Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan: Capital as Power. Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism @Dissident Voice blog

Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan: 
Capital as Power. 
Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism
@ Dissident Voice 

Thx to Edmund Berger for signaling

Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists think of capital as an economic entity that they count in universal units of utils and abstract labor, respectively. But these units are totally fictitious: they can be neither observed nor measured. They don’t exist. And since liberalism and Marxism depend on these non-existing units, their theories hang in suspension. They cannot explain the process that matters most – the accumulation of capital.

This breakdown is no accident. Every mode of power evolves together with its dominant theories and ideologies. In capitalism, these theories and ideologies originally belonged to the study of political economy – the first mechanical science of society. But the capitalist mode of power kept changing, and as the power underpinnings of capital became increasingly visible, the science of political economy disintegrated. By the late nineteenth century, with dominant capital having taken command, political economy was bifurcated into two distinct spheres: economics and politics. And in the twentieth century, when the power logic of capital had already penetrated every corner of society, the remnants of political economy were further fractured into mutually distinct social sciences. Nowadays, capital reigns supreme – yet social scientists have been left with no coherent framework to account for it.

The theory of Capital as Power offers a unified alternative to this fracture. It argues that capital is not a narrow economic entity, but a symbolic quantification of power. Capital has little to do with utility or abstract labor, and it extends far beyond machines and production lines. Most broadly, it represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to reshape – or creorder – their society.

This view leads to a different cosmology of capitalism. It offers a new theoretical framework for capital based on the twin notions of dominant capital and differential accumulation, a new conception of the state of capital and a new history of the capitalist mode of power. It also introduces new empirical research methods – including new categories; new ways of thinking about, relating and presenting data; new estimates and measurements; and, finally, the beginning of a new, disaggregate accounting that reveals the conflictual dynamics of society.

The Capitalist Cosmology

As Marx and Engels tell us at the beginning of The German Ideology (1970), the capitalist regime is inextricably bound up with its theories and ideologies. These theories and ideologies, first articulated by classical political economy, are much more than a passive attempt to explain, justify and critique the so-called economic system. Instead, they constitute an entire cosmology – a system of thinking that is both active and totalizing.

In ancient Greek, Kosmeo has an active connotation: it means “to order” and “to organize,” and political economy does precisely that. It explains, justifies and critiques the world ­– but it also actively makes this world in the first place. Moreover, political economy pertains not to the narrow economy as such, but to the entire social order as well as to the natural universe in which this social order is embedded.

The purpose of this paper is to outline an alternative cosmology, one that offers the beginning of a totally different framework for understanding capitalism.

Of course, to suggest an alternative, we first need to know the thing that we contest and seek to replace. To lay out the groundwork, we begin by spelling out what we think are the hallmarks of the present capitalist cosmology. Following this initial step, we enumerate the reasons why, over the past century, this cosmology has gradually disintegrated – to the point of being unable to make sense of and recreate its world. And then, in closing, we articulate some of the key themes of our own theory – the theory of capital as power.

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Eyal Weizman on understanding politics through architecture, settlements and refuseniks @ Middle East Monitor // The Architecture of Violence @ AlJazeera English

"We need to remember that some of the most beautiful pieces of architecture, that we all love and we all travel to see, have been military fortifications and sites of battles and execution, or beautiful castles that had a repressive social, political and military use. Architecture cannot be "tainted" by its use, because its use is part of what it is, what it does. Architecture has always been a means to create hierarchies in space to produce and represent inequality, and to exercise control."

Eyal Weizman - architect, writer, activist and professor of visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London - is explaining how architecture and power are inextricably linked, even within structures that appear largely to serve an aesthetic purpose. Buildings or cityscapes that a tourist crosses the world to see were often conceived with the intent to oversee their populations.

"Even the beautiful boulevards of Paris have been partly conceived in order to generate an environment of control over the riots and urban rebellions of the nineteenth century," he continues. "We need to understand that in architecture, beauty and horror are intrinsically linked and that accounts for the fascination we have in architecture. That its beauty is not separated from its horror but that it is part of it."

Weizman says that architecture offers a different means to understanding politics than journalism or political science does, but he is still on a "trajectory of understanding" using a series of publications and exhibitions to explore exactly how. A distinct example of the intersection of architecture and politics, and a subject the architect has dedicated much of his work to, is Israeli control of the physical space of Palestinians.

As Weizman pointed out in a recent Al-Jazeera documentary the Architecture of Violence, settlements are built on the tops of hillsides, looking down on Palestinian villages so as to dominate their surroundings and protect themselves. Their roofs are painted red, which is mandated by planning regulations of most settlements, and this helps the military navigate the landscape and identify the settlements.

It seems fitting then that inside one of these illegal housing projects, the Ariel University inside the Ariel settlement in the West Bank, is an architecture school. Yet despite the overtly political backdrop of the institute, according to Weizman, there is the willing adoption of a certain "political naivety" when it comes to studying the discipline.

"They would never discuss issues of repression or land grab directly. There is a certain pact of silence around the political dimension of architecture there. Schools of architecture depoliticise the profession, they put it very much within the domain of aesthetic experimentation," he says.

"Architects want to believe, and even the architects in the settlements, that they are serving an individual family whose home they built."

"The more they say it is not political, the more that enables the political manipulation of the use of architecture for political means," he reflects. Architects in denial become prey to those who want to manipulate their profession for political gain. "The problem really is not so much the right wing architects, because they would support this idea anyway, it's centre or centre-left, which is really most architects in Israel. They are actually those that need that process of denial."

On the one hand, says Weizman, you have military structures like watchtowers and walls that are designed within the Ministry of Defence and built according to the brute, utilitarian logic of military control. Then you have the "civilian occupation", that is civilian planners working for the government who may assign a hilltop for settlement.

Whether such designs are realised in the Ministry of Defence or in the civilian planning department within the government, it is Palestinians who are paying the physical, territorial and psychological price for having their external space controlled so aggressively. "We see the eruptive violence now in Jerusalem; it's a direct response to the next wave of the settlement project," says Weizman.

This newest wave in the settlement project has seen the illegal blocs move from being "a project of separation in space", where settlements are built on hilltops, to them entering the centres of Palestinian neighbourhoods and cities. In Silwan in East Jerusalem, for example, you see compounds made up of 45 houses built right in the heart of Palestinian homes. "There would be security on its roof, it would operate as a kind of a mini settlement within the urban fabric and that increases friction exponentially. You see the eruptive violence of protests revolting against this new phase in the settlement project," he says.

One of the strengths of the Israeli system, believes Weizman, is that you cannot draw a clear border between the Israeli economy, Israeli society and Israeli politics. All members of Israeli society, all major companies and corporations are invested in buying and selling to the occupation. "It is not as if there is a project beyond the green line and then you cross the green line into '48 Palestine and there it just simply doesn't exist. The level of connections and the network of the settlement project is not in the West Bank alone, it is in '48 Palestine, in Israel, in the Israeli government, in Israeli society, in Israeli corporations and economy."

Whether or not its intertwined nature makes the occupation irreversible or not, Weizman is unsure. But to uproot it, he says, would require a complete transformation of the state. "The state as it is would not enable a project of separation and withdrawal without a huge, internal, violent conflict in Israel, tearing Israeli society apart.

"I do not see a two-state solution as a practical or achievable way in the near future," he adds.

Resistance to Israeli hegemony, for Weizman, needs to operate on all levels. "The boycott is part of that and I think being a non-violent means of transformation, a non-armed means of transformation, a civil practice, it's part of the civil toolbox of citizens all over the world. It's a very effective way to convey to Israelis that their actions are beyond the pale; that this is not acceptable. And, of course, pushing the boycott to the field of architecture might wake architects up to understand the full political implications of the work, the implications that they still deny."

