Brandon Jourdan - The Battle of Oakland (January 28th, 2012)

The Battle of Oakland from brandon jourdan on Vimeo.

Chicago police and protesters push back at Cermak Road and Michigan Avenue. — E. Jason Wambsgans, Chicago Tribune, May 20, 2012 (The beginning of the election year in the USA)

Topology VI: Spaces of Transformation: The Vast Space-Time of Revolutions Becoming. A conversation with Drucilla Cornell, David Harvey and Achille Mbembe chaired by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera @ Tate Modern, London 12 May 2012

A barricade in the Paris Commune, March 18, 1871

Spaces of Transformation: The Vast Space-Time of Revolutions Becoming

Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium

Saturday 12 May 2012, 

With Drucilla Cornell on The Site of Revolution, David Harvey on The Spaces of Anti-capitalist Transition and Achille Mbembe on Zero-World. Chaired by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera.

This panel constitutes the spirit that opens up new potentiality spaces for human thought and action toward a transformative movement (abolishing the state of things) that is always there for the making and the taking – pushing human possibilities to their limits. This is what gaining the courage of our minds is all about: to take a speculative plunge into the unknown and the unknowable – facing up to a world of uncertainty and risk where the social and the ecological orders are unpredictable and unstable. What counts is open dialogue and practical interactions across multiple theatres on this long frontier in the vast space-time of revolutions becoming.

Drucilla Cornell

(The Site of Revolution) is Professor of political science, women’s studies, and comparative literature at Rutgers University and National Research Foundation Professor in Customary Law, Indigenous Ideals and the Dignity Jurisprudence at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Prior to beginning her life as an academic, Cornell was a union organizer for a number of years. She worked for the UAW, the UE, and the IUE in California, New Jersey and New York. She has written numerous articles on contemporary continental thought, critical theory, grass-roots political and legal mobilisation, jurisprudence, women’s literature, feminism, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and political philosophy. She has published several books: Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law (1991, new edition 1999), The Philosophy of the Limit (1992),Transformations: Recollective Imagination and Sexual Difference (1993), The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography, and Sexual Harassment (1995), At the Heart of Freedom: Feminism, Sex, and Equality (1998), Just Cause: Freedom, Identity, and Rights (2000), Between Women and Generations: Legacies of Dignity (2002), Defending Ideals: War, Democracy and Political Struggles (2004) and Moral Images of Freedom: A Future for Critical Theory (2008) that won the Frantz Fanon prize. Her most recent book with Kenneth Michael Panfilio isSymbolic Forms for a New Humanity (2011). She is on the Board of Directors of the uBuntu Project.

David Harvey

(Spaces of Anti-Capitalist Transition) is a geographer and the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York. Among other awards he has received the Anders Retzius Gold Medal of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography, the Patron’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and the Vautrin Lud International Prize in Geography (France). He was made a fellow of the British Academy in 1998 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007. He is the author of many books, including Social Justice and the City (1973), Consciousness and the Urban Experience (1985), The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), The Limits to Capital (1982), Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996), Spaces of Hope (2000), The New Imperialism (2003), A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (2006), Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (2009), A Companion to Marx’s Capital (2010), and The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (2010).

Achille Mbembe

(Zero-World) is a philosopher and political scientist. He obtained his PhD in History at the University of Sorbonne and a DEA in Political Science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris. He is a Professor of Social Theory in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Stellenbosch University and a convenor of the Locations and Locutions lecture series. He is also a co-convenor of The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (Faculty of the Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand) and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University (US). He is a senior researcher at WISERInstitute in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is a contributing editor of the scholarly journal Public Culture. He has written extensively on African history and politics, including Les Jeunes et l’ordre politique en Afrique noire (1985), La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (1996), Du Gouvernement prive indirect (2000), and Sortir de la grande nuit – Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée (2010). He is the winner of the Bill Venter/Altron Award (2006) for his book On the Postcolony(2001). He has written on the artist Marlene Dumas.

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

is a philosopher and cultural critic, as well as the award-winning author of ‘What If Latin America Ruled the World?’ Oscar teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London, and often collaborates with such media outlets as the BBC, Guardian, Monocle Radio, Tank Magazine, Al Jazeera and RT, among others.

Read more on Tate M website

Mark Stewart - The Politics of Envy (sampler)

Mark Stewart vs Primal Scream - Autonomia (Pinch's Apocalyptic Rework)

'Autonomia' will be released through Future Noise Music on February 20th, a dense agit-protest superfunk monster with sirens and Bobby Gillespie's frenetic 'keeping the dream alive' call-and-response chant with Mark Stewart who explains the story behind the song - "I'd written this song about Carlo Giuliani, who was killed at the G8 demonstrations in Genoa. At that point, it was a protest ... afterwards I started getting on with Bobby and I asked Adrian [Sherwood] about doing it. It's important that people hear about the story, it's the message and the atmosphere as much as anything.'

Pushing the Limits of the Affective Workspace: Revolts, Absorption, and Ecologies of Waste @ University of East London, March 21st 2012

University of East London
Centre for Cultural Studies Research
Presents

Pushing the Limits of the Affective Workspace: Revolts, Absorption, and Ecologies of Waste

A symposium with Jussi Parikka, Stevphen Shukaitis and Tony D. Sampson
Chair: Jeremy Gilbert, CCSR

Wednesday March 21st 2012
2:00pm-5:00pm
UEL Docklands Campus
Room EB.G.10
(ground floor, main building, turn left upon entering the main square after leaving Cyprus DLR
Cyprus DLR is literally situated at the campus)
Free, All welcome. No need to book.

