Time, Space and Social Transformation

 

Andreja Zivkovic

Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cambridge

Az242@cam.ac.uk

 

and

 

John Hogan

University of Hertfordshire

J.1.Hogan@herts.ac.uk

 

 

 

[Draft Paper; Comments Welcome]

 

 

 

Introduction

 

“Modernity” and “revolution”: both terms denote a radical rupture with the past [i], the idea of historical progress, and a vision of the future as open horizon. They are also radically opposed to one another. As Perry Anderson reminds us, each has a distinct temporality, “The characteristic time of “modernity” is continuous, and all encompassing, like the process of industrialization itself: at most its most extended, nothing less than the totality of the epoch itself. The time of revolution is discontinuous, and delimited: a finite rupture in the reproduction of the established order, by definition starting at one conjuncture and ending at another.”[ii] For Marx the experience of modernity was one of “constant revolutionizing of production, unceasing disturbance, everlasting uncertainty and agitation”. The temporality of capitalist accumulation “denote[s] a homogenous historical time in which each moment is perpetually different by virtue of being next, but – by the same token – is the same, as an interchangeable unit in a process of indefinite recurrence.” [iii] The concept of modernity as this constant revolutionizing of all social relations is to be distinguished from that of revolution as a political event “compressed in time and concentrated in target” – notwithstanding the common substratum of both in the contradictions of capitalist modernisation, that is, the capitalist system was both the product of social and political revolutions – e.g. 1789 – and their matrix, the contradictions of capitalism’s uneven and combined development generating bourgeois and socialist revolution across the globe. 

            Today this dialectical interrelation between modernity and revolution is widely considered to have been undone. In the wake of the revolutions of 1989, conventionally viewed as revolutions ending the modern era of revolution, and of the profound transformations effected by globalisation, with the emergence of highly integrated and mobile financial markets and the tendency for the production and distribution of commodities to be organised across national frontiers – all of which appeared to radically question the modern, territorial nation-state as the space and object of political and economic power – the modern concept of revolution as the conquest of state power appears to have exhausted itself. Indeed, precisely in response to the transformations association with globalisation, we have recently seen the efflorescence of theories of (informational) technological revolution that confuse the “permanent revolution” of capitalist reproduction with the concept of social revolution, dissolving the latter into - what Benjamin called – the “empty, homogenous time” of capitalist modernisation, of modernisation theory.

This paper seeks to examine contemporary “networked” or “informational” theories of revolution which privilege IT (information technology) or ICT (information communication technology) networks. We examine Castells’ concept of “informational capitalism” and argue that there is no technological logic beyond capitalism, that theories of the “IT revolution” dissolve the properly political space of revolution into the linear, homogenous time of technological rationalization under capitalism. Castells’ concept of the “network society” finds an uncanny echo in postmodern, networked theories of revolution, which see ICT networks as the very model for new revolutionary movements against global, neo-liberal capitalism (e.g. the Zapatistas). We argue that, by ignoring the character of revolution as a discontinuous event within the fabric of capitalist modernization, such theories dissolve revolution into a logic of immanence, of process and of movement, thus placing revolution beyond the time and space of politics. Nevertheless we are not dismissive of the potentiality of ICTs to generate transformations in the temporal and spatial dynamics of political agency. We conclude by reflecting on how the potential supplementary powers that ICTs afford agents may be realized in real time and space.

 

1. The “IT Revolution” as Post-Capitalism?

 

For Castells the “IT revolution” of the last quarter century has led to a qualitative break in socio-economic development associated with a new “informational capitalism”. In Castells the development of a new technology (IT) is accompanied by a new “mode of development” (informationalism), based on a new source of wealth creation (“the action of knowledge upon knowledge”) and a new a new “performance principle” (technological innovation). [iv]  The IT revolution is also linked to a new flexible, decentralised, interdependent mode of organization, the networking logic. ITs have played a decisive role in “the expansion and rejuvenation of capitalism”: in the emergence of a flexible, innovation-based, globalized capitalism by providing the tools for networking, distant communication, storing/processing of information, coordinated individualization of work, and simultaneous concentration and decentralization of decision-making. [v] The new “informational capitalism”, while based on a new source of wealth creation and performance principle, remains capitalist .[vi] Indeed,

 

for the first time in history, the capitalist mode of production shapes social relationships over the entire planet. But this brand of capitalism is profoundly different from its predecessors. It has two fundamental characteristics: it is global, and it is structured to a large extent around a network of financial flows. Capital works globally as a unit in real time, and at it is realized, invested and accumulated mainly in the sphere of circulation, that is as finance capital. [vii]

 

In Castells somewhat overoptimistic view the IT revolution has also enabled capitalism to overcome its tendency to crisis. Castells sees a fundamental modification of the market logic at work in global, integrated financial markets operating in real time via electronic and informational technology. The “annihilation of time and space by electronic means” has enabled capital to successfully “colonize the future”. [viii]

