<nettime> Franco Berardi & Geert Lovink: A call to the Army of Love and to the Army of Software

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

A call to the Army of Love and to the Army of Software

By Franco Berardi and Geert Lovink

October 2011. The fight opposing financial dictatorship is erupting.

The so-called ‘financial markets’ and their cynical services are  
destroying the very foundations of social civilization. The legacy of  
the postwar compromise between the working class and progressive  
bourgeoisie has all but disappeared. Neoliberal policies are cutting  
back education and the public health system and is cancelling the  
right to a salary and a pension. The outcome will be impoverishment of  
large parts of the population, a growing precarity of labor conditions  
(freelance, short-term contracts, periods of unemployment) and daily  
humiliation of workers. The yet to be seen effect of the financial  
crisis will be violence, as people conjure up scapegoats in order to  
vent their rage. Ethnic cleansing, civil war, obliteration of  
democracy. This is a system we call financial Nazism: FINAZISM.
Right now people are fighting back in many places, and in many ways.  
Occupy Wall Street inspired a mass mobilization in New York that is  
extending across the USA every day. In Greece workers and students are  
squatting Syntagma square and protesting against the blackmail by the  
European Central Bank, which is devastating the country. Cairo,  
Madrid, Tel Aviv, the list of the ‘movements of the squares’ is  
proliferating. On October 15 cities across the globe will amass with  
people protesting against the systemic robbery.
Will our demonstrations and occupations stop the Finazist machine?  
They will not. Resistance will not resist, and our fight will not stop  
the legal crimes. Let’s be frank, we will not persuade our enemies to  
end their predatory attacks (‘let’s make even more profit from the  
next downfall’) for the simple reason that our enemies are not human  
beings. They are machines. Yes, human beings – corporate managers,  
stock owners, traders – are cashing the money that we are losing, and  
prey upon resources that workers produce. Politicians sign laws that  
deliver the lives of millions of people to the Almighty God of the  
Market.
Bankers and investors are not the real decision makers, they are  
participants in an economy of gestural confusion. The real process of  
predatory power has become automated. The transfer of resources and  
wealth from those who produce to those who do nothing except oversee  
the abstract patterns of financial transactions is embedded in the  
machine, in the software that governs the machine. Forget about  
governments and party politics. Those puppets who pretend to be  
leaders are talking nonsense. The paternalistic options they offer  
around ‘austerity measures’ underscore a rampant cynicism internal to  
party politics: they all know they lost the power to model finance  
capitalism years ago. Needless to say, the political class are anxious  
to perform the act of control and sacrifice social resources of the  
future in the form of budget cuts in order to ‘satisfy the markets’.  
Stop listening to them, stop voting for them, stop hoping and cursing  
them. They are just pimps, and politics is dead.
What should we do? Living with the Finazist violence, bending to the  
arrogance of algorithms, accepting growing exploitation and declining  
salaries? Nope. Let’s fight against Finazism because it is never too  
late. At the moment Finazism is winning for two reasons. First,  
because we have lost the pleasure of being together. Thirty years of  
precariousness and competition have destroyed social solidarity. Media  
virtualization has destroyed the empathy among bodies, the pleasure of  
touching each other, and the pleasure of living in urban spaces. We  
have lost the pleasure of love, because too much time is devoted to  
work and virtual exchange. The large army of lovers have to wake up.  
Second, because our intelligence has been submitted to algorithmic  
power in exchange for a handful of shitty money and a virtual life.  
For a salary that is miserable when compared to the profits of the  
corporate bosses, a small army of ‘softwarists’ are accepting the task  
of destroying human dignity and justice. The small army of software  
programmers have to wake up.
There is only a way to awake the lover that is hidden in our  
paralyzed, frightened and frail virtualized bodies. There is only a  
way to awake the human being that is hidden in the miserable daily  
life of the softwarist: take to the streets and fight. Burning banks  
is useless, as real power is not in the physical buildings, but in the  
abstract connection between numbers, algorithms and information. But  
occupying banks is good as a starting point for the long-lasting  
process of dismantling and rewriting the techno-linguistic automatons  
enslaving all of us. This is the only politics that counts. Some say  
that the Occupy Wall Street movement lacks clear demands and an  
agenda. This remark is ridiculous. As in the case of all social  
movements the political backgrounds and motives are diverse, even  
diffuse and quite frequently contradictory. The occupation movement  
would not be better off with more realistic demands.
What is thrilling right now is the multiplicity of new connections and  
commitment. But what is even more exciting is finding ways that can  
set in motion the collective ‘exodus’ from the capitalist agony. Let’s  
not talk about the ‘sustainability’ of the movement. That’s boring.  
Everything is transient. These fast-burning events do not help us to  
overcome the daily depression. Occupying the squares and other public  
spaces is a way to respond to the short duration of the demonstrations  
and marches. We are here to stay.
We are not demanding a reform of the global financial system or the  
ECB. The return to national currencies of the past, as requested by  
the rightwing populists, will not make ordinary citizens less  
vulnerable to currency speculation. A return to state sovereignty is  
not the solution either, and many people already sense this. The  
demand for more ‘intervention’, control and oversight of markets is a  
hopeless gesture. The real issue is that humans are no longer in  
charge. We need to dismantle the machines themselves. This can be done  
in a very peaceful manner. Hack into their system, publish their  
crimes through Wikileaks-type initiatives and then delete their real- 
time trading killing networks for good.
Financial markets are all about the politics of speed and  
deterritorialization. But we know their architectures and  
vulnerabilities. The financial world has lost its legitimacy. There is  
no global consensus anymore that the ‘market’ is always right. And  
this is our chance to act. The movement has to respond at this level.  
Decommissioning and re-programming financial software is not the dream  
of a Luddite sabotaging the machine. ‘Market regulation’ will not do  
the job, only autonomy and the self-organization of software workers  
can dismantle the predatory algorithms and create self-empowering  
software for society.
The general intellect and the erotic social body have to meet on the  
streets and squares, and united they will break the Finazist chains.


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