Over at Cyborgology, David has written a great post responding to my earlier post on McKenzie Wark. I don’t disagree with anything he says about the pressing political issues of our day, however I do think he quite misunderstands what I mean when I say that we’ve witnessed the erasure of sites of politics. Here I am talking quite specifically about the difficulty in identifying geographical locations where we can effectively engage the contemporary system of capitalism in which we find ourselves enmeshed. I am talking about the practice of politics, not the question of where the political issues are (which he nicely underlines in his post). When I use the word “site”, I am quite literally referring to geographical sites, localized in time and space, and where to engage so as to produce change.
To see what I’m trying to get at, compare contemporary capitalism with late 19th and early 20th century industrial capitalism. Under industrial capitalism, the site of engagement is quite clear: the factory. Workers are able to go on strike, shut down the factory, and thus leverage capitalists or owners of the factory for better working conditions. They have bargaining power because of the way in which the factory is dependent on their labor. This form of political engagement was, in part, successful because factories and capitalists were far more dependent on local workers, due to limitations of communications technologies as well as limitations in transportation or paths of distribution.
Notice the object-oriented dimension of these points: transportation (roads, automobiles, airplanes, shipping routes), communications technologies (telephones, internet, fiber optic cables, satellites), local workers and factories (material bodies), geographical sites and locality (placements in material space and time). These are all elements of what Braudel, in Civilization and Capitalism, refers to as material structure of possibility that afford and constrain possibilities of engagement at any point in history. My thesis is that contemporary cultural Marxism, coupled with the rise of postmodernism with its focus on the semiotic and discursive, has generated a blindness to material culture and therefore poorly understands why our contemporary capitalistic system functions as it does and how to properly engage it.
read on!
With the rise of factory automation, financial capital, and global capital, the question of where to engage becomes far more difficult. With the rise of factory automation, a deskilling of labor arises rendering factories far less dependent on skilled labor. Object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, and the new materialisms can cultivate some insight on these material transformations due to the emphasis these positions place on objects and material things and the role they play in affording and constraining human social assemblages. Material transformations due, in large part to new technologies, diminish the ability of workers to leverage capitalists because, insofar as little skill is required to do these jobs, they can be easily replaced by other workers. With the rise of globalization, it becomes possible for factories to just shift production to geographical localities with more docile and disciplined populations, diminishing the leverage workers have over capitalists. In the case of financial capital, it is difficult to discern just where labor can leverage financial institutions at all.
These are the points I was trying to get at with my remarks about contemporary capitalism being a hyperobject characterized by massive redundancy. “Redundancy” here refers to the ability of the contemporary capitalist system to always shift production of both goods and surplus-value elsewhere geographically, thereby nullifying worker leverage. As a result, redundancy, made possible through massive transformations in both transportation and communications technologies, has significantly increased its ability to discipline workers and quell resistance.
The claim that there’s been an erasure of sites of politics does not entail that there’s been an erasure of the pressing political issues and problems that David so nicely outlines in his post, but that today it is very difficult to identify where to effectively engage this system so as to address those issues. This problem has been exacerbated by the rise of cultural Marxism (the Frankfurt school, Althusser, Zizek, etc.), as well as postmodernism. In their focus on the critique of discursive systems, the semiotic, ideology, narrative, and textuality, these orientations of thought have cultivated the belief that it is enough to debunk these systems to produce change (an effective strategy for the issues of “identity” politics, but not so much capitalism). As someone who has a fairly intimate awareness of decision making processes in corporations, I’m well aware that corporations are largely indifferent to public sentiment towards them as well as axiological arguments so long as they can demonstrate an increase in quarterly profit to their shareholders. This suggests that while strategies of debunking and moral condemnation should, by no means be abandoned, they are ineffective strategies for dealing with corporations. As Luhmann taught us with his system-theoretical perspective, these strategies simply are not speaking the same language as corporations– a language organized around economy or the binary code “profitable/unprofitable” –and therefore are unable to produce change in these systems (these systems don’t register such communicative acts at all). One might object that it’s governments, not corporations, that protest movements are targeting; that it is there that the change will be produced. But the issue is similar here. Due to the way in which corporate money and politics have become intertwined as a result of Supreme Court decisions such as Citizens United, government has become deaf to moral and ideological critique. Politicians are simply unable to compete in elections without these monies and therefore turn a deaf ear to these sorts of strategies.
If I nonetheless hold that we shouldn’t abandon practices of critical debunking and protest, then this is because I still see them as serving an important function, though one very different from the one claimed by cultural critical theorists and activists. Where activists and cultural critical theorists see themselves as striving to persuade corporations and governments to do things differently, a systems theoretical perspective suggest that these forms of practice are about forming revolutionary collectives or solidarities. While these collectives do not do much themselves to change governments and corporations, they could reach a critical mass capable of doing so.
