Israeli architects analyse the vertical urban form of occupation

a radical interpretation of architectural and geopositional data…

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I believe more and more that the only way to prepare for a takedown of the moribund and wildly thrashing System is to build parallel structures inside it… parallel marketplaces, cultural networks, decision making apparatus, conflict resolution methodsl etc. some of this is already happening with Fair Trade and CSA efforts, community currencies, arbitration outside the CJS, home schooling, municipalities adopting Kyoto protocol in defiance of the Fed, etc.

it may be that the best takedown is a supplanting — the construction of a new social form inside the shell of the old. this does not really address deep issues like patriarchy which persist across econ and social reforms, but it offers a way to leach power out of the System in a zillion TAZs rather than attempting an all out “red October” slugfest with a vastly overarmed opponent…

perhaps the best revenge on authoritarians is to render them irrelevant? I don’t imagine they will let go without more flailing attempts at coercion, more violence, more tragedies — but seems to me there has to be an armature in place for the New Thing before the Old Thing comes down. where there’s a vacuum, new authoritarians seem to spring up like dragon’s teeth….

- Utah Phillips

Maps are about understanding the terrain you can’t see, relating it to the terrain you can see, and finding the names and addresses.

On Peggy’s last question, that’ a big dilemma for many, maybe THE big one. Inside-outside strategy mixes, perhaps. But Marx pointed out that a system doesn’t get torn down from outside. It dies from internal contradictions. I’m still a fan of the notion that the first priority is to refound a viable left that is devoted to siezing political power in the metropoles. My question from the organizing perspective is who are those who are (1) positioned to do the most damage to the system from the inside and (2) who are those who have already been expelled to the greatest degree from the system? That takes us from GI resistance to the Tamil Tigers. (-: Inside-outside.

What’s interesting is that in New York, at least, Grand Juries are picked with these Prime Voter lists, unlike regular juries which pull from general tax records and drivers licenses. Basically, you’re taking people who skew to the higher end of the wealth scale, and people who have tended to vote for the DA/Attorney General. Little wonder they say you can indict a ham sandwich!

What’s also interesting is that while these Prime Voter lists can be bought for a few dollars usually (they’re covered by Freedom of Information here), they’re essentially useless as an analytical tool unless you can plug the data into a GIS mapping program. A nonprofit I worked for had to learn this the hard way when they tried a voter drive. It’s easy to spot those Prime Voters – it’s much harder to figure out where, exactly, are the non-Prime Voters and non-voters and those ineligible to vote are.

From my own perspective, GIS is to the class war what the Enigma crypto machine was to WWII. You’ll recall that Enigma was an almost unbreakable coding system the Nazis had, that involved a machine that scrambled a message, as well as code books that told you how to set the machine each day. The only chance the Brits got to crack the code was by getting their own Enigma machine secretly off a U-boat, and even then because there was no code book it still took hours and days.

So too does GIS has the potential to help revolutionaries “crack the code” of the ruling class in its class war, to be able to map out and understand that they’re going after this or that social strata in this or that area for Army recruitment. But there’s still intellect and instinct involved – one has to know where exactly to look.

Money – like the five dollars in my pocket – is a sign of a piece of a vast system of credit-and-debit. This system has become fully symbolic, in both the Peircean and the Saussurian senses. This means that the symbol is arbitrary (Saussure), and neither similar nor physically connected to (Peirce)the thing that it symbolizes. The symbol system is pure idea, and therefore unable to be attained in real life (Lacan). It is just a fantasy, an ideal, that people pursue. Their pursuit of the fantasy maintains the fantasy, while their lives fall into ruin.

The symbol system which is money controls the entire present human world. One cannot live as a human being outside of this system. Previously, human beings could live within smaller systems of mutual interdependence, but now we cannot. Not a single human being can live outside the system of money.

In principle, when you buy a thing or a service, you pay for the labor that went into producing and delivering that thing. I get money for the products of my labor, and I pay money for the products of other people’s labor. But not all labor is the same. One may try to render different kinds of labor quantitatively commensurable, but this is the first mistake. Some things, many things, cannot be reduced to money, a quantitative measure of qualitative value.

