The Cultural Contradictions of Anti-Capitalism

The Liberal Spirit and the Making of Western Radicalism

Daniel Fletcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315461199
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Does contemporary anti-capitalism tend towards, as Slavoj Žižek believes, nihilism, or does it tend towards, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri believe, true egalitarian freedom?

Within The Cultural Contradictions of Anti-Capitalism, Fletcher presents an answer that manages to tend towards both simultaneously. In entering into contemporary debates on radicalism, this innovative volume proposes a revised conception of Hardt and Negri's philosophy of emancipatory desire. Indeed, Fletcher reassesses Hardt and Negri's history of Western radicalism and challenges their notion of an alter-modernity break from bourgeois modernity. In addition to this, this title proposes the idea of Western anti-capitalism as a spirit within a spirit, exploring how anti-capitalist movements in the West pose a genuine challenge to the capitalist order while remaining dependent on liberalist assumptions about the emancipatory individual.

Inspired by post-structuralism and rejecting both revolutionary transcendence and notions of an underlying desiring purity, The Cultural Contradictions of Anti-Capitalism offers new insight into how liberal capitalist society persistently produces its own forms of resistance against itself. This book will appeal to graduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as: Sociology, Politics, International Relations, Cultural Studies, History, and Philosophy.

Chapter 1
Perspectives on contemporary radicalism

Transcendence and the immanentist break

In commenting on the social unrest and resistance movements of 2011, Žižek (2011) suggested that the manifesto of the Spanish indignados revealed much about of the “post-ideological” era we find ourselves in, for it was indicative of the fact that protesters have become very good at disavowing the system but have proved incapable of developing a radical alternative to it. Laying out their human rights, the indignados called for an “ethical revolution”, rejecting the entire political class because of its complicity in the corporate drive for power and profit. For Žižek, this moralistic rage against the system is simply not enough – what is needed is “a positive programme of sociopolitical change”. Even in Greece, where protestors were more radical and confrontational, Žižek suggested that in attempting to reach consensus on positive action for change, the protestors could agree only on an impotent response – “to exert pressure on political parties” (ibid.). Žižek has made (2012) similar criticisms of the Occupy movement, which followed in the footsteps of the 2011 European protests against economic mismanagement and austerity programmes. For Žižek (2011), the Occupiers demanded radical change whilst refusing to adequately organise themselves to actually effect democratisation – it was almost as if they deliberately enfeebled themselves as part of their anti-establishment charade. Žižek argues that, ultimately, the protesters of the current era “express a spirit of revolt without revolution”. For revolution, the protesters need “a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness”.

Despite Žižek’s pessimistic assessment of contemporary political struggle, intellectuals whose ideas are closer to the protesters’ own interpret the spirit of the age very differently. Hardt and Negri, for example, would argue that Žižek misses the point, failing to grasp the new dynamics of emancipatory social movements. Many social movements no longer feel the need to rely on ‘strong bodies’ to add solid structure to their projects for change. They do not seek to be filtered, moulded and branded by centres of power. They are not compelled by the need to order diversity around an efficient decision-making body, or to follow a grand plan laid out by a party manifesto. In Declaration (2012), Hardt and Negri argue that rather than submitting to central leadership, today’s social movements simply assert themselves by taking to the streets and occupying city squares. In doing so, they “have declared a new set of principles and truths” (4). Through their declarations, the multitude of revolting peoples is beginning to develop “the basis for constituting a new and sustainable society” (ibid.). As Hardt and Negri note, in the occupied areas of 2011, organisation was marked by a lack of clear leadership structures; it proved impossible to find real leaders or figureheads, with the press relying on informal spokespeople and celebrity intellectuals for insight. Instead, there was an invigorating democratic ethic to the movements, with horizontal organising and participatory decision-making. Through their democratising or people-power ethic, the protesters opposed the corrupting effects of privilege and hierarchy. In opposing the power of elite individuals with the power of the people, the protesters developed “a struggle for the common” (ibid., 7).

