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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  • 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.

  • The rationl and irrational

    I have no desire to uphold bourgeois ideals around personal mental health because I have been crazy on their terms my whole life and have been attacked by that same system the whole time. The rationality I will speak of in terms of social organization is my weapon against that system. I am not giving it up because some theory milieu says the underclass can’t break from liberal society and assert values against it, and must remain somehow illegible in all instances. Stressing values, in some limited sense, will be unavoidable. Being illegible to the system is no reward, and doesn’t help you escape their management.

    We have to assert a world against theirs, inverting the driving social logic of their society into something that gives that practical logic no quarter. We have to take up the questions implied by social life itself, for which liberals can only provide contradictory answers. Contrary to what some believe, liberal philosophy is not an all-knowing big Other, and did not pull all elements of society from thin air as a means of control. If liberals say friendship is important, that does not then make friendship a philosophical conspiracy. Liberals were forced to answer specific questions that were implied by a social organization that preceded them, and escaped them at many points.

    We are going to assert that every human should be fed and housed. We will assert that in practice, and we will devise a practice that does what it promises. That practice will be rational, even if it lets us off the hook individually to be something else. It is not important that we uphold some sanist standard as individuals. Rather, it is necessary for us to be able to trust that the total social body, in as much as it is consciously organized, will do the minimum of what is necessary while acting as that social body.

    We can be personally “irrational”, but that is currently only a question as a congruence of how society is organized, and because of power’s need to escape interrogation. We want a collective social endeavour to be predictable on certain terms. It is not incidental that it would be rational. It is functionally necessary for it to be so. The contradictions of human society thus far make that demand even more central. In application, this is not individuals conforming to any standard around mental health. They can be totally insane by liberal society’s current standards. All that maters is that we collectively do enough work to provide the minimum guarantees of life.

    The question of rationality matters in the total social product. That is also the case now, and was the case when bourgeois liberals went about philosophizing rationality, just in an inverse illusion: liberalism displaces this matter of the non-rational system onto individuals. When a liberal sweeps up homeless people off the street and sends them to psych wards, there is a definite question of a non-rational system being inverted into a matter of individual dysfunction by those liberals. The needs of those homeless people are inescapable because they are universal: they need food, shelter, and social care.

    The rational thing for the society to do would be to care for its citizens with the resources it definitely has. There is no way out but for us to cross the bridge that is rational social organization at the total social level, but especially when you start from the social contradictions we endure. It has nothing to do with “saving liberalism” from itself.

    In addressing the irrational social organization, we are doing away with the problem that made the matter of rationality so important to liberals in the first place. Their clinging to “rationality” is a neurotic reaction to a world that is no such thing. Yet the matter of rationality appears because of the misapprehension of the social totality. It lingers until you resolve the central conflict that keeps giving it shape, and that does necessarily come down to social organization being stable and tethered to universal needs.

    We have a social system now that refuses self-acknowledgment, allowing it an escape route from serving universal needs. It exists, but refuses to admit that it does. Once it consciously exists, it must serve the needs that are universal, and impose no ideals in lieu of that. Humans should be free to be whatever they want, as long as it doesn’t transgress against universal basic needs. Liberal capitalist society is purely that transgression.

    Securing needs is exactly the way to open up an expansive realm of freedom where we may depart from one another in more interesting ways. Yet this new society doesn’t escape ideology, either. Practically, the communist society acts every day to help, where capitalism forces us to attack one another. Where competition lurks in the background of capitalism, we have something else entirely when the automatic movement of society is about feeding and caring for one another.

    Ideology comes out of that, but it would be a result of a stable embedded practice that built trust, that also would allow us to depart from one another, while always having our bonds reinforced in the background. Someone could claim to be a lover in capitalism while the real society forces them to kill. In communism, we could have people who claim to be scary monsters, who practice love in opposition to their self-image. The only semblance of rationality that matters is at the total social level. We can not get beyond that matter other than by going through it. We have to transform these conditions into something else, first knowing what they are.

