Back in the early 90's I worked for a small third-party company in internet advertising research.  Online ad revenues were relatively small at the time, still no threat to print or television.  The firm I worked for had one major client in the area, the biggest producer of computer processors in the world (really, I couldn't give a broader hint).  They were concerned mostly with finding out what their competitors were up to, and checking the criteria on retailers enrolled in their advertising rebate program.  In other words, I was a sophisticated corporate spy, all legal like, even Department of Justice approved, unlike those pirates who did Microsoft's evil bidding. 

What the experience taught me was that "public perception" and the "official account" are the same thing.  The supposed gap that everybody assumes exists between the two really isn't there.  There is no big unfathomed zone of public ideas and opinions, unknown to those in charge and, perhaps, waiting to blow up at a moment's notice: just add the internet, and voila, instant revolution.  Insulated as I was in my bubble of reality from the Big Illusion of the "revolutionary" nature of the internet age, I couldn't help but notice how well controlled things seemed from the center, the locus of control, in an emerging industry, and how far this, too, was from the reality.   

The official account of such an age--and we seem to be on the threshold of yet another one, in the form of the sparkling new "green" economy-- is largely the version that capital wants people to see.  And since capital gets in on the ground floor of everything, literally, this means that its version of a new field of products, and the jobs made to service them, determines much of what comes after.  Of course, as I've said, I couldn't help but notice some gaps.  Control, it turns out, is a notorious failure at achieving its ends.  Where capital is concerned, it usually settles for half, or less.  And it relies on its near monopoly of politics to accomplish the rest, or at least to hold its critics at bay long enough so that once the central scam on which the latest "new thing" was based is revealed to be a disappointment or an outright fraud, it can move on to the next one.  And the next...  And the next...

So the determining function of capital in its abstract role, the power to impose its vantage point on an entire new area of production, has some pretty disturbing implications.  One who thinks that controlling the federal government (in true progressive, or "evolutionary socialist," terms, controlling the "heights of politics") will somehow afford one the ability to really change anything, has not been paying attention.  Or rather they have, and that's the problem.  Because the constant projection of the speculative idea of the non-existent "gap" between officialdom and the public domain is one of the most notable features of capitalist society, one of its few consistent frauds, to the point of representing a seizure-inducing fixation (public corporate advertising).  The point of view remains the same--and the failures of capital are continually ignored or forgotten as everything "moves forward."  This is the most fundamental type of historical elision accomplished by the system: it kills its own ugly children in the cradle.  Or, it forgets them, and they grow up malformed and resentful.

Just as the "gradualists" in Britain and the Scandinavian countries found out when occupying certain vital areas of the economy didn't turn the social-economic system in the direction of socialism, the progressives right now in America are finding out that occupying the White House won't accomplish a transformation of the political system.  Washington insider influence-peddling and corporatism, which appeared to be on the run at the end of the Bush era, have reasserted themselves, and Obama's supporters have lost their man to the establishment (I voted for him, too).  And like the European social-democrats, who wound up supporting failing industries with public money until they became profitable again, only to see them re-privatised and globalised, the progressives here are finding that some of their most cherished efforts are going to support the very parts of the system they wanted to fight: healthcare reform for the financial benefit of pharmaceutical companies; financial reform for the benefit of the investment banks that crashed the national economy; and pending environmental legislation that is looking more and more every day like a gift to companies invested in "clean coal" and other garbage.

It turns out that while there are real alternatives to the present system, there is no alternative to changing the system as a whole.  One has to approach the problem from the ground up, and not from the "heights," whether political or economic, as presented by capital.  In order to do this, one has to be willing to go and find out what the real issues and the real causes are that one should be fighting for, before going off half-cocked on a quest that would embarrass Don Quixote.  There's no way to find this out from public opinion since, as I've said, it is just a reiteration of what capital wants, in the usual response-counter-response way--like a congregation responding to the liturgy as read by a priest whose "initial" utterances are themselves determined by the written text.  He conducts himself in his role as cultic functionary, and the congregation conduct themselves accordingly.   In the same sense, different people play their various roles when adhering to class provincialism, a social-metabolic interpellation that can only be interrupted by doing something that is always already "out of bounds" that is, obscene or foolish, from capital's point of view.  (Notice also that this is exactly what American progressives are not doing when they focus exclusively on electing certain candidates to certain offices.  Anyone who thinks that something will change by electing somebody new to the White House isn't thinking very clearly.  This is supposed to happen, every four or eight years, like clockwork.) 

