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Title: Ediciones InĂŠditas Anthology Author: ediciones inĂŠditas Date: 2019 Language: en Topics: communism, anti-politics, anarchy, gentrification, Latin America, USA, Insurrectionary, communization, decolonization, anti-work, post-situationism, self-abolition of the proletariat Source: Retrieved on 2020-07-18 from https://prolewave.noblogs.org/post/2019/12/31/ediciones-ineditas-anthology/
Note on the font used for the ediciones ineditas logo and cover: this
font was recently popularized by White artist, Cali DeWitt when he used
this font for merchandise for Kanye West. This was a fontfirst used by
Chicanxs in the 80s, most notably on sweaters made to memorialize those
recently deceased, often by gang or police violence. Using it here is an
act of taking back what a White artist has appropriated for their own
financial gain & furthering of their career off of Chicanx pain and
cultural innovation.
Unless otherwise stated, the author of the work is Noche.
Works translated by Ediciones InĂŠditas are not included in this
compiliation.
What was intended as a small translation project among a few friends
grew into a thing whose reach somehow spilled across borders and
languages. To translate international radical texts which often go
unread by Anglophone readers due to a language barrier and which also
often go untranslated since they break with classical anarchist &
communist orthodoxy: the ultra-left with its impossible positions.
What this project proved is that there is indeed a deep interest in the
ultra-left in 2019 and which the spreading wave of proletarian revolt
will only deepen. We would often get messages expressing having not
previously heard of ideas such as the abolition of work, a vision of
anarchy & communism beyond worker self-management, the abolition of
money, a critique of democracy, communization, a critique of art, etc.
I can only hope that this project helped people understand this world we
live in and the way that some of us seek to radically transform it. I
also hope that it served as a nexus point where people could link up and
talk to each other across languages & borders: the kind of
correspondence we need more and more of these days.
To my Black, indigenous and other comrades of color: write, act & be
active in this world. Your thoughts & actions are more than ever needed
to clarify and deepen our positions against this world. Letâs vibe.
Unfortunately the project outgrew its ineditors and we decided to fold
instead of further burning out. But true to the ultra-left &
insurrectionary anarchist projectuality, this does not spell the end of
our activity. We continue on but in other capacities.
Most of the original essays written by me were written quickly, for
better or worse, and often as a reaction to something happening in the
world or in my life, hence their brevity. And as I wrote, and
translated, I learned more about what I desire and what I reject. We
learn by doing more so than through simple contemplation. I invite you
to attempt to write out your own dreams & nightmares. You may find
comrades who feel (or think) the same way as you and from that bonds can
form which can break this world.
North of Yangna,
Noche of the so-called Los Angeles Eastside
A recent wave of protest activity against climate change, and general
environmental degradation, has been seen around the world. But curiously
open revolt around the world has not centered around climate change
itself, but rather around circulation struggles: the name for struggles
that occur beyond the point of production; i.e. around the distribution
or consumption of commodities. These struggles largely have revolved
around the price of a commodity which is directly linked to climate
change: petroleum.
In 2017 Mexico went through the gasolinazo: a rise in the price of
gasoline (20%) due to then Mexican President Pena Nietoâs privatization
of the Mexican oil industry bringing about removal of price controls.
Riots, looting and blockades rocked the country. In 2018, the Gilets
Jaunes movement rose up and rocked France (& its territories) with
riots, looting and blockades. The spark: a rise in fuel prices due to
French President Macron leveling carbon taxes, as part of a plan to stem
climate change, put on the backs of rural proletarians that need cheap
fuel to get to work or go about basic errands since there is little
public transportation infrastructure in the French rural and semi-rural
countryside. In Haiti, fuel shortages and price harks have also sparked
open revolt, along with fighting a government which is openly-aligned
with U.S. interests. More recently, Ecuador has been gripped by an
insurrectionary, largely indigenous, wave that has also been set-off by
a rise in fuel prices: the president, Lenin Moreno, had planned to cut
fuel subsidies as part of an agreement with the International Monetary
Fund austerity plan as part of a loan to deal to with Ecuadorâs debt and
fiscal deficit (the plan has been recalled, halting the revolt for now).
In all cases, except Haiti, the price hikes have been addressed after
governments & national economies were rocked by proletarian revolt.
Comin Situ
Replying to @Breakaway_chi
We are witnessing the advent of mass struggles against climate barbarism
as imposed by fiscally desperate states on their proletarian and surplus
1:21 PM ⢠13 Oct 19 ⢠Twitter Web App
Now, if the proletariat around the world seems to fervently want fuel,
and at a low cost, what are we to make of the real need to address
climate change? The problem, as we see it, is that liberal
ecologically-minded individuals & groups typically conceptualize climate
change in the abstract (think of all this talk of humans going extinct),
whereas the proletariat reacts to climate change via its material
manifestations. Why? Because they have no other choice. In some parts of
the world proletarians are directly dealing with rising seas, but what
does this reality mean to proletarians in Forth Worth, Texas? The same
reason the proletariat does not produce communes or communism out of
some ideal, but out of a real material need. (Weâll address the role /
position of the radical later.)
Returning to the question of communism, we recall the words of Italian
insurrectionary anarchist, Alfredo Maria Bonanno:
âWe must counter the satisfaction of spectacular needs imposed by
consumer society with the satisfaction of manâs natural needs seen in
the light of that primary, essential need: the need for communism.
In this way the quantitative evaluation of needs is overturned. The need
for communism transforms all other needs and their pressures on man. â
Armed Joy (1977)
How then do we counter the spectacular needs imposed by this society?
First we should clarify that proletarians largely do not need fossil
fuels. This is an imposed false-need, just like employment (or some way
to get money) is an imposed false-need. Do proletarians need consistent
access to cheap gas if they live in a world where work has been
abolished?
The rise of circulation struggles we noted above open up the possibility
to demonstrate that the real need of the proletarians is not free, or
cheap, access to x, y, z commodity, but rather a world where our lives
are no longer dependent upon commodity-production itself. Abolition out
of need, not mere ideals. In Chile a fare hike, on top of an already
high cost-of-living for proles, has instigated a wholesale revolt
against the State, its brutal State-of-Emergency & capitalism in
general. High school students self-organized MASS fare evasions, which
others quickly joined in, and it was only a matter of time until the
whole country came to a halt. The struggle in Chile is also a
circulation struggle, but here the commodity in question is the price of
transportation. But as comrades in Chile have noted, part of their
struggle is not only against the fact that free movement comes at a
price, but that human life has further commodified on a class basis.
This is the link that Extinction Rebellion misses, and other idealist,
class-agnostic environmental movements as well. That the climate crisis
is a product of a certain set of coercive capitalist social relations
and not just bad management on behalf of our so-called representatives
in power. (Weâll get to more on Extinction Rebellion later on).
These circulation struggles are part of the beginning of a movement
against not only against Capital but also climate change. How? As part
of the course of circulation struggles giving way to open revolt,
proletarians will begin to realize through struggle our problem is not
merely the price (or lack) of fuel, but the fact that fossil fuel is a
commodity that is only as crucial to us in a world that moves at the
speed of Capital. All the cars on the roads with proles heading to jobs
they hate; all the fossil fuels burned to generate electricity for
content delivery networks bringing the latest non-news to smartphones
and the jet fuel burning in the sky for global commerce...is only
necessary for a world where Capital reigns.
The speed of human life was profoundly slower for much of what we can
call human history. And a return to a much slower speed would not only
be beneficial to arrest the causes leading to deepening climate change,
but it would do wonders for our mental & physical health. Work is
literally killing us and this world. Anti-work as de-growth, to use a
hip new term.
Responding to climate change as some sort of global, abstract thing
(i.e. human extinction) will likely not be the basis of the movement the
abolish the present state of things: i.e. communism. You can see where
that leads: groupuscules like Extinction Rebellion UK which openly work
with the police and call the police on those who exceed their notions of
protest / resistance. Whereas most racialized proletarians know that the
police are always our fucking enemy and never an idle, protective force.
Proletarians do not fight capitalism at a global, abstract level; they
fight it at their local level, but with an understanding of its global
nature.
Social democrats, and other State-agnostic Leftists, ponder State policy
to get us out of climate catastrophe: the Green New Deal. We see that
the State is inherently part of the climate catastrophe when the U.S.
military is itself the greatest consumer of fossil fuels.
Recently, Extinction Rebellion staged actions around London to halt the
London Underground, and specifically blocked a train at Canning Town (a
working-class district of East London, England) by climbing atop it and
faced angry commuters who dragged them down, pissed-off at the
disruption. We recalled the freeway takeovers in the U.S. during the
height of open proletarian Black Revolt (#BLM), between 2013 ~ 2015,
against anti-Black policing (and this anti-Black world) and then we also
saw angry commuters, but this anger was quite often racialized:
lawmakers even passed legislation that would absolve angry commuters of
killing protestors block their way (who were largely Black).[1] Angry
white Americans wanted to mow down angry Black protestors and now had
the blessing of the American Legal System.
Then the difference?
Some will say that proletarians arenât at all responsible for
environmental degradation. That itâs the fault of the capitalist class.
Unfortunately this isnât entirely so. The commuters in Canning Town did
in fact need to go to work, so that they can get by as all proletarians
are compelled to do, and it is this world of work that is a key
component in environmental degradation.
But we should note instead that this degradation, that all workers are a
part of, is also a part of the coercive relations which also degrade our
very lives.
So then the difference?
During the Black Revolt of recent years it was Black proletarians, and
their comrades, acting together & materially against this anti-Black
capitalist world. With XR we have a largely liberal, and by all accounts
fairly white & middle-class[2] movement whose direct actions still are
meant to act at the level of Spectacle. As a comrade noted:
Extinction Rebellion is doomed to extinction because it has no tactical
aptitude and is fighting on the spectacular terrain of the enemy by
relying on the moral sensitivity of the spectatorâs heart.
6:15 AM ⢠17 Oct 19 ⢠Twitter Web App
We must go beyond spectacular moralism to find a way out of capitalism
and the climate crisis it has wrought in the pursuit of infinite growth.
This is not to say that the success of an action is the number of proles
who agree with it. Not all proles will welcome the measures necessary to
bring about free communal lifeways. There will be open reactionaries we
will need to defend against, but the actions of proletarians against
capitalism, and NOT actions directly against proles, will be what will
help us win the day.
For example: If XR had instead done what has occurred in Chile with mass
fare evasion, their efforts would have built solidarity with their
movement but instead they chose to attack those who benefit the least
from this world. And now we see a broad movement against capitalism
growing in Chile.
As we said a couple of days ago when images of Chilean proletarian
looters were seen chucking flat-screen TVs into a bonfire and some
people noted how âwastefulâ and âtoxicâ these acts were.
ediciones ineditas
@edcns_ineditas
If yer more concerned abt the âwastefulnessâ of destroying a S , or its
toxicity, than the fact that a nationâs proletariat is waging offensive
class war then we know yer not on our team. Whatâs rising is the horizon
of communism & anarchy which is the âgreenestâ shit possible.
2:37 PM â 10/20/19 â Twitter for Android
The task at hand for radicals, as we see it, is not necessarily to raise
climate consciousness (mass media already provides endless terrorizing
click-bait on this issue) but to push the proletarian revolt emerging
around the world to generalize so that the horizon of communism draws
nearer and nearer. We will always be in the minority, but we understand
that communist revolution (as we see it) is not the concerted actions of
those self-identified as communists but the proletariat expressing its
immanent capacity to abolish its condition as the proletariat which just
means proles are the ones that are gonna get ourselves out of this mess
by destroying this world that marks us as proles.
We can begin to strategize & actualize preparations for climate
catastrophe where we live, and build networks of solidarity and mutual
aid, but the climate will likely not kill off capitalism for us so we
must understand we will still have to meet our global enemies on the
streets, in the mountains, in the valleys and at the ports. This image
made by Chilean comrades sum up what we feel is necessary.
[]
ALGUN DIA LA SOLIDARY LES HARA TEMPLAR / SOMOS COMUNIDAD EN LUCHA / POR
LA COMUNIZACION DE LA VIDA
tr. âOne day our solidarity will make them tremble. / We are community
in struggle. / For the communization of life.â
Trump has been sworn in, the Left and Liberals have come out in droves
to denounce a president whom Congressman & Civil Rights Leader, John
Lewis, has declared illegitimate. Though the grounds for illegitimacy,
as he states, are not necessarily based on Trumpâs racist, sexist,
isolationist, ultra-nationalist, anti-queer agenda but rather that he is
the subject of a Russian conspiracy. (Though we have had presidents who
have been slave-owners, rapists, leaders of genocide, fervently
anti-queer and yet they were able to complete their terms.) Others more
generally decry Trump as a Neo-Fascist set to bring 1939 onto American
soil. The U.S. Radical Left clamors to revive itself and swell its
numbers. Though this Radical Left has chosen, more and more so, to speak
the language of politics rather than of revolt (or revolution). This
Radical Left sometimes speaks of communism as a set of affairs to be
installed, and to which proletarians must be won over to, rather than
the means by which proletarians will free themselves.
In Mexico, there are already some who are finding a fruitful ground for
a rupture away from capitalism and politics. Though even there it is
commonplace to point to the more radical elements of the response to the
conspiracy to discredit more populist responses: marches, protests, list
of grievances.
Here in the U.S. we had massive marches across the country, under the
umbrella name âWomenâs Marchâ (on January 21^(st)). A variety of
critiques have been directed at it: its centering of white womanhood &
its feminism, the trans* exclusionary images & slogans, its championing
of non-violence and a generally pro-police sentiment. On Trumpâs
inauguration day, January 20^(th), we saw the black bloc emerge, with an
attempt at demonstrating both a show of force but also to disrupt as
much as possible the pomp & circumstance of the day. Though we all
delighted in the punch-out of Richard Spencer, self-proclaimed leader of
the âalt-rightâ movement, by someone dressed in black bloc we could say
that the same critique could be made of both the âWomenâs Marchâ and of
the black bloc: they both were a but response to a political moment. A
political moment which bears deep consequences for this country and for
the world, but a political moment all the same.
