Žižek holds a symptomatic point within Leftist politics; his work grapples with the same difficulties of representation that have brought the downfall of traditional Left (essentialist) politics – namely that there is no ultimate foundation from which politics can be guaranteed – yet he maintains that the Left must not abandon the political terrain either by giving way to these dilemmas or by losing sight of the materiality of the economy. Nonetheless, whilst I have argued that Žižek is able to produce a form of political analysis based upon a Lacanian reading of the dialectic, he has (willingly) been unable to renew Marxist politics in their traditional form – one which holds to inevitability of history and communism. This is not to suggest, however, that Žižek’s (Lacanian) form of politics elides a Marxist reading. Instead, the very purpose of producing a Žižekian response to the economic problematic that defines this thesis is to suggest that Žižek’s work reconstructs Marxist politics in manner that can be relevant to the critique of contemporary capitalism. This analysis starts with Žižek’s conception of capital through which Žižek, particularly through his concern with class struggle, suggests a Lacanian re-reading of the structural primacy of the economy.
Thus far we have noted how Žižek’s Lacanian reading of Marxism suggests a damning critique of both the traditional concept of the revolutionary subject and the fantasmatic utopianism inherent in many forms of communism, both existing and theoretical. The turn to psychoanalysis, both in terms of Lacan’s clinical understanding of ethics and attempts to translate these ethics into a political system, has not produced any further optimism. Although the Lacanian orientation provides a productive understanding of politics and ideology, the institutionalisation of psychoanalysis is entirely contrary to its dialectical thrust. Moreover, the ‘radical’ Leftist movements which have emerged from a broad psychoanalytic reading – Laclau and Stavrakakis foremost – have operated by way of an exclusion of the economy via what we have identified as the ‘Democratic Hypothesis’.
In reply to this hypothesis I returned, in the previous chapter, to Žižek’s strategic reading of the political implications of Lacanian theory. Here, Žižek has developed a number of political positions in relation to the singular impossibility of the Real. To properly understand his work and the hope it provides in response to the structure of capital today, I will now consider how Žižek’s work is able to return to the economy and the politics at the heart of the Marxist demand; class struggle and communism. It is only then that we shall be able to understand the value of Žižek’s work – and psychoanalysis – as a response to the daunting dilemmas of the global economy. This response does not suggest an alternative, or Lacanian-inspired, mode of production but, rather, a form of political action which insists upon the contradictions in the current mode.
Nonetheless, against Žižek’s dismissal of psychoanalytically inspired alternative conceptions of political economy, we still have cause to consider attempts to generate such an alternative to capitalism. If Žižek’s notion of class struggle suggests a condition of impossibility at the heart of all political economy, United States political theorists Yahya Madra and Ceren Özselcuk seek to rearticulate this impossibility in a manner which positions it as the principle of a renewed form of communism. This position – whilst suggesting a number of reasoned points of critique against Žižek – faces two difficulties: the limitations of feminine politics and the contemporary structure of political economy (in particular surplus labour and the ineluctable logic of capital).
As such, this chapter begins with a discussion of Žižek’s understanding of capitalism and class struggle, one that defines his political approach. I will then consider the possibilities for political action that stem from this understanding, in particular in its resonance with the work of Özselcuk and Madra, as well as Hardt and Negri. Ultimately these perspectives, whilst shedding an illuminative light on the structure of capitalism, are unable to account for the unruly and disavowed excess that defines capitalism. Instead, Žižek comes to argue that it is only by reference to a ‘communist hypothesis’, based upon the excluded element of the global polis more than an ideological position, that can begin to return to the Marxist political tradition and properly respond to the contradictions of the global economy. The first step is to consider Žižek’s conception of capital.
Žižek and the deadlock of capitalism
Žižek argues that capitalism is not another object like any other. It is not a matter of conceiving capitalism to be a particular moment in the symbolic order. Rather, Žižek considers capitalism to have a deeper hold on the political field. Capital is not just one object in the field of hegemony but has rather hegemonised hegemony itself. As he states:
in so far as we conceive of the polito-ideological resignification in terms of the struggle for hegemony, today’s Real which sets the limit to resignification is Capital: the smooth functioning of Capital is that which remains the same, that which ‘always’ returns to its place’, in the unconstrained struggle for hegemony. (Žižek, 2000b: 223)
For this reason, Žižek holds that the only possibility of invoking radical change within capitalism is the internal rupture of capital itself – there is no outside which could force a cleavage within capital.
This claim, along with the associated notion of capitalism as a modality of the Real, has been the source of much consternation from his critics. The primary accusation is that by constructing capitalism in such a manner, Žižek leaves room only for the Lacanian act as a mode of radical politics (see Devenney, 2007). Laclau, for example, states:
According to Žižek, capitalism is the Real of present-day societies for it is that which always returns. Now he knows as well as I do what the Lacanian Real is; so he should also be aware that capitalism cannot be the Lacanian Real. The Lacanian Real is that which resists symbolisation and shows itself only through its disruptive effects. But capitalism as a set of institutions, practices, and so on can operate only in so far as it is part of the symbolic order. And if, on top of that one thinks – as Žižek does – that capitalism is a self-generated framework proceeding out of an elementary conceptual matrix, it has to be conceptually fully graspable and, as a result, a symbolic totality without holes. In that case, capitalism as such is dislocated by the Real, and it is open to contingent hegemonic retotalisations. Ergo, it cannot be the fundamentum inconcussum, the framework within which hegemonic struggles take place, because – as a totality – it is itself only the result of partial hegemonic stabilisations. (Laclau, 2000a: 291)
Laclau here makes a reasonable point in relation to the framework of capitalism but ultimately misses the subtly in Žižek’s argument. Capitalism is certainly part of the symbolic-imaginary order; I have previously discussed the manner in which the commodity form operates as a form of enjoyment. The commodity form itself is supplemented by several other (ideological) modalities of enjoyment, most notably that of democracy (as the official ideological supplement of capitalism) and culture itself, either in multi-cultural or fundamentalist/reactionary forms. Moreover, we can observe the operation of capitalism as a symbolic form, both in terms of the economic framework which is enshrined in law as the ‘invisible’ hand of the market and the emptiness of the money form. Finally, capitalism exists as a power structure, embodied in the military-industrial imperialism of the United States and its NATO allies. However, whilst Žižek touches on the structural content of global capitalism, he is more concerned with the form of capital.
In regards to this form, an initial analysis may suggest that Žižek is engaging a rhetorical device through which to make a point about the status of capital: capital has become the political-hegemonic force of our time, the point to which everything returns without becoming a specific modality of the Lacanian Real. Nonetheless, as is always the case with Žižek, there is some truth in appearance. Žižek is not simply using ‘Capital as Real’ for shock value; rather this assertion suggests a deeper point to which he returns in his later work.
Žižek does indeed argue that global capital has become the determining factor in contemporary global affairs. It has done so, however, with a twist. Capital is not dominant in the totalitarian sense of exhausting all opposition, although both violence and systematic megalomania lie – disavowed, rather than dominant – at the heart of the beast. Rather, capitalism is a modality of the symbolic Real because it is the (absent) point to which all symbolisation returns.
As noted in Chapter Three, Žižek’s definition of Capital as a symbolic form of the Real owes to his distinction (in the foreword to the 2nd edition of For they Know Not What They Do, written in 2002) between the triadic modalities of the Real – the Real also having imaginary and symbolic dimensions. Of most interest to this argument is the symbolic Real, which Žižek describes as “the Real as consistency” – capital is thus the consistent background against which shared social life operates, even if capital is inconsistent in itself (Žižek, 2002: xii).
Žižek’s development of the capital as the Real has been a relatively sedate and contemporary occurrence. It was not until 1999 in The Ticklish Subject that Žižek began to speak of global capitalism and the Real in the same terms. He stated (in reference to global climate change and the El Nino effect); “This catastrophe thus gives body to the Real of our time: the thrust of Capital which ruthlessly disregards and destroys particular life-worlds, threatening the very survival of humanity”(1999: 4). Here though, Žižek is using the Real in a more conventional Lacanian sense; the Real as a traumatic point within the symbolic field, rather than as the unsymbolisable logic of consistency in a symbolic field.
Žižek’s initial conceptualisation of capital as the symbolic Real arose through his three-way collaboration with Laclau and Judith Butler, Contingency, Hegemony and Universality (2000). Here Žižek considers capital as the background against which all symbolisations must relate, a “limit to resignification”’ (Žižek, 2000b: 223). Furthermore, Žižek goes on to describe capital as “structuring in advance the very terrain on which the multitude of particular contents fight for hegemony” (Žižek, 2000e: 320). Žižek is clear, however, to make a distinction between capital as a limit to signification and hegemonic struggle, and of capital as the positive condition that creates a symbolic background against which hegemonic struggle occurs (ibid.: 319).
This last point is vital. It is not that capital prevents the production of non-capitalist discourse but, rather, that these discourses occur upon a background (which remains politically implicit, unless provoked) that determines in the last instance the parameters in which they operate. It is in this way that capitalism is a modality of the Real; as a non-explicit limit. It can appear that an outside to capital exists, as not all relations are capitalist relations. Rather capital is structured in a manner similar to one of its iconic structures, the shopping mall.
