Southeast Valley Libraries Are Burning Books

It may be a stretch in these internet times to remember back that far, but perhaps some people will recall a distant July 2009, when Amazon made the literary gaffe of all gaffes late one night by reaching virtually into Kindle users' libraries, located on machines these users had paid for, and deleted titles such as "1984" and "Animal Farm". This happened when Amazon found out that a third party that had claimed rights to the books in fact did not own them.  And so, with a mouse click from a remote location, buried deep within the bowels of the Amazon book tracking behemoth (do not be afraid that Amazon maintains a database on all your book purchases, citizen) -- and without a sense of irony -- the titles were deleted from users e-readers.

The deletion causes quite a controversy, with people justifiably citing censorship, invasion of privacy and even theft as causes for their outrage.  But another issue didn't come up at the time that definitely struck me as curious. It is one of the, perhaps few, redeeming qualities of the electron age that when I give you a copy of something I have on my computer, my copy doesn't go away.  Indeed, not only doesn't it go away, but the quality of your does not diminish.

Love at first sight.

Now, if we can sidestep the question of analog versus digital quality, not only isn't the grade of your copy reduced compared to mine, but when I share a copy with you, it costs me nearly nothing.  So close to nothing we would never think of keeping track between us.  And one thing I would never do would be to ask for it back from you.  I would never call you up and say, "Hey, man, are you done with those Propagandhi mp3's that I gave you?  I need 'em back."   When I give you a copy, thanks to the magic of electrons, we both have one now.  Perfect, right, because there are two of us?

And so this brings me to the just announced deal that Tempe, Mesa, Gilbert, Chandler and Queen Creek libraries, through the Greater Phoenix Digital Library, a consortium of Valley libraries, have struck a deal with Amazon.com to allow for digital downloads to Kindle devices through the library system.  Even though books, music and other files have been available for other digital devices, Kindle users have had to pay for access.  This in itself is funny, because if I loan you a book from my library, the book works just fine whether you are reading it on the couch or on the toilet.  And, to keep with our digital theme, the music I gave you earlier works just fine on your computer, whatever kind you have.

Now, this deserves a little commentary before I move on to the final point.  Pretty much anyone who uses devices but does not represent a manufacturer of devices would notice that what is happening here (aside from a direct attack on the library as a public, physical institution, since library patrons can now download the files 24/7 from home with their library cards) is that form is dictating access to content.

At the height of the hysteria and crackdown (2003), people still supported file sharing overwhelmingly

So, let's step back a few more years, if we can.  When my friend gave me a VHS copy of  Star Wars, it didn't matter whether you had a Sony and I had some crappy American VCR.  Why the hell there needs to be a separate agreement for me to download Marie Gabriel's new book, "Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution" on two formats?  Especially since we know that it is mere proprietaries -- as in limiting access for profit -- that is at the root of the division? This is a library after all.  A library I have already paid for with taxes, if I may strike a right wing note for a moment.

But it gets worse!  The Republic reports, bafflingly, that there is a waiting list for Amazon titles.  A waiting list?!  Why?  The great thing about digital files is that you and I can both have them at the same time.  If for some unexplained reason I am waiting for that newest John Grisham book and so are you, why should I wait just because you were a few keystrokes faster than I am?  It defies logic.

Successfully deleted.

But here's what really makes no sense.  When you "borrow" a digital file from the "library" under this new deal, it self-destructs in 14 days, thus "freeing" it up to be available for the next person in line.  So, the library, dedicated to the spread of free knowledge and public access, is actively destroying books, serving as Amazon's willing executioner of information.  Information that wants to be free, with the only stumbling block being Amazon's desire to make a buck.

But make a buck how?  Well, aside from the licensing deal, it turns out that embedded in each "loaned" file for Kindle will be a link to Amazon where you can opt to purchase the book you got from the library via download.  Wait a minute.  I'm going to buy something I already have?  Naturally, the only way I'm going to do that is if Amazon and library conspire to destroy the copy of the book I already have!  Imagine that with a real book.  Back in the day, if I didn't return the book, maybe there were fines I had to pay, but at least the firemen didn't break into my house and, "Fahrenheit 451"-style, set fire to the book.  And yet that's what the library is doing now, electronically.

 Carson Daly is torn not just between styles of music, but also modes of media production and distribution

I think some people may remember in 2000 when Napster founder Shawn Fanning introduced Britney Spears ("singing a song that's older than she is") while sporting a Metallica shirt.  Metallica, of course, was busy suing Napster for file sharing.  After Carson Daly remarked, "Nice shirt", Fanning famously joked, "You like it?  Actually a friend of mine shared it with me.  I'm thinking about getting my own, though." 

Of course, it was nonsense, at least for a lot of people.  We might buy the shirt, but we weren't going to buy the album.  Not after what at that point was 20 years of what has become a 30 year stagnation or decline in wages.  Who could afford it?  Napster, and the programs that followed, were a godsend to those of us dedicated to music and yet scraping by.  And to the extent that it wasn't nonsense was only because enough of us were still prisoners to dial-up or other slow connections so that sometimes it was too much of a pain in the ass to download a whole album when you were relying on some other person you didn't know to do the same.  Many people can probably remember the phenomenon of setting up files to download while you were sleeping.  All problems that have been solved now.

The thing about electrons is that they are, setting aside the externalized cost to the environment, essentially free to the consumer, at least on the level of the individual file.  Costs are so low, access so easy, reproduction so simple and distribution so effortless that it reveals the contradictions within the capitalist organization of the economy.  And, it must be said, that it is capitalism itself that has set up this contradiction.  Through our own self-organization and desire to be free, we have leapt into it like prisoners facing a blasted hole in a prison wall.  We always wanted out, and now that we can, it is only the force of law that that can push us back in, because we can see the other side.


