This book should be read through to its end, i.e. chapter five, because its first four chapters on the precariat are only set in a more complex geopolitical context in that final chapter. To be honest, I was quite reactive at times during the reading of the first four chapters, because two very important structural elements were missing in Foti’s analysis. First is the commons itself, the other side of the antagonistic struggles of the precariat; and second is the ecological crisis, the very material conditions under which this struggle must occur today. Foti indeed calls for economic and monetary growth, and sounds like an unabashed neo-Keynesian, but only in the last chapter does he stress that this growth should be thermodynamically sound (i.e. he calls for monetary growth, but not growth in material services). Foti also almost completely ignores the role of the commons and ‘commonalism’ in the first four chapters, only acknowledging in a few parts of chapter 5, that it is a vital, constituent part of the precarious condition. If you don’t read chapter 5, you could mistakenly see Foti’s analysis as an exercise in re-imagining the class dynamics and compromises of the New Deal and post-WWII European welfare states, simply replacing working class with precariat, working class parties with social populism, and the New Deal with a social compact for green capitalism. For example, it would have really helped to know from the beginning that Foti realizes that material growth is impossible, something not clear in his language until the last chapter.

So, the fact that this is a remarkably well thought-out book about contemporary strategy for social change should be tempered by a few paradoxes that the author has not completely resolved.

Indeed, at the heart of the book also lies an enduring paradox: Foti calls for the most radical forms of conflict, and identifies with the more radical cultural minorities, acknowledging their anticapitalist and anarchist ethos, yet calls for mere reformism as a focus and outcome. This is, therefore, not a book about transforming our societies to post-capitalist logics; this is a book about a new reformism. This is a book against neoliberalism, not against capitalism. At times, it is plain ‘capitalist realism’, as Foti explicitly acknowledges that he sees no dynamic value creation outside of capitalism. For Foti, it is clear that if sufficient conflict and precariat self-organisation can occur, then a new regulation of capitalism can occur. He justifies this by a detailed analysis of the different regulatory modes of capitalism (Smith-ism, Fordism, jobs-ism) and how they relate to the Kondratieff economic cycles, drawing on the insights of Carlota Perez and others. Foti distinguishes crises of demand, where there is too much accumulation of capital, and not enough distribution. These crises, he says, are essentially reformist crises as people mobilize to restore balance in the redistribution, but not against the system per se. The crisis of the 30s and the crisis after 2008 are such crises, he convincingly argues. Other crises are caused by a failing supply, due to over-regulation of capital and falling profit rates, such as the crisis of the 70s, and these crises, which are inflationary, are revolutionary. This distinction between crises of accumulation and crises of regulation is, in my opinion, very insightful and true. This recognition may, of course, be troubling, but if true, we must take serious stock of it. We simply are not in revolutionary times right now, but rather in a struggle between national populism and social populism. From this analysis, Foti then argues that the first priority is for the precariat to re-regulate for a distribution of wealth, much like the old working class achieved after WWII.

But even if we acknowledge this conjuncture, I would argue that Foti insufficiently balances his outlook between reforming capitalism and constructing post-capitalism, between antagonistic conflict and positive construction of the new. He argues that without income, there can be no such construction. This is very likely true, so we need to rebalance redistribution in a way that income growth can lead to immaterial growth compatible with the ecological limits of our planet, and use these surpluses to transform societal structures. Foti calls for social (or ‘eco’ populist) movements and coalitions as the political means to that end, pointing to Podemos and En Comu, and perhaps Sanders and Corbyn, as such forces, supported by to-be created Precariat Syndicates. He also puts forward the thesis that the enemy is national populism, an alliance between retrograde fossil fuel capitalism and the salariat. On the other side, we find a possible alliance of green capitalism (a real effort, not a marketing ploy) with the precariat, with the former fighting for top-down coalition and the second for bottom-up regulation. This division of the working class is, in my view, far too stark and perhaps even defeatist. I would very strongly argue to seek alliances and develop policies that can give hope to the salariat. The thrust of our work for the Commons Transition aims at precisely that. (Elsewhere in the book, Foti does call for an alliance with progressive middle classes, but if these are not the workers with jobs, where then are these?)

Foti correctly critiques, in my view, people like Mason and Rifkin for failing to problematize the post-capitalist transition. They make it seem like an inexorable process if not affirming that we are already post-capitalist, as some others do, but in my view, Foti himself fails to pay proper attention to this transition. What if the re-regulation of capitalism doesn’t work, for example? Then at some point, say in about 30 years, as Kondratieff cycles would indicate, we would still face a crisis of over-regulation, and a more revolutionary moment. For Foti, we have to take it on faith that green capitalism will be a successful new regulatory mode of capitalism. What if it turns out to be a unworkable compromise and that more drastic action is needed? But Foti has no faith in alternatives to capitalism, which means that the only alternatives would then be eco-fascism as a new feudalism with only consumption for the rich, lifeboat eco-hacking, a situation akin to that of medieval communes, or dictatorial eco-maoism — say, Cuba on a global scale.

