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anotherworldnowblog · 8 months ago

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WE WILL NEVER BE FORGIVEN

“Although the fascist phenomenon can be resisted and avoided, there is a point in its growth after which it appears difficult to turn it back. The moment is not that at which fascism actually comes into power; the accession to power seems such a simple final act, occurring only when the essentials are already decided and done with, in short, a confirmation of a victory already won.” Nicos Poulantzas Fascism and Dictatorship, p. 66

PART II

The defeat of the George Floyd uprising seems everywhere to signal the closure of a cycle of struggle stretching back at least to Ferguson, maybe Rodney King, with its roots going all the way to Watts. Whether the George Floyd uprising was the end of a chain of urban rebellions and circulation struggles or the first link in a quantitatively and qualitatively new series of nationwide uprisings remains to be seen. How and when the proletariat announces its return is not clear. Troublingly, what has happened since 2020 is increasingly so.

On January 6th, the closest thing in contemporary American history to a mass fascist street action coalesced in a foolish attempt to overturn the election results. We laugh at the ill-fated coup at our own risk however, as by this point the proletariat was entirely defeated and the right-wing antidemocratic attack was only foiled by a combination of the fascists’ astounding stupidity and the incoming regime's control over local police power. Fascists are always fools. It is the fact that their goals so closely align to those of the power elite and that their methods violently liberate the movement of capital from its fragile humanistic ties that make them dangerous, not their intelligence. Despite its admittedly farcical appearance, the effects of this coup-attempt were absolutely profound. The media cynically used this event to wipe clean the rebellion of the previous summer from the memories of nearly all Americans, to strongly associate “insurrection” with right-wing activity, to forcefully reverse what had then become a common disdain for police, and to neutralize all left-critique of the incoming administration. The left-wing of liberalism, the fraction of the community of capital that had momentarily sided with the proletariat in a moment of acute crisis, is completely disentangled from radical politics and psychically sealed off from protest itself.[1] As will become an obvious tendency in what follows, the gains of the working class in the period of crisis and its aftermath, both in terms of consciousness and in terms of policy, are steadily and methodically reversed in bipartisan fashion.

“Start the forgetting machine!” - Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism (p. 32)

The consolidation of the victory of capital over the working class unfolds in cascading action across multiple fronts. It proceeds relatively uninhibited because of the persistent unity of the various capitalist fractions. In the interest of concision, I will henceforth abandon a rigidly chronological presentation.

The first and most direct response to the working class rebellion in 2020 is the passage of several bills granting immunity to anyone who uses their vehicle to run over protestors demonstrating in the street, first in Iowa, Oklahoma, Florida, and with at least eight more bills across the country being debated across the country's state houses in 2021.[2] The significance of such bills cannot be overstated. After the 2017 Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville culminated in the use of an automobile as a weapon of mass murder, a tactic formerly associated exclusively with the specter of Islamic terror, elite liberals of all political persuasions recoiled in horror. However, as we have seen in the above, it would not be long before this all-too American technique of violence would be repeated, this time against a far more militant anti-racist offensive. The right to murder protestors is being quietly legalized under the guise of protecting an individual’s right to free movement and often even more cynically, by invoking the hypothetical needs of imaginary emergency vehicles. The pedestrian, the cyclist, are sacrificed at the fascist altar of the internal combustion engine, a trend further accelerated by the destruction of public transit during COVID-19. As usual, Adorno’s words read like prophecy: “which auto-driver has not felt the temptation, in the power of the motor, to run over the vermin of the street – passersby, children, bicyclists? In the movements which machines demand from their operators, lies already that which is violent, crashing, propulsively unceasing in Fascist mistreatment.”[3] The temptation then is all the more powerful when the ‘vermin of the street’ is not merely passive but actively attempting to weaponize a constructed interruption in those violent, crashing movements, which otherwise ceaselessly accelerate the flows of global commodities, towards ends quite at odds with the valorization of capital; in a word, liberation.

Regrettably, this violence is far from an exclusively petit bourgeois pastime. Fractions of the proletariat are pit against one another as increasingly large numbers of urban workers come to rely on delivery and driving gigs, a sector swollen further during the pandemic. The city street is all but erased as social space, transformed into an exclusive conveyor of private goods carried by independent contractors with overlapping commitments, coerced by the mute compulsions of capital to at times restore the free flow of commodities with violence. The rural highway remains a blood-stained latticework criss-crossed by drowsy laborers called to traverse ever-increasing distances to balance employment and disintegrating familial ties. Studies indicate that the roadways of the United States have never been more deadly, a tragedy compounded by the fact that the great majority of this increase in auto traffic is nothing but our own life energies confronting us, and killing us, as services marketed as simplification.[4] That this machine’s victims are now willing, and legally empowered, to murder those who would dare gum-up the gnashing of its steel teeth is a tragedy of anthropological proportion.

This rapid movement to sweep political struggle from the streets of America apparently knows no partisan loyalty. The militant struggle in Atlanta to Stop Cop City and the nationwide street action aimed at halting the genocide in Gaza have galvanized hesitant Democrats to abandon all pretense at connection to their grassroots and join Republicans in criminalizing constitutionally protected and normatively accepted forms of public protest. In 2023, Georgia Democrats pushed the meaning of domestic terrorism to include attendance at a music festival or muddy shoes[5] and in 2024, New York Democrats will likely level at any protest that “blocks a road or a bridge” terrorism enhancements, this coming amidst increasingly infrastructure-intelligent anti-war mobilization.[6] The latter move, a continuation of and qualitative leap-up from the endorsement of stochastic terror by state Republicans, is a direct response to the collective awareness of systemic choke points in the networks of circulation gained by the working class in the latest cycle of struggles; an attempt to dispatch with this desperate counter-riposte to decades of deindustrialization and dispersion that has all-but destroyed the effectiveness of the proletariat’s traditional, production-point tactics.

Furthermore, just in the past several weeks, the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles has announced her intent to ban protective face masks at protests and the Democratic governor of the state of New York has signaled her intention to ban masks from public transit entirely.[7] Such shocking policies, not only whiplash-inducing for their incongruity with all conceptions of public health and civic responsibility, ostensibly designed to combat crime and ensure accountability for largely fictitious acts of anti-semitic violence, are obviously intended to chill protected speech acts and guarantee the effectiveness of facial recognition software in tracking the movements of protest attendees. It is no coincidence that these suggestions come on the heels of an anti-imperialist protest movement that is militantly imbuing the struggle against white supremacy, the struggle of which the George Floyd Rebellion was but one battle, with a refreshingly internationalist perspective. Such obscene policy measures, in addition to signaling an ever-deepening political unity between the two domestic political parties when it comes to shirking government responsibility for social welfare and crushing working class protest, accelerate the devastating impact of COVID on those with pre-existing conditions, amounting to a policy of murderous social cleansing on top of the troubling implications for any who dare dissent. Politically, the Democrats’ pathetic tailing of Republican reaction will almost certainly earn them no additional votes at the ballot box. But their willingness to abandon COVID-era convictions at the first sign of working-class internationalism is quite telling indeed. It is regretful that such clarity is achieved at so high a price.

American economic policy in the wake of the pandemic (which I submit also includes intentional prolongation of the War in Ukraine), that has, among other things, led to inflationary pressures that have wiped out Covid-era wage gains, called forth unprecedented state intervention to stabilize big and small businesses, and generally sent stocks stratospheric, must also be seen as part of the offensive of capital against the working class and as an expression of exceptional bourgeois unity.[8] The concentration of capital, accelerated by inflationary pressures, pushes us towards fascism by 1. unifying rentier and industrial capital (platform capital and hardgoods producers unified through mergers, bundles, and partnerships)[9], as well as national with transnational capital (friendshoring)[10] 2. negatively impacting and threatening to cast into the proletariat the petit bourgeois, thereby spontaneously developing shallowly “anti-capitalist” ideas in a vengeful middle class, the National Socialists of tomorrow’s America who merely wish to swap the current elites with their own, and 3. reversing gains of the proletariat, prompting economistic and defensive struggles, as well as by expanding the national and international army of surplus labor (all evident in an erosion of purchasing power; digitized productivity monitoring introduced under the cover of COVID-19 exceptionalism; the repeal of state child labor law[11]; immigration policy that divides the proletariat into tiers of formality and fixes certain workers within preferable national legal systems; the lawsuit seeking to destroy the NLRA brought by SpaceX, Amazon, Trader Joe’s[12]; multifront international warfare creating huge migratory movements of refugees; etc.) as a means of reinforcing and deepening the domination of capital over labor.

“It is characteristic of the rise of fascism that the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the working class assumes an increasingly political nature, while the working-class struggle against the bourgeoisie falls further and further back into the domain of economic demands… it is the economic struggle which progressively assumes the dominant role in the struggle of the working class.” -Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (p. 142)

Meanwhile, the chauvinism of the American right deepens, and it finds ever more dangerous expression for its hatreds structurally, even under Democratic administration. In fact, the far-right agenda seems to have had far more success nationally under the current Democratic administration than during Trump’s tenure. Between 2021 and 2023, 129 anti-trans bills were passed in states across America. We have no way to know the true number of murders and suicides these bills have led to–we know of far too many as it is–but we can say the United States is no doubt becoming an intolerably dangerous place for queer life. Even President Obama was willing to credibly threaten to withhold critical federal education funds from state governments who refused to follow the administration’s guidance with respect to the usage of bathrooms by trans and gender nonconforming people. This powerful intervention to protect and normalize trans life, perhaps as a means to protect an image of capitalism as tolerant and progressive, was immediately reversed by the Trump administration in 2017.[13] Today, the Biden administration has done absolutely nothing to forestall the ongoing attempt to erase trans people from existence in State Houses across America, suggesting a new ruling class consensus to abandon the illusion of a progressive capitalist culture, and perhaps liberalism itself.

In 2022, Roe vs. Wade was overturned by the United States Supreme Court, all but condemning working class pregnant people to carry their babies to term or go broke attempting to procure abortion services in one of a dwindling number of safe states. As of now, 21 states “ban abortion or restrict the procedure earlier in pregnancy than the standard set by Roe v. Wade,” with no indication that the adoption of such policies are slowing down.[14] It is far from controversial or groundbreaking to insist on anti-abortion policies as class warfare. The lack of safe, free abortion services divides the working class; the Bolsheviks institutionalized recognition of this basic fact in the very first years of the Soviet experiment over a century ago. Capital does not merely homogenize the laboring class as labor-power; it ceaselessly differentiates it along the axes of race, sex/gender, and age. Fascism, as the political expression of an exceptionally class-conscious ruling class, ruthlessly exploits and expands such divisions. That such a strategy emerges as a compliment to traditionalist reaction to the social atomization of the capitalist system it seeks to renew and defend is simply an example of the extraordinary opportunism of our bourgeoisie. It is an ideological pivot around which the petit bourgeoisie can align itself with a capitalist class that cares little about what is traditional and only about maximizing the rate of exploitation domestically.

On the southern border medieval death traps are erected, placed there by far-right politicians, and defended against the regulation of federal guidance by National Guards of neighboring and distant states. Migrants that have made it beyond our ramparts are shipped into the city centers of various Democratic mayors where they are subject to subhuman levels of care and a brutal, a shadow labor regime, absolutely maximizing rates of exploitation and dragging the wages of citizen-workers down, fanning the flames of racism and xenophobia across all of the national classes. Even the farthest-left members of our political system can seem only able to refer to these newly-arrived proletarian faces, often entire families, in the language of the far-right: as a crisis. Yet, far from becoming the constitutional crisis suggested at Eagle Pass, murderous border policy, irrational from the perspective of national economic interest but rational from the perspective of protecting the consistency of the national ideology, becomes another point of practical unity for Democratic and Republican officials alike. In fact, what marginal differences exist between the two Amerikan politikal parties on border policy allow the ruling class to have it both ways: a zone of blood sacrifice is established along the southern border for the ritualistic simulation of protection of the White body politic, while the majority of migrants do make it into our country for the sole purpose of superexploitation. These huddled masses are then weaponized in the cynical assault on the basis of the domestic laboring classes’ bargaining power: solidarity.

No matter; this convenient capitulation of the Democratic Party to Republican bloodlust has not dislodged the purely spectacular appearance of intense partisan division, nor has it stopped the wealthiest capitalist in this country from articulating anti-semitic conspiracy theories about the providence of this influx of migrants. Elon Musk, regrettably one of the more powerful of the bourgeoisie, appears to be spontaneously recreating National Socialism (With American Characteristics) in a haze of his own weed smoke. At various points, he has more or less explicitly called the immigration of people from the global south a Jewish conspiracy to destroy American prosperity and traditional family values, coming increasingly close to simply tweeting out the 14 words and decisively aligning himself with the ultraright fractions of the petit bourgeois and capitalist elements of the Republican party.

But Elon Musk is not alone in signaling his preference for a Republican presidency in the coming election; Jamie Diamond of JP Morgan,[15] Vice-Chair of Black Rock Philipp Hildebrand, and many other capitalists in the wake of conferences such as Davos have more or less openly declared their preference for a Trump victory in 2024.[16] Nonetheless, Trump’s most consistent base of support has long been that of the small-business owner, not the large capitalist. His electoral strength is his appearance as a disruptor, and it is exactly this trait which makes large capital uneasy. It is in this light which we can begin to understand the logic of Trump’s baffling selection of JD Vance as his 2024 running mate. The choice of a man so obviously disliked by the general public can only be made sense of as an attempt to further signal to the bourgeoisie what type of dictatorship a second Trump presidency would really be: a dictatorship of capital. Vance is, above all else, a creature of large tech capital, and much more so than Trump, a man who is wholly up for sale. If big capital continues to warm to a Trump presidency, despite Harris now backing away from all of Biden’s regulatory commitments, this would represent a development in the radicalization of capital that was unfathomable in 2016, when the prospect of a Trump presidency nearly crashed global markets. The ruling class is now beginning to sense both what kind of violence is truly necessary to restore profit rates to acceptable levels and that Trumpism poses no direct threat to the capitalist economic order.

We've also seen an assault on proletarian culture come in the form of the RICO charges brought against the YSL group, and Young Thug in particular. The charges are murder and organized crime and the prosecution is relying very heavily on the lyrical content of Young Thug’s songs to make their case. Rap music has long been an artistic form that creatively and dramatically expressed the harsh realities of racialized economic exclusion, the experience of savage competition accelerated by decades of neoliberal policy, and the psychic ramifications of ghettoization and state violence, even if it’s rarely presented in such terms. That this form of expression, one which is explicitly black, militant, and working class, is being attacked by the state is yet another symptom of the fascist spiral, here found at the point of legal-cultural intersection. While most rap music is not partisan, neither is the class itself, and the music is most certainly aggressively proletarian. Even lyrics about cars and money must be recognized as expressions of working class desire, specifically a desire to get out of the trenches or the mud one came from. It is important to recall that there once was a robust, self-consciously proletarian culture in this country, which often produced songs about fighting cops, offing your boss, and killing fascists. Such songs might have once been sung at red taverns, or union halls, or even at the dinner table with red-diaper babies bewilderedly looking on in hand-me-down high-chairs. While the fragmentation of the class and structural shifts in the economy have pushed such traditions to the margins of memory, we still find that vulgarity, militancy, and violence are not uncommon themes in the working class anthems of today, “fuck the police” being just one such example. To produce such content is a freedom we have long enjoyed thanks to the liberalism of our national bourgeoisie (and perhaps their own self-confidence, now rattled) and if we want to protect it, we can begin by recognizing the prosecution of Young Thug as a dangerous escalation in the assault on proletarian speech.

“what the fuck you mean put my gun down muthafucka? you must ain’t heard about Trayvon Martin you muthafucka” “When they killed my nigga, I seen the footage on the tape Man I must've threw up everything I ever ate” “R.I.P. Mike Brown, fuck the Cops Screamin' R.I.P Bennie shootin' up a block” “Hey, this that slime shit, hey YSL shit, hey Killin' 12 shit, hey Fuck a jail shit, hey”

This naturally brings us back to Atlanta. What is happening in Atlanta is nothing short of a nightmare. A Cop City is being rammed down the throats of an entire major metropolis, at the expense of the whole population's civil liberties, clean air, drinkable water, navigable streets. All democratic resistance has been shut down by Democratic politicians. Restrained clandestine activity and constitutionally protected street action have been met equally with the most intense repression since the George Floyd uprising. Unlike the George Floyd Rebellion, this struggle has generated a lasting unity across the various resistance interest groups, ideologies, and identities because of the intersectionality of the object of its opposition and an explicit and hard-won agreement to embrace a diversity of tactics—perhaps a direct response to the failure of the George Floyd Uprising and specifically the self-defeating division around responses to the police murder of Rayshard Brooks.

The tact taken by the state is notable here: rather than fragment the movement by erasing the intersectional content of the struggle through slight of hand (e.g. moving the center outside of the black, working-class neighborhood, or away from such an ecologically important site), they have decided to crush the movement with terrorism, murder, and demoralization. The construction of this center is a gesture. International capital and bipartisan politicians have come together to send a message while they prepare for a new cycle of struggle, one which we can expect will proceed on greatly expanded foundations, in the near future; the message reads: you will never be forgiven. In the last year alone, dozens of protesters have been rounded up on RICO charges with terror enhancements with hardly any evidence at all of wrongdoing. A protester, a militant forest defender, a queer person of color, a revolutionary named Tortuguita, was murdered for their unwavering commitment to the Earth and its creatures. Now, bail funds are under attack. This novel technology, mainstreamed during the May-June Rebellion, has served as a lifeline for working-class protesters assured of their righteousness, but no longer of their freedom. Make no mistake, the assault on bail-funds is a test-case for the nation as these funds made possible the sustained rebellion over the course of the months of May-August of 2020, during which well over 10,000 people were arrested. Today, huge swaths of pristine forest have been mercilessly cleared as construction of the police playhouse enters its early stages. To share a belief is now seditious conspiracy. To pool resources is organized crime. And to defend the earth is now terrorism. These are some of the tentative outcomes of the ongoing struggle against Cop City in Atlanta.

“One has to understand that the fascist arrangement tolerates the existence of no valid revolutionary activity.” -George Jackson, Blood In My Eye (p. 138)

One last, but certainly not final, expression of the rising unity of capital and the resurgence of American fascism is the Watermelon Scare, or the reaction to domestic Palestinian liberation activity. Artists have lost shows, workers have lost jobs, unions have been sued by their employers, schools are being investigated by their national boards, insufficiently reactionary Heads of Ivy League institutions are cut down and replaced with more pliant personnel responsive only to the dictates of capital, and protest is further criminalized in the name of preventing anti-semitism. My words can hardly keep pace with events. The masks are all off and we are treated to front row seats to a dispiriting disappearing act; bourgeois democracy reveals itself to be bourgeois dictatorship, announced by a stomach-turning demonstration of their disregard for Life itself in Gaza. They are inaugurating a new period of their open domination with the screams of air-to-surface missiles, baptizing us all as powerless subjects in the blood of innocent Palestinians.

A few words, with the knowledge that the coming days will make my horrifying balance-sheet of the development of American fascism seem quite quaint, and awareness that we are rapidly flying headlong into a space beyond language’s expressive capacities: it is perhaps the most urgent task of the American left to insist that the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people concerns us all. It is not merely that the violence against the colonized disfigures the colonizer into something monstrous beyond recognition, not only that these necro-technologies will rapidly be deployed on our own streets against us, and it goes beyond the fact that passivity in the face of such violence hardens our hearts to the violence that comes next (the sweeps of our homeless neighbors, the increasing murder-ability of “criminals” and “migrants,” and the erasure of trans and queer people from social space). The history of the American left since the birth of this nation is the history of its failures. There have been two prime stumbling blocks no configuration has succeeded in clearing: the white chauvinism of our working classes and the nationalism of our socialist organizations. Robust solidarity with Palestine in the moment of its genocide would be an advanced expression of an American left at last shaking off the weight of dead generations; an internationalist attack on white supremacy, recognized not as an individual attitude but a globe-spanning technique of government; a long awaited rejection of the substitution of universal rights with exclusive privileges; and an urgently necessary reversal of the decades-long drift towards short-term economic interest and away from political consciousness.

The American proletariat is once again being tested. Its historical task is the seizure of political power, but the road to political power necessarily passes through the relinquishing of its exceptional privilege. What we have tracked in the paragraphs above is the violent, state and extra-state, repression and reversal of legitimate gains in the political consciousness of various fractions of the American working class. Such reversals at a time of persistent crisis ensure that when the ruling classes unite around fascist strategies of systemic renewal, the forces of resistance will be disoriented, disorganized, and desperately clinging to the very privileges that we must betray in order to fulfill our historical mission. We must begin only with total acceptance of our defeat. Paradoxically, such a defeat liberates us from the urgent temporality of crisis. We must resist the temptation to fling ourselves headlong into every project of survival and take seriously the fact that the reemergence of fascism in the United States is not a symptom of systemic strength, but of great weakness. We must allow ourselves to be fully convinced that far more important than our survival is that the barbarism of this world does not. Then, tactics and strategy can begin.

"False praxis is no praxis. Desperation that, because it finds the exits blocked, blindly leaps into praxis, with the purest of intentions joins forces with catastrophe." -Theodor W. Adorno "They have the clocks, but we have the time." Afghani proverb "When you're running out of time, you're not out of time." Kanye West Donda (2021)

(August 2024)

NOTES

[1] This is a dynamic that very closely mirrors that identified in Poulantzas’ 1974 study of historical fascism:

“The petty bourgeoisie is itself divided into class fractions… it is also possible for dislocations to appear between its different fractions. These dislocations can even be deep enough for one fraction to swing one way, the other in the opposite direction. Experience shows that a common political position is generally maintained in ‘normal’ conjunctures of class struggle, or in conjunctures of acute political crisis where the working class is on the defensive, as in the case of fascism. The dislocations appear above all in revolutionary conjunctures or in political crises corresponding to the working-class offensive, as in Germany and Italy between 1919 and 1921.” (p. 244)

The integrated fraction of the laboring classes, the capitalized, home-owning upper fraction of salaried employees breaks with the capitalist class and stands with the proletariat during the early phase of the revolutionary conjuncture. It does not stay this way:

“Before stabilization and during the first period of open crisis between the bourgeoisie and the working class, a large part of the petty bourgeoisie clearly swings over to the side of the working class… we can say that this is mainly the case with the salaried employees… After its open swing to the working class side, this part of the petty bourgeoisie seems to stick to social democracy during the stabilization step. Subsequently it becomes disillusioned with social democracy, which fails to defend its interests. Turning away from social democracy, the petty bourgeoisie as a whole finds itself faced, at the beginning of the rise of fascism, with that instability and lack of hegemony among the dominant classes and fractions which characterizes the bourgeois parties’ crisis of representation.” (p. 248)

While we have no social democracy in this country, the Black Lives Matter movement laid down the ideological foundations for a unified class acting for itself in a way hitherto unseen in this country, a movement capable of challenging and even abolishing property relations as we know it. As the stabilization of the fascist arrangement occurred with the defeat of the proletariat, in this case coinciding with the literal stabilization of the economy, the proletariat was abandoned by the now re-integrated middle classes.

[2] U.S. Current Trend: Bills Provide Immunity to Drivers Who Hit Protesters,

https://www.icnl.org/post/analysis/bills-provide-immunity-to-drivers-who-hit-protesters

[3] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/ch01.htm

[4] https://www.chainlaw.com/why-are-u-s-roadways-getting-more-dangerous-while-other-countries-are-getting-safer/

[5] Muddy clothes? ‘Cop City’ activists question police evidence, AP, March 23, 2023

https://apnews.com/article/cop-city-protest-domestic-terrorism-atlanta-6d114e109d489d316f588f51c7cab0cc

[6] Some Assembly Democrats look to criminalize disruptive protests, February 21, 2024

https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2024/02/some-assembly-democrats-look-criminalize-disruptive-protests/394322/

[7] New York Governor considers face mask ban to deter crime https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/15/new-york-face-masks-ban-subway-crime#:~:text=New%20York%20has%20historically%20had,two%20years%20until%20September%202022.

[8] “Covid and the War in Ukraine,” IMF https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/ar/2022/in-focus/covid-19/

[9] There are many examples of these phenomena. A new unity of interest, and sometimes identity, between landed and digital capitals: Apple is now both a hardgoods producer and a streaming platform, Amazon is a platform, brick and mortar, logistics, a grocery store, and a pharmacy; and most recently Netflix has announced it is opening a chain of malls:

https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/netflix-house-entertainment-dining-shopping-complexes-cities-2025-1236040989/

[10] “Friendshoring set to lift prices” Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/c7fa3fdb-195f-449f-b7b4-461c1e93b5d1

[11] “Child labor remains a key state legislative issue in 2024” Economic Policy Institute

https://www.epi.org/blog/child-labor-remains-a-key-state-legislative-issue-in-2024-state-lawmakers-must-seize-opportunities-to-strengthen-standards-resist-ongoing-attacks-on-child-labor-laws/#:~:text=Two%20states%E2%80%94Missouri%20and%20West,they%20are%20otherwise%20prohibited%20from

[12] “What’s behind the corporate effort to kneecap the National Labor Relations Board?” Economic Policy Institute

https://www.epi.org/blog/whats-behind-the-corporate-effort-to-kneecap-the-national-labor-relations-board-spacex-amazon-trader-joes-and-starbucks-are-trying-to-have-the-nlrb-declared-unconstitutional/

[13] White House Reverses Obama Era Transgender Bathroom Policy https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/white-house-reverses-obama-era-transgender-bathroom-protections-n724426

[14] Tracking Abortion Bans Across the Country https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/us/abortion-laws-roe-v-wade.html

[15] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/17/jamie-dimon-praises-trump-warns-maga-criticism-could-hurt-biden.html

[16] https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2024/01/15/exp-blackrock-vice-chair-trump-iowa-caucuses-011503pseg2-cnni-business.cnn

[Hildebrand did not declare his preference for Trump as indicated in this statement. He called him the “wake up call that Europe needs” to regain sovereignty. Trump’s base of support comes overwhelmingly from the small business owner, not the large capitalist.]

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anotherworldnowblog · 11 months ago

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WE WILL NEVER BE FORGIVEN

“The beginning of the rise of fascism presupposes a significant series of working-class defeats. These defeats immediately precede fascism, and open the way to it.” –Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (139)

PART I

It’s spring, 2020. The third precinct is in flames. The police carry out a hasty evacuation to the sounds of the cheers and threats of thousands of rebels under a sky ablaze with fireworks. The third precinct is in flames. Statues of genocidaires come crashing to the ground simultaneously in dozens of cities across the cursed landscape of the most feared imperial power in the history of the world. Countless police lines are broken, an unprecedented number of cops are hospitalized, the national guard’s equipment fails to intimidate, and it appears as though the age of defensive struggles is over. The new world is on the attack; the real movement has the initiative.

Looting is coordinated electronically; motorized hordes attack the centers of capital accumulation and ceaselessly appropriate the world’s products for immediate use.[1] A hotel becomes fully decommodified housing.[2] Parking lots become distribution centers.[3] Prison riots explode globally as the distinction between inside and outside begins to blur.[4] With the future evaporated into a globally-felt bio-crisis, capitalist subjectivity breaks down completely and a revolutionary coalition emerges at the intersection of interest, morality, and revenge. Despite what amounts to a de facto lockout from the sites of production in the name of public health, the return of the proletariat is marked by a distinct intelligence and awareness of the totality; highways are immediately occupied as if coordinated by telepathy,[5] police power is ingeniously neutralized by virally disseminated tactics,[6] and a general refusal to appeal to representation fans across the networked rebellion. The circulatory system of capital is all but blocked, the paper tiger is soaked through by a movement determined to “be water,” and sectarian fighting and paralyzing paranoia are temporarily neutralized through a combination of good faith and a frank, now-or-never understanding of the tenuous portal pried open in the walls of a crumbling order. My heart breaks all over again with the crashing recognition of what was and did not last.

There are many stories that have been told about the rising of May-June, the George Floyd Rebellion, but very few have felt like the truth. Specifically, many of us, in our attempts to account for how we lost, have pointed to Democratic cooptation, the so-called peace police, outright psy-ops, a vulgarized identity politics, the absence of labor, general disorganization, liberalism, or at nonviolence or violence, too much or too little leadership, depending on who’s doing the talking. All of these things were present to some varied degree, but none of them truly account for the defeat of the May-June Rebellion and the vanquishing of the so-called Party of George Floyd.

Remarkably undertheorized is the way the reopening of businesses and the distribution of vaccinations, coupled with the cancellation of stimulus checks, acted to restart the economic machine, returning the prospect of a predictable future to the consciousness of the most integrated masses, almost instantly resubjectifying the lower strata of the community of capital that had, in crisis conditions, decisively broken with the old order on moral and ethical grounds to stand with the proletariat. A close analysis of this process of desubjectification and subsequent resubjectivication––a process which is at once economic, ideological, and psychological––will have to be the endeavor of some future work, for to speak of solely this still leaves a most critical dimension unelucidated.

The defeat of the Party of George Floyd would not have been possible without a terroristic and murderous counterrevolution, ever-increasing in its intensity, unleashed by the patriotic pig class; the star-spangled shock troops of capital. The vital heat from the righteous flames of rebellion woke the fascist dragon and it has not rested since.

