workers' power
“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason.
Or it can be thrown through the window.”
“'It is the first time,' said Burke, 'that we have seen men tear their country into shreds in such a barbarous fashion.' In fact, while they seemed to be dismembering living bodies, they were only butchering dead flesh.”— Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the Revolution
Proposition I: THE WORKER
Now, paradoxically, as opposed to during the Industrial Age when capitalism was burgeoning, it has become apparent that we have been robbed of our finitude, our health, and our freedom. Capital robs us of our potentiality, while simultaneously singing songs of potentiality.
Capital has absorbed everything; only the commodity roams free. The worker is everywhere; but everywhere, she feels impotent. Empire has not only been able to geographically proliferate capital, spreading it out over all lands, willing or not. Accordingly, capital has become internalized. The ideology of individualism is converted into a form of life—and on a massive, global, scale. Even to the extent that we have to ask “what exactly is a worker?” A worker almost loses her meaning inside of Empire--everyone is put to work. The concept of the worker develops beyond all substance. All that mankind does is work--long, tedious, boring, draining work.
“Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labor, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” — Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Every aspect of capitalized, imperialized civilization is work. From the classroom, to the office, into the prisons: WORK. (n.) a servitude obsessed with its ability to manufacture the archetype of products: docility, precision, and rapidity. The idiosyncrasies of every individual are merely work, only differing based on their type of work. The prisons reflect the outside, while existing as a deflection from our inner prisoner.
We are inmates and the images of inmates.
In the schools, we pay in hopes of getting paid. In the prisons, we work in hope of earning “free time,” or at least a distraction from the cell. On the internet, we hope to get work. At work, we hope to get free time. When we are at the bar, we are working to gain social capital. In the bedroom, we work so he owes us a favor, in hopes of getting what we want in return. Everything is a means to an end; but the end never arrives. The regime of work is omnipresent: nothing is done for free, therefore no one has freedom. The automatization and immanence of work thrust themselves upon the worker as Capital dances to the sounds of their backs breaking.
Proposition II: CIVIL WAR
“It's over, don't you get that? Your times is over and you're gonna die bloody, and all you can do is choose where.”— Sheriff Ray Bledsoe, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
“Scandalous, money greed and lust
In this trife life, there ain't nobody you can trust
Plus there's no justice, it's just us
In fact, watchin' yo back it be must
And each and everyday around the way gats bust
And jealous so-called friends'll try to set you up
It`s called betrayal”-- Gangstarr, Betrayal
The 2012 Olympic Games in London, one of the most overt forms of internationalized spectacle (a group of militants called it a “spectacle of wealth”), at first, were met by blasé, latent indignation. Once those on the front lines were pushed to their threshold, the spectacle was threatened, and thus it came to the brink of crumbling in a very mediated form: a group of militants released a press release claiming, “We don’t want rich tourists — we want civil war.” It seemed as if the “authorities” found this portent by a open but small assemblage of workers (“No union or movement calls our shots,” they claimed) to block the flows of the metropolis profoundly threatening. It is easy to exhibit (even via media) the vulnerability of the State. Nobody said war requires guns; it requires acts. This often happens within the indistinguishability of the activity, or the threat, of civil war.
Although civil war is imposed upon us, it still operates as a locus for the concentration of singularities. Civil war is the focal point in which insurrection burst out at the seams.
Environmental catastrophe, economic crises, apocalypse, WAR. It is going on all around you—even within you.“It'll be over soon, I just know it.” Betrayal is just an attempt to evade choosing sides--to chase indifference. This only ends in being on the wrong side of the war. Nevertheless, betrayal is just a euphemism for the war at hand. The composite body that we consider culture can only communicate through a spectacle. Our cluster of solitary independences (Ayn Rand-possessed automatons) that we consider “society” propagates itself upon itself. It doesn't end; the civil war never ends, unless we become the (multi-dimensional, multi-axial, unrecognizable, cacophonous) war. This is how justice-fallow farmland becomes a battlefield: war is the total absence of justice (i.e., efficiency saying who has legitimate power).
Our aim, however, is not to even the playing field, but to flower this desolate terrain through the intensification of struggle: that's what we call solidarity. We built this world, and we can do it again.
