"The Right and the Righteous": Required Reading in a Time of (Toxic) Righteousness

Shannon Hoff's essay "The Right and the Righteous: Hegel on Confession, Forgiveness, and the Necessary Imperfection of Political Action", published in Phenomenology and Forgiveness, ed. Marguerite La Caze, is a necessary read, as profound in what kind of human beings, what kind of ethical and political being to enact in the world, as J. M. Bernstein's Dignity and Torture.

In the essay, Hoff works through the contemporary practical, moral and political importance of Hegel's final chapter of the section Spirit, "Conscience. The beautiful soul, evil and its forgiveness".  She takes up the notions of moral action, judgment, forgiveness and their implications for moral and political action, without which political and moral ideas are mere abstractions, but which are always, inevitably, one-sided, invested, imperfect.

In a contemporary moment in which righteousness predominates, Hoff encourages us to see both the necessity and imperfection of action and the necessity and imperfection of criticism.  In this context, we require both action and criticism, but action and criticism which are themselves open to being criticized in turn, that is, to communication and forgiveness.

I will not work through the entire essay, as it is not only important to work through Hoff's arguments for oneself, but I cannot in a brief note do justice to her engaging and elegant exposition of the ideas developed herein.  It is enough to quote a paragraph that epitomizes the intellectual and ethical depth of the essay:

"The criticism that supplements and completes action, then, is not a matter of condemnation that distances the critic from the actor, but a matter of establishing solidarity through communication—it is precisely forgiveness.  As we saw earlier, our actions, as necessarily one-sided and specific, do not unambiguously manifest the principle to which they aim to answer, and so they do not “speak for themselves” but require instead communication as a supplement. And communication, insofar as it is oriented toward revealing the principle that motivates action, can precisely lead to unexpected forms of identification. The “act” of an action can never, on its own, reveal the motivation of the agent, of which it is an expression. It is through struggling to understand the action on the agent’s own terms—struggling to appreciate the action and recognize the agent—that we get into a position in which meaningful criticism—criticism that would actually be meaningful to the agent and to what the agent was doing—becomes possible. Such an understanding, however, in as much as it is precisely a matter of “sympathizing” with the agent, simultaneously fosters an identification with the agent: it involves a recognition, in other words, that the agent’s actions make sense to us. Forgiveness is precisely this intertwining of criticism and identification." (p. 15)

What is Communism?

Jehu does these neat little nuggets and I think he hits this, above all else, on the head.

His own blog header starts with this:
"Communism is free time and nothing else!"

That is a good start.

This is the obvious one:
"Communism can only be defined as the complete abolition of wage labor, capital and the state, and the realization of the principle of “to each according to need”. If communization has any meaning, it is that the complete abolition of wage labor, capital and the state — a fully communist society — is possible right now, immediately."

This adds a little clarity to what the abolition of the working as a class means:
"There is only one way the proletarians can abolish themselves as a class: the buying and selling of labor power must be abolished."

But what does that really entail? This is a little more specific and it is very important [all subsequent italics mine]:
"A society characterized by the communist principle requires certain definite technical material conditions so that the social product can be distributed without regard to the labor contribution of its members. These conditions may not necessarily require the complete automation of production, but they must at least guarantee that whatever living labor is required can be met by voluntary contribution of the members of society. Basically, communism requires that wage labor is already superfluous to the production of material wealth at present."

Now that is some good stuff as a basic "elevator pitch" answer to the question, "What do you mean by communism?"

It does not tell us how to get there and is not political strategy, but it puts us in the right frame of mind because there is no question that we can produce enough to take care of people, that it can be done with many fewer hours of labor than even happens now, but further that even now, wage labor is superfluous to the production of material wealth.

Reflections On "REFLECTIONS ON MARX'S CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY"

http://faridabadmajdoorsamachar.blogspot.in/2013/06/reflections-pdf.html?m=1

It's taking a bit of time to look through this, but I have not seen it before.

I do have some initial reflections:

The basis of their criticism of Marx is the confusion over the historical precedence of exchange and circulating capital to productive capital versus the logical precedence of productive capital over them.  As Capital is not a historicist work, there is no reason to believe that the historical order is the same as the logical order, especially as come into a world of generalized commodity production.  As such, capital did not subvert its own rules (p. 4) since merchant and usurious capital existed on the fringes of non-capitalist society, and thus money, commodity, value, etc. as constitutive social forms were at best nascent in them, but not yet wholly socially determinate.  Once productive capital subsumes the whole of society, non-productive capital only then truly becomes capital.

The confusion brought about by this is immediately evident because they argue that profits were made by the "different socially necessary labor times for the production of a thing".  However, socially necessary labor time and exchange-value only have bearing in generalized commodity production, in already capitalist society.  As such, the wealth that came from merchant and usury capital does not take the form of value.  Petty commodity production was not a mode of production, there was no exchange-value or use-value for that matter, since there was no value.  There was no abstract labor or concrete labor.  All of those categories only have bearing in relation to capital, that is, in the situation in which M-C-M' will actually work itself out to be M-C...P...C'-M'.

However, it is necessary to begin with M-C-M' because that is how capital appears.  This appearance is not false, so much as incomplete.  Marx will spend the first 6 chapters moving through different ideas of commodity, money, value, etc. and each chapter is driven to the next by its own inadequacy in grasping capital.  The first 6 chapters are about showing why value and surplus-value in generalized commodity society cannot come from exchange, which necessitates beginning with M-C-M', since C-M-C clearly doesn't lead with any necessity to an infinite cycle.

This is also why even if M-C-M' is only how capital appears, it is nonetheless not therefore simply an illusion.

Then there is the common misconception that "capital is a social relation".  I would say that Capital is closer to Hegel's notion of Concept in the Science of Logic

"The understanding determines, and holds the determination fixed. Reason is negative and dialectical, since it dissolves the determinations of the understanding into nothing; it is positive, since it generates the universal, and comprehends the particular therein. Just as the understanding is usually taken as something separate from reason in general, so also dialectical reason is taken as something separate from positive reason. In its truth reason is however spirit, which is higher than both reason bound to the understanding and understanding bound to reason. It is the negative, that which constitutes the quality of both the dialectical reason and the understanding: it negates the simple, thereby posits the determinate difference of the understanding; but it equally dissolves this difference, and so it is dialectical. But spirit does not stay at the nothing of this result but is in it rather equally positive, and thereby restores the first simplicity, but as universal, such as it is concrete in itself; a given particular is not subsumed under this universal but, on the contrary, it has already been determined together with the determining of the difference and the dissolution of this determining. This spiritual [obviously for Marx 'spiritual' is not the right word - me] movement, which in its simplicity gives itself its determinateness, and in this determinateness gives itself its self-equality – this movement, which is thus the immanent development of the concept, is the absolute method of the concept, the absolute method of cognition and at the same time the immanent soul of the content."

