A to Z of communisation (Gilles Dauvé)

(This “A to Z” is the third part of Everything Must Go! Abolish Value, published by Little Black Cart Books, Berkeley, California, in 2015.  The first two parts were written by Bruno Astarian: Crisis Activity & Communisation, and Value & its Abolition)

“Some people will find our propositions insane or naïve. We do not expect to convince everyone. If such a thing were possible, it would be very disturbing. We would rather have readers who have to rub their eyes before granting credence to our positions.”

A World Without Money: Communism, 1975

 AUTONOMY                       BLUE COLLAR                    CLASS                       DAILY LIFE

ECOLOGY                      FAMILY                             GIOTTO                              HABITAT     

INSURRECTION                   JAILBREAK                       KARL  (MARX)                   LABOUR    

MONEY               NON-ECONOMY          OBFUSCATION                POLITICS               QUERY  

REVOLUTION               SEX             TIME  (IS OF THE ESSENCE)                       UNLABELLED

VALUE                        WORK          XENOPHILIA                      YESTERDAY                      ZOMIAS

AUTONOMY

In 2012, radical Oakland occupiers made it clear that “no permission would be asked, no demands would be made, no negotiation with the police and city administration” : nobody or no body had the power to grant them anything relevant, so there was no point in bargaining with wannabe representatives.

Participatory decision-making implies a communal capacity often called “self-empowerment”. Autonomy is inclusive. As participants share an equal stake in the creation of a different world, the most important thing in their lives becomes their relation to others, and this interdependence extends far beyond the circle of relatives and friends.

In a different time and place, some people have stressed the spontaneity of many recent Chinese strikes, demonstrations, protests, street blockades and riots. Other observers have emphasized the careful planning that takes place beforehand. Yet organization and spontaneity are two sides of the same coin. A self-initiated work-stoppage needs previous secret talks and meetings, and its continuity needs durable independent information channels (such as a mutual help hotline) and decision-making structures.

However, the ideology of autonomy is one of the up-to-date nostrums. Autonomy is acting by oneself:  it says nothing about what this individual or collective self actually does. In the ebbs and flows of social battles, most occupations and strikes meet the limit of one company, one neighbourhood, one town, one city. Workplace, neighbourhood, kinship, etc., create a potential community of struggle which by its own strength alone can certainly self-manage an occupation, a strike, even community life for a while… but it is not enough to break the log jam.

How does a community of struggle create more than its struggle ? Can it go beyond rituals of social partnership ? How does solidarity not become an end in itself ? When can collective will wield its transformative power?

Unlike a book divided into chapters which gradually make their point from beginning to end, this A to Z is more like a dictionary in which each entry is to be read in relation to all the others. It is by accident that autonomy begins with the first letter of the alphabet. But it is no accident that self-activity should be a starting point. Autonomy is a necessary condition of the whole A to Z of communisation. It does not encapsulate the whole process.

Occupational Hazards. The Rise & Limitation of Occupy Oakland, CAL Press, 2012

New Strikes in China, gongchao.org

Eli Friedman, Insurgency Trap. Labor Politics in Post-socialist China, Cornell U.P., 2014

A Contribution to the Critique of Political Autonomy, troploin site, 2008

See INSURRECTION, CLASS, LABOUR 

Carbuncles

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 18 May 1874

---

Dear Kugelmann

I have received everything: your letters (including some friendly notes from your dear wife and Fränzchen), the ‘Meyer’ ^[1] (police-socialist, faiseur, ^[2] literary scribbler), the cuttings from the Frankfurter, etc, and finally a letter from Madame Tenge.

I am very grateful for your, your family’s and Madame Tenge’s friendly interest in my progress. But you do me an injustice if you ascribe my failure to write to any other cause than an uncertain state of health, which continually interrupts my work, then goads me on to make up for the time lost by neglecting all other duties (letters included), and finally puts a man out of humour and makes him disinclined for activity.

