Here is a translation of two texts about the ongoing Swedish riots that have appeared in the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet authored by Megafonen and Pantrarna. Megafonen (The Megaphone) and Pantrarna (The Panthers) are two community activist groups based in Swedish suburbs, Pantrarna in Biskopsgården outside Göteborg and Megafonen in Husby outside Stockholm, where the riots of the past few days began. Both groups work for social justice and improvement and investment of and in the suburbs, have self-organized homework help and youth centres, among other things. Lately Megafonen have been accused in the Swedish press for not taking a clearer stance and condemning the rioters. These two two texts appeared in the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet.

Megafon in Husby: We don’t start any fires

We called a press conference to explain why our neighbourhood is in flames. We addressed the politicians, the police and the journalists. The media reports and calls on the government, the government calls for the police. The police calls on itself and multiplies its presence. We also called out to you, much earlier, but our calls fell on deaf ears.

The situation slips out of the hands of the police. The first night they send in more and more cops. It is symptomatic of the government’s policy. Control. Surveillance so that they never lose it. Though parts of society have already lost faith in society. The district is overflowing with police and reporters but the fires do not want to go out. More police are called in, the prime minister puts the blame on angry young men, and the conflict continues to escalate. More and more neighbourhoods burn.

It is tragic that public transportation, emergency services and police are attacked. Sad that cars burn, that homes and commercial buildings are damaged. We share the despair with everyone else witnessing the devastation in our own neighbourhoods. It is this desperation that forces us to look for structural explanations that attack the causes of this devastation.

Megafon does not start any fires. Why are journalists and politicians so interested in Megafon denouncing the rebellion? Young people are being demonised to prevent all of us from seeing the truth – because the truth will sting. The editorial pages and the police also demonise us in Megafon, saying that we are responsible for what is happening – because we didn’t keep silent.

We understand that it is uncomfortable, even depressing, to have to reflect on what is happening in Sweden today. It is even more difficult for the government, the police force, and the large portion of the media that is a part of the reason all this is happening.

From our side, we see a government whose answer to social problems is more police. We see police brutality and harassment in our neighbourhoods. We see verbal racist abuse, fists smashing faces, aggravated assault with batons. We see the police aiming their service weapons at youths and shouting: “I’ll shoot!”

We see a school system being “reformed” over and over again, where we, our friends, and our brothers and sisters struggle to cope in schools that lack resources. We see that they can send their children to other schools. We see housing policies that create housing shortages. The human right to a home tossed aside for luxury condominiums. We see our rent increase steeply on the pretext that our building is being renovated when only the façade has been repainted.

Now everyone is on the side of the suburbs and competing to propose solutions. Where were you before everything set off? We were here and arranged homework help, lectures and concerts. We fought for our community centres and homes. Now we continue to stand up for our neighbourhoods and our city.

They want us to take responsibility. We don’t own any newspapers and control any state authorities. We take our responsibility by starting dialogues with those in our neighbourhoods, by organising and creating escape routes for the young people who are constantly demonised. We are starting a collection for residents in our neighbourhoods who have had their cars burnt. We extended a helping hand. No one should have to live in despair.

We urge everyone in our district to organise for justice – then cars will not be burnt, stones will not be thrown. We will develop our work against police violence, we will continue to develop our educational programs, we will continue to build our community, take care of our neighbourhoods and show that there is a way forward for our districts.

An ankle bracelet alarm goes off every time we go against what is expected. We continue walking despite the ringing. We walk because we believe in it, even when the bracelet starts chaffing. Stig Dagerman wrote, “The shackle chooses the foot, we chose to wander.”

We take our responsibilities, will you take yours?

The Megafon through
Emma Dominguez
Rami Al-khamisi
Patrik Gronostaj

Published in Aftonbladet, 5, 24, 2013

The Panthers Writing Group: To a Nation that Burns

We write first and foremost to our brothers and sisters in Megafon. Recently, we were talking on the phone and you had to stop mid-sentence to say: ‘Another car is burning, we have to go.”

You’re standing in the centre of the storm. Your world is burning. And we are writing to you to say that we know what you’re going through, and we admire how you have handled the events of recent days.

A few years ago cars burned on Bishopsgården. The police did whatever they wanted to do those nights, and when morning came, the politicians said whatever they wanted to say about us.

The charred wrecks, broken glass on the street – it all seems so easy to condemn from the outside. And that’s what is now required of you when you are trying to say something about the revolt: you can’t explain anything; you can only join in the chorus of condemnation, with the choir who says that it’s inexcusable to burn a car or smash a window. But whatever you say will never be enough. You will never be able to say and write enough times that which you have already clearly said and written: that you don’t think violence is the right method for changing society.

You’re doing the right thing by going on the news, the debate programs and online and insisting, time and time again, on why the city is burning rather than just condemning the youths. Those who only condemn an act without explaining it also condemn the feelings and experiences that give rise to the act.

To those seeing the events from outside…

…we write to ask: can you understand the hand that throws a rock at a police car? Can you try to understand?

Imagine being a child and being bullied for your accent and appearance. Imagine the exclusion you feel. The meaningless teachers sitting behind their desks earning their meaningless salaries. To be popular, you light up a cigarette when you start middle school. You find a group of friends you hang around with. You’re formed by what you see.

It’s hard to be strong when there are no role models around you. You may not have the best contact with your family. Maybe you lost your mother or father during the war in Iraq. Maybe you lost siblings during the war in Afghanistan or were damaged from the war in Palestine.

Throughout your teenage years nobody listened to you. You have no one to turn to. You are trying to rebuild you life but there are no jobs. You’re looking for work but Daniel Svensson got the job before you every fucking time. You lose hope and start looking for other routes. Some end up on the wrong path, others survive.

Many people say that you should struggle through this alone, but it’s not so easy. The pigs are hanging over your shoulder every day. The hope to survive disappears. There is weed all around you. Temptation makes your hands itch. Are you going to try or back off? Peer pressure increases, you will be pressured to do things you might never have done alone. It feels like there is no future. You stand there with a stone in your hand. You stand there with your life in your hand. Are you going to throw it?

