Commentary SympoSium: return to KeyneS?No New Deal Is Possibleantonio negri ................................................................................................. 2

Keynesianism ConstrainedJim tomlinson ................................................................................................. 6

The Politics of the Long Runyutaka nagahara .......................................................................................... 10

artiCleSThe Will of the People: Notes Towards a Dialectical Voluntarismpeter Hallward .............................................................................................. 17

After Life: De Anima and Unhuman Politicseugene thacker ............................................................................................. 31

The Jargon of Finitude: Or, Materialism TodayBruno Bosteels .............................................................................................. 41

reviewSPatrick Barrett, Daniel Chavez and Csar Rodrguez-Garavito, eds, The New Latin American Left: Utopia RebornJon Beasley-murray ...................................................................................... 48

Dayan Jayatilleka, Fidels Ethics of Violence: The Moral Dimension of the Political Thought of Fidel Castronathan Coombs ............................................................................................ 51

Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War EconomyJean-Jacques lecercle ................................................................................. 53

Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, On Reason: Rationality in a World of Cultural Conflict and Racismalessandra tanesini ...................................................................................... 56

Colin Milburn, Nanovision: Engineering the Futurenathan Brown............................................................................................... 57

Alenka Zupani, The Odd One In: On Comedytom eyers ...................................................................................................... 60

newSUniversity Occupations over Gazamona Baker ................................................................................................... 62

ConferenCe reportCelebrity Come Communism: On the Idea of Communism, 1315 March 2009matthew Charles ......................................................................................... 64

Gender Trouble at the Birkbeck Boys Institute for the HumanitiesmH ................................................................................................................ 64

ContentS155

Radical Philosophy Ltd

r a d i C a l p H i l o S o p H ya j o u r n a l o f s o c i a l i s t a n d f e m i n i s t p h i l o s o p h y

Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd.www.radicalphilosophy.com

may/June 2009

Copyedited and typeset by illuminati www.illuminatibooks.co.ukLayout by Peter Osborne, David Cunningham and Matt Charles Printed by Russell Press, Russell House, Bulwell Lane, Basford, Nottingham NG6 0BTBookshop distribution UK: Central Books, 115 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN Tel: 020 8986 4854USA: Ubiquity Distributors Inc., 607 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217 Tel: 718 875 5491Cover image ric Alliez, Red Pyramid, 2009.

editorial collectiveClaudia Aradau, Matthew Charles, David Cunningham, Howard Feather, Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie, Stewart Martin, Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford, Chris WilbertContributors

Antonio Negris books include The Politics of Subversion (1989; 2005), Insurgencies (1992; trans. 1999), Time for Revolution (2003), and, with Michael Hardt, Labour of Dionysus (1994), Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004).Jim Tomlinson is Bonar Professor of Modern History at the University of Dundee. His most recent book is The Wilson Governments 19641970, vol. III: Economic Policy (2004). Yutaka Nagahara is a Professor of Japanese Economic History at Hosei University, where he also teaches Marxian theory and French philosophies. He is the translator of numerous works into Japanese, including books by iek and Badiou.Peter Hallward teaches in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University. His most recent books are Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment (Verso, 2007) and Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (Verso, 2006).Eugene Thacker is Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and co-author of The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (University of Minnesota Press, 2007).Bruno Bosteels is Associate Professor of Romance Studies, Cornell University. He is the author of two forthcoming books, Badiou and Politics (Duke University Press) and Marx and Freud in Latin America (Columbia University Press).

2 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 5 5 ( M a y / J u n e 2 0 0 9 )

Commentary SympoSium

No New Deal is possibleantonio negri

John Maynard Keynes was a gentleman that is, an honest bourgeois, not a petty-bourgeois like Proudhon, or an ideologue, but an easy man and when political economy was still concerned with the political ordering of market and society every classical economist knew this. Keynes thought that knowledge functioned factually and that, in the culture of pragmatism, a teleological dispositif needed to be brought into the analysis of series of phenomena and their assemblage; that by organizing the order of facts one could cautiously and efficiently construct the order of reason. In his case, this dispositif consisted in securing the reproduction of the capitalist system.

In Keyness times economic science was not that horrid little mathematical device that all variants of financial adventurism and derivations of rent now have at their dis-posal. Now we know what happens when this mathematization ends up in the hands of dodgers individualism This is not to say that mathematics has nothing to do with eco-nomics or other disciplines; quite the opposite: it can be useful and productive for politi-cal economy, but at a completely different level. One instance is where neo-Keynsianism resulted from the encounter between socialist planners in the Soviet Union (or the liberal planners of the New Deal) and the mathematicians of market rationalization invented by Lon Walras. But for Keynes and his contemporaries the relationship between reason and reality was still entirely political: capital still sought clarity for itself.

Keynes entered the scene of economic science and the political field of the critique of political economy at the end of World War I, as a member of the British delega-tion at the Conference of Versailles. Shocked by the stupidity of the politicians who wanted to crush Germany with further impoverishment, he stated in The Economic Consequences of Peace: Vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp. In 1919 witness to the folly of elites who, engaged in reshaping the postwar order in fear of the powerful appeal of Red October, tried to apply the methods of classical imperialism inside Europe Keynes already warned against that final civil war between the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilization and the progress of our generation. He realized that the Russian Revolution had completely changed the political economy of capitalism, the market was definitively broken, and that one divided into two (as a Communist leader would later say).

The fact that capitalist development was traversed and prefigured by class struggle and its movements had to be acknowledged, and Keynes expressed a first sign of this realization when he wrote: Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society. So he scientifically tackled this political problem: how to use currency and finance to defeat communism. On Keyness trail this became the main question of political economy for the whole of the twentieth century.

3Keyness communism of capital

Keynes believed in the virtues of finance; he even had an equivocal relationship with the Stock Exchange until he got kicked in the teeth as often happens even to the most adept. (I disagree here with his biographer Harrod, who claimed that Keynes had financial speculation in his heart.) From Keyness realistic point of view, the virtue of finance was that it was the beating heart of capitalism. Keynes subverted the old moralist conceptions that, from the Middle Ages to Hilferding, had downplayed and disqualified the hegemony of money in the production of wealth and the reproduction of social order. Against them, Keynes claimed that financial markets functioned as wealth multipliers. Can this theoretical assumption still be valid in a period of economic crisis? Of course it can, he asserted from his position in the middle of the crisis that started in the 1920s and assumed gigantic proportions by the end of the same decade. The state will have to intervene in society and reorganize it productively: Thus it is to our best advantage to reduce the rate of interest to that point relatively to the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital at which there is full employment.1

This was how the entire therapeutic cookbook of Keynsianism emerged out of the crisis that kept affecting development. In building a new model of equilibrium whilst being pragmatic and keeping the continuous lack of equilibrium in mind, Keynes proposed to determine a persisting imbalance of state initiative through deficit spending. However, this deficit created new margins for effective demand and aided the develop-ment of capitalist dynamics whilst accepting the severe rigidity in workers wages. This was the way class struggle got reabsorbed into the system of capital.

Keyness proposal was wholly progressivist. He fully recognized it when, in the negotiations leading to the establishment of the Bretton Woods system of international monetary relations, he faced the opposition of the conservative representatives of Washington who were not willing to allow the currency of reference to forget a real

standard, as this standard was the dollar that functioned as a means to organize labour and its international division based on the accumulation of gold in the US Central Bank. For them, deficit spending which each capitalist and national govern-ment could have advanced so as to progressively contain the movements of its national working class, who sought to change society and break the capitalist yoke needed to be controlled by a capitalist centre, the Komintern of Wall Street. Farewell to the illusion of bancor, Keyness great invention, an ideal currency based on free exchange that could have given way to the establishment of different equilibriums that referred to the desires of populations and the intensity of the struggle of the organ-ized working class

Keynes was a serious capitalist: he knew that with reaction and

return to KeyneS?

