Toward a Political Theory of Non-cooperation

The last two decades have seen an ongoing attack on the notion of the working class as an agent of revolutionary transformation. Not surprisingly, this attack has coincided with even broader claims, for example, that the “working class” no longer exists in any meaningful sense, and that traditional forms of working class organization (like unions) have become obsolete. This attack has been critiqued by Marxists, who have given strong reasons for continuing to support the notion of the proletariat as potential revolutionary agent (see, for example, Ellen Meikens Wood, The Retreat from Class, and Ralph Milliband’s Divided Societies). I will not review these arguments here; rather, I will presuppose the validity of the classical Marxist position. However, I will also presuppose that any theory of revolutionary agency depends upon its ability not only to explain the activities of that agent itself, but also to account for the more general forms of political practice which follow from the centrality of that agent. This means that a class politics which merely “includes” questions of race and gender cannot be a revolutionary politics; rather race and gender must be assimilated to a transformed understanding of class politics. In this article I will try to develop some of the elements of such a politics, based upon an analysis of the structures of working class oppression and struggle.

Contemporary theories of democracy, including many new leftist theories of “radical democracy,” do not depart from the assumptions of liberalism. That is, democracy is invariably understood as the association of autonomous agents (individuals and groups) for the purpose of collectively deciding upon questions which are essential for the “common good.” For liberalism, these agents are simply given, as a precondition of “democracy,” which has the purpose, on this account, of managing the freedom of the agents in question. That is, neither the social and historical construction of these agents, along with the disparities and inequalities which constitute them, nor the way in which the very structure of these agents determines the social definition of what is “common” and what is “good,” is seen as relevant to the understanding of democracy for liberalisms, new and old alike. Whether the agent is conceived of as the rational individual of classical liberalism, or the interest groups of social democracy, or the collective identity of postmodern liberalism, is secondary: these different articulations of liberal assumptions simply correspond to different moments in the history of capitalism.

A marxist theory of democracy proceeds according to opposed presuppositions. Marxism argues that political agents and political forms are the products of the global political economy, or the dominant mode of production. This means that political articulations cannot be abstracted from socio-economic structures and evaluated according to “pure” political or ethical “principles,” but are rather the results of struggles in which various economic agents are compelled to engage as a result of their position in relation to the means of production or the dominant property form. The content of political struggles, then, and the means with which they are waged, are therefore not freely chosen by the agents involved; rather, they are determined in an extremely precise way by the contradiction between the forces and relations of production.

For liberal theories, freedom is a result of contingency. That is, freedom is the lack of determination of the activity of autonomous agents by the overarching form of social organization, that is, the absence of “external” restraints. Liberal theories claim that, given the absence of such forms, the agents must be, as if by default, “self- determining.” Marxism detects in this claim the logic of the market. From the standpoint of the individual bearing his/her commodity to the market, freedom consists of the absolute possession of that commodity, and the ability of its owner to dispose of it as he/she sees fit. However, the commodity only confers this freedom upon its owner because it is part of the entire system of commodity production and exchange; the commodity, and by extension its owner, are already “determined” by the abstract labor (value) it contains relative to other commodities.

The system of commodity production and exchange, that is, is in fact a highly organized system of compulsion which only appears to be free from the standpoint of the property owner. This is evident in the case of the most problematic of all commodities, the commodity of labor power. In the “ideal” capitalist system, the worker brings his/her capacity to labor to the market like any other property owner. Unlike other commodities, though, in which each owner transfers his/her commodity to the other and goes his/her own way, the sale of labor power can only be consummated, or this commodity can only be consumed, when the worker subordinates him/herself to the authority of the “buyer” for a specified period of time; that is, by completely surrendering his/her freedom. Furthermore, this sale only becomes necessary when the worker has been transformed into a dispossessed subject, with nothing to sell but his/her labor power, and no way of surviving other than through this sale.

In other words, the apparent freedom of commodity owners turns out to be the result of an unequal power relationship determined by the worker’s dispossession and the capitalist’s possession of the means of production: that is, it is a result of a system of compulsion. Furthermore, this type of exchange is a site of struggle. The worker’s labor power can only be consumed when the individual worker combines his/her labor with that of others within a collectively organized workforce. This leaves both capital and labor in a contradictory situation. Capital requires the fragmentation of this workforce so that individual workers are compelled to bargain from a position of weakness (from the standpoint of their individual dispossession), while the organization of the workforce it requires for the consumption of labor power compels it to provide the working class with collective power (the possibility of collective possession of the means of production). The working class, meanwhile, can only utilize this power through the subordination of the individual interests of workers as commodity owners to collective ends and organization, while its relation to the system of exchange sets individual and groups of workers in competition with each other. The outcome of this contradiction, the way in which it is resolved, is ultimately a result of political struggle between the agents representing the respective sides of the contradiction.