We refuse to wait. Our time is now!
Proposition III: INSURRECTION
“I already told you, uncle dear, that we don't recognize any authorities,” interposed Arkady.
“We act by virtue of what we recognize as useful,” went on Bazarov. “At the present the most
useful thing is denial, so we deny—”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
In the era of the “War on Terror,” it is difficult to begin an explication of insurrection without first confronting counterinsurgency.
There is a threat of terror that posits terrorism, and a terrorism that preserves the threat of terror, a counterinsurgency that preserves insurgency. Namely, counterinsurgency creates what it claims to combat.
Despite the deus ex machina of dialectical materialism, liberalism, or the promises vomited by leftism in general: capitalism is in crisis—again.
The narrative of dialectical materialism—beginning in the Medieval era—predicted a gradual change through the inevitable conflict of the worker and the owner of the means of production. We acknowledge this could engender stagnation. Our ambition is to crystallize our epoch: “The calendar does not therefore count time like clocks. They are monuments of a historical awareness, of which there has not seemed to be the slightest trace for a hundred years. Yet in the July Revolution an incident took place which did justice to this consciousness. During the evening of the first skirmishes, it turned out that the clock-towers were shot at independently and simultaneously in several places in Paris. An eyewitness who may have owed his inspiration to the rhyme wrote at that moment:
Who would've thought! As though
Angered by time's way
The new Joshuas
Beneath each tower, they say
Fired at the dials
To stop the day.”
— Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History
Insurrection seems to operate as this fundamental axiom: a continuous break in the quotidian. This event, attacking while concurrently exiting, seems to carve a mark into the matrix of history. In our own epoch, this revolutionary exodus is not only the act of leaving capitalism, but also defending against capital's habitual restructuring, self-revision, and prefigurative resurrection. Insurrection, coming from the late Latin insurgere, meaning “to rise up,” distinguishes itself from a resurrection (from the Anglo-French, resurrectiun, meaning “the Resurrection of Christ,” and more directly, from the church Latin resurrectionem, “a rising again from the dead,” the noun of action from the past participle stem of Latin resurgere, “rise again, appear again”). We constantly see resurgences, but you only see a insurgence once.
To embody the logic of insurrection, we must no longer wait, or hope, but build a material force.
The phantasmagoria of contemporary leftism is in its ability to misappropriate radical rhetoric while perpetuating its feebleness.
They talk a big game, but aren't worth shit.
Wherever they stand—the streets, the parliaments, the studio, the apartment, the cafe, the ballot box, the office, the fast-food line, the border, the factory--they stand with their heads hanging.
Our epoch is the epoch in which we refuse to be used as shields and free labor for the activist cause. Our exodus from their social ghettos will be the illumination of their triviality; our exit from their mantras will be the maxim for true progress. Drawing the line between ourselves and our enemies will allow us to operate in the rift between the State and the multitude.
Proposition IV: COMMUNISM
“The world is neither true nor real but living.”- Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy
“The weakness of anarchist and Marxian critiques of the State was precisely to have not caught sight of this structure and thus to have quickly left the arcanum imperii aside, as if it had no substance outside of the simulacra and the ideologies invoked to justify it. But one ends up identifying with an enemy whose structure one does not understand, and the theory of the State (and in particular the state of exception, which is to say, of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the transitional phase leading to a stateless society) is the reef on which the revolutions of our time have been shipwrecked.”- Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power & Bare Life
Communism — a classless, stateless society. The use of such vague terms as “classless” and “stateless” does not require an exposition of the historiography or rudimentary forms of a State or classes. The ambiguities invoked by the idea, or the linguistic ideologies, behind the notions of the State or of class mean that we understand these notions as terminologies rather than terms. The lack of linguistic stability (or rather, its semantical state) around the idea of communism allows for experimentation, creativity, and democracy—communism's constant reformulation. This does not entail a preferability for synchronic methodology rather than a diachronic methodology. On the contrary, it means a participatory, anti-reductive methodology.
