make all the fun you want kids.

***

I used to lay awake at night listening to the sounds of my room, lost in my head. As a boy, my brothers and I spent summers at our dad’s house. It was only for two months of the year—hardly long enough to justify each of us having our own rooms—so each summer the three of us would all cram together into the same small space. Laying there in the dark staring up at the ceiling, I would hear their soft, rhythmic breathing and know that they were asleep. Know that they had some kind of switch that allowed their unconscious minds to sweep over their conscious ones, lulling them into a kind of lethargic darkness. A switch that I missing. My conscious brain struggled for primacy over sleep. Struggled into the small hours of the morning while my thoughts shifted and morphed from the important questions of my childhood to the irrelevant, made-up facts and images that would flitter through my mind. I always liked this time of night. I felt like the only person in the whole world who was awake. The only person that could see the secrets that passed in the dark.

Some nights I would hear a voice too. The same voice that would speak to me in my dreams or when I had a bad fever. My father never knew about this voice, but my mother did. She would stay up with me on nights when I was really sick and hallucinating, and I would blabber to her insensibly about the voice and the form who made it. I don’t remember her thinking that it was a weird thing. She was an understanding woman. The rock of my childhood. The one who was left to raise three boys with almost no help from anyone. My father did occasionally talk of sending me to see someone, but this was because he thought that my sleeplessness was born out of some problem I had with their divorce. My mother didn’t agree with him, she thought I was fine, and his opinions carried a lot less weight than hers did when it came to the big decisions in the lives of my brothers and I.

I’m not sure how these pieces fit together. I can’t point it out the link to you—the exact spot where the lines of these stories cross and blur into one—all I can say is that there is some vague connection between my sleepless nights, the voice in my head, and my parents separation. The voice eventually stopped. It was in a dream. The voice and its bulky form were calling out to me from some mountainous distance. I could see a black silhouette on some rocky outcrop, a familiar enemy come again. I’m not sure if the words ever had a tangible meaning, but the malicious intent was always obvious in that deep, demonic tone. I always knew that’s what it was too. A demon. Personal or otherwise, I’m not sure. It would beckon to me from some deep place, taunt me, challenge me, fill me with the fear that I came to understand as the fear of death. In this dream, it wanted to test the body that I had conceived for myself in the land of my subconscious. It was decided that we had to swim against one another, so that’s what we did. We swam across a black ocean framed in a blood coloured sky. The black waves were breaking white overtop of me as we laboured across the water. I don’t remember how long we were swimming. I don’t know if time had any meaning in that world, and if it did, I don’t trust my memory to hold onto that truth for very long. It could have been years or what could have been only minutes. It was hard, and it was frightening. I knew that the outcome of the dream would dictate the outcome of my reality. That to lose in this dream would have dire consequences for the rest of my waking life. When I walked upon the grey shore on the other side of the water, exhausted, and looked back out over the waves I knew I was alone. That something was different. That I had won. Never again did I hear that sound, but the distorted echoes of its memory still lingers on somewhere in my head.

I don’t have a lot of memories from my childhood. One of my brothers will remind me of some event that happened to us in the past, but nothing will stir in my brain. It frustrates them, and sometimes me. I mostly remember feelings from that time not events. The two things that stick out are that strange voice and my parent’s divorce. It happened when I was five. My dad had moved from Texas, where my brothers and I were born, to Ontario, where my mother comes from. He hated it, didn’t want to be married, didn’t want to have kids. Sometimes life gets away from you, and I think it got away from him. He took his things and went back to Texas to try and reclaim whatever it was he felt he lost. I’m not sure if he ever got ahold of what he was looking for, but I hope he did. We visited him every summer and every other Christmas until I was about ten years old, and then we fell out of contact for a long time. Not a phone call, not a birthday card, not a word. I didn’t know then why it happened, and I don’t really know now. Him leaving defined my youth. It’s not such a big tragedy, really, but it was the tragedy of my childhood.

I do remember the plane rides, the trouble that we would always have with customs coming back into Canada. The hot days, the heavy rains, and the time that a tornado was whirling away close to our house. So close that a tree branch came crashing through our kitchen window. I remember that there was something about the South and the way people talked about it that made it seem very special. A place apart where people would speak a little differently, be a little nicer to you. I remember chicken n’ dumplings for supper, and how my step-sister would always eat the fat and grizzle from the steaks that nobody else wanted. Mostly I remember the spaces. Our little house with a veranda and the family of opossums living underneath. The kids across the street who we would race with to see who was the fastest. My Mimi’s house and the big back room where we would play elaborate games. All these places and spaces that were a part of my childhood—places that helped shape who I am—but ones that I could now walk by, walk through, and have no idea that this was where I spent a lot of time growing up. Spaces like that bedroom where I was laying awake, staring up into the darkness, listening to the sounds of my brothers sleeping.

I heard my dad get up and go out into the living room. It was right beside our bedroom, so when he turned on the television, I knew that he would be up for a while. I sat up in bed wondering whether or not I should go out there. Making up my mind I crept down off of the top bunk, slowly, trying not to wake either of my brothers. I walked out into the living room which was light up by the soft blue glow streaming from the television set. My dad was sitting there on the couch in his underwear and a white tank top. He had a bowl of marinara sauce resting on his lap and a few pieces of white bread in his hand. He looked up to see me rubbing my tired eyes, adjusting to that soft blue glow. He probably said something like ‘Boy, what are you doin’ up?’ and then laughed his big, deep laugh. I don’t remember him laughing a lot when I was younger, but having spent more time with him now, I know that his laughter follows almost everything he says. Like he sees the humour, the abstruse irony, of every single thing that happens in the world. Like all events are transpiring only to convey some deeply concealed joke to this one person.

I would like to recount the conversation that we had that night, but the truth is I can’t remember it. I actually can’t remember any conversations that I had with my father when I was a child. I remember that he taught me how to fold jeans, I remembering riding in the bed of his truck going out to restaurants, I remember him being tall with dark features, that he always had cuts on his hands from his job, but I don’t remember any conversations. We sat for a while that night watching TV, dipping white bread into the marinara sauce and eating it. He might have told me that this was a snack that he and his brother ate a lot as boys because his father wasn’t around and his mother couldn’t cook.