Megafon, we believe that you are right in labelling this week’s events in your neighbourhood as a suburban revolt. We think that it is correct to point out that it is not just youth rioting or apolitical rioting, but precisely a rebellion, that is to say a reaction – as you write in your press release: ‘unemployment, poor schools, and structural racism are the underlying causes of what is happening today.’

When your courage falters, ask yourselves this question: if you didn’t exist, what would have happened this week? Maybe a pensioner would have been shot to death in a suburban apartment and no one would have cared. Maybe. There is one answer: that if you had not photographed the body bag that was carried out in the middle of the night, although the police claimed that the man had died in the hospital several hours earlier – then maybe no one would have cared, and everything would have continued as usual.

But it is right to care when someone dies. It is right to demand that the police do not lie to the media about a dead body.

You were right when you organised the rally that some accusatory voices are now calling the spark that lit the fire of revolt in the suburbs.

Ask yourself this: what connection does Hässelby or Fittja – which are also burning on these summer nights – to the man who was shot dead in an apartment in Husby? None perhaps. What connection does Megafon have to the dead? There is no friendship, no family connection. But there is a bond between all people. We mourn each other when we die. We stand in solidarity with each other. We live together in society.

We support you in every way. We know it feels impossible to remain where you are, in a place where you explain rather than condemn.

In Hammarkullen police horses sometimes stand in the square. In Bishopsgården cameras surveil the courtyards. In Frölunda tonight there are reports of disturbances – calls and text messages that whisper of the revolt spreading to Gothenburg, where we wrestle with the same problems as you do in Stockholm: the militarisation of the suburbs, police harassment, social deprivation.

Now it’s burning. And here we are, together. The Panthers and Megafon.

If we didn’t exist, who would take the responsibility to try to understand the shadows moving on our streets with stones in their hands? These shadows were born in Swedish hospitals and were registered with the Swedish tax authorities. They have gone to Swedish schools and hung out on Swedish playgrounds. These shadows want to work in this country, pay Swedish taxes, live and die here, but our prime minister can still turn them into foreigners by saying that their actions are the result of the existence of ‘cultural thresholds’. This, as you in Megafon know, is the only explanation he has presented for the suburban revolt: he says it is about angry, young men who must overcome certain cultural thresholds and make themselves part of Swedish society.

We can’t be bothered to point out how trite and racist that statement is.

The shadows move in the nation.

To all of Sweden’s politicians…
…we write instead the following:
You are elected. The people are all of us, together. Police abuse their power and see those of us who lack a uniform as scum. That’s why we call them pigs. Simple. We are sick of hearing those in power just say a few words that don’t mean anything at all. Do something instead of just talking. Do something good. Establish, for example, a separate agency that can investigate and oversee the police.

You still have the power in your hands, so do something to help the people who have elected you to sit there and pull hundred of thousands into your account. The shit salaries that teachers get make them lose hope, and so on. Cause and effect. If you insist on reducing every political issue to a police matter, we might as well start electing police officers instead of politicians.

Yet another part of society died in that apartment in Husby. That’s why it burns.

But you already know this.

Finally, to all the kids in the suburbs:
All our brothers and sisters. Just be calm. The media will of course stop reporting when it has settled down in your neighbourhood. They will pack up and go home for the time being. They don’t want to hear your voices talking about police violence, bad schools, homes in need of renovation, closed-down youth centres, or about discrimination. They want to see burning cars and broken windows. So when the revolt is over this time, you must continue to report on your lives yourselves.

The media will smear your neighbourhoods and write inaccurate reports. Demand rectifications.

There is one thing we can learn. Our voices count. We must talk to each other even if no one else is listening.

The Sweden Democrats might get a few more votes, but never quiet down. We will not be silent, we will speak together. If they try to sew your mouth shut, your voices together will burst their stitches.

Our pockets are poor but our eyes are rich.

All power to the people.

Homa Badpa
Murat Solmaz
Pantrarna för upprustning av förorten

Published in Aftonbladet, 5, 23, 2013

Allan Sekula and Noël Burch podcasts care of the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid.

As soon, therefore, as it occurs to capital … no longer to be for the worker, he himself is no longer for himself: he has no work, hence no wages, and since he has no existence as a human being but only as a worker, he can go and bury himself, starve to death, etc. The worker exists as a worker only when he exists for himself as capital; and he exists as capital only when some capital exists for him. The existence of capital is his existence, his life; as it determines the tenor of his life in a manner indifferent to him. Political economy … does not recognize the unemployed worker, the workingman, insofar as he happens to be outside [the] labor relationship. The rascal, swindler, beggar, the unemployed, the starving, wretched and criminal workingman – these are figures who do not exist for political economy but only for other eyes, those of the doctor, the judge, the gravedigger, and bum-bailiff, etc.; such figures are spectres outside its domain. (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)

The incapacity to politicise unemployment outside of a weak and ambiguous demand for the right to work, job programmes and the retention of some of the benefit-structures of the welfare state is one of the salient features of the ongoing crisis. This has been accompanied by a public compulsion to reassert the centrality of waged-labour to social life and citizenship, rolling out of a punitive apparatus centred around the practices of ‘workfare’, bitterly encapsulated in such anecdotes as the requirement that British ‘job-seekers’ increase the number of hours spent looking for jobs that do not exist. This is indeed a social landscape in which the following observation by André Gorz has a caustic pertinence: ‘Never has the “irreplaceable”, “indispensable” function of labour as the source of “social ties”, “social cohesion”, “integration”, “socialization”, “personalization”, “personal identity” and meaning been invoked so obsessively as it has since the day it became unable any longer to fulfil any of these functions’ (Gorz, Reclaiming Work, p. 57, quoted in Weeks, The Problem with Work, p. 77).

Though I’d like to question the temporal cast of the end of work argument advanced by Gorz and others, I think underscoring the rift between a ubiquitous ideology of work and its social disaggregation is salutary today. In this talk I want to suggest that inquiring into the current relevance of Marx’s theory of relative surplus populations, and its difficult translation into the language of politics, provides an important counter to two opposite, but equally limiting, political philosophies of our current moment: on the one hand, a position that severs the political assertion of equality the structural antagonism between capital and labour (which we could associate with Badiou), on the other, a view that sees the liberation of the productivity of living labour from its parasitic capitalist fetters (which we could associate with Negri).

