Note: Much of the material on China

below is drawn from the important

research being done by Chuang.

Their blog is currently available at:

Chuangcn.org

The first issue of the Chuang journal

is due to be released in full early next

year.

Sabot

There’s something about shoes. In theearly workers’ movement, slowdowns,sit-downs and the destruction ofmachinery took on the name “sabotage,”from the sabot or wooden shoe. Thoughthe frequently repeated story of workershurling wooden shoes into turning gearsappears to be a myth, the association isnot insignificant. The clog was used infactories and mines as an early form ofprotective equipment, a sort of steel-toeboot that took on a distinctly working-class character as heavy industryproliferated across Europe. In the sametimespan that the term sabotage cameinto usage, the sabot also became thefirst mass produced piece of footwear.Shedding its artisanal heritage, thewooden shoe grew to symbolise thechanges sweeping the continent. It wasfactory-made footwear built for recentlydispossessed peasants-become-workers,some of whom might, in fact, be makingshoes. Altogether, it was the symbol for acomplex, market-driven chain ofenclosure, migration, boom and bustwhich, despite its complexity, really justcomes down to the stupidest of logicalcircles: make shoes for workers to wearas they make more shoes.

Sabotage is the name for the excess ofthis process—its inherent tendency toshort-circuit, collapse and restructure—and for the desperation of those caughtwithin it. The act of sabotage is not a

strike, nor a riot. It is something moreinchoate, a blanket term covering allsorts of minor and major obstructionpossible at various nodes in theproduction chain. It speaks to a certainimmanence. Sabotage is only possiblebecause the workers committing it arenecessary. They wear the shoes, even asthey make them. They need the wage tolive, even as the mines and factoriesmake for lives that are little more than aslow disemboweling. Stuck in themiddle, sabotage designates a kind ofdesperate destruction of one’simmediate vicinity. It can be anindividual act or a collective one. It is thesimplest form of combat.

Made dependent on the wage, migrantsnewly dispossessed of any other meansof subsistence crowded into the earlyindustrial slums. Here, the shoe took onits martial meaning. Many of what wemight call the early proletarian martialarts adapted to use the shoe as theirprimary weapon. Lacking the moreexclusive training and arms (rapier,quarterstaff, long-sword, pole-arm) ofthe aristocratic martial arts, migrantspacked into alleys and tenementsinstead fought with their workboots. Inthe slums of Paris, the early, street-fighting variants of what would soon beknown as savate focused on open-handblows meant to stun by striking nervesand low kicks (rarely above the groin)designed to snap the bones of the leg. In

industrialising England, miners andfactory workers secured hobnails andmetal toecaps to their boots andengaged in bouts of “purring,” a combatsport in which competitors would fightfor holds on each other’s arms andcollars while hacking at the opponents’shins with their workboots.

The industrial wasteland of overcrowdedapartments and clanging machinescreates desperate, alien conditions forthose that live within it. There should beno surprise, then, when those who havebecome dependent on this wastelandseize any weapons at hand in order tostrike out toward somethingimperceptible—a vast social system andthe economic algorithm behind it—bystriking at its immediate representations,including their own bodies and thebodies of other workers. In these vastlyunequal, futureless hellscapes, combatoffered at least the illusion of equalmeasure and sabotage a modicum ofretribution for the bleeding away ofone’s life into the machines.

Nothing

Today things have changed a little, butmostly stayed the same. Still, there’ssomething about shoes. Someonesmashing the windows of Niketown iswearing a pair of Nikes, their white logosthe only flash of contrast to the smoke-wreathed mass of young people wearingblack. Later, of course, there will bescreams of hypocrisy from all corners,which is really just to say from differentsides of that same political centre forwhom “politics” is nothing but adifferent advertising algorithm forunique consumer profiles. But you haveto admit that there’s still a certainbeauty to it, just like the sabot: thatsickle-shape cutting through the teargasas the fractures on the glass branch outlike rivers without an ocean to spill into.It shatters and in the moment for somereason you can’t hear it because theentire thing is reverberating, our citiesno longer heaving tenements but insteadcop-corridors that become echochambers the moment they’re hollowedout.

The beauty here isn’t really in thesmashing, but in the ritual. The glassnearly soundless, the storefrontinsubstantial, populated by facelessmannequins dressed in clean sportswearwhile below stand their perfect,hammer-swinging counterparts. Thoseyoung people in black masks smashing at

that glass as if it actually separatedsomething when really their activity isjust that: pure activity, the spectacle ofburning calories dressed in black. Theriot is a frenzied, liquid thing, flowingdown those very boulevards cut assluices for the easy flow of capital, allalmost as immaterial as the Nike logosfloating through the pale smoke,smashing at every surface as if therewere something behind it when ofcourse there isn’t, just like there isnothing, really, behind the mask.

The secret to it is simply that everyonealready knows that nothing’s there in thesame way that those workers snappingtheir shins in half and smashing factoriesknew that their actions wouldn’t stopthe imperceptible monstrosity of theirlives—but they smashed the shitanyways. Emptied of their commodities,these are only echoing corridors. There’smaybe a little bit to loot but nothing toseize—none of those magnificentmachines that we all know liesomewhere, nonetheless. But not here.There is no stopping the world fromhere, just smashing the vicinity. Theritual, then, is best performed in Nikes.