The boundaries of capitalist workspaces are continuously stretched to new limits. Work is pushed into the home, the obsolescent and the unconscious. Focusing on affective labour, new materialism and neuromarketing, this seminar looks initially beyond the media screens of the digital industries to the wasteful ecologies of obsolescent technology. It then explores resistance to contemporary capitalism extending to, for example, the refusal of caring labour. Last, it repositions the attentive subject of cognitive capitalism in a neurological space of absorbent and mostly unconscious consumption.

Media Matters as Ecology
Jussi Parikka, Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton).

This talk investigates “new materialism” through the context of media ecology – but ecology understood literally and through electronic waste, and the various temporalities and materialities of obsolescence. It argues, following Sean Cubitt’s and German media theory lead, for such a focus to technical media that accounts not only what’s on the screen, but what enables “media” as content to exist. German media theory has been successful to track this back to the engineering and scientific roots of modern entertainment media, but this talk focuses on electronic waste, and its relation to information technology work, but from a slightly alternative perspective. As such, the talk also touches discussions of “affective labour” as well as non-representational approaches to contemporary media culture.

Jussi Parikka is Reader in Media & Design at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). His books include Digital Contagions (2007), Insect Media (2010) and the forthcoming What is Media Archaeology? (2012). He has co-edited The Spam Book (with Tony D. Sampson, 2009) and Media Archaeology (with Erkki Huhtamo, 2011).

Learning from Affective Revolts: Social Reproduction & Political Subjectiviation
Stevphen Shukaitis, University of Essex / Autonomedia

Despite the importance that autonomist feminism has played in the development of autonomist politics and struggles it is commonly relegated to little more than a glorious footnotes of figures emerging out of operaisti thought (such as Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno). Organizing around gender, affective labor, and issues of reproduction posed numerous important questions to forms of class struggle that focused exclusively on the figure of the waged industrial worker. Revolts of housewives, students, the unwaged, and farm workers led to a rethinking of notions of labor, the boundaries of workplace, and effective strategies for class struggles: they enacted a critical transformation in the social imaginary of labor organizing and struggle. By drawing on the history and of these struggles (such as the various Wages for Housework Campaigns and current organizing such as Precarias a la Deriva) and ideas of those involved (such as Silvia Federici, Leopoldina Fortunati, Mariarosa Dallacosta, and Alisa Del Re) this paper will explore some lessons that can be learned from these a(e)ffective insurgency.  Taking seriously the questions posed by these struggles are extremely important because as Alisa Del Re argues, attempting to refuse and reduce forms of imposed labor and exploitation without addressing the realms of social reproduction and housework amounts to building a notion of utopia upon the continued exploitation of female labor. Furthermore the often cramped positions that organizing forms of affective labor and social reproduction (housewives, sex workers, etc) occupies becomes all the more important as these processes are further integrated into the composition of contemporary capitalism. How does one refuse caring labor? Strategies for organizing around affective labor, what Precarias a la Deriva have called a “very careful strike,” are important to learn from to find ways “not a high productivity of domestic labor but a higher subversiveness in the struggle.” (Dallacosta/James)

Stevphen Shukaitis is a lecturer at the University of Essex and a member of the Autonomedia editorial collective. He is the author of Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Day (2009, Autonomedia) and editor (with Erika Biddle and David Graeber) of Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (AK Press, 2007). His research focuses on the emergence of collective imagination in social movements and the changing compositions of cultural and artistic labor.

Following the Glint in the Eye of the Consumer
Tony D. Sampson, University of East London

New developments in marketing techniques not only aim to sidestep the self-reporting of consumer experiences, but also look beyond the explicit cognitive realm of visual representation to exploit instead the implicit, unconscious affective systems of consumption. Like this, the neuromarketer measures the streams of affect the consumer somatically absorbs in the atmosphere. As the enthusiastic CEO of one US based neuromarketing company puts it, these techniques help the marketer to go beyond conscious consumer engagement with a product and actively seek out what unconsciously attracts them. “Absorption is the ideal,” he claims. This is because it “signifies that the consumer’s brain has not only registered your marketing message or your creative content, but that the other centers of the brain that are involved with emotions and memory have been activated as well.” Along these lines, persuasion and absorption seemingly involves priming the sensory experiences of consumption so as to achieve a number of design goals intended to influence purchase intent.

Tony D. Sampson is a London-based academic and writer. He lectures on new media at UEL where he also leads the new media degree programmes. He is the co-editor (with Jussi Parikka) of The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalies From the Dark Side of Digital Culture (Cresskill, Hampton Press, 2009) and the author of Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (University of Minnesota Press) to be published later this year. His current research focuses on the latest applications of noncognitive psychology in studies of human computer interaction.

