Álvaro Ibáñez: An Amazon Logistic Centre, in San Fernando de Henares (Madrid), Spain, 2013. (ctxt)
Caliban: You taught me language, and my profit on’t Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language!
Shakespeare, The Tempest
Historical colonialism: extractivism of physical resources
The history of colonialism is a history of systematic depredation of territory. The object of colonisation is the resource-rich physical places that the colonialist West needed for its accumulation. The other object of colonisation is the lives of millions of men and women exploited in conditions of slavery in the territory under colonial rule, or deported to the territory of the colonising power.
It is not possible to describe the formation of the industrial capitalist system in Europe without taking into account the fact that this process was preceded and accompanied by the violent subjugation of non-European territories and the exploitation in conditions of slavery of the labour force subjugated in the colonised countries or deported to the dominant countries. The capitalist mode of production could never have been established without extermination, deportation and slavery.
There would have been no capitalist development in industrial-era England if the East India Company had not exploited the resources and labour of the peoples of the Indian continent and South Asia, as William Dalrymple recounts in The Anarchy, The relentless rise of the East India Company (2019).
There would have been no industrial development in France without the violent exploitation of West Africa and the Maghreb, not to mention the other territories subjected to French colonialism between the 19th and 20th centuries. There would have been no industrial development of North American capitalism without the genocide of native peoples and the slave exploitation of ten million deported Africans between the 17th and 19th centuries.
Belgium, too, built its development on the colonisation of Congolese territory, accompanied by genocide of unimaginable brutality. Martin Meredit writes in this regard:
“Leopold’s fortune came from raw rubber. With the invention of tyres, for bicycles and then for automobiles, around 1890, the demand for rubber grew enormously. Using a system of slave labour, companies holding concessions and sharing their profits with Leopold plundered the Congo’s equatorial forests of all the rubber they could find, imposing production quotas on villagers and taking hostages when necessary. Those who did not meet their quotas were whipped, imprisoned and even mutilated by cutting off their hands. Thousands died for resisting Leopold’s rubber regime. Many more had to abandon their villages. …” (Martin Meredit: The State of Africa, Simon & Schuster, 2005, p. 96).
Many contemporary authors insist on this logical and chronological priority of colonialism over capitalism.
“The era of military conquests preceded the emergence of capitalism by centuries. It was precisely these conquests and the imperial systems that flowed from them that promoted the unstoppable rise of capitalism.” (Amitav Gosh: The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, p. 129).
And according to Cedric Robinson: “The relationship between slave labour, the slave trade and the formation of early capitalist economies is self-evident.” (Black Marxism, 1983).
Few, however, have observed how the techniques used by liberal countries to subjugate the peoples of the global South are exactly the same as those used by Hitler’s Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, the only difference being that Hitler practised the techniques of extermination against the European population, and against the Jews who were an integral part of the European population.
One of these few is, surprisingly, Zbigniew Brzezinski who, in a 2016 article entitled “Towards a Global Realignment” (The American Interest, 2016), had the intellectual honesty to write: “Periodic massacres of their not-so-distant ancestors by colonists and associated wealth-seekers largely from western Europe (countries that today are, still tentatively at least, most open to multiethnic cohabitation) resulted within the past two or so centuries in the slaughter of colonized peoples on a scale comparable to Nazi World War II crimes: literally involving hundreds of thousands and even millions of victims.”. Brzezinski’s article concludes with these words: “Just as shocking as the scale of these atrocities is how quickly the West forgot about them.”
Indeed, historical memory is highly selective when it comes to the crimes of white civilisation. In particular, the memory of the extermination of non-European populations does not receive special attention and is not part of the collective memory, while the Shoah is given an obligatory cult in all Western countries.
White civilisation regards Hitler as the Absolute Evil, while the British Warren Hastings and Cecil Rhodes, the German Lothar von Trotha, exterminator of the Herero people, or Leopold II of Belgium are forgotten, if not forgiven by white memory.
