What is Communism?

Jehu does these neat little nuggets and I think he hits this, above all else, on the head.

His own blog header starts with this:
"Communism is free time and nothing else!"

That is a good start.

This is the obvious one:
"Communism can only be defined as the complete abolition of wage labor, capital and the state, and the realization of the principle of “to each according to need”. If communization has any meaning, it is that the complete abolition of wage labor, capital and the state — a fully communist society — is possible right now, immediately."

This adds a little clarity to what the abolition of the working as a class means:
"There is only one way the proletarians can abolish themselves as a class: the buying and selling of labor power must be abolished."

But what does that really entail? This is a little more specific and it is very important [all subsequent italics mine]:
"A society characterized by the communist principle requires certain definite technical material conditions so that the social product can be distributed without regard to the labor contribution of its members. These conditions may not necessarily require the complete automation of production, but they must at least guarantee that whatever living labor is required can be met by voluntary contribution of the members of society. Basically, communism requires that wage labor is already superfluous to the production of material wealth at present."

Now that is some good stuff as a basic "elevator pitch" answer to the question, "What do you mean by communism?"

It does not tell us how to get there and is not political strategy, but it puts us in the right frame of mind because there is no question that we can produce enough to take care of people, that it can be done with many fewer hours of labor than even happens now, but further that even now, wage labor is superfluous to the production of material wealth.

Hegel's "the rational is real and the real is rational"

Hegel's famous quote from the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, "was vernünftig ist das ist wirklich und was wirklich ist das ist vernünftig", typically translated as "the rational is real and the real is rational" ought to be considered one of the most misunderstood phrases among his generally misunderstood work.

For example, the Wikipedia page on Hegel says the following:

"Hegelianism is the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel which can be summed up by the dictum that "the rational alone is real", which means that all reality is capable of being expressed in rational categories. His goal was to reduce reality to a more synthetic unity within the system of absolute idealism."

What, however, if this is mistaken? On the one hand, for Hegel, following from the Science of Logic, his attempt to begin without presuppositions, to think Being without any presuppositions, from an immediate, unmediated, sheer Being that itself turns out to immediately vanish into Nothing, leads him to the conclusion that the categories of Thought are also the categories of Being, not because we dogmatically assert, that is, assume, this is so, but through a lengthy logical working out. That is, if Thought can think Being without imposing its own presuppositions on it, then, contra the contemporary Pragmatist-influenced reading of Hegel's logic as non-ontological, Hegel's logic is an onto-logic. Following both Slavoj Zizek (Absolute Zero) and Stephen Houlgate (The Opening of Hegel's Logic), both of whom approach Hegel's thought in otherwise quite different ways, I would argue that Hegel proposes a non-dogmatic beginning to philosophy, unlike the modern metaphysics of Leibnitz, Spinoza, and Hegel's own contemporaries, that nonetheless takes seriously the critique of metaphysics pace Kant. To put the matter bluntly, Hegel is making claims about Being in a manner that does not correspond with deflationary notions of truth as argued by Robert Pippin in "Back to Hegel?" in the journal Mediations.

Hegel takes Kant's critique of prior metaphysics seriously insofar as he accepts that metaphysics made assertions about Being that presupposed what had to be proved, but at the same time Kant still presupposes certain things about Being, that is, what could and could not be said about Being, but further Kant simply takes the categories of thought without justification from traditional metaphysics, hence his putting forward of the twelve categories. The result in Hegel's work is the Science of Logic and the attempt to engage the questions metaphysics proposed while keeping Kant's own critique of pure reason in mind.

The end result, and one I would suggest is maintained by Marx, is that the categories of Thought are the categories of Being because the categories of Being can be thought adequately without importation of unjustified concepts by working through Being itself. The dilemmas of philosophical realism, which take for granted and defend the dualistic separation of Thought and Being whether in a (neo-)Kantian mode or an empirical-positivist mode (Trent Schroyer's book The Critique of Domination lays out the distinction between the two reasonably clearly), are fundamentally non-problems from the Hegelian and Marxian perspective. In the case of the latter, this is of course frequently not grasped and so you see nonsense like the split between Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism or Subjective Dialectic versus Objective Dialectic and various other dualisms which uncritically reproduce the aporias of dogmatic thought.

Simultaneously, the categories of thought are also not simply imported by Hegel wholesale from prior philosophy, but themselves come into being and disappear and then reappear in different ways. Not all social formations of humanity have access to the same categories of thought and they don't even necessarily think those categories in the same way. This does not mean that all categories of thought are social constructions as if they had no objectivity of their own, since if they are also categories of being they cannot be simply subjective. Nor do "older" categories necessarily have the same character as if they were immutable. This is fairly clear in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, which takes us through many shapes of consciousness, in which many categories appear repeatedly in different shapes of consciousness with differing degrees of determination and concretion.

However, there is a more important sense in which the reading of the original quote from Hegel is horribly mistaken, and that has to do with what Hegel means by "real" or "actual". Most commentators confuse the real with what exists. Of course if this was the case, then Hegel's point would be conservative at best, and really simply a wholesale justification of "things as they are".

Something is real in Hegel in a speculative sense, that is, not because it is materially there or because it is coherent, but because it has possibility. The real and what exists for Hegel are by no means the same thing at all.

Here I just want to end with a practical example of the speculative dimension of Hegel's statement.

Two people are in a long-term intimate relationship and they are nominally committed to spending the rest of their lives together. However, one of them then finds out that the other person has been having sex with their best friend for years. As it turns out, though the relationship existed, it was not real. Of course, the relationship is also then not rational exactly because an intimate relationship between two people involves honesty, trust, and so on between the two people and instead the foundation of the relationship was dishonesty and distrust; essentially a lie. Thus the relationship, which fully existed, turned out not to be real or rational.

We might then say that Hegel's statement is, at its heart, how we ought to read Marx's oft-quoted, always misunderstood:

"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."

Communism is the real that is rational within capital. Marx does not praise capital in The Communist Manifesto because it is itself great or rational, but because it's potential is communism, which is the rational outcome and inner dynamic of capital (all inner dynamics, if I may use that phrase, for Hegel are those of negation and so a rational outcome is also a self-negation), and therefore the real movement.

Christian Thorne • Commonplace Book

Very interesting site recently brought to my attention.  Between articles and the new translation work on Adorno'sNegative Dialectics, very worthwhile.

Christian Thorne • Commonplace Book

I do not exactly agree with his points about Marx's relation to ontology, as I do not think Marx is a deflationary thinker and hence we cannot replace the word "materialism" with "pragmatism" without accepting the Kantian transcendental move.

His point that Marx is close to Pyrrhonic skepticism is spot on, but Hegel was also an admirer and supporter of the same Pyrrhonic skepticism, as is evident from his reading of it in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy.  However, this is important in part because that skepticism does not throw out truth in the post-Kantian manner or in a way similar to the skepticism of the Scottish Enlightenment.

