural causality.

  What does the territorialisation of political power consist of?  Territoriality in its simplest sense is the disposal of a particular bounded space as a base for achieving a particular social outcome.  A church, a police station, a school... all are, among other things, bounded spaces within which a certain type of social organisation is performed; containers for certain sets of social relations.  Territorialising political power, then, is nothing other than a process of binding political authority to a determinate space in which the goals of the politically dominant class, the ruling class, can be achieved.  

  What is distinctive about capitalist state territoriality?  We can start with the problem of sovereignty.  In the international system, the modern state is a sovereign power to the extent that it not only exercises a monopoly of legitimate violence and political authority within its bounded territory, but also demands recognition by other states of its exclusive right within that territory. In exchange, it recognises the same exclusive right of other states.  This notion of sovereignty seems to have origins in feudal property relations, in absolutist states organised on the basis of kingship, patrilineal descent and personal rule. The concept of sovereignty described the absolute right of kings and princes to dispose of their population and territory, to instruct them in their faith, and command them as they saw fit. However, sovereignty takes a particular form under capitalism that is quite distinct from that of feudal states: it is the sovereignty of the people-nation rather than the king as god-incarnate. 

  This redirects the discussion from inter-state relations to social relations in general; the capitalist state is not just a territorial state, but a national territorial state.  It is a national space that the modern state organises, maps, and attempts to bring under a grid of intelligibility.  But as I have also said, the state does not strictly coincide with the nation.  Many states, like the UK, are multinational; and many nationalities have no state. Nor, obviously enough, are the state's powers simply contained within the boundaries over which it exercises sovereignty: one effect of the internationalization of capital is the internationalization of capitalist states. Nonetheless, the capitalist state specifically identifies itself as a national state, and cannot be indifferent to nations. In some cases, it suppresses them. In some cases, it organises them in a multinational territory, reproducing national spaces through its distribution and scalar organization of sites of power as part of the logic of political domination, while elaborating a superordinate nationality as part of its symbolic organisation of the territory it rules. So, nationality cannot escape the logic of statehood, and the territory of the state is always national.

  One strategy for explaining the relationship between nation-state and capital is to relate the development of the national state to the requirements of a unified market. As Fernand Braudel put it:

“A national economy is a political space, transformed by the state as a result of the necessities and innovations of economic life, into a coherent, unified economic space whose combined activities may tend in the same direction. Only England managed this exploit at an early date. In reference to England the term revolution recurs: agricultural, political, financial and industrial revolutions. To this list must be added- giving it whatever name you choose - the revolution that created England's national market.” (Afterthoughts on material civilization and capitalism, 1977)

  This would seem at first glance to explain the relationship between the spread of capitalism and the shift from fragmented polities of various scales and types with nebulous boundaries - city-states, principalities, communes, sprawling patchwork empires etc. - to rationalised, imperfectly homogenised national-states.  Capitalism’s need for a unified space within which production and exchange can be organised gives rise to various ways of organising space – the growth of towns and cities connected by transport and communications (in a single dominant language), unified by a common currency, protected by military installations, within a territory delimited by borders and protected by a sovereign authority.  But returning to Braunmühl’s argument, cited above, we are reminded of a methodological principle derived from Lukacs – the primacy of the totality over individual instances.  It is insufficient to take the nation-state itself as the starting point, the self-sufficient unit from whose aggregation a world-system arises: “An international system is not the sum of many states, but on the contrary the international system consists of many nation states. The world market is not constituted by many national economies concentrated together, rather the world market is organized in the form of many national economies as its integral components.”  

  The theoretical basis for this assertion is the typical state-derivationist approach of attempting to derive the state form from something in the general concept of capital.  In this case, it is at first the world market itself that is implied in the general concept of capital, as capital has an innate tendency to drive through and beyond national boundaries.  Through the mediation of the world market, localised centres of production and accumulation form a totality, and from that arises the material basis for a world state to carry out the tasks of an ideal-capitalist.  The fact that there is not one world state but many states is, then, an historical accident; nonetheless, these states have fallen under the dominance of the world capitalist system, have been transformed into political organisations capable of organising the world market in some way, and thus should not be seen as simply a series of nation-states having a relationship of exteriority to one another.  They are intrinsically linked through the world market upon which they arise.  Clearly, then, if the unification of the market is what is at stake, it is difficult to explain the perpetuation of national states except as a contingent fact.