The stability of the capital relation in the USA rests above all else on the maintenance of a centuries old racial hierarchy, affecting all class relations and influencing the outcome of all class struggle. To challenge this hierarchy is to threaten the stability of the capital relation and the existence of the American nation at once. The Party of George Floyd was a world-historic incarnation of the type of movement capable of bringing America to its knees. It was a prophetic vision of the Second American Revolution to come, led by the proletariat, drawing in and subordinating splintered class fractions as it moved, these having been fleetingly cut loose by a crisis that perhaps began as exogenous and biological, but rapidly became endogenic and total.

The uprising of May-June was put down only through a savage concatenation of extrajudicial fascist street violence, the urban warfare of a police and national guard operating within a state of exception, and a bipartisan legal assault on all forms of dissent instinctually choreographed between the lowest of local courthouses and the highest halls of power.

The rebellion of May-June confirmed what several decades of class struggle in the United States had already disclosed many times over: today, the watchwords of the most advanced segment of the proletariat are simply, “fuck the police.” The George Floyd rebellion sought to once and for all make good on the promise of liberal antiracism––to eradicate the scourge of racial and police violence from America––and practically tripped over the truth that the abolition of capital necessarily follows; it is now painfully clear that we will never be forgiven for it.

Below, I have attempted to tell a familiar story in an unfamiliar way. My aim here is not to chart the rise and fall of a noble protest movement; celebrate the unmistakable dialectic of joy and fear, love and revenge, immanent to every insurrection worthy of the name; nor is to theorize the radical desubjectivation and class betrayal brought about by unprecedented crisis conditions. Many other past writings and future works have and will be dedicated to such topics. History tells us that failed revolutions are always periods of incredible transformation and of horrifying violence. What I hope you will see plainly in what comes below is exactly that: a period of unprecedented rebellion and counterrevolutionary violence in all fifty states and an accelerated consolidation of an increasingly coherent fascist bloc in American society, called forth by a triple crisis of public health, social relations, and ideology. The following is not exhaustive or comprehensive, but rather a preliminary gathering up of data points. Today we have no shortage of high definition imagery of each fresh atrocity and injustice; what we lack and what we need desperately is a bird’s eye view of the present. What we lose in detail, we hopefully gain doubly in orientation.

“Between equal rights force decides” -Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1 (p. 344)

As the first fires raged at the end of May in Minneapolis, a protester is shot dead by the owner of a liquor-store.[7] The movement is undaunted, but the incident darkly portends a stochastic, extrajudicial countermovement in defense of private property.

In Detroit, as risings explode across the country in solidarity with the courageous actions of the Minneapolis militants, a car pulls up to a growing crowd of rebels and fires several shots in their direction, killing a 21-year-old man.[8]

On May 30th, a black protester in Omaha is shot dead by a business-owner who claimed he was seen vandalizing several neighboring businesses.[9] A few hundred miles east, another man is fatally run over by a FedEx driver attempting to protect his cargo from would-be looters in St. Louis.[10]

On June 1st, Louisville cops open fire on a crowd of protestors, killing one.[11] On the same night, a 22-year-old woman is shot dead by an unknown assailant in Davenport, Iowa as she leaves anti-police protests.[12] Across town, a group allegedly fires upon an unmarked Davenport police van. Officers, ostensibly returning fire, kill one person.[13] In Cicero, Illinois, two men who happened to be near a group liberating libations from behind the liquor store’s paywall are shot and killed by an unknown assailant. The murders are pinned on “outside agitators” by police.[14]

On June 2nd, in Vallejo, California, at least one hundred protestors surrounded the police and showered them with a hail of bricks and trash. Seemingly in retaliation, later that night, a 22-year-old man is forced to his knees in the parking lot of a Vallejo Walgreens by police. He is summarily executed.[15]

On the 3rd of June, a 50-year-old protestor partaking in a march in Bakersfield, California, is run over and killed by a local patriot, undoubtedly inspired by the infamous automotive homicide in Charlottesville, which killed antifascist Heather Heyer, only a few years earlier.[16] In under a month, another brave protestor is murdered in the same fashion, this time in Seattle.[17]

On the evening of June 4th, New York Police kettle a group of protesters and mercilessly douse them in military grade OC spray as soon as they are in violation of the 8 PM curfew. As they choke on their own vomit, blinded by searing chemical burns, the cops beat the disabled protestors without restraint, breaking bones and leaving several to bleed across the asphalt, convulsing and unconscious. Miraculously, no one is found dead when the police finally make way for emergency services.[18]

On June 13th, Atlanta goes up in flames in response to yet another police lynching. This time, an armed occupation forcibly evicts the police from the area surrounding the Wendy’s where the slaughter took place. The movement, sensing both the narrowing window to another world and the fatigue of an already-expiring coalition, openly grapples with the question of armed struggle. With the engine of resubjectification already beginning to hum, the moralistic fraction of the abolitionist machine pulls the eject cord, opening up the now isolated vanguard to the most severe repression.[19]

In Washington, DC, fires burn across the city and the riots’ frontlines move closer and closer to the White House. The President is evacuated to a bunker and aerial photographs of the capitol show columns of smoke pouring from the nation’s nerve center, obscuring the neoclassical architecture universally loved by the world’s fascists. The movement is beaten back after days of fighting only by the deployment of a deluge of chemical weapons. The President stages a triumphant march through the now-cleansed streets.[20]

In July, an American soldier, a 36-year old sergeant, arrives at a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Austin, Texas. Perhaps sensing that the movement for black life was indeed a movement towards the dissolution of his America, he, like so many proto-fascist veterans before him, steps in to do the work his beloved state seems unable or unwilling to do itself. He shoots and kills a white protestor who, as well as providing armed defense for the would-be builders of the new world, was protecting his wheelchair-bound, black girlfriend.[21]

That same month, police riot in Chicago, descending on a massive street action that had cleverly veered off its expected course and began rapidly working to tear down a towering gift from Mussolini himself: a statue of Columbus emblazoned with the fascii, situated in the city’s most central park. The militants had wasted no time in going on the offensive, clearing the park of cops with a barrage of frozen soda cans, fireworks, stones, laser blasts, and day-old pastries from behind a wall of umbrellas. Having been completely embarrassed, forced to frantically retreat, the Chicago police tap their collective memory of the Days of Rage and unleash a fury on the protestors not seen in generations. Gas threatens to drown and choke the movement, batons swing wildly, and an 18-year-old black girl named Miracle, an increasingly visible local leader of the fragile coalition to get free, is targeted by officers and beaten to a pulp by hand. Those unarrested limp to the nearest train. Fingers previously reserved only for flicking off the cops and national guardsmen begin to be pointed at each other. The statue’s partial removal is completed by the mayor herself, an obvious example of the combination repression-coptation that would contribute to the irrevocable fragmentation of the movement nationally.[22]

In late July, videos surface from Portland of unmarked vans kidnapping and disappearing protestors off the streets. It is later revealed that these were in fact federal agents under the authority of DHS, at least partially exposing a government sanctioned terror campaign against a hitherto unbreakable coalition of riotous antiracists and anticapitalists.[23]

In August, Kenosha explodes. Another black man is shot in the back by police and protestors automatically go on the attack. Fireworks are launched into the lines of storm-troopers, commodities are seized or torched, and buildings are destroyed with a hitherto unseen intelligence; notably, a Wisconsin Department of Corrections building is burned to the ground along with the countless records it contained.[24] After multiple nights of all-out insurrection, a cherubic 17-year-old fascist from Illinois drives north with the goal of setting things right. Determined to protect the racialized property regime at the center of the American project, he shoots three anti-police protestors, killing two, before disappearing safely behind police lines.[25]

In September, antifascist Michael Reinoehl is executed in the street by US Marshalls. The assassination was more or less ordered publicly by the President of the United States. At the end of the same month, a grand jury declines to prosecute officers for the murder of Breyona Taylor. Protests continue throughout the country, but the Party of George Floyd has now vanished from the historical stage. Emboldened fascist gangs more frequently begin to menace the now defanged protest movement and hold counterprotests of their own. Police continue to slaughter unarmed black people but it ceases to call into existence a force capable of challenging the murderous status quo. As alluded to above, everything has changed; or perhaps more precisely, things were beginning again to stay the same. In November, Joe Biden is elected president.

The young people involved in burning down the third precinct are sentenced to several years in prison.[26] Many of the protesters across the country charged with arson will serve more time than the few property-loving death-dealers who were performatively punished for patriotically murdering those who dared to challenge America’s racial caste system. Most of these killers are never caught. It’s doubtful law enforcement even made an effort. Derek Chauvin is eventually convicted, if only so the rest of his ilk can go on.

Kyle Rittenhouse is acquitted. Kyle Rittenhouse is acquitted.[27] He walks among us, a free man, while many of our bravest comrades languish in prison or are with us now only as martyrs.

The Party of George Floyd was not neutralized by peace police, or by electoralism, or by bad leaders, or by not having leaders. It was beaten back by frantic, often stochastic and extrastate, terroristic violence, aided and abetted by previously disparate fractions of the capitalist state drawn into unprecedented unity by the layered crisis of 2020. I would argue that the force used to put down the rebellion was far from “excessive,” but rather exactly what was necessary to avert an unprecedented crisis in capitalism spiraling into a full-blown revolution.

The revolutionary energies of the May-June uprising called into being a counterrevolutionary force that, far from dissipating with the defeat of the movement and the election of a new president, has continued gestating, consolidating, and cohering into something that can only be accurately described as fascism.

“Terror tactics like lynching will never be allowed to work on us. If terror is going to be the choice of weapons, there must be funerals on both sides. And let the whole enemy power complex be conscious of that!” -George Jackson, Blood In My Eye (p.14)

NOTES

[1] Chicago's Magnificent Mile Erupts In Overnight Looting, Violence. August 10th, 2020

https://www.npr.org/2020/08/10/900805820/chicagos-magnificent-mile-erupts-in-overnight-looting-violence

[2] They Built a Utopian Sanctuary in a Minneapolis Hotel. Then They Got Evicted. June 12, 2020.

https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2020/06/minneapolis-sheraton-george-floyd-protests/

[3] The Heart of the Uprising in Minneapolis. June 15th, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/22/the-heart-of-the-uprising-in-minneapolis

[4] Prison Riots and COVID 19 Pandemic: A Global Uprising? https://blogs.helsinki.fi/gulagechoes/2020/04/15/prison-riots-and-the-covid-19-pandemic-a-global-uprising/

[5] The Racial Injustice of American Highways. June 3rd, 2020.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-03/what-highways-mean-to-the-george-floyd-protesters

Protestors, law enforcement clash in downtown L.A. during protest over George Floyd’s death. June 27th, 2020. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-05-27/protestors-block-the-101-freeway [There are countless examples of such tactics in just the first weeks of the rebellion, easily found online. In an effort to save space, the two articles above must suffice for our purposes here]

[6] America is awash in cameras, a double-edged sword for protesters and police. June 3rd, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/06/03/cameras-surveillance-police-protesters/ [“We have been learning tactics from the protests in Hong Kong”]

[7] Man shot dead outside Lake Street pawnshop during unrest is identified. May 29, 2020. https://www.startribune.com/man-shot-dead-outside-lake-street-pawnshop-during-unrest-is-identified/570865962/

[8] Man fatally shot during protests in Detroit. May 30, 2020. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/30/us/detroit-man-shot-protests/index.html

[9] Omaha Police investigate Saturday night shooting death of protester. May 31st, 2020. https://www.3newsnow.com/news/local-news/omaha-police-investigate-saturday-night-shooting-death-of-protester [The murderer of James Scurlock was a local bar-owner who later killed himself, rather than be brought to justice.]

[10] Family of man struck, killed during protests fault FedEx. June 3rd, 2020. https://apnews.com/general-news-261c0a07eb120c6ee7fe8890b069b3f0

[11] One dead in Louisville after police and National Guard 'return fire' on crowd. June 1st, 2020. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/one-dead-louisville-after-police-national-guard-return-fire-protesters-n1220831

[12] Woman, 22, killed at protest as civil unrest roils Davenport. June 1st, 2020. https://apnews.com/article/18e8ec5a9b8e7175a128254d55df41e3

[13] Police: 2nd person killed in Davenport was shot at site of officer ambush. June 5th, 2020. https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/crime-and-courts/2020/06/05/davenport-unrest-name-2nd-person-killed-released/3155832001/

[14] Chaos In Cicero: 2 Bystanders Shot Dead In One Incident, Liquor Store Looting Suspects Caught Hiding In Another. June 1st, 2020. https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/chaos-in-cicero-2-bystanders-shot-dead-in-one-incident-liquor-store-looting-suspects-caught-hiding-in-another/

[15] SF resident was kneeling when fatally shot by Vallejo police during civil unrest. June 3rd, 2020. https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Attorney-identifies-SF-resident-fatally-shot-by-15315301.php

[16] Protester dies after being hit by car during Wednesday’s march. June 6th, 2020. https://www.kget.com/news/local-news/protester-dies-after-being-hit-by-car-during-wednesdays-march/

[17] Protester killed on Seattle freeway was dedicated to cause. July 5th, 2020. https://apnews.com/article/us-news-ap-top-news-wa-state-wire-police-racial-injustice-ff3c4fb3a627d694b5d888dcd48c89b0

[18] NYC to pay millions over police ‘kettling’ at Floyd protest. March 1st, 2023. https://apnews.com/article/nypd-george-floyd-protests-settlement-kettling-2b8c40a36e2195b9a4b33fa2efaccf0a

[19] 23 Days: Stories from the occupation of the Wendy’s where Rayshard Brooks was killed. August 7th, 2020. https://www.atlantamagazine.com/great-reads/23-days-stories-from-the-occupation-of-the-wendys-where-rayshard-brooks-was-killed/

[My summary of the events at the Wendy’s in Atlanta is woefully inadequate. The episode is deserving of intensive study. See analysis published at Ill Will under the title “At the Wendy’s” or the documentary called We Are Now, hosted on Crimethinc]

[20] Peaceful Protesters Tear-Gassed To Clear Way For Trump Church Photo-Op. June 1st, 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/06/01/867532070/trumps-unannounced-church-visit-angers-church-officials

[21] Armed Protester Shot, Killed By Driver In Austin Identified As Garrett Foster, Alleged Shooter Released From Custody. July 26, 2020. https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/armed-protester-shot-killed-driver-austin-identified-garrett-foster-shooter-released-custody/

[22] What Happened July 17? https://protesttimeline.southsideweekly.com/july-17/

[23] ‘It was like being preyed upon’: Portland protesters say federal officers in unmarked vans are detaining them. July 17th, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/17/portland-protests-federal-arrests/

[24] Department of Corrections building burned to the ground in Kenosha unrest. August 25th, 2020. https://www.cbs58.com/news/department-of-corrections-building-destroyed-in-kenosha-unrest

[25] Illinois Teen Arrested After Fatal Shootings Of 2 Kenosha, Wis., Protesters. August 26th, 2020. https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/08/26/906145086/3-shot-1-fatally-in-kenosha-wis-as-protests-continue-over-police-shooting

[26]St. Paul Man Sentenced To Prison, $12 Million In Restitution For Minneapolis Police Third Precinct Arson, United States Attorney’s Office: https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/st-paul-man-sentenced-prison-12-million-restitution-minneapolis-police-third-precinct#:~:text=MINNEAPOLIS%20%E2%80%93%20A%20St.,crowd%20of%20hundreds%20had%20gathered.

[27] Kyle Rittenhouse is acquitted on all charges, NPR: https://www.npr.org/2021/11/19/1057288807/kyle-rittenhouse-acquitted-all-charges-verdict

#Third Precinct #george floyd #fascism

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anotherworldnowblog · 1 year ago

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IT'S WINTER AGAIN

(January, 2024)

Why are we so reluctant to see fascism in the twenty-first century? So many of us, the left (what’s left of us), appear desperate to confine fascism to the blood-soaked era of Great Powers and Great Wars, setting aside our prized theoretical frameworks and ignoring the screaming of our instincts. ‘Fascism was the product of a distinct concatenation of historical circumstances and thus, cannot arise in the here and now,’ we say, anxiously tugging at our shirt collars. If that is true, well then I shudder to think what this means for communism! For better or worse, I do not believe either of these tendencies are contained in the amber of a static history.

However, perhaps I understand the frantic and frankly, telling, response triggered by any suggestion that we may now be living in an epoch of resurgent fascism. Liberals, leftists, and even rightists in the West, particularly in America, are so often prompted to imagine ‘what you would do under fascism,’ that to admit to its presence is at once to admit to one’s own failure and cowardice. It means admitting that you have somehow fallen short of a commitment you made (to whom?) to fight it, to resist it, to somehow disentangle yourself from it. You are not one of those Germans who passively keeps their head down while their neighbors shop is vandalized, you are certainly not one to leave control of the cobblestone streets of your home city to those brutish man-children in black shirts unchallenged, and if a civil war erupted you’d certainly do whatever was in your power to make sure that the forces of reaction and restoration never found their way to the halls of power. That is what we tell ourselves. That is how we sleep at night.

So much of the popular conception of fascism, and of our fantastical resistance to it, is predicated on seeing fascism as a threat that lies always just over the horizon of the present. ‘What would you do?’ This emphasis on fascism as event, as rupture, ignores the many decades of world history where fascism persisted as a stabilized social formation (only ever stable like capitalism; stable in its obvious instability). Popular consciousness ignores fascism as a social formation or arrangement, instead focusing solely on fascism as social movement and as coup. A fascism that never seems to arrive, a world where we still have time to prepare our resistance ahead of its coming, is simply too convenient and too flattering to our sense of our own morality and heroism to be true.

The historical fascisms (Italian, German, Spanish) of the first half of the twentieth century did indeed forcefully impose their racist, class-collaborationist national projects on their respective societies, beginning first as event, as coup, and as a social movement from the exterior inwards. In the years immediately preceding the fascist dawn, these societies were characterized by their acute class antagonisms; revolutionary class struggle threatened the power of the shaky unity of the old and new ruling classes everywhere in the wake of the War of 1914-1918, but this was especially so in the late-blooming capitalist states where, despite astounding economic growth, the national spoils of colonialism were too sparse and the technique of the capitalist state too underripe to completely circumvent wave after wave of proletarian rebellion. In time, and with the Red Army ensnared in devastating civil war, the rebellions were put down, but the post-war crises of economics, politics, and ideology remained. In the absence of a communist path, only a social movement, appearing miraculously from the outside, critical of the state (so as to save the state), critical of bourgeois ideology (so as to save bourgeois ideology), and critical of the international capitalist economy (so as to save the capitalist economy) could purport to resolve such contradictions. Only a chauvinist vanguard could hope to impose its violent unity on an antagonistic class structure.

But in America, the same false unity has been more or less the norm for at least several decades. There has been virtually no need to forcefully impose such an order, except in the rarest of circumstances which infrequently bend the otherwise straight line of American history, since 1877 and the thermidorian reaction to Reconstruction.

Class antagonisms in the United States of America were historically first stabilized or outright neutralized by the extension of property ownership to nearly all white men, through a process of settler colonial expansion that deputized the would-be proletarian as a key agent of genocidal nation-making, and the maintenance of a black underclass that would persist well beyond the abolition of slavery. Even the racist eighteenth-century naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt could not help but notice that, “in America, the greater or lesser degree of whiteness of skin decides the rank which a man occupies in society. A white who rides barefooted on horseback thinks he belongs to the nobility of the country.” Over two hundred years later and after centuries of slave rebellion, bloody civil war, Civil Rights, as well as the rapid proletarianization and dispossession of most of the white population, racial (and sexual) difference is continually exploited by our national bourgeoisie to produce a chauvinist, collaborationist layer of the working class, a “pig class,” in the words of George Jackson. This layer is bought off for a pittance, a mortgage and a jet ski, and acts as a dampener of the class antagonisms endemic to any capitalist society. So long as this layer has ample access to credit, property, and largely symbolic representation in the political system (today, in the form of the Republican Party), the American Dream, so central to the stabilization of American collaborationist ideology, remains intact, and the class struggle remains stillborne, the working class having betrayed itself and tied both hands behind its own back.

Class collaboration, in service of and with faith in the Nation and the Nation’s People, remains virtually unchallenged and generally accepted in the United States. This is why, in contemporary American fascism, the democratic process can proceed relatively unmolested; class collaboration, racism, and property worship are assumed. The fascist social order is in fact regularly presided over by individuals who are not even themselves fascists. The unique social-property relations of the United States of America form a self-regulating fascist social order where the class struggle is virtually always already foreclosed upon. The stabilization of the capital relation is here assured not simply by the violence of the bourgeoisie, but by the economic, political, and ideological incorporation of a critical fraction of the working class.

Of course, in the moments class struggle does rupture the collaborationist status quo, two parties are revealed to be one, the masks hit the floor, the democratic facade falls away and only returns with the stabilization of the capital relation and the resolution of the ideological crisis class struggle provokes.

This all suggests that we must insist upon a distinction between a fascist social movement and a fascist social arrangement; the latter is the suspension of class struggle in service of a national project and the former is a chauvinistic vanguard called forth by a crisis that’s at once ideological, political, and economic. The former can take on either restorationist or “revolutionary” characteristics, but the crisis of the social arrangement, even an already-fascistic one, ensures the fascist social movement appears as something exterior to the structures of power.

Sometimes, the fascist social movement works in tandem with the fascist society, supporting it in an extra-state role. Sometimes the fascist social movement attacks or even attempts to carry out a coup on the fascist society, but only in order to reimpose on renewed foundations the same social order.

The police are interesting in this regard, as they occupy the narrow space of intersection between the fascist social movement and the fascist society. They are primarily tasked with imposing the reproduction of fascist society (the containment of class struggle) but also, often simply by way of their armed presence throughout society and sometimes through their own self-activity, discipline the “progressive” elements of the ruling classes, breaking from a destabilized fascist order to become an element of the fascist social movement.

The point of all that lies above is simply this: that we Americans live within a fascist social arrangement already and that the status quo is now threatened by a genuinely fascist social movement does not actually represent a contradiction. A fascist social order is from time to time caught off guard, either by environmental or biological catastrophe, the economic crises inescapable in capitalist society, or the modest resistance movements often tolerated in fascism’s stabilized form, or perhaps some combination of the aforementioned elements. In moments such as these, the class domination at the heart of fascism must be forcefully reasserted, typically by some combination of state apparatuses. However, when the state proves incapable–or is simply perceived to be incapable–of such a restoration, an extra-state response may be generated. Fascist society is attacked and reordered by the fascist social movement, a movement which is nothing but an aggressive fraction of the ruling classes and their allies, acting to stabilize that which they purport to attack–the bourgeois state. As always, the seal of capital’s domination over labor is set with the blood of the proletariat.

#fascismo #fascism #america #trump #Biden #january 6 #marxism #marxismo

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anotherworldnowblog · 1 year ago

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MOVIE REVIEW: THE ZONE OF INTEREST (2023)

Not a bearing witness, but a warning.

Visually, this film is a triumph. The Love Island style camera system is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a movie and it has this incredibly disarming effect where you almost forget you’re watching a movie at all. The decisions of the filmmakers, the entire armature of cinema itself, slides to the back; you’re left solely with what is in front of you. This is happening. Is this cowardly? A way of shirking responsibility? Or is that itself a feeling, produced by the film, induced in the viewer; evasion, culpability, but culpable like the pilot of a Reaper drone.

The striking few moments where the filmmakers’ hands return to the forefront of consciousness, the swelling frames of red, black, and white abstraction and the (less than nine minutes of, and no less the remarkable for it) soul-crushing score, seem to explode the frame; these are not images, but visions. The new man of National Socialism rises out of the smoke and steam and abject screams. The screen goes white as the camera drifts up past the totenkopf on his lapel.

Jarring thermal camera imagery briefly and abruptly announces a shift in perspective. Hoss reads Hansel and Gretel and we follow a Polish sympathizer through the woods as she hurriedly stashes precious calories for the prisoners in the muddy rim of a massive pit. The wide shots of thermal grayscale amplify an animal fear–she moves like a mouse through the thicket, hoping she won’t attract the precision talons of the barn owl–while actually visually assuring us of her safety. Technology leaves nothing unseen, we are privileged with the knowledge that she moves alone, unstalked, but this is somehow of no comfort. The machine is entirely indifferent to her small act, yet to be sympathetic is to live forever like prey.

The sound is, as everyone who has seen it knows, everything. Constant, pulsating, unending violence; the gears of the machine groan and creak even in between screams and gunshots. The train rumbles incessantly and it only goes one direction. I’m not sure the camp’s noise ever actually rises and falls, but it seems to with the shifting sensitivity and emotional state of the characters on screen. Again, we are implicated, empathizing against our will… do we understand more than we care to admit?

The film does not shy away from ambiguity, but it is careful not to confuse it with contradiction. Death appears to be pushing inwards from the margins, always apparently one inch away from exploding the settler fantasy, but it never does. When a jawbone (?) is plucked from the rushing waters of a nearby river, indicating a dangerous contamination, the family excursion comes to a crashing halt; bodies are frantically scrubbed, human ash comes shooting out of the nose, but the forest doesn’t appear to be any less beautiful for having been affirmed as a crime scene. And it is not the last time Hoss is seen with his family relaxing in its dappled light.

When the youngest boy peers over the wall, aroused by the sounds of death camp justice, he recoils and says something like, “don’t do that again.” To reference the ‘banality of evil’ is to miss the point. The sounds from over the wall are non-stop ultra-violence, an X-rated action movie. If it were everyday, stupifying, lulling, then what would there be to recoil from? Desensitization is an excuse and evasion (why do we feel compelled to offer such absolution?); for the National Socialist, what is happening over the wall is right. When the grandmother abruptly leaves the camp, it is not because she suddenly found her conscience. She did not head into the mountains to supply the resistance, but rather back to Berlin and to the drapes and the jewels rightfully stolen from her now vanished Jewish neighbor. Some of us carnivores simply cannot stomach seeing how the sausage is made. So we don’t. We form our lives so that it is not seen, and we never stop eating it. But we know what happens.

The issue here is not cognitive dissonance, nor is it the supposed monotony of atrocity, but the way ideology informs the senses; it’s not so much a desensitization as a re-sensitization. Up is down, suffering is joy, death is life. The garden is fertilized with the ashes of the national enemy. The characters have not gone blind and deaf. Quite the contrary. And this is what makes the film so sickening and so cleverly accusatory.

When the older brother picks up the youngest, carrying him crying across the perfect garden, and locks him in the greenhouse with sadistic satisfaction and quiet laughter, my body silently screamed in total, agonizing horror. But my terror was not at the ruination of the Hoss children by their proximity to the most notorious Nazi death camp, but that I have seen this before. Is the lesson of sadism and domination any less complete when the mother and child step over a frostbitten homeless person as they enter a cafe? When the father is rude to the server or the drive-thru attendant?

In the final minutes, we are given what seems to be a naked critique of contemporary holocaust memory, threatening to derail the entire movie, perhaps only rescued by a soft invocation of the supernatural, an occult shattering of time. Workers methodically and unemotionally polish and vacuum the artifacts and dim hallways of a Holocaust museum. It is Auschwitz, present day, nearly eighty years after the events the film portrays. The workers move through their task as though flipping a room at the Marriott. What did you expect? Every injunction to ‘never forget,’ becomes the means of forgetting. Seeing somehow ensures nothing is really seen–or at least, not the thing that really matters. Representation only carries one further from the real. In a way, this becomes a conceptual mirror of the architecture of the movie; only by refusing to drop a camera over the camp walls are we able to really approach the truth.

We co-construct the Holocaust we need, the one that paradoxically comforts us in its singularity, in its supposed senselessness. We delude ourselves into believing the myth of its incomprehension. What is more terrifying? That the industrial murder of 13 million people was the height of human irrationality? Or is it in fact far more frightening to admit that the Shoah was the result of a rationality that we are all too familiar with? That it was the outcome of a logic and of values that we refuse to reckon with and have certainly not overcome. Its reason continues to work on us and through us now. It’s nearly ten degrees below zero tonight. Barely a block away, someone dies in the street. I draw my blinds shut and type out this movie review for no one.

When Hoss nearly vomits in the dark hallways of the Nazi machine, is this Glazer stumbling blindly into the trap of representation, the trap he appears to have consciously set out to avoid? Was this the mark of a filmmaker who doesn’t exactly understand what he made? Is this an instance of moralizing character development, entertainment, the type lambasted by Haneke in his comments on Schindler’s List, sneaking in the back door in the final minutes? I don’t think so. I think Glazer is perhaps attempting to have it both ways. He has created a film that functions almost entirely as a warning, negatively indicating the non-defeat of Nazism and forcing an uncomfortable confrontation with our own fascistic complicity. But with this final scene, a space is opened, a space with all the gravitational force of a black hole, a space that not even light can escape, a space where time itself is annihilated; this is the space of the Shoah. A singular event. A rupture in the fabric of the universe. But presented so as to not crowd out the sobering recognition of this chasm’s immanent origins; the fact that it is, in contrast to conventional wisdom, remarkably thinkable, comprehensible; and the knowledge that we do not gaze back at history as though watching a screen, but from within it, guilty, damned.