They further go on to talk as if there were such a thing as "simple commodity production" as something distinct from, as a kind of mode of production independent of, capital.  Aside from Engels' complete misunderstanding of the matter, I don't see a point in Marx's text that would allow for this reading.

Reading on through, I think there continue to be significant problems with how they comprehend Marx's actual work.  It is a bit like reading Marx's critique of Hegel, in that one really feels like Hegel is the name ascribed to the Young Hegelians, and therefore much of the criticism of Hegel as more aptly a criticism of the Young Hegelian reading of Hegel.  In the same manner, this essay is wrangling with post-Marx Marxism, and particularly the versions of it that one might call Orthodox Marxism, the Marxism of the 2nd and Third Internationals.

The reason this matters is simply that a lot of what Marx is actually engaged in cannot be read since they see a work like Capital through the lenses of Engels, Lenin, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Pannekoek, et al, and most of this stuff is nearly worthless for us today.  Marx, however, retains a freshness that speaks to the moment.

Allow me to give examples. 

The first mistake is evident in the idea that Marx's Capital is a critique of capitalist society, and thus Capital is an empirical, historicist text that must project an ideal in order to be coherent.  I would argue that that text is nothing of the sort.  Marx's work is, firstly, a critique of political economy.  Marx is rather explicit about this, as that is the subtitle.  Very few people, however, think about that very seriously and so they assume that Marx is simply presenting a better political economy, not a critique of political economy as such, as an attempt to rationally comprehend capitalism as a rational object.  This obscure the irrationality that Marx identifies both within capital and political economy. 

Instead, we should see Capital differently.  It remains immanent to political economy's categories and is a critique of those categories and their insufficiency, and insofar as political economy is capital thinking about itself in a rigorous way, about its being-for-itself if one wanted to borrow a Hegel-ism, Marx considers it scientific, which in his Hegelian sense would mean both ontological and systematic, wissenschraft, not scientific in the natural-sciences sense which takes the object of its investigation for granted.  Actually, beginning with J.S. Mill in particular, Marx excoriates as vulgar economics or vulgar political economy the shift from wissenschaft to natural scientific approaches to a decidedly non-natural object.

Capital thus moves like a Hegelian phenomenology of categories taken from within political economy, not proposed from outside of it, developing a "science of logic" of capital through the limitedness of those categories from their abstractness to greater and greater degrees of concretion.  As such, the complaint that Marx does not take into account states and cannot explain wars misses that Marx never actually arrives at The State or International Money/Finance because those were supposed to be a part of the 4th volume of Capital, and could only be dealt with at a degree of concretion that was beyond what Marx was able to complete in his lifetime and which was largely never taken up afterwards, with only a few exceptions, prior to the last quarter of the 20th century and even then, as a completely heterodox strand of Marxian thought.  One of the more engaging recent pieces on exactly this is Werner Bonefeld's excellent book

Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason.

A second mistake is to think that Marx is not concerned with realization of value or that he held to a disproportionality theory of crisis.  He is explicitly concerned with the realization of value and issues arising from it and all crisis in Marx is logically a crisis of valorization.  However, the problems that arise from the failure of realization, from what we might call a part of a crisis of accumulation, could only be partially developed in his incomplete work.  It is already implicit, however, in his discussion of value and price and the implication that value and price are never the same in actuality.  That is, insofar as the validation of the expenditure of labor, raw materials and means of production into potential values only is realized in exchange, there is always the situation that no individual capital can ever gauge socially-necessary labor time accurately.  This is part of the reason that command capitalist economies, rather than market capitalist economies, are so much more rigid and stagnant.  Competition between capitals through freely floating prices really is the only way that winners and losers can be sorted out in a way that is not directly distorting (it is indirectly distorting, but that comes back to the problem of the necessity of the critique of value to grasp the social form and nature of crisis, and why competition models fail.)


The third mistake is the attribution to Marx that the overthrow of capitalism is the overthrow of relations of distribution (private ownership of the means of production.)  They are quite clearly wrong that "Exproprition of capitalists or the dissolution of the private power of the individual capitalists would thus obviously be the negation of capital", not simply as a statement, but as attributing this view to Marx.  Marx's critique is not a critique of distribution, but of the very mode of production itself, and thus of labor, of value, of money, etc.  Postone's work has been critical to recovering this dimension of Marx's work (see the recent “The Current Crisis and the Anachronism of Value”) 


Of course, they are quite right to reject the idea that overcoming private ownership of the means of production is the end of capital, even if they got there by throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  However, they would get much more out of Marx if they gave up reading him through their Leninist-tinted lenses, a tint that they have not because they are Leninists, but because they end up reading Marx through lenses they purport to want to stop wearing.  It would make the work of a more adequate critical theory against capital less difficult.


I also fully concur in their statement that Monopoly Capitalist analyses take us away from the critique of capital, that they "blatantly subvert the analyses of value relations i.e. they render impossible the comprehension of the social distribution of labour in commodity economy."  This is fully evident not only in obvious ways with writers like Robert Brenner fetishize intra-capitalist competition as the locus of capitalist crisis, and therefore the competition between states as central to crisis, but very much also in what would seem to be quite otherwise critical Marxists, such as Endnotes, which in their last issue largely adopted the stupidity of Brenner, and the British SWP trotskyists who always understood their state capitalism as provable through the competition between states.

The further conclusion that theories of imperialism, oppressed and oppressor nations, etc. is reactionary rubbish is on very solid ground.  My complaint would simply be that I sense a tendency (and let me be clear, it is a sense of a tendency, not a claim that this is quite made explicit) in the text to want to shrug aside gender, nationality, sexuality, race, etc as kind of fake and class struggle as real.  As I see it, this would be radically false, insofar as it confuses the critique of political economy with a reification of class.  Race, gender, sexuality, etc are very much categories of capitalist society and are as connected to the logic of capital as class.  I would argue that part of the crisis of communist ideas today is the end of the working class as a third estate, as a social group with its own culture, ideas, and separation from society a a whole.  It is also the foundation of the possibility of returning to Marx's work as the critique of labor rather than as the critique of capitalism from the point of view of labor.

