Five Provisional Theses on the Politics of Communism
Two excellent posts from Angela and then k-punk. Common to both, a shared desire - namely, for a politics of communism proper. This desire can be summarized in the form of the following theses:
1. A refusal of the politics and rhetorics of ressentiment. Such speech is henceforth defined as theoretically anathema to communism proper, and pragmatically anathema to action. The dialetics of ressentiment thus so considered can still be recognized as expressive testimony - like the screaming of a wounded angel - and thus can still be affirmed as actual on that basis, but is rejected from being understood as a representation itself as the real expression of the politics of communism proper.
2. A refusal of nationalism, both ideologically and categorically. The refusal extends as well to the notion of internationalism - so considered as a negation of the ideology of nation which nonetheless still remains dependent on the nation-form. The nation-form cannot be used to ground a properly communist politics.
3. An additional refusal to ground communism also in terms either of an idea or a name. This refusal is incorporative both of the idea of socialism and the name of Marx. The nature of this refusal is a strategic one, and represents the drawing of a axiom so designed as to prevent the signifier communism from sliding into an idealist dialectics of either authenticity or fidelity. Henceforth, communism so considered is to be designated neither as a transcendent gurantee, nor as a internal critique, but rather as an immanent condition, a real movement, a ceaseless practice. Thus both utopianism and apocalypticism - so designated as the fantastic therapeutic pallitatives of capitalism itself, rather than communism proper - are henceforth bracketed as inessential and misleading.
4. A refusal of morality and a commensurate reiteration of the problematic of desire. In this, again, a rejection of the politics of authenticity - a politics really more fascist than communist - and the commensurate reiteration that the politics of communism so considered must be recognized as an immanent and ontological concern. The question of desire is thus reiterated on a cartographic basis, in the terms of the essential stellar orient thought to be inseperable from the very definition of a situation as such.
5. A commensurate privileging of resistance above knowledge, in terms of that quantity so designated to be the fundamental unit of revolutionary theory/practice. So defined, resistance is recognized in terms of an affirmative desire itself, rather than the negation of desire. Correlatively, the concept of proleteriat is thus reiterated along these lines in the terms of a resisting agency - that which is, but which does not exist. Hence, the proleteriat is thus defined in the terms of that inexistent element, thought in some sense to be immanent to all and every situation.
1. A refusal of the politics and rhetorics of ressentiment. Such speech is henceforth defined as theoretically anathema to communism proper, and pragmatically anathema to action. The dialetics of ressentiment thus so considered can still be recognized as expressive testimony - like the screaming of a wounded angel - and thus can still be affirmed as actual on that basis, but is rejected from being understood as a representation itself as the real expression of the politics of communism proper.
2. A refusal of nationalism, both ideologically and categorically. The refusal extends as well to the notion of internationalism - so considered as a negation of the ideology of nation which nonetheless still remains dependent on the nation-form. The nation-form cannot be used to ground a properly communist politics.
3. An additional refusal to ground communism also in terms either of an idea or a name. This refusal is incorporative both of the idea of socialism and the name of Marx. The nature of this refusal is a strategic one, and represents the drawing of a axiom so designed as to prevent the signifier communism from sliding into an idealist dialectics of either authenticity or fidelity. Henceforth, communism so considered is to be designated neither as a transcendent gurantee, nor as a internal critique, but rather as an immanent condition, a real movement, a ceaseless practice. Thus both utopianism and apocalypticism - so designated as the fantastic therapeutic pallitatives of capitalism itself, rather than communism proper - are henceforth bracketed as inessential and misleading.
4. A refusal of morality and a commensurate reiteration of the problematic of desire. In this, again, a rejection of the politics of authenticity - a politics really more fascist than communist - and the commensurate reiteration that the politics of communism so considered must be recognized as an immanent and ontological concern. The question of desire is thus reiterated on a cartographic basis, in the terms of the essential stellar orient thought to be inseperable from the very definition of a situation as such.
5. A commensurate privileging of resistance above knowledge, in terms of that quantity so designated to be the fundamental unit of revolutionary theory/practice. So defined, resistance is recognized in terms of an affirmative desire itself, rather than the negation of desire. Correlatively, the concept of proleteriat is thus reiterated along these lines in the terms of a resisting agency - that which is, but which does not exist. Hence, the proleteriat is thus defined in the terms of that inexistent element, thought in some sense to be immanent to all and every situation.
6 Comments:
hi Josef,
You and I have really different idioms and I think points of reference, so I don't follow a fair portion of this.
My own notes to self on what I think I mean about communism are linked below, if you're interested. While some of this I've since become less satisfied with, it's the clearest statement I've got on what I think:
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2005/08/21/a-communist/
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2005/08/21/is-communism/
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2005/09/28/is-the-use-of-a-nouveaux-abcs-of-communis/
Here's my over all response to your piece here. First, is this to be considered one potentially useful way to talk about communism, or the truth/essence of communism?