The ‘mall’ allows all apparent freedoms and is experienced as a site of consumptive enjoyment. One is free to move around and experiences no apparent repression, except in acting against the interests of the mall. What the mall has achieved is the subsumption of public space: the historical village centre, with all its associated public space and room for dissent, is now contained within the mall itself. In this sense one can be free within the mall – and within capitalism – only by following the rules and internalising the structures of the mall. These rules appear coercive only in an imaginary sense; through the insistence of jouissance and ideology.
Beneath the benevolence of the Mall and the doctrines of capitalism lies a more openly coercive sense of power, both in terms of symbolic restraint – codes of behaviour – and an undercurrent of violence. Indeed, the success of capitalism lies in its ability to combine resistance and subversion into the ideological dialectics of power: what appears to be a counter-cultural or subversive movement is always a possible opportunity for profit, whether it is the Green, Pink or Punk dollar. Moreover, if the likes of Greenpeace provide the most visible power of resistance today, then it is a form of subversion which will only serve to make capitalism more sustainable. These movements, amongst which we can include various forms of progressive action, including unions and ‘rights’ groups, act only as a ‘conscience’ – with all its super-ego connotations – upon capitalism, ultimately smoothing the wheels to prevent political unrest (Daly, 2009: 291; Hawken, 1997; Žižek, 2006e: 238). This ‘ability’ has been evident since the origins of the capitalist empire: England, for example, avoided the violence of the French revolution largely through the development of ‘poor laws’[1] (Ross, 1998: 8). The ability to integrate the demands of the polis – both progressive and populist – is the great advantage of capitalism, and not only in a critical sense. Under capitalism a great number of progressive developments have occurred. We should not, however, lose sight of the cost at which these developments have come, in particular the massive contradictions of poverty and over-development identified at the beginning of the this project.
The identification of capitalism as a form of the Real has significant consequences for political action. Firstly, it suggests that there can be no ‘outside’ of capitalism from which to establish an alternative position with any traction against capitalism. Just as in the mall analogy, an alternative or outside position can only exist so long as it is not a threat to the existence of capitalism. As an illustration, against the rhetoric of ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ and the spread of democracy, critics of the US invasion of Iraq have suggested that the attack was motivated by Iraq’s vast Oil resources. Conversely, others have suggested that the Bush administration had no issue with Iraq’s use of their Oil resources, until they switched from trading their Oil in US Dollars to Euros, threatening the hegemony of the (petro)Dollar as the universal currency of the Oil market (Clark, 2005; Henderson, 2003; Looney, 2004). Indeed, immediately after the invasion, Iraqi Oil accounts were switched back to the US dollar (Petrov, 2006).
In this sense, also, the Euro – despite being an integrate element of capitalism as an exchangeable currency – operated as an antagonistic ‘outside’ to the hegemony of the US Dollar in the Oil market. Its presence threatened the hegemony of Dollar to such an extent that the intrusion of the Euro into the market produced a major dislocation, one that forced violent intervention. Thus, while the Euro cannot be conceived as an inherently anti-capitalism currency, we can see from this example the consequences of a threat to the smooth running of the logic of capital – the dominance of the US Petrodollar being part of that hegemony.
Furthermore, any radical political approach that attempts to gain traction within capitalism hits a limit at capitalism itself. This is the fundamental limitation of the democratic approach of Laclau and Stavrakakis, or the deconstructionist ethics of the likes of William Connelly (2002, 2008) and Critchley (2007b). These theorists are regular critics of Žižek, accusing him of political impotence. They suggest that Žižek’s work holds no political value because he refuses to partake in political ‘activity’ within capitalism. Connelly and Critchley, for example, each argue that we should ‘chip away’ at the capitalist structure, making whatever possible progressive political adjustments within the system. Ultimately they are social-democrats, appealing for greater tolerance and environmental standards. Stavrakakis and the earlier Laclau make similar demands in relation to democracy. What these theorists fail to understand are the limits to action posed by capitalism. Most notably, these piecemeal reforms are unable to gain any traction against the global material contradictions and deprivations which are at the heart of this thesis. What Žižek advocates, therefore, is a kind of withdrawal from the activity of politics. Here he reverses Marx’s famous Eleventh thesis, stating:
the first task today is precisely not to succumb to the temptation to act, to intervene directly in and change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul-de-sac of debilitating impossibility: ‘What can one do against global Capital?’) but to question the hegemonic ideological coordinates. (Žižek, 2006e: 238, original emphasis)
This withdrawal, however, is only from politics: it does not signal a withdrawal from the political. Moreover, the ontic conditions of global capitalism do not mean that radical action is impossible. Rather, an identification of the emergent void, or impossibility, within capital that opens the possibility for action is required. Capitalism is not only a repetitious monster against which we have no resistance; it may be the consistent background to political symbolisation but it is inconsistent in itself. That is, within the repetition of the chain exists a condition of impossibility that sustains as a latent possibility the entire subversion of the power of capitalism: Žižek labels this impossibility ‘class struggle’.
Žižek and the Impossibility of Class Struggle
Žižek’s approach has led critics to suggest that his work suffers from a political formalism, capable of holding no commitment other than to the Lacanian ontology. Although this accusation is largely unfounded in Žižek’s earlier work – which displayed a foundational theoretical commitment to Marxism and an increasingly apparent anti-capitalist agenda – it has become entirely redundant in Žižek’s most recent texts, in which he mobilises a ‘communist hypothesis’ and begins to speak of ‘our side’, a commitment that shall be the topic of Chapter Eight.
Nonetheless, Žižek’s most persistent commitment, however, comes via the very formalism of his ontology, producing as it does a consistent position throughout his oeuvre. Žižek argues that the antagonism which founds society today is class struggle. It is this distinction – more than the materialist character of his critique – which distinguishes Žižek’s project from that of Laclau. Laclau, first through radical democracy and then through populism, rejects the notion of an objective, or transcendental, revolutionary agent. Instead, he argues that the elevation of a particular group to the position of universality must come through the open and contingent battle for hegemony; that a particular struggle for hegemony becomes the general equivalent for other struggles, is a political, rather than economic, struggle. For Laclau:
the notion of class struggle is totally insufficient to explain the identity of the agents involved in anti-capitalist struggles. It is simply the remainder of an old-fashioned conception which saw in an assumed general proletarianisation of society the emergence of the future burier of capitalism. (2000b: 201)
He goes on to argue that:
Žižek could be criticised for introducing into his discourse a set of categories [class] which, taken literally, either have no precise meaning, or the little they have goes against what I would have thought is the main tendency of Žižek’s thought….One cannot avoid the feeling that the notion of class is brought into Žižek’s analysis as a sort of deus ex machina to play the role of the good guy against the multicultural devils… this is what Žižek ultimately does, and it is a new example of the way in which his discourse is schizophrenically split between a highly sophisticated Lacanian analysis and an insufficiently deconstructed traditional Marxism. (ibid: 204-205)[2]
Without wishing to enter into any ad hominem commentary[3], one can sense the threat to Laclau’s work when he continues further into the debate, arguing that “Žižek’s thought is not organised around a truly political reflection but is, rather, a psychoanalytic discourse which draws its examples from the politco-ideological field” (2000a: 289, original emphasis); and “the only thing one get from him [Žižek] is injunctions to overthrow capitalism or to abolish liberal democracy, which have no meaning at all … his way of dealing with Marxist categories…would put the agenda of the Left back fifty years” (ibid.: 290). Ultimately, for Laclau, class is simply one of the possible antagonisms in a radical democratic or populism movement, and one that “has lost all intuitive content” (ibid.: 298) such that “[t]here are still remainders of full class identities in our world – a mining enclave, some backward peasant areas – but the main line of development works in the opposite direction” (ibid.: 301).
As Madra and Özselcuk (2005: 81) suggest, here Laclau is strangely resistant to the consequences of his own work – he rejects class as an essentialist notion, without any possibility of reconstruction. Laclau does not, for example, reject the notion of sexuality because it is essentialist but, rather, encourages an emphasis on the contingency in every construction of sexuality. Thus, whilst Laclau’s project began with a reworking of Marxism, it now appears powerfully opposed to any such rehabilitation of Marxist categories. In his view, Žižek is a theoretically lost soul, attempting to find meaning in a proliferation of particularised identities by hanging on to one last sense of Marxist essentialism.
Žižek, however, relies far more on Lacan than Marx for his understanding of the form that class struggle takes, even if the narrative remains Marxist. Here, class struggle does not refer to any empirically existing class structures – the disappearance of the Western working class, for example – but, rather, an absent antagonism around which social life is constructed. Žižek’s identification of class struggle as this transcendental antagonism began as an almost sheepish aside in a discussion of the Real in The Sublime Object of Ideology. He stated:
In this way we might reread even the classic notion of ‘class struggle’: it is not the last signifier giving meaning to all social phenomena (‘all social processes are in the final analysis expressions of the class struggle’) but – quite the contrary – a certain limit, a pure negativity, a traumatic limit which prevents the final totalisation of the social-ideological field. (1989: 164)
In his next major text, For They Know Not What They Do (1991), Žižek was more bullish about the status of class struggle. He argued that while class struggle is the totalising moment in society its holds no final guarantee. Instead class struggle – because it signals the failure of society to constitute itself – is the antagonism which holds together society. Class struggle acts as this point not as a transcendental signifier but, rather, in its absence within the social imaginary. In this sense class struggle is a modality of the Real; it is both the antagonistic point to which direct access is not available and the factor preventing this access. Therefore class struggle is not only the failure of each symbolisation but also operates so as to “conceal and patch up the rift of class struggle” (1991: 100).
