Deconstructing Post Industrial Capitalism

international | anti-capitalism | opinion/analysis Monday October 02, 2006 17:31 by Peripheraldisorder

and reconstructing an alternative

This is a summary article of a thesis I wrote, and titled..

‘Contemporary Critical Theory....Transgressing the logic of Capital..... Deconstructing Post Industrial Capitalism and Reconstructing an Alternative......Radical Theory for Modern Pirates'

whilst doing a philosophy MA in Amsterdam. The overall thesis would be far too long to post in its entirety so I thought that I would post this summary. I posted it on this site as I feel that a lot of people using it would share my basic arguments and that such a modest theoretical contribution to a budding anti- capitalist literature might make for an interesting online debate.

Critical Social Theory:

Communicative Democratic Production as an alternative to Communicative Capitalism.

A Critique of Post Industrial Capitalism.

Contents

1.0 Introduction
1.1 Communicative Reason and formal pragmatics; the conceptual background to Communicative Action
1.2 Communicative Action and life world-system framework of critical social theory
1.3 The reification of life world: Marx and Habermas
1.4 Colonisation of the life world as capitalisation.
1.5 Empire as a conceptual understanding of global informational capitalism.
1.6 Blurring the lines between communication and production; General Intellect.
1.7 Democracy; Communicative Production and the Internet.
1.8 Radical Democracy and progressive political struggles: the Zapatistas.
1.9 Conclusion; Democratic Self Governance.

1.0 Introduction.

This paper is a critical articulation of the basic concepts of Habermas, Marx and Antonio Negri. It is an attempt to develop a critical theory of dominant capitalist societies whilst at the same time provoking the possibility of a democratic alternative that emerges within the changing role of production in post industrial capitalism.

Firstly we will examine the conceptual background to communicative action and illustrate the language theoretic foundation to this concept. It will be shown that communicative rationality and the paradigm of ‘language use’ is a better foundation to a social theory attempting to instigate a programme of radical democracy. Communicative reason is useful for our paper in that it begins from a theory of social co-operation and not self interested purposive reasoning. Equally it provides a pivot around which we can engage in critique and develop our critical theory of dominant capitalist societies. It is our belief that any theory of democracy ought to begin from the social context of species being and not the individuated individual brutishly pursuing their own interests. Communicative sociation is the necessary pre-requisite for any theory of democracy. Thus, it will be argued that Habermas fulfils the requirement of the constitutive basis of critique that allows us to proceed in our critical socio- analysis. This normative constitution is communicative reason, and when organised to co-ordinate social activity in the lifeworld; communicative action .

Secondly, the paper will examine the distinction between ‘lifeworld- system’ and the process of colonisation that occurs when the subsystems of ‘economy’ and ‘state’ are decoupled from the ‘lifeworld’. It will be argued that this colonisation and the anomalies that emerge are the effects of capitalist modernisation on the social integration of the life world. This dual account of society provides us with an ontology for the construction of social change. Thirdly, we will compare the analysis of Marx and Habermas. Both of them grapple with an action theoretic and systemic analysis of capitalist societies. Habermas is undeniably influenced by Marx distinction of base and superstructure. Therefore it is necessary to compare and contrast their sociological approaches.

Fourthly, it will be shown that Habermas failed to develop his thesis on colonisation. We will argue that the colonisation of the life-world ought to be conceived as the capitalisation of the life-world. In post industrial capitalist societies the role of capital has expanded beyond a wage relation and there has been a revolution of reaction against the welfare state. At this stage we will drop the analysis of Habermas and subsequently proceed to examine the changing dynamic between the state and the economy in our globalised world. We will examine the basic concepts of Antonio Negri’s Empire. The concept of Empire will be employed to describe the emergence of globalised free market capitalism. It will be shown to be a hybrid constitution of bio political control, which is the result of the complete capitalisation of society. It is a diffuse hierarchy of rule that reduces the role of the nation state in social and economic governance yet increases capitalist sovereignty. Empire is a total world situation of immanent control of complicity among juridical, media, military, and corporate powers in the control of life . However, it is a concept with a subtle twist in that it ultimately creates the conditions for its decline.

Following on from this it will be shown that the constituent communicative production of the general intellect becomes the ontological condition of capital and thus the possibility of a reconstructive project of radical democracy that transgresses capital. We will discuss the critical importance of the free software movement. It effectively undermines the core validity claim of capitalism. Equally, it has proven to more commercially viable. This has produced an electronic fabric of struggle within the Internet that we ought to politicise. We will argue for a material revitalisation of a democratic media, and illustrate how new generations of political activists have made the production of alternative democratic media central to their project of the democratisation of society. To conclude, we will examine some progressive cyber-democratic political struggles that are emerging throughout the entire fabric of existence, namely the Zapatista’s uprising in Chiapas to indicate where and how our critique of capital is actualising and materializing. The Zapatistas are of particular interest to us due to their means of organisation. Their method of organisation is a system of direct delegate democracy.

1.1 Communicative reason and formal pragmatics: the conceptual background to communicative action.

Habermas begins his philosophical defence of reason, the unfinished project of modernity, and his project of rebuilding a constitutive base in which to make this possible, through a critique of purposive functional reasoning. This requires shifting the paradigm of Critical Theory from that of consciousness and the subject into the paradigm of language use. This is an attempt to retain the emancipatory thrust of Critical Theory by appropriating the discursive structure of language at the level of communication. Through an analysis of speech acts, Habermas concludes that functional reason is logically dependent on communicative reason. Through this analysis of language as the basic medium of inter-subjective communication, Habermas attempts to give foundation to a new social theory. Habermas begins from a universalistic understanding of communicative competence. We will attempt to unravel the basis of this competence, but only to clarify the implications for a theory of social action. It is the practical side of communicative action and the communicative infrastructure of rationalised lifeworlds and their relation to capitalist post-modernisation that is of importance for the critical articulation of our paper.

The philosophical grounding in language use is an attempt to avoid the atomistic model of action as carried out by an isolated subject. The outcome of all isolated action theories, it is argued, and theories of meaning that begin from subjectivism inevitably produce social theories that have purposive rationality at the core. This is what Habermas wants to avoid. His chief concern is to begin a new social theory with communicative action. For a theory of communicative action, only those analytic theories of meaning that start from the structure of linguistic expressions rather than from speakers’ intentions are instructive . Communicative action is grounded in a formal-pragmatic theory of meaning. This concept of interaction between speaking and acting agents is mediated through acts of reaching understanding. What is important for us in this paper is to appreciate the language-theoretic foundation to communicative action. Communicative action must find its constitution in a process of inter-subjective meaning and co-ordination if it is to be fruitful for a social theory that wishes to avoid the theoretic framework of purposive self-interested rationality. Purposive, strategic, and means-ends instrumental reasoning is the study of commerce and secondary to a social theory that attempts to articulate the possibility of a constitutional democratic programme aimed at social change.

