Post-Anarchist Communism Part Three

The Process of Communization

Communism as a movement underwent notable failures throughout the twentieth century, mostly due to the failures of the German Revolution and the rise of Stalinism. With no active revolutionary movement crisis cannot be taken advantage of, crisis turns into mere rage with no end goal. The communist movement had many reactions towards the failures found within Stalinism and the bolshevization of communism, many being reformist actions that only reinforced capital. There was another reaction, that of the communist left, which reaffirmed the original communist tenets and critiqued deviations as reinforcing capital. This reaction was in line with Marx's original theories and emphasized the need for the real movement to abolish the current state of things. Communist commodity production was theorized by Stalin and even earlier there was the New Economic Policy, capitalist production was not in the process of being abolished but rather was being reinforced and reproduced. It had become clear to many western communists that a new approach was needed outside of the growing Stalinization of the Third International.

The ultra-left reaction was to reaffirm the original communist tenets, emphasizing the ultimate abolition of capital and the movement toward communism. This goal was to be achieved through various strategies or programs, the two most prevalent in the ultra-left being the party form and the council form. Italian left communists emphasized the party and the doctrine of organic centralism as developed by Bordiga, which was said to remove the threat of the party becoming a renegade of communism. Bordiga describes it as such:

“The democratic criterion has been for us so far a material and incidental factor in the construction of our internal organization and the formulation of our party statutes; it is not an indispensable platform for them. Therefore we will not raise the organizational formula known as "democratic centralism" to the level of a principle. Democracy cannot be a principle for us. Centralism is indisputably one, since the essential characteristics of party organization must be unity of structure and action. The term centralism is sufficient to express the continuity of party structure in space; in order to introduce the essential idea of continuity in time, the historical continuity of the struggle which, surmounting successive obstacles, always advances towards the same goal, and in order to combine these two essential ideas of unity in the same formula, we would propose that the communist party base its organization on "organic centralism". While preserving as much of the incidental democratic mechanism that can be used, we will eliminate the use of the term "democracy", which is dear to the worst demagogues but tainted with irony for the exploited, oppressed and cheated, abandoning it to the exclusive usage of the bourgeoisie and the champions of liberalism in their diverse guises and sometimes extremist poses.” (Bordiga, 1922, pg. 38-39).

The party to Bordiga and the rest of the Italian left, was the leader of the communist movement. It allowed the proletariat to rise from a mere class statistically to a real political force. This party was not meant to be above the proletariat, but of the proletariat, being its main expression of political force. Italian left communism provided the most radical and authentically Marxist expression of Leninism, not falling to the opportunism that was so prevalent during his time.

The Dutch-German left emphasized a different form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, expressing proletarian power through the council form. Councils are an expression of the power of the working class as itself, organized into councils of workers that manage the state apparatus. This is not a labor bureaucracy, nor a hierarchy of workers’ unions, but the expression of working-class power directly in a dictatorship of the proletariat. Pannekoek describes the state of the workers’ councils as such:

“The Workers' Councils are the form of self-government which in the times to come will replace the forms of government of the old world. Of course not for all future; none such form is for eternity. When life and work in community are natural habit, when mankind entirely controls its own life, necessity gives way to freedom and the strict rules of justice established before dissolve into spontaneous behavior. Workers' councils are the form of organization during the transition period in which the working class is fighting for dominance, is destroying capitalism and is organizing social production. In order to know their true character it will be expedient to compare them with the existing forms of organization and government as fixed by custom as self-evident in the minds of the people.” (Pannekoek, 1947, pg. 44).

Workers’ councils are an expression of power by a cohesive working class, to abolish capital and transition into communism. The workers through the council form organize production, distribution, and work to destroy the bourgeoisie.