Castells’ discussion of informational capitalism, like Bell’s post-industrial economy, is linked to “a periodisation of modes of development based on changes in the primary factor of production for wealth creation”. [ix] A common periodisation sees a transition from agriculture (land) through industrialism (modern manufacturing industry involving the scientific control of nature and the use of artificial energy sources) to 'informationalism' (information and communication technologies and theoretical knowledge as the source of innovation). This involves a form of vulgar technological determinism [x], in which the relations of production correspond to a particular technological mode of development: “The information technology revolution, and the restructuring of capitalism, have induced a new form of society, network society.” [xi]Changes in social structure are then read off technological changes: “the Information Age, that is, a social structure of organised information flows and symbolic manipulation”. [xii] Thus, the logic of technological determinism in Castells runs as follows:  IT is at the basis of an informational mode of development producing an informational capitalism to which corresponds a network or informational society, based on the decoupling of a space of flows of money, power and information from the space of places (e.g. the nation-state); which in turn generates a culture of “real virtuality”, involving a dichotomy between the timeless, placeless hypertext of the net and the place-based modes of experience of the self.

            This technological determinism ignores the fact that “technologies are applied in specific social contexts and that class relations are shaped by technological change”. [xiii] Castells’ discussion of informational capitalism, like Bell’s post-industrial economy, treats knowledge as a factor of production similar to land, capital, enterprise or labour. Such analyses tend to naturalise factors of production, obscuring the conditions under which they enter the economic process and get combined to produce goods and services. They thereby reproduce the fallacy, criticised by Marx, that value is rooted in immanent, eternal qualities of things rather than in social relations. [xiv] Labour-power under capitalism is both concrete labour and abstract labour, both source of creativity and factor of production substitutable by capital, both use-value and exchange-value. Analogously information and knowledge under capitalism are both collectively generated knowledge and abstract intellectual property. Hence in order to understand the role of information and knowledge under capitalism we need to consider how these come to be transformed into commodities, that is, the formal and real subsumption of intellectual labour to capital; the mechanisms that enable the collective labourer to be dispossessed of its collective knowledge (for example, the commodification of the abstract properties of nature and the private expropriation of the knowledge of past generations through bio-piracy); the mechanisms by which capital appropriates profits from its control over intellectual property (that is, the problem faced by capital when new knowledge becomes generalised and so defines the socially necessary labour time embodied in products and/or the socially necessary labour time required for their distribution – a problem that is most commonly solved through the establishment of monopolies in knowledge to protect profits, e.g. Microsoft); the self-cancelling character of the informational revolution under capital as each new wave of innovation is prone to ever more rapid devalorization.

            Castells thus fails to establish that we are really living in a post-capitalist society, to identify a logic of technology (as factor of wealth creation and performance principle) beyond capitalism. In terms of the theory of revolution, Castells concept of “informational capitalism” collapses the discontinuous temporality of revolution into the continuous, homogenous, undifferentiated time of modernity; that is the temporality of “creative destruction” [xv] under capitalism as understood by modernization theory and its logic of technological rationalization. By contrast, Marx’s own conception of the historical time of capitalism as a mode of production is of a complex and differential temporality, in which episodes or eras are discontinuous from each other and heterogeneous within themselves: that is Marx’s concept of capitalism, unlike the uncritical concept of modernization, implies a periodisation of different stages and paths of capitalist development. In the case of Castells, we might say that since he does not locate technological development in the logic of capital accumulation, the mode of development in the relations of production, his concept of informational capitalism, confuses the notion of a stage in capitalism (industrialism/informationalism) with a new mode of production (informationalism). This, unlike Marx’s differential concept of capitalist temporality, is an evolutionary, linear, undifferentiated temporality: time differs from one epoch to another, but within each epoch all sectors of social reality move in synchrony with one another, such that the development of a new technology (IT) is accompanied by a new mode of development (informationalism), resulting in a new mode of production (informational capitalism), leading to a new form of society (network society) with a new (informational) politics and (virtual) culture.

            At the end of the final volume of his trilogy, in terms that recall those of Marx, Castells inveighs against

 

“the extraordinary gap between our technological overdevelopment and our social undevelopment. Our economy, society and culture are built on interests, values, institutions, and systems of representation that by, and large, limit collective creativity, confiscate the harvest of information technology, and deviate our energy into self-destructive confrontation.”

 

For Marx, of course, this state of affairs derived from the contradiction between the forces and relations of production under capitalism, between an increasingly socialized, interdependent, knowledge-driven process of production and the privatized appropriation of the social product. Castells is not so sure and hesitates. On the one hand, the production of wealth in informational capitalism derives from knowledge driven innovation. [xvi] On the other hand, we are told that “[p]rofitability and competitiveness are the actual determinants of technological innovation and productivity growth” [xvii]. In this case it is a specifically capitalist logic of valorization and competition rather than technological change that shapes informationalism. As Callinicos points out, this incoherence reflects the unstable and internally contradictory character of the concept of “informational capitalism”, a hybrid of Marx’s theory of the capitalist mode of production and the theory of the post-industrial society, an opposition which tends to dissolve in favour of the latter. Castells’ nevertheless raises the interesting question of whether the increasing socialisation of the productive forces in a knowledge-driven economy [xviii] is coming into conflict with the capitalist nature of the social relations of production:

 

“….we are already witnessing the development of alternative information networks, around non-capitalist and anti-capitalist values, which interact with dominant networks in an increasingly conflictive space of flows. Thus while, the network society, as a specific social structure, has been constituted around current forms of social domination (informational capitalism), its logic goes well beyond these specific interests: [information-communication] networks can be re-programmed by deliberate social action.” [xix] 

 

However for Marx, by setting in motion the powers of scientific knowledge and social co-operation (what Marx, in the Grundrisse, calls “the general intellect”), capitalism ultimately undermines itself. Market competition forces rival capitals to introductive productivity enhancing technologies to cut costs and thereby reduce relative prices. This tendency to replace variable (labour) by fixed capital (machinery), while raising the mass of surplus value also increases the organic composition of capital and reduces the rate of surplus value, leading to more frequent and deeper economic crises. 

