Malatesta on Syndicalism

Errico Malatesta

Syndicalism and Anarchism

(April/May 1925)

From Errico Malatesta: The anarchist revolution: Polemical articles 1924-1931, Freedom Press. [1]
Downloaded with thanks from Endpage.com.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The relationship between the labour movement and the progressive parties is an old and worn theme. But it is an ever topical one, and so it will remain while there are, on one hand, a mass of people plagued by urgent needs and driven by aspirations – at times passionate but always vague and indeterminate – to a better life, and on the other individuals and parties who have a specific view of the future and of the means to attain it, but whose plans and hopes are doomed to remain utopias ever out of reach unless they can win over the masses. And the subject is all the more important now that, after the catastrophes of war and of the post-war period, all are preparing, if only mentally, for a resumption of the activity which must follow upon the fall of the tyrannies that still rant and rage [across Europe] but are beginning to tremble. For this reason I shall try to clarify what, in my view, should be the anarchists’ attitude to labour organisations.

Today, I believe, there is no-one, or almost no-one amongst us who would deny the usefulness of and the need for the labour movement as a mass means of material and moral advancement, as a fertile ground for propaganda and as an indispensable force for the social transformation that is our goal. There is no longer anyone who does not understand what the workers’ organisation means, to us anarchists more than to anyone, believing as we do that the new social organisation must not and cannot be imposed by a new government by force but must result from the free cooperation of all. Moreover, the labour movement is now an important and universal institution. To oppose it would be to become the oppressors’ accomplices; to ignore it would be to put us out of reach of people’s everyday lives and condemn us to perpetual powerlessness. Yet, while everyone, or almost everyone, is in agreement on the usefulness and the need for the anarchists to take an active part in the labour movement and to be its supporters and promoters, we often disagree among ourselves on the methods, conditions and limitations of such involvement.

Many comrades would like the labour movement and anarchist movement to be one and the same thing and, where they are able for instance, in Spain and Argentina, and even to a certain extent in Italy, France, Germany, etc. – try to confer on the workers’ organisations a clearly anarchist programme. These comrades are known as ‘anarcho-syndicalists’, or, if they get mixed up with others who really are not anarchists, call themselves ‘revolutionary syndicalists’. There needs to be some explanation of the meaning of ‘syndicalism’ If it is a question of what one wants from the future, if, that is, by syndicalism is meant the form of social organisation that should replace capitalism and state organisation, then either it is the same thing as anarchy and is therefore a word that serves only to confuse or it is something different from anarchy and cannot therefore be accepted by anarchists. In fact, among the ideas and the proposals on the future which some syndicalists have put forward, there are some that are genuinely anarchist. But there are others which, under other names and other forms, reproduce the authoritarian structure which underlies the cause of the ills about which we are now protesting, and which, therefore, have nothing to do with anarchy But it is not syndicalism as a social system which I mean to deal with, because it is not this which can determine the current actions of the anarchists with regard to the labour movement.

I am dealing here with the labour movement under a capitalist and state regime and the name syndicalism includes all the workers’ organisations, all the various unions set up to resist the oppression of the bosses and to lessen or altogether wipe out the exploitation of human labour by the owners of the raw materials and means of production. Now I say that these organisations cannot be anarchist and that it does no good to claim that they are, because if they were they would be failing in their purpose and would not serve the ends that those anarchists who are involved in them propose. A Union is set up to defend the day to day interests of the workers and to improve their conditions as much as possible before they can be in any position to make the revolution and by it change today’s wage-earners into free workers, freely associating for the benefit of all.

For a union to serve its own ends and at the same time act as a means of education and ground for propaganda aimed at radical social change, it needs to gather together all workers – or at least those workers who look to an improvement of their conditions – and to be able to put up some resistance to the bosses. Can it possibly wait for all the workers to become anarchists before inviting them to organise themselves and before admitting them into the organisation, thereby reversing the natural order of propaganda and psychological development and forming the resistance organisation when there is no longer any need, since the masses would already be capable of making the revolution? In such a case the union would be a duplicate of the anarchist grouping and would be powerless either to obtain improvements or to make revolution. Or would it content itself with committing the anarchist programme to paper and with formal, unthought-out support, and bringing together people who, sheeplike, follow the organisers, only then to scatter and pass over to the enemy on the first occasion they are called upon to show themselves to be serious anarchists?

Syndicalism (by which I mean the practical variety and not the theoretical sort, which everyone tailors to their own shape) is by nature reformist. All that can be expected of it is that the reforms it fights for and achieves are of a kind and obtained in such a way that they serve revolutionary education and propaganda and leave the way open for the making of ever greater demands. Any fusion or confusion between the anarchist and revolutionary movement and the syndicalist movement ends either by rendering the union helpless as regards its specific aims or with toning down, falsifying and extinguishing the anarchist spirit. A union can spring up with a socialist, revolutionary or anarchist programme and it is, indeed, with programmes of this sort that the various workers’ programmes originate. But it is while they are weak and impotent that they are faithful to the programme – while, that is, they remain propaganda groups set up and run by a few zealous and committed men, rather than organisations ready for effective action. Later, as they manage to attract the masses and acquire the strength to claim and impose improvements, the original programme becomes an empty formula, to which no-one pays any more attention. Tactics adapt to the needs of the moment and the enthusiasts of the early days either themselves adapt or cede their place to ‘practical’ men concerned with today, and with no thought for tomorrow.

There are, of course, comrades who, though in the first ranks of the union movement, remain sincerely and enthusiastically anarchist, as there are workers’ groupings inspired by anarchist ideas. But it would be too easy a work of criticism to seek out the thousands of cases in which, in everyday practice, these men and these groupings contradict anarchist ideas. Hard necessity? I agree. Pure anarchism cannot be a practical solution while people are forced to deal with bosses and with authority. The mass of the people cannot be left to their own devices when they refuse to do so and ask for, demand, leaders. But why confuse anarchism with what anarchism is not and take upon ourselves, as anarchists, responsibility for the various transactions and agreements that need to be made on the very grounds that the masses are not anarchist, even where they belong to an organisation that has written an anarchist programme into its constitution? In my opinion the anarchists should not want the unions to be anarchist. The anarchists must work among themselves for anarchist ends, as individuals, groups and federations of groups. In the same way as there are, or should be, study and discussion groups, groups for written or spoken propaganda in public, cooperative groups, groups working within factories and workshops, fields, barracks, schools, etc., so they should form groups within the various organisations that wage class war. Naturally the ideal would be for everyone to be anarchist and for all organisations to work anarchically. But it is clear that if that were the case, there would be no need to organise for the struggle against the bosses, because the bosses would no longer exist.

In present circumstances, given the degree of development of the mass of the people amongst which they work, the anarchist groups should not demand that these organisations be anarchist, but try to draw them as close as possible to anarchist tactics. If the survival of the organisation and the needs and wishes of the organised make it really necessary to compromise and enter into muddied negotiations with authority and the employers, so be it. But let it be the responsibility of others, not the anarchists, whose mission is to point to the inadequacy and fragility of all improvements that are made within a capitalist society and to drive the struggle on toward ever more radical solutions. The anarchists within the unions should strive to ensure that they remain open to all workers of whatever opinion or party on the sole condition that there is solidarity in the struggle against the bosses. They should oppose the corporatist spirit and any attempt to monopolise labour or organisation. They should prevent the Unions from becoming the tools of the politicians for electoral or other authoritarian ends; they should preach and practice direct action, decentralisation, autonomy and free initiative. They should strive to help members learn how to participate directly in the life of the organisation and to do without leaders and permanent officials. They must, in short, remain anarchists, remain always in close touch with anarchists and remember that the workers’ organisation is not the end but just one of the means, however important, of preparing the way for the achievement of anarchism.

April-May 1925

More Dupont!

"The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answer'd. 'I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded, & remain confirm'd, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote.'
Then I asked: 'does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?'
He replied: 'All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing.'"

I saw a man from Egypt on the television news. He said his mother said he had to fight because she wanted him a hero. The interviewer did not ask why his mother wasn’t at the square and why he had not stayed at home to scrub the step.

In a 30 second snapshot we are reintroduced to Marx’s unfinished examination of the problem known historically as the ‘Russian road to socialism’. The objective historical role of capital has been to disconnect populations from their culture and introduce representative abstractions (cyphers for Value) in their place. The dis-attachment of populations from their specific history becomes an objective condition for their pliant reorientation towards different, perhaps, communist values.

The question of the ‘Russian Road’ asks whether a society may reach a communist consciousness without their pre-modern cultural practices having first been deconstructed by the process of capitalist re-valuation. Clearly, Marx did not get to the bottom of this question and the subsequent efforts of anti-imperialism and national liberation have been signally unsuccessful in everything but the further mystification of the capitalist productive relation. There are no proletarian states.

In the case of the days of rage in Egypt of January/february 2011, we see a ‘modern’ social revolution defined entirely by its unreconstructed bourgeois aspirations. There are mass prayers. There are national flags. There is a hated personified oppressor. There is an externalised enemy. There are calls for democracy and constitutional government. There is ‘self-organisation’ around the defence of property. There is the continuation of traditional roles between men and women.

In a situation such as Egypt where the question of communism is raised as a possible outcome, communism itself must take on the role of a corrective consciousness and do the work which otherwise would have been undertaken on the unconscious of the population by capital. It occurs to me, that Freud’s structural model is appropriate here... in this scenario, communist consciousness becomes the nagging superego, perpetually illuminating the shortcomings of the proletarian/popular ego as it attempts to realise objects from the tensions within the specificity/objectivity of its unconscious.

