PM: Bolo Bolo
A novel concerning the fitting together of macro scale to interpersonal scale relationships in different essential fields of activity and without any defined protagonist.
The plot is set ‘in the future’ between 1984 and 1987 and describes the process by which capitalist production is overcome by the Bolo Bolo network.
Whilst the jargon occasionally grates (I adopted the tactic of not even attempting to learn it) and the fine detailing of survival becomes rococo and tedious by the last pages; and whilst the introduction sets up the critique of capitalism in rather facile terms... i.e. positively valued ‘intentional’ activity set against negatively valued inherited processes; and whilst it greatly overvalues, and on their own terms, the post-60’s countercultural milieu (rather than evaluating it as an aspect of capitalist restructuring), despite all of this, I still found the book well-researched, of its time, provocative, pleasingly written, honest and real.
I particularly enjoyed the footnotes and the statements concerning the (at the time) pertinent critique of externalisation and armed struggle,’let’s not forget, we are parts of the machine, it is us’, ‘we’re never facing an enemy, we are the enemy’ and ‘when the struggle can be put on the level involving the police or the military, we’re about to lose. Or if we do win, it’s our police or military that will have won, not us.’
During an extended footnote on the number 500 as the basic unit of human social organisation, which culminates in a discussion of those authoritarian traits which are always generated within proposed ‘designed’ communities, i.e. communities which come into existence in accordance with decision, PM's most telling sentence precipitates thus:
‘I am frightened of Bolo Bolo.’
Fear, yes, the author is spooked at the point where he senses that what he proposes might magically come to be. If we are not frightened by the proposals we make, if we do not consider how what we propose might be even worse than what we have now, then we have not performed the basic tasks that are necessary for making any proposal. It is necessary to grasp how our unspoken reservations appear at the same moment, and contradict, our planned interventions. It is necessary because this describes precisely the fullness of the object.
Blankly stated: our intentional interventions produce unintended consequences, for ourselves and for others. We find ourselves in situations which we did not foresee, and yet, still we are responsible for them, we created them – what are we going to do about it? It is not feasible, in the real world, for outcomes to follow our plans and so we should be ready to adapt or resign. True, this is a rudimentary strategy, and yet, how many radical groups have honestly adopted it?
What we do escapes us. We cannot maintain a hold over the multiplying and elaborate sequalae of a deliberate intervention and yet almost every radical structure does attempt to contain or liquidate such complexity. In the end, realistically, it is only possible to intervene again in the new changed circumstances as a new force. But even when we know this, it is difficult to factor such precognition into our original theory, which anway, tends to map the past, rehearsing strategies from the last war, rather than anticipate the future. Maybe Bolo Bolo is not about the future at all, but rather describes the autonomous milieu of the early '80's, which even as it was being described was passing from its most viable stage and thus becoming an image of what could be.
It is for this reason of external relativisation that truth-orientated structures withdraw into a state of internal vigilance and sect dynamics – for such structures, whilst there is an acceptance that the message, the context, the relation changes the group's truth cannot be revised. In the face of external relativisation, if not outright negation, the temptation is always to uncover that motive force which was only ever barely concealed in the first place, namely the justification of holding true to an identified tradition which is assailed from the outside.
One is most true-hearted, the motive for continuing the struggle states, where one holds to 'invariance' under circumstances of perpetual mutation; external falsification is thus taken as final proof for holding out. The logical outcome of this tendency is the fetishism of tradition for its own sake, an allegiance to the image of allegiance. Strangely, this loyalism tends to initiate a process of ossification and mineralisation which supplants, with pure objective form, that internality which once had been worth defending. The upholders of tradition and defenders of the thin true vein, have still not learnt that the Red Death is always and already inside.
The impact of planning on relationships i.e. the entirety of the ‘revolutionary’ project, is very little examined by that milieu. It seems to me that one’s own appropriate response to one’s own modest proposal should always be an intuitive, conditional, fright – 'don't lock me in here with this monster.'
We should always be careful to arrange within our ideas a back door, so as to change our mind when confronted with the unexpected results of that which we have advocated. The project is not to establish a line of truth which must be realised so much as a field of worst/best case scenarios, or a conceivable array of tolerable possibilities, arrived at from basic propositions. However, it is precisely this immediate self-revision which is absent within the ultraleft – which must always possess the truth, and which always externalises faults. There is so little readiness to be surprised, which is surprising within a milieu that so highly values the lived and spontaneous.
The following problem remains, and but for the one sentence quoted above it goes unaddressed in Bolo Bolo, how is it possible to theorise and express uncertainty in projects directed towards the truth?
Turbulence
There's a more nuts n' bolts type of article by p.m. along the lines of Bolo Bolo, even including the base of 500 as the smallest political/economic unit.
http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-5/potatoes-and-computers/
Calm
Okay. I didn’t know that there was going to be a republishing... maybe I unconsciously picked up on this. But both this feeding of independent efforts into network confluences and the use of the same as a trigger to activate those networks demonstrates the deep problem with the ideology of ‘networks’ itself.
The Turbulence link leads to an essay which quite nicely demonstrates the shift in autonomist theory from the lingering ‘80’s critique of subject positions to the present acceptance of necessity in the form given by the relations of production. It is strange to read these new re-presentations of ‘democracy’, money based exchange and global planning. I think this indicates that I rightly put my finger on Bolo Bolo being of a time which even as it was being recorded was also passing from the frame of social struggle.
