I think now the difference between our approaches is becoming clear.
On the one hand, I would say that I don't terribly disagree with most of
your critique concerning the fetishization of pure potential and revolt,
and perhaps our disagreement simply has to do with how we imagine the
historical relationship between, for example, occupy and the DSA, or from
your example, 15-M and Barcelona en Comú. My argument would be that the
latter in each case would have been unthinkable absent of the periods of
revolt that preceded them (and the new kinds of subjectivity they
produced), and to conceptualize them as being historically distinct or
disconnected in some fashion would be to make the same mistake that people
make when they claim that revolt is purely spontaneous whereas in actuality
they emerge from long traditions and ongoing (often less than visible)
forms of organization.
I'm by no means a purist, and I don't think it's foolish or a mistake to
participate in DSA or any of the many moving parts of the municipalist
movement in Barcelona, which is itself of course now reaching its own
limits. Rather, if you were to ask me what I would think is required in the
present, I would certainly lean towards the forms of revolt we experienced
and lived following the 2008 crisis simply because that's where novel
subjectivities and concepts can be produced. That isn't to say that I think
revolt will be the only way forward, but that it's a necessary part in the
cycle/sequence of struggles (call it the deterritorialization wing of the
left if you'd prefer) that creates new opportunities for new kinds of
social formation to emerge (that pesky bit neccesary reterritorialization).
The forms that emerged postoccupy in the U.S. are certainly an improvement,
but I don't think they'll go much further than a few marginal electoral
wins unless the struggle that made them possible is broadened and
generalized.
I suppose I would like to reiterate my initial point again: things like the
the DSA (and the Democratic party) are neccesary but insufficient. Yes,
let's push for socialism and broader forms of organization, because
certainly our problems require that scale of coordination, but let's also
not trick ourselves into believing that these will be able to adequately
address and respond to the intensity of the situation we find ourselves
within. When fascists march in the streets, when climate change renders
entire regions of the earth unliveable, and when democracies become
increasingly corrupt and compromised, let's not invest so heavily in the
diminishing potential of recuperative/incorporative politics.
In solidarity, because it's the only thing we've ever had or needed,
~i
On Aug 4, 2018 22:48, "Brian Holmes" <[email protected]> wrote:
On Sat, Aug 4, 2018 at 9:05 PM, Ian Alan Paul <[email protected]> wrote:
> We need more movements that, as Michael Hardt has described it, allow us
> to become monstrous, to become something different and unrecognizable, to
> become truly transformed, and from there things will follow. The point is
> not that the human microphones cannot challenge state power, but rather
> that state power must reckon with what is beyond its organization.
>
Ha ha, so we disagree almost entirely but no matter! It's good to discuss.
I worked with Toni Negri and the larger autonomist group in Paris and in
Europe for years. Unfortunately they repeated the same things over and
over, like a religion. Meanwhile the world around changed in ways that had
nothing to do with that repetition. When I saw that we had no chance
whatsoever of seizing the famous "kairos" of a first-order historical
event, namely the epochal crisis of 2008, I decided it was time for me to
go back to the States and start engaging with other problems. We couldn't
seize the moment because we had such poor, outdated knowledge of how
contemporary society was organized, technologically, economically and
politically.
What I learned from that experience is that grassroots action, or molecular
revolution or whatever you want to call it, is capable of opening up a
potential, rather like art does. This is an extremely valuable thing, on
that we do agree. However, a potential that remains a potential, remains
irrelevant to determinant social reality, which is an operative function.
Negri was keenly aware of this and when some fresh and amazing revolt would
happen he would ask, But where are the new forms of organization? I found
that question fascinating, the way a dissonant note in music can sometimes
be, because in fact the autonomous discourse was almost entirely about the
potential of revolt. The revolt happened a lot. The reorganization of daily
life on the metropolitan or national scale, a lot less. Organization, to
the extent there was any, remained on a micro-scale, most often (but not
always) subject to the typical "tyranny of structurelessness" that has
afflicted radical left consensus-based processes since the Sixties.
Now, that did not happen to everyone who was influenced by autonomia. Case
in point: the folks in Barcelona who actually got themselves elected to the
city and national-state government. It has not been easy for them by any
means, but they have been able to go far beyond the circles of committed
anarchists and professional NGOs, toward ordinary people whose terrible
conditions have been and continue to be addressed by them in all kinds of
very concrete ways. To do this they had to adopt a discourse and a way of
acting that could probably be described as a form of democratic socialism.
I don't know if any of them would agree, so let them speak up. In my
understanding it means you attempt to institute universally applicable
means for attaining conditions of relative equality between the inhabitants
of a given territory, while at the same time permitting and actively
supporting continuous debate about what the goals are, and whether the
means adopted really achieve those goals.
I don't mean to be aggressive, Ian, but your declarations strike me as a
kind of fetishization of potential. Meanwhile I am afraid that state power
doesn't give a damn about "what is beyond its organization." Rather, it
focuses on what it can concretely shape, which covers most of the surface
of everyday economic relations, a significant part of corporate activity,
and almost all of international relations - ie the major determinant forces
that weigh on our struggling human potentials.
You could respond, but corporate activity is irrelevant, they are even
worse than the state, the absolute enemy. But if you can do nothing about
what your enemy does, while your enemy can decisively shape the behavior of
the majority of your fellow human beings, then where exactly is your power?
The only answer that can sustain your discourse at that point is: "Our
power lies in an as-yet unrealized potential, which is getting bigger day
by day." And this is the answer consistently delivered by people who do not
want to learn anything from their organizational experiments at micro
scale, but rather, just repeat and repeat and repeat the experiment.
You know, this is the reason why 68-style anarchy flourishes in art schools
and in philosophy or literature departments, just as much as it does in
squats and on the streets. We expect art to be a pure experiment, and we
expect philosophy to produce radically new and untested concepts. But when
the concepts, like the experiments, are the same over and over again, I
start to think it's just bad art and bad philosophy. Our maybe, to put this
more generously, it's just outdated art and outdated philosophy. It's kind
of hard to find a nice way to say this, so instead I just say exactly what
I have concluded. The idea about monstruosity originates not from Michael
Hardt but from Toni Negri, it forms the basis of his political philosophy
as well as his aesthetics, and he has repeated it for a long long time. It
conveyed an amazing power of revolt in its day - I imagine you have read
those unforgettable texts in "Books for Burning," they are worth reading.
But the infinite plasticity of human existence and the "difference that
goes on differing" (one of our catchphrases at Multitudes) just ends in
randomness, exactly like the libertarian utopia in which every actor does
what they want, there is no coordination between anyone, only the
expression of singular and monstruous desires, and so it's just burn the
fossil fuels, baby, burn. The wild desires that flourish on the
anarcho-libertarian spectrum preoccupied much of civil society for decades.
Meanwhile corporate and financial capital reorganized themselves decisively
and reshaped the state in their own image, rendering the theoretical
distinction between the state and capital into a kind of tautology, and
thereby leading us to the current desperate pass.
So if you think that the thing to do with Occupy, is just occupy some more,
and hope it'll be bigger and more intense and more full of potential than
the last time, you're kidding yourself man! The thing to do right now is to
turn widespread dissatisfaction and a very clear perception of the sources
of injustice into an organizational force that can change the corporate
state.
Anyway, please excuse the rather direct critique, it's philosophical rather
than personal and I continue to think that solidarity is a very good word,
Brian
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