The violent response against OWS is an act of class war

84-year-old woman pepper sprayed by police in Seattle.

As David Harvey persuasively argues in his 2005 A Brief History of Neoliberalism, the primary consequence of neoliberalisation in practice has not been – as has been the main theoretical justification for neoliberalisation – to foster and strengthen growth in the neoliberalised economies, but rather the consolidation of class power in the hands of elites.  While neoliberalism has created opportunities for massive accumulation of capital, this capital has been in the hands of an increasingly small minority, and this accumulation has been been bought at the cost of destroying the social infrastructure which would permit, or better force, ‘wealth-creation’ to yield a general increase in the standard of living and prevent widening inequality.  Ultimately, neoliberalism isn’t, Harvey argues, so much concerned with growth – although of course it is part of the neoliberal formula that economic growth becomes of absolutely paramount important in our economic considerations, trumping concern for maintaining livable conditions for the general populace – as with the redistibution of power upwards, compromising both real conditions of life and the democratic structures put in place to keep the people in control of those conditions.

The Occupy movement’s stand against this attempt by elites to consolidate their economic and political power has been met with brutal censure (see, e.g., here, here and here).  In light of a proper understanding of the class dynamics of neoliberalism, we must understand the significance of this violence – namely, that it is an act of class war, a violent assault by the disciplinary apparatuses of the ruling classes against the people.

OWS – with its ‘We are the 99%!’ slogan – is reminding us of the importance of learning again how to use this vocabulary.  Class needs to be on the agenda, because economically ingendered inequality is rotting the heart of human civilisation.

Critical pedagogy in RP

Just a little plug for the latest volume (170, Nov/Dec 2011) of Radical Philosophy, which has some really interesting pieces on the philosophy and politics of education.  (I’m a bit busy for any extended commentary on any of these texts right at the moment, but I might post up some thoughts over the weekend if I get a chance.)

Most interesting from the perspective of my interests is Matthew Charles‘s article on the philosophy for children ‘movement’ (although this phrase might be a bit of an overstatement at this point) and the political consequences and limitations of the form it has taken thus far.  Charles examines the organisations involved in teaching philosophy to children in the UK – The Philosophy Shop and SAPERE – considering the differences in their approaches and the shared limitations of their more or less implicit political framework.  These are important issues, as teaching philosophy in schools is potentially very valuable, but only if it can be extricated from the limitations of an exclusively liberal conception of education and what it would be for education to be ‘critical’.

Also in RP 170 is a collection of articles prompted by the publication by Continuum of Emiliano Battista’s English translation of Jacques Rancière’s first book, Althusser’s Lesson.  In this work, Rancière distances himself from his former teacher, Louis Althusser, the father of so-called ‘structuralist Marxism’, through a cutting critique of the latter, both his theoretical work and his pedagogical practice itself.

The collection includes a reprint of the English translation of a 1964 essay by Althusser entitled ‘Student Problems’ – introduced by Warren Montag – in which he criticises the contemporary student movement for attacking the traditional, liberal, unidirectional form of university pedagogy, grounded in an essential epistemic inequality between the teacher and the student, instead of ‘the true fortress of class interest in the university‘ (p. 13, original emphasis), i.e., the ‘ideological’ content of that pedagogy.  For the Rancière of Althusser’s Lesson, this insistence on pedagogical inequality and refusal of any transformation of the very form of the university is definitive of Althusserianism, its deep opportunism and servitude to the cause of order and the authority of the Communist Party leadership.

The essay is followed by three very interesting engagements with Rancière’s critique of Althusser, by Nathan Brown, Bruno Bosteels and Stéphane Douailler.

A final note: somewhere in one of these papers – I can’t now remember which one – reference is made to Radical Philosophy‘s founding statement, a document which bears re-reading at this juncture of crisis for philosophy in the university.  While I don’t straightforwardly agree with this document’s partisan stance against analytic philosophy, its concern regarding academic philosophy’s isolation from other disciplines and from ideas and activities critical of the wider political, social and cultural setting – a concern which continues in the CRMEP’s ongoing project on transdisciplinarity in the humanities – is still a crucial one for the future of philosophy today.

Occupied Europe

New College, the humanities and neoliberalism

So, what are we to make of London’s new private ‘college of higher education’, New College of the Humanities, awarding University of London degrees and charging fees of £18,ooo p.a. for one-on-one access to an all-star lineup of well-known academics (including A. C. Grayling, Richard Dawkins, Simon Blackburn, Peter Singer, Steven Pinker and Ronald Dworkin)?

