Postcapital Archive (1989-2001)

Edited by Hans D. Christ, Iris Dressler, texts by  Iris Dressler, Iván de la Nuez, Valentín Roma, graphic design by Nieves und Mario Berenguer Ros

German/English

2011. 344 pp., 523 ills.

17.00 x 24.00 cm clothbound

pub. date: September 2011 by Hatje Cantz

ISBN 978-3-7757-3170-6

Price: 35 Euro (Amazon Online)

In conjunction with the exhibition Postcapital Archive (1989-2011). Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart

| A political art project in the form of a multimedia installation, open database, and interactive laboratory

The project Postcapital Archive 1989–2001 by Spanish artist Daniel García Andújar centers on the profound changes that have occurred around the world on social, political, economic, and cultural levels. Key issues are the fall of the Berlin Wall and the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York. Here, Andújar examines developments after the collapse of the Wall not from the aspect of postcommunism, but postcapitalism. He is concerned with the question of how “Western” societies have changed without their former counterpart, communism, and what kinds of new walls were built through global politics after 1989 and 2001. The foundation of the project is a digital archive containing over 2,500 files the artist has gathered from the Internet over the course of the past decade.

| Ein politisches Kunstprojekt als multimediale Installation, offene Datenbank und interaktives Labor

Das Projekt Postcapital. Archive 1989–2001 des spanischen Künstlers Daniel García Andújar kreist um die tief greifenden Veränderungen, die sich in den letzten zwei Jahrzehnten weltweit auf gesellschaftlicher, politischer, ökonomischer und kultureller Ebene ereignet haben und als deren Eckpunkte der Fall der Berliner Mauer sowie der Terroranschlag auf das World Trade Center am 11. September 2001 gelten. Dabei betrachtet Andújar die Entwicklungen nach dem Mauerfall nicht unter Aspekten des Postkommunismus, sondern des Postkapitalismus. Es geht ihm um die Frage, inwiefern sich die »westlichen« Gesellschaften ohne ihr ehemaliges Gegenstück – den Kommunismus – verändert haben und welche neuen Mauern durch die globale Politik nach 1989 und 2001 gezogen wurden. Das Projekt basiert auf einem digitalen Archiv mit über 2500 Dateien, die der Künstler in den letzten zehn Jahren aus dem Internet zusammengetragen hat.

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En esta entrevista, Georges Didi-Huberman, comisario de la exposición “ATLAS. ¿Cómo llevar el mundo a cuestas?”, plantea el modelo del atlas como un dispositivo para reconfigurar la ordenación sensible del mundo, así como las relaciones establecidas en la formación del conocimiento. A partir del trabajo de Aby Warburg, se plantea la producción artística como un trabajo de montaje en el que reconfigurar las cosas, los lugares y el tiempo.

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In a just world, the idea of wealth–be it money derived from the work of human hands, the resources and natural splendor of the planet itself–and the knowledge handed down through generations belongs to all of us. But in our decidedly unjust and imperfect world, our collective wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. There is be a better way–the notion of the commons–common land, resources, knowledge–is a common-sense way to share our natural, cultural, intellectual riches.

In this innovative animation, filmmaker Laura Hanna, writer Gavin Browning and video artists/animators Dana Schechter and Molly Schwartz examine the concept of “The Commons” as a means to achieve a society of justice and equality.

Video licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b… to view the license.

Inspiration from the film came from four provocative books:

Unjust Desserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take it Back by Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly ( http://www.thenewpress.com/index.php?… )

Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water, by Maude Barlow ( http://www.thenewpress.com/index.php?… )

Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own, by David Bollier ( http://www.thenewpress.com/index.php?… )

The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All, by Peter Linebaugh ( http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10… )

In cyberspace, the “viral spiral” is a way ideas and innovations grow and be shared with ever-larger numbers of people. That spiral path could be the way the ideas of the commons can help shape a more just society. Learn more at OnTheCommons.org.

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Václav Bělohradský

Umělec 1/2010 / cz en de. Ilustrated by Daniel G. Andújar. Umelec magazine. p 76-109

MECHANISMS

There are no facts in front of which we would be silenced in the same way as in front of a reality that appeared on its own, such that „there is nothing to talk about“. Builders of universal empires require an agreement between them to be announced as an agreement with reality itself. If they succeed, there will be a worldwide universal empire, which won‘t stand anything but „willing helpers“. …

The greatest contradiction of industrial society is the rational nature of its irrationality, its rational foolishness. The system’s ever-increasing level of productivity is accompanied by the ever more rapid destruction of ancient worlds; sovereign political power rests on the threat of nuclear holocaust; our thoughts and emotions are subjugated to the power strategies of large corporations; the helplessness of the majority increases in direct proportion to the enormous and unprecedented power of the privileged minority. A society filled with such contradictions can survive only because of the immense effectiveness of its controlling mechanisms, which rob us of the ability to perceive the system’s objectives and our role within it as an offense to human reason and feeling. “The mechanism by which the individual is bound to his society has itself been altered. Social control is grounded in the new needs which it has created.” We become the chief editor of a newspaper, we have a high salary, a person with a high salary must live in a house outside of Prague, we take out a loan on our high salary,
…

Democracy as a public debate over what is relevant in different situations is just an illusion – each situation is defined in advance, like the canned laughter in American sitcoms.
…

Democracy is in a stage of decline, it is slowly fading away; in its place we are seeing the emergence of Crouch’s “post-democracy,” whose main characteristic is the gradual replacement of the rule of law and parliamentary democracy with a network of efficient lobbying power structures whose aim is the implementation, through opportunistic bargaining, of rules of the game advantageous to the most powerful economic groups.
…

The efficiency of technology is increasing so rapidly that is rendering the very difference between the realm of means and the realm of ends an archaism: Are not the ends in themselves merely the means for the further expansion of technology?
…

Democracy is that form of social organization in which questions of frame are constantly left open; people are interested in them. Public space has its own unique tension, its effervescence, because it is here that opposing great truths are constantly encountering and controverting one another. Disputes about great truths are useful: they render us better and more open; they make our decisions more legitimate and superior in quality. In fact, the general availability of questions of frame and the public’s interest in them form a basic pillar of democracy.

UNEASINESS

There are many reasons for the sense of uneasiness in modern society. Above all, (…) there are the dizzying proliferation of signs, images, expressions and declarations, as a result of which there has been a sharp decline in reality. Many signs, little that is signified, many meanings, little that is meaningful, many parts, few wholes, many facts, little context, many copies, few originals, many images, little that is depicted, much talk, little agreement, many goals, little purpose, many representatives, little that is represented, many answers, few questions.
…

The sense of uneasiness is ever-present; it may not be strong, but it is persistent. No, we do not feel ill; there is just too much – information, food, garbage, people, packaging, books, signs, political programs, places to fly to on holiday, loan offers, excessively hot days in the year. There must be some kind of limit, some boundary beyond which the things of this world can no longer be used and consumed, but just venerated. We do not know where this boundary is; we just feel a little uneasy.
…

During the bird flu epidemic, shop sellers in Hong Kong wore sterile masks on their faces with a smile drawn on them. In late modern society, criticism is merely a “reproachful expression” drawn on invisible masks worn in public by the protagonists of sponsored cultural events. How to revive the fundamental virtue of liberal society – not being indifferent to critical images of itself? I do not know, and the fact that I do not know how to answer this question makes me uneasy. What good is an intellectual if he doesn’t know how?

