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domenica 18 dicembre 2016

OUT NOW! Marx, Money and Capital in the debate that animated the Italian and French Marxist Left at the time of the Anti-Oedipus. An interview with Lapo Berti by Obsolete Capitalism

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lunedì 5 dicembre 2016

Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan: Capital as Power. Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism @Dissident Voice blog

Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan:
Capital as Power.
Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism
@ Dissident Voice

Thx to Edmund Berger for signaling

Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists think of capital as an economic entity that they count in universal units of utils and abstract labor, respectively. But these units are totally fictitious: they can be neither observed nor measured. They don’t exist. And since liberalism and Marxism depend on these non-existing units, their theories hang in suspension. They cannot explain the process that matters most – the accumulation of capital.

This breakdown is no accident. Every mode of power evolves together with its dominant theories and ideologies. In capitalism, these theories and ideologies originally belonged to the study of political economy – the first mechanical science of society. But the capitalist mode of power kept changing, and as the power underpinnings of capital became increasingly visible, the science of political economy disintegrated. By the late nineteenth century, with dominant capital having taken command, political economy was bifurcated into two distinct spheres: economics and politics. And in the twentieth century, when the power logic of capital had already penetrated every corner of society, the remnants of political economy were further fractured into mutually distinct social sciences. Nowadays, capital reigns supreme – yet social scientists have been left with no coherent framework to account for it.

The theory of Capital as Power offers a unified alternative to this fracture. It argues that capital is not a narrow economic entity, but a symbolic quantification of power. Capital has little to do with utility or abstract labor, and it extends far beyond machines and production lines. Most broadly, it represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to reshape – or creorder – their society.

This view leads to a different cosmology of capitalism. It offers a new theoretical framework for capital based on the twin notions of dominant capital and differential accumulation, a new conception of the state of capital and a new history of the capitalist mode of power. It also introduces new empirical research methods – including new categories; new ways of thinking about, relating and presenting data; new estimates and measurements; and, finally, the beginning of a new, disaggregate accounting that reveals the conflictual dynamics of society.

The Capitalist Cosmology

As Marx and Engels tell us at the beginning of The German Ideology (1970), the capitalist regime is inextricably bound up with its theories and ideologies. These theories and ideologies, first articulated by classical political economy, are much more than a passive attempt to explain, justify and critique the so-called economic system. Instead, they constitute an entire cosmology – a system of thinking that is both active and totalizing.

In ancient Greek, Kosmeo has an active connotation: it means “to order” and “to organize,” and political economy does precisely that. It explains, justifies and critiques the world – but it also actively makes this world in the first place. Moreover, political economy pertains not to the narrow economy as such, but to the entire social order as well as to the natural universe in which this social order is embedded.

The purpose of this paper is to outline an alternative cosmology, one that offers the beginning of a totally different framework for understanding capitalism.

Of course, to suggest an alternative, we first need to know the thing that we contest and seek to replace. To lay out the groundwork, we begin by spelling out what we think are the hallmarks of the present capitalist cosmology. Following this initial step, we enumerate the reasons why, over the past century, this cosmology has gradually disintegrated – to the point of being unable to make sense of and recreate its world. And then, in closing, we articulate some of the key themes of our own theory – the theory of capital as power.

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domenica 5 giugno 2016

4.11. How to escape from axiomatics and to make the modern immanent machine break down? - Part XXXII - Excerpt from the essay «Acceleration, Revolution and Money in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus», Obsolete Capitalism Free Press/Rizosphere, 2016

How to escape from axiomatics and to make the modern immanent machine break down?

