Subject: RE: [postanarchism] Anarchism, Marxism and the Bonapartist State Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 11:02:10 +0100 From: "Bailey,DJ (pgr)" <D.J.Bailey-AT-lse.ac.uk> My question for Makhno (who I assume is Saul Newman??): doesn't the construction of political identities/movements around "chains of equivalences" itself risk the kind of reification of identities that post-anarchists are struggling to overcome? Shouldn't the aim be a deconstruction of political identities through the postulation of a fundamental absence of equivalence? In which case, the anti-globalisation movement merely represents another stage in the reification of political identities; the subordination of the individual to the collective; and the narrowing down (rather than opening up) of political opportunities through the rigid postulation of a single enemy ('globalisation'), rather than the multiple and fluid forces of control that need to be dissolved in order for a postanarchist society to be deconstructed? In short, is there something contrary to post-anarchism within the concept of a "chain of equivalences"? -----Original Message----- From: Makhno [mailto:tombombadillo2002-AT-yahoo.com] Sent: Tue 27/07/2004 21:49 To: postanarchism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu Cc: Subject: [postanarchism] Anarchism, Marxism and the Bonapartist State (Part III) 7. ANARCHISM AND POST-MARXISM Anarchist theory, in its emphasis on the sovereign state as an autonomous and specific dimension of power, has uncovered new arenas of radical political antagonism that are no longer overdetermined by economics or class. To further explore these new fields of struggle, and the way that political identities arise from them, I shall turn to the interventions of key post-Marxist thinkers Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. I shall suggest that not only does the post-Marxist project have important links with classical anarchism, but that anarchist theory can itself be extended through an analysis of the relations of hegemony and political identification central to the post-Marxist argument. In their work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe attempt to address the theoretical and political crisis of Marxism, evident not only in the abject failure of Marxist-Leninist projects, but also in concrete social conditions of the shrinking working class in post-industrial societies, the fragmentation of the political domain and the rise of the `new social movements'. Added to these factors are the cultural and epistemological conditions of `postmodernity', which entail a scepticism about the universal essentialist identities and positivistic categories that Marxism based itself on. The theoretical premise for the post-Marxism problematic is the contention that the failure of Marxism as a political project was due to its general neglect of politics - to its insistence that the political is subordinated to the economy. Laclau and Mouffe argue that the potential political radicalism contained in Marxism was vitiated by its class essentialism, economic reduction ism and blind faith in rational science and the dialectic. Therefore, using and developing insights from poststructuralism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis, Laclau and Mouffe have sought to radically rethink Marxism in ways that are non-essentialist, pluralistic and avoid the deterministic logic of the dialectic. For Laclau and Mouffe, economic and class determinism constitute the central problem in Marxist theory, preventing it from being able fully to grasp the political - the field of political identities, power relations and antagonisms - in its specific autonomy and contingency. They argue that the contemporary political field is longer held together by the struggles of the proletariat, and that for some time has been fragmented by a whole series of different and competing identities and struggles: those of blacks, feminists, gays, ethnic minorities, students, environmentalists, consumers, to name but a few. Class is no longer the dominant category through which radical political subjectivity is defined. As Laclau and Mouffe argue, `The common denominator of all of them would be differentiation from workers' struggles, considered as `class' struggles' (159). Moreover, these identities are no longer overdetermined by the struggle against capitalism, but they are rather struggles o ver a number of different issues that can no longer be explained in economic or class terms: for instance, environmental degradation, differential cultural identity, institutional surveillance, and welfare rights. It could be suggested, moreover, that these new struggles and antagonisms point to the anarchist moment in contemporary politics. As Laclau and Mouffe argue, these `new social movements' have been primarily struggles against domination rather than economic exploitation, as the Marxist paradigm would contend: `As for their novelty, that is conferred upon them by the fact that they call into question new forms of subordination' (160). That is not to say that they do not contest capitalist exploitation, but rather that economic exploitation would seen here as an aspect of the broader problem of domination. In particular, permutations of the state over the past fifty or so years - from the welfare state and its increasing bureaucratisation, to neo-liberal state privatisation, to many contemporary forms of security-driven biopolitical sovereignty as discussed above - have generated new relations of