Theory

by Bruno Miranda

Even if in the context of the 1952 revolution the centrality of mining workers was indisputable, today the shape of the working class has changed. It is true that manufacturing workers remain an important part of the Bolivian working class, but the casualisation of labour relations and informal economy have created a large majority of the working class facing unfavourable conditions for organising.

In Bolivia there have been at least seven important uprisings in the last decade, based on the struggle over the control of natural resources [1]. Among these it is worth mentioning the battle normally called the “Gas War” of September-October 2003, and the “Second Water War” in May-June 2005, both of them in the city of El Alto.

In this city, migrants from the countryside – who bring with them communitarian traditions of land cultiviation and everyday political life – and redundant ex-miners – who bring the experience of more than 30 years of decisive control over matters of state (1952-1985) – are brought together in an urban context. The co-existence of these two populations, as well as migrants from La Paz, students and an Aymara intelligentsia which has grown since the late 1960s, was expressed in a new multitude form in 2003 and 2005.

In these struggles in which working-class and peasant trade unionism co-existed with Andean communitarian practice [2], neighbourhood organisation outside of Bolivia’s bourgeois political parties resulted in mobilisations which brought down two successive presidents.

Although trade union federations were involved, among them the Central Obrera Boliviana in the struggle against the export of gas to California via Chile and the struggle against high water rates, the protagonists were the hundreds of Residents’ Associations in El Alto, which spoke for all the organisations in struggle, including those from other parts of the country. Although they were based on district organisation, these were in the last instance associations of extra-proletarianised workers, such as street-sellers, contracted labour, ex-miners and migrants from the country.

A brief history of El Alto

In the journey from the countryside to the city – taken by thousands of Bolivian migrants every day – the destination is almost always the city of El Alto, on the Bolivian altiplano. At 4,000 metres above sea level and with a population of over 1 million people (according to unofficial figures) El Alto has received migrants since the 1980s, or more precisely, 1985, when the Paz Estenssoro government promoted the “re-homing”[3] of miners with decree 21060 [4], broke up the working class. This meant that the locum of struggle then moved on to the coca planters of the valleys of Cochambamba and then, in the 21st century, the workers of El Alto organised in Residents’ Associations.

El Alto’s history of struggle is not only a matter of recent times. In 1781, in resistance to Spanish taxes, the Aymara leader Tupak Kataria and his comrade Bartolina Sisa formed indigenous armies which encircled the city of La Paz from March to July and August to October of that year. The ultimate objective was the expulsion of the Spanish by blockading food supplies and starving them out. In the end, Tupak Katari was condemned to death and quartered in public by four horses. His figure became a symbol of struggle not only for Aymara and Quechua peasants but for the workers’ movement itself and the urban proletariat of indigenous descent, including a small proportion of mestizos and whites.

More than a century later, during the so-called Federal War, under the leadership of the Aymara Pablo Zárate Willka, the constitutionalist troops of then president Fernández Alonzo were prevented from passing through El Alto en route to La Paz. The intention was to protect the liberals so that they might legislate in favour of the indigenous territories, which in fact did not happen. The indigenous people then organised independently and decreed a new form of indigenous government, calling for the destruction, seizing and burning of private properties and the physical elimination of the mestizo and white elite.

Then, in 1952 during the national revolution, in El Alto there were controls on the coming and going of troops from the mines, as well from the air force which still today is based in the city. It was the backdrop to the victory of the revolution.

In recent times the city served as the reference point for working-class struggles in Bolivia, such as had existed elsewhere decades before during miners’ struggles. Known as the “Poor people’s HQ” El Alto has been compared to the Siglo XX miners’ encampment north of Potosí, from which emerged the ideas and political direction followed by the proletariat in the 1952 revolution[5].

The city of El Alto only officially became a municipality independent of La Paz on 26th September 1988. It is geopolitically important not only because it is the main entry and exit route for La Paz – which is literally in a hole in the middle of the Andes – but also because it leads to the northern altiplano – where can be found the most combative peasant communities in Bolivia such as Achacachi, Warisata, Sorata, Huanuni and Copacabanda – and the southern altiplano – where can be found Caracollo and the mining centre of Oruro. It also serves as the pathway to the Amazon region for the departments of La Paz, Beni and Pando.

According to the 2001 census El Alto has 649,958 inhabitants, 28% of the La Paz department. But, as Ramírez (2005b) reminds us, on the day of the census innumerable families would have gone to their areas of origin to register. According to other sources the population had already surpassed the 1 million mark in 2000.

Given the size of its population growth, it is considered the first large city of indigenous people on the continent. However, Duran Chuquimia has presented some statistics on the living standards of most of the population. According to his dossier 77% of homes are clay and only 22% of its walls contain bricks, the majority without grouting; 47.9% have concrete floors, 28.1% wood and 21.8% earth; 60% of houses do not have a registered owner; 46% still lack basic sanitation and guttering for rain water, even though at times there can be torrential downpours. In 2005, El Alto counted some 66.8% of its urban population as in a state of poverty. In the rural area of the municipality the figure was 98.9%. Among this group, 17.1% live in destitution.

An important figure reflected in the socio-political scenario is that 85% of homes are built by their inhabitants, as well as the paving of the streets and the district environment itself. This allows for a sense of belonging to the district, which each worker can express in moments of confrontation and protest. It is a city in permanent construction.

The world of the El Alto worker

Consequently there has grown an informal sector: eight out of ten jobs are in this sector in Bolivia at the moment. In the city of El Alto the family sector – that is to say, micro- and small businesses staffed by members of the same family – grew 1120% between 1989 and 1995.

Workers from El Alto are predominantly concentrated in trading and manufacturing. Trading, followed by industry, is the sector in which informal work has expanded to dizzy heights. At the same time, El Alto is the country’s second manufacturing city in absolute terms, after Santa Cruz de la Sierra, according to the 2001 census.

Using a different methodology, Rojas and Rossell point out that, while in 1992 64% of El Alto residents worked in the informal sector (family and/or petty employers), by 2000 the number had gone up to 69%: the main unit of capital reproduction in El Alto is the family.

Although these workers can administrate their working time with more autonomy, the realisation of capital takes place by means of self-exploitation or extraction of surplus value from the family itself. Abusive labour contracts and ones which generate surplus value from the family are covered by relations of parenthood or marriage.

In the current context, after the lay-offs of the 1980s and the decentralisation of industry, workers in the home and small workshops remain subordinate to the productive dynamics of big industry, since in no few cases these small workshops produce to meet its demands. Forms of work which are not totally capitalist, like in associations or family and/or community production are not eliminated but subsumed and become part of the general valorisation of capital.

