I cite

Split consciousness

The present left is becoming more self-conscious as a left.

Occupy changed the terrain of struggle, making opposition appear in class terms in a way that had been repressed in the US for decades. Multiple lefts came together in occupation, not only sharing a project but also struggling over its meaning. In Europe, the deadly impact of austerity measures and growing opposition to them (not to mention the ongoing effects of the financial crisis of 2008), has made capitalism visible as a problem again (most explicit indication: polls reporting that the majority of Americans think the division between rich and poor is the most fundamental division in the country). For over thirty years, the preoccupation of a left that has been practically and theoretically active in a variety of specific movements and causes, as well as in multiple groups and locations, opposition to capitalism is growing, covered now in the mainstream media and a matter of governmental concern. That concern is generally exhibited via quick repression and aggressive policing (surveillance, intimidation, arrests, out-numbering, tasers, teargas, etc). 

The growing self-consciousness is at the same time, and necessarily, a time of division. As we emerge, we fight over who we are, over our name and names, over our principles and tactics, over whether we can even be said to exist. At the very least, our infighting lets us know we are here.

There are fights and there are fights. Some we shouldn't have to fight. We shouldn't have to fight over whether rape is wrong, over whether rape should be covered up. We shouldn't have to fight over whether the genocide of Native Americans was wrong, over whether Palestinians should be able to live and work and flourish. Fighting those fights, even though it remains necessary, doesn't strengthen us. We are already know what the answers are. Having to fight for them again and again doesn't let us advance theoretically or practically. It mires us in defensive maneuvers.

There are also useful fights, the kinds that sharpen thinking, clarify stakes. In the thick of things, it can be hard to know which kind of fight one is in. Which ideas are innovations? Which tactical repetitions further the struggle and which are but tributaries into circuits of drive (whether as media stunt, fetishized process, or perpetual self-criticism)?

This is a particularly tough challenge for communists insofar as the very opportunity presented by the collapse of socialism (the dissolution of the USSR and the Chinese capitalist turn) ushers in a generative chaos such that previously clear and distinct tendencies engage one another once again. An advantage is that ideas suppressed by the too tight link between communism and Stalinism, intransigence of Trotskyist parties, and reduction of debates into pointless repetitions of Marx and Bakunin have room to breathe. A disadvantage is the absence of learning or advancement (old lessons in a new time, one step forward and two steps back), lack of clarity about the stakes of debate insofar as the repetition of old themes in a new context can displace attention from present issues, and the undeniable fact of increasing inequality and immiseration in the wake of 1989.

Contemporary communist theoretical engagements draw on differing textual traditions and histories of struggle. They also unfold in the context of ongoing movement and protest. Absent a common language or common commitments, discerning what is at stake in any disagreement, beyond, say, the performance of a revolutionary identity insistent on the purity of its difference, at times seems impossible. Which views are anarchist, libertarian communist, autonomist, communist, or socialist? What is the difference between the ultra left and the anti-left? Where are the points of alliance that are useful and to what end?

Labels distort. But the critique of labels, the rejection of 'isms', leads to the cultivation of specificities that hinder debate and prevent thinking. Rather than building a common analysis and movement, we are pushed into esoteric analyses of multiple, specific, texts. Rather than debating what to do, we argue over what did so-and-so mean, which texts matter and why. Do these arguments derail the very possibilities that the current chaos opens up? Do they lead it to dead ends when they could insight new questions and approaches?

There's an irony, though, in these questions insofar as all they do is reiterate the split. Those who oppose organizing in common would likely take this reiteration as affirmation of their point that the Party is impossible now. I take it as an indication that it's necessary because disconnected and multiple loci of opposition is the form of our current defeat.

There are, though, points of convergence, ideas irreducible to generic anti-capitalism.

