Post on 24-Jan-2023
1
Introduction: Global Crisis of Capital and Society
When we view capital as a global system that is economic, political and social then we can begin to
understand the contemporary world. Comprehending the complex processes of economic globalization and
contemporary financial crises is impossible without understanding the dynamics of capital. Classical and
neoclassical economics cannot adequately explain why we have financial crises; they can only barely describe
what has happened. Without Marxian analysis of capital we cannot begin to adequately explain the
underlying causes of the crisis of the capital system as an entirety. Marx saw the tendencies of capital to view
life itself as a commodity; Nature, humans as part of nature and all human activity can potentially be
appropriated and commodified by capital. The Marxian articulation of the dynamics of capital
commodification, privatization and alienation as well as his category of fictitious capital, are fundamentals for
understanding the world we live in today. The construction of the world market has been and continues to be
a historical process that is intertwined with the uneven economic development of states, various political
models and the advent of technologies that transform communication and production. Contemporary
capitalism must be approached from the level of the world market as must the social relations of capitalism
gone global.
The transition in the 1970s from the gold standard to currency as commodity in itself was also a transition
to the financialization of markets. Profits from material production of goods in the western world have been
superseded by profits generated from speculative money flows, corporate mergers and acquisitions. At the
same time labor has become more service oriented while production of material goods has shifted to China
and newly developed and developing countries. Financial crises, neoliberal policies of privatization and
deregulation have had a devastating effect on society and the environment. We are in the throes of three
dialectically interrelated crises that are symptoms of the crisis of capital; the crisis of the market, the political
crisis of society and the crises of ecological systems that support and sustain life itself. The spectacular failure
of private banks, major corporations and financial institutions is a failure of the capital system that is
symptomatic of the limits to capital growth in the global market. The predominant government policies of
bank bail-outs with public funds and austerity measures that significantly cut social spending have generated
public outrage and demands for social justice.
We are witnessing a time of escalating public opposition to the domination of society by global
capital and neoliberal ‘free market’ politics. Marx argued long ago that capital would become global and
dominate society; both Marx and Polanyi (2001) argued that when this happened society would rise up in
opposition. When we understand capital as a social relation in its totality then we can make more sense of the
mass civil uprisings and the underlying common and systemic causes for them. Although the protests and
occupations of public spaces are necessarily local, there is an increasing awareness among everyday people
that their causes and problems are connected across the world. There are growing realizations of global
solidarity against the ravages of capitalism neoliberal style. I argue that the various social movements and
mass protests that have captured world attention are the beginnings of a global social movement to counter
the social pathology of capital. The masses are voicing their opposition to the various manifestations of a
system that is increasingly perceived as anti-human, anti-nature and against life itself. These mass
demonstrations of public protest have become battlegrounds as states forcefully and violently step in to
quash mass dissent in public places.
The crises of democracy and of the ecological system that sustains and supports life itself are the result of
historical capital expansion. The environment has always been neglected in the economic growth paradigm.
We are confronted in our times with environmental and socio-financial crises that our current political
2
models are unable to cope with. Marxian revolutionary ideas and a re-examination of what communism can
be for us are prevalent. The issue of exploitation, appropriation and systemic dispossession of the commons
and what is or should be common is the problem of confronting capitalistic and neoliberal agendas. Part of
the problem in the West is our historic view of nature as available for human exploitation. Now that we are
confronted with the result of centuries of plundering natural resources and the environmental effects of
industrialization it is clear that we need new ways of understanding that we as humans are also nature. What
happens to the global environment is not external to us as objects in nature but as natural subjects. We must
find ways of articulating this relationship to create more human/nature sustaining political and social life.
The myth of endless growth and no limits to capital are increasingly seen as such by people across the
world. What is new is that the crisis has come to the developed world just when the western conventional
wisdom held that colonialism and imperialism were historical phases long past. Current debates about
whether globalization is transnational or truly global depend upon understanding uneven geographical
development and imperialism. The legacies of colonialism remain very apparent today. We need to be
mindful of the concrete situation in every case. If we understand David Harvey’s work on the spacio-temporal
geography of contemporary capitalism we can say that globalization is corporate and imperialistic.
Corporations dominate political life at the state level. What we have today is a hybrid corporate/state
imperialism (Harvey 2005). It is also highly Eurocentric that the focus on immaterial biopolitical processes
tends to downplay the ongoing material production that continues unabated in the global South. Resource
exploitation continues at a rampant pace, the loci of material production have shifted from the developed
western economies to the more newly industrially developed areas of the world. These shifts can easily be
explained within Marx and Engels’ expectation in the Communist Manifesto that capitalism was a global
phenomenon and that regional differences in capitalist development were to be expected due to the various
manifestations and outcomes of capitalistic/imperialistic activity.
Marx consistently held that capital was a social relation between the market and society. His development
of the concepts of value and surplus labor recognized that the social relations of industrial capital exploited
human life and human bodies for capitalist gain. This was seen by him to be most evident in the processes of
production which reflected concrete reality at the time. In our times Marxian concepts are necessary to
explain the financial crises that are also generating political dissent. The Occupy movement and public
protests are a response to these crises and show a growing awareness that developed democracies are
hollow, for the benefit of capitalists and not the people. The issue of the proletariat, who it includes and
excludes and the changing nature of waged employment to temporary and precarious work is fundamental to
understand what is common to the anti-capitalist social movements that have occurred in recent times.
People feel excluded from democratic processes and they are; electoral representation is in crisis because it
has been dominated by corporate interests. These social uprisings are also experimenting and enacting
different models of decision making and direct participatory democratic processes that are inclusive.
Horizontal and non-hierarchic methods of organization are enabling people who had no voice or no audience
to speak and to be heard. This is a process of political subjectivation that counters the alienation and social
exclusion that capitalistic social relations reproduce.
