Communists therefore are not those who ‘fight for communism’, as if communism were a fixed thing, a fixed set of rules, of norms we could fight for. There is nothing static in communism understood as social force; all of it is dynamic, flowing and relational, because the commoners create it. Communists are those who take part in the value struggles we are all involved in with awareness that alternatives linking our particular struggles to those of others can only be constructed beyond enclosures and beyond disciplinary integration. […] Communists in this sense are not enchanted by the parables of reform or revolution, since neither of these is the point of the beginning of history. The point is to live a different type of life, linked to others and to nature through different value practices. De Angelis, The Beginning of History, Chapter: Anarchism, Communism and Socialism

Communism in this sense is a social force of progressive decoupling from the monetary circuit of capital, and this can only be done through progressive extension of commons and corresponding communities. De Angelis, The Beginning of History, Chapter: Anarchism, Communism and Socialism

The only difference between communists and any other struggling subjects whatever their identity, is that communists confront capital while holding a mirror in their hands. The alternative to capital, at whatever scale of social action, is a social force that creates a world within the space defined by that reverse image: the image of commons and democratic communities instead of enclosures and market disciplinary integration. Communists are those who seek to create alternative ways to meet needs and follow desires at whatever scale of social action, wherever they are, knowing that the means can be shared, while the goals and the modes of doing that those means make possible can emerge from direct engagement with the other. Just as the social force we call capital seeks to preserve itself by extending and defending enclosures and the realm of the markets, so the social force we call communism can preserve itself only by extending and defending the realm of commons and grass-roots democratic processes and practices. The bottom-line ground within which to problematise alternatives, or the beginning of history is, in my opinion, all here. De Angelis, The Beginning of History, Chapter: Anarchism, Communism and Socialism

The surest way to know that one is in the presence of commu­nistic relations is that not only are no accounts taken, but it would be considered offensive, or simply bizarre, to even consider doing so. Graeber, Debt, p.99

[…] we are not really dealing with reciprocity here-or at best, only with reciprocity in the broadest sense. What is equal on both sides is the knowledge that the other person would do the same for you, not that they necessarily will. The Iroquois example brings home clearly what makes this possible: that such relations are based on a presumption of eternity. Society will always exist. Therefore, there will always be a north and a south side of the village. This is why no accounts need be taken. In a similar way, people tend to treat their mothers and best friends as if they will always exist, however well they know it isn't true. Graeber, Debt, p.100

Finally, once we start thinking of communism as a principle of morality rather than just a question of property ownership, it becomes clear that this sort of morality is almost always at play to some degree in any transaction-even commerce. If one is on sociable terms with someone, it's hard to completely ignore their situation. Merchants of­ ten reduce prices for the needy. Graeber, Debt, p.102

Communism, then, is based neither in exchange nor in reciprocity­ except, as I have observed, in the sense that it does involve mutual ex­pectations and responsibilities. Graeber, Debt, p.102

This is presumably also why in the immediate wake of great di­sasters - a flood, a blackout, or an economic collapse-people tend to behave the same way, reverting to a rough-and-ready communism. However briefly, hierarchies and markets and the like become luxuries that no one can afford. Anyone who has lived through such a moment can speak to their peculiar qualities, the way that strangers become sisters and brothers and human society itself seems to be reborn. This is important, because it shows that we are not simply talking about cooperation. In fact, communism is the foundation of all human socia­bility. It is what makes society possible. Graeber, Debt, p.96

The central issue is the counterposing of a distinctly different logic here and now to the logic of capitalism. There is nothing unusual in this: it is part of everyday life. It is the anti-logic of what we think of as humanity, of decency, of dignity; even in the most harmless-looking examples, there is always an underlying insubordination or non-subordination. Dignity will not wait: the crack is a here-and-now insubordination, not a project for the future. It is not 'after the revolution, our lives will not be subordinated to capital', but 'here and now, we refuse to subordinate our activity to the rule of capital: we can and will and are doing something else.' There is a shift in the temporality of rebellion. In all sorts of ways, the urgency of the situation of humanity imprints itself on the way that people struggle. The old notion of planning for the future revolution sounds hollow when we know that there may be only a very limited future. Communism (or whatever we choose to call it) becomes an immediate necessity, not a future stage of development. Holloway, Crack Capitalism, p.26

Opposing the divisions that capitalism has created on the basis of race, gender, and age, reuniting what it has separated in our lives and reconstituting a collective interest must then be a political priority for feminists and other social justice movements today. This is what is ultimately at stake in the politics of the commons, which, at its best, presupposes a sharing of wealth, collective decision making, and a revolution in our relationship with ourselves and others. The social cooperation and knowledge building that Marx attributed to social work can be constructed only through commoning activities - urban gardening, time banking, open sourcing - that are self-organized and require, as well as produce, community. In this sense, insofar as it aims to reproduce our lives in ways that strengthen mutual bonds and set limits to capital accumulation, the politics of the commons, in part, translates Marx’s idea of communism as the abolition of the present state of things. It could also be argued that with the development of online commons - the rise of free software and free culture movements - we are now approximating the universalization of human capacities that Marx anticipated as a result of development of productive forces. But the politics of the commons is a radical departure from what communism has signified in the Marxist tradition and in much of Marx’s work, starting with The Communist Manifesto. There are several crucial differences between the politics of the commons and communism that stand out, especially when we consider these political forms from a feminist and ecological viewpoint. Federici, Re-Enchanting the World, Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, p.166

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

It is obvious, as they claim, that the question of what suits me, of what I need, of what makes up my world has been reduced to the legally enforced fiction of private property, of what belongs to me, of what is mine. Something belongs to me insofar as it joins the realm of my usage — not by virtue of any juridical title. Ultimately, private property has no other reality than the forces that protect it. So the question of communism is, on one hand, to do away with the police, and on the other, to elaborate modes of sharing and uses, among those who live with each other. Anonymous, Call, p.21

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

In the final analysis, capitalism consists of nothing more than a reduction of all relations into relations of production. From business to the family, consumption itself appears as another episode in the general production, the production of society. The overthrowing of capitalism will come from those who are able to create the conditions for other types of relations. Therefore the communism we are talking about is the exact opposite of what has been historically termed “communism,” which was mostly nothing but socialism, a form of monopolist state capitalism. Communism is not made through the expansion of new relations of production, but rather in their abolition. Not having relations of production within our milieu or among ourselves means never letting the search for results become more important than paying attention to the process, bankrupting all conventions of value, and watching that we do not disconnect affection and co-operation. Being attentive to worlds, to their perceptible configurations, is exactly what renders the isolation of something like relations of production impossible. In the places we open, around the means we share, it is this favor that we seek, that we experience. To name this experience, we often hear about everything being free. Instead of free, we prefer to speak of communism — for we cannot possibly forget what the practice of this freedom implies in terms of organization, and in the short term, of political antagonism. Anonymous, Call, p.22-23

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 something endured, the process of fragmentation of the world can drive people into misery, isolation, schizophrenia. It can be experienced as a senseless loss in the lives of human beings. We're invaded by nostalgia then. Belonging is all that remains for those who no longer have anything. At the cost of accepting fragmentation as a starting point, it can also give rise to an intensification and pluralization of the bonds that constitute us. Then fragmentation doesn't signify separation but a shimmering of the world. […] With the endless fragmentation of the world there is a vertiginous increase in the qualitative enrich­ ment of life, and a profusion of forms-for someone who thinks about the promise of com­munism it contains. In the fragmentation there is something that points toward what we call "communism": it's the return to earth, the end of any bringing into equivalence, the restitution of all singularities to themselves, the defeat of subsumption, of abstrac­tion, the fact that moments, places, things, beings and animals all acquire a proper name-their proper name. Every creation is born of a splitting off from the whole. As embryology shows, each individual is the possibility of a new species as soon as it appropriates the conditions that immediately surround it. If the Earth is so rich in natural envi­ronments this is due to its complete absence of uniformity. Realizing the promise of communism contained in the world's fragmentation demands a gesture, a gesture to be performed over and over again, a gesture that is life itself: that of creating pathways between the fragments, of placing them in contact, of organizing their encounter, of opening up the roads that lead from one friendly piece of the world to another without passing through hostile territory, that of establishing the good art of distances between worlds. It's true that the world's fragmentation disorients and unsettles all the inherited certainties, that it defies all of our politi­cal and existential categories, that it removes the ground underlying the revolutionary tradition itself: it challenges us. […] Here is the paradox, then: being constrained to unity undoes us, the lie of social life makes us psychotic, and embracing fragmentation is what allows us to regain a serene presence to the world. There is a certain mental position where this fact ceases to be perceived in a contradictory way. That is where we place ourselves. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.45-46

To leave the economy is to bring out the plane of reality it covers over. Commodity exchange and all that it comprises in the way of harsh negotiation, mistrust, deceit, and wabu wabu, as the Melanesians say, is not exclusively Western. In places where people know how to live, one only practices this type of relations with outsiders, people one is not connected with, who are distant enough so that a mix-up cannot develop into a general conflict. To pay, in Latin, comes from pacare, "to satisfy, to calm," for example by distributing money to sol­diers so they can buy themselves some salt-thus a wage. One pays in order to have peace. The whole vocabulary of economy is basically a vocabulary of avoided war. "There is a link, a continuity, between hostile relations and the provision of reciprocal prestations: Exchanges are peacefully resolved wars, and wars are the result of unsuccessful transactions." (Levi-Strauss). Economy's defect is to reduce all possible relationships to hostile rela­tions, every distance to foreignness. What it covers over in this way is the entire gamut, all the grada­tion, all the heterogeneity among the different existing and imaginable relations. Depending on the degree of proximity between beings, there is a commonality of goods, a sharing of certain things, exchange with an adjusted reciprocity, mercantile exchange, or a total absence of exchange. And every form of life has its language and its notions for expressing this multiplicity of regimes. Making the bastards pay is good warfare. When you love you don't count the cost. Where money talks, words are worth nothing. Where words matter, money's worth nothing. Thus, exiting the economy is being able to dearly distinguish between the possible divisions and, from where one is, to deploy a whole art of distances. It's to push the hostile relations - and the sphere of money, accounting, measurement - as far away as possible. It's to banish to the margins of life that which is presently its norm, its core, its essential condition. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.107-108

However repressed it may be, the question of communism remains the heart of our epoch. If only because the rule of its contrary-economy-has never been so complete. The delegations from the Chinese state who go every year to place flowers on Marx's tomb in London don't fool anybody. One can avoid the communist question, of course. One can get used to stepping over the bodies of the homeless or migrants on one's way to the office every morning. One can follow the melting of the polar ice in real time, or the rise of the oceans and the panicked pell-mell migrations of animals and humans alike. One can go on preparing one's cancer with every forkful of mashed potatoes that one swallows. One can tell oneself that the recovery, or a dose of authority, or ecofeminism will eventually fix all this. Continuing in such a manner is possi­ble, at the cost of suppressing our feeling that the society we live in is intrinsically criminal, and one that doesn't miss a chance to remind us that we belong to its little association of miscreants. Every time we come in contact with it-by using any of its devices, consuming the least of its commodities, or doing whatever job we do for it-we make our­ selves its accomplices, we contract a little of the vice on which it is based: that of exploiting, wrecking, undermining the very conditions of every earthly existence. There's no longer any place for innocence in this world. We only have the choice between two crimes: taking part in it or deserting it in order to bring it down. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.127-128

