PRIMA PORTA

ON ART AND COMMUNIZATION: A REPLY TO NOYS AND SPAULDING

Sun, 19 May 2013 17:36:00 +0200

In lieu of a longer hashing-through of the current debate on communization theory and its bearing on art/aesthetics, I’m posting a reply to Daniel Spaulding, a friend and collaborator whose writing on these matters, in addition to our piece in October (co-written with Jaleh Mansoor), should be read on its own merits:

http://skepoet.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/interview-with-daniel-spaulding-on-communization-occupy-and-the-spectre-of-aesthetics/

http://leniency.blogspot.fr/2013/05/there-is-no-aesthetics-of-communization.html

The second of these links is Daniel’s response to Benjamin Noys, who discussed our October piece (and the art/communization problematic more generally) towards the end of a recent talk in London: http://leniency.blogspot.fr/2013/05/the-aesthetics-of-communization-xero.html

I’ll leave it for readers to track through this literature - I won’t offer any summaries here, only the kernel of a reply (this was originally written in email form, a fact I’ve not tried to dissimulate).

*

Daniel: my only concern is that this line of argument steers a bit close to the position it’s aiming to critique: communization as political-theoretical formalism. For example, when you write that “communization takes the form of the immediate abolition of class society,” you imply that the latter (abolition of class society) is the particular to which communization is the general; but isn’t this just answering abstraction with abstraction? (In other words, isn’t the abolition of class society also an abstraction, to which few if any struggles/measures/activities straightforwardly conform?) I grant that communist theory must necessarily divagate between concept and form-of-appearance, but I find myself asking why the abstract pole tends to take precedence in our thinking. This might be more a complaint with Noys than a criticism about your admirable reply, though. That said, I worry that our side risks saying something overly simple, if not overdetermined, about what it means to “make it with communization”; what you’ve formulated here sounds very much like a defense of Adorno’s modernism, but with an updated communist conscience. I’m not sure if the same could be said of our joint effort in October - perhaps so. In any event, I’m not hugely troubled by this, since modernism is my meat and potatoes, but it does seem like a bit of a dodge to say that the political function of art should (again) be to attach itself to the contradictions implicit in the value-form, the commodity, etc. What would prevent this aesthetic project from becoming a sort of negative aesthetic programmatism, the artist immersing in contradiction, thriving on a lean diet of critique, waiting for the revolutionary moment to arrive?

I keep coming back to something I wrote early on in our communization conversation: that the point isn’t to ask what art can do for communism, but rather the other way around. I follow you in desiring a theoretically clear view of the reef on which the avant-gardes have foundered, and on which the Left has failed; in this sense, I agree that we would do well to take a step back and attempt a revised look at the past century - something Théorie Communiste can be helpful with, despite the annoying brittleness and eurocentrism of their periodization. Along these lines, I appreciate Noys’ suggestion (I don’t remember if he says it explicitly, but it’s there nonetheless) that modernism and programmatism follow parallel, tracks: even in its most doggedly institution-critical mode, modernism has required of its adherents a belief in the autonomy of form, without which it would be impossible to face up to capitalism’s real abstractions and come away with anything resembling an artwork. As often as not, this credence was expressed in the negative, as a conjuring/exorcism of bad autonomy, but the negative nonetheless preserves the positive as its shadow and double. The programmatists (if I can be permitted this admittedly vague term) made the same choice, putting their faith in class identity as a sort of proletarian diving bell - a breathing-chamber for probing the abyss of the wage-relation. Likewise, Autonomia was the Left’s answer to the neo-avant-garde (or was it the other way around?), clinging to the shifting sands of the capitalist mode of production - shouting down the workers as they exited the factory.

The obvious anti-programmatist/anti-modernist move would be to claim autonomy outside capitalism, fleeing this world in search of the commune, the Gemeinwesen, etc., or if not that, then a more personal, solitary refusal of capitalist relations - the expired modernist’s petite robinsonnade, the bourgeois answer to the bad totality. T.J. Clark pitches for something along these lines in his Texte zur Kunst piece, choosing Pierre Bonnard’s retreat from modernity over the Constructivists’ immersion in modernity (read: immersion in the commodity-form), a move he sanctions by observing that refusal and retreat were always two sides of the modernist coin: “Between hiding and exposure, or mimicry and self-preservation - this is the to-and-fro, the false but unavoidable choice, that modern art has gone on being obliged to repeat.” Here’s where the perspective of communization theory might set the score somewhat differently: like communism, modernism’s negativity required an equally strong positive structure or idea - something on the order of the grid, or the unmotivated sign, or the readymade - if it was to become something rather than nothing. It’s this something, this something-negative, that must be put to rest: we don’t need any more “critical” art, we need communism! That is, insofar as art matters at all, it will have to be shorn of the adjective “modern.”

How this is to be done is a matter of debate: an insurrectionist defense of Bonnard would no doubt replace the word “retreat” with “evacuation,” or even “offensive opacity” - I’ll leave you to imagine what the Invisible Committee’s defense of late Bonnard might be. Against this position (could we call it the Claire Fontaine doctrine?), it could be countered that the point shouldn’t be to formalize evacuation, but rather to really and truly evacuate - i.e. communize. The burning question is therefore “How do we do communism, now?” not “How do we make anti-capitalist art.” This is different than calling for the abolition of art or artists: just as communization theory fundamentally decenters the field of class struggle, it likewise decenters the aesthetic field, unburdening art of its negative (modernist) baggage. If communism by definition cannot emerge through the valorization of an oppositional identity (not only “worker” and “artist,” but also “anti-worker” and “anti-artist” - negative identities, but identities nonetheless), then why should we demand refusal in the form of art? The point cannot be to abolish art through, and as, art; it must be to reproduce ourselves outside any relation to capital - a task that renders null and void whatever professional identities and affiliations we might currently claim. Communism is what matters, in other words; art will come later. There will still be good artists in times of revolution, but no modern artists.

I don’t mean any of the above as a defense of the studio arts, as some might want to take it - Bonnard versus Andrea Fraser, in other words. That said, I do think it’s worth noting the advantages of painting, drawing, and the like in times of revolution: they’re much cheaper than institution-specific practices; one can draw or compose poetry anywhere, without needing to depend on curators and other similar art-world rentiers. Presumably art practiced in the heat of communization will need to be cheap, and probably portable - unless we’re talking about seizing the means of cinematic or museological production: “Occupy Museums” for real, not as masquerade. More to the point, though, the pictorial and/or lyric arts have a key advantage over the arts of abstraction/spectacle in that they simply are material - poetry being the material of speech, of signification, painting being the material of the visible and tangible world. If we are to have any fighting chance of organizing social reproduction socially, rather than as private individuals - to say nothing of taking and repurposing the means of production, circulation, instruction, communication, etc. - then we will need to think, and even see, like materialists; I don’t care what form this takes, but I’ll be damned if the answer looks anything like a Bernadette Corporation show. A poet friend recently asked me if this means more shitty poetry about love, family life (and its dissolution) - the sentimental crap of the everyday. I didn’t have an answer for him then, but now I would say, “Yes, for us, revolution means that the reproduction of everyone becomes everyone’s business, not just the degraded province of women and service workers. Family life, love, pots and pans, sentimental crap - this is exactly the terrain on which communization operates; too bad if it offends our modernist sensibilities.” I would rather have revolution than a million Black Squares.

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Wed, 01 May 2013 23:33:06 +0200

trillsubsumption: “While the dissolution of the traditional patriarchal household by itself is the...

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 04:57:55 +0100

trillsubsumption:

“While the dissolution of the traditional patriarchal household by itself is the major force in these developments, other factors such as the growing proportion of jobs paying poverty-level wages and the declining real value of transfer payments have also contributed to the growth of impoverished households. Our point is that the breakdown of the feudal/patriarchal household, in the context of economic stagnation and racist and patriarchal processes reproduced at the societal level, has impoverished many women with children. It is interesting to us that the complaints about the “American worker” have accelerated in the very years that the cohort who went through childhood in the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s- the social products of the years of economic stagnation, fiscal crisis, and crisis in the feudal/patriarchal household- entered the labor market.”

— Stressed Families, Impoverished Families -Richard McIntyre and Michael Hilliard

POWER TO THE SISTERS, AND THEREFORE THE CLASS

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 17:08:00 +0100

The following essay was written on the occasion of Selma James’s visit to Occupy Philly, March 7-8, 2012.

It is Wednesday evening, and I am sitting with several dozen dissidents in the packed main room of the Lancaster Ave Autonomous Zone (LAVA), a West Philly meeting- place for local radicals. Tonight’s speaker is Selma James, a lifelong activist and author best known for having founded the Wages for Housework campaign in the 1970s, who has come over from London to address the Occupy movement face to face—and to promote a new book of mostly old writings, Sex, Race, and Class—The Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings 1952-2011 (Oakland: PM Press, 2012).

James’s presentation begins on a self-effacing note: “I am not an author. An author is somebody who sets out to write, and I never set out to write. I set out to organize.” This might seem a strange preface for a book tour event, but resistance to authorship has long been a red thread in James’s career. Take, for example, the opening lines of her explosive letter to the National Conference of Women in Manchester, written in March, 1972: “It is impossible any longer to sit in the protection of a group and see the potential of the movement squandered. This was hastily written, though it represents many years’ consideration. It is not meant to be the final word, not even of its author.” These are the caveats of a writer repulsed by the egotism of writing, and by all egotism: what kills movements, James argues, is the vaunting of personal ambition over the collective interest. To make one’s voice an asset rather than a hindrance, it must be the urgency of the moment that spurs the pen, as in, This, I couldn’t not write, the stakes were too high.

