Preface
1.John Hutnyk, Bad Marxism: Capitalism and Cultural Studies, Pluto Press, London, 2004. When I first proposed the present book to Pluto, Hutnyk generously suggested in his reader’s report that the book “ skates the utopian edge of reason and politics, which we would do well not to forget, can also be the refuge of comrades.”
2.The “amongst other things” is borrowed from John Berger’s essay “Ten Dispatches About Place,” Le monde diplomatique, August 2005. “Somebody enquires: Are you still a Marxist?” Watching four burros graze in a field on a bright mid-summer’s day, seeing them roll about on their backs and stand motionless, time slows down, says Berger. They stare back at the English writer, propped up against an apple tree, size him up, and wander away, heads down, ears missing nothing. “I watch them,” he says, “eyes skinned. In our exchanges such as they are, in the midday company we offer one another, there is a substratum of what I can only describe as gratitude. Four burros in a field, month of June, year 2005. Yes, I’m still amongst other things a Marxist.” Berger’s piece helped convince another donkey-lover that this silent wisdom might also somehow be Marxist. (Cf. Andy Merrifield, The Wisdom of Donkeys, Walker Books, New York, 2008.)
3.Guy Debord, Panegyric Volume One, Verso, London, 1991, p. 48.
4.Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Everyman Library, New York, 1993, pp. 474–9.
5.This brilliantly intelligent cinematic set piece from 1981 has a romantic dreamer and a realist skeptic dialogue over dinner in a New York restaurant. The screenplay, written by Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, is available in book form and warrants close scrutiny. “You see,” explains Gregory, “I keep thinking that we need a new language, a language of the heart, a language where language isn’t needed—some kind of language between people that is a new kind of poetry, that is the poetry of the dancing bee, that tells us where the honey is. And I think that in order to create that language we’re going to have to learn how you can go through a looking-glass into another kind of perception, in which you have that sense of being united to all things, and suddenly you understand everything.” (Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, My Dinner with André, Grove Press, New York, 1981, p. 95.)
6.Subcomandante Marcos, “The Fourth World War has Begun,” Nepantla: Views from the South, Vol. 2, No. 3, 2001, p. 570.
7.Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Picador Books, London, 1978, p. 125.
8.Guy Debord was another big fan of My Dinner with André, confessing his admiration of Louis Malle’s film to the French writer Morgan Sportès in the late 1980s. Christophe Bourseiller’s Vie et Mort de Guy Debord (Plon, Paris, 1999) recalls Debord’s numerous meetings with Sportès in assorted Parisian bars chosen by Debord (p. 525). The interesting revelation about Debord’s fondness for the film elicits only a couple of throwaway lines and is never followed up by Bourseiller.
9.Shawn and Gregory, My Dinner with André, pp. 91–2.
10.Shawn and Gregory, My Dinner with André, pp. 93–4.
11.Shawn and Gregory, My Dinner with André, pp. 94–5.
Introduction
1.John Cassidy, “The Return of Karl Marx,” The New Yorker, October 1997, p. 248.
2.Militant was a Trotskyist faction of the British Labour Party who dominated Liverpool municipal politics after its dramatic electoral victory in May 1983. Militant councilors reigned almost supreme in the city until 1987, during which time they imposed their own brand of hard-edged, confrontational socialism, frequently clashing with Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government over budgeting and rate-capping, at the same time as they clashed with trade unions and Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party. For more details, see Peter Taaffe and Tony Mulhearn, Liverpool: A City that Dared to Fight, Fortress Books, London, 1988; cf. Michael Parkinson, Liverpool on the Brink, Policy Journals, Hermitage, 1985.
3.Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: The Ideology of Industrial Society, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1964.
4.“News from Nowhere” still thrives along Bold Street as a women’s cooperative. But back then it was located in a frayed, marginal zone, near the Mersey Tunnel entrance, actually next to a fascist “Soldier of Fortune” store, whose clientele periodically lobbed bricks through the bookstore’s window. From time to time, the bookstore’s clientele would respond in kind. Ah, those were the days!
5.After almost 40 consecutive years of teaching Marx’s Capital, Harvey has finally written up his lectures, and published them in handy book form, there for everybody to ponder over. The text is a step-by-step guide for old-hats and newcomers alike, and is a vital resource for anyone interested in understanding our world’s innumerable crises and instabilities. See David Harvey, Introduction to Marx’s Capital, Verso, London, 2009.
6.I transcribed the experience in article form: see Andy Merrifield, “Marx@2000.com,” Monthly Review, November 2000, pp. 21–35; cf. Jeff Byles, “Dialectical U,” The Village Voice, January 23, 2001. It’s true about my generation’s failings; it’s only with hindsight that this has become apparent. Just as the 1960s generation never saw the coming of the early 1970s’ economic crises, and even if they had were powerless to do anything about them, my generation failed to halt the New Right backlash in the 1980s, leaving us powerless to prevent the neo-liberal long march throughout the 1990s.
7.Karl Marx, Capital I, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1976, p. 481.
8.David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003; see especially Chapter 4. John Berger, whose novels are often so subtle and multilayered, still knows how to call a spade a spade. He pulls no punches in labeling our current system: “economic fascism.” “Today, in the age of globalization,” he writes, “the world is dominated by finance not industrial capital, and the dogmas that define criminality and the logic of incarceration have radically changed. Prisons have always existed, of course, and more and more are getting built. But prison walls henceforth have a different goal. What constitutes the feeling of incarceration has been transformed.” (John Berger, Dans l’entre-temps: réflexions sur le fascisme économique, Indigène éditions, Montpellier, 2009, p. 10.)
9.Harvey, The New Imperialism, p. 148.
10.Harvey, The New Imperialism, p. 148.
11.Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Verso, London, 1991, p. 16, original emphasis. This text, of course, is Debord’s sequel to The Society of the Spectacle.
12.Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, p. 24.
13.García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, p. 75. Hereafter page references to the novel are given in the text.
14.The Coming Insurrection, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2009, p. 23. L’insurrection qui vient was originally published in France in 2007 under the authorship of “The Invisible Committee.” I’ll return to its suggestive “neo-communist manifesto” in Chapter 2.
15.Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1991, p. 223.
16.Galeano, The Book of Embraces, p. 223.
17.Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Robert Tucker (ed.), The Marx–Engels Reader, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1978, p. 597.
18.Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” pp. 597–8, emphasis added.
19.García Márquez often said that literature, for him, should be a poetic transformation of reality; perhaps it’s possible to see politics in this same light? In the first volume of his memoirs, García Márquez poses a related question: why is a thinker like Friedrich Engels only taught as a boring political economist rather than an inspiring lyric poet? García Márquez refers to Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, and suggests that it’s really an “epic poem of a beautiful human adventure.” (Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale, Alfred Knopf, New York, 2003, p. 192.)
20.Aimé Césaire, “Calling the Magician: A Few Words from a Caribbean Civilization,” in Michael Richardson (ed.), Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean, Verso, London, 1996, pp. 119–20
21.Plato, The Republic, Everyman Books, New York, 1935, pp. 305–6.
22.Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Avon Books, New York, 1965. See especially pp. 201–2, 214–15.
23.Karl Marx, Capital III, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1959, p. 465.
24.Marx, Capital III, p. 472, emphasis added.
25.Marx, Capital III, p. 466, emphasis added.
26.André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class, Pluto Press, London, 1982, p. 67.
27.Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume One, Verso, London, 1991, p. 21.
28.Alejo Carpentier, “On the Marvelous Real in America,” in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris (eds.), Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, Duke University Press, Durham, 1995, p. 85.
