Social Movements Network: Campbell Jones "What is possible"

Dr. Campbell Jones of Auckland University talks about Social Movements, Resistance, and Social Change in Aotearoa New Zealand at the eSocSci Social Movements Network Conference in 2014

Thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here and an honour to start the proceedings. Thanks to all for being here. Thank you Ozan for your kind invitation and your kind words and I'm really looking forward to the presentations today and tomorrow and the building of relationships which I think is the purpose of this event – that we start some conversations we consolidate and build towards more successful work in the future.

Today I want to I want to speak to the conference theme of social movements resistance and social change and taking as my lead the the problem of what is possible. I take it that um most of us here are concerned and puzzled by the problem of political agency with the formation and elaboration of political subjectivity which Alain Badiou specifies involves a problem of the principle of orientation towards a truth procedure. I'll speak then of principles of orientation today orientation for radical thought, radical philosophy, and for political activism orientation towards capital and the 21st century, which I will designate as our problem.

When I speak of capital in the 21st century I'm referring both to this little book by Thomas Picketty which goes by that title, I guess you're probably all aware of it and hopefully some of you have read it. It's been widely discussed in the business press – and beyond has been noticed by politicians around the world. Hopefully the reason that I'm referring to the book will make sense but the other reference of capital in the 20th century is to do with that object of social criticism, the object which we are focused on here. I'm going to read the paper, it is somewhat heavy, hopefully we won't all fall asleep after lunch. The only other caveat I will make is that I will not insert little quotation marks but I'll be quoting a heavily as we go through from Piketty and from others I won't sign all their quotations but do ask me if I'm quoting or not.

Foreign to read capital in the 21st century. Toward the end of the preface to the phenomenology of spirit, clearly anticipating the reception of all sizable books and not only his own, Hegel emphasizes the hard work required by thinking. He presents the activity of philosophy as a strenuous exertion one that always struggles against the cheap and easy seductions of received wisdom also against sensualism and Romanticism and against the idea that understanding could be achieved on the basis of brute sense perception alone. He therefore writes with biting wit and here I quote, "no matter how much someone asks for the Royal Road to science, no more convenient and comfortable way can be suggested to him than to put his trust in healthy common sense and then for what else remains to advance simply with the times and with philosophy read reviews of philosophical works perhaps even go so far as to read the prefaces in the first paragraphs of the works themselves. After all, the preface provides the general principles on which everything turns and the reviews provide both the historical memoranda and the critical assessment which because it is a critical assessment exists on a higher plane than what it assesses." One can of course traverse this ordinary path in one's dressing gown consistent with Hegel's constant insistence against the Greek presupposition that philosophy is a kind of work available only to those who are afforded a life of leisure.

Hegel is dismissive of the shortcuts that are taken by those who imagine that philosophy might come easily. This is parody of the comfortable Repose of this figure in the dressing gown, which of course appears in the first of Descartes meditations. It's in this context that Hegel writes true thoughts and scientific insight can only be won by the labor of the concept. The late this labor of the concept involves the most patient care and runs against the temptations of the day. It involves resisting rushing to judgment and leaping ahead of one's material rather than staying with what he calls the matter at hand – the thing that matters. Hegel stresses the need to struggle against seeing in a book or in the work of a thinker something that is merely either true or false in its entirety. Science for Hegel is something very different from the inspiration which begins immediately like a shot from a pistol as he says with absolute knowledge which is already finished with all the other standpoints simply by declaring that it will take no notice of them. Hegel therefore argues in his science of logic in relation to the idea of what a refutation of the philosophical system would be that we must get over the distorted idea that the system has to be represented as if thoroughly false and as if the true system stood to the false as only opposed to it by contrast. He says effective refutation must infiltrate the opponent's stronghold and meet him on his own ground. There is no point in attacking him outside his territory in claiming jurisdiction where he is not.

