Existential equality and class stratification, loose thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A model for high school education

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

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

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

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

*Liberal arts and sciences.

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

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

Americanism and wilderness

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

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

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

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

Agamben on movements

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

Very fucking interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Folks express living by their clinamen...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on Fantasia and Voss; Baudrillardian model for labor "militance"

Reading Hard Work by Fantasia and Voss, excellent overview of the particular problems of the American labor movement.

The unusual part (that I like) is their focus on the symbolic power of social movements. They don't do this in an overly academic way, they mention it alongside real political and institutional situations. But they mention it, and they point out that the business unionism of the post-WWII era rooted in bureaucracy and social contractism crippled the sets of desire that allow for strong and militant unionism. Immediate resolution of problems on the shopfloor, broad inclusiveness, a sense of participation in a larger social movement, and the experience of "sacralizing" fairly mundane events thereby. All of these gave unions strength and vitality, and their absence makes them less robust.

I don't think the shopfloor antagonisms have gone away at all. I think they have been channeled away from their potential resolution in spaces of either immediate agon or bureaucratic mediation.

I think the working class has stopped imagining itself as such, and instead of resolving "shopfloor" tensions in a direct way, it has undertaken something else entirely. It has taken the paths of resistance open to ideological slaves, namely passive avoidance and self-abuse and denigration. This manifests itself either in the bodies of single individuals or in the relationships between collectivities, groups, couples, packs of friends and associates, etc.

I put "shopfloor" in quotes because we have a social factory now (and honestly always did) and so the workplace itself is really just a system, a concept displaced onto matter along a particular logic. We see the same logics in schools, governments, professional and technological societies, churches, prisons, sites of recreation, as media participants and consumers, as consumers in general, etc etc etc.

Because American society has displaced space for direct confrontation, of which the workplace is simply the easiest site to show both this practice and its negative repercussions, instead we have a viscous flow, Baudrillard's mass perhaps. There is a rise of self-policing and a decentralized regulation, but it occurs as a secondary phenomenon, wholly inadequate to stabilizing labor.

Capitalists and hence those who think through and by capitalist ideology (meaning most of us most of the time) have tremendous difficulty keeping a clear view of these things. Capitalists have no "memory," meaning simply that profits in a particular constellation of labor and desire are transient, and capitalists must remain uncritically and constantly in observation of their markets. When the markets representing public desire shift, new capitalists rise to the fore, new companies gain the upper hand, and old companies must adapt. So there is no cause or structural ability to remember what labor was five years ago let alone thirty years ago, nor to tease out the unconscious drives in operation in the past and in operation now.

So, to put it bluntly, if labor has entered a period of alienation, neurosis and widespread self-abuse (psychologically, spiritually and physically) there is no need for a capitalist logic to worry too much over it in the short-term. They can always sell self-help books or even better, make enormous profits from the sale of psychoactive drugs and medicines. Or in the prison economy, or through the massive service and entertainment sectors.

The expansion of these sectors represents a new phase of "labor militance." However, this is labor militance of a fairly strange new form.

If you take a wild animal, chain her up, and starve her of attention and community, she will chew her own leg off to escape. Will to difference does not vanish and cannot be stopped or halted, and this is the thing that capitalist logic at its core has always desired and worked towards. Stasis, calculability. It has succeeded in America in simulating near-total victory.

However, will to difference has not stopped. It has turned against itself.

The only rebellion open to a slave in the purest and most effective of absolutisms, at the end of the day, is suicide. And so as the integration of capitalist logic becomes more and more complete for vast swaths of the American population, we see more and more cracks in basic social structures in America. We see massive increases in medication and self-medication, we see prison populations that never cease to grow, we see slow collapse in schools.

We also and far less nihilistically see rejection outright of the working class of the most alienated forms of labor and dependence upon imported and exported workforces. This is not a sufficient strategy for revolt, but it does open some doors, and it does reveal the nature of the problem effectively.

Another version of this is the expansion of schooling as a near automatic choice for much of the young population. Again, rather than profit in alienated work, young people pay for an identity that will leave them debtors or simply impoverished. There is some economic necessity and gain for this, true, but I think there is a much more subjective element of desire for most people. The economic advantage of schooling is more a justification and rationalization than a direct cause.

