Letters Journal

Dear Persons of Libcom,

I also saw there the Auroch, the Parpue, the Darlette, the Epigrue, the Cartive with his pear-shaped head, the Meije, the Emeu with pus in his ears, the Courtiplian with his eunuch pace; Vampires, Hypedruches with black tails Bourrasses with three rows of stomach pockets, Chougnous in gelatinous mass, Peffils with beaks like knives; the Cartuis with his chocolate odor, the Daragues with damascend plumes, the Pourpiasses with green and trembling anuses, the Baltrees with watered silk hides, the Babluits with their pockets of water…

- Henri Michaux

It seems to me disingenuous not to grasp that the question of what didn’t happen after May 68 is aimed rhetorically at the temporal limits of revolt-events. The question is directed at the subsequent fetishisation of such events in the absence of their continuation and it is this absence that is of most interest. The question refers to event mechanics in relation to the context of ordinary social interaction from which they erupt. It implies that the revolts themselves play some role in the totalisation of the social relation. In other words, revolt is a not-that-extraordinary component of capitalised society. But what function does it perform?

I would also like to say that there is an acknowledged weariness on the part of the author of the piece, and all of us on our ‘side’ of this discussion, about playing the part of the knee-jerk pessimists in response to the knee-jerk enthusiasm of others. The author fully acknowledges that his piece is still too ‘political’, too engaged with the terms that motivate ‘revolutionaries’.

But having to speak one’s prewritten lines, and play the regulation moves of the pieces assigned to us, is both part of this racket that we are all involved in, and also necessary. This consistency of play at least allows for the identification of any genuine novelty that may occur once the opening salvos of the ‘our side/your side’ bombardment have all been spent.

The obvious historical text to read in conjunction with discussion of such ‘events’ is The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, the categories of which I will return to below. For our part, our discussion has been greatly enriched by the recent protests and we have attempted to fit the insights/new terms we have gained both within our own theory and in that of wider communist/German ideas. I will list a few of these new conceptual objects and their possible implications below:

1. Our basic approach in our discussion of these events has been to investigate the nature of ‘involvement’. We ask ourselves what it is to participate, and in particular, what it is to participate from a position of pro-communist consciousness within a popular context which does not reflect back a confirmation of that consciousness. It is strange, to us at least, that a communist would affirm ‘revolt’, and pour the small glass of his ideas into the great torrent of other people’s agendas. Our first impulse is to hold our glass high above the waters and try and retain its precious fluids. It occurred to us that we might better understand involvement if we proposed a quite different model to that which is received in the history of the left.

Where radical thought identifies its object in political-revolt phenomena which occur rarely and only amongst small sectors of the population (the young, the middle class), it seems to us more feasible/rewarding to attempt to situate our non-involvement within the greater non-involvement of the majority of the population as well as within the major part of social process (i.e. that part of temporal and spatial existence defined by not overtly revolting). We ask ourselves the question, what is communism in relation to the majority who will never call themselves communists?

2. The received theory of engagement is based upon the twin  assumptions: i. ‘the unity of theory and practice’ (putting one’s ideas into practice); ii. the conscious changing of the world (the key phrase of Marx here, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.’) It is assumed that by involving themselves, communists will convince others of their perspective, and that this will eventually transform protest into revolution. Again, in order to get some perspective on this rationale we ask ourselves, what if theory and practice cannot be unified? What if the role of ideas is not to become the template for a future society? And, what if the world cannot be ‘planned’ as is implied in the Marxist project

3. Our initial model then is constituted in terms of our belonging, literally, to those who are not involved. Like the 79.5 million Egyptians who are not involved in their ‘revolution’. At present we do not belong to any protest constituency and therefore it would seem absurd to speak as if we did. We are outsiders and we speak as such. It is also the case that if capital’s crisis did reach a level where it engulfed us then it would be likely that our involvement would be that of individual proletarians… our ‘communist’ consciousness would play no role in the general turn of events, and we would have to ‘go along’ with what is happening, lacking the numbers, the intent and the weapons to change them to our will.