What is at stake in this struggle is ultimately the control of society’s collective labor force. The “freedom” of the market means the determination of labor time by the needs and criteria of capitalist profitability. The suppression of this “freedom” by the collective actions of the exploited class, on the other hand, means the possibility of organizing society’s labor capacity in accord with the democratically determined needs of society.

To put it another way, what is at stake is the future of the very concept of “democracy.” Capitalism depends upon the dispossession and consequent powerlessness of individual workers. That is, they must be completely dependent upon their wages, upon placing their labor at the disposal of some capitalist. This seems to be so “obvious” to the subjects of capitalist culture that it has the sanction of an “absolute moral law”—individuals must be “responsible” for themselves (and their “family”), they “should not” expect “handouts,” etc. This “obvious” moral law, though, is simply the translation into moral terms of the absolute dependence of individuals upon the market and the logic of private property and profitability. It moralizes this logic, by presupposing that the ability to meet the terms imposed by that dependence is available to each individual; leaving it up to the “free will” of each individual to fulfill this “responsibility.” This places very definite limits on “democracy,” in the sense of equal participation of all citizens in public decision making processes. This is because it places those questions most central to our actual conditions of existence outside of the public domain, reducing them to “natural” or “moral” “laws”: how much we work, how intensely, who controls the conditions of work, how much we are compensated for our work, and who or what determines whether we get to work at all. Conservatives are correct, from their standpoint, to object to the introduction of such questions into the political arena because they strike at the heart of the contradictions of capitalist “democracy.”

This point can be illustrated by posing the following question, or “paradox.” In the past century, the amount of labor considered average or standard in the advanced capitalist countries has been reduced from about 60 hours a week to about 40 hours a week: that is, about 33%. Meanwhile, the increase in productivity has, to put it mildly, been far greater. While it is difficult to calculate these quantities, even if we take into account increases in average consumption, the decrease in labor time is completely incommensurate with or disproportionate to technological advances. Why? (Incidentally, try raising this question in your introductory economics class. One would think that the relation between technological capacity, labor time and living standards would be a fundamental question for economic theory. Economists disagree.) To make the question even more vivid, consider the fact that despite the enormous technological advances of just the last 20 years, along with the decline in living standards for Americans, we are nevertheless constantly exhorted to “work harder” in order to “catch up.” The answer to this question, or the solution of this “paradox,” lies in the capitalist economic system, which determines labor time in accord with the need to exploit labor (that is, to have workers labor beyond what is required for their own subjective reproduction) and, more broadly, to maintain an exploitable labor force, which must show up at work every day, to take what they can get, that is, to be “responsible” for themselves. Contemporary moralizing about “our” need to work harder in order to be “competitive” with other nations should be translated as follows: American workers “should” work harder for less money so that the capitalists who exploit their labor can be competitive with the capitalists who exploit the labor of other peoples.

The struggle for democracy, at this point in history, is, I would argue, ultimately a struggle for free time, for the right to use one’s time as one pleases. Capitalism produces the contradiction between “work” and “leisure.” This contradiction is a reflection of the division between the time spent in “production” (the consumption of labor power) and the time spent in reproducing the capacity to labor (which is of concern neither to the capitalist nor to the “public,” i.e., for which the worker is individually “responsible”—at least “ideally”: I will return to this point). The resolution of this contradiction in the interests of democratizing social institutions requires an extension of “leisure” time, that is, of the time and resources “invested” in individuals as citizens and administrators of those institutions. This resolution in turn presupposes a radically opposed set of values: rather than the fetishization of individual responsibility I have discussed, this mode of organizing social and cultural relations is based on the rational use of society’s productive capacity to produce increasingly free individuals who are “responsible” to the reproduction of social relations as a whole (and therefore have an abundance of time to spend in education, various forms of cultural enrichment, and play).

In this context, a theoretical understanding of the purpose and significance of working class economic organization becomes easier. Working class organization is a violation of the laws of the market and free enterprise; it enables the working class collectivity to maintain a monopoly on the commodity of labor power, to abstract it from the laws of the market; it undermines the labor contract between “individuals”; it transforms the questions of labor time, labor intensity, control of labor, and the value of labor into “public” questions which can be consciously determined and not left to uncontrolled economic processes. It is highly significant that the first working class struggles of the nineteenth century were concerned, first, with establishing the “right” of such organization and, second, with reducing the length of the working day.