However, producing that change through these collectives will require, I think, adopting strategies different from standing in front of Wall Street and protesting. All I am calling for is greater attentiveness to material culture and the arteries institutions such as governments and corporations rely on in order to sustain themselves. Locating these arteries allows us to devise strategies that do create leverage. This is one reason that things such as boycotts have been able to produce real political differences, because they understand the language that autopoietic systems such as corporations speak (money/profit), and intervene at that site. It is also the reason that I suggested that it might be more effective to protest on highways and at ports, shutting them down, because businesses require these arteries to transport their goods and produce their profits. In the case of finance capital, some change might be able to produce if we could form collectives large enough that vowed not to pay back student loans, credit card debt, house mortgages, etc.
These are just some suggestions, and they are suggestions that come with danger. As my friend Rachel and I have been discussing in email, the worry is that these strategies carry the danger of increasing State power (where the State is understood as both governments and corporations). This intensification of State power can occur in two ways: First, through forms of civil disobedience such as the ones suggested here, it might become possible for States to more easily enact repressive laws and forms of law enforcement that make it even more difficult to target contemporary capital. We saw something like this following 9-11, where surveillance intensified making it more difficult to resist. It scares the daylights out of me just writing posts discussing these things for precisely this reason. Will I end up at Gitmo or have all my property seized because I’m deemed a terrorist threat? Second, the hardships that shutting down arteries in the system of distribution might cause in the lives of ordinary people might very well generate reactionary collectives more sympathetic corporations and to repressive laws and forms of enforcement by governments, than to emancipatory struggles against these entities. The question is one of how to avoid these negative feedback loops. I wish I had the answers. All I know is that I don’t see much in contemporary political thought that is even seriously posing the questions.
Larval Subjects . 
August 8, 2012 at 6:13 pm
Concerning your thought of forming large communities not paying taxes and loans I can add my experience of the Greek reality where the people don’t pay their taxes because they can’t afford and it’s interesting how the State is paralyzed…….they can’t react and they just give new deadlines which aren’t met…. People react by not paying loans to the banks and the banking system is also paralyzed
August 8, 2012 at 8:40 pm
A decent write-up, but don’t worry, this won’t land you in Gitmo. Questions such as the ones you are posing are central to all local political conversation I’ve engaged in this year. Not exactly inspiring or enlightening but resonant with my experience and those around me. The question IS how to avoid the negative effects of effective actions, to which I don’t think there is a reasonable answer other than the second totem of the anarchistic “two power system”, namely, alternative infrastructure so when effective action shuts down our system people will be able to really be emancipated instead of emaciated. Also, Occupy did shut down several West Coast ports immediately after the shutdown of the Wall St protest, which itself functionally served as a hub to connect those with revolutionary aspirations but more questions than answers.
August 8, 2012 at 10:00 pm
Reblogged this on My Desiring-Machines and commented:
All I seem to be able to do lately is reblog posts from other sites — especially this one. I find Bryant’s insights on the simultaneity of the material and the discursive to be especially helpful as I try to lay out my research methodology. This post in particular reminded me of a photo from the ILWU protests here in Washington where one of the workers makes explicit the connection between force and language.
August 8, 2012 at 10:44 pm
I’m just drifting through this conversation but wanted to say both you and David are making sense to me. I think David is right to call for specificity (the devil is in the details) with regards to how particular actions effect particular peoples, and right to be sensitive to the underadvantaged, but like you I also see the need for an onto-cartography of antagonisms in order to make sense of those particulars. How can we affect positive changes if we fail to understand the intricacies and tendencies of the systems involved? Appeals to concepts such as “working class” and even “capitalism” are based metaphysical commitments than may or may-not (not in my opinion) refer to actual entities, no matter how hyper they may seem. But to get a clearer understanding (map) of the factors involved (territory) we have to get in there and do ontography, and in such a way that includes the intricate specificity of things, flows and networks, in all their materials and existential details. And tracking the material (physical), imaginal (psychological) and symbolic (cultural) dimensions of antagonistic situations/compositions means including considerations of ethical/empathetical realities and sentiments into the mix/mangle, and so requires exactly what I would want to call political ontography.
August 9, 2012 at 2:37 am
would mostly echo Michael along these lines with perhaps the slight exchange of models/prototypes for maps (not that maps. flowcharts, can’t be a kind of model) and that we would need to cultivate a sense of which differences/particularities/aspects at play/hand need to be attended/manipulated (and how) for what kinds of effects/ends.
