#and I am triply determined to see the other side of this

[azuresquirrel]

my friends, if nothing else, let spite motivate you to live. I sure am.

[irenewendywode]

Kinesis, Chapter One

Myrdu was deep in the flow of data analysis, right on the breathless cusp of an insight that would change the landscape of Avla’s interplanetary knowledge, when his broodmate popped into his work room for an unannounced visit.

More than forty years, even as Avlans measured, and Atur’s timing was just as impeccable as when they were boys. No one but Atur could make that sound coming down his hallway, boots treading heavy and unfailingly steady.

“What do you want?” Myrdu asked impatiently, turning away from his screen.

“I came to ask you to rejoin the ranks of the Avlan military,” Atur answered.

“Of course you did.” When Myrdu was halfway to cracking open all the secrets of Mimica communications streams. He barely kept from rolling his eyes. “And what makes you think it will appeal to me any more today than it did last time?”

“I merely hope,” said Atur. “And I can offer you a higher position. Better pay.”

“No,” said Myrdu.

“You know the fleet needs you,” said Atur. “Please.”

Myrdu gave him a flat look. “Perhaps,” he said, “but do I need it?”

“I know you, Myrdu. You won’t be happy until you have a project you can devote your talents to.”

“I have a project.” Myrdu gestured to the screen in front of him, on which the progress of his latest decoding effort was displayed.

“I mean a real one,” said Atur.

Myrdu glared.

“Something that suits your talents,” Atur corrected himself. “Not just a challenge, but something important. You should be winnowing out hidden viruses, saving the Avlan fleet’s computers from the Cewri’s underhanded attacks.”

It was difficult to say no to an older broodmate, Myrdu mused, especially one who had always been able to beat you up. Doubly so if the man in question had grown up to be a skilled diplomat, and triply so if he was elected chairman of a coalition that spanned dozens of worlds, including your own.

But Myrdu was damn well going to try.

“And who determines importance?” he asked. “You, as always?”

“I believe you should see the truth of this too,” Atur said. “You’re so smart, Myrdu. Smarter than me, in most ways. When will you accept that this is a dead end?” His eyebrows furrowed, and he shifted his weight with his impatience. “We know what Mimica do.”

“You mean we know what they’ve done in the past,” Myrdu corrected.

“Yes. Fine. What they’ve done in the past. They don’t think like us, Myrdu. They aren’t like us.”

“Is that so terrible?” His own daughter was unlike anyone else on Avla. Always would be, no matter how hard she might try.

Mimica, though, weren’t even humanoid. Atur could be right. Maybe.

“The Mimica could be great allies,” Myrdu persisted, “if we could trust them. And if not, if this research points the other way… well, then, ‘know your enemy’ is just as important with them as with the Cewri, or any race in the Imperium.” Atur knew full well how much of Myrdu’s value as a force against the expansion of the Imperium lay in his ability to collect new knowledge about them and their member species. Why not use the same tool to gain insight about the Mimica?

“You could waste your whole life trying to make sense of those signals. They’re most likely meaningless, if I am to believe my advisors.”

Myrdu snorted. “I know the markers of organized, lingual communication when I see them, Atur. There is something here to make sense of. I’m right on the edge of finding it.”

Atur pondered this for a long moment. “When you’re done, I want you back at my side.” His voice softened. “The Cewri’s attacks are unrelenting. My xenotechnical experts do their best, but none of them are you.”

Myrdu had forgotten to account for how Atur’s eyes could be huge, liquid gray pools.

Myrdu sighed. “When I’m done,” he agreed, “I’ll think about it.”

◈

The last tweaks to the decoding algorithm were finally finished. Myrdu put it in place and hit the button that would begin processing the transmissions. Then he could sit back and wait for the results. Myrdu’s hand hovered between the two snacks in his bag. There were plain tiru seeds, but also a wrapped crispcake in case of emergencies. It was a comfort food he indulged in rarely, but today felt like the day. He just had to be extra careful not to drop any crumbs. The palace folas chased after sweet things with abandon, and if they started foraging in the lab, the disgusting things might start chewing on the wires.

Small, creeping things that got into places they shouldn’t and spread who knew what ailments were one of Myrdu’s least favorite things.

Myrdu couldn’t handle any more delays. Atur had been gone for a couple of hours, but the weight of his impatience still lingered in the air.

Myrdu let the sweet smell of the herb-infused crispcake chase it away.

This was a good day. All his research might finally be coming to fruition. Nothing else mattered. Myrdu looked forward to finally learning something about the mysterious and often vilified Mimica species.

