This Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit
This Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit
This Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v014/14.4S.wark.html
Theory & Event, Vol. 14, No. 4, 2011 Supplement
This Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit
McKenzie Wark (bio)
Look, I understand that some people find the notion that we've become an oligarchy
— with all that implies about class relations — disturbing. But that's the way it is.
Paul Krugman
I'm a worker. I go to work every weekday. I get paid. Most of that
money goes to support my family. There's a little left over for fun.
There's some for small acts of generosity. This makes possible a pretty
good life. Will my students get to have that life? Or my kids?
In his novel Dead Europe, Christos Tsiolkas imagines a man exiled
from his country, who dies in another land. On his tombstone are three
words: Worker, father, husband. Husband is a bit too patriarchal for me.
Perhaps mine would say: Worker, father, lover. Lover, in different ways,
of different people: my partner, my kids. But a lover too, in another way,
of my class. The class - or is it classes? - of people who work, with
some part of their bodies. People who work with eyes and hands and
backs and voices, and so on.
I take pride in my work. Sure, there are good days and bad days.
Nobody gives "110%" When you hear that sort of bullshit you know it's
coming from people who aren't workers. It's the language of the Donald
Trump types, who managed not to squander an inheritance and think
that makes them a genius. They're so proud of themselves and have no
barriers to telling you about it. The pride of the worker is mostly silent.
You get up, go to work. You get up, go to work again. Until you can't get
up any more. That's all there is to it.
With luck, you get to work at something that won't kill you, and that
you might even like. I got lucky. I like my work. I like teaching. I like
writing. I have a secure job, doing something I like. This is not
something my people took for granted. On the other hand, I refuse to
see this through the reactionary language of 'privilege.' To have work,
security, a little left over at the end of the week. This is not privilege. It's
a right.
This was the most brilliant move of Occupy Wall Street: We are the
99%. Of course we're the 99% of the 1% of the planet, but let's not get
sidetracked back into the language of privilege. The slogan is all about
the remainder, about what is left out. It's a way of saying: we are not the
ruling class. Our solidarity, that fragile thing, orbits what it is not.
Maybe it's an Australian thing, or part of an almost extinct antipodean
way of thinking, but to be doing well is not something to take too much
personal pride in. You can always "fall back" so don't "sell tickets on
yourself." Let's recall, just for a minute, that the late Steve Jobs was
adopted. The story is usually told from his point of view - how
remarkable his success is, given that he was adopted. Nobody stops to
think about the extraordinary act of generosity of the people who chose
to provide the enormous, thankless labor of being his parents. The
success of Steve Jobs comes from a lot of things - but one of them is
'communism.'
I'm no Steve Jobs, but I am doing alright for myself. Things happened
in my life that taught me how much work it takes for anybody to even
get by at all. I can walk because a now-famous surgeon, by trial and
error, worked out how to hack my club feet into something that would
support bipedal life. Three months in a hospital bed at the age of seven
will impress upon you just how many people it takes to make a world
where that doctor can operate on that child. The nurses, the kitchen
staff, the lady who came to mop the floor. My older brother and sister
bringing me books and toys.
They were worried how I would stand up to institutional life, I think.
But I wasn't the kid who screamed all night for his mother. My mother
was dead. Since the age of six I spent the afternoons after school at the
house of a childhood friend. My family was not close to that child's
family, but they had me over every afternoon anyway, until my big
brother could come and get me. And all things considered, regardless
of what had happened, I had a pretty good childhood. It was good, once
again, because of something one could call communism. Because
people did things for each other and made a 'community.' All they had
in common, in this case, was caring for a child.
So I got by. I emigrated. Found work in a new country. Fell in love,
got married, had kids. Life goes on. I do my job For me to do it the guys
in grey overalls have to keep the building running. The women behind
the desks have to push paper and quietly network with each other to do
the social maintenance. Not to mention the MTA employees who keep
the subway running to get me to the New School. Or the people who
run the cafes all over the neighborhood where I actually get work done.