After my return from Harrogate I had an attack of carbuncles, then my headaches returned, insomnia, etc, so that I had to spend from the middle of April to 5 May at Ramsgate (seaside). Since then I have been feeling much better, but am far from being quite well. My specialist (Dr Gumpert ^[3] of Manchester) insists upon my going to Karlsbad and would like to make me travel there as soon as possible, but I must finally complete the French translation which has come to a full stop, and, apart from that, I should much prefer it if I could meet you there.

In the meantime, while I was unable to write, I worked through a lot of important new material for the second volume. But I cannot start on its final working out until the French edition is completed and my health fully restored.

So I have by no means yet decided how I shall spend the summer.

The progress of the German labour movement (ditto in Austria) is wholly satisfactory. In France the absence of a theoretical foundation and of practical common sense is very evident. In England at the moment only the rural labour movement shows any advance; the industrial workers have first of all to get rid of their present leaders. When I denounced them at the Hague Congress I knew that I was letting myself in for unpopularity, slander, etc, but such consequences have always been a matter of indifference to me. Here and there people are beginning to see that in making that denunciation I was only doing my duty.

In the United States our Party has to fight against great difficulties, partly economic, partly political, but it is making headway. The greatest obstacle there is the professional politicians, who immediately try to falsify every new movement and change it into a new ‘company-promoting business’.

Notwithstanding all diplomatic moves, a new war is inevitable au peu plus tôt, au peu plus tard, ^[4] and before the ending of this there will hardly be violent popular movements anywhere, or, at the most, they will remain local and unimportant.

The visit of the Russian emperor is giving the London police a great deal to do and the government here will be glad to get rid of the man as soon as possible. As a precautionary measure they requisitioned forty police (mouchards), with the notorious police commissioner Plocke at their head (Ali Baba and the forty thieves), from the French government, to watch the Poles and Russians here (during the tsar’s stay). The so-called amnesty petition of the London Poles is the work of the Russian embassy; in answer to it the Poles here issued an appeal, written and signed by Wróblewski, ^[5] which is addressed to the English and which has been distributed in large numbers at the Sunday meetings in Hyde Park. The English press (with very few exceptions) is obsequious – the tsar is after all ‘our guest’ – but for all that the real feeling against Russia is incomparably more hostile than it has been since the Crimean War, and the entry of a Russian princess into the royal family ^[6] has aroused rather than disarmed suspicion. The facts – the arbitrary abrogation of the decisions concerning the Black Sea in the Paris Treaty, the conquests and trickeries in Central Asia, etc, irritate John Bull, and Disraeli has no chance of remaining at the helm for any length of time if he continues Gladstone’s unctuous foreign policy.

With my warmest greetings to your dear family and Madame Tenge.

Yours
KM

Political art group sets up Roman-style arena for refugees to be devoured by tigers

The Berlin-based collective Center for Political Beauty has launched a provocative stunt called “Eating Refugees.” It targets a law that prohibits refugees from flying into the EU without a visa.

Known for its provocative actions blending theater and political activism, the collective of activists known as the Center for Political Beauty launched its latest intervention on Thursday. Called “Eating Refugees – Distress and Games” (“Flüchtlinge fressen – Not und Spiele”), it is an unusual spectacle.

Outside the Maxim Gorki theater in Berlin are four tigers in a cage. The caretaker is dressed like a Roman gladiator; his insignia refers to the European Union. In the background is a picture of Germany’s President Joachim Gauck.

A huge poster shows a little girl asking her mother: “Why don’t refugees just take a plane?” in reaction to the countless people who drown while crossing at sea or suffer trying to reach Europe on foot.

Against this setting, the group announced it was looking for refugees desperate enough to be ready to be devoured by those Libyan tigers. In a video, the activists claim that Angela Merkel and the German government, like a Roman emperor during a gladiatorial combat, have to power to stop this from happening with a simple thumbs-up gesture.