I often think of the kind of work books that ceramicists develop to track differing trials/combos of clays, firings,glazes, etc.
August 9, 2012 at 3:49 pm
[…] A Response to Cyborgology: Material Culture Over at Cyborgology, David has written a great post responding to my earlier post on McKenzie Wark. I don’t disagree with anything he says about the pressing political issues of our day, how… […]
August 10, 2012 at 5:55 am
Thanks for this, Levi. I was at the Oakland General Strike last November that shut down the Oakland Port (http://footnotes2plato.com/2011/11/04/occupy-oakland-general-strike-112-peaceful-protest-shuts-down-port-of-oakland-anarchists-throw-temper-tantrum/). We probably cost the Corporate Machine a few million dollars, but they will just send a few more million over seas and get it back in tax loopholes, or some such maneuver. I’m not sure what the lasting symbolic impact has been, though it seems that Occupy has largely disappeared off the national radar. I do think the symbolic and material dimensions of resistance are equally important and must be integrated for there to be any successful response to our economic situation. The General Strike is case in point: we had a meager impact on corporate profits, but the hope was that the national media would take notice and people around the country would imitate Oakland by peacefully shutting down corporate supply routes. The national media did take notice, but only because a few dozen black bloc anarchists stood down police late at night, after the tens of thousands of peaceful protesters had gone home. The story wasn’t “peaceful protest stands up to corporate power” but rather “violent misfits terrorize Oakland streets.” I’m not sure how to get around the issue of how the corporate media sways public perception. There is the Internet and citizen journalism, of course… but is it enough? I don’t know.
August 10, 2012 at 4:31 pm
http://canopycanopycanopy.com/podcasts/36-all-a-are-not-b
“Participants discussed how the diagram can break down conventional systems of signification and provide us with different ways of thinking about and acting in the world, and of making art. They may consider the role of transitiveness in contemporary painting; the humorous, mimetic diagrams of Ad Reinhardt; how chance operates in the work of Marcel Duchamp; how the circulation and disposition of images affects the way we relate to them; and how diagrams can draw a line between the body and the machine”
August 10, 2012 at 10:01 pm
My comment is summed up by David’s: “We forget that a node can be a hungry child.” It seems like the ontological “flattening” that takes place in OOO puts it in danger of being blind to this. Or at least, it seems to make it difficult to make value judgments of a sort.
At the risk of offense, I would ask this: are macro-scale structural interventions ever going to solve these problems? It strikes me as somewhat ironic: we seem to care more about “tumbling capitalism” than we do about actually feeding those who are hungry. But what justifies this? It rides on a belief: that structural change will minimize the number of hungry overall, and so it is worth sacrificing presently hungry mouths for the sake of minimizing the total number of mouths. The economic nature of this belief is clear– but what justifies it? At what point did theorizing produce any promising results, that is, produce anything we might actually have hope in? At what point did a “strategy” emerge that led to more than chaos and disruption? To be clear, I ask these questions very sincerely, since my knowledge in this area is far from complete. I simply look to the failure of Marxist strategies and of most everything that has flowed from them and wonder if we aren’t barking up the wrong tree after all.
Let me be clear that I am not saying that structural change does not have its role– that would be absurd. However, I do not believe that it is ever going to solve society’s problems, because at the root of society are people, and people are free beings who are faced with figuring out what is good and what is evil. Structural change can’t combat greed for money, for example, because greed is a matter of the heart. But if greed for money is one of the core problems, then it would seem that our strategy would have revolve around eliminating and curing that greed. Otherwise, all grassroots structural change is doomed to be swallowed by it. Obviously, this presents a much more difficult problem, because it means eliminating the greed within ourselves first and foremost. The same goes for all the other human behaviors that enchain us to the current ways of society: judgmental attitudes, party-oppositional thinking, lack of forgiveness, etc. I admit that taking up the tough work of eliminating these behaviors within ourselves seems small and minuscule in the face of the larger, macro-scale problems; and yet, in comparison, the marco-scale problems almost seem easier to deal with! And perhaps that is why we do deal with them first.
It is my belief that until we stare eye to eye with those who are most suffering, all of our thinking is going to remain futile, because the problem will remain abstract and static. Only when we make ourselves vulnerable to the vulnerable do we realize the extent to which the problem is not structuralist or materialist, but spiritual and human. The problem lies in our inability– and our unwillingness– to connect deeply with those who are strange to us, or those who disagree, or those who are dirty or ugly to us. But to deny them is to affirm our own ugliness and reluctance to love.
