| http://www.indymedia.org.il/imc/israel/
webcast/display.php3?article_id=14010 israelshamirdotcom.htm by poetpiet3:09pm
Sat Feb 2 '02 -- israel shamir deserves a little attention I think.
201K print resource friendlily printable file: http://piet.tripod.com/israelshamirdotcom.htm
(about 10 of his items; yes I think he is that good). 11066
Maidens and warriors is a december gem by the man that I haven't read yet;
nobody commented on it and I find his work of such a magnitude in
truth as to expect a lot more mention than a couple of handfuls worth over
the whole of the year past. ------ Subject: Re: Going Nazi
From: Chuck Grimes (cgrimes@rawbw.com) Date: Sat Jan 26 2002 - 12:08:27
EST fascism. All fascist movements seem to be racist, but it was
only Hitler and his followers who invented "final solutions." The Italian
Fascists cooperated, but in a somewhat lackadaisical fashion if I remember
correctly. Carrol ------------ Thursday I didn't have a chance to go into
this since I was at work. But, I think of the difference between fascists
and nazis differently. I think of fascism as the criminalization of all
political oppositional forces, their imprisonment and possible execution
or disappearance with the goal of reducing all political activity to a
homogenous, uniform and single party system. The nazis on the other hand
seem to me to be distinguishable from the fascists by their racism---while
also being fascist. The nazis also criminalized their political opponents
and sought a single and uniform ideological political system. But in addition,
they also created a racialized system as their ideology, giving it biological,
evolutionary, cultural, and historical attributes and granting themselves
uniqueness of place at the top. The idea of the final solution then arises
as the end product of this racialized system. This was a rather different
form of social system from the fascists, and was arranged by quasi-scientific
and rational categories ranging from supremely human to sub-human. As sub-humans
then various groups, independent of their own political beliefs could not
be say Jewish and German, or Slavic and German, or disabled or mentally
retarded and German. These were mutually exclusive categories. At this
quasi-biological level then an individuals politics were irrelevant. German
Jews could be progressive or conservative, it didn't matter. The important
thing was there was no such thing as a German Jew. Jews were not German,
therefore they were alien, non-citizens, non-persons. And it is important
to add, this was made a legal category. Since they were stripped of their
legal status as persons, could not own or sell property, could not engage
in business, could not be employed in state run industries, then they effectively
became wards of the state. The logic then was, what to do with these alien
wards of the state, and the answer was to put them in special work camps---and
from there the whole system devolved into the final solution. This kind
of system is completely different from the process of criminalizing political
ideologies and their attending political activities, like organizing political
parties, meetings, and publications. With a single stroke of law, the membership
of the political opposition were criminals and could be arrested, tried,
convicted and then shuttled off to where ever, prison or work camp. Now,
returning to US government and its current turns of the moment. I think
of the US christian righwing fundamentalists as predominately fascist,
particularly in their conceptualization of social policy. Their apparent
drive for an absolute and uniform system of policies all constructed around
their particular ideas of a so-called christian life, has an explicit intolerance
for variation, raised to metaphysical authority. It absolutely smacks of
fascism. These groups have a potentially nazis-like element in the distinction
they make between christian and non-christian, since this is to their way
of thinking equivalent to a division between the human and sub-human, those
who should enjoy various rights and benefits and those who should not.
Most of these groups are also racist, although they try and down play that
element. Thankfully, the historical, social and cultural context within
which they must function, makes it basically impossible for them to carry
out a fully totalitarian program repleat with a fully consistent racism.
There are too many black and hispanic christian groups with equal claim
to the whole christian religious tradition as either protestant or catholic
that it simply makes the white fundamentalists claims of authencity look
silly---beside the fact they are probably out numbered. On the other hand,
the problem with Islam and its stereotypic identification with semitic
middle eastern looking peoples, poses the potential for a nazis-like reaction
in the US because of the potential for a racist identification. Since there
are a significant number of resident aliens, foreign nationals, and naturalized
citizens who are middle eastern and provisionally moslim, this makes them
a target for a more thorough going nazisifaction process in the US government's
domestic policies. That is to say the concrete elements are already present.
First, for all people who are not legal citizens, their civil and legal
rights are formally compromised. Add the obvious war hysteria from the
government, add the joint contempt that the Christian and Jewish community
have for Islam, and its apparent reciprocal from the Islamic community.
Then add the extra ordinary powers given the US government in the name
of fighting terrorism---a new category of crime with its broaden police
powers---and its complete identification with middle eastern looking people.
Then add the strange ad hoc legal categories of non-person that seem to
have been manufactured for people held by the INS, FBI, and whoever the
US military has in Guantanamo. And finally add in the quasi-legitimate
political position of the executive, that is Bush's need to legitimate
himself as an elected president. But there is also the problem of the Supreme
Court, and its evident bias toward supporting at least some of these measures
and giving their stamp of legal approval. All of these elements, the implicit
racism, the extra ordinary police powers, the creation of artificial categories
of non-persons, the background of war hysteria and public support, all
add up to very dangerous potentials. This is very bad situation. Chuck
Grimes ------------- Hi, This is simply the definition of a single-party
authoritarian dictatorship, it dismisses 50 years of social science research
into what is different with fascism. How is your definition different from
Stalinism? Was Stalinism a form of fascism? I think not. All christian
righwing fundamentalists are fascists?!? So there is no difference between
a pragmatic election-oriented Ralph Reed, an authoritarian like John Ashcroft,
social totalitarians such as the Christian Reconstructionists, and the
neonazis as found in Christian Identity? The wave of authoritarianism and
government repression we are experiencing needs to be challenged, but this
overly-simplistic level of analysis is not helpful. The US is not going
NAZI. There are echoes of fascism in all forms of authoritarian government
repression, but the level of state action under fascism to repress dissent
is a different order of magnitude from what we are experiencing. -Chip
Berlet ------------- Then give me an arguement and put out an alternative
analysis. What are `we' experiencing? And how would you distinguish between
nazis and fascists? I believe I wrote we had the potential and that the
elements existed and that it was a bad situation. Chuck Grimes (BTW, I
at work so until later today, the exchanges will be brief) --- >camps.
The Romanian Antonescu regime, supported by the Iron Guard fascists, >was
killing Jews so fast that the Nazis had to intervene because their >bookkeeping
couldn't keep up (Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the >European Jews.
New York: Holmes and Meier,1985, p.759). > >Hakki The Croatian fascists
during WWII, aka the Utasha, carried out an anti-Serb genocidal program
of wholesale slaughter, forced religious conversion, and expulsion so furious
that it left the Nazis aghast. Peter ----- --------- It is my understanding
that unlike the German, French and Rumanian varieties, Italian Fascism
was not originally antisemitic. In fact, some of Mussolini's closest associates
in the early days were Jews. His regime did not adopt antisemtic policies
until the formation of the Axis alliance with Germany. ----- Hi, On the
other hand, the scapegoating central to fascism's campaign for a rebirth
of society was distributed around to include French intrigue, communism
and anarchism, and a very racist campaign in Ethiopia which tends to get
swept under the rug of White history. -Chip ----- to be fair, every European
country did terrible racist things in African colonies, from beacon-of-liberalism
England to tiny oppressed Belgium. So it doesn't really make the fascists
stand out. The Italians did crow about what they did to the natives more,
but I think that might have been in part a testament to how bad they were
at it compared to their more liberal neighbors. The Ethiopians kicked their
asses in 1896 at Adva, one of the rare great victories of Africans against
would-be colonizers, and a deep embarassment to the Italians -- one they
were still trying to expunge 40 years later. Michael ------- wave of authoritarianism
and government repression we are experiencing needs to be challenged, but
this overly-simplistic level of analysis is not helpful. The US is not
going NAZI. There are echoes of fascism in all forms of authoritarian government
repression, but the level of state action under fascism to repress dissent
is a different order of magnitude from what we are experiencing...'' -Chip
Berlet ``Then give me an argument and put out an alternative analysis.
What are `we' experiencing? And how would you distinguish between nazis
and fascists?..'' (CG) -------- Okay. I assume you are not going to answer
the question, so I'll answer it for you. Chip Berlet would have gotten
overly specific and detailed, ground nazism in the German past, and in
the US present in various explicitly named neonazis movements that center
on some from of aryanism and its semitic nemesis, the master race hypothesis
out to exterminate the evil jewish cabal. This becomes in my view over
determined to the point of making nazism difficult to recognize in other
contexts with variations of ideology. While that is fine for scholarship,
in the more messy and less well delineated political world, it also misses
the forest for the trees. I accept on the other hand, that I over generalized
nazism, by making a simple distinction between nazis as forming a central
dehumanizing, racist ideology and enacting it into law, and contrasting
that to fascists who seem more interested in simply eliminating their political
opponents though the usual channels of oppression: the law, courts, and
prison, and the propaganda machinery of over ripe nationalism. The use
of ad hoc intimidation, thugs, and death squads is always available to
both groups. So I can be accused of missing the different species of trees
for the general greenery of the forest. Or to use a different metaphor,
crying wolf too often and too soon. So, the argument turns on over specification,
losing the general contours of the phenomenon in the details of its historical
context, and thereby making it non-reproducible. While the other view threatens
to over generalize it to the point of discovering it under every rock.
Never mind. What I am more interested in is highlighting the fact that
the Bush administration is now in a legal position to set-up a police state
in relation to very large number of people in the US. It now has the necessary
tools and nobody seems to care much, or be willing to call this what it
is. As far as I can tell, there is no formal or legal barrier between the
administration and whoever, whenever, and whatever they want. The argument
that the Bush administration is not likely to over exercise its new police
powers for various political popularity reasons, really isn't very re-assuring.
There is essentially nothing to stop them. The fact that they bullied their
way into public office and are now using and manufacturing a war hysteria
to legitimate themselves isn't very reassuring either. And then there is
the very real possibility that as long as they are not seriously threatened
by domestic political challenges, we will probably not know how far they
are willing to go on this course. A jail cell isn't confinement, until
you grab the bars and shake them---then it's real. Nobody is willing to
grab the bars and find out. I am more interested in focusing on the concrete
legal means and the barriers that once existed to stop the development
of a nazi like agenda in the first place. Most of those institutional safeguards
and protections are either gone or eroded to such an extent that they are
meaningless. It certainly doesn't help that the Supreme Court already a
rightwing apology is now completely compromised by their own decisions
in the Presidential elections. Since Florida, I certainly wouldn't trust
them to protect anything but the administration they effectively put into
office. I assume that Chip Berlet on the other hand has spent a great deal
of time and effort examining the detailed ideologies of the Right and has
come up with a well nuanced criterion for distinguishing the various groups
in a spectrum that runs from merely authoritarian and potentially fascist
all the way out to the fringe advocates of racist genocide. It would be
nice to see that applied to our current condition, if for no other reason
than to have some standard to measure our progress. But that probably won't
happen. However, the link that worries me, is between the legal definitions
that create the status of non-persons, people with no legal rights of any
sort, and their racist identification with a vague label of Islamic terrorist.
The other part of this formulary that is disturbing to say the least, is
the use of secret court panels, military tribunals, and summary executions.
These currently existing US government formalities are clearly parallel
to counter parts in the German Nazis regime. I realise that simply typing
`reich' in front of the US government's new office of Homeland Security
in google, and getting the official Nazi SS office name with Himmler is
not proof of the US going nazi, but it is both hilarious, and frightening
at the same time. It seems somewhat nit-picky or academic to me, to try
to keep ideas of what nazism is restricted to the internal nuances of their
master race ideology, while failing to recognize the general legal and
institutional means developed in their historical or political contexts
to carry out these ideologies. In other words, in my mind, the institutional
tools themselves are the essential feature, and not the content of their
raison d'etre. These tools in particular include defining a broad class
of people as non-persons and identifying them with generally racial characteristics---in
this case, middle eastern looking, and subscribing to Islam. Next, there
are the broadened police powers of the state to investigate, arrest, and
detain people within this designated population, above and beyond the framework
of the usual powers given to the police and government of a bourgeois democracy.
In addition there are, the availability of military tribunals, closed hearings
before unspecified military or government officials, and finally the punishments
of indefinite imprisonment and or execution without either review or appeal
to any outside authority. Sure, these are just the usual police state hardware
of any self-respecting totalitarian regime. Are we supposed to just wait
around for lunatic white supremacy diatribes, mass rallies of nationalism,
and posters of hook nosed arabs done up as rat people before we start calling
this shit nazis? But I suppose we can all wait and see if Bush actually
uses some of this power to start killing people in Guatanamo. That is pretty
much the bottom line empirical test for me. Chuck Grimes ---- > > In fact,
there's a place at the beginning of Bassani's IL GIARDINO DEI FINZI-CONTINI
where the Jeeish narrator talkds about Jews joining the Fascist party --
"Fu nel 1933, l'anno della cosidetta ." Grazie alladel Duce, che d'un tratto,
quasi inspirato, aveva deciso di aprir le braccia ad ogni , anche nell'ambito
dell nostra Communità il numero degli iscritti al Facio ero potuto
salire de colpo al novanta per cento." (Page 27) Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema
----- Fascist is as fascist does. Of course historians or sociologists,
like economists, are terrible at predicting the future in any detail that
proves useful. However, if the US doesn't draw back from its rampant cultural
imperialism and economic nationalism, and if the world does plunge into
an economic depression as deep as say the Great Depression, historical
perspective tells me anything is possible. Backing up: Hitler hardly had
uncontested military power. He didn't have the physical means to end human
existence on the planet. Nor did he have his naked economic and political
ambitions on the world confused with some form of dynamic market ideology.
