When I started writing stuff like this five-and-a-half years ago, I did so under a pseudonym because I anticipated the gales of mocking, condescending laughter from the tough-guy RRRRRevolutionaries who knew that only ideas and words were important and soft, fuzzy stuff like "culture" and "emotion" could be left to fend for itself, if not an actual impediment to the struggle. But perhaps the time has now come.
Anyway, follow the Kasama Project - they come from a Maoist tradition, we were originally Trots, but the Truth Is One and all those who sincerely seek the Truth Are One.
Showing posts with label subcultures. Show all posts
Showing posts with label subcultures. Show all posts
2012-03-20
2009-03-26
The next step
"The capitalist economy presents itself as a vast accumulation of commodities" - Karl Marx
"Life under capitalism presents itself as a vast accumulation of spectacles" - Guy Debord
"The memetic environment under consumer capitalism presents itself as a vast accumulation of identities" - Doloras LaPicho
Identity-as-commodity is, Chaos Marxism insists, fundamental to explaining the ideological effect of capitalism. Social identities have always been based on participation in a social network. The novelty of late, Fordist/post-Fordist capitalism is that in every other era, identity-networks were based on one's place in relations of physical or memetic production. In the modern era, they are based on consumption. Which is why they proliferate, because they expand along with the dizzying consumer choice offered by the debt-driven monopolistic competition model. There are of course "mass market" identities sold to virtually everyone as race, nation, religion, favourite sports team, and if you're an American, "liberal" or "conservative". And then there are the niche market identities, which most readers of this blog will buy into. The important point is that adopting an identity based on consumption means that - unlike the proletariat of the 19th century - you do have something to lose apart from your chains if capitalism comes to an end, that very thing which (we argue) is fundamental to existence as a human being.
Just a brief note that what seems most ludicrous about the popular culture of the late '80s - late '90s (i.e. the high water mark of consumer capitalism) is the whole "neo-tribal" bullshit. It was the era in which wearing a subcultural uniform really took off - the more outlandish the uniform and the more "unconventional" its choices of entertainment commodities, the better. That is the dark future of total fragmentation predicted by Ken MacLeod in The Star Fraction. To some degree, the collapse of this economy (begun with the dot.com crash, accelerated by the War On Terror in which once again a position for or against the Powers That Be became important, and perhaps finally ending with Depression 2.0) is the collapse of the idea that fulfilment consists of finding the right clique to hang with. Now can someone tell this to the Marxist and anarchist sects? Or the Paultards, for that matter.
An even briefer note that no-one had better be thinking that stripping someone of their identity forcefully, or even challenging it directly, is a good idea. If it doesn't work, you've made an enemy for life, and if it does, they will be rendered useless. Of course, if you run a mind-control cult, the second is precisely what you are hoping for so you can reprogramme them according to your whim. You have to get the goose out of the bottle without breaking the glass - that's Trotsky's transitional method. Proposed political action has to be consistent with currently existing mass identity, while following a logic which leads out of them.
Special note: we have abolished pre-approval for comments, although we reserve the right to delete anything we consider retarded, or not retarded enough.
"Life under capitalism presents itself as a vast accumulation of spectacles" - Guy Debord
"The memetic environment under consumer capitalism presents itself as a vast accumulation of identities" - Doloras LaPicho
Identity-as-commodity is, Chaos Marxism insists, fundamental to explaining the ideological effect of capitalism. Social identities have always been based on participation in a social network. The novelty of late, Fordist/post-Fordist capitalism is that in every other era, identity-networks were based on one's place in relations of physical or memetic production. In the modern era, they are based on consumption. Which is why they proliferate, because they expand along with the dizzying consumer choice offered by the debt-driven monopolistic competition model. There are of course "mass market" identities sold to virtually everyone as race, nation, religion, favourite sports team, and if you're an American, "liberal" or "conservative". And then there are the niche market identities, which most readers of this blog will buy into. The important point is that adopting an identity based on consumption means that - unlike the proletariat of the 19th century - you do have something to lose apart from your chains if capitalism comes to an end, that very thing which (we argue) is fundamental to existence as a human being.
