Negate!

Author: Lyra S

  • To Lead, Not Learn From

    To Lead, Not Learn From

    Introduction

    “All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”

    Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, VIII

    The red line for every single socialist has historically been: actually organising the working class.

    In practice, this simply means:

    1. Appearing as a real authority to the working class.
    2. Giving the working class the weaponry of its emancipation.
    3. Telling the working class who to direct that weaponry against.

    It has always been in evidence that the proletariat does not want to ‘teach’, but instead it wants to be ‘taught’: namely, given a gun and told who to shoot. Until communists are in a position to provide this, which presupposes a movement of real class organs, then the communists will not win purchase among the working class.

    Largely, this is because today’s Marxists are, to be blunt, frequently scared of their own shadow. They are ridiculous idiots who do not really identify themselves as part of the working class. It is hard to find a sect or tendency or ‘vanguard’ that does not tout its capacity to learn from the workers, to understand what it’s like on the ground.

    Are the communists, in the world of the modern Marxist, the foremost representative of the proletariat, the class’ most politically-developed vanguard?

    No! In the world of the modern Marxist, in fact little more than anyone else who calls themselves a ‘socialist’, the proletariat exists as a moral authority! The proletariat, so inept, so lacking in class-consciousness, so manifestly inert, the proletariat who, in the west, may well readily follow the ready-paid piper of bourgeois electoralism right into the jaws of rightist “populism”; this is the proletariat we ought learn from?

    And this, itself, could be read as me making a moral indictment of the proletariat; as me chastising it; as me presenting the failures of communists as the failures of proletarians.

    But the failures of communists are the failures of proletarians; the failures of proletarians are the failures of Communists. This class is the subject of our doctrine and the state of the class informs the state of the doctrine. Accountability to the doctrine involves lucidly regarding what our predecessors left us to work with.

    Friends, I do not know whether you have laid your sensitive eyes upon the modern workplace, but these people have little to teach you. Indeed, I can recall the poetic wisdom of my elder coworker, his sternly-taught life lessons, his perversely compelling diatribes about the various supposed cruelties inflicted upon him by the women he has been romantically involved with. He is very well-acquainted with the mythology of work; of rolling with the punches, it is what it is, of enjoying the little things and accepting the world’s shit but you work your hardest. He has had a very storied life.

    What he is good at is coping with work. Indeed, if we were about coping with wage-labour, of making it more spiritually comfortable, then he would have a lot to teach us.

    Notably, this is not historical materialism. Historical materialism teaches us that, in fact, the point is to abolish wage-labour. I have shockingly little in common with my elder coworker in this regard.

    I have given years of my life to the study of the Marxist doctrine; of the politicisation of the intimate. Of the crises of faith, the reassurances, the meetings, the organisation, the Sisyphean assailing of a task most deem impossible.

    I know more about historical materialism than my coworkers. If a class-conscious organ was formed around my workplace, I would likely be selected for doctrinal leadership.

    This is something you are not allowed to say in modern Marxism. You are meant to be humble. You are meant to, in fact, concede to a ‘democracy’ of your coworkers, rather than the stratified command already present in the workplace. Alike the bureaucrats we hate, who tell us how we ought to do our job, and who are ignored when the tactical-level decision making is produced.

    ‘Leadership’, to these people, means the office. It means the union, the bureaucracy, the state.

    It can never refer to real power, which is in evidence in practice, not in form.

    We must not fetishise our colleagues as proletarian mystics; they are alike the Soviet peasants who may well have possessed profound conceptions of God and religion. But when the first radio towers were erected in their villages, they stared in raptest awe; Communism brought them miracles far greater, far realer than their saints.

    In the absence of anything else, the way we erect these radio towers in the modern day is to deliver a victory. That first victory–the real proof that there is lurking power that exists in the hands of all the class–is only something communism may truly deliver in practice; communism as the real movement, within the present social order, positioned toward the abolition of the present state of things.

    And despite the crude idiocies of the Marxists, I do believe they are capable of rising to this task. And in doing so, they might learn, as we all learn one day, that this great and awful word, “Communist”, is not a mark of a martyred apostle, or a beast of burden to carry our woes.

    Instead, they will know “Communist” is a title, earned and kept, and carried with pride.

    The Working Class: Religion vs. Reality

    Education workers, and the Communist Party as the vanguard in the struggle, should consider it their fundamental task to help enlighten and instruct the working masses, in order to cast off the old ways and habituated routine we have inherited from the old system, the private property habits the masses are thoroughly imbued with.

    Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, p. 365

    I

    There appears two ‘working classes’: the working class as a political subject that is being organised (the class-for-itself), and the idea of ‘the working class’, which is tantamount to a civic theology concocted around the conditions of wage-labour (a fetishisation of the class-in-itself).

    II

    The strength of the worker-religion is weakened by the real organisation of the political subject. This is because, far from building a real unity, the struggle is about delineating the class and its enemy in a real sense. Coworkers who do not strike become scabs; allies of management become workplace cops.

    III

    The working class as a political subject can be ‘learned from’, but only as a product of its action in accordance to an organic doctrine.

    This presupposes an organisation of the working class for itself, i.e., for its abolition, by which this political subject can exercise its power.

    Without the organisation, the worker-religion is all that’s left, and we conclude that wage-labour is solely instructive in the proceedings of consciousness; that it is the method of learning, rather than the grounds upon which it occurs.

    Yet, the workers curiously resist history’s attempts to turn them into communists.

    IV

    The real class unity is not about uniting class-sects; it is about establishing who is for and who is against the class.

    For this to happen, there must, again, be a class organisation.

    V

    If elements of the proletariat oppose their own liberation, they are not simply misled from their real interest; they have accepted the religious class-order over the real one. Whether this comes from an attempt to preserve a fleeting hierarchy, a convoluted false consciousness, or sheer stupidity, does not matter.

    VI

    The working class as a subject does not resolve its disputes democratically. It resolves its disputes forcefully: separation, segregation, and, when tensions are high enough, elimination. The class-for-itself, wishing to abolish the class-in-itself, is in conflict with those workers who simply identify the class-in-itself as their essential state of being.

    In order for the class-for-itself to come into being, a definite labouring mass must have identified the extent of its own potential power. In other words, it must have been made lucid of its real conditions and then acted upon them.

    VII

    When the class-in-itself becomes the class-for-itself, it has given a definite form to what can now be called ‘the Party’.

    VIII

    The Party, representing the organisation of a real movement, possesses a doctrine. This doctrine’s determination cannot be a product of any democratic force within the Party, but the real authority behind its operation.

    It is a mark of dogmatic institutionalism to suggest that the arrangement of the Party’s organs change the doctrine to which it will always adhere: the abolition of class society. The premises of the abolition of class society do not actually change because of the decisions of a party’s democratic organ.

    The Marxist doctrine is not divined, but developed. It lies beyond the imagination of some people that a doctrine’s evidence is in its success, not its determination.

    IX

    If a clique were to attempt to dethrone the revolutionary objective of world-revolt, self-abolition, et cetera, and it were in the means of the class to reject this clique, the answer is not to concede to a democratic abstraction, but to operate via real power structures to nullify them.

    X

    In all of this there is a real programme for liberation.

    But at every moment in this programme, there will be those who ask about the sanctity of the worker-religion, who demand the whole class be represented, that there is moral sanctity to the root of the proletariat’s oppression–their status as proletarians.

    In protection of the class’ angelic virginity, the devout apostles of the worker-religion demand a return to democratic form; they may even suggest that the proposal of a vanguard organisation itself, even with no actual working organisation in question, is a form of manifest harm to this celestial virgin.

    This ludicrous superstition must be driven out of the skulls of any class-conscious proletarian; that they ought love their work, that they are purer, greater for their sacrifice at Capital’s altar.

    We demand, however, the altar’s desecration; a real overthrow of the ridiculous demand we kill ourselves for the money-god.

    Fetishisation of the Instant Form

    “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

    Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, p. 16

    XI

    The objective of present-day communists, when it comes to questions of organisation, appears as the identification of latent consciousness. Thus begins the great search for a hidden revolutionary mass that eludes us; so we may conclude the answer is the lumpen, or the racialised masses, or the ever-waged queer rebellion against the family, or the imperialised and colonised periphery, etc.

    Some Marxists, working on age-old Eurocentric divinations, even go so far to actually conclude that the first-world masses are, in fact, the most developed revolutionary subject!

    We look for a group to whom we may prescribe consciousness, to contort into the shape of the Marxist doctrine. Then, when they do not behave as this perversity has demanded of them–when there is still no real communism in evidence–the enemy can become literally anything but the bourgeoisie.

    It is very rare indeed for a Marxist to conclude that consciousness is not a latency of any specific sectional identity, but a world-historic immanence of capitalist production in general; that the real process is supreme over the fetishised form.

    XII

    This form-fetishism can be retroactively deemed correct if social revolution occurs in such a fashion that it is led by members of the fetishised form. The danger emerges when this form is then transposed beyond immediate struggle; when the present attempts, in increasing desperation, to reach into the past. The form-fetishism is itself fetishised, and the attendant doctrinal modernisations are transformed into a class-religion, which becomes a dogma. When the dogma is proven incapable of meeting new needs, it is ‘revised’, and there is this bargain struck between the dogma and revision, where both are understood as bad, but in relation to one, essential doctrinal truth.

    GLOSS: In history, we can see this no clearer than with Mao.

    Mao’s concept of New Democracy is based upon ‘camps’ within society that build socialism together. This emerges from a form-fetishisation of a particular character: the “peasant”.

    The peasant is understood as inherently non-proletarian; but in China, there was indeed in many cases a C-M-C/surplus value extraction relationship between rural tenants and their landlords. Yet their particular place in the town-country distinction was fetishised as a category unto itself, and thus any corollary interest between the proletarians and ‘the peasantry’ was collapsed into a ‘contradiction’ to be resolved ‘democratically’.

    Mao talks a lot about ‘dogma’ and ‘revision’, all in relation to a doctrine based on false premises. Today, Maoists blame the rightist clique for its complete and utter destruction of ‘Chinese socialism’, and lament the orphaned child of a forgotten time.

    XIII

    Now that the form-fetishised spectre appears as a real force in sect and tendency, some who claim to be on the ‘Communist Left’ will belabour themselves with the vanquishing of this spectre. They demand progress toward a ‘class unity’ in the face of racial, gendered, and national hierarchies. Notably, this demand does not really abolish the reality of these stratifications.

    One can only wonder how this led to a severe overpopulation of blisteringly white left-communists.

    XIV

    The real class-unity is not within the class-in-itself, but the class-for-itself; the Party is a product of a real unity in the latter, rather than a force instrumentalised for the unity of the former.

    To simplify: if a class-organisation appears as a movement of racialised workers, the task is not to demand an allegiance to ‘white workers’, but instead to view class struggle as an abolition of racism; to view Capital as the enemy, not white Capital.

    XV

    So: the Marxist doctrine does not inform people how to halt their struggle, but rather how to continue and elevate it; to bring it to its logical conclusion, to smash Capital and all who stands in its way. If the sectionally-supreme workers, in that instance, decide they will stand in Communism’s way, the Marxist doctrine, which cares little for whiteness, manhood, cisheterosexuality, or anything else, happily allows their political subjugation.

