Archives: antagonism

We’ve been thinking antagonism recently and have drafted a piece entitled ‘Six impossible things before breakfast’, that we hope will be published in the forthcoming Turbulence product and also – in an extended form – in Antipode in a special issue on ‘autonomy’.

In the piece we describe the 1980s UK anarchist practice of publishing names and addresses of those who dominate our lives as liberating and quote Lucy Parsons:

Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or knife and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination and without pity. Let us devastate the avenues where the wealthy live…

This section drew some criticism. One of our Turbulence comrades wondered whether we seriously believed this naming revealed some real vulnerability in the capital relation and suggested we had confused the ‘important distinction between the “personalisation” and “personification” of capital, [using] the latter term here to describe what is actually the former’:

My boss, at work everyday, personifies capital. But to blame the rational behavior of an individual, like my boss, on that person him/herself is a problematic personalisation of the capital relation. It not only (as you note yourselves) corresponds in some ways to some of the vulgar anti-capitalist positions which characterised earlier anti-Semitic movements (in this sense, the horrific Parsons quote about “extermination without mercy is particularly unfortunate!); but it also attributes too much agency to individual capitalists. As Marx said, “…looking at these things as a whole, it is evident that this does not depend on the will, good or bad, of the individual capitalist. Under free competition, the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him.” (Capital, Vol I, 381). In other words: don’t fight the players, fight the game, baby!

Our comrade is, of course, correct about this distinction between personalising and personifying … to an extent. And he’s also right that we are all – workers and capitalists alike – confronted by laws that appear as coercive forces external to us.

But, capital is a social relation. It is a relationship amongst human beings, not a relationship between things, although this is how it frequently appears – this is what Marx meant by fetishism. John Holloway writes about this in Change the World Without Taking Power, describing it as the ‘rupture of doing and done’:

Marx begins the second paragraph of Capital saying, ‘A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us.’ The commodity is an object produced by us, but standing outside us. The commodity takes on a life of its own in which its social origin in human labour is extinguished. It is a product which denies its own character as product, a done which denies its own relation to doing. (p. 46)

Somewhere else, he (Holloway) has emphasised the ‘in the first place’ bit; once we get beyond this ‘the first place’ to delve more deeply, we discover that the commodity is not external to us at all. It’s the same with the idea that the ‘forces of competition’ or the worker-capital (or worker-boss) relationship are somehow external to us. They’re not!

Fetishism is one aspect of the separation effected by capital, the way, as we say in our ‘Six impossible things’ piece, that atagonism is constantly displaced. There’s an interesting take on separation in a new book on finance by two Marxists Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty, Capitalism with Derivatives. . Bryan and Rafferty talk of three degrees of separation. The first is the separation of humans from the commons and the transition from feudalism to capitalism (primitive accumulation). The second occurs with the creation of the joint-stock company when the owners of capital become distinct individuals from its managers. And the third separation takes place with the emergence and widespread growth of financial derivatives, which make it possible to ‘own’ some attribute of an asset – e.g. its profitability – without owning the asset itself. For example, you could purchase some share-index derivative linked to the performance of the FTSE-100, giving you an interest in these companies without owning a single share in any one of them.

At each new level of separation, antagonism is further displaced. ‘Doing (human activity) disappears further and further from sight.’ (Holloway in Change the World again: p. 47) Under feudalism, the peasant or serf’s relationship with the lord who dominated him or her was personal and direct. The lord was there, on his horse, in his manor, visible. Moreover the relationship between the lord and his serfs was fixed: the lord could no more escape the lazy or unruly serf than the serf was allowed to run away from an unusually cruel lord.

With the transition to capitalism this relationship became more fluid. Both capitalists (who once were lords) and workers (né serfs) were free. The worker was free to seek employment wherever he or she liked, just as the boss could ‘let go’ the worker if market conditions were unfavourable or for any other reason. And the capitalist was as buffeted by market forces as the worker: if he was forced to sack workers he could always hold up his hands and blame these market forces. But the relationship remained face-to-face and thus quite personal: the industrious Victorian factory-owner would probably have spent almost as long each day stalking his satanic mill as his overworked ‘hands’. What’s more, his livelihood was on the line, just as theirs were. If his business failed, his creditors wouldn’t spare the family home, his horse or his wife’s silk.

This shifted once again with the creation of joint-stock companies in 1844 and the ‘invention’ of limited liability in 1855. The joint-stock company allowed many wealthy individuals to pool capital and thus led to the development of large-scale projects such as railways. It also introduced a further separation: the relationship between workers and capital(ists) was now mediated by a layer of professional managers, a new managerial class. Limited liability introduced a (second) asymmetry into the capital relation. (One asymmetry is that while capital is wholly dependent upon living labour, we, humanity, does not need capital. The second asymmetry is in capital’s favour, not ours.) With limited liability a capitalist’s (whether this capitalist is an owner-manager or a shareholder) liability is limited to her investment, to the value of the company or of his shares or whatever. If the company goes bust, the manager will keep his or her house, the car, the savings. Except in certain cases (where a firm carries on trading whilst insolvent, which is illegal) creditors – including workers who are owed wages or pensions – are powerless.

This has consequences. Whilst the boss is the personification of capital in the workplace, he or she can leave this persona behind once s/he walks out the door. S/he climbs into the not-at-risk car to drive to the not-at-risk home, becoming a private citizen, who might be a good father or mother, even a generous benefactor of worthy causes. (There’s a quote somewhere in Capital vol. 1 about this but I can’t find it.) But it’s much harder for the worker to shed their identity as worker. Just as a person carries their social power in their pocket, so the worker carries home their relative lack of social power, their precarity. Because their home is at risk, just as their reproduction depends upon more unwaged domestic labour. It’s not that the boss won’t suffer economic consequences if their business goes bust, it’s that these consequences will be less serious and will be limited. Just think of the current credit ‘crunch’: whilst subprime borrowers and others are being turfed onto the streets, the Wall-Street executives and analysts who’ve been caught are having to sell third homes and luxury yachts.

So? The ‘game’ and its ‘rules’ are created by the ‘players’. They’re not external. It’s all personal, not just ‘business’: to repeat one of my favourite recurring LMDG/Free Association riffs, one of the themes running through The Godfather is ‘this isn’t personal, it’s business’. Michael Corleone, in contrast, understands that all business is personal: ‘It’s all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of shit every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it’s as personal as hell.’ No, we’re not mafiosi, but just substitute ‘the market’ for ‘business’! Attempting to identify those responsible for our subordination is a way – imperfect admittedly – of reducing the separation, making less external the ‘laws’, practically criticising the separation, making the relationship less asymmetrical. And that’s why it felt liberating, at least in the 1980s.

Finally, on the Lucy Parsons quote. Of course it’s horrific. But ‘extermination without mercy’ would seem to be an apt way to describe current processes of enclosure, for example in Cambodia, just as it would well describe the ‘clearances’ catalogued by Marx.

Sang Run was out in his boat at 7am when disaster struck his village. He arrived back at 11am to find bulldozers had flattened his home and those of the 229 families who lived beside him. He heard from neighbours that it had happened in an instant. Uniformed men, sent in by governor Say Hak, used electric batons to chase terrified residents from the burning ruins; three of Sang Run’s neighbours were knocked unconscious. Village Number One – a mundane name that failed to capture the beauty of its uninterrupted sea views and vegetable gardens that ran to the beach – had been erased. Sang Run heard that a hotel was planned, although no information was given to the people evicted from their homes for a further 18 months. (The Guardian 26.04.08)

And what is the current financial crisis doing if not devastating the avenues where the poor live?