And, is this a program referencing a to-come or a description referencing an actually-existing/always-already? (Communism shall be or communism is?)
In general, you identify a number of things communism is not. Can those things become communism, in a type of transition to communism? If so, then the denunciations of those things has a different status. If not, then what are the different relations between the various not-communisms and communism (some are misleading, some are inessential, some are presumably blockages, but which noncommunisms have which status?), and do these vary with time and place or are they true for all time?
Your final two lines are way beyond me. The proletariat as in every situation, do you mean this literally (that which you call the proletariat is an intra-situational position/function/potential that is immanent to every situation) or metaphorically (there is an existing proletariat and the proletariat also provides a name for the trans-situational intra-situational something)?
Yours,
Nate
How about:
1. What in the hell is a situation?
2. What in the hell is the proleteriat?
hi Josef,
Re: the first, I'll have to take a pass. I used the term because it occurs in the last line of your 4th and 5th theses. I find that some of what I've read that uses term which I've encountered are really provocative and interesting (mainly stuff from Argentina that is, I think, influenced by Badiou, but also some of the old Situationist International stuff too) but I do have to admit I don't really understand what the term means. It's something I've been meaning to make time to read and think about for a good long while and haven't yet done so.
On the second, I use the term like this:
the proletariat is the set of all people who produce surplus value, the working class in the sense of class-in-itself. An important political project is for some of that group (the class-for-itself, except I don't like that term as I don't think it's the whole class) to act in such a way that will, in the long run, eliminate surplus value extraction and the compulsion to sell labor power. Does that make sense? (In the sense first of 'have I been clear?', then in the sense second of 'what do you think?')
How about, you what do these terms mean in your use?
Best wishes,
Nate
ps- if we can find a text we're both interested in addressed to either or both of these questions/terms, I'd be all about it.
Nate - One distinction which seems to be crucial regarding the proleteriat is the distinction between a class In-Itself and a class For-Itself. In the 18th Brumaire, Marx draws attention to this distinction apropos the peasantry of france, who in remaining as a assemblage of atomistic individuals worked in the terms of the former, rather than the latter, and as a consequence ended up delivering France to Louis Bonarparte.
In this sense, then, there are two proleteriats. Firstly, the already-existing proleteriat constituted at present as a class in-itself. Second, the inexistent potentia proleteriat constituted as a class for itself. This first proleteriat can be thought to be more or less always here, this second one comes and go depending on circumstance and organization.
The key question would then be, how does this first proleteriat become this second one? How does the proleteriat as a class in-itself become a class for-itself? This is where I would suppose the concept and question of a situation to be important, and where also I would advance the idea, following Freud, that the "primal" scene of a situation is a situation of desire, with the proleteriat "appearing" in this situation in terms of a class for-itself in terms of resistance.
hi Josef,
Thanks for clarifying. We're in heated agreement on the utility and importance of the -for-itself/-in-itself distinction.
Two things I'd like to hear your take on, please - First, it seems easy to read this as a temporal sequence: there is a class-in-itself, then there is a desire within that, then there is a class-for-itself constituted. I think it's reasonable to say that this does sometimes happen in that order. On the other hand, I think it's also a reasonable description to say that the existence of that desire and the becoming class-for-itself are the same moment/thing. I'm not sure if anything hangs on this distinction, though.
Second - it seems to me that there's a synecoche between the class-in-itself and the class-for-itself. The -in-itself is the set of everyone who produces surplus value. The class-for-itself, strictly speaking, is likely to not be that entire set, at a minimum not all the time. It's more likely to be a subsection of the class-in-itself. That's not particularly problematic, but to speak of it as the whole class, I'm not sure if that is or not. Aside from being, literally speaking, probably false, more importantly I think it implies an imputing of class interests as objective rather than politically and subjectively constituted. Part of what I'm unsure on here is precisely that question of class interest (as uninterpreted, an interest derived from the fact of being part of the class-in-itself). One the one hand I do want to say, yes, every member of the class-in-itself will be better off with the abolition of the capital relation, but that type of move, political synecdoche, strikes me as something to pause over or at least recognize the potentially politically problematic aspects of. (As in, for instance, "the interest of Americans" etc.) Ranciere's comments on the proletariat, I think in Disagreement, seems to make the proletariat the name of whatever it is that disrupts a given order, rather than a class in the marxist sense(s) that you and I agree on here (we do agree, right?). I'm not sure if that version of the term proletariat enacts the same kind of synecdoche, though its loss of the marxist sense I think also limits its utility otherwise. I hope this makes sense.
Best wishes,
Nate
It's self-defeating to define yourself against ressentiment. Spoils everything that follows.
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