(If this is the first you’ve heard of this venture, then you can get more info from The Guardian, BBC News, Nina Power’s blog, Infinite ThØught [for an angrier and more partial account, with more investigative probing and info on upcoming protests and boycotts], or Brian Leiter’s Leiter Reports [for a sympathetic account, especially in his responses to comments].)

A. C. Grayling, ‘master’ of the college, proclaims New College ‘the most exciting innovation in Higher Education in a generation’ (here).  Certainly there are aspects of the college’s programme which are innovative (at least from a British perspective), namely the emphasis on a broader spread of subjects, with core courses on ‘science literacy’, logic, applied ethics, finance and business.  While Badiou has rightly taught us to be wary of the ubiquity of ‘applied ethics’ – especially in such a liberal and corporate context – and finance and business are bound to be taught in a less than critical, if not thoroughly pious, manner, a familiarity with the latter can’t help but be of use in our age of homo economicus.  A basic grounding in the natural sciences and formal logic too is useful to anyone.  (I only wish I was better equipped in these areas, as no doubt do many of us working in the humanities who’ve found the specialised character of our education a hindrance to accessing bodies of knowledge outside the remit of our particular disciplines.)

However, while this programme has its appeal, we have to see New College for what it is: another step on the road to privatisation, deregulation and corporatisation, i.e. neoliberalisation, of higher education in the UK.  One might have thought it hardly possible for British universities to take yet another step down the road of neoliberalisation – Haven’t we reached some point of absurd, self-caricaturing extremity in this regard already? – but apparently this is a process without end.  (Or at least, by the time the end is reached, there’ll be nobody left able to conceptualise anything any different such as to be able to recognise the move to total neoliberalisation as having been a process at all.)

While New College claims (here) to be ‘open to anyone who has talent and ability’, ‘from any background’, what this translates to (if The Guardian is to be believed) is the college’s offering ‘some scholarships, with assisted places being granted to one in five of the first 200 students’ (my emphasis).  Now to my ears, this hardly sounds like an openness to all.  Obviously the college is aiming to be highly selective along ‘meritocratic’ lines (and this brings with it its open problems for those of us concerned with inequalities in the availability of higher education and with the role of education, but we’ll save that for another time…), but its claim not to be selective along socio-economic lines – oh go on then, let’s just say class shall we – is going to need much greater substantiation if it’s going to avoid appearing highly spurious.  While there’s much talk of scholarships and the funding possibilities of the New College Trust, the statistics available at present indicate that the majority of students will have to be able to pay the prohibitively high fees charged by the college – a situation which promises to create a student body constituted primarily by the socio-economic elite.

In addition to these concerns regarding the class constitution of the student body of New College, there are concerns regarding the relationship between this private institution and the University of London, which, despite the neoliberalisation of higher education which has been going on for the last thirty years at least, is still a public university.  While the very notion of a public university has been so eroded in Britain as to leave little but a hollow resonance of the idea in its realisation, New College contributes to what is perhaps one of the key pernicious developments of the political era into which we’re entering under the present coalition government; namely, the move from covert to explicit privatisation, and with it the attempted elimination of the collective memory of ‘the public sphere’ as a space of communal property, a concept which becomes harder and harder for us to articulate as it rapidly fades from the public political imaginary.  That a private institution should be able to make use of the public facilities and degree-awarding powers of the University of London is a sign of the changing tides, and one which is sure to inspire copycat institutions parasitic on other British public universities.

Another point, which is made forcefully by Nina Power, is the lack of demographic diversity of the New College ‘professoriate’.  Few but white and male faces will greet you upon consulting the college’s faculty list.  Some responsibility for this might be put down to the generation of academics from which the college has sought to recruit – famous and well-respected, hence ageing, academics, relics from an earlier time when academia was, even more than today, the sole reserve of white, upper- and upper middle-class men (a time to which we seem, through governmental reform, wilfully to be returning, like some Ballardian archaeo-psychic regression).  However, this can hardly be seen as an excuse, and the sidelining of non-male and non-white researchers is not going to be eased by more self-marketed ‘elite institutions’ reinforcing these trends.  The humanities especially, with its claim to critical social awareness, ought to sensitive to these sorts of issues.  Certainly an insensitivity to class, gender and race issues smells a little too much of an older conception of the humanities, lingering from an age before the need or the desire had been felt for critical theory; a conception of the humanities as ‘liberalising’ and ‘humanising’, as ‘civilising’ even.  These sorts of conceptions have bubbled to the surface all too often of late in response to the call to Justify yourself! that has been aimed at the arts and humanities in the face of massive funding cuts.  This isn’t the humanities we need.  We need critical humanities or none at all.