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anotherworldnowblog · 1 year ago

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EXCEPTIONAL FREEDOM AND FREEDOM WITHOUT EXCEPTION

Two Views of Slave Rebellion in Jamaica

(November 5th, 2023)

Throughout the eighteenth century, all across the Americas, enslaved Africans broke from the iron grip of the slave system and launched countless direct assaults on its varied and depraved institutions. At every moment, the mountainous island of Jamaica and the thousands of enchained peoples occupying it sat at the heart of these struggles. In the familiar telling, such risings were isolated events, eventually contained or put down, and the unfree peace of plantation society was restored. What historians Mavis C. Campbell and Vincent Brown make undeniably clear is that no such peace has ever existed; not for the slaves, and not for the planters. In their accounts, following Equiano, they describe how slavery is indistinguishable from “a state of war.”[1] In fact, both authors go much further, detailing the interconnectedness of military revolution in Africa, globe-spanning competition between the warring European powers, and slavery and rebellion in the Caribbean. In each of the works under examination, the formation of a unique diaspora culture, provoked by the slavers and developed and protected by the slaves, is identified as a key factor in rebel success. Additionally, both books go to great lengths to situate Jamaican slave rebellion as world-historical phenomena; these insurrections were both influenced by their truly global context and capable of affecting economies and politics far beyond the turquoise waters of the West Indies, eventually bringing the entire colonial system to its knees. The scholarship of Campbell and Brown is separated by more than three decades and deviates sharply in methodology, ideological approach, and in each writer’s respective priorities. Nevertheless, in the divergent works of these historians, we find two views of Jamaican slave rebellion and marronage that suggest, no matter the conscious goals of the rebels, the antagonisms of slave society once laid bare by uprising and marronage could only be resolved in abolition.

Between Mavis C. Campbell’s sweeping 1988 overview of Jamaican marronage, The Maroons of Jamaica 1655-1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration, and Betrayal and in Vincent Brown’s forcefully written 2020 book on Jamaican slave rebellion, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, we see an undeniable interpretive unity. In both books, engagement with seventeenth and eighteenth century West African politics and culture are deemed essential for developing any understanding of the slave rebellions rattling the nerves of planters across the Americas, and especially in Jamaica. The Jamaican planters expressed a perverse preference for the Africans of the Gold Coast precisely because they “often had experience in military campaigns… a superior but difficult-to-manage piece of property; like wild horses broken to domesticity, they conferred prestige upon the master.”[2] The European demand for exportable unfree labor fueled the flames of African warfare, in turn ratcheting up the production of human beings as slaves, driving down costs, and ultimately creating a devastating cycle of depredation and degradation. While European thirst for blood-soaked riches led them to plunder the Slave Coast of Africa with their right hand, they had unknowingly sowed the seeds of the colonial system’s destruction in the Caribbean with their left: “War and conquest also stimulated important cultural transformations. Not only did smaller states come to pay tribute to the expansionist states, they also learned and adopted second and third languages and new mores and customs. These wars led to a great familiarity with the family of Akan languages… the process made a common set of symbols and cultural practices widely available.”[3] Campbell establishes clearly that “most of the Maroon leaders, especially those of Jamaica, were of the Akan-speaking group.”[4] Indeed, of the countless “slave rebellions from 1760 to 1831, most… were led by the Akan-speaking group, the last one being the exception.”[5] West African military conflict is recognized across both works not only as a critical site in the production of a transatlantic slave trade, but also as the political and cultural basis for future rebellious alliances and devastating rivalries, for claims to leadership and structures for governing, and for the tactical and strategic success of any assault on slave society and its defenders. Furthermore, convergent West African cultural practices, especially in the context of the turbulent century of imperial warfare on the Slave Coast, made possible the formation of new diaspora identities and customs, in turn unlocking a rebel solidarity that eclipses the difference and separation deliberately cultivated among the slaves by the owning class. Across both books, we are shown how rebel groups coalesce around military and political leaders from the homeland, employ guerilla tactics and knowledge of the familiar landscape with profound success, and use ritual and oath-making ceremonies derived from African folkways to bind disparate and desperate peoples into a powerful historical force.

Both books also maintain that the significance of slave rebellion and marronage can only be grasped by situating the risings as one front in a broader global ecology of warfare and commerce. Jamaican slave rebellion and maroon warfare were influenced by, and capable of decisively influencing, the inter-European struggle for world supremacy. In the final years of the 17th century, the power of the Maroons was already unmistakable to the governor of Jamaica and, recognizing the “heightened successes of the ‘intestine’ enemies and the very real external threats from the French and the Spaniards,” he desperately, and futilely, sought a path to bring them to terms.[6] In fact, at many different points during the course of the eighteenth century, the Spanish, Dutch, French, and British all had to reckon with the emergent power of maroon societies in their respective colonies, both as internal threats to the stability of colonial production and as autonomous nations capable of expressing a discrete geopolitical interest, and even of threatening the very existence of the transnational institution of slavery itself. In Jamaica, the scope of the challenge posed by rebellion and marronage was undeniable and, as both books skillfully illustrate, the phenomena seriously jeopardized the economic success of the colony for the entirety of the first hundred years of British rule, making profitable settlement and production on the island virtually impossible by way of sabotage, assault, and the simple subtraction of territory from colonial control. By the first years of the new century, “the north and northeastern sectors of the island was entirely possessed by the windward Maroons… many of the marginal planters had perforce to abandon their estates.”[7] By the 1760s, the slave rebellions had decisively imperiled Britain’s position in the world economy, having “disrupted production, delayed shipping… slave rebellion created bottlenecks… Edward Long would later estimate total losses of at least ￡100,000 sterling ‘in ruined buildings, cane-pieces, cattle, slaves, and disbursements,’ and a similar additional amount for the cost of erecting new barracks and fortifications across the island.”[8] The persistent slave risings and resilience of the maroons did not simply threaten Jamaica’s economic viability, however. The example set by maroon autonomy and the ensuing unwavering refusal of submission to the slave order by so many of the enchained Africans undermined the entire racial and political hierarchy of the island and of the colonial system, prefiguring its overcoming and clearing a path towards its eventual dissolution.[9]

Nonetheless, the story of Jamaican slave rebellion and marronage is far from a one-dimensional tale of solidarity and liberation. The Leeward and Windward Treaties of 1738-1739 provided for the security of the oldest maroon communities on the island at the expense of much of their imagined political content; the treaties enshrined a nominal autonomy in exchange for more than a simple cessation of hostilities, cloaking the roots of dependence in the language of friendship and extracting collaboration as the high price of recognition.[10] In the latter half of the 18th century, right up until the outbreak of the Second Maroon War in 1795, the Maroons occupied an unsustainable zone of exception, existing simultaneously as the single most effective weapon of counterinsurgency available to the British colonists and as a powerful example of the feasibility and rewards of rebellion. It is here, in the treatment of this perplexing aspect of this period’s history, that both books begin to sharply differentiate themselves from one another, opening space for a conversation on their varied priorities, approaches, and methodologies.

Mavis C. Campbell, writing in 1988, set out to achieve something very different from Vincent Brown, who wrote his book some three decades later, and she attempted to do so under a very different set of circumstances. In introducing her own work, Campbell says that “there has been no historical study of the Maroons of Jamaica tracing them through Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone since R. C. Dallas’s History of the Maroons (1803),” laying out her aim of crafting a multivolume study of the maroon communities from their formation all the way through their lengthy exodus.[11] She points to several path breaking scholarly articles, most notably one written by historian Orlando Patterson in 1970, where he too “laments that ‘no adequate historical analysis yet exists on this vital episode of West Indian history. Available accounts are either too inaccurate or superficial or ideologically biased.’”[12] Campbell concludes: “The present work is an attempt to fill this gap.”[13] Given the apparent dearth of reliable secondary sources and a sensitivity to “the misconceptions, the inaccuracies, and the misinterpretations connected with this subject… materials of primary origin were therefore sought as far as they were available.”[14] At every turn, Campbell’s bibliography attests to her commitment to such a methodology, utilizing letters, journals, legal documents, and contemporary accounts to reconstruct the events of this period. Her emphasis on primary source material not only ensured that “old maps, surveyor’s diagrams and notes, songs, folklore, taboos, and the like were all mobilized in the process” of constructing a definitive history of Jamaican marronage, but also the oral histories and closely guarded ancestral knowledge of the Maroon communities themselves. Campbell made numerous visits to the remote interior of the island where she “interviewed a number of people including the colonels, majors, and captains from all the existing Maroon communities,” as well as tracking down “disparate families from disintegrated former Maroon societies.”[15]

It is likely that Campbell’s insistence on drawing almost exclusively on primary source material was a combined product of the paucity of available scholarship, her own ambition and aspirations for her book, and a stated determination to avoiding presenting her account of slave resistance from within the narrow confines of “any theoretical construct, whether Marxist, Fanonian, ‘archaic,’ ‘primitive,’ ‘millenarian,’ or even Freudian.”[16] It is clear then that no similar necessities, scarcities, or limitations affected the creation of Vincent Brown’s recent work on the same subject, despite it too overflowing with an undeniable ambition and fiery intensity, albeit one entirely its own. Brown’s work is of course densely populated with a wealth of primary material, most of which is found in Campbell’s book and much of which is likely unavoidable in any account of the era, owing both to the limited number of written first-hand accounts and the revelatory quality of particular sources, now accepted as definitive. The contemporary writings of slaveholders Bryan Edwards and Edward Long appear prominently throughout both of the works presently under examination and help to capture the sense of overwhelming terror at the precarity of their class, among many other insights. Yet, the writing in Tacky’s Revolt is exceedingly supported by a glut of secondary works on the topic, reflecting both a significant methodological divergence between the two authors and the very different scholarly context out of which Brown’s book emerges. In the decades since Campbell’s publishing her overview on the subject, research in the field of Caribbean studies has exploded, spurred on by new recognitions of the significance of decolonial and subaltern historical perspectives within academia and a parallel rise of popular interest in “history from below.” Although Jamaica still remains relatively marginal in popular consciousness and historical scholarship alike, overshadowed by the near-mythical quality of national and revolutionary histories of places like Haiti and Cuba, the island now has countless monographs dedicated to its history, many on the maroons in particular, and Campbell’s work no doubt played a small part in inaugurating this new era of historical activity. In fact, Brown cites Campbell’s Maroons early and often in his own chronicling of the events of 1760-1761, relying on her systematic overview of the topic for secondary background information and interpretive schemas. But her name is recorded unceremoniously among an unfathomably long list of recent scholarly works populating Brown’s bibliography, reinforcing our appreciation of these two book’s differences. The two authors do not only separate themselves by their methodologies however, as Brown says little else in introducing his work to the reader other than unambiguously situating his book in the black radical tradition, “following [W.E.B.] Du Bois… C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, and Walter Rodney.”[17] It is clear then that the two writers not only differ in methodologies, but also in ideological approach.

As alluded to in the above, the biggest discrepancy between these two historical works is neither methodology nor approach, but rather the historical and conceptual priorities of the authors as evinced by their treatment of certain aspects this period, and none more so than maroon collaboration with the colonial authorities. For Campbell, developing a definitive history of the Jamaican Maroons and following that thread wherever it might lead was her stated goal. So when the first Maroon Treaty is signed by Cudjoe in 1738, Campbell dutifully evaluates the event’s significance in a distinctly non-partisan style, arguing that admittedly, “one can find no ancient precedents of rebel slaves and their ex-masters signing treaties conjointly. And it is in this sense that the Treaty is historically important, that it is a triumph for the Maroons. In practical terms, though, it is another matter, for the Treaty, in effect, represents more a victory for the colonial powers than for the Maroons, who were never defeated in battle by the British… demonstrating that what the British could not gain on the battlefield, they now gained in full measure over the negotiating table.”[18] Campbell does not seek to minimize the ramifications of such a treaty nor downplay the Maroons’ agency in its formulation, pointing to a range of primary source materials that strongly indicate the willingness of the Maroons to act as slave-catchers and an irregular fighting force under British command, although she does make sure to note the illegitimacy of any treaty where one half of the signatories can neither read nor write. According to Campbell, “the Maroons, over time, had developed an inordinate sense of their own importance and a marked feeling of superiority over the other blacks of the island… the combination of ethnic particularity and earned superiority, as they perceived it, did not make for a feeling of black solidarity.”[19]

In keeping with her unwavering commitment and steadfast focus, the unprecedented slave rising of 1760-1761, known colloquially as Tacky’s Revolt, is afforded only about three pages of examination and is discussed only as the first of many successful maroon forays into the business of counterrevolution. Campbell collapses a year’s worth of exhilarating military campaigns and liberation struggles into a few lines, abruptly explaining that, “without going into all the details of the rebellion which spread throughout the island, involving the Akan-speaking group, suffice it to say that it was crushed” the following year.[20] One can practically sense the opening left by Campbell that Vincent Brown would step in to fill, thirty-two years later. For Brown, Tacky’s Revolt is practically overflowing with “political intent” and his fidelity in this work lies solely with the movement against the slave system, wherever he might find it.[21] In the early chapters of Tacky’s, Brown isolates the Jamaican Maroons as an obvious embodiment of a rebellious Coromantee diaspora subjectivity, as forming the clearest example of successful strategies and practices for slave liberation and survival, and as expressing a distinct, autonomous political interest on the island. But when the Maroons sign the treaties of 1738-1739, they are elevated and segregated as a middle class within Jamaican planter society, contradictorily engaged in the active repression of slave rebellion while passively serving as a living reminder to planter and slave alike of the possibility for insurrectionary emancipation. Brown, unlike Campbell, is writing about Jamaican slave rebellion, not the specific form of slave rebellion known as marronage, and as such, when the maroons make their infamous transition from an insurgent force to a counterinsurgent one, Brown abandons their story of ascendance up the Caribbean class hierarchy for the story of the ensuing slave wars, keeping his feet firmly planted in the mud alongside those at the lowest ranks of colonial society. The maroons subsequently appear in the pages of Tacky’s Revolt almost exclusively as a material fetter on the struggle of the enchained, as their collaboration immediately “limited the spatial horizon of the plantation slaves, diminishing their hopes of fighting their way to freedom in the interior.”[22]

Brown proceeds to narrate decades of escalating slave rebellion through the beginning of the 19th century, convincingly demonstrating an ever-increasing level of tactical sophistication and political consciousness, even detailing how “the enslaved were teaching the story of the 1760s to new arrivals… an oppositional political history taught and learned on Jamaican plantations–a radical pedagogy of the enslaved–shaped the slaves’ goals, strategies, and tactics as they rehearsed bygone battles and considered future possibilities.”[23] Campbell traces the arrested development of maroon society in the years after the successful, although temporary, extinguishing of the flames of rebellion in 1761, all the way through the Second Maroon War’s beginning in 1795. For Campbell, the tragedy of the Jamaican Maroons is not found solely or even primarily in their collaboration in the suppression of slave self-emancipation; as both authors remind us, the slaves prevail. Instead, it is that the Maroons of Jamaica, in their self-isolation and self-interest, were left behind by the movement of history, unredeemed, frozen in an amber of their own making. While “by the late eighteenth century, ethnic particularity among the slaves and the free blacks of the island would seem to have been yielding place to a kind of pan-Africanism, embracing the concerns of all blacks,” the maroons found themselves dangerously vulnerable in their solitude.[24] When talks addressing flagrant British violations of the Treaties of 1738-1739 broke down and a military assault on the Leeward Maroons began in 1795, the maroons discovered themselves to be crushingly alone. The balance of forces had decisively swung in the direction of the British government in the five decades since the last war, the Treaties and subsequent maroon collaboration being in large part responsible for creating the conditions for an explosion in productivity, population, and profits on the island, and the maroons quickly found that virtually no slaves deserted in support of their cause. Not even the Windward Maroons came to their aid; “their feeling of superiority to the other blacks finally backfired,” demonstrating the limits of Akan exclusivity and an exceptional freedom.[25] The maroons of Trelawny Town are deported as the world enters an age of unprecedented revolutionary convulsions, revolving around the insurrectionary axis of Caribbean slave revolt, reaching a crescendo in a slave war of unfathomable intensity on Jamaica in 1831, and resulting in the subsequent passage of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

These two works, remarkable in their scope, their detail, and for their boldly heterodox and holistic views of Jamaican slave rebellion and marronage as genuinely global phenomena, distinguish themselves from each other in a number of important ways. Their use of sources and the academic contexts they crystalize out of present a stark contrast. Furthermore, where Campbell seeks to author a dispassioned overview on the topic, Brown unflinchingly proclaims his fidelity to a radical tradition and to the slave-warriors themselves. Naturally, such ideological differences in approach led to the telling of two very different, albeit deeply entangled, stories. However, it would seem that hovering high above such differences in methodology, approach, and focus sits a startlingly obvious connection that makes these two books far more related than the above analysis would seem to suggest: at their basest level and at their respective conceptual heights, they are both works that deal with the question of human freedom. Both works place at their core the struggle for liberation and both authors do not hesitate to declare the heroism, however flawed, of their protagonists. For Campbell, despite her tendency towards pessimism, when the Maroons avail themselves to “the best of the colonel’s venison and… the choicest of the gentleman’s port,” this is just one of many examples of their “heroic audaciousness” in the face of the disciplinary terror of the slave system.[26] And for Brown, the slave’s struggle for emancipation, proceeding even in the face of certain defeat and annihilation, should indicate to us that “military victory isn’t the only object of struggle… however degrading war itself might be, enslaved men and women fought for dignity as much as for territory.”[27] Beyond all else, these books illustrate that “power is never total. Even the most subjugated peoples have dared to plan and fight for their own forbidden aims…their struggles illuminate cracks in the edifice of racial capitalism, reminding us that another world is not only possible, another world is inevitable.”[28]

NOTES:

[1] Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by himself, Olaudah Equiano, 1789 . Literature in Context: An Open Anthology. http://anthology.lib.virginia.edu/work/Equiano/equiano-interesting-narrative.

[2] Brown, Vincent. Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2020. 78

[3] Brown, Tacky’s Revolt, 99

[4] Campbell, Mavis C. The Maroons of Jamaica 1655-1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration & Betrayal. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1990: 3

[5] Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 162

[6] Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 58

[7] Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 59

[8] Brown, Tacky’s Revolt, 216-217

[9] “The situation had reached the point where ‘No man at [the] North side’ could be said to be master of a slave.” Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 80

[10] Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 130

[11] Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 10

[12] Patterson, Orlando. “Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Sociohistorical Analysis of the First Maroon War, 1665-1740” In Maroon Societies, edited by Richard Price, 246-288. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. quoted in Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 11

[13] Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 11

[14] Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 11

[15] Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 12

[16] Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 13

[17] Brown, Tacky’s Revolt, 9

[18] Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 129

[19] Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 131

[20] Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 155

[21] Brown, Tacky’s Revolt, 131

[22] Brown, Tacky’s Revolt, 119

[23] Brown, Tacky’s Revolt, 242

[24] Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 245

[25] Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 245, 251

[26] Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 81

[27] Brown, Tacky’s Revolt, 249

[28] Brown, Tacky’s Revolt, 15

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Brown, Vincent. Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2020.

Campbell, Mavis C. The Maroons of Jamaica 1655-1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration & Betrayal. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1990.

Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by himself, Olaudah Equiano, 1789 . Literature in Context: An Open Anthology. http://anthology.lib.virginia.edu/work/Equiano/equiano-interesting-narrative.

Patterson, Orlando. “Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Sociohistorical Analysis of the First Maroon War, 1665-1740” In Maroon Societies, edited by Richard Price, 246-288. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.

#jamaica #maroon #slave rebellion #colonialism #slave revolt #revolution #west indies

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anotherworldnowblog · 2 years ago

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CREEPING WINTER

(the following was written in the weeks following January 6th, 2021, at what became the beginning of several months of personal historical study of Nazi Germany. There are certain claims regarding the prospects of imperial war that perhaps have not aged well in light of developments in Ukraine and the Middle East. Despite all of this, I still find value in many of the conclusions arrived at below. For that reason, I have uploaded them here.)

The hysteric crescendo reached by our fraying society during the previous regime’s tenure is matched only by the maddening levels of psychic repression and senescent denial we are presently swimming in. Issues that were all-important have suddenly been discarded and forgotten, truths uncovered are now swept back under the rug, and energies that had begun to find purpose are now left to dissipate and fizzle uselessly.

Throughout the spectacular Trump presidency, there were many on both the far left and within the liberal punditry who found themselves equally caught up in the circular and unproductive discussion of whether or not we had crossed some historical, categorical line into the bleak, gray territory of fascism. Indeed, when any analysis of the Trump presidency goes beyond surface aesthetics and the no doubt very real, and very naked, executive branch incitements to murderous hate acts, we are left clutching at air; it is somewhat unclear how this moment differs from the usual business of empire which America has been so steadfastly conducting for the past seven decades. These commentators on the far left and the liberal center can in fact get nowhere in their discussions, for their definitions are exactly those of a static view of history in which the only fascism that can exist is that which has already existed (not to mention, a view of history that can only produce even greater horrors than those witnessed in the 20th century). In evaluating America’s fascism through the narrow conceptual parameters of German Nazism and Italian Fascism, or even worse, solely through a comparison of the men who were the historical face of past fascisms, we ensure our inability to recognize America for what it really is.

When we look around the world, we see something that is only apparently contradictory: fascistic leaders are slowly beaten back at the polls, but exactly as their policies of murderous border patrol, social cleansing, eviction, encampment, and medical apartheid prevail, now to the grimace-laden applause of the “politically-realistic” majority fraction of the global bourgeoisie. The camps, the cleansing, the virulent racism, and the suspension of the normal legal order all persist, perhaps with even greater effect, as the great-men (and women) who’s farcical return supposedly signaled the rise of present-day fascism are laughed promptly off the stage of history. All this suggests to us that fascism, and specifically nazism, are only coincidentally associated with the rise of strong-men. This means that in order to understand fascism past, present, and future, parameters that are not dependent on the presence of such leaders are required.

It seems quite possible, given the resurgence of the most fascist tendencies in our society and the coincidence of yet another moment of financial crisis for the capitalist world system, that fascism can be explained as a structural response to economic catastrophe that is inherent to the mode of production and its laws of motion in ways neither capitalists nor many of their critics would care to admit. Without the distraction of a fuhrer, likely only a characteristic of 20th century fascism specific to countries accustomed to having a king, fascism appears clearly as a forceful re-assertion of the most brutal and immanent tendencies of the capitalist system: namely, of capital’s preference for and abuse of spatial and material differentials, its tendency to differentiate the bearers of labor-power at that same time that it homogenizes and dehumanizes them; fascist violence appears at the moment capital's habitual predation of the victims of uneven development is forced to turn sharply inwards.

Fascism is the desperate attempt of a closed system to produce an exterior where none exists. It is the production by state violence of an exterior within the interior.

The production of an exterior within the interior needs no end or resolution, as its effect, the stability of the capital-labor relation, is a process with no determined end. In the example of America, we can see that a more or less automatic process of fascist terrorism and annihilation of the free Black population has been in motion since at least as early as the late 1800′s. Black revolutionaries have used the term “fascist” to describe America for over half a century. That there still exists some debate about the appropriateness of the word’s deployment serves only as evidence of the racist perception of Black theoretical contributions as somehow inferior to the theoretical understanding of American capitalism generated by those firmly enclosed within its interior, with greatest proximity to whiteness and to property. It is Black revolutionaries’ position as exterior to whiteness that enables them to see clearly that America is a fascist state.

America is the fascist state par-excellence because it is the racial capitalist state par-excellence and vice versa. It has been since 1968, or 1963, or 1945, or 1877, unceasingly developing in this direction since 1619 or even 1565.

The national and imperial wars of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries are quite obviously a product of these same capitalist laws of motion that we are asserting produce the global fascism of the present day. But with the subsumption of the entirety of the world’s resources by the capitalist labor process, the planet itself becomes capital’s cold interior and there is no enemy nation left to fight nor peasant population left to proletarianize on its now evaporated outside. The size of the capitalist firm balloons well beyond the boundaries of any single nation. The nations in turn desperately form toothless transnational governing bodies in attempt to wring concessions from the virtually sovereign transnational corporations. Imperial military conflict transforms into an endless secret police operation that recognizes no border. Destructive acts, periods of deterritorialization, are the key to the cyclical and theoretically endless accumulation and expansion of capital. Periods of economic stagnation, like the one we are trapped within now, can only be broken out of by costly, sweeping acts of restructuring, which are only ever provoked by the infernos of total war or by heroic, society-rattling rebellion on the part of the working classes. With the entire world now brought into a neat division of labor, the global working class knocked back on its heels, and a monopoly of force held only at the star-spangled center, the nation temporarily loses its meaning as any inkling of an exterior vanishes into the fluorescent strobe of a flickering McDonald’s sign.

The dissolution of the nation into the global marketplace provokes all manner of impotent domestic reaction. But the possibility of national war as resolution to the present crisis is foreclosed upon by an increasingly post-national economic reality. So long as the current balance of forces persists, war has only one place left to turn: inwards.

Fascism is the production of civil war from above.

This means that revolution, the production of civil war from below, must aspire to more than to blindly play out our role in capital’s planetary snuff film.

#fascisim #writing #communism #communist writing #america

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anotherworldnowblog · 2 years ago

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ON THE DEATH OF CHIEWELTHAP MARIAR

(the following text was originally published and distributed in the first months 2023 as the final section of Service Notes #2, a zine written and edited by Chicago baristas and published for Chicago baristas and food service workers. This second issue included two personal essays from food service workers, one poem by an ex-barista, stills from Christian Marklay’s “The Clock,” selected poems by the poet-worker, Xu Lizhi, as well as the following journalistic and theoretical essay)

My friends, it pains me beyond expression to inform you that one of our own has fallen. Chiewelthap Mariar, a 26 year old Sudanese refugee and UFCW member at District Local 2, was killed in Guymon, Oklahoma on January 9th. He was murdered in cold blood by police on the shop floor after his supervisor called the cops to the meatpacking plant where he worked. Our union brother was shot dead at work, by the police, and our union representatives can unfortunately do little more than call for a federal investigation. A coworker of Mariar, who was fired for filming Mariar’s final moments, spoke to press:

“The worker claimed Mariar was fired from his job by a supervisor but was told by human resources to finish his shift. The worker said the supervisor who fired him [then] confronted Mariar on the shop floor after he was fired, and police arrived soon after to escort Mariar from the site. Seaboard Foods did… not refute this characterization of the situation. ‘I witnessed the entire thing, from when they started arguing with him until he was shot,’ said the worker. ‘He had a company-issued band-cutter in his hand. When the police got to the plant, the guy was already working, minding his own business.’ The worker provided cell phone footage leading up to and following the incident, where Mariar can be seen… working around other employees and being confronted by officers on the shop floor. The worker claimed employees were told to keep working after the incident occurred. ‘I worked in maintenance. All they had us do was cover the scene with plastic, and we proceeded to finish what was on the production line,’ the worker added. ‘This company fired me for recording the truth they were trying to brush under the mat. They never asked me if I was OK. It was my first time seeing a guy get killed – and then I get fired.’”[1]

Chiewelthap Mariar should still be here. Just like Tyre Nichols[2] should still be here, just like Adam Toledo,[3] and just like Tortuguita.[4] Our union brother, a worker, a 26 year old black man with his whole life before him, was cut down at his place of work while carrying out his assigned duties. His own boss made the telephone call that ended his life. And his union, our union, could not save him. Those workers who witnessed this heinous act didn’t even get the day off. Without the pressure of militant, radical, rank and file self-activity, the union officials can hardly do more than cry out, “Justice!” They are legal entities, state entities, and they have rules they must abide by if they wish to exist the next day. An investigation may come and some restitution pay may too. But if it comes, it will come too late.

In history, especially at its most critical hinge points, the workers are sometimes called to go beyond the limits of their union counterparts. But most of the time they simply want to get by. History is always calling us towards a greater bravery and a higher mode of living together, sometimes more loudly than other times, and yet more often than not we do not heed this call; we often can hardly hear it even when we try. The dire consequences for acting shine with the unmistakable clarity of the present and the promise of transcending that present can only be faintly discerned through the opaque mist of the future. So the workers look away and they finish their shift. And the union officials breathe a sigh of relief. This regrettable fact is not hard for us to understand. This is one side of the union. And these are the conditions of employment in America. We live in a country where you can be shot dead on the job for the crime of holding the tools of your trade. Killed because of a bureaucratic mix up, a Brazil-esque inconsistency in official instruction. And we know that in this country, being caught in such a mix up is all the more unforgivable in the eyes of the capitalist state if you are black.

Higher wages will not stop them from killing us.[5] Legally recognized bargaining power within a single company will not halt global pollution. It cannot stop war. And we are running out of time; we can all feel it. But the union is only hopeless when looked at as an end. This is not an end, but a beginning. The union can be the means by which we discover something about ourselves and about this world: that we are unfathomably more powerful together, that we don’t need the boss, that the new world exists right here in the old; the union can be the means by which we discover all of that, so long as we are open to finding it.

And this brings us to that other side of the union. It is more or less a hack “ultraleftist” talking point to say that the union is a capitalist institution. Anyone who thinks about it can understand that this is basically true. The union facilitates our smoother integration into the capitalist system. But at the same time, it is also the exact opposite. The union is the living embodiment of the cooperation, solidarity, and bottom up power that will become the basis for whatever better world comes next. The union is the form in which we combine our strength to take on the gods of this world; it is one rung in the ladder we build as we prepare to finally storm heaven itself.[6] Our very existence as a union, anytime we coordinate our activity, this is the living proof that a better world is possible. One day, this same cooperation and coordination will be generalized and it will be our only law. So we struggle for our union, even knowing that it will not save us today. We struggle anyway.

