The Health unto Death

[grupaok]

Suprematist class at the School of Fine Arts, Vitebsk, 1922. Kazimir Malevich is at the blackboard in back; among the students are Nina Kogan, Vera Yermolaeva, Nikolai Suetin, Ivan Chervinko and Lev Yudin.

[healthuntodeath]

Recalling what Marx said about the nationalization of the land, that the land cannot belong to either the direct producers or even to any particular generation of humanity, but rather to the species as a whole, Bordiga emphasized the fact that the communist revolution cannot serve to benefit a single class, regardless of how universal that class may be. Were it to do so, it would remain in the stage of the generalization of the proletariat and would not proceed towards its abolition. If one then declares that every person should become a producer, one mutilates humanity at the same time that one casts aside an entire historical-practical acquisition; man does not have to intervene directly, personally, in order to produce! And furthermore, such a demand is revealed to be more and more contradictory with each passing day. As a consequence of the enormous productivity of labor, the act of production can no longer define man; only human activity, the development of the human forces as ends-in-themselves, can be the fundamental determination of a humanity that is finally liberated from capital.

Jacques Camatte, The KAPD and the proletarian movement.

[petrasvonkant]

Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express (1932)

[aiminoes]

Leaving the Fortress: Between Class Internationalism and Nativist Social Democracy - Viewpoint Magazine

For the time being, borders are here to stay, but pushback is possible on both the fronts that matter: developing structures (both networks and norms) of solidarity in workplaces and communities, and recreating a consistent pole of anti-racist internationalism.

[keroppi-blush]

green snake, 1993 dir. tsui hark

[healthuntodeath]

While the slogan "luxury for all" criticises the exclusion of the majority of the world's population from social wealth, it nonetheless fails to bring into critical perspective the specific form of this wealth. Not only are questions of health and ecology left out; above all, this approach tacitly accepts the consumer monad, individualism of consumption, and separation of the spheres of consumption and production. By accepting this separation, this perspective mistakes emancipation for mechanisation because it ignores the crucial question of the control, construction, and programming of machines. Yet the sphere of consumption is every bit as much a product of modern capitalism as are the spheres of circulation and production. Objectively, its construction is necessary to locate demand for all produced commodities - that is, to keep accumulation going. While labour is construed as pure exertion, toil, or duty, the customer is a queen whose freedom to choose is only limited quantitavely, by money. The qualitative limits of the consumer's options can be expressed as three options: buy, don't buy, and steal. While labour is shaped by the hierarchies of subordination to the pressures of the production process, the money commodity lends its possessor control over the labour time of others. That's why money bears a certain fetish of masculine autonomy. Capital shapes all products as commodities, whether in their particular durability, quality, and specificity, or symbolically in their branding, distinction, and standardisation. The addiction to consumption as a sphere separated from production stands fundamentally at odds with full social emancipation. Critcising capitalism from the standpoint of consumption extends the ideological function of accepting the promise of happiness by means of commodities. The goal is rather to collectively transform all social spheres so that the need to escape - into "leisure" time, the mall, or television - is overwhelmingly minimised.

Bini Adamczak, Kommunismus.

[orbitalpavilion]

[human-flesh-search]

Liubov Popova, Textile Design, 1923-4. Gouache on paper, 115 x 92 mm

[healthuntodeath]

Marxism differs from all primitive forms of socialism by not binding the movement to any one particular form of struggle. It recognises the most varied forms of struggle; and it does not “concoct” them, but only generalises, organises, gives conscious expression to those forms of struggle of the revolutionary classes which arise of themselves in the course of the movement. Absolutely hostile to all abstract formulas and to all doctrinaire recipes, Marxism demands an attentive attitude to the mass struggle in progress, which, as the movement develops, as the class-consciousness of the masses grows, as economic and political crises become acute, continually gives rise to new and more varied methods of defence and attack. Marxism, therefore, positively does not reject any form of struggle. Under no circumstances does Marxism confine itself to the forms of struggle possible and in existence at the given moment only, recognising as it does that new forms of struggle, unknown to the participants of the given period, inevitably arise as the given social situation, changes. In this respect Marxism learns, if we may so express it, from mass practice, and makes no claim what ever to teach the masses forms of struggle invented by “systematisers” in the seclusion of their studies.

V.I. Lenin, Guerilla Warfare.

[healthuntodeath]

[class-struggle-anarchism]

“The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious.”