Earlier Weizman pointed out that a few cases of architectural refuseniks do exist, where architects have turned down a commission that could support their office and provide a livelihood for them and their families. "What we need is an architectural refusal to participate in that, like the soldiers who are refuseniks or like the soldiers who are committed to "breaking the silence". Architecture also needs its process of breaking the silence, of confronting the denial and understanding the political framework within which their work is located."

Whilst the mechanism of control in a capitalist society, says Weizman, can lead us to believe that we have freedom, the structures of debt and economical consideration means that to refuse we need to be strong, perhaps even stronger than a soldier who disobeys a command and refuses to carry out military service.

"An architect that is running an office, who is in debt and pays salaries, has all the economic incentives to take it [a commission], but must resist it. The punishment is obviously not in going to a military prison, as in the case of soldier refuseniks, but on the livelihood of these people. So that's a way of controlling people, of course. When the economy is organised in a particular way it's very difficult not to participate in hegemony, so hegemony works. It organises the economy, it organises the structure of debt in a way that you might conform to power."

Most of the world has been colonised, says Weizman, and therefore it is colonial architecture that has set the precedent for controlling populations across the world. "Patterns of settler colonialism have always sought to isolate and protect the coloniser," he says, "and exclude the colonised." But contemporary tools of economic and capitalist separation that can be seen, for example, in corporate high rises or gated communities also play their part.

Weizman has just returned from a trip to the US. Like Israel, highways in Los Angeles serve more affluent communities and bypass the poorer areas. In the Gulf, he says, the labour force is contained, separated and supervised. Such capitalist tools of separation, seen across the world, "are all part of the growing toolbox of architecture and planning in the West Bank – it's composed, I mean it has a sort of colonial history, but it's contemporary vocabulary exists overall, everywhere you look, everywhere you go you have the politics of surveillance, separation, supervision and sometimes even oppression. Palestine is to a certain extent, a laboratory for the application of the most extreme means."

The Architecture of Violence will be screened at SOAS Khalili Lecture Theatre at 7.15pm on 5 December as part of the London Palestine Film Festival. After the documentary Weizman will be speaking on Architecture and Violence after Gaza.

Read more @ MEM-

Alberto Toscano: Metaphysics, Metamorphosis and Monetization @ Sophistry, Zagreb, 27-29 June, 2014

Talk at the conference "SOPHISTRY - The Powers of the False" at MaMa, Zagreb [June 27-29,2014] Our symposium will take up sophistry not only as a matter of historical concern but also contemporary contestation: as one way to think through not only the relation between the true and the false, but also the "ancient" and the "modern," not only the philosophical past but also the future of philosophy. Alberto Toscano is Reader in Critical Theory at the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Fanaticism (2010), The Theatre of Production (2006) and the forthcoming Cartographies of the Absolute (co-authored with Jeff Kinkle). He has translated several works by Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri and others. He edits The Italian List for Seagull Books and is a member of the editorial board of the journal Historical Materialism.

Alberto Toscano's interview on Crowd, Power and Post-democracy in the 21st Century

Alberto Toscano's interview on digital populism and recent European political phenomena, held on 17th November 2013 with the author of Obsolete Capitalism and Rizomatika. 

 EDIT: We collected Toscano's interview in one PDF file that you can download or read online. All interviews on digital populism - in English language - are collected into a single file HERE. The e.book that collects all the interviews is titled   
"Nascita del populismo digitale. Masse, potere e
postdemocrazia nel XXI secolo" (italian language) and it's 

available for free download HERE!

Crowd, Power and Post-democracy in the 21st Century

'Rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran's fascism... fascism of the couple, family, school, and office. Only the micro-fascism can answer the global question: "why does desire long for its repression? how can it desires its very own repression?"' — Gilles Deleuze, Fèlix Guattari, A thousand plateaus.

On the micro-fascism
OC Let us start from the analysis Wu Ming set out in their brief essay Grillismo: Yet another right-wing cult coming from Italy and which interprets Grillo’s Five Star Movement as a new authoritarian right-wing faction. Why did the desire for change of much of the electorate long once again for its very repression? We seem to witness the re-affirmation of Wilhelm Reich’s thought: at a given moment in history the masses wanted fascism. The masses have not been deceived: they have understood very well the danger of authoritarianism; but they have voted it anyway. Even more worrying is that the authoritarian Berlusconi's Freedom People (PDL) and Grillo’s Five Star Movement (M5S) conquer more than half of the Italian electorate together. A very similar situation arose in the UK in May 2013, with the UKIP’s exploit in the latest local elections. Why and in what measure are the toxins of authoritarianism and micro-fascism present in contemporary European society?

Alberto Toscano My inclination would be to bracket the explicit invocation of fascism, bound to distract us from a proper physiognomy of our political moment, and stress instead Wu Ming's reference to the way in which the M5S had piggy-backed on, but also sapped, many struggles against the dispossession of public spaces and common livelihoods (e.g. No TAV), bending them to the benefit of a remote-controlled anti-politics of the 'angry citizen', and drawing them away from their profound continuity with other anti-systemic or far left movements. The M5S itself, in all its ideological ambiguity, is a pretty precarious condenser of all the loose political energies, destructive and constructive, that the crisis has thrown up. As repugnant as the figure of Grillo might be, or as depressing as we may find the political culture of many of his followers, the stresses and strains that Grillo has suffered ever since February – which he accompanies with ever shriller doses of pompousness and braggadocio –  should perhaps warn against excessively gloomy prognostications. 
In this regard, the break between Grillo and his MPs over revoking the vile Bossi-Fini law on immigration is symptomatic. While they responded to the outcry over the drowning of hundreds of migrants off of Lampedusa with an act of liberal humanist decency – which, for all of its attendant ambiguities, was far preferable to the exquisitely hypocritical day of national mourning called by Letta – Grillo yet again showed that nationalism, chauvinism and indeed racism are part of his repertoire. If anyone was still in doubt, his response to that event, as well as the now periodic rants against the indiscipline of his supposedly horizontal movement, confirm that Grillo (and his marketeer, Casaleggio), if not necessarily the M5S itself, is a figure of the right. 
As for the 'toxins' of which you speak, they are indeed ambient, and require unsparing opposition – especially in terms of the vicious and endemic forms of racism that the crisis has accelerated (from anti-Roma violence to the UK government rolling out of 'Go Home' vans in Black and Asian areas of the country).  But I wouldn't rush to call the Manif pour tous in France, UKIP or various movements of the European Right 'fascist' (needless to say, with the several exceptions of those who lay claim to such a heritage, most dangerously Golden Dawn). Nor are these phenomena – especially racism – in any sense 'micro', in the sense that Deleuze & Guattari wrote of 'groups and individuals contain[ing] microfascisms just waiting to crystallise'. 
I wonder whether the theory of micro-fascism is not in some respect a far too elaborate tool with which to confront the attraction for a downwardly mobile petty-bourgeoisie of 'cognitive mappings' of the crisis that identify clear culprits and allow one to enjoy a sense of innocence and victimhood (the circulation among some M5S followers and MPs of conspiratorial economic theories may accordingly suggest that, to paraphrase Jameson, Grillo is peddling 'the poor man's cognitive mapping). Though 'socialisms of fools' are bound to ferment in interregnums such as our own, we could also note, somewhat more hopefully that, for all its ambivalence, the incorporation into the M5S programme of an orientation towards common, social needs points us to the presence in Italy's political unconscious – despite the defeats and suicides of official and movementist lefts – of something like 'micro-communisms'.