But how might the “general intellect”, like Prometheus, be unchained from capitalist order that consumes it? Braudel and Mumford argue that technology has definite technical properties, but these are deeply moulded and shaped by society and culture. Whilst rejecting the notion of a logic of technology à la Castells, we will consider below how technology might contribute to a revolutionary transformation in a manner consistent with the modern concept of revolution. For the moment, we will examine whether or not Castells can answer his own question: namely, the possibility of an informational mode of development beyond capitalism. 

 

2. Network Society, Informational Politics and Symbolic Power

 

For Castells, the central cleavage of the informational age is that between the abstract, calculating timeless, placeless logic of the space of flows and the historically, culturally and geographically rooted identities of social actors, deriving from the decoupling and opposition between the space of flows and the space of places. The decoupling of dominant processes from the space of places is the cause of a terminal crisis in the institutions and “legitimating identities” of industrial society - the nation-state, government, labour movements, the patriarchal family and the political ideologies of modernity. Emerging in the place of these shared identities is “a world exclusively made of markets, networks, individuals and strategic organizations” dominated by the identityless, individualistic logic of the self-centered calculations of the global networks. [xx] In response to global flows and radical individualism, defensive resistance identities are activated which “retrench in communal heavens” around the traditional values of God, nation and family, but also around non-traditional values, as with the feminist, sexual liberation and environmental movements. [xxi]  To the extent that resistance identities are able to project themselves beyond communal “trenches” set up outside and against network flows into society at large they cease to be purely reactive and develop transformative power. The reason why such resistance is transformative relates to the importance of identities in the new system of power.

 

“Power…is no longer concentrated in institutions (the state), organizations (capitalist firms), or symbolic controllers (corporate media, churches). It is diffused in global networks of wealth, power, information and images which circulate and transmute in a system of variable geometry and dematerialized geography…The new power lies in the codes of information and in the images of representation around which societies organize their institutions, and people live their lives, and decide their behaviour.” [xxii]

 

The significance of these arguments is that it enables Castells to establish an isomorphism between the informational, network structure of the “Information Age” and that of transformative identities. It is only as decentralised, informational networks, as networked nodes and hubs subverting the individualistic, abstract, identityless, timeless codes of the network of flows that resistance identities can become transformative. But, equally, it is only as place-based identities anchoring power to some area of the social structure that they are able to engage in symbolic warfare and so transform institutions. Thus we can say that the concept of the “informational politics” is consistent with the technological determinism of the theory of the network society, where flows of power, money, and information have voided the state and representative government of power and legitimacy.

It is arguable, even in Castells’ own terms, that the theory of informational politics ignores the problem that power in modern societies does not merely reside in the control of information, is not purely “immaterial” in the sense of a symbolic capacity to frame life experience, but is also embedded and embodied in the ownership of capital and the coercive power of the state. This is, of course, not exactly news to Castells, but it remarkable to what degree his theory of informational politics appears to dissolve the space of economic and political power, market and state, into the flux of informational, dematerialized networks. For example, take his claim that “if people equate the quality of life with conservation of nature and with their spiritual serenity, new political actors could emerge and new public policies could be implemented”. [xxiii] No doubt, but three difficulties with this argument immediately suggest themselves. Firstly, to what degree is the demand for sustainable development consistent with the environmentally destructive logic of capital accumulation (as expressed, for example, in greenhouse gases, radioactive waste and the obliteration of biodiversity)?  Castells, of course, recognizes the problem, but poses it in terms of a contradiction between on the one hand, “glacial time”, the cosmological time of the unity of the species, and of matter as a whole, in its spatio-temporal evolution [xxiv]; and on the other, the abstract, de-sequencing logic of the timeless time of the space of flows. In fact the contradiction is between the short temporal horizon of capital and the long-term horizon of the species. [xxv] Capital’s drive to accumulate profit ignores the effects of synergy, of threshold, of amplification and irreversibility proper to the biosphere. Contrary to neo-classical economics and its game theoretical models of marginal preferences adjusting to scarcity, capitalism presupposes an inexhaustible nature offered gratis. The short-term temporality of capitalism thus acts on an ever distant future, transforming the relationship both between generations and between the species and nature. The ensuing de-sequencing of temporalities is not the result of an informational mode of development but of capitalist reproduction tout court. Secondly, given the above, it might be argued that any system of sustainable development worthy of the name implies a system of collective resource allocation at a global level, in other words, a system of co-ordinated planning. Thirdly, any attempt to actually move in such a direction would face extremely powerful material capitalist interests, backed by the coercive power of states, quite unmoved by the transformation of symbolic codes by identity politics.  The fate of the Kyoto Treaty, an example of limited, capitalist planning, bears this out.