subordination, domination and surveillance, as well as concomitant forms of resista nce: `In all the domains in which the state intervened, a politicisation of social relations is at the base of numerous antagonisms' (Laclau and Mouffe: 162). In other words, they are struggles against specific forms of state power and relations of domination instigated by it. In sense, they are anti-authoritarian, anti-state - that is `anarchist' - struggles. Laclau and Mouffe also show the way in which the struggles of workers and artisans in the nineteenth century tended to be struggles against relations of subordination generally, and against the destruction of their organic, communal way of life through the introduction of the factory system and new forms industrial technology such as Taylorism. They did not conform to Marx's notion of the proletarians embracing the forces of capitalism in order to radicalise it (Laclau and Mouffe: 156). This refusal to reduce the struggles of workers to the specific Marxist vision of the proletarian struggle against capitalism would also be characteristic of the classical anarchist position, which emphasised the heterogeneity of subaltern subjectivities and antagonisms (the crucial role of the lumpenproletariat, for instance, which had been dismissed by Marx) and their primarily anti-authoritarian character. There is an important theoretical link here between anarchism and `post-Marxism': bot h positions reject the economic and class reductionism of Marxist thought, insisting that it cannot account for the specificity, complexity and heterogeneity of political struggles. 8. THE POLITICS OF CONTINGENCY Given the theoretical proximity between anarchism and post-Marxism, it is perhaps surprising that this connection is not explored by Laclau and Mouffe - particularly since, as I have suggested above, classical anarchism was able to offer, as a radical alternative to Marxism, a wholly autonomous theory of the state and political power. Moreover, while anarchism could be used to inform post-Marxism, perhaps post-Marxism can also be used here to inform anarchism. In particular, Laclau and Mouffe's theory of hegemony could be developed here as a way of understanding the processes of political identification characteristic of contemporary antiauthoritarian struggles. Hegemony is a concept used by Laclau and Mouffe to describe a radically synthetic political relationship that goes beyond the confines of the Marxist understanding of class struggle. It refers to a political and theoretical problematic that emerged from the central crisis of Marxism - the widening gap, already apparent in the nineteenth century, between, on the one hand, the empirical reality of the shrinking of the working class and the transformations in capitalism, and, on the other, Marx's predictions about the polarisation of society into two opposed classes and the inevitable collapse of capitalism. There were various attempts to patch up this gap through synthetic political articulations - interventions which seemed momentarily to invoke the autonomy of the political and the contingency of the social, only to re-inscribe these once again within the parameters of economic determinism and class reductionism, thus foreclosing their radical potential. Indeed, it was only w ith the introduction of the concept of 'hegemony' that the political domain started to be considered in its own right. The solution proposed by the Russian Social Democrats to the specific problems in Russia during the nineteenth century was a hegemonic one: because of the situation of `combined and uneven development', the proletariat would have to take upon itself the political tasks of the bourgeoisie. This was extended to Lenin's notion of the class alliance, in which the bourgeoisie and the proletariat would unite to achieve common democratic political ends. In both these positions, there is a conscious construction of a political unity, which involves one class `standing in' synthetically for the demands of other classes. Gramsci took this synthetic political construction the furthest with his notion of `collective will', in which radical alliances or `historic blocs' could be formed from different sectors and classes in society through ideology, intellectual leadership and sh ared `values' and `ideas' (Laclau and Mouffe: 66-67). What is crucial about this concept of hegemony is that it designates a distinctly political relationship. That is to say, radical political identities are seen here as being constructed contingently and strategically to suit the specific situation, rather than being the inevitable outcome of historical or economic forces. In other words, it is assumed here that there is no necessary or essential relationship betwee the proletariat and other social identities: there is only a synthetic relationship between them that develops out of political expediency and is entirely contingent. It suggests that radical political struggles can no longer be limited to the proletariat alone, and must be seen as being open to other classes and social identities. This is similar to the anarchist position, which sought to include other classes and strata in the revolutionary struggle alongside the industrial proletariat: peasants, intellectuals, declasses and the lumpenproletariat. Indeed, Bakunin preferred the word `mass' to `class' to characterise this heterogeneous revolutionary idea, `class' implying hierarchy and exclusiveness (1950: 47). This notion of hegemony, if it is taken to its logical conclusion, breaks the link