Book. Jeremy Gilbert. Anticapitalism and Culture. Radical Theory and Popular Politics. Berg, 2008

Reviews anti-capitalist protest movements since WWII.

Excerpt

From chapter 5:

We have surveyed several different manifestations of that movement, and so we should now ask what it is, at a more abstract level, that they have in common with each other, and what makes them different from other forms of resistance to hegemonic formations, neoliberalism, or capitalist social relations. Here, two features are most striking. Firstly, we can note the refusal to subsume multifarious struggles into one overarching identity. Secondly, we can identify the demand for concentrations of power (both State power and corporate power) to be broken down by the proliferation of sites for participative decision-making. On the one hand, we have a radical pluralism, and on the other hand, a pursuit of democratisation as a radical process of participation. Following these two lines of thought, we can conceptualise this politics in terms of some key bodies of philosophical work which we will examine in much more detail in subsequent chapters, but which it will be useful to consider here briefly.

Firstly, radical pluralism and refusal of identity bring to mind Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari’s famous celebration of the minor (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 291-3). Deleuze & Guattari make a fascinating distinction between ‘majorities’ and ‘minorities’ which has nothing to do with numerical discrepancies. ‘Majorities’ are those identities, those modes of being, which occupy the powerful position of the norm within any given culture. They are always resistant to possibilities of change, always defined by their position of dominance over the not-norm. So woman is always a minor position in a patriarchal culture, even if there are more women than men (hence it is still common for histories of ‘democracy’ to treat women’s suffrage as a relatively unimportant issue, or to ignore the fact that Athens, the supposed cradle of democracy, was a slave society in which a tiny proportion of the actual population were allowed to vote). Following this logic, a ‘minoritarian’ politics could not be one which aspired merely to occupy the position of ‘majority’, but which sought to free all minorities and all fixed majorities from their static conditions. Now, crucially, this is not a matter of ‘identity politics’ promoting a rainbow coalition of oppressed groups, each defending its pure status as Woman, or black, or gay. Rather it is a matter of seeking the destabilisation of all such fixed positions: ‘only a minority is capable of serving as the active medium of a becoming, but under such conditions that it ceases to be a definable aggregate in relation to the majority (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 291)’

From this point of view, the ‘movement of movements’ might be conceived as a loose assemblage of minorities, waging war against all majority. So does this mean that it would have to be conceived as opposed to all democracy as such?

Well, that depends how we conceptualise democracy. If we imagine that ‘democracy’ means simply ‘majority rule’, then of course Deleuze & Guattari could have no truck with it. But what if we conceptualise it differently? ‘the notion of radical and plural democracy...will be central to our argument from this point on...Pluralism is radical only to the extent that each term of the plurality of identities finds within itself the principle of its own validity, without this having to be sought in a transcendent or underlying positive ground for the hierarchy of meaning of them all and the source and guarantee of their legitimacy. And this radical pluralism is democratic to the extent that the autoconstitutivity of each one of its terms is the result of displacements of the egalitarian imaginary. Hence, the project for plural and radical democracy is nothing other than the struggle for the maximum autonomisation of spheres’ (Laclau & Mouffe 1985: 167)

Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe here offer an account of ‘radical democracy’ which is entirely compatible with the minoritarian perspective. From this point of view, radical democracy does not imply ‘the tyranny of the majority’, but an ongoing effort to maximise autonomy for groups and individuals, against the rule of either capital or state institutions. It therefore seems hard not to argue that the anti-capitalist movement is, as much as anything, a movement for radical democracy.

Here is one point to keep in mind. Whichever vocabulary we choose, this minoritarian / radical democratic perspective depends on one thing. It depends on a rejection of all old-fashioned ways of thinking about politics which see ‘society’ as a single coherent thing with a centre, or a top, a singular locus of power, which a radical movement must seek to occupy and control. Neither government, nor control of the means of production, nor anything else, can be seen as the one source of power and the one objective of struggle. In other words, although we may continue to regard all the elements of world culture as connected and related in complex ways, we can no longer think of society, or capitalism, or anything else, as simple totalities. This will prove to be a very important point later in the book. For now though, let’s move on from this assessment of the abstract politics of radical democratic anti-capitalism, to look briefly at the ways in which the movement thinks and acts in regard to one of this book’s key issues: ‘culture’ itself."

Anticapitalism and Culture

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