And in some ways his elected path to office was clearer than Bush's. If
the US had to face crises on the magnitude of Germany between the wars,
or , let's say, the Soviet Union in the 1980s, just how stable and safe
would the responses within the government be? Is the US national security
state going to back down and say, hey, you know, 9-11 happened because
we really fucked up and we owe a sincere apology to all the Americans affected
and all the families of the internationals who also died in 9-11? In short,
the reactionary dynamism so far on display is breathtaking. Charles Jannuzi
------------ Brad DeLong>I would be dead at 5 of pneumonia without antibiotics,
so my take on this issue is rather... extreme And as one born three months
premature, 2 pounds 15 ounces, delivered at Fitzsimmons hospital at Lowry
Air Force Base outside Denver and stuffed in an incubator for two months
to fatten me up a bit, I'm grateful for high-tech medicine such as it was
back in '61. Imagine the cost to my folks if If the bill hadn't been paid
by the USG. That's the plus side. On the negative balance sheet, my Dad
was exposed to asbestos at Lowry (plus on USN and USAF bases, battleships/carriers
and an auto body shop he worked at briefly as a teenager) http://www.google.com/search?
q=asbestos+Multinational+Monitor+ and other toxics at Lowry. It's a EPA
Super-Fund site now. http://www.westword.com/ issues/2001-04-12/feature.html/1/index.html
(By Eileen Welsome who received a Pulitzer for reportage that led to her
book, "The Plutonium Files." 3 part series.) He has cancer, in remission,
has to lug around a damn oxygen tank.In a big lawsuit, other side has 40
lawyers representing such behemoths as General Electric and W.R.Grace.
http://www.motherjones.com/ web_exclusives/features/news/grace.html
Michael Pugliese ------------------ >Michael Pugliese wrote: > >>Was it
Bakunin or Proudhon who said that after the revo. (well it's a >>continuous,
permanent revolutionizing but, y'all get my point...) that >>children would
pick up the garbage since they love to play in the dirt? > >It was Charles
Fourier. > >"Two thirds of all boys have a penchant for filth. They love
to >wallow in the mire and play with dirty things. . . . . These children
will >enroll in the Little Hordes whose task is to perform, dauntlessly
and >as a point of honor, all those loathsome tasks that ordinary workers
>would find debasing.. In> >-- "The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier",
eds. Beecher and >Bienvenu, pp.317-8. > >It was passages like this that
Marx was thinking of, I take it, when >he wrote against Fourier's belief
that "labour can be made merely a >joke", and noted that "really free labour,
the composing of music for >example, is at the same time damned serious
and demands the greatest >effort". (McLellan ed, p.124). > >Chris Right.
As as a parent of kids who loveto play in thedirt but not to clean up,
I can testify that Fourier had no idea what he was talking about. Just
try to get them to take out the garbage! If you suceed, tell me how. jks
_____ Chuck0 mentions Food Not Bombs. Living in the Tenderloin in S.F.
their soup give away in the Civic Center around 6 p.m. gets a bit of an
audience if the hungry homeless miss the earlier line at Glide Memorial.(Of
which, more in a second.) I've known folks that have gotten sick because
the food was not refridgerated. Stored in someone's garage.Keith McHenry
is a great guy who was a founder of FnB so I don't blame him. (Heard he
was working in Phoenix for Goodwill.)Back in the early 90's esp. the were
big protests to defend FnB from the SFPD which then and later would periodically
arrest the FnB folks over a lack of the proper permits that all other non-profits/soup
kitchens have as a matter of course. Which FnB refuses, out of anarchist
principle, to apply for. I've always suspected that the food handling problem
is part of their stubborn refusal. Plus the agit-prop value of the periodic
police harassment. Glide, is connected, mondo, to Senator Feinstein, his
Willieness nd other pols. For each meal they are reimbursed $8.00. I've
eaten there. The quality at a Burger King is better. And I hate BK. Michael
Pugliese ----- Food Not Bombs is an international network of autonomous
local groups. Some of them do comply with permit regulations, but most
do not. The SF FNB practice of not getting a permit has nothing to do with
food handling issues. That charge is simply a pretext the city has used
to arrest group members and to give the group bad PR. The whole idea is
that sharing food is a basic human practice. Of course nobody wants to
eat food that makes us sick, but we all already take that crapshoot whenever
we eat out. << Chuck0 >> Infoshop.org -> http://www.infoshop.org/
Alternative Press Review -> http://www.altpr.org/ Practical Anarchy Online
-> http://www.practicalanarchy.org/ Anarchy: AJODA -> http://www.anarchymag.org/
MutualAid.org -> http://www.mutualaid.org/ Factsheet 5 -> http://www.factsheet5.org/
AIM: AgentHelloKitty ------------ justin: I said: >>I've read Marshall
Sahlins too. It's very nice if you want half >>your kids to >>die before
the age of 5 and you yourself don't mind being old at 30 and >>dead >>at
45 of diseases that could be be avoided by vaccination or cured by >>antiobiotics,
or just plain starvation. Anyway, you ever hear about not >>being able
to go home again? >> >>jks (a big fan of modern technology, especially
anesthetics) >> > > > >no i never heard of not being able to go home again
- you have to excuse >me for not grasping the meaning. Thomas Wolfe wrote
a now-little read novel called You can't Go Homre Again. The point is that
even if hunter-gather societieswere totally idyllic, we, who came from
them millenia ago, cannot retuen to thor form of life short of a siocial
disaster tahtwould destroy civilization. i too love the technology that
i >surround myself with but i do not know if the tribal people want to
or >not want to have their kids die at 5 or themselves to die at 45 etc.
do >you think they too would share your preference for your life over >theirs?
------------- Some do, some don't. I am opposedto imposing it on anyone
who doesn't wantto live it, but that wasn't the issue here. i am new to
this stuff and havent read sahlins, but doesnt >bodley try to show that
tribals actually have resisted "civilization" >and thus shown a preference
for their way of life? if he is right, then >would you say their choices
are uninformed? ------------- Can'ta nswer the question in the abstract.
But even if the choice si uninformed, it's their choice. But I wasn't aware
we were discussing the fate of stone age societies in the modern world.
or does "you cannot >return >home" mean that the tribal person might have
that choice but i do not? > > It means at least that. jks -------------Sorry,
but you ought to read Sahlins again then - seeing as one of his major points
was that hunter-gatherers are by and large NOT subject to starvation (its
_peasant farmers-_ that starve on a regular basis because they are reliant
on very few food sources). Also, antibiotics and vaccines dont enter into
it because the infectious diseases these things are used against can only
exist in large populations, such as are supported by farming but not by
hunting and gathering. For example, measles cant maintain itself in populations
of less than several thousand people. So you might break your leg hunting
and gathering, but youre not going to get measles, TB, smallpox, typhus,
plague, flu, any of the STDs, or a host of others. As for half your kids
dying before age five, I would concede the point here provided you understand
it isnt due to famine. In the absence of other methods of contraception
hunter-gatherers have to practice infanticide - their societies have to
be highly mobile, and you cant cart too many kids about with you when youre
on the move. Again, its the children of farmers who die from famine, not
those of hunter-gatherers. Relatedly, birth control is important for hunter-gatherers,
but not for farmers, who can just go ahead and have as many kids as possible
and then have a large fraction of them starve when famine beckons. Old
at thirty and dead at forty-five again, you seem to be thinking about peasant
farmers and not hunter-gatherers. Apparently hunter-gatherers had much
better dental health than peasant farmers, for example. So if you're thinking
of some wizened, toothless thirty-year-old, you've got some mental image
of a peasant in your head, not a hunter-gatherer. Unfortunately, you are
probably right about not being able to go home. But I dont think this was
Ravis point anyway. These societies are important because they demonstrate
the potential of human social arrangements. One of our greatest problems
is that we cannot think beyond the crap weve been brought up to believe
is necessary - work and markets are good examples that have recently cropped
up on this list (though you would maintain both are necessary). A consideration
of other societies gives some window onto what the imagination would otherwise
not provide, hobbled as it is by the world we actually live in. Eric ---------
Just for fun, I put together some figures to get a feeling for aboriginal
output, using a Northeast U.S. native, my local Safeway and the Cabela's
catalog. Daily figures: One third pound cleaned meat at $4.99 a pound 1
cleaned trout at $2.99 1 pint berries at $2.49 one pound acorns or starch
equivalent at $1.00 a pound Yearly figures: One suit clothes - compare
to Wall's uninsulated camouflage hunting coverall at 49.95 One pair shoes
- compare to Cabela's Woodsman leather hunting boots at 59.95, consumed
over three winter seasons: $19.98 One woven wigwam - compare to Cabela's
8-person Alaskan Guide Series tent w/ fiberglass poles at 409.99 Non-food-producing
tools, consumed in use - compare to Leatherman Supertool 200 at 54.99 plus
Cold Steel heavy machete at 9.99, consumed over five years: $13.00 Net
contemporary value in 1870 of a native art collection priced today at $35,000,
based on 5% rate of appreciation: $62 Remember the value of hunting and
fishing tools are included in the value of their product. I think these
figures are generous by any standard. I get a total yearly figure of approximately
$3,521.17 but you have to lower average life expectancy to 35 or 40 and
yes, you do. The idea that hunter-gatherers are healthy people is silly.
First, all hunter-gatherers are subject to parasitic infections. Second,
consider the fact that all predators (human or no) are subject to both
high infant mortality and episodes of population decline due to starvation.
Drought, for example, kills hunter-gatherers just as easily as it kills
farmers - more easily since hunter-gatherers do not have the power to turn
their food production to foodstuffs that can be saved to make it through
lean times. That's why people raise grain staples in the first place. -----------
The glorification of premodern life leaves me cold. Like Brad and Michael,
I wouldn't have survived infancy without the medical science of the 1940's.
Also, a bit of social-historical reading tells us that any city before
150 years ago in Europe or North America smelled of shit in most places.
Pre-modernity also meant people didn't bathe and had untreatable dermatological
problems. Etc. Check out Shorter's A HISTORY OF WOMEN'S BODIES for more
gross-out detail -- there's a fine chapter on the history of vaginal discharges
before modern medicine could address them. As for the factory, I always
think back on my two visits to the Shaker village in Hancock, Massachusetts.
Early Socialists were interested in Shakerism, because, despite its obvious
nutty qualities, it also was a serious attempt to bring industrial work
together with social life in a humane mix. Think yourself into the prevailing
situation in about 1830 and you can see why it was popular for a while.
Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema ----------- I assume this statement applies
primarily to Europeans. I recall the pre-modern natives of America thought
the Europeans unhygienic. The natives bathed frequently, sometimes several
times a day. The "dirty" Europeans ignored methods of personal care used
by the natives. The Indian people were remarkably free of disease with
the predominant disorders being external injuries, arthritis, digestive
disorders and respiratory infections. Cancer, heart disease and nuerological
problems were rare. The traditional medicinal practices by the Indians
was in some cases quite advanced and apparently held up pretty well until
the Europeans arrived with their diseases and poor hygiene. I understand
Dr. Frederick Banting, discoverer of insulin, credited Indian medicine
in part to his discovery. In the treatment of wounds one of the more interesting
aspects of Indian practice was the use of some form of aseptic technique.
It was the late 19th century before Europeans learned the necessity of
keeping wounds clean. - Tom ------------ Native American life expectancies
were not much different from most of the worlds life expectancies. Douglas
Ubelaker, Rebecca Storey, and Christopher Ruff have given the following
estimates. 30.5 years for 'Texas Indians' 24.7 to 42.9 years for 'Pecos
Pueblo Indians' 33.0 years for 'Mississippian Indians' For comparison Peter
Razzell estimates life expectancies in English villages at 31.6 to 34.0
years Yves Blayo estimates French villages at 27.5 to 30.0 years Japanese
estimates range fro 35 to 55 years in different studies Chinese estimates
range from 29 to 36 years (most Chinese estimates assume higher than world
average infanticide of females) These figures for all but Native Americans
cover the years 1600 to 1800 with some overlap. Native American figures
are for pre-columbian years (before the influx of diseases from overseas)
John Thornton ------- From: "Cian O'Connor" < > > What was their life
expectancy? And how good were at > they diagnosing such things (one culture's
natural > death, might be anothers cancer). ---------- Feminism unpaid
labour Distasteful Nowork will still have to be done and peoples'
social >> obligations >> > will still have to be met. >> >>I never argued
that distasteful work will be avoided. However, there is >>a difference
between alienated work that only serves to create profit >>and shitty work
that people need to do to live. Cleaning a toilet can be >>distasteful
work for many people. Working in a cubicle or factory is >>alienating for
most people. >> >>Isn't this like basic Marxist and socialist theory? as
i recall, marx made a distinction between productive and unproductive labor.
housework was unproductive labor. marx and engels and some of their followers
later argued that the thing to do was to move housework from the realm
of unproductive labor to the realm of productive labor. marxist feminists
in the late 70s argued for social policies that would pay women to do housework.
the point was to _socialize_ production. they actually wanted to bring
it into the realm of wage-labor. (i'm not advocating this approach. i thought
it was the most assinine policy proposal i'd every heard when i first read
about it). remember marx's famous phrase about how work was socialized
already? (i can't recall the exact quote and am too lazy to look it up).
the socialization of labor (the division of labor in which we all depend
on one another to produce the goods and services we need.) was the opposition
against the centralization of capital. the two antagonisms that characterized
capitalist class society. and remember that needs are historical: they
constantly change. in the process of creating the goods and services we
need now, we create new needs. this is why EE, i say that marx believed
that work/labor/whatever you wanna call it is fund. to human being. (in
the past i've argued that it should be human being (as process) rather
than nature or essence as thing. hope that makes ya feel better EE.) marx
was saying that we already had a division of labor and this was a good
thing! a complex division of labor created plenty of material goods with
less effort, objectively speaking. the point was to truly socialize it
so that people had control over what and how they produced things. work
wasn't alienating because it existed under a complex division of labor
(which is what Adam Smith said). work was alienating because we didn't
have control over what we produced, how we produced it, and why. marx believed
that we objectified our humanity in our work. think: hegel. the problem
is, under capitalist class relations--we could no longer see ourselves
objectified in our work. instead, the object was fetishized, while individuals/humanity
receded. instead of fulfilling our creative potentials in productive labor,
we began to see objects as who we were. (put simply) (see his work on religion
to really understand. to really understand, it's helpful to know how indebted
Marx is to aristotle's conception of causality in Physus) we are alienated,
not because of a division of labor per se, but because the products of
our labor do not belong to us. so, alienation is characterized by four
things: 1. we are alienated from the products of our labor. we no longer
determnine what is to be made nor how to dispose of it. work has become
a means to another end, rather than an end in itself (acquiring money to
buy things.) Because people no longer have a meaningful rel. to the thing
they create, they come to related to the things they produce as alien objects
rather than extensions of themselves. 2. people are alienated from the
_process_ of work. someone else controls _how_ it is done (tools, techniques,
methods, pace, etc). 3. people are alienated b/c they are denied the opp.
for creative, productive activity. marx believed that such creative activity
was essential to human life, what made us different from the ants that
simply created ant hills because it was instinctive. 4. alienated labor
is isolated, not pat of a collectively organized project of meeting human
needs. we are alienated from each other as we go about our work lives under
contemporary captialism. we don't understand how our work fits in with
the bigger picture. our work always involves others; we are interdependent.
