In the Marxist legacy, there has always been a relationship, even if sometimes difficult and controversial, between dialectical philosophy — coming from Hegel and Marx — and political determination. And I think that this point is especially important today, because in the present moment there is a general weakness of revolutionary ideas. And so, when men and women today engage in political action they are in search of an orientation… It is not so much the question of immediate struggles which is obscure. In many cases it is not. For instance, that you should struggle against racist police violence is clear. But of course in the long-term it is not enough to defend a purely negative indignation. You must have some principles, some positive will, an affirmative determination.
— ALAIN BADIOU, “A Philosophy for Militants” 58
The concept of “struggle” has occupied a central place in the radical imagination. Social and political transformation have long been understood as the products of social and political struggle. For Frederick Douglass, all progress requires struggle, and for Karl Marx, human history is comprised of conflict and class struggle. Struggle has become an integral substance, and is often the crux, of revolutionary projects and politics. Even today, influential thinkers like the autonomist Marxist John Holloway understand militants. that, fundamentally, revolution begins with a scream of sadness. From an affective point of view, however, people do not want to struggle or to scream with sadness. In this chapter, I explore the contradiction of desire embodied in wanting a different world without wanting to struggle. For example, is revolt not often the joyful interruption of struggle, a reaction against (and not an expression of) struggle? However we answer that question, I shall argue that there is an intractable absurdity at the heart of any politics that valorizes struggle: If the narrative on virtuous struggle is not deconstructed, it shall always be ultimately undesirable to make the world that we desire.
In 1979, Raoul Vaneigem — who in many ways wrote the philosophy of autonomy that helped to articulate Italian and French movements in the late 1960s and 1970s — sharply observed the general problematic as follows: “When the struggle against misery becomes the struggle for passionate abundance, you get the reversal of perspective. Doesn’t each of us dream of making what gives him intense pleasure the ordinary stuff of everyday life?” 59 Vaneigem is right to call for a reversal of perspective, but the old focus on struggle has not simply been the intellectual and existential error that his polemics make it out to be. That everyday life is full of multifarious forms of struggle is not a fact of the world that can be “reversed” by taking on a different perspective. And, while Vaneigem is also right that most (and sensibly all) individual persons would prefer an everyday life of pleasure to an everyday life of pain, no single individual can make it so within his or her everyday living.
The problem, I shall argue, is better understood through a consideration of the conditions of everyday life, the field on which everyday life takes place. That field is colonized (though not absolutely) by capital, which means that a critique of capitalism and its culture remains indispensable.
I draw on key concepts from Félix Guattari and Franco “Bifo” Berardi — and on the joyful and even ecstatic disposition of the Egyptian uprising of 2011 and other recent revolts. I pool these resources to make the case for an autonomous conception of collective action that decenters struggle as a virtue. Struggle happens. But theory must speak instead to the cultivation of human talent in micropolitical projects, and must aim to uncover the real desires obscured by a life governed by money.
Very generally, this chapter advances three distinct yet linked reversals of perspective relating to the questions of autonomy, struggle, and pleasure. (1) First, autonomy as a form of freedom (or as freedom itself) is not reducible to the freedom of capital, to the unbounded flow of capital and its arbitration. To the contrary, the logic of capital seeks to organize everyday life such that human autonomy is severely limited and even extinguished, as our creative energies are increasingly relegated to an almost-disappeared “leisure” time. In the actually existing context of everyday life, then, autonomous action antagonizes the expectations of capital. (2) Second, autonomous action is not incompatible with collective action, but its relationship to the individual person must be made clearer than it currently is in the major works of autonomist Marxism. (3) Third, while capitalism does make autonomous action expendable in the harshest realizations of human precarity, autonomous action remains the possible and optimal mode for the displacement of struggle. All of the technical terms of these preliminary gestures will be clearly defined below.
In short, I aim to work out the parameters for an autonomous theory of revolution that can help revolution overcome its historic fixation on struggle. Despite the reality of struggle, the virtue of struggle must be refuted and overcome, and pleasure must play a part in displacing the worn out logic of paying for everything with pain.
The mainly diagnostic approach of the critical theorists of the 1940s did not complete — and could not have been expected to complete — the task of analyzing the problems of capitalism and its culture. Just as one hundred years earlier, Karl Marx’s work did not and could not complete that very same task. This is not because of faults in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 or the Dialectic of Enlightenment of 1944, to mention two examples.60 These works, and all of the theories of capitalism that surround them, can certainly be criticized, but capital’s formal developments are frequent and radical enough to outflank any analysis of a period, no matter how precise the analysis in its place and time. Good diagnostic works, like those just mentioned, retain much of their explanatory value, but capitalism always outgrows them in important ways. Note that I mention the “formal developments” of capital. This is because capital’s internal logic remains unchanged (to accumulate capital), while its organizational modes are always changing in order to evolve the capacities of capital to organize culture, communication, production, style, work, and consumption. Very simply, capital’s operational logic is the same, but its organizational mode is changing. The operational logic of capital refers to its invariable functioning for capital and its accumulation. The organizational mode of capital refers to the evolving ways life and society are organized for capital and its accumulation. Thus, when we speak of Fordist and post-Fordist society, we are speaking about a life and society with the same logic, in different organizational modes. This is what enables us to differentiate the modalities of 19th-century industrial capitalism and 21st-century financial capitalism without obscuring the functionality of their common operational logic.
This distinction is critical to an understanding of capital in each of its eras, and yet, many thinkers have mistaken major changes in organizational mode for changes in operational logic. For example, McKenzie Wark argues:
The kind of mode of production we appear to be entering is one that I don’t think is quite capitalism as classically described. This is not capitalism, this is something worse. I see the vectoral class as the emerging ruling class of our time, whose power rests on attempting to command the whole production process by owning and controlling information. In the over-developed world, an information infrastructure, a kind of third nature, now commands the old manufacturing and distribution infrastructure, or second nature, which in turn commands the resources of this planet, which is how nature now appears to us.61
But, what motivates the so-called “vectoral class,” this new ruling class that still seeks, much like the previous ruling class, to command production, the old manufacturing and distribution infrastructure, and the resources of planet Earth? Perhaps Wark’s description is correct, that the control of production, manufacture, and resources is now done by way of controlling information rather than by way of controlling money and the means of production. But two points are sufficient to flagging a confusion between organizational mode and operational logic in Wark’s analysis. First, those who command the most capital are those who own and control the greatest quantity of the most significant information, that is, who wield the dominant influence on the information infrastructure. The power of the vectoral class remains, fundamentally and overwhelmingly, a capitalist power. Therefore, the logic of capital remains decisive of the whole new informationalist organization. Second, it is still the logic of capital that mobilizes the interests of the vectoral class to command production, manufacturing, and distribution, and to seize the natural resources of the planet. The mode changes, not the basic motivation. The ruthless pursuit of such interests is made sensible only by capital within a capitalist lifeworld.
What has to be remembered is that the “mode of production” is, as the term suggests, a particular modality. There are many actual, and many more possible, capitalist modes of production. We know that the industrial modality from the late 18th century through the whole of the 19th century is not the only organizational mode that capital may take. When Wark says that we are entering a mode of production that is not capitalism “as classically described,” this simply means that the now-classical descriptions Marx was capable of providing in the 19th century do not sufficiently describe the new organizational modalities of capital. Marxists, however, have studied changes in organizational mode since Marx himself, so it is hardly a revelation. It is in Wark’s conclusion that the present era is not capitalism where his conflation of the operational logic with the organizational mode is made clear. The logic of capital has governed many modes of production, and continues to govern new ones. Understanding the mode of production is critical to understanding how capitalism works, but we must also understand that the history of capitalism is largely a history of the different modalities of capital.
I claim that the decisive question in understanding any period of capitalist society is to consider how much of human relationality is governed by the logic of capital. How much of human relations is/has been/is now being converted into exchange relations? How much of everyday life, that is, how much of what we do dayin-and-day-out, is decided by a real or perceived need for money and/or commodities? How much does the profit logic function as a “justification” for the decisions of national and state governments, groups, corporations, and individual persons? How much of space and time is carved up and paid for by capital? And, how much does capital assign space and time their respective values? How much is human security (personal, local, national, global) secured by money? And, for each of these questions, in what ways? Looking at how the operational logic of capital survives in new organizational modalities helps to reveal the enduring and, I think, growing relevance of capital in the governance of the world today. Inasmuch as capital still governs and organizes life and space and time, we cannot be done with capitalism.
It is a clear folly to discuss antidotes to a problem without an understanding of the problem. Still, one can only go so far in diagnostic work before bumping into the question of “What is to be done?” And often the question of “What is to be done?” is posed disingenuously. The question is not always posed in pursuit of a good answer. Many times, the question of “What is to be done?” is asked in order to invalidate critique, to point out that critique has no practical recommendations, to reveal it as being “merely” negative. Many times when my conservative and liberal students demand to know what is to be done, it is not because they want a solution to the problems revealed by critical theory, Marxism, etc., but rather, because they want a concrete reason to abandon lines of inquiry they perceive as, and hope will prove to be, dead ends. More simply, their means of refutation is to show that the theory cannot solve the very problems it diagnoses, i.e. if the critique outlines no expedient solutions, then it is useless. But that view rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of theory and its uses.
