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Continental Drift II

Articulating the Cracks in the Worlds of Power

Brian Holmes, New York City, Nov. 3–5, 2006

Is there such a thing as a national Skid Row? What happens when the hegemonic country goes on a multibillion-dollar binge, drinks itself blind on the fictions of power, loses control, collapses in public, hits bottom with a groan?


After its first anniversary, the slow-motion blowback of Hurricane Katrina seems finally to have carried the war all the way home to the USA, water-slogged and banal, drenched in the flow of time, choking on the stupid truths that the blazing spectacle of the Twin Towers pushed outward for years, beyond unreal borders. Yes, the levees broke. Yes, the New Economy was a fitful dream. Yes, there were no WMD. Yes, the invasion of Iraq was a terrible mistake. Yes, it's not over. Yes, it takes some kind of care for others to make a world livable.


In September and October of 2005, at 16 Beaver Street in New York's financial district, the first sessions of Continental Drift tried to put together a set of lenses to examine the present condition of Empire, with its Anglo-American foundations stretching back to WWII and its normative models projected across the planet, beneath the guise of neoliberalism. We wanted to have a collective try at mapping out the world that our divided labor helps to build. But at the same time as we carried out this cartographic project, all of us struggled to see how the imperial condition inexorably cracks, along the great continental fault lines that increasingly separate the earth's major regions, but also at the heart of the very ties of belief, habit, complicity and sheer affective numbness that keep the silent majorities convinced that somewhere there is still something "normal."


That was before the last war in Lebanon.

"Economies of Affectivity"

Juan Martín Prada

Life and Biopolitics

It is no longer an exaggeration to claim that we are in the "biological
century", judging by the intense development and the dimension of the
achievements attained in recent years in some of the life sciences, such as
Genomics and Biotechnology. However, let us not forget that the increasingly
more efficient knowledge of the biological processes or genetic
determinations of life and its functional mechanisms is only a small part of
biopolitical action, whose real capacity for regulation is much more
extensive, spanning all of the vital processes that ultimately make up the
collective production of subjectivity. Thus, the capacity to improve or
transform bodies or the biological conditions of a life are no longer
prevalent among the keys of biopolitics but rather, more than anything else,
the production and reproduction of ways of living.


Therefore, the permanent questioning of the limits of what is natural and of
human ethics as regards genetic manipulation or the fact that the scientific
industries aimed at these areas of work should be the most probable
environment for the future capitalism revolutions[1] to take place, are just
a minimum number of problems within the extremely complex series of
biopolitical practices with which any exercise of power is integrated with
the logics of vitality (and from which it would be non-differentiable).

Dmytri Kleiner writes:

"WOS4: The Creative Anti-Commons and the Poverty of Networks"
Dmytri Kleiner

The Wizard of OS conference is currently underway in Berlin, as is to be expected, the fourth edition of this biannual gathering of proponents of free software, free culture and alternative economics has brought together a fascinating group of presenters and participants.

The dominant themes of this year's conference are centred around the work of Lawrence Lessig and his many collaborators in the Creative Commons family of resources and projects, and Yochai Benkler's ideas relating to "commons-based peer-production" or "Social Production" as expressed in his book "The Wealth of Networks."

In his key-note address Lessig presented a history of culture framed in the idea of a "Read-Write" culture, a culture of free sharing and collaborative authorship, having been the norm for the majority of history and having been, over the course of the last century, thwarted and exterminated by Intellectual Property legislation and converted to "Read-Only" culture dominated by a regime of Producer-Control.

El Kilombo Intergaláctico writes:

John Holloway's Change the World Without Taking Power

Toni Negri

[Translator’s note: The following review of John Holloway's Change the World Without Taking Power appears as an "Addenda" to Chapter 13 of Global: Biopower and Struggles in a Globalized Latin America, a book co-authored by Antonio Negri and Giuseppe Cocco's (Italian political scientist currently residing in Brazil) and distributed in Spanish by Paidos, Argentina. Due to the nature of Negri's writing and certain ambiguities made possible by the Spanish in which it first appears, this translation remains preliminary and we would welcome any suggestions for changes. Translation by El Kilombo Intergaláctico.]

Change the World Without Taking Power by John Holloway is a beautiful but strange book. Its paradox consists of the fact that, in his critique of Italian operaismo (the method of which is the basis of our book), Holloway considers dialectical Marxism (what he calls “the problem of form”) as predisposed to assume the fetishistic character of the world (this is his reality principle), and at the same time as capable of proposing an antagonistic foundation for action. In practice, however, Holloway considers reality only from its fetishistic side while critiquing operaismo—attacking it for having employed dialectics—exclusively from its antagonistic side. With this in mind, where is the principle for action within Holloway’s perspective?