THE WEST

(…) – those who wish to remain Europeans must never allow themselves to be controlled by the force emanating from everything that we unreservedly accept as “natural.” Understand well: liberally educated Europeans do not wish to deny their own prejudices, they merely wish to understand them in relation to time and place, to the problems that these prejudices were once meant to solve. Understanding liberates us from the power held over us by the perspective of the whole, in which the experience of historical conditionality has extinguished any notion of the whole.
…

The deepening environmental crisis, the scandalous helplessness of the industrial democratic countries in the face of extreme events – whether caused by anthropogenic climate change or natural climatic developments – the horrible state of the Third World, the hypocritical newspeak that calls aggression “preventive war” and the occupation of a foreign country “liberating a people from tyranny,” the restriction of civil rights through the “Patriot Act,” the ever closer alliance between entertainers and politicians in order to mobilize the masses for the further consumption of unnecessary things, the building of a “majority consensus” through the strategic control of the media – all this is a sign that wartime mobilization is the most intrinsic tendency of the system.
The Western political and economic system is extremist in its normality: the “peaceful days” enjoyed by the inhabitants of the West consist primarily in a war against nature and other forms of life.
…

NATO expansion is merely an attempt at masking the saber rattling of our civilizational crisis.
…

What strange victors, who have not resolved any of the issues the more effective resolution of which was at the heart of the East-West conflict: inequality among people is an ever-greater scandal for the “Christian West,” democracy is increasingly absent from the adoption of strategic decisions, loyalty questionnaires are a hundred pages long, capital exerts an ever more total control over public space, the atom bomb and technologically managed force continue to form the foundation of political sovereignty, NATO is expanding, the Schengen Agreement has fractured Europe into first-class Europeans, second-class Europeans, and the peons in the Balkans and Ukraine; all around us new invisible walls are springing up, and the Third World gets dirtier and hungrier, as do the peripheries of our affluent cities; ministry of defense budgets are growing, ministry of education budgets shrinking.
…

Is not the hatred of the “white us” in this historical world a normal answer to the way in which it has been invaded by this tolerant “white us”? The ruined, historical worlds that remain in the wake of his rule, collectively labeled the Third World – most of Africa, much of Asia and possibly Latin America as well – are nothing more than subjugated and exploited peripheries of the empire of global economic growth, whose shaken and rapidly weakening center is this “white us.”
…

The Global South is not just the Third World; anyone may find himself there who refuses to convert to the †bercivilization and who thus offers resistance to the empire of the growth of Growth.
…

Consumerism is a democratically uncontrollable automatism resulting from an uncontrolled demonic element of Western civilization: it is a type of rapture, a seductive shadow-world into which man throws himself in order to escape the contradictory world shown him by his reason.
…

“What is reason?” we ask when watching a long, motionless line of cars on the blocked highways when our cities declare a smog emergency, when our limited resources have been destroyed in order to produce superfluous things, when we discuss climate change caused by the greenhouse effect, when the front pages of all Czech newspapers announce the search for the next Czech Idol, when we see television images of long lines of people at exchange offices in South Korea, Argentina, or Moscow during various financial crises, when we watch reports from Malaysian cities where disappointed candidates for affluence are looting stores, or scenes from President Clinton’s Sexgate proceedings with Ken Starr trying to find the legal definition of sex..
…

The tyranny of values in industrial society necessarily leads to colonialism, concentration camps, the genetic manipulation of everything living, the reduction of nature to natural resources or its transformation into a laboratory filled with laboratory animals such as OncoMouseTM, a mouse that has been genetically engineered to be born with cancer so that it can be used for experiments. The ends must be bigger and bigger, so that the realm of means for their attainment – techno-scientific power – can continue to grow.
…

The most serious form of criticism is criticism of false consciousness. The most important feature of modern industrial society is alienation, in the sense that man does not know the laws of the world that he has created and thus enslaves himself through his products. Just as pre-modern man did not recognize that the gods were his imagination, so does modern man fail to see that the world of goods represents “his essential forces, transformed into objects, and a world that… enslaves him” (Marx).

TEXT

Is reading the art of identifying the meaning of a text as inserted by its author, or does a text receive its meaning from its readers, who try to come to some kind of mutual agreement as to a “meaningful” reading of texts?
…

In an era characterized by such a colossal overproduction of texts, we should be learning creative reading instead of creative writing. There has been a sharp decline in meaning and a sharp increase in the number of texts. If we do not learn to read them creatively, they will swirl around us like a dark shroud of whirling dust.
…

The theory of the implied reader is generally applicable. Every person is a text in search of its implied reader, everyone hopes that someone will read him just as he has written himself, as he has imagined the acts and ideas that he has encoded into his life. It is true that often this does not happen, and the cities are full of drunks mumbling: “Joe, you can ask anyone; I’ve never been a coward, that’s just Wendy talking trash about me!”
…

Today, networks of computers are capable of spewing forth all possible combinations of symbols and letters in a matter of seconds. I am sure that even such texts long for their implied reader. But how to become one? Let us conclude a new agreement on the reading of texts during the era of globalization! Yes, but with whom, where, and what about?
…

People are made up of statements; they are surrounded by them. All that they have said and heard whirls around in a jumbled mixture consisting of their truths and the truths about them. Each statement belongs in some landscape of statements and has meaning only if it can be used for something within this landscape. Statements that are of use within a landscape are called truths; those that stand in the way are called mistakes or lies. Some statements can act as bridges in the landscape, others as levers, shortcuts, artificial lakes, or shelters. These landscapes of statements also contain many ruined truths, some of which have been wasting away for ages, while others have collapsed suddenly, people fleeing their ruins in panic. They are also home to many truths that entangle people like spider webs, the spider patiently waiting; some truths – such as the belief in hell – are traps laid eons ago; others are new, designed using computers – economic growth, nuclear energy, financial flows.
…

We learn to navigate the overgrown corners of our landscapes of statements under the supervision of our teachers, for these corners are inhabited by ill-fated poets and delirious thinkers, angry young men, long-haired rockers, and eccentric scholars who look after all the weeds and shrubbery but who have not managed to avoid expressing doubts and making heretical statements. Sometimes the voice of our conscience chases us into these corners, we take a liking to them, and remain.
…
Over the past millennia we have combined a desert biblical landscape full of shepherds, farmers, and seedsmen with extravagant statements made by participants of Greek gay parties and homosexual libations – thus was born Christian philosophy; in the name of the Renaissance, we smuggled the Greek concept of beauty into our Christian landscape, constructed bridges of statements between the claims made by the crucified prophet from Palestine and the Englishman Darwin, or between the vocabulary of stockbrokers and the verses of Otokar Březina. They are flimsy bridges, but they can be crossed. Without interpretations, the West’s landscapes of statements would not hold together, they would be contradictory and filled with garbage, their boundaries would be unclear, we would not understand relationships and contexts.
…

Pilate’s famous question (the only sentence in the Gospels that makes sense, wrote Nietzsche) has long changed its addressee. What is truth? we today ask the scientist adding meal from dead cows to the feed of live cows, and what we mean to say is: Do you know the boundaries of the landscape to which your statements belong?

GROWTH

Industrial growth is war.
Will the century of extremes ever end?
American author Don DeLillo wrote:
“While watching the first day of the attack on Iraq on television, with the smart bombs exploding in the center of Baghdad, I got the sense that technology itself forces us into war, that it has the need to realize everything that can be realized. Our Progress needed to blow off steam in that attack, with unprecedented precision.”
The drive for war is encoded in the products that shape our daily life; everything that we take into our hands contains the need to “blow off steam.” After 1989, there was a brief period of hope that the drive for war inscribed into technological and economic growth could be overcome.
We were mistaken.
…

A civilization of economic growth reduces all meaning to nothing more than a Great Objective; the greater the objective, the more capital (accumulated energy, work, resources, and the efficient use thereof) is required. Today, meaning has become hopelessly merged with the great objectives of Euro-Atlantic technological civilization – economic globalization, star wars, space travel, living to be a hundred illness-free.
Everything must contribute to the growth of capital – even protests against its absurdity. Are you protesting? That is your right, but you will have to purchase your means of protest from us! How to resist capital without promoting its growth? How to express and implement the difference between meaning and mere objective?
…

What is the point of freedom, reason, and education if, no matter what, we are all dragged along by the relentless automatism of the economic growth of Growth, which nobody is capable of giving human meaning?
…

Is there any meaning to the endless devastation of the planet, the world’s transformation into a pile of garbage, the tyranny to which the Third World is subjected in the name of controlling raw materials? Growth is not a universal good, as claimed by the council of globalization that meets in Brussels or Washington.