1919, 1933, 2013. On the crisis
OC In 2008 Slavoj Zizek said that when the normal run of things is traumatically interrupted, the field is open for a ‘discursive’ ideological competition. In Germany in the early 1930s Hitler won the competition to determine which narrative would explain the reasons for the crisis of the Weimar Republic — the Jewish conspiracy and the corruption of political parties. Zizek ends his reflection by stating that the expectations of the radical left to get scope for action and gain consent may be deceptive as populist or racist formations will prevail: the Greek Golden Dawn, the Hungarian Fidesz, the French Front National, the UK Independence Party are examples. Italy has had farcical groups such as the Lega Nord or the recent Five Star Movement, a bizarre rassemblement that seems to combine Reverend Jones People's Temple with Syriza, or ‘revolutionary boyscoutism’ with the disciplinarism of the societies of control. How can one escape the crisis? What discursive, possibly-winning narratives should be developed? Are the typically Anglo-Saxon neo-Keynesian politics an answer or, on the countrary, is it the new authoritarian populism that will prevail?

AT Especially in the Italian case, we should be very wary of indulging in the pastime of guffawing at the absurdities of the right. The seventies radical adage, una risata vi seppellirà (laughter will bury you), has alas been proved wrong time and again. Unfortunately, unlike its adversaries, an anti-capitalist politics cannot operate at purely discursive or narratological, which is to say ideological, level (this is where I think radical-democratic, post-Marxist revaluations of the category of populism are also very limiting). 
While Grillo can profit from the inconsistency of his discursive operation, thus holding together the votes and aspirations of a motley array of voters – orphans of both left and right – it would be calamitous for the left to think its task is to come up with a 'better narrative'. I'm not gainsaying that world-views and watchwords ('we won't pay for your crisis', 'the 99%', etc.) are an indispensable element of politics, but contrary to forces of the right whose discursive radicality accompanies a fundamental acquiescence to basic structures of social power (e.g. the link between nationality, citizenship and social rights in Grillo), the challenge for actually anti-systemic politics is to combine a strategy for transforming social relations with the capacity to defend and further working poor people's interests in the present. Though rooted in deep structures of phobia and projection, the racism and classism that makes possible the gains of the contemporary right is very much based on its capacity to present itself as a kind of biopolitical advocate for the 'losers' of the crisis – and some of the explicitly fascist groups, from Casa Pound to Golden Dawn, have played precisely on this register, of providing 'public services' (housing occupations, vigilantism, etc.) to 'white', 'national' populations. 
I think it would be inappropriate to define North Atlantic austerity regimes as neo-Keynesian – while breaking with neo-liberal doctrine as actually existing neo-liberalism has always been happy to do, bank-bailouts, quantitative easing and the roll-back of public provisions all belong to the uneven but ultimately homogeneous field of capitalist state strategies to socialise losses and privatise gains. Contrary to ephemeral euphoric declarations of the death of neo-liberalism by people too quick to see epochs and events around every corner, I think we should be more patient and recognise the considerable capacities of capitalism to reproduce itself by making our own social reproduction dependent on it – 'neoliberalism', if we still wish to use the term, does not reproduce itself primarily as a narrative or belief in the straightforwardly cognitive sense, but as a set of social devices and 'real abstractions' that govern us in many ways irrespective of our overt attachments. 
In this regard, I think a more sober estimation of our present may want to revisit the debates on neoliberalism as authoritarian populism triggered by the work of Stuart Hall, or consider, following the work of Paul Mattick, Jr., how both the ideas of a lean state imagineered by neo-liberal pundits and neo-Keynesian recipes for recovery obfuscate the crisis-dynamics of capitalism, deluding us that new narratives or political regulations could somehow magic away the fact that devastating devaluations of living-labour power and of our built and social environment ('fixed capital') are ineluctable dimensions of a system driven by the imperative production of surplus-value.

On the missing people
OC Mario Tronti states that ‘there is populism because there is no people.’ That of the people is an enduring theme which Tronti disclaims in a very Italian way: ‘the great political forces use to stand firmly on the popular components of the social history: the Catholic populism, the socialist tradition, the diversity in communism. Since there was the people, there was no populism.’ Paul Klee often complained that even in historical artistic avant-gardes ‘it was people who were lacking.’ However the radical critique to populism has led to important results: the birth of a mature democracy in America; the rise of the theory and the practice of revolution in the Tsarist Empire, a country plagued by the contradictions of a capitalist development in an underdeveloped territory (Lenin and bolshevism). Tronti carries on in his tranchant analysis of the Italian and European backgrounds: ‘In today's populism, there is no people and there is no prince. It is necessary to beat populism because it obscures the relations of power.’ Through its economic-mediatic-judicial apparatuses, neopopulism constantly shapes “trust-worthy people” similar to the "customers portfolio" of the branded world of neoliberal economy: Berlusconi’s “people” have been following the deeds of Arcore’s Sultan for twenty years; Grillo’s followers are adopting similar all-encompassing identifying processes, giving birth to the more confused impulses of the Italian social strata. With institutional fragility, fluctuating sovereignties and the oblivion of left-wing dogmas (class, status, conflict, solidarity, equality) how can we form people today? Is it possible to reinvent an anti-authoritarian people? Is it only the people or also politics itself that is lacking?

