Dialogue Against Labour

Discussing Manifesto Against Labour by Gruppe Krisis

DS:

In their ‘Manifesto Against Labour’ Gruppe Krisis examines the labour idol, the ideology of work. Vulcan incapable of crisis. This god of manufacture descends into a landscape of stasis and assumes the project of tearing the roof from economies of scale. Post-Fordism – as part of the larger post-industrial restructuring – emphasized flexibility, information technology and the reclassification of the individual as economic receiver, as consumer speculator, and was intended as the productive path away from crisis. The Manifesto suggests that the diffuse attempt has resulted in a deepening of crisis, to the extent that labour is on its deathbed. The purpose of work, the meaning, is pulled from underneath the worker in this efficiency parade. The worker toils in whatever service is most flexible and accumulative. No longer a creative process to be found, only dead things to be shuffled and sorted, the creator becomes a convenient attachment within the greater process efficiency. In freeing itself of traditional production the economy destroys work, destroys the worker. Production halted, we enter a new phase of crisis.

It is an attempt at a much needed critique of post-industrial labouring. At times excellent in its analysis, we do not see much as to where one might go, against the idol. You mention the ‘unfortunate call to action’. The self-imposed quality of finding solutions. To take a positive, I think this suggests the compounding nature of anti-politics, the going beyond of Moss, Bonanno, or Beckett even. What is it that you think forces this call to action from Gruppe Krisis? Was this a step out of insurrectionary anarchism, a negative, a compounding? If the struggle against labour is anti-politics are there any subtleties here that we should take note of, in the way of their policy? Or, how do they define anti-politics? In the first issue of Letters, yourself and FD are not in total agreement as to the dynamic between pro-revolutionaries and the proletariat. You suggest that the position is fixed. Is there anything in this manifesto that changes the relationship? Is there a potential for intervention, as insurrectionalists would put it? What might these projects look like?

DA:

I want to begin by asking – what does this manifesto by Gruppe Krisis affirm? I don’t ask this in search of a positive political project but to reveal what is not negated. Why does this critique of work and (near) rejection of leftism ultimately affirm a political practice of spreading consciousness? This question is more important to me than the specifics of the consciousness being promoted.

Perhaps before going into that I want to state my rejection of their main thesis. I do not think ‘labour society’ (that is to say, capitalism) is inevitably coming to an end, and your description of contemporary work (“No longer a creative process to be found, only dead things to be shuffled and sorted, the creator becomes a convenient attachment within the greater process efficiency”) does not seem to me to be anything new at all. Such a description could easily be of proletarianization and factory work in the 19th century. When has capitalism not been like that? This false claim of ‘newness’ is the foundation of the political project they seek to create. I am also skeptical of their claim that labour is an “end-in-itself” and not put to the end of commodity production and the accumulation of capital.

I do not think this manifesto changes the relationship between pro-revolutionaries and the proletariat, nor does it offer a potential for “intervention” in the insurrectionist (or any other) sense. The language of “intervention” is very telling because it acknowledges separation. It acknowledges the fixed position of pro-revolutionaries and proletariat that Sam Moss describes so well. When we participate in class struggle, we do not contribute anything special, no matter how special we are on the pages of our publications or posts on internet forums. The insurrectionist “intervention”, as far as I can tell, is on the level of tactics. For example, in response to protests against the construction of a nuclear power plant, some insurrectionists topple power lines. Breaking and burning things doesn’t offend me, but I think the anarchist mythology of ‘social war’ (which might be compared to the Marxist myth of ‘real movement’) and the turn towards militancy and clandestinity need to be broken down. The former is repeated as a justification and reason for the latter while the latter becomes the proof of the former. Every action, every word, everything that happens is evidence of the social war. The “intervention” of some insurrectionists in the United States is reduced to reproducing police records of local crime and adding in urgent anti-state slogans. It is the anarchist equivalent to the communist “intervention” of publicizing strikes and adding in anti-union slogans. I am getting off topic, but it might be nice to go back sometime and revisit this while keeping in mind developing a critique of ‘radical’ journalism.