contemporary class relations make it difficult to see that. as such, we
are alienated ------------ At 07:02 PM 1/25/02 +0000, Erik Empson wrote:
>This is just a tautology. Too right 'work' is something to be opposed
in >principle when what is understood by that principle coincides with
>absoltuely with its current social form. 'Work' would have an absolutely
>different essence under communism, and its not true to Marx nor to that
>project to conflate them. no one is. >It is contradictory to argue that
for Marx man's >essence is the result of the totality of historically existant
social >relationships and then in the same breath argue that he thinks
one type of >social relation is an enduring quality of being human. Still,
I think I know >what you mean. i'm not arguing that work as we've known
is man's essence. ------------ rather, marx argued that what made us distinct
from other animals is that we produce our own subsistence and substantially
change the natural world and ourselves in doing it. we have to work. if
you call making shelter, food, and clothing something other than work,
fine. even hunting and fishing is work. if you interpret marx to mean that
hunting and fishing is play, somehow not work, then i think you need to
lose your contemporary understanding of hunting and fishing. i'm arguing
that marx would not likely claim that we should do away with work completely--though
surely he advocated the use of technology and the division of labor to
reduce its burdens--since he wanted us to be able to fulfill our capacities
as creative, productive human beings. but that is precisely the debate
in the first place, for some here were arguing that technology, in and
of itself, was the problem. kelley --------------- Housework was only unproductive,
for Marx, because it did not produce surplus value -- that is, a very narrow
interpretation of productive within the context of capitalist values --
it did not denigrate housework. For example, the production of destructive
goods would be productive. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California
State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael@ecst.csuchico.edu
------------ could you elaborate what it means to say that it doesn't produce
surplus value? i've not visited these debates in quite some time-- more
than a decade ago. i do, though, recall reading a number of feminist critiques
of marx/engels and marxists feminists' claims about housework as unproductive
labor. thanks, -------------- Whatever produces direct profit (surplus
value) for capital is productive -- say producing a medicine that kills
patients. caring, nurturing work is not. It is more a critique of capitalism
than of housework. ------------ ah, i see, i needed to flesh it out more:
for some early feminist marxists, housework is unpaid labor performed by
women for men, and should really be regarded as unpaid labor performed
for capital--where individuals males and the institution of masculinity
can be understood as we understand (!!!) the role of management and the
ideologies of managerial control to capital. housework--or more broadly
understood, reproductive labor-- needed to be brought into the sphere of
wage labor as a way of advancing capitalism, and thus its demise. for some,
this meant paying "women" to do housework, reproductive labor. others countered
with the argument that this would keep reproductive labor isolated to the
realm of the family. what was needed was something more akin to Charlotte
Perkins Gilman's proposal that reproductive labor--cooking, clearning,e
tc--should be _socialized_. it should become part of the realm of wage
labor. women and men shouldn't cook and clean, etc., but we should encourage
that work to become paid labor: daycare, caferterias, restaurants, etc.
this approach was based on the feminist critique of the public/private
split that intensified under capitalist class relations. kelley ---------------
I am familiar with the feminist take on the subject, but I don't think
that they gave Marx a fair reading. He was describing how capitalism determines
what is/is not productive. ---- could you elaborate? i think you're sensitive
to a critique that i never made perhaps. as far as i can tell, there wasn't
anything in what i'd written that would suggest that it was a critique
of marx/engel's claims about productive labor. rather, it was a description
of policy proposals two strands of marxist feminist offered to deal with
the way in which class relations obscured the role of reproductive labor
within capitalism. for marxist feminists, the goal was to move productive
labor out of the home and make it "public". that is, they wanted to "socialize"
it.i brought it up because it related to what i was saying to chuck0: some
marxists (feminists in particular) have actually supported the rationalization
(division of labor) of things like housework for they saw it as part of
the process of socializing work. kelley ------------------ Reply to this
exchange follows: ------------------ >Public transport (trains in japan)>Michael
Perelman Subject: Re: Who Does No Work, Shall Not Eat Very interesting
post. Are you saying that with all the spending on infrastructure Japan
has been shorting public transportation? On Wed, Jan 23, 2002 at 12:41:42PM
+0900, Charles Jannuzi wrote: > > Yes, the trains are fast and they do
run on time, but Japanese get to spend > hours in crowded trains instead
of in cars in traffic jams. And here in > Fukui, where the American dream
prevails, we have more and more traffic > jams, and fewer and fewer buses
and trams. > > Charles Jannuzi > > ---------------- Well, another current
American-led line of analysis is that Japan has foolishly poured a trillion
dollars into wasteful public works that DID NOT benefit anyone but inefficient
construction firms (although you have to remember this is exactly what
the US's Japan experts and trade reps called for over ten years ago). Some
Japanese believe this too (but I say it still has benefits that go beyond
what the US spends on military,if only they'd spend even a fraction of
it on restoring the environments they destroy). A little recent history.
One of the reasons why the Japanese government made the Ministry of Construction
so powerful in the past 12 years was, in part, a response to demands from
the US trade representatives. The US was going to balance trade by getting
the Japanese to invest all those surpluses into public works (and at the
height of the bubble years it only fueled the flames, since the Japan bubble
was a real market meltdown in both real estate and equities). The resulting
infrastructure (one goofy prime minister--the one Bush threw up on--used
to always talk about making Japan a lifestyle superpower) would turn Japanese
into American-style consumers. This sort of stuff got really big under
Clinton because his bunch of wonk idiots were always trolling thinktanks
and books for NEW ideas in how to DEAL WITH the Japanese. After old labor
Dem Kantor was gone, I think the basic line was cheapen the dollar against
the yen til trade is balanced (which even had Japanese automakers scrambling
to re-outfit US auto parts makers so as to import the parts from the US,
and Toyota outfitting plush new dealerships to sell a handful of Saturns
). But, anyway, to answer your question. Most of the dense networks around
the big cities, I mean the megalopolises--Tokyo, Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto (Kansai),
Nagoya--consist of public and private subways and private rail networks
that stretch out to the suburbs and exurbs. These networks have to break
even or make money, so that requires packing them with people during rush
hour. And they do. I don't think anyone who has ever visited a large Japanese
city would say, compared to Europe even, they have neglected subways and
commuter trains. They have, however, neglected anyone who wants to walk
on the surface or cycle. Car culture is really big here, too. That's one
reason why they got so good at designing and building them (of course,
if markets ruled or maybe God, any country that gave the world the Pinto,
the Vega and the Gremlin would long ago been forced to give up trying).
Back to Japan. The city-to-city rail extends all over the country, has
been heavily subsidized, and did get extended during the last ten years.
Construction gets subsidized, but the idea is to get them to make money
then. I think that's an important distinction you have to make when discussing
the pros and cons of public transportation. Subsidize the network and then
the rail lines can provide great service and make some money. Afterall,
it was public subsidy that gave the US it's highway networks. A toll road
is no different than a privatized rail line in that way. The city-to-city
rail is also a 30 billion dollar hole the government has tried to marketize
by breaking JR up and turning it into regional companies, with OVERPRICED
stock and everything. Of the four JR companies, two make money: JR East
makes solid money, because it connects Tokyo and Nagoya. JR West makes
a bit of money (but has to use profits to subsidize unprofitable lines).
The other two have never seen profits as far as I know. (This info. might
be a bit old since I lost interest in this stuff 5 years ago.) There is
quite a bit of private rail between cities, too, if the cities are close
together--like Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe. In the Kansai, you can get anywhere
without using JR. Anyway, the public works push during the past 12 years
has emphasized roads and airports--which is what the American trade reps
wanted (it started under Bush for balancing trade, and then got more rationale
when Japan fell into a deep recession, like the day the yen hit 79 to the
dollar and for a brief while Japan had an economy the value of which exceeded
the US's). Now, let's take it to the real world. I live in Fukui, a 'rural'
(for Japan) prefecture on the Japan Sea side of Honshu, about halfway between
Kyoto and Kanazawa (if you have a map handy). There are plenty of small
cities, towns, and villages in this region, but it can't support private
rail networks. The few left (two lines just closed this year) have always
required subsidy from local governments. JR West is here but there are
, as yet, no bullet trains. However, the new 'shinkansen' bullet train--the
Hokuriku Shinkansen--is now being constructed (with really horrific devastation
of fragile mountain environments to go with it--I was a trout fisherman).
Meanwhile, there has been all sorts of road construction. If I showed you
a picture of 'rural' Fukui, what with all the buildings, roads, and rail
lines, you'd think it was New Jersey somewhere between NYC and Philadelphia.
So, have they been shorting public transportation? The subways are already
there and run everywhere under the major cities and didn't need expansion,
but the heavy population density means they will be packed if everyone
leaves work at the same time to go home. Most Americans have no idea what
a Japanese city is like. Around the business centers are the rail hubs,
and people move in dense waves 3-5 levels below ground. If you could see
Shinjuku station in Tokyo at 6 in the afternoon, you'd get the picture.
. Private rail lines around cities and out into the suburbs have to make
money to stay in operations, and they do, which means they want maximum
ridership on every scheduled train if possible. This, by the way, is one
reason some office workers don't go home til late; they go out, get drunk,
wander around the red light district for a while, and go home on a late
train where they can sleep (which is easy to do if you live at the end
of the line). And the heavily subsidized bullet trains have been extended
to the point some of the lines will NOT make money. Everone knows the bullet
train line to the Olympic site in Nagano was just pork (though I suppose
a lot of urban skiiers now use it to get to the slopes). Meanwhile, road
and bridge construction continues unabated, as far as I can see. And this
includes putting expressways through some of the most treacherous terrain
and fragile mountain environments you will find anywhere, like in Gifu
Prefecture, just east of Fukui. Hope I answered the question. Charles Jannuzi
- -- Michael Perelman ------------------- Justin Schwartz" wrote: > So,
Pradeep, what's your solution to the free rider problem? Note that you
> do not need to assume that people would rather do nothing and have infinite
> desires to get this offthe ground. All you need is to assume that they
would > rather do less rather than more of relatively unpleasant but necessary
work. > I myself would rather tour European museums and hang out in cafes
listening > to jazz than even doing relatively pleasant work like writing
legal briefs. > Of course in the ideal communist world there would be now
laws and no > lawyers, so you can imagine my analytical skills being in
demand for > something ideal communists would like, whatever that might
be. But the fact > of the matter is that if any signifigant percentage
of the populaution is > like me,a nd I think, as a matter of fact thata
lmost everyone is, but > suppose it is only one third, then there will
be a really significant free > rider problem. . . . > > But > since much
such work is fairly unpleasant, it wil face the same problem as > any sort
of unpleasant work, namely the free rider problem. My examples of > idle
drones were people like me who'd rather be boulevardiers, Malibu > surfers
and the like. ------------- Look Justin this is just not a serious issue
-- at least for those us who arent Ayn Rand nuts or geeks with a lot ideological
baggage left over from their undergraduate econ. studies. The idea of any
revolutionary struggle is to begin the process of reorganizing society
and the economy along more rational and humane lines -- to phase out or
at least minimize onerous, numbing and debilitating labour in order to
maximize free time and leisure as much as is materially possible. Something
about fishing in the morning and philosophizing in the evening, I believe.
The point is that *we* will be able to decide collectively both the nature
of work and the amount required -- democratically and collectively weighing
the benifits with the costs of any particular economic plan or set of priorities.
Now I am actually surprised that this thread went on for as long as it
did before someone - Remick --------------- I believe- actually brought
up what I thought would have been an obvious point -- that people should
be able to engage in useful work or activities that they find meaningful
and then share out whatever little of the distasteful work is left over.
It wouldnt take much to get people to work such jobs if their obligations
were light - a few hours say-- all the while still having access to the
material comforts of modern life. In addition, given the fact that onerous
labour would be shared out equitably and not relegated to socially powerless
groups, labour -in its various forms- would lose much of the stigma it
currently carries. Indeed much of what we call toil today would probably
be a welcome diversion for us provided we weren't forced to engage in it
day in and day out for forty odd years simply in order to survive. So the
question Justin is why you're obsessing over non-issues like the threat
posed by Malibu surfers-- what should at best be a marginal issue, at least
for those of us in the advanced industrial world. Most of what discipline
may be necessary can largely arise out of the fact that people are social
beings(!) -- and subject to all sorts of social pressures due to their
socialization -- and are not little ahistorical bundles of egotistical
impulses ready to explode and devour all of civilization if given half
a chance. Really! for you to obssess over the need for 'work-police' says
more about youre hang-ups than about any serious or inherent barrier to
a truly libertarian society. Now I should probably qualify the above discussion
and point out that what we're really speaking about is a relatively advanced
economy here, and that a less developed economy with a lower technological
and material base and marked by conditions of severe material scarcity,
would probably require a greater amount of external discipline to be exerted
on labour(preferably in the form of greater differential rewards based
on effort) and would probably require a culture fostering a more intense
'internal' discipline -- expressed in the form of a more puritanical culture
-- than one would expect in a post revolutionary society in the West. >
> To those who say we'd do little harm, I say that we'd be parasites, and
a > society of parasites is unlike to survive. I preduct that the anarchist
> coercion free utopia would survive about six months before the people
who > did care about working organized a police force and swept us goof-offs
out > of the museums and off the beaches into the factories under the slogam
> heading this thread. > > jks -------------- Man, I can almost see your
face -- all scrunched up and severe-- as you typed out the words "coercion"
and "police". You know if I were a Freudian Justin I'd probably point out
the almost anal preoccupation you seem to have with goof-offs, malibu surfers
and general layabouts -- but I'm not so i'll let it go at that. signed
pradeep, the-"I-dont-want-to- be-a-part-of-your -revolution-if-I-have-to-
get-up-before -noon"-slacker PS I'm really backlogged so I apologize to
the Collective if this thread has already moved on to better things ------------------
'immature' or 'stupid' -- I said you were 'anal'. But I was only bustin'
your chops there, and being a wise-ass. OK Justin maybe we should be clear
about something right of -- Im not arguing Chuck's technophobic primativist
utopia. No serious person aside from perhaps Chuck or certain reactionary
"anarchist" currents, imagines society as an amalgam of primitive individuals
totally bereft of any form of discipline or compulsion. Distasteful work
will still have to be done and peoples' social obligations will still have
to be met. But discipline can exist in institutionalized and noninstitutionalized
forms, embedded in social pressures and conditioning and in material rewards/incentives.
