The aff replicates neoliberalism at the level of form – though their politics may appear revolutionary, it mirrors market dynamics in its appeal to individual transformation and particular forms of resistance – this makes true change impossible and re-entrenches capitalism

I have been involved for over 10 years with a large group of male industrial workers and their families in a town in the northwest of Spain. The area has been in ongoing restructuring since the 1980s and early retirement, lay-offs, and long-term unemployment have become the norm. Women have increasingly found temporary jobs in the service sector and younger generations are generally unemployed, have precarious jobs in contract firms or have migrated. Historically, labour struggle structured through class-based unions has been ubiquitous here, and has yielded what people voice as ‘conquests’ (universal public services such as health and education, and political rights through parliamentary democracy). Today, the situation is one of generalized uncertainty and hesitant forms of resistance. As years have passed I have observed three distinct processes: (1) the waning of a workingclass faith in unions and union mobilization, (2) the multiplication of forms of activism that target concrete issues, and (3) a creeping hopelessness demobilizing younger generations. In this context, old-time unionists who have shifted their struggle toward social activism tend to analyse situations in terms of local connection with larger processes expressing structural logics. Analysis produces the design of a strategy and tactical mobilizations that they strive to explain in an endless pedagogy of struggle. Knowledge and theory become instruments of change and are understood as stemming from everyday life experience. In contrast, younger people – with the exception of a small group of young, unionized industrial workers – tend to present the local situation as an aggregate of concrete personal experiences. A few build collective supports based on social networks, a practice that they sometimes abstract as a theory of solidarity that challenges the state and capitalism by opening spaces where alternative provisioning processes put people instead of profit as the aim. Their theory is also based on their experience, on political and social mobilizations (15M, Indignados, Anti-Foreclosure Platform) and miscellaneous readings that encompass a wide range of perspectives including political economy, political ecology, anarchism, de-growth, social and solidarity economy, and commoning. Both groups stress the need to be aware of and respect the multiple social positioning of those that suffer from capitalism. In practice, however, the older group tends to produce a coherent model and to design a unified oppositional strategy, while the younger group is explicitly unwilling to do so. As a result, the local practice of social activism is a succession of short-term targeted actions often subjected to the tensions of endless idiosyncratic strategies. Demoralization is recurrent and is expressed in the small numbers and high turnover of younger people in activist groups. If we factor history in, it is difficult to describe the situation of the present younger generation as ‘worse’ than that of their predecessors. Yes, they are massively unemployed or in precarious jobs, but ‘stable’ industrial jobs in the 1950s and 1960s in Spain under fascism did not provide a much better livelihood. The present-day welfare state and universal public services, however shrunken, are much better than the previous non-existent ones. One major difference is the lack of expectations for a brighter future on the part of the younger, better-educated generations. Another major difference is their unwillingness to produce or adopt a coherent oppositional ideology that could become counter-hegemonic. The remains of an old debate: The hegemony of form With this in mind, I interrogate the fierce criticism and ultimate abandonment of the concept of ideology as an instrument for struggle by those who would like to change the existing structure of power and economic distribution. I suggest that (a) distrust of the concept’s validity stems from the domination of a neoliberal conceptual tool-kit in particular as it has been instituted by the rise of the Austrian school and its hegemony in neoliberal thought. This has resulted in (b) an incapacity to imagine an alternative project that does not ultimately rest on the basic formal premises of neoliberalism: individualism (or singularity), freedom and exchange. The Austrian school developed as a coherent ideological model during the 1940s and 1950s (Hayek, 1948; for an account of the emergence of the Austrian school see Foucault, 2004) and became established as a powerful economic model in the 1990s (Harvey, 2007). Its major innovations emerged from the ‘socialist calculation’ debate that dated from the early 20th century (Hayek, 1938; Lange, 1936, 1937). What was at stake in this apparently technical debate was an epistemological issue of import: could society exist as a coherent whole and the knowledge about it be gathered and organized to meet a particular end? Or was reality an emergent result of the interaction of ‘dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess’ (Hayek, 1948: 77), and hence could not be organized to advantage? Although in a first round the debate seemed to have been won by the ‘socialist’ camp, in a second round the Austrian school imposed its views and eventually became hegemonic. The point I wish to make here is that the triumph of the epistemological premise for eliciting knowledge that the Austrian school proposed as being the only possible way to capture the reality of imperfect market competition has permeated our lives, becoming an hegemony of form. The debate hinged on how to achieve market coordination. The ‘socialist’ side maintained the parameters of neoclassical market theory (perfect knowledge, competition, equilibrium and efficient allocation) but focused on the problems of calculation and planning. In contrast the Austrian school introduced the