Come, whistle the sun, like a glass of white wine. Come, we’ll teach you the language of tomorrow. We’re men of today, we bear the weight of today; but that’s not enough: we honor all that’s becoming. We’re in full bloom. The light of the night has conceived the morning.
He spoke to them about the magical wonders of the world in a way that not only touched the limits of his and their knowledge, but that forced to an incredible extreme the limit of his and their imagination.
Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.
The founder of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendia, had two aspects to his personality that are indispensable for the left activist: he was a daringly practical man, but also someone with an unbridled imagination. These twin powers made for an almost inexhaustible magical source and magical force. Indeed, practicality and imagination were two aspects of José Arcadio’s personality that animated his spirit of social initiative. He was forever forward-looking, never dwelling on the past, and his insatiable curiosity and desire for adventure led him to convince his friends to cross the distant mountains, to try to found a new community next to the sea. Through sheer will and in the hope of a better life to come, they kept going, hacking their way through the jungle. Then, one morning, after two years of journeying across difficult terrain, they finally reached the cloudy summit of the mountain range, where, below, they saw not the sea but a gigantic swamp, apparently limitless. That evening, camped out near a river and lying in his hammock, José Arcadio Buendia had a dream. He dreamt of a noisy city and shipwrecked people. He asked them what city it was, and they answered him with a name he had never heard, and that had no meaning at all, “but that had a supernatural echo in his dream: Macondo” (One Hundred Years of Solitude, p. 9). The following day, José Arcadio urged his men to cut down the trees where they were, to make a clearing beside the river, at the coolest spot on the bank: here they would establish the new city.
From the beginning, José Arcadio became a kind of “youthful patriarch” of Macondo, with the imaginative drive and practical wherewithal to orchestrate the building of the town. He collaborated with everyone, even in the physical work, helping to plant trees, giving advice on the raising of children and animals, doing everything for the welfare of the community. His own simple adobe house had been the first and best in the village. It had “a small well-lighted living room, a dining room in the shape of a terrace with gaily colored flowers, two bedrooms, a courtyard with a gigantic chestnut tree, a well-kept garden, and a corral where goats, pigs, and hens lived in peaceful communion” (p. 15). Other houses would soon be modeled after its image and likeness. Moreover, the placement of each house was such that from all of them one could reach the river and draw water with the same effort; likewise their arrangement in Macondo’s streets was so well planned that no house got more sun than any other during the hottest time of day. Within a few years Macondo became the most orderly and hardworking village in the land, and its 300 inhabitants had instigated their own style of democratic socialism. It was a village that grew happily and soon became a town; it didn’t “give orders with pieces of paper” and had no need of police or priests, of meddling officials or institutions, of lawyers and judges, because there was nothing that couldn’t be judged by the people themselves. Macondo was a town in which citizens organized local affairs. The people distributed land amongst themselves, opened up roads, and introduced necessary improvements without having to bother the government and without anyone having bothered them: “No one was upset that the government had not helped them. On the contrary, they were happy that it had let them grow in peace, and they hoped that it would continue leaving them that way, because they had not founded a town so that the first upstart who came along would tell them what to do” (p. 53).
Macondo isn’t, of course, a bad ideal for a new organization of life, for a space in which people might realize a new subjectivity, and act and live together in relative harmony. In its initial conception, it was a utopian town with few repressive conventions and morals, and that had liberated itself from mediating images. It was a society with no intermediaries—no institutions and their agents imposing themselves between workers and their products, creating subjects out of naturally born citizens. One of the town’s most interesting features was its apparent lack of a money economy, of money as an arbiter of value. To be sure, the thriving prosperity of the town was due more to the innovative spirit of its denizens than to any rapacious desire to accumulate wealth and capital. One is struck by how little money-values figure in the daily life of Macondo, at least in its pre-colonized phase: if there were markets, then people exchanged with one another in a system of fair barter; and if the law of value prevailed, then it prevailed as a measure of necessary labor time not abstract labor. A case in point is the relationship between José Arcadio Buendia and the gypsy sage Melquiades, who swapped back and forth new weird and magical objects on the basis of reciprocal trust, as if an incipient form of Local Exchange Trading (LETS) existed between them, and between the residents of Macondo.
In our own times, the system of Local Exchange Trading is a novel and growing experiment in how various goods and services can switch hands without recourse to printed money; it’s a novel experiment in how people can live alternatively in a self-managed way, and in how they can go back to the future. Though still restricted to the local scale, the fact that many cities in North America, Australasia, Great Britain, and Europe now have an “open money” network and a system of direct swaps for goods and services, of interest-free credit and a full disclosure principle available to all members, means there’s something truly radical about the formula. If it can be broadened—and there’s no reason why it can’t develop at least on a regional basis—it has revolutionary potential for the construction of a dynamic economy, of “circles of cooperation” that put an alternative spin on the notion of money as a supreme social power.1
LETS’ radicality lies in the fact that it helps resolve the problem of money in the economy—money that, under capitalism, is a big part of all that’s wrong with our culture, the foundation of the nonsensical society we’ve somehow created for ourselves. Money as we currently know it is printed by central banks and circulates across national borders in pernicious ways, in ways that foster scarcity and promote competition. Some people have too much, others none at all. All of us have to scramble and hustle for money to survive; we compete for it, bargain for it, beg for it, and yearn for it in a zero-sum game in which nobody can really win the ultimate existential battle. But imagine a situation in which local people can issue money themselves, in which a local currency can serve their needs, financing community undertakings. Imagine a money system that isn’t based on monopoly power; money that nobody can claim or exert ownership over; a money system in which there’s no profit making, no commission, no interest to be filched. Imagine a money system in which no money leaves it, and that represents a measure of personal worth rather than despotic power. Such is the promise of the LETSystem, such are the ideal criteria that the LETSystem strives to meet.