I'm not a technophiliac, but the most powerful lesson that the relatively new electron based production system reveals is the tenuousness with which commodity production clings to life.  We see it in the riot.  We see it in gifts between friends, in rides to the airport, in knit caps from mom and in our backyard gardens.  And we also see it in the files we share.  And, most importantly, we see the absurdities of the system in its attempts to corral, limit, prosecute and impose proprietary relations on escaped commodities that defy remuneration.  

A system that turns librarians into book burners.

What a way to make a living? Or, 20 percent unemployment is a good start.

I know I don't usually get all personal on here when I write -- I try to keep it strictly business, as they say -- but it's been a fucking shitty last couple of weeks at work for me. Partly because of that, I haven't really been inspired to start on any of the new writing projects I've got bouncing around in my head right now (I think Jon Riley may have a couple things in the works if we're lucky, though). So when the classic 90's photo series below came across my phone this afternoon as the boss clock ticked down towards quitting time, it couldn't have come at a better time.

I suppose the montage goes without explanation. We recognize it immediately. Both it's form and it's content. No détournement required on this one, Situs, thank you. The series perhaps comes at a relevant time as well, or perhaps emerges as a meek but important counter-point, as we watch the tens of thousands gather in Wisconsin in a rearguard action in defense of their right to organize against capital and to keep the few paltry crumbs that warrant the absurd label "Cadillac" these days, that alone speaking volumes about how far we have fallen since the capitalist counter-attack began in the late 70's, early 80's.

So, three years into economic collapse and now well into the austerity measures that we all knew were coming from the get go, the best we get is a zombified union movement, rising from the crypt to sell us out again, paired with Democratic recuperators so chickenshit over a fight that they flee the state. One keeps hoping for a break in the terrible dance between capital and it's mild-mannered gentle critics on the American Left. We scan the skies for any sign of an emerging fightback that defies the acceptable boundaries.

Of course, lurking behind the scenes is the terrible step-child of the labor movement -- the refusal of work. The human desire to be done with the whole mess that lives in the space between working and unemployment. That terrain denied us in reality for the most part as well as in the popular dialog that delineates the borders of polite discussion. Have you heard any of those party hacks or union negotiators utter one word about it? All out in defense of work!

But we know, we remember, that fleeting feeling, before cold capitalist reality sets in, when you almost cheer for a second after you get that pink slip. The feeling of buying your buddies a round at the bar with your last paycheck. Maybe tossing a brick through the boss's Mercedes window on the way out. You know us, we're the ones who don't apologize for being on unemployment. The ones who love it. When I was on unemployment it was one of the most productive and enjoyable times in my life. This is not to repeat CrimethInc's naive mantra from the last decade about poverty and doing it right. It's just to remember a time of freedom that appeared unexpectedly and to lament it's eventual loss.

I mean, I get it: let's by all means defend ourselves from the capitalist coup de grace. Maybe push them back, snap victory from the jaws of defeat. I'd fight, too, if they tried to cut my pay or take away the benefits I fought hard for. But, still, I can't help but think that the most radical thing that could be asked in the middle of the conflict is, "Do you like your job?" It's certainly never come up that I've heard of. And it's of course precisely the misery of work that is captured so clearly in the Al Bundy series below (Bundy being, along with Homer Simpson, the classic working class hero/foil/numbskull all rolled into one), revealing at the same time, I think, the sheer poverty of the struggle taking place now in Wisconsin. Surely, somewhere, someone camping in that square tonight is thinking, I hope this thing at least goes through Tuesday so I can get an extra day off out of this.

In an age that is increasingly looking like it will be defined by permanent unemployment for so many who thought themselves previously immune (i.e., white, middle class), will the issue finally get forced on the agenda? Or will it further feed the already blazing anti-immigrant mania? I heard today a story on NPR alleging that what migrants remain in Arizona are having an easier time getting work than citizens. True or not, that's the kind of thought that creeps behind the eyeballs of white workers even in good times. One shivers, thinking of it's power now to rally the reactionaries. And how about the government workers? Will endemic unemployment continue to be turned on those few who still manage to hang onto to decent pay and benefits packages, a class eating itself before the lustily leering eyes of the capitalist pornographers. Enter the Tea Party again, stage right.

That said, will ten or twenty percent unemployment ever seem like a good start rather than a social ill to be remedied with stimulus and austerity? Some of us remember Paul LaFargue's "Right to Be Lazy" and Ivan Illich's "Right to Useful Unemployment". And of course that party pooper Bob Black. Or hell, even the Smith's singable "I was looking for a job and then I found a job and heaven knows I'm miserable now"! Or, I suppose, "Take This Job and Shove It" is reaching back just as far, expressing without fear that good ol' American desire not just to shirk work but to be done with the whole mess entirely. To wipe it off on your jeans and drive off in your F150, flippin' the bird. It seems like so much of this has been co-opted by the modern day concept of the entrepreneur, having polluted so much of what might otherwise pass for resistance in times of class struggle's low ebb. Even our musicians and sports heroes are not untouched. Not escapte artists -- entrepreneurs! Venture capitalists. Self-employed. Such a tragedy.

Perhaps I've said this before, but one of the things that Italian immigrants said about America when they came over in the 19th and 20th centuries (most to return home some years later) was that to them this was the land of bosses and clocks. That interminable clock on the factory wall, always ticking. Enforcing capital's narrative one unbearably painful second at a time. Coming from peasant villages and towns, they had no concept of the time card or the regimented work day.

