Thursday, July 27, 2017

Emancipatory Biopolitics

I have for some time (at minimum since November of last year) been saying that Marxism is past the point of provability, and thus no longer salvageable as an exemplar of "scientific socialism." In more short-hand forms I have taken to referring to myself as "post-Marxist," dissatisfied with that term, since it encompasses a wide range of political and philosophical manifestations, more than a few of which I dislike. What I have not had time to do, until now, is try to articulate what aspects of the Marxian edifice retain some plausible correspondence to the facts, and which have to be jettisoned as corollaries to negated premises. After I left the SPUSA last month, I have had time, and my thoughts have begun to cohere, for the first time in years, into something resembling a coherent world view. This post represents my first attempt to articulate that world view. Its weaknesses are, I hope, in the nature of a first draft.

There have, within movements purporting to be Marxist, been two distinguishable visions of the communist aim. One can find traces of both in the first section of the Gotha Program. One is the notion that workers get more and more, until the workers have it all. This Marx stigmatizes as Lasallean, even as he concedes that, with some modifications, it describes a necessary but temporary stage. The second is that the workers cease to be workers as distinct from society at large, that the self-emancipation of the proletariat corresponds to its self-abolition as a class. The contradiction, insofar as it is Marx's own contradiction, is a contradiction in the Hegelian sense, one that resolves itself through its own immanent development. More concretely, Marx argued that the partial (trade union and legislative) struggles waged by the working class to lessen its exploitation at the expense of capitalist profit, while they would not end that exploitation, would enable the working class to develop the collective confidence and self-concept necessary to take over from the capitalists--and thus to put itself out of existence. One finds the two visions in different proportions in different areas of Marx's work--more of the aggrandization of the proletariat in "Value, Price, and Profit," more of its self-abolition in the "Communist Manifesto"--but both are there.

Varying admixtures are found in later Marxist writers as well. For example, Trotsky articulates the former vision when he writes (in his 1939 essay "Marxism in Our Time," that is, on the eve of the bloodiest war in history) that "The class struggle is nothing else than the struggle for surplus-product." Its traces are all over the Transitional Program as well. The notion that the class struggle is "nothing else" than the struggle over surplus-product does not mesh well with Marx's dictum from the Manifesto that "every class struggle is a political struggle." The point is not to pick on Trotsky: He was intelligent and well-read, and quite familiar with self-abolition as an aim of the proletarian class struggle. For example, it figures in the arguments of his book on Literature and Revolution. That the economistic notion of the class struggle as the struggle for the surplus figures so strongly in his more overtly political writings may help account for the political weaknesses of subsequent organizations claiming to be Trotskyist, but does not necessarily cast doubt on Trotsky's quality as an interpreter of Marx. Certainly not in comparison to some of the alternatives.

How do these two visions fare in the face of climate crisis, in which Marxism's "fundamental positive hypothesis has been invalidated, not as a moment of a self-devouring dialectic of negativity but as an inexorable consequence of physical processes triggered by humanity but escaping its control"? Neither fares well. For the moment, we need to examine each in turn before comparing their bruises and wounds.

"The struggle over the surplus-product" can be summarized more concisely in the slogan of someone who was never a Marxist, the American trade unionist Samuel Gompers: "More." One hesitates, at a moment when the inequality of wealth and income in the U.S. is the greatest it has been in nearly a century, to abjure the need for workers to demand more. Most such struggles, in fact, can and must be joined without hesitation. To fight for a shortening of the working day and working week, for more leisure and freedom, is a fight to lessen subordination to capitalist production and its destructive outcomes. To fight for better health and safety on the job is to insist that some things have value that cannot be reduced to the universal equivalent of money. To decouple the basic preconditions of social life--health, food, water, shelter, education--from employment and the wage is essential.

But what of fights for higher wages? At the basic level, among the layers of the working class who now are not paid enough to meet their basic needs (on a global scale--the majority), this is an urgent demand. But if posed more generally, we must ask, to what end? What does more money get us? Greater claim to a mass of commodities, most of which meet no need at all, but whose production serves to accelerate our social death.

Or fights for more jobs? We must ask: Doing what? Creating what? And most importantly at the moment, creating what waste products?

The struggle over the surplus-product is a struggle over the conditions of our hastened collective demise. A political struggle would be a struggle for human survival, against heedless destruction, and thus, against the very conditions for the existence of the surplus-product.

