Colin Cremin
The excuse of scarcity, which has justified institutionalised repression since its inception, weakens as man's knowledge and control over nature enhances the means for fulfilling human needs with a minimum of toil
(Marcuse 2006: 92).
From the condition of scarcity arises the need for repression, self-sacrifice and sublimation of libidinal energies in socially necessary tasks (work, cultural production and so forth), or so Freud (2006) argued. Moreover, the more we submit to the superego law by internalising and sublimating aggressive instincts, the greater are its demands and through (his process civilisations evolve. Herbert Marcuse's objection is an obvious one. Repression has become a function of capitalism rather than a necessity of life. The reality principle we submit to is the historically specific performance principle of instrumental reason and exchange. As Marcuse points out, the productive forces are adequately developed that if utilised for our social needs rather than in the interests of capital, scarcity could be overcome and erotic energies liberated from mundane and alienating labour. An empirically defendable proposition, Marcuse's work is a rejoinder to the now prevalent view that the human population has exceeded the planet's carrying capacity. However, it is not just the ecological argument that strengthens the ideological justification for libidinal restraint and austerity; more pertinent to this chapter is the scarcity of jobs that commands a continual sacrifice to the logic of employability. It is this reality that binds erotic energy to capital in the hope that a job will eventually materialise. As rising numbers join the dole queue and those fortunate enough to be exploited by capital fear for their futures, there is an added impetus to develop the credentials and train ourselves in the art of becoming marketable commodities for capital to use. The reality principle of capitalism today, the injunction to improve employability intensifies on diminishing job opportunities, insecurity and unfulfilling labour. "Employability" is a master signifier that connects us all to capital: materially, ideologically and libidinally.
As Marcuse (1969: 11) put it, "the so- called consumer economy and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form." A victim of the current political and economic crisis, the subject remains largely wedded to capital and it is upon such shoulders that our future, at least in Europe, depends. This is the reality that critical theory and movements against capital have to grapple with. Shifting from what Marcuse called a Great Refusal to play by the rules of the capitalist game to the more contemporary notion of subtraction most prominent in its Marxist-Lacanian inflection in Slavoj Žižek's work, this chapter charts out a map for political transformation. Questioning the value of placing libidinal subtraction (Lacan) before material subtraction (Marx), and the consequences of this for how struggle is conceived, a number of propositions are made as to how a Great, as opposed to small, Refusal or generalised act in the Žižekian sense can be achieved. The chapter linearly progresses from abstract theory to its deployment in an analysis and critique of employability—regarded here as the principal ideological device through which the subject remains invested in capitalist social relations—through to a discussion of the concrete possibilities of a Great Refusal or generalised subtraction. The critique focuses on productive relations as the moment which begins the cycle of accumulation, exchange and expansion, and which is thereby central to a politics of subtraction from the Capitalist State matrix.
It begins with a tickle and ends in a blaze of petrol. That's always what jouissance is
(Lacan 1991: 72).
Signifiers dance in the gap between the bodily itch and its satisfaction, coordinated within a movement called subjectivity. Jouissance confirms and reveals itself through entropy, a dance of dissatisfaction in which each movement opens up a space for the next. This "spoliation" of jouissance, Lacan argues, is what Marx condemned in surplus value: "surplus value is surplus jouissance." (Lacan, 1991: 108) Thus capital and subjectivity are set in motion by a constitutive gap, a gap for making profit/signification, the closure of which brings about crises. And here, like pauses in the beat, crises anticipate new rhythms that as they kick in revitalise the dance and guarantee our hopelessly entwined future.