Not only has the right to unionization had to be won through historic struggles, but it is never really safe in capitalist society. The economic struggles of the working class are always also political struggles which place the principle of collective control over the conditions of existence on the agenda. Furthermore, the more general progressive, democratic and political significance of labor struggles does not end here. Such struggles have introduced a specific weapon into the political arsenal of all oppressed groups: collective non-cooperation with the “normal” functioning of dominant institutions. Working class agencies invented the strike as a result of their most immediate necessities, that is, their need to utilize their collective (potential) control over the means of production in order to make it possible for even individual members of the working class to preserve their existence. Strikes involve the collective withholding of labor power; it transforms the relation between capital and labor from one in which workers confront capital as isolated “dependents” to one in which capital’s (and “society’s”) real dependence upon collective labor determines the form of social cooperation. This practice of collective “non-cooperation” with “legitimate” institutions and social apparatuses is, I would argue, something that all effective movements of the oppressed increasingly have in common, whether they take the form of “riots,” “passive resistance,” etc.

This is because the contradiction in the capital-labor relation now pervades capitalist society as a whole. Late capitalism has destroyed all pre-capitalist economic, social, and cultural forms, some of which (like peasant economies) continued to exist alongside of and in relation to the dominant capitalist system for a long time. It has organized virtually all social groupings (including women, previously largely enslaved within the domestic economy, and blacks, previously enslaved within the sharecropping economy) in collective ways: as “workers,” “students,” “consumers,” etc. This is because, contrary to capitalist “ideals” the reproduction of labor power has increasingly become a “public” concern—this is both because of anti-capitalist struggles but more fundamentally because of the contradictory logic of capitalism itself which, by socializing the forces of production and drawing virtually all individuals into capitalist production, requires ever more socialized (in the sense of being produced by society as a whole) individuals. This is why activities which appear “private” are more and more often placed on the public agenda, such as child rearing, sexuality, personality “disorders,” etc. Under such conditions, non-cooperation with the existing order and its institutions becomes the primary mode of effective struggle.

By “non-cooperation,” I do not mean “non-participation”—it is impossible to refuse to participate in the existing order. Non-cooperation means the organization of collective forces so that they can be strategically withheld from dominant institutions in the interest of imposing a different set of priorities upon those institutions—priorities determined by the needs of collective power over the means of production. Therefore it is necessary to develop ways of participating in those institutions so as to refuse to cooperate with their present uses. Non-cooperation is a kind of “negative” work, which involves as well the production of the elements of opposed types of institutions, based upon production for democratically determined needs.

This understanding of politics defines politics as struggles over the control of socially produced collective labor: struggles over whether such labor is to be subordinated to the logic of private property (and hence reduced to individual, more or less specialized and antagonistic labor powers); or whether it will be self- determining (and therefore organized so as to make the total productive capacity commensurate to social needs in the interest of maximizing freedom). Of course, this question in concrete political struggles is never so clear cut and direct. Political activities represent possible directions of collective mobilization; they contest specific obstacles to such mobilizations; or they contribute to the production of subjects capable of engaging effectively in collective struggles. In any case, the first line of resistance to such (radical) practices is the defense of the “private,” the “individual” as a site of incommensurability and “responsibility” which abstracts specific relations and problems from the global totality and thereby contributes to the organization of social capacities as a tributary or subsidiary of private property.

If the general form of emancipatory politics is represented by working class organizations, it also follows that a rejuvenation of working class organization (unionization) at this point in history must start out with a much higher level of political self-consciousness: to achieve even the most minimal successes it will have to be internationalist, anti-racist, feminist, and supportive of gay rights. That is, it will have to adopt as its own the interests of all democratizing and egalitarian movements: it must recognize as central all the questions connected to reproducing labor power, as well as those connected to selling and using it. Any other course makes unified action impossible from the start. This is the case for several reasons. First, a regeneration of working class organization will depend upon the ability to draw women and people of color (who now represent a majority of the working class, as well as its most oppressed segments) into the movement from the start. This, in turn, cannot be accomplished without not only enabling women and people of color to possess positions of authority within such organizations in order to make sure their interests are adequately represented, but also supporting the interests of these groups which are not immediately connected with economic struggles but which nevertheless directly affect their fighting capacity. Second, working class organization will require not only class solidarity against capitalists, but the support of entire communities who are also adversely affected (and sometimes devastated) by the increasingly “free” mobility of capitalists. This is because local political and cultural institutions have increasingly been drawn into economic processes, through the establishment of tax policies, “appropriate” schooling, enterprise zones, etc.