I haven't gone though all of their notes, and I probably won't because it is a rehearsal of a lot of things I have read over the years.


That said, I appreciate their attempt to grapple with the present and to abandon orthodox Marxism and I am very sympathetic to their political conclusions, but they need to go rather further with their critique and oddly enough they will not get there without recovering Marx.

Some Notes on Things I've Been Reading

Reclaiming Work, Andre Gorz, 1999

This is an exceptionally interesting little book which affirms my conviction that Andre Gorz remains one of the most overlooked radical thinkers of the late 20th century.  I will post some notes on here as soon as I can transcribe them.


Interview with Anselm Jappe at the Brooklyn Rail

"Value cannot be created by decree, only by a real labor process—and it has to be “productive labor” in the capitalist sense (that means that it does not only consume capital but helps to reproduce it). Money can be created by decree—but when it does not correspond to the real amount of labor that it is supposed to “represent,” it has no “substance” and loses its value through some form of inflation (although for decades now the explosion of massive inflation has been deferred by parking large sums of fictitious capital in stock markets, real estate markets, and so on). Here the Critique of Value finds itself in sharp contrast to nearly all left-wing economists, who are generally just neo-Keynesians."

The point I put in italics is really what I find interesting vis-a-vis the notion of productive labor.  This is the clearest, most succinct reasoning as to why military production is unproductive, since military commodities cannot be used to reproduce constant or variable capital.  This is also why production of luxury goods for non-laborers is unproductive, unlike "luxury" goods consumed by potential laborers which goes toward the reproduction of labor power.

Adolph Reed Jr on Rachel Dolezal and "Selma"

I think these are two excellent articles on two related moments.

On the one hand, Reed argues acutely that the problem with Selma is a racial nationalism that has to distort history in order to promote a particularly communitarian identity politics.  On the other hand, we see the absurdity of racial essentialism and identitarian politics in the hullaballoo over Rachel Dolezal.

From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much

The Real Problem with Selma

Reed's critique of racial essentialism goes hand-in-hand with Gillian Rose's critique of contemporary neo-liberal capitalism as falling into two categories, libertarianism and communitarianism, a critique shared in many respects by Jacques Ranciere's Hatred of Democracy:

“By maligning all putative universality as ‘totalitarian’ and seeking to liberate the ‘individual’ or the ‘plurality’ from domination, both the libertarian and the communitarian disqualify themselves from any understanding of the actualities of structure and authority, intrinsic to any conceivable social and political constitution and which their opposed stances still leave intact.  the libertarian argument presupposes formal-legal rationality, just as the communitarian argument presupposes traditional rationality; both are types of legitimising domination as authority.  Politics begins not when you organise to defend an individual or particular or local interest, but when you organise to further the ‘general’ interest within which your particular interest may be represented.” [Italics mine - CDW]

Politics is thus a leap of faith, in two senses: a leap of faith that one might somehow further the general interest, and a leap of faith that one might know what the general interest is.  It is therefore also a leap outside oneself, a seeing the furthering of oneself only in the furthering of another.

I don’t think that this general interest is per se expressed in the state, but it may be represented in the state, and this is the critique of representation.  However, the critiques of representation below are the libertarian and the communitarian: that the individual is beyond representation and at the same time that the group is beyond representation, that is, the singular and the particular severed from the universal.  The critique of representation may be a critique of the state, but it can also be the critique of the possibility of a general interest, with the possibility of governance, as such and a refusal to take responsibility for such a general interest as opposed to individual interest or group (‘community’) interest which only exist within the universal or general interest.  Rose’s critique of the critique of representation is this kind of critique of representation.

p. 4-5

“As a result of this shared refusal to take responsibility for what Weber called the ‘legitimate violences’ of modern politics, libertarianism and communitarianism require other agencies to act on their behalf.”  

“Libertarian extensions of the right of ‘individuals’, the right to purchase and consume goods and services, presuppose and widen the already unequal distribution of opportunities and resources within a capitalist society.  Extension of individual rights amounts to an extension not an attenuation of coercion: it calls for a reinforcement of the police function to contain the consequences of inequality.” [Italics mine - CDW]

This latter is neo-liberalism in a nutshell.

“Communitarian empowerment of ‘ethnic’ and gender pluralities presupposes and fixes a given distribution of ‘identities’ in a radically dynamic society.  ‘Empowerment’ legitimises the political tyranny of the local or particular community in its relations with its members and at the boundary with competing interests.  It is the abused who become abusers; no one and no community is exempt from the paradoxes of ‘empowerment’.

This is of course the politics of representation at another level: “The X ‘community’ needs an X leader because no not-X can possibly speak for/represent the interests of the community they are by definition not a member of.”  This of course also assumes that X identity is the primary or driving identity of a person, Rose’s point being that no one identity is ever adequate, nor are we simply an assemblage of identities with given weights, hence her comment on “a radically dynamic society”.

p. 5

“In their abstract and general opposition to the state, power, rationality and truth, libertarianism and communitarianism directly and indirectly aid and abet authoritarian power of control.  They do so directly, by disowning the coercive immediacy of action legitimated, and indirectly, in the way the stance at stake disowns the political implications of legitimated violence and re-imposes the burdens on agents and agencies of the state.  These reversals in the planned reconfiguration of power arise from the attempt to develop normative political alternatives to the modern state without any preliminary analysis of the actualities and possibilities for freedom and justice.  Any account of ‘freedom’ and ‘justice’ is deemed to depend on the ‘metaphysics’ of truth.  When ‘metaphysics’ is separated from ethics in this way, the result will be unanticipated political paradoxes.” 

Baltimore in Flames

I wrote this for the German weekly Jungle World.

               Baltimore became the center of national attention in April because of the events surrounding the killing of Freddie Gray by the police while he was in custody on April 19. Freddie Gray's death became the focal point for local, city-wide demonstrations that became larger and more militant in the week following Freddie Gray's death, until on April 25^th there was a dual confrontation between demonstrators and bar crowds downtown and then demonstrators and the police, which ended in some property damage and the arrests of a handful of protesters.

