Intellectuals and (Counter-) Politics

Essays in Historical Realism

Gavin Smith

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782383017
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Contemporary forms of capitalism and the state require close analytic attention to reveal the conditions of possibility for effective counter-politics. On the other hand the practice of collective politics needs to be studied through historical ethnography if we are to understand what might make people's actions effective. This book suggests a research agenda designed to maximize the political leverage of ordinary people faced with ever more remote states and technologies that make capitalism increasingly rapacious. Gavin Smith opens and closes this series of interlinked essays by proposing a concise framework for untangling what he calls "the society of capital" and subsequently a potentially controversial way of seeing its contemporary features. This book tackles the political conundrums of our times and asks what roles intellectuals might play therein.

PART I

INTELLECTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE

– Chapter 1 –

CAPITAL

Structural, Phenomenological, Financial

[I]f capitalism has all but disappeared as a subject and object of political theory … capitalism is and remains our life form … [C]apitalism arguably remains the dominant force in the organization of collective human existence, conditioning every element of social, political, cultural, intellectual, emotional, and kin life … This is not to say that capital is the only significant social power afoot in the contemporary world … [but] Marx’s insight into capital’s awesome power to drive human history and contour agentic possibility is not diminished by them. …our averted glance here … prevents us from grasping the extent to which the dramatic alterations in the configurations of the political … are themselves effects of capitalism and not simply secularization, disenchantment or contingent human invention … Thus, to theorize the politics of recognition, the sexual order of things, the nature of citizenship, or the reconfiguration of privacy, without taking the measure of their historically specific production by capitalism, is literally not to know the constitutive conditions of one’s object of analysis [italics added].

– Wendy Brown, ‘At the Edge’

Introduction

One reason I made the decision to get a degree in social anthropology was so that I could avoid doing any more economics. It went something like this. I had been in an investment bank on Wall Street and then in Montreal working in what today is rather cryptically called ‘the financial services sector’, when I became interested in initiatives poor people were making to change their lives – mostly in what we then called ‘the Third World’. I applied for a variety of jobs and found that I was always offered a desk job as some kind of economist (I had a degree in Economics and History). I realized, to use another current expression, that I needed to ‘rebrand’ myself. This may explain why, once I made it to my field site to understand peasant resistance, I was so determined that no part of that understanding would involve economics. It was not just that temperamentally I didn’t like doing economics; it was also that I felt determined to dispense with the dominant role economic issues played in people’s lives. More accurately, I got these two things muddled up. Not enjoying economics, it suited me to propose that economics was not important. The book I wanted to write would be called Peasant Resistance and Politics in Central Peru.

Unfortunately the people I lived with for two years, first in the Andean highlands and then in Lima’s inner city slums and shanty towns (coralones, callejones and barriadas), didn’t agree with me. Their discussions perpetually interwove the political issues that revolved around securing the basic means for maintaining their way of life – pastoral land in the highlands, a secure place to live and access to sites for petty commerce in the city – with the economic issues of livelihood concerns – how to find and maintain lines of credit, acquire skilled labour and so on. Much as I wished to understand their culture and politics in terms relatively removed from the economy, narrowly or broadly conceived, they themselves kept pulling me back. Moreover, two years after the original fieldwork I returned to the barriadas to explore how interpersonal credit networks were affected by Peru’s shift from a fixed currency rate that limited inflation to a floating rate that stimulated it.

So in the end the book that resulted had to carry the title Livelihood and Resistance: Peasants and the Politics of Land in Central Peru. Not only had livelihood and land crept into the problematic; it was impossible to understand resistance, politics, livelihood or ‘land’ without seeing them to be thoroughly interlaced with one another. And attending to the issues relevant to livelihood was not simply a matter of taking account of local ‘economic’ practices,¹ it was also a question of exploring shifts at larger scale levels – in the regional, national and global economies – noting how shifts at one level required responses at another.

Part of the point of this story is to show how unwilling I was to come to this conclusion. Having gone to considerable effort to get away from capitalism in its various sites and manifestations, I was not filled with joy at the discovery that coming to grips with the realities of life for the people I had lived with obliged me to take into account those very sites. I stress this unwillingness to obviate the suggestion that only social analysts with certain inclinations choose to address the issues of the specific nature of the capitalist economy. As Wendy Brown makes clear in the epigraph to this chapter, for the responsible scholar there really is no choice. Indeed she makes clear that in fact we are not talking about an isolatable sphere that we might call the capitalist ‘economy’, rather we are speaking of a particular kind of society in toto (see also Streeck 2012).