So communism does not require Marx. Furthermore, despite what seems irreversible, communism does not necessitate the Soviet Union. Moreover, the Soviets were by no means a vessel for communistic expression. The Soviet Union distorted communism as an aegis for weak Leninist theory, purged of any Marxology at all. Furthermore, Stalin used communism for protection—for cover—every time the specter of state-induced (and sponsored!) capitalism stuck its foul head out.
The withering away of the true specter of communism by those who called themselves “communist” proved far more destructive than the White Army; thus, the Kronstadt rebellion happened. What is often considered “war communism” is just an exhibition of the frustrations and failures of the Bolsheviks. A single party can never elaborate or further a culture. As history presents to us, for better or for worse, it takes the multitude to pursue such an ominous task.
To build a force. To use our power. To love each other madly. To help a comrade. To mend her wounds. To introduce yourself to a stranger, without the medium or pretext of money. The annihilation of alterity. To just be there for someone. To, at all times, destroy every form of domination. To unfetter discourse. To elaborate sharing. To spread anarchy. To live.
For every school, workplace, town, friendship, prison, family, border—we have an alternative. It is not enough anymore that we just accept the transformation of ourselves into postmodernist commodities without doing something about it, without a politics of participating. As we tear away the shackles of the old world, we must build a world without chains. We must compose powers that counter and perfectly mirror and subvert the powers that control. To truly destroy the edifices of the State, we must simultaneously construct our own edifices. In the schools, have true discourse. In the workplace, kick out the boss. In the streets, fight off the poli-migra. In your community, manifest real participation.
(Let us clarify; inasmuch as we believe in molecular revolution, we only see the lifestyle of insurrection as a means to insurrection en masse. The counter-powers are just our infrastructure to maintain communism on a large scale.)
All relationships are political. This is not our choice, but our reality.
To love is not to love someone’s predicates, to point out features, to characterize.
To love is not to abstract qualities.
To love is to wholly love. This is not a goal, but an aim. This is the society we will build. To reject the notion of qualification and evaluation is antipode to the capitalist relation. This is what we desire. That is what we mean by communism. That is how we build counter-powers. That is how we build the communes.
All power to the communes!
Or it can be thrown through the window.”
“'It is the first time,' said Burke, 'that we have seen men tear their country into shreds in such a barbarous fashion.' In fact, while they seemed to be dismembering living bodies, they were only butchering dead flesh.”— Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Régime and the Revolution
Proposition I: THE WORKER
Now, paradoxically, as opposed to during the Industrial Age when capitalism was burgeoning, it has become apparent that we have been robbed of our finitude, our health, and our freedom. Capital robs us of our potentiality, while simultaneously singing songs of potentiality.
Capital has absorbed everything; only the commodity roams free. The worker is everywhere; but everywhere, she feels impotent. Empire has not only been able to geographically proliferate capital, spreading it out over all lands, willing or not. Accordingly, capital has become internalized. The ideology of individualism is converted into a form of life—and on a massive, global, scale. Even to the extent that we have to ask “what exactly is a worker?” A worker almost loses her meaning inside of Empire--everyone is put to work. The concept of the worker develops beyond all substance. All that mankind does is work--long, tedious, boring, draining work.
“Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labor, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” — Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Every aspect of capitalized, imperialized civilization is work. From the classroom, to the office, into the prisons: WORK. (n.) a servitude obsessed with its ability to manufacture the archetype of products: docility, precision, and rapidity. The idiosyncrasies of every individual are merely work, only differing based on their type of work. The prisons reflect the outside, while existing as a deflection from our inner prisoner.
We are inmates and the images of inmates.
In the schools, we pay in hopes of getting paid. In the prisons, we work in hope of earning “free time,” or at least a distraction from the cell. On the internet, we hope to get work. At work, we hope to get free time. When we are at the bar, we are working to gain social capital. In the bedroom, we work so he owes us a favor, in hopes of getting what we want in return. Everything is a means to an end; but the end never arrives. The regime of work is omnipresent: nothing is done for free, therefore no one has freedom. The automatization and immanence of work thrust themselves upon the worker as Capital dances to the sounds of their backs breaking.
