Inoperativity – Infrapolitical Reflections

In a recent text published at Verso Blog, entitled “The Coming Post-Hegemonic World”, Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra make a case for a “turn to a post-hegemonic model” that will challenge the consensus of global in the coming era. In many ways, this era is already here with its diverse and multifaceted (in terms of intensities, forces, and leverages) of protracted and bizarre nationalisms, which as Jamie Merchant has teased out brilliantly, amount to desperate attempts to offer a belated response to the decline of growth as one more stage for containing rampant processes of accumulation via state capacities. For Hardt & Mezzadra, this “posthegemonic world to come” is characterized by a global spatial reconfiguration of capital – accommodating the logistics of regional spaces of influences and exchange across the planet – and on the other, an increasingly “domestic sphere of authoritarian rule” promoted by new accelerated initiatives at generating social homogeneity in the wake of rushing fragmentation hand in hand with a war regime that has utterly scrapped ideals about “strategic autonomy” in order to trumpet an arm race (nuclear weapons included), as it is currently unfolding in Europe.

One can claim that this posthegemonic world is one that firmly assumes the consequences of two interdependent vectors that imploded within the project of political modernity: the end of economic growth (thus validating the law of the fall of profit outlined in Capital V.III), and the liquidation of the principle of legitimacy that for two centuries accommodated the legislative sources of the state authority in democratic constituent power. For Hardt & Mezzadra posthegemony means global fragmentation, authoritarianism, and spatial remaking; however, one should also say that it means, the opening towards stagnation, the collapse of political unity of the state, and most recently the total discredit of the foolish leftist hypothesis that promoted a “rainbow social equivalent coalitions” to push for compensatory, and in every instance insufficient and moribound, populist resurgences elevated through the combustion of ethereal but effective rhetoric (in fact, my argument in a new short book, La fisura posthegemónica, is that the push for political hegemony of the last decades only cosigned forms of consensual totalization at the expense of the production of subalternization and social death).

Even taken as a descriptive and normative condition of the current state of Western politics, the posthegemonic situation lays bare the reciprocal impasse of the claim of its opposition: in other words, one should also put to rest social mobilization that characterized the politics of High Modernity, since ultimately movements (and total mobilization as an apparatus of social energy transfer) presupposes that “every social structure, that it can receive what form required the needs of the political adventure…total mobilization signifies nothing other that the effort to reduce the social substance to a kind of plastic”, as Gérard Granel once defined it. Hence when Hardt & Mezzadra claim that the “effective rebellion must be rooted in social movements envisioning a life beyond the rule of capital”, they are inadvertently refusing to come to terms with the factical posthegemonic reality that they are describing, which is no longer driven by expansive economic growth, but rather by stagnation, and inoperativity at planetary scale that is maintained through the a global veneer of production into regimes of competitive accumulation (of territory, contractual debt, fiscal regulation, executive taxation or tariffs, and increasing arbitrary monetary regulations in the global system) for marginal profitability, as Paul Mattick argues in his recent The Return of Inflation (2023).

This means that there is no outlook towards ‘social mobilization’ that does not serve the subjective productivity of real subsumption, since its ultimate goal is to anaxate social energy into the force of (un)productive labor. This form of dilatant mobilization can only serve the master of illusionary hegemony, and thus promote functional and unwarranted servitude everywhere. Indeed, only a reprobate can be immune to the moralist or the realist conditions of hegemony. If push comes to shove, the posthegemonic factical world of stagnation and political fragmentation already here proves that the ongoing irruption of non-movements are irreducible to the modern movement’s energy; and that life never fully coincides with political claim to rule and legitimacy, even less so in the becoming-world of Production.

Ultimately, this posthegemonic fissure outlives the crumbling hegemonic world of principial High Modernism and no ‘international movement’ can piece it back together again. We are all posthegemonic now, but only if one takes up this predicament seriously and candidly.