  However, there is no reason to start by inferring or deriving the capitalist state form from commodity circulation.  We can certainly concede the methodological primacy of the totality.  But we should remember that the capitalism which emerges in Marx’s Capital is a complex totality composed of many determinations.  Each new determination, as Callinicos points out in Imperialism and Political Economy, is connected to the previous in a dependent but non-deductive way.  So Marx moves from the analysis of the commodity form to the struggle over the eight hour day, or financial markets, or another aspect of capitalist relations.  And while each stage of analysis may depend on the foregoing explications, it is not directly implied in them.  Capital markets are not implicit in the analysis of the commodity form; there is no reason why the state form should be implied by the general form of capital either.  That being the case, the capitalist state form must be seen as part of a complex totality of mutually articulated elements, each exerting a reciprocal effectivity on the others, the organization of the whole determining the effectivity of each element.  The capitalist state is overdetermined by the organization of the complex totality of which it forms a part.


  From this perspective alone can one start to do justice to the relationship between the national state and capitalism. The rational kernel of the state-derivation approach is that capitalism doesn’t merely impose a new organization on territorial entities which otherwise remain essentially the same, but rather take hold of an alter their materiality.  This is true of all the spatial units that occur under capitalism. Castells denounced ‘urban theory’ for presuming that the urban retained the same content, the same meaning, through centuries of change, across modes of production and the stages in their development.  Urban space meant something quite different in medieval Europe; towns and cities represented a different spatial organisation of the social division of labour.

  In Marx’s terms, the social division of labour is distinct from the technical division of labour, in that it arises from social functions related to class.  Under capitalism, the social division of labour is organised around personalized bonds between the feudal lord and the peasant or serf.  The major form of extraction was directly political – the ruling class took tribute by means of coercion – and this tended to produce both a parcellisation of political authority and disarticulation of space.  The rural-urban divide, the patchwork of spaces ranging from estates and small towns to great commercial centres and ports to walled cities, condensed a particular social division of labour.  In the countryside, the producer was bound to the soil working for nobles of various rank on estates of varying size with porous frontiers and no clear boundaries.  Towns varied greatly in size and function; some were enclaves of relative commercial freedom, particularly port towns connected to world markets; smaller towns were usually abutments to large feudal estates.  Their inhabitants did not live off the land and produce tribute, but rather lived off petty commodity manufacture, or various types of trade serving the luxury consumption of the feudal ruling class.  (On the rural-urban divide in the middle ages, see Rodney Hilton).  The major form of ideological dominance being religious, there were overlapping frameworks of sacred and secular power, the church acting as landlord, tithe collector, and symbolic guarantor of the unity of the state as the body of Christ.  This specific articulation of economic, political and ideological power was also the basis for the checkered system of miscellaneous polities, from communes  to city-states to empires.  So, the territorialization of political power under feudalism, based on bonds to lord and land, was such that spaces tended to be irregular, reversible, turned in on themselves (though bonds to lord and land) yet simultaneously open (through extensive migration across intersecting boundaries).

  Where the capitalist mode of production took root, however, producers obtained their famous dual freedom, from both lord (bondage) and land (the means of labour); they were drawn into relations of production mediated through exchange, selling their labour power to capitalists who procured it as just one element in a productive process intended to produce a profit.  However, as Poulantzas pointed out, this did not entail deterritorialization; such a schema relied on a naturalist image in which territory was assumed to have a continuous meaning, connotatively linked to ‘rootedness’ in determinate plots of land.  Rather, the capitalist division of labour entailed a different type of territorialization.  Production, circulation and exchange now demanded a spatial matrix of imperfectly homogenized sites, segments of space each carefully delimited by clear frontier marking insides and outsides and linked to a social division of labour – factories, hubs, supply chains, shopping centres, terraces, conurbations, condominiums, and so on.  So while the movements of money, capital and labour would tend to push beyond these spaces, they must cross frontiers in order to do so.  This system of boundaries is necessary to organise the labour force, the distribution and storage of goods, communications, transport, consumption, residences, and so on.  It is necessary to help regularise an already anarchic system of production and minimise its dysfunctions: for example, they help impose a general sedentarization on the labour force (see James Scott on this) that makes its supply more predictable and its constituents intelligible.