Where communism does not take this corrective role, (and who could suppose it could ever have a positive outcome except in conditions of complete economic breakdown?), bourgeois categories of national liberation will continue to be generated, and even within the pro-revolutionary milieu:

"Suez has a special value in every Egyptian heart. It was the centre for resistance against the Zionists in 1956 and 1967, in the same district. It fought Sharon's troops back in the Egyptian-Israeli wars."
Nidal Tahrir, from Black Flag, a small group of Anarcho-Communists in Egypt

Up to the point of writing this, communists have not dared to revile the fetish-object of the hero’s spilt blood from which the romance of bourgeois revolution is generated. They have defined themselves in terms of involvement in rather than separation from received historico-cultural conventions. But a communist revolution is defined precisely by its generation of new terms, of new roles; by a great flourishing of gestures and extended innovatory logics, the transformation of the entirety of conditions and lives. A revolution cannot be reduced back to the atavistic romance of red guards against white guards.

We are presented then, in the absence of such a flourishing, with the task of manifesting negative thought... of separating ourselves from enthusiasm and irrationality, from received and barbaric practices. Intelligence is defined by critically diagnosing conditions and identifying what is absent, it is not an accident that Marx talked of communism in terms of ‘criticism after dinner’. The communist role is essentially therapeutic, it coolly observes and quietly questions ongoing processes which it can neither initiate nor halt. People involved in struggle (i.e. the entirety of the human race) must process the vast accumulation of their inheritances, they must revalue their preconceptions and they must work through their history in order that they might escape from it. The communist is society’s therapist, he supplies, in the objective absence of spontaneous new forms and new relations, continued opportunities for transference in terms of provocations, doubts, telling criticisms.

The forms of struggle developed by the proletariat (e.g. its self-organisation) must be criticised not supported and must be criticised until it criticises them itself, until it abolishes its forms itself. Up to this point in the Egyptian events, pro-revolutionaries have been beholden to twitter feeds and 24 hour news coverage. Their thirst for contingent facts has completely obscured their critical faculties. The absence of innovatory thought, the failure in the character of their response, which has not yet got beyond a sluggish affirmational sentimentality and the mystification of solidarity, is the substantial proof that there is no prospect of communist revolution. Until communists are prepared to think for, and before, the Other... until they are able to think critically against their own prescriptions, and find a therapeutic path, they will not be able to escape their own dogmas.

I like the daily mail crossword. I like suduko. I do jigsaw puzzles. My shirts come from Marks and Spencer, my socks are cotton rich. My tie is made of acrylic-ah.

"I also asked Isaiah what made him go naked and barefoot three years? he answer'd, 'the same that made our friend Diogenes the Grecian.'
I then asked Ezekiel why he eat dung, & lay so long on his right & left side? he answer'd, 'the desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite; this the North American tribes practise, & is he honest who resists his genius or conscience, only for the sake of present ease or gratification?'"

Marcello Musto

http://www.khukuritheory.net/a-de-dogmatized-marx/#more-1195


Which of Marx’s ideas do you think were especially distorted or not understood by his followers? For example in the foreword to the volume Sulle tracce di un fantasma (Roma, Manifestolibri 2005) that you edited, you criticised Plekhanov’s idea that Marxism should be “a complete worldview.”--

Plekhanov, like many other Marxists after him, was guilty of building a rigid conception of society and history. And his ideas became very influential among Russian revolutionaries – and not only Russian, due to his international reputation at the time. In my opinion, this conception, based on a simplistic monism in which economic developments are decisive for other transformations of society, had very little to do with Marx’s own conception. It is much more related to the cultural climate of the time, in which positivism and determinism played a big role.

In the preparatory manuscripts for the third volume of Capital, Marx wrote that he was trying to present the “organisation of the capitalist mode of production, in its ideal average,” and hence in its most complete and general form. So, I am not saying that Marx was not interested in reaching “a complete worldview” or that he did not want to be a systematic thinker, if we want to use this expression. I have tried to argue that his generalisation was very different from the one made by Plekhanov and, even worse, later by the fathers of that inflexible monism called Dialekticeskij materialism.

Anyway, the list of Marx’s ideas that have been misunderstood or completely distorted by some of his “followers” or by the self-professed custodians of his thought is very long. Distorted by different perspectives into being a function of contingent political necessities, he was assimilated to these and defamed in their name. From being critical, his theory was utilised as bible-like verses. Far from heeding his warning against “writing recipes for the cook-shops of the future”, these custodians transformed him, instead, into the illegitimate father of a new social system. A very rigorous critic and never complacent with his conclusions, he became instead the source of the most obstinate doctrinarianism. A firm believer in a materialist conception of history, he was removed from his historical context more than any other author. From being certain that “the emancipation of the working class has to be the work of the workers themselves,” he was entrapped, on the contrary, in an ideology that saw the primacy of political vanguards and the party prevail in their role as proponents of class consciousness and leaders of the revolution. An advocate of the idea that the fundamental condition for the maturation of human capacities was the reduction of the working day, he was assimilated to the productivist creed of Stakhanovism. Convinced of the need for the abolition of the state, he found himself identified with it as its bulwark.

I do not think I have enough room here to answer this question as it would deserve. Therefore, I will focus on only one topic — perhaps the most important aspect, after all, of what happened to Socialism in the 20th century: the conception that in communist society there is no place for the individual; that the post-capitalistic association among workers conceived by Marx was a liberticidal society, a regime of oppression without civil rights or political guarantees. This is the biggest paradox that could have happened to Marx. And it is scandalous for those who know his oeuvre. I have read many philosophers and classics of political thought and have encountered only a few thinkers who were interested (and politically engaged!) in the free development of the individuality of all women and men (not only of a privileged class). And I believe that this point is fundamental for the political parties and the social movements that still look at Marx as a source of inspiration. They should be able to challenge the right-wing parties and ideologies to regain possession of the flag of freedom, which is in the hands of the right today. Just to give you an example, the name of the new populistic political party of Berlusconi in Italy is The People of Freedom: a blasphemy!

From 'Rough Theory'

IS SLAVERY CAPITALIST?

Posted by N Pepperell 04/09/2010 @ 1:53 pm
Filed in Capital v.1, Contradiction, Philosophy of History, Political Economy
Just a brief placeholder note here, since I don’t have the time to develop this textually (and it would take a very long run-up, since it relates to the architectonic of Capital as a whole), but I was reminded that I’ve been meaning to post on this, by a discussion over at Nate’s over whether slavery in the US in the 19th century could be considered capitalist.

This is one of the many, many – have I mentioned many? – ways in which the presentational strategy of Capital has led to unfortunate confusions… By starting, as it does, deep within the epicentre of a certain classical political economic fantasy about capitalism, then only gradually panning back to bring into view the complex world-system that Marx believes that capitalism really is, Capital makes it too easy for readers to take the opening passages as “definitions” of capitalism, as conditions that need to be met in order for something to be considered capitalist. In relation to Nate’s specific question about slavery, there is a long debate over whether slavery – because it doesn’t involve wage labour – meets the criteria Marx sets out for capitalist production.

These “criteria” are taken be those set out in the early chapters, where Marx initially starts out from a sort of petty bourgeois fantasy of simple commodity production and exchange, and then pulls the rug out from under this fantasy by introducing the category of wage labour – and the related category of the capitalist, as someone who exchanges goods produced by the labour of others. This initial détournement, where Marx shows that the petty bourgeois conception of capitalism is only a partial and narrow view, which cannot account for reality of wage labour, is often read as a one-off gesture: at this point, Marx is taken to have swept aside the curtain and revealed the true reality, which is that capitalism is founded on wage labour and class exploitation, rather than on some purportedly harmonious system in which those who work exchange the products of their respect labours for a fair price. From this point, the text is taken to settle down to business – it has abolished the petty bourgeois illusions and arrived at the reality of class exploitation.

This passage of text of course does do this sort of work – it pans back from the initial petty bourgeois forms of theory with which Capital begins, and shows those forms of theory to be adequate only to a very blinkered and limited view of capitalist production – one which ignores the implications of the existence of class relations. Panning back to the categories of wage labour and capital show that the capitalist vista is much wider than can be grasped by the opening theoretical gambits with which the text begins.

The problem comes in seeing this movement as a one-off strategem. As though, having used this technique to shatter the presuppositions of petty bourgeois theories, Marx then spends the vast remainder of the text just working through the details of this single and unique discovery.

The process of détournement does not end so soon.

Instead – and this is something I will try to demonstrate textually as I have the time – Capital continues to pan back (and move sideways, backwards, and forwards, in order to view previous claims from an ever-widening array of new perspectives). As the text continues to zoom out, it finally reaches elements of capitalist production that overtly violate the “criteria” set out in the initial discussions of wage labour. The later chapters of Capital highlight a whole range of labouring practices that do not conform to the vision of wage labour presented in the earliest passages – including, among other examples, parents selling the labour of their children, press gangs, slavery, and colonial systems.