AT Populism is such a fraught notion, and such a favourite term for those crisis-managing elites who wish to discount and dismiss anti-systemic drives, that one should use it with extreme caution. From Tsarist Russia to the late-nineteenth century US, and on to twentieth and twenty-first century Latin America, we could loosely identify a 'left' populism which formulates opposition to exploitative domination outside well-defined class antagonisms (because the unevenness that you mention has not given rise to ideal-typical bourgeoisies or proletariats). The question such populisms throw up regards, as far as I'm concerned, primarily the question of how we define antagonism and partisanship, and only secondarily the question of political agency and collectivity ('the people'). 
We could perhaps see 'populism' not as the invariant, repetitive matrix of political subjectivation (the tendency of Laclau and others), but as a moment present in any movement of emancipatory opposition – but it is a moment that requires criticism and transcendence, especially for one of the reasons you suggest: the tendency in 'populist' movements to treat 'the people' as wholesome, innocent, the victim of depredations by a parasitical minority. Against this ideology of offended innocence, of the 'good people', I think we need to strongly affirm the far more conflicted legacy of a 'dialectical' politics, which struggles against the temptation of moralism, and does not ground antagonism in ethical superiority. Or, as Franco Fortini put it: in the list of your enemies, write your own name first. 
Politics is, in many respects, a matter of decision and demarcation of us and them, but the moment the 'us' is identified with the ethical substance of the Good on is set on a dangerous trajectory. More generally, I have recently been struck by a kind of neo-Jacobin temptation in discussions of communist politics – let me address here an indicative case, Jodi Dean's defense of 'the sovereignty of the people' in The Communist Horizon. 
Some caveats. First, I am in no doubt that the erosion of popular sovereignty is one of the distinctive facets of our moment, and of the capitalist management of the financial crisis in particular. The reclamation and perhaps reinvention of popular sovereignty against the odious machinations of 'sovereign debt' in Greece, Spain and elsewhere is an important political development. Second, Dean is careful to distance herself from any full, organic version of the people, such as may be encountered in what takes the problematic name of populism. Even with these caveats in mind, I do not recognise 'sovereignty of the people' as an intrinsic determinant of communism, which is probably why I strain to see the galvanising upsurge in popular assembly and insurgency as testament to the idea that communism is a 'present, increasingly powerful force'. Very briefly, let me try to explain why.  
There are broadly two tendencies in how one conceives of the relationship between communism and prior movements of emancipation. A thesis of continuity defines the first, of which I think the later Georg Lukács was the most able theoretical interpreter and Palmiro Togliatti the most eminent practitioner, which sees the communist movement picking up the flags that the bourgeoise has abandoned in the mud; the communist revolution sublating, which is to say also incorporating, the bourgeois revolution. This tendency broadly retains the crucial concepts of a Jacobin radical liberal tradition, in particular the people, the state and the law. 
The second tendency – for which I think two key texts are Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme and Lenin's gloss in State and Revolution, but also much of the left-communist 'heretical' tradition and so-called value-critique from the 70s onwards – poses that there is a radical discontinuity between communism and the political radicalism of the bourgeois tradition. It stresses the abolition of the value-form and the withering away of the state. The standard for what counts as communism here is high indeed – which is why Lenin had to recognise in the early 1920s that Russia was still, after the revolution, a capitalist society, albeit one run by communists (and ones who had to reinstate capitalism with the NEP on pain of defeat). It doesn't deny the progressive value, in certain moments, of popular sovereignty, but it aims for it to be transvalued, so to speak, rather than sublated, by workers' control – a term which I don't think can be treated as synonymous with popular sovereignty, on pain of losing historical specificity. 
This transvaluation also involves another, to my mind, crucial distinction: between radical and communist conceptions of equality. Communism is not just a more perfect equality, precisely to the extent that it seeks to overturn the very basis of even the most enlightened conceptions of equality, to wit the rights of the individual founded on the commensuration of labouring individuals under the standard of value and the rule of property. Here the question of the state is critical – though the site of considerable victories, the state, when founded on popular sovereignty also depends on making a claim founded on the representative apparatus (and here I just want to note my sympathy for Jodi's critique of the fashionable critique of representation). This claim, to legitimacy, is what allows it to repress people in the name of the People, according to a mechanism which, though we may find obscene, is very difficult to counter. 
To the extent that the state, under capitalism, serves to provide a unified fulcrum for a trans-class identity, and does so through the very idea of popular sovereignty, it remains at best an ambivalent phenomenon. Though the demand for a state of all the people can be radical, even ruptural (from the progressive postwar constitution in Italy to contemporary struggles by Israeli Palestinians for full citizenship) – and the interclass appearance need not, though it often is, serve as a mechanism of class rule – it is in the end against or at the very least beyond the idea of sovereignty, and of the people (which is rarely extricable from citizenship of a state, identities and privileges) that communism has staked its claim to differ from both radical liberalism and social democracy (both of which, I am happy to recognise, seem beacons of emancipation in the current moment). 
The proposal of a constituent rather than constituted people, or the delineation of a popular sovereignty which exceeds the state in the spaces of appearance of assembled bodies, as in Butler's recent article 'We, the People: Reflections on the Right of Assembly', do not seem really to transcend the intrinsic relationship – again, not devoid of ambivalence or progressive potentialities – between the capitalist state and popular sovereignty. The state, in its transcendence, absorbs the division of the people into its unity, over and over again – creating a vertical distinction between the represented people and people in their 'uncollected state' (this is the strength of Badiou's critique of representation). In this respect I think that, for all of the virtues of tactical or even strategic populism, the division between the rich and 'the rest of us' risks repeating the dangers of what we could call the 'popular horizon'. 
First, because to remain at the level of inequality itself, of the 1 and the 99%, neglects that when workers fight in the domain of distribution 'They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady'. Communism is not simply a struggle against the rich, and it can't, for analytical and strategic reasons, treat the exploited as a homogenous group. It is a struggle abolish the very relations that produce us as the subjects that we are, which means that one of the dimensions of the 'rest of us' narrative is both necessary for it, as the initial claim for a wrong, and must ultimately be undone, especially when it involves the rest of us imaging ourselves as more or less innocent 'victims' of capital. 
Second, to retain a purely political idea of the us, in both unity and division, which neglects the profoundly political character of social divisions, especially of class and race. The people is a name almost invariably shadowed by national adjectives which trail behind them their own histories of subjugation, which is to say by the horizontal division of peoples within states themselves (as Sadri Khiari points out in his essay 'Le peuple et le tiers-peuple', working-class French citizens of African origin do not generally consider themselves or are considered part of le peuple). Though state, people and sovereignty remain critical domains for any strategy that would wish to call itself communist, the latter stands or falls as a distinct political tradition on the abolition of the form of value and the correlative dismantling of the state, to be replaced with an organisation of resources and activities and institutional forms for which the modern tradition of sovereignty cannot serve as a model. Though it may make one want to reject it in the end, I think we have to retain the specific difference of communism vis-à-vis radicalism, Jacobinism, state socialism, social democracy, and other traditions in the broad Left. 

On Control
OC In Postscript on the Societies of Control, published in 1990, Gilles Deleuze states that, thanks to the illuminating analyses of Michel Foucault, a new diagnosis of contemporary Western society has emerged. Deleuze's analysis is as follows: control societies have replaced disciplinary societies at the beginning of the twentieth century. He writes that ‘marketing is now the instrument of social control and it forms the impudent breed of our masters.’ Let us evaluate who stands beyond two very successful electoral adventures such as Forza Italia (Berlusconi’s first party) and M5S: respectively Publitalia 80 owned by Marcello Dell'Utri, and Casaleggio Asssociati owned by Gianroberto Casaleggio. The incontrovertible fact that two marketing companies stand behind these political projects reinforces Deleuze’s analysis. Mechanisms of control, media events such as exit polls and infinite surveys, im/penetrable databases, data as commodities, continuous spin doctoring, influencers that lead consensus on the net, opaque bots, digital squads, dominant echo-chambering. Evil media. These are the determinations of post-ideological (post-democratic?) neoliberalism. The misery of the new control techniques competes only with that of the glass house of transparency (web-control, of course). Jacques Ranciere says we live in the epoch of post- politics: how can we get out of the neo-liberal cage and free ourselves from the ideological consensus of its electoral products? What will the reconfiguration of left-wing politics be after the exhaustion of Marxist hegemony?

AT I'm not sure what is meant here by 'the exhaustion of Marxist hegemony'. If this refers to the fact that the categories and organisational forms of the First, Second and Third Internationals no longer orient the politics of the left, then it's an exhaustion that we can date to the 1970s at the latest, though, as Fredric Jameson has aptly noted, 'post-Marxisms' spring up with every crisis of capital ('Five Theses on Actually Existing Marxism). This loss of political hegemony is a simple fact, but I don't think we can draw from it any linear conclusion either about the categories (especially) or the organisational forms that we may associate with Marxism (and which often, as with union associations, parties, strikes, or what have you, were never straightforwardly products of Marxism). I also think there is something debilitating about the widespread notion that what we especially need is a new narrative, a new paradigm to break with 'ideological consensus'. 
The problem is not breaking with our conscious belief in capitalism or neo-liberalism, but with the deeper embeddedness of our everyday life in the material devices of capitalist reproduction – our subjection to wage, credit, property, insurance, etc. But that is a matter of political-economic practices, not (primarily) narratives or world-views. There is no shortage of instances of collective antagonism out there (see Alain Bertho's Anthropologie du présent website for a running tally of our 'age of riots', or the China Labour Bulletin, or the reports of the maritime insurance agency The Strike Club to their clients, if you're in any doubt that we categorically do not live in a post-political age, 'after' class struggle). Our difficulty lies far more in mustering up the energy, steadfastness and inventiveness to practice collective politics than in breaking with the supposedly capillary hold of ideology. Starting from the movements around social needs and demands that have sprung up against austerity – mobilisations against hospital closures, collective platforms against house evictions, etc. - and thinking how these could be federated and turned into a challenge to capitalist rule is a much more urgent task than challenging the ideological grip of a system which does not, to my mind, primarily depend on consensus, but on the lived, everyday experience that we cannot reproduce our lives outside of compliance with exploitation, our own and that of others.

