Thread by @deontologistics

So, here’s a way of reframing this question: which societies enabled coexistence and collaboration between people with divergent social styles, rather than imposing a dominant social style? Such social pluralism is very important indeed.

https://twitter.com/keithfrankish/status/1350043049489952770

I suspect that the vast majority of the answers to the original question will fall foul of the tendency to project ideal social arrangements that reflect our own style of social understanding and engagement, and that this will lead them to talk past one another.

Consider the perspective of someone far away from you on in the neurological map, who doesn’t overlap with your socially calibrated genetic resources for social intelligence: the social heaven of an autist introvert may be the social hell of a bipolar extrovert, and vice versa.

I’ve had many good conversations about this with people in different parts of the map who overlap with me in different ways (h/t @tjohnlinward, @dynamic_proxy, @maradydd, @mojozozoe, @UnclePhobic) whose personal heavens I would like to visit, but maybe not live in full time.

We get to see glimpses of these heavens not merely in the past, but in the present, and abstract their geometries, both in spatial/architectural terms (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byker_Wall) and in temporal/dynamic terms (). The physical/computational platforms around us configure our agency.

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1347128200963510274

The strand of communism I have the most problem with, which has the most violent reaction against l/acc, is the puerile insurrectionism I tend to call ‘Paris commune alt-history fanfic’. I don’t mean to demean either alt-history or fanfic here, but rather the imaginary commune.

There are many people out there whose intuitive orientation toward utopia (expressed as ‘omnia sunt communia’ and articulated by the microeconomics of LTV) looks to me like nothing so much as a washing up rota stomping on a human face for all eternity.

These insurrectionists are the first to castigate those who feel an aversion to such communal living arrangements (economics in the original sense of the management of the household) as themselves puerile and irresponsible, unwilling to collectively commit to reproductive labour.

They often simply cannot see that the ways they like to be embedded in the social environment that enables mutual reproduction (the macroeconomics of LTV and its competitors) are not well suited to those with different cognitive make ups. For the latter live through abstractions.

The strand of communist thought that emerges from Sohn-Rethel always threatens to collapse back into an ahistorical and eschatological critique of the evils of money, when the latter provides the freedom-of-last-resort for those who aren’t embedded in less liquid support systems.

I’m not going to say there’s nothing to the notion of ‘real abstraction’, but the unthinking valorisation of the concrete that I have critiqued in other contexts (deontologistics.wordpress.com/2019/09/30/the…) renders it not merely useless but actively counterproductive.

If you can’t talk about the concrete abstractions that articulate the whole industrial platform of modern human life from agriculture and waste disposal to finance and telecommunications, then you’ve got no choice but to stick to fanfic. At best, this becomes sabotage fanfic.

I can see why it’s attractive to rhapsodise about pulling it all down and squatting the ruins, salvaging what little is left from the industrial remnants of the capitalist age, but I and my friends *need* industrial pharmaceuticals, and we’ll fight for them if it comes to it.

If it must be communism, at least give me acid communism or FALGSC over the hauntological aesthetics come haunted ideology of salvagepunk communes. Give me infopunk spectres over the last dying embers of the promise of modernity. Give me a fucking future, not a squalid past.

Solarpunk, fine! Atompunk even. Hell the NRx hellscape of nanofacture steampunk Pax Victoriana in Stephenson’s Diamond Age is better than this romanticisation of ruin and regret. The cynical view of endless domination/resistance in The Expanse and Altered Carbon is preferable.

I think there’s plenty of problems with what I’ve seen of the discussions regarding ‘patchwork’ coming out of the Fisher/Land nexus, and I’m pretty skeptical of ‘left NRx’ as a viable configuration, but at least the idea is to stitch us back together in some way that fits.

I’ve equally got theoretical bones to pick with the post-left anarcho-transhumanism of C4SS, but as recent exchanges with @rechelon have shown, these can be extremely productive, for me if no one else. But I can’t get into insurrectionist cosplay, no matter how much I like ARGs.

We simply don’t have the time, will, resources, or *opportunities* to burn it all down to the ground and start again, and anything that even suggests so in its aesthetic framing is squandering what opportunities we have to steer secular trajectories towards better futures.