Fly

That same year—2012, one of thoseyears the world ended—Nike woulddebut two new running shoes, the Racerand the Trainer, each featuring curiously-

woven, ultra-light uppers. The twomodels were not particularly popularwith their intended demographic(professional runners) and they mostlystayed on the shelf. But behind thedebut was an engineering breakthroughfor the industry. Rather than being builtfrom some combination of leather,mesh, plastic or synthetic materials, theshoes were instead machine-knit, theirintricate weave crocheted by computer.The result was a complex, micro-engineered new material capable ofbeing spun in a single piece from a lineof yarn, rather than having the cookie-cutter design stamped out of leather orsynthetics.

The business weeklies were the first topick up on what was happening:

In a process Nike calls “micro-levelprecision engineering,” proprietarysoftware instructs the machine tominutely alter a shoe’s stability andaesthetics. If the toe needs morestretch, the design can be digitallyaltered instantly to add Lycra-infused thread. For added strengthin the heel, the software usesmultiple layers of yarn of varyingthickness. Nike plans to patent theprocess.

Despite the lackluster release, the newtechnology, dubbed “flyknit,” was rapidlyscaled up. Within a few years it haddropped the functional focus and shiftedto fashion. The new Kobe 9s were flyknit.Kanye was wearing them. As stylish

brands like Hood by Air began toincorporate more and more haute-sportswear, the flyknits becamemainstream. Combined with the fad forCrossfit, Fuel Bands and any number ofperformance-tracking apps, the sneakershave gradually come to symbolise a veryparticular urban fantasy: the fit,quantified, cardio-driven citizen, dutifullytapping workout reports into theirsmartphone before jogging from theirsharespace office loft to the town hallmeeting where they’ll offer progressiveopinions on civic affairs, like a douchierversion of that one Norman Rockwellpainting.

The swoosh is the ultimate symbol of thismythos, the Nike demiurge. A worldviewed through the swoosh is a lighter,sleeker one, if not perfect.Deindustrialisation at least makes thingscleaner. We’re all inventing a “new” citytogether and the only sin is lack of effort.At its base, then, it offers a simplepromise: you can accelerate. The worldmoves fast but you can make yourselffaster to keep up. An attractive miragefor people leaping from temp job to

temp job, convincing themselves thatthey are self-employed “contractors”performing “immaterial labour.” Theswoosh is the cardio-fueled cult ofhuman capital.

Sometimes it comes full circle, gaining acertain post-ironic self-awareness. This ismost visible in the so-called internet“microgenres,” like Vaporwave andHealth Goth—not quite trends untothemselves but at least aestheticsubsets, the replacement of sub-culturewith sub-reddit in an endless processionof basement-produced whatever, gainingprominence in the early 2010s. But withsome of these mini-trends, what beganas a simple trolling against conventionsin music and fashion journalism quicklytook on a weird, official character, ashigh-end designers like Alexander Wangreleased $400 pairs of track pants andthe inventors of Health Goth wereinvited to explain the concept to Adidasexecutives. After a tour of the Adidasfacilities, Mike Grabarek, one of thethree coiners of the term commented:“There was a whole room dedicated to3-D printers.” The epigraph to an entireideology.

Overflow

It’s really no coincidence that thesesemi-aware microgenres were coined bysome intermittently-employed whitekids from Portland, Oregon. Long a “hub-

and-spoke” regional city, Portland has inthe last few decades become a de-industrialised holding zone for thewhitest segments of America’s youngersurplus population. Though oftenassociated with those who suffer underthe worst abjection (prisoners, slum-dwellers, refugees flooding into Europe)“surplus population” actually justdesignates one side of the general trendfor firms to shed labour from the directproduction process. As less work isneeded to extract raw materials,manufacture goods and transit them tobuyers, more and more labour becomes“surplus,” since it is no longer necessaryfor this core productive process.

One form this takes is, certainly, anincrease in unemployment,imprisonment and general abjection,especially among the world’s poorest.But within the large middle-strata ofdeveloped countries, becoming surplushas more often meant the restructuringof “traditional” jobs alongside thecreation of baroque hierarchies ofservice work, self-employment andwelfare within which it is perfectlypossible to lead a somewhat comfortablelife. These are rich countries, after all,and the brutality of our presenteconomic system has always beensustained as much by hand-outs as policebatons.

In the United States the growth of thesurplus population has manifested in the

expansion of existing slums and thecreation of new suburban ghettoes suchas Ferguson, as well as in the creation ofwhat we might call “green zones,” amostly-coastal archipelago of high-employment, “revitalised” urban cores,with a spattering of rural satellites forleisure, retirement or going “back to theland.” The urban centres of Seattle,Portland, San Francisco, and New Yorkepitomise the phenomenon, though theTwin Cities, Austin, Atlanta, DC andothers tend in the same direction, whileall the megacities—Houston, Chicago, LAand the greater New York complex—contain several urban cores with theirown equivalents.