On the Googlization of politics; the financial side of digi-populism
OC The first decade of the 21st century has been characterized by the rise of neo-capitalism, referred to as cognitive; in this context a company like Google has established itself as the perfect synthesis of web-business as it does not compensate, if not in a small part, the content-carriers it lists. In Italy, following the electoral success of the Five Star Movement we witnessed a mutation of the typical prosumer of social networks: the new figure of the “prosumer-voter” was in fact born on Grillo’s blog - being essentially the one and only channel of information of the movement. The blog is a commercial activity and the high number of contacts and daily access has steadily increased in the last year. This digital militancy produces incomes both in the form of advertising and online sales of products such as DVDs, books and other material associated with the movement. All of this leads to the risk of googlization of politics whereby the modes of financing political activity radically change because of the "network surplus-value" - an expression coined by the researcher Matteo Pasquinelli to define that portion of incomes extracted from the practices of the web prosumers. Having said this, are we about to witness a shift of the financial paradigm applied to politics? Will the fundings from powerful lobbies or the general public be replaced by micro-donations via web (in the style of Obama’s) and by the exploitation of the prosumer-voters? And if so, will the dominant 'googlization of politics' involve any particular risks?

AT This is not a phenomenon on which I have any real knowledge, so my comment can only be impressionistic at best. At the risk of sounding like a reactionary techno-phobe, I am certain that mechanisms for financially exploiting people's desire for pseudo-agency (the politics of 'like') will accelerate in intensity and algorithmic sophistication, but I do not think there is anything positive to be extracted from the figure of the prosumer-voter; the political metaphysics of social media (rather than the very limited, if at times very efficacious uses, to which they might be put) which governed the mis-representation of uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, or the self-adoration of the M5S, is a hindrance to thinking forms of political action adequate to the present. In terms of the 'googlization' of politics I think the 1970 British dystopian comedy The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer provides us with a very nice allegory, especially as it links the alienating pseudo-activity of 'clicktivism' with its obverse, authoritarian populism. The critique of the serial interpassivity of electoral representation is not going to take place through fantasies of digital emancipation. 

On digital populism, on affective capitalism
OC James Ballard once said that after the religions of the Book we should expect those of the Web. Some claim that, in fact, a first techno-religion already exists in the form of Affective Capitalism whose technological and communicative characteristics mirror those of network cultures. This notion of a secularized cult can be traced back to Walter Benjamin's thought but is enriched by a very contemporary mix of affective manipulation techniques, politics of neo-liberalism and political practices 2.0. The rise of the Five Stars Movement is the first successful example of italian digital populism; Obama’s campaign in the U.S.A. has witnessed an evolution of micro-targeting techniques - customized political offers via the web. The new frontier of both medical and economic research is producing a disturbing convergence of evolving ‘fields of knowledges’: control theories, neuro-economics and neuro-marketing. In 1976, in the optic of the ‘war-repression’ schema, Foucault entitled his course at the Collège de France ‘Society must be defended’. Now, faced with the general friability of all of us, how can we defend ourselves from the impact of affective capitalism and its digital practices? Can we put forward a differential, local knowledge which, as Foucault said, ‘owes its force only to the harshness with which it is opposed by everything surrounding it’?

AT I think a first step in the defence would be to resist the tendency to amplify capital's own narratives of novelty with our supposedly critical categories, or, relatedly, to accept at face-value its dreams of full spectrum dominance over our consciousness and unconscious alike. No doubt, the mining of relations and emotions for profit has reached staggering levels of ubiquity and sophistication, but this does not mean that we live in a new capitalism – one somehow not requiring the exploitation of living-labour power, one not plagued by the contradictions between the fixity and mobility of capital, one not beset by crisis-tendencies, etc.
'Affect' – a terribly inflated term in contemporary theory – has not 'resolved' any of these limits and contradictions. One of the historical dimensions of workers', subaltern and revolutionary movements was that of being able to create relatively autonomous spheres of cultural production, forms, contents and social relations somehow alternative or antagonistic to those of its adversaries (a kind of cultural dual power, if you will, sometimes doubled by a 'biopolitical' dual power, as in the Black Panthers' health care programmes). So, aside from the delinking option, there might be something to be said about not taking for granted that our social interactions or political organising should take place in platforms which are proprietary, profit-oriented and formatted in ways that canalise communication into particular patterns and redundancies. Short of 'socialising' social media, in the way that Lenin may have spoken of socialising the banks, I think there is still a lot of room for reviving more systematic debates about the construction of counter-public spheres. Otherwise, defending oneself against digital alienations risks becoming an individual, therapeutic question – just think of the cottage industry of online advice about how to spend less time online, or even programs to block pathological compulsions to connectivity (like the symptomatically named Antisocial and Freedom). 

Alberto Toscano, Italian, lives and works in London. He is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London (UK). He is a cultural critic, sociologist, philosopher and translator, known in the anglophone world for his translations into English of works by Alain Badiou including Logics of Worlds (Continuum, 2009) and Theoretical Writings (Continuum, 2004) of which he was also the curator. He has translated works of Franco Fortini, Antonio Negri and Furio Jesi. He's a columnist for The Guardian with interventions on Italian politics. Toscano's research focuses on the contemporary political and sociological thought, on Marxism, political economy and the history of ideas. He is author of publications including The Theatre of Production. Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze (Palgrave Macmillan, UK, 2006), The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics (Re:press, UK, 2009) and Fanaticism: The Uses of an Idea (Verso, UK, 2010). Toscano is a member of the editorial board of the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory. He regularly writes on Mute, an English cult magazine of 'hybrid media and cultural politics after the Net'. He's currently completing a book on the aestethics of capital with Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (forthcoming from Zero Books, blog @ http://cartographiesoftheabsolute.wordpress.com)

Painting: Stelios Faitakis

Simon Choat: intervista su "Masse, Potere e Postdemocrazia nel XXI secolo"

Intervista di Simon Choat su "Masse, potere e postdemocrazia nel XXI secolo" a cura dei blog Obsolete Capitalism e Rizomatika. Intervista raccolta il 16 giugno 2013 

 EDIT: E' disponibile e scaricabile online/free download QUI il libro "Nascita del populismo digitale. Masse, potere e postdemocrazia nel XXI secolo" che raccoglie tutte le interviste di Choat, Parikka, Sampson, Newman, Berti, Toscano, Parisi, Terranova e Godani. Abbiamo raccolto l'intervista di Choat in questo PDF. 

Masse, potere e postdemocrazia nel XXI secolo

'Fascismo di banda, di gang, di setta, di famiglia, di villaggio, di quartiere, d’automobile, un Fascismo che non risparmia nessuno. Soltanto il micro-Fascismo può fornire una risposta alla domanda globale: “Perchè il desiderio desidera la propria repressione? Come può desiderare la propria repressione?'

—Gilles Deleuze, Fèlix Guattari, Mille Piani, pg. 271

Sul micro-fascismo
OC Partiamo dall’analisi di Wu Ming, esposta nel breve saggio per la London Review of Books intitolato 'Yet another right-wing cult coming from Italy', che legge il M5S e il fenomeno Grillo come un nuovo movimento autoritario di destra.  Come è possibile che il desiderio di cambiamento di buona parte del corpo elettorale (nelle elezioni italiane del febbraio 2013) sia stato vanificato e le masse abbiano di nuovo anelato –ancora una volta– la propria repressione ? Siamo fermi nuovamente all’affermazione di Wilhelm Reich: sì, le masse hanno desiderato, in un determinato momento storico, il fascismo. Le masse non sono state ingannate, hanno capito molto bene il pericolo autoritario, ma l’hanno votato lo stesso. E il pensiero doppiamente preoccupante è il seguente: i due movimenti populisti autoritari, M5S e PdL, sommati insieme hanno più del 50% dell’elettorato italiano. Una situazione molto simile si è venuta a creare in UK, nel Maggio 2013, con il successo della formazione populista di destra dello UKIP. Le tossine dell’autoritarismo e del micro-fascismo perché e quanto sono presenti nella società europea contemporanea?