Proposition II: CIVIL WAR
“It's over, don't you get that? Your times is over and you're gonna die bloody, and all you can do is choose where.”— Sheriff Ray Bledsoe, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
“Scandalous, money greed and lust
In this trife life, there ain't nobody you can trust
Plus there's no justice, it's just us
In fact, watchin' yo back it be must
And each and everyday around the way gats bust
And jealous so-called friends'll try to set you up
It`s called betrayal”-- Gangstarr, Betrayal
The 2012 Olympic Games in London, one of the most overt forms of internationalized spectacle (a group of militants called it a “spectacle of wealth”), at first, were met by blasé, latent indignation. Once those on the front lines were pushed to their threshold, the spectacle was threatened, and thus it came to the brink of crumbling in a very mediated form: a group of militants released a press release claiming, “We don’t want rich tourists — we want civil war.” It seemed as if the “authorities” found this portent by a open but small assemblage of workers (“No union or movement calls our shots,” they claimed) to block the flows of the metropolis profoundly threatening. It is easy to exhibit (even via media) the vulnerability of the State. Nobody said war requires guns; it requires acts. This often happens within the indistinguishability of the activity, or the threat, of civil war.
Although civil war is imposed upon us, it still operates as a locus for the concentration of singularities. Civil war is the focal point in which insurrection burst out at the seams.
Environmental catastrophe, economic crises, apocalypse, WAR. It is going on all around you—even within you.“It'll be over soon, I just know it.” Betrayal is just an attempt to evade choosing sides--to chase indifference. This only ends in being on the wrong side of the war. Nevertheless, betrayal is just a euphemism for the war at hand. The composite body that we consider culture can only communicate through a spectacle. Our cluster of solitary independences (Ayn Rand-possessed automatons) that we consider “society” propagates itself upon itself. It doesn't end; the civil war never ends, unless we become the (multi-dimensional, multi-axial, unrecognizable, cacophonous) war. This is how justice-fallow farmland becomes a battlefield: war is the total absence of justice (i.e., efficiency saying who has legitimate power).
Our aim, however, is not to even the playing field, but to flower this desolate terrain through the intensification of struggle: that's what we call solidarity. We built this world, and we can do it again.
We refuse to wait. Our time is now!
Proposition III: INSURRECTION
“I already told you, uncle dear, that we don't recognize any authorities,” interposed Arkady.
“We act by virtue of what we recognize as useful,” went on Bazarov. “At the present the most
useful thing is denial, so we deny—”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
In the era of the “War on Terror,” it is difficult to begin an explication of insurrection without first confronting counterinsurgency.
There is a threat of terror that posits terrorism, and a terrorism that preserves the threat of terror, a counterinsurgency that preserves insurgency. Namely, counterinsurgency creates what it claims to combat.
Despite the deus ex machina of dialectical materialism, liberalism, or the promises vomited by leftism in general: capitalism is in crisis—again.
The narrative of dialectical materialism—beginning in the Medieval era—predicted a gradual change through the inevitable conflict of the worker and the owner of the means of production. We acknowledge this could engender stagnation. Our ambition is to crystallize our epoch: “The calendar does not therefore count time like clocks. They are monuments of a historical awareness, of which there has not seemed to be the slightest trace for a hundred years. Yet in the July Revolution an incident took place which did justice to this consciousness. During the evening of the first skirmishes, it turned out that the clock-towers were shot at independently and simultaneously in several places in Paris. An eyewitness who may have owed his inspiration to the rhyme wrote at that moment:
Who would've thought! As though
Angered by time's way
The new Joshuas
Beneath each tower, they say
Fired at the dials
To stop the day.”
— Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History
Insurrection seems to operate as this fundamental axiom: a continuous break in the quotidian. This event, attacking while concurrently exiting, seems to carve a mark into the matrix of history. In our own epoch, this revolutionary exodus is not only the act of leaving capitalism, but also defending against capital's habitual restructuring, self-revision, and prefigurative resurrection. Insurrection, coming from the late Latin insurgere, meaning “to rise up,” distinguishes itself from a resurrection (from the Anglo-French, resurrectiun, meaning “the Resurrection of Christ,” and more directly, from the church Latin resurrectionem, “a rising again from the dead,” the noun of action from the past participle stem of Latin resurgere, “rise again, appear again”). We constantly see resurgences, but you only see a insurgence once.
