Rob Lucas' "Sleep-Walker's Enquiry"

SLEEP-WALKER'S ENQUIRY
[by ROB LUCAS, expanding his "Dreaming in Code" essay]

This morning, floating through that state between sleep and consciousness where you can become aware of the content of your dreams immediately before waking, I realised that I was dreaming in code again. This has been occurring on and off for the past few weeks — in fact, most times I have become aware of the content of my unconscious mind’s meanderings, it has been something abstractly connected with my job. I remember hearing the sound of the call centre in my ears as I would drift in and out of sleep when that was my job, and I remember stories from friends of doing an extra shift between going to sleep and waking — of the repetitive beeps of a supermarket checkout counter punctuating the night. But dreaming about your job is one thing; dreaming inside the logic of your job is quite another. Of course it is unfortunate if one’s unconscious mind can find nothing better to do than return to a mundane job and carry on working, or if one’s senses seem stamped with the lingering impression of a day’s work. But in the kind of dream that I have been having the very movement of my mind is transformed: it has become that of my job. It is as if the habitual, repetitive thought patterns, and the particular logic which I employ when going about my job are becoming hardwired; are becoming the default logic that I think with. This is somewhat unnerving.

The closest thing that I can think of to this experience is that of someone rapidly becoming acquainted with a new language, and reaching that point at which dreams and the rambling thoughts of the semi-conscious mind start to occur in that language. Here too it is a new kind of “logic” that the mind is assuming — that of the structures and patterns of a language, and here too the mind is able to scan across its own processes with a pseudo-objectivity and determine the nature of their logic as something particular — something which does not yet possess the whole mind, but inhabits it and takes command of its resources. One never really gains this kind of perspective on thoughts in one’s own language; one never normally develops an awareness of the particularity of one’s own thought. But right now I experience it as a clear split: that between the work-logic-me, and the spectator on that me.

***
I work in IT. Specifically I am a web developer. That means I write potentially all the original code that goes into a website: markup like HTML and XML, the visual styling, the functional “logic” that happens behind the scenes and in your web browser, and the scripts that keep a site running on a web server. I work in a small company, in which I am the main web developer, working alongside one other who also deals with the graphical side. My line manager is the IT manager who, apart from programming himself, takes a lead in organising how our projects come together. Above him are the CEOs, who are a couple of oddball born-again Christians with a serious work ethic. They asked me about my religion in my interview, and set alarm bells ringing straight away. My response was that I didn’t see religion as mere superstition like “banal atheism” does, but that I see it as the real expression of a particular life situation, with its own meaningful content. I could have added that it is the “heart of a heartless world”, but I seemed to have convinced them by that stage that I was a good-ish guy, if not one of them.

After I had worked here for a while the stories started emerging: one of the CEOs claims to be an ex-gangster who saw “the living God” in a bolt-of-lightning revelation when he was contemplating a new scam that involved setting up a fake religion. The other was a successful businesswoman around the dot-com boom, but she fell into a crisis when the father of her child left her, and was converted in a low moment by her new partner — the other CEO. In drunken ramblings at the Christmas do, they have spoken emotively of “the living God”, with that “I was blind but now I can see” way of thinking that is the hallmark of born-agains. They used to try to put all new staff through “The Alpha Course” — a cross-denominational charismatically-inflected project to convert people to Christianity, and to organise monthly “God days” in which all staff would get to take the day off work on the condition that they spend it taking tea with a preacher. Unsurprisingly, many members of staff skipped these days — actually preferring to work than go through some kind of attempted conversion.

They had eased off a little by the time I started — someone had apparently told them that they were at legal risk if they continued to use their business as a missionary organisation. But God still comes to work on a regular basis — intervening to turn the annual business forecast into prophecy, or melding the fortunes of the company with providence. The most notable example for me is the time when I fixed a problem with the speed of our websites. The company had been held up for a while with an appallingly slow performance on each of the many small websites it runs, and people had been searching around for an answer. As long as our performance was that bad, we would’ve only been able to deal with a very limited volume of traffic, and thus a similarly limited number of potential customers. When I figured out the solution the bosses were clearly very happy: suddenly the amount of potential customers we could serve on each site was multiplied by about 30. But rather than thanking me directly, the female CEO simply said that I couldn’t take all of the credit as she’d been praying for better site performance, and we thus had to give God his due. In response I stammered out some over-hasty and awkward attempt at a gag, which trailed into a meaningless murmur.

In an everyday sense, probably the worst part of this job is that I have to deal with the paranoia that comes from knowing that your bosses are insane to the extent that they may not always act in the company’s interest: at least you know where you are with a capitalist who acts with the straightforward rationality of calculated self-interest. When the “living God” takes precedence in deciding company policy, and when stories abound of random and reckless sackings such as that of an employee fired because his wife disagreed with the CEOs’ attitudes towards homosexuality, the sense of a guillotine poised over one’s neck never quite goes away. My line manager is a freakish bipolar who bounces around the office like a well-oiled space hopper one day, and behaves like the drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket the next. But he is decent enough, and easy to deal with once you get to know the cycle.

***
One of the most notable characteristics of the “politics” of this type of job is another kind of bipolarity — the split and antagonism between two poles: the business pole and the technical. The techies always feel that business are making arbitrary decisions based on insufficient knowledge of the way that things really work; that things could be done so much better if only we who understand were left to do it ourselves. Business always feel that the techies are being sticklers, pedants, needlessly and pathologically recalcitrant. Whilst business wishes it could just take flight into the ether, and rid itself of the recalcitrance of its technical staff, the technical staff wish that business would just leave them alone to get the job done properly: that the recalcitrance is that of the real world and its demands. In some ways this makes it easier to deal with the immediate people that I work with: since contact with the business side is mostly supposed to be mediated through a specific “project manager”, I primarily deal with those on my side of the great divide, so it is even possible to develop a certain “us against them” attitude with my line manager, and to hide behind the formal mediations when the shit hits the fan.

