Fictitious capital

What is fictitious capital, and is it a relevant notion to understand contemporary capitalism? I recently participated in a discussion on this subject. Rather than trying to reproduce all the arguments, I will just state my own view here. But at the same time I will also try to account for at least one important conflict line that exists regarding the concept and try to elucidate what theoretical considerations underlie the disagreement.


What is fictitious capital?

To begin with, what is fictitious capital? It is capital that is not involved in production, and production here, as always in Marx, means the production of surplus value. Instead, it merely involves a claim to part of the surplus value produced elsewhere. Typical examples include interest-bearing bonds, securities and stocks. Marx' clearest explication of the concept occurs in Chapter 29 ("Banking capital's component parts") in Volume 3 of Capital, where he clarifies that fictitious capital is fictitious because it doesn't function as capital. It seeks revenue or profit without being invested in production. The “profit” expected from the investment in fictitious capital does not derive from production per se, but arises through a mere redistribution of a surplus value expected in the future. As Michael Heinrich explains:

This term [fictitious capital] does not mean that these claims cannot be redeemed. Rather, it refers to the fact that the real capital the owner originally possessed in the form of money has been advanced only once, during the purchase of stocks and bonds. After that, it is possessed by the business and is advanced by it. Securities, stocks, and bonds represent mere claims to certain payments; their ‘value’ (the market price) has nothing to do with the amount of value originally paid for these claims... (Heinrich 2012:164)

All credit does not involve fictitious capital. To illustrate with a simple example, money that is borrowed to obtain capital for investment in production is not fictitious capital. But let’s say that the creditor in return for lending money obtains a promissory note stating his or her right to a certain percentage of the surplus value expected in the future. This promissory note is not capital in itself, since the “real” capital has already been advanced and invested in production. The note is a fictitious form of capital. Regardless of its fictitious character, however, it can be traded and become the object of speculations that drive its price upwards. Trading with rights like these can become an important source of profit. It's important to note that the price of these rights is unrelated to the value law since they are decoupled from production and merely involve the redistribution of surplus-value produced elsewhere.

The relation of fictitious capital to the larger circuit of capital can be illustrated by the diagram below (which I've borrowed from here; for the original formula of M-C-...P...C’-M’, see Volume 2 of Capital). As shown in the diagram, money that doesn't find productive investment may instead chase profit by investments in bonds, shares and the like, thereby creating fictitious capital. To the diagram one might add circuits going in loops around these shares and bonds to highlight the extensive trade going on in these assets. As the diagram shows, fictitious capital isn't necessarily trapped in fictitious form. Profits amassed through fictitious capital can potentially always return to the outer circle and become real capital.

The paradoxical quality of fictitious capital

To Marx, the fictitious character of this capital doesn’t mean that it is unnecessary or superfluous in the process of capital accumulation. Why is this? Let us note that the concept has an interesting, paradoxical quality. Fictitious capital is decoupled from production, but still somehow needed by capitalism - which seems strange since capitalism is supposed to be all about the production of surplus value. The paradoxical quality is most evident in the case of banks. Capitalism needs banks and credit, but almost all of banker's capital is "purely fictitious", as Marx writes (Marx 1991: 600). What is the relation between these seemingly contradictory statements, and how is it possible to combine them? Why does capitalism need fictitious capital if the latter is unrelated to the production of surplus value?

The answer seems to be that it facilitates circulation and redistributes money to those capitalist hands where it can become invested in real production. Such facilitation is essential to capitalism. As shown in Volume 2 of Capital, capitalism must constantly strive to shorten “turnover time”, meaning that capital must constantly be channeled back, with as little delay as possible, to those capitalists who are capable of finding profitable production processes where to invest it.

That fictitious capital can facilitate circulation without itself ever being involved in production is quite evident. Even a pyramid scheme facilitates the circulation of money, redistributing it to others who possibly might know of better ways to invest the money than in a pyramid scheme. As noted by Trenkle and Kurz, fictitious capital is therefore always "real capital in spee". No matter how fictitious an investment is, the money gained through fictitious capital always has the potential to become real capital, and the more it circulates the greater the chance is that this will happen. This is also why there is no way to just remove “speculation” and only have healthy, productive investments left.

It's interesting to note that this function of facilitating circulation isn't necessarily impaired by crises that wipe out the numerical value of the fictitious capital. Even the burst of bubbles performs an important function to capital: thus the depreciation of securities "in a crisis is a powerful means of centralizing money wealth", as Marx writes (1991:599). In fact, it is easy to make the case that it is precisely in moments of crisis when speculative bubbles burst that the power of capital reasserts itself the most starkly and nakedly, with outrageous gains being made by the few while whole populations are ruined. Indeed, the burst of these bubbles almost always seem to involve huge transfers of wealth from the working class to the capitalist class. In this sense, fictitious capital represents an alternative and hugely important route to enriching the capitalists in addition to  the "regular" one represented by the production of surplus value.


The relevance of "fictitious capital" for understanding contemporary capitalism

The concept of fictitious capital seems particularly relevant for understanding contemporary capitalism. After all, aren't we living in times in which fictitious capital has completely overwhelmed and dwarfed all "real" production? The allure of the concept also lies in its seeming capacity to be generalized. In Capital, Marx applies it above all to trade in financial instruments, but wouldn't it be eminently applicable also to real estate speculation? That such a generalization of the concept would be possible is suggested by some definitions proposed by later Marxists, like the following one by Trenkle and Kurz:

Kapital ist einerseits definiert als Vernutzung ("Ausbeutung") von Lohnarbeit, andererseits als Verwandlung von Geld in mehr Geld. Fiktives Kapital entsteht dann, wenn der zweite Teil der Definition den ersten nicht mehr enthält, und zwar nicht etwa als bloß subjektive Einbildung, sondern als gesellschaftliche Realität.

This definition suggests that it would be possible to apply the concept to all transactions where capital seeks to obtain profit without being invested in production. This would open up for connecting it to what David Harvey calls "accumulation by dispossession", i.e. ongoing processes of so-called primitive accumulation. Harvey himself seems ready to make this connection. As contemporary examples of such accumulation he mentions the management and manipulation of crises, including the use of bailouts as excuse for pillaging, raiding pension funds and reducing whole populations to debt peonage (Harvey 2005) - all phenomena that are crucially mediated by fictitious capital.