This is my basic view of left-accelerationism: it’s a theory of strategic opportunity in the age of auto catalytic and mutually reinforcing global trends. The choices we have are: steer, slide, or crash into the collapsing potentials of the 21st century. Prometheanism is best.

If someone turns up at your door with a hammer & sickle pin, torn jeans, and asking if you’ve heard the good news of value form theory, my advice is to tell them that you’ve got better things to do, like hustling to keep up with the post-career economy we’re still sliding into.

So, that’s my thoughts on the speculative fictions that orient us towards the (hopefully post-capitalist) future, and my critique of the worst. What positive things do I have to say about the original question as I reformulated it?

I’ve got two thoughts, that are largely imagistic, but that’s what we’re after here: models or analogies that orient our thinking about how to steer/construct. I’ll number them, as I’ve taken to doing:

1. Urbanisation. There are various processes of modernisation throughout human history, understood as the generation of new ranges of personal freedom not through isolation but through economic entanglement: complicity in mutual reproduction.

Cities remain the best historical model of the sort of overlapping coexistence I’m advising in the way I’ve framed the question. I’m deeply influenced by Jane Jacobs’s work here (The Nature of Economies & TDaLoGAC), even if I have certain qualms about her normative naturalism.

Somewhere in my head she’s having a very interesting conversation with George’s Bataille, Guy Debord, D&G, and @InigoWilkins about the way time and energy bootstrap themselves into ever more excessive tangles of beautiful inefficiency, with cities as the core case study.

It's possible to reconceive processes of modernisation in a way that loosens the connections to modernity/modernism in the history of Europe from the Renaissance to post-colonial neoliberal capitalism: Addis Ababa, Tenochtitlan, Beijing as much as Rome, London, and New York.

We must avoid the anachronistic/utopian temptation to project the politico-economic configuration that Marx called 'capital' into times and places where it does not belong, where wage labour and endogenous technological evolution were not yet integrated and ascendent.

This is about more than the commodity form and its monetary synthesis - more than markets for land, labour, and currency - its about the mode of investment that ties these things together into an autocatalytic process of wealth accumulation through the modulation of industry.

This is Marx's real insight about what's unique to the birth of capitalism, and rather than watering it down so it can be indiscriminately smeared across time/space, we would do better to elaborate and particularise it, as Veblen, Neurath, and Polanyi do in different ways.

If you're serious about political economy, you've got to get outside the echo chamber of Marx philology now and then, no matter how much intrinsically worthwhile work there may be in there (e.g., the Frankfurt school, Cohen, Althusser, Postone, etc.). I'll return to this thought.

For now I'm supposed to be talking about cities, and the modernisation dynamics that they enable/are enabled by. Mighty empires have crystallised around the economies of cities (e.g., Rome), but cities have equally been created by the politics of mighty empires (e.g., Beijing).

This back and forth between urban power structures and rural agricultural bases stretches back to the beginnings of recorded history, even though what passes for a city in the bronze age is a mere village in the era of the megalopolis (e.g., Mexico City, Tokyo, Shenzen).

There are many disasters, no doubt most unrecorded, in which the proto-cities that formed the loci of politico-economic control in the process of bootstrapping an agricultural base into something resembling industry failed catastrophically, taking history with them (e.g., Troy).

But it's clear that the successful ones allowed pooling of resources that not only facilitated the diversification and division of labour, but which created sufficient Bataillean excess to be channelled into social, epistemological, and aesthetic experiments in personal autonomy.

As Debord makes very clear, this is not to deny the extent to which most human beings who have ever lived have been bound up in cycles of fate within which even the smallest quantum of destiny was denied them, insofar as it was extracted and hoarded by the ruling classes.

Modernisation doesn't simply expand personal autonomy, it also enables new modes of domination that are parasitic on the outputs of those experiments in freedom that modernisation generates: familialisation begets nucleation, industry begets junk food, art begets propaganda.

This dynamic is what Deleuze & Guattari call deterritorialization/reterritorization, and it is manifold: from the economic 'double movement' where liberalism undermines its markets (Polanyi), to the cultural dialectic between want and need in 'conspicuous consumption' (Veblen).

When we can see how these dynamics play out in global history, we can use them as models for explaining the historical turbulence that is disrupting our image of the present (and its cancelled future); its clear that the urban/rural divide is once more a source of chaos.

