Seda calls Andrej:
    January 2017

seda: 
we want to change the current frame of how the social impact of technology is studied and instead use a political economic lens to engage the cloud infrastructures and associated market and labor practices. 

andrej:
Harvey political economy stuff
Arrighi: Long 20th Century
Adam Smith in Beijing
the really big one: Long 20th Century, a study of the systemic cycles of accumulation
affecting every hegemonic regime, from 17th century Netherlands to
British hegemony and now the US, which is in decline
with some regularity, every hegemonic regime, back then the UK, now the US, in decline, goes from one phase to another
the last phase is how financialization signals the ultimate crisis of capitalism
and how it signals the decline of a hegemonic power
the last phase is how financialization signals the ultimate crisis of hegemonic regime
this paved the way for the most exciting collaboration between geography and political economy
many people pick up on it, enclosures, commons (Federici, De Angelis,
Raquel Guttierez, Retort Collective), continuous (and not primitive)
accumulation, accumulation by dispossession (Harvey), accumulation by
appropriation (Jason Moore) is all the hot stuff in the left right now
what the economy is and what it is supposed to be

depending on how deep and how broad you want to go, this literature may be helpfulutopia of rules from graeber
planetary bureaucracy, the financialization and bureaucratization is central
people play with this
i just came back from puebla (mexico)
gutierrez, politics of the common in latin america
giovanni Arrighi
what is the financial capital all about
how will you set up the historical analysis
what is the financialization right now


seda:
how do you do strategy meetings? (seda explains a little what we are trying to do)

andrej:
what do we do?
this is slightly different
my own work is in line with what you are trying to do
what we do in our department is very different
it is based on the idea of militant research
something the italians did and that travelled all the way to the argentines
how to intervene in research as an activist
it starts with karl marx and the workers questionnaire he created for workers in a particular factory in france
he wrote an exhaustive list of questions
tension: is this positive scientific knowledge of what is going on in the factory, or is it a tool for organizing?
it was left there
silar james??, in the US, picked this up. he was also part of the group that came up with the term "autonomy"
correspondences is a keyword
autonomous sectors of the workers: women, industrial workers, black people, forgot last category
are going to write about their own work
it became the worker's narrative
finally, when this type of research moved into the italian hot summer: operaismo
it became less an exact form of figuring out what is happening in the factory
but a tool how to use knowledge to organize workers
it was an interesting travel from the US, to France and to Italy
in Italy, they took it to the factories to get the knowledge about workers in factories
and they called this co-research
they were taking stuff from industrial sociology
finding out what is going on in Fiat and Olivetti factories
and organizing workers, most of whom were from the South of Italy
and they were studying the "refusal of work"

the more interesting groups are the ones in Argentina
and Precarious Solidarida in Madrid
people trying to understand the immigrant experience
to follow these groups
and how the composition of work is changing and how we can understand and advance the struggle
as militant researchers
militant research, inquiry

it can have different forms
what we are doing now is oral history of direct action practices in the bay area between 1980 until now (BLM)
this may be interesting
we have two reference points that are practical
one is the experience of people you may know
Kolinko: they published their work on hotlines
they published the process of how they started the research
every step of the research is talked and written about
there was a new form of work (2001-2002)
work in call centers
they became call center workers
they spent time there
and they tried to understand what this work is about
and you can see all the questions they asked themselves and people they work with
and how they can advance the struggle against this kind of work


the other one
is this idea of radical oral history
i think of it as a sub-genre of militant research
most of this is outside of the university
basically radical oral history is about putting different workers together
and what you do is listen
you have your tape recorder back in the days
you have workers talking about their experiences
but these are not only workers
one work along these lines was called: "ours to loose", about squatters in NY (lower east side)
what happens when they moved from being rebels to home owners
what happened there?
they did an extensive research of going and asking questions to everyone that was involved in this project
the oral history, sharing authority
the idea is that both parties, interviewee and the people asking questions are doing co-research
they are all owners of this
nobody owns it, in the sense that everybody does
it is interesting way of thinking about horizontalizing research practices
we try to find out what happened and try to advance the struggle by putting people together in the same room
and then transcribing the stuff, sending it back to them and then back to us
then it becomes a final document after a few lapses
there is a lot of work and there are 50 of us
the idea is to organize: we had fun doing, when one person goes to do an interview
we organize a listening party, and all the participants in the process
we go to a room and listen
then what we do is, we transcribe it collectively
then we send it to the person that was interviewed
and they send it back
and then, we try to introduce the historical and theoretical context
we do another round
and the final product is something that was truly created collectively
this is militant research that is called radical oral history

the translation element of theory and history
history maybe not so much, but the theoretical positioning
to embed these interviews in a theoretical interpretation is the most difficult part
we try to keep it open to people who are the protagonists, and it becomes a long process of negotiation
and the idea is that we are doing this together
it is a form of co-research
we are not imposing our theoretical understanding onto them

seda: 
you are looking at marginalized communities, but we want to study corporations, or power itself. 
in a sense, we want to connect the political economy work with some of the more empirical research (interviewing developers). how do we do that?

