https://www.gofundme.com/red-may-2020-capitalism-or-life In her radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that information has empowered a new kind of ruling class. Through ownership and control of information, this emergent class dominates not only labour but capital as traditionally understood as well. And it’s not just tech companies like Amazon and Google. Even Walmart and Nike can now dominate the entire production chain through the ownership of not much more than brands, patents, copyrights, and logistical systems. While techno-utopian apologists still celebrate these innovations as an improvement on capitalism, for workers—and the planet—it’s worse. A new ruling class uses the powers of information to route around any obstacle labor and social movements put up. So how to find a way out? McKenzie Wark explains. Alexander, Magally, and Jasper discuss. Wendy moderates. McKenzie Wark, Alexander Zevin, Jasper Bernes, Wendy Liu (moderator)

https://www.gofundme.com/red-may-2020-capitalism-or-life Thea Riofrancos has a new book, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador that studies the conflict between a left government focused on economic development via resource extraction and the anti-extractivism of grassroots activists opposed to the disregard for nature and indigenous communities. Vanessa Freije, Assistant Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington and.co-editor of the new issue of NACLA, “A People’s Policy for the Americas,’ interviews Thea. Thea Riofrancos, Vanessa Freije

https://www.gofundme.com/red-may-2020-capitalism-or-life Work hard, play by the rules, get ahead. You’ve heard that sermon from Obama, from Elizabeth Warren, maybe even internalized the unstated corollary. If you don’t make it, schmuck, it’s your own fault. Our panelists see it differently. Promises of social mobility in neoliberal capitalist America are empty. Working-class children without college degrees, as Jennifer Silva has shown, have no shot at the union jobs their parents or grandparents had, and struggle to manage their pain. Students form what Gary Roth calls an educated underclass. The so-called professional-managerial class, which saw itself as a neutral arbiter between Capital and Labor, as Gabriel Winant has noted, is decomposing into a few winners and an indebted, downwardly mobile majority. And Hadas Weiss argues that the so-often-invoked category of ‘the middle class’ itself is nothing more than an ideology, a fantasy produced by capitalism which instills the belief that anyone can ascend or rise entirely by his or her own efforts. Now — after the onslaught of Covid-19 and the steps taken to isolate it — economists are predicting a 30% unemployment rate, larger than the Great Depression. How will the already-frayed ideology of the American Dream fare under circumstances that demand resources far beyond individual merit? Will the loose conception of society as being composed of a broad, middle strata, surrounded by the fortunate rich and the unfortunate poor, give way to a relational picture of class, one that maps lines of class struggle more accurately and reveals whose foot is on whose head? Red May welcomes four actual social scientists to figure things out. Gary Roth, Hadas Weiss, Gabriel Winant, Jennifer Silva, Philip Wohlstetter (mod)

https://www.gofundme.com/red-may-2020-capitalism-or-life Negative solidarity: an aggressively enraged sense of injustice. Because I endure lousy working conditions (wage freezes, no benefits, increasing precarity) everyone else must too. Mythic emblems? The Welfare Queen, (a racialized demonization of benefits for the impoverished or unemployed). The Migrant (scolded for dependency and laziness on the one hand and seen as “stealing jobs” on the other). The Public Services Worker (a teacher or government employee who still benefits, if only slightly, from union protection and collective bargaining, thus failing to suffer enough or work adequately). Will it expand in scope and intensity after the quarantine in the form of a clamor for more austerity, for persecution of the disadvantaged in the name of fiscal discipline?  Or will this complex articulation of affect and imagination have to contend with a renewed sense of interdependence inspired by the countless acts of solidarity from frontline workers that got us through the crisis? Jason Read, Jeremy Gilbert, Steven Shaviro, Jo Isaacson, Bruno George (mod)

https://www.gofundme.com/red-may-2020-capitalism-or-life In her book, Capital is Dead, McKenzie Wark poses a provocative thought experiment: what if we are not in capitalism anymore but something worse? Jodi Dean responds to Wark’s question with a tendential analysis: what tendencies do we see leading us away from capitalism and toward something worse? Expropriation, domination, and force have intensified to such an extent that it no longer makes sense to posit free and equal actors meeting in the labor market. New businesses seek revenues from rent and debt rather than production. But tendencies are not all-determining. There is always a space for, a need for, political action. If Capitalism is indeed tending toward a kind of Neo-Fuedalism, then our choice will not be, as Rosa Luxemburg framed it, between socialism and barbarism, but between communism and neo-fuedalism. Let’s see where this line of thought leads. Jason Read, Eva Cherniavsky, Jodi Dean, Philip Wohlstetter

