A specter is haunting technological society—the specter of Luddism.
Granted, as is so often the case with hauntings, reactions to this specter are divided: there are some who are frightened, others who scoff at the very idea of it, quite a few dream about designing high-tech gadgets with which to conclusively bust this ghost so that it can bother us no more, and still others are convinced that this specter is trying to tell us something important if only we are willing to listen. And though there are plenty of people who have taken to scoffing derisively whenever the presence of General Ludd is felt, there would be no need to issue those epithetic guffaws if they were truly directed at nothing. The dominant forces of technological society have been trying to exorcize this spirit, but instead of banishing this ghost they only seem to be summoning it.
The problem with spectral Luddism is that one can feel its presence without necessarily understanding what it means. When one encounters Luddism in the world today it still tends to be as either a term of self-deprecation used to describe why someone has an old smartphone, or as an insult that is hurled at anyone who dares question “the good news” presented by the high priests of technology. With Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Were Right About Why You Hate Your Job, Gavin Mueller challenges those prevailing attitudes and ideas about Luddism, instead articulating a perspective on Luddism that finds in it a vital analysis with which to respond to techno-capitalism. Luddism, in Mueller’s argument, is not simply a term to describe a specific group of workers at the turn of the 19th century, rather Luddism can be seen in workers’ struggles across centuries.
At core, Breaking Things at Work is less of a history of Luddism, and more of a manifesto. Historic movements and theorists are thoughtfully engaged with throughout the volume, but this is consistently in service of making an argument about how we should be responding to technology in the present. While contemporary books about technology (even ones that advance a critical attitude) have a tendency to carefully couch any criticism in neatly worded expressions of love for technology, Mueller’s book is refreshing in the forthrightness with which he expresses the view that “technology often plays a detrimental role in working life, and in struggles for a better one” (4). In clearly setting out the particular politics of his book, Mueller makes his goal clear: “to make Marxists into Luddites” and “to turn people critical of technology into Marxists” (5). This is no small challenge, as Mueller notes that “historically Marxists have not been critical of technology” (4) on the one hand, and that “much of contemporary technological criticism comes from a place of romantic humanism” (6) on the other hand. For Mueller “the problem of technology is its role in capitalism” (7), but the way in which many of these technologies have been designed to advance capitalism’s goals makes it questionable whether all of these machines can necessarily be repurposed. Basing his analysis on a history of class struggle, Mueller is not so much setting out to tell workers what to do, as much as he is putting a name on something that workers are already doing.
Mueller begins the first chapter of his book by explaining who the actual Luddites were and providing some more details to explain the tactics for which they became legendary. As skilled craft workers in early 19th century England, the historic Luddites saw firsthand how the introduction of new machines resulted in their own impoverishment. Though the Luddites would become famous for breaking machines, it was a tactic they turned to only after their appeals to parliament to protect their trades went ignored. With broad popular support, the Luddites donned the anonymizing mask of General Ludd, and took up arms in their own defense. Contrary to the popular myth in which the Luddites smashed every machine out of a fit of wild hatred, the historic record shows that the Luddites were quite focused in their targets, picking workshops and factories where the new machines had been used as an excuse to lower wages. Luddism did not die out in its moment because the tactics were seen as pointless, rather the movement came to an end at the muzzle of a gun, as troops were deployed to quell the uprising—with many of the captured Luddites being either hanged or transported. Nevertheless, this was certainly not the last time that machine-breaking was taken up as a tactic: not long after the Luddite risings the Swing Riots were even more effective in their targeting of machinery. And, furthermore, as Mueller makes clear throughout his book, the tactic of seeing the machine as a site for resistance continues to this day.
Perhaps the key takeaway from the historic Luddites is not that they smashed machines, but that they identified machinery as a site of political struggle. They did not take hammers to stocking frames out of a particular hatred for these contraptions; rather they took hammers to stocking frames as a way of targeting the owners of those stocking frames. These struggles, in which groups of workers came together with community support, demonstrate how the Luddite’s various tactics served as “practices of political composition” (16, italics in original text) whereby the Luddites came to see themselves as workers with shared interests that were in opposition to the interests of their employers. The Luddites were not to be assuaged by appeals to the idea of progress, or lurid fantasies of a high-tech utopia, they could see the technological changes playing out in real time in front of them, and what they could see there was not a distant future of plenty, but an immediate future of immiseration. The Luddites were not fools, quite the contrary: they saw exactly what the new machines meant for themselves and their communities, and so they decided to do something about it.
Despite the popular support the Luddites enjoyed in their own communities, and the extent to which machine-breaking remained a common tactic even after the Luddite risings had been repressed, already in the 19th century more optimistic attitudes towards technology were ascendant. Mueller detects some of this optimism in Karl Marx, noting that “there is evidence for a technophilic Marx” (19), yet Mueller pushes back against the common assumption that Marx was a technological determinist. While recognizing that Marx (and Engels) had made some less than generous comments about the Luddites, Mueller emphasizes Marx’s attention to the real struggles of workers against capitalism and notes that “the struggles against machines were the struggles against the society that utilized them” (24, italics in original text). And the frequency with which machines were becoming targets of worker’s ire in the 19th century demonstrates the way in which workers saw the machines not as neutral tools but as instruments of the factory owners’ power. While defenders of mass machinery may point to the abundance such machines create, some figures like William Morris pushed back on these promises of abundance by noting that such machinery sapped any pleasure out of the act of laboring while the abundance was just a share in shoddy goods. In Marx and Morris, as well as in the actual struggles of workers, Mueller points to the importance of technology becoming recognized as a site of political struggle—emphasizing that in worker’s resistance to technology can be found “a more liberatory politics of work and technology” (29).
That the 19th century was home to the most renowned fight against technology, does not mean that these struggles (be they physical or philosophical) ended with the arrival of the 20th century. While much is often made of the “scientific management” of Frederick W. Taylor, less is often said of the ways in which workers resisted this system that turned them into living cogs—and even less is usually said of the strike at the Watertown Arsenal wherein (quite unlike the case of the Luddites) Congress sided with the workers (and their union). Nevertheless, the Taylorist viewpoint that “capitalist technologies like scientific management” were “an objective way to improve productivity and therefore the condition of workers” (35) was a viewpoint shared by a not inconsiderable number of socialists in those years. Within the international left of the early 20th century, debates about the meaning of machinery were heated: some like Karl Kautsky took a deterministic stance that developments in capitalist production methods were paving the way for communism; others like the IWW activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn cheered the tactic of workers sabotaging their machines; still others like Thorstein Veblen dreamed of a technocratic society overseen by benevolent engineers; various Bolsheviks argued about the deployment of Taylorist techniques in the new Soviet state; and standing at the edge of the fascist abyss Walter Benjamin gestured towards a politics that does not praise speed but searches desperately for an emergency brake.
While the direction of debates about technology in the early 20th century were significantly disrupted by the Second World War (just as they had been upended by the First World War), in the aftermath of Auschwitz and Hiroshima debates about technology and work only intensified. Automation represented a new hope to business owners even as it represented a new threat to workers, as automation could sap the power of agitated workers while centralizing further control in the hands of management. Importantly, automation was not simply accepted by workers, and Mueller notes “on the vanguard of opposing automation were those often marginalized by the official workers’ movement—women and African Americans” (63). Opposition to automation often took the form of “wildcat strikes” with union leaders failing to keep pace with the radicalism and fury of their members. In this period of post-war tumult, left-wing thinkers ranging from Raya Dunayevskaya to Herbert Marcuse to Shulamith Firestone articulated a spectrum of different responses to the promises and perils of automation—yet even as they theorized: workers in mines, factories, and at the docks continued to strike against what the introduction of automation meant for their lives. Simultaneously, automation became a topic of interest, and debate, within the social movements of the time, with automation being viewed by those movements as threat and hope.
Lurking in the background of many of the discussions around automation was the spread of computers. As increasing numbers of people became aware of them, computers quickly conjured both adoration and dread—they were a frequent target of student activists in the 1960s and 1970s, even as elements of the counterculture (such as Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog) were enthusiastic about computers. Businesses were quick to adopt computers, and these machines often accelerated the automation of workplaces (while opening up new types of work to the threat of being automated). Yet the rise of the computer also gave rise to a new sort of figure, “the hacker” whose very technological expertise positioned them to challenge computerized capitalism. Though the “politics of hackers are complicated,” Mueller emphasizes that they are often some of technology’s “most critical users, and they regularly deploy their skills to subvert measures by corporations to rationalize and control computer user behavior. They are often Luddites to the core” (105). Not uniformly uncritical celebrants of technology, many hackers turn their intimate knowledge of computers into a way of knowing where best to strike—even as they champion initiatives such as free software, peer-to-peer sharing, and tools for avoiding surveillance.
Yet as computers have infiltrated nearly every space and moment, it is not only hackers who find themselves regularly interacting with these machines. The omnipresence of computers creates a situation wherein “work seeps into every nook and cranny of human existence via capitalist technologies, accompanied by the erosion of wages and free time” (119) as more and more of our activities become fodder for corporate recommendation algorithms we find ourselves endlessly working for Facebook and Google even as we respond to work emails at 1 a.m. Despite the promises of digital plenty, computing technologies (broadly defined) seem to be giving rise to an increasing sense of frustration, and though there are some who advocate for an anodyne “tech humanism,” it may well be that “the strategy of refusal pursued by the industrial workers of old might be a more promising technique against the depression engines of social media” (122).
Breaking Things at Work concludes with a call for the radical left to “put forth a decelerationist politics: a politics of slowing down change, undermining technological progress, and limiting capital’s rapacity, while developing organization and cultivating militancy” (127-128). Such a politics entails not a rejection of progress, but a critical reexamination of what it is that is actually meant when the word “progress” is bandied about, as too often what progress stands for is “the progress of elites at the expense of the rest of us” (128). Putting forth such a politics does not require creating something entirely new, but rather recognizing that the elements of just such a politics can be seen repeatedly in worker’s movements and social movements.
In putting forth a clear definition of “Luddism,” Mueller highlights that Luddism “emphasizes autonomy” by seeking to put control back into the hands of the people actually doing the work, “views technology not as neutral but as a site of struggle,” “rejects production for production’s sake,” “can generalize” into a strategy for mass action, and is “antagonistic” taking a firm stance in clear opposition to capitalism and capitalist technology. In the increasing frustration with social media, in the growing environmental calls for “degrowth,” and in the cracks showing in the golden calf of technology, the space is opening for a politics that takes up the hammer of Luddism. Recognizing as it does so, that a hammer can be used not just to smash things that need to be broken, a hammer can also be used to build something different.
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One of the factors that makes Luddism so appealing more than two centuries later is that it is an ideology that still calls out to be developed. The historic Luddites were undoubtedly real people, with real worries, and real thoughts on the tactics that they were deploying—and yet the historic Luddites did not leave any manifestoes or books of their own writing behind. What remains from the Luddites are primarily the letters they sent and snatches of songs in which they were immortalized (which have been helpfully collected in Kevin Binfield’s 2015 Writings of the Luddites). And though one can begin to cobble together a philosophy of technology from reading through those letters, the work of explaining exactly what it is that Luddism means has been a task that has largely fallen to others. Granted, part of what made the Luddites successful in their time was that the mask of General Ludd could be picked up and worn by many individuals, all of whom could claim to be General Ludd (or his representative).
With Breaking Things at Work, Gavin Mueller has crafted a vital contribution to Luddism, and what makes this book especially important is the way in which it furthers Luddism in a variety of ways. On one level, Mueller’s book provides a solid introduction and overview to Luddite thinking and tactics throughout the ages, which makes the book a useful retort to those who act as though the historic Luddites were the only workers who ever dared oppose machinery. Yet Mueller makes it clear from the outset of his book that he is not primarily interested in writing a history, rather his book has a clear political goal as well—he wishes to raise the banner of General Ludd and encourage others to march behind this standard. Thus, Mueller’s book is simultaneously an account of Luddism’s past, while also an appeal for Luddism’s future. And while Mueller provides a thoughtful consideration of many past figures and movements that have dallied with Luddism, his book concludes with a clear articulation of what a present day Luddism might look like. For those who call themselves Luddites, or those who would call themselves Luddites, Mueller provides a historically grounded but present focused account of what it meant, and what it can mean, to be a Luddite.
The clarity with which Mueller defines Luddism in Breaking Things at Work places the book into a genuine debate as to how exactly Luddism should be defined. And this is a debate that Mueller’s book engages with in a particularly provocative way considering how his book is both a scholarly account and an activist manifesto. Writing about the Luddites tends to fall into several camps: works that provide a fairly straightforward historical account of who the original Luddites were and what they literally did (this genre includes works like E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, and Kevin Binfield’s Writings of the Luddites); works that treat Luddism as an idea and a philosophy that is not exclusive to the historic Luddites (this genre includes works like Nicols Fox’s Against the Machine, and Matt Tierney’s Dismantlings), works that emphasize that the tactic of machine-breaking was not practiced exclusively by the Luddites (this genre includes works like Eric Hobsbawm and Geogre Rudé’s Captain Swing, and David Noble’s Progress Without People), and works that draw lines (good or bad) from Luddism to later activist practices (this genre includes approving works like Kirkpatrick Sale’s Rebels Against the Future, and disapproving works like Steven Jones’s Against Technology). Mueller’s Breaking Things at Work does not fit neatly into any single one of those categories: the Marxist analysis makes the book pair nicely with Thompson’s book, the engagement with radical theorists makes the book pair nicely with Tierney’s book, the treatment of machine-breaking as a common tactic makes the book pair nicely with Noble’s book, and the call to arms places the book into debate with books by the likes of Sale and Jones.
All of which is to say, the meaning of Luddism remains contested terrain. And even though many of technology’s celebrants remain content to use Luddite as an insult, those who would proudly wear the mask of General Ludd are not themselves all in agreement about exactly what this means.
Mueller has written a wonderfully provocative book, and it is one in which he does not attempt to hide his own opinion behind two dozen carefully composed distractions. Instead, Mueller is quite clear “to be a good Marxist is to also be a Luddite” (5), and this is a point that leads directly into his goal of turning Marxists into Luddites and making Marxists out of those who are critical of technology. And in his engagement with Marx, Mueller tangles with the perceptions of Marx as technophilic, engages with a variety of Marxist thinkers who fall into a range of camps, all while trying “to be faithful to Marxism’s heretical side, its unofficial channels and para-academic spaces” (vii). And all the while Mueller endeavors to keep his book grounded as a contribution to real struggles around technology in the world today. Considering Mueller’s clear statement of his own position it is likely that some will level their critiques at the book’s Marxism, and still others might critique the book for not being sufficiently Marxist. And as is always the case with books that situate their critique within a particular radical tradition it seems inevitable that some will wonder why their favorite thinker is not included (or does not receive more attention), even as others will wonder why other branches from the tree of the radical left are missing. (Mueller does not spend much time on anarchist thinkers).
Overall, the question of whether this book will turn its Marxist readers into Luddites, and its technologically critical readers into Marxists is one that can only be answered by each reader themselves. For what Mueller’s book presents is an argument, and the way in which a reader nods along or argues back is likely to be heavily influenced by the way they personally define Luddism. And Mueller is not the first to try to rally people beneath the Luddite’s standard.
In 1990, Chellis Glendinning published her “Notes Towards a Neo-Luddite Manifesto” in the pages of the Utne Reader. Furiously lamenting the ways in which societies were struggling under the onslaught of new technologies, her manifesto was a call to take up oppositional arms. While taking on the mantle of “Neo-Luddite,” the manifesto articulated a Luddism (or Neo-Luddism) that was defined by three principles: “1. Neo-Luddites are not anti-technology,” “2. All technologies are political,” and “3. The personal view of technology is dangerously limited.” Based on these principles, Glendinning’s manifesto laid out a program that included the dismantling of a range of “destructive” technologies (including genetic engineering technologies and computer technologies), pushed for the search for “new technological forms” that would be “for the benefit of life on Earth,” and this in turn was couched in a call for “Western technological societies” to develop a “life-enhancing worldview.” The manifesto drew on the technological criticism of Lewis Mumford, on Langdon Winner’s call for “epistemological Luddism,” and on the uncompromising stance towards technologies deemed destructive typified by Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television.
The Neo-Luddites are more noteworthy for their attempt to reclaim and redefine Luddism than they are for their success in actually creating a movement. Indeed, the lasting legacy of Neo-Luddism is not that of a vital social movement that fought for (and continues to fight for) the principles Glendinning put forth, but instead about half a bookshelf worth of books with “Neo-Luddite” somewhere in their title. There are certainly critiques to be leveled at the Neo-Luddites, but when revisiting Glendinning’s manifesto it is also worth placing it in the moment at which it emerged. The backdrop for Breaking Things at Work is one in which most readers will be accustomed to seemingly omnipresent computing technologies, climate exacerbated disasters, and a world in which the wealth of tech billionaires grows massively by the minute. By contrast, the backdrop for Glendinning’s manifesto was a moment in which personal computers had not yet achieved ubiquity (no one was carrying the Internet around in their pocket), climate change still seemed like a distant threat, and Mark Zuckerberg was still a child. It is impossible to say whether or not Glendinning’s manifesto, had it been heeded, could have prevented us from getting into our present morass, but preventing us from winding up where we are now certainly seems to have been one of Glendinning’s goals. At the very least, Glendinning and the Neo-Luddites (as well as the thinkers upon whom they drew) are a reminder that the spirit of General Ludd was circulating before you could Google “Luddism.”
There are many parallels between the stances outlined by Glendinning and those outlined by Mueller. Though it seems that the key space of conflict between the two is around the question of dismantling. Glendinning and the Neo-Luddites were not subtle in their calls for dismantling certain technologies, whereas Mueller is considerably more nuanced in this respect. Here attempts to define Luddism find themselves butting against the degree to which Luddism is destined to always be associated (for better or worse) with the actual breaking of machines. The naming of entire classes of technology that need to be dismantled may appear like indiscriminate smashing, while calls for careful reevaluation of technologies may appear more like thoughtful disassembly. Yet the underlying question for Luddism remains: are certain technologies irredeemable? Are there technologies that we can remake in a different image, or will those technologies only reshape us in their own image? And if the answer is that these technologies cannot be reshaped, than are there some technologies that we need to break before they can finish breaking us, even if we often find ourselves enjoying some of the benefits of those technologies?
Writing of the reactions from a range of 1960s social movements to the technological changes they were seeing playing out, Mueller notes that the particular technology that evoked “both fear and fascination” was none other than “the computer” (91). This point leads into what is perhaps the most troubling and challenging element of Mueller’s account, as he goes on to argue that hackers and some of their projects (like free software) fit within the legacy of Luddism. I imagine that many hackers will not be too pleased to see themselves described as Luddites, just as I imagine that many self-professed Luddites will scoff at the idea that using bitcoins to buy drugs on the dark web is a Luddite pursuit. Yet the idea that those most familiar with a technology may know exactly where to strike certainly has some noteworthy resonances with the historic Luddites.
And yet the matter of hackers and “high tech Luddism” raises a much broader question, one that the left has been trying to answer for quite some time, and perhaps the key question for any attempt to formulate a Luddite politics in this moment: what are we to make of the computer? Is the computer (and computing technologies, broadly defined) the offspring of the military-industrial-academic complex with logics of control, surveillance, and dominance so deeply ingrained that it ultimately winds up bending all users to that logic? Despite those origins, are computing technologies something which can be seized upon to allow us to reconfigure ourselves into new sorts of beings (cyborgs, perhaps) to break out of the very categories that capitalism tries to sort us into? Have computers fundamentally altered what it means to be human? Is the computer (and the Internet) simply something that has become so big and so widespread that the best we can hope for is to increase our knowledge of it so that we can perform sabotage strikes while playing in the dark corners? Are computers the “master’s tools”?
Considering that computer technologies were amongst those that the Neo-Luddites called to be dismantled, it seems pretty clear where they came down on this question. Yet contemporary discussions on the left around computers, a discussion in which Breaking Things at Work is certainly making an intervention, is quite a bit more divided as to what is to be done with and about computers. At several junctures in his book, Mueller notes that attitudes of technological optimism are starting to break down, yet if you survey the books dealing with technology published by the left-wing publisher Verso Books (which is the publisher of Breaking Things at Work) it is clear that a hopeful attitude towards technology is still present in much of the left. Certainly, there are arguments about the way that tech companies are screwing things up, commentary on the environmental costs of the hunger for high-tech gadgets, and paeans for how the Internet could be different—but it often feels that leftist commentaries blast Silicon Valley for what it has done to computers and the Internet so that the readers of such books can continue believing that the problems with computers and the Internet is what capitalism has done to them rather than suggest that these are capitalist tools through and through.
Is the problem that the train we are on is taking us somewhere we don’t want to go, so we need to slow down so that we can switch tracks? Or is the problem the train itself and we need to hit the emergency brake so that we can get off? To those who have grown accustomed to the comforts of being on board the train, the idea of getting off of it might be a scary thought, it might feel preferable to fight for a more equitable distribution of resources aboard the train, or to fight to seize control of the engine car. Besides, the idea of actually getting off the train seems like little more than a fantasy—it will be hard enough just to get it to reduce its speed. Yet the question remains as to whether the problem is the direction we’re going in, or if the problem is the direction we’re going in and the technology that is taking us in that direction.
Here it is essential to return to an important fact about the historic Luddites: they were waging their campaign against the introduction of machinery in the moment of those machines’ newness. The machines they attacked had not yet become common, and the moment of negotiation as to what these machines would mean and how they would be deployed was still in flux. When technologies are new they provide a fertile space for resistance, in their moment of freshness they have not yet become taken for granted, previous lifeways have not been forgotten, the skills that were necessary prior to the introduction of the new machine remain vital, and the broader society has not become pleasantly accustomed to their share of machine generated plenitude. Unfortunately, once a technology has become fully incorporated into a workplace (or a society) resistance becomes more and more challenging. While Mueller evocatively captures the long history of workers resisting the introduction of new technologies, these cases show a consistent tendency for this resistance to take place most strongly at the point of the new technology’s introduction. The major challenge becomes what to do when the technology has ceased being new, and when the reliance on that technology has become so total that it becomes almost impossible to imagine turning it off.
After all, it’s easy to say that “computers are the problem” but at this point it’s easier to imagine the end of capitalism than it is to imagine the end of computers. And besides, many of those who would be quite happy to see capitalism come to an end quite like their computerized doodads and would be distressed if they couldn’t scroll social media on the subway, stream music, go shopping at 2 a.m., play video games, have video calls with distant family, or write overly lengthy book reviews and then post them online. One of the major challenges for technological criticism today is the simple fact that the critics are also reliant on these gadgets, and many of the critics quite like some things about some of those gadgets. In this technological climate, where the idea of truly banishing certain technologies seems fantastical, feelings of dissatisfaction often wind up getting channeled in the direction of appeals to personal responsibility. As though an individual deciding that they will abstain from going on social media on the weekend will somehow be a sufficient response to social media eating the world. This is the way in which a massive social problem winds up being reduced to telling people that they really just need to turn off notifications on their phones.
What makes Breaking Things at Work, and its definition of Luddism, vital is the way in which Mueller eschews such appeals to minor lifestyle tweaks. As Mueller makes clear the significance of the Luddites is not that they broke machines, but that they saw machines as a site of political struggle, and the thing we need to learn from them today is that machinery still must be a site of political struggle. Turning off notifications, following people with different politics, trying to spend a day a week offline—while these actions can be useful on an individual level, they are not a sufficient response to the ways that technology challenges us today. In a moment wherein so many of the proclamations from Silicon Valley are treated as though they are inevitable, Luddism functions as a powerful retort and as a useful reminder that the people most invested in the belief that you cannot resist capitalist technologies are the people who are most terrified that people might resist those technologies.
In one of the most infamous of the surviving Luddite letters, “the General of the Army of Redressers,” Ned Ludd writes: “We will never lay down our Arms. The House of Commons passes an Act to put down all Machinery hurtful to Commonality, and repeal that to hang Frame Breakers. But We. We petition no more that won’t do fighting must.” These were militant words from a militant movement, but the idea that there is such a thing as “Machinery hurtful to Commonality” and that such machinery needs to be opposed remains clear two hundred years later.
There is a specter haunting technological society—the specter of Luddism. And as Mueller makes clear in Breaking Things at Work that specter is becoming more corporeal by the moment.
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Zachary Loeb earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA from the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU, and is currently a PhD candidate in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. Loeb works at the intersection of the history of technology and disaster studies, and his research focusses on the ways that complex technological systems amplify risk, as well as the history of technological doom-saying. He is working on a dissertation on Y2K. Loeb writes at the blog Librarianshipwreck, and is a frequent contributor to The b2o Review Digital Studies section.
Victor Frankenstein, the titular character and “Modern Prometheus” of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, drawing on his biochemical studies at the University of Ingolstadt, creates life by reanimating the dead. While the gothic elements of Shelley’s narrative ensure its place, or those of its twentieth-century film adaptations, in the pantheons of popular horror, it is also arguably the first instance of science fiction, used by its young author to interrogate the Prometheanism that animated the intellectual culture of her day.
Prometheus—the titan who steals fire from the Olympian gods and for humankind, suffering imprisonment and torture at the hands of Zeus as a result —was an emblem for both socio-political emancipation and techno-scientific mastery during the European enlightenment. These two overlapping, yet distinct, models of progress are nonetheless confused, one with the other, then and now, with often disastrous results, as Shelley dramatizes over the course of her novel.
Frankenstein embarks on his experiment to demonstrate that “life and death” are merely “ideal bounds” that can be surpassed, to conquer death and “pour a torrent of light into our dark world.” Frankenstein’s motives are not entirely beneficent, as we can see in the lines that follow:
A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve their’s. Pursuing these reflections, I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption. (Shelley 1818, 80-81)
The will to Promethean mastery, over nature, merges here with a will to power over other humanoid, if not entirely human, beings. Frankenstein abandons his creation, with disastrous results for the creature, his family, and himself. Over the course of the two centuries since its publication, “The Modern Prometheus” has been read, too simply, as a cautionary tale regarding the pitfalls of techno-scientific hubris, invoked in regard to the atomic bomb or genetic engineering, for example, which it is in part.
If we survey the history of the twentieth century, this caution is understandable. Even in the twenty-first century, a new Frankensteinism has taken hold among the digital overlords of Silicon Valley. Techno-capitalists from Elon Musk to Peter Thiel to Ray Kurzweil and their transhumanist fellow travelers now literally pursue immortality and divinity, strive to build indestructible bodies or merge with their supercomputers; preferably on their own high-tech floating island, or perhaps off-world, as the earth and its masses burn in a climate catastrophe entirely due to the depredations of industrial capitalism and its growth imperative.
This last point is significant, as it represents the most recent example of the way progress-as-emancipation—social and political freedom and equality for all, including non-human nature—is distinct from and often at odds with progress as technological development: a distinction that many of today’s techno-utopians embrace under the rubric of a “dark enlightenment,” in a seemingly deliberate echo of Victor Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s great theme is the substantive distinction of these two models of progress and enlightenment, which are intertwined for historical and ideological reasons: a tragic marriage. It is no coincidence that she chose to explore this problem in a tale of tortured familial relationships, which includes the fantasy of male birth alongside immortality. It was both a personal and family matter for her, as the daughter of radical enlightenment intellectuals Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. While her mother died a few days after Mary’s birth, she was raised according to strict radical enlightenment principles, by her father, who in his 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness argues against the state, private property, and marriage; a text in which Godwin also predicts a future when human beings, perfected through the force of reason, would achieve a sexless, sleepless, god-like immortality, in what is a 1790s-era version of the technological Singularity. Godwin’s daughter drew on this vision in crafting her own Victor Frankenstein.
While Godwin would later modify these early proto-futurist views—in the wake of his wife’s death and a debate with the Reverend Thomas Malthus—even as he maintained his radical political commitments, his early work demonstrates the extent to which radical enlightenment thinking was entwined, from the very start, with “dark enlightenment” in today’s parlance, ranging from accelerationism to singulatarianism and ecomodernism.[1] His subsequent revision of his earlier views offers us an early example of how we might separate an emancipatory social and political program from those Promethean dreams of technological mastery used by capitalist and state socialist ideologues to justify development at any cost. In early Godwinism we find one prototype for today’s Promethean techno-utopianism. His subsequent debate with Thomas Malthus and concomitant retreat from his own earlier futurist Prometheanism illuminates how we might combine radical, or even utopian, political commitments with an awareness of biophysical limits in our own moment of ecological collapse.
Godwin defines the “justice” that animates his 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice as that “which benefits the whole, because individuals are parts of the whole. Therefore to do it is just, and to forbear it is unjust. If justice have any meaning, it is just that I should contribute every thing in my power to the benefit of the whole” (Godwin 1793, 52). Godwin illustrates his definition with a hypothetical scenario that provoked accusations of heartlessness among both conservative detractors and radical allies at the time. Godwin asks us to imagine a fire striking the palace of François Fénelon, the progressive archbishop of Cambray, author of an influential attack on absolute monarchy:
In the same manner the illustrious archbishop of Cambray was of more worth than his chambermaid, and there are few of us that would hesitate to pronounce, if his palace were in flames, and the life of only one of them could be preserved, which of the two ought to be preferred. But there is another ground of preference, beside the private consideration of one of them being farther removed from the state of a mere animal. We are not connected with one or two percipient beings, but with a society, a nation, and in some sense with the whole family of mankind. Of consequence that life ought to be preferred which will be most conducive to the general good. In saving the life of Fénelon, suppose at the moment when he was conceiving the project of his immortal Telemachus, I should be promoting the benefit of thousands, who have been cured by the perusal of it of some error, vice and consequent unhappiness. Nay, my benefit would extend farther than this, for every individual thus cured has become a better member of society, and has contributed in his turn to the happiness, the information and improvement of others. (Godwin 1793, 55)
This passage illustrates the consequentialist perfectibilism that distinguished the philosopher’s theories from those of his better-known contemporaries, such as Thomas Paine, with his theory of natural right and social contract, or even utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, to whom Godwin is sometimes compared. In the words of Mark Philp, “only by improving people’s understanding can they become more fully virtuous, and only as they become more fully virtuous will the highest and greatest pleasures be realized in society” (Philp 1986, 84). In other words, the unfortunate chambermaid must be sacrificed if that is what it takes to save the philosophe whose written output will benefit multitudes by sharpening their rational capacities, congruent with the triumph of reason, virtue, and human emancipation.
Godwin goes on to make this line of reasoning clear:
Supposing I had been myself the chambermaid, I ought to have chosen to die, rather than that Fénelon should have died. The life of Fénelon was really preferable to that of the chambermaid. But understanding is the faculty that perceives the truth of this and similar propositions; and justice is the principle that regulates my conduct accordingly. It would have been just in the chambermaid to have preferred the archbishop to herself. To have done otherwise would have been a breach of justice. Supposing the chambermaid had been my wife, my mother or my benefactor. This would not alter the truth of the proposition. The life of Fénelon would still be more valuable than that of the chambermaid; and justice, pure, unadulterated justice, would still have preferred that which was most valuable. Justice would have taught me to save the life of Fénelon at the expence of the other. What magic is there in the pronoun “my,” to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth? (Godwin 1793, 55)
Godwin amends the puritan rigor of these positions in subsequent editions of his work, as he came to recognize the value of affective bonds and personal attachments. But here in the first edition of Political Justice we see a pristine expression of his rationalist radicalism, for which the good of the whole necessitates the sacrifice of a chambermaid, a mother, and one’s own self to Reason, which Godwin equates with the greatest good.
The early Godwin here exemplifies a central antinomy of the European enlightenment, as he strives to yoke an inadvertently inhuman plan for human perfection and mastery to an emancipatory vision of egalitarian social relations. Godwin pushes the Enlightenment-era deification of ratiocination to a visionary extreme in presenting very real inequities as so many cases of benighted judgment waiting for a personified, yet curiously disembodied, Reason’s correction in the fullness of time and entirely by way of debate. It was this aspect of Godwin’s project that inspired John Thelwall, the radical writer and public speaker, to declare that while Godwin recommends “the most extensive plan of freedom and innovation ever discussed by a writer in English,” he “reprobate {s} every measure from which even the most moderate reform can be rationally expected” (Thelwall 2008, 122). E.P. Thompson would later echo this verdict in his Poverty of Theory, when he compared the vogue for structuralist—or Althussererian—Marxism among certain segments of the 1970s-era New Left to Godwinism, which he described as another “moment of intellectual extremism, divorced from correlative action or actual social commitment” (Thompson 1978, 244).
Godwin blends a necessitarian theory of environmental influence, a belief in the perfectibility of the human race, a perfectionist version of the utilitarian calculus, and a quasi-idealist model of objective reason into an incongruous and extravagantly speculative rationalist metaphysics. The Godwinian system, in its first iteration at least, resembles Kantian and post-Kantian German idealism as much as it does the systems of Locke, Hume, and Helvetius, Godwin’s acknowledged sources. So, according to Godwin’s syllogistic precepts, it is only through the exercise of private judgment and a process of rational debate—“the clash of mind with mind”—that Truth will emerge, and with Truth, Political Justice; here is a model of enlightenment that resonates with Kant’s roughly contemporaneous ideal-type of progress and Jürgen Habermas’s twentieth century reconstruction of that ideal in the form of a “liberal-bourgeois public sphere.” It is for this reason, and in spite of his conflicted sympathies with French revolutionaries and British radicals alike, that the philosopher rejects both violent revolution and the kind of mass political action exemplified by Thelwall and the London Corresponding Society, hence Thelwall’s and Thompson’s damning judgments. Rational persuasion is the only feasible way of effecting the wholesale revolutionary transformation of “things as they are” for Godwin.
But this precise reconstruction of Godwin’s philosophical and political system does not capture the striking novelty of Godwin’s project. In the example above, we find a supplementary argument of sorts running underneath the consequentialist perfectibilism. Although we can certainly read in Godwin’s disparagement and hypothetical sacrifice of both a chambermaid and his own mother a historically typical, if unconscious, example of the class prejudice and misogyny the radical philosopher otherwise attacks at length in this same treatise, I would instead call attention to the implicit metaphor of embodiment and natality that unites maid, mother, and Godwin’s own unperfected self. The chambermaid is one step closer to the “mere animal” from which Fénelon, or his significantly disembodied work, offers an escape. If the chambermaid were rational in the Godwinian sense, she would easily offer herself as sacrifice to Fénelon and the Reason that finds a fitting emblem in the flames that consume our hypothetical building. While Godwin underlines the disinterested character of this choice in next substituting himself for the chambermaid, his willingness to hypothetically sacrifice his mother points to his rigid rejection of personal attachments and emotional ties. Godwin would substantially modify this viewpoint a few years later in the wake of his relationship with first feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
The figure of the mother—whose embodied life Godwin would consign to the fire for the sake of Fénelon’s future intellectual output and its refining effects on humanity—is an overdetermined symbol that unites affective ties with the irrational fact of our bodily and sexual life: all of which must and will be mastered through a Promethean process of ratiocination indistinguishable from justice and reason. If one function of metaphor, according to Hans Blumenberg, is to provide the seedbed for conceptual thought, Godwin translates these subtexts into an explicit vision of a totally rational and rationalized future in the final, speculative, chapter of Political Justice.[2] It is in this chapter, as we shall see below, that Godwin responds to those critics who argued that population growth and material scarcity made perfectibilism impossible with a vision of humans made superhuman through reason.
Here is the characteristically Godwinian combination of “striking insight” and “complete wackiness,” which emerges from the “science fictional quality of his imagination” in the words of Jenny Davidson.[3] Godwin moves from a prescient critique of oppressive human institutional arrangements, motivated by the radical desire for a substantively just and free form of social organization under which all human beings can realize their capacities, to a rationalist metaphysics that enshrines Reason as a theological entity that realizes itself through a teleological human history. Reason reaches its apotheosis at that point when human beings become superhuman, transcending contingent and creaturely qualities, such as sexual desire, physical reproduction, and death, eviscerated like so many animal bodies thrown into a great fire.
We can see in Godwin’s early rationalist radicalism a significant antinomy. Godwin oscillates between a radical enlightenment critique that uses ratiocination to expose unjust institutional arrangements—from marriage to private property and the state—and a positive, even theological, version of Reason, for which creaturely limitations and human needs are not only secondary considerations, but primary obstacles to be surpassed on the way to a rationalist super-humanity that resembles nothing so much as a supercomputer, avant la lettre.
Many critics of the European Enlightenment—from an older Godwin and his younger romantic contemporaries through twentieth-century feminist, post-colonial, and ecological critics—have underlined the connection between these Promethean metaphysics, ostensibly in the service of human liberation, and various projects of domination. Western Marxists, like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1947) overlap with later feminist critics of the scientific revolution, such as Carolyn Merchant (1980), in naming instrumental rationality as the problem. As opposed to an ends-oriented version of reason—the ends being emancipation or human flourishing— rationalism as technical means for dominating the natural world, or managing populations, or disciplining labor, became the dominant model of rationality during and after the European enlightenment in keeping with the ideological requirements of a nascent capitalism and colonialism. But in the case of the early Godwin and other Prometheans, we can see a substantive version of reason, reified as an end-in-itself, which overlaps with the critical philosophy of Hegel, the philosophical foundation of Marxism and the Frankfurt School variant on display in the work of Adorno and Horkheimer.[4] The problem with Prometheanism is that its proponents’ ideal-type of technological rationality is not instrumental enough: rather than a reason or technology subordinate to human flourishing and collective human agency, the proponents of Prometheus subordinate collective human (and creaturely) ends to a vision of reason indistinguishable from a fantasy of an autonomous technology with its own imperatives.