The results began to blink on the display. Myrdu leaned in.

The numbers that came out of the filtering program were in distinct sequences, repeating in varied combinations. Myrdu’s brain lit up.

These were codes. These were intelligible codes. Myrdu held his breath, looking hard, trying to be sure. He’d never imagined that something so clear would come out of the results, not so soon. He had expected to find a pattern of thought, an unknown language that would take years to make meaning of. But he recognized these codes.

He knew them intimately.

He dropped his crispcake, fingers shaking.

These were Cewri codes. These were the communications between member species of Avla’s greatest enemy. No one but full members of the Imperium were privy to the meanings of these codes.

Myrdu had achieved unequivocal results. He had learned something for certain about the Mimica. No scientist could hope for more.

Myrdu knew the Cewri. He knew the Imperium they commanded. He’d been there beside Atur, running digital interference while Atur fought them with more tangible weapons.

Myrdu had nightmares about the brutality of the Imperium’s Scythe forces in battle. Their strange, unwieldy bodies, their huge, hooked claws. The way they killed without a second thought.

While Myrdu had had doubts about the Mimica, there was no question in his mind as to where the Cewri stood.

Their two most feared enemies had joined forces, pooled their strengths. The Cewri’s malevolent intent was driven outward by all the tools at their disposal, and now that included everything the Mimica could do. This discovery might well spell doom for Avla and every world under Avlan protection.

The full force of Myrdu’s exhaustion hit him at once. With shaking hands, he meticulously shut down his equipment and closed his lab for the night.

Stumbling out into the glowing greens and blues of the courtyard’s evening lights, Myrdu made his way further into the heart of the palace. This could not wait for the morning report. He had to tell Atur what he had learned.

Myrdu’s footsteps on the stone floors of the palace, in the silence of the evening, sounded loud and booming, like cannons. It was jarring, but he just needed to get there. Hand off the weight of his discovery to someone else.

After that, maybe Myrdu could have some manner of rest. The job was as good as done—his part of it, at least. They had their results. The nobles could decide what needed doing about it all.

The largest question had been answered.

But as soon as he thought that, there was the niggling sensation that he’d forgotten something. He hadn’t forgotten to turn off the light or sweep up the remains of his crispcake. No. Something… big. The more he tried to bring it forth, the bigger he realized it all was.

Thoughts, memories—years of them.

Hanni’s children, taking the form of puppies for the first time, tumbling over their siblings, wiggling and biting each other’s ears. A cascade of gemstones catching the light as they were poured out for substance practice. The ocean flooding up over him as he took the Mimica’s ancestral cephalopoid form.

How did he know all this? Who were these beings to him? Where were these memories from?

His steps slowed as he tried to get a hold of this influx of information, make sense of it. His curious mind needed to know what it had lost. Why. His reality was spinning apart, everything was coming loose, and he struggled to catch it all and pull it back together.

There was a lifetime, there. More than a lifetime. A world. A galaxy.

For a moment, then, he saw double in his mind’s eye. In xir mind’s eye. Myrdu, the Avlan citizen, the life he had lived for the last four decades of Avlan time. His daughter. His work. His loyalties.

And… someone else, who was him and not him, as an actor is not their role. Okka. The Mimica. An earlier life on a wildly different world, at once bizarre and intimately familiar.

This new self—this older, deeper self with a different language and body and name—was still Myrdu. Alien, but still him/her/xem. Okka remembered creating Myrdu, becoming Myrdu, stepping inside of him and sealing up the cracks. But now the walls were breaking down.

Xir mission here was over. The question xe had come here to ask had been answered, and xir memory blocks had fallen away. It was time to return.

It was jarring. Myrdu’s mothers and broodmates were part of a culture which fostered a distrust for anything or anyone not bipedal, not humanoid. A distrust of anything like what Okka now knew xemself to be.

A cephalopoid. A plotter. A spy.

Xe was one of the enemy.

What would Atur think? What would he say, what would he do? The prospect was terrifying. But that terror was small in comparison to all xe felt.

The largest element was the sense of belonging that came with the memories of being Mimica. It was tangible and immense, like a warm blanket that both enfolded xem and stretched to the horizons. And it was within reach.

I want to go home. I want to go where I belong. I want to return to the Collective.

Okka felt for those connections, systems away but so close now. Those signals that Myrdu had studied, that reached across the sky, carried the Collective across the galaxy. They’d all be waiting for xem to rejoin.

So xe reached.