Largely, most of the large-scale revolt we have seen in the United
States, and around the world, the last few years have not been a
reaction against a political moment, but ferocious responses to
domination both economic and direct. See:
An attempt to create revolt has always been the modus operandi of the
Left and even of Left-Anarchists in a vanguardist way. Rather, we
contend the task at hand is to foster and help further along revolt, but
the Left can only see the world politically even when it has its
historical-materialist glasses on.
The Democratic Party is essentially dead in the water. Many on the
Radical Left are not deriding party politics, or parliamentary politics
but rather are calling for a working-class party. To push for a
political party at that moment when voter turn-out has been at its
lowest in decades is not only politically unsound, it is tone-deaf.
âGranted, we donât have a political party in the United States. We donât
have a labor party. And weâre a long way away from becoming a force that
can enact policies to represent and empower the working class. But weâre
building momentum and making demands.â
âJacobin Magazine, âThe Party We Needâ
The Radical Left offers more of the same because their strategy and
tactics are precisely centered on a field where workers, whether
racialized, gendered, employed or not, have not been able to win in
decades: politics.
We are still speaking of a new cycle of struggle in the worn-out
language of the old. We can refine that language as best we can, but we
have to recognise that it is nearly, if not completely exhausted.
âEndnotes, âSpontaneity, Mediation, Ruptureâ
This language is largely the language of politics which boils down the
capacity for any substantive change in our lives into polls, charts,
numbers and voting turn-outs.
One of the prevailing guiding principles for those of us of the
insurrectionary kind is reproducibility:
âConcretely, reproducibility means that acts of sabotage are realised
with means...that can be easily made and used, and that can be easily
acquired by anyone. [...] Reproducibility also encourages the
radicalisation of the individual or collective acts of attack, extending
to the maximum the autonomy amongst individuals and collectives,
generating, when one desires, an informal coordination in which, outside
of the logic of dependency or acceptance, one could also come to share
the knowledge of each comrade concerning sabotage.â
âRevista Negacion, âReproducibility, propagation of attack against power
and some related pointsâ
Reproducibility means bringing extra masks to the looting street party,
letting the people you trust know how easy it is to X or Y against the
police, showing people how easy it is to be as-close-to-invisible
online, disseminating simple ways to scam corporations to help you
get-by. Reproducibility guides us in our attacks against the State &
Capital, but attacks will not carry the day for the creation of
communism. This is often the critique directed at insurrectionary
anarchists: that we bear no image of what a future communal way of life
may hold and how it would be formed. Though any substantive reading of
intelligent insurrectionary anarchist literature would demonstrate
otherwise, our fellow travelers in the communization current do bear the
productive notion how we can act in the here and now by way of communist
measures:
âA communist measure is a collective measure, undertaken in a specific
situation with the ways and means which the communist measure selects
for itself. The forms of collective decision making which result in
communist measures vary according to the measures: some imply a large
number of people, others very many fewer; some suppose the existence of
means of coordination, others do not; some are the result of long
collective discussions, of whatever sort (general assemblies, various
sorts of collective, discussions in more or less diffuse groups) while
others might be more spontaneous... What guarantees that the communist
measure is not an authoritarian or hierarchical one is its content, and
not the formal character of the decision which gave rise to it.â
âLeon de Mattis, âCommunist Measures: thinking a Communist Horizonâ
Here we have demonstrated the suspended step of communization which
makes communism possible without the proletarian seizure of political
power and which makes of communism not a state of affairs but rather a
process which proletarians actively engage in from the very beginning of
revolutionary activity. Though our comrades in the communization current
claim that now is the historical moment when communization is possible,
insurrectionary anarchists have contended that the time has always been
right. A reading of the illuminating text, Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of
Insurrection in the American South, demonstrates that something akin to
communization as the way towards a communal way of life is not
hard-encoded into any particular historical moment, rather it is has
long been the way that oppressed peoples have responded to the State
actively trying to control them, their way of life and as the means to
be able to flee slavery and colonization, while making communal and
autonomous life possible. Ex-slaves and their comrades would routinely
raid plantations so that they could live outside of slave society and
would often not make any political demands of the State. Those involved
in this raids (appropriation as a communist measure) would be as much
interested in disrupting and destroying slave society as much as they
wanted to be able to live outside of it.
What we need to be speaking of in this moment is not a zero-sum game of
recruitment of the workers, or the surplus population, or whatever to
our side. These days hardly anyone but Radical Left die-hards bask in
proudly calling themselves workers. For most, work is a drudgery imposed
which bears no possibility of bearing a positive program. We often see
our work as that which is destroying our lives and the world we live in,
rather than contributing to a positively-viewed development of the means
of productions necessary to make communism possible (to hearken to old
productivist notions of communism). We view our identities under
capitalism as impositions which can prove to be sites of antagonism
against this society. Though we reject identity-politics, we also
understand that favoring a class-reductionist worker-identity to unite
us is yet another form of identity-politics.
This leads us to a final point. Though we found the Arab Spring
inspiring, we would roundly say that its failure to move beyond its
initial success was that it relied heavily on populist rhetoric around
democracy, (political) freedom, transparency and anti-cronyism (The same
critique could broadly be said of most of the Occupy Movât). Its attacks
against the State and its forces were awe-inspiring but falling short of
a rejection of the State in toto and of capitalism allowed a return to
normality that we see there today. This is why we describe our position
towards politics as anti-political.
There will always be push back against us by Liberals and the Left when
we act in a way that views them as unnecessary. We will be called upon
to explain our position and how it could be constructive or productive.
Such debate is ultimately meaningless. Some of us have already been
attacked by Liberals and the Left for expressing this very position. We
would contend that our actions may at times require some explanation but
those who see us riot, loot, fuck-shit-up and are inspired are often
those who have the most to gain from the fall of this society. Those who
have the most to lose will use whatever means necessary to stop us and
we can understand why. Those of us who struggle to get by will not
flinch when the ultra-rich get theirs.
This anti-political wave may take on different names according to its
context: proletarian insurgency, les casseurs, the invisible party, los
desmadrosos, thugs, etc. but they all point away from relying on the
state to recognize us as citizens to negotiate with. The point of course
is not to merely be ungovernable but to be able to initiate, with our
revolting actions, the means to live free of the State, Capital,
Patriarchy, Colonization and Work. If we merely react to what Trumpâs
presidency may or may not do, we then foreclose the wide breadth of
actions we may take. If we foreclose our actions around anti-fascism, we
would end up with a return to a normality which was already genocidal
and miserable but which would not be called fascism.
Lastly we end with Leon de Mattis further clarifying what the nature of
what couldbe communist measures:
Likely to be communist, then, are measures taken, here or there, in
order to seize means which can be used to satisfy the immediate needs of
a struggle. Likely to be communist also are measures which participate
in the insurrection without reproducing the forms, the schemas of the
enemy. Likely to be communist are measures which aim to avoid the
reproduction within the struggle of the divisions within the proletariat
which result from its current atomisation. Likely to be communist are
measures which try to eliminate the dominations of gender and of race.
Likely to be communist are measures which aim to co-ordinate without
hierarchy. Likely to be communist are measures which tend to strip from
themselves, one way or another, all ideology which could lead to the
re-establishment of classes. Likely to be communist are measures which
eradicate all tendencies towards the recreation of communities which
treat each other like strangers or enemies.
We hereby reject any form of self-imposed austerity. We posit that we
want nice shit for everybody and that is not only feasible but
desirable. We will not put forth graphs announcing how much work (or
not) will require such a project but will state that such a project is
part of our desire for communism. We hereby reject all forms of feigned
punk slobbiness, neo-hippie shabby chic, or pajamas in the outdoors. We
see the stores in the bourgeois parts of town (& the newly-gentrified
ones too) and say that we want that shit and even more. Capitalism is
that which stands in the way of us having the shit we want with its
hoarding of commodities only to sell them to highest bidder. Weâve been
told to live with less and less by not only Green Capital, but by the
Church, by our liberal âfriendsâ and even by fellow comrades. Fuck that
shit. Nah: if weâre going to be putting our shit out on the line itâs
definitely not going to be so that I can live simply.
Is this commodity-fetishism? Yes, of
the worst kind. Mainly, itâs the kind that does not want to maintain
capitalist social relations, but one that seeks to destroy them. Weâve
been living without and we want to remedy this situation. Do we also
want to live with the deepest, most sensual set of social relations:
yes. But why must we choose between the two? The destruction of
capitalism, for communism, will leave us with so much time to cultivate
ourselves, our tastes, our desires. Pre-capitalist peoples did not dress
themselves in tunics of ash gray or shave their heads en masse. It is
capitalism which has made our self-fashioning so impoverished; though
glimmers of indulgent self-fashioning sometimes does grace the streets;
sadly only to be homogenized, recuperated and sold back to an
indiscriminate consumer. It is capitalism which has accustomed us to
bland food & drink, or tricked us into paying top dollar at the co-op.
It is capitalism which has us moving our IKEA furniture from apartment
to apartment. We imagine all the home furnishings to be plundered.
Capitalism in its poverty of ideas, by way of colonialism, plunges
itself into our indigenous cultures and sells us back what it took from
us. We still remember that we used to build structures that still stand
while cheap buildings kill so many now in disasters. We still remember
that European colonialism spread its tentacles across the world because
it was without and we lived in such wealth (after it had plundered its
own).
âI want to shed myself of my first-world privilege and not live confined
by how capitalism wants me to.â If only it were so simple. Weâve
actually read this sentence (though its intent weâve seen many, many
times). This is pure reactionary thought. To run and do the opposite
just because capitalism displays certain social features does not make
one an anti-capitalist. It makes you a petit-bourgeois bohemian. We all
want to not pay rent, or pay for food, or have to work so many hours of
our lives but there is no outside of capitalism. Asceticism is not
revolutionary. Even those nodes of âautonomyâ scattered around the
globe, like among the Zapatistas, or Marinaleda, Spain still have to
contend with the fact that Capital has them surrounded. But we will not
squat our way to a revolution. Squatting, dumpster-diving,
train-hopping, stealing from work, work slowdowns are not acts of revolt
but of resistance. Thus we understand that the nice shit will not come
until capitalism is done with, because little acts of appropriation will
not really get the goods as we see fit.
This is no mere provocation: it is part of our intent. Communism, for
us, is not as we were taught in schools: the general immiseration of
everyone, but as Marx so eloquently put forth in 1845, âthe real
movement that abolishes the present state of things.â The present state
of things is poverty, hunger, work, racialized social death, gendered
violence, the unmitigated murder of transgender people, the free
movement of goods but not people and the general immiseration of
everyday life.
Further, a critique of consumerism (& likewise Capital) that only asks
us to consume less misses the trees for the forest. Capital would have
us consume less only to appease our consumer guilt. Let us not be
fooled, Capital necessitates eternal growth and this growth is done on
terms that will destroy us regardless of how much (or little) we buy.
Capital has made a sin of our desires because they inevitably know that
it cannot satisfy them. To each according to their need, and to each
according to their desire. We contend with capitalist logic and aim for
the unreasonable because capitalist logic would have us cut ourselves
from our ludic, indulgent dreams.
The cap above is an image making the rounds as a counterpoint to
now-President Donald Trump and the hat that heâs made (in)famous. It
serves as a visual reminder that a great deal of the U.S. territory was
once Mexican national territory. A Chicanx act of detournement.[3]
Though itâs an act of detournement which lacks a critical analysis of
Mexican history. That such much of the Chicano movementâs nationalist
fervor arises from Mexicoâs territorial loss at the hands of U.S. racist
aggression. This resulted with the Treaty of Guadalupe in 1848, which
âcededâ the territory now known as California and a large area roughly
half of New Mexico, most of Arizona, Nevada, Utah and parts of Wyoming
and Colorado to the USA.[4]
Last year, two artists undertook the task of surveying the northern
border of Mexico as it was in 1821, marking it with obelisks that lie
well within the current U.S. borders. Today we refer to this historical
form of the Mexican republic as the First Mexican Empire; this empire
extended well into the Central America, extending into the national
territory of Costa Rica. If these artists were to survey the southern
border of this Empire then we would begin to see the glaring oversight
of this project. Yes, they claim to want to show the transient nature of
borders but they inadvertently highlighted what the project of the
Mexican republic is really about: the extraction of Capital to be found
within its borders without the need of wars of aggression (colonialism);
a project which prefers the class warfare of privatization of natural
resources[5] held in common and the extraction of surplus value from its
native, Black and mestizo populations. Once this State project held a
territory which was once much more vast. The nostalgic picture of a
peaceful homeland that Chicanxs often project onto Mexico begins to lose
its luster. Yet from this nostalgia is born much of Chicano Nationalism.
It is the Chicano poet, Alurista, whom is largely credited with
spreading the story of Aztlan as the mythic homeland of the Mexica. He
also wrote what would become the leading document for Chicano
nationalists: El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan. In it we find the first few
fundamental errors in Chicano Nationalism:
âNationalism as the key to organization transcends all religious,
political, class and economic factions or boundaries. Nationalism is the
common denominator that all members of La Raza can agree upon.â
Hic salta, hic Aztlan: a new nation to arise in what is currently the
U.S. Southwest/ West as part of the assumed patrimony of all Chicanxs,
by way of a supposed shared ethnic heritage.[6] As an anti-state
communist I desire the overthrow of capitalism en su totalidad. How then
could even Chicanx anti-state communists/ anarchists support a plan
which would inevitably align us with a new national bourgeoisie? The
contradictions are glaring and would result in no liberation of the
actual people which would make up this âChicanx nationâ from either wage
labor or general exploitation. Yet another revolution forestalled in the
name of national sovereignty. Though there may be certain things which
bind Chicanxs across these âfactionsâ and âboundariesâ which Alurista
alludes to, it is these binds that dampen the communist project which
understands that the notion of a Chicanx Nation is a false one. Fredy
Perlman, in his incendiary essay The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism,
wrote:
â[One] might be trying to apply a definition of a nation as an organized
territory consisting of people who share a common language, religion and
customs, or at least one of the three. Such a definition, clear, pat and
static, is not a description of the phenomenon but an apology for it, a
justification.â
This fabricated justification is used to allow the project of capitalist
exploitation. Further, if we were to begin to analyze this homeland
which Chicano Nationalists hope to reclaim we also run into the
fundamental contradiction wherein this supposed homeland has already
been continuously occupied for millenia by many different Native
peoples. To mention a few: the Tongva-Gabrielino, the Chumash, the
Yuman, the Comanche, the Apache, the Navajo and the Mohave.