4revolution, on the one hand, and an established socialist power, on the other, there was no third way of defending capitalist interests, only a more advanced political synthesis. Deriding the hegemony of real production, Keynes believed that when confronted with production production here as civil society finance could become the mediation of opposing class interests, the construction of a new model of capitalism. Against Bolshevism Keynes refuted the slogan Power to the workers and its corollary legitimization he who will not work shall not eat.2 He also realized that socialism and communism went beyond the prospects of constructing a new order of labour and these primitive watchwords and banal political objectives. According to Keynes, communism could represent the totality of abstract labour extracted from the totality of workers in society, every citizen, and hence all socialized human beings. Accepting these paradoxi-cal exclamations, we could now say that communism is the form of the biopolitical, intending by biopolitical the fact that not only society but also life has been put to the work of commodity production and that not only social relations but the relationship between minds and bodies have been made productive. With great foresight, Keynes seems to have understood the advent of what we now call the communism of capital.

Keynes wished to contain class struggle within the rules of a society where the exploitation of labour was directed not simply towards the production of profit but also towards progress in the satisfaction of needs. We can understand how strong was his hatred for the rentier! Keynes thought that anyone willing to save the capitalist system must hope for the euthanasia of the rentier, and he saw this as a morally legitimate and politically urgent task, because the rentier is anarchic, selfish, and exploits the posses-sion of land and estates, metropolitan spaces, as well as the labour that surrounds them and keeps valorizing them. The rentier spends nothing in the game; he earns without working and wins without fighting. This squalid exploiter has to be eliminated. And here he reached the highest point of the capitalist intelligence that spent the twentieth century trying to understand its enemy in class struggle.

fighting for basic income

Allow me a smile at this point. Keynes looks like a subversive genius, in view of the centrality of rent to the post-industrial system of organization of contemporary capital. Today no political leader or economic thinker has the courage to attack rent. All we see are moralistic sweeps against the obvious thieves and corruptors of banking credit systems. But who is attacking the habitual and surreptitious thieves, the rentiers who are worse than the usurers? Who will ever bring into the frame the sacred, both real and symbolic, foundation of every form of property? Keynes tried, to no avail, but at least he tried

The attack on rent was certainly the highlight of Keyness political discourse but also the point where the illusory character of his reasoning becomes manifest. In fact, as he developed his progressivist discourse aimed at salvaging capitalism, Keynes too often forgot the preconditions on which it rested. Two preconditions were insuperable and, in his view, beyond doubt: one was that colonial power, as an accomplished fact and a tendency, had finally consolidated; the other was that the form assumed by the organization of class relations in trade unions and the social welfare infrastructure in Europe was definitive. The difficulty with presenting Keynesianism as the dominant theory of development between the second half of the twentieth century and the begin-ning of the twenty-first century derives from the massive transformations of labour, class composition and the geopolitical dimensions of class struggle. From this perspec-tive, from the turn of our century, Keynes is no more than an event, an intellectual flash of intuition of the twentieth century, at the endpoint of the long crisis of Western capitalism. His response to the Soviet revolution was adequate and representative of the hegemonic urge to bring class struggle under the control and development of capital,

5but no more than that. It failed to account for the global extension of class struggle, the end of colonialism, and, above all, the exhaustion of the ability of capital to transform modes of exploitation and accumulation in the First World. Look at what happened after Keynes: the revolution advanced through the underdeveloped world preventing capital from governing with the instruments of classical colonialism; dependency gave way to interdependency; capital won by globalizing and unifying itself, but at the same time it also lost, because the old order was certainly destroyed and building a new one is a hard task. That is why it is impossible to recuperate Keynes today.

The reason is easy to explain: the Keynesian New Deal was the outcome of an institutional configuration based on three essential prerequisites: a nation-state capable of independently developing national economic policies; the ability to measure profits and wages inside a relation of redistribution that is democratically accepted; and industrial relations that allow for a dialectics between the interests of the enterprise and the move-ments and demands of the working class that can be agreed upon in a legal framework. None of these prerequisites exists in the present circumstances of political economy.

The nation-state is in crisis because of the processes of internationalization of production and financial globalization, which are the grounds for a definition of a supranational imperial power. Furthermore, the dynamics of productivity increasingly tend to depend on immaterial production and the involvement of human and cognitive faculties that are hard to measure by traditional criteria, so social productivity makes it impossible to ground the regulation of wages on the relationship to productivity. The crisis of the trade unions is, from this perspective, exemplary albeit not definitive of the development of contemporary capitalism. And so when we come to the crisis of contractual relations, all the subjects of Keynesian agreements are absent. Moreover, the only thing capitalist interests share is the pursuit of short-term profit, first, and the radical exploitation of the chances for enjoying rent from land, estate and services, second. All of this makes it practically impossible to formulate progressive reforms.

As a result, there is no room for any institutional policy of reform in contemporary capitalism. The structural instability of capitalism is definitive, no New Deal is possible. If we really want to make the effort of resurrecting Keynes, we should direct his deficit spending his idea of the socialization of investments towards the institutions of basic income and towards policies that anticipate new forms of development and organ-ize the fiscal structure of the state in relation to the global productivity of the system that is, the productive power of all citizens. By doing so we would probably move beyond the measures and anthropological requirements of a capitalist society, especially well beyond the ideologies of individualism (of property and patrimony) and the political consequences of its development. Basic income is more than a wage; it is the recognition of the exploitation that affects not only workers but everyone who is avail-able to capitalist organization in society. Fighting for a basic income and recognizing this reality already signals a move beyond the image of capitalist ownership. One has divided into two: whilst Keynes incessantly worked to close this division and redirect all social struggles to the One, in a Hobbesian way, today sees the opening of this divi-sion and of struggles. A season of class struggle is probably flourishing. Keynes loved dance (he married a dancer), not flowers (he was allergic to them).

translated by arianna Bove

notes 1. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936, ch. 24. 2. The saying Qui non laborat, non manducet originally appeared in the Bible, 2 Thes-

salonians, 3. It notably recurred in Jeremy Benthams (1797) Writings on the Poor Laws as the No work no eat principle. In other languages it appears as No mill, no meal, Il faut travailler, qui veut manger (Fr.), Wer nicht arbeitet, soll auch nicht essen (Ger.), Chi non lavora non mangia (Ital.), El que no trabaja, no come (Sp.) [Trans.].

6 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 5 5 ( M a y / J u n e 2 0 0 9 )

Keynesianism constrainedJim tomlinson

the current economic crisis has reignited a debate about Keynesianism that many had thought only of historical interest. This commentary suggests that the revival of Keynesianism undermines a key assumption of almost all accounts of postwar capitalism, namely that it can be fundamentally divided into a Keynesian and a post-Keynesian period.

Keynesianism is taken here to mean the use by national governments of their taxing and spending power to alter the overall level of economic activity. Across the developed world national governments are pursuing expansionary fiscal policies, and accumulating public deficits, as part of their attempts to limit the recessionary impact of the banking crisis. While there is much debate about the precise shape of such packages, almost all countries have some measures of this character planned or enacted. A few voices have raised concerns about the long-term impact of such packages, but they have been ineffective against the compelling need felt by most governments to be seen to be using all possible instruments to stave off economic collapse.

These events clearly contradict the narrative of economic policy developments which sees Keynesian policies as a product of the middle years of the twentieth century, ideo-logically challenged and then comprehensively defeated by monetarism and neoliberal economics from the 1970s onwards. For many commentators this ideological shift was in turn rooted in a transformation of the productive character of capitalist economies, so the end of Keynesianism reflected not just ideological defeat for the centre-Left, but a profound transformation in the nature of capitalist economies. For this narrative, the revival of Keynesian policies in the early twenty-first century appears incompre-hensible. There has been no sustained ideological challenge to the predominance of neoliberalism, nor an identified shift back to the economic structure that is purported to have been the material base for the earlier phase of Keynesianism. Clearly that narrative needs to be revised.

Perhaps the best place to start that revision is to ask the simple question, what are the conditions of existence of Keynesian policies?1

Big government

The most important of these conditions is the existence of big government. If manipu-lations of spending and taxation are to make a significant difference they must be a large part of national income. While Keynesianism did not cause the rise of big government in the twentieth century, its effectiveness was predicated on that rise. That connection is, of course, why conservatives have always been at best wary if not hostile to Keynesianism, notwithstanding that Keyness own political project was to save liberal capitalism.