By considering the human subject in isolation from its world, by detaching living beings from all that lives around them, modernity could not help but engender a communism destined to eradicate a socialism. And that socialism could only encounter peasants, nomads, and "savages" as an obstacle to be shoved aside, as an unpleasant residue at the bottom of the national scale of importance. It couldn't even see the communism of which they were the bearers. If modern "com­munism" was able to imagine itself as a universal brotherhood, as a realized equality, this was only through a cavalier extrapolation from the lived experience offraternity in combat, offriendship. For what is friendship if not equality between friends? Without at least the occasional experience of com­munity, we die inside, we dry out, become cynical, harsh, desert-like. Life becomes that ghost city peo­pled by smiling mannequins, which functions. Our need for community is so pressing that after having ravaged all the existing bonds, capitalism is running on nothing but the promise of "community." What are the social networks, the dating apps, if not that promise perpetually disappointed? What are all the modes, all the technologies of communication, all the love songs, if not a way to maintain the dream of a continuity between beings where in the end every contact melts away? Opportunely, this frustrated promise intensifies the need, making it hysterical even, and accelerates the great cash machine of those who exploit it. Maintaining misery while dangling the possibility of escape is capitalism's great stratagem. […] Even this epoch's obsession with sexuality and its hyper-indulgence in pornography attests to the need for community, in the very extremeness of the latter's deprivation. When Milton Friedman says that the market is the magic mechanism enabling "millions of individuals to come together on a daily basis without any need to love one another or even to speak to one another," he's describing the end result while carefully redacting the process that has brought so many people into the market, the thing that keeps them there, which is not just hunger, threat, or the lure of profit. He also spares himself from having to admit the devas­tations of all sorts which make it possible to establish something like "a market," and to present it as natural. […] In reality, the question of commu­nism is also raised in each of our tiny and unique existences in response to what is making us sick. In response to what is slowly killing us, to our failures in love, to what makes us such strangers to each other that by way of an explanation for all the world's ills, we're satisfied with the foolish idea that "People are assholes." Refusing to see this amounts to wearing one's insensitivity like a tattoo. It's well suited to the kind of pale, myopic virility that's required for becoming an economist. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.132-135

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

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. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.154-155

What would be the principle characteristics of the new culture and how would it compare with ancient art? Against the spectacle, the realised situationist culture introduces total participation. Against preserved art, it is the organisation of the directly lived moment. Against particularised art, it will be a global practice with a bearing, each moment, on all the usable elements. Naturally this would tend to collective production which would be without doubt anonymous (at least to the extent where the works are no longer stocked as commodities, this culture will not be dominated by the need to leave traces.) The minimum proposals of these experiences will be a revolution in behaviour and a dynamic unitary urbanism capable of extension to the entire planet, and of being further extensible to all habitable planets. Against unilateral art, situationist culture will be an art of dialogue, an art of interaction. Today artists - with all culture visible - have become entirely separated from society, just as they are separated from each other by competition. But faced with this impasse of capitalism, art has remained essentially unilateral in response. This enclosed era of primitivism must be superseded by complete communication. At a higher stage, everyone will become an artist, i.e., inseparably a producer-consumer of total culture creation, which will help the rapid dissolution of the linear criteria of novelty. Everyone will be a situationist so to speak, with a multidimensional inflation of tendencies, experiences, or radically different "schools" - not successively, but simultaneously. We will inaugurate what will historically be the last of the crafts. The role of amateur-professional situationist - of anti-specialist - is again a specialisation up to the point of economic and mental abundance, when everyone becomes an "artist," in the sense that the artists have not attained the construction of their own life. However, the last craft of history is so close to the society without a permanent division of labour, that when it appeared amongst the S.I., its status as a craft was generally denied. Situationist Manifesto, Internationale Situationniste #4, https://libcom.org/article/situationist-manifesto

His [Sorel’s] identification of socialism as a movement rather than a state of society to be treated as a historical goal recalls Marx’s assertion that communism is the real movement which abolishes the present state of things: "Socialism is the workers’ movement, the revolt of the proletariat against ruling institutions. It is the organization which is both economic and ethical at the same time, which we see forming before our eyes, and whose purpose is to struggle against bourgeois traditions.” [Stanley, From Georges Sorel, Oxford University Press, p. 147.] Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 76

The subject position of human flourishing is figured by Bloch in terms of human dignity as the upright gait, ‘the individual who is no longer to be humiliated, enslaved, forsaken, scorned, estranged, annihilated, and deprived of identity’. Bloch concludes The Principle of Hope with the aspiration for the world anticipated as outcome of this process: "But the root of history is the working, creating human being who reshapes and overhauls the given facts. Once he has grasped himself and established what is his, without expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no-one has yet been: *Heimat*. [Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Basil Blackwell 1986, p. 1376.] [The English translation renders Heimat as ‘homeland’. This never captured the resonance of Heimat] Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 6-7

I argue that Marx’s vision of communism as a society beyond exchange value, private property, and money, based on associations of free producers, and governed by the principle “to each according to their needs from each according to their abilities” represents an ideal that no anticapitalist feminist can object to. Feminists can also embrace Marx’s inspiring image of a world beyond the social division of labor, although they may want to ensure that between hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, and criticizing after dinner, there would remain some time for everyone to share cleaning and childcare. Federici, Re-Enchanting the World, Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, p.153-154

[…] Marx’s historical materialist method, which posits that in order to understand history and society we must understand the material conditions of social reproduction, is crucial from a feminist perspective. Recognizing that social subordination is a historical product rooted in a specific organization of work has had a liberating effect on women. It has denaturalized the sexual division of labor and the identities built upon it, projecting gender categories not only as social constructs but as concepts whose content is constantly redefined, infinitely mobile, open-ended, and always politically charged. Federici, Re-Enchanting the World, Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, p.154

The main characteristics of the work-processes described above is that they are all connected with the direct production of life or of use values. A feminist concept of labour has to be oriented towards the production of life as the goal of work and not the production of things and of wealth (see the quotation from Marx above), of which the production of life is then a secondary derivative. The production of immediate life in all its aspects must be the core concept for the development of a feminist concept of work. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, Towards a Feminist Perspective of a New Society, p.217

[…] the development of a feminist concept of labour has to begin with a rejection of the distinction between socially necessary labour and leisure, and the Marxist view that self-realization, human happiness, freedom, autonomy - the realm of freedom - can be achieved only outside the sphere of necessity and of necessary labour, and by a reduction (or abolition) of the latter. If we take as our model of a worker not the white male industrial wage-worker (irrespective of whether he works under capitalist or socialist conditions), but a mother, we can immediately see that her work does not fit into the Marxian concept. For her, work is always both: a burden as well as a source of enjoyment, self-fulfilment, and happiness. Children may give her a lot of work and trouble, but this work is never totally alienated or dead. Even when children turn out to be a disappointment for the mother, when they eventually leave her or feel contempt for her - as in fact many do in our society - the pain she suffers at all this is still more human than the cold indifference of the industrial worker or engineer vis-a-vis his products, the commodities he produces and consumes. The same unity of work as a burden and work as enjoyment can be found among peasants whose production is not yet totally subsumed under commodity production and the compulsions of the market. The peasants who have to work from dawn to dusk during the harvesting season, for instance, feel the burden of work more than anybody else in their bodies and in their muscles. But in spite of the hardship of this work, it is never only ‘a curse’. I remember the times of haymaking or harvesting on our small subsistence farm in my childhood as times of extreme labour intensity for everybody-mother, children, father-and as times of the greatest excitement, enjoyment, social interaction. I found the same phenomenon among poor peasant and agricultural labourer women in India during the season of rice transplantation. […] During the collective work-processes in the fields, they sang an endless number of ballads which helped them ftp bear the burden of work more easily. And in the evening, after the evening meal, they danced and sang together till late (Mies, 1984). Anyone who has had an opportunity to observe the work-process of people involved in non-market oriented subsistence production will have found this interplay of work as necessity and burden, and work as a basic source of enjoyment and self-expression. The same is true for the work of the artisan or in handicrafts production, as long as this work is not yet fully subsumed under the compulsions of the market. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, Towards a Feminist Perspective of a New Society, p.216-217

A feminist concept of labour has, therefore, to be oriented towards a different concept of time, in which time is not segregated into portions of burdensome labour and portions of supposed pleasure and leisure, but in which times of work and times of rest and enjoyment are alternating and interspersed. If such a concept and such an organization of time prevail, the length of the working-day is no longer very relevant. Thus, a long working-day and even a lifetime full of work, will not then be felt as a curse but as a source of human fulfilment and happiness. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, Towards a Feminist Perspective of a New Society, p.217

[…] we can work with Marxist categories, but we must reconstruct them and change their architectural order, so that the center of gravity is not exclusively wage labor and commodity production but the production and reproduction of labor power, especially that part of it that is carried out by women at home. For in doing so, we make visible a new terrain of accumulation and struggle, as well as the full extent of capital’s dependence on unpaid labor and the full length of the working day. Federici, Re-Enchanting the World, Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, p.156

Placing the reproduction of labor power at the center of capitalist production unearths a world of social relations that remains invisible in Marx but is essential to exposing the mechanisms that regulate the exploitation of labor. It discloses that the unpaid labor that capital extracts from the working class is far greater than Marx ever imagined, extending to both the domestic work that women have been expected to perform and the exploitation of the colonies and peripheries of the capitalist world. […] in both cases, not only have the forms of work and coercion involved been naturalized, but both have become part of a global assembly line designed to cut the cost of reproducing the wage workers. On this line, the unpaid domestic labor ascribed to women as their natural destiny joins with and relays the work of millions of campesinas, subsistence farmers, and informal laborers, growing and producing for a pittance the commodities that waged workers consume or providing at the lowest cost the services their reproduction requires. Hence the hierarchies of labor that so much racist ideology has tried to justify, but which only demonstrate that the capitalist class has maintained its power through a system of indirect rule, effectively dividing the working class, with the wage used to delegate to the male workers’ power over the unwaged, starting with the control and supervision of women’s bodies and labor. This means that the wage is not only the terrain on which the working class negotiates the quantity and constitution of socially necessary work - but is also an instrument for the creation of unequal power relations and hierarchies between workers, and that worker’s cooperation in the labor process is by no means sufficient to unify the working class. Federici, Re-Enchanting the World, Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, p.156-157

It took women’s revolt against the housework in the 1960s and 1970s to prove that domestic work is “socially necessary labor” in the capitalist sense, that even though it is not organized on an industrial basis, it is extremely productive, and that to a large extent it is work that cannot be mechanized; for reproducing the individuals in which labor power subsists requires a variety of emotional as well as physical services that are interactive in nature and therefore very labor intensive. This realization has further destabilized Marx’s theoretical and political framework, forcing us to rethink one of the main tenets of Marx’s theory of revolution, that is, the assumption that with the development of capitalism all forms of work will be industrialized and, most important, that capitalism and modern industry are preconditions for the liberation of humanity from exploitations. Federici, Re-Enchanting the World, Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, p.159

