Friday 23 January 2015

Tinned chunks - an introduction to the rejection of everything through moments in the description of deep opposition (part 7 in an extended series)

The ongoing and calamitous decline of the ultra-left and its associate 'class struggle' milieu can be attributed to its failure to comprehend the significance of Camatte's comments on historical realisation:
Furthermore, the capitalist mode of production has realized Marx’s proletarian project. By remaining on a narrowly Marxist terrain, the proletariat and its theoreticians were outflanked by the followers of capital. Capital, having achieved real domination, ratifies the validity of Marx’s work in its reduced form (as historical materialism). While German proletarians at the beginning of this century thought their actions were destroying the capitalist mode of production, they failed to see they were only trying to manage it themselves. False consciousness took hold of the proletariat.
However, the problem is not simply the mislaying of a 'revolutionary subject' and the consequent state of incomprehension before capital's containment of the dynamics of class struggle. This is only a failure of 'position' in relation to larger forces which, by definition, is entirely understandable - it takes a global force to consciously process the significance of global forces at the necessary scale (the absence of quantities of communists severely restricts its capacity for theoretical quality.)

Of more significance, is an ongoing failure to reconnect with the visionary aspect of the human community, of being human, to adequately distinguish itself from the 'community of capital'. Most marxist communists still set the frame of reference for communism around the perceived imperative of a continued development of the forces of production where use-values and 'need' are realised as a dual central principle.

The failure here is referred to by Camatte in terms of not recognising an 'outflanking' event, by this he means that the reproduction of the species already has need and use-value realised as the central principle of production (and, by implication, this is the world that results where such a principle is dominant).

As communists have become increasingly preoccupied with conserving the material process which has become fixed as a sort of treasury of historical gains, they have increasingly forgotten that the human species is driven towards 'overcoming' the constraints of its conditions, and that it seeks to exist somewhere other than where it is (capitalism is infinitely more capable of manufacturing utopias of being elsewhere than are the communists which are supposed to antagonise it by presenting another possibility for humanity):
The human being is never a pure being-there. He can only be by superseding and he cannot be only that which has to be superseded (Nietzsche). Structurally and biologically man is a supersession because he is an overpowerful being. In other words, human beings are explorers of the possible and are not content with the immediately realizable, especially if it is imposed on them. They lose this passion, this thirst for creation — for what is the search for the possible if not invention? — when they are debased, estranged, cut off from their Gemeinwesen and therefore mutilated, reduced to simple individuals. It is only with the real domination of the capitalist mode of production that the human being is completely evacuated.
And nowhere is the human being so completely 'evacuated' (i.e. reduced to its productive function) than in the rationalising discourse of the communists - as pure ideology of capitalism. 

At the present moment, the ultraleft seems to have got caught up in three specific political traps from which it must extricate itself if it is to break away from the triviality of the political form itself - if it is to return to a utopian, and revolutionary, form. The first trap is the failure to sustain a critique of nationalism (i.e. against the projects of Kurds and Palestinians); the second trap is the failure to appropriately apply the critique of religion in the face of the ideology of 'islamism'; the third trap is the failure to develop an adequate critique (at the level of categorisation) of the 'intersectionality' ideology.


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