We went outside to sit by the pool on that cool Texas night. My father smoked a cigarette and I sat beside him, watching him. He might have spoken to me about coming to live with him in Texas for a few years, as that was a conversation being thrown around at the time. I wasn’t as far into the school system as my brothers were, so it would be an easier transition for me. Plus I would get to play football, which was a big draw for me back then even though I don’t care much for organized sports now. It made me feel special. That this person who had left us all behind wanted me, and just me, to come live with him. I remember tearful phone call with my mother who did not want to me to stay in Texas, who did not want to separate my brothers and I. Life would have been a very different thing had that come to pass, and looking back I know that I am glad that it didn’t happen. What else could I be? It’s hard to regret a life that never happened.

Maybe we didn’t say much at all on that cool Texas night. Maybe we just sat there by the pool, him smoking his cigarette, me watching him. The truth is he didn’t have to say anything to make an impression on me. He was always this mythical person in my head. He left before I got know him. When I was five, he went to Texas because his grandmother was sick. Mimi raised him and his brother because his father wasn’t around and his mother was abusive both physically and mentally. They weren’t always at their grandparent’s house, but they were there often enough. Often enough for both my father and his brother to consider them their real parents. Whenever he found out she was sick, there was no hesitation about flying down there. But when she got better, he never came back. We got a phone call from him one day. I remember my mom made us all get on different phones scattered throughout the house because he wanted to talk to everybody at once. I was on the phone in our unfinished basement. I was standing on top of pale blue concrete that was cool on my bare feet. Holding the phone to my ear, I was looking out at boxes of old clothes and christmas ornaments while our father was telling us that he wasn’t gonna come home. It wasn’t our fault, of course not. He just felt that it was the right thing to do. I couldn’t understand that then, how it could be right, but I think now I can grasp some of it. His choice lay between a kind of responsible misery or an irresponsible happiness, and he chose his own happiness over ours. It was a human choice, and maybe I would have made the same one in his spot. I don’t think it was the right choice or the wrong choice. Rightness doesn’t come into it for me. We make decisions and we have to live the things that come along afterwards. It doesn’t matter how our lives would have played out if he acted differently—if he had stayed around. He made his choice, and we all have to live with it. Life couldn’t be any other way.

Watching him smoke that cigarette beside the pool was one of the few moments where we were actually alone with one another. Maybe there were other times when I was too young to remember, but this moment sits concrete on my mind like the floor of our unfinished basement. A chance to understand this person that I never knew, hear him talk, but I can’t even remember what we spoke about. I only remember the feeling. The feeling of having a strong, unspoken connection to an older man. The feeling of wanting to have a father, and maybe just this once, just for this moment, having one. Eventually he must have put out his cigarette. Maybe he stubbed it into the ground and threw it into the garden, or maybe he dropped it into an empty beer bottle. Then we walked back inside and he said something like ‘Alright boy, time for bed. Can you sleep?’ and I said that I could. I crawled back into bed, got under the covers, and waited for the secrets of the night to pass me by.

 

In honour of the Iron Lady, here’s an excerpt from one of my favourite books – Gravity’s Rainbow.

Context: the passage is in a part of the book fantasizing the genesis and evolution of the German dye-making conglomerate, IG Farben, in 1925, which had/s subsidiaries in America, and was found guilty of war crimes. The relevant segment is the exploration of a dream dreamt by revered 19th-century German chemist/molecular architect, Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz. In it, Kekulé uncovers the cyclical design of benzene in the form of a snake with its tail in its mouth. The snake, a strong Jungian archetype, implies above all cycle and return; beginning and end as continuity and as (r)evolutionary model. But as the chemical benzene was actually made and explored, its cyclical premiss did not likewise usher in such tempered, respectful and perhaps fatalistic development. Rather, the snake ‘benzene’ was exploited by what Pynchon refers to – vintage Pynchon – as Them. The System. What follows is an astounding monologue inspired by anti-capitalism and eco-justice.

Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, “The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally returning,” is to be delivered into a system whose  only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity–most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . (pg 419, GR 2006)

So let’s remember Mag for her resounding toast to the health of the System. Let’s remember her as one of those who denied us reflection of our Cyclical nature, our true relation to the world as its beings.

Because why not use ubiquitous technology to depict the bleak, the sad, the alone, hope, and the mundane? This is our series of shorts shot using only the simplest and crudest of techniques. We have no training. We have little equipment. But we have ideas.

This short clip came out of a dream that I had. I had visited this statue – the Wellington Monument in Phoenix Park, Dublin – a week prior, and its size and placement must have resonated with my subconscious. It’s two simple (shaky) shots. The music is Debussy’s Danseuses de Delphe.

The French Marxist-Leninist philosopher Louis Althusser develops the concept of Interpellation as an analogy for ideological control in his 1970 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).”

Interpellation, or Hailing as he also calls it in the text, is this specific routine whereby a police officer blows a whistle, points an arm out at some offender in the street, and yells “Hey, you!” The offender, whose guilt is self-known, turns around and confirms the officer’s authority.

This brief interaction invites Althusser to interpret a whole metaphysical system of subject-making power controlled by a/an ideology. The metaphysical officer, whose role is that of carrying out the rule of ideology, finds the offender in some way lacking. The offender meanwhile is assumed to be “always-already” a subject of an ideological formation, and therefore knows their transgression. As the offender turns around they meet the officer, by the very action of recognizing the call of the officer, they embrace their subjective nature under the ideology that the officer is bearer of. They confirm the power of the officer, but more importantly, they confirm the power of the ideology itself over themselves, as subjects. The subject-offender, who knows their transgression when it has been called – evidenced by their very turning around and embracing the authority of the ideology – is thus already a bearer of the ideology. They are being called to account not for failing to bear an ideology they do not know, but as a failure of an ideology they know well. Their turn is a mark, a confirmation to the officer. The subject recognizes in that instance of their being singled out from a crowd of other alway-already ideological subjects, whose transgression have not been called to account. This particular subject’s turn, however, is an act of will. It is a facing of consequence on ones own terms. And when they do turn, they meet with an ideological reality. There are conditions to this meeting that confirm both ones status as a subject and ones relationship to an officer of ideology.¹

The schematic that Althusser draws up amounts to:

1. the Interpellation of ‘individuals’ as subjects, i.e. being called to account and made a respondent of ideology

2. their subjection to the Subject (officer/ideology)

3. the mutual recognition of subjects and Subject (officer), the subjects’ recognition of each other, and finally the subject’s recognition of themself

4. the absolute guarantee that everything really is so, and on that condition that the subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly, everything will be all right²

This entire system of transaction, which might take but a few seconds, amounts to a routine of confirmation of ideology and status. And, for certain reasons, I think it has some relevance for how we think of class consciousness.

