Negative Capability

[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
F Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

It seems to appropriate to quote the writer of the "great smash up", at once existential and financial; as Fitzgerald wrote "‘All the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them - the lovely young creatures in my novels went to ruin, my millionaires were as beautiful and damned as Thomas Hardy's peasants". Of course we can reflect on the question of "class ontology" that runs through Fitzgerald ("her voice was full of money"). Hemingway objected to the romanticism of this ontology of difference, writing in his short-story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro":

The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The rich are different from you and me.’ And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren't it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.

John Updike nicely analyses this little contretemps, and notes that Hemingway neglects the next line of the story: "‘They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand." We might remember the books on brokerage Nick Carroway carefully shelves in The Great Gatsby, and note that it is Fitzgerald rather than Kafka who has the true appreciation for the "mysticism of money".

All this is merely a long-winded introduction to a series of comments on katechons and Crises, which you have probably already noted, here, here, and (of course) here. I've also has some comments off list raising the work of Rudolf Meidner as a temporary (but unlikely) best case katechon / lesser evil. Of course we now have the word from a certain contemporary theorist.

Wagering on the Worse

Buried in a footnote of a critical discussion of Perry Anderson's relaunching of the NLR in 2000 by Gilbert Achcar is this comment:

“One striking aspect of Perry Anderson’s ultra-pessimism is the way in which he raises very high the bar for a new modification of the balance of forces acting against neo-liberalism, succumbing thereby to a particularly crude economic determinism. Thus, according to him, the present balance of forces ‘will probably remain stable so long as there is no deep economic crisis in the West’ (“Renewals”, op cit, p19). Following this, he goes one step further and adds: ‘Little short of a slump of inter-war proportions looks capable of shaking the parameters of the current consensus’ (ibid). Apart from its exaggerated character, this judgement carries a surprising reading of
history from the pen of such a far-sighted historian. Quite the opposite is needed: let us wish that the new period of economic growth is consolidated so that the new wave of radicalisation which appears to be taking shape is strengthened. The long recessions of the inter-war period and of the last quarter of the 20th century led to a significant worsening of the balance of forces. Conversely, even Durkheim understood that boom phases are favourable to radicalisation of demands because of the expectations they raise. Besides, a new expansion under the present neo-liberal conditions of development in global capitalism clearly could not reproduce the ‘virtuous circle’ which flattered the Western working class during the long post-war boom.” (my italics)

I suppose it is this kind of suspicion that makes me unsure that the current credit crunch will have the effects of disenchantment and radicalisation that might be supposed. In the case of Argentina the collapse of the banking system appeared to produce a temporary radical effloresence that all too rapidly faded. Of course perhaps a "world" crisis would mean these effects couldn't be contained, but that is not yet self-evident. I hope I'm wrong.

La Fin Absolue du Monde

On the financial crisis the Pope declares that there is nothing to worry about as money is "nothing" and "the only solid reality is the word of God". There may be something to the first contention... (thanks to Savonarola for this link).

If you aren't already depressed enough cheer yourself by contemplating the apocalypse here, including yours truly trying (again) to avoid the politics of the worst. What is the Threads font? And can we try to overturn Times New Roman with it...

[I did try and persuade the Kino to show The Crazies, but they were having nothing of my populist cult studs deviationism...]

'We Hold What We Have'

7 For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way. 8 And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the brightness of His coming.
2 Thessalonians 2:7-8 (New King James Version)