This demand from Hegel has a remarkable durability maybe in this mediated age as well of online reviews and blogs and Amazon analyses of books. There is also a short version of this a summary version for executives or on a DVD or something. Hegel's remarks have durability because of the seductions that lie in the ease of speed reading and the small victories that can be seized by focusing on particulars from an abstract outside against this the effort to transcend a system from within Marx some of the most productive appropriations of Hegel and radical philosophy and radical politics through the 19th and 20th centuries and I will argue retain vital lessons for radical philosophy and radical politics in the 21st century. For now let it be said that the first point of orientation I'm proposing is to work with the matter at hand rather than shoot right past it. This is on such grounds on the grounds of the thing that possibilities can arise. The position of the lonely outside is satisfying a satisfying delusion but a delusion nonetheless of course at some point we have to decide but decisions should not be made in advance. This is the position of resignation resulting from the fact that on the basis of the basis of the conclusion that we are in a ruinous and faultless epoch one might take the position of withdrawing from it completely. This is an ethics that is grounded in either praise of the situation or resignation to it but it's rather what Hegel calls an ethics of discordance which recognizes that the situation is not all but takes a negative or nihilistic stance a position that touches on anxiety which knows that it touches upon the real only through what Hegel calls the inconsolable loss of the Dead world.

Against this ethics of discordance Hegel defends a Promethean ethics grounded in confidence in an affirmation of the concrete and actual possibilities that exist within but are unencountered are unaccounted for by the situation. If this is a politics of the impossible then this is a politics that demonstrates that the impossible is in fact quite possible and that it is already taking place in this context. It is crucial to grasp the status of the there is which Hegel will assert regarding the status of something taken to not exist to not exist. This there is of the Apparently absent runs through all of Hegel's work something but something which is often but not always schematized as the inexistent and Logics of Worlds. This is the except there are truths that threatens to interrupt any world. It is also clearly the motif of Hegel's practical politics that starts from the there is of present living and working bodies and for instance the fourth of his analyses of our circumstances.

The first book on Sarkozy that you write there exists in our midst, women and men who, although they live and work here like anyone else, are considered all the same to have come from another world. Again, this "there is" in Badiou does not come out of thin air and can politics be thought? Badiou presents the "there is" as the ground of Marx's politics. For Mark's bedroom rights, The Point of Departure is there is a revolutionary workers' movement that is there is a subject that presents as an obstacle where it unbinds itself. It is a pure "there is," a real, that is with respect to this "there is" that you say that Marx advances this or that thesis. So in this book, The Can Politics Be Thought? Badiou divides Marx from Hegel and then splits Hegel from within in order that he might return, arguing that Hegel was an obligatory reference point although he surely did not furnish either the principle of the formulation of the "there is" nor the rule of political engagement. Badiou proposes a rereading of Hegel that you argue is the referent of Marxism's acquisitions. Hegel theoretically must be dismembered, disarticulated, re-established, something I've already done, you probably, since so as to participate in his way in the contemporary designation of the "there is," which is at its starting point because brought back to the foundational hypothesis that there is an ordered political capacity to non-domination. Badiou is certainly right that these acquisitions do not come from Hegel alone. In the introduction to his critique of Hegel's philosophy of right of 1843-44, Marx explicitly introduces this motif from the French Revolution and Occupy, and the International. This motif recurs throughout Badiou's work, for example, in Logics of Worlds, where he proposes another formulation: "a body is composed of all the elements of the site that subordinate themselves with maximal intensity to that which was nothing and becomes all." Badiou is certainly right that these acquisitions do not come from Hegel alone. In the introduction to his critique of Hegel's philosophy of right of 1843-44, Marx explicitly introduces this motif from the French Revolution and Occupy, and the International. This motif recurs throughout Badiou's work, for example, in Logics of Worlds, where he proposes another formulation: "a body is composed of all the elements of the site that subordinate themselves with maximal intensity to that which was nothing and becomes all."