that had always been assumed in Marxism between class position and political outlook, showing that identities, alliances and radical positions are constituted contingently through engagement in political struggles themselves, rather than being predetermined. Laclau and Mouffe argue that when a number of different identities are engaged in different political struggles, `chains of equivalence' can be formed between them as they become united around a common struggle or in opposition to a common enemy. For instance, we can imagine a situation in which there is an authoritarian government that antagonises different groups in society: a government that denies workers their rights also denies students their rights, and so on. Despite their different specific aims and identities, a certain relation of equivalence would be formed between workers and students as they become united against a common foe. In this situation, a certain identity will `stand in'for or embody the universality of this political struggle, thus `suturing'<6>; or temporarily holding together the political field. To understand this hegemonic relationship more formally, we can think of in structural terms. For Laclau, the political field is constituted by two irreducible poles or principles - the universal and the particular- and the dynamic that operates between them. Because there is no longer any universal subject - the position which was once held by the proletariat - this dimension of the universal is 'empty'; that is, it can no longer be embodied in an objective content. The universal remains as the empty horizon of politics - the `empty signifier' - that cannot be filled and yet, precisely because of this, generates the desire or structural imperative in political identities (the particular) to fill or embody it. It is this political operation attempting to fill the `unfillable' place of politics that is precisely the logic of `hegemony' (Laclau in Butler, et al., 58). In other words, there is a political dimension that is symbolically empty and which can only be articulated thr ough a contingent relation of representation, in which a particular political identity comes to partially embody it, thus generating the very contingency in the social and political identities that are constitutive of it. Laclau shows that the political field can be reduced neither to essentialist determinacy nor to a complete `postmodern' dispersal of identities; neither, in other words, to absolute universality nor absolute particularity. Both are reductionist paradigms that deny a properly political domain. Rather, politics must be seen as involving a contamination of the universal and the particular. Political identities are split between their own particularity, and the dimension of the universal that constitutes them in their particularity. Political identities, no matter how particular, cannot exist without a dimension of universality that contaminates them. It is impossible for a group to assert a purely separate and differential identity, because part of the definition of this particular identity is constituted in the context of relations with other groups (Laclau, 1996: 48). For instance, the demand of a particular minority for cultural autonomy always bears reference to a universal dimension. The demand for the right to be different is also a demand for equal rights with other groups. It is also the case, however, that the universal is contaminated by the particular. The universal is formally empty, so that it can only articulate itself if it is represented by a particular political identity. However, it is also the case that because the universal is formally empty, no identity can completely represent or embody it. In other words, the universal, for Laclau, is an `impossible object' in that its representation is, at the same time, impossible and necessary. While no particularity can fully symbolise this universal, its partial symbolisation is crucial if we are to have any notion of politics at all. So in this hegemonic relationship of mutual contamination, the universal is split between its universality and its need to be represented through a concrete particularity; while the particular is split between its particularity and its reference to a universality which constitutes its horizon (see Laclau in Butler et al., 56). As I have shown, even the most particular of identities, if it is to engage in any form of political activism or to articulate a series of political demands, has to refer to some universal dimension and form `chains of equivalence' with other identities and groups. In this way, the groups in this chain are increasingly unable to maintain their own particularity, as they become united in opposition to a common enemy. It is important to note here that this hegemonic political relationship is not determined in an essentialist way. There is no a priori link - as there was in Marxism with the proletariat - between the universal position and the particular identity that comes to incarnate it. According to Laclau, the relation of incarnation is entirely contingent and indeterminate. The `stand in' is decided in an open field of discursive articulation and political contestation. Theoretically, any identity, if it manages to articulate adequate chains of equivalence, can come to represent a common political struggle. Furthermore, the particularity that `stands in' for the universal does so only temporarily, and its identity is destabilised by the universality it `represents' (Laclau, 1996: 53). Because this link is