Theoretical critique, if it is any good, is never “merely” negative, even if it proposes no confident solutions to the problems it studies. In purely logical terms, a good diagnosis is not falsified by the absence of a certain cure, nor is it ever useless. No doubt, the absence of a certain cure is frustrating, as anyone who has been to many doctors knows well. But as frustrating as this can be, the diagnosis may still be right. What is the use of a diagnosis without a cure? The “use-value” of diagnosis, if you will, is as a necessary preliminary, or as a prerequisite to the best courses of action. No confident course of action is possible without a good diagnosis. Sticking with the medical example, I do not think I’m alone in not wanting a surgeon who is ready to do a heart transplant who cannot say for certain that the heart is the problem. The common sense one brings to the surgeon is no less useful in political theory. Good diagnostics are also necessary in cases of social and political problems, despite common obfuscations about practical politics having little to no need for theory.62
Let us consider capitalism as a problem. In the midst of extant and emergent global crises, capitalism aims to reconcile a 3% compound growth rate with instabilities in the growth model on every level.63 The imperative of growth refers only to capital accumulation and therefore not to humans directly. Human societies generally are only ever the inadvertent beneficiaries of private accumulation. I have argued elsewhere that capitalism’s internal logic is fundamentally problematic and immoral.64 For now, it shall have to suffice to say that more than 80% of the world’s population lives in countries where income differentials are widening. The poorest 40% of the world’s population accounts for 5% of global income. The richest 20% of people account for three-quarters of world income.65 The number of children in the world is 2.2 billion, and the number in poverty is 1 billion (every second child).66 More recently, in his best-selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty and an international team of researchers organized out of the Paris School of Economics confirmed that the history of capital reveals structural tendencies in capitalist societies that have guaranteed the growth of global inequality.67 According to an Oxfam International Report from 2014, the 85 richest individual persons on Earth have more wealth than the poorest half of the global population (the 3.5 billion poorest).68 These are some of the basic features of a world organized by the logic of capital. If we are honest about macrosocial and macroeconomic realities, it is not possible to avoid certain basic conclusions; for example, that the exchange relations of the world are governed by capital, and that most people on Earth are poor. The ideological practice of thanking capitalism for all our favorite things in a technological life is killed by any consideration of the worst things that people suffer on a global scale.
This book both substantiates and accepts the premise that capitalism, which has dominated global social relations and international political economy for over two hundred years, has not managed to remedy or reverse the worst trends of impoverishment, maldistribution, and basic want. Further, I claim that the so-called communist projects of the 20th century were always already capitalist in varying ways, and that communism is not achieved in and by bureaucratic capitalist states that implemented state capitalism instead of the free market form that developed in the US, the UK, and elsewhere.69 Whichever way one looks at it, one cannot simply select the most remarkable instances of abundance and personal well-being as the benchmarks of capitalism to the exclusion or neglect of the far more widespread and much bleaker global picture without doing some violence to the truth. As one such narrative may go: The financial crisis that opened up in 2008 and the BP oil spill had nothing to do with capitalism’s deficits, but new communications technologies and new medical breakthroughs have everything to do with capital’s empowering tendencies. Defenders of capitalism commonly credit everything that they like to capital, while disassociating capital from every catastrophe. This is the worst form of apologetics. The present work identifies capital as a root problem, even if not the only problem. If we are to address the problems of a capitalist lifeworld, we must diagnose them well.
Nonetheless, we can justify diagnostics in perpetuity. Shall we never allow ourselves to consider the question of “What is to be done?” If we wait until after we have gotten the diagnostics right on a unit of analysis that is ever-changing, until after we are in possession of total knowledge, we will never have done with the preliminaries. We must therefore break with the logic of diagnostics from time to time, for the sake of human action, even if we intend to pick up and continue our diagnostics later. In fact, sometimes an active break with diagnostics is part of the diagnostic work itself.
This is what happens in revolt. A revolt is not separate from the diagnostic work, but part of it. And yet, every revolt also wants to change the problems that it diagnoses. In this way, revolt both advances the diagnosis of its participants while openly and actively confronting certain impasses, searching for a resolution. We can see this well in the Egyptian Revolution from January and February 2011. The uprising in Egypt simultaneously comes from an understanding, and works to test and to deepen that understanding. The uprising says something like, “we diagnose our problems right up to Mubarak’s front door, but let’s also see what we can do.” It is both critical and exploratory, both reactive and creative. The same lesson is also contained within the surgeon analogy. At certain points, the surgeon will say that even though she does not have a perfect diagnosis, she must consider acting anyway, for to perpetually wait for certainty is to possibly act too late.
In the spirit of the above considerations, I shall now address the question of “What is to be done?” However, I want to rephrase the question as “Who should do what?” This version implicates the old question, but adds the dimensions of personality and multiplicity, and removes the passive voice. This line of questioning is not always a disingenuous quip against theory. Most critics of capital want a theory of praxis of some kind, even if their idea of revolution is more Foucauldian than Marxist. Let us try to think in a preliminary way about what we can and should do in the context of an opposition to the constituted present.
Looking out at the diverse field of humanity, we encounter amultifarious state of potentia, as Enrique Dussel calls it.70 On the political field, we find many different actors, including potestas, potentia, and hyperpotentia.
Potestas refers to the organized institutional political organs of a society, such as governments and all of their parts — executive, judicial, legislative, electoral, military, etc.
Potentia refers to the capacity for political power that lies within and throughout the community.
Hyperpotentia refers to the realization of the power of the community of people, which exists, for example, when the community enters into a state of revolt.
In Egypt and Turkey and Greece, we recently saw potentia become hyperpotentia, and clearly why that matters.
Now, within the field of potentia (which is where I shall focus my attention), we immediately hit upon a certain fact. People have different talents, capabilities, proclivities, or, as we might call them, “gifts.” I shall use the terms “talent” and “gift” synonymously and alternatively. But what do I mean by these terms? Not everyone has, or can be made to have, the same talents. At a rather young age I came to the realization that I could never be trained to draw very well, nor could I be made to desire learning high-order mathematics. With drawing, I did not have any natural talent. I could see the world, the human figure, the objects of nature, but I could not draw their lines to reproduce their shapes. I tried. I took classes as a child. Sometimes I came a bit closer, but I had little control over the outcome. Often, the very first line that I drew would determine the fate of the whole, and I knew it. Classes had no significant impact on me, and very different impacts on the differential raw talents of the students beside me. Perhaps other classes would have helped me more. However, as cognitive science now knows well, there is indeed a certain gift that some people have for drawing, a gift I do not have.71
With mathematics, I could do it. I could struggle to learn the rules of various forms of calculation, and I could memorize and apply certain complex formulae. But I didn’t want to. I had no desire for the work, no innate feeling for it, if you will, beyond the ulterior motivations pertaining to my grade in a class or degree requirements. There are so many ways mathematics relates to human life, but none of them interested me enough for committed and sustained study. And desire is not all. I also noticed that it took me a great deal more effort to understand basic concepts and equations than it did many of my classmates, who seemed to “get it” quite naturally. I am not suggesting that I couldn’t get it with hard work, only that the level of work required to do well far exceeded my desire to do it, and the distance between the two made it even harder work indeed. With philosophy I also worked through certain difficulties, but at least there I had the passion to support my efforts. Does not everyone find abundant evidence in their own lives for the existence of multifarious gifts?
It is possible to object to this particular indulgence of common sense, for example, if one sees in it a vulgar version of the Aristotelian view on natural talent, as Aristotle discussed in his Politics and Metaphysics. But, if we distinguish Aristotle’s discussion from the offending context of slavery in Book I of Politics and a subsequent long history (still ongoing) of eugenics and racism, his basic observation about the existence of diverse abilities remains convincing and compatible with the view I am outlining. Simply put, not everyone is an athlete, nor would everyone make an equally good carpenter, artist, or mathematician, and these “differences” are not all simply and wholly a matter of training. We do not even need, as Socrates suggested in Plato’s Republic, to tell people that they are mixed with various metals that make them more or less suited for one form of work or another. Without any such manipulations, we spend much of our lives discerning and developing our talents in rather autonomous manners.72
Immediately, this appears as the old nature/nurture debate, though we should be done by now with taking either of those faulty sides. Both dimensions account, in various ways, for the real differentials of talents that we see across potentia. The whole range of difference can neither be described as a purely materialist exposure to experience and education, nor as a matter of the human soul or human biology. Neuroscience and biology no longer stand categorically opposed to sociology, as Frans B.M. de Waal has conceded.73 There has indeed been substantial work on “sociobiology” since the 1970s.74 Different people use different parts of their brains, sometimes in response to the same stimuli. There are genetic and biological aspects of the issue as well as cultural and experiential ones, and one must never leave out desire, passion, and feeling, and our distinctive psychological comportments. Because of the complexity of biological and social diversity, the diversity of human talent is a complex field that is almost impossible to sort out. And although social and cognitive scientists will nevertheless continue to sort out the causes of this diversity, it is not my aim to unravel the whole mystery.