A Note on the Abolition of Labor

This is inspired by Edward's comment.

For my part, I think the abolition of labor has to be addressed at several levels.

Firstly, the abolition of labor is the abolition of labor as a determinate social form, that is, as the constitutive social relation for humanity.  To say that human beings will always engage in labor as a metabolic interchange between humanity and nature is not the same as saying that human beings will always engage in labor as the socially determinate relation between human beings.  The former is the general, trans-historical, aspect of labor, and the latter is Labor as socially determinate form of domination constitutive of capital.

Secondly, Marx rightly discusses the difference between the realm of necessity, of the performance of labor to reproduce human existence in whatever social form we find ourselves in, and the realm of freedom, which is the realm of freely disposed time.  In pre-capitalist class societies, as far as I know without exception, the realm of necessity was the realm of unfree labor, of slaves, serfs, etc. in their own minimal reproduction as most of humanity engaged largely in subsistence labor and as the portion of humanity engaged in surplus-wealth producing labor (only 33% of the ancient Greek population were slaves, but they produced the majority of surplus-wealth that did not come from the plundering of other peoples; most free Greeks were subsistence farmers who had a nominal freedom.)  The realm of freedom was explicitly the realm of not-working and the claim of the ruling classes was always a claim to free time, to unproductive activity: philosophy, politics, war, art, etc.

Pre-capitalist societies were generally the explicit, overt, direct relegation of the producers to the realm of necessity and of the ruling classes to the realm of freedom via the direct, personal domination of the laboring classes.  Under capital, the realm of necessity is conflated with the realm of freedom because the relations of domination are indirect and impersonal, even with a capitalist class because each and all must obey the logic of capital, the imperatives of the market and all come to freely sell their wares.  "Arbeit Macht Frei" was not just what the Nazis put above the entrance to Auschwitz, it is the mantra of capitalism and of much of the Left from Social Democracy to Leninism to Stalinism to Maoism to Trotskyism to Council Communism.

Communism is nothing if it is not the entering of all of humanity into the realm of freedom, of freely disposed time to do or not do as one pleases.  This does not eliminate the realm of necessity, but reduces it to a subordinate, non-determinate position in the relation of between it and freedom.  This is impossible if the majority of time of a human life are spent doing work for an alien power, as a slave, a serf, a worker, a taxed peasant, regardless of whether that alien power is a lord or a master or the abstraction of capital.  Only when necessary labor by human beings is reduced to a minimum of human time and the work freely chosen engages the mental, physical, and emotional faculties of a person can we reasonably imagine actual freedom for all of humanity, as opposed to the abstract freedom of exchange and democracy.  It is also the unity in difference of the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom, rather than merely the victory of one aspect over the other (the fantasy of Utopian Socialism) or the enforced domination of one over the other (societie of direct domination) or the collapsing of one into the other (capitalism).

Thirdly, Jehu's point that "the higher stage of communism is exactly the point where there is no longer any connection at all between the activity of the worker and her needs" hits the nail on the head.  For this to be the case, we cannot speak of human beings defined by their labor or even labor being life's prime want.  This does not mean that people will not choose to pursue medicine or the study of nature and the cosmos or aesthetic production and do it for many hours a day.  Rather, it means that even if an individual stopped and chose to lay on their back in the grass and listen to the wind in the trees, they would not cease to have their needs met.  I would say, to be picky, that at this point there is no such thing as a worker, rather, the tighter formulation would be to say that "there is no longer any connection at all between the activity of an individual and her needs".

EDIT:
I rain into some rather interesting discussions of a book I am reading that is germane to this conversation, called Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams.  The book is itself quite interesting, alongside Paul Mason's book Postcapitalism.

I recommend the discussions on this at the following links as follow-up to the question of a world without work:

https://libcom.org/blog/wrong-work-two-perspectives-abolition-work-03012013
https://thedisorderofthings.com/2015/11/05/why-we-cant-let-the-machines-do-it-a-response-to-inventing-the-future/
https://thedisorderofthings.com/2015/11/04/postcapitalist-ecology-a-comment-on-inventing-the-future/
https://thedisorderofthings.com/2015/11/11/reinventing-the-future/#more-11229

Some Notes on Things I've Been Reading

Reclaiming Work, Andre Gorz, 1999

This is an exceptionally interesting little book which affirms my conviction that Andre Gorz remains one of the most overlooked radical thinkers of the late 20th century.  I will post some notes on here as soon as I can transcribe them.


Interview with Anselm Jappe at the Brooklyn Rail

"Value cannot be created by decree, only by a real labor process—and it has to be “productive labor” in the capitalist sense (that means that it does not only consume capital but helps to reproduce it). Money can be created by decree—but when it does not correspond to the real amount of labor that it is supposed to “represent,” it has no “substance” and loses its value through some form of inflation (although for decades now the explosion of massive inflation has been deferred by parking large sums of fictitious capital in stock markets, real estate markets, and so on). Here the Critique of Value finds itself in sharp contrast to nearly all left-wing economists, who are generally just neo-Keynesians."

The point I put in italics is really what I find interesting vis-a-vis the notion of productive labor.  This is the clearest, most succinct reasoning as to why military production is unproductive, since military commodities cannot be used to reproduce constant or variable capital.  This is also why production of luxury goods for non-laborers is unproductive, unlike "luxury" goods consumed by potential laborers which goes toward the reproduction of labor power.

Thoughts on Varoufakis

This is a very interesting article by the finance minister of Syriza, Yanis Varoufakis.  It makes me think that we should be very keen on what is happening in Europe.

I am currently reading this article and his book, The Global Minotaur, which has a perspective towards the dollar and US double debt exploitation (trade deficit and budget deficit) related to being the currency of record still, not unlike Michael Hudson's less Marxist Super-Imperialism. 


"Europe’s crisis is far less likely to give birth to a better alternative to capitalism than it is to unleash dangerously regressive forces that have the capacity to cause a humanitarian bloodbath, while extinguishing the hope for any progressive moves for generations to come."
One of the few antidotes to this view is his own Party's coming to power in Greece (Syriza) and the rise of the left populist Podemos in Spain (http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/01/02/new-left-europe-austerity-gives-rise-new-political-parties).  However, I think on balance his point remains valid.
This is, however, a slippery slope:
"It is a confession intended to convince radicals that we have a contradictory mission: to arrest the freefall of European capitalism in order to buy the time we need to formulate its alternative."
"A radical social theorist can challenge the economic mainstream in two different ways, I always thought. One way is by means of immanent criticism. To accept the mainstream’s axioms and then expose its internal contradictions. To say: “I shall not contest your assumptions but here is why your own conclusions do not logically flow on from them.” This was, indeed, Marx’s method of undermining British political economics. He accepted every axiom by Adam Smith and David Ricardo in order to demonstrate that, in the context of their assumptions, capitalism was a contradictory system. The second avenue that a radical theorist can pursue is, of course, the construction of alternative theories to those of the establishment, hoping that they will be taken seriously.