Freddie Gray and Baltimore's West Side

               Freddie Gray lived on the near west side of Baltimore, in a poor black neighborhood like many others in the U.S. In the post-WWII period, in part thanks to industrial expansion and in part thanks to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, it seemed as if there might be a break with the old world of racial oppression grounded in the split between unfree black labor and free, waged white labor, which had begun with chattel slavery and continued with segregation. However, this break was not to lead to liberation from racialization. Capital flight and de-industrialization were already breaking up the post-WWII capital-labor productivity-wages agreement, leading to an increasingly generalized contingency of workers to access to waged work. This economic shift combined with white flight from the city to the suburbs meant that wealth production and taxable income left the cities. This dual movement re-instantiated racial division on a new basis, where black people became non-labor, radically contingent to wage labor, and the inhabitants of de-industrialized, impoverished urban areas. As these conditions progressed from the late 1960's to the 2000's, the underground economy based on the drug and sex trades expanded exponentially and the state responded with the militarization of the police and increasing incarceration of black people. Gentrification that began in the 1980's in some cities (in Baltimore only in the 2000's) only intensified the divide, justifying even more militarized policing.

               The police in Baltimore therefore were not doing anything new when they arrested Freddie Gray because he ran away when they rolled up. Nor were they doing anything new when they bent him like a pretzel during the arrest, broke his spine while in transit to the police station, and lied about it on their arrest report. The murder of Freddie Gray by the police is the latest in a long line of incidents.ⁱ The city of Baltimore has paid out approximately $6 million in settlements over the past four years to avoid criminal prosecution of Baltimore City police officers. According to the Baltimore Sunⁱⁱ, this is because “more than 100 people have won court judgment or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil rights violations.” On a national scale, the closest count seems to be from the Bureau of Justice Statistics reportⁱⁱⁱ in the Justice Department, which reported more than 4,800 “arrest-related” deaths from 2003 to 2009. Black people were just under 4 times as likely to die in custody as white people and almost twice as likely as Latinos. ProPublica did an analysis of the data from 2010-2012 and determined that in that period, young black men aged 15-19 were 21 times more likely to be killed by the police than young white men in the same age group.^iv These numbers, as bad as they are, are based on very incomplete data sets.

Daily Protests

               From the day of Freddie Gray’s death on April 19^th, there have been daily demonstrations attended by hundreds and, by the 25^th, thousands of people from all walks of life.^v The first real violence took place on the 25^th in the evening near Camden Yards where the Baltimore Orioles baseball team was playing. There was a combination of some protesters ready for a fight, mixed with a series of hostile, racist provocations from drunken white sports fans^vi and cops all too willing to use any misstep as an opportunity to wade into the protesters and arrest people. The mainstream media coverage only focused on the “violence” of the protesters, who had done little more than break some windows and “loot” a 7-Eleven convenience store. Arrested protesters, on the other hand, reported being maced while in the holding cells by officers.

A Provoked Riot^vii

               The events that have become the focal point, the riots on Monday April 27^th, actually had a somewhat indirect relationship to the protests. The conditions that led to the events on Monday were effectively created by the actions of the police.

In response to items posted on various social media that there should be a “purge”^viii at Mondawmin Mall, a very poor city mall near where Freddie Gray lived and died. The mall was closed down and the students at Frederick Douglass High School across the street were let out early. Many students told teachers they wanted to get out of the area before anything crazy happened. However, instead of letting students get on buses and disperse, the police department re-routed buses away from the school, and took passengers off of the buses that were leaving the area, and effectively forced the students to stay in the neighborhood face to face with 200-300 hundred police in riot gear, who then moved on the students.

After a considerable amount of tension had built up, the students began to throw things at the police who had herded them into a corner. Once the dam was breached, all of the anger was released in a running battle that lasted well into the evening, eventually centering around the CVS drug store at Pennsylvania Ave. and North Ave. Over a dozen police were hurt and around 200 people were arrested. Approximately 15 buildings were burnt, and some looting took place, though not as much as you would think since there aren’t a lot of places to loot there.

Not only was the police role the riot not reported, but all we have heard from the Democratic President to far right-wing bloggers to Baltimore’s Democratic mayor is how horrible it was that these “thugs” destroyed property and hurt cops, but no recognition that the cops killed Freddie Gray; how the protesters ought to be peaceful even though this completely misrepresented the protesters as the same people as the rioters in order to discredit the protests; how black people have no right to be angry about police violence and institutionalized poverty and discrimination because “they” burned down a chain drug store.

However, the defenders of the protesters and rioters were often as unsatisfactory. Some of the anarchist-inclined Left, seduced by images of “riot porn”, uncritically read the riots as a kind of pure resistance, never mind the problematic celebration of destruction in “those people's” neighborhood under the assumption that “they” have “nothing” anyway, a view by no means shared by many people in the neighborhoods where rioting happened. The more progressive local politicians recognized a crucial “socio-economic dimension” to the protests and riots, but of course cannot account for this “dimension” as intrinsic to capital and so they can't really say why this “dimension” persists seemingly without end. The traditional Left called for “workers' solidarity” under the idea that “the race problem” is really only a “class problem”, as always unable to reckon with the irreducible specificity of racial domination. Finally, the largest Left-liberal milieu, espousing a politics of “white privilege” falls into line with Black Nationalist politics in hypostatizing racial differentiation. On the one hand, this politics cannot but offend a large layer of working class whites who in no way feel privileged in the age of capital's precaritisation of all labor, and on the other hand it provides cover for black middle class opportunism in the name of sublimating radical critique to obedience to “the leaders” of “the community”. It disarms radical critique in the face of the politics of ressentiment, of “white victimization”, which is frequently strongest among whites most likely to be economically and socially punished for close proximity to black people (e.g. the real estate industry really does drop property values in neighborhoods where black people move in, so poor whites who have scraped something together frequently draw the conclusion that the problem is black people, not a racist capitalism, the latter being much harder to do anything about.)

Solidarity Actions

On Monday night a state of emergency was declared and the Governor sent in National Guard troops to assist the police in maintaining “order”, that is, in maintain a situation in which poverty, state sanctioned murder, and business as usual is met with compliance. This has been phenomenally successful in stopping all tourism and business activity in the downtown area, but not the activity of protesters.

Despite the blockading of some neighborhoods by the police, with no logic other than to cut them off from the rest of the city, hundreds of people from all over the city came out to help clean up the area where the riots took place. Parents brought their children to talk with them about what was going on and why. Gangs called a truce (not to facilitate murdering police officers, as the Police Department claimed) in order to help stabilize the city. By the end of Tuesday night, it was also clear that those people from around the city were key in keeping the police from provoking new riots because the police started using tear gas and shooting pepper-spray bullets at people in certain neighborhoods, with seemingly little provocation.