Writes Lacan (1991: 80), "Once a higher level lias been passed, surplus jouissance is no longer surplus jouissance but is inscribed simply as a value to be inscribed in or deducted from the totality of whatever it is that is accumulating." Surplus jouissance tied to the commodity form creates value in the act of labour, realises it in the act of exchange and destroys it in the act of consumption. Beginning with a tickle, ending with bombs, it is the fuel that enables capital to circulate, expand and ultimately destroy everything that human life depends on. Through the Marxist and Lacanian concepts of surplus value / jouissance we can see that the worker is exploited twice over: in the first "materialist" instance by creating value in excess of remuneration in wage, and in the second libidinal sense through an excessive attachment to the Lacanian objet a operationalised for capital. Corresponding forms of alienation one historical relating to the abstraction of labour power and the other a historxcal relating to the fundamental split between subject and signifies are the wound for which coimnodified bandages in the form of DVD box-sets, new dresses, iProducts and so on are sought. As Marx (1993: 99) explains, "a definite production determines a definite consumption, distribution and exchange as well as definite relations between these different moments." We can either suffer or enjoy its symptoms or else become organised into a movement that subtracts itself from the bind of surplus value/ surplus jouissance. And here the worker is at an advantage. Capital caimot subtract itself from the worker without undermining its own drive for profit but the worker, identifying as belonging on the side of a proletarian struggle, can end its material alienation. It can subtract its libidinal energy from the (disavowed) enjoyments of capital and "resublimate" it dirough a positive identification with, and excessive attachment to, the object of global emancipation, however signified. Subtraction is an act that reconfigures the symbolic order, placing the subject within a new linguistic constellation from which a new idea of itself and its relation to others is realised. When people strike, they establish forms of solidarity based on a common interest that negates the abstract universality of the work team or presupposition of a shared humanitarian interest. But these subtractions are often mere hiccups in the accumulative process, aimed at getting a better deal rather than constituting a subjective break. Likewise when people take part in mass demonstrations, those demonstrations are often fragile in composition and limited in duration, even when impressive in numbers. While at certain moments surplus jouissance is de facto subtracted from the accumulative process, it does not mean that we are any less bound to our fetishistic enjoyments of capital, that we are any less animated by the prospect of acquiring a new product or developing a career.
By withdrawing its labour, the class upon which capital depends reveals itself and therefore the antagonism that until then was disavowed. "The point of subtraction," as Žižek (2012: 33) succinctly explains, "is to reduce the overall complex structure to its antagonistic minimal difference." If we approach subtraction in a strictly Marxist sense of exploitation of waged labour, those actively contributing energies to the accumulative process are the only ones with the capacity to subtract. This would exclude surplus labour and as Fabio Viglii (2012: 154) puts it, "subtraction is already immanent to our experience of social life." Consequently, the only effective weapons against capital would be those Žižek pejoratively calls the "salaried bourgeoisie": they create value in their labour and destroy it through their capacity to consume thereby ensuring capitalist circulation and expansion. Advancing on this, it will be argued that subtraction matters irrespective of whether a person has traversed the fantasy of their enjoyment of capital. It can be "performed" materially or libidinally but in the final instance of a contingent (revolutionary) event, the two combine in the body of the exception that underpins or is excluded from capital though nevertheless intervenes against it.
According to Žižek, subtraction operates at the level of phantasy. Vighi (2012: 137) again: "subtraction is always at least minimally traumatic because I subtract first and foremost from my fetishistic enjoyment of what I profess to hate." Traumas are not something that can be self-induced. The Act as Žižek (2000: 374) puts it, differs from activity in so far that the phantasmal background by which life acquires meaning is contingently disturbed. In terms of employ ability, we could think of this as the moment when everything we do to improve our job prospects no longer has any meaning. Not only do we recognise the enjoyment derived by filling in the lack in the Other—imagining ourselves in the place of surplus value (the job vacancy)—but derive no satisfaction in improving our employability because it would have no symbolic value. When the fantasy of our enjoyment of employability is traversed, the career itself is sacrificed. A measure of the strength of the movements against capital can be discerned when to the question Can the career be sacrificed? it is possible to answer in the affirmative. We have not reached this decisive phase, not in Europe where unemployment is chronic and where movements, such as in Greece and Spain, are numerically significant.
A contingent change in the situation forces the decision. The 1984-5 Miners Strike and 1989 Hillsborough Stadium Disaster can be thought of as British instances of this: trauma necessitating a decision that reconstitutes the subject caught up in the moment. In both examples, an abstract possibility / opposition became a concrete reality / opposition when the police revealed itself as a brutal weapon of state oppression, the mass media, particularly the BBC in its coverage of the Battle of Orgreave, an apparatus of ideological distortion and the state in general of class violence. With the fundamental antagonism thus revealed and the symbolic fiction shattered, those involved are forced to take sides and reckon in their very sense of being with a new symbolic reality. Events such as these, however, are rare, and often only affect a relatively small number of people. If the political act is necessarily traumatic and only occurs through a chance sequence of events, the theory of subtraction has no political value. But by separating subtraction into two different forms, corresponding to Marx's and Lacan's different concepts of exploitation, the limitations of a theory that presupposes contingent traumatic breaks can be overcome. Contingencies can be planned for.
The change in the biological constitution of the individual, or rather the libidinal economy, as a result of the commodification of desire, presupposes the need for a traumatic event but it is the political activities of such a subject that, ineluctably entwined in the commodity form, will prove decisive in the current context of struggle. We must contend with the thing in us more than ourselves—the objet a—but can only do so if there has already been a change in the situation in which those biologically constituted needs are organised. Political action must in the meantime happen in spite of us, or rather in spite of our libidinal attachments to surplus value. In contrast to Žižek, trauma, I want to argue, is not the a priori of the political act of sorts. Put another way, enjoyment of capital—the jouissance knotted into the creation and destruction of value—is not necessarily antithetical to political action if that enjoyment is identified as symptomatic of a system that itself must change in order for there to be a libidinal subtraction from the commodity form.