‘The humanities’, Grayling informs us in his statement of intent for New College, ‘provide personal enrichment, intellectual training, breadth of vision, and the well-informed, sharply questioning cast of mind needed for success in this complex and competitive world.’  This all sounds lovely, but the problem is this: What value is there in this success, success in this world, according to the standards of the present ideological consensus?  Do we want an education in the humanities to be a training ground for the future global elite, preparing them to engage in the sort of tough, complex decision-making that is required of you if you take it upon yourself to make decisions on behalf of vast numbers of people all over the world, a tiny percentage of whom you have some tenuous claim to ‘represent’?  Or do we want a critical humanities that helps equip people – not an elite but just people, anyone interested and engaged enough not to take their situation at face value – with ways of thinking that can help them not to respond so readily to the interpellation of the established social formation?

I’m at risk here – and probably I’ve already crossed the line – of idealising the humanities, of endulging a naive and even politically suspect utopianism regarding the humanities and education in general.  According to this utopian view, all we need is education.  Education for all.  I take it as axiomatic that we do indeed require such a universal and egalitarian access to education, but of course this isn’t the whole story.  Education isn’t even the whole story when it comes to ‘social mobility’ and the latter itself is little more than a poor ersatz for a real egalitarianism.  Nevertheless, if there’s worth in the humanities, it lies in their critical edge, their capacity to expose us to ideas and ways of thinking which challenge us and in this way empower us to challenge others, other powers, other orders and structures.

Can the humanities exist in this form in an institution like New College?  I suspect not.  What are we left with then?  More privatisation, more corporatisation, more neoliberalisation, ever more explicit, ever more intense.  The humanities – ‘personal intellectual enrichment’ for the ruling classes.  The academic founders of New College may have been hoping to save the integrity of the humanities by playing the neoliberal reformers at their own game, but in the end all they’ve done is drill a few more holes in the sinking ship of public higher education in the UK.

No happy moral to this one then.  Please comment with uplifting sentiment if you can muster any.

the generic political subject of egalitarianian resistance

If race, class, gender, and disablism aren’t appropriate focal points for liberation, then what is?

BT

This is the question put to me by a friend of mine – herself very involved in left-wing activism around various issues – in response to my attempts to explain the need for (what I’m terming, under the heavy shadow of Alain Badiou) egalitarian political resistance (in, as will become evident, a quite particular sense).  This post will hopefully shed more light on what I was trying to get at.

The position I take BT to have been taking is that resistance needs to be organised by the oppressed group as such, and there are two reasons for this.  Firstly, blacks or gays or women or the disabled or whoever know the particular way in which they are being oppressed and so are in a better position to formulate a strategy of emancipation.  Secondly – and I take this to be something like Franz Fanon’s point – it has to be the oppressed group themselves that grasp their freedom; only a hollow or perhaps even false freedom can follow from the granting of this freedom by the oppressing group.

My response to this, then.  BT underestimates the ideological significance of the way in which the prevailing political discourse understands the divisions between people.  Contemporary “politics” is a matter of the management of the  masses, a management required by the tensions between distinct, autonomously defined and communicatively incommensurable demographic groupings.  We see this in the treatment of immigration issues, beautifully displayed in the recent BBC Question Time featuring Nick Griffin: the framework shared by both our friendly neighbour fascist Mr. Griffin and the mainstream parties is that the units of political mass management are ethnic-cultural-religious groups which are – “naturally” – in a state of perpetual tension with one another.  Now, we can respond to this tension by encouraging “tolerance” – a move the subtle racism of which Žižek has proclaimed relentlessly for some time now; more recently this has even come to the attention of one Tony Blair – or by deporting those who fail to “integrate”, i.e. eliminate the differences between their existing cultural-demographic grouping and that of the “indigenous” (read: hegemonic) group.

What I want to emphasise here is that central to the castration of politics in contemporary mainstream political culture is the fixation on cultural groupings as the fundamental categories of political change.  If we are to move to an egalitarian mode of politics – something radically out-of-joint with the existing political coordinates as laid out above – then we must repudiate this way of conceptualising the political space.

