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As a history of US workers of European origin, Settlers is profoundly flawed. The main problem is how it makes sense of what it documents (the genocidal oppression of indigenous peoples, African slavery, the reactionary actions of white workers etc.). As a result, it paints a misleading picture in which workers of colour who have supported multiracial organizing are dupes, since even the most militant and democratic unions have in the end been tools for white workers to control workers of colour. This kind of analysis simplifies history and leads to dead-end politics.The roots of the problem are in the book’s crude theoretical framework, one of many versions of the Maoist “Marxism-Leninism” that flourished in the “New Communist Movement”(NCM) of the 1960s and 1970s.

J. Sakai’s Settlers and Anti-Racist Working-Class Politics - Sebastian Lamb

There's little chance that a person who's never once felt the urge to blow anything up will write meaningful subversive stuff. But the same is true of a person who has never felt some derision when looking at bookshelves full of revolutionary books and archives, or at the infinite availability of similar books and archives on the Internet. There's no relevant theory without an awareness of the limits of words in general and theory in particular.

What’s it all about? - Troploin

For the collective worker, product of the factory system, was ever more dispersed across a complex productive apparatus. As it turned out, the real links forged among workers were not found in their lived connection within workplaces. For the most part, their real links formed outside of the factory gates: on the roads, in electricity lines, in the supermarket, on television. Instead of the "great evening" of the industrial worker triumphant, we got the groggy morning of the suburban commuter. The atomised worker revealed itself as the truth of the collective worker. Here was the unity-in-separation of capitalism, corroding the bases of workers' solidarity, not just in the factory, but also across the city. Instead of the Workers' Chorus there was Soul Train. Instead of the Thames Ironworks Football Club, there was West Ham on Match of the Day. Instead of neighbours filling up parks and seasides there were family holiday packages with Club Med. All this - it should go without saying - proved much more entertaining than a socialist meeting. Yet it wasn't to last. The strange victories of the postwar period turned out to be only a temporary respite from the ravages of capitalist society. Crisis tendencies re-emerged, already in the mid 1960's and early 1970's. The glorious advances in production became overproduction, and full employment became unemployment.

A History of Separation - Endnotes

The workers' movement survived WWII and even thrived in its aftermath. It did so by sticking to one safe strategy: to whatever extent possible, workers' organisations supported the war effort. They presided over a labour peace for the war's duration, hoping to gain power and recognition in the war's aftermath. Where fascists took power, no such peace was possible. All above-ground organisations of the workers' movement were annihilated. It was thus communists, rather than social democrats, who took the leading role, giving their lives in the Resistance. Following the war's conclusion, this Resistance served as a temporary irritation to the social democratic and communist leadership: armed revolutionary organisations, formed beyond the control of established parties and unions, had their own visions for post-war reconstruction. But these organisations were quickly disarmed, and then fell away. The same developmental strategy could then be pursued after the wars as before.

A History of Separation - Endnotes

[T]he tracing should always be put back on the map. This operation and the previous one are not at all symmetrical. For it is inaccurate to say that a tracing reproduces the map. It is instead like a photograph or X ray that begins by selecting or isolating, by artificial means such as colorations or other restrictive procedures, what it intends to reproduce. The imitator always creates the model, and attracts it. The tracing has already translated the map into an image; it has already transformed the rhizome into roots and radicles. It has organised, stabilised, neutralised the multiplicities according to the axes of significance and subjectification beloning to it. It has generated, structuralised the rhizome, and when it thinks it is reproducing something else it is in fact only reproducing itself. That is why the tracing is so dangerous. It injects redundancies and propagates them. What the tracing reproduces of the map or rhizome are only the impasses, blockages, incipient taproots, or points of structuration.

A Thousand Plateaus - Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari

What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. It is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a mediation. Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways; in this sense, the burrow is an animal rhizome, and sometimes maintains a clear distinction between the line of flight as passageways and storage or living strata (cf. the muskrat). The map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back "to the same". The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing involves an alleged "competence".