Contra this ‘capitalist realism’, our contention at the P2P Foundation is that post-capitalism is both necessary and possible, even if we recognize that today is possibly a reformist moment in that evolution/transformation. In that context, the construction of seed forms, the recognition of other forms of value creation (which can be monetized!), of other forms of self-organization, are absolutely a vital side of the coin in the dialectic of construction and conflict. Foti seems to forget that the traditional working class did not simply ‘fight’, but constructed cooperatives (both consumer coops and producer coops), unions, parties, mutualities and many fraternal/sororal organizations. The very generalization of the welfare system was an extension, by means of the state, of the solidarity mechanisms of the working class, which had taken decades to develop. But vitally, the identity of the working class itself was always more than a mere reaction to capitalism: this was a movement toward another type of society, whether expressed through socialism, social-democracy, anarchism, and other variants. When that hope was all but lost, that was also the end of the strength and identity of working class movements. There can be no offensive social strategy without a strong social imaginary, and reformist designs alone won’t do. So commonalism (Foti’s term for what we’d call “commoning”) is not just something that we do when we come home from work, or tired from our conflictual organizing against an enemy from whom we want mere redistribution. On the contrary, it is vital part of the class formation and identity. This is why we stress our identity as not just precariat, which is a negative formulation that characterizes us as the weaker victims of the capitalist class, but as commoners, the multitude of co-constructors of viable futures that correspond to contemporary, emancipatory desires. We cannot simply trust green capitalism; we vitally need to build thermodynamically sound and mutualized provisioning systems as commons, even if we have to compromise with capitalism. Post-capitalism should not be essentialized as something occuring ‘after the revolution’, but as an ongoing process, dynamically inter-linked with political self-organizing and conflict.  In this book, Foti is only really good at conflict. Even if we look at conflict, I would argue that the strength of the reformist compromise after WWII was very much linked to the fear of the flawed alternative that existed, and that the forms of compromise were the result of decades of invention of new forms.

If we take that view, then I believe the contradiction in Foti’s book can be resolved. In that case, we do not have to ask the radical precariat to give up its values for a reformist compromise, but to productively combine them with a radically transformative post-capitalist practice.

There is another issue with Foti’s book. He strongly stresses the superdiversity of the precariat, and the key role of gender and race/migration unity in their struggles. He also mentions en passe the need for a potential Eurasian alignment between Europe and China, now that the Atlantic unity has been broken by Trump. But, at the same time, this is really a very Eurocentric book, calling for a new compromise in Europe and ‘advanced western states’. Obviously, since in the Global South it is the salariat and proletariat which are growing, there is a theoretical difficulty here. But what if, as we contend at the P2P Foundation, a thermodynamically sound economy would require a cosmo-localization of our global economy combining global sharing of knowledge with substantial relocalization of physical production (as even big bank reports now recognize)? Only if we acknowledge this, can we actually have a new global view of solidarity, as both elements benefit workers, salaried and precarious, in the whole world.

In conclusion, I find Foti’s book to be an excellent first half of a book, which would have been much better and sound if it had more extensively struggled with the commons equation of the precariat. The commons is not something we do ‘afterwards’, after a successful New Green Deal; it is something that is as ongoing and vital. Theoretically, in a few paragraphs at the end of the book, Foti seems to recognize this but does not integrate it in his strategic vision, or only marginally.

Readers who miss this aspect could look at the ten years of research and analysis the P2P Foundation has conducted on that other half of the equation. However, we may suffer from the other weakness. We have intentionally not focused on the conflict part — the natural inclination of the left, which needs no help. Instead, we focus on showing how the self-organization and construction of commons (which inevitably comes with conflict) is just as essential a part of the programmatic alternatives of the precariat. Not only as proposals of electoral parties and syndicates, but as expressions of actual practice. Our orientation is to try to achieve a greater understanding by emancipatory forces — of the salariat, the precariat, and progressive entrepreneurial groups — of the importance of integrating the commons as a programmatic element in their struggles and proposals. We will probably retain our bias towards the constructive side of the equation, fully aware that this alone is insufficient, and requires the kind of understanding of struggle and its attendant strategies as provided by Foti.

In conclusion, Foti’s enduring quality is to have systematically worked out what the conflict part of the equation entails, and that is a very important achievement. Bearing in mind what we think is missing in this book, there is nonetheless much to be learned. I believe that among the different perspectives and weaknesses in the approaches of people like Foti and the commons-centric approaches of the P2P Foundation (and others), there is ample room for convergence and mutual enrichment.

Photo by Andrew Gustar

The post A P2P review of Alex Foti’s General Theory of the Precariat appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Description

“From the fast-food industry to the sharing economy, precarious work has become the norm in contemporary capitalism, like the anti-globalization movement predicted it would. . It investigates the political economy of precarity and the historical sociology of the precariat, and discusses movements of precarious youth against oligopoly and oligarchy in Europe, America, and East Asia. Foti covers the three fundamental dates of recent history: the financial crisis of 2008, the political revolutions of 2011, and the national-populist backlash of 2016, to presents his class theory of the precariat and the ideologies of left-populist movements. Building a theory of capitalist crisis to understand the aftermath of the Great Recession, he outlines political scenarios where the precariat can successfully fight for emancipation, and reverse inequality and environmental destruction. Written by the activist who put precarity on the map of radical thinking, this is the first work proposing a complete theory of the precariat in its actuality and potentiality.” (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/just-out-alex-fotis-general-theory-precariat-geert-lovink/)

About the author

Alex Foti is an editor, essayist and activist based in Milano. He was among the founders of ChainWorkers and EuroMayDay, early instances of the self-organization of precarious workers in Europe. Trained in economics, sociology, and history at Bocconi, the New School and Columbia, he has written several articles and books, including Anarchy in the EU: Grande Recessione e movi.menti pink, black, green in Europa (2009).

