WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT

The Writing on the Wall

This passionate collection of essays by Anselm Jappe, a critique of value theorist, is a significant contribution to the critical analysis of contemporary capitalism. Resolutely anti-capitalist, the author reminds us that by demanding submission of all aspects of life to market relationships, the system inexorably leads to the destruction of human communities and the environment. Michael Löwy, Alternative Libertaire

Contact with reality makes a theory stronger and the importance of Anselm Jappe’s book is that it allows us to measure the explicatory power of the ‘critique of value’ when it is applied to a number of different subjects, from […] political life to contemporary art. The central chapter, where he analyses the subprimes crisis, is the most striking. Here Jappe reminds us of the founding paradox of capitalism as originally formulated by Marx: capitalism realises profits by exploiting human labour, yet every increase in productivity made possible by automation and technology reduces human input into the goods that are produced.

Eric Aeschimann, Libération

First published by Zero Books, 2017

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Preface

The by now patently obvious decline of capitalism does not always provide confirmation of the critiques that its traditional adversaries have levelled at it. On the contrary, it appears that these old antagonists are entwined en route towards the same dustbin of history. The question of social emancipation is beginning to be posed in a new way. It must be rethought. This is the purpose of the “critique of value” that the German journals Krisis and Exit! and their principal author Robert Kurz, as well as Moishe Postone in the United States, have been elaborating since the 1980s. In 2003 I published Les Aventures de la marchandise: Pour une nouvelle critique de la valeur,¹ in which I tried to summarise the critique of value for the French-speaking public. The book begins with an analysis of the basic concepts of Marx—value, abstract labour, money, the commodity—in order gradually to arrive at some considerations on the current state of the world and at some form of polemic on the basis of other critiques of contemporary capitalism.

In the years that followed, I have put that theory to the test by using it as an interpretive framework in order to work out whether it is more effective than other perspectives as an approach to understanding today’s world. The Writing on the Wall contains ten of my contributions to the debate in France, published between 2007 and 2010. While these texts were written on different occasions and often on a “given” theme, it is true nonetheless that they all deal with the same questions, but without going over the same ground too much. They may be read separately because they were written separately, and because each of them contains some material that explains its theoretical assumptions, that is, the critique of value and commodity fetishism. In this sense, they also make up a kind of introduction to the critique of value for those who have not read Les Aventures de la marchandise or other books from this school of thought that have been published in French and English.² In fact, each text is made up of a brief summary, depending on the topic it addresses, of a different aspect of value critique: crisis theory, the structure of the commodity, fetishism, etc. I decided it was better to leave these summaries within their separate articles, rather than to combine them into some kind of introductory text, which would have unravelled them, made it impossible to read them separately, and at the same time obliged the reader to “cross the desert” of preliminary concepts. Except for “The Cat and the Mouse”, all these articles were originally written in French and published in French journals. All of them have been specially revised for this book.

Essentially, these texts analyse the decomposition of contemporary capitalism and the reactions this decomposition engenders. The first part, pars destruens, includes four articles that appeared in the journal Lignes. “The Princesse de Clèves Today” appeared in November 2007 in issue no. 23-24 of the same journal devoted to the theme “Twenty Years of Political and Intellectual Life”. Its title refers to comments by Nicolas Sarkozy, who, back when he was running for the French presidency, had deemed it scandalous that questions about Madame de La Fayette’s book should be featured in civil service entrance examinations. His statements triggered a wave of indignation and sarcasm, and La Princesse became, more than three centuries after her fictional exploits, a symbol of the rebellion against state educational policy. “Politics without Politics” was published in issue no. 25 (March 2008), which was on the theme of “Political Decomposition/Recomposition”. “Violence to What End?” was published in issue no. 29 (May 2009), which was devoted to the theme “On Violence in Politics”, following the “Tarnac Affair”, which I also discuss in that article. “The Writing on the Wall” was published in issue no. 30 (October 2009), the theme of which was “Crisis as Mode of Governance”. This article was disseminated internationally thanks to translations into Italian, Portuguese, Greek and Dutch. These first four articles address the gradual stagnation of capitalism that culminated in the crisis of autumn 2008. This crisis, in fact, vindicated that aspect of the critique of value that had always aroused the greatest degree of incredulity, on the left as much as on the right: the assertion that there is an internal limit to capitalist production. But these essays deal not only with the self-destruction of capitalism and its slide into barbarism; they also address the similarly destructive and barbarous reactions to its decomposition. Large portions of what passes today for a critique of capitalism are here examined as part of the problem rather than as part of the solution: thus, the civil society movement of the ATTAC³ variety, the hounding of city traders, and critiques focussing exclusively on high finance; but also proposals for a return to “politics” and “class struggle”, as well as talk of regenerative violence that would see capitalist barbarism defeated by its own weapons. These kinds of reactions to the crisis are filed here under the general term “populism”, for despite their radical cachet, none of them really criticises the foundations of capitalist production. They are much more focussed on tinkering with the system, looking for scapegoats, reigniting antagonisms that have in actual fact collapsed along with capitalism itself, or descending into bluster.

The first section of the book could have been given the title “No”, just as the second part—the pars construens—could have been titled “Maybe”. In the latter I examine some of the recent responses to the obvious impasse in which capitalist society finds itself and which, from the point of view of a radical critique of commodity society, merit some attention. For despite, at least from a distance, serious limitations here and there, these approaches could serve to point the way towards a real supersession of capitalist society. They therefore make up what is called a “critical dialogue”. “The ‘Dark Side’ of Value and the Gift”, published in issue no. 34 of the Revue du MAUSS⁴ (second half of 2009), devoted to the theme of “What Is To Be Done, What Is To Be Thought About Marx Today?”, compares, in the pages of the leading publication of the theoreticians of the “gift”, the MAUSS group’s theory of the gift as elaborated over the last thirty years, with the critique of value whose various aspects are summarised in this article. It may therefore serve as an introduction to the critique of value and be read first. “‘Common Decency’ or Corporatism? Observations on the Work of Jean-Claude Michéa” first appeared on the website of MAUSS and subsequently in issue no. 6-7 of the journal Illusio (spring 2010). It analyses one of the most interesting and original contributions to social criticism published in France in the last ten years. “Degrowthers, One More Effort If You Want to Be Revolutionaries!” first appeared, in part, in issue no. 258-259 (July 2009) of the Spanish journal El Viejo Topo [The Old Mole], in response to a survey on the degrowth movement. It analyses the merits and the limitations of this movement, which has seen a large increase in its audience over the last few years. “From One Utopia to Another” appeared in issue no. 2 of D’Ailleurs, the journal of the École régionale supérieure d’art de Besançon [Besançon School of Fine Arts], devoted to the theme of “utopias”. It examines the ambiguity of the concept of “utopia”, which is once again enjoying a surge of popularity among part of the public.

Finally, the third part, pars ludens, confronts one particular area: contemporary art and the role of culture in the decline of capitalism. “The Cat, the Mouse, Culture and the Economy” is a contribution to a symposium held in 2008 in Mexico as part of the “Fifth Forum of Public Art”, and was published in issue no. 263 (December 2009) of El Viejo Topo. I have delivered this lecture in several art schools in France and it has met with fairly positive responses, despite—or perhaps because of—the damning judgement it passes on contemporary art and the latter’s subordination to the commodification of life. “Is There an Art after the End of Art?” was published in 2007 in the catalogue of the 9th Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art, which featured the title “The History of an As Yet Nameless Decade”. This text has been considerably expanded; however, it preserves its “seminal” character, that is, its attempt to sketch the outlines of a future investigation. Sometimes, just one sentence may contain matter for far-reaching extrapolations.

Can the considerations that appear in this book be characterised as “optimistic” or “pessimistic”? On the one hand, the critique of value has always forecast the downward spiral of capitalism, and even catastrophic developments. This book could have been entitled Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. These were the mysterious words that, according to the Old Testament (Daniel 5), were written by a supernatural hand on the walls of the palace of King Belshazzar of Babylon at the very moment when he believed he was at the height of his success; words that lead the king to discover that he had been weighed in the balance and found wanting, and that his kingdom had been given over to his enemies who were waiting outside its walls. Radical critique remains wholly unfazed since it has no intention of saving “our way of life”. Crisis theory has always met with outright rejection, as much from traditional Marxists as from bourgeois thinkers. The last few years, however, have provided undeniable confirmation of its validity. In 2002 I gave a speech in London on the Situationists in which I also evoked the deep-seated crisis of capitalism. A review in an English Marxist publication admitted that my speech was very interesting, but claimed that it was unfortunately marred by “surreal assertions” about “capitalism’s immanent [sic] collapse”.⁵ Had this been six years later, I am not sure they would have deemed my assertions quite so surreal.

This is, however, small consolation. For crisis is less than ever synonymous with emancipation. This claim, which is at the heart of this book, is by no means optimistic. It would, however, be pointless to carry on not wanting to “drive Billancourt to despair”.⁶ It is not the purpose of the critique of value to furnish direct pointers for immediate action. This refusal often occasions a certain amount of disappointment on the part of those people eager for radical social critique, but who immediately raise the question of what the practical application of this fine theory might be. It is necessary, however, for critique to avoid succumbing to the demand that it always provide concrete immediate solutions. Although it is legitimate to expect that a critique of capitalist society should also be able to reveal a possible praxis of supersession, there are good reasons to insist on the necessary autonomy of theory. Indeed, were its corollary in immediate action the only thing allowed to govern everything thought or said, the very formulation of radical theory would no longer be possible. The “categorical break” that forms the background to the critique of value cannot be turned instantly into a political strategy, as is the case for example with theories of the “multitude” or of “alter-globalisation”; nor is instantaneous application to one’s personal life within its gift. On the other hand, conceptualising a break with the basic categories of capitalist socialisation, even if such a break cannot be realised in the here and now, enables a focus to be maintained which goes far beyond the countless proposals in this day and age that seek to change the present without having to change anything.

We are drifting towards a situation where humans will be nothing but “waste” (Zygmunt Bauman). The countless people who survive by picking through garbage—and not only in the “Third World”—show us where a humanity that has made the valorisation process its chief requirement is heading: humanity itself becomes superfluous when it is no longer necessary for the reproduction of the capital-fetish. There are increasing numbers of people who are no longer “good” for anything, not even for being exploited, while at the same time they have been stripped of all means of subsistence. And those who still possess resources often put them to disastrous use. In these circumstances, there is nothing else for it but a fundamental reinvention of the project of human emancipation. The old prescriptions are scarcely of any use in a world that has changed so much.

It is beyond doubt that emancipation cannot be a mere consequence of capitalist development, and it is not a matter of keeping the latter going by replacing its managers, or by “liberating” the forces that it created yet whose putting to good use it would not brook. There is no such thing as an historical tendency towards communism, revolution or emancipation, no teleology, no current upon which the forces of emancipation can be swept forward; nothing that guarantees their victory, no stages that naturally succeed one another. There are no forces created “behind capital’s back” that will eventually abolish it, nor any “dialectical” reversal, nor any cunning of reason. Social emancipation, should it happen, will be a leap into the unknown with no safety net, and not the execution of a sentence dictated by history.

On the contrary, it is the tendency to disaster that has an objective basis. Indeed, there is something preordained about the development of commodity society because its crises and its collapse lie within its very core, and its history is the deployment of this nexus. Catastrophe is programmed, not emancipation; things left to run unchecked lead only into the abyss. If there are “laws of history”, they tend always to go in the wrong direction; human freedom and happiness never result from these laws but are always achieved against them.

Hope that capitalism is not only its own gravedigger, as generations of revolutionaries have proclaimed, but that it has also created the foundations of what will replace it, is to be found not only in this “positive” version (inherit from capitalism, hand victory to what capitalism has itself engendered, whether it be the proletariat or productive forces), but also, particularly where the recent past is concerned, in a “negative” version. According to the latter, capitalism produces such devastation that it will compel humanity to get rid of it or, at the very least, subject it to drastic changes. Even within this scenario, capitalism is conceived as the best ally of the revolutionary, as the force that will, albeit indirectly, bring about emancipation rather than head straight for disaster. This is doom-mongering, available in environmental and/or economic versions: faced with extreme danger, people will wake up and a miracle will happen.⁷ The survival instinct will make humanity stop at the edge of the abyss and recognise that the pursuit of capitalism is incompatible with its most basic concern for survival. Unfortunately, however, there is no generalised instinct for self-preservation, individual or collective. There are people who drive while busy chatting on the phone and smoking, and there have been entire civilisations that collapsed rather than change their ways. Furthermore, awareness of environmental threats does not necessarily lead to emancipation, but is just as likely to lead to authoritarian solutions, to increased competition for unspoilt surroundings, or to new wars. Nor does economic disaster imply a “thrust” towards emancipation, as the essays in the first part of this book attempt to demonstrate.

The word “emancipation” is not yet as tainted as the word “revolution”. Originally, it meant the liberation of a slave who thus became masterless and won independence. One is always emancipated from something; one exchanges heteronomy for autonomy and becomes one’s own master. From what must we emancipate ourselves today?

It is not just a matter of emancipating ourselves from the rule of one group of human beings over another: capitalists over proletarians, rich over poor, men over women, whites over blacks, the northern hemisphere over the southern, heterosexuals over “deviants”… However much these demands may be justified in particular instances, they generally lead along the road to disaster with a more diversified group of managers and with a distribution of advantages and disadvantages which is not even fairer, but which alters the type of injustice. In the best-case scenario, it leads to everybody’s right to eat at McDonald’s and to vote in elections, if not to have the right to be tortured by a policeman whose skin is the same colour, who is the same gender, and speaks the same language as his victim. One cannot escape from the structural constraints of the system by democratising access to its functions.

Emancipation, therefore, can only be liberation from what inhibits autonomy at a deeper and more wide-ranging level. It must take in the entire capitalist and technological system, without favouring either one of these aspects of the “megamachine” (Lewis Mumford): there can be no simple “appropriation” of industrial technology by a society that claims to be “non-capitalist”, no abandonment of technology, or of its excesses, without destroying the valorisation of value, abstract labour and capital. It is necessary to abolish fetishism as a ready-made system where no decision, big or small, can any longer be made.

What is required is to keep all possible options open, to stop the drift toward irreversible consequences. If genetically modified organisms spread everywhere, or if we reach a point where humans are cloned, or if the ozone layer disappears for good, what good will it do to continue to struggle for social emancipation? On another level, we can be sure that the perfection of unprecedented techniques of surveillance, and the readiness of many people to welcome them as guarantors of freedom or security (whether in the form of the Internet, subdermal microchips, nanotechnology, surveillance cameras, Facebook, mobile phones, credit cards, or fingerprint recognition; not to mention the fact that the refusal to use these technologies may arouse suspicion and lead to imprisonment, instances of which have been reported) will make any structured social opposition almost impossible.

A remark that Walter Benjamin made at a time of triumphant Fascism comes to mind: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake.”⁸ Activating the emergency brake: this will not be achieved by Saturday demonstrations alone and even less by elections or “consumer choice”. It may never be really understood why men react so differently to the same situations and the same challenges, beyond the “objective” circumstances in which they find themselves. But this also means that everything is still possible.

Almost every article in this book contains a reference to the ideas of Jaime Semprun (1947-2010), the driving force behind the Encyclopédie des nuisances. He was one of the rare intellectuals of our time whom I admired, despite our differences. I would like to dedicate this book to his memory.

Notes

1.Anselm Jappe, Les Aventures de la marchandise: Pour une nouvelle critique de la valeur [The Adventures of the Commodity: For a New Critique of Value] (Paris: Denoël, 2003).

2.My analysis owes a great deal to the work of the late Robert Kurz. The following books by Kurz have yet to be translated into English: Der Kollaps der Modernisierung [The Collapse of Modernisation] (1991), Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus [The Black Book of Capitalism] (1999), Weltordnungskrieg [The War for World Order] (2003), Das Weltkapital [World Capital] (2005). See bibliography for full references.

3.Association pour la Taxation des Transactions financières et pour l’Action Citoyenne [Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and for Citizen’s Action].

4.The biannual journal of MAUSS, Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales [Anti-utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences].

5.Andrew Fisher, “Scholasticism and Swagger”, Radical Philosophy 114 (July/August 2002), p. 49.

6.[Translator’s note: “Il ne faut pas désespérer Billancourt” [“We must not drive Billancourt to despair”]: the words of Jean-Paul Sartre in 1956 after his return from a trip to the USSR. At that time Billancourt was one of the main centres of working-class activism, located in the Île-de-France region.]

7.Cf. René Riesel and Jaime Semprun, Catastrophisme, administration du désastre et soumission durable [Doom-Mongering, Disaster Management and Lasting Submissiveness] (Paris: Éditions de l’Encyclopédie des nuisances, 2008).

8.Walter Benjamin, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940 (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 2003), p. 402.

Part 1: Pars Destruens

The Princesse de Clèves Today

As the beginning of The Communist Manifesto states, pre-capitalist societies, as well as industrial capitalist society in its first phase, were based on a dichotomous and hierarchical organisation: masters and slaves, aristocrats and peasants, exploiters and exploited, capitalists and proletarians. These social groups were opposed to each other in almost every way, even though they shared the same form of religious consciousness and the same worldview. At the base of social reproduction was the theft of the surplus production created by the direct producers; this theft was initially carried out by violence, and violence was also the method of last resort to assure the distribution of social “roles”. Normally, however, this theft was justified and disguised by a vast apparatus of “superstructures”—from education to religion—which guaranteed the peaceful submission of those who, in reality, had little interest in accepting such an unfavourable distribution of rights and duties in society and who, at the same time, potentially had the ability to overthrow this state of affairs if they were united enough and resolved to do so. Once this order was put up for debate—essentially, from the onset of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment—revolution (or profound reforms; in any case, a drastic change of course) was the necessary outcome. Opposition to the material mode of production was accompanied by the questioning of all of its justifications, from monarchy to religion, and even, during the most advanced stages of this opposition, of the family, the education system, etc. The dichotomy was then clearly highlighted: a tiny fraction of exploiters ruled all the rest of the population by means of violence and, above all, by cunning—a cunning that would later be called “ideology” or “manipulation”. These classes have nothing in common; the exploited are the bearers of all the human values denied by the ruling classes. It is very hard to break the power of the rulers, who have accumulated a considerable quantity of means of coercion and seduction, and often successfully divide the exploited classes, or else intimidate or corrupt segments of them. But there was no doubt that the day would come when, despite all the obstacles, the “lower” classes would overthrow the social order, and replace it with a just and good society such as the earth had never seen. If the members of the ruled classes exhibit in their present life multiple defects and egotistical attitudes with respect to their peers, this is because the upper classes inoculated them with their vices; furthermore, the revolutionary struggle will not fail to eliminate these defects, which are not inherent to the ruled classes.

This portrait, caricatured to only a slight degree here, has served to galvanise all the supporters of social emancipation for two centuries. It was not a false depiction. Although it was always one-sided, it partially corresponded with certain realities. The anarchist movement in Spain of the first decades of the twentieth century, which in 1936 led “a social revolution and the most advanced model of proletarian power ever realised”,¹ was probably the movement that came closest to the formation of a counter-society within capitalist society itself and largely opposed to its values (but not as completely as this movement believed itself to be; we need only think of its exaltation of work and industry). Furthermore, its solid roots in clearly pre-capitalist local traditions played an understandably prominent role in this “otherness” with respect to bourgeois society, something that was always cruelly lacking in—for example—the German workers’ movement, whose revolutionaries, according to Lenin’s well-known observation, would have bought train tickets before storming the station (which, however, did not prevent Lenin from maintaining that the German Post Office was the model for the future communist society that had to be constructed in Russia).

In the last few decades the idea that social emancipation will consist in the victory of one part of capitalist society over another part of that same society has lost its lustre. This idea held sway as long as the ruled part of society was deemed not to be part of that society, but only bore its yoke as that of an alien rule. If, however, this schema can still find partial application today—perhaps—in certain particular cases such as Chiapas, it can by no means be applied to capitalist society in the fully developed form it has assumed since 1945. The distinctive feature of this society is not the fact that it is based on the exploitation of one part of the population by another. This exploitation certainly exists, but it is not specific to capitalism; it also existed before. What is specific to capitalism—and what makes it historically unique—consists rather in the fact that it is a society based on generalised competition, on commodity relations that affect all aspects of life, and on money as the universal mediation. Equalisation before the market and money, which “only” understand quantitative differences, has gradually eclipsed the old classes, but without by any means making this society less conflict-ridden or less unjust than it was before.

This equalisation existed in embryo from the very inception of the industrial revolution because it is consubstantial to capitalism as valorisation of labour value and self-referential increase of money. It became predominant after the Second World War, at least in the West; but only over the course of the last few decades, with the advent of so-called “postmodern” society, has it become self-evident. It was also during these last twenty years that theoretical reflection began to take note of this fundamental change. The “dichotomous” view, of course, has not died; its most common avatar is the concept of “class struggle”, the axis of all variants of traditional Marxism and even of certain forms of thought that do not define themselves as Marxist (from Pierre Bourdieu to the main currents of feminism). The anxiety caused by the recent globalisation of capital has given new impetus to concepts—from the social democrats of ATTAC to the neo-workerist advocates of “intellectual capital”—that only question the distribution of capitalist “goods”, such as money and the commodity, but never their existence as such.

However, a different kind of analysis of the contradictions of the capitalist system is beginning to emerge. This analysis abandons the centrality of the concept of the “class struggle” (without denying, however, that class struggles exist and often for good reasons), but not in the same way that Tony Blair declared, in 1999: “the class war is over.”² Indeed, this analysis certainly does not abandon social critique; on the contrary, it attempts to find within it what is really at stake in social critique today. In so doing, it grants a central place to the critique of the commodity and of its fetishism, of value, money, the market, the state, competition, the nation, patriarchy and work. It discovered its initial inspiration in a previously neglected aspect of Marx’s works. A fundamental stage in its elaboration was the founding in Germany of the journal Krisis: Contributions to the Critique of Commodity Society in 1986 (originally entitled MarxistischeKritik); other contributions (which had arisen independently) were the publication in the United States of Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory in 1993,³ and—from a somewhat different perspective—the publication in France of Jean-Marie Vincent’s Critique du Travail: Le faire et l’agir in 1987.⁴

Of course, the publication of a few theoretical works—which, moreover, were hardly received with universal acclaim within self-appointed critical circles—is not necessarily in and of itself an event of any importance or the sign of an epochal change. But it could indicate the as-yet-limited recognition of a development that has been underway for some time already: we have reached the point in history where changing the forms of distribution and managerial personnel within a way of life that is accepted by all its participants will absolutely no longer do. We are instead confronted by a crisis of civilisation, the decline of a cultural model that concerns all its members. This claim is not itself new; it was made particularly during the period between the wars by observers considered to be “bourgeois” or “conservative”. At that time nearly all ideas of social emancipation shared the general confidence in “progress” and were only concerned with the unequal distribution of its benefits. Moreover, the notion of technological, industrial and economic progress, and that of social and moral progress, overlapped and appeared to go hand in hand; the ruling classes of the time were seen by those who were proponents of progress as “conservative” by nature and opposed as a matter of principle to “progress”, “change” and “reforms”. With authors like Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the critique of “culture” crossed paths with the critique of “capitalism” for the first time. But it would not be until the 1970s that critiques of modern life, which embraced all of its aspects, would be more widely disseminated. On the one hand, there was the critique of “technology” articulated by authors such as Ivan Illich, Günther Anders, Jacques Ellul, Bernard Charbonneau, Michel Henry, Lewis Mumford, Christopher Lasch and Neil Postman; but there were also the environmental theories and the critique of “development” elaborated by MAUSS, Serge Latouche and François Partant. Nevertheless, when it came to discerning the causes of these problems that were so well described, these analyses were often simply pointed towards a kind of deplorable moral failing on the part of humanity. At the same time, the Situationists and, in more general terms, the debate that issued from “artistic critique” (Boltanski and Chiapello), initiated by the Dadaists and the Surrealists, as well as the strain of critical sociology elaborated by Henri Lefebvre, put more “subjective” aspects at the forefront of protest such as dissatisfaction with life lived in the “society of abundance” even though basic needs have been satisfied.⁵ But these critiques, even more so than those of the first variety, were still based on a dichotomous worldview: “us” against “them”, the necrophilic “masters of the world” against “our” will to live.

The new theory of commodity fetishism seeks to overcome the limitations of these critiques. For it, the problem is not the metaphysical destiny of “humanity’s relationship to the essence of technology” as Martin Heidegger termed it, nor is it a conspiracy of powerful evil individuals against good people. Instead this new theory claims that the crux of the problem resides in the “subject-form” common to all those who live in commodity society, although this does not mean that this form is the same for all subjects. The subject is the substrate, the agent, the bearer that the fetishistic system of valorisation of value requires in order to assure production and consumption. It is not completely identical to the individual or the human being, who may on occasion feel the subject-form as a straightjacket (for example, the role of “male” or “breadwinner”). This is why Marx called the subject of the valorisation of value the “automatic subject”, the opposite of the autonomy and freedom with which the concept of “subject” is ordinarily associated. The subject is therefore that from which we must be emancipated, and not that through which and in terms of which we must be emancipated.

Viewed in this manner, the supersession of capitalism cannot consist in the victory of a subject created by capitalist development itself. Yet this is precisely how the theories of emancipation have long understood this supersession. Capitalism was considered to be the inefficient, unjust and parasitic management of something that, in itself, was very positive: the progress and industrial society created by proletarian labour, science and technology. Communism was often thought of as the simple continuation of the “conquests” of capitalism by other subjects and with a different regime of ownership; not as a profound break with the past. The positive valorisation of the “subject” in traditional theories of emancipation assumed that the subject was the basis of the supersession (and not the basis of the development) of capitalism and that it was necessary to help the subject fully realise its essence, to develop its potential, which, as such, had nothing to do with the system of domination. The revolution would then enable labour to extend across society as a whole, transforming everyone into workers. At most, subjects would have to rid themselves of certain corrupting influences, but would not have to question their own existence as labourers, information technology workers, etc. The revolutionary hope placed in the subject did not result in any specific reflection on what had constituted this subject, and seemed to be unaware of the fact that it could contain in its deepest structure elements of the commodity system, which would furthermore explain the incredible capacity of this system for self-perpetuation, self-regeneration, and its ability to “recuperate” critiques directed against it.⁶ The substance of this subject can be identified in different and even contrary ways. For the traditional workers’ movement, it resided in productive labour, which was the pride of the proletariat; for the leftists of the 1970s, it could reside in resistance to work, in personal creativity, or in “desire”. But the conceptual structure was the same: the purpose of revolutionary activity was to allow the inner essence of subjects to emerge and overcome the restrictions imposed on them by an artificial society that only served the interests of a minority.⁷

Hence the famous quest for the “revolutionary subject”: identified, in succession, with workers, peasants, students, the marginalised, women, immigrants, the peoples of the global South, “immaterial” workers and casual workers. This search was finally condemned to failure, but not because the subject does not exist, as structuralism and poststructuralism preach, perceiving it as nothing more than an illusion. Subjects exist, there is no doubt about it, but they are not the expression of a “human nature” that is prior to or external to capitalist relations; they are the product of the capitalist relations that they in turn produce. Workers, peasants, students, women, marginal individuals, immigrants, the peoples of the global South, immaterial workers and casual workers, each of whose subject-forms, along with their whole lifestyle, their mental attitudes and ideologies, is created, or transformed, by the socialisation they undergo at the hands of commodity society, cannot be mobilised in their current form against capitalism. As a result, there can be no workers’, peasants’ or casual labourers’ revolutions, but only revolutions carried out by those who want to break with capitalism and with the very subject-form that capitalism imposes and that each person finds within himself. This is why today no revolution, in the broadest sense of the term, can consist of a positive valorisation of what one already is, as though we only need to be liberated from the chains that have been foisted upon us. Yet, currently fashionable concepts, such as—the very democratic—“multitude”, consist precisely in praising to the skies subjects in their empirical and immediate existence. One is thus spared the effort of making a break with one’s own subject-form, which is not simply imposed from the outside, but which structures one’s own personality at its deepest level, for example, in the almost universal presence of the spirit of competition.

Unfortunately, the general exacerbation of living conditions in capitalism is not making subjects more capable of overthrowing it, but increasingly less capable of doing so, because the totalisation of the commodity-form creates ever more subjects that are totally identical to the system that encompasses them. And even when these subjects express dissatisfaction that goes beyond a mere declaration that they are disadvantaged, they are incapable of discovering within themselves the necessary resources for a different kind of life or even simply for having different ideas, since they have never experienced anything different. Instead of asking ourselves, like the environmentalists, what kind of world will we leave to our children?, we must ask ourselves, as Jaime Semprun put it so well: to what kind of children will we leave this world?⁸

Some idea may thus be had of the importance of the critique of “progress”, “technology” and “modernity”. Despite the mixed character and numerous weaknesses of its analyses, this critique has begun to cast doubt on the trajectory of industrial society, and has also proposed a change of course rather than a mere change of management. This also implies a critical focus on the attitude of the ruled groups; so that capitalists and workers, employees and managers, rich and poor are no longer presented as absolutely different, but as united by the same effort of reshaping the entire world with the help of technology without worrying about the consequences. It is therefore this civilisation as a whole that is challenged, and along with it, the types of personalities, mentalities and psychic structures created by this civilisation. Modern society is no longer—or not exclusively—understood as a “violation of the masses by propaganda” (Sergei Tschachotin) and by force, but also as a circular production of the social reality between individuals and structures that for the most part takes place by means of unconscious processes; this is where this critique could join up with the categories of the critique of fetishism. On the other hand, the dichotomous view associated with the subject’s thought processes flatters the narcissism of the commodity subject by allowing it to externalise the negative aspects of commodity socialisation innate to it and to project them onto “other” subjects, whether finance capital or immigrants. It will be appreciated that it is much more difficult for contemporary subjects, even when they perceive themselves as “critics”, to acknowledge something like the description of narcissism offered by Christopher Lasch,⁹ according to whom the same narcissistic structure may be found in the dominant culture and in almost all forms of opposition to it; or Ivan Illich’s critique of modern medicine and its neutralisation of suffering¹⁰ which is universally considered an aspect of progress; or the rejection of assisted reproductive technology and genetic therapy, which are so highly esteemed by the public; or in more general terms, the rejection of consumerist individualism.

