Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere

by Paul Mason

  Capitalism itself, he believed, had created a social group whose material interests would force them to seize the means of production: the proletariat, owning nothing but their own capacity to work. However, there was nothing in the lifestyle of the workers themselves that could foreshadow the freedom they would create.

  It is often forgotten that Marx’s goal was not ‘class solidarity’ or ‘proletarian power’ but the liberation of individual human beings. In 1843 he wrote a passage that has become newly relevant in the context of social networks:

  Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself. Human emancipation will only be complete when the real individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a species-being.16

  Marx believed this truly social life—‘species-being’—could not be attained without abolishing capitalism. Indeed, the whole thrust of the book this passage comes from (On the Jewish Question, 1843) was that the nineteenth-century goal of political and civil rights was really a form of self-enslavement: the individual with his ‘human rights’ alone against the world.17

  Because Marx believed capitalism could only atomize, only alienate, he concluded that this ultimate ‘human emancipation’, in which people would express their freedom through communal interaction, could only happen after it was gone.

  The actual history of organized labour was to be one long refutation of this theory. First, from the late nineteenth century, workers did develop highly sophisticated subcultures in which they attempted to develop civilized and communal lifestyles. Second, the most skilled gained possessions and a material stake in the survival of the system itself. On top of this Marx himself moved away from this initial, humanistic version of communism, settling on a theory that stressed the clash of technology against social relations, rather than humanity versus alienation, as the dynamo of the coming revolution. Finally, after the 1960s, the old manual workforce began to decline and fragment, leading theorists like André Gorz to propose its disappearance as any kind of revolutionary force.

  What none of the critics dared suggest, however, was that it might be possible to achieve this ‘species-being’ under capitalism.

  The technological and inter-personal revolutions of the early twenty-first century pose precisely this question. Namely, is it now possible to conceive of living this ‘emancipated’ life as a fully connected ‘species-being’ on the terrain of capitalism itself—indeed on the terrain of a highly marketized form of capitalism, albeit in conflict with it?

  I don’t know the answer, but merely to pose the question is exhilarating.

  Strangely, it turns out, Marx himself posed the very same question. In a notebook known as the ‘Fragment on Machines’ (1858), he explored the potential impact of automation. What if, Marx asked, you took ‘labour’ out of the process of making things and did it all through intelligent machines? The machines, he speculated, would become repositories of a ‘general intellect’, calling into question an economic system based on wages and profits, since neither could be properly allocated through market mechanisms.18

  Those who want to turn Marx into an anti-humanist detest this fragment, just as they detest his pre-1845 writings about alienation. The reason is clear: it opens up a whole new dynamic of social change based on the clash between free information and economic systems. It creates the possibility that the real ‘contradiction’ in society is not so much about economics but about shared human knowledge versus ‘intellectual property rights’. It opens the possibility that the new society can be created within the old, in a struggle over information and power.

  For orthodox Marxism, of course, these debates were marginal—and who knows what substance the man himself was on the night he scribbled these thoughts down. But the political theory that influenced the events of 2009–11—‘autonomism’—had theorized very clearly the idea of a struggle between the ‘general intellect’, the suppressed human being and capitalist legal norms.19 Its figurehead, Franco Berardi, put it like this, in a manifesto issued at the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement:

  There is only one way to awake the lover that is hidden in our paralyzed, frightened and frail virtualized bodies. There is only one way to awake the human being that is hidden in the miserable daily life of the softwarist: take to the streets and fight.20

  And that is the significance of 2011. It was the year people realized that instant collaboration could extend out of Facebook groups and wikis and into the public squares of major cities; that amateur news could be more reliable than the professionally produced propaganda of TV networks. And they rediscovered what the Berkeley rebels of 1964 had found out before them, that the act of taking a space and forming a community within it might be just as important as the objective of the struggle itself.

  And if all this challenges orthodox Marxism, it also challenges social democracy, which in the late nineteenth century embraced a watered-down version of Marxism. In social democracy, of course, the working class is not the ‘subject’ of history, but it nevertheless remains the ‘object’ of politics: to be delivered to in return for votes. For social democracy it’s the capitalist state that does the delivering; but it shares with Marxism the essential premise that conditions predominate over consciousness. Since capitalism can only produce the alienated, helpless human being, social conditions have to be changed from above, by benign state intervention.

  For both social democracy and Marxism, the challenge amounts to this. If you are an anti-utopian and want to build a socially just society starting from the most modern and advanced forms of capitalism, what exactly is that most advanced form? What if it turns out not to be Microsoft, or Toyota, or another highly profitable corporation, but instead this emerging, semi-communal form of capitalism exemplified by open-source software and based on collaboration, management-free enterprise, profit-free projects and open-access information?

