Post-Anarchist Communism Part One

The Current Crisis

The final crisis, in its Marxist context, can no longer be conceptualized as a coming event, but rather must be seen as a process we are all immanent toward. We are no longer waiting for the fabled time when the revolution will arrive, where the contradictions of capitalism will lead to its destruction, for it is here. Yet where is the revolution, where is the fabled dictatorship of the proletariat, where is communism? There are riots, there are strikes, there are even small insurrections, yet there has been no end to capital’s hegemony over the world. The riots of today are moments of clarity, where individuals disobey and begin to affirm their own future outside of the dominant discourse. Rioters, a crucial segment imaginary party as Tiqqun characterizes them, are not in their current form part of the communist as Marx describes it. A riot is merely an expression of anger, but this anger never goes anywhere. The Marxist crisis is no longer recognized as a crisis within a stable system, but instead it is seen as the system itself. Thus to fight the crisis is to reclaim stability, to return to a sense of normality. The crisis has no becoming-event, it can neither be recognized as a break in the system or as a way to overcome the system. We live in the greatest civil war ever conceived, yet cannot recognize our own positions. As such the discourse collapses, and our forms of resistance become trapped and recuperated. There is no affirmative destruction of the institutions of society, there is no overcoming, there is no communization.

The Marxist response has been twofold: there is some false consciousness brought on by some cultural totality such as spectacle, capitalist realism, ideology, etc, or that the crisis is still yet to come. The first response realizes correctly that revolution should be here, that the interests of the proletariat should lead to revolution, yet has not. To explain this they posit some cultural force that creates a false consciousness, a replacement or development of Marx’s notions of ideology or superstructure. Ideology in Marx explained why the workers didn’t turn to the communist movement, positing that the worker does not realize their true interest as a class. Many have correctly realized that this notion, based upon the reductive base and superstructure system in Marx, is insufficient for what is happening here. Realizing this, they need a replacement to explain why the revolution is not here, to explain why the workers have not overcome capital. Reich and The Frankfurt School spoke of the desire for repression, derived from Freudian psychoanalysis, to explain why the revolution had not come. To them, the revolution should have come at the end of the First World War, yet it failed, the Spartakus were destroyed and the KPD became Stalinized. This in turn led to the rise of fascism, a rise similar to the recuperated discourse of resistance found today. The crisis of the First World War was supposed to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Lenin wrote that when the colonists had no new markets to acquire they would destroy themselves. Yet that crisis came and went, with the only thing resulting from it being repackaged capitalism in the form of Soviet Russia. Lenin had seen the imperialist war as the final event, yet all attempts to recognize this crisis’ finality either failed or was transformed into something unrecognizable. The Situationists spoke of spectacle, of the mediation of life by images. This is beyond the mere fetishism of commodities, as Marx describes in the first volume of Capital, but comes to the point where the superstructure itself becomes a fetishism. All forms of culture become dominated by the commodity form, including gestures traditionally seen as threatening. There is no longer an accumulation of commodities but an accumulation of spectacles. Their methods for the overcoming of capital came to light in the events of May 68’ in France. Much like the crises of today the mass insurrectionary potential settled, with the communist party settling for better working conditions. Even so the post-68 theorists were able to recognize this event as an event, one that fundamentally changed the dominant cultural attitude. Fisher speaks of capitalist realism, where in Deleuzian terms all desire for post-capitalism has been repressed and repurposed into a desire for repression. The future is quite literally canceled, the inevitable future of communism has been replaced by the liberal end of history. Fisher is perhaps the best contemporary theorist of our time in this sense, as he recognizes that all radicality is completely absorbed in the dominant discourse. We no longer recognize potentially transformative events as transformative, we can no longer affirm.