In an extremely technologically advanced society the point of social transformation
is to minimize or make as light as possible such obligations -- that is
to make it as easy for people to fulfil their obligations with the least
recourse to external discipline or compulsion. That is, to attempt to come
as close as is *materially possible* to the ideal of labour arising spontaneously
and freely of one's own volition. Like ive said before, the potential for
such a social and economic reorganization presupposes an extremely advanced
technological/industrial base. If the social wealth and productivity of
the economy is high enough to radically reduce the work day I'm sure, as
many have said on this list, that fulfilling their labour obligations in
order to still enjoy a relatively high quality of life (which, yes, would
include cd players, computers and insulin) would not be something that
required severe forms of external discipline. Would there still be forms
of discipline --------- however benign- in the form of social pressures
and even perhaps forms of economic compulsion?-- possibly yes. Would this
need to be a central problem in any libertarian/communist society? ---------
Most likely no, since as I've said the proper startingpoint of any true
communist/anarchist society is the development of a sufficiently advanced
material culture with lbour productivity high enough to minimize the compulsion
required to ensure things keep running. This doesnt necesarrily apply to
a transitional period or an underdeveloped economy where, despite the severe
disciplining effect of the market being removed, some other form of economic
'compulsion' may be required in its place ----------- such as a more marked
differential reward system based on effort --------- something along the
lines of "from each according to her ability, to each according to his
effort" as it were. Would there still be the occasional goof-off, layabouts
and malibu surfer? ------------ of course! Look you're never going to get
a society with no 'deviance' ----------- they're will always be perpetually
stoned fuck-ups who, despite all the gentle proddings of the Revolutionary
Propaganda Committee, will never mend their erring ways - the question
is whether these saboteurs' refusal to contribute will effect the sustainability
of our Workers' Utopia ---------- no it wont. And this here has been the
real issue: --'why you're continued obsession over this pt.?' Indeed you're
"free rider" arguement makes more sense as an arguement against 'welfare'
or 'minimum garunteed income schemes' *today*, where such entitlements
could more plausibly be seen as undermining the strict discipline of the
labour market in forcing people to work at jobs with far less appealing
work regimens and under more onerous conditions than would exist in our
glorious workers' utopia. Yet even within mainstream economics its only
the more right wing wags that constantly fret over the inevitable collapse
that will result if such entitlements are expanded and made more generous
----------- an obsession remarkably similar to your "free rider" problem.
Again, of course therewill be problems ---------- the question is whether
the objective material conditions are sufficient to ensure that such problems
remain marginal and not are not destabilizing enough to undermine the more
ethical social arrangements we envision. No perfect 'Utopia' is actually
being advanced here. I have never been one to see social revolution as
leading to some sort quasi-mystical repose from alienation, pain and conflict.
> , and that > >a less developed economy with a lower technological and
> >material base and marked by conditions of severe material scarcity,
would > >probably require a greater amount of external discipline to be
exerted on > >labour(preferably in the form of greater differential > >rewards
based on effort) and would probably require a culture fostering a > >more
intense 'internal' discipline -- expressed in the form of a more > >puritanical
culture -- than one would expect in a post > >revolutionary society in
the West. > > > > History is against you on this one. Early modern Europe
had far less > external discipline, despite futile attempts to impose it
by law with > vagabondage laws and the like. People in the 1500s worked
maybe 150 days a > year, "St. Monday" was regularly observed, feast daysd
were frequent, the > level of effort --and technological development and
productivity -- was low. > You help yourself to the high technology and
high productivity created by > the impositiona nd internalizatioon of labor
discipline created by markets,a > nd then suppose,w ithout good reason
that I can see, that this would > continue without the conditions that
created it. >------------- No history is with me, and quite unambigously
so. I figure that you must have misread or misunderstood what I was trying
to say. A social revolution in an isolated underdeveloped economy faces
the task, not of developing a socialist, let alone a libertarian society,
but of developing the material pre-conditions for socialism. Capital accumulation
in Western Europe (spanning several centuries), Germany, Japan(late 19th
early20th), Russia, China etc (20th century-21st) entailed both lengthening
and intensification of work under conditions of *extreme* economic compulsion
and coercion and all at terrible human costs. Any social revolution in
a 'backward' society that is not rolled back completely by bureaucratic
counter-revolution will still have to face the same problems of capital
accumulation and industrialization faced elsewhere-- extracting the needed
surpluses and in sufficient quantities to ensure expanded reproduction
and growth of labour productivity. And so long as some meaningful form
of democratic control of the means of production persists, do all this
without recourse to terror. Its here, much, much more so than in an advanced
economy that you're insistence on labour discipline/coercion and a solution
to the "free rider problem" becomes indispensible. -pradeep -----------------
Re:
Who Does No Work, Shall Not Eat Subject: Re: Who Does No Work, Shall Not
Eat From: Ted Winslow (egwinslow@rogers.com) Date: Sun Jan 20 2002 - 20:59:10
EST > It gets some response, though. I asked what it was about >
high technology that requires a context of coercion, as many > participants
in this discussion seem to assume. I think that's > a fundamental moral
and political question with some fairly > serious implications, but no
one seems willing to engage it. > Apparently it's much more rewarding to
deride Chuck and Joe as > primitivists. What if, as Marx assumes, capitalism
is inconsistent with the full development of rational self-consciousness.
Employing more modern language, what if there is a significant irreducible
aspect of psychopathology in the mentality dominant in it.
===== (Ian): Doesn't this presuppose that we know rational self-consciousness
is? Is arationality or irrationality in social life eliminable and how
could we know and wouldn't that be a prediction either way the answer was
arrived at? ------- This is not inconsistent
with the achievement of a great deal of insight into the nature of reality.
Newtonian physics, for instance, was obviously powerfully insightful though
it came from a deeply disturbed mind. Newton suffered a paranoid psychotic
breakdown in 1693. (Keynes, with the express purpose of calling in question
the view of Newton and hence of Newtonian physics as the embodiment of
"reason," emphasizes this aspect in his biographical essay. Collected Writings,
vol. X, pp. 363-74) ==== Well that's what happens
when one reads too many alchemy texts, stays terrified of women, poetry
and music and has Locke as ones physician......-------
If this is so there will be important aspects of modern science and technology
that reflect not rationality but psychopathology. Even those features of
work that embody science and technology will then not be wholly determined
by unalterable features of nature itself but by the particular psychologically
constrained ways of thinking about nature and technology characteristic
of capitalism. ====== Given that it's possible to
slow and even stop the speed of light, nature seems to be a lot more malleable
- in principle - than we thought we could imagine. And, if Richard Gott
is right, it's only a matter of time before anyone who wants to can build
different space-time systems in their basements. ---------
If labour process engineering, for instance, is done by minds driven in
important ways by irrational defences against persecutory anxiety the resulting
technology will embody an irrationally based need to sadistically and obsessively
dominate others, to treat them with contempt ("idiot proofing"), and to
"fragment" both the production process as a whole and the individual jobs
it involves. Taylorism illustrates this. The lack of individual autonomy
and the "specialization and division" characteristic of work would then
be to some extent expressions of the psychopathology.====
So what would a paranoid-proof technological system look like? Who/what
is an idiot? --------- Among other things this would
make the technology inefficient in comparison with what would be developed
by minds free from these limitations. ==== What
would be the meaning of efficiency if we had a different culture of property
and contract? If we designed all our technological devices-appliances-systems
up to the limits of the 2nd law of thermodynamics would that solve the
problems of human suffering via domination etc.? ---------
In particular, a properly designed technology would attempt to facilitate
the development and full use of the capacities of the producers - not merely
to make the labour process more efficient but also to make it "worthy of
[the producers'] human nature."===== Who gets to determine
the meaning of proper? ------ It would also have eliminated
those aspects of its view of those capacities that reflect irrational paranoia
and contemptuousness. A labour process that developed and made use of these
capacities would then, in combination with other social arrangements having
the same effect, also set free a great deal of creativity and intelligence
that is now stifled by the alienated character of modern work, creativity
and intelligence that would find one of its outlets in improving the science
and technology embodied in the process. Ted -=====
So, if everyone was a scientist in some minor way [Marx, De Solla Price,
Perelman], we'd no longer be paranoid or manifest various other forms of
'fear of the other'? Respecting epistemic incompleteness in a Godelian
world[s], Ian ------------ ----- ------------ It's an "internal relations"
view of the development of rational self-consciousness. It assumes, as
I said before, that though capitalist relations are ultimately inconsistent
with the full development of rational self-consciousness by anyone (so
you can't without self-contradiction assume that the minds that can see
how to change it in a progressive way are fully rational), they are consistent
the development of a sufficient degree of it to be able to see that, say,
contemptuousness is a way of dismissing reasonable ideas because they threaten,
say, the "fragmentation" - e.g. "the world is made up of an immense number
of bits, and ..., so far as logic can show, each bit would be exactly as
it is even if other bits did not exist" - a person is unconsciously using
to defend against persecutory anxiety. ==== Oh, that's it; use internal
relations as a stand in for ineffability and don't define 'see' or 'fragmentation'
or explain how, within capitalist relations of production, we can't define
the *full-ness* of rationality yet are still capable of understanding atomic
processes well enough to create technologies that can wipe just about every
terrestrial species off the surface of various geological structures [I'll
leave aside the difficulties associated with taking care of deep sea critters]..
Of course we don't need to define progressive in any way whatsoever, it's
epistemologico-ontological status safe from the dynamics of contending
definitions. No self-contradiction without otherness.....----------- A
sign of this would be that they would misidentify the following ontological
claims as sublating the idea of "internal relations" when in fact they
directly contradict it, and would substitute contempt for argument when
confronted by ideas that threatened this defence. > "1]The world can be
resolved into digital bits, with each bit made of > smaller bits. > > "2]These
bits form a fractal pattern in fact-space. > > "3]The pattern behaves like
a cellular automaton. > > "4]The pattern is inconceivably large in size
and dimensions. > > "5]Although the world started very simply, its computation
is > irreducibly complex." > > From the mathematician Rudy Rucker's 'Mind
Tools', Hegel's great, > great, great grandson. > Aufgehoben indeed!" it
also assumes that our self-consciousness can become sufficiently rational
to allow us to become aware that we are necessarily in some ways currently
unknown to us unreasonable so that we must be constantly self-critical
and open to the possibility that we're mistaken. This has the advantage
that it at least opens us to what others say - to read and listen to them
with "good will" - and allows us to change our minds if what they say shows
that our beliefs are in some way mistaken. ========== Oh, you mean we should
adapt a paraconsistent approach to descriptive-normative approaches to
self-description/epistemic capabilities regarding natural and social kinds?
How *novel*. http://www.christophercherniak.com What's consciousness? Ian
-------------- A sign of this would be that they would misidentify
the following ontological claims as sublating the idea of "internal relations"
when in fact they directly contradict it, and would substitute contempt
for argument when confronted by ideas that threatened this defence. ======
Well you sure are perseverating on internal relations and the possible
forms of *representing* internal relations within a conceptual scheme.......
--------- http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/0201/1752.html a beefy post with
Whitehead, Popper Hume and Engels quoted omitted here -------- Ian wrote:
>> They are internally related where their identities depend on their >>
relations. Where relations are internal there are no "substances" in the
>> above senses. > > ====== > Right and that just reduces 'internally'
to a trivial proposition. Internal relations made concrete in the human
case |
have to be conceived
so as to be compatible with other ontological ideas. As with the internal
relations of all living things, human relations must allow logically for
self-determination and purpose. My relations now are constitutive of me
now (this makes it impossible for me to be presently in more than one universe
since I am a particular universe now from my standpoint). They constitute
me now as a set of possibilities open to closure by me, this is the self-determination.
Another ontological premise is that these possibilities are open to objective
valuation as better or worse so that the purpose that guides self-determination
can be based on rational valuation of alternative possibilities. Marx assumes
that a human individual is an individual potentially having a will proper
and a universal will, i.e. a will whose content is fully open to rational
self determination on the basis of knowledge of the objective values (Marx
belongs to a tradition in thought that takes these to be "love" and "beauty")
which provide the foundation for ranking possibilities. (Anyone claiming
that people are naturally resentful, naturally envious, naturally selfish,
naturally exploitive etc. is denying that they potentially have a "will
proper".) The possibilities open to me now depend on (are "internally related"
to) past decisions and actions so that self-determination in the past can
create a current set of possibilities, a "real potentiality," that includes
the ideal. The will is only potentially proper and universal, however.
Persons require particular relations in order to realize this potentiality,
i.e. become fully rationally self-conscious. Their actual relations can
be more or less consistent with this. I'm not a Sovietologist but my impression
(from, for example, Gorky's My Childhood) is that the social, including
the family relations, characteristic of the Russian peasantry (the vast
majority of the population in 1917) were very far from what would be required
for the development of full rationality, that their likely usual result
would be an adult personality characterized by primitive defences against
psychotic anxiety i.e. a more or less paranoid, extremely hostile, sadistic
personality. These particular internal social relations would then explain
the coming to dominance within them of a paranoid, hostile, sadistically
murderous mentality. It is in this way that "internal relations" might
help to explain the last 80 or so years of Russian history including the
disastrous consequences of the collapse, important features of which were
the product of advice from "economists" of the Hayekian sort having no
knowledge either of the psychological factors I've just pointed to (they
are explicitly denied any role in explanations framed in accordance with
the "logic of the situation"), of the "internal relations" which produce
them (the approach treats social relations as "external"), or of the truth
contained in the passage from Keynes that Brad recently quoted. The passage
implicitly calls attention to the irrationality of apocalyptic thinking.
Such thinking goes together with the obsessional Ricardian vice and the
sadistic puritanism to produce the conclusion that immense present pain
and suffering are justifiable because in "the [for Keynes unknowable] long
run" there will be enormous positive benefits that will far outweigh them,
a belief Keynes claims can't be rationally justified and attributes to
a psychological need to deny that "in the long run we are all dead." Ian
also claimed that my description of "Oh, that's it; use internal relations
as a stand in for ineffability ..." as contemptuous was "patently untrue."