We depend on each other. If I forget my wallet, the guy in the café
waves me away. He trusts me to pay next time.
Not everybody wants the same things. Negotiating how to
accommodate different desires is one of the great challenges of
modern life. Still, it's surprising how common certain core desires are. A
lot of people want something like the life I am describing - at least for a
start. To love and be loved. To belong somewhere, with others. To work
at something that seems worth working at. To not have all this taken
away.
And it could be taken away. Could my family survive a medical
emergency? The untimely death of either me or my partner? How
would my family get by? Would the apartment have to be sold? Would
the debts mount beyond the point where they could ever be paid back?
What if there was no work? It can keep you up at nights. And there's no
comfort in the fact that living hand to mouth, without proper medical
care, under looming waves of debt is the life lived now by millions of
Americans.
Theodor Adorno put it well: "There is tenderness only in the coarsest
demand: that no-one should go hungry any more."1 That children go
hungry, that they will be cold and starving, and uncared for this winter,
right here in New York, condemns every fine word said in favor of the
current social order by the sock puppets whose fine, well paid job it is to
find excuses for it.
I have never cared all that much about equality. I don't want to bring
anyone down. I find it mildly comic that some people, even people I
know, don't feel motivated or valued unless they have been showered
by great gushers of money. I saw contemporaries of mine take truly
awful, soul crushing jobs that held no promise other than that one day
they would have great piles of money. Some made it; some didn't. I
have compassion for the successful ones, who having come into
money, have no idea what to do with it. They buy big houses. Take
endless vacations. Buy 'contemporary art'. Become patrons of
something or other. These things are all they have, and all they can talk
about. I don't see anything to envy in that.
On the other hand, I know too many people who also do awful,
unpleasant, soul consuming jobs who hardly get paid for it at all. They
juggle bills. They screen their phone calls. They cross their fingers and
hope for the best. Money is a problem for these friends of mine, but it
isn't really a desire. They want it to stop being a problem so they can do
things that are more interesting. Make art, or have time for friends, or
teach their kids the language of their homeland. These are the things
that seem so tenuous and impossible.
There's a tumblr blog called We Are the 99 Percent, on which people
hold up home made signs that tell their stories. The stories are mostly
about two things: debt and jobs. Most people don't really care all that
much about what the 1% has. They are not concerned about someone
else's wealth, they are concerned about everyone else's
impoverishment. They are concerned about going hungry.
The promise of all those fine words, of deregulation, of
financialization, was that things would get better for everybody. It didn't.
It seems to come as something of a surprise to the sock puppets that
anyone actually believed any of the promises. The promises were just
ways to make us all feel better. In reality, the 1% expects its cut no
matter what. And all the talk about rewarding risk was also not
supposed to be believed by anybody either. It's the 99% who take the
risks. The 1% expects its bad bets to be covered by the rest of us.
Nobody is quite ready to call the 1% what they are: a ruling class.
Nor are they quite ready to identify what kind of ruling class they are: a
rentier class. It's not important. It is only ever a minority who are
attracted to an analytical language to explain their circumstances.
Popular revolt run on affect, and affect runs on images and stories. Still
the instincts of Occupy Wall Street have been pretty keen. It has
identified its own problems: jobs and debt. It has provisionally identified
the problem causing their problems: the 1%.
The idea of a rentier class can be traced back to David Ricardo. Joan
Robinson had a keen analysis of it in her The Accumulation of Capital.2
That's an old book, but its language has hardly been bettered. A rentier
class owns some kind of property that everyone else needs in order to
invent or create or build anything else. The original rentier class of
Ricardo's day owned land. If land was the choke-hold on the rise of
industry, these days its capital itself. The part of the surplus diverted to
an unproductive ruling class isn't rent any more, its interest.