  The specific combination of cooperative and competitive relations in the division of labour also has effects on the spatial matrix.  Production, distribution and exchange must necessarily take place in a cooperative manner, meaning that capital units are locked in a relation of interdependence.  This will produce a tendency toward clustering, as functionally associated capitals reduce their distance from one another: it makes sense, for instance, that large manufacturing enterprises would tend to cluster in industrial estates near large workforces with access to main road; or that commercial enterprises would cluster on high streets in pedestrian and motorist accessible centres where consumption can take place.  On the other hand, this cooperative effort is structured by competitive accumulation.  Some capitals will succeed better than others, and over the long-term there will be a concentration and centralization of capitals, which themselves attract chains of supporting industries, producing spaces (towns, cities, even countries) which work as privileged centres of productive capital, and by extension other spaces that are underdeveloped and neglected.

  Political authority under capitalism, rather than being directly embedded in those sites through a chain of significations linking land to labourer to lord, acquired a formal separation or relative autonomy from them.  Indeed, part of its role was to help constitute this new spatial matrix by standing in a formal sense ‘outside’ it, while ‘intervening’ constantly.  The scare quotes are necessary, because it is clear that in no real sense does the state have an external relationship to the spheres of production or exchange.  This is where the state-derivation approach produces an important insight: breaking with the fetishised notion of the state, with the legal, constitutional image of the state as simply an external guardian of civil society, it treats the state as a social relationship, actively involved in the constitution of the totality of social relationships in part by separating off aspects of them and deeming them ‘political’ as opposed to ‘economic’.  This is consistent with Corrigan and Sayer’s important argument that ‘the state’ as such is a fiction, a ‘mythicized abstraction’; it is through the state relation itself that the social categories are produced to give it its seeming legal and institutional determinacy, its “misplaced concreteness”.

  Still, despite the above, and despite the spatial metaphor deployed, this ‘standing outside’ adverts to a real political relationship which is the state’s relative autonomy from social classes.  As Claus Offe put it, this relative autonomy is necessary to capitalism because only a “fully harmonious economic system that did not trigger self-destructive processes of socialization could tolerate the complete positive subordination of the normative-ideological and political systems to itself."  It is the fact that capitalist production is not a self-sufficient system, that it has inherent crisis tendencies, and arguably the fact that is articulated with other systems (ecological, biological, etc.), which makes it so inherently unstable and requires a state with the freedom to provide a spatio-temporal fix.  Another relevant feature of capitalist production is the ‘isolation effect’ it produces in social classes.  Because it is a system of competitive accumulation among many producers, and because capital is constitutively divided into fractions, the capitalist class finds it impossible to constitute its political dominance over the popular classes without the state, which cannot therefore be an ‘instrument’ or ‘tool’ for the capitalist class as such.   So the apparent extrusion of political authority from the organization of the spatial matrices of production, circulation and consumption is actually nothing other than the formal separation of the political from the economic; the state remains deeply involved in and articulated with the processes of capital accumulation, constituting the segments of space through its schools, police, armed forces, councils, parking authorities, free enterprise zones, etc.  And through its action it seeks to unify and homogenize those spaces; but how?

