Deep Currents Rising:
Some
notes on the global challenge to capitalism
Despite neo-conservative illusions of a hegemonic Pax Americana, the
persistent efforts of supranational state institutions such as the IMF and the
WTO to impose neo-liberal policies throughout the world and the US government’s
efforts to use its post-9/11 “war on terrorism” to leverage the power of
capital against all opponents, the basic institutional structures of modern capitalist
society continue to be challenged on all levels by diverse currents of
grassroots struggle. In their increasingly common rejection of business
priorities these struggles recall Marxist notions of class warfare. Yet the
common opposition to capitalism is not accompanied by the old notion of a
unified alternative project of socialism. On the contrary, such a vision is
steadily being displaced by a proliferation of distinct projects and a common
understanding that there is no need for universal rules. In response to these
struggles, the threatened global order is responding in various ways, sometimes
by military and paramilitary force, sometimes by co-optation aimed at
reintegrating the antagonistic forces. The problem for us is finding ever new
ways to defeat these responses and continue to build new worlds. To find those
new ways, we need to understand the character of the currents of struggle now
in motion. Among such diverse currents conceptual approaches have naturally
differed. In the notes that follow I evaluate a few of those concepts and offer
some new ones.
1. Global Challenge and Theoretical
Innovations
There can no longer be any doubt that proliferating interconnections among
diverse, geographically dispersed, grassroots social struggles – e.g., those of
waged workers (often precariously waged), indigenous peoples, human rights
advocates, ethnic and cultural minorities, environmentalists, women, students,
immigrants – are resulting in a deepening and broadening threat to the
contemporary capitalist social order. On the one hand, it is the very proliferation,
intensity and interlinkages of struggles attacking one or another dimension of
capitalist domination that is so striking – virtually all types of existing
social relationships of control are being challenged. On the other hand, one of
the most important and widely recognized dimensions of increased collaboration
is its global or transnational character. Those involved in local and national struggles
who have fought local and national battles, are quite consciously seeking and
finding ways to connect up with those struggling elsewhere and to make their
efforts complementary and visible. This has taken at least three main forms:
first, increasingly effective transnational mobilization in support of
particular struggles in specific locations, e.g., support for the Zapatista
rebellion, second, global convergences of thousands of protestors besieging
various supranational state institutions and their meetings, e.g., those of the
World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and the
G8, and third, coordinated, simultaneous actions in diverse locations with a
common purpose, e.g., the June 18, 1999 “global ambush of capitalism.”
One dimension of this multi-pronged, increasingly global attack on
capitalist hegemony has been the effort to grasp theoretically what is new about
this situation. This project has occupied both those involved in or sympathetic
to the attacks and those threatened by them and desperate for counter-strategies.
New metaphors and concepts about social conflict are born with insights flowing
from the recognition of new situations that don’t seem to fit existing
theories. One kind of new situation involves hitherto unknown or unrecognized
phenomena; another occurs when some known, but previously secondary phenomena
have taken on a new importance and have become progressively more central in
the challenging of existing institutional structures and mechanisms of control.
The genesis of new theoretical approaches then results from efforts to
imaginatively resolve apparent contradictions between existing theory and these
new perceptions and insights in order to inform strategy and tactics for
dealing with the new situations. In recent years there has been a veritable scramble
to grasp the nature of the dizzying array of new disjunctures, connections,
contradictions and complementarities that make up the current proliferation of
interconnected challenges to global capital.
Perhaps the most common new theoretical approach has been to interpret the
pattern of interconnections among proliferating struggles in terms of
“networks.” Among those challenging capitalist domination neither what is now
called “networking” nor the concept of networks are entirely new. The entire
history of challenges to capital has been replete with the efforts of its
opponents to break out of their isolation and form mutually beneficial linkages
with others in similar situations. This is true of early resistance to its
primitive accumulation and true of the rise and development of trades unions,
political parties and other organizational forms against its ongoing efforts to
accumulate people as workers and labor power. As a general rule the wider and
deeper the linkages, the more successful struggles have been, the greater the
isolation, the more likely defeat.
As for thinking about such linkages in terms of “networks”, some roots of
today’s common use of the concept by activists can be found in Italy in the
1960s where the Marxist sociologist Romano Alquati in his studies of workers
conflicts with the Italian auto giant FIAT meshed the Marxist analysis of class
composition with that of networks, at the factory, national and international
levels.[1]
Other sociologists and then political scientists took the concept of
networks over from mathematical graph theory to analyze a wide variety of
social relationships. These have included individual behavior, small group
interactions, organizational behavior and social movements - most recently
transnational movements.[2] Of
these, the last two would seem to have the most salience here. Organizational
theorists and observers have traced the emergence within businesses and to some
degree the state sector, of network forms of organization that appear distinct
from more traditional hierarchies and market systems.[3]
Recent applications of network analysis to transnational social struggles have
drawn on past sociological studies of local networks, on organizational studies
and on empirical work on particular network-based campaigns to knit together a
synthetic view of "those relevant actors working internationally on an
issue, who are bound together by shared values, a common discourse and dense
exchanges of information and services."[4]
Similar work has been done by national security analysts, who have examined
the implications of the emergence of network forms of organization for the
United States Department of Defense. One early study was that of Pentagon
analyst Charles Swett who focused in on the role of the Internet.[5] The most perceptive and influential work has
been done by
3. The Zapatista
Rebellion
In much of this recent work, a primary reference point for the study of
transnational networks has been the rebellion waged by Zapatista communities in
The first activist analysis of the communicational dimension of that
rebellion noted that the "most striking thing about the sequence of events
set in motion on January 1, 1994 has been the speed with which news of the
struggle circulated and the rapidity of the mobilization of support which resulted."[10]
It went on to note how modern computer communications, through the Internet and
the Association for Progressive Communications networks, made it possible for
the Zapatistas to get their message out despite governmental spin control and
censorship. Mailing lists and conferences also facilitated discussions and
debate among concerned observers that led to the organization of protest and
support activities in over forty countries around the world. The Zapatista
rebellion, the analysis concluded, was not only built on local indigenous
networks but through much wider networks was able to catalyze the weaving of a
global "electronic fabric of struggle."
Subsequent studies at the U.S. Defense Department and at
More recently network analysis has been applied empirically in some detail
to understand the international struggles connected to the Zapatistas. From
hyperlink analysis designed to identify the structures of Zapatista support
networks, to more extensive efforts both to discover the nature of, and
relationships within the transnational Zapatista support network and to explore
the connections with, and impact on, other networks of counter-globalization,
we find a variety of sympathetic efforts being elaborated to understand this
ever-growing set of experiences.[13]
4. From Static Networks to the Dynamics
of Struggle: Swarming
One problem with the application of the concept of “network” to social
struggles has been the tendency to think about “networks” in static terms. Even
when the noun “network” is turned into a verb – “networking” – it just means “building
networks” or “operating through a network” with no specification of the
dynamics involved. Recognizing patterns of connectivity is not enough; the key
thing is how they work dynamically. Capitalist strategists need to know how
networks function to threaten them so that they can develop countermeasures –
to block, crush or absorb the threats. Those building opposition to capitalist
domination need to understand how networks are established, strengthened and
can be used for mobilization and attack, but they also need to understand how
and to what degree networks constitute viable approaches to the organization of
post-capitalist social relations.