This doesn’t mean that Marx hasn’t identified a trend toward proletarianisation – a tendency toward the creation of a wage labouring class. It means that – like every other “trend” Marx identifies in Capital – this trend toward proletarianisation is not linear or uniform, but rather confronts a series of counter-trends and conflicting eddies within a vastly complex overarching global system. All of these trends are “characteristic” of capitalist production as a global phenomenon – theories that focus on one trend to the exclusion of contradictory eddies will thus overextrapolate from a limited and partial view of capitalism, and render themselves unable to grasp the likely impacts of other aspects of the complex whole. The interconnectedness of this system as a global whole means, among many other things, that the development of unfree labour in parts of the world carries implications for the development and political self-assertion of formally free labour in other parts.

Significantly, all of these contradictory trends are equally “capitalist”. Capitalism is a global system. No part of the world is “more capitalist” than any other. The trends that are able to play out in more advantaged portions of the world system are related to the trends that play out in the least. Different parts of the world can experience radically divergent conditions on the ground, radically different organisations of labouring activities, and yet all be part of the same global capitalist system – because what “defines” the system, for Marx, is the downstream aggregate consequence of all of these local practices, operating unwittingly in tandem to drive a coercive process of expanding production.

Within the context of this overarching vision of what capitalism “is”, some of the earlier, apparently “definitional” passages, operate as a part of an argument that explains why it might seem plausible to various theorists to act as though, for example, different parts of the world lie along some sort of developmental continuum – as though some are “pre” capitalist, and some are capitalist proper, and some, perhaps, are asserted to be capitalist in some rarified higher form. Marx believes he has to account for the plausibility of this perspective even though it does not reflect his own understanding of capitalism – which holds that capitalism is an internally contradictory global whole, which is quite capable of suspending within itself local and regional trends that directly oppose the trends playing out in other locations.

So: yes – slavery in the 19th century US is capitalist. If we understand capitalism as a global system, effecting global forms of compulsion – and effecting this compulsion precisely in and through a range of apparently contradictory practices playing out in various regions, through apparently dissimilar forms of everyday practice on the ground…

It will take a long long run-up textually to explain how this argument plays out in Capital – even if I were able to blog regularly, it would be quite a while before I could ground this point… But for whatever it’s worth to foreshadow where the argument would go… Here’s where :-)

Latest From FD

Dear JS

Please accept the following as a sort of epistolary response to your comments, a section of which I include here as a means of introduction:

[quote]I suggest that this question is unsolvable in the way it is posed in NC. Both that text and your response below ascribe the aperture to a “confluence of factors" —again, I point to the part of NC where you describe this as “almost by accident," the result of a “cause and effect" that produces a “hole." But the aperture and grace-particle are precisely what require explaining: how is it possible for capitalism to produce, out of its own univocal and total domination, something capable of both defying it and constituting a new social order? The grace-particle seems to come, for you, out of capital itself—by the simple confluence of factors within the course of capital’s own development. This suggests a continuity between capitalism and the revolution—a revolution produced only by the dominating practices of capital itself. This leads to the question: how could it be possible for confluent factors all constituted by univocal domination to produce something radically different? You point towards the “grace-particle" as the answer, but why, and for what reason? Nothing in your analysis allows you to do so except the presupposition that something new can come out of something old—since for you the revolution itself comes only as a matter of cause-and-effect still totally dominated by capital. (“Grace" operates here, in traditional fashion, as a very, very free gift from above, wholly “unmerited" by our fallen world. So how the heck did it get here in the first place? How is it possible? These are the essential questions.)[/quote]


I am not a propagandist and therefore the prospect of replying to you in the terms of the original text which you are responding gives me no pleasure. Therefore, my response to your critique is set in a slightly ‘other’ register; I hope you are able to make the leap easily from the content of what I have written to its relevance as a response to your concerns.


1.
The living thing escapes change either by correcting change or changing itself to meet the change or by incorporating continual change into its own being. ‘Stability may be achieved either by rigidity or by continual repetition of some cycle of smaller changes, which cycle will return to a status quo ante after every disturbance[/i] Nature avoids (temporarily) what looks like irreversible change by accepting ephemeral change.
Gregory Bateson Mind and Nature
First, lets begin with a theorem: the rate of live engagement with the idea of communism (i.e. the rate of non-ideological engagement with the idea of communism) can be measured, and this measurement indicates the crisis of capitalism. That is to say, the rate of the appearance of the idea of communism as a live problem at the level of conscious engagement with the problem of the rate of appearance of communism indicates the level at which capitalism is in crisis.

At present, at most, the rate of engagement is perhaps a few hundred. It could be that it is much less than this in numbers of individuals but the magnitude can be set in the hundreds. This indicates that capitalism, as it involves 7 billion individuals, is something like 4 orders of magnitude greater (or more real) than the magnitude of living engagement with communism (please do the maths for me if I’ve got the terminology wrong). From this, we can deduce a situation of what Camatte calls real domination. Real domination is a self-correcting system in steady state, i.e. although it experiences some turbulence, its problems and its solutions are all generated within its parameters and this would suggest that all elements within the system have become stabilised and are not likely to cause a problem in the foreseeable future. In other words, there is no reason to suppose that proletarian revolution, a real historical movement of communism, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the collapse of markets, the obsolescence of technologies, or the running out of raw materials, or any other element within the system is likely to upset its continued operation. In fact, the capitalist system is so well stabilised that it is possible that it can do without Value, capital, the commodity and simply continue as a form of natural environment hence Camatte’s comments concerning the capitalised community, the realisation of communism on capitalist territory. There are no barriers to capital’s infinite becoming:

‘Capitalised human activity becomes the standard of capital, until even this dependence on value and its law begin to disappear complete. This presupposes the integration of human beings in the process of capital and the integration of capital in the minds of human beings.... Since capital is indefinite it allows the human being to have access to a state beyond the finite in an infinite becoming of appropriation which is never realised, renewing at every instant the illusion of total blossoming.’
2.
It is only by thinking the impossibility of change that we are able to allow for change. It is only through the pursuit of change that it may be inhibited. Thus the discourse of change, under capitalist conditions, is the means by which the same circumstances are best ensured. Marxism is a discourse of change... and yet Marx and the Marxists through the first and 2nd Internationals behaved as bourgeois proprietors scheming by all means to defend their right to ownership of communist theory:

"The French need a thrashing. If the Prussians win, the centralisation of the state power will be useful for the centralisation of the German working class. German predominance would also transfer the centre of gravity of the workers' movement in Western Europe from France to Germany, and one has only to compare the movement in the two countries from 1866 till now to see that the German working class is superior to the French both theoretically and organisationally. Their predominance over the French on the world stage would also mean the predominance of our theory over Proudhon's, etc." (Marx to Engels, July 20, 1870)
The realisation of communist theory as a property that is subject to the goals of bourgeois politics begins with Marx... the notion of change which this theory seeks to direct retains the historically ‘objective’ gains of the bourgeois era, and thus social revolution is perceived as a procession through an aperture that positively gapes at the forces of production, and is as wide as the world itself. The conception of a transformation which is not transformation but the realisation of an already existing set of relations and social laws, that may become directable by consciousness once relieved of irrational barriers, is a very accessible proposition. In fact, it is the bourgeois conception par excellance. The vision of a future in which the major work has already been done aside from the release of a few adhesions is evidently appealing and yet, it seems that capital has inconveniently block booked all the tables in the restaurant at the end of the universe:


... the "future industry" [23] has come into its own and assumed an enormous scope. Capital enters this new field and begins to exploit it, which leads to a further expropriation of people, and a reinforcement of their domestication. This hold over the future is what distinguishes capital from all other modes of production. From its earliest origins capital's relationship to the past or present has always been of less importance to it than its relationship to the future. Capital's only lifeblood is in the exchange it conducts with labour power. Thus when surplus value is created, it is, in the immediate sense, only potential capital; it can become effective capital solely through an exchange against future labour. In other words, when surplus value is created in the present, it acquires reality only if labour power can appear to be ready and available in a future (a future which can only be hypothetical, and not necessarily very near). If therefore this future isn't there, then the present (or henceforth the past) is abolished: this is devalorization through total loss of substance. Clearly then capital's first undertaking must be to dominate the future in order to be assured of accomplishing its production process. (This conquest is managed by the credit system). Thus capital has effectively appropriated time, which it moulds in its own image as quantitative time. However, present surplus value was realized and valorized through exchange against future labour, but now, with the development of the "future industry", present surplus value has itself become open to capitalization. This capitalization demands that time be programmed, and this need expresses itself in a scientific fashion in futurology. Henceforth, capital produces time. [24] From now on where may people situate their utopias and uchronias?
Camatte Against Domestication
As we diverge from Marx, we find ourselves in the unfortunate situation of positively asserting the impossibility of capturing the future from the ground of the present. This having nothing to predict is a much more difficult proposition, and strangely, all the more implausible for that – as if claiming ownership of the future is a condition of political speech. However, we would reply that after nearly 150 years of systematic thought of social change, all those inputs, the milieu which possesses this thought still hasn’t arrived at a method, or an analysis, or a goal, or a movement. It is always at the point of returning to its original model in the conviction that something can be practically extracted from it.

This is the preamble, maybe we now need to think about the possibility of an escape from a room with no exits.



3.
What is a system? How do we think about a system? But before that we should note again how we can think about change occurring in a system. As I have already noted, those discourses which are directed towards change are in fact discourses of conservation... and in reality orientate themselves towards a regulated continuity – i.e. their possession of what will happen next. They are sensitised to that which remains constant (if only to the role of the discourse itself within the process) and thus find the event of genuine transformation itself incomprehensible. This is important and bears repeating because human society has lived through a period of two hundred years of social progress, i.e. a period of rapid constancy. Nothing has ever been so revolutionised as the capitalist social relation in order that it might preserve itself. And therefore, against the background of this tumult of repetition, all claims for escape become suspect, as we have arrived here via 200 years that were constituted from nothing but claims for escape.