But there was something odd. Something not quite right. A chill down xir spine. Okka stopped xemself, coming up against the residual mistrust of the different, the other, that xir Avlan identity had in spades. Clinging to that mistrust to combat the pull to rejoin the others. Xe realized that there might be questions xe did not want the answers to.

Xe remembered how Myrdu had felt, mere minutes ago, when those codes had come into focus like a figure walking out of a thick fog. A figure that resolved itself into an enemy.

Mimica were a clear threat to everything Myrdu held dear. The Cewri codes in their transmissions had been clear. There might be danger, or lurking evil, where the new warm memories told xem was only love and safety.

A lifetime of xenophobia, patience, and scientific study let the Mimica who had been Myrdu cling to what Myrdu knew for a little while longer, just long enough to stop that headlong plunge into everything xe remembered loving.

The science had told Myrdu that the Mimica were the enemies of Avla.

Myrdu listened. Okka listened. Opened xemself to the sound/feel of the Collective without letting xir mind touch theirs.

Something was wrong. The warm vibrations of the Mimica Collective weren’t reaching out to greet xem; instead they were cold, still, and somehow vacant.

Silent. Silent like death. Silent as Creepers.

Xe wrenched xemself away, shut down xir ability to reach out across space as xe always had.

No.

No! It couldn’t be. The personalities that were xir parents, xir siblings, Jerra, Hanni, their children, everyone in the Collective crushed to nothing in the stifling fist of the Imperium’s mind slavery… No, it couldn’t be. But if it were true, Okka could not reach out. Could not let xemself do what xe most urgently needed. To be home. To be connected. To be one.

Xe would be just as lost to the Creepers as the rest of xir family. Imprisoned, helpless.

Breath left xir currently humanoid lungs in a rush. The Collective was lost. Xe knew it now. That familiar thrumming of love, of life, at the back of xir mind was gone.

Xe realized xe was sitting on cold stone, and did not remember when xe had ceased to stand, but it didn’t matter now. Perhaps nothing did.

They were all gone.

Okka could not go home. Okka could never go home.

Xe had come here to find a definitive answer to one question. Was it possible to get the Avlan nobles to give the Mimica another chance as allies? Would the Avlans ever be persuaded to at least hear them out?

Xe had expected to work for many years more. To work until the answer became “yes.”

The Collective had made no plans for the answer to come out “no.”

The Avlans were at least sensible enough that if the answer came up “no,” there would be a reason. The Mimica hadn’t planned for this eventuality because this eventuality was unthinkable.

What Creepers did to thinking beings… Xe’d seen it before, in other species, the lifeless eyes, the stiff and mechanical motions. A thinking being made into merely a body, a puppet only moving with the pulling of its strings.

Okka felt as if xe’d been abruptly dropped into the worst of all possible nightmares.

Everything had shifted. Everything was cold and unfamiliar and strange. On this world, and on others.

Shaking in this suddenly-alien humanoid body, Okka sank to xir side on the stone floor, and wept.

◈

On Earth, Waverly Kemp was dancing.

Not with anyone in particular, or for any particular reason, although he enjoyed excuses to do so. No, one of the most powerful men in the tech industry was wiggling his butt around in his boxers just because it was a beautiful morning, and he could.

No one else quite kept in step with him, after all.

Well, there was Toto. But Toto had been built for it: His aluminum chassis had four legs with a generous range of motion, and he could wiggle his behind with the best of them. And his brain…

Kemptech had been consulting with Boston Dynamics on advanced learning software for their robots, and Waverly found the project interesting enough to get deeply involved himself, rather than leaving the bulk of the work to his employees. Somewhere along the line, something magical had happened, and Toto had come alive.

Waverly had set out to build an assistant, and he’d wound up with a friend. Since he needed both desperately, he’d run with it.

He twitched a finger up in suggestion, and the next song that came across the speakers was a faster tempo, trumpet notes tumbling over each other in their haste, urging motion, urging dance.

This was when Waverly Kemp felt alive. He moved, and with every little twitch or waggle, his little world moved with him. Toto read his motions and followed along, bobbing his head/hand, shimmying across the floor. The rest of his computers were customized in the same kind of way but less complex, and they responded quickly and obediently to his touch to bring up the files he wanted, adjusting here, testing there.

Toto and Waverly were family. Neither of them could quite pull off being human, or adults, but they tried. They helped each other.

The music faded down in volume. Waverly looked at Toto. The bot gave a subtle little shrug/wiggle, which was code for ‘David is coming, and he doesn’t look happy’.