Given this circumstance, our initial conclusion then took the following form: If we do not have to convince others of the rightness of our ideas (as a means to make our ideas ‘real’), it becomes possible for us to think the ‘impossible’ and set these theoretical objects against the given form of ‘pragmatics’ and ‘real’ politics. Our assumption is that social process is not predicated upon everyone ‘agreeing’ with communist ideas but rather belongs to populating a field of communist possibilities. We can certainly play our part in that by stretching our connection to people like you to the very thinnest of threads

4. Our initial hypothetical model, which neatly fits over our actual existence (we cannot play the happy woof and wagging tail of the lumbering pet golden retriever, which is the role adopted by much of the left), has produced a number of seemingly stimulating concepts/hypotheses for subsequent research. The most obvious is that of ‘separation’. Against the idea of ‘unity’ of integrated thought and practice, we now see that the process of socialisation must always run on a fully socialised circuit… in other words, to reduce this to its very jus: me think, you throw rocks in which we assume a corrective, and mutuality, occurs as an objective effect of coexistent and separate spheres.

Full socialisation requires factors of non-involvement such as ours in order to inhibit spirals of ‘enthusiasm’ (another of our key new concepts). The corrective of dispassion and self-exteriorisation appears as a manifestation of the same set of conditions as the ‘days of rage’ of others and therefore it seems there is no requirement for  a conscious achievement of ‘unity’ as this is already objectively conditional. Our doubt fixes your fanaticism and inhibits it passing into a state of runaway… it is not necessary for you personally to ‘agree’ with our doubt. Generally speaking, we have previously understood revolt to be corrected by that which is hostile to it and that revolt must therefore extend itself over opposition. But now it seems that this is no longer the case. The first implication that occurs to us in our reflection of non-involvement, is that revolt is not identical with communism, that communism must depend upon multiple modes of being which do not need to ‘agree’ with each other but need only to satisfy the objective criterion of belonging to the set, ‘communism’.

Communist society will not be defined by today’s ‘revolt’ and therefore the skills of revolt will only have a transient value… therefore, in order to engage the vast majority of the world’s population, which has no interest in ‘protest’, communism must present more widely distributable registers which will engage that vast majority. The question is how to best think communism as the extension of infinite numbers of divergent for-itself human existences framed by an encompassing social relation… and contrariwise how not to reduce it to battle lines, the familiar images of street fighters, the psychological mechanisms of personification, projection and exteriorisation? Our brief answer is that we are not going to war.

The alleged vigilante justice of the shopkeepers who are defending property against ‘criminals’, was described by a BBC reporter as very extreme and out of control;  we infer from this anything from torture to summary execution. This is not acceptable to us. The frustration of the demonstrators as they rant and shake their fists is wholly understandable to us but, crucially, not to them. They remain trapped within the same dynamics, letting off steam but not even beginning to transcend that which makes them so unhappy. Symbolically, they have not ripped their holy books, they have not burnt their national flag. This is not acceptable to us. With their effigies marked with the Star of David, they do not grasp what they are doing, they are stuck in the same old cycle of revolt as a means of acquiescence. That is unacceptable to us. That the brutalised commit acts of brutalisation, is wholly understandable. But it is not acceptable to us. We understand that the entirety of their frustrated and alienated lives is flooding up through violent passions but it is not finding an adequate means of conscious expression and instead is being channelled into conventional political formations. We empathise, but it is not acceptable to us. They are acting out. And when they are tired, they will acquiesce to something even worse than they had before, the tragedy and the farce. All of this is comprehensible to us. We understand the psychological and economic dimensions of their revolt, these are identical to the motive factors in everybody else’s life… it is what produces violence at every level in society. But until the protesters understand that these frustrations and unhappinesses which fuel their actions have nothing to do with their fixation on Mubarak they will continue to reproduce their own misery, even as they inflict it on others.

5. Another area for further research, is that which is presented in Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire…. In particular the notion of theatre, which for Debord, and Marx, indicates a false relation of representation between surface and underlying production. For us though, after Artaud, nothing is more real than theatre, and what we see in these events (and what is alluded to in the opening post) is a cyclical return to performances of certain eternalised ‘counter-values’, those which must appear as performance. A key term here,  which we have picked up on, is Brendan Barber’s notion of ‘Last resort’ which we have extended to the entirety of the tragedy/farce schema.