    XVI

    Vulgar ‘class-first’ politics thereby appears not as a negation of sectional identitarianism, but the fortification of the dominant sectional positions.

    Still belaboured by an obsession with majoritarian consensus, with ‘democracy’ (or whatever else they may call it), these vulgarisers believe that the class-for-itself must seek assent from its immediate enemies, in order to appease the Godly beliefs of the worker-religion.

    Through their attempt to return to base order, they have only found themselves in the base order of civil society: affirming dominant race, gender, and national norms.

    XVII

    A true class-politics, divorced from all pretensions, is one that is unconcerned with the practical assent of anyone other than they who are necessary for social revolution. This understanding is what allows a real liberation to take form.

    GLOSS: This understanding appears callous, it appears cruel; it is the understanding capital gives us nonetheless. One might ask: the promises of the communist revolution are great indeed, but how can you help me, in the here and now?

    The answer is: as we always have. By sheltering those in need, and having those to shelter us; by building support structures that can stand the test of weary souls.

    Marxism, however, is not the doctrine of living under capital. Marxism is the doctrine of abolishing it. Through this narrow understanding, we liberate ourselves from needing to contort it into an intimate politicisation, to explain the minutiae of individual selves via its lens, to treat our transient organs as a real movement.

    You’re allowed to help your friends and peers, and you don’t need sanction from Saint Marx.

    XVIII

    This understanding is what allows us to properly contextualise and elaborate on movements of the oppressed, directed for their liberation, rather than click our tongues and demand they stop.

    GLOSS: Take Palestinians, who we will take in evidence the interest that they see an end to Israeli oppression.

    Those who identify imperialism as the primary contradiction will say: the tactics of Hamas are the primary weapon in our fight.

    Class-first vulgarisers will say: neither Israel nor Palestine! And try and delude themselves with the ridiculous proposition that “Palestine is imperialist.” There are real people who say this and demand you take them seriously.

    The Marxist position is simply to accept that the Palestinians struggle as they do because they have to, and that we cannot tell them to stop struggling in the certain way foisted upon them, that we can only elaborate upon that struggle, to say: a Free Palestine is an excellent goal, but why simply stop there?

    And in fact, we should organise our own ‘national workers’ to advance themselves, and in revolutionary strike action disrupt the supply chains of Empire. This would also, presumably, help the Palestinians.

    Should such a development arise, we could then see in the mutual struggle, no matter how divorced by distance or subsistence condition, the emergence of a common interest; something capable of developing into a united political subject.

    But this would only be a product of that organisation, of that immediacy; we cannot prescribe it beforehand.

    In other words, the united emergence of the Party is not an essential product of the present historical instance, but the real outcome of invariant historical forces. Doctrinal ‘modernisation’ is the assumption that the Party is anything but.

    XIX

    Communism remains an immanence to the invariant properties of capital. The question is not how instances wrap themselves around these invariants, but to understand how these instances are the product of invariants.

    Unions and Class-Consciousness

    “The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc.”

    V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, p. 17-18

    XX

    It is understood that trade union organisation only produces trade union consciousness.

    GLOSS: The remnants of the old trade union bureaucracy remain some of the most infernal vestiges of British left-TERFism. Bereft of any politics left to actually do, and feeling constantly undermined, the only shit they’ve got left is to obsess about the gamete (something they very clearly do not understand). “Gender critical” thought becomes another religion, the sigh of this oppressed, gelatinous creature we find at the heart of reformist politics.

    XXI

    Not all unions are the same. Workplaces that are in the embryonic process of unionising–and are thus less concerned with the construction of an elaborate union bureaucracy–are not as ossified as a developed union.

    XXII

    Given the tendency of unionisation to self-nullify, to assemble structures that strangle even the most dedicated root organisers, to seek collaboration and ‘peace’ with the bourgeoisie, it is clear that at some point the negative force of class struggle results in the creation of a positive politics.

    XXIII

    The proletariat’s world-historical position is not a position at all, but the negation of the position of class society; thus follows the negation of the negation, the fact that the ‘proletariat’ itself is simply an infliction of the class society it is immanent to, and historically strives to abolish.

    Socialist experiments in history can have their failures explained by their points of defeat whereby they were compelled to establish positions for a class society: the failure of international revolution, the creation of a ‘socialist civilisation’ in its stead.

    Trade unions, likewise, lend themselves to a positive order.

    XXIV

    When class organisation extends beyond a certain scale, it must be maintained.

    The Party finds its definition in what occurs when a supreme class organ arises for its maintenance, with a negative, abolitionist programme of overthrowing the old society. Trade unions are the emergence of a class struggle that understands itself in isolation.

    The real union is the bureaucracy that emerges as “the first line of defense of the working class”, the means by which the encroachments of capital are fought against through organisation and strike action. In the absence of a negative, world-historical doctrine, however, this can only lead to the production of a union position; union bureaucrats, union identity, union consciousness.

    Introducing a new doctrine would upend this position and as such it is much harder to introduce Marxism to an established union bureaucracy.

    XXV

    It is the Marxist objective to translate consciousness into a negative class organ before the imposition of a positive politics.

    For this to be in evidence to workers, Marxists must provide, in evidence, proof of the doctrine’s success and utility to them.

    XXVI

    The only way for the utility of Marxism to independently arrive in evidence is for its doctrinal intervention at a moment of crisis to elaborate existing struggle.

    In other words, the doctrine must [a] be correctly developed, and [b] be ready for application via existing, communist class organs, constituted not as the first line of defense, but as the first line of offense.

    XXVII

    To those who say a diagnosis of spontaneity to revolution serves to intellectually postpone it indefinitely: don’t worry, the crisis is arriving soon.

    Some say it is already here.

    This article was syndicated via Headcase Kultkrit

  • For An International Economic Zone

    For An International Economic Zone

    During the 19th Century, the corrupt Jurchen hegemony of the Qing dynasty dominated China, and its venal and parasitic leadership made very clear that China ought remain a place where not much happened, where their splendid supremacy over all foreign barbarity found itself in perfect evidence, the borders would remain welded shut, trade would be minimal, and all relationships beyond the imperial borders would go no farther than the establishment of tributaries.

    All under heaven, as far as the imperial hierarchy was concerned, relied upon this way of things. The introduction of conflicting factors could destroy the norms which had governed China for countless generations. It was on these grounds that China stood firm, and would continue to stand firm. To reform the country would introduce new types of people, and those types of people, doubtless more dynamic than the strict and myopic bureaucracy, would take precedence in the long run. This could not be allowed! Otherwise, China would be a step closer to being ruled on merit rather than tradition. Horrifying!

    But reform would arrive anyway.

    When the British attempted to convince the Qing Emperor to open trade to the west, he correctly deduced they were swindling devils who could not be trusted and as such refused. But his critical error was in the assumption that the British were unable to impose themselves by force. The Chinese simply couldn’t conceive of a world that didn’t center China, a natural center. The Qing Emperor treated the British as barbarians offering tribute, and gracelessly declined any ‘equal exchange’ with the foreign devils.

    The British, of course, who had proven in India to be rather enterprising indeed, viewed the world as something largely acquired through the supremacy of its gun-toting steamships.

    There was no ‘moral depravity’ to which British capital would not stoop. Honour was a relic of the past, of the Anglo-Saxon impulse, the desire of Alfred the Great to unify a fractured petty kingdom to defend against a horde of foreign invaders. British capital was profoundly Norman in its sensibilities, however; the rule of the deed, of seizing what you want, and in the process laying the foundations for a rootless international hierarchy even beneath the auspices of an ostensible ‘nationalism’, as it arose.

    Honour lay dead, alongside the Cavaliers in St Fagans.

    So the British simply sold Opium to the Chinese. When the Chinese fought back, with their heavenly emperor and his heavenly armies, the British crushed them with the swiftness and brutality they’d been taught in Europe. This ‘genteel’, honourable lot would have sold their own grandmothers into slavery for a quick pound note, and it earned them the world.

    British honour, British brilliance, British ingenuity, were only mere characterisations of flintlock muskets, modern banking, Bessemer steel, and the urgency of an empire that had to be sustained. In every instance in British imperial history we see a delicately positioned house of cards that could collapse over at any moment. What appears as an almost inevitable order of supremacy was in fact something routinely challenged.

    We all know of the necessary depravities of the ancient mediaeval lords. We also know their unnecessary depravities; Henry VIII’s cruelty to his wives, the extravagance of Marie Antoinette, the absent-minded stubbornness of every other Habsburg princeling.

    Under capital, however, every depravity appears necessary. The cruelty of its reign is the constant reaffirmation of the predominant order, the ability to act without mercy, to forget the chivalrous ideals now entertained only by children and reactionaries (though I repeat myself). The British revolution was the revolution of steel over iron, flint over snap and wheel, steam over sail, inaugurating a reign of terror not even Marat would’ve stomached, because it was in service of no enlightened ideal but the truths contained in that steel, flint, and steam: of deeds before words.

    Though the Qing Emperor would’ve had you believe otherwise, the Chinese were not incapable of wielding these truths either. While the bureaucrats and aristocrats certainly couldn’t, the ‘reform’, the opening-up of China’s markets, did in fact lead to dynamism and agency on behalf of hitherto then marginalised classes. Across China, the western powers, in treaty after treaty, concession after concession, established multinational zones in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Qingdao, Harbin, Macau, and so on. The Europeans erected a series of lesions on the empire’s skin, where these rootless cosmopolitans could get down to business, far away from affairs of heaven.

    The Europeans didn’t understand it either, even as the same process was going down in Japan, but they had sowed the seeds of China’s self-realisation, and thus their own defeat. But for capital, it stood on the cusp of its own realisation: of the creation of a manufacturing market encompassing all those souls, liberated from the parochial rule of lords and emperors, sharpened to a point on a spear called labour.

    Enter the great bourgeois revolutionary Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the father of the Republic of China. This man, had the Qing their way, would have remained a dirt-munching peasant like his parents. But the rule of heaven’s son was of no consequence anymore, and he became a free cosmopolitan, with an American education. Filled with the auspice of all those ideals, he possessed like a fire in his heart the germ of China’s self-realisation. He alone would shatter the empires, Chinese and European alike, and bring about an end to the unequal treaties, to the concessions, to the century of humiliation.

    Unfortunately for Dr. Sun, men may make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; he would die, his free and equal republic unrequited, inherited by a lesser man, a coward in strongman’s clothing, manifestly unsuited for the task of republican modernisation. This warlord-in-chief, Chiang Kai-shek, had not identified the real future of China, and was also couched in the sins of his ideological forefather, and the movement behind him, which did not know how to answer the question of China’s new republic, how to renegotiate the treaties, to appeal to the burgeoning universalism of the Christian empire in Europe.

    Thus appears the most splendid revolutionary of his day: Mao Zedong. What Maoists and their critics both forget is that the tenants were mere rural proles in general subservience to a patchwork bourgeoisie. Mao’s “new democracy”, an appeal to air, to mediate a class contradiction that did not in reality exist, obscures this.

