Islamic Counter-Racist Thought Food #121

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Consider this:

Neoclassical economic theory is an ideology originally developed in colonial Britain to justify and morally neutralize the exploitation of its extractive periphery. In its modern, neoliberal guise, it has championed ‘globalization’ as a modern euphemism for imperialism. The very concept of ‘technology’ is an indispensable component of this ideology. (p.9)

Extract taken from Hornborg, A. (2020) Machines as Manifestations of Global Systems: Steps Toward a Sociometabolic Ontology of Technology. Anthropological Theory: 1-22. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499620959247

Peace

Islamic Counter-Racist Thought Food #114

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

To consider in relation to the recent crushing defeat of the Labour party in the 2019 UK general election:

If capitalism and White Supremacy (Racism) are the shark and Water respectively, then Corbyn is in a Submarine. Socialism is not the natural environment for this type of idealism. It still swims around in the same water thinking it might have dominion over the sea and with its crew comfortable in its bubble, yet it is ultimately a guest with the power of the water always able to crush it.

Counter-racist observation by non-white VoR (Victim of Racism/White Supremacy), Wasif Mahmood.

Peace

Decolonising Luddism

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Consider this:

The Luddites were not opposed to the idea of using machines to make things more efficiently or be more productive. They just thought if you’re going to make more money because you’re more productive, you need to kick some of that money back down to the workers. The merchants were really not of that opinion….

[The Luddites] tried to bargain with the factory owners [arguing for minimum prices, a textile tax to support workers pensions, or phased introduction of new machines], but that didn’t go over at all. When the Luddites got to their wits end, they basically started going in and smashing and breaking machines, saying, this is all we got left. We’re going to destroy the means by which you produce this dislocation in our lives.

(Extract taken from “Luddites have been getting a bad rap for 200 years. But, turns out, they were right” (2017) by Michael J. Coren.

Agreed, yet I suggest therein lies the problem/limit of historical Luddism, viz. that the Luddites were oblivious to the entanglement of the emerging industrial capitalist system with racialised-colonial logics that are carceral (that is, containing/controlling) in nature. (I should point out that as white people – and hence, Racial Suspects – it is not at all clear to me that were the Luddites to have been made aware of such entanglement that they would have turned ‘Race Traitor’; in this connection, there is a need to consider what DuBois refers to as “the wages of whiteness“.)

This is one of the reasons why, as a Counter-Racist, I suggest the need to consider the ‘entanglement’ of Luddism with fugitive and decolonial thinking with a view to getting beyond Eurocentric (West-centric, North-centric) class-based/economistic analyses that fixate on capitalism/labour/work in relation to contemporary debates about automation (robotics, AI etc.)* and marginalise consideration of colonialism/racism/domination**.

As to the form that contemporary Luddism might need to assume, Coren offers the following by way of a brief pointer:

There are no factories to monkey wrench anymore. What are you going to do: burn down Facebook or Uber? Their products are software. Any similar software activity would take the form of not smashing a machine but smashing a piece of software. Hacking. It would look more like what Anonymous does.

Peace

* Importantly, Coren (2017) maintains that “automation has really moved up the income ladder. It’s not just taking away jobs with your hands. It’s taking away jobs from your mind. The difference with the Luddites is that automation is moving up the job chain [emphasis added].”

** Of course, there are exceptional, non-marginalising discourses to consider including Atanasoski and Vora’s position on ‘surrogate humanity‘.

Islamic Counter-Racist Thought Food #107

Peace Be Unot Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Consider this:

All that ‘community’ implies – self-sufficiency, mutual aid, morality in the marketplace, stubborn tradition, regulation by custom, organic knowledge instead of mechanistic science – had to be steadily and systematically disrupted and displaced [by the industrial capitalist system]. All of the practices that kept the individual from being a consumer had to be done away with so that the cogs and wheels of an unfettered machine called ‘the economy’ could operate without interference, influenced merely by invisible hands and inevitable balances and all the rest of that benevolent free-market system guided by what Cobbett called, his lip curled toward Hume and James Steuart and Adam Smith, ‘Scotch Feelosophy. ‘ (p.38)

