1
Wolfgang Haug
On the dialectics of anti-capitalism
Draft translation
Starring at evil contains an element of fascination. That way, however, also an element of consent.
(Horkheimer/Sorno, Dialectics of Enlightenment, 264)
The thought baffled me. Was that my thought? That was the thought of the enemy. Was I my own enemy? I distanced myself from myself, that means, I imagined a man who looked at me from outside.
(Volker Braun, The Iron Car, 234)
The first massive appearance of a diverse movement of globalisation critics in Seattle 1999, greeted as the “new daybreak” by Ramonet (2000), may not have rung in a revolutionary turn in the world, but in the way to turn against the rulers of world capitalism, it has brought about a turn of the globalisation critics towards the world. A memorable dialectics has converted them into the pioneers of another kind of globalisation. With a term borrowed from French, we call them “Alterglobalists”. Their world-wide movement has conjured from the paralyzing trauma of state socialism the new dream of a world that would no longer be capitalist without nonetheless falling prey to the almightiness of a state apparatus. Since then, not only slogans critical of capitalism, but also anti-capitalist slogans increasingly find an echo. Along with that grows the need for clarification.
1) Dialectics or the crisis of anti-capitalism
The words are close together. What they designate, is different at first sight: critique of capitalism names what is bad in capitalism in order to change it. Anti-capitalism wants to eliminate capitalism. Critique of capitalism has a second meaning, different in its category and settled on another level than the first, namely the criticism of political economy, as the expressive title of the Marxian theory of capital goes. In turn, there are also many forms of anti-capitalism, roughly speaking, you may distinguish regressive from progressive ones. The following attempt at clarification aims at progressive anti-capitalism. Who has learnt from Marx, will see its turn and angle pointin that it is concerned with elimination of capitalism towards the future, on the basis of the material and personal productive forces that capital has produced. Yet immediately, objections are voiced that bring into play the Dialectics of Enlightenment, following which “technical rationality today […] is the rationality of power itself (CW 3, 142).
If we try to contribute to clarification in the form of a “dialectics”, we shall not have an academically definitive notion of that in mind. The “thing itself”, of which it is the matter here, cannot be grasped from an apparently extraterrestrial vantage point. We are ourselves at issue, “since, as Vico says, human history distinguishes itself from natural history that we have made the one and not the other.” (MEW 23, 393, fn. 89). However, our history is made in such a way that what comes out in the end was usually not thought that way. It is important to avoid such confusion of the done with the thought, and that is what matters in our question for the dialectic of our practice of capitalism critique. Asking that way, we try to drive half-way things towards decision, pre-determinedness towards a more flexible self-relativity and to get limitations in view in order to transgress them. The limits meant follow from short-sighted intervention in the moving ensemble of our social conditions. If the conditions react back, we make the experience that our goal-directed action misses the goal “unconsciously” and leads to something that with Engels can be sketched as in its further consequences “unintended; the historical actors have either directly wanted something else than the aimed-for, or this aimed-for draws in its wake quite different unpredicted goals again” (39/428). We need to conceive of these turns. In general, however, what “hangs together with conflict, collision and struggle”, as Brecht urges us, “can in no way be treated without materialistic dialectics” (CW 23, 376). It is needed for dealing with the “surprises of the logically progressive or jumping developments, the instability of all situations, the joke of contradictions etc.” (CW 16, 702). That begins with the fact that every struggle creates a sort of unity among those fighting one another. If, however, we suffer from the “surprises of jumpy developments” from in back and the “joke of contradictions” takes place at our expenses, we can speak of passive dialectics.[1]The dialectics of anti-capitalism has to do first of all with that. To deal with passive dialectics means to work on the capacity for practical dialectics. Naïve anti-capitalism has its original rights. But if it does not evolve, it holds for it, what Lenin observed in the old social democracy, still understanding itself as ‘Marxist’: “Dialectics is being replaced by eclecticism.” (SR, LW 21, 412)[2] As long as that is the case and it does not learn to deal with contradictions that its environment holds ready for it, it will at least remain helpless,[3] if it does not even call forth counter-effects that make it resemble more to its enemy image.
Even if misunderstandings cannot be avoided, let there be advanced a few sentences likely to be misunderstood “so as to prevent misunderstanding”. The attempt to get to know the tricks of the dialectics of a field where one acts oneself, the claim to get the solidified positions of this field into a moving context, without being able to avoid to take position oneself, after all seems to entangle itself in an insoluble contradiction. In fact, we are interested, following Spinoza’s insight that any determination is a negation, in every position in its negation, which is its limit. Since that way all single figures are criticised, none is thrown out, this attempt, moreover, risks double anger, partly, because no condemnation takes place, partly, because no justification is given either. We do no longer depart, like Lukács, from one homogenous totality, but from criss-crossing totalisations that usher in incomplete entities (that constantly fall apart again as well). Moreover, our reflections are situated in the process itself. Neither will we have to announce an apparently absolute truth, nor a patent recipe for solving problems.