Waverly didn’t know what he’d do without Toto. Toto had saved Waverly’s life when David had broken up with him. The worst part had been that they’d still needed to work together. So much of what kept Kemptech up and running was David.

There was a chirp from the door as David walked in. Waverly braced himself.

David Miller was the same cutie he’d been when he and Waverly had first met, dark brown hair with that hint of bright copper shining in it, cheeks dusted with freckles and just overall geeky and lanky and amazing. The years and the familiarity hadn’t taken away any of it. Now that David knew how to dress himself to best advantage, it was even more devastating. It hit Waverly all over again every single time.

Even more so when David was annoyed. He was annoyed now. As with everything, it was clear on his face.

It always made Waverly want to heckle him, to see more of that lively emotion. But they’d established some ground rules, over the years, and that was absolutely out of bounds.

Remembering that fact killed the last of Waverly’s happy buzz from what should have been a really satisfying dance interlude. Waverly pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Ugh, I hate it when you bring that face in here, now that I’m not allowed to poke it.”

“If you’d act even vaguely professional, maybe you could avoid this face.”

Waverly turned wide, innocent eyes on his HR director. “I don’t recall doing anything particularly unprofessional recently, Davey. I mean that honestly. Cross my heart. I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He really didn’t.

“Your interns?” David prompted.

“I recall them,” Waverly said.

“You fired all of them!”

“I also recall that,” he admitted.

“What the hell was the problem this time, Waverly?”

“All these interns are trying to be me. But badly. Nothing that’s original. Nothing that’s them. They’re of no use to me. Go out and find me someone trying to be themselves.”

David sighed. “All of them, though?”

Waverly shrugged.

“What about Chuck? He had ideas. Opinions. He wasn’t worried about ingratiating himself.”

“Chuck? Really? His go-to insults were… hideously uncreative.”

“You’re judging him by the creativity of his insults?”

“His default put-down was ‘fag’.”

David was quiet for a moment. “Okay, I’ll give you that one,” he conceded. “But Pete! Pete was perfectly polite. Clearly he didn’t want to be you.”

Waverly shook his head, looking at his computer. “Didn’t trust him. He was too polite. I couldn’t piss him off, and that pissed me off. Anyone that polite is hiding something.”

“Some people are just nice!” David exclaimed, exasperated. “I thought Pete was nice. Waverly. You cannot fire someone for being nice.”

Waverly rolled his eyes. “I didn’t fire him. I just… transferred him. Away from me.”

David stepped close to Waverly and tugged his chin until their gazes crossed. “At a certain point this stopped being about the interns and started being about you.”

Waverly pulled away and stomped across the room. “That’s ridiculous. I reserve the right to enjoy the company of the people I work with. I’m the boss. Is that too much for the boss to ask?”

“Listen to me,” David said more quietly, not trying to approach him. “Listen to what I’m saying. I’m trying to help you. This isn’t about what you need from your interns, professionally speaking. I don’t even think it’s about whether you like them or not. You’re perfectly capable of getting along with people when it suits you. I think this has gotten personal.”

Waverly was well and confused now. “What are you even talking about?”

David bit his lip, looking across the room at Waverly before speaking again. “Waverly… you’re trying to find another me. You’re trying to find someone who has that same dynamic with you that I had back in the beginning. Even if that’s something you can find? That’s not going to work any better than people trying to be you.”

That… might have been a little true. Waverly missed those days. He missed David. What they’d had, or what Waverly had thought they’d had. He wanted work to be like that again. “Why not?” he asked.

David took a breath, and his eyebrows went down. “Because sooner or later everyone realizes they deserve better than someone who treats people the way you do!”

“Then why are you still around?” Waverly spat. He turned away. He hated when things got like this. David was a friend. The best head of Human Resources Waverly could ever ask for. Waverly didn’t know what he’d do if he lost David the rest of the way.

“Waverly,” David said, low and concerned, “I know you. I care about you. You’re my friend. I know you’ve come to respect me professionally. But what we had to go through to get here? It was not a good scene. It hurt both of us a lot.” He sighed. “Sometimes you have to adapt to people instead of making people adapt to you.”

For once, Waverly was left without words. His emotions were too big to fit into such limited containers.

Okay, yes, but how?

How do I treat people? What do I do wrong?

How do I do better?

(x)

[breakingculture]

The Alt-Right and the Counter-Triple Movement

In response to Adam Kotsko's post on the important conjunctural emergence of the alt-right, i.e.:

once we recognize the distinctiveness of the alt-right, we can see that racism isn’t some random leftover of a bygone era, but a phenomenon that is incorporated into our present social order and political moment. It is not the return of the repressed, it is the exacerbation of something in the present. In other words, the violence at Charlottsville did not happen despite the fact that it’s 2017, but precisely because it is 2017 and not some other historical moment.