Third, the actions of the state in regulating the movements of capital and the reproduction of labor forces takes on greater importance now than ever before: thus, the working class will need the ability, even in order to produce and preserve the conditions of organization, to determine (through alliances with other progressive groups) the limits and whenever possible the content of such activity. Finally, the international activities of capital in the absence of sufficient resistance have not only produced at least the beginnings of a global working class, but have succeeded in setting different regional and national sections of that class against each other. Rather than fighting a lost battle for greater protectionism on the part of “its” government, the American working class must defend its interests by supporting the economic and political rights of workers in other (especially underdeveloped) countries. The most direct, and for the foreseeable future, most practical, way of accomplishing this is by using its collective power to block the militaristic and imperialistic activities of “its” government.

One contemporary problem which draws all of these questions together in an especially concentrated way, and has been placed on the agenda in extremely volatile forms in all the advanced countries, is that of immigration. The increase in immigration, legal and illegal, throughout the advanced world, is an effect of the globalization of capitalist production, including both movements of capital and movements of workforces. National (and even regional—as in “Europe”) boundaries no longer correspond to economic realities; however, these boundaries are necessary for the capitalist class because they allow it to keep the working class divided and hence enhance its own control and profits. Furthermore, immigration controls allow for the reproduction of reactionary political tendencies (like nationalism and racism) which not only exacerbate the antagonisms between sections of the global workforce but also support reactionary tendencies throughout society. (Take, for example, the logic of opposition to immigration: “they” are going to take away “our” jobs. This presupposes a condition of scarcity of jobs, and therefore of competition over limited “resources”; this is the most extreme form of the tendency of capitalism to fragment the working class which I discussed earlier. It also presupposes, again, in an “extreme” way, the notion of “individual responsibility” that I critiqued earlier: “they” should take care of themselves, like “we” do, etc.) Finally, the (inevitable) existence of high levels of illegal immigration (which immigration laws are established more to produce than to prevent), leads to the establishment of a class of disenfranchised workers within the advanced countries, which in turn produces the conditions under which the rights of all workers can be encroached upon.

Thus, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that, next to its commitment to the reduction of the working day and establishing a universal minimum income as the right of all citizens, the main measure of the maturity of a renewed working class movement will be the degree to which it accepts the principle of the abolition of all immigration controls. This entails learning to see “foreign” workers as allies, as the elements of a massive workers movement which would be based on the struggle against the exploitation and oppression of the world’s workers. In other words, if efforts are made to organize rather than expel such workers, they will be transformed from “competitors” or “freeloaders” into the elements of tremendous class power. However, a precondition of this is the struggle against efforts to regulate and expel them. The very horror with which such a slogan would be viewed by the mainstream is indicative of its radical character.

The most obvious objections—that it would take away jobs from American workers, that it would lead to “chaos,” that it would overburden public agencies (welfare, health care, etc.), and even, in some exorbitantly reactionary claims (never far from the surface), lead to the end of “Western Civilization”—all these objections merely demonstrate how deep are the cultural and ideological habits of seeing workers (and not only “foreign” workers) as a “special interest,” a “burden,” an “uncontrolled mass,” a threat to order and civilization, and so on. Furthermore, they similarly illustrate the hold that the assumptions of private property have on the dominant culture, which sees “work” as a “good” which is “distributed” by capitalists and is therefore in limited supply, like certain rare natural resources. The struggle against immigration controls would also enable the working class and its allies to free themselves from these assumptions and to see labor as an independent force capable of reorganizing society on completely different foundations. It would also challenge one of the state’s fundamental powers (to regulate its borders and determine criteria of citizenship) and compel much of the population to develop a critical consciousness of US. international policies (support for repressive regimes and corporate exploitation of the worlds people’s) which are also largely responsible for migratory flows.

