Guest Posts

Governing Through Resilience: Implications for Solidarity and Political Action

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The second guest post in our solidarity and resilience forum, this time from Tudor Vilcan. Tudor is a doctoral candidate at the University of Southampton. He seeks to critically investigate how discourses of resilience are put to use as ways to govern society. He is also interested in complexity theories, new materialism and critiques of neoliberalism.

This contribution represents a sum of reflections about solidarity and political action in the context of resilience policies based on a presentation given at the Political Action, Resilience and Solidarity Workshop organized at King’s College London in September 2014. I suggest that there is room to think about political action and solidarity in the context of resilience policies. Political action and solidarity are developed through encouraging individuals and communities to take ownership of their own risk management and build generic adaptive capacities. I argue that the meaning of political action and solidarity is changed in this context, as it provides a localized social engagement that at the same time evacuates political concerns from consideration. For resilience policies to succeed in properly connecting with individuals and communities, they need to find a level of engagement that is not just social, but also political.

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Resilience has become an important idea, especially in the last few years. It has been developed and applied in the context of the environment, threats and hazards, development or thinking about change. More importantly, it has started to make its way into policy making, becoming one way in which society can be governed. At its core, resilience proposes to be a property or capacity of groups, communities or societies to cope with disruptions and still maintain their basic functions.

There is an acute absence of contributions that seek to draw links between resilience on one side and political action and solidarity on the other. This might be because we are told that resilience is about the strengthening of society as a whole to better tolerate shocks and rebuild if necessary. It appears to go beyond concerns with formal politics and deliver a model for governing society that is more appropriate to the interdependent and complex world in which we are living. Such a model emphasizes the need for connections, diversity, broadened participation or devolved governance. It signals a move away from the centralized approaches to policy making to emphasize that society must be seen as a large array of networks, systems and critical infrastructures whose disruption or failure can have catastrophic domino effects. When resilience is conceptualized in such way, political action and solidarity can be seen to represent atavisms of a time when static, concrete political and social categories were popular. In today’s complex and fluid world, they don’t appear to have the same purchase.

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Why We’re Not Ditching Resilience Yet…

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A guest post in our resilience and solidarity symposium from Rhys Kelly and Ute Kelly. Rhys is a Lecturer in Conflict Resolution at the Division of Peace Studies, University of Bradford. His work currently focuses on the pressing challenges posed by ecological crises (including climate change) and resource depletion (including ‘peak oil’). Retaining a long-standing interest in (peace) education, Rhys’ work is now broadly concerned with investigating what kinds of individual and social learning are needed and possible in the context of increasing global insecurity, which might support just and peaceful transitions to more resilient, ‘sustainable’ communities. Ute is a Lecturer in Peace Studies at the University of Bradford. Her current research interests arise from the intersection of two areas that she has been interested in – the theory and practice of participatory engagement processes (particularly dialogue and deliberation), and the emerging interdisciplinary field of social-ecological resilience. Ute is interested in exploring the communicative and collaborative dimensions of resilience, the relationships between people and the places in which they find themselves, and approaches to enhancing resilience at different levels and in a range of contexts. She also teaches a module on ‘Peace, Ecology and Resilience’ within the BA in Peace Studies, encouraging students to explore the meanings, uses and limitations of ‘resilience’. Rhys and Ute are jointly engaged in exploring the meanings of ‘resilience’ on the ground, particularly for people who have been trying to engage with the converging ecological, economic and energy crises facing us today. Relevant recent joint publications include ‘An Education in Homecoming: Peace Education as the pursuit of Appropriate Knowledge’, Journal of Peace Education (2013); and ‘Towards Peaceful Adaptation? Reflections on the purpose, scope, and practice of peace studies in the 21st Century’, Peace Studies Journal (2013).

Those who responded:
engaged with resilience,
thoughtfully active.

‘I want you’, she said,
‘to ditch ‘resilience’ now’.
How, then, to resist?

Part of a sequence of haikus about ‘10 days in September 14’ for a collective zine, these two fragments are an attempt to convey Ute’s experience of the workshop on ‘Political Action, Solidarity and Resilience’. The first tried to describe the people who responded to a survey we had created to gather reflections on ‘resilience’.[i] The responses to our survey were thoughtful and reflective, and most came from people who are critical of the status quo and trying to respond to a set of crises that includes climate change and the degradation of ecosystems, energy depletion, austerity, conflict, inequality and injustice. Interestingly, many of our respondents appreciated the opportunity to reflect on their own understandings of ‘resilience’, on the contexts in which they had seen the concept appear, and on its strengths and limitations.

