Pearly Royals Of Global Starbuckia

Some Simple Things, Very Hard To See, but once you see them, you get the whole thing in a flash

So I’ve been talking to @hieropunk, about a variety of elements within a single topic, related to my little talks, and to the article by T. Mohr, which is persuasive, important, necessary, and with which, however, we both differ in some of the analysis. These disagreements involve mainly certain propositions in that text that derive from a) a cited text from the same website which alas neither of us can read, it being in German, by “Yana",” and b) two books by Zak Cope, a militant scholar I hugely appreciate and admire, but whose books (recommended) I am not familiar enough with yet to really engage responsibly on the fly. So this is not a reply of any sort to the propositions in that article (which everyone should read), but is going to be a very general set of remarks on this question as it appears in the Mohr text, of a population which is named for and “recognized” as the descendant and continuation of that class stratum referred to by Lenin — polemically, and to a point humorously, let us not forget — as the Labor Aristocracy.

Whether a population exists today as a politically salient and powerful class stratum in a situation really meaningfully analogous to that in which the concrete political subjects to whom Lenin referred by this term found themselves (advanced industrial proletarians turned bourgeois, that is to say, labor-sellers who acquired some meaningful capital assets without being able to live securely as rentiers) is by no means clear, but debating that assumption will not be necessary as preamble to the points hieropunk made to me and which I want to echo and elaborate on myself.

That’s a fingerpost to the destination, which is where I conclude, in agreement with @hieropunk, that it’s nonsensical, a-political, a-historical bean counting political economy economism, bad Robinsonade (she called it Pod-insonade, which really does help you picture it — the ahistorical fantasy of all of us as a wild population of naked propertyless skill-less yahoos captured by Algorithmaster and then subjected to selection and sorting), and alas also concessions to the hoity toity sanctimony into which the discourse of privilege has degenerated, to describe the social relations between that class called The Labour Aristocracy today, the pearly kings and queens into whom socioracial whiteness and first world social democratic citizenship make us, as a case of the workers of the first world exploiting the workers of the periphery. But first I am going to take several detours. We eventually will have to go back through our guiding historiography and theory, tracing the development of social relations in bourgeois society, in order to identify and conceptualize the subalterns of the imperial vanguard now, and see and grasp the political meaning of the proletarianization of middle strata worldover, and what has been achieved by the ruling class against the worldwide peasantry since the counterrevolution went on the offensive in the 1980s.

There is a lot of propaganda now to a population I personally tend to call clerks, or clergy (a large category and meaningful itself though it is riven by old class distinctions). Some popular propaganda to this sector-as-audience, for example, comes from the funny central casting Gollum clown Yuval Hariri whom the WEF sponsors to make a lot of soundbite clips for youtube, sound bites that have the feel of being wrenched from the conclusions to presentations but really aren’t. There is never any evidence presented or argument made preceding them. Anyway: he says people have become useless. To whom and to what? To him, evidently. People are superfluous and unnecessary.

“We no longer need you,” he says, with a straight pointy vole face, as if everyone is watching hoping to be hired by this crazy to mow his lawn. But of course I’m playing dumb: it’s scientifically ideological, building paradigm by implication and innuendo, never being explicit, in old skool mafia terroristic mode, but also, because this is the 21st century and the science of persuasion is much advanced, equipped with a comforting implicit decoding of the caesura (it’s all one big gap actually). Of course it’s not you you whom we don’t need. Or he wouldnt bother even youtubing at you. You the listener to such clips on youtube are invited to think: maybe I’m we with him. It is they who are useless, the growers of m/y/our coffee. You may picture them as a crowd, a mass, that mass whose formation is destructive, and must be prevent from coming into being: the images Hariri’s youtube soundbite consumers are triggered to conjure show this mass praying in Mecca or carrying a coffin in Gaza, “teeming” in Port-au-Prince or a shantytown outside Mumbai. (Now some new images of the psychotic mass are added by the charlatans, but they all, even waving stars and bars, or decidedly unmassed and sporting surgical masks while dancing in scrubs or typing in cubicles, function as updates, for newly produced niches, of these.)

But you know, you are implicitly codedly reminded to think you remember, they used to have something to do with providing for you things that don’t grow on the trees in Brooklyn. They used to guarantee your morning coffee. Now Yuval Hariri can just touch the screen of his phone and provide you with infinite coffee, and a drone will pour it into your souvenir Kafka Koffee Kup from the sky. All these people are superfluous, and now we know to whom and what. To yo/u/s. Replaced by that phone and that drone. The flying suit that also brews craft beer. Hariri made it himself at the bench.