  In the capitalist mode of production, the dominant form of ideology is no longer religious but political; in normal circumstances, the capitalist state presents itself as a popular, representative state (even if not actually democratic).  It does so firstly by binding itself to a nation, an ‘imagined community’, usually with a shared language.  But to represent the nation as such, it must dissolve classes at an ideological level into individualised subjects, who are then cemented together through the state; the dominant ideological form this takes is legal; the law produces the ‘free and equal’ subject of the bourgeois nation-state.  This is connected to the enclosure of a ‘national’ space, which is obviously by no means a natural space (though of course national expansiveness is necessarily responsive to natural resources, and the spatial matrix of production is warped around them).  Just as the segments of space at the level of factories, bureaucratic offices or towns are circumscribed by a clear frontier as part of the logic of organising the social division of labour, so the state constitutes the national space by erecting a frontier around it, a system of exclusion and filtered admission (of labour, goods, etc) which is operated on behalf of the nation.  

  Not only that, but the state effectively operates a system of internal borders, whereby those who are deemed non-national or anti-national can be confined, brutalised, hyper-exploited, etc. – this can range from detention centres for asylum seekers to concentration camps; from Jim Crow laws restricting movement to secret prisons.  This too has a certain relationship to the social division of labour, insofar as the latter is constituted by politics and ideology.  Capitalism has always shown a marked tendency to stratify labour forces according to principles of race, nationality, religion, gender, ethnicity, and so on, in a way that enhances the political dominance of capital over labour and increases the rate of exploitation of all workers over the long-term.  As Roediger and Esch’s accounts of ‘race management’ would demonstrate, this is not something that simply takes place at the level of the state; such strategies are implemented and experimented with directly in productive enterprises.  But the state also develops strategies for the control of labour forces, for example by obstructing the mobility of some workers to discourage migration at some points or render migrant workers insecure at others, or implementing material incentives in a gendered way so as to preserve a family structure in which women perform the labour of reproducing labour (ie maintaining a household, raising children, feeding male workers etc).  The system of both internal and external frontiers is part of the organization and disciplining of the pyramid.

  This directs one’s attention to what the legal concept of the border, as simply an arbitrary political cleavage separating nation from non-nation, obscures: the fact that the frontier is a set of social (economic, political, ideological) relations, mediated through the state, between the contending classes bound by it; between the many capitals based within it and those beyond it; between national oppressed and dominant groups, and those beyond the nation; and between social formations unified by respective national states, whether imperialist or non-imperialist.  The transgression of frontiers naturally also represents one moment in a given social relationship, be it oppression (refugee flows), exploitation (labour migration), social resistance and class struggle (breaking out or breaking in), or imperialism (invasion, bombing).  The point I’m making here is that the most important fact about national states is not that there are many of them, although logically there must be and this is important; it is the social relations embedded in them, which make them national states.


Tahrir  So, rather than deriving the appropriate type of territoriality of the capitalist state from one of the general formal elements of the capitalist mode of production, I have suggested multiple levels of determination beginning with the overall social division of labour, proceeding to the organisation of political authority specific to capitalism, the dominant form of ideological domination under capitalism, the type of relation between capitals, and between different groups of workers, and the effects of these determinants on each other.  I am not claiming to have been exhaustive, but approaching it in this way gives one a superior perspective on the different orders of scale and space that characterise the capitalist world system and particularly allows one to understand why the key strategic base at which territorial statehood is organised is the nation and is likely to continue to be the nation.  Of course, the specific unity between nation and state is a practical unity, not one that is given in the theoretical understanding of capitalism.  Nations are not essential to capitalism.  However, in any counterfactual scenario of capitalism’s emergence and development, the world system would most likely be constituted by a graduated system of spaces at the strategic centre of which would be something like national states.

  And it’s worth thinking about how this hierarchy of oedipal territories, this very tightly controlled grid of social spaces from the main public square to the prison, dense with symbols and ideology as they are, are so important to capitalist political dominance.  I don’t claim that actually controlling this or that bit of space is the most important thing about capitalist territoriality – no, it is the social relations embodied in the space that is central.  I have said these segmented spaces are ‘containers’ for social relations in which an implied set of social expectations and responses are condensed.  Because of this, there is a strategic hierarchy; some spaces are worth more than others, because the social relations they embody are more important than others to reproducing the system.  