indeterminate and contingent, this opens the political field to other identities to attempt to fulfil this incarnating function. Let us apply this logic of hegemony to contemporary radical political struggles. One of the most important developments in radical politics in recent years has been the emergence of what is broadly termed the `anti-globalisation' movement, a protest movement against the capitalist and neo-liberal vision of globalisation that so dominates us today. What is radical about this movement is not only the breadth of its political agenda, but the new forms of political action it entails. It is fundamentally different from both the identity politics that has recently prevailed in Western liberal societies, as well as from the Marxist politics of class struggle. It may be seen as a hegemonic political movement because while it unites different identities around a common struggle, this common ground is not determined in advance, nor is it based on the priority of particular class interests, but rather is articulated in a contingent way during the struggle itself. Chains of equivalence a nd unexpected alliances are formed between different groups and identities who would otherwise have little in common. In other words, the anti-globalisation struggle involves a contamination of the universal and the particular. It is a form of politics that is no longer confined to the particular, separatist demands of excluded minorities, but rather puts into question the global capitalist state order itself. At the same time, though, it problematises capitalism precisely from the perspecive of the identities and minorities that are excluded and dominated by it, targeting specific sites of oppression: corporate power and greed, G-M products, work surveillance, displacement of indigenous peoples, labour and human rights abuses for example. In other words, it doesn't transcend these identities and demands from the perspective of a universal epistemological position, such as that of proletariat, for instance; rather it is a universal politics that emerges in a contingent way prec isely through these particular identities themselves. Moreover, it transcends the particularity of these identities only from a position that is formally empty. The different identities that come to represent the struggle at different times - students, trade unionists, indigenous groups, environmentalists - do so only temporarily, thus leaving the political field constitutively open to a plurality of identies, positions and perspectives. So while this movement is universal, in the sense that it invokes a common emancipative horizon that interpellates the identities of participants, it also rejects the false universality of Marxist politics, which denies difference and heterogeneity, and subordinates other struggles to the central role of the proletariat; or, to be more precise, to the vanguard role of the Party. In many ways, then, the anti-globalisation movement may be seen as an anarchistic form of politics: it is not confined to a single class identity, having the character more of a `mass' than a `class' struggle, and it highlights different relations of political, social and cultural subordination, rather than just economic exploitation alone. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that anarchist groups feature prominently in these protests. Moreover, it is a movement that rejects centralism and hierarchy, preferring structures that are more democratic and pluralistic.<7>; All of these strategies and forms of activism suggest a contingent hegemonic style of politics, in political identities and positions, rather than being determined at the outset, are constituted and reconstituted through their engagement in the struggle itself. CONCLUSION The anti -globalisation movement might be seen, then, as not only a form of hegemonic politics in action, but also as a contemporary expression of an anarchistic politics. In this sense, post-Marxism, poststructuralism and anarchism share a similar politico-theoretical terrain - one that is characterised by contingency, heterogeneity and the specificity of the political itself. I have tried to explore the emergence of this terrain, suggesting that it may be seen as arising from the crucial innovation of classical anarchist theory itself: the theorisation of an autonomous and specific political sphere that was irreducible to a Marxist class and economic analysis. As I have shown, anarchism took Marx's notion of the Bonapartist State to its logical conclusion, thus developing a theory of state power and sovereignty as an entirely autonomous and specific domain, around which different political struggles could be constellated. NOTES 1. Some of these connections have been explored in Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power (2001). 2. This point of difference is summed up by Engels: `While the great mass of the Social Democratic workers hold our view that the State power is nothing more than the organisation with which the ruling classes - landlords and capitalists - have provided for themselves in order to protect their social privileges, Bakunin maintains that it is the State, which has created capital, that the capitalist has his capital only by the grace of the State. As, therefore, the State is the chief evil, it is above all the State which must be done away with and then capitalism will go to blazes of itself. We, on the contrary, say: Do away with capital ... and the State will fall away of itself' (see `Versus the Anarchists' in Tucker: 728, 728-729). 