But surely if the goal is precisely the self-liberation of oppressed groups, then using the categories under which people are oppressed as launch pads for resistance can’t contribute to this oppression?  Surely we need to meet the oppression head on, by responding as the oppressed group?  This is certainly the model that has become prevalent through the various liberation movements of the last 40 years, from womens’ lib and black power to the LGBT rights movement.  However, I want to claim that it’s extremely dangerous to take on the category under which one is oppressed as the name under which one proclaims one’s freedom.

There are two possible outcomes of this kind of emancipatory resistance:

1. The oppressed group finds itself increasingly “tolerated”, but in such a way that underlying tensions between it and the hegemonic group are preserved.  This sort of “victory” is perpetually liable to be rescinded – if not “politically” by the official legislative authority itself, “socially” by (elements of) the “normal” populace itself.  (Cf. the current treatment of British muslims.)  In the worst case scenario, the extremely strong sense of cultural identity which is constructed as a basis for resistance proves an insurmountable barrier to genuinely peaceful interaction with the hegemonic group, and a kind of self-perpetuation of the previously imposed ghettoisation occurs.
2. The oppression associated specifically with the particular cultural designation is alleviated.  However, modes of oppression remain which are patently factually associated with that group, but the recognition of this association has been systematically undermined by the liberation movement itself.  (Cf. the poverty of African-Americans; the collapse or commodification of feminism.)

I want to emphasise that these aren’t even consequences of the failure of the sort of resistance I take BT to be advocating; these are (some of) the outcome(s) we can expect from a successful liberation movement of the envisaged sort.

What, then, is my understanding of egalitarianism and its vision of political action.  By ‘egalitarianism’, I mean the purging of all the cultural categories with the management of which mainstream politics and the BNP alike are concerned from political space.  Politics is a space in which subjects interact as equal rational agents and collectively address group concerns as such.  As such, in the space of egalitarian politics my being black, gay, female or whatever is irrelevant – more than that, it is excluded.  What is sought is generic equality – politically, we are all the same – and this equality is the only name under which we ought to demand it.

From the perspective of practical activism, this cashes out in the idea of the generic political subject.  The difficulty the mass-subject manifested in egalitarian political action poses to the hegemonic group is precisely its genericity – its evasion of any easy grouping in terms of cultural categories, and thus the impossibility of any appeasement in terms of minor concessions to particular cultural-demographic interests.  The generic political group-subject is bound together solely by its demand of generic equality and as such this is the only hold that the authorities can get on the consistency of the group, the only way in which it can be understood and dealt with.

Does this approach risk homogenising the struggles being fought by various groups and thus masking the specificity of the oppression of particular cultural groups as such?  In a certain sense, yes.  Egalitarianism is indifferent – at the level of political resistance – to the specificity of particular cultural groups’ struggles.  The reasons for this – and the reason it isn’t a problem for emancipatory politics – are twofold:

1. In many cases, the specific struggles of particular cultural groups are possible only on the basis of the persistence of the group as an isolated political unit.  So, for example, issues of the political representation of particular groups cease to be an issue in the event of the eradication of the group as a registered political entity that can be attacked (or defended).  This is why egalitarianism strives to simply ignore these categories.
2. Insofar as there are issues that do effect particular groups even once they have become part of the generic group-subject – such as, perhaps, disability issues concerning physical access to spaces etc. – an emphasis on the capacity of the group of rational subjects to engage with each other and come discursively to solutions to problems affecting the group (insofar as members of the group are affected) is essential to the motivation behind egalitarianism.  Presenting a united, generic front of rational subjects concerned with issues affecting these parties is precisely what is needed in order to pragmatically demonstrate that these are issues with which everyone ought to be concerned, not simply the affected group.

I hope this has cashed out to some extent how I see an egalitarian activism as functioning.  The generic political subject seems to me to be the best model we have for an activist community that genuinely subtracts itself from the political coordinates of existing power structures and which provides a rudimentary model of the sort of political organisation that could come after these structures – that is, one in which rational political subjects discursively overcome problems which, insofar as they afflict any members of the group, are seen as collective problems.

As ever, comments welcome, especially on problems for realising this vision at the level of real activism.

Addendum on class

I haven’t dealt with the issue of class struggle in the main body of the post, although it was mentioned by BT in the quotation above, because I take class to be a somewhat different kind of category.