Further, the Plan Espiritual de Aztlan states that Chicano Nationalists
âdeclare independence of [their] mestizo nation.â Here creeps in the
danger of a new form of oppression: yet another settler-colonial,
mestizo nation once again makes an enclosure around Native peoples.
Though the National Brown Berets, a Chicano Nationalist group, instead
claims that.
âThe amount of mixture of European blood on our people is a drop in the
bucket compared to the hundreds of millions of Natives that inhabited
this hemisphere. The majority of us are of Native/Indigenous ancestry
and it is that blood that ties us to and cries out for land.â[7]
A strange play of blood belonging lays the groundwork for a presumed
claim to Aztlan. Kim Tallbear, an antropologist at the University of
Texas, Austin and a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate of South
Dakota, laments:
âThereâs a great desire by many people in the US to feel like you belong
to this land. I recently moved to Texas, and many of the white people I
meet say: âIâve got a Cherokee ancestorâ...That worries us in a land
where we already feel thereâs very little understanding of the history
of our tribes, our relationships with colonial power.â[8]
Chicanxs are the historical product of colonialism, racism, capitalism,
slavery genocide and cultural erasure. Part of the struggle to liberate
Chicanxs (and all people) would inevitably incorporate the reclaiming of
lost ancient ways, but this cannot overtake the struggle of Native
peoples who have managed to maintain a direct connection to their deep
past & present. Indigeneity is more than just genetic heritage; it is a
real cultural link. And a politics based on genetic heritage begins to
look more and more eugenicist.[9] It is unclear how the Chicano
Nationalist project would differ from the sovereignty that the American
Colonialists merchants (âFounding Fathersâ) sought to establish from the
English Crown.
The original 10-point Program of the Brown Berets includes the demand
that âall officers in Mexican-American communities must live in the
community and speak Spanish.â[10] Forty-seven year later in 2015, the LA
Times reported that 45% of the LAPD force is Latino and yet
relationships between the LAPD and the city it overlooks remain
strained.[11] It could be said that at the time of the drafting of this
program that this was a radical demand, but 61 years prior there is an
anecdote that exemplifies that Mexican-Americans had already known
another way was necessary.
â.scores of cholos jumped to their feet and started for the spot where
the [LAPD]officer was supposed to be sitting. If he had been there
nothing could have prevented a vicious assault and possible
bloodshedâ[12]
Now the context: Mexican-American LAPD Detective Felipe Talamantes,
along with other Mexican-American LAPD Detectives, arrested three
members of the P.L.M., a Mexican Anarchist-Communist organization, in
Los Angeles under trumped up and false charges in 1907. At the time it
was noted that it was highly possible that the LAPD detectives were
working under direction of the Mexican Federal Government, then headed
by dictator Porfirio Diaz. It was seen as a way to clamp down on Mexican
radicals in the USA just prior to the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution
in 1910.
Someone in the courtroom said that Det. Talamantes might have been in
attendance at a hearing resulting in the scene described above with the
jumping cholos. At the time there was already a very strained
relationship between the LAPD and Mexicans in Los Angeles. Consequently,
there was massive support by Mexicans, Mexican-Americans and white
radicals for the three anarchists. Noting that on principal, all
anarchists are against the institution of the police. Throughout their
imprisonment they were able to raise a remarkable $1,950 in their
defense: remarkable in light of the meager size of the contributions
ranging from $0.10 to $3.00.[13] This anecdote is so telling since it
mattered little to the those who supported the 3 arrested that the LAPD
detectives were themselves also Mexican-American. These detectives were
clearly understood to be complicit with the white-majority which
controlled the conservative power structure which was local governance
at the time.
To this day Chicano National Liberation group, Union del Barrio,
advocates in Los Angeles what the Brown Berets advocated back in 1968: a
Civilian Police Review Board. As the more radical elements of the Black
Lives Matter movement call out for the wholesale abolition of the
police, Chicano Nationalists, in their racialized myopia, fail to see
and acknowledge the anti-Black origins of the police in the U.S.A.[14]
Fredy Perlman notes something curious about pro-nationalists and says:
âIt is among people who have lost all their roots, who dream themselves
supermarket managers and chiefs of police, that the national liberation
front takes root; this is where the leader and general staff are formed.
Nationalism continues to appeal to the depleted because other prospects
appear bleaker.â[15]
But what is the prospect, however bleak, the anti-state communists
offer?
Chicano nationalists often talk about âthe border jumping over themâ to
counter the racist narrative that Mexicans are somehow invaders of what
is now the American SouthWest. They rail against borders that their
parents, grandparents and others have to perilously cross, yet they
evidently do not desire the abolition of borders but rather desire a
re-drawing of them. Anti-state communists (& anarchists) desire the
wholesale abolition of borders, nation-states, capitalism, patriarchy,
colonialism and work. Though of course it is a difficult push forward
these measures without speaking to the experience of identity, speaking
through the lens of a purely national liberationist scope is to speak in
half-measures.
Mao Zedong thought, a frequent source of much National Liberation
ideology, here is critique by Perlman:
âFew of the worldâs oppressed had possessed any of the attributes of a
nation in the recent or distant past. The Thought had to be adapted to
people whose ancestors had lived without national chairmen, armies or
police, without capitalist production processes and therefore without
the need for preliminary capital.
These revisions were accomplished by enriching the initial [Mao Zedong]
Thought with borrowings from Mussolini, Hitler and the Zionist state of
Israel. Mussoliniâs theory of the fulfillment of the nation in the state
was a central tenet. All groups of people, whether small or large,
industrial or non-industrial, concentrated or dispersed, were seen as
nations, not in terms of their past, but in terms of their aura, their
potentiality, a potentiality embedded in their national liberation
fronts. Hitlerâs (and the Zionistsâ) treatment of the nation as a racial
entity was another central tenet. The cadres were recruited from among
people depleted of their ancestorsâ kinships and customs, and
consequently the liberators were not distinguishable from the oppressors
in terms of language, beliefs, customs or weapons; the only welding
material that held them to each other and to their mass base was the
welding material that had held white servants to white bosses on the
American frontier; the âracial bondâ gave identities to those without
identity, kinship to those who had no kin, community to those who had
lost their community; it was the last bond of the culturally
depleted.â[16]
The project of supplying Chicanxs with an alternative to National
Liberation, or some other false appeal to Nationhood, is one that is
more necessary than ever. As radical Chicanxs who desire to truly free
this world (or perhaps destroy it), we should take it upon ourselves to
create the rhetoric, the movements, the history which we want to see in
the world. I look forward to helping find, create and elevate such work
which would fulfill this project of total liberation, not just for
Chicanxs, but for oppressed people everywhere.
by Asmodeus, a friend of the project
Eli Broad is a multibillionaire. He made his fortune constructing tract
homes, which is to say by pumping hot air into the pre-2007 real estate
bubble. Later he moved into life insurance as well. Some of that money
ended up bailing out LAâs Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) around the
time the housing market was going south â the museum had been
hemorrhaging funds for years. It was a maneuver that some have described
as closer to a hostile takeover than an act of philanthropy. Notably,
Broadâs intervention was closely tied to the arrival of a new director â
the gallerist Jeffrey Deitch â who fired the museumâs widely admired
chief curator, Paul Schimmel, in 2012. Other wads of cash ended up at
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) â where the donor had Renzo
Piano build the quasi-autonomous Broad Contemporary Art Museum â as well
as the Los Angeles Opera, which promptly used the funds to stage a full
production of Wagnerâs Ring Cycle. These actions, among others, won
Broad a reputation in the art world as LAâs resident Maecenas-cum-Evil
Emperor, with Deitch, perhaps, playing the role of a bumbling Darth
Vader.
As of September 2015, the city has had a new museum downtown, known
simply as The Broad to distinguish it from the edifice at LACMA. It is a
clean slate: it exists to display the personal collection that Eli Broad
and his wife Edythe have amassed over the previous five decades. The
museumâs architecture is by the firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. They
are perhaps most famous for the High Line that runs through New Yorkâs
blue-chip gallery district in West Chelsea. Having already designed what
is arguably the worldâs first vaporwave structure (the fog-enshrouded
âBlur Buildingâ that was their contribution to the Swiss National Expo
in 2002), their work in LA further develops the play of circulation,
sightlines, and cladding that has become the agencyâs signature. The
Broadâs initial aspect is unprepossessing, however: its exterior is a
drab box with two of the bottom corners shaved off. On one side of the
facade there is an âoculusâ that stares unblinkingly at the Colburn
School (a well-regarded music academy) across the street, as well as at
the Colburnâs next-door neighbor, MOCAâs Grand Avenue flagship. On the
opposite corner is Frank Gehryâs Walt Disney Concert Hall, the
completion of which in 2003 was widely taken as a sign of Downtownâs
revitalization. (Eli Broad had a hand in that, too.) If one were to draw
lines between The Broad and these other monuments, the resulting
triangle would, very roughly, point in the direction of the Westin
Bonaventure Hotel about half a mile away, where Fredric Jameson once
discerned the hallmarks of postmodern space. New, pricey condos have
been sprouting up nearby, some of them connected to the more desirable
parts of Downtown by walkways that are literally raised above the
plebeian street.
Developersâ dreams notwithstanding, this remains a weird and
uncomfortable part of the city, nestled as it is between multiple
freeways and the massive homeless encampment that is Skid Row. There are
few other parts of Los Angeles where the contradictions of capitalist
real estate, of which Broad is a Donald Trump-level protagonist, are so
clearly on display. Thus the location is fitting. The building itself is
encased in a sheath of corrugated off-white webbing that screens the
interior from its surroundings. Most of the perforations in fact conceal
windows that are oriented to the rising and falling of the California
sun, with the result that the upstairs galleries, at least, can boast
some of the worldâs most luxuriant natural lighting. These subtleties
are little apparent from the street, however. A friend points out that
the museum looks like nothing so much as the raw material of menudo:
tripe, that is. But whereas menudo is a venerable hangover cure, one
suspects that The Broad will remain a headache for some time to come.
Visitors enter the museum through either of its lifted corners, where
they find themselves in a gray, cavern-like space. (One of its chambers
houses Yayoi Kusamaâs Infinity Mirrored Room, 2013 â the museum���s
biggest crowd-pleaser, to judge from the lines.) Goofy sculptures by
Robert Therrien and Urs Fischer establish a funhouse vibe. Both this
area and the galleries are almost extravagantly well-staffed by
headset-wearing attendants. Ascending either by escalator, stairs, or in
a Willy Wonka-ish cylindrical elevator, one then arrives at the top
floor, only to meet a funereal installation of Jefif Koonsâ immense,
polished metal Tulips (1995â2004), flanked by no less than nine
word-paintings by Christopher Wool (Untitled, 1990). A grander imperial
reception could hardly be imagined. In the same space there are equally
imposing works by Julie Mehretu, El Anatsui, Mark Bradford, and Marlene
Dumas, all of which combine a diffusely political charge with
market-friendly scale and format: this is globalization as viewed from
Sothebyâs. The art is about, and exemplifies, the workings of capital,
the market, and the uneven distribution of violence in the global
economy. It might even be read as âcritical.â Could it be that The Broad
is thinking about its own noxiousness? No, it seems: that feeling soon
dissipates.
The problem is the collection in toto. There are no surprises here,
although there are some very good pieces. There is not a single artwork
on display that would give a hedge fund manager qualms. It is all
investment-grade, and it is all nearly equally so. The paintings are
big. The sculptures are shiny. That said, there are things worth seeking
out. The museumâs top floor is by far its best, due both to the quality
of the art and to the influence of the punctured ceiling that rains
filtered sunlight into the galleries. There are no permanent walls on
this level, but only movable barriers that demarcate the exhibition
spaces. Half of the top floor is dedicated to art of the 1950s through
â70s, with a particularly fine stock of American Pop; there is also a
cluster of superb paintings and sculptures by Cy Twombly. The other side
contains art from the following decades and almost up to the present
day. Some galleries are monographic, while others are devoted to small
groupings. One, for instance, throws together Damien Hirst with Andreas
Gursky â practitioners who seem to have little in common other than a
distinctively â90s brand of gigantism. Local heroes such as Chris Burden
and Charles Ray are also in evidence, while another gallery boasts yet
more works by Koons, who is something like the museumâs mascot. Indeed
it is interesting that Koons is at the physical center of the inaugural
installation, on the axis, in fact, along which the top floor splits
cleanly in half. A roll call of postwar greatest hits lies on the one
side, mostly â90s-vintage art on the other â meaning art that is often
concerned with the politics of race, trauma, and gender. This may
suggest that it is Koons who mediates from the one to the other, and
thus, that there is no nexus other than the extreme of reification that
he represents to link the mid-century to its end. Which would be a
defensible if depressing art historical argument.
Things go downhill from here, figuratively as well as literally.
