Anonymous Kumquat submits:

"Realer Than Real:

The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari"

Brian Massumi

There is a seductive image of contemporary culture circulating today. Our world,
Jean Baudrillard tells us, has been launched into hyperspace in a kind of
postmodern apocalypse. The airless atmosphere has asphyxiated the referent,
leaving us satellites in aimless orbit around an empty center. We breathe an
ether of floating images that no longer bear a relation to any reality
whatsoever. That, according to Baudrillard, is simulation: the substitution
of signs of the real for the real. In hyperreality, signs no longer represent
or refer to an external model. They stand for nothing but themselves, and refer
only to other signs. They are to some extent distinguishable, in the way the
phonemes of language are, by a combinatory of minute binary distinctions. But
postmodernism stutters. In the absence of any gravitational pull to ground them,
images accelerate and tend to run together. They become interchangeable. Any
term can be substituted for any other: utter indetermination. Faced with this
homogeneous surface of syntagmatic slippage, we are left speechless. We can only
gape in fascination. For the secret of the process is beyond our grasp.
Meaning has imploded. There is no longer any external model, but there is an
immanent one. To the syntagmatic surface of slippage there corresponds an
invisible paradigmatic dimension that creates those minimally differentiated
signs only in order for them to blur together in a pleasureless orgy of exchange
and circulation. Hidden in the images is a kind of genetic code responsible for
their generation. Meaning is out of reach and out of sight, but not be cause
it has receded into the distance. It is because the code has been miniaturized.
Objects are images, images are signs, signs are information, and information
fits on a chip. Everything reduces to a molecular binarism. The generalized
digitality of the computerized society.

Anonymous Kumquat submits:

"The Strategy of The Refusal"

Mario Tronti

This article develops a concept that has been fundamental to autonomous politics in Italy -- the concept of the working-class refusal -- The refusal of work, the refusal of capitalist development, the refusal to act as bargaining partner within the terms of the capital relation. If we accept Tronti's description of the working class as developing within the structures of capitalist production, but outside of, free from, its political initiative, then we have a test-bed for a radical critique of current forms of Marxist orthodoxy regarding organisation. The argument contained in this piece is developed still further -- in the context of a new class composition -- in Toni Negri's concept of working class and proletarian "self-valorisation", contained in the article "Domination and Sabotage". The Strategy of the Refusal was written in 1965 as part of the "Initial Theses 11" in Tronti's Operai e Capitale (Workers and Capital), Einaudi, Turin, 1966, pp.234-252. Another Tronti article from Operai e Capitale was published in the CSE pamphlet No.1: "The Labour Process and Class Strategies," 1976, ISBN 85035 025 5.

Adam Smith says -- and Marx comments on the accuracy of his observation -- that the effective development of the productive power of labour begins when labour is transformed into wage labour, that is, when the conditions of labour confront it in the form of capital. One could go further and say that the effective development of the political power of labour really begins from the moment that labourers are transformed into workers, that is, when the whole of the conditions of society confront them as capital. We can see, then, that the political power of workers is intimately connected to the productive power of wage labour. This is in contrast to the power of capital, which is primarily a social power. The power of workers resides in their potential command over production, that is, over a particular aspect of society. Capitalist power, on the other hand, rests on a real domination over society in general. But the nature of capital is such that it requires a society based on production. Consequently production, this particular respect of society, becomes the aim of society in general. Whoever controls and dominates it controls and dominates everything.

"Hall of Mirrors"

John Chuckman

Perhaps you remember the "fun houses" that were once part of old big-city amusement parks? They were filled with mazes, frights, and surprises. Often, these included a hall of mirrors, a maze of rooms walled with mirrored doors. The confusion of reflections made the maze seem infinitely more complex than it actually was.

The relationship between political leaders and intelligence institutions is a great deal like a hall of mirrors. Looked at from a perspective above, a perspective not permitted most people, the maze may be fairly simple, but it is designed so that any individual trying to make his or her way through it is confused and set off balance.

hydrarchist submits: Bruce E. brought this writer to my attention, although unfortunately little of his work is available on the web.

"The Great Utopia:

Outlines for a Plan of Organization and Activity of a Democratic Movement"

Josef Weber (Submitted in agreement with the editors and friends
of Dinge der Zeit and Contemporary Issues)

1

For thousands of years tormented humanity has been laboring at the solution of the
disconsolate and trivial tasks of how to eat, dwell and live in security; for thousands of
years, it has yearned for a paradise from which it feels itself expelled and to which it
wishes to return. The theme which myths and fairy tales sing of, the force which impels
masses into movement, the desideratum of founders of religions, what philosophers have
brooded over, the object of the enquiries of scientists, the visionings of poets, the
achievements or aspirations of statesmen and revolutionaries — all revolve round
these two poles and are nourished, at root, only by the terrible necessity for securing
the perpetuation of life in good or evil. But all endeavor had to remain fantasy and
Utopia, the problem of humanity could, in the final analysis, find merely a temporary
regulation “in evil” as long as it was not possible to produce sufficient goods
for the satisfaction of even the most urgent needs of everybody. This decisive difficulty
was only removed by the so-called Industrial Revolution, which, towards the
middle of the last century, also encompassed Germany and America and constituted the basis
for the “Communist Manifesto,” which appeared in 1848, that is, for scientific
socialism in general.