The effects of Decree 21060 and its politico-theoretical implications

Recently the intellectual and activist milieu in Bolivia has discussed at some length the current configuration of the urban proletariat. If, in the context of the 1952 revolution, the centrality of mining workers was indisputable, today, after the mass lay-offs starting in 1985, the morphology of the workforce has certainly changed. Similarly, if it is true that manufacturing workers still represent a significant portion of the Bolivian working class, it would be dishonest to deny that the casualisation of work relations and informality have created a large majority of the working class facing unfavourable conditions for organising.

Besides massive lay-offs, the restructuring of Bolivian mining meant re-homing some 4,000 miners from private companies, another 60,000 from what remained of the state miner COMIBOL and more than 500 co-operatives and smaller mines spread across the country.

We agree with Antunes when he refuses to accept the substitution of work by science or value production by communications: in the contemporary world there is ever more interchange between productive and unproductive work, industrial work and informal or service-sector work.

What is new, however, is the combination of productive processes on a large scale with other minor and more flexible processes. Thus self-employed workers, traders, street-sellers and artisans, without being directly subsumed into a large capitalist enterprise, contribute to value realisation in the sense that they participate in the buying and selling of contraband goods and sell them below price to the working class, reducing the use value of labour power itself. This is an international phenomenon expressed by the growing numbers of an unorganised and atomised type of wage-worker.

However, the numerical reduction of the industrial working class does not mean we have to join the ranks of those who defend the idea of post-industrial societies, since the informal and service sectors are in general dependent on large-scale industrial production and its possibility – or not – of creating value.

The new shape of the world of work in El Alto is also present in other urban centres of Latin America: São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires and Santiago in the southern cone; and Lima, Quito, Bogotá or Caracas in the Andes; also suffering the same effects of neoliberalism. Understanding the dynamic of surplus-value appropriation in contemporary regional capitalism necessitates deepening the debate on informal economy. In terms of the Bolivian altiplano, the radicalism of its workers mixed with the oppressed condition of indigenous people – whether Aymara or Quechua – draws our attention to its historic potentialities.

Future perspectives

Beyond the factory floor and the workplace, in Bolivia it is clear that excess appropriation is taking place via overarching measures such as the privatisation of natural resources, in the last instance an obstacle to the redistribution of tax. Given that these mobilisations are in response to excessive underlying expropriation, led by multinational consortiums, they show new elements common to community struggles and working-class trade unionism, worthy of political articulation.

On the other hand, although clashing with the state and multinational capitalism and also giving political and social support to the first Evo Morales/MAS government, these movements of the multitude did not manage to force the completion of the “October agenda”[6]. From the MAS’s ascension to the Palacio Quemado in 2006 until today, the main organisations which mobilised people in previous years have been defending government decisions.

The governing party strategically negotiated with the Central Obrera Boliviana, Central Obrera Regional de El Alto, Federación de Juntas Vecinales-El Alto, and Federación de Gremiales, as well as being able to count on the support, from the start of its first campaign, of the Confederación Nacional de Mujeres Campesinas Indígenas Originarias de Bolivia Bartolina Sisa, the partial support of the poweful Confederación Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia and the coca growers’ unions of the Chapare region. At the same time it negotiated with landowners’ representatives like the Comité Cívico de Santa Cruz and fascistic youth organisations like the blood-stained Unión Juvenil Cruceñista. In other words, MAS has functioned like a land-leveller, promoting alliances in search of national unity.

The last elections on 6th December were also an expression of an earlier point: in the La Paz department, in which El Alto was MAS’s greatest bastion, Evo Morales won 78% of votes, as against 11% for his opponent Manfred Reyes Villa. Nationally he won 63% of votes, 25 of 36 members of the senate and 85 of 130 MPs. For the next five years we can forecast a certain stability for the MAS government.

It has been made clear that the community mobilisation and the autonomy of the mobilisations of 2003 and 2005 instrumentalised the critique of the left, in its practical form, parliamentary democracy and democratic capitalism. It ripped off the mask of capital accumulation and electoral democracy as part of a power structure co-opted by capital.

However in doing so these mobilisations are, contradictorily, prevented from spreading into wider urban spaces and for longer periods of time. The bourgeoisie permit assemblies, face-to-face relations, the alternative use of time and control of authority only in small degree and as long as they are not confronted. In more ordinary times, the state will return to exercise its politico-juridical-military dominion over social relations.

Notes

[1] The insurrections began in 2000 with the “Gas War” in Cochabamba, followed by the communal-peasant blockades of April and September that year, and another in June 2001.
[2] Andean society revolves around the ayllu, the organisational set-up of poor Andeans. The essence of communal autonomy exists on a complex and varied system of elected authorities and direct democracy, accompanied by a system of communal justice.
[3] Euphemism used to designate mass lay-offs of miners
[4] Around 32,000 miners were sacked on the pretext of rehoming under the Paz Estenssoro government’s 1985 Decree 21060
[5] Huanuni, in the north of Oruro department, is another historic site of struggle for mining workers. It was the centre of the establishment of the FSTMB miners’ union in 1944 and the working-class base in the 1952 revolution and for decades after.
[6] A series of demands including the nationalisation of gas plants, the resignation of then president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, rejection of the ALCA free trade deal, freedom for the Universidade Pública de El Alto and better conditions for agricultural workers.

Towards the end of Capitalist Realism Fisher puts his finger on the central reason for my reluctance to discuss issues of normativity. In the chapter entitled “There’s no central exchange” Fisher compares contemporary capitalism to the bureaucratic universe depicted so well by Kafka.

The supreme genius of Kafka was to have explored the negative atheology proper to Capital: the centre is missing, but we cannot stop searching for it or positing it. It is not that there is nothing there– it is that what is there is not capable of exercising responsibility. (65)

What we have here is a sort of “transcendental illusion” that emerges when mereological relations are crossed in such a way that it seems as if we’re dealing with one object when, in fact, we’re dealing with quite a different object. Fisher deftly illustrates a similar point with respect to bureaucracy. Like Kafka’s famous Castle or Law, you never directly encounter the castle or the law. Rather, we only ever encounter spokespersons or surrogates of the castle or the law. Many of us will be familiar with this is the case of bureaucracy. Suppose you’ve just been promoted and that this promotion was a very public affair, announced before all the staff and faculty at the bi-annual beginning of the semester meeting (our version of this event here at Collin is called “All College Day”). Perhaps you’ve been appointed Provost of your campus or Dean of Student Affairs. Whatever.

read on!

In this scenario all the staff is aware of your promotion. The next day you head off to your new office, stopping by the desk of one of your new colleagues asking to see some files pertaining to such and such an issue. “I’m sorry Ma’am, but I can’t show you those files. Those are only for the eyes of administrators.” “But Mark, you were at the meeting yesterday, I am an administrator!” “Yes, I’m aware of that, but I haven’t received the paper work yet. My hands are tied until the proper forms go through.” “Just call the President! He’ll tell you! I need to get to work!” “That’s not the issue Ma’am. While he’s announced your promotion even his hands are tied until the paper work goes through.”