For the time being, I only ask the reader to follow me to this conclusion: Certain activities that give you great joy may be a misery to others, as philosophy or mathematics may be a joy to one and a misery to another, as sports may be a pleasure to you and a torment to me. I only ask that the reader acknowledge the existence of a multifarious manifold of human talent, regardless of its complex genealogy and origins. It is in relation to this diversity, and in relation to a transformative social and political hope, that I ask: Who should do what?
When theorists think about action against the capitalist lifeworld and for something else, whether that better destination is named and described or left as an unspecified liberatory future, they are sensibly led by the scale of the problem. This has been particularly true in the Marxist trajectory of thinking through the grand antagonisms capable of setting the stage for world-historical transformation. Capitalism is a big problem and thus calls for a big solution. Thinking dialectically, its antithesis, or from a historical materialist point of view, its real antagonist, must be of equal or greater power — power meaning not only that of a physical critical mass, but also that of an antagonist who is reasonable, convincing, and widely appealing.
Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas have argued well that real power, as opposed to force or violence, comes from and rests on those who occupy spaces outside the formal offices of power. For example, Arendt holds that “political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.” 75 And Habermas argues that, in its best moments, the “public sphere as a functional element in the political realm was given the normative status of an organ for the self-articulation of civil society with a state authority corresponding to its needs.” 76 Arendt thus insists that the apparatuses of political power, whether individual public officials or state institutions, require a power outside of themselves that must empower them. They require the agonistic and active affirmation of the everyday people on whose behalf they act, or else, as both Mubarak and Morsi have seen in Egypt since 2011, their only “power” is the formal apparatus of the state, and mainly the military — to which they would not need practical recourse if they possessed real power. Habermas gave the name “public sphere” to this agonistic space of real power. For him, the public sphere is the mechanism through which civil society articulates its collective will and interest, so that it can substantively steer or throw into question the legitimacy of institutions and powerholders. For Habermas, because the public sphere requires collective (communicative) action, it is necessarily a state of hyperpotentia. This is what distinguishes the public sphere from civil society, as the latter is a field of potentia.
It is critical to point out that however we define power — from that of the proletariat to that of the public sphere — the radical imagination has gravitated toward the organization of a critical mass of some kind. And, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have imagined with the “multitude,” theorization of the grand revolutionary subject continues. The revolutionary actor we always get is a united front of some kind, by way of large mechanisms like international unions, political parties, or something more spontaneous and “bottom-up” like the outbreak of mass revolt, social and cultural movements, and the organic emergence of global solidarity. To be fair to this common inventory of radical imaginaries, thinking in such grand scales reflects much of the truth of the matter. Capitalist states, capitalist culture, and capitalist political economy cannot be undone by isolated and atomized acts, no matter how contentious. Capital demands an opponent of comparable scale. Even from the perspective of capital, such smaller acts appear temporary, aberrant, and ultimately as perfectly permissible within the limits of capitalist society. In fact, capitalists look forward to allowing such temporary aberrations to occur, since they serve as opportunities to demonstrate the tolerance and “democracy” of the existing system.
For some time, revolutionary theory has required a new imbrication, one capable of moving beyond the desperate or delusional scale of isolated and atomized acts, but which does nothing to standardize political action or constrict autonomy in the process. When Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri collaborated in the 1980s, they came close to just such an imbrication:
From a molecular point of view, each attempt at ideological unification is an absurd and indeed reactionary operation. Desire, on a social terrain, refuses to allow itself to be confined to zones of consensus, in the arenas of ideological legitimation. Why ask a feminist movement to come to a doctrinal or pro-grammatic accord with ecological movement groups or with a communitarian experiment by people of color or with a workers’ movement, etc.? Ideology shatters; it only unifies on the level of appearance.77
I suggest that this conceptual and organizational perspective is far superior to anything found in the more recent works of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. I do not blame the presence of Hardt for this difference, nor do I claim any contradiction in Negri’s thinking; rather, I would perhaps give credit to Guattari for the better idea. But, what exactly is this “molecular point of view” I want to build upon?
Guattari and Negri’s molecular point of view rejects any attempt to take distinct molecular revolutions as part of some unified revolutionary program. That is, their position reflects an honest acceptance of the smallness of certain revolts and a total rejection of the effort to make every movement appear as a self-conscious part of some ideological whole. For example, it would be an ideological sleight of hand to say that the revolution in Egypt in 2011 is orchestrated by the Muslim Brotherhood, or by a Google marketing manager, or by anarchists, or by communists disaffected with capitalism. Guattari and Negri point out that desire, on a social terrain, does not express a cohesive ideological consensus. It can only be made to look “communist” on the level of appearance, and this serves as a critical reminder to Hardt and Negri, who have retrieved the Marxian revolutionary subject position and refigured it in the multitude. I am afraid that the molecular point of view — more honest, less ideological — gets lost in the aggregate points of view of the multitude.78
But Guattari and Negri do go on to recommend a multiplicity of “molecular revolutions” that can link in clear and concrete ways, even if only for a limited time.79 For them, this means the following: Real revolutionary activity is autonomous, sporadic, particular, singular, unpredictable, and demanding, but the impact of such activity ultimately depends on culminating intersections that can rise to the challenge of forcing or provoking transitions and transformations of social and political structures. Thus, while we must move beyond the old virtue of class struggle, we must also get over the self-glorification embedded in heroic notions of living a revolutionary lifestyle. Guattari and Negri insist on a molecular perspective capable of recognizing the transient and autonomous smallness of fragmentary and often desperate revolts, and of appreciating those moments as real expressions of desire and disaffection. On the other hand, Guattari and Negri understand the limitations of molecular revolutions in political terms. That is, on their own, molecular revolts comprise a politics of failure.
Today, only the most delusional of so-called anarchists and the most juvenile of activists will insist on the “revolutionary” character of their individual lifestyles, which mostly amounts to nothing more than slight modulations on the exchange of capital through consumption patterns. I aim to decenter struggle without shrinking to a lifestyle politics of consumption.
Indeed, some recent theories have aimed to decenter struggle. But at the same time, many such theories make a different kind of fatal mistake — that of decentering political agency and collective action. We could of course take any number of examples from the postmodern milieu, but let us take, instead, the “radical” theory of primitivism. Primitivists often distinguish themselves as the apex of the radical milieu.
Two fundamental positions constitute primitivism: (1) Primitivists accept the premise that all civilization is unsustainable, will therefore inevitably collapse, and that highly technological contemporary civilization is bringing itself to that ultimate crisis point. (2) Primitivists look forward to collapse as a potentially emancipatory transition to a sustainable primitive future.80 In other words, the primitivist argues and longs for the inevitable collapse of civilization, and foresees such collapse as an opening to new/old forms of life liberated from the present technological dystopia.
But consider the question of what is to be done from the primitivist perspective. John Zerzan keeps a running inventory of the social and psychological problems and illegal acts that indicate civilization’s inexorable march toward its own end. In every tragedy, ecological catastrophe, school shooting, or pandemic, Zerzan finds evidence for impending collapse. There is a peculiar deception in all of this. Zerzan, for example, recommends direct action of all kinds. But it appears to be an absurd recommendation in light of his other unwavering assertion that — action or no action — the end of civilization is coming. We can even do nothing at all, and that potentially emancipatory collapse will come. Collapse is always already on the horizon. As Zerzan writes in his latest book: “Civilizations have come and gone over the past six thousand years or so. Now there’s just one. Various cultures, but a single, global civilization. Collapse is in the air.” 81 Civilization has an expiration date, always to be determined, so it is ultimately sufficient to be prepared. For this preparation, what should we do? Practice with gardening and carpentry would be good, so that we might know how to survive, and some philosophical support for the journey, which one could get from reading Zerzan, among others.82
Therefore, the truth about Zerzan’s primitivist point of view is that despite his own praise for them, the courageous acts of the Black Bloc and other “elements of refusal” have only a cheap gloss of nobility, for they are ultimately quite unnecessary.83 Primitivists observe acts of civil disobedience and property destruction (as well as school shootings) as signifiers of a better future arriving, as signs of the times, but even without such acts and incidents they claim that the system is doomed by design. Although he finds the revolt of dignity in certain forms of action, especially those acts that can be interpreted as attempts to say something against civilization, Zerzan reliably reminds us that civilization will accelerate its own collapse far more than — and regardless of — any human action.
From the primitivist point of view, and also, from similarly inflected theories of the Anthropocene, capitalism is often regarded as a red herring.84 According to primitivists like Zerzan, critics of capitalist society are always far too Marxist (even if they’re not Marxist at all) and old-fashioned.
Yet, despite Zerzan’s disdain for Marxism, the primitivist approach inadvertently reifies the worst elements of Marxist scientism. Like Marx’s crisis theory of capitalism, civilization is also pregnant with its own end. “Domination/civilization had a historical beginning. It may have a historical end — which would be the end of history.” 85 But unlike Marx, there is no revolutionary subject position — not the proletariat, not the indigenous, not even the anarchists, the students, the multitude, or anyone else you might imagine in that role. Far more than Marx himself, Zerzan finds the inevitable future always forthcoming, all fatalistically determined by the present state of affairs. Ultimately, Zerzan’s determinism mirrors Marx’s, and runs deeper.