The linguistic turn in Habermas is also a pragmatic turn. Habermas’s theory of meaning is pragmatic because its focus is not on what language says or represents but on what it does. The pragmatic function of speech is to bring interlocutors to a shared understanding and to establish inter-subjective consensus. This pragmatic approach prioritises the achieved agreement implicit in linguistic communication over the ‘cognitive’ function of representing states of affairs and the ‘expressive’ feature of disclosing subjective experiences . This basis of reaching agreement or understanding is the telos of language for Habermas. This shared inter-subjective consensus that arises from an analysis of the pragmatic function of speech forms the basis of the ensuing actions of the agents involved. The resulting co-ordination of action that emerges from speech is due to the inherent claim to validity within our utterances. Habermas’s controversial claim is that speech acts make three different validity claims: a validity claim to truth, a validity claim to rightness and a validity claim to truthfulness. These are necessary and presupposed in any act of communication.

However, the essential point for Habermas regarding the theory of meaning is to develop a concept of communicative rationality that is sufficiently sceptical in its development, but is nevertheless resistant to cognitive instrumental abridgements of reason . His bisection of reason provides a dual process of societal rationalisation and a two-tier account of society. By splitting reason into communicative and purposive rationality, Habermas can account for the pathologies of modernity and give credence to the arguments of a totally administered society while avoiding the totalising outcome of the ‘iron cage’. Modernity is not the untrammeled development of capitalist modernisation, but an unfortunate story of communicatively structured domains of life being subordinate to the imperatives of autonomous action systems that have cognitive-purposive reasoning as their steering mediums of interaction: the economic and administrative systems. Communicative rationality gives Habermas the space to develop his critique of functional reasoning whilst providing a normative direction for the construction of alternative institutions outside the imperatives of the market.

1.2 Communicative action and ‘lifeworld-system’ framework of critical social theory.

Habermas distinguishes between communicative action and instrumental and strategic action. There is an important difference between strategic and instrumental action, namely, the former is not just concerned with means-ends reasoning, but with using others as means to realise its own ends. However, both differ from communicative action. Communicative action has as its goal the aim to reach understanding and bring about the recognition and acceptance of validity claims between actors. We are not so much interested here in the development of this argument but with its conclusion. All successful action in the world, it is argued, depends upon the capacity to reach consensus. Habermas’s analysis of speech acts is intended to show that illocutionary aims are theoretically and practically more basic and fundamental than perlocutionary intentions. Expanding this analytically we can argue that strategic action (which is the dominant means of social integration of capital and the current institutions of the subsystems of the lifeworld) is parasitic upon communicative action. The phenomenon of communication between social agents is logically prior to, and makes possible, instrumental reasoning. The importance of communicative action is the clarity it provides for the crucial role of co-operative communication and discourse in forming social bonds between agents, and for the complex process of human association. Therefore, the widely accepted argument of isolated individuals in society brutishly pursuing their own self-interest, and using whatever means to achieve such, as the primary constitutive base of society is shown to be dubious at the least.

At the heart of this distinction between instrumental and communicative action is the development of two distinct spheres of social life, each with their own rules, institutions, logical and rationalisation processes. For analytic clarity we can simplify the two spheres into ‘lifeworld’ and ‘system’, which respectively correspond to two methods of rationalisation and action: communicative and strategic. Parallel to the dependence of functional reasoning upon communicative reasoning we can say that the system is dependent upon the communicative lifeworld. Sociality, it is argued, is not possible without communicative reason, for it is that which makes possible the symbolic reproduction of the ‘lifeworld’. It weaves the inter-subjective social organisation of individual language users and makes possible shared meanings, norms and values of a community. This is opposed to purposive-functional rationality, which seeks to influence all means in order to achieve a given end, and is generally equated with the medium of ‘money and power’.

The ‘lifeworld’ determines the preservation of the ‘system’ and is socially integrated through a process of reaching the understanding which is made possible through communicative rationality. It is the horizon of activity that makes society possible. The lifeworld and the rationalisation of the lifeworld through communicative reason, mediated by symbolic mutual understandings, must be prior to the functional integration of the system. The ‘system’ is that aspect of institutionalisation that develops from the ‘lifeworld’ to develop both the organisational power and exchange value in society. These have been socially evolved to form the administrative-state and economy-market. They began as subsystems to the ‘lifeworld’ and developed their own logic of social integration that valourises functional and instrumental reason.

Habermas argues that the ‘economic and political subsystems’ have become decoupled from the ‘lifeworld’ and the everyday communicative life of inter-subjective norms and values. These ‘subsystems’ have become de-lingistified and have taken on a life of their own, steered by the medium of money and power. They are no longer co-ordinated by communicatively generated rational consensus but by their own internal strategic logic. Habermas equates this differentiation process as necessary in the unfolding of societal rationalisation. The increase in rationalisation of lifeworld and system extend the possibility of communicative action. There is an increase in autonomy from the totalising worldviews of religion. The possibility of communicative action that is opened up by the differentiation of society is fundamental to the project of modernity. However, the result of this post-metaphysical concept of reason creates a fundamental paradox, namely, “the more complex social systems become, the more provincial lifeworlds become. In a differentiated social system the lifeworld seems to shrink to a subsystem ”.

The subsystems of the state and the economy have been decoupled from the lifeworld and encroach corrosively back into it as a form of colonisation. This can be referred to as the bureaucratisation and commodification of the lifeworld. The communicative becomes reified by functional reason. Social co-operation and integration oriented towards reaching understanding through validity claims becomes subsumed under economic-administrative relations. Interaction in the realms of the systems must act strategically using functional reason which bypass the morals and values which integrate the lifeworld. It is this imposition of instrumental reason onto lifeworld contexts that the early critical theorists concluded as the irrationality of enlightenment and reason itself. They lacked the foundation in communicative rationality and the concept of lifeworld that is necessary to counter-balance and conceptually understand the totalitarian potential of instrumental reason. Through a bisection of reason, and the conflicting paths of rationalisation made possible by this, Habermas diagnoses the ‘pathologies of modernity’ while retaining a constitutive normative grounding in reason itself. He can criticise reason without abandoning it altogether. The communicative aspect of reason and its rich moral and normative implications become the pivot around which critique and thus Critical Theory is made possible

The concept of communicative action is pivotal to understanding the concept of the lifeworld and it is my argument that the lifeworld should be viewed as the ontological basis for the subsystems of state and economy. That is, the life world and communicative action is the conditional possibility of the system and instrumental action. Communicative reason is ontologically prior to functional reason and it is necessary to valorise and act upon this ontology in order to unleash the potential of ‘communicative action’. It is by unravelling the concept of ‘lifeworld’ and the ontological priority of ‘communicative action’ that illuminates the solid democratic normative framework made possible by Habermas for a critical theory of society. For the purposes of our paper and a theory of democracy, communicative democratic organisation ought to be recognised as the necessary pre-requisite for something akin to Associative Democracy to emerge.

1.3 The reification of the ‘lifeworld’: Marx and Habermas.

Habermas undeniably utilises the Marxist distinction between base and superstructure, and labour and capital as inspiration for his analysis of lifeworld and system. It is therefore important that we examine the similarities and differences between these two approaches explaining how our societies are constructed. A close reading of the concluding reflections in the second volume of the Theory of Communicative Action can help clarify the position of Habermas regarding his turbulent relation with the analysis of Marx. Both approaches to understanding the structural differentiation in society grapple with the theoretic relation between action and system analysis. For analytic purposes we can equate a systems approach with the development of what Marx called the superstructure and what Habermas calls societal sub-systems and the action-theoretic approach with base and lifeworld respectively. The dynamic between the two is fruitful and requires a detailed level of analysis that we will now briefly attempt to articulate. The differences between the two are within the same terrain as their similarities, that is, the relation between the action and systems approach in understanding capitalist societies and how the divide between the ‘system and lifeworld’ can be closed.