The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie by Slavoj Žižek (London Review of Books, Uk, 26 January 2012) §§ La rivolta della borghesia salariata - Slavoj Žižek (@ Sinistra in Rete, 11 febbraio 2012, traduzione it. Maurizio Acerbo)

The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie by Slavoj Žižek (London Review of Books, Uk, 26 January 2012)

How did Bill Gates become the richest man in America? His wealth has nothing to do with Microsoft producing good software at lower prices than its competitors, or ‘exploiting’ its workers more successfully (Microsoft pays its intellectual workers a relatively high salary). Millions of people still buy Microsoft software because Microsoft has imposed itself as an almost universal standard, practically monopolising the field, as one embodiment of what Marx called the ‘general intellect’, by which he meant collective knowledge in all its forms, from science to practical knowhow. Gates effectively privatised part of the general intellect and became rich by appropriating the rent that followed.

The possibility of the privatisation of the general intellect was something Marx never envisaged in his writings about capitalism (largely because he overlooked its social dimension). Yet this is at the core of today’s struggles over intellectual property: as the role of the general intellect – based on collective knowledge and social co-operation – increases in post-industrial capitalism, so wealth accumulates out of all proportion to the labour expended in its production. The result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge.

The same is true of natural resources, the exploitation of which is one of the world’s main sources of rent. There is a permanent struggle over who gets this rent: citizens of the Third World or Western corporations. It’s ironic that in explaining the difference between labour (which in its use produces surplus value) and other commodities (which consume all their value in their use), Marx gives oil as an example of an ‘ordinary’ commodity. Any attempt now to link the rise and fall in the price of oil to the rise or fall in production costs or the price of exploited labour would be meaningless: production costs are negligible as a proportion of the price we pay for oil, a price which is really the rent the resource’s owners can command thanks to its limited supply.

A consequence of the rise in productivity brought about by the exponentially growing impact of collective knowledge is a change in the role of unemployment. It is the very success of capitalism (greater efficiency, raised productivity etc) which produces unemployment, rendering more and more workers useless: what should be a blessing – less hard labour needed – becomes a curse. Or, to put it differently, the chance to be exploited in a long-term job is now experienced as a privilege. The world market, as Fredric Jameson has put it, is ‘a space in which everyone has once been a productive labourer, and in which labour has everywhere begun to price itself out of the system.’ In the ongoing process of capitalist globalisation, the category of the unemployed is no longer confined to Marx’s ‘reserve army of labour’; it also includes, as Jameson notes, ‘those massive populations around the world who have, as it were, “dropped out of history”, who have been deliberately excluded from the modernising projects of First World capitalism and written off as hopeless or terminal cases’: so-called failed states (Congo, Somalia), victims of famine or ecological disaster, those trapped by pseudo-archaic ‘ethnic hatreds’, objects of philanthropy and NGOs or targets of the war on terror. The category of the unemployed has thus expanded to encompass vast ranges of people, from the temporarily unemployed, the no longer employable and permanently unemployed, to the inhabitants of ghettos and slums (all those often dismissed by Marx himself as ‘lumpen-proletarians’), and finally to the whole populations and states excluded from the global capitalist process, like the blank spaces on ancient maps.

Some say that this new form of capitalism provides new possibilities for emancipation. This at any rate is the thesis of Hardt and Negri’s Multitude, which tries to radicalise Marx, who held that if we just cut the head off capitalism we’d get socialism. Marx, as they see it, was historically constrained: he thought in terms of centralised, automated and hierarchically organised industrial labour, with the result that he understood ‘general intellect’ as something rather like a central planning agency; it is only today, with the rise of ‘immaterial labour’, that a revolutionary reversal has become ‘objectively possible’. This immaterial labour extends between two poles: from intellectual labour (the production of ideas, texts, computer programs etc) to affective labour (carried out by doctors, babysitters and flight attendants). Today, immaterial labour is hegemonic in the sense in which Marx proclaimed that, in 19th-century capitalism, large industrial production was hegemonic: it imposes itself not through force of numbers but by playing the key, emblematic structural role. What emerges is a vast new domain called the ‘common’: shared knowledge and new forms of communication and co-operation. The products of immaterial production aren’t objects but new social or interpersonal relations; immaterial production is bio-political, the production of social life.

Hardt and Negri are here describing the process that the ideologists of today’s ‘postmodern’ capitalism celebrate as the passage from material to symbolic production, from centralist-hierarchical logic to the logic of self-organisation and multi-centred co-operation. The difference is that Hardt and Negri are faithful to Marx: they are trying to prove that he was right, that the rise of the general intellect is in the long term incompatible with capitalism. The ideologists of postmodern capitalism are making exactly the opposite claim: Marxist theory (and practice), they argue, remains within the constraints of the hierarchical logic of centralised state control and so can’t cope with the social effects of the information revolution. There are good empirical reasons for this claim: what effectively ruined the Communist regimes was their inability to accommodate to the new social logic sustained by the information revolution. They tried to steer the revolution, to make it yet another large-scale centralised state-planning project. The paradox is that what Hardt and Negri celebrate as the unique chance to overcome capitalism is celebrated by the ideologists of the information revolution as the rise of a new, ‘frictionless’ capitalism.

Hardt and Negri’s analysis has some weak points, which help us understand how capitalism has been able to survive what should have been (in classic Marxist terms) a new organisation of production that rendered it obsolete. They underestimate the extent to which today’s capitalism has successfully (in the short term at least) privatised the general intellect itself, as well as the extent to which, more than the bourgeoisie, workers themselves are becoming superfluous (with greater and greater numbers becoming not just temporarily unemployed but structurally unemployable).