  What if—instead of waiting for the collapse of capitalism—the emancipated human being were beginning to emerge spontaneously from within this breakdown of the old order? What if all the dreams of human solidarity and participatory democracy contained in the maligned Port Huron Statement of 1962 were realizable right now? Yeah: what then?

  The general intellect has expanded

  Economists and business gurus have for two decades been grappling with the concept of ‘information capitalism’: what it means if the most valuable commodities in the market are ideas, rather than physical objects.

  One fact is clear: people know more than they used to. That’s to say, they have greater and more instant access to knowledge, and reliable ways of counteracting disinformation.

  Though academia has become obsessed with firewalling and commercializing the products of research, the info-revolution has massively expanded the primary sources of knowledge. Since 1665, when the first two scientific journals were started, researchers estimate that about 50 million scholarly papers have been published. Of these, 10 million were published in the last ten years, and 20 million in the last twenty-five years.21 But even here, the open-access revolution is corroding commerce: a 2006 study found that useable copies of 11 per cent of all papers published that year could be found for free, through self-archiving on academics’ personal websites.22

  It’s now possible to conceive of a situation where the great bulk of academic research will be free, open to all, and transparently cross-referenced. This will destroy the business models of media empires like Reed Elsevier but, arguably, they have already been destroyed.

  Meanwhile the nature of learning has been transformed. There are huge numbers of facts available to me now about the subjects I studied at university which were not known when I was there in the 1980s. Back then, whole academic terms would be spent disputing basic facts, or trying to research them. Today the plane of reasoning can be more complex, because people have an instant reference
source for the undisputed premises of arguments. I am not referring here to Wikipedia, which can be unreliable, but to sources like instantly searchable documents, scanned books, census data and digitized historic photographs and manuscripts. It’s as if physics had been replaced by quantum physics, but in every discipline. Or, as Clay Shirky has argued, it’s as if the impact of the calculator on school mathematics were now being replicated in every field.

  And as the nature of learning changes, the nature of the individuals produced by it evolves. We are prepared to consult secondary sources less, primary sources more, and each other always. We are prepared to follow our search results across academic boundaries; we are prepared to ‘load’ complex information into our minds—just as a computer loads software—and then ‘unload’ it, once the task is complete, making room for a new upload of expertise to do something else. High-level knowledge work becomes less about ‘information conquest’ than ‘information management’, and the latter is the valued corporate skill.

  It is as if, in response to the creation of digital networks, we are changing our behaviour to become not just networked individuals but ‘network animals’.

  This should come as no surprise: observers of the early factory system described how, within a generation, it had wrought a total change in the behaviour, thinking, body shape and life expectancy of those imprisoned within it. People grew smaller, their limbs became bent; physical movements became more regimented. Family units broke down.

  Why should a revolution in knowledge and technology not be producing an equally dramatic—albeit diametrically opposite—change in human behaviour?

  The challenge to info-hierarchies

  The impact of social networks on knowledge, community and individuals constitutes a challenge to three kinds of hierarchies that stood at the heart of twentieth-century reality: repressive states, corporations and hermetically sealed ideologies.

  Repressive states rely not just on the manipulation of news, but on the suppression of truth and the control of narratives. Today, in the face of totalitarianism, more or less everything you need to know to make sense of the world—and explode a false narrative—is available as freely downloadable content on the Internet; and this content has not been pre-digested by teachers, parents, priests, imams or commissars.

  For example, if there was a narrative that really finished off Mubarak’s regime, it was not the April 6th movement but the ‘We are all Khalid Said’ Facebook page: again and again you find that those who became detonators of the 25 January uprising acted through the links made over Said’s murder. Though Mubarak shut down Twitter on 27 January 2011, to stop the revolution he would have had to close down the Khalid Said page, hunt down its members and round up the protest networks that sent people like @sarrahsworld, @Hennawy89 and @3arabawy into the slums of Cairo on 25 January.

  But you cannot run a modern economy that way. The only defence against information-driven revolt is to de-network your society and institute Nazi or East German Communist levels of surveillance and control.