COMMUNISM AND CAPITALISM

Is capitalist globalization a new “grand narrative” that we tell ourselves at the end of the era of nation-states, whose expansion had been the subject of all the grand narratives of the past two centuries? Is it a new “recognized necessity,” the only resistance to which comes from irresponsible extremists or the classes marked for extinction?
…

A system founded on private ownership has a “big dirty secret” – capitalists never pay the full costs of their “private” business. A large share of the costs is paid by people who in some way are affected by what the capitalist does with his property but who lack the legal means to influence his activities. A company uses water from a river, but its production costs do not include expenditures caused by the fact that other people have to adapt to the impacts of its business activities – changes in water quality, for instance. This is the vicious circle of democratic policy: the oligarchies that have achieved a hegemony in society support the governments, who in exchange for this support happily allow them to transfer their private costs onto society at large. Through the use of state and police control, governments preventively take away their citizens’ rights to legally protest the capitalists’ unpaid accounts.
…

I called my first book of reflections from the nineties Capitalism and Civic Virtues. The “and” between the market and virtues is a very fragile bond, one that is constantly threatening to come apart. In the second half of the 1990s, to cries of “Globalization, globalization!”, several fanged monsters began gnawing away at this bond – successfully, as the “global financial crisis” has shown.
Communism was not disarmed by capitalism; it collapsed because the bond between politics and civic virtues was severed. In Plato’s Apology, we read that “virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private (…)”. Renewing the bond between “virtue and money” may be a long process, but it is the only possible solution to the current “global crisis” and future crises as well.
…

And now the same, but in a more erudite manner. We use the word “externality” to label various ways in which costs are transferred onto others and the word “internality” to describe ways of rectifying such forms of inequality. The expression “legitimate disregard” is used to describe the fact that people do not have the legal right to fight business activities whose externalities are causing them harm.
Right-wing ideology and politics then take up the struggle for the greatest possible level of legitimate disregard. Through their ideological apparatuses, right-wing parties work to create a majority consensus for those governments that allow the oligarchy in whose interests they govern to transfer as much of their costs as possible onto all of society.
…

In right-wing discourse, the word “freedom” means the right of private owners to use their property with the greatest possible level of disregard towards others.
…

“If we limit the right of the owners of private property to transfer a part of their costs onto all of society, this restricts the rights of all because free enterprise is the most important form of freedom in society!” – cries the Right. And the Left answers: “We are constantly expanding the right of “citizens” to protest against the failure by the owners of private property to pay their bills. One day you, too, will be affected by the impacts of some “capitalist’s” business activities, and not being a helpless victim is the most important form of freedom in society.”
…

hyper-bourgeoisie
This word, which is borrowed from French sociologist Denis Duclos, describes a “transnational” elite working to abolish first the democratic welfare state, and subsequently all restrictions by which the nation-states have fettered economic rationality over the past two centuries. The hyper-bourgeoisie is “anti-cultural”: it delegitimizes traditions, national memory and shared lifestyles, it censors all that is capable of resisting financial capital, which redefines in its own interest the plus and minus values historically assigned to things, words, landscapes, and interpersonal relationships.
…

The bourgeoisie was a part of a nation and acted within the history of that nation; it was bound, morally and historically, by the solidarity that brings together societies of a national language. The hyper-bourgeoisie, on the other hand, attacks all historical societies from the outside. Its global power is a lightning-fast “raid, plunder, and run;” the obligations arising from a shared language or national solidarity would only serve to restrict it. Investments managed by the global nomenklatura can quickly and inexorably change the value which human societies have assigned to landscapes, things, symbols, interpersonal relationships – nothing and no-one may restrict them in the name of solidarity among people or earthlings within the broadest meaning of the word. The hyper-bourgeoisie and its paid hyper-nomenklatura (employees of the EU, NATO, WTO, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, PR hyper-corporations, and certain research institutes) form a “transnational class” – they do not acknowledge any obligations towards the nation whose language they are currently using and on whose territory they are enforcing their strategic interests.
…

The phrase “an irrational society of rational individuals” captures the fact that in late industrial society, the whole of all individuals acting rationally or working to maximize their own success forms an insane society; rational individuals work to maximize their profits, but taken together they form an insane society, one example being global warming.
Put differently: the more rational people are as individuals, they more insane they are as a society. One convincing example of collective stupidity is the private automobile: for each individual, it is advantageous to drive to work in his own car; traffic jams and highway accidents are the irrational result of this individual rationality.
…

total market
I use this term to define the expansion of market rationality beyond all national, ethical, and social boundaries. Technological environment lowers the cost of moving anything – information, knowledge, materials, companies and their manufacturing output. There exist thousands of individuals capable of performing my job better and for much lower pay, and in a technological environment it is cheap to send my job to them.
…

The total market insists that everything that is “technologically possible” be “for sale” as quickly as possible, because it will not tolerate any rational goal for man other than the “maximum consumption of what is sold.” First of all, the total market conceals the actual price of the consumed good – mineral water or fruits produced thousands of miles away and transported to your local hypermarket have intolerably higher environmental costs than locally produced water or fruits. And secondly, it requires censoring all questions regarding the biological, moral, and social sustainability of technologically realised (realisable) human choice.
…

Our century of extremes has been most deeply marked by the bloody conflict between dead capital and live human work, between the meaning and price of work. This conflict has not been resolved; the entertainment industry has merely postponed it indefinitely.
…

In the age of globalization, a new Marx will have to slightly alter the introductory sentence to his critique of political economy: “The wealth of global bourgeois society, at first sight, presents itself as an immense accumulation of worlds. Everyone can choose into which world he wants to be lulled to sleep, and by whom.”
…

I believe that the historical catastrophe of communism was the result of a lack of diligence in the face of reality, in the face of the structure of human existence; it resulted from a terrible overestimation of the “revolutionary act” of forcing a form of existence on people that they could only feign in an artificial world – a world in which they cannot live without a vast coercive apparatus.
…
Communism was not the same as Nazism, as the dogmatic warriors for the capitalist system claim. It was a grand project of modernism whose promises came to naught because of the resistance of the historical world in which these ideas were to be implemented; the communists lacked the necessary patience and so they declared the representatives of this resistance to be “enemies of mankind” and eradicated them. As a result, they found themselves in a terrible contradiction with the ideas that had been the source of their historical legitimacy.
…

As the discrepancy between democratic ideal and oligarchic reality grows, current global capitalism increasingly resembles communism..

GLOBALIZATION

The earth is sown with wonders of technology, into which it is slowly sliding.
…

Today, we describe the planet-wide expansion of industrial modernity using the already devalued word “globalization.” That aspect of globalization that, in terms of its radicalism, we view as a threat like no other before is the detachment of techno-scientific-economic growth from the right of the public to ask, “what meaning is there to it?” This demand for meaning stands in the way of the automatic cumulative growth of knowledge and power, and is thus suppressed from the public realm as illegitimate, extremist, or proto-terrorist.
…

Since the early 1990s, capitalism has been undergoing a dangerous mutation – it is globalizing, becoming, in the words of Karel Kosík, a “supercapitalism.” Democracy is too closely bound to the values that form the foundation of the nation-state; supercapitalism drains democracy by draining it of its sovereignty: free public space, civic independence, a natural shared language, and anti-conformist and transversal communication are beginning to stand in the way of the growth of global uniformity, which cannot abide any limitations or boundaries. Ralf Dahrendorf speaks of the “Singapore Syndrome,” the danger of the emergence of an authoritarian capitalism controlled by a “globalized nomenklatura” composed of the largest financial institutions, the arms industry, Eurobureaucracy, multinational corporations, and the managers of the media elite.
…

Is there such a thing as a global culture capable of giving globalization a humanly comprehensible objective? Globalization has three central symbols – the atom bomb, the environmental crisis, and a planetary media network. All national cultures are trapped in this triangle, while the technocratic spider sucks them dry. The philosophical question of the time is whether there is any civilizational competence. By this, I mean the ability to respond to the abrupt relativization of all national cultural models by finding some kind of shared “grammar.”
…

The post-bipolar world is controlled by structures whose focus is not on the meaning of the exercise of power, but on the growth of power.
…

(…) in a society of global growth, there is a growing community of people brought together by a “shared sense of absurdity.”

FROM THE HISTORY OF MODERNITY

Being an individual is nothing natural. It is the result of a long educational process that began in Greece, when man broke free from the world of myth he had taken for granted; this process strengthened under the pastoral power of Christianity, which taught each person to examine himself, to have a conscience, to struggle with his body, to see himself as a unique and unreproducible individual. The strict maxim of cogito ergo sum commanded man to always start from his awareness/self-confidence, which raises him not only above other living creatures, but also above the infinity of the cosmos. Then the Earth began to turn and man was spun off from the center of the universe to the periphery of the Milky Way, but his self-confidence grew; then came the era of progress and Enlightenment, which taught man to trust his own experiences and not allow himself to be confounded by holy authority or the power of the majority.
…

(…) the word “globalization” is connected to the word “postmodernity,” which we use to describe the time between the first and the second modernity. The first modernity was a massive hoax perpetrated by a powerful discursive machinery controlled by the officials of modern pastoral power – educators, teachers, poets, psychiatrists, experts in the human sciences, engaged intellectuals, ideologists – all of whom worked to make sure that the phrase “industrial growth” and all sub-phrases derived therefrom would have a higher, inner, figurative meaning in addition to its literal, material, outer meaning: the development of production tools and the accumulation of products in the form of goods. Their work ensured that the metaphor inscribed within this word in booming verse and ornamental lettering was kept alive, and that the figurative meaning of the word “growth” would rule over its literal meaning (the higher controlled the lower, the spiritual the material).
The emergence of the society of communications overload, in which an ever larger number of subcultures has their say, made the omnipresent hypocrisy of this hoax readily apparent. The powerful representatives of the “demands of the spirit against the demands of the material base” reduced themselves to a grotesque preaching mafia, and the first modernity came to an end.
…

