We see a division in the American economy, a bifurcation based upon a service sector that has gained ascendence over agriculture (although we still eat) and industry (although we still use tools and materials). The service sector is split into high and low end. High end service sector is simply a mass of differentiated professionals, itself undergoing the divisions that accompany any process of proletarianization. The low end service sector in large part caters to itself, the remnants of industrial and agricultural labor, and especially high end service.
The current strength of the American economy is allegedly based on professional services.
The question we are left with is the precise nature of these "exports", this service sector.
To a significant degree it appears that the American high end service sector is essentially managerial knowledge in various mutations.
This means that America exports, simply enough, systems of power and logics of coordination and control, embodied in the form of particular professional classes and their codified and specialized individual wills.
A revolt against Americanism becomes at once a revolt against the hierarchy and efficiency of the modern economy.
What clases then are most open to radical action? Precisely those survivals based on the integration of management and action, i.e. skilled labor. In theory craft logic is most opposed to globalization of control because as a form of labor it most decisively locates the will of labor at the point of application, not divorced from the point of application.
Monday, February 19, 2007
Monday, February 12, 2007
concepts.
a concept is simply a bridge between dissimilar things. it moves in the edges of their use. i'm thinking of things in their materiality, but still as things in movement, becoming. concrete but not static. sort of like merleau-ponty and the body-image i think. i tend to think of it as the degrees of freedom open to a moving thing, traced out in lived space as attractor points. conditioned and predicated upon materiality that allows certain movements (i cannot decide to suck in water through my trunk or stretch my neck out like a giraffe because i'm not those things, although i can engage in a becoming-animal with them that allows the transfer of different qualities, an embodied "communication" that runs deeper than normal ideas of discourse), but that is still fairly varied.
the uses and habitual movements of things are the points of their "identity" most open to novelty, new construction, or most colored by ambiguity. they are the points of real connection to the world, through a sort of infinite/indefinite causation unbeholden to time (causation relevant in direct ways, in marginal ways, in simple alterations of the structure of the world and paths of possible relationships, etc- think of the movie Babel, to pick a recent one, in which the myriad meanings of a bullet transfer across worlds to stitch together a small and temporary collectivity of people in brutal accidents and confusions).
we are used to considering and using things (and people and ecosystems and industrial products and knowledge and and and...) instrumentally, or directly. we are accustomed to seeking the essence of a thing, a being, and using it appropriately to some purpose.
[we may think philosophy has little bearing upon life, yet still we act in the world under the unknown and tacit assumption that things have their appropriate essences and must be utilized according to those essences. that to engage with a thing we must grasp it firmly, fix or transfix its meaning, and turn that fixity into a sort of potential energy to capture and utilize. we adopt a stance towards the world and understanding, and use this stance to orient in the day to day of structural living.
--ASIDE: capturing essence, instrumental thought itself as the ground of this economic mechanism of capturing a virtual field, repressing it and siphoning off energy from the repression. vampirism over human populations, ecological populations, and the use of things in general.-- ]
yet in capturing the "essence" of a thing (or more honestly pretending to capture it) we lose the ambiguity embedded in its structure, in its symbioses with an ecology (natural or artifical or social). a thing moves through its edges, its points of indeterminate possibility. this is the mystical flourish and shimmer to the world that we are hellbent as a civilization upon denying and masking. but that's neither here nor there.
the concept takes those traces, those edges of things and bridges them. once again, this means that the concept sets up overlaps in the affective spaces of things, overlaps in their fields of movement.
a concept is a party host in the world of beings. it allows new liaisons by opening beings to their becoming, and the open ragged edges of meaning they occupy because of it.
now, a good concept, a good "party host," is one that "maximizes" the possible connections between beings in the relevant set. maximization is a poor metaphor for this but it will have to suffice for the moment. put more clearly, a good concept traces out more spaces in the movement of a thing and makes more of them amenable to influence and engagement with the movement-spaces of other things.
this is the basis of theoretical work i think, in any context. it's valuable because it opens up habituated pathways to new possibilities.
a good concept will, once again, allow richer and thicker connections by opening up more spaces of ambiguity and freedom in the becoming-identity of a thing.
[the task of a former of concepts must be to arrange them such that the concept-former does not force bridges or demand them, only open up reciprocal spaces in things- the things themselves must make the leap of communication.]
the uses and habitual movements of things are the points of their "identity" most open to novelty, new construction, or most colored by ambiguity. they are the points of real connection to the world, through a sort of infinite/indefinite causation unbeholden to time (causation relevant in direct ways, in marginal ways, in simple alterations of the structure of the world and paths of possible relationships, etc- think of the movie Babel, to pick a recent one, in which the myriad meanings of a bullet transfer across worlds to stitch together a small and temporary collectivity of people in brutal accidents and confusions).
we are used to considering and using things (and people and ecosystems and industrial products and knowledge and and and...) instrumentally, or directly. we are accustomed to seeking the essence of a thing, a being, and using it appropriately to some purpose.
[we may think philosophy has little bearing upon life, yet still we act in the world under the unknown and tacit assumption that things have their appropriate essences and must be utilized according to those essences. that to engage with a thing we must grasp it firmly, fix or transfix its meaning, and turn that fixity into a sort of potential energy to capture and utilize. we adopt a stance towards the world and understanding, and use this stance to orient in the day to day of structural living.
--ASIDE: capturing essence, instrumental thought itself as the ground of this economic mechanism of capturing a virtual field, repressing it and siphoning off energy from the repression. vampirism over human populations, ecological populations, and the use of things in general.-- ]
yet in capturing the "essence" of a thing (or more honestly pretending to capture it) we lose the ambiguity embedded in its structure, in its symbioses with an ecology (natural or artifical or social). a thing moves through its edges, its points of indeterminate possibility. this is the mystical flourish and shimmer to the world that we are hellbent as a civilization upon denying and masking. but that's neither here nor there.
the concept takes those traces, those edges of things and bridges them. once again, this means that the concept sets up overlaps in the affective spaces of things, overlaps in their fields of movement.
a concept is a party host in the world of beings. it allows new liaisons by opening beings to their becoming, and the open ragged edges of meaning they occupy because of it.
now, a good concept, a good "party host," is one that "maximizes" the possible connections between beings in the relevant set. maximization is a poor metaphor for this but it will have to suffice for the moment. put more clearly, a good concept traces out more spaces in the movement of a thing and makes more of them amenable to influence and engagement with the movement-spaces of other things.
this is the basis of theoretical work i think, in any context. it's valuable because it opens up habituated pathways to new possibilities.
a good concept will, once again, allow richer and thicker connections by opening up more spaces of ambiguity and freedom in the becoming-identity of a thing.
[the task of a former of concepts must be to arrange them such that the concept-former does not force bridges or demand them, only open up reciprocal spaces in things- the things themselves must make the leap of communication.]
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Notes on ethics
[while reading secondary discussion of Spinoza and Kierkegaard]
Kant shows the limits of reason and its inability to form valid statements regarding the world beyond direct experience, i.e. the impossibility of speculative theology. We are left then with a phenomenal world open to observation by experimental science and a noumenal world, inaccessible but present (and as Deleuze comments open to constant imperial rape by German philosophy and its bsession with foundation).
So speculative metaphysics is irrelevant (unless we take a peculiar view of the field like that of Lakoff). And scientific observation only gets to the phenomenal impression of things, not the things-in-themselves.
And another option opening, the possibility of phenomenology, reaching the noumenal through deconstruction of the phenomenal experience.
But there is another option, neither reason nor scientific empiricism nor the assertion of a neutered perpetual present. There is the possibility of knowing the noumenal through forming a collective body with the other. This is as much a style of engagement as anything else.
Perhaps this is the way to open up the question of the multitude in Spinoza to a larger philosophical politics, i.e. reaffirm its connection to the "third type of knowledge," the intuitive(if can call it that) knowledge that allows blessedness.
The third kind of knowledge itslef offers an aeonic variation of the utopian idea of revolutuion, neither displaced into the future nor harkening back into the past. It is a style of knowing and engaging with the world, perhaps similar to Heidegger's? It relates to the dialogue of Bohm and Krishnamurti, amazingly enough, or rather their dialogue is an instance of it. The presence of this turn of thinking/engaging is revolutionary immediately, and need only agglutenate to reveal itself in full form.
The problem is that it doesn't tranform into words very easily, or does so only in effective poetic language, song, etc., which though redemptive of man does not lend itself to the formation of institutions, however tenuous.
If Being hides itself from thought, then what do we call the experience of Being unadulterated yet bound to a blessed understanding? How does memory connect to this experience?
Should we say that the traces of thought as vital memory allow the "quiet"necessary for this third kind of knowledge? That dynamic stability is its precondition?
I can see an anarchist philosophy branching out from this, focused around these questions, that of open engagement with the world revealed by forming collective bodies rather than deconstructing imperial encounters of reason/scientistic empiricism. And that we form these bodies by application of the third kind of knowledge, and hence must develop the preconditions for achieving this understanding. And that these preconditions suggest a political economy.
So we have then an ethics that follows from a "metaphysics" so to speak, not of the beyond but of the conditions adequate to allowing direct encounter with the noumenal world in its fecundity.
So,
Niether gods Above
Nor masters Within or Beyond
But the World alongside.
And ethics/political economy follows as the "study" of the conditions adequate to allowing the world to be lived alongside, revealed in its action.
[note: the tie here to syndicalism, the world revealed by action, simply not individualized action but the action of movement and difference that is the whole- so that to know the noumenal is simply to move with it, complementing its speeds and rests.
Action is the key here, and hence syndicalism, because it by action that the "noumenal", the world beyond instrumental analysis, reveals itself to intuitive knowledge and allows itself to be understood. So syndicalism+reverence+difference.]
Kant shows the limits of reason and its inability to form valid statements regarding the world beyond direct experience, i.e. the impossibility of speculative theology. We are left then with a phenomenal world open to observation by experimental science and a noumenal world, inaccessible but present (and as Deleuze comments open to constant imperial rape by German philosophy and its bsession with foundation).
So speculative metaphysics is irrelevant (unless we take a peculiar view of the field like that of Lakoff). And scientific observation only gets to the phenomenal impression of things, not the things-in-themselves.
And another option opening, the possibility of phenomenology, reaching the noumenal through deconstruction of the phenomenal experience.
But there is another option, neither reason nor scientific empiricism nor the assertion of a neutered perpetual present. There is the possibility of knowing the noumenal through forming a collective body with the other. This is as much a style of engagement as anything else.
Perhaps this is the way to open up the question of the multitude in Spinoza to a larger philosophical politics, i.e. reaffirm its connection to the "third type of knowledge," the intuitive(if can call it that) knowledge that allows blessedness.
The third kind of knowledge itslef offers an aeonic variation of the utopian idea of revolutuion, neither displaced into the future nor harkening back into the past. It is a style of knowing and engaging with the world, perhaps similar to Heidegger's? It relates to the dialogue of Bohm and Krishnamurti, amazingly enough, or rather their dialogue is an instance of it. The presence of this turn of thinking/engaging is revolutionary immediately, and need only agglutenate to reveal itself in full form.
The problem is that it doesn't tranform into words very easily, or does so only in effective poetic language, song, etc., which though redemptive of man does not lend itself to the formation of institutions, however tenuous.
If Being hides itself from thought, then what do we call the experience of Being unadulterated yet bound to a blessed understanding? How does memory connect to this experience?
Should we say that the traces of thought as vital memory allow the "quiet"necessary for this third kind of knowledge? That dynamic stability is its precondition?
I can see an anarchist philosophy branching out from this, focused around these questions, that of open engagement with the world revealed by forming collective bodies rather than deconstructing imperial encounters of reason/scientistic empiricism. And that we form these bodies by application of the third kind of knowledge, and hence must develop the preconditions for achieving this understanding. And that these preconditions suggest a political economy.
So we have then an ethics that follows from a "metaphysics" so to speak, not of the beyond but of the conditions adequate to allowing direct encounter with the noumenal world in its fecundity.
So,
Niether gods Above
Nor masters Within or Beyond
But the World alongside.
And ethics/political economy follows as the "study" of the conditions adequate to allowing the world to be lived alongside, revealed in its action.
[note: the tie here to syndicalism, the world revealed by action, simply not individualized action but the action of movement and difference that is the whole- so that to know the noumenal is simply to move with it, complementing its speeds and rests.
Action is the key here, and hence syndicalism, because it by action that the "noumenal", the world beyond instrumental analysis, reveals itself to intuitive knowledge and allows itself to be understood. So syndicalism+reverence+difference.]
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Effective divisions within philosophy.
We have taken to considering philosophy in terms of schools or methods or particular questions. We have ethnicized it to some degree, opposing the analytic tradition to the Continental. We have established a sort of hierarchy of popular, lay speculation and philosophy proper, enforced by professional practitioners authorized by an archaic guild structure.
Let's forget some of this now, it is foolish in the sense that insular debates among the barely relevant become foolish.
Philosophy must be a practice devoted to the relationship between life and thought, and bridging those two realms by means of the creation of concepts. Philosophy must develop and refine methods for the cultivation of certain styles of living and thinking, informed by those concepts.
Finally, modern philosophy, in keeping with the dramatic insight that birthed and rebirthed it and rebiths it anew, must begin with a radical dividuation. We must learn to forget what we have been told and ordered, we must let out instructions for living and thinking collapse around and within us, so that we might become adequate to the task of creating and organizing ideas, relationships between things.
We must be ready and able to see the world in a new way if we are t practice this craft.
I would propose that the chief question of philosophy currently is as follows:
Are thinking and willing themselves adequately creative tasks to understand the world as we encounter it? Are they sufficient tools for the creation of new, relevant concepts? If not, what else must be offered?
I would propose that our chief problem is as follows, the reorganization of thought such that people can experience the world as a lived and dynamic thing that exceeds their analysis, yet feel an open reverence for that world.
Let's forget some of this now, it is foolish in the sense that insular debates among the barely relevant become foolish.
Philosophy must be a practice devoted to the relationship between life and thought, and bridging those two realms by means of the creation of concepts. Philosophy must develop and refine methods for the cultivation of certain styles of living and thinking, informed by those concepts.
Finally, modern philosophy, in keeping with the dramatic insight that birthed and rebirthed it and rebiths it anew, must begin with a radical dividuation. We must learn to forget what we have been told and ordered, we must let out instructions for living and thinking collapse around and within us, so that we might become adequate to the task of creating and organizing ideas, relationships between things.
We must be ready and able to see the world in a new way if we are t practice this craft.
I would propose that the chief question of philosophy currently is as follows:
Are thinking and willing themselves adequately creative tasks to understand the world as we encounter it? Are they sufficient tools for the creation of new, relevant concepts? If not, what else must be offered?
I would propose that our chief problem is as follows, the reorganization of thought such that people can experience the world as a lived and dynamic thing that exceeds their analysis, yet feel an open reverence for that world.
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Oil Independence devotional
The dependence of contemporary society on petroleum for fuel demonstrates the utter fragility of a mechanistic society.
Oil is a massive alienation of solar energy, whose mining requires vast sums and whose ownership tends towards centralization accordingly.
We slave ourselves to an inherently nihilistic commodity, a self-limiting commodity.
Rather than build a fuel system on a broad observation and engagement with the flows of the living earth, we seek to annihilate all binds to these flows and create a constant maximation of energy as an expression of infinite instrumental will.
Enough of this, it is idiocy. Reverence brings more power than will alienated from Being, and reverent technics brings wider and more varied powers of action than a neurotic technics of domination.
Oil is a massive alienation of solar energy, whose mining requires vast sums and whose ownership tends towards centralization accordingly.
We slave ourselves to an inherently nihilistic commodity, a self-limiting commodity.
Rather than build a fuel system on a broad observation and engagement with the flows of the living earth, we seek to annihilate all binds to these flows and create a constant maximation of energy as an expression of infinite instrumental will.
Enough of this, it is idiocy. Reverence brings more power than will alienated from Being, and reverent technics brings wider and more varied powers of action than a neurotic technics of domination.