Habermas argues that the theoretical superiority of Marx is his analysis of the commodity form. The monetarised labour power of producers is appropriated as a commodity and alienated from the life contexts of producers; this is what Marx referred to as abstract labour. The labour power sold by producers is the site of encounter between the imperatives of system integration and social integration. As an action, this co-operative labour is alienated from the lifeworld of producers and used as an exchange mechanism for the functional systemic imperatives of the capitalist economy. Labour power is thus abstracted and made indifferent to the ‘lifeworld’ of producers and translated into an instrumental means of the system. The transformation of the capitalist economy from that of communal and feudal living is presented as a form of reification. Concrete labour becomes more estranged, social relations amongst producers become increasingly objectified and all social and intra-psychic relations take the form of instrumental reasoning .
Marx presents capitalist modernisation as a dialectical process within a single totality. He can analyse the historical unfolding of capitalist modernisation and account for its destructive effects by returning to the horizon of everyday practice of co-operative production. Capital is equated with the system, and labour the lifeworld. This conceptual linking of system and action-theoretic analysis is the critical link between Marx and Habermas. However, it is also the point of divergence. For Habermas, Marx is too tied to a Hegelian totalising logic to appreciate the structural differentiation process internal to both the lifeworld and its autonomous sub-systems. Marx sees the capitalist system as a totality that opens up as a totality and therefore fails to see the intrinsic value that the media steered subsystems possess in themselves. The system and lifeworld are presented as a simplistic dialectic of class conflict. Habermas, on the other hand, views the subsystems of administration and economy as positive evolutionary products that are to be regulated and governed and not abolished. However, for Marx, the lifeworld of production is the terrain that must abolish the system, as opposed to appraising it as a product of modernity. It is a horizon in which the practical political action of producers can dissolve the subsumption of the lifeworld to capital by organised revolution.

Habermas’s thesis regarding lifeworld and system and the resulting reification or colonisation by the subsystems when they are not communicatively regulated is grounded in Marx’s analysis of base, superstructure, capital, commodity and subsumption. He argues that Marx’s analysis is too narrow. He concentrates solely on the action-theoretic over the systems-theoretic approach to sociological analysis. It is also argued that Marx fails to distinguish between the reification of the lifeworld and the structural differentiation of the lifeworld. The lifeworld is not simply the economic production of producers, but separated into culture, society and personality. Rationalised lifeworlds produce an increased level of individuation and can only be measured according to the level of communicative association. Finally, and most importantly, Marx failed to account for the neutralisation of class conflict and societal action with the growth of the administrative system i.e. the welfare state.

The dynamic relation between state and economy has produced three aspects that Marx failed to recognise within his narrow economic approach to reification. The first aspect is the role of government intervention into the economy to pacify functional gaps within the market, including the establishment of boundary conditions on limits of capitalist accumulation and private enterprise. This has limited the crisis potential inherent in capital accumulation. Secondly, mass democracies and the institutionalisation of power played a vital role in politically legitimising the steering medium of money. Marx concentrated on the latter, yet failed to see how fully labour conflicts could become institutionalised with state bargaining, “The legal institutionalisation of collective bargaining became the basis of a reform politics that has brought about a pacification of class conflict in the social welfare state” . It is continuing this welfare state compromise and the enshrinement of political rights within a constitutional state that motivates Habermas’s desire to close the chapter on modernity. Thirdly, there is a displacement of the theory of ideology and consciousness with an understanding of cultural modernity. Instead of the revolutionary critical attitude, Habermas argues that we need to re-couple rationalised culture with the everyday communicative conditions of societal integration. Thus, it is not about uncovering the ideology of capitalism and highlighting class conflict but to promote communicative association as the means of societal interaction.

If such a pacification of conflict has emerged with the process of capital modernisation and the development of the social democratic state, then how can we account for the wide range of anomalies and revolts that emerge throughout society? Class conflict, it is argued, has been displaced with the growth of mass democracies and now conflicts emerge over how to protect forms of life from the encroaching ‘colonisation’ of media steered subsystems within the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld. However, what Habermas fails to recognise is the changing role of production within the post industrial information based economy. Similar to a lot of post modern theorists he fails to see the importance of the communicative and affective within the changing role of production. This will be dealt with in more detail in 1.5. The material reproduction of society has not been displaced by the symbolic but the productive material process becomes increasingly immaterial and dependent upon the affective and communicative.

1.4 Colonisation of the ‘lifeworld’ as capitalisation.

A discussion of the colonisation of the lifeworld illuminates the causes of alienation and social fragmentation that afflict modern society. Habermas never sufficiently develops the empirical aspect of his argument regarding where, when and how this colonisation process can be located. He simply states that the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld has become utilised for the imperatives of money and power. It is my argument that this effect is essentially the result of the changing dynamics between the state and economy; it is economic colonisation. It is the effect of untrammeled neo-liberal capitalisation on sociality. The process of capitalist modernisation and the expansion of the market is what colonises the lifeworld. The capitalist economy has subsumed the lifeworld and absorbs the integrating function of communicative reason. In this respect the market has become the constitutive aspect of society. The transparency of the lifeworld is obscured, the communicative has been reified and the bases of action and decision have been withdrawn from public scrutiny and from possible democratic control . Colonisation is the privatisation and the market-isation of social space. Habermas avoids using the term ideology to describe the social contradictions that arise from this process of capitalist modernisation. Oppressive social structures retain themselves not through processes of ideology, but because the actions of agents fall into pre-established patterns of instrumental reasoning. The steering mediums of money and power integrate the lifeworld contexts of individual agents, not of communicative argumentation, deliberation, or claims to validity. Thus, with the increase in colonisation or market-isation, the possibility of a democratically and rationally ordered society that aims to remove all forms of oppression and domination decreases.

In post-industrial capitalist societies, the role of capital has expanded beyond a wage relation. There has been a revolution of reaction against the welfare state. The liberalisation of public services and the flexibility of labour reign supreme in the new era of unregulated capital. Flexibility, innovation and increased productivity are but some words that can be found within the ‘newspeak’ of neo-liberal jargon. In the workplace this translates into increased job insecurity, competition with cheap exploited immigrant labour, with the extension of work practices that demand intense levels of production. Flexibility is also applied outside the world of work. It is applied to health-care, education, pensions, knowledge (no longer 'free', but the battlefield of a ferocious war around 'intellectual property'), housing, culture, public transport and the environment. These are then run on strategic, cost effective, and efficient means. The goal is the expansion of profit and not the delivery of essential services such as education or healthcare.