Like General Rodolfo Graziani, torturer of Libya and Ethiopia, who was seriously wounded in an attack in Addis Ababa, but unfortunately saved his life, and who after the war was pardoned by the Italian government so that he could become honorary president of the Italian Social Movement, the party of the murderers that now rules again in Rome.
Entire populations were exterminated in order to impose the economic domination of Britain, Belgium, Germany or France, not to mention Italy. However, they are not remembered, because only Hitler deserves to be execrated forever, as his victims did not have black skin.
As for the exterminators of the American prairie peoples, they are even the object of a heroic cult that Hollywood chooses to celebrate.
Colonisation has acted irreversibly not only materially, but also socially and psychologically. However, the main legacy of colonialism is the endemic poverty of geographical areas that have been plundered and devastated to such an extent that they are unable to emerge from their condition of dependency. The ecological devastation of many African or Asian areas today pushes millions of people to seek refuge through migration, when they then encounter the new face of white racism: rejection, or a new slavery, as is the case in agricultural production or in the construction and logistics sector in European countries.
Since the process of decolonisation did not succeed in transforming political sovereignty into economic, cultural and military autonomy, colonialism presents itself in the new century with new techniques and modalities, essentially deterritorialised, even if the territorial forms of colonialism are not annulled by the formal sovereignty enjoyed (so to speak) by the countries of the global South.
By hypercolonialism I mean precisely these new techniques, which do not do away with the old ones based on extractivism and theft (of oil or of materials indispensable to the electronics industry, such as coltan), but give rise to a new form of extractivism that has as its medium the digital network and as its object both the physical labour resources of digitally captured labour and the mental resources of workers who remain in the global South but produce value in a deterritorialised, fragmented and technically coordinated way.
Hypercolonialism: extractivism of mental resources
Since global capitalism has been deterritorialised through digital networks and financialisation, the relationship between the global north and south has entered a phase of hypercolonisation.
The extraction of value from the global South takes place partly in the semiotic sphere: digital capture of very cheap labour, digital slavery and the creation of a slave labour circuit in sectors such as logistics and agriculture. These are some of the modes of hypercolonial exploitation embedded in the Semiocapital circuit.
Slavery – which we have long considered a pre-capitalist phenomenon, and which was an indispensable function of the original accumulation of capital – reappears today in a widespread and ubiquitous form thanks to the penetration of digital command and deterritorialised coordination. The assembly line of labour has been restructured in a geographically delocalised form: the workers who run the global network live in locations thousands of kilometres away and are thus unable to set in motion a process of organisation and autonomy.
The formation of digital platforms has set in motion productive subjects that did not exist before the 1980s: a digital workforce that cannot recognise itself as a social subject because of its internal composition.
This platform capitalism works on two levels: a minority of the workforce is engaged in the design and marketing of immaterial products. They earn high wages and identify with business and liberal values. On the other hand, a large number of geographically dispersed workers are engaged in maintenance, control, labelling, cleaning and so on. They work on the line for very low wages and have no union or political representation whatsoever. At the very least, they cannot even be considered workers, because these forms of exploitation are not recognised in any way and their meagre wages are paid invisibly, through the cellular network. However, the working conditions are generally brutal, with no fixed working hours and deprived of any rights whatsoever.
The film The Cleaners (2018), by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewick, tells the story of the exploitative, physically and psychologically draining conditions to which this mass of precarious semi-workers, recruited online on the principle of Mechanical Turk, created and managed by Amazon, are subjected.
Between the 1990s and the first decade of the new century, this new digital workforce was formed, operating in conditions that make autonomy and solidarity almost impossible.
There have been isolated attempts by digital workers to organise themselves into unions or to challenge the decisions of their companies: I am thinking, for example, of the revolt of eight thousand Google workers against subordination to the military system.
These first demonstrations of solidarity occurred, however, where the digital workforce is united in large numbers and earns high wages. But, in general, networked work seems irregular, because it is precarious, decentralised and, to a large extent, takes place in conditions of slavery.
