Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination

The Occupation CookbookUser’s Guide to Demanding the Impossible

It is such arrangements that allow us to pretend that money is some kind of physical substance, that debts are not simply promises – which would mean that a government’s promise to pay investors at a certain rate of interest has no greater moral standard than, say, their promise to allow workers to retire at a certain age, or not to destroy the planet), but as some kind of inexorable moral absolute

Really a coin is just a promise, and the only real limit to the amount of money we produce is how many promises we wish to make to one another, and what sort

Yet it’s this very tyranny of debt – on every level – that becomes the moral imperative that forces oil from the earth and convinces us that the only solution to any moral crisis is to convert yet another portion of free human life into labor.

It might help to start by acknowledging that we are all workers insofar as we are creative, and resist work, and also refuse to play the role of the administrators – that is, those who try to reduce every aspect of life to calculable value

And yes, it is likely that in time, the capitalists will pick themselves up, gather their wits, stop bickering and begin to do what they always do: begin pilfering the most useful ideas from the social movements ranged against them (mutual aid, decentralization, sustainability) so as to turn them into something exploitative and horrible. In the long run, if there is to be a long run, it’s pretty much inevitable. In the meantime, though, we really are facing kamikaze capitalism – an order that will not hesitate to destroy itself if that’s what it takes to destroy its enemies. It is no exaggeration to speak of a battle between the forces of life and the forces of death here.

That means trying to understand the true nature of the global work machine, the real relation of those domains of life artificially separated into “economics.” “politics,” and “ecology.” The relation between oil and money actually provides a striking illustration. How is it that we have come to treat money, which after all is nothing but a social relation, and therefore infinitely expandable, as if it were a limited resource like petroleum (“we must cut social services because we simply don’t have the money”), and oil, which actually is a limited resource, as if it were money – as something to be freely spent to generate ever-increasing economic activity, as if there would never be an end to it? The two forms of insanity are, clearly, linked

The same is of course true of constantly increasingly labor-time. Economically, it’s if anything counter-productive (especially if we imagine capitalists do want to be able to pass on their ill-gotten gains to their grandchildren); politically, there is no better way to ensure people are not politically active or aware than to have them working, commuting to work, or preparing for work every moment of the day. Sacrificing so many of one’s waking hours to the gods of productivity ensures no one has access to outside perspectives that would enable them to notice – for instance – that organizing life this way ultimately decreases productivity. As a result of this neoliberal obsession with stamping out alternative perspectives, since the financial collapse of 2008, we have been left in the bizarre situation where its plain to everyone that capitalism doesn’t work, but it’s almost impossible for anyone to imagine anything else. The war against the imagination is the only one the capitalists have actually managed to win

Financial elites, having shown the world they were utterly incompetent at the one activity they had claimed they were best able to do – the measurement of value – have responded by joining with their political cronies in a violent attack on anything that even looks like it might possibly provide an alternative way to think about value, from public welfare to the contemplation of art or philosophy (or at least, the contemplation of art or philosophy for any other reason than the purpose of making money). For the moment, at least, capitalism is no longer even thinking about its long-term viability

This is not an economic argument. It’s a moral one. It’s pretty obvious that there are many circumstances where, even from an economists’ perspective, too much work is precisely the problem. Yet every time there is a crisis, the answer on all sides is always the same: people need to work more! There’s someone out there working less than you, a handicapped woman who isn’t really as handicapped she’s letting on to be, French workers who get to retire before their souls and bodies have been entirely destroyed, lazy porters, art students, benefit cheats, and this must, somehow, be what’s really ruining things for everyone