Part XXXII - Excerpt from the essay «Acceleration, Revolution and Money in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus», Obsolete Capitalism Free Press/Rizosphere, 2016

Here we finally return to the plot of money and revolution, under the sign of the Œdipic contrast. If, in our modern empirical experience, our societies are pervaded with economic optimism – descending from the eighteenth-century positivism thoroughly analysed by Marx at the socio-productive level and by Nietzsche at the impulsive-energetic level – and with cybernetic processual evolution of monetary and credit circuits farsightedly described by Deleuze and Guattari, what strategies could be adopted to escape from commercial axiomatics and to make the modern immanent machine break down? Which relation exists between money and revolution? Shall we switch to a detailed and bureaucratic plan descending from a totalising “keys-in-hand” theory that explains and foresees everything, according to fixed relations between the forms of the Earth and of human set theory, or shall we adopt a plan of impulsive consistency corresponding to the always productive swinging energy of desire, of the real and of imbalance? Between organisation-administration and chaos-creation, what levels of synthesis and innovation should we choose in order to “search and destroy” and to then rebuild? Shall we build revolutionary subjects and identities within class or economic determinations, or shall we de-construct forms, to discover the “hollowness” of subjects and to increase the speed of activation of the revolutionary “process” of the irregular idle, of the non-exchangeable group and of the community of singularity? Nonetheless, from a different perspective, as Ewald seemed to argue, if the seventies history has handed over to us a “fact” in all its tragic evidence, that is the disappearance of the social revolutionary horizon, that is, the sinking of the concept of insurrection as magnet for political action from the Enlightenment onwards. Are we assisting to the Death of Revolution as palingenetic event and qualified creative rupture, mother of modern politics – as Foucault seems to foresee after 1978 and after the Rhizosphere period, or are we facing the perpetual revolutionary becoming as human condition at the times of post-revolution and post-capitalist control-based neo-societies – as Deleuze and Guattari argued in the multi-stratum desert of A Thousand Plateaus? Something has changed after 1978, revolutionaries become spectres like beautiful losers, as if the sedition and the overturning of desire on the carpet of Reality were symmetrical to the decline of industry and to the erosion of the historically fixed capital. The productive practices of industry and the concept of cathartic revolution decay together with the West, in a miserable and stagnant dusk. To us, authors of this volume, the intersection between “money and revolution” suggested by Klossowski and Deleuze, and by the whole anti-œdipic rhizosphere, seems still profoundly relevant, no longer in the westerly vulgate but instead on a global scale, the only possible one today. In the wildest present circumstances, the reproduction of money and liquidity has not stopped, neither have the attempts to become revolutionaries and pathologically seditious, in every single planetary background. Daily events speak for themselves. As Foucault consciously wrote, the triangle of “desire, value and simulacrum” still dominates us, and we seem unable to grasp it nor to understand it in its horrific geometrical effectiveness. How to escape from axiomatics and to make the modern immanent machine break down: the question of the Anti-Œdipus is still relevant in the present, as it has been in the past. Part of the answer, within the context of the evolution of the relation between technology and liberation, can certainly be generated and developed by the conflation of three specific fields of our age: cyberpunk, blockchain/DAO technology, and the heterarchical movement P2P. The new alliance between peer to peer – a digital evolution of anarchic and self-organised reticular logics of autonomist philosophy of existentialist punk dis-intermediation – and DIY – the do-it-yourself already post-capitalist in its very own nature. The fourth pillar, which has to escort the three fields indicated above, could be the philosophy of the rhizosphere, or of the future. The “philosophy of the future”, in order to return joyful and dangerous, must abandon the collusive position that has occupied in the industry of knowledge and of wisdom, and return to being an informal peripatetic wayfarer – a gypsy scholarship. With great awareness it must experiment, fail, create: study, deconstruct and reconstruct, even itself. The gypsy scholarship, though, conceived as pedagogy of freedom and insurrection, cannot become science, absorbed by institutions: it is like a gust of The Fixer, or the glow of a moment lasting for a century.

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lunedì 16 maggio 2016

McKenzie Wark: The Sublime Language of My Century @ Public Seminar, May 14, 2016

The Sublime Language of My Century

McKenzie Wark @ Public Seminar

(...) Another way to tackle this would be impute some meaning to Marx’s famous remark to the effect that he was not a Marxist. What if what he meant by that is that he was not one of those who simply took a language and a rhetorical form extracted from his texts as a given? He was, to the contrary, the one who had constructed that language with a quite particular purpose in mind: to understand the situation of his times from the labor point of view. So: what if we kept the commitment to understanding, not his times, but ours, from the labor point of view, whatever that might mean now — and bracketed off the rest?