Here's another thing I may have said before: when I worked at the post office the clock was divided into 100 segments per hour. Not sixty. Taking our fifteen minute breaks, we had to think in 36-second increments. We called them clicks. Naturally, you clocked in early, at 41 clicks, because if you hit 42 you were late. Like the laundromat near my house that offers washes at 99 cents but only lets you put money on your "laundry convenience card" in one dollar increments, there was no way to hit 15 minutes on the dot on those clocks. Always over or under. Those seconds were just plain stolen from you right before you eyes. Every day. Sure, you'd get a shop steward there with you when you got written up, defending your rights but doing nothing about the abominable 100 click clock. Looking at that damn timepiece every day, it often struck me how much I would have traded a million shop stewards for just one sturdy baseball bat almost any day. Of course, when the layoffs came, I was convinced. Naturally I had just rented a new apartment.

Of course now, thanks to the satellites hooked into our cell phones, the boss's clock stares at us all day, everywhere, working or not. All the clocks say the same thing now, for everyone. The discipline of capitalism consumes everything eventually, but most of all time, as I think perhaps Marx wrote a bit about once or twice.

So, as you can perhaps guess, after six years of letting us keep track of our own hours, with a decent amount of flexibility, my work started making us log in and out. Not on a time clock, yet, but in a book. Write down the exact time you show up but don't let it be before seven. No work before seven, we are told. Linger around, waiting, if you're early. Here's what actually happens: my co-workers sign in as if it's seven and begin their day at 6:57 or 6:58 anyhow, giving two or three minutes of their lives to the boss for free every day. And, although it seems illogical, ours is work that we'd just as soon have over, and sitting there staring at it, waiting for the clock doesn't help anyone, not even you. You just get done later.

Of course, not me. I'm coming in late. I don't give my time up for free. So, anyway, this little montage has been making its way across the tubes today and I figured since I didn't have anything else, I may as well write a little bit about it and post it up in the hopes that others out there may appreciate it the way that I did, and to maybe give a little context about why I did. It always strikes me that, along with the scratching record and the ticking clock, the sound of the end of day whistle at the factory still sticks with us in this society, even though they have been purged from most people's lives almost entirely. Maybe it harkens back to a certain analog universality, an experience we all shared and still do, even if now it has been digitized and internalized.

Anyhow, quittin' time!

Some things of note from the last week

To the left of this article you can see our Reddit feed, which we update regularly with items, mostly articles and news, that we find interesting. That feed gets continually added to, usually several times a day, as we encounter ideas and information that we think are worth considering. If you sign up for Reddit, you can comment and discuss them.

But because of the volume of news that gets posted to the feed, sometimes things can get missed that I think deserve a closer look, so from time to time I like to highlight some of the more important things that showed up on our feed during the week.

(1) The first item I want to point out is Rowland Keshena's piece "J. Sakai and the Struggle for Onkwehonwe Liberation". I first ran into Sakai's ideas in early 2001 with his interview/pamphlet "When Race Burns Class", a deep critique of the revolutionary potentiality of the white working class (and whites generally). This essay, which takes what can only be said to be a deeply pessimistic view of whites' ability to engage in liberatory activity, led me to Sakai's book, "Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat" and then on to Red Rover and Butch Lee's "Night-Vision: Illuminating War & Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain" and "The Military Strategy of Women and Children".

These works are interesting in their almost nihilistic assertion that the white proletariat represents a bought off labor aristocracy which, even when it appears to be defending larger libertarian goals, is in fact defending its privileged status within American imperialism, a deal it enjoys at the expense of the rest of the class. This stands in stark contrast to race traitor thought, for example, which recognizes the contradictory position of whites in society without writing them off entirely. Indeed, following the Settler logic, one inevitably comes to the same conclusions that Weather did in the 70's: if the white working class is reactionary by nature -- and unredeemable -- then what else can one do but "fight the people".

This is problematic for a variety of reasons, including, as the author points out, the obscuring of class differences within whites by painting them instead with a broad brush. But it also denies the agency of whites in their own liberation and the liberation of others. I find this particularly wrong-headed not least of all because US history provides plenty of examples of whites struggling against white supremacy and the cross-class alliance that it represents. Consider the Abolitionists, to use an example that PCWC is fond of. How does Sakai explain them? To him, they are exceptions, plain and simple. Keshena does a good job of taking on Sakai's arguments and showing their weaknesses.

One thing in particular that I think is worth considering that Sakai misses entirely is the power of the negative example of whiteness. Whiteness, constructed as it from the top and at the same time from below (as Sakai probably correctly points out), while not liberatory, is still a sign of the ability of the white working class to act politically. That is, whiteness is a political relationship to power (by the way, that's a main reason why the "national anarchists" are not anarchists at all, since they defend that relationship) and as such it shows that whites are capable of thinking and acting politically, however wrongly at times.

Indeed whiteness itself is precisely constructed to limit the political imagination of whites -- to ensure that their struggles reinforce rather than challenge power -- and this is in part why some of the most imaginative and transformative periods in American history have been times when whiteness was in crisis. However, this, combined with the examples of whites acting against white supremacy gives us direction where Sakai fails: it allows us to approach the problem of whites and politics from the perspective of tacking how we can change the basic facts and assumptions that lie beneath their choices, how we can frame a politics that doesn't revert back to the short-sighted politics of white supremacy.