Autonomia/Nomad Production devotional
This weblog is devoted to personal research and links that offer possibilities for political economy relevant to "nomadism," or that are relevant to or express the ontologies described by Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche, Bergson, Spinoza, etc. Essentially, this means economic/labor/organizational activity that maps onto concepts of the virtual and actual, feminist critique, anarchist or autonomist economic principles, economic reorganization favorable to the concrete virtual or decentralization and flexible, open embeddedness, etc. This may also involve lots of institutional economics and summaries of texts dealing with political economy.
from castells
[rise of the network society, ch3, the network enterprise, pg 171:
"A distinguished Japanese economist, Aoki, also emphasizes labor organization as the key to the success of Japanese firms:
'The main difference between the American firm and the Japanese firm may be summarized as follows: the American firm emphasizes efficiency attained through fine specialization and sharp job demarcation, whereas the Japanese firm emphasizes the capability of the workers' group to cope with local emergencies autonomously, which is developed through learning by doing and sharing knowledge on the shopfloor.'
Indeed, some of the most important organizational mechanisms underlying productivity growth in Japanese firms seems to have been overlooked by Western experts of management. Thus, Ikujiro Nonaka, on the basis of his studies of major Japanese companies, has proposed a simple, elegant model to account for the generation of knowledge in the firm. What he labels 'the knowledge-creating company' is based on the organizational interaction between 'explicit knowledge' and 'tacit knowledge' at the source of innovation. He argues that much of the knowledge accumulated in the firm comes from experience, and cannot be communicated by workers under excessively formalized mangement procedures. And yet the sources of innovation multiply when organizations are able to establish bridges to transfer tacit into explicit knowledge, explicit into tacit knowledge, tacit into tacit, and explicit into explicit. By so doing, not only is worker experience communicated and amplified to increase the formal body of knowledge in the company, but also knowledge generated in the outside world can be incorporated into the tacit habits of workers, enabling them to work out their own uses and to improve on the standard procedures. In an economic system where innovation is critical, the organizational ability to increase its sources from all forms of knowledge becomes the foundation of the innovative firm. This organizational process, however, requires the full participation of workers in the innovation process, so that they do not keep their tacit knowledge solely for their own benefit. It also requires stability of the labor force,because only then does it become rational for the individual to transfer his/her knowledge to the company, and for the company to diffuse explicit knowledge among its workers. Thus, this apparently simple mechanism, the dramatic effects of which in enhancing productivity and quality are shown in a number of case studies, in fact engages a profound transformation of management-labor relationships."
so, taking only this segment, what might we create from it? we see here a clear expression of the actual from the virtual, and the strength that comes with encouragement of the event of knowledge transformation that comes from moving the tacit into the explicit. we shouldn't be hasty with this comparison, but it is fairly interesting.
now, under a capitalist firm, especially one without strong labor stability or profit-sharing, etc, this becomes not so much paternalism as a purer form of exploitation of labor. this time, firms don't just seize labor, they seize knowledge, the knowledge of a collectivity of workers, and transform them into a commodity for exchange.
given the nomadic concepts, we cannot see this as, say, spinozist freedom from bondage. this is not quite active. it is, however, "stronger." a more joyful passion. to transform this joyful passion into an authentic action, in spinoza's sense, requires first, locally, a communist organization of the firm in question, and secondly, eventually (because there is much good in training locally as long as the agents are still focused towards deepening change and expanding and enhancing capacities and powers of action) a fully communistic society, in which all firms are communally organized (simply worker owned firms or ESOPs will suffice in the long-run, they take the good from communism and the good from capitalism, i.e. sociality but limited in space for the greater intensity in time). even this could be established incrementally, through preferential trading networks among communistic firms, as is happening already in buenos aires. not extravagantly so, not preference great enough to endanger the firms themselves, but small preferences organized systemically, that show their broader effects after several years of incubation.
"A distinguished Japanese economist, Aoki, also emphasizes labor organization as the key to the success of Japanese firms:
'The main difference between the American firm and the Japanese firm may be summarized as follows: the American firm emphasizes efficiency attained through fine specialization and sharp job demarcation, whereas the Japanese firm emphasizes the capability of the workers' group to cope with local emergencies autonomously, which is developed through learning by doing and sharing knowledge on the shopfloor.'
Indeed, some of the most important organizational mechanisms underlying productivity growth in Japanese firms seems to have been overlooked by Western experts of management. Thus, Ikujiro Nonaka, on the basis of his studies of major Japanese companies, has proposed a simple, elegant model to account for the generation of knowledge in the firm. What he labels 'the knowledge-creating company' is based on the organizational interaction between 'explicit knowledge' and 'tacit knowledge' at the source of innovation. He argues that much of the knowledge accumulated in the firm comes from experience, and cannot be communicated by workers under excessively formalized mangement procedures. And yet the sources of innovation multiply when organizations are able to establish bridges to transfer tacit into explicit knowledge, explicit into tacit knowledge, tacit into tacit, and explicit into explicit. By so doing, not only is worker experience communicated and amplified to increase the formal body of knowledge in the company, but also knowledge generated in the outside world can be incorporated into the tacit habits of workers, enabling them to work out their own uses and to improve on the standard procedures. In an economic system where innovation is critical, the organizational ability to increase its sources from all forms of knowledge becomes the foundation of the innovative firm. This organizational process, however, requires the full participation of workers in the innovation process, so that they do not keep their tacit knowledge solely for their own benefit. It also requires stability of the labor force,because only then does it become rational for the individual to transfer his/her knowledge to the company, and for the company to diffuse explicit knowledge among its workers. Thus, this apparently simple mechanism, the dramatic effects of which in enhancing productivity and quality are shown in a number of case studies, in fact engages a profound transformation of management-labor relationships."
so, taking only this segment, what might we create from it? we see here a clear expression of the actual from the virtual, and the strength that comes with encouragement of the event of knowledge transformation that comes from moving the tacit into the explicit. we shouldn't be hasty with this comparison, but it is fairly interesting.
now, under a capitalist firm, especially one without strong labor stability or profit-sharing, etc, this becomes not so much paternalism as a purer form of exploitation of labor. this time, firms don't just seize labor, they seize knowledge, the knowledge of a collectivity of workers, and transform them into a commodity for exchange.
given the nomadic concepts, we cannot see this as, say, spinozist freedom from bondage. this is not quite active. it is, however, "stronger." a more joyful passion. to transform this joyful passion into an authentic action, in spinoza's sense, requires first, locally, a communist organization of the firm in question, and secondly, eventually (because there is much good in training locally as long as the agents are still focused towards deepening change and expanding and enhancing capacities and powers of action) a fully communistic society, in which all firms are communally organized (simply worker owned firms or ESOPs will suffice in the long-run, they take the good from communism and the good from capitalism, i.e. sociality but limited in space for the greater intensity in time). even this could be established incrementally, through preferential trading networks among communistic firms, as is happening already in buenos aires. not extravagantly so, not preference great enough to endanger the firms themselves, but small preferences organized systemically, that show their broader effects after several years of incubation.
from Sabel
on democracy and the classic versus the networked firm:
A final contrast between classical organizations and pragmatist alternatives returns us to the opening theme of this essay: their relation to democracy. A fuller treatment would have to sketch in detail a pragmatist democracy, tracing the role of the legislature, administration and judiciary in a polity that deliberately governed itself by framework laws intended to be revised in the light of diverse efforts to implement them (Cohen and Sabel, 1997, 2003; Dorf and Sabel 1998; Sabel and Simon 2004. Here I only want to indicate how pragmatist institutions invert the very features of classic hierarchies that made them an encumbrance on, if not an outright obstacle to democracy: If the class organization reasonably occasioned pessimism about the prospects of democracy, then in its networked mirror image should, all else equal, occasion optimism about a democratic revival.
In classic theory, we saw, the routines of the large organization were the bane of democracy. Whether rooted in actual technical necessity, or imposed as technical necessities through the manipulations of self-interested, technically versed elites, these routines so limited individual and group autonomy as to reduce self rule to the periodic power to change one set of rulers for another. Hence public school became (for Dewey) a kind of incubator of citizen autonomy, a last-ditch defense against the encroachment of the elites, while the idea of a universal language of design was (for Simon) a fanciful means of connecting fundamentally disparate technical elites, and allowing them at least to communicate with the masses.
But in the pragmatist organization, we saw, the questioning of routine at the level of individual projects and more generally has itself becoming institutionalized. In this sense the lesson of the Deweyian school and the world of work surely overlap, even if they are surely not identical: In both rule following elides with rule making, and individual autonomy is explicitly linked to group decision making. Reform of the current, bureaucratic public school system on pragmatist lines further blurs the distinction between education and other forms of problem solving. Meanwhile Simon’s language of design has been transformed in pragmatist institutions from a forlorn, academic hope into an everyday necessity: the many, interconnected protocols of iterated co-design are in effect so many (partial, but intercommunicating) design languages, allowing actors with diverse expertise, and different background assumptions not only to exchange ideas jointly but also to develop new tools for mutual understanding. More yet: in assuming all current expertise to be importantly limited, and hence the corresponding need to develop corrigible institutions through peer review and local experimentation informed by lay knowledge, pragmatist institutions directly challenge the traditional equation of efficiency with rule by unquestionable professionals and technical experts. By their nature, therefore, these institutions invite the individuals and group that together form civil society to participate in new ways in the decisions that shape their lives. Long aware of the limits of principal-agent governance in volatile circumstances, and increasingly aware of emergent, alternatives that allow for institutional learning in the absence of master plans, mayors and local administrators—in Denmark, for instance (Sørensen, 2002)—and high civil servants and cabinet level politicians—in, for example the Netherlands (Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid, 2004)—are beginning, but only just, to think openly about the implications of a shift to pragmatist public problem solving for parliamentary democracy (Engelen and Ho, 2004).
Sidney Hook, one of the great philosophic wits of the last century, famously quipped that pragmatism was good in theory, not so good in practice. But his is almost surely not the last laugh. The deep surprise of the current organizational revolution is that pragmatism institutionalized—put rigorously into practice—for once, in the reality of our own time, seems to be confounding our inveterate theoretical pessimism, expanding our capacities for problem solving while inviting us to exercise our capacities for self rule.
construction coops
Denmark apparently has a significant presence of worker cooperatives in the construction sector, a spinoff of labor strife in the 19th century. They were instrumental in the development of Denmark's cohousing infrastructure, which dominates the Danish residential sector.
syndicalism, rough start
We can describe a movement and an ideology in several ways. For my purposes, it is most useful to describe syndicalism in terms of the concepts or even aesthetics in brings into play.
To introduce, syndicalism is a radial labor-oriented ideology, often tied to anarchism. Its most famous trait is a belief in economic action through labor unions and total abstention from government oriented politics. However, I think this is a weak way to approach the topic.
One of the key problems of syndicalism and anarchism over the years has been an over-arching focus on the negative definitions of the movements, what they refuse. We must develop an understanding based on the real positive concepts deployed by syndicalism, as it was practiced historically.
1) the importance of self-managed teams of labor. This cannot be underestimated. The key feature of importance in syndicalism is precisely this feature ...
To introduce, syndicalism is a radial labor-oriented ideology, often tied to anarchism. Its most famous trait is a belief in economic action through labor unions and total abstention from government oriented politics. However, I think this is a weak way to approach the topic.
One of the key problems of syndicalism and anarchism over the years has been an over-arching focus on the negative definitions of the movements, what they refuse. We must develop an understanding based on the real positive concepts deployed by syndicalism, as it was practiced historically.
1) the importance of self-managed teams of labor. This cannot be underestimated. The key feature of importance in syndicalism is precisely this feature ...
pieces of the argument grande
*syndicalism. history, ideology, major aspects of importance
*failure of syndicalism. fascism.
*the basic transfer of critique to bureaucratic society and contemporary relevance; total commodification
*constructive critique, the question, what structure did syndicalism create that allowed transition into fascism, militarism?
*post-structural thought, esp. that of deleuze, and grounding in same critical need.
*the critique of unity, extreme
*the event and time, bringing into the present, immanence of the event
*myth, in lived time
*unions of the virtual and actual
*concrete examples
*failure of syndicalism. fascism.
*the basic transfer of critique to bureaucratic society and contemporary relevance; total commodification
*constructive critique, the question, what structure did syndicalism create that allowed transition into fascism, militarism?
*post-structural thought, esp. that of deleuze, and grounding in same critical need.
*the critique of unity, extreme
*the event and time, bringing into the present, immanence of the event
*myth, in lived time
*unions of the virtual and actual
*concrete examples
laboring communities
any time that we see a semi-coherent community form around a type of labor, we know that labor develops certain capacities, builds in certain skills, and organizes the laborer's body/mind/affects in such a way that this adaptation is retained. they are qualitatively "skilled labor" and have communal skill sets that are maintained across a labor market.
this implies that such labor, often considered unskilled, actually is skilled in a certain concrete sense, and that such laborers would derive the economic and political gains of this status except for social biases, repression, and mystification by status and rank.
capitalist society maintains its own affordability through this mechanism, denying the status of some fields and professions and repressing their percentage of aggregate wealth in order to overinflate others. this overinflation allows the support of a bureaucratic class from aggregate wealth.
this implies that such labor, often considered unskilled, actually is skilled in a certain concrete sense, and that such laborers would derive the economic and political gains of this status except for social biases, repression, and mystification by status and rank.
capitalist society maintains its own affordability through this mechanism, denying the status of some fields and professions and repressing their percentage of aggregate wealth in order to overinflate others. this overinflation allows the support of a bureaucratic class from aggregate wealth.
laban movement analysis and factory labor
Making a Factory into a Song, part I
A guiding ideal of the utopian left for generations has been the quest for unalienated labor. Since Marx first penned the ideal that all men would in the same day act as fishers, workers, scholars, etc., or since the first strike against the imposition of factory routines on established work patterns and rhythms, radicals have sought to tie emancipatory projects to the experience of labor itself. In the absence of analysis, however, or a way of talking about bodies in motion, they have often fallen back into macroeconomic objectivism or poetic, subjective reverie. Hence, the wide-ranging and automatic interests of workers experiencing the micro-pains of the disciplining of their minds and bodies, a disciplining that they must submit to and experience as an outside, weakening force, interests that flare up in workplace rule negotiations, small and short strikes, etc., these do not find a voice in radical theory. Such a place might allow us to, firstly, develop a liberatory ontology of labor and laboring that encompasses a richer experience of living in its minutia. Secondly, it is quite possible that a more thoroughly embodied class and work analysis will be of greater interest to workers and employees, whose strains and confusions at work might find some coherence if politicized. Most Americans have little knowledge and only slightly greater interest in unions, radical theory, workplace democracy, etc., and perhaps if theory sought to meet people in their actual experiences they might be more sympathetic.
It's important, if we want to follow the route of visceral, unalienated labor as a conceptual tool for inventing new laboring practices, to be able to talk about the laboring body, and different species of discipline of that body. We need a system for studying and thinking about motion, bodies in motion, and the body in different phases of intensity as those phases relate to coordination with economic actions.
Laban, famous for his innovations in dance, worked on exactly this problem. He took the brutal reductionism of Taylorist studies of work-place discipline, a reductionism that sought to minimize all moments of wor to single motions and reduce extraneous movements for greater efficiency. Laban saw that the Taylorized factory made men and women into cogs in an industrial machine, and he developed, through working with the industrial engineer Lawrence, another system of analyzing movements. They did this in industrial factories in Britain during WWII.
Laban took his notations developed for studying and teaching dance, tweaked them, and applied them to motions in industrial work, developing a study of "industrial rhythm." In one example, he took a case of lifting tires onto hooks in a factory, done by two women heaving a large tire up several feet, under great strain. Laban studied the motions necessary to the action, to the tire, and the motions that would properly balance the women's physiological capacities with moments of motion and rest. He studied the space of movement of the women and the tire, and developed a different pattern of motion to achieve the same end. Rather than two women simply lugging a tire up onto a hook, one woman, through a trained and intimate understanding of the space of movmeent of the tire, its weight, etc., could swing the tire up, using the tire's own momentum to provide the right force, and twist the tire off onto the hook at the right moment. In this way one woman could do the job of two, and with greater physiological ease and balance.
This example shows us several things. First, cultivating this sor tof sensitivity involves a particular model of advancement and enhancement of productivity. However, unlike productivity enhanced by breaking down industrial tasks into less and less skilled labor, and subjecting the assembly worker to ever greater routine and bodily fatigue, it cultivates productivity in another direction entirely. Rather than deskill tasks, it opens up the worker into greater sensitivity to the dynamics between intention, body, and artifice. This does not discipline labor in quite the same way as Taylorism- instead of forcing people to become ever more regimented instants in a hierarchy, it cultivates an open sensitivity to the outside, and bringing sensitive innovation into every aspect of working and moving, achieving a proper balance in work. Many people who have taken up a martial art or sport will understand the power possible when this is accomplished.