Let us develop this thought. The words that Holloway uses are very harsh. According to him, operaismo would be a “radical democratic” theory and consequently (according to the traditional polemic), neither working class nor revolutionary because it is incapable of understanding Marxist dialectics as the discovery of the radical negativity of the world. But Holloway belongs only partially to this tradition—one towards which he shows much respect, if at times irreverence. Here we will see how.

"Formulary for a New Urbanism"
Ivan Chtcheglov

[Translated from the French by the Bureau of Public Secrets from the Newly Published Complete Version]

SIRE, I AM FROM THE OTHER COUNTRY

We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of
the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal
cup. That’s lost. We know how to read every promise in faces — the latest stage
of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city,
we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the
latest state of humor and poetry:

Showerbath of the Patriarchs

Meat Cutting Machines



Notre Dame Zoo

Sports Pharmacy

Martyrs Provisions

Translucent Concrete

Golden Touch Sawmill

Center for Functional Recuperation

Saint Anne Ambulance

Café Fifth Avenue

Prolonged Volunteers Street

Family Boarding House in the Garden

Hotel of Strangers

Wild Street

And the swimming pool on the Street of Little Girls. And the police station on
Rendezvous Street. The medical-surgical clinic and the free placement center on the Quai
des Orfèvres. The artificial flowers on Sun Street. The Castle Cellars Hotel, the Ocean
Bar and the Coming and Going Café. The Hotel of the Epoch.(1)

And the strange statue of Dr. Philippe Pinel, benefactor of the insane, fading in the last
evenings of summer. Exploring Paris.

"Peace-for-War"

Brian Holmes

The concept I’m going to present draws directly from the work of Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan. It describes the economic phases of "depth" and "breadth," and correlates them with the first- and second-order cybernetics of control.


It attempts to situate the functions of cultural-communicational labor within these economic phases. It questions those autonomist Marxists who thought it would be possible to transform a broadly expansionary phase of capitalism, like that of the ‘90s, into a qualitatively different society. It’s not a polemic, but seeks to open up a field of strategic debate. It doesn’t assert a future, but observes the unfolding of the present into the depths of violence, which has robbed resistance movements of their potential, again. The concept is Peace-for-War.


At stake here is society itself: the really existing forms of social cooperation. The Argentinean activist, Ezequiel Adamovsky, writes about exactly that: “Today, the division of labor is so deep, that each minute, even without realizing it, each of us is relying on the labor of millions of people from all over the world.” (1) This text, the words, the images, my voice through the microphone or over the Internet, is literally brought to you by the labors of Asia, the Americas, Africa and Europe combined. The question is, what guides the dynamics of our worldwide cooperation? How is order maintained? And why does this “order” descend periodically into chaos, as it’s doing now in the Middle East?

Adamovsky points out that nothing encourages even asking such questions, much less answering them. “In the capitalist system, paradoxically enough, the institutions that enable and organize such a high level of social co-operation are the very same that separate us from the other, and make us isolated individuals without responsibility with regards to other people. Yes, I am talking about the market and the (its) state. Buying and consuming products, and voting for candidates in an election, involves no answerability. These are actions performed by isolated individuals.”


Order will not provide a language to explain its chaos. The essence of contemporary power is to provoke crisis and to ride it out toward profit, without revealing strategies or goals. The effect of such huge unknowns is to make people cling to their identities and their operative routines, for fear that the public disruption will spread into their private lives. Without an interpretation of capital – indeed, of power – there can be no opposition. The first thing that resistance movements are lacking is a common language to describe, predict and oppose the maneuvers of the most powerful groups in the world.

Angelus Novus writes:


"Invaders from Marx:
On the Uses of Marxian Theory, and the Difficulties of a Contemporary Reading
– A Critical Engagement with Karl Heinz Roth and others"
Michael Heinrich


[The following text is the slightly reworked version of an article which appeared on 21 September 2005 in Jungle World, a leftist German weekly newspaper. In a previous issue, Karl Heinz Roth, one of the main German representatives of Operaismo, had argued that some important Marxian categories are not able to grasp contemporary capitalism. The text at hand answers this critique, stressing the difference between Marxian theory and traditional Marxism, emphasizing the “new reading of Marx”, which developed through the last decades. The German text can be found at the website of the author: here]

In the past 120 years, Marx has been read and understood in widely varying ways. In the Social Democratic and Communist worker’s movement, Marx was viewed as the great Economist, who proved the exploitation of the workers, the unavoidable collapse of capitalism, and the inevitability of proletarian revolution. This sort of “Marxist political economy” was embedded in a Marxist worldview (Weltanschauung) which provided answers for all pre-existing historical, social, and philosophical questions.