At least since 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed followed by various of its satraps and then more recently by the shift to ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’, it has become tempting to naturalize capitalist society – or at least to see capitalism as the inevitable end point to which all societies tend. While talking about any one of the issues that are the concern of this book, however, I wish to tug us back – perhaps as reluctantly as I had felt those years ago in Peru – to the specificities of capitalist society. As Wendy Brown notes, features that distinguish the age we live in may include the politics of recognition, the sexual order of things, the nature of citizenship, or the reconfiguration of privacy, but their constitutive conditions lie in their embeddedness in a specific kind of society; one in which daily life depends on commodities whose production and circulation are achieved through the normatively sanctioned pursuit of profit through capital (Harvey 2001: 312).

I am interested in a variety of relations that arise in the reproduction of the kind of society in which commodities are produced and circulated in the pursuit of profit. For this process to unfold, a series of relations must arise – between people and tools, between people and the things they consume, between people and other people, between things as they circulate through exchange, and so on. We can identify some of the most fundamental of these relationships and we can follow them as they are reproduced or undergo modifications through time. In so doing we can identify moments of potential tension and contradiction as well as the means by which these tensions might be resolved or apparently overcome to provide bases for a renewed cycle of reproduction.

In this chapter I set out some of the most pervasive of these kinds of relations, tensions and contradictions. An exercise of this kind runs the risk of appearing overly formulaic and even deterministic, especially when stripped down in the way I do it here. I admit to the straitjacket tendency in viewing our society in this way. Clearly the flesh and blood that comes with the skeleton I describe is what real societies are all about and, as Wendy Brown notes, we are interested in all these elements of the social world. Nevertheless I insist that we do need to know about the quite specific way in which capitalist relations are reproduced, even if, once we understand them and take them into account, we can as it were complicate the picture. This is especially so because recently scholars have either lost interest entirely in the specificities of the kind of society we live in qua a capitalist society, or they have begun to speak of capitalisms in the plural without specifying what characteristics of these various kinds of society allow us to speak of them all under the rubric ‘capitalism’.

Along with these disappearances of capitalist society we are in danger of also losing the social grounding not just of the subjectivities, practices and relations we study in our work, but the social grounding too of our own practice of critique. Everything becomes contingent and the dialectic that constitutes phenomena through the relations among them in a dynamic of reproduction/transformation is reduced to the placement of events, spatialities, regimes of rule and what have you in assemblages whose juxtaposition has no emergent property but is rather a convenient portmanteau for the analyst. This is not to say that such authors deny social causality but, in reducing the characteristics of capitalist society to a series of features of no greater significance than any other phenomena, they are denied the possibility of exploring the ways in which the immanent features of capitalist reproduction relate to the contingencies of specific histories. This linking of critique to its specific social setting (within capitalist society) and thence to the immanent features of that society’s reproduction is what I turn to now.

For Marx the practising subject is always historically and socially constituted. If there is some trans-historical essence distinct to the human being, such as manipulating symbols to inform practice (that is, ‘culture’ as understood by some anthropologists), it is of no particular epistemological or political importance. ‘Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men (sic) is their actual social process’ (Marx, quoted in Williams 1989b: 207–8) In Balibar’s words (1995: 25), ‘the subject is practice’. So we need to ask what might be the socio-historical basis of a counter-politics under capitalism. Where does such a counterforce to the dynamic of capitalist logic come from? For Rancière, [counter-]politics is not socially grounded at all, rather it is a kind of radical democratic imperative across history. Others would make the case for the contingency of counter-politics: the existence of a collective will that counters and disrupts the logic of capital or the iniquities of power cannot be captured by reference to any useful set of social determinants: either the very notion of ‘will’ works against such a formula, or counter-politics are always so overdetermined that the exercise is futile.

For Gramsci by contrast, answering the question ‘Is this the right time to strike?’ meant studying a historically specific society to assess the conditions of possibility for a counter-politics. But if we stick with the notion of the socio-historical constitution of a practising subject, then an assessment of capital’s domination and weakness is not sufficient. We need to show how this domination produces such a practising social subject. It is at this point that we confront the issue of immanence and, by extension, the role of a particular kind of critique of capital. Not just a criticism on moral or ethical grounds, not even a criticism that suggests that there are practical problems with capitalism that need addressing (social differentiation for example), but rather an immanent critique.