That makes a certain sense to me. I really am puzzled by why we should use blocks of linguistic material from his time again to understand our time. Why use the fashionable philosophy, the popular science, the political tracts, or the technological metaphors of the mid-nineteenth century? When poets or novelists do that, we immediately think its dated and quaint. But somehow we want our great narrative to be about capitalism, even if it is dated and quaint.

Of course different genres of text have a different relationship to tradition and innovation, and at different moments in their development. They aren’t always in synch. And of course there’s generally a culture industry in which the texts get pulped into sameness, and an avant-garde trying to do something else. If you are trying to write an interesting, rather than merely successful, novel or poem, you want to change things at the formal level, rather than ship your wine in the same old bottles. The thing is, where readings and rewritings of Marx are concerned, they seem to me to belong to the culture industry. Its a commonplace now to read Capital as a work of philosophy or an epic novel, but to do so very conservatively. And indeed could there be anything more conservative now that the tradition of continental philosophy? (...)

Read more @ Public Seminar

domenica 7 febbraio 2016

E.3.1 The Freudian engine and the Marxist-Leninist train - Pt. XV - Excerpt from the essay «Money, Revolution and Acceleration in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus», Obsolete Capitalism Free Press/Rizosphere, 2016

chapteR iii

For an Erotica of the Revolution

Solution to the molecular questions 4 and 5

“We realized that we couldn't just hook a Freudian engine up to the Marxist-Leninist train” (DI, 216).

The Freudian engine and the Marxist-Leninist train

Guattari’s jokes positions the authors of
the Anti-Œdipus in-between the Freudian theory of desire and Marxist political theory. Desire for Deleuze and Guattari cannot be simply the sum of Marxism and Freudism: “The relations of production and those of reproduction participate in the same pairing of productive forces and anti- productive structures. We wanted to move desire into the infrastructure, on the side of production, while we moved the family, the ego, and the individual on the side of anti- production. This is the only way to ensure that sexuality is not completely cut off from the economy.”(DI, 216-7).
In response to the fourth molecular question on how a politico-philosophical reflection on the real can conjugate in a coherent design both economic and revolutionary dimensions, it is important to isolate a few concepts expressed in the accelerationist passage of the Civilized Capitalist Machine. What meaning do «economy», «value», «money» and «revolutionary subject» hold in Deleuze and Guattari? And in Nietzsche and Klossowski? To describe the discouragement of the human being in the process of normalisation in XIX century society, Nietzsche uses economical categories like «exploitation», «luxury», «management» to testify that his thoughts overstep both the traditional concept of liberal economy (Smith, Ricardo, Mill) and their political expression, which is to say the Marxist concept of economics. In his view, Economy leads to a mediocritisation of man and demands a reaction in the form of a counter-movement “aimed to bring to light a stronger species, a higher type of overman”. (NVC, 160-1). In Circulus Vitiosus Klossowski analyses Nietzsche’s vision of excess, otherwise known as plus value: “What Nietzsche discerns in the actual state of affairs is that men of excess, those who create, now and from the outset, the meaning of the values of existence (a very paradoxical configuration for Nietzsche) form, so to speak, an occult hierarchy for which the supposed hierarchy of current labourers does all the work. They are precisely the real slaves, the ones who do the greatest labour.” (CV, 36). There is another important consequence resulting from the comparison between gregariousness and singularity in the economic movement of «wrong Darwinian selection», that Klossowski argues and comments with the following words: “From this point of view, the singular case represents a forgetting of previous experiences, which are either assimilated to the gregarious impulses by being relegated to the unconscious, and thus reprimanded by the reigning censure;