For Althusser, the term subject means

“a free subjectivity, a centre of initiatives, author of and responsible for its actions; (2) a subjected being, who submits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped of  all freedom except that of freely accepting his [sic] submission … the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he [sic] shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he [sic] shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e. in order that he [sic] shall make the gestures of his actions of his subjection ‘all by himself’. There are no subjects except by and for their subjection. That is why they ‘work all by themselves’.³

I suppose the way in which I am relating these statements to class consciousness is in questioning what it is the left is trying to accomplish when it employs things like critical pedagogy; diversity of consciousness. In trying to build a relationships between diverse working experiences, are we interpellating or hailing working people to our ideology, our Subject of class consciousness? Are we making our own subjects by confirming the experiences of alienation and exploitation, whose activity is deemed free as long as it falls within the general framework of left criticism? If we acknowledge difference but claim intersectionality; if we condemn racism, patriarchy, and privilege but uplift class dynamics – do we then create a subjectivity which is free to exist; subjects that ‘work all by themselves’ as long as they confirm the totality of consciousness? Further, if this is a truth (I am rather ambiguous about this whole point, perhaps ambiguous about the point of it as well), what are the contours of the ideology of class consciousness? Are they white, male, petty bourgeoisie?

That’s it. No resolution. Just a thing to consider.

 

¹ 173-176

² 181

³ 182

 

 

In the review of Michael Hardt’s The Common in Communism that was previously posted, I suggested that Hardt may have overstated how much immaterial production has transformed capitalism. Let me correct this: I believe Hardt is generally wrong.

First, here is a summary of his basic argument: today’s dominant form of capitalism has pushed material production to the periphery of global society (the South and the East) and has invested into an economy based on immaterial production. This immaterial economic formation amounts to a new set of relations between capital and workers: the former removes itself from the minutia of the labour process, extracting rent on the distribution of the completed product and not a surplus from the discrepancy between wages and value. The latter, meanwhile, have begun to produce in much more spontaneous ways; ideas are filtered and found through a commons of social knowledge, making any attempt to control the labour process stifling and futile. Hardt states that these relations open up a new space for revolution: if we rebel against the monopolizers of distribution – financial capital and intellectual property controls – whose actions amount to the theft of society’s imaginationary impulse, we can realize a new way of life free the shackles of property, where we make each other through the open sharing of ourselves.

My disagreement with this his argument is this: While I think to some extent we are witnessing the birth of a new class of producers who have unprecedented control over the labour process, interacting with each other through a social ‘common’, the real overwhelming feature of the transition towards the immaterial economy is the reification of social labour, i.e. taking immaterial work and positioning it within the familiar world of object production. Where Hardt sees the development of un-capturable interaction, I see a more intrusive system of commoditization.

The ideology of neoliberalism, in vogue in the Northern capitalist countries since the mid-1970s, has as its salient features: neo-colonization of non-capitalist states, political policy restructuring to better service the dynamics of the financial sector (austerity), and globalization of production. The floodgates for this ideology were opened when China’s dictators created an unbeatably cheap working army by forcibly expropriating masses of peasants from their land. Simultaneously, innovations in communications technologies and transportation allowed/developed-with Japanese firms to pioneer the ‘Just In Time’ production model, where automobiles began to be produced with utmost subservience to efficiency and economy. Coupled with a piece-work system of parts production that incorporated a sizeable portion of the Japanese working class, Just-In-Time revolutionized the way companies interacted with supply and demand. Global supply chains emerged in the East in the 1980s that are still unrivalled in their ability to pump out quality goods in record speed and number. Material production in the old capitalist economies simply did not have the technological drive nor the legal legitimacy to so easily re-tool the workforce for equally cheap mass production, so they shut down factories and began outsourcing labour, which itself became a standard systems logic for the telecommunications industry, allowing a techno-indsustrial class to flourish in India. The composition of the workforce since the 1980s has thus changed immensely in the global north.

But contrary to Hardt’s thesis, this recomposition has not necessarily revolutionized the labour process. Instead, the logic of material production has been extended to the immaterial world. People are self-branded, objectified forms offered to companies. Interaction is optimized. Performance evaluation numerically-renders complex social activity. Where the alienated body – whose physicality was set to work for the sole purpose of producing more value than it was hired for – once was the central force of capitalist production, today in the neoliberal economy it is the alienated personality. The soul is the target of value production, and the healthy-happy individual is its source. Arlie Russell details this in her seminal text, The Managed Heart (1973, reprinted in 2003). In it, she explores the way feeling has been captured and objectified in the work done by airline stewards, but one easily sees how it permeates many forms of work in the immaterial economy.

Further, if we see the economic structure of society as being in a state of neoliberal revolution, we can also see how this has enlivened the consciousness in the superstructures of the north (for clarification of these terms structure-superstucture, see the Review post). State austerity has adopted the language of just-in-time production. Services are provided to ‘customers’, not just to the general public itself. The way services are delivered by all levels of the state is in flux: third parties like NGO’s or not-for-profits (or for-profits!) often perform the services that were once sacrosanct pillars of state legitimacy. Taking a market-abstraction view, the state acts as a consumer of prior-produced commoditized services, advertised through grant proposals. Of course people groups have always formed external organizations to solve problems the state has been unable to, or refuses to, address (harm prevention for drug users would be a typical example). But these things have always been in conjunction with state institutions like welfare, hospitals that offer reasonably reliable care, or accessible public transit, and never in lieu of them.

In the realm of civil society, cultural institutions have also been captured by the ideology of neoliberal production: leanness, targeting, optimization, speed, and maximization have impacted the way schools, hospitals, media, food provision, and social interaction functions. Advertising has adapted itself to the task of selling of immaterial goods, admittedly a much more complex process than hawking physical use-values.