Here class struggle – as with the Real – is not simply a historical occurrence but is rather the non-historical kernel to which history responds. This notion of class struggle does not suggest any particular form of ideological formation (including that of the communist state) but, rather, holds that all class formations are ultimately a response to the failure of the class relationship. Indeed, all political formations are a response to this absence – that of the Real (ibid.: 100-101).
The logic of sexuation (between the masculine and the feminine) is the model for Žižek’s understanding of class struggle. Just as for Lacan there is no sexual relationship, Žižek suggests that there is no class relationship. The condition of sexual difference is not the ultimate referent of sexual relations but, rather, that point which prevents the understanding of sexual difference itself (Žižek, 1997: 216). In this same vein, as a consequence of the exclusion of class from the symbolic realm, Žižek argues that class struggle cannot become the “positive object of research” (2006b: 82). The problem for Žižek is that there is no meta-language in which to discuss class; any definition of class struggle cannot but be positioned within class struggle. Even the designation of class struggle as this point is not neutral; class struggle itself is included in class struggle. Thus, Žižek contends that class struggle doesn’t exist because it has the character of being non-all; there is no exception that escapes its terms (1994b: 22). In this sense Žižek suggests that class struggle has the structure of the feminine, in the Lacanian sense of the word. Under the Lacanian logic of the masculine, all subjects are submitted to the law through the existence of an exception which completes the set of all possible social relations. The feminine, in comparison, is without exception. The feminine is non-all; there is nothing of the condition of the feminine that is not included in the set. This formulae means that there is no possible neutral point – no meta-language – to give coherence to any social formation, or which would allow society to exist. Instead, society is marked by an internal limit which we can only ascertain through the effects within social relations of the absence of its presence (ibid.: 125).
This point attracts strong criticism (Devenney, 2007). Devenney contends that Žižek’s account of capitalism is inadequate, in particular his apparent refusal to define the manner in which he is using the concept of class. Suggesting that Žižek’s argument is ‘extraordinary’, with the only purpose that it “allows Žižek to wear Marxist labels” (ibid.: 54), Devenney roundly dismisses Žižek’s argument that an element – specifically class – can come to structure the social through its absence. For Devenney, this is a statement entirely without ‘evidence’ (ibid.: 54).
In reply, Žižek is equally critical of Devenney, in particular his ‘faked ignorance’ at the possible structuring role of an element which, while being present symbolically – we can write the word ‘class’ – is absent at the level of the imaginary (insofar as we cannot imagine the presence of something that is absent) (Žižek, 2007b: 212). For Žižek and other readers of Lacan, the effect of absence (in the form of the Real) does not equate to an absence of effect; a phenomenon can form an absence within ideology, yet it is this absence which propels ideology itself. Such is the nature of the Lacanian Real; although it ‘does not exist’ within the positive contours of reality it produces a range of effects.
Nonetheless, a potent question remains – one that Laclau would certainly be asking at this point: Why is it that the economy and in particular class struggle hold this privileged position? Has class struggle taken this form because of contingent historical circumstances relating to the meta-hegemony of capitalism, or is class an ahistorical antagonism? Moreover, what is the relationship between class struggle as Žižek has identified it, and what might be deemed ‘actually existing class struggle’ in relation to capitalism?
Žižek compares class struggle, which can be read as the economy, with Freud’s sexual ‘essentialism’. Žižek takes Freud to argue that sexuality holds this status because there is no sexual relationship – as a result of symbolic castration, the subject is constitutively unable to both achieve the sexual ‘Thing’ and to acknowledge this impossibility. Instead, this search for the fullness of the sexual relationship spills over to other discourses – the arts, for example – contaminating their content (2008a: 294). Moreover, Žižek argues that:
the Marxist hypothesis is that, Mutatis Mutandis, the same goes for the “economy”, for the collective process of production: the social organisation of production (“the mode of production”) is not just one among many levels of social organization, it is the site of “contradiction” of structural instability, of the central social antagonism (“there is no class relationship”), which, as such, spills over into all other levels. (ibid.: 294).
This move has a double significance. Žižek speaks for the first time about the content of class struggle – the contradictions of the mode of production – making it clear that his conception of class struggle is not simply a substitute for the Lacanian Real but, rather, has a reference to the history of Marxism. Secondly, Žižek identifies the economy – in the form of class struggle – as the base of social totality. This is not a simple reproduction of Marx’s historical materialism; indeed, as has been discussed thus far in this chapter, Žižek’s conception of class struggle has been developed through Lacan to subvert this form of determinism.
Furthermore, Žižek rejects any suggestion of economic determinism, arguing that the effect of the absent presence of class struggle suggests an extimate relationship between politics and economy rather than a strict division. Žižek here attempts to move between the two readings of Marxism presented in this thesis; the economic determinism of traditional Marxism and the (discursive) political essentialism that has dominated post-Marxism after the discursive turn. For Žižek, because class struggle ensures that the economy is non-all, class is the politics at the heart of the economy – the impossibility of the class relationship means that there is no naturally occurring sense of economy, hence every form of economy is a political economy. To rephrase, because class struggle means the economy is never complete, it is class struggle which ensures that the economy will always be political; contra Marx, there is no historically inevitable form of the economy. Instead, class struggle means that any formation of the economy will always have to be a political formation.
At this stage, however, it is unclear how this definition is continuous with Žižek’s previous conception of capitalism as a modality of the Real. If the economy qua class struggle has the ahistorical determining role discussed above, the empirical and historical observation that capitalism has become a Real limit to shared social life appears redundant. Capitalism, as the contemporary mode of economy, has no particular transcendental status: the economy itself has this status. Nonetheless, whilst Žižek himself has not sought to make a strong distinction between the economy and capital in relation to the Real – indeed he appears to have largely abandoned the capital-as-Real thesis – we can locate a divergence between the economy as an abstract form and global capitalism as an empirical system.
By empirical, here I am referring to a phenomenon which has a symbolic-imaginary appearance rather than a Real effect. Global capitalism as an empirically existing system can be symbolically identified as it arguably has an imaginary formulation. Alternatively, class struggle as an ahistorical antagonism perforates each modality of economy. Both Žižek and Badiou have come to argue that capitalism is not a form of civilisation, that it is without ideology (Žižek, 2009a: 25). Whilst this would reinforce Žižek’s point in regards to capital as a symbolic chain, we can perhaps now risk a triadic conception of capitalism – as a symbolic chain, as being punctured by class struggle as an effect of the Real, and as being sutured through an imaginary cultural formation. Moreover, whilst class struggle can be identified as the impossibility in every ahistorical (abstract) form of the economy, class struggle itself takes a specific form in every instantiation of the economy, capitalism being no exception.
Žižek’s point in regards to the economy is that whilst capitalism has both an imaginary and symbolic appearance, punctuated by class struggle, its dominance has become such that the symbolic logic of capitalism has become a form of the Real. The capitalist form of economy has become such a strong historical form, in terms of militancy and its materialism, its incitement of cultural jouissance and, most importantly, its own revolutionary feedback system, that every threat to the system becomes an opportunity for profit. Moreover, never before has an economic system had a grip on the global polis such that its ‘truth’ becomes self-reinforcing; if one were to attempt to introduce a ‘socialisation’ of the means of production, the degree of ‘capital flight’ would be such that both the efficiency of capitalism and its status as the ‘only game in town’ would be reinforced. This is a historical assertion, divorced from the ahistorical Real of class struggle.
What, however, is the relationship between actually existing class formations within capitalism, and the structure of class struggle itself? Despite suggesting that class struggle never directly appears, Žižek does make regular references to class formations. Sharpe (2004: 202-205) argues that this is a hesitation within Žižek’s work, contending that his identification of class formations contradicts his reference to class struggle qua Real. Here, Sharpe suggests that Žižek becomes entwined in the same impossible game that Laclau rejected: the identification and necessary enlargement of conceptions of the working class. If Žižek is to speak of class as an empirically locatable phenomenon, then a more detailed analysis of class structure is required. Sharpe comes to argue that today such a description has become impossible and it is for this reason that Žižek can only refer to class without expanding upon it.
Indeed, Žižek does make fairly regular references to changes in class structures which, in Sharpe’s terms, can appear ‘ad hoc’ or ‘journalistic’. Sharpe (ibid: 197), for instance, cites Žižek’s distinction between the ‘symbolic’ class of Western professionals, the middle class of Western manual labour and the excluded class, which he links to the symbolic, imaginary and Real (Žižek, 2000e: 323). There is a certain logic to Sharpe’s critique; such an analysis does not engage with the difficult history of class structure, nor does it appear to have a strong empirical backing. Conversely, the mapping of class structure is not Žižek’s central point in this passage; rather it is the subsequent reference – a reference Sharpe ignores – to the manner in which class antagonism is the underlying factor beneath all these political forms of identity.