Challenges to Keynesianism from the 1970s were very much associated with attacks on contemporary levels of public spending and taxation, with allegations of an over-mighty and inefficient state. The result of these attacks in most Western countries was an end to the rapid rise in the size of the public sector which characterized the

71960s and early 1970s. The fiscal crisis of the state is undoubtedly central to the weakening of Keynesianism under the Thatcher and Reagan governments and later in other Western countries. But that rolling back of the state had clear limits. Across the OECD world the story of the last three decades is not one of inexorable state retrench-ment, but of a break in the expansionary trend in the 1970s, followed by stabilization, and latterly renewed expansion in some countries.

Here we need to distinguish between the ideological battle where belief in the efficacy of government action has undoubtedly been on the defensive across the Western world for most of the last four decades and government action, which has been driven by electorally powerful forces towards higher spending, notably ageing populations, and the revolution of rising expectations in popular understanding about physical and mental health. Similar expectations about education, combined with governmental com-mitments to upskill their workforces, have driven huge expansions in state spending on education. In sum, the welfare state, however compromised by marketization and partnerships with the private sector, has continued to expand.

In Britain this is strikingly evident in the huge expansions at the beginning of this century, the biggest ever sustained increase in a short period. In the USA welfarism has been particularly on the defensive ideologically (at least up to the election of Obama), but even there, in practice, spending has increased. This is in part disguised, as in veteran support, which provides a hidden welfare state to so many Americans, and also in penal Keynesianism, with rising state spending on fighting crime, and especially on imprisonment, a well-aimed method of taking over 2 million of the least employable out of the labour market.

For effective Keynesianism government spending has to be not only big, but also subject to effective national control. In more federal systems, like the USA and Germany, this has always been an issue. American states are constitutionally bound to run balanced budgets, and in the 1930s this led to expanding federal programmes being offset by state-level retrenchment. This time, however, the Obama plan includes federal subsidies to states to help them sustain their spending as their tax revenues are hit by the recession. So far it has been taken for granted that what matters for Keynesianism is the size and capacity of national governments. This focus is, of course, wholly at odds with notions that globalization has rendered national states largely impotent in the face of global economic forces. What are we to make of such claims?

Globalization and national economics

First, it is vital to get a sensible historical perspective on globalization. Ever since the rise of modern capitalism national economies have been interconnected with each other. In the late nineteenth century these interconnections were immensely strengthened with the enormous expansion of international trade based on steam shipping, railways and national policies favouring trade expansion, even if few counties went the whole hog with free trade. After 1870 these trade flows were accompanied by unparalleled flows of capital and labour, creating what economic historians stress was the first great age of globalization.2 While much of this globalization was a one-off creation of European expansion into North America and Australasia, it was by no means restricted to those areas, with much of Asia, especially, drawn, willingly or unwillingly, into large-scale economic interaction with the rest of the world.

While the interwar period saw a retreat from the heights of globalization reached by 1914, few countries even attempted to retreat to full economic isolation. The transmission of the slump of the 1930s around the world well demonstrated how strong international economic links still were. Paradoxically, it was in the country which continued to have the most internationally integrated economy (even if below the hyper-globalized levels of 1914), Britain, where Keynesianism was born. While

8Keynesian textbook models occasionally assumed a closed economy for the purposes of exposition, Keyness own life work was largely concentrated on making national economic management compatible with continuing high levels of international economic integration. While seemingly sometimes despairing of this dual project in the depths of the 1930s slump, Keyness work in the 1940s in attempting to create new international economic institutions was clearly predicated on the belief that Britains interest lay in combining national policies of full employment with maximization of trade and long-term capital flows between countries.

Keynesianism, then, has nearly always operated in countries with substantial open-ness to international economic forces. The national economy may always have been a myth, but it is not a myth that Keynesians have historically had to subscribe to.3 But what about now, after the recent period of renewed globalization in the late twentieth century? Is there still a significantly autonomous national economy to be the object of Keynesian (or indeed any other kind of) management?

The trends here are mixed. The above emphasis on the continuing existence of a high-spending state for national policy could be offset if state expenditures were largely spent on imports, either by the state itself, or by the recipients of transfer payments, such as pensions and social security. However, taking the British case, most direct state spending on services like the NHS and education is on staff sala-ries, so the impact, like that of transfer payments, depends on what consumers spend their money on. The long-term trends have been for consumers, as well as paying more in taxes to pay for public serv-ices, to spend a smaller proportion of their incomes on food and, more recently, less on manufactured goods, and more on services. As regards food, there has been a definite trend to deglobalization. Britain is far less dependent on imported food than before 1914, when two-thirds of all British food consump-tion relied on imports.

Manufactured goods are the quintessential inter-nationally traded items. The long-term trends are twofold. On the one hand, a world of freer trade and the rise of new industrial nations has sharply raised the proportion of consumption of manufactures sourced from abroad. On the other hand, the signifi-cance of manufactured goods to total consumption (and production) has declined. As regards the portmanteau category of services the story is also mixed. Some of these (tourism and travel, for example), and some financial services, are highly internationally tradable. But many services are defined by being personal requiring the personal presence of the supplier at the place of consumption (restaurants, live entertainment, hairdressers and other beauty providers, shops). Also notable is the expansion of personal-care services such as childcare, and care for the elderly and infirm. Thus many private services are akin to the major public services of health and education in requiring the human touch as a large component of what is purchased, and so lacking international tradability. From all these trends has emerged an aggregate trade picture which suggests that open-ness to trade today is only fractionally above where it was in 1913.

For migration the picture is more straightforward. Compared with the pre-1913 period, the scale of movement of people in and out of the major Western countries is significantly lower relative to their total populations. While migration may well

9have effects on wage levels in both sending and recipient countries, these are likely to be relatively small in aggregate, though may have serious implications for particular categories of workers.

The area where the effects of globalization on national economies is focused is international capital flows. Again, it is worth stressing that pre-1913 such flows were enormous, and certainly in the British case are smaller today than they were then. For most OECD countries they are only at similar levels. It is also worth noting that globalization is in many respects a misnomer here, as many of these flows are confined to limited geographical areas, though there have been some recent shifts as a result of the rapid industrialization of India and China.4 The crucial question is: how far do these flows undermine the conditions for national economic management?

Cred

One term often deployed here is the race to the bottom, which suggests that faced with internationally mobile capital, countries will slash tax (and hence spending) to retain their attractiveness to international investors. But there is no good evidence of this occurring tax rates on corporations have fallen a little in many OECD countries, but this has been offset by parallel cuts in corporate tax allowances. The evidence on spending certainly doesnt suggest national governments are finding it impossible to finance that spending because of capital flight.

If we divide capital flows into direct (much of which is long-term and carried out by multinational companies) and portfolio (which is predominantly short-term buying and selling of financial assets) we can get a handle on what is happening. On the direct side, the mobility of such capital is constrained by the embeddedness of much of multinationals activity in local supply chains, based on specific transport and commu-nication networks in local (national) systems of commercial and patent law; in local labour markets, welfare systems and patterns of workplace regulation. All this means that the footloose nature of such capital is often exaggerated. It does move, but not readily, and not in response to every national policy change.

For short-term national economic management it is portfolio investment, where the costs of moving are usually vanishingly small, that is the constraint on national Keynesian policies. But how much of a constraint?

This issue is an old one. Ever since national governments sought to manage their economies they have been subject to the constraint of a potential adverse response by international financial markets, leading to a loss of confidence, capital flight, and enormous pressures to change direction. Such scenarios were enacted under the British Labour government of 192931, and later in the 1930s under the Blum government in France. Both countries endured similar problems, in Britain in the mid-1970s and under the Mitterrand presidency in France in the early 1980s. These episodes make it clear that in order to pursue national economic management governments have to pursue policies acceptable to international financial markets. In modern terminology, they have to sustain policy credibility if they are not to be forced to change direction.5

But sustaining such credibility does not rule out Keynesian policies. The key issues for participants in international capital markets are inflation (actual and anticipated) and the scale of public borrowing.6 If inflation is deemed out of control, and borrowing is expanding at a rapid rate, then the markets are likely to see such policies as unaccept-able and force a change of course and such conclusions are more likely to be drawn if the government in power is on the left, and therefore seen as more likely to take risks with inflation and public borrowing levels.

