Workshop I
The Long Memory of Cocaine
Modernity and the transformations of value and labour

05/10 - 10/10/2009
In English language

By Max Hinderer (D)
With Jorge Hurtado (BOL) & John Barker (GB)


To us, modernity is not a phenomenon of style, rather it begins with the first colonial conquest, its enrichment and its genocides: Eduardo Galeano’s “Open Veins of Latin America” (1973) describes the structural exploitation of Latin American resources and the productive power of its inhabitants through the colonial centuries to the present day. The exploited silver and gold shipped from the colonies to Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries generated an incredible accumulation of capital here, that took place at the same time as the process of “original accumulation” in England described by Marx, and that may be regarded as the advent of the modern capitalist age. But what silver was to the Habsburg monarchs of Spain, cocaine was to the Thatcher / Reagan era.
The history and upheavals of the modern age are reflected particularly clearly, however, in the un-relation between the natural coca leaf, millenarian crop plant of the Andes regions, and cocaine, a German pharmaceutical product from the late nineteenth century. Yet it is the long memory of cocaine that today links the colonial exploitation of the silver mines with Wall Street and the producers of immaterial labour.
The workshop offers an economy-critical interpretation of the relation of modernity, ###

the un-relation of coca / cocaine and immaterial labour.

On 10/10/2009, the workshop will visit the steirischer herbst “Conference of Elective Affinities“ (with Krassimira Kruschkowa, Marcus Steinweg, Bernhard Waldenfels and many more).


Max Hinderer is an author and art critic who lives in Berlin.

In 1971 John Barker, born in North London in 1948, was sentenced to ten years in prison as a member of the “Angry Brigade” and began writing. He was involved in drug deals in 1986. After escaping, he was arrested in 1990 and sentenced to five years in prison. His novel “Futures” was published by DuMont in Cologne in 2001. Barker regularly publishes political and cultural-critical essays, i.a. for London’s Mute Magazine.

Jorge Hurtado Gumucio is a psychiatrist and specialised in psychotropic substances. As such he investigates the benefit of chewing coca leaves to combat cocaine addiction. He is also director and founder of the Coca Museum La Paz, Bolivia, and sees himself as a drug-political activist for the concerns of Andine cultures. Hurtado has published various books on the topic of coca/cocaine, including “Cocaine – the Legend”, La Paz 1995, that have been translated into English and French.


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