  • Liberal recuperation, protest, violence, universalism

    In times of legitimate social anger, expressed instantaneously and spontaneously in reaction to events, we must carefully always assess the forces of liberal recuperation. The raw expression of events in the aftermath of injustice are always given a mediation by the system that encloses it within the liberal ideological imagination. Events are captured by liberals as law-abiding and peaceful on liberal terms, before protesting crowds demanding justice know which way they are going in securing it. They are immediately sprung into action, and soon they have liberals marching by their side, stealing their anger and regurgitating it back to them on terms that acknowledge it while boxing it into solutions. It becomes hard to tell in these moments where genuine anger starts and where liberal recuperation begins.

    “Resist” is even now one of these words that close off space, in terms of what can be thought by radicals. “Resist” as an ideological buzzword is a prison. The system’s liberal ideologues are stamping reality on terms favorable to them before anyone else develops the capacity to articulate what is transpiring. They steal unfolding events before anyone beyond them can narrativize around events in a way that broadens the future of the protest activity. Once liberals frame it in their ideological terms, suddenly the whole flow of events that preceded their intervention starts to feel as if it was hatched in a meeting at the Center for American Progress.

    About four months into George Floyd, we had Marxists and socdem leftists complaining that the riots themselves were somehow liberal in origin. Liberals have enough power to continually narrow the frame around events and redefine what is happening on their terms. We need activity that surpasses this liberal ability to absorb unfolding events into their ideological templates. Not just in the sense of “we need revolution”, but we need these events that are already guaranteed to happen to take on new dimensions.

    Our acts can’t be so small that liberals can write them off as irresponsible, and must still be so norm-breaking that liberals fail to understand how to capture them within their narratives. The actions must be big in away where liberals can neither deny them nor claim them. We need these exact demonstrations of power to break from their past incarnations as safely within bounds and become something else. They must appear as they always do, and then shock society by taking a different path.

    Something has to happen that a liberal can’t deny, but hat does not have to be machine guns firing. It does not have to be the revolution in and of itself, but we need to break down the protective liberal imagination, and before the fascists finish doing that on their terms. The protest activity cannot wait for others to decide what it is. It must speak something in its actions that go beyond the liberal imagination. The third precinct burning was exactly that, but liberals ultimately managed to win back space for themselves in the aftermath.

    Police violence was such a clear wrong in 2020, and was an exclamation point to a whole sequence of activity in the prior decade, that burning down a police station became justified in the broad public imagination immediately. Liberals were stunned into silence. The system immediately began trying to recuperate the anger, and it wasn’t until liberals developed the “outside agitator” narrative that they managed to wrestle back some sense that certain types of protest were out of bounds.

    Yet even in reestablishing terms in their favor, they only could dismiss destruction by saying a Boogaloo Boy or whoever was responsible. They still couldn’t outright suggest that the oppressed were out of line for burning down businesses. For a full month, liberal ideology around protest norms collapsed. We can find the breakdown of those norms again, but actions have to be sharp and speak to something latent in the public imagination, that liberals can’t acknowledge or address. You make what is anti-social from the liberal POV transform into something socially acceptable to the broad public and vice versa. Destruction carried out by the poor becomes morally justified per the terms of an unrealized form of society, and violence against the poor becomes a sign of what is properly anti-social. We must make it the highest crime that a system could deprive humans of what they need to survive and then sic the cops on them when they speak out.

    As long as there is class, concepts like “rational” and “anti-social” are unavoidable. They are byproducts of liberalism’s false universalism. Liberalism’s contradictions make the highlighting of morality inescapable. True universal guarantees around life would render such words like “rational” and “antisocial” largely inapplicable, but they will be necessary for as long as a movement from below asserts a standard opposite to theirs. We have to talk about the “rational” and the “anti-social” because liberalism cannot address class conflict. Their insistence that their achieved universalism marks dysfunction a product of individual failure, means that we must assert that such cases of individual pathology result in “irrationality” only as a byproduct of liberalism’s invisibilization of class.