But if we cannot count on the metanarratives of Marxism or primitivism, and if we are also critical of the atomistic forms of lifestyle politics, then how do we not fall into a postmodern malaise of acquiescence and failure? It is in the graveyard of these narratives of transformative hope that I want to point out a more promising pathway beyond the old virtue of struggle. The theory of revolt developed in this book is my recommended alternative to a rich history of radicalisms, which have been either too small or too big in various ways. The preliminary goal of the present chapter is to outline a direction that reflects neither the impossible “bigness” of the grand revolutionary schemes of the past, nor the primitivist delusion that mistakes school shootings as death knells of human civilization — nor do I seek a liberal path felicitous with capitalism, one which happily allows capitalism to prove its own virtues.
We do need to get away from the “size requirements” of Marxist historiography. If we always look out for a massive counter-position, the multifariousness of human talent and desire appears as a kind of impediment. Even autonomist Marxist thinkers have conceptualized a massive revolutionary counter-position, such as Hardt and Negri’s concept of the “multitude,” or the “working class” as an open and heterogeneous category, as the term has been deployed by Holloway.86 These authors in particular make major contributions to a better articulation of Marxist critique, but unfortunately, they theorize the antagonist as a refurbished, but equally problematic revolutionary class.
Let’s consider Guattari’s conception of the “molecular” revolution or “micro-revolutions” of “micropolitics,” and Berardi’s conception of the “precarious class,” or “the precariat.” 87 I have written elsewhere and at greater length about the precariat as both a useful and problematic concept.88
But consider first that “multitude” and “working class” only indicate a compositional content, by which I mean that they intend to specify a revolutionary demographic, even if that demographic is not drawn cleanly or simply over class lines. Like “proletariat,” these terms do not indicate any particular comportment or contestatory activity. “Multitude” and “working class” do not tell us about the condition or comportment of the group (or, as it were, the group of groups) in the world. Nor do these terms indicate any particular mode of action. As a result, revolutionary theories that use such placeholders as these typically move to prescribe or predict the condition, comportment, and action of the revolutionary group that they name. The failure of this method becomes clear when — if ever the group is found anywhere in the world (and I have not yet found the “multitude” in the world) — the group does not identify or act as prescribed or predicted, because it is not in fact the theorized group.
In 1985, Guattari and Negri theorized the revolutionary subject from its singular characteristics instead of from generalizations, arguing that “[e]ach molecular movement, each autonomy, each minoritarian movement will coalesce with an aspect of the real in order to exalt its particular liberatory dimensions.” 89 Thus, rather than prescribing or predicting how a cohesive revolutionary class may act as a critical mass, various subsets of the exploited, oppressed, neglected, and despised will show us directly how they act in their actual and diverse modes of revolt. So, taking the molecular point of view as a start, we begin with concrete and particular moments and modes of revolt. This helps us to understand the conditions of each movement, and their respective proclivities for action. This perspective is critical to the theory of revolt developed in this book, because it does not seek to subordinate every uprising to an ideological format of class conflict, and rather, actively guards against such reductions.
The theory of precariousness is capable of enriching class analysis, so long as it is not introduced as a replacement for class analysis. The precarious class, or precariat, is distinguished as a social class by virtue of its actual comportment within (and as a result of) capitalist society. The precariat is not told that it is (nor does it need to be described as) precarious, for its precarity is a measurable feature of its life. Simply put, the precariat is the class of people who lead precarious lives, whose everyday life is set within an ongoing state of anxiety about an increasingly uncertain future. The precariat cannot be given any guarantees about tomorrow, for they know too much about our “flexible” and “mobile” societies to believe such promises. The system of work, wages, and security (in all countries), from the point of view of the precarious, cannot be trusted to deliver on promises for a good life. Some people’s lives are more precarious than others. Conceptually, “precariat” has an advantage over “proletariat” in that it describes a real condition of life and specifies a clear point of view — which is also the content of its condition — whereas “proletariat” does not indicate a point of view, just a position in the mode of production.
But the theory of precarity still needs to be supplemented with some form of class analysis, or else we run the risk of minimizing, or worse, neglecting, real differences that make a big difference in the lives of real people. For example, inasmuch as we can say that everyone is increasingly precarious, or that the whole society is already precarious, we are susceptible to a leveling gaze that pays insufficient attention to what makes people more or less precarious in our stratified societies marked with growing inequality, consolidated power, and different opportunity structures for different demographics. But to speak of precarity does not mean we must make such mistakes. Like any potentially useful concept, we can use the concept of precarity well or not.
A synthesis of Guattari’s conception of molecular politics with Berardi’s class analysis may surpass the limitations of an overly confident class analysis that marks the boundaries of inclusion at the point of production. Looking at the molecular politics of the most precarious among us, we can identify class formations with actual points of view. We see the possibility of class positions to generate multiple modalities of action, and the outbreak of collective action that cannot be easily predicted. We cannot always or easily predict where collective action will come from, what it will look like, or what it may demand. If we are honest, we not only have to confess, but must finally confront the fact that not every revolt is a proletarian uprising. Certain sectors of precarious people may revolt from other impetuses — such as in Baltimore in April 2015 — adding, for example, race to class, and even very particular histories of abuse and police brutality. The situation of impoverished black communities living in a city (Baltimore) in one of the wealthiest states (Maryland), and facing daily racism, specifies a particular precarity that is not like every other. There is undoubtedly a proletarian dimension to the Baltimore revolt, but we overdetermine the significance of that dimension to the detriment of our understanding.
For Guattari, molecular politics involves interventions, subversions, and transformations on a small scale. But molecular politics within and against capitalism can have no grandiose promise on their own. They are molecular in their smallness and their hope to be part of a larger living movement, and they function as a contamination or an interruption rather than as a revolution in any classical sense. Molecular politics can include rebellions of the precarious, as in Greece, Tunisia, Egypt, Ferguson, MO, and Baltimore, MD, but may also include transformations in personal and group identity, not only with regard to race, gender, and sexuality, but also with regard to the typical fixed poles of each (i.e. male or female, black or white, homosexual or heterosexual).90 The molecular or “micropolitical” field is certainly biopolitical, which is perhaps one of the reasons why Foucault wrote his glowing preface to Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. But Guattari was no individualist, nor was he interested in the merely micropolitical. Rather, he was always interested in their possible culminations. As Guattari puts it:
Will these micro-revolutions, these profound examinations of the relationships within society only remain divided into limited spheres of the social arena? Or will a new “social segmentation” manage to connect them without imposing hierarchy and segregation? In short, will all these micro-revolutions finally initiate a real revolution? Will they be able to take charge of not only local problems, but also administrative larger economic configurations? 91
Guattari’s questions in the above passage express an accurate sense of the problem of politics in our time. Revolutionary activities are neither global nor unitary, but appear instead in fragmentary and often isolated ways, like the saturnalias of upheaval in France in the 1960s, Italy in the 1960s and ’70s, or in the United States from Occupy to Baltimore. Revolutionary activity is typically sporadic and affective, ebullient and unpredictable. Nevertheless, Guattari wonders if such molecular activity could link up, if it may be possible for such connections to move the micro- revolutionary toward “real revolution.” In juxtaposing “micro-revolution” to “real revolution,” it is clear that Guattari retains a notion of revolution that is both “larger” and non-local. Only Guattari does not think that the activity of “real revolution” will be coordinated and executed as such.
We end up, then, with a variously precarious, diverse field of humanity, which nonetheless remains capable of producing new antagonistic subject positions, even if none of them appears capable of any sweeping negation on its own. While this may be bad news for the old Marxian conception of global proletarian revolution, it is closer to the truth, and promising in new ways. The good news about the present state of our precarious revolutionary politics is that, whereas the old, more confident, unified, revolutionary class has always been something we had to wait for, desperately and hopefully, the new contestations actually happen from time to time. They actually happen, and they embody and express real perspectives and living efforts for new forms of life, both possible and desirable.
None of my efforts here to rethink the concept of “revolutionary class” help to restore the dead determinism of certain strains of Marxism (and certain parts of Marx’s own writing). Although class analysis remains necessary to our project, determinism is dead; autonomy is not. On the one hand, we might argue for an autonomist politics; on the other hand, it’s the only politics we’ve got.
So, within the context of the micropolitics of the precarious: what is to be done, and who should do what? In conventional revolutionary narratives, our personal gifts and passions are indefinitely subordinated to the overarching tasks at hand, to what the “Great Cause” calls for. It may be hoped, of course, that one’s talents and desires could be an asset in the service of the cause, but if that is not possible, the virtuous will always do what ought to be done, no matter how painful and undesirable that may be. In contrast to this, I argue that if such narratives are not deconstructed, it shall always be undesirable to make the world that we desire. Against the old virtue of struggle, we have got to find ways to make it desirable to make the world we desire. This is the central problem.
Vaneigem was right to emphasize an approach from pleasure, to insist that autonomous action brings together the talents and passions of actors. Revolution must be desirable.
