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Notes
on: Brown, N (2011) 'Red years. Althusser's
lesson, Ranciere's error and the real movement
of history'. Radical Philosophy
170: 16 – 24
by Dave Harris
[There are some very interesting links to various
modern communist and Marxist theoretical analyses
of modern events like the Greek economic crisis. I
have inserted them from Brown's footnotes]
There is a new return to Marx, so it is timely to
look at Rancière (R) vs. Althusser (LA). In
Althusser's Lesson, R had accused LA of
defending order, especially the political and
academic hierarchy. We can equally apply to
his own work, R's insistence that LA be read in
terms of discursive constraints in historical
contexts.
R develops his critique from the specific
conjuncture, the workers' occupation of the Lip
watch factory, which R saw as a development from
May '68. L A's reply was published in the
same year, and was seen as an attempt to reassert
a failed Marxist discourse which insisted that
nothing had changed.
Debates about different trends inside communism,
including ultra left and self organised ones, are
in the forefront again. In France, there has
been a discussion of 'communization', associated
with Dauvé and the Theorie Communiste
group, with Aufheben
in the UK, Riff-Raff
in Sweden, TPTG
and Blaumachen
in Greece, and Endnotes
in the UK and U.S.. These groups have
attempted to understand recent social
movements. They also help us reevaluate the
debate between R and LA.
The intention here is to situate the debates
inside a particular movement unfolding at the
time, the 'red years', and the present. LA
and R can be seen as representing 'discrepant
trajectories' (17).
R's book on LA sets out to examine how
Althusserian theory had initially being critical
but had become apologetic. R advocated a
term to maoism instead. The book also shows
R's own transformation. Both combine self
criticism with 'implied self
congratulation'. While LA became separated
from political practice, R was transformed by
it. LA kept his place within the party and
the university, while R revolted against
hierarchies of knowledge. They disagreed
over the political maturity of students as well,
with LA becoming 'increasingly infantile' and
reactionary. R's revolt against the
university leads him 'to align himself with
Foucault'.
R had to explain why the initially critical
currents in LA led necessarily to conservatism and
counter revolution. He actually says that LA
had misled readers even while opening up new
possibilities which only lead back into
theory. However there is also a notion that
history itself transforms Althusserianism.
A central role is played by L A's essay on student problems.
Initially, R went along with the argument to
restore Marxist rigour, even within the UEC [union
des etudiants communiste], and to defend science
against ideology. The university system
itself had trained academics to compete, which
made the criticism of individualism and calls for
collective work groups seem '"the reveries of
illiterate minds"' In this way, LA's essay came to
have an immediate political force inside the
university and the UEC, opposing student radicals
attacking institutions.
If this is R's self criticism, he also gets
'paranoid' in other accounts, such as when LA was
censured by the Party for maoist sympathies.
This resulted in a tactical move to reconcile the
interests of theory with the interests of the
Party, to stave off opposing trends and
criticisms. This is what leads to the
critique of humanism for R. It helped LA
restore the authority of theory over politics, and
it also served to restore the Party's authority by
intervening to rebuke some communist intellectuals
on the right.
It is hard to see this as a tactical compromise,
however, since the work on Marxism and humanism
did not stave off warnings from the Party.
It can be seen rather as the refusal of
compromise, and the continuation of the earlier
critique of Marx's early writings, which had
already attacked Party orthodoxy. It can
even be seen as a reassertion of maoism with the
Chinese Communist Party's own polemic against
humanism in the Soviet Party.
Why does R pick out in particular the text on anti
humanism? R had himself embraced 'a
workerist humanism' in his investigations of
working class history [if this is the real split
between them, LA's comments in the Reply seem apt—when
humanists are criticized they get really furious!]
R's chronology is also faulty. He claims
that only when militants inside UEC began
influential, did the PCF rediscover the appeal of
going back to Marx and the role of theory, and
this inspired LA's tactical maneuvering.