Somewhat sloppy scholarship aside, the difficult question of the relationship between class struggle and class structure remains. Žižek appears to be arguing two points: that class struggle is the antagonism which determines social life in its absence: and that class as a specific antagonism is excluded from political life within capitalism. Yet these positions are not strictly correlative. Just because class struggle is never directly expressed does not mean that class struggle never occurs. Class struggle has a symbolic form but not an imaginary one – whilst we can speak the word, we cannot imagine a coherent class relationship. That is, whilst the feminine form of class struggle makes a definition of the raw form of class struggle strictly impossible – we cannot speak of the content of class struggle in itself – because class struggle actually occurs in class formations, we can encircle this possibility and produce a reading which relies upon both Lacanian and Marxism notions.
The difficulty is that Žižek does not come to define what he means by class structure – can it be taken from Marx’s critique of the contradictions of the mode of production, as Žižek’s previous comments imply? That is, if class has a symbolic form, rather than a singular signifier, can we specify what that form is, even if an ideal content cannot be identified?
We can move towards answering this question through one of Žižek’s most common suggestions, that class is the excluded antagonism from the list of ‘new social movements’ that dominates the ‘New Left’. Žižek argues that class is not just one on the list but, rather, is the antagonism today – but not in terms of the set of empirically-existing struggles. For Žižek it is the exclusion of class struggle qua the Real from the symbolic chain that allows for the coherent construction of capital. In this sense, Žižek argues that it is this exclusion of class which constitutes the global capitalist horizon. In relation to the battle for universality and hegemony in global capitalism via the exclusion of class, he contends:
This contamination of the universal by the particular is ‘stronger’ than the struggle for hegemony (i.e. for which particular content will hegemonise the universality in question): it structures in advance the very terrain on which the multitude of particular contents fight for hegemony… the question is, also and above all, which secret privileging and inclusions/exclusions had to occur for this empty place as such to emerge in the first place. (Žižek, 2000e: 320, original emphasis)
Thus, we can identify (imaginary) forms of class struggle – say changes in the relationship between the managerial function of ‘knowledge’ workers – but these imaginary forms are themselves only a response to the impossibility of the class relationship. Just as the lack of a sexual relationship does not prevent sex from occurring – in fact it is the reason it occurs – class relationships occur as a response to the impossibility of class struggle. Moreover, just as there is no imaginary ideal form of sex, contra historical Marxism, there is no ideal form of class relationship.
This is a point taken up by Madra and Özselcuk – working as part of a group based around the Rethinking Marxism journal – who, like Stavrakakis in regards to democracy, argue that a (partial) ideal form of class relationship can be found in the institutionalisation of the impossibility of class struggle. It is to this vital point of discussion, one quite opposed to Žižek’s work, which I shall now turn. If much of this response has been rehearsed in the previous chapter by way of a reply to Stavrakakis, Madra and Özselcuk raise a more interesting point in regards to the structure of class relations, both in terms of the ahistorical conditions of possibility for class formations and of their structuration within capitalist political economy.
There appears to be a gap within Žižek’s work thus far unaccounted for: I have identified the formal (Lacanian) structure of class relations and suggested that this does not rule out attempts to formulate class relationships in ideology. Žižek, however, has only implied the Marxist structure of class struggle; here Madra and Özselcuk seek to be more explicit.
Rethinking Class as Surplus-Labour
This strand of work has emerged from a collection of scholars working largely out of the University of Massachusetts. This group has formed the Association for Economic and Social Analysis (AESA) and Community Economies Collective (CEC), publishing primarily out of the Rethinking Marxism journal. Explicitly following both Laclau and Žižek, the grouping hopes that by rethinking Marx’s notion of class struggle through Lacanian psychoanalysis, possibilities will emerge for “not only repeating Marx’s critique of the political economy of capitalism but also of reformulating communism as an axiom without resorting to a utopian social ideal as its fantasmatic support” (Özselcuk & Madra, 2005: 80).
The group itself has attempted, inline with Althusser’s work on overdetermination, to reconsider class as a process – understood as the “processes of producing, appropriating and distributing surplus labour” (Graham & Amariglio, 2006: 200). This contrasts with a consideration of class as a fixed or determinate position. Thus, rather than occupying part of the working class, one might be embedded in class processes as both a producer involved in direct labour and the consumer of symbolic capital. Class is thus a process with three distinct moments; the production, appropriation and distribution of surplus. These moments are enacted within an infinite number of discourses, making the process of class somewhat similar to Žižek’s notion of class struggle; class is a process that is expressed through other discourses. Indeed, like Žižek, Madra and Özselcuk (2007: 92) argue that class struggle is “[the] foundational, constitutive lack as the absent cause, the foundational antagonism, the constitutive impossibility, around which sociality is constructed”.
Whilst the AESA have opened up class and took a step away from economic determinism, their position has remained open to two separate threats. Politically, the AESA delineation has tended to remain within a transcendental ontology of class and ethics, relying on notions of theft and exclusion which assumed that producers were the natural owners of surplus (Madra, 2006: 206). Additionally, and economically, by defining class as a process, the AESA have rejected any structural necessity to class and instead focused on the contingency of class identity and process. Like Laclau’s work, this conception of class has appeared to leave itself open to the possibility that the dissolution of (Western) class identities would mean the disappearance of class struggle itself.
Two particular theorists in the AESA group, Madra and Özselcuk have sought to mediate this difficulty by taking on a more Lacanian reading of class. Citing Žižek (Özselcuk & Madra, 2005: 85), they suggest that Lacan’s maxim ‘there is no sexual relationship’ can be transposed to class struggle, such that ‘there is no class relationship’: there is no possibility of successfully integrating the hitch of class struggle into any organisation of political economy. Although sharing the same ontological commitment, Madra and Özselcuk diverge strongly from Žižek in their epistemological interpretation of this commitment, a distinction with real political consequences.
Whilst Žižek has (implicitly at least) rejected a definition of the structure of class antagonism, Madra and Özselcuk base their work around a deconstruction of the structure of class struggle. They posit that concrete class structures do exist but any attempts to consummate the class relationship will necessary fail. Madra and Özselcuk argue that Žižek’s refusal to delineate the cause of class relations, rather than its effects, results in an inability to see past specifically capitalist class relations. As part of this, Madra and Özselcuk critique Žižek’s use of surplus-value – as opposed to surplus-labour – in conceiving of the homologous relationship between Lacanian surplus-jouissance and Marxism. They contend that by referring specifically to the capitalist form of surplus-labour in surplus-value, Žižek is unable to see envisage the possibility of class relations outside of capitalism. To reiterate this important point, Madra and Özselcuk argue that because Žižek abstracts his conception of class struggle only from capitalism, he is unable to conceive of the possibility of alternative forms of production and as such is destined to remain within the horizon of capital.
Furthermore, Madra and Özselcuk argue that Žižek allows for contingency within capitalism only at the moment of consumption. In terms of production, however, Žižek considers only a structural approach, the cyclical ‘accumulation of capital’(Özselcuk & Madra, 2007: 85). This approach gives capital a teleological presence, as if it could continue reproducing itself infinitely.
This is not a point with which Žižek would disagree; the basis of his argument in regards to capitalism qua the symbolic Real is that the reproduction of capitalism no longer requires an active subjective presence. It is, however, a point on which Madra and Özselcuk take issue. Capital does not simply exist, rather it is actively reproduced by subject positions (ibid.: 84). They argue that because Žižek does not subjectivise the sphere of production, or consider the conditions of possibility for production outside of capitalism, he misses a possible realm for political action. This critique is familiar reproach to Žižek’s work – that his ontological commitments, in particular his construction of capitalism as a self-revolutionising beast run amuck – leaves too little room for political action (ibid.: 83).
By contrast, Madra and Özselcuk argue that class formations “are fantasmatic and libidinally animated formations, structured around an impossibility that stains all attempts to institute a stable and harmonious organisation of production, appropriation and distribution of surplus labour” (Özselcuk & Madra, 2007; 78). If class struggle is impossible, then this impossibility occurs within ideological formations which attempt to seal the wound of their foundation. In response, Madra and Özselcuk seek to develop a “psychoanalytically informed economic difference that pertains to class” (ibid.: 79, original emphasis) arguing that Žižek has been unable to “imagine the ethico-political principles of a non-capitalist and non-exploitative relation to class” because he is “neither clear as to what the object of class struggle is, nor indicative of what a new way of organising our enjoyment to the economy might be” (ibid.: 79).
Madra and Özselcuk contend that by examining the conditions of possibility for the necessary failure of the class relation we will be in a position to both understand how class operates in capitalism and how it might operate in a non-utopian conception of an axiomatic communism. In doing so, they implicitly assume both that such a transition is possible at this stage in history and that class struggle itself can be understood. Žižek, no doubt, would suggest that any position taken on class struggle can only be ideological – one cannot get outside of class struggle to speak about class struggle. Nonetheless, this appears to be a risk that Madra and Özselcuk are willing to take.
Madra and Özselcuk’s conception of surplus labour – as opposed to the surplus of labour to which we have previously reference throughout this thesis – is vital to both their epistemological understanding of class and its ontological status. Özselcuk and Madra argue that production is always collective and cannot be reduced to the reproduction of singular workers. As a result labour is always the aggregation of socially organised individual parts and one cannot distinguish between labour which is necessary and that which is surplus. As a corollary, they contend that all labour is surplus labour; the natural operation of labour is the production of surplus (Özselcuk & Madra, 2007: 91).
