Hello!
welcomes to Marx Festival 2013
organized by The Coming Society and Left
21.
You are invited to:Cyber Marx: Communization And Insurrection In The Age Of Semiocapitalism
It is a talk hosted by activist Nin Chan.
What exactly does it mean to be a 'materialist' revolutionary today,
in an age where growth is driven by the deluge of images and brands generated by what
Baudrillard has called the political economy of the sign?
Where, despite whatever nostalgia we may have for the 'hidden abode of production', the 'real economy' of industrial production,
outsourced to the hinterlands of the East,
a growing proportion of the global proletariat
can be found performing informal services, attending inquiries at call centers,
standing behind counters at franchised fast food chains or doing data entry
and processing jobs at home or at cafes?
Where value can no longer be deduced from
the calculus of classical political economy,
but derives from the symbolic prestige that a commodity projects and promises?
Where the production,
circulation, appropriation and expropriation of information has become a crucial conflict,
marked with all of the tensions and contradictions of class struggle?
If, as 'autonomist Marxists' such as Christian Marazzi, Antonio Negri, Maurizio Lazzaratto
and Bifo Berardi have claimed, today's 'cognitive' or 'semiocapitalism'
is built upon the parasitic extraction of value from the common and
dynamic productivity of the General Intellect, the combination of bodies,
minds and capacities linked by networks of cooperation, can we think about what
this would mean for those of us who persist in calling ourselves communists,
advocates of the common?What sort of ontology would this entail or require?
What is the place of subjectivity?
Standing in the midst of a biogenetic revolution in which the human being
has been reduced to an informational code, searchable in a universal data archive
(the Human Genome Database),
what does this imply for our conception of the human, inherited from
an Enlightenment that appears more and more of an anachronism as time goes on?
Can we still presume,
with these Enlightenment thinkers (Marx bringing humanism to a culminating apotheosis), that the dignity of the human should be
upheld against the alienation of the machine, or should we rethink the relationship that
human beings have with their technological appendages and the capacities that are
produced in these connections, one that does not privilege the 'subject'
or the 'human' at the expense of the conjunctions that are established between
the human and what is beneath or beyond the human?This talk will attempt to
develop a discussion on these very subjects, contextualizing
and introducing the comprehensive re-evaluation of Marxist thought that
this group of Italian thinkers has engaged in since the Hot Italian summer of 1968
and the Autonomia movement of 1977,
as well as touching upon the work of others who sought to re-think the meaning of
revolution after the developments of 1968,
when the metropolitan world re-structured itself to become
what we now call 'post-Fordism'-
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
Jean Baudrillard,
Paul Virilio,
Andre Gorz, Giorgio Agamben and Tiqqun. All of this is done with an eye to
connecting these currents in thought to the practice of autonomism and anarchist
organization throughout the last 30 years,
from the German Autonomen to the Occupy movement of last year.
Please check out our website for more details
or search Marxism Festival HK on Facebook. The Coming Society is a bookstore and
art space in Hong Kong
Our aim is to bring together people and
perspectives to imagine the world
differently.
We sell second-hand books with titles in
literature and philosophy, social science
and history.Both English and Chinese.
We organize talks, book launches, movie
screenings and many concerts on a weekly
basis for anyone who are interested in
social affairs, art and culture.