The 1970s in Britain are instructive on this point. In 1974/5 inflation and public borrowing appeared to be getting out of control, the Labour government was forced by a loss of confidence to tighten policy from 1975, and after much excitement in 1976 this

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restrictive policy was given a seal of approval by the IMF. By 1978 the government was able once again to pursue mildly expansionary fiscal policies, as by then inflation and public borrowing were clearly under control. This episode suggests that Keynesian policies are compatible with sustaining credibility as long as they are measured and not too ambitious, though plainly what is deemed reasonable by financial markets is likely to shift over time rather than being a fixed entity.

Constrained Keynesianism is the only type that ever existed in the Western countries. In the light of the above, the revival of so-called Keynesianism may be seen as unsurprising. Governments possess the calculating machinery necessary to gauge the effects of manipulating the very high levels of spending and taxation they control. There is a separable economic domain within which their actions are (subject to leakages) effective call it, for the sake of argument, a national economy. If they calculate carefully they can finance their policies without suffering a loss of confidence, especially as fears of inflation are absent. Of course, the satisfaction of these conditions of existence does not necessarily bring such policies into being that also requires the necessary political calculation. But in a self-reinforcing way, if such policies do not threaten a loss of confidence then the political calculus shifts towards Keynesianism by greatly reducing the potential downside of expansionary policies. The possibility of mitigating a recession otherwise likely to bring all sorts of difficult policy dilemmas, as well as electoral unpopularity, is likely to prove extremely attractive.

notes 1. See Jim Tomlinson, Why Was There Never a Keynesian Revolution in Economic Policy?, Economy

and Society 10, 1981, pp. 7287. 2. Martin Daunton, Britain and Globalization since 1850: I. Creating a Global Order, 18501914,

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 16, 2006, pp. 138. 3. Hugo Radice, The National Economy A Keynesian Myth?, Capital and Class 22, 1984, pp.

11140. 4. Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalization in Question, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999. 5. Gordon Brown, The Conditions for High and Stable Growth and Employment, Economic Journal

111, 2001, pp. 3044; Ben Clift and Jim Tomlinson, Credible Keynesianism? New Labour Macro-economic Policy and the Political Economy of Coarse Tuning, British Journal of Political Science 37, 2006, pp. 4769.

6. Layna Mosley, Global Capital and National Governments, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003.

The politics of the long runyutaka nagahara

It is proper to State deterritorialization to moderate the superior deterritorialization of capital and to provide the latter with compensatory reterritorializations.

Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

How did the neoliberal globalization of the last thirty-five years change the structure of capitalism? Or, to put it in Deleuze and Guattaris terms, what hap-pened, after globalization, to the state moderation of the superior deterritorial-ization of capital to the state which capital has to fall back on in order to be able to

11

continue its apparent perpetual accumulation? This is the crucial point at issue in the current crisis, not only for those trying to reterritorialize capital, but also for those in search of another world. Let us hear first from two legitimate heirs of Keynes: Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz.

animal spirits of the short run

Krugman, who proudly distinguishes himself from the masses of what he calls the vulgar Keynesians, keeps on emitting the message that depression economics has returned.1 He is confident of his analysis that as a political remedy for the current crisis an interest-rate cut has already lost its usual effectivity to boost the economy, since it is ultimately evaluated inside the shrunken market. The sole policy for Krugman is, therefore, the fearless and bold interventions of the state into the atrophied market, temporarily ignoring the already cumulatively enormous budget deficit:

[I]n normal times modesty and prudence in policy goals are good things. Under current conditions, however, its much better to err on the side of doing too much than on the side of doing too little. The risk, if the stimulus plan turns out to be more than needed, is that the economy might overheat, leading to inflation but the Federal Reserve can always head off that threat by raising interest rates. On the other hand, if the stimulus plan is too small theres nothing the Fed can do to make up for the shortfall. So when depression economics prevails, prudence is folly.

Living in the world of the short run, Krugman also reproves those who are reluctant to employ financial devices, being timidly nervous about so-called crowding-out, asserting that there is no trade-off between whats good in the short run and whats good for the long run. Clearly, he is insisting on a short-run strong fiscal expansion only on behalf of the long-run prospects. In this respect he is undoubtedly a genuine Keynesian who is accustomed to taking the state on trust. However, due to his short-term world, Krugman strategically avoids going deeper into topics such as the enhanced regulation of financial capital and the repositioning (i.e. recentring) of the US dollar.

On the other hand, Joseph Stiglitz strategically insists that the current situation is a chance for the reconstruction of a new world economic order.2 Interestingly, this places him close to Henry Kissinger, who has volunteered to shill Obama, enticing him to launch a project for the (re-)establishment of the new world order.3 Stiglitz also strongly admonishes us that [e]ven Adam Smith recognized that unregulated markets will try to restrict competition. He develops this further:

Adam Smith, the father of modern economists, argued that the pursuit of self-interest (profit-making by competitive firms) would lead, as if by an invisible hand, to general well-being. But for over a quarter of a century, we have known that Smiths conclusions do not hold when there is imperfect information and all markets, especially financial markets, are characterised by information imperfections. The reason the invisible hand often seems invis-ible is that it is not there. No modern economy can function well without the government playing an important role. Even free marketeers are now turning to the government.4

Having given a sincere hommage to the principle of the market and the Smithian invisible hand, Stiglitz therefore appeals to us for the necessity of a new kind of publicprivate partnership and/or a new balance between market and government. This is because he is deeply convinced that, in relation the Keynesian expectation backed up by the Keynesian convention (about which Krugman cautiously holds his tongue), the possible recovery from the current crisis will experience neither a V-shaped (short and sharp) nor a U-shaped (longer but milder) curve, but rather an L-shaped one. In other words, he has never doubted that rash and impatient policy is highly likely to end up with another disaster in the near future.5

The problem here revolves around the difference between the twin concepts of the short run and the long run, which in turn connotes the implicit difference between

12

the recentering (Krugman) and the decentering (Stiglitz) of the axis of the world economy, changing concomitantly with the historical shift of American capitalism. In particular, we need to think about what this doublet of the short run and long run means, theoretically, in connection with the state (form) from which economists have been trying clandestinely to avert their scientific insights, in the name of a makeshift concept such as policy, despite the fact that the sole subject of the policy is obviously the capitalist state?6

the spinning wheel

The seductive bitter-sweet smell that the term crisis emits is particularly attractive in Japan, where the economic situation is about to trigger a political crisis for the impotent prime minister Taro Asou. Before talking about Keynesian devices, we cannot fail to notice the starting point of this kind of crisis, which Marx eloquently described:

Such a crisis occurs only where the ongoing chain of payments has been fully developed, along with an artificial system for settling them. Whenever there is a general disturbance of the mechanism, money suddenly and immediately changes over from its merely nominal shape, money of account, into hard cash. Profane commodities can no longer replace it. The bourgeois, drunk with prosperity and arrogantly certain of himself, has just declared that money is a purely imaginary creation. Commodities alone are money, he said. But now the opposite cry resounds over the markets of the world: only money is a commodity.7

In the last decade or so, everything, including even the currencies on the forefront of which sovereignties are deeply carved (with an exception like the euro), became commodities, ending up with a situation where only money is a commodity, and as its recto the profane commodities produced in the so-called real economies seem to disappear totally from the surface. Under such a situation, where capital completes itself as fictitious capital pure and simple, and devotes itself only to the production of nominal differences on the surface, not only pensioners (in the original sense of the word), as a matter of course, but also the workers who produce the profane commodities, and even the state per se, appear to become the pensioner or the rentier in a wider sense of the word. Does capitals deterritorialization of everything including debts subprime problems escape its reterritorialization by the state? Under the normal conditions of this inversion, what is supposed to occur?

