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Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia www.minorcompositions.info | [email protected] Distributed by Autonomedia PO Box 568 Williamsburgh Station Brooklyn, NY 11211 Phone/fax: 718-963-0568 www.autonomedia.org [email protected] Cover and layout by [email protected] Communization and its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles Edited by Benjamin Noys The Fabric of Struggles 7 Benjamin Noys The Moment of Communization 1 What are we to do? 23 Endnotes 2 Communization in the Present Tense 41 Théorie Communiste 3 Refections on the Call 61 Leon de Mattis Frames of Struggle 4 Now and Never 85 Alberto Toscano 5 Capitalism: Some Disassembly Required 105 Nicole Pepperell 6 Work, Work Your Thoughts, and Therein see a Siege 131 Anthony Iles and Marina Vishmidt Strategies of Struggle 7 The Double Barricade and the Glass Floor 157 Jasper Bernes 8 Fire to the Commons 175 Evan Calder Williams 9 Make Total Destroy 195 John Cunningham No Future? 10 Communization and the Abolition of Gender 219 Maya Andrea Gonzalez 11 Black Box, Black Bloc 237 Alexander R. Galloway Contributors 253 Notes 259 The Fabric of Struggles Benjamin Noys I Barely twenty years have passed since the collapse of actually-existing so- cialism and now the crisis of actually-existing capitalism, in its neoliberal version, is upon us. Te shrill capitalist triumphalism of the 1990s, or the bellicose equation of capitalism with democracy that defned the ’00s ‘war on terror’, ring more than a little hollow in the frozen desert of burst f- nancial bubbles and devalorization. Te commodities that make up the capitalist way-of-life have turned malignant, exposed as hollow bearers of debt servitude that can never be paid of. Te cry ‘No New Deal’ goes up as wealth is transferred in huge amounts to save the fnancial sector. We are prepared for yet another round of sacrifce as structural adjustment and ‘shock doctrine’ return to the center of global capitalism after exten- sive testing on its self-defned ‘peripheries’. Whether this is terminal crisis, entropic drift, or merely the prelude to the ‘creative destruction’ that will kick-start a new round of accumulation, is still obscure. Communization and its Discontents In this situation new waves and forms of struggle have emerged in dispersed and inchoate forms. We have also seen a new language be- ing used to theorise and think these struggles: ‘the human strike’, the ‘im- aginary party’, ‘clandestinity’ and, not least, the strange and spectral word ‘communization’. Te concept of communization emerged from currents of the French ultra-left in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but has gained resonance as a way of posing the problem of struggle today. It draws at- tention to the exhaustion of existing forms of organization that have tried to lead, dictate or pre-empt struggles, it contests the tendency to afrm or adopt an alternative counter-identity (worker, militant, anarchist, activist, etc.), and it challenges the despotism of capitalism that treats us as sources of value. II Tis collection is dedicated to a critical questioning of the concept of com- munization, and in particular to analysing its discontents – the problems, questions and difculties that traverse it. It is not easy to defne what the word communization refers to, and it has often been used more as a slogan, a nickname, or even worse a ‘brand’, than forces together very diferent per- spectives and analyses. What we fnd ‘in’ communization is often a weird mixing-up of insurrectionist anarchism, the communist ultra-left, post- autonomists, anti-political currents, groups like the Invisible Committee, as well as more explicitly ‘communizing’ currents, such as Téorie Commu- niste and Endnotes. Obviously at the heart of the word is communism and, as the shift to communization suggests, communism as a particular activity and process, but what that is requires some further exploration. Here I want to give some initial points of orientation, which are explored further in the contributions that follow, by analyzing the commu- nizing arguments that pose struggle as immediate, immanent, and as anti- identity. In each case I want to treat these points as sites of dispute, espe- cially between the theorisations of the well-known contemporary French 8 Introduction radical grouping associated with the journal Tiqqun, also publishing under the name ‘Te Invisible Committee’ (henceforth I will refer to them as ‘Tiqqun’ for convenience), on the one hand, and the less-known but explic- itly communizing currents of Téorie Communiste (TC) and Endnotes, on the other. What does it mean to say that communization is or should be immediate? It suggests there is no transition to communism, no stage of socialism required before we can achieve the stage of communism, and so no need to ‘build’ communism. Tis, however, has a very diferent meaning in diferent hands. For Tiqqun and others infuenced by anarchist prefgu- rative politics this immediacy means that we must begin enacting com- munism now, within capitalism. From the commune to ‘commoning’, from cyber-activism to new ‘forms-of-life’, in this perspective we can’t make any transition to communism but must live it as a reality now to ensure its eventual victory. On the other hand, TC and Endnotes give this ‘imme- diacy’ a rather diferent sense, by arguing that communization implies the immediacy of communism in the process of revolution. In fact, they are deeply suspicious of a prefgurative or alternative politics, regarding such forms of struggle as mired in capitalism and often moralistic.1 Instead, if anything, contemporary struggles can only be negatively prefgurative, indicating the limits of our forms of struggle and indicating only possible new lines of attack. Tese diferences are also refected in the posing of the commu- nization in terms of immanence. Te point here is that communization requires that we start thinking communism from within the immanent conditions of global capitalism rather than from a putatively radical or communist ‘outside’, but again this can lead in very diferent directions. Tiqqun regard capitalism as globally dominant, but also see it as leaving spaces and times through which revolt can emerge, or into which revolt can slip away from power. Tey regard capitalism as porous or, in Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation, ‘holey’.2 Tis kind of ‘enclave’ theory is a familiar 9 Communization and its Discontents strategy, ranging from the Italian social centers, to squats, to communal gardening, communes themselves, and other practices of ‘commoning’. Tis kind of formulation appeals to struggles in progress, to activists, and so links with the claim for a prefgurative immediacy. Again we might not be surprised to see that TC and Endnotes disagree. Tey too regard capi- talism as dominant, but as a contradictory totality fssured by class strug- gles between proletariat and capital. Tere is no ‘outside’, or ‘line of fight’, but only a thinking through of this immanent contradiction and antago- nism secreted within capitalist exploitation of labor to extract value.