29.Carpentier, “On the Marvelous Real in America,” p. 86. “What is the history of Latin America,” Carpentier had asked, “if not a chronicle of the marvelous in the real.” It was this idea, the idea of lo real maravilloso, that eventually became synonymous with “magical realism,” and the early writings of Carpentier are now taken as prologues to what we recognize today as the Magical Realist genre. Apparently, after having read and been so impressed with Carpentier’s Explosion in a Cathedral (1962), García Márquez decided to toss in the trash an earlier draft of One Hundred Years of Solitude and begin again. Explosion in a Cathedral, entitled El Siglo de las Luces (The Century of Light) in the original Spanish, transports us back to colonial Guadeloupe and Haiti in the wake of the French Revolution. The novel focuses on a young orphan, Esteban, and his relationship with the mysterious subversive pirate Victor Hugues, a prototypical Colonel Aureliano Buendia. Esteban is dazzled by the revolutionary 1790s Caribbean, as republican ideals reach enslaved people’s outre-mer; he’s dazzled by magical streets and pageants, by hearsay and underground fervor, by secret clans and associations, by music and women, by corporal and political excesses. In amongst it all, Esteban finds for a while an intoxicating liberation, a total transformation of his erstwhile sickly self: “Do you want to work for the revolution,” somebody asks him. “He responds yes, with pride, with enthusiasm, adding that he won’t allow his fervor, nor his desire to labor for liberty, to be put in any shadow of doubt.” (Alejo Carpentier, Le siècle des lumières, Gallimard, Paris, 1962, p. 140.)
30.Carpentier, “On the Marvelous Real in America,” p. 86. Amadís of Gaul is a masterpiece of Castilian medieval fantasy from 1508, staple reading for a youthful Don Quixote; Tirant le Blanc is a 1490 Valencian romantic epic that cast a magic spell on a pre-Don Quixote Cervantes. Carpentier himself has been criticized for his “conception of an independent American sensibility” and for his “extremely ungenerous appreciation” of European surrealism. According to Michael Richardson, in his useful introduction to Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean (Verso, London, 1996, especially pp. 12–13), this reveals Carpentier’s refusal to engage with the dynamic way different cultures interact, cross-fertilize, and transform one another. Magic, in other words, exists everywhere there’s a perceptual twist to reality, and goes beyond any singular culture, should there be such a thing as singular culture anyway.
31.Karl Marx, “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1974, p. 326.
32.Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Beacon Press, Boston, 1955, p. 26.
33.Huizinga, Homo Ludens, p. 195.
34.Huizinga, Homo Ludens, p. 206.
35.Huizinga, Homo Ludens, pp. 210–11.
36.Gabriel García Márquez, “The Solitude of Latin America,” 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature Lecture; http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1982/marquez-lecture.html
Chapter 1
1.Even though The Society of the Spectacle and One Hundred Years of Solitude are quintessential 1960s books, their authors admit to coming of age in the 1950s. In Considérations sur l’assassinat de Gérard Lebovici, Debord says he wasn’t converted by the street skirmishes of May 1968; “I am an older bandit than that,” he claims; “1968 was a date that came to me much later.” (See Guy Debord, Œuvres, Gallimard-Quarto, Paris, 2006, p. 1564.) A lot of Debord’s political muckraking fomented during the 1950s, through Lettrist and early Situationist rebel-rousing, and through experimental films and radical urbanism. If anything, Debord’s disposition was more classical, more baroque: his Marxism went back to the future from the seventeenth century. As for García Márquez, his political awakening similarly occurred in the 1950s, specifically in the spring of 1959, when he went to Cuba as a young journalist to write a series of articles “about a guy half out of his mind” trying to overthrow the Batista regime. Several months afterwards, Castro’s efforts were consummated and in the 1970s a friendship deepened between the former-lawyer-cum-revolutionary and the future Nobel Laureate. Also in the 1950s, García Márquez toured the Eastern Bloc and wrote an article called “The Iron Curtain,” in which he expressed his disapproval of what was happening there. The Soviet model of socialism, with its dogmatism and chasteness was the antithesis of his Marxist ideas and wasn’t for Latin America, García Márquez said. Thus Debord and Márquez find common ground over their incredulity towards Soviet-style socialism.
2.Guy Debord, Correspondance volume 2: septembre 1960–décembre 1964, Librairie Artheme Fayard, Paris, 2001, p. 279.
3.Debord, Correspondance volume 2, p. 307.
4.This is a well-known passage from The Society of the Spectacle (Black & Red Books, Detroit, 1970), from Thesis #9: “Dans le monde réellement renversé,” Debord says in his original French, “le vrai est un moment du faux.” Debord’s italics, as we’ll soon see, are vital, because he’s telling us that, nowadays, falsity really is the truth, that this falsity is in no way a faux reality, that it is real reality: such is the spectacle’s grip, such is our perceptual take on its reality, that we have now normalized this topsy-turvy world as our ordinary, everlasting condition of life.
5.Lautréamont, “Les Chants de Maldoror,” in Œuvres Complètes, Éditions Charlot, Paris, 1946, p. 289.
6.Lautréamont, “Les Chants de Maldoror,” p. 292, p. 251.
7.Gabriel García Márquez, The Fragrance of Guava: Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza in Conversation with Gabriel García Márquez, Verso, London, 1983, p. 72.
8.García Márquez, The Fragrance of Guava, pp. 30–1.
9.Marx, Capital I, p. 284.
10.García Márquez knows plenty about dictatorships: he has lived through a good number of Latin American despots, like Rojas Pinilla in his native Colombia, and has written about them as well, like his monstrous Caribbean tyrant in The Autumn of the Patriarch, first published in Spain in 1975, in the autumn of another pathological fascist, General Franco. The Autumn of the Patriarch gives poetic meaning to Debord’s concept of the concentrated spectacle: “none of us had ever seen him,” García Márquez writes, “and even though his profile was on both sides of all coins, on postage stamps, on condom labels, on trusses and scapulars, and even though his engraved picture with the flag across his chest and the dragon of the fatherland was displayed at all times in all places, we knew that they were copies of copies of portraits that had already been considered unfaithful ... yet we knew that he was there, we knew it because the world went on, life went on, the mail was delivered, the municipal band played its retreat of silly waltzes on Saturday under the dusty palm trees.” (Gabriel García Márquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Avon Books, New York, 1976, p. 10.) Some might consider García Márquez a bit too intimate with another tyrant, a real life one: Fidel Castro. Often critical of Castro’s regime, García Márquez nonetheless remains an optimistic advocate of Cuba, pointing out its continental significance as a beachhead against US hegemony. “It is my duty to serve the Latin American revolution however I can,” García Márquez remarked in 1997, “and concretely, to serve the defense of the Cuban Revolution, which is one of the most basic obligations for any Latin American revolutionary right now.” (Cited in A. Esteban and S. Panichelli, Fidel and Gabo: A Portrait of the Legendary Friendship Between Fidel Castro and Gabriel García Márquez, Pegasus Books, New York, 2009, p. 69.)
11.García Márquez, The Fragrance of Guava, p. 73.
12.Cf. Eduardo Posada-Carbo’s essay “Fiction as History: The Bananeras and Gabriel Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Journal of Latin American Studies, No. 2, May 1998, pp. 395–414. Posada-Carbo raises concerns about the scrupulousness of García Márquez’s rendering of the banana worker’s massacre and his fidelity to “real” historical reality. Posada-Carbo “challenges” the idea that One Hundred Years of Solitude can be used an “historical source,” claiming the evidence points to a handful of deaths not to the 3,000-odd García Márquez invokes. Moreover, rather than any “conspiracy of silence,” Posada-Carbo says that García Márquez’s “legendary” version has now generally been adopted as “official history.” Yet while Posada-Carbo’s article cheers for a provable realism in the light of fictive representation, it ends up emphasizing precisely the sort of thing its author wanted to avoid: that we can never know for sure the absolute “facts.” Michael Wood, author of a monograph on García Márquez’s great book, puts it well: “the texture of the novel is made up of legends treated as truths—because they are truths to those who believe them—but also ... of real facts that no one believes in.” (Michael Wood, García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990, p. 58.)
13.Marx, Capital I, p. 165.
14.John Holloway, How to Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today, Pluto Press, London, 2002; see especially Chapters 4, 5, and 6. Holloway devotes three whole chapters to fetishism.
