The Nathan Barleys of the movement of movements
I’d never really read Adbusters before, but of course we had a copy lying around our bourgeois anarchist congress. Some people are enthusiastic about the magazine because of its rejection of hair-shirted leftist opposition to design, but it seems to be more like a recapitulation of the worst parts of advertising ‘design’, the sort of thing you see in the Weekend on Sunday and think, “Oh, I see what you’re doing, very clever you wankers.” If you want a genuinely beautiful radical magazine, Greenpepper is a better alternative.
Adbusters also seems a bit like Counterpunch with nicer typography, adopting the same viewpoint that editorial intervention or any kind of quality control is oppressive. Which is not to say that a couple of articles weren’t good, particularly an article by Žižek including his hilarious analysis of Isreal-Palestine and an unexpected call for slums to be recognised as the site of the new proletariat. Over the page, there’s a so-so article by Michael Hardt which does include a very good short description of the hegemony of intellectual labour:
Although only a small portion of global labor is involved in such immaterial production, its model of decentralized network collaboration has become dominant and tends to influence all other types of production.
In other words, the hegemony of intellectual labour does not mean that everyone is doing intellectual labour; it means those not doing intellectual labour are increasingly organised as if they were.
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