Science & Society, Vol. 79, No. 3, July 2015, 363–387 • Cognitive Capitalism and Contemporary Politics: A World Historical Perspective BRENDAN MCQUADE* ABSTRACT: The recent upsurge of class struggle seemingly conirms the cognitive capitalism hypothesis and, particularly, the political predictions of Hardt and Negri. Using world-systems analysis as a heuristic device to facilitate comparison of Egypt’s Arab Spring Revolt and Occupy Wall Street reveals complexities that belie these conclusions. The “cognitariat” and “multitude” are not uncomplicated revolutionary actors but fragmented and politically ambiguous forces. Revolutionary subjectivity is not a structural fact to be read off material conditions but remains a political project to be realized through collective struggle. Meanwhile, the ideological and practical appropriation of antiauthoritarian and antistatist impulses by neoliberal forces poses the question of the passive revolution, wherein the hegemonic center blunts and overtakes revolutionary movements by incorporating some of their elements. Cognitive capitalism does not appreciate these complexities, and this undermined the full development of the contemporary cycle of struggles. T HE 2008 FINANCIAL CRISIS shook the world and inaugurated a period of revolutionary mobilization: the Arab Spring uprisings, renewed militancy of workers and students, and the occupations and general assembles that transformed Tahrir Square, Syntagma Square, Plaza del Sol, Zuccotti Park, and Taksim Square into something much greater than municipal parks. For a moment — perhaps the autumn of 2011, when Arab Spring protests teetered on the precipice of comprehensive social revolutions and Occupations * Kaan Basaran, Roberto Ortiz, Valentine Moghadam, Thomas Reifer, David Laibman, and the anonymous reviewers all provided valuable feedback at various points during the writing and revising of this piece. 363 364 SCIENCE & SOCIETY still dominated public squares across the normally quiescent United States — it seemed as if world revolution was upon us. In the four years since Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was forced from power, however, the Arab Spring’s jubilant protests have given way to a winter of civil war, foreign intervention and political violence. In the United States, the Occupy Movement seems to be more properly characterized as the “Occupy Moment” — more performance and agitation than organization and transformation. More generally, these “leaderless” and horizontal movements have made dramatic demonstrations and symbolic interventions but have failed to consolidate substantive, structural change. In the case of Egypt, the return of the military to power has reversed the political revolution that deposed Mubarak. Meanwhile, the general crisis that defines the moment continues to deepen and, despite the revolutionary upsurge, austerity and a disciplinary notion of security still stand as the dominant, albeit embattled, conceptual rubrics organizing formal political discussion. What do we make of the movements emerging and unfolding before us? Can we apprehend the deeper social processes that define our historical moment and provide needed perspective on the current travails? Historically, the Marxist tradition has focused on the historical and structural determinants of social change and, especially, revolutionary change. Many interpretations of Marxism hold that the revolutionary subject is synthesized from the most productive elements of the working class. The workers found at the leading edge of capitalist development are the most militant and class conscious. They are the living labor that prefigures new, potentially non-capitalist social relations. From this perspective, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s reflections on contemporary politics deserve sustained attention. In the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and related protests, they see the emergence of a new era of capitalist development, cognitive capitalism, and, with it, a transformation in revolutionary politics (Hardt and Negri, 2011a; 2011b; 2012). Indeed, the wider literature on cognitive capitalism sees it as a new mode of labor exploitation and capital accumulation that undermines the labor theory of value and demands new theories (Moulier-Boutang, 2012, 9, 78–79, 94; Vercellone, 2007). Politically, cognitive capitalism replaces the Leninist vanguard with a new mode of revolutionary organization, the multitude. COGNITIVE CAPITALISM 365 The cognitive capitalism hypothesis is both exemplary and suggestive and overstated and lacking global perspective.1 However, some of its conclusions become more measured in light of Moulier-Boutang’s (2012) acknowledgement that the scholarship is extrapolating on an emergent trend. Rather than thinking of “a stabilized regime, a mode of accumulation,” he sees cognitive capitalism as “a tendency towards transformation in the mode of exploitation” (original emphasis). With this in mind, the research agenda of cognitive capitalism becomes “advanc[ing] a hypothesis . . . even to the point of exaggeration, in order to bring development out of the shadows where we are condemned to it for as long as we limit ourselves to the cautious adding up of ‘facts’” (60, 94). While this approach may be appropriate to clarify the logic of an emergent tendency, we must limit ourselves to adding up “facts,” when dealing with its uneven effects on contemporary politics. In this paper, I use world-systems analysis as heuristic device to evaluate the cognitive capitalism hypothesis in relation to the political upsurge of the last three to four years. World-systems analysis is neither a theory nor a paradigm, but rather “a call for a debate” that challenges the often unacknowledged consensus of Marxist and liberal thought (Wallerstein, 1974; 2011a, xxx). World-systems analysis complicates both traditional Marxist and liberal thought by expanding the unit of analysis from national society to historical systems that encompass a larger “spatial/temporal zone which cuts across many political and cultural units [and] . . . represents an integrated zone of activity and institutions which obey certain systemic rules” (Wallerstein, 2004a, 17). The goal of world-systems analysis, then, is not to produce an airtight, universal and ahistorical theory of capitalism. Instead, it is a framework for analysis that draws on the insights of Marxism, dependency theory and the Annales school (among other bodies of literature) to develop theoretically informed histories of capitalism as a globally evolving relational system. 1 One must recognize that Hardt, Negri and the wider cognitive capitalism school take up the fundamental questions of our times in a way that few do. Here it is necessary to identify ecofeminism/the subsistence perspective and the rigorous attempts to investigate the labor theory of value as similarly ambitious interventions into some of the most dificult and pressing questions of the contemporary moment. See Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen, 1999; Mies and Shiva, 1993; Amin, 1978; 2010; Harvey, 1999; 2006. 