The real consequences of social and political actions are always codetermined by the context within which they take place, regardless of the justifications and goals of such actions. Inasmuch as immanent critique, in analysing its context, reveals its immanent possibilities, it contributes to their realization. Revealing the potential in the actual helps action to be socially transformative in a conscious way. (Postone 1996: 89)²

Marx recognized the implications of his insistence on historical determination for the social practice of critique itself: there could be no ‘outside’ of capitalism from which one could critique capitalism, no well-placed redoubt from which one could view the battle beneath from some kind of intellectually isolated position. But, in his view, this did not mean that the dominance of capital simply meant the moulding of the subject positively into its logic. And this was because of the contradictions inherent to capital itself. So,

Marx now feels compelled to construct his critical presentation of capitalist society in a rigorously immanent fashion, analysing that society in its own terms as it were. The standpoint of critique is immanent to its social object; it is grounded in the contradictory character of capitalist society, which points to the possibility of its historical negation.³ (Postone 1996: 140)

But note, this is absolutely not a form of historical determinism. As Postone is careful to say here, capitalist society does not produce its own negation; it produces the possibilities for the emergence of a politics counter to its domination, what I am calling a counter-politics. Subsequently the historical specificities of its actual contradictions condition the possibilities of the outcome of those counter-politics. None of this suggests that the use of immanent critique leads inevitably to a kind of ‘iron logic of predetermined history’. Rather it simply proceeds from a series of logical moves: that social reality cannot be understood statically – it needs to be understood as a historical process (of dynamic reproduction); that the specific form capitalist society takes makes this dynamic reproduction inherently contradictory; that the subject is inseparable from historically specific practice. There is no ahistorical subject and there is no subject prior to social practice. It therefore follows that the practice of critique itself arises specific to its historical context. Critique must therefore attend to the immanent features of social reality that make it possible.

In this chapter I do no more than lay out the baseline for an understanding of capitalist society in terms of the characteristics of its social reproduction and transformation. To do this I change the order of Marx’s presentation.⁴ I divide the discussion into two sections in which I discuss the two essential features of capitalist society: the peculiar feature of capital and the peculiar feature of the commodity (in that order), followed by a final section on finance capital. So, in the first part, I treat capital as a rather mechanistic set of social relations that need to be reproduced through time, ending by showing how reproduction produces tensions and contradictions that, through moves to resolve them, then reconfigure the process for another round (transformation). Then, in the second part, I change the angle of vision from the mechanics of social reproduction to the phenomenology of commodities. If the importance of Part I is that we understand the social world in terms of tension-filled reproduction, the importance of Part II is that we understand ideology, not as an issue of mind, separate from or determined by the mechanics we have seen in the previous part, but rather as inherent to the practised relations of what I.I. Rubin (1928) called ‘commodity-capitalism’. In these two parts I seek to provide a fairly straightforward and I hope uncontroversial summary of the ‘elementary structures’ of capitalist society as Marx drew them out. In the final part of the chapter, however, I move beyond the kind of capitalism that most drew Marx’s attention, and make some introductory remarks about the nature of finance capital. This section is especially relevant to the argument I make in Chapter 6.

The challenge to understanding a society dominated by social relations reproduced for the purposes of capital is to attend to the dialectical production of what appear to be three levels, or moments, of social reality but in fact cannot be thus compartmentalized.⁵ These are: immanently produced relations among people, the imaginary associated with the commodity form, and the irresolvable tension between two kinds of power. These are not separable spheres of social activity – social relations/practices, ideas/subjectivity, agency/constraint – rather they are mutually producing phenomena, and we need a methodological frame that allows us to see them as such. So this is what I seek to do in what follows.

The Structural Features of Capitalism

‘Production in general’ is an abstraction, but it is a rational abstraction … Yet these general or common features discovered by comparison constitute something very complex, whose constituent elements have different destinations. (Marx 1973: 85)

So we begin with social relations and we are especially concerned with understanding the principles by which they are reproduced: how, as these relationships are put into practice over generations, they are reproduced and possibly transformed.⁶ This process of social reproduction gives rise to tensions which, in turn, call for the need for resolutions and, if those fail, then possibly to a major transformation in the way social reproduction takes place.⁷ From this point of view social relations are not thought of through the metaphor of a structure – the parts of a bridge that hold it together, making it rigid and stable – but rather in terms of formation and re-formation. Movement takes precedence over stasis in the model we use to try to understand the parameters of social relations and practices. The practices of key social relationships in our society meet with tensions and contradictions that give an immanence to their outcomes. Nonetheless, immanent features of these relations provide us with only the warning signs of what we need to look for. This is just a preliminary – an elementary – task. The way tensions and contradictions are resolved cannot be predetermined: rather they result in multiple outcomes, the variety of which are one element (and only one element) of what we know as history or, perhaps better put, histories.

The fact that what we are trying to understand is the process of a society’s reproduction, not that of its stable equilibrium, means that we are faced with a carousel that will not stop. So we need to choose the moment we jump on, recognizing that, had we jumped on elsewhere, we would be starting our enq...