Now, it is important to note that both neo-Jacobin communisms and vitalist productivisms took their cue from the social and ideological decomposition of the industrial working class and from the crisis of Marxism of the 1970s, the one intensifying its communist politics to the detriment of its economic totalisation, the other maintaining many of its most traditional schemas (above all that of the forces of production breaking through the integument of legal and political relations) while abandoning the location of productive labour and insurgent subjectivity in the industrial proletariat. I would suggest that such positions, in symmetrical ways, neglect the character of contemporary struggles as responses to the ‘structural adjustments’ of the capital-labour relation, but in particular that they strain to articulate the problem of political subjectivity in the present with that of labour as the dominating (though according to some also residual) form of social synthesis. Parenthetically, there is an irony in this, as the struggles around the reserve army of labour were critical to the political genesis of both of these currents of thought I’m alluding to – in French Maoism’s orientation towards the undocumented and hyper-exploited ‘international proletariat of France’ and in Italian autonomia’s concern with the young metropolitan sub-proletariat.

The political consequences of the ‘end of work’ were thought in the more combatively optimistic strands of the seventies European Left with the paradigm of the Grundrisse’s so-called ‘Fragment on Machines’ in mind – in a nutshell as theories of the partial liberation from the realm of labouring necessity through the intercession of automation, reverting the contradictory dynamic whereby intensified productivity and the potential for the accumulation of social wealth, rather than capital, were accompanied by the immiseration of workers and society. The linearity of this account, both in terms of the secular direction of accumulation and in terms of the political subjectivity of its offspring and gravediggers is a weakness that many critics have highlighted. The suggestion by a number of recent authors from which I’ll be drawing – among which Ken Kawashima, Michael Denning, Aaron Benanav and Fredric Jameson – to rethink capitalism and its negations starting from the arguments in Chapter 25 of Capital and related sections of the Grundrisse poses a timely challenge, with the potential to unseat nostalgic conceptions of proletarian politics, as well as premature farewells to the working class.

Among the virtues of this focal shift towards the question of surplus populations are (1) the recovery of the dialectical core of Marx’s argument about “unemployment”, traduced by theories of immiseration and end of work; (2) the sensitivity to the uneven spatial and temporal dialectic of capital; (3) an attention to the disciplinary and demographic dimensions of social change which is capable of articulating biopolitics, discipline and accumulation in terms of the violent imposition and deposition of the capital/labour relation; (4) the capacity to recast the question of the racial and gendered constitution of class as a constituent rather than supplementary dimension of this relation; (5) the foregrounding of the problem of proletarian politics in the present outside of nostalgias for the industrial working class or premature farewells. I want to deal with these five points in turn, with extreme brevity, simply to provide some of the theoretical coordinates for approaching our political present in light of the Marxian notion of surplus populations.

1. Dialectics of Surplus: Population is perhaps the most glaring example of the manner in which Marx’s dialectic transfigures the one-sided abstractions of political economy. In that rare discourse on method which is the 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse he famously writes ‘It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc.’ Yet once this dialectic of the abstract and the concrete is applied to the notion of population, the result is a devastating departure from Malthusian naturalism and all of its parlous political consequences. For it is precisely in the entirely social relation between capital’s ‘breeding’ of a necessary labouring population and its simultaneous generation of a differentiated, stratified relative surplus population that Marx encapsulates the most massive and momentous contradictory effects of capital accumulation. Projecting the dynamic of the working day onto a dialectical demography, Marx argues in the Grundrisse that capital’s is driven to create as much labour as possible, while, in the inverse direction, making the part taken by necessary labour diminish. There is thus ‘a tendency of capital to increase the labouring population, as well as constantly to posit a part of it as surplus population – population which is useless until such time as capital can utlize it. … It is equally a tendency of capital to make human labour (relatively) superfluous, so as to drive it, as human labour, towards infinity’ (399). Or, in more markedly Hegelian language, ‘Capital, as the positing of surplus labour, is equally and in the same moment the positing and the not-positing of necessary labour; it exists only insofar as necessary labour both exists and does not exist’.

2. Geography and Temporality of Surplus: Scale and speed, driven by what Massimiliano Tomba has discussed in terms of differentials of surplus-value, are both at stake in this process, lending the absorption and repulsion of surplus populations an immensely complex and variegated rhythm, which is nevertheless globally marked by an increase in absolute labouring population and a faster increase in the relative surplus population (the whole process being characterised by Marx in terms of acceleration). In a rich study on the history of unemployment, Maria Grazia Meriggi has nicely encapsulated this process:

‘Together with the magnitude of social capital already in function, together with the degree of its increase, with the extension of the scale of production and of the mass of the workers put in motion, together with the development of the productive force of labour, together with the wider and fuller flow of all the sources of wealth, there also extends – in Marx’s analysis – the scale in which a greater attraction of workers on the part of capital is tied to a great repulsion of the latter. … Thus the working population produces in greater measure, through the accumulation of capital which it has itself produced, the means to render itself relatively superfluous’ (La disoccupazione come problema sociale, p. 136).

As outlined in an incisive chapter on the global reserve army of labour in Bellamy Foster and McChesney’s The Endless Crisis, global labour statistics bear much of Marx’s analysis out, with depeasantization and the integration of formerly ‘socialist’ countries into the global labour force leading the ILO to track an increase between 1980 and the present from 1.9 to 3.1 billion into the global work force, within which they identify 1.4 billion wage workers, 1.7 billion ‘vulnerably employed workers’ (including own-account workers involved in ‘subsistence and entrepreneurial activities’ and ‘contributing family workers’ made up mainly of unpaid women family workers) and 218 million unemployed. Including ‘discouraged workers’, and other categories, they tally up a ‘maximum size of the global reserve army’ of 2.4 billion people. What is critical to this reserve army, according to Bellamy Foster and McChesnay’s account, and what complicates the account of surplus populations in Marx – which, we should recall, is predicated on abstracting from the existence of a plurality of capitals and from geographical, political and other differences – are the radical divergences in the value of labour-power it mobilises. They borrow here the terminology of a Morgan Stanley analyst, to emphasize that today’s global reserve army is the object of ‘global labour arbitrage’, surplus-profits gained from exploiting the international wage hierarchy. The notorious superexploitation of workers at the Foxconn iPod, iPhone and iPad assembly plants in Longhua, Shenzen illustrates this phenomenon, including significantly, the combination of the employment of vast quantities of labour combined with the decreasing significance of the necessary labour component in the value of the final product.