Excerpt

Precarious Labor and Autonomous Marxism

In a literal sense, the precariousness of labor has existed since the dawn of steam-powered, industrial capitalism. Karl Marx addresses the issue in the first volume of Das Kapital,38 when he discusses the reserve army of labor. He described how the wage demands of the factory-bound proletariat were kept in check by the precariousness of labor demand, due to the irregular, crisis-prone process of capital accumulation (i.e. investment). If laborers didn’t organize, unchecked exploitation and misery would befall those working in the mills and fields. However, below the proletariat in the socio-economic hierarchy was the lumpenproletariat, whom Marx wrongly despised (and Bakunin eulogized): thieves and other petty criminals, prostitutes, tramps, vagrants, etc. The lumpenproletariat made up a reserve army of potential replacement laborers, keeping those in the factories in line, and keeping wages low.

A temporary workforce is a permanent feature of certain industries, exemplified by seasonal workers in sweatshops, and laborers in commercial agriculture. In this respect, things have not changed much since the 19th century. Informal labor remains the norm in emergent and developing economies. However, the recent swelling of the precariat is a symptom of a troubling return to informal labor markets inside the relatively wealthy societies of advanced capitalism.

While contingent labor has always existed in capitalist societies, Italian Autonomous Marxism was the first to argue that precarious labor had moved from the peripheral position it occupied under keynesian, industrial capitalism, to a core position in neoliberal, informational capitalism. Negri and others argue that informational capitalism − the current technological and social paradigm, according to Manuel Castells’ seminal work of social theory The Information Age

is based on casual, affective, creative, immaterial, and precarious labor.

However, a theory of the precariat is not immediately able to slot into the world as understood by Autonomous Marxism. The precariat comprises of two categories of workers with very differ- ent levels of skill and education: pink-collars working in retail and low-end services (cashiers, cleaners, janitors, cooks, waiters, etc.) under constrictive but standardized employment norms, and the digital creative class (editors, graphic artists, programmers, etc.) who are temping, sometimes at high wage rates, in the information economy connecting the world’s major cities. Furthermore, the precariat is also a plurality of young people of different genders, different classes, and different ethnicities.

Aside from Autonomous Marxism, contemporary Marxist thought tends to discount the notion that this precarious plurality constitutes an analogue of the 20th century working class; there might be precarity, but there’s no precariat. At most, they make up a section of the working class. I deny this. The precariat is the successor of the working class, emerging from the new form of informational neoliberalism expanded and radicalized in the crucible of the Great Recession. The precariat is a generation becoming a class. It has become a new historical subject, and is the only subject capable of progressive collective agency; it’s the precariat that both performs general labor, and constitutes the general intellect (to use Marx’s terms). The precarious have their identity based on exclusion from social status, rather than on nationalist, or cultural norms. The centrality of the service precariat for 21st century capitalist accumulation is equivalent to the role played by the industrial proletariat in determining the fortunes of 20th century capitalism.

Autonomous Marxism, as elaborated by Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno and others, places the revolutionary agency of the exploited subject at the center of philosophical analysis. After the defeat of the 1968-1979 insurgency of the western working class,40 the theorists of operaismo (workerism) turned to focus on urban movements, as well as emerging forms of service and intellectual labor, as a new Post-Fordist, digital economy was consolidating out of the ashes of industrial Fordism. In the work of Negri especially, this position is made clear: the precariat must be radicalized, in order for the multitude to cast off the dominating weight of imperial structures. It is within the relative obscurity of this intellectual tradition that the radical theory of precarity was forged in the 00s, centered around Milan, Rome, Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Helsinki, and Liège.

To summarize my previous point differently: the new digital capitalist class is confronted by a multitude of young precarious workers. It is the precariat’s labor, communication, and distribution that is making internet billionaires rich beyond imagination. The oligopolists have long acted jointly to protect their class interests (low taxes, low wages, etc.). However, the time has come for the precarious to act as class, and work with their collective interest in mind. It is time to cut into profits and end income insecurity. Just as Henry Ford needed to be buried for Fordism to rise, not only Steve Jobs, but also his free-market ideology, needs to die for Jobsism to rise. Although in vastly different technosocial paradigms (industrialism and informationalism, respectively), the implications of the Fordist and Jobsian compromises are the same regarding regulation: let workers share the bounty of productivity, either individually in the form of wages, or socially in the form of welfare, else risk economic crisis and class warfare. If an egalitarian solution to capitalist crisis was found against National Socialism in the last century, it can also be found against national populism in this century. Capitalism can be reformed. It has been reformed before, during the Belle Époque, and again after World War Two. However, today we need a simultaneous revision of both social and ecological regulation of capitalism. Social regulation has been experimented before with success, yet ecological regulation has not. If we consider Piketty’s laws of capitalist motion valid, and I think any thinking left-leaning individual should, then growth must be restarted, so that it can jump above the profit rate, and reduce capital-labor disparity. However, this ‘red’ (social) objective is posed to clash with the ‘green’ (environmental) objective, since additional growth would lead to even greater carbon emissions, pushing the planet further towards environmental chaos.41