Meanwhile, a few cities becameparticularly strong magnets for morehighly educated youth, who tend tosettle somewhere within the service-work/self-employment segment of thesurplus population, but are alsoattracted to cheaper housing and the“character” of a city—not out of somehipster intuition for creativity, as somany thinkpieces would have us believe,but simply because these areas tend tobe where you can convert that “humancapital” you’ve accumulated into a littlecash to pay off all that debt or, in theworst-case scenario, re-attach yourselfto the massive welfare structure of someuniversity as a lab tech, adjunct or “gradstudent.” These cities are attractivebecause they have immense, thriving

markets in bullshit—and bullshitting isone of the few skills that hasn’t yet beenfully automated.

The Nike campus in Portland, OR

As this migrant stream spiked andPortland became Portlandia, it alsobecame a sort of capitol for globalsportswear production. In the early1990s, just as the new factory hubs hadbeen secured in Asia, the world’s largestsportswear conglomerates startedmoving their headquarters to the metroarea, which today hosts the corporateoffices of Nike, Adidas, ColumbiaSportswear, Hi-Tec Sports, and others.These administrative hubs—part of whatare called “producer services”—givetheir respective cities an image of post-industrial cleanliness and efficiency,generating the illusion that “immaterial”or “cognitive” labour lies at the core ofthe global economy. At the same time,they often serve to obscure the shadowy,logistical underlayer of the American city,itself embodied in faceless distributionwarehouses, lattice-works of utility linesand container-cluttered railyards andseaports.

Today, this underlayer is obscured notthrough simple whitewashing but ratherthrough its very inclusion in our fantasiesof “complexity.” The flyknit is itself aperfect symbol of this fetish, its careful,computer-guided knitwork and micro-detailed colourways mirroring theinscrutable cartography of thecommodity chains and high-frequencytrades that shape our habitations. Butthis sleek imagery must also beaccompanied by a robust social myth,capable of promising a new utopianismthat extends beyond the spectacle. Theshoe’s production is low-waste, its solesare 3D-printed, executives have evenhinted that flyknit factories might soonopen within the United States—anequation in which capitalism, via its ownintensification, systematically solves itscontradictions. The shoe crafts an imageof production without the messiness oflabour or environmental degradation. Aprocess too complex for human workers,such clean production can only behandled by the tender crocheting ofcomputers producing a technologyfinally adequate to the world we mighthope for, in which algorithms deliverunto us shapes that emulate—evenimprove upon—the organicism of theworld they have extinguished. This is theswoosh, reaping.

Kicks

Again, there’s something about shoes.Eugene Dennett, a member of theCommunist Party in the depressionyears, recalls his childhood amidst thefootwear factories of Lynn,Massachusetts:

I had personally seen women shoeworkers attacked by mountedpolice, resulting in injuries,bloodshed and death. I remembermy mother arming herself withtwo big hatpins with which to stabhorses in the flanks to throw themounted policemen to the ground.The women strikers would take ahandful of cayenne pepper out oftheir handbags and throw it in theeyes of the downed policemen andjump on them with their “spike-heeled” shoes.[1]

This is the kind of messiness that theflyknits seek to foreclose. No moresweatshops. No more waterwayspoisoned for generations. Just the

consumers and the machines, thatswoosh lowering to cull the world of itsmisery.

But the reality is that smoke always rises.Beginning in the spring of 2014, Asia’sfootwear industry would see one of thelargest strike waves in decades.Foreboded by a spate of earlier strikes inthe garment factories of the region, theunrest began in earnest with the massive2014 strike at all six Dongguan, Chinafacilities for Yue Yuen, one of the world’sbiggest contract manufacturers[2] forfootwear, itself responsible for producinga hefty 20 percent of the world’s “sportsand casual-wear shoes,” includingproducts for Adidas and Nike. With morethan 40,000 workers participating, theYue Yuen strike was one of the largest inmodern Chinese history. Strikes like thissoon spread from long-time contractorsin places like Dongguan all the way downto newly-opened special economic zonesin Vietnam and Cambodia.

Workers strike at the Yue Yuen factory inDongguan, China.

cThe workers’ demands have mostlybeen about unpaid social welfare funds

—benefits for things like healthcare andhousing which compose a significantsegment of their overall wage. But thesebenefits have only been called intoquestion by rumours of factory mergersand relocation, especially in China’scoastal cities, where the past decade oflabour unrest has resulted in massivewage increases. Overall, the character ofthis recent strike wave has been markedby minimal, defensive demands andextreme precarity, which distinguishes itfrom the more offensive actionsfollowing the 2010 Honda strike. Asfactories consolidate and relocate, eitherto China’s interior provinces or to lessexpensive labour pools in places likeCambodia, the advent of the flyknits alsohints at a general downsizing. There isalways a gap between the minimaldemands articulated by striking workersand the larger dynamics pushing them tomake demands in the first place. Thesedefensive strikes are, then, less thesimple result of unpaid social benefitsand a shuffling of factories betweenregions and more the product ofcontinual pressure to render labour itselfredundant.

