Unions and vision.

[short thoughts]
Labor organizations must necessarily orient their overall trajectories and structures in relation to the economy in which they find themselves. How could it be otherwise in institutions meant to govern wage relations in the favor of workers? There have been fairly radical changes in the economy relative to the period of greatest American organized labor growth, the 30s-50s. As such, it is necessary to reconsider the structures and goals of organized labor, the ideals that animate its long-term projects and thereby inspire short-term projects.

What has changed? Communism is no longer a viable political ideology among American leftists. The Cold War is over, meaning there is no ideological imperative for international economic leaders to seek any level of just treatment for workers. Much of manufacturing has moved to low-wage regions of the global south. The US economy is dominated by low and high wage service sectors. Organized class consciousness barely exists. Economics and business training have been taken over by laissez-faire ideologies and politics has followed in suit. Environmental problems have taken center stage among American progressives and throughout much of society.

The nature of labor in America is currently very mixed. We have a very large immigrant population doing mostly low-wage service and construction work. Anyone involved in production now has the constant threat of outsourcing. The only perceived "safe" jobs, besides the highest levels of the professions, are directly applied skilled labor. Nursing, skilled construction, etc.

How can labor respond in this climate? The first step must be accepting something we rarely seem to consider, that any approach organized labor takes must be all-encompassing. That manufacturing employment has declined in America and that it is more tenuous does not mean that manufacturing should not be considered in terms of the trajectories and goals of organized labor. American labor must consider the aggregate of labor, the economy of the world as a whole, if it is to begin to mount successful campaigns against the directives of global industry.

That being said, the next step may be to recreate a vision for labor, a direction to guide its efforts, applicable to the economy as a whole and adequate to both the current organization of labor and the values and desires animating members of the working class, both in the US and abroad.

It is clear that these values are not systemic, the "working class" of the world is highly fragmented by culture, interest, and economic position. So any semi-coherent vision would have to allow that level of fundamental diversity.
[phenomenology of labor; immediacy of translating desire into work, autogestion, cooperative commonwealth]

Autonomous labor.

[incredibly loose notes towards a post-structural theory of labor, i.e. accounting for production by the structural dynamics between an embodied collection of participants]
We have two very broad schemas for thinking about labor and business, that equate to roughly the "capitalist" ideological position and the "communist" ideological position. The "capitalist" schema is dominant in business, American pop culture, and economics. This is the standard story of how goods and services are delivered in a market. An investor or pool of investors finance a business, hire management, and employees work for whatever wages the relevant labor market will bear. Management deals with labor through paying wages and salaries and benefits, and making decisions about the operation of the company day-to-day.

The "communist" counter-narrative is more intriguing. All real value in a good or service is created by the work itself (or the work plus nature, or work plus nature plus machines, etc). Capitalists (investors and/or financiers and/or upper management)steal the surplus value created by workers, and that is source of profit. This will lead said capitalists to exploit labor as much as they can to extract greater profits. A class struggle necessarily exists between the capitalists that steal surplus value and the workers from whom it is stolen. There are variations on this theme of course, and we could lump a great deal of left populism in this camp. Corporations exploit workers and the community through sweatshops and externalizing the residue of commerce, etc. The key theme here is the tension between owners who exploit labor and workers whose labor is exploited. This narrative is dominant in some form in many leftist organizations, in sections of academic theory, in much of the Third World, etc.

These are gross simplifications of both "positions". I think though that they serve the purpose of very briefly summarizing two tendencies we receive about how to think about economic life. These tendencies are very important. They structure what sort of actions we try to take in the economic world, and both enable and constrain our experience of economic agency. If we adopt the "capitalist" position we also adopt certain choices of action- trying to become a manager or leader in business, starting our own small business, considering the desires of employees as secondary and purely reactive, attacking unions, investing. If we adopt the "communist" position, we adopt other courses of appropriate action- working in unions for wage and benefits increases, fighting for labor laws and workplace regulations, joining adversarial and critical political groups, fighting bosses in one form or another, or participating in the "capitalist" position in occupational life while feeling moody and cynical about it (or, participating but promoting moderation of the "capitalist" position).

These approaches both have major problems. "Capitalism" as a position allows and rewards tremendous exploitation and inequality. "Communism" as a position tends to be self-limiting and destructive because its notion of agency is primarily reactive, secondary, oppositional. Unions tend to fight for conditions, wages, and salaries, but they don't tend to join their efforts to those for worker ownership or worker self-management, in any form. This isn't simply a question of "racialism." Unions in theory could promote self management or employee ownership through a variety of means, from full takeovers to buyouts to supporting small business or cooperative formation among members. With notable exceptions, this sort of effort just isn't embedded in the general schema of labor as exploited, struggling against owners for rights and privileges.

Libraries have been filled with books detailing and debating the strengths and weaknesses of these positions in all their forms and iterations. I'm not going to join that process of critique. I would like to offer instead a different "schema" for looking at workplace relationships, that is a little more thorough than either system yet allows for both to occur. What I'm proposing is a genuine change in perspective of analysis, which would allow for different sorts of "constructive analysis" in the form of facilitating the development of new economic projects.

I will label this position, provisionally, a "populist" perspective.

Taking a cue from the Italian autonomist theorists, we can begin by adopting some of the "communist" perspective, that the conditions of production are created by the efforts of the working class completely, and that investment and management are in a deep sense "secondary." But what can we mean by this, such that it doesn't just present an antagonistic model?

Consider an actual workplace, that generates a good or service. Consider what actual happens. A diverse array of people, occupying different positions regarding their values, desires, and abilities, unify around a particular process in order to develop and release a product. We tend to think of the design and organization of that process as primary, and this is essentially what I want us to reconsider. We can look at the process that way, focusing on the form of the thing, the abstract organization of a work process. Or we can look at the structure, the content, the "building blocks" of the process primarily, namely the particular people involved and how they relate and interact with one another and their "tools" of production. This doesn't mean that "management" of the process doesn't exist, far from it. But it means that this management is primarily a function of facilitating a coordination of desire around a particular product or set of products and services, binding together am array of people and things towards one semi-stable relationship.

Instead of only considering the direct aspect of a workplace, the part that gets planned out by bosses, we can consider the entire field of experience created by all the interactions of the participants. In this case, each "participant" can be considered as a field of desiring-experience, with multiple points of contact with the fields of desiring-experience of other "participants". The official "work-process" is the point of contact that is most stable, creating a single point of contact, a single event between all these "fields". There are multiple other points however, involving any number of the "fields." The privileged point though, the point that maintains across time and restricts the participants of the set, is the event of the work process. This is a sort of hegemonic event. The work event isn't the only point of contact, it is simply the dominant one, and "acts" at times to repress the other points and prevent them from becoming stable events in their own right.

In this characterization, the real tension to look for is the relative dominance of that stable event of the work process. If this event is configured to repress other events among participants so as to protect its dominance and integrity (for instance, preventing unionization at a sweatshop), then the incidence of contact between participants decreases outside the "work" point. A decrease in contact incidence, though, has the effect of reducing overall change in the set, stifling "innovation" or "experimentation" in the work process itself.

The optimal arrangement of power in this scenario is one that maintains the integrity of the work event while allowing easy connection and disconnection of points among fields.

{namely, an organization based on a cooperative model that doesn't create a strong barrier between independent connections and the event of the work process, so that those independent connections can feed into the work process fluidly and easily. both worker cooperation and consumer cooperation, see for instance discussion surrounding prosumers}

Notes towards an alternative economics.

We have a host of theories on the left designed to offer positive prescriptions for reform and action. I am concerned here with economic life. Among those of an anarchist bent, the most comprehensive contemporary proposal is undoubtedly Michael Albert's parecon (participatory economics). This system is grounded in extrapolating economic life from some left values, equity, solidarity, diversity, and self-management. The most salient characteristics of this plan include the following: mixed job complexes; coordination of production through workers' and consumer councils; remuneration according to effort and sacrifice; and participatory planning.

This is an intelligent system developed by brilliant thinkers, whose tireless devotion to human emancipation in unquestionable. Their system incorporates elements of the best in left and anarchist history and theory, and as a whole parecon offers something very rare, a comprehensive vision for economic transformation of the world.

The strength of this proposal makes it difficult to critique, but that same strength makes it a suitable starting ground for offering a different schema for a new economic organization.

I am completely sympathetic to all of Albert's proposals and the values girding them. My criticism lies not with any particular aspect of his program. I find fault in that it is precisely this, a program, a system developed from abstract ethical principles that he proposes we apply throughout the economy. It is utopian in a sense Albert readily embraces, rightly proposing that utopian projects can guide real positive change in the world as long as we are mindful of any disempowering or absolutist tendencies within them. I agree, I agree to the worth of his project, but I also think this obscures a fundamental weakness.