15.Holloway, How to Change the World Without Taking Power, p. 36.
16.It’s important to stress that the insomnia plague doesn’t represent a form of classical Marxist “false consciousness.” A more precise and subtle understanding would perhaps invoke Louis Althusser’s notion of ideology: the insomnia plague is “a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” (Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New Left Books, London, 1971, pp. 152–65.) Ideology, says Althusser, is something eternal, without history. There’s nothing unreal about ideology or about the insomnia plague, even though at the same time neither directly corresponds to reality either. Nonetheless, like ideology, the plague somehow makes allusion to reality and constitutes concrete individuals as social subjects.
17.See Jacques Rancière, Le spectateur emancipé, Éditions la fabrique, Paris, 2009.
18.Clausewitz gained combat experience in the Napoleonic era. He served time as a Prussian field soldier, was captured by the French in 1806, rose to the rank of major-general at 38, and played a major role in the resurrection of Prussia and the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815 at Waterloo. Clausewitz operated equally effectively in Berlin’s intellectual circles. His approach to war was distinctly dialectical, and he brought into his account the frailties of human nature and the complexity of the physical and psychological world. In the 1970s, Debord invented a war board game called Kriegspeil, which he joked “may well be the only one of my works that anyone will dare acknowledge as having some value” (Guy Debord, Panegyric, Verso, London, 1991, p. 64). Its strategic and tactical relations followed Clausewitz’s theory of classical warfare, where two armies, with infantry, cavalry and foot and horse regiments, confront one another like white and black confront each other in chess. The goal of the game is, however, serious: “the complete destruction of the military potential of the other.”
19.Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Everyman Library, New York, 1993, p. 471.
20.Guy Debord and Alice Becker-Ho, Le jeu de la guerre, Gallimard, Paris, 2006, p. 148.
21.Marx, Early Writings, p. 422.
22.This is the magical Debordian rejoinder to Jacques Rancière, and singularly the best route any spectator can take towards emancipation.
23.Of Chinese origins, the Cuban-born artist Lam (1902–82), also a Spanish Civil War veteran, blended European surrealist and cubist motifs with Afro-Caribbean myth and totemism. His most famous painting, the 2 meter by 2 meter The Jungle (1943), has stood in the lobby entrance of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) since 1945. Lam’s vivid imagery was inspired by the magic of tropical culture—by its exotic vegetation, birds, and atmosphere, by its primal dance rhythms and primitive rituals. One-time friend of Picasso and the surrealists André Breton and André Masson, as well as Aimé Césaire and Situationist artist Asger Jorn, Lam was fêted by Alejo Carpentier as an artist who really understood the Latin American “marvelous real.” Later in life, Lam also did a series of lithographs for García Márquez’s short story, the poem in prose, “The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship” (1976). One of the things Lam’s Jungle and García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude have in common is their spontaneous candor. Colors and words dance vividly in front of us with a freshness of vision. Both works are achieved by men at the top of their game, more or less the same age—40 years old—still full of boundless energy and perhaps some naivety, yet not self-conscious of what they’re doing. Their modus operandi is instinctive, impromptu: they’re making it up as they go along, giving free reign to unbridled impulse, to an art of pure creation; there are political lessons to derive from this. Their respective canvases are vast and complex, erotic and voluptuous, mad and chaotic, scary and darkly incandescent, bursting with metaphor, even with political metaphor. Lam’s art, André Breton once said, “showers with stars the BECOMING that must be human well-being.” Even Louis Althusser waxed lyrical about Lam: “I discovered him. I’ve known Lam forever. He was born before us, the world’s oldest painter; and the youngest.” If Magical Marxism has a portrait painter, a portrait of itself in action, that artist would surely be Lam.
24.Early Macondo bears an uncanny resemblance to David Harvey’s dream-state at the end of one of his best books, Spaces of Hope, perhaps emphasizing how journeying beyond the spectacle is really going back to the future. The year is 2020, even though it sounds a lot like 2009; a stock market collapse has driven pension funds and banks under; after widespread crop failure and environmental havoc, a meltdown leads to a period of anarchy out of which the ruling class is overthrown and new radical communities organize themselves around egalitarian bioregions. Private property is abolished and soon a transformed spirit pervades the new social order, quicker than anyone would have ever imagined beforehand. Play, aesthetics, and the pursuit of intellectual and personal passions begins to flourish, and people engage in unrepressed “spirit-talk.” Above all, there are “no banks and insurance companies to run our lives, no multinational companies, no lawyers, no stockbrokers, no vast bureaucracies, no professors of this or that, no military apparatus, no elaborate forms of law enforcement.” (David Harvey, Spaces of Hope, California University Press, Berkeley, 2000, p. 280.)
25.Henri Lefebvre, “Theoretical Problems of Autogestion,” in Selected Essays on State, Space, World, ed. Stuart Elden and Neil Brenner, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 2009, p. 148.
26.“In any place and moment in which autogestion is spontaneously manifested,” says Lefebvre, “it carries within itself the possibility of its generalization and radicalization; but at the same time it reveals and crystallizes the contradictions of society before it.” (Lefebvre, “Theoretical Problems of Autogestion,” p. 147.)
1.See “Entretien avec Julien Coupat: La prolongation de ma detention est une petite vengeance,” Le Monde, May 25, 2009.
2.See “Liberating Lipsticks and Lattes,” New York Times, June 18, 2009; and “The Insurrectionary Style,” The New Yorker, June 16, 2009.
3.The Coming Insurrection, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2009, p. 9. All page references are to the Semiotext(e) edition. The Invisible Committee’s “Introduction” to the English translation was written in January 2009 and didn’t appear in the original French version.
4.“Liberating Lipsticks and Lattes.”
5.In a wonderful irony, after Beck introduced the book to his 3 million or so viewers, and after he proclaimed it “the most evil book I’ve read in a long, long time,” The Coming Insurrection soared to No.1 on Amazon’s bestseller list. (See “A Book Attacking Capitalism Gets Sales Help from a Fox Host,” New York Times, March 14, 2010.)
6.Cf. “Considérations sur l’assassinat de Gérard Lebovici,” in Debord, Œuvres, p. 1539.
7.Debord actually uses the expression “insurrectional style” (original emphasis) in The Society of the Spectacle (Thesis #206), describing the young Marx’s “style of negation” from The Poverty of Philosophy. See Debord, Œuvres, p. 853.
8.See Luc Boltanski, “Situationist Inheritors”; http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/situationist-inheritors
9.Poet-boxer, Dadaist, and wild-man “deserter of seventeen nations,” Cravan set sail one morning in 1918 in a small fishing boat into the Gulf of Mexico; his craft breezed out to sea, dipped on the horizon, and nobody ever saw him again. For details of Cravan’s short life and everlasting thought, see my “The Provocations of Arthur Cravan,” The Brooklyn Rail, June 2004; www.brooklynrail.org/2004/06/books/the-provocations-of-arthur-cravan. In a fascinating novel, Arthur Cravan n’est pas mort noyé (Grasset, Paris, 2006), Philippe Dagen reinvents Cravan’s shadowy world of flight and eternal dislike, bringing him back to life in Geneva during the 1960s, claiming he didn’t drown in 1918, that it was yet another prank from an arch-mystificateur.
10.The interview is downloadable in English translation: http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/interview-with-julien-coupat. Gérard Coupat, Julien’s father, says of the affair: “They are turning my son into a scapegoat for a generation who have started to think for themselves about capitalism and its wrongs and to demonstrate against the government ... The government is keeping my son in prison because a man of the left with the courage to demonstrate is the last thing they want now, with the economic situation getting worse and worse. Nothing like this has happened in France since the war. It is very serious.” (Cited in Jason Burke, “France Braced for Rebirth of Violent Left,” Observer, January 4, 2009.)