I share the following excerpt from the manuscript I'm working on. I can put the full citations at the bottom if there is interest, but I'm mostly trying to get some feedback on this interpretation of the emergence of these movements. In short, I would say that the particular racially charged element is an important reaction to the way that what Nancy Fraser has called the “Triple movement" for emancipation was articulated to neoliberalism. Kotsko is doing important work on the latter concept as a form of political theology so I hope something like the below contributes to that conversation.

Apologies in advance for the fragmentary nature of this. I had to exculpate some references that don't make sense out of the larger context of the manuscript, which is on Intellectual Property Rights - notably, the thing Trump’s administration has been talking about extensively this week in an attempt to change the subject to their purported assault on neoliberalism rather than progressivism.

...

Other scholars - such as Mouffe and Fraser  - discuss elements of what I call a reified culture of property using the concept of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is a useful concept because it points to the way this culture of property has been articulated - and rearticulated - in the post-industrial era.  Neoliberalism is haunted by what Jefferson Cowie and others have termed the “Great Exception” of the New Deal in the U.S. and the rise of social democracy in Europe (Cowie 2016a).  These midcentury breaches of the longstanding “culture of property” were driven by what Karl Polanyi called a “double movement,” where society rises up to demand protection by the state from the ravages caused by the disembedded market (Polanyi 2002).   

In turn, neoliberalism can be seen as what Mark Blyth calls a “counter double movement” (Blyth 2002). Central to this counter movement is a theoretical and philosophical imperative to re-commodify what had increasingly become social wages or social goods - in short, by reasserting the political, economic, and ultimately cultural and moral legitimacy of the culture of property. Blyth convincingly argues that, while both the double movement of the New Deal and the counter double movement of neoliberalism had specific social interests behind them, the key to their hegemonic rise was the coherence of their economic ideas at the time of their ascendency.  Thus in the 1970s  there were alternatives - for instance, the Regulationist Economics school in France and other leftist critiques of corporate capitalism - to the theories of Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, supply side economics, rational choice theory, and the Laffer curve, but they were less successful in both defining the crisis of stagflation and proscribing a solution that would be attractive politically.  This political-ideological crisis was compounded by what Nancy Fraser has recently termed a “triple movement” for emancipation.  

In the final essay of her collection, Fortunes of Feminism, Fraser says the triple movement, “conceptualizes capitalist crisis as a three-sided conflict among forces of marketization, social protection, and emancipation.” (Fraser 2013b, loc. 5342).  If Polanyi saw the double movement as being a demand for social protection against “the disintegrative effects of marketization,” the triple movement of emancipation explains the “ against “the entrenching domination” of the social protection provided by the welfare state.  The concept of the triple movement is triply useful: first, it helps categorize the social movements of the 50s, 60s, and 70s in relation to the dominant culture and political economy;  this, in turn, helps explain the particular political and theoretical direction of cultural studies and its ancillary fields; and, I would argue, insofar as the concept of the triple movement helps us understand the way progressive, emancipatory politics relate to both the midcentury double movement and the counter double movement of neoliberalism, it explains the most reactionary tendencies of Trump and other populist leaders as a counter-triple movement.

On the first point, Fraser uses the”triple movement” to categorize the, “vast array of social struggles that do not find any place within the scheme of the double movement.”

I am thinking of the extraordinary range of emancipatory movements that erupted on the scene in the 1960s and spread rapidly across the world in the years that followed: anti-racism, anti-imperialism, anti-war, the New Left, second-wave feminism, LGBT liberation, multiculturalism, and so on. Often focused more on recognition than redistribution, these movements were highly critical of the forms of social protection that were institutionalized in the welfare and developmental states of the postwar era. Turning a withering eye on the cultural norms encoded in social provision, they unearthed invidious hierarchies and social exclusions. For example, New Leftists exposed the oppressive character of bureaucratically organized social protections, which disempowered their beneficiaries, turning citizens into clients. Anti-imperialist and anti-war activists criticized the national framing of first-world social protections, which were financed on the backs of postcolonial peoples whom they excluded; they thereby disclosed the injustice of ‘misframed’ protections, in which the scale of exposure to danger—often transnational—was not matched by the scale at which protection was organized, typically national. Meanwhile, feminists revealed the oppressive character of protections premised on the ‘family wage’ and on androcentric views of ‘work’ and ‘contribution’, showing that what was protected was less ‘society’ per se than male domination. LGBT activists unmasked the invidious character of public provision premised on restrictive, hetero-normative definitions of family. Disability-rights activists exposed the exclusionary character of built environments that encoded able-ist views of mobility and ability. Multiculturalists disclosed the oppressive character of social protections premised on majority religious or ethnocultural self-understandings, which penalize members of minority groups. And on and on. (Fraser 2013a)