    In lieu of an international revolution, Mao inherited a classically bourgeois tradition nevertheless couched in a real momentum of the proletariat. While the Republicans attempted to elevate themselves above their basal instincts, Mao indulged them, and instead inherited the mindset of the British brutes who’d ransacked his home country. When the Japanese marched down, Mao was a dishonourable fiend, an enemy to his country and a friend to its people. He hid in the mountains, the countryside, and let the nationalists absorb losses and the blame for them, building support through widespread land reform and winning the heart of the peasantry.

    We see in Mao’s movement the same house of cards, acting with that same ferocious, amoral brutality, learning at long last to behave as the barbarians. Mao’s revolutionary depravities, of an incalculable quantity, were indeed depravities of necessity, the life of the movement itself contingent on their swift execution. While in ruling over China he reformed the land relations and irreversibly changed the social orders on which the traditional society was built, he lay the ground for the true revisionists, the modernising ‘rightist’ clique, to finally take their place in the sun, cast off all pretensions of higher ideals, and without a second doubt tossing the proles in sweatshops, to be alienated as the rest.

    So emerges the modern empire of China, the supreme exponent of the world-civilisation, the unity of manufacture and finance, the seemingly impenetrable dirigisme now no longer consigned to the mandate of heaven, the narrow-minded peasant superstition of dead emperors that imposed a cyclical history on the masses. But as with all such childish things, modernity too disposed of it, and now, as the Europeans and Americans who once parasitised the east squabble over air and decline, the Chinese stand stalwart, unmoving, the best of capital’s attendants. They learned to build heaven on Earth, and like Laozi’s brutal heaven and Earth alike, which treat the people as straw dogs, it is one of the necessity of brutality, its fierceness, the rule of force.

    Those who say, “nobody wants to die for an international economic zone” do not understand this: entire armies have fought and died for international economic zones. And it is only in these cosmopolitanised, rootless Bastilles, constantly stormed by the exchange of goods and people, that old ways can be changed.

    Here in Britain, we feel alike China’s century of humiliation. But we are not beset by foreign barbarians and their supremacy over us, but rather the arrival of a vast cohort of new and foreign folk, who simply come here because it is where the money is. The international economic zone is no infliction of a conspiracy, but the natural progression of capital. All which stands in its way must be set aside, and this includes the bigotries of the provincials, who want in Britain a quiet nothingness, somewhere where history refuses to happen.

    When history happens regardless, these people, alike the Qing bureaucracy and the dirt-munching peasantry, who held so much in common, will attempt to prevent it, to toss the tsunami off the shore. They look to London, which only cosmopolitanises further, which only sinks lower and lower, creates more and more desperate people, scum of the Earth, with no roots and no loyalty, and where it drives this behaviour in the ‘native’ whites just as much as the immigrants, and they scream: “expel the barbarians!”

    Of course, our slogan will not be “expel the barbarians”, but “down with the twenty-one demands!” For that to happen, we need our own twenty-one demands, and they must come with the iron hand of capital, its momentum indifferent to the screams of the populists.

    For should the reactionaries succeed, elect their chain-smoking alcoholic to the premiership, and should he, against the tsunami, against history, against progress, manage to toss this wave back in the sea, with the might of his army of pensioners, should they turn mundane this burgeoning lesion, the final and complete destruction of the nonsense “British” ideal, and if, forbidding nothing, the hinterlands finally succeed in taming London, the ramifications will be more than humanitarian: it will be a world-historic defeat for communism.

    The ‘old working class’ of Britain must be eradicated wholesale! All common traditions, chain-smoking, pint-chugging, football-punting philistinism, must evaporate! There is only one human heritage in land and power, and we must build the power to seize the land. If the British working class won’t advance communism, we must dissolve this working class and appoint a new one. The revolutionary subject’s historical reconstitution is only one of the many joys of capital’s development, working in spite of itself to conjure up its own destruction.

    We, the progenitors of the new society, must look upon every depravity capital inflicts, take notes, and when the time comes, with the army built for us by its hand, we will mete out the response to each injustice wholesale, extricate all the land and power from the hands of the oppressors, smash their hegemony, and at long last complete our historic task, and revel in the victory of communism.

    Come on, ye restless and weary. Here in Britain, you will find nothing but pain, indignity, and suffering. But you will learn to win the world.

  • All Support To Starmer!

    All Support To Starmer!

    For a long time, we, the Party of the Communists, have been in resolute opposition to “Herr Keir Stürmer”, the bureaucratic dredge of neo-Blairite rot that presides over (what is left of) the British state machinery.

    This position must change, as reality has changed. “Herr Keir Stürmer” has, for the first time, become a champion of the proletariat. His continued leadership over the Labour Party, and the United Kingdom, is now contradistinct to the interests of the British bourgeoisie.

    Britain is a patchwork state, all common ‘identity’ thrown to the sectarian wind, where nobody knows what Britain is, or how to speak to it. We, who have not once attempted to speak to Britain in the first place, who see no abstract personage behind the ruling idea, raptly support this. The common national community is another abuse which the bourgeois civilisation demands the perpetuation of. We support all forces which make concrete its demolition.

    Keir Starmer, long toying with the prospect, has finally become one of these forces. He has, in defiance of all ‘political sense’, thrust his ego over the continuation of the country, of his party, of his government. It is becoming readily apparent that there is no length Starmer won’t go to to keep his grip on a ‘power’ so hazy it may well be air.

    Those of us who abstain from electoral politics now find ourselves tasked with an election that is not about legislative strength, but the undemocratic mediation of the executive. The bourgeoisie demand, through Makerfield, that the class-traitor Andy Burnham seize executive power, to save Britain from a reckless and self-destructive Starmerism.

    But Starmerism isn’t about anything at all but Keir Starmer. Where the infantile, sniveling wretches of capital’s left flank demand they try and corral civil society into a state of anything but social oppression, and in doing so become its staunchest allies, Keir Starmer stands their fiercest opponent. Thus, our staunchest advocate. If this would-be Mussolini has his way, the civil strata will have no chance to prove themselves, the British political project will continue to collapse into yet more nothing.

    We must, at this critical juncture, have the bravery to say: long live this butcher, now in rebellion against his judicial socialisation, who has run out of boxes to check and now lives in defiance of all sense, all order, all ‘civilisation’, whose aspiration as survival is rule by no authority but his own. Were this despotism made true, he would continue to ruin this country, and as opponents of this country, we stand in full support!

    As for Burnham and the two-timing Streeting, they are clearly trying to fix things, alike Polanski, whose coalition threatens to tie a new ‘Britain’ into being. Should they rescue the ‘Labour’ Party from our wrecker on the inside, they may prove its utility to capital yet. Should this happen, should the festering boil be soothed, the revolutionary subject may yet again postpone its conclusion that the capitalist limb must be amputated wholesale from the human species.

    The Makerfield by-election now becomes a junction for Burnham’s entry to the Party of Order, and it is a junction that must be closed. We call on all of Makerfield’s progressive elements to work, at any level, for his defeat, in service of any other conclusion but his victory. There are those who are troubled by the prospect of a Reform victory, and we admit this would be displeasing to us. But all that matters now is the British state; something the Fagash Führer could well resist through wrecking.

    If Starmer has his way, we do not think Parliament will be powerful enough to execute the manifest harm Reform UK intends to bring. Then, the only avenue left is class power. We will remain in rapt support of the “sensible” centre-left, who prove time and time again, in every instance of history, the supreme proletarian principle: Communism is the only frontier worth advancing.

    May Blair’s shadow cast its own shade, and in its cynicism alone prove the worthlessness of the British state. We stand to gain immensely from the victory of the son of the Toolmaker, and we encourage him to hold firm, steadfast, against the historic storm of his bourgeois opponents.

  • A Sermon From Father Arnold

    A Sermon From Father Arnold

    Introduction

    We here at Negate! are, in a word or two, supremely iconoclastic. That is to say, we have no gods, saints, preachers, mystics, holy texts, et cetera, and we are very invested in seeing the demolition and deposition of all such childish things. We do not believe in ghosts, banshees, spectres, the ontological will–or, inasmuch as any of this ought relate to politics. I cannot truthfully speak for my colleagues’ personal interiorities; being oppressed creatures, they may sigh in some certain fashion or another, and in some cases that sigh may take the form of God.

    Alas, cruel reality sheds light through the window, and one day we must take up the working assumption that the saints we hang up there are simply icons, and there is nothing holy in the depictions strung above.

    This is because our materialism is negative. We do not take capital for its poltergeists, but for its working mechanism; we do not create a teleology of the present from a future position, but develop our understandings with the living doctrine of our time. We are abolitionists.

    Positive materialism, however, is presented with a problem here: for any abstraction they deem worthy of use, ‘reification’ and ‘fetishism’ is essentially the same thing.

    ‘Reification’ being the process by which a real thing is articulated as an abstract concept; ‘fetishism’ being the process by which the thing is treated as that concept. Please defer to our good friend Plato about how this essentially means all instances of that thing descend from the One True Thing (to rule them all, and in the Textwall bind them).

    When a positive materialist concocts an abstraction, the materialist must then have it all make sense in an academic stratum; to codify it, in the Glorious History of Ideas. This, in turn, is then strung, through precedent, peer review, into a ‘scientific socialism’ that, over time, comes to address only the reified abstractions.

    Once this grotesque sophistry has been finalised and put to paper, we may now instantly regard the form itself, and have a bunch of dead academics do all the heavy-lifting of fetishism for us.

    This Deviance is presented to the Sensitive Communist Youth as real thinking, real science; that the perverted mystic, in the guise of intelligentsia, actually understands the fetish object better than the philistines.

    No more does this confound the positive materialist than the state. These people profess to have read Marx (who readily and bluntly addresses the state as a mere idea), and then play with the idea itself in lieu of the other ideas behind it; addressing the other ideas, as Lenin did, makes a precarious approach toward the real world.

    One might possess a working state theory, hidden in the background, communicating through the Ley Line of History, but at some point the abstraction turns to air when discussing it. In any case, because the liberal ontology presents its state as something equivalent to God, and yet we are told Communism is stateless, so the defeat of God becomes a battle, not his passive dismissal by modernity; we may find workarounds to the ‘state’ monad, and its attendant noumena, but we tie ourselves into knots when we come back to Karl Marx, that hideous Prussian oaf, who defeated both.

    We here at Negate! do not consider the state-category useless for analyses. But we refuse to treat it as anything but its appearance.

    This is not so for some people!

    Enter the lauded Cosmonaut Magazine. I have long been infatuated with this particular Church, but their sermon drones on to the point of boredom, no matter how much money they put on offer. I will tell you how I have quite literally prostituted myself in dire financial straits; but I have never, as of yet, debased myself so far as to submit an article to Cosmonaut in pursuit of money.

    Beneath the ‘Neo-Kautskyist’ auspices of the Notorious Donny P (the American Left’s very own pícaro), this magazine has yet again assailed our senses with a new article: Toward a Marxist State Theory of the Socialist Market Economy, by Theryn D. Arnold (a candidate PhD in Geography; we wish our mystic well in this regard). You can read it on Cosmonaut here.

    Father Arnold seems an affable enough chap. But make no mistake, he is a priest, a mystic! This particular Smart Cookie, successfully gaslit into the Church of the Position by the self-selecting myopia of the Sensitive Communist Youth, now provides his analysis of China’s ‘socialist market economy’; and alike the enlightened centrist, he implores that we move beyond our present, banal understandings of China as ‘capitalist’ or ‘AES’, and move forward, into his own blinding light! His critique of the theory involved is necessarily idealist, and is based on dialogue surrounding the left, and the correction of some of China’s ‘critics’ and ‘supporters’.