A Thousand Plateaus - Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari

[A] rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure. A genetic axis is like an objective pivotal unity upon which successive stages are organised; a deep structure is more like a base sequence that can be broken down into another, transformational and subjective, dimension. This does not constitute a departure from the representative model of the tree or root - pivotal taproot or fascicles (for example, Chomsky's "tree" is associated with a base sequence and represents the process of its own generation in terms of binary logic). A variation on the oldest form of thought. It is our view that genetic axis and profound structure are above all infinitely reproducible principles of tracing. All of tree logic is a logic of tracing and reproduction. In linguistics as in psychoanalysis, its object is an unconscious that is itself representative, crystallised into codified complexes, laid out along a genetic axis and distributed within a syntagmatic structure. Its goal is to describe a de facto state, to maintain balance in intersubjective relations, or to explore an unconscious that is already there from the start, lurking in the dark recesses of memory and language.

A Thousand Plateaus - Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari

At bottom, "society" only denotes the projected shadow of the successive modes of government. It was the whole set of subjects of the absolutist state in the age of the Leviathan, then that of economic actors in the liberal state. From the viewpoint of the welfare state, it was man himself, with his rights, needs, and labour power, who constituted the base element of society. What is perverse about the idea of "society" is that it has always helped government to naturalise the product of its activity, its operations, its techniques. It was constructed as what essentially preexisted it. It was only after the Second World War, really, that one dared speak explicitly about "social engineering". Since then, society has officially become what one constructs, sort of like doing nation-building by attacking Iraq.

To Our Friends - The Invisible Committee

Accommodating internal conflict when it presents itself honestly, doesn't interfere at all with the concrete elaboration of an insurrectionary strategy. On the contrary, it's the best way for a movement to stay vital, to keep the essential questions open, to make the necessary shifts in a timely manner. But if we accept civil war, including in our midst, it's not only because in itself this constitutes a good strategy for defeating imperial offensives. It's also and above all because it accords with the idea we have of life. Indeed, if being revolutionary implies attachment to certain truths, it follows from the irreducible plurality of the latter that our party will never enjoy a peaceful unity. As far as organisation is concerned, fraternal peace and fraticidal war. We will need to choose between the forms of internal confrontations that strengthen revolutions and those that hinder them.

To Our Friends - The Invisible Committee

Identification of the enemy and effective strategies and tactics are things that come from living and not from any prior declaration of belief. The logic of increasing power is all that can be set against the paradigm of government. One can throw oneself onto the state apparatus, but if the terrain that's one is not immediately filled with new life, government will end up taking it back.

To Our Friends - The Invisible Committee

[T]he left rejected the problem of adding up the class to get a 51 percent majority at the national level. There was no need for compromises with other parties, no need to appeal to the people instead of the class. That explains the increasingly anti-parliamentary character of a sizable fraction of the workers' movement after 1900: they rejected the parliament as the place where the entire country is added up and somehow the workers come up short. The left rejected the problem of the real majority - but they did so only in favour of so many local ones. That was because the anarchists and the communist left, more than anyone else, really believed in the collective worker. They saw the mass strike as the stirring of a sleeping giant, tugging at the robes with which formal organisations had diligently bound it. The collective worker had to be encouraged to throw off the mediations that divided it, that trapped it in unions and parties, with their fixed focus on this world and winning gains for workers qua commodity sellers. In that sense, the left implicitly recognised that the development of the productive forces was leading to the separated society. They rightly saw this as, in part, the work of the workers' own organisations, their attempt to empower the class via integration with the state. The left criticised the realities of the workers' movement in terms of its ideals, taking refuge or finding solace in the logic of Marx's purer, more revolutionary analyses. But in doing so, they sought mostly to turn back the clock. They didn't see that it couldn't have been otherwise: it was impossible to build the collective worker without, on one hand, defeating the old regime, and on the other hand, building class power through all these different mediations. They saw the mass strike as a revelation of the true essence of the proletariat. But what were those strikes for? Mostly, they either sought to secure political rights for worker' parties and unions, or else sought to renegotiate, rather than overturn, the relationships between workers and their leaders.

A History of Separation - Endnotes

Under the social democrats support for the development of the productive forces primarily meant constructing the image of the collective worker, calling for discipline, building the institutions to see workers through the long haul. With the romantic revolutionaries we find the workers' movement not merely waiting for the development of productive forces, having faith that they will develop, but actively developing them, with the iron discipline of a centralised state apparatus.