Following up their earlier advice of devising state networks to counter oppositional
networks, David Ronfeldt and his primary co-author John Arquilla have also argued
for the adaptation by such state networks of one method they have identified as
being used by such opponents: “swarming”, defined as “a deliberately
structured, coordinated, strategic way to strike from all directions, by means
of a sustainable pulsing of force.” Some examples that they cite are from
historical military experience but others are from anti-capitalist social
struggle, e.g., Mikhail Bakunin’s proposal of “general strikes” and the rapid
mobilization of support networks in response to Mexican government moves
against the Zapatistas. The concept is also, obviously, evocative of the
periodic convergence of thousands from diverse struggles who have gathered to
besiege various capitalist institutions. In their essay devoted to this
subject, Ronfeldt and Arquilla juxtapose swarming to other types of military
tactics, e.g., melee, manoeuvre and massing, and propose “battleswarming” as a
successor to current
The concept of “swarming” has subsequently been appropriated by some activists for their own purposes. One
example, hactivists – whose coordinated “ping” attacks on targeted websites
were one example of swarming for Ronfeldt and Arquilla – quickly adopted their
adversaries’ conceptualization for their own purposes; “digital Zapatismo”
became “InfoSwarm Systems.”[15]
The responses to such actions on the part of those involved in various
social struggles have often been highly critical. One criticism has been that
the hacktivists have chosen bad targets and have done so because they are
neither connected to, nor did they consult with, the particular struggle their
actions were aimed at supporting. A second criticism has been that the use of
such tactics could open movements to the charge of violating their own rules of
free speech and set them up for being attacked in the same way.[16] A
third objection has revolved around the difficulty in demonstrating that such
actions are not the rogue actions of a few individuals but do indeed involve
thousands of people and are thus politically significant. Although the ping
engines can generate information about the numbers and addresses of those who
logged into a site and used it, there remain the questions of circulating that
information, making it believable and gaining legitimacy for such actions.[17]
When this tactic was used by
Another adaptation of “swarming” explores the dynamics of real-time
mobilization during protests and demonstrations in the streets. An essay
written by the activist group “Why War?” recognizes and adapts the work of
Ronfeldt and Arquilla to their own purposes:
“Swarming, for the purposes of
protesting, can be thought of as the technique of quickly massing a large
number of individuals from all directions onto a single position in order to
attain a specific goal. There are roughly four different phases in a successful
swarm: locate the target, converge, attack, disperse. For these four phases to
work correctly they must be synchronized between a diversity of seemingly
disconnected individuals. Therefore, there must be a layer of instantaneous
communication between these individuals.”[19]
The essay also offers detailed analysis about how swarming can be
facilitated by protestors using portable communication devices such as
cell-phones and text-messaging. This adaptation of flash mobs analyzes possible
police counter-measures and discusses some concrete cases.[20]
5. The Dynamics of Struggle: Rhizomes
As an alternative to “networks” and “networking”, the theoretical work of Michel
Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari offered a quite different set of metaphorical
and conceptual approaches for analyzing the dynamics of struggle. Leaving
behind some traditional orthodox Marxist frameworks, such as structuralism,
dialectics and a preoccupation with the overall war between capitalists and
workers, they elaborated a number of new concepts to explore and illuminate the
micro-politics of individual psychology, class power and interconnected social conflicts.
For my purposes here, the most salient of their ideas – because the most widely
taken up by others – are the ones associated with the metaphor of the rhizome: a subterranean system of
horizontal roots and above ground stems.[21]
Deleuze and Guattari juxtaposed this to more familiar form of trees. Obviously,
both trees and rhizomes grow, they propagate dynamically; the difference lies
in the pattern of growth. Trees grow vertically with their branches radiating
from the central trunk; rhizomes propagate horizontally elaborating tuberous
root systems in all directions – from which new sprouts arise. (These botanical
examples provide the core of their metaphor in Thousand Plateaus, although they also called rats and their burrows
rhizomes.) Through the metaphor of the rhizome they explored the characteristics
they argued could be found in horizontally linked human interactions: connectivity,
heterogeneity, multiplicity and rupture.
Closely related to the metaphor of rhizome are two other concepts they elaborated:
deterritorialization and nomadism. Like “rhizome” both obviously evoke not only
space (as does “network”) but movement through space. Whereas capital has
tended to impose specific “territorializations” – fixing people in particular
positions where they can be controlled as workers, the struggles of those
people, elaborated rhizomatically, tend to rupture that fixing by finding or
creating new spaces for autonomous activity. Thus deterritorialization is an
autonomous prison-break and nomadism is another way of thinking about such
autonomous movement. [22] Just as
traditional nomads, e.g., the Roma of Europe or the herders of the
This dynamic metaphor and these concepts of the kinds of dynamism involved have
been taken up by those involved in such struggles and used for thinking about and
organizing their own activity, both locally and internationally.[23] Rhizomatic
self-organization and “rhizomatic” thought have quite explicitly challenged
older conceptions of organization, e.g., the welfare state or Leninist party,
and the associated kinds of thinking that accompanied and justified those kinds
of social organization. Acolytes of those older kinds of thinking, not
surprisingly have condemned these newer approaches.[24]
If we compare and contrast Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the dynamics
of rhizomes with Ronfeldt and Arquilla’s concepts of the dynamics of networks
we can see how the latter reflect and pertain mainly to moments of attack,
while those of the former provide much more insight into the dynamics of
political recomposition that not only make attack possible but possibly
establish organizational points of departure for alternatives to capitalism. These
differences undoubtedly flow from the different locations of the authors amidst
contemporary social struggles. Whereas Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts were
enunciated by men who were trying to think from within opposition to capitalist
ways of organizing the world, Rondfeldt and Arquilla’s work for the Pentagon
has situated them most firmly within the defense of the current order.
6. The Dynamics of Struggle: Currents
Every metaphor, like every analogy, has its limits. Even with the analysis
of swarming we can see how the concept of networks used by both the
theoreticians of "netwar" and some of their opponents grasps only part
of the reality of those loosely connected, yet restless, actors and sets of
actors who share a common, creative opposition to contemporary capitalism and
sometimes seek to go beyond it. What is missing is the sense of ceaseless,
fluid motion among those antagonistic actors who make up that opposition in
which "organizing" may not take the form of "organizations"
but rather of an ebb and flow of contact at myriad points that only sometimes
results in massed or simultaneous attack.
On the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari's fecund metaphor of "rhizome"
does evoke ceaseless growth in various directions, albeit a slow and
subterranean kind. But despite its
horizontal propagation and connectiveness, the plant rhizome is a fixed form (and
the restlessness of rats is obviously quite limited.) The iris rhizome in
flowerbeds or the cattail rhizome in ponds do propagate themselves in all
directions and send up shoots from old and new nodes, year after year. But the
shoots with their leaf structures, flowers or heavy heads of pollen, are always
the same. So here too restlessness exists only at the margins as a given
structure reproduces itself. Indeed, the truth is that many of Deleuze and
Guattari most creative insights escape their own metaphor. The deterritorialization
of the plant rhizome is obviously very limited, as are the metamorphoses of
which the rhizome is capable. The insight into nomadism definitely evokes a degree
of mobility far beyond its possibilities. These important concepts are quite
separable from the metaphor of the rhizome.
An alternative metaphor for thinking about the ceaseless movement that forms
the political life and historical trajectory of those resisting and sometimes
escaping the institutions of capitalism, is that of water, of the hydrosphere,
especially of ever restless ocean currents. Currents are masses in motion, not
just masses of homogeneous water but of whole ecologies of differentiated water
molecules and the myriad forms of life that thrive and perish amidst them –
floating or swimming with the flow or struggling across or against it. Everything
thing is in motion, nothing is stable, deterritorialization is virtually
constant, there is no “safe haven”, no “secure foundation” other than
familiarity with the ever rushing, ever changing flow.[25]
Yet nomadic whales sing and dolphins play as they traverse thousands of miles
of ocean.
In some places these flowing ecologies move faster, in others more slowly,
in some places they are warmer, in others colder, in some places they run deep,
in others on the surface. The most visible currents - those that run on the
surface of the ocean - are warmer, while the deeper currents are colder. Ocean
waters also differ in both salinity and in the array of life that populates
them. But precisely because they are in
constant motion all these things change. Sometimes deeper and colder
nutrient-rich water rises in an upwelling that brings it to the surface where
its molecular components warm up and grow more agitated. On the other hand,
when ocean water enters polar regions it gets colder, becomes saltier, denser
and either freezes or sinks. When water does freeze, it crystallizes into
rigidity, but mostly it melts again, undoing one molecular form to return to a
process of dynamic self-organizing that refuses crystallization yet whose
currents, of varying directions and power, can be observed and tracked. When
currents connect in the ocean they sometimes interact to form giant eddies: “gyres”
or circular movements that pile up water in “mounds” whose surfaces rise above
that of the nearby ocean. Or, more dramatically still, crosscurrents may
interact to form killer “rogue waves”, mini-tsunami’s capable of destroying and
sinking huge ships.[26]
Finally, the movement of ocean currents are affected not only by the makeup
(temperature, salinity, density, nutrient load) of different masses of water
but by the topology of the ocean's floor, gravity and also, especially for
surface currents, by sun, wind and the coriolis force.[27]
In other words, currents move according to the nature of the water that
composes them, but that movement is shaped by surrounding forces.