Happy birthday Walter Benjamin, born 15th of July 1892

[healthuntodeath]

[coeursfideles]

Le genou d’Artémide (Jean-Marie Straub, 2008)

[heksenkring]

Sayat Nova (The Color Of Pomegranates), 1969

[healthuntodeath]

...it is incumbent on a critical, or indeed anti-fascist, Left to stop indulging in the ambient rhetoric of the white working class voter as the subject-supposed-to-have-voted for the fascist-populist option. This is not only because of the sociological dubiousness of the electoral argument, or the enormous pass it gives to the middle and upper classes, or even because of the tawdry forms of self-satisfied condescension it allows a certain academic or journalistic commentator or reader, or the way it allows a certain left to indulge in fantasies for which ‘if only we could mobilise them…’. More fundamentally, it is because, politically speaking, the working class as a collective, rather than as a manipulated seriality, does not (yet) exist. Endowing it with the spectre of emancipation is thus profoundly misleading, irrespective of statistical studies on those quintessentially serial phenomena, elections. To impute the subjectivity of a historical agency to a false political totality is not only unwittingly to repeat the “unity trick” of fascistic propaganda, it is to suppose that emancipatory political forms and energies lie latent in social life. By way of provocation we could adapt Adorno’s statement, quoted earlier, to read: “[We] may at least venture the hypothesis that the class identity of the contemporary Trump voter in a way presupposes the end of class itself”. A sign of this is of course the stickiness of the racial qualifier white working class. Alain Badiou once noted about the phraseology of Islamic terrorism that “when a predicate is attributed to a formal substance … it has no other consistency than that of giving an ostensible content to that form. In 'Islamic terrorism', the predicate 'Islamic' has no other function except that of supplying an apparent content to the word 'terrorism' which is itself devoid of all content (in this instance, political)." Whiteness is here, not just at the level of discourse, but I would argue at that of political experience, the supplement to a politically void or spectral notion of the working class; it is what allows a pseudo-collective agency to be imbued with a (toxic) psycho-social content. This is all the more patent if we note how incessantly in both public discourse and statistical pseudo-reflection in order to belong to this “working class” whiteness is indispensable, while any specific relation to the means of production, so to speak, is optional at best. The racialized experience of class is not an autonomous factor in the emergence of fascistic tendencies within the capitalist state; it is the projection of that state, a manipulated seriality, and thus an experience different in kind from political class consciousness, and likely intransitive to it.

Alberto Toscano, Notes on Late Fascism.

[avecetcontrelecinema]

Uwasa no onna (dir. Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)

[shutdownld50-blog]

Racism as Deep Trolling and Other New Centre Diversions

Who would begrudge the New Centre for Research and Practice attempting to salvage a modicum of credibility after all the egg on its face for its association with Nick Land? It does look extraordinarily foolish, fashioning itself as a fulcrum of leftist innovation while singing the praises of a far right racist whose eugenic fantasies entrench the neoliberal status quo. We would have left it to its predicament, but in the New Centre’s desperate fire-fight it has shown itself to be more troubling than we first thought.

On one level, our broadside against Land’s racism, ‘No Platform for Land’, had the intended effect, provoking the New Centre’s public statement against future associations with Land and throwing light on the circulation of far right racism in cultural and academic scenes. But in the New Centre’s statement and associated social media postings, it has sought to rewrite its sorry history to position itself as a leading edge in the critique of Land, and to deflect attention from this shameless manoeuvre by positioning its anti-racist critics as vengeful and reactive ‘Red Guards’. Now it’s not only a matter of saving face. Attempting in this way to discredit and divert those who would challenge the content and circulation of far right ideas cannot but serve the agenda of the far right. Hence it’s no surprise to find that this trope of the ‘Red Guard’ is not the sole preserve of the New Centre but is integral to today’s far right, to be found, for example, every time Land loses his prized ‘coldness’ to Twitter-rave at those who would object to the spread of racism.

But at least the New Centre has finally cut loose from Land? Well, sort of. It was astonishingly reticent in doing so, and at least one of its Board of Directors seems to think the matter not yet closed, posting this on 30 March in reply to the New Centre announcement about ending relations with Land: ‘whatever decision we come to on this – and there’s been nothing like a consensus yet – i think we can agree that we shouldn’t in any way encourage the extortionary, red-guard tactics of these goons’.