The era of postmodernity between the first and second modernity is characterized by a preoccupied lack of awareness of the fact that the metaphors that had previously given all events a higher meaning are fading away. We do not dare see our new “grand narrative” within the permanent darkness; the recently declared “end of grand narratives” still applies.
…

In the period between the first and second modernity there are landfills containing the waste of the first modernity everywhere. This waste has its beauty: in the random interplay of shapes, sounds, and images we can often glimpse the old “figurative meaning”, distorted, out of place, superfluous. Yes, the instability of events abandoned by the grand metaphors of the first modernity – this is the aesthetic of postmodernity. This installation of extinguished meaning reveals not only the unyielding prosaism of global circumstances, but also the mass nostalgia for the metaphoric world that once glittered in the word “Enlightenment.” In Petr Zelenka’s film Wrong Side Up, a sculptor installs a work at a gallery belonging to a man who used to narrate newsreels under communism. The audience is fascinated by the words that are the residue of those images, she repeats, taken by his words. An allegory of our relationship to the loss of meaning between the first and second modernity.
…

The culture of the second modernity is being formed during a time defined by the motto “There is no culture,” and the new grand narrative is being shaped during a time defined by the motto “There is no grand narrative.” The second modernity will begin once the fading of metaphors, the sudden dusk of grand slogans, the proliferation of boundless peripheries, and the unexpected fluctuations and mixing of codes, places, and things become our new grand narrative.
…

The bipolar world of the Cold War was simple: there is plenty of time for peace and democracy, but first we have to defeat their enemies. The two systems did not differ from each other in anything essential, both were the largest global protagonists of the world’s transformation into a pile of resources at our disposal, even if the “capitalist” pile was more diverse and its consumers freer in digging around in it as they wished.
The Cold War is over, but the need to postpone peace, democracy, and the question of the meaning of this constantly growing mass of phenomena and things at our disposal endures. The question of the growing absurdity of the civilization of the growth of Growth does not fit into the global players’ strategies; what they need is another more or less cold war so that they may again put off, until some distant “later,” answering the question of the overall framework of the world in which we are imprisoned; what applies now are wartime priorities, people must be a priori suspected, inspected, monitored – the enemy lurks everywhere.
…

We live on the edge of giant landfills of used information and images, discharged contexts and worn-out clichés, semiotic wrecks and dilapidated linguistic traditions.

FROM ACTUALITY TO THE END

The difference between modernity and tradition has been a central theme of the past three centuries: historians tell the history of the world as a sequence of stories about when, where, and why the old world came to an end and “modernization” took off – the victory of reason, the rule of scientists of managers. In some places, this end came earlier, in some, later; in some places, people resisted it; many were murdered. All these stories lie about the most fundamental aspect of the matter. Modernity is not a new thing. It is merely a new name for the old religion of the West, which we call the “Cult of the Actual” – Christianity and modernity are its two main forms.
…

The end of the old times is coming at an ever faster pace, an everlarger number of people are liberating themselves from the darknesses of the past, say the chroniclers of the modern era. And with them, Siemens, Ford, General Motors, Boeing, IBM, NASA, and their (all) newspapers. Believers of the Actual are doomsayers prophesizing various ends of the world; they point at one thing or another in our world – scientific knowledge, for instance – and cry, “through this, the old world will end forever.”
The dogma of the Believers of the Actual is well-known: The present is different from the past, time is not cyclical like the time of plants and animals, but it is rolling inexorably forward to its end, beyond which lies the new world. Anything that repeats itself is without meaning – the stars circling above our heads according to their unyielding laws, the seasons of the year. The cogito-subject wanders aimlessly through his history, but it is an exalted wandering with a glorious end – death (misery, lack of education, sickness) will be defeated. The word “actual” describes the chasm between the past and the mesmeric NOW, where everything is new, including man. Christians are the most dangerous Believers of the Actual, the accelerated end of the world is their genetic disorder, their heretical euphoria, their effervescence that prevents them from awaiting the end of the world in peace.
Actuality is merely another name for Paul’s “death has been vanquished.”
…

Jan Patočka wrote that the Christian faith is not the meaning sought for and found by man, but the meaning “dictated from the hereafter.” This concept of meaning as a dictate from “the hereafter,” as a revealed truth that triumphs over the “temporal world of shadows, mortality, and insecurity,” unites all Believers of the Actual within one large tribe. Even venerated Western science in its temples – laboratories, universities, multinational corporations – glorifies its statements as being “objective” (i.e., dictated) facts, and thus it, too, is just one of several ways of worshipping the religion of the Actual. Only that can be actual which hails from world other than the one that we see with our eyes, the one in which we die and in which we are constantly erring and in fear: only that is objective which is guaranteed, like a message from the hereafter, with a firm foundation in a netherworld accessible only to scientists dressed in their white coats. The modern Believers of the Actual replace the good word of the Almighty Father with the dictate of scientific empiricism.
…

The Cult of the Actual has its origins in Greek philosophy; it is the legacy of the fable of the “true world” that a delusional Plato once told his tribe. … Plato saw “pure spirits” behind all things, and the elders of the tribe of Greeks were unable to convince him otherwise. Not only that, but they succumbed to this delusional belief themselves, and so Plato triumphed and founded the dreadful religion of the Actual, whose believers did not celebrate as real the visible and transient things around us, but the invisible ideas behind them, things we do not see with our eyes but with our reason. For the crackpot Plato, reason is something like an eye through which we see the true world behind the shadows of this one.
As we know from various sources, plenty of people tried to talk Plato out of his delusion. They pointed out that they could see tables, trees, and people, but not the idea of a table or of a person. Plato arrogantly retorted: “No wonder, for you have eyes, but no intellect.” He would probably have lost his arguments had the tribe of Greeks not succumbed to the Romans and the Romans to Christianity, which packaged Plato’s delusional world into their popular fable about a good Father who sacrifices his own son out of love for Man and then celebrates victory over death in the hereafter; this is the “Good News” (evangelium) that the Almighty Father sends us through his Son, incarnated as a mortal.
Nietzsche’s statement that “Christianity is Platonism for the people or for the poor” reminds us of the reason why the fable of the true world was victorious – there were more poor people, they were hungry and impatient and afraid of death. … the tribe of white men believed in Plato’s netherworld and began to destroy this one. Not a Greek was found who would put his hand on Plato’s shoulder and kindly tell him – that’s just your delirium talking, seeing eternal ideas behind everything. And so this delirium has been the normal state of white men for two thousand years as they summon the end of the world. Their world.
…

The Believers of the Actual have summoned the age of desperation, the Earth is going to waste, all that is around us becomes a trap, and our much-vaunted reason builds factory farms. We have succumbed to our Plato and associated the meaning of life with the end of the world. And the end is near. Our cities reek, the French coast – Cézanne, van Gogh, Utrillo, Picasso! – is covered in a black mass, more and more seabirds are dying encased in a shell of oil, there are Temelíns on every horizon. The sectarian Believers of the Actual firmly shut their eyes before these ends.
What a strange story it was! Plato left the cave, followed by the entire Academy, St. Paul exhorted the impatient Thessalonians – first in good will, but later the borders burned and the stench of scorched human flesh was everywhere – later still, Galileo turned the Earth under our feet, Newton calculated how things move, where they are moving, and the effect of this motion, Einstein ordered parallel lines to intersect, the cyborg beckons with its virtual arm, hearts are transplanted from one body to another, the globalizers have firmly bound us with an invisible fiber, a butterfly flapping its wings in our valley causes hurricanes on the other side of the world, there is a hole in the ozone layer through which the Sun fries us like the millionaire in Wolker’s unforgettable fairytale.
Hell hasn’t frozen over; instead, the ice is melting. The unhappy end is near.
…