3. Alan Carter argues that because many Marxists have neglected the possibility of political forces determining economic forces, they have fallen into the trap of the state: `Marxists, therefore, have failed to realise that the State always acts to protect its own interests. This is why they have failed to see that a vanguard which seized control of the State could not be trusted to ensure that the State would `wither away'. What the State might do, instead, is back different relations of production to those which might serve the present dominant economic class if it believed that such new economic relations could be used to extract from the workers an even greater surplus - a surplus which would then be available to the State' (see `Outline of an Anarchist Theory of History' in Goodway: 184, 176-197). 4. Indeed, Bakunin argues that a democratic republican state can be more despotic than a monarchic state, because it can oppress people in the name of the popular will (1984: 209). 5. According to Agamben, zoe was for the ancient Greeks biological life itself - the mere fact of existence - as opposed to bios, which was a form of life proper to the individual within the polis. In other words, at the heart of the very concept of life itself is the division between symbolic and politically significant life, and naked life stripped of this significance (see 1998: 1-2). 6. This concept 'suture' is taken from Lacanian psychoanalysis to describe a process by which the subject is joined into the signifying chain, allowing the signifier to stand-it for the subject's absence in discourse (see Miller 26-28). 7. Here David Graeber has explored not only the different and increasingly imaginative forms of activism that characterise the movement, but also the different strategies employed by protest groups to build consensus amongst participants and to implemet forms of direct democracy in decision making (see 2002). REFERENCES Agamben, Giorgio, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993. Agamben, Giorgio, homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, California, 1998. Agamben, Giorgio, 'Security and terror', Theory and Event 5(4), 2002. Althusser, Louis, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, New Left Books, London, 1977. Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, Verso, 1979. Bakunin, Mikhail, Marxism, Freedom and the State, trans. K.J Kenafick, Freedom Press, London,1950. Bakunin, Mikhail, On Anarchism, ed. Sam Dolgoff, Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1980. Bakunin, Mikhail, Political Philosophy: Scientific Anarchism, ed. G. P Maximoff, Fr Press of Glencoe, London, 1984. Bakunin, Mikhail, From Out of the Dustbin: Bakunin's Basic Writings 1869-1871, trans. and ed. Robert M. Cutler, Ardis, Michigan, 1985. Bornstein, Stephen (ed.), The State in Capitalist Europe, Allen & Unwin, London, 1984. , Bookchin, Murray, Remaking Society, Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1989. Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony Universality. Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, Verso, London, 2000. Callinicos, Alex, Is There A Future For Marxism?, Macmillan Press, London, 1982. Engels, Friedrich, Anti-Duhring, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1969. Foucault, Michel, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-77; ed. Colin Gordon, Harvester Press, New York, 1980. Foucault, Michel, 'The politics of crime', trans. M. Horowitz, Partisan Review 43 (3), 1976. Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality VI. Introduction, trans. R. Hunter, Vintage' Books, New York, 1978. Gordon, Colin, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991. Graeber, David, 'The new anarchists', New Left Review 13 (Jan/Feb): 61-73, 2002. Jessop, Bob, State Theory: Putting Capitalist States in their Place, Polity Press, Oxford, 1990. Kropotkin, Peter, The State: Its Historic Role, Freedom Press, London, 1943. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, Verso, London, 2001. Laclau, Ernesto, Emancipation(s), Verso, London, 1996. Marx, Karl, Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right', ed. Joseph O'Malley, Cambridge's University Press, Cambridge, 1970. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1968. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works Vol. 5, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1976. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works Vol. 7, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1976. Miliband, Ralph, The State in Capitalist Society, Basic Books, New York, 1969. Miller, Jacques-Alain, 'Suture: elements of the logic of the signifier', Screen 18(4): 24-34, 1977/8. Newman, Saul, From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power, Lexington Books, Lanham, MD, 2001. Poulantzas, Nicos, Political Power & Social Classes, Verso, 1978. Rappaport, Elizabeth, 'Anarchism and authority', European Journal of Sociology 17(2), 333-343,1976. Tucker, Robert C., The Marx-Engels Reader 2nd Ed.., Norton, New York, 1978. --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. --- StripMime Warning -- MIME attachments removed --- This message may have contained attachments which were removed. Sorry, we do not allow attachments on this list. --- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- multipart/alternative text/plain (text body -- kept) text/html --- Ҷ2)Yxmifz{l騽ɞƠzfrj)umifz{lz*+/y'֥֜g'+-JȦyq,y0JZةj,^vױej)mnrڦbqbgy
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