The flyknits represent the largestmechanisation of the notoriously labour-intensive footwear industry in decades.According to a research report byDeutsche Bank, “the technology reduceslabour costs by up to 50% and cutsmaterial usage by up to 20%, resulting

in .25% higher margins.” This hasallowed for a relocation of footwearfactories back up the value chain, toplaces like Taiwan[3] and, executivesspeculate, all the way back to the UnitedStates and Europe. Even this is only onepart of a more generalisedmechanisation, which has seen Nike filepatents for a fully-automated factoryand invest in a separate start-up taskedsolely with inventing new manufacturingtechniques. And the trend is quicklybeing picked up by others, with Adidasalready emulating the new techniques inits own line of “primeknit” sneakers. AsMark Parker, Nike’s CEO, remarked inregard to the flyknits: “The most labour-intensive part of the footwearmanufacturing process is gone from thepicture.”

The problem, however, is that theworkers themselves fail to disappear.With its reduction of labour costsnearing fifty percent, Nike’s newproduction lines may require as little ashalf as much labour to produce the samequantity of shoes. If these technologies

truly scale up, it would mean an extremeshedding of workers—at a magnitudenot seen since the early mechanisationof the industry. With more than fourhundred thousand employees, Yue Yuenalone would lose something in excess ofa hundred thousand workers, sixtythousand more than went on strike in2014, and equivalent to almost twice thetotal number of employees in its sixDongguan factories.[4] Unless offset byan equally enormous influx of jobs, theresult could be a wave of revolts acrossSouth China and Southeast Asia muchlarger than that witnessed in the pastfew years. The stirrings of 2014 and 2015may simply be the beginning of the nextdecade’s flyknit riots.

Cull

Though Nike might epitomize theprocess, this tendency towardmechanization is much larger than asingle company. We’re flooded withheadlines explaining that, from farmwork to computer science, the world is inthe midst of a “second machine age,” inwhich workers will again be replaced enmasse by machines. Anywhere from onethird to forty-five percent of jobs will beautomated out of existence over the nextfew decades, and the vast majority ofthese will be jobs held by the poor. Thisis as true for occupations in countries likethe US and UK as it is for increasinglyexpensive, formerly-outsourced jobs in

places like India and China.

The government of Guangdong provincerecently announced a three-year plan tosubsidize the purchase of robots in orderto help automate factories in the region.Several firms in Dongguan and Shenzhenhave already moved to replace as manyas ninety percent of their workers withmachines. New printing and knittingtechnologies, of which Nike’s flyknits areonly the most visible, guarantee thesame for the apparel industry. There iseven a user-friendly algorithm that willcalculate the likelihood of a robot takingyour job.

The trend is often met with optimism bythe highly-skilled, who guarantee thatthe “second machine age” will create asmany jobs as it eliminated, just asprevious bouts of mechanizationreplaced farm work with manufacturingand manufacturing with services. Theseare often the dreams of people livingwithin today’s Silicon bubble economies,part of the small fraction of thepopulation actually employed in high-end services, STEM fields or, god forbid,“the arts.” Some even claim that thetrend will, in and of itself, tend towarddrastic reductions in the workweek andthe general liberation of humanity fromtoil. These claims are similar to thosemade during previous technologicalwatersheds, and, at their strongest,easily transform into prophesies of animminent “post-capitalist” world just

around the corner.

This is the core of what is called“accelerationism,” the belief that theinternal dynamics of capitalism—andspecifically the technological innovationit incentivises—will accelerate us beyondcapitalism itself. Accelerationism comesin a few forms, and this is its happiervariant. Essentially, the happyaccelerationist is a health goth minus thegoth, envisioning a sleek future withoutthe ambiguous, dark undertones ofhyper-real dystopia—the swoosh ismerely a fragment of our own brightinheritance, glimpsed from a distance. Inthe meantime, all we need to do isaccelerate the very dynamics ofautomation currently underway, pairingthem with social programs like universalbasic income in order to soften the blowof labour redundancy and prefigure thecybernetic socialism of the future. Theaccelerationists at least avoid the cheapoptimism of the Silicon Valleydouchebag.

But the problems remain. All of thesehopeful futures are, first and foremost,built on half-told histories. While it istrue, for example, that the toil of farmwork was in large part replaced byemployment in manufacturing, theprocedure was a bloody one, in whichpeasants had to be forced off the landand into the slaughterhouses of early-modern factories in industrial Britain.The process was also marked by high

unemployment, overflowing slums andfrequent crises, accompanied by theoverproduction of goods newlycheapened by mechanisation. A series of“Great” Depressions followed the wavesof technological innovation, each greaterthan the last in both its promises ofmechanical salvation and the depths ofthe misery it actually delivered assmaller and smaller shares of the labourforce were employed in the new coreindustries. Technological progressbecame, simultaneously, theevisceration of employment.

Again, it is simply not the case—and itnever has been—that this employmentloss is magically “made up for” by new,non-productive industries developed toattend the productive ones. The excessworkers are a net cost. In some casesthis cost is made up for at the expense ofwealthier workers, whose consumptionof services pays the bill for poorerworkers. In other cases the state takesup the cost in the form of welfare,stimulus spending, prisons or simplythrough an array of social programsmashed together in an attempt to paythe diffused costs of slow-motionsocietal collapse. In all these instances,this general cost takes the form ofsecond-hand rents charged onproductive work.

