Radical media, politics and culture.

"The Society of the Unspectacular"

Eric Kluitenberg, Nettime

[The short text below was given as a fast talk in the closing program
of the INFOWARROOM series on media criticism and visual cultures at
De Balie Centre for Culture and Politics in Amsterdam, June 8 & 9
2007. After three seasons the INFOWARROOM series came to a close this
weekend with an extensive two-day lecture program devoted to the
theme "At the end of the era of mass media."]

It is time to leave the theories of Debord about the Society of the
Spectacle behind us. If today we witness the hyper-spectacular in the
mass-media, this should not fool us. It is not the apotheosis of the
spectacle, but much rather the eclipse of the spectacle — the final
moment of tragic sublimity, of hyper-violence, before it fades out....


In many ways the fate of the spectacle society mirrors (and is
mirrored in) the culture of the spectacle par excellence, that of the
mass-mediated United States of America. If today the USA projects its
power as super-state throughout the world with an unprecedented hyper-
violence, then this tragic spectacle should not fool us. The USA has
long shed it status as the sole superpower in the world. Silently
financed by China, economically eclipsed by the EU, again China, and
soon even India, unable to procure for its own wasteful energy needs
(hence its dependence on countries like Russia, Venezuela, Saudi
Arabia), culturally and intellectually unsettled — it has become a
crash waiting to happen...

"What's The Economy
For, Anyway?"

John de Graaf

"If they can get you asking the wrong question, they don't have to worry
about the answers" — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow {1}

Suggest any alternative to the status quo these days — greater
environmental protection, for example, or shorter working hours — and
the first question reporters are likely to ask is, "But what will that
do to the economy?" Immediately, advocates must try to prove that their
suggestions will not adversely affect economic growth or the Dow Jones
industrial average.


It's long past time for a new framing offensive, one that turns the
obligatory question on its head and shifts the burden of proof to those
who resist change. Imagine bumper stickers, posters, internet messages,
a thousand inquiries visible everywhere, asking a different question:


"What's the economy for, anyway?"


It's time to demand that champions of the status quo defend their
implicit answer to that question. Do they actually believe that the
purpose of the economy is to achieve the grossest domestic product and
allow the richest among us to multiply their treasures without limits?


For in practice, that really is their answer.

[Continued from the first part, of this essay, here.]


CHAPTER FIVE: Considerations on the Causes of the Advances and Retreats of the Workers' Assembly Movement

"In what concerns our war, it is a great truth that, when men are fighting, they imagine that they are in the greatest of wars and, once peace has returned, they prefer to admire the wars of yesteryear. Without a doubt, a simple examination of the facts will make us see that we have here the most important conflict ever." Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War.

The workers' assemblies, defended by pickets and co-ordinated through revocable delegates, were not only the weapon of the social revolution but also its signal. They implied that the working class, dispersed into a multitude of organisations that divide them into a thousand parts, had joined together and that no one part existed independently. They meant that the entire class was preparing for its communal existence with equal interests, formulating its own ideas from its own practice. The assemblies were not born as organs of power but as a stronger and more representative form of organising strikes, in which workers dealt with their own concrete and immediate problems, and negotiated with management. Before exercising power, they acted as defensive organs for their everyday existence. At this stage of struggle, the proletariat did not concern itself with an assured and permanent organisation of industrial sectors and branches, areas, and provinces or at the level of the State. This indicates that it had not planned a systematic large-scale offensive against the dominant power. But by beginning simultaneously at various points, the historical logic of struggle changed the assemblies into organs of power whose enormous strength the proletariat was not fully conscious of. When assemblies existed as a real power alongside the fictitious power of the unions, opting for one or the other became the order of the day. It was a knife-edged balance. Either assemblies or unions! The unions were too weak to oppose the assemblies but the proletariat was not sufficiently conscious to feel the need to destroy the unions. All throughout the first half of the year, an immediate alternative was posed: either the autonomous affirmation of the proletariat or the defeat of the movement. For the unions an inverse alternative was posed — either lose their dominant position conferred on them by the bourgeoisie and the State as spokesmen for the workers or finish with the assembly movement by enframing the workers within the unions. The unions had to accept the workers' conquests and recognise the power of the assemblies, thereby hoping to smash them in a moment of reflux that the workers, in order to hold on to their gains, were obliged to follow through; they had to extend the movement to every sector and every town, and defend it. The end of one fight could only be regarded as the beginning of a more tenacious and decisive one. If this was not to be, if the working class did not use the victories obtained to radicalise and consolidate its struggle elsewhere — and after a more or less favourable outcome to strikes, just let the assemblies dissolve and all communication channels along with them — then one had to regard this as one of those unusual situations in which a victorious army abandons the field to a conquered one, as happened in May 1937. The unions would recover lost positions and the workers would begin the next strike in worse conditions than before. A victory never can have repercussions if it is not exploited. The pursuit of a conquered adversary must begin at the moment when, abandoning the struggle, it leaves the field of combat. The assemblies had to go on until the unions were smashed. The proletariat must know how to end a strike, keeping open its path of retreat — which is the same as that which it had advanced along — so that it can begin the next one in the best possible circumstances.