11.See http://trucadire.com/files/documents/PV-SDAT.pdf
12.Giorgio Agamben, “Terrorisme ou tragi-comédie,” Libération, November 19, 2008; www.liberation.fr/.../0101267186-terrorisme-ou-tragi-comedie
13.Another striking thing about The Coming Insurrection and the arrests of Julien Coupat and the Tarnac Nine relates to the role of radical publishing today: whether writing (and publishing) a book is the same as doing in kind, whether to provoke on the page is enough to make one guilty of the act. Nowadays, it’s perhaps too messy to ban a book when you can just as easily arrest its supposed author. Even the publishers, Éditions la fabrique, headed by veteran gauchiste Eric Hazan, had to face state heat. Anti-terrorist police called Hazan in for questioning and subjected him to four hours of abusive interrogation demanding to know the author’s identity. Needless to say, Hazan refused to comply.
14.Agamben taught Coupat at Paris’s École des hautes études for a while and collaborated in Coupat’s short-lived journal Tiqqun. An English version of The Coming Community was published by Minnesota University Press in 1993, translated by one half of Empire’s duo, Michael Hardt.
15.Coupat’s hard-line francophone Tiqqun shouldn’t be confused with Michael Lerner’s Jewish-American liberal Tikkun.
16.Tiqqun, No. 1, 1999, p. 50. See “Thèses sur le Parti Imaginaire.”
17.James Joyce, Ulysses, Modern Library edition, New York, 1946, p. 327 (“Cyclops,” Chapter 12).
18.Joyce, Ulysses, p. 55. In 2004, the Théorie du Bloom from Tiqqun appeared in stand-alone book form (Théorie du Bloom, Éditions la fabrique, Paris, 2004).
19.“Théorie du Bloom,” Tiqqun, No.1, 1999, p. 25. Throughout Tiqqun, the Debordian concept of spectacle always appears upper-case as Spectacle.
20.Tiqqun, No.1, p. 35. Cf. Herman Melville, Bartleby, Dove Books, New York, 1990, p. 19. In a 1993 essay called “Bartleby, or on Contingency,” Agamben was one of the first contemporary theorists to shine philosophical and political light on the rebellious law-copyist Bartleby (see Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1999, pp. 243–71). Bartleby’s refusal as a form of quiet negation and political potentiality has been emphasized more recently by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000) and by Slavoj Žižek in The Parallax View (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006). One interesting commentary on Bartleby that pre-dates them all is Gilles Deleuze’s postscript to Flammarion’s 1989 French translation of Bartleby. Deleuze’s approach is literary based, but is interesting politically because he draws out the radical lineage—the radical “formula”—connecting Melville’s Bartleby, Dostoevsky’s underground man, Musil’s Ulrich, and Kafka’s Gregor Samsa. Each was a person without qualities or particularities who conveyed a “new logic,” says Deleuze, or rather leads us towards another logic that has little to do with reason (Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby, ou la formule” in Herman Melville, Bartleby, Flammarion, Paris, 1989, p. 191). “Bartleby isn’t sick,” Deleuze writes, “but the doctor of an American malady, the medicine man, the new Christ, a brother to us all” (p. 203).
21.Jean-Paul Sartre, L’existentialisme est un humanisme, Gallimard, Paris, 1996, p. 39.
22.The Coming Insurrection, p. 34.
23.The Coming Insurrection, p. 44. This chimes more with Benjamin Péret’s hard-edged Great Refusal and poetry of non-coincidence: “Je ne mange pas de ce pain-là” [“I won’t stoop to that”], his well-known militant surrealist verse from 1936. “I’ve stolen all I could,” Péret tells us, “from shops whose windows I smashed!”
24.The Coming Insurrection, p. 41, p. 42.
25.Karl Marx, Grundrisse, livre 3: chapitre du capital, Éditions Anthropos 10–18, Paris, 1968, p. 343.
26.The Coming Insurrection, p. 95.
27.The Coming Insurrection, p. 15, p. 16.
28.The Coming Insurrection, p. 99.
29.See André Gorz’s persuasive essay, “A New Historical Subject: The Non-Class of Post-Industrial Proletarians,” in Farewell to the Working Class, Pluto Press, London, 1982, p. 67.
30.Someone once asked Henri Lefebvre if he was really an anarchist: “No,” he said. “I’m a Marxist, of course, so that one day we can all become anarchists.” (Cited in Ed Soja, Thirdspace, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996, p. 33.)
31.See Alberto Toscano, “The War Against Preterrorism: The Tarnac Nine and The Coming Insurrection,” Radical Philosophy, No. 154, March/April 2009.
32.Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class, p. 68.
33.Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class, p. 75.
34.Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class, p. 11.
35.The Coming Insurrection, p. 98.
36.See Ivan Illich, la convivialité, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1973, especially Chapter 2, “La reconstruction conviviale,” pp. 26–49.
37.The Coming Insurrection, p. 98.
38.The Coming Insurrection, p. 110.
39.The Coming Iinsurrection, p. 116. At the end of Vers le cybernanthrope (Denoël, Paris, 1971, pp. 211–13), Lefebvre suggests that the insurrection will vanquish by a new style, homemade and home-baked, at once organized and spontaneous, valorizing desire and passion, pitting slingshots against tanks, nets against armor, and clatter against chatter.
40.The Coming Insurrection, pp. 112–13.
41.The Coming Insurrection, p. 114.
42.The mask incident is recounted in Juana Ponce de León’s “Editor’s Note” to Subcomandante Marcos’s selected writings, Our Word is Our Weapon, Serpent’s Tail Books, London, 2001, p. xxvi.
43.The Coming Insurrection, p. 113.
44.The Coming Insurrection, p. 112.
45.The Coming Insurrection, p. 125.
46.Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805–85) spent half of his life rotting in French jails because of his threatening utopian communist ideals. He came of age between the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. Marx and Engels admired Blanqui’s writings and activism and Marx saw him “as the heart and head of the French proletarian party” (see Marx’s letter to Dr. Watteau, November 10, 1861). Blanqui’s most magical text, however, is the proto-New Age L’éternité par les astres (Eternity through the Stars) (1872). For a great source of Blanqui’s voluminous writings, nearly all of which were scribbled clandestinely behind bars, see www.marxists.org/reference/archive/blanqui/index.htm
47.Blanqui, Textes choisis, Éditions sociales, Paris, 1955, pp. 217–18.
48.The Coming Insurrection, p. 128.
49.The words are General Moncada’s from One Hundred Years of Solitude (p. 135), addressed to Colonel Aureliano Buendia, fearing that such was the latter’s loathing of despotism that he’d turn into Macondo’s most brutal despot.
50.The Coming Insurrection, p. 101.
51.The Coming Insurrection, p. 102.
52.The Coming Insurrection, p. 104.
53.The Coming Insurrection, p. 104.
54.Gorz, “Nine Theses for a Future Left,” in Farewell to the Working Class, p. 2.
55.The Coming Insurrection, p. 108.
56.The Coming Insurrection, p. 109.
57.When Cuba lost access to Soviet oil, fertilizers, and export market in the early 1990s it faced virtual ruin and a very immediate crisis: feeding its population. Cubans initiated a “Special Period” to create a low-energy alterative and developed a system of organic urban agriculture that has since helped resolve its food security problems. Cuba’s city gardens are now renowned and provide lessons for creating a radically low-tech healthy future food system.
58.The Coming Insurrection, p. 96.
59.Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume One, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1986, p. 75.
60.André Gorz, Misères du present, richesse du possible, Éditions Galilée, Paris, 1997, p. 11, emphasis added. Gorz, of course, is speaking of an Exodus from the society of wage-labor, that hastens the end of our alienated “ salaried society.” At times, Gorz suggests that this Exodus is a metaphor, a metaphor of a concrete utopia, a symbol of a departure for a promised land, one yet-to-be invented—or, better, one invented only through the process of departure. “Utopia has the function of letting us stand back,” he says; “it permits us to judge what we are doing in the light of what we should do.”
61.Palmares was the best-known Quilombo, near Recife in Northeastern Brazil; in its hey-day it had a population of around 30,000 renegade ex-slaves. Palmares endured for almost the whole of the seventeenth century.