Basically, my fear is that for a materialist or “flat” ontology, all solutions are necessarily going to “flat.” Because the spiritual dimension is denied– that is, the dimension of ones inner well-being– there is not even an attempt to develop a strategy to heal those wounds– which are the real wounds. People need more than material sustenance or a clean cage (society) to live in– unless we are going to just treat them like animals. They need someone to stare them in the eye and let them know that they are loved, that someone cares for them, even if that is a total stranger. That is what will give them hope. They need to know that they exist in a human community that isn’t all bullshit and balance sheets. I believe, and have seen how, that nourishment means much more to them than anything else (including more than any material or monetary gift we might give them)– but alas, it is the most difficult to give, because a loving look cannot be faked.
For me, the question then is really this one: how do we cultivate, ourselves, hearts that are able to reach out to those most vulnerable and give them what they really need– a look of love and appreciation that confers self-worth, where perhaps before they had none? I think we can all admit that structural or material change will never accomplish this– only a change of the heart will do.
All the best,
Tim.
August 10, 2012 at 10:33 pm
Tim,
This simply isn’t true. Flat ontology doesn’t claim that everything’s equal or that there aren’t power differentials, but that everything equally exists and one thing can’t be reduced to another. I’ve written a great deal about hubs or nodes that exercise disproportionate power in networks here on the blog, and the project of onto-cartography is designed to identify such points. It’s ontologies that posit transcendent terms such as god or absolute sovereigns that fall into the problem you describe because they simultaneously posit a term that conditions everything else while also foreclosing the possibility of acting on those terms. Unfortunately I’m unable to respond to the rest of your post at this time as I’m swamped with deadlines.
August 10, 2012 at 10:38 pm
Tim,
I should also note that your moralistic claim that all of these things are the result of people and that material conditions play no significant role is the core thesis of conservative ideology and neoliberalism. It’s what allows the conservative to say that poor people are as they are because they’re *immoral* and *lazy*, ignoring the disadvantages of their material circumstances. I also find the thesis that Marxism has had no success highly tendentious, given all the great social programs and public infrastructure we have. These sorts of assertions are precisely what follows when one privileges phenomenological modes of analysis incapable of dealing with material conditions and assemblages not given to intentionality.
August 12, 2012 at 10:35 am
Hey Levi,
I really don’t mean to waste your time, and there’s no need to feel obligated to respond, especially if other things are pressing in your life. Plus, with the far-reaching questions I think we are raising there is no need to rush our answers (so please know that I am doing my best to be very careful with mine). At any rate, I submit my views and my ideas for anyone who might be reading and thinking along with us on these issues, so I will do my best to respond in that spirit.
Going by your response, I think it’s best if I start my own by clearing up a few things, before recapitulating the heart of my question, which your response did not really approach.
First, I never meant to say “material conditions play no significant role” or that “structural change” was not an essential piece of the puzzle. I spend a good deal of time in conversation with the homeless and helping at soup kitchens, so I see first hand the incredible structural disadvantages facing these folks. I also see how helpful structural things like free clinics are. There is also the issue of information networks and how to “get the word out” (word of mouth is often the default method, although admittedly it is not best or most reliable). I also lament the lack of public showers and shelter houses. I realize that the structural-material elements involved here run deeper than these (such as city councils and public funding– not my area), and you are obviously in a better position to pinpoint them out than I am. But I am certainly not ignorant of them (who could be?), so it is my mistake if my words misled on that front.
Second, I would like to respond to your comment that religious belief prevents people from acting compassionately. At the soup kitchen, all of the groups that participate are religious (some are mixed: there is one team made up of Quakers, Jews, and Socialists!). They each take one day per month and organize a team to cook and serve enough food to feed anywhere from 100 to 200 guess. They know that this may be the only meal they have all day– but more importantly, they know that theirs may be the only kind word they hear all day, the only moment of genuine interaction.
While I am not trying to discuss what religious belief enables or inhibits, let me just say that, in my experience with religious folks in general, their love for God nourishes their love for neighbor and their willingness to serve them. Obviously not all self-proclaimed religious folks are like that, and some use their religion as leverage for superiority and judgment; but they are not, in fact, being religious, but hypocrites. At any rate, to say that belief prevents people from loving others is to contradict a wealth of evidence– just look to Mother Theresa, who has perhaps done more for the poor than anyone else this past century. Alas, I am now severely afraid that my comments will set up stumbling blocks to my main topic, so let me proceed there now, and quickly, hoping that whatever I have just said can be passed over if it, indeed, poses an obstacle.
When I wrote that, “Only when we make ourselves vulnerable to the vulnerable do we realize the extent to which the problem is not structuralist or materialist, but spiritual and human,” I did not mean to dismiss structural and material issues involved, but to express my opinion that, as important as they are, there is another issue involved here which I believe must be addressed. In my parlance, I would call it “spiritual poverty,” but again I don’t want the terms to get in the way. What is at issue is the feeling of human worth and dignity. What is at issue is our ability to transmit hope in people (which of course means having hope ourselves). What is at issue is the question lying in everyone’s heart: “Am I loved?”