"...wealth is collectively produced and then privately appropriated through social relations of production and property rights that rely, for their reproduction, almost exclusively on false consciousness."


"Both of them, in addition to their other errors (and, indeed, crimes) failed, to their detriment, to follow Marx’s lead in a crucial regard: instead of embracing liberty and rationality as their rallying cries and organising concepts, they opted for equality and justice, bequeathing the concept of freedom to the neoliberals. Marx was adamant: The problem with capitalism is not that it is unfair but that it is irrational, as it habitually condemns whole generations to deprivation and unemployment and even turns capitalists into angst-ridden automata, living in permanent fear that unless they commodify their fellow humans fully so as to serve capital accumulation more efficiently, they will cease to be capitalists. So, if capitalism appears unjust this is because it enslaves everyone; it wastes human and natural resources; the same production line that pumps out remarkable gizmos and untold wealth, also produces deep unhappiness and crises.
"Marx’s first error – the error of omission was that he failed to give sufficient thought to the impact of his own theorising on the world that he was theorising about. His theory is discursively exceptionally powerful, and Marx had a sense of its power. So how come he showed no concern that his disciples, people with a better grasp of these powerful ideas than the average worker, might use the power bestowed upon them, via Marx’s own ideas, in order to abuse other comrades, to build their own power base, to gain positions of influence?"

My view on this dilemma has always been that the powers that be are never perturbed by theories that embark from assumptions different to their own. The only thing that can destabilise and genuinely challenge mainstream, neoclassical economists is the demonstration of the internal inconsistency of their own models."

This is a rather succinct explanation of immanent critique entails and why it is more valid politically as well as philosophically.  To paraphrase Adorno, this society wishes to be judged by the character of its enemies, rather than by its own character, but it is only in showing how it fails on its own (immanent) terms can it really be undermined.  In terms of such, one does not counter falsehood with fact, but has to show that the truth content and the form of that content are also false, insofar as they are the ideas (the concept) of an untrue actuality.  Thus current economics, as Varoufakis points out in his book, cannot speak truthfully of its assumptions because to do so would undermine its assumption that the world is the way it must be, and that that is good.

"If workers and employers ever succeed in commodifying labour fully, capitalism will perish. This is an insight without which capitalism’s tendency to generate crises can never be fully grasped and, also, an insight that no one has access to without some exposure to Marx’s thought."

This is interesting.  He seems to have in mind that if human beings were actually reduced to mechanisms, they would have no capacity for surplus.

"For a start, a society of dehumanised automata would resemble a mechanical watch full of cogs and springs, each with its own unique function, together producing a “good”: timekeeping. Yet if that society contained nothing but other automata, timekeeping would not be a “good”. It would certainly be an “output” but why a “good”? Without real humans to experience the clock’s function, there can be no such thing as “good” or “bad”.

If capital ever succeeds in quantifying, and subsequently fully commodifying, labour, as it is constantly trying to, it will also squeeze that indeterminate, recalcitrant human freedom from within labour that allows for the generation of value. Marx’s brilliant insight into the essence of capitalist crises was precisely this: the greater capitalism’s success in turning labour into a commodity the less the value of each unit of output it generates, the lower the profit rate and, ultimately, the nearer the next recession of the economy as a system. The portrayal of human freedom as an economic category is unique in Marx, making possible a distinctively dramatic and analytically astute interpretation of capitalism’s propensity to snatch recession, even depression, from the jaws of growth.

When Marx was writing that labour is the living, form-giving fire; the transitoriness of things; their temporality; he was making the greatest contribution any economist has ever made to our understanding of the acute contradiction buried inside capitalism’s DNA. When he portrayed capital as a “… force we must submit to … it develops a cosmopolitan, universal energy which breaks through every limit and every bond and posts itself as the only policy, the only universality the only limit and the only bond”, he was highlighting the reality that labour can be purchased by liquid capital (ie money), in its commodity form, but that it will always carry with it a will hostile to the capitalist buyer. But Marx was not just making a psychological, philosophical or political statement. He was, rather, supplying a remarkable analysis of why the moment that labour (as an unquantifiable activity) sheds this hostility, it becomes sterile, incapable of producing value."

I think Varoufakis is here struggling towards something akin to Moishe Postone's contention that value (not merely surplus value) is a social form, a human social relation, in which the dynamic between objectively dominated, waged living labor and objectively dominating, money-shaped dead labor forms the capital relation in its totality.  Without living labor, the value form and capital itself cease to be.  However, Varoufakis on p. 30 of his book seems to see consent as taking place in distribution, and thus I will be watching to see (I have a long way to go) if his critique of capital remains at the level of distribution rather than at the core of production.  Moments like this in the essay point towards the latter"

The problem of capitalism is not private appropriation, but that labor is itself, and thus the whole of "modern" production, a relation of domination.

The eventual reference to Kalecki is interesting and potentially illuminating.  Kalecki went down a road not unlike that of Sweezey and Baran in the U.S.

This is an especially good point:

Having failed to couch a critique of capitalism in terms of freedom and rationality, as Marx thought essential, social democracy and the left in general allowed the neoliberals to usurp the mantle of freedom and to win a spectacular triumph in the contest of ideologies."

Raymond Geuss makes a similar point in his book Philosophy and Real Politics and it is one we should beat every liberal and so-called Marxist with.

"Perhaps the most significant dimension of the neoliberal triumph is what has come to be known as the “democratic deficit”. Rivers of crocodile tears have flowed over the decline of our great democracies during the past three decades of financialisation and globalisation. Marx would have laughed long and hard at those who seem surprised, or upset, by the “democratic deficit”. What was the great objective behind 19th-century liberalism? It was, as Marx never tired of pointing out, to separate the economic sphere from the political sphere and to confine politics to the latter while leaving the economic sphere to capital. It is liberalism’s splendid success in achieving this long-held goal that we are now observing. Take a look at South Africa today, more than two decades after Nelson Mandela was freed and the political sphere, at long last, embraced the whole population. The ANC’s predicament was that, in order to be allowed to dominate the political sphere, it had to give up power over the economic one. And if you think otherwise, I suggest that you talk to the dozens of miners gunned down by armed guards paid by their employers after they dared demand a wage rise."

This covers much of the pettifoggery of "democratic deficit".  The political form is wholly inadequate to the task at hand, a point Marx made from the very beginning.

On the one hand, I think this is a fair accusation insofar as Marx over-estimated the objective, immediate revolutionary propensity of the proletariat of his day and the extent to which Marx intentionally curbed the making public of his own critique of his "best" followers.  His Critique of the Gotha Program did not see light when it should have.  His contempt for his German followers Liebknecht & Co. did not come to light publicly until much later.