Simon Choat In tutta Europa l'autoritarismo e perfino il fascismo rimangono rischi reali. Sempre più spesso vi è la minaccia di un 'fascismo-leggero' o di un 'fascismo dal volto umano': partiti e movimenti che attingono alla retorica populista, contro il grande "business" o contro le banche mentre in realtà propongono politiche pro-capitaliste, autoritarie e (implicitamente o esplicitamente) razziste. In Inghilterra tutto ciò è senza dubbio rappresentato (anche se nel solito tiepido modo inglese) da UKIP (il quale, nonostante il nome, è un fenomeno inglese piuttosto che britannico) - mentre è sempre presente la violenza di strada "vecchio stile" del partito inglese EDL - English Defence League. Penso che vi siano presenti ragioni ma anche pericoli nell'interpretare queste minacce attraverso il concetto di 'desiderare la propria repressione'. Può essere un buon correttivo al concetto obsoleto e inutile di "falsa coscienza", laddove le persone che vogliono la repressione e lo sfruttamento vengono  presumibilmente ingannate per ignoranza o per illusione. Allo stesso tempo - sia in Reich che in Deleuze - c'è il rischio che questa nozione di 'falsa coscienza' venga reintrodotta dalla porta di servizio, con una distinzione implicita tra coloro che godono di un desiderio 'buono' (a favore dell'emancipazione e della rivoluzione) e coloro che lavorano nell'ambito di un desiderio 'cattivo' (per la repressione e per l'autorità) e necessitino di qualcuno (un partito, un leader, un intellettuale) che li illumini. Più in generale, non penso che 'repressione' sia un concetto molto utile: il potere nel capitalismo non opera attraverso la repressione ma inducendo e incitando sia il desiderio che il piacere.
Parlare di 'micro-fascismo' per di più è utile nella misura in cui richiama la nostra attenzione alle pratiche sociali quotidiane e agli investimenti affettivi che rafforzano i centri di potere: il fascismo può svilupparsi, almeno in parte, per il desiderio o di un senso d'ordine o di partecipazione, per sentirsi parte di qualcosa, un desiderio che può diventare particolarmente forte in tempi di crisi e che può manifestarsi in modi autoritari. Questo è il motivo per cui dobbiamo essere particolarmente diffidenti nei confronti del 'populismo digitale' di una forza come il "grillismo": il suo appello al desiderio delle persone di sentirsi parte di un 'movimento' è rafforzato dal potere d'attrazione narcisistico dei social media.
Infine, una spiegazione approfondita dell'attuale ascesa degli autoritarismi richiederebbe un'analisi storica, concreta, di lungo periodo, che comprenda, non solo l'attuale crisi economica, ma anche una serie di altri fattori tra i quali va incluso - ma non limitato a - l'ascesa del neoliberismo negli ultimi trent’anni, l'aumento della disoccupazione, il depotenziamento e declino dei sindacati e della sinistra socialdemocratica.

1919, 1933, 2013. Sulla crisi
OC Slavoj Zizek ha affermato, già nel 2009,  che quando il corso normale delle cose è traumaticamente interrotto, si apre nella società una competizione ideologica “discorsiva” esattamente come capitò nella Germania dei primi anni ’30 del Novecento quando Hitler indicò nella cospirazione ebraica e nella corruzione del sistema dei partiti i motivi della crisi della repubblica di Weimar. Zizek termina la riflessione affermando che ogni aspettativa della sinistra radicale di ottenere maggiori spazi di azione e quindi consenso risulterà fallace in quanto saranno vittoriose le formazioni populiste e razziste, come abbiamo poi potuto constatare in Grecia con Alba Dorata, in Ungheria con il Fidesz di Orban, in Francia con il Front National di Marine LePen e in Inghilterra con le recentissime vittorie di Ukip. In Italia abbiamo avuto imbarazzanti “misti” come la Lega Nord e ora il M5S, bizzarro rassemblement che pare combinare il Tempio del Popolo del Reverendo Jones e Syriza, “boyscoutismo rivoluzionario” e disciplinarismo delle società del controllo. Come si esce dalla crisi e con quali narrazioni discorsive “competitive e possibilmente vincenti”? Con le politiche neo-keynesiane tipiche del mondo anglosassone e della terza via socialdemocratica nord-europea o all’opposto con i neo populismi autoritari e razzisti ? Pare che tertium non datur.

SC L’analisi di Zizek è stata confermata: nel momento della sua più grande crisi, il capitalismo neoliberista è stato rafforzato piuttosto che indebolito. Le ragioni sono complesse, ma un elemento chiave è stata la sua vittoria nella “competizione ideologica”. Nel Regno Unito, ad esempio, la crisi economica è stata accusata di essere figlia delle politiche “dispendiose” del precedente governo laburista - da qui la necessità di ciò che viene eufemisticamente definita  “austerità”. In realtà, questa “narrazione” è ormai così ampiamente accettata che l'attuale governo si è già spostato su una nuova storia che sottolinea la necessità di competere in una “gara” mondiale (e così deregolamentare gli affari,  abbassare le tasse e i salari, togliere i diritti del lavoro, etc.). Abbiamo quindi bisogno di una narrazione alternativa. Ma spero che la nostra scelta non sia semplicemente tra autoritarismo neo-populista e neo-keynesismo! Anzi, questa mi sembra una falsa alternativa: se il populismo è quel movimento che pretende di unire una società, mentre in realtà oscura i reali rapporti di potere e le forme di lotta, allora si potrebbe sostenere che il keynesismo è di per sé una forma di populismo, in quanto propaganda la fantasia di un capitalismo di cui possono beneficiare tutti. Ciò non esclude tuttavia la possibilità che potremmo aver bisogno di una sorta di keynesismo strategico, a difesa dello stato sociale, dei diritti del lavoro, delle provvidenze del settore pubblico, etc.: dato il contesto attuale, difendere il welfare è un gesto radicale.
La sinistra deve tuttavia affrontare una serie di difficoltà nello sviluppare la propria narrazione. In primo luogo,  esiste una concorrenza ideologica all’interno della sinistra stessa. La destra ha un compito più semplice: è più facile difendere lo status quo piuttosto che sfidarlo. In secondo luogo, qualsiasi analisi di sinistra si concentrerà su strutture apersonali, difficili da incorporare all’interno di narrazioni popolari (è il motivo per cui non ci sono molti buoni film o romanzi marxisti). Questa è una delle ragioni per cui, invece, otteniamo narrazioni populiste con protagonisti ben definiti ai quali attribuire ogni colpa (banchieri, immigrati, burocrati, etc.). Infine, vi è la difficoltà di diffondere narrazioni alternative nei canali di diffusione che sono per lo più di proprietà e gestiti proprio da coloro che stiamo cercando di sfidare. I social media qui potrebbero essere utili, ma non operano in un vuoto bensì all'interno dello stesso complesso di relazioni sociali  dei media tradizionali e i suoi attori sono soggetti alle stesse pressioni ideologiche, alle stesse censure statali e aziendali e (come abbiamo visto di recente) allo spionaggio. Inoltre - come si è visto con il M5S in Italia  - i social media si comportano spesso come una gigantesca cassa di risonanza della stupidità: non  sono necessariamente favorevoli al pensiero critico.