What we have here an uncanny encounter with a dual split between objects such that we appear to be engaged with one object (ourselves as agents, the president of the college, our colleague), but where, in fact, we’re dealing with two very different objects. On the one hand, one of the objects here is not the colleague, ourselves, or the president of the college, but the bureaucracy itself. The colleague our heroine is addressing is not another person, but is rather a node or structural position within the network defining the endo-structure of the bureaucracy. And so too in the case of both ourselves as newly promoted individual and the president of the college. These are all functions within these particular objects, purely relational elements where the terms are entirely defined by “relations of interiority” (i.e., relations where the terms do not exist independently of what they relate).

This is why the knowledge of the colleague is irrelevant to the issue of whether our newly promoted heroine should have access to the files. For here the colleague is another body or person, not the bureaucracy as such. The place the president, the heroine of our story, or the colleague occupies in the bureaucracy all pertain to how this other entity or object, the bureaucracy, translates other independent objects, persons, in the production of its own closure as a self-subsistent object in its own right. Just as cells turn sugars into something else in the process of relating to these various sources of its energy in the environment, functions within a social object are different from the bodies that occupy these positions. Our heroine’s colleague knows very well that she’s been promoted, but the bureaucracy does not yet know. Thus what we get in a situation like this is a sort of short-circuit or contradiction between two distinct objects: the knowledge of the colleague and the knowledge of the bureaucracy.

Nonetheless, within the framework of experience– and this is where we get the transcendental illusion specific to these sorts of mereological cross-overs –we experience ourselves as relating to another person, when in fact we’re dealing with a very different type of object, bureaucracy. This accounts for the very special sort of frustration we experience when dealing with bureaucracy. Because of the sort of ethical understanding we’ve inherited (what might be called our “pre-ontological understanding of ethics”), we feel as if our colleague should be responsible here because we treat ethics as pertaining to individual persons. Yet we quickly discover that no one can be responsible in a bureaucracy because bureaucracies, while dependent on persons to exist, are objects that are entirely different from persons. Like Joseph K., the Law and the Castle can never be reached because it is oddly in all of the functionaries of the Law and the Castle, but something quite different than any of these functionaries.

And this is why most of the ethical theories we have available to us today are thoroughly inadequate for dealing with entities like bureaucracies, corporations, and the system of capital itself. Indeed, we can go one step further and argue that not only are these ethical theories inadequate, but they are downright ideological insofar as they promote the idea that the functioning of these objects is a matter of individual persons rather than larger-scale objects that use persons as elements in their own composition while transforming them into something quite different. As Fisher puts it, “[t]he problem is that the model of individual responsibility assumed by most versions of ethics have little purchase on the behavior of Capital or corporations” (66 – 67). If this is the case, then this is because these entities, while themselves being individuals, are not composed of individuals.

Where this sort of distinction is lacking, we end up asking the wrong sorts of questions where issues of social and political transformation are concerned. As Fisher writes,

Does anyone really think, for instance, that things would improve if we replaced the whole mmanagerial and banking class with a whole new set of (‘better’) people? Surely, on the contrary, it is evident that the vices are engendered by the structure [my emphasis], and that while the structure remains, the vices will reproduce themselves. (68)

Fisher then goes on to drive this point home remarking that,

The delusion that many who enter into management with high hopes is precisely that they, the individual, can change things, that they will not repeat what their managers had done, that things will be different this time; but whatch someone step up into management and it’s usually not very long before the grey petrification of power starts to subsume them. (69)

The illusion that the ethical theories we have inherited from the tradition engenders is that these properties of certain types of systems or objects arise from abuses on the part of corrupt or stupid individuals that occupy positions within these systems. By contrast, Fisher’s thesis seems to be that objects are closer to the way in which cells produce their own elements and repetitive patterns such that the entities used to produce these parts and repetitive patterns have little or no capacity to steer or direct the cell as a whole. In other words, there is something internal to these organizations or systems that perpetuate these sorts of relations regardless of how good or well intentioned the people are that occupy positions within these systems.

But here’s the rub: If systems or objects function in such a way as to reproduce their own patterns of actualization, then the idea of changing or steering these systems from within is highly unlikely. But this entails that changes in the endo-structure of these objects can only come from the outside or from sets of objects other than these sorts of systems. But how, we can ask, can one object act on another object in this way? In the case of the body we can discern such a relation of change between cells and the body. Cells are one object, “independent” of the body. The body is another object, independent of cells. To be sure, bodies cannot exist without cells and cells cannot exist in most cases without other cells. But nonetheless, the body is one object and the cells the body uses to perpetuate itself is quite another object. Yet there are instances where the cells “assert their independence” from the body and begin to act of their own accord. Cancer, for example, would be one instance where the governance of the body over the cells go awry and the cells begin to trace their own course to the detriment of the body. Of course, it is precisely this sort of cancerous relation between social systems and persons that those wishing to change social systems wish to avoid. But under what conditions is this possible?

As many on the far left plan to call for a Labour vote in the general election, Clifford Biddulph looks at the historic roots of this slogan and the dogmas on which it is based.

An eleventh commandment for many on the left is to vote for New Labour as a lesser evil without illusions. But why? “The Labour Party is a  thoroughly bourgeois party, which although made up of workers, is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. It is an organisation of the bourgeoisie which exists to systematically dupe the workers”. These words seem an obvious description of New Labour.

New Labour is the self proclaimed party of business, neoliberalism, the free market, privatisation, public sector cuts, and partnerships with employers. A party that has kept the legal shackles on trade unions as a matter of conviction. New Labour is also the party of aggressive imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Brown and before him Tony Blair were the ideological sons of Thatcher. Peter Mandelson, like Blair, is a close friend of the rich while the party presides over increasing inequality. An indication of the pro-business activities  of New Labour is the recent complaint by ASLEF that the Labour government and the Secretary of State have compensated, through the rail franchise, the financial losses of train companies who have provoked industrial action by treating their workers badly.

However, the words describing the Labour Party are the words of Lenin in 1920, years before the first Labour government in 1924. He had in mind Arthur Henderson who was a Liberal agent for seven years, Phillip Snowden, a man of respectable conformist views, who went on to become the financially orthodox chancellor, Ramsey Macdonald who liked to dine with the wealthy and created a secret electoral pact with the Liberals, and Keir Hardie who began his political career as an admirer of the Liberal leader Gladstone. The popular image of Hardie as the cloth cap member for the unemployed is an Old Labour myth. He wore a decent sporty deerstalker, and as a Labour parliamentarian advocated a liberal solution to unemployment: regimented work colonies in the countryside to set them to work. New Labour is very much a return to Old Labour’s Liberal roots. Labour stood for class co-operation, not class war.