My personal slogan for Occupy Wall Street would be: "put the ruling
class back in charge!" Despite the violence of the class struggle that
characterized the United States in its great period of growth and
dynamism - from the nineteenth century robber barons to the rise of
Fordism - most of that period is dynamic and forward-looking.
The railways were built over the bones of thousands of Chinese
workers. But they were built. The iPhone was built on the backs - once
again - of a small army of Chinese workers. But they get built, and they
are a damned sight more impressive than the Bakelite rotary phone I
remember from my childhood home. The railways and the tech industry
had their bubbles. But at least in the aftermath of those exuberant
parties there were pools of skilled labor, bits of infrastructure, new
techniques lying around waiting for more productive employment. But
after the housing bubble of 2008? What to we have except the rotting
carcass of suburbs nobody needs, and a great pile of debt that working
people are going to have to shoulder to keep the rentier class in rent?
The rentier class makes even those murdering thugs and thieves the
robber barons look good.
What makes our current rentier class even worse than the robber
barons is that they are not even building anything. They are not
interested in biopower. Their MO is 'thanopower.' They have no interest
in the care and feeding of populations. All they care about is extracting
the rent. It doesn't matter to them if we get sick, if we can't read, if we
are not being raised up and developed to our full capacity. We're just
peons. We owe the 1% the vigorish not because they're going to invest
it in anything useful and productive. We just owe it. Or else.
There are three components to this struggle. The Marxists are right.
It's a class struggle, and we workers have been losing it. When the rise
in the rate of productivity slowed down in the 70s, class struggle in the
workplace became heated but futile. Wage rises out of line with rising
productivity just led to inflation, as businesses just passed on the costs.
What broke the cycle was not so much some new breakthrough in
productive efficiency, as shipping the work off to newly-available pools
of cheap labor - they symbol of which is China.
The problem is that there's a mismatch between the rise of
productive capacity in the underdeveloped world and a decline in real
wages in what the Situationists called the 'overdeveloped' world. The
gap was covered, among other things, by rising levels of indebtedness.
To have a 'middle class' life in America now means at least two people
in a household have to work fulltime and hope or pray that no disaster -
medical or otherwise - befalls them.
The ruling class in the United States is less and less one that makes
things, and more and more one that owns information and collects a
rent from it. Sometimes this is productive, in that it at least designs new
things and creates new markets for them. Apple and Google: the
commodity economy at its finest. But in other respects the ruling class
becomes one that just seeks rent without really doing much to earn it.
Apple and Google employ engineering and design and even cultural
talent to make things people get to use in their everyday lives. But a lot
of that talent gets employed to make pilotless drones and other
weapons of mass destruction for the Pentagon. In an age of permanent
austerity where the state disinvests from everything, the siphoning of
talent into the toys of war is somehow sacrosanct.
The first branch of our new ruling class in the overdeveloped world at
least still designs and markets things, but it doesn't really make them.
The second branch makes things, but they are designed to kill people.
The third branch makes its money out of money - the vector perfected.
Its game is fiancialization. It's the expansion of the scale of social
relations that take a financial form, from the insinuation of commercial
credit into everyday life at one scale to the global financial trading
infrastructure on the other. Is this ruling class really capitalist any more?
Perhaps we could call it vectoralist. It collects a rent by controlling the
'vectors' along which information shuttles, not to mention that
information itself.
Occupy Wall Street targets one of these three branches of the ruling
class with clear and powerful images and stories - the financial wing of
vectoral power. It's a perspective from which to start thinking about the
other branches of power in the United States - and elsewhere. But
perhaps it might take a bit of an update on the old Marxist diagram of
class forces. This is not your grandparents' ruling class. Take my
hometown: it used to be a steel town, which of course means it was
near coal mines and on a working port. It still has coal mines, but the
coal is shipped to China. The land where the old steel mill was is fallow,
and the port now houses office blocks for the regional offices of
insurance companies and the like. Perhaps we need to extend and
refine - rather than overturn - granddad Karl's analysis of what was
once capitalism to understand what these familiar landscapes of the
overdeveloped world are all about.