Of course, anti-capitalists of all tendencies will just question why we don’t simply ditch capitalism instead. My answer to them is that capitalism makes innovation and mate- rial progress possible in ways that state communism has been unable to deliver at any latitude, even under well-meaning leaderships like those of the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev, and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere. Communism simply doesn’t work as an eco- nomic system; look at what China accomplished when it switched from Mao Zedong’s communism to Deng Xiaoping’s capitalism. Immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia’s GDP was still larger than China’s, at exchange rates reflecting purchas- ing power parities. By 2016, China’s GDP was more than five times larger that Russia’s (536% larger), making the country the workshop of the world, pulling hundreds of mil- lions out of poverty. It is hard to argue with these facts. Although the Communist party officially retained power in spite of the Tiananmen Square student rebellion, the lives of over one billion people were drastically improved by market reform: the rate of extreme poverty in China went from almost 90% in 1980, to less than 2% in 2013 (World Bank data). China’s might be state-controlled capitalism, but it’s capitalism nonetheless. In light of this, I do not see a viable economic alternative that can replace firms and markets. To adopt an effective, populist strategy, the instinctive anti-capitalism of the precariat must be of the transformative kind: changing both the state, and market institutions, in order to achieve social and ecological regulation of capital, abolishing the dictatorship of global finance, and expanding the domain of commons-based peer production, as an alternative to both state and market production.

Evaluation

Michel Bauwens: (a very provisional evaluation after reading the first 40 pages, roughly ch. 1 and 2)

I’m currently reading the book, and there are some surprising aspects to it:

• the author sees the precariat as a ‘class in formation’

• the author advocates a reformist outcome within capitalism, i.e. a new regulation of capitalism but calls for growth to allow for redistribution, recognizing that this may class with green objectives

• he calls for an alliance of the precariat and the underclass against the traditional working class seen as allied to national-populism (he calls for social populism as an alternative)

• there is relative little connection to be seen in this book between the precariat and commoning/commons, though Foti calls for expanding commons-based peer production within a capitalist reformation process and with CBPP seen as distinct from market and state production.

Discussion

Reading notes by Giorgos Anadiotis: “I found the book to be a step in the right direction, as it focuses on the class with the most potential of driving social change, and does so under the lens of class-conscious analysis, which is sorely needed. I have however also found some things i am skeptical about, and some others that i find clearly flawed.

To start with the positives, Foti’s background in economics and involvement in grass-roots politics shows. To his credit, unlike many of his counterparts his style makes the book both accessible and interesting. His analysis of modern capitalism and the strata of the precariat is to the point, as well as the critique on the traditional left and its unions.

However, some of the book’s premises, as well as the ending and conclusions were somewhat lacking to say the least.

I am extremely wary of approaches that border on identity politics. Foti himself has some words of warning against that, but he seems imo to cross that border too. He does for example mention queer and feminist movements as possible actors of change. While i am all for emancipation and sympathetic to such causes, i am yet to find elements of radicality in such movements. Liberal capitalism gladly embraces those.

Perhaps he knows something i don’t, but citing for example a Women’s Strike in March 2017 as a sign of mobilization and radicalization does not make sense. This was largely unnoticed and unaffective (never heard of it before), reported only by Vogue. I understand his point was mostly the trans-national nature of the organization, and we all need to see hope where we can, but this seems way far fetched.

His overall reformist and EU-centric views are also something i am not really comfortable with. While i do see their pragmatism and the need for broad alliances, i think these can only be used as stepping stones towards more radical approaches. History shows that ambivalence, half-baked attempts and the logic of “lesser evil” do not really serve well in the long run if left to their own devices.

Foti for example speaks of free trade as alternative to war, which is true to some extent. But he does in this context also speak of the invalidation of treaties such as NAFTA TTIP and the like by Trump as a setback, without a word of critique on the treaties themselves. If you know anything about the treaties or the way they are negotiated and enforced, this is deeply problematic.

As for the EU, i find his thesis of defending and preserving it problematic too, both from an ideological and a pragmatic POV. While the EU is certainly the most progressive-looking among state apparatuses today, you don’t have to dig too deep to find its true nature. That has justifiably got it a bad name, which the nationalist populists are riding on, and a movement that would associate itself with the EU has no chance of appealing to the disenfranchised.

While i am all for internationalism, a union of europeans would have to be reinvented and rebranded to stand any chance of success. Hoping to simply capture the deeply flawed and malfunctioning cross-state apparatus that is the EU and fix it from within, while not breaking with its practices and trademarks is a doomed strategy imho. Just look how that worked for Syriza – been trying to make that point forever, sorry to see it proven.

But the most serious flaw i see is the assesment of the precariat’s position and leverage as referred to in the final part of the book. The claim there is that the precariat owns the means of production (smartphones, laptops etc), therefore if it becomes a class per se and claims its role in the productive process it can interfere with it and influence things.

“In a networked information economy, it is the precarious, not the capitalists, that control the strategic means of production – the computing power of connected smartphones and PCs – and enable the production and distribution of information, culture, and knowledge, through networks which are making the age of mass media obsolete”.

Wishful thinking at best, but flawed and dangerous. This is hard to explain for someone who has otherwise been so diligent in his economic analysis and classification of different sub-layers of the precariat in previous parts of the book. It’s certainly not true for the service precariat or platform users. It’s not even worth analyzing how (most) Amazon or Wal-Mart workers have nothing to do with this.