Descending through the museumâs midsection, where its storage spaces are
visible from two portholes cut out of the stairwell (like windows onto a
big catâs enclosure at a zoo), one returns to the first floor, where The
Broad displays, or rather stockpiles, its contemporary holdings. There
are large, bland pictures by the likes of Mark Grotjahn, as well as an
installation of Ragnar Kjartanssonâs The Visitors, an irrepressibly
cutesy nine-channel video from 2012. The largest exhibition space of all
â it is directly beneath Koonsâ Tulips, if I am not mistaken â harbors a
generous selection of manga-inflected works by Takashi Murakami; their
cumulative effect is queasy-making. Karl Marx himself puts in an
appearance in a fairly execrable piece by the Polish artist Goshka
Macuga, which at least stands out for being slightly less warmed-over
than everything around it: it is a photo-tapestry that plasters some of
Miroslav Tichyâs voyeuristic snapshots of Czech women on top of a view
of Marxâs grave. And that is about all that I remember, or care to. Even
the John Currin paintings, typically good for a chuckle at least, look
more lethargic (read: less perverse) than usual.
It is sometimes difficult to keep in mind that this abundance of very
expensive art was assembled by only two people, so doggedly does it
resist the detection of any guiding sensibility other than the sheer
will to accumulate things upon which the market has left its stamp of
approval. Such anomie may have social significance. This is how a class
â a very small class â sees; this is how it dreams. And what banal
dreams they are. For granting that insight, The Broad has some value.
Yet there is a way in which discussing the details of the inaugural
exhibition is entirely beside the point. The collection is a
placeholder; one has the sense that it might as well be switched out for
anything else of equal value, or painlessly liquidated should Eli Broad
ever fall on hard times. Whatever their intrinsic merits, the works are
significant, here, primarily as tokens of capitalâs supremacy. This is
true regardless of the fact that admission is free, and also of the fact
that LA already has a multitude of institutions that bear the names of
other tycoons (Getty, Hammer, Geffen...). The critique still has to be
made anew, if only because the building is new, familiar as everything
else about it may be. What this museum means has little to do with what
it shows, and very much to do with the relations that it materializes
simply by being what it is, where it is, and bearing the name that it
does. The scandal is not that The Broad is bad, but that it exists.
Guy Debord said that spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that
it becomes an image. Fair enough, except that it is too easy, when
thinking or writing about spectacle, to forget what capital is. Capital
is dead labor. It is the abstract form of a trillion instances of
suffering. Contra Debord, it need not become visible at all, and in fact
capital is perhaps most destructive where the social relation that it
objectifies is most naturalized and unseen â in the everyday violence of
class, race, and gender; in the omnipresence of money and commodities,
which are violent forms in themselves because they distribute life and
death according to an inhuman logic. Contemporary art is the obverse of
this invisibility. This is why The Broad is a shrine to class hatred. As
a sponge for surplus capital â its function as a hedge or investment â
art absorbs human suffering; contemporary art is therefore class hatred
in one of its most concentrated forms. Art takes upon itself the guilt
of those who caused that suffering and who think that art will discharge
it. But it does not.
by Asmodeus, a friend of the project
Basically the art world exists to make money for a small number of
people and to make a larger number of people feel like theyâre cool. The
first purpose is just capitalism. The second is an effect of capitalism,
because only in a world as ridiculous as ours would standing around in
mostly empty white rooms be considered a valid form of community. This
probably sounds cynical, and in a way it is. But if you think about it,
the fact that lots of people have nothing better to do with their âfreeâ
time than to stand around in mostly empty white rooms, rooms that make a
huge amount of money for other people, is a good reason to destroy
pretty much everything.
Hatred of art, in the best and truest sense, has always really been
disappointment that art canât keep its own promises. The German
philosopher Theodor Adorno once said: âThe bourgeois want art voluptuous
and life ascetic; the reverse would be better.:â Hatred of art isnât
hatred of beauty. In fact itâs closer to the opposite. Itâs hatred of
capitalism for trying to make us accept the fact that we can only find
beauty in art. Or in some other commodity, or some commodified
experience. (On Instagram everyone lives in paradise.) Of course itâs
also hatred of the people who buy and sell and talk about art, because
theyâre mostly rich assholes. Nothing mysterious about that. For
academics, though, itâs a lot easier to come up with elaborate theories
about iconoclasm than it is to admit that iconoclasm is usually quite
easy to explain.
Hatred of art, or at least this kind of it, has nothing to do with
hatred of pleasure. Or even hatred of artworks, exactly. You can enjoy
looking at art at the same time as you hate the art world and its
institutions, in the same way you can shop at a store in the daytime and
then loot it at night, if you get the chance. Communism means nice shit
for everybody, as some other people have pointed out.[17] You can even
make your own art if you want to. Thatâs fine. You can also be a
revolutionary â better still. (Much better.) But donât try to do your
revolution through your art. Thatâs not how it works. If you feel the
need to argue against this more or less self-evident point, thereâs a
good chance that youâre an art world asshole.
There are few things more depressing than the idea that art is the last
zone of freedom in a capitalist world. If this were true, it would be
yet another reason to destroy everything. (Donât worry, weâre not
running out of reasons.) But itâs not true, anyway. The art world is
part of capitalism, just like everything else, which means that itâs
built on a set of antagonisms. Class antagonisms, racial antagonisms,
antagonisms around sexuality and gender. Of course this isnât any
secret. The problem with a lot of art world people, though â aside from
the other, obvious problems â is that they want their participation in
the art world to function as a complete package. In other words you can
get your aesthetics, your ethics, and your politics in the same place,
by doing the same stuff. Your art is your resistance, or your academic
research is your resistance, or whatever. Conveniently enough, you can
sell art, and you can also sell your labor as a radical academic. Maybe
not for much, but somebody has to do it, right? Walk into any gallery
these days and thereâs a good chance the art will be âpolitical.â You
have to wonder exactly when the market is going to peak.
The package deal only works so well because the art world absorbs and
mediates conflict in order to fuel its own reproduction. Where else
would constant scandals over racist behavior turn out to be good for
business, for example? An angel gets its wings every time some art world
drone writes a think-piece about the latest racist shit in the latest
biennial. Or rather, somebody or other gets to accumulate a little more
(political, academic, aesthetic) cred. What this means, perversely
enough, is that nearly everyone in the art world has a vested interest
in yet more racist shit happening in the future. Otherwise there
wouldnât be anything to talk about.
Buying into the âcomplete packageâ means that when you do your politics,
you do it through and in the art world. You want to make the art world a
better place, so that everybody gets a seat at the table. You make sure
that museum collections, biennials, and gallery rosters have the right
demographics (they never do and probably never will). You make sure that
everybody knows that you do not like Donald Trump, nope, not one bit! Or
else, your activism boils down to mobilizing art for some other
political purpose, as a tool or a weapon. Thatâs usually even worse.
(Did you hear about the Art Strike earlier this year? Iâm guessing
either you didnât or you already forgot.)
Unless youâre extremely edgy, art activism doesnât mean questioning
whether there should be museums or biennials at all. The tendency to
circle the wagons (the settler-colonialist metaphor isnât totally
accidental) has become much worse since Trumpâs election, which had the
effect of resurrecting a bunch of liberal-humanist cliches about the
goodness of art that seemed like theyâd been deconstructed out of
existence decades ago. Whose team do you want to be on, after all: the
nice, progressive, intelligent, well-dressed art people, or the
right-wing philistines? The fact that the alternative is false, that
other options exist, doesnât make it less attractive. The art world is
so used to being on the right side that itâs almost impossible for them
to grasp that maybe it isnât.
In LA, right now, weâve had the pleasure of witnessing some of the art
worldâs contradictions unravel in real time. Militants in Boyle Heights
and elsewhere have been very good at explaining what theyâre doing and
why, so I wonât even try to summarize the issues at stake. Instead, I
recommend that you just read the statements from the involved groups,
such as Defend Boyle Heights, Boyle Heights Alianza Anti Artwashing y
Desplazamiento / Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and
Displacement (BHAAAD], Union de Vecinos, the Los Angeles Tenants Union,
and Ultra-Red. Some of the press coverage has been decent, too. (That
being said, let me put in an extra special fuck you to LA Times reporter
Ruben Vives for threatening to write a negative story if he wasnât given
an interview with a member of this coalition.)
In general terms, the conflict has to do with artâs complicity in the
process that we call gentrification â a term that gets thrown around a
bit carelessly, itâs true. Often, saying âgentrification is a way to
avoid saying âcapitalismClowning white hipsters is cool (also â they
arenât always white, or hip), but it shouldnât distract from the fact
that the bigger enemy is the real estate industry, not to mention
employers who donât pay workers enough to make rent. Some extremely
violent forms of gentrification wonât necessarily look like the
stereotypical âartists with fixies and cold brew moving into the hood
narrative. What if we talked about new Chinese money pushing out poorer
people of Asian descent in the San Gabriel Valley at the same time as we
talk about Boyle Heights, for example? In economic terms the phenomenon
might not be that different. Thereâs a danger of reinforcing existing
forms of oppression and exploitation in the name of a preexisting
community that supposedly overrides class divisions. That said,
gentrification often does look like artists with fixies and cold brew
moving into the hood, which is why these events east of the LA River
have a meaning that goes far beyond the local context.
What is important about the struggle in Boyle Heights, and what makes it
different from any other anti-gentrification conflict I know of, is that
itâs developed into a direct confrontation between the âradicalâ art
world and a local opposition that wonât back down, even when offered the
chance for dialog. This is how you win. For example: a huge victory for
the anti-gentrification campaign was the closure of the gallery PSSST in
February of this year. Representatives of PSSST described their project
as queer, feminist, politically engaged, and largely POC. All of which
are perfectly good things in themselves, of course. A space for queer,
feminist, politically engaged POC artists and their friends only becomes
a problem when it contributes to a colonial, gentrifying dynamic. Which
will inevitably happen as soon as well-connected art world people move
into a historically working class neighborhood, regardless of their
color or credentials.
This isnât a matter of intentions or consciousness. No doubt PSSST
thought they were doing good. Itâs a matter of economics â in other
words, stuff that happens whether you want it to or not, because thereâs
money to be made. Real estate developers donât give a shit about your
MFA in social practice art. PSSST never understood this. People in Boyle
Heights did. PSSST was all about âdialog.â So is every gentrifier.
Refusing dialog was the best (in fact the only) strategic decision the
neighborhoodâs defenders could have made. Thereâs no such thing as
dialog when one side is pushing you out of your home. The fact that
groups like Defend Boyle Heights have been so willing to engage with
their enemies is the shocking thing, not their supposedly aggressive
tactics. These tactics could be generalized. In fact in some places
militant resistance to gentrification goes back decades, which is why
cities like Berlin, for example, are so much more livable and fun than
otherwise similar areas. Resistance wonât stop real estate from
destroying livable communities â nothing except the end of capitalism
will do that â but it can slow the process down and make life better for
a lot of people.
The Boyle Heights conflict is racialized. Obviously. âFuck White Artâ is
an excellent slogan. However, the adjective âWhiteâ is unnecessary, for
reasons that I hope are clear by now. But then again, it is necessary,
too, a bit in the way itâs necessary to say âBlack Lives Matterâ instead
of âAll Lives Matter.â In effect, the slogan points out that the default
setting for all art is âwhite art..ââThis isnât to say that there arenât
any non-white artists, or that their work is somehow marginal or
inauthentic. Rather, itâs to point out that the art world as such, which
really means the art industry, is fundamentally connected to capitalism,
which is white supremacist even when there happen to be non-white people
running things. Real estate works by fine-tuning the racial composition
of neighborhoods so that itâs possible to sell property to more
âdesirableâ (wealthier) buyers, who happen to be white people most of
the time, coincidentally or not. Galleries, as well as fancy cafes,
record stores, etc., are the smart bombs of gentrification. Land one in
just the right place and you can take out the whole barrio. It was
perfectly logical when another Boyle Heights gallery, Museum As Retail
Space, called the cops on a picket line at one of their openings.
Of course smart gentrifiers prefer to avoid calling in (uniformed) pigs,
if they can. Nothing works better than getting a few âdiverse art
spacesâ to help out with your development scheme. Thatâs pretty much
expected now. And it probably would have worked in the case of PSSST if
nobody in Boyle Heights had tried those supposedly alienating tactics.
After these events it almost seems unnecessary to present a critique of
the non-white artist as representative of something called âthe
community!â (What community? Whose community? Is your landlord part of
your community? How about your boss?) PSSST did a program focused on
Latinx party crews in the 90s. It didnât save them. It just pointed out
how the phenomenon that some people have started calling gentefication â
gentrification with a brown face â can be just as much bullshit as the
idea that galleries âenrichâ the neighborhood (as if Boyle Heights
doesnât have any culture of its own). Instead of trying to say something
new about the topic Iâll just recommend this short text, which is
already a classic:
The Poverty of Chicano Artists by El Chavo[18]
The one thing that has possibly changed since those words were written
over 20 years ago is that the art scene, in its role as advance scout
for capitalist development, has become much better at providing an
apparent space for disagreement and even resistance â as long as nothing
goes beyond empty talk.
The way PSSST operated, the way places like 356 Mission still operate,
is through a technique that you could name âThe Conversation.â The
ideology of The Conversation works by taking a conflict thatâs pretty
clear from the start and then insisting that thereâs more to talk about.
The Conversation is always âmore productive1 when the people getting
fucked over avoid actually doing anything about it. The Conversation
feeds on panel discussions. Often, The Conversation takes its cue from
somebody or some group of people who have the right credentials to
represent The Community, or who happen to be âactivists.â (They hate
Trump! Donât you hate Trump, too?) Usually these activists have a long
record of doing lefty stuff. They never understand that the left is the
enemy, too.
There is no purer expression of The Conversation than members of the
Artistsâ Political Action Network (a post-election group of lefty
artists) crossing a picket line to hold a meeting at a Boyle Heights
gallery, then sending a letter that reads: âIn deciding to stage the
event at 356 Mission, we hoped that, rather than ignoring or attempting
to avoid the conflicts in the area, the choice of location would create
an opportunity for engagement and dialogue.â Funny logic: it works for
every invasion. I bet the Aztecs loved it when Cortes gave them such a
great opportunity for engagement and dialogue.