On the other hand, it is not fair insofar as Marx did know their limitations and also reckoned against the limitations of the immediate prospects (the immediate subjective disposition or consciousness) of the organized working class.  This was clear in his decision with Engels to bury the International Workingmen's Association by sending it to New York City and his own letters to Engels and others regarding the limits of hat they could say in 1874 compared to what they had been able to say in 1848-50.

"Marx’s second error, the one I ascribe to commission, was worse. It was his assumption that truth about capitalism could be discovered in the mathematics of his models. This was the worst disservice he could have delivered to his own theoretical system. The man who equipped us with human freedom as a first-order economic concept; the scholar who elevated radical indeterminacy to its rightful place within political economics; he was the same person who ended up toying around with simplistic algebraic models, in which labour units were, naturally, fully quantified, hoping against hope to evince from these equations some additional insights about capitalism. After his death, Marxist economists wasted long careers indulging a similar type of scholastic mechanism. Fully immersed in irrelevant debates on “the transformation problem” and what to do about it, they eventually became an almost extinct species, as the neoliberal juggernaut crushed all dissent in its path."

I can't really agree with this one at all.  Marx's point was not mathematical models, but to try and grasp how the incommensurable and qualitative could be made commensurable and quantitative, in a sense, how capital was about equality of exchange and monetization.  Marx's critique has to come to terms with how everything can be expressed in that most universal, most meaningless of all forms, money.  This is key to Marx's critique of capital as social form.

It is hardly his fault that the leaders of the workers' organizations, good Lasalleans that they were looking for a fair day's wage and political equality, should have taken his critique of capital to be a manual of a "proletarian political economy" counterpoising good, productive labor to bad, unproductive appropriation.  Varoufakis himself seems subject to this error.

"In economic terms this meant a recognition that the market power, and thus the profitability, of capitalists was not necessarily reducible to their capacity to extract labour from employees; that some capitalists can extract more from a given pool of labour or from a given community of consumers for reasons that are external to Marx’s own theory."

Marx most certainly is aware of this, but if his concern is an adequate concept of the determinate social form, then he cannot start with the exceptions (one argument for why Marx could not, in Capital Vols. 1 or 2 as such, deal with other forms of labor or property.)  He must first have a concept of the determinate social form that allows other social forms to be gasped adequately.

His point on the immiseration thesis and Thatcher is spot on.

"A Greek or a Portuguese or an Italian exit from the eurozone would soon lead to a fragmentation of European capitalism, yielding a seriously recessionary surplus region east of the Rhine and north of the Alps, while the rest of Europe is would be in the grip of vicious stagflation. Who do you think would benefit from this development? A progressive left, that will rise Phoenix-like from the ashes of Europe’s public institutions? Or the Golden Dawn Nazis, the assorted neofascists, the xenophobes and the spivs? I have absolutely no doubt as to which of the two will do best from a disintegration of the eurozone."

The end of the article is very open and decent, I think.  I do not know that saving capitalism from itself is our task, but neither is reveling in immiseration, as if empty bellies led to revolution rather than counter-revolution.

At least he is not claiming to save capitalism in order to build a new working class movement like that of old.  I take his view to be that if we allows the world to fall into the abyss, the future will be bleak, not bright, and thus we have to somehow stop that slide into the abyss long enough for the idea that we could have a better world rather than a worse one to find a material form.

However, I don't think he engages radically enough with the problem that we don't really know what a way out might mean.  Maybe he can't, but I would like him to pose the problem a bit more sharply.

Chris

Notes on Chris O'Kane's "Fetishism and Social Domination in Marx, Lukacs, Adorno and Lefebvre", Part 3

66

“In contrast to the analysis in chapter one, Marx’s account of the dominating properties of the money form accounts for the agents who exchange commodities.”

For such a significant claim, this sort of dangles out there under-justified.  Not that it isn’t correct, but it needs some validation and fleshing out. At least a footnote.

66-7

I am always struck by the failure, IMO, to grasp that the worker is the owner of a commodity at this point in Capital’s development.

67

This is interesting as s summation:

“I argued earlier that Marx’s account of the fetish grows more complex as his analysis progresses, and one can see from the above that the fetish-character of money possesses more pronounced characteristics than the fetish-character of commodities. On the one hand, money is socially constituted as the general equivalent by the logic of the relations of commodities, which grants it the autonomous and personified properties of the universal incarnation of human labour. On the other hand, the means by which these autonomous properties invert and dominate individual action is concretised in the determinate form of the legal contract and the determination of the actions of commodity owners.”

69

I don’t think I can actually overemphasize the degree to which talk of “capitalists do this” and “capitalists do that” sounds so very 19^th century.  It has been a long time since individual capitalists played the key role in representing capital.  Capital needs representation in particular capitals more than in individual capitalists. 

The legal recognition of the corporation as a legal person by the United States Supreme Court is both horrific and rational.  Rational because corporations have been the particular capitals for a long time, but horrific because capital has survived to this point in its development wherein personification entails recognition of these homunculi of capital as persons.

“The domination exerted by the capitalists results from their actions, but the latter are in turn shaped by their role as personifications of capital; as individuals determined by the fetish-characteristic forms of value that are external to them, and which compel them to dominate and exploit the proletariat. Thus, because capitalists - as capital personified - are ‘fanatically intent on the valorization of value’ they ‘ruthlessly compel the human race to produce for production’s sake.’”

Seriously, domination is not exerted by capitalists in the 21^st century in all but marginal cases.  Individual capitalists don’t ruthlessly compel the human race.  If only!!!  Then we could point to “the capitalist class” as a bunch of robber barons, but no one outside of the Left sees the matter this way anymore.  It is anachronistic at best.

As I complained with Werner Bonefeld’s new book, there is still this residue of a need to show the domination of “society” or “the working class” by the capitalist class, this class of individuals, when we have surpassed that point long ago.  Capital has shown very little need for these antediluvian phenomenal forms.

Check the quote from Marx on function and personification (Ehrbar translation, 989).  I wonder if Mar refers to the function of the proletariat in production, versus the function of the capitalists.  Function is a funny word with all sorts of overtones to people raised in a world after Parsonian sociology and functionalist explanations.

70

“As a result the worker ‘exists to satisfy the need of the existing value for valorisation, as opposed to the inverse situation, in which objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development’205”

So one could argue that if the worker exists to satisfy the need of the existing value for valorization, then valorization has to be at least posited in production, not in exchange or simply in the transformation of a commodity into money.

Doesn’t Marx’s theory of value also account for the centrality of labor and “relations of production” to the determinate social relations?  Or is that the same as 2?

70

Someone really ought to print The Trinity Formula in English in the correct order.  Or, you know, Volume 3 of Capital in a correct form.

71

I really like the way O’Kane follows through the thread of fetish-character and fetishism through to the end.  This is really an exciting way to read the book productively that is not another Marxist Political Economy reading.