Badiou, certainly right that these acquisitions do not come from Hegel alone, in the introduction to his critique of Hegel's philosophy of right of 1843-44, Marx explicitly introduces this motif from the French Revolution and Occupy, and the International. This motif recurs throughout Badiou's work, for example, in Logics of Worlds, where he proposes another formulation: "a body is composed of all the elements of the site that subordinate themselves with maximal intensity to that which was nothing and becomes all." Badiou is certainly right that these acquisitions do not come from Hegel alone. In the introduction to his critique of Hegel's philosophy of right of 1843-44, Marx explicitly introduces this motif from the French Revolution and Occupy, and the International. This motif recurs throughout Badiou's work, for example, in Logics of Worlds, where he proposes another formulation: "a body is composed of all the elements of the site that subordinate themselves with maximal intensity to that which was nothing and becomes all."

Marx, therefore, paraphrases Cas and praises him as that genius which can raise material force to the level of political power. The revolutionary boldness he says, which flings into the face of its adversary the defiant words, "I'm nothing, I shall be everything." This demand for the right to exist of what already exists is, of course, not foreign to a certain angle to a dismembered Hegel and remains central to Marx throughout in his youth. Then, Marx wrote, "We do not anticipate the world without dogmas, but instead attempt to discover the new world through the critique of the old." Hitherto, philosophers have left the keys to all riddles lying in their desks, and the stupid uninitiated world had only to wait around for the roasted pigeons of absolute science to fly into its open mouths. From this polemical starting point, in his training in Hegel, Marx commences to undertake an immanent critique of capital that runs across the three volumes of Capital. The voluminous notes of Grundt and the extensive commentary on the political economists of his day that occupy the theories of surplus value are the fact of a "there is" that he uses to disconfirm the pleasantries of elites. The Manifesto opens with the reality that European powers already recognize communism as a power in its own right. In the inaugural address of 1864, he starts out from the great fact of the misery of the working classes. In 1871, the year after the year of the Commune, he writes, "The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence. The existence of the Commune was the fact; it was against abstract moralized moralistic dreaming that Hegel wrote in the Philosophy of Right, 'What is rational as actual and what is actual is rational.'"

Domenico Lasordo notes in his Feinberg and Hegel that in his scathing critique of Hegel's philosophy of right, Marx does not even mention this phrase. Lasordo stresses that the claim of the rationality of the actual is by no means outside traditional revolutionary thought. This Lasordo's important argument that the assertion of the rationality of the actual is not a rejection of change but its anchor in the objective dialectic of the actual. It is probably useful for us to recall that in the final version of the Encyclopedia Logic of 1830, Hegel returns to this phrase, "The rational is actual, the actual is rational," and adds by way of explanation, "Who would not have enough good sense to see much around him which is indeed not as it should be?" He concludes, "Philosophical science deals solely with the idea which is not so impotent that it merely ought to be actual." I may conclude that I take Hegel's remarks to be equally relevant to the question of how to read Piketty's Capital in the 21st century as they are to the broader question of how to read Capital in the 21st century. Indeed, the two matters which I've so far presented in turn or at least seem to present in turn are not so distinct as they may seem. If we are today here in search of a political subject, and if, as Badiou says, a subject is both a principle of differentiation at the level of the individual, the determinate individual, and globally a principle of orientation towards a truth procedure, and these questions of orientation towards works of economics such as Piketty's and towards current structures of capital and state are pressing questions for radical philosophy and for social movements, this may be obvious to some of you. If it is, I'm sorry to have labored you.

This work performs many of the moments of a dialectical overcoming from within that, as we've seen again, an indispensable part of the radical tradition. That Piketty's project could belong to the radical tradition while it's key at its key moments departs from it or even explicitly disowns it strategically needs to be taken as symptoms of an opening. Piketty opens a series of doors, even if he himself doesn't go through all of them at times for the reason of evoking traditional, traditionalistic, even lines of separation. This, for instance, in the final note to Capital in the 21st Century, we read, "When one reads philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, and our Lampard, you on their Marxist and/or communist commitments, one sometimes has the impression that questions of capital and class inequality are of only modest interest to them and served mainly as a pretext for a different nature entirely." This comment by Piketty should be read very carefully as an important critical moment for radical philosophers and for activists in terms of their connections with the already existing.

