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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
It seems like a really a fundamental part is towards new forms of value, new forms of organization that aren't premised on growth.
Brian Bartell:It's really about social relations. How to out of the contradictions of this moment to create new and more just social relations.
John Elrick:Hi, my name is John Elrick. I'm a faculty member at Bastard College in the Geography and Urban Studies programs. And I'm excited to talk to Brian Bartell today about his book, recently published, on the eve of the cybercultural revolution, black power and capitalism in the nineteen sixties. Hi, Brian.
Brian Bartell:Hi, John. It's nice to be here today talking with you.
John Elrick:I have to say, just congratulations, and thanks for writing this book. It's a real real resource, I think, for anyone interested in the history of radical political thought and the politics of technology under racial capitalism. It's a really excellent, exciting piece, so thank you for writing it. You explore how a group of theorists and activists in the Black freedom movement engaged with questions of automation and technology to develop a revolutionary and transformative political agenda. Just curious how you how you came to this project.
John Elrick:And maybe if you want to give us a brief overview of what you're up to
Brian Bartell:in the book. Yeah, thank you. You know, the 1960s was a period in which much like today, the automation discourse was very widespread. See this everywhere from popular TV shows to articles in Life magazine to governmental like studies of the effect of automation and technological unemployment on the labor force and like The US economy, including urban uprisings of the 1960s, it finds its way into things like, you know, the McCone report on the Watts rebellion, and as one of the sort of like reasons for social instability, you know, sort of like looking at that, that the prominence of the automation discourse that it was really central to the emergence of black power, whether this is a Black Panthers engaging with this Martin Luther King and his thinking about like black power, the course of his writings over the late 1960s, whether it's people like James and Grace Lee Boggs. And so in the book, I wanted to think about how automation or cybernation or mechanization, these sometimes different and sometimes synonymous terms from the period were really central to theorizing what constitutes like black power, its politics, and the sort of ways in which the movement sought alternative economies, alternative capitalism, more just distributions of like surplus.
Brian Bartell:And thinking about this with people like James and Grace Lee Boggs, who defined this as the cybercultural era, like drawing on some of the cybernetic discourses of the period, you know, really saw this as a new emergent version of capitalism that involved potential risks, of mass technological unemployment of potentially like new racialized forms of like inequality, that is very much connected in their mind, despite the emergent or like new aspects of this to a history of racial capitalism, dating to plantation slavery, of rearticulations, recompositions of race and class, of freedom and unfreedom of wage and unwage labor rights. So thinking with these theorists about what was new about the cyber cultural moment, and what was connected to a history of racial capitalism, whether we're thinking about things like the cotton gin or farm mechanization of displacement. At the same time, for people like James and Grace Lee Boggs, this was a moment despite the risks of potentially new forms of dispossession and racialized inequality of new potential like politics, right. And so the other thing I look at in the book is whether it's in their chapters on Martin Luther King Jr, on the boxes on the artist note purifoy, the novelist Paul Marshall, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, as well as the Black Panthers, and the ways in which they not only theorize the problems of automation.
Brian Bartell:And again, thinking about this is not so much like a technology, but an organization of the economy, right, and projects to create, again, like alternative, more than capitalist like futures out of this moment.
John Elrick:Yeah. Really interesting. I think maybe one place that I wanted to jump in is your title. Right? And you've already mentioned, I think you've given us a really good overview of the broader project.
John Elrick:But I'm struck by the title, On the Eve of the Cybercultural Revolution. How do you use this concept of the cybercultural revolution to figure the 1960s as a particular historical conjuncture, as a moment under racial capitalism. How do you develop this concept? How do you draw on it? Maybe if you could just expand a little bit more on cyber culture and the cyber cultural revolution.
Brian Bartell:Yeah, so the term cyber culture, I think most people, myself included before starting this project, very much associate with like, the late 90s, maybe like the odds and internet culture, right? And, of course, there's the book from counterculture to cyber culture, for instance. And this sort of, know, that cyberculture is something that comes the late twentieth century, again, with the emergence of the internet. And in fact, it's a term from the 1960s. It's a term developed by Alice Mary Hilton, futurist and technologist of the period.
Brian Bartell:I was thinking about some of these issues, and a friend of mine in graduate school at the time, Nija Cunningham, who's now a professor at Hunter College was like, Oh, have you read The Negro and Cyber Nation? A lecture that James Boggs gave at this conference in 1964, which is published as a book in 1966, called The Evolving Society on Cybercultural Revolution. And reading this thing, and also at the time, I was looking at some of Noah Pirouvoir's work, they're thinking about a question of like value in a period of high unemployment of struggles over, you know, integration and inclusion, as well as emergent political problematic of like black power. This term cyber culture is referring at the time as this emergent automated economy, right? And all of the risks that we associated with this, particularly around technological, like unemployment, what are the sort of similarities and differences between today's automation moment or like AI moment in this earlier one?