As commercialisation and commodification aim for the farthest reaches of human existence, Marx's dictum about the reversal of all values appears to attain absolute validity. No concept illustrates this so clearly as precarity. Precarity is everywhere, and we all are coming under its rule. It signifies the complete reversal of the quest for security and well-being for the largest number which had prevailed since Enlightenment. The increasing withdrawal of the state from its duties towards the citizenry as part of deregulation and liberalisation policies may be the ultimate form of 'flexibility' -as the authorities move into more profitable areas (since the business of government is business) but retain the sovereign power to legally (if not legitimately) repress and oppress the people. It is this changing dynamic between state and economy and the expansion of capital into all spheres of existence that creates the anomalies diagnosed by Habermas. It is a reaction to the ‘society of the spectacle’ .

Habermas does not directly equate social pathologies with the destructive effects of capitalism. He recognises that the market must be contained, but does not offer any recommendation on how to combat the corrosion of the market upon what makes it possible -the co-operative aspects of inter-subjective agents. Habermas’s develops his theory of communicative action into legal-political theory and a justification of the social-democratic constitutional state. The mediation between the ‘system’ and ‘lifeworld’ is to be generated through law. Thus, the containment of colonisation is made possible through public discursive spheres that influence the normative direction of society. Law is the arena that will keep the market in check and balance. This appears to be somewhat naÔve. If one leaves aside the process of rationalisation and focuses instead upon the historical unfolding of capitalist expansion it is possible to see the materialist concerns submerged within Habermas’s ‘system-lifeworld’ approach and his over-emphasis on normative-linguistic factors. One can view the spheres of ‘lifeworld’ and ‘system’ as distinct spheres of rationality but they can also be viewed as distinct spheres of productive activity. Pushing rationalisation aside for a moment allows us to view the importance of the paradigm of production.

The technological revolution made possible through new media’s, the internet and technology subverts the bifurcations between communication and production in the Habermasian paradigm. Technology and communication are becoming supporting structures. Equally, technology is opening up the possibility of new expansive global means of communication. Blurring these categorical distinctions unleashes the potential of valorising communicative action not just in civil society but the entire social field ranging from the economy to media, education, politics and other realms of social production . Communicative action is playing a direct role in production, as information technology, communications, and interpersonal interaction structure the field of labour.

1.5 Empire as a conceptual understanding of global informational capitalism.

In the last sub-chapter we discussed the process of internal colonisation as the expansion of capitalist modernisation. However, we also indicated that capitalisation has expanded beyond colonisation to subsumption. The global reach of the capitalist market and its expansion into all realms of social existence indicates a shift beyond capitalist industrialisation. The transition from a predominantly agricultural and craft based society to the mass industrial factory can be referred to as capitalist modernisation. Capitalist modernisation can be equated with the rise of industrialisation. The process of modernisation and industrialisation detailed by theorists from Weber to Habermas transformed and redefined all elements of the social plane. On a social level we could refer to this 'iron cage' as the emergence of the social factory. On one the empirical level we can say that the migration of those involved in the agricultural sector to the industrial sector constituted the industrialisation process .

However, a brief quantitative examination of the shift in employment in recent decades would indicate a huge transition in dominant capitalist societies towards the service and information sector. In the simplistic language of developmental capitalism, there has been a transition from primary (agriculture) to secondary (industry) and now the tertiary (service). We can conceptualise this transition from the industrial to the post-industrial economy as the transition to an informational-based economy. Thus, capital has been restructured as an informational-based society and this can be referred to as capital post-modernisation. Post-industrial capitalism therefore can be equated with the rise of the informational society. In short, Hardt and Negri emphasise that if industrialisation was the economic paradigm of modernity, then informatisation is the economic paradigm of postmodernity .

Negri argues that in dominant capitalist countries sovereignty has shifted from a policy of imperialism to Empire and from the nation state to the political regulation of the global market . In contrast to imperialism, Empire is a decentred and deterritorialised apparatus of rule. With the expansion and irreversible globalisation of economic and cultural exchanges the national colours of the imperialist map have blended into a global rainbow. This changing sovereignty and restructuring of global rule calls into question Habermas's analysis of the dynamic between the societal subsystems: state and economy. However, his theory of communicative action and his system/ lifeworld distinction hold firm. Habermas recognises that the societal subsystems seem to have expanded to such an extent that their internal strategic logic has come to constitute the entire social realm. That is, the market steered by means of money and power has increasingly become the constitutive aspect of societal integration, which bypasses the norms and values of the lifeworld. Habermas diagnosed the problem, but it would appear he stopped short before fully understanding the extent of the disease, or prescribing a remedy. Capitalism has transformed radically. In Empire, and its regime of bio-power which we will discuss later, economic production and political administration are not autonomous but increasingly coincide.

Negri argues that with the dismantling of Keynesian economics, government intervention, and the lessening of the role of the nation state in economic governance, we are witnessing a paradigm shift in the world economic and political order. The capitalist state that emerged with the Keynesian planner state has abandoned the strategy of stability (in markets, production and exchange rates) that previously paved the way for mass industry and the collective bargaining between labour and capital. The rise of the neo liberal state puts an end to capital’s attempt at institutionalising collective bargaining as a means of control and legitimisation . Negri reads the measures in the seventies to decouple the dollar from the gold standard as an important moment in the passage towards 'Empire'. The outcome of this measure was the destabilising of exchange rates, which was central to the planner welfare state. Stable exchange rates meant stable markets suitable to mass production . However, in line with the autonomous Marxist theoretical framework, Negri argues that this shift in capital’s structure was a response to organised industrial class conflict. Organised labour posed such a threat to the expansion of capital that it had to abandon its strategy of stability and collective bargaining. Negri utilises a vast amount of empirical data, particularly from the Italian workers movement, in which he was heavily involved, to highlight this change in strategy. However, for the purposes of this paper we will have to exempt this data and take for granted the quantitative measures he used.

The devalourisation of labour and the loosening of the boundaries of the market regime correlate with a new era of technological innovation and computerisation of industry where capital can expand more easily without state regulation. The changing role of the administrative sphere is exceptionally important in that the institutional procedures for trade unions and class conflict become less significant. They too become subsumed within the corporate governance of capital. Negri warns against any nostalgic return to a political strategy that involves returning to the old arrangement of the nation state to protect against global capital. Negri presents the globalisation of capital in a similar manner to how Marx presented capitalist societies in the 19th century, that is, it is a better form of society and mode of production than that which preceded it. Therefore a return to the state is not an option for Negri. He views this proposition as an outdated form of political sovereignty that is insufficient in dealing with the complexity of new plural forms of human association. Negri is in favour of the globalisation process. What he rejects is the regime of capital and the imperial rule of Empire.

However, with this paradigmatic shift in economic and political order, one might presume that the whole concept of sovereignty has been abandoned with the demise of the capitalist state. Negri argues that this could not be further from the truth. Driven by the failure of modern welfare states to regulate global flows of capital and culture, sovereignty has extended and intensified both its juridical and bio-political powers, grafting itself to global flows and permeating all levels of social life . We have shifted from the social factory to the society of control. This shift highlights that the entire society with all its productive and reproductive capacities is subsumed under the command of capital. The dialectic between state and economy has taken on varied forms throughout the history of capitalist development. It is currently organised in a global hierarchical manner that we need to examine. The changing dynamic between the state and capital is also a changing process of political and capital sovereignty. Sovereignty has not disappeared but dispersed into different forms within the universalising and decentred world market. What we are witnessing with the rise of Empire is a diffuse network of bio-political control.

