Category: World

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Information Age?

This essay makes good sense to me, digitalisation will not of itself foster feminism, liberation, equality or revolution.  However there is something missing in this piece too.  What IS the impact of the information … er, revolution?  is there a shift in the relationships of production?  Is whatever it is significant at all when it comes to a Marxist conception of history.  Has anyone really examined this fully, I bet they have. 

It is important to be able to see all of history as a history of class struggle, makes sense to me.  Of course there is ajso a history of the relationships of reproduction (perhaps what the essay below is about.) And there are cultural forces, racial, religious and generational forces.  The art is to be able to see what, at any time is “primary”.  Even if the history if information from language to the Internet is not “primary” what is its nature?  The distribution of the means of information, the ability to have mass peer to peer communication… what does it all mean. 

Interesting (see previous post) where Trotsky notes that the revolution in Russia was won by the group that had dialectical materialism, not just bombs.  It is important to get all this right.

Class, the Digital, and (Immaterial) Feminism:

Immaterial feminisms have emerged as part of the digital movements of “new economy” and “network society” in order to help capital eliminate old ideological fetters of gender that stand in the way of the expansion of capitalist production and the intensification of the exploitation of labor for profit. By “immaterial feminisms” I mean the network of feminisms—from “cyberfeminism,” to feminist theories of “immaterial labor,” “(im)materiality,” and “new materiality,” to “network feminisms,” “digital feminism” and “technofeminism”—which, as a species of new economy theory, ideologically displace the relation of gender to class, labor, exploitation, and the social relations of production in capitalism by positing a constitutive change in the wage-labor/capital relation brought on by the innovations of “new technologies,” the growth of the service industries and of “knowledge work” (i.e., “immaterial labor”). This is another way of saying that the role of immaterial feminisms in history is to represent as “radical,” “innovative” and as “progress” for women toward human freedom what capital is economically compelled to do to temporarily stave off declines in profit.

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Red Green?

Trotsky’s Views On Dialectical Materialism:

Pragmatism, empiricism, is the greatest curse of American thought.

I have added the tags “emergence, coherence” to this post as the “dialectics” in materialism foreshadows these conceptions. It is so unfashionable to see a big picture, it is in the ruling class interest to obscure that there is a big picture, or to make it appear that it is a static one, “human nature”, “reality”. Dynamic processes are not discovered through looking at the trees, one must see the woods.

Dialectical materialism gets a lot right when it comes to seeing the big picture. Much of the language is dated and some of the science was current at the time, but has been superseded (as one would expect in a dynamic world).

I’ve found the work of John Bellamy Foster was able to re-kindle a sense of the value of dialectical materialism – or to put it another way: ecology.

Marx’s Ecology – Monthly Review Press:

MARX’S ECOLOGY Materialism and Nature by John Bellamy Foster

More from him here:

http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrmarxistecology.php



http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj96/foster.htm

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Language of life

NVC Non-Violent Communication, how to identify needs in self and others and how to speak without shaming, blaming and criticising is one of the four or five disciplines that I’d like everyone in the world to know how to do.

Language is important, but as Moreno said:

The analysis of language, useful as it is in itself. does not lead to any change in behavior. It has to be followed up by methods of action learning which train the pupil to think and act below and beyond the boundaries of language.

That’s why I think there are four or five disciplines, but none of them sufficient alone.

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Revolutionary Art

Statements and actions for a cause or revolutionary change are needed, but not art.  Art can be revolutionary even while its creators are reactionary in their words.  Art is art because it expresses something of the unconscious.

I make politically trivial sketches, Thousand Sketches, (Like the image above) but I think they are ok, even somewhat progressive.  I think it is because they are steps on a path into my own unconscious and that is the collective ethos, zeitgeist, at the same time.   I don’t know how deep I go.  I let the pen do the work, stuff comes  unbidden, I trust my life has its roots in the culture and thus something of the culture will emerge.

It is a struggle not to judge it as crap. It is as a result of my scribbling that I discovered an affinity with the abstract expressionists, who do not rank high on the political awareness scale, but I think their roots (check out Mark Toby) in calligraphy and the spontaneity of the body (Pollock’s dance as he paints) may be a way to tune into zeitgeist.  It had to do that or it would not even have been capable of being exploited by the art world.

Pollock’s statement “I am nature” makes sense to me.  He does not need to look at the world and then paint it, he is nature.  Social and political dimensions don’t need to be painted from the outside, they will emerge… with luck through spontaneity, ie the absence of fear and judgement.  They will not be pure expressions of one class, art is too specific for that. Art is a slice of time & specific contradictions under a microscope, a probe into what is going on.  The interpretation of the data is important, but before interpretation is possible it has to be mined.

