obsolete discourse
7th November 2007, 06:13
Each part of the text is broken into Propositions and Scholiums. It's both cute and a little prentensious. Ah, but what else could we expect from the exquisite intellect of the parisian communist movement and it's anarchic desires.
Perhaps others have already read this, or recieived a copy in Germany. Eitherway, I find the whole essay fascinating and challenging. One finds ones self reading quickly and agreeing, but being a little lost until this part.
I'm currious as what those who still drape themselves in images of Che and those who act in such good nature will think.
From near the conclussive parts of The Call.
Proposition VII
Communism is possible at every moment.
What we call "History" is to date nothing but a set of roundabout means invented by humans to avert it. The fact that this "History" has for a good century now come down to nothing but a varied accumulation of disasters shows how the communist question can no longer be suspended. It is this suspension that we need, in turn, to suspend.
Scholium
"BUT WHAT DO YOU actually want? What are YOU proposing?" This kind of question may seem innocent. But unfortunately these are not questions. These are operations.
Referring every WE that expresses itself to a foreign YOU means first warding off the threat that this WE somehow calls me, that this WE passes through me. Thus constituting the one who merely carries a proposition that cannot itself be attributed to anyone as the owner of this proposition. Now, in the methodical organisation of the prevailing separation, propositions are allowed to circulate only on condition that they can give proof of an owner, of an author. Without which they risk being common, and only that which is proposed by the spectacle is permitted anonymous diffusion.
And then there is this mystification: that caught in the course of a world that displeases us, there would be proposals to make, alternatives to find. That we could, in other words, lift ourselves out of the situation that we are in, to discuss it in a calm way, between reasonable people.
But no, there is nothing beyond the situation. There is no outside to the world civil war. We are irremediably there.
All we can do is elaborate a strategy. Share an analysis of the situation and elaborate a strategy within it. This is the only possible revolutionary and practical WE, open and diffuse, of whoever acts along the same lines.
At the last count, in August 2006, we can say that we face the greatest offensive of capital since the beginning of the eighties. Anti-terrorism and the abolition of the last gains of the defunct labour movement set the parameters of a diffuse discipline. Never have the managers of society known so well from which obstacles they are emancipated and what means they hold. They know, for instance, that the planetary middle-class that lives henceforth in the metropole is too disarmed to offer the slightest resistance to its planned annihilation. Just like they know that the counter-revolution they conduct is now inscribed in millions of tons of concrete, in the architecture of so many "new towns." In the longer term it seems that the plan of capital is indeed to bring out on a global scale a set of high-security zones, continuously linked together, where the process of capitalist valorisation would embrace all the expressions of life in a perpetual and unhindered way. This imperial deterritorialised comfort zone of citizens would form a kind of police continuum where a more or less constant level of control would prevail, politically as well as biometrically. The "rest of the world" could then be treated, in the incomplete process of its pacification, as a foil and, at the same time, as a gigantic outside to civilise. The chaotic experiments of zone-to-zone cohabitation between hostile enclaves as it has been taking place for decades in Israel would be the model of social management to come. We do not doubt that the real stake in all this, for capital, is to reconstitute from the ground up its own society.
Whatever the form, and however high the price.
We have seen with Argentina that the economic collapse of a whole country was not, from its point of view, too high a price to pay.
In this context we are those, all those, who feel the tactical need of these three operations:
1. Preventing by any means the reconstruction of the Left.
2. Advancing, from natural disaster to social movement, the process of communisation, the construction of the Party.
3. Bringing the secession to the vital sectors of the imperial machine.
1. The Left is periodically routed. This amuses us but it is not enough. We want its rout to be final. With no remedy. May the spectre of a reconcilable opposition never again come to haunt the minds of those who know they won�t fit into the capitalist process. The Left, everybody admits this today, but will we still remember the day after tomorrow � is an integral part of the neutralisation mechanisms peculiar to liberal society. The more the social implosion proves real, the more the Left invokes �civil society.� The more the police exercises its arbitrary will with impunity, the more they claim to be pacifist. The more the state throws off the last judicial formalities, the more they become citizens. The greater the urgency to appropriate the means of our existence, the more the Left exhorts us to appropriate the conditions of our submission, to wait and demand the mediation, if not the protection, of our masters. It is the Left which enjoins us today, faced with governments which stand openly on the terrain of social war, to make ourselves heard by them, to write up our grievances, to form demands, to study economics. From L'on Blum to Lula, the Left has been nothing but that: the party of the man, the citizen and civilisation. Today this program coincides with the complete counter-revolutionary program. Which consists in maintaining all the illusions that paralyse us. The calling of the Left is therefore to expound the dream of what only empire can afford. It represents the idealistic side of imperial modernisation, the necessary steam-valve to the unbearable pace of capitalism. It is even shamelessly written in the very publication of the French Department of Youth, Education and Research: "From now on, everyone knows that without the concrete help of citizens, the state will have neither the means nor the time to carry on the work that can prevent our society from exploding."