In an argument antithetical to Žižek’s, Hardt and Negri state that 2011 was the year of radical social change. Early in the year, the exploited peoples of the world were crippled by the fear that the worldwide economic crisis had imbued within them. The multitude was tolerating the ‘tough decisions’ on economic restructuring their leaders were making, “lest even greater disasters befall us” (ibid., 4). However, as the year progressed, this tolerance began to wane and a new “cycle of struggles” emerged to undermine the existing political arrangement. The precursor to this cycle began in Tunisia in December 2010, when mass street demonstrations began against Ben Ali’s government. With Ben Ali ousted by mid-January, “Egyptians took up the baton” (ibid., 5), beginning their demonstrations in late January, occupying Tahrir Square and forcing President Mubarak out of office. These Arab struggles for democracy tapped into grievances in other Arabic countries, with the emancipatory upsurge spreading to Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, and Syria. Unlike Žižek (see 2011), Hardt and Negri focus on the positive aspects of the Arab Spring, suggesting that the emancipatory struggles pushed forward a progressive agenda, even if they didn’t bring about complete democratic revolutions. Inspired by the spontaneity of the Arab Spring push for democratisation, the indignado movement in Spain began occupations of central squares in Madrid and Barcelona on May 15th. Demanding ‘Democracia real ya’ – real democracy now – the protesters rejected political representation because they were demoralised by its ineffectiveness, and dismayed by their socialist-led government’s collusion in protecting the banking and corporate elite and in failing to support ordinary people during economic plight. As Hardt and Negri note, as part of their democratising push, the indignados developed participatory assemblies in the occupied squares. The Spanish occupations inspired Greeks to take up the baton, with protesters occupying Syntagma Square as austerity became the indefinite future for Greece. Finally, Hardt and Negri suggest that the Occupy movement, beginning in Zuccotti Park in New York in September, pushed the rebellion further, with the movement quickly spreading across the United States and the world.

Importantly, Hardt and Negri link the 2011 wave of uprisings to the “alter-globalization movements” that began to make an impact at the end of the 1990s (2012, 7). The demonstrators within these movements would try to disrupt the summit meetings of “the key institutions of the global power system”. They would travel from summit to summit, challenging the legitimacy of the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the G8, and other global institutions, calling into question the right of these institutions’ bureaucrats to set the political and economic agenda for the world. However, Hardt and Negri note that while the early alter-globalisation movement was nomadic, the cycle that began in 2011 was marked by occupation – by the refusal to be moved. They suggest that while the alter-globalisation movement nurtured the rebellion against the global system of power, the rebellious pitch has now been invested so thoroughly in local and national social issues that a rejection of the global system is beginning to take root.

Žižek is happy to embrace participatory democracy in the squares only to the extent that the social organisation leads directly to the forging of a new socialist ideology that can obliterate capitalist non-ideology. However, for Hardt and Negri, the social movements of 2011 did not “build headquarters or form central committees” not because they were lost in a post-ideological age, but because their concept of constitution has been democratically radicalised (2012, 10). In developing a constituent process, the new social movements will not seek “to codify new social relations in a fixed order” (ibid.), for they do not want there to be a fixed order to restrict their common power. One might say, then, that in implicit opposition to Žižek, Hardt and Negri suggest that the spirit of revolt is the becoming of the revolution, for within the spirit lies a radical notion of democratisation. For Hardt and Negri, there is no need to drive the new social movements towards the claiming of power, for in their very being the movements are sowing the seeds of a future revolution. Living through the spirit of radical democracy, the new social movements are alienated by traditional socialist forcing mechanisms that demand the immediate overthrow of the system and victory at all costs – as Žižek puts it, the pressing need for “quick decisions” and “necessary harshness”. Protesters in the twenty-first century want to live people-power in its radical form, and in doing so, they nurture the culture of the commons that makes possible a revolutionary reorganisation of social life.