In the book The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi writes that when he was interned in the extermination camp he “had at least hoped for solidarity among fellow sufferers”, but then had to recognise that the internees were “a thousand sealed monads, between whom there is a desperate, hidden and continuous struggle”. This is the “grey zone” where the network of human relations is not reduced to victims and persecutors, because the enemy was not only all around, but also within.
In conditions of extreme violence and permanent terror, each individual is forced to think constantly of his own survival, and is unable to create bonds of solidarity with other exploited people. As in the extermination camps, as in the cotton plantations of the slave states of the Land of the Free, also in the immaterial and material slave circuit that digital globalisation has helped to create, the conditions for solidarity seem to be barred.
It is what I would call Hypercolonialism, a dependent function of Semiocapitalism: violent extraction of mental resources and attention time under conditions of deterritorialisation.
Hypercolonialism and migration. The coming genocide
Hypercolonialism however is not only the extraction of mental time, but also the violent control of migratory flows resulting from the unlimited circulation of information flows.
Since Semiocapitalism has created the conditions for the global circulation of information, in territories far from the metropolis one can receive all the information necessary to feel part of the cycle of consumption and of the cycle of production itself.
First comes the advertising, then a huge amount of images and words that try to convince every human being of the superiority of white civilisation, of the extraordinary experience of the freedom of consumption and the ease with which every human being can access the universe of goods and opportunities.
Of course, all this is false, but billions of young people who do not have access to the advertising paradise aspire to achieve its fruits. At the same time, living conditions in the territories of the global South have become increasingly intolerable, because they are indeed worsening with climate change, but also because they are inevitably confronted with the illusory opportunities that the imaginary cycle projects in the collective mind.
Hence, out of necessity and desire, a growing mass of people, especially young people, are physically moving towards the West, which reacts to this siege with fear, aggression and racism. On the one hand, the info-machine sends seductive messages, and beckons towards the centre, from which emanate flows of attraction. On the other hand, however, those who believe in it and approach the source of the illusion end up in a massacring process.
The population of the global North, increasingly old, unproductive, economically declining and culturally depressed, sees the migrant masses as a danger. They fear that the poor of the earth will bring their misery to the rich metropolises. They are presented as the cause of the misfortunes suffered by the privileged minority: a class of politicians specialised in sowing racial hatred deludes old white people into believing that if only someone could wipe out this disturbing mass of young people pressing at the gates of the fortress, if only someone could eliminate them, destroy them, annihilate them, then the good times would return, America would be great again and the dying white homeland would regain its youth.
In the last decade, the line that divides North from South, the line from the Mexico-Texas border to the Mediterranean Sea and the forests of Central and Eastern Europe, has become an area where an infamous war is being waged: the black heart of the world’s civil war. A war against unarmed people, exhausted by hunger and fatigue, attacked by armed police, sniffer dogs, sadistic fascists and, above all, by the forces of nature.
Despite the glossy advertisements of commodities that animate consumerist idiots, and despite the propaganda of the neoliberal pigs, the logic of Semiocapital works in only one way: the global North infiltrates the South through the innumerable tentacles of the network. It is a tool for capturing fragments of deterritorialised labour.
But the physical penetration of the South, which presses for access to territories where the climate is still tolerable, where there is water, where war has not yet arrived in full destructive force, is repelled by force and genocide. A significant, if not a majority, of the white population has decided to entrench itself in the fortress and use any means to repel the migratory wave. Yesterday’s colonialists – those who in centuries past came across the seas to invade the territories to be preyed upon – are now clamouring for violence because millions of people are pressing the fortress borders.
This is the main front of war that has been developing since the beginning of the century, and it is widening, taking on everywhere the contours of extermination. It is not the only war front: another front of the chaotic world war is the inter-white one that pits imperialist liberal democracy against fascist authoritarian sovereignty.
The disintegration of the West, and in particular of the European Union, as a result of the inter-white war, runs parallel to the genocidal war on the frontier: two distinct processes today intertwined.
How does one get out of this alive? This is the question all deserters ask themselves.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi: Hipercapitalism and Semiocapital
Caliban: You taught me language, and my profit on’t
Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!
