The Molecular Subject(s) of Revolution

Just a short post here today. I wanted to highlight a few really interesting sections of Richard Gilman-Opalsky’s excellent book ‘Specters of Revolt‘ and to expand on them with some further thoughts, particularly about the revolutionary subject(s), molecularity, and joyful rebellion. It’s been a bit of a revelation reading it, I have to say, though its exact ideological tenor I found a little ambiguous. On the one hand, there are frequent (cheap) pot-shots at anarchists; on the other, he criticises Hardt and Negri’s return to the ‘Marxian revolutionary subject.’ It isn’t clear to me that there really can be a Marxism without that, which is why Hardt and Negri’s attempt to theorise the Multitude is so daring insofar as it pushes, perhaps to the extreme, how Marxism can conceptualise contemporary movements and revolts. Certainly his interest remains in autonomy. But perhaps I’m playing the wrong game by worrying about this at all. Here’s some of the passages that stood out to me from his chapter on ‘Beyond Struggle.’

Guattari and Negri’s molecular point of view rejects any attempt to take distinct molecular revolutions as part of some unified revolutionary program. That is, their position reflects an honest acceptance of the smallness of certain revolts and a total rejection of the effort to make every movement appear as a self-conscious part of some ideological whole. For…