To listen to the stories of those on the street will truly break your heart– but the question is: who will listen to them, if not us? Who will tell them that even though all of society rejects them that they are still worthy human beings? Who will remind them that they are brave and courageous, when 99% of the people that drive by them only spit on them, ignore them, ask them to be prostitutes or deal drugs for them, or call them “assholes” and “lazy”? I believe it is a serious question, and one we can only answer by going to them with a “loving look”– which as I mentioned above, cannot be feigned.
That is why my final question, posed to anyone reading, was this: “How do we cultivate, ourselves, hearts that are able to reach out to those most vulnerable and give them what they really need– a look of love and appreciation that confers self-worth, where perhaps before they had none?” When I go on to say, “I think we can all admit that structural or material change will never accomplish this–,” I only said so to emphasize my feeling that, “only a change of heart will do.” And a change of heart can only begin with our own.
In closing, I believe that we really handicap our efforts at social justice if we underestimate this element, which is unavoidably inter-personal. That is why my question really had to do with the question of hope. If I expressed any skepticism over theory or criticism, it was simply to ask: can it really bring hope to the hopeless– and if it can, how does it do so? Of course we should strive for all the material/structural change that we can; but if we are still judgmental, if we are still selfish and guarded, if we are still greedy, if we still have no humility, how there can be any “lasting” change? If we still make no effort to understand and to love one another, no matter how strange or disagreeable they are to us, where then will we be?
All the best,
Tim.
August 12, 2012 at 2:31 pm
Tim,
I didn’t say anything about *religious* belief in my response to you. I was criticizing the notion that capitalism functions as it does because of “greed for money”. Sure, there are capitalists that have this “greed for money”, but the reasons that capitalism functions as it does are not based on a desire like this, but are structural. Businesses must necessarily produce profit over the previous quarter or they’ll be weeded out of existence. The problem with explaining things in a belief/desire matrix as you try to do is that it gives rise to the idea that if we just change the heart of, say, a CEO, we can put an end to these problems. It thereby fails to get at thereby fails to get at the structural or systemic nature of these things.
August 12, 2012 at 2:36 pm
I don’t have a position on religious belief one way or another. Sometimes it can be a powerful motivator for revolutionary engagement; more often it functions as a supplement that supports the injustices of these systems and keeps them in place. It can go either way. In the United States it primarily functions in the latter way. I’m not really interested in internecine battles between who is and isn’t a genuine religious believer. I’m only interested in how religion does, in fact, function sociologically in particular assblages.
August 12, 2012 at 6:15 pm
Levi,
When you referred to “ontologies that posit transcendent terms such as god or absolute sovereigns that fall into the problem you describe because they simultaneously posit a term that conditions everything else while also foreclosing the possibility of acting on those terms” — I assumed you were speaking of religious belief, at least in part. And since the problem I described was essentially a “lack of love,” it seemed necessary to defend those who ascribe to those ontologies, since quite often they have a great deal of love in their heart, as well as a strong desire for social justice and an ability to give hope to the hopeless. I admit that the language you’re using is a bit tough for me to parse, so if I erred or jumped to conclusion, that is my bad.
Alas, at no point did I say that changing the heart of one CEO was going to fix the problem. The focus of my comment was on meeting the vulnerable people in our society face-to-face and how to bring some light and hope into their lives. They are not just nodes in a system– they are people with faces and fears. What can we bring to them, today, to ease their burden?
From what you’ve said, you believe that fixing the structures/material conditions will fix the problem. Personally, I disagree. It seems to me that you can change all the material structures you want (or talk about it all you want), but if people’s hearts are still callous and closed-off, what good is it going to do? New ways of exploiting people will be devised. New ways of being judgmental, prideful, and acting superior will arise. Human societies/economies have gone through many forms and in all of them there has been ugliness. I guess I just don’t see any evidence to think that changing the system one more time is going to fix this core problem.
So my point was never to say that structural problems don’t help. But to think that they are the absolute key to success overlooks quite a bit, in my opinion. If the heart is ugly, society will be ugly– which doesn’t mean that I’m saying the heart is the only factor! But no matter how many coats of paint you put on her, if the engine is bust, she won’t run. I admit that that is a belief of sorts. I believe that our selfish and uncharitable hearts are the key thing to be solved. But even if you do not think it is primary, certainly it is not negligible. To think that the structure or the material conditions determines everything is to reduce human beings to robots; whereas we are free beings, making choices as to how to be, how to give, how to love, etc.
