[I]f one cannot make the revolution everywhere at once (which is reasonable enough to assume), and capital can fight us in every place at once, because capital is not in any sense a force with which we contend, but the very territory on which that contention takes place — how then would a communisation from within be possible? From this analysis, it seems no more locally possible than globally, and indeed (as Bernes rightly points out) the very point of global logistics was precisely to circumvent local insurrections, strikes, revolutions, and other anti-capitalist engagement in the first place. The practical critique of all capitals mediation seems to leave us with nothing but sabotage for its own sake — the politics of fin-de-siècle anarchism and nihilism. This reinforces the impression, certainly from Endnotes 3, that the Endnotes critique is consistently one of sabotage, of blockade, of the negative and oppositional against the logic of value. This is, it must be said, a healthy antidote against the habit of some Marxists and parties to see the germ of The Revolution in every strike in a cookie factory in Peru, as long as some worker somewhere is wearing a red shirt. Indeed one may well accept that generally any of the activities of the workers movement as such have only tended to reinforce the working class as a subject class of capital, and so has the model of transition offered by the Party Marxists. But the purely negative of communisation has its own downsides. It cannot comprehend how to get from A to B, other than by critique of the existing; against the unwarranted self-help Marxism of the workerist 20th century Marxists, they offer a Marxism which is essentially gnostic — in which only irruptions exist against the logic of the material world, ones that must contain within themselves, spontaneously and wildly, the totality of the new world against the totality of the old. For Endnotes authors, of course, this can happen any time and anywhere and can never be foreseen — in this sense they are not nihilists. But while it bypasses the purely defensive Marxism, tailing labor unions and social-democrats, that effectively dominates the left today, and it shows no nostalgic tendencies, it has instead a purely oppositional Marxism, one which is maintains this romantic form, but is empty of its content. It has a message of hope, perhaps, rather than one of nostalgia — but one unrelated to its actual analysis. […] To this, Endnotes can tell us no more than that the revolution today can only mean seven billion people trying to find ways to reproduce themselves, in non-capitalist ways. Not only is this little enlightening, but it also seems to contradict the emphasis on totality being the realm of capital. Here, in my view, the need for abolishing all mediations of capital in the here and now runs clearly into the impossibility of doing so from a purely negative viewpoint, i.e. from a standpoint that assumes a kind of prefiguration of this abolition. It is in essence a circular argument: the revolution must abolish capitalisms mediations, and the only place it can be achieved is where capitalisms mediations are abolished. Communisation begs its own question. My suggestion is that this is because of a subtle idealism and ahistoricity in the argument: a dislike of transition turns into a dislike of temporality and of historical causation.
Posted on: Tue, 28 Jan 2014 04:48:37 +0000
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