So at the most basic level, taking our approach from the ground up, the problem of what political strategy to take against the capitalist system is a problem that turns on the category of the Human.  All contemporary political theories and movements revolve around the Human (and Humanity) at their most fundamental, and they all claim to be "for it" and have its "best interests" at heart.  But the Human is a very hard category to pin down.  Sometimes we mean one thing when we invoke it, and then later, when we invoke it again, we mean something else--something vastly different, if not contradictory, from what we meant to imply the first time.  This should cue us in to some historical inconsistency in its uses--inconsistency, but not total arbitrariness. 

After all, it's not just any category.  It's how we refer to ourselves, en masse, in the current of time.  It's how we track ourselves collectively in history.  Once again, it's also the gravity-point of every philosophical outlook in modern times.  The political fight is a fight over the territory of the Human.  Maybe this is why, when political discourse really breaks down, the people on opposing sides start referring to each other as "sub-human" (I've done it myself).  It devalues the other side to the point where they no longer enjoy the protections supposedly offered and defended by all points of view.  The impassioned moment, though, only reveals what is always at stake: our collective future.

Conservative Humanity and Liberal Humanity

Conservatives only use Humanity to refer to what it means to be a "good, decent" person---a functionalist use, by definition implying an uncritical functioning of the social-economic system.  It refers here to workers playing their assigned role as labor functionaries just as much as the priest in the above example plays his ritualistic part. 

As for the liberal definition of the Human, it is much more complex.  Recent popular commentary (over the past thirty years or so in America, more contemporary in parts of Europe), which highlights the so-called failures of liberalism, are unconvincing.  At almost every level, liberalism is the outlook inherent in the social metabolic.  If I had to define American society, for instance, I would say that it's a liberal democracy.  (It's status as a republic is a mere technical fact, an artifact of history but not a functioning reality, or barely.)  The failures of liberalism apply more to the ballot box in recent times than anywhere else.  Furthermore, there is no real difference between contemporary political liberalism and philosophical liberalism.  That's a popular misconception.  Liberalism derives from the idea that in order to get people, to get workers, to cooperate with the system, the best method is one of common consent.  It doesn't have to be a perfect situation--a solidly exercised "social contract"--and very often in practice it involves a great deal of misery for the vast mass of people. 

The argument for liberalism, that it represents a more "humane" approach than that of conservatism, is selectively and historically specific: it belongs to certain periods of largesse, and it fails to take into account the larger picture at any time in the history of capital.  The two philosophies have in fact always been present in modern political discourse, at least in every country and every period (even under Bonaparte I in France, where two camps of royalists played the respective parts) since the dawn of capitalism during the period of "primitive accumulation."  In this way liberalism has provided the backbone of argumentation for the secondary fact that all social programs should be based on the incentives model: people need to fall extremely low in their personal conditions before they can draw on any kind of benefit from the commonweal, a design that is supposed to motivate everyone to work and never require anything of real value from the state.  The state's real purpose is to serve capital, a primary fact that is revealed when crisis sets in and conservatism, along with its disciplining philosophy, focused on the control of labor, comes to dominate the political conversation.

This situation, this one-two punch of liberalism in good times and conservatism in bad, frees "state capital" to be used for the purposes of capital more generally.  Strictly speaking, in relation to the capitalist system, political liberalism is the carrot, conservatism the stick.  And political liberalism doesn't differ markedly in this respect from its philosophical counterpart either.  Liberal philosophy posits an "individual" (the lowest, smallest unit of the Human), free to make choices, but only within the bounds set by society at large.  It's a basic statement in favor of contingency, and as such it begins the modern period in Western philosophical discourse, one concerned centrally with the question of contingency v. determinacy.  But this also provides the grounds on which the incentives model is built.  One of the first proponents of philosophical liberalism, John Locke, also supported a political-economic liberal view: "harsh justice for the layabout, fine reward for the industrious."

