“No Individual Can Resist”: Minima Moralia as Critique of Forms of Life (Jaeggi, 2005)

by Rahel Jaeggi (Constellations, 2005)

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Can forms of life be criticized? Can we say whether particular forms of life are good, successful, or even rational? Since Kant it has been broadly accepted that happiness or the good life, in contrast to the morally right, cannot be determined philosophically. And since Rawls the ethical content of forms of life has been regarded, in view of the irreducible ethical pluralism of modern societies, as not up for debate. Philosophy has thus withdrawn from the Socratic question of how one should live and restricted itself to the problem of how, given the multiplicity of mutually incommensurable “comprehensive doctrines,” a just common life can be secured as the “coexistence” of different forms of life. The question of how we lead our lives has been consigned to the domain of unquestioned preferences or irreducible and unchallengeable identities. As with taste, there is no quarreling with forms of life.

This restraint is alien to Adorno’s critical theory.

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See also by Jaeggi:

• Alienation (2014)
• Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory (2018)
• Critique of Forms of Life (2018)

Minima Moralia by Adorno

A world without money: communism (Les Amis de 4 Millions de Jeunes Travailleurs, 1975-76)

Un Monde Sans Argent: Le Communisme was originally published in three parts, as three separate pamphlets, in France, between 1975-6. It was produced by Dominique Blanc, shortly after the dissolution of the Organisation des Jeunes Travailleurs révolutionnaires. The name Quatre Millions de Jeune Travailleurs was apparently ‘adopted’ from a 1971 PSU youth publication (Parti Socialiste Unifié – a French Socialist Party), presumably to satisfy French publishing laws, and texts continued to be published under this name through the 1970’s including the widely distributed tract A Bas Le Proletariat/Vive Le Communisme.

PDF: English / French

Mattick and Council Communism in Miserable Times: Critique Between Defeat and Crisis

A reading list by A New Institute for Social Research, 2021

See also: Theses on the Council Concept

A few accounts of the emergence of the tendency

• Pozzoli, “Paul Mattick and Council Communism”
• Bonacchi, “The Council Communists Between the New Deal and Fascism”
• Baum, “The Frankfurt School and Council Communism”
• Canne-Meijer, “Origins of the Movement for Workers’ Councils in Germany”
• Mattick, “Council Communism”
• Roth, Marxism in a Lost Century: A Biography of Paul Mattick

New theory, new practice

• Living Marxism, “Against the Stream”
• Canne-Meijer, “The Rise of a New Labor Movement”

Against and beyond the old movements

• Korsch, “Marxism and the Present Task of the Proletarian Class Struggle”
• Wagner, “Theses on Bolshevism”
• Appel, “Marxism and State Communism”
• Mattick, “Karl Kautsky: From Marx to Hitler”
• Rühle, “The Struggle Against Fascism Begins With the Struggle Against Bolshevism”

The critique of organization

• Pannekoek, “Party and Working Class”
• Mattick, “Pannekoek’s ‘Party and Working Class'”
• Pannekoek, “General Remarks on the Question of Organisation”
• Moss, “On the Impotence of Revolutionary Groups”
• Mattick, “Spontaneity and Organisation”

From depression to fascist war

• Korsch, “Planning New Depressions”
• Living Marxism, “The Future of Unemployment”
• Mattick, “The Great Depression and the New Deal”
• Langerhans, “The Next World Crisis, the Second World War, and the World Revolution”
• Adorno, “Theses on Need”
• Living Marxism, “The Jitterbugs”
• Living Marxism, “The War is Permanent:”Part One, Part Two
• Coffinet, “What Destroyed Democracy?: An Analysis of Capitalist Technology”
• Adorno, “Novissimum Organum”
• Horkheimer, “The Authoritarian State”
• Mattick, “How New is the ‘New Order’ of Fascism?”
• Rühle, “Which Side to Take?”

Mattick’s critical theory vs. postwar society

• Mattick, “Nationalism and Socialism”
• Mattick, “The Economics of Cybernation”
• Mattick, critical introduction to the GIK’s Fundamental Principles
• Mattick, Critique of Marcuse
• Mattick, “Capitalism and Ecology”
• Mattick, “The Crisis of the Mixed Economy”
• Mattick, “The Destruction of Money”
• Mattick, “Authority and Democracy in the United States”
• Mattick, “The New Capitalism and the Old Class Struggle”
• Mattick, interview with Lotta Continua
• Mattick, Marxism: Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie?
• Marramao, “Theory of Crisis and the Problem of Constitution” 

The Economic Foundations of Council Society (Canne-Meijer, 1948)

1954, Henk Canne Meijer and Gé Hoogland

by Henk Canne-Meijer

Originally published in Dutch in Radencommunisme, 1948, as part of the Dutch and German communist left’s debate about the period of transition from capitalism to communism. The text later appeared in pamphlet form in 1972, from which this translation was made. – via marxists.org. See also: The Dutch and German Communist Left (1900-1968) by Philippe Bourrinet

Preface

Only about a year ago we accomplished a new, a fourth, edition of the study by the Dutch prewar Group of International Communists, which first appeared in 1931: The Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution.

As this G.I.C. published a second edition in 1935, it wrote in a preface: “At present the politico-economic ideal of the masses, of either socialist and communist or of catholic, christian or of neutral workers, envisages the State as the big, general caretaker of their interests. The practical implication is that the masses are orientated towards state capitalism, even if they are not conscious of it.“

The preface payed attention to the fact that this situation had its origins in a truth of experience from the period that lies behind us; that the conditions of struggle are completely different in the forthcoming period; that henceforth the self-determination of the masses, born from the necessities of the struggle, becomes the guiding principle of the new ordering of social life.

Under these circumstances the “Fundamental Principles” became a theoretical writing against old state socialist conceptions in the first place.

How these necessities of the struggle and, accordingly, the new experiences have articulated themselves was the problem that occupied Jan Appel, Henk Canne Meijer and B.A. Sijes in this study of 1946, as former members of the G.I.C. (who had fused with the Communistenbond Spartacus). At present, parties and parliaments lose significance and interest. Be it with clarity, or in part still confused, the workers generate waves of strikes and enterprise occupations throughout the whole of Europe.

November 1972
Spartacusbond and Uitgeverij De Vlam

Onward Barbarians (Endnotes, 2020)

An anti-government protester returns a tear gas canister to police during clashes in Santiago, Chile, on March 6, 2020. Esteban Felix / AP

by Endnotes, Dec 2020

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At the beginning of May 2020, hunger riots erupted in Santiago, Chile. Lockdowns had deprived men and women of their incomes to the point of near starvation. A large movement of self-organized community kitchens soon spread across the country. Later in the month, riots spread through Mexico in response to the police murder of Giovanni López — a construction worker who had been arrested for not wearing a mask — while thousands of despairing migrant workers broke the curfew in India. Some Amazon warehouse workers in the US and Germany had begun to strike in protest at poor COVID-19 safety protocols. (1) Yet these stirrings of workers’ struggle in the world’s largest retailer were quickly drowned out, at the end of May, by a mass movement of unprecedented size that swept across the US in revulsion at the live-streamed police murder of George Floyd. Largely initiated by black residents of Minneapolis, the uprising was quickly joined by Americans from every place, race and class. In the first riots and demos one could even spot a few supportive militiamen in a Querfront worthy of the age of QAnon. (2)

A Guide to Value-Form Theory

via reification of persons and personification of things (2021)

It’s winter in the middle of a global pandemic. You have time on your hands and you like to read. Maybe you’ve stumbled across Heinrich twitter and want to know what the hell is going on? Maybe you’ve read Michael Heinrich’s Introduction to all 3 volumes of Capital or you listen to (and patronize) Reel Abstractions, but you still want to read more value-form theory (at least until Science of Value comes out?)

This blog post will introduce you to other important contributions and contributors to value-form theory. I have tried my best to include free links to all of the readings. If the reading does not have a link, you may be able to find it somewhere else for free online. I am also happy to take suggestions for what to add. I wrote this quick and off the top of my head. 

The Big Takeover

by Jarrod Shanahan, Hard Crackers, Jan 7th, 2021

On January 6th a determined mob from across the United States descended on Washington, D.C. They rumbled with police, overturned barricades, breached the perimeter of the United States Capitol, and smashed their way into the building itself – all while both houses were in session. Inside, the insurgents played cat and mouse with police and federal agents, gleefully traipsing the evacuated halls of Congress and the Senate, and marauded through the offices of high-level politicians, who escaped a direct confrontation by a matter of minutes. The scene at the Capitol was replicated in miniature across the US, with large crowds menacing state houses in Washington state, Georgia, Arizona, Oklahoma, and others. But nothing compared to the spectacle playing out in the nation’s capital.

The State of the Pandemic (Toscano, 2020)

by Alberto Toscano, Historical Materialism 28.4 (2020) 3–23

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The Covid-19 pandemic has further intensified a crisis in the functions and the perception of the state. It has also revealed underlying contradictions in both mainstream and radical ideologies of the state. A desire for the state as guarantor of public welfare vies with fear of the state’s hypertrophic capacities for surveillance and control. Following a brief exploration of the intimate modern connection between plagues and the state, the article tries to map some of the ways in which the state has been at stake in political and theoretical commentaries on the pandemic. Is an epidemiological politics from below, beyond the plague state, possible? Can recent emergency measures be seen as incomplete or inverted anticipations of a communist use of the state of exception? Or is the primacy of the political we are currently experiencing a mere fetish, indissociable from the rule of capital?