While obviously very pessimistic about “projects of intervention”, I’m going to answer your question and toss around some ideas for them anyway as I think intervention can happen within the pro-revolutionary milieu (if not within the proletariat). One intervening project could be a deliberate placing of things where they are not supposed to be – provoking sexual tension and openness against the seriousness of summit protests, a light-hearted but total pessimism against the constant affirmations of activist gatherings, the celebration of inefficiency and unproductivity everywhere. The most powerful intervention is the raising of mirrors in front of ourselves and others. Uncomfortable, dangerous self-examination is the greatest weapon against optimism and politics.

Camatte wrote: “It becomes clear that raising the banner of labor or its abolition remains on the terrain of capital, within the framework of its evolution. Even the movement toward unlimited generalization of desire is isomorphic to the indefinite movement of capital.” This opposing thrust sets the boundaries of our discussion. What does the critique of the Left in this manifesto mean next to the call for the “constitution of a social movment that puts labour critique into practice (the “prerequisite” of this movement apparently being “a new public awareness”)? What is the “struggle against labour” and how is it different from class struggle?

DS:

I’ll start off by responding to your comment that what Gruppe Krisis (GK) describes “does not seem to me to be anything new at all. Such a description could easily be of proletarianization and factory work in the 19th century.” Well, this is just not so. The Post-Industrial economy and its labour counterpart have only partially been dealt with by Bob Black and Alfredo Bonanno, among other situationist derived thinkers. The larger milieu has not given this changing landscape any consideration; even those exploring anti-politics often have a misconception of the proletarian as a worker with productive agency. Ignoring the basic that when work changes, the proletarian changes. Even if it is just a slight change, which it is not.

The service industry now makes up some 75% of the labour force. Anyone who has worked in the past 30 years knows that there is a significant difference in working today. How could there not be? Work and its ethic have been dismantled, yet somehow labour becomes an ideology stronger than ever. This is counter-intuitive and poses many problems. From an anti-political perspective I think there is much needed here. In the way of depatterning our working lives, how we think about work and exploring what is possible away from work creation. GK do not answer this, but they are right to poke at the changing labour idol.

Was the worker a convenient attachment in early industrialism? Did the 19th century demand the same flexibility and process efficiency of proletarians? To suggest this is to take the human out of work relations. To suggest this is to ignore important shifts in the ideologies of capital and labour. The relationship of slave and master, of capital and labour, has always been complementary (at what point it becomes symmetrical is debatable). And as we should know of any complementary relation, there are always those who identify with the other, no matter how abusive they may be. Work will always have adherents in both camps. The traditional view is that this complementary relationship is simplified, but we should consider that changes in the valorization process will complicate the relationship.

Post-Industrialism is a separate phase of Capital. It is a changing ideology within both camps. Even today, after the production of goods has shifted to automation, we see a clear demarcation between secondary and tertiary sectors. Do you mean to tell me there is little difference whether one walks the line in an automotive plant or shuffles digital information in an IT chatroom? There is a difference, and it is quite significant. The latter being a passive transceiver, detailing information already laid out for him by managers. Controllers who likely had no effort in the creative process themselves, apart from sharing the information through computers. Let’s not simplify human relations. This difference is further clarified when we expand the timeframe of work. I will give an example.

Five or six years ago I worked in a warehouse where there was talk of unionizing, the employer threatened to fire everyone and relocate the warehouse across town (eventually they did fire everyone and then hired them back on through a temp agency). This is part of the flexibility of capital, which in turn demands a flexibility of labour. The capital of the 19th century was without computers and unable (or unwilling due to costs) to rent warehouses at will. Such innovations enabled further separation of proletarians from the means of production. We can also see that the formalization of temporary agencies – often involving a year or two probationary period – takes on a sort of legalized lumpenproletarianization. Labourers in the secondary industry often take on the security of illegal immigrants and under the table workers, at least until they have proven they have earned their security. This is a much different ideology than the capitalist of days gone by, who engaged in philanthropic acts to assert a sort of localized nationalism in his workers. I think of how Bonanno described the Fiat workers and how they had celebrations together and cheered for the owner’s football team. Work was a community. It was a dishonesty for all involved, but again a difference in human relations that shouldn’t be ignored.

