Capital Infection

Capital infects healthy cells, converts their purposes to its own ends, breaks up the healthy cell in order to reproduce and infect other cells.

"must be replaced"

"Economic relations cannot be addressed via political means, but must be replaced."
- swords cannot fight the fog

What is the meaning of this "must be replaced"?
What makes up the "Economic relations" in question?
Why must they be replaced?
Who makes this demand?
(With what authority? To what end?)

The demand - asked by an unknown speaker - seems implicitly based on a moral authority that we have no reason to attribute to her or him.
In which case, where does one locate the authority of this moral question?

Let us set up a theoretical stand-in for these demands: a misattributed quote, perhaps a fabrication, but no less urgent morally:
"The fact that there is no need for people to die of starvation and that people are dying of starvation is a fact of some importance one would think."

Why does this compelling moral case imply the must of replacement? And: what system is being attacked here, the actual system of economic relations or its ideal counterpart?

The system is necessarily responsible in some ways for the negative outcomes possible within it, as it allows for those outcomes. "Must be replaced" assumes that the replacement will relieve these problems - is this a realistic expectation?

The system of economic relations as it actually is shares little with the system as its presented (by its proponents as well as by its enemies). Is the ideal flawed [A], or its reality [B]?

This question proposes multiple distinct enemies: to A and B we must add C, the relationship between A and B. Certain structural conceits mediate the relationship between A and B in ways that are neither emanations nor contradictions of A. C is the group of independent phenomena that are combined with A in order to produce actuality. Let us add to this list D, the group of meta-phenomena that determines the frameworks of C. C and D are each dependent on previous historical situations in concrete but different ways (which ways?).

These questions should occasion a "return to zero," a reevaluation of the goals of any movement in relation to actuality.

The root of the "must", from zero, must itself be proven through an analysis of two systems: the ideal and the actual.

Any attacks waged against the problems of the actual should be considered as shifts rather than replacements. Certainly elements of the actual are to be maintained by virtue of their physical - rather than moral - necessity.
[Which begs the question: are our moral necessities in conflict with the possible realms of the actual? Is the revolution demanded by this "must" achievable in the world? Let us not fall into the traps of platonicity.]

If the problem is one of reality, then we should be careful to attack the system actually responsible. Attacking the wrong target is neither victory or defeat, but distraction - and therefore, further postponement of worthwhile struggle.

swords cannot fight the fog

Indirect tactics, efficiently applied, are inexhaustible
as Heaven and Earth, unending as the flow of rivers and streams;
like the sun and moon, they end but to begin anew;
like the four seasons, they pass away to return once more.
- The Art of War

Capitalism's best defense is its diffuseness.
It has no locus of power outside of the concrete structural circumstances that create it.

Economic relations cannot be addressed via political means, but must be replaced.
How, then, to accomplish this?

The present forms of economic relations are one method of organizing freedom. These forms present possible points of attack on a structural basis only when oppositionary forces use their own weapons against them. Markets can and must be turned against Capital in favor of new forms of freedom.

questions on Kautsky

where to begin:
The Intellectuals and the Workers
by Karl Kautsky


isn't the changing structure of class relations under capitalism de-proletarianizing the First World, creating more intellectuals than proletarians?
how does this impact the process and goals of 'revolution'?

is the Third World now being proletarianized as it is better integrated into capitalism?
is this process a step toward their own intellectualization, or not?

what is the significance of an increasingly intellectual society, and what relationship does it bear to class relations as understood by [Marx]?




(Chabert on Nietzsche and the latter half of Kautsky's essay)

collaborationism is a default position

The media collaborates with dominant ideological forms largely out of laziness

Revolution is an ACTION

THE NEXT CHAPTER REMAINS TO BE WRITTEN...

THE NEXT CHAPTER REMAINS TO BE WRITTEN...

The next chapter is not yet written, we are living it (internal economic questions, political discussions, education, library, invitations to specialists, meetings, etc...) with all the others in the factories, in the universities, in the neighborhoods; we are carrying on the movement.

- Maine-Montparnasse Neighborhood Action Committee, 1968

Autonomous capital

The laws of the market are the owners of the means of production. Capital has become an autonomous force. Transgression of the demands of autonomous capital is impossible.

The concrete circumstances that set the character of market laws are those which create the demands of autonomous capital and determine the nature of all class relations. These circumstances should be the target of our opposition.

inextricably tied

Practically all the spare money in the country consists of a mass of rent, interest, and profit, every penny of which is bound up with crime, drink, prostitution, disease, and all the evil fruits of poverty, as inextricably as with enterprise, wealth, commerical probity, and national prosperity. The notion that you can earmark certain coins as tainted is an unpractical individualist superstition.
- George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara

organizational tools

To the Union Leader, union members are a means of production.
To the Party Leader, party members are a means of production.
To the War Machine State, soldiers are a means of production.

“One never escapes the economy of war” — Jacques Derrida

The "Leadership" of the Union, the Party, and the State traffic in the same fundamentally fictional myths of futurity. Each relies upon the apparition of (class) struggle to maintain ownership of the means of production.

If the war machine does not have war as its object, then what is its object? Deleuze and Guattari face this question at the end of the nomadology treatise. They come to the following, curious qualification: that there are two types of war, one “real,” and the other only the “pure Idea” of war: “the distinction between absolute war as Idea and real wars seems to us to be of great importance....The pure Idea is not that of the abstract elimination of the adversary but that of a war machine that does not have war as its object and that only entertains a potential or supplementary synthetic relation with war” (ATP 420). It is important to understand how Deleuze and Guattari are using the term “Idea” here. It does not refer to Plato’s eidos, but to a non-positive condition of existence of the war machine: “an Idea, something real and nonactual” (ATP 420).
- Robert P. Marzec, The War Machine and Capitalism: Notes Toward a Nomadology of the Imperceptible

The "Leadership" of the "Movement" sees the Movement itself as another form of capital.

'Power' always develops in the direction of invisibility.

a new politics is practical and necessary

"May '68 demonstrates as well that spontaneous action can erupt quickly and surprisingly, that it can provide alternatives to standard politics, and that a new politics is practical and necessary. The initial inability of established Left political parties and unions to support the students and workers suggests the irrelevancy of politics as usual and the need to go outside of ordinary political channels and institutions to spark significant contestation and change. The Events also suggest the primacy of social and cultural revolution, of the need to change individuals, social relations, and culture as a prelude to political and systemic transformation. The total nature of the rebellion reflects the totalizing domination of the system which must itself be transformed if significant change is to take place."
- May '68 in France: Dynamics and Consequences

Leisure is a Means of Production

Ten Days of Happiness Already

Déjà dix jours de bonheur


Reflections on revolutionarism, etc.