We build up strength and we gently nudge our friends awake because now is not a time for sleep. To sleep now is to die and let die. Chiewelthap Mariar was killed by the police at his job, in uniform, on the production line, and was represented in negotiations with his employer by UFCW District Local 2. What would you do if he was one of our coworkers? What would we do? We cannot sleep, we cannot go numb. Some day, perhaps sooner than we think, we will be presented with a choice: turn our heads away and go back to work or stare reality in the face and act with bravery, breathing new life into that dusty, dented, old word: solidarity.

NOTES

[1] Excerpts clipped from a recent Guardian piece: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/20/oklahoma-pork-plant-seaboard-foods-chiewelthap-mariar

[2] Tyre Nichols was stopped and beaten within inches of his life by Memphis Police on January 7th, 2023. He died from his injuries on January 10th. He was a talented skateboarder and photographer.

[3] Adam Toledo was a 13 year old boy who was murdered by Chicago Police on March 29th, 2021. His hands were raised high above him when the police opened fire.

[4] Tortuguita was a 26 year old, queer, environmental and anti-police activist who was assassinated by police in Atlanta, Georgia on January 18th, 2023. They were a militant defender of the forest, a genuine revolutionary, and a loving friend and partner to all who knew them.

[5] Fred Moten: “The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it's fucked up for you, in the same way that it's fucked up for us. I don't need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?” See The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study

[6] Karl Marx referred to the Paris Commune of 1871 as “storming heaven” in his book of working class history, The Civil War In France

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anotherworldnowblog · 3 years ago

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ON OUR HISTORY

Eclipse and Re-emergence of Class Struggle Inside La Colombe

(the following text was originally published in Winter 2022 as Service Notes #1, a zine written and edited by Chicago baristas and published for Chicago baristas)

Introduction

To our friends: we have taken it upon ourselves to write this so that we may share a common history; a history of struggle at this company, and most especially at this West Loop café.

Below, we will attempt to bring you a full account of the waves of rebellion and counter-rebellion, de-structuring and restructuring, that have occurred over the preceding years so that you can know, above all else, three things with certainty:

1. What has been uncovered in the process of struggle; what we have learned in fighting,

2. What has changed over the course of this fierce battle within the structure of the company, specifically how the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated certain tendencies and transitions within La Colombe,

3. That you are not alone, that many have come before you to deliver us to this moment, and that many will come after you, to benefit from our experience and our triumphs, and to finish the work which we now begin and carry forwards in our own way.

A partial summary of the key ideas of this essay in the form of numbered theses appears at the end of this document for those in a rush or who struggle with reading longer pieces.

The Beginning

Our story begins long before any of us worked at this café, in a period admittedly semi-shrouded in the mist of our own prehistory, with a seemingly innocuous incident involving a pair of West Loop baristas and the mysterious origin of an email received by CEO and founder Todd Carmichael. The story goes that, one of these two baristas sent an email directly to our famously narcissistic founder in which the author details a whole host of crimes against the waged, ultimately boiling down to a scathing accusation of soulless exploitation and unlivable levels of compensation.

For some reason lost to time, it was wrongly understood by Carmichael that the second barista was the sender of the email, and the first allowed the misunderstanding to continue unchallenged, throwing his coworker into the storm he had caused. Moving past this unsettling detail, the letter nonetheless so rattled the Chief Executive, so shook his sense of self-righteousness, that he personally flew incredible numbers of baristas from several markets to Philadelphia for a town-hall style discussion in which he fully expected to reaffirm his own goodness and fairness.

As I’m sure you can imagine, this is not how that meeting went. Baristas from across the country told him the same thing: we are not paid enough. The meetings were abruptly wrapped up and the baristas returned to their home markets empty handed and dejected. This story was later told to a very young, then barista, named ******, who has since relayed it to us. But it did not end there. Shortly after the town hall fiasco, an anonymous group of Philadelphia-based La Colombe baristas made national news when they created a spreadsheet that compared the abysmal wages of workers across the industry.[1] This practice exploded with memetic frenzy, sweeping across the nation’s coffeeshops, setting into motion an astounding surge of labor activity that now dominates the airwaves and jostles the stock prices of the, once assumed untouchable, multinational retail corporations.

COVID-19 and The 2020 Uprising

We will now briefly attempt to describe the interregnum between the events above and the eruption of naked class warfare inside our café that occurred in the latter half of 2020. It feels important to note that at this point, a few times a year, the market would get together for a cookout hosted by the general manager. Many baristas at our café made frequent visits to the other shops, solely out of a genuine interest in friendship and connection. There was a definite sense of familiarity amongst and between the various cafes, although a firm tribe-like atmosphere between cafes persisted that would be obvious to anyone in attendance at the various gatherings. Nonetheless, it is true that almost everyone at the West Loop had at least one friend working at another café in the same market.

At the end of 2019 and through the coldest bits of 2020, our café was closed for a renovation that would bring its aesthetic and functional design in line with the overarching brand and its then-secret goal of acquisition. So that we could keep our jobs, we were given cleaning and organizational tasks within the renovation process itself and instructed to staff a coffee cart, which would distribute unlimited free drip coffees, outside of the café for the duration of the construction (more often than not, doing so in sub-freezing temperatures). We will return to this moment later to examine its significance in greater detail, but it should suffice for now to say that this, far from exhausting and deflating the café workers as one might expect, had a profound effect on the development of our own individual political horizons and our growth together as friends and comrades. Even more so, we could not shake the feeling that we were literally putting the café back together ourselves, deciding as a group on the organization of storage space, and even giving serious input into the design of the new floor-plan, much of which was translated into the structure we all now spend far too much of our lives within. The glistening new West Loop café reopened as news of a strange new virus causing chaos in China’s Hubei Province became impossible to ignore.[2]

Within only weeks, and after image after image of bio-horror was spectacularly broadcasted live from places like Italy and Spain, it became clear that the novel coronavirus was already beginning to spread within the borders of the United States and it would only be a matter of time before it touched us personally. There is no PPE made available for workers and the only protective policy instituted is a more rigorous and regular process of spot cleaning surfaces. By the end of March, and only 21 days after reopening our own café, workers across the market began spontaneously calling out sick to avoid exposure. By March 29th, all cafés were formally shut down and we were instructed to sit tight, later to be furloughed so that we could receive the surprisingly substantial unemployment payments on offer from the State and Federal Governments.[3]

It is at this point that informal mutual aid networks begin to develop within and beyond the café. PPE is biked or driven to the various baristas across the city, our former manager makes sure no one goes hungry with regular soup deliveries (as well as non-stop assistance in navigating the complicated and overloaded unemployment registration process), another barista keeps everyone supplied with fresh focaccia, the first study group is established over Zoom,[4] carpools to the grocery store are organized, and everyone waits with bated breath for what comes next. It feels important to note that these mutual aid networks developed spontaneously out of the pre-existing connections we all had with each other, arising out of an immediate need for survival and the apparent collapse of normal systems and relations of reproduction.

On May 25th, George Floyd, a father and grandfather, worker, and Black man residing in the Minneapolis area is brutally murdered by four police in sickening slow motion, broadcasted live; the entire country bears witness. On the 26th, violent clashes with the police begin in Minneapolis. On the 27th, looting becomes more widespread and shops begin to burn. On the night of May 28th, the world watches the Livestream in ecstasy and terror as the police, at last completely out of munitions and tear gas, flee the 3rd Precinct. It is immediately breached by an unfathomably large crowd, at once euphoric and devastatingly grief-stricken, and the building is promptly set alight beneath the twinkle of endless fireworks. On May 30th, Chicago at last explodes into open rebellion.[5] For two nights, this city belonged to the proletariat. Riots fanned out across the downtown area, completely exceeding the control of police and National Guard, and workers from our café, across the market, and even at multiple levels of management bravely leapt into the flames. From May through July, the shuttered café becomes a staging ground for direct action against the police and private property, a refuge, and an abandoned storehouse to be pilfered whenever necessary.

In late July, we are at long last told we must return to work or we will not be guaranteed our jobs. The company successfully lures us back out of the safety of our homes with the promise of a ten percent, automatic gratuity placed on all transactions. Between the prospect of being out of work whenever the stimulus checks might run out and the very real money that was waiting to be made, most baristas who had not left the city for families out of state returned to work that month. Upon our return we found the cafés somewhat transformed: plexiglass encased the bar, a concierge stand was erected outside where orders were electronically placed and paid for and then retrieved indoors, to-go only, and hours were limited from eight to three in the afternoon.

With a slimmed down staff, the hours only helped concentrate business and the accompanying steady flow of tip money into the pockets of us baristas, now wearing the mandatory gloves, goggles, and masks. These gestures towards workplace safety, as much for the customers’ peace of mind as our own, were designed to ease the psychic transition from pandemic shut-down to business as usual. Both parties could take some solace in the fact that maximum precautions were in place, despite the inherent and obvious danger of face to face business transactions. As we have since seen, once the general population, worker and consumer alike, had accepted a return to regular life, these protocols were removed, one by one, despite the persistence of emergent viral variants and extremely high local hospitalization numbers. It is also worth reflecting upon that in practice, the plexiglass and to-go service gave us a new level of privacy and autonomy in the workplace, one which would be hard to let go of once attained. Conversations freely developed without interruption, countless books were read on company time, and music selections ranged from the unspeakably lit to the mind-expandingly experimental, and were played loud.

Our connections to and trust of one another, especially in a period of more rigid isolation, deepened beyond measure. And all the while, sometimes in the streets just outside our shop, the protest movement in defense of black life and against the police pressed resolutely onwards.

The Boss Strikes First; The Class Strikes Back

Little did we know, forces preparing the undoing of all that we had found within these four walls were readying their assault. By the end of summer, the illusion of partnership between management and workers would be forever shattered. In late September, managers are notified about the removal of the 10% auto-gratuity, to be enacted on October 6th. It eventually comes out that we had always just been pawns, easily sacrificed, in a much larger game: the company had been secretly in negotiations with Chobani for the acquisition of a controlling stake of the corporation; to seal the deal Chobani wanted confirmation that our customers could weather a price hike. The price hike would take effect the same day that the 10% auto-gratuity was removed. The company was laundering their pursuit of profit through a public posture of pandemic morality (a worker-positive policy that was entirely paid for by the consumer); we paid for the price increase, ultimately sealing a deal involving unfathomably large sums of money, with our misery and sudden plunge back into utter precarity (keep in mind, hours had not been expanded and the 10% gratuity was the only thing keeping many of us solvent).

On the night of study group, an all-cafe meeting is quickly called for; every West Loop barista is in attendance, via Zoom. The above information is relayed to us through tears, and immediately the question on everybody’s lips is that same question asked only by those about to act on the stage of history: “what is to be done?” The group unanimously decides to spring into action, through a vote that, at this point, feels almost unnecessary.

By the end of the same week, the emails of every barista in the market are procured. A zine is then quickly drafted and designed, detailing mathematically, utilizing the company’s own data, exactly how much each barista at each specific café stands to lose with the loss of the 10% automatic gratuity. Baristas at each café known to be trustworthy are then contacted anonymously and sent the zine along with instructions for its rapid but careful dissemination. Also included is a draft of a letter to management, stating the importance of the gratuity, with the intention of rallying willing signatories. The pamphlet spreads like wildfire. By September 26th, the cafés are buzzing with positive reaction and the inbox of the dummy email account set up to handle anonymous communications is full of messages from eager baristas.

It is significant however, that not all the reactions were positive and the anonymous nature of the communiques seemed to spark as much suspicion as it did interest. The anonymous authorship of this aggressive call to action could not be avoided, due to a need and a promise to protect our sources in management who had leaked emails and sensitive financial information when we urgently needed them. We now had just over one week to protect our only lifeline; strategy quickly devolved into improvisation. Anonymity may have been unavoidable, but it was also an obvious barrier in our struggle we were forced to desperately overcome. Baristas in each café are instructed to nominate representatives for a zoom call scheduled for September 29th where we would make the final revisions to our letter to corporate. On September 30th, the final communication from the anonymous email is issued, dissolving the shadowy entity, and promising to “see you on Zoom.” The identity behind this anonymous account would remain an unfortunate distraction for the duration of this period of worker self-activity.

After a day of fierce debate, the final language of the letter implicitly threatens a strike on the company, but not explicitly. Nearly every barista signs their name and it is then promptly emailed, once again from the dummy email account, to much of the corporate staff, including owner Todd Carmichael. After a few days, a lengthy response is relayed to the entire market, through the managers of each café: the ten percent will stay, for now; we apologize for our poor communication; we appreciate the work that you do, etc. Many weeks later we are told that the same policy will begin in January, and that now having been properly communicated, there should be no issue. Those added months with the gratuity in place amounted to thousands of dollars in the pockets of every Chicago barista. A battle had been won. But it was not enough. The policy was not extended in other markets – a failure of this spontaneous resistance movement to reach beyond the region.

Eclipse and Re-Emergence

As fall turned to winter, the slow grind of counterrevolution continued apace. With vaccinations[6] came indoor seating, eventually the removal of the plexiglass, and the first infections of La Colombe baristas with COVID-19. Meanwhile, the movement in the streets was finally captured and dispatched, barely even coalescing into a march in Chicago by the time the winter wind had stripped the trees bare. Certain leaders in our workplace struggle were promoted, others left, and still more threw themselves into the myopia of social and artistic pursuits as bars, clubs, and galleries began to open once more without restriction.[7] Solidarity and even basic communication between the cafés was not tended to, and promptly disintegrated. The final removal of the 10% in January occurred without pushback. The limits of our spontaneous resistance had been abruptly slammed into, and without the solid foundation that might have been achieved with the development of a longer term, strategic organization, capable of not only sustained resistance but even of a righteous offensive push, there was little to be done but bitterly watch coworker after coworker depart for higher paying work, often in warehousing and education.

In early 2021, a longtime member of our team, a black woman, and a trusted friend to all of us, is accused of discrimination by a cop who alleges she refused to take his order. The company sides with the officer, giving our coworker an ultimatum: serve the police like anyone else, or leave. She quits. The only other black worker on our staff quits days later. That we failed to act in this moment, that we failed to fight for a workplace environment where anyone could feel safe and at the very least, be treated equally to their white counterparts, was the ultimate failure of solidarity. It cannot happen again. This company had cynically used slogans of the Black Lives Matter movement and Black art, at one point plagiarizing a black artist for a coffee mug, all summer long to sell its frivolous luxury products during a period of unprecedented social unrest. When winter finally came, the mask of social progressivism donned by the entire capitalist class had fallen off. Our company was no exception.

The rest of 2021 was a blur. The last remaining sympathetic managers were promoted or transferred to lateral positions, no longer involving direct contact with waged staff. The West Loop cafe is somewhat isolated and even ostracized, and to this day, very few coworkers, if any, have current friendships with workers in other shops. Our movement had flickered out as fast as it had ignited. In September 2021, after a possible exposure, a sick-out is orchestrated at the West Loop, resulting in the COVID tests we can still find on the first aid shelf at our café. Baristas avoid direct repercussions through unwavering solidarity; everyone refuses to work. Rumors swirl that another café had autonomously shifted their opening start time back a full hour without bosses finding out for several weeks. Punishment is rumored to be swift. The spark of a better world is kept alive only in casual conversation behind the bar at the Morgan Street café. One by one, the team that now inhabits our bright coffee distro in the terrifyingly homogenous corporate food court known as the West Loop is assembled. At some point, the deal with Chobani is finalized and a slow trickle of changes to company policies and structure is set into motion. Tiers are established to divide the baristas and halt further wage increases across the company. Managers are no longer hired from the ranks of wage workers, effectively obliterating the “coffee career” path many baristas had been working towards.

On December 9th, 2021, the first union is formed at an American Starbucks, in Buffalo, New York. On April 1st, 2022, the first union is formed at an Amazon warehouse, on Staten Island, in New York. Across the country, retail, warehousing, and food service unions begin to spring into being with exponential frequency. The depressingly total collapse of the protest movement against the police is all of a sudden mirrored nationally by an unfathomable explosion of labor unrest and organization. One might be tempted to speculate that one event conditioned or flowed into the other, but that would have to be the subject of an entirely new study that would likely be impossible to complete until this period of our lives has officially entered the realm of “history.”

By August of 2022, there are more than 230 unionized Starbucks locations and the workers of the La Colombe café at the corner of Randolph and Morgan have successfully courted the local organizers of Worker’s United, the very same union that is having such miraculous success inside Starbucks cafes in every region of this nation. Contact with sympathetic baristas in each café in the market has been re-established, and now, with historically tested strategy, the resources of an established union, and most importantly, time to move forward methodically, with care and patience, we are rapidly approaching a hitherto unrealized threshold: the organization of a legally recognized union at La Colombe Coffee Roasters [8].

Without a doubt, the campaign for a successful vote and subsequent fight for a worthwhile contract will be fierce, draining, and a test of our solidarity. But if our past efforts are any indication, it will also undoubtedly be one of the most rewarding, revealing, spirit-giving, and life-affirming moments of our lives. Fascism continues to rear its ugly head, right here at home and across the globe, and the only force in this world with any chance to defeat it comes in the form of an organized working class. There is no more urgent political task before us than the writing of this next chapter of our collective history.

Summary

Now, we will briefly attempt to sum up some of the key lessons, insights, and observations we have made throughout the duration of our time working for and fighting with this company:

There is no true substitute for the power, trust, and solidarity of friendship. Making friends at another cafe is the single most useful thing one can do as we begin the work of winning a union.

The uncertainty of the pandemic and protest movement in early 2020 softened certain boundaries between worker and manager, opening a space of negotiation and feedback. With the return to normal business practices and the failure of the movement in the streets, those boundaries have been recalcified and even further fortified. Today, our place has never been clearer: we are the exploited and the expendable, their property and their pawns. We can only rely on each other now.

PPE, testing, other precautions were only taken to avoid liability and to get ahead of any possible concerns from below regarding worker safety; they were a reaction to uncertainty and not an act of care. With all levels of government now ushering us back to business as usual unanimously, the company will never again raise the issue of pandemic protocols without us organizing for our own safety first. Their silence on the spread of Monkeypox is further evidence of this.

Struggles over workplace autonomy, even granular forms of control such as music selection, are at times legitimate and even revolutionary; and at other times must be subordinated to the long term, collective project of building something that lasts. The defense of small areas of autonomy can serve as a spark but can also be a treacherous whirlpool along the river of progress, a side quest that derails the larger mission.

Our company, in the wake of its successful acquisition, has goals of dramatic and imminent expansion. In pursuit of this goal, cafe’s must be homogenized, the cafe workers must be further disciplined and domesticated, and all traces of worker input or collaboration must be eradicated. Tiers, dress codes, new training metrics, and the enforcement of previously unheard-of policies are all part of this. Our owners have accepted and internalized their roles as our exploiters. It is time we understood the true nature of our relationship to them as well, and acted accordingly.

It sadly doesn’t matter how “good” or moral our managers and corporate superiors might or might not be; they have a job to do (making the most money possible for the company) and at the end of the day they will do it or they will be replaced by someone else who will. They may fire us through tears, pay lip service to our concerns while shutting them down, or attempt to make us pity them for the tough spot we have put them in. It’s bullshit and we must be firm and resolute in our righteous assault on the gilded coffers of this company.

A union is the only way to ensure our collective gains become irrevocable. Until it is in writing and in a contract, all can be undone, as illustrated in the above. They can say one thing and do another, and they will, until we force them to the bargaining table. A petition, a letter, a march on the boss, a strike; these are all tactics that we may utilize in our pursuit of a union. But without this as our horizon, we are simply opening up time and space for a counterattack, for our comrades to be fired or bought off, and for the company to successfully dupe our coworkers into thinking that they’re listening when history tells us otherwise. As the saying goes: fool us twice, shame on us.

What happens in the streets, in government, or in the world is not separate from what happens at our café. The particularities of the world around us and the movements that arise out of those particularities condition what is and is not possible at a given moment. This was seen above when the outbreak of nationwide rebellion coincided with the shutdown of inessential businesses, opening up space for radical acts of class betrayal, courageous criminality, and intensive collective study. In the current context, none of these things are possible or maybe even rational. But when a door closes, a window opens, and new possibilities for a different type of struggle have since unfolded before our eyes. We now have the time, the resources, the collective knowledge, and the regrettable certainty that our workplace will still be standing in the morning with which to move forward calmly and strategically, and not to mention, legally. In a time of riots, riot. In a time of strikes, strike. The spirit of rebellion in this country has not vanished, but rather, following changes to our material situation, moved from the streets to the shop floor.

Solidarity is not a given; it must be tended to. The isolation of the pandemic threw us together in a way previously unthinkable. That there still exists such obvious and genuine affection for one another at our café is nothing short of miraculous. It must be defended! And, as our lives again grow more and more complex and extend further and further beyond the confines of this café (as they should), we must make time to be together, to deliberately maintain our relationship of trust and love for one another. After all, it is our greatest weapon.

We Have Seen The New

Finally, we want to shed some light on the origins of a beautiful, quiet tradition still carried forward by the workers of this café, perhaps somewhat unknowingly, since the months before the outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States. As stated above, during the period of renovation at the end of 2019 and the bitter cold beginning of 2020, we all stood outside our café under a kerosene heat lamp to distribute free drip coffee to anyone who wanted it. What happened under the orange glow of the futuristic, stainless steel heater that winter was so utterly profound, I doubt there was anyone left unchanged by it.

The first days were marred by interactions with regulars and nearby homeowners, astounding in their negativity, where the rich West Loop customers reacted with suspicion and even disgust at the coffee cart. People with the means to pay, firmly embedded in the world of work and wealth, not only did not trust something that really did come free with no-strings-attached; they reacted with naked hostility, as if dimly aware of the challenge it posed to their entire way of life. We were shouted at, scoffed at, and lost touch with countless previously pleasant regulars, oftentimes those customers who normally ordered and paid for the very same drip coffee we were now offering free of charge.

But simultaneously, something else was occurring. Addicts attempting recovery or perhaps simply mandated to participate in programming at the Haymarket Center, food service workers across the neighborhood, and most especially, what felt like the entirety of the West Loop’s houseless population began to catch wind of the warmth and calories freely available outside the old brick building at Randolph and Morgan. A previously fragmented and hidden community of the oppressed was uncovered and constituted, in the shadow of one of the densest concentrations of capital in our city, by the simple act of abolishing the price signal; by giving people what they needed or wanted for free. If it wasn’t clear to some of us prior to the renovation, no one could deny what was plainly obvious within days of outdoor operation: that our customer base is almost uniformly on the side of the owning class; that our newfound friends forced to live on the frigid streets have so much more in common with any of us café workers than do our millionaire clientele; and that any meaning that might be wrung from our jobs has nothing to do with money and everything to do with our desire to care for another, to make something that fills someone’s belly or brightens someone’s day.

This moment was a rare glimpse of what has been called in the past, “The New Society,” nestled in plain sight, unbeknownst to us, right there within the mundane brutality of the Old. And it is what we have been protecting and will continue to protect – right up until that day when the New bursts irreversibly forth, abolishing the Old once and for all – when we feed those who ask or ignore the price of a drink for another worker on our block.

So many friends have left us, but not without courageously fighting to keep this struggle alive. And countless baristas will soon join us, to benefit from the victories which we will soon achieve together, and to finish the work which we push forward today; and more broadly, to complete the historical task of our class: organizing for the complete overthrow of this rotten society. One day we will only be able to faintly remember, like a nightmare, the time of organized barbarism, formalized exploitation, and legalized ecocide known as capitalism. But that work can only begin from where we find ourselves today, behind the marble countertop and in front of the espresso machine. It can only begin when we have drawn a line in the sand and said, together, enough. We will not bear idle witness to our own annihilation. We are going to fight. And we are going to win.

NOTES

[1] This practice of wage transparency went viral sometime in early October of 2019 https://talkpoverty.org/2020/02/11/coffee-pay-transparency-spreadsheet/

[2] Cases are believed to have first been documented in Wuhan in December of 2019 https://health.ucsd.edu/news/releases/Pages/2021-03-18-novel-coronavirus-circulated-undetected-months-before-first-covid-19-cases-in-wuhan-china.aspx

[3] The amounts of money we received were often far more than we earned normally by working, thanks to our ability to report tips as part of our lost income and the additional padding of temporary pandemic unemployment insurance. This insurance policy has since been rescinded by the federal government in an attempt to push people back to work.

[4] The group studied a wide variety of left tendencies and thinkers, including Sylvia Federici, The Invisible Committee, Mao, and Lenin.

[5] For a more detailed account of this night, see https://protesttimeline.southsideweekly.com/ or the introduction of Towards an Ecology of Love, 2020 https://anotherworldnowblog.tumblr.com/post/626122686417010688/3

[6] Vaccinations began with nurses and the immuno-compromised on Dec. 14th, 2020; being classified as manufacturing workers enabled us to get access to vaccination in the second round of distribution, well ahead of most in the service industry

[7] This process began in mid-June, but in Chicago especially, took some time to fully take old, many establishments having invested serious money into accommodating to-go service

[8] After the publication of this zine, the union struggle took many twists and turns, culminating in our eventual filing with UFCW Local 881. We are now 7 cafes strong across three separate markets and time zones (as of March 2023).

0 notes

anotherworldnowblog · 3 years ago

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THE SOVIET AGAINST THE SOVIETS

A Longer View of The Workers’ Councils in Hungary 1956

The story of the Soviet, of the Workers’ Council, is the familiar story of history: tragedy and then farce.[1] The Soviet is freedom in motion, it is the unity of revolutionary theory and practice, but it has been buried alive beneath the heavy rubble of history. In one of the endless haunting ironies of the twentieth century, the murderers, grave diggers, and eulogizers of this idea either bore its name on their lapels or exalted its democratic virtues, all while quietly stamping the fresh earth flat, packing it tight lest the dead rise up once more.

1905: The Soviet Is Born

The Soviet was first conceived, simultaneously as both an idea and a practical organizational formation, by the workers of St. Petersburg during the October Revolution of 1905 in the Tsar’s Imperial Russia. The St. Petersburg Soviet can be understood as a horizontal system of representation and communication, “founded on the basis of 1 deputy for every 500 workers,”[2] designed to coordinate strike activity, and which proved itself to be highly effective in the chaos of rebellion.[3] “The Soviet was the axis of all events, every thread ran towards it, every call to action emanated from it.”[4] The wildly diverse grouping of anarchists, socialists, revolutionaries, and intellectuals that comprised the St. Petersburg Soviet first met in the apartment of the anarchist Volin in a preliminary effort to create cohesion across the revolting sectors of society.[5] This humble meeting, a testament to the type of ingenuity and even “left unity” that is possible when ideology takes a backseat to the practical activity of making a revolution out of concrete reality, would go on to change the course of world history forever. But, to fully understand this first Soviet, we must pause to consider the grisly set of preconditions out of which it first arises.

Proletarians at this time live in absolute immiseration and were entirely at the mercy of the capitalist, as well as the tsarist State. The proletariat in Tsarist Russia have “little or no labour legislation; no trade unions; no rights of combination, assembly, strike, or speech. The working class, quite simply, have no rights.”[6] Not only did the proletariat have no legal rights, as Serge alludes to, they also had no state-sanctioned organizations or even press outlets. This would soon change as a result of concessions made in the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution, perhaps specifically in reaction to the actions of the St. Petersburg Soviet. We must also remember that the inter-imperialist war with Japan was an absolute disaster for Russia, shattering national pride and further crippling an already stunted economy. Faith in the Tsarist system was disintegrating rapidly. Lastly, we must recall that the proletariat had now been twice denied democratic suffrage, first through the persistence of feudal political relations well beyond the emergence of capitalist economic relations, and second through the farcical creation of the first Duma, only two months prior and in response to the growing unrest, on August 6th.[7] Considering the trajectory of Russian history in comparison to the rest of the imperial states, one must wonder if representative democracy is not a key component of industrial capitalism, necessary for the stabilization of the capital-labor relation. If so, the effect its absence has had on the development of Russian capitalism is quite astounding.

Finally, in October of 1905, the workers of St. Petersburg, after decades of abuse, national decline, accelerating labor action, and with the January Bloody Sunday[8] massacre of hundreds of their comrades fresh in their memories, rather spontaneously make their world historical attempt to circumnavigate the disfigured hybrid feudal-capitalist society that blocks their every move. They strike, riot, and fight in the street, now coordinating their activities through the Soviet. For a moment, everything seems possible. Isolated with the exception of the uprisings in Moscow, the proletariat in St. Petersburg is tragically crushed within a matter of weeks as the rest of the country accepts concessions and eventually an expanded, but ultimately insufficient, franchise. In the countryside, “two thousand landowners’ homes were reduced to cinders.”[9] The peasants, acting in narrow self-interest, think only to attempt to reclaim their lands from the entrenched landlord class, but eventually settle for the promise of land reform. There was apparently no coordination between the proletariat in the town and the peasants in the country and even this well-timed campaign of fire could not fully shake loose the decrepit feudal fetters of the old Russian society in the countryside. The Soviet goes silent as leadership is arrested. “January 1906 is a month of firing squads.”[10] But the idea of the council lingers on, as a ghost. A revolutionary form of cooperation is let loose upon the world, a form of government-that-is-not, and it already here hints at its potential to simultaneously transform political and economic relations in one gesture.