Invented in the 1920s in Germany, and developed under diverse forms in the United States during the Depression, LETS expanded most rapidly throughout the 1980s, when, in 1983, Michael Linton coined the term Local Exchange Trading Systems in Comox Valley, British Columbia, Canada.2 Thereafter, the idea captured the imagination of a lot of people who began to set up organizations to trade between themselves. Records are kept of all members; paying for goods and services can be done by writing a LETS check or a credit note for an agreed amount of LETS units, or else by exchanging printed LETS notes. Members, too, can earn credit by doing services in kind, like child-minding for one person, and then spending the credit later, on, say, a plumber, who’s also a member of the particular LETS network. Childcare, transport, DIY, food, hiring of tools and big equipment can be added to the roster of services: the list is potentially endless and vast in its spatial reach. The sway of LETS can be local and regional; as “local” the network of participating people may be restricted to just a few blocks of an urban neighborhood; but a “local” network can equally extend into a wider geographical terrain and comprise numerous independent LETS registries that cooperate to exchange goods and services with each other at commensurate rates. Good organization is necessary in order that group coordination can be maintained, and so that the relative successes (and failures) of one network don’t unduly affect the growth and development of its neighbors.
Interconnected yet autonomous organizations existing within a regional network ensure that their services and activities serve the needs of each locality; this avoids the pitfalls of centralization and monopoly control yet means that organizations are collectively large enough to be effective over a broader scale. LETS money circulates within these networks and money exists purely and solely as a means of exchange, as a token used to equate one service or good with another. Money is quite literally a “promissory note,” and there is no way to store it up, invest it, or profit from it by treating it as a commodity. Money circulates as an enabling use value not as a dreaded exchange value that contaminates everything and everybody. As such, small businesses can flourish without the need for big inputs of capital; marginalized communities can mutually engage in exchange of goods and services to do amazing things on a shoestring. LETS can reintegrate the unemployed, allowing people the labor-market deems worthless to finally feel self-worth. As ever, dangers of bourgeois re-appropriation lurk, dangers of social pacification and the promotion of self-reliance so handy for the neo-liberal state; but this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case if the system is well organized and if participants put their hearts and energies into making the project a success, making it a community’s principal economy rather than its safety net.
One of the many nice things about the LETSystem is that fosters a sense of community and community empowerment that brings consenting people freely together. (The system of course stands or falls on the level of commitment participants give to it, give to their community.) Another progressive thing about LETS is that it de-economizes economic life, makes a locality a voluntarily de-institutionalized space that shrugs off the weight of heavily centralized control, of unwieldy bureaucracies that alienate life for the many, that fail as service providers and ultimately answer only to the bottom-line, to shareholder greed, or to the perverse “rational” logic of the organization men. In a certain sense, too, LETS also re-politicizes social life because it re-empowers real people in their everyday lives; then people become aware of their power, of their re-empowerment, not a power to dominate something but an imaginative power to socialize an economy, to invent a different notion of political economy, an alternative politics and economy in which no upstart can ever tell you what to do.
José Arcadio Buendia wasn’t constrained in his dreams by what Bloch calls “the factuality of the external world” because his imagination “went beyond the genius of nature and even beyond miracles and magic” (p. 9). José Arcadio Buendia thought it possible to do anything he willed—well, almost anything—and taught his sons from an early age to think likewise. He spoke to them of the wonders of the world, not only where his learning extended, but forcing the limits of his imagination to extremes. He pushed his imagination beyond the reality of realism, made it subordinate to his imagination, to his adventurous will, and in so doing he was able to achieve what he wanted; he was somehow able to realize his dream of Macondo because he de-realized reality, he speculated with reality, placed his bets squarely on a “speculative realism,”3 one that took risks with reality, that gambled on futures, that rolled the dice and hoped for the best, just like the bourgeoisie does with its stock market.
Or perhaps José Arcadio Buendia is really a magical existentialist, grappling with deep ontological questions of Being and freedom and with the political question of collective action that Marxists still need to grapple with, that Sartre grappled with during the 1940s with mixed success. To a certain extent, the analysis Sartre undertook in his great masterpiece, Being and Nothingness (L’être et le néant) (1943), still has plenty to say to the Magical Marxist spirit, to a Being that yearns to be “for itself,” that yearns to fill in the nothingness reigning between consciousness and the realm of things in the world. Sartre’s epistemological point of departure here is consciousness, at the level of cogito; yet unlike Descartes the consciousness Sartre posits is always a consciousness that has an object, that is only ever conscious of something, conscious that it refers to the inert world of the inorganic, to things. Consciousness doesn’t have an essence, but, following the phenomenologist Husserl, is instead a consciousness of intending, a consciousness that’s intentional. In itself, consciousness is empty, is bereft of anything, is rien. But the issue that henceforth arises, including for any Magical Marxist, is how this consciousness relates to Being.
Sartre suggests there are two different sorts of Being, or “two regions” of Being. He calls them “Being-in-itself” (l’être en soi) and “Being-for-itself” (l’être pour soi). The former is a Being that’s present in inanimate objects, a passive kind of Being that’s a thing-in-itself, “a Being,” says Sartre, “that is what it is.”4 The latter type, a much more dynamic and potentially progressive Being, is a Being that is both conscious of itself—i.e. self-conscious—and conscious of itself being conscious of other objects; it is a Being that is faced with an object, that confronts an object, that is conscious of this object, yet is nonetheless not this object. Thus, if a Being-in-itself is a simple Being, a Being that is what it is, constituted neither of possibilities nor impossibilities, then a Being-for-itself is a more complex force, because it is a Being that is conscious of the gap that exists between its own consciousness and the objects it is conscious of. It is somehow aware of the distance between its own thinking and the things in the world: it is aware, in other words, of that which it is not.