A powerful alternative analysis can be found in David Graeber's
monumental Debt: The First 5000 Years.3 He makes debt, rather than
work the central category of analysis. After a quick debunking of Adam
Smith's myth of 'barter', and through careful use of ethnographic and
historical material, he shows that credit came before money. Most
people, most of the time, have managed careful relationships of debt
and credit. From time to time these become lopsided, debt becomes
the permanent indebtedness of the peon. The peons revolt. The ruling
order declares a debt jubilee. Life returns to some pattern of stability
and integrity.
Money in the form of 'coinage' arises out of warfare. Soldiers are by
definition not creditworthy. They need to be paid in something that
seems more tangible than a promise. With soldiers, a ruling class can
conquer territory, enslave populations, and not least impose a cash
economy on its subjects in which taxes have to be paid in coin. The
necessity to come up with the cash then drives everyone at least partly
into the cash economy.
Like anyone with a solid grounding in ethnography, Graeber sees all
social formations as hybrid structures, not reducible to the simple-
minded abstractions of the economists - or for that matter the political
philosophers. At the risk of caricature, this complexity has at least three
components: communism, exchange, and hierarchy. Debt works
differently in all three.
Communism knows no debt. The one to whom one extends
generosity in not the other. That one is one of 'us' and as we hold
ourselves to be 'in common' there's no externality with whom to be in
credit or debit. Hierarchy has asymmetric debts. Those below owe
something tangible to those above; those above repay that debt with
something symbolic. The peasant owes his the or its equivalent in coin.
The lord or the bishop - as Vaneigem would say - owes a debt only to
the totality.4 His debt it to the 'order' he upholds.
Exchange is not among 'us', it is with the 'other.' There are two kinds
of exchange and hence two kinds of debt that exchange creates. One
can be quantified. Debts of this kind can be canceled on repayment.
But there is another kind of debt, the debt of gift exchange. It is always
qualitative. Paying it back is something of an art form. You can't pay it
back too quickly, or in too exact an amount. The whole point of the gift
as debt is that it can't be canceled on repayment. There is always some
incommensurability between one gift and another. Gifts are stratagems
for binding people through time.
Graeber draws on a rich tradition which sees money in the form of
coinage as foundational social practices on which both philosophy and
religion developed both their theories but also their practices. Whether
it was Buddhist temples or Christian monasteries, the withdrawal of
gold and silver from circulation to make idols of the saints converts one
form of measuring debt into quite another. Our founding categories are
caught up in a series of metaphors drawn from ancient amazement at
how money works.
The period since the 70s, since the breakdown of Fordism,
represents something of a break in Graeber's narrative. Until then most
histories oscillate between money as coinage and money as debt
accounted without coins between people in more stable relationships.
Coinage and debt payable in coins usually coincides with the kind of
state apparatus that uses coins to finance wars to acquire slaves to
make more coins to finance more wars, and on. Situations, in other
words, which foreclose the dense web of social relations - communism,
exchange, even hierarchy - which prevail in more stable periods.
The key moment in this narrative is Nixon taking the United States off
the gold standard, in order to finance the Vietnam war while continuing
to pacify populations at home with state largesse. But Graeber doesn't
linger much on what made this possible. He pays attention to early
technologies for recording and transmitting information that might work
to support all kinds of debt relations. But he stops paying attention to
this material dimension as his story gets closer to the present. The
missing piece is what I call the vectoral. The underlying story in
Graeber's masterful book is the steady improvement and occasional
leaps in development, of the means of recording and transmitting
information - the vectoral. Nixon had his reasons, but what he realized
was an inevitable break between the transmission of information and its
embeddedness in materiality.