we have people doing interviews with people who are employed by twitter
they are trying to find out how the composition of the work is effecting the workplace
they are creating a division between lower employees and the more powerful ones
it always has the double edge
one is to accumulate knowledge and the other is to advances the struggle

seda: 
but part of what we want to do is to expose these companies and their inner workings, so the techniques are used in a different power situation. how does that work?

andrej:
these terms maybe useful
studying up
studying down

laura nader
studying up
the role of the anthropologist is to study power
there are some useful ethnographies that i can send you
these were individual projects
the idea was to figure out from a leftist perspective how a corporation works
they had really interesting results
there is a movement of people doing that
then there is studying down, not marginalize people, but people in struggles
and this permeates our work as well
do we study up and down or both and if we do both, how do we do it?

seda: 
i think we want to do both!?


andrej:
my own work is about doing both
most recent book i wrote
how people are impacted by global capitalism
and how in turn they impact the re-organization of global capitalism
it was a global ethnography
the other way to do is doing this collectively. how do you do research collectively?
we tried, to figure out several theoretical approaches that would be useful to us
we went through "cognitive capitalism" literature and decided that we can't use that framework
so we went to commons and enclosures
and we are acting within that framework
harvey, arrighi, silvia federici and many other people
we did decide on a particular theoretical template of understanding what is going on
we created a common understanding of "through which prism we are going to look at our research"
and this we tried to communicate to the people we are working with
and this is i think key, and this is the translation work that is very important

what will you do when you sit together with the people in the end of january?

seda: 
we want to discuss the current frame of looking at the social impact of technology, we want to argue that this framing focuses us on certain questions and not others.
we then hope that people will think together with us some new questions they can ask, that looks at why certain technologies are being produced, and why they are being produced the way they are, and what are points of intervention after we ask these questions.
then, we hope that we can converge on certain kinds of researc questions that we could share in the future.

adrej:
this is rounds of listening
first you present the project
then they present, based on their own expertise, a response
and the third round would be collectively deciding what questions would be most important to ask

once you accomplish that
once you get to that stage
and you have collectively formulated questions
you are going to ask those questions
and, the end result you are hoping for is?

seda:
we are currently a group of three that has an ongoing discussion.
we hope to enlist some of the people in the room in our project.
expand our conversation together with them.
the meeting is also an opportunity to see how some of the things we have been discussing resonate with people we think may be our allies.
so many ambitions at once.

andrej:
this is the moment where you have to be tremendously patient
people are going to drop out, have time limitations
you want to keep it open and have it as structured as possible
so that people feel that they participate in something that is meaningful
that is what got people excited that we were working with
some people left and many people decided to stay and there was a structure to this
to some extent you are trying to figure out what you are trying to do but there are some protocols
you should decide the core group of researchers
you should decide how to conduct those listening sessions
and get interest back and forth
you have to be tremendously patient cause everything is going to be longer than you planned
the kolinko link is interesting, they are leftists and have boring marxist prose but you will see the process
they are the ones you may have seen in brussels,
they started the islave research
it is the same group

you can also count on us at some point in your research of participating in any way that you decide to be meaningful

seda: maybe one thing we should do during our meeting in brussels is to map future possibilities for continuing the conversation. some of this may be through local meetings. 
in may, i will be in san francisco and we can organize something there

andrej:
that would be great.

to do: follow up on twitter work research and intro to kiki

Kolinko Hotlines:

https://libcom.org/library/hotlines-call-centre-inquiry-communism

No Politics without Inquiry!
http://www.wildcat-www.de/en/material/cs18inqu.htm

Precarias a la Deriva:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCEsKJrKH9c


Militant research in Argentina:

https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/25/from-decomposition-to-inquiry-militant-research-in-argentinas-mtds/

Attached is the history of radical oral history in the US.