Importantly, it is precisely this disjuncture—this space or gap that exists between our consciousness and the objects we think about—which gives rise to what Sartre calls “nothingness”: it is through being conscious of Being, conscious of being a Being-for-itself, that nothingness enters into the world. Nothingness is a negative condition in which positive capabilities reside, since the conscious Being is conscious of what it lacks, of what it could be, of what its possibilities are, of what its future might be. It’s somehow all up for grabs. Humans are masters of their own existential choice, Sartre believes. The Being-for-itself, he says, doesn’t desire what it is: it strives to be what it isn’t. Only a conscious being has the capacity to distance itself from the world and reflect upon it, to introduce this gap, to affirm this nothingness, to comprehend it, to try to leap across it through its own praxis, through its own conscious power, through the magical power of its imagination.
This “gap” between the thing-world and the thinking world, between the world of objects and world of the conscious mind, is increasingly subject to collapse in our spectacular society. As Debord put it (cf. Chapter 1), the spectacular world of things is colonizing our brains with its thing-images, and is creating unity out of this separation. So, contra Jacques Rancière’s claim regarding Debord, to engage in a politics of the counter-spectacle isn’t to romanticize a world without separation but is to struggle to keep this separation alive. For in this separation, Sartre tells us, nothingness prevails, and within nothingness, within the power of the conscious mind understanding itself as separate from the world of things, possibilities reside, possibilities for addressing deficiencies, for creatively filling in the empty spaces of life. In this separation—what I’ve called a “space of slippage”—we might reinvent ourselves subjectively while creating a new world objectively, a new material world, a new physical and social structure. And so in this gap, in the nothingness that Sartre tells us exists in our world, that we bring into the world, we can begin to locate the realm of freedom, the realm of magic.
Thus the conscious Being, the Being-for-itself, is conscious of its own freedom. The crushing void of nothingness is in fact an opportunity for us to question, to doubt, to criticize, to fight and to take flight, to imagine alternatives, to act and to make choices. This freedom floats above any determinism, above any biological, psychological or social determinism, above any scientific Marxism or Freudianism, above anything imposed from above, anything that reduces or invokes some kind of inevitability; this freedom frees itself from the past, too, isn’t weighed down by the past, and hence can reinvent, can create anew, create its own Macondo out of the free will of its Being-for-itself. Out of this free will arises the possibility of constructing a new situation, a meaningful totality from the standpoint of a free individual, who alone gives sense to their world, who creates the context and the content of what they do in this situation, and of how they live.5
It follows here, as it follows for any Magical Marxist project, that neo-communism cannot come to individuals by an abstract, predetermined law or logic—the logic of history, the science of history, the inner laws of the dialectic, etc.—but can only come from individuals who re-appropriate their subjective alienation (and/or material exploitation) by a collective praxis, a praxis which is the result of a unity of group and individual praxes. Or, as Sartre put it later in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960): “The group is constructed on the model of free individual action.”6 Elsewhere in this text (which Sartre always rated as his favorite and which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary at the time of writing) Sartre points out with typical abstruseness: “the unity of the group is immanent in the multiplicity of syntheses, of which each one is an individual praxis, and we have insisted on the fact that this unity is never that of a made totality but rather of a totalization that makes itself.”7 The promise of communism isn’t born of any external objective logic, but is the inner will of thinking and acting individuals, of Beings-for-themselves, of real, everyday, concrete individuals who somehow find each other through a common cause, who define themselves as individuals in struggle, yet who also mobilize as individuals in a group, a group with a collective praxis, based on voluntary cooperation and a collective will and imagination.
Sartre says that those who try to fudge their freedom, who fear its consequences and run from the responsibility of being free, who seek to escape it by enslaving themselves, squirm with the malady he calls “bad faith” (mauvaise foi). We lie to ourselves, sell out, deny our dreams, take the easy option, and flee the anxiety of having to live up to our own potential, to our potential freedom. We act in bad faith by playing roles, Sartre says, like a waiter in a Parisian café conscious he’s acting out a part, playing a game, ensuring he makes all the right movements, all the right gestures, and is solicitous about the customers’ orders in an artificial way.8 It is precisely because he is conscious of what he’s up to that he is deceiving himself, is denying what it is to be a Being-for-itself, a free self. By contrast, to act in good faith is presumably to act as Remedios the Beauty acts in Macondo, with a consciousness that is totally free, totally natural, undetermined and hence lucid. Remedios the Beauty was a “symbol of subversion” (p. 165) because of her simplifying instinct; her consciousness was free of formalities because she obeyed no other law than the law of spontaneity. The conscious choices we Magical Marxists have to make in our lives and in our politics must be guided by precisely this unfettered imagination—like the imagination that created Remedios the Beauty, the imagination that produces a work of art, that re-appropriates our freedom and turns it into an œuvre. But this magical imagination will be something more than idealism, something more than simple wishful thinking and naive optimism.
A consciousness that cannot imagine, Sartre says, that is hopelessly mired in the “real,” is incapable of the perception of unrealized possibilities. For Sartre, “the act of the imagination is an act of magic.” It is magic because it conjures up imaginary forms, imaginary images, because free consciousness can always formulate the real constitution of an image and therefore posit imaginary images that are realizable possibilities.9 We know these images exist but know that they do not yet really exist. Within this gap between the really real and the not-yet-real is the recognition that something is missing and that this something is also somehow attainable. Sartre frames the problematic as the double aspect of nothingness, as a slippage between two futures: a real future and a future imagined. The real future is like the real past, knowable because it is recognizable, because it is a future that merely continues what the past has bequeathed. This future is the future expected, already actual, since it doesn’t take much imagination to herald its arrival. The real future is the business as usual of the past, a conservative future. It is what we don’t have to imagine because we know it is already here, or about to be here soon. Taken thus, the real future is a kind of bad faith, a truncating of one’s possibilities, an escape from freedom. To be free, Sartre insists, one needs to be able to pose a thesis about irreality. But, as ever, it necessarily has to be done by a consciousness that is conscious of something, that never ceases to be conscious of the object it doesn’t yet have but knows exists somewhere in a distant unreality.