So-called modern economics are premissed on the creed that What goes up must come down. Spinning wheel got to go round.8 That is to say, behind the creed there must also lie the expectation that What comes down must go up. It implies an optimistic faith in the return of real and profane commodities as the sole wealth, and the restarting of production, despite the fact that the real economy is already totally financialized (or securitized) and plunging into a phase of instantanisme rather than prsentisme.9 This is what the business cycle unconsciously sets forth as an optimistic premiss, ignoring how it manages to transmogrify itself. The standpoint with which the business cycle arms itself is the immaculate kyklos as such. It takes for granted that the boom (or, rather, the bubble) is the normal state of economies and therefore the crisis is abnormal. On this presumption alone are the devices of anti-cyclical policies scaffolded.

The alarming problem for this kind of optimistic standpoint, backed only by long-run expectation, is not only how to gauge the Keynesian expectation by which the turning point of the cycles must be measured, but also how to find reliable carriers of the social (overhead) cost to sustain the expectation as the convention, until the boom/bubble comes back. However, if the time of the bottoming-out is always discovered belatedly, then the problem becomes how long we have to hold out the so-called recession and the pain associated with it. And, more importantly, who is supposed to shoulder its destruction and pain?

13

The accusation that capital does not care how much labour will be destroyed no longer holds. As Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin point out, labour is now organized as the specific pensioner, even before retirement, and is captured by the speculative markets manipulated by the so-called shadow banking system even while still having to work for a living.10 With regard to this situation, which was fixed during the globalization of the last decade, it is unfair to condemn workers for being bribed by the ideological apparatuses of the state. The problem about how long the juxtaposition of the plethora of capital and the redundancy of labour the very definition of crisis in the Marxian sense

can endure the two closely connected destructions together must become a central political theme, which cannot be conflated with the rescue of capitalism.11 In which case, then, we have to say straightfor-wardly that the shorter the holidays from work the better, so as not to condemn to premature death those who do not deserve it.

the Keynesian state: expectation and convention

On 28 January 2008, when the last phase of the bubble was about to burst, former President Bush delivered the last State of the Union

address and proclaimed that in the long run, Americans can be confident about our economic growth. He also repeated, on 18 October 2008, when the acute meltdown was already clear from the viewpoint of the short run that in the long run our economy will bounce back. These two political statements immediately provoked cyber (network) dwellers to recall Keyness famous statement, in order to scoff at Bush.

This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs [the short run]. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.12

Based on Keyness statesmanship of the short run, we can criticize Bushs two addresses as those of a man pretending nothing is amiss in order to conceal his resourcelessness as a politician, miserable bluster for the presidential election to come. However, there is another piece of classical Keynes that deals with the postwar regime, and the Bretton Wood Agreement of 1944, which should be posthumously taken as his political will. Here, Keynes is a genuine classical economist:

In the long run more fundamental forces may be at work, if all goes well, tending towards equilibrium Here is an attempt to use what we have learnt from modern experience and modern analysis, not to defeat, but to implement the wisdom of Adam Smith.13

As is also clear in his famous metaphor of the beauty contest by which he tried to describe the self-referentiality of the market,14 the Keynes who engages with current affairs in the short run is forced to behave as a resolved statesman (and he actually did), from which we can draw a generalization: the principle of the short run should be nothing but the political decision, even if it is given an ostensibly rational or rather, axiomatic explanation by the theory of economics.

Of course, there have been a lot of arguments about chapter 12 being some kind of derailment of The General Theory as a whole, and a psychology rather than a part of macroeconomic theory. However, can we be so simple and naive? Keynes is way smarter than those who style themselves Keynesians. Why do so many economists, including me, an adamant Marxist, have prosaic predilections for chapter 12? It is partly because in order to reduce the uncertainty of the self-referential and beauty-contest-like market by fixing a long-term expectation in the short run (i.e. in advance), it is neces-sary even for neoliberalism to expect, or fall back on, the state which functions as the non-market device that can sustain the long-standing and stable conventions for the promotion of the animal spirits of capitals.15

14

In this sense, Keynesian convention is nothing but the capitalist state as such, which is expected to stably bolster capitalist expectations in the long run. Hence, chapter 12 should be grasped as a systemic derailment of The General Theory. In other words, for Keynesian economics, the state is inevitably yet implicitly embedded in the whole theory as the device that encourages the animal spirits on behalf of capital even when it falls into the depression following the crisis.

On the other hand, if we take up the Keynes of the long run, the Bush who was mocked for his politically intentional optimism must rather be justified, even by the Keynes who elaborated his theory of effective demand in the short run (i.e. his economic theory of the state), derived from the critique of the Says Law: in the long run, precisely speaking, without doing

anything in the short run, the equilibrium will and must arrive.The difficulty is that the socio-economic and ideological apparatuses

that furnish the convention, backed by the state, which can ensure the prospective yield according to capitalist expectation in the long run, must also be theorized as that which functions as the political leverage

by which capitalist expectation in the short run can be guaranteed. Thus, thinking about the accelerated spillover of capitalisms too rapid deterritorialization from reterritorialization by the state in the last decade, we have to say that it seems to be no longer possible to hold the distinction between the long term and the short term. For contemporary capitalism the long run in which we are all dead is no longer allowed; only the painful continuation of the the short run, where people are forced to experience their unexpectedly short life, remains after globalization. Capitalism, whose sole essence is deterritorialization, so accelerated its movement in the last decade or so as to unexpect-edly succeed in depriving the state of its power to reterritorialize that which capitalism deterritorialized. The (nation-)state can no longer reterritorialize what capital deterritorializes. The relative deterritorialization that has been managing capital-ism, in one way or another, faces a tectonic crisis. This is what the current crisis means, into which the subject of absolute deterritorialization is literally expected to intervene.

notes 1. Paul Krugman, Vulgar Keynesians, The Dismal Science, 6 February 1997; Depression Economics

Returns, New York Times, 14 November 2008. 2. Joseph Stiglitz, The Next Bretton Woods, Project Syndicate, November 2008. 3. K. Nimmo, Kissinger Again Shills Obama and the New World Order, 13 January 2009, www.

prisonplanet.com; Henry Kissinger, The Chance for a New World Order, International Herald Tribune, 12 January 2009.

4. Jospeh Stiglitz, A Crisis of Confidence, Guardian, 22 October 2008. 5. Joseph Stiglitz, Guided by an Invisible Hand, New Statesman, 16 October 2008; Reversal of

Fortune, Vanity Fair, November 2008; Bail-out blues, Guardian, 30 September 2008. 6. As Skidelsky points out, Keynes rejected lassez-faire as a policy before he developed a convincing

economic theory explaining why laissez-faire would not work. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, vol. 2, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1992, p. 219.

7. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976, p. 236. 8. Blood, Sweat & Tears, Spininng Wheel (1968). 9. Paul Virilio, Le krach actuel reprsente laccident intgral par excellence, Le Monde, 18 October

2008. 10. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Current Crisis, The Bullet 12, 2008. 11. Slavoj iek, Dont Just Do Something, Talk, London Review of Books, 10 October 2008. 12. J.M. Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes,

Macmillan, London, 1971, p. 65. 13. J.M. Keynes, The Balance of Payments of the United States, Economic Journal, vol. 56, no. 222,

1946, pp. 1856. For the classical aspect of Keynes, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1994, ch. 2.

14. J.M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 7, Macmillan, London, 1973, p. 156.

15. The General Theory, pp. 162, 152.

VU

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THE UKS LEADINGRESEARCH CENTRE FORMODERN EUROPEANPHILOSOPHY MA Modern European PhilosophyStudy the great texts of 19th- and 20th-century European philosophy:Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit,Nietzsche's Will to Power, Heidegger's Being and Time,Sartre's Being and Nothingness.