Uber or Foodora drivers may be owners of their vehicles for example, but what really makes the wheels turn are the platforms (algorithms and data) and they have no access to those. That is not to say they are powerless and they should not unionize etc, but it’s an important distinction.

Similarly, social media users do not directly produce value for the platforms, they mainly act as a target audience for advertisers. Fleeing en masse would put pressure on the platforms, data sovereignity and control issues can and should be raised, but it makes no sense to classify this as a traditional employer – employee relationship and this heterogenous crowd has very little potential for common awareness and action.

The only part of the precariat for which this somewhat applies is the cognitive precariat. Software and data engineers, content creators, artists etc are indeed the owners of the means of production since in that case production is mostly cognitive and digital.

Even they however they have no ownership of the networks required to distribute and run their products en masse (cloud and web platforms) and they must either pay (both money and skills-time) to use them, or rely on one-off contracts without redistribution, hence non scalable.” (https://www.facebook.com/ganadiotis/posts/10159815548640322?)

Photo by Keturah Stickann

The post Book of the Day: General Theory of the Precariat appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The hypnotic documentary Hypernormalization, by British director Adam Curtis, takes its name from a concept developed by Soviet writer Alexei Yurchak. In his book Everything was Forever, Until it was No More, Yurchak describes the tense social and cultural atmosphere during the years prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Curtis describes, after decades of attempting to plan and manage a new kind of socialist society, the technocrats at the top of the post-Stalinist USSR realized that their goal of controlling and predicting everything was unreachable. Unwilling to admit their failure, they “began to pretend that everything was still going according to plan”. The official narrative created a parallel version of the Soviet society, a fake reality (like in the home videos of Good Bye Lenin) that everyone would eventually unveil. But even though they saw that the economy was trembling and the regime’s discourse was fictitious, the population had to play along and pretend it was real… “because no one could imagine any alternative. (…) You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it”.

Nowadays, our society is driven by very different forces. We don’t need technocrats to predict our actions; the last advancements in information technology, in addition to our constant disposition to share everything that happens to us, are enough for an invisible —and, apparently, non-human— power to define and limit our behaviour. In his book Social Media Abyss, the Dutch theorist Geert Lovink —founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam— speaks about the dark side of these new technologies and the consequences of our blind trust in the digital industry.

The closest comparison that we have today to the New Soviet Man is perhaps the cult to the cyberlibertarian entrepreneur of Silicon Valley. We are now used to thirty-somethings in sweaters telling us, from the ping-pong tables in their offices, that the only road to success —both personal and collective— lies in technology. To oppose them is no easy task: who is going to question a discourse that has innovation and “the common good” at its core? But the internet today hardly resembles the technology that, in its origins, seemed to promise a source of decentralization, democratization and citizen empowerment. Nowadays, the giants of Silicon Valley —lead by Facebook and Google— have mutated towards a monopolistic economic model and flirt with intelligence agencies for the exchange of their precious data.

Our relationship with the internet seems to be on its way to becoming something very similar to the later years of the Soviet Union. The Spanish sociologist Cesar Rendueles formulates this concern when questioning the capacities of technology to guarantee a plural and open space: “the network ideology has generated a diminished social reality”, he claims on his essay Sociophobia: Political Change in the Digital Utopia. Lovink shares the “healthy scepticism” of Rendueles when elaborating what we could call an “Internet critical theory”. In Social Media Abyss, he inaugurates the post-Snowden era — “the secular version of God is Dead”— as the beginning of a general disillusionment with the development of the internet: now we can say that the internet “has become almost everything no one wanted it to be”. But even though we know that everything we do online may be used against us, we still click, share and rate whatever appears on our screen. Can we look at the future with optimism? Or are we too alienated, too precarized, too desocialized (despite being constantly “connected”) to design alternatives? In the words of Lovink, “what is citizen empowerment in the age of driver-less cars”?

The year did not start all that well. The big political changes of 2017 have been, as Amador Fernández Savater has described, “a kind of walking paradox: anti-establishment establishment, anti-elitist elite, antiliberal neoliberalism, etc.”. But fortunately, politics not only consists of electoral processes. Lovink has spent decades studying the “organized networks” that operate outside the like economy: “The trick is to achieve a form of collective invisibility without having to reconstitute authority”. We spoke with him not only about the degradation of the democratic possibilities of the internet (and the possibilities for coming up with an equitative revenue model for the internet) but also about how to design the alternative.

We may opt for hypernormalizing everything: “nothing to see here, let’s keep browsing”. Any other option involves theorization as we advance on our objectives. The answer lays on creating “dissident knowledges”.

“Radical disillusionment”

Your latest book starts with the idea that the internet, initially portrayed as a democratizing and decentralising force, “has become precisely everything no one wanted it to be”. The once uncontested Californian ideology is now being challenged for the first time, after the Snowden revelations showed us that we have lost any controlled, pragmatic rule over internet governance. What is our next move?

Geert Lovink

I don’t want to make it too schematic, in terms of chronology. But because the internet is still growing so fast, it is really important to ask ourselves: “where are we“? This was really the “beginners” question, but for a while, the discussion turned to what it could become. The Snowden revelations, together with the 2008 crisis, should make us go back to the original question: where is the internet now?