The stakes certainly seemed high Wednesday evening. The winter months had taken their toll on the Occupy movement, drawing out divisions to the point of outright conflict—between reformists and revolutionaries, socialists and anarchists, all the familiar shades of internecine dispute. James’s visit was intended to energize a different sort of debate, one centered on women, their enemies and allies; to that end, she would preside over a special women-led general assembly the following night in celebration of International Women’s Day. Whereas the session at LAVA stuck mostly to matters of theory, Thursday’s GA would address the role of women in Occupy and in the radical milieu more broadly, a topic on which James has long been an authority. Her 1972 pamphlet, co-authored with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, argues that feminism and anti-capitalism cannot be considered as separate struggles; to destroy capitalism means overcoming the economic domination of women in all spheres, even in the trade unions and other enclaves of working-class power. (Not incidentally, The Power of Women was read collectively by a group of occupiers in the first weeks of the Philly encampment.)

The argument sketched out by James and Dalla Costa begins by exposing a blind spot in Marx’s analysis of capitalism: the domestic sphere and the unpaid work of housewives. Supporting the above-ground system of production and waged labor is, they suggest, a sub-level of social reproduction, wherein care-taking, cooking, cleaning, and sexual service are combined to produce and maintain the worker as a creature fit to work. After all, it is only in the mists of fantasy (a pervasive one, nonetheless) that the workingman arrives self-constituted at the factory gates; in reality, he had always been dependent on the labor of women, whether mothers or wives. This dependence holds in the workplace as well: When women stay at home, their toil is free—it isn’t even acknowledged as labor; but when they seek an escape-route from domestic servitude in the workplace, the fact of their being paid less than men is frequently used as a bargaining chip to keep men’s salaries artificially low. One way or the other, James and Dalla Costa argue, capitalism divides the working class against itself, separating women from men and the reproduction of society from the production and exchange of commodities.

This critique wasn’t itself unusual: two years earlier Shulamith Firestone had proposed a notion of “sex class” that was tied to reproductive labor. But controversy arose when The Power of Women led to the Wages for Housework campaign, which James launched in 1972 alongside a cadre of militant feminists. Its demands were enumerated concretely:

WE DEMAND A GUARANTEED INCOME FOR WOMEN AND FOR MEN WORKING OR NOT WORKING, MARRIED OR NOT. If we raise kids, we have a right to a living wage. The ruling class has glorified motherhood only when there is a pay packet to support it. We work for the capitalist class. Let them pay us, or else we can go to the factories and offices and put our children in their father’s laps. Let’s see if they can make Ford cars and change nappies at the same time. WE DEMAND WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK. All housekeepers are entitled to wages (men too).

For many organizers and activists, the demand of “wages for housework” seemed a bewildering step for a feminist to take, if not outright regressive. James seemed to be advocating housework and domesticity at exactly the moment when women were poised to reject patriarchal confinement. As Jenny Turner’s recent article on feminism in the London Review of Books recalls—and as a lengthy reply by Beatrix Campbell confirms—Wages for Housework provoked a rare sort of indignation within feminism, particularly in the UK, prompting accusations such as the one Campbell voices: that Wages for Housework failed to challenge “the patriarchal political economy, or the domestic division of labour, or men. Far from being an ‘intellectually ambitious attempt to synthesize Marxism, feminism and postcolonialism,’ its theory was crude and its practice toxic.” James’s new book gives a detailed account of the dispute, describing the backlash against her publication of the Manchester letter:

Almost every Left organization or party mobilized against it, and at the next national women’s conference in London some months later, there were large banners which said, “A reply to Selma James”—except one which said, “A reply to the reactionary Selma James.” Each had a publication with a major article devoted to attacking this terrible thing I had done. I had dared to be critical of the unions and, on top of that, demanded wages for housework which would discourage women from going out to work, so they could have as high a consciousness as men.

But these complaints did not resurface during the two days of James’s visit to Philadelphia. Why this is so, and why James’s work makes sense in the context of Occupy, is a question well worth pondering. One answer surely lies in the profound transformation the welfare state has undergone in the era of neoliberalism. For if there is any one thread that holds together the weave of Occupy’s DNA, it is that the decades-long strangulation of the public sector has made life less and less livable for more and more people. To fight under the banner of Wages for Housework today is to struggle along a broad front, much broader than in the early 1970s when the movement was conceived. James and her comrades aimed to deepen the welfarist impulses of the state, to bring it to its absolute limits—if the state would not cross the boundary, then the implicit answer was a revolution that would. Now, with auster- ity as the watchword, “wages for housework” takes on a different cast: a defense of welfare as a defense of women. This was James’s most urgent message to the audience on Thursday: that the attack on welfare in the US, the UK, and around the world, has a direct impact on women, and on all who have chosen—for whatever reason—not to enter the workforce, or for whom there are no longer decent jobs available.

Those who recall James’s activism of the 1970s might be surprised to find the platform of Wages for Housework translated, and even transformed, into a relatively simple argument for social welfare. In one sense, this shift indicates how much ground has been lost in the intervening decades. James’s cohort launched its campaign during the final years of capitalism’s postwar golden age, when it was still possible to imagine guaranteed income as a realizable demand. The perspective of Wages for Housework was utopian, but it appropriated this vision from the welfare state as it really existed. After the 1973 oil crisis, though, everything changed: the capitalist system entered a period of declining rates of profits and stagnating wages, characterized by increasingly frequent booms and busts, one effect of which politically was to precipitate a political backlash against the welfare system. It is against the backdrop of economic crisis that Wages for Housework must be understood. Strangely, the movement’s demand was reviled exactly when it might have been realized. The political atmosphere today has degraded to the point where even moderate social-democratic reforms seem beyond contemplation.

When a participant at Thursday’s GA asked what the present-day struggle for welfare ought to be called, James paused for a moment, then said, “They’ll probably call it Wages for Housework.” Maybe not, I thought to myself. Attitudes in the radical milieu have changed in the past few years—changed, that is, in direct relation to the decline of the welfare system. If “workfare” has been the neoliberal solution to the problem of social reproduction (i.e. “He who does not work shall not eat”), one response to neoliberalism has been to advocate autonomy from the failing apparatus of the state. Cut budgets and we will protest, but we will also lay plans to do for ourselves what the state will no longer provide is many an occupier’s response. This attitude reveals a critical ambivalence: Does Occupy stand for the defense of welfare, or does it prefigure, and even initiate, techniques of social reproduction that presume the elimination of entitlement programs? And if the latter case is true, doesn’t that make Occupy more or less complicit in realizing the neoliberal vision of entrepreneurial self-reliance?

This problem has beset autonomist movements, Wages for Housework among them, from the outset. By focusing on self-organization as a counter-model to the revolutionary party (and its implicit horizon, the “dictatorship of the proletariat”), one recognizes the impossibility of simply “tak[ing] over the state machinery” (as Marx realized after the 1871 Paris Commune). But this prompts an accusation of ignoring the question the state altogether. In the case of Occupy, however, this accusation could be expanded to include the realm of labor—a point upon which many occupiers diverge from previous autonomist movements, Wages for Housework among them. But the real issue that James raised is not how Occupy treats the state, but how it treats labor: a question that autonomy poses in a particularly complicated way. It was in the context of Autonomia, the Italian Marxist current associated with Antonio Negri and Franco “Bifo” Berardi, that Dalla Costa and others of James’s collaborators (among them Silvia Federici and Leopoldina Fortunati) developed their call for work stoppages in the sphere of unwaged, domestic labor; this program mirrored Autonomia’s politics of refusing work, and more specifically, its rejection of trade-union mediation in the struggle of workers with capital. Along these lines, James’s 1973 essay, “The Perspective of Winning,” advocates feminist autonomy, defined here as a total refusal of capitalism in all arenas of the life-world:

Our struggle against the factory is not only to get out but never to go in. Our struggle against the family is to get out, but not so we are free for the factory. This is our demand for autonomy, our autonomous class perspective, founded in this total rejection of the capitalist organization of our lives.

Much of the autonomist program would appear to have been revived by the Occupy movement, from the creation of self-managed kitchens, medical units, and power generators to the political process of mass assembly and consensus. Self-organization was always a constitutive feature of Autonomia Operaia (which translates as “worker autonomy”); squatted social centers and pirate radio stations were everyday fare in the 1970s and ’80s in Italy. But beyond this point, the resemblance ends. Occupy puts an emphasis on public space and communal encampments that is wholly absent in autonomist Marxism, which remained focused on class struggle in the factories and in the home (the practice of “refusing work” makes far more sense in an era of factory labor than in the self-managed service economies of the present). Even though Autonomia was largely driven by student protests and occupations, it nonetheless placed all these struggles under the newly expanded category of “labor.” The same can be said of Wages for Housework: even for James and her comrades, the sphere of reproduction was inextricable from production, hence their demand for wages and importation of strike tactics into the household and bedroom. For Occupy, however, the site of struggle is neither the home nor the factory: occupiers have laid claim to the no-man’s-land of empty plazas and “privately-owned public spaces,” only reluctantly articulating distinctions of sex, race, and class. In New York, OWS claims the status of an amorphous assembly of 99 percenters, while in Oakland, occupiers have proclaimed themselves a self-sustaining, self-defending commune, reviving the memory of Paris, 1871 (without, again, the emphasis on a specifically workers’ commune). The result has been a movement with an unusual potential for openness, a space for categories to be sloughed-off and reassumed at will.

