Re: <nettime> Driverless cars, pilotless planes -- will there be jobs left for a human beings / intellectuality

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

Hello Frederic!

On 05/28/2013 08:46 AM, frederic neyrat wrote:

> I was thinking about your expression, "constituent forces": they
> already exist, they already work, they already produce, and they can
> do that until the "end". So, for me, the real problem is not only to
> know where is the constituent power, the center of the value, etc, not
> only the battle around the production of the value, but also: how to
> pass from immanent constitution to political change.

Yes, that is exactly what I meant. I think the question has become 
imperative everywhere, in the face of the clear capitalist agenda to 
complete the neoliberal restructuring of the 1980-2008 period by totally 
destroying all redistribution programs and all other barriers to 
accumulation. In Spain, leftists are talking very pragmatically about 
destitution-constitution, and by that they mean an actual political 
constitution to replace the one inherited from the so-called "transition 
to democracy" of the 1970s. The destitution part is well underway: 
historic lows in the polls for BOTH mainstream parties, highly active 
and popular social movements, new national organizing capacities as 
shown in the May 15 movement and also in last summer's encirclement of 
the parliament. The tactical question is how to go on mobilizing in ways 
that do not unleash full state repression. The strategic question is, 
how to constitute another system?

> The failure of the whole thought linked with post-operaism is the belief
> in the fact that political change will automatically (sic) follow the
> power of the general intellect. It failed.

I quite agree and said so years ago in my text "Recapturing Subversion." 
By the way, Maurizio Lazzarato has taken the same road, claiming that if 
the left cannot create new organizations on the scale of the former 
communist party, we won't achieve anything. I think he's right. The 
question is what form these organizations should take.

> Last political Springs were not ecological; nobody cares about ecology
> anylonger; climate change is going one; the Russians left their basis in
> North Pole last week, kind of The Day Before Tomorrow. When everything is
> immanent, everything follows the way be which things are produced. I do
> not call for a Transcendence, but for this minimum amount of separation
> without which we will continue to constitute and produce the same way.
> That is to say: we have to rethink intellectuality as something neither
> immanent (Virno) nor transcendent (say Sartre).

It seems to me that intellectuality needs to be made objective and 
tangible in the form of organizing process directed programatically 
toward goals, but also punctuated by regular moments of critical 
assessment, including the revocation of ineffective representatives. 
Above all, the new forms should be carefully structured  so that the 
larger scales of organization do not squash the smaller ones. Capital's 
program is obvious: there is no internal critique and largest scale 
trumps everything. The Left needs an ecosocial program, for sure. 
Without it, let's face it, we simply don't exist. The old autonomist iea 
of a gradual transition to communism through the expansion of immaterial 
labor has been made defunct by history. Let's forget it and move onward.

best, Brian

<...>


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org