    Now it is apparent that China’s ostensible ‘socialism’ is in fact not a mystical property passed down through the Tao Te Ching and Confucius, nor some tautological claim about the collectivism of rice farming, we attempt to understand it again. This lies, however, in the ideas, states, princes; never the social relations!

    To our shock and horror, the priests, their churches demolished by Xi Jinping’s gelatinous fist, now turn, in trembling awe, to lay the founding stones of another.

    We must not let up! We must not hesitate! Peoples across the world have, in that noble Jacobin tradition, littered history with the corpses of priests and preachers. So let us continue, rifles held forward, in the spirit of the Bolsheviks, Catalans, Red Guards, and all the rest of those who, with a noble and terrible sense of duty, took it in their hands to smash every church and temple they could find.

    I

    The Idealist Conceit

    This response will be cut into three parts: critique of Father Arnold’s idealist dialectical framing, addressing the vagaries of his criteria, and the inadequacy of his resolution.

    I would wager any one of these is enough to reject the premises of his gospel outright.

    Let’s start with the first.

    Father Arnold, as an academic, is prolific in the merchandise of ideas. The entire premise of Cosmonaut is the development of a scientific socialist space; one that is intelligent, academic in tone, with citations, reasoned critique, et cetera.

    The article in question is a ‘critique’ of the discourse surrounding Chinese political economy. It is (allegedly) scientific, intelligent, academic indeed. Father Arnold, furthermore, suggests his state theory on China is a Marxist one. This is a bold assertion! If this is the case, then he will have provided a materialist critique.

    Let us review his case then.

    Father Arnold tells us that there are two dominant Marxist stances on China’s political economy: the ‘campists’ (who uphold China as socialist) and the ‘state-capitalist critics’ (who do not). He sees both as substantial positions in this day and age, but they are products of the same error; ‘mirror images’, so he claims. Both get something right, but it is this error, this single error of thought, makes both distinct from the real truth. If this is rectified, the two outlooks can be synthesised into a truly Marxist state theory.

    We must assume that Fichte is the principal saint of Father Arnold’s parish.

    Father Arnold first paints us a picture of the ‘socialist market economy’ as it emerged in the eighties. This, which Father Arnold assures us did not emerge from a theoretical blueprint (as opposed, presumably, to those famed economies which were simply wished into existence by a theoretical blueprint), is distinct from ‘market socialism’:

    It is worth pausing here to distinguish the SME from the market socialist tradition with which it is sometimes confused. Market socialism – in the versions associated with Bardhan and Roemer, or with Schweickart’s Economic Democracy – is fundamentally a normative-institutional project. This means these scholars try to figure out how to design a socialist economy that retains market mechanisms for efficiency while subordinating them to socialist property relations. The market is an instrument to be engineered within a socialist framework. The SME inverts this relationship. It does not propose to subordinate a market to a socialist design; it proposes to derive the socialist character of a market economy already in operation through public ownership dominance and party direction.

    What Father Arnold is saying here is effectively that the egg comes before the chicken; that the SME is distinct from the market socialism we know, because it is about a market deriving its Socialism Particles from existing state and party control, as opposed to the persistence of market mechanisms under socialist property relations. Here, socialist property relations refers to ‘worker ownership of the means of production’; co-ops, people owning their otherwise marketised workplaces.

    What’s interesting is the cases invoked for ‘market socialism’; in lieu of existing examples of market socialism in practice, Father Arnold angles for the theories of Pranab Bardhan and John E. Romer, or those of David Schweickart.

    All of the models proposed by these people do invoke the traditions of past market socialist experiments; Schweickart proposes a model in common “with Yugoslav socialism, with Japanese capitalism and with Mondragon [a collective in the Basque region of Spain that began under Franco’s regime] cooperativism” (Schweickart 1992, p. 18). The resulting proposal, as the Sensitive Communist Youth will probably intuit, resembles something rather fascist.

    A problem with all proposals cited is that none of them have ever existed in fully-fledged practice, as China’s ‘SME’ has, and yet Father Arnold uses them as his comparison here; certainly, one could take the case of Yugoslavia’s ‘socialist self-management’, a system that actually existed (with similarities and differences to China’s own situation, albeit warped by scale), that can be measured via its outcomes, but Father Arnold at present seems deliberately unconcerned with the real world. He does sort of mention Yugoslavia, and other market socialist experiments, but as scarcely more than a footnote, much later in the article; as with all priests, heaven remains more important than Earth.

    In any case, to take his claim seriously, Father Arnold’s statement here is that the ‘socialist market economy’ is not a normative-institutional project at its foundations. But China’s political economy, he wagers, requires a structural framing, not a normative one; i.e., one that does not simply address the premises of Chinese party ownership as articulated, but its existence as contextualised by the way all the systems link together.

    In effect, what Father Arnold is telling us is: you cannot understand China simply as a party-state, but as a party-state with a state-directed market economy.

    Fucking groundbreaking. Take the salt from your tears of joy, and shape it to a medal for Father Arnold.

    The ‘campist’ position, Father Arnold astutely observes, is largely contextualised by understanding China on its normative claims: that because “the party-state owns strategic sectors, directs industrial policy, and declares socialist goals”, it is, in fact, socialist. This, says Father Arnold, cannot possibly be a full analysis. Praising the position for its ‘virtue’ in ‘taking the socialist question seriously’, he still nevertheless says it fails to take account for how the Chinese state could possess an operation independent of Party intent.

    Of course, the ‘state-capitalist’ position must invert this error, so says Father Arnold:

    The state-capitalist position makes the opposite error. By identifying capitalism with the presence of wage labour, market competition, and surplus extraction – all of which are present in China – it dissolves the socialist question entirely.

    You read that correctly, friends. This ‘state-capitalist’ position permits the profanity of identifying capitalism with the presence of capitalism, and thus concluding socialism cannot be in evidence. As good Hegelians, we could never accept this.

    Now, let’s give Father Arnold a chance to explain himself. According to him, this position adopts the following stance:

    China is simply capitalist, the CPC is a ruling class faction, and the SME is an ideological fig leaf.

    To start with, the argument attacked here is one that proposes China as simply capitalist, with the CPC as a ruling class faction that seems to deliberately offer the SME as an ‘ideological fig leaf’ and no more.

    One of the sources provided for this understanding–David Camfield’s Red Flags: A Reckoning with Communism for the Future of the Left–curiously resists this sort of scrutiny, because it doesn’t actually propose the SME as the initial exponent of Chinese capitalism. Rather, it claims China has never been transitioning to communism at all:

    Without question, though, in spite of what CCP leaders have maintained, China has never been in transition to communism. The Chinese Revolution ended semi-colonial domination and unified almost all of the territory of the former Qing Empire under CCP rule. It established a one-party state that implemented social reforms and industrialized and modernized the country. This laid the basis for the extraordinary development of productive forces that has happened since the late 1970s, which has given China’s rulers great global influence. These are major changes in social arrangements. However, none of them have involved direct producers themselves taking charge of society and beginning to democratically plan production to meet their needs. None have eroded class exploitation and state power.

    This is important, because it shows that Camfield’s analysis begins not at the SME, but at the social relations upon which the development of productive forces occurred. His criteria for ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ is lacking (the book itself is kind of dogshit all the way through), but contra Father Arnold, he does in fact have a criteria for socialism.

    Such digs at the heart of the question; one that Father Arnold expertly dodges at every opportunity. At the end of the day, a lot of ‘state-capitalist’ critiques of China’s SME are not about the SME at all. Rather, they are about the conditions laid before the SME; they address in real terms the procedures behind its emergence, and use those to diagnose a socialist character or lack thereof.

    This does not necessarily lead to an analysis of Chinese political economy that is necessarily over-fixated on the past and not the present; nor does it preclude the notion that some people in the CPC may well have been working toward something they deemed socialist. It simply suggests that any ‘socialism’ in evidence cannot be seen as a quantity of economic phenomena, but an outcome of base-level social relations around which the state must necessarily take form.

    Or, in other words, it simply means we do not need to belabour ourselves with justifications as to why China isn’t socialist to any extent we may justify any other state; its politics may be unique, its economic policy may be unique, its state structure may be unique, but yes, the CPC is a boutgeois, ruling class faction, and the ‘SME’ does not need to exist principally as ‘an ideological fig leaf’ but simply as the means of its own perpetuation.

    We do not need to argue on any basis here other than the CPC’s own words and deeds, where Jiang Zemin’s Three Represents have already rationalised the bourgeoisie’s presence in the party as an integral part of the party-state.

    This will not do for Father Arnold! When China tells us: “we would like the bourgeoisie to help us manage our market society”, and then indeed, has the bourgeoisie manage its market society, this cannot be simply capitalist! There must be something else, something hidden, something within which we can discern a truer character, beyond the work of any prior theorist.

    And if we go further beyond; to say, as many have said, that China did not in fact build a socialist economy at all to begin with, as Father Arnold’s own sources for the critiqued position explicitly comment, then we are in fact left with this critique of air, this shadow-boxing of people who do not entertain the very premises upon which Father Arnold argues.

    Here, we have an issue far beyond the notion of the present-day market economy, which is simply that any justification of a modern-day Chinese socialism must emerge from the premises of a previous Chinese socialism. For a working ‘state theory’, this would require a fundamental addressing of what came before, of the function of the Chinese revolution. It would require a comprehensive addressing of several priors.

    Father Arnold does not make clear his position on previous ‘Chinese socialism’, and as such he cannot actually address the critiques he himself claims to be in the process of surpassing. He would do much better if he addressed a Maoist critique–one that takes Mao’s China as authentically building socialism, and later developments as rightist deviations toward a capitalist road–but this is a framing he never addresses. Instead, he takes two irreconcilable positions, and attempts to find a common ground for them, to synthesise them into something workable.

    This, for what it’s worth, is entirely possible in the world of pure thought. It is not really possible in the programme of workable socialist politics, which demands a coherent position. In this department, Father Arnold’s recommended liturgy is particularly unsatisfactory (something to be elaborated on in Part III).

    Father Arnold critiques the ‘state-capitalist position’ as it relates to an understanding the SME as a perversion of socialist character, but does not address the state capitalist position that understands the SME as an elaboration of an already capitalist character. This is ultimately the framing used by the ‘state-capitalist critic’ Camfield, who does not use ‘socialism’ as a category in and of itself, but instead attempts to frame social developments as occurring on top of prior social developments; who dismisses the ‘SME’ not out of incuriosity for its ‘socialist’ character, but on an assumption that the prior social relations are more important for the historical development toward communism, which, assuming communism remains the goal, socialism itself must find its evidence within.

    And I do not agree with the specifics of Camfield’s framing; but this is because I have read and internalised the thesis proposed on its own terms, as relates to a programmatic communist advocacy of praxis. I disagree with his praxis, I disagree with his understanding of communism as a politics to be adopted and not a real force to be harnessed, but I can address these on their own terms, because they are about practice.