Solidarity and the Event

Reading Hard Work by Fantasia and Voss.

As I stated before, they show much concern over the symbolic imaginary of labor, the transformative power of labor rituals. Embeddness in a larger movement of change and social transfiguration, lacking totally in the post-WWII business unionism, allows mundane shopfloor encounters to take on a more significant quality, to be sacralized.

They're using solidarity as the foundational sentiment of radical unionism.

Now, here's my question. Is solidarity independent of the actual event of labor, i.e. loyalty to the act of invention itself, or are they linked organically? In a certain sense this is a question of industrial union vs. craft union. In a certain sense it is also a question of the plane of immanence in relation to the event, or the Body without Organs in relation to the machines whose intensities constitute it.

For me it's an open question.

I'm leaning in a certain direction at the moment, though that will very likely change.

I'm thinking it's one of two possibilities.

*They are linked automatically, and capitalism is the artificial force that divides them in order to produce stabilized and neutered BwOs. So in this reading, craft specialization is a form of eternal return (becoming that looks like being, a dynamism that looks like stasis only because the dynamic is apportioned to a semi-stable set of practices). It is a contraction dependent upon the dilation of sociality in general.

*They are functionally autonomous, and it is the duty of politics/philosophy/whatever to create a space for their cohabitation and mutual reinforcement. So the current field of social desire is delinked, which occurs naturally as fields of repetition swerve apart. They swerve too far and society crumbles, so politics is necessary to intervene. I don't like this model because it's too close to the fascist one, the chaotic proles and businessmen/state unifed by the movement.

I think the two look about the same, though. They just suggest different strategies. In the second, you try and forcibly bring popular sentiment towards intensity. In the former you recognize the intensities present in popular sentiment and open spaces for them to push into greater intensity.

These are still unclear to me, both in their qualities and in their ramifications. This question though is central, the integration of craft desire and general desire. The event and solidarity...

Notes on Jane Jacobs

I like chicken salad. I normally buy it from the deli section at the HEB, but it's a little pricey relative to what you get that way. I was thinking, maybe I should just make it myself, seems easy enough. So I just found a recipe for chicken salad. Pretty f-ing easy just hadn't bothered to check. I was reading it and then thinking of things I might want to also stick in it.

And this made me think of the economic ideas of Jane Jacobs, journalist and urban theorist, prime mover in the backlash against modernist architecture and building schemes. She also wrote some odd little books on political economy.

She said that cities are the engines of innovation and economic development, and that economics viewed in terms of nations is absurd. She also said that the best way to bring rural regions out of poverty is to citify them, extending this logic to third world development.

Cities build wealth through import-replacement.

Here's her model for the birth of civilization as we know it (and with that why my chicken salad research tangent is related):

*you start with some nomadic tribes
*they trade items
*they trade items that are found in their territories for items not found in their territories; or they develop a skill and trade the goods they produce thereby
*a hub starts to develop where someone gets the bright idea to produce a traded good in large volume, and regular trading netowrks are established to provide other goods.
*those networks start folding into the hub

By her argument, for instance the city precedes agriculture. Agriculture is something cities produce to meet their needs, it isn't a stage on the way to urban specialization.

Think that is roughly her schema.

It's very interesting. D&G like it apparently. It appears to oppose the city to the Ur-staat. Think about the basic model. Nomads swapping skills. The model of economic growth, import-replacement, follows this logic:
*a foreign commodity is desired
*that commodity is essentially reverse-engineered, a new nomad group (or whoever) studies its production with an aim of generating it locally
*in the process of learning to reproduce the thing they gain an intimate connection to the process of its production and hence can innovate, change it make static knowledge dyynamic.

So this is one of the useful functions Jacobs offers us in thinking through political economy. Rather than abstraction we have this absolute focus on the concrete, even more concrete than national economies (she even criticizes national money systems and advocates currency focused around a city). And we are given an elemental unit of human economic growth but it is not really passive consumption or a sort of disembodied self-interested rationalism. The basic unit of economic growth in this model isn't really the individual, selfish or otherwise. It's a unit of mimicking and reorganizing a practice. Repetition with a difference.

So in the base of political economy we have a swerve and a shift, difference all the way down.