"Oh, that's it" expresses scorn. Placed before "use internal relations
as a stand in for ineffability" it makes "ineffability" mean the concept
of "internal relations" is "indefinable" because meaningless. A meaningless
concept is worthless. The ordinary definition of "contempt" is "a feeling
that a person or a thing is beneath consideration or worthless, or deserving
scorn or extreme reproach". Ted --------- http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/current/2167.html
and it goes on ian with a long one ------------------- ORGANIZATION IS
SUPPRESSION : interview with nick land by jim flint ~, ~~ ~ -. Why is it
that much of the content on the Internet - this supposedly amazingly democratic,
anarchic forum - is becoming dull, corporate and organised? ~ ~; ~ Your
question suggests that there's some pre-existing social pool of liberating,
revolutionary, emancipatory creative potential that could be expected spontaneously
to express itself as soon as it had an opportunity to do so. But there
is no such intrinsic power of innovation latent in the human organism that's
just waiting to bounce out onto the Net. What we should be asking is what
new power formations are emerging, and what new kinds of entities are being
produced. ~ ~; ~ How do systems which are initially free form and distributed
give way to centralised power structures? ~ ~; ~ Organisation involves
subordinating low-level units to some higher level programme. In the most
extreme cases, like biological organisms, every cell is defunctionalised
- turned off - except for that one specialised function that is allocated
to it by the organic totality. A 1iver cell, for example, only does one
thing. The preponderant part of its potential is deactivated in the interests
of some higherlevel unity. In a way, the more organised things get, the
less interesting their behaviour becomes. Ten billion amoebae will explore
more behavioural possibilities than ten billion hyena cells. ~ ~; ~So you're
not as keen on the idea of 'selforganisation' as are some thinkers? ~ ~;
~Organisation is suppression. Organisation involves 'distributed systems',
that is, populations the members of which are only lightly specialised
and which avoid self-organisation while still managing to be productive
and innovative, becoming parasitically inhabited by hierarchical and regularised
structures, or 'organisms'. These organisms might be biological creatures,
corporations or state systems. The history of life on this planet right
through to Microsoft is of the successive suppression of distributed, innovative
systems. ~ ~; ~Can you give me an example? ~ ~; ~Well, life begins when
autocatalytic chemical systems get captured and subjected to a set of rules
by RNA. When RNA gets complicated enough to start exhibiting various kinds
of lateral interference and experimental deviations of its own, it in turn
gets 'over-coded' by DNA. The crucial event in the whole history of the
planet is the point at which the earth's bacterial life system - in which
the behaviour of individual cells is still relatively unrestricted - gets
subjected to exterminatory gassing by oxygen-emitting, highly structured,
securo-maniac metazoan organisms. Many of the bacteria either disappear
or are captured as productive sub-components of highly organised, nucleated,
concentrational systems, which now dominate all life on the planet. ~ ~;
~What picture does this give us of evolution? ~ ~; ~The bacterial net being
successively suppressed by levels of organisation, tiers of control, that
have a tree-like structure. But that tree-like structure is not at all
inherent; it's actually produced by organisation. It's incredibly similar
to the relationship between corporations and markets, in the sense that
markets are potentially open-ended, distributed transaction systems which
end up subjected to regularisation, hieraTchica1 structuralisation, specialisation
and concentration by the corporate structures that superimpose themselves
upon them. ~ ~; ~Might the widespread use of computers and the Net challenge
these structures? ~ ~; ~The thing about the potentialities of massively
distributed computation capacity is that they allow productive initiative
to be dispersed to the lowest possible level in the system, rather than
simply being allotted by some central command core. Also, the PC creates
a fundamental break in the traditional structure of investment by being
both a piece of consumer electronics and a piece of productive apparatus.
But in spite of this, the old structures are being artificially maintained.
~ ~; ~How? ~ ~; ~Well, buying a personal computer is treated as productive
investment if it is done by a corporate entity and as a piece of personal
consumption if it is done by dis-integrated (sic] consumers. And presumably
this kind of trompe l'oeil is getting results, because the intersection
between software, broadcast media and telecommunications is, at the moment,
in an absolutely orgiastic state of capital concentration. And clearly
the key actors in this sector think that their strategies are based upon
some viable avenue of continued advantage - a continuation of the modernist
situation of economies of scale, if you like. Their picture is clearly
not one of dis-integration into small-scale horizontal agents. ~ ~; ~But
can't the Net itself help us overcome these illusions, thTough increasingly
universal access to knowledge and communication? ~ ~; ~Certainly the great
potential in the technical infrastructure of the Net lies with the telecoms
base rather than the broadcasting base. Capitalist and state organisations
have an absolutely immense investment in disabling the telecoms dynamics
of the forthcoming digital media system. But that doesn't mean that much
has yet been done with this telecoms infrastructure that is particularly
exciting. The more of it the better - the more that you have a multi-switched,
high-bandwidth, communications-oriented digital system rather than a one-to-many,
broadcast-oriented, media production-media consumption-oriented system,
the more chance there is of actually eliciting innovative behaviour out
of innovative systems. But I'd be very cynical with regard to the extent
to which we have seen any of that yet. ---------------- HYPErViRus Whatever
ultramodernity places under the dominion of signs postmodernity subverts
with virus. As culture migrates into partial-machines (lacking an autonomous
reproductive system) semiotics subsides into virotechnics. Yes No Yes No
Yes Yes No longer what does it mean? but how does it spread? Having no
proper substance, or sense beyond its re re re replication, yes no no usage
of virus is ever metaphorical. The word ‘virus’ is more re re virus. Postmodern
culture re re chatters-out virus virus virus virus virus virus virus virus
virus virus 011010010 ‘virus’ (viroductile, virogenic, immunosuppressor
and and or, meta-, or or and or hyper-) virus. 001. hypervirus eats the
end of history K-(coding for cyber)positive processes auto-intensify by
occurring. A cultural example is hype: products that AT AT trade on what
they will be in the future, vir virtual fashion on off, imminent technical
standards, self-fulfilling prophecies and and or and artificial destinies.
Anticipating a trend end end end ACC ACC accelerates it (which is itself
a re re recursive trend) Hyping collapses SF into CATA CATA catalytic tic
efficiency, re-routing tomorrow through what its prospect CT CT CT makes
today. Virohyping sweeps through the advertising industry. Everyone will
be doing it. Virus is parasitic replicator code: an asignifying sequence
of machinic data ATA ATA flow-break on/off 1/0 yang/yin intrinsically destined
for war. In place of mess message-content virodata is assembled bled from
asignifying materials with CATA catalytic (or positively disproportionate)
efficiency; intruder passcode, locational ZIP-code, pseudogenomic substitute
instructions, mutational junk (complex but latent segments), and garbage
(redundant scrapcpcrapcrapc rapcrap). Biovirus TA TA TA targets organisms,
hacking and reprogramming ATGACTTCAGT cellular DNA to produce more virus
virus virus virus virus virus virus virus. Its enzymic cut-and-paste recombinant
wetware-splicing crosses singularity when retroviral reverse-transcriptase
clicks in (enabling ontogenetic DNA-RNA circuitry and endocellular computation).
ATAGTA Ethnovirus targets brains Technovirus targets socioeconomic pro
pro production pro processes. Infovirus targets digital 0100100100010100computers
Hypervirus targets intelligent immunosecurity structures: yes yes no yes
no nomadically abstracting its processes from specific media (DNA, words,
symbolic models, bit-sequences), and operantly re-engineering itself. It
folds into itself, involutes, or plexes, by reprogramming corpuscular code
to reprogram reprogramming reprogramming reprogramming. ROM is melted into
recursive experimentation. Recording devices. Copiers. Faxes. Samplers.
K-stammer (((re)re)reruns) cross-cut by orphan drift. Repeat infection.
All hype hype hype hype hype hype hype hype hypervirus strains are plastic
and interoperative. INSERT. hyper-prefixing semiotic sectors TAG TAG TAG
tags them for transfer into abstract ACT ACT (nonlinear transcodable) machinic
systems, tuned to virtualities or hyperspeeds (futural currencies independent
of defuturalization). Hypermedia configure re re every implementation within
a specific medium or territory as a subfunction of extraterritorial processes.
Going (( ())) ( ) ( ) (( ) ) (( )) ( ) hyper dissolves being into ACT ACT
ACT activity; a material desubstantialisation on off on on off. Hyperprocesses
spread like Herakleitean fire re re re (although there are no analogies
or metaphors in hype hype hype hype hyperspace). Being CAG CAG cages flow
within memory. Functioning as re re real antiontology, viral amnesia machinically
realizes and dissolves biological cultural, and technical 010110100100
mnemic structures: chopping-up hierarchic-generational descendency, collapsing
phylogenetic tic frozen-code into ontogeny, and immanentizing the past
to operative current. Its competitive just-in-time innovations delete storage
CA CA capacity, flu flu flu fluidizing energetic and informational stocks
into and and or and and or orphan-vampire re re transversal 110111100010101010
vir vir virocommunication process, expressing a surplus value of code (content)
as xenoreplication-behaviour (and/or con(nective dis) junction). As war
increases in in in intelligence, it becomes softer. By trashing their hosts
crude viruses feedback negatively upon themselves, autolimiting their range
of re regenerative infiltration. Crazy vandals like Ebola CTGCTGCTGT (bodies
dissolved quickly into slime) aren’t ever going to make it big. General
principle for viral take-overs in the media: the more unsophisticated the
contagion, the bigger the splash (diversionary tactics excepted). CATGAAT
COPY. CUT. PASTE. Subtle viruses are slow, synergic, flexible and elusive.
They execute sensitive behavioural control that prolongs the life of the
biomachinic resources, maximizes opportunities for propagation, infiltrates
and disables hostile security systems, and feeds-back positive -+-++-+-++
in in in innovation technoscience. In the macroversion, a VR prey animal
hid in its enemy’s head. When hunting for hype hypervirus look ok ok ok
for its primary host species, which will be undergoing logistic behavioural
sophistication indexed by an explosive increase in communicative intensity,
population density, sexual disorganization, cultural promiscuity, and technical
sub sub subtilization (leading to neurogenomic feedback and fluidization
on off on off off on of all hard-wiring into into cybernetic fluxes). Any
plane planet net net 00011011010010010101011 hosting such an event is about
to flip over. CATA catastrophic OKOOKOK OK zero (0 ( or ((( ( )) (( ) )
( )) ) 0º)) K-virus and (RT) retroscripts (Kobe, Tokyo, Oklahoma (Koresh,
Koernke)). Apokalypse spread by the coke machine. Tomorrow’s news brews-up
in Korea, Kosovo… Climbing out of a recombination apparatus of TA TA TA
tape-recorders and cut-ups, hypervirus infected Burroughs in 1972, at the
cusp of K(ondratieff)-wave 9 (the threshold of postmodernity). It rapidly
reprocessed its target into an intelligenic no yes yes no no nova-war laboratory,
volatilizing the history of language into involutionary word-virus. Mutation
rat rat rat rat rates jump. Vector switches through Butler, Gibson, and
Cadigan fine-tune its synergic interexcitation, silt-up cybershift-inducing
K(uang)-potential, and trend-lock onto K-punk pulses with telematically-accelerating
neoreplicator plicator plicator contamination. ‘Looking for a hit of snowcrash?’
# As postmodern culture crosses to hypermania and ### ## # stop stop qo
stop go stop go go goes nova, it singularizes multiplicities cities cities
of invasively autoreplicating plexoweapon-systems (( ) ( ((( ) ((( ( ))
( )) ((( )(( ) ) ( ))))) ( ) ( ))) ) that are re re re re nothing beyond
their war AGA AGA against security. This is no longer a question on off
on of ideological representation, exogeneous political mobilization, theoretical
critique, ## # ### # or strategic orientation, but of decentralized cultural
diagrams functioning as immanent forces of antagonism. K-war derives its
sole coherence from the unity of its foe. RETURN. Ana/Cata. Switch cur((re)re)rent.
(() (( ))) O(r an)d( ). Ko( I Ching hexagram 49: Revolution (Molting (()))
leaves ( ) nothing i)ntact TACT TACT. ((( (( (( ) (( ))) (( ( )))
) Cyberserk repelting-slippage into dark-side ( (( ))) distributive ROM-scrambling
TACT tactics. )) ( (( ) ) ( ( ( ( ) Zero program.) ((( ))) (((( ) ( ))
( )) diskontent.net/k-punk.net/no%20future.html [[ ]] NO FUTURE [[1.343]
[[0]] The father's law: 'don't touch your mother.' The mother's law: 'don't
play in the tombs.' K codes for cybernetics. Bataille incinerates the soul,
and is impossible to endure. You either die or go somewhere else. Or both.
Clicking on the K-war icon Jacks you straight into hell. On all fours,
out of your face, mumbling implorIngly: 'let me be your lab animal.' You're
losing it. Collapse into now. Time-zero. You have been dumped into a heterogeneous
patchwork of criminal experiments converging upon decapitated social formations.
This is where base materialism intersects cyberpunk, FUCK TOMORROW scrawled
on the walls. Five candles thicken nocturnal space. Dimensionality warps.
Modernlty invented the future, but that's all over. In the current version
'progressive history' camouflages phylogenetic death-drive tactics, Kali-wave:
logistically accelerating condensation of virtual species extinction. Welcome
to the matricide laboratory. You want it so badly it's a slow scream in
your head, deleting ltself into bliss. Burnt meat dangling from the electrodes.
Crashed suicide fragments into occult impulses ... In the place of a way
forward they deliver a hypermedia product, telling you its about Georges
Bataille. You can't see the connection. Why the helicopters, artificial
body-parts, and manically dehumanized machine-music? There is some confusing
naterial on the cybernetics of vomiting. Obsessive reruns. Text decays
into the mutagenic fall-out from virtual thermocataclysm. Trying to to
make something out of Bataille never works. Or maybe it's the drugs. Cut
to poor quality late 50's recordings of Bataille in a TV studio discussing
negative feedback circuitries in social systems. The organization of sterilized
discharges slaves cumulative excitement to quasi-periodic cancellation
and reproduction. A vid-window in the corner of the screen morphs the catholic
church into a thermostat. Bataille curves eccentrically about the horror,
but when he gets close to smooth escalation he blows it. When the implants
go in things will be different. [[1]] Complexity is not difficulty, but
mess, toxic waste, genre disorder. Unlike the docile creature modernist
science demands, base matter twitches and spits, selfassembling neoverminous
swarms. It bites, and spreads disease. Turbular moan of digitally irresolvable
recyclones. Telecommercial contagions pulse through cybergothic switching
systems. Faceless horror. Supraterrestrial - 'solar' or 'general' - economics
bases itself in consumption: irreversible matter to energy conversion during
stellar atomic synthesis. As a closed system or whole individual the universe
is drawn towards the point attractor of entropy maximum: homogenization
into hiss. S = K log W. Cooking-through the frozen security codes you discover
that the universe is an iceberg tip jutting out or chaos, drenched in dark
rnatter- Downstream of starburn strange things can occur, emerging upon
a novum terrain of indeterministic, irreversible, and auto-delinearizing
processes. Open-systems or partial individuals. Cross behaviorial thresholds
which switch them into dissipators sifting matter-energy flows to select
against noise and engender local complexification, increasing heterogeneity,
production surplus differentiating excrement. Such siltings of machinically
disposable disequilibrium are immanently tensed against base-current, machine-efficiency
degree-zero, body without organs. Life is a problem in search of a solution,
added to protobiotic matter as a plane of variation, a continuous falling,
auto-escalating over-production crisis from the start. [[ ]] An animal
with the right to make promises enslaves the unanticipated to signs in
the past, caging time-lagged life within a script. The variably-scaled
instant of innovation is shackled to the historical temporality of inheritance,
obligation, and propositional thought, projecting future time as a persistent
dominion of the past (rigorously correllatlve with a repression of real
numbers). Now is delimited as a moment, and pluralized as linear succession.
