quick reply to @leninology
(sorry, little bit incoherent – my brain thinks in sequences of 140 characters or less)
I think we agree on a bunch of points, eg:
1. Hardt & Negri’s vague idealism / floaty optimism
2. That immaterial labour hardly replaces material labour; postfordism doesn’t replace fordism
3. The galling pointlessness and stupidity of ‘reclaiming’ business terms such as ‘deregulation’ and ‘entrepreneur’ for inane wow factor.
4. Re-organising resistance to capitalism is necessary in the face of capital’s game-changing.
Like I said, I agree that Team UCL’s rhetoric is pretty dire. Gems such as ‘dissent entrepreneurs’, a particularly egregious term, encoding as it does an affirmation of unaccountable ‘natural leadership’, of ‘meritocracy’, of hierarchies through the backdoor.
I disagree, however, that the ‘networks paradigm’ is lifted wholesale from pro-capitalist ideology. For one, networks do not necessarily imply markets. They do not even necessarily imply technophilic cyber-utopianism. They simply imply a method of conceiving organisational/communicative structures. To say that they’re infected with pro-capitalist ideology is as fatuous a claim as saying that democratic centralism is informed by the bourgeois principle of representative democracy! I don’t think that we should be under any illusions as to how embedded we are within th’ system; and I think naught is intrinsically wrong with making use of what exists; there’s nothing a priori capitalistic about this stuff. Remember Chile’s experiment in cybernetic planned economies? The one that beat the ‘bosses’ strike’ in 1972?
I appreciate that you weren’t so much seeking to discredit the buzzwords that have been floating around so much as to situate them as coming out in a context of gutwrenching defeat and pessimism for the organised left; this is basically Atilio Boron’s view in his book about Empire, and I’m somewhat sympathetic to it. But – as you say even – Capital has changed the game somewhat in the past 30 years, and if the left has suffered significant defeats a thorough reassessment of strategy is totally necessary*. If this was a simple matter of discrediting (or terms like ‘deregulating protest!’ and ‘entrepreneurialising dissent!’ and (maybe!) ‘synergising our strategies!’ – terms that emerge mainly from the UCL posse – I’d have very little to contend with, but along with these you include potentially useful concepts and strategies. Baby/bathwater, etc.
A friend of mine described the situation something like this: “when the water’s stale, the scum rises”, as if to say that we just have to get back to where we were before 1979, get great leaders and carry on with our scientific-theoretical program of occupying positions of power and waiting for the Right Moment. Hmmmm.
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* although reading back that sentence I get jitters, as though it was what Labourites were all chanting in the 80s, with Giddens et al in tow, waiting to strike.