However, the PCF's discovery is dated as 1965,
while LA's critique of humanism appeared in
1963. R uses this to deny that L A's
critique was a principled move, but rather 'the
maneuver of an opportunist (and a prescient one at
that)'(19). It is this opportunism that
condenses the case, as a'totalizing convergence'
of all the tendencies, an opportunist attempt to
remain within the party and to retain the status
of professor. As a result, none of LA's
accomplishments can be recognized, and indeed R
sees Reading Capital as just glossing
Kautsky. What of concepts like structural
causality, of symptomatic reading, the work on the
relation between real objects and objects of
knowledge, over determination, the critique of
Hegel, R's own essay on fetishism?
R insists that the major thesis was simply to show
the manipulations of '"subjects of social
practice"'(20), and that this was the basis of the
stance against revolting students—that they were
being manipulated. Every argument becomes
part of the grand strategic designed to defend L
A's own position, for Brown, 'a cynical,
unitary political logic… a practice of
paranoid reading'.
Nonetheless, R is right to critique LA. The
reply does involve a prophetic appeal to 'the
letter of Marxism Leninism' under the guise of a
debate between communists. L A's own critique of
Stalinism was highly limited by his institutional
commitments and his hesitation about radical
politics. There were elitist Kautskyist
elements in the student problems essay, although
Brown denies a connection with anti
humanism. These criticisms were already
apparent, but R finished LA off.
What followed for R? He sided with the
syndicalist left despite his early
reservations. The Lip workers' takeover of
their watch-making factory was crucial in this
support. R saw this as continuing a longer
history of takeovers, including those of the
tailors in 1833. [which opens him to LA's
critique of humanist ideology that it can never
find out anything new, but has to continually
'recognize' itself in events]. R liked the slogan
of the Lip workers: '"it is possible: we produce,
we sell, we pay ourselves"'. R saw this as a
classic struggle between bourgeois and
proletariat. However, it is easy to see how
limited the slogan is—not a demand for the
abolition of wages or capital, but rather
'preservation of wage labour and the management of
capital'.
This was the point made by a contemporary account
in a radical journal Négation [available
here,and summarized below] .
The limits of possibility are seen as affected by
the history of the change between formal and real
subsumption: this also breaks the link between
1833 and 1973. Self management was not
developed from the subjective realization of the
workers, but more as the result of isolation from
other workers. The objective conditions of
isolation led to a local struggle to see
themselves as producers, and thus they '"became a
collective capitalist"' (21). In their
explanation of the sale price of their watches,
they even included an element of owners'
profit. They did not want to accumulate
capital, so this represented simply a desire to
continue as before.
This reading contrasts with R's 'workerist
cheerleading'. The occupation failed because
it was not compatible with modern modes of
production, and this even left a legacy of counter
revolution [and recuperation]. R did not
discuss the outcome, but used the episode to
reassert humanism.
There were a lot of debates about workerism and
the ultra left following May '68. There were
lots of debates about organization, which made
discussions of the role of the PCF and its
interest in a general line 'laughable'(21).
But R did not highlight them either.
These debates included work by Dauvé on the
potential of workers' councils, seen as important
enough to take the role of the party for the ultra
left. This view appears in Society of
the Spectacle as well [and Autonomism may
well be the political imaginary of Deleuze, says
Lotringer] . Dauvé wanted to reconcile this
with Marx's critique of political economy by
denying that capitalism is a mode of management
[Marxism ignored management modes by reducing
management to a function of capital], and
concluded that emphasising management will not
reduce the limits of worker control in the cycle
of reproduction, and that it is still necessary to
see revolutionary struggle as a contradiction
between labour and capital, and not workers and
management.
The Theorie
Communiste Group [TC] has also
focused on communization, and they have identified
particular cycles of struggle, connected to the
difference between formal and real
consumption. This leads to a break between
earlier workers' movements and later class
conflict. They identify one period in terms
of 'programmatism', where proletarian struggle
identifies a programme to be realized, a future
social organization, which unifies all aspects of
the proletariat, including workers' councils and
self management as well as the party.
However, this period of struggle 'was ending as
[R] wrote'(22), and was certainly not the future.
This phase ended with counter revolutionary
developments in the seventies and eighties, which
restored real subsumption and defeated workers'
identity and organizations, including
Autonomism. This ended the notion of a
programme of social reorganisation as affirming
proletarian identity. The proletariat itself
is no longer united, as a consequence of new class
conflicts. Class-belonging becomes merely 'an
external constraint' to be overcome, and struggles
take the form of opposing being in a class.