    Someone’s pathology can’t cause them to become homeless in a society where housing is a right for all. We must find the modes of disruption and destruction that reverse the terms of liberal society. We can not take a post-modern approach of anti-universalism, because there is still a burning question around the universal, that provides a moral salience for the swift actions of the poor. We want a kind of destruction that latches on to the higher moral calling. The burning of third precinct proved, beyond whatever bourgeois polling data suggests, that there is a kind of attack on this society from its underclass that has moral leverage. That is what must be clarified, in theory and in action.

    We are stuck in a situation where the false universalism persists until we find the right means to shatter it and supplant it with a concretely determined universal, of assuring no one remains in hunger. There is no refusal of liberal universalism in theory that will mean anything. It is all masturbatory. The universalism of liberalism is in fact only a shadow of the real potential universal implied by the conditions of the poor. The materiality of that poverty is the source of the urgency for liberals in apprehending a universal in concept, as a shield. You think you refuse liberals when you refuse the universal, but really you deny the poor redress. When they are no longer “poor”, when such a word can no longer be applied to anyone in a way that seems logical, we will have achieved the universal in such a way that it no longer needs to be a source of conflict in theory.

  • Notes on “”voluntarism””

    On the left, people rarely use “voluntarism” as an attack on others in a responsible manner. What I think is a worthwhile political subjectivity will be hard to explain as something other than voluntaristic, without inviting an attack from determinists, or from Marxists who feel the correct plan has already been handed down from Lenin, Mao, or Kautsky. Our own actions can become meaningful when applied to collective projects, and a better sense of accomplishment comes on the other end of that. We give up the individualistic expression of power, dodge the relations of competition, and in turn procure a sense of accomplishment in shared political action. Where we now see the individual’s meaning as coming only at the expense of others, we turn to a new way of life that derives individual meaning, at baseline, through collaboration. That may open heretofore unknown areas of competition and individualism, but we root new forms of such expression in a collective attainment of freedom.

    In politics, we want that people should see their individual actions as meaningful and at the same time limited. Meaningful, in the sense of erasing the boundaries of atomized competition that forces them to think at odds with society. It must, in the same individual, limit the tendency towards competition, while freeing a boundless social individual in its place, who does not need regimented, competitive activity in order to find meaning. We turn individuals from facing inwards to outwards. Your move towards the collective action is most meaningful when the individualistic frame for reward has been dissolved. To think about what your lone action accomplishes on quantified terms would be a distraction from, and a misunderstanding of, the political task.

    Take, for example, people in Minneapolis right now fighting ICE. There are currently actions to root ICE out of the community and they involve large numbers of people. Surely, everyone in the action has a role that acquires a degree of specificity, but when the total action is relayed to the outside world, it does not express itself as an individualistic act, or one guided by a leader. It is a group giving voice to widespread anger, and representing a righteous current within society that aims to protect all life on universal terms. Even the thwarting of an ICE agent could be the demand for the creation of a border-less society that could not kill or harm anyone for their attachment to one piece of land or another. That would free individuals from ever being the ICE agent or being dominated by them.

    Everyone participating in these actions is surely energized. If they push ICE back, they will feel a sense of accomplishment. The individuals in this action were not “unscientific” or “too voluntaristic” to think their actions mattered. A goal can be accomplished without lone people getting singled out as heroes, and they can still walk away satisfied in their near-anonymous participation. Their individual ego is nestled within a proper social structure in this act, that attaches to something beyond the ego in single individuals, yet still defends the space of individual identity more thoroughly than the ideologically individualistic route. It is activity that secures the space where individuals can exist, where today’s space is premised on the endless competition and violence of individuals, that, connected to environmental destruction and weapons of war, threatens life for everybody.

    The undifferentiated conditions and uniformity of subjectivity that are taken for granted when some Marxists declare action voluntaristic is itself more an issue. It is possible for your direct actions, that you take as meaningful, to not immediately have a result, or even need one. It is possible your actions won’t lead to your individual acclaim, but that is perfectly fine. You do not have any proof that such actions are meaningful at first, at least through the schemes of quantification we are used to in capitalist society. But that first, seemingly rewardless step in struggle, untethered from exchange, can become meaningful, first, in the very fact of helping you escape such matters of quantification.