Thus Castells’ argument that, in a society where power lies in information exchange networks and symbolic manipulation, “[i]n the long run it does not matter who is in power because the distribution of political roles becomes widespread and rotating. There are no more stable power elites”[xxvi]– is, to put it mildly, unconvincing. Castells’ technologically determinist concept of the informational mode of development results in a thoroughly utopian picture of open, flexible, decentralized, informational networks where power is in a constant state of flux.  The primacy of “social morphology” over “social action” in the network society means that “the causal power of network flows becomes more important than the specific interests they represent, the flows of power”. [xxvii] However, economic globalization, as Castells himself notes, “was made possible, and by and large induced by deliberate government policies. The global economy was not created by markets, but by the interaction between markets and governments and international financial institutions acting on behalf of markets”. [xxviii] Rather than capitalist states being simply bypassed by immaterial flows of money, power and information, based on “variable geometries and dematerialized geographies”, the construction of global markets in capitals, goods and services, and the neo-liberal institutional architecture regulating them, is in fact highly dependent on the co-operation and coercive power of the advanced capitalist states.[xxix] Ignoring his own empirical analyses, Castells, in the manner of Althusser’s theory of history, paints a picture of networked “processes without a subject”. This technological determinism makes it hard for Castells to answer his own question regarding how the promise of the Information Age, “the unleashing of unprecedented productive capacity by the power of the mind”, might be fulfilled. Castells rules out revolution since there are “no Winter Palaces” to seize in a network society of dematerialised, placeless flows. [xxx] Generally he talks of the reconstruction of institutions to enable them to mitigate the effects of a “hardened capitalism” (globalisation and social exclusion) through social integration and the construction of  “new institutions [to] bridge the split between the Net and Self”. [xxxi] But he is aware of the scale of the problem:

 

“Should institutions of society, economy, and culture truly accept environmentalism they would be essentially transformed…it would be a revolution.”[xxxii]

 

But this is a revolution that, since it is founded on an opposition between the timeless time and placeless space of flows and the place-based experience of singular identities, exists outside of time and space (the capital relation, world economy, the interstate system). Castells offers no guide as to how resistance movements might transform really existing socio-economic structures and power relations in modern capitalist society. Nor is it obvious within the terms of reference of the concepts of “informational politics” and “network society” what the solution to this problem might be.

 

3. Network Autonomy as Revolution

 

By contrast, in postmodern, networked theories of revolution, the crisis of the nation-state and modern politics in the face of globalisation is the matrix for a new type of revolution. These theories can be seen as reverse sides of Castells’ coin, each proceeding from one side of the constitutive cleavage of network society; on the one hand, the “information revolution” and its space of flows and, on the other, the cultural resistance of communicational networks to it. Thus, on the one hand, the autonomous space of informational-communicational flows and its rhizomatic, nomadic logic is itself revolutionary and points to a networked society beyond Empire (Hardt and Negri); on the other, ICT networks are the very model for a revolutionary movement against neo-liberal globalisation that could “change the world without taking power” (Holloway). Let us now examine the first path.

The origins of Hardt and Negri’s concept of Empire lie in Negri’s genealogy of the capitalist system, which locates its dynamics in the struggle of the working class to wrest productive autonomy from the command of capital.[xxxiii] The insubordination of the working class leads to struggles over “class composition” forcing capital to elaborate a politics of regulation, to develop reflexivity in its struggle to de-compose proletarian self-valorisation in order to continue to expropriate the latter’s co-operative productivity. Historically, the skilled craft worker of the late C19th forced capital to deploy Taylorist systems of regulation from which the “mass worker” emerged; the insubordination of the latter in the period of the New Deal led to the development of the state as “collective capitalist” (Keynesian demand management and the welfare state) and subsequently to the emergence of the “social worker” at the point at which all forms of labour became subsumed under capital, became proletarianized; the “social worker”, now baptised as the “multitude”, is the figure of informational capitalism, and to its socialised, networked, affective, immaterial labour today corresponds “Empire”. “The multitude called Empire into being.” As such the structure of Empire is isomorphic to that of the multitude: it is a decentralized, network power. As such it has no centre and no boundary; it has no territory or outside, it is a “non-place” [xxxiv]:

 

In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial centre of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentred and deterritorialised apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding powers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colours of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow.[xxxv]

 