A "utopian" project that attempts to build the skeleton of a new society in the shell of the old has tremendous merit and potentially has great power and possibility. But there are two ways we may construct utopian projects. We can build them from ideals, ethical precepts, and then hope to mold the world to those precepts. This entire strategy is problematic, both because of the dangers of utopian dogmatism and formalism for individuals and collectivities, but also imply because it doesn't connect to what actually exists in the world primarily and so becomes that much more unrealistic and unachievable.

Marx damned utopian projects, anarchist, cooperative, liberal, and he was both wrong and right to do so. He wwas wrong to deny the importance of real collective agency and the necessity of autonomist collective action that tries to create something outside the bounds of capitalism and the state rather than simply seizing the mechanisms of capital and state. But he was right to point out their detachment from the world that is in favor of abstraction that has no real connection to existing struggle, and the economic possibilities in which we find ourselves.

I will not spend another word critiquing Albert, because again I agree with his principles. Instead I want to offer some observations towards an alternative economic world that I'm drawing from existing operations in the world.

As an anarchist (or one who tries to live up to the word when he can, however unsuccessfully and confusedly), I draw my initial concerns not from formal ethical principles, but from what people seem to be doing that seems outside of or opposed to capitalism. I don't want to tell anti-/non-capitalists how they should organize their projects. I want to see what the projects they undertake seem to have in common at the economic level. What actually distinguishes them from qualities we find in capitalist enterprises, and what does this mean for a "third way" in economic theory, neither capitalist nor Marxist?

The chief problem I think we encounter as 'anti-capitalist' people is actually deciding what it is about capitalism that we don't like. This is a real problem, especially in rhetoric, becausse what we think of as "bad" in capitalism are not necessarily what people tend to consider when they think of business in general. They think of hard work and creating quality goods consumers want, they think of labor-saving technology that reduces their drudgery, they think of exchanging goods and services for other goods and services using another medium (money) as an expedient. I really don't think we're fundamentally opposed to this. There are deep criticisms possible of the division of labor as we have it, and I will address these later. But generally speaking, I like not having to make everything I need myself. I think most of us do. The level of commodification capitalism promotes takes this much too far, and I also hope to address this in a moment. But when we say capitalism, there are basic qualities of the system that aren't really that odious. Here are some of the broad faults we seem to agree on regarding the modern economic world:
*exploitation of labor, in a host of ways
*destruction of local economies in favor of corporate economies
*incredible environmental devastation
*political and existential inequality that results from economic inequality and tends to create class division in society
*a tendency towards drudgery and regimentation of work
*mass production of lifeless crap over more diverse and diffuse production of high quality goods and services
*social and cultural homogenization tied to mass production and mass consumption
*a tendency towards promoting individualism as a cultural trait, and the repercussions of that (destruction of family and community, competition and suspicion over cooperation and trust, a dog eat dog world, every man for himself, etc)

I think that pretty much sums it up.

Now, my real question is if we can look at projects that don't embody these values and derive a general approach to economic understanding from those, that would allow us to construct real policy and real economic institutions that promote these better values?

I think we can, because I've noticed some odd similarities between various non-capitalist projects, and I think we can bring them together in a mutually reinforcing manner.

Let me begin by listing the "projects" I am considering:
*peasant economics, specifically that described by the Russian agronomist Chayanov
*labor-owned cooperatives (meaning worker coops)
*DIY, localized production
*small business that in some countries is labeled "artisanal" meaning owned and managed by a skilled worker who shares in the basic work of the firm
*skilled trades unions
*certain types of green business
*microenterprises of the informal economy

I think if we can find a common thread between these types of economic organization, we will have found a key to the grand mystery of transforming capitalism.

I also think I have begun to see this common thread, in studying a core similarity between labor-owned firms and the peasant economics of Chayanov...

The key lies in the way an organization will deal with chaos, specifically in the case of economic institutions, the chaos of the market, meaning unpredictable fluctuations in demand and supply. [this can't be right, it's too simple, but might be, somehow, it might be just this easy, just this undogmatic, just this intuitive]

Executive power.

Today I did the final lab in my solar cell installation class, wherein we actually practiced installing solar cells. Easier in some respects than you'd expect, harder in others. Then we went and looked at the city hall array, which produces 16,400 kWhrs a year. More of a showpiece than anything, but a swank little showpiece. One of the teachers mentioned how he likes the city hall for its design and feels very "austin" to him. Nice solar array, again more of a showpiece than anything, but a very effective showpiece- it covers the front steps where the city hosts free concerts every week, and myriad other events (everything in Austin happens outside, if you've never been here, even the freaking electronic shows). So whenever people coming to these events feel like taking a load off and sitting under the shade on the elegant (local) limestone steps, they take a gander up and notice they're under a giant solar cell array. There are no phallic elements that halls of power are known to embrace. Feels like a giant bungalow with a big porch area, and the front has lots of benches. There's a waterfall in the whole thing, and it flows out to little pools that descend in spirals and circulate the water back, and the benches are arranged around said pools; or around trees. The bottom floor has an open air coffee shop (locally owned, standard prices, the barrista who comped me a free cup of java this afternoon said the owner's a pretty chill guy). There's free parking underground, open to the public, no pay if you're out by 5pm, and lots of bike racks. The whole thing looks out over the river. The main conference table is made fromt he Treaty Oak, the tree the constitution of Texas was signed under? Something like that, any actual Texan seems to know these things. It died a few years back and they had to cut it down before it crushed whatever was next to it, but they used the pieces for memorials and plaques all over the city. I really love the city hall, if anyone ever visits I'll take you by it. Nice place to chill and see the bigwigs do their bigwigging.

Anyway, one of my teachers was talking off to the side about the national energy political situation, and he mentioned how amazing it was to him how corrupt and pathetic politics has gotten, how short-sighted. He's from a NASA family, and he referenced the Kennedy pronouncement of sending a man to the moon, from a sort of insider's perspective. He said that at the time, aerospace engineers were just looking at airplanes and seeing what they could get from them, and planning for squeezing an extra percentage of power every year to eventually get a plane 10% more efficient. And then Kennedy announced "we're sending a man to the moon and back within the decade" and they walked into work the next day, tore down their project sheets, and said "well, time to start over." The executive redefined the problem entirely, and they had been stuck in the same well-established set of problems, so they were thinking in these ossified lines and squeezing ever greater precision from them. But their entire way of constructing the problem was inadequate to the demand Kennedy made, well below the bar. So his executive pronouncement cleared their thinking so to speak, forced them to let go of the routinized problem and procedure, and to reinvent something else they hadn't even been considering. The teacher was comparing that to the incredible lethargy of politics and leadership today, when we know of looming ecological catastrophe and we also have the beginnings of ways to address it, but a total lack of leadership to change the scope of the problems, to get people genuinely working on these dramatic problems.

This struck me, as though it was the real reason I needed to be there today, to just hear that story. I think any democratic system, anarchism or whatever, has to think about this. This is the power of an executive, the function they can actually serve (at any level) that we have to consider if we are to replace their role with something different, something better.

If a democratic situation tends often and easily to lead to a sort of stalemate of action, through a balancing of interests and intentions across the spectrum of a community, how can we break through that ossification, that bureaucracy, to let something new come up? By what mechanism do we allow for a new problem to be generated and displace a weak or stalemated set of arrangements and desires?

This is really the problem of freedom, or reconciling the freedom of a citizen or a community member or participant with the freedom of power to create novelty, to adjust a social, economic and cultural situation? For this is the real meaning of the word "power"- it means power to create or deny change.

It's such a fascinating question - and I prefer to think of it as fascinating because otherwise it would just be tragic, because this core problem of agency and the meaning of freedom, when badly constructed and badly answered, has produced the greatest horrors imaginable. Nazism, armed and statist Communism, Neoliberalism (and its antecedents) and its bloody sweatshops, militarism.

I don't know what the answer to it is per se, what sort of prescription to offer for the democratic construction of novelty, the genuinely democratic exercise of power. I think anarchists have taken this question furthest, not so much in theoretical prescription but in attempted practice, through work in consensus and autonomist politics. The anarchists, the Quakers, assorted and sundry bands of populist across all time and tempers. They have attempted to answer the question of reconciling liberty and social justice, of the freedom of the individual and the freedom of power, through experimentation in in the concrete. In philosophy Deleuze and Guattari address the question, and we might following them rephrase it as "how can we construct macromolecular events?"

By this point I have some idea as to how this works theoretically, conceptually. But I'm not so sure how it works practically, concretely. It would make an interesting book- half theory, half practice. What, in a deep and powerful sense, what is freedom?

Towards a genuine libertarian movement.

We have reached a strange phase in American life, one characterized by overwhelming political apathy and general civic and economic disempowerment. The mainstream parties have failed. The minor parties and political groups remain marginal. The greens and socialists act as simple extremes of the Democrats. The libertarians and conservatives are extremes of the Republicans. Both major parties have reached a quiet consensus on the political and economic makeup of the world, and their fights over certain matters (how soon to leave Iraq, how to deal with health care costs) mask a deep congruity (visible clearly in the business press).

There must be a new configuration in American politics capable of presenting a semi-coherent alternative to the two parties that we know and their extreme versions. This must come through a new political movement, that finds common ground among a sizable portion of Americans across cemented ideological camps.