The argument of Negri concerning the changing modes of political and capital sovereignty is as follows. The global world market regime is not organised by a single nation state, force or corporation but through a hybrid multi-layered ensemble of political, corporate and non-governmental organisations and associations. It constitutes itself in crisis control, operating to extract profit from the entire social plane through cultural, financial and juridical networks, which are backed by military force unilaterally or multilaterally if necessary . On the political front, the global power is a pyramidal structure. At the pinnacle is the US on the basis of its ‘superpower’ status and monopoly over the use of force in a global society. However, it is not the big brother of global capitalism. It is simply the required police force that can be called upon if necessary. The second tier of the pyramid is made up of a group of nation states and corporations that control the global monetary decisions and the ability to regulate international exchanges. On the third level are assorted media organisations, nation states, NGO's and other components of global civil society .

However one should note that this hybrid constitution results in a hybridisation of governmental functions. The 'post modern imperial monarchy' involves rule over the collective dimension and guarantee of the world market. The glue that holds together the hybrid constitution is a diffuse apparatus of images and ideas that produce and regulate public discourse and opinion, or what Guy Debord called ‘the spectacle’. It presupposes its audience and integrates them not through discourse, consensus or validity claims aimed toward reaching understanding but advertising, the cult of the celebrity, spin and infotainment. Echoing Habermas's account of the structural transformation of the public sphere, Hardt and Negri find that "political discourse is an articulated sales pitch, and political participation is reduced to selecting among consumable images". It involves media manipulation of public opinion and political action. The spectacle stands in contrast to Habermasian discourse ethics or social integration secured through norms, validity claims and publicly discursive spheres of dialogue.

Empire is a concept employed by Negri and Hardt to indicate the global rule of the market. It is a borderless concept that operates on all levels of social ordering. "The object of its rule is social life in its entirety, and thus empire presents the paradigmatic form of bio power" . The varied and multiple globalisation processes are not unified; the globalisation of capital is the nearest thing to the conceptual understanding of Empire. The political task of Negri and Hardt is not to reverse the globalising process but to redirect it toward new ends. This requires organising the creative communicative powers of the multitude. The multitude is capable of autonomously constructing a counter-empire as an alternative political organisation of the present. In the age of Empire, they claim, we are faced with a simple dichotomy and decision: imperial bio-political control or a new possibility for democracy currently emerging on our horizon – the 'absolute' democracy of the multitude .

1.6 Blurring the lines between communication and production: General intellect, bio power and bio-political production.

The critical form of labour power in digital technology capitalism is communicational and intellectual. If we accept the social ontology of Habermas then the era of digital production is ripe for the actualisation and co-operative organisation of communicative action. Autonomous Marxists take as their premise not the power of capital but the creativity and autonomy of labour. Labour is the substrate of capital and it is by valourising the autonomy of labour over capital that the potential to subvert the regime of Empire is revealed. Labour, it is argued, has broken through the regulative function of capital as determined by the old structures of mass production and appears as a general social activity. Labour is now the productive activity of a general intellect, a hybrid of brain and body that operates through knowledge , communication and language. This productive activity is the real productive force in society. Empire is like a vampire; it is the form of political command that lives by sucking the blood off the productive, creative and communicative capacities of the plural multitude. The multitude is the productive-communicative force that sustains empire and thus the seeds of its destruction. Labour and communication have merged.

To understand the new communicative productive force that drives the bios, Negri and Hardt utilise Marx’s concept of general intellect, which can be found in a passage of the ‘Grundrisse’ known as ‘the fragment on machines’. Marx argues, or more precisely, predicts, that at a certain point in the development of capitalism wealth will come to depend not so much on the expendable labour of the masses, but on social intellect. The crucial factor in production, we are told, will become “the development of the general powers of the human head”, the “general productive forces of the social brain” . The two forms of technological apparatus that signal this passage towards the mobilisation of the general intellect are a global communications system that links the world market and an automatic system of machinery that will link the human intellect with its communicative production, i.e. the computer.

The crucial point for Marx is that should such a passage occur it would be both a utopia for capitalist development but simultaneously a nightmare. It would be a nightmare because by making capital dependent upon the social intellect and co-operative knowledge of humans and scientific social co-operation, capital would effectively undermine itself. This would occur for two reasons. Firstly, capital would no longer be made directly dependent on its traditional base of social order: the ability of people to directly sell their labour power, that is, the wage relation. Secondly, the social activity of the general intellect and scientific development unfolds not individually but as a joint collective and co-operative endeavour . What Marx is practically describing is the knowledge-based economy that our fellow capitalists never cease to celebrate. It is the informational economy. It is the present state of capitalism. Marx discusses this passage as an allegory , an imaginary plane in which capitalist development would be ripe for a transgression towards the co-operative economy. However, this passage is no longer an allusion for us, it is a reality.

It from this premise that Negri and the autonomous Marxist scholars associated with the French journal Futur Anterieur begin their analysis of communicative production. It is first noted that Marx was correct to diagnose the erosion of wage labour and the social nature of production. He was wrong, however, to think this would immediately bring about the demise of the capitalist relation. It still organises itself on wage labour and private ownership. Also, whereas Marx concentrates on the objectification of knowledge in new technologies , the school of autonomy prioritises the autonomy of labour over its objectification. Machines have subordinated labour power but this demands a new level of social co-operation, that is, the ‘cultivation of a new general social intellect’. Labour has changed, mutated, one could say, into communicative production. The critical issue of importance for our paper is the nature of this human activity or labour required to create, support and enable the techno-scientific apparatus of informational capitalism. This is what autonomous scholars refer to as the mass intellectuality or the ensemble of ‘know-how’s’ which support this change in the production paradigm. This mass intellectuality is intimately bound up with immaterial labour, which, as we described earlier, is the distinctive quality of work in dominant capitalist societies, where information and communication have come to constitute the very aspect of production.

1.7 Democracy, communicative production and the internet.

It should be taken for granted at this stage in our theoretical articulation that the paradigm of language and the paradigm of production have merged. The struggle over sense, meaning, language and how we produce these in digital technology requires engaging with the communicative infrastructures that are central to this process. Information has become fundamental to production, and depends upon communicative networks. The productivity of industries now depends more on fixed capital (information) than it does on human labour. At the pinnacle of contemporary production, information and communication are the very commodities produced; the network itself is the site of both production and circulation. It is in this context that the free software community becomes critical. The ongoing revolution in data processing and data communications technology may well be starting to undermine those basic features of property and exchange. As the productive forces immanent to the new production apparatus gradually organise outside the traditional relations of capitalist production, the importance of the general intellect becomes increasingly apparent.

With online production, free software, file sharing, free distribution, and instant communication, it is increasingly difficult to define and organise our societies around the notion of ‘private property’. The free software community indicates a new ‘commons’ that competes with, and is often in direct conflict with, many of the fundaments of private property so basic to neo-liberalism and the systemic structures of dominant capitalist societies. The success of free software in outperforming commercial software is a showcase of the productive force of the general intellect, as foreseen by Marx 150 years ago. It underpins the claim by Autonomous Marxists that production is becoming intensively social. It supports their case of a rising mismatch between collective communicative labour power and an economy based on private property .