Occupation and encampments are much more than protest, they are sites of active collective organization
and discussion to find new ways of asserting the power of the people. They are no longer relying on political
representatives to look after their interests; they are organizing around local issues of significance to them
and taking direct action to counter social injustices. Local movements are connecting across the globe, using
the internet, smart phones to share ideas and experiences. When the corporate media ignores collective
actions, the people organize their own media coverage. Mass movements and individuals are able to directly
communicate, collaborate and organize on an unprecedented level. We must pay attention to this because this
3
is perhaps the beginning of a real global social movement for alternatives to capital. We need to broaden
traditional categories of class to reflect social reality in theory and praxis. No longer are people separated in
space and as easily manipulated in their thinking by states and capitalist interests. One of the biggest
questions is who are these people that are demanding social justice, how are they organizing and how are
they acting for change?
The Deepening Structural Crisis of Capital: globalization and limits to economic growth
Neoliberalism is the most virulent political form of capitalism to date. It is a result of historical
imperialism, the demise of totalitarian ‘communism’ and the rise of market politics at a level never before
experienced. Although we have new technologies and capital has expanded into the immaterial whatever is
human is material in the Marxian sense. Life is material and reification of either economics, politics, the
market only serves to mystify what are in fact human interventions in human life that are not natural but
socially constructed. Marx recognized this and described the material conditions and manifestations for
industrial capitalism with the clear proviso and warning that capital is global, tenacious and has the
dynamism to constantly morph and adapt to social and historic circumstances. Neoliberalism rides astride
industrial capital in that it is the tendency of capital to search for new ways to privatize and gain profit from
human life. In this sense biopolitical capitalism is just another phase much later in the game that could never
have developed without industrialization and technological and political developments. It is not a ‘stand-
alone’ phenomenon. It is an example of the logic of capitalism that expands into ‘new’ life realms when the
previous stages are exhausted and reaching maximum exploitative capacity.
Mészáros (2011;42), following and developing Marx for our times, tells us we must always keep in mind
the totality of capitalism as a system. He emphasizes the fundamental relationship between the mode of
production, the material basis of society and what he terms ‘social consciousness’. Mészáros reminds us that
globalization is a process that accelerates the antagonisms between nation-states and transnational capital.
We have the forces of state imperialism together with competition between capitalists who exploit
nationalism and the ever-burgeoning international division of labor. He eloquently articulates very
convincing arguments that the current crises of capital are not solely the cyclic crises of capital. He maintains
that the capital system in its totality is in decline and heading for implosion. He thinks capitalism is
synonymous with crisis. Governments could manage and contain cyclic capital crises to some extent through
monetary and fiscal policies such as quantitative easing and public bail outs of private companies and various
forms of nationalization. These measures are followed these days by ‘austerity’ measures that up until
recently were policies primarily pursued by international financial institutions in the ‘developing’ countries.
It is symptomatic of the limits to capital and the failure of the ‘growth’ paradigm that mature capitalist states
have succumbed to monopoly capital dominating society at the expense of people and nature.
In their recent book, ‘The Endless Crisis (2012), Foster and McChesney explain how financialization
is a response to systemic stagnation. There are limits to financial bubbles as a means to growth; the ‘real’
economy of production appears saturated with no space for surplus capital or expansion. The long-term trend
of finance capital speculation relative to production creates artificially inflated and fictitious ‘profit’ or
bubbles. Projected profits from these kinds of capital ventures are not production but circulation, often only
on paper with poor risk assessments for bad loans presented as ‘growth’. The crisis of capital deepens when
the bubble inevitably bursts and the state is compelled as a last resort to bail out failures of private financial
speculation that are deemed ‘too big to fail’. It ends up as socialism for financial elites and austerity measures
for the rest of society. This in turn generates a crisis of democracy as markets continue to become more and
more speculative with more financial ‘bubbles’ that burst. The public clearly see that they are expected to
4
‘tighten their belts’ for the good of the national ‘economic recovery’. To add insult to injury the public is
expected to foot the bill for the failure of at best mismanaged private companies. The incidences of corporate
corruption, collusion with politicians and outright financial criminal fraudulence are too big to ignore. When
the free marketeers fail the public picks up the tab; when Joe Citizen cannot find employment or gets behind
on the bills the neoliberal way throws them to the wolves. There are less and less social security measures or
social safety nets available for the little guys. It’s a lose-lose situation for the majority of people when financial
elites fail. The Occupy movements are a social response to economic and political failure to stem the tide of
corporate speculative failures. Neoliberal individualism is seen to be fiscally and morally bankrupt. Social and
economic inequality between rich and poor increases,
‘What we need is for people to realize how disastrous this system is, and especially those on the
bottom who are really losing out-they have to organize, and begin to create something quite different. The
ecological crisis makes this even more pressing…Economically and environmentally we don’t really have a lot of
latitude right now. We have a system that’s economically performing very poorly, and becoming more unequal
all the time, it relies on a global labor arbitrage that exploits people in the global South at horrendous rates, it’s
destroying the planet as a place for human habitation. We’re facing overlapping material crises and we can’t
think simply in economic terms anymore.’ (Foster 2013)
Capital is confronted with limits to the environmental capacity to be exploited to the point of
destroying the planet’s ecosystems. International agreements to protect the environment are watered down
to accommodate economic growth and the demands of corporations. The political rhetoric of climate change
and measures to prevent environmental pollution are not backed up by political will of successive
administrations. It is economy first with corporates driving policy. The corruption of political processes is
staggering in its scale. People have had enough of growing economic inequality and politics that blatantly
favors corporate capital. The people are rising up and taking to the streets in protest at the threats capitalism
and neoliberal politics manifest towards life itself.
Crisis of the Commons: Exploitation and Colonization of Everyday Life
Capitalism is continually exploiting and shaping the divisions of public and private life -the family,
education of individuals and the public realm for private profit. Neoliberalism has promoted individualism for
the middle and lower classes and socialism for the rich as far as government policies are concerned. When
banks fail it is public funds that bail them out; when a war is fought the public purse pays and corporates
profit. When an individual cannot find a job or pay debts then it is a private individual moral failure due to
laziness and lack of initiative. Working for wages is a kind of privatization of human life; as Marx (1990; 716)
adroitly observed- when we give of our time and life in working for wages and there is profit to be made by
the capitalist from our labor then we are alienated. Whether the wages are generated from material or
immaterial labor, the dynamic is the same where exploitation is concerned. Someone working in a call center
or coffee shop is still generating profit for their employer. The profit from surplus labor remains in the
equation. The commodification of new forms of human activity and new products are still subject to the same
dynamics that Marx (1990;164-6) described as commodity fetishism, which belongs: ‘to a social formation in
which the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite [and] appear to the political
economists’ bourgeois consciousness to be as much self-evident and nature-imposed necessity as productive
labor itself.’ (Marx:1990;174).
