Forces At Work

Sporadic political outbursts, undercooked theory, and playlists. Most posts edited and re-edited a dozen times after publishing.

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  • Scatterbrained thoughts about privilege, benefit, interest, etc

    The role of the state in relation to the worker, from the beginning, was to subdue them. The premise of liberal-democratic capitalist society is that the individual worker is free. The system must keep labor subdued in that false experience of freedom for the entire system to function. This tendency to ameliorate harsh conditions for some, or to even give them space to live an economic life, is not the system bringing labor into a ruling class. This is instead the system figuring out how to keep the worker from rebelling, while permanently locking them out of rule. Be a ruler in this system is not a matter of having lots of material goodies, although it may involve that, or not. The capitalist and laborer, even in the imperial core, do not share all of their status, and in fact there is an antagonistic relation, still, between them. The amelioration is only to create a thick enough insulation in the worker’s consciousness from the bare fact of their servitude.

    When we talk about workers receiving spoils, it is spoils as an insulation from facing the bare fact of subordination. It is not that the worker is without this knowledge of subordination, but there is just always enough in the way of them having to face it. It is out of sight, out of mind. Consumer goods are not a prize, that once exclusively belonged to the bourgeoisie, but now extends to imperial core workers, as capitalist and worker banded together to form a class of equals. The capitalist does not care about consumption in the way a worker would. The consumption is insulation from bearing constant conscious awareness of the relation of servitude.

    This can also mean the laborer becomes more violent the closer they get to the fact of confronting their servitude, in which they seek scapegoats. Everyone else has to live with awareness of their oppression, but those with social power closer to the marginalized, who abuse, are simultaneously protected from the knowledge of their servitude through that abuse. They do not get to move society’s pieces around, and they do not get to command economy. They are deeply alienated and unfree, and they are stripped of all non-antagonistic, non-competitive forms of sociality. They can only function like protective gloves on the hands of the bourgeoisie, when the ruling class finds that it’s time to strangle surplus labor to death, or re-subordinate society to its hierarchies.

    The sense of social meaning for the middle-class or socially elevated reactionary is constrained by power. They are driven by a resentment towards the oppressed, who often become free of the mental subordination to these regimes of power, even in being assaulted by them. Reactionary abuse of others is itself servitude to a class of rulers who get to set the terms of the whole order. That exercise of local power conceals servitude, even as an act of servitude. Those dominated refuse to serve, or they are considered insufficient for the task. Yet deprived of social meaning, they become free in ways the reactionary can never manage, and this creates a ressentiment towards the oppressed. The oppressed even work like canvases for a projection on the part of reactionaries, who see the oppressed as their oppressors. The reactionaries are in fact oppressed, too, but by their own ideologies and actions. The bourgeoisie, at a far remove from local, commonplace society, exercise their power like phantoms through the reactionary. They take over the bodies of these reactionaries and devour their souls.

    The reactionary becomes pure authoritative social function the closer society moves towards war or collapse. A general precarious position, however, in between relations of power means most on the servitude side of the capital-labor relation have contradictory enough experiences to allow them to be allies to the most marginalized. The actual cops, patriarchs, and violent fascists should be ruled out as allies, but we have to take a more open approach to others, even while understanding structural incentives. People are forced to adhere to capitalist function, but they are not identical to those functions. Something always remains beyond function, maybe many things, even if we can’t always see that right away.

    You will still find enemies again on the other side of keeping an open approach. When you do, you have to re-commit to the open approach, and still take people as they come. When seeking out something shared in a group, you should speak to the highest qualities, and let whoever can be moved towards you do so. Do not convince yourself that you have to speak in a way that precludes all but a narrow kind of identity. Allow all in the audience you speak towards adapt to the highest qualities you emphasize. If they adapt, they are clearly not fascists. Speak in a way that permits every conceivable kind of person who could be moved towards you to do so.

    I am disabled and trans and I know not every white, cis, able-bodied worker is going to want to be in coalition with me, or even spare me from the camps. I know those reactionaries exist, and yet I can’t say for sure that any single white worker in front of me is going to be a reactionary. Where any of us are radical, we also have aspects that we need to change, so we are really no different, apart from structural location. It takes fighting to figure out who our allies are. Some people grow into allies, others move in the opposite direction, but you must allow yourself to be uncertain when addressing people, and not jump the gun on deciding who they are. You can’t project your enemy onto every individual body put in front of you.

    You also can’t know that they aren’t your enemy! But power comes in learning how to navigate exactly that space. We have to find in people what even they don’t realize is there. Sometimes people are showing you they are allies, when they don’t know they’re doing that. We all have a more intimate experience with the upper strata of workers. Maybe we have been abused by them. We see them in our daily lives, so we know in a more concrete way how their power can be really active in the world.

    Yet they are proxies for a power greater than them, too. Bill Gates isn’t going to be seen in your community. Jeff Bezos would never interact with your neighbors. Those closest to us abuse us in service of a system that cannot extend itself nakedly in front of us, for fear of giving itself away. And these antagonisms are made ever more severe because of survival. The deadliest petite bourgeois, or deadliest white worker, are the ones very close to losing their power. But they are likewise hollowed out husks of human beings. They are instruments of a power far beyond them. They are possessed in service of capital.

    The power the reactionary exerts is for the stabilization of an order, and their benefits are found in relative wealth, but also in an intense libidinal cathexis, that is simultaneously always undermined in conflict with an Other. It exists in potential through comparison with another, and is always undermined by that same Other. These middle-class reactionaries can be instrumentalized at all because to do so means shutting themselves off from conscious emotions and self-understanding, but these feelings return, always trailing the path of this Other. What they repress returns in the social world, and they endure emotion only when forced to from the outside. They are driven to destroy their Other in service of achieving a perfect, emotion-free emptiness, that is simultaneously perfect fulfillment and overcoming of deprivation.

    Their desire, in destruction of the Other, is towards a static state of harmony, but one that would be revealed as illusion when their state of servitude was left bare in the aftermath of the Other’s disintegration. To shut themselves off from self-interrogation means preventing an understanding of their own subordination to not only a ruling class, but to a regime of painful, life-restraining ideologies. Becoming power exercising itself is a helpful way to distract yourself from that reality. The petite bourgeois or elevated worker is stripped of life when they become power, and life where it remains at its most vital becomes unbearable, as it is then filled with a residue of the misanthropy they carry when exercising power. When they are forced to live, or forced to confront the reality of basic human social relations, the devil they maintain themselves to be in relation to power gets its revenge in their psyche.