Hereâs a more abstract way to express what Iâve been saying:
There is no such thing as a public dialog and hence art does not
contribute to it. There is rather an antagonism between those who would
like to continue pretending that such a dialog exists and those who want
to demolish that pretense â not in theory, but in practice. (Leonard
Cohen understood this, or at least he came up with a good phrase: â
There is a war between the ones who say there is a war/And the ones who
say there isnât.â) The antagonism cuts across race, class, and gender,
although itâs certainly weighted. Those who have nothing to lose but
their chains, or their abjection, or their social death, obviously have
greater clarity about it. But it might be that the edge of the
antagonism runs not so much between those who are comfortable in their
fiction versus those who have no such luxury, but rather between those
who might, in however precarious a way, benefit exactly from the
boundaryâs mediation, and those who have no interest in anything of the
sort: between those who might profit from abjection, exactly by claiming
to represent it, and those from whom this profit is made.
This distinction becomes the stuff out of which careers are built. It
turns out that the maintenance of aesthetic appearances (Iâm thinking of
the German word Schein, which also means âillusionâ) is one of the more
convenient ways of putting the abject into circulation. Convenient, but
not necessarily final. Not decisive. Much less so, anyway, than other
forms of Schein that are less recognizable as such â for example race,
which is an abstraction infinitely more violent than either the zombie
formalism everyone in the art world was talking about a few years ago,
or zombie protest. Art attracts conflict in part because the stakes are
so low, because the battles are so purely spectacular, even as art also
serves an absolutely real function in preserving the status quo.
Antagonisms play out in art when they canât (yet) be resolved in the
rest of the world. The shittiness of the present moment is how
impossible it seems to advance from the front lines to the citadels. Art
tends to function as a border guard, here, asking for papers that reduce
every real conflict into a problem of checking off the right boxes,
which these days are usually a set of commodified forms of identity. Can
you sell your abjection? Yes. Of course. You can also sell your
politics. Your âresistance.â At this exact moment itâs probably the
smartest thing you can do.
The worst participants in recent art world debates, hollow as these
debates have been, are those who presume to understand everything best.
Which in practice often means confessing your perplexity, but doing so
as a technique, a move on the chessboard, a way to strengthen your own
authority (not by actually knowing anything, perhaps, but by at least
asserting your right to weigh in â your right to join the dialog). When
in fact itâs the bleeding suture between one world and its negation that
art world bureaucrats always try to sew up. They have their mission. The
rest of us need sharper scalpels.
by El Chavo, a friend of the project
If the artist is not the most hated member of the Chicanx community it
is certain that a very healthy disgust towards the artist is felt by
many in the barrio. In the artists attempt to express themselves, speak
for La Raza, or to raise their consciousness, they come short of the
mark. The inherent poverty of the art scene is its inability to
understand and change society, its refusal to see itself as a market
place for one more commodity. This is what we detest. From cholos to
viejitas, to mocosos and their relatives, everyone hates the false
notion of the artist as a representative of our needs or as a
spokesperson for change.
All the novelty rappers, uninspired singers, hack writers, crayola
painters, pretentious poets, and the hardly-funny cartoonists and
comedians that make up the Chicano And Chicana Artist (CACA) cultural
scene imagine themselves to be that which they are not: for some reason
they believe that they are a challenge or an opposition to the dominant
culture. The truth is that they are merely another aspect of the same
society or as some would accurately call it, they are part of the
spectacle of negation. When a personâs life lacks in meaning, pleasure,
and they have no control over how to run their own lives, they look
outside of themselves for salvation. The artist finds his calling in
âself-expressionâ, creating art pieces in which she can live out a dull
reflection of what has not been possible in real life. Thatâs not
beautiful; itâs pathetic.
In a world that runs on a heavy dose of alienation the reverence for art
serves only to strengthen that society. The emergence of the Chicano Art
scene is a movement of the forgotten commodity back into the flow of the
marketplace; the desire to belong within the world of separation; to be
bought and sold like everyone else. The artist has no vision. She fails
to see what is truly beautiful, just as they failed to see the poetry in
the streets during the rioting in â92. Can their little doodles ever top
the critique of daily life that the looters offered in their festive
events? Of course not.
So what happens to La Raza once the artist sells his piece, gets her
grant, or has that special gallery showing? Nothing. All the people that
you aim to represent on your canvas or in your poems, we still have to
exist in the same ghettoes, we still have to work in the same stupid
jobs, or wait in the same welfare lines. We will never see you there.
You will never mean anything to us.
We laugh at you and the society you reinforce.
Give it up.
Youâre headed nowhere.
The wood-slate fence has jumped from being a simple signifier of âthis
house has been flippedâ to becoming a part of the construction of the
house itself. The above is a photo of an actual house in Boyle Heights
being offered for rent at $2995 for 3 bedrooms.
Whereas previously the function of this fence was to shield its new,
well-heeled owners from the insufficiently gentrified neighborhood,
these wood-slates now are free to signify âflippedâ no matter where they
are placed on the home. The now defunct website, LAist quotes Dave Bantz
an architecutral designer when they say âSo, in that respect, the slat
is a wordless billboard with the subtext, âthis neighborhood has
potential. But itâs still a place where youâre going to want a sense of
protection from the street.ââ Just as the pristine, white-walled cafes
modeled after an Apple store (and filled with as many if not more
Macbooks), that more and more riddle Los Angeles, once merely had
recourse to its exorbitantly priced coffee to keep the the proletarian
locals out, a new cafe in Boyle Heights is now a selling point for the
flipped house pictured above.
Before gentrification in the L.A. East-side, fences served a much more
utilitarian purpose: to keep stray dogs out of your yard or a way to
keep solicitors at bay. Chainlink fences predominate but there are also
the wrought iron fences for those homes with a bit more money. There was
no real attempt to completely shield oneâs home from view. Oneâs gaze
could easily pass through either of these type of fences and see your
neighbor on the porch or tending to their garden.
A walk through the heavily gentrified areas of the L.A. Eastside has
houses distintinctly separated from each other with those wood-slate
fences where you would not be able to see those who live inside,
sometimes completely obscuring the house. All this speaking to the fears
of the new arrivals who love the relatively low prices but do not love
the neighborhood. One Boyle Heights affordable advocate caught heat two
years ago for posting a photo of a home in Boyle Heights with a
wood-slate fence. People found out where the house was and the owner was
livid. He was â45-year-old, white ânon-hipsterâ who purchased the house
last year in Boyle Heights because âitâs the one place in LA where I
could (barely) afford to buy a home.ââ Interestingly this home owner
thinks that being a non-hipster means that he could not possibly be
contributing to gentrification in Boyle Heights: something akin to how
middle-class Latinxs returning to Boyle Heights think of their
âdevelopmentâ of the neighborhood as a neutral/positive gente-fication
and not gentrification. In wealthier areas of Los Angeles you see homes
without fences and with uncurtained, unshuttered windows: the interior
on display to any passerbys.
A friend called these newly-fortified homes, âa gated community of one
[home].â At this rate it would not be a stretch of the imagination, in
the not-so-far future, to walk down a street with only slightly-varying
wood-slate fences, essentially creating a walled-off street. A smooth
transition would be had from the walled-freeways to a walled-street.
Itâs been noted that the wall that Trump wants to build (but which
essentially already partially exists) along the Mexican border would be
a fence, and not a wall. On this future street you would see an old
Subaru parked out front, with a Bernie 2016 and Coexist sticker on it.
But the owner would never, ever dare chant âBuild that wall! Build that
wall!â like their relatives back home â they listen religiously to
KPFKâs âGlobal Village.â In some parts of Los Angeles you can already
see corrugated metal in use.
It is claimed by pro-gentrification advocates that the inverse of the
White Flight which happened after the 1992 Riots spells a current form
of local de-segregation in a still very segregated city. This would be
easier to believe if the well-off âreturnersâ did not feel the need to
replace every party supply store with a cold-press juice bar, an old
local dive bar with a mixology bar, a cheap local restaurant with an art
gallery, a Cambodian-owned donut shop with quirky takes on traditional
donuts or encourage some to erase long-standing murals just in time for
an event serving to bolster brand-new-to-the-hood businesses. Every city
being gentrified now just looks like every other gentrified city. And
somehow we are told that these neighborhoods are being revitalized. On
the contrary, theyâre being sterilized.
A city where Historic Filipinotown only remains Filipino historically;
where Boyle Heights exists as a place only to document its past and
fading present; where an old Lincoln Heights jail which once housed the
Bilingual
Foundation of the Arts, will soon serve as a site set to erase our
present; and where people learn of Echo Parkâs past from a fictionalized
movie right when being a Chicanx with hood fashion becomes most
marketable.
This is the rigged game the racialized proletarians of Los Angeles are
forced to play in. We only become desirable when what we have produced
out of struggle can increase profits for someone, somewhere. Until then
we are forced out of our neighborhoods with racist laws (like gang
injunctions), racist landlords and when our neighborhoods do see an
improvement in safety and quality of life after years of struggle (as
the women of Boyle Heights have done), they canât stick around to enjoy
it. It makes perfect sense then that the wood-slate fence would reach
its semiotic apogee in the neighborhood of Boyle Heights. Los Angeles is
quickly becoming a place exclusively for the white and rich.
Why for anarchy and not for anarchism? This may seem like a small point
to split hairs over but it is a point which is important to us. It is
important because we are interested in a vital anarchist (anti-state
communist) milieu. For us anarchism points to the notion that there
could be a special set of practices (forms) which can be found out to be
complentary for a free life for all. We feel this is foolish and assumes
human life could ever take on a singular form. Life should take on the
form necessary for its free reproduction, unlike its current state which
only serves those who rule/control us.
Classical anarchism (i.e. European anarchism) was in many ways a pursuit
of the best practices for/of anarchy: whether the mutualism of Proudhon,
the collectivism of Bakunin, the individualism of the Bonnot gang or the
communism of Kropotkin. As we want to distance ourselves from
Eurocentric anarchy, we feel that there should be some leeway when it
comes to all this; though it should be a tempered leeway. For us the
emphasis should be on content over form. Let us explain.
The communization current often writes about this. For them it is not a
question of radical democracy, equitable distribution, popular power,
council-decision making, local self-management...but whether the set of
relations are communist or not. Communism becomes the basis for
judgment. Why? Because communism constitutes set of relations which are
free, without measure, (and consequently) without exchange and without
needless hierarchy. And this is something which most anarchists also
aspire to. We want to wander away from anarchism because we feel it is
more about defining how we should live than allowing us to live as we
see fit, from time to time.
For instance, if some of us were to enter into a life or death battle
then a consensus-based decision makes sense. We are all entering a
situation where I lives may likely end. We should be able to decide our
participation over own life or death. Now, if we are deciding whose
house will hold the seasonal party do we really need a consensus? Do we
even really need to come to a vote? Do we need democracy among friends?
Do we put to a vote who will make the enchiladas or who will serve their
homebrew? Probably not because this is not how daily life is generally
decided. We rely on other factors to decide and other links of
kinship/comradeship/friendship. This demonstrates the limitation of the
fetishization of democracy (or consensus).
Also many speak of anarchism as though there is only one.[19] Recently
one of us attended a free school gathering where a Classical
Left-Anarchist presented their anarchism as the anarchism. Fortunately
the attendees generally revolted against this conception, this insidious
authority. We despise authority as much as we despise work and having to
pay the rent. Instead of propping up our anarchism we prefer to gauge
our forms against what is communist and what is not. We are anarchists
that agree with the communization current when they say that the
revolution is communization or rather:
âcommunisation will be the moment when [revolutionary] struggle will
make possible, as a means for its continuation, the immediate production
of communism. By communism we mean a collective organisation that has
got rid of all the mediations which, at present, serve society by
linking individuals among them: money, the state, value, classes, etc
Communism will thus be the moment when individuals will link together
directly, without their inter-individual relations being superimposed by
categories to which everyone owes obedience.â[20]
This is briefly to state that the institution of communism and anarchy
is not a pre-revolutionary possibility but a possibility that arises out
of revolutionary struggle. This is why we prefer to speak of communism
instead of anarchism. Communism becomes a revolutionary verb, whereas
anarchism becomes a pre-revolutionary dead weight (noun) that some try
to impose on the present (or future). This is why we say we are for
anarchy (a condition) and for communism (a verb).
Here is our attempt to explain what anti-politics means to us and how we
link it to communization and ultimately to communism.
Anti-politics: action and theory that posits itself against the sphere
of politics (and therefore also political-economy). Politics being the
sphere of power, alienation, mediation and domination. In this way
anti-politics questions & attacks the mediation & coercion found in
democracy; the centrality & domination of the economy (whether
capitalist or not) in our lives, patriarchy & its deadly logic;
settler-colonialism & its persistence; questions whether the breadth of
human desires could ever constitute a unitary & enumerated positive
program and opens itself up to the possibility of affinities of shared
antagonism with those who do not explicitly express themselves
politically but nonetheless attack that which anti-politics is set
against (i.e. rioters).
Anti-politics does not seek to âbuild powerâ although the building of
the capacity to broaden communal self-defense and social-reproduction is
a part of the struggle against power, it is not the struggle itself.
Immigrant enclaves and other dominated peoples have always found ways to
support each other through moments of direct attack (fascists, racists,
the police) or indirect attacks (racialized & gendered wage relation,
State policy). This is what we call mutual aid. Mutual aid is a force
that binds us, but it is not in itself an antagonistic force. The State
& Capital sees very little problem in proletarians getting by on their
own: in many ways it unloads the burden from their shoulders.
Anti-politics is that antagonistic force. It is when anger, pain, or
even joy hits the streets against this world.
So many moments in recent history have shown that revolt against power
has not come from a previously united powerful front (unless you still
dream of 1917), but by those who have found each other in the struggle
and sought to extend & generalize their revolt until they are free. The
goal of this project is to do just that. Our capacity to destroy the
order which maintains the world as we right now live is linked to how
quickly, deeply and generally revolt is spread. A war against the order
we are forced to live under is a losing war. This is how anti-politics
is linked to communization.