This side of the divide we live partially in the worldview of productive capital: business and its needs appear as a parasitic externality imposed upon the real functioning of our great use-value producing enterprise. This side of the divide, we are also strangely tied to a certain normativity; not just that of doing the job right in a technical sense, but also that of thinking in terms of provision of real services, of user experiences, and of encouraging the free flow of information. This sometimes spills over into outright conflict with business: where business will be advocating some torturing of language and truth to try to present “the product”, the techies will try to bend the rod back towards honesty, decency, and transparency. “What goes around comes around” seems to be more or less the prevalent attitude in the world of web development in the era after “Web 2.0”: provide the services for free or cheap, give away the information, open everything up, be decent, and hope that somehow the money will flow in. If business acts with the mind of money capital, encountering the world as a recalcitrance or friction from which it longs to be free, and if a tendency to try to sell snake oil can follow from that, in the strange world where technical pride opposes itself to capital as capital’s own developed super-ego, use-value rules with a pristine conscience, everything is “sanity checked” (to use the terminology of my boss), and the aggregation of value appears as an accidental aside.

I am then, under no illusions that the antagonism which inhabits this company provides any ground for romantic revolutionary hopes. The solidarity that we develop against business, apart from providing us with respite and shelter from individualised victimisation, provides a “sanity check” for the company itself. Indeed, the company is well aware of this situation, and this is more or less acknowledged in the creation of a “project manager” role which is explicitly intended for the management of relations between the two sides. The contradiction between technical staff and business is a productive one for capital: the imperative to valorise prevents the techies from going off too far into their esoteric concerns, whilst the basic need for realism is enforced reciprocally upon business by the techies as they insist on the necessity of a more or less “scientific” way of working.

There is little space left in this relation for a wilful “refusal of work”: with the technical, individualised, and project-centred character of the role, absenteeism will only amount to self-punishment where work that is not done now must be done at some point later, under greater stress. Apart from that, there is the heavy interpersonal pressure that comes with the role: since a majority of the work is “collaborative” in a loose sense, heel-dragging or absenteeism necessarily involves a sense of guilt towards the technical workers in general. Whilst I used to consider previous jobs as crap places to go to with a hangover, I now find that I must moderate my social life in order not to make working life a misery. Sabotage also, is hardly on the cards, not because of some alleged “pride” which comes with being a skilled worker, but because of the nature of the product that I am providing: whilst sabotage on a production line may be a rational technique, where one’s work resembles more that of the artisan, to sabotage would be to make one’s own life harder. One hears of freelancers and contractors who intentionally write unmaintainable and unmanageable “spaghetti code” in order to keep themselves in jobs. This technique may make sense where jobs rely heavily on particular individuals, but where one works in a typical contemporary development team that employs such group-focused and feedback-centred IT management methodologies as “agile” and “extreme” programming, and where “ownership” of a project is always collective, high-quality, clearly readable code has a normative priority that goes beyond whatever simple feelings one might have about doing one’s job well.

Of course, there is that banal level on which I drag myself reluctantly out of bed, strike off as early as I can, and push my luck in terms of punctuality; on which I try to make work time “my time” as much as possible by listening to my iPod while working, sneaking bits of reading time into my working day, or having discreet conversations with friends over the net. This sort of thing is the real fodder of worker’s enquiry. But the bottom-line recalcitrance here is simply that. It is on the same kind of level as the recalcitrance of the human body to work pressure: capital has never been able to make people work a regular 24 hour day — or even close — and people will always test the permissible limits of their own working day. Such is the fundamental logic of the capital-labour relation, and it does not take the pseudo-sociology of a worker’s enquiry to uncover it. Such actions only ever take place in the framework of what is permissible in a given job and, indeed, are defined by this framework. The apparent insubordination of my frequent lateness would soon turn to naught if it threatened my livelihood. And the attendant social pressures that come with this job are such that whatever time I can “claim back” through slack behaviour is more than made up for when the deadline approaches on a project and I work unpaid extra hours into the evening or start work in the middle of the night to fix servers when nobody is using them.

It is only when sickness comes, and I am rendered involuntarily incapable of work, that I really regain any extra time “for myself”. It is a strange thing to rejoice at the onset of the flu with the thought that, in the haze of convalescence, one may finally be able to catch up on a few things that have been pushed aside by work. Here illness indeed appears a “weapon”, but one that fights its own battle, not wielded by the erstwhile aggressor. Yet I wonder sometimes whether this sickness itself can be seen as merely pathological; a contingency imposed upon the body from without. The illness that comes sometimes feels almost willed — a holiday that the body demands for itself. Perhaps there is a continuity between “genuine” illness and the “man-flu” that a matronly temping agent once accused me of when I wilfully ducked out of work for a week on hammy claims to terrible sickness. It is at least certain that if sickness is all that we have, there is little hope here for meaningful “resistance.”

***
If then, worker’s enquiry is about unearthing a secret history of micro-rebellions, exposing the possibilities for struggle in the fine grain of lived experience, and in the process, bringing consciousness of this to oneself as well as other workers, this is worker’s enquiry in the cynical mode. We “struggle”. We are recalcitrant. But as techies against business our struggle and our recalcitrance are integral to the movement of capital, and as workers against capital our struggle has absolutely no horizon and, indeed, is barely struggle at all. Our day-to-day interest as workers is, in the most part, practically aligned with that of this particular capital. If programmers are a vanguard in the enshrinement of use-value, of technological libertarianism, of collaborative work, of moralistic “best-practices”, of the freedom of information, it is because all of these things are posited as necessary in the movement of capital. The systematic normativity with which our working practice is shot through is merely a universalisation of capital’s own logic.

