The difference between Marxism and utopian socialism does not, then, rest on the existence or otherwise of an image of the socialist society to be attained, nor even on the content of that image. It rests upon disagreements about the process of transition. Even here the question of who is most utopian in the sense of unrealistic is a matter of dispute. Martin Buber, in Paths in Utopia, defends the orientation of utopian socialism (including not just Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, but Proudhon, Kropotkin and Landauer) to this problem. Buber’s argument is that a ‘society is naturally composed not of disparate individuals but of associative units’, and that the health of a society depends on the density of voluntary associations that constitute it; capitalist society is thus ‘a society inherently poor in structure and growing visibly poorer every day’. The strength of utopian socialism is that it addressed itself to the issue of ‘a renewal of society through a renewal of its cell-tissue’, and aimed to ‘substitute society for State to the greatest degree possible’. Buber argues that neither Marx nor Engels gave sufficient attention to the process of social restructuring, in spite of the assertion that the new society matures in the womb of the old. Organic restructuring necessitates the development of a network of cooperative settlements which go beyond simple consumer or producer cooperatives – as in the Israeli kibbutzim.
[…]
His arguments in favour of cooperative settlements rest upon a recognition that the social relations of production lie at the root of the character of society. His claim, however, is that the post-revolutionary leap and the dictatorship of the proletariat involve a contradiction between means and ends which is not present in utopian socialism. The so-called utopian does not believe in this post-revolutionary leap, but in ‘continuity within which revolution is only the accomplishment, the setting free and extension of a reality that has already grown to its true possibilities’. In Buber’s view the ‘utopian’ approach to the problem is more realistic, since it is difficult to see how the centralisation of the first phase of socialism will give way to full communism. In other words, the expectation that the state will somehow wither away is itself utopian, i.e. unrealistic.
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.53
Criticism of “utopian” socialism movements by the Marxist tradition
“The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism ... bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation of their social utopias, of founding isolated ‘phalanstères’, of establishing ‘Home Colonies’, of setting up a ‘Little Icaria’ ... and to realise all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois.”
[Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 6, pp. 515–16.]
The fundamental error of the utopian socialists which gives rise to this unacceptable political position is the expectation that society can be changed by the appeal to all classes on the basis of reason and justice, and the belief that their blueprints of the good society will be the cause of social transformation. It is this idealist, as opposed to materialist, concept of social change which is the real problem.
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.60
It is clear that the basis of Marx’s and Engels’s criticisms of utopian socialism is not an objection to speculation about the future, but a difference of view about the process of transformation. As Vincent Geoghegan puts it, ‘what is under attack here is not anticipation as such, but rather the failure to root this anticipation in a theoretical framework cognizant of the essential dynamics of capitalism’.
[…]
Utopian socialism draws up schemes for the future. Its main fault however is not that it does this, or that the schemes themselves outline the wrong sort of future, but that it entails an idealist model of social change, suggesting that the mere propagation of such schemes will have a transformative effect. Utopia here is effectively defined in terms of its function, which is seen as a negative, counter-revolutionary, one:
"The chief offence does not lie in having inscribed [a] specific nostrum in [a] programme, but in taking a retrograde step at all from the standpoint of a class movement to that of a sectarian movement.” [Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 24, p. 93]
In their terms the key question is whether movements foster a deeper understanding of the class struggle, or whether they disguise it behind plans to persuade all classes to combine in the construction of a society based on harmony.
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 64, 66
Sorel’s Concept of Revolutionary Myth
The particular myth which is central to revolutionary syndicalism is the myth of the proletarian general strike, construed both as a possible actual event in the future and more importantly as a myth which mobilises people to action. Sorel observes that ‘men who are participating in a great social movement always picture their coming action as a battle in which their cause is certain to triumph’; it is to these images that he applies the term myth. The function of any such myth is to facilitate action and it must therefore be judged in these terms, not in terms of its empirical accuracy, so that it should not be taken seriously as a prediction. It operates intuitively rather than intellectually, and thus is fundamentally different from a utopia. The myth of the general strike is ‘a body of images capable of evoking instinctively all the sentiments which correspond to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by Socialism against modern society’.
Revolutionary myths are thus expressions of will rather than descriptions of the future and as such ‘lead men to prepare themselves for a combat which will destroy the existing state of things’.
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.75
A myth cannot be separated into its constituent parts and judged against reality, for it only operates as a whole, and it is not susceptible to refutation by empirical evidence:
“A myth cannot be refuted since it is, at bottom, identical with the convictions of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement; and it is, in consequence, unanalysable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical descriptions.” [Sorel, Reflections on Violence, p. 133]
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.75-76
The myth of the general strike is thus virtually unadulterated by utopia. It operates in terms of feeling, intuition and instinct rather than intellect, and promotes action rather than contemplation or reflection. The function of utopia is criticism, but an impotent criticism; the function of myth is transformation and change.
The superiority of myth over utopia is not just that it is more effective at changing the world. Myth is morally superior because of the state of mind which it induces and the action which it gives rise to. Sorel’s ethical standard is the heroic individual – a distinctly male individual modelled on soldiers fighting for noble causes. The image of virility is epitomised in Sorel’s extolling action over thought in the phrase ‘words are female and only acts are male’. And it is in action – specifically in revolutionary action – that the individual possesses the greatest freedom and thus most completely himself.
[…]
Myths are necessary because without them, revolts will not provoke revolution. Whether they bear any relation to future history is irrelevant to their power and their value. At the centre of the myth lies the experi- ence of grasping the inner self, of becoming and possessing oneself more intensely than is possible in normal life. Utopias, on the other hand, are cognitive constructs, products of the intellect, of reason. As such they are divorced from the soul of the proletariat, have no real connection with anything, are at best impotent and at worst diversionary and reactionary. Myths emphasise process, utopias portray ends. Thus ‘syndicalism is free of all utopianism in the sense that it subordinates prospects for its triumph to the complex of conditions, and while waiting it performs the role of a cleansing agent in the world’.
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.76-78
But what is most striking, for the time being, is not the arrogance of empire, but rather the weakness of the counter-attack. Like a colossal paralysis. A mass paralysis, which will sometimes cause people to say that nothing can be done, but who will sometimes concede, when pushed to their limit, that “there is so much to do” — which isn’t any different.
Anonymous, Call, p.3
The We that speaks here is not a definable, isolated We, the We of a group. It is the We of a position. This position is asserted currently as a double secession: first a secession from the process of capitalist valorization, then secession from all the sterility imposed by a mere opposition to empire (extra-parliamentary or otherwise); a secession therefore from the Left. Here secession means less a practical refusal to communicate than a disposition to forms of communication so intense that, when put into practice, they snatch from the enemy most of its power. To put it briefly, such a position borrows sudden force from the Black Panthers, collective dining halls from the German Autonomen, tree houses and the art of sabotage from the British neo-Luddites, the careful choice of words from radical feminists, mass self-reductions from the Italian autonomists, and armed joy from the June 2nd Movement.
Anonymous, Call, p.5
Nothing that is expressed in the known distribution of political identities is able to lead beyond the disaster.
Therefore, we begin by withdrawing from them. We contest nothing, we demand nothing. We constitute ourselves as a force, as a material force, as an autonomous material force within the Global Civil War.
Anonymous, Call, p.6
When they see us withdraw from the painful rituals of classical politics — the general assembly, the meeting, the negotiation, the protest, the demand — when they hear us speak about the perceptible realm rather than about work, IDs, pensions, or freedom of movement, militants give us a pitying look. “Poor guys,” they seem to say, “they are resigning themselves to minority politics, they have retreated into their ghetto, and renounced any widening of the struggle. They will never be part of a movement.” But we believe exactly the opposite: it is they who resign themselves to minority politics by speaking their language of false objectivity, whose gravity consists of nothing more than repetition and rhetoric. Nobody is fooled by the veiled contempt with which they talk about the worries of The People, and which allows them to go from the unemployed person to the illegal immigrant, from the striker to the prostitute without ever putting themselves at risk — their contempt is that obvious. Their will to widen the struggle is nothing but a way to flee from those who are already there, and, above all, from those they would dread living with. And finally, it is they who are loath to admit the political meaning of sensitivity, who have to rely on sentimentality as their pitiful driving force. All in all, we prefer to start from small and dense nuclei than from a vast and loose network. We are familiar enough with that spinelessness.
Anonymous, Call, p. 8
Critique of activists’ tactical approach
Then, at the margins of this paralysis, there is the “we really have to do something, anything” of the activists. […] Everywhere militantism has gone back to raising its rickety constructions, its depressing networks, until it is exhausted.
Anonymous, Call, p.3-4
Those who would respond to the urgency of the situation with the urgency of their reaction only add to the suffocation.
Their manner of intervention, of their agitation, points to the rest of their politics.
That it might take a generation to build a victorious revolutionary movement in all its breadth does not cause us to retreat. We think about this with serenity.
Anonymous, Call, p.9
We have known, and are still familiar with, the temptation of activism.
The counter-summits, the campaigns against evictions, against new security laws and the building of new prisons, the occupations, the No-Border camps; the parade of all of this. The progres- sive dispersion of collectives responding to the same dispersion of activity. Running after the movements.
Feeling our power on an ad hoc basis, but at the price of returning each time to an underlying powerlessness. Paying a high price for each campaign. Letting it consume all the energy that we have. Then moving to the next one, each time more out of breath, more exhausted, more saddened.
And little by little, through demanding, through denouncing, we become incapable of sensing what is supposed to be the basis of our engagement, the nature of the urgency that flows through us.
Anonymous, Call, p.9
Activism is the first reflex. The standard response to the urgency of the present situation. The perpetual mobilization in the name of urgency is what our governments and our bosses have made us used to, even when we fight against them.
Forms of life disappear every day; plant and animal species, human experiences and countless relationships between living beings and ways of living. But our feeling of urgency is tied less to the speed of these extinctions than to their irreversibility, and even more to our inability to repopulate the desert.
The activist mobilizes herself against the catastrophe. But only to prolong it. Her haste con- sumes what little of the world remains. The activist answer to urgency remains faithful to the regime of urgency, with no hope of getting out of it or interrupting it.
The activist wants to be everywhere. She goes everywhere the rhythm of the breakdown of the machine leads her. Everywhere she brings her pragmatic inventiveness, the festive energy of her opposition to the catastrophe. Without a doubt, the activist gets shit done. But she never devotes herself to thinking about how to do it. How to hinder concretely the progress of the desert, in order to establish inhabitable worlds without waiting.
Anonymous, Call, p.9-10
We desert activism. Without forgetting what gives it strength: a certain presence within the situation. An ease of movement within it. A way to apprehend the struggle; not from a moral or ideological angle, but technically and tactically.
Anonymous, Call, p.9
What we desert in militantism is this absence from the situation. Just as we desert the inconsistency to which activism condemns them.
Activists themselves feel this inconsistency. And this is why, periodically, they turn toward their elders, the militants. They borrow their strategies, terrains of struggle, slogans. What appeals to them in militantism is the consistency, the structure, the loyalty they lack. And so the activists revert to old-new disputes and demand — “citizenship for all,” “free movement of people,” “guaranteed income,” “free public transport.”
The problem with demands is that, by formulating needs in terms that make them audible
to power, they say nothing about those needs, and what real transformations of the world they require. Thus, demanding free public transportation says nothing of our need to travel rather than be transported, of our need for slowness.
Anonymous, Call, p.10
Those who would respond to the urgency of the situation with the urgency of their reaction only add to the suffocation.
Their manner of intervention, of their agitation, points to the rest of their politics.
That it might take a generation to build a victorious revolutionary movement in all its breadth does not cause us to retreat. We think about this with serenity.
Anonymous, Call, p.9
Critique of traditional militants in the Left
Old militantism provides the opposite example. There is something amazing about the cluelessness of militants in various situations. We remember this scene from Genoa: about 50 militants of the Trostkyist Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire wave their red flags labeled “100% on the Left.” They are motionless, timeless. They shout their pre-approved slogans, surrounded by peace-police. […] When compelled to com- ment on us the militants speak of adventurism, mindlessness. Their pretext is that the conditions are not right. We say that nothing was lacking, that everything was there — except them.
What we desert in militantism is this absence from the situation.
Anonymous, Call, p.10
What we desert in militantism is this absence from the situation. Just as we desert the inconsistency to which activism condemns them.
Activists themselves feel this inconsistency. And this is why, periodically, they turn toward their elders, the militants. They borrow their strategies, terrains of struggle, slogans. What appeals to them in militantism is the consistency, the structure, the loyalty they lack. And so the activists revert to old-new disputes and demand — “citizenship for all,” “free movement of people,” “guaranteed income,” “free public transport.”
The problem with demands is that, by formulating needs in terms that make them audible
to power, they say nothing about those needs, and what real transformations of the world they require. Thus, demanding free public transportation says nothing of our need to travel rather than be transported, of our need for slowness.
Anonymous, Call, p.10
Thus, demanding free public transportation says nothing of our need to travel rather than be transported, of our need for slowness. In addition, demands often end up masking the real conflicts. Demanding free public transportation only slows the spread of fare-dodging techniques, at least for this specific milieu. Calling for the free movement of people merely means avoiding the issue of a practical escape from a tightening of control. Fighting for a guaranteed income is, at best, to condemn ourselves to the illusion that an amelioration of the worst of capitalism is necessary to get out of it. Whatever form it takes, the impasse is always the same: the subjective resources mobilized may be revolutionary, yet they remain imbedded in a program of (radical) reformism. Under the pretext of overcoming the alternative between reform and revolution we sink into a timely ambiguity.
Anonymous, Call, p.10
During the conflict against the loi Travail, the emergence of what became the "cortege de tete," the lead contingent in marches, was the result of a vision. A few hundred "young people" saw, as early as the first demonstrations, that the union groups were marching like zombies, that they didn't believe a word of the slogans they were mouthing, that their security marshals were clubbing the high-school students, that there was no way to follow that big cadaver, and so it was necessary to claim the front of the demonstration at all costs. Which is what was done. And done again. And again. Until a limit was reached where, with the "cortege de tete" repeating itself, it was no longer a gesture in a situation, but a subject mirrored back in the media, the alternative media in particular. So it was time to desert that desertion, which was congealing and becoming a parody of itself. And to keep moving. That being said, for the whole time it was vibrant, the "cortege de tere" was the locus from which things became clear, the site of a contagion in the ability to see what was going down. From the simple fact that there was struggle, that different determinations were clashing, that forces were joining, allying, separating, that strategies were called into play, and that all this was manifesting in the streets and not just on tele vision, there was a situation.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.150-151
The formation of new organizations depends on a deeper critique, translated into acts. There must be a complete break with ideology, in which revolutionary groups think they possess official titles guaranteeing their function (that is, we must resume the Marxian critique of the role of ideologies). It is thus necessary to leave the terrain of specialized revolutionary activity -- the terrain of the self-mystification of "serious politics" -- because it has long been seen that such specialization encourages even the best people to demonstrate stupidity regarding all other questions; with the result that they end up failing even in their merely political struggles, since the latter are inseparable from all other aspects of the overall problem of our society. Specialization and pseudoseriousness are among the primary defensive outposts that the organization of the old world occupies in everyone's mind. A revolutionary association of a new type will also break with the old world by permitting and demanding of its members an authentic and creative participation, instead of expecting a participation of militants measurable in attendance time, which amounts to recreating the sole control possible in the dominant society: the quantitative criterion of hours of labor. A genuine enthusiastic participation on the part of everyone is necessitated by the fact that the classical political militant, who "devotes himself" to his radical duties, is everywhere disappearing along with classical politics itself; and even more by the fact that devotion and sacrifice always engender authority (even if only purely moral authority). Boredom is counterrevolutionary. In every way.
Situationist International, The Bad Days will End, Internationale Situationniste #7, https://libcom.org/article/bad-days-will-end-0
For Mouvement Communiste, Négation, Intervention Communiste, and others the breakdown of the old workers’ movement was something to be celebrated, not because the corrupt leadership of the workers’ organisations would no longer be able to restrain the autonomy of the masses, but because such a shift represented a transcendence of the historical function of the workers’ movement, a transcendence that would mark the reemergence of the communist movement, the “real movement which abolishes the present state of things”. And it did so in an immediate sense, for the riots and wildcat strikes of that decade were read by these writers as a total refusal of all the mediations of the workers’ movement, not in favour of some other more “democratic” mediation like that of workers’ councils, but in a way that posed the immediate production of communist relations as the only possible revolutionary horizon. Thus whereas communism had previously been seen as something that needed to be created after the revolution, the revolution was now seen as nothing other than the production of communism (abolishing wage labour and the state). The notion of a period of transition was jettisoned.
Endnotes, Bring out your Dead, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/bring-out-your-dead
The workers’ failures were necessary since it was capital that constituted their organizing principle:
“The example of the German, and above all, of the Russian revolutions, shows that the proletariat was fully capable of destroying a social order which presented an obstacle to the development of the productive forces, and thus to the development of capital, but that at the moment that it became a matter of establishing a different community, it remained a prisoner of the logic of the rationality of the development of those productive forces, and confined itself within the problem of managing them.” [Jacques Camatte, ‘Proletariat and Revolution’, 1975]
In a recent text Dauvé sums up this estimation of the old workers’ movement:
“The workers’ movement that existed in 1900, or still in 1936, was neither crushed by fascist repression nor bought off by transistors or fridges: it destroyed itself as a force of change because it aimed at preserving the proletarian condition, not superseding it. … The purpose of the old labour movement was to take over the same world and manage it in a new way: putting the idle to work, developing production, introducing workers’ democracy (in principle, at least). Only a tiny minority, ‘anarchist’ as well as 'marxist', held that a different society meant the destruction of State, commodity and wage labour, although it rarely defined this as a process, rather as a programme to put into practice after the seizure of power…” [Gilles Dauvé, ‘Out of the Future’ in Eclipse and Reemergence of the Communist Movement (1997) pp. 12-13.]
Endnotes, Bring out your Dead, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/bring-out-your-dead
We know that building a power of any scale will take time. There are many things that we no longer know how to do. In fact, those of us who benefit from the modernization and the education dispensed in our developed lands barely know how to make anything ourselves. Even gathering plants for cooking or medicine — rather than merely for decoration — is regarded as archaic at best, at worst as a nice hobby.
We make a simple observation: everyone has access to a certain quantity of resources and knowledge made available by the simple fact of living in these lands of the old world, and we can communize them.
The question is not whether to live with or without money, to steal or to buy, to work or not, but how to use the money we have to increase our autonomy from the commodity sphere. And if we prefer to steal instead of working, or produce for ourselves instead of stealing, it is not due to a concern with purity. It is because the flows of power that accompany the flows of commodities, the subjective submission that conditions our access to survival, have become too expensive.
There would be many inappropriate ways to express what we envision: we neither want to leave for the countryside nor reappropriate and accumulate ancient knowledge. We are not merely concerned with a reappropriation of methods. Nor with a reappropriation of knowledge. If we put together all that knowledge, those techniques, and all the inventiveness displayed in the field of activism, we would still not get a revolutionary movement. It is a question of temporality. A question of creating the conditions where an offensive can sustain itself without fading away, of establishing the material solidarities that allow us to maintain it.
We believe there is no revolution without the constitution of a common material force. We do not ignore the anachronism of this belief. We know it is both too early and too late, which is why we have time. We have stopped waiting.
Anonymous, Call, p.11-12
We set the point of reversal, the way out of the desert, the end of Capital, in the intensity of the link that each person manages to establish between what she thinks and how she lives. Contrary to the upholders of Existential Liberalism, we refuse to view this as a private matter, an individual issue, a question of character. On the contrary, we start from the certainty that this link depends on the construction of shared realms, of placing effective methods in common.
Anonymous, Call, p.13
These are so-called ethical questions which must of course be asked and above all, they are those that we find at the very heart of the political: how to respond to emotional neutralization and to the potential effects of decisive thoughts? And also: how do modern societies work with these neutralizations, or rather, how are they made into essential cogs in its continual functioning? How does the material effectiveness of the empire relate to our predisposition toward giving up, regardless of our collective experiences?
Anonymous, Call, p.15
On the subject of strategy, we have learned all the lessons from the tradition of the defeated. We remember the beginnings of the labor movement. The lessons are near to us.
Because what was put into practice in its initial phase relates directly to how we are living, to what we want to put into practice today. The building up of what was to be in force called the labor movement first rested on the sharing of criminal practices. The secret strike funds, the acts of sabotage, the secret societies, the class violence, the first forms of unemployment insurance seen in the recovery of individual clearheadedness, that were developed with the consciousness of their illegal and antagonistic nature.
Anonymous, Call, p.18
In Europe, the integration of workers’ organizations into the state management apparatus — the foundation of social democracy — was paid for with the renunciation of the least ability to be a nuisance. Here too the emergence of the labor movement was a matter of material solidarities, of an urgent need for communism. The Maisons du Peuple were the last refuges for this confusion between the need for immediate communization and the strategic requirements of a practical implementation of the revolutionary process. The labor movement then developed as a progressive separation between the co-operative current, an economic niche cut off from its strategic raison d’être, and the political and union forms working on the terrain of electoralism or joint management. It is from the abandonment of any secessionist aim that this absurdity was born: the Left. The climax is reached when unionists denounce any resort to violence, loudly proclaiming to all who wish to hear it, that they will collaborate with the cops to control rioters.
Anonymous, Call, p.18
Autonomous Spaces and Cracks in Capitalism
Often such activities are part-time: the people in the social centre, say, devote as much time as possible to anti-capitalist struggle, but they all take jobs at least occasionally in order to survive; or the friend who decide to live by cultivating their own food create their ideal community using the pensions they have already earned by working. There is no purity here, but there is a common rejection of the cohesive logic of capitalism, and an attempt to create something else.
Holloway, Crack Capitalism, p.23
Are we to say, then, that any construction of other forms of organization outside the mainstream of capitalist social relations should be seen as a crack in capitalist domination? Not if we think of a crack as a space or moment of negation-and-creation, of refusal and other doing. Being unemployed or living in a slum in Mumbai does not necessarily involve any refusal of capitalism. It is rather that the relations of mutual support that are created in such situations can easily become the material basis for a sort of a flip-over, a real detournement in which victims suddenly emerge as rebels, and the structures of suffering are suddenly transformed into anticipations of a better world.
Holloway, Crack Capitalism, p.24
This ever-renewed creation of organisational forms builds, however, upon a long tradition. The idea that our forms of organisation are radically different from their forms of organisation is profoundly rooted in the whole history of anti capitalism. Capitalist organisations are marked by hierarchy and the pursuit of efficiency. The anti-capitalist tradition of which we speak is characterised by respect for all those involved, the promotion of active participation, direct democracy and comradeship. This is the tradition of the commune, council, soviet, or assembly. This is a form of organisation celebrated in Marx's discussion of the Paris Commune in The Civil War in France, and one that recurs, with variations, in all the major uprisings against capitalism: in the soviets of the Russian revolution, the workers' councils of Italy and Germany, in the Spanish Civil War, recently in the communal councils of the Zapatistas, the cabildos in Bolivia, the asambleas barriales in Argentina and the forms of horizontal (or anti-vertical) organisation adopted by groups all over the world. These are non-instrumental forms of organisation that focus on the articulation of the opinions of all those involved in the struggles, working outwards from there rather than backwards from the goal to be achieved. The council, then, is quite different from the party, which is a form of organisation conceived as a means to an end, the end of winning state power. In the council, what is important is the effective articulation of collective self-determination; in the party, the important thing is to achieve a pre-determined goal.
The council is not only something that arises in revolutionary situations. The sort of relationship that it is at the base of the council is profoundly rooted in everyday struggle, that is to say, in everyday life. We go out for a meal with a group of friends and we take the decision on where to go through a discussion that aims to respect everyone’s preferences. This sort of decision-making is just an integral part of ordinary life. We think of it as friendship or comradeship.
Holloway, Crack Capitalism, p.40-41
Comradeship, dignity, amorosity, love, solidarity, fraternity, friendship, ethics: all these names stand in contrast to the commodified, monetised relations of capitalism, all describe relations developed in struggles against capitalism and which can be seen as anticipating or creating a society beyond capitalism. They stand in contrast to the commodified relations of capitalism not as timeless alternatives, but as struggle-against.
Holloway, Crack Capitalism, p.43
The spaces and moments we have called cracks are often described as autonomous spaces, or spaces of exodus or escape. We have tended to avoid these terms here simply because they draw attention away from the crucial issue: the conflict between these space-moments and the world that surrounds them. It is important to sing the glories of the worlds that are being created, the new social relations and the new ways of doing things: but we cannot go very far without talking of the clash with the world to which these dignities are opposed. There is a constant antagonism, a constant pressure to make the otherness yield to the enormous cohesive force of the society that surrounds us. The spaces are not autonomous, though they aspire to be. They are rather cracks, the sharp ends of a social conflict.
Holloway, Crack Capitalism, p.49
Building a new world does of course mean changing the existing one, but the shift in emphasis is crucial: instead of focusing our attention on the destruction of capitalism, we concentrate on building something else. This is an inversion of the traditional revolutionary perspective that puts the destruction of capitalism first and the construction of the new society second.
To make a new world means to cut the web that binds us into the cohering force of capitalist society, so that we can create something different. The enemy is the social synthesis of capitalist society.
Holloway, Crack Capitalism, p.50
We do not impute these weaknesses to the squat form. We neither deny nor desert it. We say that squatting will only make sense again for us on the condition that we clarify the basis of the sharing we engage in. In the squat, like anywhere else, the collective creation of a strategy is the only alternative to retreating into an identity, either through assimilation or the ghetto.
Anonymous, Call, p.18
The recent increase of policing functions of the State proves only this: that Western societies have lost all ability to cohere. They are only able to manage their inexorable decay. That is to say, essentially, to prevent any re-consolidation, to crush anyone who stands out. Anyone who deserts. Anyone who gets out of line.
But there is nothing to be done. The condition of inner ruin of these societies allows an increasing number of cracks to appear. The continual renovation of appearances can achieve nothing: there, worlds form. Squats, communes, groupuscules, barrios, all try to extract themselves from capitalist desolation. Most often these attempts come to nothing or die from autarky, for lack of having established contacts, appropriate solidarities. Also for lack of conceiving of themselves as full-time partisans in the Global Civil War.
Anonymous, Call, p.18-19
But all of these attempted re-consolidations are still nothing compared to mass desire, with the constantly deferred desire to drop out. To leave.
In ten years, between two censuses, a hundred thousand people have disappeared in Great Britain. They have boarded a truck, bought a ticket, dropped acid, or gone underground. They have disaffiliated. They have left.
We would have liked, in our disaffiliation, to have had a place to rejoin, a side to take, a road to follow.
Many who leave get lost. And never arrive.
Our strategy is therefore the following: to establish and maintain a series of centers of desertion, of poles of secession, of rallying points. For runaways. For those who leave. A series of places where we can escape from the influence of a civilization that is headed for the abyss.
Anonymous, Call, p.19
It is a matter of giving ourselves the means, of finding the methods whereby all those questions can be resolved; questions which, when addressed separately, can drive us to depression. How to dissolve the dependencies that weaken us? How to organize ourselves so we no longer have to work? How to settle beyond the toxicity of the metropole without going Back To Nature? How to shut down nuclear plants? How not to be forced to resort to psychiatric pulverization when a friend goes mad; or to the crude remedies of mechanistic medicine when she falls ill? How to live together without mutual suppression? How to take in the death of a comrade? How to ruin Empire?
Anonymous, Call, p.19
We know our weaknesses: we were born and we have grown up in pacified societies, dissolved. We have not had the opportunity to acquire the strength that moments of intense collective confrontation can provide. Nor the knowledge that is linked to them. We have a political education to develop together. A theoretical and practical education.
For this, we need locations. Places where we can organizes ourselves, where we can share and develop the required techniques. Where we can learn to handle all that may prove necessary. Where we can co-operate. Had it not renounced any political perspective, the experimentations of the Bauhaus, with all the materiality and the rigor it contained, would evoke the idea that we can create for ourselves space-times dedicated to the transmission of knowledge and experience. The Black Panthers equipped themselves with such places, to which they added their politico-military capacity, the ten thousand free lunches they distributed every day, and their autonomous press. Before long, they formed a threat so tangible to Power that the Feds had to be sent in to massacre them.
Anonymous, Call, p.19
The practice of communism, as we live it, we call The Party. When we overcome an obstacle together or when we reach a higher level of sharing, we say that we are “building the Party.” Certainly others, unknown to us at present, are building the Party elsewhere. This call is addressed to them. No experience of communism at the present time can survive without getting organized, tying oneself to others, taking sides in crises, waging war. “For the oases that dispense life are wiped out when we seek refuge in them.”
As we understand it, the process of instituting communism can only take the form of a collection of acts of communization, of making common such-and-such space, such-and-such contraption, such and-such knowledge. That is to say, the elaboration of the mode of sharing that attaches to them. Insurrection itself is merely an accelerator, a decisive moment in this process. As we intend it, the Party is not an organization — where everything becomes insubstantial by dint of transparency, and it is not a family — where everything smells like a con by dint of opacity.
The Party is a collection of places, infrastructures, communized methods, and the dreams, bodies, murmurs, thoughts, desires that circulate among those places; the use of those methods, the sharing of those infrastructures.
Anonymous, Call, p.22
The notion of the Party responds to the necessity of a minimal formalization, which makes us accessible as well as allowing us to remain invisible. It belongs to the communist way that we explain to ourselves, to formulate the basis of our sharing. So that the most recent arrival is, at the very least, the equal of the eldest.
Looking closer at it, the Party could be nothing but this: the formation of intuition as a force. The deployment of an archipelago of worlds. What would a political force be, under Empire, that didn’t have its farms, its schools, its arms, its medicines, its collective houses, its editing desks, its printing presses, its delivery vans, and its bridgeheads in the metropole? It appears more and more absurd that some of us still have to work for Capital — aside from the usual work of infiltration of course.
The offensive power of the Party derives from the fact that it is also a power of production; however, in essence, those relationships are only incidentally relationships of production.
Anonymous, Call, p.22
So, the construction of the Party, in its most visible aspect, consists of the sharing or communization of what we have at our disposal. Communizing a place means this: setting free its use, and on the basis of this liberation, experimenting with refined, intensified, and complexified relations. If private property is essentially the discretionary power of depriving any person of the use of the possessed thing, communization can only mean depriving the agents of Empire of that possession.
Anonymous, Call, p.23
As social cybernetization progresses, the normal situation becomes more urgent. As a consequence, situations of crisis and malfunction multiply in a completely logical way. From the point of view of Empire, a power failure, a hurricane, or a social movement are all the same. They are disturbances. They must be managed. For now, meaning on account of our weakness, these situations of interruption appear as moments in which Empire pops up, takes its place in the materiality of worlds, experiments with new managerial procedures. It is precisely there that it attaches itself more firmly to the populations it claims to assist. Empire always devotes itself to being the agent of returning the situation to normal. Our task, conversely, is to make the situation of exception livable. We will genuinely succeed in blocking corporate society only on condition that such a blockage is filled with desires other than those for a return to normal.
What takes place during a strike or during a natural disaster is, in a way, quite similar: a in- terruption of the organized stability of our dependencies. The existence of need (the communist essence) — that which essentially binds us and essentially separates us — is laid bare during each of them. The blanket of shame that normally covers it is torn up. Receptiveness for encounters, for experimentation with other relations to the world, to others, to oneself, as it manifests in these moments, is enough to sweep away any doubt about the possibility of communism. About the need for communism as well. What is now required is our ability to self-organize, our ability (by immediately organizing ourselves on the basis of our needs) to prolong, extend, and ultimately render the situation of exception effective, against the terror upon which Imerial power rests.
Anonymous, Call, p.26
Critique of Cooperativism
One can live a whole life without experiencing anything, by being very careful not to think and feel. Existence is then reduced to a slow process of degradation. It wears down and ruins, instead of giving form. After the miracle of the encounter, relations can only go from wound to wound towards their consumption. Life, on the contrary, gradually gives form to whoever refuses to live beside themselves, to whoever allows themselves to experience. They become a form of life in the full sense of the term.
In sharp contrast to that, there are the inherited methods of activist construction, so grossly defective, so exhausting, so destructive, when they are so focused on building. Communism does not hinge on self-renunciation but on the attention given to the smallest action. It's a question of our plane of perception and hence of our way of doing things. A practical matter. What the perception of entities-individual or collective bars our access to is the plane where things really happen, where the collective potentials form and fall apart, gain strength or dissipate. […] To live communism is not to work to ensure the existence of the entity we belong to, but to deploy and deepen an ensemble of ties, which sometimes means cutting certain ones. What is essential occurs at the level of the smallest things. […] Perception in terms of bonds dismisses the whole alternative between individual and collective, and does so positively. In a real situation, an "I" that says what needs to be said can be a "we" of extraordinary power. And so, the particular happiness of any "commune" reflects the plenitude of its singularities, a certain quality of ties, the radiant energy of each fragment of world that it harbors-good-bye to entities, to their protrusiveness, good-bye to individual and collective confinement, adios to the reign of narcissism.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.143-144
Buber’s argument is that a ‘society is naturally composed not of disparate individuals but of associative units’, and that the health of a society depends on the density of voluntary associations that constitute it; capitalist society is thus ‘a society inherently poor in structure and growing visibly poorer every day’. The strength of utopian socialism
is that it addressed itself to the issue of ‘a renewal of society through a renewal of its cell-tissue’, and aimed to ‘substitute society for State to the greatest degree possible’. Buber argues that neither Marx nor Engels gave sufficient attention to the process of social restructuring, in spite of the assertion that the new society matures in the womb of the old. Organic restructuring necessitates the development of a network of cooperative
settlements which go beyond simple consumer or producer cooperatives – as in the Israeli kibbutzim.
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.53
There is a general context — capitalism, civilization, empire, as you wish — a general context that not only intends to control each situation but, even worse, seeks a way to make sure as often as possible, that there is no situation. They have planned out streets and homes, language and emotions, even the global tempo that drives all of it, only for that purpose. Everywhere different realms are made to slide by each other and be ignored. The normal situation is this absence of a situation.
To get organized means: to get out of the situation and not merely challenge it. To take sides within it. Weaving the necessary material, emotional, and political solidarities. This is what any strike does in any office, in any factory. This is what any gang does. Any underground; any revolutionary or counter-revolutionary party. To get organized means: to give substance to the situation. Making it real, tangible.
Reality is not capitalist.
Our position within a situation determines our need to become allies, and for that reason to establish some lines of communication, some wider current or tendency. In turn those new links reconfigure the situation.
Anonymous, Call, p.5
The practice of communism, as we live it, we call The Party. When we overcome an obstacle together or when we reach a higher level of sharing, we say that we are “building the Party.” Certainly others, unknown to us at present, are building the Party elsewhere. This call is addressed to them. No experience of communism at the present time can survive without getting organized, tying oneself to others, taking sides in crises, waging war. “For the oases that dispense life are wiped out when we seek refuge in them.”
As we understand it, the process of instituting communism can only take the form of a collection of acts of communization, of making common such-and-such space, such-and-such contraption, such and-such knowledge. That is to say, the elaboration of the mode of sharing that attaches to them. Insurrection itself is merely an accelerator, a decisive moment in this process. As we intend it, the Party is not an organization — where everything becomes insubstantial by dint of transparency, and it is not a family — where everything smells like a con by dint of opacity.
The Party is a collection of places, infrastructures, communized methods, and the dreams, bodies, murmurs, thoughts, desires that circulate among those places; the use of those methods, the sharing of those infrastructures.
Anonymous, Call, p.22
From every side we oppose the extortion of having to choose between the offensive and the constructive, negativity and positivity, life and survival, war and the everyday. We will not respond to it. We understand only too well how this dismembering alternative splits and re-splits all existing collectives. For a force which is deployed, it is impossible to say if the annihilation of a device that harms it is a constructive or offensive matter, if achieving dietary or medical autonomy constitutes an act of war or subtraction. There are circumstances, like in a riot, in which the ability to heal our comrades considerably augments our ability to wreak havoc. Who can say that arming ourselves would not be part of the material constitution of a collectivity? When we agree on a common strategy, there is no choice between the offensive and the constructive; obviously there exists, in every situation, what increases our power and what harms it, what is opportune and what is not. And when the evidence is lacking, there is discussion, and in the worst case, there is gambling.
In a general way, we do not see how anything else but a force, a reality able to survive the total dislocation of capitalism could truly attack it, up to the very moment of its dislocation.
When that moment comes, it will be a matter of actually turning the generalized social collapse to our advantage, to transform a collapse (like the Argentine or the Soviet) into a revolutionary situation. Those who pretend to separate material autonomy from the sabotage of the Imperial machine show that they want neither.
Anonymous, Call, p.23
As social cybernetization progresses, the normal situation becomes more urgent. As a consequence, situations of crisis and malfunction multiply in a completely logical way. From the point of view of Empire, a power failure, a hurricane, or a social movement are all the same. They are disturbances. They must be managed. For now, meaning on account of our weakness, these situations of interruption appear as moments in which Empire pops up, takes its place in the materiality of worlds, experiments with new managerial procedures. It is precisely there that it attaches itself more firmly to the populations it claims to assist. Empire always devotes itself to being the agent of returning the situation to normal. Our task, conversely, is to make the situation of exception livable. We will genuinely succeed in blocking corporate society only on condition that such a blockage is filled with desires other than those for a return to normal.
What takes place during a strike or during a natural disaster is, in a way, quite similar: a in- terruption of the organized stability of our dependencies. The existence of need (the communist essence) — that which essentially binds us and essentially separates us — is laid bare during each of them. The blanket of shame that normally covers it is torn up. Receptiveness for encounters, for experimentation with other relations to the world, to others, to oneself, as it manifests in these moments, is enough to sweep away any doubt about the possibility of communism. About the need for communism as well. What is now required is our ability to self-organize, our ability (by immediately organizing ourselves on the basis of our needs) to prolong, extend, and ultimately render the situation of exception effective, against the terror upon which Imerial power rests.
Anonymous, Call, p.26
Critique of social movements
What is now required is our ability to self-organize, our ability (by immediately organizing ourselves on the basis of our needs) to prolong, extend, and ultimately render the situation of exception effective, against the terror upon which Imerial power rests. This is particularly striking in social movements. Even the expression social movement seems to suggest that what really matters is what we are moving towards, rather than what’s happening here and now. Up till now in all social movements, there has been a prejudice to avoid seizing the time, which explains why they are never able to get together; rather they seem to chase each other away. Hence the particular texture, so volatile, of their sociality, where any commitment appears revocable. Hence also their invariable dramatic arc: a quick ascent thanks to some popular resonance highlighted in the media; next, due to this hasty aggregation, a slow but inevitable erosion; and finally, the dried up movement, the last handful of diehards who get a card from this or that union, found this or that association, thereby hoping to find an organizational continuity to their commitment. But we are not looking for such continuity: having premises where we might meet, and a photocopier to print leaflets. The continuity we seek is the one which allows us, after having struggled for months, not to go back to work, not to start working again as before, to keep doing harm. And this can only be built during movements. It is a matter of putting into place an immediate, material sharing, the construction of a real revolutionary war machine, the construction of the Party.
Anonymous, Call, p.26-27
Up till now in all social movements, there has been a prejudice to avoid seizing the time, which explains why they are never able to get together; rather they seem to chase each other away. Hence the particular texture, so volatile, of their sociality, where any commitment appears revocable. Hence also their invariable dramatic arc: a quick ascent thanks to some popular resonance highlighted in the media; next, due to this hasty aggregation, a slow but inevitable erosion; and finally, the dried up movement, the last handful of diehards who get a card from this or that union, found this or that association, thereby hoping to find an organizational continuity to their commitment. But we are not looking for such continuity: having premises where we might meet, and a photocopier to print leaflets. The continuity we seek is the one which allows us, after having struggled for months, not to go back to work, not to start working again as before, to keep doing harm. And this can only be built during movements. It is a matter of putting into place an immediate, material sharing, the construction of a real revolutionary war machine, the construction of the Party.
We must, as we were saying, organize ourselves on the basis of our needs — to manage to answer in turn the collective questions of eating, sleeping, thinking, loving, creating forms, coordinating our forces — and conceive all this as an opportunity in 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 accepted and practiced everywhere. 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 encounters. We will not fail to notice, then, how the subjectivities and the revolutionary collectives become less flakey, as they show what they’re really made of.
Anonymous, Call, p.26-27
Hope. Now there's at least one disease this civilization has not infected us with. We're not despairing for all that. No one has ever acted out of hope. Hope is of a piece with waiting, with the refusal to see what is there, with the fear of breaking into the present - in short, with the fear of living. To hope is to declare one self in advance to be without any hold on that from which something is expected nonetheless. It's to remove oneself from the process so as to avoid any connection with its outcome. It's wanting things to be different without embracing the means for this to come about. It's a kind of cowardice. One has to know what to commit to and then commit to it. Even if it means making enemies. Or making friends. Once we know what we want, we're no longer alone, the world repopulates. Everywhere there are allies, closenesses, and an infinite gradation of possible friendships. Nothing is close for someone who floats. Hope, that very slight but constant impetus toward tomorrow that is communicated to us day by day, is the best agent of the maintenance of order. We're daily informed of problems we can do nothing about, but to which there will surely be solutions tomorrow. The whole oppressive feeling of powerlessness that this social organization cultivates in everyone is only an immense pedagogy of waiting. It's an avoidance of now. But there isn't, there's never been, and there never will be anything but now. And even if the past can act upon the now, this is because it has itself never been anything but a now. Just as our tomorrow will be. The only way to understand something in the past is to under stand that it too used to be a now. It's to feel the faint breath of the air in which the human beings of yesterday lived their lives. If we are so much inclined to flee from now, it's because now is the time of decision. It's the locus of the "I accept" or the "I refuse," of ''I'll pass on that" or ''I'll go with that." It's the locus of the logical act that immediately follows the perception. It is the present, and hence the locus ofpresence. It is the moment, endlessly renewed, of the taking of sides. Thinking in distant terms is always more comfortable. "In the end," things will change; "in the end," beings will be transfigured. Meanwhile, let's go on this way, let's remain what we are. A mind that thinks in terms of the future is incapable of acting in the present. It doesn't seek transformation; it avoids it. The current disaster is like a monstrous accumulation of all the deferrals of the past, to which are added those of each day and each moment, in a continuous time slide. But life is always decided now, and now, and now.
Everyone can see that this civilization is like a train rolling toward the abyss, and picking up speed. The faster it goes, the more one hears the hysterical cheers of the boozers in the discotheque car. You have to listen carefully to make out the paralyzed silence of the rational minds that no longer understand anything, that of the worriers who bite their nails, and the accent of false calm in the exclamations of the card players who wait. Inwardly, many people have chosen to leap off the train, but they hesitate on the footboard. They're still restrained by so many things. They feel held back because they've made the choice, but the decision is lacking. Decision is what traces in the present the manner and possibility of acting, of making a leap that is not into the void. We mean the decision to desert, to desert the ranks, to organize, to undertake a secession, be it imperceptibly, but in any case, now.
The epoch belongs to the determined.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.16-18
Against the possibility of communism, against any possibility of happiness, there stands a hydra with two heads. On the public stage each one of them makes a show of being the sworn enemy of the other. On one side, there is the program for a fascistic restoration of unity, and on the other, there is the global power of the merchants of infrastructure-Google as much as Vinci, Amazon as much as Veolia. Those who believe that it's one or the other will have them both. Because the great builders of infrastructure have the means for which the fascists only have the folkloric discourse. For the former, the crisis of the old unities is primarily the opportunity for a new unification. In the contemporary chaos, in the crumbling of institutions, in the death of politics, there is a perfectly profitable market for the infrastructural powers and for the giants of the Internet. A totally fragmented world remains completely manageable cybernetically. A shattered world is even the precondition for the omnipotence of those who manage its channels of communication. The program of these powers is to deploy behind the cracked facades of the old hegemonies a new, purely operational, form of unity, which doesn't get bogged down in the ponderous production of an always shaky feeling of belonging, but operates directly on "the real," reconfiguring it. A form of unity without limits, and without pretentious, which aims to build absolute order under absolute fragmentation. An order that has no intention of fabricating a new phantasmal belonging, but is content to furnish, through its networks, its servers, its highways, a materiality that is imposed on everyone without any questions being asked. No other unity than the standardization of interfaces, cities, landscapes; no other continuity than that of information. The hypothesis of Silicon Valley and the great merchants of infrastructure is that there's no more need to tire oneself out by staging a unity of facade: the unity it intends to construct will be integral with the world, incorporated in its networks, poured into its concrete. Obviously we don't feel like we belong to a "Google humanity," but that's fine with Google so long as all our data belong to it. Basically, provided we accept being reduced to the sad ranks of"users," we all belong to the cloud, which does not need to proclaim it. To phrase it differently, fragmentation alone does not protect us from an attempt to reunify the world by the "rulers of tomorrow": fragmentation is even the prerequisite and the ideal texture for such an initiative. From their point of view, the symbolic fragmentation of the world opens up the space for its concrete unification; segregation is not contradictory to the ultimate networking. On the contrary, it gives it its raison d'etre.
The necessary condition for the reign of the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) is that beings, places, fragments of the world remain without any real contact. Where the GAFA claim to be "linking up the entire world" what they're actually doing is working toward the real isolation of everybody. By immobilizing bodies. By keeping everyone cloistered in their signifying bubble. The power play of cybernetic power is to give everyone the impression that they have access to the whole world when they are actually more and more separated, that they have more and more "friends" when they are more and more autistic. The serial crowd of public transportation was always a lonely crowd, but people didn't transport their personal bubble along with them, as they have done since smartphones appeared. A bubble that immunizes against any contact, in addition to constituting a perfect snitch. This separation engineered by cybernetics pushes in a non-accidental way in the direction of making each fragment into a little paranoid entity, towards a drifting of the existential continents where the estrangement that already reigns between individuals in this "society" collectivizes ferociously into a thousand delirious little aggregates. In the face of all that, the thing to do, it would seem, is to leave home, take to the road, go meet up with others, work towards forming connections, whether conflictual, prudent, or joyful, between the different parts of the world. Organizing ourselves has never been anything else than loving each other.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p. 46-49
The strategy of Destitution
Critique of constituent strategies
Breaking the circle that turns our contestation into a fuel for what dominates us, marking a rupture in the fatality that condemns revolutions to reproduce what they have driven out, shattering the iron cage of counter-revolution-this is the purpose of destitution. The notion of destitution is necessary in order to free the revolutionary imaginary of all the old constituent fantasies that weigh it down, of the whole deceptive legacy of the French Revolution. […]
Destituere in Latin means: to place standing separate, raise up in isolation; to abandon; put aside, let drop, knock down; to let down, deceive. Whereas constituent logic crashes against the power apparatus it means to take control of, a destituent potential is concerned instead with escaping from it, with removing any hold on it which the apparatus might have, as it increases its hold on the world in the separate space that it forms. Its characteristic gesture is exiting, just as the typical constituent gesture is taking by storm.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.76, 78-79
Thus, where the "constituents" place themselves in a dialectical relation of struggle with the ruling authority in order to take possession of it, destituent logic obeys the vital need to disengage from it. It doesn't abandon the struggle, it fastens on to the struggles positivity. It doesn't adjust itself to the movements of the adversary but to what is required for the increase of its own potential. So it has little use for criticizing: "The choice is either to get out without delay, without wasting one's time criticizing, simply because one is placed elsewhere than in the region of the adversary, or else one criticizes, one keeps one foot in it, and has the other one outside. We need to leap outside and dance above it," as Jean-Francois Lyotard explained, by way of recognizing the gesture of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. And Deleuze made this remark: "Roughly speaking, one recognizes a Marxist by their saying that a society contradicts itself, is defined by its contradictions, especially its class contradictions. We say rather is that in a society everything is escaping, that a society is defined by its lines of escape [ . . . ] Escape, but while escaping look for a weapon."
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.79-80
Typically, the operation that the cortege de tete causes the processional setup of union demonstrations to undergo is an operation of destitution. With the vital joy it expressed, the rightness of its gesture, its determination, with its affirmative as well as offensive character, the cortege de tete drew in all that was still lively in the militant ranks and it destituted demonstrations as an institution. Not with a critique of the rest of the march but something other than a symbolic use of capturing the street.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.80
Withdrawing from the institutions is anything but leaving a void, it's suppressing them in a positive way.
To destitute is not primarily to attack the institution, but to attack the need we have of it. It's not to criticize it-the first critics of the state are the civil servants themselves; as to the militant, the more they criticize power the more they desire it and the more they refuse to acknowledge their desire - but to take to heart what the institution is meant to do, from outside it. To destitute the university is to establish, at a distance, the places of research, of education and thought, that are more vibrant and more demanding than it is-which would not be hard-and to greet the arrival of the last vigorous minds who are tired of frequenting the academic zombies, and only then to administer its death blow. To destitute the judicial system is to learn to settle our disputes ourselves, applying some method to this, paralyzing its faculty of judgment and driving its henchmen from our lives. To destitute medicine is to know what is good for us and what makes us sick, to rescue from the institu tion the passionate knowledges that survive there out of view, and never again to find oneself alone at the hospital, with one's body handed over to the artistic sovereignty of a disdainful surgeon. To destitute the government is to make ourselves ungovernable. Who said anything about winning? Overcoming is everything.
The destituent gesture does not oppose the institution. It doesn't even mount a frontal fight, it neutralizes it, empties it of its substance, then steps to the side and watches it expire. It reduces it down to the incoherent ensemble of its practices and makes decisions about them.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.80-81
Fernand Deligny said: "In order to fight against language and the institution, the right phrase is perhaps not to fight against, but to take the most distance possible, even if this means signaling one's position.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.83
Destitution makes it possible to rethink what we mean by revolution. The traditional revolutionary program involved a reclaiming of the world, an expropriation of the expropriators, a violent appropriation of that which is ours, but which we have been deprived of. But here's the problem: capital has taken hold of every detail and every dimension of existence. It has created a world in its image. From being an exploitation of the existing forms of life, it has transformed itself into a total universe. It has configured, equipped, and made desirable the ways of speaking, thinking, eating, working and vacationing, of obeying and rebelling, that suit its purpose. In doing so, it has reduced to very little the share of things in this world that one might want to reappropriate. Who would wish to reappropriate nuclear power plants, Amazon's warehouses, the expressways, ad agencies, high-speed trains, Dassault, La Defense business complex, auditing firms, nanotechnologies, supermarkets and their poisonous merchandise? Who imagines a people's takeover of industrial farming operations where a single man plows 400 hectares of eroded ground at the wheel of his megatractor piloted via satellite? No one with any sense.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.84-85
The destituent gesture is thus desertion and attack, creation and wrecking, and all at once, in the same gesture. It defies the accepted logics of alternativism and activism at the same time. It forms a linkage between the extended time of construction and the spasmodic time of intervention, between the disposition to enjoy our piece of the world and the disposition to place it at stake.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.88
Strategies for destituting the police
During the conflict against the loi Travail, the emergence of what became the "cortege de tete," the lead contingent in marches, was the result of a vision. A few hundred "young people" saw, as early as the first demonstrations, that the union groups were marching like zombies, that they didn't believe a word of the slogans they were mouthing, that their security marshals were clubbing the high-school students, that there was no way to follow that big cadaver, and so it was necessary to claim the front of the demonstration at all costs. Which is what was done. And done again. And again. Until a limit was reached where, with the "cortege de tete" repeating itself, it was no longer a gesture in a situation, but a subject mirrored back in the media, the alternative media in particular. So it was time to desert that desertion, which was congealing and becoming a parody of itself. And to keep moving. That being said, for the whole time it was vibrant, the "cortege de tere" was the locus from which things became clear, the site of a contagion in the ability to see what was going down. From the simple fact that there was struggle, that different determinations were clashing, that forces were joining, allying, separating, that strategies were called into play, and that all this was manifesting in the streets and not just on tele vision, there was a situation.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.150-151
Faced with capitalist organization, a destituent potential cannot confine itself to its own immanence, to all that grows under the ice in the absence of sunshine, to all the attempts at local construction, to a series of punctual attacks, even if this whole little world were to regularly find itself caught up in great turbulent demonstrations. And the insurrection will definitely not wait for every one to become insurrectionary. The mistake of the Leninists, Trotskyists, Negriists, and other sub politicians, a telling one fortunately, is to believe that a period that sees all the hegemonies lying broken on the ground could still tolerate a political hegemony, even a partisan one of the sort that Pablo Iglesias or Chantal Mouffe fantasize. What they don't see is that in a time of general horizontality, horizontality itself is the verticality. No one can expect to organize the autonomy of others any longer. The only verticality still possible is that of the situation, which commands all of its components because it exceeds them, because the sum of forces in presence is greater than each one of them. The only thing capable of transversally uniting all the elements deserting this society into a historical party is an intelligence of the situation. It is everything that makes the situation gradually understandable, everything that tracks the movements of the adversary, everything that identifies the usable paths and the obstacles-the systematic character of the obstacles. Based on that intelligence, an occasional vertical expedient needed to tilt certain situations in the desired direction can well be improvised.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.157-158
Theory and Communist Strategy
Deleuze said in 1968 that it was a "phenomenon of clairvoyance: a society suddenly saw what it contained that was intolerable and also saw the possibility of something else." To which Benjamin adds: "Clairvoyance is the vision of that which is taking form. [ . . . ] Perceiving exactly what is taking place is more decisive than knowing the distant future in advance." In ordinary circumstances most people do end up seeing, but when it is much too late-when it's become impossible not to see and, quite often, seeing no longer serves any purpose. This aptitude owes nothing to any great body of knowledge, which often serves for overlooking what's essential. Conversely, ignorance can crown the most banal insistence on not seeing. Let's say that social life demands of everyone that they not see, or at least act as if they didn't see anything.
It makes no sense to share things if one doesn't begin by communizing the ability to see. Without that, living the communist way is like a wild dance in utter darkness; one crashes against the others, one gets hurt, one inflicts bruises on the body and the soul without meaning to and without even knowing exactly who to be angry with. Compounding every one's capacity for seeing in every domain, composing new perceptions and endlessly refining them, resulting in an immediate increase of potential, must be the central object of any communist development. Those who don't want to see any thing cannot help but produce collective disasters. We must become seers, for ourselves as much as for others.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.151-152
The assault of the first workers movement against the whole organization of the old world came to an end long ago, and nothing can bring it back to life. It failed. Certainly it achieved immense results, but not the ones it had originally intended. No doubt such deviation toward partially unexpected results is the general rule in human actions; but the one exception to this rule is precisely the moment of revolutionary action, the moment of the all-or-nothing qualitative leap. The classical workers movement must be reexamined without any illusions, particularly without any illusions regarding its various political and pseudotheoretical heirs, for all they have inherited is its failure. The apparent successes of this movement are actually its fundamental failures (reformism or the establishment of a state bureaucracy), while its failures (the Paris Commune or the 1934 Asturian revolt) are its most promising successes so far, for us and for the future. This movement must be precisely delineated in time. The classical workers movement can be considered to have begun a couple decades before the official formation of the International, with the first linkup of communist groups of several countries that Marx and his friends organized from Brussels in 1845. And it was completely finished after the failure of the Spanish revolution, that is, after the Barcelona May days of 1937.
We need to rediscover the whole truth of this period and to reexamine all the oppositions between revolutionaries and all the neglected possibilities, without any longer being impressed by the fact that some won out over others and dominated the movement; for we now know that the movement within which they were successful was an overall failure. Marx's thought is obviously the first which must be rediscovered -- a task that should not present much difficulty in view of the extensive existing documentation and the crudeness of the lies about it. But it is also necessary to reassess the anarchist positions in the First International, Blanquism, Luxemburgism, the council movement in Germany and Spain, Kronstadt, the Makhnovists, etc. Without overlooking the practical influence of the utopian socialists. All this, of course, not with the aim of scholarship or academic eclecticism, but solely in order to contribute toward the formation of a new, profoundly different revolutionary movement, a movement of which we have seen so many premonitory signs over the last few years, one of which is our own existence. We must understand these signs through the study of the classical revolutionary project and vice versa. It is necessary to rediscover the history of the very movement of history, which has been so thoroughly hidden and distorted.
There is no other way to be faithful to, or even simply to understand, the actions of our comrades of the past than to profoundly reconceive the problem of revolution, which has been increasingly deprived of thought as it has become posed more intensely in concrete reality.
Situationist International, The Bad Days will End, Internationale Situationniste #7, https://libcom.org/article/bad-days-will-end-0
The formation of new organizations depends on a deeper critique, translated into acts. There must be a complete break with ideology, in which revolutionary groups think they possess official titles guaranteeing their function (that is, we must resume the Marxian critique of the role of ideologies). It is thus necessary to leave the terrain of specialized revolutionary activity -- the terrain of the self-mystification of "serious politics" -- because it has long been seen that such specialization encourages even the best people to demonstrate stupidity regarding all other questions; with the result that they end up failing even in their merely political struggles, since the latter are inseparable from all other aspects of the overall problem of our society. Specialization and pseudoseriousness are among the primary defensive outposts that the organization of the old world occupies in everyone's mind. A revolutionary association of a new type will also break with the old world by permitting and demanding of its members an authentic and creative participation, instead of expecting a participation of militants measurable in attendance time, which amounts to recreating the sole control possible in the dominant society: the quantitative criterion of hours of labor. A genuine enthusiastic participation on the part of everyone is necessitated by the fact that the classical political militant, who "devotes himself" to his radical duties, is everywhere disappearing along with classical politics itself; and even more by the fact that devotion and sacrifice always engender authority (even if only purely moral authority). Boredom is counterrevolutionary. In every way.
Situationist International, The Bad Days will End, Internationale Situationniste #7, https://libcom.org/article/bad-days-will-end-0
There is no other way to be faithful to, or even simply to understand, the actions of our comrades of the past than to profoundly reconceive the problem of revolution, which has been increasingly deprived of thought as it has become posed more intensely in concrete reality. But why does this reconception seem so difficult? Starting from an experience of free everyday life (that is, from a quest for freedom in everyday life) it is not so difficult. It seems to us that this question is quite concretely felt today among young people. And to feel it with enough urgency enables one to rediscover lost history, to salvage and rejudge it. It is not difficult for thought that concerns itself with questioning everything that exists. It is only necessary not to have abandoned philosophy (as have virtually all the philosophers), not to have abandoned art (as have virtually all the artists), and not to have abandoned contestation of present reality (as have virtually all the militants). When they are not abandoned, these questions all converge toward the same supersession. The specialists, whose power is geared to a society of specialization, have abandoned the critical truth of their disciplines in order to preserve the personal advantages of their function. But all real researches are converging toward a totality, just as real people are going to come together in order to try once again to escape from their prehistory.
Situationist International, The Bad Days will End, Internationale Situationniste #7, https://libcom.org/article/bad-days-will-end-0
We believe that the role of theorists - a role which is indispensable, but which must not be dominant - is to provide information and conceptual tools that can shed light on people's hidden desires and on the social crisis they are experiencing; to clarify things and show how they fit together; to make the new proletariat aware of the "new poverty" that must be named and described.
Situationist International, Ideologies, Classes and Domination, Internationale Situationniste #8, https://libcom.org/article/ideologies-classes-and-domination-nature
For us, therefore, communism is not a finality. There is no "transition" towards it. It is transition entirely: it is en chemin, in transit. The different ways of living will never cease to chafe and move against each other, to clash with and occasionally combat each other. Everything will always have to be rethought. There are bound to be the usual Leninists who will reject an immanent conception of communism such as this, by citing the necessity of a vertical, strategic articulation of the struggle, and an instant later we're sure to hear the lumbering "question of organization." The "question of organization" is still and always the Leviathan. In a time when the apparent unity of the Self can no longer mask the chaos of forces, attachments, and participations that we are, how could we still believe in the fable of organic unity? The myth of "organization" owes everything to the depictions of the hierarchy of natural faculties that were handed down to us by ancient psychology and Christian theology. We are no longer nihilistic enough to think that inside us there is something like a stable psychic organ-a will, let's say-that directs our other faculties. This neat invention of the theologians, much more political than it appears, had a dual purpose: first, to make man, newly provided with a "free will," into a moral subject and to deliver him over in this way to the Last Judgment and the century's punishments; second, based on the theological idea of a God having "freely'' created the world and essentially standing apart from his action, to institute a formal separation between being and acting. For centuries, this separation, which was to mark Western political ideas in a durable way, made ethical realities illegible-the plane of forms-of-life being precisely that of a non differentiation between what one is and what one does. So "the question of organization" exists since those Bolsheviks of Late Antiquity, the Church Fathers. It was the instrument of legitimation of the Church just as it would later be that of the legitimation of the Party. Against this opportunistic question, against the postulated existence of the "will”, it's necessary to emphasize that what "wants" within us, what inclines us, is never the same thing. That it is a simple outcome, crucial at certain moments, of the combat waged within and outside us by a tangled network of forces, affects, and inclinations, resulting in a temporary assemblage in which some force has just as temporarily subdued other forces. That the sequence of these assemblages produces a kind of coherence that may culminate in a form is a fact. But to always label with the same noun something that in a contingent way finds itself in a position to dominate or give the decisive impetus, to convince oneself that it's always a matter of the same authority, to convince oneself finally that every form and every decision are dependent on a decision organ, is to perform quite a trick, but one that's been repeated all too long. By believing in such an organ for such a long time, by stimulating that imaginary muscle over and over again, one ends up in a fatal aboulia that seems nowadays to be afflicting the late offspring of the Christian Empire that we happen to be. In opposition to that, we propose paying careful attention to situations and to the forces that inhabit and traverse beings, in conjunction with an art of decisive assemblages.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.154-157
The only thing capable of transversally uniting all the elements deserting this society into a historical party is an intelligence of the situation. It is everything that makes the situation gradually understandable, everything that tracks the movements of the adversary, everything that identifies the usable paths and the obstacles-the systematic character of the obstacles. Based on that intelligence, an occasional vertical expedient needed to tilt certain situations in the desired direction can well be improvised.
A strategic verticality of this kind can only emerge from a constant, generous discussion, undertaken in good faith. In this epoch, the means of communication are the forms of organization. It's our weakness, for the means aren't in our hands, and those who control them are not our friends. So there's no other choice but to deploy an art of conversation between worlds that is cruelly deficient, but from which, in contact with the situation, the right decision must emanate. Such a discussion can gain the center, from the periphery where it is currently contained, only through an offensive from the domain of sensibility, on the plane of perceptions, and not of discourse. We're talking about addressing bodies and not just the head.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.158
Emancipatory communication and media
The only thing capable of transversally uniting all the elements deserting this society into a historical party is an intelligence of the situation. It is everything that makes the situation gradually understandable, everything that tracks the movements of the adversary, everything that identifies the usable paths and the obstacles-the systematic character of the obstacles. Based on that intelligence, an occasional vertical expedient needed to tilt certain situations in the desired direction can well be improvised.
A strategic verticality of this kind can only emerge from a constant, generous discussion, undertaken in good faith. In this epoch, the means of communication are the forms of organization. It's our weakness, for the means aren't in our hands, and those who control them are not our friends. So there's no other choice but to deploy an art of conversation between worlds that is cruelly deficient, but from which, in contact with the situation, the right decision must emanate. Such a discussion can gain the center, from the periphery where it is currently contained, only through an offensive from the domain of sensibility, on the plane of perceptions, and not of discourse. We're talking about addressing bodies and not just the head.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.158
Those who want to supersede the old established order in all its aspects cannot cling to the disorder of the present, even in the sphere of culture. In culture as in other areas, it is necessary to struggle without waiting any longer for some concrete appearance of the moving order of the future. The possibility of this ever-changing new order, which is already present among us, devalues all expressions within existing cultural forms. If we are ever to arrive at authentic direct communication (in our working hypothesis of higher cultural means: the construction of situations), we must bring about the destruction of all the forms of pseudocommunication.
Debord, Theses on Cultural Revolution, Internationale Situationniste #1, https://libcom.org/article/theses-cultural-revolution-guy-debord
Ultimately, the problem with commercial offers and decentralized software applications boils down to the same thing. In order to challenge state reLavabitn and capitalist exploitation effectively, it is necessary to stand and organize collectively against the state and capital. Cypherpunk initiatives like Lavabit or decentralized software can go a long way to challenge the status quo, but they are historically limited by their understanding of social change and social conflict.
Social change is not simply a matter of consumer preference like the choice of an individual’s email provider, neither social conflicts are mere mathematical problems that can be resolved through a strategic application of mathematics. Radical technology collectives build political solidarity and nurture security behaviors within and between activist groups in addition to providing things like email and putting the right cryptographic algorithms in place.
Autistici/Inventati - +KAOS - 10 Years of Hacking and Media Activism, Institute of Network Cultures 2021, p.12
Communisation
What provided the impetus for a new conception of revolution and communism (as communisation) was not simply an understanding of the content of communism derived from a close reading of Marx and Bordiga, but also the influence of a whole wave of class struggles of the late sixties and early seventies which would give a new meaning to “the refusal of work” as a specific content of the revolution.
By the early 1970s journalists and sociologists began to speak of a “revolt against work” afflicting an entire new generation of workers in traditional industries, with rapidly rising rates of absenteeism and sabotage, as well as a widespread disregard for the authority of the union. Commentators variously blamed: the feeling of expendability and insecurity brought about by automation; the increasing assertiveness of traditionally oppressed minorities; the influence of an anti-authoritarian counter-culture; the power and sense of entitlement afforded by the prolonged post-war boom and its hard-won “social wage”. Whatever the reason for these developments, what seemed to characterize the new struggles was a breakdown in the traditional forms through which workers sought to gain control over the labour process, leaving only the expression of an apparent desire to work less. For many of those who had been influenced by the SI, this new proletarian “assault” was characterized by a “refusal of work” shorn of the techno-utopian and bohemian-artistic elements which the SI had never been able to abandon. Groups like Négation and Intervention Communiste argued that it was not only the power of the union which was being undermined in these struggles, but the entire Marxist and Anarchist programme of the liberation of work and the triumph of “workers’ power”. Far from liberating their work, bringing it under their own control, and using it to seize control of society through self-managing their workplaces, in the French May and the subsequent “creeping May” in Italy, the “critique of work” took the form of hundreds of thousands of workers deserting their workplaces. Rather than an indication that struggles hadn't gone far enough, the absence of workers’ councils during this period was thus understood as an expression of a rupture with what would come to be known as “the old workers’ movement.”
Endnotes, Bring out your Dead, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/bring-out-your-dead
[…] groups like Mouvement Communiste, Négation, and La Guerre Sociale advocated a conception of revolution as the immediate destruction of capitalist relations of production, or “communisation”. As we shall see, the understanding of communisation differed between different groups, but it essentially meant the application of communist measures within the revolution — as the condition of its survival and its principal weapon against capital. Any “period of transition” was seen as inherently counter-revolutionary, not just in so far as it entailed an alternative power structure which would resist “withering away” (c.f. anarchist critiques of “the dictatorship of the proletariat”), nor simply because it always seemed to leave unchallenged fundamental aspects of the relations of production, but because the very basis of workers’ power on which such a transition was to be erected was now seen to be fundamentally alien to the struggles themselves. Workers’ power was just the other side of the power of capital, the power of reproducing workers as workers; henceforth the only available revolutionary perspective would be the abolition of this reciprocal relation.
Endnotes, Bring out your Dead, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/bring-out-your-dead
Those who developed the theory of communisation rejected this posing of revolution in terms of forms of organisation, and instead aimed to grasp the revolution in terms of its content. Communisation implied a rejection of the view of revolution as an event where workers take power followed by a period of transition: instead it was to be seen as a movement characterised by immediate communist measures (such as the free distribution of goods) both for their own merit, and as a way of destroying the material basis of the counter-revolution. If, after a revolution, the bourgeoisie is expropriated but workers remain workers, producing in separate enterprises, dependent on their relation to that workplace for their subsistence, and exchanging with other enterprises, then whether that exchange is self-organised by the workers or given central direction by a “workers’ state” means very little: the capitalist content remains, and sooner or later the distinct role or function of the capitalist will reassert itself. By contrast, the revolution as a communising movement would destroy — by ceasing to constitute and reproduce them — all capitalist categories: exchange, money, commodities, the existence of separate enterprises, the state and — most fundamentally — wage labour and the working class itself.
Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory
For TC [Theorie Communiste] the communist revolution understood as communisation does not establish a “republic of labour” or any new form of management of the means of production. Rather, it is the overcoming of the alienated social relation of production which constitutes the separation of subjectivity and objectivity experienced in capitalism. In the overcoming of the separation of individuals from each other and from the means of production, communisation overcomes the separation of human subjectivity from “objectified labour,” i.e. the subject/object split that forms the basis of social reality under capitalism. TC envisage this as an overcoming of each dimension which Marx describes in the Grundrisse: labour ceases to exist as a separate activity; production no longer distinguishes itself from and dominates reproduction; needs are no longer separate from capacities; and individuals no longer confront their sociality through the mediation of the exchange of their products or in the form of the state — they become directly social. The revolution as communisation dissolves both the social form of things, i.e. their existence as carriers of ‘objectified labour’, of value (they become things again), and the atomised, empty and separated out subject-form of the individual. Thus for TC, as for Marx in the Grundrisse, the formerly “objective” moment of production no longer dominates the subjective, but rather becomes “the organic social body in which the individuals reproduce themselves as individuals, but as social individuals.”
Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory
Communism necessitates the abolition of a multifaceted relation [value] that has evolved over time, but to abolish it simply means that we cease to constitute value, and it ceases to constitute us. The radicality of our own period is that this is now the only way we can conceive it.
Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory
[…] like the proletariat, we cannot claim to be unexploitable in the present conditions; the best we can do is to work to make any such exploitation entail the greatest possible risk for the exploiters.
Now, The SI, Internationale Situationniste #9, https://libcom.org/article/now-si
If one does not think of revolution as being a complete miracle, as something that proletarians will achieve in the heat of the moment, almost accidentally, spontaneously, and without any goal set in advance, and if one does not delegate the project of human eman- cipation to the machines, then it would appear reasonable to try and reach some sort of understanding concerning the basic features of a classless society. Several objections to this have been raised: it’s premature (“the struggles aren’t quite there yet, the time isn’t ripe”), unnecessary (“people will take care of it eventually”), pretentious (“you can’t just predetermine it”), or simply impossible (“you can’t anticipate that”). But there’s never been a continuous movement defying the existing order without an idea, however vague, of what could take its place. A purely negative critique of the status quo, which some radical leftists invoke, is ultimately impossible. For example, aiming for “a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common” (Capital) follows necessarily from the critique of private property. But because this leaves a lot of room for imagination — including scenarios that have little to do with freedom and happiness — revolutionaries should state clearly what they want. Not in order to peddle recipes for redemption, but as a contribution to the necessary discussion on how to leave the old world behind. The commune shouldn’t be conceived as something that will put an end to all of humanity’s problems. On the contrary, only after the relations of production have been revolutionized will everything that is today “solved” by blind mediation, domination, and force even begin to appear as a problem requiring a solution. It is in this sense that Walter Benjamin rejected the accusation that he absolutized communism as “the solution for humanity”. On the contrary, he soberly described it as the possibility to “abolish the unproductive pretensions of solutions for humanity by means of the feasible findings of this very system; indeed, to give up entirely the immodest prospect of ‘total’ systems and at least to make the attempt to construct the days of humanity in just as loose a fashion as a rational person who has had a good night’s sleep begins his day”.
Endnotes, Contours of the World Commune, Endnotes #5, p.164-165
Consciousness-raising opens up the possibility of living, not merely theorising about, a collective perspective. It can give us the resources to behave, think and act differently at work (if it makes any sense to talk about being “at” work anymore), where capitalist realism has become second nature. The roots of any successful struggle will come from people sharing their feelings, especially their feelings of misery and desperation, and together attributing the sources of these feelings to impersonal structures, albeit impersonal structures mediated by particular figures to which we must attach populist loathing.
In the harsh conditions of cyberspatialised capitalism — conditions that, as Jennifer M. Silva demonstrates, have produced a “hardening” of the self, especially in the young — consciousness-raising can produce a new compassion, for others and for ourselves. Neurotic-Oedipalising capitalism responsibilises, harshly blaming us, while — in its therapeutic mode — telling us that we have the power as individuals to change anything and everything: if we’re unhappy, it’s up to us to fix it. Consciousness-raising, meanwhile, is about positive depersonalisation: it’s not your fault, it’s capitalism. No individuals can change anything, not even themselves; but collective activation is already, immanently, overcoming individualised immiseration.
[…]
The chief obstruction […] is what, in a trenchant and clear-eyed analysis, Ewa Jasiewicz calls “time poverty”:
"Our time is under attack. Work will be intensified, worse paid, and more casualised — if we don’t have it, we’ll be working to have it; mandatory and supervised job searches and workfare will see people forced to spend their time locked into coerced, computerised distraction. A real, diverse, working class self-representative movement needs to include people facing and living these experiences, but how will that happen when we’re too tied up working?
Access to time and our own labour is key and will determine participation and the ability to organise. If we can’t have our own time to organise, we can’t organise, we can’t meet each other, we cannot find each other. Work and the benefits regime — which is work under different conditions and profit margins — are key sites of struggle. Solidarity will need to step up if we are to win workplace disputes and strikes, refusals of workfare and support for people getting sanctioned, so that people have more control over their time and labour.
All our commons are under attack. The condition of time poverty and its roots — intensification of labour, welfare repression, criminalisation and incarceration — have to be recognised as major obstacles to movement, diversity and power. These obstacles need to be tackled if we want to overcome the ideology of wage labour as a determinant of human value on a popular level.”
The problem is that, in order to struggle against time poverty, the main resource we require is time — a nasty vicious circle that capital, with its malevolent genius, now has... This problem is absolutely immanent — writing this and the other posts I have completed this week has meant that I have fallen enormously behind on my work, which is storing up stress for the next week or so.
The first thing we must do in response to all this is to put into practice what I outlined above: try not to blame ourselves. #Itsnotyourfault We must try to do everything we can to politicise time poverty rather than accept blame as individuals for failing to complete our work on time. The reason we feel overwhelmed is that we are overwhelmed — it isn’t an individual failing of ours; it isn’t because we haven’t “managed our time” properly. However, we can use the scarce resources we already have more effectively if we work together to codify practices of collective re-habituation (setting new rules for our engagement with social media and capitalist cyberspace in general for example).
Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, Abandon Hope (Summer is Coming) - Knowing Someone in this Life Feels as Desperate as Me, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.593-595