Langdon Winner, in analyzing autonomous technology as idea and ideology in twentieth-century industrial capitalist (and state socialist) societies, underlines this reversal of means and ends or what he calls “reverse adaptation”: “The adjustment of human ends to match the character of available means. We have already seen arguments to the effect that persons adapt themselves to the order, discipline, and pace of the organizations in which they work. But even more significant is the state of affairs in which people come to accept the norms and standards of technical processes as central to their lives as a whole” (Winner 1977, 229). Winner’s critique of “rationality in technological thinking” is made even more striking when we consider that the early Godwin’s Promethean force of reason, as evinced in by the final chapter of the 1793 Political Justice—in contradistinction to the ethical and political rationalism that is also present in the text—anticipates twentieth and twenty-first century techno-utopianism. For Winner, “if one takes rationality to mean the accommodation of means to ends, then surely reverse-adapted systems represent the most flagrant violation of rationality” (Winner 1977, 229).
This version of rationality, still inchoate in the eighteenth-century speculations of Godwin, takes mega-technological systems as models, rather than tools, for human beings, as Günther Anders argues—against those who depict anti-Prometheans as bio-conservative defenders of things as they are just because they are that way. The problem with Prometheanism does not reside in its adherents’ endorsement of technological possibilities as such so much as their embrace of the “machine as measure” of individual and collective human development (Anders 2016). Anders converges with Adorno and Horkheimer, his Marxist contemporaries, for whom this “machine” is a mystified metonym for irrational capitalist imperatives.
Rationalist humanism becomes technological inhumanism under the sign of Prometheus, which, according to present day “accelerationism” enthusiast Ray Brassier, must recognize “the disturbing consequences of our technological ingenuity” and extol “the fact that progress is savage and violent” (Brassier 2013). Brassier, operating from a radically different, avowedly nihilist, set of presuppositions than William Godwin, nonetheless recalls the 1793 Political Justice in once again defining rationalism as a reinvigorated Promethean “project of re-engineering ourselves and our world on a more rational basis.” Accelerationists strive to revive both rationalist radicalism—with the omniscient algorithm standing in for the perfectibilists’ reason—and the Promethean imperative to reengineer society and the natural world, because or in spite of the ongoing global climate change catastrophe. Rather than the great driver of an ecologically catastrophic growth, self-described “left” accelerationists Nick Williams and Alex Srnicek argue that capitalism must be dismantled because it “cannot be identified as the agent of true acceleration,” or #accelerate (Williams and Srnicek 2013, 486-7): a shorthand for their attempt to reboot a version of progress that arguably finds its first apotheosis in the 1790s. Brassier’s defense of Prometheanism takes the form of an extended reply to various critics, whose emphasis on limits and equilibrium, the given and the made, he rejects as in thrall to religious, and specifically Christian, notions. Brassier, who outlines his rationalism as systematic method or technique without presupposition or limits—along the lines of “God is dead, anything is possible”—seems unaware of actual material limitations and the theological, specifically Gnostic, origins of a very old human deification fantasy, the Enlightenment-era secularization of which was arguably first recognized by Godwin’s daughter in her Frankenstein (Shelley 1818).
The Godwin of 1793 in this way also and more dramatically looks forward to our own transhumanist devotees of the coming technological singularity, who claim that human beings will soon merge with immensely powerful and intelligent supercomputers, becoming something else entirely in the process, hence “transhumanism.” According to prominent Silicon Valley “singulatarian” Ray Kurzweil, “The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates. Our mortality will be in our own hands. We will be able to live as long as we want (a subtly different statement from saying we will live forever)” (Kurzweil 2006, 25).
Kurzweil explicitly frames this transformation as the inevitable culmination of a mechanically teleological movement; and, like many futurists and their eighteenth-century perfectibilist forerunners, human perfection necessitates the supersession of the human. Kurzweil illustrates the paradoxical character of a Promethean futurism that, in seeking both human perfection and mastery, seeks to dispense with the human altogether: “The Singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality. If you wonder what will remain unequivocally human in such a world, it’s simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations” (25).
Even more than the accelerationists, Kurzweil’s Singulatarianism illustrates the “hubristic humility” that defines twentieth- and twenty-first century Prometheanism, according to Anders. Writing in the wake of the atomic bomb, the cybernetic revolution, and the mass-produced affluence exemplified by the post-war United States, Anders recognized how certain self-described rationalist techno-utopians combined a hubristic faith in technological achievement with a “Promethean shame” before these same technological creations. This shame arises from the perceived gap between human beings and their technological products; how, unlike our machines, we are “pre-given,” saddled with contingent bodies we neither choose nor design, bodies that are fragile, needy, and mortal. The mechanical reproducibility of the technological system or industrial artifact represents a virtual immortality that necessarily eludes unique and perishable human beings, according to Anders. Here Anders seemingly develops the earlier work of Walter Benjamin, his cousin, on aura and mechanical reproduction—but in a very different direction, as Anders writes: “in contrast to the light bulb or the vinyl record, none of us has the opportunity to outlive himself or herself in a new copy. In short: we must continue to live our lifetimes in obsolete singularity and uniqueness. For those who recognize the machine-world as exemplary, this is a flaw and as such a reason for shame.”[5]
Although we can situate the work of Godwin at the intersection of various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses, including perfectibilist rationalism, civic republicanism, and Sandemanian Calvinism, on the one hand, or anarchism and romanticism, on the other, I will argue here that in juxtaposing Godwinism with present-days analogs like the transhumanism or accelerationism briefly described above, we can see the extent to which older—late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century—utopian forms are returning, lending some credence to Alain Badiou’s claim that
We are much closer to the 19th century than to the last century. In the dialectical division of history we have, sometimes, to move ahead of time. Just like maybe around 1840, we are now confronted with an absolutely cynical capitalism, more and more inspired by the ideas that only work backwards: poor are justly poor, the Africans are underdeveloped, and that the future with no discernable limit belongs to the civilized bourgeoisie of the Western world. (Badiou 2008)
We can also see in recent conflicts between accelerationists and certain partisans of radical ecology the return of another seeming antinomy—one which pits cornucopian futurists against Malthusians, or at least those who emphasize the material limits to growth and how human beings might reconcile ourselves to those limits— that has its origin point in the Reverend Thomas Malthus’s anonymously published An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the Future Improvement of Society with remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (1798). Malthus’s demographic response to Godwinism led in turn to a long running debate and the rise of an ostensibly empirical political economy that took material scarcity as its starting point. Yet, if we examine Malthus’s initial response, alongside the Political Justice of 1793, we can observe several shared assumptions and lines of continuity that unite these seemingly opposed perspectives, as each of these thinkers delineates a recognizably bio-political project, for human improvement and population management, in left and right variants. Each of these variants obscures the social determinants of revolutionary movements and technological progress. Finally, it was as much Godwin’s debate with Malthus as the philosopher’s tumultuous and tragic relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft that precipitated a shift in his perspective regarding the value of emotional bonds, personal connections, and material limits: seemingly disparate concerns linked in Godwin’s imagination through the sign of the body. The body also functions as metonym for that same natural world, the limits of which Malthus brandished in order to discredit the utopian aspirations that drove the revolutionary upheavals of the 1790s; Godwin later sought to reconcile his utopianism with these limits.[6] This intellectual reconciliation—which was very much in line with the English romantics’ own version of a more benign natural world threatened by incipient industrialism, as opposed to Malthus’s brutally utilitarian nature—was a response to Malthus and the early Godwin’s own early Prometheanism, best exemplified in the final section of 1793 Political Justice, to which we will turn below.
Two generations of Romantics—from Wordsworth and Coleridge through De Quincey, Hazlitt, and Shelley—sought to counter Malthus’s version of the natural world as resource stock and constraint with a holistic and dynamic model of nature, under which natural limits and possibilities are not inconsistent with human aspirations and utopian hopes. Malthus offered the Romantics “a malign muse,” in the words of his biographer Robert Mayhew, who writes of two exemplary Romantic figures from this period: “ if nature is made of antipathies, Blake and Hegel in their different ways suggest that such binaries can be productive of a dialectic advance in our reasoning” as “we look for ways to respect nature and to use it with a population of 7 billion” (Mayhew 2014, 86).
One irony of intellectual and political history is how often our new Prometheans—transhumanists, singulatarians, accelerationists, and others—lump both narrowly Malthusian and more expansive “Romantic” ecologies under the rubric of Malthusianism, which is nowadays more slur than accurate description of Malthus’s project. Malthus wielded the threat of natural scarcity or “the Principle of Population” as an ideological tool against reform, revolution, or “the Future Improvement of Society,” as evinced in the very title of his long essay. In the words of Kerryn Higgs, to follow Malthus involves “several key elements” above a concern with overpopulation, such as “a resistance to notions of social improvement and social welfare, punitive policies for the poor, a tendency to blame the poor for their own plight, and recourse to speculative theorizing in the service of an essentially politically argument” (Higgs 2014, 43). It is among eugenicists, social Darwinists, but also today’s cornucopian detractors of Malthusianism, that we find Malthus’s heirs, if we attend to his and now their instrumental view of the natural world as factor in capitalist economic calculation—as exemplified by the rhetoric of “ecosystem services” and “decoupling”—in addition to a shared faith in material growth, to which Malthus was not opposed. While self-declared Malthusians, like Paul and Anne Ehrlich, in their misplaced focus on overpopulation, often in the developing world, conveniently avoid any discussion of consumption in the developed world, let alone the unsustainable growth imperative built into capitalism itself. In fact, for Malthus and his epigones, necessity—growth outstripping available resources—functions as spur for technological innovation, mirroring, in negative form, the teleological trajectory of the early Godwin—a telling convergence I will explore at length in the latter part of this essay.
“Malthusianism” is a shorthand used by orthodox economists and apologists for capitalist growth to dismiss ecological concerns. Marxists and other radicals—heirs to Godwin’s project, in ways good and bad, despite their protestations of materialism—too often share this investment in growth and techno-science as an end in itself. While John Bellamy Foster and others have made a persuasive case for Marx’s ecology—to be found in his work on nineteenth-century soil exhaustion, inspired by Liebig, and the town/country rift under capitalism—we can also find a broadly Promethean rejection of anything resembling a discourse of natural limits within various orthodox Marxisms, beginning in the later nineteenth century. Yet to recognize both the possibilities and limits of our situation—which must include the biophysical conditions of possibility for capitalist accumulation and any program that aims to supplant it— is, for me, the foundation for any radical and materialist approach to the world and politics, against Malthus and the young, futurist Godwin, to whom we now move.
II
Godwin translates this metaphorical substrate of his Fénelon thought experiment into an explicitly conceptual and argumentative form. He pushes the logic of eighteenth-century perfectibilism to a spectacular, speculative, and science-fictional extreme in Chapter 12 of Political Justice’s final volume on “property.” It is in this chapter that the philosopher outlines a future utopia on the far side of rational perfection. Beginning with the remark, attributed to Benjamin Franklin by Richard Price, that “mind will one day become omnipotent over matter,” Godwin offers us a series of methodical speculations as to how this might literally come to pass. He begins with the individual mind’s power to either exacerbate or alleviate illness or the effects of age, in order to illustrate his central contention: that we can overcome apparently hard and fast physical limits and subject ostensibly involuntary physiological processes to the dictates of our rational will. It is on this basis that Godwin concludes: “if we have in any respect a little power now, and if mind be essentially progressive…that power may…and inevitably will, extend beyond any bounds we are able to ascribe to it” (Godwin 1793, 455).
Godwin marries magical voluntarism on the ontogenetic level to the teleological arc of Reason on the phylogenetic level, all of which culminates in perhaps the first—Godwinian—articulation of the singularity: “The men who therefore exist when the earth shall refuse itself to a more extended population will cease to propagate, for they will no longer have any motive, either of error or duty, to induce them. In addition to this they will perhaps be immortal. The whole will be a people of men, and not of children. Generation will not succeed generation, nor truth have in a certain degree to recommence at the end of every thirty years. There will be no war, no crimes, no administration of justice as it is called, and no government” (Godwin 1793, 458).
James Preu (1959) long ago established Godwin’s peculiar intellectual debt to Jonathan Swift, and we can discern some resemblance between Godwin’s future race of hyper-rational, sexless immortals and the Houyhnhnms; as with Godwin’s other misprisions of Swift, the differences are as telling as are the similarities. Godwin transforms Swift’s ambiguous, arguably dystopian and misanthropic, depiction of equine ultra-rationalists, and their animalistic Yahoo humanoid stock, into an unequivocally utopian sketch of future possibility. For Godwin, it is our Yahoo-like “animal nature” that must be subdued or even exterminated, as Gulliver’s Houynnhnm master at one point suggests in a coolly calculating way that begs comparison to Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” even as both texts look forward to the utilitarian discourse of population control that finds its apotheosis in Malthus’s 1798 response to Godwin. Godwin would later embrace some version of heritable characteristics, or at least innate human inclinations, but despite his revisions of his views through subsequent editions of Political Justice and beyond, he is very still much the Helvetian environmentalist in the 1793 disquisition. He was therefore free of, or even at odds with, a proto-eugenic eighteenth-century discourse of breeding—after Jenny Davidson’s (2008) formulation—that overlapped with other variants of perfectibilism.
But as Davidson and others note, Godwin shares with his antagonist Malthus a Swiftian aversion to sex, which we can also see in the Godwinian critique of marriage and the family. This critique begins with a still-radical indictment of marriage as a proprietary relationship under which men exercise “the most odious of monopolies over women” (Godwin 1793, 447). Godwin predicts that marriage, and the patriarchal family it safeguards, will be abolished alongside other modes of unequal property. But, rather than inaugurating a regime of free love and license, as conservative critics of Godwinism contended at the time, the philosopher predicts that this “state of equal property would destroy the relish for luxury, would decrease our inordinate appetites of every kind, and lead us universally to prefer the pleasures of intelligence to the pleasures of the sense” (Godwin 1793, 447). Rather than simply ascribing this sentiment to a residual Calvinism on Godwin’s part, this programmatic elimination of sexual desire is of a piece with “killing the Yahoo,” consigning the maid-servant’s, his mother’s, his own body to the fires for Fénelon and a perfectly rational future state, i.e., the biopolitical rationalization of human bodies for Promethean reason and Promethean shame. The early Godwin here again suggests our own transhumanist devotees who, on the one hand, embrace the sexual possibilities supposedly afforded by AI while they manifest a “complete disgust with actual human bodies,” exemplifying Anders’s Promethean shame according to Michael Hauskeller (2014). From the messy body to virtual bodies, from the uncertainties and coercions of cooperation to self-sex, finally from sex to orgasmic cognition, transhumanists—in an echo of the young Godwin, who predicted sexual intercourse would give way to rational intercourse with the triumph of Reason—want to “make the pleasures of mind as intense and orgiastic as … certain bodily pleasures as they hope for a new and improved rational intercourse with a new and improved, virtual body, in the future” (Hauskeller, 2014).
In this speculative, coda to his visionary political treatise, Godwin’s predictive sketch of human rationalization as transformation, from Yahoo to Houyhnhnm and/or post-human, represents a disciplinary program in Michel Foucault’s sense: “a technique” that “centers on the body, produces individualizing effects, and manipulates the body as a source of forces that have to be rendered both useful and docile” (Foucault 2003, 249).[7] We can trace the intersection between perfectibilist, even transhumanist, dreams and disciplinary program in Godwin’s comments regarding the elimination of sleep, an apparent prerequisite for overcoming death, which he describes as “one of the most conspicuous infirmities of the human frame, specifically “because it is…not a suspension of thought, but an irregular and distempered state of the faculty” (456).
Dreams, or the unregulated and irrational affective processes they embody, provoke a panicked response on the part of Godwin at this point in the text. Godwin’s response accords with the consistent rejection of sensibility and sentimental attachments of all kinds—seen throughout the 1793 PJ—from romantic love to familial bonds. We can find in Godwin’s account of sleep and his plan for its elimination through an exertion of rational will and attention—something like an internal monitor in the mold of a Benthamite watchman presiding over a 24/7 panoptic mind—the exertion of an internalized disciplinary power indistinguishable from our new, wholly rational and rationalized, subject’s private judgment operating in a system without external authority, government, or disciplinary power. And it is no coincidence that Godwin’s proposed subjugation of sleep immediately follows a curiously contemporary passage: “If we can have three hundred and twenty successive ideas in a second of time, why should it be supposed that we should not hereafter arrive at the skill of carrying on a great number of contemporaneous processes without disorder” (456).
It should be noted again here that Godwin’s futurist idyll, which includes sexless immortals engaged in purely rational intercourse, specifically responds to earlier eighteenth-century arguments regarding human population and the resource constraints that limit population growth and, by extension, the wide abundance promised in various perfectibilist plans for the future. This new focus on demography and the management of populations during the latter half of the eighteenth century in the Euro-American world is a second technology of power, for Foucault, that “centers not upon the body but upon life: a technology that brings together the mass effects characteristic of a population,” in order to “to establish a sort of homeostasis, not by training individuals, not by training individuals, but by achieving an overall equilibrium that protects the security of the whole from internal dangers” (Foucault 2003, 249). This is the biopolitical mode of governance—the regulation of the masses’ bio-social processes—that characterizes the modern epoch for Foucault and his followers.
Yet, while Foucault admits that both technologies—disciplinary and biopolitical—are “technologies of the body,” he nonetheless counterpoises the “individualizing” to the demographic technique. But, as we can see in the 1793 PJ, in which Godwin proffers a largely disciplinary program as solution to the original bio-political problem—a solution that would inspire Thomas Malthus’s classic formulation of the population problem a few years later, as we shall explore below—these two technologies were intertwined from the start. The subsequent history of futurism in the west marries various disciplinary programs, powered by Promethean shame and its fantasies of becoming “man-machine,” to narrowly bio-political campaigns. These campaigns range from the exterminationist eugenicism of the twentieth century interwar period to more recent techno-survivalist responses to the ecological crisis on the part of Silicon Valley’s Singulatarian elites, some of whom look forward to immortality on Mars while the Earth and its masses burn.[8]
Godwin further highlights these futurist hopes in the second revision of Political Justice (1798), in which he underlines the central role of mechanical invention—in keeping with the general principle enshrined at the first volume of the treatise under the title, “Human Inventions Capable of Perpetual Improvement—making the technological prostheses implicit in these early speculations explicit. In predicting an ever-accelerating multiplication of cognitive processes—assuming these processes are delinked from disorder, human or Yahoo—Godwin anticipates both the discourse of cybernetics and its more recent accelerationist successors, for whom the dream of perfectibility—and Godwin’s sexless, sleepless rationalist immortals—can only be achieved through AI and the machinic supersession of the human Yahoo.
In fact, our new futurists frequently invoke the methodologically dubious Moore’s Law in defense of their claims for acceleration and its inevitability. Moore’s Law—named after Intel founder Gordon Moore, who, in 1965, predicted that the number of transistors, with their processing power, in an integrated circuit increases exponentially every two years or so—revives Godwin’s prophecy in a cybernetic register. It also suggests Thomas Malthus’s “iron” law of population. Malthus argued that “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio,” while “subsistence”—by which he denotes agricultural yield—increases only in arithmetical ratio. Malthus rendered this dubious “law” as a mathematical formula, thereby making it indisputable, although he makes his motivations clear when he writes, explicitly in response to Godwin’s speculations in the last chapter of the 1793 Political Justice, that his law “is decisive against the possible existence of a society, all of the members of which should live in ease, happiness, and comparative leisure; and feel no anxiety about providing the means of subsistence for themselves and families” (Malthus 1798, 16-17; see also Engels 1845).
Godwinism was for Malthus a synecdoche for both 1790s radicalism and radical egalitarianism generally, while the first Essay on Population is arguably the late, “proto-scientific,” entry in the paper war between English radicals and counterrevolutionary antijacobins—initiated by Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and to which Godwin’s treatise was one among many responses—that defined literary and political debate in the wake of the French Revolution. Rather than simply arguing for biophysical limits, Malthus reveals his ideological hand in his discussion of the poor and the Poor Laws—the parish-based system of charity established in late medieval England to alleviate extreme distress among the poorest classes—against which he railed in the several editions of the Essay. Whereas in the past, population was maintained through “positive” checks, such as pestilence, famine, or warfare, for Malthus, the growth of civilization introduced “preventive” checks, including chastity, restraint within marriage, or even the conscious decision to delay or forego marriage and reproduction due to the “foresight of the difficulties attending the rearing of a family,” often prompted by “the actual distresses of some of the lower classes, by which they are disabled from giving the proper food and attention to their children” (35).
Parson Malthus largely ascribes this decidedly Christian and specifically protestant capacity for “rational” self-restraint, to his own industrious middle class; and, insofar as the peasantry possessed this preventive urge, alongside a “spirit of independence,” it was undermined by the eighteenth-century British Poor Laws. Malthus provides the template for what are now standard issue conservative attacks on social provision in his successful attacks on the Poor Laws, which in providing a safety net eradicated restraint among the poor, leading them to marry, reproduce, and “increase reproduction without increasing the food for its support.” Malthus invokes the same absolute limit in his naturalistic rejection of Godwin’s (and others’) egalitarian radicalism, foreclosing any examination of the production distribution of surplus and scarcity in a class society. Even more than this, Malthus uses his natural laws to rationalize all of those institutional arrangements under threat during the French Revolutionary Period, from the existing division of property to traditional marriage arrangements, but in an ostensibly objective manner that distinguished his approach from Burke’s earlier encomia to a dying age of chivalry. It is arguably for this reason that the idea of natural limits, in general, is a suspect one among subsequent left-wing formations, for good and ill.
III
Malthus, who anonymously published his Essay on Population in 1798, proclaims at the outset that his “argument is “conclusive against the perfectibility of the mass of mankind” (Malthus 1798, 95). And if there were any doubt as to the identity of Malthus’s target we need only look to the work’s subtitle, of which Malthus explains in the book’s first sentence that “the following essay owes its origin to a conversation with a friend on the subject of Mr. Godwin’s essay on avarice and profusion, in his Enquirer.” The friend was Thomas’s father, Daniel Malthus, an admiring acquaintance of Godwin’s who nonetheless encouraged (and subsidized) his son’s writing on this topic. The parson dedicates six chapters (chapters 10-15) to a refutation of Godwinism, often larded with mockery of Godwin, against whose speculative rationalism Malthus counterpoises his own supposedly empirical method; the same method that allowed him to discover that “lower classes of people” should never be “sufficiently free from want and labour, to attain any high degree of intellectual improvement” (95). And although Malthus explicitly names The Enquirer—the 1797 collection of essays in which Godwin admits to changing his mind on a variety of positions, as Malthus acknowledges at one point—as the impetus for his Essay, the work primarily responds to the earlier Political Justice and its final chapter in particular, because Godwin’s futurist speculations (and their more ominous biopolitical subtexts) respond to an “Objection to This System From the Principle of Population,” in the words of the chapter subheading. Godwin replies to this hypothetical objection several years prior to Malthus’s critique, the originality of which was said at the time to consist in his break with eighteenth-century doxa regarding population. Despite their differences, Montesquieu, Hume, Franklin, and Price all agreed that a growing population is the indisputable marker of progress, and the primary sign of a successful nation, since “the more men in the state, the more it flourishes.” And while Johann Süssmilch, an early pioneer of statistical demography, argued for a fixed limit to the planetary carrying capacity in regard to human population, he also inferred that the planet could hold up to six times as many people than the total global population offered by Süssmilch at the time.
Only Robert Wallace, in his 1761 Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature, and Providence—which Marx and Engels would accuse Malthus of plagiarizing—argued that excessive population is an obstacle to human improvement. Wallace offers a prototype for the Godwin/Malthus debate in constructing an elaborate argument for a proto-communist utopian social arrangement, only to undermine his own argument via recourse to the limits of population growth. Godwin invokes Wallace by name, before adverting to Süssmilch and a far-flung future when human beings will have transcended the limits of finitude. Immortals won’t have to reproduce, a point Godwin makes even clearer in both the final edition of Political Justice (1798) and in his first response to the Essay on The Population—in an 1801 pamphlet entitled Thoughts Occasioned By The Perusal of Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon—in which he opts for a minimal population of perfected human beings living in a utopian society, rather than an ever- expanding human population.
While contemporary scholars still read the Godwin/Malthus Debate as a simple conflict between progressive optimism and conservative pessimism, we can still discern some peculiar commonalities between the early Godwin of the 1793 Political Justice and Malthus. Godwin’s speculations on human perfectibility represent a bio-perfectionist solution to the problems of population, sex, and embodiment generally—a Promethean program for overcoming Promethean shame—as I sketch above. Malthus rejects perfectibility along with the feasibility of physical immortality and pure rationality, adverting to humanity’s “compound nature,” a variation on original sin. In this vein, he also rejects Godwin’s prediction regarding “the extinction of the passion between the sexes,” which has not “taken place in the five or six thousand years that world has existed” (92). Yet Malthus—in proffering disciplinary self-restraint in the service of a biopolitical equilibrium between population and food supply—offers another such solution, motivated by antithetical political principles, while operating from a common set of Enlightenment-era assumptions regarding the need to regulate bodies and populations (Foucault 2003). The overlap between these ostensible antagonists should not surprise us, since, as Fredrik Albritton Jonsson notes in his critical genealogy of cornucopianism, “cornucopianism and environmental anxieties have been closely intertwined in theory and practice from the eighteenth century onward” (2014). Albritton Jonsson connects the alternation between cornucopian fantasy and environmental anxiety to the booms and busts of environmental appropriation and capitalist accumulation, while he locates the roots of cornucopia “in the realm of alchemy and natural theology. To overcome the effects of the Fall, Francis Bacon hoped to remake the natural order into a second, artificial world. Such theological and alchemical aspirations were intertwined with imperial ideology” (Albritton Jonsson 2014, 167). This strange convergence is most evident in Malthus’s own vision of progress and growth—driven exactly by the population pressure and scarcity that serve as analogue for the early Godwin’s reason—which Malthus, a pioneering apologist for industrial capitalism, did not reject, despite later misrepresentations.
IV
Both Marx and Engels would later discern in Malthus’s ostensibly scientific outline of nature’s positive checks on the poor—aimed at both eighteenth century British poor laws and various enlightenment era visions of social improvement—the primacy of surplus population and a reserve army of the unemployed for a nascent industrial capitalism, as Engels notably “summarizes” Malthus’s argument in his Condition of the Working Class in England (1845):
If, then, the problem is not to make the ‘surplus population’ useful, … but merely to let it starve to death in the least objectionable way, … this, of course, is simple enough, provided the surplus population perceives its own superfluousness and takes kindly to starvation. There is, however, in spite of the strenuous exertions of the humane bourgeoisie, no immediate prospect of its succeeding in bringing about such a disposition among the workers. The workers have taken it into their heads that they, with their busy hands, are the necessary, and the rich capitalists, who do nothing, the surplus population.
Despite the transparently political impetus behind Malthus’s Essay, his work was taken up by a certain segment of the environmental movement in the twentieth century. These same environmentalists often read and reject both Marx’s and Engels’s critiques of Malthusian political economy, with the disastrous environmental record of orthodox communist and specifically Soviet Prometheanism in mind. John Bellamy Foster notes that many “ecological socialists,” have gone so far as to argue that Marx and Engels were guilty of “a Utopian overreaction to Malthusian epistemic conservatism” which led them to downplay (or deny) “any ultimate natural limits to population” and indeed natural limits in general. Faced with Malthusian natural limits, we are told, Marx and Engels responded with “‘Prometheanism’—a blind faith in the capacity of technology to overcome all ecological barriers” (Foster 1998).
While Marx rejected a fixed and universal law of population growth or food production, stressing instead how population increases and agricultural yields vary from one socio-material context to another, he accepted ecological limits—to soil fertility, for example—in his theory of metabolic rift, as both Foster (2000) and Kohei Saito (2017) demonstrate in their respective projects on Marx’s ecology.
This perspective was arguably anticipated by the later Godwin himself, in the long and now forgotten Enquiry Concerning Population (1820), written at the urging of his son-in-law Percy Shelley, in order to salvage his reputation from Malthus’s attacks; Malthus was awarded the first chair in political economy at the East India Company College in Hertfordshire, while Godwin’s utopian philosophy was fading from the public consciousness, when it was not an explicit object of ridicule. Godwin returned to the absurdity of Malthus’s theological fixation on the human inability to resist the sexual urge, with a special emphasis on the poor, which we can see in first response to Malthus’s Essay in the 1790s, although in a more openly vitriolic fashion, perhaps at the urging of Shelley, for whom the Malthusian emphasis on abstinence and chastity among the poor was “seeking to deny them even the comfort of sexual love” in addition to “keeping them ignorant, miserable, and subservient” (St. Clair 1989, 464). Shelley, unlike the young Godwin of the 1793 Political Justice that influenced the poet’s radical political development, saw in unrestrained sexual intercourse a vehicle of communion with nature.
The older Godwin offers, in his OfPopulation, 600 pages of historical accounts and reports regarding population and agriculture—an empiricist overcorrection to Malthus’s accusations of visionary rationalism—in order to show us the variability of different social metabolisms, the efficacy of birth control, and, most importantly, how utopian social organization can and must be built with biophysical limits in mind against “the occult and mystical state of population” in Malthus’s thinking (Godwin 1820, 476). More than a response to Malthus, this later work also represents a rejoinder to the young proto-accelerationist Godwin and that nevertheless retains most of his radical social and political commitments. OfPopulation troubles the earlier Malthusian-Godwinian binary that arguably still underwrites our present-day Anthropocene narrative and the standard historiography of the English Industrial Revolution.
In 1798, Malthus argued in favor of population and resource constraints, for largely ideological reasons, at the exact moment that the steam engine and the widespread adoption of fossil energy, in the form of coal, enabled what seemed like self-sustaining growth, seemingly rendering that paradigm obsolete. But Malthus also argues, toward the end of the Essay, that as just the “first great awakeners of the mind seem to be the wants of the body,” so necessity is “the mother of invention” (Malthus 1793, 95) and progress Malthus’s myth of capitalist modernity, the negative image of perfectibilism, underwrites the political economy of industrialization. Malthus stressed the power of natural necessity—scarcity and struggle—to compel human accomplishment, against the universal luxury proffered by the perfectibilists.
Like the good bourgeois moralist he was, Malthus saw in the individual and collective struggle against scarcity—laws of population that function as secularized analogues for original sin—the drivers of technological development and material growth. This is a familiar story of progress and one that, no less than the perfectibilists’ teleological arc of history, elides conflict and contingency in rendering the rise of industrial capitalism and Euro-American capitalism as both natural and inevitable. For example, E. A. Wrigley argues, in a substantively Malthusian vein, that it was overpopulation, land exhaustion, and food scarcity in eighteenth-century England that necessitated the use of coal as an engine for growth, the invention of the steam engine in 1784, and widespread adoption of fossil power over the next century. Prometheans left and right nonetheless use the term “Malthusian” as synonym for (equally imprecise) “primitivist” or Luddite. But, as Andreas Malm persuasively contends, our dominant narratives of technological progress proceed from assumptions inherited from Malthus (and his disciple Ricardo): “Coal resolved a crisis of overpopulation. Like all innovations that composed the Industrial Revolution, the outcome was a valiant struggle of ‘a society with its back to ecological wall’” (Malm 2016, 23).
Malthus’s force of necessity is here indistinguishable from Godwinian Progress, spurring on the inevitable march of innovation, without any mention of the extent to which technological development, in England and the capitalist west, was and is shaped by capitalist imperatives, such as the quest for profit or labor discipline. We can see this same dynamic at play in much present-day Anthropocene discourse, some of whose exponents trace a direct line from the discovery of fire to the human transformation of the biosphere. These “Anthropocenesters” oscillate between a Godwinian-accelerationist pole—best exemplified by would-be accelerationists and ecomodernists like Mark Lynas (2011), who wholeheartedly embraces the role of Godwin avatar Victor Frankenstein in arguing how we must assume our position as the God species and completely reengineer the planet we have remade in our own image—and a Malthusian-pessimist pole, according to which all we can do now is learn how to die with the planet we have undone, to paraphrase the title of Roy Scranton’s popular Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene (2015).[9]
Rather than the enforced austerity conjured up by cornucopians and neo-Prometheans across the ideological spectrum when confronted with the biophysical limits now made palpable by our global ecological catastrophe, we must pursue a radical social and political project under these limits and conditions. Indeed, a decelerationist socialism might be the only way to salvage human civilization and creaturely life while repairing the biosphere of which both are parts: utopia among the ruins. While all the grand radical programs of the modern era, including Godwin’s own early perfectibilism, have been oriented toward the future, this project must contend with the very real burden of the past, as Malm notes: “every conjuncture now combines relics and arrows, loops and postponements that stretch from the deepest past to the most distant future, via a now that is non-contemporaneous with itself” (Malm 2016, 8).
The warming effects of coal or oil burnt in the past misshape our collective present and future, due to the cumulative effects of CO2 in the atmosphere, even if—for example—all carbon emissions were to stop tomorrow. Global warming in this way represents the weight of those dead generations and a specific tradition—fossil capitalism and its self-sustaining growth— as literal gothic nightmare; one that will shape any viable post-carbon and post-capitalist future.
Perhaps the post-accelerationist Godwin of the later 1790s and afterward is instructive in this regard. Although chastened by the death of his wife, the collapse of the French Revolution, and the campaign of vilification aimed at him and fellow radicals—in addition to the debate with Malthus outlined here—Godwin nonetheless retained the most important of his emancipatory commitments, as outlined in the 1793 Political Justice, even as he recognized physical constraints, the value of the past, and the primacy of affective bonds in building communal life. In a long piece, published in 1809, entitled Essay On Sepulchres, Or, A Proposal For Erecting Some Memorial of the Illustrious Dead in All Ages on the Spot , for example, Godwin reveals his new intellectual orientation in arguing for the physical commemoration of the dead; against a purely rationalist or moral remembrance of the deceased’s accomplishments and qualities, and against the younger Godwin’s horror of the body and its imperfections, the older man underlines the importance of our physical remains and our the visceral attachments they engender: “It is impossible therefore that I should not follow by sense the last remains of my friend; and finding him no where above the surface of the earth, should not feel an attachment to the spot where his body has been deposited in the earth” (Godwin 1809, 4).
These ruminations follow a preface in which Godwin reaffirms his commitment to the utopian anarchism of Political Justice, with the caveat that any radical future must recognize both the past and remember the dead. He draws a tacitly anti-Promethean line between our embodied mortality and utopian political aspiration, severing the two often antithetical modes of progress that constitute a dialectic of European enlightenment. While first-generation Romantics, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, abandoned the futurist Godwinism of their youth, alongside their “Jacobin” political sympathies, for an ambivalent conservatism, the second generation of Romantics, including the extended Godwin-Shelley circle, combine the emancipatory social and political commitments of Political Justice with an appreciation of the natural world and its limits. One need look no further than Frankenstein and Prometheus Unbound—the Shelleys’ revisionist interrogations of the Prometheus myth and modern Prometheanism, which should be read together—to see how this radical romantic constellation represents a bridge between 1790s-era utopianism and later radicalisms, including Marxism and ecosocialism.[10] And if we group the later Godwin with these second-generation Romantics, then Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre’s reading of radical Romanticism as critical supplement to enlightenment makes perfect sense (see Löwy and Sayre 2001).
Instead of the science fictional fantasies of total automation and decoupling, largely derived from the pre-Marxist socialist utopianisms that drive today’s various accelerationisms, this Romanticism provides one historical resource for thinking through a decelerationist radicalism that dispenses with the grand progressive narrative: the linear, self-sustaining, and teleological model of improvement, understood in the quantitative terms of more, shared by capitalist and state socialist models of development. Against Prometheanism both old and new, let us reject the false binaries and shared assumptions inaugurated by the Godwin/Malthus debate, and instead join hands with the Walter Benjamin of the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) in order to better pull the emergency brake on a runaway capitalist modernity rushing headlong into the precipice.
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Anthony Galluzzo earned his PhD in English Literature at UCLA. He specializes in radical transatlantic English-language literary cultures of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Colby College, and NYU.
[1] The “Dark Enlightenment” is a term coined by accelerationist and “neo-reactionary” Nick Land, to describe his own orientation as well as that of authoritarian futurist, Curtis Yarvin. The term is often used to describe a range of technofuturist discourses that blend libertarian, authoritarian, and post-Marxist elements, in the case of “left” accelerationist, with a belief in technological transcendence. For a good overview, see Haider (2017).
