I have an essay in the latest issue of Jacobin on liberals’ preference for crafting policy through judicial review – rather than pursuing political power through collective action. Liberals have not only abandoned mass politics by embracing the Court, but they have also turned their backs on the radical implications of the (partial and incomplete) successes of mass movements and the expansion of democracy in American political history. It’s a fundamentally antidemocratic posture. Even more pathetically, it tends to fail even on its own terms.

In an excellent essay recently posted at Jacobin, David Golumbia calls attention to the reactionary tendency of cyberlibertarian frames on digital culture and politics. Cyberlibertarians’ preference for viewing all political conflicts as computationally tractable tends to diminish the importance of political participation, and shrouds structures of power rather than illuminates them: “computational practices are intrinsically hierarchical and shaped by identification with power.” “Hacktivists” and digital utopians are practitioners of the kind of neoliberal antipolitics that elides questions of political antagonism in favor of adopting a managerialist posture. There is no prima facie reason to suppose that exposing more of our lives and social relationships to computerization will not result in our being further enmeshed in the circuits of capital. The wide-open tracts of the digital frontier are actually subject to an aggressive enclosure movement on behalf of capital. Adopting the mottoes of cyberlibertarians is no winning left strategy and only obscures the power relations that are strengthened through the use computing on a massive scale. ...

Pamela Jones, founder-operator of the indispensible blog Groklaw, has announced that the site will be shuttered because she no longer feels confident using email, citing the recent closure of Lavabit. She would rather be in the position of not having data to hand over in response to a “National Security Letter” should she ever be presented with one. It’s hard to fault Jones for acting on a healthy and justified fear of an unconstrained surveillance regime. I also share the despair she voices about the parlous state of privacy and freedom – freedom to think, to organize, to act – under such a regime. However, in her despair she goes on to say: ...

From the introduction to Isaak Illich Rubin’s Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value: Political economy does not analyze the material-technical aspect of the capitalist process of production, but its social form, i.e., the totality of production relations which make up the “economic structure” of capitalism. … This distinction at the same time defines the method of political economy as a social and historical science. In the variegated and diversified chaos of economic life which represents a combination of social relations and technical methods, this distinction also directs our attention precisely to those social relations among people in the process of production, to those production relations, for which the production technology serves as an assumption or basis. Political economy is not a science of the relations of things to things, as was thought by vulgar economists, nor of the relations of people to things, as was asserted by the theory of marginal utility, but of the relations of people to people in the process of production.

Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History: According to Fourier, a beneficent division of social labor would have the following consequences: four moons would illuminate the night sky; ice would be removed from the polar cap; saltwater from the sea would no longer taste salty; and wild beasts would enter into the service of human beings. All this illustrates a labor which, far from exploiting nature, is instead capable of delivering creations whose possibility slumbers in her womb. ...