For the same reasons, however, Occupy finds itself faced with a new set of obstacles—or rather, with old obstacles confronted anew. Thursday evening’s GA concluded with a speak-out session for women occupiers, many of whom took issue with the sexual division of labor within Occupy. Two organizers, both heavy lifters in Occupy Philly, pointed out that despite the movement’s rhetoric of fairness and equality, the burden of reproductive work—the tasks of caring, cleaning, keeping on schedule, mending bruises, resolving disputes, and so on—has consistently devolved to women; and because it is not acknowledged as work, it goes without thanks. In this way, they argued, Occupy attacks capitalism and the state in word only, busying itself with protest while ignoring the work of care. Along these lines, one of the most wrenching testimonials at Thursday’s GA came from a woman who spoke of sacrificing her job, her education, and her boyfriend in order to care for her dying mother. For the many women who end up making the same decision, it is often because there is no other option: no one else is willing to do the labor of caring. That the same can be said of Occupy—not always, but often enough—is no compliment to the movement.

There is a lesson in this for Occupy in its moment of springtime awakening. If we cannot organize ourselves in ways that elevate care above a narrow conception of work, recognizing the work of reproduction as what it is—as labor—then we might as well quit now. Care, James tells us, is the mark of civilization; to be deprived of the experience of caring is to be deprived of one’s humanity. That the Occupy movement has made care a priority—and more than a priority, a rallying point and an ethic—is evidence of its basic goodness, if we can be permitted that term; for if it is not good to provide eye wash to strangers during a tear gas attack, or food to the hungry, or calming words in the midst of crisis, then nothing is good. But if these tasks remain the de facto burden of women, then there will not be enough goodness yet to warrant celebration. Or to say it differently, Occupy will not be what we need it to be unless it is a movement of and for women, and of and for of all of us whom care has civilized. This might require us to fight for welfare as James is advocating, but it might also provoke a more radical refusal of capitalism and its governmental protectorates: resistance with care, not chaos, as its objective. Thankfully, some women in Occupy (and their male allies) have begun to make space for this conversation—an arena that will no doubt widen as James’s speaking tour continues. Now that warm weather has returned, perhaps we will hear her slogan echoing on the human microphone: Power to the sisters, and therefore the class.

THE AUSTERITY QUESTION: WORK, WELFARE, AND POST-FAMILY LIFE

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 23:23:00 +0100

What is austerity, and how is it to be combatted? Should it be combatted at all?

Recently, certain comrades have floated an anti-state argument for sequestration: that the state being Evil, therefore cuts are desirable - the better to speed anarchy. In other words, praise be the sequester, bringing us closer to the collapse of government. As evidence, one could gesture at the Department of Homeland Security’s ongoing release of undocumented immigrants from ICE detention centers in Florida - 2,000 detainees have already been freed, with some 3,000 more promised for March. It would seem indisputable that a poorer DHS and ICE would be better for immigrant communities and other oppressed populations; anti-statists would have every reason to gloat over the prison-industrial complex’s apparent self-castration. “Apparent” is the operative term, however: stacked against a total detainee population of 429,000 immigrants, five thousand fewer is hardly a victory. Considered globally, the positive aspects of sequestration pale in comparison with the negative impact of lost jobs and cuts to social services.

Austerity means class war, but this statement needs to be qualified: austerity is first and foremost the manifestation of a crisis in the reproduction of capital and labor - or rather, a crisis of the reproduction of the wage relation. We’ll not be able to understand the ongoing assault on social welfare without understanding that welfare and wages are inseparably linked: the stagnation of wages and restructuring of work in the past four decades tracks the withdrawal of social services and the transformation of welfare into a meager supplement for the wage. To be even more precise, we should add that the term “supplement” here doesn’t designate a shift in the relation of labor to capital, but rather a shift in the means by which the wage relation is prolonged. To put it simply, the replacement of wages with entitlement benefits keeps the paradigm of the wage relation intact even as wages continue to stagnate and fall, and as capital sheds workers in greater numbers. Yes, welfare has served to emancipate workers from certain burdens associated with workers’ self-reproduction, principally healthcare, education, social insurance (unemployment), and old-age care. But it has also reinforced the dependency of workers on capital, maintains the proletariat’s position as proletariat when all forces tend to push it towards redundancy - the status of a surplus population. It is this status that austerity forces us to confront, and, politically, to seek to overcome.

I don’t claim to have generated this argument ex nihilo; the broad outline of my analysis is derived from Théorie Communiste, whose recent work (the following quotation is from “The Present Moment,” 2011; this and other translations modified from the original) offers an indispensable account of the convergence and overlapping of welfare and the wage-relation, beginning with the invention of social entitlements in the wake of the Second World War:

In the previous phase of the capitalist mode of production, up until the end of the 1960s, exploitation produced its own conditions of realization – conditions which at the time were optimal from the point of view of the valorization of capital itself. This included everything that made the reproduction of the proletariat a determinant of the reproduction of capital: public services, the delimitation of accumulation within national arenas, creeping inflation ‘erasing’ the indexing of wages, ‘the sharing of gains in productivity.’ These conditions made it possible for the proletariat to be legitimately constructed and recognized inside the capitalist mode of production as a national interlocutor (both socially and politically), from the point of view of capital. Hence workers’ identity [l’identité ouvrière] modulated between social democracy and councilism.

The phrase “from the point of view of capital” is the key to understanding TC’s position on the welfare state. The victory of labor in securing social welfare was always phyrric; after all, they note, the safety net operated like an apparatus of capture, abetting not only the reproduction of capital but also the reproduction of the working class within capital - or rather, the reproduction of the wage relation. The Fordist/Keynesian compromise of the 1930s yielded nearly full employment in America and Western Europe during the boom years of the 1950s and ’60s; in turn, and concomitantly, the reproduction of proletarian labor-power was organized entirely by and for the wage relation, augmented by entitlement programs that were, in effect, the repositories of proletarian savings (e.g. Social Security). High wages were the fundamental premise of this grand bargain: rather than replacing earned income, welfare was implemented to buttress the hegemony of the wage relation, ensuring that a lifetime of work would be rewarded with social benefits and infrastructural development (maintenance of roads, utilities, etc.). The point was never to emancipate workers, but rather to keep them in hock to capital even outside the workplace and beyond the age of mandatory retirement - until death do us part!

As TC has recently suggested in “Response to the Americans on Gender” (2011), the postwar nexus of productive and reproductive forces was knotted together at the site of the nuclear family, combining the ideal male wage-earner with the ideal reproductive laborer, the stay-at-home mom. Since the early 1970s, however, capitalist restructuring has effectively undone this knot, delinking production from reproduction and scrambling the codes of family life almost beyond recognition:

The collapse of the model of the full-time male breadwinner tied to a consistent firm or workplace is accompanied by the increase of female workers, of part-time work (female workers and part-time work tend to be associated with one another), of temporary work, of outsourcing, of subcontracting, in other words, of a proliferation of intermediary situations. The accumulation of capital no longer being confined to the national sphere, each State can therefore no longer consider the wage “as an investment” according to the Fordist formula. The use and valuation of labor-power becomes an adjustable variable in external competition; any politics oriented towards economic stimulus or social welfare for the unemployed is condemned. This is the epoch of Barre, Thatcher, and Reagan. All the social models, all the dynamic modalities of the exploitation and reproduction of labor-power deployed pretty much everywhere in the developed capitalist world during the 30s and in the period immediately following the war, henceforth disappear.

In the wake of the neoliberal turn, proletarian self-reproduction is no longer knotted, or “coagulated,” at the site of the family; this is not to say, however, that the wage relation no longer governs the survival and subsistence of the working class. “Segmentation” is the key term here: as each member of the family unit is now captured by the wage relation separately, TC argue, the family can no longer serve as the primary organ of reproduction. Husband, wife, and children are henceforth responsible for their own self-reproduction; everyone goes to, trains for, or seeks out work, often on vastly different timetables and entailing distinct self-reproductive needs. The family that once ate dinner together now scrambles to eat at separate times and in disparate locations. Likewise, families no longer pool resources from the earnings of a single (male) breadwinner, out of which “allowances” are paid to wife and kids; the extension of credit and the normalization of part-time and temporary work ensure that all family members have access to the wage relation, if not actually, then latently:

In this re-internalization of welfare as part of structural logic of labor, the family no longer furnishes a site for the application of the externalized “social”; hence the pregnant American teenager has nothing to do but work… or pretend to work. The family is permitted to shatter, or to present itself in all manner of more or less ephemeral forms, because it is no longer the site of a coagulation of the social reproduction of labor-power; instead, it becomes a space where individualized segments of this reproduction merely coexist (simple addition): one child at school, another in temporary work, an adult unemployed, a woman working part-time, a welfare recipient, a salaried, full-time worker—each of these positions has its own logic; the ensemble is no longer organized around a central figure [the male worker] for whose sake reproduction unfolds; there is no longer any ensemble to speak of.

