{from Chris Chrappa}

Hey, I read on this website (this is totally irrelevant, but anyway)
a bunch of people who were very furious about your graffiti article, and
they all seemed to take great pleasure in deriding you and offering to
graffiti your house. I presume these were the folks you mentioned in your
article.
They pretty obviously feel that we live in a neo-classical world
where all space is occupied by the winners in the fairly practiced
enterprise of bartering and such. Therefore, the losers should respect the
fairly obtained space because, well, the losers lost and if they'd won
they'd have the same right the winners have. Also, they feel that there's
other, more "constructive" ways for the losers to assert their rights and
speak out---starting zines, or websites, or just flat out protesting---all
ways that are granted by the law and don't involve gross negligence
for....well, shit that isn't theirs.
I suppose it follows in some weird way that, from the preceding
considerations, graffitying up one place is as good as any other----hence,
spraypaint a building or an advertisement billboard, or spraypaint Crispy's
house....makes no difference, the point is the places are not their's to
decide to disfigure. I may have some of the fine print wrong, but in
general they think that all of this is self-evident and makes you a stupid
ivory tower professor (QED...ha ha).
What they fail to grasp is that you are not presupposing the
neo-classical economy, the Adam Smith or Robert Nozick world where anyone
who "mixes their labor" with the land is entitled to it. In other words,
they assume that a state of affairs is justified by arising from the free
choices of the people involved. They CHOSE it. Moreover, capitalism
delivers the goods. So people are free, interact freely, trade freely, and
whoever gets whatever is justified by this freedom, and also the key
proviso--necessary for the theory to make any sense---that this infringes
upon no one else's freedom.
Balzac said every fortune begins with a crime. That is, infringes
upon someone else's freedom. Not every trader is the same, and it's clear
that traders with capital looking to purchase labor power are very different
than those without capital forced to sell their labor power. Capital then
becomes something more than a sum of goods or money. It becomes a power
relation. And Rousseau said it best when he pointed out that property can
be one of two things: either that which makes one immune to outside
influence, or that which gives someone power over others. So a difference
arises between local situations where holdings are roughly equal and a
transaction is accomplished, and situations where certain parties own and
hold capital.
It's easy to imagine. Say we're at the end of a working day and we're
going to give labor and capital users their due. Each is given a certain
amount in proportion to the amount they've used. Labor is easy: number of
people times hours worked. What about capital? We could weigh it, and pay
for it according to the bulk used. Better, however, to measure it
monetarily and pay on the basis of its WORTH. But what's it worth? That is
of course a function of how profitable it is. But, you see, that depends on
how much output is paid to it. Understand: we justify the rate of profit by
the value of capital, but the value of capital is a function of the profit.
This means that the business of capital and its value is political, and has
next to nothing to do with the "losers" who actually deal with it.
Put it like this: If two people are competing entrepreneurs and one of
them gets a slight leg up on the other---say, one gets a larger stake in the
market---then that guy can just lower his prices below cost and drive the
other sucker out of business. This method is as old as they come. It's
called predatory pricing, made famous by none other than JD Rockafeller, who
used it regularly to lift Standard Oil up to the heavens. Then you just use
your larger stake and snatch up all the machinery or corner markets or
whatever. Large scale production is obviously more efficient than small
scale, so more little fellows are driven out the bigger you get. Then you
can buy advertising, lawyers, and the grail that is political sway that the
mom and pop suckers just can't afford. Finally, you can go for the gold by
using coalitional strategies and pool resources with another big shot, drive
more little suckers out of the market, and then share the booty accordingly.
Before you know it, you own wall mart. The motto is, as Alan
Garfinkel said, "Get them before they get you." Starting off with equality,
which we must acknowledge is terrifically unstable, if not ideal, you wind
up with, in actu, a concretization of something more or less stable
involving a large amount of poor people and a small fraction of a fraction
that holds all of the capital. Small traders are exorcised like demons and
then have to "sell their labor." Then the rich get richer, and everyone is
fucked by their promontory holdings.
People who enter into this argument often mistake an argument for
how it ought to be for a statement of how it is. Perhaps Nozick ought to be
right, but he's not, as anyone can see from the fact that the masses of
people do not set any relevant economic standard, and for the most part are
constrained to accept whatever the great monoliths proffer. "Constraint" is
an important word, and I think that the idealism of a great many
neo-classicists stems from taking the word too lightly---as if being born
free and equal meant that we stayed free and equal, come what may.
The way I see it, you were just pointing out the obvious and then
saying that graffiti is a particularly powerful way for people deprived of
any sort of stake, or even a voice, in this maelstrom to make themselves
heard by the right "ears," so to speak. At the very least, it's a way of
reminding everyone that THEY EXIST, and don't you fuckin forget it.
Now in what way would spraypainting your house, capriciously and
really just out of spite, be in any shape or form related to the preceding?
It isn't.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Later, Chris.

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