The current decomposition of the system is by no means a result of the efforts of its revolutionary enemies, nor even of a kind of passive resistance—against work, for instance. It is instead derived from the fact that the basis for the life of each and every one of us in commodity society in the form of the perpetual transformation of labour into capital and capital into labour—and consequently the productive consumption of labour power and the valorisation of capital—is being exhausted before our very eyes, due essentially to the replacement of living labour power by technology. This provokes the anxiety and the panic of subjects whose life directly or indirectly depends on this valorisation of labour, be it the managing executive of your “medium-sized European business” or an African looter-militiaman, a welfare recipient in the United States or a Russian miner. In one way or another, everyone has the impression that the ground is disappearing from under their feet, and it is this struggle for a piece of an always-shrinking pie that is leading to barbarism at all levels. The warlord and the high-level executive are just as implicated as the racist jobseeker or the thief in the shantytown: all of them are competing to appropriate the scraps and leftovers of commodity society. In this context, nationalist, racist or anti-Semitic ideologies or any ideologies that advocate other forms of “exclusion” spread with ease, especially among the “lowest” layers of society. The global society of labour is self-destructing after destroying all, or nearly all, of the old forms of solidarity: virtually all that remains are subjects wholly wedded to the principle of competition at any price, whether as individuals or within corporate bodies such as nations, ethnic groups, families, mafias or gangs. Humanity is definitely ill-prepared to confront the generalised dissolution of social bonds and their productive foundations.

This situation provokes a great deal of discontent, but this discontent no longer leads to the demand for better conditions for all, as was often the case with the classic proletariat or even the student movement of the 1960s.¹¹ Furthermore, the various expressions of discontent do not cohere into a solid whole, into a vast movement that would unite all the victims of the earth against the small stratum of manipulative and exploitative ruling elites; no matter how much the great strategists of the “alter-globalisation” movement continue to evoke such a “Popular Front”, which often goes hand in hand with certain conspiracy theories (everything is the fault of high finance, or the U.S. government, or the neoliberals, or the neoconservatives, or the Jewish “lobby” or other lobbies).

Every inhabitant of the earth, or almost every inhabitant, has become in the first place a subject of competition, in a constant state of war against all other subjects. The sombre description of the beginnings of human society offered by Hobbes, the true origin of the bourgeois conception of life in society, was really a prophecy that took several centuries to become reality. To his depiction we must add one more fact: over the long term, perpetual and uncontrolled competition is absolutely unliveable. It leads to madness. Wanton murders, whether in the form of school massacres in the United States (and other countries) or suicide bombings, are its most eloquent testimonials. In a society where individuals live exclusively for the purpose of selling themselves and being accepted by the god of the market, and where all the possibilities of life are sacrificed to the laws of the economy, a veritable “death drive” is unleashed, which lays bare the nothingness that underlies a system whose only professed goal is the accumulation of capital.

It can therefore no longer be a matter of ensuring that some competitors win out over others: for example, the owners of labour in its living phase (labour power) over the owners of labour in its dead phase (capital). Rather, the civilisation itself, of which the agents are only one aspect, must be thrown open to question. Despite all appearances, such an idea can make more headway now than it could twenty years ago. Many things no longer require discussion: “real socialism” and the chances of reforming it, “national liberation movements”, state-sponsored social progress (Mitterrand’s France or Castro’s Cuba), the possibility of working within the “left-wing” trade unions and parties to radicalise them… So many illusions have just faded away on their own, which at least has the merit of clearing the field. The conviction has perforce gained ground that neither the state nor the market are capable of developing in the direction of a more human society and that, on the contrary, within the framework of the escalation of world competition, both are leading towards social and even anthropological regression.

In the span of just a few decades, there has been a complete reversal of perspective: today it is no longer a matter of trying to destabilise a powerful system that is hard to fight, and whose collapse, should it be achieved, would automatically lead to something better. Instead, we have to prepare for ways to emerge intact from the dissolution of that system, which is already underway. For generations of revolutionaries, the problem consisted in waging a frontal assault on the ruling order, which possessed an infinite array of weapons with which it could defend itself. If, however, the “progressive” faction were to emerge victorious from this test of force, the advent of socialism, communism, or whatever name was given to the radiant future that was planned, was automatic. And this was understandable: according to this outlook the only thing that could throw capitalism off course was the existence of a class that had decided to do away with it and was strong enough to bring this programme to a successful conclusion. Capitalism, then, could only disappear thanks to the action of an enemy that was specifically out to replace it with another social order. What was supposed to provoke the collapse of capitalism was the “desire for communism” among the masses, so that the end of capitalism and the beginning of the liberated society would coincide exactly.¹² But this historical opportunity, if it ever existed at all, has been lost and the theory of social emancipation now confronts an unprecedented situation. Capitalism has visibly become what it essentially was from its inception:¹³ a beast that devours itself, a machine that destroys itself, a society that, over the long term, cannot be endured by anyone, since it consumes all social bonds and all natural resources in order to preserve the mechanism of value accumulation, which becomes increasingly difficult. With each passing day capitalism is undermining its own foundations. The foregoing statement is not some kind of “prophecy” concerning the future collapse of capitalism; it is a résumé of what is taking place every day right before our eyes. The fact that certain economic actors still make big profits must not be confused—as so often happens—with the state of health of capitalist society as a general system of social reproduction. The gradual collapse of capitalist civilisation (should one wish to employ such an oxymoron) is obvious. But this collapse is by no means the result of the conscious intervention of people who desire to replace it with something better. Its end is of its own doing, as the consequence of its own basic logic which is dynamic and self-destructive, an aspect that distinguishes it from all previous societies. Capitalism does more harm to itself than all of its enemies put together. This good news, however, is only half the story. This collapse does not necessarily imply the emergence of a society that is better organised: first of all, because it is the consequence of the action of blind forces that, as such, are in and of themselves destructive. And also, because capitalism has had enough time to extirpate all the other forms of social life, of production and reproduction, which might have provided a basis for building a post-capitalist society. When its end does come, there will be nothing left but a scorched earth where the survivors fight over the remains of capitalist “civilisation”. This is already the everyday reality of a large part of the “global South”; and it is beginning to be an everyday reality for a growing part of the “developed” countries, right down to the peripheries of major cities. Left to its own dynamic, capitalism does not end in socialism, but in ruins. If it were capable of having intentions, one could claim that it means to be humanity’s last word.

But horror films sometimes have a happy ending. Not all is lost. The race towards the abyss in the name of profitability is not met only with resignation. The same energies that were in the past directed towards revolution are now beginning to be orientated towards avoiding the collapse into barbarism. An emancipated society, or, at least, a better society than the one we have now, is still possible. But we must build it on the rubble of capitalist society. In order to accomplish this a major effort of theoretical clarification is the principal requirement, an effort that takes into account the degree to which the conditions of the emancipatory project have changed. The old fronts have entirely shifted and blurred; failure to acknowledge this change and stubborn adherence to the same trails blazed fifty or a hundred years ago are what prevent many well-intentioned people from understanding today’s world—whose defects they nevertheless clearly perceive—and from acting accordingly.

In such a situation, there is no longer a dichotomy between a party of order, on the one side, and a party of disorder and subversion, on the other. The meanings of words like “reforms”, “conservative”, “freedom”, “transgression” or “provocation”, are almost the opposite of what they were in days gone by; to observe this development is to learn a great deal. For a century and a half, two factions confronted one another—generally identified as that of the “bourgeoisie” and that of the “proletariat” or the “people”—and each faction possessed, as a whole, a series of programmes relating to practically every aspect of life. Bourgeois society, whose economic face was capitalism, also implied—at least in its ideal-typical form—ubiquitous hierarchies in social relations; the importance of religion in private and public life; authoritarianism within the family and the educational system; nationalism and militarism; an oppressive and hypocritical sexual morality; a classicist and elitist art; the predominance of rationality over the imagination, of saving over spending, of production over consumption, of calculation over immediate enjoyment, of the collective over the individual, and a fortiori over the “different” individual; the rule of men over women, old over young, whites over people of colour, etc. Anyone who felt opposed to bourgeois society needed only to choose, on every occasion, the pole that bourgeois society had established as inferior; this attitude was the cult of “transgression”. This was not so much a matter of what Boltanski and Chiapello called “social critique” (the traditional workers’ movement) as it is a characteristic of “artistic critique”, whose importance, since the Surrealists, only increased until it finally became preponderant after 1968. For several decades, the transgressive attitude in the world of art, morals and everyday life could conceive of itself as “symbolic subversion” that attacked the foundations of bourgeois society at least as effectively as social struggles; it could even for example hold the view that protest against sexual morality could serve as a lever for total transformation. In retrospect, however, it seems that in most cases cultural dissent mistakenly identified as essential features of capitalist society aspects that were instead archaic or anachronistic elements inherited from its previous stages.

After 1968, capitalism, with its “new spirit”, not only made concessions in this field of transgressive politics in order to blunt the edge of social unrest, but seized the occasion to dump some useless ballast and rid itself of numerous superstructures that had become obstacles to its own development. It is certainly not necessary to be reminded that postmodern capitalism cannot exist with young people who live in austere conditions, are chaste and save their money. But most “progressive” milieus have ignored this paradigm shift and relentlessly seek out “transgression”, and constantly flog the same dead horses, kick down the same open doors and revel in the support they provide to postmodern society in its efforts to rid itself of the humanist and classical debris that is so prejudicial to progress and republican equality in the labour market. Who would dare to say, in a democracy, that it is better to study Greek and Latin in schools than computer science and business management, or that an opera is more valuable than rap music, or that Michelangelo is better than a comic book?

The capitalist system long ago ceased to be the “party of order”. It has proved well able to take advantage of “artistic” dissent in order to reconstruct a chaotic society that serves its purposes. The dissolution of the family, “free” education, apparent equality between men and women, the disappearance of notions like “morality”: everything works to its benefit so long as these developments are disconnected from a project for generalised emancipation and are translated into a commodity form. There is of course no question here of yearning for a return to the time of corporal punishment in schools, compulsory military service, the catechism or draconian paterfamilias. For while it is true that part of the politics of the last twenty years was inspired by a perverted—or perhaps faithful—version of the “ideas of ’68” (in education, for instance),¹⁴ recently other managers of the same political system have loudly claimed that the “ideas of ’68” are responsible for all the world’s problems. But this accusation has no content; it is like both the political left and right’s blanket recourse to either Keynesian or monetarist policies as the fancy takes them, depending on the current situation and regardless of ideological considerations.

We have to face the facts, which are hardly comforting: the situations and the conflicts of the past are scarcely of any help in deciding what to do today. Neither the social movements nor the cultural protests of yesteryear have anything useful to teach us about what we should do today. One example: in 1963, the Belgian Surrealist Louis Scutenaire provoked a scandal (which led Gallimard to refuse to publish the book that contained this aphorism) when he wrote: “Last night I reread La Princesse de Clèves with my asshole”. A few decades later, a French president not only said the same thing in more media-friendly terms, but also has the power to act on his aversion to such inconsequential things.

These considerations may appear somewhat bleak. Undoubtedly, they are not grist for the mills of contemporary activism and do not lend themselves to being translated into a practical everyday “political” strategy. But over the last century and a half, many “concrete” proposals and many “practical” activities have led to results that were very different from what had been intended. Perhaps what is called for, then, is a mere theoretical step forward, a mere conscious realisation in the right direction: our only chance lies in jettisoning industrial capitalism and its foundations; that is, the commodity and its fetishism, value, money, market, state, competition, nation, patriarchy, labour and narcissism, instead of adapting to these things, appropriating them, improving them or using them. If these last few decades, which were otherwise so inauspicious, helped some people to understand this historical necessity, then they will not have been entirely in vain.

Notes

1.Guy Debord, tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1995), p. 64.

2.See BBC News Online Network for Tuesday, 28 September 1999: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/460029.stm

3.Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

4.Jean-Marie Vincent, Critique du travail: Le faire et l’agir [Critique of Labour] (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987).

5.On a less theoretical level, the “counterculture” of the 1960s and 1970s signified the same thing: a rejection of the way of life proposed by capitalist society, instead of complaining about how hard it is to find a place in it.

6.We are not speaking here of poststructuralist and postmodernist theories, which have simply evaded the question of the dialectic between subject and object and denied the very possibility of tracing the multiplicity of social phenomena to the effects of certain underlying principles, such as commodity value and its fetishism.

7.This explains the excessive emphasis that “radical” currents, from the Trotskyists to the Situationists, have always placed on the role of “the treason of the leaders”. They invariably assume that “proletarians” or “the people” are essentially revolutionaries per se and that they would always make radical choices if the manoeuvres of the leaders and the bureaucrats did not always—unfortunately and inexplicably—prevent them from doing so.

8.And as Nicholas Sarkozy repeated, through some mysterious turn of events, during the presidential campaign.

9.Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations [1979] (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991).

10.Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (London: Calder & Boyars, 1975).

11.Of course, the worldwide demonstrations against the Iraq War and, especially, concern for the environment, display a scope that can be said to be general. But pacifism is only sporadically expressed and even then it is based on a very emotional foundation, while resistance against “harmful phenomena” only rarely takes the form of a “movement”, and is rather the affair of experts and government conferences, except when it assumes the form of struggles, authentic but narrowly focused, against a harmful phenomenon in one’s own “backyard”, which generally avoids questioning the kind of lifestyle—industrial society and the comforts it offers—that produced the phenomenon in question (waste incinerators, nuclear power stations, high-speed rail transport, etc.).

12.While so-called “orthodox” communists (Leninists) linked the consolidation of this emancipatory impulse in the masses with a dramatic deterioration—which they considered to be inevitable—of their living conditions, caused by the capitalist economy, the so-called “radical” currents (leftists) were more “voluntarist” and “subjectivist”, and put their faith for the most part in a rejection of capitalist life, one that could arise at any moment, regardless of the economic situation and largely as a result of the militants’ existential radicality.

13.As is so accurately described by the non-Marxist historian Karl Polanyi, whose classic work The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time [1944] (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957) analysed the beginnings of the industrial revolution in England.

14.With regard to this issue, see Dany-Robert Dufour, The Art of Shrinking Heads: The New Servitude of the Liberated in the Era of Total Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008); Jean-Claude Michéa, L’Enseignement de l’ignorance [Teaching Ignorance] (Castelnau-le-Lez : Climats, 2001); Nicolas Oblin and Patrick Vassort, La Crise de l’université française: Traité contre une politique de l’anéantissement [The French University Crisis: Treatise Against a Policy of Destruction] (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005).

Politics without Politics

At first, the “primacy of politics” was a pet notion of Hitler’s jurist, Carl Schmitt. But for some time now the “radical” left has hitched its wagon to a “return of the political” in which “politics” per se is looked on as the polar opposite of the “market”. Must it be taken then as an article of faith that opposition to capitalism, or to its contemporary excesses, goes via what is commonly called politics? It is clear that nothing would have changed if Segolène Royal had been elected instead of Nicolas Sarkozy. But even if the Trotskyists, who have taken over from the social democrats turned liberals, were to share power in France, they would not exactly rock the world to its foundations. In Germany, the “Party of Democratic Socialism” takes part in regional government; in Italy, Rifondazione Comunista had cabinet posts; even the Italian Centri sociali, often considered the cutting edge of dissent, send a few deputy mayors to city hall. Everywhere, these representatives of the “radical” left end up supporting neoliberal policies. Should therefore “truly” radical parties be formed that would never sink into the same quagmire? Or are the reasons for these “betrayals” structural? Does every involvement in politics inevitably lead to surrender to the market and its laws, regardless of any subjective intentions to the contrary?

It would therefore make sense to ask a basic question: what is meant by the term “politics”? The whole topic is home to a confusion similar to the one that bedevils “labour” and its critique. Criticising labour makes no sense at all if it is identified with productive activity as such, which is undoubtedly a fact of life present in every human society. But everything changes if by labour we understand what this word actually denotes in capitalist society: the self-referential expenditure of mere labour power regardless of its content. Thought of in this way, labour is an historical phenomenon that exists only in capitalist society and that can be criticised and eventually abolished. Indeed, the “labour” that all the actors on the political stage, left, right and centre, want to save is labour as understood in this narrow sense. Likewise, the concept of “politics” must be clearly defined. If it is identified with collective action, with the conscious intervention of men in society, with “love of the world” (Arendt), it is obvious that it enjoys unanimous support and that a “critique of politics” could only be understood as mere indifference to the world. But those who regularly advocate a “return to politics” have a much more specific idea of what “politics” is: the politics whose alleged disappearance causes them such serious withdrawal symptoms. The ritual evocation of “politics” as the only possible way to change the world is the core concept of today’s “left”, from the Bourdieusian sociologists to Multitude, from ATTAC to the “radical” electoral left. Despite their explicit intention to create a “completely different” politics, they still lapse into “realism” and the “lesser evil”, take part in elections, comment on referendums, discuss the possible evolution of the Socialist Party, seek to make alliances and seal some “historic compromise” or other. Faced with this desire to “play the game”—and almost always as a “representative” of some “interest”—movements and moments of radical opposition that embraced “anti-politics” should be recalled: from the historical anarchists to the artistic avant-gardes, from certain movements in the global South, such as Critica radical in Fortaleza (Brazil), to the wildcat strike of May ’68 in France and the continuous state of insubordination in Italian factories during the 1970s. This “anti-politics” is just as far removed from the refusal of conscious intervention as “anti-art”, the rejection of art by Dadaists, Surrealists or Situationists, which was not a rejection of artistic means but, on the contrary, was conceived as the only way to remain faithful to the original intentions of art.

But can anyone seriously believe that politics is the social sphere that might allow limits to be placed on the market? That politics is “democratic” by nature and opposed to the capitalist economic world, where the survival of the fittest is the rule?

Modern capitalist society, based on the commodity and universal competition, requires a body that takes care of those public structures without which it could not exist. This body is the state, and politics, in the modern (and narrow) sense of the term, is the struggle to assume control over the state. But this sphere of politics is not external or an alternative to the sphere of the commodity economy. On the contrary, it is structurally dependent on it. In the political arena, the object of contention is the distribution of the fruits of the commodity system—the workers’ movement has essentially played this role—but not its actual existence. The visible proof: nothing is possible in politics that has not been previously “funded” by commodity production, and whenever the latter goes off the rails, politics becomes a clash between armed gangs. This kind of “politics” is a secondary regulatory mechanism within the fetishistic and unconscious commodity system. It is not a “neutral” body or a victory that opposition movements snatched from the capitalist bourgeoisie. Indeed, the bourgeoisie is not necessarily hostile to the state or the public sphere; that all depends on the historical moment.

Contemporary advocates of “politics” distort the original goal of “action” because they reduce it to mere tinkering with a machine come to be accepted as such. Today, “action” must face situations that are far too serious to be confronted with the outdated means of politics. The new arena is that of a real anthropological transformation, which is both the result of over two centuries of capitalism and, in the course of the last few decades, of its increasingly visible programmed self-destruction. This regression is leading to barbarisation. Given the increasing frequency of incidents such as the one involving teenagers who laughed as they used a camera phone to film a dead female classmate of theirs who had just been run over by a bus so that they could later upload the video to YouTube, it is somewhat inadequate to resort to unemployment, the casualisation of labour or the shortcomings of our schools by way of explanation. Rather, we are witnessing a generalised, albeit inconsistent, “anthropological regression” which appears to be the product of a deep-seated collective mental disorder, of a narcissistic psychosis bequeathed by commodity fetishism and the relation it imposes on the way individuals interact with the world. No one can honestly offer any effective short-term remedies in the face of this crisis of civilisation. Indeed, precisely because the situation is so serious, calls in the circumstances to do something, anything, right now, on the grounds that there is zero time for discussion and that praxis is better than theory, tend only to aggravate matters. In this age of financial and molecular capitalism, Fordist-era forms of opposition will simply not do.

A precondition for reviving the prospect for action is to break clearly and definitively away from all “politics” in the institutional sense. Today, the only possible form of “politics” is radical separation from the world of politics and its institutions, of representation and delegation, in order to invent and replace it with new forms of direct intervention. In this context, it seems singularly pointless to confer with anyone who still wishes to cast their vote. Those who, almost a hundred and forty years after the introduction of universal suffrage, still flock to the ballot box, only deserve the words proclaimed by Octave Mirbeau in 1888,¹ or Albert Libertad in 1906.² The conquest of the universal franchise was one of the great battles of the historic left. The right-wing voter, however, is not such a fool: sometimes he gets the little he expects from his candidates, even when it is not in the official platform of his party (for example, toleration of tax evasion and violations of labour laws). His representatives do not betray him too much; and the voter who only votes for the candidate who is going to hire their relative or obtain vast subsidies for the farmers in his district is, after all, the most rational voter. The left-wing voter is much more stupid: although he has never obtained what he has voted for, he persists. He has obtained neither great change nor scraps. He lets himself be lulled by mere promises. That is why those who voted for Berlusconi in Italy were by no means fools: they were not just seduced by television networks, as his opponents would have everyone believe. They obtained limited, but very real, benefits from their government (and above all from its laissez-faire policies). But to vote again for the left after their time in government—and on this score one can only side with Mirbeau—smacks of the pathological.

The rejection of “politics” thus conceived is not the product of a mannered taste for extremism. Faced with a threatening anthropological regression, to appeal to parliament is like trying to quell a hurricane with a religious procession. The only “realistic” proposals—in the sense that they could effectively change the course of events—are of the following kind: the immediate abolition, starting tomorrow, of all television. Is there a party in the world, however, that would dare to embrace such a proposal? What measures have been adopted during the last few decades that could really slow down the advance of barbarism? It will be said that a few small steps are better than nothing. But where have such steps actually been taken? Thirty years ago, those most undaunted laid down proposals for one television-free day a week. Today, there are hundreds of television channels for the asking. If nothing has managed to stop this continuous degeneration, it means that the goals and methods were wrong and that a complete rethink is required. And it is self-evident that this cannot be done by keeping the public sweet or by appearing on television.

There are some examples of anti-political action: the “volunteer wreckers of genetically modified crops”, especially those who operate at night, thus reviving the tradition of sabotage rather than resorting to media stunts, or actions seeking to put surveillance and biometric recognition equipment out of action. The residents of Val di Susa in the Italian Alps could equally be cited in this respect. On various occasions they have blocked the construction of a high-speed train line in their mountains. This prevalence of “defensive” struggles does not necessarily imply the absence of a broader perspective. On the contrary, these struggles against the worst “nuisances” help to keep such a perspective open. Against the dehumanisation engineered by the commodity, which threatens to put a stop once and for all to any alternative, at the very least the possibility of future emancipation needs to be safeguarded. This may allow for new fronts and new alliances to be created. There are issues, such as the expropriation of individuals from their own biological reproduction, publicised under the rubric of “artificial fertilisation techniques”, where the positions of the modernist left are so fully consonant with the delusions of technological omnipotence entertained by contemporary capitalism that even the Pope’s stance seems to acquire an air of rationality. The opposite of barbarism is humanisation. This concept is real enough, but hard to define. A feasible “policy” nowadays would be defence of the minor victories that have been historically achieved on the road to humanisation, and opposition to their abolition. Contemporary capitalism is not just the economic injustice that still lies at the heart of debate, and its list of misdeeds is not even complete with the environmental disasters it causes. It is also a dismantling—a “deconstruction”—of the symbolic and psychological foundations of human culture, which is especially evident in the process of derealisation that electronic media have brought about. With regard to this aspect of the problem, it is of no importance whether it is Sarkozy or Royal, Besancenot or Le Pen whose face appears on the small screen.

Practice still needs to be reinvented without surrendering to the demand to “do something and do it quick”, which always leads to a rerun of things that were already tried and found wanting. The real problem is general isolation—one that is above all mental—within the fetishistic forms of existence affecting the alleged adversaries as well as the supporters of the commodity system.³ The struggle to break with these forms that are anchored in everyone’s minds, to strip money and the commodity, competition and labour, the state and “development”, progress and growth, of their innocent air, relies on those “theoretical struggles” situated beyond the fixed opposition between “theory” and “praxis”. Why should the analysis of the logic of the commodity or patriarchy be dubbed “merely” theory, whereas any strike for higher pay or any demonstration by students protesting because the university is not doing enough to prepare them for the world of work is labelled “praxis” or “politics”?

Thought and feeling precede men’s action, and the way they act derives from what they think and feel. Changing the way men think and feel is already a form of action, of praxis. Once there is a clear idea, at least among a minority, of what the goals of an action are, things can rapidly unfold. May 1968 comes readily to mind in this regard, seemingly appearing out of the blue but in fact silently prepared by lucid minorities. On the other hand, we have often seen—and never more so than in the Russian Revolution—where even the best opportunities for action lead in the absence of a clear theoretical grounding. Such clarification does not necessarily take place in books and conferences but must be present in people’s minds. Rather than identify politics with the public institutions of commodity society, it could be identified with praxis in general. But this praxis must not be opposed in some abstract way to theory. The theory under discussion here is not the servant of praxis, nor its preparation, but an integral part of it. Fetishism is not a set of false representations; it is the entirety of forms—such as money—in which life really unfolds within a capitalist society. Every step forward in theoretical understanding, as well as its spread, is therefore in itself a practical act.

Naturally, the story does not end there. Future forms of praxis will no doubt be somewhat diverse and will also involve defensive struggles at the level of material reproduction (such as struggles against the casualisation of labour and against the destruction of the Welfare State). While there is a need to break with “policies” that only offer to defend the commodification of the social categories constituted by fetishistic logic itself along the lines, say, of “purchasing power”, it is still nonetheless necessary to prevent capitalist development from destroying the basis of survival for large sectors of the population and generating new forms of poverty, which are often more due to exclusion than exploitation. Indeed, to be exploited these days has become almost a privilege compared to the fate of the masses of those who have been declared “superfluous to requirements” because they “are unprofitable” (i.e. they cannot be used profitably in commodity production). The reactions of the “superfluous”, however, take many different forms and may themselves tend towards barbarism. Victimhood is no guarantee of moral integrity. One fact is thus overriding all the others: the behaviour of individuals in response to the vicissitudes of life within capitalism is not the mechanical result of their “social situation”, their “interests” or their geographical, ethnic or religious background, nor of their gender or sexual orientation. Nobody’s response to the collapse of capitalism into barbarism can be predicted. This is not because of the supposedly generalised “individualisation” that sociologists are crowing over nonstop so as to sidestep all mention of the increasing standardisation that it conceals. But the dividing lines are no longer created by capitalist development. Just as barbarism can arise anywhere, in Finnish high schools and African shantytowns, among yuppies and ghetto kids, among high-tech soldiers and unarmed rebels, so too can resistance to barbarism and the impulse for social emancipation arise anywhere (although with infinitely greater difficulty!), even where one would least expect it. While no single social category has squared with the forecasts of those who sought an agent of social emancipation, opposition to the inhuman conditions of life under capitalism is nevertheless always re-emerging. This landscape teeming with false friends and unexpected aid constitutes the present necessarily ill-defined terrain on which all “political recomposition” must now take place.

Notes

1.“One thing fairly fills me with surprise. In fact, I’d even say that it leaves me dumbfounded, and that’s at the scientific moment in which I write, after countless experiences and daily scandals, there can still exist in our dear France […] one voter, one single voter—that irrational, inorganic, hallucinatory animal—who agrees to take time out from his affairs, his dreams, and his pleasures in order to vote in favor of someone or something. If we think about it for just one instant, is this surprising phenomenon not one fit to upset the subtlest philosophies and confound reason? Where is the Balzac who can give us the physiology of the modern elector, or the Charcot who will explain the anatomy and mentality of this incurable lunatic? […] He voted yesterday, he’ll vote tomorrow, and he will always vote. Sheep go to the slaughter; they say nothing and expect nothing. But at least they don’t vote for the butcher who will kill them and the bourgeois who will eat them. More bovine than cattle, more sheep-like than sheep, the elector names his butcher and chooses his bourgeois. He has fought revolutions in order to enjoy this right. […] So, my good man, go home and strike against universal suffrage.” Originally published in Le Figaro, 28 November 1888, and republished in Octave Mirbeau, La Grève des électeurs [The Electors’ Strike] (Montreuil-sous-Bois: L’Insomniaque, 2007). This English translation available online at: http://www.marxists.org/subject/anarchism/mirbeau/voters-strike.htm. One hundred years after this call for a “voters’ strike”, it is still possible, and necessary, to repeat the same arguments. Were it to be published now with a few name changes, anyone would think the text from which these lines are excerpted had been written today and not in the early days of the Third Republic. After more than a century, voters are clearly none the wiser, which, admittedly, does not amount to a very heartening state of affairs.

2.“The elector is the criminal. […] The elector, the voter is you, the one accepting the status quo, the one whose support for the ballot-box sanctions all its misery, whose activity underwrites the enslavement it perpetrates. […] You are a danger to we free men, we anarchists. In the danger you pose you are no different from tyrants, from the masters you choose, name, support, feed, protect with your bayonets, defend with your brute force, extol with your ignorance, legalise with your ballot papers and foist upon us by your idiocy. [.] If command-hungry and platitudinous candidates kowtow to your paper autocracy, if you get carried away by the incense and promises showered on you by those who have always betrayed, deceived and sold you off, it is because you are just like them. […] Go on, vote! Trust your representatives, believe in your deputies, but stop complaining. You yourself have donned the yokes you bear, just as you commit the crimes whose consequences you suffer. You are master and criminal and yet ironically slave and victim too.” Albert Libertad, Le Culte de la charogne: Anarchisme, un état de révolution permanente (1897-1908) [The Carrion Cult: Anarchism, a State of Permanent Revolution (1897-1908)] (Marseilles: Agone, 2006).