I think my main criticism of what I've read of her work is too much of a bias towards what she construes as urban in her own day and age. Something about urban life as we have decided to live it radically damages and dismisses nature. I don' t think this is necessary, even my only counter-examples are large Iroquois towns and the fluid style of their agriculture. It's the old question, right? The hyper-determination of the city is itself dependent upon a layer of indeterminacy, a wild zone, and the urban world tends to degrade that wild zone articulate it as a dead or neutered space when it is actually a vital torrent. This is a peculiar criticism, but Jacobs is a peculiar economist at any rate. I wonder that her urbanism requires her to construct an undeveloped barbarous zone outside the city walls, a dead zone ripe for the taking.

The Derrideans (maybe just pop Derrideans) bring me towards this in a way, their focus on any agency being dependent upon a passivity. Self is only self with an Other etc., binary opposition,etc. The subordinate term is not just articulated, it is debased, murdered, turned into a dead and neutered thing. It feels as though Jacobs does this with her idea of the country outside the city.

And I wonder how essential this is to the concepts I find compelling in her work.

It's a question of definition. So for instance you could define the working class as primarily that class engaged in a master/slave dialectic with the capitalist bourgeoisie, or something to that effect. A binary opposition with a repressed term.

Or you could define it as the people who work and blend mental and physical experience into myriad forms of labor, extending their being beyond the boundaries of their flesh thereby. An immanent definition.

I think honestly power works through binaries and liberation works through autonomous immanence.

You could define the country as people who aren't city-dwellers, who lack its resources and wealth and sophistication. You can also define country people as those who regularly blend their labor with complex ecological systems, enhancing them in a complementary fashion.

You could also simply define the city as the zone of import-replacement and reinvention, to greater or lesser levels of intensity.

I like the import-replacement model, very much in fact, but I do think that binarism is somehow unnecessary, a product of living in an already degraded system. The two poles she develops in reality need each other draw each other together into a smooth continuum. The reverence of the country with the willpower and curiosity of the city, together they prevent torpor in one and violent arrogance in the other.

Maybe...

Light attempt to adapt Spinoza to the everyday and think of the everyday alongside Spinoza

[W]e fear death primarily because we misplace identity upon this thing we call our self, our life. our life isn't a closed entity, it is comprised of a lifetime of motions and impressions and communions and dialogs. every moment we live and breathe we spill over out into the world.

so immortality isn't some sublime mystery to be apprehended through false religion or obsession with science and technocracy. our being survives our individual minds and bodies automatically, living immediately in the world of those who survive us as our streams of affect have come to form bits of their own skin and memories and desires and conditioning. that is, as long as we live with open lives and open souls. as long as we live to create a flow of being out into our larger milieu, we gain a real measure of immortality.

this leaves us with two imperatives, however, to ensure that this overflowing can occur with vigor.

the individual must always condition her soul for overflowing, living with he fellows in open dialog, reverence and the most trenchant humanity. we must allow ourselves to merge fluidly with others as concrete, embodied individuals, share our rhythms, offer them up.

the individual must also seek to reduce the structual alienation present in the world, in all levels and manifestations, for each alienation represents a barrier to spreading the little bacteriophages of our being through traces and streams of affect.

the greatest immortality is that which occurs when we reduce the barriers between ourselves and the world and within that lived collective world. we can then rejoice in the presence of our decentered life throughout the perambulations of the world. this memory is virtual, it lives in flesh and patterns and traces, we cannot truly map out its full range of connections, but we may be assured it is there.

and hence each moment carries with it a mark of infinity that refers to the most particular event and the great breadth of the world across space and time.

Anarchist labor

Labor is movement the binds together diverse people and things through the act of construction. This may be construction of a good, a tool, an affect or an occasion. The key point is that the identity of the participants become bound together through the collective development of an other thing. The thing forms a focal point that destabilizes and restabilizes the movements and habits of the workers involved.

An act of unalienated labor is akin to a ritual. There is no necessary unity between workers involved in a task. Labor takes the chaos of the world, manifested through the particular lives of a collection of workers, and puts that chaos towards the construction of a thing. The type of thing varies tremendously, but its qualities will serve as marks of the particular characteristics of the workers involved.