366 SCIENCE & SOCIETY In this way, this paper uses world-systems analysis to facilitate comparison of revolutionary movements in distinct spatio-temporal zones of the world economy: Egypt’s Arab Spring uprising and the Occupy Moment in the United States. I validate elements of the cognitive capitalism hypothesis and argue that it apprehends novel facets of contemporary capitalism. At the same time, I show how the failure of Egyptian revolutionaries to move from a political revolution to more comprehensive social revolution and the ephemeral nature of the Occupy Moment point toward historical complexities that belie the political predictions of the cognitive capitalism hypothesis and demand more complex and historically grounded analysis. To this end, this paper proceeds in four sections: first, a review of the cognitive capitalism hypothesis and its claim about the dynamics of contemporary class struggle; second, a presentation of world-systems analysis as heuristic device to help interrogate and historicize the political predictions embedded in the cognitive capitalism hypothesis; third, a world-historical analysis of Egypt’s Arab Spring Revolution and Occupy Wall Street that highlights a series of structural factors ignored by the cognitive capitalism hypothesis; fourth and finally, a concluding section that integrates elements of the cognitive capitalism hypothesis in a theoretically informed history of contemporary capitalism in a way that can help enliven theories of historical capitalism and, more importantly, contemporary revolutionary practice. The Cognitive Capitalism Hypothesis The foundation stone of cognitive capitalism is the apparent hegemony of immaterial labor. The social worth of immaterial labor’s products is more pronounced than its physical qualities. It “creates not only material goods but also relationships and ultimately social life itself” (Hardt and Negri, 2005, 109). Immaterial labor is biopolitical because it “blur[s the] . . . boundaries between labor and life, between production and reproduction” (Hardt and Negri, 2010, 134). While Hardt and Negri (2004) recognize that “immaterial labor constitutes a minority of global labor and . . . is concentrated in some of the dominant regions of the globe,” they argue that it is “hegemonic in qualitative terms,” and “is today in the same position that industrial COGNITIVE CAPITALISM 367 labor was in 150 years ago” (109, original emphasis).2 From here, some write about the cognitariat or cognitive precariat, which replaces the proletariat as the privileged revolutionary subject (Toscano, 2007, 5; Moulier-Boutang, 2012, 134–135, 160; Hardt and Negri, 2012, 55). For theorists of cognitive capitalism, the hegemony of immaterial labor and biopolitical production transforms social relations in novel and politically important ways. Cognitive capitalism expands exploitation beyond physical labor power to the “second degree” to “capture a part of the invention-power” or the affects, subjectivities, knowledge and mental or spiritual capacities of labor (MoulierBoutang, 2012, 93–98). From here, theorists of cognitive capitalism evoke an obscure concept in Marxist thought, “the general intellect” or the “collective, social intelligence created by accumulated knowledges, techniques and know-how” (Hardt and Negri, 2000, 364).3 As information and communications technologies become increasingly central to all aspects of capitalism, the general intellect expands from being a contributing factor in production to its driving force. This fundamental change in the organization of production speaks to the deepening “real subsumption” of labor to capital: “In the biopolitical context, capital might be said to subsume not just labor but society as a whole or, really, social life itself, since life is both what is put to work in biopolitical production and what is produced” (ibid., 142). Paradoxically, the real subsumption of labor to capital is said to increase the autonomy of labor. When capitalist control pervades all social relations, it is everywhere and nowhere: the distinction between waged and non-waged labor breaks down; the spatial location of exploitation is no longer the workplace but the full web of relations that constitutes an individual’s life and circumstances; the temporal scope of exploitation extends beyond the workday to envelop the entire life span. Instead of a “productivist” capitalism lording over 2 When Hardt and Negri speak of the hegemony of immaterial labor, they mean that it imposes its tendency on all forms of labor. In the same way that industrial labor’s hegemony transformed agriculture, leading to “agricultural modernization [that] relied heavily on mechanical technologies, from the Soviet tractor to the California irrigation systems,” immaterial labor informationalizes agriculture with “biological and biochemical innovations. . . . Seed corporations patent the new plan varieties they create. . . . agriculture is being informationalized” (Hardt and Negri, 2004, 112–113). 3 See Bowring’s (2004) analysis of Hardt and Negri’s use of “the general intellect” for a detailed account of the history of the concept and its contested and contradictory interpretations. 368 SCIENCE & SOCIETY the labor process, we have a rent-seeking capitalism that captures the products of immaterial labor without interfering in the process itself (Vercellone, 2007). A more diffuse “social Taylorism” replaces the ironclad workplace discipline of traditional Taylorism. On their face, such claims apprehend important features of contemporary capitalism: the work of consumption, the increasing importance of “services” in the capitalist core, and, more recently, the “digital enclosure” of social relations through digital networking, mobile telephony and related technological developments (Andrejevic, 2007). However, these claims tend to overstate the originality of these matters to the point of caricatured exaggeration. The notion of immaterial labor and its contradictory condition of greater autonomy within social relations fully subsumed by capitalist control, for example, has been rightly criticized on multiple points. Sayers (2007) and Starosta (2012) show how Marx’s original works can explain contemporary capitalism without resorting to such a fuzzy concept as “immaterial” labor. Caffentzis (2007) goes even further, expanding Marx’s theory of machines to include Turing Machines, i.e., computers. This new theory of machines allows us to appreciate how the products of “immaterial labor” — services, cultural products, knowledge and communication — are, in fact, material goods. Similarly, Ross (2013) moderates claims about such seemingly anti-capitalist developments as free and open source software that have, in fact, been fully subsumed within the apparatus of accumulation. While these points cannot be elaborated at length here without distracting from this paper’s focus on questions of contemporary class struggle, the limitations of the paradigm’s view of the organization of labor and capital accumulation call into question its political