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.