With attractive ease as the most natural thing in the world, our common desire for autonomy will bring us together to stop paying, working, following orders, giving up what we want, growing old, feeling shame or familiarity with fear. We will act instead on the pulse of pleasure, and live in love and creativity.92
The difference between Vaneigem’s comportment and that of the conventional revolutionary narratives is clear. Vaneigem inverts the politics of self-sacrifice and struggle, rejects the logic of an exchange of suffering for freedom, and calls for a creative and pleasurable activity. And, he does not outline this position only because it makes revolution more desirable, or more about our desires. More importantly, Vaneigem insists that such an approach is more effective. He proclaims: “I will strike harder and more accurately if pleasure demands it. Fires of desire burn fiercer than torches of rage or despair.” 93
In Paris in May-June 1968, in Italy in the decade from roughly 1968 to 1978, and even in Egypt in 2011, it was not simply suffering, struggle, and despair that motivated the uprisings. Indeed, in these three cases and in others, there was certainly an everyday suffering, struggle, and despair that had been normalized, and it seemed to be that everyday despair, and not some surprising crisis or offence, that made revolt inevitable. Sometimes revolt is less of a reaction to a great new situation or outrage, and more of a breaking point or threshold. And beyond the suffering and despair, desire and pleasure also have something to do with it. Capital cannot keep desire in abeyance forever.
While Vaneigem and Guattari have much in common, I find Guattari’s analysis particularly useful here. His consideration of the place of desire is more fully developed and more explicitly political. Micropolitics may be playful in a dangerous way, but it is not a simple expression of desire. The micro-revolution of Guattari’s “becoming-woman,” for example, is not teleological toward a static end of identity. “Becoming,” by definition, is a process of transformation, not a settled end state. Becoming destabilizes what is, and on a macropolitical scale becoming has revolutionary connotations. Guattari’s psychoanalytic understanding of human desire makes a critical intervention in earlier forms of Marxism, and particularly in autonomist Marxism: Desire can be disfigured in various ways, it can be repressed or buried in everyday life, but desire and its disfigurations can nevertheless be understood. Psychoanalysis can help with this understanding. Desire is never completely disintegrated, and can be crystallized and expressed in micro-revolutionary political moments. In the political context as such, desire displaces and decenters struggle.
But struggle has long been considered a virtue. Beyond Marx’s centralization of class struggle, Frederick Douglass famously said, “If there is no struggle there is no progress.” 94 Douglass’ observation of the facts of the world, which are for Marx the fundamental facts of human history, presents struggle as a revolutionary necessity. This has contributed to the fetishization of struggle (as has much of revolutionary theory). But who wants to struggle? Should anyone want to struggle, even if at times they must? Doesn’t struggle already define too much of everyday life, and isn’t struggle precisely what makes it so painful? Does it make any sense, psychologically and affectively, to make struggle the centerpiece of a revolutionary project? If ever one can find some way forward without struggle, won’t that path always offer a special and sensible alternative? Is it time for revolutionary theory to stop glorifying struggle? We have given too much of human life over to struggle already; should we give it our theory and praxis too?
Of course, struggle is sometimes the cry, or the scream, of the oppressed and exploited, of those who must fight for their self-determination, their autonomy. As John Holloway says, opposition to capitalism starts with “a scream of sadness, a scream of horror, above all a scream of anger, of refusal: NO.” 95 Sadness and horror: How long can we sustain a scream of sadness, horror, and anger, and how long should we wish to? We seek relief from sadness, horror, and anger, and we seize upon such relief at the first opportunities. Capitalism wants to empty the most precarious of their revolutionary feelings, so capital provides us with enough opportunities for a temporary respite from the miseries of everyday life, sufficient (most of the time) to squelch the scream before it turns revolutionary. So again the question: Can our revolutionary aspirations find some other impetus than the scream of sadness and the pain of struggle to supplement and sustain revolutionary praxis?
Autonomous action within the limits of capital — self-directed, micropolitical, and joyful — is the scream’s complement. We cannot simply choose between the screams of struggle, on the one hand, and pleasure, on the other, nor should we assert a hard separation between the two. The majority of the world’s people, living on the losing end of capital, are stuck with struggle as a kind of modus operandi. They do not need to commit to the struggle, since the struggle is inevitably always with them. However, for a sustainable and ongoing contestation of capital and its culture, we must oppose the total negation of our desires and talents in the here and now. Struggle may be necessary, but it is never enough. As long as the fight for a better future places our desires and talents in abeyance, the fight will tire too quickly, and power has the patience to wait it out. Some of the most inspiring saturnalias of social upheaval rise up and subside over the course of a long weekend. Struggle must be decentered. If struggle remains the central modality of revolution, then only the most “selfless” and/or miserable among us will participate in revolution, and one wonders about the possibility, sustainability, and psychic health of such “selfless” and miserable individuals, of such a sad and horrible politics.
In order to advance an argument for a revolutionary theory centered on talent and autonomy, we must confront the logical core of the claim that collectivism and autonomy lead down divergent paths. Though not incommensurate, there is a real tension between collectivism and autonomy. For example, in the early years of the Soviet Union, in the first decade after the 1917 revolution, the state assessed the changing needs of society and industry, and directed and redirected human labor toward the satisfaction of those needs. One could be a seamstress for a month, then an electrician, and then could be called to work on the assembly of light bulbs. In the best divisions of labor, we can find a commendable principle of common cause at work, just as in a family or any other organization where individual members contribute their fair share to the healthy functioning of the whole. But examples of collective functionality may also illustrate a tension between autonomous and collective action. If everyone is given the autonomy to let their desires alone decide what they do, what needs to get done may not get done, and the common cause of the whole may be subverted by individual desires. Collective action falls apart wherever there is too much autonomy to secure its cohesion. We cannot simultaneously sing one song together and sing whatever song we want to sing.
Reinforcing the Soviet example, the dominant idea in the US for most of the 20th century was that autonomy (loosely construed as freedom) could only flourish under a system that promoted radical individualism. This view was sharply articulated mid-century by free market fundamentalists such as Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand, who viewed Marxism, Leninism, and Stalinism (as if those three “isms” have more in common than not) as antithetical to any concept of human freedom. “Autonomy” was not exactly claimed in name by these capitalists, but inasmuch as the term embodies notions of personal freedom and decentralized voluntary action, it seemed from their point of view to map out perfectly over capitalist approaches.
However, the demand for autonomy is not satisfied by capital, and autonomous action is not incompatible with collective action. Autonomy does not lead to nor flourish under capitalism and its culture. Ever since the industrial revolution, capitalism has progressively (i) standardized working life, (ii) standardized the products of labor, and (iii) standardized human desire for commodities on the marketplace. There is, of course, enough flexibility within capitalism to allow for variations on (i), (ii), and (iii), but too much variation is tantamount to a breakdown in the functionality of the system, and has not happened yet. For example, working life can be differentiated by specializations in cognitive labor, but each specialization is itself standardized and vetted by training or some form of peer review, in the absence of which, the specialization itself cannot be claimed. Products can be new and innovative, but new products must be highly standardized in mass production for mass markets and “quality control.” And advertising may indeed fail to cultivate a desire for a new commodity, but when that occurs, the commodity fails and has a stilted lifespan in the marketplace. Indeed, the standardization and standards of capital must hold together most of the time, for if they do not, the market system enters into a state of crisis. This is because the functional capitalist market system depends upon a high level of demand with predictable and reliable consumption patterns, backed by a corollary consumption power (ability to pay).
The above paragraph restates certain contentions of Marxism, for example, Marx’s discussion of the business cycle in Theories of Surplus Value.96 But we more deliberately build upon Adorno and Horkheimer’s thesis of “the culture industry” in Dialectic of Enlightenment. At the same time that the free-market fundamentalists were infiltrating the field of economics to profound effect, critical theory was making exactly opposite claims about the loss of individuality and autonomy (as freedom) in post-War post-Fordist capitalism. While I do not share the vision of catastrophe in Adorno and Horkheimer’s famous chapter, and while I reject many of their political conclusions, the diagnosis of standardization in capitalism retains its veracity.97 And on that view, which has of course been updated in later critical theory (largely from France), autonomy sharply emerges as a clear problem for capitalism. Human autonomy is a problem that capitalism cannot reconcile easily with its homogenizing tendencies (tendencies that have only intensified since Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis, in the context of the latest developments and accelerations of globalization). Whatever human activity can be standardized has been standardized, and whatever human activity cannot be standardized remains a technical problem to solve. Think of everything from automatic teller machines, tollbooths, and cars and planes without drivers or pilots, to drones and robot factories. Think also of standardized expressions of individuality on social media and technological device customization and the massive market for accessories. The motto of capital has more been “automation” than “autonomy.” Autonomy, as it turns out, is fundamentally antithetical to capital. This is one part of an answer to the question: Why autonomy?
According to any substantive sense of autonomy, people must have some freedom, despite limitations, to explore, identify, and cultivate their distinctive gifts. Contrary to a well-funded and entrenched mythology, this freedom to explore, identify, and cultivate one’s gifts is not abundant in our capitalist societies. Indeed, many people cannot even name their distinctive talents, or worse, wrongly think that they have no talents at all. The critical cultivation of our gifts is left to the margins of chance and spare time, which are overwhelmingly colonized by the obligations of a capitalist lifeworld (i.e. vocation/training, work, attention, consumption, sleep).