A History of Separation - Endnotes

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, in essence, discovered the possibility of big-push industrialisation, based on his analysis of Marx's reproduction schemes. He developed his findings into a new sort of anti-Marxist Marxism: catch-up development via central planning. Thus, in an emerging "communist" bloc the figure of the technocrat-planner came into its own. However, setting up a technocratic planner state meant uprooting traditional agrarian relations, something old regime elites, as well as many peasants, would bitterly oppose. Marxism-developmentalism thus depended on getting rid of the old elites and reorganising life in the countryside; compromises were no longer an option. In the end it was this aspect of the strategy that would pay off. In the twentieth century, only countries that wiped out the old regime elites were able to catch up: Russia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Of course, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan were able to achieve this result without turning communist, but their ability to do so had everything to do with a wave of revolutions that swept East and Southeast Asia (the main sites of victorious peasant wars), and also with assistance received from the US. Where romantic revolutionaries did not come to power, the old regime elites were not deposed, in India and Brazil, etc, developmentalism ran aground. They had to do it in the old way, via compromise and corruption, and that just wouldn't cut it.

A History of Separation - Endnotes

A deeper tension within neoliberalism is in terms of its self-image as the vehicle of modernity, as literally synonymous with modernisation, whilst promising a future that it is constitutively incapable of providing. Indeed, as neoliberalism has progressed, rather than enabling individual creativity, it has tended towards eliminating cognitive inventiveness in favour of an affective production line of scripted interactions, coupled to global supply chains and a neo-Fordist Eastern production zone. A vanishingly small cognitariat of elite intellectual workers shrinks with each passing year — and increasingly so as algorithmic automation winds its way through the spheres of affective and intellectual labour. Neoliberalism, though positing itself as a necessary historical development, was in fact a merely contingent means to ward off the crisis of value that emerged in the 1970s. Inevitably this was a sublimation of the crisis rather than its ultimate overcoming.

#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics - Alex Williams & Nick Srnicek

When the most indiscriminate repression comes down on us, we should be careful, then, not to see it as the conclusive proof of our radicality. We shouldn't think they are out to destroy us. We should start rather from the hypothesis that they're out to produce us. Produce us as a political subject, as "anarchists", as "Black Bloc", as "anti-system" radicals, to extract us from the generic population by assigning us a political identity. When repression strikes us, let's begin by not taking ourselves for ourselves. Let's dissolve the fantastical terrorist subject which the counter-insurgency theorists take such pains to impersonate, a subject the representation of which serves mainly to produce the "population" as a foil - the population as an apathetic and apolitical heap, an immature mass just good enough for being governed, for having its hunger pangs and consumer dreams satisfied.

To Our Friends - The Invisible Committee

The tactic of repression seems to have consisted in bringing a radical revolutionary subject into existence, and separating it from everything that made it a vital force of the Catholic community: a territorial anchorage, an everyday life, a youthfulness. And as if that wasn't enough, false IRA attacks were organised to finish turning a paralysed population against it. From counter gangs to false flag operations, nothing was ruled out for making the IRA into a clandestine monster, territorially and politically detached from what constituted the strength of the republican movement: the districts, their sense of making-do and of organisation, their custom of rioting. Once the "paramilitaries" were isolated, and the thousand exceptional procedures for annihilating them were routinised, it was just a matter of waiting for the "troubles" to dissipate of their own accord.

To Our Friends - The Invisible Committee

If the insurgents' war against the government needs to be asymmetrical, it's because there is an ontological asymmetry between them, and hence a disagreement about the very definition of war, about its methods as well as its objectives. We other revolutionaries are both the focus and the target of the permanent offensive that government has become. We are the "hearts and minds" that must be conquered. We are the "crowds" that are to be controlled. We are the environment in which the governmental agents evolve and which they mean to subdue, and not a rival entity in the race of power. We don't fight in the midst of the people "like fish in water"; we're water itself, in which out enemies flounder - soluble fish. We don't hind in ambush among the plebs of this world, because it's also within us that the plebs hide. The vitality and the plundering, the rage and the craftiness, the truth and the subterfuge all spring from deep within us. There is no one to be organised. We are that material which grows from within, which organises itself and develops itself. The true asymmetry lies there, and our real position of strength is there. Those who make their belief into an article of export, through terror or performance, instead of dealing with what exists where they are, only cut themselves off from themselves and their base. It's not a matter of snatching the "support of the population", nor even its indulgent passivity, from the enemy: we must take it so there is no longer a population. The population has never been the object of government without first being its product. It ceases to exist once it ceases to be governable.

To Our Friends - The Invisible Committee

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