If the old capitalism ideally involved an entrepreneur who invested (his own or borrowed) money into production that he organised and ran, and then reaped the profit from it, a new ideal type is emerging today: no longer the entrepreneur who owns his company, but the expert manager (or a managerial board presided over by a CEO) who runs a company owned by banks (also run by managers who don’t own the bank) or dispersed investors. In this new ideal type of capitalism, the old bourgeoisie, rendered non-functional, is refunctionalised as salaried management: the members of the new bourgeoisie get wages, and even if they own part of their company, earn stocks as part of their remuneration (‘bonuses’ for their ‘success’).

This new bourgeoisie still appropriates surplus value, but in the (mystified) form of what has been called ‘surplus wage’: they are paid rather more than the proletarian ‘minimum wage’ (an often mythic point of reference whose only real example in today’s global economy is the wage of a sweatshop worker in China or Indonesia), and it is this distinction from common proletarians which determines their status. The bourgeoisie in the classic sense thus tends to disappear: capitalists reappear as a subset of salaried workers, as managers who are qualified to earn more by virtue of their competence (which is why pseudo-scientific ‘evaluation’ is crucial: it legitimises disparities). Far from being limited to managers, the category of workers earning a surplus wage extends to all sorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and artists. The surplus takes two forms: more money (for managers etc), but also less work and more free time (for – some – intellectuals, but also for state administrators etc).

The evaluative procedure used to decide which workers receive a surplus wage is an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence; the surplus wage exists not for economic but for political reasons: to maintain a ‘middle class’ for the purpose of social stability. The arbitrariness of social hierarchy is not a mistake, but the whole point, with the arbitrariness of evaluation playing an analogous role to the arbitrariness of market success. Violence threatens to explode not when there is too much contingency in the social space, but when one tries to eliminate contingency. In La Marque du sacré, Jean-Pierre Dupuy conceives hierarchy as one of four procedures (‘dispositifs symboliques’) whose function is to make the relationship of superiority non-humiliating: hierarchy itself (an externally imposed order that allows me to experience my lower social status as independent of my inherent value);demystification (the ideological procedure which demonstrates that society is not a meritocracy but the product of objective social struggles, enabling me to avoid the painful conclusion that someone else’s superiority is the result of his merit and achievements); contingency (a similar mechanism, by which we come to understand that our position on the social scale depends on a natural and social lottery; the lucky ones are those born with the right genes in rich families); and complexity(uncontrollable forces have unpredictable consequences; for instance, the invisible hand of the market may lead to my failure and my neighbour’s success, even if I work much harder and am much more intelligent). Contrary to appearances, these mechanisms don’t contest or threaten hierarchy, but make it palatable, since ‘what triggers the turmoil of envy is the idea that the other deserves his good luck and not the opposite idea – which is the only one that can be openly expressed.’ Dupuy draws from this premise the conclusion that it is a great mistake to think that a reasonably just society which also perceives itself as just will be free of resentment: on the contrary, it is in such societies that those who occupy inferior positions will find an outlet for their hurt pride in violent outbursts of resentment.

Connected to this is the impasse faced by today’s China: the ideal goal of Deng’s reforms was to introduce capitalism without a bourgeoisie (since it would form the new ruling class); now, however, China’s leaders are making the painful discovery that capitalism without the settled hierarchy enabled by the existence of a bourgeoisie generates permanent instability. So what path will China take? Former Communists generally are emerging as the most efficient managers of capitalism because their historical enmity towards the bourgeoisie as a class perfectly fits the tendency of today’s capitalism to become a managerial capitalism without a bourgeoisie – in both cases, as Stalin put it long ago, ‘cadres decide everything.’ (An interesting difference between today’s China and Russia: in Russia, university teachers are ridiculously underpaid – they are de facto already part of the proletariat – while in China they are provided with a comfortable surplus wage to guarantee their docility.)

The notion of surplus wage also throws new light on the continuing ‘anti-capitalist’ protests. In times of crisis, the obvious candidates for ‘belt-tightening’ are the lower levels of the salaried bourgeoisie: political protest is their only recourse if they are to avoid joining the proletariat. Although their protests are nominally directed against the brutal logic of the market, they are in effect protesting about the gradual erosion of their (politically) privileged economic place. Ayn Rand has a fantasy in Atlas Shruggedof striking ‘creative’ capitalists, a fantasy that finds its perverted realisation in today’s strikes, most of which are held by a ‘salaried bourgeoisie’ driven by fear of losing their surplus wage. These are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being reduced to proletarians. Who dares strike today, when having a permanent job is itself a privilege? Not low-paid workers in (what remains of) the textile industry etc, but those privileged workers who have guaranteed jobs (teachers, public transport workers, police). This also accounts for the wave of student protests: their main motivation is arguably the fear that higher education will no longer guarantee them a surplus wage in later life.