  A certain approach to anticapitalist struggle focuses on taking over spaces, and creating autonomous zones which are simultaneously protest, pedagogy and prefiguration.  This has been tried with the Occupy movement, and has demonstrated some real strengths in all three capacities.  But it has clearly reached its limits inasmuch as the capitalist state has learned, through trial and error, how to regain control of such spaces.  And to the extent that the strategy was bound up with a longer term perspective of, piece-by-piece, liberating space and building communism on a cellular level, it was never going to work.  For, if it is worth claiming autonomous spaces, then it has to be asked why those actually claimed outside of actual revolutionary situations (and then only for a short period) have always been strategically negligible, of marginal importance to the reproduction of the system.  The answer is most likely that the politically important spaces are always very well organised and manned, while it would be unwise to occupy strategically important productive spaces unless the workers already agree with you, in which case they should be doing it.  That leaves public and semi-public spaces, and a few vacated buildings.  Not exactly the Paris Commune; not even the parish commune.  And since the national state is the privileged level of the political organization of the territory, capturing visible but strategically marginal space is always at best a short-term tactic, doomed as it is to encirclement and shut-down in short order.  The only sensible answer is to re-focus on the social relations that are constituted through a particular organization of space, and try to organize the agencies best placed to disrupt their reproduction.

*That means exactly what you think it does.



Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Salma Yaqoob posted by Richard Seymour

This is a big deal for the Left:

Dear friends

This is obviously a calamity for the Left, particularly for anyone interested in building any kind of radical left-of-Labour alternative.  At a time when the two major parties are lockstepped in the austerity drive, and when we can hardly count on the TUC to lead the resistance (this notwithstanding), yet another disastrous quietus was the last thing we needed.  That is not Salma Yaqoob's fault, obviously.  The usual suspects will spread vicious gossip ("she's taken the New Labour shilling" etc etc) but as far as I can see, her decision is perfectly justified.  I'm sorry to say it, but George Galloway did it to himself: he ought to have had the humility to retract his statement rather than relying on the diminishing fan club to issue cloying rationalisations.  

There are serious questions raised by this nadir, and not only about the gender politics.  If, only months after Respect's second coming, the whole thing could come crashing down like this then there are wider issues about the politics, institutional setting and tactics of left-of-Labour formations that need be thought over.  Not much else I wish to add for now. 

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Tuesday, September 11, 2012

What Are We Fighting For? posted by Richard Seymour

I have contributed an essay to this collection, What We Are Fighting For, published by Pluto Press.  It follows from last year's conference at the ICA, which sought to deal with some of the political, strategic dilemmas posed by Occupy.  It features Peter Hallward, David Graeber, John Holloway, Nina Power, Mark Fisher, Zillah Eisenstein, Dan Hind, Owen Jones, Hillary Wainwright and other excellent contributors.  It also features, as I just mentioned, me.  I'm in there.  Buy it.  Buy it or you're not my friend any more.*  


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Sunday, September 09, 2012

UK students could learn from Quebec posted by Richard Seymour

My latest for The Guardian analyses the students' recent victory in Quebec:

So this is how it's done. Students in Quebec, in rebellion against their government over tuition fees, have scored an amazing victory in the province's general elections.


Thursday, September 06, 2012

Mad dogs and Englishmen: Stuart Hall on 'Englishness' posted by Richard Seymour

My latest for Jacobin, should you be interested (of course you are):

Stuart Hall, prelate of British cultural studies, has intervened in the Labour Party’s current debates about ‘Englishness’.  He is brief, but nonetheless interesting: “I talked to Cruddas about this … I think I understand his preoccupations rather more than Maurice Glasman’s. In a constituency like Cruddas’s, where you’re fighting the far right, you have to think about those things [English identity, immigration]. But you have to be careful about how you recruit them. He came to talk to me about the New Left, which, of course, was interested in the popular language of the nation.  But I had the feeling he was raiding the past, out of context, in a way.  I do think Englishness is something we need to talk about, but it’s contested terrain that is structured powerfully against a contemporary radical appropriation.”
This is perhaps a more pointed intervention than the tone of guarded scepticism would lead one to believe...