2) Danger of monopolisation from the right and mortgage of Stalinist
The question for the dialectics of anti-capitalism does not come out of vain sunshine. The sky of capitalism is obscured by the plagues that precisely it, just because of its up to now unsurpassed productivity, brings over “the earth and the worker”: over-accumulation of capital and massive consumerism here[4], under-consumption here, massive overworking of some at the expense of massive unemployment of the others, product and capital destruction wars, resource wars and consumption of absolute resources, the conditions for life on this planet. Since the dignified survival of the human species – and with it countless animal and plant species – is in question, there are more and stronger questions than ever for a critique of capitalism. Nevertheless, the destructions that it organises still do not lack the creative moment. A system that has saved the computer from the catacombs of nuclear war preparations and elevated to the general “guiding productive force” (Haug 2003, 38f.) is historically not yet finished, even if “capitalism of any degree is not in a position to really transpose the ‘high’ in the ‘new technology’ really into a ‘new economy’” (Krysmanski 2001), but only realises its potential only selectively and often enough in a destructive way. The productivity of this literally in-human developmental machine that we call capitalism cannot be separated from its destructivity. That has consequences for the struggle against these. You cannot simply decree that the time of “transitional necessity of the capitalist mode of production” (MEW 23. 617) was over, even if the system moves at its historical border.[5] We shall return later on to this contradiction[6] that can catch anti-capitalism on its wrong foot.
The sky of anti-capitalism is also clouded in other ways. For mainly two reasons. First of all, anti-capitalist motivations can also be caught by right-wing populist, authoritarian, yes, even fascist and racist agitation (compare on that Christina Kaindl in this issue). Where the “anti” in anti-capitalism gets it by a long shot over the “pro” in favour of the socialist project, this danger is particularly great. For the moment, you may be able to get result with anti-capitalist rhetoric. But the approval gained that way is mood first of all, and as such inconsistent in force as well as in orientation. Comparable to the enlistment of human rights for the US-led wars, anti-capitalist motives can also be enlisted for reactionary mobilisation. Indeed, “Sharia and Jihad” after all aspire to make themselves “the spearhead of anti-capitalism world-wide” as the magazine Bahamas infuses it to the naïve anti-capitalists, of course without saying that the former are in many respects the products of just this Western-staged capitalism.
If already the threatening monopolisation from the right admonishes the Left to self-examination, the tipping over of the social liberation project of the 20th century into a repressive and, after considerable industrialisation and urbanisation, increasingly inefficient developmental dictatorships makes such self-questioning completely inescapable. This defeat paired with self-betrayal[7] weighs on any anti-capitalist project. Historical self-criticism is the prerequisite of all further criticism.
How are we going to deal with this inheritance? Shall we, as far as Stalinism is concerned, whitewash ourselves by calling it “the most extreme form of capitalism” (Harman 2000) and blaming it on capitalism? Shall we excommunicate the Communist movement of the 20th century from the history of the left as long as we did not have a personal share in it? Shall we reduce the state society issued from the revolution of 1917 by way of civil wars and economic crisis to the dictatorial “police state” whose socialism was “mere mask” (McNally 2006) and assure to want the exact opposite in every respect?
In order to escape Stalinism, it seems spontaneously correct to distance ourselves as far as possible from the discredited social forms. Where that was hierarchical and centralised, we take refuge in the rainbow pattern of leadership- and rule-less addition. In place of repressive unity we put unconnected diversity. Let nothing happen “from the top”, everything “from below”. Let us announce, therefore, with McNally that we want to abolish the rule of commodities, money and capital and at every moment want to realise the will of the majority in shaping of production and distribution? That, moreover, total freedom should reign with us? Should we, following Holloway, declare both revolution and reformism to be equally “state.centred approaches” and, together with the “state illusion” also leave behind the “power illusion” that consists in the idea that “changing society was only a question of conquering positions of power or getting powerful in some way or other”, while we write the demand on our flags to “dissolve all relationships of power” (Holloway 2003, 814f.)?