This isn't new. Go back to the Iranian revolution and you'll see that the urban/rural split was decisive in putting the theocrats in charge. The same split enables Erdogan's islamic nationalism and its overturning of the secular power of Ataturk's military bulwark in Turkey.

Every resurgent authoritarian nationalism across the globe is fuelled by resentments, and many of these resentments are articulated by the stable political, economic, and culture power of the urban middle class against an alliance of rural wealth and post-industrial poverty.

This pattern is so familiar that everyone who remotely recognises it hears a cautious voice whisper 'fascism' in the back of their mind. As Polanyi and Benjamin explain, fascism is less an ideology than it is a vector of reterritorialisation that reaches for any symbols to hand.

The secular melting pots we find in immigrant rich metropoli within liberal democracies face similar pressures to the larger patchwork coalitions formalised by Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire after WW1: new forms of federation (EU) or balkanisation (Singapore on Thames).

In the UK, the diverse metropolitan working class and the more homogeneous post-industrial working class are pitted against each other in a conflict between urban and rural wealth, itself articulated by a conflict internal to what @mckenziewark calls the vectorialist class.

Brexit can be said to be about anything but what it's actually about: a conflict over the destiny of liberal political economy, between sincere neoliberals committed to the Hayekian project of the EU and resurgent classical liberals seduced by @GreatDismal's emergent Klept.

Less still can the underlying failure of the neoliberal compact be admitted in the open, even though the 21st century has seen nothing but a sequence of escalating economic crises inexorably generated by the ravages of the 'globalisation' the right so happily call 'globalism'.

I think that Polanyi's story about the global economic trap created by the gold standard in the early 20th century, and the way it generated spiralling economic hardships that drove the world into WW2, probably needs to be updated to the global economic trap we find ourselves in.

This involves saying something about the obsolescence of the liberal nation state, and the way in which borders/currency function less to secure tax revenue than gate access to the remaining consolations of the postwar liberal compact: residual welfare nationalism.

This state of affairs has been held together by the equivalent of rubber bands and string for some time, a heady mix of negative solidarity between classes and generations framed by an ideological consensus that prevents us even discussing political economy in public.

When this sort of thing finally gives, it's historically explosive, and the crazy scenes from #coupanon are only the most obvious sign of the political turbulence that the dead end defaults of capitalist realism are struggling to contain. Buckle up, the 20's will be a bumpy ride.

But this is a long story to tell, and the point of this winding tangent is that this latest episode in the dynamic oscillation between experimental urbanism and authoritarian retrenchment might tell us which historical models we should look at and where we should apply them.

In particular, the negative solidarity established between the metropolitan working class and the post-industrial working class is in some sense an intra-urban matter, disguised by the sheer dereliction of urban areas whose relative scale makes them appear parochial.

The city of my birth, Sunderland, voted to Leave the EU by a wide margin (63%), and the city I live in, Newcastle, voted to Remain by a narrow sliver (50.7%). One is squarely post-industrial, while the other is a regional capital that supports a more metropolitan culture.

But in truth, these differences are negligible, and their ideological accentuation struggles against onrushing realities that will progressively undermine them, and this creates opportunities for true solidarity not seen since the Thatcher crushed the miners' strike.

There's recent history here, but also a deeper history, the history of the early Labour movement and the working class counter-culture that bootstrapped an economic platform from which to launch a political offensive in an ongoing class war; a war that never went away.

One of Neurath's main contributions to the critique of political economy is his extensive study of war economies and his corresponding insistence that they are not an exception, but a manifestation of the rule: a rule hidden by the ever shifting mask of liberal ideology.

There is such a thing as a *class war economy*, and though it need not and should not take the form of the coalition of trade unions, cooperatives, small businesses and other institutions that the British working class built for themselves, there are concrete models to revise.

In the end, this may reveal me as more of an Owenite than a Marxist, but there's a synthesis to be articulated here (with Veblen, Neurath, Polanyi, Jacobs, etc.) that mirrors in abstract theoretical content the solidarity we must realise in concrete practical form.

To put this in slogan form: if post-capitalism is to be organised by post-capital, then anti-capitalism must bootstrap anti-capital.

But what else is the emerging complex of crowdfunding niches, new media platforms, and similar quasi-market structures upon which people are erecting and integrating hustles at 90° to the economy of the last century? This is economic counter-culture, and could be counter-power.