I think you are misinterpreting what is meant by labour as an end-in-itself. The concept does not deny that labour is put to the end of capital accumulation, GK explores this in detail. Labour as an end to commodity production though? With that question we have to clarify local or global direction. Globally, labour remains at the end of commodity production, sure. Locally, as I have said, less than 25% of the labour force is producing commodities. This shift is partly due to the inherent contradiction of capital, one cannot accumulate infinitely with finite numbers. In real world economic terms, economies of scale cannot approach this infinity of production due to the conditions of finite consumption. So conditions have to be changed to allow for this approaching infinity. Currency speculation comes closest to the mark. Currency speculation reliant on commodity speculation reliant on the ability to industrialize abroad. The 19th century proletarian you mention is now the Southern proletarian. He is something of a ghost in Oceania.

Why is this so? Might I explain indirectly? Pop culture even suggests this shift in work ethic and actualization, so one cannot claim ignorance. Blue Collar and Roger & Me are well known films that suggest the impotence of unions and the decaying secondary sector of industry. Office Space said exactly what GK are saying, work is an end-in-itself, a social treadmill. Or more currently, weekly episodes of The Office. Jim says of his performance review ‘I’m actually asking for a pay decrease. What if he gives it to me? Then, I win.’ The cynic response to careerism is a recurring theme throughout the series. These pop culture references suggest that even ‘stultified submissives’ are well aware of the diminished value of the worker, that identifying oneself through work is as hip as identifying with monotheism.

Few are organizing over this injury of flexibility, an injury to all is rarely a consideration. Apart from the odd walkout, or strike to guarantee the right to work, fucking the dog seems to be the only generalized act of sabotage. This is not to pass judgment on this sort of thing, as stealing labour time, theft and small scale sabotage are primarily the only sort of workplace struggle I’ve been involved in. While at times immediately satisfying, such actions can easily give a very minimal feeling of agency.

This is another important difference for proletarians and pro-revolutionaries today. There is always a balance to things, connections and transmissions, and interference within that. Class struggle is interference within the capital connection. The old interferences of luddism, collective sabotage and unionism have been dismantled, and to some extent even valorized. The atomization of the worker, the isolation of fucking the dog and committing vandalism is not a form of agency that reconnects any sort of balance to the interference. Capital now has inhibitors. But they are not perfect circuits. We have memory and decoding. There are breaks in the interference blocking that can be more devastating than the original interference. People are not going to their workplaces in the night to smash machines, they are going to set off pipe bombs and shoot managers. There are less actions, but when they do occur the acts are unmitigated, almost aseptic in the apparent attitude towards violence. There is often an ambiguous intent. I’ve worked shipping docks and shitty manufacturing jobs, but the only time I’ve ever been around serious workplace violence was at a call center. In a six month period there were two pipe bombs left in the parking lot and a drive by shooting. And it’s fairly common for workers in these places to consider calling in a bomb threat to get a day off work. The reduction of labour, the devaluing of the worker, leads to generalized violence.

As Zerzan has pointed out, with Luddism workers began smashing machines due to the inferior products they were being forced to make, due to the devaluation of the labour process. Tools were once, at least partly, in the hands of the worker. An extension of creative process within production itself. There was an ‘insistence on either the control of the productive processes or the annihilation of them’. Capital made it clear that production had changed, that machines were not under labour control. The labour unions de-escalated the process of annihilation. The next phase was taylorism, and labour’s de-escalation, the walkout, a temporary counterbalance to violence.

Scientific management doesn’t really enter a new phase, it merely becomes more complex. Taylorism of the body becomes taylorism of the mind, and so on. A sort of professionalism without title. The rise of the service sector, or feminization of work within the society without the father. Workers take on the role of the wife, and all go unrecognized. Workers become as Laing’s schizophrenics, a situation begging violence.

This culture of violence that exists in the devalued worker is quite important. It either results in a rupture that is impossible for social managers to deal with, making communism possible, or a sporadic and repressive outpouring of violence in the form of psychiatric de-escalation, making communism impossible. And then there is the potential for combined forms, which is the most likely scenario. We see this in France, where recent rioting was much more violent and chaotic than in past moments of rupture. For pro-revolutionaries this means that the hordes likely will not listen to leftists and other managers of revolt, just as they do not listen to the democrats who label them racailles. To some extent there is non-ideology here. But it also means that insurrections and revolt will occur with an outpouring of violence never before seen. Revolt where we may not be able to intervene as we intended. To some extent I take mythic insurrectionalist social war combined with Perlman’s internalized war machine. If there is any reality in this, then ideology takes on a rhizomatic role within the insurrectionary groupings. Differences compound one another. Not recognizing this makes anti-politics not so different.