If what we really want to do is find new ways of reproducing society and finding how to overthrow
neoliberalism then I argue that we also need to look at the whole global situation rather than model primarily
on the latest forms of life to be expropriated for capital. The conventional forms of exploitation continue
5
under post-colonial corporate imperialism that involves a large degree of material exploitation/extraction.
Without an understanding of this aspect of contemporary capitalism and globalization we are unable to
explain militarization and resource-based conflicts that are connected to the drive for capitalistic profit. If we
view the construction of the global market as a historical process, then we can accommodate the multi-levels
of uneven industrialization. Marx’s writing about labor was to counter the dynamics of industrial capital that
was prevalent in his era. It is all fundamentally about the exploitation of human life for profit. Marx’s
explanation of exploitation in the production process as the capitalist appropriating the ‘surplus labor’ of the
worker and his concept of alienation are just as relevant now as in his day. When Marx begins Capital with his
chapter on commodities he is explaining capital as a social relation where relations between people appear as
relations between things. As Žižek says, ‘only in capitalism is exploitation naturalized, inscribed into the
functioning of the economy…domination is already in the structure of the production process.’ (2013;194)
‘It is here that Marx’s key insight remains valid, today, perhaps more than ever: for Marx, the question
of freedom should not be located primarily into the political sphere proper. The key to actual freedom rather
resides in the “apolitical” network of social relations, from the market to the family, where the change needed if
we want an actual improvement is not a political reform, but a change in the “apolitical” social relations of
production. We do not vote about who owns what….the emergence of an international protest movement
without a coherent program is therefore not an accident: it reflects a deeper crisis one without an obvious
solution.’ (Žižek: 2012)
Capitalistic exploitation thrives on novelty and Marx clearly recognized that, which Hardt and Negri
acknowledge; ‘Since Marx’s time the critique of political economy has focused on the contradiction between
the social nature of capitalist production and the private nature of capitalist accumulation; but in the context
of biopolitical production the contradiction is dramatically intensified, as if raised to a higher power.’ (Hardt
& Negri:2009;149). When living labor is no longer required or cost prohibitive and technology allows for new
and cost effective ways to extract profit then it is not a completely new form of capitalism that we encounter.
It is a new form of exploitation, the ever-increasing exploitation of the common (Hardt & Negri:2009;137).
Hardt & Negri (2009;139-140) explain the commons in the traditional sense of natural resources and their
material scarcity while adding a second area of the commons, knowledge, which they say is not subject to the
logic of scarcity; ‘The expropriation of this second form of the common- the artificial common or, really, the
common that blurs the division between nature and culture - is the key to understanding the new forms of
biopolitical labor…Biopolitical production does present in newly prominent ways the characteristics of
alienation.’ Since biopolitical labor no longer corresponds to the law of scarcity, an idea, image, affect, etc.
does not exhaust itself: ‘…if you use that idea productively, I can use it too, at the very same time. In fact the
more of us that work with an idea and communicate about it, the more productive it becomes.’(2009;381).
This kind of labor and value is increasingly autonomous from capital: ‘…an increasingly autonomous labor-
power and, consequently, a capital that becomes increasingly pure command. Labor-power is thus no longer
variable capital, integrated within the body of capital, but a separate and increasingly oppositional force.’
(2009; 292).
I think that Hardt and Negri overestimate ‘autonomy’ and underestimate neoliberal and market
strategies that control immaterial labor through wage-labor and privatization. The biopolitical is not an
adequate explanation for contemporary times because it has always been present in capitalistic social
reproduction; the difference is that it is now more visible and extensive than before. People still generally
work for wages and people have always had thoughts and activities that are not necessarily defined by their
wage occupation. People have always belonged to community groups, volunteered their labor and time and
had diverse interests. Prostitution and sex work is hardly a new phenomenon as far as affective labor is
concerned and the increased role of migrant domestic workers is more about taking up the gap of wealthier
women working for wages. The feminization of labor is more a result of women moving out of the domestic
6
sphere and into waged labor; it is indicative of the globalized division of labor. To me, biopolitical labor is a
fancy term for being human and having a life apart from my occupational status. There is nothing new in
having interests, community and abilities beyond occupational status. These ‘externalities’ are certainly
‘captured by capital at a broader social level’ (Hardt & Negri;2009;152). The advertising of being an
individual, of ‘lifestyle’, niche markets for extra-work interests, of ‘new’ experiences has exploded post World
War II with mass marketing. The market specializes in manipulating consumption and desire for novelty both
material and immaterial. We are still dealing with the human organism and the dualistic body/mind split that
is so distinctive in Western notions of subjectivity/objectivity.
Knowledge itself and personal information are increasingly commodified and privatized. The
internet is a perfect example of information as a commodity. All the big internet companies provide their
services for free to consumers- but the price is paid in personal information which is gathered and used to
target advertising. The recent exposé of the United States National Security Agency ‘Prism’ program that can
directly access internet service providers to collect information about individual communications shows how
we may think we are autonomous but we are also increasingly under state surveillance. Hardt and Negri
underestimate the collusion of corporates and political elites in manipulating society. The rise of public
relations, mass media and advertising that influence affective behavior through campaigns of epic
proportions leave very little room for ‘openings’ for public and collective displays of autonomous dissent.