62.The Coming Insurrection, pp. 12–13.
63.The Coming Insurrection, p. 98.
Chapter 3
1.Daniela Issa, “Praxis of Empowerment: Mística and Mobilization in Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement,” Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 34, 2007, p. 125.
2.In the radical imagination, mística figures much in the same vein as Raymond Williams’ “structure of feeling”: as a meaning and value actively lived and felt. “We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse,” Williams wrote, “specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating continuity.” (Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1978, p. 132.)
3.Hobsbawm, cover blurb for Jan Rocha’s and Sue Branford’s Cutting the Wire: The Story of the Landless Movement in Brazil, Latin American Bureau, London, 2002.
4.In April 1996, 19 MST members were massacred by the military police, and 69 wounded, in what started as a peaceful protest in the Amazonian state of Pará. The event, now as mythical as the banana workers’ massacred from One Hundred Years of Solitude, caused national and international outcry, and prompted one of Brazil’s largest criminal cases, graphically documented by Amnesty International and still largely unsettled.
5.Cited in Issa, “Praxis of Empowerment,” p. 129. Lonas pretas are the black plastic tarpaulins used as makeshift tents; they signify the initial stage of a land occupation and for the MST are loaded with deep meaning and powerful symbolism. So, too, is the MST’s red flag, with its map of Brazil and two peasant laborers, a man and a woman. As for seeds, they represent the land and farming and subsistence, hope of things to come, growing in the future, of fertility and food for the generations to come. Seeds have utopian connotations, but, as every organic farmer knows, are also susceptible to inclement weather. Much of what drives MST activism is collective memory and the creation of a symbolic, largely imaginary universe, all of which magically transforms the life-and-death realism of their plight in Brazil.
6.Cited in Abdurazack Karriem, “The Rise and Transformation of the Brazilian Landless Movement into a Counter-Hegemonic Political Actor: A Gramscian Analysis,” Geoforum, Vol. 40, 2009, p. 319.
7.Issa, “Praxis of Empowerment,” p. 130.
8.Federico García Lorca, In Search of Duende, New Direction Books, New York, 1955, p. 52.
9.William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (1800), in The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Houghton Mifflin & Company, New York, 1932, p. 791.
10.Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” p. 791, emphasis added.
11.Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” pp. 795–6.
12.Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” p. 795.
13.Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads, p. 790.
14.Walter Benjamin, “Hashish in Marseilles,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, Schocken Books, New York, 1978, p. 141, p. 144.
15.Benjamin, “Hashish in Marseilles,” p. 142.
16.Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Reflections, p. 190.
17.Vladimir Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (The Crisis in our Party), Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1978.
18.Rosa Luxemburg, “Leninism or Marxism” in The Russian Revolution, and Lenin or Marxism?, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1961, p. 94.
19.Luxemburg, “Leninism or Marxism?”, p. 94.
20.Luxemburg, “Leninism or Marxism?”, p. 92.
21.Luxemburg, “Leninism or Marxism?”, p. 94.
22.Henri Lefebvre, L’irruption, de Nanterre au sommet, Éditions Anthropos, Paris, 1968, p. 79. The text is translated into English under the title The Explosion, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1969. In June 2005, the British Labour government authorized a ban on all impromptu protests within a half-mile “exclusion zone” around Westminster. Some Members of Parliament say protests are an “eyesore”; loudspeakers distract them from their work and piles of placards reputedly pose “security risks.” Henceforth, under this new exclusion legislation, police have to authorize any demonstration, and anyone staging an unauthorized spontaneous protest can be arrested.
23.Mike Davis, “Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Proletariat,” New Left Review, March–April, 2004, pp. 29–30. See also Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, London, 2006.
24.Lefebvre, L’irruption, p. 81.
25.Lefebvre, L’irruption, pp. 81–2.
26.Lefebvre, L’irruption, pp. 82–3.
27.Henri Lefebvre, The Survival of Capitalism, Alison and Busby, London, 1976, p. 100. “There must be an objective,” Lefebvre says, “a strategy: nothing can replace political thought, or a cultivated spontaneity.” Curiously, when Lefebvre published La survie du capitalisme in 1973, he included several essays that had already figured in The Explosion [L’irruption, de Nanterre au sommet], including “Contestation, Spontaneity, Violence.” Alas, the English version removed these repetitions, denying Anglophone audiences the chance to muse on the reason for the doubling up. The subtitle of The Survival of Capitalism perhaps offers clues: “Reproduction of Relations of Production.” Five-years on from ’68, the capitalist system had not only withstood “subjective” bombardment, it had “objectively” begun to grow, too. The essential condition of this growth is that relations of production can be reproduced. In a nod to Althusser, Lefebvre’s text is less exuberant in its revolutionary hopes, and enters into the world of institutional analyses; yet it’s obvious he can’t quite resist toying with the idea of spontaneity and contestation throwing a spanner in the apparatus of societal reproduction.
28.Lefebvre, L’irruption, pp. 172.
29.Stendhal, Racine and Shakespeare, cited in Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, Verso, London, 1995, p. 239. Stendhal (1783–1842) was the penname of Henri Beyle, whose romantic novels, especially Scarlet and Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), brought him fame and fans. Stendhal dedicated his works to “the happy few,” and coined the term “Beylism” as his philosophical credo for the pursuit of happiness. His dedication may have been an allusion to Shakespeare’s Henry V: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” Interestingly, Shakespeare’s phrase would feature in Guy Debord’s film version of The Society of the Spectacle (1973). Following the caption of “we happy few,” the frame flashes to wall graffiti at an occupied Sorbonne, circa late 1960s: “Run quickly, comrade, the old world is behind you!”
30.The idea of a “Smart Mob” comes from Howard Rheingold, the virtual communities guru whose influential book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Basic Books, New York, 2002), is the bible of disaffected computer geeks who’ve transformed themselves into hackers, mobile IT activists, and connected citizens now coalescing around autonomous lifestyle communities. Smart Mob keywords are: “mobile communication,” “pervasive computing,” ‘wireless networks,” and “collective action.” As Rheingold puts it in his own summary of the book: “The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities. Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in the environment as well as with other people’s telephones. Dirt-cheap microprocessors embedded in everything from box tops to shoes are beginning to permeate furniture, buildings, neighborhoods, products with invisible intercommunicating smartifacts. When they connect the tangible objects and places of our daily lives with the Internet, handheld communication media mutate into wearable remote control devices for the physical world.”
31.“Protests Powered by Cell-phone,” New York Times, September 9, 2004.
32.Peter Waterman, “International Labor Communication by Computer: The Fifth International,” Working Paper Series No.129, Institute of Social Studies (ISS), The Hague, The Netherlands, July 1992.
33.Waterman, “International Labor Communication by Computer,” pp. 3–4.
34.In a fundamental sense, “hackers” can “crack” open computer systems and gain access to them, sometimes covertly, by circumventing security devices. Hackers are generally united in their dislike of corporate monopolization of information technology and digital media, and usually share a profound anti-authoritarian impulse in their development and propagation of free software.
35.André Gorz, L’immatériel: connaissance, valeur et capital, Éditions Galilée, Paris, 2003. See, especially, Chapter III, “Vers une société de l’intelligence?” In September 2007, the 84-year-old Gorz and his terminally ill wife Dorine ended their days together in a joint-suicide pact. Gorz’s poignant memoir, Lettre à D (2006), a postscript to their undying companionship (undying even in death) became a bestseller in France; sparse and elegant, this text exhibits all the qualities of what Magical Marxism should be: a tale of love in the time of social theory.
36.Gorz, L’immatériel, p. 93.
37.Gorz, L’immatériel, p92
38.Cf. Sarkozy’s Presidential campaign mantra from March 2006: “Travailler plus pour gagner plus!” As a recent Le Monde “Dossier & Document” indicates, the majority of French now recognize the bankruptcy of the Sarkozy equation: as economic crises deepen into everyday life, layoffs and increasing job insecurity are the order of the day. Most workers prefer to reduce their hours of work, and many, “to the great chagrin of the unions, prefer to battle for a severance cheque than preserve a job already condemned.” (“Travail: Le temps des révoltes,” Le Monde dossiers et documents, No. 389, septembre 2009.) Cf. Chapter 5 below.
