PRIMA PORTA

INSURRECTION, COMMUNIZATION, AND THE PERMANENT STRIKE

[Excerpted from an ongoing conversation about communization and the #M1 general strike. Both texts are written by the same author, but the second presents a somewhat different argument than the first—slightly more hard-line.]

Point

I haven’t been following this thread until now, but I did want to respond to the question of subtraction and its relationship to communization—and also insurrection, which I think has to be distinguished very clearly from communization. 

When we pose the question of resisting capitalism as an either/or—either I subtract myself completely from capitalism OR I participate completely in it—we should be aware that we’re shifting the problem of our relationship to capital from the level of the personal to the level of the totality: i.e., from questions concerning what we do with the money we get in exchange for our labor to the question of the systemic badness of the capitalist system. This represents a shift from present to future tense: from the problem of making do in the here-and-now to the prospect of a totally different system yet to come. And it’s also a shift in agency: from what I can do in relation to my own employer (or lack thereof), my own money (or debt), my own friends (or loneliness), etc., to what “workers” in general can do in relation to “capitalism” in general. Once we pose the question this way, it’s inevitable that we’ll recoil from the impossibility of subtracting ourselves from the world we live in—that is, subtracting 
ourselves from our work, our means of support and social reproduction (from the recipes we’ve memorized for making cheap food to the knowledge we’ve acquired to help us compete on the labor market, etc.)—since the problem of our personal misery has become a moral imperative: a directive from the Totality to the Individual, “Thou shalt depart from capitalism! Thou shalt sacrifice thyself in the wilderness!” 

It’s a problem when we put off-limits our personal misery under capitalism, whether as workers who hate their jobs or who hate the idea of selling ourselves on the market, as debtors who will never be able to pay off our loans, as bodies that don’t receive the care (medical, social, emotional) they require, etc. Aren’t we all miserable under this system? I know I am! Rather than confront our relationship with capitalism as a moral issue, and as an either/or dilemma, let’s try to confront our particular relationships within the wage and property system, since our misery has everything to do with our dispossession in the world of work and our atomization in the sphere of everyday life (i.e. social reproduction). Personal misery can’t be solved personally (that’s the logic of the market); it can only be solved when we come together and start to plan how to live—how to survive—as a collective. That’s the truest meaning of the word ”commune”: a commune is simply a group of people who work for the collective rather than for themselves. 

Communization is often discussed as if it were simply a matter of stripping-down the public sphere in its moment of decay. This seems like nonsense to me; we can’t communize anything if we don’t start with what we ourselves own and earn; we can’t fight capitalism if we don’t first break the barriers of the property system in our own quarters. As much as I love the banners and slogans of the “Oakland Commune,” I don’t think it means anything to call an occupation a commune if the people in it haven’t anted up their property—income as well as debts—and kick-started the process of redistributing it among the collective. Maybe that’s happened in Oakland, maybe not. Are we really “doing communization” if we let our friends suffer privately under the weight of their debt? Or if we relegate our political energies to planning occupations and general strikes while still worrying about how we’ll survive as workers on the job market, or as artists on the art market? I’m not saying I’ve made this leap; I haven’t. But it’s a leap that has to be made—not as a withdrawal from capitalism, but as a shift in our relations to one another. I’ve said this before, but just to reiterate: communization is simply the process of making things common; it doesn’t matter whether these things are obtained from capitalism or from somewhere else. There’s no contradiction, for instance, between being a communard and earning a wage or any other form of income. Communization isn’t a shift from one system to another, it’s a shift in what we do with the money we make (or owe) that matters. A communard who holds down a steady job is working so that other people in the commune don’t have to. I wish I could say that when I apply for jobs or fellowships, I’m doing it for the collective rather than for myself only. It would make what I do a good deal less odious. [Someone], YOU don’t have to become a small-scale farmer, but maybe one of your friends really wants to do that. Or maybe there’s already a community farm nearby that’s running at half capacity for want of volunteer labor, or that throws away half of what it produces because it can’t sell it. Whatever: the point is that we’re in no position to organize our means of social reproduction differently until we make social reproduction a social rather than a personal problem. And though Occupy has come close to that—especially in the camps—it’s still a leap that most of us haven’t taken (myself included). 

As [someone] points out, people make do without a steady source of income all the time by falling back on the support of friends and family. The only reason we don’t tend to think of this sort of mutual aid as having anything to do with class struggle or “subtraction” from the wage system is because these acts of support aren’t usually intended as a replacement for personal income, they’re only meant as a supplement or safety net. We need to get past this; why not organize our incomes and rents so that one or two of us can devote themselves to politics full-time without having to worry about the job/art market? Or something along those lines. Instead of meeting about W.A.G.E. or artists unions (the horizons of which are always far in the future: things will be better when there’s a better system), why not take our own problems into our own hands? We don’t need capitalism to survive, but we sure as hell need each other. 