I want to start off with two points:

1. I accept that within a liberal capitalist system, economic modes of oppression are quite central – in the sense that the economic control a root problem preventing emancipation of various kinds.  This claim should be distinguished from the claim that class struggle is the fundamental, or even the only real, mode of struggle.  I am not claiming that women are really oppressed as workers or any such thing.  I am claiming that, under liberal capitalism, women are often oppressed as women by economic means.  However, despite its centrality as a mechanism of oppression, economic inequality is not generally registered by the politico-legislative structure, certainly not in the form of class.  As such, the notion of class must be given some special treated within the egalitarian schema outlined above, which is largely focused on the eradication from political discourse of categories which, obviously, are actually included there.
2. I’m sensitive to the complexity of different modes of oppression and control explored at length by, among others, Michel Foucault.  Oppression can be enacted at the level of pure ideology, at the level of physical or sexual violence, or even at the level of the organisation of space and time itself (e.g., domestic buildings constructed around the nuclear family unit, the working day, the individualising function of the office cubicle, etc.).  As such, a pure focus on class and class struggle – seeing it as the “hidden”, real category of political oppression – is misguided.  There is more going on than simply economic oppression.

So (in a somewhat disorganised way) these are the two issues concerning class: (1) the central importance within liberal capitalism of class issues; (2) the inability to reduce issues of oppression to issues of class.

What consequences does this have for the role of class in egalitarianism?  It seems to me that the best way that class considerations can be brought to bear by egalitarianism is to view oppression on the basis of class in precisely the same way as other kinds of oppression, but to make use of the economic power of workers as such as a resource for the egalitarian struggle of the generic political subject.  So, workers as much as any other group ought to resist not as workers – under the banner of ‘We the workers…!’ – but ought to bring the leverage granted them by their role in the process of production to bear in bringing about the collective aim of generic equality.

This is the best way I can think of at present to do justice both to the special place that workers have within capitalism and the desire not to subordinate generic egalitarian resistance to workers’ resistance.  This hopefully does more justice than a traditional Marxist-Leninist model to the way in which all can be oppressed and take part in resistance against the oppressing system, without dubious appeals to the “proletarianisation” of groups such as students that play no economically productive role analogous to that of the industrial workforce.

gender and sophistry in professional philosophy

Interesting piece in tpm on women in philosophy, or rather the lack thereof.  There’s some discussion in the article of the aggressive argumentative atmosphere prevalent in postgraduate and professional philosophy as a possible explanation for the dearth of women in philosophy.

[Helen Beebee, a University of Birmingham lecturer and director of the British Philosophical Association (BPA)] says this tapering off of women may be at least partly caused by a culture of aggressive argument that is particular to philosophy and which begins to become more prominent at postgraduate level. “I can remember being a PhD student and giving seminar papers and just being absolutely terrified that I was going to wind up intellectually beaten to a pulp by the audience,” she says. “I can easily imagine someone thinking, ‘this is just ridiculous, why would I want to pursue a career where I open myself up to having my work publicly trashed on a regular basis?’”Jennifer Saul, a Sheffield University lecturer and president of the UK division of the Society of Women in Philosophy (SWIP), says that relative to post-graduate students, there is a significant drop in the number of women going on to become temporary lecturers. She says that number decreases again at permanent and more senior levels of academic philosophy and agrees that an aggressive culture may be a contributing factor. “I think that very combative ‘out to destroy the speaker’ sort of philosophy is something that a lot of women find uncomfortable,” she says. “But I wouldn’t want to say it’s just a problem for women – I think it’s a problem for men and a problem for philosophy because I don’t think it’s a good way to do philosophy.”

Beebee says the masculine culture of philosophy is more likely to be off-putting to women than any overt sexism. “I can’t honestly say that I’ve ever felt unfairly treated as a woman in the male-dominated world of analytic philosophy,” she says. “On the other hand, I do think that the culture of face-to-face philosophical discussion, at seminars and in conferences, is pretty aggressive and confrontational.” Beebee recalls working in one department where, “one member of staff kept a list of ‘home wins’ and ‘away wins’ on his whiteboard – a ‘home win’ being a seminar where the members of the department ‘defeated’ the visiting speaker during the discussion.”

Although this point is made with all the proper hesitance, with Helen Beebee’s already tentative position – that philosophy’s culture of aggressive argumentativeness is especially off-putting to women – being to some extent countered by Jennifer Saul’s more gender-neutral criticisms, I feel it’s important to counteract this view more caustically.

