Armed Cell

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM AUSTRALASIA is a one-day conference to be held in Central Sydney on Saturday 21 July 2012.

Website: http://historicalmaterialism2012.wordpress.com/

HM journal website: http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/

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Following the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis epitomized the prevailing attitude, summed up more brutally by Margaret Thatcher’s injunction that “There is No Alternative.” Twenty years on from Fukuyama’s assertion, liberal triumphalism has been battered by war, recession and political radicalization on the left and the right. In this context even Fukuyama has conceded that history does indeed have a future.

Karl Marx famously remarked that we make our own history, adding that we do not do so “under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”. Today, history is being re-made on the streets of the Middle East and North Africa, and now also across the Global North. These struggles will shape the world’s future. Yet they take place in conditions marked by protracted economic crisis, continuing wars and imperialist “interventions”, and the rule of the market over all of life. The reoccupation of the world’s streets, squares and commons is matched by the ever-increasing subordination of parliaments to the dictates of the market, witnessed most profoundly in the imposition of technocratic rule in Greece, Italy and elsewhere.

These events have seen Marx return to mainstream debate, but all too often in the form of having his insights cherry picked and reified in an attempt to rescue capitalism from itself. There is a need to go beyond such appropriation, to reestablish a living critique of political economy, to work towards the “determinate negation” of capitalism that Marx spoke of. Such a project requires raising questions about the meaning, the form and the very desirability of democracy in an era of growing technocratic rule. Similarly, as human rights provide a moral cover for wars it becomes necessary to interrogate the language of rights in contemporary political struggles. And, as revolution re-appears on the global stage, if in new forms hardly recognizable to revolutionaries of the past, it is clear that the categories of our political thought and practice must be subjected to renewed thought and debate.

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To facilitate this, Historical Materialism welcomes individual paper submissions and panel proposals that seek to contribute to this debate.

Please email paper abstracts of no more than 250 words and panel proposals of no more than 100 words to historicalmaterialism2012@gmail.com by Friday, April 13th.

Archival Masturbation

In the past few months I’ve had a couple of poems published in Cordite. They’re available here and here.

“a generalized stock-market quotation turned into a liturgy”

Television is watched because it is as real as possible … except for one thing: the only world it gives us non-stop news about … is the world seen from the viewpoint of power (just as one says ‘the earth seen from the moon’). That is its only reality. Without it, how would we know who has power and who doesn’t? Who’s worth what and who’s worth nothing? If the power men wield over each other is to be found at the intersection of economics and the sacred, then TV is a generalized stock-market quotation turned into a liturgy (which is itself quoted). That is really why we watch it, for about that, at least, it keeps us informed. About that, yes, but nothing else … That’s why we don’t respect it … Throughout this war there has been a missing image: that of Baghdad under the bombs. An image whose absence has obliged everyone to ‘imagine’ something, in spite of their opinions, their fantasies, or their memories of war movies … The furious energy involved in imagining what neither Bush nor Saddam wanted to show is one of the first effects of this ‘imageless’ war upon us guinea pigs. The more the video game took over, the more the growing abstraction of the targets filled us with dread. Was this out of compassion for the Iraqi people or because the cinema bequeathed those reflexes to us? And what if it’s the same thing?

- Serge Daney, ‘Obligatory Montage: The War, the Gulf, and the Small Screen’, quoted here.

Some quotes from Storming Heaven relevant to the conjuncture

The politically motivated subjective exercise of violence, it it is not to be a simple reflection of class behaviour already present in the social confrontation, needs legitimation. Not the formal legitimation of the state, or of legislation, which is ‘legitimated’ by the ferocity of its adversary, but a class legitimation. Such a class legitimation comes about when a credible political project of ‘changing the status quo’ meets with, roots itself in, and is recognised by, a significant element of the class.

- Mario Dalmaviva, ‘Hunger Strike by Political Detainee’, 1981, quoted in Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class composition and struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, pp. 147.

The working class is the only subject which interests us. Every other for of subjectivism is only an attempt to supplant the working class … the problem of milatrisation therefore is completely subordinate to the development of mass struggle and must be directed, even in its technical aspects, by the current form of the party (the mass organisations under working-class direction) … The military ‘specific’ is such only if it refers to mass struggle. To think of the militarisation of the mass movement in terms of von Clausewitz is worthy of facists.

- Potere Operaio, ‘Preparare l’insurrezione’, Potere Operaio 49, June 1972, quoted in Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class composition and struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, pp. 151.

Tracing Negri’s passage to this dismal point beyond both operaismo and Marxism is a depressing task. Behind the evident haste that has characterised much of his work, there lies what Negri himself would later concede as

this damning pretence, that runs through all our writings; it is the language of the Marxist tradition, but it carries a residue of simulation that creates a distorted redundancy.

Such and aberration stemmed from the peculiar mode of thinking which Negri had inherited from the father of Italian workerism, Mario Tronti, and honed to perfection, a mode of thinking which took its starting point from real social processes only to rapidly turn in upon itself. Seeking for his part to avoid such a fate, Marx had abandoned the dazzling heights of conceptual flight displayed in the Grundrisse for the sombre, but historically specific, passages of Capital. Unconvinced by such a choice, Negri might have done worse than to heed the advice of Tronti himself, who had once warned that ‘A discourse which grows upon itself carries the mortal danger of verifying itself always and only through the successive passages of its own formal logic.

-Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class composition and struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, pp. 175.

