T100 Communism Must Wager on Economic Media by Brian Massumi

Abstract

Reviewed by: T100 Communism Must Wager on Economic Media by Brian Massumi Jonathan Beller (bio) REVIEW OF 99 THESES ON THE REVALUATION OF VALUE: A POSTCAPITALIST MANIFESTO BY BRIAN MASSUMI University of Minnesota Press, 2018 "Communism or extinction." —McKenzie Wark (Twitter) To be at all sustainable, even temporarily, the autonomous zones must be able to interface with the existing economy. To do so they must practice creative duplicity in relation to quantification and economization. SCHOLIUM. Otherwise they will be crushed. MEDIATION AND ABSTRACTION When invited by the editors of Cultural Critique to review Brian Massumi's 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto and to possibly provide a "100th thesis" of my own, I agreed. I now confess that I agreed in the spirit of "creative duplicity" extolled by Massumi's text. I welcomed the invitation to study the text, to give it the attention it deserves, to sample it, and then, as Trinh T. Minh-ha might say, to write nearby.1 I wanted to study this text that borrows not only its form but its interest in the operations of evaluation from Spinoza, but I also wanted to eschew the devout textolatry and ultimate evaluation [End Page 219] demanded by the review genre and to refuse any assignation of ultimate value that today can at best be but two degrees removed from monetization. The occasion provided me with the opportunity to further engage with a thinker whose work I admire in order to perhaps develop what in market terms might be called "my own thought" but that, in direct embrace of the collective aspect of this thought, should more appropriately (that is re-appropriatingly, from capital) be called "the thinking." If you are reading this, the editors have forgiven me and in their own possibly creatively duplicitous ways have agreed to participate in the undercommoning of a growing movement to rethink and indeed remake political economy. The movement I refer to is not centralized, though, no doubt, aspects of it will be criminalized: Occupy, strike debt and debt jubilee movements, housing unions, guaranteed basic income, rights for the disenfranchised, new currencies. Massumi himself, invoking his long-term thought process interaction with Senselab, the Three Ecologies Institute (3E) and the Economic Space Agency (ECSA), says that his text "does not represent a consensus (just one proposed suite of attractors)" (T95, 130). For me, Massumi's hard-won suite is particularly lucid, precise, and poetic, entering in, as it does, to the immanent abstraction process of financialization. He distinguishes his approach to "take back value" ("It is time to take back value" [T1, 3]) from the approach of "local currencies" that "strive to disable the speculative side of capital and return to the simple money model" (T24, 23) and again from that of "Sharing economies [that] also try to disenable economic speculation and preserve the logic of equal exchange" (T25, 32). Instead, Massumi goes deeper into capital and offers the provocative and counterintuitive claim that "the speculative engine of surplus-value might provide a model for the re-valuation of value" [T27, 24]). He says: T27; SCHOLIUM: The key to revaluing value might reside in reverse engineering a dynamic carried to its highest power in the most advanced and seemingly regressive segment of the capitalist economy: the financial markets. It may be necessary to go right for the heart in order to drive a stake through it, so as to make vitality live up to its potential (or potential live up to its vitality). (24) Though Massumi's critique of the capitalist value form is not a Marxism that most Marxists would easily recognize as such, since it engages [End Page 220] some of the emergent possibilities of cryptocurrency, crypto-economic design, and, in what is anathema to current orthodoxy, the possibility of new money forms, the new thinking he is participating in is increasingly perceptible everywhere. It embraces risk, as well as the complexity, technicity, and potentiality of relation. Massumi's work understands capitalism as "a more-than human of the human" (T35, 37), taking what could be thought of as a cybernetic approach to politics and situating the revaluation of value in a technosocial and...