Short of these options, discardedworkers can break back into theproductive sphere by entering the illegal

economy. This sort of activity may growto include larger and larger sections ofthe global workforce in regions thatcannot afford the other, more expensive,responses, as evidenced by illegal loggingin Southeast Asia, the poppy industry inAfghanistan and, of course, the Mexicancartels. Such black market activities arefacilitated by the “regular” market andhelp to subsidise it, often acting as thebottom-most layer in global supplychains, as in the mining of diamonds orrare earth metals in Africa. Moregenerally, however, the illegal economyprovides a sort of statistical buffer to theglobal market. Precisely because it is notcounted in official economic data, theblack market is capable of subsidising thevisible economy with invisible inputs.

In California’s emerald triangle, forexample, weed money trickles down toexpand employment in services, raiserents and boost tax revenue, with manyresidents’ disposable income seeminglyappearing from nowhere in officialcensus data. In rural China, local officialshire gangsters to clear villagers fromland, which is then sold to real estatecompanies, used for industrialdevelopment or aggregated into new,mechanised farms owned by massiveagricultural conglomerates, their on-the-book expenses cut to nearly nothing bythe shady nature of the acquisition.

In the US, the extremes of this trend areevidenced by skyrocketing numbers of

families living in complete economicdestitution. According to the Survey ofIncome and Program Participation, theonly survey that records individuals’entire range of incomes, the number ofhouseholds surviving on less than twoUS dollars a day—the World Bank’sstandard for poverty in the developingworld—had more than doubled betweenthe mid-90’s and 2011, with 1.5 millionhouseholds and “one out of everytwenty-five families with children inAmerica” falling into this category.[5]Here objections will inevitably be raised.Depending on one’s taste, the problemcan be blamed on political shifts(Clinton’s welfare reform), corporategreed (if only we taxed the rich), moraldecline (get a job), or, of course,immigration (they’re taking all the jobs)—anything but technological innovation,the one fragment of good news we haveand maybe the only hope of savingourselves from ecological catastrophe.

Unfortunately, aside from data on themassive replacement of middle-tier jobswith low-end service work, the rise ofhomelessness, a gap between rich andpoor so extreme that it’s getting hard toput on one graph, and all the studies onmechanisation linked above, we alsoalready have an intuitive understandingof the relationship between this trendand the automation of productive work.

A brief list of the 20th century’s ownSilicon Valleys makes this abundantly

clear: Detroit, Baltimore, Cincinnati, St.Louis. These names invoke in us a basicgut feeling—that sense of impendingapocalypse, complete with images ofblasted cars clogging freeways, bridgesrusting over feral rivers, trees and vinesreclaiming skyscrapers. It’s the feelingthat makes you hoard cans in yourbasement, buy road maps from the gasstation and ink out routes in red so thateveryone in your family knows where togo when it happens, whatever it is. Thesecities were once what our coastalmetropoles are today—economicpowerhouses at the forefront oftechnological innovation. Now they havebecome little more than a foreboding ofour own dark future. Because deep downwe already know the truth: theselandscapes are what the swoosh leavesbehind when the reaping is complete.

If you cut away all the deification,demonisation and just about everythingelse, this is what lies at the core ofMarxist thought. In competition witheach other, individual firms have anincentive to revolutionise production.Nike, as the company to introduce theflyknit automation, stands to benefitimmensely. Even though the machinesthemselves are expensive, the early-adopter firms sit at a profitable juncture,able to draw all the labour-savingbenefits before the technologygeneralises and the market price of thecommodity adapts to the new

conditions. As Adidas and others beginto copy the method, however, thesegains will grow sparse. The machinesbecome an expensive necessity. Theirlifetime of productivity is purchased upfront, with added maintenancethroughout. If a worker gets injured,killed or simply grows old, s/he can bereplaced with little additional expense.The reproduction[6] and replacementcosts of the worker can be externalisedto the family, the church, the state, theprison, the farm, the forest, the grave.For a machine, however, everybreakdown comes with its price tag.Each part must be paid in full.

Despite initial excitement, then, everytechnological breakthrough has aparadoxical effect. For the firm, whatwas once an immensely profitableinvestment is now a huge, fixed cost, atrisk of becoming obsolete as newtechnologies arise to replace it. For theworker, the growing ease of productionmakes it more and more difficult to findand do enough work for enough money.Meanwhile, what is produced becomesincreasingly opaque. The actualknowledge required to make a car, acomputer, even a hunk of steel, growsmore rarefied, itself an expensivecommodity rationed to smaller andsmaller shares of the population, oftenpieced apart and distributed so widelythat no single engineer or programmeractually knows the entirety of the

process, which can only be synthesisedat the social level through coordinationbetween many firms via the market. Theprocess is abstracted—not in thought,but materially or “objectively,” by itsliteral piecing-apart and recomposition inthe market, with the mechanism ofmoney as an abstract universalequivalent. The shoe itself arcs towardthe swoosh.

In his early writings, Marx described theprocess as one of labour’s'estrangement' from its own products:

The worker becomes all the poorerthe more wealth he produces, themore his production increases inpower and size. The workerbecomes an ever cheapercommodity the more commoditieshe creates. The devaluation of theworld of men is in direct proportionto the increasing value of the worldof things. Labour produces not onlycommodities; it produces itself andthe worker as a commodity – andthis at the same rate at which itproduces commodities in general.