Consider the role of the student in current struggles against austerity and finance capital. Here we have the archetypal subject of the university discourse invested in capital from the privileged position of being able to develop credentials that improve employability while, at the same time, campaigning against capitalism. Lacan's (1991: 201) retort to heckling students at Vincennes in 1969 is relevant in today's context of struggle:
You are the product of the university, and you prove that you are the surplus value, even if only in this respect— which you not only consent to, but which you also applaud—and I see no reason to object—which is that you leave here, yourselves equivalent to more or fewer credit points. You come here to gain credit points for yourselves. You leave here stamped, "credit points."
Scarcity of jobs and grants is a powerful material and ideological device for justifying repressive submission to the university discourse irrespective of what we know or politically (self-consciously) desire. In this context it is difficult to deny the fleeting though ultimately dissatisfying jouissance spent and stained on the CV. Refusal is not an option until a political struggle reaches a decisive stage when sacrifice would not simply guarantee unemployment and political marginality.
Our relation to politics prior to a traumatic separation can be thought of in terms of Žižek's (1989) classic critique of ideology: that we know full well the "secret" beneath the commodity—that, for example, goods do not magically appear on supermarket shelves but arrive there by way of exploited labour through the plundering of natural resources, imperialist violence and so forth—yet still in our social activity we act as if such things do not happen: that the commodity is indeed a magical thing. The fetishistic illusion in this respect enables us to go on living with such knowledge, critiquing the "system" while disavowing our contributions to it. Yet, inverting the point, if only dimly aware of how enjoyment is knotted into the operation they protest against, those who nonetheless do protest are doing it: students blockade shopping centres and prise open spaces for critical dialogue, the salaried bourgeoisie go on strike and entrepreneurial slum dwellers disrupt production and prop up leftist regimes. The danger for critical theoiy is that it gets caught up in the abstract ideas of subtraction and ceases to be of political relevance in times when ideas do matter and strategies can be decisive. Under current conditions—a situation far from excellent—by day we engage in the proletarian struggle and by night work for the bourgeoisie. If the left, then, is to avoid staking its future on a contingent event, it needs to develop over a period of time the organisational capacity for a generalised subtraction from the circuit of capital—strikes, boycotts, and intervention—sabotage, blockades—strategies that eveiyone irrespective of their status within the division of labour or, up to a point, libidinal investments can partake in. Our fetishistic enjoyments of capital are an obstacle to emancipation only insofar that at the level of ideology they prevent us from doing the mundane job of taking action and developing the capacity for a generalised properly political act in the sense referred to by Žižek. In short, critical theory is essential for the ideological task of separation and strategy, articulating the problem by explaining how capitalism operates materially, ideologically and libidinally, showing what is at stake and advancing a dialogue on what can be done rather than individualising the problem which is arguably what happens when everything hinges on traversing the fantasy.
While much has been written about the pacifying effects of consumption, it is our relation to production that has greatest ideological and political significance. Through the lens of psychoanalytic theory, this relation, understood as a libidinal one. illustrates the extent to which the subject is bound to capital and what a revolutionary struggle must ultimately entail. The master signifier that draws surplus value and surplus jouissance into a societal wide compact is employability. an object without substance, an aim without outcome and. as it shall be argued, the material, ideological and libidinal stumbling block to a generalised subtraction or Great Refusal.
The most succinct definition of the reversal constitutive of drive is the moment when, in our engagement in our purposeful activity (activity towards some goal), the way towards this goal, the gestures we make to achieve it, start to function as the goal in itself, as its own aim, as something that brings its own satisfaction
(Žižek 2000: 304).
The shift from desire to drive was fully systemised in respect to labour the moment that work became "precarious" through the systematic dismantling of labour regulations, the passing of anti-trade union legislation and so forth combined with attacks on the industrial base and privileging of finance capital via the ideology of neoliberalism and the entrepreneurial self. Surplus labour is a structural element of capitalism; what changes is that the emphasis shifts from simply competing for a job to improving employability regardless of whether there are jobs available or whether a person is actually employed.1 Employability operates at the level of drive in that satisfaction lies in the aim (there is no object to attain) rather than the outcome (an actual job). We cannot get rid of it and we camiot get enough it; there is no end to employability because there is no job that can end dissatisfaction or be materially secure in duration and arguably no movement that can currently force a more stable compact between capital and labour. The lack in capital symbolised by the job vacancy can be filled, it is the void that determines constant circulation and expansion in which drive is located.