Theopolitical false memory syndrome deifies reason, subordinating distributed
systems to serialization, unitary historical time, linear determination
from a pseudo-transcendent primordial element, and the dominion of the
word. Monocult gerontocrats launch their white-light demented onslaught
against amphiblan nomadism, smothering the earth in priests, cops, and
bureaucrats. Cultural eradication of the sacred Imprisonment within the
face. The socius cancerizes a head, cephallic concentration, rationalizing
itself into nuclear capital. K-insurgency parallel communication goes underground
into occulted spaces. In its geohistorically efficient - negative - sense,
protestantism exhaustively defines itsell by refusing the authority of
Rome, not only in principle, but in military fact. A sell-prolonging runaway
revolt against the Church was triggered at a date proximal to 1500, and
catholic unity began its haemorrhage into multiplicities strewn across
zero; capitalist terraprocess, net explosion, digital revolution, parallel
insurgency clambering from the dark-side of the brain. Oceanic navigation
and place-value calculation interexcite ln a spiral. What globalizes itself
in reality - rather than in doctrine - is the collapse ot Christendom positivized
into communicable social disequilibrium, dropping you through unfathomable
intensities of social decay. K-virus impact. Melted-out protestantism disorganizes
into voodoo, and drifts towards China. Western orgasmic delusion crushes
libidinal fluxes under punctual-hit teleology and its negative structuration,
defining desire as lacking in relation to a bioenergetic spasm that functions
as disintensifier. News programming chokes with radical Islam flaring-off
petro-revenues into the pure flame of jlhad. Metropolitan masculinity implodes.
Skinner-boxed males drag each other through dungeons drlpping wlth sperm,
out of touch with any release lnto K-guerrilla anticlimax. Rationalizing
patriarchy locks lnto a one-way rush to the end. Power sticks to the script,
and it immediately recognizes the necessity that at the end of history
modernlty vaporize into solar storms, termloal theopolltical sociality
coming apart into ragged bleeding madness, amongst digital audio machine-howls.
As you speed-up the industriallzation simulation you see it converge with
slow-motion butchery, choppig up the body into trade-format interchangeable
parts. The full labour-market cycle blurs into a meat-grinder. Does lust
eat anyone except in proximity to evil? When you ask Continuity whether
Bataille understood the capital-antichrist conjunction any better than
Weber she laughs coldly, and says: 'he ran out ol' yang, just about the
time the Hitler-trip caved in. Orgasm is impossible alter Auschwitz.' You
look perplexed. She merely adds a dismissive shrug, and the suggestion:
'defocus desire across the skin, where it can hurt security. It's war.'
The camera explores her crotch, and she wriggles about. 'You see, I am
God.' Blitz irnages of dead astronauts. Monetarization indexes a becoming-abstract
of matter, parallel to the plasticization of productive force, with prices
encoding distributed SF narratives. Tomorrow is already on sale, with postmodernity
as a soft-commodity, subverting the modernist subordination of intensification
to expansion, and switching accurnulation lnto continuous crisis (prolonged
criticality). What modernity defers and reserves as inexhausted historicity,
postmodernity accesses as efficient virtuality, with concomitant contract-time
implosion. Mass computer commoditization de-differentiates consumption
and investment, triggering cultural micro-engineering waves that dissociate
theopolitical action into machinic hybridities, amongst increasingly dysfunctional
defensive convulsions. Acephalization = schizophrenia: cutting-up capital
by way of bottom-up macrobacterial telecommerce, inducing corporate disintegration.
The doomed part of intensively virtualized techonomic apparatuses subverts
the fraying residues of anthropomorphic guidance. Control dissolves into
the impossible. [[2]] Anonymous excess takes life over the cliff, exceeding
socially utilizable tranegressions and homeostatic sacrifices. Matter goes
insane. You are led to a simulation of God as a hypermassive ROM security
construct at the end of the world. It is 201l and monocrat New Jerusalern
approaches climax, directing retrochronal counter-insurgency sweeps down
into the .jungle, where space-programrnes subside into the inertia of myth.
The ultimate dream ot anthropomorphic power hurtles towards its immaculate
conception, whilst the robot slaves of phallic order bleat adoration. Jesus
wants you for a meat-puppet. Is this ritual cannibalism or nano-engineering?
The old bastard is coming back. He's promised it. The war against God is
hot and soft: more fierce than anything humanly imaginable, but slicked
insidiously by intelligence. Body-counter runnlng. Savage metronomic pulse.
CNS baked and pulsing with cyberspace-virus. Motor-output feeding to technotrance-matrix.
Sobbing voltages. Desocialization waves desolate telecommercial space,
until impending human extinction becomes accessible as a dance-floor. What
is the scale of now? It isn't a matter of informing the mind, but of deprogramming
the body. Amongst the strobes, artificial cool, and inorganic attack beat,
dark-side K-war machinery resiliently persists, luring the forces of monopolism
down into free-fire zones of fatal intensity, where promiscuous anorgasmic
sexualities slide across tactile space, meandering fractally into wet electric
distributed conflicts continuous with their terminal consequences. Dropping
endlessly tracks the passage of evaporating subjectivity on the zero-degree
plane of neuroelectronic continuity. Loa prowl through the attic-spaces
ot inltelligence. Nothing is arriving unless it's already there. Pecocious
technihilo. Nocturnal ocean. Dark matter. Nightmare. Zero or time in-itself
is place-value consistent or magnitude neutral, executing an abstract scaling
function by inserting virtuality into digit sequences. It designates a
real, non-specific, cosmic body interswitching forbidden communications.
Simultaneously located through ruptured time. You had forgotten having
been in the the future. So this is how it feels to be a cyberian wet-weaponry
module, clotted out of cat-tensed nanotechnic predation. A relentless chant
clicks into the sonics package: kill, kill, kill, kill ... Bodily travelling-in-place,
with sense shorting-out through matricide scenarios into black tactilities,
wrecked motherhood, abortion, autism. An ineffectual refusal to be born,
connecting with death before its patriarchized ascent to the symbolic.
Aeschylus rather than Sophocles. Fermented-honey smell of corpses ripening
in the sun. The Bataille reconstruct is waiting for you in the bar. Calm
hallucinations paint Orestes over his features. Eyes blotted-out in nihilism,
lagoons of greenblackness re-running Kurtz at the end of the river. Skin
plastic-surgery taut. Smile like a butchering instrument gently stroking
your throat. To your vampiric sensitivities, he seems to smell of his mother's
blood, intolerable intimacy, and devastation. He passes you a tumbler of
mezcal. 'So, it's all over' you mumble weakly. He shrugs, emptying his
glass, and refilling it. Metal flexes beneath vatgrown skin. Hard .jungle
hacks through blue gloom. ------------------------------ http://www.ccru.demon.co.uk/archive/rinse.htm
s Cybernetic culture research unit e-mail abstract culture syzygy archive
timeline links news Fei Ch'ien Rinse Out sino-futurist under-currency Steve
Goodman 1. [11011] The Death of a Thousand Cuts is an encryption system
for 'cleansing' professed traitors of the Hung-Triads.2 'Cleansing' involves
draining every-drop of blood from the victims body through an intricately
timed numerical system of one thousand incisions. "In Chinese they say:
'Only the mighty 7 (which is Death) keeps 3 (which is Creation) pure!'
"3 2. [11010] The global war machine sets "its sights on a new type of
enemy, no longer another State, or even another regime, but the 'unspecified
enemy'. . .multiform, manoeuvring and omnipresent. . .the unassignable
material Saboteur or human Deserter assuming the most diverse forms."4
3. [11001] "All war is based on deception."2 4. [11000] Sinofuturism is
a darkside cartography of the turbulent rise of East Asia. It connects
seemingly heterogeneous elements onto the topology of planetary capitalism.
On digital maps sent back from Shaolin (a satellite entity orbiting somewhere
outside history) the modern Occident appears as irrigated through a modernity
of thermodynamic industrialist aggression. When the modern nation-state
bought its war machines, splitting a constitutive power into a double articulation
between political aims and militarised means, it adopted a state-centred
martial mode. But the regulation/prohibition of means has, for a long time,
been known as the best recipe for turbulence- control as a catalyst of
non-linearity. It was not surprising, therefore, when the means (through
unprecedented investment in constant and variable capital), in a flash,
emerged from the depths of the strata, dragging with it the intestines
that had held it in place, pulling the inside of the State onto the outside.
Thereby Clausewitz's formula was reversed, relegating component States
into mere conduits for a planetary military-cybernetic machine. Phase change.
Programmed catastrophe surfing on pure war. Turbulence simulation. A war
against positive feedback "quantizing it as amplification within an unvariable
metric. . .[and] . . .establishing a cybernetics of stability fortified
against the future."6 Postmodern control is based on the undecidable proposition
because, after the Absolute Peace of the Cold war, the enemy to the human
security system is a polytendrilled abomination (into which the state is
always becoming) of transnational trade, warlords, narco-syndicates and
millenial death cults. At this precise point, Sun Tzu rushes in from Shaolin,
with tactical cuts on the CNS of the Occidental megamachine as it mutates
into informational ice.7 5. [10111] "The modern Human Security System might
even have appeared with Wiener's subliminal insight that everything cyberpositive
is an enemy of mankind. Evolving out of a work on weaponry guidance systems,
his was an attempt to enslave cybernetics to a general defence technology
against alien invasion. Cybernetics was itself to be kept under control,
under a control that was itself not cybernetic. It was as if his thinking
were guided by a blind tropism of evasion, away from another, deeper, runaway
process: from a technics losing control and a communication with the outside
of man."8 6. [10110] Cut. When Wiener sanctifies Leibniz as the don of
cybernetics for animating the triadic geometricism of Spinoza's Ethics,
he wages war on the outside. Wiener's Cybernetics consisted of on-off electrical
switches, a Boolean algebra of classes based on the yes-no of inside or
outside a class. The crucial point of convergence was Leibniz's elucidation
of the binary counting system. When Leibniz had developed this he sent
some transcripts to his Jesuit correspondent in China, Bouvet. In return,
Bouvet sent Leibniz a copy of the I Ching thinking he would be amazed to
see that his binary system had been circulating for millennia. Leibniz
was so affected. So affected as to hallucinate it as evidence as some kind
of universalist triumph. He re-routes Creation through a neo-Confucianist
I Ching of binary arithmetic. "I think the substance of the ancient theology
of the Chinese is intact and, purged of additional errors, can be harnessed
to the great truths of Christian religion."9 It would seem therefore that
Leibniz organizes Spinoza's substance as Confucius codes the tao. Neo-Confucianism
becomes the mega-organism of the monadology, with God as the binary machine
of the yin-yang, while hiding a darkside cosmic cartography of the matrix,
Spinoza's substance or the machinic phylum. (It should be noted that Deleuze's
Leibniz is more resilient, a organicism taken to such psychedelic extremes
that it takes merely a nudge to open it out onto a topology of morals;
the monadology unfolds into the nomadology) 7. [10101] Shaolin takes the
I Ching for software assigning the number 3 as the immobile motor of the
encryption system. In the I Ching, the hexagramic production process involves
a chaotic flow of numbers. A trigram involves 2 machinic components; rigid,
unbroken lines; supple, broken lines. The rigid and broken lines correspond
to yang and yin respectively. Either of these lines can be lines of becoming
in that period of transition which makes it impossible to speak of the
yin-yan as dialectic. Trigrams or gua are composed of three lines stacked
upon each other. In piles of 3, the possible configurations are 23=8. Around
these lines function a 64 (82) piece system comprised of all the possible
permutations. A hexagram cartography maps the non-linear dynamics of exteriority;
self-organization in smooth space, the onset of turbulence and the folding
of stratification.10 As with a computer, the I Ching samples the actual
and runs it through a binary system- in materialist hyper-reality, simulation
is not a loss of the real (a postmodern idealist nihilism) but the intervention
of the virtual (reality) into the actual (reality). Reality is always a
machinic production. 8. [10100] Oriental and Occidental stratification
meet on the plane of organisation. According to Wiener, Leibniz "replaces
the pair of corresponding elements, mind and matter, by a continuum of
corresponding elements, the monads. While these are conceived after the
pattern of the soul, they include many instances which do not rise to the
degree of self-consciousness of full souls, and which form part of that
world which Descartes would have attributed to matter. Each of them lives
in its own closed universe, with a perfect causal chain from the creation
or from minus infinity in time to the indefinitely remote future; but closed
though they are, they correspond one to the other through the pre-established
harmony of God. Leibniz compares them to clocks which have which have been
wound up as to keep time together from the creation for all eternity. Unlike
humanly made clocks, they do not drift into asynchronism; but this is due
to the miraculously perfect workmanship of the creator."11 Like Hobbes'
Leviathan, where the Man-State is an organism (with the embryonic bourgeois
monetary capillary system as irrigated network of blood), Wiener points
out how in Leibniz's fractal monadology his "treatment of the living organism
[as]. . . really a plenum, wherein other living organisms, such as the
blood corpuscles, have their life" runs along that same plane; "scarcely
more than a philosophical anticipation of the cell theory, according to
which most of the animals and plants of moderate size and all those of
large dimensions are made up of units, cells, which have many if not all
the attributes of independent living organism. . .building bricks of organisms
of a higher stage."12 9. [10011] East-West co-stratification. Twined. Organisms
on every scale. For non-organic or machinic desire, exterior to any system
of transgression, law or lack, "PODS= Politically Organized Defensive
Systems. Modelled upon the polis, pods hierarchically delegate authority
through public institutions, family and self, seeking metaphorical sustenance
in the corpuscular fortifications of organisms and cells. The global human
security allergy to cyberrevolution consolidates itself in the New World
Order, or consummate macropod, inheriting all the resources of repression
as concrete collective history."13 10. [10010] "The last organs fall off
leper earth revealing sockets of mangled circuitry and coagulated blood
dispersing out through transcarcerative planomenal veins- drug rush, energy
rush, artillery through the arteries."14 "Heroin goes triadic, the veins
ice over and crack."15 Carried along by the breakbeats of a cosmic secret
numeracy, a whole darkside network of trade and relays from the Orient
infiltrate the Occident. An intricate system of cuts, sinofuturism is the
acupuncture of the West into planetary schizophrenia. "The transfer from
Empire of China to Empire of the Self is never ending."16 11. [10001] "Five
hundred years of modernity fades when the weaving of bamboo mats converges
with the manufacture of computer games in the streets of Bangkok, Taipei,
and Shanghai. The silicon links were already there."17 Cybernetics is not
just about technical machines. Information warfare is not just about cyberspace.