    Even if we have to fight some these reactionaries, we cannot envy their condition, nor can we render every single person in our environment at one with that reactionary worldview. We are not organizing fascists into becoming communists, but there are other people in our world who can be shown the tragedy of the fascist condition. Not even so they refuse to become fascists themselves, which they likely wouldn’t; but so they see a futility in this current world, which should help embolden them to think beyond it in cooperation with others. We all have one foot in upholding power in our various ways, and one foot grounded in an antagonistic relation to power. The task of communism is to create the stable foundation where we all can take that one foot out of power’s reproduction. We need to create the platform for everyone to stand on.

  • Reification and the consciousness of the Situation Monitor

    My constant reassertion of the problems of reification is linked to my constant reiteration of the problems of political realism. Simply put, the reified world always insists on itself as a limit. In that same breath, it is constantly changing in content, while carrying over its prior form. It can project out its form in numerous but concealed ways, and to just follow one of its threads without a declared and theorized upon aim is a refusal of liberation’s demands. It can seem like, in capital’s opposite global pole, there may be liberation. That opposite pole erases what we are accustomed to as content, as it violently clashes against our known oppressor. Yet the capitalist totality is necessarily split in two spheres, at least, and its Otherized pole is baked-in and not a sign of its overcoming. Capitalism maintains a gravitational pull in this split that can redirect liberatory elements in one pole in service of its opposite pole. We see leftists and marginalized groups in the east forced to escape towards the west, and leftists in the west reaching east to fight their state. In this misidentification of the liberatory force, both are forced to betray each other, and aid the system that maintains their enemies.

    In capitalist society, the society of the day prior imposed itself as if it were eternal. That prior society and its form could shed its content, but then act all over again as if its content had been there from the beginning of time. If we do not move towards grasping the totality of relations in any given local or particular struggle, we will be immediately subsumed into that totality, and it will envelop us behind our backs. The form will enclose us in its reproductive logic, and we will be rendered into its new content, which it points to as inevitable and static. We will speak of liberation out of one side of our mouths, and then begin appealing to naturalized, ideological laws of society that we will say must be adhered to in place of that same liberation. This path of “realism” achieves us on a perpetual wishful thinking, that settles for the illusion of victory, even as such false victory erodes our practical foundation and reason for existing.

    Reification is a seemingly frozen social reproduction, that presents its current limit as the eternal one. Yet these reified forms are also always, in their moment, very real and limiting. In capitalist reification, we are stuck in a space where we must smash through reality’s appearance and deny its claim of eternity. The only way to do that is through an understanding of the totality, along with grasping its reproductive negation. We can’t achieve liberation through means that practically project capitalist premises into the future. Content in capitalism can always shift, but the stranglehold of capital remains in its forms. That it can do strangle us but then claim eternity while permitting content to ceaselessly shift is its whole game. Only the transcendent political position can expose what its limits are. We can not take its premises for granted and negate them flatly, only in particular dimensions. That negation needs the further step of negating the system in total through practical advancement.

    We must ground ourselves in the premise of communism, then look for where it is latent in the world. That must be how we embed ourselves in political situations, because otherwise we will be blind to the capitalist totality. We will unconsciously cede to it if we’re refusing understanding its elasticizing formal shape, and understanding where it meets its limit. We are pushing against its barrier from the inside of the totality and not simply idealizing a state of affairs. We are forcing it to go all the way to its breaking point, where conscious human intervention can then assert itself against its reproductive logic. We are turning the inverted capitalist world right-side out. The material for the new world right now is laid out before us.

    Without principled theoretical guidance, capital will constantly re-mold us from behind our backs. The only way to break from it is to understand what the opposite and negating social principle would be across the totality, that would render capitalist subsumption inoperable. We have to construct the negating logic of counter-subsumption by erasing capital’s practical social laws and asserting their totalized opposite. Capital has to hit its wall in the assertion of a new practice that we bring into reality. The practice is woven from elements already within capitalism.

    To be a “realist” is to give capitalism all control over our directionality. There could be no shift in that directionality, unless we had a sense of what a negating form of society would look like. In some ways, it is as if we are smashing society’s breaks, as opposed to changing directions. Capital projects a linear direction, and we are erecting barrier for it to crash into. From there we enter a new world that seeks no future hide its goal in. It aims to shape present conditions in a way where it can always be in accordance with any goal, and not practically divorced from it. The experience of shaping the world and embedding goal are two sides of a movement.

    That deferral of the goal in prior Communist struggle has always been a “realist” concession to the dominant order that is simultaneously communism’s practical death. “Realism” closes off practical space, and we can never achieve the communist goal through directly antagonistic means, which is what all deferral of the goal adheres to, even in fighting one pole of capital. Capitalist society and communism are opposed in ways that do not lend to gradual, incremental change. Capitalism asserts the necessity of one enclosed form of social reproduction, and communism negates all of its central reproductive claims in practice.

    We should never disavow that we are in fact judging this world from the point of view of communism. Otherwise, we will be immediately subsumed. Its rules never cease shaping our behavior, until we make a counter-logic conscious. We either survive on capital’s terms, or we are stressing its overcoming and straining to bring a new world into existence. The fact is, we will be subsumed anyway, even apart from “realist” political maneuvering. I do not need to join with others to fight and die on a mission to be subsumed under a new form of life that camouflages oppressive relations. I certainly don’t need to sit here and root for other states like they’re sports teams, when they are subordinated to the very order I want to overthrow. There are better fantasies.

    The point of communism as a movement is the transformation of the capitalist world into a superseding form of life, all through finding the transcendent possibility latent in what exists. We need communism as our anchor, not for the sake of conforming to an ideal, but for creating the force that could counter capital at all, or ever cohere as anything we could call a movement. We can never, in a million years, break from capital by taking its reproductive logic for granted and projecting it out from our actions. Those actions, even when negating one aspect of the system, are governed by the capitalist totality, and in a way that could go on for an eternity without ever brushing shoulders with the genuinely liberatory.

    The subjectivity of the “realist” is reified because it is isolated and detached from an active, living theory of social relations, and detached from the genuine movements of popular struggle in the outside world. In its limited perspective, it sees whatever appears as a dominating order it must cower before, hiding its adherence through an affiliation with the less overt pole of global capitalist relations. To break through this reified subjectivity is to be able to see the opposite warring poles of capitalist society in their similarities, and devise the strategy that can materialize the underclasses that serve capital in a proletarian formation.

    The reified subjectivity always sees this task as something to put off in favor of taking a stance that is in thrall to reified, isolated appearance, totally absorbed by the parameters of capitalist competition. Whatever current moment they live through is one of an eternal capitalist ideology, to be followed only by a new moment wiping the slate clean and reaffirming its new content as likewise of a piece with capitalist eternity. The “realist” will follow one reified moment to the next, never breaking free. Yet it is precisely when capitalism offers you its opposite pole as liberation that you should reject it.