Shakespeare, The Tempest
Historical colonialism: extractivism of physical resources
The history of colonialism is a history of systematic depredation of territory. The object of colonisation is the resource-rich physical places that the colonialist West needed for its accumulation. The other object of colonisation is the lives of millions of men and women exploited in conditions of slavery in the territory under colonial rule, or deported to the territory of the colonising power.
It is not possible to describe the formation of the industrial capitalist system in Europe without taking into account the fact that this process was preceded and accompanied by the violent subjugation of non-European territories and the exploitation in conditions of slavery of the labour force subjugated in the colonised countries or deported to the dominant countries. The capitalist mode of production could never have been established without extermination, deportation and slavery.
There would have been no capitalist development in industrial-era England if the East India Company had not exploited the resources and labour of the peoples of the Indian continent and South Asia, as William Dalrymple recounts in The Anarchy, The relentless rise of the East India Company (2019).
There would have been no industrial development in France without the violent exploitation of West Africa and the Maghreb, not to mention the other territories subjected to French colonialism between the 19th and 20th centuries. There would have been no industrial development of North American capitalism without the genocide of native peoples and the slave exploitation of ten million deported Africans between the 17th and 19th centuries.
Belgium, too, built its development on the colonisation of Congolese territory, accompanied by genocide of unimaginable brutality. Martin Meredit writes in this regard:
“Leopold’s fortune came from raw rubber. With the invention of tyres, for bicycles and then for automobiles, around 1890, the demand for rubber grew enormously. Using a system of slave labour, companies holding concessions and sharing their profits with Leopold plundered the Congo’s equatorial forests of all the rubber they could find, imposing production quotas on villagers and taking hostages when necessary. Those who did not meet their quotas were whipped, imprisoned and even mutilated by cutting off their hands. Thousands died for resisting Leopold’s rubber regime. Many more had to abandon their villages. …” (Martin Meredit: The State of Africa, Simon & Schuster, 2005, p. 96).
Many contemporary authors insist on this logical and chronological priority of colonialism over capitalism.
“The era of military conquests preceded the emergence of capitalism by centuries. It was precisely these conquests and the imperial systems that flowed from them that promoted the unstoppable rise of capitalism.” (Amitav Gosh: The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, p. 129).
And according to Cedric Robinson: “The relationship between slave labour, the slave trade and the formation of early capitalist economies is self-evident.” (Black Marxism, 1983).
Few, however, have observed how the techniques used by liberal countries to subjugate the peoples of the global South are exactly the same as those used by Hitler’s Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, the only difference being that Hitler practised the techniques of extermination against the European population, and against the Jews who were an integral part of the European population.
One of these few is, surprisingly, Zbigniew Brzezinski who, in a 2016 article entitled “Towards a Global Realignment” (The American Interest, 2016), had the intellectual honesty to write: “Periodic massacres of their not-so-distant ancestors by colonists and associated wealth-seekers largely from western Europe (countries that today are, still tentatively at least, most open to multiethnic cohabitation) resulted within the past two or so centuries in the slaughter of colonized peoples on a scale comparable to Nazi World War II crimes: literally involving hundreds of thousands and even millions of victims.”. Brzezinski’s article concludes with these words: “Just as shocking as the scale of these atrocities is how quickly the West forgot about them.”
Indeed, historical memory is highly selective when it comes to the crimes of white civilisation. In particular, the memory of the extermination of non-European populations does not receive special attention and is not part of the collective memory, while the Shoah is given an obligatory cult in all Western countries.
White civilisation regards Hitler as the Absolute Evil, while the British Warren Hastings and Cecil Rhodes, the German Lothar von Trotha, exterminator of the Herero people, or Leopold II of Belgium are forgotten, if not forgiven by white memory.
Like General Rodolfo Graziani, torturer of Libya and Ethiopia, who was seriously wounded in an attack in Addis Ababa, but unfortunately saved his life, and who after the war was pardoned by the Italian government so that he could become honorary president of the Italian Social Movement, the party of the murderers that now rules again in Rome.