It has also been great to see solidarity demonstrations in Seattle, New York City, Chicago, and other cities, but we also need to understand that these are not just acts of solidarity. These demonstrations are acts of resistance because Staten Island is Ferguson is Baltimore is America. The brutality of the police in relation to these demonstrations has been higher than normal, as have been the number of arrests.

An Indictment!?

               No doubt the most singularly surprising outcome of all this was the actual indictment, on May 1, of the six police officers involved in Freddie Gray's death. This probably would not have happened without the constant pressure of people in Baltimore and around the country in the last year.

               As a result, the demonstration on Friday, May 1, was both surprisingly large (I would estimate at its peak somewhere around 4,000 people) and extremely well-received. We marched from downtown, surrounded by heavily armed police and National Guard units, with armored military vehicles, up to the neighborhood where the main rioting took place and back into the downtown area. Support on the way out was generally positive, but it was hard not to cry as we entered the community around Pennsylvania and North. There were already hundreds of people out in their cars blocking the streets, “Justice for Freddie Gray”, “No Racist Police” and all manner of other slogans on people's cars, posted on buildings, etc., but neither they nor we had any idea that these two demonstrations would come together. People on all sides cheered, got out of their cars and hugged marchers, honked their horns in support, took pictures together, marched together. Small children no more than 6 or 7 years old stood on top of cars, fists in the air, high-fiving people who walked by.

               Saturday, a similar march went to back, but this time instead f marching on, they stayed and literally held a street festival, with people dancing and carousing and paying no heed to the barriers that normally break people apart. This, much more than the very male-centered, adult riot, is what the powers that be should fear. This was a festival, however brief, against oppression. There were no “revolutionary heroics” to be found here, but something profoundly auguring a different future.

i http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/08/police-shootings-ferguson-race-data, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/08/police-shootings-michael-brown-ferguson-black-men,

ii

http://data.baltimoresun.com/news/police-settlements/

iii

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/average-of-one-person-a-day-killed-by-police-but/article_36b96a29-3267-5cc8-aa51-046d7744ea52.html

iv

http://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white. Given the limits of the data and its reliability, the difference could in fact be anywhere from 10-40 times more likely.

v Estimates for the April 25^th March vary from 1200-5000 people.

vi

Journalist Brandon Soderberg, who was there and who intervened in one instance, relates what actually happened here.

vii http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/how-baltimore-riots-began-mondawmin-purge

viii “The Purge” is a fictional film (now with a sequel) about the seizure of power by a right-wing government in the U.S. and how that government institutes a “purge” one night a year, in which everyone can commit any sort of crime they want, including murder. Hence the reference of “purging”.

Thoughts on Varoufakis

This is a very interesting article by the finance minister of Syriza, Yanis Varoufakis.  It makes me think that we should be very keen on what is happening in Europe.

I am currently reading this article and his book, The Global Minotaur, which has a perspective towards the dollar and US double debt exploitation (trade deficit and budget deficit) related to being the currency of record still, not unlike Michael Hudson's less Marxist Super-Imperialism. 


"Europe’s crisis is far less likely to give birth to a better alternative to capitalism than it is to unleash dangerously regressive forces that have the capacity to cause a humanitarian bloodbath, while extinguishing the hope for any progressive moves for generations to come."
One of the few antidotes to this view is his own Party's coming to power in Greece (Syriza) and the rise of the left populist Podemos in Spain (http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/01/02/new-left-europe-austerity-gives-rise-new-political-parties).  However, I think on balance his point remains valid.
This is, however, a slippery slope:
"It is a confession intended to convince radicals that we have a contradictory mission: to arrest the freefall of European capitalism in order to buy the time we need to formulate its alternative."
"A radical social theorist can challenge the economic mainstream in two different ways, I always thought. One way is by means of immanent criticism. To accept the mainstream’s axioms and then expose its internal contradictions. To say: “I shall not contest your assumptions but here is why your own conclusions do not logically flow on from them.” This was, indeed, Marx’s method of undermining British political economics. He accepted every axiom by Adam Smith and David Ricardo in order to demonstrate that, in the context of their assumptions, capitalism was a contradictory system. The second avenue that a radical theorist can pursue is, of course, the construction of alternative theories to those of the establishment, hoping that they will be taken seriously.

"...wealth is collectively produced and then privately appropriated through social relations of production and property rights that rely, for their reproduction, almost exclusively on false consciousness."


"Both of them, in addition to their other errors (and, indeed, crimes) failed, to their detriment, to follow Marx’s lead in a crucial regard: instead of embracing liberty and rationality as their rallying cries and organising concepts, they opted for equality and justice, bequeathing the concept of freedom to the neoliberals. Marx was adamant: The problem with capitalism is not that it is unfair but that it is irrational, as it habitually condemns whole generations to deprivation and unemployment and even turns capitalists into angst-ridden automata, living in permanent fear that unless they commodify their fellow humans fully so as to serve capital accumulation more efficiently, they will cease to be capitalists. So, if capitalism appears unjust this is because it enslaves everyone; it wastes human and natural resources; the same production line that pumps out remarkable gizmos and untold wealth, also produces deep unhappiness and crises.
"Marx’s first error – the error of omission was that he failed to give sufficient thought to the impact of his own theorising on the world that he was theorising about. His theory is discursively exceptionally powerful, and Marx had a sense of its power. So how come he showed no concern that his disciples, people with a better grasp of these powerful ideas than the average worker, might use the power bestowed upon them, via Marx’s own ideas, in order to abuse other comrades, to build their own power base, to gain positions of influence?"

My view on this dilemma has always been that the powers that be are never perturbed by theories that embark from assumptions different to their own. The only thing that can destabilise and genuinely challenge mainstream, neoclassical economists is the demonstration of the internal inconsistency of their own models."

This is a rather succinct explanation of immanent critique entails and why it is more valid politically as well as philosophically.  To paraphrase Adorno, this society wishes to be judged by the character of its enemies, rather than by its own character, but it is only in showing how it fails on its own (immanent) terms can it really be undermined.  In terms of such, one does not counter falsehood with fact, but has to show that the truth content and the form of that content are also false, insofar as they are the ideas (the concept) of an untrue actuality.  Thus current economics, as Varoufakis points out in his book, cannot speak truthfully of its assumptions because to do so would undermine its assumption that the world is the way it must be, and that that is good.

"If workers and employers ever succeed in commodifying labour fully, capitalism will perish. This is an insight without which capitalism’s tendency to generate crises can never be fully grasped and, also, an insight that no one has access to without some exposure to Marx’s thought."