The point about the collapse of fetish-characteristic form/fetishism/mystification into one mess is reasonable, as is the explanation of it being from an earlier period.  This point could be amplified by the changes Marx makes between the first and second German editions of Vol. 1 and the French edition.  A lot of the changes and work go into the fetish-characteristic section, so that was clearly something he was still working out as late as the mid-1870’s!

75

Para 2

“In this context ‘the mystifying character ’ mirrors his usage of fetish-characterisation which transforms ‘social relations’ into the ‘properties’ of things themselves (commodities), still more explicitly transforming the relation of production itself into a thing(money).”

This clarification is nice.  Not sure if it was used earlier in the book, but it is very concise.  Could further add that capital is the transformation of the total cycle into an autonomous, self-producing Subject which is Substance.  This may be the third usage of mystification.

I would add that is works very well with Nicole Pepperell’s reading of the first chapter as a phenomenology: the fetish characteristic of commodities explains how the various notions of value up until that point, while having a certain validity, are similar to empiricism, rationalism, and absolute idealism (which would cover the range of sense certainty, perception, and the understanding in Hegel.)

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RE: esoteric/exoteric or money theory and neo-Ricardian, that Pepperell’s reading shows that this is a failure to read the text phenomenologically.  Taken so, Marx’s comments about labor as physical as opposed to his clear treatment in the “Theories of Surplus-Value” where even a clown, employed in the social form as wage-labor, can produce value, are comprehensible.

I think one has to work with Marx as one would with any opponent: take the strongest way of reading their argument.

Pepperell’s is not only reasonable, it is coherent and the strongest form of the argument.

RE: ideal average, Marx was not attempting a theory of society, a sociology.  One could further make the argument, pace Cyril Smith, that Marx’s critique of political economy is not a critique of capitalism, and as such is not concerned with empirical minutiae or historical representation except insofar as it is subordinated to the critique of political economy.  The critique of capitalism is a practical criticism, a question of struggle and overcoming.  Marx’s work is aimed at an ideological impediment, the ideology, to that struggle.  His is a work of clarification, and of bildung, a part of the self-education of the class.

In other words, I think this criticism of Marx mistakes the intent and purpose of the work, in the same way one might criticize Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit for not being a rigorous criticism of philosophy or specific philosophers, though it certainly does that.  It is not a pedantic work, but a working through of forms of consciousness.

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I like this point and no doubt Adorno, Lukacs and Lefebvre respond to the “gaps” in Marx’s work, but also to maybe what they see as gaps that are not gaps at all.

Moving to Section 2 Next.

Critical theory and the Critique of Political Economy by Werner Boneflecd

I am working on a proper review for a journal, so I can only say so much, but I believe that Werner's book is a singular contribution to critical theory.

I think of Open Marxism as a tendency broadly grouped around a composite of works produced by Richard Gunn, Kosmas Psychopedis, Simon Clark, John Holloway, and Werner Bonefeld, first among a host of critical intellectuals they have influenced (e.g. Adrian Wilding and myself), and themselves the inheritors of Frankfurt School critical theory via Hans-Georg Backhaus, Helmut Reichelt, and Johannes Agnoli.

At the same time, there are other appropriations of critical theory that come through Gillian Rose and Moishe Postone, respectively, and they have existed at a certain distance from Open Marxism.  And yet there have been connections.  Adrian Wilding has in his work brought together Open Marxism and Gillian Rose, as Bonefeld's book brings Postone and Open Marxism together.  My own work has been deeply influenced by these strands and has been driven by a reconciliation of these various elements (see several of the earlier pieces on this site.)

If you have a commitment to a truly critical Marxian analysis or you want to engage with a Marxian perspective worthy of intellectual engagement (hostile or not, as for example my compatriot at Insipidities might be), this book should be a key reference point.

Value Critique and Politics... or Not

Elmar Flatschart, who writes for the journal Exit!, has recently produced some interesting materials available in English. The first item is actually a talk he gave sponsored by the Platypus Society on the connection, if any, between value-form theory or value critique and a communist politics. The second, which I will deal with in the next entry, is the essay “Critical Dialectics for the Social Sciences: Towards a Mediation of Critical Realism and Critical Theory” which suggests that Critical Realism 's (most famously put forward by Roy Bhaskar) treatment of philosophy falls prey to the same kind of limitation as analytical philosophy of science in treating philosophy as “an underlabourer and occasional midwife” of science. This treatment resonates with, but approaches the matter somewhat differently from, Richard Gunn's “Marxism and Philosophy” from Capital & Class #37.

In his talk on Marx and Wertkritik, Flatschart argues for a strict separation of Marxian critique as “the abstract critical theory of society... from the contradictory practical attempts to overcome capitalism.” As he states early on, “There is no new program or a master plan for emancipation that can be developed out of the abolition of value. Rather, it can be seen as a condition of emancipation from value and the abstract system of oppression it represents.” Just because we understand the need to abolish value, labor and all the forms derived from the value-form does not mean that we have an actual politics deriving from this in practice. At most, we can say that the imposition of a direct form of domination is no replacement and that any attempt to overcome capitalism that leaves labor, and thus the value-form, intact, that is, production relations as social relations, we do not actually overcome capitalism.

There is thus a gap between the conditions of emancipation and actually producing new relations, emancipated human relations (Marx refers to it, in his references, as “association”, but it is in no way clear what this entails.) Flatschart believes that the outcome of the work begun by the Frankfurt School and then Hans-Georg Backhaus began to account for a new situation, in which “There is no one vanguard party but many situated politics; no one system of oppression that covers all, but an abstract notion of reified domination (verdinglichte Herrschaft) that realizes itself in various ways; and no one strategy for revolution, but contradictory relations that, although graspable only in the negative, we have to confront wherever we meet.” (italics mine)

And is there a political program? No, “There are neither programs nor utopias, only a hard laboring through these contradictions that we face in struggles, wherever they occur.”

He concludes with a summation that is very interesting:

“It is not the task of abstract critique of society to give you immediate steps to social revolution. Rather, it seeks to develop the most radical critique of society, but that project is in no way tied to an equally elaborated notion of revolution. That was also a problem of older approaches that had this package-deal mentality, which was essentially politicist, as it proved to be with Lenin and the Marxist-Leninist tradition. As value-diremption critique sees it, revolution is not the task of the abstract critique of society; rather, revolution is the task of concrete theories of praxis and immanent political theories, which is different from and more complex than theorizing society. We need to keep those separate.”

If we pull this apart a bit (keeping in mind that is a talk and that therefore imprecision based on extemporaneous formulations are always possible), the whole comes into view.

The first sentence strikes me as utterly commonsensical, but it is by no means taken as such. The organized Left, whether referencing Lenin's fabled unity of theory and practice or simply following on from a liberal activism at best suspicious of and at worst utterly hostile to intellectual independence which might seek to disabuse it of its direct access to “obvious truths”, has little liking for such a view. Even some its best representatives in intellectual and academic circles, such as Adolph Reed, Jr., fall prey to this view (see my comments on the “Introduction” to Class Notes or better yet, read it yourself.) Nonetheless, I believe it is no accident that Marx highly valued those times when he could fall completely into his work without the distraction of immediate political engagements and certainly it would be even more difficult to find in Capital any directives to concrete political action or a road map from the present to the revolution, much less to its success.

