Biocommunism

Discussion

Nick Dyer-Whiteford:

"David Harvey (2009) remarks that, in an era when all liberal and social democratic ameliorations have weakly prostrated themselves before the prime directives of finance capital, the question is not is another world possible, but ‘is another communism possible?’ Oppositional rebellions face a ‘double blockage’ because ‘the lack of an alternative vision prevents the formation of an oppositional movement, while the absence of such a movement precludes the articulation of an alternative’ (Harvey, 2010: 227).

Can one start to think a communism adequate to the era of climate change, synthetic biologies and global networks? The gamble of Marxism is that liberation lies through, not prior to, alienation: there is no way home, only the capture of the strange planet to which the global worker has been abducted. A politics against the fourth alienation, the alienation of species-becoming, will have to produce a post-capitalism order as different from industrial socialism as industrial socialism was from the agrarian commune, an intensification of tendencies to socialization implicit in the new forces of production and destruction – something we might call a biocommunism

Powerful technology-systems produce large-scale effects rationally incommensurate with private ownership and market allocation. These effects are both constructive and destructive. They include both catastrophic ecological hazards and the productivity necessary for large sectors of the global populations to emerge from chronic immiseration. Confronting this contradiction, socialist progressivism and romantic primitivism alike appear hopelessly linear and one-sided. A diagonal approach that puts to the front the question of the social form within which technologies are produced and deployed is required.

The autonomist tradition inverted the concept of the organic composition of capital to produce the concept of class composition: the technical composition of the class, the labour process in which it was involved, became the basis for a political composition, a capacity to become a counter-power against capitalist command. Extending this line of thought, perhaps we can say that the objective of political struggle is to replace organic composition of capital with the organic composition of the communal, in which decisions of resource allocation and investment are determined in a collective and democratic fashion.

In such a composition, the creations of digital labour could have at least three important roles. First, productivity increases from computerization could be translated, not into profits, but into resources, not just of goods but of time, allowing collective participation in decision making. Second, ‘open source’ circulation of knowledge and inventions would be an important element of new forms of cooperative production. Third, networks would be part of the architecture of an infrastructure of distributed democratic planning and debate of the difficult questions a biocommunist society would face: slowing or mitigating climate change, the role of genetic engineering outside corporate ownership, and, recursively, the level of virtualization that is commensurate with collective democratic planning. As Marx (1977: 447) put it, in one of his very few allusions to Gattungswesen in his later writings, ‘when the worker cooperates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species’.

Economic crisis is colliding with climate chaos, ecological exhaustion, energy depletion and emergent challenges to a fiscally bankrupt but militarily dominant imperial hegemon. To foresee cataclysmic instabilities ahead is neither pessimistic nor optimistic, but a historically-informed extrapolation from current tendencies. In this context, it becomes realistic to consider the cycle of university rebellions now traversing Europe, the pulsing of industrial revolt in Southern China, the climate change assemblies of the farmers and miners of Bolivia and the migrant worker movements raging from Phoenix to Marseilles as anticipations of larger tumults to come.

As this essay undergoes final revision, the contending potentials of planetary labour under digital conditions have become dramatically visible in the popular revolts sweeping North Africa and the Middle East, revolts whose main antagonists are dictatorial and kleptocratic client regimes of global capital. On the one hand, the ignition of these uprisings--one of whose immediate catalysts was the Wikileaks exposure of the corruption of the Tunisian regime--and their rapid circulation, via satellite television, mobile phone, and social media networks, testify to how contemporary means of communication can, despite censorship and black-out, abruptly burst apart the limits on thought, speech and action imposed by the dominant order. On the other, however, the insurgents who fought out against security forces in streets and squares with stones, sticks and small arms, in the most brutally immediate combat, are a defiant, collective self- assertion by subjects who have been excluded from the benefits of the so-called information economy. They are an eruption of populations consigned by the world market to the margins of high-technology development, to labour at its ignored material base, in oil fields and gas pipelines, mines, waste sites and farms. They are consigned to a reserve army of the un- and under-employed, suffering gyrations in food prices dictated by climate change and financial speculation in an immiseration from which migration offers the only escape. Western media have focused on the first part of this equation–the undeniable importance of computer networks–for the uprisings; but in doing so they have created a narrative that not only focuses on the most affluent elements in the insurgent movements, but also complacently affirms the merits of market-driven technological progress. What such narratives underplay is the second, crucial, aspect of the uprisings, namely the explosive stockpile of equally market-driven unemployment, exploitation and inequality–that is to say, of class conflict--that underlies the revolts.

Regardless of their outcome, whether catastrophic, compromised or victorious in unimaginably experimental ways, these uprisings have already returned to the political horizon possibilities of radical self-organization that have in so many places been banished for a generation. They are revolutions detonated by the meeting of extraordinary high technological development and extreme inequality, a contradiction that defines the condition of the global worker, and whose resolution will determine the trajectory of human species-becoming. In such struggles, the future of the ‘actual living species’ (Marx, 1964: 112) will depend on the level of biocommunist organization."

(http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/digital-labour-species-becoming-and-global-worker)