I like to see the internet as a facilitating ideology. This is a notion that comes from Arthur Kroker, a Canadian philosopher working in the tradition of Marshall McLuhan. It is obviously not repressive, let alone aggressive, as it does not cause any physical violence on you. But what it does is that it facilitates.

Since the 2000s and the so called Web 2.0, the internet has been primarily focused on its participatory aspect. Everywhere you go you are asked not simply to create a profile, but to contribute, to say something, to click here, to like… The internet these days is a huge machine that seduces the average user without people necessarily understanding that what they do creates an awful load of data.

The fact that we are not aware of what the data we produce is used for seems to be the problematic aspect. Precisely one of the defining phrases of the book is that “tomorrow’s challenge will not be the internet’s omnipresence but its very invisibility. That’s why Big Brother is the wrong framing”. In the internet, power operates in the collective unconscious, more subtly than a repressive force. In fact, “the Silicon Valley tech elite refuses to govern”, you say; “its aim is to achieve the right for corporations to be left alone to pursue their own interests”. So how do you better describe this?

Yes, you can see that even after Trump’s win. They take the classic position of not governing. This is in a way a new form of power, because it’s not quite Foucauldian. Even though we would love to see that it is all about surveillance —and the NSA of course invites us to go back to this idea—, the internet is in a way post-Foucauldian. If you read Foucault’s last works, he invites us to that next stage, to see it as the Technology of the Self. That would be the starting point to understand what kind of power structure there is at stake, because it is facilitated from the subject position of the user. And this is really important to understand. All the Silicon Valley propositions or network architectures have that as the starting point.

Nowadays, surveillance is really for the masses and privacy is for the upper class

In a way, this invites us —the activists, the computer programmers, the geeks— to provoke the internet to show its other face. But for the ordinary user this other face is not there. And when I say ordinary I mean very ordinary. If you look at the general strategy, especially of Facebook, the target is this last billion, which is comprised of people really far under poverty levels. When we’re talking about the average internet user, we are not talking about affluent, middle-class, people anymore. This is really something to keep in mind, because we need to shed this old idea that the internet is an elitist technology, that the computers were once in the hands of the few, that the smartphone is a status symbol, etc. We are really talking about an average user that is basically under the new regime of the one percent, really struggling to keep afloat, to stay alive.

So when I say invisibility, I mean that this growing group of people (and we’re talking about billions across continents) are forced to integrate the internet in their everyday struggles. This is what makes it very, very serious. We’re not talking about luxury problems anymore. This is a problem of people that have to fight for their economic survival, but also have to be bothered with their privacy.

That is what I call facilitating. When we are talking about facilitating, it also means that we are dealing with technologies that are vital for survival. This is the context in which we are operating now when we hear that the internet has been democratized. It doesn’t mean that there is no digital divide anymore, but the digital divide works out in a different way: it’s no longer about who has access and who doesn’t. It’s probably more about services, convenience, speed… and surveillance. Nowadays, surveillance is really for the masses and privacy is for the upper class. And then the offline is for the ones who can really afford it. The ones who are offline are absolutely on the top. And it didn’t use to be on top. It used to be reversed. These are really big concerns for civil society activists and pro-privacy advocates.

The social in social media

These brings us to the issue of “the social in social media”. You call it an ‘empty container’, affected by the “shift from the HTML-based linking practices of the open web to liking and recommendations that happen inside closed systems”, and call for a redefinition of the ‘social’ away from Facebook and Twitter. Could you develop this idea?

It is really difficult these days to even imagine how we can contact people outside of social media. In theory it’s still possible. But even if you look at the centralized email services, like Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail, they are now completely integrated in the social media model and they are, in fact, its forerunners. However, the problem really starts with the monopolistic part of the platform: the invisible aggregator that is happening in the background that most users have no idea about. Even experts find it very hard to really understand how these algorithms operate.

In this field, where there are a lot of academics but no critics, there is an enormous overproduction of real life experience and practice

Why has there not been any attempt from political science or sociology, at least that I know, to theorize the Social in Social Media? Obviously this is because the ‘social’ in scientific terms has really been reduced to the question of classes. But the idea that you can construct the social… sociology has a hard time to understand this. Historically it would understand that the social consists of the tribe, the political party, the Church, the neighborhood, etc. We know all the classic categories. Maybe when they are a bit newer they would talk about subcultures or gender issues. These are the “new” configurations of the Social.

But the idea that communication technology can construct and really configure the social as such, despite all the good efforts of science and technology scholars, has caught them by surprise. I think this is especially due to the speed and the scale; the speed at which the industry established itself and the scale of something like Facebook, which now connects almost two billion people. If you would have told that to someone 20 or 30 years ago it would have been very difficult to imagine, how a single company could do that.

Something that is clear in your work is the need to take technology seriously. Rather than falling in the trap of “offline romanticism” —or its alternative “solutionism”—, you are interested in “organized networks” that are configured in this day and age, because technology is going to stay whether we want it or we don’t. Against this, you appeal to the importance of theory. “What is lacking is a collective imagination (…). We need to develop dissident knowledges”, you say. What is the role of theory in all this? Isn’t there a sense of urgency to act right now?

The urgency is felt by the young people. I can only point to numerous experiments going on at the moment which could tell us something about the models that could work. What is important now is to write down the stories of those who are trying to create alternative models and to really try to understand what went wrong, in order to somehow make those experiences available for everyone who enters this discussion.