So the question is, on what can we agree, what can be the terms of this new coalition?

I will list a few themes that might make a solid core of a real "third way."

For the right:
*Opposition to big government.
*General, permanent reduction of federal income taxes.
*Reorganization of Social Security to encourage mixture of shared income guarantees and personal savings and investment accounts.
*Voucher programs for non-profit (including religious) schools.
*Reduction of foreign military and economic involvement.

For the left:
*Opposition to corporate power in government.
*Eliminating $100k income cap on Social Security taxation to stabilize program.
*Some form of guaranteed, cheap universal health insurance.
*Major reduction of funding of offensive capability of the military, and a far less interventionist military policy.
*Major investment in renewable energy research, paid for by redirecting subsidies away from fossil fuels and nuclear.

Nonpartisan planks:
*Major reorganization of farm subsidies, towards local, small-scale production and distribution.
*Rebuilding local manufacturing centers through preferential loans, etc.
*Reducing trade dependence upon authoritarian nations by enforcing basic levels of political and economic rights for trading partners.
*Promotion of localization of banking and investing.
*Promotion of employee ownership of firms.
*Addressing housing affordability through community land trusts and inclusionary zoning.
*Replacing environmental regulation with public trusts, with officers elected by the general populace.
*Stronger preferential tax mechanisms for small business against corporate business.
*Exploring stronger state requirements for corporate legal and financial privileges, such as employee ownership clauses.
*Gradual shifting of federal forestland towards locally owned and managed sustainable forestry programming.
*Major expansion of Americorps program, with each year of participation equaling a year of university room, board and tuition; or an equivalent fund for small business or nonprofit grants; or an equivalent fund towards purchase of a first home [in a CLT].
*Reorganization of military service towards reduction of active duty soldiers and expansion of National Guard. Major expansion of state rights in releasing and calling back guardsmen.
*Total elimination of political lobbying funded or undertaken by any group besides democratic, membership-based organizations of citizens. (flesh out) Major political corruption reform through constitutional amendment- IRV, elimination of concentrated lobbying, contribution limitations locked at one day's minimum wage per month, etc.
*Removing cabinet offices from the executive office and placing them under the direct control of Congress, besides State and Defense. [ahem. cough.]
*Creation of mechanism for national initiative and referendum.
*Citizens' panels [adapt from proposal in Democracy In Small Groups]
*Education reform (broad)
.......................................

Libertarian socialism.

“Libertarian” originally meant a general opposition to authority of all types. In the United States, the Libertarian Party has conditioned the reception of the idea as being exclusively aanti-statist. Classical libertarians opposed not only the power of centralized government, but of the centralized businesses and corporations that strove to dominat people and societies through the dollar (and often enough, the gun).

A phrase that often provokes confusion is the political moniker “libertarian socialist.” This is essentially a gussied up euphemism for “anarchist,” though one that illustrates the positive content of the concept. Libertarian socialist means one who promotes the decentralized, social ownership of the means of production of a society. So not only do they oppose centralized government power; they also oppose with equal ferocity corporate power, and promote as an ultimate ideal some means of direct, social ownership of economic factors.

What does this mean? The easiest and clearest example would be cooperatives. a libertarian socialist might promote employee and consumer cooperatives as an alternative to normal business organization. A worker-owned and managed firm gives full, democratic power to those that work in a firm, and entitles them to a fair and equal share of profits. In practice, worker cooperatives do wonderfully across many types of business. They generally exceed the productivity of a private firm or corporation in spades. This makes a certain degree of sense intuitively, doesn't it? Workers who share in profits have every incentive to work hard, and workers who participate in managing their firm feel that much more connected and empowered through their work. Study after study demonstrates the viability of cooperatives in terms of productivity relative to traditional business forms. Their chief impediments are access to finance and general education- people aren't taught that these are possible or viable, and they aren't taught the crucial skills of democratic and participatory management. But if we look at one form of employee ownership, the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), we see both the wide adoption of this model and an increasing incidence of ESOPs that involve high levels of employee participation in management and majority or 100% ownership of stock.

This example shows the potential of a libertarian socialist framework to address concrete experience in the modern world without selling out and compromising basic principles. Though most ESOPs and cooperatives don't mesh thoroughly with a libertarian socialist value system, they are often a positive step in that direction and prove by their own success the inherent potential of these principles.*

Another model for empowerment that fits this basic value system, the one with greatest historical presence, is anarcho-syndicalism. This is a movement of radical unionism, based around achieving worker control of the economy. Examples of syndicalism include the famous CNT, the anarchosyndicalist union of Spain that spearheaded the spanish Revolution of 1936, fighting off Franco's troops in egalitarian union militias from the factories and villages until displacement and repression by the Stalinist union. The tradition includes the French syndicalists, who strove to recreate an economy of small, democratic workshops of skilled artisans against the onslaught of deskilling and deadening factory work. It includes the IWW, the mostly American union that brought together militants from every job sector to fight for worker control of industry by any means necessary, popularized by folk singer and radical alike.

Americans bridle when they think of unions, perhaps frightened by the presumption of conflict that organized labor brings. They often rightfully cringe at the corruption of many major unions (though are usually more accepting of the institututionalized corruption of big business). Despite this, the vast majority of Americans are still working class, and they still derive most of their income from wages or salaries. Syndicalism sees unionism not as a thing in and of itself, an effort to simply raise wages or elect amenable political candidates. Syndicalism sees unions as the best tool possible for worker control of industry, once again embodying the values and ethos of libertarian socialism.

If we focus on the principles rather than the proper nouns of this movement, we can see evidence of its legitimacy as a tactic in major sectors of the economy. Labor unions in America in the past few years have begun to use their often large pension plans to influence business decisions and put pressure on major financiers. This has taken many forms: funding major workplace buyouts; launching union-funded cooperative start-ups; promoting investment in unionized firms through leveraging weight in major investment funds and bank holdings. In other countries, unions have contributed heavily to the worker-owned sector. Here in Austin, members of the IWW have successfully pressured several businesses to operate as worker-managed collectives.

Syndicalism is scarier than simple cooprativization, because syndicalism denies the right of capital to control the workplace or the profits produced by work. To many Americans this might appear strange and unjustified; investors and their managers invest in the machines and/or facilities necessary for work to happen, and why should they let workers get anything out of the affair besides their agreed upon wages? As I said, relative to actual production itself, there are good arguments that this type of arrangement actually maximizes productivity, or at least enhances it dramatically. There is the basic argument of workplace democracy, that work should be democratic in the same way that government should be democratic, as a basic right of human existence necessary for basic human dignity. I agree with these arguments whole-heartedly. but they do little to address a belief in private property rights of capitalists, banks, or landlords.

To answer the argument in favor of the rights of property is to reveal the fundamental disconnect between libertarian socialism and the libertarianism we generally encounter in the US. The libertarian socialist tends to accept the charge that all true value is created by labor or the natural world, and that owners of substantial capital got it by stealing the earned wealth of workers or the given wealth of nature, through systemic collusion with government forces. This is a similar to a labor theory of value, in which all value added to a good comes to it through the work done on it alongside its natural value. The great producer of wealth, the great producer of productivity increases that have made modern civilization possible, is intellectual and physical labor. Capital simply amasses labor value from previous ventures or through some instance of petty theft or profiteering, and then repeats the cycle in new business ventures. Think of the foundation of the centralized wealth in America, where did it really come from? Didn't the government give land to railroad companies at well below market rate? Didn't the major industrialists get their start as corrupt profiteers during the Civil War? This is a larger argument, a deeper argument that I can't address fully here, one that demands a different idea of property than the rights of accummulated wealth.

Finally, we can consider another current of libertarian socialism, that of communalism. This has taken many forms, qualititative distinct yet all sharing a basic characteristic. They all focus on community control of assets, and management of that control through democratic community organs. We can include in this any number of religious or utopian communes throughout American history, and even contemporary ecovillages organized socially. We can also include the well-developed school of thought called libertarian municipalism, promoted by the Institute for Social Ecology and its founder Murray Bookchin. This school focuses on a sort of town assembly model, in which a local governing body, directly democratic, owns and manages local property, both physical space and manufacturing or production facilities. The dangers of state control of industry are prevented by using local control instead of national or state ownership. This is a very communitarian philosophy, and maximizes the strengths and weaknesses of any communitarian vision. Again, we can see the possibilities of this line of thinking when we look at numerous successful experiments in community ownership across the country. These range from something as everyday as municipal utilities (for instance our own Austin Energy) or moderate as local ownership of a city sports teams (the Green Bay Packers); to more radical ecovillages and cooperative living projects.

