Magical Marxism by Merrifield Andy

Author:Merrifield, Andy. [Merrifield, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783710904
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

Holloway’s “scream” seems to want to reverberate everywhere, but it sounds frustrated in the mouth of its author, trapped within his realist four walls; and it plainly has trouble penetrating the sound insulation. (As for freedom in a cell, Holloway might find enlightenment reading Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn or even Sartre.) Negri is particularly derided because in his now-classic Spinoza study, The Savage Anomaly (1991), a positive foundation of struggle is developed. Holloway cites Negri, disapprovingly: “the genealogy of social forms ... implies negativity only in the sense that negativity is understood as the enemy, as an object to destroy, as a space to occupy, not as a motor of the process.” “The motor of the process,” says Negri, “is positive: the continuous pressure of being toward liberation.” Negri’s concern, according to Holloway, is “to develop the concept of revolutionary power (the potentia of the multitude) as a positive, non-dialectical, ontological concept. Autonomy is implicitly understood as the existing, positive drive of the potentia of the multitude, pushing potestas (the power of the rulers) onto ever new terrains.”9 Negri, the heterodox Marxist, uses Spinoza to shift the ballast away from political critique towards social liberation (or “perfection” in Spinoza’s terminology). As Negri writes, the “Spinozian alternative does not have to do with the definition of the bourgeoisie but with the essence of the revolution—the radical character of the liberation of the world.”10 Here the concern isn’t so much the constitutive power of capital as the constitutive power of the subject: “The actual growth of the human essence, then, is posed as a law of contradiction and expansion of being in the tension of the spontaneity to define itself as a subject.”11

My sympathies are with Negri: it’s in the struggle to liberate oneself, to affirm oneself—not necessarily to be recognized, as the Hegelian master and slave drama suggests—that a communist subjectivity takes hold, that a process of ideological identification with one’s kindred spirits shapes up. In affirming oneself positively, affirming one’s potentiality, one willy-nilly encounters a force resistant to this positivization, be it the state or capital. In any act of affirmation, one will likely be obliged to resist, to negate an antagonist or antagonism, to defend oneself; but this is more often than not an outcome of self-affirmation, not something causal, not something that determines the action. (Palestinians resist the Israeli state only insofar as they want to assert their own territoriality; it’s the latter that conditions the former.) Participation comes about, if it comes about, through some form of collective self-affirmation, through self-unfolding. Affirmation, not negation, is the driving force, the impetus towards any neo-communist project, towards the “positive humanism” that Marx rallies around in “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.”

One instructive analogy we could draw is that between how, in the first volume of Capital, Marx theorizes accumulation vis-à-vis competition, and how popular liberation might resemble capital accumulation for capitalists: accumulation is an imperative that compels capitalists to compete with other capitalists, with those likewise intent on accumulating capital. Accumulation

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