Political Philosophy

This brief video discusses what a time bank is and some of the philosophy behind the idea, including the ideas of its founder Edgar Cahn. I became interested in the idea after reading Walter Brueggemann’s Another Kingdom. Time banks already exist in a lot of cities and towns. The URL below will take you to TimeBanks.org, which has everything you need to find out if you have one nearby or to start one up if you don’t. Time banks are one way that we can cooperate with each other without relying on the money economy.https://timebanks.org/https://www.nycservice.org/organizations/1097http://www.cafederationoftimebanks.org/starting-a-time-bank.htmlFor more from me:https://lauriemjohnson.com/https://politicalphilosophy.video.blog/

In this video, I reflect on the current coronavirus pandemic and what I think I have learned over the past couple of years about the human reaction to crises and how our “just in time” economy and expectations can leave us without the resources to deal resiliency with unforeseen contingencies. https://www.amazon.com/Green-State-Re…http://theanarchistlibrary.org/librar… For more from me: https://lauriemjohnson.com/https://politicalphilosophy.video.blog/

In this final video on McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? I discuss some of the big takeaways I get from the book, and relate Wark’s view of “past masters” and detournement of old ideas to Friedrich Nietzsche’s three types of history in On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. Along the way, we find out why farmers are turning into hackers.

I will make some final observations based on reading McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead next weekend. The weekend after that I’ll put up a special topic lecture on Machiavelli. Starting on the third weekend of March I’ll start up on Robyn Eckersley’s The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty. If you’d like to follow along on that book you can get it for under $20 on Kindle or in paperback on Amazon and probably a lot of other sellers.

Thinking about Ch. 5 in McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, I dwell on how the scientists and technologists might have been able to make the world truly better rather than more dangerous and polluted. We still look at them as our heroes and saviors. But they’ve done more harm than good, at least arguably. Who or what is responsible for their status as tools of corporate profit-seeking and national security? What light does this unorthodox view of scientists (not as our saviors but as a large part of the problem) have to say about if and how we can deal with our environmental problems. Is there any reason to think that the scientific and technical hacker class can rise to the occasion and use their latent imagination to create pathways to a better way of life?

McKenzie Wark argues that capitalists are no longer at the top of the economic food chain, and that this is not good news. It turns out vectoralists can make more money by outsourcing risk and depreciation to manufacturers and contractors and moving the capitalist pieces around on the global chessboard. That makes them, as Cardi B says, “the boss.” In this video I reflect on some of the key insights from Chapter 4 of Wark’s Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?For more from me:https://lauriemjohnson.com/https://politicalphilosophy.video.blog/

Ch. 3 of McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? explains why Wark advocates for “vulgar Marxism.” This chapter traces the historical emergence of the scientific class and how its potential via the development of thoroughly socialized labor of all kinds has gotten side-tracked by the vectoralists’ “enclosure” via intellectual property law.

I pause to try to pick apart and better understand some key but often bedeviling Marxist terms that can get in the way of understanding McKenzie Wark and other authors who borrow from Marx’s toolkit. Dead labor, capital, surplus value, commodity fetishization, and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (and what capitalists tend to do about that) are all touched on in this program.

We move into Chapter 2 of McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse. Wark thinks that people on the left as well as the right need to end their love affair with capitalism and summon their inner punk rock goddess and try something new. The something new entails detournement of old ideas–an irreverant use of parts and neglect of other parts in order to account for an economy that Marx would not recognize. There’s a hint that the hacker class should somehow organize by first seeing what they have in common–they do not control the information they manipulate in order to monetize it for the vectoralist class. Wark very clearly explains the connection between the current state of property law and the power of this new class of people, a class responsible for the “disintegrating spectacle” of our world, information, entertainment, commerce and therapy become so intertwined that we are constantly confused, suspicious and mentally exhausted. I comment on that phenomenon and the relative lack of reference to government institutions in this part of the book, but there is the political implication that the hacker class is potentially powerful. Should they take aim at property law? It’s too early to tell, but that’s one possibility.