[2] This is a simplification of Blumenberg’s point in his Paradigms for a Metaphorology:
Metaphors can first of all be leftover elements, rudiments on the path from mythos to logos; as such, they indicate the Cartesian provisionality of the historical situation in which philosophy finds itself at any given time, measured against the regulative ideality of the pure logos. Metaphorology would here be a critical reflection charged with unmasking and counteracting the inauthenticity of figurative speech. But metaphors can also—hypothetically, for the time being—be foundational elements of philosophical language, ‘translations’ that resist being converted back into authenticity and logicality. If it could be shown that such translations, which would have to be called ‘absolute metaphors’, exist, then one of the essential tasks of conceptual history (in the thus expanded sense) would be to ascertain and analyze their conceptually irredeemable expressive function. Furthermore, the evidence of absolute metaphors would make the rudimentary metaphors mentioned above appear in a different light, since the Cartesian teleology of logicization in the context of which they were identified as ‘leftover elements’ in the first place would already have foundered on the existence of absolute translations. Here the presumed equivalence of figurative and ‘inauthentic’ speech proves questionable; Vico had already declared metaphorical language to be no less ‘proper’ than the language commonly held to be such,4 only lapsing into the Cartesian schema in reserving the language of fantasy for an earlier historical epoch. Evidence of absolute metaphors would force us to reconsider the relationship between logos and the imagination. The realm of the imagination could no longer be regarded solely as the substrate for transformations into conceptuality—on the assumption that each element could be processed and converted in turn, so to speak, until the supply of images was used up—but as a catalytic sphere from which the universe of concepts continually renews itself, without thereby converting and exhausting this founding reserve. (Blumenberg 2010, 3-4)
[3] Davidson situates Godwin, and his ensuing debate with Thomas Malthus on the limits to human population growth and improvement, within a longer eighteenth-century argument regarding perfectibility, the nature of human nature, and the extent to which we are constrained by our biological inheritance. Preceding Darwin and Mendel by more than a century, Davidson contends later models of eugenics and recognizably modern schemes for human enhancement or perfection emerge in the eighteenth, rather than the nineteenth, century. See Davidson (2009), 165.
[4] Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), with its critique of enlightenment as domination and instrumental rationality, is the classic text here.
[5] Benjamin famously argues for the emancipatory potential of mechanical reproducibility—of the image—in new visual media, such as film, against the unique “aura” of the original artwork. Benjamin sees in artistic aura a secularized version of the sacred object at the center of religious ritual. I am, of course, simplifying a complex argument that Benjamin himself would later qualify, especially as regards modern industrial technology, new media, and revolution. Anders—Benjamin’s husband and first husband of Hannah Arendt, who introduced Benjamin’s work to the English-speaking world—pushes this line of argument in a radically different direction, as human beings in the developed world increasingly feel “obsolete” on account of their perishable irreplaceability—a variation and inversion of artistic and religious aura, since “singularity” here is bound up with transience and imperfection—as compared to the assembly line proliferation of copies, all of which embody an immaterial model in the service of “industrial-Platonism” in Anders’s coinage. See Anders (2016), 53. See also Benjamin, “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1939).
[6] This shift, which includes a critique of what I am calling the Promethean or proto-futurist dimension of the early Godwin, is best exemplified in Godwin’s St. Leon, his second novel, which recounts the story of an alchemist who sacrifices his family and his sanity for the sake of immortality and supernatural power: a model for his daughter’s Frankenstein (Shelley 1818).
[7] I use Foucault’s descriptive models here with the caveat that, unlike Foucault, these techniques—of the sovereign, disciplinary, or biopolitical sort—should be anchored in specific socio-economic modes of organization as opposed to his diffuse “power.” Nor is this list of techniques exhaustive.
[8] One recent example of this is the vogue for a reanimated Russian Cosmism among Silicon Valley technologists and the accelerationists of the art and para-academic worlds alike. The original cosmists of the early Soviet period managed to recreate heterodox Christian and Gnostic theologies in secular and ostensibly materialist and/or Marxist-Leninist forms, i.e., God doesn’t exist, but we will become Him; with our liberated forces of production, we will make the universal resurrection of the dead a reality. The latter is now an obsession of various tech entrepreneurs such as Peter Thiel, who have invested money in “parabiosis” start-ups, for instance. One contribution to recent e-flux collection on (neo)cosmism and resurrection admits that cosmism is “biopolitics because it is concerned with the administration of life, rejuvenation, and even resurrection. Furthermore, it is radicalized biopolitics because its goals are ahead of the current normative expectations and extend even to the deceased” (Steyerl and Vidokle 2018, 33). Frankensteinism is real apparently. But Frankensteinism in the service of what? For a good overview of the newest futurism and its relationship to social and ecological catastrophe, see Pein (2015).
[9] Lynas and Scranton arguably exemplify these antithetical poles, although the latter has recently expressed some sympathy for something like revolutionary pessimism, very much in line with the decelerationist perspective that animates this essay. In a 2018 New York Times editorial called “Raising My Child in a Doomed World,” he writes: “there is some narrow hope that revolutionary socio-economic transformation today might save billions of human lives and preserve global civilization as we know it in more or less recognizable form, or at least stave off human extinction” (Scranton 2018). Also see Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015) and Lynas (2011).
The eco-modernists, who include Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, and Stewart Brand, are affiliated with the Breakthrough Institute, a California-based environmental think tank. They are, according to their mission statement, “progressives who believe in the potential of human development, technology, and evolution to improve human lives and create a beautiful world.” The development of this potential is, in turn, predicated on “new ways of thinking about energy and the environment.” Luckily, these ecomoderns have published their own manifesto in which we learn that these new ways include embracing “the Anthropocene” as a good thing.
This “good Anthropocene” provides human beings a unique opportunity to improve human welfare, and protect the natural world in the bargain, through a further “decoupling” from nature, at least according to the ecomodernist manifesto. The ecomodenists extol the “role that technology plays” in making humans “less reliant upon the many ecosystems that once provided their only sustenance, even as those same ecosystems have been deeply damaged.” The ecomodernists reject natural limits of any sort. They recommend our complete divorce from the natural world, like soul from body, although, as they constantly reiterate, this time it is for nature’s own good. How can human beings completely “decouple” from a natural world that is, in the words of Marx, our “inorganic body” outside of species-wide self-extinction, which is current policy? The eco-modernists’ policy proposals run the gamut from a completely nuclear energy economy and more intensified industrial agriculture to insufficient or purely theoretical (non-existent) solutions to our environmental catastrophe, such as geoengineering or cold fusion reactors (terraforming Mars, I hope, will appear in the sequel). This rebooted Promethean vision is still ideologically useful, while the absence of any analysis of modernization as a specifically capitalist process is telling. In the words of Chris Smaje (2015),
Ecomodernists offer no solutions to contemporary problems other than technical innovation and further integration into private markets which are structured systematically by centralized state power in favour of the wealthy, in the vain if undoubtedly often sincere belief that this will somehow help alleviate global poverty. They profess to love humanity, and perhaps they do, but the love seems to curdle towards those who don’t fit with its narratives of economic, technological and urban progress. And, more than humanity, what they seem to love most of all is certain favoured technologies, such as nuclear power.
[10] Terrence Hoagwood (1988), for example, argues for Shelley’s philosophical significance as bridge between 1790s radicalism and dialectical materialism.
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Thelwall John. 2008. Selected Political Writings of John Thelwall, Volume Two. London: Pickering & Chatto.
Thompson, E. P. 1978. The Poverty of Theory: or An Orrery of Errors. London: Merlin Press.
Winner, Langdon. 1977. Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
works by William Godwin
Godwin, William. (1793) 2013. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Godwin, William. (1797) 1971. The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners and Literature. New York: Garland Publishers.
Godwin, William. 1798. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Third edition. London: G.G and J. Robinson.
Godwin, William. 1801. Thoughts occasioned by the Perusal of Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon, preached at Christ Church, April I5, 1800: being a Reply to the Attacks of Dr. Parr, Mr. Mackintosh, the Author of an Essay on Population, and Others, London: G. G. & J. Robinson.
Godwin, William. 1809. Essay On Sepulchres, Or, A Proposal For Erecting Some Memorial of the Illustrious Dead in All Ages on the Spot Where Their Remains Have Been Interred. London: W. Miller.
Godwin, William. 1820. Of Population. An Enquiry concerning the Power of Increase in the Numbers of Mankind, being an Answer to Mr. Malthus’s Essay on that Subject. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Ornie & Brown.
For a more complete bibliography see the William Godwin entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
God made the sun so that animals could learn arithmetic – without the succession of days and nights, one supposes, we should not have thought of numbers. The sight of day and night, months and years, has created knowledge of number, and given us the conception of time, and hence came philosophy. This is the greatest boon we owe to sight.
– Plato, Timaeus
The term “computational capital” understands the rise of capitalism as the first digital culture with universalizing aspirations and capabilities, and recognizes contemporary culture, bound as it is to electronic digital computing, as something like Digital Culture 2.0. Rather than seeing this shift from Digital Culture 1.0 to Digital Culture 2.0 strictly as a break, we might consider it as one result of an overall intensification in the practices of quantification. Capitalism, says Nick Dyer-Witheford (2012), was already a digital computer and shifts in the quantity of quantities lead to shifts in qualities. If capitalism was a digital computer from the get-go, then “the invisible hand”—as the non-subjective, social summation of the individualized practices of the pursuit of private (quantitative) gain thought to result in (often unknown and unintended) public good within capitalism—is an early, if incomplete, expression of the computational unconscious. With the broadening and deepening of the imperative toward quantification and rational calculus posited then presupposed during the early modern period by the expansionist program of Capital, the process of the assignation of a number to all qualitative variables—that is, the thinking in numbers (discernible in the commodity-form itself, whereby every use-value was also an encoded as an exchange-value)—entered into our machines and our minds. This penetration of the digital, rendering early on the brutal and precise calculus of the dimensions of cargo-holds in slave ships and the sparse economic accounts of ship ledgers of the Middle Passage, double entry bookkeeping, the rationalization of production and wages in the assembly line, and more recently, cameras and modern computing, leaves no stone unturned. Today, as could be well known from everyday observation if not necessarily from media theory, computational calculus arguably underpins nearly all productive activity and, particularly significant for this argument, those activities that together constitute the command-control apparatus of the world system and which stretch from writing to image-making and, therefore, to thought.[1] The contention here is not simply that capitalism is on a continuum with modern computation, but rather that computation, though characteristic of certain forms of thought, is also the unthought of modern thought. The content indifferent calculus of computational capital ordains the material-symbolic and the psycho-social even in the absence of a conscious, subjective awareness of its operations. As the domain of the unthought that organizes thought, the computational unconscious is structured like a language, a computer language that is also and inexorably an economic calculus.
The computational unconscious allows us to propose that much contemporary consciousness (aka “virtuosity” in post-Fordist parlance) is a computational effect—in short, a form of artificial intelligence. A large part of what “we” are has been conscripted, as thought and other allied metabolic processes are functionalized in the service of the iron clad movements of code. While “iron clad” is now a metaphor and “code” is less the factory code and more computer code, understanding that the logic of industrial machinery and the bureaucratic structures of the corporation and the state have been abstracted and absorbed by discrete state machines to the point where in some quarters “code is law” will allow us to pursue the surprising corollary that all the structural inequalities endemic to capitalist production—categories that often appear under variants of the analog signs of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, etc., are also deposited and thus operationally disappeared into our machines.
Put simply, and, in deference to contemporary attention spans, too soon, our machines are racial formations. They are also technologies of gender and sexuality.[2] Computational capital is thus also racial capitalism, the longue durée digitization of racialization and, not in any way incidentally, of regimes of gender and sexuality. In other words inequality and structural violence inherent in capitalism also inhere in the logistics of computation and consequently in the real-time organization of semiosis, which is to say, our practices and our thought. The servility of consciousness, remunerated or not, aware of its underlying operating system or not, is organized in relation not just to sociality understood as interpersonal interaction, but to digital logics of capitalization and machine-technics. For this reason, the political analysis of postmodern and, indeed, posthuman inequality must examine the materiality of the computational unconscious. That, at least, is the hypothesis, for if it is the function of computers to automate thinking, and if dominant thought is the thought of domination, then what exactly has been automated?
Already in the 1850s the worker appeared to Marx as a “conscious organ” in the “vast automaton” of the industrial machine, and by the time he wrote the first volume of Capital Marx was able to comment on the worker’s new labor of “watching the machine with his eyes and correcting its mistakes with his hands” (Marx 1867: 496, 502). Marx’s prescient observation with respect to the emergent role of visuality in capitalist production, along with his understanding that the operation of industrial machinery posits and presupposes the operation of other industrial machinery, suggests what was already implicit if not fully generalized in the analysis: that Dr. Ure’s notion, cited by Marx, of the machine as a “vast automaton,” was scalable—smaller machines, larger machines, entire factories could be thus conceived, and with the increasing scale and ubiquity of industrial machines, the notion could well describe the industrial complex as a whole. Historically considered, “watching the machine with his eyes and correcting the mistakes with his hands” thus appears as an early description of what information workers such as you and I do on our screens. To extrapolate: distributed computation and its integration with industrial process and the totality of social processes suggest that not only has society as a whole become a vast automaton profiting from the metabolism of its conscious organs, but further that the confrontation or interface with the machine at the local level (“where we are”) is an isolated and phenomenal experience that is not equivalent to the perspective of the automaton or, under capitalism, that of Capital. Given that here, while we might still be speaking about intelligence, we are not necessarily speaking about subjects in the strict sense, we might replace Althusser’s relation of S-s—Big Subject (God, the State, etc) to small subject (“you” who are interpellated with and in ideology)—with AI-ai— Big Artificial Intelligence (the world system as organized by computational capital) and “you” Little Artificial Intelligence (as organized by the same). Here subjugation is not necessarily intersubjective, and does not require recognition. The AI does not speak your language even if it is your operating system. With this in mind we may at once understand that the space-time regimes of subjectivity (point-perspective, linear time, realism, individuality, discourse function, etc.) that once were part of the digital armature of “the human,” have been profitably shattered, and that the fragments have been multiplied and redeployed under the requisites of new management. We might wager that these outmoded templates or protocols may still also meaningfully refer to a register of meaning and conceptualization that can take the measure of historical change, if only for some kind of species remainder whose value is simultaneously immeasurable, unknown and hanging in the balance.
Ironically perhaps, given the progress narratives attached to technical advances and the attendant advances in capital accumulation, Marx’s hypothesis in Capital Chapter 15, “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry,” that “it would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the purpose of providing capital with weapons against working class revolt” (1867, 563), casts an interesting light on the history of computing and its creation-imposition of new protocols. Not only have the incredible innovations of workers been abstracted and absorbed by machinery, but so also have their myriad antagonisms toward capitalist domination. Machinic perfection meant the imposition of continuity and the removal of “the hand of man” by fixed capital, in other words, both the absorption of know-how and the foreclosure of forms of disruption via automation (Marx 1867, 502).
Dialectically understood, subjectivity, while a force of subjugation in some respects, also had its own arsenal of anti-capitalist sensibilities. As a way of talking about non-conformity, anti-sociality and the high price of conformity and its discontents, the unconscious still has its uses, despite its unavoidable and perhaps nostalgic invocation of a future that has itself been foreclosed. The conscious organ does not entirely grasp the cybernetic organism of which it is a part; nor does it fully grasp the rationale of its subjugation. If the unconscious was machinic, it is now computational, and if it is computational it is also locked in a struggle with capitalism. If what underlies perceptual and cognitive experience is the automaton, the vast AI, what I will be referring to as The Computer, which is the totalizing integration of global practice through informatic processes, then from the standpoint of production we constitute its unconscious. However, as we are ourselves unaware of our own constitution, the Unconscious of producers is their/our specific relation to what Paolo Virno acerbically calls, in what can only be a lamentation of history’s perverse irony, “the communism of capital” (2004, 110). If the revolution killed its father (Marx) and married its mother (Capitalism), it may be worth considering the revolutionary prospects of an analysis of this unconscious.
Introduction: The Computational Unconscious
Beginning with the insight that the rise of capitalism marks the onset of the first universalizing digital culture, this essay, and the book of which it is chapter one, develops the insights of The Cinematic Mode of Production (Beller 2006) in an effort to render the violent digital subsumption by computational racial capital that the (former) “humans” and their (excluded) ilk are collectively undergoing in a manner generative of sites of counter-power—of, let me just say it without explaining it, derivatives of counter-power, or, Derivative Communism. To this end, the following section offers a reformulation of Marx’s formula for capital, Money-Commodity-Money’ (M-C-M’), that accounts for distributed production in the social factory, and by doing so hopes to direct attention to zones where capitalist valorization might be prevented or refused. Prevented or refused not only to break a system which itself functions by breaking the bonds of solidarity and mutual trust that formerly were among the conditions that made a life worth living, but also to posit the redistribution of our own power towards ends that for me are still best described by the word communist (or perhaps meta-communist but that too is for another time). This thinking, political in intention, speculative in execution and concrete in its engagement, also proposes a revaluation of the aesthetic as an interface that sensualizes information. As such, the aesthetic is both programmed, and programming—a privileged site (and indeed mode) of confrontation in the digital apartheid of the contemporary.
Along these lines, and similar to the analysis pursued in The Cinematic Mode of Production, I endeavor to de-fetishize a platform—computation itself—one that can only be properly understood when grasped as a means of production embedded in the bios. While computation is often thought of as being the thing accomplished by hardware churning through a program (the programmatic quantum movements of a discrete state machine), it is important to recognize that the universal Turing machine was (and remains) media indifferent only in theory and is thus justly conceived of as an abstract machine in the realm of ideas and indeed of the ruling ideas. However, it is an abstract machine that, like all abstractions, evolves out of concrete circumstances and practices; which is to say that the universal Turing Machine is itself an abstraction subject to historical-materialist critique. Furthermore, Turing Machines iterate themselves on the living, on life, reorganizing its practices. One might situate the emergence and function of the universal Turing machine as perhaps among the most important abstract machines in the last century, save perhaps that of capital itself. However, both their ranking and even their separability is here what we seek to put into question.
Without a doubt, the computational process, like the capitalist process, has a corrosive effect on ontological precepts, accomplishing a far-reaching liquidation of tradition that includes metaphysical assumptions regarding the character of essence, being, authenticity and presence. And without a doubt, computation has been built even as it has been discovered. The paradigm of computation marks an inflection point in human history that reaches along temporal and spatial axes: both into the future and back into the past, out to the cosmos and into the sub-atomic. At any known scale, from plank time (10^-44 seconds) to yottaseconds (10^24 seconds), and from 10^-35 to 10^27 meters, computation, conceptualization and sense-making (sensation) have become inseparable. Computation is part of the historicity of the senses. Just ask that baby using an iPad.
The slight displacement of the ontology of computation implicit in saying that it has been built as much as discovered (that computation has a history even if it now puts history itself at risk) allows us to glimpse, if only from what Laura Mulvey calls “the half-light of the imaginary” (1975, 7)—the general antagonism is feminized when the apparatus of capitalization has overcome the symbolic—that computation is not, so far as we can know, the way of the universe per se, but rather the way of the universe as it has become intelligible to us vis-à-vis our machines. The understanding, from a standpoint recognized as science, that computation has fully colonized the knowable cosmos (and is indeed one with knowing) is a humbling insight, significant in that it allows us to propose that seeing the universe as computation, as, in short, simulable, if not itself a simulation (the computational effect of an informatic universe), may be no more than the old anthropocentrism now automated by apparatuses. We see what we can see with the senses we have—autopoesis. The universe as it appears to us is figured by—that is, it is a figuration of—computation. That’s what our computers tell us. We build machines that discern that the universe functions in accord with their self-same logic. The recursivity effects the God trick.
Parametrically translating this account of cosmic emergence into the domain of history, reveals a disturbing allegiance of computational consciousness organized by the computational unconscious, to what Silvia Federici calls the system of global apartheid. Historicizing computational emergence pits its colonial logic directly against what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney identify as “the general antagonism” (2013, 10) (itself the reparative antithesis, or better perhaps the reverse subsumption of the general intellect as subsumed by capital). The procedural universalization of computation is a cosmology that attributes and indeed enforces a sovereignty tantamount to divinity and externalities be damned. Dissident, fugitive planning and black study – a studied refusal of optimization, a refusal of computational colonialism — may offer a way out of the current geo-(post-)political and its computational orthodoxy.
Computational Idolatry and Multiversality
In the new idolatry cathetcted to inexorable computational emergence, the universe is itself currently imagined as a computer. Here’s the seductive sound of the current theology from a conference sponsored by the sovereign state of NYU:
As computers become progressively faster and more powerful, they’ve gained the impressive capacity to simulate increasingly realistic environments. Which raises a question familiar to aficionados of The Matrix—might life and the world as we know it be a simulation on a super advanced computer? “Digital physicists” have developed this idea well beyond the sci-fi possibilities, suggesting a new scientific paradigm in which computation is not just a tool for approximating reality but is also the basis of reality itself. In place of elementary particles, think bits; in place of fundamental laws of physics, think computer algorithms. (Scientific American 2011)
Science fiction, in the form of “the Matrix,” is here used to figure a “reality” organized by simulation, but then this reality is quickly dismissed as something science has moved well beyond. However, it would not be illogical here to propose that “reality” is itself a science fiction—a fiction whose current author is no longer the novel or Hollywood but science. It is in a way no surprise that, consistent with “digital physics,” MIT physicist, Max Tegmark, claims that consciousness is a state of matter: Consciousness as a phenomenon of information storage and retrieval, is a property of matter described by the term “computronium.” Humans represent a rather low level of complexity. In the neo-Hegelian narrative in which the philosopher—scientist reveals the working out of world—or, rather, cosmic—spirit, one might say that it is as science fiction—one of the persistent fictions licensed by science—that “reality itself” exists at all. We should emphasize that the trouble here is not so much with “reality,” the trouble here is with “itself.” To the extent that we recognize that poesis (making) has been extended to our machines and it is through our machines that we think and perceive, we may recognize that reality is itself a product of their operations. The world begins to look very much like the tools we use to perceive it to the point that Reality itself is thus a simulation, as are we—a conclusion that concurs with the notion of a computational universe, but that seems to (conveniently) elide the immediate (colonial) history of its emergence. The emergence of the tools of perception is taken as universal, or, in the language of a quantum astrophysics that posits four levels of multiverses: multiversal. In brief, the total enclosure by computation of observer and observed is either reality itself becoming self-aware, or tautological, waxing ideological, liquidating as it does historical agency by means of the suddenly a priori stochastic processes of cosmic automation.
Well! If total cosmic automation, then no mistakes, so we may as well take our time-bound chances and wager on fugitive negation in the precise form of a rejection of informatic totalitarianism. Let us sound the sedimented dead labor inherent in the world-system, its emergent computational armature and its iconic self-representations. Let us not forget that those machines are made out of embodied participation in capitalist digitization, no matter how disappeared those bodies may now seem. Marx says, “Consciousness is… from the very beginning a social product and remains so for as long as men exist at all” (Tucker 1978, 178). The inescapable sociality and historicity of knowledge, in short, its political ontology, follows from this—at least so long as humans “exist at all.”
The notion of a computational cosmos, though not universally or even widely consented to by scientific consciousness, suggests that we respire in an aporiatic space—in the null set (itself a sign) found precisely at the intersection of a conclusion reached by Gödel in mathematics (Hofstadter 1979)—that there is no sufficiently powerful logical system that is internally closed such that logical statements cannot be formulated that can neither be proved nor disproved—and a different conclusion reached by Maturana and Varela (1992), and also Niklas Luhmann (1989), that a system’s self-knowing, its autopoesis, knows no outside; it can know only in its own terms and thus knows only itself. In Gödel’s view, systems are ineluctably open, there is no closure, complete self-knowledge is impossible and thus there is always an outside or a beyond, while in the latter group’s view, our philosophy, our politics and apparently our fate is wedded to a system that can know no outside since it may only render an outside in its own terms, unless, or perhaps, even if/as that encounter is catastrophic.
Let’s observe the following: 1) there must be an outside or a beyond (Gödel); 2) we cannot know it (Maturana and Varela); 3) and yet…. In short, we don’t know ourselves and all we know is ourselves. One way out of this aporia is to say that we cannot know the outside and remain what we are. Enter history: Multiversal Cosmic Knoweldge, circa 2017, despite its awesome power, turns out to be pretty local. If we embrace the two admittedly humbling insights regarding epistemic limits—on the one hand, that even at the limits of computationally—informed knowledge (our autopoesis) all we can know is ourselves, along with Gödel’s insight that any “ourselves” whatsoever that is identified with what we can know is systemically excluded from being All—then it as axiomatic that nothing (in all valences of that term) fully escapes computation—for us. Nothing is excluded from what we can know except that which is beyond the horizon of our knowledge, which for us is precisely nothing. This is tantamount to saying that rational epistemology is no longer fully separable from the history of computing—at least for any us who are, willingly or not, participant in contemporary abstraction. I am going to skip a rather lengthy digression about fugitive nothing as precisely that bivalent point of inflection that escapes the computational models of consciousness and the cosmos, and just offer its conclusion as the next step in my discussion: We may think we think—algorithmically, computationally, autonomously, or howsoever—but the historically materialized digital infrastructure of the socius thinks in and through us as well. Or, as Marx put it, “The real subject remains outside the mind and independent of it—that is to say, so long as the mind adopts a purely speculative, purely theoretical attitude. Hence the subject, society, must always be envisaged as the premises of conception even when the theoretical method is employed” (Marx: vol. 28, 38-39).[3]
This “subject, society” in Marx’s terms, is present even in its purported absence—it is inextricable from and indeed overdetermines theory and, thus, thought: in other words, language, narrative, textuality, ideology, digitality, cosmic consciousness. This absent structure informs Althusser’s Lacanian-Marxist analysis of Ideology (and of “the ideology of no ideology,” 1977) as the ideological moment par excellance: an analog way of saying “reality” is simulation) as well as his beguiling (because at once necessary and self-negating) possibility of a subjectless scientific discourse. This non-narrative, unsymbolizeable absent structure akin to the Lacanian “Real” also informs Jameson’s concept of the political unconscious as the black-boxed formal processor of said absent structure, indicated in his work by the term “History” with a capital “H” (1981). We will take up Althusser and Jameson in due time (but not in this paper). For now, however, for the purposes of our mediological investigation, it is important to pursue the thought that precisely this functional overdetermination, which already informed Marx’s analysis of the historicity of the senses in the 1844 manuscripts, extends into the development of the senses and the psyche. As Jameson put it in The Political Unconscious thirty-five years ago: “That the structure of the psyche is historical and has a history, is… as difficult for us to grasp as that the senses are not themselves natural organs but rather the result of a long process of differentiation even within human history”(1981, 62).
The evidence for the accuracy of this claim, built from Marx’s notion that “the forming of the five senses requires the history of the world down to the present” has been increasing. There is a host of work on the inseparability of technics and the so-called human (from Mauss to Simondon, Deleuze and Guattari, and Bernard Stiegler) that increasingly makes it possible to understand and even believe that the human, along with consciousness, the psyche, the senses and, consequently, the unconscious are historical formations. My own essay “The Unconscious of the Unconscious” from The Cinematic Mode of Production traces Lacan’s use of “montage,” “the cut,” the gap, objet a, photography and other optical tropes and argues (a bit too insistently perhaps) that the unconscious of the unconscious is cinema, and that a scrambling of linguistic functions by the intensifying instrumental circulation of ambient images (images that I now understand as derivatives of a larger calculus) instantiates the presumably organic but actually equally technical cinematic black box known as the unconscious.[iv] Psychoanalysis is the institutionalization of a managerial technique for emergent linguistic dysfunction (think literary modernism) precipitated by the onslaught of the visible.
More recently, and in a way that suggests that the computational aspects of historical materialist critique are not as distant from the Lacanian Real as one might think, Lydia Liu’s The Freudian Robot (2010) shows convincingly that Lacan modeled the theory of the unconscious from information theory and cybernetic theory. Liu understands that Lacan’s emphasis on the importance of structure and the compulsion to repeat is explicitly addressed to “the exigencies of chance, randomness, and stochastic processes in general” (2010, 176). She combs Lacan’s writings for evidence that they are informed by information theory and provides us with some smoking guns including the following:
By itself, the play of the symbol represents and organizes, independently of the peculiarities of its human support, this something which is called the subject. The human subject doesn’t foment this game, he takes his place in it, and plays the role of the little pluses and minuses in it. He himself is an element in the chain which, as soon as it is unwound, organizes itself in accordance with laws. Hence the subject is always on several levels, caught up in the crisscrossing of networks. (quoted in Liu 2010, 176)
Liu argues that “the crisscrossing of networks” alludes not so much to linguistic networks but to communication networks, and precisely references the information theory that Lacan read, particularly that of George Gilbaud, the author of What is Cybernetics?. She writes that, “For Lacan, ‘the primordial couple of plus and minus’ or the game of even and odd should precede linguistic considerations and is what enables the symbolic order.”
“You can play heads or tails by yourself,” says Lacan, “but from the point of view of speech, you aren’t playing by yourself – there is already the articulation of three signs comprising a win or a loss and this articulation prefigures the very meaning of the result. In other words, if there is no question, there is no game, if there is no structure, there is no question. The question is constituted, organized by the structure” (quoted in Liu 2010, 179). Liu comments that “[t]his notion of symbolic structure, consistent with game theory, [has] important bearings on Lacan’s paradoxically non-linguistic view of language and the symbolic order.”
Let us not distract ourselves here with the question of whether or not game theory and statistical analysis represent discovery or invention. Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and information theory formalized the statistical basis that one way or another became a global (if not also multiversal) episteme. Norbert Wiener, another father, this time of cybernetics, defined statistics as “the science of distribution” (Weiner 1989, 8). We should pause here to reflect that, given that cybernetic research in the West was driven by military and, later, industrial applications, that is, applications deemed essential for the development of capitalism and the capitalist way of life, such a statement calls for a properly dialectical analysis. Distribution is inseparable from production under capitalism, and statistics is the science of this distribution. Indeed, we would want to make such a thesis resonate with the analysis of logistics recently undertaken by Moten and Harney and, following them, link the analysis of instrumental distribution to the Middle Passage, as the signal early modern consequence of the convergence of rationalization and containerization—precisely the “science” of distribution worked out in the French slave ship Adelaide or the British ship Brookes. For the moment, we underscore the historicity of the “science of distribution” and thus its historical emergence as socio-symbolic system of organization and control. Keeping this emergence clearly in mind helps us to understand that mathematical models quite literally inform the articulation of History and the unconscious—not only homologously as paradigms in intellectual history, but materially, as ways of organizing social production in all domains. Whether logistical, optical or informatic, the technics of mathematical concepts, which is to say programs, orchestrate meaning and constitute the unconscious.
Perhaps more elusive even than this historicity of the unconscious grasped in terms of a digitally encoded matrix of materiality and epistemology that constitutes the unthought of subjective emergence, may be that the notion that the “subject, society” extends into our machines. Vilém Flusser, in Towards a Philosophy of Photography, tells us,
Apparatuses were invented to simulate specific thought processes. Only now (following the invention of the computer), and as it were in hindsight, it is becoming clear what kind of thought processes we are dealing with in the case of all apparatuses. That is: thinking expressed in numbers. All apparatuses (not just computers) are calculating machines and in this sense “artificial intelligences,” the camera included, even if their inventors were not able to account for this. In all apparatuses (including the camera) thinking in numbers overrides linear, historical thinking. (Flusser 2000, 31)
This process of thinking in numbers, and indeed the generalized conversion of multiple forms of thought and practice to an increasingly unified systems language of numeric processing, by capital markets, by apparatuses, by digital computers requires further investigation. And now that the edifice of computation—the fixed capital dedicated to computation that either recognizes itself as such or may be recognized as such—has achieved a consolidated sedimentation of human labor at least equivalent to that required to build a large nation (a superpower) from the ground up, we are in a position to ask in what way has capital-logic and the logic of private property, which as Marx points out is not the cause but the effect of alienated wage- (and thus quantified) labor, structured computational paradigms? In what way has that “subject, society” unconsciously structured not just thought, but machine-thought? Thinking, expressed in numbers, materialized first by means of commodities and then in apparatuses capable of automating this thought. Is computation what we’ve been up to all along without knowing it? Flusser suggests as much through his notion that 1) the camera is a black box that is a programme, and, 2) that the photograph or technical image produces a “magical” relation to the world in as much as people understand the photograph as a window rather than as information organized by concepts. This amounts to the technical image as itself a program for the bios and suggests that the world has long been unconsciously organized by computation vis-à-vis the camera. As Flusser has it, cameras have organized society in a feedback loop that works towards the perfection of cameras. If the computational processes inherent in photography are themselves an extension of capital logic’s universal digitization (an argument I made in TheCinematic Mode of Production and extended in The Message is Murder), then that calculus has been doing its work in the visual reorganization of everyday life for almost two centuries.
Put another way, thinking expressed in numbers (the principles of optics and chemistry) materialized in machines automates thought (thinking expressed in numbers) as program. The program of say, the camera, functions as a historically produced version of what Katherine Hayles has recently called “nonconscious cognition” (Hayles 2016). Though locally perhaps no more self-aware than the sediment sorting process of a riverbed (another of Hayles’s computational examples) the camera nonetheless affects purportedly conscious beings from the domain known as the unconscious, as, to give but one shining example, feminist film theory clearly shows: The function of the camera’s program organizes the psycho-dynamics of the spectator in a way that at once structures film form through market feedback, gratifies the (white-identified) male ego and normalizes the violence of heteropatriarchy, and does so at a profit. Now that so much human time has gone into developing cameras, computer hardware and programming, such that hardware and programming are inextricable from the day to day and indeed nano-second to nano-second organization of life on planet earth (and not only in the form of cameras), we can ask, very pointedly, which aspects of computer function, from any to all, can be said to be conditioned not only by sexual difference but more generally still, by structural inequality and the logistics of racialization? Which computational functions perpetuate and enforce these historically worked up, highly ramified social differences ? Structural and now infra-structural inequalities include social injustices—what could be thought of as and in a certain sense are algorithmic racism, sexism and homophobia, and also programmatically unequal access to the many things that sustain life, and legitimize murder (both long and short forms, executed by, for example, carceral societies, settler colonialism, police brutality and drone strikes), and catastrophes both unnatural (toxic mine-tailings, coltan wars) and purportedly natural (hurricanes, droughts, famines, ambient environmental toxicity). The urgency of such questions resulting from the near automation of geo-political emergence along with a vast conscription of agents is only exacerbated as we recognize that we are obliged to rent or otherwise pay tribute (in the form of attention, subscription, student debt) to the rentier capitalists of the infrastructure of the algorithm in order to access portions of the general intellect from its proprietors whenever we want to participate in thinking.
For it must never be assumed that technology (even the abstract machine) is value-neutral, that it merely exists in some uninterested ideal place and is then utilized either for good or for ill by free men (it would be “men” in such a discourse). Rather, the machine, like Ariella Azoulay’s understanding of photography, has a political ontology—it is a social relation, and an ongoing one whose meaning is, as Azoulay says of the photograph, never at an end (2012, 25). Now that representation has been subsumed by machines, has become machinic (overcoded as Deleuze and Guattari would say) everything that appears, appears in and through the machine, as a machine. For the present (and as Plato already recognized by putting it at the center of the Republic), even the Sun is political. Going back to my opening, the cosmos is merely a collection of billions of suns—an infinite politics.
But really, this political ontology of knowledge, machines, consciousness, praxis should be obvious. How could technology, which of course includes the technologies of knowledge, be anything other than social and historical, the product of social relations? How could these be other than the accumulation, objectification and sedminentation of subjectivities that are themselves an historical product? The historicity of knowledge and perception seems inescapable, if not fully intelligible, particularly now, when it is increasingly clear that it is the programmatic automation of thought itself that has been embedded in our apparatuses. The programming and overdetermination of “choice,” of options, by a rationality that was itself embedded in the interested circumstances of life and continuously “learns” vis-à-vis the feedback life provides has become ubiquitous and indeed inexorable (I dismiss “Object Oriented Ontology” and its desperate effort to erase white-boy subjectivity thusly: there are no ontological objects, only instrumental epistemic horizons). To universalize contemporary subjectivity by erasing its conditions of possibility is to naturalize history; it is therefore to depoliticize it and therefore to recapitulate its violence in the present.