Of course, there's nothing wrong with hard work.  But in a system where all real value derives from the surplus labor of workers, to be "industrious" means to contribute to one's own exploitation.  So really self-sabotage for the working class doesn't begin when they vote for conservative or reactionary politicians--that's a further extension of the already built-in perversity of the system.  Exploitation begins when they clock into work.

Therefore the conservative definition of the Human, and the liberal understanding or gloss on it, are the same at this level.  Under capital, like under any social-economic system, people feel they have value only when they work.  And (the elision here is represented as a smooth continuity in capitalist discourse) to work means to contribute to your own exploitation, that is, to work means to work for wages.  So under the present system people are made to feel that they have value only if they do something that leads to harming themselves.  It's rather like the position of a masochist, but a very special kind--one who gets a thrill from self-inflicted pain only.  Certainly this is the way most people experience it.  If one gets the sense that someone else is inflicting the pain, then one is liable to feel victimised and troubled.

Due to the system-wide loss of value that happens during a crisis, some people begin to perceive the not-so-automatic nature of the system.  As various attempts by capital to squeeze more surplus from labor in order to compensate for the lost value set in, people become more and more likely to perceive the social-metabolic for what it is: a system of exploitation, involving instability and crisis, followed by more severe exploitation, and so on.  That sort of clarity on the part of workers has to be averted at all cost, and during a crisis we see a number of different attempts to do so.  Some are liberal-reformist, some are reactionary-disciplinary, but they are all attempts to get the system functioning again through its two main terms, with their respective definitions of Humanity.  None of them offer real alternatives to the system as a whole.  There are some attempts to restore appearances and the system's reputation.  However these are secondary to restoring its functioning.  They belong to the vantage point of capital, too, and address what is usually called a "crisis of legitimacy."

In a long term, serious crisis, a structural crisis that reveals the system and its dependency on exploited labor, like the crisis we're experiencing today, we see the system move quickly past matters of "legitimacy," and reformist suggestions, and right on to disciplinary measures.  Notice how soon the American political system's honeymoon with progressivism ended.  From the election of Obama as a progressive candidate in '08 to the recent election, the mood has shifted, and cooled, especially in the establishment, so that it's become clear the only proposals likely to make it through the next Congress will be budget cuts, specifically cuts to programs for the poor and elderly.  Less skilled workers and retired workers are less valuable to the system.  This is always how value is assigned, by the relative worth of different types of exploitable labor, but this fact is hidden from many people when times are good.  We can see now how our voluntaristic acceptance of these conditions when times are good sets us up to be devalued and discarded when times get tough, when a crisis sets in and value becomes much harder to find.

Also there is the matter of speed.  During a structural crisis like the present one, things move much faster and in a much harsher direction.  There is really no mystery why the government would allow banks to foreclose on the homes of people who have managed to keep up-to-date with their payments on sub-prime loans, or encourage some home owners not to pay on their mortgages in order to trick them into default.  Institutions are given much more latitude when value becomes as difficult to find in the system as it is today.  Objecting to the logic of these acts, and insisting that it is only those who are behind in their payments that should suffer the worse fate, only means that you accept the system's logic, with all its ruthless, exploitive content.  A logic the outer borders of which are patrolled by "liberal" false choices, such as either we kick everybody out of their homes to satisfy the predatory banks, or just some people, just those who "deserve" it.   

Homo Sacer & The State of Exception

Although it doesn't appear in Giorgio Agamben's studies, the story is worth repeating here.  Some time in the late imperial period, in the 3rd century A.D., a Roman column was marching along when it encountered a person who was thought by certain locals in those parts to have commited a horrible crime.  They asked the general in charge of the column for justice.  There was scant proof to the charges, but the general decided that since it was a time of war, and there were no officials who could determine the man's guilt or innocence properly, he would be considered in limbo for the time being and made to march along with the column.  He was therefore tied to the back of a cart and forced to keep up with the soldiers' grueling pace.  After a few leagues, he was exhausted and fell, and despite his cries for help he was dragged behind the cart for several more miles before anyone noticed.  By the time this was brought to the general's attention, the man had died from his wounds.  The general ordered him to be cut loose and left by the roadside.  But then, turning back to the legionnaire to whom he had issued his orders, he added, "And be sure to keep the rope.  It is no doubt worth more than the man we leave behind."