However, we cannot be too idealistic about this. Though this opens many possibilities for labor, they need not be taken and seldom are. There is perhaps a tie here between Laban and ergonomics, but this is not something focused upon in the West or in the West's actual industrial sites in the Third World. It would be interesting to do a Labanian cross-cultural analysis of factory work, and see if any particular groups practiced this art with automatic precision.
Alone, we might see this simply as a one-two sucker-punch of capitalism. Bad cop, good cop- Taylor, Laban. However, it may be said that if we are to ehance the liberatory potential of laboring acts, the more powerful the freedom and artistry of those acts, and the more empowered and unfatigued the worker performing them, the easier it becomes for that worker to realistically envision a working life without, say, management and managers breathing down their necks. If work can be made pleasant and pleasurable, in a sense rigorously bound to the body in motion, giving it the dyanmics of an open, social "craft," then we may move one step closer to true economic liberation.
Links:
http://www.ickl.org/conf05_london/sessions/sessions31.html
http://www.laban-analyses.org/index.html
Note: look for work involving laban and industry, ex from text-
*The Discovery of Grounded Theory- Glaser and Strauss
*Posture and Gesture, Lamb
*Beyond Dance: Laban's Legacy of Movement Analysis- Davies
*Effort- Laban and Lawrence
A guiding ideal of the utopian left for generations has been the quest for unalienated labor. Since Marx first penned the ideal that all men would in the same day act as fishers, workers, scholars, etc., or since the first strike against the imposition of factory routines on established work patterns and rhythms, radicals have sought to tie emancipatory projects to the experience of labor itself. In the absence of analysis, however, or a way of talking about bodies in motion, they have often fallen back into macroeconomic objectivism or poetic, subjective reverie. Hence, the wide-ranging and automatic interests of workers experiencing the micro-pains of the disciplining of their minds and bodies, a disciplining that they must submit to and experience as an outside, weakening force, interests that flare up in workplace rule negotiations, small and short strikes, etc., these do not find a voice in radical theory. Such a place might allow us to, firstly, develop a liberatory ontology of labor and laboring that encompasses a richer experience of living in its minutia. Secondly, it is quite possible that a more thoroughly embodied class and work analysis will be of greater interest to workers and employees, whose strains and confusions at work might find some coherence if politicized. Most Americans have little knowledge and only slightly greater interest in unions, radical theory, workplace democracy, etc., and perhaps if theory sought to meet people in their actual experiences they might be more sympathetic.
It's important, if we want to follow the route of visceral, unalienated labor as a conceptual tool for inventing new laboring practices, to be able to talk about the laboring body, and different species of discipline of that body. We need a system for studying and thinking about motion, bodies in motion, and the body in different phases of intensity as those phases relate to coordination with economic actions.
Laban, famous for his innovations in dance, worked on exactly this problem. He took the brutal reductionism of Taylorist studies of work-place discipline, a reductionism that sought to minimize all moments of wor to single motions and reduce extraneous movements for greater efficiency. Laban saw that the Taylorized factory made men and women into cogs in an industrial machine, and he developed, through working with the industrial engineer Lawrence, another system of analyzing movements. They did this in industrial factories in Britain during WWII.
Laban took his notations developed for studying and teaching dance, tweaked them, and applied them to motions in industrial work, developing a study of "industrial rhythm." In one example, he took a case of lifting tires onto hooks in a factory, done by two women heaving a large tire up several feet, under great strain. Laban studied the motions necessary to the action, to the tire, and the motions that would properly balance the women's physiological capacities with moments of motion and rest. He studied the space of movement of the women and the tire, and developed a different pattern of motion to achieve the same end. Rather than two women simply lugging a tire up onto a hook, one woman, through a trained and intimate understanding of the space of movmeent of the tire, its weight, etc., could swing the tire up, using the tire's own momentum to provide the right force, and twist the tire off onto the hook at the right moment. In this way one woman could do the job of two, and with greater physiological ease and balance.
This example shows us several things. First, cultivating this sor tof sensitivity involves a particular model of advancement and enhancement of productivity. However, unlike productivity enhanced by breaking down industrial tasks into less and less skilled labor, and subjecting the assembly worker to ever greater routine and bodily fatigue, it cultivates productivity in another direction entirely. Rather than deskill tasks, it opens up the worker into greater sensitivity to the dynamics between intention, body, and artifice. This does not discipline labor in quite the same way as Taylorism- instead of forcing people to become ever more regimented instants in a hierarchy, it cultivates an open sensitivity to the outside, and bringing sensitive innovation into every aspect of working and moving, achieving a proper balance in work. Many people who have taken up a martial art or sport will understand the power possible when this is accomplished.
However, we cannot be too idealistic about this. Though this opens many possibilities for labor, they need not be taken and seldom are. There is perhaps a tie here between Laban and ergonomics, but this is not something focused upon in the West or in the West's actual industrial sites in the Third World. It would be interesting to do a Labanian cross-cultural analysis of factory work, and see if any particular groups practiced this art with automatic precision.
Alone, we might see this simply as a one-two sucker-punch of capitalism. Bad cop, good cop- Taylor, Laban. However, it may be said that if we are to ehance the liberatory potential of laboring acts, the more powerful the freedom and artistry of those acts, and the more empowered and unfatigued the worker performing them, the easier it becomes for that worker to realistically envision a working life without, say, management and managers breathing down their necks. If work can be made pleasant and pleasurable, in a sense rigorously bound to the body in motion, giving it the dyanmics of an open, social "craft," then we may move one step closer to true economic liberation.
Links:
http://www.ickl.org/conf05_london/sessions/sessions31.html
http://www.laban-analyses.org/index.html
Note: look for work involving laban and industry, ex from text-
*The Discovery of Grounded Theory- Glaser and Strauss
*Posture and Gesture, Lamb
*Beyond Dance: Laban's Legacy of Movement Analysis- Davies
*Effort- Laban and Lawrence
Radical Learning devotional.
This weblog is devoted to the exploration of radical ideas and practical experiments in education and learning. It stems from my own interest in alternative education, rooted in my undergraduate career at Hampshire College. Hampshire is an experimenting college in western Massachusetts of some repute: it lacks grades or tests, instead relying upon narrative evaluations and a heavy emphasis on writing/work in the field.
Some themes here will include ideas for high school and college instruction; broad critiques and reconstructive proposals for academia; experiments oriented around learning; theoretical concerns in education; etc. This is a loose effort, make use of it however you wish.
Some themes here will include ideas for high school and college instruction; broad critiques and reconstructive proposals for academia; experiments oriented around learning; theoretical concerns in education; etc. This is a loose effort, make use of it however you wish.
The formation of student unions.
In much of the world, high school students have their own "student unions." These take on concrete political meaning. Students strike over issues relevant to their lives as students- for instance, education budgets. THey often work in concert with teachers' unions. They take on a serious role for participating students as well. Leadership in the unions is open to upper-level students, the equivalent of American seniors and sometimes juniors. Becoming an active union leader takes a "rite of passage" quality, offering students a position of peer prestige based in social organization and organizing bound to the economy and political world as a whole.
American schools are beset by myriad problems real and imagined, yet neither liberals nor conservatives offer solutions that seem very effective. They tend to offer bandaid solutions, appealing to either conservative fantasies of discipline or liberal ideas of coddling and nurturing youth.
Neither are mistaken per se. But they leave out a crucial element, the bit of surplus that might make educational reforms actually function. They do not empower students. They give students no real freedom nor the responsbility that accompanies true freedom. How can we expect them to become anything resembling virtuous adults if they are never given opportunity to become such? And so reforms are tried and attacked and tried and attacked from different ends of the spectrum, and the default effect, the least common denominator, becomes more bureaucracy, more administration, more regulation, and less and less freedom for students and teachers. Costs escalate with few real results, and kids lose interest in what becomes empty training for a life they don't want.
The most effective way to challenge this is for teachers and students to actualy work together in real unions, and use these cooperative organs to push substantial academic reforms in secondary education.
In any moment, a variety of political issues present themselves for ready use by such organs. Current real-world issues are as follows:
*the war- counter-recruitment; building international connections with student groups to broaden understanding and encourage dialogue
*environmental degradation- refocusing high school curricula to promote sustainability education; refocusing school infrastructure to support ecological ends, for instance by hosting community gardens, using alternative energy sources, encouraging bikes and buses instead of car culture (after all, car ownership as a rite of passage into adulthood takes root in high school), etc.
In addition, student unions can focus on perennial academic issues.
*Promoting project-based learning over mass learning.
*Promoting small group learning efforts over overfilled classrooms.
*Promoting service learning, genuine civic education, and practical apprenticeships.
*Promoting the integration of practical knowledge and classroom knowledge.
The real question becomes one of promotion. Who might lead experimentation with high school student unions in America? Who will experiment with them to build their toolkit of effective political, rhetorical and organizational tactics and strategies? Who will lend such organs some legitimacy? I would suggest one of the major teacher unions as a possible champion, or even union locals. I would also suggest the formation of a low-capital nonprofit organization that serves primarily to facilitate these activities. Finally, with some coordination, a variety of progressive groups could support such groups through simple political ties.
[For instance, many environmental groups or anti-war groups have student wings, and by supporting these organizations they might build a permanent fount of potential rejuvenation and support for their own organizations. The participation of organized labor is key, as students must come to view their learning as bound to the concrete economy that shapes the world around them, or else the alienation of the modern school/workforce remains unchecked.]
American schools are beset by myriad problems real and imagined, yet neither liberals nor conservatives offer solutions that seem very effective. They tend to offer bandaid solutions, appealing to either conservative fantasies of discipline or liberal ideas of coddling and nurturing youth.
Neither are mistaken per se. But they leave out a crucial element, the bit of surplus that might make educational reforms actually function. They do not empower students. They give students no real freedom nor the responsbility that accompanies true freedom. How can we expect them to become anything resembling virtuous adults if they are never given opportunity to become such? And so reforms are tried and attacked and tried and attacked from different ends of the spectrum, and the default effect, the least common denominator, becomes more bureaucracy, more administration, more regulation, and less and less freedom for students and teachers. Costs escalate with few real results, and kids lose interest in what becomes empty training for a life they don't want.
The most effective way to challenge this is for teachers and students to actualy work together in real unions, and use these cooperative organs to push substantial academic reforms in secondary education.
In any moment, a variety of political issues present themselves for ready use by such organs. Current real-world issues are as follows:
*the war- counter-recruitment; building international connections with student groups to broaden understanding and encourage dialogue
*environmental degradation- refocusing high school curricula to promote sustainability education; refocusing school infrastructure to support ecological ends, for instance by hosting community gardens, using alternative energy sources, encouraging bikes and buses instead of car culture (after all, car ownership as a rite of passage into adulthood takes root in high school), etc.
In addition, student unions can focus on perennial academic issues.
*Promoting project-based learning over mass learning.
*Promoting small group learning efforts over overfilled classrooms.
*Promoting service learning, genuine civic education, and practical apprenticeships.
*Promoting the integration of practical knowledge and classroom knowledge.
The real question becomes one of promotion. Who might lead experimentation with high school student unions in America? Who will experiment with them to build their toolkit of effective political, rhetorical and organizational tactics and strategies? Who will lend such organs some legitimacy? I would suggest one of the major teacher unions as a possible champion, or even union locals. I would also suggest the formation of a low-capital nonprofit organization that serves primarily to facilitate these activities. Finally, with some coordination, a variety of progressive groups could support such groups through simple political ties.
[For instance, many environmental groups or anti-war groups have student wings, and by supporting these organizations they might build a permanent fount of potential rejuvenation and support for their own organizations. The participation of organized labor is key, as students must come to view their learning as bound to the concrete economy that shapes the world around them, or else the alienation of the modern school/workforce remains unchecked.]
Reconceiving high school education.
If we want to develop a truly progressive education, one oriented around building a student's ability for genuine autonomy, then we can no longer afford the luxury of neglecting the student's material autonomy.
Meaning, we know that the real problem of education lies in its subservience to the economy. The idealists among educators focus on developing critical thinking, exposing students to higher values and ideas than crass materialism. Yet at the end of the day, the student is still forced into a corporate role in one form another. Very little can change this, and most students understand exactly how little is offered them in terms of chances for genuine expression or community or dignified working and living.
To reorient education such that it creates the grounding of a free citizenry, we need only tailor schooling towards skills necessary for autonomous economic existence.
To say it simply:
Teach high school students the skills necessary to maintain small businesses, independent organizations and clubs, and, especially, cooperatives, worker and consumer.
This primarily affects a few subjects- economics, civics, home economics, trades education, etc. It can also be effectively incorporated into training in applied math and science, in humanistic efforts, and in arts education.
If this becomes a focus in high school and college education, we will generate tremendous numbers of independent firms and cooperatives.
I would further claim that the skills necessary to prosperously maintain these types of organizations are precisely those skills and values that we attempt to capture in the tradition of humanistic education.
Loose possibilities:
-science education tailored around small farming and small manufacturing, keeping fact/theory and practice interwoven in the students' experiences.
-civics education oriented primarily around teaching the skills needed in participatory democratic groups; and with units on how to form nonprofit organizations and community groups
-liberal arts education focused on critical thinking and incorporating some of the principles of project management and development
-economics focused on small business accounting and markets, internal perspective
-arts education with some incorporation of the business of arts, i.e. forming labels, distribution, hosting shows and events, etc.
-a general course, elective, currently nonexistent, on the principles of democratic, egalitarian management- incorporating some philosophy, some practice, a shared class project, reflective writing, etc.
rhetorical pitches, honest ones: Jeffersonian education; independent education; anti-corporate education
develop a variety of syllabi, advertise em, boom.
Meaning, we know that the real problem of education lies in its subservience to the economy. The idealists among educators focus on developing critical thinking, exposing students to higher values and ideas than crass materialism. Yet at the end of the day, the student is still forced into a corporate role in one form another. Very little can change this, and most students understand exactly how little is offered them in terms of chances for genuine expression or community or dignified working and living.
To reorient education such that it creates the grounding of a free citizenry, we need only tailor schooling towards skills necessary for autonomous economic existence.
To say it simply:
Teach high school students the skills necessary to maintain small businesses, independent organizations and clubs, and, especially, cooperatives, worker and consumer.
This primarily affects a few subjects- economics, civics, home economics, trades education, etc. It can also be effectively incorporated into training in applied math and science, in humanistic efforts, and in arts education.
If this becomes a focus in high school and college education, we will generate tremendous numbers of independent firms and cooperatives.
I would further claim that the skills necessary to prosperously maintain these types of organizations are precisely those skills and values that we attempt to capture in the tradition of humanistic education.
Loose possibilities:
-science education tailored around small farming and small manufacturing, keeping fact/theory and practice interwoven in the students' experiences.
-civics education oriented primarily around teaching the skills needed in participatory democratic groups; and with units on how to form nonprofit organizations and community groups
-liberal arts education focused on critical thinking and incorporating some of the principles of project management and development
-economics focused on small business accounting and markets, internal perspective
-arts education with some incorporation of the business of arts, i.e. forming labels, distribution, hosting shows and events, etc.
-a general course, elective, currently nonexistent, on the principles of democratic, egalitarian management- incorporating some philosophy, some practice, a shared class project, reflective writing, etc.
rhetorical pitches, honest ones: Jeffersonian education; independent education; anti-corporate education
develop a variety of syllabi, advertise em, boom.
A method.
Marxists have relied primarily upon the dialectic as formulated by Hegel and the post-Hegelian left. This has allowed them a certain broad understanding of history and its nuances, of the world as a process of change and transcient relationships. It functions as a ground for their systems of thought, an image of a process that can be applied in myriad contexts.
It inspired provocative extentions of Marxist theory into new terrains, political and intellectual. I'm personally impressed with their ability to use the dialectic to give confidence to workers engaged in union struggles and to articulate those struggles in class terms (their relationship to capital, the engines of material society) instead of simply ethnic terms.* In the intellectual sphere, it has been highly effective for mobilizing impressive ideas about development and learning (esp. with Vygotsky), evolutionary theory (Gould, Lewontin), and political economy.
This sort of concept, one expressing deep relationships animating change in the world, is useful if only because it functions as a ready tool for considering an array of situations.