1.  Today the working class is not revolutionary.

2.  Our modes of opposition strengthen and reproduce what they attempt to destroy or overthow.

There are various explanations for the first point, including the insight into the role of unions in facilitating compromise with and acquiescence to capitalist demands, the decline of unions, the limit of proletarian identity as an identity within capitalism, the fragmentation of the working class in the wake of the rise of identity politics, the technological changes associated with digitalization, the outsourcing and off-shoring of industrial production from the US, EU, and UK to China, South Korea, and the Philippines, and the decline of confidence in metanarratives assigning historical purpose to specific agents (no big Other of history). How the fact of the absence of a revolutionary working class is explained and interpreted affects the conclusions that are drawn. Should efforts be made to raise class consciousness? strengthen unions? Or, alternatively, find another revolutionary agent, whether that is a different social group or capitalism's own crisis tendencies?

The explanation one find most convincing has repercussions. My approach is to emphasize the people as the rest of us and the process of proletarianization as fundamental to capitalism. An effect of this emphasis is that politics matters -- the people are divided, differentiated, dissagreeable. Even as capitalism involves never ending crisis (whether structural or local), creating another world requires work and organization. Communism doesn't just flow out of capitalism's self-destruction -- there are more potentials here (pick your favorite post-apocalyptic scenario: climate disaster, nuclear disaster, global pandemic, peak oil, enclaved super rich funding aggressive police state to oppress the increasingly immiserated ... oh, wait, we have that one already).

The second point also admits of variation. The critique of reformism points out that parliamentary efforts to build socialism prevent it, strengthening instead bourgeois capitalism institutions. The ultra left critique of bolshevism, premised on viewing the USSR as a capitalist state (which I find a point too crude to be useful, basically a variant of the notion of totalitarianism), argues that it strengthened the proletariat instead of dissolving it. A psychoanalytically inflected critique of some forms of direct action (particularly those that emphasize getting arrested) observes that demonstrations (like terrorism) call out and enhance state power. And, my own account of communicative capitalism criticizes media oriented activism --particularly but not exclusively in networked social emdia-- for intensifying communicative capitalism, providing media content to be circulated, adding to noise and hindering action, displacing focus from creating organizations with duration and commitment, and affirming liberal democracy's claims to legitimacy.

In my view, the only way to address to address the problem is via an analysis of the present (which is what I've tried to do in my communicative capitalism research). When we look at the present in terms of what is missing--and in terms of what everyone acknowledges is missing--it's an organized left, a Party, an alliance to which we have a degree of commitment. 

We have riots, insurrections, demonstrations, gardens, chickens, blogs, NGOs, networks, newspapers, lectures, fora, conventions, meetings, assemblies. But we do not have them in common. We do not associate them under a common idea. This was part of the event of Occupy -- that for a time, at least, the left was visible to itself as a common struggle. And, we knew it even as we knew that we disagreed, that some of us wanted to spend our time talking about how to arrange our everyday life, others wanted to  draft banking legislation, others wanted to block the ports, and others wanted to bring down the stock exchange. What was remarkable with Occupy is that these different actions, in different places, happened under the same name. They were consciously part of one struggle.

Notice as well: in this struggle, the 99% were not acting as a class. But they were acting like a class insofar as they were opposed to another class. Their affirmation of themselves declared the incompatibility between capitalism and the people, entirely circumventing the problem addressed in some ultra left theory in terms of the dilemma of proletarian affirmation (for example: 'The central theoretical question thus becomes: how can the proletariat, acting strictly as a class of this mode of production, in its contradiction with capital within the capitalist mode of production, abolish classes, and therefore itself, that is to say: produce communism?') Of course, this in no way means that Occupy produced or prefigured communism. It's contribution was more modest: breaking a hole in our setting, making the gap between capitalism and the people (in other words, class struggle) apparent as a gap. And more: Occupy made real and new the challenges of mobilizing, organizing, and enduring. Against the fantasy of an immediate communism (as compelling as it might be for a quick fix generation), it posed the ongoing and unavoidable questions of infrastructure, self-governance, problem-solving, provisioning, and mutual care that are themselves inseparable from communism as a self conscious mode of emancipatory egalitarian production and reproduction.

The left we are. The left we need.

I came across the following passage in a Slate piece about the failure of gun control legislation to pass the Senate. The question was whether it was Obama's fault, his failure to lead, or whether it was the fault of partisan politics. 

In fact, the type of president who could work or cajole the Senate in this political environment would probably never have been elected in the first place. 