Propaganda and state/political control and surveillance of the masses have never been so prevalent. We
could look at education as another example of how knowledge is actually becoming privatized and
commodified. The trend towards privatization of higher education together with the ‘market specific’
qualifications has resulted in the significant shrinking of liberal arts and humanities departments in
universities worldwide. This is hardly opening up opportunities for intellectual talents in these fields. Market
forces are dominating higher education in the sciences as well. Private funding for research is on the increase
which is also limiting the scope of research to profit-generating. There is an increase in privatizing human
innovation through patents, branding and private corporate ownership of innovation rather than the open
access that Hardt and Negri want to see. Intellectual property and trade-related intellectual property rights
(TRIPS) are rapidly appropriating life and discoveries in the biological and chemical sciences for private
profit. Private corporations set the research agendas for scientists far more than scientists having free-reign
to follow their own research. Production may have significantly moved outside the factory in post-
industrialized states and may be immaterial or affective but it doesn’t necessarily come without a price or
without profit for private gain. The corporate structure still dominates biopolitical labor in my view.
It is also not sufficient to explain new technologies and commodities as biopolitical when we are
confronted with a world where industrial capitalism is still so evident in less industrialized areas of the global
South. If biopolitics wants to say that it focuses on, ‘the “subjective” conditions contained in the antagonistic
relationship between capitalists and workers, which are expressed in exploitation and revolt’ (Hardt & Negri:
2009;137), then perhaps we should not be too quick to reject the ‘old’ forms of exploitation. To understand
Marx’s analysis of capital merely in terms of ‘the producing subject and the produced object’ (Hardt & Negri:
2009; 136) is an oversimplification of Marxian political economy and dialectical processes. I disagree with
Hardt and Negri about the extent of autonomy of biopolitical labor. They rely upon the, ‘…growing rupture
within the organic composition of capital, a progressive decomposition of capital in which variable capital
(and particularly biopolitical labor power) is separating from constant capital along with its political forces of
command and control’ (2009;151). I think they have underestimated the scope of temporary labor and
precarity for the traditional working class as well as the middle classes. Most people globally are dependent
on wage labor; whether their work is productive in Marxian terms is whether their labor is profitable for
capital: ‘…the capitalist produces the worker as a wage-laborer. This incessant reproduction, this
perpetuation of the worker, is the absolutely necessary condition for capitalist production.’ (Marx 1990; 716).
7
Although Hardt and Negri include precarious and temporary labor as a category where human life is ‘on call’
for work (2009;146-7), I think they underestimate its impact and are rather starry-eyed about the potential
for biopolitical labor to transcend capitalist confines and control. The neoliberal political agenda of
systematically dismantling trade unions together with the shift to temporary and contract labor is a form of
capitalist control. Most people have not chosen temporary and contract labor, it has been imposed on them.
Labor has consistently struggled against neoliberalism’s inroads into collective organization for labor and the
dwindling public sphere in government. A hallmark of neoliberalism is the intimate relationship between the
corporate world and government in implementing public policies that benefit corporations before people. It
is another kind of colonization and appropriation of everyday life.
Reconfiguring Class struggle, the Multitude and Classes in the Making
Harvey (2005) emphasizes the competing and antagonistic agendas of corporate and political elites.
Political elites require periodic democratic legitimizing through elections whereas the corporates are more
concerned with short-term profit and lobbying for business-friendly legislation and government policies.
Social cohesion even in elite classes is fragmented by the competing agendas of political and economic elites.
The ‘revolving door’ between public policy and government positions and private corporate interests is one
of the primary ways that has been used to circumvent the competing agendas of administrative politics and
private corporate interests. Harvey (2009: 212) sides with Zizek on the issue of the structural importance of
class in capitalist society:
‘ …Hardt and Negri dismiss Slavoj Žižek’s contention that there is something far more foundational about class
than there is about all the other forms of identity in relation to the perpetuation of capitalism…while revolution is quite
properly opposed to prevailing notions of the republic of property, the presumption that the world’s six and a half billion
people can be fed, warmed, clothed, housed, and cleaned without any hierarchical form of governance and outside the reach
of monetarization and markets is dubious in the extreme. This question is far too huge to be left to the horizontal self-
organization of autonomous beings.’ He also finds that Hardt and Negri are too abstract and lacking, ‘specification of any
revolutionary transformation in the material foundations of daily life to parallel the revolutionary transformation in class
identities…’.
Žižek argues for a return to Marx’s Capital and the fundamental structural importance of
unemployment in the context of globalization as far more than the classic conception of the unemployed as a
reserve army of labor1: ‘…unemployment is structurally inseparable from the dynamic of accumulation and
expansion which constitutes the very nature of capitalism as such.’2 This is Standing’s ‘precariat’: the
inclusion of the global population in the total capitalist world market. Those whose are excluded from
‘society’ yet still perhaps involved in the world market through the black market, illegal labor and the
machinations of corporations extracting resources from the developing world, those in failed states, the
‘lumpen proletarians’3: ‘Does not this extension of the circle of the ‘unemployed bring us back from Marx to
Hegel: the ‘rabble is back, emerging in the very core of emancipatory struggles’ (2013:192). He reminds us
that Marx referred to the French peasants in his Eighteenth Brumaire as ‘sacks of potatoes’ without
community, national bond, political interest or class who could not represent themselves and needed
representation: ‘In the great twentieth-century revolutionary mobilizations of peasants (from China to
1 See Marx (1990; 796) Capital Vol.1, where Marx talks about the ‘third category of the relative surplus population’ as stagnant with ‘extremely
irregular employment’: ‘It’s conditions of life sink below the average normal level of the working class, and it is precisely this which makes it a braod foundation for special branches of capitalist exploitation. It is characterized by a maximum of working time and a mini mum of wages…It’s extent grows in proportion as, with the growth in the extent and energy of accumulation, the creation of a surplus population also advances. But it forms at the same time a self-reproducing and self-perpetuating element of the working class, taking a proportionally greater part in the general increase of that class than the other elements…It calls to mind the boundless reproduction of animals individually weak and constantly hunted down. 2 Cites Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital (London:, Verso, 2011), p.149
3 Marx (1990;797) Finally, the lowest sediment of the relative surplus population dwells in the sphere of pauperism. Apart from vagabonds,
criminals, prostitutes, in short the actual lumpen proletariat, this social stratum falls into three categories
8
Bolivia), these ‘sacks of potatoes’ excluded from the historical process proper started to represent themselves
actively.’ (2013:192).