Still, Graeber's work is a useful parallel to the Marxist tradition and its
focus on labor. Clearly debt is the other constant in the popular
sentiment behind Occupy Wall Street. Its just unfortunate that in Debt
The First 5000 Years Graeber so gingerly treats the boundaries
between his own perspective and the Marxist one. It is present, barely
acknowledged, in the text and the footnotes. There's a space between
these two perspectives Graeber is perhaps constitutionally incapable of
'occupying.'
I want to suggest there's actually three perspectives one needs to put
together to understand the Occupation. The third can help bridge the
other two. The first is classically Marxist, and is about labor. The
second is anarchist, if of an original kind, and is about debt. The third
was pointed out by Gar Alperovitz, and in his terms is abut the
privatization of the knowledge economy.5
An analysis in the journal Occupy! of the We Are the 99 Percent
tumblr shows that the words 'jobs' and 'debt' are the two most frequent
salient terms in people's handwritten notes about their lives and what
makes them part of the 99%.6 Also in the top ten are 'college' and
'student' and 'school.' A few things to note here: firstly, one of the big
issues, and not just for young people, is student debt. This is perhaps
the next big crisis after housing debt, and as powerful a motivation as
the debt and bankruptcy forced upon people by medical expenses in
the United States. Trying to get a piece of the 'knowledge economy'
through study is just not a sure thing any more.
Secondly: its worth paying attention not just to the content of the We
Are the 99 Percent tumblr but the form. The internet is old news. Its
hardly 'new media' any more. But one can forget that something like a
tumblr is a tool that simply wasn't available to an early era of social
movements. If since Nixon the 1% used the vector to untether the
financial wing of the vectoral class from anything as tangible as a gold
reserve, then social movements too have consistently learned how to
occupy whatever abstract means of communication are at their
disposal.
Marx said that the people make history, but not with the means of
their own choosing. A corollary is that the people make meaning, but
not with the media of their own choosing. Occupy Wall Street not only
'occupies' Zuccotti park. It also occupies an abstraction. In Henri
Lefebvre's terms it took the struggle out of mere language and onto a
more properly symbolic terrain. Or, as the Situationists would put it,
what transpired is a brilliant example of détournement. Both an actual
place in the city of New York, and the symbolic place it occupies in the
global spectacle as a symbol have been appropriated as if they were
common property, as if they belonged to us all. That's the essence of
détournement: that both the space of the city and the space of culture
always and already are a commons.7
The third component to analysis then, alongside work and debt, is the
struggle over the means of inventing and communicating, a struggle
over knowledge, culture and science, over the 'general intellect' if you
like. Only it is not just about 'intellect' as ideas in people's heads. It is
about the form of the relations which mesh human and machine
intelligence together. It is not just about ownership and control of these
means, although that is crucial. It is about the design of these very
means themselves. Or sometimes the redesign. The people hack tech,
but not with the tools of their own choosing. Sometimes you have to
kludge together whatever you can. 'Occupying' tumblr might not be a
bad example.
So: the ruling class has three components. One is financial, one
military, one in the business of the control of a consumer economy of
things through intellectual property. Occupy Wall Street has identified
one aspect of it - financialization and debt. To talk about jobs one would
have to talk about how the resources of the state are now directed far
more to maintaining the military wing of the vectoral class, while the
idea that the state could invest in anything that might provide jobs for
anyone else is somehow now unthinkable.
Perhaps its because exotic fighter jets are so sublimely useless in
any tangible sense that subsidizing them is somehow acceptable to the
powers that be, whereas it would condemn to nonsense the whole
reigning ideology to point out that states frequently use public money,
and quite successfully, to secure investment and create jobs that the
private sector might provide but is for some reason incapable of
creating. This was, after all how both the railways and the internet got
built. A lot of private interests were involved in both cases, but
underwritten by public investment and authority.
As for the third component of the ruling class, it is hard to get a
critical perspective going on Apple or Google when those are the best
examples anyone can point to of new kinds of investment, product
development and employment. Hackers like Anonymous align
themselves with popular movements. Ordinary people with even basic
tech skills hack the social media environment to make it a platform for a
social movement. Yet at the same time the 'entertainment' wing of our
military entertainment complex is pressing on Congress some of the
most punitive and restrictive 'intellectual property' legislation
imaginable. Even the most seemingly 'enlightened' wing of the
vectoralist class are not our friends.