The critique of the left in the manifesto is unfortunately lacking, in some ways breaking towards its opposition. But I don’t think less of it for the call for dialectics and education of the public. It is a process, a holding up of mirrors. We tend to lose sight of this when we hear Voltaire speaking, when Destutt lines us up in sections. Even when it is not Rousseau, we respond as though our firmness in right were attacked. There is a tendency, even within anti-politics, to hold onto ideas as if they were all we had, as a prisoner and her escape plans. She will be careful not to give away too much, or diverge from the plan. Our writing and discussions often follow this line of ideology. We escape to nowhere new, only different routes to the same place. The purpose is how much different?

The mirrors distort and I cannot see myself clearly. It is likely the same for Gruppe Krisis. This breaking, this becoming. Is there anything distorting your perception? Anything coding the conclusions you have arrived at? The purpose remains uncertain to me, so I will restate your question. What fragments of the left remain in this manifesto and how would their call result in anything different from past social movements of labour? The obvious answer is the felt necessity of finding solutions, the determining of something, anything. Like western cinema there was a tying of things together, to not leave anyone hanging. There is the desire to hum and have the audience respond, ‘Bravo! Very nice, very nice.’ This leftist practice goes back to our Christian origins, and beyond to our days as script writers and receivers. Tell me a story, any story, just don’t make me cry. If this is all meaningless, all without purpose, then at least give me a happy ending.

Perhaps they should have said, if they were to suggest any ending, that your work will only get worse, become more emptying. Some Robocop figure will become your foreman, your team leader, and prod at you to get to work. To do what, who knows? Run out the clock maybe. Review efficiency charts. Hey, this is what every sci-fi movie suggests, so who are you to argue? You send your children to schools where they can no longer play tag or hug each other. Aseptic, you are stupid. You hate your wife. Why? You must be stupid. You are in the darkness, there is no time off, no brightness.

Ridiculous. But they chose something equally ridiculous, a theoretical debate to bring about public awareness. It is here that I agree with you. GK concludes that labour is dead, the labour movement a loyal dog never leaving its master’s side, even in death. Yet, somehow they have decided to reinvent this practice. Somehow they see a theoretical debate and a resultant new public awareness as aesthetically different from One Big Union or the party. Is this not obligation and the democratic barking of orders? A reaching of consensus as to what work is. They never elaborate on what they mean though, it just feels tacked on.

I think this is the best writing on labour up to this point, in its detailing of alienation. But they fail to reconnect this critique to anything creative. They fail to separate the struggle against labour from class struggle, or determine how they see class struggle changing with the death of labour. On the one hand they feel as though class struggle needs to take on an educational form. But what does it matter if capital will implode? What does it matter if the contradictions become so clear that class struggle will renew itself without revolutionary intervention? They say, ‘We don’t tell you anything new. You do know all these things very well.’ It seems they are speaking to both labour and capital. It is progressive and hopeful, reformatively Christian. Confused.

So obligating. If the only road to abolishing labour is debating the merits for public consumption and hopefully capitulation – perhaps decapitating the labour idol as some did with Margaret Thatcher’s likeness – we find it becomes work itself, apart from the other leftist sacrifices necessarily involved. Again, they never suggest how such a sweeping debate would take place. Perhaps a green cookie on St. Patrick’s Day. One never knows what to expect.