I do agree with Hardt and Negri that what we have to develop, ‘…are the terms of class struggle today: on
what resources is it based, what are the primary social lines of conflict, and what are the political forms
available for its organization?’ (2009;151). Hardt and Negri’s views on the significance of the commons for
alternatives to capitalism feature the city and urban life as the scene of dissent as well as the production of
the commons. Their ideas about autonomy have value for us as it is clear that changes in the social
consciousness of people about their situation in capitalistic society is very important. The question of the
political forms available for reorganization of class struggle strikes to the heart of urban collective
demonstrations of dissent. The Occupy movements and urban resistance to privatization of the commons
across the world are experimenting with non-hierarchical and horizontal ways for people to express their
views and desires for a better, more equitable life. Horizontalism one of the primary ways that people have
been organizing and it has been transforming people to become more autonomous in the sense that they are
directly expressing their concerns. People are no longer relying on representation through the liberal
democratic electoral politics which have failed them. They are organizing themselves in neighborhood
collectives that network with other collectives. This political subjectification of individuals interacting in
various collective processes is what Hardt and Negri’s multitude expresses. When they speak of ‘singularity’
and ‘the multitude’ against ‘axes of domination’ they want to include aspects of social life they feel are not
sufficiently articulated solely by traditional notions of class:
‘We certainly agree that more attention to class is necessary, but insisting on its priority is not an adequate
solution…We intend the concept of multitude as a means of approaching such problems [of coloniality, racism,
gender hierarchy] both of an analysis of the structures of power, and of the practical organization of political
activity…the challenge is to organize the intersections and encounters among class, race, gender, sexuality, and
other struggles in a process of liberation.’ (Hardt and Negri: 2009b; 213)
Standing (2011) also argues that we must reconfigure how we conceptualize class. Class composition
has changed as capital and neoliberal policies have made inroads into public life. The nature of work has
become more temporary, less secure and collective workers’ rights have been systematically dismantled
under neoliberal governments in collusion with business elites. Standing has put forward new social ‘classes
in the making’, particularly the ‘Precariat’, that are the result of decades of neoliberal policies of privatization,
deregulation and putting the interests of financiers and big business before the interests of the people. He
describes the Precariat as those who are increasingly marginalized and/or live without security of regular
income. It includes large numbers of educated young people who have been unable to find work related to
their studies or training as well as those who have always tended to be socially marginalized; unskilled
migrant labor, domestic workers and those unwaged who care for families. Standing would agree with Žižek
when he points out that we need to rethink the concept of exploitation to realize that in our times, ‘…in a
properly dialectical twist, exploitation includes its own negation-the exploited are not only those who
produce or ‘create’, but also (and even more) those who are condemned not to create …[they] are not simply
outside the circuit of capital, they are actively produced as not-working…’ (2013:193).
This is quite a different dynamic to Hardt and Negri’s ‘exodus’ (2009:306) where autonomous people
choose to live outside the influence of capital. I think in this sense there are objective material conditions and
subjective and revolutionary awakenings in people disaffected by government policies. Having already said
that Hardt and Negri under-estimate the power of people to be autonomous from the necessity of earning a
living, I do think that they have a powerful description of what is happening to many people when they
participate in uprisings against political and economic tyranny. Hardt and Negri focus on modes of
9
subjectification under capitalism and the subjective transformation that is required to create a future that is
radically different and for the people.
‘So many of the movements of 2011 direct their critiques against political structures and forms of
representation, then, because they recognize clearly that representation, even when it is effective, blocks
democracy rather than fosters it. Where, they ask, has the project for democracy gone?...One path, the
movements teach, passes through the revolt and rebellion against the impoverished and depotentialized
subjective figures we have outlined….Democracy will be realized only when a subject capable of grasping and
enacting it has emerged.’ (Hardt and Negri 2012; 22)
It is indeed the Multitude, which includes the Precariat that has taken to the streets. Hardt and Negri’s
contribution to the debate about how to overthrow capitalism, and the kind of wage labor system that we live
with today is profoundly resonant with the mood of contemporary mass movements.
Marx’s Theory of Value: production of world value and the metropolis
We need to return to the Marxian idea of simple ‘labor’, as a creative human activity as opposed to
commodified ‘work/wages’ and reexamine what is productive and unproductive in the context of our own
era. Marx (1990; 287) thought that,
‘Labor is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own
actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the
materials of nature as a force of nature…Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it,
and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.’
Later in the same passage it seems as though Marx is using the terms ‘labor’ and ‘work’ interchangeably. He
also comments that the labor process,
‘…is purposeful activity aimed at the production of use-values. It is an appropriation of what exists in nature for
the requirements of man. It is the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature, the
ever-lasting nature-imposed condition of human existence…it is common to all forms of society in which human
beings live.’ (Marx 1990;290)
Marx viewed the wage labor process as a commodity purchased and consumed by the capitalist (1990; 292).
The Marxian category of surplus value is where the ‘…value of the labor power, and the value which that labor
power valorizes in the labor process, are entirely two different magnitudes: and this difference was what the
capitalist had in mind when he was purchasing the labor power.’ (1990; 300) This is where exploitation and
alienation for the worker occur in the work place. There are also other ways workers contribute to capital
accumulation through rents, credit and debt- what Marx termed ‘relative surplus value’:
‘The capitalist who produces surplus value, ie. who extracts unpaid labor directly from the workers and fixes it
in commodities, is admittedly the first appropriator of the surplus value, but he is by no means its ultimate
proprietor. He has to share it afterwards with capitalists who fulfill other functions in social production taken as
a whole…Surplus value is therefore split up into various parts. Its fragments fall to various categories of person,
and take on various mutually independent forms such as profit, interest, gains made through trade, ground rent
etc. We shall be able to deal with these modified forms of surplus value only in Volume 3.’ (Marx 1990; 709)
Amin (2010; 11) extends Marx’s law of value to the law of worldwide value that includes the concrete
situation of unequal global development and continuing imperialism:
10
‘My major contribution concerns the passage from the law of value to the law of globalized value, based on the
hierarchical structuring -itself globalized -of the prices of labor-power around its value. Linked to the management
practices governing access to natural resources, this globalization of value constitutes the basis for imperialist rent. This, I
claim, orders the unfolding of really existing capitalism/imperialism’s contradictions and of the conflicts linked to them,
so that classes and nations are imbricated, in their struggles and clashes, in all the complex articulation, specific and
concrete, of those contradictions…I claim that our reading of the twentieth and twenty –first centuries can be nothing
other than that of the emergence –or of the “reawakening” –of peoples and nations periphic to the globalized
capitalist/imperialist system.’