This fact expresses merely that theobject which labour produces –labour’s product – confronts it assomething alien, as a powerindependent of the producer. Theproduct of labour is labour whichhas been embodied in an object,which has become material: it isthe objectification of labour.Labour’s realisation is itsobjectification. Under theseeconomic conditions this realisation

of labour appears as loss ofrealisation for the workers;objectification as loss of the objectand bondage to it; appropriation asestrangement, as alienation.

Each moment in this productive processbecomes, then, not one instance in thefulfilment of human needs but instead apoint in the metabolism of capital itself.This is what the French communist,Jacques Camatte, called the “materialcommunity of capital,” in which “there isno longer any distortion between thesocial and the economic movements asthe latter has completely subordinatedthe former.” This material community isrepresented by the growing dominationof fixed capital, which is itself “dead”labour—machines, factories, roads,ships, skyscrapers, power plants, serverfarms, raw materials—over variablecapital or “living” labour, otherwiseknown as human beings.

The automation of production,circulation and just about everydimension of people’s lives entails thedomination of humans by the dead,machine-like logic of accumulation. Asthis material community is secured,

people become fundamentally shaped byand irrevocably dependent upon themechanical, ever-growing mass ofcapital. This mass begins to appear moreand more as an essential—almostnatural—infrastructure supporting lifeitself, since all of our necessities areprovided through it. At the same time, ittakes on a mystical character, embodiedin baroque financial instruments,ephemeral cultural symbols, and amultitude of new desires, hobbies andfetishes. All of this was considered byCamatte to be the “domestication” ofhumanity.

In short: the currently existing globaleconomic system is built for theaccumulation of value at an everexpanding scale. Technology isrevolutionised for this purpose, and itspotential to make life easier is alwayssecondary to this purpose, remainingunderutilised. What the flyknitsrepresent, then, is not the astoundingfulfilment of a human need for awesomekicks, but instead the monstrousmachine-logic that lies at the heart ofour economic system. These shoes are asymbol of that vast, ambient enemy—surrounding us not like encircling soldiersbut like the body surrounds and digestsswallowed food.

At first this might seem hopeless. Butreally it’s an obvious point. We areimmanent to a system that we hope willbe destroyed, its remains pieced apart

and made into something better. Beingwithin it suffocates and, yes,“domesticates” us, but it also exposesthe internals of that system to apotentially hostile element. Severalthousand striking workers in a single cityin Southern China are capable ofstrangling a major lifeline in that globalmetabolism. The system’s own drive toreplace humans with machinestransforms more and more people intopotential enemies. Many have beenejected from the mainlines of thatmetabolism, left to stagnate in placeslike Baltimore or Kurdistan. Others, likethe Chinese shoe workers, populate itslifelines. Swoosh always meets sabot.

Swag

It’s not a purely destructive system, ofcourse. These lifelines are, in a literalsense, the currently existing lifelines ofthe human species. Destroying theeconomy is only a reasonable endeavourif it is clear—not even to the generalpublic, but to the people who advocateit—that this does not entail massstarvation and widespread rationing ofwhatever consumer durables could bewrenched from the rubble. Of course theproject is a war, one that we are alreadyin, even as everyone intuitively preparesfor it to suddenly happen. But in orderfor this war to have any recognisablecommunist pole, it must, on our part, bea war against want. The most important

front in such a war is not the heroism ofmilitary struggle, but instead thedistinctly unromantic work of helping tobreak down and re-engineer what weinherit in that war, so that our species’unprecedented efficiency in producingfood, flyknits and other nice shit mightactually be put to some use other thanthe world-fucking expansion of value.Communists have won before,succeeding in massive feats of armedcombat against those fighting topreserve the world as it is. And thesesame communists have gone on to loseon that less romantic front in a slowseries of agonising defeats stretchedacross the 20th century.

The flyknits, then, also signal somethingbrighter. They hint at the promise of thissecond, more fundamental war—wherevictory doesn’t mean living with less inthe name of equitability, but insteaddank footwear for everyone for free. Thisis Yacht Communism, the only thingworth fighting for. Against the pre-lapsarian bemoaning of the modern era—in all its many forms, from oogles toISIS—Yacht Communism argues thateveryone should just be able to have niceshit. That’s it. Fully automated luxurycommunism. On a technological level, it’ssurprisingly reasonable. On the sociallevel, however, it seems impossible. Thisis because technologies can’t really beseparated from the large-scale socialcoordination that operates them. But the

destruction of our current batshit-crazyways of doing things doesn’t mean theliquidation of all the technologies we useto do them.

It’s a point taken too far by theaccelerationists, but one that is therenonetheless: these technologies haveimmense potential. The productiverevolutions that have marked capitalisthistory, beginning with itsunprecedented intensification ofagricultural productivity, are so efficientthat they seem to almost infer acommunist ends. But the global supplychains that make them work are built asmuch for combat as for efficiency.Piecing apart the production processacross large territories is often inefficientand expensive. These costs are made upfor in the ways that they weakenworkers’ power to demand highercompensation for their work. Expensiveredundancies are built into thesenetworks, for example, to ensure thatwhen strikes do happen at one link inthe chain, there are back-up channels tokeep production flowing downstream.

