An Appealing Pro-Revolutionary Milieu
No.1 : Our first task is to relax. Then, we can begin our second task: dismantling the regime of urgency. Urgency destroys whatever space exists for pro-revolutionary ideas to be received and is bad for our blood pressure. There is always a war. There is always crisis. Revolution is always the only solution. Slow down. This has been the case for several centuries.
No.2 : The vaunted historical perspective of pro-revolutionaries has never prevented them from being perpetually too early or too late. The current crisis is not driven directly by class struggle but by an internal partial collapse in the productive circuits for extracting value. Agency is still absent.
No.3 : It’s said that the Great Wall of China was built on brown rice and fermented cabbage, while the revolution will be built on the fermented blood of pro-revolutionaries. If the working class does not drink our wine, it is because we have not made enough. This is the logic of organization.
No. 4 : Common discussions, common meetings, common statements and interventions putting forward the same positions is a game of putting all our eggs in the same basket.
No. 5 : Our third task is cutting holes in baskets. We can begin with our own, naturally, then move on to others.
No. 6 : All pro-revolutionary activity ought to be defined above all by restraint. Restraint, first of all, because none of us know any more about communism and revolution than anyone else. Restraint, second of all, because every victory of a pro-revolutionary organization has meant defeat for the working class in its task of destroying itself. Restraint, finally, because this task is apparent only to us.
This is a short response to a hymnal recently passed around the congregation by Internationalist Perspectives.
One Comment
The regime of urgency is a provocation to make one’s face appear. Popping one’s head out of the sand – replacing the mole with an ostrich – only produces an unequal battle for the sake of the fight. We aren’t knight-errants but proles. Perhaps it would be better for us to subvert and sabotage through anonymity than declare that we, now at this very moment, are revolutionaries; that the social war is embodied in our very appearance, and let us not lose a minute in the battle, the war, with the spectre of capital. The poverty of daily life (obsessively) assures us we need to destroy everything this instant, yet the potentiality of the swerve of communism (the abolition of the existent, the negation of the world) is both immanent and impossible, outside of the everyday and always there. Let us attain the summit, but unfiltered, without regard for and against organizations. Let us await the urgency of an orgiastic rupture when and if such a clinamen appears.
Agency is always there regardless of the extent of domination and control. Revolutionary agency however, can only appear in those extreme moments of potentiality unleashed in magnificent situations of crisis we so long for, or look longingly towards with desire and apprehension.
We’re always too early and our wine tastes sour. We are always too late and our moonshine is deadly, usually for ourselves and for our closest friends. We should find some more bearable nectar; our communist egoism should be a little more Dionysian, perhaps cruel.
The question is how – some of us do feel a bit uncomfortable with a machete or kukri knife constantly in hand – how to cut holes? The baskets of leftism have always had the stench of rotten eggs, and surely they need to be emptied and aired out, if not thrown entirely into the compost heap.
Although leftism is a racket, it rarely – at least in much of north america – has the same control, stability, or capital as other institutions. With an attack on leftism it may be more a question of subverting the sign…or subverting the empty signifier (leftism as discourse, an empty node which sucks up misdirected ‘radical’ activity towards the ends of continuing the flow; leftism as a fascistic desiring machine; leftism as a regime of empty signification). However, not to avoid material conflict with the left I propose as a model for us the ways in which the surrealists approached and attacked the catholic church and its priests.
Sometimes I do want to wage total war on the world, the dominant and existent. Regardless of how many nodes in the society of control I may impede or destroy my own existence is lacking if in this activity I assume the reified position of ‘revolutionary’, as with such a mindset I can but only be role playing, taking up alone and out of turn the potential for the theatre of cruelty to come.
Better still, I’ve had visions and dreams of utopia since I was a child, and yet regardless of what my nights are like the world of the commodity still reigns supreme (as spectacle/appearance).
Jumping the gun will not make my dreams appear. More likely than not, jumping over the candlestick will cause displacement and a regime of sacrifice.