There is a real problem in philosophy of unproductive, ‘set ‘em up, knock ‘em down’ argumentation.  At seminars and conferences, but also in mainstream journals, there is a routine which consists in trawling through every nook and cranny of an argument – which no doubt attempts to make only the most minor and tentative of claims – and triumphantly shooting it down in flames.  It is this practice of ‘every argument guilty until proven innocent’ which prevents most philosophers from bothering to make bold speculative steps: anything but the most cautious of steps forward is pointless into such hostile terrain.

If there’s anything we should have learned from Plato over two thousand years ago, it is that philosophy is a process of collective aspiration towards truth – it is not a competition to score points in some tiresome battle for the ultimate height of self-important pretentiousness.  The latter – we shouldn’t need reminding – is sophistry.

This issue needs to be distinguished from the issue of the lack of women in professional philosophy.  The real issue here is the reinforcement of social stereotypes and gendered norms of behaviour.

[I]t is generally agreed that cultural assumptions have a powerful impact on either creating or greatly exacerbating any such differences as there may be. “There’s some very good literature showing that people are affected by stereotypes about their group,” Saul says. “So if you have a maths exam and you do something to make women conscious of the fact that they’re women before taking the exam, like having a box where you tick what your sex is, women’s scores go down and men’s scores go up. That’s how sensitive people are to these stereotypes, so if you do something to activate the stereotypes they can be very damaging.“I think logic is going to activate the same stereotype and given the importance of logic to philosophy, those stereotypes would be easily activated by a lot of philosophy as well – I think that can play a real role in maintaining the male-ness of the discipline.”

Attempting to mitigate the aggressive atmosphere prevalent in philosophy because it is off-putting to women is a misstep: this logic just reinforces the social norms whereby women are not expected to be able to deal with this sort of atmosphere.  In the end, none of us should have to deal with it, as it is extremely unhelpful, but it must be made clear that the battle for a better mode of philosophising is a distinct, gender-neutral project.  To deal with the issue of aggressiveness as a gender issue will only help to perpetuate debilitating gendered behaviour patterns and modes of thinking.

Two projects, then:

1. Purge philosophy of its sophistical argumentative atmosphere and refound the ideal of a collaborative search for truth.
2. Cease to perpetuate and actively disrupt the perpetuation of inegalitarian gendered social norms, in the academy and in society as a whole.

There is an important way in which these projects are deeply connected: it is crucial, if philosophy is to drag itself out of sophistry by its bootstraps, that it not allow itself to be susceptible to the inegalitarian ideologies that permeate our society.  Philosophy needs to subtract itself from the politics of demographic micro-management and re-engage with its speculative calling; that way, by really being a community of philosophers, professional philosophy can rid itself of the problems that infect it from our inegalitarian society at large.

community through exclusion

I’ve just read Owen Hatherley’s excellent piece on ‘austerity nostalgia and ironic authoritarianism in recession Britain’ in the latest Radical Philosophy (which I thoroughly recommend reading; if anyone wants to borrow my copy, please let me know, as the University of York library doesn’t stock it….grumble grumble…..), and it’s brought to my attention the phenomenon of ‘Community Payback’.

Community Payback is an idea struck upon by London Probation, part of the National Probation Service (NPS) (which, along with the Prison Service, is part of the delightfully New Labour-sounding National Offender Management Service).  Offenders serving community service for petty crimes can be ordered to perform their service as part of a police-escorted gang, all adorned in fetching orange hi-vis jackets emblazoned with ‘COMMUNITY PAYBACK’, paraded in front of the community against whom they have offended.  This community is encouraged to come and peruse this spectacle of hi-vis humiliation, and also to have a say in what tasks the offenders should undergo (the options presented are generally tasks that would have gone undone had the government actually had to pay for the required labour).

This scheme raises various concerns.  First of all, there’s the obvious attempt to rouse and appeal to the base reactionary sentiments of those growing sections of the electorate who feel themselves to be living in a time of social collapse and wish to lash out against ‘unruly’ elements in society, in the hopes that a bit of good old fashioned clip-round-the-ear discipline will set ‘em straight. The presence of the term ‘payback’ in the vicinity of the term ‘community’ is sufficient to indicate that the latter’s polymorphous web of implications is firmly orientated in the direction of a reactionary in-group paranoia of the outsider.

This immediate reactionism is just the surface manifestation, however, of a deeper ideological effect.  The role of community input in the Community Payback scheme is an interesting example of the liberal pseudo-democracy of the reality TV poll applied to the issue of criminal punishment.  Clearly the intent is to give the sense that crimes committed against the community are dealt with by the community, a reality which the presence of an inegalitarian policing institution speaks strongly against.  This is of course a classic example of the sort of hands-off democracy that permeates our society: the people’s input consists only in influencing the whims of specialised institutions that have already decided to a great extent the coordinates within which these decisions can be made.

