Friday 15 July 2011

War Communism as a state of grace; or further delvings into the Foundation Pit

Communism is not a historically specific phenomenon in the development of social relations. 

There are no requisite material conditions for communism other than the presence of a few human beings... communism is not the redistribution at its tipping point of historically specific post-scarcity resources.

For this reason communism has been a contingent possibility within society throughout human existence. 

However, the probability for the realisation of communism is diminishing. 

The opening in existence through which communist organisation might appear is  narrowing, not widening, as the question of material survival is being objectively settled by capitalist production. 

The question of adequate resources in relation to survival of the species is finally settled only where communism itself has become impossible. 

The communist individual no less than any other individual must be set within, and against, a landscape. He must not have to endure his existence being indexed merely to the background of others’ accumulated labour.  

The redistribution of capitalist wealth for the securement of continued survival, that is the ascendancy of the discourse of quantity over the question of living, makes amends for the absence of communism whilst closing the door on communist life forever. 

Communism is unthinkable where separated from the crises of existence.

Communism does not assume a turn towards higher things in a context of abolished scarcity. On the contrary, those endeavours undertaken within communised relations are directed entirely at the basics of production. However, such endeavours, and its objects, will be removed from drudgery by the touch by grace.

Communism is an unprecedented endeavour undertaken at a point where the matter of need is set at the same level as, and which cannot be separated from, the fulfilment of social and individual existence.  

Need cannot be structured but must be lived individually.

Communism is a structuring of the quality in human relations without reference to quantities of resources. It is not a means of rationalised provision. 

The likelihood of communism has continued to diminish up to the present moment in inverse proportion to the accumulation of forces of production. 

Communism may achieve its full articulation only as an urgently lived response to the eternal pressures of need that must appear within human existence as its essence.  

Communism is the optimal organisation of the entire extent and full history of human need. 

Where the opportunity for immediate ingenuity is reduced by the intervention of capital intensive technological fixes the possibility for fusing base need with radical departures is spoiled. 

Where direct activity does not make the crucial difference between life and death, the problem of society is being settled elsewhere. 

Communism does not settle the hazards of scarcity but reformulates them at a threshold where risks are gladly taken. 

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