The revolts circa 1989 are the signal events of our time. In the east and in the south, the productive classes rose up against all forms of tyranny and boredom. Farmers and workers — workers in both material and immaterial trades — all formed alliances against the most oppressive and tedious forms of the state. Mixed in amongst them were hackers, hackers of all kinds, including not a few, borne of the struggle, who are hackers of politics itself.

In Beijing and Berlin, Manila and Prague, Seoul and Johannesburg, alliances rose up that could turn the vectoral flows of information against states all too used to policing representations by cracking the heads that disputed them. The cracking of heads confronted the hacking of codes, and the hack won out.

If only for the moment. What the revolts of 1989 achieved was the overthrow of regimes so impervious to the recognition of the value of the hack that they had starved not only their hackers but also their workers and farmers of any increase in the surplus. With their cronyism and kleptocracy, their bureaucracy and ideology, their police and spies, they starved even their pastoralists and capitalists of innovative transformation and growth. The revolt of 1989 put an end to all that.

It did not succeed everywhere. In the four most populous states, in China, Russia, India and Indonesia, there was no successful break with the old order. India took a reactive turn toward spiritual nationalism. Russia sank in kleptocracy and control by the secret police. Indonesia saw a bold but fragile and incomplete democratic revolt. In China, the Goddess of Democracy stood briefly in Tiananmen Square, before becoming a global expression of a fugitive movement.

In the “frontline states” of the old cold war, the forces of revolt were most successful. In Taiwan, Korea, Thailand and the Philippines; in Czechoslovakia, East Germany Poland, Hungary, Slovenia and the Baltic states, the forces of revolt pushed the old ruling classes toward a new state form, in which further movements toward abstraction at least have a fighting chance.

In Latin America, the so-called “transition” produced mixed results, undermining authoritarian states, but also undermining the socialized property of the productive classes through privatization and “austerity” budgets. In the Middle East, the ruling classes mostly used the state as a bulwark against an opening to the world, at the price of increased repression and underdevelopment, or corruption and theft in those states where oil clouds the waters. In Africa, democratic movements rarely made much headway against the tidal forces of ethnic division, that poisonous legacy of colonialism, or against the new colonialism of vectoral power. South Africa was a signal exception, and inspiration to the world.

The revolts that group around that noisy year of 1989 achieved mixed results. But they put the state on notice everywhere that in the vectoral age, any state that cannot recognize the value of the hack, that cannot incorporate transformation into its being, will soon be forced to find more and more extreme diversions for the desires of the productive classes.

The productive classes have seen what the world has to offer, and they want it all. There is no stopping them. Whatever qualms the good people of the overdeveloped world may have about the bounty of the vector, the good life of consumption and equivocal liberty that everyone now sees courtesy of telesthesia, the rest of the world is coming to get it, ready or not. “Those who are against, while escaping from the local and particular constraints of their human condition, must also continually attempt to construct a new body and a new life.”¹Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 214. Hardt and Negri’s Empire takes a strange turn early on, when it discusses the legal framework of … Continue reading And not just any body — an abstract body, a body of expression.

The revolts of 1989 overthrew boredom and necessity . . . at least for a time. They put back on the world historical agenda the limitless demand for free expression . . . at least for a time. They revealed the latent destiny of world history to express the pure virtuality of becoming . . . at least for a time. But then new states cobbled themselves together claiming legitimacy as representations of what revolt desired. Oh, what a time we had.

The revolts of 1989 opened the portal to the virtual, but the states that regrouped around this opening soon closed it. They affirmed new theories of transformation, which were quickly rewritten as the end of history. What the revolts really achieved was the making of the world safe for vectoral power. The opening was in the end a relative, not an absolute one. The failed state-capitalism of the east and kleptocapitalism of the south may have been overthrown by a limitless desire, but that desire soon had to confront the actuality of becoming a free trade zone for an emerging global alliance of ruling classes, and a dumping ground for the consumable images of the vectoral economy.

New circumstances call for new theories, and new practices, but also for the cultivation of variants, alternatives, mutant strains. The revolts of 1989 may have flourished and withered, but are a seed stock for future movements. So long as there is a past, there is a future; so long as there is memory, there is possibility. Debord: “theories are made only to die in the war of time.”²Guy Debord, Complete Cinematic Works (Oakland: AK Press, 2003) , p. 150. One of the virtues of Debord’s writings is its delicate, even melancholy awareness of the sea swell of time, and how the … Continue reading

The so-called anti-globalization protests from the late 90s on — Seattle, Genoa — are an offshoot of these fertile events of 1989, but an offshoot that does not know the current to which it truly belonged. This heterogeneous movement of revolt in the overdeveloped world intuits the rising vectoral power as a class enemy, but all too often it allowed itself to be captured by the partial and temporary interests of local capitalist and pastoralist classes. It did not quite grasp how to connect its desires to those of the underdeveloped world,to which in some ways it is an impediment.

But this revolt is in its infancy It has yet to discover the connection between its engine of limitless desire and free expression, and the art of making tactical demands. It has yet to discover how and when, and in whose interest, to mask its faceless free expression with a representation of interests that corresponds to the broadest coalition of class forces for a free and just future. Or rather, to rediscover, as all this is already known in the secret history of revolt—that other knowledge and knowledge of the other.