Despite the massive labour input of Chinese workers in assembling the final product, their low pay means that their work amounts only to 3.6 percent of the total manufacturing cost (shipping price) of the iPhone. The overall profit margin on iPhones in 2009 was 64 percent. If iPhones were assembled in the United States – assuming labour costs ten times that in China, equal productivity, and constant component costs – Apple would still have an ample profit margin, but it would drop from 64 to 50 percent. In effect, Apple makes 22 percent of its profit margin on iPhone production from the much higher rate of exploitation of Chinese labour. (The Endless Crisis, p. 140)

3. Disciplining the Surplus: The importance of a theory of populations to an understanding of contemporary power is of course at the centre of the theoretical fortune’s of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, and of its various iterations by Giorgio Agamben and others. Not least of the virtues of attention to the theme of surplus populations in Marx is to undo the notion put forward by Foucault himself in The Order of Things, according to which Marx’s critique of political economy is epistemically locked in with its object of critique. It is precisely on the question of population that the break not just with Malthus, but with Ricardo is most definite. The means of subsistence theory, whereby the ‘workers’ rapid multiplication prevents wages from rising for any length of time above the natural price of labour; when they multiply slowly or die off this keeps wages from falling too long below it’ (Rubin, History of Economic Thought, p. 281), is dismantled for an understanding that population under capitalism is a social force, and that biological minima of subsistence cannot generate any kind of ‘iron law of wages’ (Lassalle’s variant on Ricardo’s Mathusian borrowings). Where a more fruitful connection with Foucault can be found is in the idea that to stratify and discipline this surplus, to commodify labour power and to maintain the contingency of the sale of labour a whole set of apparatuses and institutions (from Poor laws to unemployment provisions to workfare) are required. In Foucault’s own Marxian formulation in Discipline and Punish:

‘the two processes – the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital – cannot be separated; it would not have been possible to solve the problem of the accumulation of men without the growth of an apparatus of production capable of both sustaining them and using them; conversely, the techniques that made the cumulative multiplicity of men useful accelerated the accumulation of capital’ (p. 221).

Or, to use the even more evocative formulation from the 1973 Brazilian lecture course ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’:

‘A web of microscopic, capillary political power had to be established at the level of man’s very existence, attaching men to the production apparatus, while making them into agents of production, into workers. This binding of man to labor was synthetic, political; it was a linkage brought about by power. There is no surplus-value without sub-power. I speak of “sub-power,” for what’s involved is the power I described earlier, and not the one traditionally called “political power.” I’m referring not to a state apparatus, or to the class in power, but to the whole set of little powers, of little institutions situated at the lowest level. What I meant to do was analyze this subpower as a condition of possibility of surplus value.’ (Foucault, ‘Truth and Juridical Forms’, in Power, pp. 86-7)

This formulation allows us to think, following Kawashima’s suggestion in The Proletarian Gamble, how the fashionable theme of biopolitics can be wrested from the ‘bad abstraction’ of populations, to think the fraught dialectic of the centrifugal and centripetal pressures on the ‘living labour power of surplus populations’. It also permits us to think a different articulation between the disciplinary anatomopolitics of ‘fixing’ and adapting the labourer to dead labour, on the one hand, and managing the productivity of populations, on the other. The formalist distinction between biopolitics and anatomopolitics, proposed by Foucault, is undermined by the manner in which differential processes of proletarianisation, of the generation of what Denning has recently referred to as wageless life, condemns workers to the capital-labour relation, especially when this relation is experienced as a temporary or permanent exclusion. As Marx put it in Capital:

‘The law which always holds the relative surplus population in equilibrium with the extent and energy of accumulation rivets the worker to capital more firmly than the wedges of Hephaestus held Prometheus to the rock. It makes an accumulation of misery a necessary condition, corresponding to the accumulation of wealth. … It forms a disposable industrial army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost’ (p. 784).

4. Race and Surplus: Just as the idea that capital inadvertently organizes a politicised working class through the spatial discipline of the factory often led to a teleology of organisation that occluded the difficulties and ambivalences of politicisation, so a contemporary focus on surplus population risks thinking, even less plausibly, that marginalisation or expulsion from the capital-labour relation is itself a more or less linear factor of politicisation. It is here that some of the analytical and political uses to which the notion of surplus populations was put to in the 1970s can be of important use in confronting the ways in which the differential structures of ‘superfluity’ can play a role in political subjectivation and in an uneven and combined process of proletarianisation. In particular, the articulation of race and capitalism through the concept of surplus population in the concluding chapter of Hall et al. Policing the Crisis, ‘The Politics of Mugging’, provides us with a means to reflect on some of the stakes of thinking the politics of unemployment in light of the antagonistic segmentation and social violence that inheres in the production of superfluous populations – in their instance the unemployed black youth which were the target of the 1970s moral panic over crime. Dovetailing with the discussions of the politics of women’s reproductive labour at a time when, to quote Braverman, ‘the female portion of the population ha[d] become the prime supplementary reservoir of labour’, approaching the black proletariat in Britain through the angle provided by the contradictory logic of superfluous populations promised for Hall et al. a break with the narratives of social exclusion and criminality. It introduced the strategic problem, shared with feminist debates over housework, of how to align, as they put it ‘sectoral struggle with a more general class struggle’, in terms of the ‘double structure’ of exploitation at work in both the sexual and racial division within class relations. Most significantly, as they write: ’the key to unravelling the relation of both is not the question of whether each directly receives a wage or not, since a proportion of each is, at any time, in employment – i.e. ‘waged’ – while the rest are ‘wageless’; […] the key lies in the reference to capital’s control over the movement into and out of the reserve army of labour’ (Policing the Crisis, p. 369), which is especially significant to the extent that modern capitalism has made us of two principal reserve armies: women and migrant labour (p. 381). The authors of Policing the Crisis try to position themselves in the debate over the politics of the black British proletariat that pitted the Race Today collective against Black Liberator. It’s a rich account, but I wanted simply to indicate their attempt to wend a path between an autonomist politics of the ‘refusal of work’ which sees a caste-like racial (and sexual) hierarchy of labour, one that foregrounds wagelessness as a positive political starting-point, and a more classical analysis wherein black workers are ‘conceived … as a reserve army of labour (of a special, racially differentiated part’ which is ‘used, productively or unproductively, in relation to the needs and rhythms of capital. A they constitute a black sub-proletarian stratum of the general working class’, and their struggles are, according to the Black Liberator collective, for the time being, locked in a more economistic and less directly political struggle.