Harvey and Hardt & Negri's "exchange" on fictitious capital

Still it is not self-evident that such a generalization will be fruitful and that it can be done unproblematically. One way to approach the question of the usefulness of such an operation is to look at one of the conflict lines that exist around the concept of fictitious capital. To illustrate it we can use the debate between David Harvey on the one hand and Michael Hardt and Tony Negri on the other (“Commonwealth: An Exchange”, published in Artforum 48:3, November 2009: 210-221).

First out is Harvey:

While Hardt and Negri occasionally mention financialization and concede its general importance in recent times, they have absolutely no theory of fictitious capital, no conjecture as to what it means for a market circulating six hundred trillion dollars' worth of derivatives of various kinds (and from which finance capitalists can extract vast personal wealth, like the three billion dollars George Soros gained in 2007) to be superimposed on a global economy that produces only fifty-six trillion dollars' worth of actual goods and services. This omission could be forgiven were it not for the brute fact that political subjectivities have been as deeply affected by fictitious-capital proliferation - everything from the credit-card culture to speculating on gains in housing value - as they have by any Foucauldian exercise of biopower (i.e., state power over life). Talk about immateriality!

And here's Hardt and Negri’s response:

Finance capital can be considered fictitious, in our view, only within the bounds of market relations and, in particular, in the competition among capitalists. From this standpoint, many conclude that the current crisis is due in large part to the separation between finance and real economic production, a view often accompanied by socialist rhetoric against the plutocracy and the parasitic agents of finance. When we focus not on individual capitalists but on collective capital, though, we see a different picture: Financialization is not an unproductive and/or parasitic deviation of growing rates of surplus value and collective savings but rather the central form of the accumulation of capital. Furthermore, whereas in the industrial framework the relationship between economic production and finance might have appeared as reality versus fiction, the economic forms emerging as central today cast this relationship in a new light. In fact, increasingly today the form of finance is symmetrical to the new processes of social and biopolitical production of value. The production of common goods we focus on in our book, such as the production of knowledge, codes, languages, images, services, affects, and social relations, has significant immaterial components but neither these immaterial goods nor finance are for that reason fictional.

What is the disagreement about? First let us recall how much Harvey and Hardt & Negri in fact agree about. They both agree that there has been a change in capitalism. Struggles around the “common” have become more central, reflecting the fact that the production of surplus value by exploiting wage labor is becoming less central to capitalism. Instead, capital relies for profits on processes such as “accumulation by dispossession” (a term Hardt & Negri take over from Harvey and use in their book Commonwealth) or “immaterial” commodities much more than in Marx' time. However, they disagree on how to interpret these processes. This in turn is reflected in their differing views on the relevance of the concept of "fictitious capital".

To understand the disagreement, we need to return to the question what it is that drives capital accumulation. This is arguably the central question around which Capital revolves. As we recall, the engima Marx seeks to solve is how such accumulation is possible at all. Famously, his answer is that long-term, systematic accumulation is possible only thanks to the existence of a peculiar commodity, namely labour power, which has the ability to produce more value than is required for its own reproduction. The exploitation of labour power, then, is the crucial source or motor of capital accumulation. Without it, the accumulation process would be erratic and unpredictable, dependent on the contingencies of luck and force. An example of this is the merchant capital of premodern societies that sought to obtain profits by utilizing price differences in different locations or by resorting to plunder, monopolies and political patronage. While such methods could certainly yield spectacular profits, they don't constititute a reliable way to systematically produce surplus value. The only lasting, systematic way for capitalism to grow is to rely on surplus value derived from labour power.

In view of this, it would seem that what is crucial for capital accumulation isn't so much profit in itself, as a steady production of surplus-value through the exploitation of wage labor. However, the problem with this position is that it cannot explain the explosive growth in financial capitalism in recent decades or the increasing reliance on “accumulation by dispossession”. In other words, it cannot explain why investors increasingly seek to draw profits from “fictitious capital” rather than real capital.

The alternative position would be to give up insisting on surplus value and state that what drives capitalists is simply the thirst for profit, no matter from where it is derived. Accumulation by dispossession or gains from speculation are fine as long as they yield profit. What matters to capitalism is that profits are made, not from where they come. As Wallerstein and others have pointed out, this is why capitalism has historically always been happy enough to rely on non-wage labor where it has been expedient, such as serfs in Russia, slaves in America, or unremunerated housework everywhere. The assumption that the crucial thing for capitalism is profits rather than the ability to exploit wage-labour may seem persuasive. Yet there are problems with this assumption too. It would make the value law redundant – or in any case not central to capitalism. Why is this problematic? Here we need to remind ourselves that to Marx, labour is the only reliable source of long-term capital accumulation. This means that to the extent that capitalism turns to other sources of profit than production, the process of capital accumulation will ultimately becomes less stable and orderly, more crisis-prone and more dependent on luck and violence. While fictitious capital can yield enormous profits, it's hard to organize it into a system for long-term, predictable capital accumulation.

To my mind, the concept of "fictitious capital" is still useful since it helps us trace this increasing migration of investment from production to rent and speculation and the like as sources of profit. To explain why fictitious capital is expanding is quite possible without jettisoning the idea that surplus value extracted from labour is central to long-term systematic capital accumulation (this is not a question I want to delve in too much here, but it seems to me that Arrighi for instance does a good job of it in The Long Twentieth Century). But the question then becomes: why do Hardt & Negri jettison it? To understand this we need to turn to their background in "workerist" Marxism:

Firstly, like other workerist Marxists, they see the workers as the driving force of history as well as of capitalism. Relying on the agency of the workers, they have no need for a Zusammenbruchstheorie, a theory of the inherent tendency of capitalism to break down. Capitalism is parasitical and hence in a sense perpetually in crisis, since it cannot do anything but piggyback on the workers, trying its best to keep up with them and extract profit from their powers of self-valorization. Coming from this background, it is hardly strange that Hardt & Negri see little of interest in a theory that says that a capitalism that relies increasingly on fictitious capital will tend to be more crisis-ridden.

Secondly, Hardt & Negri build on the idea that capitalism becomes more diversified as it follows the working class around. It spreads to more and more social domains, learning to profit from all kinds of everyday activities. It becomes increasingly hard (and meaningless) to try to draw any boundary between production and other activities that yield a profit. We end up with everything becoming production and everyone being a “worker” (the social worker) active in the “social factory”. When everything is production, it of course also becomes impossible to draw a boundary between real and fictitious capital.

