*Call for Papers for an ephemera Special Issue on: Communism of Capital?*
Issue Editors: Armin Beverungen, Anna-Maria Murtola and Gregory Schwartz
http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/communismofcapital.pdf
Deadline for submissions: 29 February 2012
Today, neoliberal capitalism is increasingly put into question. Whereas
two decades ago business school gurus argued that the US was 'the most
"socialist" country around' (Drucker, 1993: 6), today's self-appointed
business leaders know they cannot do without a certain communism. George
Soros, Bill Gates and others refer to themselves -- not without irony --
as 'liberal communists' (Z(iz(ek, 2008a). Recognising the evils induced
by capitalism these patricians of the market proselytise market
philanthropy to deliver many of the ostensible benefits of the communism
of yore. Newsweek, reflecting on the national bailout of the banks in
response to the financial crisis, declared: 'We are all socialists now'
(Meacham, 2009). Yet, the one thing that seems beyond question in such
projections of communism is capital itself.
At the same time, theories of cognitive capitalism, immaterial labour
and biopolitical production suggest that some kind of communism is
already at work within capitalism. According to Hardt and Negri,
immaterial labour 'seems to provide the potential for a kind of
spontaneous and elementary communism' (2000: 294). Similarly, Virno
defines post-Fordism as 'the communism of capital', since it 'puts
forth, in its own way, typical demands of communism (abolition of work,
dissolution of the State, etc.)' (2004: 110-111). The contemporary
enjoinments to pursue work that is authentic, ethical, spiritual,
evoking and invoking the community, friendship and collaboration
(Heckscher and Adler, 2006), chime in with invitations for employees in
work organisations to 'just be themselves' (Fleming, 2009), thus
delivering on some of the promises of communism. From a 'paleo-Marxist'
perspective (Adler, 2007) we can surmise that concrete changes in
technology and work organisation assure us some version of communism in
substance, if not in form.
However, such projections of work organisation rely on a commons in
production without opening up production to a commons that will tear
apart the dominance of capital. For Negri (2008: 157-180), the communism
of capital is marked by new forms of capture of the creativity of
labour. For Virno (2004: 110), communist demands and objectives have
been subject to 'an insiduous and terrible interpretation', for example
in the way that unemployment and precarity accompany overwork. For
Holloway (2010), more fundamentally, it is the communal, communising and
communistic doing that, in capitalism, exists in the mode of being
denied. For Read, capital operates 'through the abstractions of money
and labour, which are all the more effective in that they are not
believed or even grasped' -- 'the cynicism of the productive powers of
the general intellect today, is a cynicism without reserve, in which
every aspect of one's existence, knowledge, communicative abilities and
desires become productive' (2008: 146, 150). The question for Negri,
Virno, Holloway and Read, then, is how to overcome this enclosure by
capital.
Yet even anti-capitalism seems to return only as communism of capital.
As Z(iz(ek (2008b) and Fisher (2010) point out, capitalist realism
already embraces a certain kind of anti-capitalism -- 'corporate
anti-capitalism' is discernible in the products of Hollywood, such as
Wall-E and Avatar, but also in the way that today it is acceptable or
encouraged to express anti-capitalist sentiments at work (Fleming,
2009). Anti-capitalism as a signifier thus loses its radical edge,
especially as it is contained within a parliamentary democratic politics
(Z(iz(ek, 2008b: 184). Indeed, the more gushing the moralism against the
evils of our age, the more certain the conclusion that capitalism is an
eternal, natural system of social organisation.
At this impasse we might be at once more sceptical and more hopeful. We
might hedge doubts about the communism of capital in view of Groys'
(2009) argument that language -- the basis of a communist politics --
will remain silent as long as the commodity form mediates it. We might
question the communism of capital by insisting, with Ranciere (2010), on
the politics of emancipation and not the logos of history as the
purveyor of communism. We might deny its ethical claims by revealing the
underlying 'ontology of profit' (Badiou, 2008: 47) -- that with
capitalism as 'a system that hands the organization of our collective
life over to the lowest instincts, to greed, rivalry and unconscious
egotism' (Badiou, 2010: 96) the communism of capital is a simulacra of
late capitalism. And if communism is 'not a state of affairs which is to
be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself',
then where are we to look for 'the real movement which abolishes the
present state of things' (Marx and Engels, 1998: 57; emphases in original)?
Contributions
For this special issue of ephemera we invite contributions that address
various aspects of what could be conceived as the communism of capital.
We are especially interested in papers that try to cover the following
interrelated areas of organisational inquiry.
First, we are interested in contributions that seek to locate the
attempts by capital to organise society as producers. For example, in
what ways are social forms mobilised in the name of a discernible
communism, and how do such dispositifs reproduce the dominance of
capital? Based on postworkerist/autonomist thought, how or to what
extent is production based on the common, and what kinds of political
effects does this produce? Alternatively, drawing on the
Lacanian/Hegelian tradition, how does anti-capitalist ideology work in
practice in the organisation of work, and what negations and
contradictions are involved?