or on the contrary, are rejected as being unassimilable to the conditions required for the existence of both the species and the individual within the species. For Nietzsche, the singular case rediscovers, in an 'anachronistic' manner, an ancient way of existing - whose reawakening in itself presupposes that present conditions do not correspond to the impulsive state which is in some manner being affirmed through it. Depending on the strength of its intensity, however, this singular state, though anachronistic in relation to the institutional level of gregariousness, can bring about a de-actualization of that institution itself and denounce it in turn as anachronistic. That every reality as such comes to be de-actualized in relation to the singular case, that the resulting emotion seizes the subject's behaviour and forces it into action - this is an adventure that can modify the course of events, following a circuit of chance that Nietzsche will make the dimension of his thought. To the extent that he isolates its periodicity in history, the plan for a conspiracy appears under the sign of the vicious Circle.” (NVC, 80) The comment is explosive: it implies an irreconcilable fracture between singularity on an institutional level. He is saying that the communities of non-assimilated human beings will form new institutions with new forms: non-institutions or post-institutions rather than reformed institutions. Nietzsche assumes that dark forces operate on human nature thanks to the theory of will to power and with the help of a selective doctrine: he calls it Eternal Return; Klossowski calls it the Vicious Circle. In this context, the same doctrine becomes a tool for conspiracy. Nietzsche’s anti-darwinian attitude is here very clear inasmuch the implications brought about by the selective doctrines or the instinctual impulses are antithetical to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Deleuze and Guattari are absorbed by the implications developed by Klossowski’s post-institutional gregarious scenario. The communities of singularities may use the liberation of impulse to make mortal what seems immortal: the gregarious society and its institutions. In the Anti-Œdipus the two philosophers state: “The revolutionary pole of group fantasy becomes visible, on the contrary, in the power to experience institutions themselves as mortal, to destroy them or change them according to the articulations of desire and the social field, by making the death instinct into a veritable institutional creativity. For that is precisely the criterion—at least the formal criterion— that distinguishes the revolutionary institution from the enormous inertia which the law communicates to institutions in an established order. As Nietzsche says; churches, armies, States—which of all these dogs wants to die?” (AO, 62-3)

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venerdì 6 novembre 2015

4.6. Supporti conformi e formazioni di sovranità - Parte XXXVI - Tratto da «Moneta, rivoluzione e filosofia dell'avvenire. Nietzsche e la politica accelerazionista in Deleuze, Foucault, Guattari, Klossowski» (Rizosfera/Obsolete Capitalism Free Press, 2016)

Supporti conformi e formazioni di sovranità

4.6. - Parte XXXVI

Tratto da «Moneta, rivoluzione e filosofia dell'avvenire. Nietzsche e la politica accelerazionista in Deleuze, Foucault, Guattari, Klossowski» (Rizosfera/Obsolete Capitalism Free Press, 2016)