In this field, where there are a lot of academics but no critics, there is an enormous overproduction of real life experience and practice. However, there is almost no reflection happening. This is in part because the people who build the technologies are quite entrepreneurial or geeky and they don’t necessarily see the bigger picture. So that is our task, that is what projects like the MoneyLab network aims for.

The entire industry is not changing fast enough to accommodate the rising group of precarious workers

Internet revenue models

One of the big problems of this lack of theorization, as you point out in the book, is that the internet was not built with a revenue model in mind. We pay for access, hardware and software but not for content, so there are fewer and fewer opportunities to make a living from producing it. You call it “anticipatory capitalism”: “if you build it, business will come”, they tell us. What is even more striking is that your own experience from decades ago seems to point out to no advancements. This lack of direction has given place to a number of contradictions; for instance, freelance work, “simultaneously denounced as neoliberal exploitation and praised as the freedom of the individual creative worker”.

In a way, the internet today has a very traditional financial model. It is essentially based on targeted advertisement, which already existed in the past, but it was not focused on the individual. This caught me by surprise as well because I thought, especially in the early 2000s, that advertisement in an internet context was more or less dead, that beyond the web banner there wasn’t really much else. Of course, there was e-commerce but that’s something different, because then you are purchasing something, there is a real money transaction.

What really remains unsolved —and not much has changed since the 1980s— is the problem of how to pay the people that produce the content. The entire industry is not changing fast enough to accommodate the rising group of precarious workers. We can see some solutions on the horizon, going in different directions, but again we have to fight against the free services of Facebook, Google and all these other companies based on advertisement and data resell, who will always try to sabotage or frustrate the implementation, because, obviously, it is not in their interest that these new models start to work.

The only thing we can say is that, luckily, since 2008, there is something happening in different directions. And the more we try, the more certain we can be that, at some point, something will work out. To just wait until the industry solves it is not going to work because, again, we know the main players will frustrate these developments. Because that will be the end of their revenue model.

These strategies will only work if they becomes ubiquitous, if they are somehow integrated in the plan of becoming invisible

What happens with some of these advancements, like crowdfunding, is that while they are portrayed as alternative models, they still don’t solve the question of how to get paid for produced content.

The thing with crowdfunding, for instance, is that while it can work (and I know it has worked for many friends of mine) it usually only works once. It is very difficult to repeat. I find the Patreon model more interesting, in which people subscribe to you as an artist, or a writer, or a magazine, and have the possibility to fund you over time. That goes back to my previous idea that the internet should have developed itself through the subscription model but it didn’t, and I think that’s a lost opportunity. Even if it catches momentum again in 10 or 20 years, it already means that numerous generations, including my own, have been written off. At the moment, we are still supposed to contribute to the internet, to bring their content online, discuss, organize and so on, without anything coming back to us.

Some of these models, however, can easily get mistaken with an act of charity.

At the moment, when we’re still on defense, every attempt that tries to put the revenue model situation on the table and bring the money back to the content producers, is a good thing. Kim Dotcom, for instance, is planning on launching a kind of revenue model system connected to bitcoin. He is of course speaking to really broad, mainstream culture. On the more obscure side we have this cyber currency experiment called Steemit, which also works with the idea that if you read something and you like it, you pay for it.

First, we have to understand that these strategies will only work if they becomes ubiquitous, if they are somehow integrated in the plan of becoming invisible. Because if they aren’t, if time and again you have to make the payment a conscious act, it is not going to work. These payments, or this redistribution of wealth and attention, in the end, need to be part of an automated system. And we have to fully utilize the qualities and the potential that the computer offers us in order for it not to remain a one-off gift. Because it’s not a gift. We are not talking about charity.

Designing alternatives

So you have a precarious youth, with high levels of disenchantment and short attention spans, living within a system that seems to absorb whatever is thrown against them and come up even stronger after crises.

It feels like social media and the entrepreneurial industry is designed for non-revolt. Because “we are Facebook”: you are the user all the time. Some would say that for us to move forward all we have to do is to stop using these platforms. But is that really the move?

I find difficult to make any moral claims because of how it has all turned out. The exodus from Facebook, for instance, is a movement which already has a whole track record in itself. I myself left in 2010, six years after it was launched. And I was already feeling mainstream then because I left with 15,000 other people! So already by then it felt that I was the last to leave. This discussion has been with us for quite some time now and it feels like, especially here in the Netherlands, it never proved to be very productive to call for this mass exodus.

The one approach I am particularly in favor of is that of the smaller groups, the “organized networks”, that do not necessarily operate out in the open of the big platforms. I say that because, if you start operating there, you’ll see that the network itself invites you to enter their logic of very fast growth, if not hyper-growth. For social movements, this is something very appealing.

Yes, it feels like now it’s all measured by followers, even social movements.

Exactly, we cannot distinguish the social movement from the followers anymore. This is the trap we are in at the moment, so in a way we have to go back to a new understanding of smaller networks, or cells, or groups. It is no surprise that many people are now talking of going towards a new localism, because the easiest way to build these smaller groups is to focus on the local environment. But that’s not necessarily what I have in mind: I can also imagine smaller, trans-local networks.