So where does the notion of the common fit in? I suppose we might accept that a cadre of producers whose jobs are built in the superstructure – artists, intellectuals, engineers, and activists – do in fact produce in a uniquely socialized realm, their work free from intrusions by capital into the process of production itself. But this makes up a rather small class in society. The majority of immaterial labourers are still being objectified under the old model of surplus-value extraction, where the result of their labour – a cup of coffee, a resolved bill, a great meal – is but an intangible replacement of a physical form; a credit where hard currency once stood. Capital has not abandoned surplus value extraction at all; it has merely modified it. One notable example is the re-birth of piece-work, which has grown out of the vast knowledge monopolies of ubiquity. In a recent segment on Spark, a CBC Radio show that documents human-technology relationships, a comparison was made between work that was crowdsourced from Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and the industrial revolution-era lace manufacturers in 19th century England. Interestingly, Marx understood piece work (work taken out of a direct assembly and performed by an individual who is then paid per piece) to be the form of production most amenable to capitalism. With its reliance on worker competition, its tendency to drive the cost of labour down (the most efficient workers set the standard wage, while the average worker is underpaid), and its informality of contract, is it really any wonder that technology companies have turned to an army of “freelancers” to complete copious quantities of menial tasks like tagging and sorting? (Seriously, this is a very interesting episode – pertinent bit starts at 16:30)We can concede to Hardt that the labour process for immaterial production appears to be much more complex, less time-based than physical value production. But then Hardt must also concede that its evaluation is also less revolutionary, less common-based than he has suggested.

In sum, (and in agreement with Hardt) we should recognize neoliberalism as a transformative moment for capitalism (all moments are revolutionary) where – among other unprecedented changes – immaterial production has emerged as the dominant type in the northern economic base – changing the way daily life is itself (re)produced. Its effects have reorganized the consciousness of the superstructure, changing distribution of services, forms of state, and dissemination of socio-culture. To an un-registered extent, neoliberalism has also pervaded the realm of cultural production, interpellating who we are and how we struggle for subjectivity. Immaterial production has been therefore subjected it to the dictates of capitalism both in distribution and in what is manufactured. The way that these two things work cannot be divided as Hardt suggests. Rather, they are constantly evolving in a symbiotic ever-present.

Because why not use ubiquitous technology to depict the bleak, the sad, the alone, hope, and the mundane? This is our series of shorts shot using only the simplest and crudest of techniques. We have no training. We have little equipment. But we have ideas.

This is our first short. It was filmed in Toronto (maybe that’s obvious). Music by Christian.

I’m not quite sure this is strictly a review, but let’s call it that.

Michael Hardt’s The Common in Communism (2010) is a short essay extolling the revolutionary idea of the ‘common’, which he derives from Marx’s conception of communism in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 1844 [EPM] (1975):

the positive content of communism, which corresponds to the abolition of private property, is the autonomous human production of subjectivity, the human production of humanity/a new seeing, a new hearing, a new thinking, a new loving (2010: 353).

Communism is the “positive expression of the abolition of private property” (1975: 345-6), where the freedom to engage in creative making of human subjectivity is the paramount object and right of society. Property is revealed as a crude interface, hindering self-expression and fetishizing the object form as the pinnacle process for making social consciousness.

Given the context of the essay (a marxist journal), Hardt sources his critique of property not only in the world of capitalism, but also in challenges to it. He (perhaps easily) describes actually-realized communism as ‘Crude Communism’ using Marx’s own (early) sense of the term: mainly, the form of communism that is concerned with the equitable redistribution of private property, which conceives of the state as “simply a community of labour and equality of wages, which are paid out by the communal capital, the community as universal capitalist.” (1975: 346-7). Hardt, in close company with Marx, scoffs at the efforts of the communists (post-1923) and emergent social democrats (1930’s-present) who want to bring about equality without revolutionizing the society upon which inequality is built upon – without scrapping the concept of private property itself. Marx’s critiques of this bogus transformation are well documented: the segment of the Communist Manifesto (1848) entitled ‘Socialist and Communist Literature’ and the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) are both good examples of how bitterly Marx regarded such inferior thinking. Taken together, it shows how his concept of revolutionary action developed consistently over the span of 27 years.

Building a new paradigm of communism is therefore the central theme of the essay. To accomplish this, Hardt uses an analysis of the “production of the immaterial” in the locale of Northern* neoliberalism.

He claims that a transition has taken place within production that pushes us past Marx. Where Marx is concerned with the 19th-century transition of hegemonic power from landed (fixed) property in the form of rent to capital (mobile) property in the form of surplus value, Hardt is concerned with movement away from the material labour process to capital as a rentier of the immaterial common (2010: 348). He is careful to stress that material production under the direction of capital is still growing in the (post?) periphery, and remains the basis for the superstructures of politico-civil consciousness in said periphery. He nevertheless asserts that the immaterial economy is in an emergent, revolutionary position today. Hardt explains immaterial, or biopolitical (Foucauldian influence here!) production as

the production of ideas, information, images, knowledges, code, languages, social relationships, affects, and the like. This designates occupations throughout the economy, from the high end to the low, from healthcare workers, flight attendants, and educators to software programmers and from fast food and call centre workers to designers and advertisers (348-9).

In this economy of immaterial transference, there emerges a new form of production that doesn’t entirely reconcile itself to the systems of capitalism that  Marx was dissecting. Hardt makes several key claims that solidifies this division. First, immaterial production draws on a broad range of communal knowledges and interactions that are simultaneously spontaneous and organized, making the production process a series of intangible moments that cannot be reduced to a state of planned manufacture – what he calls ‘the common.’ Whereas material production is characterized by tightly controlled, highly detailed systems of human movement, every person with their defined and specialized roles, immaterial production constantly eludes attempts of capital to impose a hierarchized processes; the transference of ideas by humans is too complex to be reduced to detailed property relations.

In fact, Hardt claims that this operates paradoxically in that “the more the common is controlled as property, the more its productivity is reduced” (349). This leads him to a more important claim, one which he states rather tentatively (in this essay at least): capital is responding to the crisis of immateriality by shifting its centre of control from production itself to production of the networks of distribution. If ideas, sentiments, mythologies, narratives cannot be produced directly, than what can be produced is ways in which these things are disseminated. Hence, Hardt sees the construction of vast technical-legal systems that attempts to limit the channels by which immateriality flows, and enacts a form of rentierism upon these legal networks. In Marxian terms, it could be understood as a new primitive accumulation; i.e. the accumulation by capital of the interface nodes of interactions. This accumulation has a dual effect. First, it acts as a funnel by which all ideas must flow. Access to the web for example requires hard access to the internet, a gateway patrolled by capital and not, rather, a common utility operated by the public. Second, and perhaps more importantly, this type of accumulation pervades our consciousness in a deep level, transubstantiating property as an intangible that acts as a barrier between ourselves and the common. And it is here that Hardt emerges with Marx’s notion of capital in the EPM, mainly that capital’s innovation is not merely in revolutionizing the system of producing objects, but that in so doing it revolutionizes the possibilities of consciousness itself. What emerges is thus a system of production that “not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object.” (Grundrisse 1973: 92). This is the conceptual grounding of the base-superstructure argument that Marx gives us in Preface:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social political and intellectual life (1975: 425) [emphasis added.