Entire populations were exterminated in order to impose the economic domination of Britain, Belgium, Germany or France, not to mention Italy. However, they are not remembered, because only Hitler deserves to be execrated forever, as his victims did not have black skin.
As for the exterminators of the American prairie peoples, they are even the object of a heroic cult that Hollywood chooses to celebrate.
Colonisation has acted irreversibly not only materially, but also socially and psychologically. However, the main legacy of colonialism is the endemic poverty of geographical areas that have been plundered and devastated to such an extent that they are unable to emerge from their condition of dependency. The ecological devastation of many African or Asian areas today pushes millions of people to seek refuge through migration, when they then encounter the new face of white racism: rejection, or a new slavery, as is the case in agricultural production or in the construction and logistics sector in European countries.
Since the process of decolonisation did not succeed in transforming political sovereignty into economic, cultural and military autonomy, colonialism presents itself in the new century with new techniques and modalities, essentially deterritorialised, even if the territorial forms of colonialism are not annulled by the formal sovereignty enjoyed (so to speak) by the countries of the global South.
By hypercolonialism I mean precisely these new techniques, which do not do away with the old ones based on extractivism and theft (of oil or of materials indispensable to the electronics industry, such as coltan), but give rise to a new form of extractivism that has as its medium the digital network and as its object both the physical labour resources of digitally captured labour and the mental resources of workers who remain in the global South but produce value in a deterritorialised, fragmented and technically coordinated way.
Hypercolonialism: extractivism of mental resources
Since global capitalism has been deterritorialised through digital networks and financialisation, the relationship between the global north and south has entered a phase of hypercolonisation.
The extraction of value from the global South takes place partly in the semiotic sphere: digital capture of very cheap labour, digital slavery and the creation of a slave labour circuit in sectors such as logistics and agriculture. These are some of the modes of hypercolonial exploitation embedded in the Semiocapital circuit.
Slavery – which we have long considered a pre-capitalist phenomenon, and which was an indispensable function of the original accumulation of capital – reappears today in a widespread and ubiquitous form thanks to the penetration of digital command and deterritorialised coordination. The assembly line of labour has been restructured in a geographically delocalised form: the workers who run the global network live in locations thousands of kilometres away and are thus unable to set in motion a process of organisation and autonomy.
The formation of digital platforms has set in motion productive subjects that did not exist before the 1980s: a digital workforce that cannot recognise itself as a social subject because of its internal composition.
This platform capitalism works on two levels: a minority of the workforce is engaged in the design and marketing of immaterial products. They earn high wages and identify with business and liberal values. On the other hand, a large number of geographically dispersed workers are engaged in maintenance, control, labelling, cleaning and so on. They work on the line for very low wages and have no union or political representation whatsoever. At the very least, they cannot even be considered workers, because these forms of exploitation are not recognised in any way and their meagre wages are paid invisibly, through the cellular network. However, the working conditions are generally brutal, with no fixed working hours and deprived of any rights whatsoever.
The film The Cleaners (2018), by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewick, tells the story of the exploitative, physically and psychologically draining conditions to which this mass of precarious semi-workers, recruited online on the principle of Mechanical Turk, created and managed by Amazon, are subjected.
Between the 1990s and the first decade of the new century, this new digital workforce was formed, operating in conditions that make autonomy and solidarity almost impossible.
There have been isolated attempts by digital workers to organise themselves into unions or to challenge the decisions of their companies: I am thinking, for example, of the revolt of eight thousand Google workers against subordination to the military system.
These first demonstrations of solidarity occurred, however, where the digital workforce is united in large numbers and earns high wages. But, in general, networked work seems irregular, because it is precarious, decentralised and, to a large extent, takes place in conditions of slavery.
In the book The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi writes that when he was interned in the extermination camp he “had at least hoped for solidarity among fellow sufferers”, but then had to recognise that the internees were “a thousand sealed monads, between whom there is a desperate, hidden and continuous struggle”. This is the “grey zone” where the network of human relations is not reduced to victims and persecutors, because the enemy was not only all around, but also within.