Brian Bartell:Cyberculture in the 1960s, and thinking about like automation more broadly is a time in which there is generally more of a commitment to full employment, the welfare state. This term is used in this moment to think about the ways in which the Keynesian economy or the welfare state is being undermined by automation and mass unemployment. And the bogs is take this up. As far as I can tell, it's like primarily used at this conference, the evolving society, and then they use it in their own writings for a couple years after this, 06/6667. And they write in the essay, the city is the black man's land, that The United States is on the eve of the Cybercultural Revolution, that it's gone through the histories of technological change, industrial technological change, that for them, and particularly, they're thinking about compositions of race and class, with the ways in which farm mechanize the cotton gin is introduced during slavery, and that in requires intensified like black labor for them, they connected to the introduction of farm mechanization in the early twentieth century in the ways in which like that displaces like black labor into like the city, when they write that The United States is on the eve of the Cybercultural Revolution, they are arguing that there is this potential, again, potential mass unemployment and creation of a class of like what they call like outsiders.
Brian Bartell:And they very much attribute urban uprisings in the 1960s. And Watson this to a political movements of outsiders that at least is partly such because of automated like unemployment for them, and then other thinkers from the period is to think about, again, like, cybernation mechanization, not as like a technology, right, but as like, you know, mode of production to use that like language, of an organization of the economy, and one that is they see as being as rapidly changing, right. And again, that requires political intervention, because for them, the the cyber culture revolution, right is one of potential increased dispossession and potential racialized inequality, right? On the other hand, it offers this like opportunity that as they say, that, that black people will no longer have to like labor for white capitalism, right, it opens up the possibility of new forms of freedom and not a freedom, though, that's a sort of like fetishization of technology of robotics of, you know, the automated assembly line, but instead, valuations of the human right of thinking about ways of organizing life differently, right of taking the surplus that's been produced by black labor have been produced by all in creating a more equitable like economy.
Brian Bartell:So I think, you know, again, to come back to cyber culture as being this term that in most other context is referring to, you know, an internet, an early internet, like moment with and everything that comes with that, instead, like looking at like how it's used in the 1960s, again, around the organization of like racial capitalism at a time in which, again, the economy seemed to be shifting quite rapidly technologically.
John Elrick:So interesting, you know, it strikes me that the ad hoc committee on the triple revolution is a sort of important group to think with here. Clearly, you're talking about Alice Mary Hilton as the sort of coiner of cyberculture and the Boggses. James Boggs was a participant in writing, although dissenting participant in writing the ad hoc committee's statement on the triple revolution. And it strikes me as a really interesting moment for us to think about today. Right?
John Elrick:Like my reading of the triple revolution, the ad hoc committee on the triple revolution's pamphlet, a real sort of faith in quite frankly central planning, but with the idea of disarticulating jobs from access to surplus. A really sort of, I think, powerful framework. Thinking about technology as providing the means to transform social relationships, transform the organization of society in some ways. Right? The ad hoc committee, what, they published their pamphlet in 1964.
John Elrick:I I guess I'm curious to dwell in that moment a little bit more because it it shows up in your first chapter. It shows up with Martin Luther King Junior's engagement with the triple revolution. Can you lay out a little bit, like, what the project of the triple revolution was? What the faith in central planning, I suppose a sort of effort to push the LBJ administration to the left, desire to extend the democratic welfare state. Can you talk a little bit more about that moment for us?
Brian Bartell:So I came to the triple revolution through Martin Luther King, who in March 1968, while the poor people's campaign is being organized, gave a Sunday sermon in Washington DC under the title of remaining awake through the great revolution, in which he frames the need for poor people's campaign in relation to this pamphlet that is published in 1964, which was a collection of so yes, James Boggs is one of the authors of Byard Rustin, members of SDS like Tom Hayden, Michael Harrington is one of the authors, as well as a lot of former military people from the Washington establishment. There's something like 25 co authors along these lines. So it's a wide group of people. And there are three revolutions. There's the weaponry revolution, thinking about like nuclear bombs, there's the human rights revolution, moment of obviously civil rights and decolonization.
Brian Bartell:And then there's the technological revolution of automation. King here is particularly thinking about automation in relation to structural inequality, and like poverty. And so going back and looking at this text, two things here, it is a document that's committed to central planning, you know, at least in an American vein, while also emphasizing the need for a more democratic society. The extent of automation and technological change and production requires what they call a new science of political economy thinking about, as you said, the need to disarticulate the wage from like jobs, thinking about an economy that's supposed to at least in principle, again, be the classic management like union like compromise, right about full unemployment, thinking about how should the economy be reorganized when Lyndon Johnson is, as you say, beginning of like the Great Society. At the same time, Lyndon Johnson commissions the National Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress.
Brian Bartell:You know, there's debates between these think tanks, different groups like this of what is the rate of technological change. There's this broad agreement that automation is increasing technological unemployment. And one of the things that say is there needs to be a universal basic income. Richard Nixon calls for universal basic income when his presidential campaign in 1968, for instance, right? And so this is a this is a pamphlet that circulates, it presents a particular vision of what The US economy could look like.