The short answer then regarding digital universality is that technology (and thus perception, thought and knowledge) can only be separated from the social and historical—that is, from racial capitalism—by eliminating both the social and historical (society and history) through its ownoperations. While computers, if taken as a separate constituency along with a few of their biotic avatars, and then pressed for an answer, might once have agreed with Margaret Thatcher’s view that “there is no such thing as society,” one would be hard-pressed to claim that this post-sociological (and post-Birmingham) “discovery” is a neutral result. Thatcher’s observation, that “the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money,” while admittedly pithy, if condescending, classist and deadly, subordinates social needs to existing property-relations and their financial calculus at the ontological level. She smugly valorizes the status quo by positing capitalism as an untranscendable horizon since the social product is by definition always already “other people’s money.” But neoliberalism has required some revisioning of late (which is a polite way of saying that fascism has needed some updating): the newish but by now firmly-established term “social media” tells us something more about the parasitic relation that the cold calculus this mathematical universe of numbers has to the bios. To preserve global digital apartheid requires social media, the process(ing) of society itself cybernetically-interfaced with the logistics of racial-capitalist computation. This relation, a means of digital expropriation aimed to profitably exploit an equally significant global aspiration towards planetary communicativity and democratization, has become the preeminent engine of capitalist growth. Society, at first seemingly negated by computation and capitalism, is now directly posited as a source of wealth, for what is now explicitly computational capital and actually computational racial capital. The attention economy, immaterial labor, neuropower, semio-capitalism: all of these terms, despite their differences, mean in effect that society, as a deterritorialized factory, is no longer disappeared as an economic object; it disappears only as a full beneficiary of the dominant economy which is now parasitical on its metabolism. The social revolution in planetary communicativity is being farmed and harvested by computational capitalism.
Dialectics of the Human-Machine
For biologists it has become au courant when speaking of humans to speak also of the second genome—one must consider not just the 26 chromosomes of the human genome that replicate what was thought of as the human being as an autonomous life-form, but the genetic information and epigenetic functionality of all the symbiotic bacteria and other organisms without which there are no humans. Pursuant to this thought, we might ascribe ourselves a third genome: information. No good scientist today believes that human beings are free standing forms, even if most (or really almost all) do not make the critique of humanity or even individuality through a framework that understands these categories as historically emergent interfaces of capitalist exchange. However, to avoid naturalizing the laws of capitalism as simply an expression of the higher (Hegalian) laws of energetics and informatics (in which, for example ATP can be thought to function as “capital”), this sense of “our” embeddedness in the ecosystem of the bios must be extended to that of the materiality of our historical societies, and particularly to their systems of mediation and representational practices of knowledge formation—including the operations of textuality, visuality, data visualization and money—which, with convergence today, means precisely, computation.
If we want to understand the emergence of computation (and of the anthropocene), we must attend to the transformations and disappearances of life forms—of forms of life in the largest sense. And we must do so in spite of the fact that the sedimentation of the history of computation would neutralize certain aspects of human aspiration and of humanity—including, ultimately, even the referent of that latter sign—by means of law, culture, walls, drones, derivatives, what have you. The biosynthetic process of computation and human being gives rise to post-humanism only to reveal that there were never any humans here in the first place: We have never been human—we know this now. “Humanity,” as a protracted example of maiconaissance—as a problem of what could be called the humanizing-machine or, better perhaps, the human-machine, is on the wane.
Naming the human-machine, is of course a way of talking about the conquest, about colonialism, slavery, imperialism, and the racializing, sex-gender norm-enforcing regimes of the last 500 years of capitalism that created the ideological legitimation of its unprecedented violence in the so-called humanistic values it spat out. Aimé Césaire said it very clearly when he posed the scathing question in Discourse on Colonialism: “Civilization and Colonization?” (1972). “The human-machine” names precisely the mechanics of a humanism that at once resulted from and were deployed to do the work of humanizing planet Earth for the quantitative accountings of capital while at the same time divesting a large part of the planetary population of any claims to the human. Following David Golumbia, in The Cultural Logic of Computation (2009), we might look to Hobbes, automata and the component parts of the Leviathan for “human” emergence as a formation of capital. For so many, humanism was in effect more than just another name for violence, oppression, rape, enslavement and genocide—it was precisely a means to violence. “Humanity” as symptom of The Invisible Hand, AI’s avatar. Thus it is possible to see the end of humanism as a result of decolonization struggles, a kind of triumph. The colonized have outlasted the humans. But so have the capitalists.
This is another place where recalling the dialectic is particularly useful. Enlightenment Humanism was a platform for the linear time of industrialization and the French revolution with “the human” as an operating system, a meta-ISA emerging in historical movement, one that developed a set of ontological claims which functioned in accord with the early period of capitalist digitality. The period was characterized by the institutionalization of relative equality (Cedric Robinson does not hesitate to point out that the precondition of the French Revolution was colonial slavery), privacy, property. Not only were its achievements and horrors inseparable the imposition of logics of numerical equivalence, they were powered by the labor of the peoples of Earth, by the labor-power of disparate peoples, imported as sugar and spices, stolen as slaves, music and art, owned as objective wealth in the form of lands, armies, edifices and capital, and owned again as subjective wealth in the form of cultural refinement, aesthetic sensibility, bourgeois interiority—in short, colonial labor, enclosed by accountants and the whip, was expatriated as profit, while industrial labor, also expropriated, was itself sustained by these endeavors. The accumulation of the wealth of the world and of self-possession for some was organized and legitimated by humanism, even as those worlded by the growth of this wealth struggled passionately, desultorily, existentially, partially and at times absolutely against its oppressive powers of objectification and quantification. Humanism was colonial software, and the colonized were the outsourced content providers—the first content providers—recruited to support the platform of so-called universal man. This platform humanism is not so much a metaphor; rather it is the tendency that is unveiled by the present platform post-humanism of computational racial capital. The anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the ape, as Marx so eloquently put the telos of man. Is the anatomy of computation the key to the anatomy of “man”?
So the end of humanism, which in a narrow (white, Euro-American, technocratic) view seems to arrive as a result of the rise of cyber-technologies, must also be seen as having been long willed and indeed brought about by the decolonizing struggles against humanism’s self-contradictory and, from the point of view of its own self-proclaimed values, specious organization. Making this claim is consistent with Césaire’s insight that people of the third world built the European metropoles. Today’s disappearance of the human might mean for the colonizers who invested so heavily in their humanisms, that Dr. Moreau’s vivisectioned cyber-chickens are coming home to roost. Fatally, it seems, since Global North immigration policy, internment centers, border walls, police forces give the lie to any pretense of humanism. It might be gleaned that the revolution against the humans has also been impacted by our machines. However, the POTUSian defeat of the so-called humans is double-edged to say the least. The dialectic of posthuman abundance on the one hand and the posthuman abundance of dispossession on the other has no truck with humanity. Today’s mainstream futurologists mostly see “the singularity” and apocalypse. Critics of the posthuman with commitments to anti-racist world-making have clearly understood the dominant discourse on the posthuman as not the end of the white liberal human subject but precisely, when in the hands of those not committed to an anti-racist and decolonial project as a means for its perpetuation—a way of extending the unmarked, transcendental, sovereign, subject (of Hobbes, Descartes, C.B. Macpherson)—effectively the white male sovereign who was in possession of a body rather than forced to be a body. Sovereignty itself must change (in order, as Guiseppe Lampedusa taught us, to remain the same), for if one sees production and innovation on the side of labor, then capital’s need to contain labors’ increasing self-organization has driven it into a position where the human has become an impediment to its continued expansion. Human rights, though at times also a means to further expropriation, are today in the way.
Let’s say that it is global labor that is shaking off the yoke of the human from without, as much as it the digital machines that are devouring it from within. The dialectic of computational racial capital devours the human as a way of revolutionizing the productive forces. Weapon-makers, states, and banks, along with Hollywood and student debt, invoke the human only as a skeuomorph—an allusion to an old technology that helps facilitate adoption of the new. Put another way, the human has become a barrier to production, it is no longer a sustainable form. The human, and those (human and otherwise) falling under the paradigm’s dominion, must be stripped, cut, bundled, reconfigured in derivative forms. All hail the dividual. Again, female and racialized bodies and subjects have long endured this now universal fragmentation and forced recomposition and very likely dividuality may also describe a precapitalist, pre-colonial interface with the social. However we are obliged to point out that this, the current dissolution of the human into the infrastructure of the world-system, is double-edged, neither fully positive, nor fully negative—the result of the dialectics of struggles for liberation distributed around the planet. As a sign of the times, posthumanism may be, as has been remarked about capitalism itself, among those simultaneously best and worst things to ever happen in history. On the one hand, the disappearance of presumably ontological protections and legitimating status for some (including the promise of rights never granted to most), on the other, the disappearance of a modality of dehumanization and exclusion that legitimated and normalized white supremacist patriarchy by allowing its values to masquerade as universals. However, it is difficult to maintain optimism of the will when we see that that which is coming, that which is already upon us may also be as bad or worse, in absolute numbers, is already worse, for unprecedented billions of concrete individuals. Frankly, in a world where the cognitive-linguistic functions of the species have themselves been captured by the ambient capitalist computation of social media and indeed of capitalized computational social relations, of what use is a theory of dispossession to the dispossessed?
For those of us who may consider ourselves thinkers, it is our burden—in a real sense, our debt, living and ancestral—to make theory relevant to those who haunt it. Anything less is betrayal. The emergence of the universal value form (as money, the general form of wealth) with its human face (as white-maleness, the general form of humanity) clearly inveighs against the possibility of extrinsic valuation since the very notion of universal valuation is posited from within this economy. What Cedric Robinson shows in his extraordinary Black Marxism (1983) is that capitalism itself is a white mythology. The history of racialization and capitalization are inseparable, and the treatment of capital as a pure abstraction deracinates its origins and functions – both its conditions of possibility as well as its operations—including those of the internal critique of capitalism that has been the basis of much of the Marxist tradition. Both capitalism and its negation as Marxism have proceeded through a disavowal of racialization. The quantitative exchange of equivalents, circulating as exchange values without qualities, are the real abstractions that give rise to philosophy, science, and white liberal humanism wedded to the notion of the objective. Therefore, when it comes to values, there is no degree zero, only perhaps nodal points of bounded equilibrium. To claim neutrality for an early digital machine, say, money, that is, to argue that money as a medium is value-neutral because it embodies what has (in many respects correctly, but in a qualified way) been termed “the universal value form,” would be to miss the entire system of leveraged exploitation that sustains the money-system. In an isolated instance, money as the product of capital might be used for good (building shelters for the homeless) or for ill (purchasing Caterpillar bulldozers) or both (building shelters using Caterpillar machines), but not to see that the capitalist-system sustains itself through militarized and policed expropriation and large-scale, long-term universal degradation is to engage in mere delusional, utopianism and self-interested (might one even say psychotic?) naysaying.
Will the apologists calmly bear witness to the sacrifice of billions of human beings so that the invisible hand may placidly unfurl its/their abstractions in Kubrikian sublimity? 2001’s (Kubrick 1968) cold longshot of the species lifespan as an instance of a cosmic program is not so distant from the endemic violence of postmodern—and, indeed, post-human—fascism he depicted in A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick 1971). Arguably, 2001 rendered the cosmology of early Posthuman Fascism while A Clockwork Orange portrayed its psychology. Both films explored the aesthetics of programming. For the individual and for the species, what we beheld in these two films was the annihilation of our agency (at the level of the individual and of the species) —and it was eerily seductive, Benjamin’s self-destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the highest order taken to cosmic proportions and raised to the level of Art (1969).
So what of the remainders of those who may remain? Here, in the face of the annihilation of remaindered life (to borrow a powerfully dialectical term from Neferti Tadiar, 2016) by various iterations of techné, we are posing the following question: how are computers and digital computing, as universals, themselves an iteration of long-standing historical inequality, violence, and murder, and what are the entry points for an understanding of computation-society in which our currently pre-historic (in Marx’s sense of the term) conditions of computation might be assessed and overcome? This question of technical overdetermination is not a matter of a Kittlerian-style anti-humanism in which “media determine our situation,” nor is it a matter of the post-Kittlerian, seemingly user-friendly repurposing of dialectical materialism which in the beer-drinking tradition of “good-German” idealism, offers us the poorly historicized, neo-liberal idea of “cultural techniques” courtesy of Cornelia Vismann and Bernhard Siegert (Vismann 2013, 83-93; Siegert 2013, 48-65). This latter is a conveniently deracinated way of conceptualizing the distributed agency of everything techno-human without having to register the abiding fundamental antagonisms, the life and death struggle, in anything. Rather, the question I want to pose about computing is one capable of both foregrounding and interrogating violence, assigning responsibility, making changes, and demanding reparations. The challenge upon us is to decolonize computing. Has the waning not just of affect (of a certain type) but of history itself brought us into a supposedly post-historical space? Can we see that what we once called history, and is now no longer, really has been pre-history, stages of pre-history? What would it mean to say in earnest “What’s past is prologue?”[6] If the human has never been and should never be, if there has been this accumulation of negative entropy first via linear time and then via its disruption, then what? Postmodernism, posthumanism, Flusser’s post-historical, and Berardi’s After the Future notwithstanding, can we take the measure of history?
I would like to conclude this essay with a few examples of techno-humanist dehumanization. In 1889, Herman Hollerith patented the punchcard system and mechanical tabulator that was used in the 1890 censuses in Germany, England, Italy, Russia, Austria, Canada, France, Norway, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. A national census, which normally took eight to ten years now took a single year. The subsequent invention of the plugboard control panel in 1906 allowed for tabulators to perform multiple sorts in whatever sequence was selected without having to be rebuild the tabulators—an early form of programming. Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company merged with three other companies in 1911 to become the Computing Tabulating Recording Company, which renamed itself IBM in 1924.
While the census opens a rich field of inquiry that includes questions of statistics, computing, and state power that are increasingly relevant today (particularly taking into account the ever-presence of the NSA), for now I only want to extract two points: 1) humans became the fodder for statistical machines and 2) as Vince Rafael has shown regarding the Philippine census and as Edwin Black has shown with respect to the holocaust, the development of this technology was inseparable from racialization and genocide (Rafael 2000; Black 2001)
Rafael shows that coupled to photographic techniques, the census at once “discerned” and imposed a racializing schema that welded historical “progress” to ever-whiter waves of colonization, from Malay migration to Spanish Colonialism to U.S. Imperialism (2000) Racial fantasy meets white mythology meets World Spirit. For his part, Edwin Black (2001) writes:
Only after Jews were identified—a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately—could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and, ultimately, annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organizational challenge so monumental, it called for a computer. Of course, in the 1930s no computer existed.
But IBM’s Hollerith punch card technology did exist. Aided by the company’s custom-designed and constantly updated Hollerith systems, Hitler was able to automate his persecution of the Jews. Historians have always been amazed at the speed and accuracy with which the Nazis were able to identify and locate European Jewry. Until now, the pieces of this puzzle have never been fully assembled. The fact is, IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany and then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and organizing of concentration camp slave labor.
IBM and its German subsidiary custom-designed complex solutions, one by one, anticipating the Reich’s needs. They did not merely sell the machines and walk away. Instead, IBM leased these machines for high fees and became the sole source of the billions of punch cards Hitler needed (Black 2001).
The sorting of populations and individuals by forms of social difference including “race,” ability and sexual preference (Jews, Roma, homosexuals, people deemed mentally or physically handicapped) for the purposes of sending people who failed to meet Nazi eugenic criteria off to concentration camps to be dispossessed, humiliated, tortured and killed, means that some aspects of computer technology—here, the Search Engine—emerged from this particular social necessity sometimes called Nazism (Black 2001). The Philippine-American War, in which Americans killed between 1/10th and 1/6th of the population of the Philippines, and the Nazi-administered holocaust are but two world historical events that are part of the meaning of early computational automation. We might say that computers bear the legacy of imperialism and fascism—it is inscribed in their operating systems.
The mechanisms, as well as the social meaning of computation, were refined in its concrete applications. The process of abstraction hid the violence of abstraction, even as it integrated the result with economic and political protocols and directly effected certain behaviors. It is a well-known fact that Claude Shannon’s landmark paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” proposed a general theory of communication that was content-indifferent (1948, 379-423). This seminal work created a statistical, mathematical model of communication while simultaneously consigning any and all specific content to irrelevance as regards the transmission method itself. Like use-value under the management of the commodity form, the message became only a supplement to the exchange value of the code. Elsewhere I have more to say about the fact that some of the statistical information Shannon derived about letter frequency in English used as its ur-text, Jefferson The Virginian (1948), the first volume of Dumas Malone’s monumental six volume study of Jefferson, famously interrogated by Annette Gordon-Reed in her Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings: An American Controversy for its suppression of information regarding Jefferson’s relation to slavery (1997).[7] My point here is that the rules for content indifference were themselves derived from a particular content and that the language used as a standard referent was a specific deployment of language. The representative linguistic sample did not represent the whole of language, but language that belongs to a particular mode of sociality and racialized enfranchisement. Shannon’s deprivileging of the referent of the logos as referent, and his attention only to the signifiers, was an intensification of the slippage of signifier from signified (“We, the people…”) already noted in linguistics and functionally operative in the elision of slavery in Jefferson’s biography, to say nothing of the same text’s elision of slave-narrative and African-American speech. Shannon brilliantly and successfully developed a re-conceptualization of language as code (sign system) and now as mathematical code (numerical system) that no doubt found another of its logical (and material) conclusions (at least with respect to metaphysics) in post-structuralist theory and deconstruction, with the placing of the referent under erasure. This recession of the real (of being, the subject, and experience—in short, the signified) from codification allowed Shannon’s mathematical abstraction of rules for the transmission of any message whatsoever to become the industry standard even as they also meant, quite literally, the dehumanization of communication—its severance from a people’s history.
In a 1987 interview, Shannon was quoted as saying “I can visualize a time in the future when we will be to robots as dogs are to humans…. I’m rooting for the machines!” (1971). If humans are the robot’s companion species, they (or is it we?) need a manifesto. The difficulty is that the labor of our “being” such that it is/was is encrypted in their function. And “we” have never been “one.”
Tara McPherson has brilliantly argued that the modularity achieved in the development of UNIX has its analogue in racial segregation. Modularity and encapsulation, necessary to the writing of UNIX code that still underpins contemporary operating systems were emergent general socio-technical forms, what we might call technologies, abstract machines, or real abstractions. “I am not arguing that programmers creating UNIX at Bell Labs and at Berkeley were consciously encoding new modes of racism and racial understanding into digital systems,” McPherson argues, “The emergence of covert racism and its rhetoric of colorblindness are not so much intentional as systemic. Computation is a primary delivery method of these new systems and it seems at best naïve to imagine that cultural and computational operating systems don’t mutually infect one another.” (in Nakamura 2012, 30-31; italics in original)
This is the computational unconscious at work—the dialectical inscription and re-inscription of sociality and machine architecture that then becomes the substrate for the next generation of consciousness, ad infinitum. In a recent unpublished paper entitled “The Lorem Ipsum Project,” Alana Ramjit (2014) examines industry standards for the now-digital imaging of speech and graphic images. These include Kodak’s “Shirley cards” for standard skin tone (white), the Harvard Sentences for standard audio (white), the “Indian Head Test Pattern” for standard broadcast image (white fetishism), and “Lenna,” an image of Lena Soderberg taken from Playboy magazine (white patriarchal unconscious) that has become the reference standard image for the development of graphics processing. Each of these examples testifies to an absorption of the socio-historical at every step of mediological and computational refinement.
More recently, as Chris Vitale, brought out in a powerful presentation on machine learning and neural networks given at Pratt Institute in 2016, Facebook’s machine has produced “Deep Face,” an image of the minimally recognizable human face. However, this ur-human face, purported to be, the minimally recognizable form of the human face turns out to be a white guy. This is a case in point of the extension of colonial relations into machine function. Given the racialization of poverty in the system of global apartheid (Federici 2012), we have on our hands (or, rather, in our machines) a new modality of automated genocide. Fascism and genocide have new mediations and may not just have adapted to new media but may have merged. Of course, the terms and names of genocidal regeimes change, but the consequences persist. Just yesterday it was called neo-liberal democracy. Today it’s called the end of neo-liberalism. The current world-wide crisis in migration is one of the symptoms of the genocidal tendencies of the most recent coalescence of the “practically” automated logistics of race, nation and class. Today racism is at once a symptom of the computational unconscious, an operation of non-conscious cognition, and still just the garden variety self-serving murderous stupidity that is the legacy of slavery, settler colonialism and colonialism.
Thus we may observe that the statistical methods utilized by IBM to find Jews in the Shtetl are operative in Weiner’s anti-aircraft cybernetics as well as in Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. But, the prevailing view, even if it is not one of pure mathematical abstraction, in which computational process has its essence without reference to any concrete whatever, can be found in what follows. As an article entitled “Traces of Israel’s Iron Dome can be found in Tech Startups” for Bloomberg News almost giddily reports:
The Israeli-engineered Iron Dome is a complex tapestry of machinery, software and computer algorithms capable of intercepting and destroying rockets midair. An offshoot of the missile-defense technology can also be used to sell you furniture. (Coppola 2014)[8]
Not only is war good computer business, it’s good for computerized business. It is ironic that te is likened to a tapestry and now used to sell textiles – almost as if it were haunted by Lisa Nakamura’s recent findings regarding the (forgotten) role of Navajo women weavers in the making of early transistor’s for Silicon Valley legend and founding father, as well as infamous eugenicist, William Shockley’s company Fairchild.[9] The article goes on to confess that the latest consumer spin-offs that facilitate the real-time imaging of couches in your living room capable of driving sales on the domestic fronts exist thanks to the U. S. financial support for Zionism and its militarized settler colonialism in Palestine. “We have American-backed apartheid and genocide to thank for being able to visualize a green moderne couch in our very own living room before we click “Buy now.”” (Okay, this is not really a quotation, but it could have been.)
Census, statistics, informatics, cryptography, war machines, industry standards, markets—all management techniques for the organization of otherwise unruly humans, sub-humans, posthumans and nonhumans by capitalist society. The ethos of content indifference, along with the encryption of social difference as both mode and means of systemic functionality is sustainable only so long as derivative human beings are themselves rendered as content providers, body and soul. But it is not only tech spinoffs from the racist war dividends we should be tracking. Wendy Chun (2004, 26-51) has shown in utterly convincing ways that the gendered history of the development of computer programming at ENIAC in which male mathematicians instructed female programmers to physically make the electronic connections (and remove any bugs) echoes into the present experiences of sovereignty enjoyed by users who have, in many respects, become programmers (even if most of us have little or no idea how programming works, or even that we are programming).
Chun notes that “during World War II almost all computers were young women with some background in mathematics. Not only were women available for work then, they were also considered to be better, more conscientious computers, presumably because they were better at repetitious, clerical tasks” (Chun 2004, 33)One could say that programming became programming and software became software when commands shifted from commanding a “girl” to commanding a machine. Clearly this puts the gender of the commander in question.
Chun suggests that the augmentation of our power through the command-control functions of computation is a result of what she calls the “Yes sir” of the feminized operator—that is, of servile labor (2004). Indeed, in the ENIAC and other early machines the execution of the operator’s order was to be carried out by the “wren” or the “slave.” For the desensitized, this information may seem incidental, a mere development or advance beyond the instrumentum vocale (the “speaking tool” i.e., a roman term for “slave”) in which even the communicative capacities of the slave are totally subordinated to the master. Here we must struggle to pose the larger question: what are the implications for this gendered and racialized form of power exercised in the interface? What is its relation to gender oppression, to slavery? Is this mode of command-control over bodies and extended to the machine a universal form of empowerment, one to which all (posthuman) bodies might aspire, or is it a mode of subjectification built in the footprint of domination in such a way that it replicates the beliefs, practices and consequences of “prior” orders of whiteness and masculinity in unconscious but nonetheless murderous ways.[10] Is the computer the realization of the power of a transcendental subject, or of the subject whose transcendence was built upon a historically developed version of racial masculinity based upon slavery and gender violence?
Andrew Norman Wilson’s scandalizing film Workers Leaving the Googleplex (2011), the making of which got him fired from Google, depicts lower class, mostly of color workers leaving the Google Mountain View campus during off hours. These workers are the book scanners, and shared neither the spaces nor the perks with Google white collar workers, had different parking lots, entrances and drove a different class of vehicles. Wilson also has curated and developed a set of images that show the condom-clad fingers (black, brown, female) of workers next to partially scanned book pages. He considers these mis-scans new forms of documentary evidence. While digitization and computation may seem to have transcended certain humanistic questions, it is imperative that we understand that its posthumanism is also radically untranscendent, grounded as it is on the living legacies of oppression, and, in the last instance, on the radical dispossession of billions. These billions are disappeared, literally utilized as a surface of inscription for everyday transmissions. The dispossessed are the substrate of the codification process by the sovereign operators commanding their screens. The digitized, rewritable screen pixels are just the visible top-side (virtualized surface) of bodies dispossessed by capital’s digital algorithms on the bottom-side where, arguably, other metaphysics still pertain. Not Hegel’s world spirit—whether in the form of Kurzweil’s singularity or Tegmark’s computronium—but rather Marx’s imperative towards a ruthless critique of everything existing can begin to explain how and why the current computational eco-system is co-functional with the unprecedented dispossession wrought by racial computational capitalism and its system of global apartheid. Racial capitalism’s programs continue to function on the backs of those consigned to servitude. Data-visualization, whether in the form of selfie, global map, digitized classic or downloadable sound of the Big Bang, is powered by this elision. It is, shall we say, inescapably local to planet earth, fundamentally historical in relation to species emergence, inexorably complicit with the deferral of justice.
The Global South, with its now world-wide distribution, is endemic to the geopolitics of computational racial capital—it is one of its extraordinary products. The computronics that organize the flow of capital through its materials and signs also organize the consciousness of capital and with it the cosmological erasure of the Global South. Thus the computational unconscious names a vast aspect of global function that still requires analysis. And thus we sneak up on the two principle meanings of the concept of the computational unconscious. On the one hand, we have the problematic residue of amortized consciousness (and the praxis thereof) that has gone into the making of contemporary infrastructure—meaning to say, the structural repression and forgetting that is endemic to the very essence of our technological buildout. On the other hand, we have the organization of everyday life taking place on the basis of this amortization, that is, on the basis of a dehistoricized, deracinated relation to both concrete and abstract machines that function by virtue of the fact that intelligible history has been shorn off of them and its legibility purged from their operating systems. Put simply, we have forgetting, the radical disappearance and expunging from memory, of the historical conditions of possibility of what is. As a consequence, we have the organization of social practice and futurity (or lack thereof) on the basis of this encoded absence. The capture of the general intellect means also the management of the general antagonism. Never has it been truer that memory requires forgetting – the exponential growth in memory storage means also an exponential growth in systematic forgetting – the withering away of the analogue. As a thought experiment, one might imagine a vast and empty vestibule, a James Ingo Freed global holocaust memorial of unprecedented scale, containing all the oceans and lands real and virtual, and dedicated to all the forgotten names of the colonized, the enslaved, the encamped, the statisticized, the read, written and rendered, in the history of computational calculus—of computer memory. These too, and the anthropocene itself, are the sedimented traces that remain among the constituents of the computational unconscious.
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Jonathan Beller is Professor of Humanities and Media Studies and Director of the Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute. His books include The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (2006); Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle, and the World-Media System (2006); and The Message Is Murder: Substrates of Computational Capital (2017). He is a member of the Social Text editorial collective..
[1]A reviewer of this essay for b2o: An Online Journal notes, “the phrase ‘digital computer’ suggests something like the Turing machine, part of which is characterized by a second-order process of symbolization—the marks on Turing’s tape can stand for anything, & the machine processing the tape does not ‘know’ what the marks ‘mean.’” It is precisely such content indifferent processing that the term “exchange value,” severed as it is of all qualities, indicates.
[2] It should be noted that the reverse is also true: that race and gender can be considered and/as technologies. See Chun (2012), de Lauretis (1987).
[3] To insist on first causes or a priori consciousness in the form of God or Truth or Reality is to confront Marx’s earlier acerbic statement against a form of abstraction that eliminates the moment of knowing from the known in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,
Who begot the first man and nature as a whole? I can only answer you: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question. Ask yourself it that question is not posed from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it is a perverse one. Ask yourself whether such a progression exists for a rational mind. When you ask about the creation of nature and man you are abstracting in so doing from man and nature. You postulate them as non-existent and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing. Now I say give up your abstraction and you will give up your question. Or, if you want to hold onto your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as non-existent, then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely man and nature. Don’t think, don’t ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egoist that you postulate everything as nothing and yet want yourself to be?” (Tucker 1978, 92)
[4] If one takes the derivative of computational process at a particular point in space-time one gets an image. If one integrates the images over the variables of space and time, one gets a calculated exploit, a pathway for value-extraction. The image is a moment in this process, the summation of images is the movement of the process.
[5] See Harney and Moten (2013). See also Browne (2015), especially 43-50.
[6] In practical terms, the Alternative Informatics Association, in the announcement for their Internet Ungovernance Forum puts things as follows:
We think that Internet’s problems do not originate from technology alone, that none of these problems are independent of the political, social and economic contexts within which Internet and other digital infrastructures are integrated. We want to re-structure Internet as the basic infrastructure of our society, cities, education, heathcare, business, media, communication, culture and daily activities. This is the purpose for which we organize this forum.
The significance of creating solidarity networks for a free and equal Internet has also emerged in the process of the event’s organization. Pioneered by Alternative Informatics Association, the event has gained support from many prestigious organizations worldwide in the field. In this two-day event, fundamental topics are decided to be ‘Surveillance, Censorship and Freedom of Expression, Alternative Media, Net Neutrality, Digital Divide, governance and technical solutions’. Draft of the event’s schedule can be reached at https://iuf.alternatifbilisim.org/index-tr.html#program (Fidaner, 2014).
[8] Coppola writes that “Israel owes much of its technological prowess to the country’s near—constant state of war. The nation spent $15.2 billion, or roughly 6 percent of gross domestic product, on defense last year, according to data from the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a U.K. think-tank. That’s double the proportion of defense spending to GDP for the U.S., a longtime Israeli ally. If there’s one thing the U.S. Congress can agree on these days, it’s continued support for Israel’s defense technology. Legislators approved $225 million in emergency spending for Iron Dome on Aug. 1, and President Barack Obama signed it into law three days later.”
Black, Edwin. 2001. IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation. New York: Crown Publishers.
Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press.
Césaire, Aimé. 1972. Discourse on Colonialism New York: Monthly Review Press.
Coppola, Gabrielle. 2014. “Traces of Israel’s Iron Dome Can Be Found in Tech Startups.” Bloomberg News (Aug 11).
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2004. “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge,” Grey Room 18, Winter: 26-51.
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2012. In Nakamura and Chow-White (2012). 38-69.
De Lauretis, Teresa. 1987. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
In a passage from his 2014 book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free author and copyright reformer Cory Doctorow sounds a familiar note against strict copyright. “Creators and investors lose control of their business—they become commodity suppliers for a distribution channel that calls all the shots. Anti-circumvention [laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits subverting controls on the intended use of digital objects] isn’t copyright protection, it’s middleman protection” (50).
This is the specter haunting the digital cultural economy, according to many of the most influential voices arguing to reform or disrupt it: the specter of the middleman, the monopolist, the distortionist of markets. Rather than an insurgency, this specter emanates from economic incumbency: these middlemen are the culture industries themselves. With the dual revolutions of personal computer and internet connection, record labels, book publishers, and movie studios could maintain their control and their profits only by asserting and strengthening intellectual property protections and squelching the new technologies that subverted them. Thus, these “monopolies” of cultural production threatened to prevent individual creators from using technology to reach their audiences independently.
Such a critique became conventional wisdom among a rising tide of people who had become accustomed to using the powers of digital technology to copy and paste in order to produce and consume cultural texts, beginning with music. It was most comprehensively articulated in a body of arguments, largely produced by technology evangelists and tech-aligned legal professionals, hailing from the Free Culture movement spearheaded by Lawrence Lessig. The critique’s practical form was the host of piratical activities and peer-to-peer technologies that, in addition to obviating traditional distribution chains, dedicated themselves to attacking culture industries, as well as their trade organizations such as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
Connected to this critique is an alternate vision of the digital economy, one that leverages new technological commons, peer production and network effects to empower creators. This vision has variations, and travels under a number of different political banners, from anarchist to libertarian to liberal and many more who prefer not to label.[1] It tells a compelling story (one Doctorow has adapted into novels for young people): against corporate monopolists and state regulation, a multitude, empowered by the democratizing effects bequeathed to society by networked personal computers, and other technologies springing from them, is posed to revolutionize the production of media and information, and, therefore, the political and economic structure as a whole. Work will be small-scale and independent, but, bereft of corporate behemoths, more lucrative than in the past.
This paper traces the contours of the critique put forth by Doctorow and other revolutionaries of networked digital production in light of a nineteenth-century thinker who espoused remarkably similar arguments over a century ago: the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Few of these writers are evident readers of Proudhon or explicitly subscribe to his views, though some, such as the Center for Stateless Society do. Rather than a formal doctrine, what I call “Digital Proudhonism” is better understood as what Raymond Williams (1977) calls a “structure of feeling”: a kind of “practical consciousness” that identifies “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt” (132), in this case, related to specific experiences of networked computer use. In the case under discussion these “affective elements of consciousness and relationships” are often articulated in a political, or at least polemical, register, with real effects on the political self-understanding of networked subjects, the projects they pursue, and their relationship to existing law, policy and institutions. Because of this, I seek to do more than identify currents of contemporary Digital Proudhonism. I maintain that the influence of this set of practices and ideas over the politics of digital production necessitates a critique. In this case, I argue that a return to Marx’s critique of Proudhon will aid us in piercing through the Digital Proudhonist mystifications of the Internet’s effects on politics and industry and reformulate both a theory of cultural production under digital capitalism as well as radical politics of work and technology for the 21st century.
From the Californian Ideology to Digital Proudhonism
What I am calling Digital Proudhonism has precedent in the social critique of techno-utopian beliefs surrounding the internet. It echoes Langdon Winner’s (1997) diagnosis of “cyberlibertarianism” in the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s 1994 manifesto “Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,” where “the wedding of digital technology and the free market” manages to “realize the most extravagant ideals of classical communitarian anarchism” (15). Above all, it bears a marked resemblance to Barbrook and Cameron’s (1996) landmark analysis of the “Californian Ideology,” that “bizarre mish-mash of hippie anarchism and economic liberalism beefed up with lots of technological determinism” emerging from the Wired (in the sense of the magazine) corners of the rise of networked computers, which claims that digital technology is the key to realizing freedom and autonomy (56). As the authors put it, “the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through profound faith in the emancipatory potential of new information technologies” (45).
My contribution will follow the argument of Barbrook and Cameron’s exemplary study. As good Marxists, they recognized that ideology was not merely an abstract belief system, but “offers a way of understanding the lived reality” (50) of a specific social base: “digital artisans” of programmers, software developers, hackers and other skilled technology workers who “not only tend to be well-paid, but also have considerable autonomy over their pace of work and place of employment” (49). Barbrook and Cameron located the antecedents of the Californian Ideology in Thomas Jefferson’s belief that democracy was best secured by self-sufficient individual farmers, a kind of freedom that, as the authors trenchantly note, “was based upon slavery for black people” (59).
Thomas Jefferson is an oft-cited figure among the digital revolutionaries associated with copyright reform. Law professor James Boyle (2008) drafts Jefferson into the Free Culture movement as a fellow traveler who articulated “a skeptical recognition that intellectual property rights might be necessary, a careful explanation that they should not be treated as natural rights, and a warning of the monopolistic dangers that they pose” (21). Lawrence Lessig cites Jefferson’s remarks on intellectual property approvingly in Free Culture (2004, 84). “Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers were thoughtful, and got it right,” states Kembrew McLeod (2005) in his discussion of the U.S. Constitution’s clauses on patent and copyright (9).
There is a deeper political and economic resonance between Jefferson and internet activists beyond his views on intellectual property. Jefferson’s ideal productive arrangement of society was small individual landowners and petty producers: the yeoman farmer. Jefferson believed that individual self-sufficiency guaranteed a democratic society. The abundance of land in the New World and the willingness to expropriate it from the indigenous peoples living there gave his fantasy a plausibility and attraction many Americans still feel today. It was this vision of America as a frontier, an empty space waiting to be filled by new social formations, that makes his philosophy resonate with the techno-adept described by Barbrook and Cameron, who viewed the Internet in a similar way. One of these Californians, John Perry Barlow (1996), who famously declared to “governments of the Industrial World” that “cyberspace does not lie within your borders,” even co-founded an organization dedicated to a deregulated internet called the “Electronic Frontier Foundation.”
However, not everything online lent itself to the metaphor of a frontier. Particularly in the realm of music and video, artisans dealt with a field crowded with existing content, as well as thickets of intellectual property laws that attempted to regulate how that content was created and distributed. There could be no illusion of a blank canvas on which to project one’s ideal society: in fact, these artisans were noteworthy, not for producing work independently out of whole cloth, but for refashioning existing works through remix. Lawrence Lessig (2004) quotes mashup artist Girl Talk: “We’re living in this remix culture. This appropriation time where any grade-school kid has a copy of Photoshop and can download a picture of George Bush and manipulate his face how they want and send it to their friends” (14). The project of Lessig and others was not to create the conditions for erecting a new society upon a frontier, as a yeoman farmer might, but to politicize this class of artisans in order to challenge larger industrial concerns, such as record labels and film studios, who used copyright to protect their incumbent position. This very different terrain requires a different perspective from Jefferson’s.
