Keir’s great blog about be(ar)s, rupture and the ‘Thou shalt not kill’ song has really got me thinking… about what’s radical, what’s revolutionary and what is not, about rupture and even about ‘directional demands’. And about context or perspective. And about all that non-linear stuff about small actions potentially have very large effects.
I’ve been reading Massimo De Angelis’s new book, The Beginning of History. Massimo talks about value practices:
those actions and processes, as well as correspondent webs of relations, that are both predicated on a given value system and in turn (re)produce it. These are, in other words, social practices and correspondent relations that articulate individual bodies and the wholes of social bodies in particular ways. This articulation is produced by individual singularities discursively selecting what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’ within a value system and actually acting upon this selection. This action in turn goes through feedback mechanisms across the social body in such a way as to articulate social practices and constitute anew these ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ or, given the nature of feedback mechanisms, to set a limit to these ‘goods’ and ‘bads’. To talk about value practices is therefore to talk about how social form, organsiational reach, mode of doing, modes of co-producing and relating, forms of articulation of powers, are constituted through social processes.
I’m thinking that actions which appear to be within a capitalist logic, the value practices of the market, may in fact take us outside it, if only marginally. This tiny crevice, this little fissure or rupture, may then give us a foothold to step further outside, it may be a crack large enough to ease a crowbar into, it may spread and join with other such fissures, as John Holloway writes in his ‘Breaking Time’ piece.
So ‘Thou shalt not kill’ may be just another song for sale on the market, but the references to Crass and Minor Threat perhaps take us fleetingly outside market relations. And this is perhaps the potential of the ‘fair trade’: money, commodities, etc. are all produced/circulated, but participants are stepping outside the market logic which values only lowest cost of production as a ‘good’. But I think that how one views (or values) these, depends on one’s perspective. Compare the social centre in Venice which offers a three-course meal (doubt very much if it’s vegetarian), let alone vegan, for 10 euros (or a kebab, if you’re in a hurry) with the Common Place in Leeds, where such a menu would be considered a ‘bad’.
So, from where I’m standing it looks like Keir’s lying on the left side of the bed — along with David Essex, Bryan Ferry, et al. — but, no doubt, from where he’s lying, it all looks very different.
Not sure about the etiquette of commenting on your own blog, but here goes…
This stuff links to the idea of social systems as non-linear dynamical systems, as in complexity theory. (This idea is developed in Kay Summer and Harry Halpin’s pieces ‘The end of the world as we know it’, in Shut Them Down!, and ‘The Crazy Before the New’, to be published in Turbulence.) Modes of production (value systems, in Massimo’s language), including capitalism, are the attractors, possibly strange attractors, of these systems.
In ‘normal’ times, it’s possible to act according to other value systems than that of capital, but it’s hard not to get drawn back by the capital attractor. You have a workers’ co-op, say, but your suppliers are worker-exploiting profit-maximisers, just as your competitors are… so you end up exploiting yourself. You have to: TINA — there is no alternative. Similar with a bar or cafe in a social centre. Similar with ‘fair trade’ producers.
But, further from ‘equilibrium’, it may be easier to resist capital’s attraction. If your ‘customers’ are also acting according to a non-capitalist value system, then you’ll be under less pressure to minimise costs in order to ‘compete’ and hence survive. (And we’re talking about social systems as survival strategies.) Perhaps this is what’s happening with so-called ‘solidarity economies’. Perhaps this is what’s happening with the webs of fair-trade producers and buyers who are agreeing the prices of commodities such as coffee and cocoa apart from the international finance/commodity markets.
It’s really easy to criticise fair trade, worker co-ops as ‘reformist’. But perhaps we can understand such experiments as occupying that highly unstable region of ridges on the topographical map of all possible social systems. They could be drawn back to the capital attractor, but perhaps they are also within the basin of attraction of some other, more communistic mode of doing.
Seeing as I am a details man I feel I should point out that the song is actually called “Thou shalt ALWAYS kill” and that the post was tagged Beards not Bears, although I’ll grant you there is some hirsute cultural connection between the two.
I like the bit about social systems as survival systems though. I was taking the piss about Crass being outside commodification but the pay no more than bit makes sense as part of dole culture. The most important thing is whether it can take part in change beyond mere reproduction.
Yeah, OK, Keir, there’s a few typos in there… beds, bards, bears, beards, beads… whatever.
I think Massimo’s point, which echoes stuff we’ve written in the past, is that reproduction is never mere reproduction, it’s never neutral. If you act according to the logic of some value system, then you also reproduce that value system.
Great stuff. I’ve just ordered Massimo’s book. Commodification or capitalization doesn’t exhaustion. Here’s what this post resonated with for me, two things.
First, among the folk I like to read about workplace organizing is this guy Stan Weir who was a dockworker for a long time in the US before getting blacklisted by a so-called progressive union leader. He wrote about what he called informal work groups. Remember when Marx writes about cooperation in the factory, how the capitalist gets cooperation for free? Informal work groups are the concrete units or apparatuses of cooperation, so to speak. If you and I work together regularly, we may get to know each other, and build relationships, plus we get better at our jobs perhaps, at working together to do them. This can be functional for the boss – if we work well together at our jobs then production can be sped up. On the other hand, if we have relationships with people at work and we know how to do our jobs well – as in, we know what makes the machines work, and what makes them not work, and we know how to fuck off and still meet the minimum production requirements – then we can use that against the boss to shut down production or for ourselves to work less and have time to do other things on the clock. Just because this happens in the capitalized and capitalizing space of the workplace doesn’t mean it’s exhausted.
Second, my IWW branch has started to do orientations for new members and interested nonmembers. I did one last friday, a few members brought their co-workers and one guy brought someone he goes to uni with. She was like “isn’t this anti-boss stuff just part of the problem, like you’re presuming that people just want money.” We were like “well, what do you think employers want other than profit?” It was very confused and weird conversation at first. Eventually we got it sorted out. What she was saying was that we can’t settle for more money (bigger cages, longer chains), we need a different social logic. We were like “yes, absolutely!” and then had a really good discussion of solidarity and cooperation as opposed to profit and competition. Several people who have been organizing in their workplaces said things like “well, we do need more money because it’s hard to live on what we get paid but we also want to not be insulted and disrespected at work by the boss. More than that, organizing changes you as a person and you can build really great relationships with the people you’re organizing with, build solidarity now as part of building a society of solidarity which replaces profits.” It was very exciting because this came out from people unprompted. That’s also another example – the struggle against capitalist social relations can be a production of new social relations right now – not perfect ones, but better ones. The fact that these are still bound up with capitalist social relations doesn’t mean they’re reducible to that.
It’s like… some (many) things within capitalism have a sort of halo, the something more which makes them not just dead labor, not just embodiments of the deadly/zombie logic of capital. When haloed things get together in enough concentration and with the right resonance, rupture results.