Just a brief note that what seems most ludicrous about the popular culture of the late '80s - late '90s (i.e. the high water mark of consumer capitalism) is the whole "neo-tribal" bullshit. It was the era in which wearing a subcultural uniform really took off - the more outlandish the uniform and the more "unconventional" its choices of entertainment commodities, the better. That is the dark future of total fragmentation predicted by Ken MacLeod in The Star Fraction. To some degree, the collapse of this economy (begun with the dot.com crash, accelerated by the War On Terror in which once again a position for or against the Powers That Be became important, and perhaps finally ending with Depression 2.0) is the collapse of the idea that fulfilment consists of finding the right clique to hang with. Now can someone tell this to the Marxist and anarchist sects? Or the Paultards, for that matter.
An even briefer note that no-one had better be thinking that stripping someone of their identity forcefully, or even challenging it directly, is a good idea. If it doesn't work, you've made an enemy for life, and if it does, they will be rendered useless. Of course, if you run a mind-control cult, the second is precisely what you are hoping for so you can reprogramme them according to your whim. You have to get the goose out of the bottle without breaking the glass - that's Trotsky's transitional method. Proposed political action has to be consistent with currently existing mass identity, while following a logic which leads out of them.
Special note: we have abolished pre-approval for comments, although we reserve the right to delete anything we consider retarded, or not retarded enough.
2009-01-19
I am a Moralfag and I approve this message.
A rogue Anonymous (as if there were any other kind) covered himself with vaseline and pubic hair and ran around touching all the books in a Scientology cult outreach centre.
Now that's the kind of stuff that we've been missing here. Some of you might have wondered whether Project Chanology was still going, and I kind of wondered that myself. It seemed to be degenerating into staid, morally upright protest politics, of the kind which have completely failed to dislodge the cult for decades. Now we see "the chemo that is curing Chanology", as the trolls put it - the movement must walk on two legs.
Like South Africa needed a political as well as a military fight against apartheid, so the fight against Scientology requires a SERIOUS BUSINESS wing and a RANDOM INSANE OFFENSIVE SHIT wing, organisationally independent from each other. Only thus can the constituency spread and the meme gain new life. The "troll" is the irregular partisan of meme warfare.
Now that's the kind of stuff that we've been missing here. Some of you might have wondered whether Project Chanology was still going, and I kind of wondered that myself. It seemed to be degenerating into staid, morally upright protest politics, of the kind which have completely failed to dislodge the cult for decades. Now we see "the chemo that is curing Chanology", as the trolls put it - the movement must walk on two legs.
Like South Africa needed a political as well as a military fight against apartheid, so the fight against Scientology requires a SERIOUS BUSINESS wing and a RANDOM INSANE OFFENSIVE SHIT wing, organisationally independent from each other. Only thus can the constituency spread and the meme gain new life. The "troll" is the irregular partisan of meme warfare.
2008-12-23
Niche markets and their genesis
The central point of the CM political model is that, while factory workers and office workers have fundamentally identical interests, they have fundamentally differing experiences of the work place. The essential reason for this is that the process of accumulating education / cultural capital that qualifies you for office work is also the process of cultural assimilation. In other words - to work in an office you have to be able to communicate with the boss and with your fellow workers in terms they can understand. You have to be pretty fluent in whatever the local lingua franca is, naturally, but you also have to "fit in" socially, so that people don't feel "uncomfortable" around you. Which assumes some commonality of social and cultural frames of reference with your employer. Which is not ideal for the dawning of class consciousness.
The essential upshot of this is that office workers are far less likely to see their interests as counterposed to that of the boss than factory workers - even though in reality they are. The exception to this is in large corporate firms, where "the boss" is generally ten flights of stairs up and might as well be on a different planet. But the nature of office work is that it's as efficient to carry it out in small sites than in big ones, especially in the Intarwebz age. When "the boss" is just across the hallway, when they pretty much "speak your language" in every significant sense, it is so much easier to feel an affinity with them than, say, the Bengali immigrant who's emptying your wastepaper basket.