This is interesting.  He seems to have in mind that if human beings were actually reduced to mechanisms, they would have no capacity for surplus.

"For a start, a society of dehumanised automata would resemble a mechanical watch full of cogs and springs, each with its own unique function, together producing a “good”: timekeeping. Yet if that society contained nothing but other automata, timekeeping would not be a “good”. It would certainly be an “output” but why a “good”? Without real humans to experience the clock’s function, there can be no such thing as “good” or “bad”.

If capital ever succeeds in quantifying, and subsequently fully commodifying, labour, as it is constantly trying to, it will also squeeze that indeterminate, recalcitrant human freedom from within labour that allows for the generation of value. Marx’s brilliant insight into the essence of capitalist crises was precisely this: the greater capitalism’s success in turning labour into a commodity the less the value of each unit of output it generates, the lower the profit rate and, ultimately, the nearer the next recession of the economy as a system. The portrayal of human freedom as an economic category is unique in Marx, making possible a distinctively dramatic and analytically astute interpretation of capitalism’s propensity to snatch recession, even depression, from the jaws of growth.

When Marx was writing that labour is the living, form-giving fire; the transitoriness of things; their temporality; he was making the greatest contribution any economist has ever made to our understanding of the acute contradiction buried inside capitalism’s DNA. When he portrayed capital as a “… force we must submit to … it develops a cosmopolitan, universal energy which breaks through every limit and every bond and posts itself as the only policy, the only universality the only limit and the only bond”, he was highlighting the reality that labour can be purchased by liquid capital (ie money), in its commodity form, but that it will always carry with it a will hostile to the capitalist buyer. But Marx was not just making a psychological, philosophical or political statement. He was, rather, supplying a remarkable analysis of why the moment that labour (as an unquantifiable activity) sheds this hostility, it becomes sterile, incapable of producing value."

I think Varoufakis is here struggling towards something akin to Moishe Postone's contention that value (not merely surplus value) is a social form, a human social relation, in which the dynamic between objectively dominated, waged living labor and objectively dominating, money-shaped dead labor forms the capital relation in its totality.  Without living labor, the value form and capital itself cease to be.  However, Varoufakis on p. 30 of his book seems to see consent as taking place in distribution, and thus I will be watching to see (I have a long way to go) if his critique of capital remains at the level of distribution rather than at the core of production.  Moments like this in the essay point towards the latter"

The problem of capitalism is not private appropriation, but that labor is itself, and thus the whole of "modern" production, a relation of domination.

The eventual reference to Kalecki is interesting and potentially illuminating.  Kalecki went down a road not unlike that of Sweezey and Baran in the U.S.

This is an especially good point:

Having failed to couch a critique of capitalism in terms of freedom and rationality, as Marx thought essential, social democracy and the left in general allowed the neoliberals to usurp the mantle of freedom and to win a spectacular triumph in the contest of ideologies."

Raymond Geuss makes a similar point in his book Philosophy and Real Politics and it is one we should beat every liberal and so-called Marxist with.

"Perhaps the most significant dimension of the neoliberal triumph is what has come to be known as the “democratic deficit”. Rivers of crocodile tears have flowed over the decline of our great democracies during the past three decades of financialisation and globalisation. Marx would have laughed long and hard at those who seem surprised, or upset, by the “democratic deficit”. What was the great objective behind 19th-century liberalism? It was, as Marx never tired of pointing out, to separate the economic sphere from the political sphere and to confine politics to the latter while leaving the economic sphere to capital. It is liberalism’s splendid success in achieving this long-held goal that we are now observing. Take a look at South Africa today, more than two decades after Nelson Mandela was freed and the political sphere, at long last, embraced the whole population. The ANC’s predicament was that, in order to be allowed to dominate the political sphere, it had to give up power over the economic one. And if you think otherwise, I suggest that you talk to the dozens of miners gunned down by armed guards paid by their employers after they dared demand a wage rise."

This covers much of the pettifoggery of "democratic deficit".  The political form is wholly inadequate to the task at hand, a point Marx made from the very beginning.

On the one hand, I think this is a fair accusation insofar as Marx over-estimated the objective, immediate revolutionary propensity of the proletariat of his day and the extent to which Marx intentionally curbed the making public of his own critique of his "best" followers.  His Critique of the Gotha Program did not see light when it should have.  His contempt for his German followers Liebknecht & Co. did not come to light publicly until much later.

On the other hand, it is not fair insofar as Marx did know their limitations and also reckoned against the limitations of the immediate prospects (the immediate subjective disposition or consciousness) of the organized working class.  This was clear in his decision with Engels to bury the International Workingmen's Association by sending it to New York City and his own letters to Engels and others regarding the limits of hat they could say in 1874 compared to what they had been able to say in 1848-50.

"Marx’s second error, the one I ascribe to commission, was worse. It was his assumption that truth about capitalism could be discovered in the mathematics of his models. This was the worst disservice he could have delivered to his own theoretical system. The man who equipped us with human freedom as a first-order economic concept; the scholar who elevated radical indeterminacy to its rightful place within political economics; he was the same person who ended up toying around with simplistic algebraic models, in which labour units were, naturally, fully quantified, hoping against hope to evince from these equations some additional insights about capitalism. After his death, Marxist economists wasted long careers indulging a similar type of scholastic mechanism. Fully immersed in irrelevant debates on “the transformation problem” and what to do about it, they eventually became an almost extinct species, as the neoliberal juggernaut crushed all dissent in its path."

I can't really agree with this one at all.  Marx's point was not mathematical models, but to try and grasp how the incommensurable and qualitative could be made commensurable and quantitative, in a sense, how capital was about equality of exchange and monetization.  Marx's critique has to come to terms with how everything can be expressed in that most universal, most meaningless of all forms, money.  This is key to Marx's critique of capital as social form.

It is hardly his fault that the leaders of the workers' organizations, good Lasalleans that they were looking for a fair day's wage and political equality, should have taken his critique of capital to be a manual of a "proletarian political economy" counterpoising good, productive labor to bad, unproductive appropriation.  Varoufakis himself seems subject to this error.

"In economic terms this meant a recognition that the market power, and thus the profitability, of capitalists was not necessarily reducible to their capacity to extract labour from employees; that some capitalists can extract more from a given pool of labour or from a given community of consumers for reasons that are external to Marx’s own theory."

Marx most certainly is aware of this, but if his concern is an adequate concept of the determinate social form, then he cannot start with the exceptions (one argument for why Marx could not, in Capital Vols. 1 or 2 as such, deal with other forms of labor or property.)  He must first have a concept of the determinate social form that allows other social forms to be gasped adequately.