On the anti-Islamophobia ideology

(translated from the french)

The intention of this text is to reply to those among the anarcho-communists who are engaged in the fight against “Islamophobia” and who, for that reason, bar all criticism of Islam and endorse a theory of race as a social class, in an atmosphere of increasing tension, accusations of racism, and even actual physical attacks.

The term “Islamophobia,” which probably dates back to the early twentieth century, only recently came into widespread use to designate racism against “Arabs.” This corresponded to a shift from racism against North Africans to terror or horror aroused by the Muslims’ religion. Immigrants and their descendants, formerly rejected for “ethnic” reasons, are discriminated against today for their supposed adherence to an original culture identified with one of its dimensions—the Muslim religion—which many do not even practice, although some observe certain traditional customs.

Through this artifice, religion is assimilated to “race” as a cultural matrix in what amounts to a “cultural mystification (…) by which an entire cross-section of individuals is assigned, on the basis of their origin or physical appearance, to the category of ‘Muslims,’ silencing any criticism of Islam, which is perceived, not as a critique of religion, but directly as a manifestation of racism.”[1] While Claude Guillon sees “contempt” in this “antiracism of idiots,” [2] we mainly recognize the specter haunting the left—third-worldism. According to this ideology, which entails uncritical support of the “oppressed” against their “oppressor,” those who saw the “colonized” as the exploited people par excellence during the Algerian war unconditionally supported the NLF. Or take the Vietnam committees during the Vietnam war, for whom denunciation of the Americans meant supporting the Viet Minh and the politics of Ho Chi Minh, chanting his name and waving his picture at every demonstration. This scenario was repeated with the Iranian revolution in 1979 and with the pro-Palestinians. Today, taking the Kurds’ defense usually implies supporting the PKK and waving Oçalan’s picture. Such was the process by which, little by little, the third-worldist perspective abandoned the proletariat as revolutionary subject and replaced it with the colonized, then the immigrant, the descendant of immigrants… and finally the believer. While at first, third-worldism promoted cultural relativism, its successors adopted culturalism, which posits cultural differences to explain social relationships. SOS Racisme’s great manipulation in the 1980s made this shift a doctrine that ultimately engendered all the excesses we’re witnessing today, in particular the Muslim identity assigned to “Arab” immigrants and their descendants as a whole.

What is wrong with free money?

by Gruppen Gegen Kapital und Nation

Proposals for a Universal Basic Income or Citizen Income and variants thereof enjoy sympathy from different camps: from conservatives like Richard Nixon¹, from libertarians who consider themselves disciples of the free market², from liberals like Martin Wolf³, from social democrats like Paul Krugman⁴ and from people who consider themselves Marxists⁵.

However, what each of these proponents actually mean and want with a Universal Basic Income is wildly divergent. Centrally, the Marxists want an end to the “compulsion to work”, liberals and libertarians rather want to provide “incentives to work”.

Yet, despite these differing and at times opposing aims, these proposals share more than just a name: they share wrong premises about the capitalist mode of production and the state which watches over it.

In the following we want to first critique these shared wrong premises about productivity, the welfare state and the budget. Then, we draw out the contradiction of some left-wing supporters who, on the one hand, insist on unity with libertarian, liberal and social democratic Universal Basic Income proposals in order to acquire a whiff of seriousness and, on the other hand, continuously deny this unity.

Political Fundamentals and the UK Brexit Referendum

Tony Norfield from here

What explains the desperation of British capitalism and Conservative Party in the lead up to the Brexit referendum on 23 June? Opinion polls have shifted in favour of a Leave vote and, while the accuracy of the polls is always in doubt, a shift towards Leave seems evident from widespread vox pop views in the media, in the panic of the Remain camp and in the financial market setbacks for sterling’s exchange rate. Equity markets have also been hit, and not just in the UK. As a sign of desperation, the Remain camp has even called upon the Labour Party’s lumbering has-been, Gordon Brown, to add his weight to what looks like a failing balance. Her Majesty has so far been allowed to stay above the dispute, just about. One can imagine that if the polls get any worse for Remain, then Downing Street could try to prompt a Royal appeal to her loyal subjects to do the right thing. Where has this revolt of popular sentiment come from?