Resonances with the young Marx perhaps ring out, the Marx of 1844 who wrote about human “vital powers,” about “passions” and “drives,” about imagination as a “natural power” and how conscious life activity, our conceptual and imaginative drives, distinguish us from other animals. The fact that we can convert these drives into an active transformation of the objective world, as well as into a self-creation, means that we can produce ourselves universally, Marx said, not one-sidedly like other animals. Just as did Sartre, the young Marx claimed that these drives, these essential powers, this consciousness, always exist in relation to an object, to a desired object that lies outside of ourselves and which we “vigorously strive to attain.”10 Yet the specter of alienation forever haunts us, the specter of alienating activities, of the deadening division of labor, of stultifying work, endless drudgery, and mindless tasks that mean little or nothing to the doer but which cripple the imagination and numb our creative powers. If conscious activity is not “free,” it can no longer transform anything. It’s a consciousness without an object, says Marx, a consciousness that “is a mere means for our existence.”11
Insofar, then, as consciousness can imagine, it needs to escape the narrow confines and deep factuality of the real world; it needs to be able subjectively to release itself from the world of alienation, from bad faith, from Being-in-itself. A consciousness that is for-itself can overcome the real, Sartre says, first of all through “affectivity” and then by “action,” by conscious practice, by a filling of the void, a closing of the gap between the future real and the imagined future.12 Sartre makes it clear that imagination isn’t an empirical power, measurable or touchable; nor is it something that needs to be “added on” to consciousness in an ad hoc fashion. Rather, imagination is nothing less than a consciousness for-itself expressing itself in all its liberty. That’s how imagination creates its own real image: the imaginary. The imaginary is another possibility in the existent, a non-existent real possibility. “The imaginary,” says Sartre, “is in each case the concrete something towards which the existent is overcome.”13
In recent decades it’s incredible how much the imagination seems to have disappeared from left consciousness, how its consciousness has wallowed hopelessly in the real, how it has been repressed by bad faith. It is the left’s imagination, rather than the state, that seems to have withered away. We might wonder if the left has been successively defeated because it lacked the power of imagination or whether it is defeat that has thwarted its imagination, bullied it out of the battle of ideas, out of a possible imaginary future. In the case of Marxism, I suspect it’s a touch of both, that a sort of negative dialectic has taken hold of our minds, reacting back to negate Marxism’s own developmental life-spirit, its own evolution as a historical reality. But it’s also true that some of the most innovative and imaginative Marxism has emerged from dark and depressing times, from fascism and war (cf. the Frankfurt School), out of prison camps and in exile (cf. Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Bloch). So how to explain the drying up of ideas? How to explain that hitherto long march of Marxism, permanently rewriting itself in the successive ruins of each epoch, suddenly stopping dead in its tracks? It seemed to stop dead in its tracks around 1979–80, with the advent of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and since 1989 this now stationary cripple, totally bereft of imagination, toppled almost completely along with those tumbling monuments and great walls.
The subsequent capitulation to bad faith, to realist actuality, and the apparent reluctance even to try to reach out into the nether-nether land of the normative, is tellingly exhibited by one of Marxism’s most prominent mouthpieces, New Left Review, who recently toasted (or commiserated) its half-century on earth. The journal’s lack of imagination, the disdain it shows towards little germs of new possibilities quietly incubating in the world, its obsession with scouring the political landscape for global oppositional forces, and nothing less, betrays the mandarin cynicism it contents itself with peddling: “To attend to the development of actually existing capitalism remains a first duty for a journal like NLR,” it claims.14 Since there are no “made totalities” around, let’s forget about any totalizations in the course of making themselves. The mission, first and foremost, is simply empirical research, to monitor a failing global system, to soberly and coolly analyze capitalist machinations, to revel in clinical critical negativity.15 All of which reveals the worst face of Marxism, a gutless and worthless variety, without a future, without hope, without hope of inspiring hope, without any discernible characteristics to pass on to anyone. Its only real engagement is an engagement in reproducing itself, of maintaining its own elite inner circle.
If Marxism wants to continue to play a losing game, it should go on doing things no differently, go on as New Left Review goes on, as a journal that doesn’t document the future of Marxism only its past: a dead one. Marxism’s future lies not in the hands of “official” Marxists, but with those who come from outside, who aren’t poisoned by either sectarianism or the search for the purest theory, for the most rigorous rigor. The future of Marxism lies in the hands of oppositional social movements and in opportunist actions that break the mould of past battles, battles now long lost, no longer worth dwelling upon. The future of Marxism lies in a Marxism that forgets about its past and isn’t so much interested in analyzing the present because it has already imagined the future—it is already working towards that future, for and by itself. This Marxism does the only thing it can do in a situation of NO EXIT: it gets going, it imagines and re-imagines, it experiments here and now, it takes risks and talks in a language it has only just invented. Adherents and insurgents may not call themselves Marxists nor even communists; but their activism and engagement, their illicit subversion and overt radicalism, their desire for autogestion, for self-management and group praxis, for a community that lives somehow post-capitalistically, somehow compels them to become the best Marxists ever. It compels them to become “the worst of architects and the best of bees.”
The phrase, of course, is Marx’s own, from the beginning of the “Labor-Process” chapter of Capital Volume I. Marx’s discussion here relates to the act of production, of labor-power at work, transforming nature, setting in motion “natural forces” that belong to our bodies, appropriating the materials of nature and adapting them to human needs. But, as Marx says, “we are not dealing here with those first instinctive forms of labor which remain on an animal level.”16 What we’re dealing with is sophisticated and advanced labor, a form of production that can imagine beforehand the actual process of work and the product this work realizes. As Marx puts it: “At the end of every labor process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally.”17
Human beings, Marx says, don’t only effect a change of form in the materials of nature; we also realize our own purpose in these materials. And this is a purpose we are conscious of, that conditions the mode of our activity. In effect, as a species, we become architects of our own destiny, of our own physical and mental forms, creating first in our imagination, in a plan or design, what’s around us, making it empirical and real only afterwards. A spider puts to shame any human weaver, Marx says, and for any civil engineer or architect, a bee does likewise with its honeycomb. “But what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees,” says Marx, “is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax.”18 So even the weakest human imagination has one over other animals, even our weakest conceptions can be realized. Even the worst of architects—and if we look around our cities we see a lot of their work about!—can do something no bee can ever do. Marx, in short, is both cognizant of and wont to praise human mental powers of creation, the human capacity to formulate abstractions, to invent future scenarios, to conceive things in our fertile imagination before erecting them in reality. We do it in the capitalist labor process all the time, so why not in political life? What has happened to even the worst of architects of the left?