[…] Marx’s vision of a society in which necessary labor can be drastically reduced through automation clashes with the fact that the largest amount of work on earth is of a highly relational nature and hardly subject to mechanization. Ideally, in a post-capitalist society we would mechanize several household chores, and we would certainly rely on new forms of communication for company, learning and information, once we controlled what technology is produced, for what purposes, and under what conditions. But how can we mechanize washing, cuddling, consoling, dressing, and feeding a child, providing sexual services, or assisting those who are ill or the elderly and not self-sufficient? What machine could incorporate the skills and affects needed for these tasks? Attempts have been made with the creation of nursebots and interactive lovebots, and it is possible that in the future we may see the production of mechanical mothers. But even assuming that we could afford such devices, we must wonder at what emotional cost we could introduce them in our homes in replacement of living labor. But if reproductive work can only in part be mechanized, then the Marxian scheme that makes the expansion of material wealth dependent on automation and the reduction of necessary labor implodes; for domestic work, and especially the care of children, constitutes most of the work on this planet. The very concept of socially necessary labor loses much of its cogency. How is socially necessary labor to be defined if the largest and most indispensable sector of work on the planet is not recognized as an essential part of it? And by what criteria and principles will the organization of care work, sexual work, and procreation will be governed if these activities are not considered part of socially necessary labor? Federici, Re-Enchanting the World, Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, p.162-163

[…] the collectivization of our everyday reproductive work […] is an essential part of our education to collective government and our recognition of history as a collective project, which is perhaps the main casualty of the neoliberal era of capitalism. On this account, we too must include in our political agenda the communalization of housework, reviving that rich feminist tradition that in the U.S. stretches from the utopian socialist experiments of the mid-nineteenth century to the attempts that “material feminists” made from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century to reorganize and socialize domestic work, and thereby the home and the neighborhood, through collective housekeeping […]. These practices and, most importantly, the ability of past feminists to look at reproductive labor as an important sphere of human activity not to be negated but to be revolutionized must be revisited and revalorized. One crucial reason for creating collective forms of living is that the reproduction of human beings is the most labor-intensive work on earth and, to a very large extent, is irreducible to mechanization. We cannot mechanize childcare, health care or the psychological work necessary to reintegrate our physical and emotional balance. Despite the efforts that futuristic industrialists are making, we cannot robotize care except at a terrible cost for the people involved. No one will accept nursebots as caregivers, especially for children and the ill. Shared responsibility and cooperative work not given at the cost of the health of the providers are the only guarantees of proper care. For centuries, the reproduction of human beings has been a collective process. It has been the work of extended families and the communities upon which people could rely, especially in proletarian neighborhoods, even when they lived alone, so that old age was not accompanied by the desolate loneliness and dependence with which so many of our elderly live. It is only with the advent of capitalism that reproduction has been completely privatized, a process that is now extended to a degree that destroys our lives. This trend must be reversed, and the present time is propitious for such a project. Federici, Re-Enchanting the World, Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, p.110-111

[The capitalist mode of production] has been rendered so much more productive not only by the extension of the working day to the humanly possible limits, but also through reproduction being posited as "natural production," which has enabled two workers to be exploited with one wage. and the entire cost of reproduction to be unloaded onto the labor force. Thus it becomes clear that Marxian analysis describes only one half of the process of production - the production of com­modities - and cannot be extended per se to cover reproduction; and further­more, that an analysis of the entire cycle of production cannot be made until reproduction has been analyzed too. This latter analysis can only be made if Marxian categories are not used dogmatically and if they are combined with feminist criticism. Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction, p.9-10

It is often asserted that, within the definition of wage labor, women in domestic labor are not productive. In fact precisely the opposite is true if one thinks of the enormous quantity of social services which capitalist organization transforms into privatized activity, putting them on the backs of housewives. Domestic labor is not essentially “feminine work”; a woman doesn’t fulfill herself more or get less exhausted than a man from washing and cleaning. These are social services inasmuch as they serve the reproduction of labor power. And capital, precisely by instituting its family structure, has “liberated” the man from these functions so that he is completely “free” for direct exploitation; so that he is free to “earn” enough for a woman to reproduce him as labor power. It has made men wage slaves, then, to the degree that it has succeeded in allocating these services to women in the family, and by the same process controlled the flow of women onto the labor market […]. And women are of service not only because they carry out domestic labor without a wage and without going on strike, but also because they always receive back into the home all those who are periodically expelled from their jobs by economic crisis. The family, this maternal cradle always ready to help and protect in time of need, has been in fact the best guarantee that the unemployed do not immediately become a horde of disruptive outsiders. Dalla Costa & James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community, p.33-34

Now it is clear that not one of us believes that emancipation, liberation, can be achieved through work. Work is still work, whether inside or outside the home. The independence of the Wage earner means only being a “free individual” for capital, no less for women than for men. Those who advocate that the (liberation of the-working class woman lies in her getting a job outside the home are part of the problem, not the solution. Slavery to an assembly line is not a liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink. To deny this is also to deny the slavery of the assembly line itself, proving again that if you don’t know how women are exploited, you can never really know how men are. But this question is so crucial that we deal with it separately. What we wish to make clear here is that by the non-payment of a wage when we are producing in a world capitalistically organized, the figure of the boss is concealed behind that of the husband. He appears to be the sole recipient of domestic services, and this gives an ambiguous and slavelike character to housework. The husband and children, through their loving involvement, their loving blackmail, become the first foremen, the immediate controllers of this labor. Dalla Costa & James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community, p.35

The husband tends to read the paper and wait for his dinner to be cooked and served, even when his wife goes out to work as he does and comes home with him. Clearly, the specific form of exploitation represented by domestic work demands a correspondingly specific form of struggle, namely the women’s struggle, within the family. If we fail to grasp completely that precisely this family is the very pillar of the capitalist organization of work, if we make the mistake of regarding it only as a superstructure, dependent for change only on the stages of the struggle in the factories, then we will be moving in a limping revolution that will always perpetuate and aggravate a basic contradiction in the class struggle, and a contradiction which is functional to capitalist development. We would, in other words, be perpetuating the error of considering ourselves as producers of use values only, of considering housewives external to the working class. As long as housewives are considered external to the class, the class struggle at every moment and any point is impeded, frustrated, and unable to find full scope for its action. To elaborate this further is not our task here. To expose and condemn domestic work as a masked form of productive labor, however, raises a series of questions concerning both the aims and the forms of struggle of women. Dalla Costa & James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community, p.35-36

In exemplary fashion, the famous feminist motto “the personal is political” intended to convey an idea that was scandalous in the 1960s: that there are “political dimensions to private life, that power relations shaped life in marriage, in the kitchen, the bedroom, the nursery, and at work” (Rosen in Lee 2007:163). […] “The personal is political” means, also, that pervasive cultural norms and social and economic structures are enacted and reproduced through individual action (Butler 1988:522). The feminist movement worked out schemes of political thought and action in line with this politicization of the everyday. It favoured modes of civic engagement that involved “average” women in their everyday lives. The emblematic practice of “consciousness-raising” that has been nurtured in feminist groups purported to empower women politically in their personal relations and life worlds. This process of critical group-thinking embodies a dynamic way of politicizing the personal and a singular modality of politics in the “everyday”. By way of sharing personal experiences and through collective discussion around shared feelings and concerns, it stimulated reflection on the political facets of personal life. Consciousness-raising thus enhanced awareness of everyday oppression. It boosted the self-esteem of women as persons who bring their distinct contribution to politics by cherishing, for example, values of sensitivity and care for the others. It also investigated ways of initiating change in patriarchal norms and subjectivities, in the present tense and from below. Hence, feminist politics intimated the idea that individual acts can be political in the mundane reality of gender relations inasmuch as they recycle cultural conventions of subordination or they undertake to displace and upset them (Hanisch 2006; Butler 1988: 523-4; Lee 2007: 165-6) Kioupkiolis, The Common and Counter-Hegemonic Politics, p.123

Ironically, the reproduction of dual spheres of gender and the anchoring of women to one and not the other is perpetuated and constantly re-established by the very mechanism of the “sex-blind” labour-market, which obtains not for the man/woman distinction directly but rather for the price distinction, or the exchange-value of their labour-power. Indeed, labour markets, if they are to remain markets, must be “sex-blind”. Markets, as the locus of exchanges of equivalents, are supposed to blur concrete differences in a pure comparison of abstract values. How then can this “sex-blind” market reproduce the gender difference? Once a group of individuals, women, are defined as “those who have children” and once this social activity, “having children”, is structurally formed as constituting a handicap, women are defined as those who come to the labour-market with a potential disadvantage. This systematic differentiation — through the market-determined risk identified as childbearing “potential” — keeps those who embody the signifier “woman” anchored to the IMM sphere. Therefore, because capital is a “sex-blind” abstraction, it concretely punishes women for having a sex, even though that “sexual difference” is produced by capitalist social relations, and absolutely necessary to the reproduction of capitalism itself. […]. As an apparent contradiction, once sexual difference becomes structurally defined and reproduced, woman as a bearer of labour-power with a higher social cost becomes its opposite: the commodity labour-power with a cheaper price. […] capitalists […] will […] privilege the labour-power that is likely to be the most reliable over a long period. If the worker is potentially going to leave, then she will not be as good an investment, and will get a lower price. Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender

Systems theory replaces "subject" with "system," "object" with "environment," and conceptualizes the subject's ability to know and to deal with objects as systemic achievements that consist in registering and reducing the complexity of the environment. When systems learn to relate reflexively to their own systemic unity, this is merely an additional step in heightening their own complexity in order to be a better match for the hypercomplexity of the environment; this "self-consciousness" also remains within the logical sphere of the self-maintenance of systems. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1, p.396

Whether the tendencies toward bureaucratization described by Weber will ever reach the Orwellian state in which all integrativeoperations have been converted from the - in my view, still fundamental-sociative mechanism of reaching understanding in language over to systemic mechanisms, and whether such a state is at all possible without a transformation of anthropologically deep-seated structures - these are open questions. I see the methodological weakness of an absolutized systems functionalism precisely in the fact that it formulates its basic concepts as if that process, whose beginnings Weber perceived, had already been concluded - as if a total bureaucratization had dehumanized society as a whole, consolidated it into a system torn from its roots in a communicatively structured lifeworld, and demoted the lifeworld to the status of one subsystem among many. For Adorno, this "administered world" was a vision of extreme horror; for Luhmann it has become a trivial presupposition. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.312

The propelling mechanism of the economic system has to be kept as free as possible from lifeworld restrictions as well as from the demands for legitimation directed to the administrative system. The internal systemic logic of capitalism can be rendered in social-theoretical terms by the formula that the functional necessities of systemically integrated domains of action shall be met, if need be, even at the cost of technicizing the lifeworld. Systems theory of the Luhmannian sort transforms this practical postulate into a theoretical one and thus makes its normative content unrecognizable. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.345