NOT BORED! writes:

Commentaries about Wildcat Spain in the Run up to the Second Revolution

By Workers for Proletarian Autonomy and Social Revolution

"There is nothing more improbable, more impossible, more fantastic than a revolution one hour before it breaks out; there is nothing more simple, more natural, more obvious than a revolution when it has waged its first battle and gained its first victory." — Rosa Luxemburg, Der Kampf (7 April 1917)

CHAPTER ONE: The Social and Political State of Classes in Spain in the Hour of Francoism's Relief

It is somewhat trite these days to say that the general crisis in Spain is caused by the democratic evolution of Francoism. It is the same crisis facing every country of the world, bourgeois or bureaucratic, which is exacerbated for instance in Portugal, Greece or Poland — by a long period of stagnation resulting from a counter-revolution, as well as by the accelerated breakdown of the dominant political forms. We shall not, therefore, be examining the formation of a new society but rather the senile Iberian rebirth of a society that is everywhere in the process of dying. Francoism was the extreme defence of the Spanish bourgeoisie threatened by proletarian revolution, a triumphant counter-revolution that, through a state of siege, provided the first urgent rationalisation of Spanish capitalist society; and saved it by incorporating the State under its wing. But when Francoism became the most costly form of maintaining it, it was forced to leave the stage for the benefit of stronger and more rational forms of the same order.

The Sick Planet

Guy Debord (1971)

Today "pollution" is in fashion, exactly in the same manner that revolution is:
it takes hold of the entire life of society, and it is illusorily represented in
the spectacle. It is boring chatter in a plethora of erroneous and mystifying
writings and discourses, and in reality [dans les faits] it gets everyone in the
throat. It reveals itself everywhere as ideology and it gains on the ground as
real process. These two [mutually] antagonistic movements — the supreme stage
of commodity production and the project of its total negation, equally rich in
internal contradictions — grow together. They are the two sides through which a
single historical moment (long-awaited and often foreseen in inadequate partial
figures) manifests itself: the impossibility of the continuation of the
functioning of capitalism.

Extraterrestrial Biopolitics and Creative Industries

Konrad Becker, Global Security Alliance

Global media and business networks create a planetary environment for
geopolitical experimentation with global parameters of life — and death.
The "Grand Chessboard" of the geo-strategic world has expanded to outer
space and inner space. Conflict management has migrated into the military
entertainment complex, the domain of culture, media and the creative
industries.


The space age began with a grand media spectacle. In the 1960's, for the
first time in history, planet Earth was emerging in the consciousness of a
global audience, terrestrials on a pale blue dot in the vastness of the
skies. But the innocent picture of Man on the moon was diverting attention
from an advanced weapons program for the militarization of space. The
rockets of the United States space program and the Soviet Union's Cosmic
Troops were based on the V-2 ballistic missiles of World War II. In 1945
Wernher von Braun and his team, who developed and manufactured the V-2 based
on slave labor, were brought to America. This operation named Project
Paperclip included scientists linked to human experiments in concentration
camps. Nazi military officers were at the core of Defense Department
projects that centered on carrying military personnel up into space and
moving them around, but also on the use of robotic weapons in orbit, nuclear
missiles and the setup of armed "Death Stars".

Extraterrestrial Biopolitics and Creative Industries

Konrad Becker, Global Security Alliance

Global media and business networks create a planetary environment for
geopolitical experimentation with global parameters of life — and death.
The "Grand Chessboard" of the geo-strategic world has expanded to outer
space and inner space. Conflict management has migrated into the military
entertainment complex, the domain of culture, media and the creative
industries.


The space age began with a grand media spectacle. In the 1960's, for the
first time in history, planet Earth was emerging in the consciousness of a
global audience, terrestrials on a pale blue dot in the vastness of the
skies. But the innocent picture of Man on the moon was diverting attention
from an advanced weapons program for the militarization of space. The
rockets of the United States space program and the Soviet Union's Cosmic
Troops were based on the V-2 ballistic missiles of World War II. In 1945
Wernher von Braun and his team, who developed and manufactured the V-2 based
on slave labor, were brought to America. This operation named Project
Paperclip included scientists linked to human experiments in concentration
camps. Nazi military officers were at the core of Defense Department
projects that centered on carrying military personnel up into space and
moving them around, but also on the use of robotic weapons in orbit, nuclear
missiles and the setup of armed "Death Stars".