Brian Bartell:Martin Luther King Jr. Is very engaged with this. In fact, his remaining awake through a great revolution like speech is actually the last a series of speeches that he gave in which he thinks about the relationship between civil rights, what in the mid 1960s, he begins to call human rights, which he defines explicitly as about economic equality, Under both the title remaining awake through a grave of revolution and other similar titles, he actually begins talking about automation in the late 1950s. Not long after the Montgomery boycott, And automation is the term that was first coined in the late 1940s. So it's really quite new in this period.
Brian Bartell:So in the first chapter of the book, one thing I do is talk about what this document, the triple revolution is, but most importantly, how did Martin Luther King Jr. Engage with this? One thing that I think is really interesting about this moment in black power engagement with cyber culture, and King being the first example, right, if somebody who is not a quote unquote member of the black power movement, right? But as that emerges with Stokely Carmichael, like with the Boggs is Martin Luther King is engaging with it, like very closely. What I also think is interesting is the ways in which across King's writings over the course of a decade, the ways he's thinking about automation is he is initially connecting it to the family wage and black men's inclusion into an industrial economy, factory unionization, these sorts of jobs.
Brian Bartell:He's also meeting with members of the National Welfare Rights Organization, right? Black women's groups who are struggling for universal basic income, really beginning to think about the ways in which for him automated unemployment in this reorganization of the economy really requires rethinking about like the wage itself, right? And the gender nature of the wage, the racialized nature of the wage, how inclusion into a male headed household, like family wage, like economy is right out of sync, right? That sort of goal of civil rights integration is out of sync with changes to cybercultural, like capitalism, right? So really, really needing to fundamentally rethink these connections.
Brian Bartell:And as you mentioned, James Boggsjohn is one of the authors of the triple revolution, and he descends from this along these lines as well. So I sort of turned to this as the book develops.
John Elrick:One of the things I really got out of the book was just how central thinking about racialized in equality and technological change was to King. You mentioned James Boggs there. I have a question. The second chapter, you really go into to thinking about the Boggs' work as a key touchstone for black power cybercultural theorization. One of the things that struck me about that chapter was your discussion of their formulation of scientific black power.
John Elrick:Could you talk about that for us?
Brian Bartell:I wanted to hold on to attention in the book between the fact that cyber culture as I'm calling it right, which is basically James and Grace Lee Boggs's term cuts across many of the different formulations of black power. So on the one hand, trying to offer a coherent theory of black power cyberculture, as well as the ways in which that's handled differently by, the Boxes versus the Black Panthers versus the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, right? But at the same time, the Boxes were defining what they were doing at the time, as you say, as scientific black power. So they're one of the first people to use this term, they're actually using it, at least in 1965, which is a year before Stokely Carmichael first most famously uses it 1966. Of course, black power is a term that has a much longer history.
Brian Bartell:They're like charting that in terms of yes, a history of the relationship between processes of racialization changes in capitalism and changes in the technology of capitalism. They believe that black people and a black power movement should be at the forefront of creating what they call a classless society. You know, for James Boggs writing about automation, right, most famously, I think probably what people are most familiar with is his book, The American Revolution, which is originally published in the Monthly Review. That is a text in their mid 1960s writings in which thinking about the emergence of the black freedom movement as in some sense, kind of like replacing the labor movement as being at the forefront of political change, right? As James Boggs, who is originally from Mississippi, moves to Detroit, right, and is an autoworker while he's writing all this, right, while all this is theory they're producing and all this political activism, he's still like working on the assembly line, and being involved in that 30s, immediate post World War Two, like labor movement, thinking about the decline of that and the emergence of civil rights.
Brian Bartell:In that book, when he's thinking about automation, he's really doing two things. How does automation and cybernation change the technical composition within the workplace? And he writes a lot about the ways in which forms of social difference, right, are exploited within the workforce in particular ways, and that's how that's kind of like changing with automation and the importance of the managerial class, and also increased unemployment, and the ways in which this sort of shifts the politics of struggles over like work. And, you know, later on, he'll make the argument that jobs ain't enough, that the question of dealing with automated employment is not the question of like jobs, right? But it's very much a rethinking of in a reorientation towards what they call like socially necessary activity.
Brian Bartell:And I think that this idea of activity is really important. The boxes and everybody I look at is very much thinking about what will people do in a post capitalist world? How do you reorganize an economy in this setting? And to come back to this idea of scientific black power for them, right, is thinking about the relationship between racialization technology change and the organization of the economy versus cultural nationalist ways of thinking about Black power.
John Elrick:In chapter two on the Boggses, you write on page 70: For the Boggses, automation was not just a problem of unemployment and work. It was also a political ecological problem that necessitated new forms of value and social reproduction. Capitalism, as they argued, was necessarily a growth oriented system that required not only racialized and gendered inequality in the labor process, but also required that nature be put to work in destructive ways and for the waste produced by capitalist production and consumption to be unequally distributed. It seems like a really a fundamental part of that chapter, chapter two, is is thinking about the Boggs' political ecology and maybe even gesturing towards new forms of value, new forms of organization that aren't premised on growth. Does that relate to our moment of thinking about degrowth or changing social relationships in a way that take human and nonhuman life into account?