This is easy to see in some cases. For instance, in a project requiring the efforts of skilled tradespeople, we can see the influence of a particular worker on the overall structure.

In other projects, that influence is felt in more indirect ways, through the politics of workplace organization, the deployment of certain technologies and techniques over others, the price of goods, the overall flexibility of the firm or general economy, etc. We see the influence of the worker in the social character of the goods and services produced.

In firms governed by a logic of mechanical reproduction and elevation of a uniform logic, we can easily locate the individual contribution of employees- that very uniformity exists as an expression of the discipline and disciplining of the workforce, such that they reduce experimentation and error to a minimum. The particular contribution of the worker in this case is self-denial and obedience, ideally. In actuality their presence is felt also through the minor rebellions of poor service and casual low-level sabotage (say, a fast-food worker pissing in a mixing pot or spitting on an order) and high turnover rates.

In any instance, work should be seen as a system of workers' aggregated desire if we are to understand its immanent dynamics at the point of production.

Labor can become a site for meaning and values production if we take this position.

Notes on anarchism

Anarchism is not primarily a political ideology. Holding certain beliefs and opinions does not make you an anarchist. Or perhaps a better way of putting it is that anarchism requires the disruption of ideology by action and the union of belief and projects in the world.

A democrat or republican takes on his/her political identity by voting for representatives of a certain party or promoting that party in some other way. Most political identities based upon mass parties are defined primarily in terms of their aligned candidates, using elections and the mechanisms of the state to promote their political agendas, etc.

Anarchists clearly cannot express their political positions through the mechanisms of government, at least not directly*, and so they must pursue other means. These consist primarily in participating in projects or organizations that express anarchist values and are organized along anarchist lines.

If you want to become an anarchist then you should begin by attaching yourself to an anarchistic project or organization.

Why?

There are several reasons to address the problem in this way. The simplest is the mixture between theory and practice that grounds anarchist principles and desires. Thought means nothing absent the movement of bodies and the generative organization of their desires, or their "flesh."**

But a more direct reason lies in the nature of anarchism. It is not an ideology, so what is it?

It is a comportment of bodies, a tendency towards certain ways of constructing the world in which we live; and a ferocious dedication to doing so. It is grounded in affect and emotion, a particular style of emotion that can only be strongly communicated through direct experience. I would offer yet another description of anarchism, an "atomic" definition- it is the emotional response to an experience of unalienated labor, and the system of sense and thought that erupts from such an experience to buttress it and create the conditions for the experience's repetition.

*we can do any number of things that the government reacts to however.
**see Merleau-Ponty

Some strange thoughts on equality and inequality

[T]hought that occurred when trying to teach rats to escape, on the role of power inequality.

in Nietzsche we see a valoriztion of inequality in power, the Master if you will, as something generative of values and difference. inequality is necessary to create. this is tied to his fervent disregard of socialists and his outright hatred of anarchists.

we see this dilemma played out throughout contemporary francophone philosophy and its watered-down advocacy in the States. this of course creates something of a problem, a question, regarding socialist values. if creation is engendered by a differential of force, then shouldn't we allow major power inequality to cultivate significant changes and flexibility in the society?

this seems absurd though it is of course the (generally unconscious) logic of all bourgeois values that dominate America. it also legitimates the very concrete wage and salary differentials across society. peole get paid more because they create more, and high-paid professions are such because they involve the most creativity and autonomy, etc etc. so in one sense I'm talking about something nebulous, raw power in a social field, but in another sense I'm talking about something very concrete, major wage stratifications based upon that raw power.

so thinking back to my little parable of the rats. we exercised power over them to train them how to escape from the larger system in which they were enmeshed. (sorry that this thought came from some silly drunk activity) a teacher, any teacher, exercises power over a student. the intent is to show the student a connection quickly so that they need not discover it for themselves. it in theory expands the student's power of action.

there is no way to eliminate inequality from society at the base level. at the very least there will be differentials of skill and understanding, and rough layers of engagement and focus with tasks of greater and lesser necessity. and this translates into rough inequality. this problem become significant in the revolutionary situation of the Hot Autumn in Italy, when semi-skilled factory workers successfully reduced the wage scales between them and skilled laborers to the point that the skilled laborers quit in large numbers and set up their own firms.