The question, then, is one of“reconfiguration.”[7] These logisticalsystems themselves may largely beweapons turned against us, but thetechnologies that they coordinate arenot all guilty by association. Some can beextricated from these systems morereadily than others, and discovering whatcan and cannot be severed from globalproduction networks requires a processof experimentation carried out by thosewho have gained some knowledge ofhow these technologies operate. Thisprocess can only really take place in thespace opened by major upheavals thatinvolve the seizure of productive, ratherthan purely circulatory, territories. Wecall these spaces “communes,” a termthat ought to be used much moresparsely than it currently is.[8] Certainpotentials might be identified anddebated earlier, but only in a speculativeway, and speculation quickly growsincestuous. History is a cascade of bone-snapping dice. It’s hard to guess thenumbers before you’re being crushedunder them.

The recent strike wave among shoeworkers shows the eviscerating power oflogistical systems, certainly—the workerscan do little more than defend benefitsthey might get if the factories relocate—but it also raises the spectre of whatmight actually happen in a majorshutdown. Similar events in the region’shistory (in Gwangju, Korea in 1980 and

Tiananmen Square in 1989) quickly grewto dangerous proportions, ending inviolent repression. One reason for theextremes of this repression, which wasmuch more brutally exacted uponworkers than upon student-participants,was precisely because the presence ofsuch productive infrastructure combinedwith the involvement of workers beganto pose questions of power seizure and,thereby, reconfiguration, which isessentially the question of what to dowith what might be seized. These werenot breakaway movements in far-offrural areas rich in natural resources andpoor in everything else—they could notsimply be quarantined.

The threat is not just that these workershave an amplified disruptive abilitybecause of their position in the globalsupply chain, but also that they hold ageneral knowledge of how productionitself functions. In the cardio cult’s fetishfor complexity, we are encouraged not todisentangle these things—they arepurely complex, the work ofprofessionals. But the fact is that the skillof making factories run is still largelydevolved to workers. Yes, the intricateknowledge of design, high-levelprogramming, supply chain coordinationand specialised engineering areconcentrated elsewhere, but one of thereasons that places like China andVietnam became ideal locations forfactories was precisely the high literacy

rates and glut of mid-level engineersthey had inherited from the socialistperiod.

These systems are complicated, but theyare not impenetrable. As they dispersefurther—returning hyper-mechanisedshoe factories to the United States, forexample—their accessibility is alsodispersed. But, again, the piecing apartof the process by logistics chains ensuresthat this is not an endeavour that can betaken up individually, nor locally by“communities.” This knowledge can onlybe synthesised collectively, and thelinking up of these different pools ofknowledge—for sabotage as well ascounter-logistics—is the essence ofcommunist partisanship. The myth of“complexity” must ultimately be forcedapart in practice, and this force is notgiven but constructed. This is thedistinction between communism andacceleration.[9]

Glass

The windows finally shatter in that waythat shop windows are built to shatter,not in giant knife-long shards but insteadin a cascade of frost, the Nikes glitteringwith it after. Even then, though, theconundrum remains: what is beingsmashed?

Riots, blockades and mass occupations inthe US or Europe are primarilyinterventions into the circulation of

commodities. Since the “logisticsrevolution” beginning in the 1970s, theintensification of finance, transport,warehousing and retail has becomecentral to increasing profit, closelyintegrating the productive andcirculatory spheres. This is frequentlyportrayed as a “scattering” of productionacross a worldwide “social factory,” andit’s often pointed out that massive-enough stoppages on the circulation sidewill quickly cause production to stop aswell. Networked dispersion is then takento mean that resistance, too, willdisperse such that interventions at anypoint in the chain—whether a factory ora university—will contribute to a moregeneral disruption of that system. If welook closely, however, it seems thatthese notions of “scattered” productionand the “social” or “global” factory aremerely that same myth of complexity,translated into academic tracts oranarchist pamphlets. The idea that allinterventions somehow “matter” is, verysimply, wrong.

This isn’t to say that only disruptions inthe traditional factory are important,however—or even that any disruptionreally matters that much at the moment.Global production has various nodes,corridors and unintentionaldependencies, and these all becomepotential chokepoints, providing anasymmetrical leverage against it. Ratherthan attempting to make strict divisions

between what is actually productive,what merely aids in production, andwhat is, ultimately, just a rent charged onit, we might approach the question fromthis more pragmatic angle. Years ago, theauthors of Nihilist Communism arguedthat there exists an “essential”proletariat, composed of workers whoproduce or distribute “things withoutwhich the economy would crumble” andwho can thereby “halt vast areas of theeconomy by stopping their work.” This isnot simply factory or shipping work, butalso includes seemingly mundane thingslike telecommunications, garbagedisposal and other public utilities.

Though Nihilist Communism might takethe emphasis on these workers too far,their breakdown of priority within theindustries is perfectly correct. And this iswhy most riots and blockades are littlemore than a ritual, which may have avast social effect—capable ofcompounding in the future—but do notin and of themselves greatly disrupt orthreaten the present economic system.Even the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore,followed by national highway blockades,present a social rather than economicthreat—and the problem here is that thesocial threat can easily be diverted into apolitics of representation. The riotbecomes the “voice of the unheard” andpolitical recuperation, then, takes theform of properly representing this voice.

