What in the hell …

It’s/they’re a dumb joke. (more…)

Thinking more about some conversations around Negri, and about Marx… (more…)

I don’t like ideology critique. I generally find it underwhelming, and suspect there’s a lingering idealism at work there, of the sort that implicitly holds to one or more of the following: “X idea in the mind of Y means Z act will follow”,”Changing Z circumstance requires instilling W idea in the mind of Y”, and “Instilling W idea in the mind requires U discursive act (defined as the exchange of the propositional contents of sentences)”. None of that strikes me as very compelling, and it also can easily imply a sort of “one road to revolution only” kind of attitude (and, more importantly, that road is not mine!) and a “people are dupes” kind of attitude. The combination of these two is part of why there seems to be an overlap (though by no means an identity) between the populations of self-important asshole intellectual bullies and Marxists. (more…)

On the productivity of labor, that is. (more…)

In German, I mean. (more…)

What follows started out as a comment on a post Tim wrote over at the Wrong Side of Capitalism. I decided to make it an entry here not out of any assessment of it’s quality but because it got too long and I started to feel like it may be overbearing of me to leave all of this in Tim’s comment section. I just cut and pasted the entry from his comment box to here, so it’s still in the form of a comment to Tim. All of this is stuff I want to think and read and write more on, which is to say, my mind is not entirely made up. I recommend reading Tim’s post.
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This is a review I wrote of Jason Read’s book. The review comes off too harsh (still that kind of marxist I guess, unfortunately). It’s a great book. Just not perfect. I got a lot out of writing the review, though that’s not a promise to any readers. I’ve written to Jason about doing an interview and he’s agreed. If anyone has questions to suggest - or just wants to discuss - Read’s work I’d be happy to hear. (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…)