The free software movement is located at the heart of contemporary means of communicative production. It is a vast and nebulous community of computer programmers, spread all over the globe, who use a production model that is much closer to pure communism than to capitalism -the vast majority of work is voluntary and the products are given away for free. This community is responsible for much of the software that runs the Internet itself and its creations have been crucial in the development of Internet communities where information, rather than software, is the product. With the development of software tools to facilitate the creation and distribution of information by large groups of cooperating people, enormous repositories of information have been developed by ever-growing communities. The increasing sophistication and ease of use of the tools has been followed by larger, more diverse and sophisticated examples of community organisation . Politicising this electronic fabric of struggle against capital is thus central to our project of Critical Theory.

Many activist groups are coming to see that media politics is a key element of political organization and struggle and are developing forms of techno-politics in which they use the Internet and new technologies as arms of political struggle. The inherently trans-national nature of the Internet has had important effects. By allowing people to communicate without any penalties for physical distance, radical political currents which were previously too geographically dispersed to form themselves into effective movements, have been able to come together and organise in cyberspace. The global anti-capitalist movement, which exploded onto the TV screens in Seattle and Genoa, had a long incubation period on the Internet before it was capable of coalescing in the real world.

The Internet's trans-nationalism has also allowed non-corporate media to somewhat circumvent the various legal impediments that states have devised to impede radical media. National copyright and libel laws are difficult to enforce when the website is physically hosted in another country. As an international entity, there is no single legal system which has authority over the whole Internet. Unsurprisingly, the US government have been taking steps to remedy this. They have effectively attempted to legislate for the entire Internet through the promotion of multi-lateral agreements, such the treaties on intellectual property rights agreed at the World Trade Organisation, or through unilateral measures like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, where the US attempted to prosecute foreign companies for breaking US copyright law. Although such legal control is still limited, it is a constant threat to free communication on the Internet .

In addition to its low financial barrier to entry and its trans-national, geographical distance-collapsing nature, perhaps the most important development of the Internet is a consequence of its fundamental communication paradigm. Traditional media facilitate few-to-many communication. This means that a relatively small number of people produce the information, while a large number of people consume it. There is a clear division between the two. This model is favoured when there is a relatively high cost involved in producing and distributing the information. However, unlike a newspaper or a TV broadcast, there is virtually no cost involved in adding and distributing new information on the Internet. There are few constraints on the size and volume of the information distributed. This feature has facilitated the development of many-to-many communication models, sources of information created by participatory, voluntary communities where the lines between consumer and producer of information are blurred. This type of community stretches back to the birth of the Internet and has migrated through the various Internet communication tools from usenet newsgroups to email lists to the World Wide Web.

The nature of the Internet's communication model has also meant that those political movements which are more libertarian in their organisation with considerable autonomy within broad agreements on principle, and more democratic and participatory in the way in which they produce information, have tended to take advantage of this opportunity much more effectively than the traditional, authoritarian Left. Highly hierarchical groups are organised so that a small number of specialists produce the information, or at least closely scrutinise it before distribution, which is more suited to traditional few-to-many communication. Communities like Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Indymedia and Wikipedia are entirely managed by the community that uses them, and these communities number many thousands.

Indymedia is of particular interest for us due to its political roots as well as its open participatory nature. It was born in Seattle in November 1999, during the famous protests there against the WTO and has remained heavily influenced by the radical libertarian ideas current in the global justice movement. Today, it has expanded to be a global network of open publishing news sites, with 150 collectives of varying size in over 70 countries. "Open publishing" means that all of the users of the site produce the news collectively, rather than it being a job of a small group. These network-wide agreements amount to a statement of basic organisational principles of communicative action -emphasising democracy, accountability, openness and non-hierarchical structures. Whereas Habermas utilised his concept of communicative action to develop an autonomous civil society guiding the normative direction of the social democratic state, we wish to utilise its basic components to indicate the procedural requirements of an inclusive programme of action within the democratic attempt to subvert the capitalist system. We are using it to highlight the requirements for a theory of democratic organisation for all those organically organising outside the imperatives of the market to construct radical social change. The Internet, in short, has facilitated an international co-operation between struggles seeking a collective network of resistance against neo-liberalism, but one which does not have a central command or strict hierarchy .

1.8 Radical democracy and progressive political struggles; Zapatistas.

There are by now copious examples of how the Internet and cyber-democracy have been used in progressive political struggles. A large number of activists are already making use of these new technologies and public spheres in their political projects. The peasants and guerrilla armies struggling in Chiapas, Mexico used computer data bases, guerrilla radio, and other forms of media to circulate their struggles and ideas from the beginning . However, for the purposes of our paper we are interested in the uniqueness of the Zapatista uprising for two main reasons. Firstly, it emerged as a direct response to the command of global capital and its neo-liberal institutions. Secondly, its democratic structures of organisation make it distinct from most authoritarian Left politics and have influenced a new generation of political activists around the globe.

The Zapatista uprising occurred when seven towns in the Chiapas regions were seized on the 1 January 1994. It was no coincidence that the uprising coincided with the beginning of NAFTA (North America Free Trade Area) as NAFTA signed the death warrant for the indigenous and predominantly agrarian based people of Chiapas. For NAFTA to be initiated, Mexico had to comply with the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP’s) laid down by the US in order to receive loans from the World Bank. The problem with SAPs in relation to the Zapatistas are that it calls for the privatisation of all land (oil, mining, telephone service, etc..), deep cuts in social spending, (health, education, housing), and an emphasis on export production (eliminates nearly all loans for those in the sectors producing goods for internal consumption).

The privatisation of all land would have a dramatic effect on the Zapatistas. Previously the Mexican constitution protected the communal lands (ejidos) held by the indigenous population. In the state of Chiapas (70% indigenous population) this would lead to the expulsion of 1.5 million people from their land. Not only will these people lose their land, but the land would suffer irresponsible rates of deforestation. The Zapatistas felt that the theft of their land is an attempt to destroy the culture of the Mayans. Thus, the campaign was a dual attempt at defending the indigenous culture of the MAYA population and an attempt to defend the privatisation of their lands.

The Zapatista movement includes the Tzotzil, Tzelta, Tojolobal, Chol and other Mayan ethnic groups of the Chiapas region. The year before the Zapatista Uprising in 1994 roughly 30,000 people in the Chiapas region died of hunger and diseases related to malnutrition. The Chiapas is a region rich in resources and the Mexican Government has systematically pushed the natives off their land to make way for profitable private business. When the Mexican government signed NAFTA, and announced the extraction of resources and land by a few companies would be intensified, the Zapatistas declared it a “death sentence” for the indigenous and farming populations of Mexico. They declared enough is enough: “Ya Basta”. They represent a living revolution that differs from traditional left/ right structures in that they organise autonomously from the state. They are thus one autonomous movement amongst many that prioritises people, community, justice and democracy over capital.