Madra and Özselcuk explicitly seek to distinguish the universal form of surplus labour from its capitalist instantiation claiming that Žižek’s failure to do so significantly reduces the possibility of conceiving of class structures outside of capital. For the former, class structures are always a response to the production, distribution and appropriation of surplus labour. Although there is no naturally occurring form of class relationship – class relationships always fail – this does not prevent their occurrence as fantasmatic forms of jouissance. That is, all forms of sociality are ultimately a response to the lack imbued by the impossibility of class struggle. As such, these structures are not simply absent, as Žižek suggests but, rather, occur as forms of ideological fantasy, attempting to compensate for the lack upon which any instantiation of class struggle is founded. As a corollary, Madra and Özselcuk suggest that the basic (ahistorical) form of class struggle can be identified – contra Žižek, not only can the operation of class struggle within global capitalism be represented but the prospects for class struggle beyond capital can be envisaged.
Žižek suggests that class struggle occurs in the imaginary only to the extent that the presence of absence can be staged in the symbolic order. By contrast, Madra and Özselcuk argue that by identifying both the symbolic formula of the impossible class relationship – based around surplus-labour – as well as the manner in which they are subjectively embodied as forms of fantasy, a new, non-exclusive class formation is possible. As such, they reject the apparent consequences of the Lacanian homology between surplus-jouissance and surplus-value (focused on in the conclusion to Chapter Three) contending that it applies only to capitalism; replacing surplus-value with surplus labour introduces a new range of possibilities. Here they follow the same line of thought as Stavrakakis, suggesting what is required is a different relationship to lack, specifically one informed by a feminine, as opposed to masculine, logic.
According to Madra and Özselcuk, within capitalism it is a masculine logic which structures the field. Under this logic, the antagonism of class is partially sutured by relations of ideological fantasy and jouissance which operate through the production of an exception. They locate this exception to the capitalist, masculine, form of political economy in the Board of Directors (2007: 94). In contrast to other stakeholders throughout the organisation who battle for surplus, the directors enjoy other people’s surplus without giving anything in return. As noted in Chapter Three, the authors are here using only one possible sense of the exception. We may take issue with both the example given – would not the silent shareholder be a better embodiment of this position? – as well as the status of the exception. A more pertinent example of the exclusion is the constitutive surplus of labour within capitalism, both in terms of the officially unemployment and those unfortunate souls noted in the introduction to this thesis, for who employment is a strange exception rather than the norm.
It is this identification of the masculine as the defining exception to capitalism that causes the biggest difficulty in Madra and Özselcuk’s conception of an ethico-political movement to feminine class struggle. They consider that psychoanalysis has a very ‘precise’ sense of difference; sexual difference between the masculine and the feminine (2007: 98). Madra and Özselcuk argue that this difference specifies a move from the capitalist (masculine) ‘all’ to a communist, feminine ‘non-all’. For the authors, the feminine offers an entirely plausible and possible alternative ontological horizon, as if the masculine had simply held a historical hegemony that could be overturned with through a stunning grasp of the communist (partial) truth.
According to Madra and Özselcuk – and here their work is confluent with Žižek’s – the masculine logic of class relations within capitalism allows for an unlimited sense of difference but this play of difference depends upon the existence of a constitutive exception. By contrast, the feminine allows for unlimited difference without an exception because it is non-exclusive; there is nothing that is not included within the set. For this reason, “exclusive rights over the dispatching of the surplus” (2005: 93) and a “dictatorship of the proletariat” would simply reproduce the fantasy of the wholeness of being and reproduce the masculine logic of exception.
Like Stavrakakis’ conception of feminine jouissance and radical democracy, feminine class struggle appears both logical and desirable. If the masculine produces an exception and the feminine does not, then surely this is a preferable way for the economy to operate. An axiomatic commitment, the idea that “no one can have exclusive rights to the appropriation of surplus” (2007: 100) is entirely congruent with the history of Marxism. Indeed, this axiomatic commitment – one derived from the work of Alan Badiou – informs the communist hypothesis that we shall build upon in the final chapter. This key difference, as we shall see, is with the way in which this commitment is held.
If this solution appears too simple – given the complexity of the global economy and the sustainability problematic to which this thesis is directed – then it sadly is. The concern here is not so much abstract theoretical idealism around the utopian society but, rather, of a plausible response to the contradictions of the global economy. There are two central concerns with the notion of a feminine class struggle. The first objection is philosophical, the other pertaining to political analysis of the global economy.
Firstly, Lacan did not conceive of the feminine as an alternative panacea to the ills of the subject or society. Instead, for Lacan the feminine was a strictly impossible position, held only by comparison to the masculine. The masculine and the feminine are two alternative logical positions in regards symbolic castration but only the masculine is historically possible. Class struggle may be have a feminine form but, as noted, in the previous chapter in relation to Stavrakakis and radical democracy, feminine jouissance is not a feasible position upon which to structure politics – the content of class struggle cannot be feminine.
Yet, if feminine jouissance is impossible, is it nonetheless possible to suggest a form of class struggle without exception? At the core of Madra and Özselcuk’s argument is an axiomatic commitment – one they see as key to a communist politics – to the non-exclusive rights to surplus. If I have thus far rejected their proposed approach for achieving this structure – class formations structured around feminine jouissance – is it possible to specify a form of economy that does not rely on any particular group receiving exclusive rights to surplus?
Including the Multitude?
This logic is found at work in Hardt and Negri’s conception of the multitude; the operation of postmodern forms of ‘immaterial’ labour whereby the means of production are directly embedded in the workers themselves (Hardt & Negri, 2000, 2004). Hardt and Negri suggest that the postmodern form of capitalist sovereignty – sovereignty that occurs without an exceptional agency but, rather, through direct communication between workers – leads to the possibility of ‘absolute democracy’ and a decisive break with capital.
Both Hardt and Negri and Madra and Özselcuk identify the board of directors or ‘management’ as the exception which is constitutive of power within capitalism. Together they argue that the abolition of this managing figurehead, who receives surplus only from this (unnecessary) organising function, is the necessary step towards a new era in history. Conversely, by focusing on the materialism of the economy and Žižek’s – as opposed to Laclau’s – understanding of universality and exception, such that it is excess labour, rather than the board of directors which maintains the structure of capital – then we might more productively interpret the lumpenproletariat as the point of exclusion. Through this conception, the inability of any postmodern mode of political economy to respond to the exclusion of excess labour from the global polis can be seen.
Hardt and Negri, identify the global (political) economy as ‘empire’, within which lies the latent potential of the workers of the multitude. Empire’s predominate feature is the reliance upon communication and cooperation between subjects. That is, one is no longer able to make a strict distinction between politics, the economy and social life; the reproduction of shared social life through communication and cooperation, always political in itself, is now the primary source of profit for Western capital. We have entered an era of biopolitical production, such that; “the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another” (Hardt & Negri, 2000: xiii).
The changing nature of capitalist sovereignty is reflected in the movement from a disciplinary society to a society of control, where power is directly bio-power, internalised into the body as the whole of social life comes to be administered in the ‘panoptican affect’ (Hardt & Negri, 2000: 23-24). Instead of a single entity controlling power – a modernist organisation of power – sovereignty is rather constructed via the processes of the cultural reproduction of capitalism. Whilst we can acknowledge an influential structure of governing organisations, including the United Nations, the Bretton Woods financial instruments, regional trade organisations and agreements and the easily forgotten nation-state itself (as well as more local forms of sovereignty within the state), the dominant form of sovereignty within Empire is what Hardt and Negri label ‘ether’– the reproduction of shared social life (in the name of profit) by immaterial labour through cooperation and communication (2000: 346).
In contrast to modernist imperialism, for Hardt and Negri empire is without exception: all forms of social life potentially falls within its grasp. Neither has it a home, despite the apparent hegemony of the United States, instead it is organised around the ‘non-place’ of capital. This non-place is mediated by the continuous flow of ether; sovereignty is guaranteed only to the extent that it is reproduced in our social relations as nothing exists outside of the existence of capitalist social relations that might secure the system. Instead capitalism is actively – if unknowingly – reproduced by those who participate. Here, Hardt and Negri return to a traditional Marxist conception of ideology; ideology prevents the subject from acknowledging the truth about their place in the mode of production.
For this reason we can argue that Hardt and Negri’s conception of empire – and, as we shall see, its reactionary potential, the multitude – matches the same (feminine) structure as suggested by Madra and Özselcuk. The feminine, outside of the clinic, here appears to be nothing more than a postmodern cultural practice. As part of this practice, theorists of postmodernity have come to suggest that the decline of stable identities and power relations which result from the loss of sovereign authority has offered the prospect of widespread freedom from the symbolic order, even if material emancipation is no longer an appropriate political goal.
Capitalism, or rather empire, has achieved this level of hermeneutic self-containment through the deployment of communication and cooperation as the hegemonic forms of labour in capitalism – immaterial labour. Emblematic here are social networking sites. These sites – most notably Facebook, MySpace and Youtube – commodify human relationships by offering a free and attractive service to users who update their personal details in order to interact with their peers. This information is then stored and sold to advertisers, both for research purposes and for the benefit of more direct advertising. The business model of these sites is similar to that of newspaper[4] – the selling of readers’ attention to advertisers – with a greater reliance upon user interaction. Here, social relationships and communities are actively created and reproduced for the sole purpose of the production of profit.