WOMAN AND MAN

Philosophers have spent millennia arguing about the sex of angels, but what about the sex of reason? For more than two thousand years, reason was a primary male sexual characteristic, but today it passes as neuter. God is father and mother, Pope John Paul II once said. Reason has its male and female side, the philosophers say conciliatorily. But the French flag is not neuter, nor are generals, managers, judges, or the architect of Temelín. These are male roles. Like the African in Sartre’s example, woman must speak in her own voice and say roughly this: Male civilization is a catastrophe; it is missing a large piece of reality, it is narcissist and hurtling into an abyss.
Women in Central Europe have not spoken with their own voice; it was too bloody and cruel here. There was fear. But many men here taught us to identify the voice of women within the clamor of the male world. For instance, Karl Kraus saw woman as an anti-Platonic being, rebelling irrepressibly against the male world of pure ideas that subjugated the real world with insatiate abstractions such as Law and Order. He studied the trials of women who had rebelled against their families, and in the “sinfulness” which the court of respectable men ascribed to these women he saw a liberating primal force that rejected the recent era of manipulation and prostitution. In 1929 he wrote: “You know that all my life I have persecuted spiritual prostitutes, but never the prostitution of the female body. Towards the end of the time that I have been allotted in order to learn the things of this world, I assert that sex is probably the only activity that does not prostitute itself in this world, and that we have affixed the stigma of prostitution onto women in order to distract attention from male prostitution in all vocations.” At the pinnacle of male prostitution is the Media, which robs us of our imagination and empties our hearts. Kraus believed that in their fight against the Media’s emptying of the heart, women use their bodies, all their instincts, and their most individual voice.
…

I imagine that women’s voice will help us avoid two traps of reason. The first trap is reason in the singular, which alone can discover eternal and universal truths, and which therefore must be codified by the state and professed by all citizens. Truths of reason in the singular raise man above all other living beings with which we share the planet. I believe that, through their touch, women teach us from childhood (even when their lessons are censured) that reason is just one of the human senses, and not lord over them. Reason is a piece of our body. When we watch a landscape tortured by poisonous vapors, reason protests within our body. “That is but feminine reason,” people used to say. Yes, feminine reason! There are as many reasons as there are reasons for the living bodies of all species to rise up against Law, Order, Structures.
…

▵ [12]

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[pdf] Tiqqun 1 – Intégralité scannée

Eh bien, la guerre !

Qu’est-ce que la Métaphysique Critique ?

Théorie du Bloom
[pdf] version augmentée, La Fabrique.[de] [es] [it]

Phénoménologie de la vie quotidienne

Thèses sur le Parti Imaginaire

Le silence et son au-delà

De l’économie considérée comme magie noire

Premiers matériaux pour une théorie de la Jeune-Fille
[pdf] version augmentée, vlcp. [it]

Hommes-machines, mode d’emploi
[pdf] version augmentée, Michel Baverey éditeur

Les métaphysiciens-critiques sous le «mouvement des chômeurs»

Quelques actions d’éclat du Parti Imaginaire

[pdf] Tiqqun 2 -Intégralité scannée

Introduction à la Guerre Civile
[pdf] version vlcp [en] [de] [es]

L’hypothèse cybernétique
[de]

Thèses sur la communauté terrible
[por] [it]

Le problème de la tête

“Une métaphysique critique pourrait naître comme science des dispositifs…”
[pdf] La Fabrique, 2009

Rapport à la S.A.S.C. concernant un dispositif impérial

Le petit jeu de l’homme d’Ancien Régime

Echographie d’une puissance

Ceci n’est pas un programme
[pdf] version augmentée, vlcp.

Comment Faire?
[pdf] - [en][es]

links to other translations from the same group:
Bloom Theory
Theses on the Terrible Community
The Cybernetic Hypothesis
Raw Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl
The Coming Insurrection

a ‘critical study guide’:
Avant Garde and Mission

• final warning to the imaginary party
• marginal considerations on the present movement
• phenomenology of everyday life
• the great game of civil war
• untitled notes on citizenship papers
• you’re never to old to ditch out

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I generally agree with the efforts of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek to renew the idea of communism and the communist hypothesis. The concept of communism, like that of democracy, has been corrupted so that today in standard usage it has come to mean its opposite, that is, state control of economic and social life. I would like to shift the discussion slightly, however, or recenter it from Badiou’s and Zizek’s focus on the political decision to the critique of political economy and the project for the abolition of property. To realize the communist hypothesis for our times we need to move, so to speak, from Lenin to Marx. Indeed one of the reasons that the communist hypotheses of previous eras are no longer valid is that the composition of capital – as well as the conditions and products of capitalist production – have altered. Most importantly the technical composition of labor has changed. How do people produce both inside and outside the workplace? What do they produce and under what conditions? How is productive cooperation organized? And what are the divisions of labor and power that separate them along gender and racial lines and in the local, regional, and global contexts? In addition to investigating the current composition of labor, we also have to analyze the relations of property under which labor produces. Along with Marx we can say that the critique of political economy is, at its heart, a critique of property. “The theory of the Communists,” Marx and Engels write in the Manifesto, “may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”1

In order to explore the relationship and struggle between property and the common, which I consider to be central to communist analysis and proposition, I want to read two passages from Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. By referring the Manuscripts I do not intend to pose the early Marx against the late, celebrate Marx’s humanism, or anything of the sort. These are arguments, in fact, that continue throughout Marx’s work. The Manuscripts provide a model for reading the common in communism and measuring the distance between Marx’s time and our own.

In the first passage, titled “The Relation of Private Property,” Marx proposes a periodization that highlights the dominant form of property in each era. By the mid-19th century, he claims, European societies are no longer primarily dominated by immobile property, such as land, but instead by mobile forms of property, generally the results of industrial production. The period of transition is characterized by a bitter battle between the two forms of property. In typical fashion Marx mocks the claims to social good of both property owners. The land-owner emphasizes the productivity of agriculture and its vital importance for society as well as “the noble lineage of his property, the feudal reminiscences, the poetry of remembrance, his high-flown nature, his political importance, etc.”2 The owner of movable property, in contrast, attacks the parochialism and stasis of the world of immobile property while singing his own praises. “Movable property itself, “ Marx writes, “claims to have won political freedom for the world, to have loosed the chains of civil society, to have linked together different worlds, to have given rise to trade, which encourages friendship between peoples and to have created a pure morality and a pleasing culture” (339). Marx considers it inevitable that mobile property would achieve economic dominance from immobile property. “Movement inevitably triumphs over immobility, open and self-conscious baseness over hidden and unconscious baseness, greed over self-indulgence, the avowedly restless and versatile self-interest of enlightenment, over the parochial, worldy-wise, artless, lazy and deluded self-interest of superstition, just as money must triumph over the other forms of private property” (340) – and, I will add soon to this list, profit over rent. Marx, of course, mocks both of these property owners, but he does recognize that movable property, however despicable, does have the advantage of revealing “the idea of labor as the sole essence of wealth” (343). His periodization, in other words, highlights the increased potential for a communist project.

I want to analyze a parallel struggle between two forms of property today, but before doing that I should note that the triumph of movable over immobile property corresponds to the victory of profit over rent as the dominant mode of expropriation. In the collection of rent, the capitalist is deemed to be relatively external to the process of the production of value, merely extracting value produced by other means. The generation of profit, in contrast, requires the engagement of the capitalist in the production process, imposing forms of cooperation, disciplinary regimes, etc. By the time of John Maynard Keynes profit has such dignity with respect to rent that Keynes can predict (or prescribe) the euthanasia of the rentier. This conception of an historical movement within capital from rent to profit also corresponds to the purported passage in many analyses from primitive accumulation to capitalist production proper. Primitive accumulation might be considered, in this context, an absolute rent, expropriating entirely wealth produced elsewhere.

The passages from rent to profit and from the dominance of immobile to that of mobile property are both part of a more general claim by Marx that by the mid-19th century large-scale industry has replaced agriculture as the hegemonic form of economic production. He does not make this claim, of course, in quantitative terms. Industrial production at the time made up a small fraction of the economy even in England, the most industrialized country. And the majority of workers toiled not in the factories but in the field. Marx’s claim instead is qualitative: all other forms of production will be forced to adopt the qualities of industrial production. Agriculture, mining, even society itself will have to adopt its regimes of mechanization, its labor discipline, its temporalities and rhythms, its working day, and so forth. E. P. Thompson’s classic essay on clocks and work-discipline in England is a wonderful demonstration of the progressive imposition of industrial temporality over society as a whole.3 In the century and a half since Marx’s time this tendency for industry to impose its qualities has proceeded in extraordinary ways.