This is far from a foregone conclusion. Look what happened to the 60s counter-culture, which failed to develop administrative alternatives and was absorbed more or less whole by existing institutional structures, creating the emancipatory hallucinations of 90s 3rd way liberalism.

The big question remains: How should we conceive of the differences between models of pre-capital, anti-capital, and hopefully post-capital modes of resource accumulation and investment? What changes must we make to these older platforms in order to wage the current class war?

2. Anonymisation. If there's one peculiar desire developed within and as a response to urbanisation, it's the capacity not simply to cultivate personal destiny, but to unmoor this cultivation from the systems of address that gate access to everything unrelated to this destiny.

Though characteristic of every settlement whose social connectivity passes Dunbar's threshold (~150), this capacity was progressively refined throughout the 20th century and its integration with computation and cryptography promises to define the character of the 21st century.

This is a desire developed under capitalism that shouldn't be presented as degenerate merely in virtue of its genesis. Selective anonynimity and its associated abstractions enable the coexistence and collaboration between divergent forms of sociality from which we began.

We live in an age of proliferating styles of living, genres of personal autonomy, and mediums of instrumental agency. Yet these concrete freedoms remain unequally distributed and otherwise inaccessible to those without social position or liquid assets.

Without abstractions these freedoms remain entirely abstract: formal promises that are substantively invalidated by lack of access to the levers of social/financial power. Only the powerful get to turn recognition on and off as they so choose, moving freely between contexts.

I'm hardly the first to note that the early promise of the internet as a radicalisation of the urban affect of anonymous interaction (e.g., as articulated by 90s cyber feminism) has been heavily curtailed by the consolidation of the big platform stacks (e.g., Amazon, Google, FB).

This is one more example of D&G's dynamic: a technological deterritorialisation that opens up new ranges of action, giving way to a commerical (and now political) reterritorialisation which restricts theses errant freedoms. Yet these interacting tendencies can still be contested.

Returning to the intra-urban resentments that have been used to build negative solidarity and similar forms of complicity against the interests of both the metropolitan working class and the post-industrial working class, the social lubrication provided by anonymity is important.

Of course, it's not just about urban anonymity, but rather the sorts of social mobility that it permits: the ability to choose when/how to connect the contexts that one moves between (e.g. work/home), and distinguish basic needs/personal desires therein (e.g. food/clothing/etc.).

One of my spicier opinions is that indexing the figure of 'the hipster' to urban gentrification has largely prevented us from thinking through the relevant social trends, and has served more to foster negative solidarity than build the economic alliances we desperately need.

This isn't to deny the importance of the critique of gentrification, but rather to say that there is a more complex story about social mobility and generational relations to be told here. Boomer savings have funded many hipster projects, but that's mostly a one time deal.

Most hipsters aren't the new media creative types it's so easy to parody (cf. Nathan Barley), but service industry workers who specialise in catering to their own economic niche: barristas, line cooks, bartenders, etc., who dream of building their own businesses at some point.

The entanglement of such people and their businesses in ongoing dynamics of asset speculation and housing provision is important to note, but there's a wider story about the economics of small and local business here irreducible to the discourse of 'the startup'.

There's much that could be said here, but I don't want to get side any more side tracked than I already am. There are three specific claims that I want to make, and so I'll restrict myself to these, and ramify the numbering:

2a. The hipster is something like the contemporary correlate of Baudelaire's flâneur, and I think what Foucault says about this figure and its relationship to the continuance of the Enlightenment applies here: they give themselves over to the aesthetics of existence.

However, what's interesting about contemporary hipsterism is that it is concretely oriented by the aesthetics of the coexistence and collaboration from which I began. It breeds subcultural diversification and creates the overlapping economic platforms that support it.

Of course, this breeds pretentiousness, but that's true of every aesthetic orientation that diverges from the cultural norm. Experiments breed failure, but also better experiments, and this proliferation of aesthetic trajectories is the legacy of hipsters in the cultural sphere.

Not everyone can afford to have artisanal coffee, bread, haircuts, and the wider range of products that these overlapping networks of aesthetic experts makes their living providing, but the balance of need/want is much more customisable in these anonymous urban contexts.