These examples all express common themes. Decentralization, a focus on the local and immediate level of organization, the everyday world of experience- at work, in a union local, in the community and home. A major focus on the control of land and capital. (We might consider it the greatest triumph of mainstream politics it has convinced so many of us to seek power through government and the state instead of through direct ownership and control of capital, rooted in the communities of labor and valuation that create it.) A strong concern with the social ownership of the factors of the economy, either by purchase, creation ad hoc or seizure. A rejection, even disregard of conventional politics and economics. A focus on creating viable projects in the now, instead of planning and theorizing about the future. Political economic projects more experimental and constructive than antagonistic, even if some strategies are adversarial.These features characterize the libertarian socialist tendency, and hence a major theme within anarchist thought and practice as a whole.

Politics

Politics is always ultimately a question of who is allowed to speak to and as power, and who is excluded. Which singular voice or idea, which propositions are allowed to drown out the others, why, and from whom? We can see this in a lecture hall as easily as a federal election, at a concert or in a board meeting. Most of the actually existing rules of power are unwritten, codes of behavior, style and speech that are known implicitly or explicitly by insiders but are unknown to outsiders. Who can speak and how much will their opinion matter, how direct will be its influence on power, these are the core questions of politics. The political process is always analytic in a sense, it always cuts into a population. People are included and excluded to define a hierarchy of legitimate participation. Are you a citizen? Are you an immigrant? Are you rich? Are you an educated professional? Are you white, black, Latino, Asian? What music do you listen to? What language and idiom do you speak? The navigation of power is conditioned by a host of these questions. And the most important question of all, how close is your proposition to the major existing configurations of power? How are your acts and words aligned in regards to the acts and words of the already powerful, be they institutions or individuals?

We cannot hope for a world in which this subterranean calculus is absent. It "Power" is simply the ability to form semi-coherent organizations and events that sustain themselves and/or increase over time. Last night I went to a wonderful show at Enchanted Forest, known to many Austinites for their performances that mix the aesthetics of raves and jam band shows with more ambitious performance art. I had a great time, even though they had problems with the sound system. During one of these problems, someone whipped out a set of bongos and started playing, trying to get a drum circle going. The MC vied with him a bit, and it was entertaining. Eventually the MC drowned him out be blasting a hip-hop song. I'm using this as an example of power dynamics because it's fairly innocent. The drummer tried to participate in the event directly, through starting a drum circle. Functionally, this was an attempt to share int he power of this particular event, to bring the audience into the show. The MC put a stop to it, albeit humorously. He was able to because he had an instrument of power unavailable to the drummer- a set of giant speakers. There was a momentary contest of power within the event, and the MC won through superior technology.

Now, frankly, as an audience member, if the whole event had been derailed into a drum circle, I would have been pissed. I wanted to see skilled performers, not be in a drum circle. So I'm glad the MC won. My point is simply that power is exercised all the time, in every event, every organization, any cluster of people.

The point of political thought though should be to bring these power mechanisms to light as they happen, to point out the process of exclusion and inclusion that is occurring, to evaluate them. This is the constructive element of political thought, to question whether or not the particular processes of inclusion and exclusion are appropriate, "fair," etc. For a political movement, there must be some sort of focus, some sort of tendency to promote, but we should be aware that this process is occurring. We can then always be mindful of the possibility of doing otherwise, of modifying our politics, or of adapting them to the times without losing the core of values we want to promote. So we must note and critique inclusions and exclusions. We must evaluate this process as it occurs. And we must always be able to focus our attention beyond the particular political arrangement of the moment and towards the actual values that are guiding us.

Purpose.

[Philosophy exists to defend and disclose the shining of the world, and to help that shine speak to Power]

Philosophy, or something we can call philosophy, is radically distinct from analysis, and that's its ultimate justification. In a critical vein, it reminds us of the limitations of analysis, and the imposition within our analysis of presumptions that separate us from things in themselves. This isn't something that can be truly "corrected" out of importance, it's part of the nature of thought and experience. Thought is directed, intentional, and intentionality, attention moves towards those qualities in beings that it recognizes. Analytic thought attends to given qualities, dissects and organizes them, develops patterns for them, comprehends them as organized systems. Yet because it is drawn to those qualities of being it already recognizes, it does not tend to a full observation.

In truth, "full observation" of a being cannot be an instrumental act, it must begin with an assumption of a thing's indeterminacy and accept the permanence of its own chaos. Chaos in this sense simply means perpetually indeterminate. As critique, philosophy points out the limitations of will and thought for analyzing beings, for getting at the Being[s] of beings I suppose. [I mean that Being is just that quality of a thing, still particular to it, that evades the attention of our will and thought. So Beings for beings, not Being for beings, maybe...] As a constructive project, philosophy opens space for aspects of the world to continually present themselves to and assert themselves into discourse. It does this through the formation of concepts that enable communication between radically distinct beings and states of Being, allowing the presentation of Being through events. The ambiguity of event, the mutual determination of their character by entangled beings, discloses the Being in which these beings participate. [Truth of a thing is revealed in its action and what it produces in concert with other things, other beings, other people, etc...]

The Technical Embrace

I was at a talk tonight by Norman Solomon, on media and the war. I'm not quite sure what I expected but I know it didn't occur. He spoke mostly about the role between technology, education and the normalization of war, of the way that our society is carved as a grand hoax. That the people employed to put society at risk are for some reason trusted to its salvation. And that our fascination with and portrayal of technology in war and technology in general, royal science as some would call it, covers over and obscures the reality of American society, that we are to a large extent a nation of war. Half our taxes go to it, it's the real welfare and jobs training program for most of America, and big science is built and organized around it.

Some of his words reminded me of the absolute horror and frustration I feel about the whole miserable business. For instance, he talked about the Cold War a bit, and living under the shadow of nuclear annihilation. And I am amazed at how easily a reality so obvious that few demand or desire its memory is forgotten, and the administration plays with nuclear toys and bridles that we resist their development and use. For fifty years the whole of humanity lives under the fear of death come screaming out of the sky like demons from the nightmares of insane mystics, and these wretches play with them, for money, for sick pleasure, who knows.

I think American identity has a variety of themes in it, the chief two being the trace of democracy and the trace of Empire. They oppose each other. There's a third trace though, the trace of technophilia, the love of applied reason. I have a deep suspicion that this is where the real ambiguity lies, that the fate of the battle between democracy and Empire rests in the allegiance of this faction, the faction oriented primarily to the world or metal and earth outside the social dynamics of man. Where shall they place their loyalty, to the Empire that offers them capital or the demos that offers them something else? The ambiguity lies in the fact that technophilia or the embrace of the nonhuman world can take two general forms. We can approach it with reverence as a way to learn the truth of the world to better respect and work alongside it. Or we can crave technology as a pure expression of power over the world. One involves understanding, the other simply contrivance and use, isolated interest.

I think the democratic forces of society can only win when this skilled faction works through respect and reverence, when it forsakes the appeal of simple power. We don't often know this, but I think it is necessary.

[or another way of putting things- will the war machine or the smiths turn towards the State or against it?]

Reform or Revolution, rough

The question that often seems to determine where leftists orient themselves in the world of politics is that of reform or revolution. The question more specifically is this: is it possible to make incremental improvements to society without changing its basic mechanisms, and still achieve the vision of a free and classless world? Or is it necessary to cast aside the entire edifice of society, private property, law as we know it, commerce as we know it, and create something entirely new?

The basic problem with reform is that certain properties change for the system of society as a whole, but the basic institutional framework does not change. The anarchist would say that so long as a the structures of power maintain their form, oppression will repeat itself no matter what. Bakunin famously predicted that under state communism, the people would still be beaten down as ferociously as under the czar or worse- only it would be by the "people's" stick.

Closer to home, many have pointed out that we're fighting a rearguard battle when we try and regulate the corruption of big business, and reveal its collusion with government for the benefit of the few over the many. This is only a distraction, because as long as the corporate form exists as it does today, all these reforms will be outweighed by the overwhelming financial and political power of the owning classes. We must abandon the corporate form altogether, or radically transform it.

Many anarchists are far stronger in their criticism than this. They point to rather embarassing history of civilization itself, and note the absence of any real viable democracy in which class society in some form exists, or even when any centralization of economic and cultural power whatsover exists. We can start with Enron and keep swinging back the clock to the early nation states back to Rome and Babylon, and the same basic patterns repeat. As long as there is concentration of wealth and power, and s long as society is organized to support this concentration, we will see corruption, we will find abuse and exploitation rampant. This isn't a mere technical problem or a momentary lapse of integrity. The problems stem from a basic logic of domination and control at the heart of our society, an ascendence of will over and against empathy. So long as this remains, our every liberation will b turned against us and every new freedom will carry with it the same cages, even if the bars be shaped differently.

So this leads us to espouse a revolution, a total rejection of what is and creation of something new. Yet revolutions are strange affairs, and surprisingly few of them ever seem to have "worked" in any sense of the term. I think the problem of revolutions might be equally fundamental as the problems of reforms. When you cast off the mechanisms that govern a society, you have no real way of guaranteeing which mechanisms will replace them, and generally they seem to fall back to the most immediate, unreflective level of power. Instead of revolution, we lose the developed socia structures of class and caste and fall instead into simple association bound by ethnicity or tribe, identification based on the body, and the ordering principle of direct violence.