3.On the other hand, one of the new realities that anti-capitalist praxis must confront today is the blurring of borders between supporters and enemies of the system and in the dissemination of fragments of critical thought among numerous individuals who simultaneously participate fully in the ordinary business of this world: they read Marcuse and work in advertising, they manage businesses and donate money to the Zapatistas, they declare themselves anarchists and forge careers as administrators… The need to live does not, however, imply a willingness to be played for a fool. A veritable “mithridatism” designed to arrest any awareness that might disrupt an individual life may be discerned here.

Violence to What End?

What is the public face of violence in France? For someone who regularly travels all over Europe, the first image of violence one sees on arriving at a station or an airport is the police. I have never seen so many police in France as there are at present, especially in Paris. Not even in Turkey during the military dictatorship were there such numbers. Anyone would think that a coup d’état was taking place or that the country was under occupation. There is nothing to compare with it in either present-day Italy or Germany. A right bunch these police are too! A wholly unparalleled air of brutality and arrogance hangs about them. From the moment the least objection is made—to having your papers checked, for example, or to the quite-unprecedented bag searches before boarding a train—you feel that you run the risk of being arrested, manhandled and eventually charged with “resisting arrest”. It is difficult to imagine what it must be like if you happen to have darker skin or cannot produce the right papers.

One is left seething with indignation at reports of policemen entering schools under the pretext of looking for drugs, and, once there, using dogs to terrorise children while taking teachers to task for shielding their students; or at reports of the sudden arrest of journalists for merely expressing “unorthodox views”; not to mention the conditions in which immigrants who seek leave or otherwise to remain are expelled, and the fact that a ministry has predetermined the number of calamities to bring about or lives to tear apart in the manner of the figures for industrial output and arrests established by decree in the Soviet Union back in the good old days (for the police).¹ What emerges here above all is the intention to humiliate, carried out with an almost scientific precision. Journalists have on occasion shown just how ineffective airport security is by the ease with which they have smuggled knives or bomb components onto a plane. But in the airports we continue to be frisked and parents made to drink the contents of feeding bottles, alongside the routine injunctions to remove all belts. Every time this happens I cannot help thinking of the trial of the Prussian generals who attempted to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944. To humiliate these former aristocrats as much as possible in court, the Nazis gave them outsized clothes without belts in order to enjoy watching them hold their trousers up throughout the proceedings…

No need to read scathing revolutionary diatribes to learn about the misdeeds of police and the justice system, Le Monde will do. Unease is rife, even among the liberal bourgeoisie. Why though is so little being done to defend “civil liberties”? Whereas the erosion of purchasing power or cuts in school staffing levels prompt large-scale demonstrations, no such mobilisations ever occur against CCTV, and even less against biometric passports or the card-cum-human tracking device called a “Navigo” used in the Paris metro.

It is a universal tendency to give absolute power to the police and to a justice system that is subservient to the government. Proof enough of this is furnished by the fact that Great Britain, the birthplace of bourgeois democracy, has practically abolished Habeas corpus which prescribes that a person has to be brought before a judge within three days of their arrest. Its introduction, in 1679, is widely considered to mark the beginning of the rule of law and of the freedom of the individual faced with the arbitrary workings of the state. Its abolition heralds the symbolic closure of a long historical phase. The drift towards a police state, however, seems even more developed in France than in any other “long-established democracy”. A quite unprecedented blurring of the boundaries between terrorism, collective violence, sabotage and illegality has been achieved. This criminalisation of all forms of dissent that are not strictly “legal” is a major feature of this day and age. Recent times have seen spray-can art and attempts to disrupt rail travel classed as “terrorism”. Teachers have appeared in court for voicing their objections to a “forcible repatriation” that they happened to witness on a plane. The facts are too well-known for me to repeat them here. “Democracy” is more than ever purely formal and limited to periodically choosing between representatives of the different inflections of the same management (and even this vestige of choice is rigged). All opposition to the politics of elected authority that goes beyond a petition or a letter to a local representative is by definition “antidemocratic”. In other words, anything that might be the least bit effective, and which was even permitted not so long ago, is now banned. Thus, in Italy, Berlusconi’s government has just placed drastic curbs on the right to strike in the public services and introduced huge fines for sit-ins on transport routes. Students who continue to protest have been described by one government minister as “guerrillas”.

In this conception of public life every single initiative lies with the state, institutions and authorities. What is more, this state monopoly on all forms of conflict is also encountered in everyday life. People now seek legal redress for the slightest insult or dispute. The struggle against “harassment” has done much to rob people of the ability to react directly against harm caused by others and fosters an increasing reliance on institutions for everything. Insult is no longer met with insult, or, at the most, with a punch, but by filling out a form at the police station. It is claimed, particularly on the left, that such measures address the protection of the most vulnerable, especially women, when in reality the effect is to make them weaker and more dependent than ever. In the process the most elementary forms of personal response are being wrenched from us.²

At the same time, it is no secret that in Iraq the Americans leave the dirty work for the most part to private companies—contractors—made up of mercenaries from all over the world. The number of private “security officers” is on the rise everywhere. In Italy, Berlusconi’s government, which bases its consensus largely on racism against immigrants who are wholly equated with criminality, has decreed the setting up of “citizen patrols” in order to provide a police presence everywhere. He has even permitted them to be privately funded, a move that could eventually lead to the formation of “death squads” as in Latin America, paid by local businessmen to have someone “clean up” their neighbourhood.

There is nothing contradictory, however, about the reinforcement of the state’s monopoly on violence and its privatisation. Violence is the core of the state and always has been. In times of crisis the state transforms itself back into what it first was historically: an armed gang. In many regions of the world militias are becoming “regular” police and police are becoming militias and armed gangs. Behind all of the rhetoric on the state and its civilising role there is in the last analysis always someone smashing in the skull of another human being or who at least could do so. The functions and functioning of the state have varied greatly throughout history but the exercise of violence is its common denominator. The state may or may not see to the wellbeing of its citizens; it may or may not provide education; it may or may not create and maintain infrastructure; it may or may not regulate economic life; it may overtly serve a small group, or a single individual, or, on the contrary, claim to serve the public good. None of this is essential to it. But a state without armed forces to defend it from external threats and to maintain “order” internally would not be a state. Hobbes and Carl Schmitt have been proved right on this point: the ability to administer death remains the linchpin of any state structure.

In the course of the last few centuries the state has claimed to be much more. It does not only want to be feared; it wants to be loved. On an ever-growing historical scale, it has gradually taken charge of a host of things that were previously the domain of other agents. But as soon as the crisis of the valorisation of capital began to cut off the state’s means of subsistence, it reversed course and ceased to intervene in an ever-increasing number of sectors. When there are not many nurses or teachers left in the public services, there will always be more policemen.³ In times of crisis, the state has nothing to offer its citizens other than “protection”, and it therefore has every reason to foster the insecurity that creates the demand for this protection. It can do without all its functions but not the maintenance of law and order. This was already the opinion of that prophet of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman: the state must leave everything to private initiative, except for security (it is true that his son David wished to go much further and privatise the justice system, although this proved to be a step too far even for hard-core liberals).

So the state is shedding the flashy rags in which it has been clad for more than a century. But this is no retrogression. The historical situation is new, for the state is establishing itself as the only master of the game. Over the last thirty years it has forged an arsenal of discipline and repression that is wholly without precedent, even in the time of so-called “totalitarian” states. Has anyone ever sat back and thought what would have happened if the Nazis and their allies had been able to use the same instruments of surveillance and repression as today’s democracies? Between CCTV and electronic tags, DNA samples and spying on all written and verbal communication, no Jew or Gypsy would have escaped, no resistance could have emerged, and everyone who managed to escape from a concentration camp would have been captured immediately. Today’s democratic state is far better equipped than the totalitarian states of yesteryear to harm, track down and eliminate anything that could oppose it. For the moment it would appear to have no wish to put these means to the same use as its predecessors, but the possibility of such future use has not been ruled out. An inescapable logic drives states on to do everything that can be done, even more so given that they are the managers of a technological system which obeys the same logic. This can be seen moreover every day in the use of repressive means: DNA sampling, originally used only for the most serious crimes, such as child murder, is now used widely for scooter theft or anti-GM activists and, in the last analysis, for any crime except the financial kind (do-gooders on the left will confine their protest to a demand for the criminalisation of this too in order to combat “privilege”). For the first time in history governments can reign supreme by wiping out any possibility of a different future from the one foreseen by its leaders. And what if their foresight is not as masterly as all that?

The very existence of an historical dialectic presupposes that the current state cannot be all-powerful, but that other forces must be able to emerge. Today, everything is done to prevent any possibility of a change in direction. And yet, a study of the street names in every French city will reveal those of Auguste Blanqui and François-Vincent Raspail, Armand Barbès and Louise Michel, Édouard Vaillant and Jules Vallès… all persecuted in their time, thrown in prison, deported, sentenced to death, and today all acknowledged even by the state itself (albeit reluctantly) as having right on their side against the state of their own time. By its own self-definition the French state is based on two or three revolutions and on the wartime Resistance movement; but if its predecessors had had the same weapons as today’s state, today’s state would not exist. If the state held to its own logic, it would have to give its adversaries a chance… Of course, the state will hardly be asked to abide by its own rhetoric. But were it to seek to strip its real or imagined enemies of the least capacity to act and react, fancy itself to be more perfect than all its predecessors, and appoint itself as the “end of history”, the consequences could prove to be disastrous. It has done everything to make open barbarity the only “alternative” to its reign. It truly prefers to be judged by its enemies rather than on its non-existent successes, just as Guy Debord pointed out in his Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle in 1988. Every “anti-terrorist” policy follows this principle and Algerian leaders have applied it more effectively than perhaps any other government.

So, the state declares that change is no longer possible, take it or leave it. It does this at an historical juncture—at the beginning of the real economic, environmental and energy crises into which we are currently sinking—when it will be harder and harder for its citizens to continue to go along with the way things are, however great the tendency toward submissiveness. Thus there is no point in justifying or condemning the spread of practices identified as “illegal” and the recourse to what the state defines as “violence”. One thing is easy enough to predict: it will be quite hard for the increasing number of future protest activities to remain within the parameters of “legality” designed precisely to neutralise them.⁴ In its ascendant phase the workers’ movement essentially placed itself—and was placed by its adversaries—outside the laws of bourgeois society. It knew very well that laws were not neutral but promulgated by its enemies. The rise of the “legalists” within the workers’ movement, especially in the late-nineteenth century, was considered to be treason by many of its members. It was only after the Second World War that the state managed to get accepted nearly everywhere as a regulatory body above the fray. At the same time as social struggles stopped aiming for the advent of a completely different society and limited themselves to talks over the distribution of value, “respect for the rules” had become customary on the left and marked the divide with “extremist” minorities.

But these illusions seem to be in the process of disappearing for good. There is no more margin for manoeuvre. At the same time as the state no longer has anything to redistribute, the incentive to stay within the law loses its effectiveness. Missing is the payoff, the cake in return for our forbearance. Thus a marked rise in the number of “illegal” acts, such as occupations, the abduction of company directors, disassembling, acts of destruction and the blocking of transport routes, can be foreseen if not yet actually witnessed.⁵

In short, acts of sabotage. It seems to be what the authorities fear above all. Sabotage is effective: if there is now a partial moratorium on the growing of genetically modified crops (GMO) in France, and if a large part of public opinion is against them, this is down to GM crop wreckers rather than to petitions. It is significant that over the last few years the French Minister of the Interior has marked out these wreckers for police persecution. Mass disobedience, continuous sabotage, uninterrupted resistance—even without physical violence—would be the worst-case scenario for defenders of law and order. They prefer overt violence and terrorism: that is their terrain. In issue 25 of the journal Lignes (spring 2008) I wrote that sabotage is a possible form of political action, citing the destruction of GM crops by night and the disabling of biometric devices. I would never have dreamed that I myself was running the very real risk of finding myself some months later in prison accused of inciting terrorism.

I am of course referring here to the “Tarnac affair” involving the arrest of eleven young people in November 2008, accused of sabotaging railway lines. Despite the obvious lack of evidence, Julien Coupat, who the police regarded as their “leader”, remained in prison for about six months. Moreover, the police presented them as the authors of the pamphlet The Coming Insurrection, published in 2007 by an “Invisible Committee” (which, beyond the whole police angle, has not even been denied by their supporters). Indignation towards the state, which left them to rot in prison to “set an example”, should not prevent us from being surprised at the naiveté of the authors of The Coming Insurrection. Paradoxically, they must have had a lot of trust in democracy to believe that they could, at an historical juncture like our own, use their writing to invoke sabotage of the railway network without eventually suffering the consequences. Where do they think they are living? In nineteenth-century England? Their tragedy is to have happened upon policemen and judges cynical enough to take their fantasies of violence literally, to act as though the authors are as dangerous as they fancy themselves to be, and to punish them for what they hoped to do… somewhat along the lines of what befell Antonio Negri in Italy in 1979. Moreover, the hype doled out by their supporters can sometimes grate. Is it any wonder that the police tried to cast Julien Coupat as a kind of Charles Manson given the following to be found in Tiqqun, the journal he edited: “In Germany it was the June 2nd movement, the Red Army Faction (RAF) or the Rote Zellen, and in the United States, the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, the Diggers and the Manson Family, emblem of a ‘massive inner desertion’”.⁶ Or will he say that he was only clowning around and not to hold it against him? It is unlikely that Coupat is some kind of Charles Manson, but it is clear that his capacity for historical analysis is no better than that displayed in the course of a TV debate.

Apparently the state has failed to pull off its coup and everything suggests that the defendants will be cleared of all suspicion.⁷ Moreover, they have achieved some degree of fame and received a great deal of support, from their farmer neighbours as well as from members of parliament and leading articles in Le Monde. But the state may be said to have won out if the intention was to nip in the bud any attempt at a mass resort to sabotage, and if the aim was to trumpet “zero tolerance” for forms of resistance of the low-level warfare kind that could emerge in budding social movements. A real “terrorist” is not frightened by a few months in prison; the average frustrated citizen, tempted at one time or another to carry out a threat, thinking “It’s not a big deal, it’s not like I’m going to kill anyone”, might think twice about the prospect of months in prison. And if humiliation and anger drive someone to resume armed struggle, the state will again relish the company of its dearest enemy.

On the other hand, it is averse to leaderless and wayward social movements. In late 2008 the Minister of Education apparently abandoned his project to reform high-school education because of the growing and, above all, uncontrollable (by student organisations and leaders) violence of school demonstrations and also because of the example provided by the youth revolt in Greece which seems to have made a strong impression on the French government.⁸

It is nevertheless to be hoped that “violence” will not take the form described by the authors of The Coming Insurrection. They propagate, as did their predecessors in the radical-chic journal Tiqqun, the narrow concept that it is possible to redirect increasing barbarity into an emancipatory force. They are fascinated by the emerging chaos and seek to accentuate this barbarity,⁹ instead of placing their reliance on human qualities which might represent the only way out. Contrary to popular belief, there is nothing “anarcho-communist” or Marxist about The Coming Insurrection. Rather, its pages smack far more of Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt: the “decision”,¹⁰ the will without content that is equally at the heart of state politics. They simply want to set their will against that of the state, to be the strongest, to hit the table louder with their fist. Their legal debacle may well transform them into a myth among protestors. But even on a literary level their apology for gratuitous crime seems a bit clichéd, sixty years on from André Breton’s reconsideration of his ideas on the “simplest Surrealist act”.¹¹

Faced with sabotage and other forms of “violence”, the question is always: who exercises it and to what end? The radical left has often confused violence, even when it is used for goals that are absolutely immanent to commodity logic such as demands for wage increases, with “radicality”. Sabotage can also be conflated with the violent assertion of particular interests and provoke equally violent reactions from the other side. Thus, farmers whose genetically modified crops have been targeted by wreckers, and who feel let down by the state, could turn to private security firms. Even though it may start out on a sound basis, the emancipatory character of an opposition movement is never guaranteed in the long run; it can always fall into a populism that “goes beyond the left-right divide”. The transformation of certain resistance movements against the state into mafias only fending for themselves (such as the FARC in Columbia) is highly significant. Moreover, once the “communes” referred to in The Coming Insurrection (and whose concept is somewhat reminiscent of the North American survivalists who are currently preparing for the apocalypse) realise that the rest of the population is not going down the same road, they will fight solely on their own account. It would not be the first case in recent history.

Rather than engaging in a critique of how capitalism functions—and therefore of value, money, labour, capital and competition—the present time is instead witnessing a “manager witch-hunt”, involving attacks on their residences, abduction¹² and the storming of luxury restaurants. It is not necessarily “proletarians” who are most inclined towards violence but usually lower-middle and middle bourgeois: swindled investors, owners whose homes have been repossessed. Once their demands are satisfied they will again be pledging their allegiance to the dominant order, and will keep their properties under armed patrol to defend them against other “predators”. A popular revolt against a “development project” that will fell an entire forest is much less likely than one against a trader who has stolen perhaps one euro from every citizen. What if it was envy that prompted this hatred, the desire simply to be like them? We could have massacres of leaders and their lackeys as The Coming Insurrection wishes, thereby kick-starting the same system all over again after a bloodbath. A different hunt for a fraudster and his political accomplices, the Stavisky Affair in 1934, led to the storming of the French Parliament by the far right.

The Coming Insurrection informs us that “little more than hatred for the present society, and not considerations of class, race or locality, unites the range of characters to be found among those charged [with affray in the suburban hotspots]”.¹³ All well and good. However, the fact of hating society as it currently exists remains neither here nor there, it has to be seen whether the reasons for this hatred are good or bad. The Islamist is also driven by hatred of this society and fascist football supporters shout “All cops are bastards” in stadiums. Followers of Antonio Negri fancy that they see wholly imaginary alliances too between all the enemies of this world, from Palestinian suicide bombers to striking teachers, from the Paris ghetto kids to Bolivian miners; just so long as whatever it happens to be is kicking off… The feelings of rejection engendered by today’s world are often much closer to “abstract hatred” [haine désincarnée] (Baudrillard) and aimlessness than to traditional violence, and are hardly the stuff of which “political” strategy of whatever kind is made. And were civil war to break out for real, it is not difficult to imagine who would be the first to find themselves awakened in the middle of the night and unceremoniously shoved up against the wall, while women are raped and children shot.

It is quite possible to hate what exists in the name of something even worse. One can hate Sarkozy and prefer Mao or Pol Pot. The feeling of humiliation, the impression of having to submit with no power to react, is just as likely to lead to intelligent subversion as it is to school shootings or massacres in town councils. What filters through in the majority of present-day protests is above all the fear of being excluded from society and therefore the desire to remain a part of it. Generally speaking, what people are now seeking to escape from is no longer “adaptation” to a situation judged to be untenable, as in 1968 and thereafter, but marginalisation in a society that is shrinking away.

Admiring violence and hatred for their own sake will help the capitalist system direct the fury of its victims onto scapegoats. Many things have deteriorated, violence and illegality among them. It is very likely that the armour of “legality” will soon fall apart and there is no point in bemoaning its passing. But not all reasons for violence are good reasons. Perhaps violence should only be wielded by people without hatred and resentment. But is this possible?

Notes

1.In 2009 Amnesty International published a report entitled “France: Police above the law”, confirming all these impressions.

2.Of course, the demonisation of violence in everyday relationships only moves it elsewhere. The German sociologist Götz Eisenberg, who analysed school shootings in Germany, insists on the fact that their perpetrators do not come from “tough neighbourhoods” or working-class or underclass backgrounds, where a certain amount of violence is part of life, but from middle-class, “run-of-the-mill” families where any violent expression of tension is stigmatised. A taste for violent video games is thus widespread and can eventually lead to a desire to transpose them into real life. The public instinctively feels that these killings, called “amok”, reveal a hidden truth and that these killers—who generally commit suicide at the end of their “mission”—are expressing the death drive that in one way or another pervades all commodity subjects. See Götz Eisenberg, Amok—Kinder der Kälte: Über die Wurzeln von Wut und Hass [Amok—Children of the Cold: The Roots of Rage and Hatred] (Reinbek: Rowoht, 2000), and …damit mich kein Mensch mehr vergisst! warum Amok und Gewalt kein Zufall sind [That way, no one will forget me anymore! Why amok and violence are not random] (München: Pattloch, 2010).

3.Or better equipped policemen because the replacement of man by technology affects even law enforcement. Some representatives of the “left” will, however, always be on hand to request that the state invest in “community police” rather than in the high-tech variety, or who salute those police voicing their scepticism towards the government’s “war on crime”, and complain that they are not given the funds to do their job properly.

4.Issues of legitimacy, more than legality, will take on another dimension. The public may again see defendants who, instead of continuing to plead innocent before the law, will use court proceedings to mount a proud defence of their actions and accept the consequences. René Riesel gave us such an example in the trial which followed his participation in the destruction of genetically modified crops, and during his subsequent imprisonment. See René Riesel, Aveux complets des véritables mobiles du crime commis au CIRAD le 5 juin 1999 suivis de divers documents relatifs au procès de Montpellier [Full disclosure of the real motives for the crime committed at the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development on 5 June 1999, followed by various documents relating to the Montpellier trial] (Paris, Éditions de l’Encyclopédie des Nuisances, 2001). Throughout history, time spent in and out of prison has been viewed with equanimity by most revolutionaries.

5.Politicians like Olivier Besancenot, who, after the arrests of the “Tarnac 11” for the alleged sabotage of a TGV line, claimed straightaway that no activist in his party would ever do anything like that, may well find themselves swiftly outflanked by their “rank and file”. Such is the historical fate of second-rate Leninists.

6.“Parti imaginaire et mouvement ouvrier” [Imaginary Party and Workers’ Movement], Tiqqun, no. 2 (2001), p. 241.

7.It is particularly worth noting the historical and political acumen of the current Minister of the Interior, Michèle Alliot-Marie, who observed, forty years after 1968, that the French Communist Party is no longer attracting dissenters, thereby confirming the role that the party had in the Grenelle agreements in containing social unrest.

8.“The ‘Greek syndrome’ is no doubt largely responsible for Xavier Darcos’ recent about-turn on high-school reform. After consultation and agreement with the President, the Minister for Education decided to defer the reforms for a year, thereby completing a U-turn that was as spectacular as it was unexpected. […] Hence all the talk of a ‘Greek syndrome’. In other circumstances, i.e. leaving the economic crisis which again threatens the employability of young people, the tense situation in the suburban trouble spots which are ready to erupt at the merest hint of police intervention, and the threat of imminent youth revolt represented by Greece out of the equation, it is likely that the Minister for Education would not have given in so easily. A heated debate on the subject between the government and the Élysée Palace resulted in victory for the most cautious elements who sensed such a degree of tension that steps needed to be taken to cool things down. It was not so much the scale of the fortnight-old high school student movement that worried the government as the fact that it was largely spontaneous, unruly and sometimes violent.” Françoise Fressoz, “Réforme du lycée: un récul symbolique” [High-School Reform: A Symbolic Retreat], Le Monde, 16 December 2008.

9.“The normal functioning of the world usually serves to hide our state of truly catastrophic dispossession. What is called ‘catastrophe’ is no more than the forced suspension of this state, one of those rare moments when we regain some sort of presence in the world. Let the petroleum reserves run out earlier than expected; let the international flows that make the country tick be disrupted, roll on massive social breakdown, a ‘return to primitive savagery,’ ‘planetary threat,’ and the ‘end of civilisation!’ Either way, any loss of control would be preferable to all the crisis management scenarios they envision.” This translation is an amended version of the original translation; see The Coming Insurrection: http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/.

10.“It’s a fact, and it must be translated into a decision. Facts can be conjured away, but decision is political. To decide on the death of civilisation, then to work out how it will happen: only decision will rid us of the corpse.” Ibid.

11.In an interview in 1948, reproduced in Entretiens in 1952 (Gallimard). [Translator’s note: André Breton once famously stated: “The simplest Surrealist act is to go down into the street, revolver in hand, and shoot randomly as much as possible into the crowd.”]

12.Which seem not to be that infrequent but which go largely unreported in the copycat-averse media and which have not yet reached South Korean levels, where bosses are thrown from the tenth storey of a building or doused in petrol.

13.The Coming Insurrection, op. cit.

The Writing on the Wall

On Thursday it was reported on The Guardian’s website that the building in Times Square, in the heart of Manhattan, which displays the amount of U.S. public debt, no longer has enough room for such an astronomical figure of trillions of dollars, to wit 10,299,299,050,383, a humongous number due principally to the Paulson Plan and the government bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Even the ‘$’ sign, which occupied the last space on the clock has had to be removed so that passers-by could see the number to the last decimal point.¹

Who cares now to recall this to mind? The great fear of October 2008 now appears more remote than the “Great Fear” at the start of the French Revolution. But at the time the impression was not only that the ship was taking on a lot of water and would sink straight to the bottom, but that everyone had been silently expecting it to do so for some time. Experts were openly querying the solvency of even the mightiest states and newspaper headlines were conjuring up the possibility of a chain collapse of French savings banks. Boards of guardians contemplated whether they should withdraw all their money from the bank and hide it under their mattresses; commuters buying tickets in advance wondered whether the trains would still be running a couple of weeks later. The American President George W. Bush, in his address to the nation, spoke of the financial crisis in terms reminiscent of those he had used after 11 September 2001, and the October 2008 issue of Le Monde’s monthly magazine was entitled: “The End of a World”. All commentators agreed in their assessment that what was taking place was not simply a temporary glitch in the financial markets, but the worst crisis since the Second World War, or since 1929.

It was particularly surprising to discover that the same people, from the top manager down to the welfare recipient, who, prior to the crisis, seemed to be convinced that ordinary capitalist life would continue to function for the foreseeable future, could so quickly get used to the idea of a major crisis. The general impression of being poised at the edge of a cliff was all the more surprising since in principle it began merely as a financial crisis that the ordinary person only found out about via the media. No mass layoffs, no disruption to vital supplies, no shutdowns of ATM machines, no businesses rejecting credit cards. Thus no “visible” crisis as yet. There was, however a feeling that an era was drawing to a close, which can only be explained by assuming that a vague, albeit wary sense of stepping onto thin ice or onto a frayed tightrope was already widespread. When it actually hit, no contemporary observer seemed, deep down, any more surprised than a heavy smoker might be on being informed that he has cancer. Although never explicitly expressed, the feeling that things could not go on “like this” was universal. But perhaps even more surprising had to be the speed with which the media ditched the apocalypse in order to refocus on such important issues as the state of the oyster industry or Silvio Berlusconi’s escapades; or the economists who coolly announced that the worst was over and that everything would go back to running like clockwork; the depositors who turned up at their banks fully expecting them to be open; or the average citizen for whom the crisis meant shorter holidays this year… Even the experts who are matter-of-factly explaining to us that nothing happened and that nothing untoward is going to happen ought to be concerned and treat such sudden relief and oblivion with suspicion. But they, too, are carrying on like the cancer patient who smokes his head off in order to prove that he is in excellent health. They, too, are used to making do. For decades, low rates of economic growth had been deemed to be a national catastrophe, and in 2009 growth was, for the first time in sixty years, actually negative in many countries. No problem assert the experts, their feathers unruffled: growth will be back on track next year—and every positive statistic, even if confined to one country, one productive sector, or one quarter, and even if merely the modest outcome of the gigantic “recovery programmes” financed by governments through credit, is immediately offered as proof that the crisis is well and truly over.

There is nothing new under the depleted ozone layer. Neither official science, nor everyday consciousness, can imagine anything other than what they are already familiar with, i.e. capitalism and more capitalism. Capitalism might undergo serious setbacks, it could lead to “overload”, times ahead might be tough, but those in power will learn from their mistakes. Moreover, Americans have at last elected a reasonable president, and necessary reforms will be put into place: every cloud has a silver lining! It is hardly surprising then that hired optimists, the only people who are usually authorised to mouth off in institutions and the media, announce summer every time they see a swallow. What else could they say?

But at the peak of the crisis of 2008, the media felt obliged from time to time to allow those who offered an “anti-capitalist” interpretation of it the chance to speak, i.e. those who portrayed the crisis as a sign of a deeper dysfunction and went straight on to call for “radical changes”. While the “New Anti-Capitalist Party” and its ilk were of course proclaiming their absolute refusal to pay for any crisis as they dusted off stacks of left-over pamphlets from decades-old demonstrations, the best-known representatives of what today passes for an implacable critique of contemporary society—to wit the likes of Badiou, Žižek and Negri—garnered much more exposure in the mainstream press than usual, or in any case felt that they were on a roll. What comes across, however, as rather surprising is the prospect of a major crisis of capitalism not triggered by the resistance of the “exploited” or the “multitude”, but by a malfunction of the machine that “dissident” analyses had in no way foreseen. Indeed, they too explained in their own inimitable manner that it was time to stop gawping and move along, that one crisis is much like another and that it will die down in time because crises are a normal part of capitalism. But what they call crises—stock-market collapse, global deflation—is in fact merely a mass of epiphenomena. These are the visible manifestations or surface expressions of the real crisis that they themselves cannot fathom. The declared enemies of capitalism—whether “hard” or “radical” left, Marxists of various schools, “opponents of growth” or “deep” ecologists—almost all insist on believing in the eternity of capitalism and its categories, sometimes with even more conviction than some of its apologists.

This kind of critique of capitalism attacks only finance, deemed to be the sole villain of the piece. According to this view, the “real economy” is healthy but total financial deregulation is threatening the world economy. Hence, the most expeditious and widespread explanation lays the entire blame for the crisis at the door of a “greedy” handful of speculators busy gambling with everyone’s money as if they were in a casino. Indeed, boiling down the mysteries of the spluttering capitalist economy to a nasty arch-conspiracy is part of a long and dangerous tradition, the worst possible upshot of which would be the designation once again of scapegoats in the form, say, of “Jewish high finance” primed and ready for pillorying by worker and small-saver “honest folk”. Nor does it make much more sense to set a “bad” rapacious and limitless Anglo-Saxon capitalism against a reputedly responsible “good, continental” capitalism. As already noted, they are all but indistinguishable from one another. For the likes of ATTAC and Nicolas Sarkozy who are now calling for “greater regulation” of the financial markets, the stock-market frenzy merely represents a blip, an outgrowth on an otherwise healthy body.