    We want, in political struggle, to challenge the direct, one-to-one causal relation to achieved outcome. We do not want such concern to mediate our actions, and so we should take up action from a point that de-links us from such concerns. We are not taking to politics to move up the ladder and acquire a social promotion, and we want to close off the space that utilizes such mediation. Our desired outcome develops from numerous people abandoning the sense of directly legible individual accomplishment and actually shutting off our egoistic self-censorship, that often demands directly quantifiable meaning, accomplishment, and reward in exchange for all our activity.

    Getting over this expectation of equal exchange and direct quantification of actions, to have people give themselves over to actions that are unbound to such relations, is difficult. Some determinists will become hysterical and read this is unscientific. If they do not have a legible reward for an action staring them in the face, they will reject what you’re saying as some kind of exotic anarchism. But an initial unquantified action can be an avowal of one’s power in a sensible capacity as an individual, but also a recognition of limitation simultaneously. Certain Marxists who are stuck in their ways will still call this volunteerism, as if somehow not living in a total state of subsumed spectacle is unscientific. The overbearing reality we endure that tells us that action doesn’t matter is not science, but is rather a concession to spectacle, and is a disavowal. The truth is that we are always in some way acting in the world, and our actions can be consequential when we truly believe we are passive.

    It is not the easiest thing to explain the benefit of this kind of subjectivity, while also stressing that it should center around non-individualized reward. I think even for an individual, it can become empowering to silence that part of your psyche. Taking action in this manner frees you from commodified relations and likewise pulls you into the relation that can overcome capital’s demands. We dissolve capital through the shared action of securing each other’s subsistence. This doesn’t mean all activity has to become blind. Grounded in new collective endeavors, we can redirect each other towards personal strengths.

    The cult formation of this kind of process is something to be leery of, obviously. We cannot permit a guru or leader who tells us to shut off our individualism for the sake of the group. Especially not when that group is itself still dominated by a hierarchical form, with a patriarchal ego acting as its head and heart. The trick will be to turn off our individualism in groups in order to then lay down a foundation of care that can in return sustain limitless individual expression. Still, it means something now to find other people and begin to act in groups, without knowing precisely what the end goal will be. You are not more scientific if you refuse to act, hunkering down to wait for New Mao to descend from heaven and lead the masses. Nor are you more scientific to decide that you and a handful of your friends already came up with the plan for revolution, and you’re just waiting for the right time to strike, where the masses will finally be receptive to your idea of replacing the constitution with a new constitution.

    Communism itself does not permit you to constantly play Goldilocks and present yourself as more sensible when compared against determinists and voluntarists. The communist objective will often force your hand and make you act in ways that don’t fall directly into some reasonable centrist’s posture. Communist avowal might cause you to appear sensible one moment, and like an alien to other people the next. A further problem at play here is the sense of communism being taken a future object. When communizers, for example, bring the matter of communism to the lived present, the deterministic Marxist will think in terms of completed objectives and balk at the idea that you can snap your figures and achieve communism in its total quantification in just a mere moment. Yet what the communizer is attempting to focus on is a change in the quality of our relations, that eschews the idea that the long term object is only a heavenly one, that must at all times separate itself from our action.

    We are not attempting to quantify all matters of communism as accomplished in one fell swoop, but are trying to change the way we relate to social experiences that unfold through time and can not be felt tangibly in any moment in total. To participate in a path towards any given communist objective must also become communism itself, and must abide by a new relational logic in order to meaningfully develop communism at all. The communizers are trying to bridge the present to the future, where the deterministic Marxist is permanently split in the present from that future because of their inability to see communism in multiple dimensions, unfolding in space and time. They can only say “you’re crazy to call this communism because from what I can tell, the static end state of communism is not totally visible.”