The industry which embodies both immaterial labour and the femininity of the postmodern economy is finance capitalism. Finance capitalism is the ultimate example of immaterial labour, whereby production itself does not exist; vast sums of money change hands through an intangible global system of co-operation and communication. Yet, that money exists not only because we believe it to exist (money being a system of trust whereby I believe that the currency which you offer me is ‘legitimate’) but because our societal practices establish this belief for us. We have no choice but to use money and in functioning economies only the most neurotic of users would concern themselves with the acceptance of their money.
Moreover, finance capital comes to stand between Madra and Özselcuk’s critique of Žižek’s understanding of capital as the symbolic Real, and Hardt and Negri’s reading of immaterial labour. Žižek argues that the machinery of capitalism is engineered only for its own continued expansion. Money becomes an end in itself rather than being tied to some notion of ‘actual material progress’ (Žižek, 2006d: 61-62) . Žižek’s main target here is financial capital and its continual expansion of the circulation of money, in which there is no actual goal other than the more money. Currency trading and arbitrage, in which money is bought in one market and quickly sold again in another to take advantage of a temporary misalignment in prices (Moles & Terry, 1997: 19) are examples of this kind of symbolic money-for-money transactions within capitalism. Moreover, Žižek comes to argue that this process exemplifies the movement of drive where the goal is circulation and movement around the goal (money for the sake of money) as opposed to surplus-value in desire, which is linked to imaginary desires for notions such as progress, under the guise of commodity fetishism. This movement is characterised by the change from C-M-C (the commodity is exchanged for money in order to obtain other commodities) to M-C-M (money is used to obtain commodities for trade in order to make more money). The latter is certainly the logic of capital but it operates under the illusion of the former, which carries the ideological illusion of a progression towards the object.
By contrast, as I noted earlier, Madra and Özselcuk argued that this contention takes away subjectivity from the mode of production and depersonalises the potential for political action. Moreover, we see in the notion of Empire that finance capital is based upon subjective communication and cooperation. Thus, Žižek may be correct in his description of the pure structure of capitalism adhering the dynamics of drive, yet although at an abstract level of analysis we can detect the structure of drive, there remains a subjective level of production. Indeed, by contrast to the systematic production of drive, those actively involved in production are more likely to adhere to an economy of desire. Thus, while those embedded in the process, say currency traders, may be aware on some level that money is ultimately empty they still operate in a discourse of desire; whether to fulfil their personal budget, to get further status or to get a pay raise, at this level capitalism remains driven by desire, even if the resulting structure is of drive. As a corollary, Žižek’s point is that whilst global capitalism is necessarily subjectivised in the bodies of its participants, the systematic operation of capital is such that no radical political action is possible at that level. Instead, the consequence of his identification of capital as a modality of the Real is that effective political action can only occur by taking this systematic structure into account.
These ideas find their expression, also, in the the notion that the development of financial capital has been congruent with the rise of postmodernity, or as Jameson calls it, late modernity[5] (Jameson, 2000). Financial capital, although always operative in some form throughout the modern era, established its dominance in the 1970s. The 1970s saw the advent of two vital and interlinked trends, over-production and the decoupling of the dollar from the gold standard. The crisis of over-production, combined with the oil shocks early in the decade, led a mass of surplus looking for an investment home. Some of this surplus was redirected into newly established 3rd world markets but the core of the problem remained. The solution was the development of the financial industry, whereby ‘excess’ currency was able to be put into circulation and expanded without any physical reference (Jameson, 1996; Wade, 2007, 2008).
Key to this move was Richard Nixon’s breaking of the US Dollar from the gold standard (Hardt and Negri, 2000; 266). The move to floating currencies was followed, in various speeds, by the majority of governments. The floating of national currencies allowed for the trading of currencies themselves, rather than through physical trade. The trading of currencies for profit, whether nominally attached to commodities or not, is the basis of the international financial industry. This move was of massive historical significance; along with the development of the financial industry, the dropping of the Gold standard removed the guarantee of the ‘general equivalency’ of money. Instead, in a definitively postmodern – or feminine – manoeuvre, money no longer exists, there are only currencies[6]. Such a move is part of a historical development; money having moved from being an element of value itself, to being supported by an item of supposed value (the gold standard) to its current state as a purely virtual occurrence, given a presence only because we believe in the value of its presence.
Indeed, physical commodities are no longer the basis of much trade. Certainly the growth in physical trade, production and consumption continues, as the materiality of the climate crisis reveals. Nonetheless, increasingly commodities are traded simply as a placeholders for currencies – livestock might be bought in Euros only to be traded when the value of that currency rises – particularly through mathematical ‘derivative’ trading through which value is ‘derived’ via various instrument of finance trade, including hedging, options and swaps. This trading has established a certain distance from the ‘real’ economy, such that the material operation of economy in the sense of fulfilling ‘needs and wants’ of consumers is no longer operative. Instead the real economy – in the sense of value and influence – lies in the financial centres of the Western world, where value rises and falls based upon the second-order expectations of the fate of financial products developed only for monetary gain. The financial crisis that first became apparent in 2008 saw these self-destructive tendencies in action as the credit ‘bubble’ burst, most of all because people lost their faith in money. To a certain degree actors have come to realise that money does not exist and have withdrawn their confidence from the system. For this reason the main task of the Obama administration in handing over unthinkable amounts of US currency to their financial institutions, is to restore confidence in the value of money[7].
The financial industry, therefore, is the paradigmatic postmodern industry not only because it is without a general equivalent or sovereign exception but because it is based upon immaterial labour, cooperation, and communication. Because under empire cooperation has become inherent to labour in a way that it never has previously, labour power moves from variable capital (a force activated by capital itself) to capital itself; knowledge has become the key means of production. Hardt and Negri contend that:
Today, productivity, wealth and the creation of social surpluses take the form of cooperative interactivity through linguistic, communicational and affective networks. In the expression of its own creative energies, immaterial labour thus seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism. (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 294)
Conversely, if knowledge is the most important means of production, then for the first time the seeds of a new order lie with the workers themselves. Workers no longer need capital to reproduce shared social life; the workers are already doing so in their everyday movements. Capital loses its organising function and becomes purely parasitic (Žižek, 2008a: 351). The material reproduction of society occurs in the workplace already in the forms of communication, cooperative and affective labour produced by the multitude. Rather than workers being solely operators of fixed capital, deploying the resources provided for work, the immaterial labourer is now a source of capital in itself; knowledge. The worker is thus a unit of variable capital, such that the economy no longer requires specific sources of capital for its reproduction[8].
Hardt and Negri suggest that this move, by which the knowledge inherent in labour power becomes the key means of production, produces a subversive potential in what they label the ‘multitude’: the germs of the future produced within capitalism. Thus,
from one perspective Empire stands clearly over the multitude and subjects it to the rule of its overarching machine, as a new Leviathan. At the same time, however, from the perspective of social productivity and creativity, from what we have been calling the ontological perspective, the hierarchy is reversed. The multitude is the real productive force of our social world, whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only off the vitality of the multitude. (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 62)
Therefore, for Hardt and Negri the multitude is the inherent form of resistance produced within capital. There may not be an outside within empire which provides a nodal point for the subversion of capital, rather this point is produced by capitalism itself; capital provides the seeds of its own destruction. If postmodern production is immaterial, then the most important means of production lies with the bodies and the minds of the workers. Capital is no longer machinery and tools but is increasingly immaterial in itself. As Žižek comments; “[i]t was Marx who emphasised how material production is always also the (re)production of the social relations within which it occurred; with today’s capitalism, however, the production of social relations is the immediate end/goal of production” (Žižek, 2006d: 262).
The role of the multitude – and here Hardt and Negri return to classical Marxism – is to become conscious of their position as both subject and object of history and come to determine the world themselves, to break free of capital and realise the ‘absolute’ democracy that they are already in the process of creating. The multitude is in the paradoxical position of both holding an inherent potential for resistance to the system yet being the point of subversion of that resistance; all that is required to formulate a political movement is a realisation of this power.
Again, we have reached a Marxist critique of ideology, whereby the worker requires an awareness of their circumstances in order to break free of their chains. Ironically, however, it is knowledge which has become the very object of production under empire. Thus, it is the reproduction of knowledge and social relations by the multitude which holds the potential for radical action, yet at the same time the ideological construction of capital – itself reproduced by the multitude, though in the implicit name of empire – prevents the realisation of that radical potential. If knowledge is power, within empire it is immanently contained by the power of capital.
Here, perhaps the most pertinent point is that it is difficult to determine the enemy within because of the sovereignty of ether and the ‘non-place’ of power within empire. Ironically, given the shared communicative mechanisms which define the multitude, the problem they experience is a lack of clear language, both in identifying the enemy and articulating the future (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 210). Once this can be established, and the multitude become conscious of their dominating status, all that is required is to locate and knock off of the nominal head: communism and absolute democracy are within reach, all that is to be done is to realise our fate. Yet, is this approach not, however, as Žižek suggests, confluent with the ultimate capitalist fantasy of frictionless capitalism, capitalism without governance, simply organising itself through the invisible hand of the market? (2006d: 263). That is, if Hardt and Negri imagine the multitude to be a point of resistance to capital within capital itself, the danger is that this logic is entirely confluent with its operation.