These thoughts came up well before finishing this item on Reading the Maps:

Reading the Maps: Alan Brunton and the dream of a revolutionary art:

In a country where the Greens are considered a far left party, and where socialism is presently regarded as an alien political tradition, how can any coherent political programme hope to be popular, or even comprehensible, without being, from a radical left-wing perspective, ‘cowardly’? And in a country where large numbers of people still expect poetry to rhyme, and still consider any visual art movement more recent than Impressionism to be an elitist fraud, how can any self-respecting artist disavow incomprehensibility? Could, say, Colin McCahon or Rita Angus have created their masterpieces without daring to be, for a large segment of the population, incomprehensible?

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Public Relations, Freud and evil

The Century Of Self Part 1 (of 4) Happiness Machines:

The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud’s ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn’t need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires. Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar. His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses.

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Bad!

Obama ‘Even Worse’ Than Bush On Secret Wiretapping Case, Says S.F. Lawyer – San Francisco News – The Snitch:

Politics Obama ‘Even Worse’ Than Bush On Secret Wiretapping Case, Says S.F. Lawyer By Peter Jamison, Thursday, Apr. 1 2010 @ 11:22AM Comments (19) Categories: Law & Order phonedial.jpg Is ‘Mr. Change’ listening? ?San Francisco attorney Jon Eisenberg thinks he’s learned a thing or two about Barack Obama over the past 15 months. Eisenberg, who won a landmark decision against the government in Northern California’s U.S. District Court Wednesday on a wiretapping case, says that when it comes to violating civil liberties in the name of national security, the present occupant of the White House is just as bad as — or “even worse” than — his predecessor. “The Obama Administration stepped right into the shoes of the Bush Administration, on national security generally and on this case in particular,” Eisenberg said, referring to the lawsuit brought by his clients, an Oregon branch of an Islamic charity and two American lawyers. The plaintiffs argued successfully before federal Judge Vaughn Walker that their conversations were illegally wiretapped under the Bush Administration’s secret surveillance program. Just as significant as the ruling, however, may be what the case demonstrates about the Obama Justice Department’s approach to surveillance of suspected terrorists. Eisenberg told SF Weekly that government lawyers working for Obama had been “more strident” than those working for Bush, refusing to let him see important federal documents related to the case even after he was approved for a top-secret security clearance. “Even though I have the security clearance, I don’t have the ‘need to know,’ so I can’t see anything,” Eisenberg said. “This is Obama. Obama! Mr. Transparency! Mr. Change! It’s exactly what Bush would have done.” The federal government has not announced whether it intends to appeal the decision in favor of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation and lawyers Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoor. It had argued that the “state secrets” privilege was more important than potential violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires that a judge issue warrants for wiretaps.

Cyberspace isn’t a place – Irish Judge � The Register:

Cyberspace isn’t a place – Irish Judge * Alert * Print Creators’ rights are human rights, says Court By Andrew Orlowski � Get more from this author Posted in Law, 19th April 2010 14:56 GMT Free whitepaper � Taking control of your data demons: Dealing with unstructured content An Irish Judge has upheld the right of a creator to protect his creations as a fundamental human right. In a scathing and occasionally lyrical ruling, Judge Peter Charleton also pointed out the internet is merely one communication tool of many, and not “an amorphous extraterrestrial body with an entitlement to norms that run counter to the fundamental principles of human rights”. It’s the strongest refutation of the idea most famously expressed at Davos by John Perry Barlow, in A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, which warned: “You have no sovereignty where we gather.” Charleton said, “the right to be identified with and to reasonably exploit one�s own original creative endeavour I regard as a human right,” pointing out that this has existed in Irish Law since before even the days of The Grateful Dead – it’s credited to Saint Colmcille (521-597). The High Court in Dublin was reviewing the settlement in last year’s EMI vs Eircom case. The defendant had referred to Eircom as Eire’s Data Protection Commissioner. Charleton rejected the argument, ruling that: “Copyright is a universal entitlement to be identified with and to sell, and therefore to enjoy, the fruits of creative work… Were copyright not to exist, then the efforts of an artist could be both stolen and passed off as the talent of another.” After singing the praises of the internet Charleton notes that it is, “thickly populated by fraudsters, pornographers of the worst kind and cranks. “Among younger people, so much has the habit grown up of downloading copyright material from the internet that a claim of entitlement seems to have arisen to have what is not theirs for free.” Everyone won from this, he noted, “except for the creators of original copyright material who are utterly disregarded.” Interestingly, Charleton rejects the idea of copyright infringement as a ‘crime’ – it’s a mere civil offence, in this case a breach of contract. Copyright infringement doesn’t include a “mental element” involved in arson or murder, he notes. So the ruling rejects two key arguments made by critics of the UK’s Digital Economy Act – that internet access is a ‘fundamental human right’, and that copyright enforcement infringes privacy. The ruling gives the go ahead light for a ‘three strikes’ policy in Ireland – one rather speedier than anything discussed here, and which will be thrashed out in the months ahead (see A user’s timetable to the Digital Economy Act). After 28 days and two letters, the ISP may serve a 14-day disconnection notice during which time the user may appeal or promise to stop for good. You can read the ruling here. �

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