Financialization is just part of a wider 'vectoralization' in which all
social relations are caught in a threefold vice. Relations of culture are
replaced by intellectual property. Relations of obligation and gift are
replaced by consumer debt. Relations of trust and community are
replaced by security and surveillance. The danger is three-fold, and
Wall Street is just the most visible part of it.
To the Marxist and 'anarchist' forms of analysis I want to add a third,
which for want of a better term I'll call post-Situationist. The theory and
practice of the Situationist International have been absorbed in different
ways into both the Marxist and anarchist perspectives. Debord's
famous book The Society of the Spectacle can be read, if somewhat
partially, as an Hegelian-Marxist classic. As Graeber notes elsewhere,
the anarchist milieu in the United States is steeped in Situationist
literature.8 Yet I think there's other ways of reading this legacy.
The first Situationist tenet of relevance comes from Vaneigem:
"People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring
explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive
about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such
people have a corpse in their mouth." Hence the significance of the
stories on tumblr, on the taking of space in Zuccotti park, of the
generosity of so many people in making the occupation a reality.
Enough said.
The second comes from René Vienet: "our ideas are on everybody's
minds." Boredom and revolt are always present, and lacking nothing
except a pretext. The theoretical elaboration always comes after, not
before, the revolt itself. If a theory is any good, it provides a language
for what the movement already knows. Or in short, the intellectual's role
is an adjunct one. The Leninist fantasy of 'leading' a movement is
mostly tragedy and farce.
The third tenet is of course Debord: "the whole of life presents itself
as an immense accumulation of spectacles." Or in short, we live inside
an 'aesthetic economy', not a political one. One has to question
whether politics even exists. Is it not a special effect of the spectacular
organization of appearances? Of course: exploitation exists, oppression
exists, and unnecessary suffering exists. But one cannot take it for
granted that there is axiomatically a 'politics'. Its very possibility has to
be invented. This is a less well known lesson of Debord's famous text.
A fourth tenet might come from the even less well known writings of
Asger Jorn.9 The tragedy of the commodity economy for Jorn is that is
separates form from 'content' - indeed, it creates 'content' where none
otherwise exists. The commodity economy makes concrete a 'tin can
philosophy' where so many identical cans are filled with equivalent
quantities of seemingly formless goop - tomato soup, for example. Jorn,
the artist, the maker of new forms, finds this devaluing. In the great
romantic tradition of William Morris, he wants to restore the role of the
creation of form to the center of collective human endeavor.
This would mean an alliance of the interests of those who labor to
make forms and those who labor to fill them with content: artists and
workers, in short. Scientists, designers, artists, hackers - the form
makers - are artificially separated as a class from labor. The
distinctiveness of Jorn is to understand this in class terms. While 'tin
can philosophy' might seem archaic in a world that prizes artisanal
organic cheeses and other yuppie wonders, consider this: what if the
iPad was just a soup can? What if the problem with the vectoral as we
now have it is that we are supposed to think of the device as just a form
to hold 'content'. Gone is the possibility of the device as configurable, of
technological space as something everyone can hack and share.
A fifth tenet is from Situationist practice: the worker's council. This too
may seem a bit archaic. While I think of myself as a worker, not
everyone does. The idea of the General Assembly revives the structural
principles of the councilist tradition and mixes it with some others,
learned along the way. The Situationists were 'horizontalists' before
there was such a term. This surprises people who know only Debord's
self-constructed glamor and not the actual practice of the Situationist
International and other groups with which it bears a family
resemblance.
Finally, one might turn to the Situationists' account of why May '68 in
France failed. At least two lessons seem salient. One is the inability of
workers to articulate their desires. Our ideas are on everybody's minds,
but not the access to language and images with which to communicate.