The restructured family is part and parcel of a substantially restructured economy in which “[a]ll individual labor-powers become independent,” cut adrift from one another, all circulation between labor and capital becoming ruthlessly segmented. Yet segmentation (i.e. division, atomization, personalization) doesn’t mean that the hegemony of the wage relation has worn thin - not in the least. We have reached a point, TC argue, where ”[t]he purchase of labor power by capital is now total,” meaning that workers now live entirely within the wage relation: absent any other means of subsistence than the sale of one’s labor-power (absent even the paternalistic “allowance”), workers are treated as if the sale of their labor-power to capital has already been achieved, no matter whether any such transaction actually occurs. Prior to a student’s matriculation from school to the “professional” workforce (an increasingly remote possibility for the vast majority of workers), she will already have been interpellated as a larval worker a thousand times over; not only do all her expectations, and all expectations of her, cohere around her independent pursuit of a wage - towards which she may accrue a lifetime’s worth of debt - but there is literally no way of her living otherwise. Somehow, usually through a combination of part-time and/or informal jobs, she will find a way to pay for her flat, her meals, her cellphone, and her access to the means of urban sociability (drink, entertainment), all of which are coordinated according to the temporality of the weekly wage or monthly salary. Needless to say, credit plays a larger and larger part in this absurd compact between worker and capital, to the point that basic questions of trustworthiness are vetted with a credit report. Life outside the wage relation becomes strictly unthinkable; even those who cannot find work are interpellated - ingested might be a better word - as labor-power.

The “total purchase” of labor by capital combines extreme precarity with extreme dependency: workers have a harder and harder time reproducing themselves within the wage system, yet they need capital more than ever. Depression is certainly one outcome of this infernal bargain, the flip-side of a pervasive (and oft-maligned) ethos of entitlement, according to which wages occupy the same place as welfare; both are “entitlements,” so to speak - a formulation perverted by the so-called Right to Work movement. As TC puts it, “[t]here is a tendency towards the equalization of income from wages (revenues du travail) and income from unemployment benefits (revenus d’inactivité), and an institutional contagion between the two.” We can observe a shift in the temporality of self-reproduction underlying this trend: in the restructured economy, work is increasingly posited in the future tense, along with its payoffs and benefits; although the nuclear family has largely collapsed, it remains a governing fiction, uniting the diverse sectors of the proletariat in subservience to a dream-image of 1950s-era domesticity, a paradise of regularized employment and patriarchal order. As indicated by Communiqué from an Absent Future (2009) and similar tracts, the time of labor has become a time of waiting, in which the evanescent hope of a “return to normal” alone justifies the hardships and disappointments of the ongoing crisis. A student will take out loans to pay for a professional degree, a laid-off engineer shuffles through part-time jobs in anticipation of better times, an immigrant searches for work in a foreign city, far from his wife and children… and so on. As the promise of a decent standard of living (or any living at all) is further delayed, the workforce grows dependent on substitutes - credit and welfare - to the point that it no longer matters how one makes a living; every day, we meet the crisis of self-reproduction headlong, and every night we wonder how life will be possible next week, next month, or next year.

But these nightly traumas are everywhere contradicted by the verities of the waking world. If employment is a universal right, then our abjection can only be a temporary condition; wait long enough and a job will come, and with it, a happy family - even if we don’t believe this fantasy, we find it legitimated at the spatial level, the urban sphere having been restructured as part and parcel of the capitalist mode of production, transforming zones of low-cost housing, shops, parks, and pubs into a pseudo-bourgeois theme park of shopping and leisure. Far from extending the Lebensraum of the bourgeoisie, who remain largely ensconced in their suburban enclaves (largely though not entirely: witness Manhattan under Mayor Bloomberg), urban development and gentrification plays the more pernicious role of reinforcing the wage relation in its moment of crisis - forcing the proletariat to the temp agency door, in other words. She who does not intend - or pretend - to work shall not live, nor shall she afford organic produce. Acting in concert, urban revivalists and petit-bourgeois shopkeepers have cement the wage relation into the fabric of the city itself. At every turn, the contemporary metropolis interpellates its users (a more appropriate term than “inhabitant”) as fully-employed professionals - an absurdity, since most of the work available in cities today is part-time or temporary. Those few workers who can claim to fit the mold of the middle-class professional likely reside in the suburbs, where the city confronts them as a foreign territory; meanwhile, we who continue to depend on the city as an aid to our self-reproduction take to imitating the chimeric yuppie in dress and manner: a smartphone and dark-rimmed glasses suffice to conjure the image of professional busyness. In reality, we are all wageless and under-waged; our portable laptops and hand-grown vegetables are poor stand-ins for the homes we will never own and the families we will never afford to feed.

Remarkably, the near-total embourgeoisement of urban agglomerations coincides with the final emptying-out of rural society. As Mike Davis and others have noted, the past several decades have seen the majority of the world’s population relocate farm to city; one would therefore expect the urban infrastructure to yield to the needs of landless peasants and underemployed workers, but the reverse is true: at no other time in recent history has the bourgeoisie’s grip on the city been more firmly secured. The reality of work and welfare, then, is the reality of urban life. As the dream-image of middle-class domesticity recedes further into the future, the proletariat acclimatizes to ways of living that deviate sharply from the family-form, inhabiting communal apartments, splitting rent with housemates or roommates, and sacrificing most vestiges of privacy IRL for the micro-privacy of email accounts and online avatars. For the majority of recently urbanized workers, communal living is the only affordable means of survival; statistics collected in 2007 show 75-80% of Chinese migrant workers living in dormitories, with each room housing an average of twelve persons. In America and Western Europe, students’ dormitory living frequently bleeds into extended flat-sharing arrangements, thanks both to hikes in urban property values and rental markets (in California, for example, a minimum-wage worker would need to work 130 hours per week in order to meet rent on a two-bedroom apartment; statewide average rent is $1,353) and, more importantly, to the ongoing deficit of jobs. Increasingly, the family itself resembles a sort of coercive flat-sharing arrangement, with individuals coming and going autonomously, tied not to one another but to online social networks comprising peers, workmates, and semi-anonymous soulmates.

Where does this leave the enemies of austerity? In theory, austerity means the withdrawal of state-sponsored social reproduction, but in practice, we confront austerity as the absolute impoverishment of future life - the promise of the wage relation dialed down almost to zero. The cuts hamper our ability to reproduce ourselves, not so much immediately (only for laid-off workers do budget cuts resemble the impact of a plant closure) as in the medium and long term. With the closure of after-school programs under sequestration, for example, parents will see their children’s future employability wither and fade; the defunding of public health programs, such as HIV testing, will eat away at the medical condition of the poor and uninsured; workers seeking jobs with the military will be laid off or turned away - and yet we will continue to eke out a living from day to day, our expectations “managed” with one or another form of anti-depressant, our future ground down to a miserable nub. After decades of welfare reform, zero-tolerance policing, and the defunding of public education and social services, proletarian America suffers in a state of living death: condemned to protest on behalf of our future selves, our energies are diverted from the here-and-now to the might-be and the not-quite-yet. This is austerity’s most sinister aspect: that it perverts the temporality of crisis and collapse, leaving us alive but immiserated, fighting to preserve what we will never have.

We who oppose austerity find ourselves in an impossible bind: by protesting the cuts, we unwittingly prolong the hegemony of the wage relation, validating the promise of patriarchal domesticity, liberal democracy, and all the other sad fictions of postwar capitalism. Yet the misery of austerity is real and present; for many of us, death is already the condition of life - witness the slow frittering of the Greek proletariat, for example (or that of East Oakland, or North Philly). Only a fool - a bourgeois - would welcome further cuts. The question is rather this: with what reality-image should we oppose the dream-image of a capitalist future? If not the wage relation, then what?

Perhaps the contours of this other future - this reality, I should say - are less mysterious than we have been led to believe. In seeking a counter-image to the Norman Rockwell family, we might gesture to the present state of the proletarian life-world, to our shared dormitories and apartments, our extended families and expansive friendship circles, and to the activity for which the absence of work has so well prepared us: socializing. After all, no generation in recent history has devoted more time and attention to the complexities of social life than ours, nor has any generation so thoroughly divested itself of the need for privacy; in this sense, we are already larval communards, requiring little training for a propertyless world. Rather than posit communist society as an impossible future - a horizon as unthinkable as the nuclear family - we should recognize that the basic conditions of communism already exist. We are the commune, and the family is our enemy.

There remains, as TC rightly point out, the problem of production, a “glass floor” against which struggles in the realm of social reproduction inevitably collide. In rallying against the nuclear family, the point cannot simply be to claim autonomy for every expanded household - tying the red flag to the dormitory weathervane, in other words (thought this would be a laudable act in itself). We propose going further, aggregating the segmented lines of self-reproduction in any social group or neighborhood so that they coagulate in the form of a commune; and, simultaneously, expropriating the means of satisfying these needs as a commune (rather than as isolated segments of a global workforce). This horizon is immanent to the capitalist mode of production as it presently exists: capital has already thrown us into communal life, which it delimits as a temporary period of extra-familial sociability - the precarious preface to a middle-class existence yet to come. But the longer we wait together in purgatory, the flimsier these fables of heaven and hell seem to us. Isn’t this world - this so-called purgatory, this precarious life - enough? When we bemoan the passing of Occupy, isn’t it the explosion of sociability that we miss above all - the activity of being together made an end in itself? What else should communism mean, if not the proclamation of social life as the only purpose worth struggling for?

The fight against austerity can only go in one direction: towards supplying ourselves with the materials and tools necessary for living together, reproducing ourselves as an ensemble: a commune. At the very least, we might start by rejecting the model of the nuclear family tout court - personally, but also politically (in this sense, queer theory and communization theory align on the question of the family). Patriarchy is at issue here, but is not the only issue; the persistence of the family-form has long served to atomize and contain proletarian communities, branding the inclination to socialize as a leisure activity without political standing and applying the mold of the nuclear family as a means of disciplining the poor, preventing extended families and expanded societies from acquiring economic validity. It is therefore not enough to merely laud promiscuity or polyamory; we must also seek to demolish the economic basis of the family-form, replacing it with the commune-form. This means politicizing the decision to separate into isolated families, agitating to subvert the reproductive importance of the heterosexual couple. Practices of communist child-rearing are in order, and also of communist sexuality; we will not find them in utopian experiments, however, but rather in political activity contra capital. There can be no avoidance of anti-austerity struggles, in other words; but only when we refuse austerity in the name of no future will emancipation be possible in the here and now.