In PCWC's opinion, this has always meant fighting to foster the crisis in whiteness. Or, as the race traitors say, to create situations where whiteness cannot be counted on to resolve in the favor of the powers that be. When that crisis happens, dramatic change becomes possible.

(2) The second piece I want to single out is the article "Leninist front-groups and the problems of 'tail-ending' the Left", posted at PropetyIsTheft. As was pointed out at our most recent Beer & Revolution featuring Lawrence Jarach, I think a lot of us here in Phoenix have had a refresher course this summer in the failures, opportunism, obstructionism and parasitism of the left, delivered free of charge by out of town organizations like the so-called Revolutionary Communist Party and local leftists, Puente and Tonatierra.

Time and time again groups like these have proven their unfailing ability to head off militant and radical action, to collaborate with the police in attacks on anarchists, to co-opt grassroots struggle and to divert actions into useless and ineffective petition drives and inane marches. Nothing epitomizes this more than the idiotic attempt by Left party apparatchiks to divert the migrant struggle away from broadly democratic and empowering tactics like general strike and into voting and boycotts. Voting, for instance, is a silly waste of time in any movement, but in this one, composed as it is of such a high percentage of non-citizens who by definition cannot vote, reaches heights of absurdity not seen around these parts in quite some time.

This feature of anarchist history (indeed, general history) -- that tendency to be sold out and attacked by our supposed "comrades" on the Left -- remains a difficult lesson for anarchists to learn, it appears, because the tension reoccurs in every movement. In my organizing experience over the last decade and more, it has been a constant feature of the anti-globalization movement, the anti-war movement and the migrant struggles of today. Such problems have bedeviled anarchists since time immemorial, from the splits of the First International to the Spanish Civil War to the various uprisings in Eastern Europe against communist domination and on through the French May Days of 1968 into the present day. Indeed, I just read John W. F. Dulles' "Anarchists and Communists in Brazil, 1900-1935", and the same thing went on then. It turns out that anarchists and communists don't really want the same thing at all. Who knew?

This simple fact, as obvious as it may seem, still remains very hard for many anarchists to grasp. Post-leftism within anarchy, as I understand it, is an attempt to struggle to recognize this basic truth and to consider ways of relating, supporting and opposing various tendencies and organizations in society as we struggle to overthrow the state and capitalism. Primarily, what post-leftism does is bring into question these generally accepted but also undiscussed quiet alliances, maintained for a variety of reasons (habit seeming prominent among them), between anarchists and the Left that often work not just to our detriment as anarchists, but also to anyone who seeks out genuine self-organization as opposed to that imposed by bureaucratic socialists and capitalists.

"Leninist front-groups and the problems of 'tail-ending' the Left" doesn't identify as post-Left, but it is essentially grappling with the same issues, the problems that come from orienting oneself and the movement towards the Left, especially the authoritarian Left. Finding one's way through disentangling the various biases and reflexive relationships of support and opposition that come with an uncritical relationship with the Left is hard. It requires considering one's moves carefully because one doesn't want to risk, by unshackling oneself from the Left, the danger of adhering somewhere even worse, like the Right, as has obviously happened with the racist unanarchist "National Anarchists".

With PCWC, we have opted to engage critically in all directions. We have reached out to libertarians on the right, and received some criticism for it within the anarchist and Left milieu -- criticism that essentially boils down to the knee-jerk opposition to all elements on the Right that comes with the default affiliation with the Left. This even though our appeals and interactions with the libertarians have been exclusively around anti-racism, anti-fascism and the defense of free movement. And despite our deeply critical and open discussion of what we view as the flaws in the Right libertarian movement in Arizona. The Leftist is concerned primarily with contagion, as if one can engage with authoritarians on the Left without fear but that any association with libertarian elements on the Right is inherently dangerous.

Likewise, when we have stood up in solid opposition to movement hacks and outside authoritarian communist groups, we have been similarly attacked for the Leftist sin of sectarianism, as if remarking on the fact that a group wants a society that is distinctly un-anarchists is a crime against the movement. But which movement? As is pointed out in the piece, maybe it all comes down to how you look at it.

Are anarchists merely a minority wing of a movement that we concede to the more authoritarian, manipulative sections? Or, instead, are we a movement unto ourselves, tireless defenders of self-organization, and participants in a broader struggle that we refuse to allow to be dominated by authoritarian factions. A movement that overlaps various other groups and individuals, but which has its own distinct aims and objectives? Answering this question is at the heart of the way forward, I think, if anarchists are to be anything but the alternating conscience and punching bag of whatever movement happens to be in vogue at whatever time.

(3) Lastly, I want to share an excellent little film (about an hour long), entitled "The Betrayal by Technology" about French theorist and technology critic, Jacques Ellul. Despite the long description of our group in the sidebar, PCWC has always sought to remain un-ideological about our anarchy. We may have a very specific kind of anarchy, with regards to the general anarchist milieu, but we try to avoid getting ourselves too wedded to a particular set of ideas. That's why you see a wide variety of perspectives at our Beer & Revolution night: not because we are big tent anarchists, but because we want to promote ideas that we find valuable and useful, even if we don't agree with the entirety of the rest of the presenter's politics. We've tended, I think, to take what's worth taking and ditch the rest from various strains of anarchism.

And, more often than not, we've likewise tried to use anarchist ideas as critiques rather than reifying them as holy writ. For instance, PCWC is deeply critical of technology, but we approach it from a variety of angles. Our range of influences with regard to technology start first and foremost with our own lived experience, but are also informed by technology critics as varied as labor historian David F. Noble, who focuses on technology as a class war attack on workers and our ability to self-organize our own lives; by technology critics like Kirkpatrick Sale and his analysis of the early resistors to industrialism; and by primitivists like John Zerzan and his deeper questioning of the nature of technological society and the inherent alienation that derives from it.