    Beyond that offer from established power is where the “self-interest” of humanity in the form of the self-abolishing proletariat exists. This has to be constructed at the point where the system’s offer breaks down. Those trapped as servants and objects of power find their likeness in the opposite pole, beyond the range of the warring factions who uniformly treat the human life it rules over as grist for war. There may not be perfect symmetries between the underclasses at different poles, but they can find relation is their separate conditions of forced deprivation, and as a kind of livestock repurposed as cannon fodder.

    Only at that precise point of the underclasses finding their inversion of the “multipolar world” can capitalism can be perforated at the scale of the totality. Where capitalism announces its split into two sharp poles, those subjugated must pull the rug out for under these factions and assert themselves as the true unity of society. The underclasses must refuse the offer of false salvation in the opposite poles, or in nationalism, and smash at the system across borders. This is never a task to be put off. We are always challenged by the question of how to construct this revolutionary force. Its dilemma is always us. The failure of achieving this formation must burn, and we must keep our focus on the failure still, while never opting for capitalism’s consolation prize. The consolation prize is always to become one form of cannon fodder or another, only achieving purpose through the acceptance of subjugation, and through delusion.

  • Campism is a non-sequitur

    The campist says “conditions are not ideal, but we must conform to them and put aside ideological considerations,” as if the pressure to conform could ever escape what is latent in choosing an opposition. If you oppose a pole within capitalism, you either have ideological considerations for doing so, which necessitate considerations of praxis, or you are affirming capitalist competition by choosing one side of conflict without ever making demands.

    Without what the campist labels “ideal”—which is usually what we are actually on the hook for consciously attempting to establish—their position is a non-sequitur from the communist vantage point. I may personally prefer China to the US, but it would have nothing to do with communism, as it exists only as a passive preference in relation to a process contained within capitalist boundaries. There is no communist guarantee in passively siding with one state or another, even if that state is nominally communist. Passivity and hedging do not mix with communism! For the nominal communist state to live up to its aim, they would have to in turn wait on us to become self-active. If China actually were communist, our passivity is weighing them down!

    Communism is not something to be forced onto people. It has to be a mode of life that encourages active participation and responsibility. There is no imposed, top-down, state-led training program that teaches you how to take control over your life, as that would be an intractable contradiction. Nor is there an educational bar of entry for claiming power. The most beaten down of our lumpenized underclass can claim their world. That will involve a learning process, as it will for all of us, but it would be made meaningful by the initiative in taking control.

    The entire premise of “things aren’t perfect, so we have to obey what exists until change magically happens” is clearly wrong. You have to be “anti-campist” to figure out where a communist politics can be developed at all, or even where a temporary alliance with a state would be feasible. No “campist” has that understanding. They are pawning off responsibility in lieu of having a developed theoretical framework. A communist framework never consigns you to spectacle, even if the odds of victory aren’t in your favor. To even begin the fight is a form of victory. The odds are irrelevant. Never in history have the odds been in our favor.

    We do not even need the promise of victory to stand against this society. This world immanently begs for its own negation. All the reason you could ever have to take up the communist position are already here, and hedging around odds should be resisted. If you died opposing this system today, you would die correct. Which isn;t to say we do not want victory, but that this world only is redeemed in acting against it. An asteroid crashing into earth and killing us all before massive social change happened could not render that opposition pointless. It is always “right to rebel.” That is the only thing that gives this world any order of meaning.

    Once you take the position seriously, you realize there is no “campism” that allows you to abide by communist principles. Communists would have to have independence of position first, before ever assessing any temporary alliance. But then an alliance is only an alliance if you are oriented towards communist struggle.

    Campism is a byproduct of one pole of capitalism mirroring the other while entangled with it, with both holding up the necessary avenue of competition and conflict that the system relies on, even if some actors are more aggressive than others. If Iran won a war right now, they will push to further take advantage of their victory by integrating themselves deeper into the capitalist system. And then, they would continue to slaughter communists. Just because we want the US to face blows does not mean we need to tell ourselves a fairy tale about what Iran’s victory would look like. That is being absorbed by the spectator’s disease. If Iran’s “victory” could mean anything to us, we would have to re-orient ourselves right now. Stop making excuses and reorient yourself already.

  • Another reiteration of principles

    We’re not challenging the world in successive steps on a linear trajectory over 500 years. We’re not fighting Israel, so we can move on to fighting to US after, and face capitalism only at the end of the journey. We fight Israel to fight the US to fight capitalism in one motion. No stages. Everything is those multiple “stages” made into one moment and one movement. It is always a 2-steps-at-once maneuver, at least. Each blow registers in multiple dimensions.

    We attack the enemy through whatever available non-self-undermining means, and simultaneously shift the ground under their feet, where that ground conditioned behavior antagonistic to communism. It will be the case from here until eternity that revolution can only break the infinite linear sequence towards a goal, that it necessarily cuts itself off from practically, by making a movement work in multiple dimensions at once.

    That is likewise a refusal of the successive phases model. Everything an ML says has to happen in a structured linear sequence over hundreds of years has to, in terms of practical logic, be brought into the same present. That does not mean communism is “achieved” in terms of a finished project in the present, but communism is in fact not a finished project at all, ever.

    We establish the basic starting premise of communism by negating capitalism’s practical logic, which secures the society we will need in order to face non-static existence together. MLs have the social premise of communism suspended as a far off goal, where the practical logic behind communism is the only engine we could rely on for change, and what must be secured for us to have free existence at all. Sure, securing needs seems utopian under capitalism, but that is in fact a demand for a minimal standard.

    The freedom of communism comes after needs are secured. The society that comes in the wake of securing needs is what must be left open for us to dream open. If the injustice of capitalism is that we are deprived for its model to work, then we can establish no practice that doges the matter of deprivation. We certainly can’t forestall it simply because deprivation would also be a convenient tool for aspiring Communist leaders.

    We can not treat alleviating hunger as a utopian dream. We can and must embed a practical logic in a movement within this world that would challenge all of capitalism’s deprivation. You cannot secure the elimination of deprivation by setting up a new regime of deprivation and throwing some red paint on it. Yet refusing to end the deprivation as the baseline of a movement will also sustain every form of perverse power in this world that we want to overthrow. All these forms of power, even ones that predate capitalism, are based on deprivation and hierarchical control.

    Which is all why calls for abstract unity are so ridiculous. Some people in that block of would-be unity need to have their basic assumptions about political organizing challenged, as what they advocate for would replicate what we want to be unified against. As if we can talk about the “Epstein class” when most Communist orgs in the US have endless abuse allegations. If you “unify” without consciously delineating the separate premises of political organizing among the broad left, you have just bypassed the portal we must move through to bring revolution into being. The call for unity is itself a demand to camouflage antagonism, that can only open space for top-down modes of organizing to cement themselves. That would be a potential revolutionary energy forfeiting contestation out of the gate.