Communization, similarly, does not seek to create new nodes of power (or
counter-power) but to act as an encroaching acid on power through the
openings created by a revolutionary moment (or moments). Though
communization looks on to the terrain from the ground-level: how do we,
as proletarians, abolish that which makes us racialized & gendered
proletarians (self-abolition) while also bringing about another way:
communism. Anti-politics tends to look up from the ground with its
sights on politics, on power. So communization is not a political
program to be installed, but rather the revolution as the creation of
communism immediately.
Now some clarification of what we mean by communism.
Many think of Stalinist Russia, or the Cuba which Fidel Castro ruled for
decades, or even the regime of North Korea. All those Nation-States
hold, as their claim, the intent to build communism through some
variation of State Socialism. As anarchists, who also call themselves
communists, we see their attempts as different forms of State
Capitalism. Money still exists. Commodities are still produced. There
are still police and prisons. Gendered violence and division of labor
largely maintained. Work as a sphere of life separate from the rest of
life maintained. Race persists and is violently maintained. Value is
still valorized. The State is still the final arbiter of what will be
and what will not be.
Communism is a free, classless way of life. No State; no money; no
commodity-production; gender & race as a site of oppression abolished;
stolen Native lands restored;[21] work abolished;[22] art re-integrated
into daily life; the economic way of life largely (if not totally)
abolished; decision-making no longer a specialized separate sphere of
life; and the parties are gonna be pretty banging.
There is much more to be said and we wish we had more time to say it:
this project is run by proletarians and free time is not a luxury we
have. This is but a modest first attempt at attempting to explain why we
say the things we do, do the things we do and why this project exists at
all. La lucha sigue y sigue.
We originally posted this on twitter here. We learned that some of the
text formatting on there made it difficult for people to read it. So we
share it here de-twitterized.
We donât deny the necessity of organization in toto but we reject the
primacy of The Mass Organization⢠as an a priori necessity for class
struggle. The organizational forms necessary to class struggle
(proletarian self-abolition) arise from the struggle itself. As we see
it, the commune is not necessarily a thing to be built in the absence of
a general struggle but rather it is a communist way of life that arises
from the struggle itself. Its arrival is not merely due to an
âorganizationalâ preference by proles. It simply is the beginning of a
way to sustain the antagonism of the struggle, to help prolong a rupture
in capitalist space/time logic so that the revolt can further generalize
& de-specialize.
The commune is mobile because itâs not just a thing in space/time but
how people relate to each other and to the land. A re-integration into
the metabolism of the world, not a domination over it (as Marx once
noted)
The commune is not the end goal, but it is a form (filled with communist
content) likely to arise as part of the proletarian communist movement
set to destroy the world we live in. Some attempts to build the commune
now end up as enclaves or the work of self-selected specialists who have
the capacity to independently suspend their condition as proles. Or
perhaps they never were proles at all, or are intentionally declassed.
Collective living is not itself revolutionary. The media has published
instances of very wealthy white young professionals now seeking
âcollective housingâ as a way to network or unload the burden of social
reproduction: someone else washes their clothes, does the dishes or
turns are taken in cooking meals. It seems even the bourgeois long for
connection in our hyper-atomized society.
Now the commune is not meant to be a space for the self-selected or
specialists. The commune is not intended to be the center of communal
life nor is it really a place. Though it would be a recognizable node
within a largely decentralized mesh network. It would be porous & allow
movement in and out of it. It would not be a new Nation-state with
borders.
Struggle specialists will have us think radical democracy would be a
feature of the commune. We maintain democracy is what we do with those
we donât trust (or for life or death situations). Would we need to
gather for a vote to decide who will be the DJ at the harvest party?
Decisions would be made but no longer will decision-making be a
specialized and alienated sphere from everyday life. Itâs just what we
do cuz life requires decisions. This immediacy means the commune is
inherently anti-political.
The commune is mobile because itâs not just a thing in space/time but
how people relate to each other and to the land. A re-integration into
the metabolism of the world, not a domination over it (as Marx once
noted). This is why communism must be anti-colonial. Those of us who
have maintained a deep connection to an original human culture borne of
a deep interaction with the land we are on have a knowledge more
necessary to our lives than anything Western science has ascertained in
the last 500 years.
The strength of the commune would not merely be its defensive measures
but the the intensity of need that proles-in-abolition have for it. This
is why it would have to abolish race & gender as a site of oppression,
though this does not entail the abolition of difference. If anything
social-communal life would deepen & enrichen because no longer would the
basics of life be meted by the market based on who you are, how you
choose to live and express yourself. Culture, now de-commodified,
returns to its pre-capitalist richness & malleability.
Communists who view life only economically have historically created a
social life that is flattened and impoverished. They confuse means with
ends. They view meeting âneedsâ as the goal of social life; rather than
social life as a way of meeting our primary need: each other. Further
the division of human life between needs & not-needs is an economistic
way of viewing things. We are more than machines requiring fuel.
Communism would necessarily overcome this economistic way of viewing
ourselves & our lives.
Recently we were asked about our thoughts on communization &
decolonization and this essay is our response.
It should first be noted that the communization milieu is indeed
European in origin and largely does not address our settler-colonialist
reality in the so-called Americas. Its largely European writers are
conceptualizing from a different context than we live under in the
so-called Americas (& other colonized lands).
Then why do we still talk about communization?
Those of us that work on this project still find value in communization
theory because it demonstrates a clear way to bring about the conditions
for communism immediately.
But what is communism:? For us, and fellow travelers, communism is not a
mode of production. It is not just a economic system of âfairerâ wealth
distribution. Itâs a broad spectrum of life-ways that are based on
communal social relations, including (but not exclusive to) mutual aid,
solidarity, the collapse of the production / consumption binary (thus,
the abolition of work), the abolition of the State, abolition of money,
the abolition of value, the abolition of race & gender as a site of
oppression, the abolition of cis-hetero-patriarchy (and all that
entails, like compulsory heterosexuality). Some also call this anarchy.
A negation of what props up Western capitalist civilization.
We are not interested in a transitional stage, as ârevolutionary
socialistsâ call for, or in an incremental way, as those calling for
âdual-powerâ or âbuilding the commune.â Those of us that work on this
project are not indigenous, but we do have indigenous ancestry. As we
have had our ties cut off to our much-more communal lifeways of our
respective indigenous ancestors, we are left to find other possible
roads towards a free & communal life without misappropriating
contemporary or ancient indigenous lifeways (though understanding these
lifeways will be paramount to the successful project of assuring a free,
communal way of life that does not doom us all). We do not claim that
communization would replace indigenous resistance & revolt against the
settler-colonial capitalist world, rather we maintain that we understand
that without this resistance & revolt the settler-colonial capitalist
world will remain.
It should also be noted that although communization theorists employ
Marxian 1 categories & concepts, they do not see these categories &
concepts as eternal. We recognize them as tools which Marx developed to
understand & critique capitalism (of his time) and not necessarily
eternal categories & concepts that will / would / should always exist.
We will not carry these concepts into a post-capitalist, de-colonized
world. If anything, the communism which we write about would be a clear
rupture from not only capitalism, the State, patriarchy, white supremacy
but from Western civilization itself. This is why communization
theorists often call themselves communists and not Marxists.
What communization theory largely offers is not a rigid program, but an
understanding of how capitalism functions (with its embedded contours of
race & gender) and what it would mean to abolish it. It allows for space
for improvisation & flexibility when it comes to the actual process of
what communism (or anarchy) could look like. There is no rigid party
line.
Communism is not a state of affairs to establish (or impose) but rather
it is the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. And
if the communism Marxists, and some anarchists, are attempting to
establish retains the same settler-colonial relationship to the land
then itâs not communism at all. Settlers building a commune on occupied
land still maintains a class society. A class society where settlers are
indeed still preventing indigenous people from reproducing their
lifeways, as they see fit.
Now decolonization, like communism, is a vast topic. And like full
communism, decolonization (or anti-colonialism) will vary from place to
place, bio-region to bio-region, etc. A one-size fits all plan does not
exist (and should not exist) and the creation of such a plan would grind
against our strong anarchist inclinations.
We can think about communization and decolonization as two aspects of
the same weather system. Communization would attack the capitalist
social relations which exist on occupied land, but clearly it would not
go far enough. Weâre writing from occupied Tongva territory, known by
its original name Tovaangar, and to merely create communism (anarchy)
and make no attempt to restore native lands to their original
inhabitants would (once again) not be communism at all. Decolonization
(anti-colonialism) reminds us that there is more to be done.
The coupling of communization & decolonization recognizes, especially
with ever-intensifying climate change, that settlers do not deeply, or
even superficially, understand the deep natural history of the land they
are on. Here in so-called Los Angeles we are constantly facing the
increasing danger of massive wild fires. But wild fires are an ancient
part of this landscape. The ecology of the landscape made famous, via
its mass particularization, around the world depends on fire for its
rejuvenation. What has caused an increase of danger for humans is not
just climate change bringing less rain and hotter weather, but also the
fact that unmitigated capitalist development has made it profitable to
build in places which would previously burn with little effect on human
life: hilltops, in mountain forests, etc.
Communization works as a corrective on Marxism and Left-Anarchism which
merely call for a different kind of management of production (worker
self-management, state-run management) instead of a fundamentally
different set of social relations. Even Marx noted that communism is
part of the human communityâs return to a re-connection with the land,
instead of capitalismâs attempt to control & extract as much value from
it (though we are also critical of humanism as well). Since the
beginning of colonization, Indigenous people across the world have
repeated that the settler-colonial-capitalist way of life has not only
been genocidal but has also been an unmitigated act of ecocide.
This is our understanding. A work in progress, but our understanding.
There can be no âdecolonized socialist state,â just as there is no such
thing as âscientific socialism.â A way of life cannot be a science. What
we desire is to see the words communism, and even anarchy, to eventually
be forgotten and instead live in a world where we can be intimately
connected to the land and to each other, and understand that this
disconnection is an alienation much more ancient than the alienation we
have from our labor under capitalism.
What was once Mr. Tâs Bowl is now the Highland Park Bowl. The bowling
alley described above in the blurb from Purple Magazineâs L.A. issue.
Previous to Mr. Tâs Bowl destruction and re-branding as the Highland
Park Bowl, it was a no-frills but great Los Angeles divebar and
underground music venue. It was also the first place I got served an
underage beer. The heyday of Mr. Tâs Bowl had already largely passed by
the time I started to go there, but it still served as a venue for
NorthEast L.A. to showcase the kind of musical and creative acts that
would not get any stage time in the Hollywood clubs.
I went to check out HPB once it opened and I almost felt physically ill
by its transformation into some gaudy, neo-vintage bowling alley. What
existed before actually bore history and this was just a simulacrum of
it. Itâs ironic that this short, badly-written blurb mentions the
bowling alley in The Big Lebowski. That bowling alley which existed in
East Hollywood is now gone; it stood just east of the 101 freeway. Like
much of L.A. history itâs been erased, which is why newcomers to the
city feel that they are breathing life into the city. But this city has
always self-cannibalized to save face & make space. Thatâs part of its
attraction to outsiders. A city of no-history where re-invention is
possible. The fact of the matter is that Los Angeles is a place with a
deep history, previous to European invasion & settlement. And even its
settlement is rife with settler-colonial, racist and class-struggle
history. Not far from the new Highland Park Bowl, is another bowling
alley: All-Star Lanes. An almost dilapidated bowling alley which until
fairly recently was one of the few last bastions of proletarian
entertainment in Los Angeles: a city that is hellbent on erasing
proletarian social life. The venue has often hosted underground Latinx
punk shows.
Some 10+ years ago some friends started a localist blog to help us tell
our own story about our part of the city, the L.A. Eastside. This was
before gentrification crashed into us. Whatâs troubling about this blurb
is how even in 2019 NorthEast L.A. is seen as âremote.â Back in 2008 the
L.A. Eastside was almost invisible in both local & national media, so
itâs not altogether surprising NELA is referred to as remote; but remote
from where? These same friends also once had a radical space in NELA
known as Flor Y Canto Centro Comunitario, from 2000â2005. A space where
I learned about local anarchist history, the Situationist International,
the Ultra-Left, Post-Left Anarchy and about what it could mean to live
in a fundamentally different way. But these spaces donât get
memorialized, remembered by local media or even re-imagined the way Mr.
Tâs Bowl has been. Thereâs no money in it. Previous to FYC there were
other spaces & projects in NELA like Radio Clandestino &
Regeneracion/Popular Resource Center in the 1990s (named after a Mexican
Anarchist-Communist newspaper from a century ago). So here we are, in
2019, waiting to be revived and colonized by those seeking cheaper
rents, and yet also agents of displacement. All this reminds me itâs
important we write our own history on our own terms or else someone else
will do it for us.
An anti-gentrification strategy which counters the âgood local businessâ
to the âbad, âgentrifierâ business,â and thus does not question
capitalism itself, is a strategy which may garner popular support, but
it is one which is ultimately shallow & reformist in nature. It confuses
the symptoms of gentrification for the causes. If we take gentrification
as an opportunity to truly interrogate what housing means under
capitalism for proletarians, we would see that this society will always
have us living as close to the edge as possible.
Itâs easy to say âFuck Hipstersâ because of their hyper-visibility at
the surface/ cultural level. But if we are radicals, we have to be able
to see beyond the white-tiled cafes, the art galleries which used to be
party supply stores and the breweries which used to house manufacturing
machines. Gentrification is very much a homogenizing force: every
gentrifying city looks like every other gentrifying city but what unites
these cities more than a spreading basic aesthetic are the intensifying
capitalist social relations which they are a product of. Capitalism ever
deepening its teeth into proletarian life.[23]
If we were to remove every âgentrifierâ business from Los Angeles, or
any other city in the world, we would still have to pay the rent, go to
work and lead a life so disconnected from our own needs & desires.[24]
Of course, a strategy which takes into the consideration the totality of
capitalist society is difficult to imagine at the level of everyday
life, but if we are radicals then this is part of the dream we must
make. Surely we will have to level antagonism towards the shocktroops of
gentrification, but like a moldy piece of bread the shocktroops are but
the end of a lifecycle of the parasites they are. They go on as
contagion, but the deep work happened before their arrival. In the same
way, we must look and think deeply. It is not simply âthe communityâ vs
âthe not-community.â Itâs about liberation of those of us under the
thumb of capitalism and those who gain from pressing the thumb. And
those pressing the thumb are more likely to be local & State government,
international financial institutions investing in real estate, the
police, local real estate agencies and banks...than those pressing
French coffee presses.