Again, to be clear, I never said we should ignore “material conditions and assemblages not given to intentionality.” But to think that we can fix those without addressing the moral/intentional questions that involve the human actors within them…?
So no, when it comes to the question of the kindness/charitability of the heart, it is not firstly a question about some unnamed CEO. On the contrary, it is first of all, and it is always, a question that involves us.
Tim.
August 12, 2012 at 10:25 pm
Tim,
I don’t think the problem is primarily with people’s hearts. I’ll leave it at that, as explaining why would require lengthy discussion of how networks function independent of people’s intentions. I believe that your religion has done far more harm than good throughout history, but don’t at all dispute that it is a positive motivator for a small minority.
August 14, 2012 at 3:59 pm
[…] came across an exchange between Levi Bryant (at Larval Subjects) and David Banks (at Cyborgology) recently that riled up my interest in occupy and its ability to […]
August 15, 2012 at 11:30 pm
Levi,
My only concern is that, if you don’t think how one behaves is ultimately all that important, or at least not the determining factor, then you risk opening up a slippery slope to justify any sort of conduct whatsoever. We should remember that millions of people have been murdered in the name of restructuring society so that it was made “better” according to their theories and political strategies. This is what I ultimately tried to say in my initial post: when those who are already suffering the most suffer even more from our strategic interventions (such as disrupting a high-way), aren’t we who make that intervention called to account for their increase of suffering? Or is that loss, that suffering, negligible, if it benefits changing the structure overall? Are we willing to sacrifice some for the sake of the many?
So the basic question is: at what cost do we devote ourselves to this broad-scale attempt at re-hauling society? Will we sacrifice our attempts at being civil and kind to one another? Will we give up being forgiving and understanding of those who are different from us? How much humanity in our own personal acts towards others will we give up in the name of the salvation of the world? Will we give up any attempt at being loving human beings– and for what? What ultimately is the goal, then?
Those would be my questions– answer or don’t answer as you see fit.
Thanks,
Tim.
August 16, 2012 at 1:00 am
Tim,
I have never suggested that how we behave is unimportant and irrelevant. My point is that many of the ways things are organized aren’t so much the results of individual behaviors and beliefs, but are emergent results of larger-scale systems.
To see what I’m getting at, take the example of congested traffic on a highway where there’s 1) no construction, 2) no accident, and 3) a perfectly regular flow of cars (rather than unusual volume). How do we explain congested traffic in these circumstances? Appealing to people’s beliefs or whether they have regard for others does no good. These are aggregate results of millions of tiny actions. One person towards the front, perhaps, swerves to avoid a squirrel. All the other drivers in their vicinity adjust their actions in response. Some swerve themselves, others slow down, others brake. This ripples backwards for miles. Voila, we get congestion even though there’s no reason congestion needs to exist.
How, then, do we prevent this congestion? Changing people’s beliefs will not have an effect here because this situation is not a matter of belief. We need different ways of changing this situation. For example, we might take drivers out of the equation altogether and have computers drive our car once we get on the highway, keeping all cars at a constant speed, in the same lanes, and at a regular distance from each other. California has been exploring technologies like this.
The case is similar with capitalism. While there are clearly greedy and heartless capitalists, the way capitalism functions is not primarily a result of these ugly beliefs and heartless attitudes. In order for a business to stay afloat (and matters are far more complex than I can outline here), businesses have to produce profit each quarter. If they don’t, they lose shareholders and they go under. In order to produce quarterly growth they have to either increase their markets or decrease their production costs. Markets are limited and there’s always competition for consumers. This leaves decreasing production costs. How do you decrease production costs? The rate of materials used to produce commodities are fairly stable. This leaves automating factories and cutting wages and benefits.
In other words, like traffic, diminishing wages and economic inequality are built into the very fabric of capitalism. You can have capitalism with the greatest hearts and most philanthropic regard for people in the world (I wager many of them are). It’s the nature of this system, not their heart and regard for other humans (or lack thereof) that compels this action on their part. The point is that you can’t change these actions by changing their beliefs and heart. You have to intervene in the functioning of the system itself.
My criticism of your claims is not that beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes are irrelevant, but that you’re working at the wrong level of analysis and are not discerning the nature of the system at issue and why it functions as it does. I think this poor analysis arises directly from your background in phenomenology and Kierkegaard that emphasizes the subject and belief and that is therefore blind to large scale systems and how they function. It’s also noteworthy that all the things you suggest can be changed in these systems (hearts and beliefs) ***and*** the system can still function exactly as it did before. Why? Because hearts and beliefs weren’t the cause of this functioning in the first place.
