What in the hell …

It’s the title for a post by k-punk in response to mine on what I sort of jokingly called ‘post-novelty‘. (Sort of jokingly, but joking in the spirit of a Chumbawamba quip - “don’t let my unseriousness make you think this isn’t serious.”) I’m replying here because there’s no comments at chez k-punk.

Among the things I want to say, I want to start with saying that I wasn’t clear - in my head or in the post - about the pessimism I was responding to. K-punk notes that the bleakness of the perspective wasn’t a result of the film, but of his worklife and the difference between the two. I completely understand that and empathize. I hope my post didn’t come across like “poor k-punk is sad cuz he saw a sad movie”. Not my intent.

Second, on the idea of Capitalist Realism, that’s a concept I’d like to think more about and read more about. It’s very interesting. As I understand it, it’s a set or distribution of thinkable and practicable activities within the present - a configuration or delimitation of the field of possibility, a distribution of the sensible. An event, in k-punk’s terms, is when this field is ruptured by activities which couldn’t previously be thought or practiced. This is what Ranciere calls politics or democracy - the action of a part which has no place in a given (ac)count of the world or of a situation. It’s like in that episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Buffy goes to hell and it’s a big factory. As people start fighting the demon bosses one of them says “you can’t do this!” In response, either the act must be quashed or a new (ac)count given to make room for the action of the part which had no part but now clearly exists. In a sense, it’s the breaking of the implicit equation ‘no part = does not exist’.

What this means, though, is that the field of the possible is relative. Actions and thoughts that were impossible were held impossible from a given perspective. It may even be empirically the case that they were held impossible from all actually existing perspectives. (For instance, Subcomandante Marcos has said that prior to the EZLN uprising at the start of 1994 the participants all thought they were going to be killed.) But, clearly, this doesn’t mean actually impossible, in the sense of impossible from all possible perspectives. Impossible thoughts and acts - or simply unthought and unacted - do happen. Of course, someone might respond “well then flap your arms and fly!” That would miss the point. The point is that the existing political order has as part of a condition of its continuation the undermining of certain political projects and thoughts, and of others as not taking place. There are, then, two positions here: within the field of the thinkable/possible but under erasure or negation (thought of as impossible) - “that would never happen” - and simply not within the field of the thinkable/possible. The distribution of the sensible is an arrangment of memories and forgettings, of the past and of hopes for the future, and of modes of relating to each within the present.

Third, to my mind while there is clearly a difference between our era and others, I think the concept of capitalist realism should be extended backward to include the Cold War era. Quite simply, to my mind the so-called Soviet powers offered no meaningful alternative. There was a sort of realism predicated on the either/or of market vs state capitalism. This is part of why my reaction to Grin Without A Cat is a different sort of melancholy - while I did have a bit of the nostalgic “I wish stuff was jumping today like it was back then” response that I think k-punk had, I mainly just felt down because the politics portrayed in that film strike me as largely misdirected. It’s the same with the Weather Underground documentary. A big squandering of energy and potential. I don’t feel like there’s the same level of active - actually composed - potential today, it needs to be (re)built), but I also don’t feel like there are as many well-worn political ruts to channel that potential so quickly in negative directions, into dead ends.

Fourth, on optimism of the act vs pessimism of the will, I’m not 100% sure this relates but it occurred to me as I thought about all this. I think it’s important where we place or derive our optimism and pessimism. I don’t have an over-arching theory of this (yet!) but it does seem to me tremendously important that the judgment question not be “what does this do to them?” but “what does this do for us?” The former leads to a tremendously depressing outlook, and also leads easily to a vanguardist approach in which most strategic sectors are identified (a la the Leninist ‘weak link’ or the factoryism of at least some of the operaisti).

This has come up in conversation with comrades of mine, some of whom think that radicals today should try to get jobs in strategic sectors of the economy, and/or that our organizing should target those sectors. In this sense, then, longshore workers are more important that service workers and housewives, for the power they have to bring production to a halt. The piquetero movements in Argentina are one demonstration that the bosses can be made to hurt and forced to make concessions by other more ‘marginal’ sectors. But in any case, to my mind a better approach is to think from the perspective of a sort of accumulation of organization - the production and accumulation of class hatred, the power to act upon it effectively, and the power to continue to produce more of it. So, in this sense, we evaluate phenomena like the anti-NAFTA movements of the early 1990s differently. They failed to stop NAFTA. Judged from a criterion of effectivity based on what it does to the enemy, that’s all they did, fail. At the same time, these networks or parts thereof later became very important for Zapatista solidarity work, helping the EZLN survive.

At a more micro-level (and I think this is the more important level, not because of its scale but because it’s more closely linked to articulable concrete organization) there are workplace organizing campaigns that have failed - failed to hurt the bosses in any permanent way, failed to win any permanent or even temporary gains in wages, conditions, and benefits for workers or even to build significant shopfloor power. I don’t want to downplay the difficulty and uglyness of experiences like this. They’re awful and they fuck up lives. At the same time, that’s not all they do. They also produce knowledges, habits, affective responses, and relationships that lay the groundwork for future organizational activity. Linebaugh and Rediker’s Many Headed Hydra portrays something like this at the level of the trans-atlantic economy, via informal organizations of slave revolts which accumulate and hone the anger that drives and the skills that facilitate the practice. Assessing those events means not flinching from the horror, but also not letting the horror exhaust the prospects for the future (not letting the [ac]count of the situation or world be rewritten). And not only the future but the present - as k-punk notes there are reasons for optimism in the present as well. In a sense, though, optimism or pessimism isn’t the issue so much as (or is an issue only insofar as it touches upon) the accumulation of class hatred and communist love (of love born of hate) and the activities required to ensure the recouping of that which is advanced and more (CH-CH’, CL-CL’, perhaps?).