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Title: Against the strategy Author: Humanaesfera Date: July 2016 Language: en Topics: class struggle, class war, Autonomy, critique, communisation, leftism Source: https://libcom.org/library/against-strategy-humanaesfera
There is nothing more fruitless and misleading than activism, militancy
or the craving for "action". To exist is to act. The proletarians are
not beasts who do things blindly or by instinct. There are no actions
without purposes, objectives, desires ... that is, existence (ie action)
presupposes and implies theories that the proletarians create and
enhance (or degrade and dogmatize) as their ability to act is
objectively increased (or decreased).
Let us explain:
The proletariat's capacity to act is increased when they trust
themselves (from an internationalist viewpoint), do not believe in
"scapegoats", impose the satisfaction of their needs (which are
communists: do not work and that everything be free, "gratuitous") and
oppose radically, by this simple act, the ruling class (for whom, of
course, this is "oppressive"); consequently, they attack power by
dissolving what supports it (the mutual opposition among proletarians in
enterprises, nations, race, gender, etc, fighting with each other to
defend their own masters) through a material universalism (communism)
which ensures free acess for anyone to the means of production and life,
the free and autonomous expression of human capabilities and needs. The
free individuality is no longer hindered by the reifying, identitarian,
massifying comparison that consists of competition, private property,
hierarchy, market and state.
On the other hand, the capacity to act is decreased when the
proletarians are wary of themselves (to the point of massacring
themselves by a simple request of the chiefs and powerful), are willing
to attack scapegoats (foreigners, "Jews" immigrants, "vagabonds," "slum
dwellers", "bad politicians", "bad businessmen"), and when they repress
their desires on behalf of fiction of a "greater good" (nation,
enterprise, ethnicity, ideology, religion ...), that is, when they unite
with "their" ruling classes (bureaucratic or private, of the left or
right) against themselves. The less they are able to act, the more they
surrender to the reaction.
In the first case (increased capacity to act), the theory necessarily
develops and is enriched, whereas in the second case (reduced capacity
to act), the theory can only degrade and dogmatizing.
The criteria in order to distinguish lies or rumors from truth,
speculative from probable, things that are true in some contexts and
false in others, what is based on mere faith from what is based on
evidence etc., these criteria are intrinsic expressions of the degree of
autonomy or heteronomy of the proletariat, of their self-determination
or their subjection to the ruling classes. In this regard, there are
three types of critique of capitalist society:
A) There is a criticism of capitalist society whose truth can be checked
materially by anyone in their everyday lives, worldwide, by any
proletarian: the critique of capital as a relation that forces us to
sell ourselves as useful objects in the labor market, which coerces us,
if we want to survive, to sell our capabilities in exchange for money,
which coerces us to exercise our capabilities against ourselves, making
the world a hostile force that accumulates, depriving us (private
property) of our own material conditions of existence, a hostile power
that dominates us, use us and discard us: capital and the repressive
apparatus that guarantees it (the state). Such is a critique of the
essence of capital, it is radical, and it invariably implies the
irrevocable need to abolish work, private property, the interprise, the
borders and the state, that is, effectively communism [1]. Detail:
requires no faith in "special sources of information."
B) There are other criticisms that require some "faith", as are the
partial criticism of the capitalism (which are basically social
democratic criticism: unequal distribution of income, planned
obsolescence, deterioration of living conditions, of the environment,
capitalists and bureaucrats circumventing laws, governments plotting the
overthrow of others ...) which are nothing more than criticism of
accidents of capital, not of its essence. While in the case A, the
proletarians are fully autonomous as to be able to verify the truth of
his knowledge (which expresses the matter of his own everyday life) and
act according to what they know, in case B, they must rely on experts.
Yet the truth of this criticism can be weighed in the everyday life (for
example, verifying in fact the worsening of living conditions, or not
verifying the planned obsolescence). But the less radical and more
partial is the criticism, since it is more "inaccessible", the more
require that the activity of proletarians submits to "higher spheres",
and less expresses an autonomous praxis able to oppose the capital in
order order to impose the satisfaction of human needs.