All of these characteristics are evocative of the behavior of those forces
in opposition to capitalism. Like ocean currents, social struggles have both their
internal dynamics – shaped by the class composition and imaginations of the
people involved – and they are shaped by the forces that surround them:
capitalist institutions that constrain them or other struggles that may counter
or reinforce them. They are fluid, often changing and only momentarily forming
those solidified moments we call "organizations" – sometimes small,
like patches of ice, sometimes quite large, like icebergs. However, such
moments are constantly eroded by the shifting currents surrounding them so that
they are repeatedly melted back into the flow itself. There is, of course, a
certain kind of power in rigidity – frozen seas block ships and an iceberg sank
the Titanic – but recognizing the inevitably transitory character of organizations
necessarily must broaden our attention to the flows out of which they have
crystallized and to which they must sooner or later return.
Some currents of opposition are quite visible, on the surface as it were,
sometimes steady, sometimes turbulent. When they connect reinforcing each other
the social equivalent of rogue waves and gyres are the swirling turbulence of
public struggle: short term upheavals such as massive protests, e.g., the
Battle of Seattle against the World Trade Organization, or the heady, intense
days of the Zapatista intercontinental encounters, or more protracted,
widespread upheavals such as insurgencies.
But, it is worth remembering that oppositional movements on the surface of
society are like the surface currents of the oceans – they only involve a small
percentage of the total mass.[28]
Most currents of opposition run deep, below surface appearances, but like deep
waters that are rich in salt and nutrients they can be rich in social
connections, anger and creativity.[29]
When such deep currents surface in surprising, massive upwellings of social
struggle they can nourish wider conflict and change the world. Such were the
world shaking eruptions in the 20th Century of the Mexican, Russian,
Chinese, Cuban and Hungarian Revolutions; such too were sudden appearances of
Solidarity in
It has always been easier to identify the outside forces shaping social
struggles - the social equivalents of seafloor topology, gravity, wind and
solar energy – than their internal dynamics. Just as undersea landslides and earthquakes
can cause abrupt changes in seafloor topology and trigger tsunamis, so social
analysts often look for events that trigger social upheavals, e.g., the Mexican
government attack on communal lands and the imposition of NAFTA that convinced
the Zapatistas that they had to act quickly or see their lands privatized and
their communities dispersed. Marxists, in particular, have often devoted far
more time to analyzing the “laws of motion” of capitalist development and its
consequences for workers than they have the internal, self-organization of the
working class.[32] They
have more readily seen and understood how capitalist imposed patterns of
development, exploitation and institutional structures have confined and shaped
the development of social struggles than they have grasped the internal
relationships of those struggles. When those relationships have frozen into
overt organizations, e.g., political parties, labor unions, NGOs, guerrilla
groups, they have become the focus of intense research. Unfortunately, the
molecular dynamics of the flows that have gestated self-organization but have
only occasionally resulted in visible organizations have remained, all too
often, largely out of sight and unanalyzed.
Many have also tended to think in terms of a one-sided causality between
changes in capitalist institutions, policies and actions and working-class
reactions rather than seeing how the self-activity of workers may bring about
those changes. Within the framework of my oceanographic metaphor, for example,
capitalist policy changes, e.g., attacks on peasant land holdings, may be seen
as the result of persistent resistance to enclosure and success at reversing it
- just as undersea landslides may be triggered by the erosion caused by
turbulent ocean currents. Or, just as hurricanes are intensified by warming
ocean water, so too is capitalist desperation and murderous flailing about
often the result of their loss of control due to suddenly visible, rapidly
circulating struggles.
Such invisible, deep currents - the inevitable consequence of alienation and
exploitation throughout the history of capitalism - have been a source of
endless frustration to those who would harness the power of those flows, whether
the institutions of Western capitalism or the Leninist party. Power would
harness power, but power lies in the flow itself, in the broad, deep and partly
invisible currents that traverse society. Imagine the challenge to these
would-be dictators or managers, standing in the middle of a world of swirling,
powerful social currents, trying to manage the flows. It is easy to see how the
frustration of early capitalists who had very little grasp of the flowing,
living ecologies they sought to dominate would often drive them to desperate,
violent efforts. It is also easy to see how later capitalist policy makers,
although more experienced, have often been at a loss as to any other way to
handle those ecologies and have resorted, over and over again, to force – thus
the cruel brutality of much of capitalist history.
7. Harnessing flows
But, over time, the more perceptive of capitalist policy makers have
fostered and financed the development of an array of "social
sciences" whose primary purpose has been to identify and analyze the
social currents that have given rise to overt attacks on business' domination
of society. In many Western countries, such as the
As a result, in its more genial moments capital, like engineers who have
designed devices to harness the power of ocean waves, currents, tides and even
salinity gradients, has understood enough to design institutions to harness
antagonistic social flows without trying to simply dam or crush them. One
example of such harnessing can be found in the Keynesian period when workers'
struggles were used to stimulate capitalist investment, productivity growth and
accumulation. By shaping worker-formed unions into institutions that would not
only negotiate but impose contracts on workers, capital was able, at least to a
degree, to convert struggles over wages and working conditions into motor
forces of its own development.[34]
Much earlier Marx captured such harnessing in his adaptation of Quesnay’s
metaphor of circulation to sketch the "circuits of capital."[35]
While those circuits – whether of money, commodity or productive capital –
represent flows of capital, at the heart of the flows is the living labor of
workers. The various moments of the circuits and their interconnections constitute
the general framework through which capital organizes or manages life as living
labor. The metaphor returned, in a small way, in mainstream macroeconomics'
portrayal of the circular character of economic relationships and its sharp
distinction between flows and stocks. In both cases social relationships are
conceptualized as flows, but they are harnessed flows, like rivers or ocean
tides diverted into hydroelectric plants to drive turbines.
Such harnessing and the constraints it imposes, quite unsurprisingly, are
endlessly resisted by the restlessness of a humanity that has so many, many
different ideas about interesting forms of self-organization. From shop-floor
to street, from rice paddies to mountain forests people have organized and
reorganized to escape this harnessing. As a result, some contemporary Marxists
have not only recognized the autonomous power involved in this resisting and
these efforts to escape but have analyzed how such struggles “circulate” from
sector to sector of the working class, rupturing capitalist circulation in the
process – thus taking over and using the metaphor of “circulation” for their
own purposes.[36]
In line with this metaphor we can
think about the conflicts described above not so much in terms of wars between
set pieces (chess, go, military confrontations) or wars between classes for
Power (Leninist revolution versus the capitalist state), but rather in terms of
the vast imagination and capability of self-organization of a multiplicity of
struggles straining against capitalist rules that bind, limit and distort.[37]
There is a kind of class war here that involves increasingly resistance to the
unity of global capitalism. But the resistance flows not from an increasingly
unified class seeking a new unified hegemony, but rather from myriad currents
seeking the freedom of the open seas where they can re-craft their own movement
and their interactions with each other free of a single set of constraining
capitalist rules.
Given the diversity of approaches to thinking about the emergence around the
world and connections across borders of such a wide variety of social struggles
that have increasingly challenged capitalism, there have also been a variety of
approaches to the characterization of the subjectivities involved in those
struggles.
Ever since East European dissidents resurrected the concept of “civil
society” as a way of talking about social initiatives that escaped the control
of Soviet-style states, the use of the term has proliferated across the
political spectrum. From Left to Right, from opponents of capitalism to its
defenders, the concept has been deployed, as it has in the past, in a variety
of ways. “International civil society”, “transnational civil society” and
“global civil society” have all been evoked to characterize the kind of
widespread challenges to contemporary capitalist policy I have been discussing.
But when we examine what people mean by these terms we find the same varied
meanings as when the concept of “civil society” has been applied to local social
structures in the past.[38]
Many have tended to reduce the meaning of "civil society" to
formal NGOs.[39] This
reduction has been more or less severe, largely depending on the interests of
those using the words. For many state agencies, either national or
supranational, the term NGO is used so broadly as to include the private
business sector. For others the term refers only to non-governmental and
non-business organizations. In this case, however, there is often a failure to
distinguish between NGOs that are obviously integral parts of capitalism such
as the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations from grassroots organizations opposed
to it. Conceptualizing "civil society" only in the form of NGOs is a
reductionism not surprising in a society where political Power is usually
vested in formal institutions. It is not, however, satisfactory. Oppositional NGOs
should be seen as only particular organizational crystallizations of a much
more general and fluid social struggles. Indeed, partly in reaction to the
growth and behavior of some transnational NGOs, various critiques have emerged
along with a quite conscious search for alternative ways of organizing. One
such critique has been of an observed tendency for NGOs to become bureaucratic
and self-preserving institutions, increasingly operating above and
independently from their supporters. This critique parallels similar ones that
have been directed at traditional labor unions and political parties by the
Zapatistas who have been unusually successful in articulating these critiques
in ways that have resonated widely among those who have become disenchanted
with such organizations.