The “anti-capitalism” of the radical left is nothing more than a form of “anti-liberalism”. The only alternative to capitalism that this radical left has ever been able to imagine were dictatorships with state-controlled economies of the world’s East and South; since the latter have gone bankrupt, changed course or become completely indefensible, the only choice that such anti-capitalists can still envision is one between different models of capitalism: between liberalism and Keynesianism, the continental model and the Anglo-Saxon model, financialised turbo-capitalism and the social market economy, stock-market euphoria and “job creation”. There may be different modes of the valorisation of value, of the accumulation of capital, and of the transformation of money into more money; but it is above all the distribution of the fruits of this mode of production that may be altered to benefit some social groups or countries more than others. They anticipate that the crisis will even be beneficial for capitalism: overvalued capital will be devalued, and, as is common knowledge ever since Joseph Schumpeter coined the term, “creative destruction” is the basic law of capitalism. Theirs is not to imagine for one moment, on pain of being branded a hopeless idealist or a would-be Pol Pot, that is, of being a supporter of the only alternatives to capitalism that this day and age can still bring to mind, that humanity could live without the valorisation of value, the accumulation of capital and the transformation of money into more money. There might be an external limit to capitalist growth such as the depletion of natural resources or the destruction of the environment; as a form of social reproduction, however, capitalism is impassable. What is openly stated in the pages of Le Figaro is delivered in roundabout fashion by born-again Marxists, Bourdieusians and alter-globalisation activists: the market is natural to man. Anti-liberal anti-capitalists merely propose a return to the no doubt grossly idealised “social” capitalism of the 1960s, to full employment and high wages, to the Welfare State and education as a “social ladder”; some prefer to add a dash of environmentalism, voluntary work or the “nonprofitmaking sector” into the mix. In reality, they must be hoping that capitalism will recover and go back to running at full throttle in order to carry out their fine and costly programmes.

In the view of these “enemies”, the current crisis represents the ideal opportunity to finally get an audience for the proposals they have long been harbouring. The crisis will be salutary, for it will no doubt mean losses for some but will nonetheless force men and institutions to mend their harmful ways. Thus each one of these beneficent critics hopes to bring grist to his mill: regulation of the financial markets, caps on executive bonuses, an end to “tax havens”, wealth redistribution and, above all else, “green capitalism” as the driving force behind a new regime of accumulation and job creation. Their position is clear: the crisis is an opportunity to improve capitalism, not break with it.

However, even in this respect, they may well be disappointed. In the context of the crisis, wholly antagonistic reactions are emerging. Thus, in order to transcend the crisis, new measures to protect the environment may be advocated (as set out by the American and French presidents themselves) or, on the contrary, a complete overhaul of current safeguards may be carried out in the name of “stimulating growth” and “job creation” (of the kind that Berlusconi is currently engaged in and as industry, particularly the construction and automotive sectors together with a large sector of the public, are demanding).² What should be the response when, in an attempt to obtain better severance packages, a group of sacked workers threatens to dump toxic waste into a river, as has happened in France on several occasions? Will we see environmentalists come to blows with workerists? The “radical” left will have to decide now: either embark on the undiluted critique of capitalism, even if the latter has ceased to proclaim itself neoliberal, or else join the management team of a capitalism which has incorporated a share of the criticisms levelled at its “excesses”.

Some observers appear to go further and refer to a capitalism that is destroying the world and is self-destructing. Do not such cries of alarm denote a growing awareness of the disasters caused by capitalism, both in “normal” and in crisis-ridden mode? Such attacks, however, are in most cases aimed only at the recent “deregulated” and “chaotic” phase of capitalism, the neoliberal phase, and definitely not at the system of capitalist accumulation as such, so not at the tautological logic that ordains that one euro be transformed into two euros and which consumes the real world as mere raw material for this increase of the value-form. According to these critics, a return to a “moderate” capitalism, one that is “regulated” and subject to “politics”, should offer a logical solution to the problem.

Is it therefore the case that “anti-neoliberal” reasoning denies the existence of an on-going crisis? No, but it wants only to remedy the symptoms of the disease. What is more, the general inability to imagine that the crisis could lead to something other than merely capitalism over and over again stands in stark contrast to the vague, although persistent and universal, sense of living in a permanent state of crisis. A mood of pessimism has prevailed for decades now. Young people are knowingly resigned to the fact that their lives will be worse than those of their parents and that basic necessities such as jobs and housing will be increasingly difficult to come by and keep. The general impression is one of careering down a slippery slope. The only hope lies in not falling too fast, but there is no real hope of getting back up again. There is a vague feeling that the party is over and that lean times are ahead; a feeling often accompanied by the conviction that the previous generation (that of the “baby boomers”) has snapped up everything and left hardly anything to their children. Most young people in France, at least among those who have acquired some kind of college degree, are still convinced that they will manage to find the means to survive on an economic level, but nothing more. No longer is it possible to refer to a crisis affecting some sectors to the benefit of others that are booming: an eloquent example being the market crash in 2001 of the “new economy”, an economy trumpeted for years as the new-found driving force behind capitalism. Nor are we witnessing the devaluation of certain occupations in favour of others, as when farriers were replaced by car mechanics, and as the “retraining” mania would still have us believe. What is taking place now is a general devaluation of nearly all human activity, visible in the accelerated and unexpected impoverishment of the “middle classes”. Add to this the awareness, now well-entrenched in everyone’s mind, of past and future environmental disasters combined with the depletion of natural resources, and it is possible to assert that the vast majority of people now contemplate the future with fear.

What may seem strange is the fact that this so very widespread apprehension of the general worsening of living conditions should often be accompanied by the conviction that capitalism is functioning at the height of its powers, that globalisation is at its peak, and that there is more wealth than ever before. The world might be undergoing a crisis, but not capitalism, or at least that is what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello claim at the beginning of their book, The New Spirit of Capitalism, first published in 1999:³ capitalism is expanding; it is the social and economic situation of many people that is deteriorating. Thus, capitalism is perceived as a part of society opposed to the rest of society, as the group of individuals who possess accumulated money, and not as a social relation that encompasses all members of contemporary society.

Other commentators who like to think they are more clued-up, regard all the talk about a crisis as a mere fabrication on the part of industrialists in order to reduce wages and increase profits, or of the authorities themselves, in order to justify a permanent state of worldwide emergency. It is true that past and present crises have been used and are still frequently used to legitimate the state, especially since the latter no longer puts forward any “positive” proposals but confines itself to crisis management by highlighting all the problems itself (unlike the propaganda of the past, which was devoted to spreading the message that “everyone is happy thanks to the wisdom of the government”). Its mission is to create the proper environment for the only proclaimed goal, for the sole objective recognised by contemporary global society everywhere (with the exception of the ideologies in force in North Korea, Iran and a few other Muslim countries): to grant individuals maximum commodity consumption and “personal fulfilment”. It is true that if crises did not exist, states would invent them; but only secondary crises, not the kind that threaten their very foundations. During this crisis, never before had there been such an impression that the “ruling classes” were not ruling over very much and that, on the contrary, they themselves were being ruled by the “automatic subject” (Marx) of capital.

However, a critique of contemporary capitalism very different from the ones sketched out above has been put forward. A critique that asks: what if, far from ruining the real economy, financialisation has in fact helped it to survive beyond its expiration date? What if it was breathing life into a dying body? Why this unshakable belief that capitalism is itself exempt from the cycle of birth, growth and death? Might it not contain intrinsic limits to its development, limits that do not reside solely in the existence of a declared enemy (the proletariat, oppressed peoples) or in the mere depletion of natural resources?

During this last crisis, it once again became fashionable to quote Marx. But the German thinker did not only talk about class struggle. He also foresaw the possibility that one day the capitalist machine would grind to a halt on its own, that its dynamic would be exhausted. Why should this be so? From its very inception, the capitalist production of commodities contains an internal contradiction, a veritable time bomb located within its very foundations. Capital can be made to work and thus accumulated only by exploiting labour power. But the worker, in order to generate profits for his employer, must be equipped with the necessary tools, and these days they must be state-of-the-art. There ensues a continuous race, dictated by competition, to keep abreast of technological change. At each stage, the first employer to avail himself of some new technology will be the winner, since his workers will produce more than his competitors with no access to it. But the system as a whole loses out because these technologies are replacing human labour. The value of each particular commodity therefore contains an ever-diminishing portion of human labour; the latter is, however, the only source of surplus value and therefore of profit. The development of technology brings about a blanket reduction in profit. For the last century and a half, however, the expansion of commodity production on a world scale was able to compensate for this tendency for the amount of value contained in each commodity to fall.⁴

Ever since the 1960s, this mechanism—which was nothing but a blind pursuit—has been malfunctioning. The increase in productivity fostered by microelectronics has paradoxically plunged capitalism into crisis. Increasingly massive investments were required in order to set the few remaining workers to work, in accordance with the standards of productivity established by the world market. The real accumulation of capital threatened to stall. It was at that moment that “fictitious capital”, as Marx called it, took off. The abandonment of the dollar’s convertibility into gold in 1971 eliminated the last safety valve, the last mooring in real accumulation. Credit is nothing but the anticipation of expected future profits. But when the production of value, and therefore of surplus value, stagnates in the real economy (which has nothing to do with the stagnation of the production of things; capitalism revolves around the production of value and not of products as use values), only finance enables the owners of capital to extract profits that have become impossible to obtain in the real economy. The rise of neoliberalism after 1980 was not some devious manoeuvre on the part of the greediest capitalists, nor a coup d’état carried out in collusion with smug politicians, as the “radical” left would have it. Neoliberalism was, on the contrary, the only possible way to make the capitalist system last a bit longer. For quite some time, credit allowed many businesses and individuals to maintain the illusion of prosperity. Now, this crutch is also bust. But the return to Keynesianism, which has tongues wagging practically everywhere, will be completely impossible: there is no longer enough “real” money at the disposal of governments, i.e. money not created by fiat or by speculation, but money as the result of commodity production in accordance with the standards of productivity on the world market. For the moment, the “decision-makers” have postponed their Mene, Tekel, Upharsin by adding another zero to the ludicrous numbers displayed on screens and which no longer correspond to anything. The recent bank bailouts are ten times higher than the deficits that rocked the markets twenty years ago—although real production (GDP in common parlance) has increased by roughly 20-30%! The “economic growth” of the 1980s and 1990s no longer had any independent basis, but was the result of financial bubbles. And when these bubbles burst there will be no “stabilisation” after which everything can start afresh.

Why has this system not yet undergone complete collapse? To what does it owe its temporary survival? In a word, to credit. Faced with the growing difficulties over the course of the last century of financing the valorisation of labour power and thus of investing in fixed capital, the resort to ever larger amounts of credit, far from being some aberration or other, was in fact inevitable. Even during the reign of the neoliberal monetarists, debt grew on a massive scale. Whether this credit is private or public, domestic or foreign, does not really change the situation much. The continuous and irreversible development of technology permanently widens the gap between the role of labour power—which, to repeat, is the only source of value and surplus value—and the increasingly important role played by the instruments of labour, which must be paid for with the surplus value obtained through the exploitation of labour power. Consequently, the resort to credit can only increase over time, eventually to reach a point of no return. Credit, which is profit consumed before being realised, can postpone the moment when capitalism hits its systemic limits, but it cannot prevent it. Even the best medically-assisted prolongation of life has to end someday.

Credit not only prolongs the life of the system as such, but also that of the consumers. Consumer debt is generally known to have reached astronomical proportions, especially in the United States, and is fast increasing to boot. Some idea of the prospects for this kind of life may be gained in a country like Brazil where cell phones can be purchased in ten instalments, car maintenance paid for in three, and petrol stations compete not over the price of petrol, but over how long it takes to cash cheques – 90 days, 180…

Some people end up going into raptures over this “virtualisation” of the world and predict a radiant future. But only a completely postmodernised consciousness could believe that a virtualisation devoid of any real foundations can last forever. There are those who have sought to challenge and “deconstruct” the very concept of the “real economy”. Undoubtedly, many people would welcome proof that fiction is worth just as much as reality, being much more congenial to our desires. It is not necessary, however, to be a great prophet to foresee that the “denial of reality”, declared with self-satisfied grins for the last thirty years, does not have much of a future in an era of “real” crises. The aforementioned editorial in Le Monde was logically entitled: “Tick the box marked ‘disaster’ to return to reality”.

Even on the strictly economic level, the crisis is only just beginning. There continue to be a considerable number of banks and large corporations busy concealing the disastrous state they are in by falsifying their accounts, and there is talk, along with further bankruptcies to come, of the approaching collapse of the consumer credit industry in the United States. The astronomical sums injected by governments into the economy, as from one day to the next they jettison the monetarist dogma in whose name millions of people had been plunged into poverty, alongside the announcements of comprehensive regulatory measures, have nothing to do with a return to the Keynesianism and the Welfare State of yesteryear. There are no “New Deal”-type investments in infrastructure, nor any creation of popular purchasing power. Sums on such a colossal scale have increased US public debt by 20%, but their only impact has been to avert the immediate collapse of the credit system. For a real “economic recovery”, even more gigantic sums would be required, sums which, as things currently stand, could only be obtained by printing money by decree—which would trigger worldwide hyperinflation. Short-term growth driven by inflation would lead to an even greater crisis because nowhere are new possible forms of accumulation to be found that, after an initial “stimulus” provided by the state, would be able to produce growth that could continue thereafter on its own momentum.

But the crisis is not just an economic one. When there is no money left, nothing works anymore. Over the course of the twentieth century, capitalism has encompassed, for the purpose of extending the sphere of the valorisation of value, increasingly larger sectors of life: from children’s upbringing to the care of the elderly, from cooking to culture, from heating to transportation. It was seen as progress in the name of “efficiency” or “individual freedom”, liberated from the bonds of family and community. The consequences of this are now clear: everything that cannot be “financed” is crumbling. Everything depends not only on money but, even worse, on credit too. When real reproduction is completely dependent on “fictitious capital”, and businesses, institutions and governments can only survive due to their credit ratings, every financial crisis, far from affecting just those who gamble on the stock markets, has an impact on countless people in the innermost recesses of their daily lives. The many Americans who accepted their retirement funds in the form of stock portfolios and who, after the markets crashed, found themselves with nothing to live on in their old age, were among the first to get a taste of this death on the instalment plan. That was only the beginning; when the crisis really gets underway—when sudden mass unemployment and job insecurity are accompanied by a steep decline in government revenues—we shall see entire sectors of social life abandoned to the arts of day-to-day survival.

The various kinds of crisis—economic, environmental, energy—are not simply “contemporaneous” or “linked”: they are the expression of a fundamental crisis, that of the value-form, that of the empty, abstract form that fills all content in a society based on abstract labour and its representation in the value of a commodity. Having emerged at least two hundred and fifty years ago, a whole way of life, production and thought no longer seems able to assure the survival of humanity. Perhaps no “Black Friday” along the lines of 1929 or a “Judgement Day” will occur. But there are good reasons to think that we are experiencing the end of a long historical epoch,⁵ an epoch in which productive activity and products do not serve the satisfaction of needs, but feed the incessant cycle of labour that valorises capital and capital that employs labour. The commodity and labour, money and state regulation, competition and market: behind the repeated and increasingly serious crises of the last twenty years and more, looms the crisis of all these categories, which latter thankfully have not always and everywhere been part of human existence. They have seized control of human life over the last few centuries and may give rise to something different: something better, or something even worse. There might be a temporary recovery that will last a few years.⁶ But the end of labour, of selling, selling oneself, and buying, the end of the market and the state—categories that are in no sense natural and that will someday disappear, just as they replaced other forms of social life—is a long-term process. The current crisis is neither the beginning nor the end, but an important stage of this process.

But why does this analysis, which is just about the only one to have been confirmed by the recent crisis, arouse so little interest? Essentially, because no one can really imagine the end of capitalism. The very idea provokes extreme fear. Everyone thinks they have too little money, but each individual feels that their existence is threatened, even in psychological terms, when money looks like it is devaluing and losing its role in social life. In times of crisis, subjects cling more than ever to the only forms of socialisation that they know. One thing at least generally tends to be agreed upon: selling, selling oneself and buying need to carry on. This is what makes it so hard to react to this crisis or to organise to confront it since it is not a matter of us against them. What needs combating is the “automatic subject” of capital, which also inhabits each and every one of us, and is consequently part of our habits, tastes, idleness, inclinations, narcissisms, vanities, egoisms… No one wants to look the monster in the face. The effort to propound all sorts of crazy nonsense far outstrips attempts to train critical fire on labour and the commodity, or even on the automobile! “Revered scientists” drivel on about giant satellites able to deflect part of the sun’s rays or devices for cooling the oceans. Proposals are made to “grow vegetables in hydroponic and even aeroponic greenhouses”, to manufacture meat “directly from stem cells” and to fetch declining resources literally from the moon: “Among other things, the moon contains a million tons of helium 3, the ideal fuel for nuclear fusion. One ton of helium 3 would be worth about 6 billion dollars, in terms of the energy it could generate. And this is only one of the reasons why so many countries are focused on going back to the moon.”⁷ Along the same lines, adaptation rather than active opposition to climate change is proposed.⁸ Instead of escaping from “economic terror”, the threat is being redoubled: “More than ever, organisations and human beings who know how, are willing, and are able to adapt have a social and economic future. Those opting to keep things as they are could well become unemployable”⁹ and, as a result, disappear off the face of the earth. As Malthus pointed out, hunger is the best spur to work.¹⁰ Anything that does not serve the valorisation of capital is a luxury and, in times of crisis, luxury has no place. Nor is this an aberration; it is completely logical in a society that has made the transformation of money into more money its driving force.

Back will come the answer that this is painting an ominous picture: we have been hearing about the demise of capitalism ever since its inception and every time it is plunged into difficulty. However, after each crisis it re-emerges like the phoenix rising from its ashes. At the same time, each occasion has seen it re-emerge changed, so that it is very different today than it was in 1800, or 1850, or 1930. Are we not witnessing another transformation of this kind, in which capitalism is changing, all the better to endure? Why should this crisis be any worse than any other crisis over the last 200 years? Could capitalism not continue to exist in new atypical forms, between catastrophes and wars? Is crisis not the eternal form of its existence, and even that of historical societies in general? The mere enumeration of all the dysfunctions of current capitalism—to continue with the objection—cannot constitute proof of its final crisis unless the brief Fordist period of stability is taken to be the only possible form of functioning for capitalism, and all its other forms of existence deviations. The civil wars in Africa and the process of re-feudalisation in Russia, Islamic fundamentalism and diminishing job security in Europe, only prove that it was impossible to spread the Fordist model the world over, but not the collapse of capitalism, which, as a global system, consists precisely in the coexistence of all of these forms, each of which is, within its context, of use to this system. Capitalism could also function very differently from the way it did in 1960s Europe, which merely demonstrates how flexible it is. The devastation it causes, from the isolation of individuals and the dissolution of the family to psychological and physical diseases and pollution, are not necessarily a sign of its collapse; on the contrary, they will create a series of constantly renewed needs and market sectors that enable capital to be accumulated.

But this objection cannot be sustained: what it describes is the emergence and perpetuation of continually changing forms of domination and exploitation, but not that of new models of capitalist accumulation. The “non-classical” forms of profit creation can only function as forms of indirect participation in the world market and, therefore, as a drain on the global circuits of value (for example: by selling drugs to rich countries, some southern hemisphere countries are redirecting back to themselves a portion of the “real” surplus value obtained in rich countries). Should the creation of value in the industrial heartlands be completely wiped out, the fate of drug barons and child traffickers would be sealed. At the very most, these heartlands could then force their subjects to go back to producing an agricultural and material surplus for their masters. But not even the most convinced defenders of a sempiternal capitalism would dare call this a new model of capitalist accumulation.

More generally, it should always be borne in mind that far from being a form of labour that reproduces capital, services in fact depend on its productive sectors. This is not only Marx’s theory (being a point that Marxists have singularly failed to take on board), but even everyday experience: far from serving as “the driving force behind growth” in times of recession, culture and education, nature conservation and healthcare, subsidies to nonprofit associations and the preservation of our cultural heritage, are in actual fact the first things to be sacrificed due to a “lack of funds”. Of course, it cannot be abstractly “proved” that we are witnessing the end of this centuries-old commodity society. But some recent trends are indeed new. An external limit has been reached with the depletion of resources—and especially of that most important and irreplaceable resource: clean water—as well as with irreversible climate change, species extinction and vanished landscapes. Equally, capitalism is approaching an internal limit since its trajectory is linear, cumulative and irreversible, rather than cyclical and repetitive like other forms of production. It is the only society that has ever existed that contains in its foundation a dynamic contradiction, rather than a mere antagonism: the transformation of labour into value is historically doomed to exhaustion because of the technologies that replace labour.

The subjects who are living this time of external and internal crisis are also victims of a breakdown of those psychic structures that have long defined man’s existence.¹¹ These new, unpredictable subjects are at the same time in a position to control unprecedented means of destruction. Finally, the drop in value creation throughout the world also implies that, for the first time, there is a glut everywhere of populations that are not even worth exploiting. From the point of view of the valorisation of value, humanity itself is beginning to look like a superfluous luxury, an unsustainable expense, a “surplus”; evidence here then of a wholly new factor in history!

Unfortunately, the “crisis” does not entail any guaranteed “emancipation”. There are many people who are angry because they have lost their money, homes or jobs. Contrary to what the radical left has always believed, however, this anger per se has nothing emancipatory about it. The current crisis does not seem conducive to the appearance of emancipatory projects (at least not initially), but rather to an attitude of every-man-for-himself. Neither in fact does it seem any more conducive to large-scale attempts to restore the capitalist order, to totalitarianism, or to new systems of accumulation based on force. Something more like a gradual but not always obvious descent into barbarism appears to be on the cards. Rather than an almighty clash, a never-ending downward spiral can be expected, an endless gloom that will allow time for everyone to become inured to it. The arts of survival and adaptation to anything will no doubt be seen to blossom in every imaginable way, rather than the advent of a movement of reflection and solidarity on a vast scale in which everyone puts aside their personal interests, forgets the negative aspects of their socialisation and together constructs a more human society. In order for such a thing to take place, however, there will first have to be an anthropological revolution. It seems unlikely that the crises and collapses currently underway would ever facilitate such a revolution. And even if the crisis implies forced “degrowth”, this would not necessarily augur well. Not the sectors that are “useless” from the point of view of human life, but those that are “useless” for the accumulation of capital are the first to be affected by the crisis. Thus healthcare, not arms production, will face the axe and once the logic of value enjoys acceptance, it does not make much sense to protest against it. Should such modest pursuits as helping neighbours, participating in local networks of exchange, tending allotments, doing volunteer charity work or supporting CSAs¹² be the first step, rewarding as these activities often are? Trying to prevent the collapse of the world system with such means is nonetheless like trying to empty the ocean with a spoon.

Just where do the foregoing disabused considerations all lead? At the very least, to a modicum of lucidity. To heed them makes it possible to remain outside the ranks of motley populists who merely curse banks, finance, stock markets and the people who are supposed to control them. This kind of populism easily leads to a witch-hunt against “enemies of the people”, both low-level (immigrants) and high (speculators),¹³ thereby avoiding any critique levelled at the real foundations of capitalism, which, on the contrary, then appears as civilisation crying out to be defended in the shape of labour, money, the commodity, capital and the state.

The prospect is indeed dizzying of the end of a way of life in which we are all heavily implicated and which is now coming down around our ears without anyone’s say-so, leaving us in the middle of a landscape in ruins. All the so-called antagonists of the past, proletariat and capital, labour and accumulated money, may well disappear together, entwined in their death throes given that the shared basis of their conflict is disappearing.

To escape from this situation, the leap into the unknown required is so huge that, understandably, everyone is at first loath to make it. But the fact that we are living at such a moment of epochal change is also, despite everything, an unprecedented opportunity. Therefore, let the crisis deepen!¹⁴ “Our” economy and “our” way of life must under no circumstances be “rescued” but made to disappear as soon as possible, and, at the same time, something better created. We should follow the example of recent, lengthy conflicts in education: instead of complaining about the reduction of grants for education and research, would it not be better to question the very fact that all education and research is now wholly determined by the criteria of “profitability”? Should life be deemed a lost cause because capital accumulation does not work anymore?

The Way Out At Last! is the title of a painting by Paul Klee. Already, during the brief crisis of October 2008, a vague impression could be had that the lid was about to blow off: the depredations and the limits of capitalism were beginning to be openly discussed. It is therefore to be hoped that, during a long and serious crisis, people will begin to talk, taboos and inhibitions melt away and countless people spontaneously begin to question what they had only the day before considered to be “natural” or “inevitable” and start to ask the simplest and least often raised questions: why is there a crisis if the means of productions are so well developed, and even overdeveloped? Why die of poverty if everything we need (and even a great deal more) is already to hand? Why accept the fact that everything that does not serve accumulation must stop? Should everything that does not pay be scrapped? As in fairy tales, it is just possible that, in spite of everything, the word will be spoken that breaks the spell.

Notes

1.Eric Fottorino, “Retour au réel par la case désastre” [Tick the box marked “disaster” to return to reality], Le Monde, 11 October 2008.

2.“‘Retraining’ (change beliefs in order to change jobs) is being encouraged with a view to a greater levelheadedness, fingers are being pointed at ‘carmania’, the waste of resources, alienated labour’s invasion of life and the curse of progress. But the moment the machine seizes up, that the automobile industry is in crisis, advertisers desert newspapers and threaten their financial stability, or unemployment starts to affect a large number of salaried workers, the tune changes and old [certainties] resurface”, wrote Gilbert Rist on 26 November 2008 in a blog sympathetic to the “degrowth” movement.

3.Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, tr. Gregory Elliott, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso Books, 2007).

4.For a more detailed explanation of this phenomenon see “Degrowthers, One More Effort If You Want to Be Revolutionaries!”, infra.

5.In the mainstream media, Immanuel Wallerstein was just about the only person to have asserted that after five hundred years capital had entered its final stage, and that something new would be set up (see his article “Le capitalisme touche à sa fin” [Capitalism Is Nearing Its End], Le Monde, 11 October 2008). However, he only sees the current crisis as the bursting of the speculative bubble that was inflated during the 1970s and compares it with other crises of the past. While he expects a “period of political chaos”, of “systemic crisis” and the end of capitalism in the next few decades, he attributes this to the changing relation between “centre” and “periphery”. His interpretation is therefore very different from the one we are setting forth here.

6.In the last few decades, each crisis has been followed by a “recovery”—especially a recovery of stock-market indices—which appears to show that all these crises are only a matter of cycles, of ups and downs. But none of these “recoveries” were the product of a new mode of production that profitably utilised massive amounts of labour. They were only fictitious increases in value, obtained by buying and selling securities and occasionally investing this fictitious capital in the real estate, consumer goods or service sector; which on every occasion created increasingly greater and baseless financial bubbles.

7.A suitable case for naming and shaming: Xavier Alexandre, “Plus de croissance est en nous” [We Are the Key to More Growth], Le Monde, 30 November 2008, “Chroniques d’abonnés”.

8.“S’adapter au changement climatique plutôt que de le limiter?” [Climate Change: Adaptation Not Limitation], Le Monde, 21 August 2009, on the study entrusted to the Italian “Enrico Mattei” scientific foundation (linked to the ENI oil company) by the Copenhagen “Centre for Consensus” [!].

9.Also named and shamed: Camille Sée, “Le previsible déclin du salariat” [The Foreseeable Decline of Wage Labour], Le Monde, 9 August 2009, “Chroniques d’abonnés”.

10.“The savage would slumber for ever under his tree, unless he were roused from his torpor by the cravings of hunger or the pinchings of cold; and the exertions that he makes to avoid these evils, by procuring food, and building himself a covering, are the exercises which form and keep in motion his faculties, which otherwise would sink into listless inactivity.” Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, First Edition, Chapter XVIII, paragraph seven.

11.On this subject see the closing essays of the current work.

12.CSA = Community Supported/Shared Agriculture schemes.

13.Both left and some elements of the right have protested (at least in the United States) against the bank bailouts.

14.François Partant, Que la crise s’aggrave [Let the Crisis Deepen] (Paris: Solin, 1978).

Part 2: Pars Construens

The “Dark Side” of Value and the Gift

Over the last thirty years or so, during which time it has become one of the most important ideas in contemporary social thought, gift theory has often come into conflict with paradigms of Marxist origin. The trajectory of MAUSS¹ could almost be described as a project to create a radical critique of the very foundations of commodity society and its historical presuppositions along non-Marxist lines, leading it to choose Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi as its main theoretical reference points.² Instead of being explicitly anti-Marxist, like many of the fashionable theories of the same historical period, gift theory seems to have sought to avoid Marx, attempting to construct a social critique as rich as that of Marx, but without what were deemed to be the latter’s unfortunate political consequences and without the perceived limitations and one-sidedness of the very concepts that underpinned it. The principal shortcoming of all Marxist theory, in the view of MAUSS, is its economism: it stands accused of reducing the human being to his economic dimension alone or at least of assigning an absolute predominance to this dimension. The Marxist approach is therefore strictly utilitarian: men are motivated solely by their interests alone and indeed by nothing but their material and individual interests. The philosophical and anthropological foundations of Marxism thereby demonstrate a surprising kinship with bourgeois liberalism, according to whose concept of homo œconomicus man is incapable of any act that does not directly or indirectly proceed from a calculation aimed at maximising his own advantage. Far from having any qualms about this, Marxists take malicious pleasure in demonstrating that any expression of sympathy, generosity or disinterestedness in bourgeois society is nothing but a hypocritical veil hiding the eternal clash of antagonistic interests.