The importance of Amin’s concept of the law of worldwide value is that he articulates so well the global
hierarchic division of labor and resource exploitation and how it happens in reality. The category of
imperialist rent is material in the extraction of resources and labor, immaterial in instruments of
financialization and the movements of fictitious capital in money markets. The complex relationships
between states and transnational corporations produce and exacerbate uneven development, military
conflicts and political interference in the self-determination and political processes in many developing
countries.
The critique by Harvey of Hardt and Negri’s ‘Commonwealth’ and their responses characterize the
debate between post-structuralism/postmodern theorists and those who return to Marx’s theory of value to
explain the changes in capital, class and social production. I agree with Harvey (2103; 128) when he says that
‘Any anti-capitalist alternative has to abolish the power of the capitalist law of value to regulate the world
market’. Harvey thinks that markets for things are saturated, so capital responds by expanding into
immaterial production and commodification of affects, information and experiences. He also agrees that the
commons is a critical and important foundation of political struggle. The fundamental differences are whether
it is understood that geography, place, the material political economy and material living conditions are
included in the analysis, including the circulation of wages as variable capital. Including material concrete
conditions and how they influence subjectivity as well as how fictitious capital operates in its concrete effects
is essential in my view. Consumption in any form, material and immaterial, are part of the capital system as a
totality. Harvey (2009;214) emphasizes that :
‘Marx’s conception of value as immaterial but objective underpins his theory of fictitious-capital formation…Hardt
and Negri occasionally mention financialization and concede its general importance in recent times, they have absolutely no
theory of fictitious capital…This omission could be forgiven were it not for the brute fact that political subjectivities have been
as deeply affected by ficitious –capital proliferation - everything from the credit-card culture to speculating on gains in housing
value _as they have by any Foucouldian exercise of biopower (i.e., state power over life)…But now look at the objective
consequences of this fiction (foreclosed homes, unemployment, collapsing consumerism, failed banks and so on). The point
here is not to say they are wrong, rather their analysis is far too partial to bear the burden of a satisfactory framework fo r
understanding the current crisis and its underlying political dilemmas, including the problem of producing political
subjectivities.’
Amin (2010) and Harvey (2013; 129) remind us that the total circulation of capital is not only in production;
it is also in circulation of commodities and money which is uneven and global. All are able to generate profit
and contribute to capital accumulation as well as the social woes that result; ‘…the dynamics of class
exploitation are not confined to the workplace…These secondary forms of exploitation are primarily
organized by merchants, landlords and the financiers; and their effects are primarily felt in the living space
not the factory.’ He is also concerned to include the category of rent as an important aspect of capital
accumulation and exploitation. He suggests we focus on the city as ‘the prime site of surplus value
production’. Harvey (2013; 129) challenges us to rethink and focus on the production and reproduction of city
life as socially necessary because it is part of the reproduction of the class relations between capital and labor
as well as the site and source of dissent:
11
‘Practices of accumulation by dispossession, rental appropriations, by money and profit gouging, lie at the heart
of many of the discontents that attach to the qualities of daily life for the mass of the population. Urban social movements
typically mobilize around such questions, and they derive from the way in which the perpetuation of class power is
organized around living (my italics) as well as around working…The fact that these urban discontents relate to the
commodity and monetary rather than the production circuit of capital matters not one whit: indeed it is a big theoretical
advantage to reconceptualize matters thus, because it focuses attention on those aspects of capital circulation that so
frequently play the nemesis to attempts at work control in production. Since it is capital circulation as a whole that
matters (not merely what happens in the productive circuit), what does it matter to the capitalist class as a whole
whether value is extracted from the commodity and money circuits rather than the productive circuit directly? The gap
between where surplus value is produced and where it is realized is as crucial theoretically as it is practically. Value
created in production may be recaptured for the capitalist class from the workers by landlords charging high rates on
housing.’
When we look at producing the city then we can include temporary workers, illegal workers, family and
domestic life, services like water and electricity and transport; all areas where people are active that
contribute toward city life and communities. Providing goods and services, accommodation and just the
primary necessities of life is not unproductive:
‘All of these activities (including spatial movement) are productive of value and of surplus value. If capitalism
often recovers from crises, as we saw earlier, by “building houses and filling them with things,” then clearly everyone
engaged in that urbanizing activity has a central role to play in the macroeconomic dynamics of capital accumulation. And
if maintenance, repairs, and replacements…are all part of the value-producing stream (as Marx avers), then the vast army
of workers involved in these activities in our cities is also contributing to value and surplus value production.’ (Harvey
2013: 131).
The Right to the City: Urban Revolutions, Occupations and Uprisings
Harvey has long emphasized the role urbanization has played in the current social, political and
economic crises. The social and economic conditions of increasingly urbanized life are the problem and the
city is the battleground. At the same time it is also where alternatives to the social relations of capital could
develop and bring about real alternatives to society dominated by the market. Hardt and Negri’s (2012)
response to the Arab Spring, the various Occupy movements and social uprisings around the world since
2010, is that they are all struggling against political and economic tyranny. They are all struggling against
some form of domination. They see these local movements as connected in their causes and the fact that they
do communicate with each other through social media. They are examples of the singularity of the Multitude
par excellence. These movements are part of a global uprising of the masses that are asserting their right to
social justice and social change.