prescriptions and give good reason to approach the political predictions of the cognitive capitalism hypothesis with some skepticism. Of those thinkers associated with cognitive capitalism, Hardt and Negri offer the most fully formed arguments about contemporary politics. Here, their thinking is an extension of their previous work and, in particular, two concepts: Empire and multitude. In the last 30 to 40 years, the crisis of Fordism and the subsequent flexible reorganization of production decentered global power relations. These changes, for Hardt and Negri, replace relatively compact nation–states and their competing imperial projects with an all-encompassing Empire, an immanent, totalizing system “that effectively encompasses the spatial totality . . . that effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the COGNITIVE CAPITALISM 369 existing state of affairs for entirety,” and that “extend[s] down to the depths of the social world.” Empire, however, is advanced as a progressive development “in the same way that Marx insists that capitalism is better than the forms of society and modes of production that came before it.” The multitude is the revolutionary formation engendered by Empire. It exists both “within Empire and against Empire” (original emphasis). However, these “new figures of struggle and new subjectivities are not simply negative forces. They also express, nourish and develop positively their own constituent projects . . . that sustain Empire,” while “call[ing] for and mak[ing] necessary its destruction” (Hardt and Negri, 2001, xiv–xv, 43, 61). In short, the multitude is an unmediated, immanent, and positive collective social subject offered as an alternative to the classic conceptions of the people, class consciousness, or nation. Hardt and Negri see recent events as vindication of these arguments. Noting the “frequent assemblies and participatory decisionmaking structures,” seen in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, they argue that contemporary movements “have all developed according to . . . a ‘multitude form’” (2011b). In their anti-manifesto — a pamphlet entitled Declaration4 — they explicitly link their arguments to the current explosion of class struggle: We live in a society in which capital functions increasingly by exploiting the production and expression of knowledge, a society of cognitive capitalism. 4 In Declaration, Hardt and Negri (2013) clearly try to make a dramatic political intervention, while attempting to distance themselves from the traditional genre conventions of popular political writing. Claiming a modest position as messengers rather than charismatic intellectual leaders, they begin their pamphlet with the distinction that “Manifestos provide a glimpse of a world to come and also call into being the subject, who although only a specter must materialize to become the agent of change.” Where “Manifestos work like the ancient prophets, who by the power of their vision create their own people,” Hardt and Negri’s Declaration announces a new condition, where “the multitudes, through their logics and practices, their slogans and desires, have declared a new set of principles and truths” (4). Such an effort, while admirable on its face, is not as simple as the authors would like to it appear. Hardt and Negri are world-renowned intellectuals and, as such, appear as obnoxiously cosmopolitan elites to a global working class that, by and large, remains unaware of their work. After all, their “declaration” happens to be an extension of their well known work. This note is not meant as an ad hominem attack but, simply, acknowledgement of their social position and the interests and investments that naturally and unavoidably low from it. One cannot volunteer away social relations with inspiring language, and Hardt and Negri remain embedded elite networks of power and privilege. They are, as Bourdieu (1985) famously described the intellectual strata of society, “the dominated fraction of the dominant class” (487). Their declaration remains inextricably linked to the charismatic politics that they try to escape. 370 SCIENCE & SOCIETY Knowledge ever more constitutes the heart of social relations, in terms of both capitalist control and the resistance of living labor. It is thus no coincidence that, in the current cycle of struggles, a large portion of the activists are students, intellectual workers, and those working in urban service jobs — what some call the cognitive precariat. They mediate on their own skin the activity of communication, intellectual labor, and the efforts required to study. For the Tunisian and Egyptian revolts as much as for those in Spain, Greece, Israel, and the United States, and for those characterized primarily by the call for freedom as much as for those centered on poverty or inancial exploitation, this is one solid basis they all share. The proliferation of struggles and their performative character are grounded in the new nature of labor power. As the centrality of cognitive labor becomes hegemonic, it permeates and is crystallized in these forms of struggle. (Hardt and Negri, 2012, 55.) The current intensification of class struggle, then, is a development unique to cognitive capitalism. Hardt and Negri (2012) “see very little of traditional socialist movements in this cycle of struggles” (12). Instead they conceptualize current movements as a particular form of prefigurative politics: “constituent struggles” that “root themselves in a new ontological condition and establish the circumstances under which more equal, common and sustainable relations can grow” (ibid., 34–46). There is something deeply appealing about Hardt and Negri’s work. Their particular brand of post-Marxism attempts to salvage Marxism and synthesize elements of post-structuralism into a new revolutionary vision appropriate for the contemporary conjuncture. George Caffentzis (2013), one the most perceptive critics of cognitive capitalism, puts it well: The cognitive capitalism theorists’ work has brought a welcome excitement to the study of contemporary capitalism. Their approach is certainly unconventional and illed with categorical topsy-turvies where apparent victory becomes real defeat and apparent weakness becomes real strength. For example, what conventional Marxist wisdom racks up as a defeat — deindustrialization and globalization — has, in cognitive capitalism theorists’ eyes been a victory for the proletariat in Europe and the United States (since their struggles have, in effect, driven capitalism out of the production process). Moreover, capitalism in its cognitive stage is extremely vulnerable, since workers now are using their powers of cooperation and self-determination in the very process of applying their living knowledge on the job, while — shades of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic — capitalists are reduced to the role of “middle man,” no longer COGNITIVE CAPITALISM 371 in touch with the production process. By arguing that capital suffers from a deep weakness and that the cognitariat possesses an even deeper strength, the cognitive