A second critique has been that such NGOs have cut deals with the state and
with business in ways that have betrayed the purposes for which the
organizations were formed. One example has been the willingness of some big
environmental organizations to collaborate with the World Bank or the World
Trade Organization – thus lending legitimacy to those institutions whose
policies have generally been ecologically destructive. Here again, parallels
can be drawn with the behavior of "business" unions and political
parties.
These critiques have effectively recast the notion of "civil
society" in a narrower sense. "Civil society" has become, for the
Zapatistas and many others, a term applied only
to those moments and struggles within society that resist subordination to
capitalist institutions and, in many cases, fight for alternative ways of
organizing society.
Unfortunately, both historically and in the contemporary world the concept
of "civil society" has been given so many different meanings as to render
its meaning opaque. When you have to go into a long discourse to explain the
particular meaning of your use of a term - as opposed to the way many others
use the term - it's usually a good time to seek a different vocabulary. Although
what interests me here is most closely approximated by the last definition of
"civil society" given above, I prefer to eschew the use of the term altogether
to avoid misunderstanding.[40]
9. Social Movements?
Conceptualizing
widespread but interconnected challenges to existing institutions in terms of
"social movements", rather than just unusual “collective behaviors”, grew
out of the experience of the “civil rights”, “black power”, “counter-cultural”,
student, women’s and other “movements” of late 1950s and 1960s. Those of us engaged
in struggle thought of ourselves as being part of a “movement” and so did those
many who analyzed us from within or from without, whether sympathetically or
critically. The very term “movement” not only evoked struggle for change, but
also the absence of any center, of any hierarchical organizational structures
that could command the widespread, frequent protests and related actions. Cohesion
in movements has often been thought to derive from common goals and shared
collective identities.[41]
The identification of
separate organizing by separate movements, e.g., black power groups organizing separately
from civil rights groups, women organizing themselves autonomously from men,
led many to speak of “new” social movements – as distinct from the traditional
labor movement – and sometimes to skeptical characterizations of these
movements as being balkanized, essentially reformist efforts that ultimately
posted no real threat to “the system” as a whole, however much this or that aspect
of it was being contested. Whether enthusiastic or skeptical, the number of
academic researchers, especially in sociology, focused on “new social movements”
multiplied rapidly and churned out a huge body of work, first articles and then
collections of those articles. Books with titles such as Social Movements
and Culture or Cultural
Politics and Social Movements began to appear in the mid-1990s.[42]
Political scientists and historians joined in and a variety of
approaches have been offered to explain patterns of movement development and
behavior. Among the most influential have been those of “political process” and
“resource mobilization” where the former emphasizes changes in the larger
political situation that opens up or closes down opportunities for movement
formation and action and the latter focuses on how movement activity is shaped
by all the resources available, including political, economic and
communicational ones.[43]
As recognition has
grown of how struggles for particular changes have been flowing together into
collaborations whose impact is already larger than the sum of the individual
influences, many have come to speak of a “movement of movements” and
optimistically, for the first time in quite a while, to declare that “another
world is possible” or “other worlds are possible.”[44]
As one might expect
both the commonplace use of the term “movement” to characterize these struggles
as well as the academic “social movement” literature on them have been
critiqued in various ways. One example is the paper by the Leeds May Day Group
in this volume that sees this characterization as too restrictive because it
highlights the actions of activists while ignoring much more widespread actions
on the part of “people who do not consider themselves ‘activists’ or
‘political’ but who nevertheless have to struggle against oppression and
exploitation in their everyday lives—people who, just like us, are struggling
for new ways of living.”
More generally, because
these “new” social movements have been identified as falling outside the labor
movement, they have also been identified as falling outside the Marxian concept
of class struggle. While this has permitted such “post-Marxist” approaches to
successfully create an accepted space for their work within an overwhelmingly
anti-Marxist academic establishment, it has done so only by defining
"class struggle" very narrowly and marginalizing it as one kind of
conflict among others. As with the broader space of “post-modern” studies –
which has executed a similar strategy – the overly simplified characterization
and abandonment of Marxist thought has often led to an identity politics blind
to, and thus vulnerable to, the threat of a common enemy.
10. Working Class?
Although the “post-Marxist” and “post-modernist” characterizations of
Marxian thought has rung true among those who have identified Marxism with its
orthodox varieties – e.g., Leninist, Maoist, Trotskyist – it has rung quite
false among those familiar with less orthodox and more adaptive varieties of
Marxist thought. Whereas orthodox Marxists have tended to react to the
struggles of those outside the waged industrial proletariat – and there have
been such throughout the history of capitalism – by demanding that they get a
waged job, join the working class and its
struggles, other Marxists, long ago, saw the political and theoretical flaws in
such a response. On the one hand, critical theorists of the
Such a broadened concept of working class has made possible Marxist analyses
of the wide variety of social struggles around the world that have challenged
capitalism in ever more interconnected ways. Such analyses have employed
Marxist analytical and political categories, e.g., value, exploitation,
alienation, class struggle, but have elaborated and adapted them in ways that take
account of the breath and variety of the struggles among both waged and
unwaged. Among the first examples of such analyses were those of class
conflicts of the Fordist or Keynesian period in which the factory model had
been extended to, and hence contested, throughout society. In other words both
deskilled industrial workers and others outside industry - but whose lives were
shaped in ways designed to feed into (schools), or support (nuclear families),
or manage the reserve army of (the welfare state, foreign aid, neocolonialism) industry
– were organized as effectively as Keynesian planners could manage as one great
social factory. The result, of course, was the inevitable, equally thorough
appearance of class struggle against such shaping and all of its miserably
constrained conditions of life.
The point of departure for analyzing the complexities of such a
multi-dimensional working class and its struggles was, naturally, Marx’s own
analysis of the way capital imposed a division of labor in production and the
way it pitted some groups of workers against others, e.g., Irish against
English or the unemployed and unwaged (the reserve army) against those with
jobs and wages. But whereas Marx’s focus was on the methods of capitalist
control and exploitation, the need of those in struggle against such control
demanded an inversion of perspective, from top-down to bottom-up. Just as Marx
had studied everything he could find on division of labor, including
theoretical essays by economists and engineers and factory inspector reports,
so a new generation of Marxists in the post-WWII era undertook to study,
sometimes in similar sources, sometimes at actual points of production (and
later at the points of reproduction) the contemporary shape of class
relationships.[47]
The result was the elaboration of a “workerist” analysis of “class
composition” that looked at the division of labor explicitly in terms of the
power relations between capital and workers and among the latter with a view to
providing theoretical concepts for grasping changes in those relations brought
on through workers’ struggle. Thus workers’ efforts to tip the scales of power
in their favor were conceptualized as processes of “political recomposition”
while capitalist attempts to thwart or reverse such efforts were seen to
involve the imposition of new divisions in processes of class “decomposition.”
Similarly, attempts to theorize the ability of workers to take the initiative
in the class war and to craft alternative non-capitalist relations among themselves
led from the concept of workers’ autonomy to that of self-valorization – an
appropriation and inversion of a term Marx used to describe capitalist expanded
reproduction.[48] Methodologically, these ideas implied taking
workers struggles, in all their variety and interrelationships, as points of
departure for understanding both particular organizational crystallizations,
e.g., unions, political parties, NGOs, and capitalist strategies and
tactics.
Applied to the international level such an analysis tended first, to
recognize how supranational institutions such as the International Monetary
Fund, the World Bank and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs were not
merely vehicles of post-WWII U.S. imperial hegemony but were intended to manage
a global Keynesian hierarchy of development and underdevelopment and therefore,
second, to bypass traditional orthodox theories of imperialism to focus on the
commonalties and interconnections among particular struggles. Thus, for
example, while some viewed the anti-Vietnam war or anti-apartheid mobilizations
in the
11. Multitude?
The kind of analysis of class struggle sketched above was taken by some Marxists,
mostly working in
The concept of empire designates a new organization of command, beyond
imperialist competition between national blocs of capital backed by nation
states, in which, through both national governments and supranational state
institutions capital has begun to act as a more unified whole at a global
level. A ferocious debate has followed this thesis – one that is strongly reminiscent
of that which followed Karl Kautksy’s proposed theory of ultra-imperialism just
before World War I – as it was attacked those who argued 1) national rivalries are
still very much alive, 2) the United States government still dominates all
“supranational” state institutions and 3) American imperialism is obviously
rampant in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and in neoconservative plans
for a new Pax Americana.[52]
The concept of multitude for Negri and Hardt designates the new collective subject
that overthrew Keynesianism and imposed a new organization on capitalism. Their
concept of that new subject is clearly a variation on that of the collective
worker in the social factory theorized more than a decade earlier.
Historically, multitude designates a metamorphosis of what Alquati and Negri
earlier had called the “socialized worker”. The difference between the world of
the social factory and the “socialized worker” and that of empire and
multitude, would seem to lie in their perception that worker successes in
rupturing and fleeing the social factory and capital’s successes in adapting to
those ruptures and checking that flight have resulted in a more thorough
domination of every aspect of life. Their theorization of this supposedly new,
thorough domination is based on two related concepts: biopower – a concept
taken over from the work of Michel Foucault – and immaterial labor – a concept adapted
from Jean-François Lyotard.
In a manner similar to the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Michel Foucault’s
research on capitalist domination shifted focus from macro-class forces to the
micro-politics of control. His study of Bentham’s proposal for the management
of prisons via panopticon arrangements led to his investigations into how such
control was spread throughout society, the bodies and brains of those living
within it.[53] In the
process he revealed hitherto invisible arrangements of power through which
individual lives were subtly managed through induced forms of internalized control.
In Hardt and Negri such bio-political arrangements are presented as thorough
and complete; all of life, within formal work places, but also in the home and
in the community have become places of work for capital. “Power is thus
expressed as a control that extends throughout the depths of the
consciousnesses and bodies of the population – and at the same time across the
entirety of social relations.”[54]
As a result, they argue, Marx’s labor theory of value is no longer relevant
because if it is no longer possible to differentiate between work and non-work,
between work time and non-work time, then there is no way to measure “labor”,
and hence Marx’s value.[55]
But what is the nature of this work to which all of life is reduced? While
they recognize that older forms of work still abound – such as manual labor in
fields or factories – they argue that the most important capitalist adaptation
to the emergence of the multitude’s subjectivity has been capital’s ability to
capture, organize and subordinate the increasingly important mental labor of
generating information and managing communication flows and the affective labor
through which personal and social relations are constructed and managed. Hardt,
Negri and Maurizio Lazzarato call these kinds of work “immaterial labor”.[56]
While this sounds like a more thorough variation on the vision of critical
theorists who saw total capitalist domination as having spread not only through
the sphere of production but through that of culture, Hardt and Negri insist
that the “multitude” thus subsumed by capital is nevertheless a subject capable
of revolt. The source of the power of the multitude to revolt, they argue, lies
in its “constitutive power” – a formulation taken over from their, and
Deleuze’s, reading of Spinoza where they identify the power to create or
constitute (potentia, puissance, potenza,
potencia) being distinguished from the Power (potestas, pouvoir, potere, poder) to command.[57] The
actual generation of information, communication and affect is, like more
traditional forms of labor, the activity of the multitude. Thus, the
bio-political Power of Empire is exercised against the bio-political constituent
power of the multitude, but that bio-power – which can only be harnessed but
not eliminated – not only breaks free from time to time, here or there, but has
the potential to free itself from Power completely. Moreover, “freeing itself”
means power destroying all of the mechanisms through which Power has
constrained and harnessed it and achieving complete self-determination. And if
Empire is world wide, so, necessarily is the multitude on which it is based.
How much of this analysis of multitude is really new? How much does it
really differ from the earlier Marxist analyses of class struggle from which it
drew? Let’s examine some of the key concepts. First, what of (constituent)
power vs. Power? While the two linked terms of this dichotomy may have
originated in Spinoza, is it really that different from Marx’s own dichotomy of
living-labor and dead-labor? In Hardt and Negri’s analysis it is power that is
constitutive and Power that merely controls and manages. In Marx’s analysis the
living labor of the working class is the real life force within capitalist
society and capital’s ability to survive and expand depends entirely on its
ability to control, subordinate and exploit that force. That subordination, in
turn, had to be exercised, from the beginning, throughout society, starting
with the expulsion of people from previous social relations (primitive
accumulation) and then finding ways to continue to control the dislodged in
factories, fields and communities. Although the array of skills and creative
forces of living labor have evolved over time, including the communicative
abilities essential to cooperation and collective work, these things have
always been present. Applying Spinoza’s term constituent power to living labor
merely emphasizes its creative and productive character that was already
highlighted by Marx. Hardt and Negri’s location of the revolutionary potential
of the multitude in its constituent power thus appears as a mere reformulation
of Marx and many autonomist Marxists’ grounding of the revolutionary potential
of the working class in its own self-activity (only temporarily harnessed by
capital as labor power).
Second, what of “immaterial labor”, of kinds of work that can be
characterized as productive of information, communication and affect? To begin
with, the adjective “immaterial” here is clearly designed to differentiate this
kind of mental work from manual labor that produces durable physical
commodities; indeed the adjective is simply taken over from the idea of
“immaterial goods” such as services and communication. However, there is really
nothing immaterial about the various kinds of work that produces services, information
and communication, so the adjective is confusing. Although the perspective is
reversed (Hardt and Negri see immaterial labor as absolutely central to
contemporary work) this distinction between material and immaterial labor
reminds one of the Soviet distinction between real work that produced real
physical commodities and other kinds of activity, not worth counting as value
production, that produced services. The “immaterial” work of information
production, processing and communication clearly involve considerable mental
labor which is every bit as material as manual labor.
The same is true of “affective labor” – a term that highlights the emotional
dimension of mental labor (as opposed to its rational component). Whether
affective labor is understood as producing services (e.g., health care,
entertainment) or social networks and community through direct, or indirect,
human contact, it is every bit as material as any other kind of work. Nor is
this kind of work new. To begin with Marx recognized, though analyzed far less
than he might, the necessary work of producing and reproducing human life as
labor power.[58] Hardt
and Negri even admit that “affective labor” has been around for a long time,
acknowledging how “Feminist analyses in particular have long recognized the
social value of caring labor, kin work, nurturing, and maternal activities.”[59] A
recent, excellent example of such recognition and analysis by a Marxist
feminist is the book Caliban and the
Witch by Silvia Federici who has shown how, from the very first, capital
sought to control not only production but the labor of reproduction.[60]
What they do claim is new is “the extent to which this affective immaterial
labor is now directly productive of capital and the extent to which it has
become generalized through wide sectors of the economy.”[61]
If “directly productive of capital” refers to the direct production of
profitable commodities, then this corresponds to the growth of the service
sector and certainly it has grown as a proportion of capitalist industry. If it
means directly productive of capital understood as class relation then it has
been true from the beginning. As to becoming generalized, clearly the work of
reproduction has always been necessary in every sector even if its modalities
have changed over time.
Third, what of the contention that capital has succeeded in so extending its
bio-political control throughout all of life to the point where it is no longer
possible to distinguish work from non-work or to measure either? Clearly the
imposition of capitalism has always involved the imposition of the work of
producing the commodity labor power as well as the work of producing other,
profitable, commodities. The question is what was the basis for distinguishing
these different kinds of work in the past and has that basis disappeared? Hardt
and Negri argue that because communicative or affective activities in the
sphere of reproduction have come to play a larger and larger role in the sphere
of waged work, the distinction has been breaking down. However, in Marx’s
analysis any and all activities that produce labor power, i.e., the willingness
and ability to work, have fed into what goes on in the sphere of production!
What actually distinguished work in these two spheres was that one had to be paid
for and one did not. Thus the acute capitalist preoccupation with measuring the
time of work. Those who performed unwaged work had to be supported, of course,
or the reproduction of labor power would falter and collapse, thus the family
wage, charity and eventually welfare and unemployment insurance. Quite clearly
this distinction between work that is directly paid for and work which is not still
exists.