It inspired provocative extentions of Marxist theory into new terrains, political and intellectual. I'm personally impressed with their ability to use the dialectic to give confidence to workers engaged in union struggles and to articulate those struggles in class terms (their relationship to capital, the engines of material society) instead of simply ethnic terms.* In the intellectual sphere, it has been highly effective for mobilizing impressive ideas about development and learning (esp. with Vygotsky), evolutionary theory (Gould, Lewontin), and political economy.
This sort of concept, one expressing deep relationships animating change in the world, is useful if only because it functions as a ready tool for considering an array of situations.
Conspiracy...
Widespread belief that the 9/11 attack was coordinated as a government conspiracy is more interesting as a symptom of something than as a claim in its own right. As with most statements the claim is less revealing about a society than the nature of the society that must be necessary to allow such a claim to be produced. Questions of truth and untruth wind around in vexing arguments, suspending viable action in favor of intrigue and paranoia or neurotic repression of conspiracy claims. Paranoia or neurosis, these are the options allowed us when we focus too heavily on a claim in itself instead of considering the forces that generate the space in which the claim is constructed.
More on this later.
To consider a major political claim, one bound to enormous emotional reserves of a large and diverse society, we must consider how a charged meme can spread across a body politic rapidly. We focus on means of rapid communication, i.e. the internet, but this alone is insufficient. The mechanism that allows communication does not maintain the will of that communication, it does not describe how people reach a state of willingness to search out and accept a fairly radical idea (such as a grand conspiracy in high places).
We should consider for beginners that this trend, this belief in secretive conspiracy, has accompanied power in America since its founding. At the very least, it is a constant thread of suspicion, waxing and waning in moments, only rarely reaching the level of political action. They seem to accompany the revolutionary periods of a society especially, as large constellations of people break and remake the narratives by which they define power and opposition in society.
Do they take on a particular flavor in a bureaucratic society?
My own claim: our bodies, interpreted as constellations of affect, habits, emotional conditioning, etc-i.e. the body as motion and rest- are effectively routinized, circumscribed. There is little real freedom in living, at least in living as a member of society. There is a very natural need to feel oneself a participant in the narrative construction of the world in which we live- it is how we learn, how we communicate, how we invent and create and repair and adapt. We feel disconnected from that in the present day, as we become disconnected from the production of legions of artifacts we depend upon daily (who can fix a new car today?) and disconnected from the institutions that gird our society. Workplaces, schools, hospitals and medical practices, scientific and academic knowledge production, political life, sensory life, entertainment, and systems of sensual desire, all of these are regulated now by mass codes. These codes adapt but we can feel little real power within them, and each innovation prompts an immediate reincorporation into a vast public bureaucracy that leaves no shadows, no privacy, no realm of personal expression. Everything is weighed down by numbers, by money and laws and public fascination.
Our bodies-in-motion serve as a the repositories of this vast inertia, and we experience this inertia as a profound detachment from the artifacts that populate our world and the institutions that construct and manage them. Our bodies quake with a freedom that is allowed no object, no Other for reciprocal engagement.
There may be no conspiracy, but society impinges upon the body/mind now as though there were. The conspiracy is not necessarily with a quiet junta. It lies in the fabric of our day to day relations, the thoughts and feelings we experience constantly, the limitations put to our movements and desires and will by an increasingly rigid society weighed down by a mixture of stability, commercialism, and war-fueled neurosis*. The conspiracy lies in the structure of daily experience, as the form taken by experience in an alienated society. Every second in a thick bureaucracy is a conspiracy holding down free thought and motion, with a thick morass of conformist and prescribed patterns and policies.
Bodies that experience conspiracy in the structure of innumerable experiences are bodies ready to accpet a meme of grand conspiracy. And they are also bodies ready to reject all of experience ina chaotic, destructive revolt. They are bodies that gain pleasure from fantasies of the end times or the collapse of society, precisely because their bodies are ready to reject ALL conspiracy in the name of fighting against the grand named conspiracy.
In fact, this shows that conspiracy theory is not necessarily unhealthy, that it is a symptom of something completely valid. Its inaccuracy lies in projecting target. That which impinges upon people is evil, and must be given a name so that it can be attacked, struck down, removed. Conspirators function as a sort of anti-God, the projection of all that constrains and debases man.
Unfortunately, this will to find and hunt out conspirators, this will towards grand explosion, armed revolt, battle and death, this reactive morality swings wildly in finding targets. At the moment, the left has a certain tolerance of this because the focus is on the President and his cronies. Yet this is mostly a happy coincidence of history, and could have easily gone towards other targets for more vulnerable...
...and yet I wonder. Revolutionary times are full of these conspiracies, these massive narratives of power and contestation that take on otherworldly qualities. We go back and color in lines of reason and clarity but we find when we dig very deeply that there are far more intimate relationships between communists and occultists than scientific minds might prefer.
I wonder if the real dynamic here is mythic. That by fashioning a power as a grand evil, a grand conspiracy, naming it, people are able to actually fight it. If the key point of battle is narrative, if people must first have a background for conceiving of a terrain of battle and possible defeat or success, perhaps this is exactly what must occur. People must build a man into a myth so that they might make him ready to defeat symbolically. This defeat must parallel literal expulsion from power.
The narratives of conspiracy double an opponent, and by binding that opponent to a mythic double, allow people a symbolic system for attacking it. Without this mythos, the man is too concrete, too subject to the vacillations of truth and untruth, of argument and responsibility. Responsibility at the level of the state must be fixed by mythic reconfiguration before it can be forced back upon the concrete avatars of the state.
perhaps...
To consider a major political claim, one bound to enormous emotional reserves of a large and diverse society, we must consider how a charged meme can spread across a body politic rapidly. We focus on means of rapid communication, i.e. the internet, but this alone is insufficient. The mechanism that allows communication does not maintain the will of that communication, it does not describe how people reach a state of willingness to search out and accept a fairly radical idea (such as a grand conspiracy in high places).
We should consider for beginners that this trend, this belief in secretive conspiracy, has accompanied power in America since its founding. At the very least, it is a constant thread of suspicion, waxing and waning in moments, only rarely reaching the level of political action. They seem to accompany the revolutionary periods of a society especially, as large constellations of people break and remake the narratives by which they define power and opposition in society.
Do they take on a particular flavor in a bureaucratic society?
My own claim: our bodies, interpreted as constellations of affect, habits, emotional conditioning, etc-i.e. the body as motion and rest- are effectively routinized, circumscribed. There is little real freedom in living, at least in living as a member of society. There is a very natural need to feel oneself a participant in the narrative construction of the world in which we live- it is how we learn, how we communicate, how we invent and create and repair and adapt. We feel disconnected from that in the present day, as we become disconnected from the production of legions of artifacts we depend upon daily (who can fix a new car today?) and disconnected from the institutions that gird our society. Workplaces, schools, hospitals and medical practices, scientific and academic knowledge production, political life, sensory life, entertainment, and systems of sensual desire, all of these are regulated now by mass codes. These codes adapt but we can feel little real power within them, and each innovation prompts an immediate reincorporation into a vast public bureaucracy that leaves no shadows, no privacy, no realm of personal expression. Everything is weighed down by numbers, by money and laws and public fascination.
Our bodies-in-motion serve as a the repositories of this vast inertia, and we experience this inertia as a profound detachment from the artifacts that populate our world and the institutions that construct and manage them. Our bodies quake with a freedom that is allowed no object, no Other for reciprocal engagement.
There may be no conspiracy, but society impinges upon the body/mind now as though there were. The conspiracy is not necessarily with a quiet junta. It lies in the fabric of our day to day relations, the thoughts and feelings we experience constantly, the limitations put to our movements and desires and will by an increasingly rigid society weighed down by a mixture of stability, commercialism, and war-fueled neurosis*. The conspiracy lies in the structure of daily experience, as the form taken by experience in an alienated society. Every second in a thick bureaucracy is a conspiracy holding down free thought and motion, with a thick morass of conformist and prescribed patterns and policies.
Bodies that experience conspiracy in the structure of innumerable experiences are bodies ready to accpet a meme of grand conspiracy. And they are also bodies ready to reject all of experience ina chaotic, destructive revolt. They are bodies that gain pleasure from fantasies of the end times or the collapse of society, precisely because their bodies are ready to reject ALL conspiracy in the name of fighting against the grand named conspiracy.
In fact, this shows that conspiracy theory is not necessarily unhealthy, that it is a symptom of something completely valid. Its inaccuracy lies in projecting target. That which impinges upon people is evil, and must be given a name so that it can be attacked, struck down, removed. Conspirators function as a sort of anti-God, the projection of all that constrains and debases man.
Unfortunately, this will to find and hunt out conspirators, this will towards grand explosion, armed revolt, battle and death, this reactive morality swings wildly in finding targets. At the moment, the left has a certain tolerance of this because the focus is on the President and his cronies. Yet this is mostly a happy coincidence of history, and could have easily gone towards other targets for more vulnerable...
...and yet I wonder. Revolutionary times are full of these conspiracies, these massive narratives of power and contestation that take on otherworldly qualities. We go back and color in lines of reason and clarity but we find when we dig very deeply that there are far more intimate relationships between communists and occultists than scientific minds might prefer.
I wonder if the real dynamic here is mythic. That by fashioning a power as a grand evil, a grand conspiracy, naming it, people are able to actually fight it. If the key point of battle is narrative, if people must first have a background for conceiving of a terrain of battle and possible defeat or success, perhaps this is exactly what must occur. People must build a man into a myth so that they might make him ready to defeat symbolically. This defeat must parallel literal expulsion from power.
The narratives of conspiracy double an opponent, and by binding that opponent to a mythic double, allow people a symbolic system for attacking it. Without this mythos, the man is too concrete, too subject to the vacillations of truth and untruth, of argument and responsibility. Responsibility at the level of the state must be fixed by mythic reconfiguration before it can be forced back upon the concrete avatars of the state.
perhaps...
Labor, reason, the third sector.
When the distribution of labor is controlled by capital, for the primary purpose of generating expanded capital (that is, goods and services oriented to fully public* markets and ultimately reducible to a single continuous spectrum) we note a collapse in the narrative power of labor.
We can feel this individually. The chief pain of most jobs is not their difficulty but their routine, their lack of excitement and creativity, their repression of chance and chaos. Work is divided from pleasure, officially, and we bring pleasure into work surreptitiously. We sneak a few indiscretions with drugs or small rebellions, we pretend we have freedo in our working life, we vie with our superiors for the management of our time (either with the honey of pleasure and comraderie or the vinegar of opposition and antagonism). We inject drama where it needn't become manifest, if only in the process of making meaning of our work.
We respond in this way precisely because in any moment, the individual experience of working labor is barren of life and vitality relative to what is possible or even anticipated and demanded.
Capitalism is double-edged; it motivates an aggregation of resources to allow vast expansions of power in individual acts and projects. Yet it does this by forcing participants into a stale repetition of the narratives of meaning dictated by whoever is in power in the moment.
So we will always feel work under capitalism as a reduction, a trap, because it is for all participants under (and generally including) the rank of professionals. This in and of itself isn't horrific- we could in theory hitch up our sleeves, say "work is work," and spend the evening drinking with our friends and othrwise feeling like free human beings.
But capitalism also seeks continuous expansion, and it takes over these moments of uncontrolled and unrehearsed pleasure in good company. With the expansion of advertising especially and the focused tailoring of consumer markets into liestyle niches, every moment of our desire becomes open to cooptation.
This means that our narrative space outside of working life becomes diminished as it is taken over by the dynamics and mass uniformity of market society.
Because our working life is applied to a singular logic, and controlled by professionals with semi-stable value sets regarding production and work organization, it becomes reduced, collapsed, a routine for any individual person. We feel like cogs and then try and forget it. But because our lives are also dictated by consumerism, we start to feel like cogs in every other aspect of life as well. This happens even if our experience of being a "consumer cog" is oriented around pleasure and desire. We become cogs of marketing for a popular media function, or lifetsyle purchases tied to status and identity, etc. We never get a moment to turn it all off and forget the meaning everything is already supposed to have, we never have time to just think and feel and express freely. We're controlled by outside forces at every step, and it never lets up.
Here's the hitch.
Social labor, the labor of working life, is important. It is integrated into society at large, it creates a set of our individual actions and movements and thoughts and feelings that bear upon all of humanity in indeterminate ways. Our little bits of labor at work feed into the whole world economy. Our little bits of consumption feed into the whole world economy. Where we buy a shirt helps determine (in a tiny way but in a way that masses up with each consumer) if a few hundred people will stay employed, be able to pay the medical bills for their kids, or buy a pot of food and pay the rent on a sulm tenement on another continent, etc. Our bit of labor feeds into the vast apparatus of human production. This is what an integrated world economy means, that we are bound to all civilization at the same time in wholly indeterminate and untraceable ways, whose individual lines cannot be followed except as net effects.
This means that social labor and social consumption are bound to what is generally considered "reason." They are the privileged domain for forethought, planning, building capital.
Meaning, social labor and social consumption are the ways in which people, individually and in groups, build and exercise power in the world.
In social labor and social consumption, the acts of an individual, their desires and emotions and movements and skills, are allowed to carry on into civilization itself, beyond the individual who creates them. They become detached from the indivdual to some degree and become events in and of themselves.
This can be good, it can be bad. It is good in that it allows individuals to take on tremendous expressive power. It is bad in that under capitalism, their events are stolen from them and given to the rich, to abstract corporate entities. People become powerful, but they become powerful serfs, peons.
This is what social reason actually boils down to: the right of (rough) repetition throughout society. Reason is only the power of an affect to be reproduced in a society.
******************************************************************************
We have a dilemma. Power in society is controlled by capital. Hence, we have neither individual nor social conenction to power in America. No one really does. Even the corporate CEO only takes on individual power and recognition through acts of criminal agency. Power is controlled by abstractions- corporations, markets, governments, school guidelines, professional and technical standards, the rough consensus of an academic discipline or scientific field.
We feel genuine agency through criminality and excess, through dramatic rupture and adventure that only destroys limits. This creates a dilemma. There is a definite poignance to it. No question. Feels awesome, it's thrilling. But it can't be reproduced. It's limited in time, in fact the existence of any such act (or constellation of acts or feelings) calls into being the veyr forces that will crush and marginalize it.
Excessive acts function as minor toxins to the socius. They are tolerated as minor toxins can be tolerated by a living body in the form of spices, liquor, light drug use, medicines, vaccines. And many are quite satisfied with this, with transcience of particular pleasures. They flirt with death and unsustainability in a powerful and poetic way. The ephemeral makes us appreciate life all the more, etc.
But these acts, our minor rebellions, are never allowed to actually take root and ground new values. We can be small poisons that the system of capital incorporates as spice, but we can never become symbionts, new organs, etc. These rebellions are allowed their small space and nothing more.
Such a system would last forever, except as it becomes more and more stable, with more and more centralized values and narratives, it becomes, well, ontologically "brittle". In marginalizing and controlling creation and change, society makes itself slow-moving, bureaucratic, slow to adapt and innovate.
So, in terms of narrative freedom, we are offered two choices.
*formal labor and consumption, increasingly rigid, powerful yet alienated. bound to reason and repetition. bound to consideration, planning, the rights of invention and experimentation, the rights of social experimentation (every firm is a social experiment).
*informal rupture and rebellion. poignant, powerful in the instant, unable to form structures or institutions, unable to breed essentially. no rights, no responsibilities, no creative power, no constructive power, anything invented immediately coopted and destroyed the second it is brought into the world.
These choices offer nothing in terms of crafting a civilization, a culture. They are incapable of long-term survival.
****************************************************************************
The Third Sector.
Cooperatives in all their forms offer a third narrative space. In the logic of capitalism they are floating paradoxes, little floating bits of indterminacy that can't quite be incorporated and can't quite be banished. They trouble capital.
They need only build themselves around an autonomous logic, and they will break apart the boundaries that govern our society. They are tools for tearing apart the existential ground of our material civilization, its codes of production and tragedy. Why?
*They do not obey a singular logic necessarily, and so they disrupt the consolidation of narrative.
*They invite diffuse participation in developing internal narratives, and hence all participants can channel their values and performative codes and rituals and retellings into the organizations, i.e. all participating narratives are allowed access to institutional power.
That's fucking HUGE. It means that a cab driver from Haiti has as much formal right to speak and have her words turned into action as an MBA from Harvard, and the actual effects are formed in the spaces of difference between their wills.