Today, however, it is clear that industry no longer holds the hegemonic position within the economy. This is not to say that fewer people work in factories today than 10 or 20 or 50 years ago – although, in certain respects, their locations have shifted, moving to the other side of the global divisions of labor and power. The claim, once again, is not primarily quantitative but qualitative. Industry no longer imposes its qualities over other sectors of the economy and over social relations more generally. That seems to me a relatively uncontroversial claim.
More disagreement arises when one proposes another form of production as successor to industry as hegemonic in this way. Toni Negri and I argue that immaterial or biopolitical production is emerging in that hegemonic position. By immaterial and biopolitical we try to grasp together the production of ideas, information, images, knowledges, code, languages, social relationships, affects, and the like. This designates occupations throughout the economy, from the high end to the low, from health care workers, flight attendants, and educators to software programmers and from fast food and call center workers to designers and advertisers. Most of these forms of production are not new, of course, but the coherence among them is perhaps more recognizable and, more important, their qualities tend today to be imposed over other sectors of the economy and over society as a whole. Industry has to informationalize; knowledge, code, and images are becoming ever more important throughout the traditional sectors of production; and the production of affects and care is becoming increasingly essential in the valorization process. This hypothesis of a tendency for immaterial or biopolitical production to emerge in the hegemonic position, which industry used to hold, has all kinds of immediate implications for gender divisions of labor and various international and other geographical divisions of labor, but I’ll have to leave those for another occasion.

What I want to focus on here is the new struggle between two forms of property implied by this transition, which takes us back to Marx’s formulations. Whereas in Marx’s time the struggle was between immobile property (such as land) and moveable property (such as material commodities), today the struggle is between material property and immaterial property – or, to put it another way, whereas Marx focused on the mobility of property today at issue is centrally scarcity and reproducibility, such that the struggle can be posed as being between unreproducible versus reproducible property or, rather, property that is easily shared. The contemporary focus on immaterial and reproducible property in the capitalist economy can be recognized easily from even a cursory glance at the field of property law. Patents, copyrights, indigenous knowledges, genetic codes, the information in the germplasm of seeds, and similar issues are the most actively topics debated in the field. The fact that the logic of scarcity does not hold in this domain poses new problems for property. Just as Marx saw that movement necessarily triumphs over immobility, so too today the immaterial triumphs over the material, the reproducible over the unreproducible, and the shared over the exclusive.

The emerging dominance of this form of property is significant, in part, because it demonstrates and returns to center stage of the conflict between the common and property as such. Ideas, images, knowledges, code, languages, and even affects can be privatized and controlled as property, but it is more difficult to police ownership because they are so easily shared or reproduced. There is a constant pressure for such goods to escape the boundaries of property and become common. If you have an idea, sharing it with me does not reduce its utility to you, but usually increases it. In fact, in order to realize their maximum productivity, ideas, images, and affects must be common and shared. When they are privatized their productivity reduces dramatically – and, I would add, making the common into public property, that is, subjecting it to state control or management, similarly reduces productivity. Property is becoming a fetter on the capitalist mode of production. Here is an emerging contradiction internal to capital: the more the common is corralled as property, the more its productivity is reduced; and yet expansion of the common undermines the relations of property in a fundamental and general way.

This contradiction is clearly evident in terms of scientific knowledges and code: free access to information and free exchange of ideas – in other words, the autonomy of the common – is necessary for future creation. The same is true, I argue, for all forms of biopolitical production, such as linguistic or affective production. You can produce affects and social relations on command, but productivity and creativity will be severely limited.

We could say, in rather broad terms, that neoliberalism has been defined by the battle of private property not only against public property but also and perhaps more importantly against the common. Here it is useful to distinguish between two types of the common, both of which are object of neoliberal strategies of capital. (And this can serve as an initial definition of “the common.”) On the one hand, the common names the earth and all the resources associated with it: the land, the forests, the water, the air, minerals, and so forth. This is closely related to 17th century English usage of “the commons” (with an “s”). On the other hand, the common also refers, as I have already said, to the results of human labor and creativity, such as ideas, language, affects, and so forth. You might think of the former as the “natural” common and the latter as the “artificial” common, but really such divisions between natural and artificial quickly break down. In any case, neoliberalism has aimed to privatize both these forms of the common.
One major scene of this has been the extractive industries, providing access to transnational corporations to diamonds in Sierra Leone or oil in Uganda or Lithium deposits and water rights in Bolivia. Such neoliberal privatization of the common has been described by many authors, including David Harvey and Naomi Klein, in terms that mark the renewed importance of primitive accumulation or accumulation by dispossession. 4

The neoliberal strategies for the privatization of the “artificial” common are much more complex and contradictory. Here the conflict between property and the common is fully in play. The more the common is subject to property relations, as I said, the less productive it is; and yet capitalist valorization processes requires private accumulation. In many domains, capitalist strategies for privatizing the common through mechanisms such as patents and copyrights continue (often with difficulty) despite the contradictions. The music industry and computer industry are full of examples. This is also the case with so-called biopiracy, that is, the processes whereby transnational corporations expropriate the common in the form of indigenous knowledges or genetic information from plants, animals, and humans, usually through the use of patents. Traditional knowledges of the use of a ground seed as natural pesticide, for instance, or the healing qualities of a plant are made into private property by the corporation that patents the knowledge. Parenthetically I would insist that piracy is a misnomer for such activities. Pirates have a much more noble vocation: they steal property. These corporations instead steal the common and transform it into property.

In general, though, capital accomplishes the expropriation of the common not through privatization per se but in the form of rent. Several contemporary Italian and French economists who work on what they call cognitive capitalism, Carlo Vercellone most prominently, argue that just as in an earlier period there was a tendential movement from rent to profit as the dominant mode of capitalist expropriation, today there is a reverse movement from profit to rent.5 Patents and copyrights, for example, generate rent in the sense that they guarantee an income based on the ownership of material or immaterial property. This argument does not imply a return to the past: the income generated from a patent, for instance, is very different from that generated from land ownership. The core insight of this analysis of the emerging dominance of rent over profit, which I find very significant, is that capital remains generally external to the processes of the production of the common. Whereas in the case of industrial capital and its generation of profit, the capitalist plays a role internal to the production process, as Marx claims, particularly in designating the means of cooperation and imposing the modes of discipline, in the production of the common the capitalist must remain relatively external.6 Every intervention of the capitalist in the processes of the production of the common, just as every time the common is made property, reduces productivity. Rent is a mechanism, then, to cope with the conflicts between capital and the common. A limited autonomy is granted the processes of the production of the common with respect to the sharing of resources and the determination of the modes of cooperation, and capital is still able to exert control and expropriate value through rent. Exploitation in this context takes the form of the expropriation of the common.

This discussion of rent points, on the one hand, to the neoliberal processes of accumulation by dispossession insofar as primitive accumulation can be called form of absolute rent. On the other hand, it casts in a new light the contemporary predominance of finance, which is characterized by complex and very abstract varieties of relative rent. Christian Marazzi cautions us against conceiving of finance as fictional, in opposition to the “real economy,” a conception that misunderstands the extent to which finance and production are both increasingly dominated by immaterial forms of property. He also warns against dismissing finance as merely unproductive in contrast to an image of productivity roughly tied to industrial production. It is more useful to situate finance in the context of the general trend from profit to rent, and the correspondingly external position of capital with respect to the production of the common. Finance expropriates the common and exerts control at a distance.7

Now I can bring to a close and review the primary points of my reading of this first passage from Marx’s early manuscripts, “The Relations of Private Property,” in which he describes the struggle between two forms of property (immobile versus moveable) and the historical passage from the dominance of landed property to that of industrial capital. Today we are also experiencing a struggle between two forms of property (material versus immaterial or scarce versus reproducible). And this struggle reveals a deeper conflict between property as such and the common. Although the production of the common is increasingly central to the capitalist economy, capital cannot intervene in the production process and must instead remain external, expropriating value in the form of rent (through financial and other mechanisms). As a result the production and productivity of the common becomes an increasingly autonomous domain, still exploited and controlled, of course, but through mechanisms that are relatively external. Like Marx, I would say this development of capital is not good in itself – and the tendential dominance of immaterial or biopolitical production carries with it a series of new and more severe forms of exploitation and control. And yet it is important to recognize that capital’s own development provides the tools for liberation from capital, and specifically here it leads to the increased autonomy of the common and its productive circuits.

The brings me to the second passage from the Manuscripts that I want to consider, titled “Private Property and Communism.” The notion of the common can help us understand what Marx means by communism in this passage. “Communism,” he writes, “is the positive expression of the abolition of private property” (345-346). He includes that phrase “positive expression” in part to differentiate communism from the false or corrupt notions of the concept. Crude communism, he claims, merely perpetuates private property by generalizing it and extending it to the entire community, as universal private property. That term, of course, is an oxymoron: if property is now universal, extended to the entire community it is no longer really private. He is trying to emphasize, it seems to me, that in crude communism even though the private character has been stripped away, property remains. Communism properly conceived instead is the abolition not only of private property but property as such. “Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it” (351). What would it mean for something to be ours when we do not possess it? What would it mean to regard ourselves and our world not as property? Has private property made us so stupid that we cannot see that? Marx is searching here for the common. The open access and sharing that characterize use of the common are outside of and inimical to property relations. We have been made so stupid that we can only recognize the world as private or public. We have become blind to the common.

