The 1AC’s focus on subjectivity is counter-revolutionary because it obscures the sociopolitical context that produces subjects and only amounts to individualized resistance.

Neoliberal governance, as we argued earlier together with Foucault and Brown, is a governing rationality that cannot be understood merely in terms of its general economic policies: the privatization of public services and industries, the deregulation of markets and firms, the destruction of labor unions, and so forth. Neoliberalism must be grasped also in terms of the production of subjectivity, that is, the creation at all levels of society of individual entrepreneurial subjects, homines economici, who, in turn, continually reproduce the neoliberal world. This recognition could easily lead to despair: how can we resist neoliberalism, let alone create alternatives to it, if our own subjectivity is produced by it and permeated by its rationality? There seems to be nowhere outside neoliberalism we can stand.

Power, however—and neoliberal power is no exception—is not organic or unitary but is always defined by relationship and antagonism. Foucault himself explains that power is a structure of “actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions.”26 Resistance is always present in power from the beginning, as is the potential for rupture. The processes of subjection, then, and the production of subjectivities that are functional to power are themselves both precarious and shot through with resistances and alternative potentials. Subjectivity, in other words, is not a given but a terrain of struggle.

The potential for resistances and alternatives to neoliberalism emerged in our analyses above perhaps most clearly in the context of social production. The fact that capital functions increasingly through processes of the extraction of the common, that instead of directly organizing productive cooperation as it does in the factory it captures value produced on the social terrain through processes from which it is distant, indicates that the circuits of social production and, in particular, the organization of productive cooperation are relatively autonomous from capital. That is one factor that has allowed finance, which is always distant from the scene of production, to become the predominant apparatus of capture. This migration of capital away from the scene of social production, moreover, is irreversible. Capital is not able to organize directly the plural field of subjectivities who produce socially in cooperation and communication in part because those subjectivities and the values they produce overflow capitalist systems of measure. Faced with this reality, the abilities of capital and neoliberal administration to measure, codify, and reproduce subjectivities and values in a hierarchical schema become tenuous. But any attempt by capital to dictate directly the cooperation of social subjectivities, just like its attempts to enclose the common as private property, risks reducing productivity and diminishing profits. Capital cannot get too close or it will strangle the life force on which its own survival depends. We do not mean for this analysis of the capitalist extraction of the common and the relatively autonomous processes of cooperation in social production to suggest that antineoliberal and non-neoliberal subjectivities already exist and are simply waiting to be emancipated. We mean for it simply to confirm that a battle over the production of subjectivity is possible—an asymmetrical combat between the capitalist technologies of measure and the immeasurable, overflowing forces of enlarged social production and reproduction, which reside in and produce the common.

To combat neoliberalism requires first a destituent project. We must not only challenge the processes of emptying the public and the capitalist right to extract and privatize the common but also demystify and combat the neoliberal processes of subjection. How can we sabotage and block the gears of the machines that produce and reproduce neoliberal subjectivity? This battle is possible because we are inside the productive project dominated by capital. It is not paradoxical for us to take what is power for capital—subjection—as an occasion for destituent subjectivation. In line with the Marxist tradition of subversion, this means, on one hand, that capitalist subjection is always forced to individualize productive subjects and, on the other, that the subjects put to work can discover in their own activities that they are not merely individuals but also have the potential to act together. To make sense of this being-together one must sabotage the capitalist project, not only blocking capitalist machines but also destroying ideological and material mechanisms of the organization of labor and society, along with their individualist subjection.

To this destituent endeavor needs to be added a constituent project of subjectivation, that is, in the language we used earlier, the construction of machinic assemblages to produce alternative subjectivities. How can the common be reappropriated by the multitudes that produce it? How can plural subjectivities construct and manage autonomously their own cooperative social relations? The struggle opens here to unhinge social cooperation from not only its direct exploitation but also the mechanisms of financial extraction. It is a matter of stripping cooperation from command—simple to say, difficult to do. Control and resistance, commodity production and capacities for innovation: these are some of the terms of the asymmetry between subjection and subjectivation, and the passage from destituent to constituent action.

One way forward at this point is to adopt the standpoint of existing subjects, specifically to take guidance from the agents of social production who, subjected to the command of finance capital, nonetheless manage to organize resistance and even projects of liberation. From the social struggles we need to learn, argues Pedro Biscay, former director of the Central Bank of Argentina, “a capacity of political invention able to transform the financial dynamic in the field of battle against capital.”27 That power of political invention, we should add, has its foundation in the cooperative terrain of social production and in the overflowing productive nature of the common. And, furthermore, that battle against capital must be also a battle for new social relations. At the end of chapter 9 we traced a progression, which is already in action today, from social production to social unionism to social strike. Social unionism, we argued, by combining the organizational structures and innovations of labor unions and social movements, is able to give form to the entrepreneurship of the multitude and the potential for revolt that is inherent in social production. Struggles valorize existing subjectivities but also create new ones; subjectivities are radically transformed by their participation in political organizing and political action. Struggle too is a terrain of the production of subjectivity.

Social struggles, however, even organized as social unionism and social strike, are not enough. They are not the endpoint but a point of departure, a launch pad for the production of powerful subjectivities. An alternative production of subjectivity and alternative social relations must be sustained and institutionalized. Earlier we claimed that money is a social technology that institutionalizes social relations, and we traced various ways that money sustains capitalist social relations through their different phases of the mode of production. In chapter 15 we will argue that this critique should lead us not to oppose money as such but instead to invent an alternative to capitalist money, that is, an alternative social technology for institutionalizing new social relations—a money of the common.

When we advocate for a money of the common we are not imagining any storming of the Winter Palace (or the Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank), nor are we thinking of those (however noble) local or digital currencies that seek to escape from the totalizing power of the dominant currencies. Our analysis of money is not concerned primarily, as we said, with its function as a means of exchange. We are interested instead in deconstructing the social relations that capitalist money imposes and institutionalizes, and institutionalizing new social relations through a new money. A money of the common must first be a subversive money: it must transform the capacity of struggles over social production and forms of life into weapons that block (to use old terms) capital’s power to coin money and (in newer terms) the increasing domination over the common through the financialization of society. Along with those destituent effects, a money of the common must also consolidate and extend the autonomous relations of social cooperation, confirming the values of the common and generalizing its principles of open access and democratic decision-making. A money of the common, then, must be a social technology to crown the processes of subjectivation, making lasting and socially expansive a production of powerful subjectivities. In part IV we will need to investigate this and other pillars of a potential project of transformation and liberation.