    By divorcing himself from this historical paradigm, ostensibly to provide lucidity toward the SME as it exists, Father Arnold instead is incapable of addressing the SME on anything other than its intellectual priors; on predicating his understanding on bourgeois economics to elaborate a socialist character.

    For this, he invokes the theology of a particular Bishophric: Copenhagen Business School. His Excellency Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard, alongside Koen Rutten (scraped out of a Dutch phalanstery), delivers a critical assessment of China’s economic development, in a chapter largely about the earlier history of China’s economic ‘modernisation’.

    But if we are to be building a ‘Marxist’ state theory (a task Cosmonaut might deem Promethean, but is in fact Sisyphean), we cannot simply adopt bourgeois priors with regards to the history and hope we still arrive at an approximation of the Truth, as far as it may exist for our purposes. That’s not science! That’s religion! Introducing more sources might address this prima facie, but all you’re really doing is belabouring the theology.

    At the end of the day, ideas are merely ideas; analyses, merely analyses. For Father Arnold, the work of ‘campist’ proponents, and their ‘state-capitalist’ critics, must be reconciled on the terms they provide as relate to the subject alone, and as such strips both down to principles divorced from what is actually being argued. This must necessarily emerge from a byzantine web spun by the positive bourgeois intelligentsia, not a continuation of a Marxist doctrine. Even in his attempts to provide nuance with a tertiary ‘developmentalist’ analysis, he only belabours the process more, makes its ridicule clear.

    Father Arnold has addressed nothing, proposed nothing, critiqued nothing, and provided nothing in the way of solutions. What he has done is produced a Textwall; a manifestly useless Textwall, which reads with nuance, but delivers us absolutely nothing of substance as relates to the pure ideas reduced out of practical programmes: the ‘campists’ for their support of China, the ‘state-capitalist critics’ for their opposition, and for Father Arnold a mere essay with nothing to offer.

    Let Father Arnold speak as he may. We, personally, prefer Marx:

    All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.

    Theses on Feuerbach, VIII

    II

    In Search of Socialism

    When addressing a ‘socialist’ form of production (or perhaps, productive character), as positive Marxists are wont to do, we are left with the necessary task of suggesting criteria under which a society can be deemed socialist in character.

    For ‘socialist’ criteria, the distinction at first appears:

    1. ‘Socialism’ as a degree of government intervention in the economy, through welfare spending, state regulation of business, and taxation policy.
    2. ‘Socialism’ as a measurable relation within society.

    The former is a purely quantitative assessment that treats socialism as an essence gradually fulfilled; such vulgarity is thankfully absent from even Father Arnold’s sermon.

    The latter itself must, however, qualify for socialism; at its most basic, the “worker ownership of the means of production”, or through the control of the economy by something ultimately beheld to the workers; a party, a state machinery, et cetera.

    Of course, as taught, positive Marxists are well aware that dialectical contradictions may produce certain oddities within society; that there may be a big old conflict happening between parts of the state with socialist character and parts of the state without socialist character. This sort of nonsense is a stone’s throw from Bernsteinism, but it’s frustratingly common!

    Nevertheless, Father Arnold, here, is somewhat confused, because he does not actually explain what socialism is, to him. Faced with the need to, at some level, defend some socialist element or another within China, he does not actually define what socialism is to him. Instead, he critiques given analyses on their ability to comprehend socialist character in China; completely refusing to elaborate on how socialist character in China ought be comprehended.

    Take how he addresses the ‘campist’ argument:

    But this framework cannot ask whether the Chinese state’s own reproduction has become structurally dependent on capital accumulation through market relations, or whether those market relations introduce pressures that operate regardless of CPC intent.

    Interestingly, the fact that the CPC’s own commitment to ‘socialism’ might be in jeopardy is never even brought up. This framing is important, because Father Arnold invites us to regard the CPC as a centripetal force posed to work against the centrifugal force of the state’s capital accumulation; that the CPC itself, with its almost metaphysical intent, is a force poised to work toward ‘socialism’. As such, the question becomes the CPC’s agency over the state structure, and the bubbling contradiction therein.

    This is the fetishism to which positive Marxism must necessarily take itself; if nature is built on dialectical contradiction, there must be a contradictory element between competing forms. Such, we abstract our analysis to heaven, where we simply have ‘the Party’ (God), and ‘the State’ (the Demiurge), and treat the party and the state as contradictory to each other, unbothered by the affairs of Earth.

    As I’ve already discussed, we do not need to ask on our own terms whether the CPC itself is a bourgeois class organ; they have told us this themselves, and now pursue a path in beautiful, class-collaborationist lockstep with classical fascism–‘harmonious’ development.

    Of course, addressing the stated intent of the CPC is not, in and of itself, part of Father Arnold’s sermon here. His job is to simply assume the existence of a ‘socialism’ manifest in the CPC, and its intent, and work from there.

    He gives us a very elementary dressing-down of why market relations are contrary to ‘socialist development’:

    The most important mystification the market produces is the occlusion of production. In other words, the mechanisms of the production process are obscured – the market presents exchange as a self-contained world; products appear already on the shelves, their origins in the labour process invisible, the class relations of production hidden behind the apparent equality of buyer and seller. […]

    […] This means that, for Ollman, the capitalist class rules not primarily through lies or distortions deliberately propagated by ruling class ideologists, but through the unremarkable daily experience of buying and selling that anyone living in a market society undergoes.

    […] What [the Campists] do not address is the ideological effects of market participation on Chinese workers and citizens. If Ollman is right – and there is no reason to think market mystification operates differently in China than elsewhere – then the daily reproduction of market exchange in the SME generates structural pressures on the consciousness of people regardless of the intent of the CPC or its official ideology. […]

    Here, is perhaps the sharper point of Father Arnold’s sermon; his stance here is from an essay by Bertell Ollman, titled Market Mystification in Capitalist and Market Socialist Societies.

    Ollman provides a thoroughly humanist account of market economies, and it is actually rather dogshit; but the concern here that Father Arnold raises is valid, in a sense. At the end of the day, his take is:

    But Ollman’s conclusion is too quick precisely because he has no theory of the state. Without one, the CPC’s direction of the economy can only appear as a superficial overlay on top of fundamentally capitalist social relations – the “socialist trimmings” on top of savage capitalism. But this cannot account for the real institutional differences between the Chinese party-state and liberal market states, the veritable variation in outcomes that developmentalist scholars like Medeiros and Majerowicz document, or the structural constraints the party-state places on market relations that a purely market-driven accumulation regime would not. Ollman knows what markets do but not what states are.

    This would answer why the apostate Ollman gave us this banger:

    The real choice for these societies, therefore, would seem to be between a dictatorial form of savage capitalism, with socialist trimmings (China), and a progressive, egalitarian, anti-imperialist dictatorship, with different socialist trimmings, that is neither capitalist nor socialist (Cuba). If the political dictatorship is not too severe, I favor the latter option, if only because social and material benefits are shared more equally under such regimes, other problems associated with the market are either missing or minimal, and the anti-imperialist foreign policy that these regimes generally follow creates difficulties for the world-wide rule of capital.

    Ollman’s critique necessarily fails to address the state, and as such only makes moralistic claims manifestly useless for materialist critique. But Father Arnold does not see this; he sees a puzzle, incompleted. He sees the humanist allegation against capital as something to be put into a bigger picture. Here, we finally see what Father Arnold is trying to do:

    1. The ‘campists’ don’t get market relations.
    2. His particular selected ‘state-capitalist’ critics aren’t taking into account the Chinese state.
    3. As such, we need to understand the Chinese state, in a new, more perfect way, with socialism as some hidden secret buried in the discourse.

    The notion that illusions of ‘socialism’ needn’t factor in whatsoever is completely absent. Father Arnold discusses at length the ‘different capacities’ of China’s bourgeois institutions, but is hamstrung by his own idealism into failing to introduce falsifiable criteria. This is because Father Arnold, being a prevaricating bloviator, is terrified of being proven wrong. He honestly seems to believe that by praising people for addressing “the socialist question” correctly, he absolves himself of the need to address it himself.

    ‘Socialism’, for Father Arnold, is a mystery. It is something that may well forsake itself in the path of the hand of God.

    This, again, is a quintessential property of his idealism; that there is actual, substantive, corporeal Truth being assembled through some discursive science or another, that he needs to take apart and address, through his own sermon. He can select the rational truth in all of those he critiques, but only so long as he builds his work on people, alike His Excellency Brødsgaard, who do not really concern themselves with justifying a ‘socialism’.

    For Brødsgaard, the task is a rationalisation of Chinese political economy; he uses socialism as a simple hedging character to polarise against markets, because Brødsgaard does not discuss Marxism as the perspective by which things are measured. His analysis is not Marxist.

    Father Arnold, summoning the folk wisdom of his elders, demands we find a socialism in evidence in claims made by self-professed socialists, all left to be found in the gospel of someone completely unconcerned with the premises of “socialism in evidence”. His own pyramid of ideas refuses to stand on its own grounds.

    In the world of Father Arnold, ‘socialism’ may well not be a measurable quality at all. Alike Deng Xiaoping, he sees it as only a black or white cat to be pursued without regard for a character of its own, which is fundamentally unknowable as ordered by his own premises. But unlike Deng, his cat doesn’t even catch mice!

    III

    What Is To be Done?

    So far, Father Arnold has:

    1. Established an idealist framing.
    2. Refused to introduce falsifiable criteria into his own framing.

    His supposedly ‘Marxist’ state theory is thus elaborated:

    The SME is therefore neither a neutral instrument in socialist hands nor simply capitalist restoration. It is a specific contradictory configuration in which the socialist state-form and capitalist market relations are in structural tension. This allows one to claim the “socialist” modifier in Liu Guoguang’s account is not decorative because it names a real institutional constraint on market relations, a genuine concentration of planning capacity and political insulation from domestic capital that produces different outcomes from an LME. But Ollman’s structural argument about capital-as-relation is equally real – the market relations introduced into the SME generate their own pressures, their own ideological effects, their own logic of accumulation that the party-state must navigate and cannot simply direct at will.

    Let’s break this down:

    1. The SME is not a neutral socialist instrument, but neither ‘capitalist restoration’ (again, this shadowboxing of the Maoists while refusing to address the arguments he himself presents).
    2. The ‘socialist state-form’ (the heavenly, perfectly socialist state, as distinct from the state itself) is in tension with capitalist market relations.
    3. Socialism, therefore, is not ‘decorative’, but a ‘real institutional constraint on market relations’.
    4. The ‘socialist’ party-state has to deal with the consequences of a market economy if it wants to stay socialist.

    Has this guy ever fucking heard of dirigisme? His state theory is predicated upon the fundamental understanding that state direction of markets is inherently socialist; the state is thus fetishised to a thing atop its own existence, a socialist state form which we must assume in theory, but never search for in practical evidence. Let us, again, see the state-form for Father Arnold:

    But the specific form of the Chinese party-state also introduces real constraints on those market relations that a liberal market state does not and institutionally cannot.

    Utterly bonkers. I re-iterate: Father Arnold honestly expects us to believe that there is socialism in evidence through the mere structural overcoming of Humanism; that the ‘state-form’, socialist only because it has been described as such, has now leapt onto the stage of history, and can finally be graciously addressed by this sermon.