Employability is sustained by three parties, the subject, the boss and the phantasmal "big Boss," the big Other; a symbolic refraction of capital and the State in the entirety of social relations. The process of becoming employable involves a gathering up of signifiers orbiting the master signifier of employability. "It is language that uses us. Language employs us, and that is how it [the big Other] enjoys." (Lacan, 1991: 66)
Question:
How can I keep busy while I'm unemployed?
Answer:
If you can demonstrate to employers that you have been doing everything you can to find work and to keep your skills and knowledge up to date, most will overlook the fact that you are currently unemployed.
Always remain positive—rejections are part of life. Each 'no' that you get moves you closer to that all-important 'yes.'2
Oedipus is very much "alive": the more the subject responds to the injunction to develop new skills, gain "relevant" experience and so on, the more obscene are the demands of capital and the further away is that all important yes. Scarcity of jobs operationalises the performance principle that Marcuse spoke of. Capital relies here on the excess of knowledge that it has already calculated as necessary for generating profit, the increase of which dovetails with the subject's own desire to exceed what it already knows by chasing the surplus valorised by the master signifier. Idiosyncrasies, even resistance to "corporate diktat," are calculated into the operation through the perverse superego injunction to enjoy, with the typical refrain that employers want "humans" not robots, for staff to "have a life outside of work" or not take work "too seriously." Psychometric testing, personal statements, interviews and evidence of hobbies and interests and activities outside of work and in the "non-profit" sector ensure the injunction in all its ambiguities is understood. Becoming employable is an unending repetition in the failure to be the equivalent of what capital wants through the question what does capital want from me? At the vacant heart of both parties is the objet a—the perfect job in the case of the worker—that ends dissatisfaction. A communistic impulse for non-alienated labour, the end of employability is the Utopian object that politically short-circuits the hostility we might feel towards the actual boss or company we work for. The relation to the actual work that is done is decentred as the struggle shifts from better working conditions onto an individualistic enterprise of getting a (better) job or simply maintaining one. Never sure what the Other wants from us, advice columns and career sites provide the clues on how to become a use value for capital. LoveMoney.com is typical in its advice on how to "survive" unemployment:
If you feel yourself sulking into despair/apathy/complete inactivity, you need to drag yourself out of it as soon as possible. That could just mean getting out of the house, even if you don't feel like it...
Or, to help motivate your job hunt, you could set yourself inexpensive rewards for getting things done. So three solid job applications = ice cream and a DVD—or something along those lines ...
Finally, try to keep yourself groomed and in reasonable physical shape. When you're out of work, it's all too easy to live in your pyjamas. Look good and you'll feel good
(Cowdy 2009).
Unemployment = applications = ice cream, employability enters the metonymic daisy chain of desire powered by surplus jouissance anchored to the commodity form in an unending process of becoming employable regardless of whether we have a job. The commodity becomes the mirror double, here from the appropriately named Monster.com:
When a company is determining how to advertise their products to consumers, they focus on its [sic] unique selling points—the things which make the product different from any other. It may be that it is smaller, lasts longer or tastes better than its competitors. The same principle applies to you when you are applying for a new job.3
In sum, employ ability decentres employment, shifting the signifier from the actual job to a phantom job that has no material location in the economy, does not exploit us in a Marxist sense nor demand anything from us. In and out of the accumulative circuit the subject's libido is oriented to the creation of value that capital may or may not want. The phantom job stands in for the capitalist laws of motion: no longer a particular capitalist that exploits us but rather the more abstract and ephemeral Capital. It is a phantom that the student imagines as he develops his CV and chooses courses according to whether they provide the skills employers can make use of. Capital overcodes the spatial and temporal totality of life: in the job, at the dole office, at home, in leisure, retroactively signifying the past, now and for the foreseeable future: the void in capital is writ large at the job centre, with "transferable" skills acting as the generic suture of the imponderables in each vacancy. The striving for further employability of those already employed guarantees that, if for no other reason, public sector workers will do the additional tasks required to ensure that, despite the cutbacks, hospitals, schools, bureaucracies and so on still function. Refusing such work, or simply "working to rule" by performing tasks according to the stated aims of the bureaucracy—police catching criminals rather than simply fixing the "stats" (see Žižek 2012: 95)—has to be weighed against the demands of the big Boss / big Other which haunt us when there are job cuts or if we desire another job or promotion. In becoming employable, one is simultaneously becoming unemployable, creating a gap for "innovation" because, as we all know, even in the best of occupations one must continually strive to fill the void of capital in order to avoid redundancy. The crises upon which capital innovates are thereby homologous to the crises of subjective stagnation that require us, especially the unemployed, to get out of bed and become what the Other wants.