Whilst the multitude are a possible point of resistance against capitalism – any agent involved in the creation of the commons holds a radical potential – they remain a resistant group particular to capitalism. Moreover, rather than provide the hope for what Hardt and Negri label ‘absolute democracy’, the multitude have more in common with contemporary liberal democracy; both are based upon the exclusion of surplus labour. The ultimate risk of focusing political hope upon the multitude is that they will only expand the operation of capitalism.
The essential difference between Hardt and Negri’s empire and Žižek’s reading of capitalism as a modality of the Real is their conception of what is outside to capitalism. The former argue that the multitude can break free of the logic of capital from within capital itself, suggesting an alternative mode of production can develop within capitalism. We see this in the manifesto style statements which end Empire, in which they propose a minimum social wage, the right to global citizenship and reappropriation. The assumption is that the functioning of the multitude is such that this can occur outside of capital, yet within empire. Žižek, on the other hand, argues that there is no exterior to capital in this sense. Instead, not only would the guaranteed minimum income solution be drawn into a capitalist understanding of redistribution, justice, and the market but the multitude too will continue to be an element of capital – indeed, revealing a potentially more efficient functioning.
Symptomatically, for Žižek and for Hardt and Negri, there is little difference between the multitude and Bill Gates’ image of ‘frictionless’ capital. It is just that the former believe that the multitude can be detached from capital, whereas Žižek has no such illusions. Moreover, for Žižek the democracy of the multitude and frictionless capital are sadly entwined because they both require the same propeller for sovereign-less development; surplus-value. Thus, given the materiality of the problematic suggested in this thesis, it is not a matter of simply reproducing capitalism without capitalists – not only is this impossible (without capital itself, what would drive the organisation of the multitude?) but it would only serve to reproduce the reliance upon surplus which is the structuring factor behind environmental degradation.
In this sense the multitude cannot be considered to be a group in themselves. Rather, they arise only as a point of resistance to capitalism, just as the feminine is only possible by reference to the continued existence of the masculine. Rather than the immaterial labour of the multitude, it is the universality enabled by the unwanted horde of today’s political economy that provides hope for a radically different future. Thus empire is not without exception – it is ultimately not a form the Lacanian feminine – instead it operates via a disavowal of its exception, the excess of labour outside of even the multitude.
What Hardt and Negri miss is that the absolute democracy they believe can be developed from within empire is based upon the same exclusion which constitutes liberal democracy, that of the reserve army of labour. There is no reason to suggest that a democratic reconstruction of immaterial labour would include the currently excluded populations of the world any more than is currently the case. Instead, the immaterial surplus which is created by ‘the multitude’ is only generated on the basis of an exclusion; an exclusion which constitutes the wage-labour system. Empire is not without exception, it is only without an apparent governing exception. As has been thus far noted in this thesis, however, the governing exception is only one possible modality of the outside. More pertinent in terms of the global economy is not the diffusion of governing or managerial power but, rather, the (extimate) exclusion from the global economy.
Hardt and Negri, however, do not consider there to be any exclusion from either empire or the multitude. Symptomatic of this position is their definition of the proletariat, which is so wide as to diffuse the real difference within this category, particularly in terms of suffering. Here Hardt and Negri state, “we understand proletariat as a broad category that includes all those whose labour is directly or indirectly exploited by and subjected to capitalist norms of production and reproduction” (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 52).
To compare the wealth of a professional sportsman and the poverty of a third-world farmer – both equally subsumed into capitalist exploitation – is to lose sight of the contours of exploitation and suffering. Moreover, it is to lose the reason why we oppose capital at all; the necessary suffering it imposes. For Hardt and Negri, “exploitation occurs but it is increasingly hard, perhaps impossible to designate a place of exploitation – the non-place of exploitation – exploitation can no longer be localised and quantified – instead they are universal qualities” (ibid.: 209). Consequently; “although exploitation and domination are still experienced concretely on the flesh of the multitude, they are nonetheless amorphous in such a way that it seems there is no place left to hide” (ibid.: 211).
Hardt and Negri addressed this point in the follow up text to Empire, Multitude (2004). Here they note the suggestion that those who are excluded from the waged labour are also excluded from the Multitude. Instead, they argue that the excluded are not in fact outside of the biopolitical realm but are, in fact, an integral to its reproduction such that, at a general level, “biopolitical production – including the production of knowledge, information, linguistic forms, networks of communication and collaborative social relationships – tends to involve all of society, including the poor” (ibid.: 130)
Thus, whilst the absolute poor are strictly excluded from capitalist production, they are not to be excluded from political organisation. Hardt and Negri acknowledge the Marxist conception of the reserve army of labour and the role of excess labour in maintaining the wage-labour system, particularly in the globalised labour market with its large ‘dumps’ of unproductive population groups. Nonetheless, they reject the idea of an industrial reserve army because there is not the unity that the term ‘army’ implies. Instead, the nature of employment today is such that there is little division between the employed and unemployed and, “there is no reserve in the sense that no labour power is outside the processes of social production” (ibid.: 131). Moreover, even those who may be technically in reserve employment are still socially productive.
Hardt and Negri’s conception of global unemployment largely misses this point, however. Whilst the absolute poor might be culturally rich in some areas and may well contribute to forces of social cooperation, the extent of the stretch is revealed when Hardt and Negri argue;
In many respects the poor are actually extraordinarily wealthy and productive. From the perspective of biodiversity, for example, some of the poorest regions of the world, generally speaking the global south, have the greatest wealth of different plant and animal species, whereas the rich global north is home to relatively few. (ibid.: 131).
Whilst diverse biological resources and the knowledge that goes with these resources may have value, it is little compensation for today’s poor. Hardt and Negri may emphasis the cooperative productivity of the linguistic community and its potential for resistance but this is of little consequence for empty stomachs (ibid.: 132). The authors almost glamorise the lives of those who live in squalor, not only because their historical ontic positioning is a primary point of resistance but also because of their simultaneous cultural unity and diversity. If “part of the wealth of migrants is their desire for something more, their refusal to accept the ways things are” (ibid.: 133) then Hardt and Negri seem to be dangerously down-playing their often desperate plight.
Although Hardt and Negri acknowledge the misery of migrant workers and the like, ultimately they prove unable to fully recognise the structural position of those groups:
Our point rather is that these should be conceived not as a matter of exclusion but one of differential inclusion, not as a line of division between workers and the poor nationally and globally but as hierarchies within the common conditions of poverty. All of the multitude is productive and all of it is poor. (ibid.: 134)
Differential inclusion appears very close to the Lacanian concept of extimacy and Žižek’s understanding of the concrete universal, whereby the point of exclusion is simultaneously included within that from which it is included. Hardt and Negri may be correct in asserting that we should not insist upon a sharp differential between the poor and the unemployed. Nonetheless, where they argue that the absolute poor should simply be included within the larger grouping of the multitude we should still maintain the concept of the reserve army of labour. I do not wish to engage in a game of ‘enlarging the concept’, attempting to map exactly who it is who might fit this category – the distinction is more abstract. In actually existing conditions there may be little difference between the social interactions of the poor and the very poor, the waged and the unwaged. Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge that globally, the wage-labour system only operates because of the excess condition of labour.
This operation is seen on a global scale. Yes, there may be some degree of cooperative solidarity across nations and cultures for those who can afford such technologies but employment conditions remain dependent upon excess labour populations. The strongest effect of the process of globalisation is not transnational class solidarity but the ability to export employment. If labour costs increase in China then jobs are likely to go to a poorer nation such as Bangladesh. This is not to suggest that we could walk down an alley in Bangladesh and divide up the lumpenproletariat from the proletariat but the operation of the reserve army of labour is much more real than Hardt and Negri and willing to acknowledge.
Surplus Labour Beyond the Feminine Multitude
While the multitude may be actively reproducing society through communication, we must still come to acknowledge the structuring role of the ‘part with no part’ which is truly supporting capitalism – an excess which acts as an exception beyond the apparent feminity of the ‘postmodern’ economy envisaged by Hardt and Negri. These people largely lie in these massive urban slums – slums in which all of the global three billion strong population increase is predicted to occur – unemployment has reached meaningless levels, in some places reaching 80% such that employment being a marginal exception. This concept may remain abstract but the suffering of those whose only claim to wealth is as a linguistic community is very Real.
The excluded – a surplus of labour – are truly the necessary and constitutive exception which must be excluded for the continued functioning of the system, and so it is with capital and its reserve army of labour. Surplus labour, therefore, constitutes the capitalist form of the class relationship. It is the exclusion of these masses which allows for the capitalist form of the production and distribution of surplus value. This disparate grouping, which might otherwise be labelled the lumpenproletariat, is the new breed of entrepreneur, a neo-liberal dream in a Hobbesian nightmare. These enterprising business-workers sell whatever they can to survive, whether it is knick-knacks or their bodies. Their inadvertent subversion of intellectual property in the huge market for inauthentic designer merchandise may be an example of a multitude-esque anti-capitalism but there is nothing liberating about the circumstances of their lifestyle.
In this conception – against Laclau, the New Left, and the AESA – my argument has returned full circle, although a little wiser, to Marx’s conception of the revolutionary social grouping. The twist, however, is that no revolutionary potential lies with surplus labour itself. There will be no storming of the White House from outside the slums of Bangladesh. Nor will the excess workers of the world throw off their shackles and overthrow their now unnecessary bosses. Instead the revolutionary potential lies in the tension, the gap or lack, between this excess and the relations of enjoyment which rely upon it.
