The Economy of Abolition/Abolition of the Economy
Neil Gray in exchange with Marina Vishmidt
Variant

Marina Vishmidt’s article for Reartikulacija, ‘Human Capital or Toxic Asset: After the Wage’1, reflects upon, among other things, human capital exploited as investment portfolio in ‘The Big Society’; affirmation and negation as political potentialities; the fragmentation of the class relation based on waged work; financialisation and the collapse of social democracy; the politics of reproduction; and the imposition of, resistance to, and potential negation of debt. All this through the prism of the ‘communisation thesis’ which seeks to move within-and-against defensive ‘programmatic’ struggles that tend to reify (class) identities, towards everyday struggles that supersede value, exchange, market relations, and proletarian identity itself – in a constitutive rupture with its previous situation. Not just a change in the system, but a change of the system; not later on, but now. This thesis, which develops from a long-view structural perspective of post-Fordist/Keynesian conditions in the labour market, is fraught with difficulty given the seeming hegemony of neoliberalism and the evidential need for defensive strategies against market command. Yet the communisation thesis describes the problematic of the present class relation in an extremely prescient manner that takes us well beyond the rote formulas and responses of much of ‘the Left’2. The exchange below, with Marina Vishmidt and Neil Gray, aims to elaborate some potential lines of this debate with particular reference to the politics of reproduction and debt.

"Occupy Wall Street, Act Two"
Peter Lamborn Wilson

"Money Has An Enemy." — Charles Stein

Some radical historians claim the entire Historical Movement of the Social went wrong in 1870 when the Paris Commune failed to expropriate (or at least destroy) The Bank. Could this really be so?

Since 1971 Bank Power — "Money Interests" as the oldtime Populists and Grangers used to say — i.e., the power to create money as debt — has single-handedly destroyed all chances to remake any world closer to our heart's desire. Some anarchist theorists hold that there can be no real revolution except the revolt against money itself — because money itself WANTS capitalism (i.e. money) to rule. Money itself will always find a way to subvert democracy (or for that matter any government power that opposes Money's interests) and to establish the rule of Capital — i.e. of money itself.

Beyond Adbusters
Jason Adams

Despite his comparative anonymity, it may actually turn out to be James Alex, the blogger/artist who kicked off the recent pepper-spray cop meme, who becomes the more important model for the future of Occupy Wall Street than Kalle Lasn, the now-famous head of Adbusters. Let me explain why, through my own encounter with each of them. In Summer 2002, fresh out of liberal arts school, I was, like many, disheartened by emergent post-9/11 culture and ready for new surroundings generally. So I moved from the U.S. Pacific Northwest to Vancouver, Canada, where I pursued a graduate degree in Political Science.

In the wake of what had up until then been a steadily growing antiglobalization movement, it wasn’t long before the thought occurred to me that the skills I’d honed in the design and technology niches within which I’d involved myself might be useful at the city’s most impactful alternative media institution: Adbusters. So, I called them up, proposed to share my work, and following an affirmative response, made my way down to the headquarters in West Vancouver.

The Big Ideas of 2012:
Situating Occupy Lessons From the Revolutionary Past
David Graeber

Perhaps the greatest world historian alive today, Immanuel Wallerstein,
has argued that since 1789 all major revolutions have really been world
revolutions.

The French revolution might have appeared to only take place in one
country, but really it quickly transformed the entire North Atlantic
world so profoundly that a mere 20 years later, ideas that had
previously been considered lunatic fringe – that social change was good,
that governments existed to manage social change, that governments drew
their legitimacy from an entity known as the people – had been propelled
so deeply into common sense that even the stodgiest conservative had to
at least pay lip service to them. In 1848 revolutions broke out almost
simultaneously in 50 different countries from Wallachia to Brazil. In no
country did the revolutionaries succeed in taking power, but afterwards,
institutions inspired by the French revolution – universal education
systems, for instance – were created pretty much everywhere.