At the same time it is clear that the huge revival of protest over the past year, from the Arab Spring to Western Europe, from Occupy Wall Street to China, from Spain to Greece, should not be dismissed merely as a revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie. Each case should be taken on its own merits. The student protests against university reform in the UK were clearly different from August’s riots, which were a consumerist carnival of destruction, a true outburst of the excluded. One could argue that the uprisings in Egypt began in part as a revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie (with educated young people protesting about their lack of prospects), but this was only one aspect of a larger protest against an oppressive regime. On the other hand, the protest didn’t really mobilise poor workers and peasants and the Islamists’ electoral victory makes clear the narrow social base of the original secular protest. Greece is a special case: in the last decades, a new salaried bourgeoisie (especially in the over-extended state administration) was created thanks to EU financial help, and the protests were motivated in large part by the threat of an end to this.

The proletarianisation of the lower salaried bourgeoisie is matched at the opposite extreme by the irrationally high remuneration of top managers and bankers (irrational since, as investigations have demonstrated in the US, it tends to be inversely proportional to a company’s success). Rather than submit these trends to moralising criticism, we should read them as signs that the capitalist system is no longer capable of self-regulated stability – it threatens, in other words, to run out of control.

La rivolta della borghesia salariata di Slavoj Žižek

Come ha fatto Bill Gates a diventare l’uomo più ricco d’America? La sua ricchezza non ha nulla a che fare con la produzione di un buon software Microsoft a prezzi inferiori rispetto ai suoi concorrenti, o con lo ’sfruttare’ i suoi lavoratori con più successo (Microsoft paga i lavoratori intellettuali uno stipendio relativamente alto). Milioni di persone ancora acquistano il software Microsoft, perché Microsoft si è imposto come uno standard quasi universale, praticamente monopolizzando il campo, come una incarnazione di ciò che Marx chiamava il ‘General Intellect’, con la quale egli intendeva la conoscenza collettiva in tutte le sue forme, dalla scienza al know-how pratico. Gates effettivamente ha privatizzato parte del general intellect ed è diventato ricco appropriandosi della rendita che ne seguì.

La possibilità della privatizzazione del General Intellect era qualcosa che Marx non ha mai previsto nei suoi scritti sul capitalismo (in gran parte perché ha trascurato la sua dimensione sociale). Eppure questo è al centro delle lotte di oggi sulla proprietà intellettuale: come il ruolo delGeneral Intellect – basato sulla conoscenza collettiva e la cooperazione sociale – cresce nel capitalismo post-industriale, così la ricchezza si accumula al di fuori di ogni proporzione con il lavoro speso nella sua produzione. Il risultato non è, come Marx sembra avere previsto, l’auto-dissoluzione del capitalismo, ma la graduale trasformazione del profitto generato dallo sfruttamento del lavoro in rendita appropriata attraverso la privatizzazione della conoscenza.

Lo stesso vale per le risorse naturali, lo sfruttamento delle quali è una delle principali fonti mondiali di rendita. Vi è una lotta permanente su chi si appropria di questa rendita: i cittadini del Terzo Mondo o le grandi imprese occidentali. E’ ironico che nello spiegare la differenza tra il lavoro (che nel suo uso produce plusvalore) e altre materie prime (che consumano tutto il loro valore nel loro utilizzo), Marx dà il petrolio come un esempio di una merce ‘ordinaria’. Qualsiasi tentativo ora di collegare l’aumento e la diminuzione del prezzo del petrolio con l’aumento o la diminuzione dei costi di produzione o il costo del lavoro sfruttato non avrebbe senso: i costi di produzione sono trascurabili in proporzione al prezzo che paghiamo per il petrolio, un prezzo che è davvero la rendita che i proprietari della risorsa possono comandare grazie alla sua offerta limitata.

Una conseguenza della crescita della produttività causata dall’impatto della crescita esponenziale della conoscenza collettiva è un cambiamento nel ruolo di disoccupazione. E’ il vero successo del capitalismo (maggiore efficienza, produttività elevata ecc.) che produce disoccupazione, rendendo i lavoratori sempre più inutili: quello che dovrebbe essere una benedizione – meno bisogno di duro lavoro – diventa una maledizione. O, per dirla diversamente, la possibilità di essere sfruttati in un lavoro di lunga durata è ormai vissuta come un privilegio. Il mercato mondiale, come Fredric Jameson ha evidenziato, è “uno spazio in cui ognuno una volta è stato un lavoratore produttivo, e in cui il lavoro ha iniziato dappertutto a dare un prezzo a se stesso fuori dal sistema”.

Nel processo di globalizzazione capitalistica, la categoria dei disoccupati non è più limitata all’ ‘esercito di riserva del lavoro’ di Marx, ma include anche, come nota Jameson, ‘quelle enormi popolazioni in tutto il mondo che sono, per così dire, “cadute fuori dalla storia “, che sono state volutamente escluse dai progetti di modernizzazione del capitalismo del Primo Mondo e liquidati come casi disperati o terminali ‘: i cosiddetti stati falliti (Congo, Somalia), vittime della fame o di un disastro ecologico, quelli intrappolati da pseudo -arcaici ‘odi etnici’, oggetti di filantropia e ONG o bersagli della guerra al terrore. La categoria dei disoccupati si è così esteso a vaste gamme di persone, dai temporaneamente disoccupati, non più occupabili e permanentemente disoccupati, agli abitanti dei ghetti e delle baraccopoli (tutti coloro spesso respinti dallo stesso Marx come ‘lumpen-proletari’) e, infine, alle intere popolazioni e agli stati esclusi dal processo capitalistico globale, come gli spazi vuoti sulle mappe antiche.