While it is impossible to subtract from employability without jeopardising future employment, there is a common interest nonetheless in such subtraction. The first step is recognition that we are the cause of employability, the recognition that our libidinal investments in improving employability as a necessity to life are in fact what guarantees submission to capital. To reiterate, the act in its traumatic dimension entails the sacrifice of the career. Dialectically, employability needs to be resignified as a collective aim to be liberated from capital by having determination over the productive forces and thereby signification. The advice from Monster to "spring clean your CV" can be inteipreted in this way:
Your CV is one of the most powerful weapons in your job-seeking armoury and is often the first point of contact with a potential boss, so it's vital to make this document as powerful as possible. ... the key to developing a knock-out CV lies in actively seeking opportunities to broaden your appeal and demonstrate why employers should consider you over other candidates. In a competitive job market it's those job seekers who invest the most in their personal development who will reap the rewards.4
The CV counts life as use value and also illustrates the capacity in each of us to change our condition and become fit for the purpose of class struggle. The ultimate CV is the collective one that "knocks out" the big Other as Capital through a process that involves broadening the appeal of new master signifiers to demonstrate that the employer is no longer required because we already have what it takes to organise society in our common interests. Only by investing surplus jouissance in a generalised class struggle will we have a chance of reaping the rewards for our efforts to become employable. For this to happen the lesser refusals of isolated actions against capital, refusals in the workplace, boycotts of consumer products and so forth, need to become Great ones.
If Facebook is a barometer of the popularity of sentiments that are frequently exposed within critical theoiy such as pseudo-activity (Adorno and Horkheimer). left-liberalism (Žižek) or democratic materialism (Badiou), then the many "thumbs up" on Facebook for posters such as "Top Ten Ways to Fuck the System" should be a cause for concern. The "anti-capitalist" programme is symptomatic of a narcissistic culture of enjoyment that has prevailed for the past 30 or more years:
Anticipating the so-called cultural turn, Marcuse (1972:48) wrote in his post-1960s essay Counter-revolution and Revolt: "the bourgeois individual is not overcome by simply refusing social performance, by dropping out and living one's own style of life. To be sure, no revolution without individual liberation but also no individual liberation without the liberation of society." When capitalism becomes an empty signifier of everything that is wrong with society, anti-capitalism also becomes an empty signifier of a radicalism decoupled from the labour relation. If capitalism lias as is said entered the vocabulary of mainstream politics as a pejorative term, it is no guarantee that its laws of motion are understood or, relatedly, that there is any desire to replace it with a mode of production that could satisfy our material needs and liberate us from alienated labour. "When the images of power overshadow the reality." Christopher Lasch (1991: 81) wrote, "those without power find themselves fighting phantoms." The phantoms acquire many forms, none of which serve as "the metaphoric condensation of the global restructuring of the entire social space" that for Žižek (2000: 208) is a necessary component of politics proper. The pretenders that critical theory is apt to shred are worth alighting on, global warming being perhaps the most prominent master signifier around which left-liberals rally. Badiou (in Feltham, O. ed., 2005: 139) writes:
Let's start by saving that after 'the rights of man,' the rise of the 'the rights of Nature' is a contemporary form of the opium of the people. It is an only slightly camouflaged religion: the millenarian terror, concern for everything save the properly political destiny of peoples, new instruments for control of everyday life, the obsession with hygiene, the fear of death and catastrophes ... It is a gigantic operation in the depoliticisation of subjects.
Global warming is the fillip to the affluent classes who in their "eco" lifestyles assume a moral high ground which energises Oedipus as a regulator of our (the working class) consumerist excesses and which provides business with another means of extracting profit through siirplus-jouissance. It begets a perverse kind of utopianism with echoes of fascism, the eco-primitivism that Derrick Jensen (2006) has helped to popularise being a very contemporary final solution. The argument here is that global warming will have serendipitous consequences by reducing the global population to 10 percent of current levels and usher a sustainable preindustrial age. A politics that presupposes scarcity as the natural condition of social development is evident here and in the more subtle examples of left-liberal environmentalism. "Industrialisation" is another phantom, a related master signifier that condenses and obscures capitalist relations as if the forces of production are themselves an abstract machine that is inherently destructive. The same can be said for "anti-consumerism." While Frankfurt School critics were particularly vocal in their hostility to mass consumption, their concern centred on the ideological role it plays through the culture industry in pacifying the working class and manufacturing false needs. Their opposition was not to consumption per se, nor was it a moralistic argument to berate those who today are termed "excessive" consumers.
