Friday, November 11, 2011

The Movement of Squares and the Time of Riots: R&D on the Commune



A recent analysis signed by Research & Destroy -- the same name under which the Fall 2009 "Communiqué from an Absent Future" (http://wewanteverything.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/communique-from-an-absent-future/), a text anticipating, framing and to some extent inspiring if not inducing the sequence of UC student occupations that Fall -- offers a reading of the present moment as the convergence, without articulation, between the movement of squares on the one hand, and the punctual but relentless eruption of riots, whether in Athens, London or Oakland, on the other. The title of the text, its lack of syntactical linkage, makes this lack of articulation clear: "Plaza -- Riot -- Commune." And yet the existence of a third term, a term which is not mentioned even once in the text itself -- that term is "Commune" -- proposes a very precise dialectical linkage between the "affirmative" yet still largely toothless or symbolic experimentation in mutual aid witnessed in the plaza occupations in Spain or the US occupation movement, and the necessary, but potentially inconsequential blowout of the contemporary metropolitan riot.


What is most characteristic of the present situation -- one defined by the retreat of the workers movement, the disarticulation of the promised "partnership" between capital and labor, a particularly brutal assault on worker power under the name of austerity, and the probable blessing represented by the total decomposition and defeat of the Left, understood as the party proposing to manage the social production of wealth otherwise -- is an almost complete disconnection between the tactics and means deployed by anti-austerity struggles and the actual content of these struggles themselves. R&D start out from a basic premise: even the most minimal reforms, even the dampening of the bulldozing push of austerity, will require levels of antagonism formerly manifested only in the most insurrectionary situations, with the mechanisms of state power themselves in the balance. The recent mobilization against the reforms of retirement laws in France -- a mobilization which saw reformist unions blockading the petroleum refineries, for example -- bear witness to this dissociation of means and ends, this out of jointness between the form of struggle and its content. If the Left somehow was the name for the calculus which, through the forms of organization it developed, measured the appropriateness of specific tactics and the political prize they were meant to bring about, it is precisely this articulation that is missing in the present.


The lack of any articulation between the movement of squares -- with its "affirmative" experimentation in mutual aid, in the sharing of what is common and the desire to build the capacity to provide for the satisfaction of our needs -- and the virulence of the recent riots (riots which are, it should be underlined, very common outside of the most "developed" economies of Western Europe and North America), with their rage and their immediacy, the fury with which they carry out the burning of cars, buildings and banks and the looting of shoes, computers and video games points to a weakness or contradiction at the heart of each, their mirror abstractness: the simple positing of common without means for meeting them, and the intensity of a negation which, reduced at times to the most frontal and immediate confrontation with state violence in the form of the cops, is incapable of transforming itself into a determinate negation, meets its own limit in its very form. 




Where we find ourselves, then, according to the piece, is caught between these moments or poles: the affirmation without bite of the plaza, the fury without consequence or consistency of the riot. The localization of the current "occupation" movement in the US in public squares -- these dead spaces that replace the Athenian agora with "vast pours of concrete and nothingness" -- and even in the more polarized and developed movements in Athens and Cairo, announces the emergence at the point of separation between the political and the economic: this is why it can only proposes the satisfaction of needs and the production of commons without the capacity to bring it about. The intensity of the riot, its taste for fire and need to bypass requisitioning in favor of ash, its feeling that it is only happening when it is confronting or outwitting, here and now, the riflebutts and barrels of the state, is what blinds it to the necessity of the commune. The commune is that real point where the production of the common and the sharp edge of negation coincide. It is the where the cultivation and construction of new forms of life will occur through the expropriation of what is already ours, not because we made it, but because we need it: satisfaction.


http://www.metamute.org/en/print/247

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