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The second haiku poses a question that emerged from some of the discussions at the workshop itself – in particular, a tendency on the part of some of the contributors to dismiss the idea that ‘resilience’ might be a helpful concept, to conflate a focus on ‘resilience’ with neoliberal agendas, and/or to construct ‘resilience’ and ‘resistance’ as mutually exclusive concepts.

Such a construction, we feel, is too narrow, too caught up in looking at how ‘resilience’ has been used in some (not all) academic and policy discourses, and too dismissive of genuine attempts to grapple with ‘the fragility of things’, with a real sense of converging crises. Continue reading →

The Politics of Modi’s Vegetarianism

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A guest post by Amit Julka and Medha.

AmitJulkaAmit is a PhD student at the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore (NUS), and he is working on India’s engagement with Afghanistan from the perspective of Indian identity formation. Previously he worked as a media specialist with the US Embassy in New Delhi and at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), New Delhi. He holds an M.A. in South Asian Area studies from SOAS, and is a computer engineer by training.

MedhaMedha is a research fellow/doctoral student at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg.  Her research focus is on the role of Islam in India’s identity and foreign policy. She previously worked at the IDSA, and also as a journalist in India, Germany, the Netherlands and Canada. She holds an M.A. in Media Studies, jointly from Aarhus and Swansea Universities.

Among the many anodyne reports from the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit held in Kathmandu recently, there was a curious piece of news: an article about how the Indian Prime Minister was being served ‘simple vegetarian fare with less spices and oil’ while his Pakistani counterpart was enjoying ‘halal meat dishes’ during their respective stays in Nepal. The next day, on social media, India’s Ministry of External Affairs posted a photograph of a menu with the caption ‘All Vegetarian Fare. For those asking here is what the SAARC leaders are having at the Retreat.’

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While it may be routine for the media to report about the dishes served during meetings and summits, this emphasis on Modi’s vegetarianism—and his apparent success in making sure all the leaders consume vegetarian food, at least at the Retreat—is particularly noteworthy. Especially when the fact that Modi was fasting for Navratri during his visit to the US was also equally publicised. Was this an attempt at burnishing Modi’s image as the Hindu Hriday Samrat within India as well as the increasingly vocal Indian or more precisely, the Hindu community abroad?

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The War Rages On: Women in the British Military and the De-Politicisation of War in ‘Our Girl’ (2014)

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A guest post on military gender in popular culture from Harriet Gray. Harriet is a PhD student in the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics, working on intimate partner abuse in the British military. She has also written on female combat roles in the American military, consent, and celebrity intimate partner violence, and can also be found on Twitter.

their war her battle

The five part BBC drama series Our Girl (and the 90 minute TV film which preceded it) centres around the experiences of Private Molly Dawes, a young medic serving in the British Army. Molly is assigned to a unit referred to as ‘2 Section’ as a combat casualty replacement, and with them deploys to Afghanistan. Her colleague in 2 Section, Private Dillon “Smurf” Smith, and their leader Captain Charles James, an experienced officer on his fourth tour of Afghanistan, form the two other principle characters in the series.

Our Girl was broadcast at a time when women’s roles in the British armed forces are once again under review. At present, women – who make up 10% of British regular military personnel – are able to serve in most roles in the British military with the exception of ‘combat roles’, defined as “ground combat units where the primary role is to close with and kill the enemy”. Previous reviews of the ban in 2002 and 2010 have concluded that while many women may well possess the physical and psychological capacities to serve in any military role, the impact of women’s presence on unit cohesion and therefore on combat effectiveness cannot be fully understood without taking the risk of sending mixed combat teams into battle; a risk which the MOD and the armed forces were not at the time of these reviews prepared to take. That is, women’s continued exclusion from combat roles was justified not on the basis of what women were capable of doing, but, as I have argued elsewhere, of who (what?) they are.

The current review, ordered by (then) Defence Secretary Phillip Hammond in the spring of 2014 and due to conclude by the end of the year, will once again prioritise the delivery of operational effectiveness in deciding whether women will be admitted to combat roles, but it is widely expected that this time, the ban will be lifted, in particular because the review has been brought forward to report earlier than the 2018 deadline required under EU equality laws, and following the lifting of a similar ban in the US armed forces in early 2013. While women are soon likely to be able to serve in all roles in the British armed forces, however, this is unlikely to mean that the masculinised culture and male domination within the British military itself will be undermined any time soon; it is likely that it will continue to be the case that, as Victoria Basham puts it, “it is gender-conforming for men to want to join the military or engage in paramilitary activities, but gender-nonconforming for women”.