All sacred objects-flags, emblems, decorations, tatoos, ornaments, figures, idols, or natural objects and events-share this symbolic status. They figure as signs with conventional significations, and they all have the same semantic core: they represent the power of the sacred; they are "collective ideals that have fixed themselves on material objects:' This formulation comes from the interesting essay in which Durkheim gives his theory of collective consciousness the shape of a theory of symbolic forms: "collective representations originate only when they are embodied in mate- rial objects, things, or beings of every sort-figures, movements, sounds, words, and so on - that symbolize and delineate them in some outward appearance. For it is only by expressing their feelings, by translating them into signs, by symbolizing them externally, that the individual consciousnesses, which are, by nature, closed to each other, can feel that they are communicating and are in unison. The things that embody the collective representations arouse the same feelings as do the mental states that they represent and, in a manner of speaking, materialize. They, too, are respected, feared, and sought after as helping powers”. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.2, p.51-52

In that talk he defined his task as follows: "We shall show that moral rules are invested with a special authority by virtue of which they are obeyed simply because they command. We shall reaffirm, as a result of a purely empirical analysis, the notion of duty and nevertheless give a definition of it closely resembling that already given by Kant. Obligation is, then, one of the primary characteristics of the moral rule.” Violations of these norms are punished because they claim validity in virtue of moral authority; this validity does not accrue to them because external sanctions compel their observance. "The term 'moral authority' is opposed to material authority or physical supremacy.'' The aspect of the validity of moral rules calling for explanation is precisely that they possess a binding power that, rather than itself presupposing sanctions, justifies the applications of sanctions when they are violated. This is what Durkheim is driving at with his comparison between technical and moral rules: "Thus there are rules that present this particular characteristic: we refrain from performing the acts they forbid simply because they are forbidden. This is what is meant by the obligatory character of the moral rule.” Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.48

That an emblem is useful as a rallying-center for any sort of a group it is superfluous to point out. By expressing the social unity in a material form, it makes this more obvious to all, and for that very reason the use of emblematic symbols must have spread quickly when once thought of. But more than that, this idea spontaneously arises out of the conditions of common life; for the emblem is not merely a convenient process for clarifying the sentiments society has of itself: it also serves to create these sentiments; it is one of its constituent elements. In fact, if left to themselves, individual consciousnesses are closed to each other; they can communicate only by means of signs which express their internal states. If the communication established between them is to become a real communion, that is to say, a fusion of all particular sentiments into one common sentiment, the signs expressing them must themselves be fused into one single and unique resultant. It is the appearance of this that informs the individuals that they are in harmony and makes them conscious of their moral unity. It is by uttering the same cry, pronouncing the same words, or performing the same gesture regarding the same object that they become and feel themselves to be in unison. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p.262, quoted in Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.2, p.55

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’. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.53

According to Precht, the insight that material rewards spoil people’s character has a deeply disturbing aspect. After all, our entire economic system is based on such exchanges. And if economics is the continuation of ethics by other means, as economist Karl Homann and others claim – what kind of ethics is it that causes tens of thousands of people to starve to death every day? They are the ones who did not have enough to offer in market exchanges. Accordingly, the question arises how people might withdraw from this peculiar power of money without a “fundamental criticism of our entire economic system,” which Precht, too, presents as illusory. Social psychologist Harald Welzer rightly deems so-called Realpolitik as a “politics of illusion,” if we consider the extent to which people have closed their eyes on the global societal catastrophes. In this respect, he contends, only utopian politics are realistic. Habermann, We are not Born as Egoists, https://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/we-are-not-born-egoists

Durkheim first discusses the Kantian opposition between duty and inclination from the standpoint that the relation of moral precepts to the interests of the individual is one of tension. Imperatives of self-maintenance, interests in the satisfaction of private needs and desires - in short, action orientations that are utilitarian and related to oneself- are not as such in accord with moral requirements, which demand, rather, that the actor raise himself above himself. The selfiessness of the morally acting individual corresponds to the universality of morally normed expectations, which are directed to all the members of a community: "Morality begins with membership in a group, whatever that group may be.’ Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2, p.48

We need to abandon the idea that there is politics only where there is vision, program, project, and perspective, where there is a goal, decisions to be made, and problems to be solved. What is truly political is only what emerges from life and makes it a definite, oriented reality. And it is born from what is nearby and not from a projection toward the far-distant. The nearby doesn't mean the restricted, the limited, the narrow, the local. It means rather what is in tune, vibrant, adequate, present, sensible, luminous, and familiar-the prehensible and comprehensible. It's not a spatial notion but an ethical one. Geographic distance is unable to remove us from that which we feel to be near. Conversely, being neighbors doesn't always make us close. It's only.from contact that the friend and the enemy are discovered. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.65

That an emblem is useful as a rallying-center for any sort of a group it is superfluous to point out. By expressing the social unity in a material form, it makes this more obvious to all, and for that very reason the use of emblematic symbols must have spread quickly when once thought of. But more than that, this idea spontaneously arises out of the conditions of common life; for the emblem is not merely a convenient process for clarifying the sentiments society has of itself: it also serves to create these sentiments; it is one of its constituent elements. In fact, if left to themselves, individual consciousnesses are closed to each other; they can communicate only by means of signs which express their internal states. If the communication established between them is to become a real communion, that is to say, a fusion of all particular sentiments into one common sentiment, the signs expressing them must themselves be fused into one single and unique resultant. It is the appearance of this that informs the individuals that they are in harmony and makes them conscious of their moral unity. It is by uttering the same cry, pronouncing the same words, or performing the same gesture regarding the same object that they become and feel themselves to be in unison. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p.262, quoted in Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.2, p.55

All sacred objects-flags, emblems, decorations, tatoos, ornaments, figures, idols, or natural objects and events-share this symbolic status. They figure as signs with conventional significations, and they all have the same semantic core: they represent the power of the sacred; they are "collective ideals that have fixed themselves on material objects:' This formulation comes from the interesting essay in which Durkheim gives his theory of collective consciousness the shape of a theory of symbolic forms: "collective representations originate only when they are embodied in mate- rial objects, things, or beings of every sort-figures, movements, sounds, words, and so on - that symbolize and delineate them in some outward appearance. For it is only by expressing their feelings, by translating them into signs, by symbolizing them externally, that the individual consciousnesses, which are, by nature, closed to each other, can feel that they are communicating and are in unison. The things that embody the collective representations arouse the same feelings as do the mental states that they represent and, in a manner of speaking, materialize. They, too, are respected, feared, and sought after as helping powers”. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.2, p.51-52

One can see the structural similarities between ritual action and symbolically mediated interaction steered via signals. Paleosymbols have a meaning that is not yet modally differentiated, and, like signals, they possess the power to steer behavior. On the other hand, ritual actions have lost their adaptive function; they serve to establish and maintain a collective identity, on the strength of which the steering of interaction is transferred from a genetic program anchored in the individual organism over to an intersubjectively shared cultural program. This program can be transmitted only if the intersubjective unity of a communication community is secured. The group can constitute itself as a collectivity when the motivational makeup of the associated individuals is taken hold of symbolically and structured through the same semantic contents. The predominantly appelative-expressive character of rites suggests that instinctual residues are symbolically absorbed and sublimated […]. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.2, p.55

In societies that have attained the level of civilizations, worldviews have the function, among others, of legitimating political leadership. They offer a potential for grounding that can be used to justify a political order or the institutional framework of a society in general. Thus they lend support to the moral authority or validity of basic norms. As Weber emphasized, the legitimating power of worldviews is to be explained primarily by the fact that cultural knowledge can meet with rationally motivated approval. The situation is different with the not yet intellectually elaborated worldviews common in tribal societies; they do make available a potential for narrative explanations, but they are still so tightly interwoven with the system of institutions that they explicate it rather than subsequently legitimate it. These worldviews establish an analogical nexus between man, nature, and society which is represented as a totality in the basic concepts of mythical powers. Because these worldviews project a totality in which everything corresponds with everything else, they subjectively attach the collective identity of the group or the tribe to the cosmic order and integrate it with the system of social institutions. In the limit case, worldviews function as a kind of drive belt that transforms the basic religious consensus into the energy of social solidarity and passes it on to social institutions, thus giving them a moral authority. What is of primary interest in analyzing the interrelation between normative consensus, worldview, and institutional system, however, is that the connection is established through channels of linguistic communication. Whereas ritual actions take place at a pregrammatical level, religious worldviews are connected with full-fledged communicative actions. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.2, p.56

We need to abandon the idea that there is politics only where there is vision, program, project, and perspective, where there is a goal, decisions to be made, and problems to be solved. What is truly political is only what emerges from life and makes it a definite, oriented reality. And it is born from what is nearby and not from a projection toward the far-distant. The nearby doesn't mean the restricted, the limited, the narrow, the local. It means rather what is in tune, vibrant, adequate, present, sensible, luminous, and familiar-the prehensible and comprehensible. It's not a spatial notion but an ethical one. Geographic distance is unable to remove us from that which we feel to be near. Conversely, being neighbors doesn't always make us close. It's only.from contact that the friend and the enemy are discovered. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.65

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

[…] what constitutes human need (as distinct from animal need) lies in investing the object with a value that exceeds, for example, its simple inscription in the 'instinctual' opposition, nutritive-non-nutritive (which 'holds' for ani­mals as well) and which establishes within the nutritive the distinction between the edible and the non-edible, which creates food in the cultural sense and arranges foods within a hierarchy, classifying them into 'better foods' and foods that are 'not as good' (in the sense of cultural value not in that of subjective tastes). This cultural sampling among available foods and the corresponding hierarchization, struc­turing, etc. are leaning on natural givens, but they do not stem from them. It is social need that creates scarcity as social scarcity, and not the opposite. It is neither the availability of snails and frogs nor their scarcity that makes them for contemporary, nearby and related cultures, in one instance a gourmet's delight and in the other a sure cause of vomiting. One has only to draw up the catalogue of everything that humans can eat, and actually have eaten (not feeling any the worse for it) in different periods and in different societies, to see that what is edible for humans far exceeds what each culture has taken as its food, and that what has determined this choice has not been simply natural availability and technical possibilities. This is even more clearly appar­ent when one examines needs other than food. This choice is carried by a system of imaginary significations that value or devalue, structure and hierarchize an intersecting ensemble of objects and corresponding lacks; and it is here that one can read, more easily than anywhere else, what is just as uncertain as it is incontestable - the orientation of a society. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, p.150

[…] human needs, to the extent that they are social and not simply biological, are inseparable from their objects, and both these needs and their objects are in every instance instituted by the society considered. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, p.171