Thomas Jefferson’s vision is not the only expression of the fantasy of a society built on the basis of petty producers. In nineteenth-century Europe, where most land had long been tied up in hereditary estates, large and small, the yeoman farmer ideal held far less influence. Without a belief in abundant land, there could be no illusion of a blank canvas on which a new society could be created: some kind of revolutionary change would have to occur within and against the old one. And so a similar, yet distinct, political philosophy sprang up in France among a similar social base of artisans and craftsmen—those who tended to control their own work process and own their own tools—who made up a significant part of the French economy. As they were used to an individualized mode of production, they too believed that self-sufficiency guaranteed liberty and prosperity. The belief that society should be organized along the lines of petty individual commodity producers, without interference from the state—a belief remarkably consonant with a variety of digital utopians—found its most powerful expression in the ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. It is to his ideas that I now turn.
What was Proudhonism?
An anarchist and influential member of the International Workingmen’s Association of which Karl Marx was also a part, Proudhon’s ideas were especially popular in his native France, where the economy was rooted far more deeply in small-scale artisanal production than the industrial-scale capitalism Marx experienced in Britain. His first major work, What Is Property? ([1840] 2011) (Proudhon’s pithy answer: property is theft) caught the attention of Marx, who admired the work’s thrust and style, even while he criticized its grasp of the science of political economy. After attempting to win over Proudhon by teaching him political economy and Hegelian dialectics, Marx became a vehement critic of Proudhon’s ideas, which held more sway over the First International than Marx’s own.
Proudhon was critical of the capitalism of his day, but made his criticisms, along with his ideas for a better society, from the perspective of a specific class. Rather than analyze, as Marx did, the contradictions of capitalism through the figure of the proletarian, who possesses nothing but their own capacity to work, Proudhon understood capitalism from the perspective of an artisanal small producer, who owns and labors with their own small-scale means of production. In David McNally’s (1993) survey of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century radical political economy, he summarizes Proudhon’s beliefs. Proudhon “envisages a society [of] small independent producers—peasants and artisans—who own the products of their personal labour, and then enter into a series of equal market exchanges. Such a society will, he insists, eliminate profit and property, and ‘pauperism, luxury, oppression, vice, crime and hunger will disappear from our midst’” (140).
For Proudhon, massive property accumulation of large firms and accompanying state collusion distorts these market exchanges. Under the prevailing system, he asserts in The Philosophy of Poverty, “there is irregularity and dishonesty in exchange” ([1847] 2012, 124) a problem exemplified by monopoly and its perversion of “all notions of commutative justice” (297). Monopoly permits unjust property extraction: Proudhon states in General Idea of theRevolution in the Nineteenth Century ([1851] 2003) that “the price of things is not proportionate to their VALUE: it is larger or smaller according to an influence which justice condemns, but the existing economic chaos excuses” (228). Exploitation becomes thereby a consequence of market disequilibria—the upward and downward deviations of price from value. It is a faulty market, warped by state intervention and too-powerful entrenched interests that is the cause of injustice. The Philosophy of Poverty details all manner of economic disaster caused by monopoly: “the interminable hours, disease, deformity, degradation, debasement, and all the signs of industrial slavery: all these calamities are born of monopoly” (290).
As McNally’s (1993) work shows, blaming economic woes on “monopolists” and “middlemen” ran rife in popular critiques of political economy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, leading many radicals to call for free trade as a solution to widespread poverty. Proudhon’s anarchism was part of this general tendency. In General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century ([1851] 2003), he railed against “middlemen, commission dealers, promoters, capitalists, etc., who, in the old order of things, stand in the way of producer and consumer” (90). The exploiters worked by obstructing and manipulating the exchange of goods and services on the market.
Proudhon’s particular view of economic injustice begets its own version of how best to change it. His revolutionary vision centers on the end of monopolies and currency reform, two ways that “monopolists” intervened in the smooth functioning of the market. He remained dedicated to the belief that the ills of capitalism arose from the concentrations of ownership creating unjust political power that could further distort the functioning of the market, and envisioned a market-based society where “political functions have been reduced to industrial functions, and that social order arises from nothing but transactions and exchanges” (1979, 11).
Proudhon evinced a technological optimism that Marx would later criticize. From his petty producer standpoint, he believed technology would empower workers by overcoming the division of labor:
Every machine may be defined as a summary of several operations, a simplification of powers, a condensation of labor, a reduction of costs. In all these respects machinery is the counterpart of division. Therefore through machinery will come a restoration of the parcellaire laborer, a decrease of toil for the workman, a fall in the price of his product, a movement in the relation of values, progress towards new discoveries, advancement of the general welfare. ([1847] 2012, 167)
While Proudhon recognized some of the dynamics by which machinery could immiserate workers through deskilling and automating their work, he remained strongly skeptical of organized measures to ameliorate this condition. He rejected compensating the unemployed through taxation because it would “visit ostracism upon new inventions and establish communism by means of the bayonet” ([1847] 2012, 207); he also criticized employing out-of-work laborers in public works programs. Technological development should remain unregulated, leading to eventual positive outcomes: “The guarantee of our liberty lies in the progress of our torture” (209).
Marx’s Critique of Proudhon
Marx, after attempting to influence Proudhon, became one of his most vehement critics, attacking his rival’s arguments, both major and marginal. Marx had a very different understanding of the new industrial society of the nineteenth century. Marx ([1865] 2016) diagnosed his rival’s misrepresentations of capitalism as derived from a particular class basis. Proudhon’s theories emanated “from the standpoint and with the eyes of a French small-holding peasant (later petit bourgeois)” rather than the proletarian, who possesses nothing but labor-power, which must be exchanged for a wage from the capitalist.
Since small producers own their own tools and depend largely on their own labor, they do not perceive any conflict between ownership of the means of production and labor: analysis from this standpoint, such as Proudhon’s, tends to collapse these categories together. Marx’s theorization of capitalism centered an emergent class of industrial proletarians, who, unlike small producers, owned nothing but their ability to sell their labor-power for a wage. Without any other means of survival, the proletarian could not experience the “labor market” as a meeting of equals coming to a mutually beneficial exchange of commodities, but as an abstraction from the concrete truth that working for whatever wage offered was compulsory, rather than a voluntary contract. Further, it was this very market for labor-power that, in the guise of equal exchange of commodities, helped to obscure that capitalist profit depended on extracting value from workers beyond what their wages compensated. This surplus value emerged in the production process, not, as Proudhon argued, at a later point where the goods produced were bought and sold. Without a conception of a contradiction between ownership and labor, the petty producer standpoint cannot see exploitation occurring in production.
Instead, Proudhon saw exploitation occurring after production, during exchanges on the market distorted by unfair monopolies held intact through state intervention, with which petty producers could not compete. However, Marx ([1867] 1992) demonstrated that “monopolies” were simply the outcome of the concentration of capital due to competition: in his memorable wording from Capital, “One capitalist always strikes down many others” (929). As producers compete and more and more producers fail and are proletarianized, capital is held in fewer and fewer hands. In other words, monopolies are a feature, not a bug, of market economies.
Proudhon’s misplaced emphasis on villainous monopolies is part of a greater error in diagnosing the momentous changes in the nineteenth-century economy: a neglect of the centrality of massive industrial-scale production to mature capitalism. In the first volume of Capital, Marx ([1867] 1992) argues that petty production was a historical phenomenon that would give way to capitalist production: “Private property which is personally earned, i.e., which is based, as it were, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent working individual with the conditions of his labour, is supplanted by capitalist private property, which rests on exploitation of alien, but formally free labour” (928). As producers compete and more and more producers fail and are proletarianized, capital—and with it, labor—concentrates.
However, petty production persisted alongside industrial capitalism in ways that masked how the continued existence of the former relies on the latter. Under capitalism, labor, through commodification of labor-power through the wage relationship, is transformed from concrete acts of labor into labor in the abstract in the system of industrial production for exchange. This abstract labor, the basis of surplus value, is for Marx the “specific social form of labour” in capitalism (Murray 2016, 124). Without understanding abstract labor, Proudhon could not perceive how capitalism functioned as not simply a means of producing profit, but a system of structuring all labor in society.
The importance of abstract labor to capitalism also meant that Proudhon’s plans to reform currency by making it worth labor-time would fail. As Marx ([1847] 1973) puts it in his book-length critique of Proudhon, “in large-scale industry, Peter is not free to fix for himself the time of his labor, for Peter’s labor is nothing without the co-operation of all the Peters and all the Pauls who make up the workshop” (77). In other words, because commodities under capitalism are manufactured through a complex division of labor, with different workers exercising differing levels of labor productivity, it is impossible to apportion specific quantities of time to specific labors on individual commodities. Without an understanding of the role of abstract labor to capitalist production, Proudhon could simply not grapple with the actual mechanisms of capitalism’s structuring of labor in society, and so, could not develop plans to overcome it. This overcoming could only occur through a political intervention that sought to organize production from the point of view of its socialization, not, as Proudhon believed, reforming elements of the exchange system to preserve individual producers.
The Roots of Digital Proudhonism
Many of Proudhon’s arguments were revived among digital radicals and reformers during the battles over copyright precipitated by networked digital technologies during the 1990s, of which Napster is the exemplary case. The techno-optimistic belief that the Internet would provide radical democratic change in cultural production took on a highly Proudhonian cast. The internet would “empower creators” by eliminating “middlemen” and “gatekeepers” such as record labels and distributors, who were the ultimate source of exploitation, and allowing exchange to happen on a “peer-to-peer” basis. By subverting the “monopoly” granted by copyright protections, radical change would happen on the basis of increased potential for voluntary market exchange, not political or social revolution.
Siva Vaidhyanathan’s Anarchist in the Library (2005) is a representative example of this argument, and made with explicit appeals to anarchist philosophy. According to Vaidhyanathan, “the new [peer-to-peer] technology evades the professional gatekeepers, flattening the production and distribution pyramid…. Digitization and networking have democratized the production of music” (48). This democratization by peer-to-peer distribution threatens “oligarchic forces such as global entertainment conglomerates” even as it works to “empower artists in new ways and connect communities of fans” (102).
The seeds of Digital Proudhonism were planted earlier than Napster, derived from the beliefs and practices of the Free Software movement. Threatened by intellectual property protections that signaled the corporatization of software development, the academics and amateurs of the Free Software movement developed alternative licenses that would keep software code “open” and thus able to share and build upon by any interested coder. This successfully protected the autonomous and collaborative working practices of the group. The movement’s major success was the Linux operating system, collaboratively built by a distributed team of mostly voluntary programmers who created a free alternative to the proprietary systems of Microsoft and Apple.
Linux indicated to those examining the front lines of technological development that, far from just a software development model, Free Software could actually be an alternative mode of production, and even a harbinger of democratic revolution. The triumph of an unpaid network-based community of programmers creating a free and open product in the face of the IP-dependent monopoly like Microsoft seemed to realize one of Marx’s ([1859] 1911) technologically determinist prophecies from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:
At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—what is but a legal expression of the same thing—with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the era of social revolution. (12)
The Free Software movement provoked a wave of political initiatives and accompanying theorizations of a new digital economy based on what Yochai Benkler (2006) called “commons-based peer production.” With networked personal computers so widely distributed, “[t]he material requirements for effective information production and communication are now owned by numbers of individuals several orders of magnitude larger than the number of owners of the basic means of information production and exchange a mere two decades ago” (4). Suddenly, and almost as if by accident, the means of production were in the hands, not of corporations or states, but of individuals: a perfect encapsulation of the petty producer economy.
The classification of file sharing technologies such as Napster as “peer-to-peer” solidified this view. Napster’s design allowed users to exchange MP3 files by linking “peers” to one another, without storing files on Napster’s own servers. This performed two useful functions. It dispersed the server load for hosting and exchanging files among the computers and connections of Napster’s user base, alleviating what would have been massive bandwidth expenses. It also provided Napster with a defense against charges of infringement, as its own servers were not involved in copying files. This design might offer it protection from the charges that had doomed the site MP3.com, which had hosted user files.
While Napster’s suggestion that corporate structures for the distribution of culture could be supplanted by a voluntary federation of “peers” was important, it was ultimately a mystification. Not only did the courts find Napster liable for facilitating infringement, but the flat, “decentralized” topology of Napster still relied on the company’s central listing service to connect peers. Yet the ideological impact was profound. A law review article by Raymond Ku (2002), the then-director of the Institute of Law, Science & Technology, Seton Hall University School of Law is illustrative of both the nature of the arguments and how widespread and respectable they became in the post-Napster era: “the argument for copyright is primarily an argument for protecting content distributors in a world in which middlemen are obsolete. Copyright is no longer needed to encourage distribution because consumers themselves build and fund the distribution channels for digital content” (263). Clay Shirky’s (2008) paeans to “the mass amateurization of efforts previously reserved for media professionals” sound a similar note (55), presenting a technologically functionalist explanation for the existence of “gatekeeper” media industries: “It used to be hard to move words, images, and sounds from creator to consumer… The commercial viability of most media businesses involves providing those solutions, so preservation of the original problems became an economic imperative. Now, though, the problems of production, reproduction, and distribution are much less serious” (59). This narrative has remained persistent years after the brief flourishing of Napster: “the rise of peer-to-peer distribution systems… make middlemen hard to identify, if not cutting them out of the process altogether” (Kernfeld 2011, 217).
This situation was given an emancipatory political valence by intellectuals associated with copyright reform. Eager to protect an emerging sector of cultural production founded on sampling, remixing and file sharing, they described the accumulation of digital information and media online as a “commons,” which could be treated in an alternative way from forms of private property. Due to the lack of rivalry among digital goods (Benkler 2006, 36), users do not deplete the common stock, and so should benefit from a laxer approach to property rights. Law professor Lawrence Lessig (2004) started an initiative, Creative Commons, dedicated to establishing new licenses that would “build a layer of reasonable copyright on top of the extremes that now reign” (282). Part of Lessig’s argument for Creative Commons classifies media production and distribution, such as making music videos or mashups, as a “form of speech.” Therefore, copyright acted as unjust government regulation, and so must be resisted. “It is always a bad deal for the government to get into the business of regulating speech markets,” Lessig argues, even going so far as to raise the specter of communist authoritarianism: “It is the Soviet Union under Brezhnev” (128). Here Lessig performs a delicate rhetorical sleight of hand: the positioning cultural production as speech, it reifies a vision of such production as emanating from a solitary, individual producer who must remain unencumbered when bringing that speech to market.
Cory Doctorow (2014), a poster child of achievement in the new peer-to-peer world (in Free Culture, Lessig boasts of Doctorow’s successful promotional strategy of giving away electronic copies of his books for free), argues from a pro-market position against middlemen in his latest book: “copyright exists to protect middlemen, retailers, and distributors from being out-negotiated by creators and their investors” (48). While the argument remains the same, some targets have shifted: “investors” are “publishers, studios, record labels” while “intermediaries” are the platforms of distribution: “a distributor, a website like YouTube, a retailer, an e-commerce site like Amazon, a cinema owner, a cable operator, a TV station or network” (27).
While the thrust of these critiques of copyright focus on egregious overreach by the culture industries and their assault upon all manner of benign noncommercial activity, they also reveal a vision of an alternative cultural economy of independent producers who, while not necessarily anti-capitalist, can escape the clutches of massive centralized corporations through networked digital technologies. This facilitates both economic and political freedom via independence from control and regulation, and maximum opportunities on the market. “By giving artists the tools and technologies to take charge of their own production, marketing, and distribution, digitization underscored the disequilibrium of traditional record contracts and offered what for many is a preferable alternative” (Sinnreich 2013, 124). As it so often does, the fusion of ownership and labor characteristic of the petty producer standpoint, the structure of feeling of the independent artisan, articulates itself through the mantra of “Do It Yourself.”
These analyses and polemics reproduce the Proudhonist vision of an alternative to existing digital capitalism. Individual independent creators will achieve political autonomy and economic benefit through the embrace digital network technologies, as long as these creators are allowed to compete fairly with incumbents. Rather than insist on collective regulation of production, Digital Proudhonism seeks forms of deregulation, such as copyright reform, that will chip away at the existence of “monopoly” power of existing media corporations that fetters the market chances of these digital artisans.
Digital Proudhonism Today
Rooted in emergent digital methods of cultural production, the first wave of Digital Proudhonism shored up its petty producer standpoint through a rhetoric that centered the figure of the artist or “creator.” The contemporary term is the more expansive “the creative,” which lionizes a larger share of knowledge workers of the digital economy. As Sarah Brouillette (2009) notes, thinkers from management gurus such as Richard Florida to radical autonomist Marxist theorists such as Paolo Virno “broadly agree that over the past few decades more work has become comparable to artists’ work.” As a kind of practical consciousness, Digital Proudhonism easily spreads through the channels of the so-called “creative class,” its politics and worldview traveling under a host of other endeavors. These initiatives self-consciously seek to realize the ideals of Proudhonism in fields beyond the confines of music and film, with impact in manufacturing, social organization, and finance.
The maker movement is one prominent translation of Digital Proudhonism into a challenge to the contemporary organization of production, with allegedly radical effects on politics and economics. With the advent of new production technologies, such as 3D printers and digital design tools, “makers” can take the democratizing promise of the digital commons into the physical world. Just as digital technology supposedly distributes the means of production of culture across a wider segment of the population, so too will it spread manufacturing blueprints, blowing apart the restrictions of patents the same way Napster tore copyright asunder. “The process of making physical stuff has started to look more like the process of making digital stuff,” claims Chris Anderson (2012), author of Makers: The New Industrial Revolution (25). This has a radical effect: a realization of the goals of socialism via the unfolding of technology and the granting of access. “If Karl Marx were here today, his jaw would be on the floor. Talk about ‘controlling the tools of production’: you (you!) can now set factories into motion with a mouse click” (26). The key to this revolution is the ability of open-source methods to lower costs, thereby fusing the roles of inventor and entrepreneur (27).
Anderson’s “new industrial revolution” is one of a distinctly Proudhonian cast. Digital design tools are “extending manufacturing to a hugely expanded population of producers—the existing manufacturers plus a lot of regular folk who are becoming entrepreneurs” (41). The analogy to the rise of remix culture and amateur production lionized by Lessig is deliberate: “Sound familiar? It’s exactly what happened with the Web” (41). Anderson envisions the maker movement to be akin to the nineteenth century petty producers represented by Proudhon’s views: Cottage industries “were closer to what a Maker-driven New Industrial Revolution might be than are the big factories we normally associate with manufacturing” (49). Anderson’s preference for the small producer over the large factory echoes Proudhon. The subject of this revolution is not the proletarian at work in the large factory, but the artisan who owns their own tools.
A more explicitly radical perspective comes from the avowedly Proudhonist Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS), a “left market anarchist think tank and media center” deeply conversant in libertarian and so-called anarcho-capitalist economic theory. As with Anderson, C4SS subscribes to the techno-utopian potentials for a new arrangement of production driven by digital technology, which has the potential to reduce prices on goods, making them within the reach of anyone (once again, music piracy is held up as a precursor). However, this potential has not been realized because “economic ruling classes are able to enclose the increased efficiencies from new technology as a source of rents mainly through artificial scarcities, artificial property rights, and entry barriers enforced by the state” (Carson 2015a). Monopolies, enforced by the state, have “artificially” distorted free market transactions.
These monopolies, in the form of intellectual property rights, are preventing a proper Proudhonian revolution in which everyone would control their own individual production process. “The main source of continued corporate control of the production process is all those artificial property rights such as patents, trademarks, and business licenses, that give corporations a monopoly on the conditions under which the new technologies can be used” (Carson 2015a). However, once these artificial monopolies are removed, corporations will lose their power and we can have a world of “small neighborhood cooperative shops manufacturing for local barter-exchange networks in return for the output of other shops, of home microbakeries and microbreweries, surplus garden produce, babysitting and barbering, and the like” (Carson 2015a).
This revolution is a quiet one, requiring no strikes or other confrontations with capitalists. Instead, the answer is to create this new economy within the larger one, and hollow it out from the inside:
Seizing an old-style factory and holding it against the forces of the capitalist state is a lot harder than producing knockoffs in a garage factory serving the members of a neighborhood credit-clearing network, or manufacturing open-source spare parts to keep appliances running. As the scale of production shifts from dozens of giant factories owned by three or four manufacturing firms, to hundreds of thousands of independent neighborhood garage factories, patent law will become unenforceable. (Carson 2015b)
As Marx pointed out long ago, such petty producer fantasies of individually owned and operated manufacturing ironically rely upon the massive amounts of surplus generated from proletarians working in large-scale factories. The devices and infrastructures of the internet itself, as described by Nick Dyer-Witheford (2015) in his appropriately titled Cyber-Proletariat, are an obvious example. But proletarian labor also appears in the Digital Proudhonists’ own utopian fantasies. Anderson, describing the change in innovation wrought by the internet, describes how his grandfather’s invention of a sprinkler system would have gone differently. “When it came time to make more than a handful of his designs, he wouldn’t have begged some manufacturer to license his ideas, he would have done it himself. He would have uploaded his design files to companies that could make anything from tens to tens of thousands for him, even drop-shipping them directly to customers” (15). These “companies” of course are staffed by workers very different from “makers,” who work in facilities of mass production. Their labor is obscured by an influential ideology of artisans who believe themselves reliant on nothing but a personal computer and their own creativity.
A recent Guardian column by Paul Mason, anti-capitalist journalist and author of the techno-optimistic Postcapitalism serves as a further example. Mason (2016) argues, similarly to the C4SS, that intellectual property is the glue holding together massive corporations, and the key to their power over production. Simply by giving up on patents, as recommended by Anderson, Proudhonists will outflank capitalism on the market. His example is the “revolutionary” business model of the craft brewery chain BrewDog, who “open-sourced its recipe collection” by releasing the information publicly, unlike its larger corporate competitors. For Mason, this is an astonishing act of economic democracy: armed with BrewDog’s recipes, “All you would need to convert them from homebrew approximations to the actual stuff is a factory, a skilled workforce, some raw materials and a sheaf of legal certifications.” In other words, all that is needed to achieve postcapitalism is capitalism precisely as Marx described it.
The pirate fantasies of subverting monopolies extend beyond the initiatives of makers. The Digital Proudhonist belief in revolutionary change rooted in individual control of production and exchange on markets liberated from incumbents such as corporations and the state drives much of the innovation on the margins of tech. A recent treatise on the digital currency Bitcoin lauds Napster’s ability to “cut out the middlemen,” likening the currency to the file sharing technology (Kelly 2014, 11). “It is a quantum leap in the peer-to-peer network phenomenon. Bitcoin is to value transfer what Napster was to music” (33). Much like the advocates of digital currencies, Proudhon believed that state control of money was an unfair manipulation of the market, and sought to develop alternative currencies and banks rooted in labor-time, a belief that Marx criticized for its misunderstanding of the role of abstract labor in production.
In this way, Proudhon and his beliefs fit naturally into the dominant ideologies surrounding Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies: that economic problems stem from the conspiratorial manipulation of “fiat” currency by national governments and financial organizations such as the Federal Reserve. In light of recent analyses that suggest that Bitcoin functions less as a means of exchange than as a sociotechnical formation to which an array of faulty right-wing beliefs about economics adheres (Golumbia 2016), and the revelation that contemporary fascist groups rely on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency to fund their activities (Ebner 2018), it is clear that Digital Proudhonism exists comfortably beside the most reactionary ideologies. Historically, this was true of Proudhon’s own work as well. As Zeev Sternhell (1996) describes, the early twentieth-century French political organization the Cercle Proudhon were captivated by Proudhon’s opposition to Marxism, his distaste for democracy, and his anti-Semitism. According to Sternhell, the group was an influential source of French proto-fascist thought.
Alternatives
The goal of this paper is not to question the creativity of remix culture or the maker movement, or to indict their potentials for artistic expression, or negate all their criticisms of intellectual property. What I wish to criticize is the outsized economic and political claims made about it. These claims have an impact on policy, such as Obama’s “Nation of Makers” initiative (The White House Office of the Press Secretary 2016), which draws upon numerous federal agencies, hundreds of schools, as well as educational product companies to spark “a renaissance of American manufacturing and hardware innovation.” But further, like Marx, I not only think Proudhonism rests on incorrect analyses of cultural labor, but that such ideas lead to bad politics. As Astra Taylor (2014) extensively documents in The People’s Platform, for all the exclamations of new opportunities with the end of middlemen and gatekeepers, the creative economy is as difficult as it ever was for artists to navigate, noting that writers like Lessig have replaced the critique of the commodification of culture with arguments about state and corporate control (26-7). Meanwhile, many of the fruits of this disintermediation have been plucked by an exploitative “sharing economy” whose platforms use “peer-to-peer” to subvert all manner of regulations; at least one commentator has invoked Napster’s storied ability to “cut out the middlemen” to describe AirBnB and Uber (Karabel 2014).
Digital Proudhonism and its vision of federations of independent individual producers and creators (perhaps now augmented with the latest cryptographic tools) dominates the imagination of a radical challenge to digital capitalism. Its critiques of the corporate internet have become common sense. What kind of alternative radical vision is possible? Here I believe it is useful to return to the core of Marx’s critique of Proudhon.
Marx saw that the unromantic labor of proletarians, combining varying levels of individual productivity within the factory through machines which themselves are the product of social labor, capitalism’s dynamics create a historically novel form of production—social production—along with new forms of culture and social relations. For Marx ([1867] 1992), this was potentially the basis for an economy beyond capitalism. To attempt to move “back” to individual production was reactionary: “As soon as the workers are turned into proletarians, and their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialization of labour and further transformation of the soil and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, communal means of production takes on a new form” (928).
The socialization of production under the development of the means of production—the necessity of greater collaboration and the reliance on past labors in the form of machines—gives way to a radical redefinition of the relationship to one’s output. No one can claim a product was made by them alone; rather, production demands to be recognized as social. Describing the socialization of labor through industrialization in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels ([1880] 2008) states, “The yarn, the cloth, the metal articles that now came out of the factory were the joint product of many workers, through whose hands they had successively to pass before they were ready. No one person could say of them: ‘I made that; this is my product’” (56). To put it in the language of cultural production, there can be no author. Or, in another implicit recognition that the work of today relies on the work of many others, past and present: everything is a remix.
Or instead of a remix, a “vortex,” to use the language of Nick Dyer-Witheford (2015), whose Cyber-Proletariat reminds us that the often-romanticized labor of digital creators and makers is but one stratum among many that makes up digital culture. The creative economy is a relatively privileged sector in an immense global “factory” made up of layers of formal and informal workers operating at the point of production, distribution and consumption, from tantalum mining to device manufacture to call center work to app development. The romance of “DIY” obscures the reality that nothing digital is done by oneself: it is always already a component of a larger formation of socialized labor.
The labor of digital creatives and innovators, sutured as it is to a technical apparatus fashioned from dead labor and meant for producing commodities for profit, is therefore already socialized. While some of this socialization is apparent in peer production, much of it is mystified through the real abstraction of commodity fetishism, which masks socialization under wage relations and contracts. Rather than further rely on these contracts to better benefit digital artisans, a Marxist politics of digital culture would begin from the fact of socialization, and as Radhika Desai (2011) argues, take seriously Marx’s call for “a general organization of labour in society” via political organizations such as unions and labor parties (212). Creative workers could align with others in the production chain as a class of laborers rather than as an assortment of individual producers, and form the kinds of organizations, such as unions, that have been the vehicles of class politics, with the aim of controlling society’s means of production, not simply one’s “own” tools or products. These would be bonds of solidarity, not bonds of market transactions. Then the apparatus of digital cultural production might be controlled democratically, rather than by the despotism of markets and private profit.
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Gavin Mueller Gavin Mueller holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from George Mason University. He teaches in the New Media and Digital Culture program at the University of Amsterdam.
[1]The Pirate Bay, the largest and most antagonistic site of the peer-to-peer movement, has founders who identified as libertarian, socialist, and apolitical, respectively, and acquired funding from Carl Lundström, an entrepreneur associated with far-right movements (Schwartz 2014, 142).
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Works Cited
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Lessig, Lawrence. 2008. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the New Economy. New York: Penguin.
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Marx, Karl. (1867) 1992. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Books.
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Charlie Brooker’s acclaimed British techno-dystopian television series, Black Mirror, returned last year in a more American-friendly form. The third season, now broadcast on Netflix, opened with “Nosedive,” a satirical depiction of a recognizable near future when user-generated social media scores—on the model of Yelp reviews, Facebook likes, and Twitter retweets—determine life chances, including access to basic services, such as housing, credit, and jobs. The show follows striver Lacie Pound—played by Bryce Howard—who, in seeking to boost her solid 4.2 life score, ends up inadvertently wiping out all of her points, in the nosedive named by the episode’s title. Brooker offers his viewers a nightmare variation on a now familiar online reality, as Lacie rates every human interaction and is rated in turn, to disastrous result. And this nightmare is not so far from the case, as online reputational hierarchies increasingly determine access to precarious employment opportunities. We can see this process in today’s so-called sharing economy, in which user approval determines how many rides will go to the Uber driver, or if the room you are renting on Airbnb, in order to pay your own exorbitant rent, gets rented.
Brooker grappled with similar themes during the show’s first season; for example, “Fifteen Million Merits” shows us a future world of human beings forced to spend their time on exercise bikes, presumably in order to generate power plus the “merits” that function as currency, even as they are forced to watch non-stop television, advertisements included. It is television—specifically a talent show—that offers an apparent escape to the episode’s protagonists. Brooker revisits these concerns—which combine anxieties regarding new media and ecological collapse in the context of a viciously unequal society—in the final episode of the new season, entitled “Hated in the Nation,” which features robotic bees, built for pollination in a world after colony collapse, that are hacked and turned to murderous use. Here is an apt metaphor for the virtual swarming that characterizes so much online interaction.
Black Mirror corresponds to what literary critic Tom Moylan calls a “critical dystopia.” [1] Rather than a simple exercise in pessimism or anti-utopianism, Moylan argues that critical dystopias, like their utopian counterparts, also offer emancipatory political possibilities in exposing the limits of our social and political status quo, such as the naïve techno-optimism that is certainly one object of Brooker’s satirical anatomies. Brooker in this way does what Jacobin Magazine editor and social critic Peter Frase claims to do in his Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, a speculative exercise in “social science fiction” that uses utopian and dystopian science fiction as means to explore what might come after global capitalism. Ironically, Frase includes both online reputational hierarchies and robotic bees in his two utopian scenarios: one of the more dramatic, if perhaps inadvertent, ways that Frase collapses dystopian into utopian futures
Frase echoes the opening lines of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto as he describes the twin “specters of ecological catastrophe and automation” that haunt any possible post-capitalist future. While total automation threatens to make human workers obsolete, the global planetary crisis threatens life on earth, as we have known it for the past 12000 years or so. Frase contends that we are facing a “crisis of scarcity and a crisis of abundance at the same time,” making our moment one “full of promise and danger.” [2]
The attentive reader can already see in this introductory framework the too-often unargued assumptions and easy dichotomies that characterize the book as a whole. For example, why is total automation plausible in the next 25 years, according to Frase, who largely supports this claim by drawing on the breathless pronouncements of a technophilic business press that has made similar promises for nearly a hundred years? And why does automation equal abundance—assuming the more egalitarian social order that Frase alternately calls “communism” or “socialism”—especially when we consider the ecological crisis Frase invokes as one of his two specters? This crisis is very much bound to an energy-intensive technosphere that is already pushing against several of the planetary boundaries that make for a habitable planet; total automation would expand this same technosphere by several orders of magnitude, requiring that much more energy, materials, and environmental sinks to absorb tomorrow’s life-sized iPhone or their corpses. Frase deliberately avoids these empirical questions—and the various debates among economists, environmental scientists and computer programmers about the feasibility of AI, the extent to which automation is actually displacing workers, and the ecological limits to technological growth, at least as technology is currently constituted—by offering his work as the “social science fiction” mentioned above, perhaps in the vein of Black Mirror. He distinguishes this method from futurism or prediction, as he writes, “science fiction is to futurism as social theory is to conspiracy theory.” [3]
In one of his few direct citations, Frase invokes Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson, who argues that conspiracy theory and its fictions are ideologically distorted attempts to map an elusive and opaque global capitalism: “Conspiracy, one is tempted to say, is the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is the degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content.” [4] For Jameson, a more comprehensive cognitive map of our planetary capitalist civilization necessitates new forms of representation to better capture and perhaps undo our seemingly eternal and immovable status quo. In the words of McKenzie Wark, Jameson proposes nothing less than a “theoretical-aesthetic practice of correlating the field of culture with the field of political economy.” [5] And it is possibly with this “theoretical-aesthetic practice” in mind that Frase turns to science fiction as his preferred tool of social analysis.
The book accordingly proceeds in the way of a grid organized around the coordinates “abundance/scarcity” and “egalitarianism/hierarchy”—in another echo of Jameson, namely his structuralist penchant for Greimas squares. Hence we get abundance with egalitarianism, or “communism,” followed by its dystopian counterpart, rentism, or hierarchical plenty in the first two futures; similarly, the final futures move from an equitable scarcity, or “socialism” to a hierarchical and apocalyptic “exterminism.” Each of these chapters begins with a science fiction, ranging from an ostensibly communist Star Trek to the exterminationist visions presented in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, upon which Frase builds his various future scenarios. These scenarios are more often than not commentaries on present day phenomena, such as 3D printers or the sharing economy, or advocacy for various measures, like a Universal Basic Income, which Frase presents as the key to achieving his desired communist future.
With each of his futures anchored in a literary (or cinematic, or televisual) science fiction narrative, Frase’s speculations rely on imaginative literature, even as he avoids any explicit engagement with literary criticism and theory, such as the aforementioned work of Jameson. Jameson famously argues (see Jameson 1982, and the more elaborated later versions in texts such as Jameson 2005) that the utopian text, beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia, simultaneously offers a mystified version of dominant social relations and an imaginative space for rehearsing radically different forms of sociality. But this dialectic of ideology and utopia is absent from Frase’s analysis, where his select space operas are all good or all bad: either the Jetsons or Elysium.
And, in a marked contrast with Jameson’s symptomatic readings, some science fiction is for Frase more equal than others when it comes to radical sociological speculation, as evinced by his contrasting views of George Lucas’s Star Wars and Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek. According to Frase, in “Star Wars, you don’t really care about the particularities of the galactic political economy,” while in Star Trek, “these details actually matter. Even though Star Trek and Star Wars might superficially look like similar tales of space travel and swashbuckling, they are fundamentally different types of fiction. The former exists only for its characters and its mythic narrative, while the latter wants to root its characters in a richly and logically structured social world.” [6]
Frase here understates his investment in Star Trek, whose “structured social world” is later revealed as his ideal-type for a high tech fully automated luxury communism, while Star Wars is relegated to the role of the space fantasy foil. But surely the original Star Wars is at least an anticolonial allegory, in which a ragtag rebel alliance faces off against a technologically superior evil empire, that was intentionally inspired by the Vietnam War. Lucas turned to the space opera after he lost his bid to direct Apocalypse Now—which was originally based on Lucas’s own idea. According to one account of the franchise’s genesis, “the Vietnam War, which was an asymmetric conflict with a huge power unable to prevail against guerrilla fighters, instead became an influence on Star Wars. As Lucas later said, ‘A lot of my interest in Apocalypse Now carried over into Star Wars.” [7]
Texts—literary, cinematic, and otherwise—often combine progressive and reactionary, utopian and ideological elements. Yet it is precisely the mixed character of speculative narrative that Frase ignores throughout his analysis, reducing each of his literary examples to unequivocally good or bad, utopian or dystopian, blueprints for “life after capitalism.” Why anchor radical social analysis in various science fictions while refusing basic interpretive argument? As with so much else in Four Futures, Frase uses assumption—asserting that Star Trek has one specific political valence or that total automation guided by advanced AI is an inevitability within 25 years—in the service of his preferred policy outcomes (and the nightmare scenarios that function as the only alternatives to those outcomes), while avoiding engagement with debates related to technology, ecology, labor, and the utopian imagination.
Frase in this way evacuates the politically progressive and critical utopian dimensions from George Lucas’s franchise, elevating the escapist and reactionary dimensions that represent the ideological, as opposed to the utopian, pole of this fantasy. Frase similarly ignores the ideological elements of Roddenberry’s Star Trek: “The communistic quality of the Star Trek universe is often obscured because the films and TV shows are centered on the military hierarchy of Starfleet, which explores the galaxy and comes into conflict with alien races. But even this seems largely a voluntarily chosen hierarchy.” [8]
Frase’s focus, regarding Star Trek, is almost entirely on the replicators that can make something, anything, from nothing, so that Captain Picard, from the eighties era series reboot, orders a “cup of Earl Grey, hot,” from one of these magical machines, and immediately receives Earl Grey, hot. Frase equates our present-day 3D printers with these same replicators over the course of all his four futures, despite the fact that unlike replicators, 3D printers require inputs: they do not make matter, but shape it.