The revised and realist agenda set out by P.M. demonstrates how there is far less to fight for now than in the early ‘80’s; the range of possibilities open to us has decreased not increased over time; so much of present life must go uncontested at the point where we must begin again – or else, P.M’s argument seems to be, we simply don’t begin again. For this reason, the Bolo Bolo proposals of 1985 still exists at a future point in relation to P.M.s current regressive propositions (which equally are of their time). The problem with visionary texts is that they do not carry us forward but tend to fix us at the present point in time by presenting the same formal relations but through the Looking Glass or in camera lucida.
As to the act of linking to P.M.s essay, I don’t enjoy people simply tagging my efforts. It is like dropping a business card in a begging bowl. Turbulence have affixed an appendage to my text without an engagement with my content, they have converted my efforts into a mere advert for that which I do not endorse.
What is it exactly that is going on in such a gesture? In general, the ‘networking’ project does not attempt to engender and cultivate relations except to the extent that they conform with the pre-structured model for relations; it does not add to the development of the forces of relations; it does not seek out or enable directly lived relations. What it does is impose the same form of relation again and again irrespective of content. The Turbulence tag seeks to expropriate my efforts in order to increase the circulation of its products. This gesture repeated on an individual level millions of times by millions of individuals is totalised as the general realisation of the form of the networked relationship.
Networking is pressing the flesh – it is recruiting others as a priority within an unquestioned environment. Networking is shaking the hand of the guy in front with a ‘howyadoin, nicetameetya’ whilst glancing over his shoulder at the others in the room. And from them to the others in the rooms beyond the room. Networking is the personal refusal of worth in any specific personal relation in favour of the potential accumulations of relations within the network itself; it is a refusal that is enacted by every participant in the network. Everybody who embeds their relations within the network is motivated by the thought that it is their content which trumps the conventions of the medium in which it is expressed. Whilst for each self all others are the medium, the self prioritises its content – ‘what I have to say is important, so it is okay to use you as my accelerator, my amplifier, my distributor, my magnifier.’
Everybody who seeks to use the network is used by it, everybody who relates through the network fails to relate. But individually, and on a mass scale, we are all so concerned with utilising the means (i.e. other networkers) to advance our own content that we do not register how the established relations of production are further realised within our transactions and that objectively our content is a mere flotsam carried along by currents within those relations. Content is only permitted to function as content to the extent of its general interchangeability with all other contents. In our eagerness to promote our content, we do not register its sheer marginality, its integration as a unit in the realisation of the network.
Networks realise, within individual exchanges, the pressure of strategic planning on individual life. It is how relations have been stripped down and transformed into the units of instrumental rationality. Everything is set in motion during this transaction in order to realise further potentials for transaction. Networking is fictitious relationships. Everything is displaced from its own function; its purpose and worth is assigned externally. Everything is significant to the extent that it activates and supports further particularised networking within the generalised net.
Others are represented within the network as other participants in the network. They are engaged to the extent that they articulate the circulation of networked contents. They exist to the degree that they do not problematise the network environment. The less they challenge the network itself, the more frequently they appear. Politically this non-contestation of the form networking has taken is the acceptance within large fragments of the left of the historical objectivity of planned relations. This neutrality goes further within groups such as the autonomists, including PM, as they are convinced that a formal historical victory of humanity over capital has occurred within the relations of production and that this formal victory only has to be realised through an appropriate content.
But in reality, outside and/or against the network, others tend to appear as the expression of their own difficulty, in the details of how they cannot be networked and how they insist on a content to content relation – including the form of the relation itself into their content. The network relation is contested by other potential relations.
In response to this problematisation of the network, planners, the author of Bolo Bolo for example, plunge themselves into works of hyper-planning and micro-planning as they seek to contain and realise incongruities formally within the network.
But planners always encounter the same mysterious problem, no matter how microscopically they engineer the network they find they cannot eradicate the generation of a field of unplanned and problematic material. In fact, the further they extend the plan in their struggle to anticipate difficulty, the more areas of difficulty they generate within their system.
We can speculate that this generation of problematic material within planning indicates the limit of the ideology of planning itself, that a pre-structured set of relations does not satisfy the needs it generates. The great difficulty of the network is the refusal of the network... which appears at any point where it becomes user-directed (planning only works to the degree that it remains invisible). Within all systemisations of relations we intuit that as individuals we have similar status as networked units. We are as herded through the Bolo Bolo topography as we are within capitalist relations. From the planners perspective, it seems our function is always to provide a content for, enact the mere realisation of, pre-established relations.
"As to the act of linking to
"As to the act of linking to P.M.s essay, I don’t enjoy people simply tagging my efforts. It is like dropping a business card in a begging bowl. Turbulence have affixed an appendage to my text without an engagement with my content, they have converted my efforts into a mere advert for that which I do not endorse."
Um ... I'm not a part of the Turbulence staff in any capacity whatsoever.
I linked to P.M's Turbulence essay for three reasons: it's more current than a book he wrote in 1983; it represents a different approach on his behalf to the ideas found in Bolo Bolo; it's far shorter then Bolo Bolo, giving your audience a more accessible entry point to the ideas you're (admirably) critiquing.
Thanks for the clarification
Thanks for the clarification concerning motives.
I have since more thoroughly read P.M.s essay and I have modified my response to include quotations of extremely problematic areas which were either absent or well-disguised in the original text:
http://salon.lettersjournal.org/viewtopic.php?id=1189