The passage made me think about dilemmas on the left. The kind of left that we need for successful communist struggle today is the kind that can't appear. The conditions that make it necessary are the conditions that make it impossible.

If leaders emerge, they are slapped down. If they don't emerge we are stagnant. When some try to unify our struggles, they are treated with suspicion, resisted and rejected -- even as the multiplicity of singular struggles fail to make any substantial headway. The automatic reflex in the face of any appeals to unity is to criticize:  there isn't a strong working class movement, so there is no ground for unity; any unity is or will be exclusionary; any success will only result in another form of domination. 

It also seems as if people don't know how to follow.  Instead, we are enjoined to have our own opinions, be independent, be winners. Among intellectuals this is a particular hazard -- especially for academics who are paid to judge, evaluate, and grade, who function in reputation economies that value criticism, pedantry, and iconoclasm, who construe disagreement as the sine qua non of independent thinking, especially when it is accompanied by an injunction to historicize and compare. It's odd, this way of thinking that considers itself so willing take risks even as it criticizes ideas and suggestions because they risk X, Y, or whatever.

The only ideas that seem to escape unscathed are those that conform to the expectations of communicative capitalism:  do it yourself, rely on technology, go local (small is beautiful), smash and hack (as if nobody learned that the capitalist economy can eliminate trillions of dollars of wealth and still keep going).

I'm looking forward to Historical Materialism (and Left Forum) because it seems like we may be building the critical mass necessary to break free of this deadening individualism and figure out what pulling together will entail and how to go about it. I'm going to listen for organizing ideas (not because I am an organizer, I am not, but because I would like to be able to do my part in building support for them). 

After talking to a friend who spent a lot of time with the Sandanistas, I started wondering about what it would look like to organize young women, single mothers in communist struggle. What would that look like? It seems a good place for unifying with teachers and nurses (who have been highly visible in their organized struggles). It would probably make health care, nutrition, education, and housing into core issues (and so look for protest opportunities on these fronts). And it could suggest the development of a communist infrastructure of clinics, farms, schools, and anti-eviction alliances/public housing/rent controlled apartments. A cool advantage here is that recognizing that women's politics are about a lot more than sex (birth control, abortion, etc) can attract and radicalize a lot of women who are considered so narrowly in mainstream Democratic politics. 

Midway

 

Obama says its legal for him to target and kill US citizens

The memo (obtained by NBC): http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_White_Paper.pdf

Keep Calm and Carry On

I ventured from my small declining city in farmland to the cheerless suburbs for some Christmas shopping. I wasn't immune to the consumerist spirit of Barnes and Noble. Items that I would typically ignore or mock were oddly appealing. They were potential gifts. As gifts they promised  a momentary escape from profit and loss, supply and demand. Even though they lied, I couldn't help but believe them. The day after Christmas, they will have lost their potential as gifts. Sinking back down into the swamp of over-production, they will have become bargains. So much extra and unwanted stuff, they will slide into overstock and only a week or two after the New Year turn into trash.

One series of such items features the motto from WWII Britain, "Keep calm and carry on." There is a "keep calm" calendar. There are mugs, tshirts, shopping bags, refrigerator magnents, and mobile phone cases repeating the injunction. Why are we so enjoined?

To say that the slogan traveled from the UK where it was an ironic and affectionate nod to the Queen and British resolve mistakes geneaology for explanation. Lots of things travel through communicative capitalism's meme flows. Not all of them get their own mugs and calendars.

I think the call to "keep calm" is everywhere because we are in a crisis, over the edge, living the end and one step from total panic and chaos (for a slightly different demographic the analogous meme is YOLO). It repeats a British slogan because the British handled their decline much better than we are. They offered a kind of social welfare--national health, housing, education--that eased the pain a bit. 

I started thinking about the demand for calm down during my yoga class today. The instructor mentioned the Connecticutt shootings and then told people to focus on the positive. She advised the class not to turn on the news and to be mindful of our breathing.

I don't think the instructor is an idiot, bless her heart. She's just repeating what she's heard over and over and over again for a decade, since the world ended and instead of joining the rest of the world as one of many facing common problems the US suffered a psychotic break.