Brian Bartell:You know, thinking about the question of growth today, coming back to the triple revolution, in that pamphlet, they write about the ways in which an automated economy increases in potential and available energy, I think is like their line, right? Increases in productive capacity. I think today, AI and a lot of these things, it's like the idea that somehow it's gonna make like capitalism be able to just like produce more stuff. That's of course not necessarily like a good. For the BOGSs, that's not a good for multiple reasons.
Brian Bartell:Like one, it's because they're not naive about the fact that like automation oftentimes requires a lot of people to work a lot harder behind the scenes, right? That increased production is increased like exploitation globally. They say at some point in time that the American Revolution needs to contend with abundance, an organized scarcity, scarcity in a world of abundance. Needs to be like a revolution that for the first time is not about like, as they put it, economics, but politics. About redistributing the incredible like surplus that's available to all potentially.
Brian Bartell:And really, this doesn't require an automated economy, is one of the things they talk about. But that with increased production and increase like commodities, there is increased environmental damage and evenly distributed. When they're thinking about what a real cybernated economy might look like, or cyber cultural economy, or maybe that's not even like the right term when it actually like happens, right? Because, again, for them on the eve of the cyber cultural revolution is the risk of increased inequality and dispossession, which could be otherwise, you know, through political intervention. Thinking about growth, you could have a cybercultural revolution, which, you know, the growth of the economy, right, increases this environmental like damage, increases these problems.
Brian Bartell:And so they are really degrowth thinkers. Production is not really the key for them. The key for them really is thinking about alternative forms of social reproduction. One of the terms from the time is human services. And if we're thinking about reading on the eve of the cybercultural revolution from our own time is like what happened after this, is there is automated unemployment.
Brian Bartell:There's also offshoring of jobs. There's the service economy. There's mass incarceration. Like, there's the debt economy. There's a greater introduction of women into the economy.
Brian Bartell:The changes that happen are kind of the changes that the BOGS has anticipated, in some ways not. They're writing in this time that an economy should be reorganized again around activities versus jobs. And a lot of these things are things like education and like care work that they saw as forms of political activity and not jobs that are maybe going to become underpaid service like sector jobs in the near future. The BOGs were really trying to theorize the economy as like a whole in alternative economies, alternative distributions of surplus as a whole. What you do need to think about the links between ecological damage, growth and production, is certainly central for them.
John Elrick:Yeah. It's interesting reading your book, you know, thinking with the triple revolution, thinking with the Boggses, with Noah Porrefoy, legal revolutionary black workers. And then with the Panthers, like thinking about conditions under techno capitalism as containing potentially the seeds for an alternative way of being strikes me as a theme that runs throughout your analysis of these different thinkers, these different black power theorists of cyber culture. Your final chapter is on Black Panthers. And I think it's such a rich, interesting discussion that you provide centering this question of technology.
John Elrick:And and you do so you know, you open your chapter by signaling this shift in the 10 program that sort of corresponds to the increasing importance of intercommunalism, of course, but also includes this new demand for people's control over modern technology. Could you maybe talk a little bit about the Black Panthers and the question of technology as being really central to their politics?
Brian Bartell:Yeah. You know, the book is bookended, with Martin Luther King and the poor people's campaign. The focus of that chapter is Martin Luther King, his idea of an expanded like welfare state. And then I end the book with yeah, with the Panthers, with Huey P. Newton and intercommunalism, the 10 program, like the survival programs, their involvement in the revolutionary people's constitutional like convention of like coming up with a new US constitution, if US is like the right word for that, and whether a welfare state and the state is even the right level of intervention in a cyber cultural economy, right, given the planetary nature of techno capitalists, like contradictions of what Huey Newton will call like empire, the emergence of like empire for him in the early 1970s.
Brian Bartell:And, you know, it's funny, like thinking about how you sort of encounter things for the first time. I did not know that the Panthers actually rewrote the 10 program at the beginning of the nineteen seventies, because Newton thought it was outdated. I was either listening to or reading an interview with like Angela Davis, where she said, you know, the the Black Panthers are really engaged with like technology, you know, they're one of the first people to, to think about some of the questions of today. And she didn't elaborate on that, I don't think. And I've never been able to refind this interview.
Brian Bartell:So I just want to say thank you, Angela Davis, for pointing this out. Sorry, I didn't cite this interview of yours, because I couldn't find it again. But it did lead me to reread, you know, the 10 program. And they do rewrite the 10 program. Some of the things, for instance, like calling for the Malcolm X influence plebiscite, UN plebiscite on national recognition in terms of people's community control of modern technology technology is is maybe the most important thing that they call for in the revised 10 program.