The prevalence of the tendency to conservation within the discourse of pro-revolutionaries is soon apparent in their propaganda, which urgently seeks to reassure doubters about the continuity in institutions and services (as Camatte noted, capitalism realises the programme of communism and at the same moment, communists seek to rationalise the relations of capital). And the role of syndicalism or workers’ control is capital’s last strategic pathway/adaptation through which, when workers step in during economic crises, continued production of the same, even in a circumstance of capital flight, only functions to maintain the essence of the existing social relation. Given that workers’ control of production is most pro-revolutionaries’ most radical conception of social change, we are starkly presented here with the problem of the process of change as a mechanism of reproduction.

But come along now, the possibility of transformation appearing within steady state systems that admit no transformations and which would carry on indefinitely without the intervention of grace is no mystery and outside of political discourse it is in fact a really rather common event.

The great extinction events can certainly be thought of in these terms. For example, the function of the grace particle is played by a convenient asteroid in the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event. What is important in this particular event is both the relation of the event to the preceding biological systems (which evolutionary palaeontologists define as dynamically stable) and to the resulting evolutionary patterns (i.e. the rapid evolutionary development and occupation of vacated roles by the already present mammalian species which previously had been held in place by the general relations of the earth’s ecosystem).

Within evolutionary biology, this relation of catastrophic events to systems which are otherwise entirely defined by their self-correcting stability is called ‘punctuated equilibrium.’ The first of the two lessons we are able to draw from this concept is that systems once well established tend not to produce radical change. Contrariwise, evolution seems to produce extremely stable forms (there is no evidence for a constant rate of slow ‘progress’), in other words, systems once they are well established tend to become ‘closed’ and conservative; the other lesson is that when radical change does occur, it is not the result of the intervention of an element already contained within the system. The function of change within well established systems and under ordinary conditions is to select and regulate permissible alterations whilst attempting to conserve the system’s overall coherence.


4.
It is now necessary to examine what a system is and how it relates to other systems. For this I will use some excerpts from favourite books of mine which have been helpful to me in investigating this question.

A system is a self-regulating structure; it is...

... a circular organisation which secures the production or maintenance of the components that specify it in such a manner that the product of their functioning is the very same organisation that produces them.
I said you are gods Stafford Beer
All phenomena are ‘systems’, whether small or large, natural or artificial, a virus is a system but so is what plays host to it, a limb or vital organ is a system but so is the body of which it is a component, an ant hill is a system but so is the grassland in which it is constructed, an individual, a community, a culture is a system but so is the society which supports them.

Thus, in our definition of systems, we have both a discreet, recognisable unit and its relations with others of the same or lower types and then there is a higher order environment which supports such ‘food webs’ or patterns of relations. Therefore, to understand the concept of change with reference to systems we must examine both the discreet form and the general relation. For our purposes, I will use three related basic approaches to the concept of systems of systems all of which assume dynamic relations.

5
Recursion A system is said to be recursive when it is recognised that identifiable self-organising structures are embedded in other ‘higher’ self-organising structures. The higher system supplies the constraints or rules, by which any discreet structure and the equivalents in its class are enabled. These rules, and thus the higher order system in which they appear, are termed a metalanguage and are concerned with supplying an operating programme that linguists term a ‘discreet infinity’ by which the members of the lower order system are able to access numerous adaptive and/or regulatory strategies that allow them to reproduce themselves as themselves.

The costs/benefits of the relation between the discrete unit that is embedded recursively into its environment is presented here by Bateson:

For change to occur, a double requirement is imposed on the new thing. It must fit the organism’s internal demands for coherence, and it must fit the external requirements of environment.
Gregory Bateson Mind and Nature
Bateson is well-known for his theory of ‘double guidance’, and how this mechanism operates to conserve systematised relations... the problem encountered by those who propose change within a social system for example is that whilst change may be attempted at the level of the discrete unit it will find no ‘confirmation’ in the immediate environment and as a result will wither, or rather, the ‘error’ of the change will be corrected by the environment (this is the problem encountered by the ‘alternative culture’ or by counter-hegemony movements); similarly, any change attempted at the level of the immediate environment will be resisted at the level of individuals (this is the problem encountered by state socialism in relation to peasants and other intractables).

The double guidance principle is well illustrated in John Wyndham’s novel The Day of The Triffids where the novel’s fantastical outcome becomes possible only because of the combined circumstance of both the world-wide commercial distribution of triffid plants and the blinding effects of a meteor shower; without these events occurring simultaneously and globally, the Wyndham could not hope to sustain the constraints of his preposterous tale. Bateson describes the situation of double confirmation in a tribal setting which he terms an abductive system:

Their [a tribal culture’s] ideas abut nature, however fantastic, are supported by their social system; conversely, the social system is supported by their ideas of nature. It thus becomes very difficult for the people, so doubly guided, to change their either of nature or of the social system. For the benefits of stability, they pay the price of rigidity, living, as all human beings must, in an enormously complex network of mutually supporting presuppositions. The converse of this statement is that change will require various sorts of relaxation or contradiction within the system of presuppositions.
Stafford Beer encounters the same corrective function in recursive systems (or systems of systems) in bureaucratic circumstances:

... it means that every social institution (in several of which anyone individual is embedded at the intersect) is embedded in a larger social institution, and so on recursively–and that all of them are autopoetic. This immediately explains why the process of change at any level of recursion (from the individual to the state) is not only difficult to accomplish but actually impossible–in the full sense of the intention: ‘I am going completely to change myself.’ The reason is that the ‘I’, that self-contained autopoietic ‘it’, is a component of another autopoietic system.... Consider this argument at whatever level of recursion you please. An individual attempting to re-form his own life within an autopoietic family cannot fully be his new self because the family insists that is actually his old self. A country attempting to become a socialist state cannot fully become socialist because there exists an international autopoietic capitalism in which it is embedded...
Stafford Beer Preface to Autopoiesis
In both ‘primitive’ and ‘advanced’ societies, the hierarchy of systems operate self-correctively, as an integrated whole, so as to reproduce by means of ‘double guidance’ both the defined lower order units and the discursive domains which supply the ‘discrete infinity’ of rules for their operations. Discrete infinity is the infinite combination of simple operational constraints embodied by those units that are bound by such constraints... whilst the constraints permit an infinity of possible interactions and behaviours they are all of the same categorical type.

In both Beer’s and Bateson’s accounts no room is found within the system for transformative change instigated by a factor or factors already embedded within the system... such a possibility, i.e. a discourse of transformation, would negate the very nature of self-organising systems by interrupting their capacity to maintain their identity via adaptation and self-regulation. In both accounts, change is the means by which stability is achieved; in fact change functions to articulate or give form to, or embody those rules of the higher order system which otherwise would remain mere potentialities. In other words, changes within lower order systems function as the means for realisation of the higher order system, renewing its boundaries and giving form to to its possibilities. It seems appropriate to reuse here the Bateson quote from the beginning of this letter:

The living thing escapes change either by correcting change or changing itself to meet the change or by incorporating continual change into its own being. ‘Stability may be achieved either by rigidity or by continual repetition of some cycle of smaller changes, which cycle will return to a status quo ante after every disturbance[/i] Nature avoids (temporarily) what looks like irreversible change by accepting ephemeral change.
Gregory Bateson Mind and Nature
6.
We can also understand the command by higher order structures of lower order structures in terms of ‘stochastic systems’. This is the term for a form of selective procedure whereby randomly generated ‘mutations’ or pathways generated within the process of realising a lower organism’s possibilities within the constraints or ‘discrete infinity’ of a specified domain, and in which the environment ‘selects’ and thus fixes or affirms those which best fit the continued realisation of the environment whilst it ignores those mutations/improvisations/creations that are not so well adapted to conditions.

Stochastic (Greek, stochazein, to shoot with a bow at a target; that is, to scatter events in a partially random manner, some of which achieve a preferred outcome). If a sequence of events combines a random component with a selective process so that only certain outcomes of the random are allowed to endure, that sequence is said to be stochastic
The stochastic system like recursion also functions by means of a ‘doubling’ mechanism (the discreet unit affirms its environment and this is reciprocated by its continued selection) which conserves the integrity of the overall system by admitting minor improvements or reforms to existing units or by selecting new units only if they fit with the constraints of the environment. The stochastic system tends towards ‘steady state’, or self-organisation which thus establishes the base of the reproduction of its conserved aggregate of adaptations. And as a domain of change it becomes ‘impossible’ to conceive of a radical transformative change within its processes even though, as a self-regulating system, it functions in a state of perpetual change.