The wealth of the commune will hardly be the same as the wealth we know, only produced under different relations. Nor is the point to give metropolitan residents more of what they already have: more flights, cars, cell-phones, and ugly, cheap t-shirts. And not because those needs could be denounced as “artificial” and juxtaposed with so-called natural ones. As the late Marxists from Frankfurt demonstrated, distinguishing between artificial and natural needs tends to be arbitrary in an authoritarian sense, because nature, as manifested in individuals’ drives, and society are inextricably intertwined in every need. As products of the existing class society, however, needs are not innocent nor should they always be projected into a classless society. Adorno answered this dilemma on the one hand with the dialectical core of his argument: reorganizing production towards the satisfaction of “even and especially those [needs] produced by capitalism—then the needs themselves would be decisively transformed”. It would “quickly emerge” that the masses don’t need the “trash” forced upon them today. On the other hand, he answered with ideas of equality and solidarity: “The question of the immediate satisfaction of need is not to be posed in terms of social and natural, primary and secondary, correct and false; rather, it coincides with the question of the suffering of the vast majority of all humans on earth. If we produced that which all humans now most urgently need, then we would be relieved of inflated social-psychological concerns about the legitimacy of their needs.” […] Without posing the question of ‘true’ and ‘false’ needs and far from any austere anti-hedonism in a green guise, a social revolutionary movement would aim at a different kind of wealth in the capitalist centres. While wealth today presents itself as an ‘immense accumulation of commodities’, being not so much social, but a mere sum total of private, unequally distributed possessions, the commune would have to aim not only for maximal socialization in the sphere of production, but also in the spheres of use and consumption. Contrary to any cult of community, the “right to solitude” (Marcuse) and the retreat into private life would be inviolable. However, unlike in the profit economy, built on bulk sales and planned obsolescence, the private sphere in the commune would no longer be primarily the space in which a steadily increasing flow of accumulated commodities must be devoured in order to keep the machine running. If canteens and laundromats became spaces of encounter beyond their bare functionality, it would no longer be necessary to have a dishwasher and washing machine in every apartment. With a few immediate measures, the commune would be capable of solving problems in a flash that technocrats endlessly grind their teeth on. Rather than continuing with the unmitigated disaster that is “e-mobility”—electric cars consume the same amount of labour, resources, streets and space in cities as cars that run on gas, and instead of exhaust gas pollution there is the highly toxic production of batteries — the commune could simply build a few tramways (with cars gone, there is no need to expend huge amounts of effort to dig tunnels into the earth). With no harried tourists and managers, air traffic could be reduced drastically in order to let the planet breathe a little. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

The Hellenic ideal of freedom - an ideal confined to the citizen -­ was different. Freedom existed for activity, not from activity. It was not a realm but a practice-the practice of being free by participating in free institutions, by daily recreating, elaborating, and fostering the activity of being free. One was not merely "free" in the passive sense of freedom from constraint, but in the active sense of "freeing," both of oneself and one's fellow citizens. An authentic community is not merely a structural constellation of human beings but rather the practice of communizing. Hence, freedom in the polis was a constellation of relationships that was continually in the process of reproduction. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.263

W.B.Gallie and William E. Connolly sought to explain why central political concepts, including ‘politics’ itself, are inherently susceptible to endless dispute over their meaning and range of application. When a concept is ‘appraisive’, denoting a valued activity; when it is internally complex, referring to a cluster of different dimensions; and when its rules of application are relatively open and an object of disagreement themselves, then the concept is ‘essentially contested’. It is obvious that ‘politics’ qualifies as such. Politics implicates many different dimensions, including collective decision-making, legally binding authority, interests, conflict, negotiation, public administration, government and power, which are themselves internally complex and fuzzy. And people will dissent over whether sexuality, mathematics and religion are, or should be, political issues subject to public decision-making. Kioupkiolis, The Common and Counter-Hegemonic Politics, p.119

Hence, a reasonable construal of the political should, first, remain alert to its historical limitations and its contestable validity, rather than make any pretence to universal truth. Second, it should be informed by a historicized hermeneutics that puts forth context-bound interpretations, taking its cues from the contingent, contextual ideas about politics, while testing their bounds and creatively recalibrating them. Third, one should reckon with the diversity and the contentiousness of political positions and acts, while also acknowledging the openness of political action to the radically new. Finally, a pluralist and self-reflective conception of the political should closely attend to actual social conditions, and it should dialogically interact with the arena of mainstream politics as well as with grassroots civic activity and critical thinking. In a nutshell, a qualified, contextualized, plural and open notion of the political should remain alive to a tradition of political thought that was championed by Hand J. Morgenthau in 1933: ‘The concept of the political does not have a fixed content which can be determined once and for all’. ‘The political nature of these matters thus depends on circumstances of time and place and does not result from a ground of principle’. Kioupkiolis, The Common and Counter-Hegemonic Politics, p.119

[…] ‘the political’ bears on social activity that deliberatively intervenes in existing social relations, structures and embedded subjectivities in order to shape them intentionally by challenging them, transfiguring them, displacing them, managing them or defending them against challenges. Kioupkiolis, The Common and Counter-Hegemonic Politics, p.119

In exemplary fashion, the famous feminist motto “the personal is political” intended to convey an idea that was scandalous in the 1960s: that there are “political dimensions to private life, that power relations shaped life in marriage, in the kitchen, the bedroom, the nursery, and at work” (Rosen in Lee 2007:163). […] “The personal is political” means, also, that pervasive cultural norms and social and economic structures are enacted and reproduced through individual action (Butler 1988:522). The feminist movement worked out schemes of political thought and action in line with this politicization of the everyday. It favoured modes of civic engagement that involved “average” women in their everyday lives. The emblematic practice of “consciousness-raising” that has been nurtured in feminist groups purported to empower women politically in their personal relations and life worlds. This process of critical group-thinking embodies a dynamic way of politicizing the personal and a singular modality of politics in the “everyday”. By way of sharing personal experiences and through collective discussion around shared feelings and concerns, it stimulated reflection on the political facets of personal life. Consciousness-raising thus enhanced awareness of everyday oppression. It boosted the self-esteem of women as persons who bring their distinct contribution to politics by cherishing, for example, values of sensitivity and care for the others. It also investigated ways of initiating change in patriarchal norms and subjectivities, in the present tense and from below. Hence, feminist politics intimated the idea that individual acts can be political in the mundane reality of gender relations inasmuch as they recycle cultural conventions of subordination or they undertake to displace and upset them (Hanisch 2006; Butler 1988: 523-4; Lee 2007: 165-6) Kioupkiolis, The Common and Counter-Hegemonic Politics, p.123

There is a plurality of realms. Of realms that are all the more real because they are shared. And that coexist. Politics, in truth, is the interplay between different realms, the alliance between those that are compatible and the confrontation between those that are irreconcilable. Anonymous, Call, p.7

"Politique" should never have become a noun. It should have remained an adjective. An attribute, and not a substance. There are conflicts, there are encounters, there are actions, there are speech interventions that are "political," because they make a decisive stand against something in a given situation, and because they express an affirmation concerning the world they desire. Political is that which bursts forth, which forms an event, which punches a hole in the orderly progression of the disaster. That which provokes polarization, drawing a line, choosing sides. […] Everything is political that relates to the encounter, the friction, or the conflict between forms of life, between regimes of perception, between sensibilities, between worlds once this contact attains a certain threshold of intensity. The crossing of this threshold is signaled immediately by its effects: frontlines are drawn, friendships and enmities are affirmed, cracks appear in the uniform surface of the social, there is a splitting apart of what was falsely joined together and subsurface communications between the different resulting fragments. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.61-62

We need to abandon the idea that there is politics only where there is vision, program, project, and perspective, where there is a goal, decisions to be made, and problems to be solved. What is truly political is only what emerges from life and makes it a definite, oriented reality. And it is born from what is nearby and not from a projection toward the far-distant. The nearby doesn't mean the restricted, the limited, the narrow, the local. It means rather what is in tune, vibrant, adequate, present, sensible, luminous, and familiar-the prehensible and comprehensible. It's not a spatial notion but an ethical one. Geographic distance is unable to remove us from that which we feel to be near. Conversely, being neighbors doesn't always make us close. It's only.from contact that the friend and the enemy are discovered. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.65

Communalism, in contrast to anarchism, decidedly calls for decision-making by majority voting as the only equitable way for a large number of people to make decisions. Authentic anarchists claim that this principle—the “rule” of the minority by the majority—is authoritarian and propose instead to make decisions by consensus. Consensus, in which single individuals can veto majority decisions, threatens to abolish society as such. A free society is not one in which its members, like Homer’s lotus-eaters, live in a state of bliss without memory, temptation, or knowledge. Like it or not, humanity has eaten of the fruit of knowledge, and its memories are laden with history and experience. In a lived mode of freedom—contrary to mere café chatter—the rights of minorities to express their dissenting views will always be protected as fully as the rights of majorities. Any abridgements of those rights would be instantly corrected by the community—hopefully gently, but if unavoidable, forcefully—lest social life collapse into sheer chaos. Indeed, the views of a minority would be treasured as a potential source of new insights and nascent truths that, if abridged, would deny society the sources of creativity and developmental advances—for new ideas generally emerge from inspired minorities that gradually gain the centrality they deserve at a given time and place—until, again, they too are challenged as the conventional wisdom of a period that is beginning to pass away and requires new (minority) views to replace frozen orthodoxies. Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy, p.25

The concrete political dimension of Communalism is known as libertarian municipalism. In its libertarian municipalist program, Communalism resolutely seeks to eliminate statist municipal structures and replace them with the institutions of a libertarian polity. It seeks to radically restructure cities’ governing institutions into popular democratic assemblies based on neighborhoods, towns, and villages. In these popular assemblies, citizens—including the middle classes as well as the working classes—deal with community affairs on a face-to-face basis, making policy decisions in a direct democracy and giving reality to the ideal of a humanistic, rational society. Minimally, if we are to have the kind of free social life to which we aspire, democracy should be our form of a shared political life. To address problems and issues that transcend the boundaries of a single municipality, in turn, the democratized municipalities should join together to form a broader confederation. These assemblies and confederations, by their very existence, could then challenge the legitimacy of the state and statist forms of power. They could expressly be aimed at replacing state power and statecraft with popular power and a socially rational transformative politics. And they would become arenas where class conflicts could be played out and where classes could be eliminated. […] Most importantly, in Communalist political life, workers of different occupations would take their seats in popular assemblies not as workers—printers, plumbers, foundry workers, and the like, with special occupational interests to advance—but as citizens, whose overriding concern should be the general interest of the society in which they live. Citizens should be freed of their particularistic identity as workers, specialists, and individuals concerned primarily with their own particularistic interests. Municipal life should become a school for the formation of citizens, both by absorbing new citizens and by educating the young, while the assemblies themselves should function not only as permanent decision-making institutions but as arenas for educating the people in handling complex civic and regional affairs. Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy, p.16-17, 20

There can therefore be no clear rules about how these principles should be translated into organisation, but on idea much emphasised in practice is that of 'horizontaJity'. Horizontality is part of the assertion of our own subjectivity, the rejection of vertical structures, chains of command which tell us what to do, which make us the object of the decision making of others, whoever those others may be. The idea of horizontality is that all should be involved in decision-making processes on an equal basis and that there should be no leaders. In practice, it is difficult to make this work in absolute terms, since informal patterns of leadership often grow up even where there are no formal structures, so it is probably more helpful to think of horizontality not as an absolute rule but as a constant struggle against verticality. Raquel Gutierrez, in her study of the struggles in Bolivia (2009), emphasises that the important thing is not the adoption of any particular model, but the production of shared horizons of meaning through an effective process of collective deliberation. Holloway, Crack Capitalism, p.43-44