Just as social capital posits its own constraint in the form of the state in order to not destroy itself through the rapacious self-interest of each individual capital, after an early period of ugly coding due to the fragmentation of the internet into a babel of different platforms, browsers and languages, a consensus formed in the development world that “standards” were important. Central to these standards is an idea of universalism: anything that adheres to these standards should work and be supported. If you don’t adhere to these standards, you are asking for trouble, and it is your own fault if you find yourself pissing your capital away up a technological back-ally. Microsoft became a pariah due to their continual contempt for these standards, and their penchant for developing proprietary annexes on the great public space of the net. Developers began to proudly sport web standards badges on their personal sites, and to become vocal advocates of technologies like Mozilla’s “Firefox” which, apart from the fact that it is “open source”, always beat Internet Explorer hands-down in terms of standards-compliance. Standards became enshrined in the moral universe of the developer, even above open source. To adhere to standards is to take the standpoint of a moral absolute, whilst to diverge from them is a graceless fall into the particularistic interests of specific groups. The universalisability of working practices became the particular imperative of informational capital; a duty to the “invisible church” of the internet.

***
Whilst some of these traits that come with the particularly collective character of work do not occur in the same way for the freelancer, “being your own boss” tends to amount literally to imposing upon oneself what can otherwise be left to others. I have worked freelance a little before this job, and also in my spare time whilst doing this job, and the very thought of such work now causes my soul to whither a little. In freelancing, one can easily end up working uncountable hours, fiddling with projects in one’s “own” time, with work colonising life in general due to the inevitable tendency to fail to self-enforce the work/life separation that at least guarantees us a fleeting escape from the lived experience of alienated labour. At least, when I walk out of the office I enter the world of non-work.

Indeed, the hardened work/life separation of the Mon-Fri 9-5 worker looms increasingly large in the totality of my experience. Whilst Sunday is a gradual sinking into the harsh knowledge that the return to work approaches and a sometimes dragging of the dregs of the weekend into the wee small hours of the morning, Friday evening is the opening of a gaping chasm of unquenchable desire, and the desperate chasing after satisfaction whose ultimate logic is also that of boozey self-annihilation. I become increasingly a hedonistic caricature of myself, inveighing against others to party harder, longer, and blowing much of my free time away in a fractured, hungover condition. This is the desiring state of the old fashioned rock’n’roller: the beyond of work as a state of pure transcendent desire and consumption, the nothingness of a pure abstract pleasure beyond the mere reproduction of labour-power. The refusal to merely reproduce ourselves as workers coupled to a desire to annihilate ourselves as humans. This is what the Stooges’ “1970” means.

***
But when I’m lying in that splintered early morning consciousness the night after partying, slipping in and out of dreams, and as the previous night’s fleeting attempt at liberation recedes, I often find that I am dreaming in code. It can be one of various kinds of code — any of those that I work with. A sequence will pop into my head and rattle around, unfolding itself as it goes, like a snatch of melody or conversation repeating itself in your ears. Much of the time, if I was conscious enough to re-examine it, it’d probably be nonsense: I have enough difficulty dealing with the stuff when I’m awake, and I suspect that my unconscious mind would fare little better. But sometimes it is meaningful.

One morning recently I awoke with the thought of a bug in some code that I had written — a bug which I had not previously realised was there. My sleeping mind had been examining a week’s work, and had stumbled upon an inconsistency. Since I am a thought-worker, and since the identification and solution of such problems is the major aspect of my job, it is not that fantastical to say that I have been performing actual labour in my sleep. This is not the magical fecundity of some generalised creative power, churning out “value” somehow socially, beyond and ontologically before the labour process. It is actual work for capital, indistinguishable in character from that which I perform in my working day, but occurring in my sleeping mind. Suddenly the nightmarish idea of some new kind of subsumption — one that involves a transformation of the very structures of consciousness — begins to look meaningful. Indeed, I find that standard paths of thought seem increasingly burned into my mind: the momentary recognition that there is a problem with something prompts a fleeting consideration of which bit of code that problem lies in, before I consciously jolt my mind out of code-world and into the recognition that “bugfixing” does not solve all problems. Comical as it sounds, there is something terrifying here.

Beyond the specific syntax of a language, isn’t it a particular logic, or way of operating that is brought into play when one thinks in this way? It is one that I suspect is not neutral: the abstract, instrumental logic of high-tech capitalism. A logic of discrete processes, operations, resources. A logic tied to particular “ontologies”: the objects, classes, and instances of “object-oriented programming”, the entities of markup languages like HTML. This is the logic which increasingly inhabits my thought. And when thought becomes a mode of activity that is productive for capital — the work for which one is actually paid — when that mode of activity becomes a habit of mind that springs into motion “as if by love possessed”, independent of one’s willed, intentional exertion, doesn’t this prompt us to wonder whether the worker here is entirely the bourgeois subject that capital always summoned to the marketplace: whether the subject of this labour process is the centred individual who would set about making his own world if it were not for the alienating, abstractive power of value? When I find myself observing myself sleep-working, I observe myself acting in an alienated way, thinking in a manner that is foreign to me, working outside of the formal labour process through the mere spontaneous act of thought. Who is to say that the overcoming of this “alienation” will not be that language taking its place as mother-tongue: that alienation will not entirely swallow that which it alienates?