So are they right? Is this a reasonable way to look at capitalism? Harvey obviously doesn’t think so. To him, it’s still meaningful to draw a boundary between real and fictitious capital. Not because he disagrees with the portrayal of capitalism as relying less on real production, but precisely in order to be able to trace this shift more properly. Against that, Hardt & Negri would probably reply that the pursuit of profit in new forms, through new "immaterial" forms of production, has achieved a new stability and systematicity that means that capital accumulation can rely on it in much the same way that it once centrally relied on exploiting wage labour. In reply to that, however, one might argue that Hardt & Negri don't really show that this is true in regard to fictitious capital. While they are quite right that there has been a growth in "immaterial" forms of labour, they do not clarify how this is related to the growth of financial transactions in securities, derivatives and so on - most of which seem unrelated to labour, even of the "immaterial" kind. In contrast to such fictitious capital, capital that is invested in "immaterial" commodities does involve labour, the creation of a use-value that can be consumed, and the production of surplus value. In that sense, it doesn't represent any break with Marx' analysis of capitalism as dependent on the exploitation of labour. As Negri (1999) himself has stated, labour is still the producer of value in today's capitalism, even if it has lost its role as the "measure" of value (it becomes immeasurable since it has become affective). Fictitious capital, by contrast, is not only devoid of any value input through labour; it also fails to yield any consumable use-value. Since it can never "land" in consumption, it always exists in limbo, unable to complete the circuit of capital on its own accord. As Marx points out, it remains a mere title or claim to a surplus-value produced elsewhere. To my mind, this strongly suggests that it cannot really constitute a reliable ground for systematic capital accumulation. This is also why I'm not prepared to accept the idea that all activities that yield a profit are production. This also makes it relevant to retain the distinction between real and fictitious capital.

As a matter of subjective motivation, it is probably true that capitalists will always strive for profit rather than surplus-value. This is also why fictitious capital will always attract them. It performs wonders for them: not just through direct profits, but also through the rapid redistribution of wealth that it can facilitate, especially in moments of crisis. In its ability to suddenly conjure up masses of fresh "capital" to certain capitalists, it is similar to "accumulation by dispossession", as well as to the windfalls to be had through real estate speculation. All these terms suggest operations that yield profit without any actual production happening. What makes them interesting is that capitalism today seems to rely more and more on such operations. This means that today, capitalism is increasingly driven less by value and surplus value than by profit, no matter in what form. To trace this process, the concepts of real and fictitious capital remain relevant. Marx might still be right: in the long run only the extraction of surplus value through labor power can guarantee a stable capital accumulation. But never in its history has capital been able to rely only on such extraction. There has always also been "primitive accumulation", as Rosa Luxemburg and others have pointed out - always plunder, colonialism, the extraction of money through violence and political power. But the more capitalism shifts towards such forms of accumulation, the more unstable will it be.


References

Arvidsson, Adam & Elanor Colleoni (2012) “Value in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet”, The Information Society 28(3): 135-150.

Harvey, David (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Harvey, David & Hardt, Michael & Negri, Antonio (2009) “Commonwealth: An Exchange”, Artforum 48(3): 210-221. 

Heinrich, Michael (2012) An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’ Capital, New York: Monthly Review Press.

Marx, Karl (1991) Capital: Volume III, London: Penguin.

Negri, Antonio (1999) “Value and Affect”, boundary 2 26(2): 77-88.

Trenkle, Norbert & Kurz, Robert (ND) ”Fiktives kapital”; http://www.exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=schwerpunkte&index=6&posnr=130&backtext1=text1.php

* However, there are others who, inspired by Negri, have attempted to bring together financial capital and the concept of immaterial labour. Arvidsson & Colleoni (2012), for instance, see Facebook as a clearinghouse bridging the "affective economy" of its users and financial markets. The data it gathers on the affective distance between users and a variety of potential consumer goods enables Facebook to introduce principles of valuation that operate according to a logic analogous to financial derivates, i.e. that function even in the absence of "fundamentals" like labour time. While this is suggestive, one might object that the analogy between financial derivates and Facebook isn't exact. In the case of Facebook, the ultimate point of reference remains the potential consumer - in other words "valuation" still rests on accurate referencing to a real objective world where an actual commodity can be sold. The example of Facebook, then, hardly justifies abandoning the distinction between real and ficitious capital.

   

Like a fire? Rosa Luxemburg and primitive accumulation

The idea of primitive accumulation is having a renaissance. Here I will sketch how the idea develops from Rosa Luxemburg to contemporary thinkers like David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, Giovanni Arrighi, and Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri. By right, I suppose I should have started these notes with Marx, but that will have to wait. After all this is only a blog. Suffice it to say that to Marx, primitive accumulation - the appropriation of wealth derived from non-capitalist modes of production, often through means such as fraud, looting, conquest or oppression - played a crucial part in the origin of capitalism.


Luxemburg

The first important step in the development of the idea after Marx is taken by Luxemburg. She criticizes Marx for viewing primitive accumulation as merely "incidental" to the functioning of capitalism or as "illustrating merely the genesis of capital" (Luxemburg 1951: 364). She stresses that capitalist accumulation proceeds on two tracks: both through the exploitation of wage labour emphasized by Marx and through ongoing processes of primitive accumulation (ibid. 452). Capitalism's inability to survive without primitive accumulation is part of her explanation of imperialism. Capitalism needs a non-capitalist environment into which to expand and which functions as a safety-valve that saves it from its overaccumulation crises. But this will prove to be its undoing:

Capitalism is the first mode of economy [...] which tends to engulf the entire globe and to stamp out all other economies, tolerating no rival at its side. Yet at the same time it is also the first mode of economy which is unable to exist by itself, which needs other economic systems as a medium and soil. [...] In its living history it is a contradiction in itself, and its movement of accumulation provides a solution to the conflict and aggravates it at the same time. (ibid 467)

Luxemburg conjures up the image of capitalism spreading like a fire, consuming itself: “thus capitalism prepares its own downfall under ever more violent contortions and convulsions” (ibid 453).


Harvey, Arrighi, Sassen

Contemporary authors like Harvey, Sassen or Arrighi have learnt much from Luxemburg. Like her, they stress that capital in today's world is accumulated both through the exploitation of labour and through primitive accumulation, and that spatial expansion plays an important role in maintaining capitalism. What they add is the acknowledgement that: 1) spatial expansion is sometimes a much more subtle process than the image of colonial conquest suggests, and that 2) the "non-capitalist" environment from which capitalism can draw its profits is more diversified.

