Insurrection fails—only lines of flight working together can destabilize the system

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Theorizing Capitalism and its Demise.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 22-25. // QUEERMAID

Having established a basic outline of how contemporary capitalism works, the next question has to be how it can be challenged and overcome. Communists and anarchists of old would tend to answer this question with the call to ‘revolution’, even if their ideas of what happens afterwards varied. As the 20th century unfolded, however, insurrectionary tactics were increasingly abandoned. While revolutionary Marxists persist, often in the limited realm of academia, their numbers have significantly dwindled; and on the anarchist side the singular focus on class and the need to rise up in revolt has given way to more countercultural areas of attention and the aim to ‘prefigure’ systemic change from within (Cornell, 2016). The increasing unpopularity of revolutionary demands to ‘smash the system’ coincides with a theoretical shift in ontological thinking (the basic assumptions of what reality is) rooted in the post-structural dismissal of deterministic, inflexible frameworks. In this view the Marxist reification of monolithic structures such as ‘capitalism’ or ‘the state’ are viewed as fundamentally wrongheaded. It is not possible to topple capitalism by capturing the state, because ‘capitalism’ is not a ‘thing’ that can simply be undone, nor is the state. These so-called ‘systems’ are better understood as complex phenomena composed of numerous interacting parts, both physical and mental, with which we, as subjects, are intimately intertwined. Directly related to this assessment, critical scholars and activists have also challenged classical Marxist thinking for being inherently disempowering (Gibson-Graham, 2010). In other words, when capitalism is conceived as a colossal, reified thing with a more or less determined trajectory, it leaves people with little sense of agency; revolution becomes a waiting game for the all-encompassing system to reach an apex of inevitable internal crisis. While such crises are often presented by Marxists as imminent in economic downturns, when capital then nonetheless regains its footing, these same prophets succumb to dismay and resignation. Consequently, there has been a concerted turn in recent decades towards approaches and conceptualizations that posit a much more indeterminate and malleable reality, one that leaves more room for political action here and now. One way to capture this flexibility is through the concepts of ‘assemblage’ and ‘apparatus’ (Foucault, 1980; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Agamben, 2009; Legg, 2011). While the terms have been used in disparate ways, an assemblage/apparatus can here be understood as the never fully stable arrangement and articulation of multiple animate and inanimate forces and potentials that interact to achieve specific outcomes. Importantly, this conceptualization of reality is one of flux, determined by the relations between things rather than by their essences. Yet, at the same time, assemblages/apparatuses still manage to bring about a distinct order, as, in the words of Agamben (2009, p 14) they maintain ‘the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living beings’. In terms of conceptualizing capitalism, a productive use of assemblage/ apparatus can be found in the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) who present the various defining features of our socio-economic condition as being continuously de- and reconstructed to ensure the overarching logic of capital accumulation. Especially instructive is their rethinking of Marx’s (1993) trinity formula as the ‘three-headed apparatus of capture’ (three apparatuses in one), understood as the intertwined forces that manage to continuously reinvent the governance of land (property), labour, and money in the service of profit. Thus, in its original iteration commons land and serf labour were set free from their positionalities within the feudal mode of production, only to be recaptured and reconstructed through the mechanisms of rent and wages to become the privately owned factory and the industrial worker. Underlying all of this, however, is money, which enables the commodification of property and labour in the first place. Money is brought under control via the assemblage/apparatus behind the execution of taxation, where the obligatory payment of a specific tender grounds this money’s worth and gives it the power to become the de facto measure of exchange-value in the market more broadly. Hence, in Deleuze and Guattari’s approach, Marx’s conceptualization of a capitalist mode of production, and more particularly the submission to an exchange-value framework, as captured in the idea of commodity fetishism, is still present, yet the underlying forces creating this reality are now seen as being part of a more indeterminate process of deconstruction, recapture, and reconstruction. This ‘process’ of capitalism, furthermore, is continuous, as we can see, for example, with the industrial worker (labour) and the factory (land) being de- and then reconstructed as the gig worker and the server farm. Or, for that matter, how money was de- and reconstructed to become an unbacked fiat currency that could expand exponentially in the pursuit of growth via fractional reserve banking. Returning, then, to the question of achieving systemic change, we can make use of two further concepts from Deleuze and Guattari, namely ‘lines of articulation’ and ‘lines of flight’. Lines of articulation can be understood as the way assemblages/apparatuses channel inherent potentials to maintain the functioning of a given organizational stability. Lines of flight, in turn, have been described as ‘bolts of pent-up energy that break through the cracks in a system of control … they reveal the open spaces beyond the limits of what exists’ (Rayner, 2013, np). Deleuze and Guattari suggest that lines of flight may combine with others to ultimately bring about the destabilization of an entire ‘system’, referring to this as ‘a whole generalized conjunction that overspills and over-turns the preceding apparatuses’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p 452). On a large enough scale, then, such a generalized conjunction could, theoretically, spell the end of the capitalist mode of production, at least as it is currently conceived. Arguably, the most critical lines of articulation within capitalism are rooted in the apparatus of capture, where the commodification of everything, including labour, pulls subjectivities into the overarching logic of exchange value calculations and hence capital accumulation. Lines of flight, in turn, can have various expressions, including haphazard ones, but from the perspective of actively pursuing systemic change, the most relevant lines of flight take the form of prefigurative acts of resistance – where prefiguration is defined as ‘those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal’ (Boggs, 1977, p 100). In essence, prefiguration is an action of being the change you want to see, which, by being embodied and performed, creates a line of flight that makes a different world suddenly seem possible. Significantly, however, Deleuze and Guattari see these rebellious lines of flight, including intentional forms of prefigurative resistance, as remaining mostly imperceptible from within the status quo. In other words, those controlling and embracing the currently dominant operating procedures and discourses are blind to these prefigurations, either because they are intentionally hidden from view, or because their logic makes no sense from the given set of assumptions within the current assemblages/ apparatuses at work. For those familiar with Star Trek, this is akin to the Borg, a hive collective of cybernetic beings who do not acknowledge outsiders beaming onto their spaceship until they are explicitly identified as posing a danger. In the case at hand, lines of flight can be seen expressed in the various forms of commons-based peer production, and commoning more generally. Until quite recently, these lines of flight have largely gone unnoticed, operating in the shadows, overlooked or seen as hardly noteworthy. Yet, to bring about change will eventually require coming into the light. Indeed, the point of the prefigurative is not, as Thomas Nail (2015, p 99) helpfully explains, ‘to relish the theory of an impossible and invisible revolution, but rather to “bring the imperceptible to perception” by changing the dominant conditions for visibility’. In this sense, lines of flight are like rockets seeking to break free from the fetters of gravity; they are continuously pulled on until they fall back to the ground, unless they have the power to break out of the conditions of visibility that define our world. What this means in terms of achieving a commons-based mode of production is the need to overcome the nearly inescapable apparatus of capture, which comprises the dominant conditions for visibility that render transgressive lines of counter-capitalist possibilities, like the commons, not only invisible, but largely dysfunctional, especially at larger scales. But what would a generalized conjunction of lines of flight that could topple the apparatus of capture actually look like? Is it even possible? The answer to these decisive questions hinges on how the alternative economic activities and relations being posited (the lines of flight) are understood in relation to the currently dominant capitalist mode of production. When considering the commons and commoning as this alternative, we find a number of conflicting approaches.