The struggle for a guaranteed minimum income level would have similar effects in terms of critiquing the fetishized conceptions which arise spontaneously from the structure of private property. Here, the objection would be that “who would agree to work if they already had a guaranteed income?” In this objection is contained the assumption (in properly moralized and naturalized form) that labor under capitalism is essentially forced labor, which no one would undertake “freely.” The logic behind the demand itself, meanwhile, is that the purpose of organizing social production is meeting the needs of the entire population on a level commensurate with the total productive capacity. To the extent that people do need to be “forced” to work, the amount and type of compulsion should be determined democratically, and not by the needs of capitalist discipline. Furthermore, its immediate political effects would be quite dramatic: if employers need workers, they will have to pay, not what corresponds to their need for profit, but the amount that would make it worthwhile for individuals to renounce their guaranteed income for a “job.” It should be kept in mind that in this analysis it is not necessary to move away from bourgeois conceptions of individual motivation and interest. On the contrary, such a proposal, as long as it is connected to an analysis of the general social productive capacity to provide a given minimum income, corresponds very closely to this notion of individual interest. (It should be noted that bourgeois notions of “interest” and “right,” if taken seriously, can often have radical implications, within certain limits, because these notions were not developed with the vast majority of the population in mind and because securing these rights and interests necessarily requires bringing collective power to bear upon the institutions of private property.) To the objection that this would make capitalism impossible, the answer can be made that that is because capitalism can only draw upon the “individual initiative” of workers in the sense of placing before them the alternative of work or destitution, not in the sense of basing social progress on the rational decisions of individuals.

The usefulness of adducing these “examples” is the aid they can give us in developing modes of social and cultural analysis and critique, especially in relation to problems of political practice which do not present themselves, as I suggested earlier, in such a clear cut way. For example, what constitutes a politics of “non-cooperation” for a feminist organization, for a radical academic intellectual, a peace movement, etc.? The contradictory notions of agency and responsibility which my analysis of immigration pointed to provide us with an insight into the general structure of the cultural contradictions of capitalism. The work of the dominant culture and ideology involves attempting to resolve this contradiction by rearticulating the logic of private property by reducing the emergence of new collective practices and possibilities to that logic. This can be done in a variety of ways: by “moralizing” these new possibilities as examples of “decline” (of responsibility, of absolute values, Western culture, etc.); by “accommodating” them by understanding them as instances of linear “progress” (as in “multiculturalist” claims regarding the advantages of “diversity”) which require some adjustments but no substantial changes; by “sensationalizing” them as representing new modes of freedom or some kind of monumental social change (as in postmodern celebrations of new forms of technology, or “post-industrial” society).

The first problem for oppositional practices therefore lies in the contestation of these hegemonic operations of the dominant culture. More generally, the politics of non-cooperation is, as I suggested earlier, a “negative” politics, interested in “ground-clearing” work, in destroying obstacles to democratization in all institutions and practices. This negative work, largely ignored in an “affirmative” commodity culture enamored with the mystical properties of individual initiative, ability, and possibility, is an irreducible precondition of any “positive” work concerned with establishing oppositional practices and institutions. In this context, non-cooperation is interested in the conscious realization of public interdependencies. This entails agents refusing to have the collective powers and possibilities represented by their practices employed as the means of stabilizing the hegemonic and exploitative practices of the dominant culture. It requires the demand, enforced by the potentially disrupting effects of non-cooperation, that the “rights” and “responsibilities” associated public modes of production and social reproduction be placed first on the agenda in determining social criteria, and that institutions to which are delegated the responsibility of (re)producing knowledges and subjects be subordinated to this end. This demand, meanwhile, is tied to the need to expose, critique, and undermine the systematic reproduction of the categories and relations of privatization (as I discussed before, the reduction of collective relations to the criteria of “personal responsibility”).

The “classical” liberal notion of freedom and democracy is linked to contemporary postmodern “identity politics” through the critique of “bureaucracy” that they both share. The privileging of the category of “difference” by the practitioners of identity politics presupposes that it is the “homogenizing” and “normative” force of the dominant culture (which seeks to reduce all differences to “sameness”) that is the main oppressive force in society. Terms such as “homogeneity” are in fact code words for “bureaucracy,” which has been understood by non and anti-Marxist critics of contemporary society and culture (like sociologists in the Weberian tradition, or the American New Left) as precisely such a force, one which reduces all differences to calculable quantities which can be reified, measured and manipulated. Such theories understand the bureaucracy in terms of the “technologization” of “humans,” or the reduction of individuals to mere “cogs” in the vast “machinery” of administered life in modern society.