There are two directions in politics, both of which can be found in the class struggle within nations and the imperial struggle between nations. One direction is the politics of the envelope, or the membrane. It seeks to shelter within an imagined past. It seeks to use national borders as a new wall, a screen behind which unlikely alliances might protect their existing interests in the name of a glorious past. Deleuze: “Their method is to oppose movement.”³Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 127. Deleuze supported, for instance, the free radio movement, which revealed all too well the ambiguities of a politics … Continue reading The politics it opposes is the politics of the vector. This other politics seeks to accelerate toward an unknown future. It seeks to use international flows of information, trade or activism as the eclectic means for struggling for new sources of wealth or liberty that overcomes the limitations imposed by national or communal envelopes.

Neither of these politics corresponds to the old notion of a left or right, which the revolutions of 1989 have definitively overcome. Envelope politics brings together Luddite impulses from the left with racist and reactionary impulses from the right in an unholy alliance against new sources of power. Vectoral politics rarely takes the form of an alliance, but constitutes two parallel processes locked in a dialogue of mutual suspicion, in which the liberalizing forces of the right and the social justice and human rights forces of the left both seek non-national and transnational solutions to unblocking the system of power which still accumulates at the national level.

Contrary to a popular myth, the revolts of 1989 dealt a blow to the right, not the left. The collapse of Stalinism removed the external force that kept the enveloping and vectoral forces of the right together. The political forces of the right, which represent in their purest form the compromises acceptable to the ruling classes, have had to reassemble from the ruins of the cold war the elements of their alliance within which the more extreme expressions of populism, nationalism and racism can be tamed — but retained — in the service of the ruling class.

The political forces of the left, which stretch wide to accommodate every interest the producing classes must embrace to achieve some grasp upon state power, has experienced no such clarifying moment. The left does not yet know that it faces a choice between the blur of vectoral internationalism and the fictive identities of nationalism. It has not yet articulated an alternative global democracy that can secure popular support. It has not yet found the formula for containing and defusing jingoistic and regional particularism. The left, when in power, zigzags anxiously between tactical concessions to one side or the other, whittling away its broad support from both ends at once.

Globalism, as the transcendent power of the vectoralist class over the world, is hardly a palatable option; but neither is conceding to the unjust demands of local and particular interest, which refuses the call of an abstract, global justice, and hunkers down behind the screen that surrounds the state. Since that screen is also the property of the vectoralist class, this is hardly an alternative, simply the same ends reached by means of the objectification of another desire. Either way, it’s not much of a plan: accelerated progress into hell, or the permanent purgatory of arresting the current balance of injustice.

There is a third politics, which stands outside the alliances and compromises of the post-89 world. Where both envelope and vectoral politics are representative politics, which deal with aggregate party alliances and interests, this third politics is a stateless politics, which seeks escape from politics as such. The third politics is a politics of the hack, inventing relations outside of representation. Since representations inevitably fail to live up to their promises in actuality, there’s not much to lose from an opening towards politics beyond it. Rather than a representative politics, representing advocacy of movement or opposition to movement, there is an expressive politics that escapes representation. Blissett: “Do not advance the action according to a plan.”⁴Luther Blissett, Q (London: Heinemann, 2003), p. 635. This remarkable historical allegory, a “popular” fiction in the best sense of the word, is a Brechtian learning-text for an emergent hacker … Continue reading

Representative politics is a politics that struggles to secure for the classes allied in struggle command of property, be it public or private. Expressive politics seeks to undermine property itself. Expressive politics is not the struggle to collectivize property, for that is still a form of property. The collectivist mode of state administered property was shown to be bankrupt by the revolutions of 1989, as was the kleptocracy of the south, where state and private ruling interests were one and the same. Expressive politics is the struggle to free what can be free from both versions of the commodity form: its totalizing market form, and bureaucratic state form.

What may be free from the commodity form altogether is not land, not capital, but information. All other forms of property are exclusive. The ownership by one excludes, by definition, the ownership by another. The class relation may be mitigated, but not overcome. The vectoralist class sees in the development of vectoral means of production and distribution the ultimate means to commodify the globe through the commodification of information. But the hacker class can realize from the same historic opportunity that the means are at hand to decommodify information. Information is the gift that may be shared without diminishing anything but its scarcity. Information is that which can escape the commodity form altogether. Information escapes the commodity as history and history as commodification. It frees abstraction from its commodified phase.

Talk of an end to information as property makes lawyers and liberals nervous. Lessig: “To question the scope of ‘property’ is not to question property”⁵Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas (New York: Random House, 2001), p. 6. Information is a strange thing to make the basis of property. It is as Lessig notes a non-rivalrous resource. Most arguments … Continue reading But why not? Why just a limited critique of a few vectoral monopolists — as if the cancer of commodification is restricted to monopoly. Perhaps, where information is concerned, the commodity form is the cancer and monopolies are merely walking dead.

Politics can become expressive only when it is a politics of freeing the virtuality of information. In liberating information from its objectification as a commodity, it liberates also the subjective force of expression. Subject and object meet each other outside of their mere lack of each other, by their desire merely for each other, by desire as managed by the state in the interests of maintaining the commodity form of scarcity.

Expressive politics becomes a viable politics only at the moment when a class arises which can not only conceive of freedom from property as in its class interest, but can propose to the producing classes that it is in the interests of the producing classes as a whole. That class is the hacker class, which invents the abstraction of the subject and of the object, in which both meet outside the constraint of scarcity and lack, and meet to affirm each other in new forms of expression, rather than in the sad dance of unfulfilled lack.

This expressive politics does not seek to overthrow the state, or to reform its larger structures, or to preserve its structure so as to maintain an existing coalition of interests. It seeks to permeate existing states with a new state of existence. It spreads the seeds of an alternative practice of everyday life.