Nevertheless, at a certain point even in the most spectacular capitalist societies, we do discover that playing the guitar, writing, organizing events, building, gardening, exercising, public speaking, either does give us joy or does not. As you read through a list like this, you may not know what your talent is, but you probably have some sense of what is more or less desirable or joyful from your own experience and perspective. Any answer to the question of who should do what must be considered with this in mind. If, for example, planning events and hosting them is a misery to you, you should probably not be an organizer, no matter how much organizing we may need. Just as, if you are a meek and anxious person, if you lose composure under pressure, then you should probably not be the public face or spokesperson of a movement or group, and you should not be expected to do too many interviews. Of course, one could always get better at organizing or public speaking, but some will never excel in those areas, and more importantly, nor may they want to. Of the many diverse things a person can do, some of them are great joys. Capacity neither indicates nor maps out over desire. Autonomy works at the intersections of capability and desire.
By “autonomous action,” I mean the exploration, identification, and cultivation of our talents as a self-determined, voluntary, and desirable project. Self-determined, voluntary, and desirable action defines the core of autonomy. In fact, it is difficult, if not impossible, to think of autonomous action that is directed by others, involuntary, or dreadful.
Autonomy is not turned on and off like a light switch. There is more or less autonomy depending on the case and context. So action that is voluntary and desirable, yet directed by managers to whom you are beholden, is neither total autonomy nor total subordination. Every dimension of autonomy matters. For example, one could have a job that they have chosen, that they choose to keep, and in which they are given considerable free reign over their daily activities, and yet this very same job could be the misery of their existence. In such a case as this, their “free” choice and “free” reign are attributes of a working life that is done for pleasures completely separate from and external to it. It is not the work itself that they desire, but the ends for which the work is a means.
This example also shows that “choice” and “free reign” cannot simply stand in for “voluntary” and “self-determined.” Being provided total freedom to choose a dish from a menu with nothing but terrible options is a freedom with severe limitations, and that choice is not, properly speaking, self-determined and voluntary. The evidence lies in the fact that one would choose otherwise if at all possible. In working life, it is often the case that there are no other options on the menu, and one is considered fortunate to find any work at all. Actively choosing the single option available is hardly the zenith of voluntary action. Jobs taken in the US recently by the so-called “99’ers,” a term used to describe those unemployed who have used up all three phases of unemployment benefits, find themselves making choices that are quite involuntary. Indeed, it is important to consider the range and reality of involuntary choices in everyday life.
“Free reign” in a job with supervisors who trust you, who do not micromanage what you do, who give you the freedom to determine how to organize your duties, nevertheless expect you to perform certain tasks, many of which are tasks you would never dream of doing unless constrained to do so for a wage. Thus, while autonomy is not an on/off switch, it nonetheless aims at the relative heights of self-determination, voluntary action, and desire. In short, autonomy is a kind of North Star, pointing us toward an unreachable goal in the everyday life of a world governed by capital.
To conclude this preliminary theorization of autonomy, it is necessary to be very clear about a final but major misconception, mentioned above in passing. Autonomous does not mean “alone.” Whole communities can strive for autonomy, and can work collectively toward it through collaborative, voluntary, and desirable projects. Indeed, this reflects the aspirations and efforts of a number of indigenous communities, and was very deliberately a part of the political discourses of the Mexican Zapatistas and the Mapuche of Chile and Argentina. Autonomous action can be collective action, like a musical ensemble that does group improvisation, like an uprising in the streets of Athens or Tunis or downtown Cairo, like a revolt in Baltimore.
The survival of revolutionary politics, the endurance of revolutionary perspectives, depends upon their desirability. Revolution’s biggest enemy has been the fact that we don’t really want it. To be precise, I mean this in an affective sense. That is, we may want revolution’s promises, but its processes are a long, indefinite nightmare. To come to desire revolution, it must have many locations, and no single transcript of its promise. If revolution always aims toward one specific end-state or another, then revolution as a field of thought and action will fail to accommodate the multifarious and differentiated transformative desires of people. This does not mean saying “yes” to every transformative desire. But we must consider starting points. Today, a worthy slogan for revolutionary praxis could be: “Processes not end-states.” This does not disqualify concrete improvements in the lives of real people. Rather, “processes not end-states” means a focus on the ways we may challenge the existing state of affairs. Processes not end-states means that, when you expect us in the streets, we may occupy your buildings, until you expect us to do that. We may be making films and poetry and doing theater. Processes not endstates means that we will never romanticize any static state of affairs, existing or possible.
But how, exactly, do talent and autonomy relate to the revolutionary perspective I have been working out in the present chapter? To answer, I shall return to a minor example and work outward from there.
In rare and fortunate cases, one might be paid money for autonomous action. But no amount of money can make an action autonomous. Capital cannot convert subordination into autonomy. As Marx rightly said, increasing wages for estranged labor would “be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not win either for the worker or for labor their human status and dignity.” 98 It is precisely in this way that severe limitations on autonomy can be made bearable by the ameliorations of capital (i.e. raises, perks, bonuses, consumption capacity). But making the absence of autonomy more bearable does not create autonomy. That is, autonomy is a real antidote to subordination, not something that makes subordination sufferable.
To take a minor (anecdotal) example: I am in that mythical group of people who love their jobs. I love reading and discussing social theory and political philosophy with interested people, and my students fall well enough into that category. I have good conversations every week, sometimes every day. We talk about capitalism and its culture, about rebellion and revolution, about politics and possibility. I also love doing research. It feels good to explore and to articulate new arguments that challenge and expand my own understanding of the world, and I think I might even desire to do research if I was not incentivized by the university to do it. Indeed, while scholarship is one of the formal obligations of my job, its institutional rewards are shamefully scarce. Yet it gives me great pleasure as a human person, such as I am.
This account reflects my good fortune. Should I be embarrassed by the fact, ashamed that I feel so contented with the active engagements of my everyday life while most of the world works daily in relative misery? Let’s not get carried away. After all, not everyone would want to do what I do. For others, my life would be a painful and stressful existence, full of anxiety and constant obligation, wrought with the tedium of committee meetings and paper-grading, and many of my own colleagues embody and express that very feeling.
Even for me, my present situation is precarious and I know it well. I am not, for example, currently required to use textbooks or to teach my classes online. Some of my colleagues must do those things. If I had to, and one day I might, I would likely change the evaluation of my life and work. While serving a mandatory term as Chair of the Department of Political Science, most of the joy of my everyday life disappeared, and was replaced with a seemingly infinite stream of undesirable responsibilities. Less teaching and research (sources of pleasure) and a lot more paperwork, meetings, and engagement with the administrative apparatus (sources of unhappiness). As Department Chair, for the first time in my professional life, I was required to represent and develop programs that have no relation to my interests or talents.
Outside of that obligatory and temporary role, I have had the academic freedom to propose, to design, and to teach any class I desire. I can write an article or book on any subject I would like. But if any one of these facts was to change, I might come to loathe my job, and I would certainly like it much less. I am not so naïve to think that these things cannot change, and indeed, each of them is always a proposition in circulation on my campus. The privatization of education, as it turns out, is transforming public universities at an ever-quickening pace. Many of the consequences of privatization (consumer-model education with large class caps, increasing tuition in order to compensate for diminishing public subsidies, shortened class times, and a market-driven approach to course offerings and curricula) could easily obliterate my present level of relative autonomy in a matter of months. This privatization is already well underway, and its further closure of autonomous space and time within the university is on a near horizon.99
The above reflection points to the precariousness of even the most enviable positions in our post-Fordist semiocapitalist societies, as Berardi names the present era.100 Even capitalists who today enjoy their place and vocations hold a precarious position in current conditions (not that we should feel badly for the wealthy elite, whose precarity tends to come equipped with golden parachutes). There is a shrinking and nameable number of people who live beyond precarity (Forbes Magazine literally names them every year), but among the vast mass of capitalists and everyone else, those who live precarious lives are countless, and that is the state of the world. Looking back on my father’s perpetual state of anxiety as an employee of General Electric, I now understand that his nervousness was not merely an attribute of his general psychological comportment, but rather it was the reasonable disposition of a stressed-out daily life with no certain future.
The purpose of the above storytelling can be simply stated. Autonomy is severely constrained and always subject to cancellation wherever it exists within the limits of capital. Autonomy is limited by economic constraints in a purely materialistic sense, but also by the economy of time, and by the necessities of everyday life, many of which run contrary to our desires and talents. Autonomous actions such as writing or poetry or music or painting — actions which most artists and authors do beyond the incentives of capital — can be done in the service of a revolutionary perspective. But autonomous actions such as these are extracurricular leisure activities, and they are the first to go when our already tenuous leisure time (i.e. the economy of time) evaporates. Therefore, while it is not true that capitalism snuffs out all autonomy, it is true that capitalism demarcates autonomous action as extracurricular, recreational, and as immediately expendable in the realizations of capitalist demands.
Having said that, and despite the limitations of the capitalist present, total autonomy is not possible, and is even quite difficult to imagine. My point is not merely to register a complaint against the limitations of autonomy under capitalism, nor is it to make a sweeping thesis about the possibility of total autonomy, but rather it is to highlight an irreducible tension between capitalism and autonomy, which contradicts the pervasive free-market fundamentalism of existing capitalist society. Capital does not encourage or generate autonomy, but manages and restricts it.