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C437A:RadicalPhilosophy_Onepage 27/3/09 15:10 Page 1

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radical philosophy conferencePower to the people?masses, proletariat, workers, soviets, nation, community, subalterns, multitudes, commons

Birkbeck College, Malet St, Saturday 9 May 2009Power to the people! was once a revolutionary slogan, but soon became an empty clich of the post-revolutionary status quo. Numerous alternatives have been proposed: the proletariat, the workers, the masses, the soviets, the nation, the community, the subaltern, the multitude, the commons And now? How might we assess these different conceptions of political change?

the general will The General Will on the Street: Paris, 178993 David Andress (Portsmouth)How Do the People Make Themselves Heard? Sophie Wahnich (CNRS, Paris),

urban collectivities Urban Intersections and the Politics of Anticipation AbdouMaliq Simone (Goldsmiths)Reflections on the Post-Political City Erik Swyngedouw (Manchester)

closing plenaryThey, the PeopleGayatri Spivak (Columbia University)

25 / 10 unwaged Registration and further details from: matt.charles@blueyonder.co.uk Cheques payable to Radical Philosophy Ltd should be sent to: Radical Philosophy Conference, Peter Osborne, CRMEP, Middlesex University, Trent Park Campus, Bramley Road, London N14 4YZ

www.radicalphilosophy.com

multitude and commons Can We (Still) Break the Vicious Circle

of Domination?Daniel Bensad (University of Paris-VIII)

Crisis, Tragedies and the Commons Massimo De Angelis (University of East London)

population & biopolitics Biopolitics, Diasporas and (Neo)liberal

Political Economy Couze Venn (Nottingham Trent)

Feminist Strategies Revisited Sexopolitics, Multitude and Biopolitics

Encarnacion Gutierrez Rodriguez (Manchester)

17R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 5 5 ( M a y / J u n e 2 0 0 9 )

The will of the peopleNotes towards a dialectical voluntarism

peter Hallward

By will of the people I mean a deliberate, eman-cipatory and inclusive process of collective self-determination. Like any kind of will, its exercise is voluntary and autonomous, a matter of practical freedom; like any form of collective action, it involves assembly and organization. Recent examples of the sort of popular will that I have in mind include the determination, assembled by South Africas United Democratic Front, to overthrow an apartheid based on culture and race, or the mobilization of Haitis Lavalas to confront an apartheid based on privilege and class. Conditioned by the specific strategic constraints that

structure a particular situation, such mobilizations test the truth expressed in the old clich, where theres a will theres a way. Or, to adapt Antonio Machados less prosaic phrase, taken up as a motto by Paulo Freire, they assume that there is no way, we make the way by walking it.1

To say that we make the way by walking it is to resist the power of the historical, cultural or socio-economic terrain to determine our way. It is to insist that in an emancipatory political sequence what is determinant in the first instance is the will of the

people to prescribe, through the terrain that confronts them, the course of their own history. It is to privilege, over the complexity of the terrain and the forms of knowledge and authority that govern behaviour adapted to it, the purposeful will of the people to take and retain their place as the authors and actors of their own drama.2

To say that we make our way by walking it is not to pretend, however, that we invent the ground we traverse. It is not to suppose that a will creates itself and the conditions of its exercise abruptly or ex nihilo. It is not to assume that the real movement which abolishes the existing state of things proceeds through empty or indeterminate space. It is not to disregard the obstacles or opportunities that characterize a particular terrain, or to deny their ability to influence the forging

of a way. Instead it is to remember, after Sartre, that obstacles appear as such in the light of a project to

climb past them. It is to remember, after Marx, that we make our own history, without choosing the conditions of its making. It is to conceive of terrain and way through a dialectic which, connecting both objective and subjective forms of determination, is oriented by the primacy of the latter.

Affirmation of such relational primacy informs what

might be called a dialectical voluntarism. A dialectical voluntarist assumes that collective self-determination more than an assessment of what seems feasible or appropriate is the animating principle of political action. Dialectical voluntarists have confidence in the

will of the people to the degree that they think each term through the other: will in terms of assembly, deliberation and determination, and people in terms of an exercise of collective volition.

i

The arrival of the will of the people as an actor on the political stage over the course of the eighteenth century was itself a revolutionary development, and it was experienced as such by the people themselves. To assert the rational and collective will of the people as the source of political authority and power was to reject alternative conceptions of politics premissed on either the mutual exclusion of society and will (a politics determined by natural, historical or economic necessity), or the primacy of another sort of will (the will of God, of Gods representative on earth, or of his semi-secular equivalent: the will of an elite entitled to govern on account of their accumulated privileges and qualifications).

If the French and Haitian revolutions of the late eighteenth century remain two of the most decisive political events of modern times its not because they affirmed the liberal freedoms that are so easily

(because unevenly) commemorated today. What was and remains revolutionary about France 178994 and Haiti 17911803 is the direct mobilization of the people to claim these universal rights and freedoms, in direct confrontation with the most powerful vested interests

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of the day.3 The taking of the Bastille, the march upon Versailles, the invasion of the Tuileries, the September Massacres, the expulsion of the Girond-ins, the innumerable confrontations with enemies of the people up and down the country: these are the deliberate interventions that defined both the course

of the French Revolution, and the immense, unend-ing counter-revolution that it provoked. The Haitian revolutionaries went one step further and forced, for the first time, immediate and unconditional application

of the principle that inspired the whole of the radical enlightenment: affirmation of the natural, inalienable

rights of all human beings.4 The campaign to re-pacify the people has been running, in different ways in dif-ferent places, ever since.

The events of 178994, and the popular mobiliza-tion that enabled them, continue to frame our most basic political choice between empowerment or disempowerment of the will of the people. In Robes-pierres France there are only two parties: the people and its enemies, and whoever is not for the people is against the people. Despite the well-known limits of his own populism, Thomas Jefferson found a similar distinction at work in every political configuration:

there are those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes, and there are those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them

and consider them the safest depository of their own rights.5 In spite of all that has changed over the past two hundred years, the alternative remains much the same: either an insistence on the primacy of popular self-determination, or a presumption that the people are too crude, barbaric or childlike to be capable of exercising a rational and deliberate will.

Different versions of this choice have come to the fore every time there is an opportunity to confront the system of domination that structures a specific

situation. The will, as Badiou notes, is an essentially combative process.6 Haiti, Bolivia, Palestine and Ecuador are some of the places where in recent years the people have managed, in the face of considerable opposition, to formulate and to some extent impose their will to transform the situation that oppresses them. Responses to such imposition have tended to follow the Thermidorian model. The mix of old and new counter-revolutionary strategies for criminalizing, dividing, and then dissolving the will of the people for restoring the people to their normal condition as a dispersed and passive flock is likely to define

the terrain of emancipatory struggle for the foreseeable future.

iiIn a European context, philosophical expression of a confidence in the will of the people dates back to

Rousseau, and develops in different directions via Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Marx.7 Over the course of this trajectory the category of the people expands from the anachronistic idealization of a small homogeneous community towards an anticipation of humanity as a whole. The more it approaches a global universality the more difficult it becomes, of course, to conceive

of the people in terms of a naively immediate or self-actualizing conception of will. Kants abstract universalization makes too sharp a distinction between determination of the will and its realization; Hegel goes too far in the other direction.

I will assume here that the most fruitful way to begin thinking a dialectical voluntarism that might eventually draw on aspects of both Kant and Hegel is to start with a return to Rousseau and his Jacobin followers, notably Robespierre and Saint-Just, sup-plemented by reference to more recent interventions that might be described in roughly neo-Jacobin terms. Rousseaus conception of a general will remains the single most important contribution to the logic at work in a dialectical voluntarism. Unlike Rousseau or Hegel, however, my concern here is not with a people conceived as a socially or ethically integrated unit, one that finds its natural horizon in the nation-state, so

much as with the people who participate in the active willing of a general will as such. Such a will is at work in the mobilization of any emancipatory collective force a national liberation struggle, a movement for social justice, an empowering political or economic association, and so on. The people at issue here are simply those who, in any given situation, formulate, assert and sustain a fully common (and thus fully inclusive and egalitarian) interest, over and above any divisive or exclusive interest.