ANTI-SEQUESTER: A SALVO

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 03:51:00 +0100

Sequester (v.), meaning “to set apart”—as in segregate, seclude, withdraw—“to seize by writ,” “to place (property) in custody,” “the act of removing, separating or seizing anything from the possession of its owner, particularly in law, of the taking possession of property under process of law for the benefit of creditors or the state.”

Creditors or the state… Is there any difference anymore? When the triumvirate of S&P, Moody’s, and Fitch freely dictates the terms according to which sequestration can and must be enforced, isn’t it reasonable to assume that the distinction between government and financial speculation has been wholly dissolved? Are we supposed to follow Obama blindly, as if sequestration had not been the fundamental task of every administration since the neoliberal turn of the 1980s, regardless of whose party held power? How many pints of blood and tears will be ‘sequestered’ by the police (how many stop-and-frisks, how many snatch-and-grabs, how many grand jury resisters, how many Chris Dorners, how many Pussy Riots…) before we see clearly that these miseries are merely part of a one-way flow of pain from bottom to top?

Let’s not mince words: Sequestration means austerity—the removal, separation, and seizure of the means of daily life (education, medical assistance, childcare, environmental protection, after-school programs, unemployment assistance…) by and for investors. The single premise and purpose of sequestration is this: that our lives and needs are fungible, whereas the right of capital to multiply and thrive cannot be negotiated. Sequestration is not a compromise, or even a skirmish, between progressives and conservatives; the relevant actors are not Obama and Boehner; neither Democrats nor Republicans stand to lose anything—anything—by the sequester, which is why they’ve made only the feeblest gestures toward avoiding it. Sequestration is rather a full-throttle attack on everyone who does not directly profit by the accumulation of capital; its synonyms include social war, class war, necropolitics, public genocide, patriarchy, racism. If implemented, the cuts to federal spending will amount to a roadside pit into which women, people of color, children, and the elderly will be thrown headfirst and without remorse; anyone whose life depends on care, compassion, and cooperation—in other words, society—will be discarded for the sake of the nation’s credit rating.

More than any other term, sequestration registers the traumatic dispossession of communities, families, and individual lives in the wake of neoliberal counter-reaction—a transfer of wealth enforced at gunpoint, to the tune of slurs and jeers. Sequestration speaks directly to the day-to-day misery of the American underclass, from the long-term withdrawal of public support for the waged and unwaged poor to the appalling forfeiture of young lives (Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo) in the process of segregating the creditworthy from the disposable. Sequestration is the flip-side of mass incarceration: the criminalization of non-suburban, non-bourgeois (non-white) populations is used to justify cuts to social welfare, thereby consigning the damned of the ghetto to the black market or the military—a death sentence. Although the latest round of spending reductions promises to slash police and military budgets, only a fool would believe that the popular interest is served by these cuts; far from hampering the machinery of war and incarceration, they promise to abet the proletarianization of war and peace, further undermining already precarious communities and regions. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has pledged mandatory furloughs for the civilian workforce, targeting workers for whom a decently waged job at the military commissary, daycare center, or repair shop provided a last lifeline out of terminal poverty. Of the many local services threatened by sequestration, law enforcement is by far the best protected; in California, for example, the state stands to lose $1.6 million in Justice Assistance Grants, a drop in the bucket compared to $87.6 million in cuts to primary and secondary education. Get it through your head, comrade: the sequester keeps the war machine intact; we’ll see more brutality thanks to the cuts, not less.

Anyone hoping to resist sequestration should bear in mind a powerful slogan of the 2011-12 uprisings in Moscow: You don’t even represent us. The capital-S Sequester is merely the latest event in the ongoing theft of wealth from public to private ownership, and no amount of docile phone-banking or sign-waving will prevent it. The fix is already in: they don’t represent us, nor can they. Were Congress to reject the bevy of self-imposed cuts in favor of a Robin Hood tax, the entire edifice of government finance would suddenly come crashing down—too much hangs on the nation’s credit rating. Indeed, the rating agencies deserve the largest share of blame for having spearheaded Congress’ march towards austerity in 2011, insisting on deep spending cuts where none were economically advisable or necessary; now that the deadline to avert sequestration has arrived, fear of another downgrade is well-nigh universal. Whether Congress reaches a deal or drives over the cliff, the result will be the same: absent mass resistance, it’s always easier to throw the poor and precarious under the bus than to incur the wrath of lenders. As usual, the cuts will fall disproportionately on those who lack reserves to weather the blow. The same reasoning prevails throughout the various institutions of public wealth, from universities to pension funds and cultural centers: everywhere, austerity follows inevitably in the wake of debt-financed expansion, sapping the coffers of state in a hopeless cycle of empty promises and impossible bargains. Far from an unfortunate side-effect, this downward spiral is austerity’s most consistent symptom. From Athens to Sacramento, the ship of state increasingly runs on fraud; our backs will be broken merely to preserve the fiction of solvency.

The unprecedented scale of the current round of cuts should give pause to those of us who claim the mantle of anti-capitalism. Why should we persist with tactics molded to conditions of social peace when war is everywhere the rule? In the eyes of many observers, for example, the strangest and least reconcilable feature of Occupy was its insistence on taking over demanding, eschewing the politics of representation in favor of a politics of doing: occupy the plaza, take the port, charge the barricade, change the world here and now, without leaders or ideologies. This puzzlement has since become the movement’s epitaph: by refusing to formulate concrete proposals, Occupy allegedly failed to sway policy in a leftward direction. But there is no Left and Right anymore; there is only capital and its enemies, death against life. Rather than meekly submit to the pillage of social wealth, the occupiers sought to reverse the flow of expropriation, counter-sequestering public spaces and institutions for social rather than capitalist purposes. Did they succeed in routing capital? Of course not, but in their intransigence, they showed that nothing short of organized insurrection would suffice. Whether we like it or not, the tide has turned against the politics of compromise; capital now understands only one language of resistance: force. The ongoing sequester can and must be met in kind, not through helpless pleading. As our communities are sapped of resources, we have no choice but to seize the state in return, sequestering hospitals, schools, roads, and all other implements of society—including the means of violence. Rest assured that the political class will cut and cut until the body bleeds out. Countering austerity means wresting back the institutions of society in the name of the living: the People’s Sequester, you could call it. I call it communism.

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Thu, 03 May 2012 04:27:14 +0200

FRAGMENTS—ON THE 0% AND THE REAL MOVEMENT OF HISTORY

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:52:00 +0100

Fragments excerpted from the comments section here (I’m quoting Red WithoutWhy):

The “99%”, the “1%” and the “0%” are all *in* the movement of history which traverses and determines their distinction. *This* is the movement which is radical, not that of the “0%” as a radical bloc–though it is a radical bloc within the occupation movement. That doesn’t mean it needs touting, and that the 99% needs denunciation.

[W]hat has been most radical about this movement is not at all fighting the cops or taking the streets without permits. What has been most radical has been the establishment of encampments. That’s what OWS did. And that’s why the category of radicalism doesn’t bear on the situation, and that’s why the fact that the so-called 0% are pushing for something Adbusters reformists aren’t doesn’t really matter.

It’s not a “withdrawal” from the state form or the party or the people or “the movement” that’s at issue. A critique of organizational forms as displaced or rendered counter-revolutionary by historical transitions between pertinent or revolutionary forms of struggle is completely appropriate and necessary. I think much of what LGS’s piece says is true. It’s just that it’s often trivially true (Adbusters is reformist and opportunist) and in being so it misses the point of what is *not* trivially true: that these reformist opportunists also initiated (in the US) a tactic and an organizational form, the encampment, that carved a new and radical opening into a larger political sequence and thereby reinvigorated it in a way that was entirely unexpected and mostly laudable.

Yeah, I’m not interested in holding out the radical purity of “the 0%” against people who are stepping onto the street for the first time, or even against lame journalists who somehow managed to do something pretty fucking cool. And I think it’s ridiculous to protest too much about Oakland’s street cred within the occupation movement.

But I’m not going to veer from there into hollow calls for unity and especially not into even implicit efforts to undermine legitimate critique of the state form, of the party form, of worker identity, of democratic representation.

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Sun, 29 Jan 2012 23:30:24 +0100

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Thu, 29 Dec 2011 19:21:21 +0100

PROPOSAL FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A LARGE SOCIAL CENTER FOR OCCUPY OAKLAND

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 01:41:00 +0100

From Occupy Oakland:

Proposal for the establishment of a large social center for Occupy Oakland

We propose to occupy and hold a large building that will serve the purpose of becoming a social center, convergence center and headquarters of the Occupy Oakland movement on Saturday, January 28th, 2012. The building will have sufficient office space for all of the Occupy Oakland committees and an auditorium large enough to hold Occupy Oakland general assemblies and adequate sleeping space.  It will be a vacant building owned either by a bank, a large corporation of the 1% or already public. The occupation of the building will take place in daylight and on a weekend to ensure more safety and aim for maximum participation.  The building will be the destination of a mass march, promoted as a “Move-In Day March” starting at Oscar Grant Plaza at 1pm and finishing up in the new building. Together we will enter the space, clean it, set it up and occupy it.