In its very basic form, autonomy consists in recapturing and restoring the culture and self determination taken away from us over the past 500 years. That is, in terms of territory, that the people that live in a region administer their own economy, their own politics, their own culture and their own resources. Marcos, spokesperson for EZLN

The Zapatistas are often seen as heralding the new era of resistance movement against corporate capitalism. Five years after the rebellion they organised themselves into 32 Autonomous municipalities. Up to one hundred communities can often make up one municipality. Within these communities there exists a radical form of direct democracy. The Irish Mexico Group maintained a peace camp in one community, Diez de April, from the start of 1997 to early 2000. The community is situated between the towns of Altamirano and Comitan in the highlands of Chiapas. In 1997 around 100 families lived there. 80% of the people are Tzeltal and the other 20% are Tojolobol. The ranch was occupied on the 10th April 1995. Those who moved onto the ranch had worked for the rancher in atrocious conditions before the rebellion. The church in Diez is the main assembly point for the community who meet there once a week. At the village assembly everyone may speak and everyone over 12 has a vote. Most of the time votes are not taken and a consensus is reached on most occasions. All decisions that face the community are taken democratically in the assembly. In addition there are several sub-assemblies of the people that work on particular projects within the community. They are called collectives and range from sewing, cattle, and the organisation of games. Each collective has a coordinator, a secretary and a treasurer. The coordinator is changed every year to avoid the possibility of corruption .

At the assemblies, delegates are elected onto a council which organises the day-to-day workings of the community. They serve a limited term and are recallable after one year. They answer to the community; the central principle of all Zapatistas is to ‘lead by obeying’. All the communities are run on similar structures. The collective, assembly and council are central to its organisation. Its origins lie in indigenous Mayan tradition, a tradition common to many indigenous groups throughout South America. It is a form of direct delegate democracy. The Zapatista military structure is not, however, internally democratic. Yet command of the army is. The command control is the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee. Each community delegates a member to this committee and can recall them at any stage. Any major decisions to be taken after negotiations with the Mexican government are made through a consulta. A consulta is the equivalent of a referendum, but one in which intense discussions in each community is as central to the process as the vote itself. The purpose of the discussion is to frame the question that is to be voted upon. This is important because through the wording of referenda, governments can often dictate the outcome of the vote. The consultas are of great annoyance to the Mexican government who after negotiations with the Zapatistas often want a decision within days. This rarely occurs.

The practical problem of inter-community organisation led to the creation of regional councils. These councils are known as the autonomous municipalities and link up the communities in the Chiapas region. EZLN Commandante Samuel explains the reasons why they created these liberated zones
…as a way of not having to interact with government institutions. We said ‘enough’ to them controlling all aspects of our communities for us. By creating autonomous municipalities we are defining our own spaces where we carry out our social and political customs as we see fit, without a government that never takes us into account, interfering for its self benefit

The non-governmental organisation SIPAZ has this to say about the autonomous municipalities:

considered from a western perspective, the autonomous municipalities make no sense. They have no resources or real power or legal legitimacy and they are encircled by hunger, disease, the paramilitary threat and security forces. However for the indigenous peoples they constitute an eloquent symbol of a culture which is resisting and defying the dominant culture, making a reality of a different way of understanding politics and of organizing the economy, society and even human relations

Within these municipalities the communities name their authorities, community teachers, local health promoters, indigenous municipal councils and elaborate their own laws based on social, economic, and gender equality among the inhabitants of the diverse ethnic communities. Education is of particular importance to the communities, which dedicate huge effort and time in promoting their traditional political, social, and cultural norms. The communities delegate members onto the autonomous municipal councils, which are the ultimate authority of each municipality. They are immediately removed if they do not comply with the mandates of the community. They are renewed every year. Those who sit on the council do not receive a salary. However they are supported in their farm work so that they can see to their duties. A document written by the Catholic diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas states:

the naming of authorities through indigenous norms and customs signifies that the political party structure is no longer the only channel to elect authorities and representatives, government officials are left governing themselves as they are unable to penetrate the communities. Basically this means the slow destruction of the false democracy sustained by the political party system and its replacement by communities and organisations that construct their own history first as autonomous municipalities and eventually as autonomous zones

The Zapatistas refuse to be pacified by government promises for more regional development. They have refused social funds for poverty alleviation, including a $100 million investment plan for Chiapas by Nestle. They see themselves as a simple fragment of exploited people on earth. They aim at uniting all grassroots movements against global capitalism. They attempt to do this by promoting encuenteros, or gatherings, across the globe. In January 1996 the Zapatistas called for an intercontinental gathering for “humanity against neo-liberalism”. In the summer of that same year, over 3,000 grassroots activists from 40 different countries gathered in Chiapas. This led to the creation in 1998 of the People’s Global Action network, a network of global grassroots social movements . The principles of this global action network have been central to the libertarian currents of the global justice movement in the past ten years. Also, within this time period, the influence of non-hierarchical means of organisation has spread dramatically amongst new generations of political activists across the globe. The Zapatistas are a living example that alternative ways of organising society can work. They have shown that there is an alternative and that those without a voice can set the agenda. They are the peripheral disorders pushing the limits of our epistemological capitalist web of influence and actualising the possibility of transgressing capital.

Harry Cleaver, academic and activist best described the uniqueness of the Zapatistas and readily sums up why they are of interest to us in our theoretical enterprise:

in a very real sense the Zapitistas movement emerged as a tentative and transitory solution to precisely the problem which confronts us everywhere; how to link up a diverse array of linguistically and culturally distinct peoples and their struggles, despite and beyond those distinctions , how to weave a variety of struggles into one struggle that never loses its multiplicity

For the purposes of this paper, what we wish to highlight is the materialising form of radical democracy. It is based on strong notions of participatory governance and what is often referred to as grassroots democracy or direct democracy. When we speak of direct democracy we speak of equality between individuals as the basis of the organisation of society. Bringing direct democracy into practice would mean radically changing the system of social inequality that is currently legitimated and laid down by laws and regulations. The direct democracy ideal opposes all that gives rise to hierarchy whether formal or informal, such as sexism, racism, nationalism , imperialism and capitalism. Direct democracy applies to all arenas of life , the work floor, local community and companies. In direct democracy the organisation of a company takes place in a meeting that is open to all workers. This meeting decides, for example, about working conditions and production targets. During the meeting, people who have revocable mandates are chosen, to fulfil co-ordinating functions on the shop floor and so on.

Such an ethos has been central to social movements after the collapse of state communism and expands its political vocabulary beyond class interests and traditional Marxist methods of mobilisation. Central to the grassroots project is the development of democracy and responsibility in all areas of life and not simply the choosing, once every four or five years, of a state party that works entirely within an already presupposed framework of capital. It is not aimed at taking state power but challenging the state and the current economy, whilst creating new spaces in which to build alternative conceptions of how we ought to structure, democratise and integrate society.