This kind of Marxism is no mere “edifice” cobbled together by the theoreticians of the gift the better to distinguish themselves from it. It actually exists and it is not the intention here to explore it further. But does Marx’s theory boil down simply to this “economism”? Are we sure, moreover, that the theoretical tools for emerging from the utilitarian paradigm cannot be found in Marx himself? Or, to put it another way, are gift theory and an approach based on some of Marx’s concepts necessarily incompatible? If not, would it then be a case of sticking bits together from each theory, creating “specific skills” for each approach? Or might not an underlying, doubtless partial, convergence be discerned between them? There are arguments in the works of Polyani, Mauss and other gift theorists that are similar to radical aspects of Marxian critique. These non-Marxian thinkers may well turn out to be closer to Marx’s heritage than the bulk of what is now termed “Marxism”; indeed, a particular reading of Marx could allow conclusions to be drawn that in part corroborate those espoused by gift theory.³

It should not be forgotten that the subtitle of Das Kapital is not “A Treatise on Political Economy” but “A Critique of Political Economy”. Remarks criticising the very existence of an “economy” may be found from one end of Marx’s work to the other. His intuition that an economy separated, or “disembedded” as Polanyi would say, from the rest of social activity already constitutes an alienation was revived by some of his exponents. Thus, in 1919, György Lukács, the most lucid Marxist thinker of his time, wrote with regard to the future “socialist economy”: “But the ‘economy’ no longer has the function that every economy has had hitherto: for it is to be the servant of a consciously directed society; it is to lose its self-contained autonomy (which was what made it an economy, properly speaking); as an economy it is to be annulled”.⁴ From the 1940s onwards, those who cast doubt on the necessary connection between the Marxian critique of capitalism and a utilitarian and productivist conception of man, bent solely on extending his domination over nature, were the representatives of the Frankfurt School, led by Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, along with, although from a quite different perspective, the Situationists and Guy Debord. For both of them, the experience of modern art embodied the model for establishing a less “self-seeking”, more playful and user-friendly relationship with things. To the extent that these critical currents no longer thought that the greatest defect of post-war society was material poverty but the alienation of everyday life, they envisioned a way out that would no longer take place on an exclusively economic level but was meant to encompass all aspects of life.

It is now the question of labour that is really at stake. From his early writings right through to his later ones such as the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx oscillated between a programme for the liberation of labour (therefore by means of labour) and a programme of liberation from labour (therefore, by means of a complete break with labour). His critique of political economy contains a profound ambiguity with regard to labour. The workers’ movement and official Marxism, which in certain countries became an ideology of accelerated modernisation and in others that of the de facto integration of the working class, preserved merely the centrality of and praise for labour from Marx’s works, conceiving all human activity in terms of labour and calling for the advent of a “workers’ society”. The first people to question the ontology of labour, while at the same time claiming adherence to the essential concepts of Marx, were the aforementioned authors and critics of the economy. The Situationist slogan “Never work”, a legacy of Rimbaud and the Surrealists, was indeed similar to Marcuse’s talk of the “great refusal”.

However, when they felt the time right to distance themselves from it, the majority of those who had begun their post-war intellectual careers under the banner of Marxism chose to accuse Marxist thought, even in its most unorthodox forms, of grasping only a narrow fragment of human experience. Its economic analyses might be correct, they said, but Marxist thought is completely mistaken when it tries to use the same criteria to work out the consequences for other spheres of man’s existence: linguistics, symbolism, emotions, anthropology, religion, etc. Cornelius Castoriadis and Jürgen Habermas are paradigmatic examples of those who reduced Marx to the role of an economic expert, where he could still be of some use, but would not be very “competent” in many other areas of life, which were supposed to obey very different sets of logic.

The “critique of value” has chosen a different approach. In its view, Marx’s critique of political economy contains a far more radical challenge to the foundations of capitalist society than that proposed by traditional Marxism. Thus, value, money, the commodity and labour are not “neutral”, trans-historical and eternal givens, rather they constitute the heart of what is specifically negative about modern capitalism. These basic categories must therefore be criticised, and not just the existence of social classes, profit, surplus value (or capital gain), market and legal property relations, which are essentially forms by which value is distributed, i.e. its by-products.

Rather than engage in a comprehensive comparison between the perspectives offered by the critique of value and gift theory—which would, nevertheless, be something worth doing—we shall limit ourselves here to drawing attention to some points that clearly differentiate the critique of value from traditional Marxism and where a theoretical comparison with gift theory seems most promising. This first rough outline is essentially limited to the theoretical sphere. It leaves to one side the practical implications, where the distance between the two theories seems to be greatest; especially the hope that gift theory places in associationism, the “third sector”, etc., and even a project to create a “radicalised and universal social democracy” with the goal of returning to the Fordist model, which is considered to be a form of “re-embedding the economy in society”.⁵ This, according to the critique of value, is neither possible nor desirable.

In contrast to almost the entire Marxist tradition, Marx does not argue from the point of view of labour, conceived as an eternal essence that is “concealed” behind other social forms in capitalism. The person who has best analysed this little-known aspect of Marx’s thought is Moishe Postone, author of Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (1993). He summarises the problem as follows: “In other societies, labouring activities are embedded within an overt social matrix and, hence, are neither ‘essences’ nor ‘forms of appearance’. It is labour’s unique role in capitalism that constitutes labour both as an essence and as a form of appearance. In other words, because the social relations that characterise capitalism are mediated by labour, it is a peculiarity of that social formation that it has an essence.”⁶

It is only in capitalism that labour, instead of being “embedded” in social relations as a whole, as was the case in pre-capitalist societies, itself becomes a principle of social mediation.⁷ The process of accumulation of units of dead labour (that is, of labour that has already been performed) in the form of “capital” becomes the “automatic subject”—Marx’s term—of modern society. Obviously, every society must somehow organise its material production, its “metabolism with nature” (Marx), but in pre-capitalist societies this production took place within social frameworks organised according to criteria that were different from the exchange of units of labour between formally independent producers. This is why “labour” and the “economy”, in the modern sense of these terms, did not exist at this time.⁸ Labour, in the modern sense, has a double nature: it is simultaneously concrete labour and abstract labour (which, in Marx, has nothing to do with “immaterial labour”). These are not two different types of labour, but two sides of the same labour. The social bond in capitalism is not created by the infinite variety of concrete labours, but labour in its quality of being abstract labour, always equal and subject to the fetishistic mechanism of its increase. Under such conditions, socialisation only occurs post festum, as the result of the exchange of units of value, rather than as its presupposition. Wherever production is organised around abstract labour, one may say that the social bond is constituted in an alienated way, removed from human control,⁹ whereas in other types of societies, labour is subordinated to a social bond that is established in a different way. The “social synthesis” may therefore exist in two principal and opposed forms: either by way of the exchange of gifts—in which the goal is the creation of a bond between persons—or else by way of an exchange of equivalents, in which the creation of a bond is nothing but a practically accidental consequence of the encounter between isolated producers in an anonymous market. The gift can be described as a form of social organisation in which labour and its products do not constitute independent mediations, “behind the backs” of its participants; it is therefore a direct social relationship, one that is not governed by relations between autonomised things. The gift is not a thing, as its theoreticians remind us, but always a relationship; “we would even be tempted to say, it implies, a priori, a synthetic social relationship that it would be futile to try to reduce to the elements it holds together”.¹⁰

It follows that “economism”, as the subordination of all human activity to the economy, is not a theoretical error: it is actually quite real in capitalist society, but only in this society. It is not an immutable fact of human existence, much less something that must be defended. On the contrary, this subordination constitutes an aspect of capitalist society that can and must be changed. At the same time, it should be stressed that this centrality of the “economy”, and of the “material” aspect in general, in modernity (at the expense, for example, of “gratitude”) can only be explained by the autonomisation of abstract labour. Postone perhaps goes a little too far in his identification of the Marx he reconstructs with Marx’s actual theoretical structure, which, to a far greater extent than Postone is willing to admit, also contains numerous elements that formed the basis for the later development of the “traditional” Marxism of the workers’ movement. The “critique of value”, formulated in Germany by Robert Kurz, Krisis and Exit!, makes a distinction between the “exoteric” part of Marx’s work—the theory of class struggle and the emancipation of workers, which eventually became a theoretical underpinning for the modernisation of capitalism at a time when the latter still had many pre-modern features—and an “esoteric” part, in which Marx analysed—especially in the first chapters of Capital—the very heart of commodity society: the double nature of labour and the representation of its abstract side in value and money.

The value described by Marx is far from being just a simple “economic” category. The radical break Marx made with the founders of bourgeois economics, Adam Smith and David Ricardo, consisted in the fact that he ceased to consider the representation of labour in a “value” as something neutral, natural and innocent.¹¹ It is not the concrete side of labour that is represented in value and therefore in a quantity of money, but its abstract side: the time alone taken to produce it. It is abstract labour that determines the value of a commodity. It is not the usefulness or the beauty of a table that constitutes its value, but the time employed in its production and that of its components. Abstract labour is by definition indifferent to all content and knows only quantity and its increase. The subordination of the lives of individuals and of all of humanity to the mechanisms of this accumulation without their even being aware of it, this is the “commodity fetishism” discussed by Marx.¹² This “fetishism” is by no means a simple mystification or veil, as is often thought. It can only be grasped properly in its anthropological dimension, which is reflected in the origin of the term: the projection of collective powers upon fetishes that man has himself created, but on which he thinks he depends. In a wholly objective and not just psychological sense, the commodity is the totem around which the inhabitants of modern society have organised their lives.

This autonomisation of value, and thus of economic rationality, exists only in capitalist society. This is what Marx described as the reversal of the formula “commodity-money-commodity” into “money-commodity-money”, and it can only exist in the form, “money-commodity-money”. Thus, the production of goods and services is no longer anything but a means, “a necessary evil” (Marx), for the transformation of a sum of money into a larger sum of money. Hence the “productivism” that is so characteristic of capitalism.

“Value” is not therefore limited to a particular sphere of social life. Instead, it is an “a priori form”, in an almost Kantian sense: in a commodity society, everything that exists is only perceived as a quantity of value and, as a result, as an amount of money. The transformation into value is interposed as a universal mediation between man and the world; once again in Kantian terms, value is the “synthesising principle” of the society based upon it.

This leads the critique of value to deny “historical materialism”’s claim to possess trans-historical validity and, at the same time, to reject the opposition between “base” (economy) and “superstructure”.¹³ On the one hand, commodity fetishism is a modern phenomenon; earlier societies were based on other forms of fetishism. Wherever labour was subordinated to an established social order and served above all to perpetuate existing social hierarchies, as in antiquity or the Middle Ages, it could not exert a self-constituting dynamic, as it later did by transforming itself into a system based on the tautological accumulation of units of dead labour and creating its own workforce. Yet even in a fully developed commodity society, there can be no question of the “primacy of the economy”. Value can instead be defined as a “total social form”, which allows us to bridge the gap between Marx and Mauss. The same logic which in very general terms consists of the subordination of quality to quantity and of the indifference of form with respect to concrete content, is present on all levels of social existence, even in the innermost recesses of the lives of those who live in a commodity society. The commodity-form is also a thought-form, as the German philosopher Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1899-1991) demonstrated.¹⁴ Ever since antiquity but particularly since the end of the Middle Ages, abstract and mathematical thought, as well as the abstract concept of time, have been both a consequence and a presupposition of the monetary and commodity economy, and there is no way to distinguish between what arose from the “base” and what arose from the “superstructure”.

It may be objected, however, that the critique of value, even if it does not conceive of value in a purely economic sense, always sees in it a “monist” principle according to which contemporary society is completely determined by value and, as a result, by the exchange of equivalents. There would be no place for the gift or for actions that are not tied to a calculation. Homo œconomicus is still well and truly there, only a more refined version. Actually, during its development the critique of value swiftly outstripped any such conception (which, furthermore, rendered unthinkable any positive escape from capitalism). Value does not exist, and cannot exist, except in a dialectical relationship with non-value, and this relation is necessarily antagonistic. Historically, commodity production long took place only in particular locations; it was limited to circumscribed sectors (the wool industry, for example). All the rest of production obeyed other laws because it was based on domestic production and direct appropriation (slavery, serfdom). The historical spread of capitalism has paralleled a gradual extension of commodity production to more and more sectors of life. After imposing itself on all industry and agriculture over the course of the nineteenth century, in the twentieth century it invaded everyday reproduction, above all in the form of “services”. Whether the food-processing industry or the marketing of child or elderly care, the development of the culture industry or the rise of therapeutic treatments: capital’s constant and insatiable need for new spheres of valorisation of value pushes it to “incorporate into the sphere of value” that which had previously been “of no value”. This “internal colonisation” of society has played at least as important a role as “external colonisation” in counteracting the endemic tendency of value production to grind to a halt due to the decreasing quantity of value “contained” in each particular commodity. This constant diminution is the result of technology that replaces living labour, which is the only source of commodity value.

The process of “incorporating into the sphere of value” what had not yet been subordinated to the logic of value has not come to an end, nor can it ever come to an end. Indeed, all these victories of commodification are so many Pyrrhic victories. By occupying and ruining spheres that had not yet been subjected to commodification, capital achieves a short-term resolution of its problems on the economic level. But it undermines its own foundations on the social level. Commodity logic, based on indifference to contents and consequences, is not viable as such. No society can be exclusively based on the logic of the commodity because the result would be the most complete anomie. A vast number of activities necessary for life, starting with children’s education, a love life or a modicum of mutual trust, cannot take place within the commodity logic of the exchange of equivalents and on the model of a contract. In order to function and enjoy a society in which it can develop, commodity logic needs a part of social life to develop according to non-mercantile criteria. At the same time, however, its blind fetishistic logic (and not the strategy of a mega-subject called the “capitalist class”) drives it to consume these spaces too. Value is not a “substance” that opens out, but a kind of “nothing” that feeds on the concrete world and consumes it. Whereas not just bourgeois thought, but even the quasi-totality of Marxism has accepted value as a fact of nature and argued in its name (the glory of the working class which “creates all values”!), the critique of value perceives it as a historically destructive and negative form. If capital ever succeeds in transforming everything into value, this success will also be its demise. Value is not the “totality”, a reality that embraces everything, something that needs to be appropriated, but is itself “totalitarian” in the sense that it tends to reduce everything to itself, but without managing entirely to do so. The totality only exists as a “broken totality”.

Thus, the critique of value claims to go much farther than other approaches that criticise economism, because it clearly delineates its causes. Even the critique of growth makes no sense if it is not connected to an analysis of the dynamism that is inherent to value, and of the crisis towards which that dynamism inevitably leads.¹⁵ Indeed, the prediction made throughout the last twenty years of a major crisis due to the fact that the internal limit of the system of valorisation has been reached, has constituted one of the fundamental aspects of the critique of value, and today this prediction has been largely confirmed.

The critique of value chimes therefore with the gift paradigm in the following sense: even within contemporary society, there are many aspects of life, and aspects without which life would be impossible, which do not take place in the form of an exchange of equivalents, which are not measurable as quantities of abstract labour, and which do not immediately serve the material interests of their creators. Value can only “function” because of the existence of non-value. As a result, reference may be made to a “dark side of value”, to its “hidden face”, like the dark side of the moon that is never seen but which, nonetheless, is there, and is just as large as the visible side.

However, the critique of value draws less optimistic conclusions from this insight than gift theorists. From the former’s point of view, the non-commodified sphere is not an alternative logic that flows beneath the victorious logic of the commodity and which, as such, can be mobilised to form the point of departure for a non-commodity society, or to set up an alternative on the fringes of the commodity sector. In commodity society, the non-commodified sphere only exists as a subordinated and mutilated sphere. It is not a sphere of freedom, but the despised yet nonetheless necessary servant of commodity splendour. It is not the opposite of value, but its presupposition. The sphere of value and the sphere of non-value together form the society of value. Even though non-commodified activities, like family life or cooperation between neighbours, are not the historical products of the logic of value, they have been successively absorbed by its sphere and now subsist as its auxiliary forces. They do not as such therefore constitute a “different” reality; they do not represent, in their current form, the basis for resistance to commodification. They are not the “non-alienated residue” (Theodor Adorno), nor what has escaped commodification. They also bear the marks of a fetishistic society. The woman who does unpaid housework, who neither creates nor receives value (in the economic sense, of course) is not, however, any less a part of socialisation through value. She ensures that “dark side” without which the production of value would not function, but which is not itself yet subject to the value form. The traditional housewife can only indirectly gain access to the sphere of value: by organising the everyday reproduction of the labour power of her husband and raising the labour power of the future. This sphere that is “dissociated” from value effectively obeys different rules: housework cannot be described in terms of “economic exploitation”, in the sense of the extraction of surplus value. Her labour is, however, functional, and even indispensable, for valorisation. Each of the two spheres is the precondition for the existence of the other.

The example of the housewife is not given here by chance: the distinction between the sphere of value and that of non-value coincides to a great degree with the traditional division of gender roles. The gradual expansion of commodity society that started at the end of the Middle Ages entailed the separation between labour that “creates” value, value that can be realised in the market, and other equally necessary, vital activities which cannot be translated, however, into a quantity of “value” and which therefore are not “labour”. On the one hand, the progressive accumulation of value, subject to a linear and historical logic and taking place in the public sphere; and on the other, the sphere of the reproduction of that labour power in private life, subject to an eternal cyclical logic: the non-commodified part of commodity society. Only participation in the sphere of labour allows access to a public existence and a role as a subject, while the domestic sphere retains a kind of quasi-natural quality, outside of history and all discussion. The sphere of value is the male’s, and the domestic sphere is the woman’s, who is thus excluded from all official decision-making power and from enjoying the status of “subject”. This is, of course, a matter of structural logic, and is not always associated with the biological gender of its agents. Throughout history, there have been women who have occasionally—and, in the last few decades, on a massive scale—taken part in the sphere of value as workers or presidents. On the other hand, males who take part in everyday reproduction, such as servants, and who were thus, like women, in a relation of personal dependence with their employers and not in a relation of anonymous dependence on a market that is ruled by contracts, were, like women, excluded from the public sphere (consequently when the right to vote was conceded to workers, it was not always given to domestic servants).

Masculine “values”¹⁶ are associated with the production of value: hard-heartedness towards oneself and others, determination, reason, calculation, agreement; while non-commodity activities are associated with feminine “values”: gentleness, understanding, emotion, gift, gratuitousness. This is not meant to imply that women “are” this way by nature, but that everything that does not find a place in the logic of value is projected into “femininity”. Men and women are both allowed, especially these days, to cross over to the other side, but always by assimilating the dominant values of that sphere. And it is obvious that these spheres are not just complementary, but hierarchical. A certain number of women can enter the masculine sphere, that of production and the management of value, but those activities considered to be “feminine” are still seen as inferior to “serious” matters. This is why Roswitha Scholz entitled the article published in issue no. 12 of Krisis in 1992, in which she formulated the theory of the relationship between value and what is separated from it, “Value Maketh Man”. Scholz summarises the problem as follows:

Because whatever value cannot appropriate, whatever is therefore separated from value, completely refutes the value-form’s claim to totality, this represents the ‘unsaid’ of the theory itself and is thus removed from the purview of the critique of value. Feminine activities of reproduction represent the reverse side of abstract labour. It is impossible to subsume them under the notion of ‘abstract labour’, as feminism has often done, which has largely reclaimed for its own use the positive category of labour that had previously been the domain of the Marxism of the workers’ movement. Among the separated activities that equally, but not exclusively, embrace the emotions, welfare, care for the sick and the handicapped, and also eroticism, sexuality, as well as ‘love’, there are also feelings, emotions and attitudes that are opposed to the rationality of ‘private enterprise’ which rules in the domain of abstract labour, and which oppose the category of labour, even if they are not completely exempt from a certain utilitarian rationality and Protestant norms.¹⁷

What conclusions does the critique of value draw from these considerations? There can be no question of demanding wages for “housewives”, because this would mean that only what is represented in a commodity value and therefore in money continues to be accorded social importance. Nor should the mere positive valorisation of this dissociated “dark side” be undertaken in the name of “difference”. Likewise, it would appear difficult to organise a sphere of the gift alongside the commodity sphere:¹⁸ what drives capital to conquer ever more spheres of valorisation is its internal dynamic and not the evil intentions of its managers, who could be tamed by political means. Capital will never be able to peacefully “live with” a sphere of the gift and of gratuity. The critique of value is well aware that there are social relations distinct from the exchange of equivalents and contractual relations that operate even within capitalist society. Nevertheless, it asserts that the emancipatory potential of these forms of relations can only be realised at the cost of an overall break with abstract labour as a form of autonomised and fetishistic social mediation. It is not therefore a question of complaining about some kind of “ungratefulness” on the part of the commodity system, which does not, for example, sufficiently acknowledge “business cooperation”. Perhaps, as Polanyi claims, reciprocity, redistribution and local markets could have coexisted in pre-capitalist societies; but the fully developed unregulated market—in which the transformation of labour into money and, as a result, the proliferation of abstract labour, becomes the sole purpose of social life—must destroy all other means of exchange, which in turn cannot be restored except at the price of a generalised transcendence of the concrete world’s subjection to its commodity form.

In conclusion, the critique of value and gift theory are among the forms of thought that pay most attention to one of the most dangerous aspects of the contemporary world: an increasing number of individuals and groups are becoming “superfluous” because they are “useless”. “Useless” from the point of view of utilitarianism and “useless” from the point of view of the valorisation of value. “In a society based on the duty to be useful, there is nothing worse than the sense of being superfluous”, says Alain Caillé,¹⁹ speaking of totalitarian regimes. But is it not the totalitarianism of commodity logic, based on labour, which is currently making increasingly large strata of humanity superfluous, and ultimately humanity itself? Is it even possible, without referring to the lethal rule of abstract value and abstract labour, to explain the fact that individuals have become perfectly interchangeable: an interchangeability that would form the link between utilitarianism and totalitarianism? In the absence of such a reference, is it possible to grasp the reductio ad unum that for utilitarians means all pleasures are comparable and therefore the same, being distinguishable only quantitatively, to the point that “the pleasure of listening to J. S. Bach” is no different from “the pleasure of eating a camembert”?²⁰

Notes

1.Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales [Movement for Anti-Utilitarianism in the Social Sciences]. Hence La Revue du MAUSS [The MAUSS Journal], the movement’s bi-annual journal.

2.“Easier to handle than Marx”, according to the lead article of the Revue du MAUSS semestrielle, no. 29, and more “based on consensus” (Alain Caillé, “Présentation”, in Revue du MAUSS semestrielle, no. 29, 2007, p. 28). Although Alain Caillé also says that “Marcel Mauss was, nonetheless, a great admirer of Marx and, as strange as it may seem, could reasonably be considered to be his principal heir” (Alain Caillé, Anthropologie du don: Le tiers paradigme [2000] [Anthropology of the Gift: The Third Paradigm] (Paris, La Découverte, 2007), p. 59.

3.The fact that Polanyi arrived at his conclusions on the basis of a theory that was quite different from that of Marx adds even more weight therefore to the negation of the trans-historical status of the economy: different lines of inquiry lead to the same result. It should however be pointed out that Polanyi attributes the labour theory of value to Marx, when it was in actual fact formulated by Ricardo. This theory is dismissed wholesale, moreover, by the Marxian critique of the twofold nature of labour, but Polanyi, like virtually all his contemporaries, read Marx exclusively through the lens of “orthodox” Marxism, according to which Marx had established the labour theory of value as the positive basis for the emancipation of the workers, and not as the object of a critique that aimed at its abolition.

4.György Lukács, tr. Rodney Livingstone, “The Changing Function of Historical Materialism” [1919], in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1983), p. 251. It should also be noted that three of the most innovative critical analyses of modern society appeared at the same time, in 1923-1924: Essay on the Gift by Mauss; History and Class Consciousness by Lukács; and Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value by Isaac Rubin, published in Moscow in 1924. The latter book was the most important rediscovery during its time of Marxian concepts that had been almost entirely forgotten, such as “abstract labour” and “fetishism”.

5.Alain Caillé, op. cit., p. 14. Caillé and Laville say that “market society and democracy are still incompatible” (Alain Caillé and Jean-Louis Laville, “Actualité de Karl Polanyi” [Karl Polyani’s Topicality], Revue du MAUSS semestrielle, no. 29, 2007, p. 100), but when they discuss the market or capitalism, they seem to have only neoliberalism in mind.

6.Postone, p. 166. See also the review of this fundamental work in Anselm Jappe, “Avec Marx, contre le travail” [With Marx, Against Labour], Revue Internationale des livres et des idées [International Journal of Books and Ideas], no. 13, September-October 2009.

7.After mentioning the fact that Polanyi “also emphasizes the historical uniqueness of modern capitalist society”, Moishe Postone criticises him for his “exclusive focus on the market” and for the fact that his approach is based on an “implicit social ontology”. According to Postone, for Polanyi it is only the transformation of human labour, land and money into commodities that characterises capitalism, while “the existence of labour products as commodities is, somehow, socially ‘natural’. This very common understanding differs from that of Marx, for whom nothing is a commodity ‘by nature’, and for whom the category of commodity refers to a historically specific form of social relations rather than to things, people, land or money” (Postone, p. 149).

8.Historians such as Moses Finley (The Ancient Economy [1973] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)) and Jean-Pierre Vernant (Myth and Thought Among the Greeks [1965] (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983)) have demonstrated this with respect to the ancient world.

9.In a fetishistic society, a methodological holism like that of Durkheim is therefore closer to the truth than any “methodological individualism”, even though it ontologises what pertains to a particular historical formation.

10.Jacques Godbout and Alain Caillé, tr. Donald Winkler, The World of the Gift [1992] (Ithaca: McGill-Queens University Press, 1998), pp. 17-18.

11.The Marxian critique of the exchange of equivalents, furthermore, would make no sense if this exchange was not implicitly contrasted with other possible forms of circulation.

12.Robert Kurz summarises this concept as follows: “Fetishism has become self-reflexive and constitutes, for this reason alone, abstract labour as a machine that is its own end for itself. Henceforth, fetishism no longer ‘extinguishes’ itself in use value, but presents itself in the form of the autonomous movement of money, as the transformation of a quantity of abstract, dead labour into another—larger—quantity of abstract, dead labour (surplus value), and thus as a tautological movement of the reproduction and self-reflection of money, which becomes capital—and thus modern—only in this form” (Robert Kurz, Der Kollaps der Modernisierung: Vom Zusammenbruch des Kasernensozialismus zur Krise der Weltökonomie [The Collapse of Modernisation: From the Downfall of Barracks Socialism to the Crisis of the World Economy] (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 1991), p. 18.

13.As already noted above, the critique of value is not concerned with an attempt to determine “what Marx really said” or meant to say, and thus admits that passages can be found in Marx that contradict our interpretations; for example, with respect to the universality of economic rationality. Instead, what the critique of value is attempting to do is to set about the elaboration of the conceptual core of the most innovative and important Marxian intuitions.

14.See Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1977).

15.See infra “Degrowthers, One More Effort…!”

16.On this one occasion we are using the word “value” in the ordinary sense of “behavioural norm”, while in other cases our use of the term denotes only “the value of a commodity”. But it is obvious that there is a connection between their different meanings.

17.Roswitha Scholz, “Remarques sur les notions de ‘valeur’ et de ‘dissociation-valeur’” [Remarks on the Ideas of ‘Value’ and ‘Value-Dissociation’], Illusio, no. 4-5 (2007), p. 561. This article is a translation of the first chapter of Das Geschlecht des Kapitalismus: Feministische Theorien und die postmoderne Metamorphose des Patriarchats [The Sex of Capitalism: Feminist Theories and the Postmodern Transformation of the Patriarchate] (Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 2000). See also, in the same issue of Illusio, Johannes Vogele, “Le côté obscur du capital: ‘Masculinité’ et ‘féminité’ comme piliers de modernité” [The Dark Side of Capital: ‘Masculinity’ and ‘Femininity’ as Pillars of Modernity].

18.On this subject see the long-running correspondence between André Gorz and some proponents of the critique of value published in the Austrian journal, Streifzüge.

19.Caillé, p. 246.

20.Ibid., p. 239.

“Common Decency” or Corporatism? Observations on the Work of Jean-Claude Michéa

Some contend that capitalism, also known as the market economy plus democracy, is, despite its crises, undergoing an historical stage of great expansion. Others, that these victories are nothing but a forward flight that masks a situation which is growing increasingly precarious by the day. In any case, the signs are that we are living at a time that is quite unlike any other. This seems to be obvious to everyone except those who have made the critique of capitalism their stock-in-trade. There had been indications that the final demise of “state socialism” in 1989 might also put an end to the type of Marxism that was associated, in one way or another, with the “accelerated modernisation” that went on in the “workers’ states”. The field then seemed clear for the formulation of a new social critique, one that was equal to postmodern capitalism and able to re-examine basic questions. But the accelerated impoverishment of the middle classes, a development that almost no one had foreseen, has given a new and unexpected lease of life to the kind of criticism that merely blames the capitalist system for presiding over unfair distribution and producing collateral damage, without ever seriously questioning its very existence, or the type of life it imposes. Often relying on the most obsolete concepts from traditional Marxism, ballot-box Trotskyists, Negrists and other citizenists enter their pleas for a different way of managing industrial capitalist society. In their eyes, social critique boils down to a dualism between exploiters and exploited, rulers and ruled, conservatives and progressives, left and right, good and evil, i.e. nothing new under the sun. The battlefronts are ever the same. A Karl Marx reduced to a purger of “immoral profits” is thus enjoying a comeback in full media glare. The financial crisis of 2008 has given a whole new impetus to this explanation of the world.