The classic “working day” discussed by Marx in chapter 10 of volume I of Capital is the waged working day, but it
was by no means the entire working day. The rate of surplus value, or the rate
of exploitation measured only the ratio of the work time that capital had to
pay for over and beyond that required to reproduce labor power (in the
aggregate, that required to produce goods and services consumed by workers) and
ignored the work time in the sphere of reproduction. At the same time, neither
was the entire time of waged workers actually spent working for capital, nor was
the time spent by others, e.g., spouses or children, entirely filled with the work
of reproducing labor power. Within the factory, Marx discussed the “pores” of
non-work in the working day and the endless efforts of capitalists to eliminate
them to avoid paying for non-work.[62]
Although he never analyzed them, the same kind of “pores” of non-work have
always existed in the home, school, community and so on.[63] The
“pores” in his discussion were temporal ones – time momentarily freed from
capitalist imposed work – but they must also be spatial ones as well; time
spent not working has to take place somewhere, whether directly on the shop
floor, at the water fountain, in a restroom or in specially appropriated spaces
away from the workplace.
As the ability of workers to hammer down the time of waged work grew, the
capitalist preoccupation with time outside that sphere grew apace, thus
countless efforts to shape “leisure time” and “culture”, i.e., to turn society
into a social factory, to make sure that as much unwaged time as possible has
been used to produce and reproduce labor power rather than being used for non-
or anti-capitalist activities. Thus, too, multiplying efforts to measure how
time is actually spent in various spheres of reproduction, e.g., homes, schools
and communities.[64] Those
efforts demonstrate a capitalist awareness of the importance of a continuing
difference between work and non-work that disappears in the writings of Hardt
and Negri.[65] This
disappearance, although consistent with their emphasis on the thoroughness of
capitalist bio-political control, is odd considering their contention that the
multitude has the power to rupture that control through the exercise of its own
bio-power. Does rupture actually occur? If so, then capitalist bio-political
control is not omnipresent but full of “pores” blown open by struggle and what
we need are detailed analyses of the methods of rupture and of the actual
exercise of the multitude’s bio-power to constitute new kinds of social
relationships autonomously of capital. Many of the studies of actual struggles
whose results have appeared in the journals mentioned above do provide useful
information on such issues but, unfortunately, little of it makes its way into Hardt
and Negri’s books.
12. Conclusion
The array of concepts discussed above has included sketches of several
different approaches: 1) to thinking about the interconnectedness of struggles
in terms of networks, of the dynamics of struggles in terms of swarming,
rhizomes or currents, and 2) to characterizing the subjectivities in motion in
terms of civil society, social movements, the working class or multitude. What
do I make of these? Let me answer briefly in terms of two criteria: first,
their usefulness in understanding the spreading, interconnected struggles that
are challenging capitalism around the world, and second, their usefulness in
terms of helping us figure out how to do better.
The concepts of de-centered networks and rhizomes do provide attractive
metaphors for the patterns of interconnectedness that can be identified in a
wide variety of grassroots struggles. But while the people and organizations in
networks or rhizomes may sometime converge or swarm to focus protest or
disruption against some moment of capitalist domination, understanding how such
networks or rhizomes have developed to the point where such behavior is
possible leaves something to be desired. Similarly, it’s one thing to point, as
I have done here, to the fluidity of self-organization through the metaphor of
currents of struggle, and quite another to identify exactly how such currents
form, how they gather or lose strength, how they interact and how and why
organizations sometimes crystallize into being or melt back again into the flow.
The concept of civil society, in all of its permutations, is of no help here. The
work of social movement theorists is helpful in identifying permissive or
restrictive parameters of such growth but less so in revealing its internal
dynamics. Those analyses of everyday life, of the weapons of the weak, and of
certain aspects of popular culture mentioned above help us understand something
of the social dynamics that gestate networks or rhizomes but generally have
been unable to specify the actual processes of quickening that brings these to
life. Again, some Marxist analyses of the general patterns of the capitalist
organization of social life, like some of the restrictions on self organization
identified by students of social movements, are helpful in understanding
constraints on self-activity but not on understanding the dynamics of self-activity
itself.
On the other hand, both the Marxist theory of political recomposition and
the theory of multitude – which I see as a mutation or hybrid of class
composition theory – provide concepts that focus our attention precisely on the
character of self-activity involved in the genesis of networks, rhizomes or
currents of struggle. Both theories, of the autonomous power of the working
class (in production and reproduction) or the bio-power of the multitude
throughout society, are formulated in ways intended to provide an understanding
of how struggles shape and reshape themselves.
What is all too scarce, however, in the elaborations of all these theories are
concrete analyses of how networks,
rhizomes, currents or organizations have been formed, of their growth and of
their effectiveness, strengths and weaknesses. In other words, far too much of
the work done so far has focused on understanding the general character of
these struggles and far too little on examining exactly how they have emerged,
grown – and sometimes withered – in such ways as to permit drawing useful lessons
from them about how to improve our abilities to bring about the changes we
seek. The work that has been already done analyzing these struggles can, I
think, be mined for material that can help us draw such lessons. But there is
also a need to reorient our efforts away from crafting general theories and
toward figuring out, on the one hand, what has worked, to what degree, why and
how, and on the other hand, what has failed, to what degree, why and how.
For example, at the beginning of this essay I mentioned three main forms
through which global connections among diverse struggles have been organized
and surged upward into public view. One of those has been the physical
convergences of thousands of protestors. Now, the massive convergence against
the G8 that took place in
It seems more likely that the judgments of participants and sympathetic
observers, based directly on the experiences of the mobilizations, that what
has been gained through these actions has been limited enough to warrant
redirecting one’s efforts into finding or elaborating alternative forms of
struggle. Certainly the sharing of experience, multiplication of contacts and increased
collaboration that has occurred at each of these events has been almost
universally judged positive, even exhilarating. Eventually, a few of the
positive demands made by protestors at these convergences have born fruit,
e.g., debt reduction, but clearly most have not been achieved despite the
enormous resources, personal and collective, expended in these efforts. But has
there been such a consensus over the results (if not the factors taken into
account) of such cost-benefit calculations as to explain the reduced
participation in such efforts? One approach to testing this hypothesis involves
examining the ex-post discussions and evaluations of the experience at
Two examples, on a smaller scale, of how and why shifts in the direction of
struggle have taken place can be found in the reorientations of Zapatista
struggle that occurred in the wake of their extremely well organized and
extremely public, 3000 mile long March for Indigenous Dignity in 2001. The
March took the form of a sizable caravan to
The first shift in Zapatista struggle that occurred in the wake of these
events was a turning inward and abandonment of any dialogue or negotiation with
any wing of the Mexican government. From their point of view the March had been
both a stunning success and an abject failure. The success lay in the
mobilization of thousands of other people that demonstrated not only their
continuing power of convocation and support for their demands but also
extremely widespread opposition to Mexican government policies. The failure lay
in the effort to leverage that support and opposition into sufficient pressure
on Mexican politicians to achieve the long sought legalization of indigenous
autonomy. The professional politicians in all three major parties, including
the so-called leftist PRD, ignored the voices rising from the streets of
The second shift in Zapatista struggle came after four years of the above
kind of internal work. In the summer of 2005, they issued a “Red Alert”, closed
their communities to the outside world and engaged in intensive internal debate
over strategies of struggle. The result was the issuance in June of the “Sixth
Declaration of the Lacandona” that recounted what the Zapatistas had been
doing, analyzed and condemned capitalism in general and neoliberal Mexican
capitalism in particular and announced plans for a new outward-oriented
offensive.[68] The
reasons given for this new offensive are clear: the war with capital is global,
what can be accomplished in isolation is too limited (even for struggles as
well organized internally as that of the Zapatistas), so people must organize
themselves across space and differences to win the war. As a step toward such
organization, they proposed: a series of dialogues with others in struggle
throughout
While an analysis of Zapatista communiqués clarify the reasons for these two
shifts in strategies of struggle, it is also true that because the Zapatista
communities have been besieged by police, military and paramilitary harassment
and violence ever since 1994 the internal discussions that led to these shifts
were closed to outsiders. As a result, those of us on the outside know more
about the decisions made than we do about the processes through which they came
to be made. The above brief account, moreover, provides few details on exactly
how these strategies were, and are being, implemented. (A more detailed account
can be found in Patrick Cunninghame’s contribution to this volume.[69]) Nevertheless,
it seems to me that the kinds of evaluations of experience, discussion of
lessons to be learned and possible new strategies based on those lessons that
can be found in the Zapatista communiqués provide an approximation of the kind
of concrete analysis that we need to complement the more theoretical
conceptualizations sketched in most of this essay. At the same time, those
theoretical approaches lead us to ask questions about these struggles whose
answers are not found in those communiqués and therefore prompt us to further
investigation.
