Complexity and Social Movements: Multitudes at the Edge of Chaos ...

162 The map is not the territory
neo-liberal contractualisation of everyday life and the rise of a concomitant
consumer consciousness. We do not advance this as either platform or policy,
but rather in the spirit of experimentation that Deleuze and Guattari
exhort, as a means of illustrating how comparatively minor changes might
transform relations of power and governance. For, if Thompson and Zioek
are correct in closely associating class consciousness and class action with
the sphere of consumption as well as production then the neo-liberal
axiomatic has unwittingly given prominence to the milieu that is most likely
to reconfigure the anatomy of force-relations during what Foucault hoped
tongue-in-cheek might eventually be a Deleuzian century.
Theoretical debates on class within the AGM have been entered into
around competing notions of a continuing teleology of class (Callinicos
2004 6 ) and the renewed search for a ‘subject’ of revolution leading to the
theoretical construction of a singular yet highly differentiated Multitude
engaging with a singular yet dispersed Empire by Hardt and Negri (2000,
2004). In a debate between Callinicos and Negri at the European Social
Forum in Paris in 2003 however, Negri argued that the multiplicity
represented by multitude stood alongside and augmented traditional class
concepts, whilst Hardt has also suggested that:
For us, economic analysis, class analysis, analysis of the forms of labor
and new forms of cooperation – those are what give the possibility to
new notions of democracy. 7
For us, however, this suggests certain habits of mind that are yet to be
overcome. Habits that are ultimately reductive of complexity despite their
best intentions. Notwithstanding the work of Hardt and Negri in emphasising
the multitude as a locus of generative and creative action they nevertheless
return to a telos that precedes multitude, 8 in order to re-pose a
bi-polar struggle between opposing actors, albeit one in which their ‘new
proletariat’ is somewhat more inclusive that the industrial working class.
This marks the eternal return to the centrality of one’s (class) location in the
process of production as the barometer of revolutionary potential and is
combined with the desire to call into being a revolutionary subject from
one’s own thought. Part of this is as a result of their desire to bring into
being that which they believe to be immanent to the political and economic
relations of Empire (a project which we have a good deal of empathy with)
and part of it is evidently born of frustration; as Hardt suggests ‘all of this
political theorizing about democracy remains wishful thinking unless
there’s a subject that can fill it’. 9
We are not suggesting that analysis of productive relations is unimportant,
rather the opposite in fact (see Chapter 7), we are suggesting it is essential
to complete the circle, to understand how co-operation might extend from
production to consumption, enabling the forging of autonomous nonmarketised
relations of distribution and exchange. Our fear is that the