Alcuni dicono che questa nuova forma di capitalismo offre nuove possibilità di emancipazione. Questa in ogni caso è la tesi di Moltitudine di Hardt e Negri , che cerca di radicalizzare Marx, il quale dichiarò che se solo tagliassimo la testa del capitalismo otterremmo il socialismo.

Marx per come lo lo vedono, è stato storicamente condizionato: pensava in termini di lavoro industriale centralizzato e automatizzato e gerarchicamente organizzato, con il risultato che ha compreso ‘il General Intellect’ come un qualcosa quasi come un’agenzia centrale di pianificazione; è solo oggi, con la crescita del ‘lavoro immateriale’, che un rovesciamento rivoluzionario è diventato ‘oggettivamente possibile’.

Questo lavoro immateriale si estende tra due poli: dal lavoro intellettuale (la produzione di idee, testi, programmi per computer ecc.) al lavoro affettivo (effettuato da medici, baby sitter e personale di volo). Oggi, il lavoro immateriale è egemone nel senso in cui Marx proclamò che, nel capitalismo del 19 ° secolo, la grande produzione industriale era egemone: non si impone con la forza dei numeri, ma giocando il ruolo emblematico strutturale chiave. Ciò che emerge è un nuovo vasto campo chiamato il ‘comune’: la conoscenza condivisa e le nuove forme di comunicazione e cooperazione. I prodotti di produzione immateriale non sono oggetti, ma nuovi rapporti sociali e interpersonali, la produzione immateriale è bio-politica, la produzione della vita sociale.

Hardt e Negri stanno qui descrivendo il processo che gli ideologi del capitalismo odierno ‘postmoderno’ celebrano come il passaggio dalla produzione materiale alla simbolica, dalla logica centralistica-gerarchica alla logica dell’autorganizzazione e della cooperazione policentrica. La differenza è che Hardt e Negri sono fedeli a Marx: stanno cercando di dimostrare che aveva ragione, che l’ascesa del general intellect è a lungo termine incompatibile con il capitalismo. Gli ideologi del capitalismo postmoderno stanno facendo esattamente l’opposta dichiarazione: la teoria (e la pratica) marxista , essi sostengono, rimane entro i limiti della logica gerarchica del controllo statale centralizzato e quindi non può far fronte agli effetti sociali della rivoluzione informatica. Ci sono buone ragioni empiriche per questa affermazione: ciò che effettivamente ha rovinato i regimi comunisti era la loro incapacità di adattarsi alla nuova logica sociale sostenuta dalla rivoluzione informatica. Hanno cercato di guidare la rivoluzione, per renderla ancora un altro progetto su larga scala di pianificazione centralizzata di stato. Il paradosso è che ciò che Hardt e Negri celebrano come l’opportunità unica di superare il capitalismo è celebrato dagli ideologi della rivoluzione informatica, come la nascita di un nuovo capitalismo ‘privo di attrito’.

L’analisi Hardt e Negri ha alcuni punti deboli, che ci aiutano a capire come il capitalismo ha potuto sopravvivere a ciò che avrebbe dovuto essere (in termini marxisti classici) una nuova organizzazione della produzione che lo rendeva obsoleto. Essi sottovalutano la misura in cui il capitalismo di oggi ha con successo (nel breve termine almeno) privatizzato il General Intellectstesso, così come la misura in cui, più che la borghesia, i lavoratori stessi stanno diventando superflui (con un numero sempre più grande che diventa non solo temporaneamente disoccupato ma strutturalmente inoccupabile).

Se il vecchio capitalismo idealmente coinvogeva un imprenditore che investiva denaro (proprio o preso in prestito) nella produzione che aveva organizzato e conduceva, e poi riscuoteva il profitto da questa, un nuovo tipo ideale sta emergendo oggi: non è più l’imprenditore che possiede la sua azienda, ma il manager esperto (o un consiglio manageriale presieduto da un CEO) che gestisce una società partecipata da banche (anche gestito da manager che non possiedono la banca) o da investitori dispersi. In questo nuovo tipo ideale di capitalismo, la vecchia borghesia, resa non funzionale, è rifunzionalizzata come management salariato : i membri della nuova borghesia ottengono salari, e anche se posseggono una quota della loro società, guadagnano stocks come parte della loro retribuzione (dei bonus per il loro “successo”).

Questa nuova borghesia si appropria ancora plusvalore, ma nella (mistificata) forma di ciò che è stato chiamato ’salario surplus’: sono pagati assai più del proletario’ salario minimo ‘(un punto spesso mitico di riferimento il cui unico esempio reale nell’ economia globale odierna è il salario di un operaio sweatshop in Cina o in Indonesia), ed è questa distinzione dai comuni proletari che determina il loro stato. La borghesia in senso classico così tende a scomparire: riappaiono capitalisti come un sottoinsieme dei lavoratori , in quanto manager che si sono qualificati per guadagnare di più in virtù della loro competenza (ed è per questo che la pseudo-scientifica ‘valutazione’ è fondamentale: essa legittima le disparità) . Lungi dall’essere limitata ai manager, la categoria di lavoratori che percepiscono un salario surplus si estende a tutti i tipi di esperti, amministratori, funzionari pubblici, medici, avvocati, giornalisti, intellettuali e artisti. Il surplus assume due forme: più soldi (per i manager, ecc), ma anche meno lavoro e più tempo libero (per – alcuni – intellettuali, ma anche per gli amministratori dello Stato, ecc).