It is the management of the tension which this gap creates that Hardt and Negri, as well as Madra and Özselcuk, do not consider. On the one hand there exist the postmodern corporations, characterised by Hardt and Negri’s immaterial labour. On the other side – generally the other side of the world – is the remaining material labour, a capitalist historical tribute to industrial era production and suffering. The multitude is not self-organising; it still relies upon a managerial function. For this reason, while Hardt and Negri, along with Madra and Özselcuk, are incorrect to assert that capital is purely parasitic, capital does not simply sit back and suck up profit but has a vital organising function not only in terms of organisation and strategy but also in bringing the two sides of capital together and managing the tension (Žižek, 2008a: 359).
I appear, therefore, to have reached an impasse, both in terms of the development of the argumentation in this thesis and more importantly in political action against the hegemony of capital. In terms of the later, it appears that not only has capitalism subsumed the entirely of the production and reproduction of shared social life – such that any alternative production of shared social life will automatically be drawn into capitalism – but we are also left with no ‘natural’ form of politics that would provide an alternative to capitalism.
In this thesis, I have thus far rejected any essentialism which stems from a predestined chosen revolutionary group. Nonetheless, a different kind of approach – that of the political, rather than politics – stemming from Žižek’s reading of both Lacan and Marx, suggests that the most productive form of anti-capitalism today is associated with the existence of this excluded group that I have constructed as surplus labour. This potential comes not from the group itself, nor any alternative economic construction that might attempt to include this group but, rather, a strategic manipulation of the tension that exists between the ideological narratives of the global West and the necessary exclusions from this conception of shared social life – that the wage-labour system operates only on the basis of a surplus of labour which cannot be acknowledged within Western civilisation itself. To restate this in base terms, the tension within capitalism lies in the disavowed Truth that capitalism is constructed in such a manner that for the living standards of Western civilisation to continue unfettered, an excess of workers must remain outside of the wage labour system, and as a consequence of this status, the quality and length of their lives are significantly reduced.
The revolutionary potential here lies in the intrusion of this disavowed element of our civilisation into the ideological narrative of the West, whether in relation to justice, equality, freedom or some other high-minded abstract ideal, to potentially cause a revolutionary dislocation in the structure of that narrative. This disruption has the potential to open up space for alternative modes of political action. How these responses occur, as well as generating a dislocation in the first place, is the battle of politics.
Moreover, it is the acknowledgement of the presence of surplus labour in relation to class struggle which allows for this potential. Although much of this chapter has been dedicated to rejecting Madra and Özselcuk’s work, their work on the symbolic structure of class has some value. That is, although Žižek does identify the Lacanian structure of class struggle, he only makes an implicit reference to the history of Marxism. He does this not as a lapse in scholarship but, rather, through an ontological commitment to the Real status of class struggle. Nonetheless, as we noted in Chapter Three, reading the Real through Žižek’s concept of (concrete) universality allows for an identification of the point of exclusion in relation to class struggle. This is a vital point, and shall be a central focus point in the final two chapters.
These chapters concentrate upon formulating a Žižekian-inspired approach to the contradictions of global capitalism. Thus far I have rejected both traditional Marxist politics and the production of alternative forms of shared social life based upon Lacanian psychoanalysis. Moreover, this chapter has illustrated Žižek’s construction of the ontic structure of capitalism, one that limits the range of political action available. My Žižekian response begins from this point, considering a reading of class struggle which provides opportunity for political action, and a number of political strategies that stem from Žižek’s work, including the utopian demand of the ‘communist hypothesis’.
[1] These laws, however, came to be seen as a restriction upon the activities of capital.
[2]By contrast, Homer (2001: 14), although suggesting that Žižek’s rehabilitation of class is ‘to be welcomed’ (ibid.: 14), contends that Žižek’s lack of positive definition of class has meant that the successful integration of Marxian politics and class struggle into his project has been prevented by his adherence to Lacanian psychoanalysis.
[3] Dialogue between Laclau and Žižek almost reaches this point in their debate over the value of Populism (Laclau, 2006; Žižek, 2006a).
[4] Indeed social networking sites have taken this model further than print media such that the later are trying to utilise the methods of social networking sites in order to increase online revenues enough to compensate for falling hard copy sales.
[5] We shall focus on Jameson’s work in Chapter Eight.
[6] Interestingly, in a Laclauian dynamic, although money itself does not exist, this does not mean that the international trading market exists as a series of particular currencies alone. Instead, one currency – the US Dollar – come to take the place of money, acting as a hegemonic general equivalent.
[7] One of the more interesting elements of the financial crisis was the confusion amongst the general public as to the contraction of the economy – the paradigmatic question here being ‘Where did all the money go?’ as if someone had to have ‘the money’, that it could not simply be lost. The (comedic) illusion here is not that we tragically had money and then lost it but that the money never existed in the first place. It seems, however, that most investors were without a philosophical sense of humour.
[8] That the capitalist is largely redundant was noted by Marx himself (Özselcuk & Madra, 2005: 87)
I haven’t had a chance to read through all of this, but I have two comments. First, Özselcuk & Madra are completely off base in their claim that Zizek can’t see how surplus plays out in different modes of production. If you look at the first chapter of SOI, you’ll see that Zizek draws the distinction between Feudalism and Capitialism: in Feudalism extraction of surplus is explicit, whereas under capital it is underground, hidden under the guise of formal freedom… and this is the important point – it does this via the commoditiy form and the particular form of surplus that goes with it. Özselcuk & Madra miss this, and end up giving a Kantian regulative idea as their politics, as inspired by Badiou, without explaining why anyone would ever adhere to it. (something about “thou shalt not take more surplus than you need” or some such thing).
Again, I haven’t read all of this chapter or any of those previous, but I’m uncertain about all the bogey-Marx you seem to rely on – i.e. all the “contra-Marx”s. Marx didn’t think ‘class’ was simply an empirical reality. Hence the “sack of potatoes” comment in The Eighteenth Brumaire, oft quoted by Gramsci, and of course all the in-itself for-itself business found in The Poverty of Philosophy. And Zizek does propose something exactly along this line – i.e. via the Party, as described by Lukacs. I can’t find your biblio here, but Zizek’s paper in Lukacs’ ‘Tailism and Dialetic’ goes on on this point – and it was published around the same time as CHU (with all the discussion of capitalism as real and class stuggle). Which is to say I’m not sure how much of what you say is Contra-Marx is actually contra Marx.
Lastly (so I guess there’s three comments) Zizek makes reference to Lukacs in CHU in reference to how the economy ‘overdetermines’ or acts as an ‘oppositional determination’ of capital: it’s not just via Class struggle, but the “Class and COMMODITY” structure of Capital. I think this is on Page 196 or 197. ANd Marx himself mroe or less says this in his famous letter to Weydemyer: he (marx) didn’t invent class; he showed how it takes on different inflections via the mode of production. Again, I’m trying to show how Zizek is less “contra-Marx” than consistent with what he says…
Thanks for your comments Greg. In regards to Madra and Ozselcuk, although I’m not in total agreement with their position, I would agree with their argument that Zizek does not explore alternative readings of surplus in much detail. The example you cite is over 20 years old now and to my knowledge Zizek has not discussed this point in any detail since. Indeed, he often avoids it. In Multitude, Surplus, Envy (Rethinking Marxism, 19(1), 2007, pp.55) he stated;
‘The theoretical task, with immense practical-political consequences, is here: how are we to think the surplus that pertains to human productivity ‘as such’ outside its appropriation/distortion by the capitalist logic of surplus value as the mobile of social reproduction?”
But does not go on to give an answer, or even discuss the question further. The question to ask is why this is the case. Is it evidence of Zizek’s inability to think outside of the logic of capital or simply evidence of the limitations upon political practice at this point in history? I would suggest that for Zizek it is the later and for this reason he would reject Madra and Ozselcuk’s critique.
In regards to your second point, the Marx I was responding to here was the Marx of ‘Marxism’ rather than any direct reading of Marx himself. Nonetheless, I have been remiss in not providing a more detailed reading of the ambiguities within Marxism, both in regards to class and other concepts detailed in the chapter ‘Marxism after the signifier’.
The problem is that O and M write that Z implicitly argues that capitalism is here to stay (!); they argue this by saying that he de-historicizes surplus so that it looks the same in all times and places. I completely disagree with this (as it appears you do to), as he makes it explicit for over 70 pages surplus under capitalism is to be found in the particularity of the commodity form – a position that he maintains in CHU (mentioned above), “Lenin’s Choice”, etc, etc. That he doesn’t consider other forms is, I think, beyond the point in this instance. O/M charge that he’s got it wrong even in regards to capital… and then go on to give a Kantian (i.e. an ahistorical!) political regulative-imperative disquised as a reference to Badiou.
That is, they don’t see the importance of form, and stumble into formalism.
The quote you give above sounds much like his position in SOI: i.e. you can’t have capitalism without the surplus; i.e. you can’t expect to have the productivity of capitalism once you get rid of the surplus it generates (which he accusses Marx of not seeing). This IS to say that Zizek holds that ‘surplus’ can’t be eliminated, but this ISN’T to say that the particular form it takes under capitalism is inevitable and that capitalism will therefore always exist. O/M don’t appear to catch this.
Can you send a copy of your thesis as a PDF (or whatever) to my email address? I’d like to print it out and read it properly.