His point on the immiseration thesis and Thatcher is spot on.

"A Greek or a Portuguese or an Italian exit from the eurozone would soon lead to a fragmentation of European capitalism, yielding a seriously recessionary surplus region east of the Rhine and north of the Alps, while the rest of Europe is would be in the grip of vicious stagflation. Who do you think would benefit from this development? A progressive left, that will rise Phoenix-like from the ashes of Europe’s public institutions? Or the Golden Dawn Nazis, the assorted neofascists, the xenophobes and the spivs? I have absolutely no doubt as to which of the two will do best from a disintegration of the eurozone."

The end of the article is very open and decent, I think.  I do not know that saving capitalism from itself is our task, but neither is reveling in immiseration, as if empty bellies led to revolution rather than counter-revolution.

At least he is not claiming to save capitalism in order to build a new working class movement like that of old.  I take his view to be that if we allows the world to fall into the abyss, the future will be bleak, not bright, and thus we have to somehow stop that slide into the abyss long enough for the idea that we could have a better world rather than a worse one to find a material form.

However, I don't think he engages radically enough with the problem that we don't really know what a way out might mean.  Maybe he can't, but I would like him to pose the problem a bit more sharply.

Chris

Tronti and Weber

I am just making a note here that I highly recommend the article "Workerisms' Inimical Incursions: On Mario Tronti's Weberianism" by Sara R. Farris, published in Historical Materialism 19.3.  Typically workerism, or operaismo as it was known in Italy, is taken as part of the New Left radical break with the orthodox Marxism of the day.  Operaismo laid the foundations for what would transform in the 1970's into autonomia and is today the ground for one wing of anti-political Marxism.  However the philosophical commitments of workerism have been largely under-analysed, not straying too far from a strict anti-Hegelianism and anti-dialecticial position most notably championed by Timparano and Colleti in Italy and Althusser in France (Althusser would later have a direct influence on theoreticisn of autonomia like Antonio Negri, though not per se on Tronti.)  Certainly, the connection between operaismo and Weber has been little explored and so we are indebted to Sara Ferris for doing just that.

This is important because for all of its claims to want to break with the stultifying influence of Orthodox Marxism, commitment to Weber ends up supplying a way for operaismo to reconcile itself with the right-wing shift of the 1980's and beyond.  There is a kernel of rapprochement in the very heart of Tronti's project that makes it suspect, and that allows us to see not the incoherence, but the fundamental coherence, of his drift back to a very statist Real Politik.

I highly recommend reading this alongside Marcel Stoetzler's excellent essays on anti-Semitism and the foundations of sociology.

Value Critique and Politics... or Not

Elmar Flatschart, who writes for the journal Exit!, has recently produced some interesting materials available in English. The first item is actually a talk he gave sponsored by the Platypus Society on the connection, if any, between value-form theory or value critique and a communist politics. The second, which I will deal with in the next entry, is the essay “Critical Dialectics for the Social Sciences: Towards a Mediation of Critical Realism and Critical Theory” which suggests that Critical Realism 's (most famously put forward by Roy Bhaskar) treatment of philosophy falls prey to the same kind of limitation as analytical philosophy of science in treating philosophy as “an underlabourer and occasional midwife” of science. This treatment resonates with, but approaches the matter somewhat differently from, Richard Gunn's “Marxism and Philosophy” from Capital & Class #37.

In his talk on Marx and Wertkritik, Flatschart argues for a strict separation of Marxian critique as “the abstract critical theory of society... from the contradictory practical attempts to overcome capitalism.” As he states early on, “There is no new program or a master plan for emancipation that can be developed out of the abolition of value. Rather, it can be seen as a condition of emancipation from value and the abstract system of oppression it represents.” Just because we understand the need to abolish value, labor and all the forms derived from the value-form does not mean that we have an actual politics deriving from this in practice. At most, we can say that the imposition of a direct form of domination is no replacement and that any attempt to overcome capitalism that leaves labor, and thus the value-form, intact, that is, production relations as social relations, we do not actually overcome capitalism.

There is thus a gap between the conditions of emancipation and actually producing new relations, emancipated human relations (Marx refers to it, in his references, as “association”, but it is in no way clear what this entails.) Flatschart believes that the outcome of the work begun by the Frankfurt School and then Hans-Georg Backhaus began to account for a new situation, in which “There is no one vanguard party but many situated politics; no one system of oppression that covers all, but an abstract notion of reified domination (verdinglichte Herrschaft) that realizes itself in various ways; and no one strategy for revolution, but contradictory relations that, although graspable only in the negative, we have to confront wherever we meet.” (italics mine)

And is there a political program? No, “There are neither programs nor utopias, only a hard laboring through these contradictions that we face in struggles, wherever they occur.”

He concludes with a summation that is very interesting:

“It is not the task of abstract critique of society to give you immediate steps to social revolution. Rather, it seeks to develop the most radical critique of society, but that project is in no way tied to an equally elaborated notion of revolution. That was also a problem of older approaches that had this package-deal mentality, which was essentially politicist, as it proved to be with Lenin and the Marxist-Leninist tradition. As value-diremption critique sees it, revolution is not the task of the abstract critique of society; rather, revolution is the task of concrete theories of praxis and immanent political theories, which is different from and more complex than theorizing society. We need to keep those separate.”

If we pull this apart a bit (keeping in mind that is a talk and that therefore imprecision based on extemporaneous formulations are always possible), the whole comes into view.

The first sentence strikes me as utterly commonsensical, but it is by no means taken as such. The organized Left, whether referencing Lenin's fabled unity of theory and practice or simply following on from a liberal activism at best suspicious of and at worst utterly hostile to intellectual independence which might seek to disabuse it of its direct access to “obvious truths”, has little liking for such a view. Even some its best representatives in intellectual and academic circles, such as Adolph Reed, Jr., fall prey to this view (see my comments on the “Introduction” to Class Notes or better yet, read it yourself.) Nonetheless, I believe it is no accident that Marx highly valued those times when he could fall completely into his work without the distraction of immediate political engagements and certainly it would be even more difficult to find in Capital any directives to concrete political action or a road map from the present to the revolution, much less to its success.