Milton Friedman wrote a book called Capitalism and Freedom in which he argued that “capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom.” 101 While he admits in the same passage that capitalism is not sufficient, on its own, to guarantee freedom, he insists that it is clearly a condition for freedom, as “history suggests.” 102 Friedman made many claims about choice and freedom and the state-controlled economy, arguing that capitalism is the necessary prerequisite for many forms of autonomy. While his arguments are not new, their worldly influence took time, and was accelerated in the “neoliberalism” of the past fifty years. Today, Friedman’s principle of capitalist freedom continues to restructure and organize new areas of human relations in the university, in politics, in military, in technology, and even in the domain of friendship and human health — a market logic for the “liberation” of everything. But Friedman’s premise could and should be turned on its head, enabling us to reclaim autonomy for a new and more communist praxis that might finally move beyond the fetishization of struggle and the depersonalized connotations of collective action.
Contrary to Friedman’s contention, the history of capitalism does not trend toward increasing freedom in the sense of autonomy I have been discussing in this chapter. If one is speaking of freedom purely in terms of what Guy Debord called the “autonomous economy,” an economy liberated from economic necessity, then Friedman has a point indeed.103 But we cannot agree to define freedom merely in terms of the freedom of capital and its representatives. We need a more robust concept of freedom than that of the freedom of capital. I claim that a worthy conception of freedom includes some consideration of the manifold of human talent, desire, fulfillment, and a joyful life. Employing the more robust conception of autonomy I am using here, a conception that places people — and not capital — at the center of its view, we see that autonomy flourishes against and not because of capital. Capitalism, by virtue of its own internal logic, must subordinate autonomy to accumulation. We call capitalism by that name because it is a system and worldview based on the logic of capital, and if it were not, we’d call it by some other name. That is the crux of this particular rivalry. We can organize human affairs by a logic of accumulation and/or by a logic of autonomy, and where the one is dominant, the other is subordinate (or altogether foreclosed).
Consider a different rivalry, that between work and home. Marx’s observation that the individual worker “only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself,” continues to ring true with each new generation.104 Capitalism has not remedied this fundamental problem, but has intensified it at all class levels, now making everyone permanently on-call through the cellular ontology of the technological integration of work and life.105 We are ourselves when we are off work, but if we are increasingly always at work, then the self and its home are foreclosed. One way to overcome the opposition between work and home is to obliterate the home by way of its conversion into workspace. If Marx was right of the worker that “when he is working he is not at home,” then homelessness has become the general condition.106 And yet, “home” has historically indicated a space of autonomy, a location free from the obligations of work, i.e. home as liberation from work. Inasmuch as our autonomy has really been exercised at home, in the space and time outside of work, the colonization of that space and time by work is an attack on our autonomy.
Nevertheless, as I have acknowledged, total foreclosures are unlikely. There always remains the possibility for some of the self, for some of the home, and we do have some room for autonomous action in the here and now. So, for the last time, who should do what? As you may have guessed, no marching orders can be given. We have no choice but to refuse to judge the “credentials” of those who, in the manifold of human experience, do not throw themselves into the very political activities that we might prefer, or even, that we might deem the most urgent. Any program that seeks to iron out real differences of talent, or to minimize the fact that we have distinct and multifarious gifts, is a program that must be (or inevitably will be) abandoned.
Guattari makes a highly resonant proposal along these lines:
New social practices of liberation will not establish hierarchical relations between themselves; their development will answer to a principle of transversality that will enable them to be established by ‘traversing’, as a ‘rhizome’, heterogeneous social groups and interests.107
This means that a liberatory politics must allow for the radical freedom of its participants, for autonomous action, but without devolving to atomistic individualism. Guattari’s rhizomatic approach provides one of the best ways to see the compatibility of autonomous and collective action, to see collective action as autonomous.
The approach I have outlined, which follows Guattari’s principle of transversality, is critical to the overarching goal: For revolution to be worthy of our desire, we have to want to make it. This contention reflects the heart of the general overarching theory of this book, but we must make no mistake about its relative openness. While the general theory does not specify and recommend any certain course or chronology of action, it does disqualify much of the radical milieu that has sought and continues to seek to provide concrete revolutionary answers to social and political problems.
Moreover, while the argument functions first as a general theory (as a perspective), it ultimately and ideally functions as an organizational mode. And this organizational mode works against the organizational modes of capital because the logos of autonomy is inassimilable to the logos of capital — the latter of which depends on predictable patterns of consumption, labor, and recreation (autonomous action can never guarantee, and tends to destabilize, such predictability).
Capital has not totally foreclosed every space of autonomy, and it is in those spaces where we begin. We can only ever work against capitalism from within it. We can only get to the outside from the inside. As McKenzie Wark has written: “Welcome to gamespace... You are a gamer whether you like it or not, now that we all live in gamespace that is everywhere and nowhere. As Microsoft says: Where do you want to go today? You can go anywhere you want in gamespace but you can never leave it.” 108 Autonomous action in existing capitalist societies still abides by certain game rules, none of which are of our own making. We may play, and we do play when we can, but even when we manage to create our own rules for our own games, we still play them within the limited space and time that capital leaves for free play.
Here, Wark’s observation is important because it is indeed possible that autonomous action in the here and now could become a trap. That is to say, because we have some room for autonomy within the limits of capital, some level of relative gratification is achievable in the here and now. This, it seems to me, is part of the reason why capitalism has not totally foreclosed our autonomy. As shared above, I am quite happy with my everyday life in the capitalist present. But doesn’t that daily disposition inadvertently vindicate the capitalist present? “Look! Even Marxists can be happy in capitalist societies!” Marxists have many complaints, but enjoy so much of what they do not complain about. If our talents can be explored, identified, and cultivated in the here and now, and if our desires can be gratified, then there is little impetus to leave the present for some unknown future.
To confront — if not to avoid — this trap, I am not suggesting that we refuse all gratification and happiness, according to the old tune of the virtue of struggle. Instead, autonomous action must become self-conscious. That is, actors must eventually come to understand that autonomy occurs in spite of or against the demands of capital that always aim to seize upon its open spaces. Self-conscious autonomous action cannot function as an endorsement of the existing system. But if autonomous action is not self-conscious, we may indeed be uncritically gratified with the precarious and ever-tenuous autonomy that exists within the limits of capital. If such gratification as this occurs, autonomous action occurs without its revolutionary character and doubles as an endorsement of capitalism instead. Hence, the revolutionary character of autonomous action depends on the actor’s awareness of capital’s antagonistic regard for autonomy; namely, that capital always subordinates human freedom to accumulation.
When one experiences great joy in the here and now, through love, or sexual pleasure, by epiphany or thrill, these experiences point to places where capital has not totally colonized human life. Sure, you may try to buy the thrill by paying for it, but if you show up at the gates of an amusement park fully expecting to pay and are told that the fees have been waived, the thrill remains, but is enhanced by the fact that you do not have to measure its worth in dollars. Self-consciousness reveals that the best things under capitalism are the least capitalist things. I am not going to credit the capitalist system for all of the joyful play I share with my two young children, play that occurs autonomously and beyond the interests of capital. We must not lose sight of the fact that capitalism is never undermined for as long as our autonomy remains an existential footnote to surviving. Vaneigem’s distinction between surviving and living is useful here: “Survival is life reduced to economic imperatives.” 109 Whereas living is defined by spontaneity, desire, loving, and pleasure, all of which are the first casualties of survival. Capital is on the side of survival, but autonomy sides with living.
In 1968, Fredy Perlman summarized the pacifying mythology of capitalism. We are made to believe, he wrote, that “people do not have such power in this society, and this society is the only form of society; therefore it’s impossible for people to have such power.” Yet, Perlman rejects this, insisting: “The question of what is possible cannot be answered in terms of what is.” 110 Autonomous action in the here and now reveals the power of everyday people that is often buried and hidden in everyday life. A fine example could be found in the uprising in Egypt in January and February 2011. It took the world’s most powerful military several years to implement the very beginnings of “regime change” in Iraq, whereas the unarmed and precarious people of Egypt only needed eighteen days. While the Egyptian uprising was too heterogeneous to articulate any one ideal end-state, the resounding content of the message coming from the streets of Cairo was that the existing state of affairs must end, igniting the world’s sense of the possible versus the actual. And it must be stressed that the overwhelming tone of the eighteen days of protest precipitating Hosni Mubarak’s ouster was ebullient and joyful, full of desire and feeling, and was itself quite a departure from the “struggle” of everyday life.
It is also critical to emphasize that the “results” of the popular insurrection in Egypt have been overemphasized by too many observers around the world. Critics of the uprising continually ask what’s next, worrying about the Muslim Brotherhood and Sharia law, the failure of Morsi, the resumption of military rule, and no real political transformation. Supporters, on the other hand, point to Mubarak and Morsi’s ousters as evidence of the powers of revolt, or, in an effort to qualify their own optimism, remind us that the military’s management of the government must prove temporary and transitional, and must give way to something better before any final verdict can be given. In this latter account, we still wait for a final verdict to decide the case.