5. Politics of the Surplus: As Hall et al. note with regard to the writings of Fanon and the political programme of the Black Panther Party, the strategic difficulties of organising a class politics capable of responding both to the centrifugal and centripetal dynamics of surplus populations, and more significantly to the extreme segmentations and hierarchies imposed on the waged and the wageless are legion. The irony, of course, is that Fanon and the Panthers felt obliged to resurrect and reaffirm the category of the lumpenproletariat as a way of continuing an anti-capitalist politics from a standpoint which was not that of the constituted working class at the point of production but of the reserve army itself. Suspicion and hostility towards the nostrums of official communism and the official labour movement also played a signal role. Thus we can read in a programmatic text ‘On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party’, which transposes Fanon’s political provocation into the North American metropolis:

We are Lumpen … The Lumpenproletariat are all those who have no secure relationship or vested interest in the means of production and the institutions of capitalist society. That part of the ‘Industrial Reserve Army’ held perpetually in reserve; who have never worked and never will; who can’t find a job, who are unskilled or unfit, who have been displaced by machines, automation, and cybernation, and were never ‘retained or invested with new skills’; all those on Welfare or receiving State Aid. … Also the so-called ‘Criminal Element’, those who live by their wits….those who don’t even want a job … in short all those who simply have been locked out of the economy and robbed of their rightful social heritage. (Cited in Worsley, ‘Fanon and the Lumpenproletariat’)

As the passage makes clear such lumpen politics was a way to retain a heterodox fidelity to Marxian categories while recognising a situation in which the capital-labour relation was experienced, to quote Marx, as the ‘not-positing of necessary labour’. It was also a way of responding to the fact that ‘racial oppression was the specific mediation through which this class experienced its material and cultural conditions of life, and hence race formed the central mode through which the self-consciousness of the class stratum could be constructed’ (p. 387). Capitalism, in keeping with this revitalisation of Marx’s categories, requires the exploitation not only of ‘productive’ workers, but also of those who are ‘expelled from production, pauperised out of work, or assigned to a position of more-or-less permanent “marginality”, or who, when recruited back into capital’s fitful productive cycle, are taken up through the operation of its secondary labour markets’ (p. 392). If the accumulation of capital requires the accumulation of men and women, this is a differential accumulation, which is enforced and reproduced through violent segmentations among workers, of which racism is a primary ideological and practical form. In conclusion, taking Marx’s discussion of surplus populations as a political framework permits us perhaps to redraw the dubious distinction between working class and proletariat, often expressed in a rather transcendental vein (the working class as an empirical entity, the proletariat as a subjectivity based on a void of qualities and total negativity), in a much more complex and dynamic fashion. Rather than an anachronistically exclusive focus on the industrial working class, it allows us to begin, with Marx’s proposition that all free labourers are ‘virtual paupers’, since ‘according to their economic conditions [they] are merely living labour capaciti[es], hence equipped with the necessaries of life. Necessity on all sides, without the objectivities necessary to realize [themselves] as labour capaicit[ies]‘ (Grundrisse, p. 604). But, as Hall et al.’s stress on the need for political strategies able to confront the ‘discrepancies, the divergences, the non-correspondences between the different levels of the social formation in relation to the black working class – between the economic, political and ideological levels’ (p. 393) suggest, we should be wary of the kind of philosophies of history that treat this critical ‘virtual’ status into a tendentially unified reality – be in the form of propositions of universal wagelessness, precarity, surplus humanity. If anything, an analysis of surplus populations attunes us to the potent ways in which capital exerts segmented, highly mediated, spatially differentiated and temporally syncopated forms of proletarianisation, and that, precisely, it is far more effective in the constant unmaking and decomposition of working classes than in unifying, structuring and organising its own gravediggers.

[Most images are taken from Hugo Gellert's lithographs of Das Kapital.]

[Text of a talk given at the BSA conference Understanding the Financial Crisis, 8 October 2012]

I.

‘Today, anyone opening a newspaper often bumps up against the word “crisis”. It indicates insecurity, suffering and uncertainty, and alludes to an unknown future whose presuppositions cannot be clearly elucidated’. These lines are not my own, but are taken from a political dictionary published in France in 1839. In what follows, I want to approach the question of how we reckon sociologically and theoretically with the financial crisis from a somewhat oblique angle, that of crisis as a mode of historical and temporal experience, which is also to say a structure of feeling. I then want to sketch some of the ways in which the idea, and the structure of feeling, of ‘reform’ can serve as a hindrance to our sociological imagination of crisis.

Though these might appear to be very speculative concerns (in the philosophical, rather than financial sense of speculative) I think it is worth attending to the kind of intellectual conventions and expectations that govern how we approach the relationship between economic process and political decision, insofar as these govern both public and academic debate about ‘the’ crisis. I think it is particularly important to reflect on the horizons and experiences of social temporality that govern our responses to a situation in which the short term (e.g. state responses to credit ratings of treasury bonds) and the long run (the momentous social effects of austerity policies on the very prospects of social reproduction) appear hopelessly entangled and confused.