Commodity fetishism divorces the thing from the labor.

Capitalism reifies (“makes a thing of”) the symbol system itself. From money (a mere idea) is produced more money, via interest rates and the market and so on. Nothing produces more nothing, and more nothing is exchanged for real material life (labor, food, water, air, space, time, and all the rest). Thus life is consumed.

The question is, how do we get out of this system? More quantification of life? More use of the master’s tools?

http://www.geog.buffalo.edu/ncgia/i21/papers/blaut_ToC.html

http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/Blaut/national_question3.htm

In the current age shutting off a production node or slowing down a distribution flow could be a major form of resistance with global ramifications. This is especially true for commodities like oil.

It is very refreshing to have an online resource where Marxists and other leftists engage construcively with feminism, postmodernism, etc.
I totally agree that we have to engage with theoretical tools that have been developed since Lenin’s death. The problem is all the socialist groups I have worked with are incredibly hostile to the Frankfurt school, postmodernism, critical race theory, feminism…there is this comforting introjected delusion of ultra-orthodox Marxists that the capitalism of today is the same capitalism that was around 10, 20, or one hundred years ago!

As far as class and race existing in space, all one has to do is look at who lives in the rich hills and who lives in the swampy valleys to see how important the issue of human dispersal in space is. Where I work the employees are arranged vertically according to heirarchical position-it is the Great Chain of Capitalist Being saturating the physical environment/symbolic environment. We live in space and time, and inhabit a human discursive culture that arises from a pre-discursive material existence. Steve’s ideas are very important for understanding the way capitalism moves into and reifies our public and private spaces.

“From a semiotic perspective, as we pass from the premodern to the modern
to the postmodern categories, we see in the evolution of money an increas-
ing arbitrariness of the sign-object relation. This movement toward
semiotic abstraction can be described either in Saussurian or Peircean
terms.

“If the point of departure is Saussure’s dyadic approach, we observe that
money has historically tended to repeatedly convert signifiers into sig-
nifieds, where each conversion results in a more abstract sign. Initially
gold signified exchange value. Then paper money came to signify gold.
Now electronic money has come to signify paper money. Hornborg says,
“We are thus faced with a chain of signifier-signified relations in which
increasingly abstract signifiers tend to eclipse their more tangible
predecessors, and in which the connection to the original and most
concrete signified (gold) has dissolved.”

“Or, if we prefer Peirce’s triadic approach, a similar analysis is possi-
ble using Peirce’s concepts of “firstness,” “secondness,” and “thirdness.”
Hornborg provides the following brief definitions for these terms, in
Peirce’s own words:

“”The first is that whose being is simply in itself, not referring to
anything nor lying behind anything. The second is that which is what
it is by force of something to which it is second. The third is that
which is what it is owing to things between which it mediates and which
it brings into relation to each other.”

“Hornborg credits Marx’s concept of money fetishism with increasing our
awareness of the historical emergence of money’s “thirdness,” and then
he adds:

“”In the first interpretation, the sign ~is~ the object or essence to
which it refers (the value of gold). In the second, the sign ~represents~
the object (paper money referring to a gold standard). In the third, the
sign ~mediates a relation between~ objects (money representing not an
essential value but a relation of exchange between humans). In this final
understanding of the sign nature of money, it becomes obvious that money
is nothing in itself, nor does it even refer to an object; it only
mediates social relations. In the movement from firstness through
secondness to thirdness, money metamorphosed from index to symbol and
then into an ‘empty’ sign that stands only for itself.”

“Hornborg believes that money is a highly unusual semiotic phenomenon…”

full at:

http://vega.vcu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0305&L=rosen-l&T=0&F=&S=&P=8070

There is more if you google “hornborg” and “money,” but it requires at least a passing familiarity with semiotics – which I believe the left has to get its head around anyway IAW Steve’s assertion that we need the new tools that have been developed in the eight decades since Lenin died.

Semiotics draws out the connection between the spatial relations of capital, money, and ecology. Hornborg’s explanation of general purpose, highly abstracted “thirdness” money (the internatinoal US-dollar standard) is that if money were music, this is music with only one note.