However, whilst the stochastic system ‘actively’ selects (or affirms) discrete systems which affirm its constraints, it does not actively suppress that which it does not select. This results in a ‘remainder’ of random mutations that are not actively involved in the self-production of systems; many of these are simply not affordable to the system and die off, whilst others are conserved in a potential or neutral state... this unused but conserved material is encountered as much in social systems as it is in biological organisms (the various functions of this neutral or ‘non-coding’ material range from energy dampers or dispersers to potential building blocks for alternative pathways within a changed environment):

... the gene pool of the population is nowadays believed to be exceedingly heterogeneous. All of the genetic combinations that could occur are created, if only rarely, by the shuffling of genes in sexual reproduction. There is thus a vast bank of alternative genetic pathways that any wild population can take under pressure of selection...
Bateson Mind and Nature
Within a constant environment this material (along with that which once was selected but no longer performs its selected purpose) may be used in exaptations, cooptions, preadaptations, ‘spandrels’ etc and where old functions are deployed for new purposes. However, within transformed environments, that is where the regulatory/selective mechanism is itself radically altered, then entirely other adaptations are selected (many of these will have previously existed in a latent state). This situation of radical alteration of circumstance, the intervention of grace, is referred to by Gould when discussing the impact of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction 65 million years ago and its effect on the function of mammals within the recalibrated parameters of the natural world at that juncture:

Most people assume that mammals prevailed in these tough times for some reason of general superiority over dinosaurs. But such a conclusion seems most unlikely. Mammals and dinosaurs had coexisted for 100 million years and mammals had remained rat-sized or smaller, making no evolutionary ‘move’ to oust dinosaurs. No good argument for mammalian prevalence by general superiority has ever been advanced and fortuity seems far more likely. As one plausible argument, mammals may have survived partly as a result of their small size .... [But] Small size may not have been a positive mammalian adaptation at all, but more a sign of inability ever to penetrate the dominant domain of dinosaurs. Yet this ‘negative’ feature of normal times may be the key reason for mammalian survival...

Stephen Jay Gould The Evolution of Life on Earth
The [i]failure of the mammals to develop within one fully populated environment became a decisive prerequisite for success in an entirely different set of circumstances. The material for this success existed in the previous conditions but was conserved in a latent state... even so, it would have been impossible to predict either during that earlier state, or at the moment of ‘grace’ (the great extinction) that this material would go on to develop itself as it did and thereby ‘rule the vertebrate world.’ In other words, even though the necessary materials for a mammal revolution were present during the earlier state, it was not possible to predict that revolution from the presence of those materials.


7.
The above descriptions emphasise the bound character of systems, internally and externally. This bound character is perhaps best described as ‘structural coupling’, a term introduced by Maturana and Varela:

Every ontogeny occurs within an environment; we, as observers, can describe both having a particular structure such as diffusion, secretion, temperature. In describing autopoetic unity as having a particular structure , it will become clear to us that the interactions (as long as they are recurrent) between unity and environment will consist of reciprocal perturbations. In these interactions, the structure of the environment triggers structural changes in the autopoetic unities (it does not specify or direct them), and vice versa for the environment. The result will be a history of mutual congruent structural changes as long as the autopoetic unity and its congruent environment do not disintegrate: there will be structural coupling. We speak of structural coupling whenever there is a history of recurrent interactions leading to the structural congruence between two (or more) systems.
The Tree of Knowledge Maturana and Varela
The co-relation, or doubled character of relations between systems in itself contributes to the continued reproduction of systemic stability, in which predominant relations, based on established pathways and high threshold tolerance for alterations, continue essentially unchanged.

Whilst coevolution produces conditions of dependency between autopoietic unities of the same order (between particular pollinating insects and particular flowering plants for example), the structural coupling that exists vertically between environments and supported species is much less specified (as the previously mentioned example of the great extinctions indicates). Maturana and Varela do not investigate the indifference to and ready acceptance of loss of lower order systems (lower order autopoesis and structural couplings between autopoesis) and local environments by the higher order system/environment. Individuals, other species, communities, local environments etc are all contingent from the ‘perspective’ of the totalising environment and act for it as mere forms for the dispersal of energy. For the total environment, the specific forms taken by the lower orders are entirely dispensable, expendable and utterly replaceable by similar others. Thus change occurring within lower order forms has little significance, and even less impact on the higher order system. The dominance of the dinosaurs is replaced by the dominance of the mammals, the form of each is not significant because the role played is similar in the realisation of the wider environment.

This expandability of lower orders and their dependence on the stability of their conditions can produce situations of pathological dependence and overspecialisation. The triggering mechanism (mentioned as the fundamental characteristic of the ‘structural coupling’ relation) by which anticipated changes in the ‘other’ system are included in the operation of the ‘autopoietic unity’ and are responded to in turn are thus described by Bateson in terms of both ‘collateral energy’ and ‘addiction’ (when passing into a pathology).

Collateral energy: In life and its affairs, there are typically two energetic systems in interdependence: One is the system that uses its energy to open or close the faucet or gate or relay; the other is the system whose energy ‘flows through’ the faucet or gate when it is open.
The ON position of the switch is a pathway for the passage of energy which originates elsewhere. When I turn the faucet, my work in turning the faucet does not push or pull the flow of the water. That work is done by pumps or gravity whose force is set free by me opening the faucet. I, in ‘control’ of the faucet, am ‘permissive’ or ‘constraining;; the flow of the water is energised from other sources. I partly determine what pathways the water will take if it flows at all. Whether it flows is not my immediate business.
The combining of the two systems (the machinery of decision and the source of energy) makes the total relationship into one of partial mobility on each side.

Bateson Mind and Nature
This calculated mutual triggering within autopoetic systems ensures a number of benefits, the foremost of which is a wider inter-systemic stability in which the struggle for survival is ameliorated by the positive interaction and support between systems (which combined together become a platform or ecosystem of and for the established specifics of life which is set against the untried ‘potentialities’ which exist in the system). But this interdependency may pass into pathology in terms of overspecialisation (or addiction), a circumstance where the threshold of the necessary minimum of random change within a system (which must be kept at a minimum for the system’s continued survival as a cohesive entity but which cannot be entirely suppressed) is not reached. Addiction is particularly a danger where there is a hierarchical, recursive or environmental overspecialisation, i.e. where one system plays host to another:

Over time, the system becomes dependent upon the continued presence of that original external impact whose immediate effects were neutralised by the first order homeostasis

Bateson, Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation
In terms of human society this circumstance of systematic addiction (that is, addiction of lower order units to the traits imposed upon them by their environment and which put their continued survival into question) is described by Camatte as ‘domestication’:

The explanation for this is to be found in the domestication of humanity, which comes about when capital constitutes itself as a human community. The process starts out with the fragmentation and destruction of human beings, who are then restructured in the image of capital; people are turned into capitalist beings, and the final outcome is that capital is anthropomorphised. The domestication of humanity is closely bound up with another phenomenon which has intensified even further the passivity of human beings: capital has in effect "escaped". Economic processes are out of control and those who are in a position to influence them now realize that in the face of this they are powerless: they have been completely outmanoeuvred. At the global level, capital's escape is evident in the monetary crisis; [1] overpopulation, pollution and the exhaustion of natural resources. The domestication of humanity and the escape of capital are concepts which can explain the mentality and activity of those who claim to be revolutionaries and believe that they can intervene to hasten the onset of revolution: the fact is that they are playing roles which are a part of the old world. The revolution always eludes them and when there is any kind of upheaval they see it as something external to them, which they have to chase after in order to be acknowledged as "revolutionaries".

Jacques Camatte Against Domestication
8.
If change is already an integral principle of a system’s self-reproduction then both the addition of further changes (perturbations) or the utilisation of existing mechanisms within the system seem improbable means by which to effect change and will have, according to the theories cited above, the more likely outcome of contributing to the minimal level of alteration which all self-organising systems require to maintain their autopoietic unity. It seems reasonable to assume therefore that change cannot be registered as change at the level where change indicates ordinary adaptation but rather must appear both at that point where change is impermissible according to the system’s reproduction (i.e. at that point of autopoietic rigidity, where the system’s unity is conceived) and that change must be derived from those elements which are not involved in the reproduction of the system’s unity.

In short, change must appear where change is not possible, and it must be undertaken by those elements which have no agency. To positively identify this, to paraphrase Debord, figure who cannot be identified and his entry through a door which cannot be opened first requires a fundamental shift in the ground from which such an act of recognition must be situated (this shift is what we might term ‘grace’).

However, the emergence of this randomly driven event is far from a mystical occurrence as is proved by the investigations into systems and change that I have cited above... it is not mysticism to state that subject particles may not dictate to general conditions. On the contrary, it merely records an acceptance of how systems must work and what the structural limits are for any ‘driven’ mutation which occurs within a system. Bateson describes how the random element in the exploration of complexity is central to its understanding (given that it is not self-selecting but must be approved, or ‘doubled’ by the environment in which it appears). He does not go so far as to state that the rate of engagement with communist ideas amongst human beings indicates the rate of decline of the capitalist system and yet it is a reasonable application of his insight here:

The parallelism between biological evolution and mind is created not by postulating a Designer or artificer hiding in the machinery of evolutionary process but, conversely, by postulating that thought is stochastic. The nineteenth-century critics of Darwin (especially Samuel Butler) wanted to introduce what they called ‘mind’ (i.e., a supernatural entelechy) into the biosphere. Today I would emphasis that creative thought must always contain a random component. The exploratory processes – the endless trial and error of mental progress – can achieve the new only by embarking upon pathways randomly presented, some of which when tried are somehow selected for something like survival.
Bateson Mind and Nature
9.
Evidently, the content of this letter to you is dependent on certain acts of sleight of hand and misdirection. This is not intended to deceive you or to advance an ideology, such acts are necessary because they are the effect of the parameters of my research. Certain ghosts or spectres appear at the edges of research representing irreducible values or the limits of a perspective, it is a mistake to label these ‘mysticism’, in the text For earthen cup/i], I wrote, ‘If it is true that ritual marks the place where technology fails, then equally it should be recorded that technology appears where human feeling has been defeated’. What you describe as mysticism, is what I perceive to be the attempt to assert human terms where dead labour has not yet defeated those terms.