In order to sketch out some of these questions, I want to begin by turning to the conceptual history of the notion of crisis, which was elucidated with striking erudition by the German conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck. Examining its etymology and history of use, with particular focus on its military, medical, and philosophical definition in ancient Greece – where crisis incorporated notions of urgent judgment, social conflict and political choice – Koselleck’s work underscores the relationship between time and agency, which lends crisis both its importance for social theory and its often maddening ambiguity, as well as its easily inflated and indiscriminate use (such that everything, at all times, can be said to be ‘in crisis’).

Relying on its medical meaning, as derived from Hippocratic medicine, where it referred to the phase in a disease where the patient will either succumb or recover (‘the critical phase of sickness in which the battle between life and death was [to be] definitively settled’), Koselleck defines crisis as ‘that point in time in which a decision is due but has not yet been rendered’. The language – the idea of a ‘point’ in time – is ambiguous, since social crisis (as Antonio Gramsci noted in the 1930s, and as is evident to any present observer) rarely takes the form of an instant or event.

The time of crisis is a time that has not yet been taken on or assumed by an agent or subject – it is a time of uncertainty, of expectation – but it does include the idea of an eventual decision, and thus of an agent, within its concept. Neither a simple phase, nor a caesura, crisis here denotes a temporal tension from a finite and ambivalent period to a moment or act of decision, or as Koselleck defines it, it is ‘a compulsion to judge and act under the pressure of time’. Koselleck encapsulates this nicely in the idea that crisis implies a ‘knowledge of uncertainty’ and a ‘compulsion towards foresight’.

Within the general framework of decisive judgments under the growing pressure of time, which he links to the secularisation of ‘the apocalyptic foreshortening of time’ in ‘the acceleration of historical progress’, Koselleck presents us with three semantic models of crisis, all of them of theological derivation. The first is that of history as permanent crisis, a global process that is also a total judgment, as in Schiller’s dictum ‘The history of the world is the tribunal of the world’: ‘World history as the judgment of the world’, writes Koselleck, ‘implies foremost and above all the statement that every situation is marked by the same urgent sense of decision’. The second semantic model is of singular processes of acceleration and thresholds of change. Here crisis is ‘an iterative periodising concept’ allowing for comparison and analogy. This is the model that pertains to ‘ordinary’ understanding of economic crisis, with the added complication that, unlike a medical understanding of crisis, which is broadly homeopathic, (capitalist) economic crises have incessant growth and accumulation, and not stability, as their counterpart. Here Koselleck poses an interesting question, perhaps worth returning to, as to ‘whether “progress” is the guiding concept for “crisis” or whether the iterative periodising concept of “crisis” is the true guiding concept under which “progress” is also subsumed’. The third model, that of a final crisis, is both the most theologically laden. It is also one that we can see haunting popular culture, or, if we are to go by some of the fascinating interviews in Alexandra Ourozoff’s Wall Street at War, the imaginaries of business elites. In Koselleck’s words, ‘this semantic option is taken up more and more frequently the less the absolute end of history is believed to be approaching with the Last Judgment’. Koselleck’s own conservative response to the idea that we live in an epoch of potentially terminal crises is to resort to the Christian notion of a ‘katechon’, of forces that may stabilise or restrain the unleashing of the end, the possibility of collapse. It is worth noting for our purposes that in his brief treatment of the semantics of crisis Koselleck repeats a common observation about the ambivalence or polysemy of Marx’s concept of capitalist crisis – precariously, or dialectically, poised between the second and third model. As Koselleck notes, in a debatable but suggestive formulation: ‘One the one hand, he operated with a concept of crisis immanent to the system while he expounded the iterative structure of economic crises. On the other side, he knew of a concept of crisis destroying the system which he derived from other premises, making it possible to see world history drifting toward a last great crisis’.

II.

It is particularly relevant in regard to our purposes that the twentieth-century history of reformism is the child of the socialist debate over the political consequences to be drawn from Marx’s crisis theory and from the strategic question of how worker’s parties were to intervene faced with the cyclical, and seemingly intensifying, bouts of destruction characterising the capitalist economy. The century-old debate about reform and revolution took place on these grounds, pitting Rosa Luxemburg’s interpretation of this crisis – which in Koselleck’s terms treated it as the catalyst for an urgent alternative – with Eduard Bernstein’s evolutionary view of reformism, of a reforms acting not as a katechon, holding back disaster, but as a gradual move towards a telos of social justice that revolution could only botch up. But the classical prospect of a teleological reformism, and the strategic council of caution and gradualism that accompanied it, has all but vanished from our political imaginary.

Luxemburg’s rejection of Bernstein’s notion that capitalism could adapt its way out of crisis by means of credit, the unification of capitals, and the spread of communication – a socialist precursor of Ben Bernanke’s ill-fated views about ‘The Great Moderation’ – seems rather apt in our age of consumer credit and collateralised debt obligations. But the seemingly more sober idea of a reformist katechon taming capitalist barbarism, so widespread today, is not any more persuasive for that. It is not simply the case that the balance of social forces speak against it; it appears to rely on the prospect of something like a capitalism without capitalism: a durable manner of embedding accumulation, neutralising its tendencies to crisis, and arresting its intensifying exploitation of labour and nature, as well as its expulsion of ever greater swathes of the world into various forms of superfluity.

For some years now, advocacy of a pragmatic, sensible left has depended precisely on the prospect of a tamed, ‘responsible capitalism’. This is a perspective which we could note holds a special allure for sociology, to the extent that the discipline’s spontaneous political philosophy – evident all the way from Durkheim corporativist speculations to the palliative emphasis on ‘social capital’ – may be seen to involve an ‘embedding’ of capitalism, and in particular of its tendencies to abstract and dissolve social bonds. Thinking back to Koselleck’s conceptual investigation, we could also suggest that, to the extent that capitalist modernisation has been perceived as a deep and enduring epochal crisis of experience and value, sociology has often presented itself as a kind of intellectual department of crisis management or crisis prevention. Whether pessimistically shoring up the idea of a need to preserve the social against the feral spirits of capitalist abstraction, or optimistically proposing a virtuous dialectic between markets and society, whether taking ‘left’ or ‘right’ variants, I think this is a tendency that has deeply marked the discipline.