As Cynthia Enloe also suggests, the definition as ‘combat’ of the roles from which women are excluded has long been largely ideological as opposed to practical – and Molly’s experience in the series reflects this. While as a medic, she is not in a combat role – indeed, as could be considered gender-conforming for a woman since her primary purpose is to preserve life rather than to end it – she is certainly not portrayed as a “beautiful soul” and her role requires her to be very much in the thick of the action. She is shown on patrol with her section, firing her weapon, and being on the receiving end of gunfire with the men alongside her, although she, unlike her comrades, shows some anguish and regret at her own perpetration of violence. While Molly’s role is not a combat role, then, her experiences with 2 Section illustrate many of the well-hashed arguments both for and against the growing presence of women in Western militaries.

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International Relations is Not an American Discipline (Well, Maybe It Is, A Little)

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Helen TurtonA guest post on the state of the discipline by Helen Louise Turton. Helen is a University Teacher in International Relations and Security Studies at the University of Sheffield. She received her PhD from Exeter in 2013 for a dissertation on ‘The Sociology of a Diverse Discipline’, and next year Routledge will publish her International Relations and American Dominance: A Diverse Discipline. She also has work on marginality and hegemony in IR forthcoming in the Journal of International Relations and Development (with Lucas Freire) and is beginning a larger project on ‘Rereading European IR Theory’ (with Knud Erik Jørgensen and Felix Rösch). Helen is also the co-convenor of the BISA Working Group on IR as a Social Science. If you wish to join the working group please follow the link.

Gary Hilliard

It has been said on more than one occasion that International Relations is an American dominated discipline, or that the US IR community is hegemonic. In fact, one could even go so far as to say that the disciplinary image of IR being dominated by the US has become a disciplinary truism, with many academics reproducing this characterisation time and time again. The TRIP survey that has just been sent to academics in 33 different countries even poses the question “Please indicate the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement: The discipline of international relations is an American dominated discipline” to ascertain the degree to which IR scholars around the globe feel dominated by the US. Furthermore, other empirical surveys of the discipline have sought to demonstrate the seeming continued disciplinary dominance of the American academy, pointing to the different ways in which the US is able to exercise its disciplinary hegemony.

In my new book International Relations and American Dominance I challenge the claim that IR is an American dominated discipline because the underlying question is itself deeply problematic. Asking whether IR is dominated by the US presupposes a yes or no answer. We are therefore presented with an either or option which overlooks the possibility that the discipline may be dominated by the US in some ways but not in others. This then leads us to unpack what it means to be dominant. When scholars claim that IR is an American dominated discipline we first need to assess how they understand disciplinary dynamics and relationships of dominance. Are dominance claims being made because it is perceived that American methods populate the discipline? Or do certain American theories dominate global IR? Perhaps the US is stated to be dominant because it is American IR scholars who are in positions of power? Maybe scholars have argued that IR is dominated by the US because there are more American IR scholars than those from other national IR communities? Or does the discipline subscribe to an American agenda and American understanding of what ‘international relations’ is?

The reality is that all these grounds have been used to state that the US IR community is hegemonic. Academics have implicitly drawn on different understandings of dominance and explicitly drawn attention to the different implications of US dominance, but often this is done without first clarifying what is meant or implied by American disciplinary dominance. Often scholars are speaking about one form of dominance on one page of a text, and then refer to a different understanding on another page. What this means is that the word dominance when in the context of claims stating ‘IR is an American dominated discipline’ or ‘IR is no longer an American enterprise’ is used in many different ways, taking on many different forms and measured in numerous modes despite the fact that it is presented as ‘one size fits all’ form of dominance. What this means is that although certain scholars may agree that the US is dominant they may be talking at cross-purposes about how and why America dominates. Whilst there may be agreement in one sense, there will be different answers to the crucial questions of how and why America allegedly became and remains disciplinarily dominant.

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The Far-Right: Pathology of Capital

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A guest post from Rick Saull, who is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at Queen Mary, University of London. He has written on a range of topics from the international relations of revolutions to the Cold War and the geopolitical consequences of the 2008 global economic crisis. More recently he has focused on the international political dimensions of the far-right, co-editing The Longue Durée of the Far-Right (Routledge, 2014) which has just been published, and on which this post draws. He can be contacted here.