According to Max Weber, for example, the dominant feature of modern Western society is not, as argued by Marx, capitalist social organization based upon private property and the exploitation of wage labor, but rather the pervasiveness of rationalization, or the rational (i.e., systematic, formal, specialized) mode of organizing all aspects of culture, including technique, law, art, and even religion. What characterizes modern capitalism, according to Weber, is “rational capital accounting,” which distinguishes Western capitalism from other kinds. (See Max Weber on Capitalism, Bureaucracy and Religion, edited by Stanislav Andreski. London: George Allen & Unwin). Rational accounting, in turn, requires, among other things, the “rational state,” based on “expert officialdom and rational law” (150), i.e., a bureaucracy separated from “society” due its control over the processes of rationalization. This distinction between capitalist relations of production determining rationalized (although also irrational) cultural forms, and capitalism as determined by processes of rationalization may seem a subtle and academic one: however, Weber’s reversal of Marx’s argument regarding the effects of capitalist production enables him to argue that any post-capitalist system would merely be an extension of the rationalizing and bureaucratizing forms of capitalism:

Thus in all probability the bureaucratization of society will encompass capitalism too, just as it did in Antiquity. We too will then enjoy the benefits of bureaucratic ‘order’ instead of the ‘anarchy’ of free enterprise, and this order will be essentially the same as that which characterized the Roman Empire and—even more—the New Empire in Egypt and the Ptolemaic state. (150)

Meanwhile, a similar conception, from a very different political perspective, is advanced in the following words from Mario Savio’s famous speech during the free speech demonstrations at Berkeley in 1963:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all. (Quoted from Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, Bantam Books: Toronto, 1987, 291.)

This striking image, of modern society as a vast “machine” which conflicts with the freedom of individuals, while articulating important elements of the New Left struggle in the 1960s, also places the focus on rationalization and bureaucratization rather than exploitation. In this case, the decisive question will be on the impersonal and automatic character of the social system rather than upon class domination. (For an interesting Marxist critique of Weber’s and post-Weberian theories of bureaucracy and domination—both of the left and the right—see Rajani Kanth’s Capitalism and Social Theory: The Science of Black Holes, M.E. Sharpe: New York, 1992.)

On these terms, any social force or “mechanism” which transforms social relations (or “identities”) from the “outside,” according to a “plan,” or a totalizing “theory,” is necessarily , regardless of its declared politics or intentions, an accomplice of the bureaucratization of social life. “Bureaucracies” are accused of placing unnecessary obstacles in the way of the direct translation of intention into action and effect (“red tape”) and of removing communication and decision making away from “face-to-face” contacts between individuals and situating them in the Byzantine mazes of “impersonal” rules, regulation and “jargon.”

This opposition to “bureaucracies,” regardless of its connections to various progressive struggles (like the student movement of the 60s) is ultimately reactionary—which is why, in fact, it has proven so useful to the New Right in its attacks on “Big Government.” A bureaucracy is any form of social organization which tends to reproduce itself regardless of its social necessity. The bureaucracy, then, represents a drain on social resources, a series of restrictions on social activity, and a set of “formal(istic)” rules and regulations which reduce groups and individuals to a “common denominator” (tied to its own reproduction) which is in a sense, “irrational.” Furthermore, bureaucracies tend to be a conservative force in society, and therefore generally serve the interests of those agents opposed to fundamental change. However, none of this explains why bureaucracies are such an inescapable element of social life, and without such an explanation it will be impossible to assess the significance of attacks on bureaucratic social forms.

According to a Marxist approach which sees the contradiction between the forces and relations of production and the class struggles which result from this contradiction as the determining element in social life, bureaucracies arise as the result of irreconcilable conflicts between social agents over the determination of needs and the power to allocate resources and cultural capacities. Bureaucracies “mediate” these conflicts by subjecting social problems and needs to “objective” (which is to say, directly controlled by none of the contenders for power) procedures, rules, processes, etc., which prevent these groups and classes from engaging in incessant and extremely costly struggles. Bureaucracies develop as a result of the inability of either side to impose its will on the other in an unfettered or absolute way; the source of its power lies in the independence that its role of mediator gives it. Bureaucracies, in the end, protect the interests of the more powerful agent, but they generally do so by preventing that agent from realizing those interest directly and completely. The critique of bureaucracy, then, must be part of a critique of inequality, and the struggle against bureaucracies part of the struggle to abolish systemic inequalities; without this broader context, the critique of bureaucracy, taken by itself and regardless of how it is coded, amounts to a demand that domination be exercised in a more direct and unrestrained manner—that it be privatized. The means that bureaucracies provide to defend the interests of the less powerful and the “general interest,” however meager and contradictory, often provide some essential elements of challenging existing power relations. The modification of dominant interests in the process of their realization also requires, in part, contradicting those interests, in ways that open possibilities for oppositional struggles. Bureaucracies tend to place the question of public control over social processes and general social needs on the agenda, even if they themselves are merely “simulacra” of this type of control. (This analysis of bureaucracies is indebted to Leon Trotsky’s analysis of the Soviet bureaucracy in Chapter III of The Revolution Betrayed, Pathfinder Press: New York, 1972.)