Sul popolo che manca
OC Mario Tronti afferma che “c’è populismo perché non c’è popolo”. Tema eterno, quello del popolo, che Tronti declina in modalità tutte italiane in quanto “le grandi forze politiche erano saldamente poggiate su componenti popolari presenti nella storia sociale: il popolarismo cattolico, la tradizione socialista, la diversità comunista. Siccome c’era popolo, non c’era populismo.” Pure in ambiti di avanguardie artistiche storiche, Paul Klee si lamentava spesso che era “il popolo a mancare”. Ma la critica radicale al populismo - è sempre Tronti che riflette - ha portato a importanti risultati: il primo, in America, alla nascita dell’età matura della democrazia; il secondo, nell’impero zarista, la nascita della teoria e della pratica della rivoluzione in un paese afflitto dalle contraddizioni tipiche dello sviluppo del capitalismo in un paese arretrato (Lenin e il bolscevismo). Ma nell’analisi della situazione italiana ed europea è tranchant: “Nel populismo di oggi, non c’è il popolo e non c’è il principe. E’ necessario battere il populismo perché nasconde il rapporto di potere”. L’abilità del neo-populismo, attraverso l'utilizzo spregiudicato di apparati economici-mediatici-spettacolari-giudiziari, è nel costruire costantemente  "macchine di popoli fidelizzati” più simili al “portafoglio-clienti” del mondo brandizzato dell’economia neo-liberale. Il "popolo" berlusconiano è da vent’anni che segue blindato le gesta del sultano di Arcore; il "popolo" grillino, in costruzione precipitosa, sta seguendo gli stessi processi identificativi totalizzanti del “popolus berlusconiano”, dando forma e topos alle pulsioni più deteriori e confuse degli strati sociali italiani. Con le fragilità istituzionali, le sovranità altalenanti, gli universali della sinistra in soffitta (classe, conflitto, solidarietà, uguaglianza) come si fa popolo oggi? E’ possibile reinventare un popolo anti-autoritario? E’ solo il popolo o la politica stessa a mancare?

SC L'analisi di Tronti è, per alcuni aspetti, molto acuta: in senso lato il populismo contemporaneo è considerato, almeno in parte, un prodotto dell’abbandono del riferimento politico di classe, mentre abbiamo bisogno di farlo rivivere. E’ quindi necessario evitare le rappresentazioni populiste di classe che riducono il tutto a una mera serie di caricature (gli avidi banchieri, i politici corrotti, le élite che cospirano, etc.) o  concepiscono la classe solo in termini di significanti manifesti anziché in termini di proprietà, controllo e potere. Occorre così affinare ed evidenziare le divisioni di classe, ma non vedo “guadagni” nell’utilizzare l'etichetta di 'popolo’. Necessitiamo certo di un momento di articolazione politica in cui formiamo alleanze e uniamo le lotte più disparate (piuttosto che ricorrere a fantasticherie spontaneiste sulla 'moltitudine') ma queste alleanze dovrebbero essere radicate nelle nostre esperienze concrete di (dis)occupazione, sfruttamento, etc: non c'è bisogno di invocare un "popolo". In poche parole, il “popolo” non è una categoria marxista, e penso che sia il marxismo il più utile  a spiegare la nostra situazione. Il “popolo” è una categoria populista, e quindi regressiva. Ma forse ho frainteso le affermazioni di Tronti...

Sul Controllo
OC Gilles Deleuze nel Poscritto delle Società di Controllo, pubblicato nel maggio del 1990, afferma che, grazie alle illuminanti analisi di Michel Foucault, emerge una nuova diagnosi della società contemporanea occidentale. L’analisi deleuziana è la seguente: le società di controllo hanno sostituito le società disciplinari allo scollinare del XX secolo. Deleuze scrive che “il marketing è ora lo strumento del controllo sociale e forma la razza impudente dei nostri padroni”. Difficile dargli torto se valutiamo l’incontrovertibile fatto che, dietro a due avventure elettorali di strepitoso successo - Forza Italia e Movimento 5 Stelle - si stagliano due società di marketing: la Publitalia 80 di Marcello Dell’Utri e la Casaleggio Asssociati di Gianroberto Casaleggio. Meccanismi di controllo, eventi mediatici quali gli exit polls, sondaggi infiniti, banche dati in/penetrabili, data come commodities, spin-doctoring continuo, consensi in rete guidati da influencer, bot, social network opachi, digi-squadrismo, echo-chambering dominante, tracciabilità dei percorsi in rete tramite cookies: queste sono le determinazioni della società post-ideologica (post-democratica?) neoliberale. La miseria delle nuove tecniche di controllo rivaleggia solo con la miseria della “casa di vetro” della trasparenza grillina (il web-control, of course). Siamo nell’epoca della post-politica, afferma Jacques Ranciere: Come uscire dalla gabbia neo-liberale e liberarci dal consenso ideologico dei suoi prodotti elettorali? Quale sarà la riconfigurazione della politica - per un nuovo popolo liberato - dopo l’esaurimento dell’egemonia marxista nella sinistra? 

SC Bella domanda! Purtroppo non ha una risposta semplice. La missione iniziale è semplicemente quella di aprire spazi in cui possa essere discussa questa stessa domanda. È per questo che, pur con tutti i suoi difetti e problemi, il movimento Occupy Wall Street è stato, per un breve periodo, promettente. E’ stato criticato per non aver saputo offrire una visione alternativa, ma questa critica non coglie il punto che l’alternativa di Occupy Wall Street era performativa: l'atto di occupazione era un’opzione alla sempre più brutale privatizzazione dello spazio, una rivendicazione di un ambiente in cui, tra l'altro, il dibattito potrebbe fisicamente aver luogo.
Il marxismo ha qui un ruolo importante da svolgere: la sua egemonia può essersi esaurita, nel senso che non domina più la politica di sinistra radicale in Europa - anche se nel Regno Unito è sempre stata marginale - ma fornisce ancora la più rigorosa e potente critica del capitalismo che dovrebbe essere il nostro vero obiettivo. E’ anche un modello da utilizzare per fare politica: come è noto, Marx - alla pari di Foucault - non ha passato il proprio tempo a creare progetti per il futuro bensì a sviluppare e affinare analisi del presente che, anche ai giorni nostri, potrebbero essere utilizzate da coloro che partecipano alle lotte esistenti, da cui poi le alternative concrete si sviluppano. 


    Sulla “Googlization” della politica; l’aspetto finanziario
                del populismo digitale

OC La prima decade del XXI secolo è stata caratterizzata dall'insorgenza del neo-capitalismo definito "cognitive capitalism"; in questo contesto un'azienda come Google si è affermata come la perfetta sintesi del web-business in quanto non retribuisce, se non in minima parte, i contenuti che smista attraverso il proprio motore di ricerca. In Italia, con il successo elettorale del M5S, si è assistito, nella politica, ad una mutazione della categoria del prosumer dei social network: si è creata la nuova figura dell'elettore-prosumer, grazie all'utilizzo del blog di Beppe Grillo da parte degli attivisti - che forniscono anche parte cospicua dei contenuti - come strumento essenziale di informazione del movimento. Questo www.bellegrillo.it è un blog/sito commerciale, alternativo alla tradizione free-copyright del creative commons; ha un numero altissimo di contatti, costantemente incrementato in questo ultimo anno. Questa militanza digitale produce introiti poiché al suo interno vengono venduti prodotti della linea Grillo (dvd, libri e altri prodotti editoriali legati al business del movimento). Tutto ciò porta al rischio di una googlizzazione della politica ovvero ad un radicale cambio delle forme di finanziamento grazie al "plusvalore di rete", termine utilizzato dal ricercatore Matteo Pasquinelli per definire quella porzione di valore estratto dalle pratiche web dei prosumer. Siamo quindi ad un cambio del paradigma finanziario applicato alla politica? Scompariranno i finanziamenti delle lobbies, i finanziamenti pubblici ai partiti e al loro posto si sostituiranno le micro-donazioni via web in stile Obama?  Continuerà e si rafforzerà lo sfruttamento dei prosumer-elettori? Infine che tipo di rischi comporterà la “googlization della politica”?