"No Impact Man," Colin Beavan, who spent a year in New York living a "carbon neutral" life (see noimpactproject.org website) is the archetypal embodiment of "anti-consumerism" with none of the insights of critical theory: a reified activity with no political impact. By refusing certain goods and engaging in practices deemed to be ethical or ecologically sustainable, it appears that the relations mystified by commodity fetishism are accounted for. The opposite obtains. People it seems really do believe the commodity is a magical thing: that the bikes they cycle, the roads they traverse and the bricks and mortar from which their homes are built have appeared from nowhere because nowhere can they factor in the complex relations of production without revealing the absurdity of their actions. They must act as if their choices have meaning because they are bound in their libidinal enjoyment to the commodity form and the pseudo-activities to which their identity is anchored.
Žižek (2000: 262) writes, "when a new point de capiton emerges, the socio-symbolic field is not only displaced, its very structuring principle changes." Entering the vocabulary of resistance post 2008 is the master signifier of finance. Scapegoating financiers, CEOS and speculators, politicians such as Obama earn their radical credentials through this populist rhetoric. While having the initial beneficial effect of providing a useful focus for protest movements, it displaces the problem and individualises it, in effect legitimising capitalism as a system that can be reformed if only finance is better regulated. Crises, to be clear, have roots in diminishing rates of profit, overproduction and relatedly underconsumption that are themselves symptomatic of class struggle. The signifiers of resistance help make "crisis" an ideological tool for justifying austerity as a means by which to further embed the neoliberal project in some quarters and, in others, provide politicians who set their stall against unsustainable development, consiimerist excess, "dirty" industry and global finance with a reformist veneer. The materiality of crisis acquires symbolic value that can embolden the left, but the left, by embracing this rhetoric parade of a kaleidoscope of half-truths, is in essence fighting phantoms.
The master signifier of employability gets to the core of the problem. "Equality," writes Badiou (2009: 26), "means that everyone is referred back to their choice, and not to their position. That is what links a political truth to the instance of a decision, which always establishes itself in concrete situations, point by point." The decision to sacrifice one's career, the refusal of employability, is consistent with the four determinations of what Badiou (2009: 27) calls the truths of politics: "will (against socio-economic necessity), equality (against the established hierarchies of power or wealth), confidence (against anti-popular suspicion or the fear of the masses), authority or terror (against the 'natural' free play of competition)." The inexistent, the indivisible remainder, the surplus as concrete exception, is what presents itself, point by point, in a truth procedure that refuses employability, in short, to be counted as use value. A blank essay on "turnitin" (the preferred online system in academia for ensuring against plagiarism) that nonetheless was written, a blank CV to a prospective employer by a worker who nonetheless fits the job descriptor—"include me, out!," refusals such as these are a long way from becoming generalised. But what are the prospects in these current circumstances for a generalised refusal or subtraction: a collective act that thereby has political consequences rather than consequences on the individual's job prospects?
As Žižek (2012), among many others, points out there is no going back to the Keynesian "golden age" compact be twcen capital and labour which any how benefited only a few and did nothing to address the broader symptoms of capitalism including those that critical theorists wrote about at the time. Yet this is precisely why "full employment"—and related policies to realise it—as opposed to the more abstract "employability" is politically effective. If signified by and with accompanying propositions from the left (as opposed to the right as is sometimes the case), "full employment" and job security becomes a "minimal" demand—the positive content of straggle—that if instituted would bring about significant improvements to many people's lives and also reinvigorate capital. Rational from this perspective and reasonable in terms of what should be expected under 'healthy' economic conditions, yet antithetical to neoliberal ideology, the demand for full employment operates as a vanishing mediator around which all elements of the workforce can unite. It establishes a position of initial engagement—a war of position—that indirectly draws focus on the social relations of production embedded in every sphere of activity and symbolised in the ubiquitous straggle for employability. The demand for full employment gives way to the more precise articulation of those relations within a broad constellation of movements. This would be the result of an ongoing dialogue, not least on the centrality of work in our lives, and contingent possibilities would unfold as political and economic crises intensify.