The question of bureaucracies is important here because one of the critiques of working class organization advanced by those on the libertarian left which has supported the movement away from class-based politics, is that such organizations tend towards bureaucratization and therefore into servants of the status quo. The reasons given for this are usually the following: first, the very successes of unions and workers’ political parties tend to give the most privileged sections of the working class a stake in maintaining the existing social system; second, the emphasis such organizations place on “practical” and “material” goals (higher wages, electing representatives, etc.) necessarily subordinate them to the bureaucratic logic of the system, with its stress on “results” and “efficiency.” According to the argument I have advanced here, though, one could argue that bureaucracies are an inevitable aspect of working class organizations formed within capitalist society, which are compelled to mediate between different (and unequal) sections of the working class, as well as between the working class and other, especially the capitalist, classes: however, it does not follow from this that this tendency toward bureaucratization must be the dominant one, or that it could not be contested, especially by deepening the practical connections between all layers of the working class and by relying upon those powers which are specific to working class struggles against exploitation.

Central to this issue are the questions of “power,” “difference,” authority and agency that are so central to contemporary debates among the left. Postmodern understandings of politics depend upon the connection between “instrumental rationality” (strict means-end calculations), bureaucratization, and domination in “modern” societies. This abstracts “domination” from class relations and socio-economic structures and situates it in a logic or type of “consciousness.” In this case, the most important kind of opposition to domination is the subversion of that logic (“logocentrism”) and the opening of communication to dialogue, difference and plurality. This decentering of rationality, it is argued, will make possible more democratic modes of interaction, and empower social criteria other than those of efficiency and productivity. Once again, the liberation from domination is conceived, as Jurgen Habermas understands it, as a freedom from “system imperatives” and the ability to determine activities according to rational criteria which can be mutually shared and criticized by any of the parties involved.

the problem with this approach is that, while wanting to situate freedom in the absence of bureaucracy, it necessarily abstracts resistance to domination from systemic inequalities. “Communication” becomes a realm in which, regardless of material circumstances, all can be equal insofar as they can be included in the “dialogue” or “conversation.” The assumption here is that if we direct our efforts towards “mutual understanding” of the values, criteria, and knowledges of the other in attempts to form non-coercive consensus, social interaction will be made more free and democratic. However, these knowledges, values and criteria are the effects of material determinations and reproduce material inequalities; hence, the attempt to bypass them conceals these inequalities and allows them to continue uncontested. Meanwhile, the recognition of inequalities, and in this case of inequalities in what Michel Foucault termed “power/knowledge” relations does not necessarily mean an acceptance, in the sense of legitimation of those inequalities. Rather, it means that inequalities are understood as the result of social structures of exploitation, which must be abolished totally, and not through the creation of small islands of what Habermas calls “undistorted speech situations.” Furthermore, it places the question of pedagogy on the agenda; that is, it enables us to theorize all subjective interactions as sites of pedagogy, which is to say sites at which interested and activated subjects are produced. To privilege pedagogy in this sense is to privilege, not the terms which make interaction and dialogue possible, but the transformation of those terms through an inquiry into their conditions of production and contradictions. (Jurgen Habermas has developed this line of argument in many places. See, in particular, Postmetaphysical Thinking, MIT Press: Cambridge, 1987; and see the collection of essays discussing Habermas’ theory of communicative action in Communicative Action: Essays on Jurgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action, Edited by Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, The MIT Press: Cambridge, 1991).

