Conclusion: Extraction and Utopia
So, how can a critique of capitalist extraction hope to foster ideas of new economic science fictions, or ideas that go beyond the extractive impulse? Let us also consider extraction’s contradictory nature – being both constructive and destructive – which makes it hard for us to untangle the dystopic from the utopic. Initially we can consider the idea that extraction in its cultural form is necessary for the imagining of new worlds and new political economic models (because we always take from the past in order to create the future). At the same time we can reflect on what Jameson gleans from More’s original text in Utopia: that through the removal of money we are suddenly opened up to a world no longer at the mercy of the exchange abstraction.68 So the extractive impulse can be mobilised to extract the very parts of capitalism that are inhibiting our revolutionary imagination. This chapter has identified the extractive impulse as central to both capitalism and to science fiction. Each example explored evidences the way capitalist extraction is constantly shifting the goalposts in terms of object, and, as I explain, subject. The proliferation of cultural examples of and approaches to extraction in film, literature and TV illuminates an understanding of the way that the extractive impulse is embodied in us as neoliberal subjects mobilising a type of creativity. What we also see in cultural depictions and real-life responses to economic imperatives in capitalism, however, is the immanent drive to resist this extractive impulse. Whether it is a natural fear, outright defiance or the surgical removal of the parasite, we do not passively accept the extractive impulse, which is why for now we must continue to locate extraction under capitalism as an ongoing dystopia.
1This new world and its many variations can be understood through Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), or a ‘dystopia’, such as E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909) or Michel Foucault’s ‘heterotopia’ (1984) in his article ‘Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias’ in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité.
2See F. Jameson (2005) Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso; and R. Williams (1980) Culture and Materialism. London: Verso.
3Here I refer to my own films of the ‘extraction trilogy’: Keela Mine (2013), Synophresia Nervosa (2014) and Private Life (2015).
4See, for example, writers of operaismo/post-operaismo: M. Tronti (2010) Workerism and Politics, Historical Materialism, 18(3): 186–9; and C. Vercellone (2006) From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism, Historical Materialism, 15(1): 13–36; readings of globalisation by S. Amin (1976) Unequal Development: Essays on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press; and D. Harvey (2003) The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press; and feminist authors: L. Fortunati (2007) Immaterial Labor and Its Machinization, Ephemera: Politics and Organization in Society, 7(1): 139–57; and S. Federici (2012) Revolution at Point Zero: Housework Reproduction and Feminist Struggle. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
5Here I refer to B. Brecht (1978) Short Description of a New Technique of Acting which Produces an Alienation Effect, in J. Willett (ed.) Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic: 136–47. London: Eyre Methuen; and D. Suvin (1979) Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; for a discussion of both, see C. Freedman (2000) Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
6Fredric Jameson discusses the political charge within modern montage, specifically Brecht, in F. Jameson (1977) Aesthetics and Politics: Key Texts of the Classic Debate within German Marxism. London: Verso.
7Maurizio Lazzarato explores the way that debt transforms time by owning the future, so that capitalism enacts the tenets of science fiction by its time travelling: M. Lazzarato (2012) The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
8K. Marx (1867 [1976]) Capital, vol. I. London: Pelican Books, p. 988.
9Ibid., emphasis in original.
10Ibid., p. 990.
11A. Negri (1992) Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. London: Pluto Press, and Vercellone, in From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect, both look at changes in the technical composition of capital that are directly influenced by the technological transformations of labour – which are relative surplus value.
12Writers of operaismo, such as Tronti, in Workerism and Politics, and Raniero Panzieri, in the Panzieri–Tronti Theses of 1962, identified the educated worker as a new identity in post-war Europe. This has been further developed by Paolo Virno – P. Virno (2004) A Grammar of the Multitude. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) – in his writing on the ‘multitude’.
13Amin, in Unequal Development, and Harvey, in The New Imperialism, identify the massive relocation of productive labour after 1960.
14Here I must emphasise that throughout this chapter I employ Marx’s concepts and categories in an interpretive way, using Autonomist ideas of value being located in the labourer, and subsequent ideas of value being created in reproductive time. I am aware that this position is the subject of much critique, but, as labour is currently being devalued by the increasing surplus population and mechanisation, we must consider what new ways capital generates value; the extraction of life is one such hypothesis, and, given the profit made by Web 2.0 platforms, it is important to understand value both inside and outside factory wage extraction.
15Marx, Capital, vol. I.