This omniscient Marxism was analytically useless, but was eminently well-suited as a means of propaganda and as an instrument of authority against those who questioned the party line. Already in the 1920s and 1930s, a Left critique of such Marxism emerged, but was nonetheless choked off by Stalinism and Fascism and did not receive a hearing in the Cold War era. This situation began to change in the 1960s, as Marx was read anew during the rise of the student movement and protests against the Vietnam War. A New Left arose beyond the classical worker’s movement which saw itself positioned on two fronts: on the one hand against the global capitalist system, on the other hand against an authoritarian and dogmatically petrified Communist movement, which was viewed as a force propping up domination.

This new Left was anything but unified. As regards the critique of Marxist orthodoxy, one can distinguish, to strongly simplify, between two major directions. One tendency criticized the trade unions and left political parties for viewing the workers as an object to be managed and not as a subject capable of struggle and resistance. The theoretical foundations of this controlling, dominating relationship to the working class were located in the objectivism and economism of traditional Marxism. Class struggle, as opposed to objective economic laws, was emphasized as the decisive motor of societal development.

This meant that, in this particular reading of Marx, one either alleged an economism in Marx’s “ripe”, economic works, or emphasized those passages which dealt with struggle and social classes. Such a direction was especially represented in the 1960s by the tendency of Italian Operaismo, which spread in the 1970s to other countries. In West Germany, it was primarily Karl Heinz Roth and the journal Autonomie who oriented towards this approach (cf Wright 2002 for a history of Italian Operaismo; texts of Karl Heinz Roth can be found in Frombeloff 1993).

Anonymous Comrade writes:


"The Circulation of the Common"

Nick Dyer-Witheford


Introduction


This paper makes theoretical propositions to assist conceive an emergent communism, a °coming community" that is neither capitalist, socialist nor anarchic, and the place within it of °immaterial labor." [1] Its argument, in brief, is as follows.

Marx deemed the cellular form of capitalism to be the commodity, a good produced for exchange between private owners. His model of the circulation of capital traced the metamorphosis of the commodity into money, which commands the acquisition of further resources to be transformed into more commodities. The theorists of autonomist Marxism demonstrated how this circulation of capital is also a circulation of struggles, meeting resistances at every point.

But although this concept proved important for understanding the multiplicity of contemporary anti-capital, it says very little about the kind of society towards which these struggles move, a point on which the autonomist tradition has mainly been mute. Today, new theorizations about multitude and biopolitics should to reconsider this silence.


I suggest that the cellular form of communism is the common, a good produced to be shared in association. The circuit of the common traces how shared resources generate forms of social cooperation — associations — that coordinate the conversion of further resources into expanded commons. On the basis of the circuit of capital, Marx identified different kinds of capital — mercantile, industrial and financial — unfolding at different historical moments yet together contributing to an overall societal subsumption. By analogy, we should recognise differing moments in the circulation of the common. These include terrestrial commons (the customary sharing of natural resources in traditional societies); planner commons (for example, command socialism and the liberal democratic welfare state); and networked commons (the free associations open source software, peer-to-peer networks, grid computing and the numerous other socializations of technoscience). Capital today operates as a systemic unity of mercantile, industrial and financial moments, but the commanding point in its contemporary, neoliberal, phase is financial capital.

A twenty-first century communism can, again by analogy, be envisioned as a complex unity of terrestrial, state and networked commons, but the strategic and enabling point in this ensemble is the networked commons. These must however, also be seen in their dependency on, and even potential contradiction, with the other commons sectors. The concept of a complex, composite communism based on the circulation between multiple but commons forms is opens possibilities for new combinations of convivial custom, planetary planning and autonomous association. What follows expand on these cryptic observations.

Anonymous Comrade writes:


"The Circulation of the Common"

Nick Dyer-Witheford


Introduction


This paper makes theoretical propositions to assist conceive an emergent communism, a °coming community" that is neither capitalist, socialist nor anarchic, and the place within it of °immaterial labor." [1] Its argument, in brief, is as follows.

