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
McKenzie Wark (bio)
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@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.
Paul Krugman
McKenzie Wark (bio)
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@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.
No comments:
Post a Comment