August 16, 2012 at 7:09 pm
Levi,
I realize that I am fighting a losing battle here, but I will go on.
I think you are underestimating the extent to which your own beliefs are factoring in here. You take it as fact that disrupting and revolutionizing the social system is most important. At the risk of exaggerating, I would say: you value overthrowing the capitalist system more than you value the people that live in it.
Now, it is not my studies that lead me to disagree with you here– it is my life and my experiences (including with the poor, which I’ve mentioned a few times now). My disagreement is not neutral– it has to do with the question of how my time in life is best spent– analyzing/disrupting systems, or performing works of charity?
Neither of us are final arbiter here, but we are both making a choice. We are both operating on certain values (everyone does) which precede and largely determine our “analysis” as well as our actions in life to solve what we see as the problem. Ergo, I personally value treating others with kindness and love more than I value the perfection of the economic and social system (or the perfection of our analysis); therefore, I will gladly give up the perfection of the system if perfecting it means giving up on being kind to one another. The smoother running system is less important to me than the individual person who might be squashed in the process of revolution. That’s why I asked last time, “at what cost do we devote ourselves to this broad-scale attempt at re-hauling society?” What’s more important– personal well-being or well-functioning systems?
Of course, it is my belief, deduced from all my attempts to do what I can to help society be a better place– but still I believe that it is pointless to change all the structures in the world if we haven’t changed ourselves and learned how to be patient and kind to people who are disagreeable to us. You believe otherwise, and that’s fine, but it is still a belief, it is still a choice you are making, is it not?
I really do not mean to be argumentative or accusatory here, not at all, so I hope these comments can be read in good spirit. We both obviously care about fixing things at home and abroad, we just disagree on where to put our hopes, on where we believe our human energies are best spent.
Thanks again,
Tim.
August 16, 2012 at 8:05 pm
Tim,
That’s a pretty obnoxious thing for you to suggest. I look for ways to combat that system because of the suffering and destruction it causes. In other words, it’s the lives of people that are at issue. Further, it’s not an either/or. One can *both* engage in things that improve the lives of others *and* look for ways to combat the massive abuses of that system. Nor is the issue here one of the straw man you propose, ie, “creating a perfect economic system”. It is about responding to a system that systematically creates poverty and inequality, that plunges countries into crushing debt, that promotes brutal warfare, that tears apart families, that is decimating the environment, etc. it is about responding to those issues and causes.
I’ll also note that you haven’t responded to any of my arguments here. Instead you’re attempting to paint me as someone who doesn’t care about the suffering of people and who believes nothing should be done about it. It’s great that you work at soup kitchens, but how much are you really doing for those people? Their circumstances remain exactly as they were after they’re fed because you’ve simply fed them and not addressed their real conditions. Shouldn’t you also be promoting legislation that increases the social safety net, that raises the minimum wage, that provides real healthcare so people don’t go bankrupt fighting serious illnesses, fighting to make affordable housing available, etc? At any rate, I take it that your suggestion that I’m indifferent to human suffering effectively ends our discussion.
August 16, 2012 at 9:14 pm
Tim,
I wouldn’t want to underestimate the role of love in social transformation, but I wonder if we should examine why there is a need for middle class people to offer charity to the poor in the first place? Do you think poverty is somehow just the natural order of things? I must agree with Levi that poverty is primarily the result of the structure of capitalism. Capitalism produces class stratification, funneling wealth from the many to the few. What do you say to something like the Shakers’ or the Movement of Free Spirits’ abolition of private property and re-organization of society along the lines actually prescribed by the Gospels?
August 17, 2012 at 1:53 pm
Just finished reading Wark’s interview/Bryant’s posts/Bank’s post/Lavenz’s post.
I’d love to sit down with everyone over drinks for a few hours on this – it’s a subject I’ve thought a lot about. Alas, I don’t have the time at present. Suffice it to say, I don’t see Bryant (on the one hand) and Banks/Lavenz (on the other) as opposed as they seem to see themselves.
Bryant’s arguments for structural change should be taken, in my opinion, to apply at every scale. The personal change is necessary, but so is the cultural/political and the ecological. I just finished reading The Monk and the Philosopher, where Jean Francois Revel and his son, Matthieu Ricard dialogue and they pose the same (and as I see it: false) dichotomy between the personal and the political.
I’m away for a couple weeks, but I’m in the midst of sketching out some of my own thoughts on this – I hope to write a series of posts themed around “the anarchism of everyday life”, beginning with my relationship with my self, with my spouse, with my children, in my neighborhood and cascading outward. I don’t see those as distinct – how I act towards the federal government and how I interact with my children both require countercultural actions, and there is a deficiency when one side “wins out” over the other.