February 1917: The Soviet Awakens

Barely a decade later, Imperial Russia has found its way into yet another disastrous war, this time with the rapidly industrializing German forces, and economic catastrophe of truly unfathomable proportion. This was an empire at the end, that much was clear to all. Serge describes the grim situation preceding 1917 vividly: “Whole armies entering the field without munitions… sudden fortunes in the hands of manufacturers of war supplies… Rasputin appointing and dismissing ministers between one drunken orgy and the next; Russia sliding towards the abyss… inflation… a bread and a fuel shortage.”[11] Tsarist rule had become completely untenable, it was now simply a question of how it would end.

It is the workers of Petrograd, beginning first with the women of the critically important textile manufactures, who land the final blows on the Tsarist order and bring down the three-hundred-year-old dynasty. Despite the best efforts of the authorities to discipline the restless and hungry workforce, pressure built up inside the factories until it burst out, “into the streets: it [the revolution] came down from the factories with thousands of workers out on strike, to cries of ‘Bread! Bread!’”[12] Strikes follow strikes, until hundreds of thousands of demonstrators fill the soot-stained streets of Petrograd, emboldened and empowered by each other’s presence and confident in the absolute necessity of their actions. Soldiers begin to join the workers in the streets and key weapons caches are secured by the growing masses. It is at this point that the workers of Petrograd, and indeed across Russia, begin to organize themselves into councils. On February 27th, the Temporary Revolutionary Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies is established in Petrograd and immediately calls out for “workers and soldiers to send representatives to a meeting called for that evening.”[13] That same night, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies is founded. The next day, the workers of Petrograd release the following statement to the Russian people:

“The fight is still on and must go on to the end. The old power must be completely crushed to make way for popular government. In that lies the salvation of Russia. In order to succeed in this struggle for democracy, the people must create their own governmental organ. Yesterday, February 27, there was formed at the capital a Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, made up of representatives of factories, mills, revolted troops, and democratic and socialistic parties and groups. The Soviet, sitting in the Duma, has set for itself as its main task to organize the popular forces, and to fight for the consolidation of political freedom and popular government… We invite the entire population of the capital to rally at once to the Soviet, to organize local committees in their wards and take into their hands the management of local affairs.”[14]

True to the spirit of the first councils in 1905, this soviet was not simply a product of organizational necessity, but a bold experiment in and invitation to self-governance. Councils explode throughout the city of Petrograd and across Russia, both into urban centers such as Moscow as well as into the countryside as peasants rise up and reclaim their lands. Finally, the Tsarist forces are commanded to restore order once and for all by way of lethal force. The soldiers refuse to rain hot lead on the masses of demonstrators and the old regime is finished. Tsar Nicolas abdicates his throne with one final plea: “May the Lord God help Russia!”[15] A Provisional Government of party leaders representing the landed, conservative elements of the old society is declared, the incomplete character of the revolution is confirmed, and revolutionary Russia enters a tense period of competing centers of power; “Russia has the choice between two dictatorships: either that of the proletariat or that of the bourgeoisie.”[16]

October 1917: The Soviet Betrayed

Lenin immediately recognizes the bourgeois nature of the February Revolution and desperately urges the Bolsheviks to not let up for an instant. The Petrograd Soviet, at this point headed by Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, offers its conditional support to the Provisional Government and appears content to function as a democratic organ within the emerging bourgeois order. Despite a flurry of reforms issuing from the Provisional Government, the central issues that provoked the dissolution of Tsarism remain unresolved: Germany continues to menace Russia as war remains the policy of the Provisional Government, food remains scarce and prices high, and the peasants await resolution to the burning question of land reform. The work of revolution remains far from finished and with astonishing rapidity, the revolutionary elements of society begin to understand just this. It is at this point that Lenin, who’s timing is never anything but impeccable, arrives in Petrograd at Finland Station and demands the transfer of, “all power to the soviets.”[17]

The self-organization of the workers and peasants continues apace, while Lenin urges his Bolshevik comrades to recognize the situation unfolding in front of their eyes. The councils begin to confederate; that same month the first All-Russian Congress of Soviets is held and a sprawling system of democracy from below begins to take shape. Documents from this period concerning the organization of the Congress give some idea of the incredible numbers of people now taking part in the partial self-management of Russian society: “Soviets numbering from 25,000 to 50,000 have 2 delegates; 50,000 to 75,000 have 3 delegates; 75,000 to 100,000 have 4 delegates; 100,000 to 150,000 have 5 delegates; 150,000 to 200,000 have 6 delegates; over 200,000 have 8 delegates.”[18] The masses have never stopped moving and as soon as the Bolshevik party falls behind the Leninist line they are marching in lockstep with the people, and they are alone in doing so. This is immediately reflected in the soviets themselves as the Bolsheviks, a small minority during the February revolution, take majorities in councils across Russia. It is at this point where a complicated dialectical relationship between party and people first emerges that would go on to define post-revolutionary Russia, for at least the following decade. At times the masses are pushing forwards, even to the great fear of the bold revolutionaries in the Bolshevik party. At other moments, the party is providing coherence to the wild movements of the masses where none existed prior. The workers of Petrograd continued to organize themselves for the seizure of power, creating armed regiments within the workplaces and adopting an industrial discipline that the imperial armies of the Tsar could only have dreamed of. Again, it is the workers themselves who take the lead in this process: “The initiative in forming the Red Guards in Petrograd came from the factory workers, who began it instinctively after the fall of Tsardom. In disarming the old order they had to begin to arm themselves.”[19] The masses are moving towards revolution despite the vacillations of socialist parties and the resistance of the Provisional Government, and by September, “the use of weapons was being taught in 79 Petrograd factories.”[20]

By October, the workers and soldiers were ready to put an end to the infuriating deferrals of the sham Provisional Government and the Bolsheviks, at Lenin’s urgent instruction, take command of the ensuing insurrection. Bolshevik representatives publicly abandon the Provisional Government; the Red Guards, now numbering in the tens of thousands and bolstered further still by the defections of countless soldiers, form military revolutionary committees and occupy key points across Petrograd; and a fleet of battleships, having quietly made for Petrograd in the days prior, begins bombardment of the Winter Palace, firing only blanks. “Just as the Reds are surrounding the Winter Palace, the Petrograd Soviet meets. Lenin comes out of hiding, and he and Trotsky announce the seizure of power. The Soviets will offer a just peace to all the belligerent powers.”[21] Mensheviks and right-Socialist Revolutionaries protest and abandon the Soviet, but their actions are meaningless as the people of Petrograd are firmly behind the council, recognizing it for what it is: an institution of their own, a chance at a different type of society, and the sparkling promise of realizing those always elusive 19th century ideals, progress and democracy.

But as the revolution is being made, as the Bolsheviks through the Soviets announce their first decrees (the end of the war, the abolition of private property and recognition of the peasants’ claims to the land, workers control of production[22]), the revolution is being unmade. In Moscow, the organization of the Soviets is far less complete than in Petrograd and despite the eventual ouster of the reactionary elements from the city, a bloody campaign of terror is unleashed upon the revolution by a proto-White coalition of military academy students, bourgeois intellectuals, and middle-class reactionaries. These White forces attempt the restoration of the status quo through the rapid deployment of one gruesome horror after another, as if these protectors of the Provisional Government intend to literally “drown the workers’ revolution in blood.”[23] This episode darkly presages the coming Civil War and, occurring almost simultaneously as the triumph of Petrograd, marks the beginning of a period of counterrevolution that is carried out both within and without the new ruling revolutionary coalition.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks, recognizing their fragile grasp on power and the incredible challenge of holding together a society so deeply fractured along class and party lines, reluctantly follow through with one of the early demands of the February Revolution left unresolved by the Provisional Government, namely the institution of a Constituent Assembly and universal suffrage. Lenin, weary of extending democratic powers to all elements of Russian society, including and especially those that did not carry out the revolution, makes the case that the executive committees and revolutionary leadership would not be bound by the results of such an election, arguing that true democracy has always lied in the hands of the working people, in the republic of soviets. The Constituent Assembly yields predictable results, a right-Socialist Revolutionary as its president and the Bolsheviks securing only 24 percent of the 700 delegates.[24] Crucially, this includes about half of the soldiers’ votes with the rest divided among the tangled web of remaining political parties. On January 5, 1918, the Constituent Assembly meets for the first time in the Tauride Palace of Petrograd and is surrounded and evicted by the Red Guard, acting on behalf of the Central Executive Committee of the soviets. This act, which Bolshevik accounts tend to argue was an absolute necessity for the protection and expansion of the gains of the revolutionary classes, set into motion the unfathomable bloodshed of Civil War and paved the way for the counterrevolutionary centralization and consolidation of Bolshevik power, over and above the heads of the Russian people, very much including the growing Russian proletariat.

In the desperate and bitter months and years ahead, a secret police force is established to root out enemies of the revolution on both the right and the left, obviously contrary to Lenin’s earlier insistence in his April Theses that the revolution must abolish the police; genuine worker power in the form of the soviets is transferred upwards into a state-controlled council of trade unions which describe themselves in January 1918 as “instruments of state authority;”[25] and the valiant leaders of the October revolution sink lower and lower to find flimsy theoretical justifications for their party’s activities: “Red terror cannot, in principle, be distinguished from armed insurrection.”[26] Eventually, largely out of wretched necessity, a capitalist economy in the form of the 1921 New Economic Policy is partially reintroduced as a last-ditch effort to compel the peasants, who are once again separated from the fractured coalition that had made the revolution inevitable, to produce enough foodstuffs to keep the urban proletariat and the Red Guard from succumbing to starvation. The Red forces at last emerge victorious in 1922, but at what cost? Many of the brightest and most committed revolutionaries have fallen in combat, the ideological diversity of the Red forces has been greatly reduced by the Cheka, and workers’ councils are neutralized and with them, the dream of a society defined by the free association of producers and the free development of each person is plunged once again beneath the surface of the rushing, black waters of human consciousness.[27] Communist society is suppressed and postponed in the name of Communism, cooperative relations are transformed into new relations of command, and the bright star of revolution is mercilessly pursued by the Bolshevik leaders over the horizon of history, never suspecting that their revolutionary efforts, first in 1905 and next in 1917, had already twice divulged a political formation capable of overturning society and implementing a socialist one, and it was not The Party. It would be almost four decades until the council rises once more, and although it was unable to withstand the terrified onslaught of fully industrialized reaction, the truth of its form and the completeness of its revolution shattered illusions on both sides of the iron curtain about what kind of society the Soviet Union had established, opening a space of clarity and independence of thought, especially within the global communist movement, that has affected and continues to affect the trajectory of world history to this day.

October 1956: The Hungarian Workers’ Councils

The origins of the revolution in Hungary, much like those in Russia, must be at least partially traced back to the aftermath of World War I and Hungary’s own experience of a cancellation of progress, a denial of democracy forced down from above and outside the nation’s ever shifting borders, and the generally backwards nature of Hungarian society, especially when considering class composition and the degree of industrialization with respect to the powerful capitalist nations to its West. In 1918, Hungary is a nation of peasants who are almost uniformly “landless, unemployed, and close to starvation.”[28] Virtually all the land is held by either the Church or a wealthy aristocratic class and this disturbing level of inequality, bordering on the absurd, has no equal in all of Europe at this time. However, roiling beneath the surface in this fertile corner of Eastern Europe exists a rising revolutionary sentiment, with both patriotic and socialistic characteristics. Prisoners of war returning home from the Russia spread the news of the October revolution and fan the flames of desire for another way of life among the Hungarian people.[29]

In March of 1919, the Allied powers chopped up the Hungarian territory in an effort to appease the neighboring Poles, Czechs, and Romanians, reducing it “to a fraction of its former size.”[30] The ensuing chaos toppled the government of pseudo-populist Count Karolyi and the Hungarian Soviet Republic is declared by the newly established coalition of then-imprisoned communists and social democrats, with foreign minister Bela Kun as its de facto leader and the solid red flag as its symbol. It seems worth remembering that at this point, the Russian communists were fighting for their lives against the well-funded, well-armed White menace in a Civil War that would last three more years. The activities of Hungarian communists in this moment are almost entirely independent of direct Russian influence. As the name suggests, the new system concentrated power within democratic councils, but strangled by Allied embargoes and with neighboring enemies taking full advantage of Hungarian disarmament by invading and occupying vast swaths of the country, the promising situation deteriorated quickly. Nationalist expansionist ambition ran into conflict with communist internationalist ideology, as the patriotic desire of many to restore Hungary’s prewar borders created serious internal conflict with those in leadership whose loyalties lied first and foremost in the growth of the communist movement. In August, and with Allied and Romanian forces pressing in on the precarious soviet republic, “a right-wing counterrevolutionary army under Admiral Miklós Horthy marched into Budapest, disposed of the communists with swift brutality, checked the advance of the Romanians, and instituted the first fascist government in Europe.”[31]

Horthy’s twenty-six-year reign as Regent of Hungary can be characterized most readily by its fervent anticommunism, which was rivaled only by its virulent antisemitism. This twisted fusion of aristocratic conservatism and modern fascism unleashed wave after wave of reactionary violence upon Hungarian society as, “thousands of Communists and Socialists were rounded up by fascist gangs, beaten, tortured, killed. The Trade Unions were violently suppressed. Those merely suspected of socialist sympathies were tortured and finally murdered. Thousands of people, quite unconnected with such ideas, suffered persecution and death. So frightful were the reports of atrocities that even the British (who knew all about atrocities in India) were moved to send a Parliamentary Commission to Budapest. The Commission reported that ‘the worst stories of mutilation, rape, torture and murder’ were proved.”[32] When World War II came, Horthy’s Hungary fought at Hitler’s side.[33] By 1944, the Hungarian forces were decimated, Russia continued to advance West, and Hitler, sensing Horthy’s restlessness, sent military units into Hungary to ensure its continued support. It is around this time that leaders of the SS also arrive in Hungary to carry out the “final solution” and extermination of its Jewish population. Before the war’s end, roughly 500,000 Hungarian Jews are rounded up and killed in Auschwitz.[34]

When the Nazi occupation ends and the Soviet occupation of Hungary begins, there exists great hope that the fortunes of the Hungarian people are turning, that a better life is drawing nearer, that change is on the horizon. These hopes for the outcome of the Stalinist occupation faded quickly with the announcement of the formation of a new Hungarian government. “The First Minister was the Hungarian Commander-in-Chief General Bela Miklos de Dolnok… the first Hungarian personally to receive from Hitler the greatest Nazi honour: Knight Grand Cross of the Iron Cross… months earlier, in July 1944, General Bela Miklos had held the highly trusted job of messenger between the principal organiser of the White Terror, Admiral Horthy, and the vilest Nazi of them all, Adolf Hitler.”[35] The despair of the Hungarian people, including many of the remaining Hungarian Communists, was palpable. The promise of liberation had been snatched away once more, this time by the self-proclaimed protectors of the planet’s working classes. Stalin appears to have been more concerned with maintaining an iron hold over the vast, war-torn spoils of his Red Army’s nightmarish march West than with the liberation of the masses or even the successful flourishing of any form of Communist ideology. All that mattered was that in Hungary, “a political vacuum existed. There was a real danger of it being filled by the organisations thrown up by the industrial and agricultural workers. The workers had taken Communist propaganda at its face value. They had already begun to act upon it. This was extremely dangerous for the Soviet leadership…The only people the Russians could rely on were the remnants of the previous ruling groups.”[36]

A Stalinist secret police is immediately established in Hungary. Known as the A.V.O. and staffed by “the old vermin of the Horthy regime and the new scum of the Communist Party,” the group becomes infamous almost overnight for their monstrous torture techniques, a synthesis of Gestapo and N.K.V.D. knowledge, and even the lowest ranking members make around three times the national average income.[37] Needless to say, they are hated almost universally across Hungarian society. What the A.V.O. are indirectly tasked with is enabling the accelerated resumption of production across the Hungarian economy and thus, enabling the pillaging of Hungarian resources by the Soviet Union. Rather than being welcomed into the Communist fold as comrades in the class struggle, the treatment of Hungary during this period is comparable only to the relationship the imperial powers of the early 20th century had with their colonies. Hungary was not alone in this fate:

“The satellite states were regarded as a source of raw materials and of cheap manufactured goods. Exploitation worked in two directions. Russia secured the satellites’ exports at below world prices. And it exported to them at above world prices. The Polish-Soviet agreement of August 16, 1945, for the annual export of Polish coal to the U.S.S.R. is a startling example. ‘The robbery of Poland through this transaction alone amounted to over one hundred million dollars a year. British capitalists never got such a large annual profit out of their investments in India.’”[38]

Predictably, labor conditions for most Hungarians begin to deteriorate under the new government; piece-work is introduced on a massive scale, and even some party members now begin to object to the obvious exploitation of their country and countrymen. “On January 9, 1950, the Hungarian Government issued a decree prohibiting workers from leaving their place of work without permission.”[39] But as workers endure greater degradation with each passing day, so too did they begin to mount a deepening resistance. Rates of absenteeism and poor craftsmanship soar with devastating effects on productivity, despite the best efforts of the government and its secret police to create a compliant and efficient working class.[40]

In 1953, the death of Stalin and the subsequent revelations at the 20th Congress about his dictatorship rattle the Communist world and inaugurate a period of supposed “relaxation” that extends into Hungary. Imre Nagy, who up to this point was known only for his role as Minister of Agriculture in the 1944 government, becomes Prime Minister and immediately announces a new program of modest reforms. By 1955 however, the Kremlin decided that Nagy had gone too far, that he had done too much to stimulate the imaginations of the people, and he is hastily removed with the feared leader of the Hungarian Communist Party, Mátyás Rákosi, resuming his role as leader of Hungary. But something is stirring in the hearts and minds of those in the so-called satellite nations. In Poland in October of 1956 and to the great alarm of Soviet leadership, workers spontaneously arm themselves even as Russian troops advance on Warsaw to reestablish control over their prized and hard-won territory where even the promise of reforms could not prevent an incredible, and illegal, strike wave from rocking the country that summer.

In Hungary, rebellion had been in the air since at least April of the same year, when a group of Young Communists and intellectuals, largely students, begin meeting regularly and find themselves drifting further and further from the party line. “Assisted by the Writers’ Union, it soon became an important and effective centre for the dissemination of opinion, criticism, and protest about the deplorable state of Hungarian society… Soon, the meetings of the Petőfi Circle were attracting thousands of people. These gatherings, already unanimous in their demands for intellectual liberty and truth, began to hear voices openly calling for political freedom.”[41] While the Petőfi Circle had begun as a reformist discussion group, generally supportive of Imre Nagy, all summer long and as the meetings grew in size and length, the young participants also sharpened and deepened their critique of Hungarian society, eventually adopting the idea that Hungary must find its way out from under the Soviet Union’s boot and chart its own path to communism. Intellectual and artistic agitation blossoms across Hungary. In September, the Poznan trials begin in Poland and the workers charged are handed down surprisingly merciful sentences for their insubordination. As perfect summer days give way to brisk autumn wind, the workers of Hungary awaken.

Across the country, factory workers rise with one revolutionary demand on their lips: self-management of the workplace. The Petőfi Circle, perhaps somewhat naively, adopts the workers’ revolutionary demands and calls “for a mass demonstration on October 23, ‘to express the deep sympathy and solidarity with our Polish brothers’ in their struggle for freedom.”[42] At least 50,000 people show up. After several vague but stirring speeches and demands are delivered by students and members of the Writers Union, the demonstration ends. But the mass of people refuses to disperse and instead spontaneously heads towards Parliament Square, all the while the crowd continuing to swell. Someone suggests sending a delegation to the radio station headquarters nearby to broadcast the demands of the demonstrators. “Eventually a deputation moved off in the direction of Sándor Street ... followed by 100,000 people!”[43] The massive throng arrive at Sándor Street to find it blocked off by A.V.O. officers. After some pleading and chanting, a delegation is allowed to proceed behind the menacing wall of state terrorists. Many workers now come into the streets to join the students, inspired by their courage in marching on the radio station and hearing the state’s denunciations of the demonstration over the radio earlier that evening. Time passes, and still no word from the group inside. The crowd grows restless once more. Now chants demanding the release of the delegation rumble louder and louder, echoing off the high apartment walls and up into the heavens.

“A spontaneous surge forward swept the A.V.O. cordon aside. The people halted in front of another line of A.V.O. men guarding the Radio Building… The demonstrators were unarmed — but there were thousands of them and they were angry…For their protection, ruling minorities always staff their police forces with men whose minds only work one way. The A.V.O. men knew only one answer. Machine-guns fired. Agonized shrieks arose as the front ranks of the peaceful demonstrators crumpled to the ground. The crowd became infuriated. The police were quickly overwhelmed, their arms used to fire at the windows of the Radio Building from which lead now streaked into the throngs below. The Hungarian Revolution had begun.”[44]

Over the course of the dramatic next few weeks, time would either speed up, a year’s events compressed into the span of hours, or at moments cease to exist altogether, a vortex to an endless present having opened up, if only for a few beautiful instants. The workers spring into action, immediately moving to arm themselves and their young comrades in the streets. “Those who had earlier left the arms factories returned there. Their comrades of the night shift helped load lorries with commandeered arms: revolvers, rifles, light machine guns, and ammunition. Many on the night-shift then left the factories and went to Sándor Street to help distribute the weapons and join the ever-increasing crowds. The police made no attempt to disperse the demonstrators. Many handed over their weapons to the workers and students, then stood aside; some policemen joined the demonstration.”[45] That same night, Hungarian soldiers, mostly peasants, handed over their arms to the demonstrators and stood aside. As night slipped into morning, every main street and square in the city was occupied, with arms strategically dispersed throughout the massive assemblies.

As dawn breaks, the sitting head of the Hungarian state is removed and Imre Nagy is invited to take charge over a situation that has, within hours, become an armed popular uprising. It is at this point, under Nagy’s direction, that the first call for Russian assistance is allegedly made. The naïve student contingent is stunned and momentarily paralyzed by the news, but the workers carry the struggle forwards. “In the society they were glimpsing through the dust and smoke of the battle in the streets, there would be no Prime Minister, no government of professional politicians, and no officials or bosses ordering them about. The decision to call in Russian troops only strengthened the morale and resolve of the workers. They were now more determined than ever to fight to the end, whatever that end might be.”[46] A revolutionary council of workers and students is commenced in Budapest and remains in permanent session throughout the duration of the revolution, coordinating activities, printing leaflets, and advancing the vision of the new society they sought to deliver to the world. “The Hungarian people created twenty-five new newspapers overnight, the older artists and the younger talents pouring out news, articles, stories, and poems, in a flood -tide of artistic energy.”[47]

Later that same day, Wednesday the 24th of October, was the arrival of Russian tanks. The tanks are immediately attacked in some parts of the city whereas in others, students who knew Russian are reported to have explained to the foreign soldiers that they were working class Hungarians, potentially to the genuine surprise and certainly much to the embarrassment of soldiers tasked with upholding and defending Marxist-Leninist thought. By Saturday, thirty Russian tanks had been destroyed to the cheers and laughter of the revolutionaries. In the same period however, hundreds of Hungarians had lost their lives to A.V.O. massacres, street fighting, and sporadic tank shelling. Within days it becomes clear that many of the Russian troops do not have the stomach for the fighting. It is reported that during an unarmed march in memorial of those killed by the guns of the A.V.O., multiple Russian tanks and armored vehicles joined the somber procession, only to be fired upon as demonstrators themselves in what became yet another massacre.[48] The 24th of October was also and most critically the day the strike began. “It spread quickly through the industrial suburbs of Budapest – Czepel, Rada Utca, Ganz, Lunz, Red Star – then out into the industrial centres of the country – Miskolc, Győr, Szolnok, Pécs, Debrecen. In Budapest, almost the whole population had risen… Everywhere the workers formed ‘councils’: in the factories, in the steel mills, in the power stations, in the coal mines, in the railway depots… Everywhere they armed themselves.”[49]

The councils explode across the country, all advancing a radical program calling for the dissolution of the old order, and by Thursday the 25th the councils had begun to connect with one another and join their struggles. Nagy is now pleading with the councils to return to work, but they intensify their efforts and deepen their organization. “The Workers Councils proceeded immediately to manufacture their own arms. The decision was immediately taken that these newly-produced arms should be distributed to the striking workers in other industries who were to withdraw themselves into an army of defense. Production for use was for them not a theory but an automatic procedure from the moment they began to govern themselves.”[50] They made it clear that they would only be returning to work if and when Nagy enacts a radical program. On the 28th, Nagy announces the supposed withdrawal of Russian troops and his intention to reform the government entirely: “we shall dissolve the organs of state security. No one who took part in the armed fighting need fear further reprisals.”[51] On the 30th, even the Soviet government is forced to acknowledge to rising: “The course of the events has shown that the working people of Hungary, who have achieved great progress on the basis of their people’s democratic order, correctly raise the question of the necessity of eliminating serious shortcomings in the field of economic building, the further raising of the material well-being of the population, and the struggle against bureaucratic excesses in the state apparatus.”[52] But the councils and the occupations remain, no longer capable of trusting the authorities and completely saturated with faith in each other. The movement is beginning to understand itself, no longer as the catalyst that will exact the new world as a concession from state power, but as the new world itself. Even the peasants, “broke up the collective farms which were in reality factories in the field… But at the same time they immediately organized themselves to establish contact with the workers and others in the towns on the basis of social need. They organized their trucks to take them food, did not wait to be paid but went back to the countryside to bring in new loads, risking their lives to do so.”[53] It is the total revolution of an entire society.

While October made good on its revolutionary legacy, November was not with the rebels. “At 4 o’clock on Sunday morning, November 4, Budapest was roused by the thunder of shells bursting in the city centre. Hundreds of guns in the hills of Buda opened fire, their flashes flood-lighting the MIG fighters, as they screamed over the city.”[54] The Russian forces this time unleash an all-out attack on the revolution across the entire country, simultaneously. The barricades are rebuilt, but to no avail. The tanks pound Budapest with phosphorous, setting the city aflame, this time without hesitation or sympathy. The Hungarian revolutionaries fight hand-to-tank, correctly intuiting that this would be their last chance to defend the collective vision and sense of purpose that had emerged between them and upended their rotten society. Molotovs fly, grenades are bravely dropped into tank hatches, and all the while workers and peasants act in perfect coordination to keep the pinned-down fighters supplied to the end. As the slaughter in the streets wound down, hauntingly ironic posters began appearing across Hungary, plastered to bombed out infrastructure and scattered across the rubble, bearing slogans such as: “Come and see our beautiful capital in Soviet-Hungarian friendship month.”[55] Even in death, the revolution smiles.

As the Red Army regained control, the A.V.O., now with a new name and new uniforms, “crawled out of their hiding places, like rats from sewers…They were burning for revenge… Torture and beatings began again… freedom fighters were being hanged from the bridges on the Danube and in the streets. Almost all were workers. The bodies, sometimes hanging in groups, had notices pinned to them: ‘This is how we deal with counter-revolutionaries.’”[56] By January 1957, despite the crawling persistence of sporadic street demonstrations and daring labor action, the councils had been completely destroyed. Leadership was arrested and replaced by government lackeys and in an all too familiar turn of events, the councils are made formally subordinate to the trade unions. “On November 17, 1957, it was officially announced that all remaining Workers’ Councils were to be abolished forth-with. The very name ‘Workers’ Council’ now both embarrassed and infuriated the regime. The bureaucracy attempted the impossible: to expunge from the memory of the Hungarian people and from History itself the great, positive experience of working class self-administration.”[57]

Conclusion

Attempting to tease meaning from such a bloody and senseless display of domination is inevitably fraught with difficulty and contradiction. There is no post-ideological method of analysis, especially of events as recent and contested as these, and our interpretation of history is undoubtedly colored by our own unique way of seeing the world, as well as by the material realities underlying and conditioning our very perception of that world. That said, the first observation we can draw from our brief study is the powerful effect representative democracy has on the stability of industrial production, whether it’s state or market driven. The absence or denial of such democratic buy-in or consent to be ruled is a common feature across all three revolutions we have analyzed; all three resulted in the spontaneous formation of democratic governing structures from below, councils, where state sanctioned democratic institutions failed to create the appearance, illusory or real, of popular sovereignty. For better or worse, there have been no revolutionary workers’ councils in the United States, and one is left to speculate if this can at least be partially explained by the existence of more robust democratic institutions, offering a greater sense of legitimacy to the miserable status quo and the expectation that societal change can occur through legal methods of struggle. One also can’t help but look at the ongoing crisis of American politics and wonder what becomes of bourgeois democracy in post-industrial society? And what might this evaporation of the democratic illusion mean for the prospect of a second American Revolution?

Through our analysis of these three revolutionary episodes, we can also begin to make a claim that the council, even above the party, is the revolutionary form par excellence, for at least as long as industrial conditions of production persist. As the Marxist historian C.L.R. James tells us, “One of the greatest achievements of the Hungarian Revolution was to destroy once and for all the legend that the working class cannot act successfully except under the leadership of a political party.”[58] While it is indisputable that, during the events of October 1917, the Bolshevik party did provide invaluable structure and guidance to the revolutionary movement, the party was quickly exposed not as a revolutionary organ of the people but rather as the germ of the old society, embedded within the new. This is confirmed by the consolidation and rapid expansion of state power wielded by a tiny minority of party members, in stark contrast to Marxist theories of revolution and of communism and in direct contradistinction to the type of power presupposed by the existence of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies in Petrograd and elsewhere. It is a testament to the strength of the global forces of counterrevolution and reaction, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, that memory of this revelatory triumph of self-rule, and the ensuing tragedy, hardly exists today.