It is certainly the case that Badiou drifts into the abstract distance when he writes, for instance, "True critique of the world today cannot boil down to the academic critique of the capitalist economy. Nothing is easier it says, more abstract and useless than the critique of capitalism itself. Those who make a loud noise in this critique always lead to wise reforms of capitalism. They propose a regulated and comfortable capitalism, a non-pornographic capitalism, an ecological and always more democratic capitalism. They demand a capitalism more comfortable for all and some they just say capitalism with a human face." So in Badiou concludes that the only dangerous and radical critique is the political critique of democracy. He has exited the orbit of anything that can reasonably be called materialism. This, I believe, is a terrible shame because philosophers such as Badiou have a great deal to offer in elaborating and extending the work of economists such as Piketty. Piketty himself admits that much of the battle ahead is not technical but as ideological, and in this life, there is a crucial importance in Badiou's insistence on struggles in the realm of thought and above all against all the currents of today. Bad use insists that one can have and one can live for an idea against the placeholders Piketty and Badiou, and moreover, against their separation.

I've been trying to draw out a common relation to the overcoming of capital as the problem for radical philosophy and social movements in the 20th and 21st centuries. The overcoming of capital in the 21st century is our thing in itself. Recall the principle that Hegel stresses from the beginning to the end of the Science of Logic: the value of the first demand on thought. This is what Plato demanded of cognition: it should consider things in and for themselves. He writes, "This is a demand that it should not stray away from them while it grasps at circumstances, examples, and comparisons, but on the contrary, should keep only them in view before it and bring to consciousness what is imminent in them." Such a position fears neither the labor of statistics nor the labor of the concept. It takes bodies where they are rather than where they merely ought to be. To read Capital in the 21st century means to see those bodies that exist where they are supposed to not exist and the capacities of those who are supposed to not be capable. Of course, there is always a policing operation which chases bodies back into their places. This is an operation to which Rancière gives the classic formula: "Move along, there's nothing to see here."

In the tradition of our tradition, regarding the reception of large books, we might recall the very concern on the part of Marx and Engels on the publication of Volume One of Capital in 1867, which was not so much that the book would be subject to criticism and elaboration but rather that it would be variously received with idle chatter and silence. This is the policing operation that always seeks to put radical thought and that which is radical in thought back in its place. I'm stressing here that Capital always faces bodies that are not in the places where they ought to be, and that Thomas Piketty's is one of these bodies. Good thing about negativity is that it is not something that needs to be introduced to the situation from the outside. Our situation, like every other one, is marked by radical negativity. Badiou's point is that the inexistent exists, that which is not is those who are nothing are something. Do this. I'm stressing with Rancière that people are already doing what they're not supposed to do, and that depolitization and capture are always secondary to mobilization and manifestation. To register these mobilizations and to show them in their logic certainly exercises us today. This involves an attunement of one's senses and the senses of others, which does not see only the story of domination but rather its incompleteness, the things that are breaking through. If one looks beyond this island, indeed, if one looks within it, one faces a seething sea of negativity. Negativity need not be introduced from the outside by, for instance, a critical or a moral conscience. Rather, present efforts at pacification need to be confronted directly. These include all the efforts that would corral disruption so that it runs in separate channels that never connect with one another.

For the scholar and the activist, this is the lesson of what it means to orient oneself to the other, a difference which does not separate singularity in the unity of opposites. The other does not need to be invented or created but is right here in our midst. Beyond denial is a registering of the other that is already at work right there on the inside and not invisible, awaiting our salvation but struggling for the right to exist, demanding that all are equally free, not merely in the abstract but in the concrete. To read Capital in the 21st century then requires that one read Piketty and a few others because one will find that capital is not what it is often taken to be. Capital is not all the one is not that is riven through with that which is other to it. It is again not something we need to say from the outside. The alarm bells are ringing in the economics faculty. Well-dressed assistants are scrambling to find the off switch. It's August 2014. The World Economic Forum and the OECD have just released reports alarmed at inequality and what it describes as the present social crisis. Earlier this month, credit ratings agency Standard & Poor has published a report which concludes a rising tide lifts all boats but a lifeboat carrying a few surrounded by many treading water risks capsizing. Radicals of the world, read Capital in the 21st century because the economists need us.