If the workplace here is the forlorn site, no longer of that exteriority of the worker in which it is meaningful and possible to commit daily acts of insubordination, to develop a sense of a latent “autonomy” posited in the very exteriority of the worker to the process of production, but of a productive antagonism in which technical workers give capital its “sanity check” and in which recalcitrance is merely that of the bodiliness of these materials through which capital flows; and if labour becomes a mere habit of thought that can occur at any time — even in sleep — what hope is there here for the revolutionary overcoming of capitalism? What does our revolutionary horizon look like? It must surely appear foolish to place any hope — at least in an immediate sense — in the nature of this mental work and its products, in the internet or in “immaterial labour”

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

P.S. While that image accompanying this entry does seem hyperbolic, for any "knowledge worker" cannot be equated with a girl toiling in a brickyard in India, a mother in Aleppo, or a prisoner in Lhasa all of whom face conditions of debt/slavery, the grip of our work over our self-image appears to overwhelm many of us. Increasingly, Marx's theory of alienation between our identity and what we do to sustain ourselves daily grows as the divisions between work and the rest of our life tempt to free us (telecommuting at least for privileged First World situations) or trap us (checking our work e-mail before we sleep). Managers and software seek to enter a realm where even sleep might be monetized.

I share this article for educational purposes under fair use to supplement my own exploration of this topic. Lucas' essay "Dreaming in Code" NLR 62 (Mar-April 2010) expanded and appeared anonymously as above as "Sleep-Walker's Enquiry" at EndNotes #2. Thanks to Liam O'Rourke for the NLR contents, cited in my 8/27/15 review in Spectrum Culture of The Mythology of Work by Peter Fleming. See Recomposition for workers' accounts of sleep + work and a brief comparision to Lucas's article by "JF" reviewing Recomposition's anthology Lines of Work at Unity + Struggle (4-23-14). 

Surplus Labor + me

Judy Cox, explaining Marx's theory in International Socialism (Summer 1998), a SWP magazine, concludes "As alienation is rooted in capitalist society, only the collective struggle against that society carries the potential to eradicate alienation, to bring our vast, developing powers under our conscious control and reinstitute work as the central aspect of life." I write this on Labor Day.

I don't want waged work to be my life's core. Anarchists encourage us to rethink this learned dependence. Mutual aid, voluntary organization, no demands to serve supervisors for corporate gain certainly appeal to my instinct. I want to produce creative work that I could exchange for others' goods and services, rather than a capitalist regime. But few of us "mature" folks have the stomach for dumpster diving or the gumption for petty theft. As I spend so much time and effort at my monitored posts, online and onsite, I reflect on how my occupation incorporates surveillance and management techniques that, in Marx's era, were the domain of the factory (or the prison as Foucault reminded us) rather than higher education. I am not idealizing the dispiriting system that started with Gradgrind, the dissertation and the professoriate. Still, earlier decades last century afforded some space for liberal arts, not all STEM. With digital data, a lurch has accelerated since Cox wrote this. The union where I work was "made redundant" before I was hired. This was a topic nobody confided in to me; I sensed, sub rosa, PTSD.

Lukacs proved as prescient about this loss of limited liberty as higher levels of the workplace became more standardized. In History and Class Consciousness, he pinned down the metamorphosis: "In consequence of the rationalisation of the work-process the human qualities and idiosyncrasies of the worker appear increasingly as mere sources of error when contrasted with these abstract special laws functioning according to rational predictions. Neither objectively nor in his relation to his work does man appear as the authentic master of this process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system. He finds it already pre-existing and self-sufficient, it functions independently of him and he has to conform to its laws whether he likes it or not.^34"

Cox cites Harry Braverman's 1974 Labor and Monopoly Capital to document this deskilling of white collar jobs and to a situation where managers have a monopoly of control over the production process: 'The unity of thought and action, conception and execution, hand and mind, which capitalism threatened from it beginnings, is now attacked by a systematic dissolution employing all the resources of science and the various engineering disciplines based upon it'.³² Conditions of work, from the length of the working day to the space we occupy, are predetermined: 'The entire work operation, down to its smallest motion, is conceptualised by the management and engineering staff, laid out, measured, fitted with training and performance standards - all entirely in advance'.^33"

This control increases, as Edward Snowden warns. “I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded.” — “Edward Snowden: ‘The US government will say I aided our enemies,’” July 8, 2013

“A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought. And that’s a problem because privacy matters; privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.” “Snowden Sends Christmas Message To USA,” Dec. 25, 2013. (More quotes here.)

Certainly this (de-)evolution has long been charted. Reading Marxist analyses of how my workplace has altered over the past generation, their reports dovetail with Peter Fleming's 2015 study. This London-based professor of business and society plots in The Mythology of Work, in his apt subtitle, "How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself." But where Fleming seems to depart from the Marxian critique may be in his updated critique of neo-liberal economics and management. Diverging from such as Cox who wishes to restore work as the ground for our purpose, only under our control, Fleming cautions us against embracing those who make work's "impudent needlessness" rather our "basilar necessity" out of "moral rectitude." (22) He also reminds us that "anti-work" arguments based on how the work day is stretched out to eight hours when we can do our task, earn enough for our needs, and go home in a fraction of that day will not satisfy today's capitalists. They don't present us with "finite tasks" to be checked off at our own pace. They offer jobs with "forever multiplying demands." (8) Not for only productivity and profit but one's "display" of "protracted submission" to work's ritual results. Surplus toil increases when the phone and P.C. may call us in at any moment. We are human capital, so managerial emphasis weighs accordingly on not the adjective but the noun. Fleming accounts for why meetings proliferate and bosses summon us to be seen, power plus profit.

Unfortunately, as my review elaborates, Fleming offers solutions as distant as those of some in my current reading of left-libertarians. That is, I agree with and I aspire to many of them, but as my duty is to pay bills, to keep my family fed, sheltered, and schooled, escaping tonight to fulfill my bliss is not an exit option. I also agree, that we start towards our dreams by re-constructing daily reality.