My previous coverage of the Brexit referendum has focused on the situation facing the British ruling class in a world where its economic and political interests are clearly bound up with Europe, but where there has been a minority view that an alternative is possible ‘outside’, especially in a context of European economic crisis. But the significant support for Leave shows that this has underestimated a key point. What might otherwise be considered simply as popular disgruntlement with political elites – ‘vote Leave to teach them a lesson’ – is better explained as a widespread view that these elites have broken their pact with the people. The ‘Leave’ support, however disruptive it might be to existing power structures, is based on an appeal to the British state to restore the status quo ante. To understand this point, it needs to be put in context, one that will also confirm that this is not a debate in which one can take sides.

Love, Sex, etc.

via Blind Field Journal

  ❤ of a Heartless World

By Maya Andrea Gonzalez and Cassandra Troyan.  Of the political-economy of romance under capitalism, Eva Illouz describes the “paradox of the romantic bond” — that “although it can be motivated by self-interest, it is fully convincing only if at a certain point the individual proves his or her disinterestedness.”… READ MORE

On the Future Genealogy of the Date

By Sophie Lewis. What would the most thrilling and intimate moments in our collective social reproduction feel like in the cities of our dreams? It is far harder to answer this than to identify the lack in what we’ve currently got. …READ MORE

Sex as Cultural Form: The Antinomies of Sexual Discourse

by Chris Chitty. To the extent that our lives are bombarded, minute by minute, with advertising come-ons, the latest lyrical euphemism for a sexual act and gossip of the affair of some acquaintance or media superstar, and to the extent that the critique of sexuality has become thoroughly and institutionally routinized, one is tempted to state an obvious fact: sex has become excruciatingly banal. . … READ MORE

Capitalism and Gay Identity

The Birth and Short Lived Life of Gay Marxism: Capitalism And Gay Identity in Context^*  by Rosemary Hennessy

The Stonewall uprising in New York City in June 1969 was the most immediate catalyst for the formation of the gay liberation movement. Before the end of the summer of 1969, the Gay Liberation Front had formed in the United States, and within the following year gay liberation groups sprang into existence across the country (D’Emilio 1983, 232–33). Gay liberation was itself an outcome of the adjustments of late capitalism that spawned the general international insurgency circa 1968. Most immediately, it was inspired by the black power movement and the rise of feminism — both of which included fractions that aimed to articulate the historical relationship between culture and class, local and global forces. As in much of the New Left, there was general agreement within gay liberation thinking that capitalism was oppressive. Many gay liberation manifestos at least rhetorically drew connections between capitalism and repressive sexuality, racism and imperialism. But the gay liberation movement was by no means thoroughly influenced by marxism or a united socialist front, and its internal debates sorted out in what seem in hindsight to be predictable ways. There were those who, despite references to capitalism, basically focused on and advocated for cultural change, and there were those more avowedly marxist groups that stressed that political and cultural concerns needed to be linked to more global economic structures in some way.1

Leaves fall in Spring

by insipidities

While class conflict remains an integral part of the production process which it must not disrupt, class struggle must in a sense be domesticated. […] Class conflict, therefore, generally breaks into open war only when it goes outdoors, particularly since the coercive arm of capital is outside the wall of the productive unit.

Ellen Meiksins Wood

That is the story, and that is the ideology, of revolutionary reformism.  Progress is the movement of class consciousness from inside the productive unit to engagement with conditions ‘outdoors’. It is subjectivity’s left-handed ascent of the spiral stair that, by necessity, it undertakes through the edifice of the state. As it escapes outdoors, the subject drags with it the accumulated forces of production otherwise locked within the domesticated class struggle: what suppresses also realises; what abolishes also transforms; what releases also redirects. Progress is always progress through constraint: a perpetual movement between contained and overflowing productive forces as it also condenses into the upturns and downturns of a directing consciousness – which may only engage those contradictions stripped bare before it.