How is the abolition of work, as GK sees it, clarified if related to Dostoevsky? If God does not exist, everything is permitted. Taken one step further as Orwell’s reversal, if the law does not exist, everything is permitted. Replace law with work and we have the GK position. But of course, in 1984 the zero point of law is actually the totality of law. Everything is permitted because nothing is permitted. What use is there for laws? Similarly I could ask of GK, since they are so intent on the deepening of the labour crisis, so intent on the demise of the labour idol, what use is there for work? Do not underestimate the tricks of capital, what if post-industrialism itself ends work? I have nothing to offer you than the morals of science fiction. In Arthur Lipsett’s short film 21-87 there are no workers, not in the traditional sense at least. But always connectivity to the machine, always receiving. In many ways this schizophrenic filmmaker went beyond what the Situationists were capable of in their films. And it’s funny that such an alienated individual could create 9 minutes of images and sound to inspire Star Wars. That epic where no one works, but everyone is working, where the efficiency of an automated planet supercedes the living planets. Life force itself is the machine. Perhaps this is what deepening crisis amounts to. Perhaps this is the end point of valorization.

Capital exists now in a process of deconstruction, ever quickening. Nothing is ever allowed to work, to become concrete. The left, and GK I think, ignore that a social machine’s functioning depends on it’s non-functioning. That the functioning of labour, the defining complements of the relationship have been internalized by capital, and the relationship becomes symmetrical. That when labour capitulates and joins capital through its unions capital must recreate class struggle, to move away from symmetry. Work requires an overhaul for this, the play cannot be viewed too many times. What is the immanent critique of this?

Take into account that the worker/manager dichotomy, capital and labour, is a complementary relationship in its most simplified form. The creation and extraction of value, the abstraction of value, its distribution and surplus, is always dependent on the logic of efficiency. The least amount of work for the most possible pay, and the opposite is introduced from the capitalist. It is a falsification of space and time, or at least a simplification of it. The relation needs to be made symmetrical as much as possible, but not as the symmetry introduced up to this point. Showing, if only to ourselves, that we are capable of so much more. I suppose in a way this would make the relationship neither symmetrical nor complementary. Our relations outside of work, both symmetrical and complementary, can be made increasingly complex, reaffirming creativity. We oppose to the surplus value of capital the gift of ethics and spiritual wealth.

In some sense, in order to do this, I would have to make my relationships non-functioning. That is, if they are to function, the relationships have to be destroyed. But I have to come up with a creative process that exists outside of the valorization process. Our relating in class struggle becomes a complex process, a series of games within games.

Does this go beyond our individual projects or relationships? Hard to say. It is out of our control, but it is at a level that I can experience as real. From the game of go to insurrectionary moments we see that unmanaged direction, localized and rhizomatic life, is far beyond the power of linearity or centrifugal control. We see that even democracy’s appropriation of rhizomatic life always exists in nodes and circuits. So our game of games departs from here. The capricious and passing interest individual, the individual free of class constraint, is controlled by a fluid selection of ideologies, a collective of individualities. This is the world in which workers now exist, and class struggle will find ways, is finding ways, to destroy nodes. Whether this is a struggle against labour or not is quite uncertain, but class struggle has taken on a different form due to the emptying of value and purpose in the act of labouring.

“When the valorisation of value concentrates on only a few world market havens, a comprehensive supply system to satisfy the needs of the population as a whole does not matter any longer.” How does a shift in the valorization process change your day to day life, and how those you care for struggle? Where Camatte says ‘even the movement toward unlimited generalization of desire is isomorphic to the indefinite movement of capital,’how does this effect anti-politics? Are we merely reactive? In other words, is the rejection of strategies and movements an effect of the general passing interest of capital? The surrounding of life free of any deep interest. How does the rejection of strategy affect the quality of critique and agency?

DA:

It has been at least a month since you sent me your reply, and I’ve been totally unable to carry on the dialogue. Every week I sit down with what you’ve written in my hand, but I throw away all of my responses. Nothing I write is interesting to me, and to be honest this topic no longer interests me. I do not see a creative process outside of the valorization process. I do not see games within games.

In the final lines of the novel Q, the narrator says – “No plan can take everything into account. Other people will raise their heads, others will desert. Time will go on spreading victory and defeat amongst those who pursue the struggle… Do not advance the action according to a plan.” You ask – how does the rejection of strategy affect the quality of critique and agency?