Ferocious Unilaterality

While the subsumption of all social relations to capital brought with it the generalisation of the wage relation, the advancing proletarianisation of new social layers assumed a mystified form. ‘When all of society is reduced to a factory, the factory – as such – seems to disappear’ and with it ‘labour-power itself as commodity’. This was only one of the topsy-turvy effects bound up with what Tronti called the social factory. No less important was the manner in which the state’s assumption ofthe role of collective capitalist took the semblance of ‘the possible of the political terrain from economic relations’. In Volume III of Capital, Marx had explained such obfuscations as inherent to the capital relation, and indicated as one of the functions of science the reduction of ‘the visible, and merely apparent movement to the actual inner movement’. For Tronti, this stripping away of phenomenal forms could only be achieved by examining ‘the state from the point of view of society, society from the point of view of the factory, the factory from the point of view of the workers’. Here, as before, can be found an echo of that Lukács who in 1919 had written that ‘the Marxist method, the dialectical materialist knowledge of reality, can arise only from the point of view of a class, from the point of view of the struggle of the proletariat’. On the other hand, there was no celebration in La fabbrica e la società’ of the arrival of social reality’s ‘full conciousness’ along with proletarian self-awareness. In its ‘ferocious unilaterality‘ Tronti’s class science was to be no less partial than that of capital; what it alone could offer, however, was the possibility of destroying the thraldom of labour once and for all.

- Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class composition and struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, pp. 38.

Shadows, Stones, Arrows

via Evan Calder Williams

In Which Marx Comes to the Aid of Robert Brenner

The class relation between capitalist and wage-labourer is thus already present, already presupposed, the moment that the two confront each other in the act M-L (L-M from the side of the worker). This is a sale and purchase, a money relation, but a sale and purchase in which it is presupposed that the buyer is a capitalist and the seller a wage-labourer; and this relation does in fact exist, because the conditions for the realization of labour-power, i.e. means of subsistence and means of production, are seperated, as the property of another, from the possessor of labour-power … Money can be spent in this for only because labour-power is found in a state of seperation from its means of production (including the means of subsistence as means of production of labour-power itself); and because this seperation is abolished only through the sale of labour-power to the owner of the means of production, a sale which signifies that the buyer is now in control of the continuous  flow of labour-power, a flow which by no means has to stop when the amount of labour necessary to reproduce the price of labour-power has been performed. The capital relation arises only in the production process because it exists implicitly in the act of circulation … It is not the nature of money that gives rise to this relation; it is rather the existence of the relation that can transform a mere function of money into a function of capital … If the sale of one’s own labour-power (in the form of the sale of one’s own labour, or the wage form) is no0t an isolated phenomenon, but the socially decisive precondition for the production of commodities … this fact implies the occurence of historic processess through which the original connection between means of production and labour-power was dissolved; processes as a result of which the mass of the people, the workers, come face to face with the non-workers, the former as non-owners, the latter as owners, of these means of production.

- Marx, Capital Volume II, pp. 115-116.

The Northwest Passage

Even during his most radical years, those during which the question of art appeared to have been abandoned, situationism, as a project of “total” communication, continued to maintain a connection with poetic desires, if not the oldest historically, then at least the oldest in the avant-garde. From this perspective, Debord’s ties to literature – which do not necessarily make him a writer – are all the more indisputable in that they were always present. He never made a choice between poetics and politics. Rather, he chose to articulate them, never abandoning one for the other but continuing to explore the passage that connects them, the ultimate Northwest Passage of the avant-garde. This is as true of the situationist period as it was for the lettrist period.

- Vincent Kaufmann, Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry, pp. 208.

The Negative Comes to Light

the negative in hiding

In In girum imus nocte, the Paris of May 1968 is evoked in a few sentences, and not a word is mentioned in Panegyric. Compared with the attention given to the clandestine years of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in these works, this is surprising coming from someone who presented himself as the most legitimate disturber of the public order. But the golden age of Saint-Germaine-des-Prés had been clandestine, unlike the events of May 1968. And later, what was needed was to rediscover that clandestinity and not continue May 1968 or yield to visibility, as some members of the SI wanted. Insurrection rises from the shadows and out of obscurity, far from the well-mannered Stalinist or Trotskyist organizers, which is why it must, of necessity, return to the shadows. It is the negative that comes to light, forseeable only by those who have already lived it (the only ones able to write about or predict it): “If many people did what we wrote, it’s because we essentially wrote the negative that so many others had experienced before us, and that we experiences as well.” Pro-situationists, try harder if you want to be obscure.

- Vincent Kaufmann, Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry, pp. 203.

The Rebirth of Beauty Under the Sign of Politics

Because beauty, in a sense, had to be total, it would be political or it would not be. The realization of authentic communication involves generalised subversion, through the suppression of the division of labor and all forms of specialisation, including artistic and political. This brings us back to our starting point in evaluation the impact of the Lettist International: art will be transcended totally or not at all. The break must be final. In other words, conceptions of the end of art are always conceptions of totality, for better or worse. This does not necessarily lead to totalitarianism, even if it were to occur. But it aims toward a principle of totality. It starts from the principle that there exists a totality that consitutes, in every sense of the word, the end of art once this is fated to destroy itself in an authentic form of communication. The authenticity and fullness of communication go hand in hand. Communication can only be authentic if it is based on openness, on what Breton called a language without reservations and without remainder (of which automatic writing was supposedly the embodiment). The end of art is not a book in which everything will be said (in the Hegelian sense), but a total book infinitely open and, therefore, no longer having the form of a book. It might be compared with Mallarmé’s impossible “Book,” made by and for everyone. It consists in the transition to the possibility that everything can be said, that everything can be said by and for everyone, in keeping with Isidore Ducasse, so often quoted by the situationists, who felt that poetry should be made by everyone and not by individuals.

- Vincent Kaufmann, Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry, pp. 158-159.