I was reading about the Guild Socialists earlier this week. They were a remarkable political group in England that flourished briefly in the first half of the century. They wanted society devolved to be run by congresses of guildsmen and consumers, locally based and democratic. Yet even this intelligent and broadly thinking group recommended a militia governed by the the society's political organ as a whole. I was shocked- after pages and pages of discussion of coordination between decentralized craftsmen and consumer associations, they still decided to call for a martial force controlled by a centralized political power.

Political violence stands as a sort of black hole, denying constructive analysis. We condemn and critique the violence of nations often enough, but I think we still preserve a lingering idea of some sort of truth to be found in political force. Ths makes sense really. If we are to destroy the received institutions and mechanisms for the distribution of social power, how are we to establish the legitimacy of whatever is to replace them? Since the dawn of history, violence has established and maintained almost every political system that exists. How are we to break with this and still transform society?

I am no idealistic pacifist. I don't abandon the idea of force entirely, a priori. I don't necessarily condemn groups that use it. Yet we must realize that to deploy it means to suspend all other mechanisms for governing a society, all those reasons we demand change in the first place. ...

Economic models

Let us take two ideal regimes of production and consider them in terms of their conditions of possibility and their effects upon the matrix of the world that sustains them. Let us further try and characterize them initially in terms of their production of surpluses.

One regime of production is based in driving down the cost of labor by either seeking cheaper labor sources or replacing labor with mechanization. The surpluses in this regime occur through increasing the productivity of labor without paying higher costs for that labor. Its tools are fairly simple and straightforward:
*exploitation of labor in a variety of ways, the classic style we have come to know and expect from American industry. speedups, unpaid overtime, outsourcing to lower-wage areas, etc.
*regulation and regularization of labor, controlling working behavior more tightly to insure maximum labor and/or attention from a labor force
*the organization of production towards fixed, controlled commodities, and monopolization of the lifespan of those commodities. This is based, once again, in a regimentation of the labor process and its use of machines above all else.

Because this regime is based upon the regularization and exploitation of labor itself as it relates to the products and services it produces, it is equally hostile to independent production or modification by consumers as it is to independent action by its formal workforce. This is a key concept to explore and describe effectively- that the regime of corporate production is as hostile to a genuinely active consumer as it is to a genuinely active worker. The active consumer is not one who simply offers the seller enthusiasm about a product. The active consumer engages with a product by addressing it as a worker/user, a prosumer if you will, a bricoleur.

If the corporation forms the model for one ideal, the bricoleur forms a model for the other. The limit of the second regime of production is essentially the DIY model of individual or collective self-production without the intervention of commercial exchange. It generates surpluses through "self-exploitation" in Chayanov's sense, meaning the participating individuals create surpluses through their own unpaid labor. This means that the surpluses are essentially formal, useful accounting devices. The "workers" involved agree to pool some of their product for general reinvestment. Ultimately, this is the only value of surpluses. They create a pool of funding free for experimentation. This excess allows a firm to thrive and live.

mimicry of nature, notes

One of the foundational principles of permaculture is to design artificial, human systems using patterns and relationships observed in nature. Ideally, we should try and create a living system as close to a natural ecology as possible.
This raises certain analytic problems, in part because of the very direct, intuitive observation we use to experience some of those natural patterns. What does it mean to be artificial, what does it mean to be natural, and how do we justify any form of intervention whatsoever?

[for intro: the chief question is this, what understanding of nature is necessary such that human intervention can be "natural," with the practical application of discerning the nature of environmental interventions.]

Notes for Deleuze and Permaculture

intro: setting up the problem- human identity and human agency, what is the proper relationship between the human and the natural
chapter 1: the mimicry of natural systems; bergsonian intuition, deleuze and becoming-other

The matter of thought, brief note.

We might orient philosophy as a whole along this fairly simple question: from whence come the contents that provoke thought? Do they come from the outside (empiricism) or from within (idealism) or both, and if both in what manner are they joined?

Think of Kant for instance, and his development of the transcendental deduction. He developed a sort of idealism as the precondition for empirical knowledge. For true thought to be possible, certain conditions are necessary, namely time and space.

Analytics have chosen to develop this question by analyzing the tool of thought. Rather than supposing an outside or an inside as prior source, they ignore the origin of contents and focus entirely on the mechanics of producing thought. A bridge is presumed, and that bridge becomes the object of technical fascination.

A position such as Bergson's or Deleuze's is dependent upon a sort of empiricism, an outside event that creates the conditions of possibility for thought, that molds the milieu and structure in which thought is to occur. It is sort of an inversion of Kant- rather than structures of thought conditioning the possibility of true knowledge in the world, structures of the world condition the possibility of thought and provide its virtual milieu.

This approach is not irreconcilable with analytic approaches- in fact it is quite amenable to many of them. In the end it is a weightier empiricism, an empiricism in which the structures of the world condition the mechanisms of thought itself. Though this diverges sharply from some analytic schools (say, cognitivism tied to Chomsky or Fodor) it can be argued cogently enough from neurobiology or connectionist approaches, or the metaphorical systems of Lakoff (especially through this scheme). Assuming neurons form pathways that become at least semi-stable through habit; and assuming again that these pathways fall into steady patterns because the same contents of the world are being addressed, then we have the core of a sufficient argument for the radical empiricism of Deleuze or Bergson. This is a simple enough proposition to make and defend. It's so simple that it seems specious, but it is the same argument I've seen developed by practicing neurobiologists (whose word I am more inclined to consider than a philosopher commenting upon their work, if only because of my syndicalism).

The question then is, once we've developed some very basic grounding with respect to the actual formation of the nervous system, how much should philosophy actually dwell on it? Maybe it's of some use to the neurobiologists, I don't know. So far this technical fascination among nonpractitioners seems to just lead to arrogant attempts at mimicry, siphoned mostly into war industries.

Once we have a solid physiological footing for a thorough empiricism, the question then becomes, what does this imply? What does this imply for thought and the general structure of thought? What does it imply for identity, for organization, for our basic manner of relating self to world? What does this radical empiricism based on the interpenetration of thought and world imply for ethics, politics, metaphysics and aesthetics? What does it imply for agency (the real qustion of politics)? What does it imply for existence, for or orientation towards Being, towards stasis and change? And by implication, I mean what does this ground and insight allow us to do, what capacities and what events does it render possible?

This is the weakness of analytic philosophy so concerned with developing itself as a technical apparatus. It doesn't speak to these questions, it has no real language for them, and generally little respect for them. Because of this, it often remains mired in technical fetishism that is not philosophically justifiable. It presumes the necessity of a simple realism to operate- yet this simple realism limits its operations to technical enhancement and intensification. Because it refuses to ground itself in an actual philosophical tension or question, and simply pastes over that ambiguity without coming to some resolution, it cannot build upon that very tension, the very question of the contents of thought, in order to address those implications that actually concern a society, or individuals in it. It can respond only with a technologism as often as not divorced from actual work on neurology. Without considering the question of how thought is created, we can't build upon a model of this to address humanistic questions. The best we can do is respond with more facts about the mind as precision tool. We can't connect that tool to the overall system in which it operates, and so we can't actually build anything with it.

Four elements.

Four elements to a store capable of beating out Wal-marts.
*Thrift store.
*Consignment goods from local repairmen and small craftspeople.
*Desktop manufacturing/On-demand batch manufacturing.
*Community-supported manufacturing service, with store as retail anchor.

These can be introduced sequentially- meaning, you can begin with a thrift store, introduce shelf space for consignment goods, introduce a workshop space with a desktop manufacturing unit for single on-demand production, and finish out facilitating batch manufacturing (both for customers and among consignment vendors).

All four stages ultimately exist at the same time, each fulfilling a different niche.

The scale must always stay relatively small. Think in terms of Starbucks, not Wal-mart. One on every corner as the market rises.

The thrift store component is meant to displace low quality consumer goods. Can be argued as a "green" focus, recycling and repair of goods. Ultimately, as small vendors are introduced into the thing, you start to win out on new goods as well- direct consumer/producer communication combined with very low batch manufacturing allow for constantly guaranteed sales.

Rough draft for a post elsewhere

Anarchism and the World of Things.

I've written a few posts describing the meaning of anarchism, some of its assumptions and implications, and pointed to a few instances when it lurched into the pages of written history.

In my next post, I'm going to describe some organizations in the current world that embody anarchistic principles and have some self-conscious affinity to anarchism.

But first I want to explain some of the appeal this mode of thinking and being has for me, why I am drawn to it. I think I need to mix this discussion in with more objective exegesis out of sheer honesty.

I am drawn to anarchism because it presupposes and cultivates a relationship to the world that is often palpably different from the dull habituation we are pushed towards in life.

I'll explain with an example. I've worked in several bookstores. I've worked at Monkeywrench, and I've also been employed at a corporate retail bookstore that will remain nameless. The corporate retail job paid $7.50/hr, which is exactly $7.50/hr more than I make working at Monkeywrench. Clearly, I am willing to work at Monkeywrench for nothing yet was ultimately worn down by working at a corporate bookstore for (relatively) much more. Why?