  Likewise, info-capitalism makes it increasingly difficult for corporations to control their own narratives. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation empire was plunged into crisis not just because Guardian journalist Nick Davies discovered it had hacked the phone of a teenage murder victim. It was also because, by day three of the furore, one in every four tweets mentioning the News of the World hashtag (#notw) also mentioned the brand name of a company advertising in the paper. The marketing agency We Are Social, which produced these metrics, reported:

  Every brand involved was dealing with its own social-media crisis last week. The sheer volume of this protest will have been a shock for many brands and drowned out any normal marketing activity. This cannot have failed to influence their decisions about whether to pull advertising from the News of the World. It was a mass outpouring of public opinion which hit at the right time and had its desired effect.23

  Manuel Castells had put his finger on the source of Rupert Murdoch’s power: News Corp acted as a ‘switch’ within the political elite systems of the world. It created valuable niche groups of right-wing voters around particular media outlets, and then traded influence over those voters for political influence pursuant to the growth of News Corp. Backing up this unspoken deal was always the hidden sanction of scandal or opprobrium, ready to be unleashed on anyone who did not cooperate.24

  But News Corp’s position as a ‘switch’ within the system was overwhelmed by these decentralized attacks. Faced with a massive pull-out of brand advertising, and in an attempt to stop the crisis spreading through the whole corporation, Murdoch pulled the plug on the News of the World, a massively profitable Sunday newspaper. In other words, social media killed it, once more demonstrating the truism that the network defeats the hierarchy.

  As for hermetically sealed ideologies—Christian fundamentalism, fascism, clunking Leninist orthodoxy—the info-revolution simply reinforces the choice globalization had already forced on them: isolate yourself from reality inside a closed community, or unseal the ideology, exposing it to critical dialogue and difference.

  For the traditional left, the info-revolution presents an additional problem: it loses its monopoly on critical narratives about capitalism. From the 1960s, the left and progressive liberalism were jointly engaged in a struggle against the censorship of news and the suppression of information about the past. It was from radical journalists that we learned the truth about Vietnam, or the miscarriages of justice in Northern Ireland, or the hidden secrets of the Cold War ‘Gladio’ network that ran Italian politics. And it was the left that dug through history to discover the hidden and forgotten struggles of workers, women, racial minorities, lesbians and gays.

  For activists, the moment of political commitment often coincided with a moment of revelation. Anybody, in theory, could have rediscovered the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the slave who led the Haitian revolution in 1789; but in practice, only the Trinidadian Marxist historian C. L. R. James took the trouble to do so. James’s book The Black Jacobins, produced in 1938, shaped the outlook of black activists in the 1960s and 1980s because—even forty years after publication—it was the definitive account, influencing two generations of anti-racists.

  Today the left is no longer the gatekeeper to subversive knowledge (although it can aspire to remain a ‘preferred provider’). Those seeking a narrative critical of the world order, and evidence of corporate or state wrongdoing, are free to cut out the middleman.

  It is worth here exploring the role played by ‘memes’. Richard Dawkins invented the concept in 1976, speculating the existence of core ideas within human societies that had survived, and mutated, like genes:

  Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.25

  Before the Internet, the ‘meme’ idea would have been useful as a speculative tool for understanding the prevalence of certain themes and patterns in human culture. Dawkins himself was quite negative about memes, tending to see them as autonomous entities, as selfish as genes, replicating themselves in their own interest. Meanwhile the study of memes got sidetracked into an academic debate between anthropologists and neuroscientists who purported to describe their laws of motion.

  With the Internet, however, and above all with the advent of social media, it’s become possible to observe the development of memes at an accelerated pace (much as fruit flies, with their short life cycles, help geneticists study mutation).

  What happens is that ideas arise, are immediately ‘m
arket tested’, and then are seen to either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves into the mainstream, or, if they are deemed no good, disappear. While this process is observable in mass culture generally, activists in the horizontalist and hacker movements believe memes are tools for creating direct democracy. Ideas replicate, or do not replicate, through social media according to whether they hit the right buttons within the collective consciousness.

  Examples are legion: the ‘Uninstalling dictator: 99% complete’ tweets that spun across the world as Ben Ali and Mubarak fell; the decision by thousands of activists worldwide to change their Twitter location to ‘Tehran’ in June 2009, in a bid to mask the location of the real Iranian activists. Above all, the occupation of physical space with tents: begun in Tahrir, spreading to Madrid and then Athens, and bursting out again in the autumn of 2011 in the Occupy Wall Street movement, which on 15 October inspired space-occupations in 962 cities, in 85 countries.

  For activists, memes create a kind of rough alternative to representative democracy. Methods of protests, slogans, beliefs—like the repeated insistence that ‘Black Bloc is a tactic, not a lifestyle’ among British students after the debacle of 26 March 2011—spread in a seemingly autonomous way.

  I am not certain whether memes are anything more than small cultural portions of the Zeitgeist. That they move and replicate faster than they used to seems pretty obvious. Yet it is important to understand that, for the activists themselves, memes are seen as facilitating decentralized action. One of those critiquing my original ‘Twenty Reasons Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere’ blog post, an activist aligned with the hacker group LulzSec, wrote:

  We don’t see this decentralisation of power and authority in determining the direction of actions to be a negative impact of technology. Memetics offer an opportunity for the instigation of autonomous actions, delivering death by a thousand cuts to our enemy.26