James Heartfield: "Zombie anti-imperialists vs the 'Empire': A reply".
James Heartfield hits on the crux of the matter for the non-liberal left. The revolutionary subject is missing in action (some actually suspect it has been KIA). In the G7 it is possible to make the argument that capitalism "works" quite well for 70% + of the population. That is, it is possible to explain the lack of a revolutionary subject by reference to the not too distant gap between what the bulk of people understand to be the promise of liberal (capitalist) democracy and their reality.
Mechanistic notions of capitalist reproduction (crisis theory as popularly understood and theorized by -some- Marxists) is alluring precisely because it provides a repost to the above argument. These versions of crisis theory hold out the possibility that the crisis immanent to capitalism is of such potential magnitude that it will critically impair its ability to functionally reproduce itself. Such theories of crisis performs two central tasks: (1) they provide an account of a weakened capitalist class; and (2), mechanically create revolutionary subjects from a fresh and expanding supply of disillusioned liberal democratic subjects. Hence, the revolutionary subject is a matter of waiting for the right wave. All are would-be surfers but appear as mere sun-bathers on calm waters.
Sitting here in the G7 it is hard to take any of it very seriously. The violent processes of proletarianization (the conversion of peasants to workers in the old world; the violent annexation and appropriation of indigenous lands; the transformation of petty commodity producer settlers into urban workers in the new world) is a historical fact. And it matters little that these historical facts give the lie to the substantive claims of liberal humanists because they are just that: traumatic historical facts that under-gird but do not appear to be readily productive of a traumatic social existence today in the G7 (to be sure, there are traumas although they are received individually and appear to be largely confined to marginalized groups). If it is possible to speak of "late capitalism" it is in reference to this relatively new socio-political reality. Capitalism both internationally and in its advanced capitalist forms is a highly stable order. When panics occur markets are closed; when the international credit system is threatened it is rescued by central bankers and their private counterparts (not to mention tax payers and workers); when the freaks and social activists protest, the police restore order with little trouble and some expense.
It is worth digressing to some other stubborn historical facts. Where socialist revolutions occurred there is a case to be made that they occurred prior to (1) the solidification of global capitalism and its attendant post-war regulatory institutions; and (2), in countries where the lie of liberal humanism was the lived reality of its subjects, that is, all those traumatic processes were in motion and refused.
This I think is the contribution that James Heartfield makes in his article-- although it's not really a contribution so much as a footnote. Structural Functionalist Theories of Crisis and their Rhetorical Troupes have been critically taken to task by post structuralists (including Marxists) for the last twenty years (and further back than that if one steps outside of the Anglo-American world with its hard headed addiction to axiomatic positivism).
But the problem is more damning than even Heartfield suspects. Even in those places where capitalism is unstable and not delivering the liberal bundle of commodities as promised to the majority of its citizens we are hard-pressed to find our revolutionary subject. As Patrick Bond has noted in several places: the South African unemployment rate is 40% +; it has the second highest level of income inequality in the world; ownership of the means of production is still largely colour coded; peasants are still violently being converted into prols; and private property is still popularly contested. Yet, it would not be wise to bet on our revolutionary subject making an appearance anytime soon in South Africa. So even on its own terms, the mechanical relationship between the revolutionary subject and the economic base is at best poorly specified and at worst spurious.