It wasn't the managers, I'll say that much. My bosses in the corporate stores were great. Never any problems, always friendly. I did my job adequately, they were clear, helpful, responsive and flexible. I have a leftist's automatic contempt for bosses, but mine have always been perfectly acceptable.

It wasn't the work itself, the toil of it. Working retail in a bookstore is undoubtedly one of the more pleasant examples of wage slavery one can live through. The work is light, the people are generally friendly and unrushed, the staff are intelligent and a bit eccentric, and often enough you can read at the register while business is slow (the more you know your product, after all, the better a salesperson you can be). I have no complaints about the job.

So what's the difference? To be perfectly honest, it was the way the job made me start feeling about books.

I've been a bookworm since I could first crawl to a shelf, and to me the well-written word is damn close to holy. I don't want to simply read books, I want to venerate them. And that ultimately made working a corporate bookstore job wretched for me. The stores were always clean and tidy, with that fake plastic wood everywhere, that office building carpet, that soft consumer-oriented music playing overhead. The books became tedious, piles of bound paper covered in irrelevant colors to stack in their appropriate places. They started to become meaningless to me. No longer were they packets of treasure, the voice of the Divine rendered in small digestible doses. Instead they were piles of commodities, as dead to me as a toaster oven or bottle of coke.

And so I got a different job, because I'd rather starve in the street than let books turn into ash on my lips.

When I sell books at Monkeywrench, they don't feel like commodities. I don't see the store as a retail establishment so much as a bank of tools. And therein lies the difference, the perspective that for me opens up through anarchism. The things in the world aren't dead, they aren't cut off from me or my friends and neighbors by lines of property or the habits of consumption, by the regulation of production and consumption. They are constellations of meaning and potential use, open to anyone, restricted only by the imperative to create. Their meaning isn't determined by a professional department four states away, it is open-ended.

I can walk into our store and think, today I might give someone a tool for constructing something new in the world. It might be something directly instructional, so they can learn how to grow their own food or make biodiesel or fix a bike. It might more social, teaching them to start a co-op or a union, or an independent business. It might be a tool for self-transformation via art or poetry or literature. It might be a tool for understanding the chaos of the social world, the many moments of desolation and redemption that characterize our society. But it will be a tool, not a trinket, not a commodity. It will be used to build, to change, to fight. As such these things I sell aren't alien, dead things to me, I care about them, their potential and possibilities, I care about what ideas and actions they will provoke in their readers. I see my own actions and ideas as they might relate to the texts and their future use, and feel connected to them and their readers through a web of potential use, of possible creation and co-creation.

I think most people have a sensation like this sometimes, a connection to a practice or a thing that opens up the world for them a little bit, that makes them feel free, human. If we're lucky that can become a calling, and we can make a career out of it.

For me, anarchism is less an ideology than a set of broad principles to live by and to use in forming relationships, associations, and organizations; principles that serve as the conditions of possibility for seeing the world in this free and open light, in seeing things in terms of their possible connections instead of their limitations. So I will always be drawn to it, because for me anarchism is simply the way to think and act that allows for a joyful life.

What is profit?

The logic of a reformist position must be the possibility of building capital given existing economic structures, i.e. of deriving "profit" without exploitation, and progressively taking over the economic world through this activity.

Now we see in Marx a very coherent systemic analysis for describing the nature of profit. It is based in surplus value, and this value is equivalent to unpaid labor, i.e. labor that is being essentially exploited, undervalued. I find it impossible to deny that this is a constant economic reality, and that major sector of capitalism are dependent upon this to reap high profits. We see in industry after industry a dependence upon clearly undervalued labor, meaning labor undertaken by a marginalized class or caste without political power to press for the prevailing wage of a work. This isn't what Marx means of course, but I think in some way there is a connection. Marx suggests that we might see a capitalism constantly thrown into crisis assuming rising rates of pay of workers. Political agitation by undervalued classes leads to an increase in the cost of labor, encouraging investment in labor-saving technology. Because surplus value is created by human labor, not machine costs, this drive ultimately cripples capital. However, one "out" is utilizing a reserve army of the unemployed, essentially marginalized groups. We see this constantly throughout the 20th century and before, and we see it today in the press for low-wage manufacturing.

I think we could see in a variety of industries and their history evidence to support this type of theory, that surplus value is ultimately stolen labor.

So the question, then, is if there is any other way to make profit, and hence to create genuine growth.

I'm not sure at all how to resolve this yet. On the one hand, Marx's argument is almost tautological. But it happens to very much resemble real social history.

A few points to consider.

It might be the case that Chayanov is correct, correct across all types of economies. That the principles he identifies as "peasant economics" are present universally- and that contemporary order simply regiments and concentrates them. In this case, we might see the extraction of surplus-value as equivalent to the self-exploitation characteristic of peasant economics. The only difference is that it is accomplished for the aggregate, taken away as "profit" or interest or rent. As surplus-value.

So we see then no contradiction in a program of social ownership of the means of production in a decentralized way. It is functionally peasant economics. The surplus is still made, i.e. self-exploitation occurs. It is simply deliberate, "conscious," undertaken with the intention of deciding collectively the use of the surplus. In this sense, there is no foundational disadvantage to a socially viable firm, because all we're doing is changing the point of control of exploitation. It's simply a political shift, but a deeply significant one. The scale is irrelevant in one sense- the mechanism is the same for a single proprietor, a factory, an investment pool, a nation, a global pool. The question is simply where is the point of exploitation and who decides the use of the surplus thus created.

This allows a very autonomist reading of the situation- the idea of Chayanov's self-exploitation imbedded in any moment of labor.

Two concerns.

What is the difference between technique and technology, meaning how do we read changes/improvements to the application of labor? Is this distinct? Is management technique labor or capital, and does it create surplus value?

Alongside this question, is it possible to create a permanent revolution in technique that allows continuous creation of surplus? Say, through consumer/capital goods, bricolage goods, prosumer organization? Goods that take on dual roles as capital tools (that then shift human labor and activity simply through use, without pay)? What does this create, a constant self-exploitation that allows the constant creation of value?

Is any unpaid activity, say in leisure time, exploitation? Say I volunteer my labor in my freetime, under conditions suitable to me, without pay and for enjoyment. This is a sort of exploitation, but for whose benefit? It isn't controlled by the market, by an employer. So what is it? Maybe this is a sort of foundation, collective self-exploitation as a source of value.

And maybe the "trick" is to create mechanisms for thise to transfer smoothly and cleanly into cooperative structures, shared structures. For a community of practice to become an economic agent without alienation. Forming coops out of clubs, essentially...

Conservative and liberal sexuality

Shared among conservative and liberal moralists is an assumption that sexuality is a natural ground for personal identity. This stems from a notion of human identity bound to universal experiences and possibilities, a sort of ontological egalitarianism. What does everyone care about? Food, water, shelter, sex, etc. Human identity based on a universal hierarchy of needs, defined and refined by biological arguments.

Even the conservative school of thought regarding sexuality is in fact thoroughly modern, thoroughly contemporary, in that it makes sexual identity and expression out to be a valid base for political activity.

The right blames the left for this, the left blames capitalism. Chicken and egg. Maybe class politics opens the whole thing up by expressing political identity in terms of class, in terms of what one does with one's body. Maybe such a thing is inevitable, given that all knowledge is definitely embodied, and so any politics that isn't simply lying to itself must include a deeply embodied aspect. And embodied knowledge very easily becomes construed as "natural" because it is to a very large degree immediate yet nondiscursive at least as we experience it day to day. Hell, maybe Descartes is ultimately to blame, or empiricists, or both.

The fact remains that a politics based entirely on the body is dangerous, for the simple reason that bodies are polydifferentiated, and tend towards clustering based on exclusion.That they tend towards a presumption of "natural" categories or "natural" points of interest, and so fall prey to an easy inertia, an easy ignorance of and apathy towards what could be, the possibility of change or innovation or transformation in the world. They individualize, and because the chief locus of political experience is a single and individual body, the power of action of any actor is reduced tremendously.

So rather than pick sides, it might be more significant to point out that a shared focus on individual bodily experience as the ground of human identity is itself dangerous and limiting.

A fundamentally different way of considering things might be to look towards a sort of joint identity- bodies and the collective expressions in which they engage. For instance, a business or workplace, a church, a union, a club, a local subculture based around a practice, etc.