For some, this psychosis manifests itself via an intransigent attachment to the power the country no longer has, except for its nuclear arsenal which gives it its remaining power, the power to destroy. For others it manifests itself via the delusion that we can go back, become Keynesians again, return to the social democratic road we didn't take. For still others it's in the desperate hope that they can seize enough--money, weapons, things--to keep the rest of us so far away that we can't do any damage (I talk more systematically about US psychosis in the last chapter of Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies). 

The mistake of zombie movies and Mayan calender fans is that they think of the apocalypse as happening relatively quickly -- although it's worth noting that a zombie apocalypse takes longer than an asteroid, so maybe there is some cultural learning here. The apocalypse isn't fast --it's slow, perpetually and momentarily displaced like so many chemo treatments or anti-aging creams, Snow Crash not Omega Man, Feed not Dr. Strangeglove, Super Sad Really True Love Story not 2012.

Do we really expect the areas of New York demolished by hurricane Sandy to be rebuilt in a way that can provide something like a quality of life for poor and working class people, for people who were living in public housing or other low income areas? Or is it more likely that the city will use the disaster as an opportunity to continue its steady banishment of low net worth individuals in the name of development? If we keep calm, they will keep on, keep on expropriating and exploiting because nothing is stopping them.

Do we accept that the families of those slaughtered at Sandy Hook elementary school will recover, will come back stronger and better than ever? I don't and I think that suggestions of healing and recovery and celebration and moving on and requiring a waiting period for the purchase of semi-automatic weapons perpetuate the fantasy that everything is basically okay, that the system is sound, that if we remain calm and soldier on we will get through this thing together. That's the biggest lie of all because we are not together and we have not been together. We persist in a lie that violence is freedom and inequality is freedom and the unrestrained exercise of financial power is freedom. We even have a motto for this persistence.

Keep calm and carry on.

Screwing working people

(now posted at Counterpunch)

A friend of mine dropped out of high school in the mid-70s. She went to work cleaning at a college in her town. She worked at this college for about 30 years.

Apparently, she didn't work for the college, though. She worked for three or four (it's hard to tell) different companies, companies contracted to do the cleaning. 

Now she is ready to get her pension. She went to human resources at the college. But they said she didn't work for them. They sent her to the company currently responsible for housekeeping. That company sent her to the company that manages the union's pension fund.

The union told her to fill out a form. It seemed to her like they wanted her to say that she worked at the college for fourteen years. That's all they had on record. Apparently, some time (when?) the union's pension fund was in trouble so it merged into another pension fund. All the records from the early time were transferred to the new fund managers.

The new fund managers seem to be saying that they have records for my friend's years of work and that they don't have records for her years of work. They also seem to be saying that she needs to go to the social security office to get a bunch of detailed records of her hours. This will cost $47.50. It's hard to know why this is necessary if they already have records of her work. But maybe they don't. 

Meanwhile, the office managing the fund changed addresses on August 1.

I can't quite get why they were telling my friend that she had to go get all these records. And this is after having spoken this morning to four people at three offices (college, current company, and union fund) two or three times each. 

After two hours, though, something else emerged. It now seems like there was no pension fund until 1991. That is, it appears like the local only established a pension fund for the workers in 1991. And it also looks like the employer's contribution during that period was only five cents an hour. It's strange that no one mentioned this to my friend when she was first attempting to get her pension. It is also strange that it took so many phone calls to establish this. Is it even true? That's not what my friend remembers. She remembers a union being there from the beginning, but it's been a long time and this stuff is complicated and confusing.

On the surface, my friend's experience is that of working in the same place, in the same union, in the same buildings, for nearly 30 years. Below the surface: three (or four) companies, only one of which currently exists and two (or three) pension funds, only one of which currently exists.

Because of capital, her world is not what it seems. Her basic experience of work (which also sucks) is fundamentally different from capital's managing of her remuneration for her work. The effect is that she worked for 30 years and her pension will only cover 14 years. And, it isn't clear why: no union contract? a mismanaged pension fund? a loss of records as ownership changed? The complications benefit capital and screw her. She's being exploited through the mechanisms of a process that was supposed to provide her with a benefit. She doesn't understand a lot of it (and neither do I). But she gets the basic point: "they expect me to die so that they won't have to give me my money."