…

According to the ideology of industrialism, called the doctrine of laissez-faire, the state was to leave the economy to its own devices and refrain from interfering in the free and self-correcting machinery of the marketplace. In reality, the British state worked in myriad ways, by acts of commission and omission, to advance the whole process of industrialization, enrich and protect the manufacturing sector, ensure a compliant labor force, and provide regular and prosperous domestic and foreign markets. ‘Handmaiden’ would be too flimsy a word to describe it, because it was
more active and interventionist than that … Of course it is assumed that the task of any state is to maintain the order and defend the border. It just happened that in Britain those tasks were understood to be properly carried out for the benefit of the rich and propertied-and for those, like the new industrialists, coming to be so… (p.49)

…

The state’s legal system was there to enforce contracts, protect manufacturing secrets, and oversee the body of commercial law; the state’s patent system was there to assure that inventors and manufacturers reaped special profits from private ownership of knowledge, also backed up by law and by regular grants from Parliament … to its favored inventors; the state’s financial system, particularly the Bank of England, was there to control currency, act as a deposit and source for all other banks … and in general, as Adam Smith had said with admiration, be ‘a great engine of State’ … But there was still one more role of the state … that proved to be essential for the triumph of industry: the control, if not the outright subjugation, of labor. (pp.50-51)

…

But then, the laissez-faire system never was impartial, nor was it meant to be, despite the cool recitation of its tenets as ‘natural law, ‘ inevitable and impersonal, by Adam Smith and the ‘Feelosophers.’ It was an economy, whatever else might be said about it, designed to unleash certain human appetites, greed not insignificant among them, and to enrich certain human endeavors, material amassment being primary. All its talk about a free market and iron law of wages and invisible hands was basically so much camouflage for the free working of that system, having the
guise of an impartial economic theory but in fact being little more than a partisan social blueprint. Take the ‘free market of labor,’ for example: it never existed in Britain because labor was never free to organize, workers never free to travel, the. deskilled never free to learn new crafts, and the unemployed never free to enter trades already overstuffed with excess hands, or at least not in any meaningful sense … That is how a servile state operates. (pp.52-53)

Extracts taken from Rebels Against The Future: Lessons for the Computer Age (1996) by Kirkpatrick Sale.

Peace

Islamic Counter Racist Thought Food #103

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Marx is a prisoner of the Enemy he attacks; his adversary’s body falls on him and smothers him. Marx has the definitive vision of the machine for demolishing limits, which he calls capitalism, yet he questions not the limit but the machine. He wants to design a better machine, which will demolish limits without ever jamming, without crises. Like a great mechanic, he has a loving, passionate knowledge of the capitalist machine. Concerning the limit, he shares that machine’s illusions. What offended him was not so much and not only the iniquity which capital engendered, but the fact that capital was preparing to become an obstacle to production, an antiquated and sclerotic form compared with the immensity of what was possible. Nobody has ever dreamed the dream of capital with as much faith as Marx was able to muster in his spirit. He was like a young man from the provinces who takes seriously, with despairing gravity, the customs of the metropolis—that is how Marx viewed capital.

Extract taken from The Ruin of Kasch by Roberto Calasso.

Peace

The Luddite Critique (of the Internet)

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Consider this:

There was a time when everything was so confused and chaotic that it was easy to believe that this technology [i.e. the Internet and Web] would be an exception to all the other technologies, and instead of enslaving us, it would liberate us. I never actually believed that, but I was willing to talk to people who did. Now I’m not willing to talk to them anymore. I have no interest in this dialogue. It’s finished. The Internet revealed itself as the perfect mirror image of global capital. It has no borders? Neither does global capital. Governments can’t control it? Neither can they control global capital. Nor do they want to.

…

Certain technologies hurt the commonality, as they used to say in the early 19th century. Any machinery that was hurtful to the commonality, they took their sledgehammers out and tried to smash. Direct action. That’s the Luddite critique – you do it with a sledgehammer. What it means now to live as a Luddite seems to me to involve a strict attention to what technologies one allows into one’s life.

…

And finally the Luddite philosophy becomes clear. We create the machines and therefore we think we control them, but then the machines create us, so we can create new machines, which then can create us. It’s a feedback situation between humanity and technology. There is some truth to the idea of technological determination, especially when you’re unconscious, drifting around like a sleepwalker. Especially when you’ve given up believing in anti-capitalism because they’ve convinced you that the free market is a natural law, and we just have to accept that and hope for a free market with a friendly smiling face. Smiley-faced fascism. I see so many people working for that as if it were a real cause. “If we have to have capitalism, let’s make it green capitalism.” There’s no such thing. It’s a hallucination of the worst sort, because it isn’t even a pleasurable one. It’s a nightmare.