At last, we arrive at the reason the existence of these councils were so incredibly dangerous for the Soviet Union, as well as for the Western capitalist powers. When the workers’ councils erupt once again in 1956, the uniquely liberatory spirit and character of their revolution is so immediately apparent to all that it acts as a bright mirror held up against the twisted faces of the industrialized powers on both sides of the East-West divide, violently tearing the masks off “Official Society” and exposing its hidden truths. The Soviet Union does not think to recognize the councils of Hungary as the new governing body, or even as the living embodiment of Marxist-Leninist theory, because the Soviet Union is not communist; it is not even socialist. The Soviet Union, and especially its rapidly ossifying ruling class of party elite, depend upon the satellite nations and the uneven status quo for the fulfillment of their economic needs and the reproduction of the existing order, from which they reap great personal benefit.[59] In a single sweeping movement, all of the lies and myths and propaganda about the nature of Soviet society are cut down, the bankruptcy and violence of industrial social relations are exposed, and Hungary is momentarily transformed both economically and politically into the simultaneous realization of centuries old, liberal ideals of progress as well as the fulfillment of the Marxist vision of a communist society of freely associated producers. The working classes of the world should never again have reason to doubt our capacity for collective decision, the power of our social intellect and our unique understanding of our own situation, or that our destiny lies in the self-administration of society, and as long as the memory of the Hungarian Revolution persists somewhere, the dimly flickering flame of revolution is not extinguished.

“Previous revolutions have concentrated on the seizure of political power and only afterwards faced the problems of organizing production according to new procedures and methods. The great lesson of the years 1923-1956 has been this, that degradation in production relations results in the degradation of political relations and from there to the degradation of all relations in society. The Hungarian Revolution has reversed this process.”[60]

“The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organization, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for, body and soul.”[61]

“Do not be afraid of the initiative and independence of the masses; entrust yourselves to the revolutionary organisations of the masses.”[62]

Notes

[1] “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Karl Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: Die Revolution, 1852) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/

[2] Victor Serge, Year One of The Russian Revolution (London, New York: Pluto Press, Writers and Readers Inc., 1992), 41

[3] Peter Kennez, A History of the Soviet Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 8

[4] Leon Trotsky, 1905 (New York: Random House, 1971), 104

[5] “One evening when there were several workers at my house, as usual – Nossar was there too – we had the idea of forming a permanent workers' organization: something like a committee, or a council, which would keep track of the sequence of events, would serve as a link among all the workers, would inform them about the situation and could, if necessary, be a rallying point for revolutionary workers. I don't remember exactly how this idea came to us. But I think I remember that it was the workers themselves who suggested it. The word Soviet which, in Russian, means precisely council, was pronounced for the first time with this specific meaning…The idea was adopted.” Volin, The Unknown Revolution (New York, London: Libertarian Book Club, Freedom Press, 1954), 31

This claim by Volin is of course disputed by Trotsky’s account of the St. Petersburg Soviet in his book, 1905 (1971): “The first meeting of what was to become the Soviet was held on the evening of the thirteenth, in the Technological Institute.” 105

[6] Serge, Year One of The Russian Revolution, 37

[7] Serge, Year One of The Russian Revolution, 39

[8] “After January 9 the revolution knows no stopping.” Leon Trotsky, 1905, 81

[9] Serge, Year One of The Russian Revolution, 41

[10] Serge, Year One of The Russian Revolution, 42

[11] Serge, Year One of The Russian Revolution, 47-48

[12] Serge, Year One of The Russian Revolution, 48

[13] “Formation of the Soviets,” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, accessed November 1, 2021, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/formation-of-the-soviets/

[14] “Formation of the Soviets”

[15] “Abdication Manifesto, Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, accessed November 1, 2021, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/february-revolution/february-revolution-texts/abdication-manifesto/

[16] Serge, Year One of The Russian Revolution, 49

[17] “April Crisis,” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, accessed November 1, 2021, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/april-crisis/

[18] “Calling an All-Russian Congress of Soviets,” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, accessed November 1, 2021, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/formation-of-the-soviets/formation-of-the-soviets-texts/calling-an-all-russian-congress-of-soviets/

[19] Serge, Year One of The Russian Revolution, 61

[20] Serge, Year One of The Russian Revolution, 62

[21] Serge, Year One of The Russian Revolution, 69

[22] “First Bolshevik Decrees,” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, accessed November 1, 2021, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/first-bolshevik-decrees/

[23] Serge, Year One of The Russian Revolution, 75

[24] “Constituent Assembly,” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, accessed November 1, 2021, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/constituent-assembly/

[25] “Workers Organization,” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, accessed November 1, 2021, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/workers-organization/

[26] “State Security,” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, accessed November 1, 2021, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/state-security/

[27] “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 66

[28] Andy Anderson, “Hungary ’56,” (1964) https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/andy-anderson-hungary-56#toc1

[29] Michael Korda, Journey to a Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 49

[30] Korda, Journey to a Revolution, 49

[31] Korda, Journey to a Revolution, 50-51

[32] Anderson, “Hungary ’56”

[33] “Hitler kept a signed photograph of Admiral Horthy in a silver frame conspicuously displayed on his desk, in honor of Horthy’s role as the first fascist in Europe.” Korda, Journey to a Revolution, 56

[34] Korda, Journey to a Revolution, 62

[35] Anderson, “Hungary ’56”

[36] Anderson, “Hungary ’56”

[37] Anderson, “Hungary ’56”

[38] Anderson, “Hungary ’56”

[39] Anderson, “Hungary ’56”

[40] Anderson, “Hungary ’56”

[41] Anderson, “Hungary ’56”

[42] Anderson, “Hungary ’56”

[43] Anderson, “Hungary ’56”

[44] Anderson, “Hungary ’56”

[45] Anderson, “Hungary ’56”

[46] Anderson, “Hungary ’56”

[47] C.L.R. James, Facing Reality (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2006), 17

[48] Anderson, “Hungary ’56”

[49] Anderson, “Hungary ’56”

[50] C.L.R. James, Facing Reality, 12

[51] “Formation and Program of a New Government,” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, accessed November 1, 2021, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1956-2/hungarian-crisis/hungarian-crisis-texts/formation-and-program-of-a-new-government/

[52] “Soviet Statement On Hungary” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, accessed November 1, 2021, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1956-2/hungarian-crisis/hungarian-crisis-texts/soviet-statement-on-hungary/

[53] C.L.R. James, Facing Reality, 17

[54] Anderson, “Hungary ’56”

[55] Anderson, “Hungary ’56”

[56] Anderson, “Hungary ’56”

[57] Anderson, “Hungary ’56”

[58] C.L.R. James, Facing Reality, 14

[59] Paul M. Sweezy, Post-Revolutionary Society (London, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980), 65

[60] C.L.R. James, Facing Reality, 12

[61] Karl Marx, “The Class Struggle In France” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/index.htm (quote is located in the introduction written by Fredrich Engels in 1891)

[62] V.I. Lenin, “One of the Fundamental Questions of the Revolution,” 1917 https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/andy-anderson-hungary-56#toc28

Bibliography

Anderson, Andy. “Hungary '56.” The Anarchist Library, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/andy-anderson-hungary-56#toc1.

The Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. “Calling An All-Russian Congress of Soviets.” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, Michigan State University, 25 Aug. 2015, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/formation-of-the-soviets/formation-of-the-soviets-texts/calling-an-all-russian-congress-of-soviets/.

James, C.L.R., et al. Facing Reality. Charles H. Kerr, 2006.

Kenez, Peter. History of the Soviet Union. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Korda, Michael. Journey to A Revolution. Harper Collins, 2006.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Pluto Press, 2008.

Marx, Karl. “The Class Struggles In France.” Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/index.htm.

Marx, Karl. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Marx 1852, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/.

Nagy, Imre. “Formation and Program of a New Government.” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, Michigan State University, 1 Sept. 2015, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1956-2/hungarian-crisis/hungarian-crisis-texts/formation-and-program-of-a-new-government/.

Nikolai II. “Abdication Manifesto.” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, Michigan State University, 1 Sept. 2015, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/february-revolution/february-revolution-texts/abdication-manifesto/.

Serge, V. Year One of the Russian Revolution. Pluto Press, Writers and Readers Inc., 1992.

Siegelbaum, Lewis. “April Crisis.” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, Michigan State University, 29 Dec. 2015, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/april-crisis/.

Siegelbaum, Lewis. “Constituent Assembly.” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, Michigan State University, 29 Dec. 2015, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/constituent-assembly/.

Siegelbaum, Lewis. “First Bolshevik Decrees.” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, Michigan State University, 29 Dec. 2015, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/first-bolshevik-decrees/.

Siegelbaum, Lewis. “Formation of the Soviets.” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, Michigan State University, 29 Dec. 2015, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/formation-of-the-soviets/.

Siegelbaum, Lewis. “State Security.” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, Michigan State University, 29 Dec. 2015, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/state-security/.

Siegelbaum, Lewis. “Workers Organization.” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, Michigan State University, 29 Dec. 2015, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/workers-organization/.

“Soviet Statement on Hungary.” Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, Michigan State University, 20 Jan. 2016, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1956-2/hungarian-crisis/hungarian-crisis-texts/soviet-statement-on-hungary/.

Sweezy, Paul M. Post-Revolutionary Society. Monthly Review Press, 1980.

Trotsky, Leon. 1905. Random House, 1971.

Volin. The Unknown Revolution. Libertarian Book Club, Freedom Press, 1954.

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Text

LETTER TO DANIEL CHAMPION

(February 14th, 2022)

To my dear friend, Daniel

Thank you very much for pointing me to the Clark Filio interview on The Antifada, and even more so, thank you for the wonderful discussion on art and class it has spurred between us. If there is one hope I have for the following paragraphs, it is that this may spare you and whoever else may read this the years of confusion on this very issue that I have suffered personally. And from very early in this interview it becomes evident that, regrettably, confusion abounds.

Without dancing around it for a moment longer, the issue at stake here, primarily, is this nebulous and popular term, art worker. Within the first quarter of the episode, Filio provides a definition for this term. But no sooner has he propped it up does it begin to crumble and shatter into a pile of nothing at his feet. He tells us that the arts worker is, “anybody who touches a piece of art and gets paid for it… if you’re touching the art, you’re an arts worker.” The very moment he begins to trace aloud the artwork’s circuit throughout the variegated landscape of the art world does he begin to second guess himself. But, unfortunately, rather than interrogate the nature of this glitch in the otherwise smooth plane of self-consciousness, it is quietly sped past, like one walking past a graveyard alone at night.

But I believe, and I think we share this belief, that great art is always born of bravery.

A terrifying notion: the artist is not a worker. I intend to prove this to you, albeit with several important caveats and digressions, as well as show you that the persistence with which we artists continue to believe otherwise is legitimately dangerous for the class struggle of the proletariat against and beyond capital, for the emancipation of each and all.

Let me begin by saying, critically, that the art worker does exist. This person is found throughout the vast art system. But before we can deduce who is and who is not an art worker, we must first go forwards together with a common and clear understanding of what makes a worker. When we speak of the worker, especially when we speak about the organizing of workers, we are speaking of the proletariat, we are speaking of Marx, and we are speaking, indirectly perhaps, of capital. The proletariat has no capital, it has no property with which to produce commodities, it is, “without reserves.” The sole commodity it bears and takes to market is its capacity to perform labor, its labor-power (Marx’s name for commodified labor, capitalist labor). The workers sell their labor-power to a capitalist in exchange for a wage so that they can in turn purchase the commodified means of reproduction, the stuff that keeps them alive; food, water, shelter, once held in common and having since been enclosed during the violent transition to a capitalist system.

Already now at this first stage of our analysis, it should be beginning to become clear who is an art worker with any certainty: packers, movers, studio photographers, editors, visitor services, coat-check, artists’ assistants, waged-painters, installation teams, fabricators, and shop clerks come to mind most readily, but the list goes on.

Let us then, momentarily, pull our fierce and defiant gaze away from the worker and train our merciless eye instead on the artist. The artist, who we will hereby define as the person or group directing the production of an artistic work, performs a general sort of labor of course, but simply laboring is not what makes a worker. A manager works, as does a CEO (not so hard, perhaps), as does a cop, and occasionally even a landlord will patch a hole or unclog a sink. Yet we do not say that these are workers.

Again, the worker, the proletariat, having no commodities of their own but their human capacity to labor has been left no other choice but to sell their labor-power to the highest bidder, they have been compelled to accept wage labor as their means of existence because of the historic destruction of the commons and the imposition of a global system of private property. They do not receive the value of the commodities they produce, only the value of their labor-power in the form of wages, the price of which can be said to (imperfectly) reflect the state of the class struggle (the difference between these two numbers is “surplus value” and can be used to calculate an abstract “rate of exploitation”). They do not choose what work to do or how to do it and are instead paid in part for the self-stifling of all will and true creativity for the duration of the working-day. Often, the pay is just enough so that the worker can reproduce himself but not so much that he can free himself from the bondage of the capitalist and enter the ranks of the competition. But how much or little one is paid does not necessarily determine whether one is a proletarian or not and tends to cause as much confusion as clarification among those invested in the organization of the working class. The question that matters is, and has always been, one of the ownership of private property, property employed as capital. Which brings us at last, to the artist.

The artist performs labor, but largely under their own direction (with respect to the social nature of commodity production; the work must have a buyer to become a commodity and this in turn undoubtedly has some, albeit varied, effect on the work of the artist). The artist acquires raw materials on the market or from nature directly and, within their studios, transforms them into commodity-art, which they then take to market and attempt to sell for a profit. The contrast between the artist and the worker should here already be somewhat apparent. Whereas a worker has no commodity to sell other than their labor power, and thus is employed by the capitalist to use the capitalist’s property to produce commodities which the capitalist in turn sells to realize the commodities’ surplus value; the artist obtains a variety of commodities themselves that are used in the creation of commodity-art, the value of which (this includes the surplus value), assuming the artist is able to sell the work, or said differently, realize their commodities’ value, is paid out in its entirety to the creator. Here, it becomes obvious that the artist’s relationship to property is very different from that of the worker. But at this point, as a talented and knowledgeable artist yourself, I’m sure you have many issues with the above, which we will now attempt to address together.

The first question we must tackle before moving forwards and tracing out the startling implications of our analysis is perhaps the most challenging and yet also the most fundamental: is all art today a commodity? Of course not. Many of the artworks created today exist beyond the sphere of exchange. For instance, graffiti is done with no expectation of compensation and is sometimes characterized as an act in defiance of or even an attack on private property. As many young artists are aware of, there are often a litany of artist-run spaces in every city that exhibit unknown and experimental artworks with little or no expectation of compensation. But already here we begin to encounter some complications. Many of these types of works have a price despite remaining unsold, and generally all the artists that show in these types of spaces view the exhibition as one stone on the winding path to larger, more lucrative exhibitions. The artist is attempting to produce commodities and become known for just that, even if the artworks in question never realize their values on the market and thus fail to successfully enter circulation as commodity-art. These small galleries at the base of the art-Leviathan, unless they can transition to a viable commercial model or receive funds that subsidize their inability to compete for a sale, will be forced to shutter within the year. Often, this is all well and good for the artist-gallerist, as they viewed the short-lived gallery as a simple means of finding a firm foothold within the art system anyways. So, in summary, not all art today is a commodity, but not for a lack of trying!

In this light, we can begin to make some rather controversial assertions about the art system, or as it’s often called by us, the art world. All of the art within the art system is a commodity or is in some fashion commodified. The art world is inseparable from the commodity society we are trapped within and is in fact the very mechanism by which art is captured and commodified. Artworks that stand outside the art system are thus no longer recognizable as artworks, instead relegated to the realm of either craft (the conservative) or political practice (the subversive). If an artwork that originally exists outside of the art system is deemed worthy of admission into the realm of capital “a” Art, the work undergoes a process of commodification almost automatically. For example, a protest sign is created by an artist with no intention of realizing its value through exchange, it is produced simply for use. But if an artist gathers up the discarded or fallen protest signs after an action so as to exhibit them as art, they are unknowingly carrying out a process of commodification that not only more readily grants the artist access to a gallery owner’s exhibition space but actually makes the artwork recognizable as such, its status as a commodity having become inseparable from its status as art. From this it follows that, while many artworks are never commodified, the art world is completely subsumed by the capitalist labor process. It is a world entirely enveloped by a society that can only measure wealth as an “immense accumulation of commodities” and is hence transformed in its image.

The second question we must address, as I’m sure you’re thinking it too, is this: what about the great majority of working artists who are forced to accept wage labor so as to continue living and working? It is this question in which we find the source of almost all the trouble and confusion emanating from the term “art worker.” Yes, many artists work for a wage, yourself and myself included, so that we may pay rent and get groceries with relative stability. It would seem to follow that, based on this information, we would be neatly categorized as proletarians, as artist-workers, and that would be that. Unfortunately, things are never so simple. While at our day jobs, yes, we are, at least in part, proletarians. However, not only do most of the artists I have met refuse to the point of outright denial of reality to identify with their day jobs (at school, we were encouraged to meet questions from our families, the public, about our waged activities with outrage and offense), instead insisting that they are first and foremost a painter or a singer-songwriter or whatever, these jobs act as a form of cross-subsidization of our artistic pursuits; wages are set aside to be invested in our own means of producing art, our capital, however small. Every artist thinks of themselves as a temporarily embarrassed success, they must, for they are engaged in savage competition with every other artist and even the smallest doubt or concession rebounds to the success of another artist. If they do not see things this way, they are called a hobbyist. Every opportunity for the artist must be evaluated and when reward outweighs potential consequences, seized upon. Every friendship is at grave risk for exploitation as a sterile and empty professional relationship. Such is the cold logic of capital. And what is the capitalist but capital anthropomorphized?

While it is important to acknowledge that today many people exist at the intersection of multiple and contradictory class identities, what counts is practical activity. The day job-having artist is in this respect much like the failed capitalist, partially proletarianized, but perhaps just as likely to become a scab as they are to become a member of the labor movement, for no matter how low their reserves dwindle they continue to identify with the cult of private property over and above the workers at their side; they continue to believe that someday, soon, with enough hard work, that they will command a large and powerful capital themselves and no longer be obliged to accept the degradation of wage slavery. I do not believe it is a coincidence that artists so often find themselves working as wage laborers in the sectors of industry with the highest degree of employee turnover and lowest levels of unionization. Artists consistently seek out and take refuge in the food and beverage service sector of the U.S. economy, largely because it offers the greatest net compensation (not due to a high wage but rather due to the consumer’s cultural obligation to tip) coupled with the lowest levels of temporal and physical involvement. With respect to the job, the artist is just passing through, only biding their time until their proverbial ticket is punched. This makes the artist highly unpredictable as a potential comrade to the worker; the interests of the artist and the interests of the worker are far from identical. The artist has made a secret pact with private property, behind the backs of the other workers at one’s day job.

We must remember that Marx identified the proletariat as the “really revolutionary” class not because they intuitively know revolution to be righteous or are particularly predisposed to a heightened sense of morality, but because revolution is in their very material interest. The capitalist system offers the worker nothing but deeper robbery. The worker at the café does not expect to one day be made CEO of the company if he can make the most transcendent latte. The artist on the other hand, does. The artist hires assistants and delegates tasks the moment they can afford to do so. They command labor as a capitalist the moment their practice is capable of sustaining such an investment. The artist in this sense perhaps begins as a humble entrepreneur, self-promoting their enchanting commodities until they can attract sufficient capital to rationalize, and perhaps even industrialize, their artistic process. Revolution, overturning the world, is not in the interest of the artist, as revolution, should it be successful, would be the abolition of art as such, of the artist’s world. It would mean the abolition of the distinction between art and living.

Perhaps I am over eager to get to the point, but I would imagine that what I am getting at is quite obvious by now: the artist is not a worker, the artist is a capitalist.

So third and finally, let us put this argument to rest and address the somewhat simpler question of: if the artist is the capitalist, then what is the gallery? The most straightforward answer to this is that the gallery is the landlord. Immediately this begins to explain the very real sense of exploitation felt by artists, as rent-seeking is one of the oldest and most naked forms of exploitation in history. What else is one to call the standard fifty-percent commission of all sales made through a gallery other than rent? The relationship of gallery to artist is very similar then to the relationship of the tenant farmer to aristocratic landlord, or maybe even more so, to the relationship of small business owner to Amazon’s marketplace. As suggested by that final example however, to really get an accurate picture we must complicate this triad of landlord-capitalist-worker somewhat. Even in the early writings of Marx, he observes that very soon in the development of the capitalist system the landlord, because of the pressures of competition and the allure of greater profits, no longer appears content to sit on the sidelines of production and collect rent. The landlord sets their accumulation into motion, deploying it as capital, making speculative investments and even entering into production themselves, seizing upon the competitive advantage their monopoly over property provides. The landlord then is another type of capitalist, bigger and more powerful sometimes, able to extract not only surplus value from commodity production but also interest on financial investment and ground rent on productive activity they otherwise do not oversee.

Understanding the gallery as landlord, as rent-seeking capitalist, can also help us to further confirm our assertion that the artist is also a capitalist. After all, what does the artist immediately do upon launching an exhibition within the walls of a commercial gallery space? We raise our prices. We raise our prices such that our surplus value accumulation does not fall to unacceptable levels, but also not so high that we are unable to make the sale, to realize our splendid commodities’ values in exchange. No worker can raise the price of the commodities they produce in such a way, so directly. And they would have no real interest in doing so anyways, for their pay is, as we said above, different from, yet also contained within, the values of the commodities born of their labor. For the worker at Starbucks for example, this fact is quite obvious as the company has raised prices several times over the past years while reporting growing profits, and none of this has done anything to raise the price of the barista’s labor-power, their wage. We also see that those same baristas are coming together in historic fashion to challenge this very fact. In the art world, we can also see this arrangement clearly when we recall the horror stories emanating from the studios of art’s superstars describing minimum wage art workers finding out the astronomical prices paid for the painting they painfully labored over for several sleepless weeks. But this is not a phenomenon contained only at the upper echelons of creative celebrity, it is simply most visible here. Artists financially unable to employ wage labor with any regularity often rely on much more informal, reciprocal arrangements, but when necessary, for instance to meet a deadline or fabricate something beyond one’s technical ability or even simply to ship a work across the country to New York, we too exploit wage laborers who are compensated solely for their labor-power no matter what fortune our work finds on the market or how intimately they are bound up in the process of its production or circulation.

We have before us admittedly a rather unfortunate picture of the art world. It is frightening to think of ourselves as potential class enemies to the struggle we so fervently believe in. But the real depths of this horrifying reality are also a call to the revolutionary artist towards a more profound and complete bravery. We can no longer hide behind the desperate hyphenation of two equally and incorrectly morality-laden categories such as ‘art’ and ‘worker.’ This is a form of counterrevolutionary self-delusion and as is evident from the analysis above, every attempt to act in our own interests as artists is an attempt to further separate ourselves from the very working class we purport to count ourselves among. We must be brave. The artist committed to revolution and clear-eyed about their role in the world they seek to abolish will inevitably find themselves in open antagonism to the art system as a whole. Regrettably, there is no way to dull the ringing pain of this truth, except for maybe through the salve of struggle and the company of good friends struggle necessarily entails. What revolution requires of the artist is a form of betrayal; a betrayal of the art world, of its basis in private property, and ultimately of the artist’s own future within the capitalist art system.

The worker, as we know, has nothing to lose in the overthrow of this barbaric order but its chains. The artist, if we are to be honest, has unquestionably far more at stake. Such is our horrible cross to bear.

Now, at the end, I want to address what you might, and quite rightly perhaps, feel is a rather cynical view of the art world and its artists, a rigid economistic view maybe of artists as profit-seeking, calculating business-people. Of course there’s some truth to this line of critique of the above, as don’t we artists also, even primarily, aspire to create something Good, something grand, real magic, feeling and meaning? Your own, beautiful practice is evidence enough of the truth of that. The tragedy then, and I do not use the word ‘tragedy’ lightly, is that this subsumption of the artist’s world by the capitalist economy means all our good intentions and wild creativity must be routed through, and even domesticated by, the commodity, exchange; in this way artistic practice, our creative expression, is alienated from us; but also in this way, the artist-becoming-traitor can begin to understand the struggle for revolution as the struggle for the triumphant return of our own creative capacities to us; expression by and for humanity. There is no other way to view the present arrangement of forces that allows us any inkling of useful, actionable understanding of its brutal reality other than that which has been designated as cynicism. It could be said then that we are in fact fighting for the right to abolish cynicism itself and our struggle is its practical refutation. So let it be known, I am no cynic, it is capital that is the cynic and capital is the world, but only for now.

I sincerely hope that the discussion now to be had concerning what we might do, what forms our struggle takes, what daring acts of betrayal we might conceive of, might become a conversation that plays out across the dazzling and singular movement of our own lives and practices. You are an artist of such enigmatic vision and wit, somehow able to move backwards and forwards through time as nimbly as you draw, in equal measure, from the heavens as from the social; with a confident gesture capable of delivering both mystery and clarity; deserving of the whole world; and you have honored me deeply with every glimpse into your studio and most especially by initiating this dialogue and allowing me the privilege to attempt to put some of this down in writing.

May conversation become conspiracy.

With love, solidarity, and admiration,

Your friend, Danny

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anotherworldnowblog · 4 years ago

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TWO FRAGMENTS ON SKATEBOARDING

Two kids race their silver sedan to catch up to me. I trick and they shout and we touch hands while rolling separately forwards. Through wind and teeth rides whistle and weedsmoke. We are on the same side.

Skateboarding in the street is a communist activity in that it is always a communizing activity. When skateboarding beyond the confines of the skatepark, one is requisitioning private and state property for immediate use. In this gesture the city is momentarily transformed from a labor camp to a playground where the only limit is our capacity for invention. Every waxed curb is a minor revolution. When skateboarding, one is instantly aligned with all of this world’s criminals, misfits, and outcasts–and one feels this–against the police and the entire bourgeois order. Anyone who has cruised the downtown or even their little neighborhood knows this. Who gets mad? Who smiles? Skateboarding is not only communizing, it is destituent. As every flagrantly ignored rule and humiliated security guard shows, this gesture can empty government of its power and always refuses to impose an order of its own. This is why, whenever a cop attempts to skateboard, no matter how talented they are, it always looks like a pig trying to walk on its hind legs.

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anotherworldnowblog · 4 years ago

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Art, Ordinances, and Ideology

(March 23rd, 2021)

Let me begin by offering a quick summary of recent events here in Chicago as of March 23rd, 2021. One or two weeks ago, a very foolish city council woman put forward an ordinance that would have made it extremely challenging for small galleries and museums to operate out of residential spaces. Many excellent points were made about how this would scuttle an already-hurting cultural scene and how this ordinance would disproportionately keep the working class/people of color out of the art system. A guerilla social media campaign was spontaneously orchestrated and today I am pleased to report that the ordinance has been withdrawn. So why do we feel so strange? What’s wrong?

You know as well as I, this was too easy. The working class is never acquiesced to in such a manner. Just last summer, months of collective action and righteous rebellion on the part of a cross-class (but largely proletarian), interracial movement for black lives amounted to nothing more than millions of dollars in property damage and millions more in police overtime. This is not an indictment of the movement. The state could not concede what the movement was demanding, for it would entail the capitalist state’s dissolution, as is sometimes the case when the working people fight back in a particularly revolutionary configuration. The interests of those who hold state power and those of the people in the streets are opposed. So when you and I both feel strange, when we both recognize that this was too easy, we must pay attention! Because something is being glimpsed. I call the city council woman foolish not only because her ordinance was unpopular but because as a result of the fight she provoked, many of the convenient (for everyone, really) stories we tell ourselves about the role of the artist were revealed to be lies. The central one of these goes something like this: “the artist is a worker.” A lie. I will prove it.

The artist (which we will hereby define as an individual producer, or individuated grouping of producers i.e. collective, pair, etc.) performs labor, but largely under their own direction (with respect to the social nature of commodity production; the work must have a buyer to become a commodity). The artist acquires raw materials on the market or from nature directly and transforms them into commodity art, which they then take to market and sell for a profit. In contrast, a worker has no commodity to sell other than their labor power. This is what makes them a worker. They use the capitalist’s property to produce commodities for the capitalist to sell and are only paid for the value of their labor power in the form of a wage. Class in this sense is not about income or success, but about one’s relationship to the means of production (to property). With this in mind, it becomes clear that the artist is perhaps what we can call petit bourgeois (if not an outright, albeit temporarily embarrassed, capitalist). The artist is not a worker.

In a nominally democratic political system, the ruling class can only govern by the formation of dynamic class alliances. If the artist is indeed petit bourgeois, as I am arguing, then they are much more closely aligned to the managers and bureaucrats of the capitalist system than they are to the workers. Even though the artist (and the managers and some bureaucrats even) are subject to some forms of “exploitation,” their position within the class system imbues them with a more conservative politics, seeking the preservation of the status quo they are entirely dependent on. Of course, class is not the absolute predetermination of action or choice. But one’s class position absolutely entails a certain weight attached to the options one chooses between, not to mention what options are available. We can surely say that before all of us, a path of least resistance is formed and that path has a class character.