I think that a discussion on class and exploitation brings important points for a fundamental disagreement. In so far as thought solicits perpetual interlocution, this exchange seems necessary and timely. Since I alluded in passing to Daniel Zamora’s article on exploitation in a previous note, I would like to recall the way in which he brings to bear the analytical stakes in pursuing the question of ‘exploitation’ against that of ‘inequality’. (Let’s leave for a moment the oppositional form of the debate, that is, between inequality and/or exploitation, which I do not think exhausts the discussion of work in any sense). Zamora writes at the very end of his article:

“Today, more than ever, the success or failure of the struggles to come depend on the capacity of political and class organization (e.g: unions) to draw attention to the socioeconomic stakes represented by the “surplus population”, and to convince the so-called “stable” working class that their fates are intertwined. Indeed, at the very dawn of the industrial era, Marx had already posited that a decisive stage in the development of the class struggle would be the moment when workers “discover that the degree of intensity of the competition among themselves depends wholly on the pressure of the relative surplus population” and thus on their being able to “organize a regular co-peration between employed and unemployed in order to destroy or to weaken the ruinous effects of this natural law of capitalist production on their class” [1].

I do not intend to gloss Zamora’s article, rather I want to use it to introduce at least two intertwined elements of analysis. First, I would agree with Zamora that exploitation has not disappeared from our contemporary world. On the contrary, everything is labour and everyone is exploited insofar as we are in the post-epochal stage dominated by the principle of general equivalence. What disappears is the semblance and unity of the very category of class as articulated in Marx’s thought. In the 1990s, this aporia underlying the “theory of the working class” was posed with immense clarity by the Chilean philosopher Willy Thayer as follows:

“Escasa la teoria porque esta ha caido en el territorio de la fenomenolidad. Lo que equivale a decir que el conflicto o la divison del trabajo entre teoria y fenomenolidad ya no rigen estrictamente mas. La efectividad ha subsumido esa posibilidad” [2].

So, the end of work does not mean the end of exploitation as such, but a turbulence between the categorial sphere and the phenomenal sphere. As Willy Thayer observed, the totalization of real subsumption of capital leaves only capitalism and gets rid off the potential for revolution (Thayer 139). So, if we only account for labor in the way that Zamora (or even Hatfield at the end of his book) seems to do, then, how can the role of finance, derivative models, the phenomenon of debt, and the pure means of speculative capital where nothing is produced except value itself be thought? It is general knowledge that for Marxism the model solicits a necessary mediation between money, commodity, and surplus value. However, in the ‘financial turn’, as Joseph Vogl discusses at length in his Specter of capital (Stanford 2013), work is reduced to mere re-production of value for value’s sake. For Vogl this is linked to bad faith and guilt. Today, it seems that the attractiveness of the category of class in the new the sociological revival of Marxism is solely discursive, since it cannot say anything about these transformations.

More important is the fact that, by retaining the category of class, the sociological critic secures his place as a vanguard of his time, leaving untouched the constitutive productionism at the heart of Marxian critique of capitalist labour. This is, after all, the philosophy of history working both against existence (wanting to “convince” specific subjects, whether in motley or unified social determination), while voicing a messianic promise for an emancipation to come. Of course, this does not mean that the idea of class could not be reworked as to grasp something else beyond Marx, as Andrea Cavalletti has demonstrated [3]. But the positive horizon that posits class against inequality does not do the work as an analytical tool to understand the global predicament. In fact, it seems to restitute as a sort of violence implicit in political drives.

When Zamora speaks of the “intention to convince the stable working class”, he reveals an old desire of the Left. (And it should not come as surprise that his book on Foucault and Neoliberalism comes endorsed by the Marxist sociologist Vivek Chibber). However, this is a legitimate political position, which actually exited last century under the name of guerrilla warfare. What is the guerrilla if not a process of subjectivization that pushes to link or “convince” the unemployed or the lumpen (whoever inhabits the outside of the “stable working class”) with class, or vice versa (those outside with the stable proletariat)?

It is very interesting that those who stand for full fleshed theory of such a strict political action do not push (at least explicitly) for guerrilla warfare. But it is the guerrilla form what seems to haunt the very horizon of thought that demands revolutionary alliance. Guerrilla is the unsaid of ‘obligatory’ class as a sort of universal military conscription or duty. Against voluntarism or this kind of brute force, the task is to imagine other ways of thinking labor as an exigency for our times. Infrapolitical exodus – exemplified by the sabbath (see Kelso 2016) – seems to me a space beyond this productionism and the recurring promise of emancipation of life through work.

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Notes

1, Daniel Zamora. “When inequality replaces exploitation: the condition of surplus-populition under neoliberalism “. Non-site, Issue 10, September 2013.

2, Willy Thayer. “Tercer Espacio e ilimitacion capitalista” (1999). But also see his “Fin del trabajo intelectual”, in Fragmento repetido (ediciones/metales pesados, 2006)

3, Andrea Cavalletti. Clase: el despertar de la multitud. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 2013.