Having learned from the previous attempts at occupying spaces or buildings where we weren’t able to hold space because of police crack-downs and/or poor planning we know that the only way for this to work is having massive participation and when the time comes, effective defense of the building. To work out numerous details we propose having Building Occupation Assemblies that meet at Oscar Grant Plaza on Wednesdays at 5pm and on Sundays at 1pm with representatives from the Occupy Oakland committees and individuals.  The working groups of this assembly will meet to discuss the plans necessary to make the move-in successful and create a vibrant social center. The strategies for the defense of the building will be decided collectively in these meetings.

We further propose a 2-day festival at the start of the occupation which would include cultural events, workshops and strategy sessions to generate community support and participation to further the occupy movement. The Building Occupation Assembly will coordinate this weekend festival. They will plan a full schedule of events, as well as coordinate outreach.

Those writing this proposal are in full agreement that keeping the address of the building a surprise is necessary when planning an action of this scale, so that the building proposed doesn’t have a preemptive shutdown by the city.  On the other hand, to make this an all-inclusive action by Occupy Oakland, the authors of this proposal have been in touch with various individuals from committees regarding the particular address of the building. These include: the Kitchen Committee, Events Committee, Supply Committee, Sound Committee, Medics, Free School, Library, Finance Committee, Occupy Legal, Anti-Repression Committee and the Facilitation Committee yet we hope to expand this list. These individuals know the exact address of the building in order to help organize this action in a coordinated yet decentralized manner.

To conclude, in talking to members of our community and upon consulting committee members, many feel strongly that it is time to get Occupy Oakland indoors. The winter and rainy season is upon us and has taken its toll on our numbers, our strength, and our will to continue. We know there is much more to do, and we are excited to see our projects and political endeavors through by fighting for a new space seized from the 1% without permission that will suit our needs, and become something cherished by Occupy Oakland, residents of the Bay Area, and beyond.

Proposal summary:

At 1pm on Jan. 28 have a massive Move-In March that starts from Oscar Grant Plaza and ends with the takeover of a new building for Occupy Oakland big enough to potentially provide a space for the committees, the G.A.s and for sleeping.  Immediately after the move-in a festival/convergence will begin that continues through Sunday.

The details of the building will be shared with at least one member from each committee of Occupy Oakland.

A Building Occupation Assembly will meet on Weds. at 5pm and Sundays at 1pm (or to be modified according to future GA schedules)  at Oscar Grant Plaza until the move-in day.

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Fri, 02 Dec 2011 19:08:47 +0100

BEYOND VIOLENCE AND NON-VIOLENCE—A RESPONSE TO CATHERINE COLE

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 18:19:00 +0100

It is a sure sign that a movement has reached a limit when its defenders fall to bickering over failed ideas and imaginary threats—the better to obscure, or make forgettable, the real difficulty of the project at hand. A key example of this is the ongoing “violence” vs. “non-violence” paragone, which commentators on the liberal side of the Occupy movement can’t seem to get enough of. In an article published on Christopher Newfield’s blog, Catherine Cole, a professor at UC Berkeley, rehearses the argument that has become a standard liberal mantra in recent weeks. Though her points are specific to the political situation at the UC campuses, they have much in common with the broader field of liberal discourse on and around OWS. Fair warning: if campus politics aren’t your interest, consider skipping to the bottom.

Cole takes the position that radicals are responsible for perpetrating and perpetuating violence at the UC—perhaps no more responsible than the police, but responsible nonetheless. Only by renouncing all forms of “violence,” a term that includes property destruction, will the movement be able to advance. For Cole, the model of non-violent protest at the UC remains that of the September 24, 2009 walkout, which brought together several thousand students, faculty and staff in a rally on UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza: “[N]ever before had the three segments of California’s higher education mobilized to this degree around a common cause. Berkeley’s rally on that glorious September day culminated in an exuberant procession through the campus and the streets of Berkeley, with colorful improvisational protest actions along the way. The massive mobilization of students—powerfully fueled by the rocket booster of Twitter, Facebook and tiny URL’s—gave many of us hope and inspiration, even in the face of the long entrenched problems we face in California.”

After the “glorious day” in late September, though, the movement was, at least according to the Police Review Board report which Cole cites approvingly, infiltrated by a “smaller, more calculating (but perhaps no less sincere) group” that “set out to instigate confrontations with the police – to engineer challenges to their authority and to erect obstacles to their plans in order to provoke them into high-visibility over-reactions that could be used to inflame the crowd and escalate its aggressiveness.” As such, Cole blames the police for their heavy-handed repression of the bystanders outside, who “unlike those who seized rooms in Wheeler Hall—were not doing anything illegal at all.” This day of violence was followed by a bout of “retributive violence” (i.e. property destruction) at the Chancellor’s house. It was there, according to Cole, that the movement forfeited “the one source of power it had: the moral high ground—even if it was only a small faction of that movement along with rogue non-affiliates who perpetrated that deed.”

To stop the cycle of violence, Cole argues, the protest movement must retake the high ground, recommitting to non-violent protest on the model of the September 24^th walkout: “Whereas activists have tended to perpetrate violence against property, the Administration has consistently perpetrated violence against bodies. But violence is a cycle, not a competition. […] The way to stop violence is through the practice of nonviolence. What is needed at this moment is restorative justice. Whereas retributive justice seeks vengeance, restorative justice seeks to repair the harm caused by crime. Restorative justice restores the humanity to both the victim and the perpetrator. It is within UC administration’s power to be an agent of restorative justice and nonviolence.” As such, the administration should reach out to those students who are willing to engage in reasoned discussion about the state of the university. Within the movement, “violent” protesters must be marginalized at all costs.

There are many objections one could raise about the sequence of events Cole narrates and the lessons she draws from it. Glaringly absent from her account is the Live Week occupation of Wheeler Hall, which, after first receiving the sanction of the administration, was brutally evicted in the middle of the night as students were sleeping. What violence were these “infiltrators” committing that justified their criminalization? Why, moreover, does Cole believe the official line that the radical protesters were “outsiders” bent on co-opting and corrupting the movement? After all, building occupations were attempted as early as September 24^th, and many of the eventual “rogue non-affiliates” (a wonderfully opaque euphemism) were students who had been involved in organizing from the very beginning. One could note, too, that the “bystanders” outside Wheeler Hall, whom the police brutalized despite their alleged non-violence, had gathered with the express purpose of protecting the “infiltrators” from violence that, according to the logic of Cole’s argument, would have been well deserved. The argument about “infiltrators” versus “bystanders” is not only inaccurate, it is also incoherent. After all, shouldn’t we applaud efforts to build solidarity between the campus and communities outside? Must we pretend that the crisis of the UC system exists in a social and economic vacuum? None of this seems to matter for Cole, though, since at the end of the day, an outside agitator is definable as any student whose politics fall outside the liberal comfort zone.

It is worth asking why this shadow play of invisible “non-affiliates” and innocent bystanders has proven so satisfying for members of the UC Berkeley faculty. One answer is that faculty participation has always been peripheral to the student movement; even activist faculty like Cole, whose efforts were decisive in shaping the critique of privatization in the run-up to September 24^th, have struggled to articulate a position of solidarity with students whose motivations they find deeply foreign, having more to do with jobs and debt than with the defense of liberal education. That the students’ trenchant critique of the UC administration has failed to gain adherents among the faculty should come as no surprise: professors are structurally aligned with the administration, on whose approval their advancement depends; the students who pass transiently through their classrooms and offices are often far more alien to them than the bosses upstairs. And lest we forget, UC faculty were furloughed in 2009; the crisis touched them directly that year, throwing a portion of the humanities faculty (who were less able than their peers in the sciences to recuperate their losses in the form of private-sector work) into a brief alliance with student organizers. But it did not last.

I am not shocked, then, that professors like Cole, who remain tied to the university and its administrative power structure, have balked at the radical direction the protests have taken at the UC. It is disturbing, however, that she thinks it necessary to restore that power structure within the student movement itself, accepting the administration’s discourse on violence and infiltration. In order to solve the “cycle of violence” at the UC, she calls for greater faculty and administrative control over the movement: “The teacher is responsible for setting the tone of the class. Likewise the Administration sets the tone for the campus. The tone that has been set since November 20, 2009 has been a trigger-happy resort to riot police and an utter failure to engage in any kind of meaningful dialogue.” To resolve this standoff, the administration ought to show “visible interest” in communicating with the demonstrators, conveying its willingness “to learn what their message is and to learn their perspective on the issues that concern them.”[1]

Let’s be clear: the purpose of the student movement is not to negotiate the privatization of the university with administrators. Students have tried again and again to reach out to the administration, but to no avail. The problem is not that administrators like Yudof and Birgeneau are hard of hearing; they have heard our message and they are ignoring it. The days are long gone when university administrators thought it their job to protect and safeguard affordable higher education; they’re paid to manage the university system like the multi-billion-dollar commercial enterprise it is, students and faculty be damned. We see no point in initiating yet another round of public conversations where members of the administration can respectfully “learn our message” while reminding us of the “limits of protest.” The administration knows our message all too well—not despite of the occupations but because of them.