But this story is incomplete because I've left out or underplayed another key aspect of the situation--how the people who work in offices treat my friend. She's in her sixties, black, and without a high school degree. When she got to my house this morning, she understood the primary issue to be that she needed to get information from social security that would tell the pension fund people how long she had worked for the college (which, technically, was zero years since she was employed by a private contractor). Her concern was with filling out a form properly and needing some white-out to fix some information that was misrepresented. When I made the phone calls, people talked to me, answered my questions, tranferred me to others higher on the food chain, and began doing the research on the employers and union contracts. I'm a 50 year old white woman, a full professor with a Ph.D. I found it all extraordinarily difficult to understand and only began getting things sorted by asking a lot of questions. The bureaucrats only divulged information when asked and spoke as if all of their terms were clear and obvious. They were brusk and confident, off-putting if you aren't privileged enough or socialized to question and push back. After I hung up from the last call, my friend looked at my across the table, shaking her head in a combination of disgust, fury, and resignation, "they wouldn't tell me none of that."

As it looks right now, she will get $70.70 a month. She worked as a cleaner for thirty years.

Mr. Bloomberg! Tear Down This Wall!

The photo is from the National Lawyers Guild. They note that in  New York City, police have already begun to install massive fortifications around the Financial District in preparation for the one year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, as if a day of action against corruption were a barbarian invasion. 

Killing the American University

Excerpt from "How the American University Was Killed, in Five Easy Steps" by the Homeless Adjunct. Read the whole thing.

Let’s go back to post World War II, 1950s when the GI bill, and the affordability – and sometimes free access – to universities created an upsurge of college students across the country. This surge continued through the ’60s, when universities were the very heart of intense public discourse, passionate learning, and vocal citizen involvement in the issues of the times. It was during this time, too, when colleges had a thriving professoriate, and when students were given access to a variety of subject areas, and the possibility of broad learning. The Liberal Arts stood at the center of a college education, and students were exposed to philosophy, anthropology, literature, history, sociology, world religions, foreign languages and cultures. Of course, something else happened, beginning in the late fifties into the sixties — the uprisings and growing numbers of citizens taking part in popular dissent — against the Vietnam War, against racism, against destruction of the environment in a growing corporatized culture, against misogyny, against homophobia. Where did much of that revolt incubate? Where did large numbers of well-educated, intellectual, and vocal people congregate? On college campuses. Who didn’t like the outcome of the 60s? The corporations, the war-mongers, those in our society who would keep us divided based on our race, our gender, our sexual orientation.

I suspect that, given the opportunity, those groups would have liked nothing more than to shut down the universities. Destroy them outright. But a country claiming to have democratic values can’t just shut down its universities. That would reveal something about that country which would not support the image they are determined to portray – that of a country of freedom, justice, opportunity for all. So, how do you kill the universities of the country without showing your hand? As a child growing up during the Cold War, I was taught that the communist countries in the first half of the 20th Century put their scholars, intellectuals and artists into prison camps, called “re-education camps”. What I’ve come to realize as an adult is that American corporatism despises those same individuals as much as we were told communism did. But instead of doing anything so obvious as throwing them into prison, here those same people are thrown into dire poverty. The outcome is the same. Desperate poverty controls and ultimately breaks people as effectively as prison…..and some research says that it works even MORE powerfully.

So: here is the recipe for killing universities, and you tell ME if what I’m describing isn’t exactly what is at the root of all the problems of our country’s system of higher education. (Because what I’m saying has more recently been applied to K-12 public education as well.)

 

"Time-wars" by Mark Fisher

From Gonzo Circus (English version circulating on nettime).

 Time rather than money is the currency in the recent science fiction film In Time. At the age of 25, the citizens in the future world the film depicts are given only a year more to live. To survive any longer, they must earn extra time. The decadent rich have centuries of empty time available to fritter away, while the poor are always only days or hours away from death. In Time is, in effect, the first science fiction film about precarity – a condition that describes an existential precidament as much as it refers to a particular way of organising work.