C) And there are criticisms of capitalism that only require faith, a
faith entirely based on "special sources of information", a faith that
is accepted on the basis of vague "psychological intuitions" or appeal
to feelings. For example, speculative criticisms (for example, those who
prophesy the "inevitable collapse of capitalism" as the new "critical
criticism" - Kurz, Postone, Jappe... -, the acceleracionism,
transhumanism etc.), conspiracy theories ("occult forces" that are
plotting the suffering and annihilation of the poor, the people or
nature) and identitarian criticisms (who claim an identity - gender,
race, ethnicity, nationality, culture - against other identities that
supposedly "represent capitalism"). In practical terms, these criticisms
requires complete submission, the complete annihilation of the ability
to think and to act of the proletarians, and the assumption as true of
any rumor or lie to confirm the "intuitive" prejudices (eg, the paranoid
lies about GMOs , chemicals, vaccines, medicine, science, natural
products, technology ... as many environmentalists propagate). The
supreme example is the religion itself, in which faith in the revelation
of an occult absolute truth requires total obedience to those who claim
to have special access to it (hence the word "hierarchy" of hieros,
sacred or secret, and arché , source, principle or order).
Some argue the case A, full autonomy, is insufficient because it is
abstract and philosophical, and we need the case B, because strategy is
needed (eg, "transition period"), which is even seen as more
fundamental.
But to talk about strategy only makes sense against a strategy of the
opposite side, that is, when there is a presumed counter-strategy. This
is not class struggle but a war of fronts, which implies a single chess
board, a single language, a single shared logic, implies both sides
confront each other as equivalents. In order to war against each other,
they need to be in the same plane, be based on the same structure,
position themselves in the same level, talk on equal terms. Hence all
counter-revolutions in all "victorious" revolutions that have existed,
since the same structures (domination, class society, state etc.) of the
enemy are reproduced in the name of attacking him.
The great virtue of the proletarians is that they, as an autonomous
class, can not attack the structure on the same level of the structure,
but as a product, as a resulting molecular production of their own
simultaneous everyday activity worldwide. If they attack the structure
on the same level of the structure, using a defined strategy, they are
condemned to reproduce their own subjection under the same or some new
ruling class, because their field of action, the universal simultaneous
everyday activity, is doomed to remain unchanged (work, self-sacrifice,
subjection ...) to carry out the strategy itself, reproducing
automatically, perhaps with new names, the same structures which
necessarily result from the alienated everyday activity.
As opposed to the ideology of the strategy, the proletarians can only
rely on their own autonomous capacity to act and think, boosted by the
rapid spread of their struggle worldwide. In the same act, they
communicate with each other worldwide the knowledge of how their
simultaneous daily activities interconnects (eg. according the place
where each is, the supply chains, the relationship between industry,
agriculture and the materials pathways for the free expression of needs,
desires, thoughts and capabilities of the residents and travelers of
world, etc.) [2], a knowledge that is simultaneous with the active
suppression of the material (molecular) conditions of existence of
private property, capital and the state and with the creation of a new
society in which the means of life and production, inextricably
interconnected worldwide in a network of immanent flows, become freely
(gratuitous) accessible to anyone who wants to meet his needs, desires,
thoughts, projects, passions, and develop freely their skills, abilities
and potentials.
An event like this, which disables the basis of the power of the ruling
class (businessmen, bureaucrats and the state), has from the very
beginning an incomprehensible and non-negotiable language with the
ruling class and the state, being in fact a dictatorship against them –
the true dictatorship of the proletariat. The ruling class not even have
time to begin to understand what is undergoing and can not devise a
strategy before the proletariat have self-abolished and thus abolished
the ruling class, the class society. Very different from that, activism
and militancy is characterized by showing off spectacularly to the
ruling class as "opposition". Obviously, the weapons of the ruling
class, the state, the death squads, etc. are infinitely more powerful
and refined than any "strategic opposition movement" [3], which
consequently is merely spectacle - only useful to the ruling class
rehearse their watchdogs and control methods, which, staging,
legitimizes the status quo itself as "democratic". And when it is not
staging, the "strategic opposition movement" is only the reproduction of
the structure to which seeks to oppose, as we saw in the preceding
paragraphs.
