McKenzie Wark on Tue, 5 Nov 2002 15:03:16 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> From Tactical Media to Digital Multitudes




n_ik makes the valuable point that class struggle in most
of the world appears not to be about information, but to be
about land. Indeed, the *first*, not the second or the third,
moments of commodification is very much in progress. For
many people the expropriation of their communal land
rights is their direct experience of commodification, in
terms of what it takes from them.

However, i think this process is overlaid by two other
moments of commodification: indistrialisation, or the
commodification of fungible productive resources, but
also vectoralisation, or the commodification of
information and its means of abstraction, the vector.

If one breaks it down thus, one can use this distinction as
an analytic for thinking about possible alliances, and
possible conflicts, between the subordinated classes
in each of the three distinct circuits of commodification.

It seems to me greatly clarifying to think about a
complex articulation of class struggles, than to posit
a 'multitude' arraigned against 'globalisation', where
neither of those terms have much historical analytic
specificity.

One can certianly trace a very significant movement that
arises out the Zapatista experience, but it might be a
bit limiting to restrict one's sense of a counter history to
that one strand. Or to ignore how much that movement
owed to an emergent information environment, both
in terms of what it contronted and what it was able to
use as vector for 'counter-global' (call it what you like)
formation.

k

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