But at the second congress of the Communist International in 1920 Lenin compromised  his analysis of Labour as bourgeois by recommending  tactics which have remained a dogma for much of the left ever since, despite profound historical change. These tactics of critical support for Labour at elections were partly influenced by the delegate from the British Socialist Party. The BSP later became a key component of the Communist Party. The BSP were Labour members and had a left-reformist perspective of capturing the party for socialism, as the Sheffield shop-steward and rank and file leader, Jack Murphy, and revolutionary Sylvia Pankhurst pointed out. Even Willie Gallagher who later became a leading Stalinist, described them as reformists. But Lenin claimed this was an exaggeration, although he did disagree with the BSP view that Labour was the political expression of trade unionists and the working class.

According to Lenin the only way to get a hearing for communist ideas from Labour supporters was to vote with them for their reactionary leaders. Lenin did not advocate voting Labour on the basis of political demands such as “Labour to power with a socialist programme” or “make the Labour Party fight for the workers”. The communists would be able to obtain a hearing for soviets and workers’ power by showing respect for the loyalty of Labour voters to their leaders and go through the disillusioning experience of parliamentary socialism with them. Jack Tanner, speaking from his own rank and file experience retorted that workers are always accessible in the workshops, the unions, and the streets. Communist agitation would find the workers.  Lenin’s tactic implied the  reactionary leaders would take the movement forward, albeit in a roundabout way.

In the Soviet Union Lenin had already turned his back on the self-activity of the masses  and focused on loyalty to leaders, hence the stress on Labour’s leaders. Pankhurst raised the obvious objection that Labour voters would not trust such convoluted tactics. It was better to be open, direct and honest as an independent communist organisation. Besides, any disappointment with Labour leaders could simply end in political disillusionment with communism and socialism or lead to a swing to the right, or more to the point, trap communists in a project of transforming Labour.

Lenin did advocate affiliation to the Labour Party. But he discussed Labour in terms of it not being a fully fledged centralised national party, as if it was still a federation of affiliated socialist societies and trade unions without an individual membership. This optimistic impression seems to have been given by the BSP Delegate to the Congress, lthough the mistake was Lenin’s. But Henderson’s version of New Labour – with a centralised national structure, individual membership, the block vote of trade union bureaucrats to out-vote the real members and the independence of Labour MPs from the sovereignty of the party conference – would not allow communist affiliation or allow communists to freely agitate within the Labour Party.

Lenin also overestimated the revolutionary potential of the situation in 1920, as John McLean wrote in his open letter to Lenin. Parliamentary politics were not as unstable as Lenin assumed. Lenin also assumed the advanced workers had been or could easily be won over to communism with the help of the Russian leadership so the task was now winning over the less advanced workers who voted Labour.

His label of ‘bourgeois  workers’ party’ for Labour also muddied the water. A considerable number of workers are members and supporters of the Tory and Liberal parties. Because sociologically a party is working class does not make it fundamentally different from other bourgeois parties. The label implies Labour is not a bourgeois party and some kind of support is possible. The trade union link is not an organic link with the masses, but a bureaucratic indirect link, the ‘dead souls of socialism’, as one historian described. Contact with the working class has never been dependent on contact with the Labour Party.

Some of Lenin’s disciples have followed his emphasis on loyalty to leaders and assumed mass struggle would pass through the Labour Party or be led by  Labour leaders. History has shown otherwise. The great workers’ unrest 1910-14, the general strike of 1926, the unemployed marches of the 1930s, the do-it-yourself reformism from below in the 1960s-70s, the anti-Vietnam war protests, the mass picketing of the great miners’ strike in 1984-85, the poll tax riots, the modern anti-war movement and dock strikes and firefighters’ strikes have all taken place without the approval of the top Labour leaders.

We should remember that the Labour Party was not a product of mass struggle nor even a social democratic party in the European sense, but a party which emerged from the bowels of the TUC and the trade union bureaucracy. The trade union link is not organic, but indirect and bureaucratic: there is no living connection with the mass of trade unionists in the workplace, much like the relationship between 19th century  British trade union leaders and the Liberals, or union leaders and the Democrats in the USA. As Chris Ford has written in The Commune, “we do not have to settle for lesser evil capitalist alternatives”

The second of The Commune’s Bristol reading group sessions will be on Sunday 28th February at 6pm in Cafe Kino on Ninetree Hill, Stokes Croft, Bristol. The session will discuss late nineteenth century ideas on communism and anarchism and the significance of the Paris Commune of 1871

All welcome – email uncaptiveminds@gmail.com for more info. Some background reading which may be of interest is posted below.

Communism and Anarchism

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 1848, chapter II, Proletarians and Communists

Kropotkin on anarchist communism: from The Conquest of Bread published in 1906, chapter 3 on anarchist communism

The Paris Commune

A Solidarity article and Marx’s take the on Paris Commune: see our pamphlet

Alternative source for Marx on the Paris Commune: The Civil War in France (1871).

Bakunin on the Paris Commune: The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State, (1871).

Situationist International on the Commune

Looking Beyond Labels

Sylvia Pankhurst on the necessity of looking beyond the labels anarchism and communism: ’What is behind a label – a plea for clearness‘, first published in Workers’ Dreadnought, 3rd November 1923.

http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=157170&SearchType=Basic

http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=133749&SearchType=Basic

Althusser's Lesson, translated by Emiliano Battista, is also forthcoming from Continuum in 2010.

by David Huckerby

Cuts in public services, jobs and wages have arrived in Sheffield even before the general election where the Tories, New Labour and the Liberals have all promised to take the axe to government spending to help solve the economic crisis at the expense of the working class.

The only significant difference between these parties of big business, representing the rich, are the tactics to adopt towards the timing and scale of the cuts. Don’t appear too gleeful as the Tories did initially, and don’t make the tone too harsh and negative, as the Liberal leader did. On the other hand don’t appear too positive, as Gordon Brown did at first, to the point of lack of credibility. The only certain thing is the cuts will become the deepest for decades irrespective of whether the axe is New Labour or Tory.

Housing workers in Sheffield Homes, Sheffield council’s housing organisation, have seen the future. A shortfall or cut of £4.2 million has appeared in the housing budget for 2010/11. More cuts will follow in 2011/12. It will be difficult to prevent redundancies in the long run in the diplomatic phrase of the the director and assistant directors of the company, which is wholly owned by the council. No accounts which an accountant would recognise have been put forward. Instead guestimates of huge sums of money have been conjured up to suggest savings at the expense of jobs, wages and services.For instance an extension of the job freeze and lack of recruitment might save £600,000 as staff leave for other jobs. But what other jobs? Staff leaving for other jobs has slowed down and will surely become only a trickle as the cuts bite. Other estimates have been suggested to save thousands of pounds in slashing services, or rather ‘redesigning’ services, in management jargon.

