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ultroid2068

Two quotes come to mind:

“But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” -Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire

-I think you could say this about capital and infrastructure as well. It has developed for the purpose of valorization, rather than immediately meeting human needs. I’m reading Chuang #1, and it’s describing the dilemma faced in the Chinese revolution - seizing the industrial capital furthers revolutionary potential, but also reproduces counterrevolutionary structures.

“If the ridiculous search for "content” is applied to a fully socialist society, we have all the more reason for saying that the formulae “workers’ control” and “workers’ management” are lacking in any content. Under socialism, society isn’t divided into producers and non-producers any more because society is no longer divided into classes. The “content” (if we have to use such an insipid expression) won’t be proletarian autonomy, control, and management of production, but the disappearance of the proletarian class; of the wage system; of exchange – even in its last surviving form as the exchange of money for labour-power; and, finally, the individual enterprise will disappear as well. There will be nothing to control and manage, and nobody to demand autonomy from.“ -Amadeo Bordiga, Fundamentals of Revolutionary Communism

-I guess too many of all these demands and programs focus on workers’ democracy, workers’ control, etc. in general, when it seems like as the organic composition of capital continues to rise, that means less and less - workers’ control of capital becomes less and less meaningful. Capital is what really controls workers, and bosses, for that matter. I think it’s really only meaningful to confront and challenge capital and value, to negate it as the immediate priority rather than something that we can assign to a far off day. I think this is increasingly urgent as real subsumption continues to raise the organic composition of capital like leeches feeding on a sickly anemic body.

lets-play-that

Machuca, 2004.

katianovak

“We only see the violence of change…Are we aware of how much violence goes on just to keep things the way they are?”

— Slavoj Žižek

undr

Robert Capa. Leipzig. April 18, 1945

pondwitch

hmm.

giuseppearagno

Antonio Cecchi

Elettoralismo? Astensionismo? Autonomia del sindacato o cinghia di trasmissione del partito? Riformisti? Rivoluzionari? Teorie o bibbie? Ricordare chi siamo e da dove veniamo ci aiuta a capire che fare, senza tornare a problemi che sembrano attuali e sono invece il nostro lontano passato… Una biografia lunga, ma anche una storia che farà bene leggere. Nato a Scafati il 25 aprile 1895, Cecchi…

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beholdingslut

fellas, is it gay to vote your fellow tribune out of office in a revolutionary and unconstitutional act in order to pass a law to give land to the poor

bauhaus-movement

K A N D I N S K Y

artist-kandinsky

Red Sun and Ship, 1925, Wassily Kandinsky

Medium: oil,canvas

Gray are the coats of the cops who have Imprisoned comrade Bifo, gray are their Instruments of death, Gray is the prison where he has been locked up, gray are the bedroom communities, gray are the streets of the business district.

Obtuse is the constable who holds in his hand the hoods of his colleagues who rummage through the comrade's effects, obtuse are the police who for three months recorded the phone calls (what are we having for dinner today? let's get together on this), obtuse is television. Dangerous are the organs of repression, dangerous because of the latest submachine gun model, dangerous is the judge who arrests first then looks for proof. Dangerous are the roads and squares infested with the angels of death of a system always more minoritarian, dangerous are the factories and the shipyards, dangerous to decide whether or not to let a child see the light of day.

Gray, obtuse, dangerous, they want to impose their scale on the world: gray, obtuse, dangerous. The totalitarian society of capital lives on the monotonous repetition of the exilant. It serves the owners, the cops, the judges. None of them are indispensable to the structure they serve. They make a life of shit the only model of life possible. But communism is young and beautiful.

#marxism #marx #anti capitalism #guy debord #debord

lyubov-popova

Spatial Force Construction, Lyubov Popova

https://www.wikiart.org/en/lyubov-popova/spatial-force-construction

To understand the capitalist domination over our lives and planet, we need to look not only at Marx, but also Feuerbach. Capitalism came into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt,” as Marx put it in Capital. A massive amount of violence was necessary in order to dispossess peasants and force them “into the discipline necessary for the wage system. Once established, however, direct physical coercion ceased to the primary means by which the relations of production are reproduced. As Marx puts it: “The mute compulsion of economic relations seals the domination of the capitalist over the labourer. Extra-economic, immediate violence [Außerökonomische, unmittelbare Gewalt] is sure enough still applied, but only exceptionally. In the ordinary run of things, the labourer can be left to the “natural laws of production”, i.e., to his dependence on capital, a dependence springing from, andguaranteed in perpetuity by, the conditions of production themselves”

Too put it simply, function and mechanism of this domination - appearence of the capital as “natural laws of production” - is similar to what we can see in religion - holyness, sacralization, apperance of the capitalist relations as something not not only natural, but also holy and sacred. The analogy between the dominance of the economy and the religious inversion of subject and object is drawn by Marx himself, not only in his early writings, but also in manuscripts from the 1860s: “As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand”. This analogy is really Feuerbachian and takes a lot from his definition of religion as “Selbstentfremdung”/ “ self-estrangement” - a power that duplicates the current reality “into a religious, imaginary world, and a secular [weltliche] one.” The power of value is thus understood as the sacralization of social structures, leading to the transformation of the latter into an ‘alien power’ confronting the members of society. The power of capital is accordingly not to be understood as the domination of one class by another, but as “the self-domination of labour”. As Postone put it in his “Time, Labor and Social Domination”: “domination in capitalism does not, on its most fundamental level, consist in the domination of people by other people, but in the domination of people by abstract social structures that people themselves constitute. Marx sought to grasp this form of abstract, structural domination – which encompasses, and extends beyond, class domination – with his categories of the commodity and capital. (…) the form of social domination that characterizes capitalism is not ultimately a function of private property, of the ownership by capitalists of the surplus product and the means of production; rather, it is grounded in the value form of wealth itself” The form of power implied by the value form is characterised as abstract, thing-like,impersonal and structural. It is abstract because capital is the self-referential movement of materialised real abstractions like the money and commodities. It is “impersonal” because this power does subject people to a specific person or a specific group of people, but to capital as ‘the automatic subject’. Concrete people are only the personifications of social functions. It is thing-like in the sense that it is the movement of things – commodities and money – on the market that rule over people. It is structural, because this power is a consequence of the basic social structure of production in capitalism, i.e. the fact that production takes place privately and independently and is mediated through the market. This is opposed to the predominant forms of power in pre-capitalist modes of production, which primarily took the form of direct, ‘extra-economic’ coercion and relations of personal dependence. The slave or the feudal peasant was entangled in networks of personal dependence upheld by (the threat of) violence, whereas the ‘free labourer’ in capitalism is ruled by a system of economic abstractions.

#marx #marxism #critical theory #feuerbach #capital

gulyas069

*writes George Lucas like György Lukács*

bauhaus-movement

The #women of the #Bauhaus who rethought the world and were forgotten. Bauhaus Stairway 1927. Lena Bergner, Grete Reichardt, Lijuba Monastirsky, Otti Berger, Lis Beyer, Elisabeth Mueller, Rosa Berger, Ruth Hollos, Lisbeth Oestreiche, young Gunta Stölzl in front. © Lux Feininger