And so, it is useful here for me to acknowledge that there are a number of holes in my arguments which I have simply ignored and yet which I perhaps should have anticipated and addressed. This acceptance of failure in a project that is carried on anyway only becomes ‘mystical’ if it is translated into dogmatism. I hope you accept that enquiry and not dogmatism is my main concern.

But even my central assertion is absurd, and you would not be reading this letter correctly if you did not do so assuming my humorous intent in the address of this absurdity. The above, or the entirety of this epistle, is a fiction and it would not stand a critical evaluation on scientific terms. And yet, I still think that what I have presented here is true and not at all a mystification. My basic thesis stands: change is not possible where change is possible. I think this thesis merits further investigation because such efforts would no doubt take a very creatively stimulating form. Which is the main reason for my lightly stepping into the territory of Borges after Zeno. I think my contention serves a purpose and presents a set of real problems in a, I hope you will agree, different light.

My basic thesis stands: change is not possible where change is possible (and therefore must appear where it is not possible). I think if you attempt to apply this thesis to, for example, current events in France against the Sarkozy Government, in which the full range of anarcho-syndicalist methods, from mass strikes, street demonstrations, blockades, flying pickets, occupations and general assemblies that have been coordinated between numerous interested groups against a background of 70 per cent public approval, you will find a useful explanation for the sense that even so, these events seem to appear in a vast territory, a sort of infinite buffer zone, that absorbs them. The argument I have made explains why the effect of the protests only feeds into the continued reproduction of the same conditions.

Just as the text of [i]Nihilist Communism is a last ditch attempt to save the role of revolutionary consciousness by identifying the one moment in all of human history where it might act for itself and hold sway over the entirety of creation so here I have attempted to re-assign a role for discourses of change by challenging their ongoing participation in the reproduction of the same.

It seems to me that the fictive nature of my arguments are a vital aspect of their appearance, without that leap into the truth that belongs to fiction, I would not have been able to access such ideas and therefore these would not have appeared at this juncture for your engagement (the cruciality of the material of this engagement, as we now know, is decided wholly elsewhere by our environment’s selective mechanism).

The reason I have shown my hand, and revealed the fictional device through which this letter is constructed, is that I hope it will provoke an equivalent theoretical leap in your response. I would conceive the definition of a ‘leap’ to be a restriction on any references to Marxist schematics and paradigms and a corresponding engagement with an entirely other discourse. I would be most interested in the means by which you would achieve such a leap into your method.

Be well, and may the heavenly angels protect you,

FD

Constellations

This remarkable post is from a blog called Planomenology and seems to directly relate to the questions we have been raising. The original is here:

http://planomenology.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/what-is-a-constellation/#comments


A constellation is an imaginary, invisible and immaterial relation drawn between real, visible, material things. It is something seen into the world, but not itself in the world; between things, amongst them, but not of them. It is not a property ascribed to them, but an improper way of treating them, not endorsed or induced by them, supported by them without permission. It is an improper use of the elements of the world, using them for a purpose they could not have anticipated and toward which they are indifferent.

The constellation is a mode of allegory, perhaps its purest mode, in that it makes use of some material such that the actual context and character of that material is totally abstracted, only retained insofar as it serves to illustrate something totally and essentially unrelated. The constellation treats the constellated material much in the way the present may regard ancient ruins: now deprived of everything that furnished them with relevance and meaning, we are free to read into these ruins whatever fabulous and romantic significance we care to, even if this takes the form of meticulous and scientific reconstruction of the original context. In the latter case, we do not struggle against the manifest effect of historical corrosion, but only resurrect the past in a form now deprived of its original aura, a new and barely recognizable form that nonetheless faithful repeats the original (just as Christ was unrecognizable to his disciples after his resurrection). Even the truth becomes allegorically transcribed when bestowed upon the ruin.

The constellation treats everything it touches as ruined, as deprived of any proper meaning or context. This is not to say that it ever had such a meaning, but only that it has none, and that this poverty is its only essence. The improper use of worldly material evinced in allegory and constellation is not a violation or transgression of proper use, but demonstrates the absence of any such propriety; in approaching its material as ruined, any use would have to be improper, even the scientific use of archaeology.

The constellation may be imaginary, imputed to things that have no need of it and remain blind to it, but this is not to say it is unreal. Yet the reality of the constellation does not take a literal form, as lines really traced in the void between stars. The reality of the constellation is manifest in their power of orientation, to give direction to travelers, especially at sea. The constellation exists not between stars, but between stars and sailors as the orienting force which is a condition of navigation. The lines of the constellation are traced in the movements of ships at sea, even if these lines bear no resemblance to those imagined in the heavens.

The relation between a constellation and its navigational manifestation is one of non-resemblance, as much as that between the constellation and the myth it supposedly transfigures. The constellation is a figure of both the myth and the journey, which is not to say it depicts or predicts them. Rather, it constitutes a graphic that, without resemblance, nonetheless traces or outlines elements as incomparable as a myth, a navigational course, or a divination. The astrological divination in particular is paradigmatic: its predictions have no ’scientific’ value, they have no necessary relation to the future, they may in no way resemble it; yet they nonetheless are fully real and amount to a tangible influence upon that future, however negligible.

The stars are indifferent to the myth they are imagined to figure, the course assist in charting, and the future they seem to reveal. As the material of a constellation, they are treated allegorically, as support wholly enveloped in an improper use, but nonetheless remaining essentially unassimilable, necessarily inappropriable and hence rendering every use improper, marked as improper. This relation, between the materiality of the ruin as indifferent support, and the misuse value manifest in allegorical ex-appropriation, is that of constellation.

This relation is what is at stake in myth; not myth in the sense of fabulous pseudo-histories, but myth as the effacement of the inappropriable support of every use (this is precisely the sense of mythic violence described by Benjamin). It is no coincidence that our constellations are carved up according to mythology. The mythic assimilation of origin to that which originates with it, of condition to that which it conditions, of creation to the created, is precisely what is opposed by materialism, which is the attestation of the essential inappropriability of the material support of myth, or any self-validating use. Myth, in claiming propriety over its material support, in claiming the authoritative account of its own origin (or more abstractly, that there is such an account, as in the case of Lacanian fantasy), attempts to erase every trace of impropriety. Benjamin’s historical materialism begins precisely from the revelation of this impropriety as the very materiality of history itself, and on the basis of which every sovereignty (mythic effacement of impropriety and inclusion of origin) establishes itself, while also being essentially doomed to ruin.

Productive labor & Production vs. Reproduction

Here's Loren Goldner on what I was talking about in terms of productive vs. re-productive labor (I should have used the latter term, I apologize). I think I meant to say that I think a more fundamental question for capitalism is reproductive vs. unreproductive labor as opposed to productive in terms of producing exchange value for the individual enterprise (not sure if this is what Brendan meant, but I guess I'm saying that in terms of the mortal crisis of capitalism, the questions of the total social capital, and the reproductive capacities of total social labor power are important):

PRODUCTION OR REPRODUCTION?
Against A Reductionist Reading of Capital In the Left Milieu, And Elsewhere
http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/prodorreprod.html

“Accumulation requires the transformation of a portion of the surplus product into capital. But we cannot, except by a miracle, transform into capital anything but such articles as can be employed in the labour process (i.e. means of production), and such further articles as are suitable for the sustenance of the worker (i.e. means of subsistence)… In a word, surplus-value can be transformed into capital only because the surplus product, whose value it is, already comprises the MATERIAL COMPONENTS of a new quantity of capital.” (Capital, vol. I, pp. 726-727) (our emphasis)

"'Surplus value,' once again, is not just an abstract category that it was and is for so many Marxists past and present; in a way similar to Marx and Rosa Luxemburg, it is necessary to understand “surplus value” concretely, as a mass of producer and consumer goods, the nature of whose material content and concrete consumption (i.e. by whom) is of utmost importance for understanding an economy. Instead of getting drawn into endless and tedious (and formal) arguments about the “falling rate of profit,” we also insist on the “circuit” (Kreislauf in Marx’s usage in Capital) of a society’s REinvestment of the social surplus into expansion (or its unproductive consumption of the surplus in the case of contraction) to further means of production and labor power, as the ultimate criterion for determining a system’s dynamic. This idea, once grasped, shows the “affluent society” of the 1950’s and 1960’s, not to mention the post-1973 U.S. economy, “the richest country in the world,” to be a decaying society living on borrowed time (and increasingly on borrowed funds). The dominant economic ideology solves the problem of counting apples, oranges and pears by classifying all of them as “apples” in the banal distorted concept of “GDP” where the production of guided missiles, skyscrapers for corporate bureaucrats and police locks to protect inhabitants of investment-starved cities is counted indifferently alongside the necessary consumption of the working class, including its education, health care and leisure. [this is what I was talking about I suppose]