Thanks for the thought-provoking discussion – across posts, particularly.
August 19, 2012 at 2:46 am
These are really dismissive and actually pretty nasty bad-faith strawmen:
and
Just, at a minimum, let’s substitute living “in front of Wall Street”.
Oh those naive activists who don’t understand material conditions, oh ho ho.
August 19, 2012 at 1:22 pm
Hi Tyler,
I think you’re missing the point a bit. The point is simply that camping out in front of Wall Street does not interrupt the material flows upon which Wall Street relies to continue itself. For that reason, such actions have little negotiating power with these institutions. Consider why strikes and boycotts have historically had effects, and why there have been few effects here.
August 19, 2012 at 5:11 pm
That’s all well and good. My point is that you’re characterizing the subjects of your criticism in ways that are completely unfair. So “camping out” is language clearly intended to be as dismissive as possible.
More importantly, the idea that the point of OWS was ever about *petitioning* government and corporations to change on their own is a wholesale mischaracterization of OWS, as is evident in the very widely publicized and commented-upon fact that OWS activists long refused to put together any sort of platform and explicitly rejected the idea that their activities had changes in government policy as its goal. This was such a widespread topic of discussion last fall, even in the most mainstream of mainstream news outlets, that when you characterize these activists as “see[ing] themselves as striving to persuade corporations and governments to do things differently” that is, I’ll repeat, a pretty nasty bit of strawmanning.
Rather, turning “Wall Street” into a place where people literally live — sleeping and eating and reading and talking and sharing and nursing and writing and on and on — had the goal of and effect of producing actual material change in the social spaces of downtown New York City. It’s very possible, even likely, that that does not produce longer-lived structural changes, but of course this question is itself something that OWS activists were conscious of and spent a lot of time debating. So the posture here that somehow the people involved in “camping out” at Zuccotti Park were not participating in exactly the questions you’re raising (you say “I don’t see much in contemporary political thought that is even seriously posing the questions,” which seems explicitly to exclude those activists, along with the other bits I quote) is deeply unfair and, in my view, reflects the worst sort of left-academic concern-trolling. It’s fine to think their tactics won’t be effective, but to suggest that that’s because they’re naive and don’t understand what you understand about material flows is simply false.
I’d suggest some of Aaron Bady’s dispatches from the camp at Frank Ogawa Plaza. For a while last fall there was “a permanent and round the clock food creating infrastructure, which would hydrate and feed all who came up, regardless of their affiliation with the camp.” You know, if the point of creating a permanent public kitchen is not to take active responsibility for fundamentally changing the material and social conditions of public spaces in Oakland, I don’t know what is. That it’s an endrun around corporate and government agency, rather than a petition of corporations and government, may or may not be a problem, but it’s seems to me that in some ways it’s you who is reifying and validating the singular agency of corporations and governments and the occupiers who were engaged in a truly radical campaign to bypass that power and enact a different material and social world altogether. That’s a long long way from “seeing themselves as trying to persuade corporations and governments to do things differently.”
August 19, 2012 at 5:15 pm
Or, here, October 2011: “Authorities want people focused on changing the structure of our decaying capitalism to go back to being weekend activists marching in a circle.” So you’re saying that occupy activists were basically just “activists marching in a circle,” here’s one example of such an activist saying the goal is to change “the structure of our decaying capitalism.” You maybe disagree with these folks about tactics, but you’re framing that disagreement as being one about ultimate goals and theoretical models, in a way that denies these activists the intellectual and tactical sophistication and awareness that they clearly demonstrated.
August 19, 2012 at 5:21 pm
Or your reply to Tim:
By comparison, the “soup kitchen” at Frank Ogawa Park was park of a actual community that didn’t simply feed people but welcomed them into a larger community, which really is about “addressing their real conditions,” one major element of which is social and legal exclusion. Again the point being that even if you think the tactics may be ineffective, it’s really not like these “protesters” weren’t engaged in a project with goals like yours, rather than being naive simpletons who don’t understand about material conditions.
August 19, 2012 at 5:40 pm
I don’t think so, Tyler. The premise of this form of activism is that it is the beliefs of individual capitalists that lead to these despicable things and that they can be persuaded by action such as camping out in front of Wall Street. That fundamentally misunderstands the nature of this system. I’m sorry you find my remarks dismissive and disparaging. That’s not my intent. My intent is to point out why this is a mistaken understanding of this system and a form of action that lacks efficacy.
August 19, 2012 at 5:42 pm
Tyler,
A further point, if the goals of OWS are as you describe it’s thoroughly uninteresting as a movement. Knowing a number of people involved in that movement I suspect they’d have a pretty withering appraisal of your characterization.