I get the sense that my arguments are falling flat in part because the project I’m advocating doesn’t follow the logic of the strike or the blockade, where we either stop capital from flowing, withdraw our labor, or stop consuming stuff. Please understand that I’m simply trying to sketch out the conditions of mutual aid that would make any of these things possible at a scale that would be seriously damaging to capitalism. I’m also trying to get past the barriers that prevent people from being able or willing to do those things, and which tend to make insurrection less a matter of communization than of mere squatting and looting (or worse: spectacle). If the state were the primary barrier to communization, wouldn’t property destruction be met with universal celebration? People don’t rise up against capitalism because their existence depends entirely on privately earned income and privately held property. Or rather, that’s the reason most people haven’t even considered “rising up against capitalism.” Try talking to unionized workers about indefinite general strikes and communes and the like. I just don’t see why we should expect anyone who’s not already indoctrinated (in the best sense of the term) via reading groups like ours to spontaneously throw away their only means of subsistence to join an insurrectionary movement in New York City or  anywhere else. I don’t see it happening. I can see why unemployed people, college students, artists, and the rest would participate in a limited-duration “insurrection” consisting of blockades and consumer boycotts and that sort of thing. But I don’t even see something along those lines leading to a durable win against capitalism; wasn’t that the hope and failure of May ‘68? So if we’re serious about blocking capital from flowing, isn’t it on us to figure out how to organize our lives without depending on a wage? If so, then I don’t understand why one would need to insist on the identity of that process—figuring out how to live without wages—with insurrection. 

Maybe this is a moot point: I don’t personally care if people start communizing things by seizing farms, seizing buildings, or whatever. All of that would be great. But I don’t think people will do any of those things if they haven’t first made the problem of subsistence a communal problem. And frankly, I don’t see that happening outside of 
the camps; and even in the camps, it’s mostly been people who really need subsistence who’ve gone there to live. I take [someone’s] point that the state won’t allow property to be expropriated willy nilly, but I see that more as an argument against insurrection than against communization. As for the problem of recuperation: if you’re arguing that the formation of communes alone wouldn’t bring capitalism to a halt, then I agree. But the formation of communes—and the broad dissemination of this model—would be a weapon against capitalism in a profound way, since capitalists absolutely need people who need to work. And I don’t think you can seriously ponder bringing capitalism to a halt without addressing the problem of social reproduction (the problem that we don’t control the means of our reproduction) *before* calling everyone into the streets for the moment of insurrection. 

Counterpoint

To think for a moment about [someone’s] provocation: It seems right to raise the possibility of the long-term strike; for me, this is the horizon of the general strike today (as opposed to general strikes of yore), and it’s why I posted above that a strike in NYC or anywhere else would need to begin with an indefinite renunciation of work, official duties, and “business as usual.” And that would have to mean reproductive work as well (house work, affective work, etc.) As a number of you have pointed out, social reproduction (i.e. subsistence) would be a burning issue, and would need to be confronted not secondarily but as the primary question of the movement/revolution: how do we meet our needs without exchange? This is a question we can only address together, since our needs will differ depending on the composition of the group/collective/commune. It may turn out, for example, that the acquisition of meds takes precedence over the expropriation of food - who knows. In any event, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of trying to flesh out a perfect alternative economy ahead of time; in fact, it’s imperative that we not think in terms of economies. At every moment, a permanent strike (it has a nice ring to it, no? better than the impenetrable “human strike”…) would be faced with falling back into relations of exchange, of the division of labor and reproductive work, etc., whether that means barter relations or time-chits or whatever. And by falling back, I mean falling into a trap. The point shouldn’t be to imagine a world for ourselves outside of which the laws of property, the wage, and exchange are allowed to remain in force; the point is to overturn those laws in the process (the activity) of satisfying our needs. But when we speak about para-economies, small-scale agriculture, neo-Luddism, etc., we’re admitting to ourselves that capital cannot be touched, that property cannot be expropriated and put to immediate use, and that our economy will have as its limits the boundaries imposed by capital and its agents (cops etc.). I think we can do better than that. For me, the problem isn’t to organize the economy that will replace capitalism (and I mean economy in a capacious way, including our relations with one another, with nature, etc.); the problem is to organize the renunciation of work so that we are all confronted with the problem of surviving together as an immediate priority. That sounds incredibly daunting, but there you have it.

Having said that, I feel compelled to take a less all-or-nothing position. I’ve said that the general strike would be a mass renunciation of work. But it seems more sane to say that the renunciation of work need not happen all at once, and probably shouldn’t happen at once, since many more resources are available to a collective that, having as its horizon the total renunciation of work, still retains several wage- or salary-earning members. This gets at a key difference (maybe a constitutive difference) between the permanent strike and the general strike: whereas the general strike has a firm starting date and implies an eventual end-date, the permanent strike is staggered and open-ended; it could begin on a different day for every one of its members, as not everyone will be immediately drawn into the strike. The question is: who wants to go first?