‘Many who are not part of the struggles have trouble seeing the connections in this list of events. The North
African rebellions opposed repressive regimes and their demands centered on the removal of tyrants, whereas the wide-
ranging social demands of the encampments in Europe, the United States, and Israel addressed representative
constitutional systems. Furthermore, the Israeli tent protest (don’t call it an occupation!) delicately balanced demands so
as to remain silent about questions of settlements and Palestinian rights; the Greeks are facing sovereign debt and
austerity measures of historic proportions; and the indignation of the British rioters addressed a long history of racial
hierarchy- and they didn’t even pitch tents. Each of these struggles is singular and oriented towards specific local
conditions. The first thing to notice though, is they did, in fact, speak to one another. The Egyptians, of course, clearly
moved down paths traveled by the Tunisians and adopted their slogans, but the occupiers of Puerta del Sol also thought of
their struggle as carrying on the experiences of those at Tahrir. In turn, the eyes of those in Athens and Tel Aviv were
focused on the experiences of Madrid and Cairo. The Wall Street occupiers had them all in view, translating, for instance,
the struggle against the tyrant into a struggle against the tyranny of finance. You may think that they were just deluded
12
and forgot or ignored the differences in their situations and demands. We believe, however, that they have a clearer vision
than those outside the struggle, and they can hold together without contradiction their singular conditions and local
battles with the common global struggle.’ (Hardt and Negri 2012;3)
Worldwide people are disillusioned with representative democracy if they have it, and if they don’t
have it then they want it. People are acting on this disillusionment with outrage and indignation rather than
passively putting up with a system they feel is unaccountable and not for the people. They are asserting
themselves as the public in a public space; they claim the right to their cities and political action in their
communities. We can add the May/June 2013 mass demonstrations and occupations of public spaces in
Turkey (Traynor & Letsch 2013), and now Brazil (Watts 2013) to the growing list of mass social protests and
occupations that are indicative of a global people’s movement against capital and oligarchy. The fact that
there is so much communication between spatially separated movements challenges the conventional
division of politics into nation-states. People are mobilizing globally and locally by sharing ideas, experiences
and tactics in dealing with state forces that violently suppress uprisings. There is a very real sense of
solidarity and community because people know that they are experiencing common problems and these
problems are systemic and structural. Alone against the state and governments people feel powerless,
whereas collective strategies get results that empower people to act together to solve community problems
even when politicians do not. Sitrin (2013; 69-70) talks about ‘affective politics’ as a natural development of
people organizing together and supporting each other as an essential and important feature of the
movements she has studied in Argentina:
‘ …affective politics is still articulated as one of the most important foundations of what is being
created…While it may seem like an oversimplification to say that if you feel happier with or closer to those with
whom you organize, the result will be more social construction and militant activity, this is in fact, what is seen
in practice…Affect and emotion are too often relegated to the politics of gender and identity, and thus not seen
as “serious” theory or as a possibly revolutionary part of politics. This argument denies the fact that
responsibility for the other and solidarity are the basic conditions of a future society not grounded in capitalist
principles.’
People who participate in these mass public demonstrations know the neoliberal democratic process
has failed to deliver for them and they are actively searching and experimenting with what could be
alternatives to capitalism, oligarchy and authoritarianism. In the Middle East and North African states there
were various national contexts but there were also common factors that brought about the Arab Spring
uprisings:
‘Though there can be no singular narrative of uprisings that occurred in such different national contexts, the
articles in this volume do highlight some shared underlying conditions that laid the groundwork for the
insurrections. Relatively stagnant economic systems made worse by the 2008 financial crisis and recent rises in
food prices, combined with relatively high unemployment –especially among educated youth- poorly managed
public services, and rampant corruption created systems of entrenched and pervasive social inequality.
Metastasizing security apparatuses inserted themselves into ever more aspects of daily life and impinged upon
higher levels of the social spectrum…Authoritarian practices combined with economic inequality in ways that
rendered the state –as arbiter of both political activity and socio-economic well-being-utterly alien to most
citizens. The region faced a crisis of governance.’ (McMurray & Somers 2013; 3).
There has been much criticism, particularly of the Occupy movements that they do not have agendas
and political programs. I do not think we should be too quick to say that horizontalism is not valid because it
cannot be taken to a global scale to manage resources and governance. There are always dialectical elements
in every life situation. The problem is first how to organize from the local, from a particular place and space.
How do people have a voice that is truly democratic? How are people organizing around concrete material
problems that confront individuals and communities? How can we transform politics from exploitative
13
capitalism and elevate social justice to the primary factor for social organization? A social movement with no
organizational hierarchy is a revelation to many of the people present in that they can have a voice and
participate in a collective. It is people breaking free from the liberal democratic idea that they need
representation. They are making themselves visible to their governments; they are voicing their dissent en
masse and networking with others. This is the autonomous empowerment that Hardt and Negri speak of; a
qualitative subjective change in how people experience themselves socially; it is also a question of value and
what is valued. It is too soon to know about the effects and how being part of a mass social movement has
changed people in the longer term. In many countries the movement has continued with neighborhood
collectives that meet regularly and network with others locally and globally. Sitrin (2012: 5) writes about the
horizontalidad movements that arose and developed as a result of the 2001 Argentinian financial crisis:
‘All of these active movements have been relating to one another, and constructing new types of
networks that reject the hierarchical template bequeathed to them by established politics. Part of this rejection
includes a break with concepts of ‘power over’: people are attempting to organize on a flatter plane, with the
goal of creating ‘power with’ one another…what is created is a revolution of the everyday…The movements in
Argentina, and the articulations of the process of creation there, have become a point of reference for many
others around the world…’
These ways of organizing collectively around local and neighborhood issues are not entirely outside the
frame of capitalism as a whole but they are a shift to people deciding for themselves about questions related
to production;
‘This then raises incredibly important questions on value production…The movements in Argentina are not only
creating horizontal relationships in which the participants feel better and happier, but in many areas they are
finding new ways of surviving, whether by taking over workplaces and running them together, or creating
micro-enterprises. In and of themselves these are not answers to the capitalist market, but within the
experience, within the creation of alternative ways of producing value, one can begin to see the seeds of an
alternative economy that is central to the total transformation of society.’ (Sitrin 2012; 222)
Conclusion: Revolution is a Process
Marx’s theory of value provides conceptual and analytical tools to understand how capital dominates
society. The dialectical relationships between production and capital circulation globally and in urban life
require a broadening of conceptions of class. This is one of the common elements in most contemporary
critiques of capital-driven society. Harvey connects these factors very well in his analysis of the totality of
capital circulation and the effects on how people live and work in urban environments. He argues that
accumulation by dispossession and rent as a source of capital are factors that generate urban discontent and
dissent. We need to be more inclusive and think more dialectically to overcome the separation between work
and life, private life and public life as analytical factors. We need to think more about people’s lives as a
totality just as we think about the global capital system as a totality. When we do this we can connect the
material, immaterial, domestic and wider community, people who work for wages, the unemployed- everyone
who lives in a community. We can see that daily lives and human activities are not based solely around the
factory but around the city. It is a broader scope for analysis that represents how people really live and act in
communities. It requires dialectical thinking and analysis which can allow for contradictions as well as
antagonism at various levels, spaces, places and times.