Gentrification as the intensification of the psycho-geography of the
real subsumption of everything to Capital. No place for cultural
remanants outside its logic. The banalisation of all spaces,
streamlining consumption. You donât live here, you just buy here.
But what does this mean?
Much has been written about gentrification, but simply put it is the
name for the rise of property values (and then ipso facto rent prices),
resulting in displacement and often cultural erasure of those who were
displaced. As Stuart Hall said, ârace is the modality in which class is
livedâ and so by this logic gentrification is also deeply racialized.
But what is the cause of this rise is more contentious. Some point to
art galleries/ spaces; others to international & national real estate
speculation looking for new markets to profit off of; some see it is as
a natural process of re-vitalization of areas once thought of as blight
(if life under Capital could be seen as natural); some see the incursion
of the (white) hipster as the cause. Suffice to say the cause is complex
and may include all of these.
Now what is psycho-geography? In 1955, Guy Debord [a French anti-state
communist who wrote much about art & cinema & The Spectacle] defined it
as âthe study of the precise laws and specific effects of the
geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions
and behavior of individuals.â Of course, as gentrification attests, the
physical environment we encounter does not effect all of us in the same
way. Later in 1961, he clarified things a bit by saying, âsectors of a
city... are decipherable, but the personal meaning they have for us is
incommunicable.â We may all be able to see how hostile architecture (as
seen below) works to discourage loitering and/or camping by the
homeless, though others may not understand why the appearance of a juice
bar (also seen below) may be just as offensive to some of us (especially
since a Mexican juice & snack shop is right up the street selling the
same thing at cheaper prices).
So psycho-geography could be a way to think about how certain spaces in
a city could be seen as either welcoming, hostile or open-ended. Most
spaces are very controlled in Los Angeles, though their control is
highly racialized. For instance, public drinking is illegal in Los
Angeles but curiously at art gallery openings, where a largely white
audience take their Tecates or cheap red wine onto the sidewalks or
street, there seems to be little enforcement of this law. The video
below, take from a 2010 documentary on Skid Row, sheds some light on
this racialization:
[]
Part of the power of whiteness is that those emboldened by it feel they
can and should be able to go anywhere and be safe. Freedom of movement
and safety are two things we all desire, but because whiteness is
something which demands defense under the White-Supremacist society we
live in â that enforcement comes along with an armed gang with a
monopoly on violence: The Police. There are countless of stories of
white people calling the police on Black or brown people where there was
indeed no threat and the Black or brown person ends up being brutalized
or killed by the police. One of the clear fears of Black and brown
proletarians who live in a neighborhood being gentrified is that with
new white neighbors with money, so will come a police force who either
would ignore their neighborhood in the past or would already terrorize
their neighborhood. What were normal house parties would now attract
aggressive police attention (house parties which occur because often
bars/clubs prove too expensive for proletarians).
But what does âthe real subsumption of everything to Capitalâ mean? This
is a topic which has been explained much better in Ultra-Left communist
texts than could be explained here, but briefly as Endnotes note in
their second volume: âformal subsumption affects only the immediate
labour-process, while real subsumption extends beyond the sphere of
production to society as a whole. â Or as Theorie communiste put it, it
is âcapital becoming capitalist society. â
So, at one point in time Capital only absolutely controlled proletarians
when at work, but over time Capital has been able to control
proletarians non-labor time as well (âfree time)â. Gentrification could
very well be seen as the intensification of this control within
(typically) the realm of the city. One of the tell-tale signs of
gentrification is how what were once old mom-and-pop shops which likely
fulfilled a need within a specific ethnic neighborhood (fresh tortillas
and tamales!), transition to boutique or high-end shops which fulfill
needs much more based on commodity-fetishism: the purchase of things (or
services) not so much based on need but based on what they say about the
purchaser:
I buy a coffee at Cafe de Leche because it says that I have refined
taste in coffee and also that I have the disposable income to spend much
more for something as banal as coffee, rather than picking up a cup from
a Cambodian-owned donut shop for much less. I buy crystals
supposedly-imbued with healing or other properties because I see they
are part of a trend Iâve come across on Instagram (and I will post them
on Instagram) vs. buying candles in a local botanica from a culture I
donât know enough about to spin for social capital.
Interestingly enough many times defenders of gentrification advocates
say that the changes brought by gentrification amount to bringing much
needed services and/or access to certain commodities to poorer
neighborhoods; or some even claim they are bringing culture &
difference. The first claim assumes that residents wished they could pay
more for the things already for sale in their neighborhoods. This second
claim is rather ludicrous as anyone who has visited more than a few
gentrified neighborhoods will attest to their sameness: juice shop,
high-end cafe, yoga studio, crystal shop, wine shop, etc. What
gentrification is bringing is the blight of middle-class/bourgeois
whiteness. A blight which sees itself as the default and cannot imagine
that those outside of it could not want what they want.
El Sereno starts to look like Highland Park which looks more and more
like Echo Park which inevitably becomes annexed by Silver Lake.
More and more what could have been a street where people hung out on and
could buy cheap snacks to pass the time becomes a place where one cannot
visit without spending less than $20 (currently LAâs minimum wage can be
as low as $10.50/hr). The last remnants of what some would call
community disappears. A recent LA Times article on the creeping
gentrification faced in Lincoln Heights notes how some people stay in
this L.A Eastside neighborhood not just because it is still relatively
cheap, but because they have found a place they cherish and call home.
For the petit-bourgeois/bourgeois who see themselves as cosmopolitan and
shuttle from living in one city to another and then on to another city
based on whim or fancy, Lincoln Heights has no historical or personal
meaning. Their newly-flipped rental (or mortgage) is just a nice place
(with maybe a nice view).
âOh you can see Downtown L.A. from here.â
âItâs so conveniently close to everything.â
âIt feels like a real L.A. neighborhood â not like Echo Park does now.â
âItâs really an up-and-coming neighborhood!â
âIf only it had a Trader Joeâs!â
Gentrification is the further realization of the power of Capital over
the lives of proletarians. And this realization says one thing loudly &
clearly: you donât matter and your connection to a place does not
matter. Perhaps the coming years will continue to show a Los Angeles
which says:
FUCK YOU, WE DONT WANT TO LIVE WITHIN THE LOGIC OF WHAT CAPITAL THINKS
MATTERS. WE WANT TO LIVE OUTSIDE OF ITS LOGIC AND WILL DESTROY CAPITAL
IF NECESSARY.
Cuz we know when we drive or walk around a gentrifying Los Angeles we
know that what we see is akin to a fuck you to the revolt of 1992.
Capital is taking the city back and itâs time we remind Capital of what
we can and will do.
Mexican(-American)s and Work
In Los Angeles to be against Capital typically presents itself in a
pro-work/ worker position. The problem is never work itself, the nature
of work or that work is waged but instead what is desired is extending a
sphere of work that is unionized and bolstered with higher wages. Take
for instance the CLEAN Carwash campaign,[25] where carwash workers (whom
are mostly immigrant men) have been unionized under the representation
of United Steelworkers Local 675.[26] Though this move one is that
brings much needed betterment of working conditions and wages for these
workers, what is ultimately not brought up is that the work of a car
wash workers can and has already been automated. But the fading labor
movement seems to be no longer concerned with the overthrow of
capitalism nor the abolition of work. That dream is a dream that has
been lost along with the labor movement itself.
The expression of an anti-work position has either been minoritarian or
unheard of. In a city where working conditions for immigrants can be
well below the legal standards set forth by the State and the Federal
Government, the push for more protections and rights within the
workplace takes precedence. An anti-work affect (rather than a bonafide
position) among Mexican immigrants and/or Mexican-Americans is usually
to be found in cultural forms and do not often take on explicit
anti-political, or anti-capitalist forms. That said, the playful,
tongue-in-cheek cultural forms are plentiful, the other mentioned forms
are few and far in between.
My first encounter with an explicit anti-work position came from Chicanx
friends who I had met in 2001 who were heavily-influenced by the French
Marxist theorist Guy Debord and the Situationist International. In 1953,
a young Guy Debord painted on a wall on the Rue de Seine ÂŤ NE TRAVAILLEZ
JAMAIS Âť (tr. Never Work). A statement that was difficult for me to
understand conceptually at the time but which I immediately gravitated
towards (who as a youth looks forward to a lifetime of work ahead of
them?) Previously, all the anarchist literature I had read on work
concerned themselves with how wage labor was theft of our time & of our
labor-power and that the solution was not the abolition of work per se
but worker self-management. [Think of all the nostalgia that some
Left-Anarchists still have for the revolution lost by the
anarcho-syndicalists during the Spanish Civil War.]
Anti-work was a scandalous position growing up in a Mexican household
where what was prized was the opportunity to find well-paying work, as
well as a hearty work ethic. Though the starting point for Guy Debordâs
opposition to a world of work was not a beatnik, bohemian-lifestyle
refusal common to the 1950s, but rather a rejection of the bleariness of
life under capitalism and part of a whole project to overthrow what they
called The Spectacle and to once again make life a joyous.
The critique of work can be found elsewhere throughout history including
Paul Lafargueâs âThe Right to be Lazyâ(1883) written by Karl Marxâs
son-in-law; in the unfortunately notorious post-left Anarchist Bob
Blackâs âThe Abolition of W>rkâ(1985) and Gille Dauveâs âEclipse &
Re-Emergence of the Communist Movementâ (1970) where he clarifies what
the abolition of work could mean and says âwhat we want is the abolition
of work as an activity separate from the rest of life.â He further
explains that the issue at hand is not whether we are active or not, but
rather that under capitalism what we do is abstracted into two spheres,
both alienated: work-time and leisure-time. This (anti-state) communist
critique of work notes that the liberation from Capital is not the
liberation of labor but the liberation from labor as it now exists.
Currently we assume only those activities which are paid a wage have
value and that only those things which are productive, in the capitalist
sense, are necessary to human life.
That said there is no shortage of cultural output from Mexican
immigrants, or Mexican-Americans (some of whom identify as Chicanx) that
takes a swipe at the way work is made necessary to our social
reproduction.[27] Take for instance a comedic song from âUp In Smokeâ
(1978), where the character Pedro de Pacas sings a song trying to upend
notions of popular Mexican-American identity and says,
âMexican-Americans donât like to get up early in the morning but they
have to so they do it real slow.â
Here we catch a key moment in the subjectivity of the racialized
Mexican-American worker caught up in a world where labor is managed and
controlled by borders. There is an understanding that work and the
preparation for work is drudgery but also that the refusal of work might
be impossible; this refusal is acknowledged but it gives way to a
sabotage on social reproductivity, a slow-down.
The spectacular production of the Mexican as a worker in the USA (or as
a Mexican-American) is often tied up in a binary of either being
hard-working; job-stealing; or lazy and welfare-scheming. As seen by the
words used by Donald Trump during his presidential campaign, there is
also the perception of the Mexican as a dangerous criminal, forming a
trinity of prejudice that returns when it suits the need of nativist,
racist politicians. This type of characterization was first seen when
the U.S. forcefully annexed the so-called American SouthWest from Mexico
and bandits like Tiburcio Vasquez haunted the minds of the waves of
Westward-bound Anglo-Americans. In 1954, this showed up as Operation
Wetback where the INS (which later becomes ICE) enacted indiscriminate
round-ups of Mexican laborers to put a chilling effect on undocumented
migration of laborers into the USA. Laborers need only âlook Mexicanâ to
be deported and many of those deported were in fact U.S. citizens.
To posit an anti-work position and to take into account the
racialization of workers in the USA looms as an impossible task. Often
immigrants internalize a work ethic that can be as entrenched as that of
right-wing Anglo-Americans that erroneously describe the USA as a
meritocracy. This is more necessity than reaction by Mexican immigrants
under racialized capitalism since they are often forced into the most
grueling of work that most native-born, or Anglo-Americans, will simply
not take on: picking of fruits & vegetables, construction, food service,
child care, landscaping, etc. We work hard because we have to and we
make a self-serving mythology around it where we are the hard-working
ones but everyone else is the not-harding-working ones, where notably
elements of anti-blackness come to the fore.
To further the myth of the hard-working immigrant, that does not
threaten the colonial-capitalist social order of the USA, is to strip
immigrants of the agency to express refusal, resistance and revolt. In a
time where nativist racism is peaking once again, we must realize that
this myth proliferation is no safety net against ICE sweeps or other
racist violence. There is no pride in presenting ourselves as
hard-working, since under capitalism working hard merely means we are
putting in more labor for the same amount of pay. In effect, we are
lowering our wages by putting in more work than is expected and making
ourselves hyper-exploited. If we were to collectively express our
reluctance or refusal to work beyond the bare minimum we could begin to
flex the capacity of our labor power across industries. (An inspiring
moment of this kind of flexing was the general strike on May 1^(st),
2006 where immigrants largely self-organized a strike to show how much
their labor is integral to the functioning of U.S. capitalism; in Los
Angeles 1 to 2 million people took to the streets & over 90% of LA Port
traffic was shut down.)
And as it has been noted, more and more Mexicans are returning to Mexico
than coming into the USA, the payoff for this hard-work is in
decline[28]. Iâve heard amongst friends and family that many recent
Mexican immigrants find that the work they encounter in the USA is
either too dangerous, too difficult or too hard to find.