For Hegel and for Marx, an object (in Marx’s case, a commodity) has no “discrete” existence “in itself,” but is rather a RELATIONSHIP (in Marx’s case, a self-relationship of production and reproduction), mediated by an object. S/(C+V), then, is not merely the “rate of profit” of capitalism, but also the “rate of surplus energy” for any society, past, present or future. Further, it is emphatically NOT a reductionist “quantitative” ratio, but rather (to use Hegel’s term, easily evident in Marx) a “relationship that relates itself to itself,” a SELF-REFLEXIVE relationship (Marx defines capital as “value valorizing itself”). Every society (largely unconsciously, particularly in the case of capitalism) “deliberates” on its use of S, and it is in this “deliberation,” however mediated by social relations and ideology, that the “sensuous transformative praxis” of the Theses on Feuerbach—the unique ability of human beings to express their “species-being” in the qualitative transformation of the biosphere and hence of themselves—is practically linked to social reproduction. One can understand this on four successively deeper levels: 1. the total social product (the capitalist myth of “GDP”) as the “sum” of all individual capitals, or a “total price”; (market price) 2. the total social product as the total value of all individual capitals, understood (in an actually Marxist view) as the total social labor time necessary to reproduce the total product today; (total value) 3. the total social product as the total literal (“use value”) goods and services, divided into means of production and means of consumption, available for either expanded or contracted social reproduction; But all of these successive approximations are reified expressions of 4. S/(C+V) as LABOR POWER IN RELATIONSHIP TO ITSELF, the ultimate reality of world history. Even the most sophisticated representation of S/(C+V) in terms of social labor time of reproduction is somewhat reductionist, because expanded reproduction is constantly revolutionizing the “standard” of value as measured in labor time, creating an “apples to oranges” problem for any attempt to quantitatively express social reproduction over time. Capital, as self-valorizing value, is the commodified inversion of self-developing labor power."
(Goldner, "Social Reproduction for Beginners: Bringing the Real World Back In" http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/socreprod.html )

This is I guess what I was talking about.

Also check Goldner's homepage (http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner) for any articles mentioning fictitious capital and reproduction for other explanations of this obsession of his. The best explanation is probably in Chapter I (not the introduction, but Chapter 1) of his book Remaking of the American Working Class http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/remaking.html

Another Digresssion

From F. Dupont:


I will just add here, contrary to the claims of some marxist advocates of 'socialisation' (which in reality is a form of morality concerning the massification of personal behaviours) that events become more closely aligned at a greater magnitude to wider social forces and more free of such forces within the personal domestic space. For this reason, 'socialisation' projects proposed by various revolutionaries tend to express a base ideological format whilst the 'conformity' of non-politicised individuals is actually diverse and relatively independent of ideoglogical references. This is an exact reversal of the situationists' and others' of the sixties who condemned 'passivity'. Passivity in fact doesn't come into it, there are merely different scales of significance... because most people do not function or signify within political discourse this does not mean they are 'spectators'.

Capitalism Sucks

This is a comment by Mikus on a thread on Libcom about decadence theory. If you want context, follow this link:

http://libcom.org/forums/thought/general-discussion-decadence-theory-17092007

I thought this post was hilarious, whether or not it's fair to the ICC's notion of decadence.
_________________________________________________


As far as decadence theory goes, my general impression is that it's a poor attempt to transform a mere phrase into an actual periodization of capitalism. And then when this periodization is questioned, the supporters of the theory go back to using it as a mere phrase.

I could talk about something like, suckiness theory. And I could say "capitalism sucks." And then I could talk about how it sucked more and more over time. And it very well may continue to suck. And how it in fact is necessary that capitalism sucks. And that if humanity doesn't want to live in a sucky society, it has to overthrow that society. And then if someone says "I don't see any evidence that capitalism sucks" I can say, "look at the last 100 years -- WWI, WWII, millions dead -- that objectively sucks." And then I could say that anyone who doesn't think that capitalism sucks, and who doesn't support my suckiness theory, isn't a Marxist. And that all Marxists of the last 100 years have contended that capitalism sucks, and that this suckiness puts armed revolution on the agenda.

This sounds about like what the ICC has done with decadence theory. They have turned a word used to describe one's taste into an attempted periodization. It just doesn't work out that well. If they kept it as a word of taste, and said that capitalism was decadent just in the normal coloquial sense, I wouldn't really disagree (although I think the term is a bit old-fashioned myself -- I'd probably say that capitalism just sucks). I just think that turning it into a real theory and making it a central tenet by which one can tell who is and is not a real Marxist is silly and pretends to say more than it actually does.

Mike

From F. Dupont

>>>> This failure of reproduction as labour power as well as the schizoid position of a class subject that, so the theory goes, needs to desire its own dissolution, opens up notions of whether the working class is still the revolutionary subject. I get the sense that for this brother it is the milieus that are the blockage in the revolutionary process; that and the ideological mediation (encapsulated in organisational forms) that form a barrier between them and the Others.>>>>>

Schizoid is not a term I would use; at least, I am not sure what it means – perhaps driven by contradictory impulses?

More importantly, it is within this and the following paragraph that Howard Slater loses sympathy for, or the thread of, the arguments within the book. I think it is quite difficult to hold both the concept of class theory and the arguments concerning organisations, the form of being, and isolated practice, together at the same time. This is not surprising because I am asking that the reader should keep in mind an absolute disjuntion between the two poles.

Nihilist communism makes its arguments concerning the futility or meaninglessness of pro-revolutionary interventions from a macro or structural perspective... its central argument concerns the non-impact of small pro-revolutionary group strategies within the class relation and concludes that such interventions only ever impact at a marginal ideological level. Species Being by contrast approaches the same disjunction but from the other direction, i.e. from the perspective of those groups who have attempted to make an impact within the sphere of class struggle (the central relational mechanism of capitalist society), who have failed to make that impact, but who have also included this failure within their activity by means of class analysis and have therefore passed to another stage where ‘non-impact’ has been re-circulated within their theory as the expected ordinary outcome of such interventions.

There is an absence of coherence between the rules which govern the class relation and the rules which govern small group practice, and this holds true even where that group includes class analysis within its structure. It is not feasible as some activists assume simply to ‘scale up’ small group actions to a mass scale through a process of recruitment. There are literal limits of scale to small groups and they may never progress to a mass level without transforming themselves into organisations subject to the objective rules that govern mass structures. Put in the most simple terms: the laws of mass scale social forces are dissimilar to the laws which govern small groups and the laws of each are only suspended under critical situations.

The problem then is the reverse of how Howard Slater presents it,

>>>>>>>the milieus that are the blockage in the revolutionary process; that and the ideological mediation (encapsulated in organisational forms) that form a barrier between them and the Others.>>>>>>>>

The milieus are not the blockage but are blanked out within the ordinary reproduction of conditions, they are simply not important enough to have an impact upon the ongoing tensions of the class relation. The analysis that they possess and which they wish to inject into ongoing struggles is simply not a significant enough element for it to make a difference. If class analysis did have a significant impact in winning workers’ struggles then it would be deployed to devestating effect, why would it not be? Unfortunately, the opposite is the case, the greater the level of ideological awareness, the more the struggle is diverted from its true object.

It is the Others, in their pure determination by the totality of class relations, who are unable to receive messages from groups (which are themselves separated from the others because of their overdeveloped conceptions of message communication and the potential for change contained within the message).

Structurally, it is impossible to communicate a revolutionary message under non-revolutionary conditions at a mass level... there is literally no referant. It is true though that on a secondary level that this lack of impact produces in groups a set of ideologies which seek to preserve the group as it is within present conditions and this ‘ideological mediation’ then functions as a barrier in the manner Howard Slater argues. The ‘automatic’ reproduction of capitalist roles and imperatives within small groups is another issue.


>>>>>>>>In response to his own musing Frére Dupont says that these Others aren’t inspired, that we in the milieu are solipsistic, have an insular self-regard, feel the individualised pressure of auto-culpabilisation and are increasingly negative. It’s tempting to also suggest that the milieus (in all those separate waiting rooms) are so off-putting to the Others because each room feels, somewhat pathologically, that they are in ‘possession’ of the correct consciousness, the correct analysis, the skeleton key.>>>>>>>>

Part of the problem for understanding here, and perhaps the source of some impatience is the relevance of class analysis to the content of small group activity. Wouldn’t it be better, it seems Howard Slater is almost saying, just to drop this class business and concentrate instead on the matters at hand? What use is class analysis to the small group which cannot impact upon the movement of the class? Why not forget about class altogether and concentrate on the achievable in a spirit of ‘render unto Caesar...’?

To a degree this objection is true, we have already observed that small groups are subject to different ‘rules’ than those which govern economic classes and that small groups cannot ‘speak’ to economic classes.

However, the important theoretical implication of maintaining class analysis lies within the theoretical situating of the isolated, internalised activities of groups within a wider social context. Unless the group retains within its perspective an explicit understanding of the reasons for its coming into being, it it is condemned to the status of ideology – the critical recognition of powerlessness is not identical with a delusion of effectiveness which always meets with practical failure. Knowledge of self at this point is all that is available to us, it is better to look levelly into the actual limits that have been placed upon us.

Therefore, the small group form is not necessarily a blockage on consciousness (although it can act as such when it attempts to realise its ideological programme in critical moments), and it is not to ‘blame’ for the masses’ uninterest in communism. Under ordinary circumstances, the small group is able to have effect only within the milieu of its equivalents and competitors. Within that milieu each group strives to maintain itself and its truth. However, it is important to remember that within the discussions and activities of the milieu, there is a constant falling back into the same ideas, the same blocks in our thought. This falling backwards, or regressing, occurs because although we have some elective control over our content, ultimately our projects are governed by social relations which we are unable to modify.