We do not necessarily identify as primitivist explicitly, although I do think that PCWC falls within the anti-civilization current in a lot of ways, or at least we are not in opposition to it. However, what we do appreciate is the criticisms that primitivism makes possible, both of society and history, but also of movements and the often unstated goals and assumptions that frequently underlie movements, such as ideas about work, resource extraction and the faith in progress. By merely using primitivism as a tool rather than an ideology, we are free to consider the questions it raises, but at the same time to free ourselves from the burden of defending it as a part of our identity. We recognize that there are various ways of looking at technology, even from within the anti-tech current (hell, even from within the labor movement), and each offers something useful when it comes to understanding our relationship to capitalism, the state and technology.

In this film, Ellul makes a point that really resounded with me. Discussing a friend of his, a surgeon, who was confronted with a person amazed at the wonderful advances in transplants made possible by modern medicine, the doctor replies that all those wonderful transplants must be done with healthy, young organs, which means that people with those organs -- young people, naturally -- must die. And most of those young people die in auto accidents. In that sense, as the safety of car travel improves, the availability of organs and the miracles of modern science, diminishes. At the very least, there is a hidden relationship between the two which, if not interrogated, remains obscured largely because of the blind ideology of progress hides it.

At several points in the film Ellul expounds on his general thesis that, despite any sentiments to the contrary, in reality technology is at odds with freedom, a point he drives home most clearly in his analysis of the automobile, that most revered symbol of modern capitalist, industrial freedom. A car on fire at a demonstration is shocking, he says, because it is an attack on the central symbol our modern religion, a technology that purports to deliver us to freedom, but instead drives us to the surgeon's table to be parted out under the knife.

Summing up, I'd like to invite people interested in the ideas PCWC puts out there to join our Reddit feed. There discussion can be had about various issues, political and otherwise. We've considered various other ways to engage with people, including a message board, but until then hopefully the Reddit can be one more way that those of us interested in these kinds of politics can find each other and debate, and hopefully move the anarchist movement out of the activist ghettos and university classrooms, beyond the cliques and scenes and towards something approaching relevant to people and movements outside ourselves, where we can deliver an updated, meaningful anti-authoritarianism as a viable option to the boring, limited movements and ideologies of the present day.

This Thursday: 'A Critique of Biopolitical Economy' with Rob Poe

Rob Poe is a regular attendee of Beer & Revolution and participates in discussions with a critical voice that I respect. This Thursday afternoon he will be giving a talk at the ASU West bookstore called "A Critique of Biopolitical Economy". I find his politics interesting for a variety of reasons, not least of which is his willingness to critique technology from a Marxist perspective. Below I have linked all the relevant information for those interested in attending.

Thursday, February 18
A Critique of Biopolitical Economy
A talk by Robert Poe (MACS graduate student, ASU West)
4:00pm - 6:00pm, ASU West Bookstore

Robert Poe will be presenting portions of his Master's thesis, A Critique of Biopolitical Economy, which engages thoroughly with the works of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (i.e. Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth). He grounds their political economy in the history of the Marxist and anarchist political traditions and subsequently critiques how emancipatory their conception of resistance is as understood through the political subject of the multitude. Given his strong philosophical background he will also be critiquing their use of prominent thinkers and concepts in the history of philosophy, particularly Spinoza (the concept of the multitude is taken directly from Spinoza's work). Ultimately, he hopes this project will provide a sustained critique of current movements which seek to challenge global capitalism from a predominantly apolitical position (i.e. the abandonment of the struggle for political power). The philosophical concepts of immanence and transcendence also play a crucial role in this presentation. He will look at how their philosophical and religious interpretations are equally applicable to the realm of political economy, specifically to the re/production of and struggle against global capitalism. The work of Spinoza plays a key guiding role in helping to understand the complex entanglement of politics, philosophy and religion.

Theory in the News #1: Murdering the Dead

Phoenix Insurgent

This is the first in what I would like to be an ongoing, if irregular series linking up theoretical pieces to current news, in the hopes of increasing the appreciation for theory, as well as sparking some dialog about ideas and action in the real world. Here at PCWC we really believe in the importance of reading history and theory in order to understand our world and how to take action in it towards creating a world of equality and freedom. As we say on our bookmarks (which are available free at any of our public events), "READ SMASH READ AGAIN". That is, get your ideas, try them out, evaluate them and read some more. Repeat. The more context you have, the better.

This weekend I ran across the news of a mudslide in Sicily that has killed at least 22 people. I noticed while reading the coverage that environmentalists and locals decried illegal building and corner cutting for the disaster. This from the Times:

The scale of the disaster was blamed on illegal development linked to the mafia.

Torrential floods knocked over buildings, buried vehicles in mud and forced many people to flee to the roofs of their homes.

Among the dead was a man who was submerged and suffocated in mud on the main piazza of one of Messina's suburbs. Another man drowned when his cellar flooded. The injured were evacuated by boat and helicopter because roads were impassable.

Roads and railways were choked with mud, cutting off at least three villages and forcing rescue workers to try to reach then on foot.

As the Italian government declared a state of emergency, authorities blamed a fierce overnight storm which dumped nine inches of rain in just three hours.

But locals and environmental groups said the disaster had been worsened by years of deforestation and illegal building of houses and apartment blocks, some of it linked to Sicily's Cosa Nostra mafia.