Harvey develops the first of these realizations into his idea of the "spatial fix" and the second into the idea of "accumulation by dispossession" - his term for primitive accumulation. Let me start with the spatial fix. Luxemburg identified spatial expansion with imperialism, implying that capitalism’s possibilities of expansion were very nearly exhausted by the time she was writing. The “spatial fix” is something much more flexible, consisting in geographical expansions and restructurings that are used as temporary solutions to the overaccumulation crises that are inherent in capitalism. As Harvey points out, spatial fixes are available even in a world that is already more or less fully incorporated in capitalism. Spatial fixes make use of geographical unevenness, but uneveness is not simply a product of "underdevelopment". Capitalism produces its own unevenness, often plunging already “developed” regions into destructive devaluations (a central point in Neil Smith's Uneven Development). The idea implied here is that processes of primitive accumulation are turned not only against the remaining few non-capitalist formations but also against parts of capitalism itself.

Since such processes of primitive accumulation are part and parcel of today's capitalist world, Harvey prefers to term them "accumulation by dispossession". Under this rubric he includes a wide variety of phenomena which have in common the appropriation of wealth that has been formed outside the production processes of capitalism proper, i.e. not through “the expansion of wage labour” (Harvey 2005:178). It includes things like the privatization or commodification of resources like water, land or public services; intellectual copyright; "biopiracy" (”pillaging the world’s stockpile of genetic resources”); or the use of the credit system to redistribute wealth ("reducing whole populations to debt peonage" by rescue packages or managing crises in order to be able to use bailouts as an excuse for pillaging). Things like using traditional songs for making profit in the music industry or the medical knowhow of indigenous peoples in the pharmaceutical industry would be examples of accumulation by dispossession.

Arrighi's and Sassen's analyses of primitive accumulation are inspired by Harvey's and differ only in emphasis. In line with his own theory of accumulation cycles and moving hegemonies, Arrighi (2004) puts particular stress on the tendency for the core of capitalism to move geographically with the search for profitable investment through spatial fixes. Using structural adjustment programmes and the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2008 as examples, Sassen is even more emphatic than Harvey that today's processes of primitive accumulation are not about the incorporation into capitalist relations of pre-capitalist modes of production but ”the destruction of traditional capitalism in order to extract what can be extracted for the further deepening of advanced capitalism” (Sassen 2010:24).


Hardt & Negri

Hardt & Negri refer to Harvey's idea of "accumulation by dispossession" several times in their 2009 book Commonwealth, but give the idea their own peculiar twist. The "non-capitalist" environment on which capitalism feeds is here designated as the "common". The “common” is defined as consisting both of the wealth of the material world – air, water, fruits, nature – and of those social products that need to be shared in order to for social interaction and further production to take place. The latter make up an “artificial common” consisting in language, images, knowledges, affects, codes, habits, practices, and relations (Hardt & Negri 2009:viii, 139, 171). Their central claim is that capitalism increasingly tends towards a “biopolitical” stage in which it increasingly relies on the common for production, meaning that capital can only parasitize on the resources of the common without being able to create them by itself. In particular, they emphasize the urban environment as a resource for free production and creativity that is central to capitalism. The city “is to the multitude what the factory was to the industrial working class” (ibid. 250). 

Commonwealth is perhaps the book by Hardt & Negri that I like most. It has, however, its weaknesses. Some derive from their neglect of some of the factors in contemporary capitalism that Harvey and the other contemporary authors highlight. In their insistence that the new "non-capitalist" frontier is right here among "us" in the developed world, in the midst of the metropole, they tend to disregard the continuing exploitation of wage labour and the role of spatial fixes in the international division of labor - the fact, to put it bluntly, that next to post-industrial “immaterial labor” there are sweatshops too. This problem is not solved by their insertion of a rather incongruous chapter (chapter 2.1) which is full of praise for anti-colonial struggles and calls for solidarity with the south. This chapter feels too much as an ad hoc reply to certain critics (such as Caffentzis or Dyer-Witheford) and is not theoretically integrated with the rest of the work.  


The fire is still raging

To Marx, primitive accumulation was part of the origin of capitalism, but not an organic component of capitalism itself. Luxemburg took the next step, arguing that capitalism needed constant access to non-capitalist areas into which to expand. With the onset of neoliberalism, the idea of primitive accumulation gained prominence again. Authors like Harvey, Arrighi or Sassen argued that the appropriation of "non-capitalist" wealth could also take the form of predatory attacks on wealth formed within capitalist societies themselves. This transformation of the idea reaches an apogee with Hardt & Negri, for whom the "non-capitalist" environment consists of language and other common resources that make creativity possible and on which capitalism is increasingly dependent. The common denominator of the contemporary authors is that they make primitive accumulation a central feature of contemporary capitalism. Capitalism, they suggest, is losing its capacity to regenerate itself through the surplus value generated by the employment of labour-power and has to rely on appropriating wealth created elsewhere.

For some reason, neither Luxemburg nor any of the theorists of primitive accumulation today point out that their observation that capital accumulation can be driven by other sources than labour power appears to make Marx' so-called value law less relevant to understanding contemporary capitalism. As much as labour remains crucial as a source of "value" in the theoretical sense intended by Marx, I think we need to pay more attention than we have until now to the fact that capital accumulation doesn't depend on the generation of such value alone. Capital can be created through a variety of means, many of them involving the use of state power (so called free trade treaties would be a prime example) or other forms of coercion that enable profits that by far may surpass what would have been possible through the mere exploitation of wage labour.

Many Marxists hold that exploiting wage labour is the only way to generate surplus value in a systematic and long-term fashion. Thus the merchant capital of premodern societies, for instance, is said to have been unable to generate a stable process of capital accumulation since it remained almost entirely within the "sphere of circulation" rather than producing any value itself (except for transportation). Although the profits obtained by merchant capital were sometimes spectacular, it obtained them erratically, depending on the vagaries of power and luck. What is missed in this argument, however, is that power relations aren't necessarily erractic. They too can be systematic, and hence systematic capital accumulation can be based on any kind of capital - even mere merchant capital - to the extent that it can rely on a stable and predictable alliance with political power. As Luxemburg points out, this is exactly what happens with imperialism. Customs, patents, trade monopolies, administrative guidance, lobbying and trade wars are, of course, other ways in which the alliance between capital and state manifests itself.

