If politics is a matter of living in common, and strategy is the devising of attempts to achieve modes of politics, or at least to eliminate other modes of politics, then these notes are pre-political and pre-strategic. They mean to gesture at the importance of beginning both, and suggest that the strategy will likely be to try and always-already practice modes of politics which point toward better future modes (without denying that some scarring or loss of suppleness may occur which may later become a hindrance).
All questions of political power consist of a contest over the use value of times and bodies. Capitalism is no different in this respect. The fundamental issue is what our life times and bodies will be used for, and by whom. What makes capitalism different from, or for that matter, the same as, other modes of production is only particularly interesting insofar as it relates to the project of winning this contest over use values. For the capitalist, our bodies and times matter insofar as they produce value, that is, insofar as they are able to impose work on us. For us, our bodies and times matter because they are ours, and because there many things that we could do, and want to do, which are precluded by the use of our bodies to produce value.
There are many valences here that we could put on the Spinozian quip, we don’t know yet what a body can do.
The uses of bodies and times are historically variable. It’s not as if humanity sprang up fully formed at one point with all of its possible iterations fully formed. But, neither is there a teleological or otherwise necessary direction to what we can do. Rather, there is an unfolding and a closing off of possibilities over time, conditioned by power struggles. And, the power of the body in the time of value production is always a sad passion, something that diminishes capabilities.
The power in value production is always a power less than the sets of what bodies and times are capable of (both virtually and actually), because these set are infinite, and the power in value production derives from these infinitely larger sets. If there is some development of power that happens in the time of value production, this does not at all mean that that power only could have been increased by a passage through the diminished time of value production. It means only that in the forced detour through value production some power was developed, that’s all. (To say otherwise is a theodicy, retroactively apologizing for the violent thefts and prohibitions of the many uses sacrificed to value production, exemplifying what Benjamin sensed when he said that historians side with the victors. Because one has become strong in the face of acts of violence does not mean that one could not have gotten strong otherwise, or that one owes any debt to the class enemy other expropriation.)
Learning to think the history of the many use to which bodies and times have been put in terms which do not reify is difficult. It is important, if it helps one to think and act in the situations where one finds oneself. If there other avenues to this situational fidelity exist then so much the better. In any case, it is from situations that one always already actually begins, and from where one must begin any project. The starting point here must be the Spinozian quip turned into a question, with a possessive pronoun replacing the indefinite article: what can my body do? Or better, what can our bodies do?
The alternative faced by our moment, as by every moment, is not that of capitalism versus communism. There are many possible outcomes, as in every historical moment, none of which are pre-determined, and the result is determined by balances of forces (and by chance). It is a safe bet, however, that the only positive result for post-capitalism that one can envisage is communism on a global scale. Communism, among other things, is the condition in which the free development of each is the free development of all. Put differently, it is a set of modes of use values for bodies and times, in which uses maximizes the unfolding of new uses, rather than closing them off.
To wed Agamben and Bordiga, communism is the material human community without conditions of belonging. It is the safest bet for a better future. But even more still, it is the practice of a best present, collective joyful passions: practices which increase power, which open the maximum of individual and collective potential and actual use values for bodies and times. To be clear: these uses still preclude others. One can not hunt, fish, and be a critical critic at the same time. One is still required to make choices, and though joyful passions are the best type, it is naïve to think there are not possibilities precluded. (Actuality is always less than potentiality, even as it creates new potentiality.) All of this can be thought in its generality only in its most general of sense. Thought must start from specificity, as sets of uses, and specificities must work to relate to one another in a fashion such that they act for each other as joyful passions (and hopefully we will one day have the power to, in Dionysiac joy, tear the sources of the sad passions of value production limb from limb).