Council communists have very divergent views on the party, with some viewing it as a basis of education for the proletariat and others viewing it as inherently counterrevolutionary. This division created the division of the Dutch-German left into council communists and councilists. Many among the Italian left criticize both factions for having a fundamentally economic form of organization that cannot express itself in the political realm. To them, the party represents the only true expression of proletarian force, using the state as its weapon. Bordiga is quite right that the party if organized under organic centralist lines is the truest expression of proletarian force in the political realm. Revolutionary spontaneity is a naive position, assuming that a mass movement without actual political organization behind it can lead to a seizure of political power. The council communists, such as Goter, even admit this themselves, going against councilism by stating that the party is needed for revolutionary action.

Yet the workers’ movement that inspired the debates over organization and revolutionary strategy is dead and has been dead for some time. Its death was announced in the outcome of May 68’. This death was not an immediate one, but a slow burn. The various struggles of the New Left, as well as actions among Italian autonomists and anarchists, showed that anti-capitalist desire remained. Yet this desire only was shown in moments of clarity, of crisis, the workers’ movement which had retained this desire among many for so long had died. Bonanno mourns and celebrates this death, realizing it is the end of an era. The revolutionary potential of the past was dead, yet a new way forward could be seen among many. In the death of Marxism as the dominant narrative behind radical politics an explosion of new ways forward came about. The post-structuralists deconstructed the assumptions behind the philosophy of the past. Figures such as Derrida, following Heidegger’s proclamation of the death of metaphysics, deconstructed the various essentialisms found throughout the history of philosophy. Through this radical conclusions on semiotics were reached that could have never been conceptualized within the dominant discourse of Marxism. Others such as Deleuze offered refreshing new paths forward, reversing many of the tenets of metaphysics to create a philosophy of pure immanence. Philosophy had abandoned the Marxist narrative of history, though of course, an honest reader would be hard-pressed to find this dominant narrative in Marx’s more technical pieces. Within the political sphere, the death of the workers’ movement left radicals searching for new frameworks to ground their desires. While Marxism lay dead, Derrida is quite right that a specter remained throughout the supposed liberal end of history. The promise of a liberatory future hangs like a ghost above our current situation of self-referential recuperation. Escape, in whatever form it may appear, is seen only through the cracks in an increasingly well constructed illusion. The post-left developed out of a critiqe of many of the dogma and essentialism found throughout the traditional left, emphasizing a politics of insurrectionary individuation. These folk naively abandoned communism, failing to see it as the only viable anti-capitalism. All individuation, the abolition of mediation between individuals motivated by ownness, must lead to communism. As communism is the true movement to abolish the current state of things, it is the movement to abolish the mediation of capital and its various institutions. It is not a dream that hangs as a heaven above our current lives, but instead something we are immanent towards yet alienated from. Communism, despite the death of the workers’ movement, remains the only viable anti-capitalist politics.

If we are to accept this, we must grapple with both the death of the old workers’ movement and the transformations that capital has undertaken. As was outlined in the first two parts, capital as a force has transformed into the strict regulation of the everyday. For Tiqqun and their successors, such as The Invisible Committee and Culp, the way in which capital regulates the everyday is explained by two forces. These two forces are biopower, taken from Foucault, and spectacle, taken from Debord. Tiqqun in “Introduction to Civil War” write:

“But even if Empire could endow itself with a fake institutional facade, its actual reality would still remain concentrated in worldwide police and publicity, or, respectively, Biopower and Spectacle. The fact that the imperial wars present themselves as “international police operations” implemented by “intervention forces,” the fact that war itself is put outside the law by a form of domination that wants to pass off its own military offensives as little more than domestic administration, that is, as a police and not a political matter—to ensure “tranquility, security, and order”—all this Schmitt had already anticipated sixty years ago, and in no way does it contribute to the gradual development of a “right of the police,” as Negri would like to believe. The momentary spectacular consensus against this or that “rogue State,” this or that “dictator” or “terrorist” only validates the temporary and reversible legitimacy of any imperial intervention that appeals to this consensus.” (Tiqqun, 2001, pg. 41).