The development of Cultural Studies as a field that emerges from the New Left and is infused with the political and theoretical precipitates of these movements. As I chronicle elsewhere (Aksikas and Andrews 2014, Andrews 2016) and touch on above, the focus on culture and representation as a site of struggle and emancipation made sense when the (official) site of labor had been incorporated into the system via the alliance between corporate capitalism, large unions, and the state. On the one hand, as C.W. Mills argued in his “Letter to the New Left” it appeared that the earlier reliance on labor as the source of revolutionary progress should be abandoned: “Such a labour metaphysic, I think, is a legacy from Victorian Marxism that is now quite unrealistic.” Instead, the New Left should think about the role of the cultural apparatus, which was seen as “manufacturing consent” to the political economic order and, in the words of Althusser, reproducing the relations of production (Hall 1982, Althusser 2014).

If past leftist movements had been focused on the way politics and culture would be determined by the economic system - seeing them as part of double movement for social protection - the New Left of the post-war era, focused instead on the way culture might serve to create a politics that would complete the liberatory projects stifled by welfare state protections.  Again, this points up the immanent relationship between the political, the economic, and the cultural - as well as the partial approach most in Cultural Studies have taken. In general, because the question of economics and value has been left to one side, our focus in the field has been on the way meaning intersects with power: the way culture or ideology helps legitimate, normalize or resist political relationships.

The crisis of progressive liberalism should take us back to the bread and butter issues of labor, class, and social protection that have largely been left to one side in favor of the kind of emancipatory socialist strategy advocated by theorists like Laclau and Mouffe (2001) - though not without recognizing the very real need to continue those emancipatory struggles as such.  As Mouffe observed recently, “nowadays we have to defend the social-democratic institutions we previously criticised for not being radical enough. We could have never imagined that the working-class victories of social democracy and the welfare state could be rolled back. In 1985 we said ‘we need to radicalise democracy’; now we first need to restore democracy, so we can then radicalise it; the task is far more difficult.” (Mouffe and Errejón 2016, p. 22-23).   

There is some broad, if still ambivalent, agreement on the failures of the New Left and Cultural Studies in the Neoliberal era. In looking at the different movements to radicalize social democracy, Fraser notes that, “in each case, the movement disclosed a type of domination and raised a corresponding claim for emancipation. In each case, too, however, the movement’s claims for emancipation were ambivalent - they could line up in principle either with marketization or social protection” (Fraser 2013b, loc. 5388). In the event, she argues, in most of these movements - including the feminist movement and the New Left:

The ambivalence has been resolved in recent years in favour of marketization. Insufficiently attuned to the rise of free-market forces, the hegemonic currents of emancipatory struggle have formed a ‘dangerous liaison’ with neoliberalism, supplying a portion of the ‘new spirit’ or charismatic rationale for a new mode of capital accumulation, touted as ‘flexible’, ‘difference-friendly’, ‘encouraging of creativity from below’. As a result, the emancipatory critique of oppressive protection has converged with the neoliberal critique of protection per se. In the conflict zone of the triple movement, emancipation has joined forces with marketization to double-team social protection. (Fraser 2013a)

Angela McRobbie has recently elaborated on this miscalculation and her role in perpetuating it, especially in seeing consumer feminism as a space of liberation, when that liberation was inherently premised on reproducing young women’s neoliberal subjectivity (McRobbie 2008). On the other hand, she - along with many other Cultural Studies oriented scholars - has also been well attuned to the insidious emergence of precarious, immaterial, largely feminized and unpaid labor that is central to the “creative economy” and the way this affective meaning making creates not only power, but value (McRobbie 2016).  In short, well before the emergence of Trump and the wave of other populist movements around the world, critics on the left were attuned to the limits of marketization.  But in many cases, most recent leftist critics see something unique about the political economy of immaterial or digital or affective labor, rather than focusing their attention on the larger culture of property that helps that capitalist class siphon surplus value across the system.