Simply, there is a base of material relations upon which subjectivity can be formed. If that basis is capitalism, a capitalist subjectivity emerges. That this is true of all those who oppose capital is self-evident, otherwise with what form would they oppose? This idea of subjectivity – of defining oneself and the world around them – has been too closely linked by marxists to the material world itself. Taking a rather technical-determinist view of the problem of revolution, there has been a very dominant notion (perhaps most prominently asserted by the Stalinists) that changes in the mode of production necessitate a change in the prospects of consciousness. I think this simplifies the very unique way of thinking that Marx developed, and in fact returns us to crude communism. The idea rather, is that our subjectivity is made possible by the way in which our existence is produced and reproduced, and that to change the possibilities for the production of our consciousness, we have to alter the way in which our tangible lives interact. There may be no guarantee for a communist consciousness with a shift in the mode of producing the means of existence (both material and immaterial), but its possibility is nevertheless incumbent upon such a transformation.

In true Hegel-Marx lineage, Hardt sees in this simple idea of subjectivity the grand possibilities that now exist for revolution in light of the dominance of immaterial production. Given that producing the immaterial requires the common, and given that the common is a mode of production that is not amenable to capital’s interference in the labour process, we find ourselves in a unique position of good fortune whereby a vast class of producers in the North has dominant control over the conditions and effects of labour itself. Revolution is a matter of providing non-commoditized links between the nodal points of creating, which amounts to removing the barrier of private property from production process. Keeping in mind that Hardt views private property not merely in object form, but also as individual (or state) ownership of legitimate access to a modality under the authority of capital (i.e. rent), he makes an compelling case for the possibility of creating a revolutionary consciousness, which can then transform the systems by which we produce our daily lives – making common food resources, making interconnectivity as accessible as it is essential, de-commoditizing relationships between service providers and customers, rendering them instead as mutual beings in a knowledge-material transference, etc.

Hardt’s essay is important for the single reason that it is an attempt to foster a producer consciousness in the locale of the North, and in particular, the Northern city. I think it encourages us to think critically of who is producing and how they are doing it, especially as the dominant classes in cities across the North are vying for control over the networks through which the knowledged or ‘creative class’ labour. As for the idea that immaterial production is poised to be the hegemonic form of capitalism, or perhaps rentier-capitalism, I think Hardt needs to better situate this transition. While he acknowledges neoliberalism and its midwives as the pivot by which this revolution in production happened in the late 1970s, he shies away from mapping this transition: how changes in technologies, geopolitical relations, financial regulation, cultural ideology, and material access have made it possible. This is a very difficult process to grasp given the vast historical breadth required for an accurate analysis, and it is one that Hardt deals further with in Empire (2002) and Commonwealth (2009), written with Tony Negri. Yet, he offers little here in terms of hints of the dialectical narrative between superstructure ideologies and base material production that have brought us historically to current neoliberalism.

Similarly, though I think It is possible to talk of the revolution in production as Hardt has, we have to be firm with ourselves that any revolution in production is dependent upon the actual actions of classes who feel their autonomy is being hindered by the current prospects for material existence. There needs to be serious and determined inquiry into how neoliberalism has invested consciousness so that something as revolutionary as immaterial production, replete with so-called dangers of spontaneity and cooperation, has manifested according to the rules of the capitalist class, and not other classes. We need to analyze the ideological backdrop from which immaterial production has developed, and determine to what extent neoliberalism might be baked into the very essence of common production itself. What we might find may in fact might complicate the dialectical contradiction of common production that Hardt finds obvious, and allows us to think more critically as to why obviousness itself has failed to foster much revolutionary fervour.

This question begs us to evaluate the claims of this essay through the organic, ecological lens of historical materialism – the structure-superstructure conceptualization of social transformation. To elaborate on a prior point, the base structure that Marx and Marxists consider as the origin of awareness is a very fluid, non-deterministic construct. If we take the stance that consciousness is different through space and time, and that the most basic elements common to all space and time (where life exists) are ways and means of sustaining life – that is, living, breathing, reproducing – we arise with the idea that the modes by which life is sustained form the basis upon which consciousness emerges; the ways in which a particular society satisfies its needs is the structure upon which awareness unfolds. What is consciousness? It is the superstructure of historical materialism. Simply, it is the realm of ideas about the management, interaction, celebration, and criticism of the material base by which life is (re)produced. It is religion, the state, rationality and its opposite, warcraft, aesthetics, politics, self-knowledge, nationality, science, commentary, and so on. And ideas about each of these expression form composites of ideologies, each with its own lineage of ideas and commentary. Ideologies are thus vehicles for consciousness that are bound historically to the epoch of life production appropriate to a time and space. Crucially, the superstructure of ideologies is what alters the mode of production. Consciousness, informed by a world always in flux, finds lacking the means by which life is reproduced; consciousness conflicts with the structure or material base. Transformation is rendered then as a never-ending revolutionary dialogue between structures or classes that benefit from the maintenance of systems of life production and those that do not. Antagonism is the driver of history, manifesting between those whose consciousness is in harmony with the current modes of production and those whose consciousness is not – or rather, between classes whose actions operate a biopolitics of power that informs the consciousness of other classes, resulting in systems of ideological hegemony. This hegemony is where we arrive at with neoliberalism.

Applying Gramsci’s method of dividing the superstructure into the realm of state and civil society, the former being political and military institutions, the latter as public, social and cultural forms, we start to wonder where immaterial production is currently centred. It is safe to suggest that neoliberalism has originated from ideological shifts in both civil and political society – the rise of the individual subject, the transformation in the concept of the nationstate, technological innovation, state-imposed revolutions in Asia, etc. – and that it has revolutionized the material basis of producing life (i.e. neoliberal capitalism), and hence revolutionized consciousness itself. This revolution in consciousness – perhaps we might call it a neoliberal consciousness – has emerged in full force across all spectrums: identity, ethics, consumer-cultures, new public management, tax-law, free trade, activism. Can we therefore say that immaterial production exists within the boundaries of the superstructure? That neoliberal capitalism has turned inwards to commodifying civil and political society? Or is it that the superstructure itself is conditioned so tightly to the very intense revolutionary dialogue between the hegemonic institutions in Northern society and the production that it engenders – between financial institutions and the immaterial? When Hardt suggests that the hegemonic type of capitalism (that is, neoliberalism) is moving towards financing the distribution of the common, is he suggesting that the common is becoming the material basis of society, that immaterial is replacing material as the basis of daily life?