But by then the dialectics of anti-capitalism already have caught up with us from behind that back then encouraged the transformation into the opposite, and our project is protected against the repetition of this bad magic if at all than by lack of success. Because Stalinism was the project of a passive dialectics acting from in back, uncontrolled by the actors and in this sense passive dialectics. Nicos Poulantzas developed the insight in 1979[8], following which the perspective of complete immediacy where “consequently democracy will also disappear as soon as the state disappears” (LW 25, 409), there is already dormant its extreme contrast, the total dictatorial mediation. The elimination of institutions, legitimated by such visions the most radically in Lenin’s State and Revolution of institutions, above all those of law and people’s representation[9] - which is something completely different than to abolish pre-democratic bastions in these and other apparatuses of rule -, tipped over into direct and total rule. The fetish “only from below” transformed itself into the fetish “only from the top”. Who answers to that with the renewed fetish of the only from below, starts the circle anew. If one considers this connection, then the degradation starts not with Stalin who by his command economy flanked by state terror “has done immeasurable damage to the ideas of socialism and communism” (Mc Nally), but in the form of the counter-extreme, already the ‘naïve’ anti-capitalism of the first hour. Engel’s perspective of elimination of the commodity-money relations from Anti-Dühring after the October revolution was in part even implemented 1:1. In the light of the complete historical novelty of a socialism in power for which there was no precedent and no experience, such naiveté was maybe comprehensible. However, to us the Communist experiences of the 20th century prohibit this categorically. The corresponding insights must be handed on: “direct communism”[10]landed in total state mediacy, imaginary direct democracy in really immediate state power. The pushing aside of contradictions landed in the paranoid return of the repressed. The student movement added to that additional experience of how the elimination of regulated leadership tips over into charismatic, uncontrolled leadership.
Who therefore, with the Zapatistas wishes for a world “in which many worlds find a place” is well-advised to invest everything into the political art of translating polyphony into a common language. If there is a lack of political culture and the correspondingly gifted political moderators of a plural unity, the many worlds shall divide and at last rip each other apart. The materialistic state theory should help us understand that even extra-state institutions need to develop capacities and for that purposes need to create funding institution who can take from the state apparatus the things taken from society and can fetch them back into civil society. To an extra-parliamentary movement as constant thorn of the parliamentary representation of the Left, Gramsci moreover imposes the inside that they themselves with their proclaimed “extra-stateliness” owed to an inescapable dialectics of things themselves have not left the state as such, but moves in the social part of the integral state. To look at civil society as something that is external to the state densification of relationship of forces would be flat bourgeois liberalism.
3) “It’s the economy, stupid”
An anti-capitalism that does not at least also speak also of the hard economic and political necessities begins the fatal game again. Marx did not yield to this desire of the ‘beautiful soul’. Precisely there, where in Capital he gives room to the realm of liberty, “where working determined by necessity and external need stops” and “the human unfolding of forces serving as its own end can flourish”, he clarifies in honest sobriety that this, under all conceivable circumstances, will depend “on the realm of necessity as its basis”: “Liberty in this domain can only consist in that the socialised person, the associated producers regulate this metabolism with nature in a rational way, bring it under the common control, instead of being ruled by it like a blind power; execute it with the lowest expenditure of forces and under the conditions worthy and adequate to their human nature. But this always remains a realm of necessity.” (MEW 25, 828)
The Communist experience of the 20th century shows that the problem of socialisation of production and distribution is still unsolved. A left that means seriously its idea of “another world” different from capitalism, will have to evaluate the corresponding approaches and experiences in a careful way. Necessity is the other side of freedom. The GDR solution: “Work along, plan along, govern along” shows the continually correct task that, seized in a wrong way and under most unfavourable circumstances, could not be solved. Who therefore believes that in 1989/91, it was “Stalinism” that collapsed is in ignorance of just this necessity for a basis. In reality, it was Gorbachev’s democratisation project that collapsed back then, last but not least, because on the basis of the structural heritage of Stalinism and the “colossal erosion of the human factor” (Butenko 1988, Haug 1989, 156-59) Some speakers seem to believe completely that you could free the poor one’s of this world alone, or at least primarily politically, by way of democracy, from their poverty, instead of economically. In such speeches the hard necessity yawns like a black hole that devours any comprehension of reality. It would lead to catastrophic defeats and plunge whole countries into a deep hole, if we were to leave the aggregate “overall worker” (Marx), this commanded collective actor in the realm of necessity, aside and waged exclusively on the ‘marginalised’.[11] At best rhetorically can the demand for filling in the sketch of the alternative be satisfied, as long as one does not think it to the end. No alternative path leads past the productive block of a society that includes the working class and the technical-organisational intelligentsia. “Serious anti-capitalist must go further than to simply demonstrate in opposition to the system, they must find ways to open themselves up this power.” (Harman 2000). The problem of an anti-capitalist movement of a socially capable breadth is none other but that of the political parties with a social aspiration: They must manage the splits between the relevant parts of the economic core area and the marginalised. That is one of its needs to operate with antinomies. We shall return to this practical-dialectical art.