But our somewhat inconvenient glimpse beyond the usual mystification surrounding the artist does not end there. Nor do the problems for well-intentioned, “progressive” artists. In fact, the artist is not only part of a class alliance that tends to act in defense of the ruling order, the artist is actually integrated into the State itself as part of the Cultural Ideological State Apparatus. State power flows from the ruling classes, who control the State, and through the state apparatuses, including the so-called Cultural Ideological State Apparatus. Under capitalism, art tends to be an expression of State Power. To prove this, I will briefly sketch for you the architecture of the State, and rely heavily on the work of Louis Althusser in the process.

The state is divided into two collections of apparatuses. As previously stated, State Power can be thought of as flowing through these apparatuses under the direction of the ruling class (the capitalists). There is, on the one side, the generally “public” part which we typically think of as the State, which can be called the Repressive State Apparatus. The Repressive State Apparatus is comprised of the army, the police, the prisons, etc. This apparatus tends to maintain the conditions for capitalist production and circulation, which in part, also works to ensure the reproduction of capitalist society downwards through time into the future. But the Repressive State Apparatus is not solely (nor predominantly) responsible for the reproduction of the existing relations of production. This responsibility falls largely on what we can call the Ideological State Apparatuses.

These ideological state apparatuses constitute the other side of the State and in contrast to the Repressive State Apparatus, are often “private” institutions which we do not commonly associate with the State (though not always; example: education). This vast collection of institutions or apparatuses, at times in conflict with one another, ensure the ruling ideology remains the ruling ideology, preparing each member of capitalist society for their specialized role, and ultimately integrating them to the highest possible degree into an impersonal mode of production. Examples of ideological state apparatuses include the political system, the family, the schools, the press/media, and yes, the cultural system (there are many more I will leave unnamed). The Ideological State Apparatuses are almost always controlled by the ruling classes and the result of this hegemonic control is that the ruling classes’ ideas about society appear as common sense. Sometimes, the ruled classes can gain footholds within these institutions or even develop parallel or warring ideological apparatuses. This does not seem to be the case in the arts today, however.

In the wake of this analysis, we can recognize this ordinance fight in Chicago as a contradiction or conflict between ideological state apparatuses, not between warring classes, which now casts this conflict’s speedy and nonetheless joyous resolution in a new, stark light. The unity of the ruling ideology was put ahead of the regulative whims of those within the Political Ideological State Apparatus. The civil war between ideological state apparatuses was averted and the relative unity of the ruling ideology has been promptly restored. In summary: a minor conflict is quickly resolved in the name of the ongoing and primary struggle of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat.

Fellow artists, which side are you on? Are you sure?

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anotherworldnowblog · 5 years ago

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TOWARDS AN ECOLOGY OF LOVE

(June-July, 2020)

“Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.” -Judith Butler

Fire and Mourning I’m shaking. The sun is heavy on my neck and the crowd seems to shiver in flexed anticipation. The anger running through the protestors is hot like a spider bite. The chants have all the usual words but today they sound like a new language, pulsating with a rhythm as unmistakable as it is unknown. Tears and sweat and names. My mask is damp and stale, dank breath and odor-eliminating chemicals wash back down my throat with every syllable. Then, the sun goes white and the police, without warning, jump us. Screaming. Protestors and cops collapse into blue knots, plastics are tangled up. Fists, legs, batons. Water bottles fly. I find my partner and pull her away from the cowering cop at her feet. A horrified girl in a faded tye dye top pushes her way forward, shrieking pleas for de-escalation. But we have slipped into a dark beyond, out of reach of such luxuries as deliberation, planning, and respectability...

The scuffle ends with several on our side arrested and many more beaten bloody. Whoever has the megaphone manages to march us across the city for several hours, but the veil of control has been torn. Paint goes up on every wall in the city to elated hollers. Squad cars are destroyed, at least one burns. The police are now eerily absent. We march back towards the towering art deco skyscrapers at the city’s center, monuments to abundance we’ve never known. There, a wall of riot cops awaits us. Gold light catches the edges of a gilded cupola and stains the cream colored marble like marmalade. The city would be so beautiful, if it were ours. Cracks, screams, gas. The next few hours are a blur. Running, terror, bravery, fire, hope, inspiration, ingenuity. The police deploy dispersal technology more than once but to no avail. The remaining mass of people have become something else. At times, to the police’s genuine horror and visible surprise, we push them back with a barrage of water bottles, debris, banana peels. When necessary, we melt back into the city only to reappear again moments later, one block over. At some point, word gets around that all but two of the bridges had been raised and we were trapped...

A firework rips through the police line to cheers. The cops swear and slip. Strontium carbonate burns bright red streaks across my eyes and whispers out. The police fracture into a million tiny pieces. An ATV donuts wildly and peels off straight at the jagged, trembling row of officers. Dumpsters are moved to prevent ambush, coordination flows like a river, without words. Motorcycles go up on one wheel. Eventually, we realize a curfew has been set, effective in twenty or so minutes. Someone has mounted a horse. There’s nowhere to go and it begins to feel as though the police are trapped down here with us, as opposed to us with them. Windows are smashed as darkness falls. The man on horseback charges forward, into the black and orange of the night...

The police would go on to make over 400 arrests by the end of the night, with over 80 officers reporting injuries in what turned out to be one of many, simultaneous riots taking place across the country. What I saw that night had previously been unthinkable to me. The city had flexed its anarchic muscle after decades of slumber and found it was still strong, and the police, shockingly weak. I remain struck, too, by the frantic way the police attacked. No one could be surprised at the lack of provocation nor the lack of shame, but what I did not foresee was the palpable panic emanating from behind their shields. And I am beginning to understand why we scared them so–we had come to mourn. Not to “resist” or to march or to curse DJT, but to mourn. We were there to grieve the ungrievable, to say the unsayable: that we will no longer accept no-life, we will no longer accept bare-life, that we are indeed connected, that we are hurt by this loss and every other, that we will give them a fight, that we will defend ourselves and each other, that this order is no order, and, that we deserve so much better. Our mourning was a radical negation of a system that tries to maintain an unnatural space between us, that seeks to limit experience to individual (or consumer) experience, that attempts to constrain feelings to personal feelings. Our mourning was dangerous. The cops were right. And their panic was not just at our finding strength in each other, but that they found themselves with none...

Judith Butler describes mourning as a process of transformation as well as one of revelation, in which we are exposed as being bound up in each other, our “selves” products of our relationships to each other, socially constructed, interdependent. When we lose, we change, because what we were was dependent on what we lost. This state or process of mourning makes possible the apprehension of our interlocked-ness, our interwoven-ness, in which “something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us… perhaps what I have lost ‘in’ you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related.” There is no you and there is no me, rather there is a you-me and there is a me-you.

Can mourning be the only site of such apprehension? Mourning is an extreme condition, contingent on loss and suffering, a painful process, where these links that compose us are stretched and then snapped. This severance is gradually accommodated in a transformation. However, these links to one another just as much exist before this point of breakage, before the moment of loss, and there is then no reason they cannot be pulled at, plucked and strummed, like the strings of a guitar, until that which irrevocably binds us to each other achieves a resonance or vibration that no power can obscure. This resonance, this song, this elevation of our bonds to the level of naked visibility, could usher in a moment of universal recognition of our interdependence, our interconstitution, our intervitality, that, if properly politicized, could hold the key to our liberation from the prison of capitalist relations.

The stubborn fact remains that these links, these ties, are currently obscured, mystified, hidden, or outright suppressed and attacked. We cannot politicize our ties if we cannot see them and we cannot see these ties because we are told at the level of ideology that they are either not important or, more maddeningly, that they are not there. The integrity of these links is further corrupted and degraded by the rising power of debt. Perhaps most troublingly, we humans are being transformed by supposedly liberatory technology into unfeeling components of a networked machine, incapable of empathy or solidarity. It is this final development that, when complete, could represent a point of no return, a total obliteration of the ties that both constitute us as individuals and define our humanity. If this subsumption of the human by the technofinancial machine is allowed to continue, there will soon be nothing left to mourn.

Capitalist Realism and Neoliberal Ideology Ideology is the first obstacle we encounter when tracing the gap between us and a resurgent solidarity. Neoliberalism is the dominant ideology in our time because of the hegemonic power the neoliberal bloc has accrued over the last five decades, infiltrating every level of government, media, academia, and economics. Hegemony allows the ruling class’ ideas about society to appear as if they are bubbling up from within each of us, as opposed to being imposed on us from above. As Nancy Fraser succinctly puts it, summarizing Gramsci, “hegemony is [the] term for the process by which a ruling class makes its domination appear natural.” Today, neoliberal hegemony makes the dominant ideas of the ruling class inescapable and nearly ubiquitous and yet, uniquely difficult to distinguish. A pervasive atmosphere of social-darwinism, savage competition, short sightedness, and nihilistic indulgence has become our ambient common sense. Hopelessness becomes a sort of wisdom, trust in each other and in the future becomes naivety. As Mark Fisher states in his book, Capitalist Realism, “The prevailing ideology is that of cynicism.” Nothing is possible, and it’s foolish to believe otherwise. It could be said that the apprehension of our ties to one another is the apprehension of the political, but the political under neoliberalism has been effectively neutralized. Neoliberal ideology attempts to situate us in an eternally post-political moment. The future is no longer contested space, it was sold to the highest bidder long ago.

Reinforcing this ideology is a material precarity that has come to make up the texture of life for the service underclass of neoliberal society, as well as more broadly characterizing the spirit of work for all in the new economy. Solidarity gives way to brutal competition, coworkers become competitors, friends become networks. No one job is enough; we are constantly seeking the next opportunity for advancement, overlapping work schedules clash, disaster looms, familial relations fray, neural stimulation overloads and feeds back into wave after wave of crippling anxiety, at best. At worst, violence. This precarity and its accompanying anxiety, while horribly traumatizing to the overwhelming majority of people, has very advantageous qualities from the perspective of capital. In an interview with Jeremy Gilbert, Mark Fisher points out that, “anxiety is something that is in itself highly desirable from the perspective of the neoliberal project. The erosion of confidence, the sense of being alone, in competition with others: this weakens the worker’s resolve, undermines their capacity for solidarity, and forestalls militancy.” At multiple levels of our waking (and dreaming) lives, the idea that you are not only alone but in eternal competition with every other person is reinforced, and the effects of such a social arrangement can be seen in the rapidly spiking suicide tally, spectacular violence, pharmacological dependence and abuse, and the numbers of people reporting depression, burn out, and especially loneliness.

We see this “lone-wolf” mindset very clearly when we consider the popular cultural output of Western capitalist society. In the same interview, Fisher points to the rise of hyper-competitive game shows as a manifestation of the social darwinism at the center of neoliberal thought. These aptly named reality shows, like Apprentice and Big Brother, revolve around “individuals competing with one another, and an exploitation of the affective and supposedly ‘inner’ aspects of the participants’ lives.” He continues by pointing out the way in which reality television feeds back into and constructs the reality of its audience: “It’s no accident that ‘reality’ became the dominant mode of entertainment in the last decade or so. The ‘reality’ usually amounts to individuals struggling against one another, in conditions where competition is artificially imposed, and collaboration is actively repressed.” One could endlessly list the names of these types of programs that have proliferated in the last decade or two in America, many with great commercial success.

Another trend emerging in the superstructure, more or less concurrently, is a sort of melancholic self-awareness of the brutal and total competition our lives have been reduced to. We can most easily locate this trend in music. It can take the form of a depressive acceptance of the shallowness of our relationships or perhaps a declaration of exhaustion, a celebration of outright antisocial behavior, or submission and defeated withdrawal. Oftentimes, these songs make heavy reference to a handful of favored barbiturates, opiates, or dissociatives. We can most readily see this in the relatively recent rise in popularity of “xanax rap,” as well as in some drill and trap music (21 Savage or Chief Keef come to mind). On the other end of the musical spectrum, we could look to the resurgent popularity of emo music, especially the hyper-personal, heroin addled, lo-fi bedroom varietals (artists like Teen Suicide or Dandelion Hands have amassed millions of streams and a cult following without the backing of a major label).

But even the ostensible “winners of the game” are not insulated from the melancholic deterioration of the social fabric. One song in particular off of Kanye West’s manic 2016 album, The Life of Pablo, stands out for the stark clarity with which it addresses the crisis of relations brought on by the neoliberal economy. On “Real Friends,” West laments the way his friendships have been transformed. But one gets the sense upon listening that this isn’t just the story of a star narcissistically complaining about the way people from his past attempt to use his name or piggy back on his success; that’s simply the context. The song is, at its core, about how the insatiable hunger that neoliberalism forcibly inscribes in each of us, the end result of a decades long process of privatization of risk, erodes friendship, sabotages love, and destroys family. “Couldn't tell you much about the fam though/ I just showed up for the yams though/ Maybe 15 minutes, took some pictures with your sister/ Merry Christmas, then I'm finished, then it's back to business.” There’s no time for family gatherings. Time is money, there’s not enough of it and there never will be. Your friends are simply biding their time, lying in wait for a chance to use you for their own advancement. There’s a paranoia here, but as a fellow participant in the same savage game, you understand this paranoia to be justified. “Real Friends”, while rightly lauded for its “truth” and relatability, unfortunately functions as another whirring cog in the propaganda apparatus, normalizing the growing space between each of us and presenting cynical, opportunistic relations as “just a fact of life.” West seems to echo Fisher’s bleak assessment that “the values that family life depends upon – obligation, trustworthiness, commitment – are precisely those which are held to be obsolete in the new capitalism,” but without the critical edge. Our ties to one another, if they are acknowledged at all, are deemed simply useless and perhaps even a little bit risky, much like an appendix: an archaic, forgotten form that serves no useful purpose for today’s human, but can sometimes lead to infection. Bourgeois art, even art able to successfully express the darker qualities of the capitalist system, only reaffirms the status quo and further entrenches the ruling classes ideas about our relations to one another as the de facto common sense.

Debt and Bad Faith We next see these same social ties corrupted and corroded at the level of economics. The rise of credit, debt, and finance has transformed interpersonal relations under capitalism so as to be dominated by bad faith and suspicion. It’s quite common today for people to be heard bemoaning the transactional nature of relationships. But what exactly does this mean, and from where does our compulsion to calculate the incalculable emerge? Cartographer of the debt state, Marizzio Lazzarato, at first seems to echo some of Fisher’s observations in his 2012 book, The Making of The Indebted Man, pointing out that, “under conditions of ubiquitous distrust created by neoliberal policies, hypocrisy and cynicism now form the content of social relations.” Lazzarato describes many of the same symptoms of capitalist realism, but forgoes any discussion of ideology in favor of a somewhat more concrete causal chain: the creditor/debtor relationship.

In America today, debt is nearly ubiquitous and ownership has become an optical illusion, a disappearing act. Everything can be paid for later. Consequences can be deferred indefinitely with a solid line of credit. In this way, debt is sold to us as freedom, or perhaps more specifically, as opportunity. But of course, as is true of most things under neoliberalism, what is claimed and what actually is are two very different things. Lazzarato explains that debt can be understood as an obligation over time, both a promise and a memory. As a result of decades of neoliberal policies, personal debt has exploded in the United States and around the world. Personal debt acts as a form of social control, ensuring economic integration and encouraging one to prioritize “solvency.” This “solvency” usually manifests most visibly as an aversion to risk, a self-policed austerity, and general conformity so as to make good on one’s future obligations (to pay the debt).

The compulsion towards solvency appears in our personal lives in a wide variety of ways, unique to our station and interests. In some ways, even a grade schoolers fixation on popularity could be called a manifestation of debt society’s preoccupation with solvency. Obsession with outward appearances and “who is hanging out with who” is perhaps a primitive understanding of debt as a social relation. Even before taking on personal debt, children are shown that one must appear to be a person who will make good on their debts and thus be worthy of lending or more generalized opportunity. Parents often encourage their children’s involvement in a wide variety of extracurricular activities, not because their child is passionate, but largely for involvement’s sake. In debt society, being a well-rounded, “whole” person makes you deserving of investment. What was once your private activity or leisure time is now folded back into the economic as debt society implores you to constantly work on yourself and, with the development of social media, to publicly exhibit these favorable tendencies in yourself, proving over and over again that you are indeed viable, solvent, and a safe and potentially lucrative investment opportunity. In my own professional life as an artist, I am expected to broadcast or signal my practice’s (and thus my own) solvency at all times. Instagram has become artists’ preferred medium for the transmission of these displays and through “stories” and posts, we carefully curate an image of productivity, attendance, viability, and social integration and ascendence. We outwardly project the idea that we’re working hard in our studios, that we’re networking properly through studio visits and the obligatory cruising of exhibition circuits, that we’re reading the right books and thinking not just critically but, correctly, and that our work is already being collected and invested in, all in order to facilitate personal access to future opportunity.

In other spheres of life, this process plays out in much the same way, albeit with some largely aesthetic quirks or differences. For the cognitive worker, already a member of the upper-middle class, perhaps one shares their numerous camping excursions to impart a sense of their connection to the earth and adventurous spirit. For the service class, perhaps it appears as a public chronicling of their work ethic and commitment to upward advancement, even at the expense of pleasure or non-material enrichment. The public deferral of pleasure can be used as an expression of one’s solvency, especially and tragically among the lower classes of debt society. We begin to see here that these performances or projections may have a class character to their manifestations. For the lower classes, one is expected to showcase dedication to advancement by highlighting a self imposed austerity. For the higher classes, one is expected to prove they’re not only deserving of their opportunities but are using them properly, to further improve themselves and become a more complete person. All of this theater is directed at an audience of one: capital. Much of what constituted life has been degraded to the level of rote performance, of literal Virtue signaling. When our desire for autonomous self fulfillment and development returns back to us, now as a directive of capital and as a measure of solvency, this is alienation completed. This is the total commodification of the human and of social life.

Over time, solvency comes to stand in for morality, a good person becomes a person who will “make good” on their promise to pay. We grow suspicious, slow to trust, and it’s generally considered “smart” to remain somewhat distanced from your fellow worker, ready to cast them aside at a moments notice, either because a new, more lucrative opportunity for exploitable relations has arisen or there is a sense that somehow your current relationship could hinder or damage your accumulation of social capital or even your access to real capital in the future. People become containers of undifferentiated “risk.” While this reduction of friendship to an economic calculus is reinforced and normalized by ideology, it can be traced directly back to the rise of credit and finance. Lazzarato explains that,

“the trust that credit exploits has nothing to do with the belief in new possibilities in life and, thus, in some noble sentiment toward oneself, others, and the world. It is limited to a trust in solvency and makes solvency the content and measure of the ethical relationship. The “moral” concepts of good and bad, of trust and distrust, here translate into solvency and insolvency… In capitalism, then, solvency serves as the measure of the ‘morality” of man.”

This imposition of the debtor-creditor relationship and its associated thought processes onto our social relations has had a disastrous effect on our capacity for solidarity and friendship. This reduction of trust to an arithmetic evaluation of solvency amounts to an outright attack on our bonds, our interdependence, our intervitality, well beyond the aforementioned psychological denial and ideological mystification. Debt corrodes and transforms our bonds, attempting to rob them of their revolutionary potential and leverage them towards our own management or government; our ties morph from the seeds of our liberation to become a critical node of control. This reduction, the mathematization of social life, made possible and prefigured the transformations yet to occur at the hands of computer technology. This conversion of the unquantifiable into the numeric perhaps primed us for a world governed by ones and zeros, binary options and no choices; a world of mathematically infinite opportunity but evaporated possibility, a world engulfed by digital mirage, where government has been exported and grafted into the minds of the governed, implanted by credit and sutured by tech. Credit does not simply reduce friendship to a transaction, but (especially in an environment of technologically networked acceleration), facilitates the dissolving of trust, morality, and love into accounting, of real and perceived solvency, of calculation, and of preformatted corporate connectivity. Debt catalyses our transformation from living, affective, creative, unquantifiable singularities into cold, accountable, predictable, math. Interchangeable parts. Fiber optic cable, mildly inconvenienced by our flesh’s relative lack of conductivity. Its need to piss, shit, and fuck.

Finance, Transformation, Meaning It could be argued that a paradox emerges when this drive towards a total accounting arises at the same time as the fateful decision to free the United States dollar from the gold standard is made. At once, ideology and the rise of debt reduces relations to calculations, everyday life to math while the total detachment of the sign (money) from the referent (gold) unchained valorization from the real world, opening up fictitious space for fictitious valorization. The paradox lies in the fact that any truth once found in accounting was obliterated by Nixon’s decision while workers are now compelled by debt to recognize and submit to the quantifiable, the countable, as the only truth, the last truth. Where does this false truth get its power? What resolves this contradiction? Franco “Bifo” Berardi answers: “ Strength, force, violence.” Truth is an illusion and we are forced to adhere to finance’s directives not because there lies real meaning for us in the numbers or that we will one day crawl out from under our mountains of debt, but because we are coerced with violence: the violent expropriation of the means of our own reproduction, and the violence of everyday life, with its terrorist police and torturer bankers, predatory usurers and rapist landlords. With finance unleashed from the realm of the corporeal and the corporeal lashed firmly to the mast of the sinking ship of the mathematic (by debt), the real world becomes a prison without walls to the worker at the same time that the real world (and all of its inhabitants) becomes a trivial nuisance to capital. This sets the apocalypse in motion. As Berardi puts it in his 2011 book, The Uprising,

“When the referent is cancelled, when profit is made possible by the mere circulation of money, the production of cars, books, and bread becomes superfluous. The accumulation of abstract value is made possible through the subjection of human beings to debt, and through predation on existing resources. The destruction of the real world starts from this emancipation of valorization from the production of useful things, and from the self-replication of value in the financial field. The emancipation of value from the referent leads to the destruction of the existing world.”

As the world becomes simultaneously not enough (for capital) and too much (for the indebted people), the digital emerges, like a messiah, here to save humanity from reality and capital from its limitations. The digital promised humanity new horizons of democracy and liberty, and promised capital boundless capacity for speed and integration. It made good on one of these promises. Flows picked up speed and globalized and continue to do so to this day. Humanity, instead of being liberated by the emergence of digital technologies, has been forced to undergo a painful transformation to accommodate their proliferation in the workplace. Temporality veers wildly towards the unnatural and communication favors the simplistic as, “in the field of digital acceleration, more information means less meaning. In the sphere of the digital economy, the faster information circulates, the faster value is accumulated. But meaning slows down this process, as meaning needs time to be produced and to be elaborated and understood. So the acceleration of the info-flow implies an elimination of meaning.” Berardi describes this transformation as a paradigmatic shift at the level of social relations (and perhaps even at the level of biology), away from earthly conjunction and towards a synthetic connectivity, asserting that, “the leading factor of this change is the insertion of the electronic in the organic.” He elaborates:

“The spreading of the connective modality in social life (the network) creates the condition of an anthropological shift that we cannot yet fully understand. This shift involves a mutation of the conscious organism: in order to make the conscious organism compatible with the connective machine, its cognitive system has to be reformatted. Conscious and sensitive organisms are thus being subjected to a process of mutation that involves the faculties of attention, processing, decision, and expression. Info-flows have to be accelerated, and connective capacity has to be empowered, in order to comply with the recombinant technology of the global net… connection entails a simple effect of machinic functionality… In order for connection to be possible, segments must be linguistically compatible. Connection requires a prior process whereby elements that need to connect are made compatible.”

This change in us happened gradually, perhaps before a personal computer ever entered a private residence. In fact, corporate strategists came to favor a “networked” management structure long before the literal network ever came online. As I have suggested above, the submission of the world’s populations to the violence of debt helped inaugurate and later enforce this transformation in us. This technobiological evolution, this digital mutilation we are undergoing, represents the most serious threat to the ties that constitute us. Whereas ideology functions merely as a denial and a mystification of our ties and debt serves to corrode and corrupt our ties, the rise of digital technology amounts to a direct attack on the bodies sustaining our ties. Computing technology threatens to completely obliterate our capacity for empathy and solidarity, disintegrates our ability to conjoin, and dissolves our awareness of the sensuous: the lifeblood of our interconstitution, the source of our humanity. Berardi explains that, “In order to efficiently interact with the connective environment, the conscious and sensitive organism starts to suppress to a certain degree what we call sensibility… i.e. the ability to interpret and understand what cannot be expressed in verbal or digital signs.” Our language narrows, our horizons darken, social order breaks down and meaning gives way to chaos. Sensuous conjunction becomes networked connection, singularity becomes compatibility, and poetry becomes a glitch.

This inability to conjunct, this physical denial of our mutual ties, this loss of the sensuous and the natural, affects us on the level of meaning. It manifests itself as a ghostly trauma. We are haunted by the deep pain of the spectral loss of that which we were never able to clearly distinguish, its form only evident in a wavelength of light just beyond our eye’s ability to perceive. We feel the vague weight of our ties to one another only as an atmospheric depression, a potentiality foreclosed upon, now only existing as a lost reality, a sad fantasy of a life with others. This great lack is one potential starting point from which we can begin to retrace our lost ties and construct some semblance of meaning in this global superstorm of swirling info-chaos. Franco Berardi says as much in his 2017 book entitled Futurability, articulating that,

“pain forces us to look for an order to the world that we cannot find, because it does not exist. But this craving for order does exist: it is the incentive to build a bridge across the abyss of entropy, a bridge between different singular minds. From this conjunction, the meaning of the world is evoked and enacted: shared semiosis, breathing in consonance. The condition of the groundless construction of meaning is friendship. The only coherence of the world resides in sharing the act of projecting meaning: cooperation between agents of enunciation. When friendship dissolves, when solidarity is banned and individuals stay alone and face the darkness of matter in isolation, then reality turns back into chaos and the coherence of the social environment is reduced to the enforcement of the obsessional act of identification.”

Friendship is a prerequisite of meaning and thus a necessary precondition for the revolutionary sloughing off of the mummified husk of capitalist production. But friendship is impossible in an environment of distrust, cynicism, and bad faith. It follows that our immediate goal must be the careful fostering of those preconditions of friendship, the nurturing of an environment of trust and good faith, the development of an ecology of love. Our high level of cognitive connectivity could present an opportunity, but only as long as that connectivity is then able to be elaborated into actual bodily solidarity. Anything short of that is counterrevolutionary. The question we now turn to is one of action: how can we overcome the logic of finance and debt to reactivate our dormant sensibility and the inherent power in friendship? Is there a way of circumnavigating or outright obliterating the ideological, economic, and technological barriers to our coming together, our joyous re-union? And can sustained cultivation of the aforementioned preconditions of friendship result in a lasting apprehension of our ties to one another and the ensuing resurgence of the political and the possible?

Loving Giving So far, we have seen how the development of neoliberal capitalism and its associated technologies has functioned to rob us of our humanity, our interconstitution and intervitality; how it denies and openly attacks our ties to one another, and how, unchecked, it may transform us physiologically beyond any ability to return, where there is no longer a me-you and a you-me, but a you and a me that does not meet and mix; solitary confinement perfected. By reading Fisher, Lazzarato, and Berardi, we have identified three dominant fields of battle upon which our submission to the imperatives of capital is violently coerced and our capacity for struggle dismantled: ideology, debt, and technology. This multi-front assault upon the human and all of life is absolutely cause for despair, but is strangely also a reason for hope and a source of conviction in our practice. The immense amount of violence required to enforce the barbaric competition they call “order” is not evidence of its strength; it’s evidence of its weakness. As long as this war rages, our ties remain and another world is still possible. The day our compliance no longer requires immense ideological and psychological operations, a boundless debt prison, violent repression, and a painful, pharmacological and physiological transformation and integration into the digitized flows of capital is the day all is lost. But their war of all against all rages on and we remain human against all odds. “Life finds a way” – for now.

Technofinancial power cannot seem to stamp out the humanistic drive towards radical acts of insolvency, trust, and selflessness, even though sadly much of this drive is channeled towards frantic crisis response, trying to mitigate the damage of our system’s greatest excesses (feeding the unfed, housing and caring for the unhoused, legal support for the persecuted, etc). Even capital has, up until this point, been forced to cloak its domination in philanthropy. This is why all of the world’s arms manufacturers and pharmaceutical barons are such virulent “supporters of the arts.” But the masks are falling off and the hour grows late for our planet. Gramsci said, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” A popular, and ultimately useful, mistranslation of the quote concludes ominously: “Now is the time of monsters.” And if the last decade has proven anything, it’s that the only hero we can count on is each other. Every one of us has the capacity and the duty to be both doula of the new world and vanquisher of the old one, and our salvation depends on the generalization of a hero’s bravery...

What happens to us when we share or give? Why can’t we seem to shake the old habit of altruism despite it’s utter irrationality under a system whose basic incentive structure rewards the opposite? We remain social animals despite our being governed by an antisocial ideology and we still desire love and communion despite being forcibly transformed into unfeeling, unsleeping computer parts in the automated circulation of symbols.

Giving is the main idea I want to bring forward for discussion here. It must first be said that not all giving is equal, neither in its material impact for the receiver nor in its ability to call forth our bonds from the shadows and into the warm light of apprehension. Certain acts of giving may provide immense material support for the receiver, but do little to reaffirm our ties to one another, our interconstitution, thereby unintentionally softening the brutality of capitalist production while leaving our political obligations to one another unelucidated. Whereas other acts of giving may do the opposite: forcefully affirm our ties but offer little in the way of material support, likely a key component of any act of giving that seeks to create the necessary space in the receiver’s life for proper politicization. A balance must clearly be struck, and can likely only be found through rapid and widespread experimentation, buttressed by solid theoretical and historical analysis and reflection. There also exists another type of giving, a giving that is not giving. You know this type of giving, as it is everywhere: the type of giving that asks for something in return; the type that reduces giving to an exchange; the type that requires a promise on the part of the receiver; conditional giving. This is not giving, but debt in disguise, and it must be opposed without reservation.