But this desire to be the most hardworking Mexican in the world wasnât
always the norm. In British historian E.P. Thompsonâs 1967 text âTime,
Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalismâ he mentioned how
economic-growth theorists viewed Mexican mineworkers as âindolent and
childlike peopleâ because they lacked discipline. For instance, he notes
from a book on the âThe Mexican Mining Industry, 1890 â 1950â that
Mexican mineworkers had:
â[a] lack of initiative, [an] inability to save, absences while
celebrating too many holidays, [a] willingness to work for only three or
four days a week if that paid for necessities, [and] an insatiable
desire for alcohol...â (Bernstein)
It seems that time changes little. Of course, in many ways we always
knew that we donât really want to go to work and that we only have
disdain for those who donât have to because we are not them. That we
enjoy the winter break where we fill up on tamales, cervezas and spend
the evenings talking about what weâd really like to be doing and dreams
for the future. Even the Leftâs obsession with the mythologized
collective worker that is socially-responsible, punctual and whom
identifies with their work is largely a fabrication of the dead workerâs
movement.[29]
The anti-state communist theory journal, Endnotes, states that:
âthe supposed identity that the workerâs movement constructed turned out
to be a particular one. It subsumed workers only insofar as they were
stamped, or were willing to be stamped, with a very particular
character. That is to say, it included workers not as they were in
themselves, but only to the extent that they conformed to a certain
image of respectability, dignity, hard work, family, organisation,
sobriety, atheism, and so on.â[30]
Too often we are given the lie that the way to progress is to submit to
the rationalization of the capitalist system; that we simply need to
awaken the sleeping giant which represents the possible Latino voting
bloc; that the rich are rich because they really know how to handle
their money; that if only we could sway Congress to push immigration
reform; if only we could get universities to tell us back our histories
or to enroll us at all...but really the way out is to abolish the social
relation that is capitalism
that protects itself by way of the State; that protects itself with
borders, police and a standing army; that controls the way we envision
our lives with careers, time management and gender roles; that makes
into a commodity even the way we choose to spend our not-working hours,
which yet are still spent preparing or recovering from those working
hours.
Or weâve been resisting this whole time /
Thinking back to the 90s when the ditch party was both an escape from
the terrible LAUSD as well as a form of resistance to the most
alienating of compulsory schooling: in many ways these teens that would
not show up to school and party instead contained much more awareness of
the society around them than the kids that would instead get âstraight
Asâ and then study Chicano/a Studies. These kids implicitly understood
the pipeline that the LAUSD was to low-paying, entry-level service work
where they would have to do much more rule-following, guideline-abiding,
button-pushing, uniform-wearing than critical thinking. It was as though
they were able to envision the no future we currently find ourselves in.
So many of us already partake in the public secret(s) of our resistance
to work:
raising your own wage since you are putting in less labor for the same
length of time.
worthwhile, and even get some nice gifts for friends and family.
shutting down the internet, or by talking to our coworkers about not
work-related things, or by not working at all and taking a nice siesta.
too hungover from the rager the night before.
A world without work seems like an impossibility, a utopia, an unlikely
dream especially when most of our waking time is spent thinking about
how weâre gonna pay the rent, the power bill, car insurance, possible
student loans, more probable credit card debt or the bar tab...but a
world without work is also a world without capitalism a world of
communism.
That world is a world without wage labor, without patriarchy, without
race, without class, without a state, without police; where we would
decide our lives on our own terms without the limitations of value
production, without the control of borders, without Monday mornings,
without social death, without artificial crises, where we wonât have to
suffer the indignities of being harassed by the boss, a world beyond
accounting, a world where what we do will not define who we are to each
other. For a world without measure!
Ni de aqui, ni de alla. Neither from here, nor there. An old Chicanx
saying that still rings true but tired, with a Chicano-Studies
dullness...like Gloria Anzaldua speaking to us from the other side
telling us that the border is a wound, but paraphrasing Cesar Miguel we
rather maintain that instead the border is the knife. We also have Corky
Gonzales telling us of the great hope of Jose Vasconceloâs raza cosmica
for Chicanxs: a hope that is but an inversion of Social Darwinism,
infused with anti-blackness & anti-Native erasure and sold as a sort of
metaphysical eugenics. It seems weâre in need of some rhetorical
updating.
But this is not meant to be a reformulation of what it means to be
Chicanx, though I agree with Cheech Marin when he said: âa Chicano [is]
a Mexican-American with a defiant political attitude that centers on
[their] right to self-definition. Iâm a Chicano because I say I am.â
Rather Iâd like to talk about a way out of our disappointment and our
collective dispossession: a way out of capitalism and the world it has
created; a way out of the racist-colonial state we live under; a way out
of the Patriarchy learned from the West and which we also have
homegrown. This modest proposal is the rasquache way.
First for the unfamiliar: rasquache is a word with origins in the
Nahuatl language. In Mexico it is usually a derisive term for things
that are seen as low-class or just down-right cheap. Since Chicanxs have
learned to make do with what we have, this term has been transformed on
this side of the U.S./MX border into a term to describe art or
aesthetics that arise out of making do with little and with little
regard for a singular visual cohesion. Neither of these definitions
exactly suit my intended purpose. Letâs create a new one. The rasquache
way is a way for not-just-Chicanxs to give up the charade of ideological
purity in favor of an antagonistic fervor which bears many sharp edges
like a hominy can cut into the shape of a flower for a potted plant. It
is a way to encabronar[31] orthodox politics into a deep and generative
anti-politics.[32]
If you got your radical politik-learning form the university then you
are are probably used to putting every variant/ flavor/tendency/current
of radical politics into neat little boxes that sit next to each other
but rarely ever touch. This is hardly the way real life works or the way
humans live out their lives (and those who live their lives according to
abstract ideals are often boring, quarrelsome or both). Anywayz no
revolution was ever led by a singular idea focused on a singular
position. I am no idealist and neither is any proletarian revolution.
The Leninist, Maoist and Platformist conception of ideological cohesion
and rigidity as a precursor for revolutionary activity is an impasse
that forever reaches out towards a future never to arrive. Though we
should temper our actions against what we know and what can be known, we
must realize that limit point of thought is thought itself.
Rasquache inserted into the realm of anti-politics allows us to take
what we want and leave behind that which does not suit our needs. To
build our own vision despite what the gatekeepers of good taste and
orthodoxy may want us to align with. This is why I have chose to join
the call of the return of joy and antagonism of the Situationist
International, but leave behind its fetishization of workerâs councils;
why I can talk about the material conditions which lead to the rise of
the riot, yet also echo the insurrectionary fervor of Alfredo Bonanno;
why I choose to still call myself a Chicano despite the fact that my
(anti-)politics fall outside the realm of The Chicano Movement; why
despite the fact the the Partido Liberal Mexicano called itself
âliberal,â I admire it as an openly-insurrectionary agent for anarchist
revolution; why I can hope to one day loot a jacuzzi with friends, yet
still have a critique of commodity fetishism. Anywayz, a revolution is
not the collective action of angels.
Those who take very few steps to put their politics to the test of
experimentation by engaging with the world find it easy to stay within
their dull ivory tower. Being in a room with people you may not know and
speaking your piece is how one learns to blend, to mix, to re-purpose,
to discard and to re-imagine. Of course, this is already the history of
those whom are forced to live between cultures & traditions. But we are
also told that some things are not for mixing, not for blending, not for
re-purposing, not for discarding, not for re-imagining.
The rasquache way is a liberation of our desires from the stifling world
of orthodox radical politics. The youth are especially attuned to
finding ways to make what was reserved to the staid Leftists and breathe
new life into it by transforming its content and sharpening its edge.
All over the internet I see the youth blending radical high (and low)
theory at a scale and scope that did not exist 20 years ago. Memes are
often derided for being overly-simplistic or niche-driven, but often
distill truths hidden by hazy theory.
Rasquache-ness would help us be flexible in light of changing
circumstances. We would not simply attempt to build mass organizations
because thatâs what the Classical Workerâs Movement have been trying to
do for the the past 200+ years: we would see that the impasse we face is
not so much a lack of unified organization, but a lack of concerted
action. That last few years have shown what a few determined
desmadrosxs[33] can do to set things off. See Ferguson, Baltimore,
Oakland, Orange County and even Los Angeles.
Rasquache-ness would allow us to be elusive when cornered. It would
allow us to slip into spaces and that things that would go unheeded if
were to first proclaim, âI Am An Anarchist.â Rasquache-ness would push
us to defy categorization and become opaque to the State. Rasquache-ness
would value creativity over regularity.
Chicanxs have not offered the world of radical politics much in the last
30 years. Usually we offer ourselves up as transmuters of Mexican
culture into colorful commodities (see: the proliferation of Day of the
Dead products). Perhaps the very rasquache we engage in because of our
historical position could be that which we offer the world. This would
stand as a counterpoint to the way some Chicanxs flock like
moths-to-the-flame to the dusty & anachronistic ideologies of Maoism,
Leninism and Cultural Nationalism.
Rasquache-ness would allow us to speak to those we need to build
connections with by circumventing the old language, iconography and
slogans of Leftism. No more calls to defend âThe People.â No more Che
Guevera t-shirts. No more adoration of Subcomandate Marcos.[34] No more
bad âconsciousâ rap. Sure those things may attract a certain
demographic. The kind of person who thinks, âI need to join an
organizationâ instead of âI need to do X, Y, Z action with my homies
where I live.â The type of person who needs a âmass organizationâ to
feel like they are âdoing something.â The type of person of person who
ignores revolt, riots, insurrection because they are not âorganized
forms of collective action.â
Letâs get real rasquache and get free!
[1]
[2] We have no sociological data of the makeup of XR in the UK but the
fact that they are so openly police-collaborationist is key feature of
middle-class whiteness.
[3] Further reading on detournement, Detournement as Negation and
Prelude by SI 1959
[4] Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
[5] A prime, current example is the the current struggle against the
Constellation Brands by the people of Mexicali, Mexico and its
surrounding areas from taking their water. For further reading see here:
[6] I note that this is a supposed shared heritage for even if the
territory which Alurista calls Aztlan were truly the ancestral homeland
of the Mexica, not every Chicanx could lay âclaimâ to it since not all
Chicanxs bear Mexica hertiage. Chicanxs contain a multitude of ethnic
heritages, including from Native Peoples from so-called Mexico, other
origins such as from Europe and Africa. Chicanx is not a race.
[7] National Brown Berets, Our Nation Aztlan. [Site is gone, link is
cached content]
[8] New Scientist, â There is no DNA test to prove youâre Native
American.â
[9] It is worth noting that the notion of La Raza Cosmica created by
Mexican philosopher Jose Vasconcelos (a notion widely embraced by
Chicano Nationalists) is essentially Eugenics.
[10] Hecho en Aztlan, âBrown Beret Ten-Point Programâ (1968)
[11] LA Times, âLAPD is more diverse, but distrust in the community
remains.â
[12] LA Times, Nov. 13^(th) 1907
[13] Edward J. Escobar, ââRace, Police and the Making of a Political
Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department,
19001945, p. 58
[14] For further reading, see â Origins of the Policeâ by David
Whitehouse
[15] Fredy Perlman, âThe Continuing Appeal of Nationalismâ (1984)
[16] Ibid
[17] Nice Shit For Everybody by Noche (https://
ediciones-ineditos.com/2017/01/12/nice-shit-for-everybody/)
[18] This text is included in full at the end of the essay
[19] Though truly, anarchism has never been pro-capitalist.
Anarcho-capitalism is but an online abberration.
[20] de Mattis, Leon. âWhat Is Communisation.â Libcom, 16 Nov. 2011,
libcom.org/library/ what-communisation.
[21] This is something we add into our variant of communization but it
is something not found in communization theory in general since the bulk
of theorization has arrived from Western Europe. This is a deep flaw and
one which we look forward to further theorize and write about in the
future since Ediciones ineditos is a project that sits on occupied
Tongva territory. Creating communism on a territory occupied by settlers
without questioning the settler-colonial relation would merely be a
perpetuation of settler-colonialism.
[22] For further reading on the abolition of work see our translation of
Gille Dauveâs âGetting Rid of Work.â
https://ediciones-ineditas.com/2018/03/08/getting-rid-of-work/
[23] In other words, the intensification of the extraction of profit
from the cycle of accumulation under capitalism: an intensification
necessary to the very being of capitalism.
[24] Here, we also have to call into question what exactly is a
âgentrifierâ business. Some would say it is a business run by the
âgentryâ! But what is the âgentryâ? Is the âgentryâ the
petit-bourgeoisie? The shopkeeper? If so, then even the small, local,
longtime shopkeeper is also the âgentry.â Some say it is a business
which tends to promote the forces of gentrification, but in a way most
businesses do exactly this by requiring our money in exchange for their
commodities and/or services and thus act as a way of impoverishing us.,
making it harder to pay the rent. Although, often times cultural
connections cultivated in ethnic and/or proletarian neighborhoods act as
a mask, a cover for the fact that there too does capitalism wield its
control.
[25]
https://www.cluejustice.org/campaigns_carwash
[26]
[27] DEFINITION: all the labor that needs to be done so that workers are
prepared to work the next day. this work is often un-paid though it is
necessary for any work to be done under capitalism. examples: doing the
laundry, child-care, sex, dish-washing, food preparation, commuting.
[28]
https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2015/11/19/more-mexicans-leaving-than-coming-to-the-u-s/
[29] tr. The ideal worker / Damn! it seems the company isnât making the
profits that it should be. well, say no more! : tomorrow I will quit
without any kind of compensation or anything. how would I dare protest!
Iâd rather call the anti-riot police and have them split my head open!
[30] A History of Separationâ by Endnotes
[31] Def. to get riled (familiar)
[32] â...the road of political ideology and programs is no more useful
to the project of subversion. Because this project is the transformation
of existence in a way that destroys all domination and exploitation, it
is inherently anti-political.â â Against the Logic of Submission.
[33] Def. troublemakers
[34] Whom technically has ceased to exist