Brian Bartell:In that final chapter, I really think about, like, what is people's community control of technology for, like, one? The Panthers are really associated with this idea of the lumpen proletariat. The dispossessed of the dispossessed is a figure of debate in their work with the worker, or George Jackson refers to the neo slave in his writing. Newton talks about the community. At the beginning of the 1970s, he starts to develop his theory of like intercommunalism, which is that there is a new organization of global capitalism that's led by The US capital class and with The US like military and with the war in Vietnam.
Brian Bartell:I don't know why I said intervention. Like, war in Vietnam, like the invasion of Vietnam is about reorganizing, like, global capitalism, and this is changing the nature of sovereignty. People before me have written about how this is closely anticipates and, like, comes before, like, Harte Agri's ideas about, like, empire, right, is that the global economy is being reorganized into empire, right, in which nation state sovereignty is no longer, like, central. And for Newton, the world is being transformed into communities, right? This is his like, key category, like communities, you know, at the ends of The US welfare state at the emergence of this, empire are like the new for him site of politics, right?
Brian Bartell:In this, like, formulation of intercommunalism, he has this essay that I think is really interesting called the technology question. He says the technology question,
John Elrick:one
Brian Bartell:of the aspects of it is the ways in which global capitalism is turning black and colonized peoples into quote unquote reservoirs of information. It's not just appropriation, right? But it's like appropriation in order to create this new global capitalist empire of inequality. For him, these transformations mean that communities need to take control of, like, technology, that this is like this terrain of struggle. People's community control of technology is one of the lesser known aspects of the survival programs, like the free breakfast program and all those different programs, right?
Brian Bartell:And this is also a time which the Panthers are starting a school in Oakland. These ideas are really influencing the ways they're organizing education. And so like, you know, they have these curriculum about studying the politics of technology. Again, all the people I look at is right, they're thinking about a world. Newton, I think is like interesting because he's always talking that he talks a lot during this time period about revolution itself, you know, as he sees it very like dialectically, like there's always contradiction, there's always change, and this isn't something that's going to stop.
Brian Bartell:And the question is, is like intervening in it, creating more just versions of change, and not that when a new society emerges, there aren't going to be like new contradictions and new problems, right? Or some sort of like utopian thing, right? But thinking of revolution in this like sense. And so looking at the book from these different approaches to an emergent and transforming techno capitalism, again, from like with King and the potentials of the welfare state to the Panthers of thinking about where should politics be in the early 1970s around techno capitalism, right? What are the potentials?
Brian Bartell:And for him, right, the survival programs in these things are survival pending revolution. It's an intermediary on the way to something else. Looking at his theories and then the conversations between him and other members of the Black Panthers at this, like, really uncertain moment, because techno capitalism, as he sees it, is organized as a dispossessive reservoir of information.
John Elrick:On page two zero seven, you suggest that, in the technology question, Newton noted that, quote, We the people do not have a worldview, unquote. I'm curious, what is the worldview that Huey P. Newton had in mind as as sort of necessary to confront empire in this moment?
Brian Bartell:Yeah. You know, we could say that the worldview would be to be attentive to changes in, like, techno capitalism in this, like, moment. When he's writing about some of these things, he's writing about how, you know, he started off as a nationalist. That that was like how he was thinking about the Black Panthers. And then he was thinking about the Panthers as being internationalist in relationship to other anti colonial struggles and stuff.
Brian Bartell:And then he's thinking about how you can't really be a nationalist if the nation state is no longer the primary form of sovereignty. It's like empire. So for him, the worldview being one, to always be rethinking your categories and politics, being attentive to what's actually like happening, not sort of basing your politics on an outdated version of capitalism and white power in outdated categories and needing to always update those categories. And then also thinking about how might things be reorganized in a better way. You know, I think one thing that really cuts across like all of these and thinking about like what is a black power cyber culture is really like a struggle that's, like, consistent, whether it's King or the Boxes, whether it's the League of Revolutionary Black Workers or the Panthers, Noah Purifoy and Paul Marshall, who I write about in kind of like in different ways, for like a classless society, right?
Brian Bartell:For like a just distribution of surplus. For more free time. Does it require reconstitution? Does it for a time require these survival programs? What does it require about interlinking with other communities, right, to create a classless society?
Brian Bartell:A worldview requires thinking about what is the best version that can come out of this bad moment. And maybe, you know, today, Silicon Valley, the discourse of creativity wants us to think about, like, having to work twenty four hours in one way or another for capitalism is like play or something like this and be like, Oh, man, here's another example of counter revolution in that Italian autonomous sense of you taking up the best of these visions of the counterculture from this period and kind of incorporating them in a crappy way, you know, into the capitalism of today. Did work become play, you know, like in Apple ads or something like this, right? But, you know, he means like something else that, you know, it's like, you're not gonna have to labor pointlessly all time for commodities, for consumer forms of dissatisfaction that are opportunities of which are unequally organized, and they're not satisfying to begin with. I didn't, in the book, want to lose some of these not just the analyses of the ways in which a cybercultural economy in the 1960s is connected to this long history of racial capitalism dating to plantation, right, and like distributions of wage and unwaged labor and freedom and unfreedom, right, and the risks of increased dispossession, of increased inequality, of increased gender inequality that could come with a cybernated economy, but instead projects that are trying to do the exact opposite.