Rather than disengage from the state, I want to argue that in this moment at least strategic alignments with leftist parties vying for power are crucial. The vote brought Chavez to power and has transformed the political landscape in Latin America after 500 years of extreme violence, exploitation and plunder. While there are important socio-economic and historical differences between Latin America and Europe, reforms in the former can point to possibilities in the latter. Reformist governments can themselves provoke unintended revolutionaiy consequences. It is unlikely, for example, that Gorbachev envisaged the dissolution of the Soviet Empire when introducing the policies of Glasnost and Perestroika. In respect to this and points made below, two positions on the left exemplify the problem in stances that put themselves at a distance from state power. The first, of which The Invisible Committee is typical, is the strategy of disengagement from the capitalist state and the view that an autonomous space can be created outside of it. The second, underlined by Badiou's stance towards elections (see below), is that by voting in elections the "inexistent" capitulate to the bourgeois politics of democratic materialism. Nicos Poulantzas (2000: 153) is worth quoting at length on this issue of utmost strategic importance:
Now, (a) We know that political strategy must be grounded on the autonomy of the organisations of the popular masses. But the attainment of such autonomy does not involve the political organisations in leaving the strategic field of the relationship of forces that is the power-State, any more than it involves other organisations such as the trade unions in taking up a position outside the corresponding power mechanisms. To believe that this is even possible is an old illusion of anarchism (in the best sense of the term). Moreover, in neither case does self-organisation on the terrain of power imply that these organisations must directly insert themselves in the physical space of the respective institutions (this will depend on the conjuncture), nor a fortiori that they must embrace the materiality of these institutions (quite the contrary), (b) We also know that, alongside their possible presence in the physical space of the state apparatuses, the popular masses must constantly maintain and deploy centres and networks at a distance from these apparatuses: I am referring, of course, to movements for direct, rank-and-file democracy and to self-management networks. But although these take up political objectives, they are not located outside the State or, in any case, outside power—contrary to the illusions of anti-institutional purity. What is more, to place oneself at any cost outside the State in the thought that one is thereby situated outside power (which is impossible) can often be the best means of leaving the field open for statism: in short, it often involves a retreat in the face of the enemy precisely on this strategically crucial terrain.
Badiou (2008: 17) argues:
The government, which would not be very different if it were chosen by lottery, declares that it has been mandated by the choice of the citizens and can act in the name of tins choice. Voting thus produces a singular illusion, which passes this disorientation through the fallacious filter of a choice.
Or, with reference to the "unknown elector,"
Throughout the bourgeois centuries has she too not been instrumentalized and deceived, and had her voice sacrificed on the alter of a 'democracy' where she is in fact stripped, by her very vote, of any iota of power?
(Badiou, 2012: 83).
While there are nuances to Badiou's politics, such repeated assertions invite a one-sided perspective on power that cannot account for the particulars of and possibilities inherent in the socio-economic, political and historical circumstances of a given nation state formation. Poulantzas does not fetishise the vote either in terms of what can be gained from it or what can be achieved by refusing it. Given the materially embedded nature of the capitalist state—that, as Poulantzas points out, condenses the broader social relations and ideologies that emanate from different spheres of influence, and essentially the class struggle itself—the capitalist state is a crucial terrain of contestation. It can neither be left alone nor can it be seized as if it exists separately from the relations that it embeds within itself and importantly, in terms of class struggle, the relations by which it is characterised. While the language has changed, what Poulantzas (2000: 257) said in the 1970s has contemporary relevance:
.. the current road to socialism, the current situation in Europe, presents a number of peculiarities: these concern at one and the same time the new social relations, the state form that has been established, and the precise character of the crisis of the State. For certain European countries, these particularities constitute so many chances—probably unique in world history—for the success of a democratic socialist experience, articulating transformed representative democracy and direct, rank-and-file democracy. This entails the elaboration of a new strategy with respect both to the capture of state power by the popular masses and their organisations, and to the transformations of the State designated by the term 'democratic road to socialism."
Syriza is in many respects a mirror of the movements on the ground in Greece, an alliance of disparate groupings each with their own specific agendas. Its taking of power while seeming more unlikely at the time of writing could have real political consequences though, especially if, like Chavez in Venezuela, it supported those movements which enable it to assume power. Just as it is mistaken to dismiss revolutionary politics on the basis that every revolution has ended in failure so, as Venezuela has proven, it is mistaken to dismiss engagement in parliamentary politics because, for example, of what happened to "democratic socialism" in Chile in 1973. The important difference in Venezuela is that movements that brought Chavez to power remain an active determinant in the political struggle for social transformation, attested to by the decisive role they played in bringing Chavez back to power after the homologous (to Chile) US backed coup of 2002. Contrasting the democratic discourse of inclusion to that of Chavez, Žižek's (2009: 102) point here has broader significance:
Chavez is not including the excluded in a pre-existing liberal-democratic framework; he is, on the contrary, taking the "excluded" dwellers of favelas as his base and then reorganising political space and political forms of organisation so that the latter will "fit" the excluded. Pedantic and abstract as it may appear, this difference—between "bourgeois democracy" and "dictatorship of the proletariat"—is crucial.