The forces of capital, in this case placed under the term Empire following Hart and Negri, control in a Deleuzian sense through a regulation of the body seen in biopower and a mediation by false images seen in spectacle. This model is taken up by the majority of Tiqqun’s disciples. These two forces, though there have been challenges to both’s theoretical legitimacy brought up by figures like Baudrillard, present an image of how capital operates in our contemporary context. This is well in line with the observations brought up in previous parts by Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, and Foucault. While we have previously elaborated upon the conception of power, spectacle requires further elaboration. We no longer live in the society of the spectacle as conceptualized by Debord in 1967, but we have not exited spectacle as Baudrillard claims. Instead this system of images has pervaded to the base of the base-superstructure paradigm. Capital relations came to dominate our collective senses of images, yet from there the image began to dominate our sense of capital. Capital as a construction becomes one among many concepts we exchange in our cultural scene. We now have an image of capital, in contrast to the body of capital. The question then becomes how do we distinguish spectacle from expression? How do we find an outside?

If we accept this as the modern state of capital, though there are of course critiques mentioned that will be discussed in another text, then we must accept that the horizon of struggles lie on the level of the everyday. This is of course to suggest an insurrectionary struggle, rather than a revolutionary one. Insurrection naturally leads on a wide scale to a revolutionary overthrow of power, communization, but does not create a reproduction of a new power structure. Vaneigem in his magnum opus The Revolution of Everyday Life explains everyday struggle as such:

“Assurance of security leaves unused a large supply of energy formerly expended in the struggle for survival. The will to power tries to recuperate, for the reinforcement of hierarchical slavery, this freefloating energy which could be used for the blossoming of individual life (l). Universal oppression forces almost everyone to withdraw strategically towards what they feel to be their only uncontaminated possession: their subjectivity. The revolution of everyday life must create practical forms for the countless attacks on the outside world launched daily by subjectivity (2).” (Vaneigem, 1967, pg. 158).

Vaneigem rightfully observes that dominance and oppression are at the level of everyday practices and places subjectivity as a potential outside to Capital. This is clearly correct, a pure unmediated subjectivity presents a clear outside to capital and thus must be the location of new struggles. We must propose, as the situationists did, an expression of pure creativity and playfulness. As Vaneigem once said: “creativity plus a machine gun is an unstoppable combination.” Now to be clear, this does not mean that we can realize communism by an alternative lifestyle, a commune, and supposed escapes from Capital. We must be skeptical of any expression of subjectivity grounded upon predefined boundaries. This is the error of Bey in the idea of the temporary autonomous zones, he assumes a readily made outside to capital we can simply live in. Yet this does not exist as any physical territoriality, it exists only in an insurrectionary attitude that begins to refuse. The movement to abolish the current state of things is not to settle, to give up and seek a life in fake outsides, but instead to communize. Communization is the horizon of communism that we find in the twenty first century, the mode of struggle that finds itself operable. The notion of communization is one that has much internal conflict, with different groups and theorists while keeping to similar sensibilities having large disagreement. Our vision of communization follows from the post-anarchist vision of power presented in the previous parts. Communization traditionally presents a vision of an immediacy of communism, meaning that there are no institutional stages. These institutions presented, such as the traditional Marxist conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat, are seen as presenting a workerism. This workerism asserts the proletarian class as a class, rather than a negation of its conditions. Immediatism does not imply communism being immediate, communization is a process not a sudden switch. Kropotkin’s conception of the creation of communism follows a similar logic, though sadly many contemporary anarchists do not see this nuance. To escape this workerism a strategy of self exit from the proletariat becomes clear, a strategy presented by Theory Communiste. From this we find communization as a fundamentally insurrectionary process, based on the combined power of separate individual insurrection. Following from Stirner and Newman, we find the basis of our communization. Our communization is the post-anarchist strategy towards power applied to the body of capital, with the rejection of the legitimacy of its power leading to an insurrectionary rejection of its institutions. As The Invisible Committee stated: “Communism is not made through the expansion of new relations of production, but rather in their abolition.” Our idea of communization, our post-anarchist communism, is based not in a revolutionary construction of new institutions, but a communist free affirmation following from the destruction of the institutions of capital. The struggle to live an unmediated life is not dead with the death of the workers’ movement, it has only begun.