    When in fact, once we start down this road, we are attempting to suspend life being mediated by the neatly cleaved future goal that steals our existence from us. The future goal goes from being a mediating force outside experience to one inside of it. For it to be inside, means its logic must govern our relations, regardless of what we have accomplished. Otherwise, as mediation, it becomes religion, that likewise must make existence something other than heaven. Instead, we can be on the path to accomplishing this or that aspect of communism, but take more seriously the way we relate in doing such a thing. The deterministic Marxist does not have a scheme for this that cans scientifically quantify it, but it is the most central aspect.

    These kinds of fantasies in relation to communism negatively condition us in the present, whenever we refuse participating in struggle because we have no sense that it will achieve anything that can be seen as a reward to the individual ego. The supposedly lofty “theoretical” idea of transcending the expectation of future transcendence and orienting social and political meaning in a current moment, is exactly our immediate task of finding other people in struggle against ICE and Trump, and dedicating ourselves to collective action on those issues, without guarantees. The trick of the political masters moving meaning from the present to the future goal is always born out of us not being permitted power, either by capitalist reality, or by the “anti-capitalist” forces that nonetheless become terrified of masses leading themselves. We cannot be granted the power from without, and we can not earn it from a training program. We must must take that power.

  • “You”

    There is so often an attempt, usually by liberals in opposition to Trump, to present a uniform subject in society that is being duped by reaction. They will tell you that Trump attacking immigrants is him duping this pre-given subject, who starts from a blank slate of interest before Trump arrives. Dupery is a near constant aspect of capitalism, surely, but there is no pre-given uniform social subjectivity that Trump or any other fascist aims at deceiving from some blank slate. They are never not appealing to embedded power relations.

    There is a class divide, and in this divide there are coalitions that are pushed to either side of it. Attacking “illegal” immigrants is an appeal to one coalition, against another. There is no pre-given universal subject. Trump is bringing forth a latent investment of one part of society, if not exploiting an outright conscious one. What we can say is that these people are being pulled into Trump’s coalition through their desire and investment in status, even if we could say there is a “dupery” in losing out on an alternative prospect. Yet no liberal can offer this alternative, and so they do not have the space to speak of dupery. What it would take for there to be an alternative is a collective power with the willingness to fight for it, and all consolation prizes are accepted in lieu of such a collective power appearing. There is no sense to a reaction in that situation beyond opting for the consolation prize, and yet it only can be shown to be consolation in the face of collective power appearing. Just the suggestion of a potential power is not enough. It has to demonstrate itself in some way that can break through capitalism’s ideological sense of inevitability.

    We must acknowledge the split in subjectivity that cuts through class, into reproductive coalitions based around social hierarchies. We want to amplify this divide, in making it obvious. We bring people to our side in setting about a new world that can eliminate such divides concretely. These social hierarchies are reified into static subjectivities that align with our enemy’s order, but the truth is always that they can become de-reified and rendered without prior boundaries. That insistence on a static nature is always on the side of power, but always false in the last instance. We want to acknowledge the parameters of these subjectivities in order to dissolve them. Even more, we aim to push people to our side in becoming subjects of the total social task, so we can dissolve these antagonisms through the securement of life and its necessities for all.

    Our subjective focus must acknowledge the class divide and its associated coalitions. We can not presume we have everyone on our side, but we must find a way that every reified subject in capitalism could hypothetically dissolve their interest into our social task. Our enemies can never propose what we propose, because they must maintain hierarchies at all times. We can not pretend to be inclusive of everyone on capital’s terms of identity, but we can create the space where every class antagonism could melt away.

    Capital melts all that is solid behind the subject’s back, while re-substantializing the boundaries of identity that can be gripped like an object by the automatic subject of capital. Capital will force this process for all, as it eats away at the conditions that prop up any individualistic sense of identity, and it will steer people into the new parameters needed for its continued domination of social life. Reversing this is to present the “automatic subject” as humanity’s unconscious, and to open up the path where we could dissolve and re-substantialize our own boundaries, while given to a conscious social task..