Marx arrives at the common (as the abolition of property) about 20 years later in Chapter 32 of Capital, volume 1, on the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation. He still poses this development from property to the common in dialectical form. “The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.”8 Capitalist development inevitable results in the increasingly central role of cooperation and the common, which in turn provides the tools for overthrowing the capitalist mode of production and constitutes the bases for an alternative society and mode of production, a communism of the common.

What I find dissatisfying about this passage from Capital, though, aside from its dialectical construction, is that the common Marx refers to – “co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production” – grasps primarily the material elements in question, the immobile and moveable forms of property made common. This formulation does not grasp, in other words, the dominant forms of capitalist production today. If we look back at the passage in the early Manuscripts, however, and try to filter out Marx’s youthful humanism, we find a definition of communism and the common that does highlight the immaterial or, really, biopolitical aspects. Consider, first, this definition of communism, which Marx proposes after having set aside the crude notion: “Communism is the positive supersession of private property as human self-estrangement, and hence the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man; it is the complete restoration of man to himself as a social, i.e. human, being” (p. 348). What does Marx mean by “the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man”? Clearly he is working on the notion of appropriation against the grain, applying it in a context where it now seems strange. No longer appropriation of the object in the form of private property but appropriation of our own subjectivity, our human, social relations. Marx explains this communist appropriation, this non-property appropriation in terms of the human sensorium and the full range of creative and productive powers. “Man appropriates his integral essence in an integral way,” which he explains in terms of “all his human relations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, contemplating, sensing, wanting, acting, loving” (351). I think the term “appropriation” here is misleading because Marx is not talking about capturing something that already exists, but rather creating something new – this is the production of subjectivity, the production of a new sensorium. Not really appropriation, then, but production. If we return to the text we can see that Marx does, in fact, pose this clearly: “Assuming the positive supersession of private property, man produces man, himself and other men” (349). On this reading Marx’s notion of communism in the early manuscripts is far from humanism, that is, far from any recourse to a pre-existing or eternal human essence. Instead the positive content of communism, which corresponds to the abolition of private property, is the autonomous human production of subjectivity, the human production of humanity – a new seeing, a new hearing, a new thinking, a new loving.

This brings us back to our analysis of the biopolitical turn in the economy that I described briefly. In the context of industrial production, Marx arrived at the important recognition that capitalist production is aimed at creating not only objects but also subjects. “Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object.”9 In the context of biopolitical production, however, the production of subjectivity is much more direct and intense. Consider a few examples of contemporary economists who analyze the transformations of capital in just these terms. “If we had to hazard a guess on the emerging model in the next decades,” posits Robert Boyer, “we would probably have to refer to the production of man by man and explore right away the institutional context that would permit its emergence.”10 And, Christian Marazzi explains that the current passage in capitalist production is moving toward an “anthropogenetic model.” Living beings as fixed capital are at the center of this transformation and the production of forms of life is becoming the basis of added value. This is a process in which putting to work human faculties, competences, knowledges, and affects – those acquired on the job but more importantly those accumulated outside work are directly productive of value.11 One distinctive feature of the work of head and heart, then, is that paradoxically the object of production is really a subject, defined, for example, by a social relationship or a form of life. This should make clear at least the rationale for calling this form of production biopolitical, since what are produced are forms of life.

If we return to Marx in this new light, we find that the progression of definitions of capital in his work actually give us an important clue for analyzing this biopolitical context. Although wealth in capitalist society first appears as an immense collective of commodities, Marx reveals that capital is really a process of the creation of surplus value via the production of commodities. But Marx develops this insight one step further to discover that in its essence capital is a social relation – or, even further, the ultimate object of capitalist production is not commodities but social relations. From the standpoint of biopolitical production we can see that the production of the refrigerator and the automobile are only midpoints for the creation of the labor and gender relations of the nuclear family around the refrigerator and the mass society of individuals isolated together in their cars on the freeway.

What I have been doing here is pointing out the correspondence or proximity between Marx’s definition of communism and the contemporary biopolitical turn of the capitalist economy, both of which are oriented toward the human production of humanity, social relations, and forms of life – all in the context of the common. At this point I need to explain how I regard this proximity and why it is important. But before doing so let me add one more element to the mix.

Michel Foucault appreciates all the strangeness and richness of the line of Marx’s thinking that leads to the conclusion that “l’homme produit l’homme” (using like Marx the gender defined formulation). He cautions that we should not understand Marx’s phrase as an expression of humanism. “For me, what must be produced is not man as nature designed it, or as its essence prescribes; we must produce something that does not yet exist and we cannot know what it will be.” He also warns not to understand this merely as a continuation of economic production as conventionally conceived: “I do not agree with those who would understand this production of man by man as being accomplished like the production of value, the production of wealth, or of an object of economic use; it is, on the contrary, destruction of what we are and the creation of something completely other, a total innovation.”12 We cannot understand this production, in other words, in terms of the producing subject and the produced object. Instead producer and product are both subjects: humans produce and humans are produced. Foucault clearly senses (without seeming to understand fully) the explosiveness of this situation: the biopolitical process is not limited to the reproduction of capital as a social relation but also presents the potential for an autonomous process that could destroy capital and create something entirely new. Biopolitical production obviously implies new mechanisms of exploitation and capitalist control, but we should also recognize, following Foucault’s intuition, how biopolitical production, particularly in the ways it exceeds the bounds of capitalist relations and constantly refers to the common, grants labor increasing autonomy and provides the tools or weapons that could be wielded in a project of liberation.

Now I can explain the point of recognizing the proximity between the idea of communism and contemporary capitalist production. It is not that capitalist development is creating communism or that biopolitical production immediately or directly brings liberation. Instead, through the increasing centrality of the common in capitalist production – the production of ideas, affects, social relations, and forms of life – are emerging the conditions and weapons for a communist project. Capital, in other words, is creating its own gravediggers.

It would be interesting to investigate relation between this economic discussion of the common and the way the common functions centrally in Jacques Rancière’s notion of politics. “Politics begins precisely when one stops balancing profits and looses and is concerned instead with dividing the parts of the common” (Disagreement, p. 5 ; La Mésentente, p. 24). The common is the terrain of the partage, division and sharing. “Politics is the sphere of activity of a common that can only ever be contentious, the relationship between parts that are only parties and credentials or entitlements whose sum never equals the whole” (p. 14; p. 34-35).

There are two primary points of my intervention. The first is a plea for the critique of political economy or, rather, a claim that any communist project must begin there. Such an analysis makes good on our periodizations and reveals the novelties of our present moment by conducting an investigation of not only the composition but also class composition – asking, in other words, how people produce, what they produce, and under what conditions, both in and outside the workplace, both in and outside relations of wage labor. And all this reveals, I maintain, the increased centrality of the common.

The second point extends the critique of political economy to the critique of property. And, specifically, communism is defined by not only the abolition of property but also the affirmation of the common – the affirmation of open and autonomous biopolitical production, the self-governed continuous creation of new humanity. In the most synthetic terms, what private property is to capitalism and what state property is to socialism, the common is to communism.

Putting my two points together – that capitalist production increasingly relies on the common and that the autonomy of the common is the essence of communism – indicates that the conditions and weapons of a communist project are available today more than ever. Now to us the task of organizing it.

Notes:

1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, London: Verso, 1998, p. 52.

2 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, London: Penguin, 1975, p. 338.

3 E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present, vol. 38, no. 1, 1967, pp. 56-97.

4 See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; and Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. For an excellent analysis of neoliberalism’s focus on extractive industries in Africa, see James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

5 See, for example, Carlo Vercellone, “Crisi della legge del valore e divenire rendita del profitto,” forthcoming.

6 See Marx’s discussion of cooperation in Chapter 13 of Capital, volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin, 1976, pp. 439-454.

7 See Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language, trans. Gregory Conti, New York: Semiotext(e), 2008.

8 Capital, vol. 1, p. 929.9 Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, London: Penguin, 1973, p. 92.

10 Robert Boyer, La croissance, début de siècle, Paris: Albin Michel, 2002, p. 192.

11 Christian Marazzi, “Capitalismo digitale e modello antropogenetico di produzione” in Jean-Louis Laville, ed., Reinventare il lavoro, Rome: Sapere 2000, 2005, pp. 107-126.