If we can historically, and perhaps sociologically, argue that there is an elective affinity between the sociology and a certain reformism, then this moment of protracted ‘crisis’ (a period which is replete with decisions, yet all of which do nothing but reinforce the everyday perception that this is a malady without resolution), poses a particular problem, which we could call that of the melancholy of reform. The economic crisis has all-too-predictably morphed into an opportunity for the reiteration, intensification and entrenchment of the selfsame dynamics that occasioned it in the first place. Residual regions of non-commodified social life are again primed for stripping and colonisation. Even those policy moves that seem to transcend the neoliberal matrix – US health care ‘reform’ for instance – intensify the financialisation of everyday life even as they purport to reinforce the social. In this context, the post-war Euro-Atlantic compact between big labour, big capital and big government has become an imaginary focal point for those still wedded, however nebulously, to the notion of social justice.

The pining for trente glorieuses, the thirty-odd years of postwar affluence – ‘when we still used to make things’, when working classes formed communities, when even ardent capitalists recognised the notion that some domains of social life are a priori unmarketable – can readily be registered in popular culture and critical thought alike, as well as in incoherent ideological constructs like Red Toryism or Blue Labour. (Here, we could do worse than recall Ralph Miliband’s warning in the conclusion of his 1969 The State in Capitalist Society: ‘The trouble does not lie in the wishes and intentions of power-holders, but in the fact that reformers, with or without inverted commas, are the prisoners and usually the willing prisoners, of an economic and social framework which necessarily turns their reforming proclamations, however sincerely meant, into verbiage’.) When the corrosive criticisms and energetic struggles to which Fordism and the welfare state were subject aren’t simply neglected, they are viewed as culprits of an ebbing of sensible progressivism, irresponsible pretexts for capitalist revanchism. Works whose ideological compass is set by postwar social democracy are likely to chastise ‘the sixties’ for making excessive demands and thus spoiling a good thing through a petulant inflation in needs and demands.

Ever since the last, thwarted burst, of genuine reformism, in the guise of the measures to socialise capital proposed by Rudolf Meidner in Sweden, the very notion of reform has been fundamentally evacuated of meaning or irrevocably traduced. With the mutation of social democracy into social liberalism, it has come to signify either the rollback of the postwar gains of labour, in ominous expressions such as ‘pension reform’, or the (rarer) proposal of initiatives to alleviate inequality or offset the more parlous effects of the profit motive, without, needless to say, in any way questioning it. Though it could be argued that high, Keynesian reformism also didn’t fundamentally intervene on the basic parameters of capital as a social relation, the ‘reformism’ of today’s social liberals is immeasurably more cosmetic. Indeed, as we are reminded of on a daily basis, it can only present itself as a benevolent political manager of accumulation on the upswing of the business cycle, and descends into verbiage as soon as it is faced with a crisis.

This reformism without reforms can be contrasted with the proliferation of prescriptions for reform shorn of reformism; measures, be they political or economic, that propose radical alterations of current relations of power and production, without heralding a fundamental upheaval in the social structure, or an overall strategy or agency for transformation. These range from fiscal interventions into the superpower of transnational finance (the Tobin tax) to political measures against new patterns of exploitation and welfare retrenchment (the guaranteed basic income), from proposals for audits of odious debt and policies of sovereign default (in the cases of Ecuador and Greece) to the socialisation of pension funds. We can speak of reforms without reformism here in the sense that, for all of the declarations that another world is possible, the connection between such measures and a broader horizon of emancipatory social change remains rather opaque. For most observers, neither the laws of motion of capital nor the collective biography of labouring classes provide the sense of a ‘progressive’ movement that a reformism could assume and channel into egalitarian ends.

The reformist hypothesis has long been abandoned by the political class, which can at the very best imagine palliative measures directed at restraining the further degeneration of the status quo, but never at actually presenting a plausible path for public welfare. Crisis management and diminishing returns have replaced the promise of growth and affluence. From the debt-fuelled euphoria that things have never been better to the depressive nostrum and the lived experience that things will never again be as good, in a little over a decade. But the possibilities of reviving, even in a considerably altered guise, a classical social-democratic reformism, with its reliance on waged work as the crucial mediator of political rights, seem far-fetched.

Incapable of thinking the structural determinants of unemployment, together with the principled desirability of a radical diminution of work and the elimination of the compulsion to labour to produce noxious commodities under noxious conditions, the current response to the crisis, including on much of the left, appears to imagine that ‘a society founded on work’, to quote the Italian constitution, remains the irremovable horizon of our social and economic life. A Fordist nostalgia impedes the elaboration of forms of social antagonism pertinent to a situation in which the relation between class and labour, the place of industry, the overall dynamic of accumulation and the international division of labour have mutated significantly from the postwar period – a postwar period which was itself marked by many dimensions, even if we limit ourselves to the Euro-Atlantic North, that are customarily overlooked in airbrushed visions of Fordism as a social paradigm: the gargantuan devaluation of capital through wartime destruction, which made a US-led boom possible, military Keynesianism, the critical effects of Cold War political competition, the racial and gender limitations of the welfare compact, and so on.

III.

Sociologists and social theorists are bound to share much of the historical common sense of their epoch, but it is obvious that taking the intellectual challenge of the ongoing crisis, or perhaps crises, seriously involves doing some violence to that common sense – a common sense which needless to say sociology, as a public discipline, has also played a not insignificant part in forming. Some very resilient, and in many ways indispensable, habits of mind and theory can serve as hindrances to our understanding. By way of conclusion, I want to briefly discuss two of these.

