What in the hell …

My friend Colin wrote me a while back, including a note about Negri, Virno, et al, about “understanding how these people can be “specific” intellectuals as intellectuals–they can work with the powers they have, to recompose, at least on the level of theory, a
political discourse, in a partisan fashion”. (more…)

There’s a great post and discussion on the theme of emergence and emergency over at the Archive which provoked me to put down notes on how some other friends and I have been trying to think through this stuff. I realize there are limits to word origins as theoretical resource, but I’ve found it useful as a means to begin reflection. (more…)

I’m told that the term ‘performative’ has a certain suspicious charge in some circles, perhaps due to (mis?)uses of the work of Judith Butler. I don’t know about that. Back when I was more analyitically minded, I got excited about certain aspects of Anglo-American philosophy of language, emphasizing pragmatics, performative utterances. At the time, a professor and friend of mine remarked that reading Wittgenstein was the way he began reading Marx. I’ve moved away from much of this in the past five years, but just recently have had a recurrence of some of those themes. Nick Thoburn writes, “[i]f the world is at base a primary flux of matter without form or constant, then things are always a temporary product of a channeling of this flux in what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘assemblages’ or ‘arrangements’.” (Thoburn: Deluze, Marx, and Politics, p4). There is a moment here that is problematic: the ‘at base’ implies a certain foundationalism, as if one can only attend to the temporary, contingent (to social relations we wish revised via the abolition of capitalism), if one has a certain ontology. Politics and communism are not dependent on any philosophical world view (that is, questions such as - or analogous to - that of ‘does god exist?’ are non sequitur to matters of communism). But I digress. Thoburn’s comment can be interpreted as parallel to a pragmatics/performative turn in the analytic philosophy of language: language is action, language exists in its enacting. (more…)

I’m not sure. It was an entity that existed at least on paper, consisting at a minimum of this manifesto.

Among the groups listed as signatories, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo are likely familiar to folks. (more…)

“A definition contained in the first issue of the Internationale Situationniste states that this is a moment in life, concretely and deliberately constructed through the collective organization of a unified milieu and through a play of events. Nothing would be more misleading, however, than to think the situation as a privileged or exceptional moment in the sense of aestheticism. The situation is neither the becoming-art of life or the becoming-life or art. We can comprehend its true nature only if we locate it historically in its proper place: that is, after the end and self-destruction of art, and after the passage of life through the trial of nihilism. The ‘Northwest passage of the geography of the true life’ is a point of indifference between life and art, where both undergo a decisive metamorphosis simultaneously. This point of indifference constitutes a politics that is finally adequate to its tasks. The Situationsists counteract capitalism – which ‘concretely and deliberately’ organizes environments and events in order to depotentiate life – with a concrete, although opposite, project.”

Agamben, Means without end, p78.

“[A] life directed toward the idea of happiness and cohesive with a form-of-life is thinkable only starting from (…) the irrevocable exodus from any sovereignty.”

“I call thought the nexus that constitutes the forms of life in an inseparable context as form-of-life. I do not mean by this individual exercise of an organ or of a psychic faculty, but rather an experience, an experimentum that has as its object the potential character of life and of human intelligence. (…) The experience of thought that is here in question is always experience of a common power. Community and power identify with each other without residues because the inherence of a communitarian principle to any power is a function of the necessarily potential character of any community.” (more…)

EDIT: if you found this site because you searched for “what is a communist?” in some internet search, this is not going to help you. Go somewhere else. If you don’t believe me, read the comments below. If you do read this site and don’t find it helpful then don’t complain to me. I warned you.

Before Angelica and I moved from Chicago to Minneapolis, we had a going away party at Loyola Beach. We had a sandcastle building competition. Jay from the IWW and my brother Trent competed against Jen and my nephews. Jen made a joke, “I’m a socialist. Should I be building sandcastles? Wouldn’t sand-housing be better?” Kathy, who is rightwing, said “I’m a capitalist so I can build sandcastles if I want to.” Jen said “No you’re not, you don’t own the means of production,” making a sort of socialist-realist (ie, crappy) joke. I walked away to eat some chips.

Later I thought about this, and about what it means to be a communist. There are capitalists, and capitalism. Are there communists, too? In a sense parallel to being a capitalist, a concrete social position? If the product which accompanies all other products under capitalism is that of social relations in the form of capitalism, is there communism which produces social relations in the form of communism? To my mind, the answer is yes. Then, what in the hell is a communist? (more…)

Communism:
- The real movement which abolishes the present order.
- Production by people who associate together freely.

Often, these are taken to refer to two different times. The ‘real movement’ is taken to be the political organization now (the party, frequently). The second sense of communism is taken to be a future condition which has not yet arrived. The separation of these two senses of communism into two distinct times, and the placing of the second into an always deferred future, is part of what allows the communist future to serve a justificatory function for the the so-called communist organization in the present. Thus, the Spanish revolution can be sold out, the Kronstadt soviet crushed, etc etc ad nauseum, in the name of communism, all manner of atrocities justified by the claim that they hasten a step toward the golden future.

Instead, I prefer to think of communism as people producing in a situation where they associate with one another freely, and this production itself is the real movement which abolishes the present, or threatens to. (Hence panics over piracy etc on the part of the bastards that be.) (more…)