Owen's provocative post on the State neatly triangulates two recent texts I've been reading. The first is Timonthy Brennan's admittedly batty Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (2006). First, it's never wise to repeatedly chide the historical errors of others while committing a series of such errors yourself. Second, the book, supposedly coming from a left/Marxist viewpoint overblows the power of theory in a highly idealist manner; supposedly "cultural scholars" are responsible for the collapse of social democratic alternatives and the rise of the New Right (hmmm). That said Brennan's argument for the eclipse of social democracy during a rightward "turn" dated 1975-1980 makes sense (for the US and UK in particular). Also, which links to Owen's point, his argument for a general fixation on "liberation attached to statelessness" and an "anarchist sublime" in contemporary theory hits home. The point has been made before of course, and forms of what I once used to call "Deleuzian Thatcherism" are well-known. Here libertarian discourses cross between left and right. Something that has always struck me is the failure of UK cultural commentators to grasp that there can be such a thing as right libertarianism - hence their "surprise" (which may of course be feigned) at figures like P J O'Rourke or Camille Paglia. In more provocative vein I thought William Burroughs might better fit in that lineage than the usual attempts to position him on the anarchist / libertarian left. (If you see his letters to Alan Ginsberg about his trying to start a dope farm you certainly get a sense of the "get the government of my back" attitude, coupled to an unpleasant racism about Mexican workers (debate the possible use of irony at this point)).

Brennan argues for the convergence of theory's anti-statism (anarchist or leftist) with the anti-statism of neo-liberalism: the "anarcho-liberalism" synthesis. The position is a gross simplification but it captures something of the mood of the dependance of anarcho-libertarian positions on the state which they opposed. I have some sympathy for this position of dependance: it forms the "conscience of the revolution" argument, and why should we pretend social democracy wasn't highly vulnerable to libertarian critique - especially in its paternalist / labourist forms? (Considering the focus on the NHS we might consider it's record on mental health for example. This is not a matter of full-blown Langian anti-psychiatry, a position I don't hold, but problems here (then and now) indicate problems). Of course when the attack came from the right then this is where disorientation sets in, either outflanking the left and re-hegemonising its critique or revealing the rightward drift of such critiques. A similar problem, to my mind, afficts punk / post-punk critiques of social democracy. This is why Brennan can claim an overlapping or fusion of right and left positions that view "the state as an arena of innate corruption to which no claims of redress can or should be made."

But then the qualified defence of gains made through social democracy was, to me, part of the libertarian communist point - although admittedly one often lost. Hence the expansion of the domain of "use values" as against exchange value in "free" healthcare, or the need to make continuing demands to increase the "dole" or regularise it as a citizen's income. In an ironic reversal, despite Brennan's lambasting of Hardt and Negri's Empire as "theoretical Americana" we could argue that the "modesty" of its closing set of demands (also subject to critique by Marxists & anarchists) could be regarded as a defence of the gains of social democracy?

The second text is Fredric Jameson's "Lenin and Revisionism" (in Lenin Reloaded). His position, we could argue, is more impeccably Marxist than Brennan's valorisation of social democracy; but here is where problems emerge. Jameson provides a neat diagnosis of the present that confirms the kind of point made by Owen:

“in a period whose political atmosphere is largely anarchistic (in the technical sense of the term), it is unpleasant to think about organization, let alone institutions. This is indeed at least one of the reasons for the success of the market idea: it promises social order without institutions, claiming not to be one itself.” (61)

Again, we are on the ground of the "calculation debate" and the question of the "withering away of the state" posed by capitalist libertarians. Jameson also suggests the running together of anarchism as (anti-)political project with this kind of thinking. In particular he rejects the substitution of questions of the economic for questions of power: “The rhetoric of power, then, in whatever form, is always to be considered a fundamental form of revisionism.” (66)

What then should be done? Jameson's tricky position is precisely one of social democracy as katechon: “Today, …, the most urgent task seems to me the defense of the welfare state and of those regulations and entitlements that have been characterized as barriers to a completely free marker and its prosperities.” (69) Paolo Virno (in Multitude: Between Innovation and Exodus), reclaiming this figure from Schmitt and conservative state-theorists, points out its essential ambiguity: "By impeding the triumph of the Antichrist, katechon impedes, at the same time, the redemption to be accomplised by the Messiah." Therefore, the defence of social democracy as katechon would appear to run against Marxist eschatology. It restrains the "mystery of lawlessness" that is capital unleashed; or, even better, in the King James version, the "mystery of iniquity". In doing so, however, it "delays the end of the world" (Virno); that is the revolution.

Jameson's solution is elegant: “We must support social democracy because its inevitable failure constitutes the basic lesson, the fundamental pedagogy, of a genuine Left.” (69) The difficulty is its cynicism; social democracy is defended in light of the hope of its eventual failure as the contemporary "lesser evil". Perhaps this is a coherent stance, but in light of its use of social democracy as "way-station" it becomes vulnerable to accusations of cynical manipulation.