Recuperating the Political

Gustavo Esteva

"Choose your enemy carefully," warns an old Arab proverb, "because you
will become like your enemy." If your enemy is an army, you will need
to create another to confront it; if your enemy is the mafia, you will
become a mafia.


"We cannot involve the army of the United States in the fight against
illegal drug trafficking," said the U.S. anti-drug czar some years ago,
"it would create a national security problem." He was recognizing the
risk involved, the risk of the dissolution of the armed forces if they
are used for that purpose. His statement was entirely cynical — he had
just returned from a tour of Latin America where he pressured every
government he met to do exactly that. He didn't care that those armies
would dissolve. The army of the U.S. would remain standing, in case an
army was called for.


Hard facts back the argument. A study by the lawyers guild of Puerto
Rico reported, some time ago, that for every dollar paid by a consumer
of illegal drugs in the U.S., the producers in Colombia or Mexico get
from three to five cents. The distributors and traffickers get between
ten to fifteen cents. The rest ends up in the hands of those who are
supposedly fighting the drug trade.

PERFORMANCE: COPIES & CONTEXTS IN THE AGE OF CULTURAL ABUNDANCE

Magnus Eriksson and Rasmus Fleischer


We are both co-founders of Piratbyrån, a Swedish group that has been
around for four years. Piratbyrån explores how file-sharing and other
copying technologies interact with creativity and change how people
relate to everyday culture. We analyze tendencies and cases and
discuss possible future scenarios and opportunities.

Internationally we are mostly known for starting up the The Pirate
Bay, which we no longer run but are in close contact with. By this
and many other projects, campaigns, performances, talks and media
appearances, we have intervened in the discussion known as "the file-
sharing debate".

Almost exactly a year ago, at the time of the last Reboot conference,
The Pirate Bay was taken down in a controversial raid that involved
about 180 confiscated servers and pressure on the Swedish government
from US officials and lobby groups. Still today, over 100 servers
remain in custody and the prosecution is just about to be delayed for
several months more.

The raid was followed by demonstrations just three days after co-
hosted by Piratbyrån and other piracy organisations as well as
political parties from different sides of the Swedish political
spectrum. At the very same day, The Pirate Bay came back online.

Since then, a lot of light has been put on the alleged Swedish
"pirate safe haven" and we have had an extensive public debate in
Sweden on file-sharing issues. Although it's great that we have this
debate, it is often stuck in pre-internet frameworks, copyright
abstractions and outdated perspectives.

Piratbyrån is often perceived as being primarily anti-copyright and
we often have to answer questions on how artists should make a living
if there was no copyright. On this topic we have very little to say
for several reasons: Talking about that implicates that we have (at
least until now) a perfectly working copyright economy that has
somehow provided wages for artists, an economy that would be
nullified by a future removal of copyright laws.

What we instead prefer to talk about is the present: The concrete and
complex workings of cultural economies, the cracks and grey zones in
contemporary copyright, and the massive sharing of files that is
already going on.

J.D. Suss writes:

"Decolonizing History, Recolonizing the Academy"
J. D. Suss


Some Questions

If, as I maintain, we in the West truly lust after the very things that oppress us, then should we be surprised by how absurd life has become? Who are the "we" doing the "lusting"? One might say that the "we" are all human beings who live under the spell of the post-modern Western paradigm of mental/rational consciousness, plus all others in the world who – while they may not live in a post-modern industrialized nation – are prone to "westerning" (viz., those aspiring, would be, "occidentalizing," clone-puppies).1 Our “lust” involves, well, wanting to have just about anything and everything within (and even beyond) our grasp, in a legally sanctioned, "disembodied" scientismic culture-run-amok – one in which citizens have become target markets that the media helps turn into demanding consumeroids. Still, we welcome our materialist hell as our heaven, or at least as our safe haven, in a world that largely goes without.

Certainly we can be born into privilege. We can also gain privilege by working at it, and for very cogent reasons, I'm sure. But at what cost? And who pays? Are citizens who resent the conduct of an elected or appointed official only envious, lusting for the same power that (paradoxically) oppresses them? Is it not the case that we very often are only projecting our own covert desires for power, prestige, and privilege upon those who have it when we express our distaste or outrage at them, and thereby justify, by some weird calculus, our own self-loathing via this lusting-in-disguise? Do we always demean that which we dislike about ourselves by criticizing it in others?

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