    This is completely fucking ridiculous. I am fucking insulted on behalf of Thinking Humanity that this got published. My tone in response to this nonsense is necessarily ridiculing, because I refuse to wrestle with this swine in its own mud.

    By selecting his own critics to critique, and never, ever addressing even one the herd of elephants in the room–again, refusing to concretely define his socialist state form, which we cannot understand through anything but air–Father Arnold creates his own, mystical world of an unknowable epsitemology, where all is perfect and God is real.

    When, from his gorgeous, heavenly perch, this snake-oil salesman finally deigns to offer us filthy meat-people a response, he does so through implications (never diagnoses of action; the task of praxis is left to those interpreting Father Arnold’s new translation of the KJV Bible), and they are twofold.

    As relates to China:

    It means critical solidarity without illusions and critique without capitulation to anti-communist ideology. This means taking seriously both what the Chinese party-state’s specific institutional form makes possible (the planning capacities, the insulation of strategic sectors from short-term profitability, the relative autonomy from domestic capital), and what the structural pressures of market social relations impose, including on workers. It means resisting the temptation to read geopolitical alignment as a proxy for socialist character, while equally resisting the temptation to read the presence of exploitation and market competition as settling the question of China’s class character.

    The idea here is that if we allow ourselves to settle China’s class-character, to essentialise it for a class programme, we are somehow assailing its socialist state-soul. Our geopolitics therefore cannot be aligned around the interests of the Chinese bourgeoisie, as they readily advance to make deals with formerly hostile powers in the wake of a self-destructive Trumpism; we cannot see the hand of Chinese markets moving to imperialise Africa, we cannot oppose China, which only really means ‘the Chinese bourgeoisie’, because Mao planted a seed of socialism in their source code, a hidden Textwall, sent by God.

    Everywhere, the international collusion of the bourgoisie (who are by far better internationalists than any proletarian movement at present) moves to make itself transparently obvious to all those of us with eyes. We cannot trust our eyes, says Father Arnold. They can’t detect the Socialism Particles! We need his dialectical Geiger counter!

    And as relates to markets in general:

    This is a structural argument with structural implications, as any socialist project that retains significant market relations must grapple seriously with what those relations produce and not merely assume that socialist ownership or political direction can override them. The Soviet NEP, the Yugoslav self-management experiment, and the SME; all represent historically specific attempts to manage this contradiction, and all generated, and continue to generate their own specific tensions between socialist political form and market social relations.

    As such, when us poor little socialists finally get our turn in the sun, says Father Arnold, what China shows us is that actually we need to remember the humanist account as relates to structuralist economies; that actually, Ollman’s critique is haunting us like some spooky fucking banshee we need to be terrified of.

    This must be understood, one assumes, in the context of China, where the socialism-soul has made itself evident in pure thought, and therefore can teach us things our eyes and ears cannot. We must build more theories! More understanding! More positions. Advance, advance, advance, towards a theory. Throw yourself on the bayonets of contradiction, in this brilliant world of purest thought!

    Do you not see how fucking stupid this is? The basis for our conditional solidarity with the Chinese bourgeoisie must also inform our understanding of markets; not the markets themselves. I feel as if this bit was just slapped on to pad out time and fill space, something I do with my polemic diatribes but do not pretend is anything else.

    In Father Arnold’s world, he does not fetishise socialism, because socialism does not exist; as a proselytising priest, he is indeed in the business of robbing us poor natives of our fetish objects. No, as he rolls through our village on a tide of colonial typhoid fever, he exclaims: the real Truth is in no object at all! We must all subordinate ourselves to a higher power, one we cannot, will not ever know!

    Look to the skies, o’ children of Christ, the LORD, he says. Find freedom in your ignorance.

    The only answer to this is ridicule.

    Conclusion

    I do not dislike Father Arnold. I do not even dislike the priests of Cosmonaut. I’m too kind-hearted; I love my fellow human beings too much. And anyone in the business of trying to figure out a Communism has their heart in the right place.

    But the concern here is positive Marxism. Cosmonaut understands the present intelligentsia is bourgeois, but works towards its development rather than its abolition; the Notorious Donny P himself in a rife contradiction with his task of abolishing civil society and his task of seeming like a Very Clever Boy within it.

    And these guys are all Very Clever Boys. They’ve got a handful of Very Clever Girls as well. But Cosmonaut, as it stands, is a simple decorative ornament on the wall of positive Marxism; there is no negation, no realisation of a Communist principle. It remains, as always, a scientific socialism; one that, if it proves itself of any use at all, will only be useful to the bourgeoisie, to bourgeois science. The idea that science itself is a social property, that can be measured by its utility to society, passes over their heads.

    But when they do something as disgustingly Deviant as this sermon, when they demand we are deaf to the evidence of our ears, and blind to the evidence of our eyes; when they, in turn, provide something so manifestly un-scientific even by the programme of positive academia, they produce a perversion too ridiculous to even attempt addressing on its own term.

    We ought not gaslight ourselves into pretending this practice deserves respect. We must hold true to the tradition of ridicule, of telling these people just how stupid they are being, how they use their impressive intellects to build nothing more than religious sermons, then we never, ever stand a chance of having them realise that, in their heart of hearts, they ought be destroying temples, not building new ones.

    As Communists, our goal is destruction, not production; destruction of civil society, of class, of the social division of labour that demands rigid strata systems between physical and mental labour in the first place.

    You cannot run from the society you live in, Father Arnold. Tear off those robes and put on a decent fucking outfit, and throw your bible on a bonfire.

    Come with us, into the real world.

  • There Is No Professional-Managerial Class

    There Is No Professional-Managerial Class

    Introduction

    Inasmuch as we can establish a history of ideas throughout the biblically-proportioned tragedy of the American left, the Judas appears as Barbara Ehrenreich (and her husband, John). In their diagnosis of a juvenile, middle-class ‘left’ hopped up on Evil Professional Commodities, they are often credited with the defeat of the new left itself.

    During the days of the American new left (a colossal waste of time, to spare the unacquainted), there was the very obvious reality that they were all ‘middle-class’ lifestylists who were not really getting anywhere with class mobilisation. One could conclude that this is probably down to the obsession Americans hold with their supposedly unique national property (and its rather banal descent from the real position of America as a ‘superpower’ that influences other cultures in its image and cries bloody murder when this doesn’t just produce little Americas), or one could fetishise the ‘middle class’ as the real thing impeding progress.

    Our good friends B&J decided upon the latter, and published a very long Textwall in Radical American that Barbara later conceded was only dry and theoretical to appease “the Marxists”, a tradition to which she claimed her and her husband had adhered to at the time. This makes sense, because the entire thesis is presented as a second-order rationalisation of a mere intuition, that cleverly masquerades as real Truth.

    Inasmuch as you want to know what Barbara thought of her Deviant love for a transient historical instance, you can read her 2013 retro-analysis here. If you want any more revisiting for later historical developments, you might need a Ouija board because Barbara Ehrenreich died in 2022.

    The task of engaging with her Idea now falls to us, the forgotten children of modernity, who must always be couching ourselves in the words of the dead.

    Nevertheless, B&J’s conclusion is remarkably straightforward: that the American middle class is divorced from communist class politics because its essential interest is in management, but not ownership, of capital, and this ‘Professional-Managerial Class’ now deluding itself with an imaginary proletarian status is probably not going to be building any class organisation because it is actually a movement for itself, not class abolition as such.

    This, alike Trotsky’s desperate attempts to assign the Stalinist ‘degenerated workers’ state’ with a ‘class-independent bureaucracy’, is about inventing things to justify priors to keep yourself sane in times of apparent retreat. Unlike Trotsky, B&J are not subtle about doing this, which makes sense in the context of academic culture: something very much in the tradition of trying to say something long enough that it becomes true.

    The spectre of the PMC, regardless of Barbara’s admission of its ‘ruin’ in 2013, has achieved incredible purchase among many self-professed historical materialists, because like all pseudoscience, it sounds intuitively true even if it isn’t. Not even Maoist-Third Worldists are spared the spectre, and indeed it is very helpful for them to conclude that the mechanisms of empire are not down to the need to structure and maintain globalised commodity exchange, but actually empire is the fault of white women in Human Resources. Nowhere is this idea more ascendant than with the American Maoist-Third Worldists, who graciously self-flagellate themselves in an act of penance before the global masses they crackerously oppress with their American Ideas.

    But in a moment of crisis, something curious happens to class politics: the PMC’s oft-touted shackles evaporate, and the working class starts developing notions of organisation. The PMC merely appear as more autonomous proletarians, and we see our managers as idiots just like us who are now having to split ends on their tiny fucking wages to find a shoebox it’s affordable to live in.

    Marx described all this false consciousness and its alleviation way back when and it happens every fucking time like clockwork, but people still cannot retract themselves from their present historical instance, a fetish object so abused it’d instantly kill any psychiatrist it vented to.

    So come the negation of the ghosts, the spectres, and the banshees, and we emerge, like a clearing mist, in our wretched totality: the lucid, living doctrine of our time.

    If B&J’s poltergeist still remains in any substance, let loose the proletarian exorcists, who may banish it for good.

    I

    Let us start with where B&J’s investigation begins.

    Theoretical confusion about class is endemic among all parts of the left. Some leftists (mainly associated with the “new communist movement”) describe students, professionals, and other educated workers as “petty bourgeois,” though more as a put-down than as a defensible analysis. Other contemporary leftists describe all salary and wage workers who do not own the means of production as “working class.” The working class so conceived is a near-universal class, embracing all but the actual capitalists and the classical petty bourgeoisie (i.e., small tradesmen, independent farmers, etc.). But this group, too, finds its definition practically untenable. In practice, and conversationally, these leftists use the terms “working class” and “middle class” with their colloquial connotations, knowing that the distinction is still somehow a useful one. Yet this distinction cannot be pursued in theory: the prevailing theoretical framework insists that all wage earners are working class and that the notion that some workers are “middle class” is a capitalist-inspired delusion.

    EXORCIST’S NOTE: I’m not going to be polite here: this is empiricism. “Having sensed something, the truth is indeed in that sensation.” As someone who is schizophrenic, I presume, the goal here is to convince me that when my imaginary friends make me sense something which isn’t actually ‘real’ to anyone else, I am actually catching a glimpse of true reality. By this ground of epistemic authority, I should be able to change matter itself at will.

    But no, B&J’s imaginary friends are superior to mine, because mine have voices. Only they can change matter with the will of their thoughts, through the cacophonous silence of their skulls.

    In any case, you are not some fucking firebrand radical for recognising that there are people often called ‘middle class’. Marx and Engels did this too, as did almost fucking everyone who talked about class politics because the ‘middle class’ is very demonstrably a real social force, but the point of a Marxist doctrine is to demystify social forces for what they really are. If you start your investigation from the mysticism itself, and not its rational solution in practice, you will do nothing but theology. Again, Marx described this. Marx described it very well. Cast off your saints, he tells us. Face the real world.

    “No,” say B&J. “More saints please!”

    Meanwhile, the rotting pile of dead saints steadily grows.

    This stuff hits a nerve with the American left because at some level they understand there is an ideological barrier whereby they are kind of divorced from ‘reality’, ‘real work’, ‘proper class-consciousness’. They operate under the belief the class leads them, and that they do not lead the class, and in doing so entrench a middle-class mysticism that must apologise for pretensions of a Leninist vanguardism they have not once attempted.