To embody the logic of insurrection, we must no longer wait, or hope, but build a material force.
The phantasmagoria of contemporary leftism is in its ability to misappropriate radical rhetoric while perpetuating its feebleness.
They talk a big game, but aren't worth shit.
Wherever they stand—the streets, the parliaments, the studio, the apartment, the cafe, the ballot box, the office, the fast-food line, the border, the factory--they stand with their heads hanging.
Our epoch is the epoch in which we refuse to be used as shields and free labor for the activist cause. Our exodus from their social ghettos will be the illumination of their triviality; our exit from their mantras will be the maxim for true progress. Drawing the line between ourselves and our enemies will allow us to operate in the rift between the State and the multitude.
Proposition IV: COMMUNISM
“The world is neither true nor real but living.”- Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy
“The weakness of anarchist and Marxian critiques of the State was precisely to have not caught sight of this structure and thus to have quickly left the arcanum imperii aside, as if it had no substance outside of the simulacra and the ideologies invoked to justify it. But one ends up identifying with an enemy whose structure one does not understand, and the theory of the State (and in particular the state of exception, which is to say, of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the transitional phase leading to a stateless society) is the reef on which the revolutions of our time have been shipwrecked.”- Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power & Bare Life
Communism — a classless, stateless society. The use of such vague terms as “classless” and “stateless” does not require an exposition of the historiography or rudimentary forms of a State or classes. The ambiguities invoked by the idea, or the linguistic ideologies, behind the notions of the State or of class mean that we understand these notions as terminologies rather than terms. The lack of linguistic stability (or rather, its semantical state) around the idea of communism allows for experimentation, creativity, and democracy—communism's constant reformulation. This does not entail a preferability for synchronic methodology rather than a diachronic methodology. On the contrary, it means a participatory, anti-reductive methodology.
So communism does not require Marx. Furthermore, despite what seems irreversible, communism does not necessitate the Soviet Union. Moreover, the Soviets were by no means a vessel for communistic expression. The Soviet Union distorted communism as an aegis for weak Leninist theory, purged of any Marxology at all. Furthermore, Stalin used communism for protection—for cover—every time the specter of state-induced (and sponsored!) capitalism stuck its foul head out.
The withering away of the true specter of communism by those who called themselves “communist” proved far more destructive than the White Army; thus, the Kronstadt rebellion happened. What is often considered “war communism” is just an exhibition of the frustrations and failures of the Bolsheviks. A single party can never elaborate or further a culture. As history presents to us, for better or for worse, it takes the multitude to pursue such an ominous task.
To build a force. To use our power. To love each other madly. To help a comrade. To mend her wounds. To introduce yourself to a stranger, without the medium or pretext of money. The annihilation of alterity. To just be there for someone. To, at all times, destroy every form of domination. To unfetter discourse. To elaborate sharing. To spread anarchy. To live.
For every school, workplace, town, friendship, prison, family, border—we have an alternative. It is not enough anymore that we just accept the transformation of ourselves into postmodernist commodities without doing something about it, without a politics of participating. As we tear away the shackles of the old world, we must build a world without chains. We must compose powers that counter and perfectly mirror and subvert the powers that control. To truly destroy the edifices of the State, we must simultaneously construct our own edifices. In the schools, have true discourse. In the workplace, kick out the boss. In the streets, fight off the poli-migra. In your community, manifest real participation.
(Let us clarify; inasmuch as we believe in molecular revolution, we only see the lifestyle of insurrection as a means to insurrection en masse. The counter-powers are just our infrastructure to maintain communism on a large scale.)
All relationships are political. This is not our choice, but our reality.
To love is not to love someone’s predicates, to point out features, to characterize.
To love is not to abstract qualities.
To love is to wholly love. This is not a goal, but an aim. This is the society we will build. To reject the notion of qualification and evaluation is antipode to the capitalist relation. This is what we desire. That is what we mean by communism. That is how we build counter-powers. That is how we build the communes.
All power to the communes!
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