The “smooth space” and “non-place” of Empire are analogous to the “variable geometries and dematerialised geometries” of Castells’ space of flows, while Empire as networked power corresponds to the emergent global network state that Castells tentatively identifies as one of the key networks within the space of flows. Both Empire and the space of flows (including the global network state) distribute power via rhizomatic informational-financial flows by means of the supercession of space and timeless time or “time outside measure”[xxxvi]. In the informational mode of development, the space of places is bypassed by a global space of flows (global financial markets, global information networks the global network state, global criminal networks, etc), resulting in the resistance of place-based identities; whereas in Empire, the biopolitical immanence of informational capital is fully realized (in the Foucauldian sense), that is, the whole of social reproduction is subsumed in “imperial nexuses of the production of language, communication and the symbolic”, so that “[t]he political synthesis of social space is fixed in the space of communication”, resulting in the biopolitical production of subjectivities as subjects proper to the reproduction of imperial biopolitical power[xxxvii]. Whereas for Castells, cultural singularities must transform themselves into informational networks if they are to re-program symbolic codes and rebuild institutions, in Negri productive singularities are not merely “always already” networks but are also the “general intellect” itself: 'the powers of labour are infused by the powers of science, communication, and language,' and 'life is what infuses and dominates all production'. [xxxviii] Thus for Hardt and Negri the constituent power in Empire is the immaterial labour of the co-operative informational-communicational networks of a multitude of productive singularities that are directly generative of social life, including communication and affects, are biopolitical; and Empire as constituted power, is merely the “negative residue”, is the parasitic shell of the ontological creativity, of the strength and desire of the multitude. Empire is “communism of capital”. With the real subsumption of labour by capitalism, intelligence and affect become the primary productive powers, the collective social intelligence becoming co-extensive with the process of social reproduction itself, so that labour breaks free from the value relation, is increasingly self-valorizing, increasingly autonomous of capital, which, as Empire is now an imperial command structure that expropriates the “mass intellectuality” of the collective labourer from without since it can no extort surplus value from it within the process of production. It is in this sense that the “general intellect” is “outside measure”, is “virtual”, both “irreducible innovation and revolutionary machine”. [xxxix] Where Marx saw the era of the “general intellect” in terms of an explosive contradiction between the productive powers of the social, co-operative brain and their limitation within capitalist relations of production, a contradiction that prepared the way for the revolutionary transformation of society, for Negri the formation of the “general intellect” indicates that the real subsumption of labour to capital has been reversed. Negri, like Castells, posits an autonomous logic of technology beyond capitalism based on an informational mode of production. The criticisms addressed above to Castells apply a fortiori to Negri. Here we will confine ourselves to some observations regarding the “always already” autonomous character of the multitude for Negri’s theory of revolution.

Let us return to the non-space of Empire, this “empty” shell”, this “corruption” of the ontological creativity of a multitude of communicating networks. The biopolitical subsumption of the political sphere (government, the nation-state, international state system) into this decentralised network power, “integrated world capitalism” (Guattari and Negri 1990) erases the revolutionary space characteristic of modernity:

 

“The decline of any autonomous political sphere signals the decline…of any independent space where revolution could emerge in the national political regime, or where social space could be transformed using the instruments of the state. The traditional idea of counter-power and the idea of resistance against modern sovereignty in general thus becomes less and less possible.” [xl]

 

With the biopolitical penetration of social life by capitalism there is no outside to the realization of its immanence, but this merely generalises struggle and resistance across the entire social bios. “Politics is given immediately: it is a field of pure immanence.” [xli] As in the “disciplinary society” of Foucault (to which Negri appeals), power is everywhere and nowhere, it is a “non-place”. And also as in Foucault, resistance is the “always already” of power, precedes power. The ontological immanence of the “general intellect” of the multitude to Empire, its virtual autonomy from capital as self-programming informational network, means that the assertion of its constituent power, its autonomy, is equivalent to the overthrow of Empire. Hence the assertion of autonomy by the multitude is “always already” revolutionary:

 

“…the construction of Empire, and the globalisation of economic and cultural relationships, means that the virtual centre of Empire can be attacked from any point. The tactical preoccupations of the old revolutionary school are thus completely irretrievable--the only strategy available to the struggles is that of a constituent counter-power that emerges from within the Empire.” [xlii]

 

                .

By dissolving the space of politics into the non-space of communicative capitalism, Negri erases the distinct temporality of revolution as discontinuous event, as rupture in the continuum of homogenous, irreversible, and empty time of capitalist modernization. We have already criticised Castells’ notion that informational, network capitalism has deterritorialised the space of power. Here we note that Negri’s equation of autonomy (the “constituent event”) with revolutionary transformation annuls revolution as an event in time and space, the time of the destruction and reconstruction of a state structure and the space of the political. Revolution must then become a mystery, must exist everywhere and nowhere, both within and beyond space and time, a hidden God. Hence it is not surprising that for Negri revolution is no more that the outgrowth of the “the [constituent] power of generation, desire and love” of the multitude,  “a project of love.” [xliii]

 If we follow the chain of reasoning back to its source in the ontological creativity of the multitude, that is, of the “general intellect” unchained, we find that this short-circuiting of the political is the result of a technological determinism à la Castells, of a logic of biopolitical immanence. As many commentators have pointed out, Negri lacks a theory of political mediation, of the articulation of political subjects. [xliv] Political strategy, as the construction of a Prince through the mastery of time, of fortuna by revolutionary virtù, has no place in the smooth space of Empire.

 

4) Change the world without taking power?

 

In the second type of post-modern revolution ICT networks are the very organisational model for a revolutionary movement against neo-liberal globalisation that aims to “change the world without taking power”.