By a culture of property I mean a culture whose social relations are ever more deeply commodified; where the ultimate goal is to subject all social interaction (not just those of commerce) to the market system’s understanding of the social process of valorization, geared as it is towards the accumulation of privately held properties; where the primary role of the state is held to be the protection of that process according to the ownership and distribution patterns already existing; where the owners of property are presumed to have created the value protected by the state; where the state protection of this property is held to be natural and/or scientifically necessary thus beyond democratic reorientation; and, finally, where this formal legal environment helps to determine a culture such that individuals respond to the functional discipline of the market as if it were a force of nature rather than a historically contingent social relation.

The staunchest defenders of this reified culture of property rely on what I am terming the cultural efficacy of their own presumptions in order to project this model of society as a universal set of norms with such unquestioned political stability and legitimacy it is unnecessary to have the state.  They must assume the legitimacy of, in Marx’s terms, a previous round of primitive accumulation and the direct disciplinary force of the state in preserving the property acquired in that process. They deny the political function of the state and the law in crafting—both historically and presently—a social order and population that more closely resembles the pure model they argue is a natural state of affairs. And, as in Marx’s time, the efficacy of this culture is tied to an ideal subject: homo economicus or what Paul Smith has referred to as “The subject of value” (Smith 2007). This subject, for instance, features centrally in Hayek’s mythical understanding of how the market should operate as a communication mechanism, transmitting prices qua information to buyers and sellers through a non-hierarchical, unplanned, global network helping them make decisions about where to place their investments (Hayek 1945). This rationally calculating, self-organizing subject, is best served by deregulation and re-commodification: regulations are futile attempts at state planning that will never be as efficient at communicating actual supply and demand as the market; but the market can only communicate accurate information if everything - including Polanyi’s fictitious commodities of labor, land, and money along with air, water, health, life, the past, the present, the future - is given a price and sold to the highest bidder. In our present era, this especially includes immaterial, cultural property that is covered by patents, trademarks, and copyrights. The latter, as I’ll elaborate further below, are central to the global capitalist regime of accumulation, facilitating the offshore production, commodity chains, financial arbitrage, and tax havens that make the hegemonic model of globalization possible and profitable.  

The xenophobic character of Trump’s populism is indisputable, as it is in the political appeals of Marie Le Pen in France, Nigel Farage and UKIP in the UK and elsewhere. But it is joined with a turn towards autarky and protectionism that is indicative of a politics of the double movement akin to Polanyi’s original concept.  The eerie parallels with - and sometimes explicit appeals to - Hitler and the Nazis are most often coded in terms of their white supremacist and anti-semitic appeals. But for Polanyi, the more important feature of the rise of fascism in the 1930s was its centralization of the authority in a leader that promised to provide social protection from the ravages of the market. And here, he finds the rise of a form of authoritarian populism in Russia, Germany, and the United States to be similar in important ways. Polanyi puts it, “the purport of fascism or socialism or new deal is part of the story itself,” but,“The origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system” (Polanyi 2001, loc. 1320).  In short, like this earlier emergence of the “double movement,” Trump and his cohort are clearly drawing on angst in response to neoliberalism.

The difference is that, just as neoliberalism was a counter response to the the earlier double movement, Trump and company have articulated their politics as a response to what Fraser calls the “triple movement.” In short, because these movements for emancipation were so deeply linked with the kind of “Third Way” neoliberal politics of Clinton, this iteration of the double movement was also what we might call a “counter triple movement:” against the identity politics, egalitarianism, and pleas for tolerance and inclusion that had become prominent features of not only the academic and cultural left, but of neoliberal capitalism itself.  And thus while there were massive protests against the travel ban at the end of his first week, Trump’s executives order pulling the U.S. out of the Transpacific Partnership and demand to renegotiate the terms of NAFTA earlier in the week were all but uncontroversial.  Right or wrong, these neoliberal policies have long been blamed for the erosion of jobs and livelihoods. And despite the fact that the U.S. Democratic party has long made peace with neoliberalism as the dominant hegemonic ideology, it was the radical right that instantiated the fundamentalist culture of property, often by coding it implicitly to a form of resistance to the progressive movements for liberation.