SC Il compito principale dello Stato, oggi, è di rappresentare il capitale. I politici tradizionali sono legati a questo compito: le micro-donazioni di Obama non hanno reso le sue politiche meno autoritarie o meno neo-liberali. Se esistesse una 'googlizzazione della politica’, allora io suggerirei  che si riferisse a qualcos’altro e cioè al crescente potere politico dell'industria hi-tech: al suo ruolo sempre più potente come gruppo di pressione, allo sviluppo di giganteschi monopoli, al ruolo volontario delle techno-industrie all'interno della sorveglianza di Stato e così via. Google è una società come tutte le altre - e, in quanto tale, non esattamente a sostegno di finalità democratiche o emancipatorie.

Sul populismo digitale, sul capitalismo affettivo
OC James Ballard affermò che, dopo le religioni del Libro, ci saremmo dovuti aspettare le religioni della Rete. Alcuni affermano che, in realtà, una prima techno-religione esiste già: si tratterebbe del Capitalismo Affettivo. Il nucleo di questo culto secolarizzato sarebbe un mix del tutto contemporaneo di tecniche di manipolazione affettiva, politiche del neo-liberalismo e pratiche politiche 2.0. In Italia l'affermazione di M5S ha portato alla ribalta il primo fenomeno di successo del digi-populismo con annessa celebrazione del culto del capo; negli USA, la campagna elettorale di Obama ha visto il perfezionarsi di tecniche di micro-targeting con offerte politiche personalizzate via web. La nuova frontiera di ricerca medica e ricerca economica sta costruendo una convergenza inquietante tra saperi in elaborazione quali: teorie del controllo, neuro-economia e neuro-marketing. Foucault, nel gennaio 1976, all'interno dello schema guerra-repressione, intitolò il proprio corso "Bisogna difendere la società". Ora, di fronte alla friabilità generale di tutti noi, come possiamo difenderci dall'urto del capitalismo affettivo e delle sue pratiche scientifico- digitali ? Riusciremo ad opporre un sapere differenziale che - come scrisse Foucault - deve la sua forza solo alla durezza che oppone a tutti i saperi che lo circondano? Quali sono i pericoli maggiori che corriamo riguardo ai fenomeni e ai saperi di assoggettamento in versione network culture?

SC Il mondo digitale introduce nuove aperture e possibilità offrendo alle persone potenziali modi per diventare politicamente attive ma purtroppo porta con sé anche alcuni rischi: il focus su velocità e simultaneità non aiuta necessariamente  una  riflessione critica profonda e la natura delle attività digitali, spesso individuali e private, non sono sicuramente favorevoli alle lotte collettive. Dobbiamo riflettere su questi problemi senza ricorrere a giudizi morali che   semplicemente li celebrino o li condannino, resistendo sia alla propaganda tecno-utopista promossa dal settore tecnologico-industriale sia all'ansia reazionaria e nostalgica che gonfia la novità della tecnologia digitale catastrofizzando il suo impatto. Quello che ci serve, invece, è un’imparziale  analisi storico-materialista che individui questi sviluppi all’interno del capitalismo contemporaneo, esaminando l'impatto delle nuove tecnologie sulla distribuzione di ricchezza e potere, e collocando gli utilizzi della tecnologia digitale entro i rapporti sociali esistenti.
E, ovviamente, dovremmo evitare di vedere le tecnologie digitali come una panacea. Mi ha sempre colpito una frase di Deleuze che mi sembra, ora, più pertinente: “Non è vero che soffriamo di incomunicabilità; viceversa soffriamo per tutte le forze che ci costringono  ad esprimerci quando non abbiamo granchè da dire” (1). Questo è uno dei nostri compiti oggi: resistere alla richiesta  di dover dire comunque qualcosa.

1) Gilles Deleuze: Pourparler (pg. 183) - Quodlibet, 2000

Simon Choat, inglese, è Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations alla Kingston University, London (Uk) ed è l'autore del libro Marx Through Post-Structuralism: Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze (Continuum, Uk, 2010). L'area di ricerca che sta sviluppando include i Grundrisse di Marx, le filosofie neo-materialiste, le politiche demografiche e il fenomeno della disoccupazione, il marxismo di Alfred Sohn-Rethel. E' membro del Political Studies Association Marxism Specialist Group (PSA-MSG). E' in fase di stampa l'ultimo saggio 'From Marxism to poststructuralism' compreso nella raccolta di saggi curata da Dillet, Mackenzie e Porter (eds.) The Edinburgh companion to poststructuralism. (Edinburgh University Press, Uk, 2013). Attualmente sta scrivendo la Reader's Guide to Marx's Grundrisse per Bloomsbury Publishing di Londra.


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Bibliografia

1) testi di riferimento alla domanda Sul micro-fascismo
Wu Ming, Yet another right-wing cult coming from Italy, via Wu Ming blog.

Wilhelm Reich, Psicologia di massa del fascismo - Einaudi, 2002 

Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Mille Piani, Castelvecchi, 2010 

Gilles Deleuze, L’isola deserta e altri scritti, Einaudi, 2007 (cfr. pg. 269, 'Gli Intellettuali e il Potere', conversazione con Michel Foucault del 4 marzo 1972) “Questo sistema in cui viviamo non può sopportare nulla: di qui la sua radicale fragilità in ogni punto e nello stesso tempo la sua forza complessiva di repressione” (intervista a Deleuze e Foucault, pg. 264)



2) testi di riferimento alla domanda Sulla Crisi
Slavoj Zizek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce. Verso, Uk, 2009 (pg. 17) 

3) testi di riferimento alla domanda Sul popolo che manca
Mario Tronti, 'C’è populismo perché non c’è popolo', in Democrazia e Diritto, n.3-4/2010. 

Paul Klee, Diari 1898-1918. La vita, la pittura, l’amore: un maestro del Novecento si racconta - Net, 2004 

Gilles Deleuze, Fèlix Guattari, Millepiani (in '1837. Sul Ritornello' pg. 412-413)

4) testi di riferimento alla domanda Sul controllo
Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy, UMP, Usa, 2004

Gilles Deleuze, Pourparler, Quodlibet, Ita, 2000 (pg. 234, 'Poscritto sulle società di controllo') 

Saul Newman, 'Politics in the Age of Control', in Deleuze and New Technology, Mark Poster and David Savat, Edinburgh University Press, Uk, 2009, pp. 104-122. 

5) testi di riferimento alla domanda Sulla googlizzazione della politica

Guy Debord, La società dello spettacolo, 1967 - II sezione - Merce come spettacolo, tesi 42,43,44 e seguenti fino alla 53. 

Matteo Pasquinelli Google's Pagerank Algorithm, http://matteopasquinelli.com/docs/Pasquinelli_PageRank.pdf 

Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008) 

6) testi di riferimento alla domanda Sul populismo digitale e sul capitalismo affettivo

Tony D. Sampson, Virality, UMP, 2012

Michel Foucault, Security, Territory and Population, Palgrave and Macmillan, 2009 

Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975—76, Saint Martin Press, 2003

Dipinto: Stelios Faitakis