Old Post #1- C.R.E.A.M.

Wrote this over 2 days last week-

Nietzsche said that the value of an idea did not solely concern its status as truth. In the same vein of ideas, the value of a political project may not have anything to do with its status as authentic, unified, or concrete. Sometimes, the meaning of a movement or activist project may have nothing to do with the established measures of meaning. The typical tool for social empowerment and ‘opportunity’ for disenfranchised people (such as the homeless) is money. However, an equally valuable (by any measure..) tool can also be mutual support systems, contacts with industry, self-fulfillment or even just a sense of accomplishment. In the inverse, donations of money can have an impact other than the merely monetary. Panhandling is a process that makes homelessness inconveniently visible to people who otherwise may not directly encounter abject poverty. The attempt to remove panhandlers is an overt example of erasure of homelessness without an effort to remedy the problem. However, there can be other forms of erasure: the attempt to prevent giving money to panhandlers, treating them as irresponsible or incompetent also erases the way that money acts as a form of communication. Money in transactions, like metaphor, connects two otherwise disconnected acts of labor. It designates particular people and acts as worthy of compensation/reward, and so also acts as a social sanction in its own right, independent of the disciplinary effects of capital. The non-economic becomes economic, the economic, non.

Attempts to constrain the meaning of acts of (non)compensation (particularly the designation of ‘waste’) delineates the social and the economic, and by implication, what remains open to politics. Moreso, it tells us what we think about ourselves as social beings. If we believe certain acts to be non-economic, it presumes the separate domain of the economic to consist of relationships between autonomous individuals, acting on rational principles. The implication of social, non-economic relationships in economic transaction demonstrates that economics and industry also run on social connections, norms of behavior, and a particular form of agency ensured by social networks. Similarly, in projects for social change, the domain of the corporate and capitalistic should not be totally excluded: ‘by any means necessary’ includes the means of power. Purchases, donations, endowments, etc. aren’t merely excuses to avoid ‘real’ change, but also function as symbols of allegiance and identification, which can be valuable in their own right. The use of corporate power expressed through donations (corruption), should not be seen solely as the outer limit of power in capitalism, but rather a specific strategy by a company, individual or industry to achieve a particular goal. A response that attempts to restore ‘genuine’ democracy by way of revolution cuts off struggles from empirically effective tools of change (money, advertising, PR are working, though perhaps for the wrong people) using a vision of political life that always was an illusion: the myth of genuine democracy born out of interpersonal debate.

Duncan