Bryce Colvert writes in The Nation, after revelations of the driven culture of Amazon staff, how we are trapped in this rapid pace of production. "It speaks to an inability to say no. And in the face of that disempowerment, we may be telling ourselves extreme demands are in fact voluntary choices. After all, it feels better to think of time spent in front of a computer well into the night as something done in the service of passion than in the service of someone else’s bottom line." More stress, longer hours, no increase in pay, stagnant wages for decades, work-life broken boundaries: we are the 99%.

Rojava's revolution

 

"In Northern Syria, 2.5 million people are living in a stateless, feminist, religiously tolerant, anti-capitalist society of their own creation. They call their territory Rojava, and they defend it fiercely." So begins the introduction to A Small Key Can Unlock a Large Door, a 2015 book from the radical press collective Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. They interpret a complicated Kurdish reality, misunderstood by many, not only leftists. "We need some context to truly understand the words and ideas of the rebels of Rojava, else we can be easily seduced by over-simplifications and distortions — like the claims that the struggle in Rojava is a replay of the Spanish Revolution, or that it is a sophisticated public relations makeover for a Maoist national liberation struggle." Small Key mixes left-libertarian analysis with interviews, firsthand accounts, and journalism.

"Rojava is neither a state nor a pure anarchist society. It is an ambitious social experiment that has rejected the seduction of state power and nationalism and has instead embraced autonomy, direct democracy, and decentralization to create a freer society for people in Rojava. The Rojava principles have borrowed from anarchism, social ecology, and feminism in an attempt to chart a societal vision that emphasizes accountability and independence for a radically pluralistic community." By direct democracy and a common economy, Rojava reinvents. {I updated this entry w/more hyperlinks to coverage, 12-19-15}

Dilar Dirik, in another excerpt, looks at women's subversion. Against ISIS, they join men who resist.  "Being a militant is seen as 'unwomanly'; it crosses social boundaries, it shakes the foundations of the status quo. War is seen as a man’s issue – started, led, and ended by men. So it is the 'woman' part of 'woman fighter' which causes this general discomfort." I think of a difference my wife and I have. She insists if women ruled, war would end. Perhaps in time it will, with such women as leaders?

Yet, they claim violence is not an end. Dirik shows: “'We don’t want the world to know us because of our guns, but because of our ideas,' says Sozda, a YPJ commander in Amûde, and points at the pictures on their common room’s walls: PKK guerrilla fighters and Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned ideological representative of the movement. 'We are not just women fighting ISIS. We struggle to change the society’s mentality and show the world what women are capable of.' Though there is no organic tie between the PKK and the Rojava administration, the political ideology is shared."

I admit peacemakers may, as in other self-defense campaigns, find their fervent hopes for conflict resolution thwarted by the reactionary and remorseless might of ISIS. The Kurds, under attack as non-Arabs for centuries by indigenous rulers and imperialist entities, cannot fend off by earnest appeals or amicable parleys the armed assaults and brutal regimentation of the Daesh, who have wiped out so many people in their invasions. Against their remorseless incursion, the Kurds take aim.

Across three cantons in Western Kurdistan on the Syrian frontier, a parlous situation continues. The map in the STW excerpt shows the smallness of the liberated Rojava areas vs. the vast ISIS territory. Western strategists understandably follow events here, while many on the left worldwide nit-pick. Libcom offers a helpful reading guide, where the comments and coverage display the pro-con sides.

I commented in an earlier post about the controversial legacy of "Apo" Ocalan, founder of the PKK, over his Maoist and Marxist-Leninist origins. But STW regards the recent transformation of Rojava as noteworthy. "Any sincere analysis of the past two years in Rojava shows an honest commitment to pluralistic and decentralized ideas, words, and practice." Against the male-dominated Kurdish traditions, feminism and plurality of ethnic and religious identities are encouraged. Anti-capitalism and a Murray Bookchin-Zapatista grassroots economics via cooperative ideals are promoted. Much more about these issues can be found hyperlinked at Peace in Kurdistan. More at Anarchy in Action.

The latter site reports, quoting Rafael Taylor: "The PKK itself has apparently taken after their leader, not only adopting Bookchin's specific brand of eco-anarchism, but actively internalizing the new philosophy in its strategy and tactics. The movement abandoned its bloody war for Stalinist/Maoist revolution and the terror tactics that came with it, and began pursuing a largely non-violent strategy aimed at greater regional autonomy." Ocalan calls this participation "democratic confederalism."

Since I wrote this, Turkey is bombing the Kurds in its zone in retaliation, supposedly, for ISIS. This cynical strategy is payback for Kurdish resistance, and the situation seems more dire than when I researched this two months ago. This dispirits me, and again, I wonder about self-defense against such overwhelming odds. Yet, unlike the Tibetans, say, surely some nations are arming many Kurds. 

You can support the people yourself. An autonomous university is opening and needs books and Kindles. A People's Library seeks stock to counter the destruction visited upon such centers by ISIS. Liberation can happen, the authors admit, as long as Western supporters and allies do not waste time over-analyzing the diverse roots of the struggle, rather than come to its practical, not theoretical, aid.

'When Marx has more effect than hormones, there is nothing to be done.'"

This past spring, I posted an iconic photo of Catalan communist journalist Marina Ginestà. In Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, she donned a uniform and hoisted a rifle once. That made her famous, on a hotel roof, in 1936. 

Anthony Beevor's history of that war cites Juliàn Marías, who "never forgot the expression of a tram-driver at a stop as he watched a beautiful and well-dressed young woman step down into the pavement. 'We've really had it,' Marías said to himself. 'When Marx has more effect than hormones, there is nothing to be done.'" I thought of this when reading about the Kurdish guerrilla fighters now.

Joseph Anthony Lawrence joined them as a photographer. The power of images, as the SCW with Robert Capa and Pablo Picasso taught us, endures to document and admittedly heroicize war as well as lament its destruction. Lawrence, according to an article in the Huffington Post,  was curious whether the fighters, 40% women, were "fearless warrior women" as the "foreign press" treated them, or terrorists, as the Turkish government depicts them in their fight against Assad in Syria and ISIS.

Joey L., as he calls himself, reports on his admittedly handsome subjects how their pride and martial ardor are evident in his photography of the YPJ, the female counterparts of the YPG. This army rescued many Yazidis from ISIS retaliation in Rojava. "Some carry the signs of a hard-fought war: chemical burns, chapped hands and scars. All the women are treated as equals to their male counterparts, but it is the men who will readily admit that a woman can fight better because she is a natural creator of the world, so she therefore has more to lose -- and therefore more to fight for."

My wife always chides that if women ran the world, there'd be an end to war. As this movement takes its guidance from the PKK, with its roots in Marxist-Leninism, I wonder. Their English-language website features a depiction of Abdullah Ocalan, in Borat-like celebration as the mustached and olive-fatigue uniformed leader at the center of emanating yellow and red rays, in typically People's Republic fashion. Admittedly, a glance at this reminds me of Qadafi's Green Revolution, or the later days of the paper Ginesta translated for, Pravda. Or maybe Granma, Castro's regime's mouthpiece. Our American media, with its corporate-sponsored slogans about "heroes coming home," echoes this.

The HuffPo snippets on the Kurdish fighters don't explain the background. Go to an earlier piece this year, by Gareth Watkins on the site CvltNation. "The Revolution Nobody's Talking About" draws parallels to Spanish anarchists and the Catalan dominance of women in leadership and in combat. Ocalan calls this "democratic confederalism." I am unclear as to the YPJ/G ties to Ocalan, as not the PKK but the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and Kurdish National Council (KNC) are credited by Watkins in Rojava, where left-libertarianism is said to thrive along with eco-feminist structures.

Learn more at the Libcom reading guide on Rojava. The comments debating, typically, David Graeber's affirmative visit to Kurdistan are telling as anarchist-communists argue over the situation.  Graeber enters the thread and despairs that the radicals cannot give credence, when their theory obscures the truth, to any left-libertarian progress, but opponents caution any praising Ocalan's "cult."

At the PKK site, "Killing the dominant male: Instituting the Third Major Sexual Rupture against the dominant male" features Ocalan. "The male has become a state and turned this into the dominant culture. Class and sexual oppression develop together; masculinity has generated ruling gender, ruling class, and ruling state. When man is analysed in this context, it is clear that masculinity must be killed." Reading this essay, I can imagine many peace-loving Westerners nodding in agreement.

Concerning the predictable debates at Libcom and the media attention towards the female fighters, I confess mixed reactions. Aren't we expected to cheer on the revolution from suppressive categories and restrictive belief-systems? Is Lawrence's photo-journalism the necessary exposure of a step towards freedom for Middle Eastern women? Is violence the necessary and only practical reaction as self-defense rallies men and women to protect the Yazidi and the Kurds from Islamic State and Syrian Army-led decimation? Perhaps so; I doubt if any pacifists among Jews, Muslims, or Eastern Christians survived the Crusader's invasions. Yet, part of me shrinks back wary of the celebration of armed men and women as the ideal we should strive towards. And then part of me retaliates, as my sympathies remind me of revolutionaries who rose up to free our ancestors from slavery if not debt.

With my own direct ancestor implicated in such rebellion in Ireland, who am I to discount its perpetuation? Yet he was murdered mysteriously for the Cause. I used to be self-righteously bent on a refusal to listen to any opponent of Irish independence. Now, despite my atavistic intransigence, after three decades and more leading classroom discussions, at least I hear out all sides in any debate. In the conflict with the Islamic State and Assad's regime, are there any sensible voices on the other side? Addressing war, we must ask this, unlikely as it seems to us. And, who am I not to reiterate the most lasting path to equality and harmony, and to come closer to anarchic dreams, is to lay down that RPG.
(Photo by Joey L. Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) Guerrillas Patrol Makhmour Countryside, Iraq
.)

Is Marx right on the left?

Terry Eagleton's "Why Marx Was Right" and his monograph for Routledge, "Marx" have promoted the democratic-socialist rather than authoritarian-communist view of this thinker, more as a philosopher offering inspiration to the working classes than as an economist planning their uprising. By contrast, Jonathan Sperber's massive re-examination in "Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life"
presents a man looking back to 1789 for 1848, rather than forward, and Sperber's archival arguments contrast a thinker whose ideas were sometimes trapped in his time's mindset, or revamped by Engels.

Yesterday, I perused Chris Hedges' "Karl Marx Was Right". I suppose I am either the ideal or the worst reader for Marxian takes. I lack the economic or theoretical background or the wide exposure to him. But as my three reviews hyperlinked in the first paragraph attest, I am intrigued by Eagleton's idealism, and chastened by Sperber's realism, as to the impact of Marx today. Hedges reminds us of how prescient his thinking is. It's like taking on Jesus and trying to ignore Christianity, I find, when examining Marx's appealing message apart from those who in the founder's name have erred greatly.

At a forum about Marx's relevance a week ago, Hedges sets the context for Marx's call to arms:  "He saw that there would come a day when capitalism would exhaust its potential and collapse. He did not know when that day would come. Marx, as Meghnad Desai wrote, was 'an astronomer of history, not an astrologer.' Marx was keenly aware of capitalism’s ability to innovate and adapt. But he also knew that capitalist expansion was not eternally sustainable. And as we witness the denouement of capitalism and the disintegration of globalism, Karl Marx is vindicated as capitalism’s most prescient and important critic." Hedges neatly cites Marx and aligns his critique of late capitalism with our current corporate stranglehold, government "rescue" of banks and firms, the imploding (and now again inexorably rising--I do warn my fellow residents of L.A. to be careful what they wish for as 44% of recent sales have been to largely Asian, Russian, or overseas buyers in cash) housing prices.

He reminds us that it does not matter who we elect in '16. Comments on his Truthdig site under the KMWR article point out too the danger I foresee, as Bernie Sanders will likely use the few voters he can rally soon to bait and switch them to support Hillary; his attacks are much more against the GOP.

Hedges can be strident, but as I showed in his interview and treatment of Jeremy Hammond last week, he devotes attention to issues few care about. No matter his own stance on the Black Bloc during Occupy, at least he gives Hammond his own platform and voice from behind bars to speak up. The message Hammond and some who support him and those who suspect even Sanders as too cozy with party politics vs. a radicalized anarcho-communism (not the misnomer it may seem if you check out LibCom's intro, but see Wayne Price's preference for socialist-anarchist or libertarian socialist).

Hedges concludes: 

The corporations that own the media have worked overtime to sell to a bewildered public the fiction that we are enjoying a recovery. Employment figures, through a variety of gimmicks, including erasing those who are unemployed for over a year from unemployment rolls, are a lie, as is nearly every other financial indicator pumped out for public consumption. We live, rather, in the twilight stages of global capitalism, which may be surprisingly more resilient than we expect, but which is ultimately terminal. Marx knew that once the market mechanism became the sole determining factor for the fate of the nation-state, as well as the natural world, both would be demolished. No one knows when this will happen. But that it will happen, perhaps within our lifetime, seems certain.

“The old is dying, the new struggles to be born, and in the interregnum there are many morbid symptoms,” Antonio Gramsci wrote.

What comes next is up to us.

I return to this in my next post; it's a Salon interview with Hedges about the Gramscian "interregnum" before the impending "revolutionary moment" that he senses within the restive masses. 

P.S. My friend Matt Cavanaugh opined Hedges places too much faith in the masses and should put down Das Kapital and take up Brave New World for a timelier prediction. Sperber might agree. (Image credit, if from a site that strives to champion the opposite view. I know what I think...)

Down by law

Continuing my coverage of Chris Hedges' analysis of radical (or reactionary) rebellion on the simmer, Elias Isquith's interview with him in Salon expands his critique from his Wages of Rebellion: the Moral Imperative of Revolt. "We Are in A Revolutionary Moment"--Hedges opens by observing: "It’s with us already, but with this caveat: it is what Gramsci calls interregnum, this period where the ideas that buttress the old ruling elite no longer hold sway, but we haven’t articulated something to take its place." He avers that either radicals or reactionaries could fill this new place.

As public trust in the police, the law, and politicians ebbs, the power government and corporations conspire to hold still seems intact, but despite the coup-d'etat taken by their alliance, their facade is weakening, in Hedges' estimation. "The normal mechanisms by which we carry out incremental and piecemeal reform through liberal institutions no longer function. They have been seized by corporate power — including the press. That sets the stage for inevitable blowback, because these corporations have no internal constraints, and now they have no external constraints. So they will exploit, because, as Marx understood, that’s their nature, until exhaustion or collapse."

As an Occupy participant, Hedges recognizes the scattered nature of opposition from the left. "We who care about populist movements [on the left] are very weak, because in the name of anti-communism these movements have been destroyed; we are almost trying to rebuild them from scratch. We don’t even have the language to describe the class warfare that is being unleashed upon us by this tiny, rapacious, oligarchic elite. But we on the left are very disorganized, unfocused, and without resources." Informants, within Muslim and leftist organizations, have weakened many critics.

"Diligent Bureaucrat" at Daily Kos (image borrowed from this April 22, 2015 piece; see hyperlink at end of this blog entry), warns: "Whether its [sic] an environmentalist, anti-war activist, animal rights advocate, or occupy protester, the bureau appears to have a strict policy that any individuals or movements who criticize the government, corporations, or the nexus between the two, must be monitored, infiltrated, and if possible sent to prison." Activism and terrorism to the FBI are conflated, as informants proliferate to create actions that can be criminalized if none exist beforehand.

I wonder what this will do to confront the $2.5 billion the Clintons have supposedly amassed, or the PACs both the Dems and the GOP manipulate to sway voters in our faltering nation to keep the corporate puppets in place. As I wrote last time, I fear Bernie Sanders' entry will merely serve to rally a few on the populist left to assauge Dems who want HRC to shift their way a bit, only to have the former Socialist capitulate in a few months to deliver his supporters to Clinton, as if they had anywhere else to go. As in '12, Dr. Jill Stein will front the Greens, but as then, they will go nowhere--despite my tree-hugging wishes that they'd gain traction, by promoting birth control, population reduction, lower immigration rates, as well as their predictable NPR-soothing eco-friendly nostrums.

Discussing Hedges' article on FB with like-minded folks, they bristled at the "self-immolation" he urged; one judging him a gift to our security state. Given Hedges' penchant for end-times scenarios, this may be correct. But as in his opposition to BlackBloc at OWS, he may have stepped back from the abyss. His writing can be uneven and repetitive, but I hear in him along with Matt Taibbi and George Packer critics who analyze the populist, progressive challenges to the mainstream that cheers on Hillary and the DRC as the default setting for banker-funded "hope and change," version 2.0.

Hedges reminds those around me who shrug and whisper "Supreme Court" as they cheer on Hillary: "If we are not brutal about diagnosing what we are up against, then all of our resistance is futile. If we think that voting for Hillary Clinton … is really going to make a difference, then I would argue we don’t understand corporate power and how it works. If you read the writings of anthropologists, there are studies about how civilizations break down; and we are certainly following that pattern. Unfortunately, there’s nothing within human nature to argue that we won’t go down the ways other civilizations have gone down. The difference is now, of course, that when we go down, the whole planet is going to go with us." Marx here was correct. His own followers tarnished his idealism as they trashed their side of the earth as badly as did the capitalists everywhere else. But now that there is nowhere else, how long do we have in this century of rising heat, freakish storms, population increases of mainly many more poor, ever higher pressure to accept immigrants, less national will to uphold any environmental rulings in the name of job creation, a war machine, ideological and religious tension, tax breaks, while we laud developers and investors as titans and philanthropists?

Image credit: Daily Kos, Agent Provocateurs. Private Industry, and the FBI's Orwellian War on Leftwing Activists

William T. Vollmann's "Poor People": Book Review

For an author as prolific as Vollmann, this is a short book on a vast topic. Chapters heighten the focus of his travels and interviews--often as he credits to interpreters, acknowledging the difficulty of getting to the nuanced or deflected truths told to him-- as he tries, living on $100 daily while his subjects must scrabble fractions of that, to figure out why a few are rich and most of the rest remain poor. They may blame karma, tuition, the rich, Allah, or themselves. Many claim they aren't poor compared to, well, what always seem to be people still worse off.

Vollmann admits his hubris, but here unlike his previous journalism, he steers clearer of the "drug addicts, street prostitutes, and criminals" to listen to more ordinary dwellers at the bottom rungs. He realizes he makes his living off of their stories, and he can grate or pose as if naive, but how else can we listen to those invariably so distanced from us? "Steinbeck did his homework. This is why The Grapes of Wrath is not only "universal," as any vague emotional overflow can be, but accurately particular." (xiii)

By particulars, Vollmann attempts to pin down the mindset of the poor within their own habitats. "People who are poor but not in imminent danger of perishing have more of a chance of catching their breath and actually conceptualizing their poverty." (xv) Do they respond well to his presence?

Given his interest in the Marxian "cash nexus" for gunrunners, migrants, and whores, Vollmann seems well-suited for this topic. He tries to elude the trap laid by patronizing or brutal intellectuals who try to raise the consciousness of those they claim to help. He defines in a prefatory dictionary a few terms, and the problem of how the poor themselves rank themselves as "normal" rather than poor leads to his frustration with "False Consciousness: A charge leveled against the perceptions and experiences of others whenever we wish to assert that we know their good better than they do." (xxi)

Vollmann maintains his slightly ironic authorial presence while stepping back and letting the interviewees have their say. He balances his editorial comments and his leading questions with their comments, or their gestures or refusals. "This deeply religious woman had never been inside the Cathedral of the Spilled Blood, since that would have cost money. But who knew its outside better than she?" (56) From 2005 Russia, this captures his eye for phrasing, and his own perspective, deftly.

Speaking of distancing, he wisely chooses to include his photos of those he talks to (and many staying silent, from his decades at the margins of the world) at the end of the volume, allowing us to "see" the people he interviews first by his verbal descriptions, rather than jump to conclusions or let our prejudices or sympathies interfere with what he wants us to focus on as he transcribes them. 

He emphasizes the agency that any humans possess; he will not condescend or place theory upon the reality. He dismisses the UN recommendation of "more aid, better directed," as admirable but of course, with a devil lurking in the details. He prefers to listen to the poor rather than speak for them. "Because I wish to respect poor people's perceptions and experiences, I refuse to say that I know their good better than they; accordingly, I further refuse to condescend to them with the pity that either pretends they have no choices at all, or else, worse yet, gilds their every choice with my benevolent approval. Once again I submit the obvious: Poor people deserve are no more and no less human than I; accordingly, they deserve to be judged and understood precisely as do I myself." (170) 

In 2002 Nan Ning, China, this sudden city confirms his interpreter Michelle's pride, and her dismissal of the excuses she has heard on Vollmann's behalf, for her own bargained salary daily. "Everything you should do by yourself, she replied sternly. You should not complain life is unfair to you. The history is the history!" The lack of quotation marks heightens Vollmann's ability to convey this tone.

Vollmann tells of his own workspace, an abandoned restaurant in Sacramento, and how the homeless surround him, to cajole or threaten, and how he and his daughter react to their presence. Echoes of earlier books endure, and readers of The Rifles (reviewed by me 2-2014) will recall his near-fatal encounter with a soggy sleeping bag in the Arctic when he muses: "Life is like an extended camping trip. With a leaky, inferior tent one runs no more risk of rain than anyone else; but if it does rain, the person in the cheap tent chances soaking his sleeping bag, and possibly dying of hypothermia." (137)

He conflates his travels with his residence, and he settles down to write behind a steel door at his stucco inner-city bunker. About the poor, "I shut my door on them, just as when we who are in first-class train compartments pull our glass doors shut to drown out the poorer sort in the corridors, who will be standing or leaning all the way across Romania; of course I'm doing them a favor." (276)

Chapters on Kazakh energy exploitation and Japanese "snakeheads" who smuggle from China girls for the sex trade feel imported from his journalism, and they lack the power of his more eclectically arranged sections. By contrast, "The Rider" although it too remains tangential to the theme, offers a gripping and lively look at a white man in the Philippines who ferries the take from jai alai betting.

Vollmann lags as the book goes on and fails to answer the question of why the poor are always with us. The book's brevity by his standards may betray how he can't offer any nostrums on how to solve what may persist as an endemic human flaw, the impulse to hoard, to compete, to fend off others with what we gather. "What can they do?" he asks of the poor. "Hope, accept, escape." (253) The shifting focus Vollmann prefers when speculating about poverty better captures the vagueness of this subject that entangles investigators: "money just goes to where it goes," shrugs a Japanese man in Vollmann's last pages, which seems to sum up this weary subject.  Not that there's not wit and irony to leaven the sour, sullen moods: see the first of Vollmann's many diligently documented end-sources: "Thoreau was interviewed by ouijah-board." (Amazon US 3-14-14)