In the North (especially North America), material commodities have been flowing inwards from factorized countries for several decades, while domestic producers have been closing shop. The result has been a general metamorphosis in the composition of the labour force toward immaterial production. But, has this metamorphosis become more a system of reification – i.e. making immaterial things like social relationships, ethics, identities into concrete, physical commodities – or is it the opposite: abandoning the commodity altogether and instead operating monopolies of distribution? Hardt takes the latter stance, whereas I find a blend between the two to be more compelling, especially given the transitory nature of production in neoliberal capitalism. Some sectors of immaterial production exist well-within the rentier analysis: advertising, music, film and television, design, and other cultural institution. Others, however, experience more of a reification model: wait staff, transporters, maintenance workers, cleaners, and other direct-service providers. Further, some areas of cultural production are intensely reified: sports teams are constantly referred to as “the product on the ice”, court, field, etc., as though it were a commodity to be consumed. The common is thus a much more difficult form to grasp than Hardt hopes.

He also avoids the important discussion of  diverse subaltern class relations (a la Gramsci). It appears in the essay that he’s evoking a common consciousness of immaterial producers, a noble goal. How then does this immaterial consciousness act as a revolutionary hegemon for the other producer classes? Thinking of the typical North American region – say Ontario (familiarity) – the producing classes include resource extractors in the north, industrial producers and agricultural workers in the south and GTA, to knowledge and affect workers in cities like Toronto and Ottawa. Can we really expect a revolution in the immaterial sector to translate back to labour processes that are still tightly controlled by capital? It seems to me that someone could (and should) develop Hardt’s thesis along the lines set out by Gramsci using his War of Position: that is, the means by which disparate subaltern producers can be united through strategically-formed counter-institutions in the superstructure of capitalism: schools, cultural production, public services, etc. Of course, this presents its own challenges, not least being what forms institutions are taking in political and civil society dominated by neoliberal production, and how has neoliberalism impacted the ways in which these institutions interact. The decimation of public spaces in the era of austerity and privatization has real implications for the development of a revolutionary subject. Does this not also impact our ability to perceive our production as taking place in common and to do away with private property?

Finally, in the realm of reality, Hardt critiques an effective plethora of communist parties through space and time for failing to grasp revolutionary, post-property communism as a basic tenant. Rightly so. But if we are going to distinguish between the growth of the common from the social democratic types who work towards redistribution, then the question arises: what distinguishes enlarged public service provision from common holding? Is there a real difference, or are we playing with semantics? If I could anticipate a reply, it would be that common holding differs from state communism in that the former is about moving beyond property as such and acknowledges the centrality of autonomy in creation – both organized and spontaneous, while the latter is a centralizing force aimed at equal redistribution along rational, planned lines. But this still does not give us a glimpse as to how or what common existence would look like, or how services would be organized and maintained. The dirty, unglamorous work of suggesting transitionary phases for producing daily life is necessary if we’re going to convince anyone of the efficacy of such a world.

Perhaps these types of questions will act as soundboards for future posts. I think we can and should be receptive to the optimism in Hardt’s idea, for he makes a strong, albeit potentially-deterministic case for understanding the contradictions in immaterial production. And is never problematic to remind oneself of the ironic hope revealed by such developments if we’re able to avoid the trap of thinking things are inevitable.

*The term Northern here refers to the socio-cultural structures of geographically-Northern countries. It’s common usage usually pertains to North America and Western Europe, and is used to claim capitalism as the dominant force in the world, and further to distinguish a core and periphery of countries from within it is disseminated.

Last Edited March 14th 2013, 5:45 pm: Cleaned up some ideas on Lenin’s soviet revolution; Gramsci’s War of Position. Nothing that changes the structure/weight of the argument, but corrected some errors that were made by my incomplete study of both figures.

In an interview with the Irish Left Review this past December, Alexis Tsipras, leader of the radical-left Synapismos party in Greece, credited mass sympathy for the left as a product of a particular tactic.♦ He described the response of the left to the debt crisis as originating in two distinct places: a square below and a square above. Physically, these squares were two equal strategic meeting points within Athens. Philosophically, they represented two divergent notions of resistance:

“The square below was always more politicised,” wrote Tsipras, “with themed assemblies, with different talks. Many young people took part. They practised direct democracy. But the important thing is that these demonstrations were completely peaceful with great mass participation, with very many people taking part.”¹

In contrast, the square above was “less participative”; it focused on the destruction of physical bourgeois instruments of finance – burning banks, smashing windows, wrecking cash machines – to engage the symbolism of resistance. As these two squares operated simultaneously, responses sounded. Media reported only the destruction, only physical violence. Of course it would be wrong to blame the Above faction for monopolizing protest coverage – that is the prerogative of modern media, which competes for viewers with the most shocking, most violent, least-contextualized content. Nevertheless, there were strategic implications for Above actions.

“Burnt out banks and burnt out small properties did not produce political results. It is very simple: where you had fires, big business could find some small business owner to cry.” Simply, “Wrecking strengthened the system.”²

Not all mass-movements of resistance are peaceful or non-violent. The on-going Arab revolts have been incredibly destructive; death has followed peaceful marches in strict parallel. But in global north countries who tend toward active democracy (i.e. those countries whose elections are not widely understood to be fraudulent), violent protest is often met with an outpouring of support for owners of private property; Above tactics are met with sympathy for crying business owners. To what end should a protest action take responsibility for the commentary that follows it?

This, of course, is a question of tactics, not theory. In the world-perfect, destructive action would produce an inspiring result. The symbolism of breaking a tool of capital, of smashing the windowed-modes of production that enslave the tertiary-based proletariate class, would resonate with the public. These actions whose main proponents are likely (still) the Black Bloc, are meant to question the overwhelming presence of capital in daily life. Proponents of Diversity of Tactics – the idea that protest actions should originate within an individual’s own sense of criticism  – who do not take issue with black bloc tactics, might claim that the minimal violence against inanimate property is but a whispered reply to the violence done against working people’s bodies and spirits every day. They might suggest that the police cars engulfed in flames are beacons of opposition for the productive class, motivating an internal dialectic in the individual worker. These maneuvers may in fact be quite theoretically apt, in the world-perfect. But if our protest is to be broad, which must be if it is to be legitimate and successful, we must think critically about the starting point of the working mass. Can inspiration be derived from violence if the violence has not been made recognizably different from sports riots?