A Post From Elsewhere

I think this is pretty pithy and interesting. Again, this is from the Salon de ver Luisant.

I hope this if of interest. It's focus is on the Communist Left, but I feel that it also would only be complete were were to extend it to all of the communist tendencies.

Despite protestations by hybrids like Platypus that claim Trotsky, Luxemburg, and Lenin on one side and Adorno on the other, the idea that "He who wants to eat must work" is not altered by combination with "those who labor must rule". It merely completes the argument that the revolution is the raising up of labor to the supreme principle. Even here the dichotomy of means and ends ("only if this is conceived as the revolutionary means, and not as the end goal of anti-capitalist revolution") appears immediately. The result of raising labor to power in the case of Russia was Bolshevism not merely enforcing but extending the capital-labor relation vis-a-vis the immediate curtailment and then suppression of the Factory Committees (the problem of "Workers' Control of Production" is beyond this discussion), Taylorism, piece wages, one-man management of the factories, extension of the trade unions (legal arbiters of workers' rights in the context of a society of wage labor), not to mention the cruder matters of forced labor and strike breaking.

Not merely the social form of labor is missed, but that the dominance of labor in society as itself indicating capitalist social relations is missed as well.

The political side of this disconnect of means and ends involves the conception of the revolution as creation of an alternate state power (dictatorship of the proletariat as a type of state, of "the workers' state"), and that this state then carries out the abolition of capitalist property relations. The revolution is conceived of as a predominantly political act (and yes, of course, one can find quotes in Marx that the revolution is a political act, just as one can find other quotes in Marx leading a different direction; "If the path to Hell is paved with good intentions, the path to bourgeois politics is paved with good quotations.")

This begs the question of the state as a social form, however. It presumes that the instrumental conception of the state taken from Engels' conceptions in Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State and reproduced throughout Social-Democracy and finding its most radicalized expression in Lenin's State and Revolution. Here the state is merely an object, an instrument, defined by whom it serves, by the class membership of whomever holds the offices, and the formal boundaries associated then with its function (grabbed out of context from Marx's Civil War in France.) The state is no more a means to an end, and thus mere 'means' than money is a means to simplify exchanges as political economy thought. Money is the form of value through which exchange is possible, and the state is the form or mode of existence of the separation of power and re-production into separate spheres of the political and the economic.

Exactly grappling with this set of problems points to what allows the German-Dutch and Italian Left Communists to go beyond the still social-democratic, still bourgeois-political notion of the revolution present in Bolshevism. Neither side expressed the matter in it's totality, comprehensively. While they did not quite split matters (they shared the critique of parliamentarism, the critique of the concept of a "workers' state", the critique of the United Front), they did address different aspects of the problem in a way that allows them to speak to the problems, but not necessarily to each other.

The German-Dutch Left Communists (the KAPD, which took the majority of communists with it when the KPD was forced to split and which formed under the influence of the IKD, Anton Pannekoek, Hermann Gorter, the Bremen Left, etc.) expressed the critique of trade unionism and parliamentarism, of the state as not merely an instrument and the revolution as not merely a political act, but the taking over of the conditions of life (the state as social form was given its highest theoretical expression independently in this period by the Russian Marxist Evgeny Pashukanis' General Theory of Law and Marxism, which also influenced and was critiqued by the Left Communist philosopher Karl Korsch). However, this practical critique still viewed the revolution as the elevation of labor to social domination, more or less to universalized "workers' self-management". It is not accidental that this led to Councilism, to making a fetish of the council form and not adequately grasping the theoretical problem of labor.

The Italian Left Communists, grouped around Amadeo Bordiga, took a different view. He was the first to argue that communism was a content, not a question of organizational forms. Bordiga retained the separation of the revolution into the political moment and then the social moment, but he already grasped that the revolution was not the proletarian control of the factories or "workers' control of production", but the destruction of capitalist relations of production. This did not involve, for him, statification, but the abolition of wage-labor, value, capital, etc. Thus Bordiga was able before anyone else to comprehend that Russia was a capitalist country. Bureaucracy, statification, and even abolition of formal markets could go hand-in-hand with the maintenance and extension of capitalism. This is in many respects the core of the argument in *The Uniqueness of Capitalism and the Normative Content of a Socialist Political Philosophy.* (Rough draft) by G.M. Tamás. However in Bordiga the critique of the concept of revolution as seizure of power from the abolition of capitalist social relations does not develop. It remains that one follows the other rather than the re-organization of social life being the revolution, being the destruction of the state, being the dictatorship of the proletariat. I would suggest that this conception of capitalism as not a regime but as a social form finds it's highest theoretical expression in this period in the work of I.I. Rubin, who took Lukacs' comments on value and form as his jumping off point.

The separation of means and ends, the separation of political revolt from social revolution in space and most importantly in time, is the actual legacy of Lenin and Trotsky. They did not get beyond the problems presented by trying to be communists in a country with a woefully low level of capitalist development and what to do then face with revolution. The matter is less one of intent on the part of the Lenin and Trotsky, but that their theoretical perspectives were those of 2nd International Lasallean Marxism achieving state power. Where the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks to them indicated success, the transformation of the Bolsheviks into the counter-revolution from within was not, maybe could not be, grasped or even posed adequately by the Bolsheviks themselves because state power forced them to presume what needed most to be called into question in practice. Maybe this is why it was only from the outside of the halls of power that some intellectuals could articulate, though even here at the cost of their own lives, the problems in their sharpest philosophic forms. Outside of Russia, however, Bolshevism for a while still needed to, was willing to, persuade. Even if the Communist Left could not resolve the issues, they posed them and tried to address those problems in theory and practice. The connected philosophical issues found their highest treatment in Lukacs, Korsch, Pashukanis, and Rubin.

What makes Adorno, Sohn-Rethel, etc. valuable today is not their attachment to Bolshevism, but their development of the critique the bourgeois world that generated the crisis of, and attained its fullest maturity in, 1914-1921 and the ideal manifestations of that world in crisis (the actual art, music, philosophy, and also the Lassallean Marxism), a critique given its fullest practical and political-theoretical expression prior to 1933 by Left Communists and philosophically in the work of Lukacs, Korsch, Pashukanis, and Rubin. One of the limitations of Adorno, Sohn-Rethel, et al, is the practical failure of a real challenge to capital to develop after 1923, as opposed to the massive extension and deepening of capitalist social relations across the globe, i.e. the success of counter-revolution in all of its forms. I find Adorno's unwillingness to posit the given existence of a historical Subject or to claim some radical new opening for another kind of practice during his life more clear-headed, if depressing, than the desperate search for a positive "Subject of History" in Maoism (Sohn-Rethel, apparently), the student movement/new social movements (Marcuse), or the official Communist Parties (as Ernst Bloch seems to have done). That this was less of a personal failing of the Frankfurt School Marxists than a set of possible responses to an objective situation seems evident to me in the ways that despite the transformations of capitalism after WWII, even the most sophisticated developments of communist critique were hard pressed in practice to do more than recapitulate an idealized Bolshevism (Trotskysim, part of the Johnson-Forrest Tendency), Italian Left Communism (International Communist Party) or Councilism (Socialism or Barbarism, Situationist International). The only novel openings in practice appear to have been in the events from Paris and Prague in 1968 to the hot Autumn in Italy in 1969 through the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, and seemingly the last appearance of workers' councils, in 1978, and these seem in retrospect more the death agony of a certain organization of struggles; a last brilliant flare, to be less morose, against the world ushered in by Fascism, Stalinism, and Keynesianism or the Spectacle or Fordism or whatever one chooses to call it.

Maybe their lack of being tied to a particular tendency and not being limited intellectually to the defense of that tendency and to "positions" also allows Adorno, et al to remain vibrant and challenging for us, even if we find contradictions in their work that force us to read them against their political affiliations. This may also be part of what allows other, more recent, heterodox communists to remain a challenge (I have in mind here Jacques Cammatte, Guy Debord, Henri Lefebvre, and less well-known people such as Hans-Georg Backhaus, Helmut
Reichelt, Krisis Gruppe, Robert Kurz, G.M. Tamas, etc.) regardless of their immediate political commitments.

We don't live in 1917 or 1936 or 1956 or 1968. You want to know what it is really almost impossible to do these days that I could still do in 1988: stand in front of a factory and hand out leaflets with communist politics to workers. You know why? Because a) there's damn few factories left, 2) they're almost all in the suburbs and drive-in, so you can't stand there and hand out shit, 3) most of the workers live in the suburbs, have a car and a home mortgage and a lot of them own stock in the company, 4) the idea of workers' power is an incomprehensible joke, a kind of verbal fart in an elevator. Or you can try and leaflet an office building, which has no clear class composition, and where most of the workers don't think of themselves as workers at all. Not to mention that the number of strikes involving 1000 or more workers since 1990 has been under 50 every year, and since 2001, it has been under 30 a year.

Politics that want to make workers celebrate being workers finds no reflection in the US, at least. Maybe the "affirmation of labor" is possible elsewhere, but not here. Capital may be the same in terms of value-form, money-form, etc., but its concrete form of expression does not lend itself to the practical politics of the period 1917-68. Already in 68-78, something else peaked through, but I don't even know if that has any relevance.

We experience today as the loss of those touchstones without necessarily any new openings presenting themselves.

Pan Maldito

Last edited by Pan Sloboda (Today 18:16:41)