The story exemplifies what the autonomist critic and historian Giorgio Agamben means by the "state of exception," a special category or series of categories, created in times of stress by the state or sovereign to deal with cases that otherwise would be treated in regular juridical ways.  Or, in the more extreme sense, and for certain cases, the creation of whole new categories that previously did not exist and that describe a state of being, and the category of person that goes along with it, which Agamben terms "bare life."  This is in contrast to the usual "full life" offered to the subject or citizen by "biopower," all those devices of the state that are dedicated to the care of the citizen and opening up of opportunities for a better existence than what would be possible without the state and its extraordinary powers.  Like many critics before him (Foucault, Deleuze, Negri & Hardt), Agamben sees the power of the modern state as being defined mostly in terms of "biopower," or the power to assure life, if not a good life, to its citizens, and not the power over death which was the primary threat wielded by the sovereign in feudal and pre-feudal states. 

Although some modern states continue to keep the power to deal out death as a last resort, most of the bureaucratic apparatus in modern countries is dedicated to caring for citizens and their survival--energy that keeps people warm in the winter, cool in the summer; transportation that allows people to travel and carry on trade between regions; healthcare that sees to the physical well-being of people; police and juridical systems that are meant to care for their safety.  These are all either supported by the state, or in some countries, by private entities that in turn rely on the state for direct and indirect subsidy.  Without these overlapping grids of infrastructure and services, much of our social and economic life would be impossible or at least very chaotic.  And the law in many ways stands at the center of all this activity, directing and defining the categories by which it is conducted.  Crimes are largely crimes against the smooth operating of the system--theft, illegal organizing (underground economies), and sabotage (including terrorism) are its main concerns.  This is also the micro-level of control for capital, where its interests are looked after and defended most directly.

Agamben's point is that over the last few decades, and especially in America and parts of Europe since 9/11, special categories or "states of exception" to this political arrangement have sprung up and begun to metastasize in the system.  In particular, the U.S. Patriot Act and conditions at Guantanamo Bay represent for Agamben "states of exception" where certain groups of people are regarded as being beyond the usual juridical means of deciding their guilt or innocence.  They are supposed, in practice, to be in a state of permanent limbo, legally and in a deeper sense as to their humanity, and so any treatment at all is deemed appropriate for them.  They can even be denied the right to protest extreme conditions, even torture, through the only means left to those whose entire existence has been reduced to "bare life": the hunger strike.  There is pretty ample proof that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay who tried to stage a hunger strike to protest the brutal conditions there were force-fed by guards.  For Agamben a place like Guantanamo, the concentration camp, is the space opened up once the "state of exception" has begun to reach a level of generalization in the system that makes it harder and harder to reverse the trend through mere legal means, since the entire set of events of which it is really composed exist beyond the law to begin with, and are based, ex ante, on assumptions that run to the root of a society--to its economic basis, one could say.    

The danger, in Agamben's eyes, is that such "states of exception" will become the norm, and that the phenomenon is already linking up in disturbing ways with the larger division of the world, through globalisation and its extreme inequalities, into two camps: one where the usual means of "biopower" are still at work trying to assure at  least some of the people a fuller life, the other, the Third World and "economic development zones" of global capital, where people live under repressive governments (think Singapore, or present-day Thailand, or even Berlusconi's Italy) and where they fit into the global system only as Homo Sacer, as Humanity reduced to "bare life."  These people, the people we see on TV in war-ravaged regions and places on the verge of collapse due to the economic meltdown, and the effects of the ecological one, are subjects who are regarded as mere biological automata by the system, as less than that even.  Anything can be done with them, anything can be done to them--it depends on the whims of the system.  It can save them, or it can damn them.  Or it can ignore them altogether and let them die a slow death by deprivation and catastrophe.  (One can trace here in Agamben's work an echo of Negri & Hardt, where they talk in Empire about the possibility of "biopower" collapsing under the imposition of a series of disciplinary structures, mobilised by global capital, and power reverting to its old role as the death-dealing Monarch.)