Fortunately, on the fringes of this media-electoral confrontation between liberalism and the “anti-globalisation” movement—which is often nothing but a modernised version of social democracy—other forms of social critique have begun to be formulated. Free of the obligation to issue slogans that draw in the masses, some authors have been specifically focusing their critiques on the real condition of subjects created by capitalism and have challenged the myth of a left, or a far left, heroically opposed to capital which is ever seeking to roll back the “victories” of “workers” or “minorities”. Despite their very great differences, and even their opposition on numerous points, elements of this viewpoint can be seen in authors like Luc Boltanski, Serge Latouche (and, more generally, in authors allied to the “degrowth” movement), Dany-Robert Dufour, Annie Lebrun, Jaime Semprun and Jean-Claude Michéa, just to mention the French authors. Their sources vary widely, ranging from Situationist ideas to Lacanian psychoanalysis, from Surrealism to ecology.

What characterises these authors is that they have not elaborated their theories on the basis of a resumption of the critique of political economy, as the critique of value and of commodity fetishism has done. How then can the critique of value’s point of view help to understand the importance and the limitations of these unprecedented forms of social critique? To set the ball rolling, the following remarks seek to analyse some aspects of Jean-Claude Michéa’s work. An author with no university or media affiliations, he has over the last fifteen years garnered an increasingly wide readership.¹ Beginning with his first books on George Orwell and on the “teaching of ignorance”, Michéa has set out a very original social critique, above all because it also includes a robust critique of the entire left, which he accuses of being “liberal” and of jettisoning any truly anti-capitalist point of view. Not only does his work contain wholly unarguable aspects, but thankfully includes genuinely new vistas for an understanding of the “apocalypse of our time”. From the point of view of the critique of value, however, his work also contains some expositions of a highly contentious nature. And this is a good sign for the new conditions of critique: there is no longer a sliding scale for determining whether one idea is close to or divorced from another, no more compulsory membership of some intellectual coterie or other’s rule that those who share opinions on “a” must necessarily share them on “b”.

To any left-wing militant, Michéa’s main idea can only seem like a red rag: he describes “the left” as a form of liberalism. Yet this caustic observation is in point of fact essential for grasping the history of capitalism. It is a view to which the critique of value also subscribes: the first part of my study Les Aventures de la marchandise posits that through part of his work (the “exoteric” part), Karl Marx was “the theorist of modernisation, the ‘dissident of political liberalism’ (Kurz), a representative of the Enlightenment who sought to perfect industrial society under the leadership of the proletariat”.² Michéa is right to emphasise the fact that capitalism is not by nature conservative and that the bourgeois mentality is not the same thing as capitalism. He offers a sharp analysis of the contribution that many of the post-1968 left’s actions have made to capitalist modernisation, such as the cult of youth, nomadic lifestyles and unaffiliated individuals without qualities (whose best-known advocate was Gilles Deleuze).³ He points out the ambiguities of the “philosophy of suspicion” and “hero trashing” and draws attention to the devastation caused by contemporary education. At the same time there is the sense that his critique of the Enlightenment is always carried out in the name of the “modern project of emancipation” and has nothing to do with some nostalgic yearning for a bygone world and its social order; a yearning that is beginning to spread even to some recesses of “anti-industrial” critique. The author argues against the belief that the growth of productive forces will transform relations of production in an emancipatory sense and rightly sees in the theories of Antonio Negri and his followers an avatar of this two-hundred-year-old illusion.⁴ Finally, Michéa’s great strength is to lay stress on moral reform in order to escape the quagmire of commodity society. This theme is rarely addressed by those who fancy themselves to be enemies of the system, because the moral imperative assumes that each person is able to make a personal effort to effect a partial escape from the system and should therefore do so, instead of imagining themselves to be its mere victims. Like that of his main inspiration, Christopher Lasch (author of The Culture of Narcissism),⁵ Michéa’s best work has a genuine air of wisdom about it where the personal and the universal meet.

However, Jean-Claude Michéa’s theories give rise to at least two major objections. The first concerns his refusal to recognise the centrality of the critique of political economy for understanding capitalist society. The second, which to some extent derives from this refusal, relates to the central position that the concepts of “common decency” and “the people” occupy in his thinking.

It is commonly recognised that “historical materialism” constitutes one of the pillars of Karl Marx’s thought and of Marxism in general. This assertion is not false, even though Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels subsequently undertook a deeper exploration of the first, somewhat simplistic, definitions that appeared in their earlier works, The German Ideology and The Poverty of Philosophy, to which Michéa refers.⁶ The materialist explanation of history represented a major break with all previous historiography, and a certain one-sidedness, which historical materialism has always retained even with regard to Marx himself, is also due to this need to vigorously uphold a completely new viewpoint. The fossilisation of Marx’s work in latter-day Marxism, which had become the official ideology of a workers’ movement now acting within basic capitalist categories that had ceased to be challenged, equally transformed its original materialist insight into an article of faith and into an obsessive denunciation of “bourgeois idealism”. But, contrary to what Michéa thinks,⁷ the materialist explanation of history is not logically identical to belief in the benefits of progress about which Marx had begun to express doubts towards the end of his life. If anything, historical materialism goes hand in glove with the “base” versus “superstructure” schema, according to which the activities of material production and reproduction, on the one side, and all the rest of human existence, on the other, have a cause and effect relation to each other. Economic activity is thus held to be always and everywhere at the centre of human life. The acknowledgement of the undeniable importance of other factors, such as language, psychology or religion, has earned Marxism, and Marx himself, the reproach ever since of “economism”, and has impelled many intellectuals who were initially inspired by Marx to relegate Marxism to the status of an “auxiliary science”, still useful for understanding certain economic mechanisms, but absolutely inadequate for grasping the complexity of modern life.

The critique of value has made a radical break with the dichotomy between base and superstructure, not in the name of a so-called “plurality” of factors, but by basing itself on the Marxian critique of fetishism. Commodity fetishism is not a false consciousness or a mystification, but a form of total social existence, which comes before all separations between material reproduction and mental factors because it determines the very forms of thought and action. It shares these features with other forms of fetishism, such as religious consciousness. It could thus be considered as an a priori; one that is not, however, ontological, as in Kant, but historical and subject to development. This investigation into the general codes of each historical epoch also preserves, against the fragmentation introduced by the poststructuralist and postmodernist ways of perceiving the world, a unitary viewpoint. The development of this approach has only just begun, but a facet of its heuristic potential may be instanced in the way it allows the emergence of capitalism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to be viewed:⁸ there is a link between the origins of a positive view of labour in monasteries throughout the Middle Ages, the substitution of “abstract time” for “concrete time” (and the production of the first clocks), technological innovations and the invention of firearms; the latter was the cause of the nascent state’s enormous need for money, which powered the transformation of subsistence economies into monetary economies. Against this background it is impossible to establish a hierarchy between “ideal” factors (the concept of time, the work mind-set) and material or technological factors. Equally, there was no mere convergence of independent elements. Here, the ability to abstract and quantify seems to produce this fetishism, this a priori code, this general form of consciousness in whose collective absence the technological innovations or geographical discoveries would not have had the same impact; and vice versa.

This “supersession” of historical materialism—amounting to a veritable Aufhebung in the Hegelian sense—is no easy task; rather it ranks as a long-term project. Unfortunately, the perfectly justified rejection of the materialist vulgate has led many people, since the 1960s, simply to adopt the alternative to the traditional dilemma and return to “idealist” forms of historical explanation. This was the case in the work of Michel Foucault and his “epistemes” from nowhere, together with deconstruction, which sees nothing but “discourses” in operation. Michéa, too, is anxious to put clear water between himself and “historical materialism”.⁹ Apparently therefore capitalism and liberal society happen to exist because somebody or other dreamt them up and because somebody else set about putting these ideas into practice. According to Michéa, capitalism is “first and foremost a metaphysics (and only subsequently the actually existing system engendered by the political will to experience this metaphysics)”.¹⁰ He writes: “I maintain, in fact, that the historical movement that has profoundly transformed modern societies must be fundamentally understood as the logical accomplishment (or the truth) of the liberal political project, as this has been gradually defined since the seventeenth century”.¹¹ In Michéa’s view, liberalism was sought after before it was put into practice, and for over two centuries the “Western political elites” undertook “to materialise dogmas on a worldwide scale”.¹²

There is nothing wrong of course in stressing the fact that capitalism possesses metaphysical roots and that it is not, as its own hype would have it, just a rational project for world domination that emerged from the Enlightenment and, by definition, lay beyond all metaphysics and all religion. On the contrary, it is demonstrable that economic value and its permanent self-valorisation have not only replaced the old gods to whom sacrifices had to be made, but also that value—and therefore labour, capital and money—are directly rooted in ancient metaphysics. They are, to a large extent, secularisations of what presented itself in former times as overtly religious. Walter Benjamin was one of the first people to reflect on this subject.¹³

However, Michéa has a completely different take on things: he asserts that the preconditions for the emergence of capitalism had already been assembled at various points throughout history and that capitalism is therefore not the “ineluctable consequence of the degree of objective development”,¹⁴ since a particular “political and philosophical configuration” was also necessary.¹⁵ He does not, however, describe an impersonal process, in which the organisation of society and ideas are the two sides of the same fetishistic form, but presents us with a philosophy that, according to him, was capable of reshaping reality. His theory is clearly set out thus: the horrors of the Wars of Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ushered in the liberal project of constructing a society that no longer asked men to be good, but only that they abide by certain rules enabling them to pursue their own interests. A problem arises, however, at this juncture: if a century of massacres in the name of religion serves indeed to explain the genesis of the philosophies of Hobbes or Spinoza, it by no means explains the persistence of this way of thought once the Wars of Religion were over. Had the trauma lingered on? History demonstrates, nonetheless, that ideas quickly fade once the context that ushered them in disappears. When liberalism began to win its first victories, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were many more pressing issues in people’s minds than the Wars of Religion. There are two possibilities: either liberalism was victorious because it was “in line” with the “needs” of capital, once the latter had become the predominant form of social reproduction; or else a deciding role must be attributed to ideas and “elites” who were able to impose them by force or deceit. This second possibility leads to an explanation of capitalism as a permanent conspiracy of evil masters against the good people. Michéa explicitly rejects “conspiracy theories” but it is worth pondering whether they might not in fact be sneaking into his conception of history by the back door.

To the role played by ideas—for example, the “project […] of organizing humanity scientifically”,¹⁶ which Michéa describes as an extremely important factor in the formation of the Soviet Union—the same argument that Michéa quite rightly uses against those who attribute a decisive role to technological invention (and who are not solely of a Marxist hue, cf. Marshall McLuhan) may be applied: inventions like the steam engine were made at several points in history, but had to await the advent of all the other social and “psychological” preconditions that were necessary in order for them to be adopted and develop their full potential. This argument also applies to ideas: why did an idea that existed, or could have existed, over a long period of time suddenly begin to play its historical role at this precise moment? Tommaso Campanella desired that scientist-priests run his “City of the Sun”.

Finally, Michéa is right to criticise the retrospective application of modern economic categories to pre-capitalist societies, as Friedrich Engels did in his later work. But “historical materialism” did not only emerge in modern society, it speaks the truth about this society too: capitalist development itself has directly or indirectly managed to subject the totality of human existence to economic imperatives by creating ideologies and spheres of life that must ensure the operation of the economic machine. The totalitarianism of the commodity has therefore realised the materialism proclaimed by Marxism. This observation rings truest when it is borne in mind that the rule of the capitalist economy is not some ethically unfair yet rational and practical project; if anything the latter is the quintessence of the irrational and of self-destruction. Those who denounce Marx’s “economism” believe that they have discovered a shortcoming in Marx’s theory, when in reality they are closing their eyes to the principal defect of capitalist reality: its “actually existing economism”.

The entire critique of political economy is often thrown out with the bathwater of “economism”. For a social critique that seeks to be radical, it is fundamental to recognise that the basic categories of capitalist society—commodity, value, labour, money, capital, competition, market, growth—pertain exclusively to capitalist modernity, and are not indispensable elements of all social life. However, criticising the dominant ideas and believing that the system functions essentially by manipulating people’s consciousness does not go far enough. The critique of the “economic representation of the world”¹⁷ is of the highest priority according to Michéa; but it is not just a matter of “representation”, that is, of the predominance of the economy in people’s minds. The real domination of the economy, which affects those who abhor it too, needs overthrowing above all else. Noticeably common within “dissenting” circles is the belief that a crisis of capitalism would occur if only it lost its subjects’ approval.¹⁸ However, the environmental crisis clearly points up the complete dissociation between consciousness and what the impersonal mechanisms of competition force us to do on a daily basis. These lines of argument—not to mention theories of deconstruction, which see action in the sphere of representations as the only possible form of action since representations are the only reality—always end up taking us back to that famous sentence in the foreword to The German Ideology, where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels make fun of the Young Hegelians (the real missing link between sophists and postmodernists) who believed that men drown because they fail to jettison the idea of gravity…

This absence of any grounding in the critique of political economy (even if Michéa relates that Marx criticised political economy) finally leads Michéa to disregard the critique of the subject and the critique of labour. While he provides a spirited description of the miserable forms of contemporary subjectivity, especially among young people, he clings to a simple dichotomy between the liberal logic of capital (in which he lumps the “actually existing” left together with the far left, an analysis that counts among his most robust), on the one hand, and subjects, the “people” and “democracy”, on the other. Now for the second point in our critique.

While the polemical part of Michéa’s analyses is convincing for the most part, the alternatives he proposes are much less so. This is a fate he shares, almost by necessity, with all those who seek to offer a “solution” to the evils they describe. He knows well that his defence of “populism” is open to multiple criticisms. Nonetheless, drawing attention, as Michéa does, to the “bad press” currently surrounding this concept does not yet prove that it is good.

First of all, the claim that “basic human virtues […] are still commonly found among the popular classes”¹⁹ can only run up against a multitude of empirical observations. The fact that Michéa, following George Orwell, avoids giving any clear definition of his key concept of “common decency” is not enough to shield it from all criticism. The assertion that “ordinary people” used to, or still do, act with a minimum of moral probity in their everyday lives can indeed be borne out in concrete examples although these cannot be said to be the rule judging by the number of flagrant exceptions to them. Where was the common decency of the Germans during the 1930s? Or of the Russians in Stalin’s time? Might the answer go that by then these societies were largely worn away by the modern logic of personal interest? But, in that case, where was the decency of the Spaniards in the seventeenth century? It is hard to imagine a more indecent society than the one described by Francisco de Quevedo in El Buscón [The Swindler].

Decency does of course exist in traditional societies—in the form of solidarity, mutual aid, generosity, and an attitude of not harming others—even if it is often the concern for one’s own reputation that engenders it. It could be defined as competition held partly in abeyance within the group and as a privileging of the gift over commodity exchange. The problem is that this decency is often practised only within the group, and withheld from outsiders. Frequently, it is not extended to foreigners or to transients: with them there is no “chain of gifting”, no gift reciprocity. It sometimes looks as though this decency only functions on the condition that it is not generalised, and even that it is inversely proportional to its generalisability.²⁰ There are groups within which a certain degree of “human warmth”, extended on occasion to visitors, is accompanied by the most extreme maliciousness towards other groups. At times, such a propensity bestows a certain ambiguous charm on the southerners of some countries, in France as in Italy, and in Spain or in the United States. Solidarity and the spirit of gift-giving within a collective can be transformed beyond their original context into corporatism and, in the most extreme cases, into mafia-like behaviour, especially in the cases of certain ethnic or religious minorities. Even the bandits of the past had their codes of honour which amounted to ways of being “decent” among themselves.²¹ Nowadays, the many forms of ultra-selfishness exhibited by certain “communities” (the xenophobic Lega is perhaps the only modern-day Italian political party to have emerged not from the higher echelons of society but in the bars) are based on the alleged defence that they provide against “stranger danger”, to wit those with whom no relationship based on mutual trust and therefore “decency” is possible.²²

It would be nice to think that the process of humanisation largely consists in the deepening, internalisation and generalisation of this decency first observed within circumscribed communities (and normally based on some form of birthright), but examples of this are few and far between. It is true that these positive attitudes still exist. Most people carry out actions on a daily basis that, from the strictly liberal angle of “self-interest”, ought to be judged useless and harmful. Such actions do not, however, necessarily constitute an “alternative” to the commodity economy, because the latter could not exist for very long if a significant part of the business of everyday life was not carried out in this non-commodified form. These non-commodified activities, albeit integrated in the commodity system as its invisible foundation, finally lend themselves to being recuperated in the form of the “retirement sector”, volunteer work, community service, etc., mere caretaking that ensures that everything stays just the way it is. The obvious risk here is that well-intentioned homilies on the gift, self-management and the alternative niche economy ultimately serve no other purpose than the creation of alternative modes of survival that remain totally subordinated to the perpetuation of the commodity disaster.

On the other hand, Michéa can be wholly approved when he says that the task at hand is not to forge a “new man”, one free of vices and human limitations, but to create contexts within which the desire for power of the “Robert Macaires”²³ of this world can only find an outlet in harmless activities.²⁴ Nevertheless, what should be explained—and combated—in social life is not so much the desire for power and wealth on the part of some people—which, as such, is not in the slightest bit mysterious—but the passivity of others. Michéa does in fact wonder why there is so little opposition to such a catastrophic world and lays the blame for this at the door of the left, which can only think in terms of technological progress and despises the virtues of ordinary people. Although true enough, this is too cursory an explanation.

His assertions about the historical role of the left have features in common with analyses of the workers’ movement that describe it as an immanent factor of capitalist expansion, analyses that have been put forward by theoreticians of the critique of value. Michéa, however, wants to draw a sharp dividing line between the “left” and the “original workers’ movement”. According to him, the left is “metaphysically” in favour of progress and modernisation, because it regards itself as the heir of the Enlightenment and as the party of change. But—he claims—liberal individualism is the only consistent development of the Enlightenment, and the left merely seeks to “regulate” the details. Conversely, Michéa has it that working-class socialism emerged as an opposition to modernity and absolute individualism, to atomisation and to the dissolution of communities. It was especially at variance with Saint-Simonism from which the progressivist left originates. It was around the time of the Dreyfus Affair that working-class socialism—which was more Proudhonian than Marxist—united with the republican and liberal left, for whom progress is necessarily emancipatory. This historic compromise was again sealed with the advent of the French Popular Front. Michéa contends that the benefits of this alliance are now superseded, and all that subsequently remains of the left is acquiescence to the economy.

For Michéa, the alternative to liberalism and the left is found in that “original socialism” about which he writes in glowing terms. However, the role played by anti-Semitism in Fourier and Proudhon is not something that can be overlooked. It cannot be put down merely to an “error” due to the “spirit of the times”. The first socialists also expressed, alongside many sensible things, the belief that “we”—the people, the honest workers, the masses—are pure and good, and that everything bad comes from the activities of others (Jews, Freemasons) situated for the most part in the sphere of circulation (merchants, speculators). Thus one’s own status as a worker, which, on the contrary, formed the basis for decency, was never seriously questioned. The request was merely for more “decent” working conditions.

Regardless of Michéa’s views on the matter, there does indeed exist a far-left populism today whose anti-capitalism boils down to invectives against company directors’ “obscene wealth” and to the defence of “honest workers” against finance capital and unearned income. This leftist populism could very well soon find an outlet in the hounding of city “traders” that would only end up reinforcing the system’s “automatic subject”. During the financial crisis of 2008 we could already see some symptoms of this: everyone, on the left as much as on the right, agreed that it was the fault of evil bankers, not capitalism as such. It could also, more innocently, merely ask to no avail for “capitalism with a human face”: a more decent commodity society that abjures certain excesses. To condemn, as Michéa does, “obscene” wealth already presupposes the acceptance of “decent” commodity wealth, even though the latter can only go on to assume obscene proportions. Even left-wing and right-wing politicians are now condemning the “obscene bonuses” of top managers, which implies, nevertheless, that rather more “decent” “golden handshakes” would be acceptable.²⁵ Here Michéa, like Christopher Lasch, seems to believe in the possibility of a self-limiting capitalism. His quotation from the American anarchist author Paul Goodman is therefore highly significant: what kind of social change is he thinking about, if it means that people can simply “go back to the things that matter, their professions, sports, and friendships”,²⁶ and therefore, also, to the same useless and destructive activities they engaged in before?

Faced with the current overall deterioration of living conditions, it could indeed be argued that the mere defence, or preservation, of ways of life in society that were still common enough fifty years ago, even though there was nothing harmonious about them, should now be looked on as the “lesser evil”. But are these modest goals “realistic”? Could “less obscene” stages of capitalism be regained? Is this not in fact the agenda of the “anti-globalisation” movement or of the late Pierre Bourdieu, against whom Michéa rightly argues? But if the “Fordist-Keynesian” compromise of the post-war era has given way to today’s “turbo-capitalism”, this is not only thanks to the bosses’ hunger for “obscene” profits, but essentially due to the dynamism of capitalist value which at no point brooks any cessation at a given level.

The pages devoted to the crucial roles that “seduction” and the cult of “transgression” play in contemporary domination are among the most outstanding in all of Michéa’s work. However, even these would have benefited too from a deeper reflection on the basic categories of capitalism, since this is key to understanding that capitalism is not at liberty to continue indefinitely in the form of an affluent society. The stagnation of capitalist accumulation on a world scale—inevitable in a competitive market—creates a context of crisis in which the carrot is accompanied more and more often by the time-honoured stick. Capitalism cannot be identified solely with the state, the market, the party of law and order, or with transgressiveness. It is always the dialectical unity of both. Michéa is well aware that today’s capitalism is not triumphant and that, on the contrary, it is undermining its own foundations. Like so many other commentators, however, he sees this as essentially a crisis of recognition, rather than as a gradual implosion of the foundations of value accumulation. “Seduction” is, above all, a matter of competition between capitalist enterprises that are fighting over consumers’ money. But the system as such does not function because it can count on the consent of its subjects, but because it renders any other alternative impossible. It is therefore a mistake to believe that its main concern lies in exerting charm or concealing its real nature. Everyone knows that it is industrial society that is creating a hole in the ozone layer, but this same industrial society has established itself as the only possible form of existence from which an exit no longer even appears conceivable other than in the form of absolute catastrophe.

The old authoritarianism, as well as certain forms of power that seemed to have had their day, still play a much bigger role than either Jean-Claude Michéa or Dany-Robert Dufour would like to admit. Italy is one of the centres of world capitalism, but the Catholic Church is far from participating solely in rear-guard actions on Italian soil. In 2007, it summoned two million people onto the streets to protest against the mere proposal that legislation similar to the French “PACS”²⁷ should be passed in Italy (and open to heterosexual couples only), a proposal that was immediately withdrawn by the Prodi government. In this case as in so many others, “radical” critique is mistaken if it thinks that the left is necessarily the most convenient solution for capital because it would ensure greater support. If the left was more “in tune” with capital, how then can the resurgence of the right, indeed of the most aggressive and at times ultra-reactionary right in most Western countries, be explained?

Similarly, the system does not hypocritically praise the virtues of the family just to make a concession to “popular values” as Michéa likes to think:²⁸ the family, even though it is an obviously pre-modern structure, and however much it may constitute an obstacle to the total pliability of today’s workers, is not merely some archaic remnant. It is also the most important element of the “dark side” of commodity logic which encompasses activities that do not directly enter into the production of value and are therefore not immediately “profitable”, but without which profitable production could not take place. Not even the most postmodern capitalism could ever manage to do without the family.

It is true that the term “conservative” has today acquired a different meaning to the one it once had and that it is often a matter of defending—and preserving—the minimum conditions for human life. However, in this undertaking no reliance on those that political terminology dubs “conservatives” will be possible. There is no, or no longer, such thing as an “enlightened” conservative, or one who, at the very least, sticks to their own professed principles. What little resistance to mindlessness there is can nonetheless still be found among people termed “leftists”. A most basic measure of decency could take the form, say, of not dumping one’s children in front of the television or PlayStation.

Where might the human energies be found that could save us from Adam Smith Blind Alley?²⁹ Jean-Claude Michéa’s observations on the negative role of resentment are quite appropriate. Yet if only psychologically healthy people can bring about revolution or implement worthwhile change,³⁰ we really are in a pickle, and capitalism will have discovered a foolproof way of going on forever. Indeed, each and every moment sees capitalism create the mindset that renders all escape from it so difficult.

Notes

1.His main publications: Jean-Claude Michéa, Orwell, anarchiste tory [Orwell, Tory Anarchist] (Paris: Climats, 1995); L’Enseignement de l’ignorance et ses conditions modernes [The Teaching of Ignorance and Its Modern Conditions] (Paris: Climats, 1999); Impasse Adam Smith: Brèves remarques sur l’impossibilité de dépasser le capitalisme sur sa gauche [Adam Smith Blind Alley: Notes on the Impossible Left-Flank Supersession of Capitalism] (Paris: Climats, 2002); Orwell éducateur [Orwell as Educationalist] (Paris: Climats, 2003); tr. David Fernbach, The Realm of Lesser Evil [2007] (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009); La double pensée: Retour sur la question libérale [Doublethink: Liberalism Revisited] (Paris: Champs-Flammarion, 2008).

2.Jappe, Les Aventures de la marchandise, p. 12.

3.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are still regarded in many circles as ultra-subversive thinkers. In reality they serve as classic examples of how libertarians morphed into liberals between 1970 and 1990. Regardless of what their subjective intentions may have been, they were elite representatives of a seemingly ultra-radical critique that went well beyond traditional politics and appeared to be “tuned in” to the most deep-seated aspirations of the post-’68 era, but which turned out in the end to have been a warm-up for the “new spirit of capitalism”, i.e. for postmodern capitalism. Indeed, Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello often quote them in their book, The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999), op. cit. But in order to obtain a particularly striking confirmation of the “modernising” role played by the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, one need only log on to the virtual reality called Second Life. This kind of “game”, which was all the rage a few years ago (and which has nothing subversive about it in anyone’s eyes: the Church, political parties and multinationals have created their own official avatars for it), achieves an extreme realisation of the reputedly transgressive desires of the postmodern subject crystallised in the Anti-Oedipus era: permanent nomadism, the abolition of space and instant travel anywhere, the opportunity to choose one’s gender at any moment, the abolition of age and ageing, immortality and invulnerability, the absence of annoying physical needs (eating, drinking, sleeping), the non-existence of arduous activities, a permanent holiday and party mood… This infinite and thoroughly “deterritorialised” world does however have one important limitation not unreminiscent of the reality of First Life: everything, even the acquisition of sexual organs (since the avatar provided free at the outset is asexual, a veritable “organless body”), has to be paid for, beginning with real money (credit cards are accepted), which can then miraculously mount up through various virtual activities. No actual trench digging or factory work is involved of course, rather the offering of “services” ranging from real estate deals to prostitution to other avatars is the basic principle. Indeed, the abolition of space is relative: while travel is even faster and cheaper here than with Ryanair, the earth is nonetheless finite and, in order to find accommodation or undertake any activity, land must be bought payable in Linden dollars (as with all currencies, the exchange rate with real dollars changes from day to day). In addition, the free play of desires is just as relative: no harassment of other avatars is allowed, only the establishment of relationships on a consensual basis in return for payment at some point. It is true that the latter aspect was missing from the original celebration of “desiring machines”, but this is always the problem with the “small print” that tends to be overlooked before signing up… Second Life is not just an extremely accurate depiction of the capitalist economy (it is easy to understand), but also of contemporary life in general: the absence of the most natural, biological and physical limits, and the hyper-presence of the limits created by society. Just like in reality, it is possible to give birth at the age of sixty, change sex or have a whole-face graft, but money is required upfront even to bed down somewhere.

4.Concerning Antonio Negri, see Anselm Jappe and Robert Kurz, Les habits neufs de l’Empire: Remarques sur Negri, Hardt et Rufin [The Empire’s New Clothes: Remarks on Negri, Hardt and Rufin] (Paris: Lignes/Léo Scheer, 2003).

5.Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, op. cit.

6.Michéa, The Realm of Lesser Evil, p. 40.

7.Ibid., p. 44.

8.Jean-Claude Michéa also proposes to explain the emergence of this “western exception”, but he situates its genesis in the seventeenth century, which is certainly too late. See ibid., p. 6.

9.Ibid., p. 44.

10.Michéa, Adam Smith, p. 130.

11.Michéa, The Realm of Lesser Evil, pp. 1-2.

12.Ibid., p. 43. It should also be pointed out that today’s liberals would balk at thinkers like Alexis de Tocqueville. Some of the latter’s considerations must be reckoned among the best warnings ever pronounced against the dangers posed by the “soft” totalitarianism of a wholly liberal commodity society.

13.See Walter Benjamin, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings, “Capitalism as Religion” [1921], Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume I, 1913-1926 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996).

14.Michéa, Adam Smith, p. 63.

15.Ibid., p. 64.

16.Michéa, The Realm of Lesser Evil, p. 43.

17.Michéa, Adam Smith, p. 53.

18.Jean-Claude Michéa’s assertion that “the highly developed capitalist system would collapse all at once [!] if individuals ceased the constant, mass internalisation of the fanciful prospect of unlimited growth, technological progress and consumption as a way of life and basis of one’s self-image” thus comes across as doubtful to say the least (“Conversation with Jean-Claude Michéa”, À contretemps [Out of Time], no. 31, July 2008, p. 8, included in La double pensée, op. cit.). Michéa also claims quite correctly that “we are completely free to criticise the movie that the system has decided to screen for us […] but we have absolutely no right at all to change the script” (ibid., p. 10).

19.Michéa, The Realm of Lesser Evil, p. 129.

20.On the question of the potential generalisation of indigenous movements and the demands of traditional groups more generally, see Luis Bredlow, “Notes sur la résistance, la tradition et l’indigénisme” [Notes on Resistance, Tradition and Indigenousness], Illusio (Caen), no. 6/7, 2010, pp. 257-261 [originally published in Spanish: “Apuntes sobre resistencia, tradición, indigenismo”, Etcétera, no. 43 (2008), pp. 33-36].

21.It would perhaps be fairer to say that decency can be found everywhere and in all social strata, but always as an exception. This is the meaning of Victor Hugo’s novel Ninety-Three.

22.One could criticise this use of terms such as “solidarity”, “human warmth” or “dignity” as synonyms for common decency. But the deliberate vagueness of Jean-Claude Michéa’s use of the term makes such shifts in meaning unavoidable.