    We must clarify the social task and bring people to it, and that starts by acknowledging the static categories of capitalism to be dissolvable, even if they are often materially grounded. There is no pre-given universal subject at play. We can appeal to conscious interest among many, on the one hand, and latent, unspoken, unclaimed interest, on the other. We must see all subjects, on our side or against us, as divided, and capable of being pushed in opposed directions, depending on material circumstances.

    We should see opposed identities under capital as dissolvable. People on our side need the help of the social collective to remain strong and grounded in the overall task. Nothing can be taken for granted as the natural state for any subject, because conditions are always sneaking up behind us to counter, or remold, our desire for static identity. Many we think are allies can be lost to our enemies. There is no perfect and static roles for self and other in any of this. There is just the refinement of the total social task that would stop embedding our sense of identity in the conditions of class, that all rely on forced deprivation. Overturning this forced deprivation is overturning class, capital, and every other malignant social hierarchy.

  • Hell is other communists ☹️

    I have been a communist for a decade. Others have been around longer, and I even came to it late in life. But it has been enough time to become disillusioned that the worst resistance I get for being a communist is actually from middle-class people who fancy themselves communists in a limited but moralistic way. The usual move among these moralizers will be to demand that we think of people generally as being non-radical in some kind of way that is insurmountable. The communists are only supposed to be in a little book club together. The only way being in that club matters is if we refuse the outside world.

    Which would be fine, if that starting premise was refusing the assertion of the relations that precede us in the world. It would be fine if we aimed at changing those relations, but the importance of exclusivity and novelty is asserted for the opposite reason by these moralizers. When it comes time to think about how to escape our situation, we’re supposed to say, “these fucking pig masses deserve to suffer. They aren’t worth our time. We did our work and they failed fulfilling their obligations. We must refuse them on absolute terms.” As if this could ever be more than some melodramatic reaction stemming from their own neurosis and resentment. Sure, never investigate the fact that your own relationship to theory, which is supposed to be about changing the world, has made you miserable, resentful, and passive.

    Social democrats are ridiculous when they suggest an absolute goodness at the core of the worker. But the flippant response by the moralizers, where they suggest that the average poor and working class person chose this world in a conscious, deliberate way, when they are more so victims of it, is a disgusting, but also plainly unhelpful, way to think about the situation. The fact that it is always people from the upper class who present this as the case, so they can refuse solidarity with poor people, gets a little old!

    They will selectively use abstractions in a reactionary manner. They will refuse such abstractions when they’re doing a fun little intellectual exercise defending Foucault or Deleuze, but then have no problem filing even billions of people away as disposable through the use of abstractions. They will always protect the great master Foucault from being assaulted by abstractions, and they salivate through abstractions when thinking about how much people deserve to suffer generally. They will find a spoiling essence of human nature when they need to, even if they otherwise avow an understanding of the impossibility of such a fixed essence.

    The question of politics is pressed on them, however, in a way that it isn’t to just anybody else. Politics were pressed on them in implication through their very relationship with theory, and they repressed that in order to maintain an aesthetic, libidinal, individualistic relationship with academic pursuits. Maybe they feared those pursuits might be spoiled by practice. At any point where reality presses them to think of theory in active, practical, social terms, they refuse, and they hunt for scapegoats to help explain why it would be foolish to subject themselves to any demands of political solidarity.

    “The world is this way because people don’t read” they will tell themselves. Except they’re supposed to be reading to figure out how to intervene in the world, where most people go without that form of political education. Really, more than education, it is space to reflect that aids change. The moralizers are the ones with the resources and the time to read, and they will tell you with a straight face their refusal is the fault of some abstract, totalized, immoral entity, who isn’t smart enough to value revolution, and is encompassing of the whole society in some fixed sense.

    But then a) they still want the label communist for some reason and b) when the masses don’t act, they’re like “look, I told you. The pig masses all need to be destroyed! We must let the masses die as a punishment for consciously choosing this exact state of affairs!” But these theory fandom types are implicated in the problem and had it pressed on them that they should act, and they have opted for an aesthetic relation instead. The question the theory poses to them continues, even if they only want theory to be a fun aesthetic hobby. I don’t think they should now die in a cleansing fire because of their choice, but if ghettoized populations in the US have to take blame for “consenting” to America while they’re getting their heads kicked in, I’m not sure why the moralizers escape implication just because they read the right theory. As if both they and the masses were assigned a group project around theory in a class they were both taking, and the irresponsible masses just refused to do their homework.