La procedura di valutazione utilizzata per decidere quale i lavoratori ricevono un salario surplus è un meccanismo arbitrario del potere e dell’ideologia, senza alcun legame serio con reale competenza ; il salario surplus non esiste per lo sviluppo economico, ma per ragioni politiche: per mantenere una ‘classe media’ ai fini della stabilità sociale. L’arbitrarietà della gerarchia sociale non è un errore, ma Il punto centrale, con l’arbitrarietà della valutazione a svolgere un ruolo analogo al l’arbitrarietà del successo sul mercato. La violenza minaccia di esplodere non quando c’è troppa contingenza nello spazio sociale, ma quando si cerca di eliminarla.

In La Marque du sacré, Jean-Pierre Dupuy concepisce la gerarchia come una delle quattro procedure (’dispositifs symboliques’) la cui funzione è quella di rendere il rapporto di superiorità non umiliante: la gerarchia stessa (un ordine imposto dall’esterno che mi permette di vivere il mio più basso status sociale come indipendente dal mio valore intrinseco), demistificazione (la procedura ideologica che dimostra che la società non è una meritocrazia, ma il prodotto di oggettive lotte sociali, che mi permette di evitare la conclusione dolorosa che la superiorità di qualcun altro è il risultato del suo merito e dei suoi risultati ); contingenza (un meccanismo simile, mediante il quale veniamo a capire che la nostra posizione nella scala sociale dipende da una lotteria naturale e sociale, i più fortunati sono coloro che sono nati con i geni giusti in famiglie benestanti), e la complessità (forze incontrollabili hanno conseguenze imprevedibili, per esempio, la mano invisibile del mercato può portare al mio fallimento e al successo del mio vicino, anche se lavoro molto più duro e sono molto più intelligente). Contrariamente alle apparenze, questi meccanismi non contestano o minacciano la gerarchia, ma la rendono accettabile, dal momento che ‘ciò che fa scattare il tumulto di invidia è l’idea che l’altro è degno della sua buona fortuna e non l’idea opposta – che è l’unica che può essere apertamente espressa. ‘Dupuy trae da questa premessa la conclusione che si tratta di un grave errore pensare che una ragionevolmente giusta società che si percepisce anche come giusta sarà priva di risentimento: al contrario, è in queste società che coloro che occupano posizioni inferiori troveranno uno sbocco per il loro orgoglio ferito in violente esplosioni di risentimento.

Collegato a questo è l’impasse affrontato dalla Cina di oggi: l’obiettivo ideale delle riforme di Deng era di introdurre il capitalismo senza una borghesia (in quanto avrebbe costituito la nuova classe dominante); ora, tuttavia, i leader cinesi stanno facendo la dolorosa scoperta che il capitalismo senza la gerarchia consolidata attivata dall’esistenza di una borghesia genera instabilità permanente. Quindi, quale strada prenderà la Cina? Gli ex comunisti in genere stanno emergendo come i gestori più efficienti del capitalismo, perché la loro inimicizia storica nei confronti della borghesia come classe si inserisce perfettamente nella tendenza del capitalismo a diventare un capitalismo manageriale senza una borghesia – in entrambi i casi, come Stalin stabilì molto tempo fa, ‘i quadri decidono tutto’ (una differenza interessante tra la Cina odierna e la Russia: in Russia, docenti universitari sono ridicolmente sottopagati – sono di fatto già parte del proletariato -, mentre in Cina ricevono un salario surplus confortevole per garantire la loro docilità).

La nozione di retribuzione eccedente getta anche nuova luce sulle continue proteste anti-capitaliste . In tempi di crisi, i candidati ovvi per ’stringere la cinghia’ sono ai livelli più bassi della borghesia : la protesta politica è la loro unica risorsa, se si vuole evitare di entrare nel proletariato. Anche se le loro proteste sono nominalmente dirette contro la logica brutale del mercato, loro stanno in realtà protestando contro la progressiva erosione della loro (politicamente) posizione economica privilegiata . Ayn Rand ha una fantasia in La rivolta di Atlante (Atlas Shrugged) di ‘creativi’ capitalisti in sciopero, una fantasia che trova la sua realizzazione pervertita negli scioperi odierni, la maggior parte delle quali sono condotti da una ‘una borghesia ‘ spinta dalla paura di perdere il proprio salario surplus. Non si tratta di proteste proletarie, ma di proteste contro la minaccia di essere ridotti a comuni proletari Chi osa scioperare oggi, quando avere un lavoro a tempo indeterminato è di per sé un privilegio? Non i lavoratori a bassa retribuzione in ciò che rimane dell’ industria tessile, ma quei lavoratori privilegiati che hanno posti di lavoro garantito (insegnanti, operatori del trasporto pubblico, polizia). Questa spiega anche l’ondata di proteste degli studenti: la loro motivazione principale è senza dubbio il timore che l’istruzione superiore non sarà più in grado di garantire un salario surplus nella vita adulta.