In contrast to all of these discourses, I propose that there are some things we know with certainty from processes, and not from end-states: We know that the revolt was a rejection of the old lie that the existing society was the only form the Egyptians could possibly know, that it was a realization of the power of everyday people. Indeed, for all of its internal heterogeneity, the uprising declared unequivocally that the question of what is possible cannot be answered in terms of what is — and it did so in the form of a joyful collective action traversing diverse groups and interests. In this way, we may have a verdict before any end: We should not look forward to the ends of insurrection, but rather, to its multiplication and continuation, to insurrection everywhere. Insurrection is good news for possibility, imagination, and autonomy, as it expresses a freedom to challenge and reject the existing situation in the hope for a new situation made by the real desires of the social body.
What are the unknown hereafters we should hope to get to from the here and now? I will not guess or predict, but I suspect that the kingdom of heaven will be no kingdom at all. I am reassured by the fact that Hobbes’ Sovereign, much like Mubarak and Morsi, was never enthusiastic about the autonomy of his subjects, although all sovereigns know that the autonomous action of everyday people remains a possibility to be guarded against.111 Realizations of that possibility — autonomous action in the here and now — exacerbate the living contradictions between capital and freedom. And the pleasure of autonomous acts of revolt invites us to think of revolution beyond its historic fixation on struggle. If revolution becomes desirable by way of its processes, and not by way of distant promises, then the rewards of revolution are available in the making.
58 Badiou, Alain, “A Philosophy for Militants: Alain Badiou interviewed by Aaron Hess,” International Socialist Review, Issue # 95 (Winter, 2014-2015), accessed January 11, 2016, http://isreview.org/issue/95/philosophy-militants.
59 Vaneigem, Raoul, The Book of Pleasures, trans. John Fullerton (London: Pending Press, 1983), p. 22.
60 Marx, Karl, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1997). And, Adorno, Theodor, and Horkheimer, Max, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1997).
61 Wark, McKenzie, “Digital Labor and the Anthropocene,” accessed December 30, 2015, http://dismagazine.com/disillusioned/discussion-disillusioned/70983/mckenzie-wark-digital-labor-and-the-anthropocene/. Wark has further developed this argument in Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (New York and London: Verso, 2015).
62 I would add that, even when separated from action, the negative content of critique is often a major analytical advance. We should not take for granted, for example, how hard it can be to break apart dangerous and common ideologies and correct other problematic understandings.
63 See Harvey, David, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
64 Gilman-Opalsky, Richard, Spectacular Capitalism: Guy Debord and the Practice of Radical Philosophy (New York and London: Autonomedia/Minor Compositions, 2011).
65 2007/2008 Human Development Report (HDr), United Nations Development Program, accessed February 22, 2016, http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/268/hdr_20072008_en_complete.pdf, p. 25.
66 The State of the World’s Children, 2005, UNICEF, accessed February 1, 2016, http://www.unicef.org/publications/files/SoWC_2005_%28English%29.pdf.
67 Piketty, Thomas, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2014).
68 OXFAM International Report, “The 85 Richest People in the World Have as Much Wealth as the 3.5 Billion Poorest,” Working for the Few,January 2014.
69 I elaborate this argument in my book, Spectacular Capitalism. Also, Cornelius Castoriadis had already poignantly skewered the idea that the Soviet Union was a communist state in the 1940s and 50s. See Political & Social Writings, Volume 1, 1946-1955: From the Critique of Bureaucracy to the Positive Content of Socialism, trans. David Ames Curtis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
70 Dussel, Enrique, Twenty Theses on Politics, trans. George Ciccariello-Maher (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008).
71 A substantial amount of the neuropsychological research on this subject follows and develops the work of Roger W. Sperry. See, for example, Brain Circuits and Functions of the Mind: Essays in Honor of Roger W. Sperry, ed. Colwyn B. Trevarthen (Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
72 To be clear, I am by no means suggesting that experience and education are irrelevant. Indeed, I wholly affirm the basic arguments of John Dewey’s Experience and Education (New York and London: Collier Books, 1963). I argue that the discernment and development of our natural gifts requires autonomy, for otherwise what we can and cannot do very well is more likely a result of inequalities in the structures and superstructures of society. For example, I would never assume a young girl with stunted growth and brain development due to malnutrition, a girl who is struggling with reading, has no natural talent for reading. Her case is the result of particular injustices associated with deficits in other resources than talent. It is difficult, and in many cases impossible, to assess one’s talent without the resources necessary to cultivate it.
73 de Waal, Frans B.M., “The End of Nature versus Nurture,” Scientific American, December 1999.
74 Wilson, Edward O, Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1975). Also see Wilson, David Sloan, Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives (New York: Delta Trade Paperback, 2008).
75 Arendt, Hannah, “Communicative Power” in Power, ed. Steven Lukes (New York: New York University Press, 1986), p. 62.
76 Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: The MIt Press, 1989), p. 74.
77 Guattari, Félix and Negri, Antonio, New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty, trans. Michael Ryan, Jared Becker, Arianna Bove, and Noe Le Blanc (Brooklyn: Autonomedia/Minor Compositions, 2010), p. 80. This text was originally published in French in 1985.
78 The obvious implication here is that there is a meaningful tension between Negri’s earlier work (with Guattari) and his more recent work (with Hardt). Indeed, I think that is demonstrably true, and my own preferences align with the earlier work. But as this tension is not particularly relevant to my present research, I shall leave it to others, or for another time, to properly develop.
79 Guattari and Negri, New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty, op. cit.
80 My comments in this paragraph and the following one have in mind the works of the leading primitivist author John Zerzan, whose book Future Primitive and Other Essays (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1994) I am mainly thinking of here. Generally, though, I aim this critique at all of Zerzan’s published work. To be fair, I have learned a lot from reading Zerzan (and I enjoy his radio show as well). It is also worth pointing out that a lot of the recent and fashionable attention to the concept of the Anthropocene in radical circles fails to recognize Zerzan’s formative work on the subject, which he has been doing for well over twenty years. Nonetheless, these paragraphs address the real problems I find in his worldview and arguments. 81 Zerzan, John, Why Hope? The Stand Against Civilization (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House Books, 2015), p. 93.
82 In addition to Zerzan, readers interested in this current of thinking should consult Sale, Kirkpatrick, Rebels Against the Future (New York: Perseus Books, 1996) and Jensen, Derrick, Endgame: Vols. 1 and 2 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006). Although Zerzan criticizes all kindred spirits within his milieu, Derrick Jensen especially, these three authors do share common premises about civilizational collapse, and taken together, substantiate the basic position.
83 Zerzan, John, Elements of Refusal (Columbia, MO: Columbia Alternative Library Press, 1999). Elements of Refusal also contains Zerzan’s criticisms of Marx, in numerous places.
84 See, for example, the brief discussion of McKenzie Wark above, present chapter.
85 Zerzan, John, “Paradigms,” Fifth Estate, Vol. 50, No. 2, #394, Summer 2015, p. 14.
86 See Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard, 2001) and Holloway, John, “In the Beginning was the Scream” (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2003).
87 See Guattari, Félix, “The Proliferation of Margins” (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007) and Berardi, Franco “Bifo,” The Soul at Work (Los Angeles: Seimotext(e), 2009).
88 Precarious Communism: Manifest Mutations, Manifesto Detourned (Wivenhoe, New York, and Port Watson: Autonomedia/Minor Compositions, 2014).
89 Guattari and Negri, New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty, op. cit., p.66.
90 See Guattari, Félix, “Becoming-Woman” (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001).
91 Guattari, “The Proliferation of Margins,” op. cit., p. 109.
92 Vaneigem, The Book of Pleasures, op. cit., p. 104.
93 Ibid., p. 65.
94 From Douglass’ speech at the West India Emancipation Celebration in New York, cited in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999).
95 Holloway, “In the Beginning was the Scream,” op. cit., p. 15.
96 Particularly, see the “Crisis Theory” chapter in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978).
97 The diagnosis I am referring to is in the fourth chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.”
98 Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, op. cit., p. 118.
99 Here, I recommend two recent studies of the capitalist transformation of higher education: Raunig, Gerald, Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2013) and Giroux, Henry, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014).
100 See Berardi, Franco “Bifo,” Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the pathologies of the post-alpha generation (Brooklyn: Autonomedia/Minor Compositions, 2009).
101 Friedman, Milton, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 10.
102 Ibid.
103 Debord, Guy, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Fredy Perlman (Detroit: Black & Red Books, 1983), Thesis # 51.
104 Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, op. cit., p. 110.
105 In Precarious Communism, op. cit., I refer to this as “technontology,” p.29.
106 Marx, op. cit., p. 110.
107 Guattari, Félix, “The New Spaces of Freedom” in New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty (Brooklyn: Autonomedia/Minor Compositions, 2010), p. 123.
108 Wark, McKenzie, Gamer Theory (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), Thesis 001.
109 Vaneigem, Raoul, The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Rebel Press, 2006), p. 157.
110 Perlman, Fredy, Anything Can Happen (London: Phoenix Press, 1992), pp. 11 and 13.
111 See Chapter 21, “Of the Liberty of Subjects” in Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996).