39.Peter Glotz, Die beschleunigte Gesellschaft, cited in Gorz, L’immatériel, p.92.
40.Gorz, L’immatériel, p. 98.
41.Marx, Capital I, p. 443, emphasis added. Marx’s discussion on “Cooperation” (Chapter 13) is worthy of closer inspection, it still having a lot to say about the relationship between technological advancement and collective human potentiality, and this not only in its capitalistic guise. “When the worker cooperates in a planned way with others,” says Marx, “he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species” (p. 447).
42.Marx, Capital I, p. 449.
43.Oekonux is an amalgam of “OEKOnomie” (Open Source Economy) and Linux, the free software project conceived in the early 1990s by Finish computer scientist Linus Torvalds. Torvalds wanted to free up intellectual resources from corporate control and create a non-alienated knowledgebase available to all. Linux continues to pioneer a new ethic with respect to work, money, and an exchange-value economy. See www.oekonux.org
45.“Free Software and GPL Society: An Interview with Stefan Merten,” 2001; http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/mertentext.html
46.“Free Software and GPL Society: An Interview with Stefan Merten.” The German Selbstentfaltung is close to the French épanouissement personnel, a sort of personal blossoming and blooming, and closer, too, to the Imaginary Party’s “theory of Bloom” (see Chapter 2). For that reason, I prefer to keep Stefan Merten’s somewhat clunky translation of “self-unfolding” because it denotes something in motion, something in the process of becoming, of opening out, of flowering; it’s also a newer, fresher-sounding label for expressing a post-industrial becoming, replacing the jaded Marxian concept of “ self-development.”
47.Robert McChesney, a leading American left activist and media analyst, is, however, right to underscore the “hardware” stumbling block. To get real digital freedom, McChesney claims, our “ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies, which are state created monopolies, and to divest them from control.” The cell-phone companies are similar obstacles. “The one thing the phone and cable companies are good at,” McChesney says, “is buying off and controlling politicians. They aren’t any good at the actual business of telecommunications service provision.” (Robert McChesney, “Media Capitalism, the State and twenty-first century Media Democracy Struggles,” The Bullet, August 2009; www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/246.php)
48.Unsurprisingly, the loony US right hasn’t taken these human potentialities sitting down, and fearing the worst of all fears—an attack on its bottom-line—dismisses the Free Software movement as a Marxist plot to overthrow America. Thus, the so-called “Heartland Institute,” which offers “market-based approaches to environmental protection, privatization of public services, and deregulation in areas of property rights,” claims: “Net neutrality [the Free Software movement] divests control over the Internet from the private sector to the government. And in typical Marxist fashion, innocuous words—the language of neutralism and liberty—cloak an agenda that would crush American freedom.” (See www.webcitation.org/5kkEOK21I)
49.Marx, Capital I, p. 449.
50.Marx, Capital I, p. 460.
51.“Free Software and GPL Society: An Interview with Stefan Merten.”
52.Pekka Himanen, The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age, Random House, New York, 2001. Himanen’s book, since translated into dozens of languages, has an epilogue by his Berkeley mentor, the sociologist Manuel Castells. In my own book, Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City (Routledge, New York, 2002), I was critical of Castells’ reification of technology in the trilogy The Informational Age. Himanen, however, has demonstrated how technology doesn’t have to decouple from social relations, nor does it have to kowtow to the corporate sector. Indeed, technology, as Himanen shows, can have all the normative qualities that Castells denounces in his mammoth text. “Theory and research,” says Castells, “in general as well as in this book, should be considered as a means for understanding our world, and should be judged exclusively on their accuracy, rigor and relevance.” (Manuel Castells, The End of the Millennium; Volume 3 of The Informational Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1996, p. 359.)
53.Theorists like Gorz have also been at the center of debates in Europe about a “revenue of existence,” about a “social income” or “guaranteed income,” which isn’t a handout from the state or a disguised form of dependency like unemployment benefit. Nor is it a top-up for a low-wage economy, hence a state subsidy for tight employers. Rather, a social income is an assertion of a “right to a social existence,” to an income that guarantees a “self-unfolding,” as well as an acknowledgement that a salaried work society is finally, both ecologically and socially, kaput. Gorz finds in the social income movement an extension of the hacker ethic: “For the vast majority of unemployed, it is no longer a question of defending an illusory return to full-employment, but to invent, and experiment in, the full employment of life.” (Laurent Guilloteau, cited in Gorz, L’immatériel, p. 101.)
54.Interview with Himanen, Libération, May 25, 2001; www.freescape.eu.org/biblio/article.php3?id_article=129
55.For an interesting discussion of the hacker ethic in terms of new work relations and modes of direct cooperation, see Pascal Jollivet, “L’éthique hacker de Pekka Himanen,” Multitudes, mars–avril 2002, pp. 161–70.
56.Henri Lefebvre, “Theoretical Problems of; Autogestion,” p. 147.
57.The neo-liberal marketplace, of course, is the domain of non-innovative, un-dynamic state-constructed monopolies whose essential strength lies not in the products they make (if they still make any products), but in the manner in which they successfully destroy opposition and throttle competition. And they are able to do so because they buy off politicians and exploit every subsidy and tax break they can scrounge off the state, while spreading the myth that they are champions of the free market.
Chapter 4
1.Franz Kafka, The Castle, Minerva, London, 1992, pp. 59–60.
2.Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, p. 9.
3.Cf. Vinay Gidwani’s interesting discussion in “ Capitalism’s Anxious Whole: Fear, Capture and Escape in the Grundrisse,” Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, Vol. 40, 2008, pp. 857–78.
4.G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977, p. 19.
5.The magnificent positivity of the Grundrisse, for example, comes when Marx makes his own leap of the imagination, when he shrugs off the shackles of Hegel’s Logic. In a little over ten pages, Marx reaches out to Fourier and projects the wealth of a futuristic communist society predicated on disposable time, on free time outside of production (see Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973, pp. 699–712).
6.Still, Spinoza was Marx’s favorite philosopher and it’s noteworthy how frequently the idea of the “positive” crops up in Marx himself, most regularly in his early writings, especially in “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” (1844). There, Marx speaks of creating a “positive community” (Early Writings, p. 347), a community that is a “positive expression” of communism (p. 345), a community in which there’s “positive supersession” of private property (p. 349); the re-appropriation of human life, for Marx, is “therefore the positive supersession of all estrangement” (p. 349) (emphases added). At that point, Marx says, “a positive humanism, positively originating in itself, comes into being” (p. 395, emphasis added). Moreover, in the same text Marx roots for Feuerbach in the latter’s opposition to the Hegelian “negation of the negation,” endorsing Feuerbach’s justification for taking “the positive, that is sensuously ascertained, as his starting-point” (pp. 381–2, emphases added).
7.Holloway, Change the World Without taking Power, p. 169.
8.Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power, p. 167.
9.Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power, p. 167.
10.Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 1991,p. 158.
11.Negri, The Savage Anomaly, p. 156. Negri also helps delineate Hegel’s thought from Spinoza’s. Spinoza’s philosophy, says Negri, has nothing to do with either negation or mediation; in Spinoza, the role of spontaneity isn’t “blocked” by a closed logical system of contradictory articulation. There simply is “no sordid game of mediation” (p. 141), only a pure affirmation actually defined by spontaneity, which “reproduces itself with increasing intensity at always more substantial levels of being” (p. 47).
12.Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume One, p. 210.
13.Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume One, p. 197.
14.Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume One, p. 200.
15.Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume One, p. 206.
16.Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume One, pp. 209–10.
17.Mariana Mora, “Zapatista Anti-Capitalist Politics and the ‘Other Campaign’: Learning from the Struggles for Indigenous Rights and Autonomy,” Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 34, No. 2, 2007, p. 69.