Allo stesso tempo è chiaro che il rilancio enorme della protesta nel corso dell’ultimo anno, dalla Primavera Araba all’Europa occidentale, da Occupy Wall Street alla Cina, dalla Spagna alla Grecia, non dovrebbe essere respinta solo come una rivolta della borghesia . Ogni caso dovrebbe essere preso sulla base del suo valore. Le proteste degli studenti contro la riforma universitaria del Regno Unito erano chiaramente diverse dai tumulti (riots) d’agosto, che erano un carnevale consumistico di distruzione, una vera esplosione degli esclusi. Si potrebbe sostenere che le rivolte in Egitto sono cominciate in parte come una rivolta della borghesia (con i giovani istruiti che protestano per la mancanza di prospettive), ma questo era solo un aspetto di una più grande protesta contro un regime oppressivo. D’altra parte, la protesta non ha realmente mobilitato gli operai e i contadini poveri e la vittoria elettorale degli islamisti mette in evidenza la ristretta base sociale della originaria protesta secolare. La Grecia è un caso speciale: negli ultimi decenni, una nuova borghesia salariata (soprattutto nella sovra-estesa amministrazione statale) è stato creata grazie ad un aiuto finanziario dell’UE, e le proteste sono state motivate ​​in gran parte dalla minaccia di una cessazione di questo.

La proletarizzazione della borghesia salariata più bassa corrisponde agli antipodi alla retribuzione irrazionalmente elevata di top manager e banchieri (irrazionale, poiché, come hanno dimostrato le indagini negli Stati Uniti, tende ad essere inversamente proporzionale al successo di una società). Piuttosto che sottoporre queste tendenze alla critica moralizzatrice, dobbiamo leggerle come segni che il sistema capitalista non è più in grado di avere una stabilità auto-regolamentata – minaccia, in altre parole, di perdere il controllo.

traduzione di Maurizio Acerbo

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7 février 2012 - ALAIN BADIOU - Le Réveil de l’histoire. Circonstances 6 - Paris, 6 rue Sorbier

LE SÉMINAIRE DE LECTURE DE LA RDL : AUTOUR D’ALAIN BADIOU | RDL LA REVUE DES LIVRES

http://www.revuedeslivres.fr/le-seminaire-de-lecture-de-la-rdl-autour-dalain-badiou/January 20, 2012

7 février 2012 19 h 00 min au 22 h 00 min Le temps des émeutes

Le collectif éditorial de la RdL invite les lecteurs de la revue
à participer à la prochaine séance de son séminaire de lecture
consacrée à

Alain Badiou
Le Réveil de l’histoire. Circonstances 6 (Lignes)

le mardi 7 février 2012, à 19 heures
au Lieu-Dit, 6 rue Sorbier, à Paris
(M° Ménilmontant)

« Dans ce sixième volume de la série « Circonstances », Alain Badiou examine en philosophe les derniers bouleversements du monde : révolutions arabes (Tunisie, Égypte), révoltes européennes (Espagne, Grande-Bretagne) et crise financière généralisée. C’est pour lui l’occasion de mettre à l’épreuve ses théories de l’événement et de l’Idée communiste. Prenant le contre-pied du motif de la fin de l’Histoire qui a accompagné la chute du mur de Berlin, Alain Badiou réaffirme le caractère toujours neuf et enthousiasmant de la volonté d’émancipation dont témoigne exemplairement l’actuel « temps des émeutes » ». (Présentation de l’éditeur.)

Cette séance sera pour nous l’occasion de revenir sur les révoltes récentes et de nous interroger sur la prise intellectuelle et politique que les thèses d’Alain Badiou permettent, ou pas, d’avoir sur la situation contemporaine.

(Le séminaire de lecture de la RdL réunit les membres du collectif éditorial de la revue et ses lecteurs pour un échange de vues autour de courts essais qui constituent des contributions d’importance aux débats contemporains.)

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Intern Nation. How to earn nothing and learn little in the brave new economy by Ross Perlin (Verso, May 2011, Uk)

Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy

Pub. Date: May 2011

The first no-holds-barred exposé of the exploitative and divisive world of internships.

Every year, between one and two million Americans work as interns. They famously shuttle coffee in a thousand newsrooms, congressional offices, and Hollywood studios, but they also deliver aid in Afghanistan, build the human genome, and pick up garbage. They are increasingly of all ages, and their numbers are growing fast—from 17 percent of college graduates in 1992 to 50 percent in 2008. A huge and increasing number of internships are illegal under the Fair Labor Standards Act, and this mass exploitation saves firms more than $600 million each year. Interns enjoy no workplace protections and no standing in courts of law—let alone benefits like health care. 

Ross Perlin has written the first exposé of this world of drudgery and aspiration. In this witty, astonishing, and serious investigative work, Perlin takes the reader inside both boutique nonprofits and megacorporations such as Disney (which employs 8,000 interns at Disney World alone). He profiles fellow interns, talks to academics and professionals about what unleashed this phenomenon, and explains why the intern boom is perverting workplace practices in locations all around the world. 

Insightful and humorous, Intern Nation will transform the way we think about the culture of work.

Read more on Verso website