Agamben also points, along with other authors such as Noam Chomsky in his study 9/11, to the appearance of divisions within the "rich countries" that echo the global divisions.  Isn't our American Homo Sacer the immigrant, the gay, the Muslim, and even more insidiously, the dissenter, the intellectual, and the world traveler who is increasingly subjected to methods of searching, interrogation, and control previously reserved for criminals?  Even the biometric information routinely demanded on passport and drivers license applications--height, weight, hair and eye color--were first suggested by criminologists as ways of tracking those with previous criminal records.  The additions of systematic fingerprinting, national ID cards, DNA tracking, and large-scale data mining simply add more layers to a system of control that already had as one of its potentials the creating of a permanent "state of exception" for everyone.

The Framing of Resistance, and Beyond

Notice how Agamben's terms also define the boundaries of resistance.  By creating zones, both geographical and within the Human itself, the system is suggesting a whole other topology where resistance can (and should, from capital's point of view) be conducted.  Reduced by legal and extra-legal methods to lone individuals, the system reduces the chances for collective action by workers and the solidarity that comes from it.  The experience of collective action is important in recovering a great deal in terms of technique and organizing knowledge that is lost during extended periods of accumulation, and relative calm.  From the worker's perspective, history alternates between periods of action and awareness of exploitation, and periods of withdrawal and acceptance of the utopian (and often liberal-reformist) schemes that dominate when times are good. 

The problem with the situation as laid out by Agamben is that these good periods are coming to an end.  What most people will experience in the future is a constant state of crisis, accompanied by constant calls to include larger and larger portions of the populace (both nationally and globally) under a permanent "state of exception."  Instead of vacillating between liberal-reformist and reactionary-disciplinary means to keep control, the political strata will rely solely on the latter term, defined in ever smaller increments of specificity, and expressed as ever more intrusive methods of micro-control.  Liberal and conservative versions of Humanity will vanish, and be replaced by a global adherence to exceptionalism.  Everyone will be considered Homo Sacer.  Government will also probably take up a more peripheral role in this development as private capital declares its sovereignty over everybody, right down to the minutiae of their private life.  This is the cancerous downward-spiral progression of a system bent on extracting the very last drop of surplus value from workers, the human equivalent of what is being done to the environment through the extraction of the last few desperate drops of certain vital raw materials.  It's unclear which horizon will be reached first.

The only way to oppose the system politically then, is to oppose capital directly and today.  Waiting for it to fully reveal itself means a game of relying on more and more futile measures within the round of liberal-versus-conservative, reformism-versus-discipline, until it is too late to do anything about the grounds on which the game is being conducted.  Until the ground, in fact, is legislated out from under our very feet.  After all, who can't see where the argument over "fracking," the destructive extraction of natural gas reserves from people's back yards, is leading to?  How long do you suppose it'll take for fossil-fuels corporations to declare such land eminent domain?  Therefore the fight over land use issues, battles over gentrification and the public commons, are not just battles of the poor, or exclusively worries of the city-dweller--they have far-reaching implications for everyone in a world dominated by a starved system searching for fuel and for profit.

And there is one more note to strike on Agamben's work:

His historical analysis gives one the sense that there are no alternatives except whole-system alternatives.  What we need is a new hegemonic alternative.  Although Agamben is an autonomist, his position on establishing a new systemic, one not based on the extraction of surplus labor as profit, remains unclear.  He is a critic, and not a designer of new systems.  But his work provides something of a roadmap if we are to avoid some of the worst mistakes of reformism and limited autonomy.  Notice the problem is even worse when one looks at the other side of it: the recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to allow corporations to spend unlimited funds supporting political candidates during elections not only made big corporations into citizens.  It also limited that portion of the category of the citizen, the official subject, that could be claimed by other agencies.  In that sense, it made us less human.  

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Sources, Further Reading:

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (and subsequent volumes), State of Exception; Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, Violence; Noam Chomsky, 9/11; Istvan Meszaros, Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness, Beyond Capital; David Harvey, The Limits of Capital, The Enigma of Capital; Michael Albert, Thinking Forward; Martin Pawley, The Private Future, Terminal Architecture; Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism; Naomi Klein, Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, No Logo; Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt, Empire, Multitudes (zine); Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil; Tariq Ali, Conversations, Bush in Babylon, The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad