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[...] There really is something qualitatively distinct about the forces of production that eat brains, that produce and instrumentalize and control information. This is because information really does turn out to have strange ontological properties. Making information a force of production produces something of a conundrum within the commodity form. Information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains. Information is no longer scarce, it is infinitely replicable, cheap to store, cheap to transmit, and yet the whole premise of the commodity is its scarcity,
The hacker class experiences extremes of a winner-take-all outcome of its efforts. On the one hand, fantastic careers and the spoils of some simulation of the old bourgeois lifestyle; on the other hand, precarious and part-time work, start-ups that go burst, and the making routine of our jobs by new algorithms - designed by others of our very own class. The hacker class was supposed to be a privileged one, shielded from proletarianization by its creativity and technical skill. But it too can be made casual and precarious.
This new kind of ruling class does not appropriate a quantity of surplus value so much as exploit an asymmetry of information. It gives, sometimes even as a gift, access to the location of a piece of information for which you are searching. Or it lets you assemble your own social network. Or it lets you perform a particular financial transaction. Or it gives you coordinates on the planet and what can be found at that location. Or it will even tell you some things about your own DNA. Or it will provide a logistical infrastructure for your small business. But while you get that little piece of information, this ruling class gets all of that information in the aggregate. It exploits the asymmetry between the little you know and the aggregate it knows - an aggregate it collects based on information you were obligaed to "volunteer."
The California Ideology emerged out of seemingly progressive movements of the counterculture in California in the mid to late twentieth century. Once again, repression played a role. Black militants of this period were systematically murdered or imprisoned. To give just one example, Angela Davis survived a criminal trial and was fired from her teaching job. Shorn of its more radical edge, the counterculture became merely cultural, and its anti-state posture made its peace with free market libertarian enthusiasms. Like the worldviews of capital under feudalism, the California Ideology promised a universal liberation, which turned out on its ascendancy to be just that of a new ruling class.
One has to ask whether the ruling class presiding over this mode of production is still adequately described as capitalist. It seems no longer necessary to directly own the means of production. A remarkable amount of the valuation of the leading companies of our time consists not of tangible assets, but rather of information. A company is its brands, its patents, its trademarks, its reputation, its logistics, and perhaps above all its distinctive practices of evaluating information itself.
[...] perhaps the rise of finance is really just a symptom. Yann Moulier Boutang invites us to see finance as something other than speculative or fictive excess. It has to do with the whole problem of exchange value in an age where the forces of production are extensively and intensively controlled by information: nobody knows what anything is worth. Financialization is a perverse socializing of the problem of the uncertainty of information about value.
[...] three axes: property, authority, expertise. His view of class structure offers class locations at three levels, which do not always neatly overlap. Relations of property generate the class locations of employers, petit-bourgeois, and employees. Relations of authority generate the locations of managers, supervisors, and the supervised and managed. Relations of expertise generate the locations of professionals, the skilled, and the nonskilled.
Piketty does not separate out real estate from capital, yet there might be good reasons to do so. Landlords and capitalists are already different kinds of ruling classes with overlapping but not identical interests. Ground rent and profit are not the same kinds of surplus extraction. Landlords, perversely, may benefit from the rise of the vector in ways Capital does not. As Matteo Pasquinelli says, today's landlords (often with giant global property portfolios) increase their rents by extracting the information value that the presence of the hacker class produces. [...]
I took my son to see it. I wanted him to know something of the origins and motivations of a structure of feeling that was something that I once felt deeply and to which I will remain in solidarity for the rest of my life. Let us admit, comrades, that we are a defeated people. There will be no second coming for us. And to try to remain in fidelity to something whose core myth lies in History is always to betray it anyway. The whole is to be begun again, and from the beginning.
on the young karl marx
[...] most demonstrations of white nationalism are notable for how easily they are dwarfed by counter-protestors. The question we should be asking, then, is not how to get the working class to be less nativist, but to understand why the national policy so weakly reflects the preferences of the majority for a humane integration regime.
The answer to a question like this lies where it often does, in the interests and strategies of capital. [...]
To properly assess how capital’s structural interests impact immigration policy, we need to begin with a conceptual distinction between questions of the immigration flow and questions of immigrants’ rights.6 There is, of course, a significant overlap and interaction between these two phenomena — the nativist argument against immigrants’ rights, for example, is primarily based on the deterrent effect that restricted rights will have on the immigrant flow. Still, the distinction remains useful because the interests of capital and labor with regard to immigration are not monolithic, but often diverge on the questions of flows and rights.
It is correct to say that capitalists, as employers, have a direct interest in the immigrant flow as a source of labor. However, their preference is for that flow to be flexible — growing to meet demand during periods of expansion or native labor unrest, but restricted when not needed. Thus, the oft-repeated accusation that the movement for open borders serves the interests of capital is imprecise. Capitalists may prefer the opening of borders to the extent that immigration policy permits large flows of immigrant labor, but they also prefer an immigration system that does not confer many rights to these entrants — ideally, immigrants enter under a regime that permits employers to hire them, but with no right to settle or remain if that employment should end, or political rights against employer power, to make claims on the welfare state, or to demand more secure terms of residence. How those competing preferences are balanced is determined by the urgency of employers’ labor supply needs. Where this supply is insufficient and immigrant labor is critical, capital has been more malleable on the question of rights, if only to make immigration more desirable to foreign workers. Where and when capital has other sources of labor — such as an adequate supply of domestic laborers or the option to offshore production — it has been less so, and may even support policies to restrict immigrant flow.
really good