I, as usual, don't have the answers. My "position", such as it is, would certainly not be classically anarchist although I think it is still left-libertarian. Which is to say, "we hold what we have" in regards to social democracy, especially in a time of weakness. I've never been attracted to a "politics of the worst", whether Marxist or anarchist (pending specification of if things get worse then where are the forces coming from to establish a new mode of equitable life). Instead it's a matter of building on those gains already made in times of "strength". Virno's re-coding of the multitude as katechon attempts a more directly anti-Statist position, while rejecting the tendency of anti-Statist thinking to posit human nature as fundamentally good (and so then "repressed" or "captured" by the "evil" of the State). Although Virno doesn't much flesh it out his position seems to imply an organisational politics of the multitude precisely qua katechon. This politics his figures as exodus, a politics which I view sceptically precisely because we are back into the "lines of flight" from the State and power.

I would like to hold to Virno's position, but I don't yet feel I can see the lineaments of a politics of exodus in action (successfully). What are the institutions / demands / forces of the multitude? Therefore, unsatisfactory as it no doubt is, my argument falls into the risk of cynicism I detected with Jameson: a "false friend" to social democracy ("yeh I like you", while all the time waiting for something better to come along). It's trivial perhaps to point out the relatively abstract nature of such points in the absence of a sense of agencies to perform this politics at the necessary mass level. Perhaps, however, my own attempt to think through negation is partly aimed at a double-position: engagement coupled to (destructive) attack. Doubtful as I am this constitutes a solution, it may at least try for avoiding either "distance from the State" arguments that lack traction on State forms / State violence, or affirmative positions that risk endorsing "things as they are" (fast becoming my favourite phrase - I really must read Caleb Williams...).

And this...

I have also had the pleasure / jouissance of reading this pre-publication, and offer another recommendation (Dominic is merely being modest concerning its relative merits - this is (cold) world enough for both radicalised Benjaminian reactivations of social democracy and for the evacuation of ideological jouissance).

Buy this

Congratulations to Owen; having had the privilege to read the work in manuscript and having written one of the blurb texts you'd be crossing me if you didn't obey my injunction to order this now. The cover looks beautiful as well.

Make One, Two, Many Marxisms

MANY MARXISMS HISTORICAL MATERIALISM ANNUAL CONFERENCE 20087-9 November 2008School of Oriental and African Studies, Central London

Organised in collaboration with the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize Committee and with Socialist Register.Organised in association with the International Initiative for the Promotion of Political Economy, the journal Situations and the Journal of Agrarian Change, and with the assistance of the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences of SOAS.Ever since its foundation in 1997, Historical Materialism has sought to contribute to the intellectual recomposition of the global Left by serving as an international venue for critical Marxist research. The journal's initial wager - that Marxism remains a vital, and heterogeneous and many-faceted political and theoretical tradition - has been borne out in a conjuncture where Marxist thinkers have amply demonstrated the critical resources at their disposal (witness recent debates on imperialism and neoliberalism). Within the academy, the facile dismissal of Marxism seems to have run out of steam, and the attitudes of new generations of students and researchers have changed accordingly. Marxist intellectuals are no longer simply forced to survive in hostile conditions or to retreat into isolated academic subcultures, despite an often adverse global political context. In this setting, they face new challenges, which this conference seeks to addressHow can we develop the plurality of Marxist debates, fields and schools without making concessions to eclecticism, narcissism or compartmentalisation? How do we square the concrete multiplicity of Marxisms with the strong commonalities in intellectual vocabularies, theoretical sources and political aims? Hasn't the question of the diversity of Marxism - of many Marxisms - accompanied the tradition’s entire development, a testament both to its internationalist horizon, and to the inexhaustible potential of its many critical insights and conceptual formulations? What strategies can allow us to confront, and perhaps overcome, some of the disparities or even misunderstandings born of these processes of differentiation?Having tried to foster a form of critical cosmopolitanism and debate in past conferences, bringing together thinkers working in different fields, and out of different traditions, this year's Historical Materialism conference wants to emphasise problems and opportunities raised by the existence of 'Many Marxisms'. To this end, it aims to take stock of recent developments in Marxist thought, surveying the most vibrant recent debates; to confront critical moments in the historical development of Marxism; to identify crucial concepts and areas of research that can cut across any preconceived academic specialisation or geographical isolation of Marxism; to reflect on the ways in which Marxism has and continues to intervene in mainstream intellectual debates; and, finally, to generate a space in which the outlines of the many twenty-first century Marxisms may be delineated.