I have now outlined two of the key competing perspectives within the radical intellectual left on contemporary resistance to the capitalist order. Let us consider this intellectual difference as part of a conflict between two closely related but divergent strands of radical bourgeois thought. On the one side, Žižek emerges from a strand of the Western intelligentsia still tightly rooted in the modernist philosophical movement against bourgeois conservatism that began in the second half of the nineteenth century. Those with modernist leanings reject the Enlightenment’s drive towards absolute rational mastery, which subsumes “the particular under the universal” (see Bernstein, 2001, 5). They associate such a drive with the dehumanising effects of capitalist and totalitarian bureaucracy. However, while such intellectuals embrace “sensuous particularity” in the forging of social and political radicalism, they remain committed to the pursuit of “rational ends” (Bernstein, 2001, 6). The bounded, bureaucratic, instrumentalist reason of the Enlightenment is seen by modernists as an irrational form of reason that reproduces itself as a stifling, deadening force. To fight this irrational force, social subjects must draw on the power of their consciousness to reflect, with a “true” or open-minded reason, on alternative possibilities of existence, always bearing in mind the treasured but elusive end of “freedom and happiness”¹ (ibid., 5). Thinkers with modernist leanings, then, reject absolute mastery over the sensual world, or the world of physical experience, but remain dependent on a mind that can abstract itself away from sensual reality to see past its limitations. There still seems, therefore, to be some emphasis here on the mind rising above sensual particularity. This emphasis encourages modernist thinkers to lean towards notions of transcending the material state of existence.

On the other side of the radical intellectual left, we find thinkers like Hardt and Negri who emanate from a strand of the Western intelligentsia that is determined to rip open the modernist legacy. Such thinkers embrace the modernist rejection of Enlightenment totality, but work to push it further, fundamentally rejecting a transcendent mental force or any commitment to a rational end of true reason. They insist that we do not only experiment with sensual particularity, but lose ‘our selves’ in it, thereby fully embracing the immanent. Human beings, then, should feel their way towards limitless reinvention by flowing through the intensities of life. We may loosely call immanentist thinkers ‘postmodernist’ because of the way in which they break from the modern inclination towards transcendence. In embracing immanent sensuality, the ‘postmodernists’ tend to look favourably on the spontaneous, anarchistic upsurges that mark the current period of social and political struggle. Those with modernist leanings, on the other hand, often remain sceptical of the radical emancipatory flows of the current period. Holding firm to faith in an overriding human consciousness, believing in the stability and order it promises, the modernists pull back on the brink of what we might call ‘the post-modern precipice’, refusing to leap towards the ‘abyss’ of absolute immanence.

I would now like to consider ideas presented at two key conferences on contemporary political struggle in order to explore the ‘modernist/postmodernist’ intellectual opposition further.² Key philosophical ideas explored at these conferences highlighted the key ground over which the intellectuals dispute. I shall explore the ways in which ‘modernist’ and ‘postmodernist’ intellectuals are animated by differing notions of freeing oneself within the collective struggle. I shall try to highlight how, by embracing differing notions of sensual being, the intellectuals are led to conflicting notions of the organisation and power that is necessary to drive forward emancipatory social or political movements.

In their ‘Introduction’ to The Idea of Communism (2010), a book based on a conference of the same name held at Birkbeck, University of London in 2009, Douzinas and Žižek argued that the spectre of communism had returned to haunt the world capitalist system. After the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s and the proclamation of the “end of history” in the wake of “unipolar world American hegemony” (vii), the economic crisis that began in 2008 had “marked the beginning of a return to full-blown history” (viii). For Douzinas and Žižek, the challenge to the political establishment is marked by the emergence of a new notion of communism, one that has left behind adherence to Soviet-style ‘communism’. In the wake of the economic crisis and the ensuing political crisis, Douzinas and Žižek helped organise the ‘Idea of Communism’ conference to bring together views from the West’s leading leftist philosophers on the emergence of a new communism.