But one saving has been advocated by Peter Morton, the director of Sheffield Homes. If the lowest paid workers on each salary scale, which is the majority of the staff, voluntarily give up their increment or progression up the wage scale, this would save £700,000 this financial year 2010/11. The increase or increment would be lost and not regained. Nor is their any guarantee that jobs would not be slashed anyway. Even voluntary severence might not be adequate. There is no spare money to make voluntary severence financialy attractive.There are twelve top bosses who earn more than £50,000. An increment freeze will not cause pain at the top. One comment in the staff suggestion box is to let the big earners take the full brunt of the cuts. Obviously this will not be acted on, but the workers on the lowest wage bands are expected to discriminate against themselves.

Senior management tactics have been to attempt to stampede staff into accepting the increment freeze or breaking their own contract of employment.There has been an attempt to undermine the consultation process with the trade unions by appealing directly to staff as individuals in an online survey in the context of fearmongering about job losses. To outpace the unions an impossible deadline for a response was put in place. At a meeting on the 21st of January the unions were given until the 5th of February to agree to the increment freeze. The unions’ response has been slow. The local leaders and regional officers of UNISON and GMB, the main unions, simply reacted by insisting on consultation through procedure. No meetings of unions members were called, leaving management with the initiative. Management meetings were called to get over the management view. These were small local meetings to keep control and avoid one large staff meeting.

But the management online survey of staff views following briefings by management seem to have alarmed at least one UNISON regional officer who backed up the call for a mass meeting of Sheffield Homes staff from housing shop stewards at the stewards meeting. The stewards’ meeting then unanimously called for a mass meeting to be held in the city centre. No doubt the official wanted a bargaining counter and needed to send a signal that proper procedures should be followed. But any fight back will be from a very low base of collective activity. Trade union delays and avoidance of strike ballots and lack of trade union and branch meetings and the absence of publicity have been a prominent feature of recent years. Their has been no collective tradition of fighting back. Anything from the grass roots has been frustrated in procedures designed to avoid damaging the partnership between employers and unions or class collaboration policies. To stop these austerity proposals we need to reinvigorate grass roots opposition to defend jobs, terms and conditions and services.

The future of Sheffield Homes as a council ALMO, or Arms length management organisation, is in doubt anyway once the modernisation process has ended, probably in 2012. The New Labour government provided money to modernise council Housing in sheffield and elsewhere not direct to Councils,but indirectly to ALMOs to facilitate housing transfer to non-council providers. Modernised council dwellings are more attractive to alternative landlords. In that sense ALMOs are a half way house. Sheffield Homes will be out on an unviable limb when the modernisation process is complete. This process is part of the dismantling of the council homes sector. The fall in capital expenditure on council housing has declined dramatically in recent decades along with a huge drop in the building of new council rented homes. What has not been lost to right to buy has been lost to government induced housing transfer: more than 70000 council homes have been transferred from council ownership. Council rents have been artificially jacked up at a time when more and more people in Sheffield and elsewhere desperately need cheap rented housing. We also need a democratic transformation of housing provision from below rather than the bureaucratic provision of the national and local state from the top down.

‘Real Objects or Material Subjects’

Department of Philosophy, University of Dundee

March 27-28, 2010

SCHEDULE

Saturday

11am-12pm: registration

12pm-12:15pm: Introductory Remarks

12:15pm-1:30pm: James Williams (Dundee) “Contemplating Pebbles”

1:30pm-2:30pm: Lunch

2:30pm-4:00pm: Nathan Coombs (Royal Holloway, University of London) Platonism and Realism: Badiou contra Harman

Sid Littlefield (Georgia College & State University): Inflationary and Deflationary Metaphysics

Mike Olson (Villanova University) On the Dogmatic Limitations and Speculative Resources of Transcendental Idealism

4:30pm-6:00pm: Graham Harman (American University, Cairo) “I Am Also of the Opinion that Materialism Must Be Destroyed”

 

Sunday

10:00am-10:15am: Introductory Remarks

10:15am-11:30am: Adrian Johnston (University of New Mexico) “‘Naturalism or anti-naturalism?  No, thanks–both are worse!’:  Science, Materialism, and Slavoj Zizek.”

 

11:45am-1:15pm:

Austin Smidt (Nottingham) The Beyond In Our Midst: Sartre’s Robust Materialism as a Root of Revolution

Tom Eyers (Middlesex) Lacanian Materialism and the Question of the Real

Colby Dickinson (KU Leuven) Materialism as pantheistic animality: Giorgio Agamben and the silence of transcendence

1:15pm-2:00pm: Lunch Break

2:00pm-3:00pm:

John Van Houdt (KU Leuven):  The Necessity of Contingency or  Contingent Necessity?  Meillassoux, Hegel, and the Logic of Modal Necessity

Paul Ennis (University College Dublin) Phenomenology and the Ancestral

3:15pm-4:30pm: Peter Hallward (CRMEP, Middlesex) “Self-Emancipation between Hegel and Marx”

 

4:30pm-5:00pm: Closing Discussion

Registration is ESSENTIAL, please email mykeburns@gmail.com with Name/Address/Institutional Affiliation/Email Address by March 1st.

Cost is 10 pounds unwaged/ 20 pounds waged. Checks can be made out to Dundee University and sent to:

Department of Philosophy, University of Dundee, Nethergate, Dundee, DD1 4HN, Scotland, UK

Details on travel/accommodation will be posted shortly.

As I read Fisher’s (aka of K-Punk fame ) brilliant Capitalist Realism, I find myself wondering just what constitutes radical theory. And the conclusion that I come to is that radical theory is not so much a body of political propositions as it is a repudiation of actualism of that being and the actual are identical to one another. Radical theory is any theory that treats being as in excess of what I have called “local manifestation“. Wherever being is treated as identical to local manifestation we have thought serving as a handmaiden of the State. It is only where local manifestation is treated as fissured by an excess where the possibility of the new, only where the actuality of local manifestation is actively sought to be fissured– a question so vital to Fisher’s analysis of hedonic melancholia –that something like radical theory is possible. Here it matters little whether the thinker makes determinate political prescriptions. Rather what matters is that demonstration of the contingency of the actual, that it could, in principle, be otherwise, that is important. And in this respect, Fisher punches a hole in the real and speaks truth. The aim of theory is not to provide the answer but to rigorously establish the possibility. Read this book.

My mind is more or less fried this evening from editing articles for The Speculative Turn, but I wanted to draw attention to this post by Jon Cogburn on Brandom, Hegel, and idealism. Because my background in Anglo-American thought is pretty rusty these days, I’ve had to reread Cogburn’s post a few times now to understand what he’s getting at with the distinction between sense and reference dependency. I don’t feel ready to address his questions about pantheism, but I do think the criticisms of anti-realism he draws from Brandom get to the heart of the matter.