https://www.gofundme.com/red-may-2020-capitalism-or-life Time for Ultra-Left-Post-Posadist-Nihilist-Anarcho-Communist-comedy and politics. Hosts Jamie Peck and AP Andy look at the future of work at a rare moment when almost nobody is working. Magally Miranda surveys domestic work in the gig economy. Annie McClanahan reflects on how the Covid-19 pandemic has made us all more aware of supply-chains and provision networks, not of their largeness but rather their intimacy, the human labor whereby goods move hand to hand to hand. (“Now,” says a friend, “I can’t stop thinking about all the hands that touched everything I buy.”) Aaron Benanav looks at the effects of automation. Will the rise of the robots free us? Will a guaranteed income allow us to work less and enjoy the fruits of leisure? Or will we be under-employed—pushed into doing tasks like dog-walking or assembling IKEA shelves—tasks that the rich used to do for themselves but can now hire others to do for a pittance?  The Antifada team, whose motto is ‘Unrest is Best,’ will pursue the truth wherever it leads. Aaron Benanav, Annie McClanahan, and Magally Miranda with A.M. Gittlitz and Jamie Peck

https://www.gofundme.com/red-may-2020-capitalism-or-life Innovation. Meritocracy. The possibility of overnight success. Hollow phrases.  Every day, the techie fairy tale takes another hit: revelations about Cambridge Analytica, Theranos, or the workplace conditions of Amazon warehouse workers, significantly visible during the Covid-19 crisis. In place of the promised Electronic Frontier, a slew of mega-monopolies loom over us as gate-keepers presiding over the becoming-rent of profit, working on AI applications that they hope will render humanity obsolete, or turn it into a species of transhumans working for a wage until the heat death of the universe. So how do we liberate technology from capitalism? Our panelists offer different answers. Nick Dyer-Witheford, Elise Thorburn, Wendy Liu, James Steinhoff, Chris Natale

https://www.gofundme.com/red-may-2020-capitalism-or-life Pundits have been comparing its effects to Pearl Harbor or 9/11. A surprise attack that overwhelmed American defenses. With forty-thousand dead and counting, one can’t help thinking that the multi-trillion dollars thrown at jets that don’t fly and space forces might be better allocated constructing a viable public health infrastructure. But the problems go deeper. Let us stipulate that the notion of "national security" as it has evolved since the onset of the Cold War, is a totally inadequate conceptual frame to guide our decision-making in an interdependent world facing a climate crisis of unprecedented proportions; that the supposedly hard-nosed technocratic concept provided, in practice, a convenient pretext for intervention anywhere in the world and a handy way to cover one’s ass afterwards; that the coexistence of a democracy subject to the rule of law and a state of arbitrary unlimited powers justified by national security and subject to no review is a house divided against itself that cannot stand: it will become all one thing or all the other. What concept should replace ‘national security’ as an omnibus term for the protection of the American population? What should we call that replacement? What principles should define it that would protect us from the long train of abuses that the concept of ‘national security’ enabled? What are the political obstacles (organizational, budgetary, etc.) to implementing those principles? Last of all, since this is Red May, let’s not shy away from use of the words, ‘empire’, ‘capitalism’, or ‘decolonization’, if they should prove relevant to articulating those obstacles. Join us for a lively conversation. Daniel Bessner, Jeanne Morefield, Andrew Bacevich, Adom Getachew, Nikhil Singh, Philip Wohlstetter (moderator)

https://www.gofundme.com/red-may-2020-capitalism-or-life David Geffen sent a photo from his yacht to show that he was observing social distancing. The majority of Americans are under house arrest, mostly in cramped, crowded spaces: apartments, trailers, shared houses, if they’re lucky enough not to be homeless. Suddenly a large number of men have been confined for longer than ever in the hidden abode of quote-unquote women’s work and are being asked to shoulder more of the burden of cooking or cleaning up. No surprise that reports of domestic violence seem to be on the uptick. At the same time, the new media category of 'essential worker'' has inverted the scale of what kind of work is seen as valuable and necessary. Job categories dominated by women—caregivers and grocery clerks, for example—reveal themselves to be far more essential than power boat salesman and lobbyist. Let’s look at the ways the Covid-19 crisis has highlighted in a spectacular fashion capitalist society's dependence on women's reproductive labor, paid and unpaid. How can we translate this new public awareness of the value of such labor (and its role in creating value) into a transformation of the social relations that capitalism imposes? Jenny Brown, Liza Featherstone, Kathleen Reeves, Kathi Weeks (mod)