The second sentence seeks to extend this point a bit, however. While most certainly the job is to provide, if not the most radical politically, then the most truthful critique of society, this so happens to be the most radical in the sense of going to the root. However, the next proposition rests somewhat on the verbs used, which are not unambiguous. I'm not sure what it means for a radical critique to be “tied” to an “equally elaborated notion of revolution.” The word “tied” assumes a lack of organic connection, and this is in fact what Flatschart has stated all along. Yet what would an “equally elaborated notion of revolution” entail? A blueprint? A model? If this is what he has in mind, I also find it unobjectionable, but the point itself needs elaboration. For example, he had previously noted that the critique of this society is largely negative. This negativity is not merely one which negates or even which refuses, but one which is open-ended. It admits of no certain end, no pre-given expiration date, no necessary progression of stages, but it also takes critique as internal, that is, the critique follows from the internal limits, the self-contradictions, of society itself. That critique now must encompass not only what Marx specified in his day, nor Lenin, Luxemburg, or Gorter in theirs, nor Mattick, Debord, or Camatte in theirs. We must renew that critique for our time and add to it those things which have failed, even the most cherished.

However, this renewal is not, and here my objection begins, abstract. The Marxian critique is never abstract, even when it is most completely categorial. If it were abstract it would run into the problem that Hegel repeatedly notes in the Phenomenology of Spirit: it would be inessential, and that which is inessential cannot get to the root, cannot possibly be radical. Critical theory is obliged to make a concrete critique of society, that is, one which takes up the changes in the phenomenal forms of capitalist society. It is not enough to critique capital, it requires that we take up the modes of existence of capital at a given moment. As the concrete is the outcome of many determinations and the abstract is abstract precisely because of its lack of adequate determination, it is necessary, for example, to reckon with the actual determinations of value, money, market, and so on. (This is of course what I find so critical in the work of Hans-Dieter Bahr, Serge Mallet, Andre Gorz, the Italian operaists and the like vis-a-vis the labor process.)

If what we have then is not an obligation to an abstract critique, but to a concrete one, however categorial, does that change our relationship to praxis? This depends on what we mean by praxis, or rather who we think has a praxis. The praxis of the intellectual is critique and its renewal. What seems more difficult to specify is a programmatic praxis that might apply to an organization, vanguard or mass, laying claim to a project of consciousness raising and mobilization. The assumption is that there is a political object with political interests, a positive class in need of organizers to tell it its historical mission and immediate interests. If the proletariat is indeed a negative class, that is a class that is no class, that has no interests that can be satisfied within the capital-labor relation, but only through the abolition of its own existence and the existence of said relation, then it would seem that a programmatic praxis is a categorial mistake.

It may be that there was a moment in which liberation seemed possible as the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship in the sense of a proletarian state (councils, soviets, or even of the vanguard party under specific circumstances), and, sooner or later, the establishment of worker's control of production. However, for a variety reason outside the scope of these notes, the period in which the working class, appearing as an estate defending its interests as an estate, existed in this position and in this manner has irrevocably passed. If in working out the concrete critique of society under these conditions, we can't draw any practical conclusions then maybe the problem is not necessarily a the absolute diremption of a critique of social forms and “concrete theories of praxis”. Maybe this diremption is just a dualistic split between a properly negative critique and an opportunistic positivism in politics? More likely the result will be less an opportunistic political action of its own than an apology for the political practice of others, such as John Holloway's uncritical support of the EZLN and Subcommandante Marcos.

This is ultimately my concern because I do not hold out much hope of large “working class parties” of the old sort because the predicates of their existence are gone. This in no way relieves us of the practical critique of “the Left” such as it is in its morass of opportunism and adventurism, nor of actual movements as they come into being, peak, and fade away.

On the overall point that the critique of society does not tell us what an emancipated humanity will look like, I believe Marcel Stoetzler has put forward a similar proposition in a very interesting fashion in his talk from the 2011 Historical Materialism Conference in New York City, NY, USA.

In his words:

“Communism does not automatically follow out of the inherent contradictions of the capital relation. It emerges only as a potentiality, as one of the options; in other words, communism is born out of freedom not out of necessity. Freedom is what communism essentially is. In other words, the abolition of capitalism creates a chance that we have the freedom also to spoil. Only because we can spoil it we can also make communism, and we already make some communism, as that Blochian present absense, because mostly we don’t. In other words, we have two historical tasks: task 1, the relatively easy task of abolishing capitalism (a rather precarious, vulnerable, derivative, dependent, long doomed, idiotic, arrogant and irrational structure, still extremely dangerous, perhaps more dangerous than ever, but on its way out) and the much more difficult task 2 of creating communism.”

However, he notes that we actually can distinguish between practices that are prefigurative of a better world, but not likely to help bring down capitalism; to articulate the critique and rejection of reactionary opposition to (aspects of) capitalism by asking “is it bad for capitalism?” and “is it good for communism” and a third level of “if it is bad for capitalism is it at least not bad for communism?”

Quite wittily, he then delineates the following:

“It allows us to argue that strategically we should be very enthusiastic about actions and practices that earn two ticks (bad for capitalism, but good for communism), we should be reasonably enthusiastic about those that tick one box, i.e. that are neutral in terms of destroying capitalism but good for communism, or neutral in terms of communism but destructive of capitalism, and we should somewhat more quietly and discretely enjoy those that are good for capitalism but also good for communism (the category into which most of my favourite things tend to fall, I have to admit). We should very much oppose, though, all the various forms of managerial reformism, positivistic authoritarianism, conservative revolution, populism and fascism, in spite of the fact that they are revolutionary to the extent that they bring down the liberal and probably most productive and sustainable forms of capitalism, forcing capital into political and cultural forms that seem at most temporarily to be in the best interest of capital: the crap capitalism of countless shades of bolshevik, authoritarian and fascist regimes under whose surface unhappy capital dreams of morphing into shiny good-quality capitalism. Some comrades, well-trained in deciphering the ironies of history, might be tempted to applaud crap

capitalism because it is less than ideal for capital (although good for electrification and exterminating the peasantry, not very good at all at mobilising the collective creativity needed for long-term successful accumulation), but the all-decisive point for us is that it is disastrous for communism, amongst other things because it tends to reinforce the authoritarian character structures that liberal

capitalism produces in the first place but also partially offsets.

[Footnote: We don’t mention here the multitude of the socialists of the chair who applaud and promote crap capitalism as a superior form of capitalism that paves the fast track to communism. Their misapprehension of communism is obviously born from their misapprehension of capitalism.”

In this set of ruminations, we may actually engage with the politics of the present politically and not uncritically, and reliant on our critique of capitalism without which the preceding points make no sense.