In short, and to truly conclude, whatever inspiration and insights we may
draw from general theories of the growing interconnectedness and global
character of our challenges to world-wide capitalist domination, what we really
need in order to advance our struggles is more concrete investigation of how we
have achieved what we have, what limits we have encountered, what others have
achieved and how, what limits they have encountered and what we can learn from
each other through a multiplicity of dialogues about where we are and what to
do next.
Harry Cleaver
September 2006
[1] See the
collection of Alquati’s studies: Sulla FIAT, Milano: Feltrineli, 1975.
Although this work has never been translated, a synopsis of its ideas on
networks has circulated widely and influenced many. See: http://libcom.org/library/network-of-struggles-italy-romano-alquati
[2] A useful
overview of the development of network theory, from mathematics to sociology,
can be found in the introduction to J. Clyde Mitchell, Social Networks in
Urban Situations: Analyses of Personal Relationships in Central African Towns,
[3] An
influential moment of this literature is Walter W. Powell, "Neither Market
nor Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organization," Research in
Organizational Behavior, 12 (1990), pp. 295-336.
[4] Of
particular relevance here are: Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity, Vol. II of his The Informational Society: Economy, Society and Culture, London:
Blackwell, 1997, Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond
Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1998, Martha McCaughey and Michael D. Ayers, Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and
Practice, New York: Routledge, 2003, Wim van de Donk, Brian D. Loader, Paul
G. Nihon and Dierter Rucht, Cyberprotest:
New Media, citizens and social movements, New York: Routledge, 2004, Sidney
Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism,
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005 and Clifford Bob, The Marketing of Rebellion: Insurgents,
Media and International Activism, New York: Cambridge University Press,
2005. See also the earlier work by Cathryn Thorup, "The Politics of Free
Trade and the Dynamics of Cross-border Coalitions in U.S.-Mexican
Relations," Columbia Journal Of World Business, Vol. XXVI, No. 11,
Summer 1991, pp. 12-26 and (with David Ronfeldt) North America[cut:n] in the Era of Citizen
Networks: State, Society, and Security, RAND, 1993. Not surprisingly Thorup
went on to work for both the United States Agency for International Development
and the National Security Council on building relationships with NGO’s.
[5] Charles
Swett, "Strategic Assessment: The Internet",
[6] The
[7] Such
separation was analyzed by Marx as an essential moment in the creation of a
“working” class dependent on the labor market for survival under the rubric of
“primitive accumulation” – a variation of Adam Smith’s term for the same
process: “original accumulation.”
[8] The
recurrent capitalist efforts to impose and maintain such separation, sometimes
blocked and sometimes reversed by resistance, has resulted in a debate over the
transitory or permanent character of primitive accumulation. For more on this
see the papers in this volume by de Angelis, Zarembka and Bonefeld.
[9] The
prime example of recent years was the gutting of Article 27 of the Mexican
Constitution that protected indigenous and peasant ejidal (communal) lands, and hence communities, from privatization.
This was intended to set the stage for the final enclosure of the Mexican
countryside and was executed by the
[10] Harry
Cleaver, "The Chiapas Uprising and the Future of Class Struggle in the New
World Order," Riff-Raff: attraverso la produzione sociale (
[11] John
Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, The Advent of Netwar, Santa Monica: RAND,
1996, p. 73. David Ronfeldt and Armando Martínez, "A Comment on the
Zapatista 'Netwar'" in John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, In Athena's
Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age,
[12] Keck
and Sikkink, op. Cit., p. 115.
[13] See,
for example, Maria Garrido and Alexander Halavais, "Mapping Networks of
Support for the Zapatista Movement: Applying Social-Networks Analysis to Study
Contemporary Social Movements," in Martha McCaughey and Michael D. Ayers, Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and
Practice, New York: Routledge, 2003 or the broader and more detailed study
by Thomas Olesen, International
Zapatismo: The Construction of Solidarity in the Age of Globalization, New
York: Zed, 2005.
[14] See
John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Swarming
& the Future of Conflict, Rand: National Defense Research Institute,
2000, p. vii.
[15] See:
Ricardo Dominguez, Stefan Wray, Brett Beestal and Osea, “SWARM: An
ECD Project for ARS Electronica Festival '98” at
<http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/swarm.html>.
[16] The
September 1998 counterattack by the Pentagon's Defense Information Systems Agency
has demonstrated precisely the kind of dangers feared. See report by computer
security writer Winn Schwartau, "Cyber-civil
disobedience," Network World,
[17] See my
intervention into the debate on the net in the Chiapas95 archives: "H.
Cleaver, A Contribution to the Discussion of ECD," May 1 (1998).
[18] Such
methods have been used from time to time, especially in Italy where "netstrikes" have been called in support of local
struggles and international ones, e.g. against Turkish government and business
sites in support of Kurdish Rebels in Turkey whose leader had recently been
seized.
[19] See:
“Swarming and the Future of Protesting,” at:
http://www.why-war.com/features/read.php?id=4#part4
[20] For a
brief history of flash mob protests of various kinds see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob
[21]
"Rhizome" in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia,
[22] As
Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis makes clear, capital can also intentionally deterritorialize, i.e., uproot people from one location to
fix them in another as a method of achieving and managing exploitation or
displace its fixed capital with the aim of exploiting people in other
locations. The slave trade, the recurrent use of immigrant labor, runaway shops
and outsourcing are obvious examples on an international scale.
[23] See,
for example, Rolando Perez, On An(archy) and Schizoanalysis,
[24] A good
example of such clashes are two articles in the journal Multitudes by Richard Barbrook who
attacks the work of Deleuze and Guattari and Bifo who
defends it: Richard Barbrook, “Le cyber-commnisme, ou le dépassement du capitalisme dans le cyberspace”
and Bifo (Franco Berardi),
“Techo-nomadisme et pensée rhizomatique,” Multitudes
5, Mai 2001.
[25] We can
also add, with Werner Bonefeld, that everything is uncertain. See: Werner
Bonefeld, “Notes on Movement and Uncertainty,” in D. Harvie,
K. Milburn, B. Trott and D. Watts (eds) Shut Them Down!
The G8, Gleneagles 2005 and the Movement of Movements,
[26] See the
analysis by the Department of Mathematics at the University of Bergen, Norway: http://www.math.uio.no/~karstent/waves/index_en.html
or, for a dramatic account, the program on the subject produced by the History
Channel.
[27] The
physical configuration of seafloor topology obviously affects currents,
sometimes channeling them, sometimes deflecting them. Earth's gravity affects
all water but pulls denser water toward the bottom of the ocean. Lunar gravity
causes tides. The sun's rays warm surface waters - more in some areas than
others – and indirectly, and to an ever lesser degree the deeper waters beneath
them. Wind pushes surface water through friction. Wind blown surface water in
turn affects water below it, also through friction; its differential impact
according to depth produces the Eckman Transport
Spiral that helps form gyres and mounds of water in the ocean. It also
contributes to upwellings of deep water where the wind blows offshore and downwellings where it blows onshore. The coriolus effect is a deflection of wind patterns caused by
the earth's rotation.
[28] In the
case of the oceans the surface currents are only 10% of the total ocean water
mass. As a result wind only affects, directly and indirectly, some 20% of the
mass.
[29] This is akin to Karl Marx's "old mole" – a
proletariat whose subterranean struggles periodically erupt onto the surface of
society bringing revolution – or Sergio Bologna’s “tribe of moles” in Italy of
the 1970s or his more recent metaphor of invisible “termites” eating away
wooden beams from within in ways that are free of mediation and can bring about
the ultimate collapse of a whole structure. See Sergio Bologna, “The Tribe of
Moles: Class Composition and the Party System in
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2002-02-13-hardtnegri-en.html
and http://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/netzkritik/societyofcontrol.html
[30] At this
writing the popular occupation of
[31]
Well-known among such studies are those of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bordieu, Michel de Certeau, James
Scott, Romano Alquati, and John Fiske. Included here must also be the work of those
historians who have unearthed the hitherto buried histories of everyday
struggle out of which impossible-to-ignore insurrectionary uprisings have
emerged, e.g., Christopher Hill, Edward Thompson, Peter Linebaugh,
Marcus Rediker,
Silvia Federici and contributors to “subaltern studies”.