Pretentiousness aside, this is an amazing solution to Veblen's worries about 'conspicuous consumption'. It's not that hipsters don't conspicuously consume, but rather that their choices are far more specialised in ways that make reverting to basics in other areas more acceptable.

If you want to wear the same ratty band t-shirts for the next 3 years so you can afford to regularly buy avocado toast and excellent flat whites, that's completely socially acceptable, because social pressure is largely exerted by the aesthetic communities you've joined.

There's an interesting riff on Kant's 'sensus communis' here, but I'll leave that to one side. All I mean to say is that the dialectic of need/want at the heart of the Marxist problematic has been reconfigured in certain areas of contemporary culture in encouraging ways.

2b. The negative solidarity characteristic of Brexit resulted in a bunch of the UK populace voting to remove formal freedoms from everyone that were only real freedoms for those wealthy enough to exercise them. Many Brexit supporters couldn't make use of their EU citizenship.

There were many in pro-Brexit rural constituencies who could and did make use of their right to freedom of movement across the EU, but the post-industrial constituencies that aligned with them largely could not. The South of France was simply not a viable destination for them.

The lesson to learn is this: if you want to build solidarity between metropolitan and post-industrial demographic blocks (and generational blocks for that matter) then what you need are shared real freedoms that they can elaborate and explore together.

2c. Local economic platforms that are accessible to all, rather than reinforcing cultural, generational, and financial barriers are the most obvious scaffold upon which to build this solidarity. This is not localism for localism's sake, but rather a means to enhance connectivity.

If there's a characteristic sin of hipsterism, it's not pretentiousness, but catering to a rich clientele to the exclusion of others in their immediate vicinity. This is the wider issue of gentrification beyond the housing market, and 'gentrify' signals its generational aspect.

I live in Byker, which is a wonderful and multicultural working class area of Newcastle that sits within the gentrification belt (e.g., Heaton, Shieldfield/Battlefield, Ouseburn). It's got its problems, but where doesn't? I personally enjoy the permeability of these zones.

But it's a permeability that's conditional upon a certain amount of cultural/financial freedom, not simply the relative anonymity that allows one to test out novel goods/services, but that which lets one enter new contexts without being alienated and actually purchase things.

The large and varied immigrant communities in Byker and hereabouts are exemplary. If you go to shields road you will find a mix of Eastern European, Middle Eastern, African, and South Asian businesses supplying their own communities and one another. It's an economic melting pot.

My own personal aesthetic obsession is food, and so places like this are a source of pure joy for me. I love nothing quite so much as being able to try new ingredients and develop familiarity with the palette of another place, hoarding increasingly less alien items in my pantry.

This is an urban delight that was and remains unavailable to most people in the post-industrial mining village on the border between Sunderland and Durham that I grew up in (Ryhope). Yet they can get here in less time than it takes to get to Durham via public transport.

But many can't afford the luxury of the money/time spent to do something as experimental as travelling to Newcastle for food shopping, and doing so pulls money out of the ever shrinking range of local businesses in the post-industrial wastelands on the edge of metropolitan areas.

Similarly, the hipster businesses I also frequent, less than 10 minutes walk from the multi-cultural hub on Shields Road in nearly every direction, are impermeable to many of the residents of Byker, for a mix of reasons, financial liquidity foremost amongst them.

Economic complicity keeps these barriers, obstacles, and other sources of friction from allowing people to flow wherever they like, not simply in geographical terms but in deeper political, social, and cultural ones. Economic solidarity is about removing these barriers.

But the metaphor of smashing through walls gets the effort involved in doing this backwards. Some walls are built, but not all doors are destructive. Connectivity is not the state of nature, even if there are forms of self-organisation involved: modernisation requires work.

Once more, when I say 'modernisation' I don't mean what neoliberals do when they us it to beat communities into submission, but rather what I discussed above: the genesis of causal entanglements that make us more free, not less; mutual reproduction that begets mutual recognition.

To bring this back to the topic of anonymity, what I mean is the creation of local authentication mechanisms enabling economic transactions that, as much as possible, do not depend on global interpellation: giving people the freedom to be who they want to be, in every context.

This shouldn't be seen as the erasure of older forms of mutual recognition upon which solidarity was predicated, but rather as enabling the genesis of new forms of mutual recognition that bypass their oppressive side effects (e.g., the perils of not being white/male/straight/NT).