Form, Fetish, and Film: Revisiting Open Marxism

The CSE has a long association with that body of Marxist theory loosely called 'autonomism'. Pioneered in Italy from the 1960s onwards, the ideas of Tronti, Negri and others have been developed by authors including Cleaver and Holloway, and debated in Capital & Class, in Edinburgh CSE's journal Common Sense, and in the three volumes of Open Marxism. The field is now broad and diverse, with authors such as Negri and Holloway taking significantly different approaches. Consequently, Callinicos notwithstanding (Callinicos, 2005), the term 'autonomism', with its specifically Italian associations, has become misleading. It is a vital tributary, but not the main current. Instead--with apologies to Bonefeld, Gunn, Holloway and Psychopedis--I propose to hijack the term 'Open Marxism' as an appropriate tag for the field as a whole. Finally, although I will refer to the film industry in developing my argument, this is purely illustrative. This paper is not a detailed analysis of the film industry as such. Form, fetish and labour For the current in Open Marxist thought that is associated with John Holloway, form and fetishism are fundamental. 'Form' here means 'mode of existence' (Bonefeld, Gunn and Psychopedis, 1992(a): xiii). Thus 'Money, commodity, capital are modes of existence of social relations, the forms in which social relations currently exist' (Holloway, 2005:51). Forms are therefore neither irrevocably established fact, nor illusions. They really exist, but only as contemporary manifestations of the sensuous reality of human sociability, antagonism and cooperation. As such, they are fragile. Hence the importance of fetishism. Marx stresses the weirdness of the commodity form, calling it a 'mystery', an 'enigma', and fetishistic by analogy with religious cults. Although created by humans, fetishes 'appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relations both with one another and with the human race' (Marx, 1954: 77). Mere forms--gods, devils, commodities, money--become social actors and achieve a domination over life which masks their fundamental fragility. Hence Debord's conceit, in his fevered meditation on the fetishistic power of the spectacle, the commodified image: 'The spectacle sings ... of commodities and their passions' (Debord, 2005: 33). The practical implication of this perspective is to refuse to seek to capture capitalist forms-especially the state-form--and to seek instead a revolution in everyday life, exploiting and challenging the fragility and transience of those forms. Thus Holloway talks of 'fetishism as process', constantly emergent and constantly vulnerable: 'The value-form, money-form, capital-form, state-form and so on ... are constantly at issue, constantly questioned as forms of social relations, constantly being established and re-established (or not) through struggle' (Holloway, 2005: 89). Negri, meanwhile, sees capital's fragility primarily as a feature of the current era: 'Today the constitution of communism is mature' (Negri, 1992:103). This dramatic claim emerges from Negri's reading of Marx's 'Fragment on machines' in Notebooks 6 and 7 of the Grundrisse. Here, Marx argues that capital subordinates workers, reducing individual skill and craft to abstract labour, by accumulating a vast mass of fixed capital--an 'automatic system of machinery' (Marx, 1973: 692). He argues that this will, over time, absorb the 'general productive forces of the social brain' (Marx, 1973: 694), finally reaching a point of acute contradiction in which labour time ceases to serve as a measure of value (Marx, 1973: 705). Negri claims that we have reached this high point, historically, of contradiction, so that categories appropriate to earlier phases of capitalist production are redundant, including the theory of value (Negri, 1992: 92) and the distinction between productive and unproductive labour (Negri, 1992: 78). …