The gulf that separates Marxist from Jacobin conceptions of political action is obvious enough, and in the first instance a dialectical voluntarism

has more to learn from the latter than the former. Nevertheless, what is most fundamental in Marx is not the inevitable or involuntary process whereby capitalism might seem to dig its own grave, but rather the way in which it prepares the ground upon which the determined diggers might appear. The emanci-pation of the working classes, stipulates the well-known opening sentence of the rules Marx drafted for the First International, must be conquered by the working classes themselves.8 Even Marxs most non-voluntarist work is best described as an effort to

19

show how the will to change capitalism can develop into successful transformative (revolutionary) activity, or as an effort not only to make History but to get a grip on it, practically and theoretically.9 (A similar argument, as Adrian Johnston, Tracy McNulty and several others point out, might be made in relation to Freud and Lacan.10) The concentration of capital and the intensification of exploitation and misery which

accompanies it lead not to the automatic collapse of capitalism but to a growth in the size, frequency and intensity of the revolt of the working-class. It is this class which, as anticipated by the Paris Communards, will carry out the deliberate work of expropriating the expropriators.11 Once victorious, this same class will preside over the establishment of a mode of production marked above all by the predominance of autonomy, mastery and freedom. The newly associated producers [will] regulate their interchange with nature rationally and bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power. They will thereby enable affirmation of human creativity and

energy [as] an end in itself.12 Understood as the real movement which abolishes the existing state of things, communism, we might say, forces the conversion of work into will.

The optimism that characterizes such an approach is still emphatic in Gramsci (who seeks to put the will, which in the last analysis equals practical or political activity, at the base of philosophy13) and in the early writings of Lukcs (for whom decision, sub-jective will and free action have strategic precedence over the apparent facts of a situation14). Comparable priorities also orient the political writings of a few more recent philosophers, like Sartre, Beauvoir and Badiou. Obvious differences aside, what these think-ers have in common is an emphasis on the practical primacy of self-determination and self-emancipation. However constrained your situation you are always free, as Sartre liked to say, to make something of what is made of you.15

Overall, however, it is difficult to think of a

canonical notion more roundly condemned, in recent Western philosophy, than the notion of will, to say nothing of that general will so widely condemned as a precursor of tyranny and totalitarian terror. In philosophical circles voluntarism has become little more than a term of abuse, and an impressively versatile one at that: depending on the context, it can evoke idealism, obscurantism, vitalism, infantile leftism, fascism, petty-bourgeois narcissism, neocon aggression, folk-psychological delusion Of all the faculties or capacities of that human subject who was

displaced from the centre of post-Sartrean concerns, none was more firmly proscribed than its conscious

volition. Structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers, by and large, relegated volition and intention to the domain of deluded, imaginary or humanist-ideological miscognition. Rather than explore the ways in which political determination might depend on a collective subjects self-determination, recent philosophy and cultural theory have tended to privilege various forms of either indetermination (the interstitial, the hybrid, the ambivalent, the simulated, the undecidable, the chaotic) or hyper-determination (infinite ethical

obligation, divine transcendence, unconscious drive, traumatic repression, machinic automation). The allegedly obsolete notion of a pueblo unido has been displaced by a more differentiated and more deferential plurality of actors flexible identities, negotiable his-tories, improvised organizations, dispersed networks, vital multitudes, polyvalent assemblages, and so on.

Even the most cursory overview of recent European philosophy is enough to evoke its general tendency to distrust, suspend or overcome the will a tendency anticipated, in an extreme form, by Schopenhauer. Consider a few names from a list that could be easily expanded. Nietzsches whole project presumes that there is no such thing as will in the usual (volun-tary, deliberate, purposeful) sense of the word.16 Heidegger, over the course of his own lectures on Nietzsche, comes to condemn the will as a force of subjective domination and nihilist closure, before urging his readers willingly to renounce willing.17 Arendt finds, in the affirmation of a popular political

will (the most dangerous of modern concepts and misconceptions), the temptation that turns modern revolutionaries into tyrants.18 For Adorno, rational will is an aspect of that Enlightenment pursuit of mastery and control which has left the earth radiant with triumphant calamity. Althusser devalues the will as an aspect of ideology, in favour of the scientific analysis

of historical processes that proceed without a subject. Negri and Virno associate a will of the people with authoritarian state power. After Nietzsche, Deleuze privileges transformative sequences that require the suspension, shattering or paralysis of voluntary action. After Heidegger, Derrida associates the will with self-presence and self-coincidence, a forever futile effort to appropriate the inappropriable (the unpresentable, the equivocal, the undecidable, the differential, the deferred, the discordant, the transcendent, the other). After these and others, Agamben summarizes much recent European thinking on political will when he effectively equates it with fascism pure and simple.

20

Even those thinkers who, against the grain of the times, have insisted on the primacy of self-determination and self-emancipation have tended to do so in ways that devalue political will. Take Foucault, Sartre and Badiou. Much of Foucaults work might be read as an extended analysis, after Canguilhem, of the ways in which people are de-voluntarized by the permanent coercions at work in disciplinary power, coercions designed to establish not the general will but automatic docility.19 Foucault never compromised on his affirmation of voluntary insubordination in

the face of newly stifling forms of government and

power, and in crucial lectures from the early 1970s he demonstrated how the development of modern psy-chiatric and carceral power, in the immediate wake of the French Revolution, was designed first and foremost

to over-power and break the will of people who had the folly literally to take themselves for a king;20 nevertheless, in his published work Foucault tends to see the will as complicit in forms of self-supervision, self-regulation and self-subjection. Sartre probably did more than any other philosopher of his generation to emphasize the ways in which an emancipatory project or group depends upon the determination of a concrete will, but his philosophy offers a problematic basis for any sort of voluntarism. He accepts as irreducible the intention and goals which orient an individuals fundamental project, but makes a sharp distinction between such intention and merely voluntary delibera-tion or motivation: since for Sartre the latter is always secondary and deceptive, the result is to render the primary intention opaque and beyond interpretation.21 Sartres later work subsequently fails to conceive of a collective will in other than exceptionalist and ephem-eral terms. Badious powerful revival of a militant theory of the subject is more easily reconciled with a voluntarist agenda (or at least with what Badiou calls a volont impure22), but suffers from some similar limitations. Its no accident that, like Agamben and iek, when Badiou looks to the Christian tradition for

a point of anticipation he turns not to Matthew (with his prescriptions of how to act in the world: spurn the rich, affirm the poor, sell all thou hast) but to

Paul (with his contempt for the weakness of human will and his valorization of the abrupt and infinite

transcendence of grace).Pending a more robust philosophical defence, con-

temporary critical theorists tend to dismiss the notion of will as a matter of delusion or deviation. But since it amounts to little more than a perverse appropriation of more fundamental forms of revolutionary determi-nation, there is no reason to accept fascist exaltation

of an awakening or triumph of the will as the last word on the subject. The true innovators in the modern development of a voluntarist philosophy are Rousseau, Kant and Hegel, and the general principles of such a philosophy are most easily recognized in the praxis of people like Robespierre, John Brown, Fanon, Che Guevara It is to such people that we need to turn in order to remember or reconceive the true meaning of popular political will.