It's a question then of proposing, but not determining, some
possibilities. Secondly, the occupied factories could not communicate
with each other or with the student movement. This is less of a problem
in the overdeveloped world in our time. Certain technical and legislative
initiatives may yet foreclose what is left of the great vision that was the
'internet'. But for now the vector can be occupied.
It's not just that the tools are now available that the tactics of
horizontalism seem to work. It's that labor is not what it was either. Most
jobs in the overdeveloped world require not just the filling of forms but
the invention of forms as well. We all hack the workplace, just to make
it work at all. We might not know much about factory work, let alone
harvesting the fields, but we know how to organize information, people
and things in productive and more or less harmonious ensembles.
Everybody knows. It was so articulately put by the person at Occupy
Wall Street whose sign read: THIS SHIT IS FUCKED UP AND
BULLSHIT. We know it's broken; we know the sock puppets have
nothing to say. What has to frankly be described as a neo-fascist
backlash was already underway even before Occupy Wall Street
began. It can only intensify.
Expect more attacks on reason and science. Expect more demands
that someone be made to suffer so some imagined silent majority might
feel good about themselves. Expect more pseudo-religious language
about spiritual 'debts' and 'sacrifices', to be made by everyone except
the ruling class itself. Expect more 'threats' to 'security.' Expect a few
occupiers to become cops and a few cops to be come occupiers. That's
what neo-fascism looks like.
But perhaps, with luck, the Occupation can continue to occupy
enough of symbolic space, in part by occupying physical space, in part
by occupying the vector, to shift the range of possibilities within the
aesthetic economy of the overdeveloped world a few inches leftwards.
Perhaps it can put back on the agenda the only worthy goal modernity
ever had: the incremental overcoming of unnecessary suffering.
Even if it is defeated, and neo-fascism has its day, the best university
is now open, and it is, if not free, taking donations in kind. The
Occupation is a living workshop in 'communism', but also in the gift
economy of exchange. Every day, people buy stuff and covert it back
into gifts to total strangers. Every day, people discover solidarity
through camping together, cooking together, and picking up the trash.
All that is as valuable as the General Assembly. Every day, people take
time out from their jobs or caring for their families to just be in an
occupied space.
Not a few will have an existential crisis there. In those moments when
the cops are not there to confront, and there's nothing to buy - what the
hell is one supposed to do? What is one supposed to be? This is the
source of the strange psychogeography of occupied space. These
spaces are poorly equipped, shoddily built exemplars of something
remarkable. That there could be other social relations, besides finance,
security and the commodity. That if any of this stuff is remotely
scalable, then why do we even need this ruling class at all?
McKenzie Wark
McKenzie Wark is the author of The Beach beneath the Street (Verso 2011), Gamer
Theory (Harvard 2007), A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard 2004) and various other things. He
is Professor of Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research. McKenzie can be
reached at warkk {at} newschool.edu
Notes
1. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, New Left Books, London, 1973, 156.
2. Joan Robinson, The Accumulation of Capital.
3. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years, Melville House, Brooklyn NY, 2011.
4. Raoul Vaneigem, 'Basica Banalities', in Ken Knabb (ed) The Situationist
International Anthology, Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley CA, 2005. Graeber
acknowledges the influence of Vaneigem, glancingly, and only in a footnote. He quite
rightly avoids being entangled in the pro-situ world as much as he resists the
Marxological one.
5. Gar Alperovitz, 'How the 99 Percent Really Lost Out', Truthout, 29th October 2011.
6. Mike Konczal, 'Parsing the Data and Ideology of the We Are the 99 Percent
Tumblr', Occupy!, October 2011, p28ff.
7. See McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street, Verso, London, 2011 on both
Lefebvre and détournement.
8. David Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography, AK Press, Oakland CA, 2009.
9. Asger Jorn, The Natural Order.
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