16As Trebor Scholz reminds us, 5 billion people worldwide now have mobile phones and Facebook is now available on mobile phones in Africa: T. Scholz (2013) Introduction: Why Does Digital Labor Matter Now?, in T. Scholz (ed.) Digital Labor: Internet as Playground and Factory: 1–9. New York: Routledge.
17Specifically, J. Dean (2005) Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics, Cultural Politics, 1(1): 51–74; and also C. Fuchs (2013) Digital Labour and Karl Marx. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
18See M. Tronti (1966) The Workers and Capital, accessed from http://operaismoinenglish.wordpress.com/2011/05/11/workers-and-capital-contents; and Fortunati, Immaterial Labor and Its Machinization, for a discussion about the role of the factory outside the factory.
19See N. Dyer-Witheford (2015) Cyber Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex. London: Pluto Press.
20See M. Bunz (2014) The Silent Revolution: How Digitalization Transforms Knowledge, Work, Journalism and Politics without Making Too Much Noise. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
21See interview with Vaidhyanathan: K. McNally (2016) The Rise of Facebook and ‘the Operating System of Our Lives’, University of Virginia Today, 12 July, www.news.virginia.edu/content/rise-facebook-and-operating-system-our-lives.
22Ursula Huws explores the contradictory role of the home computer: U. Huws (2001) The Making of a Cybertariat? Virtual Work in a Real World, Socialist Register, 37: 1–33, p. 16.
23‘Constant capital’ refers to the machines and fixed assets that capital uses in production, so we could argue that through the process of digital integration we are becoming constant capital. Here we can also consider Maria Mies’ concept of ‘housewifirization’, which has been used by both Christian Fuchs, in Digital Labour and Karl Marx, and Kylie Jarrett in relation to digital labour or e-labour that is enacted in the home and is unpaid; see K. Jarrett (2016) Feminism, Labour and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife. New York: Routledge.
24Marx, quoted in M. Heinrich (2013) The ‘Fragment on Machines’: A Marxian Misconception in the Grundrisse and its Overcoming in Capital, in R. Bellofiore, G. Starosta & P. Thomas (eds.) In Marx’s Laboratory: Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse: 197–212. Leiden: Brill, p. 211.
25M. Lazzarato (2014) Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), p. 26.
26D. Harraway (1991) A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, in Simians, Cyborgs, a
nd Women: The Reinvention of Nature: 149–81. New York: Routledge, p. 180.
27This ‘capturing’ is not as benign as storing your Web preferences, however. The case of Microsoft allowing the United States’ National Security Agency to have access to internet user files, e-mails and Skype conversations shows a deep level of control and surveillance, and a relationship between government and corporate interests; see C. Arthur & D. Rushe (2013) NSA Scandal: Microsoft and Twitter Join Calls to Disclose Data Requests, Guardian, 12 June, www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/12/microsoft-twitter-rivals-nsa-requests.
28A. Dur & M. Wark (2011) New New Babylon, October, 138(Fall): 37–56, p. 45.
29T. Terranova (2004) Network Culture: Politics in the Information Age. London: Pluto Press, p. 75.
30Jonathan Crary explains that ‘in-use devices and apparatuses have an impact on small-scale forms of sociality (a meal, a conversation, or a classroom)’, and consequently ‘passively and often voluntarily one now collaborates in one’s own surveillance and data-mining’: J. Crary (2013) 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso, pp. 31, 48.
31So how do we understand AIs in the context of Marx’s labour theory of value? Because Marx explains that value comes only from the labour humans do, by replacing us with robots (this has happened/is happening) do we remove this equation, or do we simply transform or relocate it? Marx’s labour theory of value is often contested, or questioned; see G. Caffentzis (2013) In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland, CA; PM Press, for discussion around these ideas; and see Z. Williams (2016) If Robots Are the Future of Work, Where Do Humans Fit In?, Guardian, 24 May, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/24/robots-future-work-humans-jobs-leisure, for a discussion around the current and future roles of robots.
32Cognitive estrangement, as Darko Suvin explains in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, includes the introduction of a ‘novum’, a new device or machine that enables us to think differently.
33See Gilligan interviewed on the Metropolis M website (2015): Zachary Formwalt Meets Melanie Gilligan, 24 January, http://metropolism.com/features/zachary-formwalt- meets-melanie-g.
34See Fortunati, Immaterial Labor and Its Machinization.