3D printing encompasses a variety of processes in which would-be makers create an image with a computer and CAD (computer aided design) software, which in turn provides a blueprint for the three-dimensional object to be “printed.” This requires either the addition of material—usually plastic—and the injection of that material into a mould. The most basic type of 3D printing involves heating “(plastic, glue-based) material that is then extruded through a nozzle. The nozzle is attached to an apparatus similar to a normal 2D ink-jet printer, just that it moves up and down, as well. The material is put on layer over layer. The technology is not substantially different from ink-jet printing, it only requires slightly more powerful computing electronics and a material with the right melting and extrusion qualities.” [9] This is still the most affordable and pervasive way to make objects with 3D printers—most often used to make small models and components. It is also the version of 3D printing that lends itself to celebratory narratives of post-industrial techno-artisanal home manufacture pushed by industry cheerleaders and enthusiasts alike. Yet, the more elaborate versions of 3D printing—“printing’ everything from complex machinery to food to human organs—rely on the more complex and expensive industrial versions of the technology that require lasers (e.g., stereolithography and selective laser sintering). Frase espouses a particular left techno-utopian line that sees the end of mass production in 3D printing—especially with the free circulation of the programs for various products outside of our intellectual property regime; this is how he distinguishes his communist utopia from the dystopian rentism that most resembles our current moment, with material abundance taken for granted. And it is this fantasy of material abundance and post-work/post-worker production that presumably appeals to Frase, who describes himself as an advocate of “enlightened Luddism.”
This is an inadvertently ironic characterization, considering the extent to which these emancipatory claims conceal and distort the labor discipline imperative that is central to the shape and development of this technology, as Johan Söderberg argues, “we need to put enthusiastic claims for 3D printers into perspective. One claim is that laid-off American workers can find a new source of income by selling printed goods over the Internet, which will be an improvement, as degraded factory jobs are replaced with more creative employment opportunities. But factory jobs were not always monotonous. They were deliberately made so, in no small part through the introduction of the same technology that is expected to restore craftsmanship. ‘Makers’ should be seen as the historical result of the negation of the workers’ movement.” [10]
Söderberg draws on the work of David Noble, who outlines how the numerical control technology central to the growth of post-war factory automation was developed specifically to de-skill and dis-empower workers during the Cold War period. Unlike Frase, both of these authors foreground those social relations, which include capital’s need to more thoroughly exploit and dominate labor, embedded in the architecture of complex megatechnical systems, from factory automation to 3D printers. In collapsing 3D printers into Star Trek-style replicators, Frase avoids these questions as well as the more immediately salient issue of resource constraints that should occupy any prognostication that takes the environmental crisis seriously.
The replicator is the key to Frase’s dream of endless abundance on the model of post-war US style consumer affluence and the end of all human labor. But, rather than a simple blueprint for utopia, Star Trek’s juxtaposition of techno-abundance with military hierarchy and a tacitly expansionist galactic empire—despite the show’s depiction of a Starfleet “prime directive” that forbids direct intervention into the affairs of the extraterrestrial civilizations encountered by the federation’s starships, the Enterprise’s crew, like its ostensibly benevolent US original, almost always intervenes—is significant. The original Star Trek is arguably a liberal iteration of Kennedy-era US exceptionalism, and reflects a moment in which relatively wide-spread first world abundance was underwritten by the deliberate underdevelopment, appropriation, and exploitation of various “alien races’” resources, land, and labor abroad. Abundance in fact comes from somewhere and some one.
As historian H. Bruce Franklin argues, the original series reflects US Cold War liberalism, which combined Roddenberry’s progressive stances regarding racial inclusion within the parameters of the United States and its Starfleet doppelganger, with a tacitly anti-communist expansionist viewpoint, so that the show’s Klingon villains often serve as proxies for the Soviet menace. Franklin accordingly charts the show’s depictions of the Vietnam War, moving from a pro-war and pro-American stance to a mildly anti-war position in the wake of the Tet Offensive over the course of several episodes: “The first of these two episodes, ‘The City on the Edge of Forever‘ and ‘A Private Little War,’ had suggested that the Vietnam War was merely an unpleasant necessity on the way to the future dramatized by Star Trek. But the last two, ‘The Omega Glory‘ and ‘Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,’ broadcast in the period between March 1968 and January 1969, are so thoroughly infused with the desperation of the period that they openly call for a radical change of historic course, including an end to the Vietnam War and to the war at home.” [11]
Perhaps Frase’s inattention to Jameson’s dialectic of ideology and utopia reflects a too-literal approach to these fantastical narratives, even as he proffers them as valid tools for radical political and social analysis. We could see in this inattention a bit too much of the fan-boy’s enthusiasm, which is also evinced by the rather narrow and backward-looking focus on post-war space operas to the exclusion of the self-consciously radical science fiction narratives of Ursula LeGuin, Samuel Delany, and Octavia Butler, among others. These writers use the tropes of speculative fiction to imagine profoundly different social relations that are the end-goal of all emancipatory movements. In place of emancipated social relations, Frase too often relies on technology and his readings must in turn be read with these limitations in mind.
Unlike the best speculative fiction, utopian or dystopian, Frase’s “social science fiction” too often avoids the question of social relations—including the social relations embedded in the complex megatechnical systems Frase takes for granted as neutral forces of production. He accordingly announces at the outset of his exercise: “I will make the strongest assumption possible: all need for human labor in the production process can be eliminated, and it is possible to live a life of pure leisure while machines do all the work.” [12] The science fiction trope effectively absolves Frase from engagement with the technological, ecological, or social feasibility of these predictions, even as he announces his ideological affinities with a certain version of post- and anti-work politics that breaks with orthodox Marxism and its socialist variants.
Frase’s Jetsonian vision of the future resonates with various futurist currents that can we now see across the political spectrum, from the Silicon Valley Singulitarianism of Ray Kurzweil or Elon Musk, on the right, to various neo-Promethean currents on the left, including so-called “left accelerationism.” Frase defends his assumption as a desire “to avoid long-standing debates about post-capitalist organization of the production process.” While such a strict delimitation is permissible for speculative fiction—an imaginative exercise regarding what is logically possible, including time travel or immortality—Frase specifically offers science fiction as a mode of social analysis, which presumably entails grappling with rather than avoiding current debates on labor, automation, and the production process.
Ruth Levitas, in her 2013 book Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society, offers a more rigorous definition of social science fiction via her eponymous “utopia as method.” This method combines sociological analysis and imaginative speculation, which Levitas defends as “holistic. Unlike political philosophy and political theory, which have been more open than sociology to normative approaches, this holism is expressed at the level of concrete social institutions and processes.” [13] But that attentiveness to concrete social institutions and practices combined with counterfactual speculation regarding another kind of human social world are exactly what is missing in Four Futures. Frase uses grand speculative assumptions-such as the inevitable rise of human-like AI or the complete disappearance of human labor, all within 25 years or so—in order to avoid significant debates that are ironically much more present in purely fictional works, such as the aforementioned Black Mirror or the novels of Kim Stanley Robinson, than in his own overtly non-fictional speculations. From the standpoint of radical literary criticism and radical social theory, Four Futures is wanting. It fails as analysis. And, if one primary purpose of utopian speculation, in its positive and negative forms, is to open an imaginative space in which wholly other forms of human social relations can be entertained, Frase’s speculative exercise also exhibits a revealing paucity of imagination.
This is most evident in Frase’s most explicitly utopian future, which he calls “communism,” without any mention of class struggle, the collective ownership of the means of production, or any of the other elements we usually associate with “communism”; instead, 3D printers-cum-replicators will produce whatever you need whenever you need it at home, an individualizing techno-solution to the problem of labor, production, and its organization that resembles alchemy in its indifference to material reality and the scarce material inputs required by 3D printers. Frase proffers a magical vision of technology so as to avoid grappling with the question of social relations; even more than this, in the coda to this chapter, Frase reveals the extent to which current patterns of social organization and stratification remain under Frase’s “communism.” Frase begins this coda with a question: “in a communist society, what do we do all day?” To which he responds: “The kind of communism I’ve described is sometimes mistakenly construed, by both its critics and its adherents, as a society in which hierarchy and conflict are wholly absent. But rather than see the abolition of the capital-wage relation as a single shot solution to all possible social problems, it is perhaps better to think of it in the terms used by political scientist, Corey Robin, as a way to ‘convert hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness.’” [14]
Frase goes on to argue—rightly—that the abolition of class society or wage labor will not put an end to a variety of other oppressions, such as those based in gender and racial stratification; he in this way departs from the class reductionist tendencies sometimes on view in the magazine he edits. His invocation of Corey Robin is nonetheless odd considering the Promethean tenor of Frase’s preferred futures. Robin contends that while the end of exploitation, and capitalist social relations, would remove the major obstacle to human flourishing, human beings will remain finite and fragile creatures in a finite and fragile world. Robin in this way overlaps with Fredric Jameson’s remarkable essay on Soviet writer Andre Platonov’s Chevengur, in which Jameson writes: “Utopia is merely the political and social solution of collective life: it does not do away with the tensions and inherent contradictions inherent in both interpersonal relations and in bodily existence itself (among them, those of sexuality), but rather exacerbates those and allows them free rein, by removing the artificial miseries of money and self-preservation [since] it is not the function of Utopia to bring the dead back to life nor abolish death in the first place.” [15] Both Jameson and Robin recall Frankfurt School thinker Herbert Marcuse’s distinction between necessary and surplus repression: while the latter encompasses all of the unnecessary miseries attendant upon a class stratified form of social organization that runs on exploitation, the former represents the necessary adjustments we make to socio-material reality and its limits.
It is telling that while Star Trek-style replicators fall within the purview of the possible for Frase, hierarchy, like death, will always be with us, since he at least initially argues that status hierarchies will persist after the “organizing force of the capital relation has been removed” (59). Frase oscillates between describing these status hierarchies as an unavoidable, if unpleasant, necessity and a desirable counter to the uniformity of an egalitarian society. Frase illustrates this point in recalling Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom, a dystopian novel that depicts a world where all people’s needs are met at the same time that everyone competes for reputational “points”—called Whuffie—on the model of Facebook “likes” and Twitter retweets. Frase’s communism here resembles the world of Black Mirror described above. Although Frase shifts from the rhetoric of necessity to qualified praise in an extended discussion of Dogecoin, an alternative currency used to tip or “transfer a small number of to another Internet user in appreciation of their witty and helpful contributions” (60). Yet Dogecoin, among all cryptocurrencies, is mostly a joke, and like many cryptocurrencies is one whose “decentralized” nature scammers have used to their own advantage, most famously in 2015. In the words of one former enthusiast: “Unfortunately, the whole ordeal really deflated my enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies. I experimented, I got burned, and I’m moving on to less gimmicky enterprises.” [16]
But how is this dystopian scenario either necessary or desirable? Frase contends that “the communist society I’ve sketched here, though imperfect, is at least one in which conflict is no longer based in the opposition between wage workers and capitalists or on struggles…over scarce resources” (67). His account of how capitalism might be overthrown—through a guaranteed universal income—is insufficient, while resource scarcity and its relationship to techno-abundance remains unaddressed in a book that purports to take the environmental crisis seriously. What is of more immediate interest in the case of this coda to his most explicitly utopian future is Frase’s non-recognition of how internet status hierarchies and alternative currencies are modeled on and work in tandem with capitalist logics of entrepreneurial selfhood. We might consider Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social and cultural capital in this regard, or how these digital platforms and their ever-shifting reputational hierarchies are the foundation of what Jodi Dean calls “communicative capitalism.” [17]
Yet Frase concludes his chapter by telling his readers that it would be a “misnomer” to call his communist future an “egalitarian configuration.” Perhaps Frase offers his fully automated Facebook utopia as counterpoint to the Cold War era critique of utopianism in general and communism in particular: it leads to grey uniformity and universal mediocrity. This response—a variation on Frase’s earlier discussion of Star Trek’s “voluntary hierarchy”—accepts the premise of the Cold War anti-utopian criticisms, i.e., how the human differences that make life interesting, and generate new possibilities, require hierarchy of some kind. In other words, this exercise in utopian speculation cannot move outside the horizon of our own present day ideological common sense.
We can again see this tendency at the very start of the book. Is total automation an unambiguous utopia or a reflection of Frase’s own unexamined ideological proclivities, on view throughout the various futures, for high tech solutions to complex socio-ecological problems? For various flavors of deus ex machina—from 3D printers to replicators to robotic bees—in place of social actors changing the material realities that constrain them through collective action? Conversely, are the “crisis of scarcity” and the visions of ecological apocalypse Frase evokes intermittently throughout his book purely dystopian or ideological? Surely, since Thomas Malthus’s 1798 Essay on Population, apologists for various ruling orders have used the threat of scarcity and material limits to justify inequity, exploitation, and class division: poverty is “natural.” Yet, can’t we also discern in contemporary visions of apocalypse a radical desire to break with a stagnant capitalist status quo? And in the case of the environmental state of emergency, don’t we have a rallying point for constructing a very different eco-socialist order?
Frase is a founding editor of Jacobin magazine and a long-time member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He nonetheless distinguishes himself from the reformist and electoral currents at those organizations, in addition to much of what passes for orthodox Marxism. Rather than full employment—for example—Frase calls for the abolition of work and the working class in a way that echoes more radical anti-work and post-workerist modes of communist theory. So, in a recent editorial published by Jacobin, entitled “What It Means to Be on the Left,” Frase differentiates himself from many of his DSA comrades in declaring that “The socialist project, for me, is about something more than just immediate demands for more jobs, or higher wages, or universal social programs, or shorter hours. It’s about those things. But it’s also about transcending, and abolishing, much of what we think defines our identities and our way of life.” Frase goes on to sketch an emphatically utopian communist horizon that includes the abolition of class, race, and gender as such. These are laudable positions, especially when we consider a new new left milieu some of whose most visible representatives dismiss race and gender concerns as “identity politics,” while redefining radical class politics as a better deal for some amorphous US working class within an apparently perennial capitalist status quo.
Frase’s utopianism in this way represents an important counterpoint within this emergent left. Yet his book-length speculative exercise—policy proposals cloaked as possible scenarios—reveals his own enduring investments in the simple “forces vs. relations of production” dichotomy that underwrote so much of twentieth century state socialism with its disastrous ecological record and human cost. And this simple faith in the emancipatory potential of capitalist technology—given the right political circumstances despite the complete absence of what creating those circumstances might entail— frequently resembles a social democratic version of the Californian ideology or the kind of Silicon Valley conventional wisdom pushed by Elon Musk. This is a more efficient, egalitarian, and techno-utopian version of US capitalism. Frase mines various left communist currents, from post-operaismo to communization, only to evacuate these currents of their radical charge in marrying them to technocratic and technophilic reformism, hence UBI plus “replicators” will spontaneously lead to full communism. Four Futures is in this way an important, because symptomatic, expression of what Jason Smith (2017) calls “social democratic accelerationism,” animated by a strange faith in magical machines in addition to a disturbing animus toward ecology, non-human life, and the natural world in general.
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Anthony Galluzzo earned his PhD in English Literature at UCLA. He specializes in radical transatlantic English language literary cultures of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries. He has taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Colby College, and NYU.
[4] Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping.” In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 6.
[7] This space fantasy also exhibits the escapist, mythopoetic, and even reactionary elements Frase notes—for example, its hereditary caste of Jedi fighters and their ancient religion—as Benjamin Hufbauer notes, “in many ways, the political meanings in Star Wars were and are progressive, but in other ways the film can be described as middle-of-the-road, or even conservative. Hufbauer, “The Politics Behind the Original Star Wars,” Los Angeles Review of Books (December 21, 2015).
In recent months I’ve remained quiet about the speculative turn, mostly because I’m reticent to rekindle the “Internet war” that broke out a couple of years ago mostly on blogs but also in various published papers. And while I’ve taught accelerationism in my recent graduate seminars, I opted for radio silence when accelerationism first appeared on the scene through the Accelerationist Manifesto, followed later by the book Inventing the Future. Truth is I have mixed feelings about accelerationism. Part of me wants to send “comradely greetings” to a team of well-meaning fellow Marxists and leave it at that. Lord knows the left needs to stick together. Likewise there’s little I can add that people like Steven Shaviro and McKenzie Wark haven’t already written, and articulated much better than I could. But at the same time a number of difficulties remain that are increasingly hard to overlook. To begin I might simply echo Wark’s original assessment of the Accelerationist Manifesto: two cheers for accelerationism, but only two!
What’s good about accelerationism? And what’s bad? I love the ambition and scope. Certainly the accelerationists’ willingness to challenge leftist orthodoxies is refreshing. I also like how the accelerationists demand that we take technology and science seriously. And I also agree that there are important tactical uses of accelerationist or otherwise hypertrophic interventions (Eugene Thacker and I have referred to them as exploits). Still I see accelerationism essentially as a tactic mistaken for a strategy. At the same time this kind of accelerationism is precisely what dot-com entrepreneurs want to see from the left. Further, and ultimately most important, accelerationism is paternalistic and thus suffers from the problems of elitism and ultimately reactionary politics.
Let me explain. I’ll talk first about Srnicek and Williams’ 2015 book Inventing the Future, and then address one of the central themes fueling the accelerationist juggernaut, Prometheanism. Well written, easy to read, and exhaustively footnoted, Inventing the Future is ostensibly a follow up to the Accelerationist Manifesto, although the themes of the two texts are different and they almost never mention accelerationism in the book. (Srnicek in particular is nothing if not shrewd and agile: present at the christening of #A, we also find him on the masthead of the speculative realist reader, and today nosing in on “platform studies.” Wherever he alights next will doubtless portend future significance.) The book is vaguely similar to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Declaration from 2012 in that it tries to assess the current condition of the left while also providing a set of specific steps to be taken for the future. And while the accelerationists have garnered significantly more attention of late, mostly because it feels so fresh and new, Hardt and Negri’s is the better book (and interestingly Srnicek and Williams never cite them).
Inventing the Future has essentially two themes. The first consists in a series of denunciations of what they call “folk politics” defined in terms of Occupy, the Zapatistas, Tiqqun, localism, and direct democracy, ostensibly in favor of a new “hegemony” of planetary social democracy (also known as Leninism). The second theme concerns an anti-work polemic focused on the universal basic income (UBI) and shortening the work week. Indeed even as these two authors collaborate and mix their thoughts, there seem to be two books mixed together into one. This produces an interesting irony: while the first half of the book unabashedly denigrates anarchism in favor of Leninism, the second half of the book focuses on that very theme (anti-work) that has defined anarchist theory since the split in the First International, if not since time immemorial.
What’s so wrong with “folk politics”? There are a few ways to answer this question. First the accelerationists are clearly frustrated by the failures of the left, and rightly so, a left debilitated by “apathy, melancholy and defeat” (5). There’s a demographic explanation as well. This is the cri de coeur of a younger generation seeking to move beyond what are seen as the sclerotic failures of postmodern theory with all of its “culturalist” baggage (which too often is a codeword for punks, queers, women, and people of color — more on that in a moment).
Folk politics includes “the fetishization of local spaces, immediate actions, transient gestures, and particularisms of all kinds” (3); it privileges the “small-scale, the authentic, the traditional and the natural” (10). The following virtues help fill out the definition:
immediacy…tactics…inherently fleeting…the past…the voluntarist and spontaneous…the small…withdrawal or exit…the everyday…feeling…the particular…the ethical…the suffering of the particular and the authenticity of the local (10-11)
Wow, that’s a lot of good stuff to get rid of. Still, they don’t quit there, targeting horizontalism of various kinds. Radical democracy is in the crosshairs too. Anti-representational politics is out as well. All the “from below” movements, from the undercommons to the black bloc, anything that smacks of “anarchism, council communism, libertarian communism and autonomism” (26) — it’s all under indictment. This unceasing polemic culminates in the book’s most potent sentence, if not also its most ridiculous, where the authors dismiss all of the following movements in one fell swoop:
Occupy, Spain’s 15M, student occupations, left communist insurrectionists like Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee, most forms of horizontalism, the Zapatistas…localism…slow-food (11-12)
That scoops up a lot of people. And the reader is left to quibble over whatever principal of decision might group all these disparate factions together. But the larger point is clear: for Srnicek and Williams folk politics emerged because of an outdated Left (i.e. the abject failures of social democracy and communism) (16-), and an outmaneuvered Left (i.e. the rampant successes of neoliberalism) (19-). Thus their goal is to update the left with a new ideology, and overhaul its infrastructure allowing it to modernize and scale up to the level of the planet.
In the second half of the book, particularly in chapters 5 and 6, Srnicek and Williams elaborate their vision for anti-work and post-work. This hinges on the concept of full automation, and they provocatively assert that “the tendencies towards automation and the replacement of human labor should be enthusiastically accelerated” (109). Yet the details are scant. What kind of tech are we talking about? We get some vague references at the outset to “Open-source designs, copyleft creativity, and 3D printing” (1), then again later to “data collection (radio-frequency identification, big data)” and so on (110). But one thing this book does not provide is an examination of the technology of modern capitalism. (Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism is an improvement thematically but not substantively: he provides an analysis of political economy, but no tech audit.) Thus Inventing the Future has a sort of Wizard of Oz problem at its core. It’s not clear what clever devices are behind the curtain, we’re just supposed to assume that they will be sufficiently communistical if we all believe hard enough.
At the same time the authors come across as rather tone deaf on the question of labor, bemoaning above all “the misery of not being exploited,” as if exploitation is some grand prize awarded to the subaltern. Further, they fail to address adequately the two key challenges of automation, both of which have been widely discussed in political and economic theory: first that automation eliminates jobs for people who very much want and need them, leading to surplus populations, unemployment, migration, and intrenched poverty; and second that automation transforms the organic composition of labor through deskilling and proletarianization, the offshoring of menial labor, and the introduction of technical and specialist labor required to design, build, operate, and repair those seemingly “automagical” machines. In other words, under automation some people work less, but everyone works differently. Automation reduces work for some, but changes (and in fact often increases) work for others. Marx’s analysis of machines in Capital is useful here, where he addresses all of these various tendencies, from the elimination of labor and the increase in labor, to the transformation of the organic composition of labor — the last point being the most significant. (And while machines might help lubricate and increase the productive forces — not a bad thing — it’s clear that machines are absolutely not revolutionary actors for Marx. Optimistic interpretations gleaned from the Grundrisse notwithstanding, Marx defines machines essentially as large batteries for value. I have yet to find any evidence that today’s machines are any different.)
So the devil is in the details: what kind of technology are we talking about? But perhaps more importantly, if you get rid of the “folk,” aren’t you also getting rid of the people? Srnicek and Williams try to address this in chapter 8, although I’m more convinced by Hardt and Negri’s “multitude,” Harney and Moten’s “undercommons,” or even formulations like “the part of no part” or the “inoperative community” found scattered across a variety of other texts. By the end Srnicek and Williams out themselves as reticular pessimists: let’s not specify “the proper form of organization” (162), let’s just let it happen naturally in an “ecology of organizations” (163). The irony being that we’re back to square one, and these anti-folk evangelists are hippy ecologists after all. (The reference to function over form [169] appears as a weak afterthought to help rationalize their decision, but it re-introduces the problem of techno-fetishism, this time a fetishism of the function.)
To summarize, accelerationism presents a rich spectrum of problems. The first stems from the notion that technology/automation will save us, replete with vague references to “the latest technological developments” unencumbered by any real details. Second is the question of capitalism itself. Despite the authors’ Marxist tendencies, it’s not at all clear that accelerationism is anti-capitalist. In fact accelerationism would be better described as a form of post-capitalism, what Zizek likes to mock as “capitalism with a friendly face.” What is post-capitalism exactly? More capitalism? A modified form of capitalism? For this reason it becomes difficult to untangle accelerationism from the most visionary dreams of the business elite. Isn’t this exactly what dot-com entrepreneurs are calling for? Isn’t the avant-garde of acceleration taking place right now in Silicon Valley? This leads to a third point: accelerationism is a tactic mistaken for a strategy. Certainly accelerationist or otherwise hypertrophic methods are useful in a provisional, local, which is to say tactical way. But accelerationism is, in my view, naïve about how capitalism works at a strategic level. Capitalism wants nothing more than to accelerate. Adding to the acceleration will help capitalism not hinder it. Capitalism is this accelerating force, from primitive accumulation on up to today. (Accelerationists don’t dispute this; they just simply disagree on the moral status of capitalism.) Fourth and finally is the most important problem revealed by accelerationism, the problem of elitism and reactionary politics. Given unequal technological development, those who accelerate will necessarily do so on the backs of others who are forced to proletarianize. Thus accelerationists are faced with a kind of “internal colonialism” problem, meaning there must be a distinction made between those who accelerate and those who facilitate acceleration through their very bodies. We already know who suffers most under unequal technological acceleration, and it’s not young white male academics living in England. Thus their skepticism toward the “folk” is all too often a paternalistic skepticism toward the wants and needs of the generic population. Hence the need for accelerationists to talk glowingly about things like “engineering consent.” It’s hard to see where this actually leads. Or more to the point who leads: if not Leninists then who, technocrats? Philosopher kings?
*
Accelerationism gains much inspiration from the philosophy of Prometheanism. If accelerationism provides a theory of political economy, Prometheanism supplies a theory of the subject. Yet it’s not always clear what people mean by this term. In a recent lecture titled “Prometheanism and Rationalism” Peter Wolfendale defines Prometheanism in such general terms that it becomes a synonym for any number of things: history and historical change; being against fatalism and messianism; being against the aristocracy; being against Fukuyama; being for feminism; the UBI and post-capitalism; the Enlightenment and secularism; deductive logic; overcoming (perceived) natural limits; technology; “automation” (which as I’ve just indicated is the most problematic concept of them all). Even very modest and narrow definitions of Prometheanism — technology for humans to overcome natural limit — present their own problems and wind up largely deflating the sloganeering of it all. “Okay so both the hydrogen bomb and the contraceptive pill are equally Promethean? So then who adjudicates their potential uses?” And we’re left with Prometheanism as the latest YAM philosophy (Yet Another Morality).
Still, Prometheanism has a particular vision for itself and it’s worth describing the high points. I can think of six specific qualities. (1) Prometheanism defines itself as posthuman or otherwise antihuman. (2) Prometheanism is an attempt to transcend the bounds of physical limitation. (3) Prometheanism promotes freedom, as in for instance the freedom to change the body through hormone therapy. (4) Prometheanism sees itself as politically progressive. (5) Prometheanism sees itself as being technologically savvy. (6) Prometheanism proposes to offer technical solutions to real problems.
But is any of this true? Interestingly Bernard Stiegler provided an answer to some of these questions already in 1994, and it’s worth returning to his book from that year Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus to fill out a conversation that has, thus far, been mostly one-sided. Stiegler’s book is long and complicated, and touches on many different things including technology and the increased rationalization of life, by way of some of Stiegler’s key influences including Gilbert Simondon, André Leroi-Gourhan, and Bertrand Gille. Let me focus however on the second part of the book, where Stiegler examines the two brothers Epimetheus and Prometheus.
A myth about powers and qualities, the fable of Epimetheus and Prometheus is recounted by the sophist Protagoras starting at line 320c in Plato’s dialogue of that name. In Stiegler’s retelling of the story, we begin with Epimetheus, who, via a “principle of compensation” governed by notions of difference and equilibrium, hands out powers and qualities to all the animals of the Earth. For instance extra speed might be endowed to the gazelle, but only by way of balanced compensation given to another animal, say a boost in strength bestowed upon the lion. Seemingly diligent in his duties, Epimetheus nevertheless tires before the job is complete, shirking his duties before arriving at humankind, who is left relatively naked without a special power or quality of its own. To compensate humankind, Prometheus absconds with “the gift of skill in the arts and fire” — “τὴν ἔντεχνον σοφίαν σὺν πυρί” — captured from Athena and Hephaestus, respectively, conferring these two gifts to humanity (Plato, “Protagoras,” 321d).
In this way humans are defined first not via technical supplement but through an elemental fault — this is Stiegler’s lingering poststructuralism — the fault of Epimetheus. Epimetheus forgets about us, leaving us until the end, and hence “Humans only occur through their being forgotten; they only appear in disappearing” (188). But it’s more than that: a fault followed by a theft, and hence a twin fault. Humanity is the “fruit of a double fault–an act of forgetting [by Epimetheus], then of theft [by Prometheus]” (188). Humans are thus a forgotten afterthought, remedied afterward by a lucky forethought.
“Afterthought” and “forethought” — Stiegler means these terms quite literally. Who is Epimetheus? And who is Prometheus? Greek names often have etymological if not allegorical significance, as is the case here. Both names share the root “-metheus,” cognate with manthánō [μανθάνω], which means learning, study, or cultivation of knowledge. Hence a mathitís [μαθητής] is a learner or a student. (And in fact in a very literal sense “mathematics” simply refers to the things that one learns, not to arithmetic or geometry per se.) The two brothers are thus both varieties of learners, both varieties of thinkers. The key is which variety. The key is the Epi– and the Pro-.
“Epi carries the character of the accidentally and artificial factuality of something happening, arriving, a primordial ‘passibility,’” Stiegler explains. “Epimetheia means heritage. Heritage is always epimathesis. Epimetheia would also mean then tradition-originating in a fault that is always already there and that is nothing but technicity” (206-207). Hence Epimetheus means something like “learning on the basis of,” “thinking after,” or, more simply, or “afterthought” or “hindsight.” This is why Epimetheus forgets, why he is at fault, why he acts foolishly, because these are all the things that generate hindsight.
Prometheus on the other hand is “foresight” or “fore-thought.” If Epimetheus means “thinking and learning on the basis of,” Prometheus means something more like “thinking and learning in anticipation of.” In this way, Prometheus comes to stand in for cleverness (but also theft), ingenuity, and thus technics as a whole.
But is that all? Is the lesson simply to restore Epimetheus to his position next to Prometheus? To remember the Epimethean omission along with the Promethean endowment? In fact the old Greek myth isn’t quite finished, and, after initially overlooking the ending, Stiegler eventually broaches the closing section on Hermes. For even after benefiting from its Promethean supplement, humanity remains incomplete. Specifically, the gods notice that Man has a tendency toward war and political strife. Thus Hermes is tasked to implant a kind of socio-political virtue, supplementing humanity with “the qualities of respect for others [αἰδώ] and a sense of justice [δίκη]” (Plato 322c). In other words, a second supplement is necessary, only this time a supplement not rooted in the identitarian logic of heterogeneous qualities. “Another tekhnē is required,” writes Stiegler, “a tekhnē that is no longer paradoxically…the privilege of specialists” (201). This point about specialists is key — all you Leninists take note — because on Zeus’s command Hermes delivers respect and justice generically and equally across all persons, not via the “principle of compensation” based on difference and equilibrium used previously by Epimetheus to divvy up the powers and qualities of the animals. Thus while some people may have a talent for the piano, and others might be gifted in some other way, justice and respect are bestowed equally to all.
This is why politics is always a question of the “hermeneutic community,” that is, the ad hoc translation and interpretation of real political dynamics; it comes from Hermes (201). At the same time politics also means “the community of those who have no community” because there is no adjudication of heterogenous qualities, no truth or law stipulated in advance, except for the very “conditions” of the political (those “hermeneutic conditions,” namely αἰδώ and δίκη, respect and justice).
To summarize, the Promethean story has three moments, not one, and all three ought to be given full voice:
Default of origin (being forgotten about by Epimetheus/Hindsight)
Gaining technicity (fire and skills from Prometheus/Foresight)
Revealing the generic (“respect for others and a sense of justice” from Hermes)
This strikes me as a much better way to think about Prometheanism overall, better than the narrow definition of “using technology to overcome natural limits.” Recognizing all three moments, Prometheanism (if we can still call it that) entails not just technological advancement, but also insufficiency and failure, along with a political consciousness rooted in generic humanity.
And now would be a good time to pass the baton over to the Xenofeminists, who make much better use of accelerationism than its original authors do. The Xenofeminist manifesto provides a more holistic picture of what might simply be called a “universalism from below” — yes, that very folk politics that Srnicek and Williams seek to suppress — doing justice not only to Prometheus, but to Epimetheus and Hermes as well:
Xenofeminism understands that the viability of emancipatory abolitionist projects — the abolition of class, gender, and race — hinges on a profound reworking of the universal. The universal must be grasped as generic, which is to say, intersectional. Intersectionality is not the morcellation of collectives into a static fuzz of cross-referenced identities, but a political orientation that slices through every particular, refusing the crass pigeonholing of bodies. This is not a universal that can be imposed from above, but built from the bottom up — or, better, laterally, opening new lines of transit across an uneven landscape. This non-absolute, generic universality must guard against the facile tendency of conflation with bloated, unmarked particulars — namely Eurocentric universalism — whereby the male is mistaken for the sexless, the white for raceless, the cis for the real, and so on. Absent such a universal, the abolition of class will remain a bourgeois fantasy, the abolition of race will remain a tacit white-supremacism, and the abolition of gender will remain a thinly veiled misogyny, even — especially — when prosecuted by avowed feminists themselves. (The absurd and reckless spectacle of so many self-proclaimed ‘gender abolitionists’ campaign against trans women is proof enough of this). (0x0F)
There are some games where a single player wins, games where a group of players wins, and then there are games where all of the players can share equally in defeat. Yet regardless of the way winners and losers are apportioned, there is something disconcerting about a game where the rules change significantly when one is within sight of victory. Suddenly the strategy that had previously assured success now promises defeat and the confused players are forced to reconsider all of the seemingly right decisions that have now brought them to an impending loss. It may be a trifle silly to talk of winners and losers in the Anthropocene, with its bleak herald climate change, but the epoch in which humans have become a geological force is one in which the strategies that propelled certain societies towards victory no longer seem like such wise tactics. With victory seeming less and less certain it is easy to assume defeat is inevitable.
“Let’s not despair” is the retort McKenzie Wark offers on the first page of Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. The book approaches the Anthropocene as both a challenge and an opportunity, not for seeing who can pen the grimmest apocalyptic dirge but for developing new forms of critical theory. Prevailing responses to the Anthropocene – ranging from faith in new technology, to confidence in the market, to hopes for accountability, to despairing of technology – all strike Wark as insufficient, what he deems necessary are theories (which will hopefully lead to solutions) that recognize the ways in which the aforementioned solutions are entangled with each other. For Wark the coming crumbling of the American system was foreshadowed by the collapse of the Soviet system – and thus Molecular Red looks back at Soviet history to consider what other routes could have been taken there, before he switches his focus back to the United States to search for today’s alternate routes. Molecular Red reads aspects of Soviet history through the lens of “what if?” in order to consider contemporary questions from the perspective “what now?” As he writes: “[t]here is no other world, but it can’t be this one” (xxi).
Molecular Red is an engaging and interesting read that introduces its readers to a raft of under-read thinkers – and its counsel against despair is worth heeding. And yet, by the book’s end, it is easy to come away with a sense that while it is true that “there is no other world” that it will, alas, almost certainly be exactly this one.
Before Wark introduces individual writers and theorists he first unveils the main character of his book: “the Carbon Liberation Front” (xiv). In Wark’s estimation the Carbon Liberation Front (CLF from this point forward) represents the truly victorious liberation movement of the past centuries. And what this liberation movement has accomplished is the freeing of – as the name suggests – carbon, an element which has been burnt up by humans in pursuit of energy with the result being an atmosphere filled with heat-trapping carbon dioxide. “The Anthropocene runs on carbon” (xv), and seeing as the scientists who coined the term “Anthropocene” used it to mark the period wherein glacial ice cores began to show a concentration of green house gases, such as CO2 and Ch4 – the CLF appears as a force one cannot ignore.
Turning to Soviet history, Wark works to rescue Lenin’s rival Alexander Bogdanov from being relegated to a place as a mere footnote. Yet, Wark’s purpose is not to simply emphasize that Lenin and Bogdanov had different ideas regarding what the Bolsheviks should have done, what is of significance in Bogdanov is not questions of tactics but matters of theory. In particular Wark highlights Bogdanov’s ideas of “proletkult” and “tektology” while also drawing upon Bogdanov’s view of nature – he conceived of this “elusive category” as “simply that which labor encounters” (4, italics in original text). Bogdanov’s tektology was to be “a new way of organizing knowledge” while proletkult was to be “a new practice of culture” – as Wark explains “Bogdanov is not really trying to write philosophy so much a to hack it, to repurpose it for something other than the making of more philosophy” (13). Tektology was an attempt to bring together the lived experience of the proletariat along with philosophy and science – to create an active materialism “based on the social production of human existence” (18) and this production sees Nature as the realm within which laboring takes place. Or, as Wark eloquently puts it, tektology “is a way of organizing knowledge for difficult times…and perhaps also for the strange times likely to come in the twenty-first century” (40). Proletkult (which was an actual movement for some time) sought “to change labor, by merging art and work; to change everyday life…and to change affect” (35) – its goal was not to create proletarian culture but to provide a proletarian “point of view.” Deeply knowledgeable about science, himself a sort of science-fiction author (he wrote a quasi-utopian novel set on Mars called Red Star), and hopeful that technological advances would make workers more like engineers and artists, Bogdanov strikes Wark as “not the present writing about the future, but the past writing to the future” (59). Wark suggests that “perhaps Bogdanov is the point to which to return” (59) hence Wark’s touting of tektology, proletkult and Bogdanov’s view of nature.