It seems like some of the stuff you're working with involves taking a few streams of what you're saying, particularly working in ontological areas. Perhaps if I take a look at it from a bit more of a psychological or emotional approach and then apply it to social movements, yeah, so you know, looking at the question of what is possible and drawing for this particular possible way of looking at the world, which is an "all or nothing" way of looking at distancing, disengagement, and a sense of hopelessness, which seems to embody the idea of the young, unhappy consciousness. I'm hearing or interpreting this in terms of a strange prison that some forms of different thought and perhaps also within social movements, definitely getting the example at the end of people sort of falling for minor reforms but maybe also existing among people in radical reforms as well. The question there for me is what is at risk, and that way of thinking about what comes after, meaning that if we are not persuasive in social movements, we might be stuck in that way, not drawing people into the social movements that were unsuccessful because of that. Perhaps also we were prone to burnout because of the way in which we distance ourselves and not engage, and maybe not being able to engage with other people within the social movement.

My thoughts here are just opening up to the other possibility, because that sense of hopelessness is understandable. You know, that response to climate change and other areas we've worked on is a real risk, and how we engage with that. Maybe as actors or people involved in movements, we need to somehow make that hopelessness coexist with a form of act of hope, and that's not perhaps opposites. Maybe despair has a place, then so moving forward, I don't know how that interacts with what we've been speaking about. Yeah, I mean, I suppose and yeah, I am kind of in a way implicitly saying that if we want to be involved in radical change, we need to think about these basic ontological questions about what changes, and that's why being radical is important, right, and contemporary thought because it reminds us of that kind of thing. On a marketing level, it's to say that it's not that the world is bad, the world is conflicted, right, and so if we just cast the world as bad, we will forever complain about it and we won't see what's already happening, which is exciting and radically possible, right. That's the psychological element of what I'm drawing to and trying to draw attention to with that Stoic idea of the unhappy consciousness, the beautiful soul, and yes, I do think it characterizes a number of movements, social movements, and folks on the left, right, and of course, with that, there are dangers beyond just the psychological things.

I want to say it's satisfying, right, there's something really satisfying about knowing that you're good and the world is bad, that's the psychological thing that's important in what Hegel shows us, right, it's really satisfying because then you'll never get to it where the world is out there, right, politics is failure, right, and if you've ever tried to do anything effectively, you'll know that if you fail all the time, you get smashed up, and there'll usually be a bunch of beautifully untouched academic standards, oh, don't you know that you could have done really, yeah, who were never doing anything, those academics generally, right, because they are the beautiful souls, they are, yeah, and so far as we're in a university space here, I'm saying to those academics, you know, that that get involved, and for those of you who are already getting involved, involve the others and tell them there is no space outside this, you know, yeah, and with climate change, I think demonstrates as well, the climate and capital demonstrate there's no outside, right, you don't sit outside that, yeah, because of the materiality of the environment and the environment, the physical environment, the ecology, and the built environment, which is stratified according to capital, it has access to the built environment, to the commons, is stratified by class, right, so there's no outside of that, so, yeah, and that's the basis as well for being much more radically comfortable than the left has been.

The other part of it that I'm trying to emphasize and maybe wasn't explicit about it is having an idea and having an idea about capital, because if you don't have an idea about capital, you'll end up seeing the kind of things that Russell Norman said yesterday. Having an idea about capital is absolutely crucial, it's touché, you're right, yes, really quickly, pick up something general, they said about hopelessness, I don't think it's so much a risk, I actually think it's a very effective strategy of the ruling class, hopelessness is a really good thing to push out every month to the product area because it means they're not going to try and change anything. Going back to the 70s, where there was a really big groundswell of radical politics and quite a few crises, the groundswell of vertical politics now, right now, there is, right now, he has the problem, there are many crises for them, all in class and the proletarian were quite politicized, it was also stride resistance, a lot of stuff going on, but it definitely turned the bourgeoisie was essentially a hand, and they had a huge regenerative capability which always seemed to rebut the proletarian in their struggles, that was 40 years ago, and I guess what I'd like to ask you is has that regenerative ability improved, is it time to sleep back practically, how can you tackle that?