18.Both cited in Mora, “Zapatista Anti-Capitalist Politics,” p. 70.
19.Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, Commonwealth, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2009, pp. 236–48.
20.David Harvey, “Commonwealth: An Exchange,” Artforum, November 2009, p. 258.
21.R.J. Spjut, “Defining Subversion,” British Journal of Law and Society, Vol. 6, No. 2, Winter 1979, pp. 254–61. Citation from p. 254.
22.Spjut, “Defining Subversion,” p. 256.
23.Spjut, “Defining Subversion,” p. 261.
24.Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche, Viking Press, New York, 1954, p. 160.
25.Saul Padover (ed.), The Letters of Karl Marx, Prentice-Hall Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1979, original emphasis.
26.Marx, “Ricardo’s Denial of General Over-Production. Possibility of a Crisis Inherent in the Inner Contradictions of Commodity and Money,” Chapter XVII of “Theories of Surplus Value,” in Tucker (ed.), The Marx–Engels Reader, pp. 443–4.
27.Hilary Wainwright, “Porto Alegre: Public Power Beyond the State,” in Sue Branford and Bernardi Kucinski, Lula and the Workers Party in Brazil, New Press, New York, 2005, p. 113; see also Hilary Wainwright, Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy, Verso, London, 2003.
28.See Patrick Bond, “The World Social Forum,” in Rupert Taylor (ed.), Third Sector Research, Springer, New York, 2010, pp. 327–36.
29.Walden Bello, “The Forum at the Crossroads,” Foreign Policy in Focus, 2007; www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4196
30.Along with events at the Usina do Gasômetro, other sessions were held at the city’s assorted municipal buildings. Sometimes these events coincided with one another; oftentimes people knew of neither. Meanwhile, unadvertised meetings being staged in PT as in the Portuguese-friendly satellite towns like Canoas and São Leopoldo merely compounded the sense of dislocation and disunity.
31.Cf. David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, Profile Books, London, 2010.
32.Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1998, p. 8.
33.Cf. Bessompierre, L’amitié de Guy Debord, rapide comme une charge de cavalerie légère, Les fondeurs de briques, Saint-Sulpice-La-Pointe, 2010.
Chapter 5
1.See Peter Lang, LETS Work: Rebuilding the Local Economy, Grover Books, Swanley, Kent, 1994.
2.See Michael Linton, “The LETSystem Design Manual” (August, 1994); www.gmlets.u-net.com/design/dml^3.html
3.“Speculative Realism” is a new, emergent branch of radical philosophy that’s now capturing the imagination of young philosophers. Championed by Quentin Meillassoux (a French philosopher based at Paris’s École Normale Supérieure) and Ray Brassier (a Brit based at the American University in Beirut), Speculative Realism interrogates the “correlationism” that has preoccupied philosophers since the beginnings of philosophy itself: what is the relationship (or correlation) between the subject and object, between the thinking mind and the external world? Speculative Realism tries to steer a course between what Graham Harman calls “the robotic chains of reasoning” of the Analytical School and the “non sequiturs, lack of clarity, and poetic self-indulgence” of contemporary continental philosophy (see Harman’s Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, re.Press, Melbourne, 2009; see also Meillassoux’s After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, Continuum Books, London, 2008; and Brassier’s Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2008). Much of the excitement and promise of Speculative Realism lies in the way it explores different brands of knowledge and action outside of empirical forms and transcendental norms, suggesting that there are other possibilities besides the Hobson’s choices of Hume versus Kant, Marxist materialism versus Hegelian idealism, or hard-edged realism versus flaky po-mo constructivism. The ontological terrain, in other words, is a lot more open, a lot more floating than has hitherto been credited, even if Speculative Realism still clings onto a distinctively realist (i.e. non-human) anchoring, doubtless a little too realist for José Arcadio Buendia’s fantastical tastes.
4.Jean-Paul Sartre, L’être et le néant, Gallimard, Paris, 1943, p. 33.
5.For Sartre, “situations” are loaded with all kinds of profound existential meaning: you are never entirely free in a situation, he says, but you can change the situation, make choices in it, imagine other situations, construct other situations. The idea of situations struck a loud chord with Debord, too, in his Situationist (and earlier Lettrist) years. Both these groups sought to hijack certain urban situations, to detonate them, modify them, push the limits of their internal logic to create situations with new internal logics. “The new Beauty will be THE SITUATION,” Debord said in 1954, “that is to say, provisional and lived” (see Guy Debord, “Réponse à une enquête du groupe surréaliste Belge,” in Guy Debord présente POTLATCH (1954–1957), Gallimard, Paris, 1996, p. 42).
6.Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, Tome 1, Gallimard, Paris, 1960, p. 544, original emphasis.
7.Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, Tome 1, p. 432, emphasis added.
8.Sartre, L’être et le néant, pp. 98–9.
9.Jean-Paul Sartre, L’imaginaire, Gallimard, Paris, 1940, p. 239, p. 343.
10.Cf. Marx, “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” Early Writings, pp. 389–90.
11.Marx, “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” Early Writings, p. 328.
12.Sartre, L’imaginaire, p. 355.
13.Sartre, L’imaginaire, p. 359.
14.Susan Watkins, “Editorial: Shifting Sands,” New Left Review, January–February 2010, pp. 5–27.
15.A line from André Gorz’s Letter to D (Polity Press, London, 2009, pp. 72–3) comes to mind in this regard, a personal admission by Gorz that seems to capture the whole façon de vivre of the left: “I am comfortable with the art of failure and annihilation, not with the art of success and positive affirmation.” Of course, Gorz would, through his wife Dorine, eventually learn how to love and affirm the affirmative; his lessons on personal as well as political liberation are lessons we can all learn together.
16.Marx, Capital I, p. 283.
17.Marx, Capital I, p. 284.
18.Marx, Capital I, p. 284.
19.Cf. Marx, Capital I, Chapter 13: “Cooperation,” p. 443.
20.Marx, “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” Early Writings, p. 353, original emphasis.
21.Marx, “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” Early Writings, p. 351.
22.Marx, “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” Early Writings, p. 354, original emphases.
23.Marx, Capital I, pp. 464–5.
24.Marx, Capital I, p. 460.
25.Marx, Capital I, p. 548.
26.Thus the nonsense of Lenin’s fascination with Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management” principles, through which Lenin wanted to “fill in the pores” of the frantic Soviet working day.
27.Marx, Grundrisse, especially pp. 699–700.
28.Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 704–5.
29.Marx, Grundrisse, p. 700.
30.The perils and possibilities of so-called “immaterial labor” and “cognitive capitalism” have prompted lively debate amongst Marxists and post-Marxists. The best-known exponents, and perhaps its most blatant optimists, are Hardt and Negri who, beginning with Empire (2000), uphold “the general intellect” of the multitude as the virtual vanguard of revolutionary transformation. “The central role previously occupied by the labor power of mass factory workers in the production of surplus value is today increasingly filled by intellectual, immaterial, and communicative labor power. It is thus necessary to develop a new political theory of value that can pose the problem of this new capitalist accumulation of value at the center of the mechanism of exploitation (and thus, perhaps, at the center of potential revolt).” (Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 29.) See, too, Negri’s earlier Marx Beyond Marx (Autonomedia, New York, 1989), which offers some imaginative “lessons on the Grundrisse,” particularly on the role of subjectivity and agency in Marx. Other key sources on this debate are Gorz’s L’immatériel (2003) and Yann Moulier Boutang’s excellent collection, Le capitalisme cognitive: La nouvelle grande transformation (Éditions Amsterdam, Paris, 2007). Much of the action around cognitive capitalism dovetails with that of “hacker ethics” and a “guaranteed social income.”
31.Marx, Grundrisse, p. 705, emphasis added.
32.Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 705–6.
33.Gorz, L’immateriél, p. 17.
34.See, especially, Harvey, The New Imperialism, Chapter 4.