While Wark makes it clear that Bogdanov’s ideas did have some impact in Soviet Russia, their effect was far less than what it could have been – and thus Bogdanov’s ideas remain an interesting case of “what if?” Yet, in the figure of Andrey Platonov, Wark finds an example of an individual whose writings reached towards proletkult. Wark sees Platonov as “the great writer of our planet of slums” (68). The fiction written by Platonov, his “(anti)novellas” as Wark calls them, are largely the tales of committed and well-meaning communists whose efforts come to naught. For Platonov’s characters failure is a constant companion, they struggle against nature in the name of utopianism and find that they simply must keep struggling. In Platonov’s work one finds a continual questioning of communism’s authoritarian turn from below, his “Marxism is an ascetic one, based on the experience of sub-proletarian everyday life” (104). And while Platonov’s tales are short on happy endings, Wark detects hope amidst the powerlessness, as long as life goes on, for “if one can keep living then everything is still possible” (80). Such is the type of anti-cynicism that makes Platonov’s Marxism worth considering – it finds the glimmer of utopia on the horizon even if it never seems to draw closer.
From the cold of the Soviet winter, Wark moves to the birthplace of the Californian Ideology – an ideology which Wark suggests has won the day: “it has no outside, and it is accelerating” (118). Yet, as with the case of Soviet communism, Wark is interested in looking for the fissures within the ideology, and instead of opining on Barbook and Cameron’s term moves through Ernst Mach and Paul Feyerabend en route to a consideration of Donna Haraway. Wark emphasizes how Haraway’s Marxism “insists on including nonhuman actors” (136) – her techno-science functions as a way of further breaking down the barrier that had been constructed between humans and nature. Shattering this divider is necessary to consider the ways that life itself has become caught up with capital in the age of patented life forms like OncoMouse. Amidst these entanglements Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” appears to have lost none of its power – Wark sees that “cyborgs are monsters, or rather demonstrations, in the double sense of to show and to warn, of possible worlds” (146). Such a show of possibilities is to present alternatives even when, “There’s no mother nature, no father science, no way back (or forward) to integrity” (150). Returning to Bogdanov, Wark writes that “Tektology is all about constructing temporary shelter in the world” (150) – and the cyborg identity is simultaneously what constructs such shelter and seeks haven within it. Beyond Haraway, Wark considers the work of Karen Barad and Paul Edwards, in order to further illustrate that “we are at one and the same time a product of techno-science and yet inclined to think ourselves separate from it” (165). Haraway, and the web of thinkers with which Wark connects her, appear as a way to reconnect with “something like the classical Marxist and Bogdanovite open-mindedness toward the sciences” (179).
After science, Wark transitions to discussing the science fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson – in particular his Mars trilogy. Robinson’s tale of the scientist/technicians colonizing Mars and their attempts to create a better world on the one they are settling is a demonstration of how “the struggle for utopia is both technical and political, and so much else besides” (191). The value of the Mars trilogy, with its tale of revolutions, both successful and unsuccessful, and its portrayal of a transformed Earth, is in the slow unfolding of revolutionary change. In Red Mars (the first book of the trilogy, published in 1992) there is not a glorious revolution that instantly changes everything, but rather “the accumulation of minor, even molecular, elements of a new way of life and their negotiations with each other” (194). At work in the ruminations of the main characters of Red Mars, Wark detects something reminiscent of tektology even as the books themselves seem like a sort of proletkult for the Anthropocene.
Molecular Red’s tour of oft overlooked, or overly neglected thinkers, is an argument for a reengagement with Marxism, but a reengagement that willfully and carefully looks for the paths not taken. The argument is not that Lenin needs to be re-read, but that Bogdanov needs to be read. Wark does not downplay the dangers of the Anthropocene, but he refuses to wallow in dismay or pine for a pastoral past that was a fantasy in the first place. For Wark, we are closely entwined with our technology and the idea that it should all be turned off is a nonstarter. Molecular Red is not a trudge through the swamps of negativity, rather it’s a call: “Let’s use the time and information and everyday life still available to us to begin the task, quietly but in good cheer, of thinking otherwise, of working and experimenting” (221).
Wark does not conclude Molecular Red by reminding his readers that they have nothing to lose but their chains. Rather he reminds them that they still have a world to win.
Molecular Red begins with an admonishment not to despair, and ends with a similar plea not to lose hope. Granted, in order to find this hope one needs to be willing to consider that the causes for hopelessness may themselves be rooted in looking for hope in the wrong places. Wark argues, that by embracing techno-science, reveling in our cyborg selves, and creating new cultural forms to help us re-imagine our present and future – the left can make itself relevant once more. As a call for the left to embrace technology and look forward Molecular Red occupies a similar cultural shelf-space as that filled by recent books like Inventing the Future and Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts. Which is to say that those who think that what is needed is “a frank acknowledgment of the entangling of our cyborg bodies within the technical” (xxi), those who think that the left needs to embrace technology with greater gusto, will find Molecular Red’s argument quite appealing. As for those who disagree – they will likely not find their minds changed by Molecular Red.
As a writer Wark has a talent for discussing dense theoretical terms in a readable and enjoyable format throughout Molecular Red. Regardless of what one ultimately thinks of Wark’s argument, one of the major strengths of Molecular Red is the way it introduces readers to overlooked theorists. After reading Wark’s chapters on Bogdanov and Platonov the reader certainly understands why Wark finds their work so engrossing and inspiring. Similarly, Wark makes a compelling case for the continued importance of Haraway’s cyborg concept and his treatment of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy is an apt demonstration of incorporating science fiction into works of theory. Amidst all of the grim books out there about the Anthropocene, Molecular Red is refreshing in its optimism. This is “Theory for the Anthropocene,” as the book’s subtitle puts it, but it is positive theory.
Granted, some of Wark’s linguistic flourishes become less entertaining over time – “the carbon liberation front” is an amusing concept at first but by the end of Molecular Red the term is as likely to solicit an eye-roll as introspection. A great deal of carbon has certainly been liberated, but has this been the result of a concerted effort (a “liberation front”) or has this been the result of humans not fully thinking through the consequences of technology? Certainly there are companies that have made fortunes through “liberating” carbon, but who is ultimately responsible for “the carbon liberation front?” One might be willing to treat terms like “liberation front” with less scrutiny were they not being used in a book so invested in re-vitalizing leftist theory. Does not a “liberation front” imply a movement with an ideology? It seems that the liberation of carbon is more of an accident of a capitalist ideology than the driver of that ideology itself. It may seem silly to focus upon the uneasy feeling that accompanies the term “carbon liberation front” but this is an example of a common problem with Molecular Red – the more one thinks about some of the premises the less satisfying Wark’s arguments become.
Given Wark’s commitment to reconfiguring Marxism for the Anthropocene it is unsurprising that he should choose to devote much of his attention to labor. This is especially fitting given the emphasis that Bogdanov and Platonov place on labor. Wark clearly finds much to approve of in Bogdanov’s idea that “all workers would become more like engineers, and also more like artists” (28). These are largely the type of workers one encounters in Robinson’s work and who are, generally, the heroes of Platonov’s tales, they make up a sort of “proto-hacker class” (90). It is an interesting move from the Soviet laborer to the technician/artists/hacker of Robinson – and it is not surprising that the author of A Hacker Manifesto (2004) should view hackers in such a romantic light. Yet Molecular Red is not a love letter to hackers, which makes it all the more interesting that labor in the Anthropocene is not given broader consideration. Bogdanov might have hoped that automation would make workers more like engineers and artists – but is there not still plenty of laboring going on in the Anthropocene? There is a heck of a lot of labor that goes into making the high-tech devices enjoyed by technicians, hackers and artists – though it may be a type of labor that is more convenient to ignore as it troubles the idea that workers are all metamorphosing into technician/artist/hackers. Given Platonov’s interest in the workers who seemed abandoned by the utopian promises they had been told it is a shame that Molecular Red does not pay greater attention to the forgotten workers of the Anthropocene. Yet, contemporary miners of minerals for high-tech doodads, device assemblers, e-waste recyclers, and the impoverished citizens of areas already suffering the burdens of climate change have more in common with the forgotten proletarians of Platonov than with the utopian scientists of Robinson’s Red Mars.
One way to read Molecular Red is as a plea to the left not to give up on techno-science. Though it seems worth wondering to what extent the left has actually done anything like this. Some on the left may be less willing to conclude that the Internet is the solution to every problem (“some” does not imply “the majority”), but agitating for green technologies and alternative energies seems a pretty clear demonstration that far from giving up on technology many on the left still approach it with great hope. Wark is arguing for “something like the classical Marxist and Bogdanovite open-mindedness toward the sciences…rather than the Heidegger-inflected critique of Marcuse and others” (179). Yet in looking at contemporary discussions around techno-science and the left, it does not seem that the “Heidegger-inflected critique of Marcuse and others” is particularly dominant. There may be a few theorists here and there still working to advance a rigorous critique of technology – but as the recent issues on technology from The Nation and Jacobin both show – the left is not currently being controlled by a bogey-man of Marcuse. Granted, this is a shame, for Molecular Red could have benefited from engaging with some of the critics of Marxism’s techno-utopian streak. Indeed, is the problem the lack of “open-mindedness toward the sciences” or that being open-minded has failed thus far to do much to stall the Anthropocene? Or is it that, perhaps, the left simply needs to prepare itself for being open-minded about geo-engineering? Wark describes the Anthropocene as being a sort of metabolic rift and cautions that “to reject techno-science altogether is to reject the means of knowing about metabolic rift” (180). Yet this seems to be something of a straw-man argument – how many critics are genuinely arguing that people should “reject techno-science”? Perhaps John Zerzan has a much wider readership than I knew.
Molecular Red cautions its readers against despair but the text has a significant darkness about it. Wark writes “we are cyborgs, making a cyborg planet with cyborg weather, a crazed, unstable disingression, whose information and energy systems are out of joint” (180) – but the knowledge that “we are cyborgs” does little to help the worker who has lost her job without suddenly becoming an engineer/artist, “a cyborg planet” does nothing to heal the sicknesses of those living near e-waste dumps, and calling it “cyborg weather” does little to help those who are already struggling to cope with the impacts of climate change. We may be cyborgs, but that doesn’t mean the Anthropocene will go easy on us. After all, the scientists in the Marstrilogy may work on transforming that planet into a utopia but while they are at it things do not exactly go well back on Earth. When Wark writes that “here among the ruins, something living yet remains” (xxii) he is echoing the ideology behind every anarcho-punk record cover that shows a better life being built on the ruins of the present world. But another feature of those album covers, and the allusion to “among the ruins,” is that the fact that some “living yet remains” is a testament to all of the dying that has also transpired.
McKenzie Wark has written an interesting and challenging book in Molecular Red and it is certainly a book with which it is worth engaging. Regardless of whether or not one is ultimately convinced by Wark’s argument, his final point will certainly resonate with those concerned about the present but hopeful for the future.
After all, we still have a world to win.
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Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently working towards an MA in the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ethical implications of technology, infrastructure and e-waste, as well as the intersection of library science with the STS field. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian,” Loeb writes at the blog Librarian Shipwreck and is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.
This summer marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the original French publication of Gilles Deleuze’s seminal essay, “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (1990). A strikingly powerful short piece, “Postscript” remains, even at this late date, one of the most poignant, prescient, and concise diagnoses of life in the overdeveloped digital world of the twenty-first century and the “ultrarapid forms of apparently free-floating control that are taking over from the old disciplines.”[1] A stylistic departure from much of Deleuze’s other writing in its clarity and straightforwardness, the essay describes a general transformation from the modes of disciplinary power that Michel Foucault famously analyzed in Discipline and Punish (1975) to “societies of control.” For Deleuze, the late twentieth century is characterized by “a general breakdown of all sites of confinement—prisons, hospitals, factories, schools, the family.”[2] The institutions that were formerly able to strictly organize time and space through perpetual surveillance—thereby, according to Foucault, fabricating the modern individual subject—have become fluid and modular, “continually changing from one moment to the next.”[3] Individuals have become “dividuals,” “dissolv[ed] . . . into distributed networks of information.”[4]
Over the past decade, media theorist Alexander R. Galloway has extensively and rigorously elaborated on Deleuze’s suggestive pronouncements, probably devoting more pages in print to thinking about the “Postscript” than has any other single writer.[5] Galloway’s most important work in this regard is his first book, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (2004). If the figure for the disciplinary society was Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a machine designed to induce a sense of permanent visibility in prisoners (and, by extension, the modern subject), Galloway argues that the distributed network, and particularly the distributed network we call the internet, is an apposite figure for control societies. Rhizomatic and flexible, distributed networks historically emerged as an alternative to hierarchical, rigid, centralized (and decentralized) networks. But far from being chaotic and unorganized, the protocols that organize our digital networks have created “the most highly controlled mass media hitherto known. . . . While control used to be a law of society, now it is more like a law of nature. Because of this, resisting control has become very challenging indeed.”[6] To put it another way: if in 1980 Deleuze and Félix Guattari complained that “we’re tired of trees,” Galloway and philosopher Eugene Thacker suggest that today “we’re tired of rhizomes.”[7]
The imperative to think through the novel challenges presented by control societies and the urgent need to develop new methodologies for engaging the digital realities of the twenty-first century are at the heart of The Interface Effect (2012), the final volume in a trio of works Galloway calls Allegories of Control.[8] Guiding the various inquiries in the book is his provocative claim that “we do not yet have a critical or poetic language in which to represent the control society.”[9] This is because there is an “unrepresentability lurking within information aesthetics” (86). This claim for unrepresentability, that what occurs with digital media is not representation per se, is The Interface Effect’s most significant departure from previous media theory. Rather than rehearse familiar media ecologies, Gallowaysuggests that “the remediation argument (handed down from McLuhan and his followers including Kittler) is so full of holes that it is probably best to toss it wholesale” (20). The Interface Effect challenges thinking about mimesis that would place computers at the end of a line of increasingly complex modes of representation, a line extending from Plato, through Erich Auerbach, Marshall McLuhan, and Friedrich Kittler, and terminating in Richard Grusin, Jay David Bolter, and many others. Rather than continue to understand digital media in terms of remediation and representation, Galloway emphasizes the processes of computational media, suggesting that the inability to productively represent control societies stems from misunderstandings about how to critically analyze and engage with the basic materiality of computers.
The book begins with an introduction polemically positioning Galloway’s own media theory directly against Lev Manovich’s field-defining book, The Language of New Media(2001). Contra Manovich, Galloway stresses that digital media are not objects but actions. Unlike cinema, which he calls an ontology because it attempts to bring some aspect of the phenomenal world nearer to the viewer—film, echoing Oedipa Maas’s famous phrase, “projects worlds” (11)—computers involve practices and effects (what Galloway calls an “ethic”) because they are “simply on a world . . . subjecting it to various forms of manipulation, preemption, modeling, and synthetic transformation. . . . The matter at hand is not that of coming to know a world, but rather that of how specific, abstract definitions are executed to form a world” (12, 13, 23). Or to take two other examples Galloway uses to positive effect: the difference can be understood as that between language, which describes and represents, encoding a world, versus calculus, which does or simulates doing something to the world; calculus is a “system of reasoning, an executable machine” (22). Though Galloway does more in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture(2006) to fully develop a way of analyzing computational media that privileges action over representation, The Interface Effect theoretically grounds this important distinction between mimesis and action, description and process.[10] Further, it constitutes a bold methodological step away from some of the dominant ways of thinking about digital media that simultaneously offers its readers new ways to connect media studies more firmly to politics.
Further distinguishing himself from writers like Manovich, Galloway says that there has been a basic misunderstanding regarding media and mediation, and that the two systems are “violently unconnected” (13). Galloway demonstrates, in contrast to such thinkers as Kittler, that there is an old line of thinking about mediation that can be traced very far back and that is not dependent on thinking about media as exclusively tied to nineteenth and twentieth century communications technology:
Doubtless certain Greek philosophers had negative views regarding hypomnesis. Yet Kittler is reckless to suggest that the Greeks had no theory of mediation. The Greeks indubitably had an intimate understanding of the physicality of transmission and message sending (Hermes). They differentiated between mediation as immanence and mediation as expression (Iris versus Hermes). They understood the mediation of poetry via the Muses and their techne. They understood the mediation of bodies through the “middle loving” Aphrodite. They even understood swarming and networked presence (in the incontinent mediating forms of the Eumenides who pursued Orestes in order to “process” him at the procès of Athena). Thus we need only look a little bit further to shed this rather vulgar, consumer-electronics view of media, and instead graduate into the deep history of media as modes of mediation. (15)
Galloway’s point here is that the larger contemporary discussion of mediation that he is pursuing in The Interface Effect should not be restricted to merely the digital artifacts that have occasioned so much recent theoretical activity, and that there is an urgent need for deeper histories of mediation. Though the book appears to be primarily concerned with the twentieth and twenty-first century, this gesture toward the Greeks signals the important work of historicization that often distinguishes much of Galloway’s work. In “Love of the Middle” (2014), for example, which appears in the book Excommunication(2014), co-authored with Thacker and McKenzie Wark, Galloway fully develops a rigorous reading of Greek mediation, suggesting that in the Eumenides, or what the Romans called the Furies, reside a notable historical precursor for understanding the mediation of distributed networks.[11]
In The Interface Effect these larger efforts at historicization allow Gallowayto always understand “media as modes of mediation,” and consequently his big theoretical step involves claiming that “an interface is not a thing, an interface is an effect. It is always a process or a translation” (33). There are a variety of positive implications for the study of media understood as modes of mediation, as a study of interface effects. Principal amongst these are the rigorous methodological possibilities Galloway’s focus emphasizes.
In this, methodologically and otherwise, Galloway’s work in The Interface Effect resembles and extends that of his teacher Fredric Jameson, particularly the kind of work found in The Political Unconscious (1981). Following Jameson’s emphasis on the “poetics of social forms,” Galloway’s goal is “not to reenact the interface, much less to ‘define’ it, but to identify the interface itself as historical. . . . This produces . . . a perspective on how cultural production and the socio-historical situation take form as they are interfaced together” (30). The Interface Effect firmly ties the cultural to the social, economic, historical, and political, finding in a variety of locations ways that interfaces function as allegories of control. “The social field itself constitutes a grand interface, an interface between subject and world, between surface and source, and between critique and the objects of criticism. Hence the interface is above all an allegorical device that will help us gain some perspective on culture in the age of information” (54). The power of looking at the interface as an allegorical device, as a “control allegory” (30), is demonstrated throughout the book’s relatively wide-ranging analyses of various interface effects.
Chapter 1, “The Unworkable Interface,” historicizes some twentieth century transformations of the interface, concisely summarizing a history of mediation by moving from Norman Rockwell’s “Triple Self-Portrait” (1960), through Mad Magazine’s satirization of Rockwell, to World of Warcraft (2004-2015). Viewed from the level of the interface, with all of its nondiegetic menus and icons and the ways it erases the line between play and labor, Galloway demonstrates both here and in the last chapter that World of Warcraft is a powerful control allegory:“it is not an avant-garde image, but, nevertheless, it firmly delivers an avant-garde lesson in politics” (44).[12] Further exemplifying the importance of historicizing interfaces, Chapter 2 continues to demonstrate the value of approaching interface effects allegorically. Galloway finds “a formal similarity between the structure of ideology and the structure of software” (55), arguing that software “is an allegorical figure for the way in which . . . political and social realities are ‘resolved’ today: not through oppression or false consciousness . . . but through the ruthless rule of code” (76). Chapter 4 extends such thinking toward a masterful reading of the various mediations at play in a show such as 24 (2001-2010, 2014), arguing that 24 is political not because of its content but “because the show embodies in its formal technique the essential grammar of the control society, dominated as it is by specific network and informatic logics” (119). In short, The Interface Effect continually demonstrates the potent critical tools approaching mediation as allegory can provide, reaffirming the importance of a Jamesonian approach to cultural production in the digital age.
Whether or not readers are convinced, however, by Galloway’s larger reworking of the field of digital media studies, his emphasis on attending to contemporary cultural artifacts as allegories of control, or his call in the book’s conclusion for a politics of “whatever being” probably depends upon their thoughts about the unrepresentability of today’s global networks in Chapter 3, “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?” His answer to the chapter’s question is, quite simply, “Yes.” Attempts to visualize the World Wide Web only result in incoherent repetition: “every map of the internet looks the same,” and as a result “no poetics is possible in this uniform aesthetic space” (85). He argues that, in the face of such an aesthetic regime, what Jacques Rancière calls a “distribution of the sensible”[13]:
The point is not so much to call for a return to cognitive mapping, which of course is of the highest importance, but to call for a poetics as such for this mysterious new machinic space. . . . Today’s systemics have no contrary. Algorithms and other logical structures are uniquely, and perhaps not surprisingly, monolithic in their historical development. There is one game in town: a positivistic dominant of reductive, systemic efficiency and expediency. Offering a counter-aesthetic in the face of such systematicity is the first step toward building a poetics for it, a language of representability adequate to it. (99)
There are, to my mind, two ways of responding to Galloway’s call for a poetics as such in the face of the digital realities of contemporaneity.
On the one hand, I am tempted to agree with him. Galloway is clearly signaling his debt to some of Jameson’s more important large claims and is reviving the need “to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system,” what Jameson once called the “technological” or “postmodern sublime.”[14] But Galloway is also signaling the importance of poesis for this activity. Not only is Jamesonian “cognitive mapping” necessary, but the totality of twenty-first century digital networks requires new imaginative activity, a counter-aesthetics commensurate with informatics. This is an immensely attractive position, at least to me, as it preserves a space for poetic, avant-garde activity, and indeed, demands that, all evidence to the contrary, the imagination still has an important role to play in the face of societies of control. (In other words, there may be some “humanities” left in the “digital humanities.”[15]) Rather than suggesting that the imagination has been utterly foreclosed by the cultural logic of late capitalism—that we can no longer imagine any other world, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a better one—Galloway says that there must be a reinvestment in the imagination, in poetics as such, that will allow us to better represent, understand, and intervene in societies of control (though not necessarily to imagine a better world; more on this below). Given the present landscape, how could one not be attracted to such a position?
On the other hand, Galloway’s argument hinges on his claim that such a poetics has not emerged and, as Patrick Jagoda and others have suggested, one might merely point out that such a claim is demonstrably false.[16] Though I hope I hardly need to list some of the significant cultural products across a range of media that have appeared over the last fifteen years that critically and complexly engage with the realities of control (e.g., The Wire [2002-08]), it is not radical to suggest that art engaged with pressing contemporary concerns has appeared and will continue to appear, that there are a variety of significant artists who are attempting to understand, represent, and cope with the distributed networks of contemporaneity. One could obviously suggest Galloway’s argument is largely rhetorical, a device to get his readers to think about the different kinds of poesis control societies, distributed networks, and interfaces call for, but this blanket statement threatens to shut down some of the vibrant activity that is going on all over the world commenting upon the contemporary situation. In other words, yes we need a poetics of control, but why must the need for such a poetics hinge on the claim that there has not yet emerged “a critical or poetic language in which to represent the control society”? Is not Galloway’s own substantial, impressive, and important decade-long intellectual project proof that people have developed a critical language that is capable of representing the control society? I would certainly answer in the affirmative.
There are some other rhetorical choices in the conclusion of The Interface Effect that, though compelling, deserve to be questioned, or at least highlighted. I am referring to Galloway’s penchant—following another one of his teachers at Duke, Michael Hardt—for invoking a Bartlebian politics, what Galloway calls “whatever being,” as an appropriate response to present problems.[17] In Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000), in the face of the new realities of late capitalism—the multitude, the management of hybridities, the non-place of Empire, etc.—they propose that Herman Melville’s “Bartleby in his pure passivity and his refusal of any particulars presents us with a figure of generic being, being as such, being and nothing more. . . . This refusal certainly is the beginning of a liberatory politics, but it is only a beginning.”[18] Bartleby, with his famous response of “‘I would prefer not to,’”[19] has been frequently invoked by such substantial figures as Giorgio Agamben in the 1990s and Slavoj Žižek in the 2000s (following Hardt and Negri). Such thinkers have frequently theorized Bartleby’s passive negativity as a potentially radical political position, and perhaps the only one possible in the face of global economic realities.[20] (And indeed, it is easy enough to read, say, Occupy Wall Street as a Bartlebian political gesture.) Galloway’s response to the affective postfordist labor of digital networks, that “each and every day, anyone plugged into a network is performing hour after hour of unpaid micro labor” (136), is similarly to withdraw, to “demilitarize being. Stand down. Cease participating” (143).
Like Hardt and Negri and so many others, Galloway’s “whatever being” is a response to the failures of twentieth century emancipatory politics. He writes:
We must stress that it is not the job of politics to invent a new world. On the contrary it is the job of politics to make all these new worlds irrelevant. . . . It is time now to subtract from this world, not add to it. The challenge today is not one of political or moral imagination, for this problem was solved ages ago—kill the despots, surpass capitalism, inclusion of the excluded, equality for all of humanity, end exploitation. The world does not need new ideas. The challenge is simply to realize what we already know to be true. (138-39)
And thus the tension of The Interface Effect is between this call for withdrawal, to work with what there is, to exploit protocological possibility, etc., and the call for a poetics of control, a poesis capable of representing control societies, which to my mind implies imagination (and thus, inevitably, something different, if not new). If there is anything wanting about the book it is its lack of clarity about how these two critical projects are connected (or indeed, if they are perhaps the same thing!). Further, it is not always clear what exactly Galloway means by “poetics” nor how a need for a poetics corresponds to the book’s emphasis on understanding mediation as process over representation, action over objects. This lack of clarity may be due in part to the fact that, as Galloway indicates in his most recent work, Laruelle: Against the Digital (2014), there is some necessary theorization that he needs to do before he can adequately address the digital head-on. As he writes in the conclusion to that book: “The goal here has not been to elucidate, promote, or disparage contemporary digital technologies, but rather to draft a simple prolegomenon for future writing on digitality and philosophy.”[21] In other words, it seems like Allegories of Control, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (2007), and Laruelle may constitute the groundwork for an even more ambitious confrontation with the digital, one where the kinds of tensions just noted might dissolve. As such, perhaps the reinvocation of a Bartlebian politics of withdrawal at the end of The Interface Effect is merely a kind of stop-gap, a place-holder before a more coherent poetics of control can emerge (as seems to be the case for the Hardt and Negri of Empire). Although contemporary theorists frequently invoke Bartleby, he remains a rather uninspiring figure.
These criticisms aside, however, Galloway’s conclusion of the larger project that is Allegories of Control reveals him to be a consistently accessible and powerful guide to the control society and the digital networks of the twenty-first century. If the new directions in his recent work are any indication, and Laruelle is merely a prolegomenon to future projects, then we should perhaps not despair at all about the present lack of a critical language for representing control societies.
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Bradley J. Fest teaches literature at the University of Pittsburgh. At present he is working on The Nuclear Archive: American Literature Before and After the Bomb, a book investigating the relationship between nuclear and information technology in twentieth and twenty-first century American literature. He has published articles in boundary 2, Critical Quarterly, and Studies in the Novel; and his essays have appeared in David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing” (2014) and The Silence of Fallout (2013). The Rocking Chair, his first collection of poems, is forthcoming from Blue Sketch Press. He blogs at The Hyperarchival Parallax.
[1] Though best-known in the Anglophone world via the translation that appeared in 1992 in October as “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” the piece appears as “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 178. For the original French see Gilles Deleuze, “Post-scriptum sur des sociétés de contrôle,”in Pourparlers, 1972-1990 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1990), 240-47. The essay originally appeared as “Les sociétés de contrôle,” L’Autre Journal, no. 1 (May 1990). Further references are to the Negotiations version.
[4] Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 12n18.
[5] In his most recent book, Galloway even goes so far as to ask about the “Postscript”: “Could it be that Deleuze’s most lasting legacy will consist of 2,300 words from 1990?” (Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014], 96, emphases in original). For Andrew Culp’s review of Laruelle for Theb2 Review, see “From the Decision to the Digital.”
[7] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 15; and Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 153. For further discussions of networks see Alexander R. Galloway, “Networks,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 280-96.
[8] The other books in the trilogy include Protocol and Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
[9] Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012), 98. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically.
[10] See especially Galloway’s masterful first chapter of Gaming, “Gamic Action, Four Moments,” 1-38.To my mind, this is one of the best primers for critically thinking about videogames, and it does much to fundamentally ground the study of videogames in action (rather than, as had previously been the case, in either ludology or narratology).
[11] See Alexander R. Galloway, “Love of the Middle,” in Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation, by Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 25-76.
[12] This is also something he touched on in his remarkable reading of Donald Rumsfeld’s famous “unknown unknowns.” See Alexander R. Galloway, “Warcraft and Utopia,”Ctheory.net (16 February 2006). For a discussion of labor in World ofWarcraft, see David Golumbia, “Games Without Play,” in “Play,” special issue, New Literary History 40, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 179-204.
[13] See the following by Jacques Rancière: The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), and “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?” in The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2007), 109-38.
[14] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 38.
[15] For Galloway’s take on the digital humanities more generally, see his “Everything Is Computational,” Los Angeles Review of Books (27 June 2013), and “The Cybernetic Hypothesis,” differences 25, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 107-31.
[16] See Patrick Jagoda, introduction to Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2015).
[17] Galloway’s “whatever being” is derived from Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
[18] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 203, 204.
[19] Herman Melville, “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street,” in Melville’s Short Novels, critical ed., ed. Dan McCall (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 10.
[20] See Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. and ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 243-71; and see the following by Slavoj Žižek: Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (New York: Verso, 2004), esp. 71-73, and The Parallax View (New York: Verso, 2006), esp. 381-85.
a review of Dan Schiller, Digital Depression: Information Technology and Economic Crisis (University of Illinois Press, 2014)
by Richard Hill
~ Disclosure: the author of this review is mentioned in the Acknowledgements section of the reviewed book.
Computers and telecommunications have revolutionized and disrupted all aspects of human activity, and even behavior. The impacts are broad and profound, with important consequences for governments, businesses, non-profit activities, and individuals. Networks of interconnected computer systems are driving many disruptive changes in business practices, information flows, and financial flows. Foremost amongst those networks is the Internet, much of which is global, or at least trans-national.
According to some, the current governance arrangement for the Internet is nearly ideal. In particular, its global multi-stakeholder model of governance has resulted in a free and open Internet, which has enabled innovation and driven economic growth and well-being around the world. Others are of the view that things have not worked out that well. In particular, the Internet has resulted in mass surveillance by governments and by private companies, in monopolization, commodification and monetization of information and knowledge, in inequitable flows of finances between poor and rich countries, and in erosion of cultural diversity; further, those with central positions of influence have used it to consolidate power and to establish a new global regime of control and exploitation, under the guise of favoring liberalization, while in reality reinforcing the dominance and profitability of major corporations at the expense of the public interest, and the overarching position of certain national interests at the expense of global interests and well being. [1]
Dan Schiller’s book helps us to understand how rational and well-informed people can hold such diametrically opposing views. Schiller dissects the history of the growth of recent telecommunications networks and shows how they have significantly (indeed, dramatically) affected economic and political power relations around the world. And how, at the same time, US policies have consistently favored capital over labor, and have resulted in transfers of vast sums from developing countries to developed countries (in particular through interest on loans).
Participants wearing Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning masks at 2013 Berlin protests against NSA PRISM program (image source: Wikipedia)
Schiller documents in some detail how US policies that ostensibly promote the free flow of information around the world, the right of all people to connect to the Internet, and free speech, are in reality policies that have, by design, furthered the geo-economic and geo-political goals of the US, including its military goals, its imperialist tendencies, and the interests of large private companies based (if not always headquartered, at least for tax purposes) in the US. For example, strict copyright protection is held to be consistent with the free flow of information, as is mass surveillance. Cookies and exploitation of users’ personal data by Internet companies are held to be consistent with privacy rights (indeed, as Schiller shows, the US essentially denies the existence of the right to personal privacy for anything related to the Internet). There should be no requirements that data be stored locally, lest it escape the jurisdiction of the US surveillance apparatus. And very high profits and dominant positions in key Internet markets do not spark anti-trust or competition law investigations, as they might in any other industry.
As Schiller notes, great powers have historically used communication systems to further their economic and strategic interests, so why should the US not so use the Internet? Thus stated, the matter seems obvious. But the matter is rarely thus stated. On the contrary, the Internet is often touted as a generous gift to the world’s people, able to lift them out of poverty and oppression, and to bring them the benefits of democracy and (or) free markets. Schiller’s carefully researched analysis is thus an important contribution.
Schiller provides context by tracing the origins of the current financial and economic crises, pointing out that it is paradoxical that growing investments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), and the supposed resultant productivity gains, did not prevent a major global economic crisis. Schiller explains how transnational corporations demanded liberalization of the terms on which they could use their private networks, and received then, resulting in profound changes in commodity chains, that is, the flow of production of goods and services. In particular, there has been an increase in transnational production, and this has reinforced the importance of transnational corporations. Further, ICTs have changed the nature of labor’s contribution to production, enabling many tasks to be shifted to unskilled workers (or even to consumers themselves: automatic teller machines (ATMs), for example, turn each of us into a bank clerk). However, the growth of the Internet did not transcend the regular economy: on the contrary, it was wrapped into the economy’s crisis tendencies and even exacerbated them.
Schiller gives detailed accounts of these transformations in the automotive and financial industries, and in the military. The study of the effect of ICTs on the military is of particular interest considering that the Internet was originally developed as a military project, and that it is currently used by US intelligence agencies as a prime medium for the collection of information.
Schiller then turns to telecommunications, explaining the very significant changes that took place in the USA starting in the late 1970s. Those changes resulted in a major restructuring of the dominant telecommunications playing field in the US and ultimately led to the growth of the Internet, a development which had world-wide effects. Schiller carefully describes the various US government actions that initiated and nurtured those changes, and that were instrumental in exporting similar changes to the rest of the world.
Next, he analyzes how those changes affected and enabled the production of the networks themselves, the hardware used to build the networks and to use them (e.g. smartphones), and the software and applications that we all use today.
Moving further up the value chain, Schiller explains how data-mining, coupled with advertising, fuels the growth of the dominant Internet companies, and how this data-mining is made possible only by denying data privacy, and how states use the very same techniques to implement mass surveillance.
Having described the situation, Schiller proceeds to analyze it from economic and political perspectives. Given that the US was an early adopter of the Internet, it is not surprising that, because of economies of scale and network effects, US companies dominate the field (except in China, as Schiller explains in detail). Schiller describes how, given the influence of US companies on US politics, US policies, both domestic and foreign, are geared to allowing, or in fact favoring, ever-increasing concentration in key Internet markets, which is to the advantage of the US and its private companies–and despite the easy cant about decentralization and democratization.
The book describes how the US views the Internet as an extraterritorial domain, subject to no authority except that of the US government and that of the dominant US companies. Each dictates its own law in specific spheres (for example, the US government has supervised, up to now, the management of Internet domain names and addresses; while US companies dictate unilateral terms and conditions to their users, terms and conditions that imply that users give up essentially all rights to their private data).
Schiller describes how this state of affairs has become a foreign policy objective, with the US being willing to incur significant criticism and to pay a significant political price in order to maintain the status quo. That status quo is referred to as “the multi-stakeholder model”, in which private companies are essentially given veto power over government decisions (or at least over the decisions of any government other than the US government), a system that can be referred to as “corporatism”. Not only does the US staunchly defend that model for the Internet, it even tries to export it to other fields of human activity. And this despite, or perhaps because, that system allows companies to make profits when possible (in particular by exploiting state-built infrastructure or guarantees), and to transfer losses to states when necessary (as for example happened with the banking crisis).
Schiller carefully documents how code words such as “freedom of access” and “freedom of speech” are used to justify and promote policies that in fact merely serve the interests of major US companies and, at the same time, the interests of the US surveillance apparatus, which morphed from a cottage industry into a major component of the military-industrial complex thanks to the Internet. He shows how the supposed open participation in key bodies (such as the Internet Engineering Task Force) is actually a screen to mask the fact that decisions are heavily influenced by insiders affiliated with US companies and/or the US government, and by agencies bound to the US as a state.
As Schiller explains, this increasing dominance of US business and US political imperialism have not gone unchallenged, even if the challenges to date have mostly been rhetorical (again, except for China). Conflicts over Internet governance are related to rivalries between competing geo-political and geo-economic blocks, rivalries which will likely increase if economic growth continues to be weak. The rivalries are both between nations and within nations, and some are only emerging right now (for example, how to tax the digital economy, or the apparent emerging divergence of views between key US companies and the US government regarding mass surveillance).
Indeed, the book explains how the challenges to US dominance have become more serious in the wake of the Snowden revelations, which have resulted in a significant loss of market share for some of the key US players, in particular with respect to cloud computing services. Those losses may have begun to drive the tip of a wedge between the so-far congruent goals of US companies and the US government
In a nutshell, one can sum up what Schiller describes by paraphrasing Marx: “Capitalists of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but the chains of government regulation.” But, as Schiller hints in his closing chapter, the story is still unfolding, and just as things did not work out as Marx thought they would, so things may not work out as the forces that currently dominate the Internet wish they will. So the slogan for the future might well be “Internet users of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but the chains of exploitation of your personal data.”