capitalist theorists aim to revive the revolutionary élan of the age. (121–122.) This is an admirable project and should not be glibly dismissed. However, the cognitive capitalism hypothesis over-emphasizes the knowledge-based sector at the expense of the systemic totality of capitalism as a global and historical system. As a result, the paradigm lacks a “synoptic comprehension” (ibid.). For this reason, I turn to world-systems analysis as a heuristic device to unpack the complexities presented by Egypt’s Arab Spring uprising and Occupy Wall Street and move us toward a more complex and multi-dimensional understanding of class struggle in contemporary capitalism. World-Systems Analysis and the Study of Historical Capitalism As a global and historical heuristic to approach the systemic totality of capitalism, world-systems analysis is a useful methodological tool to help situate and compare geographically and socially disparate moments of class struggle. In this paper, I employ world-systems analysis to compare Egypt’s Arab Spring uprising and Occupy Wall Street. In so doing, I show the limitations of Hardt and Negri’s notion of the Empire and multitude, and put forward a world-historical conception of class formation and hegemonic struggle as a more nuanced conceptual alternative. As a first step, however, it is necessary to take on strawman interpretations of world-systems analysis that reduce a broad and heterodox body of literature to a caricatured reading of its best-known representative, Immanuel Wallerstein. World-systems analysis departs from traditional Marxist thought in that it defines capitalism in broader terms as a historical system dedicated to the infinite and endless accumulation of capital. Capitalism, while centered by a “core” of national economies dominated by the wage relation, extends further to an axial or global division of labor which unifies the social scientists’ traditional units of analysis (states, polities, peoples, etc.) in a larger “spatial/temporal zone which cuts across many political and cultural units, one that represents an integrated zone of activity and institutions which obey certain systemic rules” (Wallerstein, 2004a, 17). “Core” economic processes 372 SCIENCE & SOCIETY are highly skilled, capital intensive and relatively monopolized, while “peripheral” processes are unskilled, labor intensive and highly competitive. These economic processes translate spatially into a tripartite structure: the core, periphery and semi-periphery. The latter is “not a residual category . . . [but] . . . a necessary structural element of the world-economy.” The semi-periphery is akin to the middle and professional classes in a national society. It is the buffer zone that “partially deflect[s] the political pressures which groups primarily located in peripheral areas might otherwise direct against core-states” (Wallerstein, 2011a, 349–350). On this point, Robert Brenner’s (1977) influential critique faults world-systems analysis for prioritizing the political relations of circulation in the world-market over the social relations of exploitation in class systems territorialized in nation–states. This view, however, is limited by a methodological nationalism that misreads Wallerstein and misrecognizes the systemic totality of capitalism. The main question here concerns the unit of analysis. For Wallerstein and others working in this tradition, the appropriate unit of analysis is the world-system, not the nation–state. Processes of class formation, production processes and political relations of domination and subordination cannot be adequately understood if one’s horizons remain limited to the nation–state. Wallerstein locates the emergence of capitalism in the 16th century in the confluence of multiple processes: the unification of the Mediterranean and Baltic trading systems into what would be a world-encompassing market, the strengthening of states, and the development of varied modes of labor control (including but not limited to wage labor) that together formed a larger axial division of labor. Whereas Wallerstein sees a definitive period in which capitalism emerged from the crisis of feudalism (due, in part, to important changes in class relations), a truly “circulationist” view of capitalism, such as the later work of Andre Gunder Frank (1998), reads capitalism infinitely back in time. In this regard, Brenner’s critique is a product of his refusal to consider social relations that extend beyond the formal boundaries of the nation–state. This dispute is not simply “academic.” It carries with it important political consequences that are relevant for revolutionary struggle. Brenner’s view unduly narrows our conception of capitalism and fails to appreciate the differential ways various subaltern groups — however divided by space, time and modes of labor control — share COGNITIVE CAPITALISM 373 a common convergence in capitalist exploitation. Class formation is a world-relational process. Even Marx noted that “the veiled slavery of the wage laborers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal” (Marx, 1990, 925). World-systems analysis sees the global class relations as internal to capitalism as a historical system. Brenner and more orthodox Marxists see them as external. It is important to see other forms of labor as internal and integral to capitalism. Otherwise, one privileges wage labor at the expense of unwaged labor, whether the reproductive work of the household economy or the various forms of unfree labor that have been — and continue to be! — central to global capitalism. Historically, “the wage has been and continues to be used to organize . . . divisions” with the working class (Federici, 2006). Just as the English working class formed in relation to the colonization of Ireland (Robinson, 1983, 29–43) and just as the proletariat of the Northern United States initially rested upon slave plantations of South and the Caribbean (Dubois, 1998, 3–16) and later on the social exclusion of legally emancipated Blacks (Roediger, 1991, 95–162), the ubiquitous command of a rent-seeking capital over the cognitariat rests upon more brutal forms exploitation. “There is a continuum,” Federici (ibid.) reminds us “between the computer worker and the worker in the Congo who digs coltan with his hands, trying to seek out a living after being expropriated [and] pauperized by repeated rounds of structural adjustment and the repeated theft of his community’s land and natural resources.” As the chief methodologist of world-systems analysis, Terrence Hopkins, put it: “the theoretical conditions and processes of ‘class-formation’ are themselves continually transformed in the course of capitalist development. Nor are they apparently much alike, in any one period, in structurally distinguishable areas of the world-system” (1982b, 84). Simply put, there is not a universal class structure with a consistent revolutionary subject. The political challenge of revolutionary movements is to continually (re)compose “the working class” as a politically mobilized “class-for-itself” in conscious struggle against