hydrarchist writes:

Time to Revolt — Reflections on Empire

John Holloway

What is it about Empire that annoys me?

It is not the basic thesis. The idea that capitalism is a decentred and
deterritorialising system of rule, that the old understanding of the world
in terms of imperialism is not valid — this argument is unobjectionable. But
then it was always a mistake to see capital as being attached in some way to
a particular country. Capital is an inherently a-territorial relation of
domination. The Leninist notion of imperialism was misconceived from the
beginning. What is objectionable in Hardt and Negri's argument that
imperialism has been replaced by empire is the assumption that the concept
of imperialism used to be valid — but then this reflects the ambiguous
relation to Lenin that has always been present in Negri's writings and
indeed in much autonomist writing, beginning with Tronti's brilliant "Lenin
in England": the argument that things have changed since Lenin's time, now
we must rethink strategy, do what Lenin did in England.
What annoys me about the book is that I see it as the betrayal of a rich and
powerful impulse. Or better, since 'betrayal' is a remarkably silly word:
the book brings to its dire culmination a contradiction that was probably
always present in that impulse.

By 'rich and powerful impulse' I mean autonomist Marxism (sometimes referred
to as operaismo), the movement to put the subject at the centre of
revolutionary theory. Tronti's oft-quoted criticism of orthodox Marxism is
worth quoting again: 'We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist
development first, and workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to
turn the problem on its head, reverse the polarity and start again from the
beginning: and the beginning is the class struggle of the working class’
(1979, p. 1). This is the core of what Moulier refers to as ‘operaismo's ...
Copernican inversion of Marxism’ (1989, p. 19). Whereas orthodox Marxism
focuses on the analysis of capital and the forms of capitalist domination,
understanding the task of theory as the analysis of the framework within
which class struggle takes place, autonomism places working class struggle
in the centre of the understanding of capitalism. This means not simply
adopting a working class perspective, but, in complete reversal of the
traditional Marxist approach, seeing working class struggle as determining
capitalist development. ‘At the level of socially developed capital,
capitalist development becomes subordinated to the working class struggles;
it follows behind them and they set the pace to which the political
mechanisms of capital's own reproduction must be tuned’ (Tronti, 1979, p.
1).

The autonomist impulse, this inversion of orthodox Marxism, has been of
enormous importance, reviving Marxism as a theory of struggle. The problem
is that it does not go far enough: ‘the difficulty inherent in 'autonomist'
approaches is not that 'labour' is seen as being primary but that this
notion is not developed to its radical solution.’ (Bonefeld, 1994, p. 44)
Working-class struggle cannot really be the starting point, because 'working=class struggle' presupposes a prior constitution of the working class. Marx
himself is far more radical when he insists that the pivot is the 'two-fold
nature of the labour contained in commodities' (1965, p. 41). The two-fold
nature of labour is, of course, already class struggle, the struggle between
abstract and concrete labour, the struggle between the purposive doing (that
which distinguishes the architect from the bee) and its negation. The danger
in starting from a pre-constituted 'working-class struggle' is that the
critique of orthodox Marxism (as Engels-Leninism is generally known) does
not go deep enough, that too much is taken over unquestioned from the
tradition that is being criticised. There is a tendency, too, to take 'working
class struggle' at face value, as
macho-militant-in-the-factory-or-in-the-street struggle. Taking working-class struggle as starting point leads us easily to the pure subject (the
struggle of the Working Class), whereas the two-fold nature of labour takes
us immediately to the contradictory, desperately self-antagonistic subject.
Hardt and Negri's model militant, introduced in the last paragraph of Empire
(2000, p. 415), is Saint Francis of Assisi, no longer so macho, but as pure
a figure as any to be found in the heroic monuments of socialist realism. A
joke, perhaps, but a revealing one.

The autonomist impulse has to be made more radical, to be taken further than
'the beginning is the class struggle of the working class'. The beginning is
the two-fold nature of labour or the self-antagonistic existence of doing, a
doing that screams against its own negation. To place the subject at the
centre of revolutionary theory in a world which denies the subject (as
social subject) is to criticise, and criticism is possible only on the basis
of doing. Criticism is the voice of the subject who says to an objective
world 'you deny me, but I made you (and your denial of me)'. Putting the
subject at the centre of theory is not just a question of saying 'here we
are', but of criticising all that denies our presence, all that denies our
creative force, all that denies that we are the only creative force, that we
are the only doers.