Brian Bartell:The Panthers projects in the early 1970s aren't the same as like King's in 1968, as I talk about the artist Noah Purifoy, who's often not thought of as like a theorist of techno capitalism in his community art projects in the wake of the Watts rebellion, and how that relates to, you know, questions of automated unemployment stuff, right, which is a different project. Paul Marshall's novel, The Chosen Place of the Timeless People, which is set in a fictional Caribbean island, is about US imperialism and sort of the importation of some of these things and, like, what politics can develop out of this. There are many different versions of this. It's unresolved, right? But wanting to think with these horizons of the future.
John Elrick:That really kind of leads to something that I was thinking. You know, you end with a really the last paragraph of the book, you sort of summarize in succinct ways, kind of what you've been up to, and then gesture towards what this history of the sort of cybercultural revolution, what this moment, how it might lend perspective on our present. And so I'll just briefly quote you here. You write, On the eve of the cybercultural revolution began with Martin Luther King Jr. Engagement with the triple revolution and his call for an expansive welfare state, moved through the heterogeneous political economic perspectives that constituted black power cyber culture, and concluded with the RPCC's struggle with what form a new constitution attuned to the contradictions of the cybercultural revolution should take.
John Elrick:These contradictions are not the contradictions of the present. Yet, taken as a whole, I've tried to show that Black Power cyberculture offers a particularly rich theoretical perspective on the cyber cultural organization of life, as well as on the political possibilities that could have emerged from that moment and that may still offer counter practices for the creation of new values alternative to racial capitalist automated inequality today. How does this history that you've provided lend perspective on our present?
Brian Bartell:I mean, I started this book before the rise of ChatGPT. I think that the ways in which automated or like AI techno capitalism works today is not the same as the 1960s version, right, in terms of thinking about issues with facial recognition and like how training sets are produced. You know, the contradictions of today are different. On the other hand, in King, we started talking about King and the Triple Revolution, this remaining awake through great revolution speech. And one of the things that I really struck by in that speech, reading it, when he's thinking about automation, he explicitly is talking about how rightists and white supremacists have used time much more effectively than the Black freedom struggle or the other freedom struggles that were going on at the time.
Brian Bartell:Live in our own period of the reemergence of white supremacy and fascism, along with AI. And I think it's important, one, there is a really thorough earlier engagement in The United States from these artists and theorists and like activists with the politics of automation, that there is a history. I do think it's it is really important for us to think about the ways in which today everything is like AI, you know, AI is everywhere. It's like, it's brand new, it's new. But the black power cyber culture would tell us that automation is not new, right?
Brian Bartell:And there are other traditions that talk about automation is not being new, but this one in which they are linking automation to a history of the plantation, you know, and it's in The United States for the most part. But it's like, as I show, like, they're thinking internationally about this, the ways in which for them automation and cybernation and cyber culture in this time are thinking about this like history of distributions of wage and unraged labor and freedom and unfreedom in histories of like racialization and recompositions of race and class. The Cybercultural Revolution is like new, but it's also like historical. I do think that Black Power Cyberculture and the ways in which they thought about the relationship between race and class, social reproduction, and such, does offer ways of analyzing the present. Also, not losing sight of like, they didn't just do that as scholars who are like analyzing the economy, right?
Brian Bartell:They're like political activists that want to like change the world, you know, and create a classless society. I don't want to lose sight of that term from the boxes either, right? The scientific black power is about creating a classless society. So I think there's a lot that we can draw in the present.
John Elrick:Thank you for that. One of the things I really took from this book, or one the things that struck me while I was reading it, incredible activists, intellectuals, people engaged in struggles for freedom. And in the moment of 2025, we're being inundated by discourse of AI, the anxieties that come with it, and yet really struck by the ways in which for all of the hyperventilating discussion of what AI can do and can't do, the thing is, it doesn't seem like social relations. The vision isn't to change the world, isn't to change the way in which human beings relate to one another, really. In reading your book, and reading how these theorists were grappling with questions of technology and automation, was a real grounding experience, because at the end of the day, the Boggs, Martin Luther King, the Panthers, all of these folks had a clear vision of changing the world, right?
John Elrick:And thinking about technology as implicated in uneven power relationships, but also providing the opportunity to imagine what that sort of future could look like. And that's just it was so refreshing and so important. And so I guess I just wanted to say thank you for writing this book. It's a real resource in this moment.