Those who have taken it upon themselves to create another sort of communal structure, another non-profit money-form, another mode of village life, another urban existence in an occupied building, those who have built their own housing alongside others, perhaps even rebuilt a whole neighborhood, those who have developed what Ivan Illich called “tools of conviviality,” or have tried to imagine another destiny apart from the destiny handed down to them, one that they’re told to await—these are the architects of a new society, and of a new Marxism of the future. For these people, their theoretical contestation boils down to practical experimentation, to an elaboration of alternative socialities germinating within the dominant society, of revolutionary reforms mixing imagination with practical will, somehow reforming the revolution, or at least living the revolution now. They’re not waiting around for the right moment, when the conditions and contradictions are mature or fully developed; they’re not waiting around for the Big Bang Revolution to come; they’re creating it in a continuous process of experiment and adaptation. Very often these people aren’t involved in, nor do they necessarily favor, a general insurrection; rather, they involve themselves in a sort of progressive political radicalization of their concept of life. It catches on, word gets around, and others experiment likewise, try their hand at it, opt out and tune in. A libertarian consciousness takes hold that is anti-capitalist at its core. If we look around our world today, these pockets of light and islands of possibility, little planets within a bigger planet, are springing up almost everywhere; and what they’re trying to do is impart a new purpose to living, invent a new concept of what might be possible, and of what is necessary, based upon the active application of autonomous vital powers.
Marx makes it clear that imagination is a vital power; the power to imagine, and the role of the intellect to conceive and to analyze, is a vital force that only we humans have at our disposition; action, bodily force, conscious physical strength, is similarly a vital power; cooperation—human beings working together consciously according to a preconceived collective plan, using all our mental and physical energies—is again, for Marx, a vital power. Vital powers are sources of magic, of concrete, earthly magic. Marx was clear about where the magical force of a transformative politics would come from: it would come from releasing these collective vital powers. A new power arises, Marx says, out of the fusion of many forces into a single force; a new social force is developed when many hands cooperate in the same undivided operation.19
It’s interesting to note how Marx actually recognizes a consciously conceived human project as something that both releases and stimulates our “animal spirits.” In fact, in Marx’s view, the role of preconception and imagination, of conscious purpose—and of the purpose of consciousness—is a “natural” complement to more instinctive, spontaneous impulses, to passions that unite us humans with other animals, and indeed with the plant world. (The vision almost sounds like a Wifredo Lam painting in which human, animal, and plant worlds merge incandescently as one.) Here, on the one hand, Marx wants to underscore the role of human imagination, our role as architects of our own destiny, as a priori agents of change, as super-brains leaping to freedom; yet, on the other hand, what’s equally implied is that we shouldn’t abandon our instincts either, our bee-like behavior, our spontaneous appropriation and re-appropriation, our sensuous being. In a future communist society, of whatever scale and capacity, the architect and the bee must find unity, must coexist, must imagine a counter-society amongst the honeycombs.
That a democratic society must be created and organized by conscious planning, by collective intervention first conceived in the imagination, is of paramount importance. Yet at the same time Marx knows that what he calls “real life”—and by that he means a society in which individuality is “fully developed”—is also characterized by novelty and contingency, by spontaneity and organic growth, by warm openness rather than icy routine. Thus human beings, Marx says, don’t only affirm themselves intellectually in the objective world; we also do so—and need to do so—“with all our senses.”20 Any sense that’s a prisoner of crude practical need, or dulled by mindless repetitive activity, is, Marx says, a “restricted sense.” We must appropriate our relations with ourselves, and with others in our world, “in an integral way.”21 The senses must become “organs of our individuality” and “theoreticians in their immediate praxis.” A “society that is fully developed,” Marx claims,
produces man in all the richness of his being, the rich man who is profoundly and abundantly endowed with all the senses, as its constant reality. It can be seen how subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and passivity, lose their antithetical character, and hence their existence as such antitheses, only in the social condition; it can be seen how the resolution of the theoretical antitheses themselves is possible only in a practical way, only through the practical energy of man.22
One of the greatest impediments to the release of our vital powers is a society that not only creates work without purpose, but also organizes this work through a highly detailed and fragmented division of labor. The capitalist division of labor, which over recent years has projected itself on a truly international scale, has become so technologically advanced and so complex that most working people now function as mere appendages of machines, of assembly lines, cash tills, computer terminals of various shapes and sizes; these machines either make people toil longer and faster or else banish them from work altogether. This division of labor, Marx says, “compels each worker to spend on the work no more than the necessary time. This creates a continuity, a uniformity, a regularity, an order.”23 People thereby become tiny cogs in a mighty administrative and productive machine; specific and discrete agents of tasks whose sole purpose is usually to valorize capital, to aid commodity flows, to enhance profitability. The continuous appropriation of scientific knowledge by different fractions of capital has succeeded in converting people into “living” fixed capital, into organic dead labor; and each day at work reinforces this subordination; daily turnover time becomes the time of slow death, of non-recoverable bodily wear and tear. And even high-paying jobs for elite workers involve a detailed mental division of labor that’s almost as deadening, almost as meaningless as the manual division of labor. Only the fat paycheck at the end of the month eases the emptiness.