So, capitalism cannot be understood adequately by focusing only on the extraction of surplus value through wage labour. The political conclusions from this should be clear. As Harvey points out, just as today's neoliberal capitalism is relying not only on exploiting wage labour but also on the plunder of non-capitalist formations, resistance to capitalism likewise must have a dual character. The struggle of wage laborers must be complemented by the struggle to defend things owned by the public or possessed by us in common against expropriation.


References

Arrighi, G. (2004) “Spatial and Other ‘Fixes’ of Historical Capitalism”, Journal of World-Systems Research, X:2 (Summer):527-539.

Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2009) Commonwealth, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Harvey, D. (2003) The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Harvey, D. (2006) The Limits to Capital (new edition), London & New York: Verso.

Luxemburg, R. (1951) The Accumulation of Capital (tr. Agnes Schwarzchild), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Sassen, S. (2010) ”A Savage Sorting of Winners and Losers: Contemporary Versions of Primitive Accumulation”, Globalizations 7(1-2)(March-June):23-50.

The public and its undergrowth

The public sphere has an undergrowth. Outside there are not just the caves of intimacy we call the private sphere, but also a maze of passage-ways,  alternative arenas, temporary connections, informal openings and informal gates on which the light of the public seldom or never falls.

The undergrowth is a favorite locus of the postmodern political thought that rose to prominence in the wake of the radicalism of "1968". As the pretensions of attempts to change society through open protest - in the full visibility of the public sphere and in the light, so to speak, of the sun of history - became untenable, the undergrowth turned into a place of refuge for those who still advocated resistance. Thomas Pynchon puts this idea very well:

One popular method of resistance was always just to keep moving – seeking, not a place to hide out, secure and fixed, but a state of dynamic ambiguity about where one might be any given moment, along the lines of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (Pynchon 1997, “Introduction to Jim Doge’s Stone Junction”)

In the 70s and 80s, Deleuze & Guattari started to advocate “flight” as a way to undermine the system while a “strategy of disappearance” found proponents among thinkers such as Hakim Bey and Jean Baudrillard. Strikingly, the concept of resistance now revealed itself as wedded to mobility, to flight, to vast smooth spaces, to a room of maneuver far superior to the cramped public sphere. In all these respects, the concept also presented itself as an antipode to the even more cramped private space. Resistance, in any case, was possible. Not by protest perhaps, but by disappearing from public view and finding freedom like cyberpunks in the mazes of Gibson’s cyberspace, like rats in a big house, or like the poor hunted Slothrop, fleeing his persecutors in the Zone. If the system couldn't be altered by the use of "voice" in the public sphere, then it could be altered by "exiting" to the undergrowth. The state, in Paul Virno's words, would crumble "not by a massive blow to its head, but through a mass withdrawal from its base".

When I read articles like the one by Sheller & Urry which I discussed in a recent post, I can't help thinking that it's to this post-68 current - a "tradition" already - that they are linking up. Yes, it's all there - the attempt to redfine mobility as resistance, the mood of feeling fed up with old "static" notions of the public sphere...

The idea of exit as resistance should not be underestimated. It deserves careful scrutiny, at least from two directions. On the one hand it is fairly obvious that it serves an ideological function, legitimizing or rationalizing a withdrawal from political activity under the pretext of offering resistance. But on the other, it can't be denied that exit can be a quite efficient weapen under some circumstances (provided that the opponent is dependent on your participation and you have access to good alternatives - see Hirschman!). Besides, to a person traumatized by defeat, there might not be much more to do in the way of resistance than to withdraw and take shelter in the undergrowth in order to recover his or her strength, to pick up a gun while running, so as to fight another day. Running or taking shelter all the time, however, is hardly pleasant, and to a recovering person, it is crucial to identify the moment when flight can stop and offensive action is again possible.

Let me now turn to a specific problem. How can the "undergrowth" be specified theoretically in relation to the notion of the public sphere?

Towards the end of his life Deleuze sketched the theory of the control society. This theory shows how ambiguous the relation of the "undergrowth" is to the public sphere. For instance, he points out that the fact that communication is the life-nerve of control-societies means that “[t]he key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control” (Deleuze, Negotiations, Columbia University Press 1990:175). This sounds like an advocacy of exit from the public sphere, the latter being viewed as a site of pervasive control and monitoring. However, flight teems with possibilities of counter-forays into public communication in a way which both upsets it and marks a return to the public sphere. Viruses and computer piracy, he suggests, will replace strikes and sabotage: “We’ve got to hijack speech” (ibid). The question we should now ask is: is “hijacking” a form of participation in public communication or something opposed to it?

This ambiguity remains in Hakim Bey and Negri & Hardt. All these thinkers maintain the basic idea of flight into rhizomatic complexity as a preferred form of resistance. What they add to Deleuze is a clearer emphasis on the possibility of collective resistance. The rhizome is turned into a network. Bey pictures it as a "pirate utopia" with its islands, remote hideouts, and mini-communities living outside the law. The suggestive idea of a shady “network” that might take the place of the superseded public sphere builds on the idea of a society of such complexity that no single central power really has the ability to control it any longer. “For the strategic coalescence, complexity is not just an aesthetic but a necessity, a cognitive maquis or zone of resistance, a realm of ambiguity where the uprising must find its economy, its heartlands.” (“10. Volkways”, in Millennium). What is envisioned is the guerrilla tactics of striking and running away, in the manner of a nomadic war-machine. Negri & Hardt similarly pin much on the argument that the networks of the control society are open to the possibility of resistance, because their effectiveness and hence survival to a large extent depends on the freedom of movement allowed within it. “The same design element that ensures survival, decentralization, is also what makes control of the network so difficult” (Hardt & Negri 2000:299).

These three examples - Deleuze, Bey and Hardt & Negri - show that despite an ostentative use of the rhetoric of exit ("flight", "disappearance", "desertion", or "exodus"), none of them are actually advocating any pure one-way exit from the public sphere. In fact, it is even dubious if it can be said that they advocate exit as resistance at all.  Resistance comes when one stops in order to use the picked-up gun, when one occupies part of the enemy territory in the form of a T.A.Z or when the diffused multitudes suddenly converge again, fed up with "withdrawing from the base" and intent instead on "dealing a massive blow to the head" as in Seattle. As I've pointed out elsewhere, there is an ambiguity in the rhetoric of exit as resistance which is particularly glaring in the case of Hardt & Negri.