As for the so-called “cycle of violence,” we should know by now that the discourse of non-violence exists primarily for the benefit of the enemy, dividing our movement from within while diverting attention from austerity and privatization to the alleged presence of “rogue non-affiliates.” It cannot be said often enough that radicals are not the problem, reactionary self-policing is the problem. If anyone has not understood the meaning of the student protests, it is the faculty; it’s high time they listened respectfully to our message, since much of its content has apparently been lost in translation. If they do, they will discover that the anger of students has everything to do with the crisis of capitalism in which universities are embroiled. For students, there is no clear boundary between life inside and outside the education system. Moreover, as voices within the student movement have claimed from the very beginning, the university is not the virtuous bastion of enlightened thought as professorial rhetoric supposes, it is rather a machine of the reproduction of salaried labor and management. There would be no “public university” without the forces of industry that now threaten to destroy it—that is the paradox we face, and which no amount of liberal hopefulness will help us to overcome. Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that the specific material conditions which made the development of affordable public education possible in the wake of the Second World War—namely, high rates of profit accumulated first through the modernization of industry, then through the outsourcing of production to former colonies—will return in the foreseeable future. Nor should one believe that the jobs for which students are being trained, and for which they have accepted an enormous burden of debt, will reappear even in the event that the economy recovers. Capitalism does not work that way; it is not a force for the good, even if occasionally it produces instruments of social enrichment, of which the American university system is a prime example.

One could make a similar point with regard to OWS. Following the evictions at Zuccotti Park and Oscar Grant Plaza, the movement is again faced with a limit to its powers, and with the paradoxes of capitalism in crisis-mode. Behind the movement are all the familiar tactics and rhetoric of protests past, from “non-violence” and “inclusivity” to reformism and institutionalization. Ahead of it is not less radicalism but more, not fewer tents—and fewer undesirable occupants, fewer homeless and hopeless—but more, not only in the parks and other public spaces but also in neighborhoods and, eventually, at the sites where goods are produced and circulated. There are no liberal solutions to the crisis of capitalism; there are only radical projects and the radical discomfort of breaking one’s pact with normality. As Silvia Federici suggests in a recent interview, “the [OWS] movement must begin to pose the question of how to create a reproductive network outside of the market, for instance connecting with the existing urban farming projects and other elements of the solidarity economy.” To address this question—namely, how to live without capitalism—means going beyond the discourse of violence/non-violence. Moreover, it means getting beyond the illusions that bind us to our present positions within the capitalist system. There is no sense or justification in considering the UC system as separate from the CSUs, the community colleges, and society at large, or of upholding the hierarchy of administrators, faculty, students, and staff. What was glorious about September 24th, 2009 was that for a moment it seemed that the faculty would meet us as comrades rather than as superiors. We thought that our common struggle might bring them closer to us, calling into question the dubious notion that “the teacher is responsible for setting the tone of the class.” As Cole’s missive demonstrates, the teacher still has much to learn—and much more to unlearn—from her students.

[1] Cole is quoting the PRB report, pgs. 119-122.

TWO PROPOSALS—FOR A UNIVERSITY WITHOUT CHANCELLORS

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 03:30:00 +0100

One lesson to be drawn from the past week of struggle at the UC schools and in Cairo is this: that anarchy, long relegated to the micropolitical sphere of groupuscular organization, now looms large on the horizon of anti-authoritarian struggles. Following the brutal repression of occupations at Berkeley and Davis, numerous voices within and outside the UC system have called for the resignations of Chancellors Birgeneau and Katehi. Both leaders (I use that term with distaste) are de facto neoliberals and could not be otherwise; after all, it is the job of university administrators to ensure that the academy is maximally interconnected with the circulatory system of capital. Privatization is not an elective goal for these people, it’s their entire Weltanschauung, their basic outlook on things past, present, and future. Replace Katehi and Birgeneau with new bosses and the system will operate much the same—more haltingly, perhaps, and with less hubristic self-confidence, but obeying the same directives as before. This is the conversation playing out in cafes and dormitories across the two campuses: If we are successful at deposing the two chancellors, what happens next? Should we call for new and better rulers or for no rulers at all?

Things are different, but not vastly different, in Egypt, where hundreds of thousands of protesters have again taken to the streets, this time demanding the ouster of the military council. While the violence unleashed against protesters at Davis and Berkeley pales compared to the ongoing massacre of protesters across the Arab world, both movements draw their strength from the fundamental illegitimacy of the governing authorities, and of neoliberal governance tout court. No one expects the Egyptian elections to fulfill the promise of the revolution; as of now, the only legitimate force in Egyptian society is the revolution itself. At best, elections will restore legibility to the Egyptian government, but not legitimacy. Once a new parliament and president are elected, eventually, ineluctably—within a week, a month, a year, however long it takes—the coils of power and money will again bind Egypt within the neoliberal order; it cannot be otherwise, for the very meaning of governance today is to obey the logic of capitalist expansion, and to work within this framework against the interests of the people. In this sense, the situation at the UC schools is the same. Of course, Katehi and Birgenau remain in their posts; it is far from certain that either chancellor will be deposed. But the movements in Berkeley and Davis nonetheless face the same problem as those in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Bahrain, and beyond: administrators come and go, but it is the system itself that must be cast down.

With that in mind, I want to make two concrete proposals for the students, faculty and staff of UC Berkeley and UC Davis:

1) That we demand the immediate resignations of Katehi and Birgeneau and the immediate dissolution of their posts. No cops on campus—no chancellors either. If we have learned anything these past years, it is that there is one, and only one, legitimate source of authority at the UC: that of the students, staff, and faculty, united in struggle. The problem is not that these particular administrators stand at our helm, but that administrators run the university in the first place.

2) That general assemblies open to all students, faculty, and staff henceforth take the place of the chancellor’s office. There is no need for these figurehead disciplinarians on our campuses; we can manage the work of governing the universities better without them. At present, the position of Chancellor exists for one reason only: to keep the university under the power of the capitalists who profit by it. Against the authoritarianism implicit in this power structure, we propose nothing other than the chorus of our voices.

To reiterate, anything short of these proposals will succeed only at prolonging the strangulation of the university, and the deepening of its privatization. The police won’t be deterred for long, not if the all-star team of administration hacks Mark Yudof has selected to lead the “reform” effort is any indication. The administrators will jump at the first opportunity to divide and smear us; destroying our protests is their profession. Abolishing the administration is ours—or rather, it is the only possible horizon of our movement. Down with the chancellors; all power to the general assemblies!

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Thu, 17 Nov 2011 12:29:26 +0100

FIRST TRAGEDY, THEN PATHOLOGY—ON THE COMING RAID

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 13:21:00 +0100

Mayor Quan’s second attempt at evicting Occupy Oakland now appears scheduled for sometime in the next few days (nights, I mean), a political shitstorm set to collide with a week of action/occupations at UC Berkeley following last week’s brutal repression of Occupy Cal. The Mayor’s office could not have picked a worse time to evict the Oakland occupiers. In an op-ed piece for the East Bay Express, Robert Gammon asks what’s become a fairly obvious question: forget desirability, is it even possible to permanently dislodge the encampment? “[W]hat could the city do? Keep hundreds of cops at the plaza around the clock until crews build a fence?” That this question answers itself speaks to the intractability of the Oakland occupation, but also to the unfamiliarity of its horizons. Apart from civil war, it’s hard to think of a word that describes the current situation.

That said, there will be nothing to cheer about when the occupation is raided: the cops will descend (provided that they can get their mutual aid agreements in order); various forms of hell will break loose. If there is anything to say about the raid in advance, perhaps it is simply to repeat Mao’s adage about the “one” splitting into two—that is, unity dividing into contradictory parts—and to picture this unity as the city itself. Now, there is no longer only one city of Oakland, but two, three, four Oaklands, each with its own code of order: a city of suburbanites and petit-bourgeois, a city of cops, a city of poverty, and a hornet’s nest of communards in the middle of it all; the latter two groups now find themselves arrayed against the former, and with no means of reconciliation. As a matter of fact, the Mayor’s latest and most desperate scheme for dealing with the occupation entails provisioning it with an indoor rental and/or a less central park—no doubt to facilitate eventual arrests, or in hopes that the hippies and homeless will choke on their own shit.

What makes all of this so remarkable is that there is nothing de facto wrong with the occupation. Indeed, the actual content (in the sense of form/content) of the occupation is more or less indistinguishable from the content of the city defined broadly and ideally: as a space where people live and struggle together, visibly and vocally. True to its anarcho-communist roots, the occupation is simply providing for itself what the city ought to be providing for everyone. But to call Occupy Oakland a city within a city would be to ignore the fundamental antagonism of these two power-centers: the city and the occupation are enemies in the classical sense of this term: irreconcilable, they nonetheless stand on equal footing. There will be no potlatch of peacefulness, in other words (I show you mine, you show me yours). This is war, whether one wants it or not. The Oakland city council knows, or guesses, what the occupiers are discovering with each passing day: that the commune’s future is as an urban agglomeration all its own, and that the struggle between capitalism and its enemy will necessarily unfold as a battle for the city itself.

And so the local politicos bloviate about “safety” and “public health”—as if they ever cared for these sectors of the public—with a vitriol all the more toxic for being groundless. This is what happens what a power-structure becomes so deeply ingrained that the elite can no longer cognize opposition to its rule; twisting all logic, white becomes night, and day, black. Anything and everything that happens inside the occupation is turned against it: just as it is inadmissible to live in the encampment, so too is it inadmissible to die there. The city’s message boils down to this: You scum are free to live and die—mostly to die—so long as you do it where we don’t have to look at you. With this as their only justification, the forces of order will attack the occupation again and again (first as tragedy, then as pathology). As far as the ruling elite is concerned, the city of Oakland must be united, even if this means denying a huge swathe of the population any sort of meaningful or visible public life.

We need no further evidence as to the city’s bankruptcy. Oakland has failed its people irrevocably; the only bonds left sustaining the city government are those of violence, corruption, and the circulation of capital. But these bonds will not hold. Oaklanders have been deprived of their city for long enough. The tens of thousands who marched in the general strike know exactly what’s being fought for, and with what stakes. When the raid comes, it will have been too late: Oakland is divided, and no amount of tear gas will bridge the fissure. On the side of the commune, there is everything that makes civic life meaningful, urgent, and necessary. Everything else belongs to the enemy; the bonds that tie its hands will one day loop its neck.