Already, we can begin to see the faint outline of the type of action that has potential utility in our pursuit of another world. Firstly and most importantly, giving that asks nothing in return. Giving freely and unconditionally. We can call this type of giving, loving giving. Loving giving, as opposed to conditional giving, is an act of faith and of prefiguration (of course, with varied degrees of effectiveness and vibrational intensity). It is a negation of competitive ideology, a refutation of debts logic of solvency and personal responsibility, and a rejection of the inorganic and the virtual in favor of the organic and the natural (“a century ago, scarcity had to be endured; today, it has to be enforced”). Beyond that, loving giving can be said to act as a positive affirmation of our precarity, of our shared condition and interests, and our interdependence on each other for the propagation of human life. Judith Butler makes clear that,

“...each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies- as a site of desire and physical vulnerability, as the site of a publicity at once assertive and exposed. Loss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure.”

We are political creatures because of our exposure and vulnerability to each other. We are threatened by each other constantly, yet made by each other perpetually. In this way, an act of loving giving is always underwritten by the threat of violence, our looming death, perhaps at the hands of another. Death is the third party to any act of giving; violence is the notary of all love.

When we give lovingly, recklessly, irresponsibly, insolvently, and in good faith (without condition, without narcissistic recognition), the act is defined and given its shape by the other choice, the path not taken: the choice to take as much as you can get, to harm, to ask for something in return. Under neoliberalism, even ostensible inaction amounts to the de facto submission to capitalist logics. We’ve already seen how debt paralyzes us with its myopic obsession with solvency. Austerity, in some ways, can be understood as an act of inaction. There is no neutral, not anymore. There likely never was. You can act with love and bravery or you can (in)act with fear and violence. When we act in love, we create an us, and every us is predicated by an exterior, often hostile: nature, scarcity, industrialists, colonial forces, American imperialism, those who would rather we not give, that we instead sell and buy, that we exploit each other to get what we need to survive. The act of giving, then, is also an act of revelation. Giving makes sense of the world for the involved parties. It illuminates our status as both victims of a great theft and makes clear our reciprocal responsibility for maintaining the conditions where life can flourish, that we are equally culpable co-authors of our own existence. This re-establishing of our apprehension of our being bound up in one another is a precondition for any movement against the present state of things and towards anything close to communism. Acts of good faith, of loving giving, artfully designed to undercut forces of control and alienation, to debunk competitive ideology, to dismantle logics of debt, and to negate our subsumption to the digital, carve out the revolutionary us by establishing a hostile exterior and simultaneously create an atmosphere in which trust and friendship can flourish, where a return to the sensuous and to each other is possible: an ecology of solidarity and of love.

Without a doubt, it will absolutely take much more than acts of loving giving to overthrow capitalism. The importance of a diversity of tactics has been theorized for far longer than I have lived. In that spirit, I feel I must make special emphasis of the fact that during the aforementioned George Floyd riots in late May, all of the bad faith, mistrust, selfishness, and suspicion of one another was instantaneously, albeit fleetingly, abolished. Solidarity was revealed among total strangers, power erupted between and within us. Our ties to one another, despite our obvious differences (race, neighborhood, class), emerged with astounding clarity and the role of the state in enforcing capitalist relations could not have been made more plain to everyone downtown that day. Challenging police power, refusing to disperse, asserting our right to mourn as well as our willingness to get beat up, gassed, arrested, or worse (to give all?) in order to do so, risking social insolvency or financial devastation for a chance at communion, these are forceful enunciations of our intervitality, acts of love and of life and of faith that bring our bonds into focus, as well as sharply delineating the hostile forces opposing an emergent us.

With this, at last, we return to our original question with something approaching an answer: can we bring our constitutive ties up to the level of naked visibility without relying on the reactive transformational process of mourning? We would say, “yes.*” We’ve now seen how acts of loving giving can be used to assert our latent bonds to one another and reawaken a dormant solidarity and power. It can also be said that loving giving undercuts the entire chain of valorization and contains a vestigial communal logic, on top of prefiguring a world of abundance and cooperation. My utopian heart yearns to proclaim this to be one of the many possible modes of proactively attacking capitalist relations laid out before us, but as is usually the case in this type of thinking, it is more complicated than that. It must be noted that loving giving only contains such potential usefulness for our cause because it is predicated on the great historical and ongoing theft occurring all around us. The theft of our spirit, our ideas and inventiveness, our bodily energy and our human potential, our mortal life and the content of our dreams, and of our ability to reproduce ourselves in harmony with each other and with nature. In this way, it too is a reaction to a great loss. Loving giving only rings out with such piercing resonance in a world of theft and isolation. It follows that our righteous attack on capitalist relations in the form of loving giving is in fact an expression of mourning; it is our grieving the world that could be.

Good Faith and Song Maybe it is impossible to avoid mourning in our search of a politics that can bring us towards another, better world. Perhaps it is best not to run from our loss, for we have lost a lot and lose more every day. In a world literally founded upon mass theft and slaughter, maybe it is indeed the most materialist site upon which to build something new. Our collective loss is perhaps one of the few remaining things we truly share in a world devoted to the accumulation of difference and distinction. Though, in these parting words, I want to also suggest that these differences and distinctions between us need not be a source of division and that the way forward may not necessarily entail the submission of the singular to the collective. One month has passed since the George Floyd riots of May-June and a process of division, repression, and recuperation has largely played itself out. Save for a select few city centers (and bravo to them), the fires have been doused and the barricades have been removed. The rowdy, “problematic” elements comprising the protests leading edge have largely been held back or outright turned over to the authorities and despite the rather astonishingly measured criticisms of criminal property destruction, the practice has broadly been replaced by more “respectable” forms of protest. The role bad faith has played in the apparent quelling of righteous rebellion cannot be understated. With the exception, apparently, of Portland, Oregon, the capitalist state did not require its superior military technology nor a COINTELPRO level conspiracy (although I’m sure we will learn much in the decades to come about how government agencies managed the flows of information on social media) to bring this uprising to its knees. The bad faith of debt society acts to ensure our governability. Control is smuggled into our minds by the trojan horse of opportunity which is then invaded and colonized by the forces of debt. One of the first tasks for us then must be the supplanting of the system’s bad faith with our forceful good faith. Many have already begun work on this urgent adjustment. Evidence of this can be found in the internationally adopted protest slogan “no good cops, no bad protestors.” And as long as the fighting continues somewhere, presently in Portland and perhaps Atlanta, the spark of uprising still dances in the winds of this world’s chaos and all remains possible.

With these final lines, I hope to clarify how exactly we can characterize this good faith and trace what it could look like in practice. As I have hinted at above, the good faith this moment requires is not that which requires some type of submission to a preformatted gestalt. It is not the good faith of brotherhood or family, nor is it the good faith of a party or an army. What is needed is a unique form of good faith that embraces difference, that leverages our irreducible singularity towards a collective end. If we are indeed to strum and pluck at our ties to one another, revealing and (re)politicizing our interconstitution and forging a new rhythm by which we ascribe our lives new meaning, we will need the type of trust found only among a group of musicians, the good faith of a band. A band’s members develop a sense of faith in one another that does not necessarily depend upon adherence to a set program or a uniform skillset. When one member improvises, they are trusting the others to keep rhythm. This good faith must flow in both directions. At the same time, the other band members must be able to trust that the improvisation of the first musician will not ultimately lead the group beyond an unsalvageable point of no return or to a place that jeopardizes the entire performance. We have seen a very similar dialectic play out in the last few months of protest. Peaceful marches go nowhere without the militant, sometimes violent, radical edge to push things forwards, applying pressure and teasing out the contradictions of our system. Likewise, the most radical elements of a protest are easily isolated, villainized, and violently squashed without the cover and legitimacy of the less radical masses. This is a delicate balance, and it will not be struck every time. Someone hits a bad note, someone reaches for a spectacular flourish but doesn’t cleanly play it; this happens with the most seasoned and well rehearsed performers and it undoubtedly will happen in our novice first attempts at creating music together. Mistakes are relatively unimportant. What is important is what happens after. Do we stand by one another, trusting that our partners are doing what they believe right as best they can? Or do we point fingers, stop playing, and allow our efforts to disintegrate so as to avoid being lumped in with a “bad musician?” We only need to look at the last few months of unrest in this country to see that the latter spells disaster and unstoppable fascism.

A comrade asked me while looking over my shoulder as I write these parting words, “what is the nature of the song we are writing? How does it sound and what is it about?” I’ve been thinking about how best to respond to this, especially as I sit somewhat aghast at the anarchy in the above paragraphs, written by an ostensible communist. Here I must solely rely on my much deeper personal experience as an actual musician literally playing music with friends than on my limited theoretical capacity and relatively amateurish abilities as a writer and worse still, thinker. In this light, the answer emerges immediately: at this beginning stage, when we are just now learning how to play our respective instruments, albeit in a condition of extreme urgency, it does not yet matter. What is important is that we play, and play together, often, and with a spirit of openness and experimentation; building trust and solidarity and good faith and friendship while honing our respective skills, finding our specialized roles in a revolutionary assemblage. It is only in this playing together that a common taste and interest can emerge. Deciding on a rhythm or a theme for a project before ever getting into a room together to play would unquestionably be putting the cart before the horse and in the same way, thinking up a program or adopting a party line would be premature if it is not done in the context of an already ongoing collaborative struggle. We cannot yet know what new rhythms of living and sources of meaning await our discovery and pretending as if we do could actually preclude us from ever arriving at a song truly worthy of us and our respective dreams and desires. Until that time, we must begin to do the mystical, patient work of fostering the conditions for a blooming solidarity, incubating trust and friendship, meticulously cultivating an ecology of love. For love is the energy with which the ties between us vibrate. With practice, this vibration can be bent into a tone, in time and as our power multiplies, a tone becomes a chord and then, a phrase, and one day, a song will erupt forth from the space between us and all that’s within us, unmistakable and unending, and with that song will come a new rhythm to move through the world to. With practice, good faith, and determination the day will come when our music has filled the air and all that remains on earth for us to do is dance together and fall into love. Inshallah.

“Music is a peculiar mode of chaosmosis: the osmotic process of transforming chaos into harmony. Music’s process of signification is based on directly shaping the listener’s body-mind: music is psychedelic (meaning, etymologically, “mind-manifesting”). Music deploys in time, yet the reverse is also true: making music is the act of projecting time, of interknitting perceptions of time. Rhythm is the mental elaboration of time, the common code that links time perception and time projection.” -Franco Bifo Berardi

“Some thoughts have a certain sound, that being the equivalent to a form. Through sound and motion, you will be able to paralyze nerves, shatter bones, set fires, suffocate an enemy or burst his organs.” -Paul Mu’adib in David Lynch’s Dune (1984)

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anotherworldnowblog · 5 years ago

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VALENTINES DAY: A very short story

(January 25th, 2020)

The train slinks back underground with a rattle, then a rush, after its brief breach into the twinkling, brutal cityscape. My feet are swollen and my face sore from smiling and small talk and all I can think about is getting high when I get home. I slip my phone from my coffee stained jeans and tap it awake. My eyes go blurry for a split second but I can see well enough that I am not going to get a message back.

It’s Valentine’s Day and I’m going to spend it completely alone for the first time in recent memory. I look around the train car. The lights from the tunnel faintly strobe against the bright lit, plastic interior. I notice the car doesn’t smell half bad today. A good omen. The older, hispanic man dozing across from me is wearing the tell-tale signs of the service industry: dark, pinstriped, straight-cut trousers, comfortable black shoes with black laces. Back of house. His palms are up, open, and he is sliding a little further into the aisle with every lurch of the train. His day was probably far longer and harder than mine but right now, dreaming in the ABS injection molded plastic seat, he looks remarkably untroubled and almost boyish, cute.

Just as I turn to reach for my book, I hear the metallic clang of the emergency exit door’s lock disengage, followed by a gasping swoosh that then, almost instantly, becomes a roar, as if someone had fatally opened some spaceship’s sealed hatch. I instinctively look towards the noise, semi frozen: you really never know what’s going to come through those doors.

I see three people clamber through the noisy hole at the end of the train, dressed all in red and maroon. I realize that, above the commotion, familiar music had somehow begun to play. The cacophonous, industrial din of the train hurling through the underworld abruptly evaporates when the door swings shut behind the trio and I am now able to be sure that “This Magic Moment” by The Drifters is softly emanating from bluetooth speakers attached to one of the newcomer’s backpacks. It is at this point that I also am aware that they are masked.

“…until I kissed you!”

Not entirely sure yet what I’m witnessing, I keep my eyes trained on the three at the far end of the car. One is wearing a bright red ski mask, one a large pink and white scarf adorned with hearts, and the last a simple red bandana. The group begins to move up the train car towards my position in unison, stopping to hand something small to each of the worn out travelers uneasily monitoring their procession. I begin to relax some when I see a group of younger recipients laugh and through smiles, mouth what looked to be a “thank you.”

“…I knew that you felt it too By the look in your eyes…”

The group draws nearer still and I now can see what looked like a few dozen roses protruding out of the ski masked stranger’s backpack and that the person wearing the bandana, now obviously a dark-haired, young woman, is following close behind, passing out the blood red flowers to anyone who would accept.

“…Sweeter than wine (sweeter than wine) Softer than a summer night (softer than a summer night)…”

They finally reach me and I blankly, bewilderedly stare up at the three of them. I notice that my comrade across the aisle has awoken from his slumber and is now staring up at the cadre with me. I can make out enough of their eyes in between their masks and their hats to see that they are all smiling wide. The tall man with the pink and white scarf speaks softly as he hands me a small, homemade, heart-shaped card, “Happy Valentine’s Day.” The woman hands me a rose and squeezes my shoulder lovingly before turning her attention to the man seated opposite me. Her touch jolts me out of my stupor somewhat. I am surprised to notice it feels good. I realize that despite near constant proximity to my fellow travelers, coworkers, roommates, strangers, cops, I have not been touched, deliberately, in quite some time. Days? Weeks? Ever?

“…Everything I want to have (everything, everything) Whenever I hold you tight!”

I stare down at the card. On the front of the folded red construction paper is a small collage, mostly consisting of smaller hearts, a pair of lips, x’s and o’s. I open the flimsy red card and find bold, black text neatly staring back at me. The precision with which the words are inscribed is slightly jarring considering the rather humble and homemade vehicle by which these words traveled to me. It reads:

YOU DESERVE SO MUCH MORE THAN THIS MERECES MÁS QUE ESTO

I read and re-read the phrase, thinking I must have missed some key phrase or context. My lips curl and I can’t help but laugh out loud. The emergency exit door to my right clicks, whooshes, and roars open. I feel some colder, fresher air rush in as the masked philanthropists climb into the dim tunnel and towards the next car. The train is moving terrifyingly fast now.

“Forever, till the end of time!”

I spin the rose gently between my fingertips. Taped to the back of the card I find five dollars, a loose cigarette, and a post-script, neatly typed but much smaller than the prior message:

ANOTHER WORLD IS STILL POSSIBLE UN OTRO MUNDO ES TODAVÍA POSIBLE

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anotherworldnowblog · 5 years ago

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TOWARDS A THEORY OF A FEEDBACK LOOP OF GOOD VIBRATIONS!

(December 2019 - January 2020)

“The cult of competition must be replaced by the cult of solidarity and of sharing.” - Franco Berardi, Futurability

A knowing smile forms underneath my scarf when I pass the bike cop. I smile because I feel, deeply, that his days instilling terror from above us are numbered. Everything from the rusted, oozing “el” tracks to the fact that damn near the entire anti-war protest stopped to help when a younger marcher fell to the ground to the way you are looking at me right now is practically screaming out a song of love, life, and possibility. I allow this tingling, rushing feeling to fill me completely, from my calloused heels up to my swelling throat. I’m high from it. I have developed a new superpower. I can see hope everywhere now. I’m drunk with belief in us. Until experiencing it first hand, I might have been convinced that this level of hope was either dangerous, delusional, or - at the very least - unsustainable. That I’d fall into lazy paralysis and a misguided belief in the inevitability of a communist future. But that’s not really how hope works, I think.

Hope is not belief that something is actively happening (i.e. the end of global capitalism), nor is it rooted even in the odds of some potential outcome (i.e. the odds that ***** and I end up together forever). Hope flows out of the possible, indifferent of likelihood. “The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave” (Rebecca Solnit, Hope In The Dark). What comes next is still unwritten, and as long as that remains so, all possibilities are drawn into equivalence in their non-existence, their not-yet-happenedness. To say “anything is possible” is probably too much. As we have said elsewhere, the possible is inscribed in the present (Berardi). But I have never felt so sure that somewhere within the vast, twisting tree of the presently possible there lies at least a few better worlds. And signs seemingly affirming the existence of these possible worlds are blossoming around the globe and rebounding across its networks. Despite the neoliberal capitalists’ attempts to automate the course of history through financial trickery, ideology, and digitization, we are still here in the miserable present, and the future is just as not-here-yet, or “dark,” as ever.

I have come to believe that, at this late stage of capitalism, hope takes on meaning beyond the mere apprehension of a desirable possibility. It transcends its designation as an affective state and moves in the direction of duty and action, or praxis. The maturity of neoliberal capitalism, the pervasive twin logics of finance and digitization, and the social repercussions of existing within a near-Absolute network conjointly give rise to a moment where our hope for the abolition of the nightmarish “present state of things” can be carefully deployed as a weapon or tool for guiding latent possibility into The Really Existing. In the new economy, our sincere belief in the possibility of a future together founded upon ideals of love, global solidarity, and the broadest possible conception of the common good becomes the means of achieving the world we so clearly deserve.

After the neoliberal turn in the 1970’s and 80’s, there could be no doubt: financialization of the economy had fully decoupled the public good from private profit. Major financial institutions were now gambling against the people, at times against the state itself, and even against the very planet’s continued habitability. The economic foundation upon which emerges our society has been transformed by neoliberal capitalism into a depressing mixture of doubt, mistrust, bad faith (not to mention racialized violence, hyper-exploitation, and a politics of cynical inclusion utilizing a cybernetic panopticon). The pace of life quickened to keep up with a system that’s sole focus was short-term profit and ever faster circulation of capital. Drugs were invented to ensure workers’ ability to keep up with the new demands of an accelerating world. Work itself was transformed into an isolated, not to mention precarious, endeavor. Where there had once been factory floors there are now freelancers and independent contractors, where there had been careers there now only stands part-time or seasonal jobs, or “gigs.”

But more than just the physical terrain of work changed with the rise of neoliberalism; production itself was transformed. Today, “it is not use value but emotive or cultic value that plays a constitutive role in the economy of consumption… emotion comes to possess value for capitalism only when a switch to immaterial production occurs. Emotions have become a means of production only in our own times” (Byung-Chul Han, Psychopoltics). The means of production today is nebulous, hard to pin down, both within and without. Not just our personal property (a spare room, a car) but even a thought, a feeling, a relationship becomes a site of value creation. Everyone a means of production! We’re all now our own bosses, little self-contained enterprises, exploiting ourselves endlessly with every “like,” post, or reaction. As Han goes on to say later in the same chapter, “Emotions assume dimensions beyond the scope of use value. In so doing, they open up a field of consumption that is new and knows no limit.” Our emotional, inner selves, the sphere of our lives that used to be firmly our own despite our abysmal conditions as wage slaves has finally become raw material, food, for capital under neoliberalism. At the same time as our working lives have become unbearably precarious and anxiety appears to be the dominant feeling characterizing our moment, technologies are deployed that capture and weaponize that very anxiety against us for the sake of opening up new markets and expanding private profits.

All of this has given rise to an understandably paranoid, sad, lonely, and anxious population who are largely kept too busy and dejected to even take stock of their position or the rapid changes that have and continue to unfold around them, let alone begin organizing for a chance at a better future.

It is this sadness, isolation, exhaustion, and anxiety; this mistrust, bad faith, and simply the lack of faith in each other (or really much of anything) that constitutes the terrain upon which we will wage our revolution. The capitalists’ blind pursuit of speed and profit has sapped the life from, well, life. Our goal must be its prompt return.

“The front line no longer cuts through the middle of society; it now runs through each one of us…” -Tiqqun, This Is Not A Program

We currently lack the solidarity and technical capacity to break free of this system, but right this moment we do have the ability to begin to prefigure the type of world that comes next and we damn sure have the ability to share that vision with the world– the techno-capitalists made sure of that. In fact, the algorithmic particularities of the networked world make things more plausible or imaginable or possible the more they are seen as plausible or imaginable or possible. The possible is actually made more possible by appearing possible. Within the network, something is made more imaginable when it is imagined.

The networked world is constantly experiencing wild feedback loops (as well as the more insidious, controlled variety) where attention is concentrated, activity streamlined and spread, virally, and the impact of the initial action then exponentially exceeds any prior estimation based on the initial activity’s supposed or predicted potentiality.

Franco Berardi describes these feedback loops as “positive feedback” in his 2015 book, Heroes. He elaborates that,

“Contrary to negative feedback, which maintains stability in a dynamic system through a reduction of the exciting factors, positive feedback is a process in which the effects of a disturbance on a system result in an increase in the intensity of the factors which generate the disturbance. In other words: A produces more of B which in turn produces more of A. Thermal runaway, for instance, is a situation in which an increase in temperature provokes a further increase in temperature, often leading to a destructive result.”

Embodied in the vast architecture of the networked world there lies, not only the obvious apparatus of a Total surveillance and future counterrevolution, but a potential weapon for our side. In building a vast system of interlocking “social networks” governed by a logic of maximized engagement, the capitalists have inadvertently created a situation where possibility can be steered into being by a relatively small number of actors, in our case, revolutionary possibility.

For a decade now, we have unfortunately seen an accelerating positive feedback loop, a wave, fed by the contradictions inherent in American neoliberal capitalism, of horrifying racism mixed with extreme violence. This wave eventually brought us Trump, while globally, a similar phenomenon brought with it Brexit, BoJo, Viktor Orban, Bolsanaro, and most recently, a fascistic coup in Bolivia. But just as the ascent of neo-fascism seems all but guaranteed, we are now witnessing the explosive birth of what could be the beginnings of a global uprising against austerity and neoliberal capitalism. What began with the Gilets Jaunes in Paris, has spread to every corner of the inhabited world. Barricades are burning in Haiti, Mexico, Iraq, Lebanon, and Ecuador. We’ve seen techniques for resisting armed police invented and honed in Hong Kong (laser pointers, tear gas neutralization, umbrellas, etc.) adapted and deployed in Chile within days of each other. Just in the week of this essay’s writing we have seen a local movement for the abolition of public train and bus fares in Chile adopted in New York, and then Toronto, and then Chicago and Seattle. Protestors are bravely de-arrested in Hong Kong and immediately, the possibility of a refusal to be detained fans across the network. Within weeks, footage emerges in France during the general strike of the same: an assertive declination to being taken by the police, on the part of the people.

From every corner of the planet, images of dignified struggle and deep solidarity are being generated and shared, and the belief that another world is not just possible, but preferred, is accelerating through the network. The same is true of the idea that fighting the police is both plausible and necessary. The combination of a brutal, artificial scarcity imposed on the masses from above along with the previously unimaginable level of cognitive interconnectivity thanks to the internet and its social networks, has brought us to the cusp of what could legitimately be a revolutionary moment. And the artificial nature of that aforementioned scarcity is a reason for real confidence in ourselves.

This brings us, finally, to the feedback loop of good vibrations. It is possible, as Subcomandante Marcos once described, referring to the EZLN’s defiant existence as a loosely federated region of communes, that “a crack in history” is in the process of opening up. Capitalist Realism is very probably coming to an end. The contradictions inherent in neoliberal capitalism have become too great to simply smooth over with dreamwork and fentanyl. What comes now, be it fascism or, hopefully, something far more agreeable (Anarcho-communism? Library socialism? Green Stalinism?), is not yet decided. As we are seeing around the world, this is a global civil war. And as has been stated above, the terrain of this struggle is not just the places we work or live but the very feelings in our hearts and dreams in our minds. It is a war for our capacity to imagine and to love.

What is meant by the half tongue-in-cheek notion of a feedback loop of good vibrations is the recognition that our position as situated in a near-Total network can be leveraged towards the aim of steering something known as the Good Life into existence, or at least catalyse a new era of struggle for that Good Life. It is in some ways an inversion of pseudo-Marxist assumptions emerging out of the idea of base-superstructure, that posit culture as something always downstream from politics or economics. Financialization, digitization, and social networkification have conjointly created a situation where the cultural production of a society bleeds back into the political.

Financialization, meaning the increasing influence and size of the financial sector in relation to the overall composition of the economy, creates a pervasive logic of risk aversion, short-term gains, and general stupidity. Digitization prioritizes speed and thus linguistic simplicity and reproducibility. And social networkification results in a spectacular consolidation of global attention, incentivizes participation or inclusion, and turns what was previously known as the private sphere into public life. The confluence of these three forces is what gives us the potential for a feedback loop. Financialization first imbues the entire system with a preference for a “safe bet.” Financialization occuring in tandem with digitization means that this preference for a “safe bet” is algorithmically encoded into the (social) network. A “safe bet” in the era of social networkification is anything that captures human attention. This is where we see the system feedback into itself. Once tagged as a “safe bet,” the algorithm accelerates and concentrates attention within the network for maximum engagement and capture. The possible is actually made more possible by appearing possible.

Up until very recently, this “feedback loop” phenomenon was perhaps hard to spot because late into the era of Capitalist Realism, much of the cultural output of our society does little else than reaffirm the status quo, forming a negative feedback loop. This negative feedback loop has been alluded to by Mark Fisher as the “slow cancellation of the future” in his essays about cultural stagnation and anachronism. We have been stuck in a kind of flattened no-time. The end result is more of the same: limitless wealth for the few and deepening misery for the many. The effect is that financial capitalism becomes a self-regulated, stable system in that its continued existence is all that we are able to conceive of. In fact, it’s continued existence depends on this very dis-ability. It’s “stability” is only relative, obviously, as it is predicated on intensifying boom-bust cycles every 8-12 years and the destruction of the only life bearing planet we currently know of. Our inability to imagine anything beyond dystopia is what guarantees that the future will be a dystopia. That makes the first task for of our revolutionary effort relatively straightforward: imagine something else.

Literally anything else. This is not suggesting a praxis that is limited in its relevance to a specific style of post-capitalist formation. Communist utopia is not (and perhaps should never seek to be) the end of the political or problems, just the end of Capitalism, money, and scarcity. If you allow yourself, imagining utopia is easy. The communist horizon exists dormant within each of us, in our sociality as animals and in our capacity for love as humans. Our utopic vision is OUR vision. The next step is trickier: prefigure, embody, and evangelize that new world while stuck within this one and do so in such a way that leverages our position as unwillingly placed within a near Total network, towards our own, revolutionary ends (in some of the writing to follow this draft, we will use a variety of techniques, including and especially fiction, to describe what this could possibly look like).

There are two parts to the initial work I am referring specifically to here: the aforementioned “prefigurative” work, as well as “narrative” work. Narrative work is simply an attempt to tell a different story. It is when we dream of a better world and share that dream with another. It’s when we articulate a lack and thus a desire. It’s the work of stripping neoliberal capitalist ideology of its power. It’s when we reveal words like “pragmatic” and “sensible” and even “progressive” to be empty constructs and it is when we inject new life into words like “love” and “solidarity” and “trust.” Prefigurative work is more complicated. While this work typically consists of an attempt to embody a future world in the here and now, there is also an understanding that the embodiment will always be incomplete, and due to systemic limitations (the literal price of staying alive, more specifically) will often be unsustainable as well. Prefigurative actions are perhaps inherently performative. That doesn’t mean they can’t meet a real need or seek to deliver a real blow to capital. It is a flash vision of the normally hidden possibilities of other forms of life, uncovered for as long as we can hold them in stasis for common consideration.

But what does it mean for us to attempt this work in a time of immense interconnectivity and hyper-surveillance? What happens when nearly every action creates an image? Can prefigurative action be designed to achieve a certain resonance within the network? Can such an action go beyond the cynicism or doubt or bad faith of our system and exist as a monument to the ideals of a newly possible tomorrow? We already know that the local can overnight become the global thanks to the propensity of the social networks’ algorithms to accelerate. If social media has turned the private lives of individuals into public performances, can those multitudinous singularities, those infinite @’s, be arranged to represent and propagate new potentialities across the networked world?

It at least seems possible.

At long last, we arrive at what I hesitate to even call a theory, so for now let’s call it a hunch. The hunch is this: performative belief in the possibility of a better world actually makes that world more possible, specifically due to the networked, financialized system we currently struggle under.

“What is to be done?” Take care of one another and attempt to narrow the space capitalism carves out between us. The space between us and our better world and the space between each of us is one and the same.

An action creates an image. Every image creates a ripple. Every ripple can become a wave.

“Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance. Something that is constituted here resonates with the shock wave emitted by something constituted over there.… An insurrection is not like a plague or a forest fire — a linear process which spreads from place to place after an initial spark. It rather takes the shape of a music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythms of their own vibrations, always taking on more density.”

-The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

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