"We're paying a very high price for having devastated the environment with unlawful and uncontrolled development," said Vittorio Cogliati Dezza, president of Italy's main environmental organisation, Legambiente.

In addition, Euronews reports that "[t]orrential rain triggered mudlides that swept away roads and houses in the town of Messina. But officials say shoddy building practices contributed to the tragedy and have opened a manslaughter inquiry." As anger mounts among survivors, they have increasingly demanded accountability for the disaster. Again from Euronews: "[Survivors] want to know why construction was allowed on apparently unstable land. Some accuse the government of being more concerned with a project to build a bridge between Sicily and the mainland than the welfare the island's residents."

Responding to the mounting pressure, the hard right prime minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, promised government aid to rebuild. According to the VOA, "Italy's prime minister visited areas struck by deadly mudslides in Sicily and promised to build new houses for the hundreds of people left homeless. He said he would provide new homes for them just like he did for the victims of the quake in l'Aquila earlier this year."

The money will flow and more construction will take place, we are assured. Certainly that's the logical response to disaster, isn't it? Note the almost casual referencing of a previous disaster as a precedent for the response to the current one. Setting aside the image of that fascist Berlusconi riding to the rescue yet again, replacing the destroyed buildings with new, shiny ones, placating residents and setting everything right, is there more to this story? Is there something we can draw on from theory in order to understand what's going on in Italy (and all over the world) as disasters increasingly mount?


In that light, today I want to highlight the writings of Amadeo Bordiga, especially his ideas of technology, "disaster" and capitalism. Bordiga was a leading light of the Italian Communist Left for quite some time, and while most of his positions on the party are not terribly useful for anarchists -- in particular he had a rather limited view of the ability of workers themselves to self-organize -- he did maintain a militant position against the participation of the party in the bourgeois democratic process throughout his life that is interesting. Notable not just for that, but for his rejection of the popular front method of organizing (a form that would prove fatal for revolution in Spain during the civil war) and his face to face calling out of Stalin as the "gravedigger of the revolution", Bordiga also had very interesting ideas on the inherent tendency of technology under capitalism to result in death, destruction and, as he called it, the "murder of the dead".

For Bordiga, technology necessarily led to "disaster" because of two in-born and inescapable tendencies of capitalism. First, the necessity to maximize profit and to minimize costs naturally created the conditions in which shoddy work and the cutting of corners caused systemic failures, not necessarily immediately, but often in the future. Second, capitalism, always in need of creating more commodities, therefore likewise tended to destroy what Marx called "dead labor" so as to re-create that which was destroyed with "living labor". In many ways, war is the ultimate expression of this reality, but it happens throughout economies in many other ways. Dead labor is the things that workers have produced that continue to have productive capability. Machines was one example Marx used frequently. In short, destroy it and you get to force workers to make it (or something else) again, and that gets the capitalists more profit and more capital (with the added benefit of re-disciplining the working class).

He writes in his essay "Murder of the Dead":

Modern capital, which needs consumers as it needs to produce ever more, has a great interest in letting the products of dead labour fall into disuse as soon as possible so as to impose their renewal with living labour, the only type from which it “sucks” profit. That is why it is in seventh heaven when war breaks out and that is why it is so well trained for the practice of disasters. Car production in America is massive, but all, or nearly all, families have a car, so demand might be exhausted. So then it is better that the cars last only a short time. So that this is indeed the case, firstly they are badly built with a series of botched parts. If the users break their necks more often, no matter: a client is lost, but there is another car to substitute. Then they call on fashion with a large cretinising subsidy of advertising propaganda, through which everyone wants the latest model, like the women who are ashamed to put on a dress, even if perfectly good, “from last year”. The fools are taken in and it does not matter that a Ford built in 1920 lasts longer than a brand new 1951 model. And finally the dumped cars are not used even for scrap, and are thrown into car cemeteries. Who dares to take one saying: you have thrown it away as if it were worthless, what harm is there in me fixing and reusing it? He would get a kick up the backside and a gaol sentence.

To exploit living labour, capital must destroy dead labour which is still useful. Loving to suck warm young blood, it kills corpses.

This lesson is instructive to us in this time of ongoing and seemingly never-ending disaster. Bordiga reminds us that these so-called disasters are not disasters at all. That is, they are not random. Because these system failures result from the inherent limitation of capitalism, in Bordiga's view, the resulting destruction and death ought to be treated as pre-meditated crimes, not accidents. In that sense, the advance of technology and sciences under capitalism results in what we ought to consider murder. Treating them as disasters removes the hand behind them from the scene, cleansing it of culpability and obscuring analysis.

Indeed, as the environment continues along its ever-increasing lurch towards collapse, spurred on by the very same cancerous force of capitalism, it's worth looking critically at such catastrophes in order to prevent the tendency of the system and its protectors from both creating the disaster and then profiting from its solution. So towards subverting that end, I would recommend readers consider the re-issue by Antagonism Press of a collection of Bordiga's essays on disasters. The whole book is online for reading, but I would recommend the introduction and the chapter "Murder of the Dead" as particularly instructive. The rest of the articles, for the enterprising reader, do not disappoint either. The book is short and well worth your time.

In an age of collapse and systemic failure, especially noting the way that anarchists and anti-authoritarians have been turning their attention towards disasters as breeches of the general monotony and regular discourse of civlization (and opportunities for struggle and mutual aid), as well as, as Naomi Klein has pointed out, albeit in a much less radical fashion, the tendency of the capitalist class to engineer and then capitalize on crises, it is therefore quite important that we develop a theoretical understanding of crisis, collapse and systemic failure. Bordiga goes a long way towards informing us in that direction.