[32] This
way of thinking has involved a clear-cut dichotomy between capital and the
working class such that the dynamics of the former, including its crises, could
be theorized independently of the activity of the latter. Fortunately, in
recent years this approach has been progressively superseded by an
understanding of capital as class relationship that allows us to see how the
struggles of workers have shaped, and sometimes ruptured "capitalist"
development bringing crisis, threatening its very existence and elaborating
possible alternatives.
[33] The
failure of Soviet-style regimes to use social scientists in this way – as
opposed to using them for mere ideological justification of policies – was one
reason for the ignorant and ultimately self-defeating brutality of the state's
response to all forms of struggle. The brutality drove the currents of
resistance deep below the surface where, out of sight and out of the state's
mind, they circulated, interacted and gradually gained the strength to surface
and overthrow the regime.
[34] The
classic texts that most clearly articulated this analysis were: Mario Tronti, Operai e capitale,
[35] Quenay’s “circulation” was essentially a biological
metaphor adapted from
[36] Such
analysis of the “circulation of struggles” was a factor in my coming to rethink
the Zapatista and counter-globalization “networks’ in terms of currents.
[37] In one
line of contemporary Marxist thought this imagination and capability is
conceptualized in terms of "a general intellect" (a concept plucked
from “the fragment on machines” in Marx’s 1857 Grundrisse) and is manifest not
only in the increasingly central role of mental labor, but in its tendencies to
autonomy. See, for example, Paolo Vierno, "Notes
on the General Intellect," in S. Makdisi, C. Casarino and R. E., Karl, Marxism Beyond Marxism,
New York: Routledge, 1996 and Paolo Vierno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an analysis
of contemporary forms of life, New York: Semiotext(e),
2004.
[38] There
are any number of books outlining and analyzing the history of the concept of
“civil society” and that history is much too long to recapulate
in his essay. See, for example, John Ehrenberg, Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea,
[39] See,
for example, Howard Frederick, "Computer Networks and the "Emergence
of Global Civil Society," in Linda M. Harasim
(ed.) Global Networks: Computers and International Communication,
[40] For a
different critique of the common evocation of “civil society” as the prime
agent of anti-globalization movements see Werner Bonefeld, “Anti-globalization
and the Critique of Socialism,” Critique,
Vol. 34, No. 1, April 2006, pp. 39-59.
[41] See
Alberto Melluci, “The Process of Collective
Identity,” in Hank
[42] Ibid.,
and Marcy Darnovsky, et. al., eds. Cultural
Politics and Social Movements
[43] For a
sketch of the variety of approaches see: Doug McAdam,
et. al., (eds) Comparative
Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing
Structures and Cultural Framings, Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University
Press, 1996.
[44] For
example: Tom Mertes (ed), A Movement of Movements: Is Another World Possible?
[45] For one
very brief sketch of the international development of such non-orthodox Marxisms see the introduction to Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically, London: AK
Press and AntiTheses, 2000, on the web at: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/357krcp.html
But also see the much more detailed account of the emergence of such
recognition among Italian Marxists in Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist
Marxism, London: Pluto Press, 2002 as well as such detailed historical
explorations of the long history of the role of the unwaged in working class
struggle in studies such as: Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged, London: Verso Press,
2003, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker,
The Many-headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves,
Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Boston:
Beacon Press, 2000, and Silvia Federici, Caliban
and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, New York:
Autonomedia, 2004.
[46] See: R.
Alquati,
[47] Among those who went into the factories to
discover what was the actual state of the class composition of their times were
the members of the Johnson-Forest Tendency in the United States, those of Socialisme ou Barbarie in France and associates of Quaderni Rossi in Italy (especially Romano
Alquati). These interlinked efforts are described briefly in the introduction
to Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically,
Ibid. For a more detailed discussion of Alquati and his work see Chapter 2
of Steve Wright, Storming Heaven, Ibid.
[48] On
self-valorization see: Antonio Negri, Marx
Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, New York:
Autonomedia, 1992 and Harry Cleaver, “The Inversion of Class Perspective in
Marxist Theory, from Valorization to Self-Valorization,” in W. Bonefeld, R.
Gunn and K. Psychopedis (eds)
Open Marxism, Vol. II, London: Pluto
Press, 1992.
[49] A now
classic example of this kind of analysis is laid out in the two issues of the
American journal Zerowork
(1975 and 1977).
[50]
Subcomandante Marcos, “The Fourth World War,”
[51] Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire,
[52] Kautsky’s classic essay is online at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1914/09/ultra-imp.htm
One collection of articles critical of the “empire” thesis is: Gopal Balakrishnan, Debating Empire,
[53] See:
Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison(1975) or Discipline
and Punish: the birth of the prison,
[54] Empire, op. cit., p. 24.
[55] Negri’s
attack on the “law of value” pre-dates Empire
and goes back at least to his 1971 article on the “Crisis of the Planner State:
Communism and Revolutionary Organization”, available in English in: Toni Negri,
Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis
& New Social Subjects, 1967-1983, London: Red Notes, 1989.
[56] Maurizio Lazzarato “Immaterial Labour”,
(1996) in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, (eds) Radical Thought
in Italy,
[57] See:
Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and
Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, Antonio Negri, Il potere costituente, Milan: Sugerco,
1992, Antonio Negri, Insurgencies:
Constituent Power and the Modern State, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1994 and Antonio Negri, “Constitutent
Republic,” in W. Bonefeld, Revolutionary
Writing: Common Sense Essays in Post-Political Politics, New York:
Autonomedia, 2003.
[58] See,
for example, his analysis of simple reproduction in Chapter 23 of Volume I of Capital.
[59] A
seminal text in the history of such recognition is Mariarosa
Dalla Costa, Women
and the Subversion of the Community, December 29, 1971, now available
online at http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/357kDallaCostaSubversion.html and
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/357kDallaCostaSubversionTable.pdf
[60] Silvia
Federici, Caliban and the Witch, op.cit.
[61] Michael
Hardt, “Affective Labor” (n.d.) on the web at: http://makeworlds.org/node/60
[62] This
discussion is in the discussion of the intensification of labor in Chapter 15
of Volume I of Capital. As has been
often pointed out, it was partly against such pores – as well as in order to
intensify work itself - that Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford reorganized work
with stop watch and assembly line.
[63] Marx
also failed to examine the flip side of capitalist “nibbling and cribbling” to lengthen the working day pointed out in
Chapter 10 of Volume I of Capital.
Pitted against such efforts, workers have also found innumerable ways to
shorten their work time, not only at the beginning and at the end (showing up
late, leaving early, taking long lunches) of a working day but in the middle,
by carving out precisely those “pores” that have so preoccupied their bosses.
They have done the same within the working week through fake sick leave and
other forms of absenteeism.
[64] See the
recent paper by Massimo de Angelis and David Harvie,
“Cognitive Capitalism and the Rat Race:
How Capital measures ideas and affects in UK Higher Education,” (2006)
available on the web at: http://www.geocities.com/immateriallabour/angelisharviepaper2006.html
For another discussion of the “measuring” of various kinds of unwaged
schoolwork see: Harry Cleaver, “Schoolwork and the Struggle Against It”, (2006)
available on the web at: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/OnSchoolwork200606.pdf
[65] For a
different, but useful, critique of Hardt and Negri’s thesis of immeasurability
see: George Caffentzis, “Immeasurable Value? An Essay
on Marx’s Legacy,” The Commoner, No.
10, Spring-Summer 2005, available on the web at: http://www.commoner.org.uk/10caffentzis.pdf
[66] This
protection took the form, primarily, of clearly separating the EZLN from
community self-governance. The story of their worries about possible attack and
the preparatory steps they took has now been told in Subcomandante Marcos, “The
Zapatistas and the Other: The Pedestrians of History,” (September 2006). See: http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/la-otra-campana/
[67] A
fairly detailed description of these caracoles, why they were formed, how they
operate, their successes and failures can be found in two series of communiqués
issued by the Zapatistas in 2003 and 2004 and available on the web at: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/aguascalientes.html
and http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/leerunvideo.html
[68] The
Sixth Declaration is available on the web at: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/SixthDeclaration.html
[69] Patrick
Cunninghame, “An/other Anti-capitalism in