  • Monstrous alienation

    The left side of this video still is what is granted to the right side and vice versa to keep them locked in capitalist relations without revolt. The worker can at least spend, and the consumer is sustained from their labor. This ends up being unfreedom on both ends. They are both a consequence of the class relation, and both mutually help obscure the conditions of their existence. Accepting this arrangement means you’ve naturalized what should be a political a contestation.

    In this blind spot, power can render you disposable, instrumentalize you, and threatens you always with deprivation. It will always be able to do this downstream of the capital-labor relation evading conscious mediation from those who create society’s wealth. Without conscious control over this process, those who produce and reproduce themselves as worker-consumers leave themselves to be managed. It takes a system to reproduce these two aspects of capitalist life. They don’t just happen without the management of these loose ends taken as totality. The unconsciousness of this relation creates space for alienated power, and thus class.

    With a broken subjectivity that sees work and consumption as reified, detached moments, some force has to make the reproduction sustainable. All worker-consumers become data points. This video is the broken subjectivity of capitalism, and stages capitalist individualism’s reinforcement. The two sides dwell within their reified moments, and what evades their conscious experience is the management of society, which has now fit them into its scheme behind their backs.

    We always sense a big Other lurking in our disavowed social situations, and our alienation creates space for a mechanism to capture such space. We are right to sense a big Other is possible, it flows naturally from how we relate, but we open this space by our reified practice in capitalist society. Our practice both reifies pathology at the individual psych level, and helps make pay for a real world power to exploit and naturalize what is conjured in the pathological response. A big Other is substantialized, but we can in fact claim that space back for ourselves.

    The two sides of the image still above switch places routinely, always pitted against one another, seeing the two aspects of their lives as unrelated. In this absence of solidarity or sustained social contextualization, everyone falls prey to capital’s mechanisms of control. A capitalist class solidifies its power by keeping itself on the right side of capital’s mediations. A space is carved out for a big Other, and the capitalist class flows into that space. People work and consume without view of society, but society remains anyway. A ruling class was given the opportunity to manage and control society via this alienation.

    As long as we let labor and consumption each drive us back into the reified consciousness of capitalist individualism, there we be a force that capitalizes. It will claim for itself the direction of society, and it will dominate our existence, both directly and impersonally. The unavoidable impersonal mode of domination will be captured and maintained by a class of barbarians. They rule over us and have the added advantage of us experiencing their rule as a natural condition. It doesn’t ever require them to announce that we are their property.

    Commerce and labor are wedded to the capital-labor relation, and to exchange. For us to overcome capitalism and class society, labor and consumption must be taken out of the exchange relation, and out of socially unconscious, for-profit mediation. We should produce to care for each other. We should take from production in service of need, as should be our birthright. We should reinforce the social bond on both ends by abolishing exchange, which means no longer necessarily pointing people back at their self-interest. Being a worker-consumer is capitalist society is to have an entire system always point you back at yourself, and tether you to capitalist modes of exchange and competition, one side at a time, and this must necessarily obscure the totality.

    Not to suggest we would have restaurant services like the above images this in a better world, but just for the sake of example: if those on the right side of the video still were led to do the work through their own will, whether as a desire to cook, or a desire to help their community, they would simultaneously be taking control of the social totality. Laboring to stave off deprivation and/or afford individualistic consumption leaves the space of the totality to be claimed by a malign force, that will render human beings into data points only to be managed.

    The worker has to think of survival first, even if they enjoy the work, and the social practical meaning is captured by capital. The consumer is reinforcing that relation through their aim for independence in a context where freedom can’t be granted. The consumer consumes in relation to a social Other, that it also must always disavow, or act as if it is competing with, instead of seeking. Both laborer and consumer are stuck in themselves, but necessarily so.

    To take control of society would be for either side of this video to have a direct connection to their experience, even if part of gaining this direct meaning is itself through processes of collective mediation. That mediation should of course be open to shaping from all hands. The consumption that transcends this video isn’t consuming as a replacement for or against society, and the worker works understanding themselves within society and dependent on it. Being created as a consciously social individual would be what drove them to their work.

  • Musicology goofballs

    I sometimes feel like nobody understands music less than certain musicologists or music theory people. They often can’t talk about any music without ranking it on a supposed fixed index of merit. There is often no sense that music is supposed to bypass being a rote intellectual exercise you can assign a grade to. They are sure they can call you an idiot for enjoying any music originally conceived or composed after 1900.

    As if it is a certainty that music made after 1900 is objectively the product of degraded beings, and the quality or lack thereof can be scientifically proven. These same types will listen to like anime soundtracks and go “yeah, it’s just a joke, I listen to anime music 10 hours a day as a lark.” No, you are undermining your whole air of superiority because you can’t admit that your own standards for evaluating music are insufficient.

    There is no objective route to giving experimental music a D- and officially designating it a failure at what it attempts in total. You don’t know motivations of artists, you don’t know the audiences, you don’t know the webs of signifiers and experiences audience members bring to music, you don’t know the myriad points of aesthetic connection that are being mapped out in any given performance, you don’t understand the range of interpretation the experiences open to. You degrade music by treating it will this kind of fetishistic, hierarchizing approach.

    Which is not the same as saying art for art’s sake. You can also judge works from numerous vantage points. You can judge aesthetic and political content on separate terms, even if you then turn around and consider how they interact. The political evaluation is not aided by the fetishistic instrumentalization of music as grist for rigid cultural hierarchies. We do not need to have all genres ranked on a list and told our experiences with the lower genres are the result of our degraded consciousness.

    “People who listen to experimental music are degraded beings, they think they’re smart, but they don’t realize music stopped being necessary after 1900, and all that’s left is for people like me to pick over its corpse.” Definitely a wise way to experience life, where everything you could interact with ceased being worthwhile a century before your birth, and all that’s left is to consume in service of grading it.

    You may as well be a ghost. You have turn music into an elaborate ritual that works like an anti-summoning. You’re forcing yourself to die and haunt your own existence. You have turned everything into a fetish that protects you from exposing yourself to your social world. You keep music and society at arm’s length to have an illusion of mastery.

    PS: apologies to any musicologists who are good people. This does not apply to all musicologists. But if you are a musicologist, I imagine you must have at last met a pretension one who fits this description.

  • Gendered socialization, capitalism, cheap dunks, etc

    To make a perhaps counterintuitive explanation about my attitude towards gendered socialization, I will relate it to liberal demands to censor the internet. Liberals are actually correct in some way that the internet is facilitating reaction, for example. They may even slow reaction down through censorship. However, the actual source of the problem is capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist socialization. Capitalism is still socializing into existence, even if in contradictory ways, the subjects that can be exploited by the capitalist internet.