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Wed, 09 Nov 2011 23:09:00 +0100

READING MATERIAL: THÉORIE COMMUNISTE ON REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 12:54:00 +0100

From “The suspended step of communisation: communisation vs. socialisation” (2009), via libcom.

[…] Some fractions of the proletariat will be smashed, others will be “turned back”, rallying to conservative strategies of survival. Other insurrections will pick up where they leave off. Certain of those turned back or bogged down will resume direct expropriations, and the organisation of the struggle by those who struggle and uniquely for the struggle, without representation, without control by anyone in the name of anything, thereby taking up once again the constitution of communism, which is not a goal of the struggle but the content of struggle. Counter-revolutionary ideologies will be numerous, starting perhaps with that of the survival of the economy: preserving economic mechanisms, not destroying all economic logic, in order to then construct a new economy. The survival of the economy is the survival of exchange in all its forms, whether it employs money, any kind of voucher, or even simply barter, which can be adorned with the name of mutual aid! The complete absence of any form of accounting is the axis around which the revolutionary community will construct itself, only the absence of exchange value will enable the bringing together of all the not directly proletarian social strata which will disintegrate in the hyper crisis. Only the destruction of exchange value will integrate/abolish all the not directly proletarian individuals, all those “without reserves” (including those who revolutionary activity will have reduced to this condition), the unemployed, ruined peasants of the “third world”, the masses of the informal economy. These masses must be dissolved as middle strata, as peasants, in order to break the personal relations of dependence between “bosses” and “employees” as well as the situation of “small independent producers” within the informal economy, by taking concrete communist measures which force all these strata to join the proletariat, that is, to realise their “proletarianisation”…

Proletarians who communise society will have no need of “frontism”. They will not seek out a common program for the victims of capital. If they engage in frontism they are dead, if they remain alone they are also dead. They must confront all the other classes of society as the sole class not able to triumph by remaining what it is. The measures of communisation are the abolition of the proletariat because, in addition to its unification in its abolition, they dissolve the basis of existence of a multitude of intermediary strata (which are thereby absorbed into the process of communisation) and millions (if not billions) of individuals that are exploited through the product of their labour and not the sale of their labour-power. As much on the level of regions as at the global level, communisation will have an action that one could call “humanitarian”, even if this term is currently unpronounceable, because communisation will take charge of all the misery of the world. Human activity as a flux is the only presupposition of its collective, that is to say individual, pursuit, because as a pre-supposition of itself it has no conception of a product and can thus give plentifully. The proletariat, acting as a class, dissolves itself as a class in its seizures, because in these seizures it overcomes its “autonomy”. […]

BEYOND THE GENERAL STRIKE—ONE OF MANY POSTSCRIPTS

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 14:38:00 +0100

Now seems like the right time to expand on something I wrote the other day—namely this: “We can say as well that the general strike will no longer be a lapse or break in the valorization process, but will instead take the form of a sudden intensification in the process of communization, shifting from the asynchronous and centripetal conditions of mass default (the result of staggered forces of subtraction and attraction, of renunciation and reintegration) to a period of synchronic and centrifugal expansion and disruption.” I hope this terminology isn’t completely opaque; I’m actually saying something quite simple about how communization happens, or might happen, in terms of time and territory.

One way to think about communization is as a gradual, nearly invisible process of attraction: one, two, three at a time, people arrive, adding to the commune their wealth, debts, and labor-power (also their shining personalities!). If you need a model for this, look to the camp at Oscar Grant Plaza: I call this model asynchronic and centripetal because people converge at the same point of attraction, but not all at the same time; each person will have a different history with the commune, beginning and ending on a different day. This model exists already, but it can be strengthened—I’ll say more on that below. The other model is essentially a “day of action,” which I call synchronic and centrifugal because all at once the commune empties out into the streets, careening around in search of new points of attraction. The day of action marks a shift in the commune’s activities from reproduction—everyday getting-by and getting-along—to antagonism, intensifying the distinction between the commune and its enemies and heightening divisions within the commune. Days of action mobilize and volatilize the commune, propelling it forward into enemy territory, the vast field of potential attraction-points and barriers. In this way, the commune is able both to demonstrate its presence and numbers and to take and hold new territory, creating new gravitational centers for the reproduction of communal life.

It would be ridiculous for me to comment on the Nov 2^nd general strike in its details other than to say that I was, and remain, astonished—and deeply humbled—by the size and power of the rally and march. As for the occupation of 520 15^th St., I’m only dismayed that it was put down so brutally and quickly. No doubt there are lessons to be drawn from these events in their particulars, but I couldn’t say what they are; I wasn’t there. Looking from afar, though, I see what I believe—perhaps wrongly—are the movement’s broad outlines, and can offer one or two points on that basis:

First, the port action seems to me an unmitigated success: the commune—this commune—is fully capable of blocking the circulation of capital, and with complete impunity, for as long as it wants. Many hands have been wrung over the destruction of a couple plate glass windows in and around the downtown area—damages that do not even begin to approach the several million dollars worth of commercial revenue lost thanks to the port closure. I can’t emphasize this point enough: it costs almost nothing to replace a broken window or scrub away graffiti compared to the blockage of a major commercial port. In a way, the hue and cry about “violence” and “property destruction” says something profound about life under capitalism (and I do mean under it): for the vast majority, it is simply impossible to grasp just how much wealth circulates above our heads, in the atmospheric heights of the Economy. Property is, truly, an abstraction—so much so that we can’t be sure where or what it is. In this sense, the work of the black bloc is to give the lie to the myth of property—for if anything, and perhaps despite their intentions, they showed that the city is itself devoid of property; property exists only as a numerical vapor, dissipating as soon as one chucks a hammer through it. Moreover, the architecture of the 20^th-century city begs to be defaced—indeed, it can only be defaced.[i] Like all parts of the urban façade, bank windows are simply the surface-plane of an encompassing infrastructure of discipline and dispersion (what was once called “the spectacle”). Property is not a thing or an edifice, but rather a vector; it is a relational term, as the occupiers of 520 15^th St. quickly discovered.

Despite the success of Wednesday’s port action, I stand by my claim that “the general strike will no longer be a lapse or break in the valorization process”—or at least, it will no longer posit this break as its endpoint or horizon. The real success of the port shutdown was to have halted the circulation of capital simply as a matter of course, and in a manner that was not and could not be negotiated. There is a lesson here: the commune needs no reasonto blockade the Port of Oakland or to disrupt business as usual; it is the opposite of the usual business, it is the crisis. Wherever it goes, capital flees. And so what has always been a far-away goal of anti-capitalist movements is now the commune’s banal side-effect. The plan to blockade the port gave the flow of bodies a temporary point of attraction, but it was not an end in itself. Hence the confusion about what to do next—whether to enter the port or go elsewhere, either to the Bay Bridge or back to Broadway and 14th. The commune had reached a limit: there was nothing at the port that could be communized, no territory worth reclaiming. And so the day was done.

The decision to occupy the former home of the Traveler’s Aid Society at 520 15^th St. has already been praised by some as pointing the way forward for the movement. Let’s be clear, though, about what lies down this path. To claim new territory for the commune means expanding the sphere of non-work, and at a certain point this antipathy to the wage system will need to be upheld as the movement’s explicit purpose. The occupations have already begun to draw in the unemployed, the under-employed, the homeless, the debtors, and the underclass—those whom the disciplinary apparatus of the state keeps separate from the white, male core of the employable workforce. Theirs are the voices that together comprise the “we” of the commune. There is no reason, however, for the commune to be limited to those who already find themselves outside the wage system. In the abstract, the commune is a social and economic form, but materially it is nothing more than a process, a movement towards autonomy from the wage system—not only for its adherents, but for everyone.

The movement of the communes will fail if it does not come to embody an alternative to work and the life that work demands; this will require new territories (indoors and outdoors), but also public renunciations of work and work-life from within the class of the employed. This process need not unfold according to the temporality of a general strike or day of action, but can take place as a diffuse flow of bodies and material to the commune’s central hubs. Of course, some forms of property are only reclaimable by force, with the aid of a volatilized body of supporters; there is much, though, that can be communized by day, even invisibly. No doubt this invisible work has been ongoing at OGP. As things move forward, we should set our sights on abandoned property, but also on the property some of us own or rent; this should be equally available for communization—the same goes for our earnings and benefits, those of us within the wage system.

The commune is powerful—so much so that has begun to outgrow the forms of past struggles, evolving in directions that could not have been foretold in advance. I won’t try to say what comes next, only that there is a logic at work here, a technics of growth and struggle that exceeds even our own discourses about the movement and its purposes. Does anyone truly believe that the occupations will go away once winter hits or spring arrives? Isn’t it part of the logic of the camp that it cannot go away, that the tents will always reappear, like mushrooms after a rainstorm? We know that this is true; we should know, too, that the camp is not a “form of protest” or “expression,” it is communism and nothing else. And there is no other future than that.

[i] I mean graffiti, which in its usual mode challenges the ownership of real-estate and infrastructural property without offending the rule of property—that is, by marking a wall or window as owned or claimed, but in a way that can only be read and interpreted by other artists, and which therefore makes no claim on the building (the property) itself. The problem posed by anarchist graffiti is that its tags can be read by anyone, and further, that these tags challenge the real owners of property rather than other writers.