Another substantive ideological implication of the scheme – which I have already touched on at the level of its blatant reactionary branding – is the way in which it tries to establish a sense of community on the basis of a ‘normal’ in-group (‘good, honest, hard-working folk who pay their council tax and keep themselves to themselves’ etc.) against a criminalised underclass of ‘troublemakers’.  Hence, crimes are not committed within the community but against it.  We should even go so far as to say that the exclusion of its criminal elements is supposed to be constitutive of a community; Community Payback builds a sense of community by turning the in-group against a fantasised criminal out-group, a fantasy made flesh under the gaudy mark of an orange hi-vis jacket.  (The works of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben are invaluable in the theorising of this sort of manoeuvre.)

This logic of criminality as constitutively excluded from community also helps to prop up an understanding of criminality which emphasises individual decision and underplays systemic factors.  Criminality is not seen as a product of a system in which we are all situated – ‘normal’ and criminal alike – as a pathological consequence of the failings of our own society, but as the product of the decisions of individuals parasitic on the community.

One last ideological consequence is the role of the spectacle in Community Payback and its relation to Britain’s culture of surveillance.  Besides the viciousness of the public humiliation of prisoners, the Community Payback scheme is an example of the present regimes commitment to a conjunction of surface spectacle with a more deeply ingrained opacity of process.  This invitation to gawp at the punishment of those who breach the rule of law – dressed up as a breaching of the sanctity of the community’s peace – forms both a stark contrast to the lack of transparency enforced by anti-terror legislation, such as the infamous law against photographing the police, and a strange mimesis of the government’s own neurotic desire for total surveillance.

The one positive point of the Community Payback scheme is that its rhetoric of the self-policing community, although it twists this image into something wholly pernicious, exposes a potential for self-organisation which belies the reality and the real intent of the scheme.  Criminality needs to be understood in the context of the internal dynamics of a community, not as its constitutive exclusion; further, a genuinely self-organised community would have to deal with this criminality through a logic of care and self-correction of systemic mistakes, not through a logic of spectacular exclusion managed by specialised institutions.

This is obviously too big a topic to get into the details of here, but I hope to post some more ideas of an egalitarian treatment of criminality in the future.

cynicism and the idea of communism

Reading John Gray’s review in the New Statesman of David Priestland’s The Red Flag: Communism and the Making of the Modern World, I was struck by the preponderance of a truly tragic but all too common theme: the possibility of communism as a dangerous delusion of Western intelligentsia.

The crimes committed in the name of communism by 20th Century regimes are hardly a revelation to us at this point, nor are the various flaws and limitations of Marxism as it was interpreted by those regimes (although this latter point is at least theoretically interesting).  I can understand that those who, like Gray, see the failures of the 20th Century’s communist states as the failure of the very idea of communism feel the need to make a parade of these failures, but it is important – and this is why the conference on the idea of communism at Birkbeck earlier this year was significant – to preserve the idea of communism in the wake of these failures.  The idea of communism – as Terry Eagleton was keen to remind the braying voices of Marxist ‘orthodoxy’ in the audience – is far older than the 20th Century, far older than Marx.  As Badiou has repeatedly emphasised, the idea of communism is as old as the idea of egalitarianism, the ideas of equality and solidarity.  It is, as I’ve said, truly tragic that prophets of cynical wisdom such as Gray see in these ideals only the dangerous delusions of dewy-eyed intellectuals and a pitiless bureaucracy of authoritarian state violence.

The inegalitarianism of this dismissal of the idea of communism runs deep: the elitism inherent in the view that these ideals of equality and solidarity are the property of an intellectual class, always imposed with Rousseauian vigour upon the plebeian masses, is palpable.  The idea of communism doesn’t belong to any particular class: it is a generic idea insofar as the ideals it localises are maximally universal.  The idea of equality is not the property of any elite, be it social, political or intellectual. To claim otherwise is to embed inequality into the very idea of equality; a delightfully dialectical cynicism.

Universal ethics, substanceless subject

In Hegel, we find an account of concrete universality whereby ethical values are universal insofar as the specificity of their affirmation by particular subjects is mediated through the sedimentation of those ethical values in the social environment.  While this nuanced account of the objectivity of ethical claims in terms of the notion of a social world has some weight when we are considering social norms or mores, it becomes problematic when we consider the universality we want to claim for ethical demands that supersede existing social norms in the name of social change.