Does this mean that we forego the struggle for "more" entirely, in favor of a direct struggle for proletarian self-abolition? This would not be an unprecedented conclusion, and has been articulated repeatedly by representatives of the "communization" current. Where I would differ from most representatives of such thinking is that they present the unilateral preference for self-abolition as compared to economic struggles as belonging to Marx; I consider this a misreading, but such philological questions pale in comparison to magnitude of the tasks we now face, and are thus tangential. A more important difference, that makes it impossible for me to embrace the notion of immediate communization that might, somehow, outrun the coming decline of capitalist rule is that this vision underrates the necessity of class-consciousness as a precondition to class self-abolition. (I've linked to a post from 2013 even though I now regard that post to have been too flippant in its approach to the underlying question. I still hold to the conclusion, if not to the style of argument.) Based on tracking atmospheric carbon concentration, the probable links of current weather phenomena to climate change, and some of the second-order effects in the literature, I estimate we have perhaps twenty more years until climate effects begin to erode the social wealth created in the twentieth century. If the preconditions for communism are both material and within mass consciousness (with mass consciousness being understood not as an ideal phenomenon, but as something conditioned by and forming part of the material conditions), then those preconditions are slipping away rather than strengthening.

Note that I am not postulating an eternity of capitalism. That is frankly an impossibility. With the drive to accumulate being so fundamental to capital as a social phenomenon, it is incompatible with human survival over the long term. Either we all die, or human self-preservation intervenes to replace capitalism not with communism, but with some form of as yet unheralded class society (because there will be scarcity, and with scarcity, "to each according to their needs" is impossible).

There is thus no longer a singular class struggle (if there ever was), but struggles on two fronts. The first, indispensable struggle--because without it the second struggle is impossible--is the struggle for human survival. It is the struggle against anything that threatens to accelerate climate transformation to a point where adaptation and survival are rendered impossible. The second struggle is over the shape of the new society that emerges among surviving humanity. It is the struggle to preserve and expand human freedom despite the damage we have done to ourselves, to defend every gain made by oppressed people in spite of capitalist rule and to ensure that those who consigned us to such straitened circumstances are not allowed to set terms for their own continued dominance.

The ugly not-quite-neologism I have come up with for this double struggle is "emancipatory biopolitics". (A quick Google search tells me that over the last 10 years, a few people who write about people like Foucault, Negri, and Agamben have used the phrase. Whether it is used in precisely the same sense as I intend, I do not know, nor do I particularly care at the moment.) The important point to make is that this struggle is not (just) a class struggle. It opens up a struggle within the ranks of what Marxism would term the working class. A pipeline welder, and a nurse volunteering as a medic in a water protectors' encampment, are both workers in a sense that Marx and most Marxists would understand. But they have taken opposite sides in the fundamental struggle for survival. It is only by regarding the former as a complete dupe of the capitalists that one can excuse his actions--and I have met enough workers who do destructive jobs to know that they are not mere dupes, that they are thinking beings as capable of rationalizing their actions as I am capable of rationalizing mine. And lest you decide that I have conveniently chosen an extreme case, consider more such dyads: A wall-builder, and a migrant attempting to climb a wall. A coal truck driver, and a child (maybe even his own) suffering asthma. There are two sides. One can change sides in this struggle--we must try to get more people to change sides--but ultimately one must take sides.

This is because the site of the struggle is not production, which under capitalism is necessarily capitalist production, that is, production for profit. It is a struggle over (social) reproduction, that is, the ways in which human beings collectively create the social conditions and material necessities for one generation to replace another. To the extent that capitalist production has either crowded out or taken parasitic control over other modes of social reproduction, it has become ever more the production of waste products (CO2 and leaked methane, of course, but also pollution in air, land and water, food waste, and human beings consigned to being treated as waste). The struggle against capitalist production over the conditions of social reproduction is the struggle over how much shit we will allow capital to choke us with.

I do not anticipate founding a "Party for Emancipatory Biopolitics." Not only is the phrase a barbarism, but the formation of a party would be beside the point. We have to ask ourselves, what type of knowledge, and what type of power, do we need to organize and build, in order to wage the double fight for survival and freedom? With no false modesty, I can honestly say that the point is not to have read Marx, Camatte, Foucault, or Negri. Such erudition pales in comparison with knowing where the water-treatment plants are, when the oil trains are scheduled to pass through town, the production and storage of food, or how to find and use stockpiled weaponry. For a negative example, of what can go wrong when the the forces of death are the ones who know and act on such matters, consider Jamie Allinson's account of ISIS in his essay "Disaster Islamism". But also comparatively unimportant (though sometimes tactically necessary) is knowledge of the names and personalities of local elected officials or the mechanisms of constitutional government. The types of knowledge created and mobilized by a party are at best of secondary importance. A "collective" instead, perhaps?

I make no strong claim to originality in this. My path to this outlook may be rare or unique, but the outlook itself is, I hope, not. Nor are the names especially important, either. But since my skills are primarily as a reader and a writer, let me end this on a comparatively optimistic note. Whatever the phrase "Collective for Emancipatory Biopolitics" lacks for stirring euphony, perhaps can be compensated for with a summary slogan: "Long live life! Death to death!"

No comments:

Post a Comment