It is significant that in their ‘Introduction’ to the collection of lectures on communism, Douzinas and Žižek suggest Alain Badiou as the man behind the phrase ‘The Idea of Communism’. They note that in the attempt to reclaim communism from its authoritarian connotations, Badiou has asserted that “from Plato onwards, Communism is the only political Idea worthy of a philosopher” (ibid., ix). Badiou is a key figure on the radical philosophical left, and it is his lecture exploring the Idea (capital ‘I’) of communism that appears first in Douzinas and Žižek’s edited collection. It is worth exploring some of the concepts Badiou presented because they highlight key issues regarding immanence and transcendence. More so than Žižek, Badiou teeters on the brink of the ‘postmodern precipice’, struggling to find a way to retain an element of transcendence within a worldview he presents as immanentist.

For Badiou (2010), communism is the emergence of political truth, and it can be understood Platonically as the ultimate political Idea. In opposition to the Idea-lessness of “contemporary democratic materialism”, which he associates with Anglo-Saxon empiricism, Badiou exalts the challenge posed to liberal capitalism by the emergence of the communist Idea. For Badiou, contemporary democratic materialism is a crude form of materialism that simply embraces sensual experience without working to re-orientate it towards emancipatory ends. His argument is based on the premise that the individual body is bound by “selfishness, competition [and] finitude” (ibid.). It is this individual body that is unleashed by the individualism of liberal capitalism – individualism understood, then, as synonymous with animality (“they’re one and the same thing”; ibid., 3). For Badiou, then, a simple embrace of sensual experience can only lead one to a limited life as a self-contained individual who is vulnerable to domination and destruction in a world of competing individuals. In order to free oneself from this limited state of existence, an individual chooses to incorporate his or her body into a “body-of-truth” (ibid.); a body that “cannot be reduced to an individual” (ibid., 2). The individual, then, goes through a process of “subjectification”, subjecting him or herself to a social body and an accompanying body of thought in order to rise away from limited primal existence and towards an extended existence within a ‘true’ body of overcoming. For Badiou, through this process of subjectification, the individual becomes part of “a political truth procedure” (ibid., 3), for he or she is heading towards a ‘true’ idea of emancipation from material suffering.

Badiou states that his “friend” Žižek also argues strongly for the return of the Idea of communism, and in recognising the force of Žižek’s Lacanian approach to revitalising the Idea, Badiou goes on to frame his notion of the Idea within Lacan’s “three orders of the Subject: the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic” (ibid., 4). In the development of the communist Idea, an emancipatory political sequence “is the Real on which the Idea is based”. The Real is understood as the realm where primal human resistance emerges against various forms of oppression, domination and exploitation. It is defined by spontaneous upsurges of anger and fight; the basic energies that begin a rejection of an established order. Such upsurges can provide individuals with a sense of emancipation, but they don’t become truth procedures unless a body-of-truth emerges out of them. For this to happen, an idea of emancipatory truth, of post-individualist truth, must begin to take hold. For Badiou, the Idea, being based on the Real, does not descend down from some divine realm to lead a political movement, but emerges out of the desires, interests, and reasoning of the movement itself. Nevertheless, Badiou still envisions ‘true’ ideas rising out of primal material conditions to re-orientate fragments of emancipation towards a ‘true’ process of total emancipation. For Badiou, the realm of the Imaginary is where post-primal, post-individualist possibilities are imagined. The ideas produced in the Imaginary are always a work in progress, always limited by, or developed through, the practical possibilities that exist within the Symbolic order of the hegemonic system of power, but the Imaginary alone has the power to move the individual from “fragments of truth” (ibid., 14) towards the true or ultimate emancipation of communism.