In this connection, I think that while Meillassoux has done an important service in naming a pervasive phenomenon in Continental thought with his term “correlationism”, there’s an important sense in which his explanation of this term does more to obscure than illuminate what is at issue. Setting forth the concept of correlation he writes:

By ‘correlation’ we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never either term considered apart from the other. (After Finitude, 5)

Meillassoux goes on to remark that,

Correlationism consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another. Not only does it become necessary to insist that we never grasp an object ‘in itself’, in isolation from its relation to the subject, but it also becomes necessary to maintain that we can never grasp a subject that would not always-already be related to an object. (ibid.)

Whenever I read Meillassoux’s definitions of correlationism, both in After Finitude and his Collapse talks, I get the sense that he’s circling around the issue without quite putting his finger on it. When Meillassoux expresses the issue in terms of a subject relating to an object, he is constructing a concept– to employ Deleuze’s famous description –that is too baggy for what it tries to put its finger on. Additionally, as he’s formulated the issue it becomes clear that the realist can give nothing but an incoherent response to the correlationist; for if it is true that the problem is the mere relation of a subject to an object, then it is clear that the realist can give no coherent rejoinder to the correlationist because it is both clear and obvious that in any claim we make about objects, in any knowledge of objects, we must relate to objects to know them.

read on!

No doubt this is one of the reasons that Meillassoux is led to believe that there is no possible way to defeat the correlationist argument (as he explicitly states in his Collapse talk). And as Harman has observed, this entails that Meillassoux is at heart a correlationist. But the problem here is that he is conflating the broader genus of relation with a specific concept of relation as it functions in idealist or anti-realist strains of thought. The term that Meillassoux is groping towards with the term “correlationism” is not relation, but reflexivity. It is not the relation of knowers to objects that is problematic for realists– all realists have posited some sort of relation to the real –but rather a conceptualization of these relations as reflexive that lies at the heart of the anti-realist or idealist wager.

In short, the idealist thesis is that all relations are reflexive relations. This is the real force of the idealist argument in all of our forms. The issue is not that we must relate to objects to know them– who ever thought otherwise? –but that the nature of our relation to the object is reflexive in character.

What does this mean? What does it mean to say that our relation to the object is reflexive? It means that in any relation that relation says as much about ourselves as it says about the state-of-affairs out there in the world that it is talking about. As Fremont-Smith put it in terms of the psychoanalyst Kubie of Macy’s conference cybernetics fame,

“What Dr. Kubie is really trying to say is that language is a double coding: both a statement about the outside and a statement about the inside. It is this doubleness which gives this consciousness/unconscious quality to it. (quoted in Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 71).

Kubie is speaking of utterances we make about the world, but the point holds across the board for all anti-realisms. To illustrate this concept, in deference to Copjec, anyone who has ever had “their desire read” in their writing by someone who loves them or has amorous intentions towards them knows what it means for their utterances to be doubly coded. You write an article that is dry as dirt about something in the world. For example, you write something on finance capital and how it functions in post-Fordist capitalism. The reference of your missive is post-Fordist capitalism, a state-of-affairs out there in the world. However, the person adept in reading desire will have none of this. The missive about post-Fordist capitalism is not a missive about post-Fordist capitalism, but is doubly encoded such that it is also a missive about the writers own desire or internal states, having nothing to do with post-Fordist capitalism. For example, perhaps, throughout the writer’s article, metaphors pertaining to anality (“plopping out”, “being stopped up”, “the shit capital produces”, etc) and theses such as the claim that capitalism is infinite such that it aims only to produce more excess, are present. The reader adept at reading for desire rather than reference takes these metaphors to be statements of the writer’s psychic conflicts and unrequited desire (the manner in which capital perpetually reproduces lack and expands). Rather than treating the missive as a statement about the dynamics of finance capital, the piece is instead read as a statement about the writer. This is the double articulation of every utterance or statement. Every utterance or statement says as much about the person making the statement as it does about the world that it comments on. And this is the essence of reflexivity.

Now the disturbing feature of reflexivity– apart from the fact that it tends to generate infinite regresses (am I not making a statement about myself in interpreting the writer’s desire in this way?) –is that we can no longer tell what is inside or outside. Is the writer’s statement about finance capital really about finance capital, or is it simply her own desire displaced and distorted as a discourse on finance capital? This feature of reflexivity is the core idea behind every variant of anti-realism. In Kant you get the thesis that the transcendental subject reflexively contributes distinctions that aren’t there in the world itself. As a consequence of this, we can never know the in-itself, because it is always-already constituted by our own cognition. Hegel, in the most extreme version of reflexive logic, bites the bullet and argues that because inside and outside are always indeterminate, being and thought are necessarily identical, even in their difference. I offer these only as “nutshell” versions of the anti-realist argument.

The move that makes Harman’s work so unique is the manner in which it practices parity. Harman’s move is not to deny reflexivity (if I have him wrong he’ll correct me), so much as to de-epistemologize reflexivity and democratically extend it to all objects. Harman’s thesis is thus not that epistemically we have access to objects as they are in-themselves independent of our own grasping of objects. No, of this sort of naive realism he can clean his hands. Harman’s thesis is that all objects are reflexive in this sense with respect to one another. In other words, for Harman, the reflexive “distortion” of the object is a ubiquitous feature of all inter-ontic or inter-object relations. It is not a special feature restricted to humans. And here– my thought’s fizzling out so I have to wrap this up –we can go one step further and say that the cardinal sin of the reflexive turn is that it did not practice parity. It began by noticing the doubly articulated nature of thought, perception, and language, noting that utterances about the world say as much about us as they do about the world. However, all too quickly it transformed this sort of reflexivity into a hegemony like Maturna’s variant of autopoietic theory, holding that utterances only speak of us and not the world. Here, I think, my remarks converge somewhat with Cogburn’s (I still remembering screaming that name when he’d show up at the coffee house) about reference-dependency. In other words, why is the relation not reversible? Why, under the reflexive turn, does reflexivity reveal only truths about language, mind, society, etc., and never about the objects that are also making “utterances” after their own fashion? Reflexive ontology would thus consist in two moves: the parity principle that extends reflexivity to all objects and not just humans or knowers, and the point that something of the object is revealed in its own utterances or local manifestations that cannot be reduced to our distinctions.

Start: Feb 19 2010 19:30 End: Feb 24 2010 22:00 Timezone: America/New York Start: Feb 19 2010 19:30 End: Feb 24 2010 22:00 Timezone: America/New York

Anarchist & former political prisoner Ashanti Alston will be appearing in Texas for the following events:

February 19 - HOUSTON, TX - 7:30pm at the S.H.A.P.E. Community Center (3902 Almeda Rd.)
February 22 - AUSTIN, TX - 8pm at MonkeyWrench Books (110 E. North Loop)
February 24 - DALLAS, TX - details TBA

The focus on the talk will be on Race, Resistance, Cross-Border Struggles and Anarchism.