Very brief comment on Christian fundamentalism

The logic of conservative religious attitudes towards pleasure might be given their most generous expression by summarizing them as follows: pleasure without commitment rewards/accommodates selfishness and individualism. pleasure with commitment allows you to form deep ties of creation with others, because it breaks down the division between self and other, by encouraging consideration of the other's well-being. If my experiences lead me to tie my pleasure to your pleasure, then we can create broader and more intensive projects. Commitment means that the range of those projects are extended in time, in intensity as well as extensity. You can trust me to be with you in the long-haul, so we can both conceive of our projects for living together, drawing upon our mutual reserves.
This logic is not limited to conservatism, we can build it with equal (actually greater) consistency from Spinozism. A body formed of two bodies* in perpetual contact has more power and more power of action than a single body.
If you want to be really funky about it, you can talk about the significance of mixing genders, as in having two different systems of sensual pleasure interacting. Hence the fundamentalist preference for heterosexual couples could be expressed as a directive to increase the qualitative difference in systems of pleasure within a couple. This is too generous though, since it misreads the actual nature of homosexual expression (though it might be the same reason it is poorly constructed in psychoanalysis).
Either way, there is a qualitative increase in powers of action.
Of course, this argument could be used to justify a polyamorous community as well. These don't seem to occur very often with much longevity though. The level of attentiveness possible between three people is more difficult than among two. The biology comes in here as well- takes two to produce offspring, and the production of young is a consistent enough "project" to form a sort of attractor.
So there's a good argument for commitment, based on its capacity to wedge open ontological narcissism (to be sloppy with words); and also on a Spinozist logic of expanding powers of action.

*and using Merleau-Ponty or Bergson, "body" means the broad level of kinesthetic and emotive/intellectual experience tied to and conditioning the flesh, body-image for instance

Marxism, short note

Marxism isn't incorrect when it defines the overdetermining logic of capitalism to tend towards declining rates of profit. We can see this, and we can see it in the behavior of major capitalist investors, constantly seeking new investment in morally despicable settings (most obviously in the current day, sweatshops in China).
But this alone, this exploitation of undervalued labor, couldn't account for qualitative increases in living standards, or real innovations in technology that do more or do otherwise than replace paid labor. And such innovations do occur, especially when they are tailored towards expansion of use by the customer. (In other words, when the product is at once a consumer good and a capital good).
The question then is how to account for these sources of innovation in a sphere autonomous to conventional capitalist logic of increasing the rate of exploitation through political intervention.
This is the failing of the Marxist framework of analysis, and the chief advantage of the anarchist. For while the anarchist frame has not succeeded in articulating a coherent, thorough analysis of this autonomous logic, it does at least maintain it as a perpetual question and intuitive point of reference and exploration. This is what we can offer, potentially.
It is at the same time that aspect of the existing economic organization of the world that we can develop towards a concrete transformation of the world, without slogans, without ideology and rhetoric.

aside1: the moralism of Marxist action and theory might have proved a bit too much of a weakness, or rather the failure to deploy moral arguments at the right levels. if the chief failing of the system is in fact a falling rate of profit due to reduced exploitation of labor, it makes little sense to morally damn every investor for seeking higher returns on investment in the absence of any better logic. do you want a 3% return or a 7% return? well, 7%, unless there's a good reason otherwise. without pointing out the good reasons...
it might also explain the greater willingness of larger investors to accept more liberal organization, bound to lower rates of abuse- they have so much invested that the long-term stability and growth that go along with these lower rates of abuse afford them far greater wealth that short bursts of high returns.

aside2: so how does one note returns based on genuine innovation or improvement against simple exploitation? might there always be a steady possibility of a 2% return, something small but constant? how do you tell the difference? maybe wolff knows by now, and maybe it's worth asking him. is there a different way to get returns on innovation, and is there a real way to differentiate in terms of investment besides simple SRI rules? can you tell if returns are based on some actual contribution to society, whatever that might mean, rather than simple exploitation?

[examples: the car. the bicycle. prosumer goods in general. goods that enhance the powers of action of their consumers]

Empire or Bricolage?

Our economy works by investing more money in the areas of highest growth, meaning the areas of economic development that have the highest returns on investments, make the most profit.
This means that the creation of high levels of profit will always be rewarded with increased investment.
The main way our economy generates profit, i.e. surplus revenue over costs, is by undervaluing labor and calling the savings profit.
We don't call it this, in fact it doesn't make sense in normal economics to even think in this way. Labor has the value at the pay people are willing to take for it.
This is the problem with economics. It blinds itself to the obviously political processes that create artificially low values for labor, values that are used to create large surpluses.
For example, the industrial revolution began through hooking unemployed workers desperate for a living to factory work in England. They took wages that were not high for their time or region, in fact they accepted relatively low pay and relatively wretched working conditions.
Now, why might a man do such a thing? The actual answer, known to any student of English history, is that a combination of political factors forced farmers from land, and the same farmers who became and whose children became underpaid workers in the new industrial mills. The main political interventions were the seizure of church lands in England and the eviction of peasants tied to those lands; the privatization of Scottish farmland that had historically been held by an entire family clan, and was only made possible through undemocratic changes in property ownership; and the seizure of common lands held for centuries by villages, shared by all members of village both as supplements for each and a safety net for the poorest among them.
These political interventions created the English worker, who was willing to work well below prevailing wage rates because he had no choice. Indeed, he was willing to work even in a factory, a singularly unnatural creation at the time, likened by many to organs of hell.

Skip ahead a bit to the current world economy. Pick up a business magazine, any business magazine. What are American businessmen talking about these days, what are they so enthusiastic about? Investment in Chinese manufacturing.
There is much talk of our transition to a service economy, but the truth of the matter is, we have simply expanded the bounds of our economy to include regions with artificially low wages. What do I mean by artificially low? Chinese wages are as low as they are because of political intervention by a totalitarian state. Sweatshop workers are created by the seizure of rural lands by local party officials, or as hidden people without legal status because of the Chinese restriction on child-birth, or through the vast network of Chinese prison factories. These are simply the worst cases- Chinese labor law is incredibly arbitrary (as one might expect in a totalitarian state) and workers aren't actually allowed much of the time to exercise simple rights of labor. For instance, walking off a job, or leaving a job if they aren't paid. Or seeking legal remuneration for failure to pay promised wages.
Even in the less morally questionable aspects, cheap Chinese labor is brought as rural workers who come to cities, work for far lower wages than city dwellers would take (or could survive on), and then go home to villages.

This is the basic pattern of capitalism as we live it, forgetting the rhetoric and pedantry that is promoted by rightwing and leftwing ideologues. Pockets of labor are undervalued through political interventions, even beyond the point of basic reproduction relative to local cost of living. The most profitable industries are those dependent upon this dynamic, those who can best exploit a broken pool of labor and extract the largest surpluses (i.e., pay the least for the most work).

The historic left busies itself with the reduction of inequality, meaning bringing these pockets of undervalued labor into an rough equality regarding labor markets, which tends to come with some level of political equality. Remember, since this mechanism begins with political assault, the undervalued labor pool generally has far more nebulous political rights than regular "citizens" (for example, see immigrants and pre-Civil Rights black workers in the US, and the restrictions and abuse of rural Chinese versus urban in the current era).

However, investment merely moves to find another pool of undervalued labor, and the cycle repeats itself. There is no conscious controller here to be addressed with demands of equality- the most egregious short-term profits can always be made by exploiting a brutalized labor force, wherever it happens to be. Are they immigrants beaten by police agents in Michigan? Are they black workers in pre-Civil Rights Carolinas? Are they uprooted peasants living under a central American dictatorship? Are they Chinese workers without political representation of any real sort, forced off land and forbidden even food rations or the right to officially rent a room in a city? It doesn't matter when and where. This method will always succeed in the short term.

It fails in the long term through political agitation on the part of undervalued laborers, as they develop the means to demand higher wages or better treatment, and in the process reduce profits of the industry employing them.

And so then the gaze of investment begins to move elsewhere, as profits reduce and hence investment capital begins to diminish.

Now of course we must remember that the same pool of labor that has worked to enhance its position can easily fall back into devaluation, and this is precisely what is happening in America today. Workers accept longer hours for less pay, and less control over their economic well-being.

So this mechanism doesn't actually elevate living standards on the whole in the long-run, though it does transform them, shift their mode of expression, and create dynamics of tremendous inequality. The living standards of most people in China have fallen tremendously in recent years, even as the cost of buying amorphous widgets has reduced for Americans shopping in big-box retailers. This isn't a net increase- it's a shift, one population enslaved for the benefit of another.

This is the economic logic of Empire, and it is this logic that governs our world.

However, we have of course had progress, based not on simple exploitation but rather on technical diversification of labor and tools. The two are not the same thing, though they might appear so on a balance sheet. This is the hope for humanity, for civilization, it always has been and always will be.

The question, then, the world-historic question, is this:

Is there an economic mechanism that generates innovation distinct from the economic mechanism tied to simple exploitation and extraction of surpluses from undervalued labor as profit? Is there another way to build an economy? What does it look like?

The answer is yes I think, but it appears very different from what we have come to accept as reasonable. If we became a society of innovators, of broadly educated tinkerers, what would our society turn into?

I will offer notes towards answering this question in the course of this writing.

Existential equality and class stratification, loose thoughts

Discussing equality and inequaity in the political/economic world is difficult, becase we've inherited very confused sets of ideas about social life that are disconnected from direct, daily experience. The categories of caste, ethnic group, cass, etc., don't necessrily "make sense," it's hard to see how or why they influence the world. We know that they do, however we only really perceive this in moments of injustice. We don't consider so much in terms of general divisions in society, the fairly continuous ways in which social categories actually produce individual subjective life.