Challening the Record: Amadeo Bordiga and the Myth of Antonio Gramsci

I have absolutely never been impressed with Antonio Gramsci and I have always found his activities in the PCI in the 1920's dodgy, but I happen to think that this piece makes a compelling vindication of Amadeo Bordiga in particular and a necessary challenge to the academy-approved and Stalin-approved versions of the history.  It is also a first rate introduction to the history.  This is well worth reading alongside The Bordigist Current by Philippe Bourrinet (do not get the ones from the ICC, they have edited the book to their ends and pretend that Bourrinet did not write it.)

“Amadeo Bordiga and the Myth of Antonio Gramsci”

Two More Old Reviews: Pertaining to Lenin

The first is a direct commentary on the limitations of Lenin's critique of the state in State and Revolution and why it is insufficient as a Marxian conception of the state and the political.  I am linking to the appendix to the article which argued that Lenin was not a "Red Fascist" as the anarchist milieu contends.  The review was published by an left communist/anarcho-communist group in Czechoslovakia where it apparently drew the ire of some prominent ex-Stalinist academic.

Contra State and Revolution and Why Leninism is Not Red Fascism

Lastly, this is a link to an article I wrote for Historical Materialism.  They might sue me to take the article down.  It would not be the first time they have threatened the someone for the dissemination of pieces they have published in the public domain, even with the author's approval.

This review took up a collection of articles edited by Werner Bonefeld and Sergio Tischler.  Werner Bonefeld has had a profound impact on what I understand Marxism and being a Marxian thinker to be.  I owe Werner and John Holloway, in fact the entire Open Marxism group, a deep debt for introducing me to a Marx steeped in Hegel, to the German Left influenced by the Frankfurt School.  Whatever my criticisms (obviously the review of Holloway, et al on Adorno is not forgiving), I gratefully acknowledge their profound influence.  That influence is all over my review of State and Revolution and I could not have written it without their inspiration and theoretical insights.  The reviews also owes a debt to Paresh Chattopadhyay, who has written some of the finest essays on the meaning of Marx's work and the class nature of the Soviet Union.

Review of "What Is To Be Done? New Times and the Anniversary of a Question"

This review, more than most, reflects the last gasps of my own interest in organizations of communists and the fact that I had not yet worked through my own critique of capital fully, which can be found in the earlier essays on this blog.

Utopia and Pragmatics

I have just finished two books by Russel Jacoby, The End of Utopia and Picture Imperfect.  Both are nominally about the decline of utopian thought, why this is a problem, and something akin to its causes.  The books are very different, which I suppose justifies two separate works, but Picture Imperfect definitely has the feel of left over material from the last chapter of The End of Utopia and picks up and develops the themes of the culpability (or not) or utopians for the travesties of the 20th century.  The End of Utopia has a very different character for most of the text.  It is essentially Jacoby's confrontation with so-called post-modernism as a philosophical just-so story that is complicit with contemporary capitalism despite a supposedly ultra-radical character.  However, the limits of Jacoby's works resonates with Maurizio Lazzarato's The Making of Indebted Man, and so a few words on that work will illuminate Jacoby's limitations.

I want to take up what I like about the books as a whole first because I believe what he wants to say is valuable.  He also happens to be correct in associating the hatred of universality and universals with a hatred of utopian thought and an all-too-easy intellectual complicity with the world as it is.  There is something crucial for the human imagination in a sense of a truly other, better world that is not a heavenly beyond, but a this-worldly potential.

Jacoby is right to defend utopian thought.  Most of the bloodshed of the 20th century was not the product of utopian dreamers.  As he is at pains to show, Naziism was not utopian.  Nationalism is not utopian.  Religious sectarianism and racialism are not utopian.  That is, by utopian was always meant a vision of a universal emancipation of humanity from poverty, ignorance, cupidity, and collective misery.  As a result, philosophies which attack universalism and universality sans phrase evince a reactionary fore-shortening of human potential, a restriction of humanity to an eternal present, which is a present largely composed of a range of experiences from utter horror (genocides, perpetual hunger, homelessness, war) to a dulling herd-like conformity and repetition absent of artistic passion, intellectual grandeur and all the other things that would go hand-in-hand with freedom from work.

I have no investment in what is called post-modernism, whether of the Levi-Strauss/Althusser/Lacan structuralisms or the Derrida/Foucault/Deleuze & Guattari post-structuralisms, but I have to say that in many respects Jacoby's work is a hatchet job.  Is he wrong that these writers and their progeny, who are considerably worse in many cases, conflate obfuscation with depth?  No.  Is he wrong that multiculturalism easily slides into a relativism that can become an apology for tyranny and oppression?  No.  In fact, I rather like his argument that multiculturalism in particular manages to define "culture" so closely akin to the way advertisers define "niche markets" that every difference indicates a different "culture" without really delving into what the nature of the cultural difference is, except that it validates claims of particularistic identities that allow elites to both politically manage and economically exploit these cultural constituencies.  Race, for example, in the United States does not create two cultures, one black, one white.  Rather, racialism constitutes United States "culture" and there is no separation of black from white or white from black because neither one makes any sense without the other.  Or rather, the utter non-sense of both relies on each side of the antagonism.  There is no "black particularity" separate from "white particularity" and there is no American history that is not African-American history.  At the same time, and against black nationalism, there is no African-American history that is not American history.  The blade cuts both ways.

This is a different claim, however, than arguing in favor of a generic universalism, which is a trap that Jacoby falls into.  Matthew Arnold may be a more interesting and complex thinker than intellectuals now hold him, but this in no way validates that species of universalism and cannot hold a a vindication of a Hegelian or Marxian universalism.  In fact, there is an odd failure by someone so immersed in Frankfurt School critical theory to make this kind of differentiation. 

This failure is nowhere more evident than in his treatment of science as an example of universal truth.  I find it singularly depressing that Jacoby simply rehearses the "Sokal Affair" as if Sokal was a heroic leftist scientist attacking the obscurantist "pomos".  There is something disingenuous in Sokal's treatment of science that obliterates the tentative, imperfect nature of scientific work and knowledge.  If the knowledge of the natural world was not imperfect, we would have had no reason to replace the Newtonian understanding of astrophysics with Einsteinian conceptions, and the crisis of that understanding is itself evident today in the kinds of acrobatic intellectual tricks required to maintain it, such as theories of dark matter.  Or, in a much more politically charged way pointed out with admirable clarity by Paul Gilroy in Against Race, it was the official opinion of biology for many decades after Darwin that the human species was divided into a hierarchy of fundamentally different races or even that "human = white" and "non-white < human".  The typical defense that science has "self-correcting mechanisms of reason" can only be held with a blindingly naive ignorance of the role of struggles for emancipation in practically challenging the irrational character of that "knowledge".  It also requires a failure to grasp the possibility of backsliding by official science, such as the mainstream scientific adoption over and against logic and evidence to the contrary, of the tenets of sociobiology, especially by "Leftist" defenders of Sokal like "The Chronicle of Higher Education".  That science can un-correct itself in an atmosphere of generalized intellectual reaction is completely missed by Jacoby.  If he means nothing more than "the chemical composition of water is H2O everywhere, for everyone", then he is saying something almost trivial.  If he is saying that "race doesn't exist in nature" then he is sorely mistaken if he believes there is scientific consensus on this among the scientists.  He would be correct in noting that anti-utopians of all political stripes, including racial nationalists on all sides disavow a universal humanity, not merely as something not yet practically achieved, which seems self-evident, but as something biologically impossible.