    So, liberals could slow down the acceleration of reaction, maybe, but that would not end the baseline subjectivities that are exploited. Capitalism, et al, need male subjectivity, at least under present conditions. It must socialize that subjectivity into existence, and do so as if it’s natural. If subjectivity in accordance with power does not feel natural, it dopes not feel stable. Those who are targeted as Other in this process are indeed incongruous with capital’s schemes and claims around “natural” subjectivity, and they prove that our socialization schemes do not have a claim to nature. However, the socialization as reified is still “real”.

    Even if you are Othered by this socialization, that happens to you as a consequence of your environment demanding you conform to its ideals. It would not be helpful to tell the liberal that the internet didn’t accelerate reaction, or that there weren’t subjectivities that could be exploited by it. And yet the liberal answer could only, at best, slow down the path to an inevitable explosion of reactionary society. If you refuse liberals flatly without putting forward a solution, you also leave the problems in place.

    You have to attack the underlying structures that force the subjectivities into existence, very obviously. Of course that socialization is a nightmare for those who Otehred by it. Yet there needs to be a socialization process for anyone to be Othered at all. Those who are Othered, are marked out as aberrations who must be destroyed, and this is all in dialectical relation with a repressed truth of the socialization’s unnaturalness.

    You can not overcome the reification of gender through theoretical offerings in the university alone, even I think that theory will still aid us. The terf is still going to see “male socialization” because its reification is real. They aren’t even wrong that trans women can be misogynist as a byproduct of socialization, but they see this through surface social appearance alone. Taking cis womanhood as natural and bounded blinds them to how they reproduce patriarchy as well. We all reproduce it. There is a social reproduction that aids the terf’s false consciousness, and cis women equally, or maybe even more, fall prey to gendered reification in that blind spot.

    Without attacking the society that relies on gendered division, you have no way to stop the terf from continuing to see trans women as covert men. Part of it is that the terf was socialized successfully into capitalism’s schemes of womanhood and must repress the possibility that she is Other to that socialization. Yet capital pressures all to repress what is Other than their own self-identification, in generating endless social competition. The problems here won’t be settled through theory, even if theory can disprove the terf’s claims. One trans girl growing up might feel Othered and not a part of that male socialization, or may know that she is in fact a woman, and yet the modes of socialization still live on for society broadly, if in contradictory ways.

    This does not mean trans women have to especially answer for male socialization. Such socialization is not perfectly capable of interpellating all bodies. Interpellation fails, and does so constantly. We do have to keep track of what socialization processes surround us and think about how we maneuver through them. There is what I would call a fear of weakness that can be shared among all genders, that drives confirmation of patriarchal society. Everyone from straight women to trans men and beyond can play into these fears and exacerbate them. The trans woman who says “male socialization” in not real is at least correct that the trans experience does not have to atone for that socialization specifically. Yet they could be engaging said debate in an aggressive, ideological, egotistical way, that accelerates the problems of competition in capitalist society, and thus helps naturalize the patriarchal, capitalist order. It’s just that the tetf arguing with them is usually doing that even more.

    Male superiority is not natural, for example, and yet there are reified practices that will still enshrine such an idea, and it will generate difficulties that we perpetually have to deal with. Men will keep coming to the idea of male superiority if our social practices keep confirming it in appearance. These are relations that continually attempt to reassert themselves through our behavior, and are not detached processes that stand apart from us. We have to catch ourselves in the act of reproducing the “system”. There are no “types” of people who can claim to be naturally beyond any possibility of reproducing it. No one is outside this system. We all aid to the problem in various ways, and in ways that shift. Yet our practices say there is no society, and everyone is alone and naturally at odds with all other groups.

    Now, you can disagree with me on all of this, and I would love to have respectful conversations about it. Yet just rolling your eyes as if I’m not attempting to be thoughtful, or as if I’m being some kind of ideologue because I used one piece of jargon you don’t like, is totally off the mark and disrespectful. Anyone claiming to care about social matters like these should be beyond such posturing. It is possible that I could just be wrong and not your personal enemy in the discourse wars, that you must defeat with cheap dunks.

  • Violence

    I would never claim that a demand for violence against the system should be off-limits. I think at any point in US history, or in the history of capitalism, violence would have been justified, both in terms of everyday self-defense, and in overcoming the system for something beyond it. You would be right to say this current world needs to be violently destroyed in most cases, but you have a responsibility, if you are a communist, to clarify the context of that violence.

    People who are being attacked by ICE, for example, do not have quite that same responsibility, if they have not consciously claimed the transcendent political position. They are totally justified to use violence against ICE without cementing communism in practice. Yet the communist or Marxist is actually there, not to encourage what that individual already knows to do on their own, but to help tie that immediate consciousness of the situation to a new practical logic.

    It isn’t because of stupidity or delusion that they lack this objective now. They are rightly, unavoidably concerned with their immediate circumstances. It also makes sense for, say, an individual worker to worry about their labor benefits, too, when we are in crisis. Yet once you are a communist, and you take that objective seriously, the immediate practical consciousness in these situations is a mismatch, just on their own, for the communist aim. You are not demanding subordination from these people fighting their immediate situation, however, but fighting for what you think is possible, while also treating their fight with respect. You do not hide your communist aim or shy away from it. You also don’t demand survival first and put off discussion of aim until later. The people in these situations can do survive against the immediate question on their own.

    Those fighting in the immediate situation aren’t just your tools of warfare. In their fight is also the space for you to be remade into a better social creature. You should take the violence of this situation, and your relation to others in struggle, seriously. Why do they need to use violence just to survive, at the discretion of someone off on the sidelines who is not immediately facing violence with them? Why can we just bark orders at people to be violent, when we haven’t established stakes between us? You can make demands, but you have to clarify the link between everyone, which, for communists, should be mutual relation in survival on self-conscious communist terms. Otherwise, you should just let people fight their battles on their own without bothering them.

    For communists, the collective concern is not just surviving another day according to the rules of the society we already exist in. It’s to create the practice that halts that society’s reproduction, and negates capital. You can speak up to tell someone to fight ICE—which they will do anyway— when you have some way to demonstrate the bond between the two of you in struggle. We do not need new Maoist military commandos to hide the revolutionary ball. You are not instructing them on how to survive by screaming “shoot the pigs” and then demanding they leave the trickier political matters to the vanguard when that time comes. Explain the communist dimension, fight for it, but do not demand anyone else take your orders. You are in struggle and negotiating with them.

    How do you take and share power together? How are you in struggle with them now? How are you dependent on one another? What are you bringing to their fight? What are we doing collectively in fighting this society? What is the unconscious logic in all this fighting, unclaimed in self-defense against ICE so far? We are fighting ICE for reasons beyond survival, or at least you should believe so if you are a communist. You only should speak to others about that survival when you are honest about those reasons.

  • Alenka Zupančič on Contemporary Perversion

  • Hope and discipline

    “Hope” is a word that can inadvertently tie you to a society that forced you to hope in the first place, and “discipline” can act the same way. I would say that I currently have “discipline” in a technical sense, but I don’t think of it as such, or as a chore. I naturally do what is necessary. I don’t need to have some adherence to abstract discipline, as I own the meaning that the discipline serves. When I am excited to claim the world as something I can transform, I can have technical “discipline” without the sense of self-flagellation. That is because my life is anchored in the right orientation and set of principles. Something more than honoring a vague sense of discipline ignites me to take action.

    I can see my orientation as having a constant pathway into life. If for a second I lack an entry point, I know how to seek it out and find it. The principles give me that urgency. What before appeared as tortuous, laborious, time-consuming discipline when the effort was in service of someone else’s meaning, now evades that sense of labor and eclipses the oppression of time. My own personal meaning fills in the space that prior could only be felt as alienated labor, or as time slowly ticking under another’s control and command.

    Discipline is a means. If you are browbeaten into having discipline, but you cannot so clearly own the end-goal those means serve, then you’re living someone else’s fantasy. These means have been perverted into ends prior to transcending the current order’s logic. You are in a closed loop of “discipline” that only reacts to power. I don’t need hope when I can claim my own present in alignment with principles, because I see my moment now, as much as any other period, as something to act on.

    Here, or in the future, life being claimed in the moment is an act to transform what’s around you. Now, like in the future, I can claim life at its highest expression by reaching my hands into the world and attempting to remold it. If you allow yourself to love that process, you do not need to self-flagellate, even when you are working strenuously.

    Now, part of being in society is that, yes, we will have to make sacrifices. That is much different than a structured form of politics where you are told to be disciplined, but not allowed say over what the discipline is in service of. You will be better off claiming the world as something you permit yourself to act on. Assessing the sacrifice that comes with being in society also comes easier when you feel to be yourself a part of it, and claim a role in it. You will, at least, sacrifice in relation to something you love, and not something you feel is only imposed on you.

    When ML cults pop up and tell you to have discipline, It’s because they want to objectify you and instrumentalize you. They want you to be a pure instrument, and so they demand you obsess over your function, while asking you to leave meaning beyond function to your superiors. They’ll say that revolution has already been worked out ahead of time. All that’s left for you is to become an instrument in the hands of leaders. In this, purpose, meaning, and principles, in fact communism, are stolen from would-be revolutionaries, barred from becoming acts of self-conscious self-creation.

    Do not let people browbeat you with calls to adhere to an abstract sense of discipline without clarifying what the discipline is in service of. You are always better off figuring that out yourself, on a path to or within collective struggle, and applying yourself where social action allows you to live out your principles, in a shared objective in collective society. There will be various points a collective pursuit will leave open for you to find meaning, and discover where personal and collective seamlessly hinge.

    And, the fact is, there is no space of non-enjoyment. If abstract discipline becomes your life, you will enjoy it. You will enjoy being an object, and those who objectify you will enjoy their domination over your life. Your two sides will unconsciously enjoy a disavowed reality, and together you will cut yourselves off from the consciousness that would allow transformation.

    Those who whip themselves as a matter of ritual enjoy it, and find meaning in it, and this meaning in self-flagellation blocks transcendence. We don’t want to give our meaning to dumb, empty, abstract notions like discipline without them being subordinated to higher meaning. We want those means to serve an end, and we want to live in a space that can be free of delusion.

  • Satanic bourgeois perverts

    Society at a structural level imposes a kind of violence on us and into our ideological practice. Human subjectivity itself, independent of social norms, has a structure that sets us up for antagonism, although I think that is something that could be ameliorated to a large degree in a different society. I think successfully addressing such an antagonism of subjectivity is found in sublimation, which can range from participation in sports, to taking up poetry, or to becoming involved in activities that are much more mundane. If we were to each bring to the surface and obey capital’s ideological commands, we would all start murdering each other.

    Capitalism and class society inevitably for most will frame a kind of violence in thought around its practices. We would be led to violence if not for social conscience, and for sublimation. Even in our fractured society, we manage a strained socialization that, in areas where people are actually trained to live and struggle alongside one another, can point all towards the more civil, socially conscientious act. This will of course change drastically in a social environment where everyone explicitly survives off the exploitation of others.

    I think at the highest levels of power, we have a total failure of sublimation. The system itself lays down what is interpreted as a command for abuse, and the deranged bourgeois pervert takes it most literal. Capitalism thrives off alienation and atomization, and the bourgeoisie, depending on where they find themselves as exploiters, are left with no place of sublimation, and no social environment that can seclude itself from capital’s harshest logic. I think this is something you may see in the underground economy, too, where the logic of the system is so forceful and hard to hide from, that the social space around it is generally without space for sublimation. Rich and poor alike are forced to take capital’s logic as literal command in all spheres of life.

    The one who overcomes this kind of violence is the one who succeeds at sublimation. They are the one who understands how to gain distance from the violent commands, and can transform that violent energy into an affirmation of life and of the social. When you attach directly to power, sometimes you will end up with the kind of fetish seen among our bourgeois now. That fetish must deny life as valuable because of the system’s incentives. They must prove themselves invulnerable to the violence in order to continually carry it out. When they commit the greatest sins against society, they still never escape from the fact that to commit the evil is to protect yourself from vulnerability.

    While not exactly possible, escaping vulnerability would amount to not being affected by the commands of the violent order one way or the other. You could never prove yourself invulnerable, but it is possible to take some other matter as a higher priority than the system’s commands. The deranged bourgeois pervert cannot do that. The demiurge of capital issues commands that they cannot psychically get beyond, because its incentives control every aspect of their life’s meaning. Whereas, an ordinary lower middle-class person may gain distance from capital’s raw logic enough to perhaps find a higher god, because the socialized work they participate in, while still ultimately framed by capital, allows for a space of social sublimation.

    Capital remains a kind of “satanic” paternal function for capitalists. They offer sacrifices in its honor to protect themselves from the pain of vulnerability. They think the sacrifice itself is the proof of invulnerability, when it is the opposite. It is them continually affirming that they desire a kind of perverse love, and exploit only to save themselves from being denied that love. That love can never come, but the exploitation of others works like a system of delay, from a confrontation that would deny them love officially, or prove their god false.

    If others are exploited through their practices, they feel assured that they’re stronger and more invulnerable, but have also spared themselves the great beast’s violent rejection. You would not continually try to prove how strong you are if you truly weren’t affected by vulnerability. They seek the love of a god who not only cannot ask for anything but violence, but one who isn’t actually real, either. They worship the structural logic of an unconscious society’s activity, that only inadvertently disavows the social in its collective manifestation as a matter of historical complication. They worship a false god, whether explicit in their “Satanism” or not. Some of the bourgeoisie may not even sacrifice babies, but their practice is still ideological worship of the false god of capital.

  • Perversion

    When people talk about perversion in left theory circles, I am never on the same page. I don’t think of sex or BDSM as being on a real spectrum of perversion, as I think it requires, usually, a degree of respect at baseline between people. This kind of mutual activity dons perversion like a mask. It points at perversion, tries to draw out its effects from the psyche, and even attempts to give the perverse structure a place where it can exist and not cause real harm. It is more like perversion being properly socialized, when it counts as perversion at all. It is often likely inadvertently therapeutic in some way, if not explicitly so.

    Sometimes people take this activity as a reclaiming of perversion against certain standards of psychiatry or mainstream psychology, but this can elide what the more problematic version of perversion actually amounts to. I don’t know how to relate a lot of the calls to reclaim perversion because, still, BDSM does not seem perverse to me in the most meaningful sense. I think it is typically, but not always, an activity that treats the effects of a more social and structural perversion, and typically does so humanely.

    BDSM itself seems more like a sensible way of trying to get a handle on a society that is extremely destructive and violent. I can most certainly sympathize with those who say “fuck psychiatry” or “fuck the DSM”, but then what perversion actually is escapes all of these responses. Perversion is structural in subjectivity and in society. It does not neccerily need sexual content. It is in capitalist processes and shape social behaviour. The one-sided objectification, that seeks making others only subjects of objectified domination, is the perverse subjectivity that pervades society. The key here is that it is non-consensual, but also mostly unconscious. It draws a transgressive satisfaction out of non-consensuality, although aggrievement at being wounded is, too, a secret underside to the satisfaction.

    Or possibly, the satisfaction comes in adopting the instrumentalization that should ward off psychic castration. Yet psychic castration is itself something that can live without repression, i.e., it can be disavowed and acknowledged, while also refused. The extreme perversion can acknowledge their castration, yet the perverse processes of the world command they continue to act against what they say they know. Capitalist processes instigate and reinforce this perverse behavior and disavowal. It isn’t just natural subjectivity in how it would appear in all simulations. The more extreme realities you go to in terms of the economy, the more life is both transactional and disposable, and the more perversion becomes even necessary for survival..

    Most of the people I grew up with were at one point very kind and sweet as children, and after their parents beat them enough, and they were violated in endless ways by the world around them, they got the message: you should orient towards the world on zero-sum terms, and prepare to take advantage of others. Not every kid I grew up with ended up being domineering in this way, but many did, and especially the ones I watched being beat as children. That is an example of a particular kind of education that conditions a perverse response to the world, that moves towards the habitual instrumentalization of violence.

    Once I refuse the conservative or moralistic version of perversion, there is still the perversion that is structural and does not depend on sexual fetishism. This is a problem in as much as we encourage capitalism’s specific forms of objectification. These forms cause us to think of the world as a kind of buffet course of objects for which you are a master subject, but then this is a world of subjects who resist objectification. In this problem of capitalist subjectivity, we get the push to make others subject to objectification on narrow terms. The economy conditions us towards the objectification of others, while fighting to prevent being made an object. But then this also scars the subject with resentment, when not being perceived in mutually respectful terms. Their desire to be respected as subject drives on their domination of the other, which also insists the other being subject to domination is a nature consequence.

    Where perversion is strongest is where the mutuality of any kind of sexual act or any kind of fetish play is impossible. It is nearly diametrically the opposite of the conservative’s defintion, who would label a sex act, independent of context, inherently perverted. Perversion in its most consequential sense does not have to be a matter of moral condemnation, but then this depends on what you’re doing with it. We can accept that we are conditioned in certain ways, and are idiosyncratic in others, but a society that pushes us towards violating one another is itself a problem, even if we forgive people being imprinted with this structural logic.

    Because what is the law of capitalist society underneath all of this? Coercion, non-consent, and a lack of mutuality. The default state is for the system to inculcate into you a feeling of violation. We are always already violated. You are made into a subject through processes that are totally unfree. You are given a path into your own survival with total violation of your being taken as natural. To live up to capitalism’s baseline command is to violate and instrumentalize in accordance with reality, and fend off any further attack from what is embedded as natural. You are violating from a default position that says you are merely breaking even in the act of dominating the other. It is a state of affairs that structures perversion in all of us.

  • Engels, labor aristocrats, consumption, desire, revolution

    “You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general: the same as what the bourgeois think. There is no workers’ party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the colonies” – Friedrich Engels, 1882 letter to Karl Kautsky

    The above Engels quote is cited routinely these days, particularly by third-worldists, as a means of rebuking traditional “working class” struggle. I myself agree with them in places, and diverge where their analysis hypostatizes capitalist desire. But Engels himself was essentially saying that workers being unorganized meant that it didn’t matter what they thought, and not that they believed in wrong, immoral things. Workers thinking “the same” as the bourgeois in 1882 was a matter ideological practice, which is not primarily a matter of conscious will.

    Engels wasn’t pointing out that reality as a way to say “fuck these immoral workers, I hate them.” If there’s no organized force representing the proletariat, then of course they are going to accept what ever “bargain” they’re offered. Worker interest in relation to the total system can only be made clear by sustained organization. Otherwise, individualistic, reified, “false” consciousness will pervade all affairs, and the little crumbs thrown to workers will keep the pressure off the system enough to stop the proletariat from feeling so deprived that they act out. What workers do as individuals in that case is understandable.

    What workers thought at the conscious level didn’t matter. The workers didn’t think as a class because there was no organization to facilitate such a thing, and the ruling class threw them enough crumbs to stop them from being desperate. Desperation was where workers might start asking the questions that might lead them to thinking as a class. One thing I often see from third-wordlists on this front is this need to tell the workers that they’re going to have to take a hit and accept that life will get worse for them. The problem with this line is that it smuggles back in capitalist ideology through the backdoor. What we want is to completely dissolve the entire framework of what appears as good or worthwhile in capitalism.

    Communism centers basic universal needs, and so you must start from this premise when addressing desire. You don’t leave capitalist desire intact and go, “yeah, you’d be happier if you had more worthless crap, but we’re going to put you on a diet!” Acting as if excess consumption is straightforward fulfillment of conscious need, in just some instrumental sense, is wrong. But you also smuggle in capitalist ideology to assert consumption is just an inevitability, too. I don’t think anybody is really happy with this society. The people who supposedly get something out of it are murderously unhappy, and act in a way that will destabilize their order.

    “Yes, you want consumption, because you’re too stupid to know better” is a liberal answer to the problem, and one that is terrified of finding a commonality in dissatisfaction. There are reasons for everybody to hate this society. And there are reasons for all why a new mode of social life would be better. We are all also split between the old and the new, between the familiar and the intoxication of imagining what is beyond this awful world. No one you speak with is absolutely good or bad.