1.9 Conclusion

It should become obvious that the struggle against corporate capital must proceed according to a democratic framework that is inclusive, plural and attentive to the autonomy of difference. However, it must collectively network its differences towards a common shared end. This shared end ought to be democratic self-governance. All those affected by decisions ought to be involved in how those decisions are made. We are not only advocating the re-organisation of the productive processes but also the absolute democratisation of the productive process. This is possible when production becomes communicative and immaterial labour increases the bio-political force of social life. Unleashing the communicative into all spheres of bio-existence is simultaneously a demand to democratise those spheres. This is the lucrative potential that emerges from capital based upon the general intellect. If production and communication are becoming the essential part of the social electronic fabric of existence, then we ought to prioritise the democratic control of such vast networks of activity. Thus, the democratisation of private and public institutions, culture industries, the media, education, workplace, community and every other element of social life is the crucial demand of our Critical Theory. It is the beginnings of a new political constitution of the present that enshrines the absolute democratisation of how we produce ourselves as diverse human beings and how we relate to our entire bio-sphere. It is only with this democratisation of human relations and civilisation can we avoid plundering the earth while constructing a sustainable alternative. With the changing role of production and the explosion of communicative common networks online, this is increasingly becoming a real possibility.

Democratic self-organisation ought to be the bone structure that guides the living flesh of the multitude. The multitude is a useful name for a new global political subject of democracy. Our counter hegemonic bloc includes the vast majority of the producing and communicating global multiplicities. This is a heterogeneous web of workers, migrants, indigenous groups, social movements and non-governmental organisations. This is the “living alternative that grows within Empire”. The communicative and productive capacities of the multitude ought to be equated with a bio-political power of networked citizens labouring to produce the common resources necessary to democracy. Critical Theory ought not concentrate so much on abstract blackboard-democratic principles, but on actual existing attempts to politicise the struggle of democracy within the multitude. Thus, it must connect itself with the living social movements, workers struggles, indigenous uprisings and activities of a widening struggle against corporate capital. It is only by politicising these social networks of multiple associations within the struggle against capital can we construct a global democracy and defeat the rule of Empire.

The new political constitution of the present is a recognition that we cannot simply critique, deconstruct and reject for the sake of it. Such a philosophical free-play is not only politically dangerous but impotent in the face of defending our gains within the project of constructing social change. We are arguing that human agents as social beings are capable of democratic self governance, that we ought to replace the constitutive logic of capital as the means of societal integration and co-ordination, that critical theory ought to politicise and connect itself to living social movements and that communicative action can provide an alternative to organising society. With these goals as our impetus, we have located the enemy. In fact this is arguably the most important step in constructing a new political philosophy. We need to organise and network the bio-political forces of production that rest with the world’s producing multitude in order to actualise our project. This actualisation can emerge in many forms but must be guided by the democratic principles akin to those provided through communicative action. This ethical construction guides and keeps in check the political force that is driving the project. The practically engaged activity of struggle must democratise itself before it demands the same from the entire fabric of existence.

We need to create a political movement that builds counter institutions that do not proceed according to the strategic means of money and profit, but via actions for the sustainability of our entire bio-sphere of existence. We need a counter communicative libertarian power that creates a confederated political sphere guided by the principles of communicative action that is in direct confrontation with the regime of capital. The post parliamentary project not only fights parliamentary- capitalist power relations but at the same time brings a just and workable alternative into being. The pursuit of our project is ultimately the struggle for a radical democratisation of all decision-making processes in society. This paper is theoretical in that it critically analyses the make up of dominant capitalist societies yet provides a philosophical vision of how to develop in a concrete way a non hierarchical, libertarian, grassroots, diverse and horizontal organisation from the local to the global level. The battle ground of ideas is wide open and we fear nothing in directly confronting the dominant institutions, discourses and powers that be of our time. We are mobilising our creative, productive and communicative capacities to subvert the avarice of capital in order to build a world beyond the imperial rule of empire that has sustainability of the entire ecology of existence as its core value not the private accumulation of individual profit.

References

1. empire versus multitude, place your bets, p 1
2. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume I, p 275.
3. James Gordon Finlayson, Habermas: A very short introduction, p 33.
4. Habermas, theory of communicative action, preface
5 William Outhwaite, Habermas . A Critical Introduction, P 87
6 The Theory of Communicative Action, P 187
7 Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume II, p 336.
8 Ibid, p 340
9 Ibid, 347
10 Gemma Edwards, Habermas and New Social Movements; what’s new? (in After Habermas, New Perspectives on the Public Sphere, P 116.
11 this concept was used by Guy Debord to describe the effects of capitalist modernisation in society. It was argued that the commodification of all forms of existence produces a passive isolated vicarious existence.
12 Douglas Kellner, http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/haberm...s.htm
13 See Empire, p 281
14 see, Jodi Dean, Paul A Passavant: Empires new clothes, Reading Hardt and Negri, p 261
15 Negri and Hardt, Empire, p 237
16 Michael Hardt, Into the factory: Negri’s Lenin and the subjective caesura in Resistance in 17Practice: the philosophy of Antonio Negri, p 12
18see Empire, p 247
19Empires New Clothes, the Myth of the Multitude, P 291
20 Nick Dyer Witheford: Cyber Negri: General Intellect and Immaterial Labor, in Resistance and 21Practice: The Philosophy of Anonio Negri, p 151.
22 see Empire, p 187
23 see Empire, preface XIV
24 Timothy Rayner, Reconfiguring the Multitude, http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id...17651
25 See, Nick Dyers Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (1999) http://www.fims.uwo.ca/people/faculty/dyerwitheford/Cha...9.pdf, p 487
26 Ibid, p 485
27 see http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_3/soderberg/
28 I am indebted to the analyses from my comrades in the Workers Solidarity Movement for this appreciation of free software and the growing communistic tendency implicit in such changing means of production.
29 Chekov Feeney see http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/wsm/rbr/rbr8/media.html
ibid
30 Douglas kellner http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell25.htm
31 I am indebted to Andrew Flood in the workers solidarity movement for this analysis of the internal democratic structures in the Zapatista communities, see http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/comment/andrew_....html
for an analysis of these events and a first hand account of the Irish Mexican groups account of Diez April camp see, http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/andrew/encounter1_repo....html

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 http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Soci/SociFlem.htm
 http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/feenberg/marhab.html
 http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id...17651
 http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id...10145
 http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Art-Against-Empire-On-Al....html
 http://www.theminnesotareview.org/ns61/hardt.htm
 http://www.raymondvandewiel.nl/multitude.htm
 http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell28.htm
 http://www.opendemocracy.net/xml/xhtml/articles/2549.html
 http://www.globalissues.org/
 http://www.anticapitalism.info/
 http://auto_sol.tao.ca/node/view/1852?PHPSESSID=30: -Cornelius Castoriadis, The Fate of Marxism
 http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_3/raymond/
 http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_2/delong/
 http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_3/soderberg/: CopyLeft and CopyRight, A Marxist Critique.
 http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/markovic.html
 http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/marx.htm
 http://tom.acrewoods.net/research/philosophy/ideology/m...alism
 http://www.fordham.edu/HALSALL/MOD/kant-whatis.html: Kant: what is Enlightenment?
 http://www.fordham.edu/HALSALL/MOD/kant-whatis.html
 http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/agger4.htm
 http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/bron4a.htm
 http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin....html: Peter Kropotkin: Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution.1902.
 http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/357krcp.html: Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically, AK Press.
 http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/begindx.html
 http://libcom.org/library/harry-cleaver