Again, it is especially odd in light of his immersion in the critical theory.  Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment is a thoroughgoing indictment not of Enlightenment, but of an Enlightenment which does not treat itself to the same critical self-assessment it subject all other thought to.  By the end of the book it is not hard to feel that Jacoby has lost that critical element in his eagerness to defend universalism against the overwhelming relativism of contemporary philosophy posing as "radical".  He is right that it is a radicalism without an emancipatory vision, but he is wrong to not deal with the reasons that the old radicalism with its emancipatory vision failed and has fallen in the face of such an otherwise impoverished philosophical turn.  The universalism to which Jacoby appeals is by the end no less a fetishized, abstract universality than the particularity of his erstwhile opponents is fetishized and abstract.  As any careful student of Hegel or Marx or the Frankfurters should know, neither of these can hold and each falls in some respect to criticism by the other.

This brings me to what seems like the key moment of the book.  On page 158 Jacoby summarizes what sees as the reason for the loss of a vision of universal emancipation, of a utopian impulse, in the ideas even among college-aged youths:

"It is also inexplicable inasmuch as the economic situation is not dramatically worse than it was twenty of thirty years ago, when a buffer seemed to exist - at for some - providing a momentary protective space from crushing economic imperatives.  The danger that the good sons and daughters of the middle and upper middle class will end up homeless may keep people on a narrow career path, but has little basis.  What has led to a jump in careerism and practicality among students is not the collapse of the economy, which has not collapsed, but the collapse of a belief in a future that might be different.  The conviction that the future will replicate the present stifles utopian longings."

At least three problems are evident in this paragraph.  Firstly, the only way in which Jacoby can imagine these privileged youth lacking a utopian imagination could come about would be an economic collapse.  Why a collapse would do that is not clear.  There was a definite economic collapse in the 1890's and again in the 1930's and there was no lack of utopian vision.  This is a red herring.  Secondly, it assumes that utopian visions arise from the privileged youth more than from elsewhere.  Lastly, he draws the conclusion that the problem is one of faith.  This might explain why both of the books spend more time on religious thinkers of utopia like Landauer and More and proponents of universalism like John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold than on Marx or most of the other "utopian" Marxian and anarchist thinkers, of whom there is quite a long list, all of whom were intellectuals of the sort Jacoby laments the loss of and none of whom turned their backs on a universal, emancipatory vision.

What Jacoby lacks is a comprehension of what has happened in actuality since the 1930's, of the actual transformations of society that has undermined the conditions of the imaginary he has in mind.  This is where the otherwise philosophically crippled work The Making of Indebted Man makes a definite contribution.  This work points out the extent to which the general human condition under capitalism beginning after World War II is one of debtor-creditor.  Lazzarato may not quite be able to grasp that this new condition is itself an outcome of the revolutionary rising and counter-revolutionary triumph that took place from 1917-1945, but he is quite right to note that the transformation of the majority of individuals into debtors has altered their relation to capital.  If this process of becoming-indebted was under way after 1945, and went hand in hand with this breaking of the emancipatory institutions of the working class, often of their transformation into bulwarks of the capital-labor relation, it was also expressed in the ongoing displacement of living labor by dead labor, of the practical knowledge of the worker by the direct application of the haute-bourgeois scientific knowledge of the engineer and scientist that undermined the relation of the laborer to the labor process in ways that have undone the world which gave rise to an emancipatory imagination connected to workers' control of production or the working class winning the war over who ran society.  The the creation of the mass consumer through the massive extension of debt (home, appliance, and car loans from the 1940's on, and then in the 1970's forward as "neoliberalism" took full effect, the extension of debt to student loans, medical bills, and many other areas of life) has both ended the threat of immediate immiseration, something Marcuse noted in One-Dimensional Man, and at the same time more completely than ever tied the individual to the imperatives of capital not merely in the present but into the future as well.  The real fount of emancipatory dreams in the 19th and 20th century, a revolutionary proletariat with its own culture and institutions, parties and newspapers, has ceased to exist.  That working class lost the battle for control over society and the practical cut of its utopian visions is irrevocably blunted.

Further, if the capacity to imagine the future is reduced, at best, to moderately improved visions of the present it has something to do to the degree to which the future of ourselves, our children and our children's children is already leveraged as debt.  In his example, one need look no further than the amount of debt those same students will accrue to get their education and the paucity of positions for people not engaged in glorified technical programs under the rubric of "Business Schools" or "Liberal Arts and Science" programs which primarily service law offices and think tanks and NGOs and which provide no end in themselves.

A new emancipatory vision will not be bred by the hope of proletarian democracy and workers' control of production and confederations of councils.  It has to go deeper, to the vision of Marx and others that was not limited to this or that phenomenal configuration of the working class around a specific labor process, but one that saw emancipation in terms of the emancipation from labor.  Marx expressed it in Volume 3 of Capital as follows:

"In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite." (italics mine)

Jacoby seems to get this, but what he seems to not be able to get is that capital has in fact already made most human labor unnecessary, but without having abolished Labor (as Marx describes it in Capital, Vol. 1) as the mediating form of social relations.  That is, what I have laid out briefly above has more to do with the death of the utopian than Jacoby's demonic (anti-)intellectuals.  They are a pernicious symptom, indeed, and one that if left untreated further the course of the disease, but they are not the disease itself.  

The problem, to whit, is not Derrida, though Derrida's philosophy as a structurally implicit apologia for capital is a problem, but a capitalism that has come close to abolishing labor while doing everything in its power to not abolish itself.  That is a crisis felt by the college students of today, as opposed to the college students of the 1960's, and it is one in which the future, for the moment, seems foreclosed by obligations of debt and guilt to a capitalism seemingly without opposition.  

It is not without opposition, however.  Capitalism brings about its own demise.  Capital as social form determined by the mediation of labor cannot subsist indefinitely without coming into a general crisis through its own logic of domination and exploitation.  We live today in a world where labor (the realm of necessity and thus of domination) is conflated with freedom (the realm of freedom from necessity, of freely disposed time)  to a hitherto unimagined degree, and yet it is a world in which the end of hunger, homelessness, ignorance, cupidity, and collective misery has never been materially closer to hand.  Maybe we live in a moment where we stand so close to so huge that we cannot see it or bring it into focus.