if we're actually talking with people and not thinking through an ideology, why do they accept power differentials between themselves and management? they perceive managers as earning that power by taking on greater responsibility and having greater skill and understanding of the business. this is not false. leftist thought is also not well-suited to accept this fact that occurs naturally to most people in the American workforce.**

as long as there is a differential of intensity of knowledge and understanding between people related to a task or project, there will be inequality. and there must be this variation, this variability and difference, to allow creation to occur at all.

now, this needn't cripple our thinking or our beliefs. worker cooperatives generally operate with wage differentials based on skill that resemble those in standard firms (thought generally not to the same degree). however, they differ in two ways:
*every member has an equal share to the aggregate surplus, regardless of rank
*every member is encouraged to participate in day-to-day management of the firm, through a union or some other body; even though there is a differential, every point in that differential is encouraged to "speak at the table"

this is a bit of an internal split, but it is also a wonderful mechanism of macroeconomic regulation embedded into the microlevel. the sharing of surplus means that you don't shunt that surplus away from the (consuming) working class, generating excessive market imbalances that must be corrected by government action to prevent recessions, crises of "overproduction," etc.

the managerial participation means that even though there are differentials of force, power is exercised on the less-powerful towards their own empowerment.

people are trained but they are trained with the skills that increase their powers of action. power is directed towards escape from power; or in another sense, power is direted towards its own immanent "self-transcendence."

for an image I can only think to offer a kombucha shooting off babies. although perhaps any natural reproduction offers a good example.

and perhaps this idea does fit well enough with American ideology. after all, it posits the base of society as dynamic and creative, willful.

perhaps such an overall construction of values has an inherent advantage over an imperial model based on stasis, regimentation and stratification. it encourages the overall system to exceed its own limits, to grow and innovate.

if even the leaders in a society want that society to increase its powers of action, its internal differentiation and economic strength*, then they must orient that society towards escape, invention through secession.

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*Economic strength is only equal to the range and intensity of embodied knowledge present in a society; and the rough stability of means of transmission of that knowledge. The knowledge is embodied int hat it is dependent upon engaged skills and craft ability, artisanship, the actual bodily knowledge of how to perform tasks.

**Now of course we must separate between managerialism based on a perception of skill oriented to the task and managerialism based on the skilled deployment of Power-values, signs and aesthetics. we need a language in american politics and left economics that might allow us to easily describe this difference.

Criminality

[T]he real link between anarchism and criminality is that most people in society regard the realm of crime as the point of absolute violation of the norms set by the State. they are fascinated with it. they see it as the bounds of the possible, and its valid prosecution (however they interpret that) as indication of the strength and legitimacy (might makes right) of the State.

so the criminal act has and will always have political possibility. trick is the difficulty of managing it.

another way of putting the same point, criminality is the most observable point at which an organic logic of pure force and desire is embedded within a system of discursive regulation, i.e. law, and a structure of validation based not on force and desire but upon instrumental reason abstracted from force and desire; or if not abstracted away from per se, based upon the aggregate of force and desire across society.

crimnality is exciting because it is one of the ultimate expressions of the logic of immediacy and local intensity of force expressed in total ignorance of or opposition to the social aggregate. it champions the Event against the Law.

unfortunately it generally does this in absurd, brutal, stupid ways.

and so the problem with criminality as a general stategy lies in its incorporation by the Law to publicly delegitimize the Event. criminality is made into an ingredient for the fashioning of docile bodies unecumbered with a desire for the Event.

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of course, people still like a good heist picture...

Some notes on Jesus and Being

You can reconcile the two rough positions on Christ with a slightly more subtle metaphysics and a basic knowledge of what actually set Hebrew religion apart from the pagan religions of the gentiles.

The two rough positions we now see fought over.

*Liberalism. Jesus as a great man, you get into heaven/you are good by emulating his acts.
*Fundamentalism. Assertion of the absolute divinity of Christ. You get into heaven/are good through total submission to his direct intervention.

One side is smart and consistent but doesn't capture your soul. The other is populated by empty signifiers, scary proper nouns bereft of quality and content. This is because the chief function of any fundamentalism is to destroy the self against an Absolute Other. To bash the self upon a sublime sea wall.

It serves a purpose though, the destruction of ego that sometimes allows for connection to a genuine holy spirit. Often enough not, because rule by nouns does not lend itself to open embrace of the living word/world.

The Hebrew idea of God was unique because it was identified generally with the living force of the world. It was essentially a God equivalent in meaning to Being or living Being. That's a big fucking deal.

It means that the actual milieu of the advent of Christ and Christianity was not focused around God as an empty proper noun, a sky-god modeled on Zeus and used as the symbolic representation of Empire.

It means that the divinity of Christ refers back immediately to a notion about the divinity of the world, of Being and Becoming, and of the nature of transcendence of the powers of the world that prevent love of that world, i.e. agape.

So Christ is more than a man and more than a Romanized, pagan god. He is a method of engaging the world, of engaging Being, such that God becomes present and visible in the day-to-day world around us. He is the method for knowing God in the world. SImply emulating his acts doesn't reveal this per se because it neglects to point out the ontological quality of the God Christ refers to. It isn't just a vague idea of the good, it is the ontological grond of creation in the world.

So a third meaning becomes clear. Neither man nor Roman demigod, but method of directly acessing the Hebrew God of Being, the world as a fluid act of joyful self-creation. More than a man- a singular point of reference for the whole of the the world as Event, an ecstatic rupture. That is what the liberal interpretation fails to see and that is what the fundamentalists inadequately interpret.

This third model requires a dialog between both metaphor and literalism to become present in Christian ritual and understanding.

The Eternal Triumph of the Working Class

We have lost an idea of what it means to be members of the working class. Liberals paint it as a structural weakness to be lifted out of with education and charity, conservatives paint it as a sign of failure and weakness of character. Radicals see it as a mark of oppression. And so all of them detach themselves from the reality of the working class.

Our writers and thinkers and leaders don't use that term because it scares them. They are repulsed by it and think everyone should be. And so we are brought p in this world and these lives, now at the cusp of the 21st century, in confusion about our values, fearful of yet resigned to our detachment and alienation in this world. We fall upon the world without a history. And the chief torment of living without a history is that we erupt into the world without a method of connecting to it, understanding and revering it.

We live in this state of distraction because we have had a simple truth hidden from us since birth by the subtle logics of a damnable system: we are members of the working class.

The working class has always lived and will always live, so long as civilization of any sort exists.

Intellectuals confuse the matter too much. Being a member of the working class means, very simply, that you live and breathe through the labor you bring to bear in the world. It means also that this labor leads and allows you to respect and revere the world rather than destroy and conquer it.

It has nothing to do with poverty or wealth or strength or weakness or good or evil. The working class is simply that way of orienting collectively in the world that allows us to build and rebuild it.

During the Spanish Civil War, Durutti (sp?), an anarchist military "leader" was asked about the destruction of the war. The battles leveled buildings and destroyed fields and factories, turned cities into craters. Wasn't this too high a cost?

Durutti responded, essentially, what of it? We built the cities, we built the factories and we tilled the fields. And when the bombings stop and the last fascist is banished from the Republic, when we have peace again, we will crawl out of our craters just as we have always done, and we will take the refuse and debris of war and build new life from it. We build as an act of living and so we will build again with joy and ease.

This is why Marx said the working class was the first real revolutionary class (though I don't agree with his historical bias per se). The working class builds and rebuilds society, and so embraces the whole in its actions. It is the font of creation for the whole human world. It can do whatever it godamn well pleases, as soon as it becomes conscious of this fact and organizes accordingly.

The dread and fear we feel as we encounter the world naked and unassociated vanishes the second we learn to build with it, realize that humans have this marvelous gift of understanding via labor, understanding through action and motion and experimentation. And this dread is banished into oblivion when we can associate together, such that we know our labor is joined with that of millions, and we build the world as brothers and sisters and not as alien things vying for power and property.

We are not taught to build and err and rebuild and err again and build anew. The second we perceive the reality of this, the second we live (and not just think it) the limits of the world are shown to be illusory. Nothing is automatic, nothing is given and set in stone, and so we are free to create anything in dialog with our neighbors and our world. This is the only true freedom, and this is exactly it is hidden from us.

The working class exists, it has always existed and always will, and it exists in each of us whenever we experience a signle instant of free, authentic, unalienated labor, every instant we learn and create in the world, and every instant we cast our empathy outside ourselves.

So it has not vanished, and it has not been destroyed or crushed. It always lies ready to leap to the surface of individual lives and society as a whole and the institutions therein. We need only awaken, and cast away the veils of alienation, greed, corporate property, bureaucracy, and fear that keep us apart from one another and drive wedges between our spirits and the spirit of the world. The power is there and will always be there, waiting to be called.

Happy May Day.

Two Models for Enterpreneurship

The traditional model of American enterpreneurship, the type we associate with our national identity, might be considered "artisanship." This indicates the development of business skill through the practice of a particular appropriate trade or craft (or set of them) to a degree that allows independent proprietorship of a small firm in which one was both an owner and a worker.

The newer style is characterized by a formal education in business that allows one to become manager of a firm owned by an investor/investors.

Now, a few things can be noted right off the bat to distinguish between the two:

*Skill: In the artisanship model skill is organic and involves an intimate knowledge of the basic production and maintenance processes embedded in the creation of a good or service or some intermediary step therein. In the education model skill is more removed and abstract, and loses the particularity of understanding of the whole work process. The education model responds to numbers and signs, not concrete knowledge.

*Scale: There is a natural self-limitation in the artisanship model, as work is distributed within bounds of understanding of the owner/worker. The owner/worker serves as the most skilled worker, and so will not extend beyond the work pool in which s/he directly participates.

*Monopoly: The artisanship model functions through the production of master craftspeople with direct, concrete knowledge of basic work processes and experience in most levels of the work process. This means that rather than seek either a vertical or horizontal integration, they would more naturally self-limit the bounds of their role in the marketplace. Rather than a continuously expanding firm, we would see the continuous creation of new niche firms networked together, mostly functioning according to a relatively egalitarian hierarchy of skill in the work process.

*Conservatism: The artisanship model, because it relies on direct knowledge, is more likely to be conservative in its adoptions of major new technologies or techniques. This is a mixed effect. On the one hand, small and direct innovations proliferate fluidly, producing incredible aggregate rates of technical development yet an overall even pace in the development of technology that might radically shift society and its values. A mesh of small innovations is more likely to strike a balance with prevailing practices and attitudes than single lurches of ignorant gambling. It is also more steady, more stable, more robust- it's shocks are smaller and more easily absorped, it's gains steady and progressive.

On the other hand, it will not generate hopeful monsters so quickly as a directed program of general alienation between managerial and expressive aspects of the work process. I.e., between management and labor.

*Power: Yet if we look at the driving edges of market innovation, they are characterized by the direct participation of the most skilled of contemporary "skilled laborers," i.e. co-owners who are the scientists and engineers directly responsible for the R&D of roduct innovation. Perhaps the immediate robustness of the artisanship model guarantees it the dominant position in cutting edge industry.

*Submission: However, in established industry the artisanal model is continuously under attack through scientific management (which is really a backdoor title for outsourcing, lowering and homogenizing standards, etc.). Once their processes are known they are inevitably reduced in complexity, but with a ferocity that destroys the possibility for renewed artisanal invention.This reduction moves too quickly because it does not build up its own surplus of skills through its own artisanly pool.

*Class: As a matter of social justice, which models of enterpreneurship attract which types of people, in their ideals? There is probably a clear class and ethnic divide in styles. Formal education is of course far more expensive than artisanal experience (especially considering the full difference, between paying for an education vs. being paid for work done in the learning process- who can afford to give up two-four-six years of working and who cannot?). There is also a question of style of learning- one based on working experience and one based on signs and power commands and abstract analysis- and clear class difference between them. Finally, there is a basic difference in method of learning, via formal education or via practical experimentation, that might relate to class or ethnic group or even gender, etc.

So it lies in our interest to promote the artisanship model alongside (or even instead of) the education model.

[and of course there is a question here of ontology, or relationship to the underlying structures of the world. the education model one of forms and abstractions, the artisanship model one of direct visceral embodied experience, action building into a virtual memory. so either tendency will lend itself towards the individual experience of either ontological model, alienation or embeddedness.