In conditions of extreme violence and permanent terror, each individual is forced to think constantly of his own survival, and is unable to create bonds of solidarity with other exploited people. As in the extermination camps, as in the cotton plantations of the slave states of the Land of the Free, also in the immaterial and material slave circuit that digital globalisation has helped to create, the conditions for solidarity seem to be barred.
It is what I would call Hypercolonialism, a dependent function of Semiocapitalism: violent extraction of mental resources and attention time under conditions of deterritorialisation.
Hypercolonialism and migration. The coming genocide
Hypercolonialism however is not only the extraction of mental time, but also the violent control of migratory flows resulting from the unlimited circulation of information flows.
Since Semiocapitalism has created the conditions for the global circulation of information, in territories far from the metropolis one can receive all the information necessary to feel part of the cycle of consumption and of the cycle of production itself.
First comes the advertising, then a huge amount of images and words that try to convince every human being of the superiority of white civilisation, of the extraordinary experience of the freedom of consumption and the ease with which every human being can access the universe of goods and opportunities.
Of course, all this is false, but billions of young people who do not have access to the advertising paradise aspire to achieve its fruits. At the same time, living conditions in the territories of the global South have become increasingly intolerable, because they are indeed worsening with climate change, but also because they are inevitably confronted with the illusory opportunities that the imaginary cycle projects in the collective mind.
Hence, out of necessity and desire, a growing mass of people, especially young people, are physically moving towards the West, which reacts to this siege with fear, aggression and racism. On the one hand, the info-machine sends seductive messages, and beckons towards the centre, from which emanate flows of attraction. On the other hand, however, those who believe in it and approach the source of the illusion end up in a massacring process.
The population of the global North, increasingly old, unproductive, economically declining and culturally depressed, sees the migrant masses as a danger. They fear that the poor of the earth will bring their misery to the rich metropolises. They are presented as the cause of the misfortunes suffered by the privileged minority: a class of politicians specialised in sowing racial hatred deludes old white people into believing that if only someone could wipe out this disturbing mass of young people pressing at the gates of the fortress, if only someone could eliminate them, destroy them, annihilate them, then the good times would return, America would be great again and the dying white homeland would regain its youth.
In the last decade, the line that divides North from South, the line from the Mexico-Texas border to the Mediterranean Sea and the forests of Central and Eastern Europe, has become an area where an infamous war is being waged: the black heart of the world’s civil war. A war against unarmed people, exhausted by hunger and fatigue, attacked by armed police, sniffer dogs, sadistic fascists and, above all, by the forces of nature.
Despite the glossy advertisements of commodities that animate consumerist idiots, and despite the propaganda of the neoliberal pigs, the logic of Semiocapital works in only one way: the global North infiltrates the South through the innumerable tentacles of the network. It is a tool for capturing fragments of deterritorialised labour.
But the physical penetration of the South, which presses for access to territories where the climate is still tolerable, where there is water, where war has not yet arrived in full destructive force, is repelled by force and genocide. A significant, if not a majority, of the white population has decided to entrench itself in the fortress and use any means to repel the migratory wave. Yesterday’s colonialists – those who in centuries past came across the seas to invade the territories to be preyed upon – are now clamouring for violence because millions of people are pressing the fortress borders.
This is the main front of war that has been developing since the beginning of the century, and it is widening, taking on everywhere the contours of extermination. It is not the only war front: another front of the chaotic world war is the inter-white one that pits imperialist liberal democracy against fascist authoritarian sovereignty.
The disintegration of the West, and in particular of the European Union, as a result of the inter-white war, runs parallel to the genocidal war on the frontier: two distinct processes today intertwined.
How does one get out of this alive? This is the question all deserters ask themselves.
We have to organise ourselves to desert together.
Source: Lobo Suelto (14/09/2024) and ctxt: contexto y acción (14/09/2024).