The subject emerges as that factor of social production which ensures becoming is fixed into the historical continuum through expropriation of the mediations of the state – thus confirming the teleological precepts that have predicted it. Within Marxist schematics, the subject’s movement is ‘real’ to the extent that it both extricates itself from and instigates state mediated relations – the state is always that form taken by the objective. At each successive destination, the subject’s progress is reevaluated as the transposition, as it were, from the formal to the actual.

The Withering of the State

by Paul Mattick

These days, critics of electoral politics can sit smugly and enjoy the deepening disarray of the political parties; the worries of the 1%, who really want little more from their governments than low taxes, high subsidies, social peace and quiet, and just enough military action to keep the world safe for democracy; and the panicked musings of the political pundits trying to make sense of it all and reclaim their lost function of predictors and explainers. Of course, when (as is most likely) Bernie has finally been done in by the Democratic machine and “progressives” are asked to hold their noses—as they now must do in every election—to vote for the hated Hillary in order to stop the dreadful Donald, it will seem like just one more dreary step downhill, the apparently inevitable result of electoral efforts not to sacrifice the good for the impossible best.

But there does seem to be something special this time. For one thing, both of the most dynamic contenders, Trump and Sanders, apparently entered the lists without expecting to win, and were only moved to give it the old college try when they discovered an unexpected level of response among the voting public. This is another side of the fact of the nearly complete absence of believable contenders beyond those two (and Clinton, of course, but without Sanders she would have been the only one on her side). The Republican field featured an astonishing array of nitwits and nonentities; the fact that Cruz—a man so obnoxious in policy and personality that he is the most hated official in his own repulsive political camp—was the last non-Donald standing says it all. This reflects the absence of any political content to Republican politics but the most simple-minded fealty to the richest Americans combined with assurances of devotion to the emotional needs of increasingly dispossessed white working- and lower-middle-class people.

Hailing Hydra

Hydra is a criminal organization dedicated to the achievement of world domination through terrorist and subversive activities on various fronts, resulting in a fascist New World Order. Its extent of operations is worldwide; always attempting to elude the ongoing counter-espionage operations by S.H.I.E.L.D. Hydra is funded by Baron Strucker’s personal fortune, based on his recovered hoard of Nazi plunder from World War II, and funds established by the original leaders of the Japanese secret society that became Hydra.

The organization is run with behind-the-scenes direction by Baron Strucker (who was one of the people to assume the role of Supreme Hydra). Under him is a central ruling committee; under them are individual division chiefs, and under them are the rank and file members and special agents.

In order to become a member of Hydra, an individual must be a legal adult willing to submit to a thorough investigation of the applicant’s personal background and to swear a death-oath of loyalty to Hydra and its principles.

“Hail, Hydra! Immortal Hydra! We shall never be destroyed! Cut off a limb, and two more shall take its place! We serve none but the Master—as the world shall soon serve us! Hail Hydra!”

—The Hydra Oath 

Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism

Paul Mason gehört zu den wenigen Menschen, die es schaffen, im gegenwärtigen «Interregnum» den nur allzu notwendigen «Optimismus des Willens» aufrechtzuerhalten. Von seiner inspirierten Analyse der radikalen Demokratiebewegungen ab 2011 («Warum es überall knallt»), über seinen mutigen Journalismus während des deutsch-europäischen Putsches in Griechenland 2015 gelingt es Mason, in den Bewegungen der Zustände die wirkliche Bewegung zu entdecken, die es vermag, die Zustände aufzuheben. Nun führt er sein Projekt fort, in einem großen Aufschlag, wie man ihn seit Beginn der Krise kaum noch erwarten durfte: Während die Welt scheinbar ins Chaos driftet, findet er in den Tendenzen des Bestehenden die Saat eines Postkapitalismus. Der neoliberale Informationskapitalismus, so Mason, untergräbt die Möglichkeit seines eigenen Überlebens, während – in den Nischen der solidarischen Ökonomie und in den Staatskanzleien der europäischen Peripherie – andernorts das Neue schon im Entstehen begriffen ist. Natürlich stellt sich daraufhin die alte Frage: Was genau ist nun zu tun? Und wer zum Teufel tut es?

Moderation: Barbara Fried

weitere Infos/ further information: rosalux

College

– from The New Activism of Liberal Arts Colleges by Nathan Heller

Through the late eighties and the early nineties, liberals on college campuses often spoke of “multiculturalism”: a reform of the curriculum to reflect the many traditions of the world. As the doctrine gained adherents, though, it was criticized by the academic left—not least, by many nonwhite scholars—who worried that it made a luxury commodity of otherness.

Marc Blecher, an Oberlin professor of politics, had problems with the program at the time, in part, he said, because thinking in terms of cultural identities often leaves out a critical factor: class. He believes the problem goes back to the early days of boomer politics, which he experienced as an activist at Cornell, in the sixties. “When we opposed the Vietnam War, we didn’t take seriously that all the draft dodging we were doing was screwing black people and poor people and forcing them to go fight,” Blecher said one afternoon, in his office. He had a gray beard and a somewhat stark, feral intensity; as he spoke, he put one leg, but not the other, on his desk.

In time, the sixties gave rise to more identity-bounded movements: Black Power, second-wave feminism, gay liberation. Class was seldom fully in the mix, except, maybe, in a generalized Marxist way. Blecher suggests that this is how we ended up with market-friendly multiculturalism and, in universities, an almost consumerist conception of identity politics.

Identity politics used to be obligate: I am a woman of color, because the world sees me as such. Now there is an elective element: I identify as X and Y and Z right now. That can distract from the overriding class privilege of élite education. “Intersectionality is taken as a kind of gospel around here,” Blecher complained. For this he put a lot of the blame on Comparative American Studies, an influential program among Oberlin activists.

Reflections: antisemitism, anti-imperialism and liberal communitarianism

by Marcel Stoetzler

The politically explosive modern form of antisemitism is the one that is central to the modern, conservative-revolutionary reaction to modernity. Two of the key problems in the analysis of (and struggle against) antisemitism are, to what extent does the modern right-wing critique of capitalist modernity overlap with its left-wing counterpart, and why does the latter sometimes fail to distinguish itself unambiguously from this mortal enemy? In varying contexts, from the Weimar KPD, via Foucault on Iran, to contemporary Labour politicians, some on the left grant too much to their enemy’s enemies, and are perhaps too fuzzy in their thinking to distinguish their own longing for the community of an emancipated future from their enemies’ longing for the racially or spiritually purified, re-born community of whichever reactionary fantasy.

The principal strength and attraction of antisemitism lies in its being beyond ordinary politics: antisemitism is meta-political. Both on the right and the left its value is that it connects to the opposite side. The ambiguous meaning of the word ‘socialism’ in its name was one of National Socialism’s strengths, although Hitler made clear enough that his was a socialism ‘the German way’, namely without the corrosive Jewish-Marxist bits about class struggle. Although its specifics put Nazism in many respects into a category all of its own, it also belongs into the wider category of nationalist socialisms that affirm the capitalist mode of production but are ‘anticapitalistic’ in their rejection of this or that detail of capitalist circulation and reproduction – greedy bankers who behave like locust swarms, that kind of thing – and seek a solution to ‘the social question’ at the level of the nation. There are many of those, and they are not about to go away. They are by nature receptive to antisemitism if and when it seems opportune for whichever contextual – cultural, historical – reasons.