Start: Mar 5 2010 12:43 End: Mar 7 2010 20:43 Timezone: America/New York Start: Mar 5 2010 12:43 End: Mar 7 2010 20:43 Timezone: America/New York

The Institute for Anarchist Studies will be hosting the Anarchist Theory Track at the All Power to the Imagination Conference in Sarasota, FL, March 5-7.

IAS Speakers will include:

Mark Lance
Joshua Stevens
Andy Cornell
Maia Ramnath
Harjit Gill

This will be the third annual All Power to the Imagination Conference. For full schedule and details visit:

http://www.allpowertotheimagination.com/

by Chris Ford, UNITE Clerkenwell & St. Pancras 0694M branch organiser

At a so-called disciplinary hearing Lancaster Cleaning Services have sacked UNITE shop-steward and leader of the Latin American Workers Association Alberto Durango. The company took over the contract for the Union Bank of Switzerland on Monday 1 February; they suspended him on the Tuesday and sacked him on Thursday 4 February. This premeditated act is part of their efforts to break the union at UBS.

Lancaster were hired by UBS to replace the company Mitie, despite this banking giant making profits of $14 billion they hired a notorious anti-union firm to ensure they pay even less to their cleaners. Ignoring the protection afforded by TUPE, workers were told they are to have their wages cut via a reduction in their hours! The workers lodged a grievance; in response they have sacked Alberto their shop-steward.

Alberto was called to a ‘disciplinary hearing’ to ‘discuss that we cannot continue to employ you’ – it was a kangaroo court. They refused to recognise him as a UNITE shop-steward. The reasons they gave were that he had worked for them before and he was sacked for ‘dishonesty’. Alberto previously worked for Lancaster for over a decade, only when he became a union activist did they target him. A series of allegations were thrown at Alberto, they orchestrated his arrest by the Home Office based on false claims. He was released without charge. Lancaster then sacked Alberto regardless claiming he never worked for them under his true identity. After his dismissal the company then admitted following a union appeal he had in fact worked for them in his true identity after all!

Lancaster have ignored the ongoing Tribunal case against his previous dismissal, they have ignored his rights under TUPE and are openly blacklisting union activists. The Union Bank of Switzerland and Lancaster are partners in crime. Many activists of the labour movement and organisations have responded to the appeal for solidarity. Let’s step up the mobilisation for the demonstration on 12 February, we are now protesting at the main UBS site where Alberto was sacked. Make this a mass protest to start turning the tide on the union busters.

MASS DEMONSTRATION

Reinstate Alberto – Hands off Our Union
Friday 12 February 1:00 PM,
Outside UBS Capital, 100 Liverpool Street, London EC2M 2RH (note: changed from original venue)

Sponsoring organisations:

Latin American Workers Association; The Commune; La Comuna; Colombia Solidarity Campaign; Permanent Revolution; National Shop Stewards’ Network; Labour Representation Committee, Brent Trades Union Council, Rifondazione Comunista, Workers’ Liberty, International Federation of Iraqi Refugees, Coalition to Stop Deportations to Iraq, Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!; Green Left; The Prisma, multicultural newspaper; Feminist Fightback; London Coalition Against Poverty; Oxford and District Trade Union Council, Campaign Against Immigration Controls; Global Afrikan Congressuk; RMT Black and Ethnic Members; RMT Finsbury Park 0543 Branch; Black Workers for Justice – europe; Turbulence

Individuals:

John McDonnell MP; Jeremy Dear, NUJ General Secretary, Steve Hedley RMT (LUL) Regional Organiser; Professor Gregor Gall, Research Professor of Industrial Relations, University of Hertfordshire; Pete Firmin, LRC Co-National Secretary; George Binette, Camden UNISON Branch Secretary (pc); Derek Wall, General Election Candidate for Windsor/former Green Party principal Speaker, Jerry Hicks, UNITE General Secretary Candidate, Vaughan Thomas, RMT (LUL) Regional President, Paul Haste, Morning Star industrial reporter; Leslie Sklair, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics; Monica del Pilar Uribe, journalist; Jeremy Dear, General Secretary, NUJ

Please add your name and organisation to the sponsors:
write to latin_americanworkers@hotmail.com

Steve Ryan responds to recent debate over who – if anyone – we should vote for in the general election

So the general election is in May, probably on the 6th. As a left, what should be our position as regards voting? This question has always exercised the left and sometimes seen some strange conclusions.

This year is a very difficult one. Clearly the Labour party bears no resemblance at all to any kind of workers’ party. The memory of the minimum wage and tax credits is a very distant one as Labour ploughs on with cuts in the public sector , more privatisation than the Tories managed, war, the expenses scandal… the list grows each day.

Given this it is easy to forget just how bad the Tories would be. They are the clear party of the rich, and recent statements about only allowing “clever” people to teach, etc clearly show where we would be going if they get in.

No point mentioning Lib Dems – Tory lite – so what of the position to the left of Labour?

Depressingly the conclusion has to be there isn’t anything. The collapse of pretty well all attempts to build something from the Socialist Alliance to the SSP should have been a lesson to all – but as usual wasn’t – as the Trot groups hopped from initiative to initiative.

The Greens can be positioned well to the left of Labour, despite some strange ideas. Caroline Lucas looks set to take Brighton, with outside chances of success in Norwich.

Certainly because of the dire situation some on the left are reverting to the “vote Labour with no illusions” slogan of the ’70s and ’80s. All this of course misses the point for communists.

Voting in any government , no matter how left it looks, within capitalism is at best a tactic. It gives space to operate . Obviously some governments are better than others – BNP, anyone? This election is important, because of this. The recent survey of social attitudes shows a marked shift to the right in public thinking. The policies of successive Tory and Labour governments have enabled this. Indeed it was deliberate, to push their neo-liberal agenda.

As such the left need to fight hard to gain space for workers to hear our ideas. It means that the left’s support in the election should be given:

- to progressive candidates to up their vote, demonstrating there is a voice to the left of Labour. There are opportunities such as the Greens and whatever is to the left in your area

- to keep out the BNP, in Barking for example: this would mean voting Labour.

Doing this would retain a vote on the left, and ensure defeat for the BNP’s Parliamentary hopes

However, and here is the crux of the matter the situation up to the election is a good one to argue for communism. Workers are disillusioned, beaten down with the recession. It is vital that an real alternative is presented to them to fight for

Strikes will up as the recession returns and workers are pushed to the limit, especially in the public sector. PCS is already balloting for example. This gives big opportunities to argue for communism and self management. The strikes should be wherever possible pushed hard, placed in the hands of strike committees not union bosses. Rank and file groups should be built, the National Shop Stewards Network is a good already existing organisation to push this.