Defeating the Left, that is to say keeping continuously open the channel of social disaffection, is not only necessary but also possible today. We witness, while the imperial structures become stronger at an unprecedented rate, the transition from the old Labour left, gravedigger of the Labour movement and born from it, to a new global, cultural left, of which it can be said that Negriism is at the head. This new left has not yet fully established itself on the recently neutralised "anti-globalisation movement." The new lures they employ are not yet effective, whilst the old ones have long been useless.
Our task is to ruin the global left wherever it comes forth, to sabotage methodically, that is to say in theory as well as in practice, any of its moments of constitution. Thus for instance our success in Genoa lay less in the spectacular confrontations with the police, or in the damage inflicted on the organs of state and capital, than in the fact that the spreading of the practice of confrontation peculiar to the "Black Bloc" to all the parts of the demonstration scuttled the expected triumph of the Tute Bianche. And so, in the aftermath, our failure has been to have not known how to elaborate our position in such a way that this victory in the street becomes something else than the mere bogey systematically brandished ever since by all the so-called "pacifist" movements.
It is now the fallback of this global left on the social forums, due to the fact that it was defeated in the street, that we must attack.
2. From year to year the pressure increases to make everything function. As the social cybernetisation progresses, the normal situation becomes more urgent. And from then on, in an absolutely logical way, the situations of crisis and malfunction multiply. A power failure, a hurricane, or a social movement, do not differ from the point of view of empire. They are disturbances. They must be managed. For the moment, that is to say on account of our weakness, these situations of interruption appear as moments in which empire arises, takes its place in the materiality of worlds, experiments with new procedures. It is just there that it ties itself more firmly to the populations it claims to rescue. Empire claims everywhere to be the agent of return to the normal situation. Our task, conversely, is to make habitable the situation of exception. We will genuinely succeed in "blocking corporate-society" only on condition that such a blockage is made up of desires other than that of a return to normality.
What happens in a strike or in a "natural disaster" is in a way quite similar. A suspension occurs in the organised stability of our dependencies. At that point the being of need, the communist being, that which essentially binds us and essentially separates us, is laid bare in each. The blanket of shame that normally covers it is torn apart. The receptiveness for encounter, for experimentation of other relations to the world, to others, to oneself, as it appears these moments, is enough to sweep away any doubt about the possibility of communism. About the need for communism too. What is then required is our ability to self-organise, our ability, by organising ourselves right away on the basis of our needs, to prolong, to propagate, to give effectivity to the situation of exception, which has always formed the basis of state terror only because it has remained a threat on the part of state. This is particularly striking in "social movements". The very expression "social movement" seems to suggest that what really matters is what we are heading towards, and not what happens here. There has been in all the social movements up till now a commitment not to seize what is here, which explains why they follow each other without ever becoming a force, like a succession of breaking waves. Hence the particular texture, so volatile, of their sociality, where any commitment appears revocable. Hence also their invariable drama: a quick ascent thanks to an echo in the media, then, on the basis of this hasty aggregation, the slow but inevitable erosion; and finally, the dried-up movement, the last group of diehards who get a card from this or that union, found this or that association, expecting in this way to find an organisational continuity to its commitment. But we do not seek such continuity: the fact of having premises where we might meet, and a photocopier to print tracts. The continuity we seek is the one which allows us, after having struggled for months, to not go back to work, to not start working again as before, to keep doing harm. And this can only be built during movements. It is a matter of immediate, material sharing, the construction of a real revolutionary war machine, the construction of the Party.
We must, as we were saying, organise ourselves on the basis of our needs; manage to answer progressively the collective question of eating, sleeping, thinking, loving, creating forms, co-ordinating our forces and conceive all this as a moment of the war against empire.
It is only in this way, by inhabiting the disturbances of its very program, that we will be able to counter that "economic liberalism" which is only the strict consequence, the logical application, of the existential liberalism that is everywhere accepted and practised. To which each one is attached as if it were the most basic right, including those who would like to challenge "neo-liberalism." This is the way the Party will be built, as a trail of habitable places left behind by each situation of exception that empire meets. We will not mistake, then, how the subjectivities and the revolutionary collectives become less fragile, as they give themselves a world.
Perhaps others have already read this, or recieived a copy in Germany. Eitherway, I find the whole essay fascinating and challenging. One finds ones self reading quickly and agreeing, but being a little lost until this part.
I'm currious as what those who still drape themselves in images of Che and those who act in such good nature will think.
From near the conclussive parts of The Call.
Proposition VII
Communism is possible at every moment.
What we call "History" is to date nothing but a set of roundabout means invented by humans to avert it. The fact that this "History" has for a good century now come down to nothing but a varied accumulation of disasters shows how the communist question can no longer be suspended. It is this suspension that we need, in turn, to suspend.
Scholium
"BUT WHAT DO YOU actually want? What are YOU proposing?" This kind of question may seem innocent. But unfortunately these are not questions. These are operations.
Referring every WE that expresses itself to a foreign YOU means first warding off the threat that this WE somehow calls me, that this WE passes through me. Thus constituting the one who merely carries a proposition that cannot itself be attributed to anyone as the owner of this proposition. Now, in the methodical organisation of the prevailing separation, propositions are allowed to circulate only on condition that they can give proof of an owner, of an author. Without which they risk being common, and only that which is proposed by the spectacle is permitted anonymous diffusion.
And then there is this mystification: that caught in the course of a world that displeases us, there would be proposals to make, alternatives to find. That we could, in other words, lift ourselves out of the situation that we are in, to discuss it in a calm way, between reasonable people.
But no, there is nothing beyond the situation. There is no outside to the world civil war. We are irremediably there.
All we can do is elaborate a strategy. Share an analysis of the situation and elaborate a strategy within it. This is the only possible revolutionary and practical WE, open and diffuse, of whoever acts along the same lines.
At the last count, in August 2006, we can say that we face the greatest offensive of capital since the beginning of the eighties. Anti-terrorism and the abolition of the last gains of the defunct labour movement set the parameters of a diffuse discipline. Never have the managers of society known so well from which obstacles they are emancipated and what means they hold. They know, for instance, that the planetary middle-class that lives henceforth in the metropole is too disarmed to offer the slightest resistance to its planned annihilation. Just like they know that the counter-revolution they conduct is now inscribed in millions of tons of concrete, in the architecture of so many "new towns." In the longer term it seems that the plan of capital is indeed to bring out on a global scale a set of high-security zones, continuously linked together, where the process of capitalist valorisation would embrace all the expressions of life in a perpetual and unhindered way. This imperial deterritorialised comfort zone of citizens would form a kind of police continuum where a more or less constant level of control would prevail, politically as well as biometrically. The "rest of the world" could then be treated, in the incomplete process of its pacification, as a foil and, at the same time, as a gigantic outside to civilise. The chaotic experiments of zone-to-zone cohabitation between hostile enclaves as it has been taking place for decades in Israel would be the model of social management to come. We do not doubt that the real stake in all this, for capital, is to reconstitute from the ground up its own society.
Whatever the form, and however high the price.
We have seen with Argentina that the economic collapse of a whole country was not, from its point of view, too high a price to pay.
In this context we are those, all those, who feel the tactical need of these three operations:
1. Preventing by any means the reconstruction of the Left.
2. Advancing, from natural disaster to social movement, the process of communisation, the construction of the Party.
3. Bringing the secession to the vital sectors of the imperial machine.
1. The Left is periodically routed. This amuses us but it is not enough. We want its rout to be final. With no remedy. May the spectre of a reconcilable opposition never again come to haunt the minds of those who know they won�t fit into the capitalist process. The Left, everybody admits this today, but will we still remember the day after tomorrow � is an integral part of the neutralisation mechanisms peculiar to liberal society. The more the social implosion proves real, the more the Left invokes �civil society.� The more the police exercises its arbitrary will with impunity, the more they claim to be pacifist. The more the state throws off the last judicial formalities, the more they become citizens. The greater the urgency to appropriate the means of our existence, the more the Left exhorts us to appropriate the conditions of our submission, to wait and demand the mediation, if not the protection, of our masters. It is the Left which enjoins us today, faced with governments which stand openly on the terrain of social war, to make ourselves heard by them, to write up our grievances, to form demands, to study economics. From L'on Blum to Lula, the Left has been nothing but that: the party of the man, the citizen and civilisation. Today this program coincides with the complete counter-revolutionary program. Which consists in maintaining all the illusions that paralyse us. The calling of the Left is therefore to expound the dream of what only empire can afford. It represents the idealistic side of imperial modernisation, the necessary steam-valve to the unbearable pace of capitalism. It is even shamelessly written in the very publication of the French Department of Youth, Education and Research: "From now on, everyone knows that without the concrete help of citizens, the state will have neither the means nor the time to carry on the work that can prevent our society from exploding."