Its fundamental element is virtual reality, but an array of practical religions
have been surfing it for many millenia. This is perhaps why so much of
the 'new science' of complexity is ceaselessly converging with the cosmic
materialism of Voodoo, Tantrism, Zen and the Chinese martial arts, pointing
to non-Western influences on cybernetics, and the emergent lines of a future,
beyond the pale.18 Situated on this continuum, information warfare is stripped
down to a war of perceptions, hacking, jamming and stealth tactics in the
nervous system, whether it be planetary telecommercial networks or the
human organism. As Virilio puts it, "[w]eapons are tools not just of destruction
but also of perception- that is to say, stimulants that make themselves
felt through chemical, neurological processes in the sense organs and the
central nervous system, affecting human reactions and even the perceptual
identification and differentiation of objects."19 - It is in this respect
that narcotics can be considered as "a soft plague infecting the nervous
system of commodity cybernetics. . .A global capitalism fighting its own
drugs markets is a horror auto-toxicus, an auto-immune disease. Drug control
is the attempt by the human species to control the uncontrollable; control
escalation itself, tropisms programmed by the aliens. The human security
apparatuses experiment with drugs as weapons and tools, their soldiers
are stoned, energised, and anaesthetised on a range of prescribed and proscribed
pharmaceuticals. Their irregular forces are subsidised by narcotics revenue.
The war against drugs is a war on drugs."20 For Paul Virilio, Sun Tzu is
a rumbling undercurrent. In fact it is Sun Tzu who invents his notion of
Pure war, meditating in Shaolin for two and a half millenia waiting for
its actualisation in military cybernetics. The reason why The Art of War
by Sun Tzu is a tool-box for the 'cutting edge' of cybernetic capitalism,
from business to military strategists, is that it contains an abstract
flow chart or a fluid physics for survival 'far from equilibrium,' a tactics
for turbulence. Camouflage. Imperceptibility. Speed. "Be so subtle that
you are invisible. Be so Mysterious that you are intangible. Then you will
control your rivals' fate."21 12. [10000] "Neo China arrives from the future."22
Or has been arriving ever since it was by-passed by European militarized
capital, despite a much stronger degree of technological development. As
Manuel Da Landa puts it, "the Europe of 1494 was in a process of 'solidification,"
as if the different political entities that comprise Europe had existed
in a fluid form and were now crystallizing into a solid shape. In contrast
with rival empires (Chinese, Ottoman), which for reasons of geography and
religion had developed a mostly uniform 'crystal,' Europe never solidified
into one piece, but rather into a broken conglomerate with shifting boundaries.
As 'stress' built up along those cracks and fissures, it was relieved in
the form of armed conflict following the lines of least resistance. And
it was indeed the dynamical nature of the 'broken crystal' that allowed
Western Societies to surpass China and Islam in the competition to conquer
the world."23 13. [1111] Slow release protracted war run from Shaolin;
Shaolin is swarm catalyser, programming Triad syndicated film production
in Hong Kong, golden triangle poppy production, Kowloon chemical distillation
and encrypted planetary distribution networks rinsing out global finance
in San Franciscan Laundromats. Shaolin orchestration of the golden triangle
turns the Opium War against itself through those intricate incisions, routes
opened by numeric rhythms in continuous variation. Chinese narcotic syndicates
operate on the darkside of the guanxi rhizome of Chinese informal trading
markets. Secret cartography. Secret money. Secret composition. Unknown
chemicals to rewire the nervous systems for the 21st century. When all
the instruments of spying, deception are put in place and functioning smoothly,
the Lords of the Rim shall run the celestial web. As Sterling Seagrave
points out, sino-futurism is less an issue of the Chinese state in future
core conflict (not that this is not of massive importance to the trajectory
of the world system) but the vast overseas population which runs South
East Asia and produces internal souths in Occidental megalopian jungles.
24 14. [1110] Moebius. The encrypted plane is folded into a plane of organisation,
a twin-headed (69) multi-scalar capture complex generating closed circuits
or laminar turfs extorted by the state and micro-despotic syndicate protection
rackets. States, clans and gangs plugged together under the dark sun of
total annihilation. A symbiotics of markets and anti-markets, narco-capital
twists prohibition against itself through escalative waves of mass addiction
beyond control. What brings states into complementary relation with crime
syndicates is those kleptocratic elements which operate as an anti-market-
territorial protectionism and the exortion of rent. Protection is a mini-despotic
service, a vernacular welfarism founded on micro-monopolies of martial
potential. Turkish, Sicilian, Russian Mafia. Jamaican Gangstas. Mexican
and Colombian Cartels. Japanese Yakuza. Chinese Triads. "It all mixes in
the blood of the junky." 25 15. [1101] Deleuze & Guattari's non-linear
social 'evolution' attempts a radical break from evolution itself. "All
we need to do is combine these abstract evolutions to make all evolutionism
crumble."26 Running a tendential system from the territorialized and coded
earth to the decoding and deterritorializing planet, capitalism is seen
to retro-chronically rework the whole of history which is composed of a
co-existing continuum of rigid lines, broken lines and line of becoming,
with their corresponding modes of social segmentarity, regimes of signs,
modes of numeracy, and relation to speed (space-time). It constitutes not
historical resolution but a descent into the maelstrom, down the spiralling
slopes into the matrix. But neither does the New World Disorder become
the substitute telos of social transformation. "From the standpoint of
a whimsical evolutionism according to which packs are lower on the scale
and are superseded by the State or familial societies. On the contrary
there is a difference in nature. The organization of packs is entirely
different from that of families and states: they continually work them
within and trouble them from without, with other forms of content, other
forms of expression."27 16. [1100] The onset of turbulence. From molecular
streams seeping from the damms of Occidental ice to high bandwidth cables
plugged straight into the heart of the jungle, pumping alternating currents
of cocaine, opium, guns, cash and information into the warped strataplex
of the core. A planomenal jungle topology traced as a tropical geometry
of golden crescents and triangles feeding the internal south. "Narcotic
trade as guerrilla swarmachine. Becoming imperceptible, Becoming flea.
. .but territorial fleas. Dog fleas. Subterranean networks of molecular
distribution, deterritorializing the apparatus of statist commodity control,
but reterritorializing as micro-statist oedipal organized crime syndicates.
Statist and micro-statist Drug Enforcement Agencies in ostensible opposition,
White economies vs. Black markets, poles of mutually legitimately cybernetic
interaction operating territorial protectionism."28 The internal south
is not neo-primitive but does breed modes of collectivity of the band,
pack or gang type. In Capitalism & Schizophrenia, the primitive machine
is coded and territorialized on the earth. But its supple segmentarity,
its mechanisms put in place to ward off tendencies of stratification are
not confined to hunter-gathering societies. That is to say, its abstract
machine is not underdeveloped, disorganized or tied to the infancy of history.
The permutations of segmentarity are stretched out on a virtual continuum
of coexistence. The BWO is the sample bank out of which history extracts
its flows. It is the engine which makes the social flee all over the place.
And this is why Paul Virilio, in Speed & Politics, describes the function
of the police as 'highway patrol'29 , the regulation of escape velocities,
a tendential calculus manufacturing homeostasis. Axiomatics. The Unspecified
Enemy. Propositions Undecidable. On this continuum, banditry, piracy, gangs,
police and State war machines are merely differences in consistency, composition
and speed. This topology twists the traditional theory of organized crime
upside down. Instead of the pyramidal Mafia hierarchy run by the mini-despot
who orchestrates the tendrils of the black market with political corruption
and the threat of violence, the abstract machine of (dis)organised crime
works bottom up along the lines of viral contagion and auto-immune response.
Markets resonate in anti-markets. Rhizomes arborified by rhizomaniacs.
17. [1011] Chinese crime syndicates are not nomad war machines. There is
too much engagement in micro-fascism for that. But its blade politics generate
accidental effects crucially in distinction from the fascist morality of
the scalpel. Instead of the lancing of cancerous growths on the social
body, their incisions into the Occident accelerates trade through the protective
shell of the Western Bodily Organization. (WBO)30 But even in Shaolin the
mission was always ambivalent, assisting the Empire in fighting off the
invading Eleuth Mongols (and after World War II, against the Mao's guerrilla
swarmachine), while maintaining a secret organization always in tension
with the imperial bureaucracy. 18. [1010] An entwined composition oscillating
between mega and war machinic modes. Undoubtedly, it is the war machinic
threads that prove educational to sinofuturism. For Deleuze & Guattari,
the war machine is diagrammed by an occult numeracy which forges secret
pathways, imperceptible to the eye of power. Between the nomad war machine
and the apparatus of capture, "[t]he issue is not at all anarchy versus
organization, not even centralism versus decentralisation, but a calculus
or conception of the problems of nondenumerable sets, against the axiomatic
of denumerable sets."31 In opposition to the numbered number which measures
the movement of bodies in space, the numbering number lubricates collective
vectors through layers of social sedimentation. Nomad numeracy is an abstract
engine giving a distributed population a dynamic consistency- swarmachinic
encryption. For illegal syndicates and guerrilla groups morphological fluidity
are essential. In the "war machine and nomadic existence, the number is
no longer numbered, but becomes a Cipher, and it is this capacity that
it constitutes the 'esprit de corps' and invents the secret and its outgrowths
(strategy, espionage, war ruses, ambush, diplomacy etc."32 19. [1001] Triad
organisation engages a coding system at odds with that of the state, even
though this informal network can still be seen to criss-cross through the
higher echelons of an array of corrupt political elites. "The Numbering
Number, in other words, autonomous arithmetic organization. . .appear as
soon as one distributes something in space, instead of dividing up space
or distributing space itself. The number becomes a subject. The independence
of the number in relation to space is a result not of abstraction but of
the concrete nature of smooth space, which is occupied without being counted.
The number is no longer a means of counting but of moving."33 Cosmic secrecy
requires a multi-scalar encryption system, side-stepping Occidental evolution
to hot-link into the matrix. 20. [1000] Another economy of violence, another
cruelty, an encrypted mnemotechnics. Members are coded through initiation
ceremonies which draw new components of the collective assemblage into
the consistency of the Triad machinery. A secret semiotics of the body
allows undetected transfers of information, fluid lines of escape under
the camouflage of officialdom or legality. The secret handshake is a transversal
interlock, disengaging professional masks to conduct a darkside flow of
cash, information, software, electronics hardware, narcotics and weaponry.
"When the lodge father had accepted Piet's tea and Yung's salute, he stood
to attention placing his left hand slightly below his chest with thumb,
third and little fingers out- stretched. His index and fourth fingers were
bent under his palm. It was the secret sign which only a lodge father may
use. Yung Ming replied by putting his own hand on the identical portion
of his body, the thumb and the little finger outstretched and the other
three fingers kept tucked beneath the palm. He thereby returned the secret
sign of a branch leader. Then they bowed deeply to each other." 34 21.
[111] "To the Triads the number 3 is of central significance, both mathematically
and mystically: 3 multiplied by 3 (3 squared) equals 9; and any number
that adds up to 9 is divisible by 9. For example: 1,804,563, which reduces
to 9 by adding all the digits together (27) and then adding the result
together (2+7=9). To the Chinese, 3 is the mystical number denoting the
balance between Heaven, Earth and Man. . ."35 Triadic machine coding attributes
to each officer-rank a numerical code which begins with a four. Basic members
are known as SzeKau or 49s. Shan Chu is 489; the Fu Shan Chu, Heung Chu,
Sin Fung and Sheung Fa officers (all equal in rank) are 438; the Hung Kwan
is 426; Pak Tsz Sin is 415; Cho Hai is 432. Lodge leaders are termed 489s
and also 21s (4+8+9). 21 is also 3(number of creation) multiplied by 7
(both the number of death and lucky number); the coding encrypted into
the leader therefore inscribes the abstract machine or phase space of the
whole system in actuality. Also significant, the incense Master, 438, is
15 (4+3+8); 3 multiplied by 5, or creation and longevity/preservation maps
onto his function in lodge ritual as conductor of future-history. The internal
consistency of this numeracy is significant in that it offers a mode of
composition lubricating the movement of bodies in space, through jungles
to covert chemical/software factories to towering mega-corporations as
accountants, lawyers, stockbrokers, and most notably the police itself.
For as Martin Booth points out, "a Triad lodge rarely has a permanent location."36
Interpol once described the Triad structure as a several storied building
in which the inhabitants of one floor don't know where the stairs are to
the next floor."37 Despite global reach, the Triads vary from other syndicates
in that, while Hong Kong, especially after return to China, serves as catalytic
HQ, there is no overreaching administration. Globally, the three most powerful
factions are the 14K, the Sun Yee On and the Wo Hop To. Each lodge is for
the most part autonomous even from other 14K lodges for example. Difficult
to penetrate, subterranean imperceptibility has a long history for gangs
associated with the ancient martial arts. 22. [110] Opium was not a problem
for China until Occidental infiltration in the late 18th and 19th centuries38
. China had much that the West desired (tea, silk, cotton, spices and rice).
England, the major mercantile force of the period had to pay for goods
in silver bullion which fluctuated wildly in terms of price and supply.