In Empire (2000) the main examples of desertion and exodus are refugees, migrant labour, escaped slaves, and the mass-emigrations that triggered the fall of the Berlin Wall. Resting on a myriad of individual decisions – a “diffusion of singularities” – rather than organized movement, the effect of these desertions is said to be to silently weaken the system of power, undermining it rather than fighting it. [...]. In Multitude (2004) and other recent texts the concept of exodus tends to be broadened into a metaphor of resistance as such, including voice and public confrontation. Simultaneously, the central image illustrating the concept shifts to the mass-demonstrations of the alter-globalization movement in Seattle and Genoa. The result of these changes is that the concept becomes more confrontational – what is needed is not simply to abandon or “undermine” power by depriving it of participation and support but actively to turn against it and topple it, through “a blow to its head” to use Virno’s words. This vacillation indicates a basic unresolved dilemma. The more they stress the undermining effects of the withdrawal of various subaltern groups from imperial control, the thinner the link to organized resistance becomes. Conversely, the more they connect their theory to the present surge in anti-corporate and anti-war activism, the more its empirical content tends to merge with the traditional movement repertoire of voice and public confrontation.

However, here I will try to present a counter-argument to myself. Perhaps the "undergrowth" is essentially contradictory. If that is so, then resting content with merely criticizing this contradiction will risk blinding oneself to the fact that this undergrowth nevertheless exists and fulfills a variety of functions. Seen from the vantage-point of the "public sphere" it will perhaps inescapably appear ambiguous and contradictory, as neither pure "exit" nor pure" participation". 

Let us ask, however, if there is any other vantage-point from which these ambiguous forms of resistance would appear natural, self-evident and comprehensible. Might not autonomy be one such viewpoint? Whatever autonomy might mean, it sure doesn't mean that we need to adjust - and all to often "participation" means just that, to adjust oneself to some form of rule. But neither does autonomy mean that we must confine ourselves to non-participation. That too would be heteronomy. To act autonomously means to act in ways that can't be confined to either participation or non-participation. Could we say, perhaps, that the "undergrowth" is a place for autonomy? Or if that is too strongly put: a place where we can expand our room for autonomy?

The Riots 7: Do you think we might join hands?

Here’s another long entry, which I write to follow up my previous notes on riots and bring them a little closer to if not a conclusion, then at least a semblance of order.

Part I: Negri, the Invisible Committee, and Rancière on the riots

So I am suggesting that the riots could be seen as part of a striving for autonomy. Fine, but haven’t I left a whole lot of questions unanswered? If the rioters are out after autonomy in the face of the spectacle, pride in the face of exclusion and the police, purveyors of an economy of “theft and gift” in the face of the neoliberal market, wouldn't then solidarity with the precarity movement – at least with its anarchist or autonomous wing – appear natural, logical? Why then don’t we see much more cooperation and solidarity between them? Are the differences between the “autonomy” of the rioters and that championed by the activists too great, perhaps even unbridgeable? A clue to this can be gained from what the activists and intellectuals of this movement themselves have to say about the riots.

Let us start by listening to what some of the more well-known intellectuals. I don’t think there is any more need for me to pay any further homage to Badiou (see this previous entry). I will instead give some (brief) attention to Negri, Rancière and the Invisible Committee. I can state already here that I am critical of all of them.


Negri

This interview with Negri – conducted at the time of the Paris riots in 2005 – is perhaps best known for his statement that the cars burned because their owners didn’t go out to defend them. As a whole the interview offers an instructive contrast to Badiou. Like Badiou, Negri is an enthusiastic supporter of the rioters (albeit with reservations: it fails to qualify fully as a proper “insurrection”), but for different reasons. To Negri, the rioters are in need of a theorist since they lack political awareness: “This movement wants something, but it does not yet know what it wants” (Negri 2005). He has no qualms about stepping in as their interpreter. The riot, he states, is above all a revolt against the neo-liberal Empire (that is how I understand his talk about the “crisis of Fordism”, “economic globalization” and “neoliberal cuts in public spending”).

This interpretation is substantiated somewhat in Commonwealth (coauthored with Hardt, 2009), but the basic message is similar: the "urban jacquerie" of the 2005 riots was an expression of indignation in the banliues, the “emblematic space of the precarious worker”. But as a challenge to empire it is insufficient. A revolution needs institutions to make itsself lasting and effective and ways must therefore be found of moving from jacqueri to organization (Hardt & Negri 2009:239, 245f, 259).

While not necessarily wrong, this is a perfect example of an ideological explanation: an explanation that could have been made without listening to the rioters themselves, that fits the theory just a little bit too well, and which teaches us nothing about the riots. In fact, it is highly predictable to anyone familiar with Negri’s theories. Despite the frequent appearance of the riots in the book, I can't help suspecting that the riots never mattered much to Negri, at least not the way Seattle or Genova did. An example of this is that they appear to have left no imprint on his and Hardt’s theory of the “three cycles” of protest in the anti-globalization movement (the first inaugurated by Seattle, the second by the anti-war mobilizations in the wake of 9.11, and the third by Heiligendamm). Let me conclude by saying that I think the texts by Negri mentioned here exemplify a widespread tendency among radical intellectuals to close their ears to the rioters. As far as I can judge, the latter have been quite ready to formulate their demands verbally, above all their complaints against the police. Instead of taking them on their word, however, commentators have been prone to lament their lack of political awareness, meaning a lack of explicit antagonism against neo-liberalism or global capitalism. As I’ve already stated, I believe that Badiou is one of the few radical intellectuals who has been honest enough to see the riots as fully justified even if they’re “only” motivated by a desire to get back at the police for once, or, in other words, even if the rioters lack all but the most rudimentary awareness of or interest in global capitalism.