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On this basis we might enumerate, along broadly neo-Jacobin lines, some of the characteristic features of a will of the people:

1. The will of the people commands, by definition, voluntary and autonomous action. Unlike involuntary or reflex-like responses, if it exists then will initiates

action through free, rational deliberation. As Rousseau puts it, the fundamental principle of any action lies in the will of a free being; there is no higher or deeper source . Without will there is no freedom, no self-determination, no moral causality.23 Robespierre soon drew the most basic political implication when he realized that when people will or want to be free they will be. Sieys anticipated the point, on the eve of 1789: every man has an inherent right to deliberate and will for himself, and either one wills freely or one is forced to will, there cannot be any middle position. Outside voluntary self-legislation there cannot be anything other than the empire of the strong over the weak and its odious consequences.24

An intentional freedom is not reducible to the mere faculty of free choice or liberum arbitrium.25 If we are to speak of the will of the people we cannot restrict it (as Machiavelli and his successors do) to the passive expression of approval or consent.26 It is the process of actively willing or choosing that renders a par-ticular course of action preferable to another. Always engaged, argues Sartre, freedom never pre-exists its choice: we shall never apprehend ourselves except as a choice in the making.27 Augustine and then Duns Scotus already understood that our will would not be will unless it were in our power.28 Descartes likewise recognized that voluntary and free are the same thing, and finds in the indivisible and immeasurable

freedom of the will our most fundamental resemblance to divinity.29 Kant (followed by Fichte) then radicalizes this voluntarist approach when he defines the activity

of willing as causality through reason or causality through freedom.30 Will achieves the practical libera-tion of reason from the constraints of experience and

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objective knowledge. As Kant understood more clearly than anyone before him, mere familiarity with what is or has been the case, when it comes to ethics and politics, is the mother of illusion.31 It is the active willing which determines what is possible and what is right, and makes it so. As the French Revolution will confirm, it is as willing or practical beings that people

have the quality or power of being the cause and author of their own improvement.32

From a voluntarist perspective, the prescription of ends and principles precedes the calculation, according to the established criteria that serve to evaluate action

within a situation, of what is possible, feasible, or legit-imate. To affirm the primacy of a prescriptive will is to

insist that in politics all external (natural, sociological, historical, unconscious, technical) forms of determi-nation, however significant, are nonetheless secondary,

as are all forms of regulation and representation. To will, as Badiou puts it, is to force a point of impos-sibility, so as to make it possible.33 The guiding stra-tegic maxim here, adopted in situations ranging from Lenins Russia in 1917 to Aristides Haiti in 1990, was most succinctly stated by Napoleon: on sengage puis on voit. Those sceptical of political will, by contrast, assume that apparently voluntary commitments mask

a more profound ignorance or devaluation of appetite (Hobbes), causality (Spinoza), context (Montesquieu), habit (Hume), tradition (Burke), history (Tocqueville), power (Nietzsche), the unconscious (Freud), convention (Wittgenstein), writing (Derrida), desire (Deleuze), drive (iek)

2. The will of the people involves collective action and direct participation. A democratic political will depends on the power and practice of inclusive assembly, the power to sustain a common commit-ment. As many of his readers have pointed out, what

distinguishes Rousseau from other thinkers who (like Plato or Montesquieu) likewise privilege the general over the particular is his insistence that only active willing can enable an inclusive association, an asso-ciation with an actively common interest.34 What generalises the public will is not the quantity of voters but the common interest which unites them,35 and what sustains this interest is the common will to identify and accomplish it.

The assertion of a general will, needless to say, is a matter of collective volition at every stage of its development. The inaugural association is the most voluntary act in the world, and to remain an active participant of the association is to will what is in the common or general interest. In so far (and only in so far) as they pursue this interest, each person puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme control of the general will.36 Rousseaus analogy is familiar: As nature gives each man an absolute power over his limbs, the social pact gives the body politic an absolute power over all of its members; and it is this same power which, when directed by the general will,

bears the name of sovereignty. Defined in this way,

the general will is always on the side most favourable to the public interest, that is to say, the most equitable, so that it is necessary merely to be just to be assured of following the general will.37

As a matter of course, such a will can only remain sovereign in so far as its willing remains general, rather than particular. The general interest will prevail only if the will to pursue it is stronger than the distraction of particular interests; reflection on how best to strengthen

it, how best to carry the self into the common unity, is Rousseaus most obsessive concern. The legislator who aspires to assist the founding of a people must, in

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a word, take away mans own forces in order to give him new ones which are alien to him, and which he cannot use without the help of others.38

To say that a general will is strong doesnt mean that it stifles dissent or imposes uniformity. It means that in

the process of negotiating differences between particu-lar wills, the willing of the general interest eventually finds a way to prevail. There is an inclusive general

will in so far as those who initially oppose it correct their mistake and realize that if my private opinion had prevailed I would have done something other than what I had willed that is, something inconsistent with my ongoing participation in the general will.39 So long as it lasts, participation in a general will, be it that of a national movement, a political organization, a social or economic association, a trade union, and so on, always involves a resolve to abide by its eventual judgement, not as an immediate arbiter of right and wrong but as the process of collectively deliberating and willing what is right. Participation in a general will involves acceptance of the risk of finding yourself

being, at any given moment, wrong with the people rather than right without them.40 By the same token, its precisely in so far as it remains actively capable of seeking and willing the collective right that we can agree with Rousseau and Sieys when they insist that, in the long run, a general will can neither err nor betray. The sovereign, by the mere fact that it exists, is always what it ought to be.41

The most pressing question, as the Jacobins would discover in 179294, is less that of a general wills legitimacy than that of its continued existence. Without unity of will, Sieys understood, a nation cannot exist as an acting whole; however a nation may will, it is enough for it to will, [and] for its will to be made known for all positive law to fall silent in its presence, because it is the source and supreme master of all posi-tive law.42 After Robespierre, Saint-Just summarizes the whole Jacobin political project when he rejects purely speculative or intellectual conceptions of justice, as if laws were the expression of taste rather than of the general will. The only legitimate defini-tion of the general will is the material will of the people, its simultaneous will; its goal is to consecrate the active and not the passive interest of the greatest number of people.43

Mobilization of the general will of the people must not be confused, then, with a merely putschist vanguard-ism. An abrupt appropriation of the instruments of government by a few alchemists of revolution is no substitute for the deployment of popular power.44 In spite of obvious strategic differences, Lenin is no more

tempted than Luxemburg to substitute a Blanquist conspiracy for the peoples struggle for power, via mobilization of the vast masses of the proletariat.45 Its not a matter of imposing an external will or awareness upon an inert people, but of people working to clarify, concentrate and organize their own will. Fanon makes much the same point, when he equates a national liberation movement with the inclusive and deliberate work of the whole of the people.46

Such work serves to distinguish political will from any merely passive opinion or preference, however preponderant. The actively general will distinguishes itself from the mere will of all (which is nothing but a sum of particular wills) on account of its mediation through the collective mobilization of the people.47 The people who sustain the will of the people are not defined by a particular social status or place, but

by their active identification of and with the emergent

general interest. Sovereignty is an attribute of such action. Conceived in these terms as a general willing, the power of the people transcends the powers of privilege or government, and entitles the people to overpower the powers that oppose or neglect them. If such powers resist, the Jacobins argue, the only solu-tion is to arm the people, in whatever way is required to overcome this resistance.

3. The will of the people is thus a matter of material power and active empowerment, before it is a matter of representation, authority or legitimacy. What divides society is its response to popular self-empowerment. Jefferson goes so far as to privilege insurgency even when it might seem misguided or deluded: the people cannot be all, and always, well-informed, he concedes with reference to Shays Rebellion, but they are entitled if not obliged to preserve the spirit of resistance in the face of all obstacles.48 This is as much a Marxist as it is a Jacobin insight. Any social transformation can only come about as the product of the free action of the proletariat, notes Lukcs, and only the practical class consciousness of the proletariat possesses this ability to transform things. Such a praxis-oriented philosophy did not die out after the political setbacks of the 1920s. Sartre took up the same theme in the early 1950s (before Badiou in the 1970s): as far as politics is concerned a class is never separable from the concrete will which animates it nor from the ends it pursues. The proletariat forms itself by its day-to-day action. It exists only by action. It is action. If it ceases to act, it decomposes.49

Of all the concerns that link Rousseau and Marx, few run as deep as the critique of conventional parli-

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amentary representation. Since a will cannot be rep-resented, so then sovereignty, being nothing more than the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated [and] can only be represented by itself; power can indeed be transferred but not will. The people can (and must) delegate agents to execute their will, but they cannot delegate their willing as such.50 Marx follows Rousseau, against Hobbes, when he criticizes modern bourgeois politics as essentially representative that is, as an expropriation of popular power by the state.51 The bourgeois state enmeshes, controls, regulates, superintends and tutors civil society from its most comprehensive manifestations of life down to its most insignificant stirrings. Popular emancipation will

require the interruption of such a state, and its replace-ment, through the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, of a political form capable of overseeing the economic emancipation of labour.52 In the wake of Marxs critique of the Commune, Lenins Sta