Marx deemed the cellular form of capitalism to be the commodity, a good produced for exchange between private owners. His model of the circulation of capital traced the metamorphosis of the commodity into money, which commands the acquisition of further resources to be transformed into more commodities. The theorists of autonomist Marxism demonstrated how this circulation of capital is also a circulation of struggles, meeting resistances at every point.

But although this concept proved important for understanding the multiplicity of contemporary anti-capital, it says very little about the kind of society towards which these struggles move, a point on which the autonomist tradition has mainly been mute. Today, new theorizations about multitude and biopolitics should to reconsider this silence.


I suggest that the cellular form of communism is the common, a good produced to be shared in association. The circuit of the common traces how shared resources generate forms of social cooperation — associations — that coordinate the conversion of further resources into expanded commons. On the basis of the circuit of capital, Marx identified different kinds of capital — mercantile, industrial and financial — unfolding at different historical moments yet together contributing to an overall societal subsumption. By analogy, we should recognise differing moments in the circulation of the common. These include terrestrial commons (the customary sharing of natural resources in traditional societies); planner commons (for example, command socialism and the liberal democratic welfare state); and networked commons (the free associations open source software, peer-to-peer networks, grid computing and the numerous other socializations of technoscience). Capital today operates as a systemic unity of mercantile, industrial and financial moments, but the commanding point in its contemporary, neoliberal, phase is financial capital.

A twenty-first century communism can, again by analogy, be envisioned as a complex unity of terrestrial, state and networked commons, but the strategic and enabling point in this ensemble is the networked commons. These must however, also be seen in their dependency on, and even potential contradiction, with the other commons sectors. The concept of a complex, composite communism based on the circulation between multiple but commons forms is opens possibilities for new combinations of convivial custom, planetary planning and autonomous association. What follows expand on these cryptic observations.

The Commoner N. 11. Spring/Summer 2006
Re(in)fusing the Commons


After ten issues, The Commoner makes the first timid steps toward changing format and organisation, towards making more explicit and visible the practices of cyber commoning it is grounded on. Watch this space, we are slow, but things will happen. Meanwhile, enjoy the edition that our two guest editors, Nate Holdren and Stevphen Shukaitis, have put together, an edition in which the different contributions are traversed by the problematic of commoning.

Commoning, a term encountered by Peter Linebaugh in one of his frequent travels in the living history of commoners’ struggles, is about the (re)production of commons. To turn a noun into a verb is not a little step and requires some daring. Especially if in doing so we do not want to obscure the importance of the noun, but simply ground it on what is, after all, life flow: there are no commons without incessant activities of commoning, of (re)producing in common. But it is through (re)production in common that communities of producers decide for themselves the norms, values and measures of things. Let us put the “tragedy of the commons” to rest then, the basis of neoliberal argument for the privatisation: there is no commons without commoning, there are no commons without communities of producers and particular flows and modes of relations, an insight we have focused on in issue 6 of this journal, entitled “What Alternatives? Commons and Communities, Dignity and Freedom.” Hence, what lies behind the “tragedy of the commons” is really the tragedy of the destruction of commoning through all sorts of structural adjustments, whether militarised or not.

As the guest editors of this issue rightly point out, the question of commoning is linked to the question of “refusal of work,” that magic expression used in the 1970s to highlight the frontline clash of value practices. The term, however, is not meant as a refusal of doing, of commoning, of (re)producing in common, but on the contrary is an affirmation of all this in the only way possible when in the presence of a social force, capital, that aspires to couple its preservation to that of the commoners through the imposition of its measures of things. In these conditions, “refusal of work” as refusal of capital’s measures, and commoning as affirmation of other measures are the two sides of the same struggle. How can we refuse capital’s measure without participating in the constitution of other common measures? And how can we participate in this commonality without at the same time setting a limit, refusing capital’s measure? The setting of a limit to the beast and the constitution of an “outside” are two inescapable coordinates of struggle. It is through the problematic of this polarity that we could read the very diverse contributions of this issue of The Commoner.

Contents

Angela Mitropoulos, Autonomy, Recognition, Movement

Nick Dyer-Witheford, Species-Being and the New Commonism

Precarias a la Deriva, A Very Careful Strike - Four hypotheses

P.M., The golden globes of the planetary commons

George Ciccariello-Maher, Working-Class One-Sidedness from Sorel to Tronti

Silvia Federici, The Restructuring of Social Reproduction in the United States in the 1970s

Ida Dominijanni, Heiresses at Twilight. The End of Politics and the Politics of Difference

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