    A reaction from the “masses” is missing in the US like it is missing elsewhere and has always been missing, except for fleeting revolutionary flashes. In understanding this reality, the moralizers are more on the hook than people in the US who grow up in project housing and endure violent conditions. The country itself is designed to lead millions of people to prison slavery. To trap a few million in prison slavery, it has to subject hundreds of millions to conditions that lead people to crime. The moralizer does not have a right to lump these people in with the very class that is dominating them, in order to render them a single abstract scapegoat figure they can offload their anxiety onto. If they picked apart the abstractions and discovered their contradictions, they would again be pressed to act. The actual hard thought about prevailing conditions would reveal a humanity in the very figures they want to render as disposable refuse.

    There’s also the small matter that the ruling power disguised by these cheap abstractions has all the power to doom the entire planet, included those trapped by their system in the US and beyond. There is no shared class project between pedophilic sex traffickers and prison slaves, nor any of the millions who just barely escaped becoming prison slaves. It’s also an impotent gesture to wish death on an abstraction. It’s merely another way to avoid responsibility. Still, the theory fans are more responsible than those who grows up in conditions that were leading or led them to prison slavery.

    It doesn’t have to be oppression olympics, but the abstractions conceal reality to give the person making them leeway to refuse acting. Their insistence on the social other’s blame is pretty obviously them trying to dodge how they feel about their own culpability. That people attempt to conceal this reality while demanding everyone treat them like they’re renegades is grotesque. They should not be suspended in some guilty state forever due to this failure, and no one needs their self-flagellation. But at some point it should become transparent that they don’t really have the space to evade blame while blaming.

    There is barely a left in the US. Any given left in history was inadequate to the task of ending capitalism. The task of revolution does not just appear to all. Just because the theory fan had the question pressed on them reading theory does not make the same question appear for others. There are endless hurdles in the way, most of all that brutal social reproduction does not ever relent. You are forced back into it every day before you get any space to think. To act like this isn’t the case everywhere on earth is a lie, and the only people who believe it are rich people who want to excuse themselves due to supposed insurmountable ignorance among “the masses.” That is the kind of degraded thinking that you would hope someone reading nothing but philosophy all day long would be able to avoid! There is no place in history where it could be taken for granted that we’d secure the defeat of capitalism. I do not think the theory fans are on the hook for our collective failure. I think, deep down, they do think that, though, and they’re trying to run from addressing it. Meanwhile, as long as they refuse addressing their own relationship to struggle, they will continue to blame some abstract entity and impotently try to condemn it to death. What this does is force us all back to a state of atomization and distrust, and gives the right-wing space to dominate.

    Yet my point here as always remains that we must intervene, precisely to end the state of affairs that subjects poor Americans to degradation and even more assaults the international working class. The US working-class is not politically forged and is thus not acting, and my responsibility is to help make the situation clear to as many people as possible, and demand they act with me. Nobody has a static essence. Everyone is a product of their conditions. We are trying to foment political struggle among workers who globally exist in very different environments, and yet all these fractions of workers face the inevitability of the class relation nonetheless. Nothing can be taken for granted. The fact that nobody is acting is your cue to act, not an excuse for you to do nothing and scapegoat. I think it’s fair to say you have even less excuse if you have the free time to read political theory all day long.

    But anyway, hell should be other communists, because “communists” are a thing that should not exist. I say that because I avow the necessity of communism coming into existence as a movement and ultimately erasing the conditions that force us to speak its name. It only must be named because of the reified state of capitalism. Capitalism asserts itself as eternal, so we must name what dissolves that lie. Please, become a communist, so we can abolish communists.

  • “The Future of Psychoanalysis”, Gabriel Tupinambá

  • “Where Do Martyrs Go: The Fugitive Vanguard”, Abdaljawad Omar