Re: [-empyre-] Matrixial Encounters

["McKenzie Wark" <mckenziewark@hotmail.com>]

Alan writes:

> Hi Ken - not trying to be difficult, but to understand. You say 'farmers 
> and workers as a class alliance' for example. At this point, I'm not sure I 
> understand what 'farmer' references

I call the USA/Europe/Japan the 'overdeveloped' world, partly
in the sense that it shot past a certain historical space, it went
'too far', so to speak. It's not necessarily where these things
are decided. In India, China, Indonesia or Brazil, for example,
you still have the great transformations taking place -- turning
peasants into farmers (who pay rent in money rather than in
kind) to pastoralists (who own land as private property rather
than as traditional right). Which throws off a 'reserve army
of labour', which becomes a (mostly) urban working class,
producing one of the flows that makes capital possible. And
so on.

I want to insist, however, that the overdeveloped world is
not one that resolved the antagonisms of class, whcih is
what postindustrial narratives mostly assert, and what
postmodern narratives tacitly accept. The class conflict
that still matters in world historical terms is over who owns
what hackers produce.

Which is not to say there aren't other struggles. I just heard
Rev. Jesse Jackson address the rally of NYU's graduate
student union, and he drew together the threads of race
and class and gender very well. And pointed out, in
passng, that the growth industry in many 'red state'
towns is the prisons.

As I argue in the book, some forms of class conflict may
have become very dispersed and fragmented. I think that
certain kinds of class conflict over information are invisible
precisesly because of their ubiquity. File sharing is a social
movement. The Rev Jackson didn't mention it, but he
appealed to a synthesis without unity of points of struggle,
which would in turn imply some approach to the problem
of media, new media, media as education, as poesis, and
so on. That may be where some of the denizens of
empyre come in.

The danger in seeing difference everywhere is seeing all
kinds of difference as the same. Some differences are
different to others. Class has its own logic and effectivity.
One has to extract it from liberal list-making anf gestures
of inclusion, i think. To see it as a diagonal that polarises
the social field.

As i understand Tom Frank, he's calling for a return to
economic populism, to recreate a worker-farmer alliance.
Not in this language, but in a language of its own choosing.
The rhetorics of senators Edwards and Obana might be
trail balloons for exactly that.

http://www.ludiccrew.org