In this context it is easy to ask what justifies one’s pedagogy, or the change one is attempting to effect through interventions into “other” communities, groups, subjects, etc. At stake in this question is really liberalism’s horror at its ultimate other: collectivization, and the subordination of the free and rational individual (including “his” possessions) to collective and public criteria. All privileges in capitalist society are the products of the privatization of some socially produced capacity, whether it be machinery or knowledge; in other words, the appropriation by a small minority of capacities which required the labor of the exploited majority. Such privileges come into contradiction not with some abstract notion of justice, but with the socialization of the forces of production and the collectivization of all practices including, by now, the production and reproduction of the social subjects required by cultural institutions. This process of socialization and collectivization makes it possible to coordinate all productive and reproductive social activities and determine the allocation of resources (ultimately labor time and intensity) to those activities and therefore to address these questions publicly and democratically (for example, how many cars should be produced and how should they be distributed; how children should be raised and educated; how should access to various media be managed, etc.). This, of course, comes into contradiction with the “private” rights of car producers and consumers, parents, and the “free” press: there is, in other words, a conflict of “rights”—which is ultimately what politics is about.

The pedagogy I have outlined here, then, is justified by a commitment to the notion of collective rights over the actually-existing private rights which support exploitative relations. The exercise of collective rights requires the production and maintenance of collective power; that is, power which can only be exercised collectively and through the combined activity of those who have no social power individually. Collective power by its very nature requires violations of private rights: workers on strike take away the “right” not only of the employer to run “his” business, but of other workers to earn a living; the existence of a closed (unionized) shop takes away from individual workers the “right” not to join a union, not to pay union dues, not to contribute to the political candidates supported by the union, and so on. By the criteria of liberal democracy, such violations are despotic and practically totalitarian (the extreme of “bureaucratic”); this is in part because the exercise of collective power in capitalist society always requires a high level of solidarity which implies measures taken to discourage breaches in solidarity; but also because collective power in general requires a much closer coordination of activities, much more planning, and therefore much more rigorous subordination of many wills to a single will than does private property (which of course, is only ever owned by a small minority, who do not have to force one another to defend their common privileges). Again, tendencies toward bureaucratization are implicit here, especially insofar as the exercise of collective power and the production of new modes of authority in opposition to capitalist structures necessarily reproduce and can even exacerbate some of the inequalities produced by capitalism, for example, between skilled and unskilled, unionized and non-unionized workers: however, again, there is no reason to assume that these tendencies are irreversible. What is essential to point out is that this problem determines the most important sphere of political activity in anti-capitalist struggles and post-capitalist societies; however, I have no time to address this question here

A pedagogy interested in laying the groundwork for collective power practices non-cooperation in the sense that it doesn’t take existing criteria, values, and discourses on “their own terms”; that is because it reads those “terms” as those of either the dominant order of private property or as allies in the struggle to abolish private in the interest of collective power. That is, it reads all terms adversarially, as combatants in a struggle without neutral parties (This does not mean that it reads all of the individuals or groups who use such terms as adversaries, once and for all; rather, it makes the distinction between discourses, subjectivities and the individuals who could conceivably make use of a variety of discourses and occupy a variety of subject positions: in fact, it attempts to indicate the contradictions between the interests of agents and the implications of the discourses and subjectivities they employ or inhabit.) Non-cooperation in pedagogical situations involves critiquing and contesting those terms which compel subjects to cooperate with the ends served by existing institutions—by disrupting the obviousness and givenness of those terms, the intervention of other terms (representing other criteria, and other practices) becomes possible.

The defense of specific identities, values, communities, and so on, as “self-determining” is an attempt to extract them from adversarial relations invariably for the benefit of some private interest—ultimately the ruling class, but more directly of the class which possesses a monopoly on access to advanced and complex knowledges required for production and the reproduction of labor power. It is this class (the new professional-managerial petit-bourgeoisie) which has an interest in reducing social conflicts to misunderstandings between incommensurable modes of communication which can be mediated by those who are not so deeply invested in any specific set of terms that they are able to move “freely” from one communicative community to another. This describes the position of the new petit-bourgeoisie who, during the heyday of the welfare state represented their class interest as the general one by identifying the bureaucracies in which they had privileged places with the management of the general interest; now, however, after more than a decade of new right attacks on the welfare state as the embodiment of inefficient and totalitarian bureaucracies, this same class must identify the general interest with the capacities of those who are able to bridge gaps between heterogeneous groups in “non-bureaucratic” ways. Only in this way, that is, can this class, and especially its sections most directly involved in the production of knowledges and ideologies, sell their services to the rulers of capitalist institutions and thus preserve their privileges. In this text, I have employed the notions of “non-cooperation” and “collective power” as a way of enabling critique of these social, cultural, and ideological shifts, which represent the transformation in the hegemony exercised by the capitalist class in a very contradictory transitional period from one form of capitalist rule (that of the “welfare state”) to another, more globally organized one, of which only the outlines are currently visible.

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