Marx knows why the capitalist division of labor is so crippling and debilitating for people: “constant labor of one uniform kind disturbs the intensity and flow of man’s animal spirits, which find recreation and delight in a mere change of activity.”24 But the problem isn’t, as he sees it, a problem with the division of labor per se; breaking down tasks to organize work more efficiently, with greater coordination, both spatially and temporally, isn’t in itself a pernicious idea. What is pernicious is the crudity with which it is currently realized, and particularly the compulsion it involves: one huge mass of people is confined to either manual torment or mental boredom, while another much smaller group monopolizes skills, dominates knowledge and expertise, and prospers from that domination and monopolization. This division of labor is pernicious in the sense that the real possibility of lightening the work load, spreading the burden, is transformed into its dialectical other, a system of repression and repetition, of obsessive and odious work. Work as the instrument of man only betokens man the instrument.
In an ideal imaginary state, new technology and the division of labor would have the capacity to free us from the drudgery of work; in reality, they have become “alien powers” frantically setting labor-power in motion, stifling true subjectivity, ushering in the “real subsumption” of life under the domain of capital. Here, even a lightening of the burden of labor through technology turns into “an instrument of torture, since the machine does not free the worker from work, but rather deprives the work itself of all content.”25 Work, we might say, becomes lean and stupid, at least for the bulk of the population. It follows that for any real freedom to be possible an alternative society wouldn’t so much abolish the division of labor as neutralize it, socialize it, periodically switch tasks around, enabling people to vary their activity, letting them identify with this activity. Perhaps most crucial of all is to release the intensity and flow of the uniform activity itself, by translating productive gains from technology and the division of labor into free time or working less. Indeed, if there’s one thing that can be gleaned from Marx here, it’s that he regarded time as our most precious asset, as the wellspring of potential social riches, as something too important to let slip away unfulfilled. “Free time” is thus something vital for the full development of individuality, for self-unfolding, for expanding individual capacities, and for the creation and perpetuation of a better society. A communist society is a society in which time has been liberated, in which citizens have disposable time at hand, and where one’s “second life” outside of the workplace becomes one’s “real life.”26
Such utopian yearnings actually assume the most pressing analytical concreteness in Marx’s Grundrisse, in, for example, the long “chapter on Capital” he drafted between mid January and early February 1858. There, Marx posits a certain historicity at play: his “faith” in a utopian might be hinges on what will be. The development of communism will bloom through the “full development” of capitalism, through the historical development of its productive forces. The possibility of releasing ourselves from work, Marx says, comes about when living labor has materialized itself in machines, and when “the technological application of science” determines the entire productive character of capital. When the world of work is dominated by machines, when we become total appendages to new technology, when that technology “suspends” human beings from “the immediate form” of work, so that dead labor valorizes living labor (and not the other way around), then and only then, Marx says, will a new era become possible:27
To the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labor time and on the amount of labor employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labor time, whose “powerful effectiveness” is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labor time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of science to production.28
That projection might already be with us. That “full development” of the productive forces is now an is not a will be: The world Marx described in those long nights of a February winter might be our world today. The society in which human ingenuity, imagination, scientific know-how, the vital powers of the human brain and hand have become objectified in fixed capital, in capital that apparently rules over us, may be the society in which we currently find ourselves. We have built a society that now enslaves us: we have quite literally become the worst of architects. Our brilliant imagination is objectified into an alien force; our “general intellect”—the collective accumulated powers of intellectual labor, of our brilliant doctors and scientists and thinkers—condemns us to a world forever besieged by crises, by misery and fatigue, by exploitation and depression. The communality and culmination of our vast knowledge, Marx says, has left us helpless.29 And yet, despite all that, and seemingly counterfactually, Marx glimpses a warm-stream future lurking, a magical might be. Somehow, he makes the imaginative existential leap from a dire material reality to an almost Sartrean-like irreality: in a little over ten pages of the Grundrisse, Marx projects the immanent possibilities in a world transformed into a vast form of fixed capital, immanent possibilities in a world in which the only labor that now really counts is no longer the labor of hard-ware but of thought-ware, of immaterial labor, of cognitive no-collar capitalism rather than blue-collar corporeal capitalism.30
Marx’s realism here is magical in the sense that he doesn’t just analyze what really exists; he imagines the unforeseen, he anticipates and initiates potential transformations already existing in the real, in mutated forms. His imagination is already plotting its own image, an imaginary communist future, presumably with its very own Imaginary Party, comprising workers who no longer work, who have been “suspended” from work, displaced from work whose “direct form” has ceased to be the “great well-spring of wealth.” At that point, Marx says, “labor time ceases and must cease to be a measure of value, and hence exchange value must cease to be the measure of use value. The surplus labor of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth.”31 Marx draws several conclusions from this—complex conclusions—and tantalizingly leaves it to us to draw up a few more of our own.