    We are trying to take the project of communism in its concrete manifestation and loop it between the accommodating desires of as many people as possible. The concrete project must find its way through those compatible desires, even if each individual has many conflicting desires. We are contradictions within ourselves now, and would be contradictions still in a communist movement. We are only pulling people from prioritizing the detached individual, to then prioritize what is common for all individuals. We can all lean in aligned or opposed directions in relation to social change now, so we must take the dialectic and apply it to desire in order to find where the project can chart a course through what’s shared. We can not see people as static or as absolutely opposed and thus disposable.

    People are wedded to consumption not through instrumental need but through libidinal and social desire. To challenge the state of consumption and the economy is not a matter of giving or taking commodities and disciplining people to be happy with less consumer goods. We want to challenge the very frame of social desire that offers consumption in place of catering to more fundamental social needs. If people only consumed in line with strict need, we wouldn’t be where we are. It is a disfigured social reality that brings us excess consumption.

    Social factors are what shape us. We are constituted through social imprinting. As we set out in life to reach towards the social subsequent to this imprinting, the capitalist system intervenes and intercepts our desire. It takes us and encodes on us a path that itself becomes both a retreat from society, and simultaneously an unconscious incursion into it. We move towards society in a way that is mediated by self-image. We attempt to arrive at ourselves through society and at its expense. This is the fundamental fault line of capitalist subjectivity..

    We reach towards the social automatically from the basic premises of language and custom, only to have capitalism push us back to our own image. A lasso is placed around our self-image as capitalism steer our desire for its own gain. We are caught from the outset in a loop where we unconsciously attempt to complete ourselves in the social, but through a path that continually demands we disavow that same social for the sake of survival. We never fully are able to accept the social desire that compels us, nor can we be satisfied with what society labels as fulfillment. We can only return to where we started, to follow the path of desire towards illusory completion again. Communism, then, must be, as a movement, what breaks us out of this loop.

    We cannot just take consumption as a given of human desire. There are things we all want more than consumption, that capitalism prevents. Consumption is itself a replacement for the social. We consume through the prism of social desire. But then, practical togetherness is what can uncover our own social desire in ways we failed to understand prior. We have to be struggle and fight together. A lot of the questions about desire are answered that way. For us to learn through practice how much we need the social, and the very social that capitalism must keep hidden. Our social under capitalism, even when collective, points us back to ourselves.

    Our friendships, relationships, family bonds, even something like sex, all are conditioned to isolate us in individualistic meaning. We need to uncover the support system for new social bonds, that can teach us, in practice, what more there is to desire, beyond consumption. It will be achieved in social practice, but it lurks within all of us, still. We come into the world in a social webbing. We don’t know ourselves apart from society’s language and customs. Consumption in capitalism is a veil over more fundamental needs.

    We never actually have the society our language and concepts should imply. We are always brought to the precipice of the social, only to have it closed off. Our “collective” practices are unconsciously social, always pointing us back to ourselves while making our bonds invisible. We need to constitute a real social foundation in practice. This is what will bond us and steel us for the fight to come against capitalism.

  • Power

    All that matters is power, and power is not just law. Power has been concentrated by our enemies in such a way where law does not need to take precedence. If you were a liberal, and you even wanted to get back “normal” rule with the illusion of law, you’d have to start smashing away at the power they currently exert. That power is seen in ICE.

    But that power is also a collaboration between the fascist elements of civil society and law enforcement agencies. This coalition is being let off the leash to act spontaneously. Both parties will enforce arbitrary law against us, and it might be impossible to use law against them. so far ICE has been the central focus, but we should expect other groups to eventually intervene, too.,

    We can only start striking at them, and do so collectively. There is no guilt to be had in acting “illegally” against this formation. Your attachment to prior norms cannot save you. You have to realize that those norms are part of what brought us here, and always had this extralegal crackdown implied. The norms should have fended off Trump, but they didn’t. Those norms gave way to Trump as their protection. Those norms have to be replaced by the action of a mass against what we all know to be against the interest of humanity and life on earth.

    We don’t need things to be written into law. Our actions together can become the law. What we want to do is replace prior norms, that were subordinated to an alienation within the state and its law, with a collective pursuit that’s heart speaks against what Trump represents. We want to share the burden across large numbers, so actions becomes less and less painful. We want the fear and anxiety we feel to be alleviated by seeing our force in numbers all around us. Only as a collective entity should we bear the biggest burdens of this kind of struggle.

    We need to show collective strength. We need it to cut through propaganda in order to agitate more people into the process. A large force acting requires no additional propaganda. The large action can speak in a way that will eclipse the state’s power to propagandize against it. We want so many people to be involved and active that when they do escalate through something like an Insurrection Act, they will be surrounded by an entire society that gives them no room to maneuver.

    We want their big battle plans to backfire immediately. We have to see them coming, then and brace for the violence, be brave, but also get others into the process of defending their society. In this kind of assault, we can shift the entire terms of what our society is. We can cause them to lose control of it, as we bring people into the fight, and collectively take the reins. We have to think on our feet. It’s defense, but we can make it offense. Kind of like an interception in football. Let the enemy think they have all the leverage as they go in for the attack, and then swoop in and shift the entire terrain by meeting them with a force they couldn’t have expected. They are mostly expecting a docile population.

    If we refuse to be docile, and break the norms around individualism and atomization, we can throw them off their game. They spent a century attacking collective action, they feel like they are finally closing in on complete victory, and we have the power to completely render all of that activity wasted effort on their part.

  • Crushed ICE

    I am not saying the ICE moment in our country is revolution waiting to happen, just that it provides the opportunity. This is because it pulls us into a shared practical problem, that forces us to think about how we organize social life, and forces us to put theory in action.

    Once we are active, we realize that what we are fighting in the moment is bound to many other problems. We will become entangled within the problems consciously, as opposed to fending them off from a passive stance. Many people will be pulled into navigating social practice.

    It doesn’t need to follow from someone declaring the goal of communism and starting the party. We know that once we retreat from the world, it can be hard to break the passivity. The reverse is true, too, that once we get moving, we might not so easily be able to retreat.

    We will become absorbed into new active problems by way of fighting ICE, and consciously so, in ways that could fortuitously trap us in action. As awful as the thought of state repression is, it is also the predictable consequence of us trying to assert ourselves.

    As soon as we assert ourselves, out come the batons. Our spilt blood will be a sign that we are living correctly. If we do the right thing, we will be attacked with violence. Our only choice, then, beyond cowering, is to invite (or agitate) new people into the process.

    It just might be that cowering will lead us to violence, too, at this point. We must act in the direction of finding others and collaborating, while injecting theory into practice. We will then be in a position to declare to one another where we should focus our efforts.

    To track the reality, we have to be in it. We have to feel that we are in it with others, and not just watching it on a TV screen. The TV screen will never give you more than a misleading appearance about reality. We have to know reality in our muscle memory.