The most celebrated example of such a movement is the Zapatista revolt against neo-liberation and for the rights of indigenous peoples. For Castells the success of the Zapatistas was largely due to their “communication strategy”. In this sense they are “the first informational guerrilla movement”. [xlv] The ability to communicate with the world through decentralized ICT networks enabled the Zapatistas to evade and undermine elite and commercial media control of information; to organize virtual international solidarity networks that encircled and undermined the repressive capacity of the Mexican state, forcing it to negotiate; to export their revolution against neo-liberalism into the very fabric of Mexican society and throughout the world; to shake Mexican politics to its foundations, accelerating the break-up of one party rule, and wresting constitutional reform guaranteeing the rights of indigenous peoples in 1996;  to powerfully contribute to the creation of a critical discourse and a diverse planetary movement against neo-liberal globalisation. [xlvi] As Castells perceptively notes, ICT  “propelled a local, weak insurgent group to the forefront of world politics”. [xlvii] It was exactly this that troubled the advisers to the powers that be. In the opinion of the Rand Corporation, the Zapatista revolt is the “prototype transnationational social netwar of the 21^st century”. Castells concurs:

 

“New communication technologies are fundamental for these movements to exist: indeed they are their organizational infrastructure…The revolutionary cells of the information age are built on flows of electrons.” [xlviii]

 

This is also the starting point of theorists of networked revolution, which identify three main revolutionary potentials in ICT networks. Firstly, its character as decentralized discourse enables marginalized social actors to evade territorial or organizational control of information. Hence the potential for ICT to generate a unofficial and decentralised public sphere in which open and informed deliberation and discussion, based on a wide variety of media sources, from the official to the unofficial, from the revolutionary to the counter-revolutionary flourishes. [xlix] Secondly, ICT is seen as a tool for cyber-activism where ICT as a decentralised network is paradigmatic of the organisational structure of new social movements based on direct democracy, like the “anti-globalisation” movements:

 

“Rather than a single movement, what is emerging is thousands of movements intricately linked to one another, much as ‘hotlinks’ connect their websites on the Internet. This analogy is more than coincidental and is in fact key to understanding the changing nature of political organizing. Although many have observed that the recent mass protests would have been impossible without the Internet, what has been overlooked is how the communication technology that facilitates these campaigns is shaping the movement in its own image. Thanks to the Net, mobilizations are able to unfold with sparse bureaucracy and minimal hierarchy; forced consensus and labored manifestos are fading into the background, replaced instead by a culture of constant, loosely structured and sometimes compulsive information-swapping.”[l]

 

            Thus, thirdly, ICT as distributed discourse enables the emergence of decentralised networks of struggle in real time that are able to evade and thus challenge the centralised and bureaucratic territorial and organisational structures of modernity. Postmodern theorists of revolution often cite approvingly the view of the Rand Corporation that, thanks to the Internet, the “war of the flea’ of the Zapatistas turned into a ‘war of the swarm’. The problem facing centralized state apparatuses and bureaucratic organizations is that the swarm has no ‘central leadership or command structure; it is multiheaded, impossible to decapitate’. [li] These three potential applications of ICTs to the formation of revolutionary movements have generated a new concept of revolution “as a struggle, not for power, but against it”.[lii]

            The Zapatistas are once again paradigmatic of the new concept of revolution. The Zapatista revolution, unlike all previous revolutions, does not aim to take power – either through the ballot box or the seizure of power. [liii] Hence it is the first “postmodern” revolution[liv].  This concept of revolution is based on two premises. Firstly, a loose form of the post-modern suspicion of the state; that is, a politics of difference, hybridity and fluidity that challenges the modern state as an apparatus of power-knowledge. Consequently, any attempt to transform state power will only succeed in replacing one apparatus of power-knowledge with another. Thus, secondly, the premise that the organisation forms of struggle must prefigure the political forms of the emancipated society; that is, the future abolition of the state must be prefigured in a decentralized, anti-state power.

The Zapatistas reject the authoritarian, vanguard organisational forms of traditional guerrilla movements in favour of “commanding obeying”, the principle that those who lead should be effectively subordinated to the rule of those who are led; that is, the federated, revolutionary leadership is mandated to act on the basis of decisions made by communal assemblies of the different ethnic communities. The Zapatistas thus represent a fusion between a guerrilla army and its social base, the indigenous, peasant communities: it is thus a polis, a political community combining deliberative, legislative and executive functions, a community in arms, a revolutionary Prince.[lv] This commune form of direct democracy is a ‘revolution which makes the revolution possible’, a revolution which overcomes the separation between ‘political society’ and ‘civil society’ by dissolving the former into the latter, thus prefiguring the stateless self-managing society of the future.[lvi] Hence, according to the Zapatistas,  the future revolution:

 

“…will not be the product of one kind of action. That is, it will not be, in the strict sense either an armed or a pacific revolution. It will primarily be a revolution resulting from struggle on various fronts, using many methods, using various social forms, with various degrees of commitment and participation. And its result will not be the victory of a party, an organisation or an alliance of triumphant organisations with their own specific social proposal, but rather a democratic space for resolving the confrontation of various political proposals. This democratic space will be based upon three fundamental, historically inseparable premises: democracy to define the dominant social proposal; the freedom to endorse one proposal or another; and justice as a principle that must be respected by all proposals.”[lvii]