It is pointless to talk of slum dwellers in the context of Europe. The excluded here are the swelling numbers of surplus labour and the "precariat" inclusive of the "salaried bourgeoisie" protesting because they know their futures are vulnerable. Unemployment the threat thereof and the likely prospect that for all our efforts, potential use values will not be realised as exchange for a job, or at least one in which any satisfaction, however small, canbe drawn, is what connects us all. The possibility of a genuine act that occurs as part of a coordinated strategy of politically numerical significance depends on what happens over the coming years with regard to tactical decisions on the terrain of state power. As Poulantzas (2000: 258) emphasises:
At any event, to shift the relationship of forces within the State does not mean to win successive reforms in an unbroken chain, to conquer the state machinery piece by piece, or simply to occupy the positions of government. It denotes nothing other than a stage of real breaks, the climax of which—and there has to be one—is reached when the relationship of forces on the strategic terrain of the State swings over to the side of the popular masses.
Those currently "traversing the fantasy" of their disavowed fetishistic enjoyment of capital are too small in number or marginalised from the accumulation process to effect change. Their presence becomes more significant as those still invested in capital (not only wage labourers) get politically involved through their actions and current sense of outrage at the injustices of austerity programmes, global finance and so on. In short, "anti-capitalists" can present a critical mass that establishes the grounds for a dialogue expanding the capacity of movements to force shifts in policy that in turn strengthen the possibility of popular struggle. We might call this a strategic subtraction short of a contingent traumatising one that comes not so much with an economic crisis as an unresolvable political one. That said, revolution must remain the aim towards which libido is in the final analysis sublimated. Demanding full employment should be seen simply as an initial (leftist) populist strategy, a vanishing mediator that those "with more to lose than their chains," and largely sublimating libido in parliamentary politics, employability and consumption, can identify with. A coordinated general subtraction-cum-strike-cum-intervention that the chapter title alludes to is what is ultimately required.
In sum, then, the focus of struggle must, as has always been the case in the most advanced capitalist states whatever the regulatory regime, focus on production, the moment in the circuit in which surplus value and surplus jouissance are materially entwined. This does not in any way suggest that subtraction, as could logically be supposed, involves only those actively selling their labour power. The subjective drive to create use-values in a vain attempt under pressure from the State to "improve" employability also matters. This is the principal object of libidinal enjoyment, the objet a in which drive is sublimated and which also defines the subject in its own efforts as commodity. The refusal of employability is an empty gesture or pointless sacrifice in isolation but plausible, necessary even, at a certain stage in the class struggle. Rather than fetishising the more abstract conditions for a genuine, as in libidinal. subtraction or placing emphasis on a self-defeating stance towards the State (if only so as to appear uncompromising), everyone on the underside of the capitalist relation has a role to play including by forming temporary alliances with leftist parties vying for state power. Chavez in Venezuela underlines the point that power canbe contested on the terrain of the capitalist state, in the institutions, including the university where ideas are sometimes formulated and disperse. In this process of contestation, full employment via demands for new regulators practices against capital can operate as the positive content of struggle especially given that so many young people in Europe are currently unemployed and experiencing the egregious effect of this.
It is easy for those in tenured positions enjoying the relative comforts of university life to insist on the purity of struggle while working hard to develop those all-important research profiles. The same can be said for the more affluent students that increasingly make up the numbers of those we teach and who regularly submit impressive though entirely abstract essays on fashionable theories. Nevertheless, a self-conscious strategic partial—as in short of libidinal—subtraction involving strikes, agitation and so forth, is an important prelude of a contingent subtraction that even those in a position of relative security can be part of. An intellectual and cultural war of position (Gramsci) can help ensure that the void opening up by the political crisis does not get filled with the ideology of fascism or indeed a "puny" left-liberalism. Is this how we "fuck the system"? There is the chance at least if we are all prepared at some point, hopefully sooner rather than later, to sacrifice our often non-existent careers by dirtying our hands with a properly political leftist violence.
1 A variation of the critique of employability with more empirical examples is in the chapter Naked Enterprise in Capitalism's New Clothes.
2 'Talent List Education Group' website (available at http://talentlist.co.nz/files/trainings/KEEP%20YOUSELF%20BUSY%20WHILE%20UNEMPLOYED.pdf).
3 'What are my unique selling points?' (available at http://career-advice.monster.ie/cvs-applications/cv-advice/what-are-my-unique-selling-points-ie/article.aspx).
4 'Spring clean your cv' (available at http://career-advice.monster.co.uk/cvs-applications/cv-advice/spring-clean-your-cv/article.aspx).
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