The third sector is small and fragile in appearance, but it is ontologically robust. It obeys the economic logic of peasant economics, such as those described by Chayanov. Especially in a third sector utilizing volunteer labor, it cannot be stopped. It allows the reconciliation of diverse narrative agency with institutional permanence, or to badly use the words of a great thing, it allows the social expression of conatus into sub specie eternitatis. This is a free reason, a reason unburdened by the nihilism of a monolithic value.
Cooperatives allow reason to take a mutable and expressive form, allow labor to be both individually felt and turned into free events to be loosed upon society. From a logic of contestation and repression we move a logic of polymorphous, dynamic, and ever-present power of social action for all members of society.
We can feel this individually. The chief pain of most jobs is not their difficulty but their routine, their lack of excitement and creativity, their repression of chance and chaos. Work is divided from pleasure, officially, and we bring pleasure into work surreptitiously. We sneak a few indiscretions with drugs or small rebellions, we pretend we have freedo in our working life, we vie with our superiors for the management of our time (either with the honey of pleasure and comraderie or the vinegar of opposition and antagonism). We inject drama where it needn't become manifest, if only in the process of making meaning of our work.
We respond in this way precisely because in any moment, the individual experience of working labor is barren of life and vitality relative to what is possible or even anticipated and demanded.
Capitalism is double-edged; it motivates an aggregation of resources to allow vast expansions of power in individual acts and projects. Yet it does this by forcing participants into a stale repetition of the narratives of meaning dictated by whoever is in power in the moment.
So we will always feel work under capitalism as a reduction, a trap, because it is for all participants under (and generally including) the rank of professionals. This in and of itself isn't horrific- we could in theory hitch up our sleeves, say "work is work," and spend the evening drinking with our friends and othrwise feeling like free human beings.
But capitalism also seeks continuous expansion, and it takes over these moments of uncontrolled and unrehearsed pleasure in good company. With the expansion of advertising especially and the focused tailoring of consumer markets into liestyle niches, every moment of our desire becomes open to cooptation.
This means that our narrative space outside of working life becomes diminished as it is taken over by the dynamics and mass uniformity of market society.
Because our working life is applied to a singular logic, and controlled by professionals with semi-stable value sets regarding production and work organization, it becomes reduced, collapsed, a routine for any individual person. We feel like cogs and then try and forget it. But because our lives are also dictated by consumerism, we start to feel like cogs in every other aspect of life as well. This happens even if our experience of being a "consumer cog" is oriented around pleasure and desire. We become cogs of marketing for a popular media function, or lifetsyle purchases tied to status and identity, etc. We never get a moment to turn it all off and forget the meaning everything is already supposed to have, we never have time to just think and feel and express freely. We're controlled by outside forces at every step, and it never lets up.
Here's the hitch.
Social labor, the labor of working life, is important. It is integrated into society at large, it creates a set of our individual actions and movements and thoughts and feelings that bear upon all of humanity in indeterminate ways. Our little bits of labor at work feed into the whole world economy. Our little bits of consumption feed into the whole world economy. Where we buy a shirt helps determine (in a tiny way but in a way that masses up with each consumer) if a few hundred people will stay employed, be able to pay the medical bills for their kids, or buy a pot of food and pay the rent on a sulm tenement on another continent, etc. Our bit of labor feeds into the vast apparatus of human production. This is what an integrated world economy means, that we are bound to all civilization at the same time in wholly indeterminate and untraceable ways, whose individual lines cannot be followed except as net effects.
This means that social labor and social consumption are bound to what is generally considered "reason." They are the privileged domain for forethought, planning, building capital.
Meaning, social labor and social consumption are the ways in which people, individually and in groups, build and exercise power in the world.
In social labor and social consumption, the acts of an individual, their desires and emotions and movements and skills, are allowed to carry on into civilization itself, beyond the individual who creates them. They become detached from the indivdual to some degree and become events in and of themselves.
This can be good, it can be bad. It is good in that it allows individuals to take on tremendous expressive power. It is bad in that under capitalism, their events are stolen from them and given to the rich, to abstract corporate entities. People become powerful, but they become powerful serfs, peons.
This is what social reason actually boils down to: the right of (rough) repetition throughout society. Reason is only the power of an affect to be reproduced in a society.
******************************************************************************
We have a dilemma. Power in society is controlled by capital. Hence, we have neither individual nor social conenction to power in America. No one really does. Even the corporate CEO only takes on individual power and recognition through acts of criminal agency. Power is controlled by abstractions- corporations, markets, governments, school guidelines, professional and technical standards, the rough consensus of an academic discipline or scientific field.
We feel genuine agency through criminality and excess, through dramatic rupture and adventure that only destroys limits. This creates a dilemma. There is a definite poignance to it. No question. Feels awesome, it's thrilling. But it can't be reproduced. It's limited in time, in fact the existence of any such act (or constellation of acts or feelings) calls into being the veyr forces that will crush and marginalize it.
Excessive acts function as minor toxins to the socius. They are tolerated as minor toxins can be tolerated by a living body in the form of spices, liquor, light drug use, medicines, vaccines. And many are quite satisfied with this, with transcience of particular pleasures. They flirt with death and unsustainability in a powerful and poetic way. The ephemeral makes us appreciate life all the more, etc.
But these acts, our minor rebellions, are never allowed to actually take root and ground new values. We can be small poisons that the system of capital incorporates as spice, but we can never become symbionts, new organs, etc. These rebellions are allowed their small space and nothing more.
Such a system would last forever, except as it becomes more and more stable, with more and more centralized values and narratives, it becomes, well, ontologically "brittle". In marginalizing and controlling creation and change, society makes itself slow-moving, bureaucratic, slow to adapt and innovate.
So, in terms of narrative freedom, we are offered two choices.
*formal labor and consumption, increasingly rigid, powerful yet alienated. bound to reason and repetition. bound to consideration, planning, the rights of invention and experimentation, the rights of social experimentation (every firm is a social experiment).
*informal rupture and rebellion. poignant, powerful in the instant, unable to form structures or institutions, unable to breed essentially. no rights, no responsibilities, no creative power, no constructive power, anything invented immediately coopted and destroyed the second it is brought into the world.
These choices offer nothing in terms of crafting a civilization, a culture. They are incapable of long-term survival.
****************************************************************************
The Third Sector.
Cooperatives in all their forms offer a third narrative space. In the logic of capitalism they are floating paradoxes, little floating bits of indterminacy that can't quite be incorporated and can't quite be banished. They trouble capital.
They need only build themselves around an autonomous logic, and they will break apart the boundaries that govern our society. They are tools for tearing apart the existential ground of our material civilization, its codes of production and tragedy. Why?
*They do not obey a singular logic necessarily, and so they disrupt the consolidation of narrative.
*They invite diffuse participation in developing internal narratives, and hence all participants can channel their values and performative codes and rituals and retellings into the organizations, i.e. all participating narratives are allowed access to institutional power.
That's fucking HUGE. It means that a cab driver from Haiti has as much formal right to speak and have her words turned into action as an MBA from Harvard, and the actual effects are formed in the spaces of difference between their wills.
The third sector is small and fragile in appearance, but it is ontologically robust. It obeys the economic logic of peasant economics, such as those described by Chayanov. Especially in a third sector utilizing volunteer labor, it cannot be stopped. It allows the reconciliation of diverse narrative agency with institutional permanence, or to badly use the words of a great thing, it allows the social expression of conatus into sub specie eternitatis. This is a free reason, a reason unburdened by the nihilism of a monolithic value.
Cooperatives allow reason to take a mutable and expressive form, allow labor to be both individually felt and turned into free events to be loosed upon society. From a logic of contestation and repression we move a logic of polymorphous, dynamic, and ever-present power of social action for all members of society.
The Method: Mimesis
The question of method is a difficult one for an autonomist politics tailored to the US. How do we promote autonomist activities and organizations and principles? How do we do this without fighting for power over governmental or corporate body? How do we build institutions, and how do we link those institutions together? We have some models for this from a variety of autonomist organizations and movements around the world, but the contemporary US requires its own sort of model for addressing its own already existing values and organizations.
For conceptual models, I personally use the rhizomatic metaphysics of Deleuze and Guattari, cleaned from a host of sources. I'll save lengthy discussion of the Daring Duo for other posts though, as full on metaphysical discussion is instructive but indirectly so, and for the moment I want to pretend to be practical. For the moment, I'll just describe the rough structure of the "rhizome" as Deleuze and Guattari use it:
A rhizome is a connection between dissimilar things for the production of a third thing "between" them. Rhizomatic connections are not formed by structural integration, but by flows of matter and energy between different things. This does not destroy the differences between the things, or create a uniformity. Rather, the differences between them allow the flow of matter and energy to happen at all. The things remain different, and the flow between them creates some other, third thing, an invention, a monstrous birth beyond both of them.
This is a rough explanation of a dense idea, but for a quick example of it (besides actual rhizomes, connections between soil bacteria, fungi, and plant roots that allows nitrogen fixation) think of a common social event, one easily as common in America as political organizations: a band. We can think of a rhizomtic experience as exactly what happens when a decent band can play well together, can achieve a certain flow, especially in a jam session or through improvisation. So jazz bands and jam bands give us a common example of a social rhizome.
So how do we spread values in such a way?
Mimesis.
We create examples, forge channels of communication, and allow others to replicate or experiment with our models. They will always develop some new mutation, some new twist, but by this very difference, by this experimentation, we form an open community expressing types of values.
So, how do we promote autonomist principles and organizations? We set up examples, share information about them, and collaborate on inventing other examples. We make them concrete, and focus on concrete collaborations. We let our examples maintain their autonomy, but offer them as gifts to model other experiments.
*******
A quick argument in favor of this model. When we look at the adoption of industrial farming techniques in America and throughout the world, we note something interesting. Many attempts were made to encourage farmers to use industrial techniques and inputs, arguments, subsidies, endorsements. Nothing worked though, until proponents of new techniques used models. They made demonstration fields, wowed local farmers with increased yields, and their methods quickly spread.
Though the content of this example is fairly odious, the point remains- people are more encouraged by a working model they can see and touch than by all the argument and bribery in the world.
Build examples, root them to communities so everyone can see their effects and dynamics, network the examples.
see also Gabriel Tarde.
For conceptual models, I personally use the rhizomatic metaphysics of Deleuze and Guattari, cleaned from a host of sources. I'll save lengthy discussion of the Daring Duo for other posts though, as full on metaphysical discussion is instructive but indirectly so, and for the moment I want to pretend to be practical. For the moment, I'll just describe the rough structure of the "rhizome" as Deleuze and Guattari use it:
A rhizome is a connection between dissimilar things for the production of a third thing "between" them. Rhizomatic connections are not formed by structural integration, but by flows of matter and energy between different things. This does not destroy the differences between the things, or create a uniformity. Rather, the differences between them allow the flow of matter and energy to happen at all. The things remain different, and the flow between them creates some other, third thing, an invention, a monstrous birth beyond both of them.
This is a rough explanation of a dense idea, but for a quick example of it (besides actual rhizomes, connections between soil bacteria, fungi, and plant roots that allows nitrogen fixation) think of a common social event, one easily as common in America as political organizations: a band. We can think of a rhizomtic experience as exactly what happens when a decent band can play well together, can achieve a certain flow, especially in a jam session or through improvisation. So jazz bands and jam bands give us a common example of a social rhizome.
So how do we spread values in such a way?
Mimesis.
We create examples, forge channels of communication, and allow others to replicate or experiment with our models. They will always develop some new mutation, some new twist, but by this very difference, by this experimentation, we form an open community expressing types of values.
So, how do we promote autonomist principles and organizations? We set up examples, share information about them, and collaborate on inventing other examples. We make them concrete, and focus on concrete collaborations. We let our examples maintain their autonomy, but offer them as gifts to model other experiments.
*******
A quick argument in favor of this model. When we look at the adoption of industrial farming techniques in America and throughout the world, we note something interesting. Many attempts were made to encourage farmers to use industrial techniques and inputs, arguments, subsidies, endorsements. Nothing worked though, until proponents of new techniques used models. They made demonstration fields, wowed local farmers with increased yields, and their methods quickly spread.
Though the content of this example is fairly odious, the point remains- people are more encouraged by a working model they can see and touch than by all the argument and bribery in the world.
Build examples, root them to communities so everyone can see their effects and dynamics, network the examples.
see also Gabriel Tarde.
WIld Production
This might be a term- it's at the haze of my memory somewhere. I'll use it. I use it to refer to production that occurs without the appearance of a prior alienation through the intervention of capital.
The world of living beings is composed of labor. By this I mean only movement that creates relationships between divergent things. Any act of labor is at once an act of hybridization, binding us to a thing and to a process. Labor carries with it the power of pure creation in the universe, because it is precisely this swerving towards another.
Labor is affective movement that composes a local, impermanent heterogeneous community, of people, tools, flows of matter and energy, values, etc. Labor is the cut into a stable world that creates community by disruption, by slicing into the meaning and use of given things and forging new bonds by the slicing.
Labor, any labor, is a community-birthing disruption.
When we speak of wild production, we speak of this function alone, labor as community-forming disruption, assembled into a vast web of disruptions. Unregulated and unmoderated, except by the internal dynamics of the local communities formed by the acts of labor.
When a master stonemason, learned through apprenticeship to other masons, builds a wall, she does so using certain dynamics, certain rules and and principles. Thos principles can come from different sources. Normally, they come from the priorities of employers, their aesthetic whim, tempered by the constraints of the material.
But the master stonemason is capable of another form of production. She is capable of building in line with the values taught her through a laboring community (stonemasons). She is capable of building a wall such that it works primarily to express latent properties of the stone, aesthetic and structural. This is what we mean when we speak of mastery, and this is why we wince when we see inferior work done at the behest of sterile corporate values.
Wild production is what happens when we needn't listen to the boss or paymaster and can instead build according to the logic set up in those cuts of labor, and using the values that resonate around that cut- the values of a laboring community, the principles latent in the materials with which we work, the surrounding conditions of the area and milieu.
Wild production is wild in the sense that it is unalienated, it was never alienated. The laborer always built according to the logic of the cut, the logic of that basic laboring movement.
Wild production is the principle that grounds all creative, innovative, and beautiful work. It is also the principle that is repressed by corporate firms and the state. It is neglected, mined for energy, and corralled like a horse to be broken.
Wild production is what we will loose upon the world when we free ourselves from the judges external and internal that bind us to their Law instead of the values of our craft, the destabilizing and restabilizing logic of movement itself. Wild production is free production.
The world of living beings is composed of labor. By this I mean only movement that creates relationships between divergent things. Any act of labor is at once an act of hybridization, binding us to a thing and to a process. Labor carries with it the power of pure creation in the universe, because it is precisely this swerving towards another.
Labor is affective movement that composes a local, impermanent heterogeneous community, of people, tools, flows of matter and energy, values, etc. Labor is the cut into a stable world that creates community by disruption, by slicing into the meaning and use of given things and forging new bonds by the slicing.
Labor, any labor, is a community-birthing disruption.
When we speak of wild production, we speak of this function alone, labor as community-forming disruption, assembled into a vast web of disruptions. Unregulated and unmoderated, except by the internal dynamics of the local communities formed by the acts of labor.
When a master stonemason, learned through apprenticeship to other masons, builds a wall, she does so using certain dynamics, certain rules and and principles. Thos principles can come from different sources. Normally, they come from the priorities of employers, their aesthetic whim, tempered by the constraints of the material.
But the master stonemason is capable of another form of production. She is capable of building in line with the values taught her through a laboring community (stonemasons). She is capable of building a wall such that it works primarily to express latent properties of the stone, aesthetic and structural. This is what we mean when we speak of mastery, and this is why we wince when we see inferior work done at the behest of sterile corporate values.
Wild production is what happens when we needn't listen to the boss or paymaster and can instead build according to the logic set up in those cuts of labor, and using the values that resonate around that cut- the values of a laboring community, the principles latent in the materials with which we work, the surrounding conditions of the area and milieu.
Wild production is wild in the sense that it is unalienated, it was never alienated. The laborer always built according to the logic of the cut, the logic of that basic laboring movement.
Wild production is the principle that grounds all creative, innovative, and beautiful work. It is also the principle that is repressed by corporate firms and the state. It is neglected, mined for energy, and corralled like a horse to be broken.