    All understandings like this fucking evaporate when conditions suddenly change, developments these idiots are incapable of taking as anything but supervention, which sometimes develops into the strange American belief that Trump came about as an unknowable infliction of Satan, and not the asymmetrical ladder toward American politics we can historically see him climbing. The American left attempts to address this stupidity with their own stupidity, and ultimately this results in Hasan Piker–a man who, and I cannot stress this enough, will tell you to vote for Jon Ossoff and Graham Platner–calling for a “dictatorship of the proletariat” at Yale.

    This kind of aura-farming is what people do when they abandon politics entirely and become a fandom. We resolve the strength of the movement into Hasan Piker, and if B&J had their way they’d resolve him into the PMC, and resolve the PMC into revolutionary inertia, and thus conclude that we are blind to the developments before our very eyes.

    But B&J are off with God now, so we can instead resolve Hasan Piker into a twitch stream and try not to worry about him too much. The sigh of relief from our Sensitive Communist Youth is palpable; the priests and preachers are not around to gaslight them.

    II

    Descending further into the article–something very careful to attribute qualifications, if-statements, ‘blurred lines’ to its assuredly conclusive analyses, as stating things directly would reveal the futility of the whole exercise–we come across the actual criteria used by B&J for class.

    The Professional-Managerial Class (“PMC”), as we will define it, cannot be considered a stratum of a broader “class” of “workers” because it exists in an objectively antagonistic relationship to another class of wage earners (whom we shall simply call the “working class”). Nor can it be considered to be a “residual” class like the petty bourgeoisie; it is a formation specific to the monopoly stage of capitalism.

    EXORCIST’S NOTE: Take this brief pause to remember these people still, allegedly, considered themselves Marxists when writing this.

    […] if we were going to fully and properly define a Professional-Managerial Class, we would not be able to restrict ourselves to a picture of this group as a sociological entity; we would have to deal, at all stages, with the complementary and mutually interacting developments in the bourgeoisie and the working class […]

    EXORCIST’S NOTE: Indeed, I suppose if you were to fully and properly define a PMC you would have to do all of that. The conclusions you drew would not be historically useful, but they’d make a neat little journal article.

    Anyway, after all of this arse-covering from anyone who would dare assail their saintly intuition, these idiots finally get to the fucking point:

    However, the relation to the economic foundations of society is not sufficient to specify a class as a real social entity. At any moment in its historical development after its earliest, formative period, a class is characterized by a coherent social and cultural existence; members of a class share a common life style, educational background, kinship networks, consumption patterns, work habits, beliefs. These cultural and social patterns cannot be derived in any simple fashion from the concurrently existing relationship to the means of production of the members of the class. […] In addition, the social existence of a group of people is determined not only by its experience at the point of production, but by its experience in private life (mediated especially by kinship relations, which, in turn, are at most only distantly related to evolving relations of production) […]

    EXORCIST’S NOTE: Breathtaking. You see, this kind of ‘modernisation’ is classic because it takes something useful for socialism (an analysis of classes orchestrated around productive relations and their historically-consistent properties) and justifies itself via a deeply perverted transhistoricism into something manifestly useless.

    I would like to remind our Sensitive Communist Youth that lots of academics do this shit too and you are not obliged to necessarily take them seriously because of their institutional authority; I call Communism the real movement that confounds and frustrates academia. But do not be anti-intellectual, either! You only negate these Textwalls in your mind-palace once you have the words to dismiss them. They represent real forces to be studied. Just don’t get caught up in their ideology soup, because Marx gave you a fork, not a spoon. Trying to eat the ideology soup with this fork probably won’t get anywhere and will definitely make you look like an idiot.

    Regardless, let’s stop laughing at these idiots and get into what they’re saying.

    However, the relation to the economic foundations of society is not sufficient to specify a class as a real social entity.

    EXORCIST’S NOTE: When B&J say “economic foundations of society” and “real social entity” they are not referring to historical society, as in, a self-developing system measurable by a doctrine that has a base order it must necessarily fall to in moments of crisis. They are referring to the 20th-Century United States and history’s persistent refusal to produce ‘working-class’ socialists out of thin air, something B&J take to be a development of the left’s attempts to lead the working class, and not the fact the left is fucking terrified of doing precisely that.

    […] a class is characterized by a coherent social and cultural existence; members of a class share a common life style, educational background, kinship networks, consumption patterns, work habits, beliefs.

    EXORCIST’S NOTE: B&J, while acknowledging that a coherent social and cultural existence is preconditioned on relationship to production, very curiously fail to successfully, lucidly explain the procedural relationship between these things. This is because the procedural relationship between reality and ideology is actually incredibly simple on the conceptual level (“spades do not have souls” is probably a logical fallacy or another, but is also self-evidently true to most people), and as such when applied in theory demands a bit of coherent doctrinal practice to make sense.

    As B&J astutely note, the doctrinal practice of the American left is worker-fetishism. They then shrug their shoulders and conclude there is nothing left to do but fetishise another spectre of their historical instance. Where we learn to laugh at the noble savage-adjacent proposal that certain peoples have essential “ways of knowing and being”, the giant pyramid scheme of U.S. intelligentsia is an elaborate sophistry in pursuit of creating a mythology of Americanised ways of knowing and being; that there is something extraordinary about Americans, that Homo Americanus is a new taxonomical category.

    These cultural and social patterns cannot be derived in any simple fashion from the concurrently existing relationship to the means of production of the members of the class.

    EXORCIST’S NOTE: While there is humour in B&J’s admission that they are looking for a “simple fashion” here, i.e. simple answers in lieu of the more painful ones, the Idealism here is particularly stunning because it is effectively admitting a rejection of the Marxist precept that material reality is self-evident and social production is the first use-value of social life. This ‘dogmatic’ assertion, defiant before ‘real history’, is nevertheless laid fairly bare in moments of crisis, but many self-proclaimed Marxists will descend from heaven to the workers here, and tell them they are anything but proletarians.

    Personally, I think what these people do is tantamount to counter-revolution, and the revolutionary history will damn their memories.

    […] the social existence of a group of people is determined not only by its experience at the point of production, but by its experience in private life (mediated especially by kinship relations, which, in turn, are at most only distantly related to evolving relations of production) […]

    EXORCIST’S NOTE: Jaw-droppingly ridiculous. Having returned to the hearth, the homestead, the family, we have a ‘private life’ that is clad in a mysticism so arrogant it borders on gnosticism. Marxist-gnostics believe that the introduction of some unknowable property has occurred over modernity, and that this dark energy, inflicted by the demiurge, is what perverts the perfect world of Saint Marx, God, the LORD.

    So they may now, in an extreme arrogance, claim that ‘kinship relations’ are “at most only distantly related” to ‘evolving relations of production.’ That the relationship between families, which involve making children, and the way you work is now almost irrelevant to this new class. I take it we shouldn’t be giving these people maternity/paternity leave, then, because they’ve actually got a big baby generator that is completely extricated from their lived existence.

    B&J are secretly keeping advanced biotechnology in their home and they are using it to make good professional children at an industrial scale, to eradicate vulgar class-essentialism for good. This is what they must have meant when they said:

    “Services” which had been an indigenous part of working-class culture were edged out by commodities conceived and designed outside of the class.

    Whereas without the blinding light of Barbara Ehrenreich Thought we would have simply concluded this entire sentence is fucking nonsense and commodities don’t actually have souls that are special to the working-class, that working-class life is not a cultural essence but simply the fact some madman has you chained to a production line and will now wring you dry of your surplus value.

    But because we have Barbara Ehrenreich Thought, we can now see clear the materialist truth: these nefarious extraneous commodities are in fact the PMC’s biovats, weaved into existence by ‘kinship’.

    III

    Let’s look at how our poltergeists define their fetish object in relation to their gnosticism.

    We define the Professional-Managerial Class as consisting of salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.

    EXORCIST’S NOTE: Any basic understanding of Marx’s critique of political economy readily presents us with the fact that ‘salaries’, for one, are merely labour-power purchased either in advance or in bulk. Any attempt to divorce this from a wage relation is a return to mysticism.

    We know that wage-labour is alienating, that professionals and managers can and do experience sadness, burnout, ennui, et cetera because they are not capitalist Stakhanovites they are human beings with emotions.

    We know, then, that even if the job of the manager is the ‘reproduction of capitalist culture’ through ‘mental labour’ (the vagaries of the text yet again doing heavy lifting with their inability to say anything of substance), the class-interest of the manager, assuming their relationship to production is ultimately the same as their workers, is ultimately determined in the direction of social-revolution; that they appear less likely to do this is explained through their autonomy within and management over facets of civil society in much the same way you would a cop or professional soldier.

    Just because the ‘PMC’ will frequently act like pernicious petty-bourgeois fascists does not, in truth, mean they necessarily are; you know, Daniel Craig is not literally James Bond. The initial structure incentivises behaviour distinct from real interest. The Marxist says professionals are probably stepping on a rake here, the Marxist is ignored, and when all the professional jobs are evaporated by a crisis, the Marxist is proven correct. The idealists, for their part, probably believe this unforeseeable crisis to be alike Noah’s Ark, and sent by God.

    I remind our Sensitive Communist Youth that these people may sound very confident in what they say; it does not make them any less fucking wrong.

    The PMC, by our definition, includes people with a wide range of occupations, skills, income levels, power and prestige. The boundaries separating it from the ruling class above and the working class below are fuzzy.

    EXORCIST’S NOTE: Yes, it is hard to give shape to a ghost.

    Second, occupation is not the sole determinant of class (nor even the sole determinant of the relation to the means of production).

    EXORCIST’S NOTE: Qualifiers like this appear quite a lot in the text, where B&J will re-iterate their positions as if it makes the analysis any less useless. This axiom in particular (what they’re saying is that the way you make money is not the determinant of your relationship to production; it’s actually some other, shady thing, “kinship relations”, “PMC culture”, all now self-developing things) is basically a reminder that their whole Textwall is entirely predicated upon a notion of a self-developing family largely alien from production.

    The positive Marxist writes for the peaceful times, when nothing much seems to happen (things do happen, they just aren’t socialism); this makes their theory a comfy opiate for disillusioned socialists, and a complete liability when the times run sour. It’s religion.

    […] the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat has developed to the point that a class specializing in the reproduction of capitalist class relationships becomes a necessity to the capitalist class. That is, the maintenance of order can no longer be left to episodic police violence.

    EXORCIST’S NOTE: Even though I’ve already read this Textwall, I really spat out my beer when i re-read this bit.

    “A class specialising in the reproduction of capitalist class relationships” is just one of many sentences of pure air that B&J assail us with, but what’s so funny about it is they think people can consciously specialise in generality and have this be a class-basis, no less; that these people are trained by the witch doctors of capital to think hard enough that they can control the masses better than any cop.

    Here we must ignore the episodic police violence that has been going on since America’s inception, and generally forms the line of order when this psychotronica fails.

    The penetration of working-class life by commodities required and continues to require a massive job of education — from schools, advertisers, social workers, domestic scientists, “experts” in child rearing, etc, […]

    EXORCIST’S NOTE: This is where the professional psychics are actually presented in evidence, that the aforementioned tainted, ‘professional’ commodities through distinct ‘professional’ services are done through ‘professional’ education. This fetishised mental labour is presumably what confers upon the commodities their ‘professional’ stamp. By managing capital in a very banal sense, at some point, the ‘PMC’ has learned to contort the soul and shape of the commodity itself.