At the most simple level, precarity is one consequence of the “post-Fordist” restructuring of work that began in the late 1970s: the turn away from fixed, permanent jobs to ways of working that are increasingly casualised. Yet even those within relatively stable forms of employment are not immune from precarity. Many workers now have to periodically revalidate their status via systems of “continuous professional development”; almost all work, no matter how menial, involves self-surveillance systems in which the worker is required to assess their own performance. Pay is increasingly correlated to output, albeit an output that is no longer easily measurable in material terms.

For most workers, there is no such thing as the long term. As sociologist Richard Sennett put it in his book The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, the post-Fordist worker “lives in a world marked … by short-term flexibility and flux … Corporations break up or join together, jobs appear and disappear, as events lacking connection.” (30) Throughout history, humans have learned to come to terms with the traumatic upheavals caused by war or natural disasters, but “[w]hat’s peculiar about uncertainty today,” Sennett points out, “is that it exists without any looming historical disaster; instead it is woven into the everyday practices of a vigorous capitalism.”

It isn’t only work that has become more tenuous. The neoliberal attacks on public services, welfare programmes and trade unions mean that we are increasingly living in a world deprived of security or solidarity. The consequence of the normalisation of uncertainty is a permanent state of low-level panic. Fear, which attaches to particular objects, is replaced by a more generalised anxiety, a constant twitching, an inability to settle. The uncertainty of work is intensified by digital communication  technology. As soon as there is email, there are no longer working hours nor a workplace. What characterises the present moment more than our anxious checking – of our messages, which may bring opportunities or demands (often both at the same time), or, more abstractly, of our status, which, like the stock market is constantly under review, never finally resolved? 

The new freedom of living in decline

I sometimes find myself sad about the decline of the United States. Not for our decline in military power--this seems all too strong and all too readily deployed whether premptively or covertly. And not for our global economic decline--although I worry that our weakness here will amplify our already excessive and irrational militarism. No, my sadness--which is probably more akin to a kind of nostalgia or mourning--involves the end of the ideals of liberty, equality, and democracy wrapped up in the American experiment. 

Personal and political freedom, the equal liberty to change and determine one's plan of life, and the understanding of politics as a practice and process for the collective determination of the conditions under which one would carry out one's life plan--these are powerful ideals. They are so powerful as to provide a benchmark for judgment, for assessing whether the country was on track, was living up to what it announced as its purpose. These were ideals that could be mobilized in struggles against slavery and the subordination of women and for free and equal public education, fair wages, safe working conditions, and a social safety net.

Without a Soviet Union to keep us in line, to make us want to live up to our ideals (indeed, even need to in light of the geo-political cold war for the hearts and minds of people around the world), we quickly reverted to our basest selves, to the individualistic, aquisitive, exploitative, myopic country we have always also been. The truth of the US constitution now appears as our core value of inequality: some are worth less than others, 3/5ths of a person.

We've never gotten beyond the legacy of chattel slavery. We express it differently--with prisons, impoverishment, policing, and the occluding power of exceptions. We proceed as if some deserved to die on the streets, to scrape by in hopeless service to the better off (I am struck by the way that the ongoing economic crisis--which is nothing less than capitalism's business as usual--is a process of proletarianization; people who had owned small shops and worked in white-collar jobs become massage therapists and nail techs, attending to the bodies of those whose privilege remains). 

Sometimes we forget slavery's economic dimension: the 3/5ths rule marked not only rules of representation for the benefit of the South but also engraved economic inequality in the constitution. It was always rooted in exploitation. The game was always rigged. Some would own and others would be owned, whether as body, future, or soul.

For a while, the ideals could provide leverage against the truth. Not any more. The truth won out. The ideals were never meant for everyone--just for some. 

And maybe living in decline makes it all the easier to recognize the truth rather than be deluded by the sense that the ideals could win or, in their US political form, had won in principle if not yet in practice. Maybe this is another way of recognizing the decline of symbolic efficiency--we don't believe that the politicians who say the words believe them anymore. They don't believe for us and we don't believe through them.

This is our opening into the freedom of communism--the actuality of collectively building and realizing equal liberty.