#communization

[redorthodoxy]

[tastethebloodofmeatthawsmoth]

Now that Endnotes is being reprinted in its entirety, there's been an uptick in interest in, or at least talk about, communization theory. "Communization" is a contested term, but all of the various communization currents center immediacy, immanence, and anti-identity, as Benjamin Noys says in Communization and its Discontents (which I recommend if you're new to communization or want an interesting refresher). I like communization theory - though I like some of it more, I prefer Endnotes & Theorie Communiste to Tiqqun or the Invisble Committee in pretty much every way - but I still don't really understand why it was treated as anything that new, or why it became the hottest intellectual trend in a certain segment of the radical milieu for a while. The "immediacy" that's such an important part of communization theory has been advocated by revolutionary anarchists and for that matter many Marxists for ~200 years, but I forget how marginalized libertarian communism is compared to social democracy, Leninism, and Stalinism.

[bordigamarvin]

Workerism versus Communism

Workerism, in all its myriad forms (Marxism-Leninism, Syndicalism, Social Democracy, among others), posits the worker as a privileged subject to be empowered, liberated, or elevated within society. In doing this, it preserves and reinforces the very conditions which communism seeks to negate: the separation of life from productive activity (labor as it exists) and the existence of the proletariat as a class defined by the selling of their labor power. Communism is not the rule of the workers, the celebration of labor, or a more rational and "equitable" distribution of labor. It is the abolition of the conditions that produce workers. It is the abolition of wage-labor, private property, the state, and of the value-form. It is the supersession of the condition of the proletariat, not its exaltation. Workerism views the worker as a positive subject to be affirmed, while communism views the proletariat as a negative object to be abolished during the revolution. The workerist society is still one centered around work and the worker, whether the capitalist is individual or collective, it is irrelevant, but the communist society is one without the concept of the worker or boss. Workerism is an alteration of the present state of things, but communism is its abolition.

[ilysxmmit]

make liberals read Tiqqun and Endnotes

[carabinerandsickle]

There is no valorisation without work. Labour power is quite a special commodity: its consumption furnishes work, hence new value, whereas means of production yield no more than their own value. Therefore the use of labour power furnishes a supplementary value. The origin of bourgeois wealth is to be found in this surplus value, in the difference between the value created by the wage-labourer in his work, and the value necessary for the reproduction of his labour-power. Wages only cover the expenses of that reproduction (the means of subsistence of the worker and his family). […] Supposing the capitalist and the wagelabourer were fused into one, if labour truly managed capital, re-oriented production in the interest of everyone, if wages were equal and fair, etc., and value logic continued to operate, it would not go beyond capitalism: it would be a (short-lived) worker-led capitalism

— Gilles Dauvé, Eclipse and ReEmergence of the Communist Movement - Chapter 1: Capitalism and Communism

[endlessandrea]

Inquiry on the Future of Revolution, Part 1 - Notes - e-flux

A conversation between Jasper Bernes and M. E. O’Brien on revolutionary speculation and the poetry of communism. Part 1 of 2.

"It would be a massive technical project to remake the world so that people have access to the things they need to live lives of dignity and meaning and fulfillment—so that the free development of every person can be the maxim of a communist society. It’s not going to happen overnight. We’ll need to move stuff all around the world in order to remedy a lot of the imbalances that have been created by centuries of capitalism and colonialism and dispossession. How do we do that? Well, it’s a vast project of imagination that no one mind could solve, but I think with millions of minds it can be solved."

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

On Anti-Work, Mexican(American)s and Work.

Read it and a buncha other writings here.

Ediciones Inéditas Anthology

ediciones inéditas Ediciones Inéditas Anthology an anthology of original essays published by ediciones inéditas 2019