Wild production is what we will loose upon the world when we free ourselves from the judges external and internal that bind us to their Law instead of the values of our craft, the destabilizing and restabilizing logic of movement itself. Wild production is free production.
Work Rhythms.
Work rhythms forma focal point organizing the lived world of people living in capitalism. This is obvious when we think about our own lives, yet somehow we rebel from the idea. We rebel from that idea in part because our ideas in general are rebellion from a certain type of toil we experience regularly.
Part of the difficulty of building a radical ideology that confronts capitalism as a whole lies in the very experience of it by the people most embedded within it. There are rough levels of participation- if you are truly desperate, as are several billion people in the world today, you desperately desire escape from a system whose material conditions you experience with brutality every day. Or, of course, you get used to it, and develop a stoic resolve oriented around survival, supporting children, etc.
If you are in the relative heights of power, you're quite conscious of the way your work dictates your life. You are conscious of it because it gives you power in the form of wealth and a certain prestige. These aren't illusory per se, but they are secondary signs of the basic fact that you form a cog in the bureaucracy of society, that your actions carry over to larger numbers of people. You have authority over others, you have a host of underlings, "ghost slaves" perhaps.
But in America, we need be concerned with the lower classes to middle classes. We have a swollen lower-middle class, and the lower middle class lives and breather by trying to forget what its true identity. This large brunt of America corresponds to the plebeians of Rome, underlings too beholden to society to oppose it significantly, yet dependent upon the dictates of higher level officials in the Roman bureaucracy and armies. It is this middle position between total desperation and total incorporation into the Machine that has long been the preferred class of liberals.
This is a crucial class to understand in America, because it's so fucking big, and in theory has tremendous resources upon which to draw. It potentially has the power to become both laborer and capitalist, by pooling resources en masse.
[for example, this was an interesting feature of the Howard Dean presidential campaign and the much heralded rise of small donors in the political process; a large horde of middling liberal Americans pooled enough resources to actually challenge elite-supported candidates- note the absolute horror expressed by established liberals and media, and the ferocity with which they smashed his campaign on the most trivial of pretexts, a known and hidden microphone error]
In real terms, in simple brute terms, this class COULD challenge capitalism, effectively, without resorting to the age-old dialectics of power that characterize revolutions born of desperation and coups from vying pools of elites.
So the question becomes, why the fuck don't they?
We need to stop talking in terms of ideals and corruption and being bought off in the system. We can't just say that they're comfortable enough to do nothing. This analysis isn't rooted in materiality, really, neither the materiality of the economy nor the materiality of the working body in capitalism.
The work rhythms of capitalism, as they relate to most people in America, very simply make you want to escape work. Work is toil- not so wretched as to demand a change in quality, yet offering no real power or dignity (which is just knowledge of an egalitarian power) in life.
So we escape it. We work and then try and forget that we're working. We try and forget it before, during, and after work. So we think of ourselves as workers only secondarily. Indeed, this could be a good psychological indicator of class in America, at what level you identify with your work, and how consciously.
This makes perfect sense given the logic of work, especially in late capitalism*, but it also makes it fucking impossible to mobilize such people around a class identity primarily.
We see signs of this in certain seismic political shifts in America, for instance the collapse of working class based political organizing. The unions that prosper currently are those that focus more on issues of social justice and utilize and ethos of social work over those that focus on class identity.
How the hell do we deal with this? One method is to attack the chief avenues of escape from working identity.
*television
*alcohol and bar culture, as it currently functions
*drug culture
*popular music
*popular film
*a large portion of current "higher" arts
*organized religion
This has been the preferred method of Marxists. It has not fared well.
I think we need to make other methods primary.
*Focus on building a positive working class identity based on identity forming experience, skill development, and autonomous systems of learning and knowledge transmission and application.
*Rebuild an idea of "yeomanry." After all, the yeoman farmer of independent businessperson is the double, the affirmative twin, of the nihilistic late capitalist plebeian. Give a plebeian positive experience of productive, creative work, give her some genuine power over capital, and she'll turn into a yeoman ideologically. Give people genuine access to productive capital and systems to train them in its deployment and skilled operation in the economy.
*Encourage collective yeomanry, i.e. cooperatives. This is crucial, foundational. Only with roughly egalitarian cooperatives may we insure that people involved in a work place leave at 5 oclock feeling relatively "unalienated." Only with cooperatives can we guarantee that the chief requirement of unalienated labor, continuous participation in the construction of a shared narrative, is met.
These methods are incremental yet directed, they embody large clusters of steps with clear directions. Because of this, by the argument above, they are very difficult to deploy rhetorically. They don't have an aura of escape to them, they aren't cloaked in fantasy. But they must be developed.
*late capitalism for me refers simply to the condition of a large proletarian workforce that does not conceive itself as such, i.e. is detached enough from meaningful processes of production that it has no positive working class identity. for me the term only has meaning as a conjunction of economic identity and existential experience, based ultimately rhythms of the body. and their denial or affirmation. "late capitalism" is misleading as I would say that empires such as Rome developed the same condition with its plebeians.
so for instance, a white collar worker can easily forget their place in production, moreso than a stonemason, because of alienation from the final product.
Part of the difficulty of building a radical ideology that confronts capitalism as a whole lies in the very experience of it by the people most embedded within it. There are rough levels of participation- if you are truly desperate, as are several billion people in the world today, you desperately desire escape from a system whose material conditions you experience with brutality every day. Or, of course, you get used to it, and develop a stoic resolve oriented around survival, supporting children, etc.
If you are in the relative heights of power, you're quite conscious of the way your work dictates your life. You are conscious of it because it gives you power in the form of wealth and a certain prestige. These aren't illusory per se, but they are secondary signs of the basic fact that you form a cog in the bureaucracy of society, that your actions carry over to larger numbers of people. You have authority over others, you have a host of underlings, "ghost slaves" perhaps.
But in America, we need be concerned with the lower classes to middle classes. We have a swollen lower-middle class, and the lower middle class lives and breather by trying to forget what its true identity. This large brunt of America corresponds to the plebeians of Rome, underlings too beholden to society to oppose it significantly, yet dependent upon the dictates of higher level officials in the Roman bureaucracy and armies. It is this middle position between total desperation and total incorporation into the Machine that has long been the preferred class of liberals.
This is a crucial class to understand in America, because it's so fucking big, and in theory has tremendous resources upon which to draw. It potentially has the power to become both laborer and capitalist, by pooling resources en masse.
[for example, this was an interesting feature of the Howard Dean presidential campaign and the much heralded rise of small donors in the political process; a large horde of middling liberal Americans pooled enough resources to actually challenge elite-supported candidates- note the absolute horror expressed by established liberals and media, and the ferocity with which they smashed his campaign on the most trivial of pretexts, a known and hidden microphone error]
In real terms, in simple brute terms, this class COULD challenge capitalism, effectively, without resorting to the age-old dialectics of power that characterize revolutions born of desperation and coups from vying pools of elites.
So the question becomes, why the fuck don't they?
We need to stop talking in terms of ideals and corruption and being bought off in the system. We can't just say that they're comfortable enough to do nothing. This analysis isn't rooted in materiality, really, neither the materiality of the economy nor the materiality of the working body in capitalism.
The work rhythms of capitalism, as they relate to most people in America, very simply make you want to escape work. Work is toil- not so wretched as to demand a change in quality, yet offering no real power or dignity (which is just knowledge of an egalitarian power) in life.
So we escape it. We work and then try and forget that we're working. We try and forget it before, during, and after work. So we think of ourselves as workers only secondarily. Indeed, this could be a good psychological indicator of class in America, at what level you identify with your work, and how consciously.
This makes perfect sense given the logic of work, especially in late capitalism*, but it also makes it fucking impossible to mobilize such people around a class identity primarily.
We see signs of this in certain seismic political shifts in America, for instance the collapse of working class based political organizing. The unions that prosper currently are those that focus more on issues of social justice and utilize and ethos of social work over those that focus on class identity.
How the hell do we deal with this? One method is to attack the chief avenues of escape from working identity.
*television
*alcohol and bar culture, as it currently functions
*drug culture
*popular music
*popular film
*a large portion of current "higher" arts
*organized religion
This has been the preferred method of Marxists. It has not fared well.
I think we need to make other methods primary.
*Focus on building a positive working class identity based on identity forming experience, skill development, and autonomous systems of learning and knowledge transmission and application.
*Rebuild an idea of "yeomanry." After all, the yeoman farmer of independent businessperson is the double, the affirmative twin, of the nihilistic late capitalist plebeian. Give a plebeian positive experience of productive, creative work, give her some genuine power over capital, and she'll turn into a yeoman ideologically. Give people genuine access to productive capital and systems to train them in its deployment and skilled operation in the economy.
*Encourage collective yeomanry, i.e. cooperatives. This is crucial, foundational. Only with roughly egalitarian cooperatives may we insure that people involved in a work place leave at 5 oclock feeling relatively "unalienated." Only with cooperatives can we guarantee that the chief requirement of unalienated labor, continuous participation in the construction of a shared narrative, is met.
These methods are incremental yet directed, they embody large clusters of steps with clear directions. Because of this, by the argument above, they are very difficult to deploy rhetorically. They don't have an aura of escape to them, they aren't cloaked in fantasy. But they must be developed.
*late capitalism for me refers simply to the condition of a large proletarian workforce that does not conceive itself as such, i.e. is detached enough from meaningful processes of production that it has no positive working class identity. for me the term only has meaning as a conjunction of economic identity and existential experience, based ultimately rhythms of the body. and their denial or affirmation. "late capitalism" is misleading as I would say that empires such as Rome developed the same condition with its plebeians.
so for instance, a white collar worker can easily forget their place in production, moreso than a stonemason, because of alienation from the final product.
The Lucas Plan
The Lucas Plan was offered in the late '70s by the Shop Steward Combine Committee of Lucas Aerospace, a firm that focused in military production for NATO in Britain. Workers at the 15 different Lucas factories were involved in drafting this plan for shifting production away from military goods and towards socially useful goods.
The suggested changes included the following:
Medical Equipment:
- Increase production of kidney dialysis machines by 40% and look into the development of a portable model.
- Build up a 'design for the disabled' unit, with the Ministry of Health, to look into things like artificial limb control systems (which could use Lucas's control engineering expertise), sight aids for the blind, developing the 'Hobcart'. This vehicle was designed in the 1970s by an apprentice at Lucas to give mobility to children suffering from Spina Bifida. Lucas management had refused to develop it on the grounds that it was incompatible with their product range.
- Manufacture an improved life-support system for ambulances. An ex-Lucas engineer turned doctor had offered to help design and build a prototype for this, using a simple heat exchanger and pumping system.
Alternative Energy Techniques:
Due to the finite availability of fuels like coal and petrol, they proposed that Lucas concentrate on renewable sources of energy generation and developing more efficient methods of energy conservation from fuel sources. Up to 60% of energy is lost with traditional forms of its use (car engines etc.). Moreover this would provide a real alternative to nuclear power generation which was unsafe and damaging to the environment.
- Development and production of heat pumps which were efficient in saving waste heat. Such heat pumps would be used in new housing schemes to provide a very cheap service.
- Development and production of solar cells and fuel cells.
- Development of windmills. Lucas's experience in aerodynamics would be invaluable.
- Development of a flexible power pack, which could easily adjust to people's situations allowing for small scale electricity generation using basic raw materials. Such instruments would be invaluable in under-developed countries where electricity provision is very poor.
Transportation:
- The development of a road-rail public transportation vehicle which would be light-weight using pneumatic tyres on rails. Such a system would be cheaper, safer for use and more integrated. It would allow rail services to be provided in areas where they were being closed down, etc. The road-rail vehicle would be able to travel on rails mainly but also convert to road use when needed.
- A combined internal combustion engine/battery powered car which could give up to 50% fuel savings while reducing toxic emission from cars.
Notice that last one? That's right, they wanted to stop building warplanes and start building hybrid cars.
Now here's the important thing: these folks spent two years drafting a democratic redevelopment plan for their firm. Much of American manufacturing is geared towards military production, and so long as it is, we will always have an excessive military-industrial complex.
Currently there is a major push for converting American production to ecological technology, potentially spurring a renaissance in American manufacturing. We should use this opportunity to divorce the American economy from war production cycles.
Let us encourage a repetition of the Lucas plan in the states, and get our ailing manufacuring firms to reconceive their mission and possibilities.
Let this become a demand of democratic unions to rally progressives across America- remake yourselves! We want to help you, tell us how!
The suggested changes included the following:
Medical Equipment:
- Increase production of kidney dialysis machines by 40% and look into the development of a portable model.
- Build up a 'design for the disabled' unit, with the Ministry of Health, to look into things like artificial limb control systems (which could use Lucas's control engineering expertise), sight aids for the blind, developing the 'Hobcart'. This vehicle was designed in the 1970s by an apprentice at Lucas to give mobility to children suffering from Spina Bifida. Lucas management had refused to develop it on the grounds that it was incompatible with their product range.
- Manufacture an improved life-support system for ambulances. An ex-Lucas engineer turned doctor had offered to help design and build a prototype for this, using a simple heat exchanger and pumping system.
Alternative Energy Techniques:
Due to the finite availability of fuels like coal and petrol, they proposed that Lucas concentrate on renewable sources of energy generation and developing more efficient methods of energy conservation from fuel sources. Up to 60% of energy is lost with traditional forms of its use (car engines etc.). Moreover this would provide a real alternative to nuclear power generation which was unsafe and damaging to the environment.
- Development and production of heat pumps which were efficient in saving waste heat. Such heat pumps would be used in new housing schemes to provide a very cheap service.
- Development and production of solar cells and fuel cells.
- Development of windmills. Lucas's experience in aerodynamics would be invaluable.
- Development of a flexible power pack, which could easily adjust to people's situations allowing for small scale electricity generation using basic raw materials. Such instruments would be invaluable in under-developed countries where electricity provision is very poor.
Transportation:
- The development of a road-rail public transportation vehicle which would be light-weight using pneumatic tyres on rails. Such a system would be cheaper, safer for use and more integrated. It would allow rail services to be provided in areas where they were being closed down, etc. The road-rail vehicle would be able to travel on rails mainly but also convert to road use when needed.
- A combined internal combustion engine/battery powered car which could give up to 50% fuel savings while reducing toxic emission from cars.
Notice that last one? That's right, they wanted to stop building warplanes and start building hybrid cars.
Now here's the important thing: these folks spent two years drafting a democratic redevelopment plan for their firm. Much of American manufacturing is geared towards military production, and so long as it is, we will always have an excessive military-industrial complex.
Currently there is a major push for converting American production to ecological technology, potentially spurring a renaissance in American manufacturing. We should use this opportunity to divorce the American economy from war production cycles.
Let us encourage a repetition of the Lucas plan in the states, and get our ailing manufacuring firms to reconceive their mission and possibilities.
Let this become a demand of democratic unions to rally progressives across America- remake yourselves! We want to help you, tell us how!
Demilitarization
The anti-war movement in America has suffered from a variety of factors, but I think among them we must count limitation of scope.
We focus so much on wars as they occur that we do not attack the roots of warfare in America.
I don't mean by this that we must oppose all wars all the time. I mean that American society has become constructed such that our leaders launch foolish wars across the globe and we have nothing to say to stop them, or even hold them back. There are an array of war-profiteers waiting in the background to lap up profits on any conflict. Our citizenry, divorced from the realities of war, fear genuine critique because they want to remain loyal to the troops. Our Congress refrains from exercising the only check the legislature truly has in times of war- the power of the purse. Our economy is held up by industries tied to warfare and military research.
All of this must end, and we must be the generation that ends it. The rank arrogance of Mad King George shows us how unstable this line of living is in the world, how dangerous it is, how easy it is for the strong to make foolhardy choices and try to push world policy at the barrel of a gun.
We will demilitarize American society lest our bloody habits destroy us.
We focus so much on wars as they occur that we do not attack the roots of warfare in America.
I don't mean by this that we must oppose all wars all the time. I mean that American society has become constructed such that our leaders launch foolish wars across the globe and we have nothing to say to stop them, or even hold them back. There are an array of war-profiteers waiting in the background to lap up profits on any conflict. Our citizenry, divorced from the realities of war, fear genuine critique because they want to remain loyal to the troops. Our Congress refrains from exercising the only check the legislature truly has in times of war- the power of the purse. Our economy is held up by industries tied to warfare and military research.