Second, papers could explore how capital organises consumption in
society via affective, discursive and cognitive means. For example, how
do contemporary ideas of corporate social responsibility, business
ethics or leadership utilise ideas of communism? In what ways, and to
what extent, do efforts to purvey capitalism as, essentially, a creature
of communism lead to new ways of constructing (and consuming) the
subjects of capital?
Third, we welcome papers that interrogate how capital organises politics
and the state. For example, there is a way in which the state, by
over-coding existing codes and values, uses the terminology and imagery
of 'community' to refer to ways of fragmenting and depoliticising its
social responsibility in the face of escalating inequality, poverty and
precarity generated by capital. How might we understand this apparent
harkening to deep-seated, basic communalism in terms of the communism of
capital, with the state presiding over the inscription of the social
body as a renewed object of appropriation of capital?
Finally, we welcome theoretical or empirical contributions that bring
together or provide a cross-examination of some or all of the above
areas of inquiry. For example, following Guattari and Negri's (2010)
proposition of the pre-eminence of organisation, how might we move from
the communism of capital towards the communism discussed by Marx and
Engels in 1848? Or, in addition to the post-workerist, autonomist,
Lacan- and Hegel-inspired approaches that we have discussed here, in
what other ways might communism, beyond capital, today be thought or
advanced?
Deadline for submissions: 29th of February 2012
Please send your submissions to the editors. All contributions should
follow ephemera guidelines -- see
http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/submit.htm. In addition to full
papers, we also invite notes, reviews, and other kinds of contributions
-- please get in touch to discuss how you would like to contribute. In
anticipation of the special issue, we plan to host an event on the
themes, at which we will ask the selected contributors to present their
work.
Armin Beverungen, [email protected]
Anna-Maria Murtola, [email protected]
Gregory Schwartz, [email protected]
References
Adler, P. (2007) 'The future of critical management studies: A
paleo-Marxist critique of labour process theory', Organization Studies,
28(9): 1313-1345.
Badiou, A. (2008) The meaning of Sarkozy, trans. D. Fernbach. London: Verso.
Badiou, A. (2010) The communist hypothesis, trans. D. Macey and S.
Corcoran. London: Verso.
Drucker, P. (1993) Post-capitalist society. New York: HarperBusiness.
Fisher, M. (2010) Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? London:
Zero Books.
Fleming, P. (2009) Authenticity and the cultural politics of work.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Groys, B. (2009) The communist postscript. London: Verso.
Guattari, F. and A. Negri (2010) New lines of alliance, new spaces of
liberty, trans. M. Ryan, J. Becker, A. Bove and N. Le Blanc. London:
Minor Compositions / Autonomedia / MayFly.
Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2000) Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Heckscher, C. and P. S. Adler (2006) The firm as collaborative
community: Reconstructing trust in the knowledge economy. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Holloway, J. (2010) Crack capitalism. London: Pluto Press.
Marx, K. and F. Engels (1992 [1848]) The communist manifesto. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Marx, K. and F. Engels (1998) The German ideology. New York: Prometheus
Books.
Meacham, J. (2009) 'We are all socialists now', Newsweek, 6 February
2009. [http://www.newsweek.com/2009/02/06/we-are-all-socialists-now.html].
Negri, A. (2008) Goodbye Mr. Socialism: Radical politics in the 21st
century. London: Serpent's Tail.
Ranciere, J. (2010) 'Communists without communism?', in C. Douzinas and
S. Z(iz(ek (eds.) The idea of communism. London: Verso.
Read, J. (2008) 'The age of cynicism: Deleuze and Guattari on the
production of subjectivity in capitalism', in I. Buchanan and N. Thoburn
(eds.) Deleuze and politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Virno, P. (2004) A grammar of the multitude: For an analysis of
contemporary forms of life. New York: Semiotext(e).
Z(iz(ek, S. (2008a) Violence. London: Profile Books.
Z(iz(ek, S. (2008b) In defense of lost causes. London: Verso.
--
Stevphen Shukaitis
Autonomedia Editorial Collective
http://www.autonomedia.org
http://www.minorcompositions.info
"Autonomy is not a fixed, essential state. Like gender, autonomy is created through
its performance, by doing/becoming; it is a political practice. To become autonomous is
to refuse authoritarian and compulsory cultures of separation and hierarchy through
embodied practices of welcoming difference... Becoming autonomous is a political position
for it thwarts the exclusions of proprietary knowledge and jealous hoarding of resources,
and replaces the social and economic hierarchies on which these depend with a politics of
skill exchange, welcome, and collaboration. Freely sharing these with others creates a
common wealth of knowledge and power that subverts the domination and hegemony of the
master's rule." - subRosa Collective
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