Public meetings, street sales and actions should be upped to gain a “presence”. Action against the BNP should be redoubled

In short as the election moves the left should be organising a massive counter attack on capital, rather than angsting about who to vote for. Such an attack will sharply focus the clear differences between our agenda and that of politicians and bosses. It will start to win over – and back – layers of the working class to communist ideas, the start of a new workers’ movement.

Dasgupta, Sudeep. (2009). "Jacques Ranciere". In Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers. Ed. Felicity Colman. Durham: Acumen.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Film-Theory-Philosophy-Key-Thinkers/dp/1844651851

http://www.fabula.org/actualites/article30960.php

I’ll make these questions brief as I haven’t eaten yet today, am coming down with a cold, and am generally worn out. The model of objects I’ve been working with recently has basically focused on very simple physical objects where the attractors inhabiting the virtual dimension of the object are relatively fixed. Here I think it’s important, however, to distinguish between what, for lack of a better word, might be called recursive objects and non-recursive objects (if someone has a better term for what I’m trying to get at, let me know). When I refer to recursive objects, I have in mind objects whose outputs evoked by inputs (i.e., local manifestations) have the peculiar property of, in turn, functioning as inputs for subsequent states of the object. In addition to the outputs of these objects functioning as inputs for new objects within the endo-relational structure of the object, these objects are historical in the sense that not only do they have a past, they reflexively relate to that past. Thus all objects have a past, no matter how brief that past might be, but not all objects reflexively relate to that past such that that past can function as an input for subsequent states of the object.

I can think of no better representation for this sort of object than Bergson’s famous “cone of memory” from Matter and Memory (depicted to the left above). The point of Bergson’s cone of memory can’t really be represented in a diagram, because what the cone expresses is not simply that there’s a past that trails out behind an object, but that the object perpetually relates to different strata of that past. In the diagram above “S” can be taken to represented the most contracted point of time or the specious present (what I would call the most instantaneous of local manifestations). The cone itself represents the past.

read on!

Within the cone it will be noted that there are different rings, planes, plateaus, or levels (A-B, A’-B’, A”-B”, etc). These might be thought of as “fields” of the past for a particular object. Thus, for example, when an object such as myself hears a particular song like REM’s Its the End of the World as We Know It or smells a particular perfume, it is not simply, as Hume would have it, that associations to other particular things in the past (though this happens too), but rather a plateau of the past (say A’-B’) is contracted into the present. Like layers of celluloid film superimposed over one another, that entire strata of the past is contracted with the present.

In many instances this contraction or superimposition might be unconscious. Thus, for example, when my sister (she’s two years younger than me) and I both visit my parents in their home at the same time, we often end up fighting like cats and dogs. Yet this does not occur when she visits me here in Texas or when I visit her in Ohio. Why this difference? One plausible explanation is that like Proust’s famous madeleine cake, something about this context leads to the contraction of a strata or plateau of the past into the present, leading to the actualization of our childhood patterns, affects, conflicts, etc. with one another and our parents. This is not like an echo in a train tunnel. The point to keep in mind here is that just as we don’t note that two images have been superimposed on one another in the celluloid overlays, when my sister and I are fighting we don’t register these fights as reenactments of the past. The fights revolve around conflicts in the present– usually very stupid things –and around things that pertain to us now. They seem utterly convincing. Yet nonetheless this virtual dimension or strata that has been contracted over the past functions as an organizing space for these conflicts. The case is similar with the REM song. Suddenly, in an inexplicable fashion, when hearing this song all sorts of affects come to inhabit my being-in-the-world which seem to be related to nothing I am currently experiencing or dealing with. What is happening here, I suspect, is the actualization of a plane of the past pertaining to the first time I heard this song in junior highschool.

Clearly these objects relate to the past in a way fundamentally different from that of other objects. While it is certainly true that a particular rock may have undergone such and such an interaction in its remote past and that this interaction selected subsequent trajectories of the becoming of the rock, it strikes me as unlikely that rocks can contract plateaus of the past in the present in this way. No, this relationship to the past seems unique to living objects, social systems, and perhaps certain technologies. Additionally DNA seems to be structured in this way and perhaps ecosystems are as well.

Now if objects that maintain a relationship to their past are of particular interest in the context of questions about the individuation of objects within the framework of onticology, then this is because systems such as this are evolving systems or systems that are capable of developing new attractors or powers. These types of objects are learning objects. We can clearly see that the ever-expanding cone of memory resulting from the growth of experiment generate new attractors or powers. In learning a particular mathematics my power of acting is increased. There’s a new attractor that inhabits my being. However, interestingly, it is not simply that the growth of experience (the formation of new traces and plateaus of in the past) generates new attractors in these systems, but rather the activity of thought, and its equivalents for social systems (perhaps communication?) and certain technological objects, itself generates new powers or attractors within an object. These would be reflexive and endogenous transformations in the endo-relational structure of an object. Here we might think of an artist who, through her experimentation, develops a new style or power of producing. In this case, the new power or attractor is a mutation or transformation brought about by the object itself and by the object acting on itself.

So I suppose the question I’m asking myself here is that if objects are individuated not by their local manifestations but by their powers or attractors, is an object that evolves or develops a new attractor or power the same individual or not? There’s an important sense in which we might be inclined to say that the person that has learned mathematics is still the same substance and that New York as a village and New York as a sprawling metropolis is perhaps the same substance (or maybe not, the verdict is out for me). A third possibility would be that these sorts of objects remain the same substance within limits despite developing new attractors, but that there are threshold points where either so many attractors are lost or the structure or constellation of attractors is so transformed (as in Cronenberg’s The Fly) that there is a genuinely new substance that has come into existence. For these systems, then, memory or the past would be a crucial component in the individuation of the entity or in what makes the entity this entity.

Okay, I guess the post wasn’t short after all.

I came across this terrifying robot on a documentary a while back. In a nutshell, researchers have spliced neurons from a rat brain to a computer-chip. The computer then transmits signals to the robot controlling its movement. As the neurons “experiment” with the movements of the robot, the neural network actually evolves or develops (learns), developing its own behavior. This is a rather terrifying example of the sort of strange mereologies I’ve been talking about. Ordinarily we don’t think of neurons as entities or objects in their own right, but as parts of another object (a body) that are unable to exist in their own right. Yet here we have a rather terrifying example of stratified objects where we have objects wrapped inside of other objects. The neurons, when transplanted to the chip, become something other than they were and new powers not present in the rat itself become manifested. The truly horrifying question for me is that of whether these neurons continue to have some form of consciousness when transplanted in this way. Is there some highly confused sentient being in this assemblage that is thoroughly bewildered by the assemblage in which it finds itself and which is living an existing of shrieking pain? Here’s the video: