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February 20, 2024

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Artificial Intelligence: The Eye of the Master

Ian Parker read this new book, and wrote a review of it without the help of ChatGPT

Before we panic about the impact of AI we need to step back and look at where it has come from, what social function it serves, and how it is meshed, and meshes us, into late capitalism. The detailed history and conceptual-political analysis in this new book, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence by Matteo Pasquinelli (Verso, 2023) does that well. It is an indispensable starting point for thinking through how we use AI, including ChatGPT, instead of allowing it to use us.

There is a wealth of analysis in this book, and a history that ranges from early computer development, in which women’s labour is rendered invisible, to the role of simple “pattern recognition” that underpins most of what we mistakenly describe as “intelligent” in contemporary AI, and the ideological use of research into “neural networks” that actually projects present-day social relations into descriptions of how they seem to operate. It raises a number of crucial questions about how we think about the role of technology in general.

Technology, creativity and change

The Eye of the Master is named for the forms of surveillance and regulation that are necessary for capitalism to develop, with “the master” being the system of control that Marx described – “the power of the ‘master’” he refers to in Capital – rather than a particular individual master who is observing things and pulling the strings behind the scenes. The “eye” of the master is the increasing monitoring of each aspect of the labour process (and of consumer choice patterns), a process that includes, of course, the incitement of each subject to willingly offer themselves up to the gaze of the master.

This, the book argues, is basically what AI is; it is not a supernaturally “intelligent” phenomenon, but something much more banal than that, an entirely “artificial” invention that embeds certain kinds of exploitative and oppressive social relations in society and in the way we think about ourselves. AI is the “eye of the master” as it accumulates the rotten ideological “commonsense” of a society and implements it as if it were the only truth, indeed as if there was no alternative. Pasquinelli puts it this way: “the inner code of AI is constituted not by the imitation of biological intelligence but by the intelligence of labour and social relations”.

The book gives us a history of technology under capitalism, one that emphasises, time and again, the ingenuity and creativity of human beings and the way that ingenuity and creativity is betrayed, absorbed and neutralised, “recuperated,” put in the service of capital accumulation. It is working from within a certain kind of Marxism that takes human creativity as the fundamental founding principle of analysis; “human praxis expresses its own logic (an anti-logic, some might say) – a power of speculation and invention, before technoscience captures and alienates it”.

This is a rather different starting point from the classical Marxist approach that is often taken for granted by many of us on the left, and so we are drawn into a conceptual debate that is important for us to think through in the way we think about history and possibilities of change. So, one traditional way of working with Marxist analysis is to insist that historical developmental technological processes create, give rise to, certain kinds of social relations, including the progressive possible social relations that are the basis for socialist struggle. In this traditional Marxist way of thinking about things, the “working class” is created by capitalism, and then becomes a collective agent to overthrow it; capitalism creates its own gravedigger.

This book is coming from an alternative reading of Marx, one that is linked to Italian Autonomist Marxism, in which workers’ creativity comes first, and capitalism leeches on that, distorting it. Revolution, in this way of thinking, is a reclaiming of collective potential that was always already there. So, the book argues for an analysis of how that creativity is stolen, mechanised, turned against us; Pasquinelli writes about “collective knowledge and labour as the primary source of the very ‘intelligence’ that AI comes to extract, encode, and commodify”. Maybe he is right; the book makes a convincing argument for this interpretation of Marxism. In this way Pasquinelli argues for what he calls a “labour theory of machine intelligence,” that is, one which shows us that labour is ineliminable, and it is only the organisation of labour that gives us a way out.

Knowledge and control

Is this form of knowledge we are subjected to now really a kind of “master?” Yes, in the sense that Marx spoke of the machinery of domination that we are confronted with as workers under capitalism, and this machinery of domination presents itself to us as if it is “open” and transparent. Go to the ChatGPT portal, for instance, and it will tell you that this is a place of “open AI” (while also inviting you to write something about kittens, one of a number of useful tasks you didn’t know you needed to do). What is hidden in plain sight here is that this “master” is distributed, a network of forms of control, and one in which we are made to watch each other and watch over ourselves.

Pasquinelli draws on a range of theoretical resources to make his argument, and they include classical Marxism, Italian Autonomist Marxism, the work of the historian Michel Foucault (who wrote a lot about forms of surveillance and power in modern society) and the work of Foucault’s buddy Gilles Deleuze. It was Deleuze who wrote a Postscript on the Societies of Control, a brief dense text which, Pasquinelli reminds us, “declared that power was no longer concerned with the discipline of individuals but with the control of dividuals, that is of the fragments of an extended and deconstructed body.” These “dividuals” are objectified versions of ourselves, less even than the “individuals” we are told we should be in liberal capitalism. We are broken up, made less than human, and this “society of control” is the basis of the “platform capitalism” that current versions of AI thrive in.

Work and workers

One scary, but, if you think about it, predictable use of AI, is to watch over employees and regulate their work (and we need to watch those who are watching us). Pasquinelli takes that argument further, pointing out that the old and still much-rehearsed hopes (and fears) of AI go back to the earliest experiments with “machine intelligence” and its precursors back in the nineteenth century. According to this story, workers will be unnecessary, and a professional class of thoughtful experts will guide the technology. This has proven to be quite false. It is false on two counts.

First, this “new technology” does not at all dispense with workers, but requires them, requires more and more of them to work more intensively and for longer hours to service the machinery that enables AI to function. As Pasquinelli argues, “platform capitalism is a form of automation that in reality does not replace workers but multiplies and governs them anew”. The servers, and the many other materially-existing technological devices that are needed to keep the AI apparatus running, are served by a new labour army of mostly invisible workers; there is now an “army of ‘ghost workers’ from the Global South.”

These low-paid precarious women and migrant workers and those in out-sourced locations feed the illusion that “the cloud” is immaterial, as if it is a magical mysterious place where the data floats around, thus complementing the illusion that online banking and investment practice is, in a weird inexplicable way growing profit, rather than managing and harvesting living labour. At this point the analysis cries out for an account of social reproduction, the social reproduction of work and workers that learns lessons from analyses of domestic labour.

Second, the flipside of this failed hope, a false promise, is that AI is actually, instead, replacing what was once dubbed (by one ex-Trotskyist, James Burnham, it so happens) the managerial class who are being eaten alive by their own supposed revolution. Thus, there is not an automation of work, but work that needs to be performed under conditions of intensified surveillance and able to fit into the needs of the automated technology, and so, Pasquinelli argues, there is “automation of management” and “algorithms replace management and multiply precarious jobs”.

Unintelligent conclusions

The Official Monster Raving Loony Party candidate in the Rochdale by-election (one of the least worst candidates to stand there) had as one of his manifesto promises to change “AI” to “IA” (less ambitious than the party’s candidate in Wellingborough who wanted to abolish gravity).

We cannot wish these technological developments away, and need, instead, to tackle how the social relations they replicate and reinforce themselves need to be transformed so we will be able to turn technology from being an instrument of control to a means for our liberation. This very useful book holds open the hope of taking control of the machinery that is used to control us, with examples of self-organisation from within the Italian Autonomist tradition; as Pasquinelli argues toward the end of the book, “a collective ‘counter-intelligence’, has to be learned”.

Here is a twist on the story, something that should inspire hope and confidence in our ability to put this technology to good use. Pasquinelli reminds us that “the most zealous development of automation has shown how much ‘intelligence’ is expressed by activities and jobs that are usually deemed manual and unskilled,” so we are not the dolts we are made out to be when we fail to function as simple pattern recognition systems.

When we click on the image boxes to get into a website, selecting the bits of the picture that contains traffic lights say, to prove that we are “human”, it turns out that the “proof” is not so much that we tick the right boxes but rather that our wobbly faltering movement of the cursor is the giveaway; fully competent AI pattern recognition software would do it swiftly and smoothly. All to the good, there are some things that need to be done in that way.

One take-home message of this book is that development is not driven by technology, and that message is already there in Marx, but the driver of development, the “forces of production” are already underpinned, made possible, by certain “relations of production’ that are then crystallised in the technology. AI crystallises peculiar relations of power, and makes it seem like there is really a master with an eye on us. All this means that the alternative is, as ever in revolutionary anti-capitalist politics, self-conscious collective activity that goes way beyond the limited pattern-recognition formulae of AI, confronting the way it is currently used.

You can read and comment on this article where it was first published here

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February 20, 2024

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Psychopolitics, Reviews

Dream Scenario: Getting Cagey about fantasies of alienation and escape

Ian Parker watched a crappy film which got under his skin

Dream Scenario, released at the end of last year, stars Nicolas Cage as Paul Matthews, a college professor seething with resentment at not being recognised for a book he has not even started writing, and then paying a horrible price for being noticed, more than he would have liked. Paul lumbers around the sets with a goofy expression and an anorak pasted onto his back, and gives fake “inspirational” lectures (the staple of Hollywood films about college professors) about how zebras blend into the herd to stay safe and only stand out in order to mate.

Scenarios

Things start going awry when Cage, who is also producer of the film, starts appearing in people’s dream, not doing much, but as a passive onlooker. It’s creepy. People start to compare notes, and Paul can’t resist seizing this opportunity to break out of dumb anonymity into being a celebrity and, his game-plan, to get a contract for his book on evolutionary biology. An agency takes him on, offering him a deal to promote Sprite in peoples’ dreams, which he objects to, or to appear in Obama’s dream, which he likes the sound of.

Paul Matthews does become a celebrity, but people are frightened, and when he is singled out, he reacts, and when he reacts he is perceived, dreamt of, as being violent, and then he is scapegoated – the celebrity becomes a threat – and feared. Along the way there is a ghastly sex-scene when one dreamer tries to get Paul to enact the experience they had fantasised about with him, and one reviewer remarks that you will want to take a pen-knife to scrape away the memory of the scene (and they are right).

You will watch all this unroll for the first agonising four fifths of the film before the narrative lurches into a daft alternative near-future scenario in which people are able to use new technology to leap into others’ dreams. There are ironic references to the commodification of life, but any progressive reading is wiped away, and you are left with the kind of hopelessness that Paul is wallowing in at the start of the film.

Alienation

There is something intriguing about all this because it taps into something of the formation and experience of subjectivity under capitalism. This is a film about alienation in a number of key aspects. One is the reduction of people to being passive spectators, but that passivity, as we can see in the case of Paul, is laced with anger that cannot be channelled into productive activity. It is incited and blocked. People become ill as a result.

Another aspect is anonymity, the kind of thing that was described in US American sociology as the phenomenon of the “lonely crowd,” in which we are living alongside other people without really relating to them, and that lack of recognition also feeds into a sense of being isolated and helpless. Paul craves recognition for his achievements but cannot do anything to break out of his little prison.

The third aspect of alienation is atomisation, the imprisonment in the sense of “individuality” that is promoted as a vision of autonomy and freedom but which actually divides people from each other. This is where Paul’s passionate lecture, which he is fixated upon – he repeats it during the course of the disastrous date with an admiring dreamer – is so emblematic; zebras blend in to stay safe and stand out to get sex, excitement with others.

These three aspects of alienation are at the heart of the escape attempts that are provoked in us, that we might break out, become active, that we might actually link up with others, gain recognition, and that we might realise ourselves as fully human and – here is a trap – become fully independent.

That third escape attempt, and here in the film it is to become a “celebrity” (like Cage is in real life, in a fake-reflexive twist on the ideological core of the film), and so we become all the more locked into the forms of individuality that are provoked by capitalism and intensified under neoliberalism, locked into our little selves instead of becoming human as part of a constructed collective endeavour.

Dreams

This is where dreams come in, and they are not only explicitly a topic of the film Dream Scenario, but we are offered a “theory”, if you can call it that, for how all this works. In the even more crappy final fifth of the film someone marketing the new technology that allows everyone, and not only Nicolas Cage, to enter other peoples’ dreams, opines that the real lesson of Paul Matthews’ celebrity appearance in dreams is that “dualism” – the split between our bodies and our minds, between material reality and the ideas we have about it, is true. More than that, there are specific “theories” that also turn out to be true. Enter stage right one of the ideological master-keys to dreams and our unconscious fantasies, psychoanalysis.

Dream Scenario peddles not only dualism, an ideology about who we are in the world that divides us from it, but also banalised versions of psychoanalytic theory. First off, and this is voiced quite explicitly by some of the characters to explain how Paul Matthews appears in their dreams, is Jung. Carl Jung, who talked about a “collective unconscious” that was “racial”, and who came out with antisemitic and other racist comments during his time as head of the Nazi-controlled psychotherapy organisation in Germany after Freud and his followers were hounded out, is a go-to for some of the most reactionary ideas about our yearning for individuality, collectivity and change.

Here in “Dream Scenario” Jung’s ideas are wheeled in to not only account for the weird events in the first four fifths of the film but actually to advertise the possibility of telepathically-shared dream worlds (even if there are also some little digs at the way that commercial enterprises might harness that to their own ends).

The other psychoanalytic element is hinted it, and actually ideologically underpins how Paul projects himself into dreams. This element comes from the work of Melanie Klein, one of the most biologically-reductive of present-day psychoanalysts, with a mainly conservative influence, following her death, in psychoanalytic organisations around the world. She argued that through what she called “projective identification” it would be possible for fantasies to be conveyed from one mind to another, most significantly, for her, from the mind of the psychoanalytic patient who would “project” feelings into the mind of the psychoanalyst, would then “identify” with them. This daft idea is also, of course, of a piece with dualism, with the independent life of ideas and their circulation outside of material reality.

Some of my psychoanalytic colleagues will tell me that they reach for Jungian and Kleinian ideas in their own work and find them useful. That’s fine, but here in this film we are given an opportunity to notice how those ideas also play out ideologically in popular culture outside the clinic. The real problem is when specific techniques are turned into a complete worldview (and in this case, two complementary psychoanalytic worldviews) that is functional to capitalism.

Real life

So, though Paul Matthews tells us about zebras, and wants to write a book about evolutionary biology, the “explanation” we are sold, under the counter as it were, is a quasi-psychoanalytic one. Dream on. This film might be a critique of alienation, but it offers us no way out, only the fantasy that we might peel off that anorak and turn out to be not Paul Matthews but a famous real-life film producer Nicolas Cage. Avoid it, or, if you are tempted, step back and think critically about what you are being sold in this film, and look to quite different scenarios for combatting alienation, ones that are constructed collectively in our real lives together rather than searching for only fantasied individual ways out.

You can read and comment on this where it was first published here

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June 20, 2023

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Paine was fantastical

Ian Parker is an ardent admirer of a new book about Thomas Paine

Early this year I went to Thetford in Norfolk and stayed in the Thomas Paine Hotel which has recently, post-pandemic, put up a little exhibition about our hero. There is also a gold statue in the town of Paine holding a copy of his blazing reasoned defence of the French Revolution ‘Rights of Man’. The book in his hand on the statue is upside down, which has prompted comments online about how serious Paine was. He was deadly serious, and nearly dead as a result of his participation in that Revolution as a matter of fact.

Paine

Paine was part of the Enlightenment tradition that valued human ‘reason’ over religious mystification, and participated in not one but two world-shaping revolutions. First he travelled to the Americas and was a key player and writer in the formation, in 1776, of what become known, from a phrase that Paine himself coined in a pamphlet ‘United States of America’, a liberation struggle from British colonialism. It was there that Paine wrote the pamphlet ‘Common Sense’. Paine was admired by other leading figures in that revolution, some of whom let him down because of his too-radical politics when he was in a sticky situation soon after.

He then travelled to France and was an active participant in 1789 in the French Revolution, and was sent to the assembly as a representative for Calais. It was then that his Quaker principles that he carried with him were still evident, even though by that time he had broken from religion altogether. He objected to the Robespierre obsession with violence as a cleansing force of revolution, and Paine argued that Louis XVI should not be guillotined. As a result, Paine himself was locked up, and had a very lucky escape. He returned to the US.

Detractors

The Thomas Paine Hotel in Thetford sets out the story in rather a strange way in its ‘commemorative edition menu’, offering up an account that will be music to the ears of the US servicemen who come to stay at the hotel – his friendship with Benjamin Franklin and all that kind of stuff – and sidelining involvement in the French Revolution.

The account on the hotel’s menu says that ‘Paine was misled as to its true meaning’, and complains that ‘The controversy that Paine caused in his own day has resulted in this great champion of individual rights being branded as a prototype Communist’. I can tell you that a friendly conversation with the hotel’s owner came to a bad end over air conditioning, which they were installing for their US servicemen guests, and consequences for climate change.

Admirers

The record is set straight in a marvellous book by Manchester historian and cartoonist Paul Fitzgerald, aka ‘Polyp’ published last year, 2022, as PAINE: Being a Fantastical Visual Biography of the Vilified Enlightenment Hero by his Ardent Admirer ‘Polyp’. It would be underselling the book to say it is a ‘graphic novel’. With greatest respect to Rius, who gave us a useful illustrated introduction to Marx years ago, this is not just a pen and ink effort. The Polyp book is a beautifully illustrated and carefully researched compilation of direct quotes from Thomas Paine, which are marked in yellow text boxes, and quotes from friends and enemies.

You will be struck by the nastiness of some of the portrayals of Paine, with the yellow press whipping up mock executions, and a series of lurid tales about his devilish irreligious beliefs and lifestyle. The book does not shirk from some of his shortcomings, while also showing us what a great engineer this man was as well as active social reformer, revolutionist.

There is a lovely illustrated talk by Polyp on YouTube at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford. Thanks to Chris for lending me his copy of the Polyp book. I’ll now buy my own, and more as presents, and recommend that you do too.

 

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June 20, 2023

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Manchester, Reviews

Behind the scenes at the Jaffa Cake factory

Ian Parker was given some leaked BBC transcript

In April 2022 the BBC aired an episode of ‘Inside the Factory’ devoted to the production of Jaffa Cakes at the McVitie’s factory in Stockport. You can watch it on BBC iplayer. Gregg Wallace beams at production workers who told him how the factory makes 1.4 billion Jaffa Cakes a year, and footage shot in 2020 was also patched in about marmalade tasting in Cumbria and the picking and squeezing of oranges near sunny seaside Jaffa in Palestine (well, they call it Israel in the programme).

Production

Gregg marvels at the length of the Stockport factory conveyor belts and the amount of flour and chocolate and orange gloop that is dripped and dropped into place, and follows a batch from first mixing to late loading. This and that aspect of the production process is, Gregg declares over and again ‘Fantastic!’. And indeed it is incredible that automation, technological advances under capitalism, has reduced the amount of labour time necessary to come up with such a lovely sweet snack.

However, you will not be surprised to hear that there is another side of the story that Gregg does not talk about on air. Last year nearly a third of the jobs at the factory were under threat, with fears that the Stockport factory, which is the only production site of Jaffa Cakes along with many other biscuit lines, would go the way of other sites around the country. There was a protracted GMB strike in the Cumbria McVitie’s site last year, which was not mentioned in the programme, and in Aintree near Liverpool.

The Stockport factory workers were being defended, if that is the right word, by USDAW, who promised that they would engaged in ‘consultation’ to reduce the impact of redundancies, and local MP Navendu Mishra, Labour, once a Momentum star, appeared in a protest alongside Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham.

I spoke to a worker on the production line who did get a chance to talk to Gregg Wallace for the programme, and he gave me the transcript of a scene that was, it was claimed, shot during the programme. I cannot guarantee the accuracy of this, but spoke to the worker, who I will here call ‘Sohrab’ to protect his identity, and he gives something of the background of the clip of transcript.

Sohrab told me about his resentment that he is confined to other ‘biscuit’ lines, and not allowed access to the Jaffa Cake facilities. The discussion with Gregg started well, but included material that would not fit with the narrative that the ‘Inside the Factory’ team wanted. The transcript begins with Gregg asking for more detail about life in the factory.

Transcript

Wallace: “Sohrab, all this mixing and baking, it’s a real oven in here isn’t it mate, but lovely smells”.

Sohrab: “Er, yes, when I came to work here I did think I would get to know more about the secret of this tasty commodity.”

Wallace: “Tasty what mate?”

Sohrab: “A commodity is a mysterious thing, produced for sale and exchanged on the market.”

Wallace: “Blimey mate, that is fantastic!”

Sohrab: “But I must say that I was a bit disappointed to discover that I was actually working six hours a day for myself, for my wages, and then another two hours for Murat Ulker”

Wallace: “What, you’ve lost me there, you work for this guy, who is he”

Sohrab: “He owns this place, and I sell my labour power to him so that the two hours of my time that I work for him gives him his surplus value, which he can then realise as profit when the lorry goes out the factory gates and the biscuits are sold”

Wallace: “You’ve been scoffing too much of this lovely chocolate” [scowls and mutters to the producer that they should find someone else to talk to]

Sohrab: “Can we talk about the McVitie factory closures and redundancies here that will enable Murat Ulker to make even more profit?”

Profit

The transcript ends there, but Sohrab told me that McVities is not the cuddly little family firm conjured up in the logo, and neither is it the technological paradise depicted in ‘Inside the Factory’. In fact, it is owned by another company, Pladis, which in turn is owned by Yildiz Holding, which is in turn is owned by lucky Murat Ulker, who is currently the richest man in Turkey.

Sohrab is keen to unionise the workforce, and trying to find alternatives to USDAW, an outfit that, he claims, functions effectively like a company union, and while he told me he found the BBC programme ‘mesmerising’, he wanted it to go a little deeper into the production process. He wanted it to explore how the extraction of surplus value operates on a global scale, including colonial settler regimes like Israel in which you can already see, in the programme itself, imported labour from Asia being used to replace Palestinian workers. And, they still won’t let him inside the Jaffa Cakes production line, which, Sohrab says, really takes the biscuit.

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August 30, 2022

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International, Reviews

Communization future histories: Everything for Everyone

Ian Parker reviews interview accounts of the New York Commune 2052-2072 in M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi’s Everything for Everyone published this month by Common Notions

What will communism look like in practice, and how might it unfold and look back on how it came into being? This book is one attempt to turn the science fiction genre into something that connects the future with the present, and enable us to think about what we are doing now so as to better be able to struggle to build another world.

Some of this we already know, and the book helps elaborate elements of our histories of revolutionary struggle again, throwing new light upon it. Some of it is very new, with innovative reflection on what is missing in standard vanguard-led movements and what changes in the environment and technology will block us as we aim to replace commodity exchange as the alienating stand-in for human relationships under capitalism, replace it with something more human and ecological.

Insurrections

The book helpfully defines what it will mean to seize the means of production through insurrection – multiple insurrections in many different contexts in different parts of the world – and how that must involve the process of communization as the making present of connection between people in a way that is genuinely supportive and transformative. Key components of this process are, O’Brien and Abdelhabi tell us, the ‘assemblies’ in bringing people into conscious activity so that the ‘Commune’ becomes a reality. In this book the authors’ future selves are commissioned to interview participants in the process of overthrowing capitalism and building communes.

This is not a smooth fairy-tale about how people will rise up and exploitation will vanish. The contradictions and gaps are made quite explicit in the different cross-cutting interviews, and in some of the interviews it is clear that the participants either don’t know the whole story, or struggle as they speak to patch things together. And neither is this about a smooth transition. There are bloody battles, and hints that things are unfinished in some parts of the world; reference, for example to disastrous events in Australia and other ‘pockets of counterrevolution’.

More than this, the conditions in which insurrection and communization happen is driven by desperation, the kind of pressure that is already building up in dependent economies, including those who are subject to what some interviewees refer to as ‘what was China’. The breakdown of the economy through the arrogant greed of the super-rich escaping into space, and of the state through privatization of security forces is accompanied by a rise in sea-levels, disappearance under the water of swathes of land and the deaths of many people, and a grotesque degradation of ecology that the new world must now take pains to make sense of and repair.

Standpoints

M. E. O’Brien is a queer activist and editor who, among other things, coordinated the New York City Trans Oral History Project and that experience of committed action research interviewing is evident in the structuring of these pieces. Eman Abelhadi is a Marxist feminist academic, researcher and activist in Palestine solidarity and Black Lives Matter, among other things coordinating the Muslim Alliance for Gender and Sexual Diversity for Queer Muslims. Both of them clearly know how to ground speculative fiction in everyday life. Knowing how interviews actually work, including some telling moments where things break down and must be resolved as comrades are thrown back in traumatic flashbacks to earlier times, really makes the book come alive.

There are moments when the personal trajectory of the authors who compile these interviews bleed from the frame into the text, as happens with every piece of research, and O’Brien and Abdelhadi make great efforts to be upfront about where they are coming from so we know better how to read what they gather together here for us. For example, there is attention to moments of ‘trauma’ as they are replicated in some of the interviews, and then to therapy as an inclusive open approach to support and ‘healing’.

In this future, for example, O’Brien has completed her psychoanalytic training, and she looks back from her future self on a world in which ideas from her profession are pretty well widespread in society, at least among these interviewees. Likewise with the knowing last interview with asexual agender Alkasi Sanchez who reflects on what might lie in store for professional academic Abdelhadi, with references to the universities dissolving into more open and democratic ‘knowledge production’. What the authors have to grapple with is not only the content of the revolutionary process, but the form of it, and how that form of struggle and new form of society will have consequences for how stories are listened to and what is done with them.

There is a risk, of course, that this book will itself be read as if it is an academic exercise or that it indulges its authors’ hopes for a progressive role of therapy in such a way as to psychologise political struggle. But then, it pulls back from these temptations and instead opens up a host of new worlds that will be the basis of an alternative to capitalism. At many points it is very strange, and at many points the accounts ring true.

Fiction

This is all made all the more real, and then twisted into a more playful account of what revolution is, by the ways some of the younger interviewees, those who are unable to conceive of a society that is organised around commodities and the treating of people as commodities, react to some of the questions. Anarchist Emma Goldman did not have wanted to be part of a revolution that she could not dance in, and here we have activists who tell us how important dancing was for the revolutionary process itself.

As the Internet is enclosed, controlled and then breaks down, could it not be possible that alternative networks of dance barges might be constructed as the material basis of new forms of communication? And, if we are really going to rethink our relationship with nature as well as with each other, how might we acknowledge the sentient character of an alternative material infrastructure, one that is not merely treating the world as ‘environment’ but really thinking ecologically about what is around us? Then, how should we resist the temptation to romanticise the algae that might serve us, function as computer servers, the algae that dream about their own inner worlds when they are not embodying new forms of artificial intelligence?

Interviewees include ecological activists, Palestinian anti-racists who built the commune in the Levant, ex-sex-workers who now practice a kind of ‘skincraft’ that is therapeutic and enabling rather than exploitative, ex-academics and scientists who helped bring down the institutions that corrupted and commodified knowledge, and those who fought the New York Police Department and the US military before it eventually withdrew from the city. Those who live explain how they live, and those who died are acknowledged, remembered and honoured.

At moments the book breaks from what we know into something more surreal, and it is all the better for that. It is enjoyable and educative, thought-provoking. There are moments of awful realisation about how difficult this process of insurrection and communization will be, and moments of exhilaration at how the process must involve thinking differently, thinking about what we are unable to think about at present in this grim increasingly barbaric reality. But this is not science fiction as consolation, an escape into another world. It is a way of envisaging what might be brought about by us, and what we must do to get where we want to be.

Everyone

This book does what it says on the tin, covering an impressive range of topics that will be of interest to revolutionaries of different kinds, whether revolutionary Marxists or not, keying into contemporary anti-capitalist politics in such a way as to resonate with many different kinds of reader. Interviewees in these future oral histories show us different standpoints on the nature of oppression and resistance, and possibilities of collectivising experience.

The authors will be discussing the book at an online event in September, and the threads of the debate and speculation about what is possible should be seized and spun by us so that this is not merely theoretical fiction, about the future, but helps us shape real practice now.

You can also read and comment on this review here