 

It is precisely this indeterminacy in the concept of revolution that is celebrated by authors like Holloway.[lviii] If the revolution is not only to achieve radical democracy as its end, but is radically democratic in its struggle, then it is impossible to pre-define its path, or indeed think of a definite point of arrival. The revolution is self-creative, is the movement itself[lix], is the “openness of uncertainty”[lx]. For Holloway, echoing the negative dialectics of Adorno, revolution lies in the movement of the non-identical, movement “in the mode of being denied”:

 

“The problem of struggle is to move onto a different dimension from capital, not to engage with capital on its own terms, but to move forward in modes in which capital cannot even exist: to break identity, break the homogenisation of time.”[lxi] (Holloway 2002:)

 

But this is to pretend that ‘one can abolish capitalist relations of production by pretending they aren’t there’.[lxii] It is to ignore the problem of the space of power in modern societies, that is, in the final instance, the coercive power of the state Unsurprisingly Holloway’s concept of revolution dissolves into a negative ontology of the flux of “being in the mode of being denied”.[lxiii] In turn this ontology of revolution, having no positive referent in time or space can only exist as the pure negativity of a deus ex machina, as extra-temporal. Hence a slide into a theology of discontinuity, of rupture, of the event, as the Jetz-zeit of the Messiah (Benjamin) and the nunc stans of God (Bloch) (ibid: 214-5). If revolution here has a temporality it is that of providence, inscrutable to finite and contingent human beings, but comprehensible from the perspective of eternity.

This argument can be practically demonstrated in the case of Zapatistas. ICT has enabled the Zapatistas to escape a “space of enclosure” (Foucault), the Lacandon jungle, and more generally, the peripheral region of Chiapas, and virtually project their movement into the space of Mexican and world politics, thus effecting transformation in real time. However, crucially, the Zapatistas have not achieved their main objective; the abolition of NAFTA and its privatisation of communal village property and liberalisation of the peasant economy. Thus, virtual, decentralized networks do not completely escape their physical embodiment in space. Space and place constrain and enable (and are constrained and enabled by) social action.[lxiv] There is a duality of space.

In the case of the Zapatistas, ICT has enabled them to paralyse the repressive capacity of the state for the present. However the high political cost of repression to the state has been balanced by the physical enclosure of the Zapatista movement in a geographically and economically peripheral province of Mexico.[lxv] The longevity of the Zapatistas, like FARC (until recently) in Colombia, may be a sign of the relative weakness of the movement, its inability to threaten the nerve centres of Mexican capitalism. But this is also the consequence of its belief in “changing the world without taking power”, a strategy based on the limiting alternative between autonomy and institutionalisation within the political sphere. ICTs, like political agency, have the capacity of overdetermining space, of effecting transformation. In the case of politics, this is because the powers that social structures confer on actors are politically mediated, and in the view of Lenin, are only ever fully articulated in politics, in extensive and reciprocal social and political struggles. In the case of ICTs, their relation to social structures is transversal, and the supplementary powers they confer on actors are only ever fully realised in the territorial space of politics.

 

5. The Iron Law of Oligarchy?

 

We have argued uprising that theories of networked revolution pose a problematic isomorphism between virtual networks and the real world that effaces the politics of time and space under global capitalism.  Nevertheless, our intention is not to throw the baby out with the bath water. ICTs have technical properties that have the potential to contribute the formation of political subjects that can challenge the spatial and temporal characteristics of organizational life characteristic of modernity. Here we hope briefly to clarify some of these technical properties by means of a discussion of Michels’ iron law of oligarchy[lxvi].

Michels (Michels, 1915) argued that there is an iron law of oligarchy inherent to all forms of organization, such that even formally representative organizations, such as political parties and trade unions, are dominated by oligarchies. Michels identifies 5 key inequalities contributing to oligarchy:

 

·        The inequality of knowledge

·        The differential control over the means of communication

·        The uneven distribution of skill in the art of politics

·        Low levels of culture and sophistication

·        Time, energy and space poverty

 

Under each of these headings we will briefly examine the ways in which the technical properties may enable the formation of counter-hegemonic political subjects.

The relatively low cost of on-line communication and publication renders less credible any claim that the presentation of decisions, processes and action must be subject to the rule of informational parsimony (Hogan and Greene, 2002).  What is more, flows of information are now much harder to retain within institutional boundaries, while the distribution of points of entry into the force field of communication allows for unsanctioned and unofficial communicative pathways to be opened, where organisational performance may be observed and indexed (Grieco, Hogan and Martinez-Lucio, 2005).  Visibility and transparency are sharpened, with consequences for the processes of auditing individual and institutional performance, enabling the development of forms of meta-governance (Grieco, 2002) through the deployment of a reverse panopticon in relation to leaders, with significant implications for tracking and thereby resisting their manoeuvres (Hogan and Grieco, 2000).  With the diffusion of the technologies and skills for the faster and more extensive marshalling of materials revealing organisational and leadership performance the bargaining power of the led over those who lead is strengthened. By allowing for the rapid and low cost collation of information, the e-form allows actors to trace the points of origin and moments of translation and distortion as particular narratives pass across interfaces. This is significant not only in tracing the violation of ideal speech, but also in showing the paths of linkage which are travelled upon in the process of constructing power discourses. (Greene, Hogan and Grieco, 2001).  