23.A literary figure of the nineteenth century, the very image of the cynical arriviste.

24.It is worth recalling here the fact that in Gypsy communities, the “richest” person is generally not the one with the most but the one who gives the most to others.

25.It is almost comical that when Jean-Claude Michéa wishes to provide an example of “indecency”, he cites a luxury restaurant for dogs and cats. Frankly, even the likes of Nicolas Sarkozy would probably agree that this is a bit over the top!

26.Michéa, The Realm of Lesser Evil, p. 113.

27.PACS [Pacte Civil de Solidarité], a form of civil union.

28.Michéa, The Realm of Lesser Evil, p. 75.

29.Michéa, Adam Smith, op. cit.

30.“From the moment that socialist struggle draws on the support of the common decency of ‘ordinary people’, it assumes, as Camus emphasised, the ability to love life (and thus the psychological maturity) without which no really generous action is possible. Whenever this psychological and moral basis is lacking, ‘revolts’ against the established order—no matter their apparent ‘radicalism’—can only draw their motivations from anger, hatred, envy and resentment…” Michéa, The Realm of Lesser Evil, p. 132.

Degrowthers, One More Effort If You Want to Be Revolutionaries!

The “degrowth” discourse is one of the few relatively new theoretical propositions to have emerged in the last few decades. The actual percentage of the public that is aware of the “degrowth” discussion is still quite small. Nevertheless, this number is undoubtedly growing. It means that, faced with the evidence, people are becoming more aware that capitalist development is dragging us towards an environmental disaster, and that a few more filters or slightly less polluting cars are not going to fix the problem. There is growing distrust of the very idea that perpetual economic growth is always desirable. At the same time, there is growing dissatisfaction with critiques of capitalism that reproach it essentially for the unjust distribution of its benefits, or for its “excesses”, such as war and the violation of “human rights”. The attention given to the concept of degrowth reveals a growing impression that it is the whole direction taken by our society, at least in the past few decades, that is bad, and that we are facing a “crisis of civilisation”, which concerns all of its values, even on the level of everyday life (the cult of consumerism, of speed, of technology etc.). We have entered an economic, ecological and energy crisis all at once, and the idea of degrowth takes all of these factors into consideration, instead of wanting to “boost growth” with “green technologies”, as parts of the environmentalist movement do, or simply proposing to manage industrial society differently, as a number of Marxist critiques have done.

Talk of degrowth is also attractive because it proposes models of individual behaviour that we can practise in the here and now, such as conviviality, generosity, simple living and gift-giving. But equally, it is attractive for its genteel air that lets us believe that people can create radical change through general consensus without facing antagonism or strong opposition. It is a reformism that claims to be radical.

Without a doubt, degrowth theory has the merit of genuinely wanting to break with the productivism and economism that has for so long constituted the common foundations of bourgeois society and Marxist critique. Degrowthers appear to have a more profound critique of the capitalist way of life than, for example, neo-workerists who continue to believe that the development of productive forces (notably in the form of computers) will lead to social emancipation. Equally, degrowthers look for a better society in contemporary life, often the legacy left behind by pre-capitalist societies, such as a disposition to gift-giving. They do not therefore place their bets—as some others do—on actively seeking the decomposition of all traditional forms of life and on barbarism that is supposed to prepare a miraculous renaissance.

The problem is that degrowthers are rather vague on the causes of the race to growth. In his critique of political economy, Marx demonstrated that the replacement of human labour power by the use of technology reduced the “value” represented in each commodity; this pushes capitalism to increase production permanently. In this mechanism we find the double nature of our “old enemy” the commodity: value and use value, produced respectively by the abstract and concrete side of labour. These two sides do not peacefully coexist but enter into violent contradiction. Let us take (as Marx himself does) the example of the tailor before the industrial revolution. To make a shirt, and to produce the materials that he used, he needed perhaps one hour. The “value” of his shirt was therefore one hour. Once machines for sewing and producing fabric are introduced, it becomes possible to make ten shirts in one hour, instead of one. The person who owns these machines, that simple workers operate, will put the shirts produced in this way on the market at a much lower price than the tailor can. Indeed, from the moment a machine enables the production of ten shirts in one hour, each shirt represents only a tenth of an hour of labour, therefore six minutes. Its value and, ultimately, its monetary expression are reduced enormously. The owner of capital has every interest in the worker producing as much as possible in the hour of labour for which he is paid. If he makes him work with a machine, as in the example above, the worker makes many more shirts and therefore creates a greater profit for his boss. The whole of capitalism has been a continual invention of new technologies whose aim was to save on labour power, that is to say, to produce more commodities with less labour power. But in a regime where value is given by labour, by the “expenditure of muscle, nerve and brain” (Marx), that contains a problem: the value of each commodity falls, and equally, therefore, so does the surplus value, and, finally, the profit that one can obtain from the commodity in question also falls. It is a central contradiction that has accompanied capitalism since its beginnings and that it has never been able to resolve. Capitalism is not an organised society; rather it is based on constant competition, where each economic actor acts only for himself. Each owner of capital who introduces a new machine realises a greater profit than his competitors by obtaining more commodities from his workers. It is therefore inevitable that all new inventions that save on labour will be used. The owner of capital who does so will realise extra profit to begin with. Soon, however, other capitalists imitate him and a new, higher level of production is established. The extra profit now disappears until the next invention. This means that if a shirt no longer “contains” one hour of labour, but only six minutes, the profit that this shirt procures will diminish equally. Let us imagine a 10% rate of surplus labour and, therefore, profit.¹ A shirt that takes an hour to produce therefore contains six minutes of surplus labour and an equivalent profit in monetary terms; but if only six minutes are necessary to produce a shirt, it only contains thirty-six seconds of surplus labour, the source of profit. The capitalist who introduces technology that replaces living labour realises a profit for himself in the short term, but contributes involuntarily to lowering the general rate of profit. The same logic that pushes capitalism towards using technology therefore ends up cutting the branch on which the whole system sits.

If there had been no other factors in play, the capitalist mode of production would not have lasted very long. There are, however, mechanisms to compensate. The most important is the continual increase in production. If, in the example above, each particular shirt only contains a tenth of the profit previously obtained by the tailor, it is necessary to produce not only ten shirts in the place of one but twelve, so that the fall in profit is not only compensated for but overcompensated. The entire history of capitalism has seen a continual rise in the production of commodities, in such a way that the fall in profit contained in each single commodity is more than compensated for by the overall rise in the mass of commodities. Thus, twelve shirts each containing a minimal amount of profit ultimately yield more than one shirt with lots of profit. Equally, this explains the eternal search for new sectors of valorisation. The most striking case was that of the automobile industry: a product that was at first a luxury became one of general use after the Second World War, opening up an enormous sector of new profit. All this, however, barely succeeded in counterbalancing production’s endemic tendency not only for the rate of profit to fall (it is only in this reduced form that the problem was discussed by traditional Marxists), but also, for the mass of value, as such, to fall.

The profound causes of the ecological crisis are to be found in this logic. Environmental discourse often explains it as the consequence of an unsound human attitude to nature, a type of greed or rapaciousness of the human species as such. Or, alternatively, the environment is presented as a problem that we can resolve within capitalism with “green capitalism”. Now people talk about creating jobs in the environmental sector, of cleaner industry, of renewable energies, of filters, of carbon-credits… In truth, it is too rarely noticed that the environmental crisis is deeply linked to the logic of capitalism itself. It is always for the reason stated above: if ten industrially produced shirts contain only the same profit as one artisanal shirt, it is then necessary to produce (at least) ten. Ten industrial shirts represent much more material but altogether they have only the same value as one artisanal shirt. Indeed, it still takes one hour to produce them. In a capitalist regime, it is necessary to produce and then sell ten shirts, and, therefore, to consume ten times as many resources to obtain ultimately the same quantity of value and, therefore, money.

For two hundred years, capitalism forestalled its end by always moving slightly faster than its tendency to collapse, thanks to a continual increase in production. But if value does not increase, or even diminishes, what increases instead is the consumption of resources, pollution and destruction. Capitalism is like the sorcerer forced to throw the entire concrete world into the cauldron of commodification in order to prevent everything from coming to a halt. A solution to the environmental crisis cannot be found within the constraints of the capitalist system which always needs to grow, to consume ever more matter, for no other reason than to compensate for the shrinking mass of value. This is why proposals for “sustainable development” or “green capitalism” cannot succeed: they assume that the capitalist beast can be tamed, that is to say, that capitalism can choose to stop growing and attain stability by limiting the damage it causes. But these hopes are in vain: as long as labour power continues to be replaced by technology, and as long as the value of a product resides in the labour it represents, there will always be a need to further develop production in material terms, and, therefore, to use more resources and pollute on a larger scale. We can desire another form of society but not a kind of capitalism different from “real existing capitalism”.

It is the basic categories of capitalism—value, the commodity, money, that are in no way features of every mode of production but of capitalism alone—that bring about its blind dynamism. Beyond the external limits constituted by the depletion of resources, the capitalist system contains from its inception an internal limit: the obligation—due to competition—to reduce the living labour that, at the same time, constitutes the only source of value. For decades this limit seems to have been reached, and the production of “real” value has largely been replaced by its simulation in the financial sphere. Furthermore, the external and internal limits began to come to light at the same moment: around 1970. If capitalism can only exist as a flight forward and as perpetual material growth to compensate for the decrease in value, a real “degrowth” is only possible at the cost of a total break with the production of commodities and money.

“Degrowthers” shy away from this outcome that possibly seems too “utopian” to them. Some have rallied around the slogan: “Abolish the economy!” Yet most of them stay within the parameters of “alternative economic science” and seem to believe that the tyranny of growth is merely some kind of misunderstanding that can be swept away by means of scientific conferences devoted to the best way to calculate gross domestic product. Many advocates of degrowth fall into the trap of traditional politics, wanting to participate in elections or make politicians sign agreements. Sometimes the degrowth debate may even sound a rather snobbish note, prompting the bourgeoisie to appease their guilty consciences by conspicuously scavenging for the vegetables dumped outside food markets at the end of the day’s trading. Exactly why something like the “New Right” should support degrowth needs to be pondered too, as does the danger of mounting a one-sided defence of “traditional” societies in the Southern Hemisphere.

It is somewhat foolish to believe that degrowth could become the official policy of the European Commission or something of that sort. A “shrinking capitalism” would be a contradiction in terms, as impossible as an “ecological capitalism”. If the degrowth movement does not want to be reduced to accompanying and justifying the “growing” poverty of society—and this risk is real, a rhetoric of frugality could just as well serve to sweeten the pill for the new poor and to transform a constraint into an illusion of choice, for example, rummaging through bins—it must be prepared for confrontation and opposition. But these confrontations will no longer coincide with the old dividing lines constituted by the “class struggle”. The necessary overcoming of the productivist paradigm—and the ways of life that go with it—will find resistance in all social sectors. An aspect of present-day “social struggles”, all over the world, is essentially the struggle for access to capitalist wealth, which does not question the nature of this so-called wealth. A Chinese or Indian worker has good reasons for demanding better pay, but if he gets it he will probably buy himself a new car and thus contribute to “growth” and its nefarious consequences on the social and ecological levels. It must be hoped that there will be a convergence between struggles for improving the status of the oppressed and the exploited and efforts to overcome a social model based on excessive individual consumption. Perhaps some peasant movements in the Southern Hemisphere are already going in this direction, especially in reclaiming certain elements of traditional societies such as common ownership of land or the existence of ways of appreciating the individual that are not linked to his performance on the market.

Notes

1.The difference between surplus value and profit has been abstracted in this example.

From One Utopia to Another

Twenty years ago “High-Speed Trains” (HST) began to spread their network over French territory. Outside the organised and spontaneous chorus of approval, however, some dissenting voices could be heard: small groups who were airing their grievances against what they called the “despotism of speed”. They did not formulate detailed objections but launched a spirited attack on the society that in their view had opened up the absurd and empty possibility of crossing the whole of France in a matter of hours. The levelling of such a comprehensive and completely negative judgement at the way of life that the HST embodied is obviously predicated on the conviction that another, very different, way of life is possible. Generally, those who evoke such a possibility are branded “utopian”, a word that instantly conjures up the “utopian socialists”, the best-known of whom remains Charles Fourier.¹

A rejoinder to this pamphlet against the HST was subsequently published by a group of people who also claimed critical purchase on the existing society in the name of a different idea of cohabitation. In this case their ideas drew explicitly on utopian thought, with particular reference to Fourier. They defended the HST, seeing in it the realisation of one of Fourier’s predictions of “harmonious” humanity’s glorious future: he had declared that huge, docile lions, called “anti-lions”, would convey travellers from one end of France to another in a matter of hours, and even from Montmartre to Izmir in thirty-six hours.

These contemporary utopians did not go so far as to use the anti-lion as justification for genetic modification or cyborgs, nor did they evoke the transformation of the sea into lemonade, also predicted by Fourier. This polemic between two approaches (that may be mutually irreconcilable) at least demonstrates that “utopia” is not always on the side of the total critique of the established order; it can equally well rally in some ways to the latter’s defence.

“Utopia” generally conjures up the idea of a radically different, and clearly better, society than the existing one whose inadequacy is thereby implied. Marx and Engels famously claimed to have transcended “utopianism” as an infantile stage in socialist thought and to have replaced it with a “scientific” approach. Ever since the collapse of traditional Marxism, the last few decades have occasionally seen a rekindling of interest on the left for “utopia” as evidenced, for example, in the Dictionnaire des utopies published in 2002.² Generally speaking, however, “utopia” attracts a bad press and in everyday life, as in big public debates, the word serves above all to discredit an adversary. In the best-case scenario, it amounts to “dreaming up nice yet impossible things”, “being naïve, lacking a grasp of reality”. Often the dismissal is hammered home by the assertion that utopian thought leads straight to terror. This is driven by the idea that anyone imagining a radically different form of collective existence will go on to try and impose it by force, even on those wanting no part of it, and the resistance that the population at large and mere reality put up against those aiming at the swift and comprehensive remoulding of these latter will cause the terror to escalate. The attempt to create utopias would then account for Stalinist and Maoist crimes.

From this angle, “utopia” is usually referred to as “abstract”: purely cerebral constructs and philosophies dreamt up in a vacuum by people who may be strong on logic but woefully lacking when it comes to concrete experience of flesh-and-blood human beings and the way of the world. Utopia is distinguished therefore by a disregard for the real nature of man and by the claim that he can be improved based on a preconception of what he should be. Thus the utopian is convinced he knows better than men themselves what is good for them. As long as he is daydreaming up in his garret (like Fourier) or in prison (like Tommaso Campanella, author of The City of the Sun), he is still innocent. But the moment particular historical circumstances allow the utopian to reshape reality according to his abstract desires, tragedy becomes inevitable. Violence is taken to be immanent in utopian theory itself and in its disdain for human beings in the flesh and their faults. Bloody efforts to turn this theory into reality then merely actualise the violence inherent in the utopian vision. This rejection of utopia presupposes an anthropology that is meant to be disabused, or even pessimistic, but strictly realistic. Immanuel Kant neatly summed it up thus: “Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be built”, which the liberal English thinker Isaiah Berlin chose as the title to one of his works.³ Other, particularly English, liberals have found the origins of utopian totalitarianism in Plato (Karl Popper)⁴ or in the millenarian sects of the Middle Ages (Norman Cohn).⁵ In a nutshell, the very principles of utopia are totalitarian, ending up logically in Russian revolutionary proclamations such as: “We will force men to be happy” and in attempts to forge the “new man” that led to one of the greatest disasters in history. Participating also in the same totalitarianism born of the belief that the time had come to remake the world are the avant-gardes described by Jean Clair⁶ and Boris Groys.⁷ The latter contends that, far from being the victims of Stalin, the Russian avant-gardes foreshadowed the revolutionary tendency to consider the world as modelling clay, as an entirely new work of art far removed from tradition, common sense and any idea of restraint.

This anti-utopian thought thus emerges as a defender of the complexity and ambiguity that make up human existence and the scourge of abstract reasoning and the delusions of an overexcited imagination. Its tenants wish to safeguard human nature, thought of as immutable or at least highly resistant to all rapid change, against those who seek to re-educate and correct it.

This polemic seeks in point of fact to identify certain features of the state totalitarianism that has weighed so heavily upon the twentieth century, but it can just as well be applied—against its intentions—to the social order that it is defending: liberal democracy and the market economy. Anti-utopian thought champions man as he actually is, with all his limitations, against those bent on forcing him to be something else. However, if there is one utopia that has actually been realised during the last two centuries, the capitalist utopia is it. “Liberal” capitalism has always presented itself as “natural”: it vows to realise the eternal aspirations of man whose concern always and everywhere is for his own welfare. Man may be fundamentally selfish but given free rein, ego rivalry ends up delivering the harmony of the “invisible hand” which has been such an abiding refrain ever since Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith in the eighteenth century. In its assumed capacity as the only society never to have done violence to “human nature” in the name of a higher principle, capitalism merely follows everyman’s innate tendency to “maximise” his profit and enjoyment.

But if this is the case, why has capitalism nearly always had to be imposed by force on recalcitrant populations? Whether English peasants and craftsmen first turned factory proletarians in the eighteenth century, or today’s Indios, men have very often refused the benefits of “progress”. To get to be the closest self-proclaimed socio-economic order to human nature, capitalism had to fight ferociously to convince men to follow their “nature”. Its entire history is full of laments about the “conservative” character of the populations that it sought to convert to its benefits, their attachment to their traditions and their reluctance to change their way of life. Just about everywhere, the popular masses within and outside Europe have defended their communal ways of life regulated by naturally slow rhythms, forms of solidarity, “reciprocal gifting”, codes of honour, quests for social prestige rather than abstract wealth, “moral economy” (Edward Thompson) and “common decency” (Orwell). In no sense of course could these ways of life be described as free from injustice and violence. But scarcely ever have men willingly ditched them in order to espouse such a “natural” mode of life based solely on the pursuit of individual gain, which is the only real value that exists in capitalist society. Above and beyond open rebellions, there are umpteen everyday activities that evince an often low-level resistance that at some point or other in the day almost everyone sets against the unliveable utopia of a wholly capitalist society. Marcel Mauss was one of the first to analyse this phenomenon in his Essays on the Gift (1924), followed by a still ongoing plethora of studies. From its first theoretical formulations around the end of the seventeenth century, capitalism has taken a particular view of man and a distinct type of anthropology as its basis: that of homo œconomicus. However, at no point has this view, which only began to appear as such after centuries of being instilled into people by violence and deceit, ever had anything remotely natural about it. Homo œconomicus is the greatest utopia ever realised in history. Its geographic extent and duration far outstrip those of the state-controlled utopias denounced by the utopia of the market. Anyone seeking to criticise the present stricken day and age requires no “utopia”; the denunciation of a world entirely subjugated to the economic rationale that has dominated us for more than two hundred years is all that is required. Perhaps it is “naïvely utopian” to believe that humanity could live without private property and hierarchy, without domination and exploitation. It is doubtless terrifyingly utopian to believe that life will be able to continue on the basis of money and the commodity, buying and selling, when the consequences are by now right before our eyes.

Notes

1.See Relevé provisoire de nos griefs contre le despotisme de la vitesse à l’occasion de l’extension des lignes du TGV [Provisional List of Our Grievances against the Despotism of Speed on the Occasion of the Extension of the T.G.V. High-Speed Railway Network] (Paris: Éditions de l’Encylopédie des Nuisances, 1991).

2.Ed. Michèle Riot-Sarcey, Dictionnaire des utopies [Dictionary of Utopias] (Paris: Larousse, 2002).

3.Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (London: John Murray, 1990).

4.Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).

5.Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).

6.Jean Clair, La responsabilité de l’artiste. Les avant-gardes entre terreur et raison [The Artist’s Responsibility: Avant-Gardes Between Terror and Reason] (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).

7.Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (London: Verso, 2011).

Part 3: Pars Ludens

The Cat, the Mouse, Culture and the Economy

One of Grimms’ Fairy Tales is called “The Cat and the Mouse in Partnership”. A cat convinces a mouse that she wants to be her friend. They decide to live together and, in anticipation of the oncoming winter, they buy a pot of fat, which they hide in a church. However, on the pretext of attending a baptism, the cat goes again and again to the church and eats all the fat a little at a time. After each occasion she amuses herself by responding to the mouse’s questions with ambiguous answers. When they finally go together to the church to eat the pot of fat, the mouse discovers the trick, and the cat’s only response is to eat the mouse. The last sentence of the fable proclaims the moral: “Verily, that is the way of the world”. The relationship between culture and the economy may very well come to resemble this tale and it is not difficult to guess which one out of culture and the economy plays the role of the cat and which one the role of the mouse, especially today in the era of fully developed, globalised and neoliberal capitalism. What place does culture have in a market society where everything is subject to supply and demand, competition and purchasing power? This characteristically general question becomes concrete when, for example, it comes to determining who should finance cultural institutions and what expectations on behalf of what kind of public they are meant to satisfy. In order to try to answer these questions it is necessary to start from further afield, indeed a great deal further.

Besides the production by means of which a society seeks to satisfy the physical and vital needs of its members, it also creates many symbolic constructs. Society uses these to elaborate a representation of itself and of the world in which it finds itself situated, and it proposes, or imposes, identities and behaviours on its members. The production of meaning can, in certain circumstances, play a role that is as great, if not even greater, than that played by the satisfaction of basic needs. Religion and mythology, the customs and forms of everyday life—above all those relating to the family and reproduction—and what has, since the Renaissance, been called “art”, figure in the category of the symbolic. In many respects, these symbolic codes were not separated from each other in ancient societies as evidenced in the fact that art has largely been a religious affair for most of its history. In any case, what did not exist was a separation between an economic sphere and a cultural, symbolic sphere. An object could simultaneously satisfy a basic need and possess an aesthetic aspect.¹

Industrial capitalist society was the first in history to separate “work” from other activities, and to make work and its products, now designated the “economy”, the sovereign centre of social life. At the same time, the cultural and aesthetic dimension, which in pre-industrial societies might be intermingled with all aspects of life, was concentrated in a separate sphere. This sphere is not a priori subject to the laws that characterise the economy; it could be permitted to be “useless” and not contribute to increasing the power and wealth of those who created or “consumed” it. Within it a real critique could emerge, one that was normally repressed or suppressed, a critique of social life and its subjection to the increasingly inhuman demands of economic competition. However, culture paid a high price for its freedom: its marginalisation, its reduction to a “game” which, because it did not participate in the cycle of labour and capital accumulation, always remains in a position subordinate to the economic sphere and those who govern it. This “artistic independence” reached its zenith in the nineteenth century. It should be stated that even then art was nothing more than a protected garden or like Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, a simple escape valve, where one can freely express oneself provided that nothing comes of it. It was the appearance of an idea of something different but never its realisation.

Nevertheless, not even this limited autonomy could resist the dynamic of capitalism, devoted as it is to absorbing everything and leaving nothing outside its logic of valorisation. First, autonomous artworks—the paintings, for example, of historical avant-gardes—entered the market, becoming just another commodity. Next, the production of “cultural goods” was itself commodified; that is to say, profit, rather than intrinsic artistic quality, was the aim from the start. This is the stage of the “culture industry”, first described by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Günther Anders during the 1940s when they lived in the United States.² Soon after, in the latter phase of the same development, a kind of perverse reintegration of culture into life took place, but only in the ornamental sense of commodity production, that is to say, in the form of design, advertising and fashion. Since then, artists have rarely been more than the new court jesters and bards who have to fight over the crumbs that their new patrons, now dubbed “sponsors”, throw them. Of course, many feel a certain unease in the face of this “commodification of culture” and would prefer that “quality” culture—which, according to taste, can be “cinéma d’auteur”, opera or local craft production—be treated differently from the making of shoes, video games or package holidays, i.e. by going solely down the investment and profit route. They then evoke what in France is called “the cultural exception”: the argument put forward is that capitalist logic—competition and the market—is all very well in virtually every sector (especially where “we” come out on top as instanced in the export industry), but it is asked to be good enough to leave culture out of its clutches. This hope is very naïve. Indeed, whoever accepts the principle of capitalist competition will soon see themselves also forced to accept all of its consequences. If one accepts that it is right for a shoe or a package holiday to be valued exclusively on the basis of the quantity of labour that it represents and in the form of money, it is somewhat illogical to be surprised when this same logic is then applied to cultural “products”. Here the same principle applies: one cannot, as so many people now do, oppose the so-called “liberal” “excesses” of commodification without questioning its foundations, something that almost no one does. As anyone who watches television knows, from the moment that a small profit can be made from landmines, the global dynamic of the commodity does not refrain from shredding children’s bodies to pieces. It will certainly not be intimidated by respectful protests made by French filmmakers or museum directors exasperated at having to kowtow to the managers of Coca-Cola or to the petrochemical industry to get them to finance an exhibition. The unconditional surrender of culture in the face of economic imperatives is only one part of the ever more totalising commodification of every aspect of life. This blanket phenomenon cannot be discussed only in relation to culture without envisaging a break, on every level, with the dictatorship of the economy. There is no good reason why culture alone should be able to preserve its autonomy from the stark logic of profit, if no other sphere can manage to do so.

Thus the necessity for capital to find ever more spheres of valorisation or, put plainly, to turn in a profit, places culture on no kind of pedestal. It is even obvious that within culture, in the broadest sense of the term, the “entertainment industry” constitutes its main object of investment. Already in the 1970s the Swedish pop group ABBA was Sweden’s leading exporter, ahead of the military supplies group Saab, and in 1965 the Queen knighted The Beatles for their contribution to the British economy. Furthermore, the entertainment industry—from television to rock music, tourism to the tabloids—plays an important role in social pacification and consensus creation. This fact finds its most succinct expression in the notion of “tittytainment”. What exactly does it mean? The “State of the World Forum”, held in San Francisco in 1995, attended by around five hundred of the most powerful people on earth (among others, Gorbachev, Bush, Thatcher, Bill Gates…), was convened in order to discuss the following question: what to do with the 80% of the world’s population that will no longer be necessary for production? Zbigniew Brzezinski, ex-advisor to Jimmy Carter, is reported to have proposed what he called “tittytainment” as a solution: “superfluous” populations, potentially dangerous due to their frustration, would receive a combination of basic nutrition and amusement, mind-numbing entertainment, in order to attain a state of lethargic contentment similar to that of a breast (“tit”, in English slang) -fed newborn.³ In other words, the central role traditionally carried out by the repressive clampdown, in order to pre-empt social unrest, is now amply served by infantilisation⁴ (but, contrary to what some may think, without replacing it completely). The relationship between the economy and culture is not therefore limited to the economy exploiting culture. It goes far beyond the irritation of seeing the logos of sponsors at every kind of artistic event; sponsors who, incidentally, also financed culture forty years ago, albeit via the taxes they paid and who were therefore unable to brag about it or influence artistic decisions. The relationship, however, between the current phase of capitalism and that of “cultural production” is even closer. There is a profound isomorphism between the entertainment industry and the drift of capitalism towards infantilisation and narcissism. The material economy has close ties to the new forms of “psychological and libidinal economy”.

In a society that is not only based on the production of money but also where work and its products are the principal social bond, it is inevitable, in the long run, that narcissism becomes the most typical form of psyche.⁵ The enormous development of the entertainment industry is both the cause and consequence of the proliferation of narcissism. Thus, this industry is one of the leading causes of the veritable “anthropological regression” towards which capitalism is now leading us. Indeed, narcissism constitutes this regression as much on the collective level as it does on an individual one.

The child, in the first stage of its psychological development, must overcome the stage of reassuring bonding with the mother that characterises the first year of life (this is what Freud called “primary narcissism” and is a necessary step). It must pass through the pain of the Oedipus complex in order to reach a realistic evaluation of its abilities and limits, and to give up the infantile dream of omnipotence. Only in this way can a psychologically balanced person develop. Traditional education tried, with varying degrees of success, to replace the pleasure principle with the reality principle but without killing it off completely. The stages of an individual’s psychological development that have not been satisfactorily resolved give way to neurosis and even to psychosis. The child does not then come into the world originally perfect, nor does it spontaneously abandon its initial narcissism. It needs to be guided in order to be able to fully realise its humanity. The symbolic constructs developed by different cultures obviously play an essential role in this process (even if all of these traditional constructs do not appear to be equally capable of nurturing a fully realised human life; but this is another question).

At the other extreme lies capitalism in its most recent phase that essentially began in the 1970s: consumption and seduction seem to have replaced production and repression as the principal motor and mode of development. This postmodern capitalism is the only society in history to have fostered massive infantilisation of its members and desymbolisation on a large scale. Everything in this day and age contributes to infantilising human beings: from comic books to TV, techniques for restoring ancient works of art to advertising, video games to school syllabuses, sports to mind-altering drugs, Second Life to museum exhibitions, everything leads to the creation of a docile and narcissistic consumer who sees the entire world as an extension of himself, governed by a click of the mouse. The continual pressure of the mass media and contemporary elimination of reality as much as the imagination in favour of a lifeless reproduction of what exists, the “flexibility” permanently imposed on people and the disappearance of traditional notions of meaning, the simultaneous devalorisation of what once constituted personal maturity and the charm of childhood, replaced by an eternal, degraded adolescence: all of this has produced a veritable human regression on a large scale that might well be termed everyday barbarity. Criticisms, which can on occasion be scathing, of these phenomena are voiced by some people; but the remedies proposed are ineffectual or else plainly reactionary (whenever a mere restoration of traditional forms of authority is proposed).

