The Beginning of History by Massimo De Angelis

Author:Massimo De Angelis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

THE ‘CENTRE’ OF POWER

One thing that emerges out of our discussion of the contemporary critics of the ‘law of value’, especially those emphasising in a variety of ways the recent transformations of labour, is that modern production occurs in ‘networks’, and networks do not have centres. We can recognise this as underlying Offe’s emphasis on the heterogeneity of labour, and it is even clearer in Hardt and Negri’s emphasis on the common relational and affective features of immaterial labour and in their definition of Empire as a network form of ruling (Hardt and Negri 2000). Indeed, there seems to be a general trend in the last quarter of a century towards abandoning the problematisation of the ‘centre’ of power as it emerges within the capitalist mode of production. For example, in diverse ways, we can discern this movement away from the problematic of the ‘centre’ of power in other influential authors, such as Manuel Castell’s (2000) ‘network society’ as a ‘space of flows’ or in Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) postmodern critique of Marxism. Castells thinks of power as a flow, as something that moves across networks, passing through oscillators in ways that make a network resembling an electrical circuit through which the current (power) moves. When we understand power as a flow, however insightful the metaphor may be, until we pose this ‘flow’ in terms of a flow of social relations and the mode of their exercise, power remains a thing (a fluid thing, but a thing nevertheless), since it is not explained how its exercise as a relation makes it move. Thus, I can understand capital flows as a thing in terms of interest rate differentials across countries, but until I have related this movement to the broad problematic of how livelihoods in the two countries are systemically pitted against each other by virtue of this capital movement or the threat of this movement, and until I have understood and problematised the rationale of this, my concept of power is quite useless from the perspective of radical alternatives. This rationale is one with the problematic of the ‘centre’ of power.

The post-Marxism advocated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) disposes of the problematic of the centre by criticising the traditional Marxist emphasis on struggle against capital as ‘economistic’. Instead, they open up the social field and see it as constituted by a plurality of struggles (on class, on gender, on the environment, on homophobia, on race, and so on) with little or no connection among themselves apart from those that can be developed contingently. The corresponding project of ‘radical democracy’ seeks thus to promote egalitarian relations across the social body. And since class is seen as simply one of the many sites of struggle, the project can avoid posing the question of emancipation from capital as the central problematic of any emancipatory politics.

This postmodern critique of Marxism as economistic is of course well founded, as orthodox Marxism has a long tradition of reductivist and economistic theorising. However the call

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