The invisible committee

The “invisible committee” is already famous as the collective author of The Coming Insurrection and as a group that carries on the Situationist legacy in France. Unlike Negri, the authors of this book explicitly accord the “flames of November 2005” an exemplary, paradigmatic value. “Those first joyous fires were the baptism of a decade full of promise” (The Invisible Committee 2009:24). The book is full of statements endorsing the riots. For instance, seeing teachers whining about their school being burned downn on the evening news, the authors “remember how many times, as children, we dreamed of doing exactly this” (Ibid 38). Above all, the tactics of the rioters offers a model to be followed:

Not making ourselves visible, but instead turning the anonymity to which we’ve been relegated to our advantage, and through conspiracy, nocturnal or faceless actions, creating an invulnerable position of attack. The fires of November 2005 offer a model for this. No leader, no demands, no organization, but words, gestures, complicities. To be socially nothing is not a humiliating condition… but is on the contrary the condition for maximum freedom of action. (Ibid. 113)

However, I am skeptical of the authors’ idea of these riots. I see the riots as rooted in a desire to act out anger, get revenge and restore pride. I don’t see them as a model for any calculating, strategic plotting to topple the spectacle as the authors of this book seem to do. It's easy to feel sympathy for Coupat – one of the alleged authors – after his arrest, but I feel far less sympathy for the book. To be frank, I’m a bit downcast at what these authors have done to the Situationist legacy. No longer is the spectacle to be combated through détournements, shocking happenings or poetic terrorism. The structure is to be physically immobilized by striking at its vulnerable supply lines, in the style of guerillas. Sabotage becomes the primary means of liberation, a far more non-communicative means of combat that any of the Situationists’ acts of symbolic violence. I may be naïve, but I really like the ideal of everyone – and I mean everyone – having fun together. This is an ideal the Invisible Committee has thrown on the garbage heap.


Rancière

If we turn to Rancière, finally, we find a rather hesitant and ambivalent attitude to the 2005 riots. On the one hand, he believes that the riots come short of real political action since they have failed to put forward a “political proposition” directed at their opponents with whom they share the social field (Rancière 2006a). They are therefore lacking something – a kind of verbal self-consciousness – that would be necessary for true politics. But on the other hand we should remember, as he stresses in another piece that also briefly touches on the riots, that politics to him is about the configuration of the “sensible”, of what can be perceived as possible. It is not something purely or merely verbal. It has to do with the senses. Politics is not simply a clash of words. It starts with “dissensus”, the contention that “there is not one reality”. Far more than being a merely verbal disagreement, dissensus is about “reframing the very field of the given, of the sensible, the intelligible and, consequently, the possible. It is about putting in the unique common world of the consensual logics several worlds, conflicting worlds” (ibid 2006b). To Rancière, such a clash of worlds happens above all through the process of “subjectivization”, the self-definition in public of previously neglected or invisible groups (the “part of the uncounted”) which upsets the field since they refuse pregiven categories. Applying these ideas to the 2005 riots, he opposes interpretations such as Finkelkrauts (see my discussion in this entry), who see the rioters as guided by a consumerist ideology. These voices all sees the rioters as caught up in a single “world” or “police” taken as a configuration of the possible, a neoliberal world in which the market is absolute or a given. What emerges from Rancière's texts is therefore a deeply ambivalent picture. Doesn’t his rejection of interpretations such as Finkelkraut’s imply that the riots have at least taken important steps towards a true “politics” in his sense? He claims not to regard the riots as politics, but this seems unfair from the point of view of his own theory of politics as the emergence of other worlds. At the very least, one should concede that they meant a big no, the appearance of a huge “dissensus” that shook the established field.


The contrast to the Situationist International

What triggered my excursus into what these radical intellectuals have had to say about the riots was the obvious overlap between some of their concepts and what the rioters seemed to be doing. For instance, the seemingly pointless burning of cars can easily be understood as taking pleasure in the confrontation itself, regardless of future goals. Isn’t this similar to Negri’s strategy of autonomous separation, desertion or exodus rather than dialectical conflict? Isn’t he too interested in delineating the idea of a social movement less interested in appealing to or demanding things from authorities than in the creative formation of a new life, in being able to lead their own life while having as much fun as one can, without having to feel like victims? Aren’t autonomists and rioters alike groping for forms of public confrontation that eschew classical forms of “voice” and political participation? Aren’t they both rushing in the direction of an exit or desertion of the established field of political dialogue – an exit which, however, doesn’t take the form of quietly withdrawing to some alternative sphere of living, enclave, or subculture, but which instead, in the manner of Rancière’s “politics” always simultaneously involves a challenge and confrontation that necessarily appears provocative and outrageous from the point of view of the existing “police”? Despite this overlap, however, none of the radical intellectuals discussed above seem interested in discussing these similarities.

This attitude contrasts to that of the Situationist International, which in 1965 greeted the Watts riots in L.A. as a “rebellion against the commodity” driven by the “demand to really life” which momentarily realized an economy of “theft and gift”. The important thing was that this was done “in festive celebration, in playful self-assertion, in the potlatch of destruction. People who destroy commodities show their human superiority over commodities” (Situanionist International 2006:197). Famously, they also wrote that the riot was the first rebellion in history to justify itself with the argument that there was no air conditioning during a heat wave” (Ibid 200). That is to say: the Watts rioters didn’t riot because they were victims, because they lacked something which the state could give them. They rioted because it was their pleasure, because they were no slaves, but free people who didn’t have to put up with anything. I feel a great deal of sympathy for this way of looking at the riots. Unfortunately, however, it’s not easy to come across similar views today of the riots in recent years in the banlieus or suburbs of Europe.


Part II: A way towards convergence

So is there any prospect of a fruitful convergence, alliance or even fusion between the movement of the immigrant youth and that of autonomist radicals? Here I can only sketch an answer. I take for granted that the reader will understand that most sketches end up in the waste basket.

To the "progressive" Left an alliance between a variety of immigrant organizations or immigrant movements is certainly possible and the fact that such alliances already exist is a welcome development. But whatever was expressed in the "movement" of the rioters, and I for one can't help feeling that this "something" was extraordinarily important, appears to me to be rather far from the "progressivist" camp. Commentators have already pointed out a number of differences between what we can call the standpoint of the "rioters" and that of the "leftists".

For instance, Alain Touraine points out two differences between the suburban riots of 2005 and the wave of student protest which erupted the same year. The first is the difference in social position.