capital. On a similar point, many also fault Wallerstein and world-systems analysis for being overly restrictive in their depiction of the core, semi-peripheral and peripheral zones of the world economy. On this point, Tom Brass (2011) argues that, for world-systems analysis, “unfree labor is acceptable to capital, but only on the periphery of the global 374 SCIENCE & SOCIETY economy where this relational form is encountered” (145). This criticism is a product of an unfortunate methodological slip within the tradition. Many world-systems analysts often speak only of hard and fast locations, the core and the periphery, without any discussion of the processes of core and peripheral differentiation and hierarchization. This leaves world-systems analysis open to criticism that it remains wedded to rigid depiction of the axial division of labor that fails to apprehend the dynamics of contemporary capitalism (for this critique also see Robinson, 2001, 15–19). The original methodological writings on world-systems analysis, however, are quite explicit on this point and insist that the core, periphery and semi-periphery are relational concepts formed by world-encompassing processes (see Hopkins, 1982a, 13). This criticism is also a problem of presentation and canonization. As Wallerstein points out, the empirical scope of world-systems analysis is exceedingly complex: “far more complex than it was possible to portray” (Wallerstein, 2011a, 347). A careful reading of Wallerstein, however, shows a far more nuanced treatment of these processes than his critics will acknowledge. While conventional wisdom, for example, sees world-systems analysis as uncomplicatedly designating Europe as “the core,” Wallerstein, in the first volume of The Modern World-System, presents a more complex picture. At the time, Southern France was a semi-peripheral region, sharing more in common with neighboring Mediterranean states, like Spain and Portugal, which played a crucial role as the great exploiters of the New World and the transmission belt for the silver that drove the development of Northern Europe as a core region. At the same time, Brass’ criticism is grounded in a real problem that tends to simplify the presentation of historical capitalism in problematic ways, especially in the last 30 to 40 years of neoliberal globalization as the once rigid axial division of labor has become increasingly muddled by “cores” within the “periphery” and “peripheries” within the “core.” The world-systems analysis tripartite division still retains some efficacy, however. After all, who would deny the persistent inequality separating the “Global North” and “Global South,” despite the rise of Asia and proliferation of concentrated enclaves of privilege and privation in all world regions? The continuing salience of these world regions is especially clear when one tries to make sense of the current revolutionary upsurge. In reference to the New Left and the world revolution of 1968, George COGNITIVE CAPITALISM 375 Katsiaficas (1987) writes persuasively of the “eros effect” or the chain reaction of political protest that overtakes peoples and places them into a seemingly unified explosion of popular discontent and revolutionary agitation. The “eros effect” is clearly visible in the movements that have erupted since 2011. They are responding to some of the same problems — high unemployment, especially among the youth;5 environmental pressures, in the form of rising food prices and the increasing costs of social reproduction; and unresponsive political authorities — and share some of the same repertoires of political contention — public occupation and general assembly, the use of information technology, and the general refusal to engage in formal politics. On this point, however, Hardt and Negri only get us so far and their analysis can seem a bit superficial. The differences between Egypt and the United States, for example, are dramatic and cannot be easily collapsed into vague notions of Empire and multitude. Even if occupiers of Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park both took on unresponsive political authorities, the difference between the political power of Wall Street over U. S. politics — a financial dictatorship — and the Mubarak regime — a military dictatorship — cannot be simply glossed over. It is my conjecture that world-systems analysis can help us make sense of the differential ways in which the structural unevenness of the world economy conditions the evolution of the various instances of localized class struggle, linked together in the recent global upsurge. Egypt’s Arab Spring Uprising, Occupy Wall Street and the Decline of U. S. Hegemony In this section, I use world-system analysis as a heuristic to compare Occupy Wall Street and Egypt’s Arab Spring uprising. I argue 5 Indeed, today’s youth have little to lose. In 2010, just before the global protest wave, 210 million youths were unemployed globally (IMF-ILO, 2010, 4). In North Africa and the Middle East, general unemployment has been a chronic problem, holding at 12% for the past two decades. Recently, however, crisis conditions pushed youth employment to 24% across the region (Ahmed, 2010; Coy, 2011). Similarly, “the Great Recession” devastated youth employment in the OECD countries. From 2007 to 2010, youth unemployed jumped ive points in the UK to 19%; in the USA, youth unemployment reached 18%, up eight points; and in Southern Europe, the rise has been meteoric: from 16 to 22% in Portugal, from 20 to 27% in Italy, up ten points to 33% in Greece, and doubling to 40% in Spain (OECD, 2011). Presciently, IMF Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, at a joint IMF-ILO conference in September 2010, spoke of the need to “save the lost generation” and warned of the “time bomb” of endemic youth unemployment (Strauss-Khan, 2010; Krishnan, 2011). 376 SCIENCE & SOCIETY that an appreciation of the relative position of the United States and Egypt in the world economy provides a better understanding of these movements than collapsing their differences into vague notions of Empire and multitude. To this end, this section moves in two analytic steps: first, I draw on notions of world hegemony to critique Hardt and Negri’s notion of Empire and historicize the current moment, as defined by the crisis of U. S. global hegemony; second, I discuss world-relational processes of class formation that explain the differences between the “multitudes” mobilized in Egypt and in the United States to direct our attention to more complex dynamics of hegemonic politics that require a more nuanced explanation than what the cognitive capitalism hypothesis can offer. Since world-systems analysis is a broad and heterodox field of intellectual inquiry, there are multiple definitions of hegemony which can be seen as complementary (see Chase-Dunn, 1998, 166–198). Wallerstein (2011b, 36–73; 1983) defines hegemony as the condition in which one core power exercises such preponderant military, economic, and financial power that its material dominance becomes transformed into political and cultural leadership. Arrighi (1994) adds more subtly to Wallerstein’s conception of hegemony. He introduces the notion of a systemic cycle of accumulation or iterative couplets of material expansion and financial expansion that define the distinct epochs of capitalist history. These cycles are inaugurated by the accomplished world hegemony of the core power, which provides stability in the interstate system and sets the example of capitalist development that defines an epoch. For the purposes of this argument, the specificities of varying conceptions of hegemony are not essential. More important is the general historical argument, which locates the accomplishment of U. S. hegemony in the stability of the immediate post–World War II period, the crest of U. S. hegemony in the overlapping political and economic crisis of the period between 1967 and 1973, and its decline in the turbulent contemporary conjuncture defined by neoliberal globalization, financialization and increasing interstate tensions. In this regard, Hardt and Negri confuse the breakdown of U. S. hegemony and increasing multipolarity within the interstate system with the emergence of a deterritorialized Empire. For Samir Amin, another prominent figure in the world-system tradition, Hardt and Negri misrecognize “the emergence of ‘collective’ imperialism of the COGNITIVE CAPITALISM 377 triad (the United States, Europe and Japan)” as the crystallization of a deterritorialized Empire. In short, Hardt and Negri lose sight of the contradiction presented so plainly by France, Germany and Russia’s opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq: “the economy unites the partners of the imperialist system, politics divides the nations concerned” (Amin, 2005, 4). While Hardt and Negri (2010) try to dismiss such criticism by reframing the Bush administration’s unilateral foreign policy as a failed “coup d’état . . . to transform the emerging form of Empire back into an old imperialism, but . . . with only one imperialist power,” their oblique response to Amin falls short (206). Hardt and Negri avoid any investigation into the relationship between the structures of the declining U. S.–centered hegemonic system of states and the international institutions, the UN and NGOs, which they cite to support the rise of deterritorialized Empire in the 1990s. They ignore all evidence that contradicts “the naive thesis of a ‘network of power’: military bases, powerful interventions, the role of the CIA, etc.” (Amin, 2004, 25–26). Such evidence is abundantly clear in the relationship between the United States, the hegemonic core power, and semi-peripheral Egypt. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Egypt promoted “Arab socialism” and took a neutralist stance in the Cold War. The country leaned toward the Soviets, and clashed with Israel from the 1948 Arab–Israeli War until the Camp David Accords in 1978. Since then, Egypt has been a central pillar of U. S. influence in the region. Since 1951, the United States has provided Egypt with $118 billion in military aid, much of that coming in yearly infusions of around $1.3 billion starting in the 1980s (Miller, 2014). Military assistance was also coupled with funds for economic development, including $15 billion from USAID from 1974 to 1984 (Kandil, 2012, 163). These helped create a dramatic political reversal in the region. In 1990, Egypt even joined ranks with Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states to expel Iraq from Kuwait. Instead of a deterritorialized Empire, the current state of world order is better described as the chaotic and unpredictable unraveling of the U. S.–centered hegemonic system of states. Military power is the last pillar of world hegemony to fall, and the United States is struggling to maintain military dominance in the face of its flagging economic power. At the start of the Cold War, the United States’ global archipelago of 500 bases was sustainable when the nation accounted for 50% of the global gross product. However, today the United States 378 SCIENCE & SOCIETY “struggles to maintain 40% of world armaments (the 2012 figure) with only 23% of global gross economic output.” Such slippage will likely continue. The U. S. share of world output is expected to fall to 17% by 2016 (McCoy, 2014). In this context, the Arab Spring revolts represent a renegotiation of relations of domination and subordination at the level of the interstate system. The results are uneven and hard to predict. In Egypt, a pro–U. S. regime has been shaken. In Libya, an anti–U. S. regime collapsed, with a little push from NATO. In Syria, Russia blocked a repeat of the Libyan example and, after over three years of bitter fighting, the Ba’athist government looks like it may weather the storm after all. Meanwhile, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the so-called Arab NATO, has emerged as an increasingly independent actor in the region that cannot be reduced to a tool of U. S. power. The point here is not to predict the future world order, but simply to argue that the current status of global affairs is more complicated than Hardt and Negri’s Empire. Here again, Amin’s (2005) critique of Hardt and Negri is incisive. Instead of Empire, he proposes a focus on hegemonic politics: “an analysis of the subject of history as formed from particular social blocs capable, in successive phases of popular struggle, of effectively transforming the social relations of force to the advantage of dominated classes” (9). Revolutionary subjectivity, then, is not a structural fact to be read off from material conditions, but a political project to be realized through collective struggle. The specific dynamics of these struggles, however, are shaped by the complex relation of “internal” forces — class systems territorialized in particular regions — and “external” forces — the global relations of domination and subordination, consent and coercion that define hegemonic order on a world scale. In this regard, the varied zones of the world economy that structure capitalism as a global system cannot exist at the same “stage” of development at the same time. On this note, Mike Davis (2011) reminds us, while Western post-Marxists . . . lazily ruminate on whether or not “proletarian agency” is now obsolete, obliging us to think in terms of “multitudes,” the situation looks very different in the great industrializing society that Das Kapital describes even more accurately than Victorian Britain or New Deal America. Two hundred million Chinese factory workers, miners and construction labourers are the most dangerous class on the planet. (14–15.) COGNITIVE CAPITALISM 379 Indeed, in the last five years, thousands of spontaneous, largely defensive, strikes have rocked China, including a two-week strike in a Honda parts plant that spread across the country and across industries in 2010 (Slaughter, 2011; Lüthje, 2010; Watts, 2010). Historical capitalism, as world-systems analysts have long argued, is a heterogeneous space–time with many different class structures and modes of accumulation. This diversity of social formations is one of the secrets of