===
Another aspect of the more equal relationship (on the surface) that pertains in the office environment is that it makes it far easier for the boss to exploit your intellectual capital - i.e. get you to come up with ideas to make your exploitation more efficient and not reward you. This whole question of "enclosure of the cultural commons" is one that exercises the autonomist-operaista wing of Marxism very much, in that you get exploited simply by having a brain and thinking, let alone actually producing any concrete surplus value. But it can also efficiently explain the emergence of niche markets - as well as explaining one of the most important social cohesion strategies of globalised capitalism.
Simply put - if there's a subculture, you can sell to it. So savvy operators find the most articulate and cogent exponents of a subculture - even if they're mouthing off politically radical memes - and offer them all manner of class privileges for turning these memes into commodities. Now this isn't a simple matter of selling out of an individual, because through this process, the cultural operators get an "in" to pick the collective brains of the entire community. To use an example, once you've noticed that Belfast Protestant hip-hop exists, and you've got some MC Red Hand or whatever making some money and getting some notoreity in the media economy, then everyone will try to get on the bandwagon, and the whole community becomes just another niche market, no threat to anyone or anything.
Here's an article about how they did it in the anarcho-hippie underground of Copenhagen. In fact, every anarchist or underground "community" on this planet has a small fringe of "entrepeneurs", getting a modest but real income off translating the bubbling cultural ferment of the "scene" into something that can be sold. So there is no real benefit in rebellion for the "community leaders" - and of course they get to distribute some bones from the table, sorry, "bring something back to the community". And the scene expands, as its cultural fringe is sold cheap to kids from the suburbs looking for some identity, anything.
Chaos Marxism firmly maintains that any "scene", "community" or "movement" that someone is making money off is not a revolutionary one.
The essential upshot of this is that office workers are far less likely to see their interests as counterposed to that of the boss than factory workers - even though in reality they are. The exception to this is in large corporate firms, where "the boss" is generally ten flights of stairs up and might as well be on a different planet. But the nature of office work is that it's as efficient to carry it out in small sites than in big ones, especially in the Intarwebz age. When "the boss" is just across the hallway, when they pretty much "speak your language" in every significant sense, it is so much easier to feel an affinity with them than, say, the Bengali immigrant who's emptying your wastepaper basket.
===
Another aspect of the more equal relationship (on the surface) that pertains in the office environment is that it makes it far easier for the boss to exploit your intellectual capital - i.e. get you to come up with ideas to make your exploitation more efficient and not reward you. This whole question of "enclosure of the cultural commons" is one that exercises the autonomist-operaista wing of Marxism very much, in that you get exploited simply by having a brain and thinking, let alone actually producing any concrete surplus value. But it can also efficiently explain the emergence of niche markets - as well as explaining one of the most important social cohesion strategies of globalised capitalism.
Simply put - if there's a subculture, you can sell to it. So savvy operators find the most articulate and cogent exponents of a subculture - even if they're mouthing off politically radical memes - and offer them all manner of class privileges for turning these memes into commodities. Now this isn't a simple matter of selling out of an individual, because through this process, the cultural operators get an "in" to pick the collective brains of the entire community. To use an example, once you've noticed that Belfast Protestant hip-hop exists, and you've got some MC Red Hand or whatever making some money and getting some notoreity in the media economy, then everyone will try to get on the bandwagon, and the whole community becomes just another niche market, no threat to anyone or anything.
Here's an article about how they did it in the anarcho-hippie underground of Copenhagen. In fact, every anarchist or underground "community" on this planet has a small fringe of "entrepeneurs", getting a modest but real income off translating the bubbling cultural ferment of the "scene" into something that can be sold. So there is no real benefit in rebellion for the "community leaders" - and of course they get to distribute some bones from the table, sorry, "bring something back to the community". And the scene expands, as its cultural fringe is sold cheap to kids from the suburbs looking for some identity, anything.
Chaos Marxism firmly maintains that any "scene", "community" or "movement" that someone is making money off is not a revolutionary one.
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