In his first prison notebook, Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci characterizes three modes of military warfare as such: a war of Movement, a war of Position, and a war of Underground Action. All three modes have various applications: Movement implies attacking an enemy along a broad front, Position is a capture-fight from a strategic vantage, and Underground Action is secretive stockpiling of techniques and technologies to be unleashed in well-calculated moments.³ Historically, war has pivoted along these points depending on the scale of the conflict and the necessities of battle. Wars of colonization have employed Movement and Position, resistance has used Position and Underground Action. These terms are general and therefore mouldable to even the most minute campaign for power. But within these modes of war, there are also certain barriers to operation. Pure Movement requires a standing infantry of great size to be effective; to sweep a territory and clear it. Position less so in the immediate, but definitely in the long run. Position is a tactical project that flounders without support and backup from a mass. A space can be occupied with effect only for a certain period. Underground Action presupposes a large enough network of subterranean links in order to accommodate the hidden buildup and deployment of technology. More flexible in form than Movement or Position, it nonetheless demands an underpinning of some mass. All forms therefore must utilize a large-scale infantry, official or unofficial, in order to achieve maximum effectiveness.

Gramsci developed the idea of a War of Position as a strategic model for communists in advanced capitalist societies. The essence of his argument is that societies that  function with a capitalist base of producing life must develop well-positioned counter-institutions to the existing structures that reinforce elite ideology; schools, cultural centres, media, political parties need to be encouraged by a cadre of ‘organic intellectuals’ who emerge from within diverse subaltern (productive or marginal) classes, thus incorporating the idea of underground action to tactics of position.  These ‘organic intellectuals’ may be linked to what Gramsci referred to (albeit several years earlier and ambiguously connected) as  the arditi, or  rather arditismo militarism. Historically, the arditi were specialized Italian volunteer forces formed by Colonel Giuseppe Bassi in the summer of 1917 for use against the Austro-Hungarians. Their purpose was similar to that of the German Sturmtruppen of the Second World War, which was quick tactical assault to obtain preliminary Position and influence in a zone of combat. The way Gramsci used the concept was as a descriptor for capitalist political tactics. Gramsci articulates the bourgeois use of the arditi thus:

“the arditi, that is, private armed organizations, enter the field with a double task: to use illegality while the state appears to remain within legality, and as a means to reorganize the state itself.”¼

 Arditi tactics within the political sphere are inherently concerned with state management. They are special technical forces that operate on the prerogative of the state to suppress dissent and neutralize threats. One cannot help but write arditi into the narrative of repression executed during the G20 protests in Toronto. Arditi tactics are also operating in disembodied channels: the hacker war on anonymous and Obama’s drone war against high-value targets. These tactics throw power between state departments, giving the newest instruments to oligarchic formations that exist quietly within the broader bureaucracy (an officially sanctioned war of Underground Action?). What of the left’s capacity to wage such wars? Are anonymous, wikileaks, and The Pirate Bay arditi forces, and if so, do they belong to a class?

 “Class characteristics lead to a fundamental difference [in tactics]: a class which must work regular hours every day cannot have permanent and specialized assault organizations, unlike a class with abundant financial resources whose members are not at all constrained by regular jobs.”½

For Gramsci, effective arditi cannot be wielded by independent or non-hegemonic powers. Using the Fenians in Ireland or the comitadjis rebels in the Balkans as examples, he argues that effective ideological warfare flounders when it begins with a specialized, technical force. Instead, potent resistance must begin with the creation of a general seat of legitimacy and power that eventually emerges as a strong class subconsciousness. From within this popular subconsciousness – what Gramsci later develops as a working-class hegemony or central source of validated authority – a type of symbolic shock troop can be forged.  I would therefore argue that whistleblowers like Wikileaks, or anarchist hackers like Anonymous, or The Pirate Bay, operate outside the space of class warfare. And though their status is difficult to truly define, I see their function as being predominantly information generators and disseminator. They work independent of, and uncoordinated with, general left projects. In this sense, we might view them as types of militias that deal randomized blows through critical reports and necessary linkages, yet serve no particular network or command. They are an army-less arditi fighting a war of Underground Action. Given the need for a broad and legitimating infantry, what is current status of the army? What is its consciousness?

Western European-decendent countries with active democracies have been built on the basis of liberal property rights. The right to ownership and disposal of property is the philosophical companion to the bourgeois mode of organizing production.  It was the discourse of liberalism that brought a formality to production in Anglo society in the 18th and 19th centuries: everyone would be equally free to do what they willed with what they owned. For the peasant classes, dispossessed of land and the informal networks of power they once belonged to,  their ability to labour became their property. To sell labour-power for its equivalent value in the universal commodity of the day – gold, silver, paper, etc. – was the exercising of the rights and freedoms of property ownership, same as the bourgeoisie. That this relation of production-consumption still exists, based as it is on the ever-sharper divide between those who sell their bodies and souls and those whose accumulated capital maintains an always-quickening pace of production, is a testament to the resiliency of the structure. About two centuries have passed since England became the minister of the bourgeois mode of production, sermonizing the world into a repentant posture, the sin being its guarding of land and life from the clutches of capital.

The liberal rights paradigm also proposes the freedom of individual choice, or agency. Agency, to a worker and capitalist alike, functions as the freedom to convert money back into commodities. For the worker the composite of this conversion amounts to, in a greater or lesser degree, a subsistence. Collecting the property that makes up this subsistence is a right that is carefully guarded. As an arena of choice, the market provides a worker with a means for social expression. The capacity to consume is a dispensation of power in public, of private autonomy within the social body.* And for this reason, commodities do not appear at the outset as the objectified exertions of labour and spirit that they really are. They appear rather as pure potential; they are things that fulfill a vacancy or void known or newly-created. That commodities are sold using tactics that detach culturally-significant knowledges of feeling and belonging from their motive bases, offered instead in consistent object forms – a form universally accessible to money – rarely has a bearing in the mind of the person who reaches to buy. Aspiration is incorporated in the physical, where a transaction of intimate values and money takes place: private ownership results. The fetishism of the market, of commodity ownership, which is the result of centuries of refinement in production (headed always toward full saturation), pervades social relations in deep levels. Even informal interaction has, to at least some degree, become mediated through networking applications that reward users via metrics – numbers of likes, friends, profile ‘optimization’ – as though people were generating abstract content for others to consume in exchange for social capital. Marxist theorist György Lukács termed this process of raising object-consciousness ‘reification’.  Yet it is this working class of producer-consumers that must form the interior ranks of the infantry of opposition. Sheer size and shared exposure to the worst storms of bourgeois production make it the target for enlistment.