Defeating the Left, that is to say keeping continuously open the channel of social disaffection, is not only necessary but also possible today. We witness, while the imperial structures become stronger at an unprecedented rate, the transition from the old Labour left, gravedigger of the Labour movement and born from it, to a new global, cultural left, of which it can be said that Negriism is at the head. This new left has not yet fully established itself on the recently neutralised "anti-globalisation movement." The new lures they employ are not yet effective, whilst the old ones have long been useless.
Our task is to ruin the global left wherever it comes forth, to sabotage methodically, that is to say in theory as well as in practice, any of its moments of constitution. Thus for instance our success in Genoa lay less in the spectacular confrontations with the police, or in the damage inflicted on the organs of state and capital, than in the fact that the spreading of the practice of confrontation peculiar to the "Black Bloc" to all the parts of the demonstration scuttled the expected triumph of the Tute Bianche. And so, in the aftermath, our failure has been to have not known how to elaborate our position in such a way that this victory in the street becomes something else than the mere bogey systematically brandished ever since by all the so-called "pacifist" movements.
It is now the fallback of this global left on the social forums, due to the fact that it was defeated in the street, that we must attack.
2. From year to year the pressure increases to make everything function. As the social cybernetisation progresses, the normal situation becomes more urgent. And from then on, in an absolutely logical way, the situations of crisis and malfunction multiply. A power failure, a hurricane, or a social movement, do not differ from the point of view of empire. They are disturbances. They must be managed. For the moment, that is to say on account of our weakness, these situations of interruption appear as moments in which empire arises, takes its place in the materiality of worlds, experiments with new procedures. It is just there that it ties itself more firmly to the populations it claims to rescue. Empire claims everywhere to be the agent of return to the normal situation. Our task, conversely, is to make habitable the situation of exception. We will genuinely succeed in "blocking corporate-society" only on condition that such a blockage is made up of desires other than that of a return to normality.
What happens in a strike or in a "natural disaster" is in a way quite similar. A suspension occurs in the organised stability of our dependencies. At that point the being of need, the communist being, that which essentially binds us and essentially separates us, is laid bare in each. The blanket of shame that normally covers it is torn apart. The receptiveness for encounter, for experimentation of other relations to the world, to others, to oneself, as it appears these moments, is enough to sweep away any doubt about the possibility of communism. About the need for communism too. What is then required is our ability to self-organise, our ability, by organising ourselves right away on the basis of our needs, to prolong, to propagate, to give effectivity to the situation of exception, which has always formed the basis of state terror only because it has remained a threat on the part of state. This is particularly striking in "social movements". The very expression "social movement" seems to suggest that what really matters is what we are heading towards, and not what happens here. There has been in all the social movements up till now a commitment not to seize what is here, which explains why they follow each other without ever becoming a force, like a succession of breaking waves. Hence the particular texture, so volatile, of their sociality, where any commitment appears revocable. Hence also their invariable drama: a quick ascent thanks to an echo in the media, then, on the basis of this hasty aggregation, the slow but inevitable erosion; and finally, the dried-up movement, the last group of diehards who get a card from this or that union, found this or that association, expecting in this way to find an organisational continuity to its commitment. But we do not seek such continuity: the fact of having premises where we might meet, and a photocopier to print tracts. The continuity we seek is the one which allows us, after having struggled for months, to not go back to work, to not start working again as before, to keep doing harm. And this can only be built during movements. It is a matter of immediate, material sharing, the construction of a real revolutionary war machine, the construction of the Party.
We must, as we were saying, organise ourselves on the basis of our needs; manage to answer progressively the collective question of eating, sleeping, thinking, loving, creating forms, co-ordinating our forces and conceive all this as a moment of the war against empire.
It is only in this way, by inhabiting the disturbances of its very program, that we will be able to counter that "economic liberalism" which is only the strict consequence, the logical application, of the existential liberalism that is everywhere accepted and practised. To which each one is attached as if it were the most basic right, including those who would like to challenge "neo-liberalism." This is the way the Party will be built, as a trail of habitable places left behind by each situation of exception that empire meets. We will not mistake, then, how the subjectivities and the revolutionary collectives become less fragile, as they give themselves a world.