Extract taken from “The Luddite Critique – An Anarchist in the Hudson Valley in conversation: Peter Lamborn Wilson with Jennifer Bleyer” (2004).

Peace

Islamic Counter-Racist Thought Food #100

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Consider this:

There is a war on, but only one side is armed: this is the essence of the technology question today. On the one side is private capital, scientized and subsidized, mobile and global, and now heavily armed with military-spawned command, control, and communication technologies. Empowered by the second industrial revolution, capital is moving decisively now to enlarge and consolidate the social dominance it secured in the first. (p.3)

Extract taken from Progress Without People: New Technology, Unemployment, and the Message of Resistance by David F. Noble (Canada: Between The Lines, 1995).

For me, this needs to be put into conversation with Heidegger’s (1954/1977) cryptic assertion that:

The essence of technology is by no means anything technological

However, whereas Noble understands the nature of the war to be essentially economic, following seminal Counter-Racist theorists Neely Fuller, Jr., I am more inclined to see economics (and labour) as sub-systemic, one major area of people activity within a number of such areas, viz. Economics, Education, Entertainment, Labour, Language, Law, Politics, Religion, Sex and War, which together, and in relation to each other as parts to a whole, constitute the globally operating system of White Supremacy (Racism) under colonial modernity.

In short, there is a war going on, but this war is a ‘Race War’ – or rather, insofar as race/racism/racialization is war*, there is a race on – and technology needs to be understood in relation to this race.

To answer Heidegger, the essence of technology in colonial modernity is war.

Peace

* On this point, see Maldonado-Torres, N. (2008) Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (London: Duke University Press), and Feldman, K.P. and Medevoi, L. (2016) “Race/Religion/War: An Introduction.” Social Text 129 34(4): 1-17.

Colonisation via Computation

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Consider the following important observations on the ‘entanglement’ of racism, colonialism, capitalism and technology as the latter morphs into regimes of digitalisation, algorithmization and datafication:

During [Cecil] Rhodes’ times, the exploitation of black labour went hand in hand with a virulent form of racism. Contemporary capitalism still relies on racial subsidies. But the technologies of racialisation have become ever more insidious and ever more encompassing. As the world becomes a huge data emporium, tomorrow’s technologies of racialisation will be more and more generated and instituted through data, calculation and computation. In short, racism is relocating both underneath and at the surface of the skin. It reproduces itself via screens and mirrors of various kinds. It is becoming both spectral and fractal.

…

Islamic Counter-Racist Thought Food #89

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Consider this:

We seem to have become nothing else but workers, because in Technic’s cosmology we are nothing but work. Needless to say, within this perspective, the widespread tendency to attribute other names to this process, in particular when we blame our exploitation onto supposedly existing ‘capitalists’ or to a particular economic system, should be taken once again as a form of nostalgic superstition.

Considering work merely in its specific historical dimension, as economic/social/political/etc. activity, means remaining oblivious to the cosmogonic [i.e. reality-generating] quality which it has acquired under the current unreality-system. There is no ghostly 1 per cent of the population that authentically enjoys all this, or truly benefits from it, or specifically wills for us to be enslaved – because technically there is nothing at all, except the ever-expansion of the series that composes Technic’s cosmology. This is not to say that nobody can ever be considered responsible for any action, but rather that, within the present structure of the world as an unreal entity which is entirely comprised by absolute language, the very notion of responsibility doesn’t make sense. (p.87)

Extract taken from Campagna, F. (2018) Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality. London: Bloomsbury.

So much for capitalism being ‘the problem’.

On the contrary, it is the racial-colonial matrix of ordering power that is ‘technic, ‘viz. White Supremacy (Racism) in its technological incarnation as ‘the mega-machine’.

Peace

Islamic Counter-Racist Thought Food #71

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Consider this:

When we eliminate uncertainty, we forfeit the human replenishment that attaches to the challenge of asserting predictability in the face of an always-unknown future in favor of the blankness of perpetual compliance with someone else’s plan.

Extract taken from “The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism” (2016) by Shoshana Zuboff.

Peace