Although as a group/circle/network/tendency/journal/racket/gang we are emphatically anti-historicist we nonetheless had some sympathetic interest in the periodisations of Camatte (Marx as the theoretician of the bourgeois era, capital in runaway/community, as defined by the total domination of the proletariat etc) and of Theorie Communiste (http://libcom.org/forums/thought/theorie-communiste-17012008 ).

However, what we see now is the reappearance of certain traits of The June Rebellion/1848, i.e. the revolt of the enlightened bourgeoisie against the irrationalities of capital’s domination – it is a revolt of reason, of the professional classes, the 3rd estate. The implication of this theatrical eruption seems to confirm our original intuition that there are no periods as such in the capitalist social relation (only cyclical runs interrupted by fairly predictable events). It seems that capital has always been in runaway, that real subsumption is the precondition of capital and not some later critical phase… and that the bourgeoisie, in its attempt to realise ‘the enlightenment project’ is provoked into periods of revolt at the end of cycles of increased economic distortions of social institutions. (we had previously understood the bourgeoisie to have become historically obsolete, replaced by autonomised capital, we now see it as a class in cyclical revolt against, essentially, its own forms). ‘Changeless change’, or stasis, defines both the eternalised productive relation and the cyclical, misdirected, protests against it. But this is just a very brief outline.

6. Finally, the relationship between protest/revolt and our experiments referring to such protests, is very clear  to us, they are coexistent. But we will never be ‘of’ the protests. Perhaps the entirety of what is happening, the constellation of ideas, images and events, the socialised relations and the social formations, does constitute some larger set or ‘movement’ but of course that is not for us to identify. And we would ‘protest’ against that type of totalisation in order to get a more objective view of it.

The extent to which those who are ‘involved’ may use the reflections we have made upon the nature of their involvement in relation to the majority population which is not involved is not for us to say and maybe not for them either… what we are discovering may have no current application or any relevance ever. We are concerned with producing internally coherent objects, that is all. To make a gesture to the outside, we could say that at the very least, we are defining some of the limits of what it is possible to say at this time within what is understood as the communist discursive domain.

We are not looking for other people’s immediate agreement, certainly not the agreement of those who define themselves as ‘protesters’ – we would prefer to find an echo with those who do not revolt as that would give us greater hope concerning a wider communism which is not defined by revolt.

The lives of the 79.5 million other Egyptians are as real as those who are protesting. The privileging of events, involvement’s, lifestyles, ideas, groups, crowds and so on, the very stuff of romanticism, is what we are setting our version of ‘communism’ against. Communism is not reducible to the festivities of May ‘68, and much less the subsequent fetish of such spectacles, but rather must involve the complex interaction of billions of already complex lives… an eventuality which requires an immense quiet to even glimpse.

What we are doing, in producing conceptual objects that record events is as real as the events themselves. Our conceptual objects are as real (or as unreal) as a camel driven through the crowd in Tahrir Square, but not as immediate. The relation of the infinite diversity of social phenomena (e.g. ‘your’ rock throwing and ‘our’ meditations) to the underlying, and unchanging conditions, is of course one of our main fields of interest. It is this tendency to multiple divergence within a strict framework that is so fascinating to and rewarding of serious research.

For those who cannot read all of the above, I will summarise in two sentences: we do not advise communists to not attend protests. Instead, we propose they reflect (even as an hypothetical exercise) upon the means by which they cease to uphold communism when they do involve themselves and whether the resultant dehumanisation and reduction to an exterior agenda, the conversion of their energies into the left wing of capital, is really worth it.

It is nice to touch base again with you guys, but there are waxwings to see and that must take priority. Or as our friend Michaux says of the social violence spectacles of the Hacs, I have seen caterpillars that were ferocious and demon-canaries…

FDG

PS. I sincerely hope that you are able to qualitatively transform the vast accumulations of your Egypt-facts into a telling theory which will eclipse our own efforts. To learn from one’s opponents is a bitter pill but it is always preferable to a received consensus. Perhaps you will be able to produce something equivalent to the SI’s ‘Address to Revolutionaries of Algeria and of All Countries’, written I think in the days before 24 hr newsfeeds.