The politics of the far-right are unlikely to disappear any time soon. Unlike its historical foe on the left – social democratic or otherwise – which has continued to be characterised by a combination of disintegration and disorientation as it continues to implement neoliberalism, the far-right persists through exercising a toxic but powerful influence on political debate across mature capitalist democracies (and beyond). How are we to make sense of the persistence of the far-right and explain its recent reinvigoration? What analytical framework offers the best, way of explaining the distinct trajectories of far-right currents of politics across different historical periods? This blog post will try to address these questions through outlining an understanding of the contemporary far-right as a pathology of capital best explained through a framework based on an international historical sociology (IHS). Before I do that it makes sense to mention what the main alternative frameworks on the far-right tells us.

The academic discussion of the far-right is dominated by approaches grounded within the mainstream assumptions of bourgeois social science. Thus, it is the methodological nationalism of comparative politics combined with the literature on the history of ideas that are intellectually hegemonic. In the former, the far-right is assessed and compared across different states according to a quantitative grid of electoral performance, voter shares, opinion poll data and definitional attributes centred on ‘Europhobia’, anti-immigration hysteria and ‘welfare nativism’. In the latter, the fetish of definitional taxonomies prevails through the gradations of ‘neo-fascism’, the ‘extreme’, ‘far’, ‘radical’, populist’ and/or ‘reactionary’ right that are dissected via an examination of speeches and pronouncements to gauge the ideological coherence of said party or movement usually related to the core criteria of fascism.

This has resulted in an endless search for an ‘objective’ or ‘minimal’ definition of the far-right – an academic cottage industry in itself – which serves to freeze and simplify the far-right instead of viewing it as an evolving socio-political movement. Further, in spite of the need to treat ideas seriously it has resulted in analytical contortions to the effect that the far-right – in its fascist incarnation at least – can be seen as ‘revolutionary’ phenomena comparable to communism. This can be seen in the way in which the doyens of political science in organizations such as the ‘Extremism and Democracy’ Standing Group of the European Consortium on Political Research appear to mimic the assumptions of Cold War liberalism’s use of the concept of ‘totalitarianism’ by treating the ‘extremist threats to democracy’ from the far-left and far-right as part of the same analytical exercise thus blurring their distinct and antagonist dynamics.

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Modelling Worlds: The Politics of Simulation

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A guest post from Nathan Coombs who is an incoming Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He edits the Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, and is the author of the forthcoming book, Politics of the Event: From Marxism to Contemporary French Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2015). His current research interests are in financial algorithms and financial regulation. He can be contacted at n.coombs (at) fastmail.co.uk

 

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Over the last decade, scholars have become increasingly interested in what we do when we make use of models and simulations. An emerging consensus – often legitimated through reference to Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory – is that mathematical models and computer simulations are not passive tools but rather a material force in their own right. Agents may employ such technologies in order to achieve pre-determined ends, but the technologies themselves have an effectivity that exceeds their users’ intentions, and set in place path-dependencies that serve to proscribe the range of political and economic possibility.

This concern with the politics of technology cuts across multiple disciplines including Sociology, Communication Studies, International Relations, International Political Economy, and Management Studies. However, the Social Studies of Finance (SSF) has perhaps gone furthest in exploring the practical implications of modelling and simulation technologies. Applying Austinian and Barnesian notions of performativity, researchers in this field have sought to grasp the way in which economic models shape markets, and to dig into the mathematical and technical details that underpin this process.

Donald MacKenzie’s book An Engine, Not a Camera (2008) is exemplary of this approach, and a common point of reference for scholars in SSF and all the aforementioned disciplines. In his analysis of the development and uptake of the Black-Scholes option-pricing model in the 1970s, MacKenzie aims to show how the model’s employment of the efficient market hypothesis – where stock prices are considered to accurately reflect their risk – led to a period in which the pricing of options came to reflect that predicted by the model. The point of MacKenzie’s analysis is not to endorse the neoclassical economic assumptions codified in the model. Rather, it is to point out how models serve to socially facilitate evaluation practices in the face of complexity, uncertainty, and epistemological opacity. On this basis a model can also contribute to financial instability when it is both widely employed and based on assumptions that are confounded by ‘real world’ contingencies.

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Dispatches from the Robot Wars; Or, What is Posthuman Security?