The Greek riots of 2008 [find the article here]
showed these limits and movements. However,
TC want to deny that there is any kind of
emergent humanity detectable in the
struggles. Insisting on the humanity of the
proletariat would be counterproductive, since it
would raise the old unpopular claims that the
proletariat wants to replace society with a new
programme [maybe]
This analysis is based on the rereading of Marx,
but not an orthodox PCF one. TC have
been successful in identifying the specifics of
the present. They are not simply embraced in
eternal struggle for humanist goals. They
have criticized the ultra left legacy of self
management and self organization and attempted to
go beyond it. There is no return to LA, but
a greater appreciation of his work beyond its
apparent demise. Structuralist anti humanism
still has a cutting edge, and it can inspire
communist students. There is an objection
to 'theoreticist obfuscation, and
structuralist determinism' (23), but at least
'real history returns', and a new debate opens
between theory and politics. There is an
insistence on conjunctural analysis again.
TC might have found a way through LA's
impasse. TC and the others insist on
a role for theory in offering analyses and
structural accounts of concrete situations, in
order to understand particular struggles and real
movements. There is no general line, nor a
commitment to R's assertion of an underlying
freedom that emerges in various ways only to be
repoliced, 'a theory of the relation between
politics and "the police", as a game of
whack-a-mole"'.
DH Appendix
[The article in Négation is a very
interesting analysis of the struggle at Lip,
preceded by an analysis of the development of
capitalism. It is complex, but in essence,
as capitalism increases its productivity by
investing in machinery, so it lowers the rate of
return to capital. To cut a long story
short, the consequences of this include a
necessary socialization of capital and the
extension of credit. Additional resources
are needed from stockholders and from banks to
invest in machinery, constant capital, and other
developments include conglomeration, and
cooperation in large scale international
collaborations . As a result, productive
capital at the level of the individual firm itself
ceases to be that important [there is even a
suggestion that it becomes 'fictional'].
This doesn't do away with crises, of course, which
increasingly take a financial form, but it does
change radically the options open for a
proletarian challenge to capital, especially a
localized one.
In the old classic days of personally owned firms,
capital could only assume a formal domination over
labour, requiring the support of explicit laws of
private property and the like. Labour was
clearly a massively productive force, possibly the
only one actually creating surplus value.
The ownership of the firm came to look rather
arbitrary by comparison, and any personal
exercises of the owner's rights, such as selling
up, seemed irresponsible and anti social. It
is not surprising that in those circumstances,
workers came to see themselves as producers,
possessing a productive ethos, wanting to produce
goods, and seeing themselves as playing a key part
in the production of goods. It seemed
rational and obvious equally to replace the absurd
form of ownership represented by an individual
capitalist. Nothing would change if that
individual owner was replaced, and if the real
producers of wealth took over and ran the
enterprise for themselves.
The new conditions have made that an unrealistic
possibility, though. Productivity now
depends on the frequent investment in constant
capital, and because individual companies
themselves are unable to generate enough profit,
they must involve shareholders and banks and other
companies, as we saw. Being able to access
credit to renew constant capital is the secret of
maintaining production, together with maximizing
the returns as much as possible to constant
capital, which involves turning workers into
machines more or less. Worker resentment and
resistance now takes the form of sabotage and
absenteeism, not a wish to take over production.
In these conditions, the worker takeover at Lip
represented conditions in an isolated and lagging
region of capitalism. Watchmaking was still
recognizably run by the Lip family. The form
of production was still heavily based upon skilled
labour—it was under capitalized, and this is one
reason why it was facing bankruptcy in the first
place The workers who took over wanted to preserve
these conditions, but this would also preserve
bankruptcy. What they could not do was raise
money to invest in new constant capital: they
could not access credit, and they could not
discuss the new possibilities of using new
constant capital, which would have involved a
considerable international division of labour and
deskilling anyway. They lasted quite a while
as a collective capitalist of the old kind, but
much depended on them being able to sell watches,
including selling watches at various leftwing
rallies. They did accumulate a small amount
of revenue, but could not use it to reinvest for
the reasons given above.]
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