And all this covers up, but imperfectly, in a shallow propaganda grave, the concealed undertone message that is more true which is that the coffee growers are not yet superfluous to the AlgorithMaster of Oz but you the coffee drinker is. And dispensing with you will make a lot of them superfluous. It is yo/u/s whose tasks really have been effectively automated. The ancestor of your class, the clergy, used to have that benefit of clergy, because reading and writing were rare and valuable skills. Now the computer program really spells for you, the marginal costs of this commodity tend to zero, many of the software (intellectual) people really are superfluous to the ruling imperial class, or so it seems. The programs have stolen your minds, and can do everything the deskilled mental laboring classes did, better. The tech makes the performance even in films, where absolutely shit unskilled actors are as vendable as good ones. In this stratum of intellectual labor we find the only case where the robots are better and greatly reduce the total labor. The robot that removes your tumor, much better than a hand tool, still needs even more skilled surgeons than the scalpel needed, PLUS all the varied labor of construction transport and maintenance and powering. ONLY the clerks really are obsolete, because their skills became universal and happen to be amenable to automation, and in a way that the substitution strips all the problematic nature of the human clerk away (human agential properties, very complex stuff, including irrepressible desire for freedom and justice, pleasure and leisure), leaving just the functions the ruling class wants. And this is why the propaganda dreams provided yo/u/s portray us as both becoming Gods and becoming Satan.

End divagation #1. I’ll continue this in the next post. I’ll leave you for now with the opening pages of Rachel Cusk’s novel Transit:

An astrologer emailed me to say she had important news for me concerning events in my immediate future. She could see things that I could not: my personal details had come into her possession and had allowed her to study the planets for their information. She wished me to know that a major transit was due to occur shortly in my sky. This information was causing her great excitement when she considered the changes it might represent. For a small fee she would share it with me and enable me to turn it to my advantage.

She could sense – the email continued – that I had lost my way in life, that I sometimes struggled to find meaning in my present circumstances and to feel hope for what was to come; she felt a strong personal connection between us, and while she couldn’t explain the feeling, she knew too that some things ought to defy explanation. She understood that many people closed their minds to the meaning of the sky above their heads, but she firmly believed I was not one of those people. I did not have the blind belief in reality that made others ask for concrete explanations. She knew that I had suffered sufficiently to begin asking certain questions, to which as yet I had received no reply. But the movements of the planets represented a zone of infinite reverberation to human destiny: perhaps it was simply that some people could not believe they were important enough to figure there. The sad fact, she said, is that in this era of science and unbelief we have lost the sense of our own significance. We have become cruel, to ourselves and others, because we believe that ultimately we have no value. What the planets offer, she said, is nothing less than the chance to regain faith in the grandeur of the human: how much more dignity and honour, how much kindness and responsibility and respect, would we bring to our dealings with one another if we believed that each and every one of us had a cosmic importance? She felt that I of all people could see the implications here for improvements in world peace and prosperity, not to mention the revolution an enhanced concept of fate could bring about in the personal side of things. She hoped I would forgive her for contacting me in this way and for speaking so openly. As she had already said, she felt a strong personal connection between us that had encouraged her to say what was in her heart.

It seemed possible that the same computer algorithms that had generated this email had also generated the astrologer herself: her phrases were too characterful, and the note of character was repeated too often; she was too obviously based on a human type to be, herself, human. As a result her sympathy and concern were slightly sinister; yet for those same reasons they also seemed impartial. A friend of mine, depressed in the wake of his divorce, had recently admitted that he often felt moved to tears by the concern for his health and well-being expressed in the phraseology of adverts and food packaging, and by the automated voices on trains and buses, apparently anxious that he might miss his stop; he actually felt something akin to love, he said, for the female voice that guided him while he was driving his car, so much more devotedly than his wife ever had. There has been a great harvest, he said, of language and information from life, and it may have become the case that the faux-human was growing more substantial and more relational than the original, that there was more tenderness to be had from a machine than from one’s fellow man. After all, the mechanised interface was the distillation not of one human but of many. Many astrologers had had to live, in other words, for this one example to have been created. What was soothing, he believed, was the very fact that this oceanic chorus was affixed in no one person, that it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere: he recognised that a lot of people found this idea maddening, but for him the erosion of individuality was also the erosion of the power to hurt.

It was this same friend – a writer – who had advised me, back in the spring, that if I was moving to London with limited funds, it was better to buy a bad house in a good street than a good house somewhere bad. Only the very lucky and the very unlucky, he said, get an unmixed fate: the rest of us have to choose. The estate agent had been surprised that I adhered to this piece of wisdom, if wisdom it was. In his experience, he said, creative people valued the advantages of light and space over those of location. They tended to look for the potential in things, where most people sought the safety of conformity, of what had already been realised to the maximum, properties whose allure was merely the sum of exhausted possibilities, to which nothing further could be added. The irony, he said, was that such people, while afraid of being original, were also obsessed with originality. His clients went into ecstasies over the merest hint of a period feature: well, move out of the centre a little and you could have those in abundance for a fraction of the cost. It was a mystery to him, he said, why people continued to buy in over-inflated parts of the city when there were bargains to be had in up-and-coming areas. He supposed at the heart of it was their lack of imagination.