Each of these places their choice of a totalizing entity that controls revolutionary desire and then states that it leads to false consciousness. They conclude that there is some set interest, one that is revolutionary, and that the masses have been coopted into a totalizing cultural apparatus. Yet many after 68’ realized correctly that the politics of desire are more complicated than what the Marxists would have one believe. After 68’ and the following struggles in Italy, Marxism had in a sense died and those who clung to it were carrying a corpse. The beginning of a post-68’ approach to this revolutionary desire began to emerge with the work of Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard. These theorists realized correctly that political desire was not purely based on the base of Marx but rather formed a libidinal economy. This libidinal economy was not bound up in the discourse of Freud, but rather presented a radically novel philosophical approach. Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus showed how repression resulted from the institution of the family, producing the Oedipus complex. The pair also demonstrated that ideological desire is regulated via a series of desiring machines, leading to desire being constrained to what capital wishes. Lyotard examines this even further in Libidinal Economy, demonstrating that workers desire their repression in the workforce. Along with Baudrillard, Lyotard begins to use this approach to deny any possibility of radicality. Thus these thinkers realize that the categories of true and false consciousness are poorly constructed and that there is merely free and repressed consciousness. We may be influenced towards certain paths, To that end, the various conclusions of these new Marxist approaches are in many ways correct, as capital does indeed involve a measure of repressing consciousness, but there is no base and superstructure. There is no ideology in the original Marxist sense. Baudrillard is a key thinkers that does this, he explores this sense of alienation and false consciousness without a base of capital relations.

The other Marxist response has been to state that the crisis that will destroy capital has not yet happened. Some point to the third world and state that when the proletarianization is complete the mass crisis will come. Yet crisis is here, we are faced with it every day. The planet is burning, our institutions have become a public laughing stock, and no one is content. We live in a ever expanding state of war, yet we cannot offer any proper critique without becoming caught in an ever expanding web of nothing theories. The Invisible Committee places it best:

“This world no longer needs explaining, critiquing, denouncing. We live enveloped in a fog of commentaries and commentaries on commentaries, of critiques and critiques of critiques of critiques, of revelations that don’t trigger anything, other than revelations about the revelations. And this fog is taking away any purchase we might have on the world. There’s nothing to criticize in Donald Trump. As to the worst that can be said about him, he’s already absorbed, incorporated it. He embodies it. He displays on a gold chain all the complaints that people have ever lodged against him. He is his own caricature, and he’s proud of it. (Invisible Committee, 2017, pg. 6).

The world no longer makes sense, the clear cut institutions that leftists have opposed are no longer tactical enemies but have become laughing stocks. Trump is what Baudrillard calls obscene, he is not a break with the system but rather shows what it always has been. How can we properly wage a war when our enemy no longer can be properly seen or defined? The liberals who complain that politics has devolved from a noble affair to chaos do not see what politics always was, the modern scene of politics has both revealed itself for what it always was but also falls further from any authentic rule. Everyone sees it, the crisis is here, no one needs any further reason for a revolt. Yet where is it, where is the insurrectionary overthrowal of the current order? The modern manifestations of the proletarian movement come about in the naive protester or striker, who while expressing rage settles for essentially nothing, and the imaginary party of Tiqqun, who provides a revolutionary subject without basis. Any proper action on the part of the imaginary party must first contend with its own invisibility. Its actions will never be seen as actions, as events, because the war they fight is not even recognized.

Capital has not fallen because it has evolved, it is no longer merely in the form of the circuit of commodities M-C-M’ but has evolved beyond its own base. No one denies that the commodity form still is dominant within society, but it has evolved beyond its initial form. While this change should not be totalized into a new idol to fear as many heterodox Marxists have done and many traditional Marxists have done with capital itself, the fact that capital has changed is very apparent. The power that capital excerpts has changed from a force centralized in exchanges to one at a far more fundamental level, creating a cultural apparatus that obscures any escape and pacifies any resistance. As such we as anti-capitalists must change the focus of our strategies from targeting the traditional notion of capital to fighting it in everyday life. Revolutionary struggle, which as the communizers point out merely reproduces the conditions of the proletariat, must transform into insurrectionary struggle. Here we can take from post-anarchism to reformulate an approach, as post-anarchism has transformed anarchism to face the modern forms of power and domination. Communism in the postmodern era must face capital head on, at the level of its domination. We must not seize the state, or any apparatus for that matter, but instead let our wars be waged, to seize power outside any dominating discourse of power.