Obviously, the more reduced the capacity to act of the proletariat, the
less it can have the luxury to think for yourself, and more it can only
be the object of strategies, of bureaucrats, businessmen and politicians
who say they think and act for their "well," promising, for example,
reforms, improvements etc. So they say we must be realistic, that the
proletariat must do everything possible, voting, participating in
campaigns, militating, "trying harder", "sacrificing more " etc., in
short, participating in strategies. This is a mistake. For if there is
no autonomous struggle, it is sheer luck, and extremely unlikely to
occur any of the promised improvements; and if there is autonomous
struggle, it makes no sense to let us reduce as object of strategies.
The immediate side effect of the autonomous struggle is that all
bureaucrats, businessmen and politicians, in order to contain the
emergence of the proletariat as a class, pass finally to serve such
"improvements", but, of course, in the same dish of repression. The
point is the autonomy of the proletariat spread so quickly on a global
scale that makes it impossible to fall into this trap again.
The revolutions and counter-revolutions we have experienced in the past
300 years have shown us that the most destructive ideology for the world
autonomous struggle is that of the "practical examples". As soon as one
hears about a "revolution" anywhere in the world, ones abandons all
critical faculties and consideration for the truth, which then is
considered insignificant when compared the "real practical example of
how to transform the world". The reality of the example is considered so
complex that all criticism and search for truth is dismissed as
reductionist mental masturbation and utopianism. Abandoning the capacity
to think, this opens the way for a superstitious “taskism”, destroying
the autonomous struggle, whether by the imaginary fight that mimics the
appearance of spectacular example, whether by the acceptance of
subordination to bureaucrats considered representatives of the example
(as when the leninism spread in the world and destroyed the autonomous
struggle everywhere thanks to the "unquestionable reality of their
example," 1917 in Russia).
As an antidote, there is indeed a accurate minimum criterion to evaluate
each and every supposed example (as Kurdistan, Zapatistas, Russian and
Spanish Revolution etc): if a supposed revolution does not spread
quickly beyond the borders for the whole world (with the proletarians
opposing their oppressors in more and more places on earth and
constituting themselves as an autonomous class without borders, refusing
to kill in wars, turning their weapons against the generals on all
sides, communizeing etc.), if the supposed revolution is perpetuated
only in one place, this is enough in order to know that there is a state
and capital (regardless of the name that use, "self-management",
"socialism", "communism", "anarchism" ... ), ie a class society. By the
simple fact that, isolated, they are condemned to conform to exchange in
the world market, accumulating capital and exploiting the proletariat in
order to not to go bankrupt in international competition, and also
because they are doomed to be constituted as a state to ally himself, to
defend or attack other states.
humanaesfera, July 2016
[1] “It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the
whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of
what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it
will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is
visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well
as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today.” (Marx e
Engels, The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Criticism.)
[2] It is the class composition. For more details, see:
- Discussion paper on class composition - Kolinko
- The Network of Struggles in Italy - Romano Alquati
- The factory without walls - Brian Ashton
- Reality check: are we living in an immaterial world? - Steve Wrigh
[3] As opposed to the staging of the "strategic opposition," the only
way to suppress the repressive force of the status quo is by an
emergency so rapid and widespread of the autonomous proletariat (hence
of communism) that the ruling class not even find where start
repressing, so that their repressive watchdogs will no longer see any
point in continuing obedience, ceasing to be watchdogs, turning their
weapons against the generals and distributing weapons to the population,
for the simple reason they start to be uncontainably and irrepressibly
attracted, like the rest of the exploited, to the enthralling emergence
of generalized luxurious communism, the worldwide human community.