I hope my answer isn’t too predictable when I say that only circumstance will affect the ‘quality’ of agency, though ‘quality’ is an odd word to use to describe agency. Maybe I do not understand what you mean. As for the quality of critique, I think it will improve as we allow ourselves to transgress further from politics and firm positions. Perhaps more than anything else the power of a text like Camatte’s The Wandering of Humanity is in how far he transgressed from his beginning place of Bordigist left communism. In the Dupont article Your Face is Mysteriously Kind they write – “If the walls are not made of paper, don’t punch them, if the bars are not made of chocolate, don’t eat them.” This is as good a place as any to begin improving the quality of our critique: framing our discussions with something other than ‘struggle’. It seems to be said by many that we deserve to see our enemies destroyed just as they have destroyed us for so long. I could say instead that we all deserve the warmth of baths. That warmth is not here, so we will wait for it. It is not here, so we will search elsewhere. We will not warm our baths with burning corpses.

If, as you say, the functioning of the social machine requires its non-functioning, what does crisis mean? If capital must recreate class struggle, what force(s) can create communism?

Various political factions are forever forecasting impending disaster, usually concerning financial collapse, ecological catastrophe, nuclear war, disease epidemics. This broadcasting of a future even more miserable than our current situation serves to mobilize us in defense of the present. Anarchists march in favor of the NHS in England. Everywhere supposed ‘revolutionaries’ rally behind this-or-that state social program. What are the results? It doesn’t matter. There is never time for reflection. “Activists mobilize themselves against the catastrophe. But only prolong it. Their haste consumes the little world that is left. The answer of the activist to urgency remains within the regime of urgency, with no hope of getting out of it or interrupting it.”

Crisis occurs — including the Great Depression — in fits and starts, gradually. A Great Depression, if you like, has been ongoing since 1973 — but now it’s really going to be bad, we’re warned. A more important task is to denaturalize the present so as to demonstrate that it is utterly intolerable and should be rejected not on account of a speculative just-around-the-corner dystopia based on ahistorical conjectures but because it is a nightmare per se (the system, especially in the US, does regulate — a US collapse may just as well resemble UK postwar decline). Everyday is a disaster. Modern capitalism is perpetually controlled (and not so controlled) crisis. Destruction does not harm the system but is necessary for capital accumulation. And, of course, the social machine’s functions and non-functions all come at the expense of humanity

Is the rejection of strategies and movements an effect of the general passing interest of capital?

This is the most difficult question you put forward. What if I word it a different way and say – is our rejection of strategies and movements in the general passing interest of capital? This question is implicit in the criticism of my relative inactivity by my more activist oriented friends. What does a critique of art and schooling mean in a time when schools and the arts are falling apart, when the economy seems to have little use for them? It is impossible to approach capitalism in terms of issues or pieces without falling into the trap of half-measures. “All engagement at the level of political agenda, social aspiration, and cultural value, no matter what the content, no matter what the content, takes place within the world as it is, the world organized by capital. At the level of values, ideas, and beliefs, there is nothing outside capitalism.”

Yes, our rejection of strategies and movements as well as everything else is the affect of the current conditions of capital, but still, we choose to be communists. This choice is one of many in the economy of choices (many more choose to be football fans or gardeners), but it is peculiar because unlike football fans people like us are thrust forward during rupture. It is an odd choice at this juncture. Where most other choices fade away during revolutionary times., ours makes sense for the first time. It was once the affect of the general passing interest of capital for ‘revolutionaries’ to form mass political parties and unions; and in some cases, to actually take over power of the state and shoot the workers down ‘like partridges’. Is our pessimism and inactivity of today the voluntarism and subsitutionalism of yesteryear? This is a dirty question.

I apologize for straying so far away from talking about the Gruppe Krisis text. I will ask a few more questions then let you end this dialogue. What do you make of GK’s discussion of patriarchy and gender? Both of us have avoided that bothersome part of their argument. If I remember correctly, Camatte came to similar conclusions as GK in his article ‘Echoes of the Past’. He says – “We must create a life that is feminine and human – it is these imperative objectives that must guide us in this world heavy with catastrophe.” What does this category of ‘feminine’ mean in the context of critiquing work? Why did we avoid it? Finally, how does your understanding and consciousness of all these things we’ve discussed change your actual experience of exploitation?

DS:

I don’t think we have avoided the question. We have merely scratched the surface of a critique of work, so there are likely many things we have missed unintentionally. Patriarchy and gender is perhaps what Gruppe Krisis deals with best here, although it is a fairly short section.