Moving outward from this particular point where commodity exchange is the most dominant (but far from only) expression of autonomy and control for working people is really the strategic problem for the ‘massification’ of the left. Lenin’s solution to this problem (massification) was to create a watchful revolutionary class of proletarians that would invoke a consciousness of struggle on a diverse subaltern people – a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, as it were. Marx pre-determined Lenin’s failure to bring Western-style communism to Russia, claiming that the country, with its still semi-feudal (read: non-capitalist) class structure, was unready for it. Rather than dodge the bullet of capitalism through a uniquely-Russian solution (which Marx argued was necessary this piece), the Leninists led a veritable coup in the wake of defeat on the Eastern Front. Of course Lenin’s particular Bolshevik project, which encouraged radical worker-led organizations (soviets), was headed in a very encouraging direction. Contra Marx, the Bolsheviks pre-1923 had developed autonomous, proletarian radicalism in the worksites and was well-positioned for deep organizational growth. However Stalin’s usurpation of Soviet leadership in 1924 brought the project to completion, and he began to reorganize the party into dictatorial form. Theorists like Mimmo Pocaro or Charles Post, the former drawing on the French thought of Louis Althusser, have recently suggested the value of revisiting Lenin-style political organizing. This type of organizing necessitates a revolutionary bloc of thinkers and intellectuals whose practice is firmly class oriented and ‘evangelical’. But there is no doubt that we must also go beyond Lenin.

Employing Gramsci’s ‘organic intellectualism’, a new critical pedagogy must emerge that learns as it teaches. Rather than look to an arditi of intellectuals and theorists to be disseminators of a knowledge about working conditions to people actually being eviscerated by capital, the left must understand that the working class experience itself serves as the strongest basis of education. Instead of categorizing workers and intellectuals as separate groups, the two should work symbiotically – the function of the left being limited to an organizing role, eager to provide space for creative and daring actions. Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber raises an interesting question when he asks why it is that, in this era of neoliberalism where capital has so effectively maintained its dominance over productive-class ideology, the people most attracted to even the faintest whiff of radical opposition are “artists, musicians, writers, and others involved in some form of non-alienated production?”¤ Perhaps there is something to the idea that fortune builds an internal conservatism. Expressing a beyond-market agency where labour is a spiritual act, given but not taken, is a fortune to be protected at all costs. But beyond that also: it must be shared; to see others take the value of their labour and dispose of it truly for their own benefit is to revel in human capacity. The left must continually learn about the divergent experiences of beings under capitalism, assisting workers in meaningful ways to forge new tools of analysis. In the collective investigation, there can likely be found intersections: patriarchy, racism, dispossession, alienation, deskilling, sickness, austerity, etc. These points of mutual understanding must be the way by which a class consciousness is formed. Only through this  platform can a profound, subconscious and intimate knowledge of alienation and exploitation percolate through the ranks of productive labour and a desire to participate and fight can be fostered.

Currently, the left in North America – outside of Quebec, which requires a careful analysis of its popular political culture – is operating a war of Position by an arditi of specialist theoreticians and utopian breakers. The Occupy movement, which had massive popular support in the United States, was unable to capitalize on its struggle. While it sought to engage the public, it did not adequately make the critical leap between acknowledging the value of its pedagogy and employing that curriculum in diversified working environments. Few new labour struggles were fostered by occupy forces. Recruits were not made, distances between occupiers and the working class were maintained. Another event, the G20 in Toronto, which was defended by a paramilitarized pastiche of local enforcement officers acting simultaneously as carrot and billy club, saw public attention instead turn to the actions of the Black Bloc. As alluded to earlier, the goal of the Black Bloc is to point out the discrepancy between property and life; they want to cast a shadow of drama over protest that mocks the brutality and repression of the state over people. The broken windows symbolic of broken bodies (broken not only in protest but also in wage-slavery), a comparison so thoroughly understated that one almost laughs in pity at the paradoxical reaction of a horrified public. But wait. Why does the public react this way?

Violence carried out by a force so disconnected from its foundation is an arditi without an army. To be appalled at a public for misunderstanding your action is but a failure to grasp ones own tactical blunder. Is it any surprise that the producing-consuming class reviles the destruction of property? The symbolism is not only lost but worse, it produces a counter effect. The bourgeois gain allies in the public, who do not accept the destruction of their very notion of daily life. To break the windows in the coffee shop they meet friends in is to directly attack the foundation of that friendship. Rather than enable the spirit of criticism and perception that belongs to everyone with working experience under capitalism, minds are hardened  against yet another attack on their autonomy. To impose a view so forcefully without a critical infantry in reserve, regardless of the quality of the critique, is to do those struggling to build class consensus a great disfavour.

Importantly, this distance between the arditi and the infantry on the left is an historically-specific gulf. Perhaps it has existed for some time. In North America and in much of Western Europe it is at least as old as the Thatcher-Ragean-Mulrooney troika that ushered in the current class relations of neoliberalism. It is not an inevitable gulf, bridges can be built and in many cases, are being built. The Greek example of the Below square is a testament to the value in creating spaces that engender self-discovery and self-willed consensus. To want to belong is a choice whose influences remain subconscious. Building this subconscious or, in other words, positive coercive force, is the way forward. How this force takes shape is more or less dependent on how working people interact with the current left. If we are open, a new hegemony will have fertile ground to grow. If we impose theory before it has taken root, we will relegate ourselves to the margins of legtimacy. We, the arditi fighting our current war of Position cannot afford to continue down this path. A war of Movement, of mass action, must be our goal. And this requires us to think tactically, not just theoretically.

* Crucially, I am speaking here of the expression of a public agency. Autonomy and power obviously exist within the private spaces of life (the home, the family, the x community), and have an idodynamics dependent on the who, what, where, etc. But in the secular social body of today’s active democratic states, the ripples of agency cast by the majority are generally limited to market formations; its only other exertion being, of course, protest.

————————————————————————

♦ I am deeply indebted to ‘Richard’ (whoever you are!) for this opening of the article. He wrote this great piece for the Irish Left Review. In it, he referenced Tsipras and the points Tsipras raised about the two squares, which (obviously) framed the way into my discussion.

¹Tsipras, December 30th, 2012, ILR

² ibid

³ Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol. I, Note 134  ed. Joseph Buttgeig, 1992

¼ Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol. I, Note 133

½ ibid

¤ David Graeber, The New Anarchists, New Left Review, Vol. 247, 04. 2002