A related, but slightly different idea is expressed in the Zapatista principle of mandar obedeciendo ('to command obeying'), the principle that those in a position of authority must always obey those over whom they exercise that authority. Here a degree of non-horizontality is accepted, but the classic council principle of accountability and instant recallability ensures that those who (temporarily) occupy positions of respon­ sibility should obey the wishes of the community. In many cases (in the tradition of indigenous communities, for example), this is supplemented by the idea of a rotation of responsibilities: part of belonging to a community is to accept that one may be called upon by the community to assume certain communal responsibilities for certain periods, but always in obedience to the wishes of the community. All of this expresses the rejection of representative democracy as a form of organisation that excludes the represented. All the organisational forms that we have mentioned can be seen as developments of direct democracy, not as a set of rules but as a constant process of experimenting with democratic forms, ways of overcoming people's inhibitions, ways of controlling people's aggressions or sexist or racist assumptions. The central challenge is how to articulate effectively the we do that is the core of the cracks: how to articulate the we that is the subject of the movement, as a cohesive and yet open we, and how to articulate the do, the we as subject, as doer. The Zapatista mandar obedeciendo ('to command obeying') not only presents a solution to these questions but indicates oxymoronically a real field of tension and challenge. That the process must be understood as both exploratory and open is underlined by another central principle of the Zapatistas: preguntando caminamos, 'asking we walk'. These can all be seen as examples of pre-figurative politics, the idea that the struggle for a different society must create that society through its forms of struggle. The term describes the idea that if you can embody the change you struggle for, you have already won - not by fighting but by becoming. Holloway, Crack Capitalism, p.44-45

Under the intellectual leadership of Amadeo Bordiga, the Italian Left had long criticised council communism (which in “Left-wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder” Lenin lumped together with the Italian Left) for its championing of form over content, and its uncritical conception of democracy.8 It is this position, filtered through the influence of the dissident Bordigist journal Invariance, which underlies Gilles Dauvé's critique of council communism in “Leninism and the Ultraleft”, one of the foundational texts of the tendency we are describing.9 Dauvé accuses council communism of formalism on two counts: their approach to the question of organisation sees the form of organisation as the decisive factor (an “inverted Leninism”), and their conception of post-revolutionary society transforms the form (the councils) into the content of socialism, through depicting the latter as fundamentally a question of management. For Dauvé, as for Bordiga, this was a false question, for capitalism is not a mode of management but a mode of production, in which “managers” of any sort (capitalists, bureaucrats, or even workers) are merely the functionaries through which the law of value is articulated. As Pierre Nashua (La Vielle Taupe) and Carsten Juhl (Invariance) would also later argue, such a preoccupation with form over content effectively replaces the communist goal of the destruction of the economy with a mere opposition to its management by the bourgeoisie. Endnotes, Bring out your Dead, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/bring-out-your-dead

The use of the term utopia to refer to a category of social fictions is rejected by Mannheim as historically naïve and descriptive rather than analytical. Literary works commonly designated utopias are, at least initially, only individual expressions; they can become truly utopian only if and when they become the expression of the will of a social group, and the inspiration of successful social action in pursuit of change. Much of what is conventionally (and sometimes pejoratively) regarded as utopian is therefore excluded on this definition and consigned to the realm of ideology. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.80

According to Precht, the insight that material rewards spoil people’s character has a deeply disturbing aspect. After all, our entire economic system is based on such exchanges. And if economics is the continuation of ethics by other means, as economist Karl Homann and others claim – what kind of ethics is it that causes tens of thousands of people to starve to death every day? They are the ones who did not have enough to offer in market exchanges. Accordingly, the question arises how people might withdraw from this peculiar power of money without a “fundamental criticism of our entire economic system,” which Precht, too, presents as illusory. Social psychologist Harald Welzer rightly deems so-called Realpolitik as a “politics of illusion,” if we consider the extent to which people have closed their eyes on the global societal catastrophes. In this respect, he contends, only utopian politics are realistic. Habermann, We are not Born as Egoists, https://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/we-are-not-born-egoists

Bloch thus traces a path through ‘the little waking dreams to the strong ones, via the wavering dreams that can be abused to the rigorous ones, via the shifting castles in the air to the One Thing that is outstanding and needful’. All merit inclusion as utopian, because all are examples of wishful thinking. The notion of wishful thinking does not here carry its usual pejorative connotations. Bloch would agree with Mannheim that ‘wishful thinking has always figured in human affairs’ and that ‘myths, fairy-tales, other-worldly promises of religion, humanistic fantasies, romances, have been continually changing expressions of what was lacking in actual life’. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.100

It is fundamental to Bloch’s argument and to the concept of the Not-Yet-Become that the material world is essentially unfinished, the future is indeterminate and therefore that the future constitutes a realm of possibility. Once the world is seen as in a constant state of process, but a process whose direction and outcome is not predetermined, there are always many possible futures – futures which are real possibilities, rather than merely formal possibilities. Not all projected futures are real possibilities; there are of course constraints, and Bloch’s model is not one of pure voluntarism. Nor are all real possibilities desirable: they include ‘devastatingly, possible fascist Nothing’ as well as ‘finally feasible and overdue, socialism’. These possible futures must be seen as part of, rather than outside, reality despite the fact that the indeterminacy of the future means that there is no necessary development from potentiality to actuality, and despite the fact that not all real possibilities will in fact be realised. Utopia, as the expression of the Not-Yet-Conscious, is vindicated in so far as it reaches forward to the real possibility of the Not-Yet-Become; it is thus actively bound up in the process of the world’s becoming, as an anticipation of the future (rather than merely a compensation in the present) and, through its human purpose and action, as a catalyst of the future. Human activity, informed by imagination, has a decisive role to play: ‘the hinge in human history is its producer’.9 Utopia is the expression of hope, a hope construed ‘not ... only as emotion ... , but more essentially as a directing act of a cognitive kind ’. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.101-102

With no other writer is the rejection of form as a defining characteristic of utopia as consistent and explicit as it is with Bloch. The reason for this rejection is simultaneously political and theoretical: Bloch’s Marxism, unorthodox though it may be, means that his central preoccupation is change. The assumption that dreams of a better life may play a part in this leads Bloch to define utopia in analytic terms, as an element in this process, rather than in descriptive terms; hence the overt emphasis on function rather than form or content. Since the function of expressing, anticipating and effecting the future can be identified in a vast range of cultural forms, the subject matter of utopia is identified in terms of the common characteristic of the intention towards a better life. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.116

The preoccupation with change makes the function of utopia its central characteristic. This was true for Marx and Engels, although for them utopia was defined largely in terms of its negative function of obstructing the revolution. Bloch abandons these negative connotations, and (like Mannheim), defines utopia in terms of the positive function of effecting transformation. The process of change is a complex one, and consequently the function of utopia has several aspects. Hudson identifies four of these: “its cognitive function as a mode of operation of constructive reason, its educative function as a mythography which instructs men to will and desire more and better, its anticipatory function as a futurology of possibilities which later become actual, and its causal function as an agent of historical change.” One might add a fifth, which precedes all of these: its expressive function, as an articulation of dissatisfaction. These are properly read not as separate functions, but as different facets of a unified utopian function. This model of utopia, which is later reasserted in the work of Zygmunt Bauman, confronts many of the usual objections to utopia. These include the claims that utopia is unrealistic because it refuses to respect the constraints of external conditions, as well as dangerous since the pursuit of utopia leads inexorably to totalitarianism. It is essential to Bloch’s view of utopia that he rebuts both claims. With the Not-Yet-Become, the emphasis on process and tendency, he denies not the existence of constraints but the degree of constraint implied in ‘finished’, closed and static world. The space that is opened up in Bloch’s cosmology requires utopia in order that humanity may be able to imagine, will and effect the future. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.117-118

News from Nowhere was written in 1890 and has always been by far the most widely known of Morris’s socialist writings. […] Subtitled An Epoch of Rest, it is an account of England in the twenty-second century, to which Morris travels in a dream, waking up on the site of his own house by the Thames at Hammersmith. The first part of the book describes a journey from here to meet ‘Old Hammond’ at the British Museum. The second part is a long conversation with Hammond (who, it is whimsically implied, is Morris’s grandson), explaining both how society works and the revolution by which the change came about. The third part is a journey up the Thames from Hammersmith to Kelmscott in Oxfordshire (where Morris had his country home) for hay-making. The world portrayed in the first and third sections is compatible, at least on a superficial reading, with a view of Morris as woolly, well-meaning and fundamentally impractical; but this is substantially belied by the insistence on the need for revolutionary change and for the building and growth of the new society. In this future England, most of London has disappeared to be replaced by fields and gardens: the distinction between town and country had been abolished. Villages remain, with communal meeting places, and markets where produce is brought for distribution, but no money is used; one simply asks for what one wants. Schools no longer exist, and children learn practical skills through both play and participation in society. The Houses of Parliament are used to store manure – ‘dung is not the worst kind of corruption’. The ugliness of industrialism has been superseded by an ecologically sustainable system largely based on craft production. However, in spite of the apparent dominance of handwork there is machinery available, and power which can be used as fuel for transport as well as supplied as required to small workshops, making large factories unnecessary. The central theme is of work as pleasure, and the separation between mental and manual labour has been overcome. It is a dream from which Morris wakes to the reality of industrial capitalism and political struggle; but the book ends with the words ‘if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream’. Despite the fact that News from Nowhere contains a long section on ‘how the change came about’, which takes the form of a proletarian revolution followed by the withering away of the state, the dominant mood of the book remains anti-industrial and the society presented by Morris is one of much greater simplicity than can be regarded as feasible. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.124-125

“I believe that the ideal of the future does not point to the lessening of men’s energy by the reduction of labour to a minimum, but rather to the reduction of pain in labour to a minimum, so small that it will cease to be a pain; a gain to humanity which can only be dreamed of till men are more completely equal than Mr. Bellamy’s Utopia would allow them to be, but will most assuredly come about when men are really equal in condition ... the true incentive to useful and happy labour is and must be pleasure in the work itself ...” Morris, ‘Looking Backward’, in A. L. Morton (1984), Political Writings of William Morris (Lawrence & Wishart: London), pp. 252–3, quoted in Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.126

Thus the transformation of work lies at the heart of socialism. Moreover, this is not something that can be brought about by massive centralisation, but requires the active participation of individuals in all aspects of the social process: "there are some Socialists who do not think that the problem of the organization of life and necessary labour can be dealt with by a huge national centralisation, working by a kind of magic for which no-one feels himself responsible; that on the contrary it will be necessary for the unit of administration to be small enough for every citizen to feel himself responsible for its details, and be interested in them; that individual men cannot shuffle off the business of life on to the shoulders of some abstraction called the State, but must deal with it in conscious association with each other; that variety of life is as much an aim of true Communism as equality of condition, and that nothing but a union of these two will bring about real freedom: that modern nationalities are mere artificial devices for the commercial war that we seek to put an end to, and will disappear with it. And finally, that art, using that word in its widest and due signification, is not a mere adjunct of life which free and happy men can do without, but the necessary expression and indispensable instrument of human happiness." [William Morris, quoted by Levitas] Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.126