It could be wondered why such strengthening of regressive social tendencies has excited so little opposition. Quite the opposite even obtains in that everyone has contributed to this state of acquiescence: the right because it still believes in the market, at least since it underwent a wholesale conversion to liberalism, the left because it believes in the equality of citizens. The role that the left has played in this cultural adaptation to the demands of neo-capitalism has to be the most curious aspect of the whole business. It has often been at the forefront of the commodification of culture, notwithstanding the retention of the magic words “democratisation” and “equality” in its lexicon. Culture must be available to all! Who would deny the eminent nobility of such a sentiment? Much quicker on the uptake than the right, the left—be it “moderate” or “radical”—has, particularly since 1968, abandoned the very notion that there might be a qualitative difference between different forms of cultural expression. Try telling anyone on the cultural left that Beethoven is better than rap music or that children would do better to learn some poetry by heart rather than play on a PlayStation, and you are automatically called a “reactionary” and an “elitist”. Nearly everywhere the left has made peace with hierarchies of money and power, and found them ineluctable, even agreeable, regardless of the damage they are producing right before everyone’s eyes. On the other hand, this left has sought to abolish hierarchies precisely where they might make sense, as long as they are not permanently ingrained and open to change: those of intelligence, taste, sensibility, talent. The existence of a hierarchy of values is precisely that which has the power to negate and challenge the hierarchy of power and money, which, on the contrary, reigns supreme at a time when all cultural hierarchy is negated.

Even those who acknowledge that there is general cultural decline, in schools for example, inevitably follow up this acknowledgement with the assertion that in the past culture may have been of a higher standard but it was the privilege of a tiny minority, while the vast majority were condemned to ignorance, even illiteracy. Today, on the other hand, we are assured that everyone has access to knowledge. Is this really the case? It could nonetheless be said that the number of children growing up today reading Homer or Shakespeare or Rousseau represents an even smaller minority than in former times. The entertainment industry has only replaced one type of ignorance with another just as the marked increase in the number of people with higher education degrees or going to university—an endless source of pride for all education policies—does not seem to have greatly increased the number of cultured or merely informed people. In French universities today you can obtain a master’s degree with a level of understanding and in subjects that thirty years ago would not have been enough to get you a certificate from a technical college. Thus every year roughly half of young people have no great difficulty in obtaining a high-school diploma. What a great victory for the democratisation of culture!

The products of the entertainment industry cannot be called “mass culture” or “popular culture” as is suggested, for example, by the term “pop music” or as is asserted by those who denounce as “elitist” any critique of what in reality is nothing more than, to coin a telling contemporary phrase, the “formatting” of the masses. Generalised relativism and the rejection of any scale of cultural values have often passed themselves off, particularly in the “postmodern” era, as forms of emancipation and social critique in the name, for example, of “sub-”cultures. However, on closer inspection, they might better be described as cultural reflections of the rule of the commodity. In the face of commodification, which is incapable of making qualitative distinctions, all things are equal. Everything is merely grist to the ever identical process of the valorisation of value. This indifference of the commodity towards all content is realised in a cultural production that rejects any qualitative judgment and for which everything is the same; “culture now impresses the same stamp on everything”, as Adorno said in 1944.

Doubtless this argument is bound to be dismissed for its “authoritarianism” on the grounds that “people” themselves spontaneously seek out, request and covet the products of the cultural industry, even though they are in the presence of other cultural expressions that offer so many alternatives, just as millions of people willingly eat in fast food outlets even though they could eat elsewhere for the same price. This objection may be countered by recalling the basic fact that in the presence of a massive and continuous media bombardment in favour of certain lifestyles, “free choice” is somewhat conditioned. However, “manipulation” is not the only thing involved here. As we have seen, access to the fullness of human existence requires assistance from those who already, at least partially, possess this fullness. Allowing everything to run its “spontaneous” course of development does not create the conditions for freedom. The “invisible hand” of the market ends in absolute monopoly or the war of all against all, not in harmony. In the same way, not to help someone to develop his capacity for differentiation means to condemn him to an eternal infantilism.

This can be explained with reference to a particularly interesting fact that is not, moreover, drawn from psychoanalysis but from cooking. Our sense of taste has four basic flavours: sweet, salty, sour and bitter. The human palate is capable of perceiving a one-in-ten-thousandth part of a drop of a bitter substance in a glass of water, while for the other flavours an entire drop is required.⁶ As a result, no other flavour is so variable or characterised by an almost infinite multiplicity of taste-related sensations as bitterness. The cultivation of wine, tea and cheese, those great sources of pleasure for human existence, are based on these innumerable types and gradations of bitterness.

Young children, however, spontaneously reject bitter flavours and only accept sweet ones, and later salty ones. They must be educated to appreciate bitterness, overcoming their initial resistance. In exchange, they will develop a capacity for enjoyment which otherwise would have remained forever inaccessible to them. But if nobody ever offers it to them, the child will never ask for anything besides salt and sugar, which have very few subtleties, only degrees of more or less. Thus is born the consumer of fast food—which, as we know, is based solely upon sweetness and saltiness—who is incapable of appreciating different flavours. And what you do not learn when you are young you will not learn when you grow up: if the child who has grown up with hamburgers and Coca-Cola becomes a nouveau riche and wants to show off culture and refinement, he might very well consume expensive wines and quality cheese but he will never truly be able to appreciate them.⁷

This argument concerning gastronomic “taste” may be applied to aesthetic taste as well. An education is required to appreciate the music of Bach or traditional Arab music, while the mere possession of a body is enough to “appreciate” the somatic stimuli of rock music. It is undeniably the case that in this day and age the majority of the population “spontaneously” asks for Coca-Cola and rock music, comic books and internet pornography. But this does not prove that capitalism, which offers all these marvels in abundance, is in harmony with “human nature”. Rather, it demonstrates that it has managed to confine this “nature” to its earliest phase. Indeed, even eating with a knife and fork is not done straightaway in human development…

Therefore, the success of the entertainment industries and the culture of “convenience”—an incredibly global success that transcends all cultural barriers—is not due solely to propaganda and manipulation, but also due to the fact that these industries meet the “natural” desire of the child not to abandon his narcissistic status. The alliance between the new forms of domination, the requirements of capital valorisation and marketing techniques is so effective because it relies on a pre-existing regressive tendency. The dematerialisation of the world, which is such a hot topic for discussion, is also a stimulation of the infantile desires for omnipotence. “No limits” is the chief exhortation accepted today, whether it concerns a professional career or the promise of eternal life made by medicine, the infinitely diverse existences that can be experienced in video games or the idea that unlimited “economic growth” is the solution to every evil. Capitalism is the first society in history that is based on the absence of any limits and is constantly broadcasting the fact. We are only now beginning to understand just what this means.

But if the culture industry is completely in phase with commodity society, is it for all that still possible to oppose it with “true” art as the realm of the human? Open or covert complicity with the powers that be and with the dominant way of life has always characterised a great part of cultural production, even of the most elevated kind. What is important is that the possibility of difference existed. The characteristic ability of the best works of art of the past to have an existential impact, to put the individual into a state of crisis rather than to console him or to reinforce his normal mode of existence,⁸ is visibly absent from the products of the entertainment industry. They aim at “experiences” and “events”. Whoever intends to sell something goes far beyond the desires of buyers and their search for instant gratification. He will confirm the high opinion that they have of themselves rather than frustrate them with works that are not immediately “accessible”. Until very recently, a person was judged on an aesthetic level by the works they could appreciate, and not the works on the basis of the number of people they attracted, the number of exhibition-goers or the number of downloads made. Those who could grasp the complexity and richness of a particularly good work of art were consequently considered further along the road to human realisation. What a contrast with the postmodern vision where each and every spectator is democratically free to see whatever he wants to in a work of art and therefore what he himself projects onto it! In this way the spectator certainly never has to confront anything really new and will enjoy the reassuring certainty of always staying the same as he is. This is precisely the narcissistic refusal to enter into a proper object relationship with a world distinct from the Ego.

From this point of view there is hardly any difference now between “great art” and “mass” art. Too often, contemporary art appears to be as incapable as the products of the entertainment industry of challenging the spectator, thereby partaking in the same general loss of a sense of reality. When art becomes a subspecies of design and advertising, it deserves its commercialisation. A good swathe of contemporary art has thrown itself into the arms of the culture industry and humbly asks for a place at its table. This is the late and unforeseen result of the expansion undertaken a century ago by artists themselves of both the sphere of “art” and the quest to turn life into an artistic sphere.

Additionally, historical works of art are being incorporated into the cultural machine, through spectacular exhibitions or through restorations that aim to make works more consumable for the general public (for example, by intensifying colours as in the case of the Sistine Chapel in Rome), or even through butchering classic literary or musical works in order to make them more “accessible” to the public. They are even lumped together with contemporary production, thereby taking away all historical specificity, as in the case of the pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre museum. The sting that historical works might still possess, if only because of their temporal distance, is thus neutralised through spectacularisation and commercialisation.

Nothing is more annoying, however, than those museums who flaunt their “educational mission” and who seek to make “culture accessible to the common people” with a plethora of explanations on the walls and earphones that tell everyone precisely what they should feel about the work, not forgetting the video displays, interactive games, t-shirts and museum shops. It is claimed that this makes it possible for culture and history to be enjoyed by the lower, non-bourgeois social strata (as if today’s bourgeoisie were still cultured!). In reality, this user-friendly approach is the height of a paternalistic attitude towards the popular strata (if they still exist): it supposes that “the people” are by definition insensitive to culture and that they can only appreciate it when it is presented in the most frivolous and infantile manner possible.

This also signals the disappearance of that subdued atmosphere encountered in the rather dusty but nevertheless pleasant museums of the past; pleasant because seemingly offering admission to a separate world, where some respite could be had from the hurly-burly continually surrounding us, but also because these museums were not heaving with visitors. Now, the better a museum is “managed” and attracts visitors, the more it resembles a cross between a train station concourse at rush hour and a computer showroom. Why bother visiting them at all anymore? It would be a better idea to look at the same works on a CD because, in such museums, nothing is left of the “aura” of the original work anyway. This has been another perverse way of uniting art and life, of erasing their difference and eliminating any idea that there could be something different from the banal reality that surrounds us. The space of the old museum, with all its defects, had the potential to harbour something genuinely extraordinary for the spectator, precisely because it was so different from what we usually experience. Today, the groups of students dragged through exhibition halls are primarily receiving an effective vaccination against any risk of experiencing an existential message from art or history, or at least against the risk that they might seek them out on their own accord…

If there is the will to prevent culture from being completely absorbed by the economy—and this desire is still widely held—there needs first to be an acknowledgement that there is a qualitative difference between the products of the entertainment industry and a possible “real culture”, and therefore an acknowledgement that qualitative, and not purely relative or subjective, judgement is possible. There is a great difference between, on the one hand, the will to establish criteria for judgment, while recognising that these criteria do not just fall out of the sky but must be subject to discussion and change, and on the other, the outright rejection of the very possibility of establishing criteria in order to claim that everything is indistinguishable. If everything is the same, then there is no further need to bother with anything. This sameness and the resulting indifference shrouds life ruled by the market, the commodity, work and money. They undermine the human capacity to face up to the omnipresent threats of barbarisation. The challenges that await us in the times ahead must be confronted by people in full possession of their human faculties, not by adults who are still children in the worst sense of the word. It will be interesting to see what place art and cultural institutions will occupy in this epochal transformation.

Notes

1.In Bali, an island known for its profusion of wooden objects of all kinds, the inhabitants had great difficulty understanding an ethnologist of the early twentieth century who was interested in their “art”. In the end they told him: “We have no art. We try to make everything to the best of our ability.”

2.These authors viewed the term pejoratively, deeming it an oxymoron since “industry” and “culture” were considered to be diametrically opposed. However, the shock that the term once gave rise to has today disappeared: some French universities now offer master’s degrees in “cultural industry”…

3.Brzezinski has moreover denied coining the term. Be that as it may, the concept as such sums up very well what is actually happening. It should be borne in mind that the aim of excoriating this notion of “tittytainment” is not to argue that a conspiracy of evil men has imposed its diabolical master plan on the entire world. Rather, it is that this word summarises an objective tendency in the management of contemporary societies.

4.Cf., for example, Benjamin Barber, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007).

5.See “Is There an Art after the End of Art?”, infra.

6.Christian Boudan, Géopolitique du goût [The Geopolitics of Taste] (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), p. 35 (Ch. 1, p. 7 “Le paradoxe de l’amer” [The Paradox of Bitterness]).

7.Those who think France is still shielded from these tendencies would do well to ponder on the recent effort of French wine makers to adapt—while infringing French law—their wine for the demands of the American consumer who is a stickler for the taste of sugar and vanilla, a taste that a number of French consumers have now ended up sharing (cf. the film Mondovino (2003) by Jonathan Nossiter). In Italy, the famous Barolo has become a topic of “war” between producers who wish to defend the traditional tannic taste and those who wish to adopt “international” standards by making it lighter and fruitier.

8.Some works, while we are looking at them, seem to watch us in turn and to be waiting for a response from us.

Is There an Art after the End of Art?

In the 1950s and 1960s the Situationists announced the “transcendence” and “realisation” of art. For them art had lost its purpose and its history was over. In 1985 Guy Debord reaffirmed that this proclamation was not an exaggeration because “at no point since 1954 has one single artist of any real interest emerged anywhere”.¹

If Situationist ideas are to be taken seriously—and it has become difficult not to do so—then the following question necessarily arises: what position should be adopted towards the artistic production that has continued, on a previously unimaginable scale, over the course of the half century that separates us from the foundation of the Situationist International? It is surely very coherent to dismiss it wholesale and this production itself offers numerous reasons for doing so. But this provides no explanation for the failure of the historical project to realise art in life, a failure that has also come to characterise the past half-century. The Situationists’ attempt to transcend art had, in actual fact, been a project to rescue art,² one last great declaration of love for art and poetry, which were thought to be too important to be left to artists and cultural institutions. It was not artistic creativity that the Situationists believed to be defunct, but the social function of art, which had, according to them, become incapable of containing the rich possibilities of human life.³

The realisation of art—at least as the Situationists imagined it—did not happen. The assault on heaven fell to earth and spectacular capitalist society, which by 1970 had been thrown into considerable disarray (a view not only held by excited revolutionaries but amply borne out in employers’ reports of the time⁴), completely re-established its dominion on whose horizon no longer loomed the revolution but a slide into anomie. In this situation, art, which in the eyes of the most “advanced” intellects of the 1960s seemed too little compared with the “incredible potential development”,⁵ is generally looked on today as the last refuge of freedom. If it is not the realisation of human richness, it could at least be a substitute for it in the sense of the token or the annunciation of its possible advent. This would still be better than nothing. The ideas of Theodor Adorno could thus finally be vindicated with recourse to a “Situationist” argument, particularly when he asserts: “Because there has not yet been any progress in the world, there is progress in art; ‘il faut continuer’ [it must continue]”.⁶

But if, from the point of view of a radical critique of the contemporary world (which perforce finds one of its roots in the thought of Debord), it seems possible—due to historical development and for want of anything better—to re-acknowledge the possibility of a contemporary art in general, that does not necessarily mean that this “contemporary art”, i.e. the artistic production that has actually taken place since 1975, should be applauded. The task of theoretical reflection is not to justify or glorify the present and this is true not only for politics or economics but also for art.⁷ Before going on to analyse what contemporary artists (or those that the market, media and institutions identify as such) are doing, perhaps the following question needs to be asked: what may reasonably be expected from contemporary art?

Of course, some will reject outright the validity of any discussion of contemporary art founded upon social theory. Today, in the “plural democracy” volubly fawned over day in day out, it is held that artist and public are free to choose from a plurality of practices and to flick through these as they so wish. Any judgement of value that claims to be objective, especially if founded on considerations that are not wholly inherent to the work, is considered obsolete, even totalitarian.

Nothing in the way of objection can be made against this liberal conception of art: everyone is effectively free to indulge in it just as he is free to eat at McDonald’s, watch television or vote in elections. In contrast, those who do not accept it, or who at least claim that it should be possible to draw up criteria that are not purely subjective in order to discuss “cultural products” and with which to judge their importance, may accept the following minimal point of departure: cultural products are part of the symbolic sphere, of those structures through which men have always tried to represent and explain life and society to themselves as well as target them for criticism on occasion. There are therefore grounds for inquiring into contemporary art’s ability to create symbols that are not purely personal yet which correspond to a wider lived experience, and on this basis a few opinions on today’s creations may be hazarded.

The question should not be posed in an abstract way. This is not about establishing whether art has some timeless essence but about discussing the here and now. What are the essential characteristics of contemporary life that call for expression on a symbolic level? These cannot merely comprise injustice, war or discrimination because all three have long formed the fabric of social life. More specifically, the “contemporary” era is notable for the now total prevalence of what Karl Marx in his time called commodity fetishism. This term denotes a great deal more than a mania for commodities and does not refer either to some hoax or other. In modern, industrial and capitalist society, nearly every social activity takes the form of a material or immaterial commodity. The value of a commodity is determined by the necessary labour time for its production. It is not the concrete qualities of the commodity that define its fate but the quantity of labour it embodies, and this is always expressed in a sum of money. The products of men thus begin to take on a life of their own, governed by the laws of money and its accumulation into capital. “Commodity fetishism” is to be taken literally: modern men—just like those they call “primitive savages”—worship what they themselves have created by attributing to their idols an independent existence and a power to govern them in turn. Far from being some illusion or trick, this is the actual way in which commodity society functions. This commodity logic henceforth dominates all sectors of life, extending far beyond the economy (Debord’s theory of the spectacle remains moreover one of the best descriptions of this whole phenomenon). As commodities, every object and all activity are equal. They are merely greater or lesser quantities of accumulated labour, and therefore of money. It is the market, beyond the subjective intentions of its actors, that carries out this ratification. Deadly monotony and indeed a total absence of content thus characterise the reign of the commodity. Gradually, an abstract, empty and unchanging form, a pure quantity without quality—money—is imposed on the world’s infinite and concrete diversity. The commodity and money are indifferent to the world, which for them is nothing more than raw material to be used. The very existence of a concrete world, with its laws and its opposition, is ultimately an obstacle to the accumulation of capital, which has no other goal than itself. In order to change each sum of money into a larger one, capitalism is consuming the whole world (on all levels, social, environmental, aesthetic and ethical). Behind the commodity and its fetishism a veritable “death drive” is hidden, an unconscious but powerful tendency towards the “annihilation of the world”.

The equivalent of commodity fetishism in the psychological life of the individual is narcissism. Here the term does not only denote adoration of one’s own body or one’s person. It stands for a serious pathological condition well-known to psychoanalysis. An adult preserves the psychological structure of the first years of his childhood, when there is no distinction between the self and the world. Every external object is experienced by the narcissist as a projection of his own self. In contrast, this self remains extremely deficient due to its inability to be enriched by real relationships with external objects. Indeed, the subject, in order to do so, must first recognise the autonomy of the outside world and his own subordination to it. The narcissist can appear to be a “normal” person but in reality he has never emerged from the original fusion with the surrounding world and does everything to maintain the illusion of omnipotence that results. This form of psychosis, which was rare in Freud’s time, has, over the course of the century, become one of the most common forms of mental illness. Traces of it can be seen everywhere. This is no accident for herein may be discerned the same loss of a sense of reality and absence of the world—of a world recognised in its fundamental independence—that characterises commodity fetishism. What is more, this stubborn denial of the existence of a world outside our actions and our desires has characterised modernity since its beginning. It is the programme announced by Descartes when he made the existence of his own self the only possible certainty.

Should it aim to be something more than just a branch of the culture industry, it would be reasonable to expect contemporary art to take this acutely dysfunctional relationship between man and his world into account, a relationship which is not metaphysically preordained but the consequence of commodity logic. György Lukács in his day reproached the artistic avant-garde for its “absence of world”. Today, this term has taken on a new meaning. Expectations seem therefore well-founded for the appearance of works of art that provide a glimpse of the possibility of halting the drift towards the inhuman and defend the prospect of an eventual reconciliation between man and the world, man and nature, man and society, albeit without betraying this eventuality by claiming that it can be immediately realised or has already happened. A penchant for reconciliation can be made out in works—in the broadest sense of the term—that pay proper attention to the materials they use, whether stone, textiles, the environment, colour or sound. The world is full of architects clueless about the material properties they are using (the new National Library of France is a perfect example), fashion designers who have no idea how a fabric hangs and painters who cannot draw an apple. This “project” culture too often regards the material as an inert support that the subject can use as a vehicle for his “ideas”. It comprises a form of narcissism and denial of the world, a world felt as too insubordinate to the consumer’s desires for world domination. Exploring both the potential and the limits of matter, sound, words and seeing where amalgamation may be achieved, rather than bending them to the individual will, would thus constitute a first step towards a less violent relationship with the world, other men and nature. This is not a plea for an “objective” art or a refusal of introspection and of any work where the subject deals with himself: many things can be understood and said about the “world” by looking within the self (it is also possible to discuss the outside world without truly finding anything there save for a reflection of oneself).

Fetishistic logic runs through the whole society and through every individual. It does not permit clear distinctions to be made between culprits and victims, oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited, goodies and baddies. Everyone partakes of this logic although obviously not everyone does so in the same way. Mere goodwill however (the intention to fight for Aids victims, for example, or against prejudice) is not enough. To push people into being a bit nicer and friendlier in their everyday lives, as “relational art” tries to do, is to degrade art into a therapy against the coldness of the world. If it wants to break the hardness of fetishistic and narcissistic individuals, art itself has to be hard and difficult. This requires it to be demanding, not deliberately abstruse. If art wants no truck with the world as it is, it must stop pandering to “people”, stop making their lives easier, making society nicer, more useful, stop delighting. It remains truer to its vocation when it blocks easy communication and endeavours to confront its public with something “greater” than itself. This art must clash, not just with moral conventions that have already been completely undermined,⁸ but also with the stubbornness of human beings in the course of their empirical existence, their fossilisation into everyday categories (which these days does not preclude their total deliquescence). Ideally, it is not the work of art that must appeal to the man but the man who must contend with the work of art. Again, it is not for the spectator/consumer to choose the work but for the work to choose its public by determining who is worthy of it. It is not for us to judge Baudelaire or Malevich since they are the ones judging us and our ability to judge. From this angle, the work of art must not be “in the service” of the subject who contemplates it. One could say of art what is true of ethics: it establishes parameters; it points to what individuals should force themselves to achieve and not the opposite. One of the functions of art has always been to show individuals a better world where the freedom and intensity whose absence is so keenly felt in everyday life may be found. In epic poetry as well as early abstract painting art allowed glimpses of higher and more vital ways of life and thus confronted the individual with the real state of the world.

But will this more essential type of artwork ever materialise? The signs are scarcely encouraging. It is far easier to draw up a report on the current state of the world than it is to cite works of art that give a proper account of it or simply to get a concrete idea of these works. There is even less evidence of a coherent artistic current capable of taking on the current state of the world, as did abstract painting when reacting to the becoming abstract of social life at the start of the twentieth century, or the Surrealists, on the one hand, and the Constructivists, on the other, who offered different means to react against the sudden emergence of industrial society in everyday life and the “disenchantment of the world”.

As much cannot be said, however, for the endless repetition of Marcel Duchamp’s gesture. The urinal that he exhibited in 1917 as a “fountain” was a well-conceived provocation. Afterwards, it became a badge of honour to exhibit any old object as a work of art, thus eliminating any idea that an artwork could be excellent or “sublime”. It is worth recalling that it was Duchamp himself who, with his characteristic ambiguity, was the first to claim this. In 1962 he told the erstwhile Dadaist Hans Richter: “This Neo-Dada, which they call New Realism, Pop Art, Assemblage, etc., is an easy way out, and lives on what Dada did. When I discovered the ready-mades I sought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my ready-mades and found aesthetic beauty in them, I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.”⁹

The point is not whether Malevich’s White Square, or Duchamp’s Fountain, or, to a lesser extent, Kosuth’s Chair are works of art in the absolute sense. This is what they were at the historical juncture when they first appeared preceded by a long and painful process leading up to their creation to which artists had borne witness. But once produced, these artworks could not be repeated. Thereafter, it was as ridiculous to repeat this process as it would be to rediscover the structure of molecules today.¹⁰ In this respect art is radically non-democratic. It makes artists do what it wants and not the other way round: not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to do everything whenever they like. It is too late to make monochromatic and ready-made art. Those who were born earlier on have already done so, taking everything and leaving nothing to posterity. The historical injustice that it represents may be likened to the fact that the earth was divided up long before we were born. A sense of fury at the consummate achievements of the past is often noticeable among contemporary “creators”. If art is to be something more than a way of aspiring to personal fulfilment by ransacking the storehouse of possibilities, the situation of the contemporary artist is in fact scarcely to be envied. Not men but what devours them must be loved.

Another dead end is represented by one of today’s other major artistic procedures summed up in the words re-usability, “mixing”, referencing and plagiarism which can even go so far as to claim Situationist “détournement”. It only means anything in the context of a community of people with the same cultural references that—at least within the group—have “classic” value and that retain it for a certain period, be it Greek literature among cultured people of the nineteenth century or Surrealist literature for the early Letterist movement. In this context it is even possible to create works composed entirely of quotations. Today, there is no longer a universal cultural heritage, even among, say, rock music fans for whom Chuck Berry is now as far removed as Beethoven.¹¹ In such conditions the use of pre-existing material signifies nothing more than DJing at a console: creativity for all, courtesy of the supermarket.

Is the current oft-lamented state of contemporary art a mere aberration? Is it the fault of artists, museums or institutions? What are the prospects for putting things right? A major conference involving every art world professional, who then decide to transform the entire art scene? Are there unjustly ignored artists who ought to be recognised and who might be able to get everything back on an even keel? Should art school syllabuses be subject to a total rethink? Should the resources that the state allots to culture be otherwise redirected? Nothing is less certain. The problem is more serious. It is the present state of society, and the process that has led up to it, that makes it so difficult for art to be in any other situation. The problem is that, ever since something like “art” has existed—beginning with the Renaissance—never has its role in society been so inconsequential or its existence been so marginal, notwithstanding the fact that never have we seen such a quantity of artists and such a mass of information and knowledge circulate among the public at large, and such long queues outside exhibitions. The problem of contemporary art is its total lack of importance in collective life, and the farcical thing is that its professionals are quite happy to go along with this state of affairs because never have they earned so much money.¹² But are there works of art that will, in a hundred years, give an account of what we are currently living through today? Are there people around now who feel that this is necessary?

Notes

1.Guy Debord, Potlatch 1954-1957 (Paris: Éditions Gérard Lebovici, 1985), p. 9. Republished in Guy Debord, Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), p. 131.

2.Perhaps this was the only possible endeavour, the only possibility to progress at the very moment when different neo-Dadaisms did nothing more than rehash what had already been done, implicitly accepting that the history of art was over and that all that could now be done was to strip its corpse.

3.The fact is generally overlooked that the Situationists used the phrase “to transcend art” in two different ways: in the sense of it being “obsolete”, “defunct”, “decrepit”, “no longer with the times”, and this type of transcendence, according to them, was already the reality of their own time. “To transcend [dépasser]” is also understood here in the sense of the Hegelian Aufheben: to go further, to re-create while preserving valuable aspects of the old. For them this type of transcendence still needed to be achieved, no longer within the artistic sphere but through a social revolution.

4.Those quoted for example in Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, p. 173.

5.Situationist International, “Domination of nature, ideologies and classes”, Internationale situationniste, no. 8 (1964).

6.Theodor Adorno, tr. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Aesthetic Theory [1970] (London: Continuum Press, 2004), p. 273.

7.Given the pillorying to which every present-day governmental system is subject, there is no a priori reason why the same treatment cannot be meted out to contemporary art. There have been some cultural eras that were subsequently deemed to be ridiculous (euphuism in the seventeenth century, for example, or official painting) along with the theoreticians who extolled them. The stance of “It exists, lots of people like it, and even pay in order to own it, therefore it is valuable” cannot be accepted as a petitio principii.

8.Contemporary artists’ claim to subversiveness is not worth dwelling on for a single instant. In actual fact there still remain and recur numerous taboos in this society but at no time does contemporary art tackle them. Repulsive or illegal avenues aside, all it would take to whip up a scandal is to “query” certain things that pass everywhere for natural and positive: liberal democracy and pluralism, artificial insemination and anatomical dissection, organ transplants, easy divorce (Christopher Lasch), mechanised transport, compulsory education…

9.Marcel Duchamp, in Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (New York: McGraw Hill, 1965), pp. 207-208.

10.On the other hand, it was not impossible to continue along the same trail blazed by Kandinsky or by the Surrealists. In these cases it was a matter of technique.

11.A student who said that she regularly listens to “really old music” then added that she was referring to rock music from the 1970s.

12.Unlike the vast majority of other present-day activities, contemporary artistic production is at least not directly harmful. It is artless. It cannot even be described as a poisoning of minds because the real influence of contemporary art is nil and all the artists in the world matter less than the latest reality TV show.

Bibliography

Currently there are only a small number of books and articles from the perspective of a critique of value published in English. The work of Moishe Postone, an American professor, is available to English readers. However, the writing of German-language authors, such as Robert Kurz and Roswitha Schultz, has not been translated extensively. A number of critique-of-value texts are also available online in a variety of languages: www.exitonline.org, www.krisis.org, www.streifzuege.org. See also Marxism and the Critique of Value, ed. Neil Larsen et al (Chicago: MCM’, 2014), available as a free PDF at www.mcmprime.com.

Adorno, Theodor, tr. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Aesthetic Theory (London: Continuum Press, 2004)

Barber, Benjamin, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007)

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Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello, tr. Gregory Elliott, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso Books, 2007)

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Clair, Jean, La responsabilité de l’artiste. Les avant-gardes entre terreur et raison (Paris: Gallimard, 1997)

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Debord, Guy, Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 2006)
—, tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1995)

Dufour, Dany-Robert, The Art of Shrinking Heads: The New Servitude of the Liberated in the Era of Total Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008)

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—, …Damit mich kein Mensch mehr vergisst! Warum Amok und Gewalt kein Zufall sind (München: Pattloch, 2010)

Finley, Moses, The Ancient Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)

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Kurz, Robert, Der Kollaps der Modernisierung: Vom Zusammenbruch des Kasernensozialismus zur Krise der Weltökonomie (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 1991)
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