Recommended:

Murder of the Dead by Amadeo Bordiga

Murdering the dead: Amadeo Bordiga on capitalism and other disasters - Introduction by Antagonism

Is that a singularity in your pocket or are you just happy to see me enslaved?

Transhumanism's class problem.

By Phoenix Insurgent

Larry Page, transhumanist and full time cool dude.

The Financial Times reports today that well-known technophiliac and Google co-founder Larry Page has gotten together with X-Prize top dog Peter Diamandis to form what they are dubbing the "Singularity University". The SU, to be headed up by longtime technology writer (and originator of the Singularity concept) Ray Kurzweil, aims to prepare society for the day, not far off they claim, when the pace of technological and scientific change will increase to such a point that machines themselves will take over their own development, ushering in a very religious-sounding era of allegedly benevolent social change in which poverty, war and other problems will finally be solved by technology -- rather than exacerbated (the prevailing sad state of affairs).

I'm often quite amused by the religious nature of the technophiliac view, not leastwise because its advocates masquerade so often as the emissaries of pure, logical thought. And yet, despite the obvious fact that human social systems impact both the development, distribution and application of technological "advances", the vast majority of transhumanists develop their theories of technological change as if class, empire and governments (among other things) simply don't exist. As if when this "new" era comes, it won't reflect the class interests of the people who developed it, as it does now. Somehow we're to believe that the product of a hierarchical class society will somehow, and quite magically it seems, produce a technological utopia that liberates the whole of humanity from tyranny and want -- even though it's being developed by the very people who benefit from a system of tyranny and want.

Thus, their faith (and it's hard to use another word for it) in the benevolence of technological change is an interesting position to take because it is quite clear that we live in an era in which all the global apocalypses that hang over our heads are not waiting to be conquered by technology, but are in fact the direct result of technology. Nuclear war, industrial war, famine, ecological collapse and so much else have resulted precisely because of the interactions between the state, capitalism and technology, not despite them. And continuing scientific and technological advancements have not solved our social problems. In fact, most problems in the world await relatively simple solutions, not technological in the least, which the boosters of technological change, namely corporations and governments, oppose. For instance, the expropriation of the wealth and power of the elite requires no new technology.

Indeed, there is a larger gap between rich and poor in the world now than there was a hundred years ago. Likewise in the US. Hell, there's greater disparity in the US now than there was 35 years ago, the dawn of the computer age. In order to support the transhumanist position, one has to ignore the evidence that surrounds us every day.

GMO has not fed the world. People starve (or in India kill themselves with pesticide) because GMO dispaces them from their lands and livelihoods. People are more alienated than ever before, even though they are Twittering and MySpacing away at record pace. Highly technological warfare has killed a million in Iraq alone in the last six years while the Iraqis demand not a high tech society, but one free from imperial domination. Their problem would be solved by US withdrawal, not by smart bombs and retina scans. The easiest way to defeat malaria in southeast Asia is with mosquito netting, but instead anti-malaria drugs have created super strains. The emergence of the internet has allowed for the large scale tracking of humans as never before, truly a benefit to tyranical regimes everywhere, such as the one in China with whom Google has so avidly cooperated with, complying with the so-called Great Firewall of China. The development of cheap cameras and wireless internet has brought us a surveillance society constantly under the watchful eye of authority. And yet the cameras somehow do not record when an unarmed Black man is executed by the police in plain view. And on and on.

The truth is, the failings of technology are myriad and everywhere to see, and yet its boosters, technological fundamentalists, continue to point to the future and say that someday it will finally deliver, even though they indicate no mechanism that will guarantee such an outcome. But the distribution of technology reflects class lines, just like the distribution of money. If the social relationships between classes don't change, why would the application of power (technology) change? Diamandis, perhaps, hopes that we'll all just forget to notice the relationship between the spaceships in his X Prize competition and nuclear missiles. But the fact is, if the class system remains, the result will benefit the class. His project doesn't exist in a vacuum, an neither does technology as a whole. If he researches rocket systems, he is benefiting from and contributing to nuclear warfare. Not surprisingly, both these two characters in particular sit atop the financial pyramid.

So, do Page and Diamandis imagine a world, not far off, when the power of technology will shake the capitalist system to its core, overturning class relations and freeing all of humanity? Do they hope for a world in which they can be free of their billions? Again, it doesn't require any technological advancement to accomplish a better redistribution of wealth, but if Diamandis hopes for an age without his abundant largess, it wasn't evident at a talk he gave at a forum hosted by the The Center for Technology Commercialization at the USC Business Masters Program, entitled "Space Billionaires: Educating the Next Generation of Entrepreneurs."

And it doesn't take too much of an imagination to understand the implications for human freedom that would come from Page's pet project, artificial intelligence. Page described AI as "the ultimate search engine -- it would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted (my emphasis)." While he smiles as he delivers the line, perhaps imagining his own post singularity God-being in whatever second life he hopes to create, he obviously forgets what such a system would mean for those of us living our real lives in the real world dominated by powerful states and greedy capitalists made more powerful by their all-knowing computers (assuming the computers wouldn't just kill us all to begin with).

It's worth asking, would social change be possible at all in a world dominated by omniscient AI, or would an all-knowing elite be able to track everything, preventing any opposition and therefore transferring all power in the system to themselves? In such a situation, would everyone who wasn't in the Singular Elite become total slaves? Not having a countervailing force to compel them to relinquish even a little bit of their power, what possible reason would the elite have for providing the rest of us any rights at all under their technological "utopia"?