The doing from which we start is a social doing. This is a tautology: all
doing is social. Doing is inconceivable without the previous or simultaneous
doing of others. Doing is part of a social flow of doing in which the done
of some is the precondition of the doing of others. But this social flow is
broken, so that doing appears as individual doing. The social flow is broken
when that which has been done is appropriated by some, who say 'this is
mine!' Since the done is the precondition of doing, these people own the
means of doing and are able to control the doing of others.

Appropriation of the done breaks the social flow of doing. Doing appears
then as an individual doing, the subject is Hollywoodised, the subjectivity
of the vast majority totally denied. The breaking of the social flow of
doing class-ifies society, separating those who say 'this is mine!' from
those who are forced to transform their doing into labour-for-others. But it
goes much, much further than that: as Marx argued in his discussions of
fetishism and alienation, the breaking of the social flow of doing is the
breaking of every aspect of our existence. Living doing is subjected to past
done. Living doing is subjected to the things made by past doing, things
which stand on their own and deny all doing. Marx starts Capital with the
terrible violence of this denying: "a commodity is, in the first place, an
object outside us" (1965, p. 35). ["Die Ware ist zunächst ein äußerer
Gegentstand" (1985, S. 49] What rules is the negation of doing, commodities,
value, capital which deny their origin in the social doing of humans. The
sociality of doing, the social relations between doers (people) exist as
things.

Living doing is subjected to dead being. Capitalism is the rule of being,
the negation of doing. Being, broken down into fragments of being, into
identity and identities, becomes the basis for thought. Identity becomes the
key category of social thought, not just of sociology and psychology, but of
bourgeois social thought in general; identity creeps too into the concepts
and struggles of against-ness. In a world of identity, we are, we struggle
to say what we are or to profess what we are. The world then is a world of
equilibrium, a world which denies as ridiculous the idea that the sociality
of doing could be quite different, that we could do a different world.
Identity proclaims that we are, whereas doing always destroys that which is.
Doing proclaims that we-are-and-are-not. In a world of doing, it is the
negation of is-ness that is at the centre, the creation of that which is not
(or not-yet). The only way in which we can even pose the question of
communism is by seeing that things are not as they are, by denying that
'that's the way things are', by proclaiming that the world is simply our
doing. To place the subject at the centre (the impulse of autonomist
theory), means, if we are to be consistent, that we must attack with all our
might a world that 'is', that we must criticise, that we must place doing in
the centre of our thought.

The negation of doing is the homogenisation of time. To deny
social-purposive doing is to subordinate doing to being, to that which is.
The doing of today is subordinated to the doing of yesterday, the doing of
tomorrow can only be conceived as a continuation of the doing of today. Time
then becomes tick-tick time, clock time, like a length of railway track.
Tick-tick time measures duration, a being separated from doing, an existence
separated from constitution. Capitalism is the separating of objects from
their subjects, of things which are from the doing that made them, of
existence from constitution. This separating creates duration, the notion
that things 'are', independent of the doing which created them. Value, for
instance, appears to have an existence independent of the self-divided doing
which created it: Marx's Capital (the labour theory of value) is above all
an attack on duration, a critique of the separation of existence and
constitution, a restoration in thought of the doing denied by duration.
One of the great advantages of this homogeneous time, duration-time, is that
it can be broken up into periods, into lengths of time. This is crucial to
the organisation of work in the factory and in the office and in the schools
and universities. Homogeneous time is crucial in the organising of the doing
of others for whom doing is purpose-less, object-less labour. But it goes
further than that. It permeates our social thought, the way we shape and
think about our social relations. Time becomes stodgy, almost solid,
something that can be cut into wedges, into periods, into paradigms, a
million miles removed from the timeless-time of intense love or engagement.
But communism, a world in which we shape our own doing, a world in which
doing is emancipated from being, a world in which doing and being,
constitution and existence are explicitly reunited, can then be conceived
only as a world in which we break the homogeneity of time, a world in which
duration is shattered, in which time is not a long railway track or a slice
of pizza, but tends towards the intensity of the Jetztzeit (now-time) of
Benjamin (1973) or the nunc stans of Bloch (1964), towards the timeless-time
of all-absorbing love or engagement.