But that being said, the mirror image does not provide a more proximate answer as to the whereabouts of the revolutionary subject. That is to say, the observation/argument that the revolutionary subject is MIA in the G7 because the liberal subject is content with its bundle of liberal commodities is equally misleading and spurious. The revolutionary subject is a complex beast and cannot be reduced to a simplistic, mechanical thesis about the relationship between the economic base and its subjects -- no matter which direction it runs and no matter which hemisphere it is applied. And it is this crude materialist position, more than anything else (value theory and crisis theory included), which plagues the non-liberal left including the analysis on offer from Hartfield. As Hartfield's note makes clear:
"The issue that the critics avoid is central not just because it bears on the subjective alternative to the present. It also changes the objective possibilities of capitalist accumulation and development. In the period 1983-1989 the working-class alternative to capitalism was effectively defeated. That defeat opened up new possibilities for stabilising capitalism. With wages held down, and geographical and social limits to capitalist penetration suspended, the system grew extensively, incorporating more women workers into production, immigrants, and workers in the developing world. With the class struggle contained, elites had more room to manoeuvre, and international cooperation moderated the excesses of the economic cycle (39). "
It is not entirely clear that the hardships of the eighties were so great as to demand an encore by the revolutionary subject (though I would not have resisted it), as opposed to any other decade of the last hundred years. But that is all beside the point: Hartfield's revolutionary subject follows the mirrored path. He/she shows themselves in hard times and gets defeated or wins (in the eighties we are told defeated). But in the present decade we are told to infer that the revolutionary subject is securely sun-bathing on a lake, not an ocean: "At the economic level", Hartfield tells us, "society is not subject to the extremes of crisis that underscored the need for social revolution."
Here, now, solidly in Heartfield's mirror land the Prols are fat and lapping up the sun on a lake, secure in the knowledge that their UVA/UVB sunscreen is protecting them from the harmful rays of the sun and in the knowledge that oceans do not exist anymore or at least in this epoch. We can be permitted a dubious rendering of Shakespeare: "Oh what times are these in which man desires and is fulfilled by the most basic of things". Where, then, is our revolutionary hero? Well unlike the cynical theorists of "false consciousness" we are given, by Heartfield, instead the original mechanics in its inverted form. The image Heartfield presents is ugly to the point of repugnancy:
"Sociologist Ulrich Beck recently argued that the peculiar condition of the present is that we live under the rule of 'zombie categories' whose actual content has long since evaporated, persisting only because of a lack of new terminology to describe present conditions. The contemporary debate on imperialism makes 'zombie categories' out of the arguments of Marx and Lenin, terminology which seems to make sense to today's anti-war movement, but only because they are not taking them very seriously."
The dynamics of this collage are enough to make the left run, both in its new and old forms. The "Zombie" metaphor is decidedly unappealing to be sure. But rather than run like the innocents in "The Night of the Living Dead" it is perhaps wise to pause and ask if this is an adequate description of our times. And to do this we must critically interrogate Heartfield's conclusion that "[t]he old left can provide the rhetoric, but the content is the contemporary romantic anti-development mood", without getting into an infinite regress over content and context.
There is much to be said and praised about Heartfield's note. There is, as mentioned, a useful reminder that the return to the old structural functionalisms of days gone by cannot stand in our contemporary times. Today the problems the non-liberal, and even the liberal left, faces are of a different sort than that posed in the formulations of Lenin and Luxemburg, or for that matter Bakunin or Kropotkin. The new order of things, to which our predecessors only had a glimpse but struggled to articulate a language for the harbinger of things to come is surely outdated vis-à-vis today's reality. But we would do well to dwell on the creation of that language with its rich concepts of "exploitation", "surplus value", and "imperialism", because it is a language, which attempts to cut through the formal veneer of liberalism to its substantive core, which rests singularly on the violent moment. The language of Marxists, from Marx on, and its concepts serves as a counterpoint to the language and concepts of liberalism, which proceed from the real fictive veil of ignorance and never considers the tears, whereas, the Marxian idiom is about memory, a stubborn refusal to give ground to the liberal lie. If the theories of imperialism articulated by Lenin to the sixties find an awkward fit with our reality it is because they were doubly crafted to provide an explanation of what existed in time (history) and that which exists outside of time (memory). That a new generation is open to this idiom which has a purchase, but no monetary value in the present, is a sign of hope and an indication of where the revolutionary subject resides. As Marx says: "To be radical is to grasp things by the root. But for man the root is man himself."
That the language of the old left is wrong for these times is of little doubt, that the new left has an instinct for an alternative language to express the gulf between the formal and substantive promises of the liberal order of things is a positive move: what will become of it is up to us.
Travis