Late Capitalist Culture and Cultural Critique

The main problem for a radical, critical-oppositional, and ultimately socialist politics in the United States today is that of defining and enacting a genuinely critical solidarity with all struggles against oppression. For academic intellectuals this means, especially, defining and enacting critical solidarity within the counter-public spaces which are particularly prominent in pedagogical institutions such as the academy. In order, however, to demonstrate this critical solidarity it is first necessary to have some sense of what “critical solidarity” should mean. As we see it, “solidarity” means unconditional support for the self-determination and self-organization of oppressed groups and those struggling for emancipation. And yet a “critical solidarity” means not withholding but rather, in fact, making as our central contribution, critique of the problems and limitations — and the contradictions which make possible and give rise to as well as which are carried out within and which follow from these problems and limitations — in the cultural forms oppressed groups develop in the course of their resistance against oppression.

More precisely, this means, above all else, at this historical juncture, critiquing the tendencies towards (post-collectivist) re-privatization which by now pervade all cultural practices, including oppositional ones. These tendencies take the forms, for example, of “experientialism,” “localization,” and “textualization”: in other words, a reduction of collective struggles over the control of the means of production to their subjective effects, to local instances, and to the “communicative relations” or “language games” they generate. By contrast, we believe it is necessary to theorize and support a notion of “collective rights,” that is, an intervention in those institutions authorized to reproduce the collective subjects required for late capitalist culture: an intervention toward the redistributive redelegation of social resources and towards the expanded and enchanced democratic use of these resources. This involves addressing social subjects as agents already articulated into collectives involved in struggles over access to and exercise of social resources (although these articulations are, of course, often contradictory and conflictual, both between and “within” individuals, and these contradictions and conflicts in fact should be a principal focus of critique). It is, in particular, the counter-public spaces which must be addressed as the spaces from within which the types of mobilization, both actual and potential, of collective agents directed effectively against this (re)privatized mode of appropriation can be generated at this time. This means that counter-public spaces should neither be created nor conceived as ultimately alternative and separate (that is, privatized) sites in which merely to protect and cultivate “alternative” “cultures” in abstraction from the dominant culture.

We can take, as a central instance of what we have thus outlined as the priority direction for radical cultural critique, one of the processes central to capitalist production: the production and reproduction of labor power (ultimately the main function, we would argue, of the university and related institutions). Under earlier periods of capitalism, the reproduction of labor power took place primarily through the private consumption of commodities and domestic labor, performed in non-commodity forms, and pri- marily by women. However, due to the far more complex labor power required for late capitalist production, along with the exhaustion of pre-capitalist modes of reproducing individuals, the capitalist system must increasingly take on the responsibility itself for providing the conditions — for producing the means — for the reproduction of labor power. However, as capitalist production is increasingly organized and directed towards the fulfillment of this responsibility (however partially and inadequately), the consequent socialization of the process of reproduction makes private control and appropriation, embodied in the law of value, increasingly irrational. That is, it becomes increasingly impossible to calculate the precise amount of value contained in the commodities consumed by workers as soon as this consumption involves not only a certain amount of food, clothing, rent, and so on, but also a dozen years of state- subsidized schooling, a certain aggregate of (neo- or post-) Keynesian spending and monetary measures, of state supported health care, and so on. In other words, with the collectivization of the reproduction of labor power, the entire logic of capitalist production is undermined, and comes into increasingly direct and antagonistic contradiction with social needs even as these needs are represented by capitalist interests. Nevertheless, for a certain lengthy period of time, crisis can be avoided as the overall social costs of reproducing labor power can be shifted from one class onto another, depending upon their relative force, and even at the potential cost of economic and cultural devastation for millions of individuals.

For all of these reasons, it is necessary to recognize that the terrain of class struggle in late capitalism has expanded immensely — now proceeding well beyond more traditional areas such as struggles over wages and working time. Class struggle is now more than ever before directly cultural and political; this fact, however, also means that class struggle can be much more difficult for the exploited and their representatives to wage effectively than ever before. It is useful, therefore, to ascertain what must be the main object of this expanded class struggle at particular historical and social conjunctures so as to focus this struggle most efficiently and potentially most effectively. The main object of class struggle at this point must be the question of who will bear the costs of the reproduction of collectivized labor power because what we earlier described as the “post-collectivist process of re-privatization” is above all a way of imposing this burden upon the working class itself, of compelling the working class to develop new modes of cooperation for the purpose of managing the reproduction of its own labor power at its own (financial, physical, and emotional) expense. At its most successful, this strategy produces workers who sell their labor power as individuals but reproduce it as “post-collectivist self-managers.” For this reason, it is necessary to be extremely suspicious of celebrations of “community”-based modes of (self)initiative and (self)control which take globally imposed austerity measures as a given.

The question of struggle over what are to be the “moral-historical” components of the cost of labor power is an extremely effective way of tying together all of the issues we have raised here, in relation to the pedagogical tasks of a radical cultural critique. In this sense, the most important question one can ask of a cultural phenomenon is how it contributes to the reproduction of some of these components: does it do so by establishing isolated divisions of labor which enable those involved to “get by” on limited resources; or, on the contrary, does it contribute to the formation, extension, and interconnection of counter-public spaces designed to create and transform institutions according to the category of collective rights? Again, the critical aspect of our work consists in our focus upon the fact that these aspects are most often combined in specific cultural processes, and that the regeneration of the collective practices suppressed by capitalism but preserved in part in post-collectivist spaces itself requires a great deal of critical engagement and experimentation.

Such a practice of radical cultural critique will not, due to the very disturbing questions it raises, place us within range of the institutional center: we will not be asked to design curricula or reform departments. Unlike (neo- or post-) liberal, multiculturalist cultural critics, we are not interested in developing ways of up-dating capitalist cultural strategies so that they can correspond to “new” economic realities, now themselves increasing described as “multicultural,” and themselves requiring ever more “flexibile” and “sensitive” kinds of subjects (and subjectivities). Rather, radical cultural critique, thus understood, places us necessarily on the margins of institutions and of even the counter-public spaces themselves because our goal is not to celebrate or appreciate these spaces but to transform them in drastic ways so as to enable their contribution to ever more radically — and ultimately revolutionarily — transformative ends.

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