In an interview with Fortune Magazine, Page lamented,

If you ask an economist what's driven economic growth, it's been major advances in things that mattered - the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that. People are not working on things that could have that kind of influence.

Not surprisingly, he has a one-sided view of the events he describes even as he expresses every capitalists dream: to reorder society according to his needs. Firstly, he uses the passive voice to describe what in reality was a very violent attack by the capitalists on the lives of what would become workers. Secondly, the decomposition of the emerging working class that capitalists imposed through the rise of mass manufacture can only be ignored if, like Page, you don't recognize the hand of Capital at all in relation to the application of technology. This despite the many ways in which Google itself both creates and bends to the will of Capital, whether in its ad placement or in its censorship and regulation of YouTube, one of its many properties. Content on the internet must reflect the constraints of Capital like any other resource.

For instance, taking one of Page's examples, beyond just workers, mass manufacture changed all our lives, including those sometimes left out of the system of waged work like women and children, who found their lives, too, reorganized around the capitalist ethic of consumerism and later manufacture and commodity capitalism. Like the Singularity, consumerism and mass production promised the workers of the world great things, too. And so, the suburbs grew and the cars rolled off the assembly lines. And families were fragmented and lives became empty. But this new form of organization served the needs of Capital just fine.

Page also doesn't seem to remember that people resisted, often violently, those interventions into their lives. He doesn't realize that capitalists use technology as a means for the maintenance of their power through the reorganization of the working class to better suit the needs of Capital and that those actions have far-ranging affects that are very often not positive for the bulk of people affected by them. Affects that, like the Singularity, do not have in-built mechanisms for the democratic participation of the great mass of people. Lacking them, how can we expect democratic tendencies to manifest? Since Capital is a dictatorship, isn't it much more likely that a high tech society like the one transhumanists desire would much more likely resemble tyranny than freedom?

What democratic mechanisms exist in modern technological development lie primarily in the realm of one dollar one vote, a playing field that obviously privileges the opinions of people like Page and Diamandis over those of regular people and probably explains their comfort with that as a standard. Further, those without access to massive amounts of capital find themselves entirely out of the game when it comes to technological development.

Whatever other democratic mechanisms may exist in the future -- assuming any would emerge -- would have to be imposed by the rest of society, much the way that workers fought to impose some sort of democratic structure on industrial capitalism through their self-organization and resistance. And, given the class position of these two capitalists in particular, we can be safe in betting that they would oppose such means were they to arise.



In fact, there is little reason to believe that Page and Diamandis really believe in liberation for the masses via technology. Consider comments made, and later retracted under pressure, by Diamandis at a talk on examples from history with regard to his alleged goal of opening up space to more people. One unfortunate example he chose: the German V2 program under the Nazis.

DIAMANDIS: If you look back at what von Braun did in Nazi Germany It was incredible what you can do with literally a dictatorship. Look at the numbers. 6,000 V-2s built. 6,000 missiles were built in Nazi Germany. The recurring cost was $13,000 a launch for those vehicles. You can bring the cost down with mass production. We'll come back to what will drive ...

[Multiple audience comments - including me - "SLAVE LABOR"]

DIAMANDIS: Yea, and slave labor, Sorry.

[NERVOUS LAUGHTER]

DIAMANDIS: But you know - again to you the rest of us would happily be slave labor for that mission. Can you erase that from the video tape?

[NERVOUS LAUGHTER]

DIAMANDIS: But the fact of the matter is that mass production of rockets is possible if you have a real marketplace. And war is not a good one. Moving forward though ...

Yeah, that's right, he said it. Slave labor. But it's not a bad example, really, is it? It certainly is a revelatory one. And it goes not just for Nazi Germany. Although Diamandis nervously claims at the end of that excerpt that war is not a good market, he knows he's lying. After all, if slavery was good for the development of the Nazi missile program, surely the Nazi state was as well. High technology depends on the nanny state for guaranteed markets for its goods and services. And the state, always looking for a way to expand its power and to defend its class constituency, happily provides. After all, once WWII was over the US fought hard to gather as many Nazi scientists as possible for it's own Cold War nuclear missile program, sometimes referred to in popular discourse by its doublethink titles of the Space Program or the Energy Department. You see, tyranny and holocaust (both racial and global) are never far removed from these kinds of programs. For more on this, I recommend reading Kirkpatrick Sale's excellent book "Fire of His Genius : Robert Fulton and the American Dream" which describes the link between the steamboat and the genocidal war against Native peoples in the North America.

Peter Diamandis: not a dork in High School

But these comments also reveal a colossal disconnect in the heads of transhumanists like Diamandis and Page. They indeed mistake their own position, tremendously privileged both in terms of wealth and power, for the class position of everyone else. Note his statement about being happy to be slave labor for a space mission. Really? Does he think that goes for the rest of us, too? These are the people who will deliver us technological liberation.

Just consider the term "transhumanist." It's hard to imagine a term more fitting for a group of wealthy nerds uncomfortable in their own skin, isn't it? Like any good fundamentalist, they are ready to let slip this mortal coil for their reward in the great beyond. Still trying to escape from their dork high school personas, these new Masters of the Universe have mistaken their rewards under the capitalist system for a glimpse of our common liberation rather than what it really is -- a snapshot of our current misery. They hope to impose their uncomfortableness and their own desire for liberation from their sad human lives onto us. But their liberation comes at our expense, in this world and in the Singularity.

Their Singularity isn't big enough for the rest of us. Perhaps that's the real reason behind the name.