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Audra MitchellA guest post from Audra Mitchell, who is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of York. Audra is a Fellow of the Independent Social Research Foundation (2014-15) and has held or will hold visiting fellowships at the Universities of Queensland, Edinburgh and Melbourne. She is the author or editor of three books: International Intervention in a Secular Age: Re-enchanting Humanity? (Routledge, 2014); Lost in Transformation: Violent Peace and Peaceful Conflict in Northern Ireland (Palgrave, 2011) and (ed. with Oliver Richmond) Hybrid Forms of Peace: From the ‘Everyday’ to Postliberalism (Palgrave, 2011), as well as articles in Security Dialogue, Review of International Studies, Millennium, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Third World Quarterly, and Alternatives, amongst others. She blogs at Worldy IR. Audra’s current research project explores how mass extinction challenges the ontological and ethical underpinnings of ‘security’.

“So when are the intergalactic robot wars coming?” This is a question I’ve been asked (more than once) by colleagues who’ve heard that I’m working on posthumanist thought and international security. The implication is that what I’m doing is a kind of science fiction. Well, there’s definitely science (including robots – see below) and a rich fictional literature to draw on, but it’s not taking place in a galaxy far, far away. It’s very much rooted in, and attuned to, this planet.

‘Posthuman security’ is an umbrella term I’m using to talk about a recent surge in thinking and writing at the nexus of posthumanist philosophy, security and ethics. It starts from the proposition that international security is not solely a matter of securing human lives and bodies. Diverse beings other than humans are implicated in the conditions of (in)security. Whether other animals, machines, networks, minerals, water, ecosystems or complex assemblages thereof, a wide range of beings other than humans shape the contexts of (in)security and the ways that we define them. This, in turn, challenges the engrained notion that the human is the ultimate referent object of security, ethics and philosophy.

Mojave Desert Ecology

Indeed, another question I get asked frequently is “are you critiquing human security?” The answer is both yes and no. The norm of human security epitomizes a humanist turn in the last two decades of international thought, also reflected in the fields of humanitarianism and norms such as Responsibility to Protect. These frameworks have carved out a space for themselves within international ethics by framing a specific image of the human individual as the focal point of security, ethics and, by extension the universe. So, of course, adopting a post-human (or more-than-human) approach to security means challenging and deconstructing these influential paradigms. But this new discourse is not simply a critique of existing frameworks. Posthuman security thinking offers a number of distinct, positive contributions to international security, ontology and ethics.

The term itself is highly contestable – and should be contested. Continue reading →

Decolonising the Anglosphere

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Alex at Red Fort

A guest post from Alexander Davis, who is a PhD candidate in international relations at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Alex holds a research MA on India’s international colonial history from the University of Tasmania and his PhD dissertation is a postcolonial examination of India’s relationship with the Anglosphere, supervised by Priya Chacko, Kaniskha Jayasuriya and Carol Johnson. This post provides an outline of his critique of the ‘Anglosphere’, which follows from previous discussion on The Disorder of Things by our own Srdjan Vucetic, and acts as an introduction to the themes of his forthcoming dissertation. Alex can also be found over at Twitter.[1]

Why India? Why the Anglosphere?

The term ‘Anglosphere’ refers to a distinctly murky combination of states, peoples or cultures with an implication of both cultural superiority and closer international relationships on the basis of a shared identity. Even dictionary definitions of the term illustrate the difficult. For some, Anglosphere is based simply on the English language, for others it includes the ‘cultural values’ associated with the political development of Great Britain. Srdjan’s recent book on the Anglosphere shows excellently how the idea of the Anglosphere is rooted in its colonial history and is an expression of Anglo-western superiority. Because of my previous research and teaching interest in India’s colonial history, the idea of the ‘Anglosphere’ struck me as an assertion of cultural superiority and dominance, suspiciously similar to colonial justifications for imperial rule. Once we realize this, India, just as it was central to the British empire, becomes central to understanding contemporary discourse on ‘Anglosphere’. The first question I asked, sensibly enough I thought, was ‘is India in the Anglopshere?’ I have since realized deep inadequacies of this question, which in turn has led me towards to believe in need for a decolonisation of the Anglosphere subject.