The immigrants are wholly disoriented and set fire to cars since they can’t articulate themselves and lack advocates. The students by contrast are far more privileged and receive enormous support through their unions. Despite this the immigrants and the students share the feeling of discrimination and exclusion: the suburban youth have already stood outside society for a long time, while the students fear an impeded future, which could just as well turn them into excluded tomorrow. (Touraine 2006)

This portrayal of the student protesters is in keeping with his disparaging view of today’s precarity movement as driven less by political hopes than by fear of the future, by the desire to protect the rights and concessions they have already won. This difference in social position is important. However, it is also important to point out that this defensive posture is not shared by the autonomist/anarchist wing of the precarity movement. Unlike workers and students fearful to lose their privileges, this wing ought to be a a possible ally of the immigrant youth. In Japan too it is possible to discern two wings of the precarity movement: one making up the so-called “anti-poverty” movement and the other being animated rather by what could be called a “viva poverty” ethos (a largely anarchist ethnos which I’ve already given some glimpses of in connection with Dame-ren and Kubikubi Café).

Touraine also points to a second difference, namely that suburban riots are better seen as cultural struggles than as social movements. While the rioters rebel against social and economic exclusion, the exclusion is also experienced as cultural and the protest against poverty is therefore also a call for cultural recognition (Touraine 2006). This statement is vague, but as I’ve remarked in my previous entry, I agree that culture plays an important role in the riots, albeit a should underline that this is better seen as a wholly new culture, a culture in the process of being produced, rather than any stereotypical cultural essence. I don’t believe at all that a recognition of culture as a central element of struggle should be an impediment to cooperation between rioters and activists. I won’t enter into the difficult question of how compatible the various version of an alternative culture are that these groups may produce. Certainly there is a risk of cultural collisions – for instance regarding limitations on the freedom of women – but there are also signs of new cultures and lifestyles being born which are shared across ethnic borderlines.

A third possible difference is indicated in the rather condescending view of the riots that can be found among many commentators on the Left. We have already seen that Touraine describes the riots as “wholly disoriented” and lacking the ability to articulate their demands. Comments like that are surprisingly common. Negri and Ranciêre make similar comments, as we recall. And Zizek writes that “the recent revolt was just an outburst with no pretense to any kind of positive vision” (Zizek). Wiewiorka remarks that the riots “produce no discourse… they are typically crisis behaviours, and not at all a movement” (Wieviorka 2005). Even Lapeyronnie, one of their most understanding interpreters, thinks that the alienation of the rioters from the political system means that they remain caught in a helpless dependence on the political system from which they try to elicit understanding and concessions (Lapeyronnie 2006). The list can be made to go on and one. I’ve already stated several times that I believe that views like these are unfair, especially among activists of autonomous persuation who are the ones who more than anyone have advocated strategies of exodus, flight and desertion as better suited to the resistance of the multitudes than using established channels of protest. To the extent that the riots were motivated by being loyal to one’s desires – for instance, restoring one’s sense of pride by making fools of the police and authorities – they share the motivations of much anarchist and autonomist activism.

To summarize so far, I believe that the differences which various commentators have pointed out between the rioters and precarity activists are valid above all for those precarity activists engaged in the kind of struggle highlighted by what I have called the “progressive” interpretation, that is, the movement for social inclusion, for gaining or preserving a variety of rights and guarantees or livelihood and official support. If one instead compares the rioters to the activists oriented towards anarchism or autonomy, the differences almost melt away. Doesn't this suggest an affinity? Just as there are ways in which a "progressive" left might join hands with "respectable" immigrant organizations, might there not be room for a comraderie of rioters and autonomists? I am not saying, as the Invisible Committee, that the tactics of rioting is always right. I think that depends on the degree of oppression. All I'm saying is that I do think it would be good if the marginals, minorities, the discriminated and the dropouts could come together and help each other a little more often - and that the obstacles might be less serious than we think.


Part III: Freeters and immigrants

I will finish the entry by stating briefly why I believe that the problem of the solidarity between freeters and immigrants will become more pressing in Japan in the future. Here is my prognosis. After the media and opinion storm which has been continually growing in strength in recent years against the “reforms that went too far” – a common expression used for the deregulations and privatizations which reached a climax under the premiership of Koizumi – Japanese authorities are bound to take at least some measures to ameliorate the working conditions or freeters and other irregular workers in Japan. To the extent that their situation improves, it seems logical to expect that companies will respond by increasing the flow of immigrant labour. The DJP – the most important governing party in Japan – will probably welcome that development and may also try to further it through legislation. How will the freeters active in the precarity movement respond to this situation? Two difficulties can be predicted. Firstly, it may be harder to gain the support of the general public when the “victims” of precarity are no longer Japanese. There is a danger of growing nationalism. Already today groups like Zaitokukai (see this previous entry) have appeared. Secondly, there will be difficulties in creating a sense of solidarity within the movement between freeters and immigrant workers. Until now, freeters have been able to portray themselves as marginals and excluded. “Poverty” has been a personally directly felt (“mijika na”) problem, a problem of which they could feel themselves to be the direct victims or people most directed concerned (“tôjisha”). Among freeter activists there is also a rather widespread distrust against philanthropy and people who “support others” out of “compassion” or idealistic motives (“dôjô shite hito o tasukete ageru”). Being a “tôjisha”, a directly concerned victim, is often said to the most authentic way of participating in a movement. However, isn’t there a risk that this rejection of “compassion” and “helping others” will be used to justify cold-heartedness and indifference to the situation of immigrant workers? If freeter should concern themselves only with their “own” problems, should they simply drop out of the movement when their own situation improves? Will they be able to shed the jargon about the primacy of being a “tôjisha”, or will they perhaps be able to formulate some new conceptual framework in which they and immigrants will both be “tôjisha”?


References

Hardt, Michael & Negri, Antonio (2009) Commonwealth, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Negri (2005) “Finally a Little Revolt”, interviewed by Jacopo Iacoboni (orig. La Stampa 2005-11-12)

Invisible Committee, The (2009) The Coming Insurrection, Los Angeles: semiotext(e).

Rancière (2006a) “Our police order: What can be said, seen, and done”, interview by Truls Lie, Eurozine (contribution by Le Monde diplomatique)

Rancière (2006b) “Misadventures of Universality”, paper presented at the Moscow Biennale's Conference on Philosophy, Politics, and Art, 17 November 2006

Situationist International (2006) “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy”, pp 194-203, in Knabb, Ken (ed. & tr.) Situationist International Anthology, Berkeley: the Bureau of Public Secrets.

Touraine (2006) “Explosion möglich”, Die Zeit 2006-03-23, Nr. 13-23 (March)

Wieviorka, Michel (2005) “Violence in France”

Zizek, “Some Politically Incorrect Reflections on Violence in France & Related Matters”