What in the hell …

Another post in ignorance (more…)

I’m fucking sophisticated as fuck. No, for real. Check this shit out. (more…)

It’s role, I mean. Jodi has a post at the latest LS symposium wherein she describes the partisan as not having a self-interest in being the partisan (or doing partisan stuff). This is Jodi’s read on Carl Schmitt’s using intensity of political commitment as one of the marks that makes the partisan be the partisan. I’m pretty sure I disagree, but I’m not entirely whether I’m disagreeing with Jodi’s read of Carl here or with Jodi and Carl. (more…)

Sebastian and I translated a short piece by Colectivo Situaciones, an excerpt from their new book on Bolivia, for a Russian magazine called Chto Delat.

“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.

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…)