nettime: quote: RU lumpenproletarisch?

[Pit Schultz <pit@contrib.de>]

 CTHEORY: Notions like the end of work and scarcity are very obscure
 right now. Why do you think they're relevant?

 RU: All you have to do is look at the situation to realize that it's
 the only relevant political position for anybody who isn't rich. As
 the result of automation and internationalization, the economic power
 of ordinary people, which used to reside in the "working class," has
 completely disappeared - which, incidentally, is why a lot of people
 have little reason to be thrilled by the relative democratization of
 media communications that Wired and Mondo have touted. Also, the
 virtual economy has overwhelmed the "real" economy of goods and
 services... at the cutting edge of capitalism, you're in a pure
 "transacting" economy of derivatives, currency exchanges, options and
 so forth that has displaced economics. Networked electronic trading
 is very much its own unique ecology. "Money" is being made not in the
 investing itself but on the abstraction of the transacting of
 conceptual wealth. Tremendous profits can be conjured from the
 consensual hallucination that a transaction that doesn't necessarily
 have to happen might accumulate (for example) interest at a later
 date.

 The important thing here is that not only doesn't capitalism require
 as many workers, it doesn't require as many consumers. An economy
 that trades in pure abstraction is self-sufficient. It can satisfy
 itself building hallucinatory fortunes that can be cashed in for
 ownership of property and advanced techno-toys for your wired elite.
 It's all just bits and bytes really. It's a trick. But it conflates
 nicely with the logic of late capitalism which is to eliminate that
 which is superfluous, in other words the formerly working class
 people who are no longer needed as workers or consumers. That's what
 downsizing is about... killing the poor. This is not even a slight
 exaggeration. This is exactly the trajectory of late capitalism, and
 specifically of the Republican revolution.

 Anyway, grant me that we're in a situation where workers are
 increasingly superfluous. I don't have the figures on hand, but some
 extraordinary percentage of those people who are employed work for
 temp agencies. Hazel Henderson told me that 60% of the American
 people are either unemployable, unemployed, working temp, or working
 without benefits or job security. A week after she said that, I saw
 Labor Secretary Robert Reich on television saying more or less the
 same thing, but the figure was 70%. But a recent poll shows that
 something like 95% identify themselves as middle class. Hah! They're
 not middle class.

 What you actually have, in vaguely Marxist terminology, is an
 enormous lumpenproletariat. In other words, non-working or
 barely-working poor. I mean, this is the most oppressed country in
 the Western world according to all kinds of statistics. The Reagan
 Revolution turned the average American into a citizen of the third
 world. And here comes Newtie to finish the job.

 People identify with the middle class though... they're temp workers
 with televisions, cd players, and hip clothes and hairstyles.

 The only alternative to a world of human refuse, serfs and slaves
 abandoned by an increasingly self-sufficient corporate cyber/media
 oligarchy is a revolution of this lumpenproletariat (the formerly
 working class), based not in neo-Luddite refusal but in desire, a
 desire to live. Which means that the essentials should be given away
 free, unconditionally. This notion is of course completely in
 opposition to the current political discourse, and probably goes
 against every instinct in, say, the average Wired reader's brain. I'd
 like them to just think of me as the anti-Newt.

 Cyberculture (a meme that I'm at least partly responsible for
 generating, incidentally) has emerged as a gleeful apologist for this
 kill-the-poor trajectory of the Republican revolution. You find it
 all over Wired - this mix of chaos theory and biological modeling
 that is somehow interpreted as scientific proof of the need to
 devolve and decentralize the social welfare state while also
 deregulating and empowering the powerful, autocratic, multinational
 corporations. You've basically got the breakdown of nation states
 into global economies simultaneous with the atomization of
 individuals or their balkanization into disconnected sub-groups,
 because digital technology conflates space while decentralizing
 communication and attention. The result is a clear playing field for
 a mutating corporate oligarchy, which is what we have. I mean, people
 think it's really liberating because the old industrial ruling class
 has been liquefied and it's possible for young players to amass
 extraordinary instant dynasties. But it's savage and inhuman. Maybe
 the wired elite think that's hip. But then don't go around crying
 about crime in the streets or pretending to be concerned with ethics.

 It's particularly sad and poignant for me to witness how comfortably
 the subcultural contempt for the normal, the hunger for novelty and
 change, and the basic anarchistic temperament that was at the core of
 Mondo 2000 fits the hip, smug, boundary-breaking, fast-moving,
 no-time-for-social-niceties world of your wired mega-corporate
 info/comm/media players. You can find our dirty fingerprints, our
 rhetoric, all over their advertising style. The joke's on me.

---
 cut from: CTHEORY Special edition 1.6 
 date: Wed, 24 Apr 1996 15:19:26 -0400
 title: The R.U. Sirius Interview: It's Better to be Inspired than Wired
 interview by: Jon Lebkowsky <jonl@well.com>.


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