All of this must end, and we must be the generation that ends it. The rank arrogance of Mad King George shows us how unstable this line of living is in the world, how dangerous it is, how easy it is for the strong to make foolhardy choices and try to push world policy at the barrel of a gun.
We will demilitarize American society lest our bloody habits destroy us.
Citizen's Army
We need to deinstitutionalize the professional army.
Instead of the massive force we normally maintain, ready for invasions the like sof which we currently see, let's mix a few ideas from the right together and create a practical assemblage.
1) Maintin professional forces, i.e. the Marines. Maintain small, professional squads with high skills ready for deployment in particular, specialized situations. This plan is actually a suggestion of neoconservative military policy, though I propose making it much more dramatic in its downgrading of forces.
2) Couple these professional forces with a major expansion of the National Guard, focused primarily of practical defense of America proper (not American interests abroad, not American allies, no more "cops of the world"). We will have significant citizen military training to maintain strong internal defense.
In the case of a major cause for actual war, such as attack on the United States' territory by an actual nation-state, these forces could be easily turned into a body of soldiers.
However, prior to such time, they are to be decentralized, with heavy authority of each state over their conduct, duties, and training.
To actually convert these forces, which are much closer to the militia of the American Revolution than anything currently in operation, will require the approval of each state for its Guard deployment. The federal government, Congress or the President, will not be able to call these troops to fight without state approval.
By state approval, I mean a state-wide plebescite, in which all state citizens can vote, including the Guard members.
This framework allows for major defense at all times coupled with highly trained professional forces for special military needs.
What it also does is demobilize the vast military apparatus of the United States and replace it with primarily defensive militia.
This is dramatic, but I think offers the most favorable position possible for the anti-war Left and major sections of the Right.
Instead of the massive force we normally maintain, ready for invasions the like sof which we currently see, let's mix a few ideas from the right together and create a practical assemblage.
1) Maintin professional forces, i.e. the Marines. Maintain small, professional squads with high skills ready for deployment in particular, specialized situations. This plan is actually a suggestion of neoconservative military policy, though I propose making it much more dramatic in its downgrading of forces.
2) Couple these professional forces with a major expansion of the National Guard, focused primarily of practical defense of America proper (not American interests abroad, not American allies, no more "cops of the world"). We will have significant citizen military training to maintain strong internal defense.
In the case of a major cause for actual war, such as attack on the United States' territory by an actual nation-state, these forces could be easily turned into a body of soldiers.
However, prior to such time, they are to be decentralized, with heavy authority of each state over their conduct, duties, and training.
To actually convert these forces, which are much closer to the militia of the American Revolution than anything currently in operation, will require the approval of each state for its Guard deployment. The federal government, Congress or the President, will not be able to call these troops to fight without state approval.
By state approval, I mean a state-wide plebescite, in which all state citizens can vote, including the Guard members.
This framework allows for major defense at all times coupled with highly trained professional forces for special military needs.
What it also does is demobilize the vast military apparatus of the United States and replace it with primarily defensive militia.
This is dramatic, but I think offers the most favorable position possible for the anti-war Left and major sections of the Right.
Power of the Purse-defunding the war
The anti-war movement can only end the Iraq war one way- defunding it.
The chief executive, whoever it happens to be, will not end this. The war will not end of its own accord.
We must refuse to pay for it in Congress.
This is the only way we can hope to stop the war democratically.
The chief executive, whoever it happens to be, will not end this. The war will not end of its own accord.
We must refuse to pay for it in Congress.
This is the only way we can hope to stop the war democratically.
The Vehicle: Cross-border Affinity Groups.
We have millions of people in America disgusted by the recklessness and corruption of this war, and many are willing to work to fight it. But they are offered few actions and few outlets to fight. The battle seems too great, the distance between Americans and Iraqis too insurmountable, the crashing inertia of the war too alien and powerful to oppose. In the absence of viable action, we worry over elections and hope that new leaders can divert a trainwreck. We doubt that they can fix the situation, but we have no other options.
We need a mechanism lo loose the force of all Americans willing to fight to rebuke the callous leadership of powermad leaders. We need a structure that can attack the war from a thousand directions.
That mechanism is the affinity group. We've seen its utility as a major component in anti-globalization movements around the world.
Principally, affinity groups allow us a starting point, a way to animate a moribund movement on manageable scales.
I would like to suggest a modification though. Our affinity groups should be cross-border, and each group should be comprised of Americans and Iraqis.
This is the most important aspect of this plan, and also the most difficult to manage. It requires the support of institutionalized members of the anti-war community, with enough resources and connections to encourage comunication between American and Iraqi citizens. Our flagship anti-war organizations may undertake this, as well as religious and interfaith bodies who might find this method most viable. Without their interest and support, this strategy cannot be fully enacted.
To list specific recommendations briefly:
*we work through affinity groups of no more than a dozen people
*each group includes Americans and Iraqis
*each group develops appropriate direct actions and support and communication structures
*each group includes standard affinity group offices
*larger organizations, such as interfaith bodies, unions, and flagship anti-war organizations, provide logistical support to groups, especially to insure contact between American and Iraqi members and to provide a forum for coordination of larger actions involving a variety of affinity groups
*cross-border work insures genuine, unadulterated communication between Americans and Iraqis
*American members will be responsible for helping maintain the security of their Iraqi affinity group members, in whatever ways they are possible- this is one of the chief aims of this strategy. Simple communication with an affinity group helps maintain some level of safety. American members can respond quickly within the US if members in Iraq are persecuted by police, military, militias, or sectarian groups. Iraqi members of groups can help maintain one another's security as well in the area, to whatever extent possible.
*each group should attempt to keep Iraqi members from different religious and ethnic backgrounds, to buttress up grassroots cross-denominational civil society in that country
Caveats:
*Appropriate direct actions should remain more or less legal, or nonviolent, given the possibility of unusually severe persecution by angered political officials in this sort of effort. In an effort such as this, successful international communication networks are vital. We must have the forethought to refrain from giving angry government officials any excuse to cut this communication off.
Rough Points of Unity:
*American troops must leave Iraq.
*Sectarian violence in Iraq must end, and the nation must embrace and enforce ethnic equality and safety.
*To reduce destabilization, violent efforts must be avoided.
*Iraqi resources, including and especially oil, must remain the property of the people of Iraq. Profiteering by oil and reconstruction companies must end and be redressed.
Rough Points of Honor for Affinity Groups:
*Members must treat one another with respect and dignity.
*Members must always work towards the safety of all other members.
*Decision-making must be as democratic as possible; preferably by consensus, and by a supermajority vote if consensus is not possible. If votes are taken, the votes of Iraqi members must be weighted more heavily than those of American members.
We need a mechanism lo loose the force of all Americans willing to fight to rebuke the callous leadership of powermad leaders. We need a structure that can attack the war from a thousand directions.
That mechanism is the affinity group. We've seen its utility as a major component in anti-globalization movements around the world.
Principally, affinity groups allow us a starting point, a way to animate a moribund movement on manageable scales.
I would like to suggest a modification though. Our affinity groups should be cross-border, and each group should be comprised of Americans and Iraqis.
This is the most important aspect of this plan, and also the most difficult to manage. It requires the support of institutionalized members of the anti-war community, with enough resources and connections to encourage comunication between American and Iraqi citizens. Our flagship anti-war organizations may undertake this, as well as religious and interfaith bodies who might find this method most viable. Without their interest and support, this strategy cannot be fully enacted.
To list specific recommendations briefly:
*we work through affinity groups of no more than a dozen people
*each group includes Americans and Iraqis
*each group develops appropriate direct actions and support and communication structures
*each group includes standard affinity group offices
*larger organizations, such as interfaith bodies, unions, and flagship anti-war organizations, provide logistical support to groups, especially to insure contact between American and Iraqi members and to provide a forum for coordination of larger actions involving a variety of affinity groups
*cross-border work insures genuine, unadulterated communication between Americans and Iraqis
*American members will be responsible for helping maintain the security of their Iraqi affinity group members, in whatever ways they are possible- this is one of the chief aims of this strategy. Simple communication with an affinity group helps maintain some level of safety. American members can respond quickly within the US if members in Iraq are persecuted by police, military, militias, or sectarian groups. Iraqi members of groups can help maintain one another's security as well in the area, to whatever extent possible.
*each group should attempt to keep Iraqi members from different religious and ethnic backgrounds, to buttress up grassroots cross-denominational civil society in that country
Caveats:
*Appropriate direct actions should remain more or less legal, or nonviolent, given the possibility of unusually severe persecution by angered political officials in this sort of effort. In an effort such as this, successful international communication networks are vital. We must have the forethought to refrain from giving angry government officials any excuse to cut this communication off.
Rough Points of Unity:
*American troops must leave Iraq.
*Sectarian violence in Iraq must end, and the nation must embrace and enforce ethnic equality and safety.
*To reduce destabilization, violent efforts must be avoided.
*Iraqi resources, including and especially oil, must remain the property of the people of Iraq. Profiteering by oil and reconstruction companies must end and be redressed.
Rough Points of Honor for Affinity Groups:
*Members must treat one another with respect and dignity.
*Members must always work towards the safety of all other members.
*Decision-making must be as democratic as possible; preferably by consensus, and by a supermajority vote if consensus is not possible. If votes are taken, the votes of Iraqi members must be weighted more heavily than those of American members.
I would like to suggest something to pivotal figures in the American anti-war movement.
I believe we must invent a new set of tactics if we wish to accomplish the goal of effectively ending the war in Iraq.
The situation seems to have developed to a point beyond the power of conventional politics to address. We have a steadily growing sectarian war, rooted in the same tit-for-tat exchanges that characterize the bloodiest long-term conflicts. Many Americans (and Iraqis) fear the possibility of even bloodier ethnic conflict. To this we might respond that our presence in Iraq only makes things worse, and leaving is still the best thing we can do. I will go futher though: we will not leave, precisely because it risks total regional destabilization. And while humanitarian sentiment might make we opposed to the war hesitate in our chosen action, the fear of regional destabilization will certainly prevent mainstream political leaders from withdrawing.
They won't stay in Iraq out of humanitarian fears. If the entire region destabilizes, oil supply will deteriorate immediately and we will find ourselves at the head of one of the worst recessions possible, probably even a depression.
The industrial world such as it currently is cannot afford major political destabilization in the main oil-producing nations. If major oil supplies are cut off suddenly, our society will grind down to a slow crawl.
I don't mean to suggest that we must stay in Iraq until the government improves the situation. I don't believe that they can. The tremendous infrastructural shortfalls stemming from both absurd policy from the Bush administration and systemic corruption from reconstruction contractors make this unlikely. That ethnic clashes have begun in earnest in Iraq makes this unikely. Even the most enlightened federal policy in insufficient now.
I am saying that if we opposed to the war want the war to end, we must throw out the old playbook and develop an autonomous strategy.
Yet we must do more than the conventional fare of oppositional politics. Marches will not end this.
We must build a movement capable of performing the very function it demands- brokering some sort of peace and withdrawal.
If our government has failed to build the infrastructure of peace, we must do so ourselves, bit by bit.
I believe we must invent a new set of tactics if we wish to accomplish the goal of effectively ending the war in Iraq.
The situation seems to have developed to a point beyond the power of conventional politics to address. We have a steadily growing sectarian war, rooted in the same tit-for-tat exchanges that characterize the bloodiest long-term conflicts. Many Americans (and Iraqis) fear the possibility of even bloodier ethnic conflict. To this we might respond that our presence in Iraq only makes things worse, and leaving is still the best thing we can do. I will go futher though: we will not leave, precisely because it risks total regional destabilization. And while humanitarian sentiment might make we opposed to the war hesitate in our chosen action, the fear of regional destabilization will certainly prevent mainstream political leaders from withdrawing.
They won't stay in Iraq out of humanitarian fears. If the entire region destabilizes, oil supply will deteriorate immediately and we will find ourselves at the head of one of the worst recessions possible, probably even a depression.
The industrial world such as it currently is cannot afford major political destabilization in the main oil-producing nations. If major oil supplies are cut off suddenly, our society will grind down to a slow crawl.
I don't mean to suggest that we must stay in Iraq until the government improves the situation. I don't believe that they can. The tremendous infrastructural shortfalls stemming from both absurd policy from the Bush administration and systemic corruption from reconstruction contractors make this unlikely. That ethnic clashes have begun in earnest in Iraq makes this unikely. Even the most enlightened federal policy in insufficient now.
I am saying that if we opposed to the war want the war to end, we must throw out the old playbook and develop an autonomous strategy.
Yet we must do more than the conventional fare of oppositional politics. Marches will not end this.
We must build a movement capable of performing the very function it demands- brokering some sort of peace and withdrawal.
If our government has failed to build the infrastructure of peace, we must do so ourselves, bit by bit.
655,000
655,000 Iraqis now dead that wouldn't be were it not for the war, since 2003.