THE FULL TIMETABLE AND ONLINE REGISTRATION DETAILS WILL BE AVAILABLE SOON

For more details, please contact: historicalmaterialism@soas.ac.uk

THEMES COVERED WILL INCLUDE:Approaching Passive Revolutions * Art and Capitalism * Aspects of Imperialism * Base and Superstructure * Beyond Global Value Chain Analysis in Commodity Studies * Bolshevism: Yesterday and Tomorrow * Capitalism / Knowledge Capitalism * Capitalism and Architecture * Climate Change, Sustainability and Socialism * Contemporary Radical Thought and Marxism: Agamben, Holloway, Zizek * Early Modern Capitalism * Ecological Crisis and Marxist Theory * Everyday Life * Finance and Neo-Liberalism * Financialisation and Crisis * Food Crisis * From the Grundrisse to Capital * Future of World Capitalism * Historical Materialism and Late Development * Historiography in the Development of Marxism * International Financial Institutions * Is Today's Capitalism Actually-Existing Barbarism? * Labour-Process and Resistance * Latin American Left Today * Learning from Enemies and Rivals: Schmitt, Strauss, Weber * Life, Politics & Capitalism * Many Marxisms and India * Many Marxisms: Key Figures * Many Marxisms: Problems and Polemics * Marx and Fetishism * Marx on World Economy and World Politics * Marxism and Cinema: Film Noir and Neo-Noir * Marxism and Metropolitics * Marxism and Philosophy * Marxism and the Sciences * Marxism Outside the West * Marxism, Feminism and Women’s Politics * Marxisms and Literature * Marxisms and Religion * Marxisms and Southern Africa * Marxisms and Violences: Gender and Race * Marxist Theories of Practice * Modes of Foreign Relations * Monetary Policy and Banking under Neoliberalism * Money * Negativity and Revolution * North East Asian Marxisms and Socialisms * On the Concept of Surplus Populations * Perspectives from Althusser * Perspectives from Marx’s ‘Jewish Question’ * Philosophies of Revolt and Revolution * Philosophy in the Early Marx * Political Categories of Marxism * Political Economy and Economics Today * Politics of the Promotion of Global Competitiveness * Racism, Class and Politics * Restructuring, Capital and Labour * Revolutionary Politics in the Middle East * Sexual Liberation: Historical Materialist Approaches * Situationism at the Limits: Must we Burn Debord? * Socialism in Search of an Economic System * State in the Bolivarian revolution * Theories of Class * Theories of Imperialism * Time, Temporality, History * Transformations in the Neoliberal State * Uneven and Combined Development: Towards a Marxist Theory of ‘the International’? * US Financial Power in Crisis * Utopianism * Value: Political and Economic Dimensions * ‘Western’ Marxism and the Anti-Colonial World/Intellectuals * Windows on Empire: Perspectives from History, Culture and Political Economy * Workerism: a Generation Later *

PARTICIPANTS INCLUDE:

Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, Gilbert Achcar, Talat Ahmed, Greg Albo, Jamie Allinson, Kevin Anderson, Ricardo Antunes, Giovanni Arrighi, Sam Ashman, Antonio Carmona Báez, Richard Bailey, Metin Bal, Colin Barker, Kate Bayliss, Pınar Bedirhanoğlu, Mike Beggs, Riccardo Bellofiore, Aaron Benanav, Ted Benton, Henry Bernstein, Cyrus Bina, Werner Bonefeld, Mark Bould, Pepijn Brandon, Peter Bratsis, Robert Brenner, Dennis Broe, Dick Bryan, Ergun Bulut, Verity Burgmann, Alex Callinicos, Paul Cammack, Mauro Farnesi Camellone, Al Campbell, Bob Cannon, Gavin Capps, Thomas Carmichael, Emilia Castorina, Maria Elisa Cevasco, Hsiu-Man Chen, Vivek Chibber, Alexander Chryssis, Martin Cobian, Peter Custers, John Darwin, Neil Davidson, Charles Davis, Chuck Davis, Gail Day, Roni Demirbag, Radhika Desai, Pat Devine, Paulo dos Santos, Peter Drucker, Jean-Numa Ducange, Gérard Duménil, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Timm Ebner, Bolivar Echeverria, Juliane Edler, Ersin Vedat Elgur, Katsuhiko Endo, Sara R. Farris, Lucy Ferguson, Don Filtzer, Ben Fine, Robert Fine, Bridget Fowler, Carl Freedman, Alan Freeman, Andrea Fumagalli, Cristina Morini, Lindsey German, Melanie Gilligan, Ruth Wilson Gilmour, Saroj Giri, Richard Godden, Maya Gonzalez, Jamie Gough, Peter Gowan, Kevin Gray, Nick Gray, Chris Harman, Barbara Harriss-White, Owen Hatherley, Cristoph Hermann, Andy Higginbottom, Mike Hill, Christian Høgsbjerg, Evren Hosgor, Nik Howard, David Jack, Elinor Jean, Oliver Jelinski, Nicholas Joll, Ismail Karatepe, Ken Kawashima, Paul Kellogg, Geoff Kennedy, Sami Khatib, Aykut Kilic, Donald Kingsbury, Nick Knight, Martijn Konings, Michael Krätke, Rick Kuhn, Ishay Landa, Tim Lang, Spyros Lapatsioras, Paul LeBlanc, Sergio Lessa, Alex Levant, Peter Linebaugh, Alex Loftus, Rob Lucas, Dennis Maeder, Matteo Mandarini, Christian Marazzi, Jonathan Martineau, Paul Mattick, David Mayer, Andrew McGettigan, Philip McMichael, David McNally, James Meadway, John Milios, Owen Miller, Andrew Milner, Dimitris Milonakis, John Molyneux, David Moore, Cristina Morini, Adam Morton, Zwi Negator, Susan Newman, Jörg Nowak, Benjamin Noys, Bertel Nygaard, Bridget O'Laughlin, Keith O’Regan, Sebnem Oguz, Ulrich Oslender, Ceren Özselçuk, Maria Cristina Soares Paniago, Leo Panitch, F. Papadatos, Juan Pablo Painceira Paschoa, Leda Maria Paulani, Simon Pirani, Iain Pirie, Nina Power, Gonzalo Pozo- Martin, Thomas Purcell, Diana Raby, Michael Rafferty, Geert Reuten, Paul Reynolds, Ben Richardson, John Riddell, John Roberts, Bruce Robinson, John Rose, Thomas Sablowski, Spyros Sakellaropoulos, Jorgen Sandemose, Saskia Sassen, Michael Sayeau, Sean Sayers, David Schwartzmann, Alan Sears, Lynne Segal, Ben Selwyn, Sanjay Seth, Stuart Shields, Nicola Short, Joe Sim, Rick Simon, Subir Sinha, Panagiotis Sotiris, Dimitris P. Sotiropoulos, Kerstin Stakemeier, Guido Starosta, Marcel Stoetzler, Robert Stolz, Gaspar Miklós Tamás, Bruno Tinel, Peter Thomas, Massimiliano Tomba, Alberto Toscano, Greg Tuck, Mehmet Ufuk Tutan, Kees van der Pijl, Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, Carlo Vercellone, Danga Vileisis, Sherryl Vint, Satnam Virdee, Andriana Vlachou, Elisa Waeyenberge, Jeffery R. Webber, Dominic Wetzel, Adrian Wilding, Evan Calder Williams, Frieder Otto Wolf, Andrew Wright, Steve Wright, Galip Yalman, Iván Zatz