12 Michael Foucault, “Entretien” (with Duccio Tromadori), Dits et écrits, vol IV, Paris : Gallimard, 1994, pp. 41-95, quote p. 74. Published in English as Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx, New York: Semiotext(e), 1991, pp. 121-122. At this point in the interview Foucault is discussing his differences from the Frankfurt School.

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Jerry Mander is an American activist best known for his book “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television” (1977), and for his contribution to a book on an unrelated topic, “The Great International Paper Airplane Book” (1971).Mander worked in advertising for 15 years, including five as partner and president of Freeman, Mander & Gossage in San Francisco. In 1971 he founded the first non-profit advertising agency in the United States, Public Interest Communications, which worked on campaigns to prevent dams in the Grand Canyon, found Redwood National Park, and stop the American project to build a supersonic transport. He is currently the director of the International Forum on Globalization and the program director for Megatechnology and Globalization at the Foundation for Deep Ecology.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09zizek.html

TODAY is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Duringthis time of reflection, it is common to emphasize the miraculousnature of the events that began that day: a dream seemed to come true,the Communist regimes collapsed like a house of cards, and the worldsuddenly changed in ways that had been inconceivable only a few monthsearlier. Who in Poland could ever have imagined free elections withLech Walesa as president?

However, when the sublime mist of the velvet revolutions was dispelledby the new democratic-capitalist reality, people reacted with anunavoidable disappointment that manifested itself, in turn, asnostalgia for the “good old” Communist times; as rightist, nationalistpopulism; and as renewed, belated anti-Communist paranoia.

The first two reactions are easy to comprehend. The same rightists whodecades ago were shouting, “Better dead than red!” are now often heardmumbling, “Better red than eating hamburgers.” But the Communistnostalgia should not be taken too seriously: far from expressing anactual wish to return to the gray Socialist reality, it is more a formof mourning, of gently getting rid of the past. As for the rise of therightist populism, it is not an Eastern European specialty, but acommon feature of all countries caught in the vortex of globalization.

Much more interesting is the recent resurgence of anti-Communism from Hungary to Slovenia. During the autumn of 2006, large protests againstthe ruling Socialist Party paralyzed Hungary for weeks. Protesterslinked the country’s economic crisis to its rule by successors of theCommunist party. They denied the very legitimacy of the government,although it came to power through democratic elections. When thepolice went in to restore civil order, comparisons were drawn with theSoviet Army crushing the 1956 anti-Communist rebellion.

This new anti-Communist scare even goes after symbols. In June 2008,Lithuania passed a law prohibiting the public display of Communistimages like the hammer and sickle, as well as the playing of theSoviet anthem. In April 2009, the Polish government proposed expandinga ban on totalitarian propaganda to include Communist books, clothingand other items: one could even be arrested for wearing a Che GuevaraT-shirt.

No wonder that, in Slovenia, the main reproach of the populist rightto the left is that it is the “force of continuity” with the oldCommunist regime. In such a suffocating atmosphere, new problems andchallenges are reduced to the repetition of old struggles, up to theabsurd claim (which sometimes arises in Poland and in Slovenia) thatthe advocacy of gay rights and legal abortion is part of a darkCommunist plot to demoralize the nation.

Where does this resurrection of anti-Communism draw its strength from?Why were the old ghosts resuscitated in nations where many youngpeople don’t even remember the Communist times? The new anti-Communismprovides a simple answer to the question: “If capitalism is really somuch better than Socialism, why are our lives still miserable?”

It is because, many believe, we are not really in capitalism: we donot yet have true democracy but only its deceiving mask, the same darkforces still pull the threads of power, a narrow sect of formerCommunists disguised as new owners and managers — nothing’s reallychanged, so we need another purge, the revolution has to be repeated…

What these belated anti-Communists fail to realize is that the imagethey provide of their society comes uncannily close to the most abusedtraditional leftist image of capitalism: a society in which formaldemocracy merely conceals the reign of a wealthy minority. In otherwords, the newly born anti-Communists don’t get that what they aredenouncing as perverted pseudo-capitalism simply is capitalism.

One can also argue that, when the Communist regimes collapsed, thedisillusioned former Communists were effectively better suited to runthe new capitalist economy than the populist dissidents. While theheroes of the anti-Communist protests continued to dwell in theirdreams of a new society of justice, honesty and solidarity, the formerCommunists were able to ruthlessly accommodate themselves to the newcapitalist rules and the new cruel world of market efficiency,inclusive of all the new and old dirty tricks and corruption.

A further twist is added by those countries in which Communistsallowed the explosion of capitalism, while retaining political power:they seem to be more capitalist than the Western liberal capitaliststhemselves. In a crazy double reversal, capitalism won over Communism,but the price paid for this victory is that Communists are now beatingcapitalism in its own terrain.

This is why today’s China is so unsettling: capitalism has alwaysseemed inextricably linked to democracy, and faced with the explosionof capitalism in the People’s Republic, many analysts still assumethat political democracy will inevitably assert itself.

But what if this strain of authoritarian capitalism proves itself tobe more efficient, more profitable, than our liberal capitalism? Whatif democracy is no longer the necessary and natural accompaniment ofeconomic development, but its impediment?

If this is the case, then perhaps the disappointment at capitalism inthe post-Communist countries should not be dismissed as a simple signof the “immature” expectations of the people who didn’t possess arealistic image of capitalism.

When people protested Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the largemajority of them did not ask for capitalism. They wanted the freedomto live their lives outside state control, to come together and talkas they pleased; they wanted a life of simplicity and sincerity,liberated from the primitive ideological indoctrination and theprevailing cynical hypocrisy.

As many commentators observed, the ideals that led the protesters wereto a large extent taken from the ruling Socialist ideology itself —people aspired to something that can most appropriately be designatedas “Socialism with a human face.” Perhaps this attitude deserves asecond chance.

This brings to mind the life and death of Victor Kravchenko, theSoviet engineer who, in 1944, defected during a trade mission toWashington and then wrote a best-selling memoir, “I Chose Freedom.”His first-person report on the horrors of Stalinism included adetailed account of the mass hunger in early-1930s Ukraine, whereKravchenko — then still a true believer in the system — helped enforcecollectivization.

What most people know about Kravchenko ends in 1949. That year, hesued Les Lettres Françaises for libel after the French Communistweekly claimed that he was a drunk and a wife-beater and his memoirwas the propaganda work of American spies. In the Paris courtroom,Soviet generals and Russian peasants took the witness stand to debatethe truth of Kravchenko’s writings, and the trial grew from a personalsuit to a spectacular indictment of the whole Stalinist system.

But immediately after his victory in the case, when Kravchenko wasstill being hailed all around the world as a cold war hero, he had thecourage to speak out passionately against Joseph McCarthy’s witchhunts. “I believe profoundly,” he wrote, “that in the struggle againstCommunists and their organizations … we cannot and should not resortto the methods and forms employed by the Communists.” His warning toAmericans: to fight Stalinism in such a way was to court the danger ofstarting to resemble their opponent.

Kravchenko also became more and more obsessed with the inequalities ofthe Western world, and wrote a sequel to “I Chose Freedom” that wastitled, significantly, “I Chose Justice.” He devoted himself tofinding less exploitative forms of collectivization and wound up inBolivia, where he squandered all his money trying to organize poorfarmers. Crushed by this failure, he withdrew into private life andshot himself in 1966 at his home in New York.

How did we come to this? Deceived by 20th-century Communism anddisillusioned with 21st-century capitalism, we can only hope for newKravchenkos — and that they come to happier ends. On the search forjustice, they will have to start from scratch. They will have toinvent their own ideologies. They will be denounced as dangerousutopians, but they alone will have awakened from the utopian dreamthat holds the rest of us under its sway.

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Dr. Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics on October 12th, 2009, just four months after speaking at the Frankfurt School on the same topic in which she was awarded the prize.

Renowned political scientist, Dr. Elinor Ostrom, from Indiana University – Bloomington, gave a lecture on Friday June 19th, 2009, outlining her latest research and outcomes regarding the problem of “the commons.”

In the lab, she had simulated conflicts concerning the allocation of the commons and had derived a complex theoretical framework that exploits the various elements (e.g. leadership, trust and reciprocity) of this process.

Her framework had been applied in a number of field studies by Professor Ostrom and her team, among others in a study of three villages in the Gulf of California (Mexico), where people rely on fishing. She presented her study and outlined how different forms of managing and allocating the resource „fish lead to different levels of prosperity. Ultimately, the findings of the field study confirmed her framework.

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