American metropolitan areas* with a population of around 655,000 or less, and rank by size:
76 Stockton CA 664,116
77 Toledo OH 656,696
78 Knoxville TN 655,400
79 Syracuse NY 651,763
80 Little Rock�North Little Rock AR 643,272
81 Charleston�North Charleston SC 594,899
82 Youngstown�Warren�Boardman OH�PA 593,168
83 Greenville SC 591,251
84 Colorado Springs CO 587,500
85 Wichita KS 587,055
86 Scranton�Wilkes-Barre PA 550,546
87 Cape Coral�Fort Myers FL 544,758
88 Boise City�Nampa ID 544,201
89 Lakeland FL 542,912
90 Madison WI 537,039
91 Palm Bay�Melbourne�Titusville FL 531,250
92 Jackson MS 522,580
93 Des Moines�West Des Moines IA 522,454
94 Harrisburg�Carlisle PA 521,812
95 Augusta-Richmond County GA�SC 520,332
96 Portland�South Portland�Biddeford ME 514,227
97 Modesto CA 505,505
98 Chattanooga TN�GA 492,126
99 Lancaster PA 490,562
100 Deltona�Daytona Beach�Ormond Beach FL 490,055
101 Ogden�Clearfield UT 486,842
102 Santa Rosa�Petaluma CA 466,477
103 Durham NC 456,187
104 Lansing�East Lansing MI 455,315
105 Winston-Salem NC 448,629
106 Flint MI 443,883
107 Spokane WA 440,706
108 Pensacola�Ferry Pass�Brent FL 439,877
109 Lexington-Fayette KY 429,889
110 Corpus Christi TX 413,553
111 Salinas CA 412,104
112 Vallejo�Fairfield CA 412,970
113 Provo�Orem UT 411,593
114 Visalia�Porterville CA 410,874
115 Canton�Massillon OH 409,996
116 York�Hanover PA 408,801
117 Fayetteville�Springdale�Rogers AR�MO 405,101
118 Fort Wayne IN 404,414
119 Mobile AL 401,427
120 Manchester�Nashua NH 401,291
121 Santa Barbara�Santa Maria CA 400,762
122 Springfield MO 398,124
123 Reading PA 396,314
124 Reno�Sparks NV 393,946
125 Asheville NC 392,831
126 Beaumont�Port Arthur TX 383,530
127 Shreveport�Bossier City LA 383,233
128 Port St. Lucie�Fort Pierce FL 381,033
129 Brownsville�Harlingen TX 378,311
130 Davenport�Moline�Rock Island IA�IL 376,309
131 Salem OR 375,560
132 Peoria IL 369,161
133 Huntsville AL 368,661
134 Trenton�Ewing NJ 366,256
135 Montgomery AL 357,244
136 Hickory�Lenoir�Morganton NC 355,654
137 Killeen�Temple�Fort Hood TX 351,528
138 Anchorage AK 351,049
139 Evansville IN�KY 349,543
140 Fayetteville NC 345,536
141 Ann Arbor MI 341,847
142 Rockford IL 339,178
143 Eugene�Springfield OR 335,180
144 Tallahassee FL 334,886
145 Kalamazoo�Portage MI 319,348
146 South Bend�Mishawaka IN�MI 318,156
147 Wilmington NC 315,144
148 Savannah GA 313,883
149 Naples�Marco Island FL 307,242
150 Charleston WV 306,435
151 Ocala FL 303,442
152 Kingsport�Bristol�Bristol TN�VA 301,294
153 Utica�Rome NY 297,885
154 Green Bay WI 297,493
155 Roanoke VA 292,983
156 Huntington�Ashland WV�KY�OH 286,012
157 Fort Smith AR�OK 284,994
158 Columbus GA�AL 284,299
159 Lincoln NE 281,553
160 Erie PA 280,446
161 Boulder CO 280,440
162 Duluth MN�WI 275,413
163 Fort Collins�Loveland CO 271,927
164 Atlantic City NJ 271,015
165 Spartanburg SC 266,809
166 Norwich�New London CT 266,618
167 Lubbock TX 258,970
168 San Luis Obispo�Paso Robles CA 255,478
169 Holland�Grand Haven MI 255,406
170 Gulfport�Biloxi MS 255,383
171 Hagerstown�Martinsburg MD�WV 251,311
172 Santa Cruz�Watsonville CA 249,666
173 Binghamton NY 248,422
174 Lafayette LA 247,824
175 Cedar Rapids IA 246,412
176 Clarksville TN�KY 243,665
177 Merced CA 241,706
178 Bremerton�Silverdale WA 240,661
179 Gainesville FL 240,254
180 Amarillo TX 238,664
181 Lynchburg VA 236,910
182 Yakima WA 231,586
183 Topeka KS 229,075
184 Greeley CO 228,943
185 Olympia WA 228,867
186 Macon GA 228,712
187 Myrtle Beach�Conway�North Myrtle Beach SC 226,992
188 Barnstable Town MA 226,514
189 Laredo TX 224,695
190 Waco TX 224,668
191 Kennewick�Richland�Pasco WA 220,961
192 Champaign�Urbana IL 215,742
193 Appleton WI 215,143
194 Chico CA 214,185
195 Saginaw�Saginaw Township North MI 208,356
196 Sioux Falls SD 207,918
197 Springfield IL 205,527
198 Burlington�South Burlington VT 205,230
199 Longview TX 201,501
200 Houma�Bayou Cane�Thibodaux LA 199,670
201 Prescott AZ 198,701
202 Florence SC 198,443
203 Tuscaloosa AL 196,885
204 Racine WI 195,708
205 Elkhart�Goshen IN 195,362
206 Medford OR 195,322
207 Lake Charles LA 194,977
208 Tyler TX 190,594
209 College Station�Bryan TX 189,735
210 Las Cruces NM 189,444
211 Johnson City TN 188,944
212 Charlottesville VA 188,424
213 Fargo ND�MN 184,857
214 Bellingham WA 183,471
215 Lafayette IN 183,340
216 Kingston NY 182,693
217 Fort Walton Beach�Crestview�Destin FL 182,172
218 Yuma AZ 181,277
219 St. Cloud MN 181,159
220 Redding CA 179,904
221 Bloomington IN 177,709
222 Rochester MN 176,984
223 Muskegon�Norton Shores MI 175,554
224 Anderson SC 175,514
225 Athens�Clarke County GA 175,085
226 Monroe LA 171,138
227 Terre Haute IN 168,059
228 Joplin MO 166,178
229 Gainesville GA 165,771
230 Jackson MI 163,629
231 Albany GA 162,842
232 Niles�Benton Harbor MI 162,611
233 Greenville NC 162,596
234 Parkersburg�Marietta�Vienna WV�OH 162,529
235 Waterloo�Cedar Falls IA 161,897
236 Panama City�Lynn Haven FL 161,558
237 Oshkosh�Neenah WI 159,482
238 Bloomington�Normal IL 159,013
239 Abilene TX 158,291
240 Janesville WI 157,538
241 Punta Gorda FL 157,536
242 Pascagoula MS 157,199
243 Yuba City CA 156,029
244 El Centro CA 155,823
245 Eau Claire WI 154,039
246 Monroe MI 153,935
247 Columbia MO 153,283
248 Vineland�Millville�Bridgeton NJ 153,252
249 Jacksonville NC 152,440
250 Pueblo CO 151,322
251 Blacksburg�Christiansburg�Radford VA 151,057
Moral: we have done the human equivalent of snuffing Knoxville, TN, from the face of the earth, and rendering all her people into tallow to grease cannons and oil wells. Half a million people will now never grow a second older, never see their kids have kids, never see their homes find peace, never feel an instant of the freedom Americans think they're fighting for.
End it. End it now.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_metropolitan_areas; down to 150,000 in population
American metropolitan areas* with a population of around 655,000 or less, and rank by size:
76 Stockton CA 664,116
77 Toledo OH 656,696
78 Knoxville TN 655,400
79 Syracuse NY 651,763
80 Little Rock�North Little Rock AR 643,272
81 Charleston�North Charleston SC 594,899
82 Youngstown�Warren�Boardman OH�PA 593,168
83 Greenville SC 591,251
84 Colorado Springs CO 587,500
85 Wichita KS 587,055
86 Scranton�Wilkes-Barre PA 550,546
87 Cape Coral�Fort Myers FL 544,758
88 Boise City�Nampa ID 544,201
89 Lakeland FL 542,912
90 Madison WI 537,039
91 Palm Bay�Melbourne�Titusville FL 531,250
92 Jackson MS 522,580
93 Des Moines�West Des Moines IA 522,454
94 Harrisburg�Carlisle PA 521,812
95 Augusta-Richmond County GA�SC 520,332
96 Portland�South Portland�Biddeford ME 514,227
97 Modesto CA 505,505
98 Chattanooga TN�GA 492,126
99 Lancaster PA 490,562
100 Deltona�Daytona Beach�Ormond Beach FL 490,055
101 Ogden�Clearfield UT 486,842
102 Santa Rosa�Petaluma CA 466,477
103 Durham NC 456,187
104 Lansing�East Lansing MI 455,315
105 Winston-Salem NC 448,629
106 Flint MI 443,883
107 Spokane WA 440,706
108 Pensacola�Ferry Pass�Brent FL 439,877
109 Lexington-Fayette KY 429,889
110 Corpus Christi TX 413,553
111 Salinas CA 412,104
112 Vallejo�Fairfield CA 412,970
113 Provo�Orem UT 411,593
114 Visalia�Porterville CA 410,874
115 Canton�Massillon OH 409,996
116 York�Hanover PA 408,801
117 Fayetteville�Springdale�Rogers AR�MO 405,101
118 Fort Wayne IN 404,414
119 Mobile AL 401,427
120 Manchester�Nashua NH 401,291
121 Santa Barbara�Santa Maria CA 400,762
122 Springfield MO 398,124
123 Reading PA 396,314
124 Reno�Sparks NV 393,946
125 Asheville NC 392,831
126 Beaumont�Port Arthur TX 383,530
127 Shreveport�Bossier City LA 383,233
128 Port St. Lucie�Fort Pierce FL 381,033
129 Brownsville�Harlingen TX 378,311
130 Davenport�Moline�Rock Island IA�IL 376,309
131 Salem OR 375,560
132 Peoria IL 369,161
133 Huntsville AL 368,661
134 Trenton�Ewing NJ 366,256
135 Montgomery AL 357,244
136 Hickory�Lenoir�Morganton NC 355,654
137 Killeen�Temple�Fort Hood TX 351,528
138 Anchorage AK 351,049
139 Evansville IN�KY 349,543
140 Fayetteville NC 345,536
141 Ann Arbor MI 341,847
142 Rockford IL 339,178
143 Eugene�Springfield OR 335,180
144 Tallahassee FL 334,886
145 Kalamazoo�Portage MI 319,348
146 South Bend�Mishawaka IN�MI 318,156
147 Wilmington NC 315,144
148 Savannah GA 313,883
149 Naples�Marco Island FL 307,242
150 Charleston WV 306,435
151 Ocala FL 303,442
152 Kingsport�Bristol�Bristol TN�VA 301,294
153 Utica�Rome NY 297,885
154 Green Bay WI 297,493
155 Roanoke VA 292,983
156 Huntington�Ashland WV�KY�OH 286,012
157 Fort Smith AR�OK 284,994
158 Columbus GA�AL 284,299
159 Lincoln NE 281,553
160 Erie PA 280,446
161 Boulder CO 280,440
162 Duluth MN�WI 275,413
163 Fort Collins�Loveland CO 271,927
164 Atlantic City NJ 271,015
165 Spartanburg SC 266,809
166 Norwich�New London CT 266,618
167 Lubbock TX 258,970
168 San Luis Obispo�Paso Robles CA 255,478
169 Holland�Grand Haven MI 255,406
170 Gulfport�Biloxi MS 255,383
171 Hagerstown�Martinsburg MD�WV 251,311
172 Santa Cruz�Watsonville CA 249,666
173 Binghamton NY 248,422
174 Lafayette LA 247,824
175 Cedar Rapids IA 246,412
176 Clarksville TN�KY 243,665
177 Merced CA 241,706
178 Bremerton�Silverdale WA 240,661
179 Gainesville FL 240,254
180 Amarillo TX 238,664
181 Lynchburg VA 236,910
182 Yakima WA 231,586
183 Topeka KS 229,075
184 Greeley CO 228,943
185 Olympia WA 228,867
186 Macon GA 228,712
187 Myrtle Beach�Conway�North Myrtle Beach SC 226,992
188 Barnstable Town MA 226,514
189 Laredo TX 224,695
190 Waco TX 224,668
191 Kennewick�Richland�Pasco WA 220,961
192 Champaign�Urbana IL 215,742
193 Appleton WI 215,143
194 Chico CA 214,185
195 Saginaw�Saginaw Township North MI 208,356
196 Sioux Falls SD 207,918
197 Springfield IL 205,527
198 Burlington�South Burlington VT 205,230
199 Longview TX 201,501
200 Houma�Bayou Cane�Thibodaux LA 199,670
201 Prescott AZ 198,701
202 Florence SC 198,443
203 Tuscaloosa AL 196,885
204 Racine WI 195,708
205 Elkhart�Goshen IN 195,362
206 Medford OR 195,322
207 Lake Charles LA 194,977
208 Tyler TX 190,594
209 College Station�Bryan TX 189,735
210 Las Cruces NM 189,444
211 Johnson City TN 188,944
212 Charlottesville VA 188,424
213 Fargo ND�MN 184,857
214 Bellingham WA 183,471
215 Lafayette IN 183,340
216 Kingston NY 182,693
217 Fort Walton Beach�Crestview�Destin FL 182,172
218 Yuma AZ 181,277
219 St. Cloud MN 181,159
220 Redding CA 179,904
221 Bloomington IN 177,709
222 Rochester MN 176,984
223 Muskegon�Norton Shores MI 175,554
224 Anderson SC 175,514
225 Athens�Clarke County GA 175,085
226 Monroe LA 171,138
227 Terre Haute IN 168,059
228 Joplin MO 166,178
229 Gainesville GA 165,771
230 Jackson MI 163,629
231 Albany GA 162,842
232 Niles�Benton Harbor MI 162,611
233 Greenville NC 162,596
234 Parkersburg�Marietta�Vienna WV�OH 162,529
235 Waterloo�Cedar Falls IA 161,897
236 Panama City�Lynn Haven FL 161,558
237 Oshkosh�Neenah WI 159,482
238 Bloomington�Normal IL 159,013
239 Abilene TX 158,291
240 Janesville WI 157,538
241 Punta Gorda FL 157,536
242 Pascagoula MS 157,199
243 Yuba City CA 156,029
244 El Centro CA 155,823
245 Eau Claire WI 154,039
246 Monroe MI 153,935
247 Columbia MO 153,283
248 Vineland�Millville�Bridgeton NJ 153,252
249 Jacksonville NC 152,440
250 Pueblo CO 151,322
251 Blacksburg�Christiansburg�Radford VA 151,057
Moral: we have done the human equivalent of snuffing Knoxville, TN, from the face of the earth, and rendering all her people into tallow to grease cannons and oil wells. Half a million people will now never grow a second older, never see their kids have kids, never see their homes find peace, never feel an instant of the freedom Americans think they're fighting for.
End it. End it now.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_metropolitan_areas; down to 150,000 in population
The anti-war movment has not taken an aggressive enough posture in regards to their opponent, which is the spirit of war coursing through modern society.
We try and oppose wars when they occur, occassionally before they begin. But if we want to act against war, especially modern resource wars, we must go a little further. We must focus on the very conditions of production of war.
This includes opposing drafts/conscription as well as anti-recruitment campaigns. These deal with wars at the point of labor.
But we should also deal with war at the point of capital. To this end, we should organize major divestments from war industries and war profiteers, any and all of them.
And finally, we must fight on the virtual plane of the production of warfare. By this I mean we must change the material organization of the world that allows our wars to develop.
In the current ridiculous American adventurism, this vague comment becomes immediately clear. We must demolish the oil economy, utterly. We must completely eliminate the use of limited sources for the production of energy and electricity.
Wars are fought for something, to gain something, land, titles, power over resources. This is crude but tends to be true throughout time. Yet at the base of this lies a little trick, a clever manoeuver that takes decades or centuries.
Some item in the world must be found or constructed that is inherently limited, or can be made limited. Economic society must then be organized around that thing, that little set, and the increased demand enforces a constant limitation of the good's supply relative to its economic demand. Currently, we see oil taking this position. In centuries past it was spices, access to trade routes. In millenia past (and soon enough in times to come) it was (will be) control of irrigation and water sources for imperial states in the Near East and China. The pattern holds across time, and this pattern is simply- engineer a grand Lack and then bleed your people fighting over it.
We must take Lack out of our economy, and to do this we must create around and outside of it. Meaning? We must invent and work our way out of dependence on limited petroleum resources. Indeed, we must invent our way around any system of energy based on production that is necessarily limited in space and time.
[For instance, nuclear power is no great salvation here, so long as it must be regulated and enforced by global powers because of the threat of nuclear weapons. Nuclear power is tailor-made to be bound to massive state and corporate interventions.]
To fight wars, we must fight the condition of Lack that demands the production of wars; to fight Lack, we must invent around limited power sources that an be easily monopolized.
Meaning, to fight against our modern oil wars we must build an energy infrastructure based on solar, wind, and biomass energy and fuels.
So, once again, to fight against war we must address the three major points that collide to generate warfare:
*labor: fighting military recruitment and the draft
*capital: divesting from the war economy
*the underpinning of war, its "concrete virtual space": replacing the petroleum economy with a solar, wind, and biomass economy
We try and oppose wars when they occur, occassionally before they begin. But if we want to act against war, especially modern resource wars, we must go a little further. We must focus on the very conditions of production of war.
This includes opposing drafts/conscription as well as anti-recruitment campaigns. These deal with wars at the point of labor.
But we should also deal with war at the point of capital. To this end, we should organize major divestments from war industries and war profiteers, any and all of them.
And finally, we must fight on the virtual plane of the production of warfare. By this I mean we must change the material organization of the world that allows our wars to develop.
In the current ridiculous American adventurism, this vague comment becomes immediately clear. We must demolish the oil economy, utterly. We must completely eliminate the use of limited sources for the production of energy and electricity.
Wars are fought for something, to gain something, land, titles, power over resources. This is crude but tends to be true throughout time. Yet at the base of this lies a little trick, a clever manoeuver that takes decades or centuries.
Some item in the world must be found or constructed that is inherently limited, or can be made limited. Economic society must then be organized around that thing, that little set, and the increased demand enforces a constant limitation of the good's supply relative to its economic demand. Currently, we see oil taking this position. In centuries past it was spices, access to trade routes. In millenia past (and soon enough in times to come) it was (will be) control of irrigation and water sources for imperial states in the Near East and China. The pattern holds across time, and this pattern is simply- engineer a grand Lack and then bleed your people fighting over it.
We must take Lack out of our economy, and to do this we must create around and outside of it. Meaning? We must invent and work our way out of dependence on limited petroleum resources. Indeed, we must invent our way around any system of energy based on production that is necessarily limited in space and time.
[For instance, nuclear power is no great salvation here, so long as it must be regulated and enforced by global powers because of the threat of nuclear weapons. Nuclear power is tailor-made to be bound to massive state and corporate interventions.]
To fight wars, we must fight the condition of Lack that demands the production of wars; to fight Lack, we must invent around limited power sources that an be easily monopolized.
Meaning, to fight against our modern oil wars we must build an energy infrastructure based on solar, wind, and biomass energy and fuels.
So, once again, to fight against war we must address the three major points that collide to generate warfare:
*labor: fighting military recruitment and the draft
*capital: divesting from the war economy
*the underpinning of war, its "concrete virtual space": replacing the petroleum economy with a solar, wind, and biomass economy
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)