all, with your iPhone you are connected to everything, but at the same time you have nothing. Everything is outside of you, which means you are somewhat crippled. And now something new is emerging that I cannot but call “private public space.” When you chat erotically on the internet, even showing your photos or whatever, you feel like you are in contact with the global world, but you are still isolated in a private space. It’s a kind of global solipsism . You are totally alone but in contact with everyone. Or you are in contact with everyone, but, in a way, still not socially connected. Again, interesting things are emerging here.
This would have been my answer. One English analytic Marxist made a very simple but nice point, and I think there is an element of truth in it. He says that, in Marx’s time, the proletariat – the good old Marxist determination of the proletarian revolutionary subject – was defined by a series of features: they were from the poorest part of society, the most populated, and they created wealth on behalf of others, etc. Today, we still have all these features, but they are no longer united in one subject .
So what I am trying to do is redefine the concept of the proletariat as those who belong to a situation without having a specific “place” in it; they are included but have no part to play in the social edifice. It means that the concept of the proletariat becomes a shifting category. For example, the poorest, these days, are not those who work, but those who are jobless, excluded , and so on. So we don’t have one subject. We just have to look to see, let’s call them, different proletarian positions .
And here I have problems with my orthodox leftist friends, who still identify the old notion of proletariat as the working class. To annoy them, I give them this example and it makes them furious. If you stick to the Marxist notion of exploitation and labor theory of value, then you should say that Chávez is exploiting the United States through oil profits. Because Marx, in Capital , demonstrates that the natural resources are not a source of value. So this means that we need to rethink the category of exploitation. Marx is absolutely clear here – he even uses oil as an example – that all new value is created by labor. So where do the big profits used to finance the revolution of Chávez come from? From selling the oil and getting money from the United States. So my argument is that we have totally to rethink the notion of exploitation and all other features. Everything has to be rethought again.
16
New Forms of Apartheid
If we are all potentially Homo Sacer, in the sense that the Marxist notion of the agent is no longer appropriate for this globalized era, how can the selection of who is included and who excluded be done ethically? Some must be excluded as agents of revolution – the notion of fundamental exclusion. Is there a contradiction between your seeking an ethical, self-critical subject/agent (the barred subject) of revolution, and your ideas of perpetual revolution? To make a revolution, we need a powerful agent, but at the same time that agent has to be able to renounce his power. (The revolutionary state should both use and renounce power at the same time.) What if you were considered to be among the excluded, and threatened with death by the revolutionaries?
SŽ: One thing that still works from the idea of Marx is that, with capitalism, there exists this radical gap . On the one hand, we have reality, real people working and consuming, and, on the other, we have this virtual circulation of capital, which goes on and on. There is a gap between the two. The whole country can effectively be in ruin and people starving, and then a financial expert comes and tells you the economy is in a good state.
We saw just this after the 2008 crisis. The shock was that nothing happened in reality, but all of a sudden we realized that we were in a terrible crisis. I think the
This would have been my answer. One English analytic Marxist made a very simple but nice point, and I think there is an element of truth in it. He says that, in Marx’s time, the proletariat – the good old Marxist determination of the proletarian revolutionary subject – was defined by a series of features: they were from the poorest part of society, the most populated, and they created wealth on behalf of others, etc. Today, we still have all these features, but they are no longer united in one subject .
So what I am trying to do is redefine the concept of the proletariat as those who belong to a situation without having a specific “place” in it; they are included but have no part to play in the social edifice. It means that the concept of the proletariat becomes a shifting category. For example, the poorest, these days, are not those who work, but those who are jobless, excluded , and so on. So we don’t have one subject. We just have to look to see, let’s call them, different proletarian positions .
And here I have problems with my orthodox leftist friends, who still identify the old notion of proletariat as the working class. To annoy them, I give them this example and it makes them furious. If you stick to the Marxist notion of exploitation and labor theory of value, then you should say that Chávez is exploiting the United States through oil profits. Because Marx, in Capital , demonstrates that the natural resources are not a source of value. So this means that we need to rethink the category of exploitation. Marx is absolutely clear here – he even uses oil as an example – that all new value is created by labor. So where do the big profits used to finance the revolution of Chávez come from? From selling the oil and getting money from the United States. So my argument is that we have totally to rethink the notion of exploitation and all other features. Everything has to be rethought again.
16
New Forms of Apartheid
If we are all potentially Homo Sacer, in the sense that the Marxist notion of the agent is no longer appropriate for this globalized era, how can the selection of who is included and who excluded be done ethically? Some must be excluded as agents of revolution – the notion of fundamental exclusion. Is there a contradiction between your seeking an ethical, self-critical subject/agent (the barred subject) of revolution, and your ideas of perpetual revolution? To make a revolution, we need a powerful agent, but at the same time that agent has to be able to renounce his power. (The revolutionary state should both use and renounce power at the same time.) What if you were considered to be among the excluded, and threatened with death by the revolutionaries?
SŽ: One thing that still works from the idea of Marx is that, with capitalism, there exists this radical gap . On the one hand, we have reality, real people working and consuming, and, on the other, we have this virtual circulation of capital, which goes on and on. There is a gap between the two. The whole country can effectively be in ruin and people starving, and then a financial expert comes and tells you the economy is in a good state.
We saw just this after the 2008 crisis. The shock was that nothing happened in reality, but all of a sudden we realized that we were in a terrible crisis. I think the
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