When people are subjectively or qualitatively transformed and perceive themselves as active rather
than politically passive, as political subjects rather than excluded citizen-consumers, then new social forms
and values can begin to emerge and be created. I agree with Hardt and Negri that subjective transformation is
14
essential to find new ways of relating to each other and begin the process of radical social change. By bringing
in the subjective dimension we can talk about how people feel and what they do about it as well as how
protests and occupations can be a subjectifying process. We cannot effect social change without people
changing how they think about themselves and society and then acting on these changes. If we only focus on
class then we can lose the personal inner dimension that is so fundamental to creating alternatives to
capitalism. When people come together spontaneously in mass demonstrations and then begin to organize in
ways that they feel they have a voice and can participate in local collective decisions it can be life-changing for
them.
If we are too cynical about these movements and try to frame them only in terms of what has gone
before then we are missing the point about the need for people to become autonomous subjects now. When
people have the experience of realizing that they are not alone, that they have many thoughts and feelings
about their life situation in common with others that they would never usually meet or talk to, then they are
moving away from alienation and becoming revolutionary or emancipated political subjects. When these
experiences also include new ways of acting in the process of collective discussions and decision-making
there is an opening for the autonomy that Hardt and Negri advocate. There is much more going on than
protest, there is also revolutionary and emancipatory process. Even if it only looks like it lasts as long as the
public demonstrations which are violently put down by state force, it is too soon for us to judge the long-term
effects of these movements. They could very well be the sprouted seedlings of other ways of organizing and
living in society.
The production and reproduction of the city as a totality has always historically had temporary
workers and involved the connection between the domestic sphere and work as well as services. Harvey
thinks that reconceptualizing class and how social reproduction in the city helps us to redefine the terrain of
class struggle. This is important because then we can think about what role urban social movements can have
in overcoming capital’s domination of society. We can include those who have previously been excluded from
social analysis because we are considering human life and activity in its totality. Part of this totality is what is
common, what and where are public spaces, material and immaterial? Capital as a social relation can be
countered only by including what is the totality of collective human activity. We can analytically separate the
public/private moments of human life and activity temporally and spatially, but then we need to re-establish
how these moments dialectically relate to the whole. Everyday life must have a place in analysis because this
is where social relations are to be found. Work and occupation alone do not sufficiently represent what
people really do or how capital accumulation and commodification really affect people in concrete ways.
Urban life in the city frequently blurs traditional conceptual boundaries of what is production and
reproduction, also of what constitutes value socially. It is where the new and alternatives to capitalism are
likely to come from.
References
Amin, S. (2010). The Law of Worldwide Value. Monthly Review Press; New York.
Foster, J. B. (2013). Crises of Capitalism and Social Democracy.
http://www.mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2013/foster290513.html retrieved June 10, 2013.
Foster, J.B and McChesney, R. (2012). The Endless Crisis; How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation
and Upheaval From the USA to China. Monthly Review Press; New York.
15
Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2012). Declaration. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri with Argo Navis Author
Services.
Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2009a). Commonwealth. Harvard University Press;Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Harvey, D. (2013). Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. Verso: London and New
York.
Harvey, D., Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2009b). ‘Commonwealth: An Exchange’. Artforum, November 2009.
Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press: New York.
Marx, K. (1990). Capital: Volume I. Penguin Books: London
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (2005). The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History’s Most Important Document,
(ed. )Phil Gasper. Haymarket Books:Chicago.
McMurray, D. and Ufeil-Somers, A. (2013). The Arab Revolts; Dispatches on Militant Democracy in the Middle
East. Indiana University Press; Bloomington and Indianapolis.
Mészáros, I. (2011). Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness. Monthly Review Press; New York.
Polanyi, K. (2001). The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Beacon Press:
Boston.
Sitrin, M. and Azzellini, D. (2013). Occupying Language; The Secret Rendezvous with History and the Present.
Zucotti Park Press; Brooklyn, New York.
Sitrin, M. (2012). Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina. Zed Books; London.
Standing, G. (2011). The Precariat: the New Dangerous Class. Bloomsbury Academic; London.
Traynor, I. and Letsch, C. (2013, June 20). Turkey divided more than ever by Erdoğan's Gezi Park crackdown. The Guardian, retrieved June 20, 2013 from http://www.guardian.co.uk.
Watts, J. (2013, June 21). Brazil protests: president to hold emergency meeting’. The Guardian, retrieved June
21, 2013 from http://www.guardian.co.uk.
Žižek, S. (2013). ‘Answers Without Questions’, pp.177-205, in The Idea of Communism 2, (ed.) Slavoj Žižek.
Verso; London.
Žižek, S. (2012). ‘How the Occupy Movement Can Confront a Capitalist System that Defies Reform’ retrieved
June 2, 2013 from http://www.alternet.org/155206/zizek.