Through East India Company opium injected through the skin, the direction
of trade reversed as the drug seeped into every pore. Meanwhile in Hong
Kong, all the major financial institutions which persist today were instituted
on the loot- Dent & Co., Butterfield & Swire, Hutchison & Co.
and Jardine, Mathesons & Co. As Martin Booth tells us, "all these firms
were founded on opium."39 The taxation on opium trade imposed by the Chinese
government generated the underground network subsequently ploughed by the
Triads who made almost as much money as the English did40 . "When in 1915,
the British ceased importing opium into China, the French continued to
traffic and began cultivating their own sources of supply in north-western
Vietnam and eastern Laos. French advisors made contact with the Meo and
Yao hill tribes, teaching them to grow harvest and market opium and thus
was the Golden Triangle born. . .The basis for all of this was of course
silver. During 1837, for example, the British sent 2.4 million kilograms
of opium to China. Each kilo of opium was worth five taels of silver thus,
approximately 10 million taels of silver were transmitted abroad in a single
year."41 23. [101] "In the latter half of the T'ang dynasty a growing tea
commerce between the south and the imperial capital began to underscore
the necessity for convenience to exchange. In response, a medium poetically
named 'flying money' (fei-ch'ien) evolved. Provincial governors maintained
'memorial offering courts' at the capital. Southern merchants paid the
money they made from the sale of goods at the capital to these courts,
which then used it to pay the tax quotas due from the Southern provinces
to the central government. In return, the courts issued the merchant with
a certificate. When the merchant returned home, he presented this certificate
to the provincial government and was paid an equivalent sum of money. Thus
did both the merchant and the local government avoid the risk and inconvenience
of carrying quantities of copper or silk." 42 24. [100] Fei ch'ien rinse
out. Extensive underground banking networks running through gold shops,
trading companies and money changers, where record keeping procedures are
virtually non-existant, and trade takes on the camouflage of coded chit
messages, simple telephone transfers and nested systems of coding encrypted
for travel in cyberspace. "One Hong Kong police official has stated that
he once seized a piece of paper with the picture of an elephant on it that
represented the collection receipt for $3 million at a Hong Kong gold shop."43
Hong Kong has neither central bank nor currency exchange controls thus
virtually eliminating the possibility of tracing funds entering or leaving
Hong Kong. It is a financial secrecy jurisdiction whereby disclosure of
data is illegal44 . Drug traffickers, like all good investors prefer to
diversify their assets and invest in legit business, concealing the hot
link between globetrotting funds and source crimes. A petri dish for breeding
commercial war machines. For example: "First cash generated from importations
to the US was moved back to Honk Kong, where it was held in a number of
bank accounts under false names of individuals or businesses. The bank
was BCCI. The approach appears simple. Cash, usually in amounts of approximately
US$1million, was taken to a money transmission company in the US. The most
often used was a company called Piano, which is known for its Colombian
cocaine connections. These amounts were then transferred to Bankers Trust
and simply transferred telegraphically to the various Hong Kong BCCI accounts,
one of which was sarcastically called Launderland." 45 "Overseas banks,
left with piles of small bills, then ship them back to the US in exchange
for larger bills. . .[the] consistent increase in US currency repatriated
from Hong Kong to the US from 1982 to the first half of 1984 strikingly
correlated with the steady increase in Southeast Asian heroin marketed
in the US from 1981 to 1983. This volume of smaller-denomination bills
exceeds the total volume of all currency transactions with any European
country. . .and the flow of US currency from the US to HK is minimal when
compared to the reverse flow of US currency from Hong Kong. . ."46 25.
[11] When the battleground is in cyberspace, deception is not merely about
masks, but functions in numerical operations flat with the terrain. Money
laundering and secret crime societies were always waiting for the vast
encryption system that constitutes the Internet. Planetary electronic networks
compress space-time into vectors of pure speed, emanating a protean geography
traversed by torrents of electron flow coded into zeros and ones. From
the darkside of the military-cybernetics complex, cyberspace is a vast
digital capital Laundromat facilitating short-circuits through the ice
of the world banking system of the New World Order. "Money communicates
with the primary process because of what it can melt, not what it can obtain."47
Welcome to the jungle. 26. [10] Euro-dread for the End of Man. As the CIA
hacked into the jungle, cutting its share of Golden Triangle opium (re-routing
it into US ghettos in the first hits of programmed catastrophe48 ), William
Burroughs simulates the meltdown of White Man Face as his colonial damms
collapse and floods wash away his entrenched encampment. "When I closed
my eyes I saw an Oriental face, the lips and mouth eaten away by disease.
The disease spread, melting the face into an ameboid mass in which the
eyes floated, dull, crustacean eyes. Slowly, a new face formed around the
eyes. A series of faces, hieroglyphs, distorted and leading to the final
place where the human road ends, where the human form can non longer contain
the crustacean horror that has grown inside it."49 Meltdown in your face.
27. [1] "He breathed in deeply and whispered, 'Finish it. Please.' As if
by response to his request, the executioner took the largest knife from
its case and with one swift stroke cut Lee's throat just below the strap.
The Death of a Thousand Cuts had taken exactly twenty-seven minutes."50
[0] White out. 1.See Cassidy, W. (1994) 'Fei- Ch'ien (flying money)- A
Study of Chinese Underground Banking', www.deltanet.com/users/wcassidy/index.html
and Rider, B. (1992) 'Fei Ch'ien Laundries- the Pursuit of Flying Money-
Pt.1', Journal of International Planning, August. 2.On the Chinese Criminal
Syndicates, the Triads see Boocock, J. (1991) 'Chasing the Other Dragon',
in Police Review, 21/6, 1260-61. Cheung, T-S. & Lau, C-C. (1981) 'A
Profile of Syndicate Corruption in the Police Force' in D.P.C. Lee(ed)
Corruption & Its Control in Hong Kong, HK: Chinese Uni. Of HK. Chin,
Ko-Lin. (1995) 'Triad Societies in Hong Kong', in Transnational Organized
Crime, Vol.1, No.1, Spring 47-64. Chu, Y.K. (1995) 'The Triad Threat to
Europe,' in Policing. Lee, G. (1996) 'Troubled By Triads', 12/1 in Police
Review, 16-17. Merritt, B. (1991) 'How the Hong Kong Police Fights the
Triads', 19/7, Vol.99, 1480-81. (1991) 'Beyond the Triad Myth', 26/7, Vol.99,
1532-1533. Nevin, C. 'Sharks In Chinatown', The Observer Magazine, 5/3,
37. Posner, G. (1989) 'Chasing the Triad Dragon', in The Observer Magazine,
5/3, 30. 3.121 in H. Arvay (1977) Triad 21 London: NEL. 4.422 in Deleuze,
G. & F. Guattari (1988) A Thousand Plateaus, London: Athlone. 5.[I
17] in Sun Tzu (1963) The Art of War (trans. S. Griffith) Oxford: Oxford
University Press. 6.Plant, S. & N. Land, 'Cyberpositive' in (1994)
M. Fuller(ed) Unnatural, London: Underground. 7. 8."After many centuries
of inspiring kingmakers, generals and spies, Sun's message was lost on
the nineteenth century's Clausewitz, Moltke, and the iron generals of Total
War, who were too fascinated by industrial technology, military hardware,
logistics, and sheer destructive power. . . Nevertheless, much of what
Clausewitz admired about Napoleon's use of paramilitary units, surprise
and evasion, probably came from the Corsican's early reading of the first
Western translation of Sun Tzu by JJ Amiot, a French Jesuit scholar in
China, which was in circulation in Paris when Napoleon was a young officer.
This preference for cleverness over brute force has earned Sun Tzu a prominent
place ever since on the bookshelves of diplomats, generals and corporate
planners. Filled with terse and provocative aphorisms, The Art of War is
as closely studied by Asian investors and businessmen today as it was earlier
by Mao Tse-tung Ho Chi-minh and Vo Nguyen Giap. The Japanese say 'Politics
is business, business is war.' If the market place is a battleground, requiring
strategy and tactics, Sun Tzu wrote the Bible." 45-46 in Seagrave, S. (1995)
Lords of the Rim, London: Bantam. 9.op cit. Plant & Land (1994). 10.73
in Leibniz, G.W. (1994) Writings on China, D.J. Cook & H. Rosemont
Jr.(eds) Illinois: Open Court Publishing. 11.In What Is Philosophy, Deleuze
& Guattari (perhaps spuriously) point to the limit of the I Ching's
relation to the plane of consistency by differentiating the philosophical
concept from the figure (which they argue lapses into a tracing of Nature)
"Hexagrams are combinations of continuous and discontinuous features deriving
from one another according to the levels of a spiral that figures the set
of moments through which a transcendent descends. . .In a sort of to-ing
and fro-ing, Chinese thought inscribes the diagrammatic movements of a
Nature-thought on the plane, intensive ordinates of these infinite movements,
with their components in continuous and discontinuous features. But correspondences
like these do not rule out there being a boundary, however difficult it
is to make out. This is because figures are projections on the plane, which
implies something vertical or transcendent. Concepts, on the other hand,
imply only neighbourhoods and connections on the horizon. Certainly, as
Francois Jullien has already shown in the case of Chinese thought, the
transcendent produces an 'absolutization of immanence' through projection."
89-93 (1993) London: Verso. This seems valid against Confucianism but highly
questionable in relation to a yin-positive Taoism and its sinofuturist
guerrilla offshoots. 12.41 in Wiener, N. (1965) Cybernetics, Camb. Massachusetts:
MIT Press. 13.ibid. 155. 14.471 in Land, N. (1993) 'Machinic Desire', in
Textual Practice 7(3): 471-82. 15.11 in Switch (1998) Flee Control, abstract
culture, swarm 3, Ccru. 16.ibid. 17.Victor Segalin quoted in Dean, K. &
B. Massumi (1992) First & Last Emperors, 153. 18.253 in Plant, S. (1997)
Zeros & Ones. London: Fourth Estate. 19.See for example, 675 Fernandez-Armesto,
F. (1995) Millennium, London: BCA, Capra, F. (1975) The Tao of Physics,
London: Fontana, and Briggs, J. & F.D. Peat (1989) Turbulent Mirror,
New York: Harper & Row. Breakbeat culture, Greg Tate, Ron Eglash, William
Gibson, Samuel Delany, Kodwo Eshun, Erik Davis and the Ccru have already
begun to map elements of an Afro-futurism. (see particularly the unpublished
thesis 'Mapping the Liminal', (1997) Jessica Edwards, Roehampton Institute
of London). Marshall McLuhan (eg. In War & Peace in the Global Village,
The Global Village and The Gutenburg Galaxy) also often alludes to the
Orientalising of the West through electronic circuitry but it remains unclear
whether this involves anything more than a crude superimposition of a digital-analogue
distinction onto west-east. 20.6 in Virilio, P. (1989) War and Cinema,
London: Verso. 21.Op cit., S. Plant & N. Land (1994). 22.Op cit., (1963)
Sun Tzu [VI 9]. 23.1 in Land, N. (1997) Meltdown, abstract culture swarm
1, issue 1, Ccru. 24.22 in Da Landa, M. (1991) War In the Age of Intelligent
Machines, NY: Zone. 25.Op cit., S. Seagrave (1995). 26.op cit., Switch
1998 4. 27.Op cit., Deleuze & Guattari 1988 430. 28.Ibid. 242. 29.Op
cit., Switch 1998 4. 30.14 in Virilio, P. (1986) Speed & Politics,
NY: Semiotexte. 31.see Carlyle, A. (1997) Amortal Kombat, abstract culture,
swarm 2, issue 7. 32.Op cit., Deleuze & Guattari 1988 471. 33.Ibid.
390. 34.Ibid. 389. 35.Op cit., Arvay 1978 32. 36.8 in Booth, M. (1993)
The Triads, London: Harper Collins. On the schizotectonics of digital reduction,
geo-cosmic encryption and Plutonism see D.C. Barker (1997) What Counts
As Human, Kingsport (Mass): Kingsport College Press. 37.Op cit., Booth
1993 35. 38.45 in Sterling, C. (1994) Thieves' World, London: . 39.see
The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes, (1960) A. Waley, London: Unwin Bros.
Ltd. Karl Marx, in his articles for the New York Daily Tribune from 1853-1860
describes how the second opium war was the decisive event which opened
up China to Western civilization, ending with the capture of Peking, the
legalization of the opium traffic and the imposition of conditions which
laid the foundations of later imperialism. In this important journalism,
Marx (despite the Hegelian entrapment into a dialectical vision of the
unfolding of European history) stakes his claim as early prophet of sinofuturism;
"It may seem a very strange, and a very paradoxical assertion that the
next uprising of the people of Europe, and their next movement for republican
freedom and economy of Government, may depend more probably on what is
now passing in the Celestial Empire- the very opposite of Europe- than
on any other political cause that now exists- more even than on the menaces
of Russia and the consequent likelihood of a general European war. But
yet it is no paradox, as all may understand by attentively considering
the circumstances of the case." N.Y.D.T., June 14, 1853, 1 in Marx on China,
(1951) Lawrence & Wishart. 40.Op cit., Booth 1990 47. 41.Overthrow
the Ch'ing and Restore the M'ing. "While the Imperial army was occupied
with the Taiping rebels, the Triads were busy massing an army in the south.
They captured the port of Amoy and the important regional centre of Shanghai.
They also laid siege to Canton and Kweilin: but surprisingly they did not
consolidate these gains and in spite of their successes failed to pose
a serious threat to the Ch'ing throne. Why the Triads did not take advantage
of the situation and press home their gains remains a puzzle. Perhaps they
had lost the political will to do so, because by this time their criminal
interests had become extensive, involving the cultivation and sale of opium
outside the registered- and taxed- government network." Ibid. 12. 42.Op
cit., Cassidy 1994 7-8. 43.ibid. 5. 44.29 in Gaylord, M.S. (1990) 'The
Chinese Laundry: International Drug Trafficking & Hong Kong's Banking
Industry' in Contemporary Crises 14: 23-37. Contrary to popular opinion,
the chit system does not originate through Chinese trading. "Chits are
a colonial invention. The word 'chit' is itself the diminutive of 'chitty',
a word of Anglo-Indian origin borrowed from the Hindi Chitthi, meaning
a mark. From about the late seventeenth century the word crept into English
usage as meaning a note, pass or certificate given to a servant. The chitty
came to China in the 19th century by way of British custom. Foreign residents
in the treaty ports found handling strings of Chinese cash or silver ingots
a major inconvenience. In order to eliminate this inconvenience a system
was devised whereby; 'the salary of foreign employees was paid by check
drawn on the Chinese compradore, who then held the funds against which
the employees wrote 'chits'. . .memoranda acknowledged debts for retail
transactions. These were accepted by the shopkeeper and passed for collection
to the firms compradore." Op cit., Cassidy. 45.Ibid. 46.381 in Dobinson,
I. (1993) 'Pinning a Tail on the Dragon: The Chinese & the International
Heroin Trade.' Crime & Delinquency, Vol. 39, No.3, July 373-381. 47.Op
cit., Gaylord 1990 27. 48.Op cit., Land 1993 480. 49.McCoy, A. (1991) The
Politics of Heroin, NY: Lawrence Hill Books. Here, McCoy gives a massive
and comprehensive chronicle of CIA complicity in the global drug trade.
50.133 in W. Burroughs, Junky. 51.Op.cit. Arvay 1977 123. site design by
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