The first could be placed under the twofold rubric of periodisation and paradigm. Ever since Thucydides writing on the Peloponnesian War, thinking about epochs or processes as unified natural kinds has been a critical dimension of reflection on society, which can never proceed with the blinkered empiricism that sees history as the train of ‘one damn thing after another’. The kind of periodising concepts that social thought has long traded in – above all the concept of modernity or industrial society which inaugurates the very notion of sociology – are indispensable for any kind of cognitive mapping of social relations at the analytical and prescriptive level. And we can of course add that it is an effect of capital’s logic that it can indeed be seen to throw up temporal phases as ‘natural’ kinds of sorts – cycles of accumulation, Kondratieff waves, and so forth. However, there is a profound tendency to reify these orienting concepts, which frequently interferes with the sociological cognition of political economy. ‘Fordism’ is an important case in point. For all of its heuristic value it has also led to eliding the remarkable continuities in forms of capitalist discipline and exploitation, and to painting, in an intensely parochial way, a precarious and partial social compact in certain advanced liberal societies as a homogeneous reality. To characterise a period thusly, by formatting it in terms of a paradigm, also carries significant political effects – chiefly among them, in this case, the oscillation between viewing those postwar decades as a kind of regulative ideal for a meliorist conception of social justice, or declaring that as we are now in a ‘new capitalism’ all of our political practices must change. A particularly curious matter here is of course the way in which social theory tends to turn certain economic theories and categories into period and paradigms. ‘Keynesianism’ – that exquisitely unstable congeries of theoretical innovations, policy proposals, state strategies, and so on – is accordingly often paired with ‘Fordism’ in misleading ways. Thus, for example, the intensification of deficit-priming of aggregate demand well into the supposed era of liberalism (just think of the Reagan deficit) becomes entirely enigmatic, and is therefore ignored, the moment the economy becomes a domain to be approached in terms of its forms of appearance, so to speak, much less than in those of some resilient underlying patterns. Similarly, we could consider the way in which phenomena central to any sociological comprehension of the crisis – such as the predatory inclusion of racialised US working classes into the mortgage market, one if not the key determinant of the first phase of the crisis – become more or less unintelligible if we are unduly fascinated by such pedagogical shorthand as ‘Fordism’ or ‘Keynesianism’.

The second, closely related, I have already alluded to. It has to do with the often unreflective tendency in sociology to think of the social, and in the postwar period, the social state, as that which ‘embeds’ the abstractive, de-socialising dynamics of capital. Needless to say, a formidable efficacy, or even performativity, of abstractions seems to characterise a moment dominated by financial instruments of great mathematical complexity, whose negative feedback on individuals and communities is now there for all to see. But we must be careful not to give disciplinary support to the imprecise imaginary of a contemporary reformism that sees the return of the state and of regulation as a panacea for crisis. As a number of commentators have underscored this would be to fundamentally misunderstand the dynamics of neoliberalism. If we can reasonably ‘periodise’ neoliberalism – perhaps identifying its inaugural moment in the 1979 Volcker shock – it is not an as an epoch of deregulation and state rollback, but of different uses of regulation and a different employment of the capacity of the state – mainly in order to shore up problems of profitability by making possible a kind of ‘asset price Keynesianism’, and by deeply integrating the working population in a system of financial exploitation and expropriation (among whose symptoms are such staggering statistics as the 57 billion dollars raked in by financial institutions from late repayment charges on credit cards in 2003 alone). As Albo, Gindin and Panitch note in their In and Out of Crisis: ‘It is crucial to distinguish between neoliberalism as an ideologically-driven strategy to free markets from states, and as a materially-driven form of social practices and rules which has required state intervention and management to liberalize markets’. And to understand this, we may again need to break with much of our sociological and political common sense, and recognise, as they suggest, that: ‘As the most recent state interventions make clear, given the current balance of social forces, regulation is about finding a technical way to preserve markets in the face of their volatility, not about any fundamental reordering of relative power in society to conform to social needs’. Crisis, and this is a truism, is itself the principal means of ‘regulation’ under capitalism. Rather than being bewitched by a simplistic schema pivoting around the disembedding and embedding, or the de-regulating and re-regulating, of capital, sociology should perhaps turn its attention more to the crucial enigma that the impasse in the smooth reproduction of the capital/labour relation is posing to any contemporary model of reform. The regressive evocation of the ideology of work combined with increasing unemployment, the manner in which the credit crunch has broken the precarious balance between depressed wages and continued consumption, the lived experience of crisis as both daily urgency and interminable horizon, the novel role of labouring populations as the shock absorbers of transferable risk – these are some of the social tensions and contradictions that sociology should explore, beyond the comfort zone provided by the paradigms with which we imagine, rather melancholically, the embedding of capitalism in the recent past.

The world only appears before my eyes as a solid “landscape,” lustrous like plastic. —Takuma Nakahira

That landscapes are manufactured or altered by human interests is not a discovery of late capitalism. Whether seen as pictorial genre or as ideology, the representation of landscape has allowed the modern subject to frame his mastery over nature—crucially by clearing the land of indigenous, insurgent, and independent inhabitants—in terms of a propertied metaphysics. But the representation of landscape also functions to depict human artifacts, imprints of social intercourse. When the landscape is not scoured for traces—aftermaths of trauma, indices of futures past—its indeterminacy is most often coded as indifference: the indifference of modularity and iteration across social
spaces, the indifference of concrete abstraction (pun intended). It is an indifference remarkable for its ubiquity and magnitude, as well as for the sheer scale of its continued reproduction—tract homes all the way into a vanished horizon, container terminals that never sleep, banks of screens in a stock exchange.

[The continuation of this essay, along with a number of articles relating to the Taipei Biennial 2012, here.]

A new missile system that takes advantage of containerization. Via critical logistics

With Michael Schapira.

[Lewis Baltz, South Wall, Mazda Motors, 2121 East Main Street, Irvine, 1974, exhibited in the 1975 show New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape]

‘By 1976 I was joking that this [the New Topographics] was the ‘neutron bomb’ school of photography: killing people but leaving real estate standing. So what I was experimenting with as an alternative was a way of suggesting that social topography was inevitably the site of strife, class war, land-grabs, ethnic-cleansing, race-war, repression and empire. This is especially true in California, where the bones of the first inhabitants crunch underfoot with every step.’

Allan Sekula, ‘Translations and completions’, exhibition notes, California Stories, Christopher Grimes Gallery, California, 2011.

Taken in Omaha, Nebraska in 2008, this is Plate 8 from Mitch Epstein’s photographic perambulations through the landscapes of the US energetic complex in the midst of the Bush II era,  American Power.

The sheer weirdness and geopolitical delirium of the Islamophobic cognitive mapping behind this business venture, is clearer in this snap: