Aeon: Eternal Production

Unions and vision.

2007-12-05T15:11:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Autonomous labor.

2007-12-01T14:18:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes towards an alternative economics.

2007-11-27T20:45:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think that pretty much sums it up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Executive power.

2007-11-10T15:56:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Towards a genuine libertarian movement.

2007-11-04T00:39:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Libertarian socialism.

2007-11-04T00:22:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politics

2007-11-01T15:34:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

Purpose.

2007-10-29T22:26:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

The Technical Embrace

2007-10-25T20:54:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

Reform or Revolution, rough

2007-10-20T23:47:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economic models

2007-10-13T13:54:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

mimicry of nature, notes

2007-10-10T04:46:00.000-07:00

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

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

Notes for Deleuze and Permaculture

2007-10-09T18:10:00.000-07:00

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

The matter of thought, brief note.

2007-10-04T22:55:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four elements.

2007-10-03T19:27:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

Rough draft for a post elsewhere

2007-10-03T18:38:00.000-07:00

Anarchism and the World of Things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is profit?

2007-09-23T19:38:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

A few points to consider.

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

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

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

Two concerns.

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

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

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

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

Conservative and liberal sexuality

2007-09-22T15:39:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Very brief comment on Christian fundamentalism

2007-09-22T12:10:00.000-07:00

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

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

Marxism, short note

2007-09-22T11:39:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

Empire or Bricolage?

2007-09-16T16:23:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Existential equality and class stratification, loose thoughts

2007-05-04T16:18:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-04T15:54:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-04T15:49:00.000-07:00

...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

2007-05-04T15:46:00.001-07:00

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"

2007-05-04T15:42:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-04T15:41:00.001-07:00

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

2007-05-04T15:40:00.001-07:00

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

2007-05-04T15:37:00.000-07:00

[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

2007-05-04T15:36:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-04T15:35:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-04T15:31:00.000-07:00

[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.

--------------

*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

2007-05-04T15:29:00.000-07:00

[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.

----------

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

Some notes on Jesus and Being

2007-05-04T15:27:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-04T15:25:00.000-07:00

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

2007-05-04T15:22:00.000-07:00

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.

Green Syndicalism

2007-04-03T08:42:00.000-07:00

The surge in environmentalist sentiment in the US should give those of us concerned with the labor movement pause. Progressives across the country, especially younger activists and liberals, have become more actively engaged with green issues than any other social cause in America. The public has followed suit, forcing even an oil-baron administration such as Bush/Cheney's to make token comments on green issues. Ecological action has acquired a momentum that other progressive movements would do well to replicate.

There are myriad reasons for this, though ultimately I will focus on one broad cause. In large part this is simply a question of timing. The catastrophic Bush adventurism in the Middle East has focused America's attention on our oil dependence in a way unmatched since the '70s. At the same time, venture capital and technological development has progressed to a point where industry is willing and able to pursue serious green startups. The internet allows producers and consumers a way to link directly, bypassing retail oligopolies. And of course, there is the burgeoning reality of global warming, and the crisis that confronts us if we fail to act swiftly and intelligently to prepare for its effects.

All of these factors create a perfect storm for a growing environmental movement (in terms of consumer action, popular sympathy, and governmental influence). But I want to focus on three basic qualities of the environmental movement that seem most relevant to the labor movement. Two are positive, one forms the basis of some positive critique.

*Environmentalism offers local and diverse opportunities to act in the world. Instead of a strongly centralized movement, we see a cultural force emerging. That force is undergirded by a wide array of organizations, small and large, practical and ideological, and this internal difference allows tremendous adaptability to local conditions and new events. It also allows people to weave the movement into their daily lives in many different ways, increasing the proportion of citizens who actively identify with the movement or its values.

*Most importantly, environmentalism has the quality of a values-driven movement. Its strongest proponents are not simply motivated by pragmatism; they have a worldview and life informed by the movement's values, meaning they devote every aspect of their waking hours towards those values in some way or another. Ecology is not something meant only to reform a broken system, it proposes alternative ways of viewing the world to those dominant American society- material pleasure and consumption at any cost.
Environmentalism has effectively generated a values-driven movement based on reforming basic structures in American life. Such movements have transformed American society in the past, merging enlightened self-interest with the general betterment of humanity.

*Environmentalism (as it now stands) is possibly the most individualistic progressive movement in American history. Its chief expression currently lies in consumer action and individual economic desire. It is based in a wide field of institutions, organizations, clubs, etc, but its massive popularity at present is expressed mostly through consumer choice or electoral action.

Even the most developed "ideology" of environmentalism and ecology is openly hostile to large formations of people. It works through affinity groups, or a major desire for localism. There's nothing wrong with this, if the visions for democratic confederation of local groups actually come to fruition. They don't. This means that instead of relying upon the grassroots community action that most environmentalists and ecologists deeply advocate and treasure, the movement functions through some genuine grassroots action, lots of consumer action, and ultimately dependence on the government to force positive change through regulation or big business to redirect the economy out of sheer good will and wisdom.

I think this will neuter the environmental movement in the long-run, despite its popular appeal and overt strength. The movement will continue but it will be much weaker and move much more slowly than it might.

Environmentalism lacks effective, grassroots, collective organization, that can apply itself across society instead of simply pressuring governments and oligopolies.

The only social movement that can possibly deliver this type of organization is organized labor.

Labor and Values.

I believe there are deep, foundational reasons for the unification of labor and environmentalism, but those are for another time and place. The simple, straightforward reason to unite labor and environmentalism comes from a shared enemy: a business logic based in generating profits and responding to stress by externalizing internal cost and responsibility. To a company, the logic of laying off or outsourcing workers is the same as the logic of dumping pollution into the oceans, land and air.

Corporate logic brings labor and ecology together, because corporate logic thinks of both labor and nature as weak and expendable.

Practically, ecology needs the power of labor organizing to actually build grassroots community action that will allow exponential leaps in green transformation of the nation and world.

Labor needs ecology to make it more of a values-driven movement.

The question of labor's decline has been debated in books and articles and conferences and union halls for decades. I have no desire to enter this debate. It is heated and necessarily imprecise, based on the contingencies of history and global/national politics.

But I will say this- Labor functions most effectively as a movement when it is seen as a matter of values, when people think it offers the possibility for creating a better world. Bread and butter matters are important, but it is also important to charge people up, offer them a vision of something worth fighting for, offer them strong ideals to which they can devote their attention and life.

The structure of social movements, chaotic as they are, makes this hard to see or even to demonstrate. But it seems that the most powerful social movements are those with a large pool of members devoted to building a better world, especially in the ranks of upper and middle leadership.

Just to break the ice on this point, we cannot understand the success of the labor movement in America in the 20th century without understanding the broad appeal of anarchism, socialism, and communism among the American working class until the clear and distinct disgracing of those latter ideologies by Stalinism, whose effects were felt in America through McCarthyism and driving the organized left out of the unions. In a certain sense this a question of leadership. People do not have the strength in them to organize and fight the rulers of society out of a simple desire for another dollar an hour. Values and movements give them that strength. A vision of bettering the world gives them that strength. Knowing that that however small a trace of their actions will survive them in the form of a transformed world, this gives people the strength to organize and fight.

Right now labor in America does not have this, because it has no larger vision for a better world. It has a vision of late 1950s Keynesianism, minus the structural racism and sexism of that period. I'm not saying this is bad or wrong, I'm saying that it clearly just isn't enough.

I don't want to focus on criticism, at the end of the day it has little value. I'm just trying to say, we can merge these movements effectively to their mutual benefit.

How Do We Merge?

There have been major efforts to bind together environmentalism and labor in the past few years, and they have proven tremendously effective. I'm thinking for instance of the Apollo Alliance, the joint effort of major unions and environmentalist groups to promote political action to rebuild sections of the American economy on green technology.

The major efforts though are very top-down, at least within major unions. I think this is necessary but limited.

We need a general greening of existing industry to be really effect necessary changes in society. Now, to do this we could relie upon the efforts of managers and labor chiefs and heads of green organizations. This is slow.

We could also try and tap into the workforce of a business completely, mobilizing the energy of workers to transform their businesses from the inside out. If successful, this would be very, very fast. A mass of decentralized organizations thoughout every business, every sector, focused on the value of reducing negative environmental impacts and even contributing positively to the natural environment, would have inconceivable effect across industry.

Here's my proposal:
That a major union organization (preferably the AFL-CIO) sponsor an independent, cross union confederation.

That this confederation be open to three types of organizations:
*caucuses within already unionized workplaces
*minority unions within nonunion shops (especially in open-shop states)
*small democratic firms and nonprofits focused around environmental work

And finally that this "dual union" focus broadly on greening the workplace.

I'm taking as my structural model the old IWW (and to some extent the Knights of Labor). I mean rimarily to invoke the structure and not the ideological connotations of those organizations or labor history in general. Their organizational versatility is perfect for a labor-oriented values-based movement.

I do not mean to promote the traditional adversarial relationship the IWW had with larger unions. This confederation should have some independence from larger union structures as a whole, though, if only to minimize bureaucracy in organizing and actions.

This offers several basic benefits to both environmental activism and the labor movement.

Environmentalism gets a major infrastructural support for green action across America, and immediate partners in any firm or business.

Labor taps into the energy of the environmental movement, along with the interest of political and economic leaders in environmentalism.

Labor also receives a mechanism for bringing energy into its own locals. Finally, in the form of green minority unions, labor gains a new technique for organizing unorganized workplaces, a technique that will immediately draw out public support and potentially lessen managerial resistance.

Conclusion: Stewardship

I have focused on a mechanism for green syndicalism, but environmentalism does not provide the only possible grounds for organizing values-based hybrid unions. The only real requirement is direct application of an ethos into the production process itself.

Several other value systems present themselves. For instance, the American economy and American political logc is driven to a large extent by militarism, especially in the current climate of outright piracy perpetrated by recent administrations (either through war and occupation or by imperial trade policies). The anti-war movement has found itself without practical direction besides electoral action. Yet there is no shortage of work that must be done to change this feature of American life so basic that we often see only its most blatant expressions. Alongside environmentalism, we could see a hybrid union devoted to demilitarization of the American economy and American life.

To remake itself for a new century, Labor must build up its basic principles, the values that every unionist in the country will respond to and draw hope and strength from. This is a simple enough task but an important one, because it allows members to contribute their efforts towards long-term goals beyond the drama, stress and danger of immediate conflicts.

Just to get the juices flowing, I'd like to suggest a simple code of Labor Stewardship, that recognizes and enshrines basic values flowing organically from the experience, rights and responsbilities of working.

Some basic principles of Labor Stewardship would include the following goals and ideals:

*empowering,democratic workplaces
*community/civic responsibility and assistance
*environmental responsibility and a focus on ecological-design
*"open source” knowledge, encouraging participation of all employees(and the public)in innovation

Principles and values are tools to be used for concrete action in the world. They are important because they allow us to make concrete connections between our myriad actions and intentions in the world. Considering those principles at the start will give a vibrant movement coherence and strength, a strength based on an upwelling of diverse and devoted labor action.

Libraries.

2007-03-13T12:07:00.000-07:00

Libraries occupy one of the few relatively safe spaces of commons within American society. Though they are regularly underfunded, they are not overtly attacked.

In recent years the growth of social spaces such as coffeeshops have been mimicked to some degree by libraries, which have taken the "third space" rhetoric of firms such as Starbucks, mixed them with the already existing quality of libraries as a free communal space, and moved many libraries into more of a role as social space. We see this especially in urban flagship libraries.

However, it is quite possible for libraries to move even further in this direction without violating the basic goals of the organizations (primarily self-education for pleasure, improvement or necessity), and also without stressing library budgets.

I will offer three relevant examples of "social spaces" as they currently exist as background for a broader proposal.

*[commercial coffeeshops and the "third space."]
*[restaurant in northwest that's pay as you go]
*[toolbanks]

[third spaces; decentralized galleries]

Craft and globalization

2007-02-19T18:25:00.000-08:00

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.

Industrial Ecology link

2007-02-12T14:13:00.001-08:00

Industrial Ecology: from Theory to Practice

concepts.

2007-02-12T08:43:00.000-08:00

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.]

Notes on ethics

2007-02-10T06:37:00.000-08:00

[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.]

Effective divisions within philosophy.

2007-02-07T19:43:00.000-08:00

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.

Oil Independence devotional

2007-02-03T22:38:00.000-08:00

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.

Autonomia/Nomad Production devotional

2007-02-03T21:56:00.001-08:00

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

2007-02-03T21:55:00.000-08:00

[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.

from Sabel

2007-02-03T21:54:00.002-08:00

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

2007-02-03T21:54:00.001-08:00

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

2007-02-03T21:53:00.003-08:00

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 ...

pieces of the argument grande

2007-02-03T21:53:00.001-08:00

*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

laboring communities

2007-02-03T21:52:00.001-08:00

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.

laban movement analysis and factory labor

2007-02-03T21:51:00.000-08:00

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

Radical Learning devotional.

2007-02-03T21:49:00.002-08:00

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.

The formation of student unions.

2007-02-03T21:49:00.001-08:00

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.]

Reconceiving high school education.

2007-02-03T21:48:00.001-08:00

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.

A method.

2007-02-03T21:46:00.001-08:00

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.

Conspiracy...

2007-02-03T21:45:00.001-08:00

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...

Labor, reason, the third sector.

2007-02-03T21:44:00.000-08:00

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.

The Method: Mimesis

2007-02-03T21:43:00.002-08:00

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.

WIld Production

2007-02-03T21:43:00.001-08:00

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.

Work Rhythms.

2007-02-03T21:39:00.000-08:00

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.

The Lucas Plan

2007-02-03T21:36:00.000-08:00

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!

Demilitarization

2007-02-03T21:35:00.000-08:00

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.

Citizen's Army

2007-02-03T21:34:00.002-08:00

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.

Power of the Purse-defunding the war

2007-02-03T21:34:00.001-08:00

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 Vehicle: Cross-border Affinity Groups.

2007-02-03T21:32:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-02-03T21:13:00.000-08:00

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.

655,000

2007-02-03T21:12:00.001-08:00

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

2007-02-03T21:11:00.000-08:00

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

2006-10-14T13:15:00.000-07:00

Ethics and strategy.

Very brief.

We can interpret the ethical interaction of things in terms of their double identity as actual entities and as the focal points of virtual productions.

Some examples.

entity A is generated continuously by virtual field ~a~
entity B is generated continuously by virtual field ~b~

(This one, influenced by Irigaray and her description of the exploitation and suppression of feminine power.)
*Exploitation: entity A addresses entity B.

entity A negates entity B (think Hegel, master/slave dialectic?)
entity A does not negate virtual field ~b~

hence, A, ~a~, and ~b~ are maintained, while the production of ~b~ is negated continuously. we are left with a perpetual, ghostly "B", constantly negated by A, yet whose conditions of production are maintained so that their power may be siphoned off by A. yet ~b~ is not assimilated by ~a~, being held off by the negation of B by A. Because A negates B, B is not allowed to actualize except as negation and ~b~ is held apart from ~a~. however, over time this breaks down necessarily as ~b~ bleeds into ~a~.

Exploitation functions by alienation and the wilfull refusal of heterogenesis, and hence is unethical.

*Cooperation

entity A is maintained, entity B is maintained, ~a~ and ~b~ swap memes.

Cooperation functions by maintaining some distance between A and B while allowing transmission between ~a~and ~b~, hence allowing overlap and sharing in virtual fields of production of the terms. Distance between A and B allows a safeguard- neither A nor B engages the Other as the Same, i.e. there is no dialectical battle, no negation at the back of difference. Cooperation encourages the mutul actualization of A and B from overlapping and shared field spaces of ~a~ and ~b~ and hence maximizes the procution of difference from a virtual field.

Cooperation function by virtual communication/exchange of particles and by the maximization of heterogenesis, and hence is ethical.

Problem case: ethical warfare.

Another way to state this, how can B resist negation/exploitation by A?

Possibility, absolute negation.

B negates both A and ~a~, incorporating viable residue of each into ~b~.

Ah, better possibility- B negates ~a~, grafts A onto ~b~.

Theft and gift. Resonance with traditional radical critiques (even the simplest, for instance don't focus on punishing criminals, change the conditions that produce criminality*).

Very difficult case. What is more ethical, absolute negation or exploitation? If absolute negation functions by the removal of a section of a virtual field, then it isn't really an alienation, since virtual fields are continuities interwoven by will and desire. There's a deeper cruelty to it, but it's the cruelty of a joyful will I suppose.

*though they don't really do this when they focus entirely on negative factors, socioeconomic factors; also have to focus on positive factors ans the absence of them, the absence of sustainable mythologies and desires.

time and invention test

2006-06-11T22:52:00.001-07:00

time and invention

power test

2006-06-11T22:52:00.000-07:00

power test

God test

2006-06-11T22:51:00.000-07:00

god test

Freedom test

2006-06-11T22:49:00.001-07:00

freedom

Theology test

2006-06-11T22:49:00.000-07:00

theology test

test

2006-06-11T21:11:00.000-07:00

test