The second sentence seeks to extend this point a bit, however. While most certainly the job is to provide, if not the most radical politically, then the most truthful critique of society, this so happens to be the most radical in the sense of going to the root. However, the next proposition rests somewhat on the verbs used, which are not unambiguous. I'm not sure what it means for a radical critique to be “tied” to an “equally elaborated notion of revolution.” The word “tied” assumes a lack of organic connection, and this is in fact what Flatschart has stated all along. Yet what would an “equally elaborated notion of revolution” entail? A blueprint? A model? If this is what he has in mind, I also find it unobjectionable, but the point itself needs elaboration. For example, he had previously noted that the critique of this society is largely negative. This negativity is not merely one which negates or even which refuses, but one which is open-ended. It admits of no certain end, no pre-given expiration date, no necessary progression of stages, but it also takes critique as internal, that is, the critique follows from the internal limits, the self-contradictions, of society itself. That critique now must encompass not only what Marx specified in his day, nor Lenin, Luxemburg, or Gorter in theirs, nor Mattick, Debord, or Camatte in theirs. We must renew that critique for our time and add to it those things which have failed, even the most cherished.

However, this renewal is not, and here my objection begins, abstract. The Marxian critique is never abstract, even when it is most completely categorial. If it were abstract it would run into the problem that Hegel repeatedly notes in the Phenomenology of Spirit: it would be inessential, and that which is inessential cannot get to the root, cannot possibly be radical. Critical theory is obliged to make a concrete critique of society, that is, one which takes up the changes in the phenomenal forms of capitalist society. It is not enough to critique capital, it requires that we take up the modes of existence of capital at a given moment. As the concrete is the outcome of many determinations and the abstract is abstract precisely because of its lack of adequate determination, it is necessary, for example, to reckon with the actual determinations of value, money, market, and so on. (This is of course what I find so critical in the work of Hans-Dieter Bahr, Serge Mallet, Andre Gorz, the Italian operaists and the like vis-a-vis the labor process.)

If what we have then is not an obligation to an abstract critique, but to a concrete one, however categorial, does that change our relationship to praxis? This depends on what we mean by praxis, or rather who we think has a praxis. The praxis of the intellectual is critique and its renewal. What seems more difficult to specify is a programmatic praxis that might apply to an organization, vanguard or mass, laying claim to a project of consciousness raising and mobilization. The assumption is that there is a political object with political interests, a positive class in need of organizers to tell it its historical mission and immediate interests. If the proletariat is indeed a negative class, that is a class that is no class, that has no interests that can be satisfied within the capital-labor relation, but only through the abolition of its own existence and the existence of said relation, then it would seem that a programmatic praxis is a categorial mistake.

It may be that there was a moment in which liberation seemed possible as the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship in the sense of a proletarian state (councils, soviets, or even of the vanguard party under specific circumstances), and, sooner or later, the establishment of worker's control of production. However, for a variety reason outside the scope of these notes, the period in which the working class, appearing as an estate defending its interests as an estate, existed in this position and in this manner has irrevocably passed. If in working out the concrete critique of society under these conditions, we can't draw any practical conclusions then maybe the problem is not necessarily a the absolute diremption of a critique of social forms and “concrete theories of praxis”. Maybe this diremption is just a dualistic split between a properly negative critique and an opportunistic positivism in politics? More likely the result will be less an opportunistic political action of its own than an apology for the political practice of others, such as John Holloway's uncritical support of the EZLN and Subcommandante Marcos.

This is ultimately my concern because I do not hold out much hope of large “working class parties” of the old sort because the predicates of their existence are gone. This in no way relieves us of the practical critique of “the Left” such as it is in its morass of opportunism and adventurism, nor of actual movements as they come into being, peak, and fade away.

On the overall point that the critique of society does not tell us what an emancipated humanity will look like, I believe Marcel Stoetzler has put forward a similar proposition in a very interesting fashion in his talk from the 2011 Historical Materialism Conference in New York City, NY, USA.

In his words:

“Communism does not automatically follow out of the inherent contradictions of the capital relation. It emerges only as a potentiality, as one of the options; in other words, communism is born out of freedom not out of necessity. Freedom is what communism essentially is. In other words, the abolition of capitalism creates a chance that we have the freedom also to spoil. Only because we can spoil it we can also make communism, and we already make some communism, as that Blochian present absense, because mostly we don’t. In other words, we have two historical tasks: task 1, the relatively easy task of abolishing capitalism (a rather precarious, vulnerable, derivative, dependent, long doomed, idiotic, arrogant and irrational structure, still extremely dangerous, perhaps more dangerous than ever, but on its way out) and the much more difficult task 2 of creating communism.”

However, he notes that we actually can distinguish between practices that are prefigurative of a better world, but not likely to help bring down capitalism; to articulate the critique and rejection of reactionary opposition to (aspects of) capitalism by asking “is it bad for capitalism?” and “is it good for communism” and a third level of “if it is bad for capitalism is it at least not bad for communism?”

Quite wittily, he then delineates the following:

“It allows us to argue that strategically we should be very enthusiastic about actions and practices that earn two ticks (bad for capitalism, but good for communism), we should be reasonably enthusiastic about those that tick one box, i.e. that are neutral in terms of destroying capitalism but good for communism, or neutral in terms of communism but destructive of capitalism, and we should somewhat more quietly and discretely enjoy those that are good for capitalism but also good for communism (the category into which most of my favourite things tend to fall, I have to admit). We should very much oppose, though, all the various forms of managerial reformism, positivistic authoritarianism, conservative revolution, populism and fascism, in spite of the fact that they are revolutionary to the extent that they bring down the liberal and probably most productive and sustainable forms of capitalism, forcing capital into political and cultural forms that seem at most temporarily to be in the best interest of capital: the crap capitalism of countless shades of bolshevik, authoritarian and fascist regimes under whose surface unhappy capital dreams of morphing into shiny good-quality capitalism. Some comrades, well-trained in deciphering the ironies of history, might be tempted to applaud crap

capitalism because it is less than ideal for capital (although good for electrification and exterminating the peasantry, not very good at all at mobilising the collective creativity needed for long-term successful accumulation), but the all-decisive point for us is that it is disastrous for communism, amongst other things because it tends to reinforce the authoritarian character structures that liberal

capitalism produces in the first place but also partially offsets.

[Footnote: We don’t mention here the multitude of the socialists of the chair who applaud and promote crap capitalism as a superior form of capitalism that paves the fast track to communism. Their misapprehension of communism is obviously born from their misapprehension of capitalism.”

In this set of ruminations, we may actually engage with the politics of the present politically and not uncritically, and reliant on our critique of capitalism without which the preceding points make no sense.