New

Friends, please take a look at the newly-launched Viewpoint for more commentary along the lines you’ve seen here, by me and many others. These projects are much better done collectively.

The Prince and the Pauper

Over at Jacobin, an article by me and Salar Mohandesi on recent events in London. We invite discussion here.

Everyone on the left has pointed out that the riots in London are rooted in capital’s assault on the working class, couched in the ideological language of austerity – and that this was the kindling sparked by the racist police brutality that culminated in the murder of Mark Duggan. But our task – like Marx’s task, when he defended the violent upheaval of the Silesian weavers – isn’t to give a moral evaluation of the riots, like schoolmasters diligently stacking the pros against the cons, but, rather, to grasp their specific character.

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Society of the Skeptical

As we examine the history of riots, we should recognize the importance of resisting racist ultra-leftism. Exhibit A: Guy Debord on the Watts riots.

Note the condescending tone, the proximity of his view of black culture to various contemporary right-wing talking points, and how quick he is to dismiss the legacy of political struggle waged by African-Americans themselves.

• “Since the blacks no longer had any leaders, it was the moment of truth for both sides.”
• “The issue is no longer the condition of American blacks, but the condition of America, which merely happens to find its first expression among the blacks. The Watts riot was not a racial conflict: the rioters left alone the whites that were in their path, attacking only the white policemen, while on the other hand black solidarity did not extend to black store-owners or even to black car-drivers. Martin Luther King himself had to admit that the revolt went beyond the limits of his specialty.”
• “Like the young delinquents of all the advanced countries, but more radically because they are part of a class without a future, a sector of the proletariat unable to believe in any significant chance of integration or promotion, the Los Angeles blacks take modern capitalist propaganda, its publicity of abundance, literally.”
• “The American blacks have their own particular spectacle, their own black newspapers, magazines and stars, and if they are rejecting it in disgust as a fraud and as an expression of their humiliation, it is because they see it as a minority spectacle, a mere appendage of a general spectacle.”
• “The blacks in fact function as a perfect spectacular object-lesson: the threat of falling into such wretchedness spurs others on in the rat-race.”
• “The attempts to build a separatist or pro-African black nationalism are dreams giving no answer to the real oppression. The American blacks have no fatherland.”
• “The American blacks are a product of modern industry, just like electronics or advertising or the cyclotron.”
• “The end of all racial prejudice, like the end of so many other prejudices related to sexual inhibitions, can only lie beyond ‘marriage’ itself, that is, beyond the bourgeois family (which has largely fallen apart among American blacks)…”

It is quite clear that Debord read an article about the Moynihan report in an alcoholic stupor, then watched The Hate that Hate Produced and decided all the movements for black liberation were spectacular-Islamic authoritarianism. These unpleasant sentiments are interspersed between pseudo-insights that reduce every social formation to the commodity form. My leftist friends, we can do much better than this ridiculous drunken cracker.

Strategies

This blog is dedicated to agency. Anyone interested in the capacity to intervene in the world will have to scrutinize everyday life, and its role in the social structure. The next step is to move from critical analysis to active engagement.

Entrepreneurial ideology describes this self-referential mode of action as “lifestyle design” or “life hacking,” but this strategy has relevance beyond the world of business. It can’t be reduced to a way of generating leisure time. After all, enjoyment of consumer commodities is also a kind of work; our lifestyles are already designed by the complex apparatuses of industry and the state, and it is up to us to orient this design in a different direction. Lifestyle design can be practiced not as an atomized individual seeking profit, but as a member of a global laboring collectivity.

Here is a preliminary list of goals and responsibilities:

• Self-defense from control. A collection of defensive maneuvers, designed for protection from the damage that surveillance and exploitation can inflict on bodies and brains. To those who consider this reactive and conciliatory, please remember: knowing when to retreat is an essential element of victorious warfare.
  
• Commitment to scientific inquiry. One function of the many ideologies on today’s scene is to provide cognitive maps that allow us to navigate social life. Now it’s clear that we have to push further into science, generating theories which can explain observable phenomena, ensuring reproducibility of results, and rigorously using knowledge to innovate and revolutionize practice.
  
• Redistribution of information. Popular exchange of information is omnipresent, and allows the oligopolistic industries of communication to exist—we add to their profits with every click. It’s necessary to protect this collective labor from exploitation, and to contribute to free and universal access to the means of communication.
• Production of a subject. The ultimate mission is to transform global society; organizing an anti-state movement through social media is only one recent expression. We’ll have to begin with the potentialities that already exist, and facilitate their organization into collective subjects that can intervene in reality.

This blog is a space in which problems are described and strategies for design are developed.