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La composizione e l’alleanza delle forze degli istinti in tumulto incessante per contrapporsi al corpo sociale ed economico assediante fornisce la griglia della battaglia all’interno e all’esterno dei corpi. Le «cupe organizzazioni» delle sintesi sociali che accerchiano i corpi e le forze impulsionali sono le Herrschaftsgebilde di Nietzsche, le «formazioni di sovranità» che troviamo nei frammenti postumi di Nietzsche degli anni 1887 e 1888. Dentro e fuori dal corpo, la battaglia delle forze impulsionali infuria. La sensualità, e il suo stadio successivo, la sessualità, impediscono ogni prospettiva, anche quella economica, per cui vanno represse. La prima ondata di repressione impulsionale serve alle formazioni di sovranità nello strutturare un tutto conforme, o per parlare come Klossowski, «un’unità organica e psichica». Nonostante il suo formarsi dentro all’involucro della totalità come «essenza compiuta», il supporto conforme è sempre e comunque oggetto della lotta delle pulsioni e degli istinti nel tentativo di liberarsi dalle formazioni di sovranità e dalle potenze che le costituiscono. I modi d’espressione di lotte e contro-lotte, attacchi e resistenze, si manifestano “attraverso una gerarchia di valori tradotti in una gerarchia di bisogni” (MV, 54). Per Klossowski “la gerarchia di bisogni è la forma economica di repressione che le istituzioni esistenti esercitano, per mezzo e attraverso la coscienza del «supporto», sulle forze imponderabili della sua vita psichica» (MV, 54). La denuncia di Klossowski contro le tradizioni - e le sue «traduzioni» gregarie - che dominano la società è quanto mai efficace. Egli ha di fronte a sé tre interpretazioni contemporanee che combattono gli obiettivi di liberazione della Rizosfera e attaccano l’economia generalizzata a cui partecipano i valori libidinali attraverso la nuova gerarchia pulsionale che filosofi come Deleuze vogliono attivare: il liberismo che attraverso la gerarchia dei bisogni impone una differente gerarchia dei valori grazie all’esclusione del bisogno sessuale dai bisogni primari, annullandone il valore emozionale; il marxismo che troneggia l’economia industriale e i valori mercificati come struttura primaria, relegando la sfera sessuale alla sovrastruttura; la psicanalisi che accetta di confinare l’economia libidinale al triangolo famigliare, separando il sociale dal proprio oggetto di studio, e subendo la divisione operata dal marxismo - della società se ne occuperà il socialismo scientifico, mentre dell’inconscio e dell’atomo sociale famigliare se ne occuperà la psicanalisi. In Klossowski, gli autori che compongono la triade del dominio e dell’assoggettamento rispondono ai nomi di Raymond Aron, Karl Marx e Sigmund Freud. Lo scopo della Rizosfera sarà di liberare il potenziale rivoluzionario individuale e di gruppo rovesciando e superando - su questo punto - il Nietzsche de I forti dell’avvenire che auspicava, al contrario, una comunità discreta di sediziosi irregolari e inscambiabili. E’ sul tema dell’opposizione alla legge economica imperante attraverso la produzione pulsionale occulta che intervengono Deleuze e Guattari nell’Anti-Edipo, allacciandosi proprio a questo passaggio cruciale della «moneta vivente» di Klossowski. “I due tipi di fantasma, o meglio i due regimi” - affermano i due filosofi parigini - “si distinguono dunque a seconda che la produzione sociale dei «beni» imponga la sua regola al desiderio tramite un io la cui unità fittizia è garantita dai beni stessi, o a seconda che la produzione desiderante degli affetti imponga la sua regola a istituzioni i cui elementi non sono più che pulsioni” (AE, 68). Avremo, nel primo regime, i soggiogati, i supporti-gregari e la scambiabilità, mentre nel secondo regime le «macchine desideranti», i nomadi e gli schizo dell’avvenire che anelano l’inconvertibilità mercantile. Nella storia del socialismo utopistico un filosofo francese, tra i più inattuali, aveva lavorato su tematiche quali comunità, affetti, economia e armonia sociale: Charles Fourier. Sia Klossowski - in La moneta vivente - sia Deleuze e Guattari - nell’Anti-Edipo - lo ricordano:

“Se si deve parlare ancora di utopia in quest’ultimo senso, alla Fourier, non è certo come modello ideale, ma come azione e passione rivoluzionarie. E, nelle sue opere recenti, Klossowski ci indica il solo mezzo per superare il parallelismo sterile in cui ci dibattiamo tra Freud e Marx: scoprendo il modo in cui la produzione sociale e i rapporti di produzione sono un’istituzione del desiderio, e come affetti e pulsioni fanno parte dell’infrastruttura stessa. Poiché ne fanno parte, vi sono presenti in tutti i modi creando nelle forme economiche tanto la loro repressione quanto i mezzi per rompere tale repressione” (AE, 68-69).
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Obsolete Capitalism

mercoledì 20 dicembre 2017

Obsolete Capitalism :: Dromology, Bolidism and Marxist Accelerationism (Rizosfera/The Strong of the Future, 2017, SF009)

giovedì 25 maggio 2017

Obsolete Capitalism :: Dromologia, bolidismo e accelerazionismo marxista. Frammenti di comunismo tra al-Khwarizmi e Mach

mercoledì 5 aprile 2017

OUT NOW ! Lapo Berti :: Accelerated Fantasies. An Emergency Exit for the Left? (Rhizosphere/The Strong of the Future, SF007 eng)

mercoledì 22 marzo 2017

OUT NOW! :: Lapo Berti :: Fantasie accelerate. Un'uscita di sicurezza per la sinistra? (Rizosfera/I forti dell'avvenire, SF007)