Brad Tabas 
Conference on Revolutionary Praxis 
Abstract 
Organic Revolution 

According to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris new work, Empire,
general revolution against the contemporary global system of Imperial
power is impossible.  Revolutions remain possible, but they must
always be local and pose no threat to the overarching structures of
power.  Though Empires very thesis denies the possibility revolution,
Hardt and Negris work nevertheless urges us, as it should, to seek to
discover paths towards revolution.  Within a circumscribed set of
logical boundariesthe global economy whose only factors are human--
Hardt and Negris thesis is flawless.  Yet if we consider production
from a new standpoint, redefining organic factors as laborers and
potential revolutionaries, we come to see that global revolution is in
some senses not only possible but indeed already latent.  Our
inability to revolt against the Imperial system results from the
totalizing and biopolitical nature of the power:  in essence, and in
severe oversimplification, we cannot resist power because power seems
to act towards the right, our very modes of thinking are always
already linked to the will of power.  Hardt and Negri thus accuse
deconstructionist logic for complicity in reifying the power
structure, though by basing their theory within the limits of language
and its logic they condemn themselves to the same fate.  As a result
Hardt and Negri are unable to discover a site of revolution, they can
only offer us only the somewhat disappointing call to cultivate the
will to be against, and the exhortation to push through Empire to come
to the other side.  Drawing on Deleuze and Guattaris concept of
schizoanalyis, Hardt and Negri propose to produce anew the human,
indeed, to discover or create the posthuman.  If the modes of
resistance discussed by Hardt and Negri offer us little in the way of
guidance towards a revolutionary praxis, it is because they have
failed to conceive of the system outside of its anthropomorphic
limits.  Paradoxically, the literary example they offer as a figure of
exemplary resistance, Coetzees Michael K, offers us a rather different
sort of picture and a substantially more optimistic vector of
resistance.  Coetzee describes Michael K.  as a human soul above and
beneath classification, and we might understand the antics of this
simple gardener as attempts to displace himself from the system(s) of
human power; to render himself simply alone with the earth.  Like
Kafkas Hunger Artist before him, K moves towards the margins of
humanity, a limit that arrives and coincides with the most basic of
human functions, eating and sleeping, shitting and fucking.  In this
limit there is there is the hope, even the revelation, that even
within a human society appears to be totally divorced from the r eal,
totally immersed in the spectacle, there must always be the limits of
the human body, and, more importantly, the limits of the organic
world, limits that always remind us of their presence, and indeed
refuse to be effaced, always returning, always, as Lacan would have
it, reaching their destination.  If we are to follow Marxs claim (via
Althusser) that the factors of production simultaneously produce the
conditions of production, then we must also understand that implied
within these producers are not only simple human machines, but also
complex organic machines.  Thus the air we breath and the feces we
emit are both part of the social machine, and moreover, are subject to
capitalist exploitation.  Are natural resources not then, in a manner
of speaking, labor?  Are the limits of the natural not also linked to
the limits of capital?  Moreover, might we not be able to understand
the very destruction of the earth as a sort of organic revolution, as
the land revolting against capitalism?  Following the development of
scizoanalysis in The Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari introduced the
concept of the rhizome at the beginning of A Thousand Plateaus.  The
rhizome is the organic model of resistance, a resistance that we can
neither control nor understand, a resistance that is always latent and
always outside of the capitalist system.  The melting of the polar ice
cap, the blackouts in California, and the AIDS epidemic in Africa:
all are examples of organic resistance, of the rhizome revolting
against capital.  Yet is there any way that we as humans can ally
ourselves with this revolution, short of willfully immersing ourselves
in the apocalypse?  This paper will attempt to move towards an
understanding of organic revolution, optimistically pushing towards
the realization of social change through the motor of organic social
production.  Coetzees Michael K will be examined as a model of
resistance, though the paper will ultimately warn against the
starvation imposed upon the hunger artist, it wil l urge towards a
future that, while resisting Hegelian notions of historical idealism,
would nevertheless posit sustainability and the cessation of the need
for revolution as its primary virtues.