Brian Bartell:That's very nice of you to say. I really wanted to highlight, despite like differences across the different chapters of the different activists and artists and theorists and writers, I tried to think about questions of social reproduction in this, right? Because at the end of the day, they're not really saying like, Oh, there's like automation, we can just like automate everything, and it'd be like, Oh, you know, today, we'll turn over everything over to like AI, right? It's really about, as you said, social relations, how to out of the contradictions of this moment to create new and more just social relations, right, that are keeping questions of race and gender, sexuality, different forms of like social difference at the forefront in the ways in which those are always related to the forms of dispossession that are happening, but it is about creating a better and alternative world. It's not about fetishizing, like, the technologies and stuff.
Brian Bartell:And that, for me, reading and writing this stuff was a motivation to keep on engaging with what they were doing.
John Elrick:I'm coming from a critical geography background, right? And so a lot of my attention was drawn to the ways in which productions of space and way in which uneven geographical development was central to a lot of these projects and a lot of this theorizing. And, Brian, you know, I think we've talked a little bit about this. Like, the role of the city and the production of racialized inequality spatially seemed to really stand out to me. I think you drew on, you know, radical scholarship, right, and abolitionist work and thinking about race and the city and, technology and political change.
John Elrick:And all of those things are definitely things that I'm interested in. I mean, I'm working on a book project now that, on some level, is trying to give a different kind of history of the present, right, thinking about how racialized inequality continues to be reproduced in different ways. I was really taken by whether it be Martin Luther King's discussion of the general economy of the slum, thinking about the black urban condition, the Boggs' work in particular, thinking about, yeah, like Oakland, quite frankly, as being a site of generative sort of political theorizing and struggle through the Panthers and others. So the end there, when you were talking about We had this conversation about worldview and how the contradictions of the present aren't the same as the contradictions of the cybercultural era, yet certainly sort of thinking about that history is central to the present, made the present in certain ways. And I've been thinking a lot about that, right?
John Elrick:How techno solutionism, for example, has taken hold in cities and an accompanying sort of decline of faith in the ability for any kind of robust public response to things like racialized inequality that don't sort of depend on the market is something that I was very attuned to. A lot of our conversations have revolved around precisely like radical politics. We were having these conversations in San Francisco during dot com two point zero moment when Google Maps was driving around taking pictures of all the streets and social media and web apps were relatively new and seemingly transforming the world. It's interesting because like a lot of our conversations would turn to the recent past, To these moments and thinking about the Bay Area or California or any of these places as sites of radical theorizing. People being interested in changing the world and engaging in projects to be otherwise.
John Elrick:Your book really speaks to that sort of impulse, seems like. Looking to the recent past as a site of inspiration for imagining other more just ways of being.
Brian Bartell:Thinking about this a little bit, like I was in San Francisco, like this past weekend, and I drove across like the Bay Bridge into the city, and along 280 or whatever, all it is is billboards for AI. Thinking about U. E. P. Newton and his idea of intercommunalism and the technology questions being this question of dispossession or creating a reservoir of information.
Brian Bartell:I mean, you know, I have said that that's like, I think, what I want to kind of like turn my attention to next and like how we can think about AI techno capitalism today in more depth through some of Newton's categories and political ideas. When Newton's talking about the technology question, you know, it's that like the emergence of Silicon Valley is the thing we think about as today, in addition to the military industrial complex and stuff. So I think that that sort of thing you're describing in those, like, politics is definitely part of what I was thinking about.
John Elrick:Yeah, and like even just thinking about the Panthers in Oakland, on the heels of the production of the white noose, massive segregation spatially, right next to a port that would become, you know, the first West Coast sort of containerized port, And thinking about the Pacific as a new terrain of capitalist imperialist exercise, and Oakland and the Bay Area being a sort of hearth in that extensive node, it really opens up sort of thinking about technology not simply as tools, but as whole ways of organizing life.
Brian Bartell:Yeah. All of those folks from the black power movement are theorizing as activists in like specific projects, but also while connecting it to global, you know, Martin Luther King, his remaining weight through great revolution speech is right before he's assassinated. And the Panthers are doing this theorizing in the midst of government projects of, like, repression and actually introducing, like, dissension into the Panthers, you know, theorizing techno capitalism under these conditions, where there's a lot of risk involved.
John Elrick:And also just like how central the military industrial complex was to that moment. On some level, the Bay Area, for example, was a major port, you know, and Silicon Valley itself. Right? It grew out of out of the defense industry. You know, the implication of militarism and techno capital, like, you know, they're inseparable in some way, in some level.
John Elrick:And so it's interesting that you're turning towards intercommunalism, right, in in your next sort of projects, or one of your projects is gonna turn to that. It seems to really speak to our every day.
Brian Bartell:Yeah. I mean, this, you know, for me, sort of reminds me of a couple of things. James and Grace Lee Boggs and Noah Purifoy, assemblage artists, ostensibly being very different figures, but each really concerned with the question of value and, like, new values and how can value be redefined in this techno capitalist moment. Looking at the McConne report on the Watts rebellion, sort of how it defines the horizon of The US future as being about one of mechanization and, like, the space age in the military industrial complex, right, sort of thing, and how purifies like community activism is in, the shadow of the aerospace industry. You know, with intercommunalism and cyber culture, that concept takes us to different questions than automation.