capitalism’s durability. It “gives capitalism a freedom of maneuver that is structurally based. It has made possible the constant expansion of the world-system, albeit a very skewed distribution of its rewards” (Wallerstein, 2011a, 348). While labor unrest in China may resemble the type of “traditional” class struggle of the industrial proletarian, the situation looks quite different elsewhere. In the case of semi-peripheral Egypt, a rentier economy of oil, gas, real estate, tourism and high end retail controlled by the ruling oligarchy lording over unemployed or precariously employed workers provided an “economic impetus for revolt,” but did “not facilitate a political consciousness directed . . . at the structures of capitalism.” For this reason, the revolution took the form of “mass political revolts against the oligarchical state,” over and above “class struggles between wage labor and industrial capitalists” (Petras, 2012, 36). While Egyptian labor unions had engaged in a series of unprecedented strikes and won real victories in the years preceding the overthrow of Mubarak (El-Mahdi, 2011), different social forces mobilized to create the now-famous “Tahrir moment.” Six groups that dominated Egypt’s Arab Spring uprising were: two Facebook communities, the Youth of the Muslim Brotherhood, the “New Left” of young and middle-aged leftists, and two salient groupings of the middle class around Mohamed El-Baradei, and the NGO community (Kandil, 2011, 25–26). Anti-capitalist elements were marginal in Tahrir Square, a mobilization dominated by the middle class. As a result, the Egyptian Revolt faltered at a key moment. In late January 2011, after pitched street battles in and around downtown Cairo’s Nile Bridges, the police withdrew. The protesters had an opportunity to take over key administrative buildings and shut down the state, but that is not what happened. Kandil (2012) explains: Why did the protesters choose a giant public square (approximately 490,000 square feet with the capacity to host perhaps a million people) rather than 380 SCIENCE & SOCIETY the sensitive state organs — a fateful decision that determined the revolt’s trajectory? Everyone knew that seizing a central downtown plaza would not stile life in a sprawling city like Cario, nor was it likely to make trafic on its congested roads any worse than it already was. Also, unlike the narrow alleyways and crammed-up buildings in the city capital’s popular neighbourhoods, the square was an open ground with nowhere to hide. So if the demonstrators’ plan was neither to paralyze the city nor to be able to maneuver if forced into street battles, then what did they have in mind? It seems obvious that the only advantage such an expansive and exposed location offered was visibility. The organizer of the uprising drew inspiration neither from the revolutionaries of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, nor from their neighbours in Libya and Syria. They did not grasp the necessity of creating a situation of dual power by occupying government buildings, entrenching themselves in crowded neighborhoods, seizing entire cities, and using all these bases for incrementally supplanting the regime. Instead the organizers drew inspiration from Eastern Europe in 1989. . . . For a strategy based on galvanizing domestic and world opinion and daring the regime to shoot civilians in front of hundreds of camera and news reporters, Tahrir Square (and other central squares throughout Egypt’s provincial cities) it perfectly. (224–225.) Instead of the escalation of the revolt, it faltered at the precipice of revolution. Here, we see the limits of the “multitude” and its “constituent struggles.” It is incapable of projecting power and, despite grand claims of prefigurative politics, it lacks an alternative vision beyond an implicit liberalism. In both the parliamentary and presidential elections, Egypt’s nascent secular liberals found themselves displaced by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist Al Nour party (funded by Saudi investors), political formations with deeper roots in Egypt’s marginalized masses and the considerable informal economy (Noueihed and Warren, 2012, 124–127, 275; Salt, 2012, 61). The same deficiencies are clear in Occupy Wall Street, a youth movement of the white middle class that suddenly found their prospects for class reproduction undercut by the “Great Recession.” The demographics of Occupy Wall Street speak for themselves: 61% male, 81% white, 90% college educated (including graduate study), 30% with an income of at least $50,000, and 47% with full time jobs (Captain, 2011).6 Unsurprisingly, Occupy had problems moving beyond its base in the downwardly mobile middle class. Emahunn Raheem 6 This survey polled 5,006 visitors to Zuccotti Park on October 21–22, 2011. COGNITIVE CAPITALISM 381 Ali Campbell, in an essay tilted “A Critique of the Occupy Movement from a Black Occupier” argued the movement alienated people of color because it did not challenge white privilege and remained a movement organized by “white people have now decided to rail against capitalism as it currently functions only when it has proven adverse for their financial security” (Campbell, 2011, 42, original emphasis). These class divides were readily visible in Zuccotti Park and other occupations. By the end of October 2011, the original Occupy encampment had a clearly observable divide: “the educated political class on the east side of the park — the media and communication working groups, with their library and laptops and expensive cameras and Wi-Fi connections — and the bereft ‘ghetto’ on the west side with its drum circles and dances.” This divide led to conflicts: “$25,000 in computer equipment, digital cameras, [and] cell phones” went missing. “The Kitchen Fund had $4,500 embezzled.” The more “serious” occupiers on the east side begin to denigrate the “gutter” and “crust punks” on the west side. They “sit in a corner of the park dealing drugs: meth, ketamine, coke. They fight. . . . They don’t attend the general assemblies. They don’t join the working groups.” This tension was exacerbated by the fact that “gutter” and “crust punks” lived in the park and held it, while many of the “serious” occupiers went home for a comfortable night’s rest in their apartments (Ketcham, 2011). Similar conflicts complicated other Occupations, which evinced difficulty to integrate the homeless population, prevent sexual assault and manage the presence of illegal drugs (Newcomb, 2011; Shapiro, 2011; Linthicum, 2011; Monks, 2012). Here, the emptiness of Hardt and Negri’s “constituent politics” is manifest. As Paolo Virno (2004) explains, the multitude is ambiguous. It “is . . . the prevalent mode of being today: but, like all modes of being, it is ambivalent . . . it contains within itself both loss and salvation, acquiescence and conflict, servility and freedom” (Virno, 2004, 27, original emphasis). Indeed, Hardt and Negri, in their Declaration, subsume a series of movements and instances of moments of class struggle — Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring Revolts, the 2011 London Riots, the Spanish Indignados and the 2011 Israeli protests over rising costs of living — into a vague construct unified only by their apparent horizontal forms of organization and protracted occupations of public space. A closer examination, however, finds much about these multitudes to be uncertain, mixing calls for social justice 382 SCIENCE & SOCIETY with demands for middle class privilege. In the Deleuzean language that colors Hardt and Negri’s analysis, the proliferating desires that characterize the multitude have no intrinsic claim to revolutionary politics. Absent clear political content and any medium- or long-term revolutionary strategy, the “multitudes” that seized Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park were thus able to make symbolic interventions in the public sphere, but lacked the social power to make structural interventions at the level of political economy. Hence, Egyptian demonstrators could depose Mubarak but they could not create a broad multi-class alliance capable of seizing power, whether through elections or other means. Similarly, Occupy forced inequality into “the national conversation” and helped reinvigorate the labor movement, but it fell far from causing any revolutionary change. These are no small accomplishments, no doubt, but the failure of these movements to move from agitating to projecting social power speaks to complexities and challenges for which the cognitive capitalism hypothesis has no answers. Indeed, Hardt and Negri (2012) acknowledge this problem but, instead of taking it on, they simply beg the question: Democratic counterpowers must be able to force the corporations and the nation–states to open access to the common, to divide the wealth equitably so all can meet their basic needs, and to stop the destruction and repair the damage done to social systems, and ecosystems, populations and the planet. How can such democratic counterpowers be constructed and where will they get their force? How this will come about is not clear to us. But what is clear are the urgent needs of humanity and the earth, and the incapacities of all the existing powers to fulill those needs. (54.) On this point, Hardt and Negri’s hesitation to provide a definitive answer is both an appealing gesture to avoid the excesses of vanguard parties and frustrating failure to take on the most important question. The risks of drifting are acute. Already, the tenuous victories of 2011 and 2012 have been reversed. The military has returned to power in Egypt and the Occupy Movement has turned out to be a fleeting moment of political contention, not an enduring movement capable of systemic change. Here we confront an important analytic and political question: are the reversals of early victories a successful attempt to blunt and overtake a revolutionary opening in the form of what Antonio Gramsci called a passive revolution: controlling inexorable change, while limiting the extent to which popular forces COGNITIVE CAPITALISM 383 seize effective control? In Gramsci’s initial elaboration (1971), passive revolution was conceived as revolution from above and connotes political reorganization through state intervention, where once marginalized social groups are incorporated to a limited extent and without meaningful expansion of popular political control. On this point, Giovanni Arrighi’s (2005) analysis of the neoliberal passive revolution is prescient. Reflecting on world-systems analysts’ failure to apprehend the political significance of neoliberalism, he revised his arguments on hegemony and asserted that “each successive hegemony of world capitalism has been characterized by a particular passive revolution.” Currently, this includes “ideological and practical appropriation by the United States of the antiauthoritarian and antistatist thrust of 1968. The year 1989 was much the result of this counterrevolution as it was the continuation of 1968” (88–89). The same can be said for recent years. The World-System in the Era of Cognitive Capitalism In conclusion, I use world-systems analysis as heuristic device to situate structurally disparate but temporally linked moments of class struggles, Egypt’s Arab Spring revolt and Occupy Wall Street. I find that Hardt and Negri’s arguments are complicated by a fuller appreciation of the dynamics of historical capitalism and more detailed investigation of contemporary politics. The actually existing “multitudes” are more fragmented, uneven and politically ambiguous than presented, reminding us that revolutionary solidarity is always a political project to be realized through collective action in concrete historical situations. The enduring unevenness of global relations poses the question of the passive revolution, wherein the hegemonic center controls social change without consolidating a revolutionary breakthrough. These are the problems that undermined the development of Egypt’s Arab Spring revolt, the Occupy Movement in the United States and related instances of class struggle. The world-system has undoubtedly changed during the era of cognitive capitalism, but the changes have been both more complex and subtle than what the cognitive capitalism hypothesis presents. The cognitariat, as a laboring class, may exhibit new forms of cooperation that offer glimpses of a post-capitalist future, but the way toward that future is far from clear. The cognitive capitalism hypothesis 384 SCIENCE & SOCIETY poses an idealized case — as Moulier Boutang writes, “advanc[ing] a hypothesis . . . even to the point of exaggeration” — around which the whole system of capitalist exploitation is said to be reconstructed. This has been a fruitful, if fraught, exercise. The cognitive capitalism hypothesis clearly apprehends some novel elements of contemporary capitalism: blurring of waged and non-waged time; spatial expansion of exploitation beyond the workplace to the full web of relations that constitutes an individual’s life and circumstances; extension of the temporal scope of exploitation beyond the workday to envelop the entire life span. However, in focusing on the informational sector of capitalism, it loses sight of an equally important change in global capitalism. As Caffentzis (1999) reminds us: The computerization and robotization of factories and ofices in Western Europe, North America and Japan has been accompanied by “enclosures” that act as “the counteracting causes” to the tendency of the falling rate of proit throughout the capitalist system. Branches of industry that employ very little labor but a lot of machinery must be able to have the right to call on the pool of value that high-labor, low-tech branches create. (33–34, original emphasis.) From a global perspective, the enlarging masses of the extremely exploited, and gaps between what Dyer-Witheford (2001) calls material, immaterial and immiserated labor, may be a more legitimate focus of analytical and political attention. There is much work to be done. Department of International Studies DePaul University Lincoln Park Campus 990 W. 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