While Fraser and other critics from the left see this articulation as conjunctural - and the “cultural left” as being responsible for this reaction - I find this periodization somewhat suspect. White supremacy is (and has been) intrinsic to the legitimacy of the U.S. state. As  Ira Katznelson discusses in his book Fear Itself, most of the New Deal policies were crafted to win the approval of Southern lawmakers, who refused to allow those policies to equally help both Black and White Americans (CITE). Cowie adds to this the acknowledgement that the U.S. of the 1930s had some of the most restrictive immigration policies of its history, due to the 1924 legislation restricting immigration from anywhere but the (mostly white) countries of Western Europe. In his troubling book, Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, James Q. Wilson notes that the Nazi lawyers attempting to draft their own white supremacist laws looked to U.S. racial codes and this 1924 law (among other legislation). Thus while it is upsetting that the current U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions stated his admiration for that 1924 law in a radio interview with Steve Bannon a few months before the 2016 election, it is less an aberration from U.S. history than a key component of its mainstream. If the New Deal was a “great exception” to the protection of property rights and the rule of capital over labor, then the “triple movement” for the more egalitarian distribution of those protections is the great exception to the white supremacist patriarchy that usually walks hand in hand with these capitalist premises.

Indeed, it would be more accurate to see the economic aspects of  counter-double movement of neoliberalism to be of a piece with the political and cultural movements running counter to the triple movement of liberation.  Nixon, Reagan, and now Trump are all guilty of playing to these reactionary impulses, but it is more accurate to see them as savvy politicians capitalizing on already existing anxieties than instigators of these more fundamental cultural impulses and political forces. Cultural Studies scholar Jayson Harsin (CITE) notes that the political support for New Deal policies began to evaporate once it became clear that they would help more than just White people.  And in her recent controversial history of the origins of the Koch-funded Law and Economics institutions at George Mason University, Nancy MacLean argues that it originates in Virginia first as a way of developing valid, intellectual challenges to desegregation as a form of government coercion and the infringement on private property (CITE). Maclean traces the intellectual origins of this movement to John C. Calhoun who developed the arguments as a senator from South Carolina during the run-up to the Civil War, when there were more millionaires in Mississippi that New York and the value of slaves as capital was greater than that of the railroads.  But we could just as easily trace it back to the author of South Carolina’s original colonial charter: John Locke.

MacLean herself traces the Lockean origins of this culture of property (through Calhoun and his appeal to slaveowners in the old south) and she and others highlight about the Law and Economics movement that has helped rearticulate these ideas for the present era.  While the stated mission of this interdisciplinary enterprise is simply to bring economics and the law into conversation, the conversation is limited to using what people outside the movement would identify as libertarian, Austrian, classical liberal, or, following Milton Friedman, “neoliberal”  understandings of economics.  This means seeing the state’s role as limited to the protection of property of all kinds. This movement, like the was inspired by a set of conjunctural circumstances: the transformation of US law and the economy during and after the New Deal.  Seeing the New Deal as an affront to the natural laws governing the relationship of state and economy, this insurgent group of lawyers, economists and political scientists set out to reorient the US state towards the principles of classical liberalism.

Nancy Fraser argues that most recent particular articulation of the counter-movement should alert us to the need for a movement that will combine the impulses behind both the social protection from neoliberalism and emancipation from resurgent misogyny, racism, and xenophobia. I agree that the current conjunction - and especially the U.S. context - demands just this approach.  However, given the recent emphases of Cultural Studies on issues of emancipation and liberation in terms of these diverse categories of subjectivity, I contend that it is most important to consider the way neoliberalism and the culture of property has impacted the category most of us have in common: that of laborers. As Christopher May says in his critique of the idea of ‘the information society,’

Most of us still need to go to work, where there remains an important division between those who run the company and those who work for it, not least in terms of rewards.  When we look at what allows some of us to become rich and the rest of us to get by on our pay and pensions, this still has something to do with who owns what. (Christopher May, 2002)  

My critique of intellectual property rights - and of the so-called Free Culture movement of Lessig and others - is premised on an understanding of them as part of a larger neoliberal assault on the rights of citizens and workers and a reorientation of the U.S. state - and through the IMF and World Bank, many other states - to the protection of capitalist profits over the needs of the larger society.  Insofar as we now live in a society that claims culture as part of the economy, and in so far as our legal system is increasingly structured by the needs of capitalist property owners first, there is nothing unique about the value produced around intellectual property or the protection of that value by the neoliberal state.  The Free Culture movement has identified the renewed visibility of the social production of value, which should inspire a deeper reflection on property rights and neoliberalism more generally. The only way to truly challenge the increased rule and role of IPR, therefore, is to challenge the “propertarian ideology” (Travis) of the neoliberal state. This, in turn, will provide the grounding for precisely the kind of multipronged movement to combat not only the resurgent white-male-supremacy, but the crippling economic policies that have created the inequality, carceral discipline, diseases of despair that are likely to be the scourge of all in the coming years.