In what way has it been reticent? The New Centre’s public position is that breaking ties with Land is due to his recent Twitter activity, that from early 2017 it was ‘displeased and angered by several tweets by Land in which he espoused intolerant opinions about Muslims and immigrants.’ Yet the New Centre has known since at least summer 2016 of the odious nature of Land’s ideas, which are far more extensive and integral to his philosophy than some ‘intolerant opinions’. We refer to an attempt by the New Centre to host Nick Land at an e-flux conference in July 2016, of which the organisational discussion stream on e-flux is eye opening (see the screen-grabs below). Three participants who opposed Land’s presence at this conference drew attention to his eugenecist and ethnonationalist screeds. New Centre director, Mohammad Salemy, took the opportunity to clarify, dismissing the ‘false accusations’ of one critic and claiming Land as some kind of double agent, his racist proclamations not to be taken at face value. Another member of the New Centre chimed in to argue, in a delusion of grand proportions, that Land is in fact a rigorous anti-fascist and Marxist critic of media and economy.

Yes, we were taken aback too! When the full stinking pile of Nick Land’s racism was rubbed in the face of the New Centre, it responded by: accusing Land’s critics of spreading false accusations; attempting to disavow the significance of this racism; and claiming, with half-hearted conviction, that Land’s racism is really an anti-fascist subversion from within. When an institution promotes a far right racist, regularly hosts a far right racist, and makes out that far right racism is actually something wholly other… one is entitled to be a little alarmed.

Roll forward to February and March 2017, when after the e-flux fiasco the New Centre once more hired Nick Land to teach a course – a series of eight, 2.5 hour online seminars on ‘accelerationism’, at a price per student of $400. When challenged on social media, the New Centre’s public statement (29 March) was no longer along the delusional lines of the e-flux dispute; instead, it now leveraged in its defense the value of hosting ‘controversial ideas’ and abstract notions of ‘freedom of speech’. Salemy was less self-controlled in Facebook posts around this time, at least once arguing that Land’s idea of ‘hyper-racism’ (i.e. eugenic selection for intelligence and new speciation in separation from the ‘refuse’ of the rest) was not in fact racist (see the screen-grab).

But, hey ho, eventually, on 30 March, the day after our broadside against Land’s racism and an extensive critique of the neorectionary scene in Viewpoint magazine, the announcement came: ‘The new Centre has stopped planning more seminars with Land’. It is worded a little too carefully: ‘stopped planning’ doesn’t preclude starting again. But let’s not quibble; it’s a public announcement against Land. The statement continued, protesting too much: ‘We want to stress that we have not reached this decision based on the pressure by Shutdown LD50 campaign (there has been none until now) but as a result of our own personal convictions, beliefs and plans’. What a craven racket! It rewrites its longstanding apology for Land’s racism in order to shore-up and project a marketable brand image at all costs.

But wait! The New Centre just can’t keep its obsession down, as Landism seems to return under cover of denial. The ANON text, ‘Against Nick Land and the Reactive Left’ (2 April), functions like a proxy for the New Centre as it feels its way forward, reintroducing the New Centre’s notion that there’s a useful Land to be retrieved from a bad, and with it a new turn of Salemy’s earlier dissimulation, that Land could be a Marxist ‘deep troll’. Added to which, now the alt right as a whole may be an agent of anti-capitalism: ‘Land himself even remarked that the Alt Right is a mass political movement against capitalism incubating, unexpectedly, from the right.’

ANON will continue to glean gems like this as Land teaches his New Centre course through April 2017. After that, even the New Centre wouldn’t be daft enough to host him again. But we don’t doubt that elements there hanker to keep that option open and will be grumbling on Facebook about the Cathedral, Red Guards, and other neoreactionary bogeymen for some months to come.

[healthuntodeath]

I was a communist throughout. Justly though, the other communists looked askance at me. I was a communist despite their certainties, despite my doubts. Justly they did not see themselves in me. They would not admit my discipline. My centralism seemed anarchy to them. My self-criticisms contradicted theirs. Special communists cannot be: to think so is not to be so. Justly they did not see themselves in me, my comrades. Like them, I too was enslaved. Even more so: I tended to forget it. They did their work, I followed my inclination. Exactly that: I was a communist throughout. Despite their certainties, despite my doubts I always wanted this world ended. Myself ended too. And it was that exactly which estranged us. My hopes had no point for them. My centralism seemed anarchy to them. As if I wanted more, more truth, more for me to give them, more for them to give me. Thus living, dying thus. I was a communist throughout. I always wanted this world ended. I have survived enough to see comrades who bruised me broken by intolerable truths. Now tell me: you knew very well I was with you? Was that why you hated me? My truth is truly needed, breathed in through space and time, heard patiently.

Franco Fortini, Communism.