Moreover, with the ever wider distribution of transmission technologies, the contribution of a multitude of voices to such processes can be recorded in a disintermediated way, free from institutionalised policing (Hogan and Greene, 2002).  The e-form, by taking collective decision-making processes out of traditional physical spaces of power, provides a safer space within which to deploy and develop communicative skills.  This is because intervention can be rehearsed in safe spaces and then delivered when the participant is confident. In traditional physical spaces of power the pressures of time mean that even the most politically committed individual is unable to realise the aim of participation. When one adds the tendencies towards what Hyman has referred to as the bureaucracy of dependency (Hyman, 1979), as manifest in the differential distribution of expertise and experience, as well as the problems associated with white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied domination, then the physical meeting place represents an unlikely arena in which a plethora of voices might be heard. ICT also promotes continuous learning.  In allowing skill development to take place by small increments- e.g. online questions, statements, calls for information etc-the acceleration of information transfers become part of the educational process for participants.  Indeed, every development in user-friendly technology is a contribution to communicative competence. (Greene, Hogan and Grieco, 2001)

Imaginative communicative strategy can be developed to service and organize participants outside of the spatial dominion of managerial and bureaucratic oligarchies and to resist the logic of residential dispersal (Hogan and Nolan, 2005). Furthermore, the capacity to meet and organise in virtual time and space, outside of physical spaces of enclosure, erodes dependency upon employer and state sponsorship, enabling the maintenance of collective counter-organisation outside of spaces of bureaucratic forms of domination (Hogan and Nolan, 2005). Through allowing for asynchronous communicative exchanges, communication technologies can be used to alleviate time-space poverty and provide alternative points of entry into modes of deliberation and decision-making, thus providing for the possibility of intervention and extended participation in collective organisation and action, along with new ways of collective identity and action formation (Greene, Hogan and Grieco, 2003).

Thus within the realm of organisation, tendencies towards oligarchy (sustained by control over the flow of information, access to superior knowledge, skill in the art of politics and a membership diverted by the pulls of work, family and leisure) are challenged by the possibility for greater equality of knowledge, distributed control over the means of communication, enhanced communicative skills and a reconfiguration of the time-space dimensions of communicative practice (Carter, Clegg, Hogan and Kornberger, 2003). Thus ICT have the potential to contribute to the formation of movements of contestation by stretching and deepening the time-space dimensions of communicative practice, with in terms of greater levels of reflexivity, deliberation, intervention, participation and action.

 

6. Conclusion

 

ICT demonstrates the potential for the formation of revolutionary movements across time and space that challenge the reified and bureaucratised figures of modernity, but there is no technological fix to the problem of politics and thus of the revolutionary transformation of state power.

We have argued that networked theories of revolution face the charge of technological determinism since they either posit an informational logic of technology beyond capitalism, as in the case of Castells: or, as with Negri, they argue that with the real subsumption of labour, collective social intelligence becomes co-extensive with the entire process of social reproduction, breaking free from capitalist relations of production as a multitude of communicating, networked singularities, leading to an immanent logic of revolution; or, as with the theorists of Zapatismo, they conflate networked, informational models of organisation with the revolutionary event and/or with post-capitalist society. In this way they either dissolve revolution, as discontinuous event into the homogenous, evolutionary time of capitalist rationalization (as in the idea of an “Information Technology Revolution”); or they place a logic of revolutionary (biopolitical) immanence outside of the dimensions time and space, as an ontological apparatus beyond measure, absolute procedure without foundation; or they dissolve revolutionary rupture into pure process or movement. Post-modernism celebrates the event without history, happening without past or future, fluidity without crisis, continuity without rupture, movement without objective.[lxvii] This new concept of revolution, a revolutionary process without revolution, a revolutionary evolution, abolishes the future in extra temporal immediacy, defines a revolutionary politics outside of time. Revolution now becomes an absolute event, existing outside the profane time of politics, to be explained by theological miracle rather than secular history.

But this to misrepresent the novelty and singularity of the revolutionary event. Revolution is neither the inevitable culmination of a historical teleology or the intrusion of messianic time into the empty, homogenous time of “creative destruction”, of capitalist modernization, but is constituted within the discontinuous time of politics and strategy; a discontinuous temporality that unfolds within the widening aperture of systemic contradictions and crises driven by the uneven and combined development of planetary capitalism, but a temporality which itself overdetermines and thus constitutes revolutionary crisis as revolution. Thus our journey through “evolutionary revolutions” driven by a logic of technology or informational networking leads us back to the political and its constitutive role in the formation of political subjects, in the widening of discontinuities in the fabric of evolutionary, capitalist time into revolutionary ruptures, and in the determination of revolutionary outcomes. ICT potentially provides agents located in the space and time of capitalist relations of production with supplementary powers that afford them a greater degree of mastery over time and space. However these virtual powers can only be fully articulated within real time and space, and can only be fully expressed through political agency.

 

 

 

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