In my position, I wouldn't say it's just a matter of 40 years ago. I would say there is always a resistance to capital, and that always comes first. First comes the resistance to capital and income. Capital is an apparatus that seeks to capture and channel the creativity of human beings, attaching to itself the things done by others. This is not new; it's part of the history of the struggle against capital. You could say that there has been a failure over recent years, a weakening, but there has also been a globalization of our struggle. Our struggle today is for a global tax on capital, a global tax.

Following the globalization of production and capital, there is a possibility, as much as there is a failure of national state-based politics. If you're on a progressive movement, you don't need the last thing. We must identify the actually existing possibilities that are emerging out of the prison situation, including the present situation of finance capital. Finance capital socializes us, creating new modes of connection between bodies and people. We are much more intimately connected now with people all over the world, mediated through the physical devices we use. The project is to channel this socialization into positive new ways.

The struggle against capital involves recognizing that we exist and that others are constantly told that they don't. This is the struggle against domination. We must say that we exist and that we are given the full right to existence. This is the ontological claim.

Regarding theory, in psychoanalysis, the drive is something that is repetitive and satisfying, but this repetitive satisfaction is pathological. There's something about not finishing it, about enjoying the pain. The drive is dangerous and pathological because one doesn't want to finish it. The left should stop hurting itself by recognizing that one is enjoying it. This involves doing practical steps, joining forces with other things that are already happening.

We can't just focus on the critique of democracy. Another conception of democracy exists, which is where the political programmatic difference between bad news politics and Pekingese politics lies. In his book "The Revenge of the Past," Piketty proposes a program based on local rights and outbursts of political movement, not parliamentary or electoral. This is different from the global wealth tax vision. Piketty's vision maintains capitalist social relations but heavily regulates them.

Piketty disavows state politics and disavows democracy, flirting with the worst form of speculative leftism. This is dangerous and separates politics from civil society, which Marx critiqued. The state and civil society are not separate; the state withers away when it separates from civil society. We need to recognize that the state has done many progressive things in the 20th and 21st centuries. Practical demands, like reducing the working day, are important and achievable.

Piketty defines capital as wealth, which is a problem but also Progressive because it identifies new forms of wealth outside traditional Marxist political economy. He includes rent and profit, and the tendency for new forms of rent-seeking to emerge alongside capital. He also talks about inheritance and gifting, which excludes the youth from livelihood. This is a problem but also Progressive because it expands the critique of wealth.

Piketty's vision of transcending capitalism is clear and in the classic sense of Hegel's transcendence. We should not forget the great things capitalism has brought, but we must transcend it. Capitalism will not go away, so let's not be speculative leftists. Let's move towards concrete measures of practical equality.

Regarding the lives of transient migrant labor across Europe, capitalism has an unerring genius for gathering up the bodies it needs and putting them where they are required to fuel capitalist production. This is the reality of growing numbers of people who are building Singapore, fishing the oceans, and enduring what they endure. These people are fleeing something even more unendurable and coming to endure what they are enduring.

This is not just Europe. It is the construction workers building Singapore, the people fishing the oceans of this country. This is the reality of the world. Capital creates separations, barriers, and divisions. It creates a world in which there are two worlds. Piketty's proposal of one world is a way of challenging this. It is a world premised on multiplicity and singularity, where many particularities exist within a universal. This is crucial for the left, both ontologically and politically.

The philosophical and the political are not separate; they inform each other. Moving between and across borders is crucial, both intellectually and practically. The division of labor in the university is premised on the idea of mass production and division of labor, which is a principle Kant took from Adam Smith. This division is implicated in each other, even when divided. Those who are doing the fishing are implicated in our dinner tonight, so they should exist because they do.

Thank you for this lovely introduction.