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Thinking the Anglosphere through India

In order to understand contemporary Anglosphere discourse, and the position in which India fits within the concept, we first need to understand its historical context. An early form of contemporary Anglosphere debates on India can be in England on the future of the British empire at the turn of the 20th century which turned into a discussion on the concept of ‘Greater Britain’. This idea was to be federation between Britain and her colonies might look like. Some thinkers at this time saw India as central to the empire, and therefore central to any ‘Greater Britain’. Sir Charles Dilke originally began to use ‘Greater Britain’ as shorthand for the British empire as a whole, but later argued it should only be the ‘English-speaking, white-inhabited, and self-governed lands’. Others, such as historian John Seeley, took up the idea, initially including India on the inside as a territory of the Crown. However, later, in the same book, he argued Greater-Britain needed to be racially homogenous, declaring India to be ‘…all past and, I may almost say, has no future’.

Winston Churchill’s work on the ‘English-Speaking Peoples’, itself an echo of Alfred Taylor’s ‘English Speaking Races’, emphasizes the supposed superiority and unity of these peoples. Conservative historian Andrew Roberts has recently taken it upon himself to follow up on Churchill’s work. Roberts cuts down the magnitude of his chosen topic by ignoring English-speakers outside the geographical centers of the Anglosphere. His approach to India and colonial history is revealed by his depiction, and ultimate defense, of General Dyer’s massacre at Amritsar. This is the worst example of ‘imperial’ history I can think of. Roberts goes so far as to defend Dyer from the propaganda of the nasty Indian nationalists. Even the British government no longer defends this event, though on a recent trip to India, David Cameron declined to apologize for it. Roberts defends the massacre even though many of Dyer’s victims were English-speaking. Leaving the victims out of the ‘English-Speaking peoples’ is a final act of humiliation and dehumanization.

Just as the debaters over ‘Greater Britain’ were unsure of where India might fit with the concept, contemporary Anglospherists are unsure of what to do with India. Continue reading →

Between Fetishization and Thrift? A Response to Dave Eden’s Autonomy: Capitalism, Class and Politics.

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Nick faceAhoi, Disorders! We’re thrilled to host a guest post by Nicholas J. Kiersey, Assistant Professor at Ohio University, indefatigable student of Foucault, Italian Autonomism and Deleuze and Guattari, plus a die-hard fan of Battlestar Galactica. Nick is the author of papers on governmentality in Global Society, the biopolitics of the war on terror in New Political Science, everyday neoliberalism in the Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, and is due to be published on the occupy movement and affective labour in the financial crisis in Global Discourse and Global Society respectively. Oh, and he’s also Irish. That’s also important. Below is Nick’s review of Dave Eden’s new book on Autonomist thought, which one can only hope has not gone entirely unnoticed because it’s one of the finest on the subject!

All quotes in the below are to Eden’s text, unless otherwise stated.

Eden Autonomy

No doubt, a return to the commodity is a risky venture. As Dave Eden puts it in his exceptional new book, certain framings of the power of the commodity can lead to an embrace of austerity, a “romanticization of poverty” or, worse, “a reactionary anti-capitalism”. Nevertheless, he asserts, a return to the commodity may ultimately be required. Currently popular framings of social movements, such as those of Hardt and Negri, he notes (citing Franco Berardi), offer very bright and “jolly” interpretations of the possibilities of the age, pretty much ignoring the need for a critique of the commodity form altogether. As such, they appear to have little sense of what it is that keeps capitalism going, or what it is that might finally send it on its way! However, while Eden wishes to convince us that we cannot do without the critique of the commodity, it is unclear if he ultimately achieves this goal. For his argument stands or falls on his ability to convince us that it is possible both to embrace this critique and remain faithful to an internal theory of capitalist power. This is a difficult circle to square and, by the end of the book, Eden seems to have done little to address it – an irony given that this is actually one of the areas where the targets of his critique are especially strong.

At the heart of Eden’s explanation of Autonomism, its virtues and its flaws, is the “Copernican inversion” of Marxism in which Mario Tronti asserts that the true dynamic force behind capitalism’s development is the workers rather than capital. Starting from this core observation, Eden proceeds to offer a survey and critque of Tronti’s heirs, particularly Antonio Negri. For Negri, the current order in world power is defined most completely by the antagonism between ‘Empire’ and the ‘multitude,’ where the latter term endeavors to expand the definition of the proletariat in order to capture not only the vitality of “labour as a whole” but to encompass the full diversity of the identities which compose it, and Empire is the power which dominates the multitude. Breaking with traditional Marxism, however, Empire is not capitalism. Rather, it is a multi-valent regime which proscribes democracy in order to bolster a global order of things which is capitalist, statist, racist, and gendered, among other things. Challenging this power, however, the Multitude realises the creative possibilities of today’s intellectual and affectively efficacious labour, and incorporates them in its struggle for self-actualisation.

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