Even if this representation fails and the

riots continue, growing into genuine,behooded rebellions, they are onlycapable of seizing territories that havealready been evacuated. Our cities arenot collectively-produced resources towhich we have any sort of “right” worthaffirming. They are spaces for the flow ofcapital, and, if that flow stops, they arerendered into little more than hollowcorridors and empty big box stores,abandoned cranes standing likeponderous skeletons over the wastelandof any “victorious” insurrection. Thesmashing of Niketown is, in its own way,a recognition of this. What is beingsmashed at in desperate futility is this“glass floor” separating production fromeverything else. And the smashing fallsflat because there is nothing, really, tostrike. The hammer swings instead into ayawning chasm—hurled into the jaws ofthe swoosh.

Underneath this spectacle, though, thereis still the social binding that is thefunction of every ritual. Activity buildsbasic affinity. So this isn’t to say thatsmashing shit is useless—even theseemingly self-destructive catharsis ofsavate and shin-kicking had their ownimportance. So by all means, go getsome friends, dress in black, put onsome Nikes and burn down anApplebee’s[10] or something. But it’sjust an Applebee’s. Aside from theirtherapeutic effect, these forms of minorsabotage and comforting self-

destruction really only becomecollectively worthwhile if they are thenused to make strength and coordinateinquiry into the actual structures ofpower that surround us. In the long-term, this means building the potentialfor a communist counter-logistics out ofpractical knowledge. Engineering,programming, agriculture (like, actualagriculture, not your shitty organicgarden), construction, metallurgy andmath—basically a list of things the left iscurrently allergic to—are all absolutelyfoundational. Only with actual skills,often gained through work, does theabstract knowledge of these chokepointsbecome relevant, since sabotage andoccupation can then be paired withattempts to build territories. Thisknowledge also serves to temper ourenthusiasm, as most of us must simplyrecognise that not much is happeningand we are quite far from the levers ofpower. It is necessary, then, to makemore friends.

— Phil A. Neel

Notes[1] Dennett, Eugene V., Agitprop: The Life of an American Working-Class Radical.State University of New York Press, Albany, 1990. p.3

[2] Yue Yuen is owned by Pou Chen Corporation, headquartered in Taichung, Taiwan.

[3] Many of the flyknits are currently produced at Feng Tay Enterprises Co Ltd., inTaichung, Taiwan, the same city that hosts the headquarters of Yue Yuen’s parentcompany, Pou Chen. Taichung was itself once a major hub in the manufacture offootwear during the “Taiwanese Miracle,” which later departed for cheaper labouron the Chinese mainland. It is still, however, a nexus for the industry’s regionaladministration and design work, hosting Nike’s Asian design centre.

[4] All of this is assuming an uptick in total consumption offsetting the net lossthrough an increase in demand as the Asian market expands, and, of course, theretention of more labour-intensive methods for certain product lines.

[5] Kathryn J. Edin & Luke Shaefer, 2$ a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America.Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2015. p.xvii.

[6] In the Marxist sense “reproduction” of workers means not just the literal birth ofnew people who will be workers but also the myriad ways that workers stay alive,stay strong and stay sane in order to work.

[7] An informative debate about the question of reconfiguration can be followed inthe back-and-forth between Jasper Bernes and Alberto Toscano in the followingseries of articles:

http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/logistics-and-opposition

http://endnotes.org.uk/en/jasper-bernes-logistics-counterlogistics-and-the-communist-prospect

https://viewpointmag.com/2014/09/28/lineaments-of-the-logistical-state/#fn1-3310

[8] There has been a fad over the last several years to refer to basically everythingthat involves people doing something even slightly outside social norms as a“commune.” In part, this is simply a revival of the Baby Boomers’ libertarianperversion of the term, and should be avoided in the same way that one shouldavoid interacting with anyone who calls coffee “java.” At the same time, it can betraced to the way that the works of Tiqqun/The Invisible Committee have been strip-

mined for valuable buzzwords by American Tiqqunistes and assorted anarchists.Against this trend, we argue that the meaning of “commune” can only beunderstood in relation to production. Sorry bro, but if your scabies-infested squat isa “commune” then this website is the People’s Republic of Get a Job.

[9] For a much more abstract take on this debate, see Ray Brassier’s “WanderingAbstraction,” in Mute magazine, alongside Anna O’Lory’s response:

http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/wandering-abstraction

http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/keepsakes-response-to-ray-brassier

[10] We hear that this is not only entirely legal, but, in fact, encouraged.

ultra-com.org

The automation of production, circulation and just about everydimension of people’s lives entails the domination of humans bythe dead, machine-like logic of accumulation. As this materialcommunity is secured, people become fundamentally shaped byand irrevocably dependent upon the mechanical, ever-growingmass of capital. This mass begins to appear more and more as anessential—almost natural—infrastructure supporting life itself,since all of our necessities are provided through it. At the sametime, it takes on a mystical character, embodied in baroquefinancial instruments, ephemeral cultural symbols, and amultitude of new desires, hobbies and fetishes.