discovery of tacit knowledge as key to the model of market operation. This important shift from the neoclassical model stemmed from the awareness that real market situations were based on imperfect knowledge.4 It then assumed that competition was a creative process that elicited knowledge about possible demand. Hence, ‘the problem is how subjective, or tacit, knowledge, necessarily fragmented and dispersed, can be socially mobilized’ (Adaman and Devine, 1997: 59). Hayek argued ‘that the mobilization and coordination of this incomplete and contradictory knowledge occur through the actions of entrepreneurs, competing against one another in the market process, discovering and learning what is and is not possible’ (Adaman and Devine, 1997: 59). This creative dynamic not only required entrepreneurship but also a constant effort at innovation, that is, of creating difference that would momentarily provide monopoly advantage in the market.5 In the 1980s and 1990s scholars in the West (Adaman and Devine, 1997; Elson, 1988) attempted to counter the Austrian economic school’s expanding hegemony in a context of increasing hardship of the population subject to structural adjustment programmes. They revisited the parameters of the original debate about market coordination in socialism in an attempt to reconfigure them while vindicating their worth for a new socialist project.6 The Austrian school’s underlying assumptions about the form of eliciting knowledge from discrete and dispersed social agents, which was the crux of that debate, are in my opinion similar to contemporary efforts to theorize an alternative to capitalism that would support a unified political struggle and durable transformation. In its central methodological assumption about how to elicit tacit knowledge through exchange, a process that will then be expressed in prices which will guide further action, this model contains some formal significant parallels with certain practices of present day (de)mobilizations and the critical theories that sustain them. The basic premise of the Austrian school is the existence of dispersed (independent and autonomous) individuals possessing largely ‘tacit’ knowledge (i.e. pre-conscious or unconscious knowledge; M. Polanyi, 1967). It is this methodological (formal) premise which, I suggest, is enacted by present-day anti-capitalist and social justice mobilizations and may be at the source of their incapacity to produce a coherent and robust counter-hegemony. The emergent aspect of knowledge about the world that results from free market interaction and supports the economic model appears to me similar in its form to post-structuralist epistemological and political models such as the ‘sociology of emergences’ (Santos, 2004a) or the virtual ‘constituent power’ of a multitude of desiring subjectivities (Negri, 2009). While this anti-authoritarian view of the world is extremely attractive to radical activism it seems to lack the capacity to become counter-hegemonic precisely because it is based on a form that is like the one that supports the system it seeks to transcend. I am not saying that this is an intentional or even conscious move, on the contrary, in my opinion it expresses the hegemony of form. In the post-structuralist mobilization/activism theories, the political project is created through a process of permanent discovery as a result of the free interaction of subjectivities, knowledges, and world(view)s. The creative, innovative and democratic aspect of this emergent politics is opposed to Western ideologies and institutions of modernist liberal politics. In particular, this new form of politics is premised on eliciting difference as opposed to the ‘enlightened’ aim of eliciting equality, a shift that parallels the move from neoclassical to Austrian models of the economy. The shift is subtle but can be found in the premise that the forces of political change should arise from autonomous – equal but essentially different – entities or ‘singularities’ (be it individuals or quasi-corporate groups such as ‘communities’) that, to push the metaphor further, could be described as adopting an ‘enterprise form’ (Foucault, 2004: 154) and interacting in a ‘market-like’ arena (e.g. a ‘forum’) where they create social value. However, in these oppositional political models cooperation rather than competition is the relationship that produces social value in the exchange arena, and this is a major difference. To use Lazaratto’s words, common goods emerge ‘as a result of co-creation and co-realization of the cooperation of ordinary subjectivities’ in the event-driven arena (Lazaratto, 2006: 129). These new models eschew the old revolutionary ideologies that were premised on designing a whole (brave) new world on the basis of understanding existing relations as a connected totality that needed to be challenged in its entirety. According to Santos (2004a: 243), ‘There is no unique theory to guide the movements, because the aim is not so much to seize power but rather to change the many faces of power as they present themselves in the institutions and sociabilities. At this level, the novelty consists in the celebration of diversity and pluralism, experimentalism, and radical democracy.’ These movements are understood as able to open up spaces where the plural visions of alternative (better) worlds can emerge and be expressed. Through their punctuated practices they challenge in myriad ways the hegemony of capitalism and provide content for the critical theorization of political struggle. While these oppositional movements are undoubtedly a form of struggle which produces results and unleashes counter-hegemonic forces, I suggest that their fragmented expression (in practice and theory) and their unwillingness to unify the struggle around an ideological project blocks their ability to overhaul our globalized society. Why is this so? My hypothesis is that the event-driven pluralistic political model, while considered revolutionary by its promoters, may be the paradoxical expression of a hegemonic neoliberal ‘power informing society’, the power of form (Foucault, 2004: 154).