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Wednesday, September 05, 2012

From the mouths of idiots posted by Richard Seymour

As you will have heard, the English Defence League were humiliated in Walthamstow last Saturday.  I knew it would go badly for them, but even when I saw how big the march was, it wasn't clear just how badly it would end. You can read the reports here, but it's probably a good idea to look at it from the EDL's point of view as well. In these videos you can see both Tommy Robinson and his deputy Kev Carroll have a massive breakdown, while a section of the UAF rally - most of which is blockading the EDL march - gathers opposite.  Robinson cuts a particularly foolish figure, attempting to channel a bit of Mussolini while he shouts and gesticulates at a hostile crowd.  I am not complacent about this, but after about a decade of fascist upsurge, this is a real pleasure to witness.

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The uses of al-Qaida posted by Richard Seymour

My article for the latest London Review of Books is out:

President Obama has waged war on al-Qaida by drone and by ‘kill list’. Vladimir Putin has hunted al-Qaida in the North Caucasus. The late Colonel Gaddafi, and now Bashar al-Assad, have summoned alliances against it. The alarming ubiquity of al-Qaida, its mitosis and metastasis seemingly outpacing the destruction of its cells, is attested by the multiplication of enemies on the US State Department’s list of ‘foreign terrorist organisations’. In 2002, al-Qaida appeared as a single entry; now there are four officially recognised organisations with the same root brand: al-Qaida (AQ), al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The list also includes the Abdallah Azzam Brigades, usually described as an ‘affiliate’ of al-Qaida in Iraq...

Sadly, it's behind a paywall. It's pretty good too. I don't know, you should probably subscribe or something.


One more contribution to the problem of left unity posted by Richard Seymour

Over at Socialist Unity, Andy Newman and Tony Collins are pleading for some unity on the left.

It's always good to hear that people are calling for some unity.  Unfortunately, I think the call is being pitched over the wrong issue.  I would be happy to unite with Andy Newman and George Galloway over other issues, such as their opposition to racism and war.  I obviously agree with them that the US is attempting to extradite Assange, and that this should not be allowed to happen.  But I don't want to unite with them over the issue of rape. I think they've made a big mistake first in trivialising allegations of rape, and second in rationalising that trivialisation; and I think the Left should be on the opposing side of that argument. It's not a question of joining the chorus of highly personalised denunciation. But there is an issue at stake here that is bigger than George Galloway, and which goes beyond the immediate case he was commenting on, which is a decades long struggle to change the political and cultural climate regarding rape.

Second, even if this was an issue we could unite around, the call is pitched in the worst possible way. Tony Collins, (who used to moderate the comments on this blog), complains that the SWP wants to destroy Galloway's career.  I know there's a lot of lingering resentment from the Respect debacle, but this is silly scapegoating: it isn't the SWP who are destroying George Galloway's career; he is doing that, and I really wish he wouldn't.  It's sad that this has led to such a serious setback for Respect, so soon after Galloway's astonishing success in Bradford.  But only George Galloway could have prevented this, by listening to his critics and perhaps admitting that he'd been in error.  Collins adds that the rest of the Left never wished Galloway well anyway, and that liberals and the right hate his guts. So, then, who is there left to unite with? 

Third, it's all very well complaining about the irrational hostility Galloway draws from certain quarters.  I am well aware of this tendency, and have no desire to encourage it.  But it is impossible in cases like this to disentangle that from real disappointment and despair. You only have to consider the comments in the Socialist Unity blog and in the thread below it - such as the snide rebuke to Kate Hudson implying careerist motivations, the finger-wagging you-should-take-this-up-in-private attitude - to sense the scale of the problem here.  Leaving aside the fact that, it's highly likely these concerns were taken up in private over several strained discussions (I am speculating, but I think I'm on reasonable ground here), this looks like a very narrow group of male socialists who want to tell everyone else what to say and do, reserving the right to smear them if they stick to their guns. Is that socialist unity?  Aren't calls for unity which require some groups, women in this case, to subordinate their own interests to a wider cause, actually rather divisive?  And, if I may try to dignify this unhappy detour, didn't a famous Sardinian suggest a rather different model of unity?


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