The point is to really focus on what you want to achieve without getting caught in this very seductive network and platform logic. You must be very strong, because it is something like a siren, you’re bound to the ship and seduced by her; but this type of network logic will not work in your favor, not in the short term or in the long term.

Can you build an autonomous structure that maintains its momentum, that can exist over time?

In a recent article on open!, ‘Before Building the Avant-Garde of the Commons’, you defined the commons as an “aesthetic meta-structure”, or a collection of dozens of initiatives and groups that come together but are also in tension. Is there no place, or no need, for a sort of collective plan?

That’s when we enter the debate about organizing. Some people say ‘yes’, and the obvious answer to that is the political party. The political party is not a network, it is not a platform. Of course, there are many ways in which to do this and in different countries there are many traditions on how to operate a political party, but this is not necessarily what I have in mind. I am still trying to understand ways in which to organize the social that might have a political party component but is not reduced or overdetermined by that.

We are not talking anymore of the old division between socialists and anarchists, or the street and the institution. What is interesting now is: can you build an autonomous structure that maintains its momentum, that can exist over time? This is the big issue for both the social networks and social movements these days. Social movements come and go very fast. On the one hand, the speed is exciting if you are into it, it has a seductive side to it, and this is of course related to the network effect. But the frustration is also very big because you come back one week later and it’s gone. You cannot find any trace of it.

The problem, of course, is when the effect stays in the social media and it doesn’t translate into other realms. “When do we stop searching and start making?”, you ask in your book.

Those other realms are very diverse, even in terms of social relations between people, organizational capacities, or even policy, for that matter. The key debate here remains perdurability. Try something that might last for a year, go ahead. That would really transform something. I am talking about those type of commitments, of expression of the Social.

In Spain we had the indignados movement back in 2011. I think one of the successes of that movement was that it showed a lot of people what else was out there. And, while at some point it might have seemed as it was banishing, it actually created all these little networks that we are today seeing translated into a bunch of different initiatives, not all exclusively political —although the discussion has been heavily monopolized by the institution-street dichotomy—. Is there something to learn from these experiences?

Again, what I am interested in is reading what has been going on, and have people outside, but also inside of Spain find out about it. What has worked and what has not worked? Tell the story and share it with others. This is the way forward. One of the problems is to find a trigger, to see where things can accelerate, where can new forms of organization take shape. But again, I think that this only happens if you start to try. If we don’t try and just wait nothing is ever going to happen. This is the same issue as with the internet revenue models: “try something, do it”, because it will not resolve itself, even more so with the more political, social forms.

I still strongly believe in more local experiences because, even the 2011 movement, where there was a very interesting dynamic at play, wasn’t necessarily local. And that experience is still ahead of us. At the moment it feels like things are more defined by lifestyle, by generation or by some kind of general discontent, a very diffused feeling that “it can’t go on like this anymore”. Usually this means that people start to become active when they know they have got very little to lose and they are thinking “the current situation is not going to bring me anything in the foreseeable future”. This is the moment when you can share that discontent with others and start to become active, “get the ball rolling”. And it is possible that these days technology will play a less important role and we forget the whole naive idea that there were Facebook or Twitter revolutions, which we of course know afterwards that it wasn’t quite like that.

What if we take those social media very seriously, so seriously that they become part of the public utilities?

Last year, I listened to Pierre Lévy on Medialab Prado say that it may be a better strategy to use the existing social networks and apps instead of trying to constantly make the public change their platform. Is that too optimistic?

Well, first of all, when the moment is there and people need to do something, it is going to happen regardless. Regardless, also, of what I think or what Pierre Lévy thinks. If you think out of the necessities and the making of history growing out of that the question may not be very important.

The things that I’m talking about are much more on a conceptual level. It means that you need to have a longer term view in which all these things are based upon, and then think of how they can further develop in alternative directions. In technology we know that these concepts are very important. That’s why I emphasize that we need to do a lot of experiments and report about them. Because maybe in the larger scheme, when we are talking about really big events or changes, all these concepts may not be very relevant; but if you take one step down and think in a more evolutionary mode how these technologies further developed, it is indeed very relevant. Just think of what may have happened if 20 or 30 years ago people would have thought more carefully about the revenue model situation, for instance. That may have made the difference for millions of people.

There is another consideration we can make. I understand that Pierre Lévy says we should use the existing technologies more efficiently. But obviously other people say we can only use the social media that exist now in a more emancipatory way if these platforms are socialized, if we really take over their ownership. That is a very interesting and radical proposition that other people have started to work on. What if we take those social media very seriously, so seriously that they become part of the public utilities? This is an interesting development in which you don’t emphasize so much on the alternatives or the conceptual level.

But then again I would say that even if it is socialized, it would be in dire need of radical reform from the inside. I have theorized a lot about that. I think where the social media really fails is that it doesn’t offer any tools and this is a real pity. Google is a bit more interesting in that respect, because it comes from an engineering background… but precisely because of that, Google has failed in social media realm even though they have tried a lot of things. So it is interesting to further investigate how this utility and this invisible nature relates to a more conscious use of the tools they provide.

These are the two directions that are quite contradictory at the moment. On the one hand there is the whole technological development, which is definitely going into that realm of the invisibility; just look at the Internet of Things. On the other hand there is the aspect of democratization and politicization of the tool. These two strategies don’t necessarily have to be opposed, but at the moment it seems quite difficult to bring them together.

Photo by basair

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