35A. Dimitrakaki (2014) Still Modern: Art in Total Production, paper presented at ‘When the Present Begins’ conference, Rietberg Museum and Johann Museum, Zurich, 11 October.
36See David Beech for a detailed analysis of art’s separate role in the economy: D. Beech (2015) Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics. Leiden: Brill.
37See L. Fortunati (1996) The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital. New York: Autonomedia; M. Dalla Costa (2004) Capitalism and Reproduction, The Commoner, 8; M. Mies (1999) Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London: Zed Books.
38Lise Vogel actually identifies the family as central to the reproduction of capital, as it independently reproduces labour power: L. Vogel (2013) Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
39M. Foucault (1990) The History of Sexuality, vol. I. New York: Vintage Books.
40See Endnotes (2010) A History of Subsumption, Endnotes, 2: 130–55; but also U. Huws (2014) The Underpinnings of Class in the Digital Age: Living, Labour and Value, Socialist Register, 50: 80–107.
41See M. Fisher (2009:16–20) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Ropley, UK: Zero Books, pp. 16–20.
42Foucault’s (2008) concept of ‘biopolitics’ refers to the subjugation of bodies under neoliberalism: M. Foucault (1990) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
43Jason Read recognises the missing component between the subject and extraction: J. Read (2004) The Micropolitics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present. New York: State University of New York Press, p. 132.
44For a discussion around cultural manifestations of accelerationism, see B. Noys (2014) Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism. Ropley, UK: Zero Books; and J. Wajcman (2015) Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
45The Bachelor is a highly successful US franchise of dating shows that is now run in 17 other countries.
46The term ‘body horror’, coined by the journal Screen in 1986, refers to films in which the breakdown or animation of the body grotesque is the main component, such as Taxidermia (2006). This is not to be confused with slasher horror, but forensic science films and TV series can also be read as body horror because of the way they animate and dissect the body. Marx also wrote a kind of body horror in Capital, due to the amount of time spent describing the condition of the body in the factory, its illnesses and its morbidity.
47See D. McNally (2011) Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism. Leiden: Brill.
48As David McNally, in Monsters of the Market, identifies in both the Victorian Frankenstein and the colonial zombie myth.
49A. Agamben (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
50See Kevin Floyd for a discussion around biotechnical reproduction and an expanded understanding of reproductive labour: K. Floyd (2016) Automatic Subjects: Gendered Labour and Abstract Life, Historical Materialism, 24(2): 61–86.
51See M. Wark (2015) Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. London: Verso.
52See J. Moore (2015) Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso.
53K. Marx & F. Engels (1848) The Communist Manifesto. London: Workers’ Educational Association.
54Here I refer to More’s original text, but also to Aldous Huxley’s novel Island (1962).
55See P. Murphy (2009) Environmentalism, in M. Bould, A. Butler, A. Roberts & S. Vint (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction: 373–81. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, p. 376.
56A. Mousoutzanis (2009) Apocalyptic SF, in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction: 458–62.
57I. Kant (1790 [2008]) Critique of Judgement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
58See Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, for a good analysis of this binary and its relationship with capitalism.
59Rosa Luxemburg and David Harvey have argued for two distinct spheres of capitalist accumulation: the sphere of the market, in which an extraction of surplus value takes place; and the sphere of the non-capitalised, or ‘commons’, which can be tapped into as a resource and turned into productive capital. See Harvey, The New Imperialism, and R. Luxemburg (1913 [2003]) The Accumulation of Capital. Abingdon, UK: Routledge; see also M. De Angelis (2006) The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital. London: Pluto Press.
60See De Angelis, The Beginning of History, p. 144, who explains that an enclosure is ‘to forcibly separate people from whatever access to social wealth they have which is not mediated by competitive markets and money as capital’; and Harvey, The New Imperialism.
61Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life.
62The law of Justus Freiherr von Liebig regarding the leaching of nutrients from the soil; for a discussion, see B. Foster (2000) Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.
63Ibid.
64For a discussion around these issues, see A. Roy (2011) Walking with the Comrades. London: Penguin Books, who writes on the indigenous resistance fighters in northern India; and, writing on China, S. Sassen (2010) A Savage Sorting of Winners and Losers: Contemporary Versions of Primitive Accumulation, Globalizations, 7(1/2): 23–50.
65Harvey, The New Imperialism.
66S. Sassen (2014) Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
67Here I refer specifically to the BBC’s The Natural World.
68Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future.
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