When I mentioned the feminization of labour I intended to suggest the contradictions of the labour world. Somehow the labour force has been turned towards work which traditionally would be quite feminine (a forced categorization from the male perspective) in nature. The turn has allowed women’s legitimate entrance into the world of capital. This occurs at an interesting juncture, just after capital needs to legitimize itself to middle class women (those demanding the vote), and after the second world war when women were scooped into the service and production apparatus. So the categories of professionalism and militarism are what gave us the legitimate female worker. These roles which are taken up are of course not feminine at all, they are male categories of femininity, compromised with the new capital.

As you point out, Camatte suggests the importance of feminist critiques of movement. In short, the critique stems from the inability of most to recognize the subtle and not so subtle differences between men and women. And perhaps more importantly, the critique has deepened due to a reluctance of men to take the questions seriously. Male revolutionaries have more oftened focused on movement building, towards the grand soiree. With a sweeping generalization I could say that women are more concerned with a series of soirees here and now. How can you love the world too much when you’re incapable of loving one individual? It is a question of ideology. I think that in some sense the women’s movement preceded the situationist concept of self-mastery, the development of spirit and ethics so that one might create relationships to the best of their ability.

Clarifying masculine and feminine isn’t an easy task. But since you mentioned sexual tension earlier, we could look at sexuality and how it is different for females and males. I suppose this is a way of exaggerating the difference. In Zizek’s review of Eyes Wide Shut we see that male fantasy is never able to keep up with female fantasy. There is a difference which is uncomfortable and threatening. Although Zizek never clarifies what this difference is we can see that female sexuality is more situational, very human focused and caring of possibilities, it is the controlling of space and time. Very in touch with real involvement, a creative affair, sort of like a film. Male fantasy is image based, the controlling of space and time in an ideological sense. The woman becomes an object desired. She is only desired as the man wants her to be, the fantasy is power based and one-sided.

This is a story however, and as important as it is occurs in a moment of transition. Since the sexual revolution things have moved towards an asexual promiscuity. The value of sex has become more and more determined by aesthetics and practicality, detached from meaning, as it is with everything capital touches. The object desired reduced to economics and consumable image. So it would seem that the male fantasy has won out. Exploring this further we might find that sexuality has been valorized, and with it the categories of feminine and masculine. This is a depressing cynicism, but certainly contains some honesty.

From a communist perspective I might suggest instead what I think the possibilities of femininity are. This is important in these negative critiques, the opposing energy that offers us a moment, a potential. Mary Catherine Bateson suggests to us that life is a composition. She sees situational responses to the unexpected, life as a dance or poetry. This is opposed to male intellectuals who are more likely to see life in a philosophical sense, that one is projectually working towards something which may or may never solidify. The latter view implies lack and ideology. Bateson’s feminine view certainly offers more to pro-revolutionaries than the male intellectual work ethic, the view leftists have traditionally taken up.

This possible femininity is contrasted to what is happening to women in the work world. As GK point out women are given a double burden. The child rearing that was once a community affair has been specialized as work. The home is a sort of warehouse, and in the post-industrial economy one must get a second job to keep the warehouse running. The other possible contradiction is for women to become professionals in the patriarchal society and allow the crèche industry to take over. Life becomes further valorized no matter what one does. There is enough here to suggest that work needs to end, it is the opposite of life potential.

I guess I’ve become even more cynical lately. It is unclear what course I can take against exploitation, as capital further forces life into contradiction everything appears through the eyes of the schizophrenic. Things are too complex and the only response is to turn inward. I guess what is possible here is that revolt will take on forms unlike past attempts. And perhaps more people will take on Bateson’s life view. I think it has revolutionary potential, as it suggests an immanent critique of capital and movement, perhaps we might supersede this. Life as a chaotic dance seems the only thing left, so it may be that we can only reject capital and ideology as much as possible in our daily relations and pray this enough in moments of crisis. I’ll admit this is strangely pessimistic, yet offers us everything.

(Note: This text appeared in the second issue of Letters)

Letters Journal

Dialogue Against Labour

Dialogue Against Labour