Badiou suggests that while the events of the 1960s opened up new emancipa-tory possibilities through a new imaginary that rejected the ‘necessity’ of party centralisation, these possibilities have been repressed beneath the reaffirmation of the bourgeois symbolic order. In the current era, the “popular masses” do not assert a coherent alternative to the established order because the capitalist system has shut off the possibility of communism – the masses are “lacking the Idea” to sustain and reinforce a truth procedure (ibid., 13). In championing individual subjectification to a body-of-truth, Badiou argues that the names of revolutionary heroes – from Spartacus, to Robespierre, to Marx, to Mao and Che Guevara – continue to matter. The names of revolutionary heroes relate to the Idea of communism in that they symbolise historical moments “of politics as truth” (ibid., 10). The revolutionary heroes, in their disavowal of individualism for the collective Subject, bring out the emancipatory struggle of the Real. In doing so, they inspire the Real struggles of the millions of ordinary individuals who are made anonymous by the capitalist system. For Badiou, then, we cannot reject the cult of personality – for him it was in fact the rejection of the cult of personality in the name of ‘democracy’ that “heralded the decline of the Idea of communism” (ibid.).

Despite his best attempts to distance communism from authoritarianism, with his fascination with revolutionary heroes who turn themselves into cult leaders, Badiou seems to reveal his underlying vanguardist inclinations. Badiou, for example, remains fascinated with the disciplining power of Chairman Mao, the Great Helmsman of Chinese Communism, particularly the power Mao had to unleash popular insurrection against the Communist Party of China during the Cultural Revolution (see Badiou, 2013). What Badiou seems to champion is any individual who rises up from raw, Real struggle to reject his or her self-centredness within the symbolic order, only to become all-powerful by leading the masses from ‘fragments of truth’ towards the universalising, totalising force of an Idea encapsulated by the leading individuals themselves. Ultimately, Badiou seems to admire Mao as the epitome of the self-empowering individual who can incite the people to sacrifice themselves on the altar of the individual’s greatness, with the individual’s greatness becoming confused with the common good: during the Cultural Revolution in China, Mao was able to abuse his demigod-demagogue status to incite a pro-Maoist hysteria, thereby reinforcing his power over the Chinese people as the Communist messiah (see Wardęga, 2012, and Burma, 2001). What Badiou seems most interested in, then, is not how the people can lead themselves through their grassroots movements, but how the people can be swept up by individuals who emerge from grassroots movements to impress themselves on the people as unquestionable leaders, ones who can elevate popular disorder to the order of an idealistic truth. The cult of personality, in both its fascist and communist forms, takes an elitist notion of bourgeois sovereignty to an extreme, galvanising a totalised mass behind the absolute power of a single ‘emancipatory’ individual.

Hardt and Negri also presented at the 2009 Idea of Communism conference that Badiou headlined with Žižek, with each of the former authors presenting separately. Although neither Hardt (2010) nor Negri (2010) really explore their opposition to transcendentalist communism in their Birkbeck lectures – perhaps in recognition of the central role of Badiou and Žižek at the conference – when the two thinkers combined to write Empire (first released in 2000), they rejected the emphasis on the formation of overriding ideas or ideology in the development of communism. Although they share in some of Badiou’s notions of uncontainable violence and spontaneous revolu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figure
• Acknowledgements
• Note
• Introduction: overview and key theoretical argument
• 1 Perspectives on contemporary radicalism: transcendence and the immanentist break
• 2 A short history of bourgeois self-emancipation: from Spinoza to Locke and onwards
• 3 May 1968: towards the limits of self-emancipatory radicalism
• 4 Varieties of self-emancipatory experience: French and Anglo-Saxon cultures of self-emancipation
• 5 Deleuze and Guattari: self-emancipatory philosophy in the ’68 era
• 6 Hardt and Negri on postmodernisation: self-emancipatory radicalism in the politics of the multitude
• 7 Flexible re-institutionalisation: from revolutionary anti-capitalism to transnationalist alter-globalism
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index