35.Marx, Grundrisse, p. 705. According to Norbert Bensel, Director of Human Resources at the German car manufacturer Daimler-Benz, workers now equate to “business associates.” “The most creative businesses,” he says, “are ones with the greatest numbers of intimate relations ... Business associates are an important part of the business’s capital ... Their motivation, their know-how, their capacity to innovate and their social and emotional competence, are a growing factor in the evaluation of their work ... This will no longer be evaluated in terms of number of hours on the job, but on the basis of objectives attained and quality of results. They are entrepreneurs.” The citation comes from The Coming Insurrection, p. 47. Interestingly, Gorz, in L’immatériel (p. 14), also furnishes the same quotation, which is where, I suspect, the “Invisible Committee” first spotted it.
36.Marx, Grundrisse, p. 706.
37.Marx, Grundrisse, p. 708.
38.Marx, Grundrisse, p. 706, original emphases. Marx is here citing an anonymous pamphlet published in London in 1821 called The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, deduced from principles of political economy in a letter to Lord John Russell. The nameless author is widely believed to have been a disciple of David Ricardo.
39.Marx, Grundrisse, p. 712.
40.Marx, Grundrisse, p. 611.
41.The Coming Insurrection, p. 104, original emphasis.
42.Cf. Marx, Capital I, pp. 794–802.
43.See Don Peck, “How a New Jobless Era will Transform America,” The Atlantic, March 2010, p. 44.
44.Charly Boyadjian, “Le temps en ‘3X8’,” Travailler deux heures par jour, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1977, pp. 25–6.
45.Boyadjian, Travailler deux heures par jour, p. 29. It’s important to remember, however, that these two hours aren’t hours in which people are still disempowered in work, still alienated and stupefied. “Nobody,” said Simone Weil ironically, “would accept being a slave for two hours a day; slavery, for it to be accepted, ought to last long enough each day to completely break a man.” (Simone Weil, La condition ouvrière, Gallimard folios essais, Paris, 2002 [1934].)
46.Peck, “How a New Jobless Era will Transform America,” p. 46.
Chapter 6
1.Henri Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, Tome II, Éditions La Nef de Paris, Paris, 1959, p. 428.
2.Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, Tome II, pp. 428–9.
3.Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, Tome II, p. 429.
4.One night, trying surreptitiously to get into a bathroom where Meme, “naked and trembling with love,” awaited him, a guard shot Mauricio down from the drainpipe. A bullet that lodged in his spinal column reduced Mauricio to bed for the rest of his life. He died of old age in solitude, “tormented by memories and by the yellow butterflies, who did not give him a moment’s peace” (p. 238).
5.Henri Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, Bélibaste, Genève, 1973, p. 11.
6.Cf. Henri Lefebvre, Le droit à la ville, Éditions Anthropos, Paris, 1968, p. 120.
7.ZUS are “Zones Urbaines Sensibles,” the French euphemism for problematic neighborhoods, “sensitive” areas with “sensitive” populations; the term is generally synonymous with the peripheral banlieues in which 4.5 million French people face poverty, employment, and insecure work. In French ZUS, official unemployment rates for men between the ages of 15 and 24 currently run at 41.7%; most young men living in ZUS face the reality of probably never being able to find stable work.
8.Gorz senses the danger with this kind of dabbling, too. In a letter addressed to the Belgian political philosopher, Philippe Van Parijs, responding to the latter’s article “Why Surfers Should be Fed” (Philosophy and Public Affairs, No. 20, 1991, pp. 101–31), which outlines a “liberal case for an unconditional basic income,” Gorz writes: “Why does this line of thinking provoke a certain malaise in me? Because the argument here bases itself at the level of quasi-algebraic logic, and questions of justice aren’t reducible to that. Justice starts out from a normative ideal, which precedes all possible rationalization. You can shift from the normative to a logical and judicial formalization, but you cannot begin from logical rationalization and then move in the opposite direction.” (André Gorz cited in Philippe van Parijs, “De la sphère autonome à l’allocation universelle,” in Christophe Fourel [ed.], André Gorz: un penseur pour le XXIe siècle, La découverte, Paris, 2009, p. 173.)
9.Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, p. 21.
10.“Take Back the Land” started out in Miami in 2006 when a handful of activists and homeless people seized control of a vacant publicly owned lot in the Liberty City section of Miami, establishing a self-run shantytown called Umoja (Unity) Village, constructed out of discarded plywood and packing palettes, tin roofs and cardboard boxes, and housing 53 displaced residents. The village was held for six months before a mysterious fire burnt it to the ground. Nonetheless, these actions attracted sympathetic audiences nationwide, sparking a larger campaign against capital investment through gentrification, predatory loans, and enticing financial packages, on the one hand, and capital divestment through housing foreclosures, abandonment, and repossession, on the other. Take Back the Land received added lift from Michael Moore’s recent film, Capitalism: A Love Story, which featured activist Max Rameau and highlighted the successes of the Miami occupations and eviction defenses.
11.Cf. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Faber and Faber, London, 1966, p. 42: “The great fact emerges that after that historic date all holographs so far exhumed initialled by Haromphrey bear the sigla H.C.E. and ... to his cronies it was equally certainly a pleasant turn of the populace which gave him as sense of those normative letters the nickname Here Comes Everybody. An imposing everybody he always indeed looked, constantly the same as and equal to himself and magnificently well worthy of any and all such universalisation.”
12.See Andy Merrifield, Dialectical Urbanism, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2002, especially Chapter 4.
13.The metropolis, Hardt and Negri say, “inscribes” the multitude’s past, “its subordinations, suffering, and struggles,” while it “poses the conditions, positive and negative, for its future.” In the “era of biopolitical production,” they add, “the metropolis increasingly fulfils the role as the inorganic body of the multitude” (Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, p. 249). The metropolis, then, is rightly conceived as the site of the production of a new urban commons, as well as the site where urban social movements and work-based autonomous politics can fruitfully conjoin.
14.Marx, Capital I, p. 342.
15.Marx, Capital I, p. 344.
16.See the very interesting collection edited by Anne Dreuille, Les aventuriers de l’économie solidaire: entre reconnaissance et résistance: la quête des chômeurs-créateurs, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2001. The citation comes from page 187. The book includes touching testimonies from the young people who participated in the project. It also includes a short offering from André Gorz, who saw the “Academy of Liberated Time” as an “embryonic form” of a potential new relationship to work, and a mode of life that’s somehow “de-economized” in surplus-value terms.
17.The Coming Insurrection, p. 108, original emphases.
18.The Coming Insurrection, p. 108.
19.Debord, Panegyric, p. 51.
20.Guy Debord, Correspondance volume 5: janvier 1973–décembre 1978, Librairie Arthème Fayard, Paris, 2005, p. 452.
21.Guy Debord, Marquis de Sade a des yeux de fille, Éditions Fayard, Paris, 2004, p. 57.
22.Goethe, Faust, Anchor Books, New York, 1963, p. 421. “He! He! Send him away!” is uttered by Gretchen, and the “He” in question is Mephisto.
23.Breton cited in Richardson, Refusal of the Shadow, pp. 23–4
24.Alfred Métraux, Le Vaudou haïtien, cited in Richardson, Refusal of the Shadow, p. 26.
25.Richardson, Refusal of the Shadow, p. 27.
26.The Chinese-American poet, John Yau, thinks that the location of Lam’s “ethnic” painting is telling, that to see it we “must wait in the cloakroom”: “the artist has been allowed into the museum’s lobby,” says Yau, “but, like a delivery boy, has been made to wait in an inauspicious passageway near the front door.” (See John Yau, “Please Wait in the Cloakroom,” Arts Magazine, No. 63, December 1988.) This past June (2010), after extensive refurbishments had taken place at the Museum of Modern Art, I returned to the mid-town gallery. Now, Lam’s canvas has finally entered the main stage, to a prime site on the fourth floor, in the thick of the Americas’ modern art.
27.See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, Routledge, New York, 1994; and Michael Sprinker (ed.), Ghostly Demarcations: Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, Verso, London, 1999.
28.Derrida, Specters of Marx, pp. 85–6.