Brian Bartell:What would it mean today to use intercommunalism as a way to think about contemporary techno capitalism? Like, what sort of political problematic does that take us to? What does it draw our attention to that's different than defining it in terms of neoliberalism or something like this? In which there's similarities, but it's also different.
John Elrick:You know, one thing that we haven't really talked about is neoliberalism, not necessarily just as a set of policies, but as a political rationality. And the way in which, I mean, we're living in the sort of aftermath or detritus of a concerted history of devaluing anything public. This is a different time, right? Like our moment is definitely different. It does seem like taking seriously, taking into account neoliberal political rationality as a force that's remade the world is probably pretty crucial, you know, instead of just drawing on old categories to make sense of it.
Brian Bartell:Yeah. One of the things that I talk about a little bit is universal basic income. A much more mainstream idea in the late sixties than I realized, and how lots of people were in favor of a universal basic income, and then some folks, like, in the black power movement were like, hey, wait a second. This is gonna be a negative income tax. Because, like, Milton Friedman's into kind of, like, universal basic income as a negative income tax, in which that's about, like, getting rid of other social services and incorporating you into the commodity form, into capitalism more extensively, into a precarious capitalism.
Brian Bartell:And looking at their thinking about, like, cyber culture as a term that is emerging at the moment in which there is this struggle over the emergence of, like, neoliberalism in, you know, like, the years to come. They do help us to rethink how that like happens in a way.
John Elrick:Yeah, mean it strikes me as like another text that comes to mind in this conversation is someone like Keeanga Yamada Taylor and, you know, thinking about race for profit and her notion of predatory inclusion in the 70s.
Brian Bartell:Yeah, Martin Luther King and thinking about the general economy of the slum in this moment when he's thinking about the war on poverty and automated unemployment in these things.
John Elrick:And a particular kind of like value as a particular relation of domination, right? And going back to some of our earlier conversations, right? The need to build new forms of value that aren't premised on relations of domination. One of the sort of tropes or one of the things that's been in this moment is, like, thinking about AI and specter of a capitalism without people. To my mind, I'm like, well, capital like, value itself is a relation.
John Elrick:Like, the Marxist tradition tells us that, right? Like on some level it's about establishing particular kinds of relations of power and domination. It's not about the capacity of machines to do things. But at the same time, I know a lot of really smart people are thinking through these questions in various angles. Like, I'm guessing the Boggses would have something to say about this idea of capitalism without human beings as a possibility or not.
Brian Bartell:You know, this question of a capitalism without humans is about questions of what constitutes a human. Thinking a little bit about what is a a Silicon Valley maybe dream of, like, a capitalism without humanity that emerges out of a history of capitalism in which not all people are considered like fully human, right? What is the status of someone who's enslaved in terms of a capitalism without humans if like an enslaved person isn't considered like fully human? There's a major tension. And again, thinking about value, the value form is like a form of domination.
Brian Bartell:And like, what sort of like alternative forms of value can emerge through political practices, you know, is definitely like bound up with what constitutes the fully like human and how that's like racialized and gendered.
John Elrick:They had a historical analysis of that, right? Like the commodity form, private property itself being bound up with questions of who was capable owning property, being property, etcetera. In other words, like racialization is central, right? It's inseparable from thinking about capitalist value historically in dynamic ways.
Brian Bartell:You know, John, thank you very much for engaging in this conversation with me today and for the questions you had and all the ways in which you've drawn attention to the things that I have tried to do in this book. You know, I'm just like curious what you're thinking about in relation to these, because you and I met as master's students at San Francisco State, like, you know, a little more than fifteen years ago now. And certainly, some of the a lot of the things that I was engaging with in this book are things that in one form or another, you and I have been wanting to think more about Huey Newnan and intercommunalism, specifically like today. And I'm curious, what are you working on these days? And just, you know, how maybe the book relates to some of the questions that we've had, like some of the things we've talked about over the years and sort of what's on your mind.
John Elrick:Yeah. No, it's my pleasure. I I wanna thank you for writing this book. It's remarkable. I'm so thrilled to have it and go back to it and reread it.
John Elrick:Congratulations on it. It's really impressive. Think one of the things that this book triggers in me generally is a desire to think about the histories of political possibility. And that's the thing that really strikes me as so fruitful in this book that you've given us, is an example of how we can turn to thinking about the past and people contending with these issues and contemporary conditions in a way that has a horizon that's better. And I think that's the kind of work that I'm interested pursuing.
John Elrick:I'm working on a project right now that's turning also to the sort of postwar moment. And I think some of the themes that you raise in this book and that you highlight are certainly gonna inspire me and animate some of the work that I'm doing in that way. But thank you, Brian. It's a pleasure and treat. I really appreciate it.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press Production. The book On the Eve of the Cybercultural Revolution Black Power and Capitalism in the 1960s by Brian Bartell is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.