To begin with, he says, “production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis.”32 The debate around cognitive capitalism problematizes how this “classic” Marxian law of value, the theory of value Marx formulated in Capital, has become unhinged with the growth of immaterial labor, as high-tech, profit-laden, scientific, knowledge-based activities assume their own, apparently free-floating value dynamics within the overall economy, little of which can be stocked, quantified, formalized or objectified. There is thus, perhaps, little reason to doubt Gorz’s words on the matter:
By furnishing services, immaterial labor has become the hegemonic form of work; material labor is displaced to the periphery of the production process, or is summarily externalized. Although it remains indispensable and even dominant from a quantitative standpoint point, material labor has become a “subaltern moment” of the process. The heart of value creation is now immaterial labor.33
Other writers, like David Harvey, have convincingly shown how expanded and continued capital accumulation over the past couple of decades has had a marked penchant for dispossession, for asset stripping and commons plundering, for raiding the public coffers through privatization, for corporate fraud, and for rolling the dice on the stock market; it has shown zero commitment to investing in living labor in actual production.34 What these theorists all show, or at least collectively imply, is that living labor might be a species en route to complete extinction. Marx himself puts it like this:
Labor no longer appears so much to be included with the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself ... He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labor he himself performs [that counts], nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power.35
The tack Marx takes in the Grundrisse is that of an optimist, rubbing his hands gleefully at the prospect of material conditions “blow[ing] this foundation sky-high.”36 He sees a world that “suspends” labor, that revolves around “dead labor,” around the production of social life under the control of the “general intellect,” as pregnant with its contrary, as itself a “moving contradiction.” Because, he says, it reduces the time of “necessary labor,” and because here we have the wherewithal and ingredients for creating “the means of social disposable time,” for being able “to reduce labor time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development.”37 After all, real wealth, Marx reminds his readers, isn’t command over surplus labor, but rather “disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society.”38 Disposable time, then, not labor time, is, for Marx, the measure of real wealth, a disposable time for the artistic, scientific development of the individual, a time for pastimes, for edification not putrefaction. Free time is “both idle time and time for higher activity,” all of which will “transform its possessor into a different subject”; imagine, Marx says, “a human being in the process of becoming.”39 And yet, nota bene, “really free working”—e.g. composing, artistic endeavor, writing books, and other forms of “individual self-realization”—“in no way means that it becomes mere fun, mere amusement, as Fourier, with grisette-like naiveté, conceives it. Really free working ... is at the same time precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion.”40
Anybody involved in any alternative project nowadays—from Tarnac to Rio, from banlieue to bidonville, from landless occupation to lawless re-appropriation—knows all too well that opting out, that “free working,” inevitably necessitates the most damned seriousness. Participation entails commitment (lots of evenings!), insecurity means doubt, lack of resources demands the most intense exertion. To be sure, “liberated time,” the Invisible Committee says, “doesn’t mean a vacation. Vacant time, dead time, the time of emptiness and the fear of emptiness—this is the time of work.” With free time, conversely, “there’ll be no more time to fill, but a liberation of energy that no ‘time’ contains.”41 In free time, the Sartrean leap to freedom is encountered, the responsibility one must take for asserting one’s freedom. We, alone, are responsible for the meaning of the situation in which we live; we, alone, give meaning to our world. Responsibility is hard: we make a conscious choice to liberate ourselves, to rely on ourselves, and then we have to take responsibility for the choices we make. Still, this responsibility is and has to be a world away from bourgeois/neo-liberal ideas about personal responsibility, about being responsible for the exploitation somebody else inflicts upon us. Communist responsibility, by contrast, means being responsible for self-assertion not for self-condemnation.
In a dream, time undergoes bizarre transformations; it no longer remains linear but gets mangled up, compressed, and disjointed. Things happen concurrently or ahead of time, out of all rational sequence or consciously recognizable temporal ordering. Everything becomes like a magical realist novel that begins with its conclusion and then proceeds to work backwards as it goes forwards, recounting its tale as a strange chronicle foretold. Marxist utopian thought must now take on these strange characteristics, become a chronicle of a possible world foretold, a world in which free time isn’t squandered like work time, but is treated with the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion, the greatest act of our imagination. There are two choices with respect to this paradigm of a possible world foretold: either a chronicle of death or a chronicle of life: a real future, on the one hand, and a future imagined, on the other. Otherwise put: a “post-work” society in which the creation of wealth no longer equates to the employment of people contains both a knowable future full of threats as well as an irreal future of great opportunities; and neither option quite resembles those that Marx envisages in the Grundrisse.
A capitalist “post-work” society, our real future, seems less akin to work-as-an-economic-necessity than to work-as-an-ideological-and-political-urgency, a matter of preserving the stability and legitimacy of a system of work without workers, ensuring that workers (and ex-workers) remain consumers and somehow “embrace” the world of immaterial labor. Therein reside the threats: not least the threat that the desire for free time, the yearning to work less (a yearning a lot of the active workforce now seem to share), will be thrown back in people’s faces, used as a pretext for the neo-liberal state to disengage, to promote “self-help” strategies as forms of self-reproduction and self-exploitation, as a means of social control: “we are all entrepreneurs!” Another threat is that joblessness, insecurity around work, part-time jobs, McJobs, temporary contracts and piecework tasks, performed casually and for little pay, translate into a never-ending, highly flexible pool of workers that enterprises can tap into or turn away at the whim of their business cycles. Here the menace of Marx’s “industrial reserve army” looms: precariousness becomes the watchword for the “relative surplus population” of our day, for the continent worker progressively produced by the valorization of capital.42
This relative surplus population boils down to the huge mass of under-employed and sub-employed workers likely to be part-time, on-call, self-employed, on temporary contracts or workfare programs, who all succeed in making the official unemployment statistics look less dire than they actually are. These people are absorbed into an ever expanding “personal services industry,” rendered even more ruthless and competitive by the burgeoning of temporary help agencies and contracting firms, coordinating the distribution of contingent labor-power whose supply and demand dances to the tune of outsourcing, cost-cutting companies. Temp agencies enable displaced workers to assume new careers floating between jobs. And not only have the numbers of people temping grown enormously over past decades, the temporary help business is itself a booming industry. (Manpower Inc., for example, is now a billion-dollar multinational company and the largest staffing agency in the world; it is technically the US’s largest employer, too, hiring out 800,000 substitute workers each year. Moreover, with 4,100 offices in 82 countries, Manpower places 1.6 million people “in assignments” with more than 250,000 businesses worldwide annually.)