This book, and its extensive references, will be a valuable reference work for all future research in this area. And surely there will be much future research, and many more historical analyses of what may well be some of the key turning points in the history of mankind: the transition from the industrial era to the information era and the disruptions induced by that transition.
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1. From item 11 of document WSIS+10/4/6 of the preparatory process for the WSIS+10 High Level Event, which provided “a special platform for high-ranking officials of WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society) stakeholders, government, private sector, civil society and international organizations to express their views on the achievements, challenges and recommendations on the implementation” of various earlier internet governance initiatives backed by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the United Nations specialized agency for information and communications technologies, and other participants in the global internet governance sphere.
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century has succeeded both commercially and as a work of scholarship. Capital‘s empirical research is widely praised among economists—even by those who disagree with its policy prescriptions. It is also the best-selling book in the century-long history of Harvard University Press, and a rare work of scholarship to reach the top spot on Amazon sales rankings.[1]
Capital‘s main methodological contribution is to bring economic, sociological, and even literary perspectives to bear in a work of economics.[2] The book bridges positive and normative social science, offering strong policy recommendations for increased taxation of the wealthiest. It is also an exploration of historical trends.[3] In Capital, fifteen years of careful archival research culminate in a striking thesis: capitalism exacerbates inequality over time. There is no natural tendency for markets themselves, or even ordinary politics, to slow accumulation by top earners.[4]
This review explains Piketty’s analysis and its relevance to law and social theory, drawing lessons for the re-emerging field of political economy. Piketty’s focus on long-term trends in inequality suggests that many problems traditionally explained as sector-specific (such as varied educational outcomes) are epiphenomenal with regard to increasingly unequal access to income and capital. Nor will a narrowing of purported “skills gaps” do much to improve economic security, since opportunity to earn money via labor matters far less in a world where capital is the key to enduring purchasing power. Policymakers and attorneys ignore Piketty at their peril, lest isolated projects of reform end up as little more than rearranging deck chairs amidst titanically unequal opportunities.
Inequality, Opportunity, and the Rigged Game
Capital weaves together description and prescription, facts and values, economics, politics, and history, with an assured and graceful touch. So clear is Piketty’s reasoning, and so compelling the enormous data apparatus he brings to bear, that few can doubt he has fundamentally altered our appreciation of the scope, duration, and intensity of inequality.[5]
Piketty’s basic finding is that, absent extraordinary political interventions, the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of growth of the economy generally (g), which Piketty expresses via the now-famous formula r > g.[6] He finds that this relationship persists over time, and in the many countries with reliable data on wealth and income.[7] This simple inequality relationship has many troubling implications, especially in light of historical conflicts between capital and labor.
Most persons support themselves primarily by wages—that is, what they earn from their labor. As capital takes more of economic output (an implication of r > g persisting over time), less is left for labor. Thus if we are concerned about unequal incomes and living standards, we cannot simply hope for a rising tide of growth to lift the fortunes of those in the bottom quintiles of the income and wealth distribution. As capital concentrates, its owners take an ever larger share of income—unless law intervenes and demands some form of redistribution.[8] As the chart below (by Bard economist Pavlina Tcherneva, based on Piketty’s data) shows, we have now reached the point where the US economy is not simply distributing the lion’s share of economic gains to top earners; it is actively redistributing extant income of lower decile earners upwards:
In 2011, 93% of the gains in income during the economic “recovery” went to the top 1%. From 2009 to 2011, “income gains to the top 1% … were 121% of all income increases,” because “incomes to the bottom 99% fell by 0.4%.”[9] The trend continued through 2012.
Fractal inequality prevails up and down the income scale.[10] The top 15,000 tax returns in the US reported an average taxable income of $26 million in 2005—at least 400 times greater than the median return.[11] Moreover, Larry Bartels’s book, Unequal Democracy, graphs these trends over decades.[12] Bartels shows that, from 1945-2007, the 95th percentile did much better than those at lower percentiles.[13] He then shows how those at the 99.99th percentile did spectacularly better than those at the 99.9th, 99.5th, 99th, and 95th percentiles.[14] There is some evidence that even within that top 99.99th percentile, inequality reigned. In 2005, the “Fortunate 400″—the 400 households with the highest earnings in the U.S.—made on average $213.9 million apiece, and the cutoff for entry into this group was a $100 million income—about four times the average income of $26 million prevailing in the top 15,000 returns.[15] As Danny Dorling observed in a recent presentation at the RSA, for those at the bottom of the 1%, it can feel increasingly difficult to “keep up with the Joneses,” Adelsons, and Waltons. Runaway incomes at the very top leave those slightly below the “ultra-high net worth individual” (UHNWI) cut-off ill-inclined to spread their own wealth to the 99%.
Thus inequality was well-documented in these, and many other works, by the time Piketty published Capital—indeed, other authors often relied on the interim reports released by Piketty and his team of fellow inequality researchers over the past two decades.[16] The great contribution of Capital is to vastly expand the scope of the inquiry, over space and time. The book examines records in France going back to the 19th century, and decades of data in Germany, Japan, Great Britain, Sweden, India, China, Portugal, Spain, Argentina, Switzerland, and the United States.[17]
The results are strikingly similar. The concentration of capital (any asset that generates income or gains in monetary value) is a natural concomitant of economic growth under capitalism—and tends to intensify if growth slows or stops.[18] Inherited fortunes become more important than those earned via labor, since the “miracle of compound interest” overwhelms any particularly hard-working person or ingenious idea. Once fortunes grow large enough, their owners can simply live off the interest and dividends they generate, without ever drawing on the principal. At the “escape velocity” enjoyed by some foundations and ultra-rich individuals, annual expenses are far less than annual income, precipitating ever-greater principal. This is Warren Buffett’s classic “snowball” of wealth—and we should not underestimate its ability to purchase the political favors that help constitute Buffettian “moats” around the businesses favored by the likes of Berkshire-Hathaway.[19] Dynasties form and entrench their power. If they can make capital pricey enough, even extraordinary innovations may primarily benefit their financers.
Deepening the Social Science of Political Economy
Just as John Rawls’s Theory of Justice laid a foundation for decades of writing on social justice, Piketty’s work is so generative that one could envision whole social scientific fields revitalized by it.[20] Political economy is the most promising, a long tradition of (as Piketty puts it) studying the “ideal role of the state in the economic and social organization of a country.”[21] Integrating the long-divided fields of politics and economics, a renewal of modern political economy could unravel “wicked problems” neither states nor markets alone can address.[22]
But the emphasis in Piketty’s definition of political economy on “a country,” versus countries, or the world, is in tension with the global solutions he recommends for the regulation of capital. The dream of neoliberal globalization was to unite the world via markets.[23] Anti-globalization activists have often advanced a rival vision of local self-determination, predicated on overlaps between political and economic boundaries. State-bound political economy could theorize those units. But the global economy is, at present, unforgiving of autarchy and unlikely to move towards it.
Capital tends to slip the bonds of states, migrating to tax havens. In the rarefied world of the global super-rich, financial privacy is a purchasable commodity. Certainly there are always risks of discovery, or being taken advantage of by a disreputable tax shelter broker or shady foreign bank. But for many wealthy individuals, tax havenry has been a rite of passage on the way to membership in a shadowy global elite. Piketty’s proposed global wealth tax would need international enforcement—for even the Foreign Accounts Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) imposed via America’s fading hegemony (and praised by Piketty) has only begun to address the problem of hidden (or runaway) wealth (and income).[24]
It will be very difficult to track down the world’s hidden fortunes and tax them properly. Had Piketty consulted more legal sources, he may have acknowledged the problem more adequately in Capital. He recommends “automatic information exchange” among tax authorities, which is an excellent principle to improve enforcement. But actually implementing this principle could require fine-grained regulation of IT systems, deployment of whole new types of surveillance, and even uniform coding (via, say, standard legal entity identifiers, or LEIs) globally. More frankly acknowledging the difficulty of shepherding such legislation globally could have led to a more convincing (and comprehensive) examination of the shortcomings of globalized capitalism.
In several extended interviews on Capital (with CNN Money, Econtalk, The New York Times, Huffington Post, and the New Republic, among others), Piketty pledges fealty to markets, praising their power to promote production and innovation. Never using the term “industrial policy” in his book, Piketty hopes that law may make the bounty of extant economic arrangements accessible to all, rather than changing the nature of those arrangements. But we need to begin to ask whether our very process of creating goods and services itself impedes better distribution of them.
Unfortunately, mainstream economics itself often occludes this fundamental question. When distributive concerns arise, policymakers can either substantively intervene to reshape the benefits and burdens of commerce (a strategy economists tend to derogate as dirigisme), or may, post hoc, use taxes and transfer programs to redistribute income and wealth. For establishment economists, redistribution (happening after initial allocations by “the market”) is almost always considered more efficient than “distortion” of markets by regulation, public provision, or “predistribution.”[25]
Tax law has historically been our primary way of arranging such redistribution, and Piketty makes it a focus of the concluding part of his book, called “Regulating Capital.” Piketty laments the current state of tax reporting and enforcement. Very wealthy individuals have developed complex webs of shell entities to hide their true wealth and earnings.[26] As one journalist observed, “Behind a New York City deed, there may be a Delaware LLC, which may be managed by a shell company in the British Virgin Islands, which may be owned by a trust in the Isle of Man, which may have a bank account in Liechtenstein managed by the private banker in Geneva. The true owner behind the structure might be known only to the banker.”[27] This is the dark side of globalization: the hidden structures that shield the unscrupulous from accountability.[28]
The most fundamental tool of tax secrecy is separation: between persons and their money, between corporations and the persons who control them, between beneficial and nominal controllers of wealth. When money can pass between countries as easily as digital files, skilled lawyers and accountants can make it impossible for tax authorities to uncover the beneficial owners of assets (and the income streams generated by those assets).
Piketty believes that one way to address inequality is strict enforcement of laws like America’s FATCA.[29] But the United States cannot accomplish much without pervasive global cooperation. Thus the international challenge of inequality haunts Capital. As money concentrates in an ever smaller global “superclass” (to use David J. Rothkopf’s term), it’s easier for it to escape any ruling authority.[30] John Chung has characterized today’s extraordinary concentrations of wealth as a “death of reference” in our monetary system and its replacement with “a total relativity.”[31] He notes that “[i]n 2007, the average amount of annual compensation for the top twenty-five highest paid hedge fund managers was $892 million;” in the past few years, individual annual incomes in the group have reached two, three, or four billion dollars. Today’s greatest hoards of wealth are digitized, as easily moved and hidden as digital files.
We have no idea what taxes may be due from trillions of dollars in offshore wealth, or to what purposes it is directed.[32] In less-developed countries, dictators and oligarchs smuggle ill-gotten gains abroad. Groups like Global Financial Integrity and the Tax Justice Network estimate that illicit financial flows out of poor countries (and into richer ones, often via tax havens) are ten times greater than the total sum of all development aid—nearly $1 trillion per year. Given that the total elimination of extreme global poverty could cost about $175 billion per year for twenty years, this is not a trivial loss of funds—completely apart from what the developing world loses in the way of investment when its wealthiest residents opt to stash cash in secrecy jurisdictions.[33]
An adviser to the Tax Justice Network once said that assessing money kept offshore is an “exercise in night vision,” like trying to measure “the economic equivalent of an astrophysical black hole.”[34] Shell corporations can hide connections between persons and their money, between corporations and the persons who control them, between beneficial and nominal owners. When enforcers in one country try to connect all these dots, there is usually another secrecy jurisdiction willing to take in the assets of the conniving. As the Tax Justice Network’s “TaxCast” exposes on an almost monthly basis, victories for tax enforcement in one developed country tend to be counterbalanced by a slide away from transparency elsewhere.
Thus when Piketty recommends that “the only way to obtain tangible results is to impose automatic sanctions not only on banks but also on countries that refuse to require their financial institutions” to report on wealth and income to proper taxing authorities, one has to wonder: what super-institution will impose the penalties? Is this to be an ancillary function of the WTO?[35] Similarly, equating the imposition of a tax on capital with “the stroke of a pen” (568) underestimates the complexity of implementing such a tax, and the predictable forms of resistance that the wealth defense industry will engage in.[36] All manner of societal and cultural, public and private, institutions will need to entrench such a tax if it is to be a stable corrective to the juggernaut of r > g.[37]
Given how much else the book accomplishes, this demand may strike some as a cavil—something better accomplished by Piketty’s next work, or by an altogether different set of allied social scientists. But if Capital itself is supposed to model (rather than merely call for) a new discipline of political economy, it needs to provide more detail about the path from here to its prescriptions. Philosophers like Thomas Pogge and Leif Wenar, and lawyers like Terry Fisher and Talha Syed, have been quite creative in thinking through the actual institutional arrangements that could lead to better distribution of health care, health research, and revenues from natural resources.[38] They are not cited in Capital¸but their work could have enriched its institutional analysis greatly.
An emerging approach to financial affairs, known as the Legal Theory of Finance (LTF), also offers illumination here, and should guide future policy interventions. Led by Columbia Law Professor Katharina Pistor, an interdisciplinary research team of social scientists and attorneys have documented the ways in which law is constitutive of so-called financial markets.[39] Revitalizing the tradition of legal realism, Pistor has demonstrated the critical role of law in generating modern finance. Though law to some extent shapes all markets, in finance, its role is most pronounced. The “products” traded are very little more than legal recognitions of obligations to buy or sell, own or owe. Their value can change utterly based on tiny changes to the bankruptcy code, SEC regulations, or myriad other laws and regulations.
The legal theory of finance changes the dialogue about regulation of wealth. The debate can now move beyond stale dichotomies like “state vs. market,” or even “law vs. technology.” While deregulationists mock the ability of regulators to “keep up with” the computational capacities of global banking networks, it is the regulators who made the rules that made the instantaneous, hidden transfer of financial assets so valuable in the first place. Such rules are not set in stone.
The legal theory of finance also enables a more substantive dialogue about the central role of law in political economy. Not just tax rules, but also patent, trade, and finance regulation need to be reformed to make the wealthy accountable for productively deploying the wealth they have either earned or taken. Legal scholars have a crucial role to play in this debate—not merely as technocrats adjusting tax rules, but as advisors on a broad range of structural reforms that could ensure the economy’s rewards better reflected the relative contributions of labor, capital, and the environment.[40] Lawyers had a much more prominent role in the Federal Reserve when it was more responsive to workers’ concerns.[41]
Imagined Critics as Unacknowledged Legislators
A book is often influenced by its author’s imagined critics. Piketty, decorous in his prose style and public appearances, strains to fit his explosive results into the narrow range of analytical tools and policy proposals that august economists won’t deem “off the wall.”[42] Rather than deeply considering the legal and institutional challenges to global tax coordination, Piketty focuses on explaining in great detail the strengths and limitations of the data he and a team of researchers have been collecting for over a decade. But a renewed social science of political economy depends on economists’ ability to expand their imagined audience of critics, to those employing qualitative methodologies, to attorneys and policy experts working inside and outside the academy, and to activists and journalists with direct knowledge of the phenomena addressed. Unfortunately, time that could have been valuably directed to that endeavor—either in writing Capital, or constructively shaping the extraordinary publicity the book received—has instead been diverted to shoring up the book’s reputation as rigorous economics, against skeptics who fault its use of data.
To his credit, Piketty has won these fights on the data mavens’ own terms. The book’s most notable critic, Chris Giles at the Financial Times, tried to undermine Capital‘s conclusions by trumping up purported ambiguities in wealth measurement.His critique was rapidly dispatched by many, including Piketty himself.[43] Indeed, as Neil Irwin observed, “Giles’s results point to a world at odds not just with Mr. Piketty’s data, but also with that by other scholars and with the intuition of anyone who has seen what townhouses in the Mayfair neighborhood of London are selling for these days.”[44]
One wonders if Giles reads his own paper. On any given day one might see extreme inequality flipping from one page to the next. For example, in a special report on “the fragile middle,” Javier Blas noted that no more than 12% of Africans earned over $10 per day in 2010—a figure that has improved little, if at all, since 1980.[45] Meanwhile, in the House & Home section on the same day, Jane Owen lovingly described the grounds of the estate of “His Grace Henry Fitzroy, the 12th Duke of Grafton.” The grounds cost £40,000 to £50,000 a year to maintain, and were never “expected to do anything other than provide pleasure.”[46] England’s revanchist aristocracy makes regular appearances in the Financial Times “How to Spend It” section as well, and no wonder: as Oxfam reported in March, 2014, Britain’s five richest families have more wealth than its twelve million poorest people.[47]
Force and Capital
The persistence of such inequalities is as much a matter of law (and the force behind it to, say, disperse protests and selectively enforce tax regulations), as it is a natural outgrowth of the economic forces driving r and g. To his credit, Piketty does highlight some of the more grotesque deployments of force on behalf of capital. He begins Part I (“Income and Capital”) and ends Part IV (“Regulating Capital”) by evoking the tragic strike at the Lonmin Mine in South Africa in August 2012. In that confrontation, “thirty-four strikers were shot dead” for demanding pay of about $1,400 a month (there were making about $700).[48] Piketty deploys the story to dramatize conflict over the share of income going to capital versus labor. But it also illustrates dynamics of corruption. Margaret Kimberley of Black Agenda Report claims that the union involved was coopted thanks to the wealth of the man who once ran it.[49] The same dynamics shine through documentaries like Big Men (on Ghana), or the many nonfiction works on oil exploitation in Africa.[50]
Piketty observes that “foreign companies and stockholders are at least as guilty as unscrupulous African elites” in promoting the “pillage” of the continent.[51] Consider the state of Equatorial Guinea, which struck oil in 1995. By 2006, Equatoguineans had the third highest per capita income in the world, higher than many prosperous European countries.[52] Yet the typical citizen remains very poor.[53] In the middle of the oil boom, an international observer noted that “I was unable to see any improvements in the living standards of ordinary people. In 2005, nearly half of all children under five were malnourished,” and “[e]ven major cities lack[ed] clean water and basic sanitation.”[54] The government has not demonstrated that things have improved much since them, despite ample opportunity to do so. Poorly paid soldiers routinely shake people down for bribes, and the country’s president, Teodoro Obiang, has paid Moroccan mercenaries for his own protection. A 2009 book noted that tensions in the country had reached a boiling point, as the “local Bubi people of Malabo” felt “invaded” by oil interests, other regions were “abandoned,” and self-determination movements decried environmental and human rights abuses.[55]
So who did benefit from Equatorial Guinea’s oil boom? Multinational oil companies, to be sure, though we may never know exactly how much profit the country generated for them—their accounting was (and remains) opaque. The Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C. gladly handled accounts of President Obiang, as he became very wealthy. Though his salary was reported to be $60,000 a year, he had a net worth of roughly $600 million by 2011.[56] (Consider, too, that such a fortune would not even register on recent lists of the world’s 1,500 or so billionaires, and is barely more than 1/80th the wealth of a single Koch brother.) Most of the oil companies’ payments to him remain shrouded in secrecy, but a few came to light in the wake of US investigations. For example, a US Senate report blasted him for personally taking $96 million of his nation’s $130 million in oil revenue in 1998, when a majority of his subjects were malnourished.[57]
Obiang’s sordid record has provided a rare glimpse into some of the darkest corners of the global economy. But his story is only the tip of an iceberg of a much vaster shadow economy of illicit financial flows, secrecy jurisdictions, and tax evasion. Obiang could afford to be sloppy: as the head of a sovereign state whose oil reserves gave it some geopolitical significance, he knew that powerful patrons could shield him from the fate of an ordinary looter. Other members of the hectomillionaire class (and plenty of billionaires) take greater precautions. They diversify their holdings into dozens or hundreds of entities, avoiding public scrutiny with shell companies and pliant private bankers. A hidden hoard of tens of trillions of dollars has accumulated, and likely throws off hundreds of billions of dollars yearly in untaxed interest, dividends, and other returns.[58] This drives a wedge between a closed-circuit economy of extreme wealth and the ordinary patterns of exchange of the world’s less fortunate.[59]
The Chinese writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo once observed that corruption in Beijing had led to an officialization of the criminal and the criminalization of the official.[60] Persisting even in a world of brutal want and austerity-induced suffering, tax havenry epitomizes that sinister merger, and Piketty might have sharpened his critique further by focusing on this merger of politics and economics, of private gain and public governance. Authorities promote activities that would have once been proscribed; those who stand in the way of such “progress” might be jailed (or worse). In Obiang’s Equatorial Guinea, we see similar dynamics, as the country’s leader extracts wealth at a volume that could only be dreamed of by a band of thieves.
Obiang’s curiously double position, as Equatorial Guinea’s chief law maker and law breaker, reflects a deep reality of the global shadow economy. And just as “shadow banks” are rivalling more regulated banks in terms of size and influence, shadow economy tactics are starting to overtake old standards. Tax avoidance techniques that were once condemned are becoming increasingly acceptable. Campaigners like UK Uncut and the Tax Justice Network try to shame corporations for opportunistically allocating profits to low-tax jurisdictions.[61] But CEOs still brag about their corporate tax unit as a profit center.
When some of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s recherché tax strategies were revealed in 2012, Barack Obama needled him repeatedly. The charges scarcely stuck, as Romney’s core constituencies aimed to emulate rather than punish their standard-bearer.[62] Obama then appointed a Treasury Secretary (Jack Lew), who had himself utilized a Cayman Islands account. Lew was the second Obama Treasury secretary to suffer tax troubles: Tim Geithner, his predecessor, was also accused of “forgetting” to pay certain taxes in a self-serving way. And Obama’s billionaire Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker was no stranger to complex tax avoidance strategies.[63]
Tax attorneys may characterize Pritzker, Lew, Geithner, and Romney as different in kind from Obiang. But any such distinctions they make will likely need to be moral, rather than legal, in nature. Sure, these American elites operated within American law—but Obiang is the law of Equatorial Guinea, and could easily arrange for an administrative agency to bless his past actions (even developed legal systems permit retroactive rulemaking) or ensure the legality of all future actions (via safe harbors). The mere fact that a tax avoidance scheme is “legal” should not count for much morally—particularly as those who gain from prior US tax tweaks use their fortunes to support the political candidacies of those who would further push the law in their favor.
Shadowy financial flows exemplify the porous boundary between state and market. The book Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works argues that the line between savvy tax avoidance and illegal tax evasion (or strategic money transfers and forbidden money laundering) is blurring.[64] Between our stereotypical mental images of dishonest tycoons sipping margaritas under the palm trees of a Caribbean tax haven, and a state governor luring a firm by granting it a temporary tax abatement, lie hundreds of subtler scenarios. Dingy rows of Delaware, Nevada, and Wyoming file cabinets can often accomplish the same purpose as incorporating in Belize or Panama: hiding the real beneficiaries of economic activity.[65] And as one wag put it to journalist Nicholas Shaxson, “the most important tax haven in the world is an island”—”Manhattan.”[66]
In a world where “tax competition” is a key to neoliberal globalization, it is hard to see how a global wealth tax (even if set at the very low levels Piketty proposes) supports (rather than directly attacks) existing market order. Political elites are racing to reduce tax liability to curry favor with the wealthy companies and individuals they hope to lure, serve, and bill. The ultimate logic of that competition is a world made over in the image of Obiang’s Equatorial Guinea: crumbling infrastructure and impoverished citizenries coexisting with extreme luxury for a global extractive elite and its local enablers. Books like Third World America, Oligarchy, and Captive Audience have already started chronicling the failure of the US tax system to fund roads, bridges, universal broadband internet connectivity, and disaster preparation.[67] As tax avoiding elites parley their gains into lobbying for rules that make tax avoidance even easier, self-reinforcing inequality seems all but inevitable. Wealthy interests can simply fund campaigns to reduce their taxes, or to reduce the risk of enforcement to a nullity. As Ben Kunkel pointedly asks, “How are the executive committees of the ruling class in countries across the world to act in concert to impose Piketty’s tax on just this class?”[68]
US history is instructive here. Congress passed a tax on the top 0.1% of earners in 1894, only to see the Supreme Court strike the tax down in a five to four decision. After the 16th Amendment effectively repealed that Supreme Court decision, Congress steadily increased the tax on high income households. From 1915 to 1918, the highest rate went from 7% to 77%, and over fifty-six tax brackets were set. When high taxes were maintained for the wealthy after the war, tax evasion flourished. At this point, as Jeffrey Winters writes, the government had to choose whether to “beef up law enforcement against oligarchs … , or abandon the effort and instead squeeze the same resources from citizens with far less material clout to fight back.”[69] Enforcement ebbed and flowed. But since then, what began by targeting the very wealthy has grown to include “a mass tax that burdens oligarchs at the same effective rate as their office staff and landscapers.”[70]
The undertaxation of America’s wealthy has helped them capture key political processes, and in turn demand even less taxation. The dynamic of circularity teaches us that there is no stable, static equilibrium to be achieved between regulators and regulated. The government is either pushing industry to realize some public values in its activities (say, by investing in sustainable growth), or industry is pushing its regulators to promote its own interests.[71] Piketty may worry that, if he too easily accepts this core tenet of politico-economic interdependence, he’ll be dismissed as a statist socialist. But until political economists do so, their work cannot do justice to the voices of those prematurely dead as a result of the relentless pursuit of profit—ranging from the Lonmin miners, to those crushed at Rana Plaza, to the spike of suicides provoked by European austerity and Indian microcredit gone wrong, to the thousands of Americans who will die early because they are stuck in states that refuse to expand Medicaid.[72] Contemporary political economy can only mature if capitalism’s ghosts constrain our theory and practice as pervasively as communism’s specter does.
Renewing Political Economy
Piketty has been compared to Alexis de Tocqueville: a French outsider capable of discerning truths about the United States that its own sages were too close to observe. The function social equality played in Tocqueville’s analysis, is taken up by economic inequality in Piketty’s: a set of self-reinforcing trends fundamentally reshaping the social order.[73] I’ve written tens of thousands of words on this inequality, but the verbal itself may be outmatched in the face of the numbers and force behind these trends.[74] As film director Alex Rivera puts it, in an interview with The New Inquiry:
I don’t think we even have the vocabulary to talk about what we lose as contemporary virtualized capitalism produces these new disembodied labor relations. … The broad, hegemonic clarity is the knowledge that a capitalist enterprise has the right to seek out the cheapest wage and the right to configure itself globally to find it. … The next stage in this process…is for capital to configure itself to enable every single job to be put on the global market through the network.[75]
Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” has begun that process, supplying “turkers” to perform tasks at a penny each.[76] Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, and various “gig economy” imitators assure that micro-labor is on the rise, leaving micro-wages in its wake.[77] Workers are shifting from paid vacation to stay-cation to “nano-cation” to “paid time off” to hoarding hours to cover the dry spells when work disappears.[78] These developments are all predictable consequences of a globalization premised on maximizing finance rents, top manager compensation, and returns to shareholders.
Inequality is becoming more outrageous than even caricaturists used to dare. The richest woman in the world (Gina Rinehart) has advised fellow Australians to temper their wage demands, given that they are competing against Africans willing to work for two dollars day.[79] Or consider the construct of Dogland, from Korzeniewicz and Moran’s 2009 book, Unveiling Inequality:
The magnitude of global disparities can be illustrated by considering the life of dogs in the United States. According to a recent estimate … in 2007-2008 the average yearly expenses associated with owning a dog were $1425 … For sake of argument, let us pretend that these dogs in the US constitute their own nation, Dogland, with their average maintenance costs representing the average income of this nation of dogs.
By such a standard, their income would place Dogland squarely as a middle-income nation, above countries such as Paraguay and Egypt. In fact, the income of Dogland would place its canine inhabitants above more than 40% of the world population. … And if we were to focus exclusively on health care expenditures, the gap becomes monumental: the average yearly expenditures in Dogland would be higher than health care expenditures in countries that account for over 80% of the world population.[80]
Given disparities like this, wages cannot possibly reflect just desert: who can really argue that a basset hound, however adorable, has “earned” more than a Bangladeshi laborer? Cambridge economist Ha Joon Chang asks us to compare the job and the pay of transport workers in Stockholm and Calcutta. “Skill” has little to do with it. The former, drivers on clean and well-kept roads, may easily be paid fifty times more than the latter, who may well be engaged in backbreaking, and very skilled, labor to negotiate passengers among teeming pedestrians, motorbikes, trucks, and cars.[81]
Once “skill-biased technological change” is taken off the table, the classic economic rationale for such differentials focuses on the incentives necessary to induce labor. In Sweden, for example, the government assures that a person is unlikely to starve, no matter how many hours a week he or she works. By contrast, in India, 42% of the children under five years old are malnourished.[82] So while it takes $15 or $20 an hour just to get the Swedish worker to show up, the typical Indian can be motivated to labor for much less. But of course, at this point the market rationale for the wage differential breaks down entirely, because the background set of social expectations of earnings absent work is epiphenomenal of state-guaranteed patterns of social insurance. The critical questions are: how did the Swedes generate adequate goods and services for their population, and the social commitment to redistribution necessary in order to assure that unemployment is not a death sentence? And how can such social arrangements create basic entitlements to food, housing, health care, and education, around the world?
Piketty’s proposals for regulating capital would be more compelling if they attempted to answer questions like those, rather than focusing on the dry, technocratic aim of tax-driven wealth redistribution. Moreover, even within the realm of tax law and policy, Piketty will need to grapple with several enforcement challenges if a global wealth tax is to succeed. But to its great credit, Capital adopts a methodology capacious enough to welcome the contributions of legal academics and a broad range of social scientists to the study (and remediation) of inequality.[83] It is now up to us to accept the invitation, realizing that if we refuse, accelerating inequality will undermine the relevance—and perhaps even the very existence—of independent legal authority.
[2] Intriguingly, one leading economist who has done serious work on narrative in the field, Dierdre McCloskey, offers a radically different (and far more positive) perspective on the nature of economic growth under capitalism. Evan Thomas, Has Thomas Piketty Met His Match?, http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9211721/unequal-battle/. But this is to be expected as richer methodologies inform economic analysis. Sometimes the best interpretive social science leads not to consensus, but to ever sharper disagreement about the nature of the phenomena it describes and evaluates. Rather than trying to bury normative differences in jargon or flatten them into commensurable cost-benefit calculations, it surfaces them.
[3] As Thomas Jessen Adams argues, “to understand how inequality has been overcome in the past, we must understand it historically.” Adams, The Theater of Inequality, at http://nonsite.org/feature/the-theater-of-inequality. Adams critiques Piketty for failing to engage historical evidence properly. In this review, I celebrate the book’s bricolage of methodological approaches as the type of problem-driven research promoted by Ian Shapiro.
[4] Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century 17 (Arthur Goldhammer trans., 2014).
[8] As Piketty observes, war and revolution can also serve this redistributive function. Piketty, supra n. 3, at 20. Since I (and the vast majority of attorneys) do not consider violence a legitimate tool of social change, I do not include these options in my discussion of Piketty’s book.
[9] Frank Pasquale, Access to Medicine in an Era of Fractal Inequality, 19 Annals of Health Law 269 (2010).
[10] Charles R. Morris, The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash 139-40 (2009); see also Edward N. Wolff, Top Heavy: The Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America and What Can Be Done About It 36 (updated ed. 2002).
[16]See Thomas Piketty & Emmanuel Saez, The Evolution of Top Incomes: A Historical and International Perspective, 96 Am. Econ. Rev. 200, 204 (2006).
[17] Piketty, supra note 4, at 17. Note that, given variations in the data, Piketty is careful to cabin the “geographical and historical boundaries of this study” (27), and must “focus primarily on the wealthy countries and proceed by extrapolation to poor and emerging countries” (28).
[18]Id. at 46, 571 (“In this book, capital is defined as the sum total of nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market. Capital includes all forms of real property (including residential real estate) as well as financial and professional capital (plants, infrastructure, machinery, patents, and so on) used by firms and government agencies.”).
[23] Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (2013).
[24] The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) was passed in 2010 as part of the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act, Pub. L. No. 111-147, 124 Stat. 71 (2010), codified in sections 1471 to 1474 of the Internal Revenue Code, 26 U.S.C. §§ 1471-1474. The law is effective as of 2014. It requires foreign financial institutions (FFIs) to report financial information about accounts held by United States persons, or pay a withholding tax. Id.
[25] Christopher William Sanchirico, Deconstructing the New Efficiency Rationale, 86 Cornell L. Rev. 1003, 1005 (2001).
[28] Ronen Palan, Richard Murphy, and Christian Chavagneux, Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works 272 (2009) (“[m]ore than simple conduits for tax avoidance and evasion, tax havens actually belong to the broad world of finance, to the business of managing the monetary resources of individuals, organizations, and countries. They have become among the most powerful instruments of globalization, one of the principal causes of global financial instability, and one of the large political issues of our times.”).
[38] Thomas Pogge, The Health Impact Fund: Boosting Pharmaceutical Innovation Without Obstructing Free Access, 18 Cambridge Q. Healthcare Ethics 78 (2008) (proposing global R&D fund);William Fisher III, Promise to Keep: Technology, Law, and the Future of Entertainment (2007); William W. Fisher & Talha Syed, Global Justice in Healthcare: Developing Drugs for the Developing World, 40 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 581 (2006).
[39] Katharina Pistor, A Legal Theory of Finance, 41 J. Comp. Econ. 315 (2013); Law in Finance, 41 J. Comp. Econ (2013). Several other articles in the same journal issue discuss the implications of LTF for derivatives, foreign currency exchange, and central banking.
[40] University of Chicago Law Professor Eric A. Posner and economist Glen Weyl recognize this in their review of Piketty, arguing that “the fundamental problem facing American capitalism is not the high rate of return on capital relative to economic growth that Piketty highlights, but the radical deviation from the just rewards of the marketplace that have crept into our society and increasingly drives talented students out of innovation and into finance.” Posner & Weyl, Thomas Piketty Is Wrong: America Will Never Look Like a Jane Austen Novel,” The New Republic, July 31, 2014, at http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118925/pikettys-capital-theory-misunderstands-inherited-wealth-today. See also Timothy A. Canova, The Federal Reserve We Need, 21 American Prospect 9 (October 2010), at http://prospect.org/article/federal-reserve-we-need.
[42] Jack M. Balkin, From Off the Wall to On the Wall: How the Mandate Challenge Went Mainstream, Atlantic (June 4, 2012, 2:55 PM), http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/06/from-off-the-wall-to-on-the-wall-how-the-mandate-challenge-went-mainstream/258040/ (Jack Balkin has described how certain arguments go from being ‘off the wall‘ to respectable in constitutional thought; economists have yet to take up that deflationary nomenclature for the evolution of ideas in their own field’s intellectual history. That helps explain the rising power of economists vis a vis lawyers, since the latter field’s honesty about the vagaries of its development diminishes its authority as a ‘science.’). For more on the political consequences of the philosophy of social science, see Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (2014), and Joel Isaac, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (2012).
[55] Geraud Magrin & Geert van Vliet, The Use of Oil Revenues in Africa, in Governance of Oil in Africa: Unfinished Business 114 (Jacques Lesourne ed., 2009).
[56]Interview with President Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea, supra note 89 .
[57] S. Minority Staff of Permanent Subcomm. on Investigations, Comm. on Gov’t Affairs, 108th Cong., Rep. on Money Laundering and Foreign Corruption: Enforcement and Effectiveness of the Patriot Act 39-40 (Subcomm. Print 2004).
[64] Ronen Palan et al., Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works (2013); see also Carolyn Nordstrom, Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World (2007), and Loretta Napoleoni, Rogue Economics (2009).
[67] Arianna Huffington, Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream (2011); Jeffrey A. Winters, Oligarchy (2011); Susan B. Crawford, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age (2014).
[68] Benjamin Kunkel, Paupers and Richlings, 36 London Rev. Books 17 (2014) (reviewing Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century).
[73] It would be instructive to compare political theorists’ varying models of Tocqueville’s predictive efforts, with Piketty’s sweeping r > g. See, e.g., Roger Boesche, Why Could Tocqueville Predict So Well?, 11 Political Theory 79 (1983) (“Democracy in America endeavors to demonstrate how language, literature, the relations of masters and servants, the status of women, the family, property, politics, and so forth, must change and align themselves in a new, symbiotic configuration as a result of the historical thrust toward equality”); Jon Elster, Alexis de Tocqueville: the First Social Scientist (2012).
[74] See, e.g., Frank Pasquale, Access to Medicine in an Era of Fractal Inequality, 19 Annals of Health Law 269 (2010); Frank Pasquale, The Cost of Conscience: Quantifying our Charitable Burden in an Era of Globalization, at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=584741 (2004); Frank Pasquale, Diagnosing Finance’s Failures: From Economic Idealism to Lawyerly Realism, 6 India L. J. 2 (2012).
[83] Paul Farmer observes that “an understanding of poverty must be linked to efforts to end it.” Farmer, In the Company of the Poor, at http://www.pih.org/blog/in-the-company-of-the-poor. The same could be said of extreme inequality.