Part of the difficulty here lies in getting some idea of what a social category actually "is", how people are actually bound together beyond the immediately obvious individual bodies and desires we experience more clearly.

Spinoza offers the best ways to think through this I believe.

Let's begin with what we regularly perceive- individual bodies, persons. Any social theory cannot deny the reality of individual life, nor its significance. Instead, a social theory must consider the atomic constituents of relationship between bodies. What draws bodies into collective formations of any sort- a workplace, a band of friends, a tribe, a church, a party, a family. What individual force draws together individual bodies?

We generally recognize only one quantum force in mainstream American culture (the culture expressed in and through major institutions like centralized media, professional training and literature, law, commerce/workplaces, education/schools, etc.) That force is some form of self-interest, based in something like instrumental rationality. It is aso tied to a certain idea of what "power" is, because the calculation of self-interest is based on increasing power. Essentially, the idea of power at play is a power of self-determination or a control over the situations in which your life is immersed. This manifests as control of other people, control of the practices you engage in, control over yourself, etc.

In this vein of thinking, we can imagine social groups as rooted in self-interested similarity and collective antagonism over social power.

We can also develop another quantum mechanism, what the early modern philosophers referred to as "sympathies." This hasn't been developed as a philosophical concept and so it hasn't been integrated into political economy.

We can tell caste differentiation when we note existential separations between people occurring in regular patterns based on certain traits. We can see this, we note it all the time, day to day. However, we have to be focused on a certain open understanding if we are to note it accurately.

This sympathy, this open understanding, is the glue that binds together a community (of any scale). It does not depend upon similarity, nor does it necessarily create qualitative unity among a population. In thrives on difference, because it actually depends upon a difference that allows for empathy, for identification with a being or process or experience outside the immediate experience of the identifying being.

[key terms: zone of proximal development, from Vygotsky; biology of empathy, neurology tied to orientation of the self into another perspective]

Now, if we reduce structural boundaries between categories of people, establishing a "rough equality", we increase the full range of possibility for existential empathy a person might experience. We increase the possibilities for becoming-other.

This means that the breadth of understanding of the person potentially increases. There are more and more diverse populations with which they may become-other. The range of individual experiences increases.

This equates to an increase in "power" according to Spinoza's description, i.e. powers of action. For Spinoza one's power is not so much a fuction of control over one's milieu, but of understanding of one's milieu that allows increased combinations with other bodies. This increases powers of action, in terms of qualitatively different powers of action.

So a rough equality in terms of social power equates to a rough communicability of existential experience. This allows for an increase in the powers of action of an individual through increasing the field of content to apply the method of becoming-other.

A model for high school education

Four general planks, themes to focus a high school curriculum:

*Artisanal skill. This is conducive to learning that has real economic value in the world. A high school education should at the same time function as a minor apprenticeship in a skilled trade, allowing the graduate tremendous relative economic freedom and allowing more academic learning to be integrated into practical and artistic work. Formal learning is better received with direct application and experimentation.

*Design. This plank would give students a firm grounding in design principles. Again, there is a practical and a more subtle advantage here. Practically, education for design will allow students to pursue higher level professions or develop solid reputations in skilled fields. More subtly, it gives students a basic understanding of the construction of the world around them and how various elements of the world they encounter may be reconsidered and adapted to new needs. This again roots formal learning in lived experience.
Examples:
-principles of design
-sustainable design
-architecture
-industrial design
-philosophy of design and technology
-project management
-basic engineering
-aesthetics and arts
-etc.

*Small business education. Students will leave the program able to provide for their own livelihood, and basic skills in small business development and management will assure this. A focus on social enterpreneurship and cooperative workplaces will allow the students to put civic values into practice in their working lives.

*Liberal arts and sciences.

We could consider this style of education as embodying a sort of 21st century Jeffersonianism, adapting the ideal of decentralized economic democracy to contemporary labor markets.

Other major theme, not sure how to integrate it: civic learning- responsbility to community, world. environmentalism, basic civic organizing, etc.

Americanism and wilderness

...has captured the intellectual imaginary because it presents a question of national identity in a fairly unique manner. america lacks simple ethnic identity and hence must define itself through actions, events, and the unity found in shared events, without anything resembling a stable and vibrant ethnic core of ritual, culture, etc.

it must also position itself in relation to the world, politically but also in a deeper sense. american identity is tied up with a certain idea of wilderness, barbarous freedom in communion with elemental forces, etc. it has fueled rich poetry and the deepest altruism, and animated the most satanic simulations of the divine and sublime in military labs and civil engineering monstrosities and nuclear holocausts-in-waiting. always this theme, always this refrain, the american between city and wilderness. cowboys and farmers and mountain men and luddites and earth firsters and hippies and urban gardeners and ecologists and rangers and ranchers and loggers and fishers and miners and explorers and all those who trace ethological conduits in the seam between organic and artifice.

the american traces an ontological relationship between determination and a field of indeterminacy, city and country, artifice and nature. the democratic american cultivates and accomodates fields of indeterminacy within and without, forgoes control in favor of dialog and event, reveres difference for its splendor. the imperial american harnesses a field of indeterminacy and bleeds it dry, creates a homogenous and pliable abstraction, representation of the thing-itself and forces the thing-itself towards that representation by guile and force. democratic america builds wilderness within, making gardens and parks and free city streets. imperial america glazes over the desert with a highway and covers sunsets with strip malls to hide the Glory of them with low-grade steel, reams of plastic and stucco, as though the pride of the sky is cowed by these tin-star lucifers and their parlor tricks of dissimulation and distraction.

the american can cultivate a wild space and show the connection between fields of indeterminacy, fields of generative chaos and vibrant living democracy. they can. or they can buy plastic molded into various shapes and attributes. respect and love or egotism and neurotic pleasure, the choice must be made. trees or oil refineries.

Agamben on movements

http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Movement.html

Very fucking interesting.

My first thought is that it's so helpful to read honest-to-God nazis sometimes, because they're so frank about their utter satanism that they reveal easy marks to look for.

So I find it fucking interesting that Schmitt completely separates the passivity of the people from the agency of the movement. I'd start just commenting on the obvious here, the structural repetition of matter (inert)/mind (active yet disembodied) dualism here, but just mentioning it is already too easy and cheap.

What I find interesting coming at it as an admitted member of the Great Underground Deleuzo-conspiracy is the total divergence of this idea from Deleuze's ontology. Against the inert populace (be it of humans or animals or fields of grass or molecules or matter itself or the chaosmos from which we draw concepts and functions and affects) Deleuze asserts "the plane" of immanence. The daring duo offer a clear enough description of this in What Is Philosophy? when describing chaos. It's generative, it's dynamic, it's constant creation and destruction. It is by no means inert. And they build their entire notion of production of subjects as arising from those immanent flows, repetitions of difference, etc.

Really, anyone working through Deleuze, this is the most important concept you will ever get from him, the plane, otherwise known as the BwO composed of machines, etc. This brings out its importance.

I wonder then of maintaining these three terms the people, the movement and the state. In America we can identify the state along with corporations, but the point is roughly the same. We think and act in these terms.

So if we are to break with the modern project of depoliticizing the people and constructing them as a population, subjects only of regimentation and micromanagement of desire and action, then we must reconsider what a movement actually is. We must begin with a sort of autonomist position I suppose, one in which the movement springs from the internal dynamics of the people and is not a specialized compartment of the desire thereof.

I've been moving more and more towards this position myself and I must admit, it's flustering. There is a hefty dose of elitism pure and simple in my thinking, and I am too tempted into rejecting the "spontaneous desire of the masses" (to be a dick about it) as a positive sign of, well, anything. As Agamben says, we've already been regimented, we've already been rendered into a system of biological categorization and explication. We are already made statistical objects of research and instrumental rationality, especially in the US. So within that where do you see revolutionary movement?

What I'm starting to think is that it has nothing to do with what people voice as their desire, and everything to do with it. It's not what people say, it's the aggregate of their massified action that counts.

I'm starting to see that regardless of my personal aesthetic predispositions, "the people" just don't do what they're supposed to do. They just rebel, without knowing it. If you just start to look at every weird social problem in America it all starts to make sense- people just fucking rebel, every second, in that they err in repeating and performing instruction from Power of any sort.

Folks express living by their clinamen...

This presents as much difficulty for the conventional revolutionary as for the most bloodthirsty of hegemons.

I don't know though, it's kind of amazing. There's no thought to it whatsoever it just happens, this omnipresent refusal.

So the question becomes, what is an intensity? An eternal return, engendered by Spinoza's joy perhaps?

And there, an (inverse?) ontological definition of "joy," that which is capable of provoking a return.

So perhaps a movement must be expressed not so much as leading or politicizing a people, as offering it increased diversity of powers of action.

A movement that is not a leader, but a toolsmith?