Bourgeois thought, of course, will have none of this. Bourgeois thought,
built upon identity, upon extending what is into what will be: bourgeois
thought is obsessed with labelling, with classifying, with fitting things
together, with creating neat boxes, with paradigms. So many doctoral theses,
so many applications for research funds that must show the coherence of the
world, that must show how things fit together, how the world is a world of
correspondences. But each correspondence closes the world, excludes
possibility, negates the social power-to-do-otherwise. On the left, on the
fringes of Marxism, in the work of those who would turn Marxism from being
the intolerable theory of the unbearable scream into some house-trained
school of social science: in this murky area we have seen in the last twenty
or thirty years the growth of regulation theory, the obsession with
labelling everything as Fordist or post-Fordist or neo-Fordist. What is
wrong with that is not the phenomena that these theorists point to, nor the
interconnections; what is wrong is the rounding-off, the systematisation,
the drive to make everything fit, to close a world. In some aspects,
regulation theory has been stimulating, but its overall effect is deadly.
To periodise the present is already to close the world, to project the
present into the future, to homogenise time, establish duration. Today, the
existence of capital was based on the exploitation of millions, the
exclusion and misery of millions, the unnecessary deaths of how many
thousands of children. Perhaps it will also kill and exploit millions
tomorrow. Perhaps it will, but if we assume that then we are already closing
the possibility that it may not, we are already assuming our own defeat. And
if we extend that beyond tomorrow to the next day, to next year, to a period
or to a paradigm, then it is clear that we are actively taking part in the
struggle to defeat ourselves. If we assume from one day to the next that we
shall be defeated then we progressively exclude any possibility that we can
make the world otherwise. If we put the present into periods and paradigms,
we actively participate in the subjection of doing to being, in the creation
of a world that 'is', in the separation of existence from constitution. And
with that we throw out all hope and all Marx and all critique. Marx devoted
his life to critique, that is, to the placing of human social doing in the
centre of our understanding. To emphasise social human doing in a world
which denies that doing is absurd, of course, but the struggle for a
different world is precisely the same urgently necessary absurdity.

To periodise the present, then, is always reactionary. This sounds silly,
but it is not. It is indeed perfectly obvious. If we think, say, of torture:
it is presumably possible to speak of new paradigms in torture, or in the
sexual abuse of children. And yet, to discuss these new trends as though
they had some fixity, as though they constituted a rounded paradigm, is
surely to give to those activities a stability that few of us would want to
do. So it is with capitalism. To speak of the present paradigm of capitalist
domination is to give an air of normality to the existence of capitalism,
when all our struggle is to show that there is nothing normal about it, that
the possibility that human action may re-create capitalism tomorrow is an
abomination that can never be accepted as normal.

Now it should be clear why I object to the Empire book. It is not because
of its content (which is often very stimulating in spite of the language)
but because of the method. The book betrays the autonomist impulse in the
sense that it incarcerates the subject within a structure, in the sense that
it participates in the subordination of doing to being, in the sense that it
extends the method of regulation theory, giving it a 'left' twist. Its
method is based on duration. Although it pays homage at moments to the idea
that it is the struggle against capital that drives the changing forms of
capitalism, the general perspective of the discussion is very much in the
opposite direction. It follows the classics of Marxist orthodoxy
(Engels-Leninism) in focussing not on struggle, but on the structures of
domination. Its notions of the state and of crisis are
structuralist-functionalist. For an argument that comes from an autonomist
background, it is remarkable in establishing a 'but-also' dualism between
capital and struggle: this is perhaps not surprising, for the very notion of
a paradigm of rule hides what every capitalist knows, namely that the
existence of capital is constant, daily-repeated struggle. Worst of all,
perhaps, is the total eclipsing of the centrality of doing in the
development of the concept of 'multitude'. The concept of 'working class',
for all its problems, for all its fetishised deformations, has at least the
great merit of taking us to the centrality of human purposive activity,
social doing. In the concept of multitude, this is lost completely. The
working class does, albeit in a fetishised form; the multitude does not do.
But if doing is not at the centre of our thought, all that is left is
opposition, not hope.

A rage and a rant? Yes, perhaps. The book is better than many, of course.
But that is not the problem. The problem is that its enormous success is the
expression of how desperately people are looking for a way forward, how
desperately people are looking for a revolution that is not a repeat of the
revolutionary cant of the past. But this book leads them into a
methodological stodge, a world of doctoral theses, a closure. That is why it
annoys me.

References:

Benjamin, Walter (1973) ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in
Illuminations, (New York: Schocken Books)

Bloch, Ernst (1964) Tübinger Einleitung in die Philosophie (2 Bde)
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp)

Bonefeld, Werner (1994) ‘Human Practice and Perversion: Between Autonomy and
Structure’, Common Sense no. 15, pp. 43-52

Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio (2000) Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press)

Holloway, John (2002) Die Welt verändern, ohne die Macht zu übernehmen
(Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot)


Marx, Karl (1985) Das Kapital, Bd. I (Berlin: Dietz)

Red Notes (1979) Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis: Italian Marxist
Texts of the Theory and Practice of a Class Movement: 1964-79> (London: Red
Notes)

Tronti, Mario (1979a) ‘Lenin in England’, in Red Notes (1979), pp. 1-6"