As at February 2010, the US has a giant black hole more than 10 million jobs deep. That’s the number of jobs that would be needed to get the economy back to a “respectable” 5 percent unemployment level, the prevailing rate before the current downturn. With a growing population, and with more and more new people entering the labor market, the US would need to produce roughly 1.5 million new jobs every year—about 125,000 a month—to keep from sinking deeper into that black hole.43 But even if some 600,000 jobs a month were created—more than double the pace of the 1990s—it would still take two years to fill in that gaping void. As even the most gung-ho neo-liberal economist will tell you, that’s a rate of growth not sustained since the 1960s: it’s a rate, in other words, that’s a practical impossibility, even more so in an economy predicted to have zero growth for the foreseeable future. The possibility of a zero growth economy also stares Europe in the face and the continent seems afraid to stare back. In France, 10 percent of the population is now officially unemployed, some 2.8 million people (ILO figure, December 2009), and 100,000 people each month are added to the unemployment roster. In the UK, 2.4 million are officially unemployed (almost 8 percent of the population), and a further 1.4 million work under temporary contracts.
Yet amongst these threats reside certain possibilities, even truly revolutionary potentialities. And it’s here that we encounter the future imagined, our possible dream state of a life foretold. In the UK, around 85 percent of part-timers don’t want a full-time job, and there are many people who actively refuse to work supplementary hours, opting to downsize, to work less hours for less pay, and to live a little better in the meanwhile. “Travailler plus pour gagner plus” now reads like a quaint relic from another epoch; “travailler moins, vivre mieux” sounds more in tune with the Zeitgeist. (This was, after all, always seen by Marx as the “fundamental imperative.”) In times of crisis, the first thing enterprises do is slash jobs even more than they slash them when times are good. One’s first reaction as a worker is “shit, a layoff, a pay cut, a reduction in hours...” The scenario is described in a still-valuable book, Travailler deux heures par jour, produced by the French collective “Adret”—“a mountainous land with a sunny exposure”—in the crisis-ridden 1970s. In one chapter, Charly Boyadjian, a young worker at a shoe factory in Romans, recounts what happened at his factory in late 1974 as the oil crisis started to bite. First of all, to cut costs, a brutal 48-hour “3X8” working week—in which an 8-hour shift is switched every week between morning, afternoon, and night-time—got reduced to 40 hours; then to 32, and later to 24. The initial worry, says Boyadjian, was about the inevitable loss of money. What to do? How to manage? Disaster strikes! But then, Boyadjian says, little by little, over the course of several weeks, all the workers noticed a change. Those who were previously exhausted began to feel better than before, more engaged with one another, more energized. Aggression diminished, too, and friendships developed. “It was in this period,” Boyadjian says, “that contestation was born, because everyone had started to talk more ... you were less taken up in work, you discussed work ... you had a political discussion on a subject really important because somebody had sparked it.”44 After a while, those workers who had tried to top up their reduced earnings by working “au noir” stopped their informal activities, preferring to be with their families, “relearning how to live,” how to relax, Boyadjian says. After the recession, many workers at the plant didn’t want to revert to their old hours. And they’d become politicized around work, discovered something the union militants hadn’t yet discovered, weren’t rallying for. Just look, Boyadjian says, what effect reducing the working day has. Imagine going all the way. Imagine, he says, “working two hours per day?” “It’s important now to think about it, though it’s sure not going to happen in one fell swoop.”45
Perhaps, then, crises might be blessings rather than calamities? Perhaps we should embrace them by desisting from labor, and from consuming, and let the situation implode even more? Perhaps in times of crises, like the crisis that appears to be forever writ large nowadays, we can relearn how to do without work, like Boyadjian et al. did. In the US, twenty-somethings with college degrees are now apparently learning how to be “carefree,” how to voluntarily switch jobs, on their own terms; they’ve reevaluated their career choices, as well as the whole notion of career itself, because they’re intelligent enough to know that they might not have anything worth deeming “a career” anymore.46 Since joblessness has lost a lot of its stigma in America, given that there are so many people unemployed, being out of work is no longer seen simply as a personal failing. In fact, there are a whole generation of twenty-somethings almost everywhere, especially young men, often young men of color, often young men who live in specific neighborhoods, who know they’ll never work a salaried job. They know they can never count on either a pension or the “right to work” because they know all that is a fiction for them, a realism without any magic. Nor do they recognize themselves as “precarious” or belonging to any “précariat” because they would never define themselves in relation to work, to what “they do.”
Perhaps, during crises, we can hatch alternative programs for survival, other methods by which we might not so much “earn a living” as live a living. Perhaps we can self-downsize or even refrain from work itself, and at the same time address a paradox that goes back at least to Max Weber: work is revered in our culture, yet at the same time workers are becoming superfluous; you hate your job and your boss, hate the servility of what you do, and how you do it, the pettiness of the tasks involved, yet want to keep your job at all costs. You see no other way of defining yourself other than through work, through what you do for a living, through the “honor” of being employed. Perhaps there’s a point at which we can all be pushed over the edge, “set-free” as Marx said, voluntarily take the jump only to discover other aspects of ourselves, other ways to fill in the hole, to make a little money, to maintain our dignity and pride, and to survive off what Gorz calls a “frugal abundance.” Perhaps it’s time to get politicized around non-work. In opting out perhaps we can create a bit of havoc through refusing to work, turn absenteeism into a positive device, a will to struggle for another kind of work in which use value outbids exchange value. If capitalists can do without workers, then it’s time workers realized that they can do without capitalists, that they can devise work without capitalists, even work without the state. What to do in a world without work? What to do with a great mass of unemployed, sub-employed, partially employed people who don’t belong to a union or identify themselves with any class, let alone with each other? How to develop and incorporate them into a solidarity economy forged out of unbridled imagination and a lot of practical will?
We still hear voices on the left calling for full employment, still battling for a return to decent jobs for decent pay and decent benefits. I’m not so sure it operates that way anymore. Today, decent jobs are the rare exception, so rare in fact that it’s safer to bet they no longer actually exist. If the left thinks otherwise then it’s backing the wrong horse, channeling its energies in the wrong direction, going backwards not forwards, in a direction that’s arguably more utopian than the vision of a society of free time. Now is the moment to change trajectory, to turn the tables, to transform a capitalist business ethic that downsizes individuals into a daring social ethic that upends capitalism.