In response to this problem, Žižek’s thought has provided some fascinating suggestions.  Žižek (in agreement with Badiou on this point) identifies precisely those excrescent elements of a situation as those who may potentially be subjectivated in the service of a universal (ethical) cause – it is precisely these subjects’ lack of social substantiality that permits them, as a singular element, to stand for the whole.  Thus, the univeral emerges in the singular not through the latter’s embeddedness in a concrete environment but through the radical exclusion from such concretion.

This has the consequence – which Badiou construes as egalitarian – that the specificity of a group’s social configuration is not the real ground from which they should make their ethical demands; the real ground of such demands is in the universal singularity of a group’s subtraction from the wider social substantiality.

I’m not yet sure what to make of all this (I’m perhaps less sure than I was a month or so ago, when I found myself in near total agreement with these points), but I do think that the following issues require further consideration:

1. What are the implications of this universality through singularity for a sustainable freedom?  Can the sort of freedom that can only be expressed through this substanceless subjectivation be sustained, or will it (should it) eventually be sedimented into the concrete universality of Hegelian norms?
2. Is the sort of substancelessness discussed here simply illusory?  Or, in other words, are we underplaying the importance of the specific issues and the cultural identity of excrescent groups?  How does this schema apply to gender and racial politics?
3. Are we genuinely transcending or simply neglecting the work of deconstructionist and postcolonialist thinkers by striving to reassert the universality of ethical demands?
4. Can this approach provide a more genuinely egalitarian alternative to Rawls’ attempt to account for both the Right (universal-singular ethical demands) and the Good (concrete social mores) within a liberal framework?

Egalitarian order, egalitarian police

The video posted on the Guardian website today showing the treatment by police of two members of Fit Watch who were documenting police activity at the Kingsnorth climate camp last year has made clear once again the need for a redefinition of the role of the police.

The police are agents of order.  What should we make of such an agency?  Increasingly, the police act in the name of an ideal of order which is counterposed to the freedom of the people; the people come to be seen as a threat to order, and thus as the enemy of the police.  This is an untenable situation – if the police are to be a tolerable presence in the world of a free people then order must be understood to play the role of a condition of the possibility of a social space in which freedom can exist.

Order clearly plays a role in any conception of a social space in which freedom is seen as the freedom to be left alone by other individuals and by the state.  But does order have a place in the dialectic of the richer freedom of an egalitarian social situation?  If there is egalitarian order, it must take the form not of authority but of organisation.  That is, an egalitarian order must be the self-imposed order of a self-organising collective, not the top-down order imposed on the people by the authority of a transcendent state.  Hence, order – in the sense of organisation – is inherent to the dialectic of an egalitarian collective: without order-as-organisation, a generic, non-hierarchical collective will lack the structural integrity required to avoid the need for order-as-authority.

What does this redemption of order imply for the police as agents of order?  Can there be an egalitarian police?  Such an idea is certainly problematic, insofar as the police – as a specific subset of the social situation tasked with the upkeep of order – seem to be bound to the imposition of order on the people by a group which is external to the people – conceived as the generic part of the situation.  The order that comes not from the generic situation but from a specific subset of the situation is order-as-authority; order-as-organisation must come from the generic as such.

If the police are to be egalitarian, then, the order of which they are agents must also be an order to which they are subject – the order-as-organisation of the generic.  If the order which the police promulgate comes from them and is imposed by them on the people, then it cannot be egalitarian.  An egalitarian police is a police that promulgates the order that the people themselves have wrought.  An egalitarian police must be wholly accountable to the people, and must seek to perpetuate an order that pre-exists them, an order born of the organisation of the people.  Complete subordination is the only appropriate relation that a specific subset tasked with the maintenance of order can have to the generic people in an egalitarian situation.

In a genuinely egalitarian space, of course, the notion of police – as the subset, ‘agents of order’ – becomes meaningless.  Every subject of the space is an agent of order, in the sense that they subjectivate the order-as-organisation of the egalitarian situation.  However, within the existing social space of the UK, where the people are not generally organised as a generic multitude, an initial egalitarianisation of order and of the police can take the form of maximal accountability of the police to the populace, and of a revision of police attitudes.  The police cannot see themselves as agents of state-order against the people; they must be agents – first and foremost – of the people.  And agents not of our interests, as these are dictated to us by the demographic calculations of the state, but of our will.