It was only a matter of time; protest at the contemporary University, and pretty soon the entire state apparatus comes crashing down upon you. At first, it seems absurd – the federal government of the most powerful nation in the world, and the worlds’ largest police force, against a bunch of students. Yet after some thought, this attack begins to make sense. In totalitarianism, there is complete, unmediated control by the totality, by the state and commodity forms. In our society, this complete control still exists, only it is channeled through a complex system of institutions, mediated and obscured by what we might call an interface. In our society, we might call this interface liberalism. The importance of liberal institutions, of the New School, Berkley and Santa Cruz, arguably the most progressively liberal academies in the United States, becomes increasingly apparent.
More frequently, however, need for direct intervention is prevented through the involvement of aid organizations and the United Nations, which serve to suppress disturbances with minimal, but carefully targeted aid, or at the very least split opposition into powerless reformists and isolated rebels. If such agencies claim to be against war and conflict, it is only because they have far more effective means of global control at their disposal. It is the process of urbanization which allows for the installation of wage labor as a totalized form of economic relation; the ensuring over-population and decline in self sufficiency has the effect of increasing the potential for exploitation. The consolidation of the harvesting of resources, and the subsequent shift towards more automated, corrosive relationship with nature has poisoned sustainable forms of life. Meanwhile, the complete penetration of luxury goods, mass media and commercialized entertainment has annihilated pre-existing cultures in order to solidify the hegemony of the commodity form.
For it is our foreign policy think tanks and associated humanitarian institutions that orchestrate a softer form of imperialism, smuggled in through the aid crates of countless non-governmental organizations. The age of colonial domination may be over, but the troops of the Peace Corps ensure subservience: sure, they may help build a school here or there, but their real modus operandi is undoubtedly to create a global marketplace, to teach starving children how to drink Pepsi. The aid provided by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank takes the form of conditional loans, which demand a prompt restructuring and privation of the domestic social structure, to bring it in line with the ‘integrated’ economy. Social services and corporate taxes are cut, tariffs are removed and the local way of life is sacrificed for the benefit of industrial, often-foreign owned production. When revolts against this new world order occur, they are crushed through military coups or right-wing guerrillas, private military contractors or even direct CIA intervention.
A similar process continues in developed countries, as urban development agencies and planners pave the way for the further gentrification and inhibition of urban areas. The Kaplan Center for New York City Affairs, which would later evolve into Milano, served as a modern prototype for what would become the definitive socio-economic control apparatus of the postmodern age. Development, once seen as a means to increase the productive capacity of a city or neighborhood, becomes an end in itself following the cessation of production in the metropolis. Development is now the abolition of poverty through the obfuscation of all the marginalized forces that were once able to elucidate their poverty. It is a prerequisite for the post-industrial economy that the old working class be annihilated as both a political and productive force. The new metropolis must be seen as a space for consumption, as a space for life and leisure. It must also a space for the underground economy, for new forms of servitude and subsistence, though this aspect of its existence is carefully concealed by the process of development.
“there was just an anti-war protest in front of 65 Fifth Avenue.
at nyu, they arrest their own students. we don’t do that here. we’re a
liberal school.”
- officer cruz, new school campus security, 2008
In Pittsburg, rendered capital of the neoliberal world during the Group of 20 Summit, we saw the service economy constitute the face of the new economy. Late stage capitalism sets about to manufacture not things, but abstract concepts such as health and knowledge. As riot cops attacked students and protesters, members of Pittsburg’s new middle class dutifully continued their leisure activities out of fear of losing their jobs or student status. In the postmodern playground, all interpersonal relationships are commodified; all existences are subsumed. Yet herein lies the realities of our new world: we either devote our entire lives to an empty form of work that consumes our waking life, determines our existence from cradle, through the abandon of a perpetual adolescence, to the grave. Or we are marginalized, forced into insecure and often dangerous forms of subservience. All labor is political, or it is criminal. Is it any wonder that we choose to appropriate alternate forms of resistance, ones that deviate from the tired and stifling conventions of politics? For, if labor is politicized, the converse is surely true; in today’s world, politics has just become a new form of work, of value creation. It could be argued that the affective energies poured into the Obama movement served not only to reinforce a political system, but also served to restore confidence to an economy that would otherwise be in free fall. The illusion of progress, of change, is instrumental to the entrapment of activism; in a world so focused on branding, novelty replaces ideology and politics becomes little more than a customer service department for transnational capitalism. It has entered the realm of culture, of immaterial products which create their own demands.
Our desire to engage in political activism brought us to New School, where our liberal forms of resistance were commended and supported by the establishment. We learned media strategies, methods of theoretical elucidation. We were given an introduction to a politics that was as apparent as it was meaningless. We spoke truth to power, and they used it in their marketing.
“the new school now prepares to construct a building...
from foundational ideas that are just as radical.”
-ideo, new school design subcontractor
We must therefore ask ourselves: what does it mean, the refusal of political work, of a form of shallow dissent which both strengthens and validates the system? Is it a melancholic apathy, as our “strategic” “allies” would have us believe? Or is it a potentiality to be explored? Is it possible that it could take the form of a chronic rupture that destroys the political dynamo, resulting in a subsequent liberation of affective capacity? Fear no doubt serves as a resource for the defensive mechanisms of the sociopolitical establishment, but it is not this force that perpetuates it on a daily basis.
A human strike at New School, a refusal to participate in the production of artificial joy in the form of mass culture and political hope, threatens to disrupt the entire binary in which we find ourselves trapped. It threatens the opacity of the deception of late capitalism, a capitalism that appears dynamic, ethical, green, exploiting as its main resource not products, but the emotional energies and social relationships of its participants. It threatens the conception of a democratic alternative in the age of hyper-mediation and assimilation of resistance movements. It threatens to spread to a generation of precarious laborers in non-profits, universities and start-ups, who are barely deluded by the idea of changing the world without destroying the fundamentals on which it is based. And it has already inspired squats, sit-ins and occupations at schools around the world, where students share our conception of the urgency of political disaffiliation.
We seek not to build a movement, to compose strategies, to win demands. We do not believe we have the means to effect any real changes to the base structure of Capital or Empire, nor can we conceive of preferable totality with which to replace it. Our aspirations are towards escape, towards disruption and disintegration of systemic nodes of control. We may not be able to stop or change the system, but we see inactivity as its perpetuation. We do not know if it is possible to build a non-state community, or develop new forms of social relationships; we don’t particularly care. We know that resistance is an end in itself, while strategy is an abstraction and politics a myth. We know we have real potential:
to affect change,
to empower ourselves and others,
to build the common.
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