    Because, as B&J remind us consistently, the ‘PMC’ has no good beginning or end point and is not coterminous with any real and defined boundary in evidence, we also can’t actually find a definite grouping of people who are contorting the precious working-class commodities.

    We can conclude, then, commodities are contorting themselves, folding gelatinously over each other, and the ‘PMC’ is spat out of all this.

    Or we can dismiss this fad as it passed us by.

    Thus the relationship between the PMC and the working class is objectively antagonistic. The functions and interests of the two classes are not merely different; they are mutually contradictory. True, both groups are forced to sell their labor power to the capitalist class; both are necessary to the productive process under capitalism; and they share an antagonistic relation to the capitalist class. (We will return to this point in more detail later.) But these commonalities should not distract us from the fact that the professional-managerial workers exist, as a mass grouping in monopoly capitalist society, only by virtue of the expropriation of the skills and culture once indigenous to the working class.

    EXORCIST’S NOTE: Here, again, we see depicted an ‘expropriation’ of the (American) working class’ ways of knowing and being. What the B&J are describing here is that yes, the working class in America did certain jobs that are now professionalised. This fairly useful observation is transformed into a weapon of the bourgeoisie when B&J say the commodity-spirit has been perverted by insidious professional-managers.

    But for me, as a traditional wage-labourer (albeit British, so perhaps Homo Americanus simply eludes me through a failure to conceive of its higher consciousness), I am somewhat uncertain as to what this professionalisation means in relation to my class-interest other than the introduction of some more petty tyrants (something my life is already in abundance of). B&J tell me that it’s actually a warping of the traditional wayfaring established and passed down to me by my worker ancestors, carried down a ley line of wisdom via an indigenous oral tradition.

    One forgets we’re reading something produced by people who consider themselves ‘Marxists’–it comes across as little more than Volkisch mysticism.

    We should add, at this point, that the antagonism between the PMC and the working class does not exist only in the abstract realm of “objective” relations, of course. Real-life contacts between the two classes express directly, if sometimes benignly, the relation of control which is at the heart of the PMC – working-class relation: teacher and student (or parent), manager and worker, social worker and client, etc. The subjective dimension of these contacts is a complex mixture of hostility and deference on the part of working-class people, conterapt and paternalism on the part of the PMC.

    EXORCIST’S NOTE: Here, the teachers and students, managers and workers, social workers and clients, etc. are taken as antagonistic to each other not because it’s annoying when some idiot tells you what you ought do, but because the middle class professionals are annoyances in themselves. The means of transfer (the social relationship) are disregarded here for being inconvenient to the project of American leftist self-flagellation.

    We can talk all we want about why the middle class is so fucking annoying, and we’d basically be performing Hermeticist divinations because ‘annoyance’ isn’t a historical thing. The fact that I find the middle class annoying is probably not the engine of history, it’s more likely the social relations which presaged our meeting in the first place.

    The classical petty bourgeoisie lies outside the polarity of labor and capital. (It is made up of people who are neither employed by capital nor themselves employers of labor to any significant extent.)

    EXORCIST’S NOTE: Here we kind of see part of this modernisation’s fatal flaw–a disconnect from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, which by all accounts are the base instructions for Marxist doctrinalism and the order from which positive Marxism must stray at some point.

    When you have decided that ‘labour and capital’ itself is a polarity in contradiction; that labour is something itself employed, that capital is something that itself employs, and take this as an article of faith rather than a rhetorical flourish, you have essentially made a capitalist and a proletarian essence that can be transposed between individuals rather than studying these essences as they exist: an ensemble of the social relations.

    The fact is that labour and capital, in their real forms under capitalist production, are measured in social relations. Form-fetishism, of treating labour and capital as anything but this, is among the highest defects of positive Marxism; of using the language Marx used, but with the bourgeois definition of this language; that the ‘capital’ and ‘labour’ he spoke of are not used in the context of their real doctrine but are projections into the future, where bourgeois economists for the most part take them as things-in-themselves.

    To descend to Earth with this understanding, labour is not a quantity instructed by capital, but the life that is lived for workers, that their real life is robbed from them by alienation, that capitalist labour is not labour, that exchange is a social property that you nevertheless experience in a real sense; that capital itself is the mere social relation of domination expressed in money and commodities, which, once fetishised, may generate a system of political economy that understands itself and only itself, and as such cannot fit the missing part (real labour) into the equation.

    The petty-bourgeoisie employs its own labour and is employed by its own capital and as such is directly related to the ‘polarity’ of labour and capital because it is operating in a system of exchange with capital accumulation concentrating in monopoly; something we all know is bad for small businesses!

    Where us Marxists applaud the cruel and iron hand of capital for sweeping these Hitlers from their pedestals, we do so with a wink: you’re stuck with us now, mom and pop! And as capital’s iconoclasm sweeps the saints from our walls, we may one day look upwards, in lieu of anything else, and decide that there still remains one more God to be tossed from heaven.

    In this understanding, we can apply a self-sealing logic that might get us somewhere. Or we could chase ghosts, in rapt allegiance to the shepherds of the coming crisis.

    IV

    Now, finally, we should talk about the fetish object’s historicisation by our poltergeists.

    It is mostly a decent history, of course, somewhat cheapened by the non-existence of its subject matter; but there are a few things to contend.

    But the conflict between the PMC and the capitalist class went deeper than the issue of occupational autonomy. Early PMC leaders envisioned a technocratic transformation of society in which all aspects of life would be “rationalized” according to expert knowledge.

    EXORCIST’S NOTE: B&J tell us that the PMC is antagonistic to the capitalist class. They then tell us that this cause lies in factors other than value extraction, that actually the raw ideas and visions of the classes are, in fact, the engine of class struggle, and not the class’ real existence, which derives itself from things other than the essential soul of that class’ ideology.

    These idiots unironically think that there is a klassengeist then articulated, rather than identifying the klassengeist as a spectre of the articulation itself. In doing so they perform a sort of deranged mysticism that actually posits civic technocracy as an interest in itself, rather than an infliction of positive interests. This entire ‘PMC’ is built on the corpses of saints.

    Specialization was the PMC member’s chief selling point, the quality which justified his or her claim to a unique niche in society, but it acted as a centrifugal force on the class as a whole.

    EXORCIST’S NOTE: This Deviant fetishisation of the PMC has thus allowed B&J to take ‘the class as a whole’ as something acted upon by its Essences, and through clever sophistry present this as its real Essence. The problem is that the class they have identified, established, and defined, is not actually a product of any Essences but a matter of autonomy under capital.

    The endeavour to do anything other than chase ghosts is the logical conclusion of any positive Marxism.

    Conclusion

    The ‘PMC’ mythology was useful for as long as the ‘PMC’ existed. Now it doesn’t exist, we are left with ghosts.

    I do not preclude the notion that B&J were trying to answer the questions of their time. The problem lies in how this extends beyond their time; that the postponement of revolution is often invoked by the moral authority of a spectre which no longer exists.

    If we try and analyse doctrines in relation to our real situation in the here and now, we are disturbing saints; that their positive, bastardising shibboleths do not extend to today. Take their opinion on ‘unproductivity’; that the ‘PMC’ is unproductive because it is not producing ‘real’ commodities.

    The main crux of B&J’s theory is the ridiculous notion that the experience of professional work is heterogenous, and its occupations do not cohere people in the same fashion as conventional wage labourers. The ability to navigate the ‘PMC’ stratum is depicted as a matter of familial networking, of background, of lifestyle—the occupation is contextually important, but it is not what solely defines their class.

    This idiosyncrasy falls back on itself when you then ask the question: so how does one become PMC? The response from this theory is necessarily incoherent, dependent on a totality of factors of which profession is important but not the whole story, that it depends on who your parents are and who you know and how you live your life and whatnot, all flattened by the ‘condition’ of an ‘essentially nonproductive’ professional class.

    The idea that ‘production’ can be social, and not immediate, is completely beyond this frame of reference.

    We ought move beyond this nonsense, and truly regard the real conditions of our time.

    And for that, I do not think we ought return to the provincial invocations of B&J Ehrenreich.

  • Theses on Textwalling (What’s Our Deal)

    Theses on Textwalling (What’s Our Deal)

    I

    The chief defect of all presently existing Marxism – that of the ICP included – is that the thing, reality, articulation, is conceived only in the form of the Textwall, but not as Textwalls that make sense to people, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to organisation, the active side was developed abstractly by Textwalls – which, of course, does not know real, articulate activity as such.

    The Communist Left wants conceptual Textwalls, really distinct from the objectified concept, but it does not conceive Textwalling itself as objective activity. Hence, in their Textwalls, they regard the Textwalling attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical manifestation. Hence it does not grasp the significance of “polemic”, of “simplifying”, activity.

    II

    The question whether objective truth can be attributed to Textwalling is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Marxists must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of their thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of Textwalling that is isolated from practice is a purely theoretical question.

    III

    The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are developed by Marxists and that it is essential to Textwall at the Textwaller themself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide Marxism into two parts, one of which is superior to Marxism.

    The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally Textwalled only as revolutionary practice.

    IV

    The Communist Left starts out from the fact of Marxist doctrinalism, of the duplication of the doctrine into a falsified doctrine and an authentic one. Its work consists in resolving the falsified doctrine into its authentic basis.

    But that the authentic basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this authentic basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the authentic invariant is discovered to be the secret of the falsified doctrine, the former must then itself be developed in theory and in practice.

    V

    Self-described ‘Marxists’, not satisfied with abstract Textwalling, want organisation; but they do not conceive Textwalling as practical, human-organised activity.

    VI

    These Marxists resolve the falsified doctrine into the authentic doctrine. But the authentic doctrine is no abstraction inherent in each single Marxist.

    In its reality it is the ensemble of the social Textwalls.

    These Marxists, who do not enter upon a criticism of this real Textwall, is consequently compelled:

    1. To abstract from the historical Textwall and to fix the falsifying sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract – isolated – Marxist individual.
    2. Doctrinal understanding, therefore, can be comprehended only as “the wordcel”, as an internal, dumb generality which naturally unites the many Marxists.

    VII

    These Marxists, consequently, do not see that the “falsified doctrine” is itself a product of the doctrine, and that the abstract Marxist who they analyze belongs to a particular form of it (its falsification).

    VIII

    All Textwalling is essentially practical. All ideology which leads Textwalling to Idealism finds its rational negation in Marxist practice and in the comprehension of this practice.

    VIX

    The highest point reached by the present aspiration to a self-sealing Textwall, that is, Marxism which does not comprehend Textwalling as practical activity, is contemplation of single Marxists and of positive Marxism in general.

    X

    The standpoint of the old Marxism is authentic doctrinalism; the standpoint of the new is Marxist society, or social Marxism.

    XI

    The Textwallers have only developed the doctrine, in various Marxists.org portals; the point is to explain it.

    ADDENDUM: Jokes aside, the point is to just argue for Real left-communism, but in a convincing rather than analytical fashion. Polemics, etc.