For Bloch, on the other hand, the utopian function of art is more active. It nourishes the sense that ‘something’s missing’, and is a necessary inspiration to social transformation. Without art to embody the dream of a matter, we will not be able to possess it in reality. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.129

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

Such demands today are not based on some sort of utopianism. They are based first of all on the struggle of the proletariat at all levels, and on all the forms of explicit refusal or profound indifference that the unstable ruling society constantly has to combat with every means. They are also based on the lesson of the fundamental defeat of all attempts at less radical changes. Finally, they are based on the extremist strivings and actions appearing today among certain sectors of youth (despite all the efforts at disciplining them and repressing them) and in a few artistic milieus. But this basis is indeed utopian in another sense of the word, in that it involves inventing and experimenting with solutions to current problems without being preoccupied with whether or not the conditions for their realization are immediately present. (It should be noted that this utopian type of experimentation now also plays a key role in modern science). This temporary, historical utopianism is legitimate; and is necessary because it serves to incubate the projection of desires without which free life would be empty of content. It is inseparable from the necessity to dissolve the present ideology of everyday life, and therefore the bonds of everyday oppression, so that the revolutionary class can disabusedly discover present and future possibilities of freedom. Utopian practice makes sense, however, only if it is closely linked to the practice of revolutionary struggle. This latter, in turn, cannot do without such utopianism without being condemned to sterility. Those seeking an experimental culture cannot hope to realize it without the triumph of the revolutionary movement, while the latter cannot itself establish authentic revolutionary conditions without resuming the efforts of the cultural avant-garde toward the critique of everyday life and its free reconstruction. Canjuers & Debord, A Unitary Revolutionary Program, 1960 (Situationist International Anthology, PM Press, p.392)

[…] the fact that utopia is no longer constrained by the need to appear immediately possible allows a freer exploration of desire. Utopia can be a much deeper exploration of the implications of alternative values than when it must be seen as realistically attainable from the here and now. And most utopias now present the transition as (i) merely possible, rather than inevitable; (ii) involving some kind of radical break from the present, necessary because it is not possible to identify trends in the present which seem likely to lead to utopia; (iii) a very vaguely defined event. The transition does not form a central issue. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.228

The essence of utopia seems to be desire – the desire for a different, better way of being. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.209

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 emancipation 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. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

[…] 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

Williams argues that the idea of society as a totality consisting of symbolic and cultural as well as economic practices (which both Ricoeur and Mannheim are employing) has certain advantages in that it represents the complexity of reality. On the other hand, the danger is that any notion of economic or class determination is lost. Only by simultaneously using Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is it possible to grasp both the class character of society and the role of ideas, meanings and values within an essentially dynamic social process. We can then locate a ‘central, effective and dominant system of meanings and values, which are not merely abstract but which are organized and lived’. This dominant culture is not homogeneous; it contains alternatives within it (so that the much vaunted diversity of choice of both products and life-styles proffered by advanced capitalism may represent both an economic benefit of market segmentation and an ideological advantage). However, there are also ‘practices, experiences, meanings, values which are not part of the effective dominant culture’, which may be alternative or oppositional. The difference between alternative and oppositional modes depends on whether the intention is to be left alone to live alongside the dominant culture or, in the case of oppositional forms and practices, to transform it. This formulation goes beyond Mannheim’s simple dichotomy between ideology and utopia. Moreover, Williams posits the existence of residual and emergent forms as part of a process which cuts across the categories of dominant, alternative and oppositional modes, rather than being elided with them; both residual and emergent practices may be either alternative or oppositional, but are commonly subject to a process of incorporation into the dominant sphere. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.90-91

There is a plurality of realms. Of realms that are all the more real because they are shared. And that coexist. Politics, in truth, is the interplay between different realms, the alliance between those that are compatible and the confrontation between those that are irreconcilable. Anonymous, Call, p.7

Politics, in truth, is the interplay between different realms, the alliance between those that are compatible and the confrontation between those that are irreconcilable. Therefore we say that the central political fact of the last thirty years went unnoticed. Because it took place at such a deep level of reality that it cannot be called political without bringing about a revolution in the very notion of the political. Because this level of reality is also the one where the division is elaborated between what is taken for reality and what is not. This central fact is the triumph of Existential Liberalism. The fact that it is now considered natural for everyone to have a rapport with the world based on the idea that each person has her own life. That such a life consists in a series of choices, good or bad. That each person can define herself by an ensemble of qualities, of properties, that make her, through her continual balancing of those properties, a unique and irreplaceable being. That the contract adequately epitomizes relations between individuals, and that respect epitomizes all virtue. That language is nothing but a means of arriving at an agreement. That, in reality, the world is composed on one side of things to manage, and on the other of an ocean of self-absorbed individuals, who in turn have a regrettable tendency to turn themselves into things, letting themselves become managed. Of course, cynicism is only one of the possible features of the infinite clinical diagnoses of Existential Liberalism. It also includes depression, apathy, immunodeficiency (every immune system is intrinsically collective), dishonesty, judicial harassment, chronic dissatisfaction, denied affection, isolation, illusions of citizenship, and the loss of all generosity. Existential liberalism has propagated its desert so well that even the most sincere Leftists express their utopia with its very terms. “We will rebuild an egalitarian society in which each person makes her contribution and from which each person gets her needs met from it... As far as individual desires are concerned, it could be egalitarian if each person consumes in proportion to the efforts she is ready to contribute. Naturally it will be necessary to redefine the method of evaluating the efforts contributed by each person,” write the organizers of the Alternative, Anti-capitalist, and Anti-war Village against the G8 summit in Evian in a text entitled When Capitalism and Wage Labor Will Have Been Abolished! Here is a key to the triumph of Empire: managing to keep in the shadows, to surround with silence the very terrain on which it maneuvers, the field upon which it fights the decisive battle: that of manipulating feelings, of defining the limits of the perceptible. In such a way it preventively paralyzes any defense at the very moment of its operation, and ruins the very idea of a counter-offensive. The victory is won whenever the militant, at the end of a hard day of Political Work, slumps down in front of an action movie. Anonymous, Call, p.7-8

There is a social use of language. No one still believes in it. Its exchange value has fallen to zero. Hence this inflationist bubble of idle talk. Everything social is mendacious, and everyone knows that now. It's no longer just the governing authorities, the publicists and public personalities who "do communication," it's every self-entrepreneur that this society wants to turn us into who prac­tices the art of "public relations." Having become an instrument of communication, language is no longer its own reality but a tool for operating on the real, for obtaining effects in accordance with more or less conscious strategies. Words are no longer put into circulation except in order to dis­ tort things. Everything sails under false flags. This usurpation has become universal. One doesn't shrink from any paradox. The state of emergency is the rule of law. War is made in the name of peace. The bosses "offer jobs." The surveillance cameras are "video-protection devices." The executioners complain that they're being persecuted. The trai­tors profess their sincerity and their allegiance. The mediocre are everywhere cited as examples. There is actual practice on the one hand, and on the other, discourse, which is its relentless counter­ point, the perversion of every concept, the universal deception of oneself and of others. In all quarters it's only a question of preserving or extending one's interests. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.9-10

The overall project of Ideology and Utopia is the development of the sociology of knowledge and Mannheim stresses two principles. First, it deals not with individuals but with styles of thought characteristic of particular groups in specific historical circumstance. Mannheim goes so far as to say that ‘strictly speaking it is incorrect to say that the single individual thinks. Rather ... he participates in thinking further what other men have thought before him’ – and this in a specific situation which is, from the point of view of the individual, predetermined. Secondly, and more importantly, he makes the point that thought is not a process of contemplation but is intrinsically bound up with action; this action is collective; and its guiding principle is the will to preserve or to change existing conditions. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.93

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

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

I desire and I feel the need to live in a society other than the one surrounding me. Like most people, I can live in this one and adapt to it - at any rate, I do live in it. However critically I may try to look at myself, neither my capacity for adaptation, nor my assimilation of reality seems to me to be inferior to the sociological average. I am not asking for immortality, ubiquity or omniscience. I am not asking society to 'give me happiness'; I know that this is not a ration that can be handed out by City Hall or my neighbourhood Workers' Council and that, if this thing exists, I have to make it for myself, tailored to my own needs, as this has happened to me already and as this will probably happen to me again. In life, however, as it comes to me and to others, I run up against a lot of unacceptable things; I say that they are not inevitable and that they stem from the organization of society. I desire, and I ask, first of all that my work be meaningful, that I may approve what it is used for and the way in which it is done, that it allow me genuinely to expend myself, to make use of my faculties and at the same time to enrich and develop myself. And I say that this is possible, with a different organization of society, possible for me and for every­ one. I say that it would already be a basic change in this direction if I were allowed to decide, together with everyone else, what I had to do and, with my fellow workers, how to do it. I should like, together with everyone else, to know what is going on in society, to control the extent and the quality of the information I receive. I ask to be able to participate directly in all the social decisions that may affect my existence, or the general course of the world in which I live. I do not accept the fact that my lot is decided, day after day, by people whose projects are hostile to me or simply unknown to me, and for whom we, that is I and everyone else, are only numbers in a general plan or pawns on a chess board, and that, ultimately, my life and my death are in the hands of people whom I know to be, necessarily, blind. I know perfectly well that realizing another social organization, and the life it would imply, would by no means be simple, that difficult problems would arise at every step. But I prefer contending with real problems rather than with the consequences of de Gaulle's delirium, Johnson's schemes or Khrushchev's intrigues. Even if I and the others should fail along this path, I prefer failure in a meaningful attempt to a state that falls short of either failure or non-failure, and which is merely ridiculous. I wish to be able to meet the other person as a being like myself and yet absolutely different, not like a number or a frog perched on another level (higher or lower, it matters little) of the hierarchy of revenues and powers. I wish to see the other, and for the other to see me, as another human being. I want our relationships to be something other than a field for the expression of aggressivity, our competition to remain within the limits of play, our conflicts - to the extent that they cannot be resolved or overcome - to concern real problems and real stakes, carrying with them the least amount of unconsciousness possible, and that they be as lightly loaded as possible with the imaginary. I want the other to be free, for my freedom begins where the other's freedom begins, and, all alone, I can at best be merely 'virtuous in misfortune'. I do not count on people changing into angels, nor on their souls becoming as pure as mountain lakes - which, moreover, I have always found deeply boring. But I know how much present culture aggravates and exasperates their difficulty to be and to be with others, and I see that it multiplies to infinity the obstacles placed in the way of their freedom. I know, of course, that this desire cannot be realized today; nor even were the revolution to take place tomorrow, could it be fully realized in my lifetime. I know that one day people will live, for whom the problems that cause us the most anguish today will no longer even exist. This is my fate, which I have to assume and which I do assume. But this cannot reduce me to despair or to catatonic ruminations. Possessing this desire, which indeed is mine, I can only work to realize it. And already in the choice of my main interest in life, in the work I devote to it, which for me is meaningful (even when I encounter, and accept, partial failure, delays, detours and tasks that have no sense in themselves), in the participation in a group of revolutionaries which is attempting to go beyond the reified and alienated relations of current society - I am in a position partially to realize this desire. If I had been born in a communist society, would happiness have been easier to attain - I really do not know, and at any rate can do nothing about it. I am not, under this pretext, going to spend my free time watching television or reading detective novels. Does my attitude amount to denying the reality principle? But what is the content of this principle? Is it that work is necessary - or that it is necessary that work be meaningless, exploited, that it contradict the objectives for which it is allegedly done? Is this principle valid, in this form , for someone of independent means? Is it valid, in this form, for the natives of the Trobriand islands or Samoa? Is it still valid today for fishermen in a poor Mediterranean village? Up to what point does the reality principle reveal nature, and at what point does it begin to reveal society? Why not serfdom, slave galleys, concentration camps? Where does a philosophy get the right to tell me: here, on exactly this inch of existing institutions, I am going to show you the borderline between the phenomenon and the essence, between passing historical forms and the eternal being of society? I accept the reality principle, for I accept the necessity of work (as long, in any case, as it is real, for it is becoming less obvious every day) and the necessity of a social organization of work. But I do not accept the appeal to a false psychoanalysis and to a false metaphysics, which introduces the precise discussion of historical possibilities, gratuitous assertions about alleged impossibilities, about which this philosophy knows nothing at all. Might my desire be infantile? But the infantile situation is that life is given to you and that the Law is given to you. In the infantile situation, life is given to you for nothing; and the Law is given to you without anything else, without anything more, without any possible discussion. What I want is just the opposite: I want to make my life and to give life if possible , and in any event to give something for my life. I want the Law not to be simply given, but for me to give it to myself at the same time. The person who remains constantly in the infantile situation is the conformist and the apolitical person, for they accept the Law without any discussion and do not want to participate in shaping it. Someone who lives in society without any will concerning the Law, without any political will, has merely replaced the private father with the anonymous social father. The infantile situation is first receiving without giving, and then doing or being in order to receive. What I want is a just exchange to begin with, passing beyond exchange afterwards. The infantile situation is the relation of duality, the phantasy of fusion - and in this sense it is the present society that constantly infantilizes everyone, by the imaginary fusion with unreal entities: leaders, nations, cosmonauts or idols. What I want is for society to cease to be a family, moreover a false one and even a grotesque one; I want it to acquire its peculiar dimension as a society, a network of relationships among autonomous adults. Is my desire a desire for power? But what I want is the abolition of power in the current sense; I want the power of each and every one. For current power, other people are things, and all that I want goes against this. The person for whom others are things is himself a thing, and I do not want to be a thing either for myself or for others. I do not want others to be things, I would have no use for this. If I may exist for others, be recognized by them, I do not want this to be in terms of the possession of something external to me - power; nor to exist for them only in an imaginary realm. The recognition of others has value to me only inasmuch as I recognize them as well. Am I in danger of forgetting all this if ever events were to carry me close to 'power'? This seems more than improbable to me. If this were to happen, a battle would perhaps be lost but not the war, and am I to rule my entire life on the assumption that I might one day slip back into childhood? Should I follow this chimera of wanting to eliminate the tragic side of human existence? It seems to me that instead I want to eliminate the melodramatic aspect, the false tragedy - the one in which catastrophe arrives without necessity, in which everything could have been otherwise if only the characters had known this or had done that. That people should die of hunger in India, while in America or in Europe governments penalize farmers who 'over'-produce - this is a macabre farce, this is Grand Guignol in which the cadavres and the suffering are real, but this is not tragedy, there is nothing ineluctable here. And if one day humanity perishes by hydrogen bombs, I refuse to call this a tragedy. I would call it stupidity. I would like an end to Guignol and to the transformation of people into puppets by other puppets who 'govern' them. When a neurotic repeats for the 14th time the same behaviour-pattern of failure, reproducing for himself and for those nearby the same type of misfortune, helping this person get out of such a situation is to rid his or her life of grotesque farce, not tragedy; it is to allow the person finally to see the real problems of life and the tragic element they may contain - which the neurosis served in part to express but especially to mask. When one of Buddha's disciples came to tell him, after a long voyage in the West, that miraculous things, instruments, medications, methods of thinking and institutions had transformed people's lives since the time the Master had retreated into the mountains, Buddha stopped him after a few words. Have they wiped out sadness, sickness, old age and death? he asked. No, replied the disciple. Then, they might as well have kept still, thought the Master. And he plunged back into his contemplation, without bothering to show his disciple that he was no longer listening to him. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, p.90-95

Like many, we have experienced that emotions stuck internally turn out badly: they can even turn into symptoms. The rigidities we observe in ourselves come from the partitions that every person believes herself obliged to put up in order to define her own limits, and to contain within herself what must not burst forth. When, for some reason or other, these partitions happen to crack and break, then things come up that might be unpleasant, which may even appear frightful — but it is a fright capable of freeing us from fear. Calling into question both our individual limits and the borders drawn by civilization can be a life-saver. The existence of any real community necessitates a certain physical danger: when emotions and thoughts are no longer ascribable to any one person, when interactions are recovered in which feelings, ideas, impressions, and emotions are exchanged carelessly. It must be understood that community per se is not the solution: it is its disappearance, everywhere and always, that is the problem. Anonymous, Call, p.15

We have been sold this lie: that what is most particular to us is what distinguishes us from the common. We experience the contrary: every singularity is felt in the manner and in the intensity with which a being brings into existence something common. At root it is here that we begin, where we find each other. What is most singular in us calls to be shared. Anonymous, Call, p.17

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

Along with the taste for risk-taking, the reasons for living disappear. Comfort - which clouds perceptions, takes pleasure in repeating words that it empties of any meaning, and prefers not to know anything - is the real enemy, the enemy within. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.88-89

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

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. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.143

A person’s life is a succession of fortuitous situations, and even if none of them is exactly the same as another the immense majority of them are so undifferentiated and so dull that they give a definite impression of sameness. As a result, the rare intensely engaging situations found in life only serve to strictly confine and limit that life. We must try to construct situations, that is to say, collective ambiences, ensembles of impressions determining the quality of a moment. If we take the simple example of a gathering of a group of individuals for a given time, it would be desirable, while taking into account the knowledge and material means we have at our disposal, to study what organization of the place, what selection of participants and what provocation of events are suitable for producing the desired ambience. The powers of a situation will certainly expand considerably in both time and space with the realizations of unitary urbanism or the education of a situationist generation. Debord, Report on the Creation of Situations, theanarchistlibrary.org, p.14

The construction of situations begins beyond the ruins of the modern spectacle. It is easy to see how much the very principle of the spectacle — nonintervention — is linked to the alienation of the old world. […] The role played by a passive or merely bit-part playing “public” must constantly diminish, while that played by those who cannot be called actors, but rather, in a new sense of the term, “livers,” must steadily increase. […] Situationist theory resolutely supports a noncontinuous conception of life. The notion of unity must cease to be seen as applying to the whole of one’s life (where it serves as a reactionary mystification based on the belief in an immortal soul and, in the final analysis, on the division of labor); instead, it should apply to the construction of each particular moment of life through the unitary use of situationist methods. In a classless society there will no longer be “painters,” but only situationists who, among other things, sometimes paint. The main emotional drama of life, aside from the perpetual conflict between desire and reality hostile to desire, seems to be the sensation of the passage of time. In contrast to the aesthetic modes that strive to fix and eternalize some emotion, the situationist attitude consists in going with the flow of time. In so doing, in pushing ever further the game of creating new, emotionally provocative situations, the situationists are gambling that change will usually be for the better. In the short term the odds are obviously against that bet. But even if we have to lose it a thousand times, we see no other choice for a progressive attitude. Debord, Report on the Creation of Situations, theanarchistlibrary.org, p.14, 15

All existing equilibrium, however, is brought back into question each time unknown people try to live differently. But it’s always far away. We learn of it through the papers and newscasts. We remain outside it, confronted with just another spectacle. We are separated from it by our own nonintervention. It makes us disappointed in ourselves. At what moment was choice postponed? We haven’t found the arms we needed. We have let things go. I have let time slip away. I have lost what I should have defended. This general critique of separation obviously contains and covers some particular memories. A less recognized pain, the awareness of a less explainable indignity. Exactly what separation was it? How quickly we have lived! It is to this point in our unreflecting history that I bring us back. Everything that concerns the sphere of loss — that is to say, the past time I have lost, as well as disappearance, escape, and more generally the flowing past of things, and even what in the prevalent and therefore most vulgar social sense of the use of time is called wasted time — all this finds in that strangely apt old military expression, en enfants perdus, its meeting ground with the sphere of discovery, of exploration of unknown terrains; with all the forms of quest, investigation, adventure, avant-garde. It is the crossroads where we have found and lost ourselves. Debord, Critique of Separation (Film), 1961 - https://remixedcity.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/critique-of-separation-english-subtitles-by-guy-debord-1961/

[…] 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

We have invented nothing. We adapt ourselves, with a few variations, into the network of possible courses. We get used to it, it seems. No one has the enthusiasm on returning from a venture that they had on setting out on it. My dears, adventure is dead. Debord, Critique of Separation (Film), 1961 - https://remixedcity.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/critique-of-separation-english-subtitles-by-guy-debord-1961/

At a higher stage, everyone will become an artist, i.e., inseparably a producer-consumer of total culture creation, which will help the rapid dissolution of the linear criteria of novelty. Everyone will be a situationist so to speak, with a multidimensional inflation of tendencies, experiences, or radically different "schools" - not successively, but simultaneously. We will inaugurate what will historically be the last of the crafts. The role of amateur-professional situationist - of anti-specialist - is again a specialisation up to the point of economic and mental abundance, when everyone becomes an "artist," in the sense that the artists have not attained the construction of their own life. However, the last craft of history is so close to the society without a permanent division of labour, that when it appeared amongst the S.I., its status as a craft was generally denied. Situationist Manifesto, Internationale Situationniste #4, https://libcom.org/article/situationist-manifesto

Finally this new society entails the production of a different kind of person, not just in the sense of increasing their powers as atomised individuals but (and in fact this is how the increase of individual powers is possible) as the production of fully social human beings. Alienation affects not just the relationship of people to themselves and to their work, but to one another. The recognition of interdependence and of the social nature of production and of human existence in general leads not only to a transformation of work, but also means that the relationships between individuals both within and outside the work process cease to have the instrumental and competitive nature they assume in capitalist society. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.50

The subject position of human flourishing is figured by Bloch in terms of human dignity as the upright gait, ‘the individual who is no longer to be humiliated, enslaved, forsaken, scorned, estranged, annihilated, and deprived of identity’. Bloch concludes The Principle of Hope with the aspiration for the world anticipated as outcome of this process: "But the root of history is the working, creating human being who reshapes and overhauls the given facts. Once he has grasped himself and established what is his, without expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no-one has yet been: *Heimat*. [Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Basil Blackwell 1986, p. 1376.] [The English translation renders Heimat as ‘homeland’. This never captured the resonance of Heimat] Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 6-7